ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WILLIAM COFFEY U. S. NAVY

This is Chuck Nichols with the National Museum of the , April, 2003. I’m sitting in the conference room of the National Museum of the Pacific War with William Coffey who was a submariner during World War II and I’m going to talk to him about his experiences. Mr. Coffey, will you tell us when and where you were born, please? MR. COFFEY: I was born in Hopkins County Texas on the 16th of October, 1919. MR. NICHOLS: And you had brothers and sisters? MR. COFFEY: My parents were John S. and Vivian Coffey. I was the ninth of ten children. I was born on a farm two and a half miles west of Sulphur Springs in Hopkins County. MR. NICHOLS: Did you go to school in Sulphur Springs? MR. COFFEY: I went to school in Sulphur Springs and in those days to get to ride the school bus to school, you had to live five miles from town. We only lived two and a half miles from town, so the school bus would pass us every day as we trudged down the road to school. In those days, there were only eleven grades in Texas, so I went from the first through the 11th grade up that highway to Sulphur Springs. MR. NICHOLS: Did they have all grades in the same building? MR. COFFEY: No, they had the first through the sixth grades and they called that the ward school, elementary school. The seventh grade was in a building by itself, and then eight, nine, ten and eleven were the high school which was in one building. MR. NICHOLS: And they only had eleven grades at that time? MR. COFFEY: At that time there were only eleven grades in school in Texas. I thought I learned everything I needed to know in those eleven grades. MR. NICHOLS: And when you graduated from high school, what did you do? MR. COFFEY: I graduated from high school in the spring of 1936 and on the first of November, 1936, I hitchhiked to Dallas, which was oh, roughly ninety miles away, with twin brothers who wanted to join the marines. We went to the marine recruiting station first and the marines accepted them, and told me to go out and eat two or three bananas

1 and come back because I only weighed about 125 pounds soaking wet. I was nearly six foot tall. Instead of that, I went straight to the navy recruiting office and talked to those folks. I was accepted for enlistment but I had to wait until March of 1937 because there was that many people on the waiting list to go into the navy at that time. MR. NICHOLS: Did any of your brothers go into the military? MR. COFFEY: During World War II, I had three brothers and we were all four in the service. My oldest brother was in the army in what they call the CID today. My next brother was in the Seabees. He spent a tour in Iceland and came back and they sent him to in ’44. I enlisted in the navy in March of ’37, and my youngest brother quit A&M and joined the navy and he was killed in September of ’43. He was aviation radioman and he got shot. They were flying out of New Georgia up north and he was severely wounded and died on Guadalcanal in a hospital. MR. NICHOLS: What type of airplane was he on? MR. COFFEY: It was him and the pilot, radioman and the pilot, I don’t remember, some kind of fighter plane but I don’t know what kind. MR. NICHOLS: You were actually in the military then when World War II started. MR. COFFEY: Yes. When I was shipped into the navy I was sent to San Diego for boot camp which lasted three months in those days. When I finished boot camp in June of ’37, they sent us to a receiving station and we rode the oiler THE CUYAMA from San Diego up to Long Beach to catch the OKLAHOMA, PB37. In those days there was no air transportation or commercial transportation. You went the first available transportation. You went to a receiving station and waited until a ship that was going the way you were going came by and then they put you on it for the ride. MR. NICHOLS: And what did boot camp consist of? MR. COFFEY: There was a lot of drilling and very heavy on physical training and learning about the navy. They were very strong on personal hygiene. They had people come into the navy in those days that didn’t even know how to brush their teeth. We were issued a two and a half gallon bucket and a scrub brush with your sea bag. Whatever clothes you wore today, you washed them tonight and hung them out on the cloths line to dry. The bucket was part of the gear you were issued when you went to boot camp.

2 MR. NICHOLS: Did you live in barracks? MR. COFFEY: Yes, we slept in hammocks in a bag. Our company commanders, there were two of them a chief gunner’s mate and a chief quartermaster, and we spent a lot of time out on the ground near the drill field. North Island is right across the bay from the training station at San Diego. I was fascinated with the PBYs that were continually taking off and landing there in the water by Marsh Island. One of my company commanders told me one day, “Coffey, you like those blankety blank airplanes so much, you lay down and you hold your rifle full arm’s length and you can look at those planes as long as you want to.” That liked to have scared me to death, but I held that rifle up there until I thought my arms were going to fall off. He finally let me get up, and I can assure you, I never spent too much time looking at PBYs again. MR. NICHOLS: The PBY was relatively new at that time, wasn’t it? MR. COFFEY: It was a large two-engine, yes, they were relatively new. MR. NICHOLS: It didn’t have any kind of landing gear on it. MR. COFFEY: No, well it had a hull like a ship’s hull but they also had two wheels. You couldn’t run it on the ground. When those wheels came down and they could attach it up out of the water onto the ramp up the landing apron on its own power. They did not land on the ground. MR. NICHOLS: What kind of chow did you have? MR. COFFEY: It was good, I thought. We had baked beans and cornbread and either prunes or figs every Tuesday and every Saturday morning. They would have roast chicken or fried chicken on Sunday, and we had pot roast and stew and hot dogs and chili. I thought the food was good. Over the years, I think there has come to be two different definitions of SOS. What we called SOS was creamed chipped beef on toast. And the other was some minced beef. We had SOS as a regular diet. As a matter of fact, I liked it. I still like it. When I rode the CUYAMA, an oil , from San Diego to Long Beach, she was empty. The ocean was very calm and I got very sick. That’s the first time I ever got seasick. I got over it. MR. NICHOLS: Did you take some technical training then up at Long Beach or did you have some during basic?

