A son discovers his father’s command in the Pacific War.
William Faulkner wrote a lot of things worthy of the Nobel Prize. One of them was this: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Call it Faulkner’s Law, and here is how I learned the truth of it. My father, Lieutenant Henry S. Allen Jr., commanded a ship in World War II, LCI(L)-1091.
It wasn’t a big ship—158 feet long—but it was his ship, and he was my father, so it loomed huge in my boyhood imagination, a legend, a myth. I am 68 now, and it still looms.
A photograph of 1091 hangs on a wall in my studio, a gray and dirty combat ship, forging against a bow wave, looking somehow tired on a cloudy day when the kamikazes weren’t attacking at Okinawa, or more likely when the battle—the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War, with almost 5,000 American sailors killed and nearly 30 ships sunk—had finally ended.
Hanging beside the photograph are a souvenir samurai sword, a tatter of 1091’s long, thin commissioning pennant and my father’s ribbons—a shrine to a lost era of Americans fighting in not just a worthy cause but a victorious one. I’ll pass along the shrine-tending duties to my oldest son when I die, along with the ribbons and photographs from my time as a Marine in Vietnam.
L anding Craft Infantry (Large) were big enough to cross the Pacific Ocean, small enough to land a company of infantry on a beach —in North Africa, Anzio, Normandy, Iwo Jima, everywhere. Armed with five 20mm cannon, some also carried rocket launchers, mortars or .50-caliber machine guns for close-in work.
Good ships with lots of uses, more than 900 of them were built, starting in 1942—so many they were given numbers, not names. No glamour, no first ladies christening them with champagne bottles, just workhorses. Coming into beaches, they made big targets for enemy artillery, which sank a lot of them.
A year after the battle at Okinawa —where suicide planes had come out of the sun for months, and the waters around 1091 had heaved with corpses —I watched my father slide the photograph from a mailing tube and unroll it on a table in our living room. I sensed even then he saw things in it my mother and I could not. I was told not to touch it.
Dad framed the picture. It traveled with us from house to house.
When I was little, he told me stories about 1091, but only the funny ones, like the one about the cooks, Loskutoff and McMasters, who used a baseball bat both to stir dough for a crew of about 30 and occasionally to go after each other.
Later he told me about taking 1091 from the Defoe shipyard in Bay City, Michigan, down the Great Lakes to the Chicago River and finally out to the Mississippi, where he saw country women sitting on the banks nursing babies— a starchy Yankee, he was shocked.
Then through the Panama Canal to California, with stops at Hawaii, Guam and Eniwetok on the way to Iwo Jima, where he arrived late in the battle and was ordered to keep going to the next one, Okinawa, where he and 1091 would spend almost three months in combat. The LCI defended battleships against kamikazes with its guns and hid them with a smoke generator.
“We were next to the Iowa when they fired the big guns,” my father told me. “The concussion picked up our whole ship and tossed it.”
He watched Marines with flamethrowers moving like dutiful postmen from cave to cave. He watched thousands of Japanese civilians jump to their deaths from cliffs at the end of the battle.
“Women with babies in their arms,” he said.
I’d know more if my mother hadn’t thrown away all his letters from the Pacific. He’d meant them as a chronicle.
On a Sunday afternoon in October 1952, my father and I sat on the couch in front of our 12-inch black-and-white TV to watch a show we’d anticipated for months: Victory at Sea.
French horns sounded the show’s signature theme while a grim ocean rolled behind the titles. My father’s face took on a severity and alertness—his war face, his command face. I think it was then I began to sense that the war had been the most important and meaningful time of his life.
I watched Victory at Sea with him every week, and, just as important, I watched him watch it. We both waited for spring and the end of the war, when we’d see footage of Okinawa, his battle. An old-school Princeton gentleman, he disdained shows of emotion, but the Okinawa segment undid him.
