Better to Take Navy Stories With a Grain of Salt

Several readers have questioned the veracity of Cal Wharton’s reminisences of his tour as skipper of a PT boat in World War II, as recently reported here.

Cal, a retired Times sportswriter, said that during a recent reunion with his crew one man recalled that Wharton’s first command was: “All right, you guys, take the ropes off the posts and let’s get going.”

“No way. Couldn’t happen,” writes Don Driscoll, a wartime PT commander himself. “I can assure you uttering such a non-Navy order would have been impossible, no matter how green the skipper.” (Navy lingo would be “cast off the lines.”)

“In the first place,” Driscoll says, “an officer had to have small boat experience to get in the PT service. Long before you stood in front of a full-length mirror and were tailored for your first set of Navy Blues, you had ceased describing lines as ‘ropes.’ Certainly after two months of intense indoctrination you had learned that there are three ways to do everything: the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way, and God help you if you didn’t pick the Navy way. . . . By the time you took advanced training at the Motor Torpedo Boat School . . . you had become saltier than any Academy graduate.”

I was skeptical of Wharton’s story myself. But I considered it a harmless distortion caused by the passage of too many years or the absorption of too much booze. Old wartime buddies tend to exaggerate.

From my own experience in the Marines, I know that when a man emerged from boot camp he would no more call a line a rope than he would call a rifle a gun. A boot was made to feel that his rifle was a part of himself, and if he mistreated it in any way, including verbally, he was made to sleep with it and hand it to his drill instructor the next morning warm .

Driscoll also doubts Wharton’s story that when an admiral was aboard one day his cook asked the admiral if he would like some coffee, and when the admiral replied “Yes, thank you,” the cook said ‘Just a minute, sir. I’ll go downstairs to the kitchen and get you some.’ ”

“In the first place,” says Driscoll, “the cook wouldn’t ask the admiral if he wanted some coffee. He would ask him if he wanted a cup of Joe. After the admiral replied ‘Yes, thank you,’ he wouldn’t have said anything . He would have gone to carry out the mission. He wouldn’t have used the words downstairs and kitchen since those words were essentially unknown to Navy men whose recollections of a civilian life (with its quaint vocabulary) had been effectively eradicated in boot camp.”

Again, I tend to agree with Driscoll that Wharton’s reunion was perhaps a bit soggy. On the other hand, perhaps Wharton and his cook hated the Navy, and were deliberately defying protocol by using civilian language.

Louis Hockman of Agoura Hills recalls a display of non-nautical language by a crew of hot rod automobile mechanics who had acquired a speedboat and invited him aboard for the trial run. On returning to port the skipper ordered, “Hey, Lou--jump out and grab the front end . . . and Don, you grab the rear end and pull it in.” The word used was not rear , however.

War stories don’t have to be true. My favorite is the one about the young British subaltern who was caught by an MP chasing a Wren (a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) down a hallway in a Cairo hotel. The young officer was nude. He was put up on charges of being out of uniform, but was acquitted on the grounds that he was properly attired for the activity in which he was engaged.

I have serious doubts about the authenticity of that story, but I have always chosen to believe it. It makes my memories of the war so much more palatable.

As Wharton and his cook may have been, I was guilty myself of pulling the tiger’s tail now and then.

Once, when the war was over but I was still stationed at Pearl Harbor, I asked my colonel why he couldn’t let me go home.

He said, “Smith, I don’t like it here either, but I have to stay.”

“But sir,” I said, “you’ve got a jeep and a girl friend.”

Not long after that I was shipped back to the States.

After I had become a civilian I was introduced in the old press club to Gen. Graves Erskine, then commandant of the Marine Corps, as “an ex-Marine.”

The general shook my hand and said, “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, is there Smith?”

Wringing the general’s hand, I replied, “You’re looking at one, general.”

Even though I was a civilian, I thought that was a pretty risky thing to say. The general might have been right.