U.S. NAVY

George Pooler

George William Pooler was a fighter, but he preferred boxing to the kind of fighting he knew his country wanted men to do in the Army.

He was known as “Bulldog,” but, as a Mainer, he was a bulldog with a taste for the sea.

“I just liked the sea,” Pooler said of his decision to join the Naval Reserves in 1942. “I always did like it.”

Pooler, lately of Bucksport, was born Dec. 20, 1920, in Scarborough. After graduating from high school in 1940, he worked odd jobs on farms before joining the Naval Reserves as a coxswain.

“I wanted to be in the service but I didn’t want to be drafted,” Pooler said. “I was afraid of the draft, that they’d put me in the Army and I didn’t want to go in the Army.”

After training, Pooler patrolled the Kennebec River for submarines. But soon, his presence was needed in the Pacific theater. He joined the crew of the USS Pittsburgh, a 13,600-ton heavy cruiser.

“That was a beautiful ship,” Pooler said of the then-newly built craft.

In addition to being beautiful, the Pittsburgh was a lifesaver – cruising in Okinawa in March 1945 when a Japanese kamikaze pilot attacked the nearby USS Franklin.

“She flew right into the deck,” Pooler said. “There was gas all over the place. Blew up the whole deck, and those guys all jumped overboard,” Pooler said. The ship wasn’t in danger of sinking — these men were on fire.

In addition to the kamikaze, Pooler said, other Japanese planes swarmed the area, trying to thwart the Pittsburgh’s rescue efforts.

“They tried to shoot the guys that were picking the ones out of the water,” Pooler said. “They’d come in and shoot at you and fly off.”

Pooler and his friend, a man named Nishenko, pulled 21 men from the sea.

“We’d pick them out of the water, take them back to our ship, leave them there, then go back in the zone where they were fighting,” he said.

“This Nishenko was kind of a character,” Pooler said. While performing rescue missions, the two men were shot at repeatedly without sustaining injuries.

“Nishenko, he’d say, ‘Well Georgie, we lived for another beer.”

Not long after the experience with the Franklin, the beautiful Pittsburgh nearly fell to pieces itself.

“We had hit something,” Pooler said. “They said it was a submarine that we hit but nobody knows for sure.”

The collision broke the bow of the ship. Pooler said they knew the bow would break off entirely unless they got to a shipyard to reinforce it.

“But we didn’t get there before the typhoon came.”

After the busted ship battled the forces of nature, the Pittsburgh’s crew had to back the ship into Guam: going forward would have destroyed the bulkheads.

Pooler had a 10-man crew under him to shore the bulkheads. One day, after about an hour of work, the 10 men disappeared. Pooler’s superior demanded to know their whereabouts.

“We had a chain locker back then. We used to sneak and go back there and play poker,” Pooler said. It was in this chain locker that he found his guys, with a case of Four Roses whiskey belonging to the ship’s officers. “They said, ‘To hell with you. If the boat’s sinking we’ll go down happy.”

“I said, ‘You better hope the son of a bitch sinks because you’re in bad trouble.’”

Pooler was never awarded any medals or citations; he didn’t apply for any, though he nominated his fellow rescuer, Nishenko.

Pooler has been married twice. He had three children with his first wife and three with his second, Emma, who had been married before and brought her own three children into the match. Those nine children have yielded an abundance of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

After the war, Pooler went to work at National Biscuit. “I was a baker, making baked bread and cookies.”

“Bulldog” Pooler also continued to box in Portland as a featherweight of 126 pounds.

Two of his sons followed in his footsteps in later decades. It was their decades of experience in the military that partially worried him so much on Sept. 11, 2001. They were just the right age, he thought, to be called upon again in a time of war.

The attacks in New York and Washington, Pooler said, shook him up quite a bit for other reasons as well. It reminded him of the disaster he witnessed when the USS Franklin was attacked, of the men who had been charred and brutally wounded by another suicidal pilot.

Pooler calls the current war “senseless.”

“Our war wasn’t senseless in a way,” Pooler said, “but in my opinion, any war is senseless.

“People who are smart enough to get in higher office ought to be smart enough to talk things over,” Pooler says today. “If you’ve got a president smart enough to be president, he ought to be smart enough to talk our way out of war.”

— Ashley O’Dell.