|
Kathy Wiedell wrote
this newspaper article in her local newspaper about her Dad, Glenn Holmgren
and his time on the Potter during WWII:
Stephen Potter Reunion
They came by planes,
trains and automobiles -- just like they had been coming every two years --
to commemorate and honor a time in their lives when they were young, their
country needed them, and they needed each other. They are the men of the USS
Stephen Potter, DD-538, a ship that had taken them to war and brought them
safely home.
This is the story of
one of those sailors and the day that journey began: It was a sunny June
afternoon, that war year of 1943 and the train depot in Minneapolis was
bustling with activity. Steam screeched from the waiting trains as scores of
barely-men signed on the dotted line to fight for their country.
One of those recruits
was a fresh-faced 17-year-old kid named Glenn Holmgren. “I was only 15 when
Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,” Holmgren, now a
Crosby resident, said. “My brother was already in the Navy and I wanted to
join too!’ “So as soon as I was old enough, I enlisted in the Navy.
“I remember going home
to tell my Mother I was leaving to enlist. I had to go right away, I told
her, so I packed up some of my stuff and gave her a hug and a kiss. I told
her, ‘I’ll just say good-bye to you here. I don’t want to see you cry at the
station.’
“I was just a kid but I
didn’t want to be left behind. I thought, ‘It’s time for me to be on my own.
I wanted to go and fight for my country.’“I was 17 and the Navy was taking
17-year-olds for a minority cruise, which meant I was regular Navy and I
would get out when I was 21.
“I remember walking
down the street and my Mother was standing there waving at me as I went to
catch the streetcar to go to Minneapolis to get sworn in. They put me on the
train going to boot camp in Farragut, Idaho.” The train trip was something
Holmgren has never forgotten. “There were a lot of other guys going to boot
camp in Farragut, too. We’d all been through the Depression and weren’t used
to fancy things. “My family was so poor, we had never gone to a restaurant,
never taken a vacation. Sometimes we’d only have lettuce with vinegar and
sugar. Sometimes all we had was corn on the cob. “But here I was on the
train -- a bed to sleep in, meals served in the dining room. We would be
called for dinner and there was a linen tablecloth on the table, silverware
and goblets and fancy dishes.
“A waiter would come
and take our order. I have never forgotten that trip.” When Holmgren arrived
in Chicago for his first reunion with his World War II shipmates, he found
they’d been looking for him.
“ I hadn’t seen these
guys for over 56 years,” Holmgren said. “A lot of us couldn’t remember each
other, but we remembered what we had been through!” Shipmates and their
wives huddled in the hotel lobby, welcoming each other as they arrived. For
Glenn Holmgren, the last time he had seen these men, they were all young
men.
Now they were
white-haired and the years had given them a perspective that made them proud
of all they’d accomplished together.
They’d been to sea for
over two years together on the Stephen Potter.
Together they had
worked as a team to defend their country against the Japanese attack at sea.
They arrived at the
hotel proudly wearing their caps, their T-shirts, their jackets, little pins
on their caps with insignia and pictures of the ship boldly declaring they’d
all served aboard the U.S.S. Stephen Potter, DD-538.
Swede Molund, one of
the Potter’s engine crew, was talking with Holmgren when a fellow shipmate
and his wife arrived. Happy welcomes surrounded them as they came through
the front door of the hotel. The group had been waiting for them. “Hey,
Smith,” Swede called out enthusiastically, “you remember Holmgren?!”
The man called Smith
came over, a broad grin on his face, his right hand extended towards
Holmgren. “Glenn?! I’ve been looking for you for 50 years! Where have you
been! I’ve been looking for you at every reunion I’ve been to! I’d say,
‘Anybody seen Holmgren? Is he here? And when you weren’t there, and nobody
knew where you were, I told them, ‘Put him on the list anyway!’”
“For many of us, the
Navy years were the best years of our life,” Holmgren said. “They fed us,
they gave us clothes, they took care of us, gave us our training. I loved
the Navy. It was the best time of my whole life.
