No matter how the time was passed on board, everyone waited for signs that home was near.
Graham: In the radio shack, we would pick up the signal at fifty miles or longer. We could always turn on the receiver and listen, and we would listen for sounds before we’d get into New York, or wherever we were going. We’d get the music, and then we’d pipe it over the speakers sometimes. I had heard of Nat King Cole for the first time in Boston at a little restaurant they called Sisters. On the jukebox they had him singing “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” I liked that. Then I heard “Sweet Lorraine,” and I fell in love with that song. I substituted “Sweet Bobbie” for “Sweet Lorraine.” I put Barbara’s nickname in there. So when we were coming into port, and we could pick up the radio stations maybe ten or twelve miles out to sea, everyone had orders to wake me up if that song should come over the radio. They would come down to the bunk and get me up to come listen to it. “I’ve just found joy. / I’m as happy as a baby boy / with another brand-new choo-choo toy / when I’m with my sweet Bobbie!”
Garrison: First, we’d get the radio; but another indication was when you’d see birds, land birds. Then you knew you were near land someplace.
DuFau: The PBY Catalina! They used to go quite a ways out to sea on patrol. And when you’d see that plane, that was a good feeling. Of course, being up on the bridge, you had a good idea from the charts that you were close. But it would just make you feel better knowing that you were within range.
Watkins: I would use Coney Island to guide us. Coney Island was lit up like a circus, see, and that was home coming in. First, you’d see Coney Island, then you’d see our lady waiting for us. We were always glad to see our girlfriend, the Statue of Liberty. Ooh, man. Back home again!
Divers: Then we’d land at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and put on our dress blues . . .
Watkins: Yeah, we’d be ready.
Divers: Ready to go to town!
War Diary (23 May 1945): patrolling as before as forward picket. . . . MASON closed buoy and began directing traffic. At 0327 the convoy and escorts turned on all navigational lights. At 0345, MASON passed [buoy] “XS” and began sweep up channel. At 0716, Buoy S-11 was reached at which point the local escort was supposed to accept the convoy. No such escort was present accordingly MASON proceeded to visual signaling distance of the Harbor Entrance Control Post at Cape Henry which accepted the convoy at 0855. Immediately the senior officer of the escort detached the escorts to proceed. . . . MASON maneuvered clear of channel, increasing speed to full and at 0950 set course 048 degrees T. for New York. . . . At 2212, the examination vessel was passed and at 2248, MASON passed through the net, proceeding to 35th Street pier.
DuFau: New York was liberty town. New York is known as the best liberty town in the world. There were great clubs, and the Savoy was open at that time too.
On May 27, 1945, Barbara Buchanan and James W. Graham were married. Gordon Buchanan was the best man, and shipmates from the Mason were among the guests. Since their ship was docked, the Grahams had a chance to be together during the early days of their marriage. But as happy as their interior world was, the outside world still intruded. Every time Graham had arrived or left the ship, he had faced the animosity that no amount of heroic action in the service of his country seemed to change for him or the crew of the Mason.
Graham: We had four ships tied up together, and we were on the outermost side. To get back to the pier we had to cross every one of those ships. There would be off-duty sailors on the ships, and they would all say some derogatory remarks as we passed. “He’s from the nigger ship” (or “the black ship”) or “Here come the coons.” Anything. Same terms that they use today. But we were instructed not to pay them any attention. I’d walk right by them.
I said to myself, “I can’t do anything now but get off this ship, and I’ll put something on you.” I used to fight them all the time. I’d fight them at the drop of a hat if I wasn’t on the ship. No one’s going to say nothin’ derogatory to me and get away with it. I just realized that in the last five years I’m not the guy I used to be; I can’t fight!
In the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on Sands Street, I was returning to the ship one night. I got out of the cab, and there was Divers arguing with a guy, a big white guy. And I say, “Divers, what’s wrong?”
“This dude agreed to pay half of the taxi fare with me, and I got here, and he don’t want to pay it—and he wants to fight.”
