The Navy Years: A Memoir

By Edith Duven Flaherty

Did I dream of becoming a Navy wife? No! Never! I wanted to stay in the safety of my own small town world like all the other post World War II couples I knew. But man proposes and God disposes so, dragging my feet, I encountered a frighteningly unfamiliar world whose terms and conditions were created by the United States Navy. I tip-toed into it reluctantly and only years later when my husband was retiring, did I come to realize how much the way of life had become a part of me, and how much I was going to miss it. The learning process was challenging. I never grew to love the weeks and months of loneliness, but I did learn to cope with it, and grew in the learning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450278843

Edith Duven Flaherty

Born in Massachusetts, Edith Flaherty married a career submarine sailor and spent sixteen years moving, settling, moving again. A lifetime love of reading ended, finally, in an itch to tell her own stories. Several reams of scrap paper later, she has written– (so far) – four novels, The War in Dover’s Landing being the first to be published. Now widowed and living in New Mexico, she has two sons, a daughter-in-law, a grandson and two cats, and continues to write.

Book preview

ONE

War Over: Life Begins

I remember the day we learned that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. It was April 12th, 1945, I was twenty-two years of age and couldn’t really remember any other president. In addition to the shock, there was the feeling of how unfair it was that he didn’t live to see the end of World War II. How could anyone else possibly replace him? Who was this Harry Truman anyhow, with his plain Middle-American speech and his unpretentious Middle-America air.

Those European politicians will eat him alive, Mom said, and I remembered people saying the seeds of World War II were sown at the treaty table that ended World War I. Then on April 30th, word came of Hitler’s suicide, a different kind of shock. That, too, seemed terribly unfair. Where was the justice in his escape from facing the cost of the slaughter and the horrors he had unleashed upon the world? Death seemed to me no punishment at all.

Germany’s surrender on May 8th, 1945, ended the war in Europe, hundreds and thousands of servicemen were beginning to stream home and that was certainly thrilling. But the war with Japan was still raging in the Pacific so the celebrations, though joyful, were shadowed by warnings that defeating Japan would be costly, bloody and probably lengthy. There was still a lot more mountain to be climbed. As to the financial cost of the war, as opposed to its cost in terms of lives lost, it wasn’t exactly a pay-as-you-go war, but the purchase of War Bonds and War Stamps were being urged upon us at every movie, public event, newsreels – glamorous movie stars made appeals on every public occasion, and millions of dollars were raised to help defray the incredible financial cost of this war. Nothing devours a country’s wealth more rapidly than wars can – and do.

Already America’s small towns were making the first tentative proposals for memorials to be erected, something that would incorporate the names of the young men who would never come home again, whose graves were in the ocean’s depths or in cemeteries on foreign soil. So our happiness was tinged with fear for those who were still fighting in the Pacific Theatre - which included Joseph Edward Flaherty, ENC(SS). Translation: Engineman Chief, Submarine Service. Joe was among the unknown servicemen to whom I wrote as part of my contribution to the war effort’s morale. However he was not as anonymous as the others whom I never expected to meet - I had met Joe, in fact we had had one hasty date before the letters between us began.

I need to back up a little. My friends and neighbors , Eleanor and Marilynn Hunter, lived across the street from me and had grown up next to the Flaherty family. Joe’s parents once owned the house my family now lived in, having lost it to foreclosure during the Depression years. Having survived my own family’s farm foreclosure earlier, my parents bought the former Flaherty house in 1940 as we began to struggle back to our feet. Marilynn and I both worked in the Town Office, she for the Town Treasurer, my boss being the small-town equivalent of mayor. On a brief leave from the Navy in 1943, this tall sailor with electric blue eyes had dropped into the Town Office to say a passing hello to Marilynn and to ask after their Aunt Emma, with whom they lived. Marilynn always took credit for our marriage – because she called me down to her office to meet the neighbor boy she’d grown up with, then pretended to answer an urgent phone call and left me struggling to find things to say to him. Joe found a few words, however, and invited me out that evening so we had that one date before his leave ended. Joe told me that evening how he had enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and his submarine, the U.S.S Crevalle, was part of the Pacific fleet working to do all the damage it could to Japanese shipping. As the evening ended Joe asked me if I would write to him and I added him to the list of servicemen to whom I wrote casual friendly letters. With one major difference. Over the next two years our letters increasingly forged a bond that didn’t occur with any of my other correspondents.