3 MR. COFFEY: No, I went aboard and went to the Second Division of the OKLAHOMA as a seaman second. I learned how to hold a field day on Friday mornings use the whole _____ and working parties. My battle station was in the bottom of number 2 turret when I first started. I was an ammunition handler and sort of worked up from there. The OKLAHOMA was a fine ship. At that time, there were 990 officers and men. When I left there in 194l there were nearly 1500 on her. The crew had been built up that much. MR. NICHOLS: Were you at on the OKLAHOMA? MR. COFFEY: I left the OKLAHOMA in April of 1941, and I rode the HENDERSON transport, the navy transport, out to the . In late 1940, a message had come out asking for volunteers for in the Asiatic Fleet. I thought that would be a pretty good deal, so I volunteered for it and was accepted. I was a second class cook at the time. Going out on the HENDERSON I got sick. I was working in the galley and somehow or other I had some bad food. I got sick and I ended up in the hospital at Cavite. When we arrived in Manila, and when I got out of the hospital, all the billets were taken. So they sent me down to the receiving station at Corite in the navy yard to await further orders. A new merchant ship, the SS FRED NORRIS out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, was being converted to a tender at that time in the navy yard. Her name was to be the USS OTUS, AS20, and when they finally got her far enough along, they commissioned her and I was sent to her for duty. That’s where I was when the war started. MR. NICHOLS: And this was in Cavite? MR.COFFEY. Yes. When they bombed Pearl Harbor, we were anchored down in Mariveles Bay which is right across from Corregidor. That’s where they fought later on down on the Bataan Peninsula. It was Monday morning out there and I had the watch in the galley. I had just got up and was going to open up the galley and the radioman came running by on his way to the captain’s cabin and said, “The Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor.” Right at that moment, I felt like was a long way off. MR. NICHOLS: And you were probably glad you weren’t on the OKLAHOMA at the time because it capsized and a lot of sailors were trapped. MR. COFFEY: In later years, I have gone to the National Cemetery at Oahu and looked through that list of names. At that time I was “Jack of the dust” in the commissary issue

4 room on the OKLAHOMA, and I issued diet rations to everybody when we were steaming or in port either one it didn’t make any difference. We stood port and starboard liberty. I knew everybody on that ship by name so there was an awful lot of names imprinted on the marble slabs at the National Cemetery on Oahu. MR. NICHOLS: This is at the Punch Bowl? MR. COFFEY: At the Punch Bowl. On the 10th of December, of ’41 the Japanese bombed Cavite. There were 54 bombers and they were flying at 27,000 feet and we had 3-inch anti-aircraft rifles for protection, had two of them. At that time I was gun captain on the 5-inch that we had. Our ammunition was all the way forword and four decks down. The 3-inch ammunition came three in a box, a triangular-shaped wooden box, and weighed 170 pounds. During that time, we were picking one of those up and carrying it up those ladders and down the length of the ship and up one more deck to the super structure where the three-inch rifles were. After it was all over I couldn’t even pick one up. MR. NICHOLS: One man would carry the three rounds up? MR. COFFEY: That just shows what you can do when your adrenalin is pumping fast. We didn’t touch anything. They were just flying too high. They came over in two groups of 27, and then they broke up into groups of nine and crisscrossed us again. We had a . We were tied up at the dock and the receiving station was right there by us. They hit the receiving station, they hit the barge on the other side of our ship. There were two submarines, the SEA LION and the SEA DRAGON anchored right off our stern right up to the other end of the dock. And the PILLSBURY was in the marine dry dock, a dry dock to pull it out of the water. The first submarine lost in World War II was the SEA LION, and they hit her with a couple of bombs directly. We were standing right there watching that. They hit the receiving station and they hit the barge and they hit the PILLSBURY. We got underway post haste and went out in Manila Bay and went alongside a barge that was floating by itself. It was loaded with provisions, fresh meat and all sorts of food stuff. We went alongside the barge and loaded the ship with all we had room for in the freezers for food. And we left that night on the way south. MR. NICHOLS: Did they bomb Manila at the same time?

