Memorial Day 2024 ~ Lost at Sea

As Memorial Day approaches, I am curious about my dad's service in the Navy during World War II. During my childhood, Dad didn’t talk much about aspects of war that shaped him into the man he became and certainly must have pierced his young heart at times.

 

Tonight I watched a PBS documentary called “Heroes on Deck: World War II on Lake Michigan.” Did you know that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy bought and transformed two Great Lakes passenger ships into fake aircraft carriers? Japan was surveilling our Pacific coast while Germany eyed our Atlantic coast. Where, then, to quickly train fighter pilots to take off and land on aircraft carriers? Lake Michigan! As soon as pilots achieved proficiency, they immediately went to wartime assignments on real ocean-going aircraft carriers. More than 15,000 pilots and 40,000 deck crews trained on Lake Michigan.

 

The PBS program prominently featured the Naval Air Station in Glenview. In port, the fake aircraft carriers, the Sable and the Wolverine, moored at Navy Pier in Chicago. Glenview is just seven miles inland. Video showed sailors being trained there for all the jobs required to keep a ship going. I wonder if that’s where my father learned how to do his job aboard ship. PBS video also showed impressive fighter jet activity over Glenview’s airfield. For decades, Dad talked about that base with pride and affection.

 

Wanting to learn more about my father’s wartime missions in the Navy, I dug out an account he had written in 2003. Because he had written it for his Northern Illinois University newsletter, however, it was more about classmates than about war. (… And about the possibility that they had been the sailors giving gum and candy bars to Sophia Loren as a child playing in the streets near Naples!) Dad’s article did mention resistance faced by the U.S. at Normandy being much fiercer than what his group of ships experienced in the Mediterranean. And later in the Pacific, his was a receiving ship for naval personnel whose ships had been crippled or sunk by Kamikaze planes.

 

I may have unwittingly learned more about my dad’s military service one day in about 2010 when he and I were walking around the pond in his senior community. By that time, he was well into Alzheimer’s and this day, as he did every week, he proudly directed us to the flag-plaza brick commemorating his being in the Navy and Mom’s serving in the Red Cross during the war. He then shared that he and fellow sailors constantly feared submarine torpedoes. He pointed to the black POW/MIA flag above our heads and then paused, mentally searching for the explanation of those acronyms. He finally settled on Lost at Sea.

 

Lost at Sea touched me on several levels—swimming in a vast, unforgiving ocean, no hope of rescue … Dad’s and anyone’s fear of drowning like this … his and many aging brains futilely flailing in search of words … my wondering in vain what justifies war. Trying to comprehend the discipline, courage, and self-sacrifice of military men and women defending freedom and integrity—I’m completely at sea. “Thank you for your service” is but a drop in the ocean of all the gratitude they deserve.