U.S. Merchant Marines & U.S. Air Force

Alvin "Jack" Dyer Sr.

With war raging in both Europe and the South Pacific in November 1944, Alvin “Jack” Dyer Sr. wanted a piece of the action in the worst way.

“All the healthy men were gone to war, and it seemed like the patriotic thing to do,” he recalls now, at age 78, from his Gouldsboro home.

At the time, Dyer was a high-school student in Steuben. At age 17, he was too young for the U.S. military and, at 5 feet 6 inches and 118 pounds, he was too small for the Merchant Marine.

“The Merchant Marine said you were supposed to weigh 125 pounds,” he said. “But they wanted men, so they said I weighed 130 pounds.

“The Merchant Marine was the only thing left if your hearing or your eyesight was not so good,” Dyer said. “We weren’t the dredges of the earth, but I was on board ships with guys with one eye, and I remember the second officer of one ship I was on had only one arm.”

Dyer soon found himself aboard The Marine Raven, one of 75 troop and cargo transport ships built by the U.S. Maritime Commission in support of the war effort. The single-screw, steam-powered C4 ships were fixtures of the convoys that took men, munitions and supplies to Europe through North Atlantic waters infested with German submarines.

“The Marine Raven had seven cargo holds — two for supplies and the other five for bunks,” Dyer said. “We had 3,200 troops on board when we left Boston for Halifax, where we were organized into a convoy of 78 ships, including some Liberty and Victory ships.

“At the late point in the war, they didn’t seem too concerned about German subs, although they did torpedo five of the tankers in hopes that the other ships wouldn’t have the fuel needed to go on.”

“We always had destroyer escorts with us, always circling the convoy in search of submarines,” Dyer said. “There were quite a few ships sunk not too far off Halifax. Those German submarines were everywhere, and nobody wanted to get on ammunition ships or tankers. There weren’t too many who survived the sinking of tankers, because you would get that oil on you and burn.”

Although his ship was capable of 17 knots, it headed toward England at six knots, the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy.

“We traveled without lights, with one ship within 500 feet of the next one,” Dyer said. “We never had any accidents, which is probably because we traveled so slow.”

The crossing required 16 days. The return trip, which brought 1,600 wounded soldiers back home from Europe, didn’t involve a convoy and required little more than a week, he said.

Dyer’s next WWII assignment was aboard a Liberty Ship, the King S. Woolsey, which carried five holds of grain from Portland to England.

“We also carried boxes of gliders and four train engines with tenders,” he said. “We wound up in a bad storm. When she would roll, she would lay right on her side, and it got so rough it felt like the ship would fall apart any minute. We did lose both gangways and one of the lifeboats.”

Before the King S. Woolsey returned to America, Germany surrendered. Soon thereafter, Dyer left the Merchant Marine and joined the U.S. Air Force, where he put his marine skills to use aboard 63-foot vessels designed to rescue downed pilots. His Air Force assignments took him to posts as diverse as the Gulf Coast and Alaska.

Dyer left the Air Force in August 1953 as an airman first class, returning to the Merchant Marines. His assignments over the next 36 years included supporting U.S. Air Force efforts during the Vietnam War and taking tankers of jet fuel from Saudi Arabia to Japan for redistribution to airfields involved in bombing campaigns.

“The Merchant Marines were never recognized as a military source until after World War II, when we were praised highly by Eisenhower,” he said. “They finally gave us a U.S. Coast Guard discharge, and it gave us the G.I. Bill, which I used to buy this house.”

Four years after leaving the Air Force, Dyer married Ramona Young of Corea.  The couple celebrated their 48th anniversary in August.  Dyer is a member of American Legion Post 207 in Trenton.

— By Tom Walsh