7
WHILE THEY MAY BE BEST remembered today for their rousing patriotic fight songs, the pluggers also cranked out plenty of sad World War I tunes, with titles like “He Sleeps Beneath the Soil of France” and lots of talk of kissing Mother’s sweet lips one last time. As far as I’m concerned, though, none of them come close, in the matter of pathos, to a song by Bud de Sylva, Gus Kahn, and Albert Gumble that wasn’t actually supposed to be sad at all. “Give a Little Credit to the Navy” is dedicated to a dignified-looking gentleman named William Buel Franklin, USNRF, commander of the US Naval Training Camp in Pelham Bay Park, New York—quite possibly the last man with such a resplendent monicker to tread upon the fair soil of the Bronx; its chorus goes:
Give a little credit to the Navy,
We took the boys across
without a single loss.
Ev’ry soldier is a fighting bear,
but don’t forget it,
give us credit,
we took ’em over there.
Mothers of soldiers, sweethearts and wives,
we’ll take care of your boys, though it costs us our lives.
So give a little credit to the Navy,
the Navy will do its share.
Gee. I don’t think it’s very nice that somebody even had to write such a song. If you’re a major branch of the United States military and you have to rely upon pluggers to make sure that you’re not entirely ignored—in wartime, no less—well, something is seriously amiss. Maybe it’s just because they often seem like the World War I of armed forces—that is, overlooked and underappreciated—but I am inclined to give a little credit to the Navy.
For one thing, they had their war stolen right out from under them. When America entered the fight in April, 1917, the conventional wisdom held that the Allies already had enough men, and that what they lacked were munitions, food, and, of course, money. The United States’ main contribution, it was thought, would be guns and ammunition, wheat and corn—and the ships to carry it all across in the face of unrestricted submarine warfare. So little thought was given in those early days to raising an army, in fact, that the nation didn’t even institute a draft until June, and only then after rigorous debate over the matter in Congress. Just as Art Fiala, looking to get into the war quickly, was directed toward the Engineers, other young men, looking for action, were encouraged to enlist in the Navy, where they would surely get in a shot or two at the hated Unterseeboot, or U-boat. This was to be a naval conflict, which explains why Laurence Moffitt’s mother was relieved when she learned that her son had joined the Army National Guard.
It didn’t work out that way. The notion that America’s main role was to be played upon the high seas had been formed in a vacuum; when French and British representatives arrived in Washington toward the end of April, 1917, they quickly disabused the American military of it. What they really needed, it turned out, were more warm bodies in the trenches. And so, though the Navy would still be critical to the war effort, theirs would be more of a behind-the-scenes role. While the USN would offer battleships and destroyers to the British Navy to help keep the German fleet trapped in harbor, their primary role would be to shuttle men and materiel across the Atlantic. In the first three months of the war, a quarter of all American ships that headed off to Europe never returned. A quarter! With odds like those, it makes you wonder how the Navy got anyone to enlist at all.
Fortunately, those odds got better and better as the war progressed; you might say, even, that if the Navy had to go through such growing pains, it’s best they did it at the beginning, before the boys were ready to go Over There. I say that by way of introducing perhaps the most remarkable statistic of the entire war: The Germans did not manage to sink a single American troop transport during a year and a half of war with the United States. Not a one. And America sent two million men across an ocean for the sole purpose of killing Germans.
So yes: Let’s all try to give a little credit to the Navy. They really did take the boys across without a single loss. And it wasn’t easy.
Among the veterans I met, seven of them had some direct connection to the Navy during the First World War.
There was 104-year-old Russell Buchanan, whom I visited in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 13, 2004. The son of immigrants from Prince Edward Island—his father, who died of some ailment (“You never hear of it today—I suppose they changed the name of that sickness”) when Russell was three, had been a carpenter and, Russell added proudly, a Scottish piper—he had grown up in Cambridge. One day in 1916, while crossing Boston Common, he came across a Marine Corps recruiting station and tried to enlist. When they asked him his age, he made the mistake of telling them the truth: sixteen. They sent him home. He went up to Maine and worked on a farm for a while, built himself up; when America entered the war, he joined the United States Naval Reserve Force. “I was offering my service” is how he put it. They assigned him to an Eagle boat—a class of steel ship smaller than destroyers but larger, and with a longer range, than wooden submarine chasers—which patrolled the Atlantic coast from the Maritimes to the Carolinas. He was a signalman—flags, semaphores, lights. They never found any U-boats, though they did encounter some banana boats, and once got stranded at sea for a few days; eventually they were towed to Charleston, where Mr. Buchanan had his first encounter with racial segregation. “We went ashore,” he recalled, “and we had a black chef, a cook, aboard the ship, and I was ashore with him. And we were going to the town proper, and a trolley car stopped. So we entered, and we took the first seats on the trolley.” He laughed. “And the operator informed us, that he had to go back to the rear . . . So we both got off the trolley car, because we were insulted.”
