Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (12 page)

Cogswell
pulled 172 of
Reno
’s sailors and officers aboard, then slowly escorted the damaged cruiser away from submarine-infested waters toward safety. Three days later, a vicious typhoon struck the
Cogswell
and its convoy, tossing the ships around like bath toys for two days. That was followed by occasional but thwarted attacks by Japanese suicide planes. When she finally
reached the apparent safety of the U.S.-occupied port on the atoll of Ulithi, the
Cogswell
was hit with reports of Japanese mini-submarines prowling the lagoon, and Shepard and the crew stayed at their battle stations through the night. Just before daylight, one of the enemy subs fired on a Navy tanker, and dawn bloomed with the exploding tanker’s demise. The crew was killed, but
Cogswell
helped hunt the Japanese submarines, four of which were sunk by U.S. ships. At the end of his first month as a seaman, Shepard’s ship was awarded a unit citation for rescuing the
Reno
’s crew and then escorting and protecting the wounded ship.

Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, t
he belligerent, blood-thirsty commander of the Third Fleet, praised the entire
Cogswell
crew for “a brilliant and courageous piece of fighting.”

The war in the Pacific was the Navy’s war. Its ships, its planes, and its Marines (which were and still are part of the Navy) wrenched Pacific islands from Japanese hands, one by bloody one. Far from home and seemingly overmatched by enormous and well-trained Japanese forces, the Navy made surprising progress in its efforts to establish military bases on the islands south of Japan, in preparation for an expected assault on the enemy’s homeland.
Cogswell
and the hundreds of other ships in the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, leapfrogging from fight to fight, island to island, were
proving to be one of the greatest fighting units in the history of warfare.

But sometimes opposition came from unexpected fronts. After assisting in assaults on and around the Philippines, in mid-December of 1944 the
Cogswell
was slammed without warning by another violent and unexpected typhoon, this one far worse than the first. She was running low on fuel, which made the top-heavy ship rock violently from side to side. Attaching refueling lines to a nearby storm-tossed tanker become impossible, so Shepard’s
crewmates held tight to their bunks below as 120-mile-an-hour-winds and thirty-foot waves battered the helpless vessel. The ship ascended wave mountains, then surfed down the other side, one after the other. For two days sleep was impossible—men were slammed from wall to wall and thrown to the steel floors. Cooking was also impossible, so they ate little during the forty-eight hours of hell.

“This is the worst storm we have been in,” one sailor wrote in his diary. “We can’t steer our course, the seas are too big.”

Although personal diaries were strictly forbidden—the Navy didn’t want information falling into enemy hands—a few aboard the
Cogswell
secretly kept written accounts of their day-to-day travails. “Several men have been lost over the side,” the ship’s cook wrote in his diary.

Three other Navy destroyers were capsized and sunk by the typhoon. For days afterward the
Cogswell
pulled near-dead and waterlogged sailors from the calming seas. Nearly 790 young men who had survived Japanese torpedoes and kamikazes lost their lives to the furious Philippine Sea.

“In the light of hindsight it is easy to see how any of several measures might have prevented this catastrophe,” Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Navy’s optimistic fleet admiral in the Pacific (and, like Shepard, a onetime Naval Academy oarsman), said in a follow-up report a few months later. “The important thing is for it never to happen again.”

But it would happen again. And again.

When the seas finally relaxed and
Cogswell
finished searching for survivors, she limped back into the lagoon off Ulithi atoll on the morning of Christmas Eve, and the shell-shocked crew began to smell the simmerings of a huge Christmas turkey dinner the galley was planning.

Late in the day, forty-five overstuffed mailbags were lugged aboard from a mail boat. One of the bags contained a letter from Shepard’s mother, Renza. Bad news from home: His beloved
grandmother Nanzie, the woman who had hatched his chicken operation and in whose basement Shepard had spent half his boyhood, was dead.

She was eighty-three but had been in perfect health. Three weeks before Christmas she slipped on an icy sidewalk in Boston, hit her head, and died three days later. Shepard was not allowed to return home for the funeral. That night, he wrote his parents “to tell you how proud I was and am of Nanzie.” Curled up in his cabin, exhausted and frazzled from the recent battles with enemy subs and enemy seas, he wrote:

“You have started me on my way as a Shepard—a way that is exacting in its requirements, a path that is difficult to follow but one that is certainly worth the while and effort. I only hope that I can follow your examples and live my life in such a way that will make both of you proud of me and that will make me worthy of being a Shepard.”

In late February 1945, five months after Shepard had joined the ship, the
Cogswell
returned to California for a much-needed overhaul. Her hull was rusted, dented, and bullet-pocked. Shepard and his fellow sailors—filthy and exhausted, edgy and sleep-deprived—were given three weeks of welcome liberty. He sent word to Louise that they should make the most of his brief hiatus from war: he wanted to get married, right away. He flew to Longwood, where he and Louise broke the news to her parents on a Sunday morning. Louise’s parents had known the couple was serious, but the urgency of thei
r desire to wed just one week later surprised the Brewers. Still, bold times led to bold decisions, and many of Alan and Louise’s friends were also leaping into marriage, near strangers choosing each other for lives built on the foundations of a brief courtship. Despite some heavy scowling from Phil Brewer, he and his wife consented.

