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PART II

FEBRUARY 21, 2014|VOL. 40| ISSUE 6

A CHANCE FOR HONORTHE HISTORY OF USS MASON AND HER CREW

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InformationPublic Affairs Officer

Lt. Cmdr. Karin BurzynskiMedia DIVO

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EditorMC2 Phillip Ladouceur

Lead DesignerMCSA Kole E. Carpenter

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Commanding OfficerCapt. Jeff Ruth

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Media DepartmentMC2 Jacquelyn Childs

MC2 Devin WrayMC2 Ryan MayesMC2 Jacob MilnerMC2 Jess Lewis

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MC3 Joshua HaiarMC3 Kaitlyn Haskett

MC3 Eric ButlerMC3 Siobhana McEwen

MCSN Andrew Price MCSN Aiyana Paschal

MCSN Kelly AgeeMCSN Victoria Ochoa

MCSN Eli BugueyMCSN Lauren Jennings

the

ON THE COVER: Sail-ors train to fight fires in the hangar bay. Photo by MCSN (SW) Kelly Agee.

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RIGHT: OS3 Yavon Robinson, right, and IS3 Nijah Lee talk to a veteran at the Carl Gipson Senior Center in Everett as he shares mem-ories from his old cruisebook during a community relations project. Photo by MCSN (SW) Kelly Agee.

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Thomas W. Young was an African-American journalist who sensed the importance of the USS Mason (DE

529) and accompanied her crew on their maiden voyage. His articles were published in every newspaper written for the black community in every major city.

Young reported his marvel of the ship’s crew and how quickly they reacted to general quarters. According to Young, GQ’s happened often. Every time a solid sonar or radar contact was made the men

ran to their stations with life vests and steel helmets. Contacts were frequent as the sonar picked up everything from real submarines to schools of fish. The men waited anxiously to hear what the verdict would be.

“When the gong begins to ring and the voice on the public address system sternly orders ‘All hands, man your battle stations!’ – well, you tingle just a little bit inside because you don’t know then how far away the enemy is or in what strength he will strike,” wrote Young.

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A CHANCE FOR HONOR

USS MASON

AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH

FEBRUARY IS

PART II

PART IIStory by MC3 Eric Butler

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HERI

TAGE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

Reports would come in from other ships about U-boat attacks in the surrounding convoys. Mason’s crew was eager to prove themselves with a kill, but half of their job was to deter submarines, not actively hunt them unless this was judged the best way to protect the ships under their care. Most of the time they were rounding up slower vessels that suffered from age or hasty construction.

At times when the ships would pull into a neutral port to refuel, they would encounter U-boats and their crews anchored next to them. Radioman 3rd Class Merwin A. Peters knew the German language and became an extremely valuable asset to the convoy. He was adept at picking up U-boat transmissions, and on one occasion, was credited with saving many lives and materials.

“I can recall one time when I copied some German messages, and because they were so close to us, we put in to the Azore Islands, and we sat there for about a week, I believe,” said Peters. “The German submarines came in while we were there…but we slipped out and slipped away from them. The skipper congratulated me, and there were some press reports on this.”

Their maiden voyage led to three events that stick out in the minds and hearts of these Sailors: visiting Belfast, Ireland, escorting convoy NY-119, and seeing action in the Straights of Gibraltar. On this voyage, Signalman 2nd Class Lorenzo DuFau summed up the experience Mason’s crew had in Belfast.

“What were we going to meet?” said DuFau. “How would the people greet us? Because here we were, so many black guys. Whenever we went ashore, the captain always told us, ‘Don’t go alone. Stay together, no matter what.’ So, that was in our minds. But then these greetings started coming without any effort on our part. That was like another world to us because never in my life until that day had I been treated like that. Never in my life had we received such greetings from people, perfect strangers. It’s hard to find words to describe the Belfast experience, what we felt to be received the way we were by the people.”

Peters also had a difficult time describing how he felt to be welcomed rather than discriminated.

“When we went to Ireland, it was a completely different story,” said Peters.

“It was like being liberated. It was like being…being…How can I put it? It was something we had never experienced in this country in terms of, ‘You’re welcome here and we love you.’ That’s literally the way it was. And I really still have a soft spot in my heart for Ireland.”

Late that year in 1944, Mason was tasked to escort barges across the Atlantic so they could be used as piers by the Allies in France. The barges

and tugs being used to tow them were meant to operate near the shore and were never meant for the deep waters of the Atlantic. The convoy moved at a snail’s pace of 4 knots on average, the speed of the slowest vessels. Needless to say, the voyage was a dangerous venture in the stormy Atlantic.