The planes came in toward the cameras, endless kamikazes twitching through anti-aircraft fire, and my father rose halfway from the couch, pointing and shouting: “Get him! Get him! Starboard bow, get him! Get him!”
I was startled, even alarmed. I knew better than to ask him about it.
After the war, LCIs would gradually vanish from the Navy. My father had no idea where 1091 had gone. There was no Internet then to find such things.
One day we were driving along the East River in Manhattan, and he saw a Circle Line boat—a converted LCI, he said. But try as I did, I could not discern any vestige of his legendary vessel in some tour boat hauling families with hot dogs and cameras.
Dad grew into middle age, became a salesman for a silverware company, then a sales manager. Evenings at our house faded into the preoccupations of an alcoholic haze.
I was on a school trip when a fellow LCI captain from Okinawa came to visit with his wife. I wish I’d been there to listen. All I heard about it was my mother’s repeated complaint: “Good God! All they could talk about was the Navy.”
Every Christmas he sent cards to his crew. Every Christmas he got fewer back.
On the back of one picture of his crew in dress blues he had quoted Tennyson in pencil:
My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads
Fifteen years after Okinawa, when he was suffering tragic reverses—personal, financial, corporate—our phone rang.
It was a 1091 sailor, now a successful funeral director, and he’d called to thank my father for inspiring his rise in life. I remember Dad walking back into the living room shaking his head with a gratitude that verged on tears.
He died in 1982, already senile at the age of 71, and I inherited all his pictures of 1091 and its crew, a brief case full of orders and the navigation charts of Okinawa he’d inscribed with a pencil and a straightedge.
One night in 2001, I was in the shower, where I do some of my best thinking. I realized that if my father’s LCI was numbered 1091, there must have been a lot of them and a lot of sailors who sailed on them.
I dried off, booted up my computer and punched “landing craft infantry” into a search engine. Amazing! There was a big LCI organization—veterans who held conventions and celebrated their service in what they called the “Gator Navy” or “Waterbug Navy.” They had hats, badges, postcards, pins, medallions, calendars and a sticker for kids reading, MY GRANDMA MARRIED AN LCI SAILOR.
How I wished my father were alive to know it. The next night, on a wild off chance, I tried punching in “LCI-1091.”
What I saw brought me out of my chair, shouting to my wife: “I found my father’s ship! I found the 1091!”
Of all the LCIs built in all the world, the only one left intact—or so it was believed then—was my father’s, and it was moored in Eureka, Calif. Its owner was a dentist named Ralph Davis, who was restoring it to World War II condition. Somehow, despite any failures, my father was redeemed, and I, in my boyhood dreams, was justified. The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.
I learned more of his ship’s history. After a stint at the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests and landings in the north during the Korean War on spy missions to search for the presence of bubonic plague (they found smallpox), 1091 returned stateside to Astoria, Ore., and was sold to a fishing company that used it for 20 years on the Yukon River.
Davis bought it in 1989. He had always wanted to be captain of a ship. He’d hoped to join the Navy but had been drafted into the Army, which trained him as a dental assistant. He had a practice in McKinleyville, Calif., up in redwood and marijuana country. He’d never owned any boat larger than an aluminum runabout with a little outboard motor. But Davis not only bought 1091, he sailed it down from the Pacific Northwest and moored it in Humboldt Bay. Once a year, with his wife, First Mate Bobbie Jo, he took it out albacore fishing.
I called Davis. He knew nothing of the ship’s early history. We arranged for me and my oldest son, Peter, to fly out there in August from Washington, D.C.
“We’ll show you a good time,” Captain Ralph said. The great treat was to be breakfast in Eureka’s Samoa Cookhouse, a huge mess hall that once fed lumberjacks.
Before our trip, I made more calls, sent more messages. I found a crewman: quartermaster and signalman Loyel “Bud” Hoseck. He’d spent the Battle of Okinawa standing on the conning tower beside my father, working signals. Now he was retired in Minnesota. He told me stories my father had not.