Like Russell Buchanan, David Byerly, whom I met in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2004, was 104 years old, born in 1900, and had lost his father at the age of three. But unlike Mr. Buchanan, whose mother had to go to work as a judge’s housekeeper, Mr. Byerly had grown up in somewhat less straitened circumstances in the town of Butler, about twenty-five miles from Pittsburgh. “The Byerlys were very well-known in Pennsylvania,” he told me. His father, who had been in the oil business, had died, at the age of thirty, during a local epidemic of typhoid fever; “they drained the reservoir of the water,” his son explained to me, and “found half a dozen cows in there.” The family went to live with his widowed grandmother. One day in early 1916, his mother was at the bank when she ran into her local congressman, who made her a proposition: “Eunice,” he said, “you have two boys. I’ve got an appointment for the Naval Academy. Would one of your boys be interested in it?”
“So my mother grabbed it,” David Byerly recalled nearly ninety years later. “I think money was running a little shy at that time. And my older brother was already a freshman in college. And so the idea of a free education appealed to her.” For his senior year in high school, his mother sent him to a special preparatory school in Annapolis, where he studied every past Naval Academy entrance exam since the Civil War, just to make sure he passed his. He did. Two months later, several of his friends from Butler High School enlisted in the Army. He tried to do the same, he said, but “they wouldn’t take me. On account of I had already committed to the Naval Academy.”
Classes didn’t begin until September; he and the other five hundred members of his incoming class spent the summer drilling. At one point, he told me, “I was caught smoking and landed down on the Ship for two weeks.” “The Ship” was a prison ship.
Once classes began, he explained, “we had a school routine. And the war didn’t really intrude on it.” In the summer of 1918, when classes were out, “they wanted us to get war experience. So they sent us out with the Atlantic Fleet . . . I served in a turret of a battleship . . . I was what was called the ‘plug man.’ In other words, I had seventeen and a half turns of this plug, to put the plug back into the breech of the gun. I did it every morning, all morning long.”
The battleship, the USS Wisconsin, was already twenty years old; after the war it would be sold for scrap. “We were hiding up in the Chesapeake Bay,” he recalled. “Actually, the York River . . . hiding from the German submarines.” At night, he said, “I had to serve as a boat officer for a boat to patrol the net. We had a net down at the Chesapeake, and in the York River.” The net was supposed to ensnare U-boats. “So every night I would go down with this boat. And my only armament was my .45 pistol.”
“So if you had spotted a submarine—”
“I’d be firing bullets.” Fortunately, he never spotted one.
And that was Midshipman Byerly’s war.
It’s a funny thing about revolutions: Sometimes, they can begin very subtly.
The Naval Reserve Act of 1916 started one not with a bold statement or action, but with an omission. What was omitted was any mention of the fact that you had to be a man to serve active duty in the Navy; by being omitted, it quietly ceased being a fact. So quietly, in fact, that Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels didn’t even realize it until the following year. When he did, he made a decision that shocked many: He formally granted the Navy permission to start enlisting women. (The Navy already had a small Nurse Corps, but it was staffed by civilians without rank or benefits.) This was around the middle of March, 1917, several weeks before the United States entered the war, and three full years before American women would be granted the right to vote. By the end of April, nearly six hundred women had signed up. Their official designation was “Yeoman (F),” but most people called them Yeomanettes.
By the end of the war there would be more than eleven thousand of them in the Navy, which is kind of surprising to me because, as far as I can tell, the Yeomanettes didn’t have it so good back then. All but five served stateside; no France for them. Almost all of them were confined to clerical work. Their uniforms were dowdy. They weren’t assigned official ranks. The money wasn’t very good. They didn’t receive any benefits. They even had to pay their own room and board. You have to wonder: Why did they bother? If they really wanted to help the war effort, there were much easier ways of doing so; Rosie the Riveter was not an invention of World War II, even if her name was. So, why the Navy?