Many of the ship’s logs were recorded in the book “Proudly We Served” by Mary Pat Kelly. The logs record the perilous journey that the crew referred to as “the battle of the barges”.

Ship’s log October 18, 1944: “…It was necessary to lead the section from

buoy to buoy and between buoys to run back to the end of the column about seven miles astern to guide in any possible stragglers. Wind now blowing 50-60 in the gusts – visibility zero. It was necessary to run at seventeen knots to accomplish this; consequently several welded seams in the deck carried away and two longitudinal strength members in compartment B-4 came adrift. This ship handled well at all times and showed little tendency to broach running before the seas which were by then quite high. Wind reached maximum of 70-80 knots in the gust at about 1400.”

DuFau described what it was like for the crew on this voyage.

“We had the most vicious experience with that ocean,” said DuFau. “You’d be surprised how damaging that water can be when it gets to acting up. We had more damage done to the convoy from that storm than from any contact with submarines.”

“There was a crack in a seam on the deck of the ship,” said DuFau. “A couple of men – damage control men – had to go up under storm conditions and weld that seam in the deck. The guys received some type of award for doing it under those conditions. Afterwards, the damage control officer said if we had ignored that seam, the ship could have split right across, because the rocking and pounding of the waves could have caused that ship to split.”

Signalman 2nd Class Gordon D. Buchanan discussed the additional hardship of navigating during the stormy weather.

“It was so overcast we couldn’t take a navigation reading,” said Buchanan. “We had dead reckoning. That’s what we were traveling on, dead reckoning. I was up on the bridge with the executive officer, Lieutenant Ross, and I saw a star. It was just a little gap in the sky, but I called his attention to it... We both went down to the charts, and we both marked it up… The captain came up on the bridge, and he radioed over to the commodore of the convoy what our position was. In another few days, when we came

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out of the storm, the commodore congratulated us because we were right on.”

The raging ocean had claimed a number of barges and tugs. Men from the tugs were lost at sea when their boats capsized and others perished due to the cold and fierce waters. Even when the convoy was only miles from their destination, the waters threatened to swallow more vessels. Mason delivered the ships under their care and set back out to help the rest of the convoy after the storm rebuffed two British ships sent to help.

Mason’s skipper, Lt. Cmdr. William M. Blackford, skillfully led the crew during this period. This was not his first time leading a ship through stormy weather, and this time, he had a skilled and motivated crew with him. Peters recalled the arduous 31-day journey.

“Each day was a new day, each day was a new adventure,” said Peters. “Personally, it was the great event, I guess you would call it… I never saw anybody really fearful that the ship was going to sink or that some bad thing was going to happen to us – although it was happening all around us. We had great confidence in ourselves and in Captain Blackford. We saw how he handled that ship.”

The convoy’s commodore made a report to the Navy in which he highly regarded Mason’s role.

“CTG 27.5 [task group] considers the performance of the USS Mason, her commanding officer, officers and men outstanding and recommends that this ship be given a letter of commendation to be filed in the record of each officer and man on board that vessel.”

That commendation never came, but was given to the commodore instead. Not receiving recognition was becoming fairly normal for the crew even though their captain made numerous requests for awards and even stood up for his crew amongst other disparaging officers.

Blackford was a man whom the crew said they would go to hell and back for. DuFau recalled his impression of their skipper, who he said they called “Big Bill” amongst themselves.

“I will always have respect for that man, because he developed a thinking among the men. He was part of making life aboard ship so wonderful.”

Mel Grant was a yeoman who ranked up from 3rd class to 1st in 18 months due to his outstanding performance as the skipper’s secretary. He remembers having a very good working relationship with the captain.

“He acted towards us man to man,” said Grant. “He understood human nature, how to deal with people. He didn’t treat anyone as an inferior.”

The other officers on board also grew to

Bottom: Quartermaster training for USS Mason’s Crew.

Top: Crew of USS Mason in New York Harbor, 1944.

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respect the crew. Lt. j.g. William H. Farrell talked about how quickly the crew made rank.

“At the beginning, more of the first class mates in the engine room were white, though we did have [one] black first class,” said Farrell. “But we concentrated on going up the line. As soon as we could, we would qualify blacks who were second class and so forth as first class, and we’d qualify the first class as chiefs. As we did that, we would transfer the whites off the ship. When we took the ship out of commission, I don’t think there were any white chiefs or first class rates on the ship.”

While their performance while escorting convoy NY-119 was probably their finest hour, the men had not yet sunken or captured a submarine.