“You won’t fight him. I’ll fight him for you,” I said. So we got into it.
Roberts: The worst incidence of racism I remember was in Charleston. We were in port, and some USO girls came aboard to dance on the fantail. They were entertaining on each ship. When they came aboard our ship, the white shipyard workers tried to charge up the gangplank and take the girls off. The captain had us man our battle stations, and we turned the guns on them. That stopped it. Really, though, we didn’t need the guns. We could have taken them on one by one!
Sometimes opposition from white sailors was so blatant it defied the navy itself.
DuFau: One time in Miami, I think it was, we threw the number-one line over (the one you secure to the pier) and yelled for a seaman to take the line, to heave the line, to pass the line over to the pier. And he stood back and said he wasn’t going to take no line off that ship, “off no nigger ship.” And the captain told me, “DuFau, as soon as we tie up, keep an eye on that fellow. Go down and get his name and rate and service number.” He was just a seaman, so we had to get his service number. I’m sure Blackford saw to it that that guy was dealt with.
The Mason had come home from war to find that not enough had changed. The final blow was still to fall. On June 12, 1945, Capt. William Blackford was transferred to Great Lakes Training Station without an explanation. He was also promoted, having received an excellent performance evaluation from his superiors. His family thinks he would have preferred to stay on the Mason. Certainly for the crew, Blackford’s departure meant the end of their adventure. Their remaining tour of duty was an unpleasant anticlimax.
The Bureau of Naval Personnel’s final mention of the Mason seems surprisingly curt considering that the whole thrust of the document is meant to answer the question, “Can Negro sailors serve well in the navy?” All it says is, “The USS Mason served in Atlantic convoy duty [and] operated satisfactorily” (92). Perhaps some clue comes in the next sentence: “The creation of additional all-Negro units was contrary to the Bureau’s strengthening policy against all-Negro units and at least in part for this reason no additional all-Negro sea-going ships were established” (92). Is it an irony of history that those in the navy who wished to do away with segregation found it within their interest to downplay the achievements of this “all-Negro seagoing ship”? Or is it just that the burden of racist assumptions prevented the navy from seeing evidence of excellence?
One last note about the report. It continually refers to men with less than four years of school as “illiterate.” The designation negates the actual level of competence. According to this measure, Abraham Lincoln would be “illiterate.” But this use of the word might explain why the Mason’s last captain, Norman Meyer, offered to teach his crew how to read and write, in spite of the fact that most of the men had high school degrees and some had graduated from college.
9
Moored
The Mason escorted no more convoys. The crew had expected to go to the Pacific and participate in the invasion of Japan. They could not know that the atomic bombs dropped in August 1945 would end the war. But June became July, and they remained “moored as before,” testing ammunition or serving as a school ship for young officers. After Hiroshima the men of the Mason just waited for the ship’s decommissioning. In many ways the life of the ship had ended when Capt. William Blackford was replaced by Norman Meyer. A member of the Naval Academy’s class of 1937, Meyer left the navy after graduation because of eyesight problems. Called back to the service after Pearl Harbor, Meyer served as an onshore staff officer
for most of the war.
Lt. James Hair (a member of “The Golden Thirteen”—the navy’s first group of commissioned officers) and Ens. Clarence (“John”) MacIntosh, two of the navy’s first black officers, served briefly on board. While in the navy James Hair spelled his name Hare—“the white way,” as he says. Meyer was so proud of his relationship with Hair that he was one of only three nonmembers to contribute his reminiscences to The Golden Thirteen (Naval Institute Press, 1993), edited by Paul Stillwell. Meyer also wrote about their time on the Mason for the Naval Academy’s alumni magazine, Shipmate (March 1990).