I was fortunate to locate and visit not one but two Yeomanettes in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the first being Ruth Elfean Richardson, who was 107 years old when I met her on November 18, 2004. She was living then in a nursing home in Farnham, Virginia, just a few miles from the town of Lodge, where she’d been born. Both are on what is known as the Northern Neck, a rural peninsula that juts out into Chesapeake Bay about a hundred or so miles southeast of Washington. Her roots ran straight back in the Northern Neck; her father, George Washington Fisher, had been a farmer there. After high school, she went to work on the farm “crating tomatoes,” she said, and didn’t much care for it, so one day, after America had entered the war, she and a friend of hers named Myrtle Dawson decided to go up to Washington. “We thought that was just somewhere to go, and it would be nice, and we’d go to Washington, and, well, we thought we could have a good time, I guess,” she recalled with a chuckle. They traveled there by steamboat. “I think we stayed on the boat all night,” she told me.
They stayed for a bit with Myrtle’s sister, “until we got a room that we wanted to be to ourselves. You know, have a good time, go to dances, and places. You know, like girls do.” Somehow, they learned that the Navy was looking for women; she seemed to think a poster might have caught her eye: “Join the Navy and see the world,” she remembered.
“Did that appeal to you?” I asked her.
“Yes!” she replied exuberantly.
So she and Myrtle went and signed up. They didn’t have to drill, as she remembered it, though she also remembered “we marched up, when they had parades. We marched in the parade on Pennsylvania Avenue.” One time, “we all got together and marched up from the Capitol to the White House in the uniform.” That was for General Pershing, after the armistice.
Mostly, though, she said, “I worked in the Navy Department. I filed . . . I sorted papers and things. The usual things, you know, in an office that people do. . . . We went to dances, and things that girls do, you know, around that time, I guess.”
Both she and Myrtle would meet their future husbands at dances. She mentioned them a lot; the more we talked, the more it became clear to me that these dances were her favorite thing about being in Washington. And her favorite thing about being in the Navy, it seemed, was that it got her to Washington. “If they wanted us to go to town and mail a letter for them, well, I did that, and I liked that because to get away, and go to town, you know, a girl liked to get away,” she explained. “And I enjoyed that, that I was doing something, you know?” The Navy issued her two uniforms: a white one and a blue one. “I still have some of it,” she told me, smiling. “At home, in my trunk.”
Seventeen months later, I traveled to Boonsboro, Maryland, to meet another former Yeomanette named Charlotte Winters. She was 108 years old then. Boonsboro is near the Antietam battlefield, about sixty miles northwest of Washington, where Ms. Winters had grown up, and where she enlisted in the Navy in 1917. “Why did you join?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said with a lilt in her voice. “I just loved the Navy.” Later, she elaborated just a bit: “We lived in the part of Washington where everyone was in the Navy.”
“Did you have any friends who joined the Navy?” I asked.
“I think so,” she answered. “All of us girls joined the Navy.”
Now, that’s quite a statement, and to be honest, I don’t know if it’s accurate; Ms. Richardson’s memory had been frail, but Ms. Winters’s seemed faded almost to the point of irretrievability. I do know, from her obituary—she died about eleven months later—that her sister, Sophie, had also served in the Navy during the war; that, after the war, she was one of twenty women who helped found one of the first American Legion posts, in Washington, D.C.; and that she remained a member of the Legion for eighty years. From our conversation, I determined that her mother had died when she was very young, at which point her father’s sister, her aunt Lottie, had moved in to help raise her; that her father had worked for the Navy as a civilian; that she had worked as a secretary at a factory—“the Naval Gun Factory,” she said it was called—that produced artillery pieces for ships; that she met her husband there; and that she really liked her work. “I liked everything about the Navy,” she told me, and it was obvious, almost ninety years later, that she still did. Thanks to the Navy, she was no longer confined to a sidestep realm where she could only watch from behind a glass as the world played out its script; the Navy put her out in the world, made her a player on the stage. She was doing something. Maybe that’s why they all joined up, all eleven thousand of them—because Josephus Daniels had given them this fleeting chance to step out from behind that glass, and a lack of rank and benefits and room and board seemed a small price to pay for something most of them never could have imagined beforehand: a place in the wider world. Give a little credit to the Navy.
