Proudly We Served

by Kelly, Mary Pat

  But another time, in Wildwood, New Jersey, a few miles from Cape May, several shipmates and I went to the one and only theater. We sat downstairs in the center section. No sooner did we sit down than the usher came over and informed us that we could not sit where we were and directed us to the “colored” section. We refused. He went to get the manager. While he was gone, the four or five white sailors sitting behind us asked us not to move and stated that they were with us. The manager never did approach us. The next time we attended that movie theater, all sailors sat in the same designated area.

  The new technology that was coming to the navy presented opportunities, but each step forward came at a price.

  Gordon: When I finished boot camp they gave us our general classifications and our scores. My tests were high enough for me to become a quartermaster. They sent me to the outgoing unit for transportation to quartermaster school. But while I was waiting for transportation to that school, they came down one day and told us we were going to take another test. There were about five or six of us. We didn’t know what it was all about; it was just another test, and they had given us so many. They gave us this series of sounds. They would give us five sounds, and we were to pick which sound didn’t belong among the five. Some of the sounds would be ascending notes, some of them would be descending notes, and some would just be steady notes. One would be different.

  As a result of this test, they decided who would become sonar men. At that time, the navy didn’t have any such rate as sonar man. They had what they called soundmen, which was not a special rating; it was just a job function. This was a new technology: equipment with which they would detect submarines.

  We were sent to Cape May, New Jersey, to the Admiral Hotel, which was made a navy facility because of the war. They had set up a school there primarily for black enlisted men. They didn’t want us going to the schools in the South and to be integrated with the white navy enlisted men. I was in the first school of sonar men and was one of the navy’s first sonar operators.

  When we graduated from Cape May, New Jersey, we were all promoted to petty officer third class. But there was a quandary. They didn’t have a rating badge for sonar men because it was a brand-new rate. The top four rates in the navy were worn on the right arm; the rest of the rating badges in the navy were worn on the left arm. Quartermaster was probably the top-ranking rate category, and so they gave us a quartermaster rate to wear on our left arm! That caused some concern. Here’s this group of black guys walking down the street with a quartermaster rate backwards on their left arm. We took some ridicule for that, but that didn’t last long because they soon came out with the sonar rating badge.

  DuFau: I was in the draft that came to New York City. I was so lucky, because I had an aunt who lived in New York City. The name beneath mine went to California. I was just lucky by one name, because all those guys in my class that went to California were killed in this big explosion at Port Chicago when they were loading ammunition.* One name and I would have been dead! I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that I had a foothold to reach New York, to see the big city. I got off the train, onto a truck with all my baggage, and we went out to Pier 6, Staten Island, then off the truck onto what they call a picket boat. I had never been on any navy vessel like that.

  Right from the pier we took off. There used to be a submarine net spread, and we went beyond that. They opened the net and let us out. I was so frightened. We all were. I was wondering whether we were trying to catch up with some ship that had left the harbor because I wasn’t prepared for all that fast movement. But they brought us outside the harbor to the Ambrose. It was a light ship out there. And there was an examination vessel called the USS Speyer Allen. It was the examination vessel for New York harbor. And I spent ten months out there.

  Roberts: I went to Hampton Institute in Virginia to be trained as an electrician’s mate. We had to learn a lot of math—trigonometry and algebra. But it come easy to me. School has always been easy for me. I could listen in class and then pass the exam. I enjoyed the electrical math. Then I went to Norfolk. My cousin who’d gone into the navy with me was there too, and we had our own private room. We’d gone all through boot camp together—swung our hammocks side by side. Here we were in Norfolk in this private room at the end of the barracks. See, the other men in the barracks were in the stewards branch, so this was how they separated us.

  Well, there I was, trained as an electrician, but the job they gave me was pushing airplanes around on the airfield. I did that for quite a while. But one day they had this southern chief petty officer out there seeing that everyone worked hard. We were loading scrap iron and he was calling out “Heave-ho, Heave-ho” like we were working on the railroad or on a chain gang. I said, “Look, Buddy, I’m not pushing any more airplanes. Give me a job doing the work I was trained for. I’ll work my tail off.”

  He looked at me. He was shocked. He said, “I’m going to send you up to see the head chief petty officer.”

  “I don’t care. Send me up to President Roosevelt. It still stands. I’m not pushing airplanes.”

  I went up to see the chief. I never will forget him. He was an old guy with hash marks all the way up to his neck. He had been told I was a problem, but he just said, “Have a seat.” I sat down. He said, “They tell me you don’t want to push airplanes around anymore.”

  “You got that right,” I replied.

  “What kind of work did you do before you went into the service?” he asked.

  “I worked for the federal government in the war department, in the Pentagon building. I started out working in the mailroom, and from there I went into specifications, which was a good job. There were only three people in my department.”

  “Ever do any filing?” he asked.

  “We did a little in specification,” I told him.

  “Think you can handle it?”

  “Sure,” I answered. He sent me around to a warrant officer who had a little anteroom with a desk near his office. The warrant officer told me that this would be my desk and that I would process invoices for airplane parts. I had to make out invoices only two or three times a day and file a few pieces of paper. The rest of the time I listened to the radio and slept. I figured, though, that if that’s what they wanted me to do, that’s what I would do.

