Hey Eric, wasn't your next post supposed to be for a completely different book, one on philosophy? Yeah, but I read this one instead because it was so much more interesting and it came to me in an interesting way. My grandfather recently passed away, the last of my three grandfathers. Grandpa was a hoarder, and what is more he had a lot of land in rural Wyoming, which only served to facilitate his hoarding tendency. Now it has fallen to my father to be the executor of the estate so he has been driving out there and coming back with truckloads of family heirlooms, and on the most recent trip, he also brought home this book. My family has no idea why he had it.
My Grandfather didn't serve in the Second World War and as far as we know none of that side of the family served in the navy during the time. None of the names in the crew list are familiar to me. There are some pencil marks in the book to several names, but I don't know what they mean. Very mysterious.
What isn't mysterious is the purpose of the book. My dad has a book like this from his days in the navy. Ships would put together a cruise book to commemorate the voyage so people could look back on the fond memories. It is basically a yearbook for warships. In this case, it is almost exactly a year. The main part of this book runs from May 14th 1944 when the ship was commissioned, to May 14th, 1945 and commemorates the first year of the life of the U.S.S. Lunga Point, but because the war ended only a few month later there is a bit added on the end to bring the story full circle.
U.S.S. Lunga Point was an escort carrier, a merchant ship hull with a flat top and elevators, the bare minimum needed to work as a carrier. Too slow to ride with the battlefleet and too short to launch the most modern fighters escort carriers were called expendable for a reason. They provided excellent air cover for merchant convoys or air support for landings. For most of its life that was the Lunga Points job. It was a veteran of the liberation of the Philipines, and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was a dangerous job, and the book has great first-person accounts of being shot down on Japanese-held islands and desperate escapes, and action photos of incoming Kamikazes. The real danger comes through in these sections.
But the book is pretty light-hearted. They are mostly inside jokes though. There is a lot of references to the smoking light being lit or going out that really confused my mother. It must have been constant. Also, the section of one sentence reminders must bring a lot of chuckles to those who were there but is a bit of a mystery today. In this way it accurately represents the experience of war. It is not combat all the time, it had the light hearted moments, and the moments of just people being normal. The joy of ice cream, the private jokes, the birth of children. The men and women who fought that war were not mythically tough, they were just normal people. So I would encourage you to take a look around your house for a book like this, and get a chance to connect with the past. While the past is a foreign country, the people there are humans like you and me, and not totally alien. Next time it should be back to the usual.
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