This article is scheduled for publication in December in the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly:
A Brief Reminiscence of World War II
by Walter N. Trulock III
Note from David Trulock: This is the second and final part of an autobiographical sketch my father wrote in 1981, eight years before he died. In the first part, published in the Quarterly six years ago (Vol. 33, No. 4), he wrote about his life up to his sophomore year at Hendrix College, 1940-41. The account picks up here during his junior year.
On December 6, 1941, we had a big formal dance at Hendrix, and my closest friend, Ed Lester, had the bright idea that a group of us would stay up all night and go to breakfast in the dining hall in our tuxedos. After breakfast we all went to bed and were sleeping soundly when someone came in after lunch and told us the unbelievable news—that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Shortly after that, the Navy sent an officer to talk to a group of us about enlisting as apprentice seamen and being allowed to stay in school to get our degrees before going to midshipmen’s school for officer training. Several of us in our junior year were sworn in to that program on January 28, 1942. In the early spring of 1943, Hendrix announced it would award degrees to students who were called into service in their final nine weeks prior to graduation. The Navy had said it would call us when we got our degrees, not before. So it took a little persuasion to get the Navy to call us early, but they did this and Ed Lester, Guy Moseley and I were ordered to report to Columbia University in New York on April 5, 1943. This began my longtime love affair with New York.
For the next 15 weeks we marched around Morningside Heights and went to classes eight hours a day in navigation, seamanship, gunnery, etc. We studied every night until lights out at 10:30 p.m. Our free time was from Saturday noon until 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, three out of every four weekends. Ed, Guy, and I spent most of those Saturday nights in one room at the Roosevelt Hotel, going to see the Hit Parade Live with Frank Sinatra (it was free to those in uniform) and to see the shows at the Paramount, Roxy and Radio City, plus the big bands playing the Cafe Rouge at the Hotel Pennsylvania and the Bowman Room at the Biltmore.
My mother had a friend from her Hollins College days who had married a young lawyer from Atlanta who had risen rapidly in one of the great Wall Street law firms (he had the RCA account). They lived in Riverdale in the old Colgate mansion overlooking the Hudson River just north of Manhattan. I spent a few weekends with them (they had two daughters, one my age and one younger) during my stay at Columbia. This was my first glimpse of how the real rich lived. The stone house was huge and elegant with large rooms, high ceilings and beautiful grounds. They had a Scottish couple who lived on the property and acted as cook-maid and butler-chauffeur. Their home was to become my home away from home throughout my navy career.
I studied the unfamiliar subjects as though my life depended on learning the material and was rewarded by being among the top 25 graduates (out of 1280 graduates—1600 had started) who were honored at a sword dinner at the New York Yacht Club (only the top graduate got a sword). My parents came up for our graduation and got to see the musical Oklahoma! which had just opened to rave reviews. Every graduate wanted sea duty—or said he did—and we three Arkansans got our wish. Ed was assigned to a destroyer escort, Guy to the Battleship Wyoming (a gunnery training ship in Norfolk, Virginia), and I was ordered to the USS Laub (DD613), a relatively new destroyer. I was to report for duty on August 7 in Norfolk, but the Laub turned out to be in the Brooklyn Navy Yard instead, having just gotten back from the invasion of Sicily.
On August 10, 1943, I reported aboard the Laub, the ship that was to be my home for the next two years and two months. I arrived as an unbelievably green ensign and left as Gunnery Officer and Senior Watch Officer. It took me only a few days to realize that much of my training had been useless. We were taught nothing about radar, sonar and the mechanical computer that solved the gunnery problem. I also learned that I had to rely heavily—entirely, at first—on the senior petty officers who served under me to see that all of our gunnery, torpedo and fire control equipment was maintained and utilized properly.
Our first mission after I came aboard was to escort a convoy of troops and supplies to Oran, Algeria, where preparations were almost complete for the landing operation on the European mainland at Salerno, Italy. This first voyage was uneventful; the Germans and the weather cooperated to give us a smooth crossing and return. Much to my surprise we were back in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in only 30 days. I flew home for a quick leave and almost ruined my ears on my first commercial flight. The old DC-3's then in use by most airlines were not pressurized and my éustachian tubes were blocked and the pain on descent was intense. A doctor at Grider Field told me I should never fly again, but I have logged hundreds of thousands of miles in the air since then—thanks to pressurized cabins.
Our next trip was to England, stopping first at Swansea in Wales. A few of us took a train to London where I watched an air raid from my hotel window near Piccadilly. Next we moved up to Glasgow, Scotland, then to Belfast, Northern Ireland, thus giving me a quick look at all four parts of the United Kingdom. We then escorted troops and supplies to the Mediterranean, stopping at Oran again. Our convoy was hit by German torpedo bombers off the coast of Tunisia. They sunk two large troopships and a destroyer just like ours. I'll never forget the sight of our sister ship slipping vertically, stern first, below the sea. We continued to Palermo, Sicily, and brought troops back to England, then we returned to New York.
We began 1944 with a quick convoy to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and back. Our next mission was to escort some ammunition ships from Norfolk to the Mediterranean, but one of them became disabled in a severe storm. We were assigned to stay with her, and in maintaining position near the stricken ship we necessarily had to get in the trough between mountainous waves during our turn. We got caught in between and could not get out, rolled 72°, and lost one man and a lot of equipment overboard. I was asleep between watches on the wardroom couch and was buried under metal chairs and a movie projector. We limped back to our home navy yard in Brooklyn for repairs.
After three or four weeks in the yard, we left to join our squadron in the Mediterranean. We arrived in Naples in early May. What a beautiful harbor! What a dirty port city! There was an allied officers club high on a hill overlooking the bay with Mount Vesuvius in the background. It was an outdoor facility with tables set among orange trees. The Allied Armies in Italy had troops from many countries and it was a sight to see the different uniforms and faces of their officers: Poles, French, Moroccan, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Australians, and South Africans, to name a few.
Every other night we would escort one or two American cruisers up the Italian coast to shell the German positions around the stalled beachhead at Anzio. After being stalled for over six months after the initial landings, the Allies were about to mount a major offensive to break through to Rome. On the night of May 22, the night before breakout attempt was to be launched, our officer of the deck zigged the wrong way on our zig-zag plan and we were rammed and almost cut in two by the Cruiser Philadelphia. By some miracle we only lost two men, but had to be towed back to Naples. We spent six weeks in dry dock there, were then towed all the way back to Boston and finally went to sea again in November.
The story ends here because my dad wrote this for a genealogy project that my youngest brother Arch was working on at Pine Bluff High School. When it was time for Arch to turn in his project, Daddy stopped writing. Despite some prodding from my brothers and me, he didn’t pick it up again.
But there is one final story he once told me: His journey home after the war in October 1945 was on a Greyhound bus, which was scheduled to stop at the bus station in downtown Pine Bluff at about 3 a.m. Since the bus was coming in on Highway 79 North, young Lt. (junior grade) Trulock asked the bus driver if he’d mind letting him off at the Free Bridge Store instead of the bus station. The driver didn’t mind (Dad had a large wooden footlocker that traveled on into town and had to be picked up later), so my father’s return from the war was on foot. He told me there was a full or nearly full moon that night as he walked the last mile home from the war. I asked if he had a key to get in. From my own experience as a child on that same farm, I should have realized what the answer would be: “Oh, we never locked the door.” –DT
