On the High Seas: Robert L. Sherrod Sails to Australia

In long lines, the men moved forward, shuffling along the covered San Francisco pier at night to the ships that would take them to a destination that was, at present, a secret. Numbering in the thousands, the troops setting out on February 17, 1942, as part of convoy PW 2034 included a cross section of American society with a couple of millionaire’s sons and doctors of philosophy along with men who could not read. There were lawyers, cooks, plumbers, clerks, brokers, welders, mechanics, watchmakers, and the unemployed. Listed on the ships’ rosters were such last names as Cassini, Flanagan, Graziani, Johnston, Brooks, La Pierre, Cohen, Schlotfeldt, Wu, Paulson, Wroblewski, Economos, and Chalupniczak.

Also among their company were fourteen correspondents—the largest contingent of journalists to accompany an American expeditionary force since the American entry into World War II. The correspondents were, like their shipmates, somewhat confused about their new surroundings. Three newspapermen mistakenly boarded the wrong ship. They were fussily informed of their error by a steward, who shooed them off “with deep contempt with a diagram showing that our cabin numbers did not match his vessel and never would,” remembered John Lardner, the son of famed author Ring Lardner and a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance and Newsweek.

As he made his way to his berth on the SS Monterey, a former luxury ocean liner of the Matson Line converted for use as a fast transport under the auspices of the War Shipping Administration, Robert Sherrod of Time magazine noted that the soldiers boarding his ship were clad in the new M1 steel helmet meant to replace the tin-plate models worn by the doughboys of World War I. Sherrod stopped the soldiers’ commanding officer, the mustachioed Brigadier General Frank S. Clark, most recently the commander of the Coast Artillery School in Virginia and known for watching over the soldiers under his command like an “anxious mother.” Sherrod said to him, “General you don’t know how much it pleases me to see American troops finally equipped with decent helmets. Time magazine [has] been fighting for them for years.” Clark laughed and asked him if he might be hinting that he and the other correspondents, who had been issued the old-style helmets, were campaigning for their own M1s? Within fifteen minutes, Sherrod noted, the journalists received the new helmets.

There was little fanfare as the convoy pulled out of San Francisco. Hundreds of soldiers stood near the rails on the Monterey’s upper decks, craning their necks skyward to watch the seagulls screaming at them from overhead. A few shouted at troops on other ships, “See you in Tokyo.” The commonest remark among the men, noted Sherrod, was, “Boy, I’ll bet we don’t see this country again for a long time.”

It was the beginning of a six-month odyssey for Sherrod, who had been told in secret by officials in Washington, D.C., that he was on his way to Australia. During his time in the former British settlement, he traveled 40,000 miles, including 30,000 as a passenger on five types of U.S. Army Air Corps bombers and two different U.S. Navy bombers. He met every important American general stationed in Australia, as well as quite a few Australian generals and politicians, including the country’s prime minister, John Curtin, leader of the country’s Labor Party, and opposition leader Arthur Fadden. Sherrod visited every vital military base then in the area, from small air bases in the extreme north of Australia to Port Moresby in New Guinea, which suffered through its seventy-third bombing raid by the enemy during his time there. The danger of an imminent invasion of Australia by the Japanese was real, as a large portion of Australia’s best troops were fighting General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Middle East.

When Sherrod and the approximately 4,000 men scattered among the ships of the convoy sailed from San Francisco, they were leaving behind an American public gripped by an epidemic of panic fueled by the rapid advance of Japanese forces in the Pacific against possessions controlled by the British, Americans, and Dutch. U.S. forces on Guam and Wake Island (after a spirited defense by U.S. Marines) were overwhelmed, effectively isolating the Philippines, and, on January 2, 1942, Manila, the Filipino capital, fell to the enemy. Many people on the West Coast feared a possible Japanese invasion. General John L. DeWitt, in charge of the Western Defense Command, failed to calm fears when he warned the citizens of San Francisco, “death and destruction are likely to come to this city at any moment.”

Sherrod had arrived in San Francisco on February 8 and checked in with Lieutenant Colonel Truman Martin, who served as DeWitt’s “fussy public relations man.” For more than a week Sherrod waited with his fellow correspondents at the Saint Francis Hotel with no official word about where they were headed to or when or how. “It was fairly obvious to anyone who troubled to look at the map that we were going to Australia (as I had been told in Washington in deep secrecy) or to the East Indies [Southeast Asia] if they inconceivably held out,” he noted. The journalists mostly sat around in the bar of their hotel, bought “prodigious” amounts of equipment and clothing (Sherrod had most of his from his previous assignment covering army maneuvers for Time), and were vaccinated for typhoid, tetanus, yellow fever, and diphtheria. “The second typhoid shot almost killed several of us,” said Sherrod. “I saw dragons and pink elephants all night, though I hadn’t had a drink.”