Smith and Holmgren were
both machinist’s mates in the Potter’s engine room. When they learned they
were both from Minnesota, they became friends. They were surprised to learn
that they’d both been on the same train to boot camp. Ozzie Anderson had
also been through boot camp at Farragut. “When we got off the train in
Farragut,” Anderson said, “we went in and they gave us a physical. We were
in this great big long hall and we had to strip down to our nothings. There
were 100s of guys in there. Here comes four nurses coming through all these
guys trying to hide themselves. “Then we got into our barracks. We got up at
4 a.m., washed up and then completely scrubbed the barracks and had a
complete inspection.” The men remember the discipline of boot camp and those
men stupid enough to defy it. “They were teaching discipline,” Anderson
said. “We had two or three guys who never made their beds or cleaned up. We
were all in this together and one guy kept getting us into trouble.
“We took him into the
shower and scrubbed him down with a heavy bristle brush. Then we made him
stand there for a while. We told him if he didn’t clean up and pass
inspection, we’d do it again!” At Farragut, Holmgren learned a valuable
lesson himself about getting along in the Navy. It happened in the mess
hall. “The first time I ate at boot camp, I was given a tray to go through
the food line. The guys dishing up the food kept putting more food on my
tray so when I got to the end of the line, I thought, ‘I’ll just get a lot
of bread to eat and I’ll throw this other stuff away.’”
When he sat down with
his overloaded food tray, Holmgren learned that in the Navy, if you take it,
you eat it! “That’s when I first learned that you better do what they say if
you are going to get along good in the Navy,” he said with a grin. “They
knew I had just gotten there and they knew I didn’t know I was going to have
to eat everything on my tray, so they showed me. It was OK. I got by. “But I
learned my lesson.” At Farragut, the men learned knot tying, navigation,
flag signals, and they were tested almost every day.
“One test we had to
pass was swimming. We had to swim 100 yards and if you failed that one,”
Holmgren remembers, “you had to stay in boot camp until you passed!” At
Farragut, the men signed up for the jobs they wanted to learn in the Navy.
The classes they passed, the discipline they learned, molded them together
as a team.
After boot camp, the
men went by train to the San Diego Navy shipyards to join up with their
ship. “The train went through the
Redwood Forest,” Anderson said,
“ -- and this really sticks in my mind -- the train came down the hill at an
angle and you could see the ocean. It was the first time I’d seen the ocean.
All we could see was water!” A brand new ship, the Potter had been built at
the Bethlehem Steel yards in San Francisco. Holmgren and the others joining
the ship would put her into commission.
In December of 1943,
with six months of training under their belts, the crew sailed the Potter to
Honolulu. “The destroyers were called tin cans,” Holmgren explained,
“because they were made so light. They had only 5/8ths inch of steel on the
side. They weren’t made like the battleships. “It weighed 2100 tons, carried
320 people, was 384 feet in length by 39 feet on the beam.” Holmgren rattles
off the statistics like he’d just seen her yesterday.
The men in the group
know exactly what he is talking about. This was their ship. Anderson, Smith
and Swede Molund had served in the engine room and fire rooms together with
Holmgren.
“I started in the
forward fire room,” Holmgren said. “I wanted to learn all I could about the
job. I always was amazed how quick we could cut all those burners out and
cut them back in again and change them around. We had Babcock and Wilcox
express-type small tube boilers. They had 600 lbs. steam pressure, ran at
850 degrees Fahrenheit under 400 pounds of water pressure, so they were a
unique unit.” After training as a fireman, Holmgren wanted to work in the
engine room.
Because of all he had
learned about the boilers, and his special knack with the equipment,
Holmgren was assigned to the fire room for his battle station.
There was one little
problem many of the men on the Potter faced, however, as they steamed out to
sea to join the war, they were polliwogs and that had to be remedied. “When
you go out to sea and you haven’t been across the equator,’ Anderson
explained, “you are called a polliwog.” Polliwogs had to go through an
initiation to earn their Shell back certificate to prove they had what it
took to be Navy. The initiation was so brutal, a doctor sat watch over the
ritual.
“It was tough,”
Anderson said, “but you didn’t get out of it, even if you were an officer.
If you went over the equator, you had to go through it.
“Old Carl Ochs, one of
our shipmates, built a little stool with some wires in it that would give
you a shock. They would wash you down with salt water and sit you on top of
it in your skivvies. But you didn’t sit there very long! Boy, you’d get a
surprise!
“After that, you got
down and had to crawl on your hands and knees and they’d whack you on your
rump! They used heavy sticks but so many guys got welts on their rear they
made them use softer stuff.
