the size of your little finger. Twenty guys lined up waiting for water, even at two o’clock in the morning. They said the Chaumont had her bow built just like her stern so the German subs wouldn’t know what direction she was going. Nobody aboard ever did, either. I hate that ship.”27
In McKenna’s last letter on the subject of Chaumont, written on 28 December 1963, the years still had not softened his rage. He wrote of his current writing project, “I am going to work in a few pokes at the Chaumont for the sake of all of us who were prisoners of war aboard that floating madhouse. . . . I am still waiting for Congress to vote me a medal for suffering hardship and insult above and beyond the call of duty.”28
Eventually, on 6 August 1933, Fireman 3rd Class McKenna left the “madhouse” Chaumont and reported to duty in his first permanently assigned Navy ship, USS Gold Star, station ship for the island of Guam. McKenna quickly realized the ship and location were all a young man from an isolated town in the high desert of Idaho who liked to meet unusual people and go to unusual places could have ever hoped to encounter. The ship also began his lifelong love of machinery.
On Sunday, 6 August 1933, with the temperature near eighty degrees Fahrenheit, a twenty-year-old McKenna departed Chaumont, carrying an envelope with his orders and his service and pay records in his left hand and his sea bag, with a hammock wrapped around it, on his right shoulder. He made his way on board Gold Star, reporting for his first permanent duty in a ship.1
The Navy had taken over and commissioned the ship—originally built for the Shipping Board by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation of Wilmington, Delaware—on 1 February 1922 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as Arcturus (AK 12), a cargo ship. Five days later, the service renamed the new ship Gold Star and classified it as an AG, a general auxiliary ship. The ship measured 392 feet in length and had a beam of 52 feet. Gold Star had a “snail-like cruising speed of about 9 knots (10 mph).” A former commanding officer, Capt. Joseph Unrig Lademan Jr., USN, described his ship as “elderly, plain, broad in beam, straight-lined from stem to stern with not a trace of graceful sheer.” The new ship sailed to the West Coast and there moved cargo along the coast, including three voyages to Alaska for naval radio stations. On 9 October 1924 Gold Star arrived at Guam, the U.S. possession in the far-off and little-known Mariana Islands. The two original 4-inch guns on the ship were removed by the time McKenna reported on board.2
Little did McKenna realize he now served in a ship with unique duties and living conditions. From 1924 to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Gold Star was used like a civilian tramp freighter, shuttling slowly between Guam, the Philippines, China, and Japan, with an occasional foray to Hawaii, carrying mail, passengers, and products such as copra from the island. To work cargo, Gold Star had two masts, five cargo holds, well decks fore and aft, and a three-level superstructure. Because it carried all types of cargo, it had a refrigeration compartment. Other cargo, including large amounts of coal, was transported to the island. Gold Star carried so much coal from Japan for the Guam power plant the ship received the nick name Goldie Maru—Maru is the Japanese word for circle and is attached to the names of all the Japanese merchant ships. Carrying “everything for a new way of life” for the islanders, Goldie Maru “came to be regarded as a mother to the half-forgotten island sleeping far off the trans-Pacific shipping lanes.”3
Sometime early in Gold Star’s tenure in Guam, the Navy sent the ship to the Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines, where carpenters fabricated small mahogany-paneled staterooms on the midship section of the vessel, which became first-class passenger accommodations. Forward, on the port side of the upper deck, the yard workers built the captain’s quarters. Furnished in “Victorian elegance,” with rattan chairs and “colorful Chinese rugs,” the quarters had eleven double-hung windows that provided an exceptional amount of light for the commanding officer. Similar quarters on the starboard side housed the governor commandant of Guam when he decided to take a cruise with his family. At this time, the governor was a U.S. Navy captain. Near the stern of Gold Star, the Navy established a sick bay, along with a dozen second-class cabins, including a modern barbershop. The ship’s yacht-like paneled interiors and accommodations for fifty passengers moved Goldie Maru into a more genteel status among naval ships.4
Nominally, Gold Star served within the Asiatic Fleet; however, the vessel operated as the station ship of Guam, and this isolated it from the even more isolated Asiatic Fleet. The administration for the ship came directly from Washington, D.C., and sailors could not transfer between Gold Star and the Asiatic Fleet, “nor did [Gold Star] operate in conjunction with [the Asiatic Fleet].” Two other Navy vessels also moored at Guam during McKenna’s time—the oiler Robert L. Barnes (AO 14) and Penguin (AM 33), a mine sweeper—but they did not have the reputation of the much larger Gold Star.5
First ships can sometimes become a distant memory for career sailors, but McKenna retained his impressions. Gold Star was the perfect assignment for him; the ship remained vividly in the mind of the young man from the high desert of Idaho until his death.
1933
One of the first things McKenna wanted to know upon reporting to Gold Star was the location of his berth. In 1933 a sailor usually slept in a hammock, and the area assigned to Richard was in the compartment above the fire room. The heat from engineering combined with tropical temperatures and a lack of air conditioning made for terrible sleeping. McKenna would soon find different sleeping arrangements in his new ship.
Gold Star sailors could, if they wished, sleep in canvas cots scattered about the topside decks. During working hours, crew members secured the cots in a hold. After the working day, those wishing to sleep on deck broke out their cots and sought the right location to protect them from rain and spray during their sleep. Unlike for most enlisted crews throughout the Navy, rate and seniority did not count for choice of sleeping locations among those in Gold Star; they were on a first come, first served basis. McKenna observed a “lack of interpersonal aggression [on the part of the crew that set] the Gold Star apart from all other ships.”6
Another unusual feature of the ship’s routine was the first serving out of coffee in the morning. In the galley a large steam kettle—called a copper—full of coffee stood waiting. Certain men had large cups—actually beer steins—that they filled with coffee, sugar, and cream. These men shared their steins with four or five other sailors. Rate and seniority did not determine the groupings for this sharing of coffee. Sailors vied with each other to own the largest cup, even though Gold Star provided single cups. The single cups were used by new sailors who had yet to join a group. No other naval memoir or novel of this period discusses this act of sharing coffee.
Breakfast for the crew began at 0700 in the old-style twenty-man messes. In this long-practiced part of enlisted naval mealtime, the sailor selected as the mess cook of a particular group, or mess, of sailors went to the galley to receive food, which he then brought back for distribution at the mess’s designated table.
Work in port started at 0800. The sailors stopped at noon, and at 1300 two of the three duty sections had liberty, or time away from the ship not counted as leave. These sailors returned to the ship by a designated time. At sea, the deck force worked until 1600 and stood two-hour watches in a six- or seven-watch list. Because of the heat, McKenna, working in engineering, stood four-hour watches and had eight hours off throughout the day.
After work the sailors began the period of washing. Even though Gold Star