Marilynn and Eleanore had known Joe for most of their lives, so in a sense I was learning to know him better than was possible just from his letters. Given Japan’s island status we all knew their shipping lanes had to be protected at all costs, so the danger was only too obvious. Several of my unknown soldier/sailor/marine correspondents had already disappeared, their letters abruptly stopped coming and I had to assume the worst. So I greeted each clutch of letters from Joe with relief. There was always a long wait, they arrived in bunches, mailed when they were in port somewhere refitting and/or resupplying.

Then, with the shock of a bolt of lightning something called an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, news it was impossible to absorb right away. Only one super-bomber, a B-29? Not a fleet of bombers? One bomb? One bomb that incinerated a whole city and melted the ground where it landed into glass? Ground Zero, they called it – and new words were added to our language. Ground Zero. Atomic Bomb. Radiation Sickness. Mushroom Cloud. It took even longer before we thought to marvel at the incredible secrecy surrounding it – only the details of the Normandy invasion had been more carefully guarded. It all sounded like science fiction, only it wasn’t, it was a new reality. As the horrendously shocking pictures began to appear the realization dawned on us that this was truly the end. No one could stand out against such a fearsome, unimaginable, weapon. When Japan surrendered unconditionally on September 2nd, World War II was at long last over and men from the Pacific theater began coming home.

Joe’s boat, the USS Crevalle, arrived in New York from Pearl Harbor on October 5th and he came directly to Rockland and straight to my door. By the second day he was already talking marriage. Marriage had never been part of my future plans – for years I had secret dreams of a small apartment in Boston, a cat, and a job as a medical secretary once I’d saved enough to take a business school course and once my contribution to my family was no longer needed. So at first I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go in such a different direction. Nor did it seem the height of wisdom to marry someone I’d known, to be honest, for only a few weeks. But Joe was both persuasive and determined. He was calm and easy-going, kind to Sibby and Raymy, Mom liked him and as I came to know him better, gradually marriage began to seem not just possible, but desirable. A very different kind of future was offering itself. So. Chief Petty Officer Joseph Edward Flaherty and I, Edith Laurette Duven, were married in Channing Unitarian Church in Rockland, Massachusetts on February 16, 1946.

This marriage was the start of a life I could never have imagined myself living. My father, Otto Louis Duven, Americanized from Otto Ludwig, had died in December of 1940 so he never lived to see me married. But the rest of my family was there for our very informal wedding. There was my mother, Grace Marie Duven, my older brother Bobby, (Robert), who was working for the telephone company after discharge from the U.S. Army’s 8th Air Force. Bobby acted as Joe’s Best Man as all Joe’s local friends were Roman Catholic and at that time, it was forbidden for them to participate in a Protestant ceremony. There was my sister Sibby, (Frances), my Maid of Honor, currently working as a telephone operator. Shortly after the war ended Sibby began dating Eddy (Edward Nahan) Sayian, a former classmate of mine. Eddy, too, was recently discharged from the Army as a gunner in the 8th Air Force, doing thirty-five missions over Germany instead of the usual twenty-five. Shortly after my own marriage Eddy and Sibby married. Eddy was the son of Armenian immigrants, his parents having fled to America to escape the Turkish massacre. And last of my family was my kid brother, Raymy, (Raymond), who was still in school, working hard, getting excellent grades, and in addition putting together our supper before Mom got home from her job in a hospital laundry. My mother had siblings from her own mother’s second marriage; Betty (Elizabeth) Curran and husband Al, my Aunt Allie (Alice) Phalen who worked as a maid and was unmarried; my Uncle Johnny (John) Phalen and his wife Grace. Johnny worked in a print shop in Boston.

