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“There is a bell on the fo’c’s’le that marks the passing of the hours. General drills. Brightwork. Chow. You reflect that, if you were in Scapa Flow or Singapore, Vladivostok or New York, Capetown or Punta Arenas, the general drills would go on, and there would be the same brightwork to be shined, and the bell forward would toll off the same hours in the fashion of the sea.”*
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Can! ?Uoted
in Red Pants and Other Stories, by 1927).
TThomSa§e 3b0Ve Was written by Captain John W.
in Au7°n; Jr” who j°ined the U. S. Marine Corps *^44. Durinpth and ^ied as a Leatherneck in March PubIiC’s ^ at time, he wrote and drew his way into Marines C^e’ *or8'nS a powerful, indelible picture of 'heir wav of 'r U dood °f stories and illustrations about
• While reaH V1”8 and their way of fighting-
hfe 0n . a lng Mail Day,” Thomason’s vignette about *920s, i ref] tae cruiser USS Rochester (CA-2) in the Mien, as -p, ected back to the times I was on board ship tr°Hed by ,0mason so deftly describes, my life was con- N&cy 0f t,e.t0" °f a bell. I became intrigued by the f°rce betwe °Se, men who served with the Fleet Marine ■ e ntembe enftbe wor*d wars, and resolved to find a bona 't: niy searoh° tbat crusty clan who could tell me all about ^°Un8 ppnti turned up one Wiley H. Smith, a 76-year- An Oklah6111311 ^an f*eciro’ California.
Personal io„0ma'b0rn farm boy, Wiley embarked upon his °f 1927 Th'tnC^ *n tbe Marine Corps in the summer Went through PUcMy-complexioned, handsome young man °n board th Tl,lbas'c training in San Diego, and reported ^hip stood oCt Chaumont (AP-5). In September, his ^Cean rv, ,U °f ^an Pedro for a voyage across the Pacific A new ] f "ation: China-
af $20.80* CSt^e was taking shape with a monthly salary
Lina_ wh-** .seManket, reasonable food, travel to
'ays mad**1 3 ^°r 3 * 9-year-old farmboy! Wiley
e an effort to go places where he could learn
ap,ain JohnwteTh is from “Mail Day- ................................ - - -
■ ‘nomason. Jr. (New York: Scribners
something, figuring he’d never get a chance to see China again; he worked at enjoying himself. But all good things come to an end. In the spring of 1929, marines filled billets on board ships with the Asiatic Fleet. Soon, Wiley was one of 15 seagoing marines from the 19th Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines in Shanghai assigned to the cruiser USS Pittsburgh (CA-4).
Shipboard detachments during this period varied in size; the Pittsburgh had an 86-man unit when Wiley joined, but increased to 126 soon after. Within the fleet, the Marine detachments were organized as companies of battalions, one battalion to a division of four ships. The battalions were, in turn, organized into regiments. Normally, about 2,000 marines were at sea at any one time.
Wiley’s berthing space was about 60-80 feet long, forward on the port side of the ship. This space was truly “home,” for the marines not only slept on hammocks, which were rolled up during the day, but also ate, relaxed, and worked on their gear in this space.
From the moment when reveille was sounded, bringing all on board the ship to the start of the day, Wiley related the events as he recalled them: it was “heave out and trice up." The rolling and storing of hammocks and mattresses in the bins along the edge of the compartment got everybody “up and at-em.” Because the Pittsburgh had a limited fresh water supply, its use was severely restricted. Each marine was allocated one bucket of water per day. From this bucket he shaved, showered, brushed his teeth, and became an expert on conservation; as Wiley said, “it became a trick to use it wisely.” Water was always available at the scuttlebutt, but for drinking only. Personal toi-
nKs / November 1983
Anchored off Shanghai in 1929, the Pittsburgh Has a majestic jewel in the setting of an otherwise ramshackle world. Inside her clean, white hull lived 126 marines, including one Private Wiley H. Smith of Oklahoma. While his home faced “dust bowl” ruin in the wake of the Great Stock Market Crash, Smith and his shipmates lived a simpler life at sea. When they weren’t busy tending their uniforms, marines fought boredom by making decorative knot- work for their lockers; more imaginative pastimes included comic-relief versions of “Repel boarders!” But undoubtedly, the most pleasurable pastime was reading mail from home. The marines had a sixth sense that told them when the mail boat was coming, and they lay in wait for it all over the ship—in hammocks, bn deck, or crouched inside ventilators.
let done, the straightening of one’s locker became the next skill to be tested. Like the limited water, limited space demanded ingenuity; to be sure, neatness was part of the game.