From the moment he boarded the Monterey, Sherrod realized he had left behind his old civilian life for war. There were dozens of guns on every side to defend his ship from attack by sea or air, and they were manned twenty-four hours a day. He and every other passenger on the convoy had thrust into their hands a mimeographed instruction sheet that informed them they must wear a life preserver at all times and were ordered to have it within reach while they slept. Also, blackout conditions prevailed throughout the voyage and portholes had to be closed even in the hottest weather. Sherrod noted that the instructions also ominously added, “Be careful. If you fall overboard the ship will not stop to pick you up.”

In spite of the constant reminders of being in a war zone, Sherrod and his journalist colleagues were treated well, having some of the best quarters on the Monterey—all at a cost of $1.25 per day for food and board. He shared a four-room suite that had beds for eight with Jack Turcott of the New York Daily News and photographers Frank Prist of Acme and Ed Widdis of the Associated Press. “Mostly, the trip has been one meal after another, plus about twelve hours’ sleep every night, including a couple of hours before lunch and before dinner,” Sherrod wrote his wife, Betty.

Civilian waiters served peacetime menus in the wardroom—omelettes for breakfast and four-course dinners with steaks or lamb chops, a luxury Sherrod never found on another transport during the war. The fancy fare shocked the austere General Clark, who soon restricted items such as passion-fruit juice and squab. “Let’s have honest victuals in honest amounts,” Clark said.

With fresh water rationed for drinking purposes, the correspondents had to shave and bathe in gritty salt water. Outside of sleeping and eating, the only duty required of the journalists was a daily afternoon boat drill, or “abandon- ship” drill. “We’ve grown so accustomed that we go through that mechanically,” Sherrod noted. After the first few days he even stopped thinking about enemy submarines. “You awake with a start from your daydreaming sometimes and find yourself hoping that the lookouts and the convoy ships aren’t as unmindful of submarines as you have grown to be,” he said.

Sherrod estimated that no more than 2 percent of the men aboard the Monterey and its sister transports of the convoy, the SS Matsonia and SS Mormacsea, had ever been at sea before and there were a few dozen cases of seasickness before the men gained their sea legs. “There sure is a lot of water out here,” was a trite phrase he heard frequently on the ship. The endless vista of water and more water caused one soldier to vow that on his next sea voyage he planned on filling a bottle with dirt to bring with him so he could have some land to look at.

Most of the servicemen were from New England, while among officers were a slightly disproportionately large number of southerners, who later bristled at the Australian soldiers’ habit of referring to their American counterparts as “Yanks.” Also included at the last minute, to the “great surprise” of the convoy commander and staff, said Sherrod, was a complement of several hundred “husky” African American stevedore and service troops that included a few from the South, but a majority from Chicago, Saint Louis, and other Midwestern cities. They were commanded, as was usually the case in the war, by white officers. It was surprising to Sherrod that black troops were on a convoy whose destination might be Australia, as that country had long ago instituted a “White Australia” immigration policy; its War Cabinet had also tried, but failed, to keep African American soldiers from entering its shores.

In a later dispatch to his editors at Time, Sherrod reported that whites on the convoy were cautioned to never refer to the black soldiers by any derogatory racial epithet, but as “colored troops.” Although some feared trouble might occur as blacks and whites mingled on the tight confines of the transports, no clashes occurred during the voyage (it would be different once they reached their destination). All of the troops were “phenomenally healthy,” said Sherrod, in part due to daily calisthenics conducted for forty-five minutes on the ship’s upper deck. “So assiduously did General Clark exercise his troops ‘to keep their alimentary canals’ clear that there were only 13 constipation cases midvoyage,” Sherrod noted. The soldiers burst out laughing at themselves the first time they attempted to touch their toes wearing, as mandated, the bulky life preservers that “they called their wives,” he added.

The correspondents’ presence engendered plenty of comments from the troops. Lardner recalled that one private demanded to know what the large, white “C” on his green armband stood for—Canadian or Cop (it was correspondent). “He had never seen anything like it,” Lardner said. “Neither had anyone else.” The journalists ranged in age from twenty-seven to fifty, with most of them married with children, Sherrod reported. He enjoyed most of their company, writing that the only “heel” in the crowd was the Englishman, W. B. Courtenay of the London Daily Sketch, who proved to be obnoxious to his American counterparts from the voyage’s start, locking himself in the bathroom fifteen minutes before breakfast so nobody else in his quarters could shave.

Of all the luxuries of civilization, the reporters missed most of all the information they had been used to reading in daily newspapers. Sherrod called the ship’s newspaper “terrible,” as the dispatches printed in it were only a few paragraphs in length and “tell virtually nothing. Sometimes the biggest news of the day is evidently omitted.” For example, the news about the shelling of the California coast by an enemy submarine consisted of a two-day old paragraph quoting U.S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles saying it was a typical Japanese trick. “We never did find out what damage was done, or whether anybody was killed, or whether the submarine got away,” said Sherrod. To help matters, the correspondents contributed their own articles, including one about Australia by Kirkland, who had visited there for four months on assignment from Life, as well as sports articles from Lardner, a former sportswriter who knew boxing champion Joe Louis and loved to ruminate about baseball. In Sherrod’s estimate, Bill Courtney of Collier’s wrote the best article, one about the other troops he had traveled with—the Germans, Italians, Russians, and Japanese. The reporters also spent many evenings giving lectures before two hundred to three hundred soldiers, with Lardner and Kirkland the most in demand.