They were all released from active duty after the war ended, whether they wanted to be or not; perhaps, in the light of day after the fighting had stopped, the Navy reconsidered what was then a bold experiment. But the Yeomanettes did not just go back home and never mention their service again. Instead, they lobbied to upgrade their discharges from general to honorable—and won. They formed American Legion posts, sometimes with men, sometimes without. Many of them never stopped working at their jobs; they merely went home one day as Yeomanettes and returned the next as civilians.
I don’t know if the notion of the Yeomanette piqued the popular imagination during World War I; I’ve never come across a song written about them, or even any mention of them in a newspaper from that time. It seems possible that the vast majority of Americans didn’t even know they existed. But the military knew. And though the Yeomanettes were all discharged in 1919, and the Army and Navy returned to being single-sex institutions for more than twenty years, when World War II swept into America, they did not hesitate to welcome women into their ranks. In 1942, the Navy established Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES; within a year it put some twenty-seven thousand women in uniform. The following year, the Army established the Women’s Army Corps, and enlisted, by war’s end, one hundred thousand WACs. And if their uniforms were spiffier, their nickname lacked the elegance of the one accorded to that earlier generation of servicewomen, the ones who’d blazed the trail.
Aside from the U-boats and a couple of battles, it wasn’t much of a naval war. The first of those battles, near the Falkland Islands in 1914, was a sound defeat for the Germans, who lost an entire squadron, as well as the revered Vice Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee. The second, fought two years later in the North Sea off the coast of Jutland, Denmark, was a draw; the Germans, tired of having their fleet bottled up in port, took it out to sea, confronted the British, and sank some ships, but not enough. The British could have pursued the retreating Germans and possibly destroyed their fleet once and for all, but they didn’t. Both sides quickly returned to the status quo: the British ruling the open waters, blockading Germany; the Germans fighting back underwater.
Not the kind of naval war that might attract young American men seeking a lot of action, perhaps, but twenty-year-old William F. Cotton, of Corley, Arkansas—far away from any large body of water—chose to enlist in the Navy, nevertheless. “I was just looking for—for a life,” he explained. “Kids today, I don’t know what they look for.”
He actually offered several different explanations. “I joined the Navy because we had a war comin’ on,” he told me at one point; then, a few minutes later, he said, “I joined the Navy, I guess, because I thought I was going to be drafted. So rather than do that, I had a choice . . . and the Navy, of course you had to go away to go to the Navy.” Later still, he said: “I didn’t particularly like the idea of the Army. But the Navy was kind of a lure.”
They sent him to Boston—“coldest place in the United States,” he called it—where they put him to work baking bread in a galley; back in Arkansas, he’d worked in a bakery on weekends. After the war, he and his brother, Herbert, moved to Alexandria, Louisiana (where he was still living when I visited him, on September 19, 2004), and bought a bakery. Eventually they owned several throughout the state.
From Boston he sailed off to Cork, Ireland, where he joined the crew of the USS Oklahoma, a battleship that escorted troop transports as they crossed the Atlantic for France. The Oklahoma was a new ship, one of only a few in the entire fleet to use oil instead of coal. On December 7, 1941, it was moored in Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor. It took five torpedo hits and was strafed until it capsized; 429 of its crew were lost.
“I was what they call a ‘chief commissary,’” William Cotton recalled. That meant that when the Oklahoma docked in Brest, France, he had to go ashore and buy all the food for its crew—sixteen hundred men. And he didn’t speak any French. It may not have been the adventure he’d thought he was signing up for back in Arkansas, but it was hard work; he particularly remembered buying yeast and flour, and strawberries from a large Frenchwoman, who impressed him. “She was the boss of a working crew,” he remembered.
Unfortunately, he didn’t remember much more about his service, at least not that he could convey to me; he was 107 when we met, and his memory seemed to have mostly slipped away by then. Lloyd Brown, though, was a different story.
Maybe it was because he was a mere 103 years old when we met, a couple of months after I’d visited William Cotton, but talking to Lloyd Brown was pretty much like talking to anyone else. He was a bit confused about his precise age, but that could have been because, when he enlisted in the Navy in 1917, he gave them 1899 as his birth year, when it seems much more likely that he was actually born in 1901, and had tacked on a couple of years at the time so as not to be turned away. Whatever the year, he was born on October 7, in Ozark County, Missouri, near the town of Lutie, which is no longer a town. He was the fourth of nine children, seven boys and two girls; the next in line was his brother Floyd. Lloyd and Floyd. Their father, Claud, had a small farm. “I used to pull weeds away from the plants,” Lloyd recalled, “and take a hoe and dig around the plants, you know. Get all the weeds away from the plants, whatever we were growing, whether it’s cabbage, corn, carrots, beans, whatever . . . I didn’t mind. It was my duties as a kid. All the kids in the neighborhood did the same thing.”