5 MR. COFFEY: They bombed Clark Field and they bombed Cavite. I’m not sure that they bombed Cavite and Manila at that time. I can’t remember. The army air force got one P40 up from Clark Field, and that poor sucker came and we were frantically shooting at these nips that were 27,000 feet and the only thing we hit was that P40. And that guy crashed in Manila Bay and we sent a mobile launch out and picked him up and brought him back to the ship. Needless to say he was not too happy with us. I don’t know what happened to him. He left before we got underway that night. He wasn’t hurting. MR. NICHOLS: As high as these Japanese bombers were, would your guns even reach that high? MR. COFFEY: No, they were out of our range. We didn’t have that kind of range. I can’t remember how far those little three inchers would shoot but it wasn’t that far. MR. NICHOLS: Probably not over three miles and those guys were five miles high. Five inchers may have reached that high. MR. COFFEY: Yes, but it was the big gun. We couldn’t get it up. On our way south we went to Balikapapan, and stopped and took on fuel. There were several American ships in there at night loading fuel so they’d have enough to get back to the States or get out of the way of the Japanese. We went to Darwin, Australia. First, before we went to Darwin, we went down to Borneo and stopped at Tillijap, Java, and stayed there, I don’t remember what we were doing in there but we stayed there a little bit and then we went on to Darwin. We had a load, oh, I remember now, there was a supply ship, the GOLD STAR from Guam, that used to go to Manila and take a load of supplies back to Guam. The GOLD STAR got caught and what they off loaded on us was whiskey. They had a cargo hold full of whiskey which is still on the market today. I’m trying to think of the name of it. They unloaded that whiskey at Darwin. Needless to say, there was whiskey all over the OTUS before we got rid of it. After the battle of Java Sea when the HOUSTON was sunk and the MARBLEHEAD lost a rudder, we escorted the MARBLEHEAD to Trincomalee, Ceylon. She was on her way back to the States just steering with her screws. She didn’t have a rudder, and we made that first leg with her and then we went back to Freemantle. While we were in Trincomalee, an English submarine came alongside that had been severely damaged. They had no water and, oh, man, they were a mess. Standing up on the deck of the OTUS and looking down at that

6 submarine, you could smell the odor coming out of the hatches on that submarine, and it wasn’t pretty. MR. NICHOLS: From the diesel engines? MR. COFFEY: No, from people. No way to clean up, nothing. It was a pitiful mess and we took them aboard and they all got clean clothes and we did what we could for them. I don’t know what ever happened to them. When we went back to Freemantle on the 27th of February of ’42 is when I went on the S41 boat.. She’d been stationed in the Philippines and she got run out of there with the rest of them. She was on her way around to the east coast of Australia to start running up through the Solomons. That was the second time I got seasick. When I went on that submarine and we were going across the Great Australian Bight and that thing was rolling about 40 degrees and, man, I tell you, I was seasick that time. But I got over it and it never bothered me again. MR. NICHOLS: What was the name of the S41? MR. COFFEY: That was it, SS146, US, they didn’t even have a name. They just had a number. The old S boats and the R boats and O boats didn’t even have names. They had numbers. We stopped in Brisbane and the navy had established a supply depot there. I went over to see what we could get because we were living pretty slim. There was a bunch of store keepers from the USS OKLAHOMA there in Melbourne that I knew, and that’s when we found out about Pearl Harbor. This was the first week of March of ’42. Our captain didn’t even know about Pearl Harbor. They gave us all the good information. I had all sorts of information when I got back to the boat and they had all sorts of stores down there that we hadn’t seen. So we loaded up with all that we could carry and went on north to Brisbane. MR. NICHOLS: And what were you doing on the S41? MR. COFFEY: I was cook on S41. We had 45 people in the crew, old S boats their test depth was 225 feet when they were built in the late teens and early twenties. They were 210 feet long. They had two Nelseco engines and top speed on the surface of 12 knots. It had four tubes forward, we carried twelve torpedoes, four in the tubes and eight in the racks. There were no torpedoes to draft on the S boat and those mark 10 torpedoes and there wasn’t but one thing wrong with them, they didn’t work. They wouldn’t maintain depth, you set them for 10 foot and they might run at thirty feet depth,

7 or they might run on the surface. And then the detonator was not right and once they hit a target nothing happened. It just bounced off and kept on running. We hit a freighter one night with 4 torpedoes one at a time and not a one of them exploded. To say that is frustrating is the understatement of the week. MR. NICHOLS: What kind of deck armament did you have? MR. COFFEY: We had a three inch gun. You had to be careful who you picked on with that thing because most people had bigger weapons than you did on their decks. We battle surfaced one time on that old 41 boat on a target and we couldn’t get the tops off of the ammunition cans to get at the shells. So that was something of a foul up. We had a change of command in Brisbane in May or June of ’42, and we got us a new skipper who was a fine, fine man named I. S. Hartman from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He took us north. This business of Guadalcanal was getting ready to get started or had started and we were trying to intercept the supply lines coming down from Rabaul to Guadalcanal. MR. NICHOLS: Guadalcanal was kind of southeast of New Guinea, wasn’t it? MR. COFFEY: Yes, it was, I think, 12 or 1500 miles due east of Australia, Queensland, and Rabaul was north of it. The Japanese had all sorts of ships and equipment in Rabaul and St. George’s Channel is about 50 miles long and goes into Rabaul. Rabaul is about half way up the channel and the submarine DRUM was at one end of St. George’s Channel and we were at the other end looking for stuff coming in or going out because anything you saw wasn’t your friend. We moved up St. George’s Channel quite a ways. Early one morning in August we intercepted, we were just sitting there back in a cove in a big I boat, a Japanese submarine that came by. We hit him with one torpedo, and we hit him with a second torpedo, and the third torpedo ran right on through because there wasn’t anything left. This was in August of ’42, and we felt real good about that, that was contributing. When all the fighting was going on on Guadalcanal, the Japanese ships were coming down and shelling them at night. We were sent in to intercept or do what we could to stop this. While we were on our way in we were supposed to have received orders not to go in because they were going to send a couple of American in there. We didn’t get those orders. We went in and the first night these guys ran us down and dropped a few depth charges and it didn’t last too long. The second night, the same thing happened only they came earlier and stayed later. At night we had to charge our

