Lloyd McGarvey: Living on a target

By Ron Bracken

It was like playing in the NFL without pads. Like taking a knife to a gunfight.

That was life aboard a Jeep aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. They were lightly armored, lightly armed and prime targets for the Japanese submarines that prowled the Pacific.

Lloyd McGarvey, of State College, spent more than two years aboard the USS Barnes, CVE 20.room.

"When we first went to sea, my battle station was several decks below the water line. We could hear the destroyers dropping their depth charges and we could feel the explosions. But if we had been torpedoed, it would have come right into us. I was glad when I got an assignment on the bridge.

"We did have one (Japanese) plane dive at us but it didn't shoot at us. We had lots of machine guns but we couldn't use them as anti-aircraft guns because we couldn't raise them high enough."

McGarvey enlisted in the Navy in Pittsburgh in 1943. Congressman James Van Zandt had given him a letter that would have secured him a commission in the Seabees, but once he got to Pittsburgh and saw the line of men who were seeking the same thing and was given a sheaf of papers to fill out and mail in, he elected to take a more direct route.

"I figured I couldn't wait for that, the draft board would get me, so I went to the post office in Pittsburgh and enlisted," he said.

He enlisted as an electrician's mate second class.

"The guy told me he could make me a chief (petty officer) but I was too young (24). But once I was in the Navy, I ran into a lot of chiefs who were younger than me.''

So instead of running a bulldozer or clearing a landing strip, McGarvey wound up aboard the Barnes, one of a fleet of small carriers whose job it was to ferry planes to the larger fleet carriers.

"A CVE is about 480, 490 feet long,'' he explained. "A carrier like the Lexington was about 1,100 feet. We had about 700 men aboard, about 800 when a squadron was aboard. We could only fly 22 planes in combat operations. That's all we had room for." During his time aboard the Barnes, McGarvey was involved in three major operations -- the invasions of Tarawa and Peleliu and the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

"We supported the troops in the invasion of Tarawa," he said. "We stayed offshore and our planes would go in and bomb and strafe the island. We were just beyond the reef. After a couple of days you could smell the death from the island.

"We could pick up the conversations of the pilots on the ship's radios, so we got a running account of the battle. We became a little concerned because the first day didn't go very well. We knew we were losing a lot of men."

Following the battle, the Barnes was used to transport a lot of the wounded Marines back to Pearl Harbor.

"It was amazing to me how many of them had been shot through the eye, or through both eyes," McGarvey said. "I don't know if they had been singled out by the Japanese or not; they didn't kill them, they blinded them."

At Leyte, the Barnes resupplied fleet carriers with planes.

"We could watch the fleet carriers dumping (damaged) planes over the side. Then we'd resupply them," McGarvey said. "Most of the planes came from Pearl Harbor."

McGarvey said the Barnes' closest call came while it was offshore at Tarawa.

"I think the Japanese sent every sub they had to that area," he said. "One day I was at my battle station on the bridge when I happened to look over the side just in time to see a torpedo just miss us."

Torpedoes weren't the only threat. Even though the Barnes wasn't involved in direct combat, living on a carrier, with all of the planes, bombs and aviation fuel, made it a dangerous place.

"We had a pilot who tried to land on our ship and he made his approach 13 times," McGarvey remembered. "Finally, the signal officer signaled for him to cut his engines. But the pilot thought he wasn't going to make it so he tried to regain speed and went skimming along the flight deck and his propeller kept nicking the deck. It hit one of the guys in a gun sponson and took the top of his head off.

"We also had a plane go off the end of the ship. The pilot couldn't get enough air speed and he went into the water. He was trying to get his canopy open but he couldn't get his restraints unfastened. His plane went down and a little while later we heard (his) depth charges go off." But life aboard ship also had its lighter moments.

"My crew was in charge of the gyro compass and one day it went dead," McGarvey said. "We couldn't figure out what was causing the problem. There was this guy in my crew who specialized in the gyro compass and he came to me and said while he had been sleeping he had a dream that there was a short in the current box in the pilot house and that it was grounding the power to the gyro compass. Sure enough, we went up there, opened that box and found that the salt water had splashed in there and grounded the power.

"When I told the navigator about it he told me to tell Fisher to go back to bed and dream some more dreams."

Once he was discharged, McGarvey went to work for Bendix Aviation, and worked for several other companies before retiring to State College. The Barnes was mothballed and, ironically, was later sold to the Japanese for scrap metal.

Looking back over a distance of 60 years, McGarvey has been able to put his Navy experiences in clear perspective.

"Overall, the war effort was essential," he said. "As for me, I wanted to do what I could for our country, for our lives. I have no regrets about participating."

Ron Bracken can be reached at 2331-4641.