A. Lester Buck, Jr

DOB: 10/5/1921
Service Dates: 1/46-1/48
Boats Served On:
USS Remora (SS-487)

A PERSONAL TRAGEDY

I've now lived almost 75 years on this earth and experienced only one true tragedy, the unexpected loss of a spouse. A lot of people would probably say that I am lucky. Only one tragedy! Until now I haven't talked too much about it, and mostly I just wanted to forget it. Now today, though, there are growing gaps in my memory for details, names, and even dates. It was a blur then and it is, fortunately, a blur now. It is definitely time to write the story before it is lost. It might be useful someday for my progeny to know why I resigned my commission from the Navy so abruptly.

It was mid-September, 1948 and my ship, the U.S.S. Remora (SS487), a submarine of the U.S. Navy, was on a secret mission to patrol the coast of Siberia staying 12 miles offshore in international waters. The patrol area was the entrance to the Gulf of Anadyr area of the northern Bering Sea. It gets cold and windy in those latitudes even at that time of year.

This was the time of the great "Cold War." We had been on station for several weeks and life was pretty stressful. Everytime a Russian ship, of any sort, went by we went to General Quarters, approached submerged as closely as safety permitted, and tried to determine why the ship was out there. At this point the few ships we saw were fishermen. They definitely were not freighters carrying construction equipment for a guided missile base. That was the sort of ship we had been instructed to look for.

My duties at the time were Engineering, Communications, and Diving Officer. I also stood my regular watch as the Officer of the Deck, four hours out of every twelve. Since there were six officers besides the Captain and Exec, we stood watch two at a time--one up on a very unprotected bridge for fifteen minutes getting soaked from wind-driven spray and an occasional high wave while the other went to the engine room. There we had a second set of clothes drying on the hot diesel engines. Diving and operating submerged was a relief. The "Guppy II" class of submarines were not noted for their sea-keeping abilities!

On September 13 in my regular duties as Communicator I was checking what the Navy called the "Fox" schedules. These are messages transmitted simultaneously to all ships from several transmitters located around the world.. From all the numbered messages one simply had to pick out the ones addressed to your own boat. You then received all pertinent messages without your location being disclosed. They are also numbered sequentially. Your radioman keeps these on file for the Communicator and the Communicator, after reading and sometimes decoding them, takes them to the Captain for information and possible action. On this particular day one of the messages from the schedule was missing and, when I inquired of its whereabouts, the radioman was very evasive, would not look me in the eye, and said the Captain had it. This really miffed me and I charged for the Captain's cabin.

At my knock the Captain opened his door and pulled me in, shutting the door again for privacy. He then handed me the message, which stated that my wife, Margie, had been admitted to the Naval Hospital, Balboa Park in San Diego with bulbar polio. I raced to our medical corpsman's library and looked up the disease--the words "usually fatal within hours" hit me between the eyes! To make matters worse was the fact the ship had to observe "radio silence," or otherwise the Russians would locate us and "come over the hill" after us. Parenthetically, a submerged submarine can receive radio messages but cannot transmit since the antenna is grounded by salt water. So all I could do was sit and wait for each four-hour F-schedule. A day passed and I only learned that she had been transferred to the San Diego County Hospital and was in an iron lung. That was even more ominous. That meant that she was unable to breathe on her on. Another day passed and I found another F-schedule message was missing and again I raced to the Captain.