We sat in his living room in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, about an hour southeast of Washington; it was a mild, sunny autumn afternoon. His daughter Nancy was there, and some other family, too, and they chimed in liberally, sometimes disputing minor details, often sharing a hearty laugh. They were a loud, lively bunch. The patriarch spoke loudest of all; hesitated from time to time, but never for long. He had an accent that, like Laurence Moffitt’s, seemed archaic, though his was harder to place. I’d say southern Missouri, but that would be cheating.
Around 1913, his father changed professions, “went to Chadwick [Missouri], and he went in business. Bought out a business, buying eggs and turkeys and processing them and plucking all the feathers off of them and putting them in barrels and shipping them to the Slipton Company, in St. Louis.” Chadwick was a railroad town, bigger and busier than Lutie, and the business did well. Claud Brown needed help; good thing he had those nine kids. His son Lloyd left school after the eighth grade and never returned.
A year or two later, America entered the war, and Lloyd decided he wanted a part of it. “I don’t know why I chose the Navy,” he said, “but I guess because it travels around different parts of the country.” Like William Cotton, he was completely landlocked.
“He wanted to see things,” Nancy added.
“Different parts of the world,” he asserted. “That sounded good to me.”
“How did your parents feel about it?” I asked.
“Oh, they weren’t concerned very much,” he said. “I was sixteen or seventeen years old.” His oldest brother, Homer, went into the Army and off to France. Lloyd signed up in St. Louis; from there, “they sent me to Great Lakes, Illinois, for about a week or ten days,” he recalled, “to learn to do a little marching, and row a boat. And then they put me on the New Hampshire.”
Like the Oklahoma, the New Hampshire was a battleship, but though it was only eight years older than the Oklahoma, there was one significant difference between the two: The New Hampshire was powered by coal. When fuel ran low, Lloyd Brown recalled, “they had a big barge pull up, and it had a big”—he closed his hand to simulate a steel claw—“grab up coal, and drop it on our deck. And then our crew would shovel it down manholes. Had a manhole on the deck, take the cover off and shovel the coal down there, and it goes down in the engine room.”
“Would that make a mess on deck?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “It’d mess the ship up and the crew and everything. Had to wash everything, the walls, the ceiling, with soap and water.” Then, he said, “you sprinkle sand on the wooden deck. And they had a brick, what they called a ‘holey stone,’ and they put that brick down there, and it had a hole in the middle of it, and you had something like a broom handle to push it back and forth. With the grain of the wood, of course.”
“Was that very hard work?”
“You didn’t have to press too hard. The weight of the brick would do the job. You would just have to push it back and forth.”
“How long did it take you to clean up after you got a load of coal?”
“Oh, I’d say a couple of days, that’s all.” You can see why the new class of battleships were so popular with seamen. It wasn’t so easy for the crew to get clean, either; on a ship that was at sea for weeks, even months, at a time, fresh water was a precious commodity. Lloyd Brown said that he and the other seamen were issued only about a quart of it every day at the canteen. In the shower, he explained, “usually you had enough fresh water to kind of get yourself soapy, and then you take a shower with seawater.” And, he added, “you had to shave and brush your teeth”—also with fresh water. There wasn’t much left over to actually drink. Fortunately, there was one fountain, located in the center of the ship, where anyone could go at any time and line up to drink their fill; it was known as the scuttlebutt. “You go to the scuttlebutt to get your drinking water. And gossip. Used to call it ‘scuttlebutt news.’”
Hence the expression.
When he wasn’t shoveling coal or scrubbing away coal dust, Seaman Second Class Brown was assigned to a gun crew. He was a loader. “You put the shell in, and then a bag of powder, and then close the breech and be ready to pull the trigger.”
“How big was the shell?”
“It was about the size of a champagne bottle. Three inches in diameter.”
“Did you ever actually have to fire the gun at sea?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “we fired the gun.” And then, he added, almost casually: “We shot a hole through another ship, one of our own ships, by accident.”
“Was that the gun you loaded?” I asked him.
“I believe it was,” he replied.
“Where did that happen?”
“In the ocean there.”
The rest of the family laughed. Lloyd didn’t seem to mind.