“Then,” Anderson
explained, “we went down the line and they made corn boiled with quinine and
stuffed that in your mouth it -- tasted like manure -- “ “And you didn’t
have a choice,” Holmgren said. “You did it!” “Then,” Anderson continued,
“they had the a sailor dressed up as King Neptune and another as the Royal
Baby, who was usually the fattest guy on board, and they put him in a sheet
and greased his belly and we had to kiss his belly! “After you kissed the
Baby” Anderson said, “we had to crawl through garbage and then they washed
us off with high pressure salt water. They figured if you made it through
all of that you had what it took!
“They gave each of us a
fancy diploma for making it through. We were now officially shell backs!”
“We were a close group,” Holmgren said. “One guy at the reunion said it was
the best time of his life . We went through so much -- so many battles that
we had to be close. We went 250,000 miles out there. It seemed like we were
always in a battle of some kind. “The destroyers went in before anyone else
in battle,” Holmgren remembers. “We had 21 destroyers lined around the
cruisers as guards and when the planes came in they always came over the
destroyers first. We would start firing first,”
Anderson added. “We were under
attack all the time,” Holmgren said. “When they rang general quarters, we’d
all run to our battle stations.
“When you think what we
were involved in out there in the Pacific. It’s unbelievable! When we were
in the Philippine Sea, we heard the Jap fleet was coming in and we left
Saipan -- went full-steam ahead for two days. Our pilots off the carriers in
our fleet would go out and they sank one or two enemy carriers and then came
back. “Some were out of fuel and they’d crash in the ocean. We’d steam out
and pick them up. As the shipmates share their stories at the reunion, a
sense of family pervades. They each played a part in each other’s safety.
They each carry a piece of the story. They had come through many battles and
storms together.
“We helped each other,”
Anderson said, “we needed each other. We all knew what we were supposed to
do.” “Remember the typhoon?” Holmgren asks. The typhoon! Everyone’s head
bobs in remembrance. It was an event they had survived by God’s mercy and
they all knew it. “We took two 76 degree lists,” Smith said. “And 90 degrees
is flat over,” Holmgren said. “If you took any water down the stacks, you
were gone. “We’d been out for days and needed to refuel to keep going. Some
of the ships had refueled, but we hadn’t finished refueling. So, our oil
king had filled our fuel tanks with water, giving the ship ballast.” “We had
burned up all our fuel and we were coming in on 1500 gallons of diesel fuel.
That fuel ran our condenser to make fresh water -- but we carried 150,000
gallons of crude oil to burn in the boilers and 15,000 gallons of diesel to
burn in the diesel generator and water softener and we came in off that
typhoon on only 1500 gallons of diesel. “The typhoon was above what the ship
was rated to handle and we couldn’t even go topside. They had more water
over the ship than under it. We had 70 foot waves and 140 MPH winds. And we
were taking over 70 degree lists.
Now the ship could sink
on a 56 or 57 degree, but if we didn’t have the power to keep moving you
would just lay over the side and sink. “But when you come in on 1500 gallons
of diesel fuel ...”
The men shake their
head in disbelief and simple gratitude for the miracle.
“I remember the ship
nearly standing on end,” Smith said. “We’d come down a trough with the bow
straight down almost, and then we’d ride over the wave and the bow would go
straight up. I don’t know how we survived it!” “Three ships went down,”
Holmgren said. “They just rolled over and were gone. When you’re empty on
fuel, you ride high. You’re out of fuel, you’re done. You can’t keep your
bow into the waves. Seven hundred and ninety men died -- just like that.
They went straight to the bottom.” Four ships made it back to port. The
typhoon’s furious claim of those three destroyers is one of the great
tragedies of the war.
As the men gather
together in the Hospitality Room of the hotel, pictures are brought out of
past reunions and shipmates now gone. The Potter, by all accounts, was a
special ship. A ship they felt was charmed and protected.
 No one was lost on the
ship, except one mate who washed overboard and was never found. “The good
Lord was watching over us,” Anderson said. “We had torpedoes and typhoons,
kamikaze attacks and different invasions the Potter was part of.
When they bombarded Iwo
Jima during the invasion, we were running submarine guard for the battle
ships.” Out on the South Pacific, Holmgren had time to think about what he
believed. He had along the Bible his Mother had given him. “I was out in the
middle of the war zone and I needed to make some decisions about what I
understood about God. I had heard the Gospel growing up, but it was just
time for me to make a decision.