Unfortunately, Meyer has presented the former captain of the Mason and her crew in a most unfavorable manner. He admits to very little knowledge of the ship’s record, yet he casually insults the crew and Captain Blackford. For example, on the Albuquerque television show Outlook New Mexico that aired in July 1990 on KOB-TV, Meyer called Captain Blackford “a drunken slob” (for which interviewer Marsha Hardeman reproved him). In essence, he says the Mason was a “terrible ship” until he, Meyer, shaped it up. “[It] started out on the wrong foot operationally and never quite seemed to set itself right. There had been two tries to pass shakedown trials. It’s performance escorting convoys had been undistinguished to say the least.” But there is no evidence in the ship’s log, the convoy reports in the navy archives, or in any of the recollections of the officers or men to support his negative characterization of the ship before he came aboard.
Meyer himself had little direct experience in convoy duty. He served in only one convoy as an officer on the USS Saucy. According to his own account in The Golden Thirteen, Meyer had such difficulty relating to the captain and other officers of that ship that he left, telling his wife, “I’m done. I quit. I quit.” With the help of a psychiatrist he was able to return to the ship. The doctor observed: “You [Meyer] just set your standards too high. Why don’t you come on down to the earth with the rest of us human beings?”
In the interview for this book Meyer seemed unaware of the effect that his remarks—based on what he considers to be widely held, conventional-wisdom judgments of women, African Americans, Catholics, and other minority groups—have on the listener. I did not include those asides, however, choosing to stick to material relevant to the Mason story.
After the interview for this book (recorded in October 1993), Meyer wrote in a letter that perhaps he misstated the conditions on the Mason so as to inflate his role. “I have been known to exaggerate and/or be in error and you would not want any of that in your book.” Indeed, he had apologized to the crew at their 1991 reunion, but he has continued to make statements that besmirch the Mason and her crew.
The USS Mason Association members are both puzzled and angered. In Meyer’s version of events, he was the captain who shaped up a sloppy ship. Yet for them, William Blackford was their only true captain; Meyer was just someone who filled in until decommissioning. At the time, they shrugged off his racist attitudes; prejudice was a fact of life to them. It is hoped that now, however, this book has set the record straight. Interestingly, what the crew remembers most about Captain Meyer is an inability to dock the ship and the times they crashed into other destroyer escorts.
Norman Meyer: An officer that I knew had been killed out in the Pacific, so I requested a transfer to the staff in Pearl Harbor. I was on the staff at Pearl Harbor for almost two years in connection with training and evaluating ships before they went out to the battle zone. Well, I am from Minnesota and really had never known Negroes. A few janitors we had in Annapolis, that’s all. But I had never seen any talented Negroes.
I heard about the Myrdal book (An American Dilemma), and so I sent away for it. And when I read it, the complete story about Negroes and how they were treated, I was incensed and outraged. I said, “This is terrible that citizens would be so badly treated.” One person could not do much, but I was going to do that.
So I wrote to the Navy Department and said, “I hear you have ships with Negro crews. And if you’re looking for a skipper for one”—knowing that it probably was not an attractive post.
They came back and said, “We have one, and the reputation is, it’s a terrible ship”—the professional reputation.
I said, “Well, I am now a Reservist. My reputation is back at a factory in New Jersey where I now work. I’ll take it.”
When asked on what he based his assessment of the Mason’s reputation, Meyer made the following reply: “Well, I didn’t know anything myself. The people in the Navy Department who assigned officers and so on merely told me that. And I didn’t make an investigation of it. I had enough confidence in my own ability that if it was a ship with problems, I figured I could manage those.”
Farrell: A terrible ship? Baloney!
Craig: I don’t understand Meyer. Meyer, of course, was an academy graduate. He was a bit of a martinet, and he tried to sort of assert his authority in a way that Blackford never had. He had been a staff officer out in Hawaii, I think, before he came to us. He had left the navy after he had graduated from the academy because he had eyesight problems, I think. But then when the war came along, he was brought back in. And I always thought he was a hard guy to get along with.
Divers: He [Meyer] announced he was going to teach reading and writing to us. Here was the cream of the crop of all the black sailors. Now, we weren’t dummies. When the navy picked us, they went through all of our service records and our test scores and all of that stuff. And he’s going to teach us how to read and write! That’s how ill informed he was about what he was in command of.