“The first night we got to Okinawa, four kamikazes came in at sunset, coming so close you could almost touch them,” he said. “The battleship Missouri was a block away. A kamikaze hit it; there were 41 killed.”
Hoseck had kept a diary and written a brief memoir. He sent them to me. They told of torpedo boats, suicide barges and 1091 gunners shooting up floating boxes and crates on the chance they might be bombs propelled by suicide swimmers; how the ship was on the beach at Ie Shima , delivering a tank, when Ernie Pyle, the famous and beloved war correspondent, was killed a hundred yards away; how they threw away bad mutton and chicken from Australia and lived on little else but macaroni and cheese, a diet so tedious that K-rations were a treat. They had a phonograph but only one record: “Don’t Fence Me In.”
“At night when the big ships were shelling the island and shooting over us, we would have to strap ourselves in our bunks, or the concussion would flip you right out of your bunk,” Bud said. “One strap was across our chest and another across our hips. Sleep was hard to get.”
And there was a story my father never told me, perhaps because of the ending. Bud remembered a kamikaze “that was hit hard and the pilot couldn’t steer his plane into a ship. It hit the water a couple hundred feet from our ship. After the big splash, we couldn’t believe it when the pilot surfaced.…We put a rope ladder for him to climb; we thought we might as well take him prisoner.…As the Jap reached the edge of the ship’s deck, we offered him a hand to help him aboard. That’s when he pulled a knife and was going to get one more American. The guys with guns were alert, and a couple of blasts sent him tumbling into the ocean. One wanted to go down the ladder and get his helmet; they had nice leather headgear.…We didn’t let him go down. But as a comment, [one I] don’t want to dwell on, some military personnel used to recover the gold teeth of dead Japs.”
May 12, 1945: LCI blown up by suicide plane, two survivors. Planes strafed and killed engineering officer and two men on LSM-414. Had been moored alongside them the day before. Suicide plane crashed into New Mexico, killed about 150 men. I saw it come in at dusk, out of sun.
May 28, 1945: Low-flying Jap plane blown up right off our starboard bow. My birthday and a lonely one. LCI hit.
June 24, 1945: Close shave with death. An APD was hit by a Jap suicide plane. We were to escort her to Ie Shima but our orders were changed at the last minute and an LSM and an LCS took our place. Three Jap suicide planes came in low, radar failed to pick them up. Sunk all three ships, just a few survivors. Lucky our orders were changed.
And then there’s the laconic entry of a combat-weary sailor well past making a big deal out of anything.
August 6, 1945: A-bomb Hiroshima. Mail run. Got several letters.
And the war ended. Bud claimed 1091 was alongside Missouri, delivering mail, when the Japanese signed their surrender. Others have doubted this. We may never know.
In more than a year, they spent only two or three days off the ship, and one of the first places they landed for liberty was Nagasaki.
I asked Bud how he liked my father.
“That was another world, the officers,” he said. (There were four officers on 1091.)
I sensed he was ducking the question.
What did the sailor think of him as a skipper?
“He was a good skipper. Your dad would pride himself on being a good navigator.” (Later, in the reserves, Dad would navigate the battleship New Jersey into New York Harbor.) I heard a careful reserve in Bud’s voice. I told him not to worry about insulting me. “He was very particular,” he said, finally, as if he’d had to look for a way to say it. “Very particular, set in his ways. One day he came into the pilothouse when I was at the wheel. He reached over to a porthole, ran his finger along it and said, ‘Dust.’”
Bud paused, still infuriated, it seemed, after all these years. “Dust.”
Particular: I remember that too. I could mow the whole lawn, and the only part he’d see was the one blade of grass I’d missed—a “holiday,” he’d call it, from sailor lingo he’d learned from chipping paint on merchant ships during summer vacations in college.
Now to retrieve my father’s ship from legend and stand on the conning tower where he stood.
