MILITARY SERVICE:
Served in the U.S. Navy during WWII as a Radioman aboard the U.S.S. Bogue. The Bogue was one of forty-five C-3 type vessels scheduled to become merchant ships, which were converted to small aircraft carriers to combat German "Wolf-Packs." Of these converted carriers, 34 were sold to the British and 11, including The Bogue, were retained by the U.S. She was commissioned at Puget Sound Navy Yard on September 26, 1942, named after the Bogue Sound in North Carolina. Here name as a merchant ship was to have been "Steel Architect. She was a single screw type vessel, 495 feet long., with 8,500 horsepower and displacing 13,890 tons.
By the end of 1942, the U.S. had succeeded in driving German submarine activity away from coastal waters and the Caribbean where they were sinking nearly 600,000 tons of Allied shipping per month.
"Deprived of easy picking close to land and hampered by increasing numbers of escort vessels for convoys, the German high command decided upon a major change of tactics. Instead of a sub being assigned an area to patrol independently, they initiated "Wolf-Packs" composed of a number of underseas craft working together against convoys which were out of range of land-based aircover."
[Historical information on The Bogue, and the above quotation, are from "U.S.S. Bogue," a booklet prepared by Lieutenant Hart, CPhoM Skinner, C.W. Murphy, Y3/c, and C.W. Ahr, S1/c , and paid for from the profits of the ship's store, commemorating the ship's third anniversary of her commissioning, as a souvenir for the men of the ship's crew who would soon be returning to civilian life.]