Meyer: When I was ordered to report to the Mason, I was going to get literacy material to teach reading and writing. I quickly saw that that was not necessary. It was a picked crew of outstanding men.
Watkins: Boy, I couldn’t like him. He was something. First thing he did was to run the ship into another ship.
Deck Log (14 June 1945): 16–20 Moored as before. At 1552, all tests completed, underway from NAD, Earle, N.J. to Pier #42, North River, Manhattan Is, N.Y. with assistance of a tug. Steering courses and making speeds to facilitate navigation of channels. . . . At 1825 fantail collided with fantail of DE-577 due to set of ebb tide. Minor damage to two starboard chocks, four depth charge arbors bent. The DE-577 sustained a hole, well above the water line in her steering engine room port side aft. No evidences of further damage.
Craig: The chief thing, of course, when you’re handling the ship, is bringing it into port and exiting out. And Meyer knew nothing about that. He just couldn’t do that because he had been a staff guy. And Blackford knew boats. He’d say, “Oh, it handles like a Buick.” But Meyer just couldn’t handle the ship. In New York harbor Meyer tore a hole in the ship that we were tying up alongside of. We were up at about 35th Street, and we were tying up alongside of another DE. Meyer just didn’t take into account the current as he pulled in, and the ship, of course, then started to go downstream. We had these K-guns on the side—the K-gun was a way of discharging a depth charge. These things had steel brackets that extended out a few inches behind the hull of the ship. One of those just cut a hole right in the ship that we were to tie up alongside of. Now, he would have been in serious trouble but for the fact that the captain of the port was a classmate of his at Annapolis and sort of brushed over it.
Meyer: Well, what happened was, we went out exercising. Because the minute I took command, I took the ship out into New York harbor and drill-drill-drill-drill-drill to get them up to what I thought was . . . One day we came back in, and of course, a lot of the guys had their girlfriends and wives there, and they were anxious and I was anxious to get ashore. And the pilot was very slow. So finally I said, “Well, I’m pretty good at handling a ship; I’ll take it in.” And here was this slip, you know. So we started in, but what I didn’t realize is that the minute the bow of the ship gets in here, to the still waters, the stern is still out in the fast current, and it’s twisted like that. And it banged into the dock, or the ship next to us, and cut a hole about
a foot square into it.
So the next day, I had to go down to the office. The officer in charge there had been one of my mechanical drawing professors at the Naval Academy. He was a short fella. Now short fellas don’t like tall fellas, and I was tall. So he really gives me a talking to. “You should have waited” and this, that, and so on, and “I’ll have to report this to the Navy Department.”
“Yes, Captain,” I’d say, or “No, Captain,” you know. He was really giving it to me. And finally I said, “Good-bye, Captain.”
As I got to the door, he said, “I’m not going to do it, but don’t do it again, Meyer.”
Deck Log (16 June 1945): 08–12 Moored as before. 0815 Y068 with Mr. MC ELOVRY at conn came alongside and collided on port quarter. Damaged port depth charge rack and dished in hull at frame 160 about two inches over an area of approximately one foot. 1000-The Commanding Officer held personnel inspection. 1045-Secured from Captain’s inspection.
Divers: Well, he [Meyer] sort of looked down on us, treated us like we weren’t quite ready for what we were doing. Oh, let’s see. How can I say that? That he had to put up with us, you know, and that he was doing us a favor by being there, and he was going to look after us. When actually, we had already been looked after. The war was over. We’d done our duty.
Meyer: In that two years that I had been at Pearl Harbor, I would go out on board a battleship cruiser or destroyer, and within five minutes of looking around I could tell whether the ship could shoot. I developed that sense of evaluation. When I walked on board the Mason, I could see that it didn’t perform well. It got along, but it just wasn’t a real top-notch ship. For example, when it’s time to get under way, the exec will say to the captain, “Captain, the ship is ready to get under way.” And it is. It wasn’t so on the Mason. There was always some rope tied to the dock, or somebody hadn’t completed some routine. It was just poor organization.
Proudly We Served Page 19