Then there was Joe’s family. My in-laws. How important and adult those words made me feel! There was Joe’s father, Harry Flaherty, and his stepmother Tillie (May Florence) and Joe’s younger brother David. Harry had been manager of a shoe factory before the Great Depression closed it down, so he lost their Rockland Massachusetts home to foreclosure, as my parents had similarly lost the Duven poultry farm in Hopkinton. During the war he got a job traveling for the U. S. Government, having to do with government shoe contracts during the war. He, Tillie and David lived in a New York City apartment, which sounded quite glamorous to me. Tillie was presently working in Bloomingdale’s, but had in the past created a fascinating job for herself, putting on productions tied to Brentano’s book store, in various towns across the country. David, sixteen at the time of our marriage, was a student. When he visited his Aunt Mame (Mary Birmingham) next door to us during summer vacations I used to see him, but didn’t know him then. Joe’s father had a brilliant mind, read omnivorously, and was a fascinating conversationalist. To me, Tillie was the epitome of New York sophistication. Joe’s people seemed agreeable to accepting me into their family even though they hadn’t really had a chance to get to know me.

At the time of our marriage Joe’s elder sister Rose Arnone and her husband, Frank, living nearby in Brockton, had two beautiful girls, Rose and MaryBeth. Rose Sr. was a nurse, her younger sister Loretta had also been a nurse, but had died from complications due to a bout with rheumatic fever. Rose was a genuine beauty with that delicate Irish skin and the same electric blue eyes as Joe’s . Her nursing manner was casual, matter of fact, but you sensed she knew exactly what to do and intended to do it – very calming to apprehensive patients. So that was the beginning of my perfectly ordinary every-day small town marriage in the hectic times immediately following the end of World War II.

Joe still owed the U.S.Navy the remaining months of his six year enlistment which would end in April – the accumulated ‘points’ by which draftees were being discharged didn’t apply to enlistees. So as the War Department began to stand down hundreds of thousands of servicemen, Joe’s waning days were to be spent on duty at the Fargo Building in Boston and we found a tiny furnished apartment in Brockton to begin our life together.

As a nation we were eager to return to normality, not yet quite realizing that that particular world was gone forever. The entire country was shifting gears, propelling us all into a new age. The Defense plants were already re-tooling, Detroit stopped making tanks and jeeps and the first new automobiles since the war began were starting to roll off the famous assembly lines. Factories were making washing machines again, hairpins and bobby pins turned up in the Five and Dime, hardware stores had new hand tools, you could buy more than one pair of nylon stockings, butter, beef and pork appeared in markets, and rationing slipped away unmourned by anyone. Everything seemed to sell almost as soon as it reached the market, after years of scrimping, making do, doing without, there was a need for ‘things’. All those ‘defense’ jobs, all that over-time money earned, gave many people the means to buy things they had never dreamed of having – things like washing machines, and (luxury beyond words) electric refrigerators. Even things like automobiles.

I think the one single factor that changed our post-war world more than any other, that pushed so many of us into what is now called ‘the middle class’, was the G.I.Bill, as it came to be called. More than half of the returning veterans, most of them from modest homes, grasped at the chance to get the college education that would never have been possible for them before. Colleges, universities, were bursting at the seams and most began plans to enlarge. Many other vets seized upon the offered vocational education, or government loans to buy homes. The thousands of homeward-bound G.I.’s from the European theater were already entrenched by the time the men began coming back from the Pacific theater but Joe wasn’t, job-wise, even in that good a situation as he was an enlistee and until late-spring early summer when his six year hitch would expire, the U.S. Navy owned him. For a time a kind of euphoria filled the country – returning vets couldn’t buy a drink or a restaurant meal, they were hailed as heroes if they chanced to drop in on a high school basketball game. The nation owed them a huge debt, and was well aware of it.

To go back even further to before the war years, Joe, like all the other young men of his generation, was a product of the Great Depression. No money. No jobs. No future. His high school years had been stormy, and mid-way in his senior year he left school. It had to have been around the time his mother fell ill with a terminal cancer. He was sixteen at the time she died. His father had been general manager of a shoe factory before the Depression closed it down, and when their home fell victim to foreclosure, the same home my family later bought a few years following our own home foreclosure, that was the beginning of his wandering years. He had a short time in the C.M.T.C., (Civilian Military Training Corps.), found a few brief jobs here and there, but the first real stability he found was in one of President Roosevelt’s most brilliant ideas – the CCC’s. The Civilian Conservation Corp.

