tool name
closeJack MacMillan wound up on a destroyer escort because of one disparaging Marine.
In 1944, MacMillan desperately wanted to get out of his hometown of Conneautville and into the war.
"Our little town of 1,400 in northwestern Pennsylvania was sending just about every able-bodied person," he said. "I had been to probably too many movies, but I had this vision of being a Marine and charging ashore and, of course, destroying the enemy."
He hitchhiked to a Cleveland recruiting station. A strapping, Southern officer checked the scale, looked down at the 112-pound teenager and drawled out the bad news.
"He said, 'We'll kill you in boot camp. You won't even get out of boot camp. Why don't you just go home and join the Navy? They'll take anyone,'" recalled MacMillan, now 80 and living in State College.
"It was really crushing," he said. "I think I was crying when I left that place."
But the recruiter was right -- the Navy had no problem with MacMillan's 5-foot-2 frame.
In fact, his size made him ideal for submarines. MacMillan turned them down, afraid the war would end before he finished training.
Someone, though, noticed the seaman first class had taken a navigation course in high school. That was enough to tab him for quartermaster school.
Waiting to go to Gulfport, Miss., MacMillan still didn't know what a Navy quartermaster did. Hand out clothes, a buddy guessed. MacMillan was horrified until an experienced sailor clued him in:
He was going to steer ships.
On a June afternoon, MacMillan shipped out from California as a fleet replacement. The war had already ended in Europe, but the battle for Okinawa still raged.
MacMillan, at sea for weeks, killed time. Swing records provided one diversion, gambling another. Some played the game of ducking crew members who roped passengers into chipping paint and other menial tasks.
"Either you did that to get out of the boredom of the trip, or you hid from them," he said.
When he steamed into Okinawa on July 27, the island had been mostly subdued. But kamikaze pilots kept up their suicide dives on ships in Buckner Bay.
MacMillan observed one strike from his tent while waiting on land for his assignment.
"There would be one or two kamikazes that would circle the harbor looking for ships," he said. "The whole harbor erupted trying to shoot them down."
On Aug. 10, four days after the first atomic bomb vaporized Hiroshima and a day after the second destroyed Nagasaki, MacMillan finally received a ship.
The USS Walter C. Wann was a 306-foot-long destroyer escort named for a Marine slain on Guadalcanal. Soon after MacMillan joined the crew, another fireworks display transfixed him.
"We had this attack, and I'm just standing there on the fantail looking up and watching the action," MacMillan said. "And this guy grabbed me -- boatswain's mate, real tough guy -- and he said, 'What the hell are you looking at, kid? Where are you supposed to be?' "
Away to the bridge he hustled.
His quartermaster training had saved him from the deck crew. It didn't get him a warm welcome from shipmates angry that 13 replacements had come aboard.
"They just kind of ignored us and didn't socialize with us," he said. "They thought we might be the bad-luck symbol that they didn't want. They had been through some pretty rough combat."
Smaller than a destroyer, the Wann had faced battleships and cruisers in the epic Battle for Leyte Gulf off the Philippines in October 1944.
During the Okinawa campaign, she sent kamikazes flaming into the sea while in picket lines shielding larger warships.
In contrast, MacMillan was as green as the Okinawan hills.
His closest brush had come from an encounter with a Marine on a sightseeing expedition. Night had fallen, and MacMillan and a friend trudged back -- until a sentry demanded a password.
To their challenger's annoyance, they had no idea what it was.
"He said, 'You dumb swabbies. It changes every night. Tonight, it's "deep woods." You say "deep," I say "woods." And if you don't say "woods," I shoot you,'" MacMillan said.
As Japan fought on despite two atomic blasts, it looked like MacMillan's youthful wish for action would be granted. The Wann was to escort transports and warships in a massive armada against the Japanese mainland.
As a prelude to what might await him, during MacMillan's first days on the Wann, a kamikaze had crashed into the battleship USS Pennsylvania. Out on a picket-line patrol, MacMillan watched another fly through blazing fire and hit a transport at anchorage.
But on Aug. 15, the Rising Sun set for good.
MacMillan would battle typhoons, not dive bombers. In Japan, he would trade cigarettes and candy instead of gunfire.
He would learn to read the stars from a former tugboat captain and earn his quartermaster rate.
Back in Pennsylvania, he would marry his wife, Jane, and raise three daughters. He would graduate from Penn State and become a newspaper reporter, state government press liaison and author.
Had one man not made the lonely decision to unleash horror to avoid a possible cataclysm, MacMillan might have finally charged the enemy.
"I would have been part of the invasion," he said. "I've always said that Harry Truman saved my life."
Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.
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