8 batteries because you stayed submerged all day and that’s what you lived on. The third night we had barely surfaced and they jumped us and they kept us down all that night and all the next day. If we could have gotten a shot at them, we would certainly have done so but we never had the opportunity. One of them would ping on us and the other guy would lay off and wait and listen, and then he’d make a run on us. We thought they must have a factory. Our battery was down, the air was foul, we were not in good shape. We surfaced in a rain storm and got away from them. There was no radar in those days, we didn’t have any. MR. NICHOLS: Weren’t there PT boats running around out there at the same time? MR. COFFEY: Not at that time. No, this was in the summer of ’42. I don’t know when the P T boats got there but they weren’t there then. And these destroyers were operating out of Brisbane also, and we didn’t find out about all of this until we got back to Brisbane. Needless to say, that didn’t help our morale any. In late ’42, we had orders to come back to San Diego for overhaul. Our skipper got a navy cross for that submarine sinking, I remember that. We got another ship but I can’t remember that as well as I remember about the submarine. We patrolled up through Ellis Islands and on into Pearl Harbor. At that time is when we fired those four torpedoes with that ship and they just hit it and kept on running. Needless to say, we didn’t feel too good about that. MR. NICHOLS: And that was with the S41? MR. COFFEY: Yes, still S41. We went to San Diego for overhaul and they put a very, very secret very small radar on us. Nobody was supposed to talk about it or even know about it or anything. They did an extensive overhaul because those old S boats were sent to the Asiatic station to die and maintenance wasn’t too whippie. About April of ’43, we went north from San Diego to Dutch Harbor and started running from Dutch Harbor to the northern coast of . They had taken Kiska back by that time. We would stop at Kiska and top off with fuel, or anything we needed, and go on and stay out as long as we could. Patrols on those S boats were about 40 days. We went into the Sea of Okosh and there the water injection was about 33 degrees. You’d last maybe five minutes in the water if you fell over the side. They issued us army clothes, those heavy wool I call drab, the brown army coat and sleeping bags. Now we had a bunk on this old submarine but you laid that sleeping bag right on that bunk and the only thing you took off was your

9 shoes when you went to bed. Forget about the shower, we didn’t have a shower on there. If you wanted to wash yourself you did it in a 2 ½ gallon bucket and don’t waste any water. During the early days of the war, until we got to San Diego, we didn’t even have a mess table. You got your food and you sat in a corner or anywhere you could sit down to eat. The wardroom had four officers, they had a table but everybody else just ate wherever they could. MR. NICHOLS: Not many corners on a submarine. MR. COFFEY: No. That’s young man’s business, but it was alright, we made out alright. MR. NICHOLS: How did you re-supply them? MR. COFFEY: You either took it with you or you did without. MR. NICHOLS: Food? MR. COFFEY: Everything. Whatever you had, you loaded before you left. And once you left, you lived with what you had, or you did without whichever the case might be. There was no re-supplying submarines on patrol, but I’ll get into that a little later. The days were long, about eighteen hours of daylight, and there was a lot of activity up there in the water. We spent a lot of time submerged, and at night you charged your batteries like crazy just to get it done. At night when we surfaced, we’d have a big pot of oatmeal or something like that. That was it because we were saving the battery juice. When we dove in the morning, we had a full meal and that was our one big meal of the day. Anyhow, this one night it was very rough, stormy, and cold naturally, and we picked up a ship with our radar. We closed within a thousand yards of him and fired and hit him. It was an and when that thing blew up, we went over somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees. I thought we had been hit and we righted ourselves. Another submarine, a US submarine, was on station 50 miles south of us that night, and he heard that explosion, 50 miles away. It was horrendous. We thought it sounded pretty good. Then in October we did a little more up there, but in October of ’43 we came back in to Dutch harbor and a whole group of us got orders to do construction. We were going to get on the big boats, on the fleet boats. So we left and spent Christmas at home and spent New Year’s Eve of 1944 sleeping on a pool table in Massachusetts or some place up there because, for some reason, the trains got messed up and we had to wait. I can’t