“What were you supposed to be shooting at?” I asked.
“Germans,” Nancy declared.
“Well,” Lloyd answered, “we were supposed to be shooting at a submarine.”
“Was there actually a submarine there?” I asked.
“There must have been not,” Nancy offered.
“No,” Lloyd said, “it turned out to be it was not a submarine, no.” He said it was “a floating piece of framework, a discarded carton or something.” U-boats were known to camouflage their periscopes by covering them with wooden crates, in the hopes that sailors would think they were just jetsam.
“Do you remember which ship it was that got hit?”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Did it do a lot of damage?”
He considered for a moment. “No,” he said.
“I guess they didn’t shoot back at you, huh?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and laughed. Most days, he explained, he did a four-hour tour on lookout up in the crow’s nest. He described the system they had for splitting up the horizon into sectors; I asked him what he would do if he spotted something suspicious. “Well,” he said, “I’d call my officer over the tube, call my boss, whoever he was—the watchtower, I guess it was—tell him what I saw, and let him issue out the orders that would be suitable for it.” On that particular day, he recalled, “I spotted what I thought was a submarine. It turned out to be a floating carton or something.”
Wait a minute. “And then you called that down?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“And that’s when they fired and hit the other ship?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh!” I said. “So you were the beginning of that?”
“Yeah,” he said, and everyone laughed, including him.
“Did you get in any trouble for that?” I asked him.
“No,” he told me. “I gave them my—I described what I saw and left them to follow their own judgment.”
And that was about as much excitement as he saw during the war, at least at sea. Ashore, especially in New York, he remembered, “we’d go chase girls together, things like that.”
“Did you have any luck?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, his smile giving way to a laugh.
“Did they like the uniform?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“That’s why he joined,” Nancy said.
“Yeah,” her father added, “during the war we were very popular.”
After the war he returned to Missouri, but soon found it bored him; a couple of years later, he enlisted in the Navy again. This time, he let them send him to music school—“It was better than scrubbing decks,” he explained. He learned the cello, and was assigned to the Seattle, Admiral Robert Coontz’s flagship, where he played in the admiral’s orchestra. “We played for his parties,” he recalled, “during his dinner hour.” One of the perks, he said, was that “they serve you the same food they’d serve the admiral.”
He also got to travel wherever the admiral went—Hawaii, Panama, Australia, New Zealand. It was a nice assignment. In 1925, after four years on the Seattle, he decided to leave the Navy for good; “my time was up, I guess,” he explained. He moved to Washington, D.C., and got work as a fireman at Engine Company 16, a job that saw him through the Depression. After sixteen years there, he moved on to serve as a fireman at the city’s National Airport, retiring in 1952.
He said he enjoyed all of the phases of his life a great deal, but I have reason to believe that his time on the New Hampshire was special to him. I know for a fact that it left a mark on him—literally. At one point, he rolled up his right sleeve and showed me, on the inside of his forearm, a large tattoo; it was faded and had blurred quite a bit, but still clear enough to read: USS NEW HAMPSHIRE.
It was eighty-six years old.
And that leaves Ernest Pusey. I first learned about him from an article in a Florida newspaper that didn’t even mention his service. It was, rather, about how he was General Motors’ oldest living pensioner. He was 109, and had been retired for forty-six years at that point. He had only worked at GM for thirty-two years. It pays to live a very long life.
He was living alone in a nice double-wide mobile home in Bradenton, Florida, when I met him; on the day I visited—June 15, 2004—it was so steamy outside that when I walked into his air-conditioned home, the lens on my video camera fogged up.
As much as any veteran I met—maybe as much as any person I’ve met—Ernie Pusey just looked like a nice guy. He wore big glasses, had a big nose and big ears and big sprouts of pure white hair atop his big, oval head, but mostly his face was defined by a big, open-mouthed smile, which never really left it during the two hours I interviewed him, nor during the lunch he and his caregiver, Rose, insisted on treating me to after we had finished. His happiness would seem to favor the nature side of the old nature versus nurture debate, because his early life hadn’t been an easy one. He’d been born in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1895; his father, already sick with tuberculosis, died just five years later. Ernie and his sister, Helen, were sent to live with their grandfather on N Street in Georgetown, but at some point his mother, who went to work for the telephone company, became afraid that her son would develop the consumption that had killed his father, so she sent him to live with two ladies—an elderly dowager and her unmarried middle-aged daughter—in Virginia. The mother, he remembered, “was bedridden, and they had to get her up and put her in a wheelchair every day. And her daughter taught school, and I went to the little school down the road.” He spent years there—eight or nine, or maybe twelve, depending upon when you asked him about it—traveling back and forth to Washington on a side-wheeler steamboat.
