Beginnings - a wartime blog

My adult life started when I enlisted in the Navy. This start took place in early 1942, long before I was required to register for the draft, so of course, selective service had no record of me on file.

The Navy soon put me in bell bottom trousers and a coat of navy blue and paid me the lordly sum of $18 per month from which a little was deducted for life insurance. Later my wage was raised to $21 per month.

I soon learned that a Springfield Rifle with bayonet weighed about twice as much a a pair of cymbals. So I became a cymbalist in a Navy band, and eventually a Midshipman, and finally a Commission was awarded me, and I wore the gold of a newly minted Ensign. Assigned to a ship, just built by the Kaiser Yards in Marin County California, I went to sea. The vast, so vast, Pacific was to be my haunt for up to four years, or the duration, according to the terms of my enlistment. My future was cut out for me, but my past left something to be desired. I had never registered for the draft.

Back home my proud parents displayed my photo on their living room mantle with the gold star and that half-inch of gold around each sleeve. My father had been a Lieutenant in the Army in the first World War ,and he was glad I could continue in his tradition.

Eventually, my dad wrote to me that the long arm of the FBI and / or the Selective Service caught up and several men visited my parents home to inquire in two parts why had I not registered for the draft and where was I? My father answered that he truly didn’t know why to the first part or where to the second part. The government people had the bit between their teeth and handcuffs at the ready, but somehow I wasn’t there. Perhaps my parents had hidden me in the basement, or in a closet, or with relatives in Canada, except I didn’t have any relatives in Canada, and our beach cottage didn’t have a basement.

The people from the government were determined to have someone, those handcuffs were dangling unfilled when one of the officials finally asked my father when he last saw me, and Dad said, “When he departed for his ship, the USS Mountrail, now on the high seas, I know not where, and if I knew,I wouldn’t tell you because “loose lips sink ships.” Then he pointed to that photo on the mantle, the one with the gold on my sleeves. The visitors went away and they never came back.

M F Roberts