THE WORLD WAR II ADVENTURES OF DON W. FARRANT

Shortly after arriving at Yale in June, 1942, my roommate, Ray Eusden,
and I both signed up for the Naval ROTC. I was following a family
tradition of naval service, since my Dad had been an officer in World War
I---and my great-grandfather was in the Royal Navy. He had fought at the
Siege of Sevastopol, and family stories tell of his many scars from cutlass
wounds in hand-to-hand fighting.

We were housed in Dirty Durfee on the Old Campus. In May, 1943, the ROTC classes of '45 and '45W were ordered to report to Staten Island for
seagoing training cruises. We were ranked as apprentice seamen. I drew
the USS "St. Augustine" (PG-54); and Ray ended up on the USS Tourmaline
(PY-20). Both these ships would be escort vessels in a large convoy, going
south. By the way, both were converted yachts.

Our ex-yacht had been the "Viking," first owned by George S. Baker, the
millionaire New York banker. Later it was sold to the Woolworth family, and
Barbara Hutton, Woolworth heiress, used it to take her well-heeled friends
on party cruises. The ship was purchased by the Navy in 1940 and the story
goes that on her shakedown cruise the executive officer, was about
to retire one night when he noticed a strange switch, or button, on the side of his bunk. He pressed it, and the bulkhead (wall) immediately slid open and his
bunk was right next to the bunk of the captain, in the next stateroom!

There were no submarine scares on this trip, which took us to Key West, at
which place the convoy left us. It picked up another group of escorts,
then went on to overseas ports. Our return voyage to New York was also
uneventful. It seems that by '43 most of the German subs were gone from
the East Coast. There were two reasons for this: U.S cargo ships were
always in strong, well-guarded convoys, and we had greater technical
expertise (radar and sonar).

When we were back in college, a few years later, those of us who had sailed
on the St. Augustine were saddened to hear that she had been rammed
amidships by a tanker, off the Jersey coast, in 1944. She sank in five
minutes with the loss of 115 men.

I was commissioned in February, 1944 and ordered to active duty on the USS Barnes (CVE-20), an escort carrier. I entrained for the West Coast and
reported aboard the Barnes in San Francisco. I spent two years, three
months on that ship in the Pacific, serving as both a deck officer and
engineering officer. I stood a LOT of tiresome four-hour watches, believe
me! Mostly, our ship acted as a naval ferryboat, carrying planes and
pilots back and forth to the war zones. The closest I got to real action
was when I got between the shore patrol and a bunch of drunken sailors in
Honolulu.

On one eventful trip we went through the Panama Canal, taking a load of
planes to Norfolk. With hostilities ended, we went through again, when the
ship was to be decommissioned in Boston.

In 1946, you had to have enough points to get discharged, and being young
and single, I didn't have the necessary points until May, 1946. All in all,
it had been a "great war"---and I went back to Yale in September of that year.


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