The Washington of Ernie Pusey’s childhood, at least the way he recalled it, sounded downright pastoral. The streets, he said, were still lit by gas lamps, “and they’d go around and light them every night.” His grandfather Samuel Pusey had been a bookkeeper at a flour mill on the Potomac; Ernie would often visit, sometimes playing in a nearby swimming hole—really—and sometimes making the rounds with his grandfather. “He’d go around to the different companies and see what they needed of any kind of cookies, or what kind of flour they’d want. And he had a horse and buggy, and he’d take a nap every afternoon when he was on the route—he’d tie the horse and buggy across the street and take a nap.”
They shared their backyard with a goat. Ernie also lived, some of the time, with his other grandparents, the Koeths, on A Street in Capitol Hill. He remembered that grandfather, Theodore Koeth, as being retired; in the 1900 census, Theodore Koeth is listed as a painter. “Their house there was a row house,” he told me, “and all the sheds in the back were together. And they didn’t want to let me out on the street because I’d run away a lot of times, so they’d put me in the backyard, and I’d get up there on the roof of those row houses, and I’d go down the street and see what everybody was doing. Sometimes they’d be having ice cream or something, I might get some.” He laughed. “And then when I got home, I’d get a spanking, every time.” It was worth it, he said.
Washington offered interesting employment opportunities for a boy. “I was delivering telegrams when I was big enough, on a bike, to the embassies,” he told me. “I must have been eight or nine years old.” He also worked at Union Station. “I had a job of putting the tags for where each [bag] was going. Put [passengers] on the cars, so they know what car to get on. And they had steam engines then. Sometimes they’d have a hard time getting out of there; they’d put sand on the track.” He said he saw the president—the first President Roosevelt—at the station many times. “They’d be on a special train,” he explained. “He’d leave out of Washington and go to some other city.” Later, he got a job as an oiler on a side-wheeler. The skipper often let him pilot it, he said.
And then, when he was twenty-one, he enlisted in the Navy. Or maybe he was twenty-two; America entered the war a month before his twenty-second birthday. “Why did you join the Navy?” I asked him.
“I had an uncle,” he replied, “and he said, ‘Join the Navy and you won’t be in the trenches.’” That was an honest answer.
They assigned him to the USS Wyoming, where he served as a fireman, firing the ship’s engines. “Two engines were fired with coal, and one engine was fired with oil,” he explained. He worked shoveling coal into one of the engines—four hours on, four off, alongside eight or ten other men. It was very hot work. He wanted to put in for another job—“either oiler or water tender, something like that”—but never did.
The Wyoming was the lead ship in something called Battleship Division 9, a cluster of five Dreadnought-class battleships under the command of Admiral Hugh Rodman that the United States Navy essentially loaned to the British Grand Fleet for the duration of the war. They almost didn’t make it; the weather was so bad during the transatlantic crossing that winds ripped the topmasts off all the ships, and one, the New York, nearly foundered. “All the way over, it was so rough, nobody was allowed topside,” Ernie Pusey recalled eighty-seven years later. “And the destroyers were going along . . . as rough as it was, I think they only saw one German submarine.” When that happened, he said, the destroyers “all rushed over there to drop the depth charges.”
“Did they get it?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he said.
They finally made it to Scapa Flow, a stretch of water amid the Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland, where they performed a series of maneuvers and exercises in relative safety. “It was fixed so the submarines couldn’t come up in there,” Ernie explained. “A couple of times we saw a submarine and the small ships would go right after them and drop depth charges.”
“Did you yourself ever see one?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, “we saw one or two.”
“What did they look like?”
“Well, they were just, had the snorkel out of the water, and of course, they weren’t going to be up above, with the ships coming along, because they had six-inch guns they could fire out both sides.”
“The battleship had six-inch guns?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they ever fire them?”
“No, they’d only fire them in practice. And one time,” he said, “they had twelve-inch guns, and they fired them in practice, and I remember we were looking out of the porthole, and thought they were going to fire the one up on the bow, and they fired the one right where we were looking out the porthole. My cap flew off the porthole. It deafened me.” Things were pretty tense onboard the Wyoming. “Some of the men on there were so afraid of the submarines that they had to discharge them. . . . They just went all to pieces.”
