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Centerfor Pacific War Studies THE N AT I D N AL M U S E U M DF PACIFIC I** Fredericksburg, Texas Centerfor Pacific War Studies Presents An Interview with: Robert D. Graff USS-Atlanta Battle of Salvo Island ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW OF LT. COMMANDER ROBERT D. GRAFF USNR Cork Morris: This is Cork Morris. It is September 16, 2007, and I’m interviewing Mr. Robert D. Graff. This interview is taking place in Fredericksburg, Texas in support of the Center for Pacific War Studies, archives for the National Museum of the Pacific War, Texas Historical Commission. I appreciate your taking a little time and talking with us. Robert D. GrafT: I thank the museum because they dragged me out of the cold East and brought me to Texas on a visit which did not involve a funeral. I’ve been in Texas a couple of times, always funerals and always in Dallas. Mr. Morris: I always like to get a little background; where you were born, where your parents were. Let’s start right there. Mr. GrafT: I was born to Max and Ann Graff in the Lying-In Hospital, now part ofNew York Hospital, in New York City, on December 2, 1919. I am a genuine New Yorker. My parents were living in Greenwich Village in an apartment on Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue and continued there for three years more until my sister mysteriously arrived. Then my parents moved to a suburb ofNew York called Scarsdale. Scarsdale was a model village in a good sense, in that the people who moved there cared about the history of the place. The Local Library was a Revolutionary War headquarters, things like that. It was a beautiful place; people cared for the land. It had then, and still does, a first-rate educational system which I attended until I went to Deerfield Academy. I graduated from there, then went on to Harvard for four years to get a degree, magna cum laude, in 1 6/29/2009 Economics. I got my diploma at the graduation ceremony, took a cab to Logan Airfield for a flight to New York, went to my family’s house in Scarsdale for the night. Next day I showed up at the Prairie State, a converted Spanish-American battleship with a barn on 135th top, moored permanently errantly to the shore of the Hudson River at about Street. All of this had been prearranged the summer before when I had originally enlisted in the Navy’s V-7 Program. In the course of that summer’s preliminary thirty-day cruise as a midshipman, the regular Navy petty officers put us to work learning what life in the Navy was all about. Officers aboard the ancient battleship New York, circulated among us taking notes, I guess of individual responsiveness to the “course”. Mr. Morris: Mmm hinm. Mr. Graff: I passed and was told that I would be accepted immediately in the V-7 program at the Prairie State, But the officer said, “I noticed you have left a note in the office stating you would greatly appreciate having nine months leave to go back to Harvard and graduate. The policy ofthe Program is to allow prospective midshipmen to do that.” That’s what I did. I graduated in June 1941, went down to the Prairie State. The Prairie State as I said, was a Spanish-American warship whose superstructure had been removed and a great gray barn replaced it as the drill hall. Below decks there were accommodations for three or four hundred midshipmen in the converted ship. Classrooms were located in a railroad freight station of the New York Central Railroad, right next to where the Prairie 135th State was moored at, Street and the Hudson River. 2 6/29/2009 We midshipmen were split into two groups, deck disciplines called Seamanship or Engineering. The two divisions had, I thinlc twenty companies each, created alphabetically. I ended up with a mix of friends or acquaintances and more strangers whose names were Gruff and Grump and so forth, because we were all G’ s. We studied seamanship; we learned the principles of navigation, how to handle a ship. When we finished, the 90-day crash course, we were given a further training assignment. I’d opted for Destroyers, but was assigned to a Communications School in Connecticut. I went there the next week. The School was a former, religious School or Institution, which now was filled with the latest intelligence paraphernalia, secret codes and coding machines, and shushhhh. The first question was: “Do you know how to type?” I said, “Yes, I can type.” “Good,” they said, “come in.” It was a room like this one we’re sitting in now. There were several rows of desks, and at each desk there was a coding machine, a black box with a typewriter keyboard and a place for a ribbon of paper to go through. The coding machine had four wheels about this big and about that thick, with wires wound around them, which spun on an axis and which, when you pressed a letter, before you would spin it a random way and you’d get a coded equivalent. Five letters and numbers could equal the letter today but, since the code changed daily, tomorrow it might be the code for . We learned and practiced and familiarized ourselves with all the procedures. They also got us to learn to use simpler codes among which were pencil and paper. Some of them had fancy paper—what do you call it when you can’t see the ink? Invisible ink. Primitive stuff and latest technology. They also told us a little bit about the status of the communication system in the Navy. The purpose ofthe exercise was to make you 3 6/29/2009 effective enough so that you could become a Communications Watch-Stander in the radio room handling the coded messages for a ship. You were not expected to receive Morse code. That we all knew. We had learned it a few years before in the Boy Scouts when we also learned wig-wag flags, and semaphore flag positions. Then the question was: where was our group going to go? I asked the officer in charge of our class if we could express an opinion as to what we would like to do. He said: “not really,” so I said goodbye to civilian life, and the Navy sent me to a new class of ship being built across the Hudson in Kearny, New Jersey. She was named the ATLANTA, a light cruiser, 6,000 tons, supported 8 turrets of twin five-inch 38 caliber guns. As an anti-aircraft ship, it was the first ship designed essentially to shoot down planes. And in a sense, it was also symbolic ofthe Navy’s moving from the Battleship era to the Carrier era. In my service in the Pacific—on three ships—two were ATLANTA class. In between I went to a fast, small carrier built on an aborted heavy cruiser hull. She could go thirty-five knots and had thirty-three fighters on it who formed a Combat Air Patrol to protect carrier task forces. The ATLANTA was the point ship of the circular screen. Those ships here in the middle ofthis diagram are a couple of big carriers plus maybe a small one, maybe a battleship plus some heavy cruisers, the capital ships surrounded by a ring of destroyers. Is this what you want? Is this enough detail, or... Mr. Morris: No, this is fine. 4 6/29/2009 Mr. Graff: I met Captain Jenkins, the skipper of the ship, after the ship had slid down the ways at the Kearny shipyard in New Jersey, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, and an Atlanta resident, christened the ship. She came back later for the commissioning. I’ll get to that in just a second. Captain Jenkins said, “Graff, I read your stuff and what people had told me about you,” and he said, “I think you would make a good communications officer. How does that strike you?” I said, “I guess.. .1 take that as a compliment if you put it that way.” He said, “I think I’d like to make you the ship’s Signal Officer, and your job will be to run a gang of signalmen. About twenty of you will be stationed on both wings of an open bridge right behind the armored pilothouse which is where the ship is conned from. Your jobs will be to communicate visually by flag hoist and flashing light.” Captain Jenkins pointed to a few department heads, older officers sitting at desks. “Why don’t you just go around there, just go and introduce yourself. Each one of them will want to talk to you and find out who you are, but you have a right to ask them who they are. And after that he said it would be lunchtime. You and I will have lunch and we’ll talk about things in general .“ At lunch he said, “We’ve got a certain responsibility laid on us by being the first of a new Class of ships, and by being the first of a new design for the Navy. The Navy has got a lot riding on the success of this kind of warship. We’re not as dumb as people think, and this ship represents seven years of design and preparation. The public is looking to us to make it work. trhe secret k to making it work is to have a splendid crew.
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