  Garrison: When I graduated from service school I was assigned to East Boston Section Base—that’s in Boston. I was on a small wooden ship called the A-48, which had a wooden hull and deck. We went out every night, out of the harbor, and we dropped hydrophones over the side into the water, put earphones on, and listened for submarines, if any were coming. And in the morning we went back to the base.

  I did that for about three months, and then I was assigned to a minesweeper, the Puffin (AMC-29). We swept mines from Boston, up to Maine, and back. I used to see the ships coming into Boston harbor and the guys standing at parade, and I wanted to get aboard one of those larger ships. I actually requested sea duty. I decided to try to be promoted to signalman. On the Puffin they had a third-class signalman, but he couldn’t do the job. We had to challenge every vessel that approached, and he just couldn’t take the messages. So the chief would tell me to do it. Though I was a seaman first class, I had taken a series of tests to be promoted to signalman, because they didn’t need quartermasters. And the day before I would have taken the final test, they called down and told me to pack my bags, I was going to Norfolk. I told the chief, “Chief, I’m supposed to take my test.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “you have to go.”

  Divers: I was assigned to a minesweeper. They needed a quartermaster, so I worked on the USS Flamingo, which was very good duty at that time because it was what we call a nine-to-five job. We’d leave early in the morning, go out five fathoms, sweep the channel, and turn around and come back. That was our duty, six days a week; we even got a day off. That was considered good duty. Some of us even slept on the base; you didn’t have to sleep aboard the ship.

  Then I
was assigned to the Office of Navigational Information, which was the hydrographic office on the base. I stayed there until another slot came up for a quartermaster on another minesweeper, the Blue Jay. I sailed aboard the Blue Jay, and then I was transferred back to the highly secret duty concerned with code breaking. I worked in the office where they invented codes. We had classified information that had to be sent out to different locations throughout the North Atlantic in the theater of war.

  Buchanan: On patrol duty we used to find fresh bread wrappings right off the coast, and we always thought the fishermen were taking bread out to the submarines. It might have been true. I have no way of knowing because, see, I don’t know whether the records show that a submarine came in and got resupplied. But that was one of the things that submarines were doing all up and down the coast. They had places to go in and get supplies, whatever they needed.

  Anyway, we paid attention. Anything we saw with a light on it, we chased. We’d catch up to it and tell them, “Turn those lights out,” something like that, with a bullhorn.

  Living on the yacht was nice. One night I got sick. I had been in town, Cape May, and had had a lot to drink. I got aboard the ship and went right down to the galley and pulled out a Boston cream pie. I ate the whole thing and promptly threw up over the side. I never did that again, you can believe it.

  Now, I was perfectly happy down there, doing the patrols. Eventually, I wound up on the signal tower. We had a thing called flag hoists. When the ships were in a line, you’d throw the flag hoist up. Each ship copies the leader’s flag hoist. You’d wait awhile and then strike it down. Every ship makes the exact move. I liked how everybody moved when I pulled the flag!

  Once a ship came into the coast in a fog. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew the coast was in front of him. He started to signal. Now, I was on the signal bridge by myself. (This story tells why I got selected to go on the Mason.) I answered him, and he gave me the signal. I called it into the base. Later on, I found out it was something very important. I don’t know what it was. I got the message through and that was important.

  As more and more of the qualified black sailors graduating from Great Lakes demonstrated their ability in shore stations, pressure built on the navy. Why train these men and then forbid them to serve on a warship? the black community asked. But just as with the earlier decision to activate black recruits, change came more in response to white concerns than black demands for just treatment. The Bureau of Naval Personnel report states: “[H]eightened problems of morale and tension were created by large concentrations of Negro personnel in shore activities, by white sentiments that Negroes were not sharing the fighting, and by Negro resentment against being barred from the fighting” (41).

  In addition, reports were coming back from commanders who had black sailors working with them. The following was written by a commanding officer on Staten Island, where Lorenzo DuFau served: “Some of our patrol craft are almost entirely manned by them, and the duties they have performed during an unusually severe winter have been arduous, hazardous, and under conditions of temperature anything but comfortable. They are serving on tugs, in running boats, minesweepers (this last is an experimental effort), on deck and in engine rooms, and the measure of service has been of a uniformly high standard. There has been, by my order, no coddling, and they have met the test” (46).

  As more and more black sailors “met the test,” and in view of “white sentiments” and “Negro resentment,” the navy decided to allow black sailors to man warships. One DE, the USS Mason, and one PC “would be manned so far as possible, by enlisted Negroes under white officers; all enlisted billets would be filled by Negroes as soon as men qualified to fill them had been trained” (42).

  Rumors started to circulate about a ship that wanted black sailors. The navy began to look among its black enlisted personnel for men to make up the crew of a destroyer escort, the USS Mason.

