He was twenty-six years old when the hometown paper back in Monticello ran his photograph.

The headline called him a submarine fighter. The ink was grainy and the halftone blurred his face a little, but the pride was sharp enough to cut steel. Russell Leroy Benjamin, electrician’s mate, second class, son of Grover and Verda Benjamin of Route 1. A Monticello boy who had already seen Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway. Now he was headed to the Submarine School in New London, Connecticut, to join what the paper called “our growing fleet of underseas fighters.”

Continue reading “From Route 1 to the Pacific: A Plank Owner’s War” →

On a cold January morning, Monday, the 24th, in 1944, the war arrived quietly in northwest Ohio.

It came folded in newsprint.

The Bryan Democrat carried a small headline that did not shout and did not explain much: Former Bryan Man Aboard Submarine Listed As Missing. Beneath it was the name Marvin Leroy Maier, twenty two years old, a son, a husband, a sailor. He had last written home to say he would be leaving port soon. Now his parents had received a telegram from the War Department. No details. Just the word missing.

Continue reading “Silence at Truk” →

There are moments in naval history when the line between chaos and calculation becomes so thin that no amount of hindsight can separate them. December of 1944 was a month full of such moments, a time when the Pacific had become a kind of cosmic joke told in a language only submariners understood. If the Hitchhikers Guide had ever been foolish enough to publish a chapter on the American submarine campaign, it might have described those boats as improbable machines crewed by improbable men who somehow made logic work underwater. It would then likely note that the worst poetry in the universe had nothing on the way the ocean recited explosions back to the hull of a submarine in the pre dawn hours.

Continue reading “Sea Devil Sinks SS Hawaii Maru” →