On October 16, 1940, sometime on his wedding day, my dad, Paul Sherfy, registered with the McPherson County, Kansas, draft board. He identified his employer as the local newspaper and his soon-to-be wife, as his next-of-kin. Pictures show us that Esther Pyle, my mother, 32-years-old to his 28, and a veteran public-school teacher, wore a stylish wool dress for the ceremony at her sister’s house in Salina. My dad’s father, a Church of the Brethren minister, officiated. What an interesting juxtaposition: draft board and wedding!
October 16, 1940 was, in fact, the first day that men between the ages of 21 and 35 could register as they were required to do by a law passed just the month before. It was the country’s first peacetime conscription, created as war in Europe raged. Likely, though I have no way of knowing, my dad told the Draft Board, that he was a conscientious objector—a CO. Pacificism being a primary tenant of the Brethren. He could have chosen to join the newly-created Civilian Public Service (CPS). An alternative for nationally significant public service available to pacifists for the first time. In World War I, COs who wouldn’t fight could be jailed. My dad chose, instead, to sign on as a miliary noncombatant.
October 1942, two years later and six months after my sister Sonja was born, Daddy enlisted in the Navy Reserve. And was sent to the Olathe Naval Air Station—170 miles away, but still in Kansas.
My dad’s time in the Navy was rarely mentioned in our house. Growing up, I studied his Navy uniform abandoned on a basement clothes rack alongside a collection of dress-up dresses. His round white cap appeared on our toy shelves. Daddy salted his food more than the rest of us—a Navy habit, he said, to make bad food palatable. And once he told us about weathering a typhoon when every man’s food tray slid off the metal tables onto the floor. I understood that he’d been a “weatherman” on board ship—and that that accounted for his keen interest in Kansas clouds and storms. But he seemed reluctant to talk about the Navy. And at some point when I was old enough to understand pacifism, I asked Mother why Daddy had joined the Navy. She allowed as how he feared that he’d never get a job in McPherson again if he wasn’t in the military.
As my silence about him throughout these essays may have told you, I’ve felt far closer to Mother, far more attentive to her memory and way of living than I’ve felt to my dad’s. In the last years of Mother’s life as she lost capacity and memory, my dad struggled to be helpful or kind to her—as I saw the situation. There were a variety of moments that contributed to my disaffection toward him, the last of which was his blazing, savagely-directed anger after I moved him from assisted living to nursing home care. So for a quarter-century now, I’ve kept my distance from his memory—from much inquisitiveness into his life. I could acknowledge that his strict growing-up wasn’t easy; that the Depression economy kept him from teaching biology as he had planned; that responsibility for his parents rested most with him; that he spent his life working a job he disliked in order to support his family; that men of his generation hadn’t been expected or taught to do household chores. But knowing all of that didn’t soften my heart much.
Stumbling into more information about my dad’s military service—realizing that it might have been a very powerful part of his life—knowing that I’d never asked him much about that, hit home. I have spent the better part of the last several weeks—not knowing him better. But acquiring a bit more knowledge about the circumstances of his military service. And, in doing so, bringing him back into my life.
Muster rolls show that Daddy spent from late 1942 to late 1944 at Olathe. Within range of my mom and sister and his parents by train connections and hitchhiking. Along with what would have been the Navy’s version of boot camp, Daddy appears to have gotten training as an “Aerographer’s Mate.” Which translates into being a weather observer/forecaster. The odds are then good that he served in that capacity for Olathe’s role as a Naval Air Station.
From January through early May, 1944, my mother kept a journal with brief entries that described how she felt; my sister’s behavior; social, church, and family activities. It documents Daddy’s presence at home over New Years. And then in the space of those four months, notes his return home on five different occasions. Sometimes he surprised Mother and other times he sent telegrams. They clearly wrote each other frequently.
Crew muster rolls put my dad in Seattle at the end of November 1944. The ship on which he was to serve, the USS Bergen APA 150 had been “laid down” in October at Vancouver, Washington, and delivered to the Navy on December 22, 1944. A Haskell-class attack transport, the Bergen had just been built. After a shakedown phase and loading with landing craft, cargo, and passengers, the Bergen stood out (Navy jargon for departed) on March 2 and arrived in Pearl Harbor on the 8th.
Over the next eight months of 1945, the Bergen and my dad crisscrossed the Pacific from Hawaii to Eniwetok to Saipan. And back to San Francisco and Seattle before heading out again to Honolulu, Eniwetok, the Ulithi Atoll, the Ryukyu Islands, and Okinawa. They were in Okinawa when the United States dropped its hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and when Emperor Hirohito surrendered.