10 remember where it was but I remember I slept on a pool table that night and I wasn’t drunk either. MR. NICHOLS: Were you there to pick up your new boat? MR. COFFEY: Yes, I was going to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for new construction, and so the next day I went on to Portsmouth and reported. They were commissioning the USS STERLET, SS392. We put her in commission in March of ’44 and did a lot of training and went down to Newport and fired torpedoes. By that time they had resolved the torpedo problem but had been blaming submarines for two years during the war. MR. NICHOLS: Did you have Mark 14s by then? MR. COFFEY: Yes, we had Mark 14s and then the Mark 18s came after that. We went to New London where we were just training, training, training, and went to Key West and through the canal on to Pearl Harbor. On the 4th of July, of ’44, we left Pearl Harbor on the first war patrol on the STERLET. I told you that the old S boats were test depth 225 feet and 210 foot long and very, very crude and primitive. The fleet boat that we won the war with was 310 foot long, had a top speed on the surface of almost 22 knots, had six torpedo tubes forward and four aft and carried a total of 24 torpedoes. MR. NICHOLS: And a crew of about 65? MR. COFFEY: We carried about 75 in the crew and you might have as many as 8 or 10 more for training, just rode with you, stood watches and did everything. But the normal crew was about 75 officers and men. What a different life that was. Naturally, we had air conditioning. We had showers and lived like people. Some of them, if you got awfully crowded, you hot bunked. You stood watches four hours on and eight hours off, so you put three men in two bunks. So when the man is coming off watch, somebody else is going on, and the guy that’s coming off watch, he gets into that bunk the fellow just got out of. That’s where the term ‘hot bunking’ came from. MR. NICHOLS: And when did you change the linens? Ever? MR. COFFEY: Yes. That depended on you. I carried sheets to change it. I probably didn’t change it more than once ever ten days or two weeks. I didn’t change it very often because you didn’t have the room. Storage space was at a premium and you didn’t take showers, you could wash up in a wash basin. The only ones that could take a shower

11 every day was the cooks because they wanted to keep them clean working with the food so nobody would get sick. MR. NICHOLS: Were you still a cook? MR. COFFEY: Yes, I was still a cook on the STERLET. I was the leading cook on the STERLET. What I did was I would bake, make cakes and pies and bread. You baked your own bread, naturally, and we’d have cakes and pies and doughnuts or whatever. How much dessert we had depended on what we were doing. It worked very well MR. NICHOLS: You had a place for relatively fresh ingredients, or did you have a lot of cans? MR. COFFEY: Oh, everything was canned. You carried eggs up to about 60 days, they turn green and they don’t look too appetizing even when you cook them. So you disguise them as best as you can. This was in the days when freeze-dried food was in its infancy and it wasn’t too appetizing at that time. Our sugar and coffee and flour came in 5-gallon cans, and when you load a submarine for war patrol, you load all compartments, everywhere you can put food. We put food those five-gallon cans, we took them out of their cases and the engineers in the forward and aft engine room would stow them outboard the engines in the passage way and then they would walk on them to check the engines. Whenever you needed a can of four or a can of sugar or whatever, you just called the engine room and say, hey, bring me a can of flour or whatever it is you need. When we loaded food, it was an almost an all hands evolution. I would see to it that after torpedo room and the forward torpedo room, the electricians or whoever wanted it would have a case of tuna or a couple of cases of something so they could put it away. When they wanted a snack without coming up to the galley, they could get one. It makes for domestic tranquility in a very fine way. MR. NICHOLS: You didn’t carry K rations or C rations? MR. COFFEY: No, we didn’t have K rations or C rations. We carried all our spare parts, we loaded with fuel. We had what we called fuel ballast tanks and converted them into fuel tanks and loaded them with fuel, too, and worked with them because once we’d left Pearl Harbor, we’d stop at Midway which was 1100 miles west. We would top off with fuel at Midway or anything else we needed or thought we needed, and then when you left Midway that was it. You either had it with you or you did without. It worked

12 alright. We had some food in strange places but we managed to eat pretty well. We didn’t worry about how much we spent on food. We were supposed to but we didn’t. And then in the STERLET, we had some very successful war patrols. We caught a one night. Now I can’t remember how many escorts there were or anything, but we went in on a surface. A gentleman by the name of O. C. Robbins, Butch Robbins, was our skipper, he was a commander, Naval Academy man I think in 1935, a real kind man, a fine officer and gentlemen and a fine sailor. We caught two of those oilers running one behind the other, and we fired six torpedo tubes forward and swung around and fired those other four tubes, from stern tubes, and we got both of them. You’d have thought the whole world was on fire because they were loaded. We got several ships like that. We had a five-inch gun for our and we had single 20mm and a twin 20. The gunner on the single 20 which was on the cigarette deck forward of the bridge, was a boy named Mays from Seattle, Washington. We would depend on him to keep the gun crews cleared on whoever we were jumping on while we got that 5-inch to working. I was gun captain on it, too. We had an ammunition train, the ammunition locker was in the after battery below deck in the mess hall, and you had to have a train to come through there up to the control room, and then across the control room and up. We called it the gun trunk hatch because that was the hatch that you used when you were going to battle surface on somebody. You’d catch him between you and the moonlight or the sunset or wherever, anything to give you a little bit of an advantage, and you’d get as close as you dared. You’d battle surface and you’d blow up and we’d have to be all just one stacked on top of the other in that gun trunk. We’d get up there and we had about a dozen rounds in the deck locker on the deck in the conning tower, waterproof thing. We would start with that ammunition, that ready ammunition that we had, and by the time we needed more they would have the ammunition train working from the armory, from the magazine. One time we battle-surfaced on a target and we were circling and we kept training the gun on the port side around from forward to aft. There was a machinist mate named Vanderwood from Michigan, we called him Oglethorpe. We had that gun really trained around and the concussion from our firing slapped old Vanderwood up against the conning tower. It addled him a little bit. So the shells were coming up and they were passing it to Vanderwood and he was throwing it over the side. That lasted a little bit but