“I realized I would
never be able to figure out where God could have come from, but I understood
enough to know He was there. In my own life, I knew that I was there -- I
just realized the greatness of God and Jesus Christ and I accepted Him as my
Savior. “I started reading the Bible Mother had given me and I’d get
together with three or four other sailors and we’d talk about the Bible.
“Once in a while,”
Holmgren remembers, “a fellow would go by and say, ‘What’s the good word,
Glenn?’ And I would say, ‘Jesus Saves!’
“I felt secure because
if anything happened to me out there, I knew I would go to Heaven.” “We had
so many experiences,” Holmgren remembers. “We were just kids. I remember
when the aircraft carrier, Franklin, was hit by steel-piercing bombs. Over
700 people died from the attack. We tied up alongside to render assistance
and passed over coffee and supplies.
“The Franklin had the
most damage of any ship that was ever returned to active duty,” Holmgren
added. “I’ll never forget the sight of her listing in the water.
“Then, when the
aircraft carrier, Bunker Hill, was hit,” Holmgren said. “I was standing on
the fantail and I saw two kamikaze planes dive into her.
“The ship was burning
and listing. I didn’t know if it was going to make it. “We picked up over
100 survivors. I was down below in the engine room, but when I came up, I
saw where the planes had hit. The men were jumping off the ship, off the
flight deck, out of the holes in the side of the ship. “We went over to pick
them up. We put a rope net over the side of the Potter and we helped
survivors climb up. I pulled a couple of guys out of the water. One of the
men I pulled out had his skin burned so badly, it folded backwards over his
arms as I grabbed him.
“His arms were burned
so badly, they were white. The doctor gave him whiskey. They were using
sulfur for an antibiotic. Guys were coming up the net with shrapnel holes in
‘em. It was awful.” When two of the fleet’s cruisers Canberra and Houston
were hit by torpedoes, the Potter steamed alongside as protection for the
ships towing them away from the battle zone. That time, Japanese planes
again attacked the damaged ships, this time coming in so close over the
Potter, Holmgren saw the pilot’s face. He has never forgotten it. “It took
us four days to cover the 500 miles out to sea to meet up with the tugs,”
Anderson remembers. “We were under constant attack.
“Okinawa was one of the last major battles, and the last one we were in on the
Potter before we headed stateside.
Japan sent out 3500 suicide planes and most of them didn’t know how to fly
back. It was their last big stronghold. It wasn’t long after that that
Hiroshima happened.” “When the Potter came back in summer of 1945, we had
our first leave in two years,” Holmgren said. “When I got back off of leave,
I’d been transferred off the Potter because I was in the regular Navy and
had another year to serve out my enlistment. “
That September, when
the war over, the Potter was decommissioned. The men whose enlistment was
over with the war stayed with the ship to take her out of service. At the
closing night’s dinner, a mural-sized photograph of the Potter and the men
who had been there at the end hung on the wall in the banquet room. Smith
and Holmgren, who were regular Navy, still had more time on their
enlistment. They had been reassigned to other ships. They weren’t among the
sailors in the photograph. They expressed their regret that they hadn’t been
there to decommission their ship and be included in the only picture taken
of the Potter and her crew before she was moth balled.
“I felt like we got
cheated out of something when we didn’t get to decommission the ship and
weren’t there for the picture of the ship and the crew,” Smith said.
Holmgren nodded in agreement. “We felt we missed out on something. That ship
was very special. We were all family.” “We didn’t even get a ship’s
picture,” Holmgren said. The Potter’s crew were family and the final picture
was missing some of its members. When Holmgren got back from his 30-day
leave, he began the final months of his enlistment. After serving seven
months on the USS Barney, a World War I four-piper ship that escorted
shakedown cruises, Holmgren was assigned to the seaplane tender, the
Cumberland Sound. “I served on the Cumberland Sound as a machinist’s mate 2d
class,” Holmgren said. “We were part of Operations Crossroads, the atomic
bomb test at Bikini Atoll in July of 1946.” Smith and Holmgren were
surprised to learn at the reunion that they had both been there at Bikini,
but on different ships. 250 ships were at ground zero in the atoll at
Bikini Island in the Marshall
Islands. They were about to take the full force of two atomic bombs -- one
from the air, one underwater.