Shepard called his parents with the news, then hopped on the next train to Boston. When he didn’t see his parents at the station, Shepard assumed they had had car trouble and hitch-hiked the 40 miles to East Derry. When he found no one at home, he climbed onto the roof and forced open his bedroom window to get into the house. The next morning his parents called from their Boston hotel room, a bit frustrated that their son hadn’t waited for them at the train station.

The Shepards all drove back down to Longwood Gardens later that week. Alan and Louise married on March 3, 1945, at Stephens Lutheran Church in nearby Wilmington, Delaware.

Alan’s father, Bart, was the best man. Father and son both wore their uniforms, Alan in dark blue and Bart in brown and tan. Back in 1941 Bart had come back from reserve status and rejoined the Army as a full-time officer. He wanted to do what he could for the war and worked as a recruiter in Manchester, convincing young New England men to serve their country.

Louise, age twenty-two, wore a satin gown with a long white train and antique lace; as a corsage, she wore one of Longwood’s rare and delicate orchids. Alan looked older than his twenty-one years—in the twenty months since cavorting on the streets of San Francisco, he had matured from a teen into a full-grown man. The couple traveled north, back to East Derry with Bart and Renza, then drove up into the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire for a brief honeymoon.

Their honeymoon was the first time they had spent more than a day or two together, and never had they been truly alone. There was just a small window of time to get reacquainted, to make plans—how many children? what should their names be? where should we live?—and then to watch each other undress, to taste each other, to make love and pretend for a few days that the war, the Navy, and Alan’s death-defying career were not about to swallow them both up.

In late March Alan and Louise traveled west to southern California—the first of many cross-country treks in the nomadic life to come—and the clock ticked down toward Alan’s scheduled April 5 reunion with the
Cogswell.
Enjoying cocktails, dinners, movies, and sunset walks along the pier, they were briefly, blissfully, carefree young newlyweds. Then, after a final night together, a final taste of each other, Louise drove Alan to the docks at the Long Beach Navy Yard. She waved from the pier as Alan sailed toward God knew what brutalities of battle. Without knowing when or if he’d return, Louise aggressively set about creating a life of her own. She drove to San Francisco, found an apartment to share with a college friend, took a job at Gump’s department store, and began attending occas
ional parties with other Navy wives.

Bob Williams’ mother hosted one such party, for Louise and few other wives, at the Sausalito home where Alan had stayed. Louise flipped through the guestbook there to find her husband’s strong, neat signature from a year earlier and then signed the book herself.

A reporter from the
Sausalito News
mingled at the party, where the wives all signed a round-robin letter to send to their husbands. In her article, the reporter described how the women reminisced about watching their men graduate the previous summer, about feeling proud to send their brave lovers off to the good and righteous war.

Louise befriended some of the Navy wives, and Mrs. Williams occasionally stopped by the apartment to see if she needed anything. But her real friends, and her real source of strength, were those in the congregation of the Christian Science Church. Wherever Alan’s career took them, the Christian Science Church would become Louise’s surrogate family.

Alan wrote to her often and asked Bob Williams to check up on her the next time he returned home.

One day, Louise met another of the store clerks at Gump’s, a girl named Peggy Duff, and as they got talking they realized they both knew a cute Naval Academy grad named Alan. It might have been the first time that Louise came in contact with one of her husband’s flings, but it wouldn’t be the last. Peggy Duff—“the rump,” Alan once called her—had been one of those attracted to his uniform during what Alan called his “good times” in Sausalito. Alan wrote to Bob that Louise’s chance encounter with Duff was “too close for comfort! The old ‘rump’ certainly gets around.”

As the Cogswell steamed back toward the South Pacific, Shepard received word that a former classmate had abandoned his crippled ship and wound up in shark-infested waters, where he met his doom. Meanwhile, another classmate, a year behind Shepard at the academy, was still exploiting the midshipman’s life but was expelled for bringing a date into Bancroft Hall and showering with her. “Wholesale debauchery!” Shepard said in a letter.

Shepard, steaming west in early April 1945, was suspended between those two worlds—the academy life behind him, kamikaze pilots ahead. While in transit from California to Pearl Harbor, the
Cogswell
learned of Japan’s increasingly desperate use of suicide planes against U.S. ships. Upon arrival at Pearl Harbor, Shepard was told that he would be one of the
Cogswell
’s primary defenders against such kamikaze attacks—he was being relieved of his telephone duties and promoted to deck officer, helping oversee a cluster of 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns on the ship’s bow. A half dozen such cluster
s ringed the football-field-sized destroyer, which complemented an array of larger and more menacing five-inch guns. The
Cogswell
cruised off the Hawaiian coast for more than a week, conducting training exercises to give Shepard and the others time to get acquainted with their weaponry and prepare for the fighting ahead.