WWII SHIPMATES NEVER GROW TIRED OF 'SAME OLD STORIES'

World War II Navy shipmates reminisce in South Burlington during their reunion Thursday. Left to right: William Cootware, 81, of Fletcher; Floyd Hungtington, 81, of East Hartford, Conn.; Manuel J. Ferreira, 86, of Newport, R.I.; and Matthew C. Herring, 83, of Savannah, Ga. Not pictured: Donald Brown, 84, of Dublin. N.H., and Thomas MacElwee, 83, of Colorado Springs, Colo. TIM JOHNSON, Free Press

Old salts regale each other

By Tim Johnson
Free Press Staff Writer

October 13, 2006
More than six decades after they prowled for enemy submarines in the North Atlantic and watched aghast as Allied troops were mowed down on Omaha Beach, crew members of USS S.C. 1354 gathered in Vermont this week knowing this might be their last reunion.

They're in their 80s now. Six showed up.

Some of Sub Chaser 1354's crew have died; some are ailing and unable to attend the event, held every other year nearby where one of them lives. San Diego; Savannah, Ga.; Newport, R.I.; and Billings, Mont., have been gathering points.

This year, William Cootware of Fletcher played host, and they stayed at the Best Western Windjammer Inn in South Burlington. Wednesday they went to Shelburne Museum. Thursday morning, they were planning to go on a ferry ride, but it rained and instead they sat around the hotel telling, as one of them put it, "the same old stories we always tell."

S.C. 1354 shipped out of Philadelphia in the fall of 1943 with 24 crewmen and three officers. "Most of us had never been to sea before," said Floyd Huntington, 81, of East Hartford, Conn. "Most of us got seasick."

"You can say that again," said Manuel J. Ferreira, 86, of Newport, R.I.

"Some of us got over it, like this guy," said Huntington, patting Cootware on the shoulder, "and some never did, like me."

S.C. 1354 had a wooden hull just 100 feet long, and was, Huntington said proudly, "the smallest fighting ship in the Navy."

What about PT boats?

"I had an argument with someone about that," Huntington said of an acquaintance who had served on a PT boat. "'You weren't a ship,' I told him, 'you were a squadron, a boat.'"

S.C. 1354 had sonar equipment to detect submarines. The crew dropped depth charges and something they called a "mousetrap," which exploded on contact.

Asked if they ever got a sub, they looked at each other.

"We thought we did a couple of times," Huntington said. "All we got was some fish."

After months of patrolling the Atlantic, they were dispatched to England in the spring of 1944 in advance of the D-Day invasion. On the fateful morning, June 6, S.C. 1354 arrived at Omaha Beach before daylight and moored a couple of hundred yards out, serving as a locator for the invading forces to come. The big ships behind them blasted the shoreline in an effort to soften up the German resistance, but they fired too far inland and many of the German gun emplacements were left intact, firing relentlessly when the Allied troops arrived.

"I was on the bridge," Huntington recalled, "and I said, 'They're not going to make it.' They were being slaughtered. Tanks were sinking in the water."

Then on the first night, a couple of German planes flew overhead and all the Allied ships opened fire -- including the S.C. 1354, which had a 40 mm antiaircraft gun. They missed the planes, but they hit one of their own fleet's barrage balloons. Ferreira will never forget that explosion.

"It was like the Fourth of July," Cootware said.

After the war, they dispersed around the country and were mostly out of touch for about 40 years. Then in the mid-'80s, a crew member who lived in California was vacationing in Savannah, Ga., and he remembered that one of his old Navy buddies was from there. He called the county office that kept the birth and death statistics, and he asked if Matthew C. Herring were still alive.

"I'm his wife," said the voice on the phone.

Herring, 83, chuckled Thursday as he told this story. Back in Savannah, he got together with his old mate, and gradually, they all began to find each other -- in some cases, via newspaper ads.

They seem to agree that living together on a ship for 15 months forged a remarkable bond among them. Their first reunion was in Colorado Springs in 1986. The best turnout was about 15. This could be the last time they do this, someone said.

What about it, they were asked. Could they have another reunion?

"Could happen," Ferreira said.

"Could happen," Huntington said.

"Could happen," Cootware said.

"No volunteers yet," Herring said.

Contact Tim Johnson at 660-1808 or tjohnson@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com