The natives had been
relocated and the island turned into a scientific laboratory to research the
effects of the atomic bomb. In the center of the formation stood the
Japanese battleship, Nagata. It had received the “Tora, Tora, Tora” message
from Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship that Pearl Harbor was a “go.” Other
captured enemy vessels were also anchored at the test site. “The first bomb
was dropped from a B29,” Holmgren said. “Before the bomb went off we had to
have sunglasses on. It was about 130 degrees in the shade and when we looked
at the sun with the special glasses on, it was just a little speck of light
out there. “But when the bomb went off, it looked like the whole world was
lit up with fluorescent lights.” A second test was then prepared to explode
the bomb under water.
“We had the scientists
on our ship that controlled the bomb,” Holmgren said. “We sent in a
radio-controlled speed boat from our ship to ignite the bomb underwater.
When it was in position, the scientists detonated the bomb from our ship.
“When the bomb went off under water, it raised the water so high up in the
air that the water froze into 100 pound pieces of hail that fell on the
decks of the ships.” Smith remembers the animals that had been tethered to
the deck of some of the ships to test how the bomb would affect them.
“All the animals died
several weeks later after the bomb test,” he remembered at the reunion. “In
the third generation, all of the animals died off who had been exposed to
the radiation. “The goats went blind. Their eyes were pure white after the
test. And on the decks of the ships, part of the deck was burned -- like in
stripes -- some of it burned here, other places not burned.” “All the ships,
including the battleship Nagato, went right up in the air and down,” Smith
remembers. “The aircraft carrier was beat up.” “We stayed there a couple of
months examining things and cleaning them up.
There were quite a few
ships out there to monitor the tests,” Holmgren said. “Afterwards, they
asked for volunteers to clean the radioactivity out of the condensers that
changed the salt water to drinking water. I was one of the volunteers. They
told us there was nothing to worry about, that it was safe. “A few years
ago, I was at the Vets Hospital in Phoenix and when I
told them I was a survivor of the Bikini Atomic Bomb test, they wanted to
run some tests to see if I had any radioactivity in me. It turned out I did.
“The doctor said it would probably bother me when I got older but I’m 75 and
the only thing that happened is I’ve just lost my hair. No one else in my
family lost their hair. I had cataract surgery in my 50s, too, that is
probably related to the blast.”
For Holmgren, those two
years serving with his shipmates on the Potter were some of the happiest
days of his life. His family was Navy -- his Dad served on a destroyer in
World War I and his brothers were on destroyers just like he was in the
Second World War. He had been proud to serve his country. “I’d join up again
if my country needed me,” Holmgren said.
On that closing night,
the USS Stephen Potter family sang hymns and old favorites. The patriotism
in this room of veterans and their families was very real and very
important.
“We knew who our enemy
was,” Smith said, “not like today with the terrorists. Our biggest battle
was the Marianas turkey shoot where 450 Jap planes were shot down in one day.” “We went
through a lot in the war. I had no regrets being out there. I was a young
boy when I went in and it made a man out of me,” Holmgren said.
“I grew up quick. We
all felt the responsibility of the war. I knew the country was counting on
me. We were a close group on the Potter. “ Out on the Pacific Ocean, the
boys who rode the train to boot camp had returned men. They had done the job
they were sent to do. And now, 56 years later, they were commemorating those
life-changing months and years -- time they would give all over again if
their country needed them.
As the years have
passed, the number of Potter veterans has dwindled. Each reunion, they meet
to remember a ship that took them to war and back; a time when together they
had some of the best years of their lives. “Being in the service gave you a
different perspective on life,” Ozzie Anderson reflected. “You appreciated
more the things in the country because you had been a part of the effort to
keep the country safe.
“It was a time when
everybody cared about everybody else. We all worked together. “It’s like
being reunited with your family when we come to the reunions,” Anderson
said. “It’s something I can’t explain. You cannot tell the bonding that you
have with the guys that were on the ship.” “We were a group of men depending
on each other,” Holmgren said. “In the middle of the ocean, if we didn’t
care for each other, we weren’t going to make it. Our lives depended on each
other. “I was raised poor. It was the first good job I had. It was helping
my country win the war. And I just loved the Navy. I still love the Navy.
How could you have a
greater job than fighting for your country?”
Written by Kathy Wiedell
Please e-mail comments to:
sojurner@emily.net
|