13 not long before we got that straightened out. But that particular thing was just like the movies, that ship went down. I don’t know how big it was, it was big enough He went down by the stern and his bow was sticking up and our gun was loaded. We were sort of watching him sink and then we had that single round we had already loaded, so we fired again and we put that round right through his bow. It just made a hole in there to ventilate him so he would sink so he went right down. The movies couldn’t do it any better than we did on that one. MR. NICHOLS: Like a John Wayne movie. MR. COFFEY: Just like a John Wayne movie. MR. NICHOLS: Was this during the daylight or at night? MR. COFFEY: This was in the early evening. We could see. MR. NICHOLS: You probably already surfaced or recharged your batteries by then. MR. COFFEY: We surfaced to get after this guy. We battle surfaced on purpose. Later on in the war, we stayed on the surface more and more because we could dive faster, we had radar, we could pick up airplanes coming in and we could move a lot faster. If you can make 20 knots on the surface and about 4 knots submerged, there’s a vast difference when you’re trying to do an end around a convoy or something. Staying submerged won’t get it on those boats in those days because they’d run off and leave you. We did very well on the STERLET. The second patrol run, the Japanese were fixing to land on Iwo Jima and we knew it. We sank the transport right off Iwo Jima and the Japanese backpack acted as a life jacket for them. We also knew that, and after we sank that guy, we surfaced and, man, they were in the water everywhere. What we did then a lot of people wouldn’t approve of, but when you hate, you hate real bad, you know. So we did what we thought we ought to do. I came back at the end of the second patrol, at the end of the first patrol run we came into Midway and refitted and went out on a second run. At the end of the second run, we came back into Pearl Harbor and we had a doctor. We all had a physical examination. That’s the first physical I had since the war started and this was December of ’44. He said, “You’re fibrillating.” I didn’t know it, I wasn’t sick or anything. I was feeling alright. They sent me back to Camp Pendleton to a naval hospital at Oceanside which was at Camp Pendleton and I spent six months there. The girl that I married, her brother was my shipmate on two submarines. And she and her

14 mother had come out to see him in San Diego. They didn’t come out to see me, they came out to see him. He fixed her up with me to have somebody to go with us when they went out, so that’s how I met her. That happened in ’43 when we were in San Diego. When I got back, she came out and we got married at the First Baptist Church in San Diego in January of ’45, and we’re still married. MR. NICHOLS: Did you go back to sea after that? MR. COFFEY: Yes, and then I got out of the hospital in June of ’45. The day we got married we went to the US Grant Hotel in San Diego. One of the officers that was on the 41 boat with me, we were shipmates when the war started. We were just coming out of the US Grant Hotel, and he was on leave. Naturally, we stopped and shook hands and I hugged him and he said, “Where are you going?” I said, “Well, I’m going to Suvad at Mare Island and they’re going to tell me where I’m going to go. I don’t know where I’m going.” He said, “Well, I’m going up to take command of the TAMRA at Port Angless, Washington, SS198, and how about you coming up there with me?” I said, “That would be fine.” So he left word with Suvad to send me up to Tambor at Port Angless and that’s just exactly what happened. I went up there and we were doing ASW work with navy aircraft. We’d go out and dive in the morning and they’d try to find us, and all that good stuff, just practice. Then when the war was over, I was seeing a movie in Port Angless and the movie stopped and the lights came on and they said, “The war is over. Japan has surrendered.” That’s how we learned about the end of World War II. Right after that we got orders to go to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to be decommissioned. We rode around through the canal and up to Portsmouth to put the TAMBOR out of commission and went to the BALAO SS285. We got the BALAO overhauled in Portsmouth and we were going to Panama. I’d already told my wife to goodbye. We’d backed out and were headed for Panama when we got orders to go to New London to go out of commission. We’d bought a ’41 Mercury after we got married. My wife had come out to where the channel was to watch the boat get under way, and when we went by and waved, she backed up into a cement post and bent a fender on that Mercury. So we turned around and went back in and I went home and she wasn’t home. After awhile she came in she had been trying to find a garage to fix that bent fender. Anyhow, we went to New London and put the BALAO out of commission when Commander E. T. Shepherd, later

