WATFORD CITY, N.D. (AP) - In a cedar-lined cabinet in the basement, George Hayden keeps the clothes he wore when he was little more than a boy, far from the farm, serving his country in the deep blue sea.
He was a submariner, a torpedo man, at a time when sonar made a submarine a sitting duck for depth charges. Of all World War II fighting men, submariners sustained the highest percentage fatality rate. If the charge didn’t kill, the drowning would. One in five died.
Fifty-two of the submarines from the war are still on eternal patrol.
Hayden is 89, living alone on small well-tended acreage just on the Watford City limits. His wife passed on, his children grown. His daily companion is a small poodle named Honeybunch that a granddaughter gave him.
He tinkers around the garage fixing things. His hands are busy, his sharp mind alive with the task at hand and decades of memories to sustain him.
Once a year on Memorial Day he opens the cedar-lined cabinet and brings out the distinctive woolen suits of a Navy man, the Bismarck Tribune (https://bit.ly/1DxKbED ) reported.
Hayden can still wear them - the handsome navy blue dress uniform with the white Dixie cup cap, or the plain wool tunic that was paired with dungarees for every day.
A submariner back then had to be fairly short and slender to fit the cramped scale of the boat. At 136 pounds, he is smaller now than when he was drafted in 1943, and volunteered for the submarine branch of the Navy. No one was assigned that deadly duty. And not all volunteers made it either. Hayden said only half his group made it through training on a vintage submarine from the first World War.
“I really think they made us take training on that old thing to see how claustrophobic we were. Other guys were really bothered by pressure on their sinuses and ears,” he remembers. He was not.
He learned how to fire torpedoes in a small forward compartment - containers of dynamite, fired by compressed air from a steam-driven turbine.
“Some didn’t work right and were capable of sinking the sub they were fired from. There were a lot of duds,” he said.
He was assigned to the USS Ling, a sub that was behind schedule and not commissioned until May 1945. The war in Europe was over and the Japanese surrendered in September that year.
Hayden’s crew never fired a torpedo at an enemy target and the USS Ling never entered the theater of war.
“We were supposed to be bound for the Pacific, but it all ended. We were too close to the end gate. Our captain was so disheartened at not being able to do damage to the Japanese that he resigned his command,” he said.
He served his time - “I can’t say I really liked it, but it was good duty and the food was good,” he said. He never saw his old submarine again until the late ’80s when he went aboard where it had been pulled up river as a tourist attraction in Hackensack, N.J.
His name was still on the original roster, his old bunk just as close to the ceiling as it ever was.
In a few weeks, Hayden will be present when the newest submarine in the Navy’s fleet is commissioned in port at Groton, Conn.
The USS North Dakota, long enough to fill the Bismarck Community Bowl and a complex nuclear-fueled war machine capable of launching 12 Tomahawk cruise missiles, will officially become part of the country’s defensive fleet.
The idea of attending the Oct. 25 ceremony was suggested by Jerry Samuelson, the McKenzie County veterans service officer.
“I started reading about it and mulled it over. I’m not doing anything that’s all that important right now,” he said. “I want to see the difference in a nuclear-powered sub. For me, it’ll be like going on a Carnival Cruise ship,” he said.
Samuelson, a retired submariner from the USS Ohio, Trident class, will keep Hayden company and saw to it that his costs are covered through American Legion charitable gaming funds. Samuelson said he is so pleased that Hayden, one of few surviving local veterans from WWII and the only submariner, will make the trip.
He’ll be there with all the military brass and North Dakota dignitaries and citizens when the flags fly, the band plays and the USS North Dakota enters active service.
And he may just slip on his old white sailor cap in memory of the young boy who volunteered for perilous duty in an unforgiving ocean and made it home again.
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Information from: Bismarck Tribune, https://www.bismarcktribune.com
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