Granddaddy in the First World War with Contemplation, Tribute, … & a Warning
The horror of World War 1 ended with a ceasefire 100 years ago today, although people continued to die by the millions in the numerous revolutions, civil wars, and ethnic conflicts left blazing on every continent except Antarctica while the Spanish flu pandemic burned grimly around the globe. My paternal grandfather, Carroll Melvin Bass, served in the United States Navy in those terrible times. He fought in the North Atlantic hunting German submarines. His ship chased and sunk subs full of sailors from the other side. Born on Sunday the 9th of April 1893, he turned 24 years old three days after the U.S.A. declared war on Imperial Germany. He achieved the rank of MM1, Machinist’s Mate 1st Class, short for Machinist’s Mate Petty Officer First Class, USN.
I remember asking him what it was like way back when I was a preteen lost in fantasies of glory. Pop, our name for him, struggled to describe his experience. He didn’t say much, and he died of cancer on Wednesday 10 March 1971 seven weeks before my 12th birthday. My paternal grandfather’s gravestone is dominated by references to his service in the U.S. Navy during World War I. In death his experiences during the Great War seemed to have formed the defining, even pivotal period of a life lived across nearly eight decades. All I can recall, however, were impressions as if splashed with black and red paint and cold, cold water.
Pop said being on a ship out at sea during the winter was freezing cold and sometimes scary. The ocean was immense, dark, stormy, and deep. The ship was small and noisy. Sometimes too smoky. He and his fellow sailors lived in dread of being torpedoed by German U-Boats and going down far from anywhere. Even when the ocean was calm and beautiful. They were sometimes afraid of sinking themselves when they dropped depth charges overboard.
Apparently his subchasers were made of wood as steel was reserved for the bigger, heavier warships. These small ships were designed to be 110 feet long, hence the nickname 110s, and displaced 85 tons. Top speed was 18 knots, or not quite 21 miles per hour. Those who identified with big, metal ships make fun of the submarine hunters and ridiculed them as “the Splinter Fleet.” I had to find many of those things out by researching online one hundred years later.
My grandfather didn’t get caught up in the stupidity of a war waged primarily as an international civil war between imperial Eurasian aristocrats using legions of the working class as cannon fodder. He didn’t consider how a toxic mix of big banks, corporations, and nationalism led to the Great War and fueled it like fat tossed upon the fire. If he did he kept such thoughts and feelings to himself. Pop felt the necessity of his civic duty to step forward and serve his country even if he didn’t always like everything going on within his nation. He’ll go out among heaving waves into the howling wind and lashing rain.
Used to have a medal of his. Lost it when my house burned down about eight and a half years ago. Kept Pop’s medal upon my desk as a reminder of choices we sometimes must make even when we don’t want to.
The medal was an old, tarnished, coin-like thing. Face-up was an image of a woman in a long dress waving good-bye or hello with a smaller, encircled image of the Goddess of Justice. On the back is inscribed, “Presented by the citizens of Richmond, VA to C.M.B. (illegible) in grateful recognition of patriotic service in the World War, 1917-1918.”
Today the United States is led by an authoritarian usurper too goddamn cowardly to walk in the rain and stand in wet, mowed grass to honor those who fell in battle. This shameless bully couldn’t “celebrate” as he had wanted. The Great War was a great folly that altered our planet forever, and so the leaders of our so-called major powers today best remember this as they boast and connive and play fast and loose with thermonuclear weapons as their warriors engage in near-misses with planes and ships while big banks and transnational corporations profit. Today’s news is fraught with the dangers of another world war. The hyperbole of the mainstream media is bad enough, but it’s the grim analyses of experts in the field who wave the reddest flags.
Pop, I can’t imagine what you and your fellow warriors went thru or felt way back on the 11th of November 1918 or know what your opinions were, and I bow my head to your service anyway. Aye, I bow my head to you Granddaddy in the Navy.
Then I raise my head to look out the windows of a house built in Seattle before an anti-Turkish, pro-Russian Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo shot dead the Archduke of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The man also assassinated the Archduke’s wife the Princess of Hohenberg. I gaze west from the bluffs of my beautiful city into the Olympic Mountains as the morning sun lights them up in a rosy pink glow, lose composure for a moment, and cry.
William Dudley Bass
World Armistice (American Veterans) Day
11 November 2018
Seattle, Washington
U.S.A
Earth
This was originally published as a post to my Facebook page.
SOURCES
Carroll Melvin Bass (1893-1971) – Find A Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/17447396/carroll-melvin-bass.
Feuer, A.B. “America’s Splinter Feet vs. Germany’s World War I U-Boats,” Warfare History Network: Military History, 2018. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/americas-splinter-fleet-vs-germanys-world-war-i-u-boats/.
Creative Commons (CC) 2018 by William Dudley Bass.