One short history of the Bergen reads, “After the end of hostilities on 15 August, Bergen rode peacefully at anchor.” That “peace” lasted just two weeks when the ship left for Korea. The Bergen then unloaded troops and supplies at Jinsen, Korea, returned to Okinawa, picked up a group of men from the 7thMarines, and took them to northern China.
And just as my dad had reported in one of his rare remembrances, the USS Bergen appeared to ride out at least the edge of Typhoon Louise which ultimately damaged many ships in Okinawa. The Bergen wasn’t directly hit or damaged, but appears to have been tossed about enough that meals were interrupted,
My dad’s “rating” as shown in the Muster Rolls was: AERM3c(t)V-6. ChatGPT interprets that to be a petty officer third class, weather specialist, likely a reservist, responsible for collecting meteorological data for convoy safety and amphibious assault operations. ChatGPT also suggests that—several times a day–such a person would have monitored barometric pressure, recorded air and sea temperature, observed clouds, wind speed and direction, and sea swells. And then would have prepared reports for the captain – needed information on general sea conditions and for launching landing craft. The odds are also good that my dad worked near the bridge or radio shack, stood rotating watch duties, shared berthing quarters with other petty officers, and periodically had to stand more general quarters stations.
My dad’s final voyage on the Bergen began on October 31 and took him and returning soldiers from the Philippines to San Francisco. At some point, this trip was recorded as part of Operation Magic Carpet. My dad was discharged on November 19, 1945. And, along with all the other returning veterans, had to make his way back to Kansas by train.
Sixteen years later and in similar Pacific territory, my friend Peter served on a nearly identical Haskell-class attack ship, the USS Okanogan. It was commissioned the same year as the Bergen but kept in service rather than sold for scrap as the Bergen was. Peter reports that living conditions were—at the best of times—difficult. Intense tropical humidity—worse below deck. What we’d call “shelf-stable food” which meant dried and reconstituted–nothing fresh. Berths stacked three and four high so that whatever sickness befell the guy on the top bunk, it “affected” everyone below. Little entertainment or diversion. Followed, at least in Peter’s service, by rambunctious shore leave—“liberty” in Navy jargon.
In the course of its short year of service, the Bergen carried men on their way into battle, men wounded in battle, soldiers facing unknown Far Eastern occupation duties after the war, and men returning home to—for most—uncertain futures.
I believe that my dad briefly returned to his newspaper proofing job, before signing on with the Alliance Insurance Companies–that lifelong, functional but distasteful job. I was born in October 1946, just a year after my father’s November 1945 discharge. His life would have picked up rapidly with parenting and partnering and his father’s death and home maintenance and church work and watching out for his mother and Kiwanis and an active social life.
None of what I could glean from records or Peter’s memories or AI tells me what I’d now most like to know, what now claims my curiosity and my heart: what did Daddy think, what did he feel, what events caused his gut to drop in fear, did he allow himself to celebrate in those two weeks when the ship rode peacefully at anchor. Did he have buddies even though I never heard him mention any? What memories transmuted into nightmares? Did he even have much time for reflection? Did he describe his experiences to anyone?
What—in the 56 years of his life after he arrived back in McPherson—did he make of his decision to join the Navy. His brother, Ralph, opted for the Civilian Public Service. Contemporaries in McPherson appear to have had deferments—farming and employment. Was he accepted by McPherson businessmen? Or rejected by anyone in the church?
Answers to which, I’ll never get. But here’s what has changed for me: rather than looking only at the difficult final years of his life, I’ve spent these words and the research behind them thinking of his vulnerabilities during the war. Of the late arriving marriage, and of leaving a toddler and a young wife at home. Of an experience outside the only two states he’d ever known—Kansas and Iowa. Of sailors—maybe a bit more like my friend Peter—who approached shore leave with gusto and rules with a grain of salt. Of sailors who smoked and, when possible, drank, as my dad’s religion forbade. Of putting his hand, if not to a gun, to making it possible for others to do so. Of a young man whose life had already been disappointing, who was, perhaps, in over his head emotionally.
And what I particularly will never know is the cumulative effect of these years on a man who—among all other qualities—intended to live a disciplined, thoughtful, moral, kind life. ©
With special thanks to my friend Peter who shared his own Navy experience and who started me traipsing through these records and memories. And with cautionary reminders about the dangers of AI.
