War Story - Vernon Russell

Vernon H. Russell, MoMM 3/C

U.S. Navy, APC-101, South Pacific

Submitted by Alan Russell, Son

My father was born and spent his entire pre-war life in Connecticut. He was a late entrant into the service. Initially he was exempt, both as a single son to his mother and because he was working as a draftsman for a company that was providing armament to the war effort. But in mid-1944, with the war effort in full swing in both Europe and the Pacific, he was asked to enlist. During intake processing, at one station they asked the men which branch of the service they wanted to enlist in. Since that station was manned by someone from the Army, no matter what you answered he stamped “Army” on your papers. But just as my father reached the head of the line there was a shift change and the new person was a sailor, so my father’s papers were stamped “Navy”.

He was sworn in on July 21, 1944 and left the next day to boot camp in Sampson, NY. After graduation in October he was transferred to basic engineering school in Gulfport, MS, then to diesel school in San Diego, CA. He shipped out of San Francisco on March 23, 1945, arriving in Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides on April 4. But in the mode of “hurry up and wait” as he later expressed it, he spent the next 2+ months in various forms of shore duty before finally being assigned to a ship on June 18.

The USS APC-101 was a small coastal transport. It was a wooden ship only 103’ long and 21’ wide that carried a complement of 3 officers and 22 enlisted men. It was used for transportation of freight between the various island groups in the South Pacific as with a shallow draft it could service islands which did not have deep water facilities. Few of the cargos were documented, but on one trip they carried cigarettes on the outbound leg to Fiji and brought back bananas. My father described it as an oversized rowboat, noting, “If you could ride on a combination merry-go-round, roller coaster, whip and a few other rides tossed in, you’d know how it feels to ride this ship.” As a transport ship, it was very lightly armed, with only a single deck gun and the captain having a pistol.

For the next nearly four months the ship traveled between three locations: Noumea, New Caledonia (their home port); Fiji; and the New Hebrides. They traveled a total of 13 legs, each one being 2-3 days in length with stops in the port in-between. Even VJ-Day did not change their routine. After stopping in Fiji for the last time on October 11, their home port assignment changed and they traveled farther east to Pago Pago in American Samoa. They had two new routes, one to British Samoa, Wallis Island, Ellice Island, and Nukafetau, the other to the Cook Islands, Bora Bora, and Penryhn. Each leg in these new routes was 3-4 days. To pass the time my father wrote poetry (published posthumously as My Father’s Love: Here, There, Everywhere on Amazon), and corresponded with the girl whom he later married.

Finally, in January 1946, the APC-101 started its trip back to the US, but this was a long trip as they had to stop in Palmyra, then in Hawaii to allow other ships to join their convoy and the convoy could only travel at the speed of the slowest ship (which included the APC-101). They finally arrived back in San Francisco on March 10, 1946. But since my father had entered the service so late, he was not yet eligible to be discharged. He remained with the ship and a skeleton crew as they went to Bremerton, WA where the ship was decommissioned and turned into a fishing vessel. He returned to Connecticut in mid-April, 1946. 

I’ll let my mother pick up the story from here in a memoir she wrote in her later life.

Our YTC [Youth Temperance Council at their church] kept going during the war and we used to write group letters to some of the boys. One night one of the boys wrote to Vernon, who, by then was in the Navy, that I was knitting ‘little things’. I was; they were for friends. When Vernon got the letter, he questioned me about that. To have some fun, I told him, “You should know, you’re the father” We kept up this repartee via letters. I told him I had quadruplets, named Abigail, Buster, Carmen and Dudley. Then I complained that I needed money to take care of them, so he made a $1,000,000 bill and sent it to me. Then I told him we really should get married for the sake of the children, so he sent me a marriage certificate. I would come home from work and the rest of the family was already at the table. My mail would be at my place, and when there was a letter from Vernon, I would read it aloud. Everyone got a kick out of it. He said his buddies used to wonder what he was laughing about when he read mine. In the meantime I had broken up with Art [he was her boyfriend when Vernon enlisted], although Vernon didn’t know it, but he began to get interested in me and I was in him, but I didn’t let him know it. But 10 days after he came home, he proposed and I accepted. That was in April. We were married in Sept.

My parents bought a house and 23 acres of land in Wolcott, CT that summer. Over the next several years they had five children – and perhaps recalling the names they gave their fictitious quadruplets, they gave them alphabetic names (Alan, Beth, Charles, Dawn, and Edward).

My father, like most of his fellow service members, did not talk much about the war. But he had a photo album of pictures that he’d purchased on each of the islands they visited, and several souvenirs that he displayed in his den at home. He was also in frequent touch with some of the other men he’d met during his time in the Navy, even though they lived in other states. Although he did not see the action that others did, the fact that when his country asked him to serve he did so without hesitation made him a hero in my eyes.

My father and mother lived in that house in Wolcott until their eventual passing away in 2006 and 2012 respectively. It was only after his passing when I inherited his photo album and other mementos that had been hidden away all those decades that I began investigating what his role in the war had been.