She had died. When I said I wanted to see the message myself the Captain was very reluctant but I forced the issue. The rest of the message gave me, personally, the choice of being transferred to another sub in the area, homeward bound, in the vicinity of the Pribiloff Islands, at night, during the next several nights, or I could remain aboard. The Captain tried to talk me out of going back and I got fairly upset, even though our relations until this point had been superb. He had a wife and children also and I could not fathom any caring person not wanting to go back! If not for the funeral perhaps, but at least to check his motherless child who had been exposed to such a terrible disease. Finally the Captain reluctantly agreed, and, following instructions, surfaced momentarily to send an affirmative message to the squadron commander. We then by Fox schedule received instructions to proceed to the Pribiloffs. I was off on a too long and sorrowful trip. I was totally dazed, almost in a trance, and not thinking too well. But I was going home…

The Captain had a transfer plan, I'll give him that, and in mild weather conditions it would have worked like a charm. The Pribiloff weather was something else however. It was a howling gale that assigned night but the Captain was not going to let that interfere. He was hell-bent on getting back on patrol, afraid that such a four-day interruption would cause us to lose the war with the Russians. I might also add that he was an impetuous type, a skilled submariner with World War II experience, and he had captained the Navy football team in the late thirties. He was headed for admiral stripes and he wanted a super grade for this deployment.

The plan was for the two subs to form a line ahead, in the lee of the islands, at night, with the Remora ahead into the gale. We would then pass a buoy astern with a long hawser. It would be picked up by the other sub. The Captain had designated the senior enlisted man, the Chief of the Boat, and the First Lieutenant, a reserve lieutenant who didn't know much about seamanship, to deliver me one way or another to the trailing sub. First a small note as to our clothing. This was long before the days of the warm "wet suit" used these days. All we had was the greenish flannel-lined cotton stuff that weighed a ton when wet and merely absorbed seawater.

So, at the appointed moment, we three were called to the main deck. What a sight to behold! Safety lines tied about six enlisted men to the sub, and they were pumping up a small rubber boat about six feet long and four feet wide. They finally got it into the water and stabilized and we three men jumped We were saturated almost instantly and hung on for dear life--that's right--life! Holding onto the trailing hawser we inched backward toward the other sub about a hundred yards or so astern. It was a long ten or fifteen minutes. We were soaked. All were getting weaker and colder but we all held that trailing line in a firm grip.

When we reached the bow of the other sub a similar situation prevailed and I didn't think any of us would be able to pull ourselves to the other sub but here the high waves helped and we scrambled on board. Then we were tied to that sub's safety line and hustled below. A bunch of good-looking humans then stripped us, wrapped us in warm blankets, and handed us a couple of medicinal brandies......living again at last! As a final note our Captain canceled the return of his two men as being too dangerous and sent them back to the States via this sub. I had verbal orders to report to the Naval Air Station, Kodiak, Alaska for which this sub was bound. I had high hopes of catching the next military flight to the States from there.

After several more days of misery--no one really had the heart to discuss my problems, and there are no chaplains aboard a sub-- we put in at Kodiak. I commandeered a jeep and driver and raced to the naval air station. Believe it or not, there was a P2V, an anti-submarine plane, warming its engines for take-off at the end of the runway. I headed for the control tower and hurriedly explained my problem. The tower operator relayed my story to the pilot. The co-pilot…can you believe…just happened to be one of my very best friends, Jack Brown, classmate, company mate, and whose plane I had flown on several weeks before as an observer in a joint air-sub exercise at Adak, Alaska. The destination of this plane was Whidby Island NAS, near Seattle, Washington, an ideal location to catch a civilian plane south. What a break!

After deplaning Jack raced me in his car to the civilian airport at Seattle where I left within hours, via Denver, and thence to Tulsa for my last date with Margie, her funeral, and a forlorn reunion with my only child, now a motherless one!

Postscript: In the last few months I have had research done on the Remora's patrol report. This document reveals only a few contacts with Russian ships. In essence it revealed the patrol was a "loser" in that the mission was useless for all intents and purposes. The research also confirmed what few questions and answers from my fellow officers that I contacted long ago. Nothing!

In reading various articles and books of the "Cold War" during the 'Fourties" I sometime muse that Margie was a casualty also. I know it sounds like a stretch to reason such. But had the Remora not been scheduled for such a patrol at that time she might never have been struck down. And the irony of Salk vaccine being invented five year later. One wonders about this universe…..is it just a lottery?