Chow, or actually, the call “to summon hands to partake of the morning meal” had Wiley and his mates setting up tables in their compartment. Down from the overhead came the tables, and mess personnel would deliver the morning meal. Chow and some “scuttlebutt talk” just about ended the personal part of the new day.
The next evolution involved waiting on the ship. Wiley and his fellow marines did their share, moving out to various parts of the ship to begin the training and work that made the ship an efficient machine in both mechanical and human terms:
“The cruiser hums about the routine of her day, a self- contained and aloof little world, suspended in a tremendous boredom.”
Some events, like coaling ship, were nasty functions that had to be performed. All hands were called out, and they didn’t stop work until the ship was fully loaded, sometimes going day and night to the bunkers. Coal dust covered everything; it showed no favorites. It was said that a good crew could handle more than 100 tons of coal per hour. Coaling was regarded as a drill, and great efforts were made to achieve record loading speeds.
As on most ships, marines’ duties ranged from manning guns of the secondary battery to being deck sentinels and brig guards. Some excitement was added to a marine’s duties when he was called to be part of an honor guard, or to act as an orderly for a senior officer. Wiley was a member of one of the 14 six-inch/50-caliber, rapid-fire gun crews with duties as a powderman. As junior man on the crew, he also maintained the piece. He took to that job as with most of his other duties—with a fervor. Wiley’s service record documents that he was a hard-working young man.
He was part of a floating man’s world, where the only way that a woman came on board ship was in the form of a letter or a picture. The seagoing marines always looked forward to the next mail, with the hope that it would bring a gentle influence to the ship of war in which they served:
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Wiley Smith and his fellow marines shared a nasty bit of the black gang’s “hell” whenever the time for coaling ship arrived. It was a most welcome break in shipboard routine, and one of the few times when it was nearly impossible to tell the Pittsburgh’s marines from her sailors: after toiling around the clock to fill the cruiser’s cavernous bunkers, everyone was covered from head to foot with coal dust. Sometime later, shipboard routine was broken once again by a funeral at sea—not nearly as exhausting as coaling ship, but unwelcome all the same. As Private Smith heard the service for his dead shipmate and listened to the sharp salute of carbines, he may have thought to himself that the world held many fates worse than being “Shanghaied” as a seagoing marine.
“A ship is a man’s world, quite. No place for women in it, whether in the wardroom country among the spurious and exact comforts of bachelors; or along the clanging living spaces forward, with the black little billet-hooks where the hammocks hang, and the unabashed guard, coming off, changes into something loose. Nor in the cabins, all painted and varnished and set with brightwork on which the mess-boy spends his soul, and where the faces of sweethearts and wives and children look inharmonious and a little strange.
“Mail day, though, brings a gentle influence to the hardest ship, no matter where the striped sacks catch up with her. There are, somewhere around the world, for most of us, women. And on this day, in a remoteness with a name out of the geography, they come aboard with the letters, mothers and sweethearts and wives, and are with us for a little. ...”
While at sea, the death of the detachment’s sergeant major injected a change in the daily routine that Wiley described. The burial, though out of context with normal activities, was really like other happenings on board ship. There was (and is) a routine procedure to cover all activities. “Prepare for burial detail” suddenly became the order of the day. The ship’s chaplain, Captain Thomas B. Thompson, Chaplain Corps, U. S. Navy, conducted the service, and the marines of the Pittsburgh's detachment said goodbye to their shipmate as “he departed by the starboard gangway.” That day’s activities provided an unusual topic of conversation for the marines to discuss in their spaces that night. ,
Wiley Smith, like John Thomason, served as a marine in a time gone by, an era that lives in the minds of many as the time of the “real” Marine Corps and Navy. But time was moving quickly and, ashore, the stage was being set for a war that would change not only the Navy, but the world in general. The Navy, as Wiley Smith and John Thomason knew it, faded into the scrapbooks, to be rediscovered by those of us who care to look back.
Lieutenant Colonel Nastri is director of the West Coast Instructional Management School at the U. S. Marine Corps Base in Camp Pendleton, California. He is currently writing a book about U. S. military involvement in Korea from 1871 to the present.
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