WWII vets recall days on destroyer

By MARGIE TRAX PAGE - Staff Writer - mtrax@starbeacon.com
Star Beacon

May 11, 2008 10:56 pm

— GENEVA — About 65 years ago, six strapping young men stood on the deck of the AD-4 USS Whitney, the wind in their hair, the salt on their faces, and the bitter taste of military-issued beer on their lips.
The Whitney, a World War II destroyer repair ship, was home to thousands of sailors during wartime. Now the men, bald heads tucked under navy blue baseball caps, recall their days as comrades in days of war.
“It was a time, looking back now, that we should have been scared. We should have been afraid. But we were too young to realize we should be afraid,” Roger Franz of St. Paul, Minn., said.
WWII Navy veterans Franz, John Bacik, Bob Wherry, Francis Barrett and Don McPherson traveled from the far ends of the country to visit Geneva resident Archie Bilger for their yearly reunion last week. The men have been meeting each year at a different location since 1990 to share the same old stories of bravery, tragedy, bad food and shenanigans of their days aboard the Whitney.
“It just seems right,” Bilger said, “to get together now and talk about how things were, how things are, and how things ought to be.”
Under his arm, Bilger carries a scrapbook of momentoes, including a frayed, foot-long scrap of flag symbolic of his attendance on the Whitney.
“We flew a huge, long flag — one foot long for each and every sailor aboard. It was so long we attached balloons to it to keep it out of the water and we still lost some of it,” Bilger said. “This is my foot of flag.”
McPherson, 81, of Kooskia, Idaho, got the reunion ball rolling 18 years ago when he made an impulsive call to shipmate Gene McCorgary, 82.
“After 40 years of nobody communicating with anybody, I called Gene and said ‘What have you been doing for the last 40 years?’ Gene started calling around and before we knew it, we had 190 guys ready for a reunion,” McPherson said.
Of those 190 men, just nine are still in the reunion circle, with McCorgary and Pearl Harbor veterans Joe Sweeny and Tom Darwin, both 88, not able to attend.
“Now we get together and wonder where everyone else is. We wonder what’s been going on in our old hometowns and we talk about politics,” Bacik, 85, of Little Ferry, N.J.
The men were aboard the Whitney on Nov. 10, 1944 when the ammunition ship the USS Mount Hood exploded, killing hundreds of men. The Whitney rocked with the Mount Hood’s explosion of 3,800 tons of ammunition. Now 63 years later, the sailors still remember the day clearly.
“It left a crater in the ocean floor,” McPherson said. “No one survived because no one could have survived. I was just going to step out of the cargo port (on the Whitney) when the explosion drove me right back into the ship.”
Franz said the feeling on the Whitney was somber as the men helped gather the dead and piece together events surrounding the tragedy.
“We all knew that any one of us could have been on that ship when it exploded,” Franz said. “We sent repair crews over there all the time. Actually, at the time, the Whitney had more ammunition on it than Mount Hood.”
Not all days aboard the Whitney were tragic. The men remember sneaking swigs of the most coveted contraband: 200-proof alcohol used to fuel torpedoes.
“We would dilute the stuff with a little grape juice. Some of us got put in lockup for IWHBA: Intoxicated Without Having Been Ashore,” McPherson said chuckling. “That alcohol was potent stuff.”
Bilger said the soldiers slept “anywhere they could find a place” as the ship was greatly overcrowded with sailors.
“I remember too that you got a beer credit for every rat you killed. One guy killed 45 rats.”
The men would sit in the sand ashore, sipping their military-issue “Greasy Dick” beers.
“I wouldn’t change anything about the experience,” McPherson said.

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