That August my son Peter and I flew to Eureka. Captain Ralph and his family—wife and First Mate Bobbi Jo and his daughter Ruth—met us at the tiny airport. He was a bright-eyed guy with his glasses down on his nose. He wore an LCI hat and the air of an eccentric who, with no previous oceangoing experience, would buy a ship and take it from Washington state to California.
“We’ve got it all set up for you,” he said. “We’ll be out on the 1091 tomorrow morning after we eat that breakfast I promised you about at the Samoa Cookhouse.”
Eureka is a faded lumber and fishing town stranded 280 miles north of San Francisco, so far north that Highway 101 reverts into a two-lane road. The ocean is so cold and the air so dank that beaches are always empty. The average high temperature in August is 64. It has the feel of a museum of lost eras, a relic decorated with its heyday’s Victorian houses and hippies who hadn’t changed for 30 years, with VW microbuses and a baffled lethargy.
After a breakfast so vast it was humbling, we drove down to the water, bumping through the scrub and rusty barbed wire fences of never-happen shoreline real-estate schemes. My first glance was over bushes, and there was no doubt: the conning tower with mast and rigging.
“There she is,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Captain Ralph.
1091 was tied to skewed pilings in tidal flats. We came alongside in an outboard motorboat while one of the many friends of the ship videotaped our arrival for history, history being what this was all about.
Up a ladder, and then the impossible was possible, the legendary real. The past is never dead…
“Here it is,” I said. It was all I could think to say, and all I needed to say.
Like other Navy ships I’d been on, it was impersonal and cozy at the same time, rivets and beams, all gray metal or paint—Navy ships seem to be built as much of gray paint as anything else. I felt as if I wasn’t visiting the ship as much as reclaiming it, a patrimony. Our feet rang on ladders, we smelled the eternal paint and diesel smell of ships, we saw marks on the deck where the gun tubs had been (Get him! Get him!).
In the galley we pictured the cook bracing against cabinets, stirring batter with the storied baseball bat as the ship rocked—it was a landing ship and only drew 5 feet of water, with no keel to grip the water beneath the waves.
We toured dim labyrinths of troop and crew compartments lit by bare bulbs, and I remembered troopships in which I’d lain on my rack—canvas strung between pipes—hearing the Pacific Ocean hiss past steel plating.
My father’s quarters, topside, had a porthole and the original desk. I imagined him scrambling from his rack up to the conning tower during yet another night attack, the crew racing along with him to general quarters—sprinting to the gun tubs in helmets, down to the dank sweat of a diesel-roaring engine room, while my father peered into a night sky lit with dirty explosions and the casual arcs of tracers.
Except now, of course, it was a cool and quiet morning in northern California.
My son and I posed for pictures on the conning tower ladder where my father stood a million years ago to have his picture taken, too. My son wore the same hat his grandfather wore. I stood at the wheel in the pilothouse where Bud Hoseck would stand a watch at the helm. I did not look for dust.
Feeling both intensely alone and intensely scrutinized, I climbed to the conning tower and looked out over the well deck to the gigantic power winch on the bow and beyond to the bay. I said a prayer, nothing in particular, just a sort of offering to the gods of war, fathers and memory.
In the years since 2001, 1091 has become a museum moored in downtown Eureka, a tourist attraction. It serves meals cooked in the galley and ladled onto mess trays. It has a dues-paying membership association. LCIs are prospering, it turns out: Another one, 713, is being restored in Portland, Ore.
“I brought the original commissioning pennant,” I said to Captain Ralph.
“Let’s run it up,” he said.
It’s faded now, a long thin thing with seven stars and two stripes, red and white. With rare exceptions, one flies from the mast of every American warship, a Navy ritual. This one flew when the ship powered out of the yard in Michigan.
We hoisted it, along with the American flag. Symbolically or even technically, the pennant meant the ship was my father’s, or so I chose to interpret Navy regulations at that moment.
It’s not even past.
I saluted. I took a picture.
Dad, I hope you know.
Originally published in the July 2010 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
