One Year Diary
1945 in the Pacific
Aboard the USS Queens (APA-103)
by
MOMM2/c (Motor Machinist Mate, 2nd class)
William Woodrow Morgan, Sr.
Introduction
In the following pages, I have transcribed and annotated my father’s WWII diary so as to make it available to be read with understanding by his family and friends. For years now, my sister Mary Ellen May and I have had the only copies of the diary—I, the original and she, a photocopy—and it seemed a pity that others couldn’t read and enjoy the book.
Our father’s intermittent daily records of his life in the U. S. Navy during the year 1945 were hand-written in ink into a commercially-produced, blank diary, measuring 6 inches high by 4 ½ inches across, bound in brown leather and with One Year Diary embossed and lettered in gold on its front cover.
The blank book consisted of a title page, repeating the cover’s One Year Diary, followed by 5 pages of such useful information as lists of “Generally Observed Holidays,” “Variable Church Days,” “Fixed Church Days,” “Birthstones by Months,” “Wedding Anniversaries,” and a list of “Colleges” from Amherst to Yale. This front matter is followed by 366 dated and lined pages (February 29 is included, to allow for Leap Year), after which there are 8 blank pages headed Memoranda. There are entries on 168 of the dated pages; 198 are blank. In addition there are notes, addresses of shipmates and others, and a detailed account of the ship’s movements—all on the Memoranda pages at the end.
The Diary’s First Entry, January 1, 1945
And finally, on its last two pre-printed pages, the diary offers calendars for the years 1944-1949.
Although it is shaken from its bindings, the book still has the look and feel of a reasonably high quality item. Whoever bought it must have meant it to be taken seriously. Nobody now living knows who that was—whether it was the writer himself or someone else—or why William Woodrow Morgan, Sr. (hereafter WWM) decided to keep a diary as a record of his wartime service. He was thirty-two years old and had a wife and two children at home when he began the diary, on January 1, 1945 somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay during the shakedown cruise of the USS Queens, the troop transport to which he was assigned and that would see action at Iwo Jima and throughout the Pacific theater of the war.* During his term of service, he was on leave from his job with Gulf Oil Corporation. Family lore has it that he consulted his employer and then his Draft Board in early 1944, and, upon learning that he would very likely be drafted into the Army, decided to volunteer pre-emptively for service in the Navy. When I asked him once why he chose the Navy instead of, say, the Air Force, he replied that he figured he “could swim a little” but “couldn’t fly worth a damn.”
He signed up for two years, was inducted into the Navy in Atlanta, GA on April 20, 1944, and was discharged on December 16, 1945 at Jacksonville, FL—a total of 1 year, 7 months, and 11 days of service, according to his official record. He was assigned to Camp Peary, VA for Basic Training from April 21 until June 21, 1944; to Diesel School at the University of Illinois in Urbana from June 22 until August 21; to Amphibious Warfare School at Fort Pierce, FL from August 30 until November 27; to the US Navy Training Station at Newport, RI from November 28 until December 16, when he boarded the Queens. He left the ship at Portland, OR on December 2, 1945, spent some days on leave in the Portland area, then made his way (by train? bus?) to Jacksonville, FL for discharge on the 16th. His record indicates that he was on leave (and presumably at home in East Point, GA) from August 22-30, 1944, and there may have been other periods of leave in 1944 that don’t appear in the documents.
The diary, therefore, records events from only 12 of his nearly 20 months of service—something like 60% of his time in uniform. But those must have been the most super-charged months—exciting, dangerous, frightening—of his time of service. Not only Iwo Jima, but Pearl Harbor, Subic Bay, Guam, Nagasaki, Sasebo, Manila, Eniwetok, Hilo and other now-famous spots in the WWII Pacific Theater of operations make their appearances here. WWM was by no means a major player in the history of his own time, but the diary makes clear that he was a witness to a great deal of history-in-the-making.
Most of the time, however, he comes across in the diary as a prisoner of history—and military authority—rather than a free and unbiased witness. He complains about the food, the attitudes of the ship’s officers, and about being kept in the dark as to where the ship is going and why. In a word, he complains about his powerlessness. He knows that momentous happenings are going on, and he knows that he and his shipmates are doing important service, but he doesn’t feel capable of influencing the events of which he is a part. The Skipper (one John J. Mockrish, I have learned, though I have learned almost nothing more about him) and the other officers are unfeeling bastards, and the ship is a kind of floating jail in which he is both prisoner and crew member. His Scarlett O’Hara-like pledge in the entry for April 24 is about more than bad food: “I’ll eat again someday and if I ever live to get home – I’ll never see my family eat the stuff we have been fed.”