From its inception to the first inductees it took 37 days to go into operation, a time-frame hard to imagine in these days of partisan political squabbling. It was set up as a quasi-military operation in that army personnel organized transportation to the camps and provided a structural framework. The men had to be between eighteen and twenty-five years of ago, with families in need. They lived in tents, they built roads, constructed drainage systems to improve farm land, laid telephone lines, and planted over 3 million trees among the many other things they did. They were paid $25.00 a month which was mailed home to their families, who in many or most cases mailed most of it back to the young men. Among other things that happened thanks to the CCC’s, over 400,000 illiterate young men were taught to read and write. I remember reading somewhere that without the groundwork laid by the CCC’s in terms of both nutrition and basic education we could never have fielded the amount and quality of the troops who later fought World War II.

Joe worked in several camps, one in Maine where they built pathways and constructed comfort stations throughout state parks. He was in Baggs, Wyoming for a time, building roads. He once told me when the temperature reached 20 degrees below zero work was called off because the ground was too frozen for the picks and shovels to penetrate.

When his enrollment period expired in the CCC’s he tried to enlist in the Navy and was told his feet had been damaged by incorrect shoe sizes. Told to buy himself some decent shoes and wear them for a few months, he could come back and try again. Which he did. So in April of 1940 he arrived at the Newport Naval Training Station boot camp. Following basic training he volunteered for the Submarine Service and was sent to New London, Connecticut, for Submarine School.

This, like the Air Corps, was considered an elite service. The physical requirements were stringent, the psychological requirements even more so. You couldn’t, obviously, be even slightly claustrophobic. You couldn’t have a scratchy personality, a tendency to sulk, a sarcastic tongue. You had to be able to get along with all kinds of people, flexible in your approach to things, and of clean habits. Submarine school was a winnowing out process, any point along the training path could be where you flunked out and were then transferred to the regular surface-craft Navy. At some point, you had to go through the escape training tank. At that time there was one at New London, Connecticut and one at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This was a water-filled tower 100 feet tall, with an access tower along one side providing entrance at several levels. You entered at the bottom using the Momsen lung, and ascended gradually to the surface. Once you have survived all this training, you were considered qualified and got to wear the submarine insignia on your uniform – for enlisted personnel it was silver, for officers it was gold, and depicted two dolphins with a submarine conning tower between them.

The earlier years of Joe’s six year hitch were spent mostly operating out of Panama on a very early submarine known as the S-13. Panama in those days was a dangerously lawless place and he had a knife-cut scar beneath his chin as proof of this. I saw it as romantically glamorous, somehow, especially since I was sure the Navy days were well behind him. Following our marriage we would blend right in with the rest of the newly freed civilians as soon as his enlistment was up. That was the plan.

He did try hard. Much as he had enjoyed his six years in the Navy, he also realized how much I was looking forward to settling down and beginning our life together amidst home and family. He went job-hunting everywhere while I continued working at the town office but all openings had vanished. Even the apprenticeship doors were closed. The last of his separation-money was fast disappearing, and three months into our marriage I became pregnant. Serious discussions as to what to do followed. The driving force for us as for my whole generation, was financial security. Everything came second to that.

When Joe and I married, I never saw myself as becoming a Navy wife. I had never even been away from home, my husband had grown up in the house my family now owned, and as soon as his six year enlistment in the Navy ended, our lives and futures stretched before us right here in Rockland, Massachusetts. Only there’s that business about the best-laid plans of mice and men. We hadn’t figured on that. There was a baby on the horizon for whose security we were responsible, and something needed to happen right away, and so one day Joe brought up doing another two year hitch in the Navy.

I have six months to ship over and still keep my chief’s rating and some of that time has already passed, Joe said. "After that, I’d have to start over. I would get around