Local man joins Navy after Peal Harbor bombing, finds himself on sinking ship

By RORYE O’CONNOR

rorye.oconnor@register-news.com

MT. VERNON – With the recent passing of the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, former Navy sailor Charles William “Bill” Shroyer, Clay County’s first World War II wartime volunteer, has a lot on his mind — both his reasons for joining up and the reason he found himself on a sinking tanker a month later.

Shroyer, 86, who now lives in Mt. Vernon, graduated high school in Flora a year before Pearl Harbor was bombed. He signed up to join the Navy with a friend six months before the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of the Hawaii naval station, but had waited to take the oath, because he wasn’t ready to ship out.

However, the day after Pearl Harbor, Shroyer decided he was ready to take the oath and join the fight.

“We didn’t have a car, or telephone, so I got a hold of my district attorney in town, and asked if he could give me a ride to Effingham, that’s where the recruiting station was, and he said, ‘I’ll get you one,’” Shroyer said. “About 15 minutes later a lady came by and picked me up, and she was the president of the Women’s Club over there. She took me up there.”

First Shroyer said the Navy transported him and others to St. Louis to be sworn in, but then he found himself in San Diego for boot camp. “Normally you spend 90 days there, but we only spent 30,” he said. “They filled us full of all our shots, and they needed us out at Pearl Harbor, so they loaded us up and sent us over there. We got there exactly one month after it was bombed.”

Shroyer said the site of the bombing was still a shock to him because of how much damage was still there.

“Boy, all the battleships were either on the bottom or rolled over, or damaged to where they couldn’t go,” he said. “Oil — lots of oil on the water, and it was just crazy.”

Shroyer was placed on a tanker called the USS Neches, which a few days after he arrived at Pearl Harbor headed out to a destination which was unknown to Shroyer at the time.

“We took off, fully loaded with aviation gasoline,” he said. “I found out later we was headed for Wake Island, to refuel the Saratoga and the Lexington, two carriers. On the way, a Japanese submarine torpedoed us at three o’clock in the morning. There were three torpedoes that surfaced and shelled us, and why we didn’t catch fire, nobody knows.”

Shroyer wrote in a newspaper article that was published in the Flora Daily News that the radio operator hadn’t been able to get out a distress signal because of power failure to the tanker as it was under fire.

While the seamen waited for help, they took stock of the situation, according to the article Shroyer wrote after the incident. After the sunrise, the captain took roll and found that 56 men were missing.

A patrol plane spotted the wreckage of the tanker and sent a destroyer ship for the men, while another plane took away the most severely wounded men, Shroyer wrote.

The destroyer arrived at about 11 a.m., according to his account.

“The USS Jarvis, a destroyer, picked us up after seven-and-a-half hours, and took us to Pearl Harbor,” he said. “When the destroyer picked us up, we had to get on it real quick, because they thought the sub might still be in the area and they didn’t want to be a sitting duck for it.”

Shroyer said the men on the destroyer were generous towards he and the other survivors of the attack.

“They took us down to their locker rooms and opened their lockers, and said, anything you guys want, it’s yours,” he said. “So I got me a jacket to put on that had three stripes on here, and a hash mark. I went from apprentice seaman to first class radio man like that! But they took it away from me when I got to Pearl.”

Because he had only been at Pearl Harbor for two weeks, Shroyer said the loss of the 56 men from the tanker was less than it would have been than if he had been there longer and gotten to be friends with them.

However, he said he made a close friend during the hours after the attack.

“I heard somebody over there hollerin’ ‘Help! Help!’ and I reached down and pulled him up out of the water,” he said, of a sailor named Blackie Scanlon. “There was oil all over him and he was cold. The water was warm, but that wind up above it, boy it froze you, and he didn’t have on very much. I took my blouse and gave it to him.”

After returning to Pearl Harbor, the men who were on the USS Neches were split up and stationed in several different places, Shroyer said.

“They sent me over to Maui, at the new naval air station that had just started up,” Shroyer said. “While I was there, I started to work in the meteorology department. They had a school for us weather men, and I attended that. After two years there, I got sent back to the States to become a Navy pilot.”

However, after nine months of flight school, Shroyer said his depth perception started to get bad.

“They won’t let you fly if you can’t tell if you’re two feet or 10 feet off the ground,” he said. “I had to go back into the fleet as an enlisted man. Had to give up my pretty blue uniform, it was an officer’s, but that’s life.”

Shroyer continued to act as a meteorologist for the Navy, flying in the rear seat of a dive bomber at 20,000 feet to get weather calculations, until the war was over.

However, as a weather man at Majuro, in the Marshall Islands, he had one frightening experience shortly before he headed back for Illinois, he said.

“The last flight I made was in the same kind of a plane, down on Majuro and the war was over, and I was just waiting to come home,” he said. “I was on a typhoon tracking detail; a typhoon had come through a couple days before, and we was supposed to go out and see where it was at and how it was doing, and the radar on this Marine pilot’s plane went out. He said, ‘Bill, we’re running out of gas, the radar isn’t working, and I don’t know where we’re at.’ And he said, ‘If we have to bail out, do you want to jump out or ride it down?’ I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, but if I tell you to jump and you’re not out in five seconds you’ll be the last one on the plane.’”

Shroyer said he was prepared to jump out of the plane, with his seat belt off and his hand on the rip cord.

“I was ready to roll out of that dude if he hollered,” Shroyer said. “But he kept saying, boy it’s between empty and absolutely. And the waves was big down below there, and all of a sudden, he said, ‘Look, Bill, there’s an island up there!’ And it was Majuro, and we flew right up to that, and we was afraid to circle and come in upwind like you’re supposed to do, so we just landed going downwind, and got on the ground, turned around and started to taxi up the flight line and she ran out of gas right there. I said, ‘I tell you what, this is the last flight I’m taking in this man’s Navy.’”

After returning to Flora, Shroyer planned to attend college in Columbia, Mo., on the G.I. Bill. However, around the same time, Shroyer met his wife, Wanda Shroyer, and he decided spending time with her was more interesting than attending college. They have now been married for 62 years.

Shroyer continued work he had previously studied in high school — as a printer for several different Southern Illinois publications. He worked at the Flora Daily News, and then worked for four years in Salem, 25 years in Mt. Vernon, and then 11 years in Sesser, printing magazines.

Shroyer said he’s found people in the community to reminisce with when the memories of his wartime experience make him thoughtful.

“I have a friend now, he spent 30 years in the Navy, and he was in all the wars,” he said. “He and I, when my wife goes to Weight Watchers, and his wife goes, we sit in the car all the time they’re in there and fight the war over. We’ve gotten to be good buddies.”

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