WWII Snapshots by Mark Wampler - 2008

Lowell Jack, Navy

In 1944, Lowell Jack enlisted in the Navy, a week before his 18th birthday, but he very nearly missed the chance to set foot on a ship.

"I almost never made it out of boot camp," Jack said.

During boot camp, at the Ferragut Naval Training Center in Idaho, he contracted pneumonia.

"I was in the naval hospital in Ferragut from Sept. 14 to Feb. 19 trying to get well," Jack said. "I almost died."

Jack's pneumonia got so serious that his parents were sent for in Iowa, thinking it might be the last time they ever got to see their son. Slowly, but surely, however, Jack began to get well, but the doctors were concerned that he was not fully better, so they sent him to convalesce in a warm climate.

"All along I think I might have spent eight months in the hospital before I ever really got started," Jack said.

Jack, a history buff and long-term resident of Manhattan, said that he enlisted, "because the draft board was taking people the minute they turned 18."

He was the eldest boy in a family of five from Burlington, Iowa. His younger brother and sister were still in public school at the time he enlisted. The Navy was his first choice.

"I don't know whether I had a very good reason or not, but I thought that if I was in the Navy and I was on a ship, I would be within virtually a few feet of medical care if I got injured." "That was maybe a crazy way to think about it," he said smiling.

Once Jack had recovered enough to rejoin the forces, he was sent to San Pedro, Calif. to get on a ship bound for an amphibious training base in San Diego where he arrived on May 28, 1944.

"As soon as I was sent back to duty, they sent me to learn how to run one of these," Jack said, pointing to a picture of a small boat known as a Standard Landing Craft Unit. Jack became known as a "coxswain," the term given to operators of the landing crafts.

"I had a crew of three deckhands and one engineer. The boat would run up on the sand of the beach, and the flap would come down. It held about 60 troops ready to fight."

The boat was capable of holding a 30-ton tank and was about 50 feet long and 14 feet across.

"It was very interesting and a little scary," Jack said of his initial experience. "I just took to it and I liked it a lot. In fact, I got to volunteer for it. They said 'What do you want to be, a deckhand or a coxswain?' I said, 'I�ll be a coxswain!'"

After Jack had learned how to operate the landing unit, he was put on board the U.S.S. Massachusetts and sent to Pearl Harbor for more training. After several weeks in Pearl Harbor, Jack was placed aboard a merchant ship with dozens of troops.

"I�m not sure we knew where we were even when we got there," Jack said.

Jack said he was excited about the first part of his tour in the Navy.

"One of the things I liked about it was that I could see that at least for awhile, I wasn't going to go against Japanese machine gunners pulling my boat up on the beach, because they had others plans for us," he said.

Jack and his fellow soldiers landed on Sorlen Island, or Keenset - the American code word for the island - on Oct. 21, 1944. Sorlen was just a small part of a large atoll of islands called Ulithi located almost on the equator, east of the Philippines and west of Japan. The U.S. government had kept the port a secret because of its strategic location and the sheer capacity of the base.

"The Japanese had it, ignored it and decided to abandon it. It was our ace in the hole," Jack said.

Laffey.org reports that in March 1945, the time period that Jack was on Sorlen, there were 15 battleships, 29 carriers, 23 cruisers, 106 destroyers, and a train of oilers and supply ships that were located in the Ulithi atoll. According to the Laffey site, "Ulithi, the biggest and most active naval base in the world, was indeed tremendous, but it was unknown. Few civilians had heard of it at all. By the time security released the name, the remarkable base of Ulithi was a ghost."

Microworks.net describes the conditions of the island that were established for the soldiers:

The construction of facilities for a standard landing-craft unit on Sorlen Island was a major project. The development involved grading the entire island and covering it with Quonset huts for storage, shops, mess halls, offices, and living quarters, and building roads, supply dumps, and necessary facilities to supply water and electricity to all parts of the island. Eleven distillation units, drawing water from the sea, and nine 5,000-gallon storage tanks were set up to provide drinking water.

Jack spent eight months on the island, using his Standard Landing Craft Unit to ferry supplies from American cargo ships to the destroyers and cruisers.

"Whatever the battleship ordered � clothes, toilet articles � would be dropped into our boat, then we'd find the ship, take it over and they'd unload it. That was our main job during that period of time," Jack said.

There was one particular night when Jack was abruptly interrupted from his routine.

"I was out on the water and it was at night," he said. "We didn't have a full moon so you could just see outlines."

Jack said that when a ship or boat travels at night, because of certain combination of chemicals in the ocean, it creates a phosphorous glow in the bow wake. In that glow, he was able to see the outline of a small submarine about seven feet away.

"I knew what it was right away. It disappeared then, fortunate for me, because if I had tried to be a hero and run into it, it probably would have exploded," he said.

Jack said that the next morning he was down in his boat looking north when he saw a ship explode. The "submarine" had been a torpedo with a man sitting in it and had run into the boat.

"So that was kind of a close call, because I know that if I had tried to been a hero and run that sub down, it would have exploded," he said.

After his eight months on the island, Jack applied for Naval ROTC officer training, and was sent to the University of Idaho. The war ended as he was training to be an officer.

Points were given based on length of service and achievements in the war, and Jack had just enough to be discharged. It became official on March 22, 1946.

"That�s what I was after," Jack said. "I was ready to go home. I hadn't been home the whole time I was in the Navy."

Jack's prize would come soon after the war in the form of a young woman named Phyllis Machholz. Jack found it difficult to gain admission to college with the influx of soldiers returning from the war. He was eventually admitted to the University of Iowa. But then his pneumonia returned and he was sent to California to recover.

"I really wanted to do something [while in California], so I went to Pasadena Institute for radio trade school to learn how to be a broadcaster," he said.

Once he had graduated, Jack found a job at KBUR in Burlington, Iowa, 35 miles from his hometown. During one of his routine mid-afternoon weather updates, Jack got a surprise.

"One day, I was the announcer on duty, and we would call ahead of time to see who was going to give the weather update from the Burlington Weather Bureau so that we could introduce them," Jack said. That day it was supposed to be Bill Muldoon. So I went to introduce the reporter and I said, 'And now to read the weather is Mr. Muldoon.' But instead, a female voice came on; it was Phyllis."

Jack was pleasantly surprised.
,br> "I�ve got to go meet that Mr. Muldoon," he said. "She has such a nice voice."

Three months later, in 1948, Phyllis and Lowell were married.

"That�s been almost 60 years ago," Phyllis said. She laughed when asked about her first impressions of Jack.

"I liked his personality � I just liked him."