Chapter 19 - 1943 Stanley & Edwin to the Pacific; Joe to ACORN 29

Chapter 19 Version 1

1943

“This man is a graduate of Class “A” Machinist Mate School Wentworth Institute, Boston Mass. And he has been trained for the rate of MM2c and by the direction of the Chief of naval personnel must be assigned to duty where his specialized training may be fully utilized. The attention of commands to which this graduate is transferred is particularly invited to this directive.” –Standard Transfer Order 11/8/1943 for Joseph Zywar

“I have my orders to report to the Submarine Training School in New London, Conn. “ said Joe to his buddy Chet as they marched from their hotel at Kenmore Square down Huntington Avenue in Boston to the Wentworth Institute campus.  It was early November and the raw cold was beginning to creep into Boston. The sailors marched in formation to and from their classes at Wentworth as they had each day for the past sixteen weeks. Joe graduated a respectable 122 out of 228 sailors in his class putting him near the middle of his class. Joe earned a rating change to F2c(MM) – Fireman 2^nd Class (Machinist Mate).

“Me too!” said Chet who was from Hatfield, Mass.

“If we are based out of New London, we won’t be too far from home. We also won’t be living on a pier in New York waiting for orders” said Joe.

It was a good plan but short lived for both men as neither man made it through the first week in New London. On November 12, 1943 Joe was “Examined and found NOT physically qualified for submarine duty” due to elevated blood pressure. The standards for submarine duty were higher than the requirements for duty on a surface ship. He was sent to Pier 92 in Manhattan to await orders. On November 30, the Queen Mary docked at Pier 92 and nearly 12,000 combat engineer troops boarded and headed for England to train for D-Day. They became experts at quickly constructing Treadway and Bailey bridges. The hollow concrete caissons for constructing a port at Utah Beach in Normandy were already being fabricated so they could be floated across the channel soon after the beaches were secured. This would maintain the flow of supplies without having to capture one of the heavily fortified existing ports. The Queen Mary made her crossings alone without protection of a convoy as she was faster than any submarine making the crossing in 5 days and 11 hours averaging over 27 knots. Hitler had a bounty on the Queen Mary and on the Queen Elizabeth of near $250,000 to the submarine commander who could sink either one. Luckily for the Allies, the bounty was never collected.

Joe received his orders to report to ABATU on November 29^th at Lido Beach on Long Island’s southern coast not far from New York City. ABATU stood for Advanced Base Assembly and Training Unit. The military loves their acronyms and Joe was assigned to the ACORN 29 Unit B-5-a. An ACORN unit was an elite unit consisting of between four and five thousand men who repaired, built and maintained airfields captured after a battle. ACORN stands for for Aviation, Construction, Ordnance, Repair, Navy. The Seabees, a Navy construction battalion, would have been assigned to be part of an ACORN unit. The different parts of the unit could be unplugged and moved as the needs of the unit changed making it a very flexible and responsive organizational structure. Joe’s training at Wentworth and his prior experience making aircraft engine parts made him a good match for inclusion in this unit. On 12/6/1943, he began a 10 day training class in gunnery maintenance of 20mm and Thompson submachine guns. It seemed that Joe was finally on his way to war at the end of 1943.


Stanley now found himself in the “Hurry up and wait” mode. He was waiting for his ship and that was all that he was allowed to say. He reported to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in mid-August and waited for two months until his ship was outfitted in Hoboken, New Jersey. The barracks conditions in Brooklyn were cramped as there were up to 4,000 men in a facility built to house 2,500. The USN Rocky Mountain also known as the USN Rocky Mount was a merchant ship being converted to an amphibious force flagship by Bethlehem Steel Company. In the Pacific Theater where the Japanese controlled vast ocean territories from bases on many islands, the strategy would be to engage the enemy by capturing strategic island bases and cut off supplies to islands that were passed by. There were so many assaults needed that a single series of assaults could not be made leaving men, ships and planes waiting while the next assault was planned and the necessary forces were brought into place. Multiple amphibious force flagships were put into place and as one was directing an assault on an island, the others would be back at Pearl Harbor being outfitted for the next assault while the plans were being drawn up. By the end of the war there were 19 amphibious force flagships.

 The USN Rocky Mount ACG-3 was commissioned on Oct 15, 1943. Stanley’s rating was changed from S3c to F2c on his assignment to the ship.  He wrote in his Service Record book:

Transferred to: “Brooklyn Navy Yard to wait for a ship that was being completed. Stayed there for two months – then left on a shake down cruise to Virginia. Ran into a hurricane and was really sea-sick”. Stanley would refer to being sea sick as “feeding the fishes” but he would never feed the fishes again.

By then Stanley knew that he was going off to sea and might not be back for some time so he took his five day annual leave from Nov 3 to Nov 8 and came up to see his wife Jeanette in Easthampton. Jeanette had moved from their apartment at 51 Parsons Street to her parent’s house on Ferry Street. Just before leaving Stanley was picked up by the Shore Patrol in Portsmouth Virginia for being out of uniform because his hat and cuffs were not being worn in regulation manner and that was worth five hours of extra duty when he returned.

The USN Rocky Mount sailed down the east coast and around the western end of Cuba through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific Ocean. On Dec 27, 1943 the ship and crew arrived at Pearl Harbor where inspections of the ship and training of the crew began with great intensity for their first mission.

While Joe and Stanley were training and waiting, cousin Edwin Wojnar was off immediately to join the crew of the USN Reid in July of 1943. After surviving the attack at Pearl Harbor and downing one Japanese plane during the attack, the destroyer Reid patrolled the area islands and provided convoy escort to and from San Francisco. In May of 1942, the Reid was called upon to provide support for actions against the Japanese positions at Kiska Island in Alaska and supported landings at Adak, Alaska sinking Japanese submarine RO-61 on August 31, 1942. This action was part of the Battle of Midway. Then it was off to the South Pacific where the Reid escorted Army troops to Guadalcanal and shelled enemy positions there in January of 1943.

During July of 1943, the Reid was refitted in the Mare Island Shipyard and Edwin joined the crew as a fireman. Mare Island is on the northeast side of San Francisco Bay. The ship did patrols in the Solomon Islands and provided radar information and fighter directions during the assault at Lae, New Guinea on September 4, 1943. She chalked up two enemy plane kills at Finschhafen, New Guinea on September 22, 1943. Support activities for landings at Arawe and Cape Gloucester, New Britain brought 1943 to a close. Edwin would continue to see plenty of action on the Reid in the upcoming year.