As a consequence of where he was positioned, the diary has two simultaneous story-lines—the progress of the war at large, which WWM notes but was, it seems, only marginally interested in, and the day-to-day life of the men on the ship. In the entry for August 8, for example, he records that “Russia declared war on Japan” and that “Nothing much has happened.” Both statements are true, even if they seem to contradict one another. The next day the entry reads, in part, “Usual watches, spent all day working in the boat, changed transmission for first time, more drills, heard that another atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.”
His grasp of spelling and punctuation is shaky: he must have come up with at least a half dozen different spellings for the surname of his friend and shipmate Frank Sciarratta, for example. But he is clearly writing to be read by others—not to record his private thoughts and feelings for himself alone. I have no reluctance, therefore, in making his diary public in this way. I think he would be pleased. And I have resisted all temptations to “correct” his sometimes idiosyncratic language; the diary is, after all, his and not mine. So I’ve made every effort to transcribe it precisely as he wrote it. I should add that, as a writer myself, I’m proud to have him in my lineage—someone before me who wanted to capture scene, character, and story and to leave memorable words behind him.
It’s fair to say that when he entered the Navy, WWM did not have especially broad cultural horizons. He had spent his entire life in of Atlanta, GA and its environs, and he hadn’t had the kind of education or travel experiences that would be expected to have given him a lot of cultural curiosity. But his circle of Navy friends was strikingly diverse—something close to a (white male) national cross-section. His best buddies were Grover Acree (Mexico, Missouri), Willard W. Church (Battle Creek, Michigan), Wilbert B. Frank (Industry, Texas), and Frank Sciarratta (Rochester, New York). (See the photo of “the 5” at the entry for July 25.) And every new place he arrived, he was keen to go ashore and learn what he could. In the entry for October 1, for example, he tells of slipping out of Sick Bay and putting his health at risk in order to see Manila and report on it in his diary. I find his curiosity about new people and places to be admirable.
A note about the annotations: rather than crowd the text of WWM’s writing with footnotes and references to other sources, I have decided to keep the explanatory notes to a minimum and have emphasized illustrations from the period of the war. I will vouch for the accuracy of my notes—most of which have been adapted from readily available on-line sources such as Wikipedia—but I have not felt the necessity to cite chapter, verse, URL, or page number in most cases. Although I have learned a great deal from reading WWII history in the course of preparing the annotations, my intention has been to make WWM’s record of events intelligible to a 21st century reader, not to exhibit my own learning.
And a final irony: the diary itself, though several of his shipmates knew about it, was probably illegal. The entry for September 4, for example, reads in part: “Censorship regs were lifted today, but we were warned not to tell where we are going or what we are doing. This trip is considered as top secret.” It’s easy to see that, if he had been captured by the Japanese, his diary, which records the ship’s movements and some of its missions in great detail, could have been highly useful to them.
As the matter worked itself out, I’m glad he kept this diary, legal or not—and very glad he wasn’t captured, killed, or seriously injured, since he was an important part of my life for another 18 years from his return home in late 1945 until his early death in June of 1963 at the age of 50. I hope his friends and family members will enjoy reading the diary and having a copy in their possession.
--Bill Morgan, 2011
*The USS Queens, purpose-built by Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, Maryland for duty as a fighting ship and troop transport, was launched in December of 1944 with a crew of 476 officers and men and space for 1650 assault troops (Army or Marines). She served in the Pacific theater for all of 1945 before being assigned to inactive status in early 1946. In early June of that year, she was transferred to the War Shipping Administration and later in the month was struck from the register of Navy vessels. In 1948, the Queens was purchased by American Export Lines and re-named the Excambion (II), under which name she travelled shipping routes throughout the Caribbean. Eleven years later, she was returned to the Maritime Administration under a trade-in program and became part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, laid up on the Hudson River in New York. In 1965, the ship was lent to the Texas Maritime Academy as a Merchant Marine training ship and re-named the Texas Clipper. She continued serving in this capacity for 32 years before being idled in 1997. The ship was finally sunk in November 2007, as part of an artificial reef seventeen miles off South Padre Island, Texas.
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