War Memories of John W. Finney

My military career was far from heroic; it was a series of endless programs of training for a war that I never quiet caught up with. Like so many of my classmates, I enlisted in the Navy V-12 program, because the Navy seemed a gentlemanly service and the Navy promised we could continue our education at Yale. And so I did in bell bottom trousers from June of 1943 until I was sent off in July, 1944 to become an officer at the midshipmen's School at Notre Dame. For a provincial Protestant from New England, it was the first of many mind-broadening experiences in a three-year naval career. Commissioned as an ensign in October, 1944, it was on to Communications School at Harvard, where I learned to touch-type, an ability that was to open the door to a career in journalism five years later. At last a touch of the sea when I reported to the PT Boat Training School at Melville, Rhode Island, in the winter of 1945. It was cold and rough out training in Block Island Sound, but I fell in love with the wooden boats that bounced around so much they had trouble firing a torpedo in anger but at the helm gave one a feeling of great power as they split the water at 40 knots. But it was a long way and many months from the docks on Narraganset Bay to the PT Boat Base in the Philippines. I arrived at Samar in July, 1945 to be assigned to PT 150, an old boat up in drydock, being scraped down, presumably in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Just a few weeks later, as we sat in ponchos for an outdoor movie, the word swept through the audience that a powerful bomb had been dropped on Japan that would end the war. I never had any moral compunctions about the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, although much later in life I did have some qualms about whether it was necessary to drop the "Fat Boy" on Nagasaki.

Caught in the military without a war to fight is like marching in place, For months the routine during the day was to take stripped-down boats up harbor to be burned, during the evening to get drunk at a huge mahogany bar the commodore insisted on building even though the war was over. Two things preserved my sanity. One was the cheerful company of classmate Ellie Vose. The other was that as squadron communications officer, I had first choice on books, and I sequestered myself with a copy of Will Durant's History of Philosophy.

With boats all burned, it was off to Manila to serve as a communications officer in the Philippine Sea Frontier Command, decoding top secret messages for an admiral, who refused to promote me because there were then, as now, too many garbles in my messages. Finally the Magic Carpet unfurled for a homesick ensign. By a slow transport, I traveled from Subic Bay to Norfolk, by way of the Canal, arriving home in July, 1946, just in time to be discharged and return to the fall semester at Yale. I returned more worldly but still a virgin. I corrected that after a brief stint at law school by shipping out as a cabin boy on a tramp steamer that in calm seas made nine knots.