News Paper Articles
A few news paper articles kept by my father. In the first one it seems that the guys were blowing off a lot of steam after the war! This was the day after they got back!
Sanity After the War
BUS "KIDNAPED BY MARE ISLE SUB SAILOR
NAPA, September 6, 1945.--(Special to the News-Chronicle)
---Cruising around in a Greyhound bus presents obstacles not encountered in submarine life, the crewman of a Mare Island submarine discovered today after a wild ride through local streets.
It all began, police said, when Authur Coates, radioman, 1/c, a crew member of the submarine USS Springer, now at Mare Island, "kidnapped" a bus at the local Greyhound depot, about 2:30 a.m.
Getting the machine in gear, Coates drove up Main Street to Pearl Street, turned east on Pearl and moved along at a merry clip--not knowing Pearl Street came to a dead-end.
Reaching the dead-end, Coates neither turned right, nor left, nor came to a halt. He and the bus continued directly ahead, just as though there was a Jap pillbox ahead and they intended to take it, come fire or high water.
Then things began to happen. The bus sheered off a power pole carrying two 2,300 volt lines, cutting electrical service to virtually every section of the city.
Four trees then went down before the onrushing vehicle before it plowed into a house at 1214 Edmonston Street, striking the rear of the structure and knocking it from the foundations.
Bart March and his son, Lloyd, sleeping three feet from the point of impact, were thrown from their bed, but escaped injury.
The Marche's went outside to investigate, found Coates fumbling in the bus, possibly wondering what had struck the submarine and whether was trapped under 1,000 feet of water. Police, arriving a few minutes later, said they would like to have a talk to Coates.
Sanity in the Subs
For World War Two's submarine fighters, undersea combat duty touched of peculiarly harrowing mental and emotional experiences. The heat, the tension from strictly enforced silence, and the helplessness against enemy depth-charge attack often strained the sanity of the soundest men. An average of one out of the 75-man crew would break, at least temporarily, during a battle.
Sometimes, half a crew could not eat or sleep for days after a heavy bombing or a close squeeze with enemy sub-chasers. Occasionally a sailor grew hysterical and had to be held down and muffled by his mates. Some men, lapsing into silence, would develop facial paralysis, breathe heavily, and stare with glazed eyes at nothing. One developed the habit during tense moments of gazing through binoculars at each of the crew members. Several tried to slash their own throats during depth-charge raids. At least one committed suicide.
To avoid just such cases, which obviously had a demoralizing effect on the rest of the crew, the submarine service worked out a tightly meshed screen to sift out the men most susceptible to mental collapse. Some years back, Captian C. W. Shilling, wartime head of the United States Naval Research Laboratory at the Naval Research Base, New London, Connecticut described the formula.
First, the Navy doctors agreed, the emotionally mature volunteer made the most level-headed sub man. After interviewing thousands of volunteers, they drew up a list of danger signals which invariably pointed to instability. Then they designed tricky tests to ferret them out. The symptoms were: abnormal shyness or sensitivity; difficulty in
school, truancy, and dislike of teachers; abnormal fear of lightning, the dark, elevators, and crowded spaces (the usual indications that an individual is suffering from claustrophobia); shunning of girls after puberty, abnormal attachment to mother, sulkiness under discipline, failure to play competitive games that involve risk of injury; stammering; obsessions and religious fanaticism.
Mothers often put heavy pressure on their son to withdraw from training. In some cases, mothers were interviewed by the Navy doctors, and if they found the son was being unduly influenced by her fears, he was usually dropped from training. Navy psychiatrists found that teen-agers often could not measure up to the maturity requirement of the
service. Finally the Navy refused to take a submarine candidate under 19.
Sub-service men were picked from the top half of the Navy's intelligence scale and from men in top physical condition. Despite this pre-screening, however, up to 30 per cent were turned away after careful psychiatric examination. Once in action, submarine crews were given liberal rest periods to recover from strain. With this business like program, the WWII submarine service ended with one of the lowest psychiatric rates in the armed forces. Out of 1,520 war patrols, only 62 serious psychoneurotic cases developed. Of these, five were psychotic.
SUBS SINK 15
MORE JAP SHIPS
WASHINGTON, April 13, 1945.--(INS)
The Navy announced today that 15 more Japanese vessels, including
an escort ship and one converted gun boat have been sunk by American
submarines operating in Far Eastern waters.
These latest announced sinkings brings to 124 the number of enemy
combatant ships sent to the bottom by submarine action.
The underwater craft were also credited with two destroyer transports
, one large and one medium tanker, one naval auxiliary, and six medium
and two small cargo vessels, for a total of 974 non-combat vessels
sunk since the beginning of the war.