Portraits of Courage: John Crowder

BIG LAKE — By serving in the Navy and joining the Merchant Marines, John Crowder is a World War II veteran twice over.

The Big Lake resident was in ninth grade when he heard about the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

“I just felt bad we had been attacked by the Japanese,” he said.

In July 1944, just after he graduated high school in Oklahoma, Crowder started pestering his mother to let him join the Navy. He was only 17 and needed his mother to sign the papers to give him permission to join.

“She didn’t want me to go, but I pestered her so much,” he said.

Crowder joined the Navy on the advice of some World War I veterans who said Army life would be terrible and he would be spending his time in trenches.

“They said in the Navy you may be killed, but you’ll be more comfortable when you’re alive,” he said.

Crowder was sent to basic training in San Diego, Calif., and then went to Gulfport, Miss., for diesel engine school so he could work in an engine room on a Navy ship.

After training, he was sent to the San Francisco Bay area and was assigned to a ship about 10 days later — a minesweeper.

The ship left shortly after he was assigned to it and sailed to Pearl Harbor, Guam and Buckner Bay in Okinawa.

“The Japanese suicide planes would come over periodically to crash into a ship,” he said. In addition to the engine room work, he was assigned to help man a 20 mm anti-aircraft gun on the ship with the help of another sailor.

“I saw every sunup and sundown,” he said. “That was a favorite time for the enemy to attack.”

When the Japanese planes would get through the defenses and come over the bay, Crowder said all the friendly aircraft were clear of the area so they would shoot at every plane in the air.

“To prevent them from seeing us, we sent up smoke,” he said. “You could hear them circling.”

Crowder and his fellow sailor were credited with shooting down one plane and partially credited for shooting down one other.

They were in Buckner Bay until the war ended on Aug. 15, 1945.

“We were jubilant,” he said. “We thought we were going home.”

Crowder, however, did not have enough points to be discharged and the minesweeper he was on was sent to Kobe, Japan, to sweep a path through the port. He was in Kobe until February 1946 when the minesweeper was sent to Shanghai, China, and given to the Chinese government.

Crowder was discharged from the Navy July 6, 1946, and was back on a ship less than a month later.

He had gone home and tried to go to college. He wanted to study mechanical engineering and was told there were too many people trained in that career field. So, he took a bus from Oklahoma to San Francisco and joined the Merchant Marines.

“They hired me the day I got there,” he said. He was assigned to the Army Transit Service and served with the Merchant Marines for 17 years. When a court declared Merchant Marines who served in World War II veterans in 1988, Crowder was issued his honorable discharge from the Army since he worked with the Army Transit Service.

In 1957, Crowder met a woman who was a passenger on a ship that the Merchant Marines were taking around the world for four months. They married later that year and Crowder decided to get out of the Merchant Marines.

“I was married and didn’t want to keep going to sea,” he said.

A friend recommended he travel to Alaska and get a job at a power plant. So, on July 5, 1957, he and his wife left Ocala, Fla., and headed to Alaska, arriving in Anchorage on July 19. He worked as a boilerman foreman at the Fort Richardson power plant.

About his time in the service, Crowder admits it helped him grow up.

“You mature as a person quickly,” he said. “Right away you develop a comradeship with people and learn to work as a team.”