Invisible soldiers

In World War II, the U.S. Navy Armed Guard made sure ships safely delivered weapons and troops overseas. Forest Grove’s Robert Shotwell was one

By Nancy Townsley

The Forest Grove News-Times, Nov 12, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Chase Allgood / News-Times

Robert Shotwell, now 83 (above) was once a U.S. Navy sailor who helped protect convoys during World War II (below, at right) as part of the Armed Guard. Shotwell and fellow Forest Grove resident Russell Yount, who also served in that conflict, will receive special commendations for their military service from Oregon Congressman David Wu Saturday on Swan Island in Portland.

ADVERTISEMENTS

During the long nights on watch, standing guard on the freezing deck of his troop transport ship somewhere in the Aleutian Islands, the young sailor would pull his wool cap down over his ears and think about his mother and sister at home in Oregon.

Robert Shotwell would wonder about his older brother, Albert, and his father, Thomas, also at war but in the South Pacific — and worry about their safety.

And, he’d scan the horizon for any sign of the Japanese, whose devastating attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 had pushed him to join the Navy in the first place.

It was a lot for a 17-year-old to handle, particularly one who was a peacemaker at heart.

Shotwell, who’s now 83, didn’t much like the idea of firing a gun at someone, even the enemy.

But “it was just something we had to do,” he says now, sitting in the living room of his Forest Grove home. “There was a lot of animosity toward the Japanese at that point in time.”

Pearl Harbor hit the U.S. news wires when Shotwell was a junior at Benson High School in Portland. As the Nazis gained ground across Europe, the shy teenager decided he wanted to be a part of the escalating war effort.

Shotwell and several friends went to the recruiting station in downtown Portland and signed up.

That was in June 1943, less than a year after his father left his job as a chemistry teacher at Benson to enter the Navy and just months after his older brother, Albert, left for the South Pacific on a troop ship.

“I went into the Navy a month or so after my 17th birthday,” Shotwell recalls today. “I wanted to help out, so my mother signed my age waiver. It seemed like the natural thing to do.”

Once in Navy boot camp in Farragut, Idaho, the young soldier heard about a duty called the Armed Guard. He quickly signed on.

“All I knew was that it was a contingent of Navy gunners on troop and merchant ships,” Shotwell wrote in “Sailor’s Odyssey,” a personal biography he penned 10 years ago for his five children and six grandchildren.

He soon learned that the Armed Guard was responsible for defending U.S. and Allied merchant ships from attack by enemy aircraft, submarines and surface ships. Guardsmen served primarily as gunners, signal men and radio operators on cargo ships, tankers, troop ships and merchant vessels.

For Shotwell, it meant a first assignment to a destroyer base in San Diego for anti-aircraft training, then north to Seattle for deployment to the Aleutians.

“They taught us how to jump off a platform into water ringed by fire,” Shotwell said. “I think I was afraid more than anything else.”

Loaded onto the USAT Chirikof, Shotwell and his fellow soldiers paused at Adak Island and in Kiska harbor to drop troops off, then continued on through the treacherous waters of the Bering Sea to the Pribilof Islands north of the Aleutians.

All the action

Gunners stood watch in freezing weather 24 hours a day, four hours at a stretch. Once, one of Shotwell’s hands “got frozen pretty bad, to where the skin wouldn’t stay on,” he said, landing him in a hospital back in Seattle.

“You had two sets of gloves, wool mittens and thermal gloves over that,” Shotwell noted. “Even with all that, you couldn’t stay warm.”

After he recovered, the Navy sent him to San Francisco, where he caught a Liberty ship — cargo ships built in U.S. shipyards during WWII — and headed to the Philippines. Later, Shotwell would travel to Hawaii and the South Pacific, “where all the action was.”

It was an eye-opening experience.

“Our decks were stacked high with tanks and guns and trucks,” he said. “Our top speed was nine knots, so they’d put us in the back corner of the convoy, which was dubbed ‘coffin corner’ because it was a target for Japanese submarines.

“We were taunted as ‘shark bait.’”

Radar was still under development, so Shotwell’s ship used sonar to navigate.

1 | 2 Next Page >>