15 retired as a captain, was the skipper of the BALAO. He’d been in the PICUDA in World War II and he only had four navy crosses to his credit. He was a pretty fine warrior and a fine man. He went from the BALAO to the HALFBEAK SS352 as the prospective commanding officer. He asked me to go along with him, and naturally I did, because I greatly admired him. We put the HALFBEAK in commission on July 22nd of 1946 at EB in Groton. I stayed in HALFBEAK for four years and left her in February of 1950. In the meantime, in that time, Captain Shepherd had been detached and Gene Fluckey, the gentleman who got the Congressional Medal of Honor and five navy crosses on the barb, came as our skipper. He stayed with us a little while and the next thing we knew, they sent him down to Washington. He later retired as a Rear . W. W. McCoy, who was from Conroe, Texas, named after Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson McCoy, was our skipper and he was a Navy Cross man and he has long since left us. We had some fine skippers in the HALFBEAK in my time and in 1950, early fifty, they sent me to the training tank at New London, Connecticut, where we teach these guys how to escape from sunken submarines. Tanks are 112 foot in depth, 18 foot in diameter, and you teach them how to use the Momson lung which they don’t use anymore. Through the 18-foot lock and the fifty foot lock and then you go down to the bottom of the thing, and you teach them to come all the way up the whole 112 foot. I spent the whole at the training tank at New London. The State of Connecticut gave me a two hundred dollar bonus for being a Korean War Veteran, but they stopped that business about the day after I got my check. I always thanked Connecticut for that two hundred dollars. MR. NICHOLS: You never gave it back to them. MR. COFFEY: No, I didn’t give it back. They didn’t ask for it back, they just quit doing it that way. They had to give it to the Connecticut boys or something, I don’t know what happened. MR. NICHOLS: You’ve been in ten years by now. MR. COFFEY: I went in in ’37, and this was 1950. I’d been in thirteen years. In the summer of ’52 I went to the USS HARDER the SS568. She was the first of the deep diving submarines built by the navy after the war. We took her to over 700 foot test depth which is nothing today but it was a far piece in those days. Just like the fleet boat, I went to right over 500 feet on the STERLET and it was supposed to be a 400 foot boat.

16 This was navy yard built and well, thank God for that. We put the HARTER in commission and they had four upright engines, I can’t remember what they were, but they didn’t work. You’d go out on four engines and come in on one. They were experimental and the experiment didn’t work too well. Finally they re-engined all of them and added to them and did various things. There were six of those boats. And then, the skipper of the HARDER was Capt. Dick Laning, Richard Laning, and his exec.was Jim Calvert who was lieutenant commander at the time, was later on Commandant of Midshipman at the Naval Academy and wrote a couple of books. He was the man that took the first submarine to the North Pole, SKIPJACK. And Admiral Calvert was a real fine man and he relieved Captain Ned Beach, Uncle Ned Beach, who wrote the first submarine book. I can’t remember what it is now, but he relieved Captain Beach on the TRIGGER. I went over as his Chief of the Boat on the TRIGGER and that was a very pleasant tour. We had same engine problems that they did on the HARDER but we had a fine crew and we did a lot of operating down in the Caribbean, St. Thomas. Used to the first of January of every year, about the third of January, you’d leave New London and go down to St. Thomas and operate down there with the ASW people for ten weeks. That was a hard road to hoe down there in the sunshine while your family was shoveling snow in Connecticut. MR. NICHOLS: And this is where your wife stayed while you were there? MR. COFFEE: Yes, your families, the wife stayed at home. We had three small children by then, so she stayed home. MR. NICHOLS: How much time did you spend at sea? MR. COFFEE: Out of thirty years, I had 25 years at sea. Then they were going to build a SEAWOLF SS575 and Captain Laning was going to be the skipper of the SEAWOLF. Captain Calvert had gone to Washington to be on Rickover’s staff with the nuclear power thing. Captain Laning asked me if I’d want to come to the SEAWOLF with him and I did. She had a liquid sodium reactor and they had a lot of trouble with it. About that time, I decided I had almost twenty years in the navy and I thought it’s time for me to go home and see what I want to do. I went to a recruiting duty in Palestine, Texas, and it was very pleasant. I was born about one hundred miles north in Sulphur Springs and had a lot of family and friends there and we did well recruiting. It was good duty. Then in