To help relieve the monotony, soldiers played cards, including poker and bridge; shot craps, especially after payday; and placed bets with Lardner on their eventual port of call. Brisbane, where they eventually landed, had 11 to 5 odds, while one captain in the quartermaster corps risked a dollar on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (100–1 odds), telling Lardner he had never “passed up a hundred-to-one shot in my life.” Lardner, joined by Carleton Kent of the Chicago Times and Martin Barnett of Paramount Newsreel, formed a singing trio known as the High Seas Hillbillies, and the group’s renditions of “Moonlight Bay” and “Mandy Lee,” Lardner recalled, could “empty a cabin faster than the call to ‘Battle Stations.’”

The favorite shipboard pastime, however, according to Sherrod, involved rumor-mongering. “One officer delighted in starting rumors then betting on how long it would take to boomerang back,” he said. Some of the rumors included that the convoy had sunk a submarine during the night and was being pursued by five others, the Monterey had been loaded improperly and was likely to overturn, and, the most distressing of all, that Tokyo had announced sinking the convoy and the U.S. Navy had confirmed the news.

Most of the soldiers wrote an endless stream of letters, so many, in fact, Sherrod said, that extra censors had to be recruited among the officers. “One censor remarked at how many soldiers wrote midvoyage, ‘Dear Millie we have arrived Australia and like it fine,’” he recalled. Troops also relished reviewing a list of Australian colloquialisms furnished by Matson Lines’ officials: “bastard” was a term of endearment, “diggers” were Australian soldiers, “screw” meant weekly wages, and “knocked up” meant tired out. Upon hearing that Australian earthworms grew to twelve feet in length, one soldier mused, “I wonder what kind of fish they catch with those.”

The weather varied greatly on the trip, beginning in “equatorial heat,” noted Sherrod, but gradually turning cool with stiff breezes. Only a day away from its destination, Brisbane, now an “open secret” among the crew and passengers, the convoy ran into a severe storm. The troops, “weary of the wastes of water,” said Lardner, “saw more water than they had ever dreamed of.” Sherrod remembered that the preponderant noises were the straining and creaking from the Monterey, the pounding of the seas, and the screaming wind. False reports were passed from man to man that the heavy seas had torn away the ship’s rudder. Sherrod, however, later learned that the Monterey’s captain had “to give the order to heave to or lose all steering control.” Nearly half of the ship’s lifeboats were shattered, with the wooden shards punching out the glass in numerous portholes. The flying glass badly cut some civilian aviation mechanics, but most of the injuries caused by the tempest were merely cuts and bruises.

There were few signs of panic among the troops. They had been paid that day and continued their gambling in spite of the rolling seas causing poker chips to fly into neighboring compartments and dice to roll for long distances. “You suppose this thing’s going to turn over?” asked some soldiers. Sherrod questioned the Monterey’s first officer if it had been the worst storm he had ever seen, and he had responded, “No, not quite, but it’s the damndest thing this ship’s been in.”

The night after the storm featured heavy, but not violent, waves. Drama ensued when Ensign James Parks, a navy signals officer, burst into the correspondents’ suite to relay the news that the London Daily Mail had just announced that the convoy was only a couple hundred miles from the Australian coast. Sherrod noted that most of the journalist’s comments were too salty to be printed. The calmest response came from Byron Darnton of the New York Times who muttered, “Stabbed in back by [an] ally.”

The correspondents’ consternation at the slipup in secrecy was heightened by their discovery that the Monterey had become separated from the rest of the convoy. Sherrod said that a “helpless feeling and grimness” underlay the usual banter among those onboard until the Brisbane harbor finally came within view. “Australia’s green shores and trees looked mighty good,” he said. Lardner recalled that those on the Monterey had to endure the jibes from those who had arrived before them, with soldiers lining the decks on other ships to yell at them, “Hello there, also-ran! Get the lead out of your pants!”

Sherrod reported that the Australians ashore shouted and waved handkerchiefs at the new arrivals, and the Americans let out a “mighty yell” when they spied the first woman they had seen since leaving the United States. They also tossed American cigarettes and coins at the Australian stevedores and soldiers, who threw back their own coins.

Standing at the rail of the ship looking at the green Australian horizon, Sherrod asked the man next to him, Captain John Dice, a Tennessee-born graduate of West Point, what it took to win a war in addition to guns, ammunition, and planes. The captain replied: “Just guts—guts to sit under guns when you know your next breath may be your last.” When Sherrod wondered if the young men he had grown to know on the voyage had what it took for such an effort, Dice responded: “Hell Bob, these are American soldiers."