Since the Wyoming was frequently confined to port during its time at Scapa Flow, its seamen enjoyed a good bit of leave—“maybe four or five hours” at a time. “One time I went out,” Mr. Pusey told me, “and a fellow says, ‘Oh, I’m going so and so further,’ so he went to Glasgow, and I went along. We met a couple of girls there, and I should’ve taken the train back that evening and I missed the train, and when I got back on ship, I didn’t get any leave for six months.”
The battleships of Division 9 left Scapa Flow on several occasions to escort critical supply convoys to and from Norway. It was hoped, by the fleet’s high command, that the German fleet might attempt to intercept the convoy, thus giving the Allies an opportunity to destroy it once and for all; but that never happened. Instead, the ships sailed for the North Sea, where they performed still more exercises and maneuvers. According to its last surviving crew member, the men of the Wyoming spent most of their time there “waiting for the Germans to come out.” He added, a bit ruefully: “They never came out.”
Not until after the armistice was signed, anyway. On November 21, 1918, the British Grand Fleet, including US Battleship Division 9, collected in the North Sea, where they—370 ships carrying ninety thousand seamen—formed two columns, through which passed the entire German fleet, en route to surrender. Admiral David Beatty, commander of the Grand Fleet, likened the procession to “sheep being herded by dogs to their folds.” Admiral Rodman later wrote: “It was hard to realize that the ships which we had expected and hoped to engage, would all be given up without a struggle or fleet action, and surrender without a fight.” In the end, the German fleet was sunk—by the Germans themselves. “They opened up valves down below,” Mr. Pusey explained. “They sunk every one of them right there, in Scapa Flow. They’re still there now.”
Those 370 Allied ships weren’t even there to see it; the armistice allowed the German Navy that small dignity. “The Fleet, my fleet, is brokenhearted,” Admiral Beatty said afterward. Even Ernie Pusey, one of the most gentle-natured people I have ever met, felt that way, as I learned toward the end of our visit, when Rose handed me a letter he had written to his sister Helen on November 21, 1918:
The German ships surrendered to us today so we went out about twenty five miles to meet them. Sorry we had to greet them in such a peaceful manner. What they really deserved was a twelve inch salvo. I guess you know what that is.
Despite the disappointment Admiral Beatty and Fireman Pusey and countless other seamen felt at the time, the fact is that, in successfully carrying supplies and munitions through U-boat-infested waters, in ferrying two million doughboys to France, in keeping the German fleet bottled up in harbor and conducting a blockade so effective that it literally starved Germany into submission, the Allied naval forces made an indispensable contribution to winning the war. Still, they never seemed to get even the little bit of credit that that old Tin Pan Alley song asked for. Even the French, who have done more than anyone in recent years to commemorate the efforts of those who fought and won the war, made service on French soil a requirement for receiving the Légion d’Honneur. So Lloyd Brown and Ernest Pusey never received it; William Cotton did so only because he went ashore at Brest to buy supplies for the Oklahoma’s commissary.
I own hundreds of pieces of sheet music from World War I, hundreds of songs about every imaginable aspect of America’s war experience. Exactly two of those songs mention the Navy.
We’ve already discussed the first. The second is one I first heard on a 1918 Columbia blue-label 78 I picked up, in a lot of a hundred or so, at a flea market in Memphis in the early 1990s. “Over There,” it starts off—borrowing, as so many songs back then did, from George M. Cohan—we hear of heroes who’ve been fighting for you and me. / Ev’rywhere, we see our soldiers, decorated for bravery. / Tho’ we are proud of them you bet, / Don’t let that make us all forget:
On the sea, we’ve other heroes, too,
On the sea, our sailor boys in blue;
With their swift Destroyers, “Submarine Annoyers,”
They’ve been tried and true;
God bless them!
Now this war is over, “Over There,”
We’ll have to take our hats right off to Jack;
Tho’ the Army is the clover,
’Twas the Navy took them over,
And the Navy will bring them back!
At the end of its second verse, the song, “The Navy Will Bring Them Back!” pleads: We knew our boys were bound to win / But why not count the Navy in? I don’t know much about Yeoman Howard Johnson, USN, who is credited as the song’s lyricist; I don’t know if he, or any of the other Americans who served at sea in that war, ever got an answer to that question. For sure, no one ever had to ask it during the next war.