17 the summer of ’57, the navy had given everybody that was eligible for anything an examination for a higher grade. I had almost twenty years in the navy at that time and I thought I might as well take it. I’ll give it one more shot. I had tried for the warrant program but I never succeeded. In 1948, I’d been disqualified for the LDO program in New London, Connecticut, because I was fibrillating again. I’d forgotten about that, but I was back in the hospital and they finally got that straightened out. I was selected for the warrant program. They had two hundred and twenty-five people on the names for consideration, and out of that two hundred and twenty-five, they selected four people to be warrant pay clerks which was what I was interested in, and I was the first one of the four. And I was prouder of that than anything I ever did in my life, and so I went to Navy Supply Corp School in Athens, Georgia, for a six-month’s course. From there I went down to the TRIPOLI, TCVU 64, old World War II jeep carrier, that was running from Mobile, Alabama, to the Mediterranean, and we carried everything from Mercedes to mules on that thing. We were literally a freight hauler, and we did carry mules, too. They decided to put her out of commission and I went to the MERCURY fleet issue ship in Norfolk, Virginia, AKS20, and they decided to decommission her. I went to the ANTERES, another fleet issue ship KS33, and put her in commission and made either two or three trips to the Mediterranean on her re-supplying the Sixth Fleet. It was just a floating Sears and Roebuck, we carried everything. Then I went to shore duty at Mare Island, California, at the reserve fleet and in 1950, about ’50, no that’s not ’50, it’s 1960, anyhow I went to shore duty. I’m getting my dates mixed up now, at the reserve fleet and spent two years there and then was sent to the USS REGULUS, AS57, a fleet issue ship, operating out of Oakland with the fifth fleet and the seventh fleet in the western Pacific. We carried groceries and clothes and food and fresh vegetables and stuff like that, and I was the cargo officer on that tour. It was a lot of work but we had a good crew. Our skipper was a naval aviator named Robert Dahloff, a real fine gentlemen. I made about two or three cruises on the REGULUS and then I was fixing to come up for shore duty and they said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “Well how about letting me go to a commissary store.” So they sent me to Brooklyn to the navy ship store school and I went to San Francisco Bay Naval Shipyard as the commissary store officer and stayed there a year. I was getting close to my thirty years then so I asked them to send me up to

18 Mare Island. I ran the commissary store at Mare Island for two years and then I retired, August, 1967. I was wrong on that date of shore duty, I served 23 years at sea and 7 years on shore duty out of my thirty. And that’s about the story of my life. MR. NICHOLS: In some ways, you’ve had a pretty illustrious career. Did you retire as Chief Warrant? MR. COFFEY: I retired as a lieutenant. The navy was going to do away with warrant officers and you had the option, you could stay at Chief Warrant or move across. I moved across but I knew that I could make lieutenant before I had 30 in, and the pay of a LDL lieutenant was more than the pay of a CWO3, so it was strictly a matter of money with me. I went across and retired and loved every minute of it. MR. NICHOLS: And a navy lieutenant wears marine captain bars. MR. COFFEY: There you go, there you go. Railroad tracks. MR. NICHOLS: Railroad tracks, that’s right. Backtrack a little. Did you pick up any downed aviators? MR. COFFEY: Yes. We picked up eight during the battle of Okinawa. We had one that was drifting into the beach and we went in quite close. We had two navy aviators strafe the beach when we went in on the surface to get this guy and it was close. As soon as they left there would be two more come in. Just keep the Nips down because we were not in a good spot to do it but we got him alright and got out. MR. NICHOLS: These were navy flyers? MR. COFFEY: Yes, navy aviators. They stayed with us about forty days and we had them stand periscope watches. They’d say altitude, minus 54 feet. MR. NICHOLS: Did you have two periscopes on your ship? MR. COFFEY: Yes. We had a good radar by that time, too. MR. NICHOLS: Did you ever come in contact with Admiral Cleary? Before he was an admiral, he was the skipper of the PINTADO. MR. COFFEY: No. His executive officer was a guy named Corwin Mendenhall who retired as an Admiral and I know Mendenhall real well. MR. NICHOLS: One of his executive officers, I think, wrote a book about submarine duty and whoever it was didn’t seem to like Cleary too awfully well. MR. COFFEY: That was Mendenhall. Did you ever read CLEAR THE BRIDGE?

19 MR. NICHOLS: No. MR. COFFEY: There’s two you ought to read, THUNDER BELOW by Gene Fluckey and CLEAR THE BRIDGE by Richard O’Kane, Dick O’Kane, both of them Medal of Honor winners, and they’ll have you sitting on the edge of your chair. Incredible! MR. NICHOLS: I think we’ll bring this to an end and we thank you for your time with us. MR. COFFEY: It’s been my pleasure. MR. NICHOLS: You’ve been married almost sixty years, haven’t you? MR. COFFEY: Yes. MR. NICHOLS: More than half your life. How many children did you say you had? MR. COFFEY: We had four, three girls and a boy. My son retired last year, he was a Sergeant Major of the 3rd Marine Airwing, Marine Corps. And I had nothing to do with him going into the Marines. He did that on his own. MR. NICHOLS: Your kids live close to you? MR. COFFEY: One of them lives in Fort Worth. We live in Fort Worth. My youngest daughter lives in Fort Worth, my son and his wife live in San Diego and my other daughter lives in Carmel by the Sea, California, and one in San Antonio. MR. NICHOLS: You must have a pretty good number of grandkids. MR. COFFEY: We’ve got grandchildren and great grandchildren. We have about six and six grandchildren and great grandchildren, a good bunch MR. NICHOLS: We’re going to end it right here then. Thank you for participating.

Edited copy typed January 31, 2007, by Eunice Gary.

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