Stories From the US Submarine Force
Back in early September, I stumbled on a small piece in the Standard Speaker (PA) from September 2, 1944. It was nothing more than a picture of Ensign Sylvester Kohut shaking hands with Admiral Nimitz and a line about him receiving the Silver Star. That was it. No details, no story.
In Ava, Missouri, Mrs. Hutchinson walked into the office of the Douglas County Herald with a request that surprised the editor. She asked them to stop sending her the papers. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to read the news, she read every line about the war as closely as any mother with a son in uniform. Her worries were different. She had been faithfully forwarding the paper to her boy, Fireman Second Class E.E. Hutchinson, serving on a submarine somewhere in the South Pacific. But letters had been few, and she had no way of knowing if the papers ever reached him. More than once, she wondered if stacks of unread issues were piling up in some forgotten postal bag while her son remained cut off from the world back home. In the end, she decided there was no sense in continuing the subscription if she couldn’t be sure he was receiving them.
The date was September 18, 1942, when the submarine USS Gurnard was commissioned into the United States Navy. She was one of the many Gato-class submarines that slipped into the war effort during the dark mid-years of World War II, at a time when the Atlantic was still contested and the Pacific was a long way from turning in America’s favor. To her crew she was not just another boat with a fish name, she was home, she was a weapon, and she was a place where life and death mixed in with diesel fumes, sweat, and salt water. To the Navy she was a number in a long line of steel tubes being turned out of yards as fast as the nation could make them. To history, she was a fighting submarine that sank nearly sixty thousand tons of Japanese shipping, disrupted convoys, and lived to tell about it.
Patrol Reports 