  Graham: I had never heard of a DE before. I thought they were looking for men to go on a destroyer. I was ready. There were two of us on the base trained as radiomen: my friend Patterson was second class, and I was a third-class petty officer. They wanted a second-class petty officer, but Patterson was deathly afraid of the water, so I jumped for the opportunity. But the chief said, “You’re only third class; we wanted second class.” So the communications officer told the chief to give me the radio manual for me to study. At a certain time he’d call me in and give me the exam, and if I qualified, I could go aboard. Patterson helped me study. I went in, took the exam, and passed. On December 15,1943, he called me in; I had passed. He said, “Well, you can go aboard ship.” They didn’t say it was an experimental ship or anything. They said it was a DD, which means a destroyer. So I jumped for joy. At last I was going on board a ship.

  I think one reason, more or less, why I got transferred to the Mason was because they had navy women, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), coming in. They had this big radio shack, and the white WAVES—they didn’t have black WAVES until October 1944—came to work in the radio shack. All the white guys would stand there and look, and I would do the same thing. There was an old chief there. My gosh, he would turn red every time I looked at them. They came through the door, and I came up to see them with everybody else. And he didn’t like it.

  Buchanan: There was another black sailor on duty with me. We used to swim in the ocean all the time. We had these dumb ideas that we’d swim out to the porpoises and things. We would try, but we never could get to the porpoises. We were good friends, but I got selected over him to go on the Mason.

  At this particular time my brother (actually he’s my brother-in-law, but I think of him as my brother) had come down to me and he said he was leaving—he was going on this destroyer. Now, the story was getting around that they were going to make this destroyer with a black crew. It was only a destroyer escort, really no comparison with a real destroyer. I wanted a destroyer, not a destroyer escort. I knew the difference. My brother-in-law-to-be was bragging about the fact that he owed me six dollars. Now, in World War II, if somebody owed you six dollars, that was a lot of money. And I said, “No, no, you’re not going nowhere without me. I want my six dollars.” We argued about this thing for days. Then, finally, the officers came down and told me, “Do you know you got selected to go on the destroyer?”

  “What?” I cried. I ran up to the base. (At this time I was living aboard a ship.) I ran up to the base and I told Graham, and that just tickled him to death. That was fun. We had been together so long, right from Chicago and Great Lakes, and he was happy that we were going together. But he wasn’t getting away with the six dollars. That was in my mind, you understand?

  But we got shipped out from there down to Norfolk to go to school for the Mason.

  At Norfolk the crew attended classes aimed at equipping them for life on a destroyer escort at sea. These included abandon-ship and fire drills, as well as further training in each man’s specialty. Their skipper, Capt. William Blackford, visited Norfolk and interceded for the crew when problems arose.

  Graham: On December 18, 1943, I was transferred and received at the naval station in Norfolk, Virginia. I learned, right away, the reason why the place was called “Shit City.” Every other day there was an incident with white and “Negro” sailors. The white sailors and the base commander thought that we should be treated the same as the steward’s mates. No reflection on the steward’s mates, but we were enlisted in the seaman branch of the United States Navy, same as the whites, and we demanded the respect. Captain Blackford came to our aid, incident after incident.

  At the theater we were directed to use the rear entrance with the steward’s mates. We refused. Captain Blackford, again, came to our rescue. Rules changed. All enlisted personnel—black and white alike—used the same designated entrance area. Commissioned officers used the main entrance.

  Jane Blackford (letter to her parents): Bill stayed with the Crenshaws in Norfolk but had little chance to s
ee much of them as he was in conference with captains and admirals, etc., most of one day and looking over his crew and working with the Exec, the rest of the time. About that crew—it isn’t quite as mixed as we thought. It’s all colored except some of the chief petty officers and officers. They are all handpicked and have all had some sea experience. Bill is much luckier, as far as that goes, than some of the other skippers.

  As the navy report states, originally, the Mason crew was to “represent a cross section of the Navy’s Negroes” (42). Again, the thinking seemed based on a view of “the Navy’s Negroes” as some kind of monolithic group, a “new and strange problem.” But the voice of common sense reasserted itself, and the bureau decided to choose the crew for the Mason “on the premise that all commanding officers deserve the best crews that can be furnished, whether Negro or white” (42). Therefore, though the sailors were not selected by name, the orders that went out stated that the best men should be picked by the officers on the spot.

  Divers: I had been called over to personnel one day and was told that I was going to be transferred. I said, “Transferred to where?”

  The fellow replied, “The USS Mason.”

  I said, “What kind of ship is that?”

  He said, “Well, you know as much about it as we do.” So they sent us to Norfolk, Virginia, and Portsmouth for pre-commissioning school.

  I had had no experience with segregation so I wasn’t used to the way things were in Norfolk. Coming back from liberty one night, a bunch of marines and sailors and I were waiting on the trolley. When the trolley came up, we all climbed aboard, and the trolley just sat there. So the guys all hollered, “Hey, Mac, let’s get this thing going. We’ve got to get back to the base.”

  “I can’t move this trolley until this fellow gets to the rear,” the driver said.

  “Get to the rear? What do you mean?”

  And he said, “Oh, all the Negroes have got to go to the rear.”