Another destroyer escort, USS Pillsbury, had taken part in an attack that ended with the capture of a U-505. That submarine had an encryption machine on board that greatly aided the war effort against Germany. The men of the Mason were all eager to score a submarine kill. Just like aircraft marking their kills with a stamp on the side of the plane, a ship would paint a submarine on their stack. However, the closest Mason came to taking down a U-boat was in the Straits of Gibraltar.

Mason was on high alert because U-boats had been hiding in clefts that made them virtually undetectable. In the narrow strait, they were sinking many allied ships.

One night, Mason was tracking a target by sonar that would appear and disappear. Every time it appeared, it showed all the signs of a submarine. It was decided to attack. All at once, depth charges were dropped, guns fired and the ship was set on a collision course to ram the sub if all else failed. Mason struck something in the water and the search lights were briefly turned on. Wreckage was seen floating in the water amidst huge wooden beams. Many of the men believed they had taken down a submarine due to the wreckage, but the beams turned out to be the remains of a barge. While many of the crew believe they hit a sub, it is still officially unknown if they scored a kill or not.

Decades later, former Radioman 2nd Class James W. Graham recalled the experience after watching a documentary about fighter aces.

“I was thinking about how much I’d wanted to paint a U-boat kill on our stack,” said Graham. “Suddenly, I realized I was glad we never we never sank a sub. Glad. I would have been an old man at fifty if I had. Their faces – knowing they were going to die. In war you think “sub,” not people, not other men. So I’m glad I didn’t kill anybody.”

When the war ended, the men still served on the ship until its decommissioning Oct. 12, 1945. However, their beloved captain was suddenly transferred to Great Lakes and replaced with an officer who didn’t command with the same respect as Blackford. The new captain was told that Mason was a terrible ship that needed shaping up. While he was supportive of integrating African-Americans into the Navy and did what he could to stand up for the crew, he was not aware of their stellar performance or capabilities. He was also responsible for a collision with another ship.

Mason took on Lt. j.g. James Hair for a brief period. Hair was a member of the “Golden Thirteen,” the first African-American officers in the Navy. He was a go-between for the new skipper and the crew, and while he was respected, it was not enough to bridge the gap for the crew.

A few of the men entered the service again during the Korean conflict, but most of them returned to civilian life. Despite their service, many still experienced the discrimination they were used to for so long.

In the 1970s, Graham contacted DuFau and they began hunting down all the information they could to tell their story and reunite the crew. They found various places where their story started to get out. They had a chapter in a book about destroyer escorts and a section in a documentary about service members in Ireland during the war. In 1994, President Bill Clinton officially honored Mason and her crew for their part in escorting NY-119 across the Atlantic.

Graham and DuFau attended all kinds of meetings and official Navy events to tell their story and let young black midshipmen and enlisted Sailors know their Navy heritage. In 1993, a group of former crewmen went to Annapolis, Md. to attend a midshipmen graduation. The class represented the change in the Navy since WWII with a mixture of races. In the book “Proudly We Served,” Kelly tells what happened next.

“A group of juniors sat together watching the ceremony,” wrote Kelly. “They noticed the Mason group and stopped to say hello. They were members of the Black Students Association and had heard something about the presence of the crew member on campus but did not know much about the history of the ship. Lorenzo Dufau took out his scrapbook and an impromptu lesson began. ‘We were the first,’ he said. As he turned the pages and told his stories the midshipmen moved closer. Then one young man looked up and demanded of no one in particular, ‘Why weren’t we told? Why didn’t we know about this?!’”

“We’ve come to tell you,” said DuFau.

Besides the book, which is available in the ship’s library, there are other sources

that tell the story too. A movie “Proud” was produced in 2004 and can be purchased

online. All this can be referenced at http://www.ussmason.org and an official

website for the movie is at http://www.proudthemovie.com.

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Celebrating the legaCy of

Entering Batangas Har-bor in the Philippines, En-sign Nimitz relied on an es-timated position and failed to check the tides, and con-sequently ran the USS Deca-tur aground on a mudbank. He recalled the words of his grandfather: “Don’t worry about things over which you have no control.”

He asked for a cot and went to sleep until he was able to get the ship unstuck. He reported the incident and was brought to court-martial.

His superiors, taking into account his previously flaw-less record, found him guilty. His punishment was a public reprimand. Other than em-barrassment, his career nev-er suffered because of the incident, one that could have ended his career just as it was beginning.

Nimitz’ calm bearing in the face of trouble would help him throughout his ca-reer, especially when leading the fight from the disaster of Pearl Harbor to ultimate vic-tory in the Pacific.

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