MERCHANT MARINE, U.S. ARMY John Kalkow Years before he was old enough to enlist, John Kalkow of Sorrento was helping with the war effort in his hometown of Newburyport, Mass. “I was probably 14 or 15 when I was a block warden, walking up and down the neighborhood at night, after dark,” Kalkow, now 78, recalls. “If I found a house where I could see lights on, I’d knock on the door and tell them to turn them off.” That was 1942, when New England’s seaside communities imposed blackouts out of concern about German aerial attacks and coastal invasion. “As part of a civilian branch of the Coast Guard, I also walked the beaches to see if there were any activities with submarines putting people ashore,” Kalkow said. Just weeks after graduating from high school, Kalkow went to Boston in June 1945, where he tried to enlist in the U.S. Coast Guard. “They had no openings, and the Navy said I was too tall and had vision problems,” he said. “Even at 18 I was 6-foot-4 plus. They must have been thinking in terms of submarines.” Undaunted, Kalkow joined the U.S. Merchant Marine and was shipped off to New York for training at Sheephead Bay in Brooklyn. On Aug. 14, 1945, he was assigned to the S.S. Montclair Victory, one of 534 “Victory” ships built during World War II to carry troops, munitions, food and other cargo to and from both theaters of war. “That was the day before we learned of the Japanese surrender,” Kalkow said. “There was a lot of shouting and dancing in Times Square, but we were anchored offshore and heard it on the radio. We couldn’t get ashore. Good thing, because if we had, there wouldn’t have been a man on that boat the next day, including the captain.” Although the war was ending just as Kalkow’s duties began, there was food to be delivered to European countries devastated by heavy fighting. There were also battle-weary American soldiers eager to get stateside with family and friends. During his first North Atlantic crossing, Kalkow worked as a steward’s mate, overseeing the ship’s pantry. While en route to Antwerp to pick up homebound troops, the ship passed through the English Channel, which had been heavily mined. “There was this forest of masts of the hundreds of ships that were sunk during the invasion of France,” he said. “And when we arrived in Antwerp, the devastation and abject poverty was something I’ll never forget. In Marseilles, there were people wanting to buy the clothes off my back, but this was worse.” After converting cargo holds to bunks, the ship headed back to America with a more than 2,000 troops aboard. “Some of these boys hadn’t been home in four years,” he said. “There were wounded men who started in North Africa, fought in Sicily and Italy and then were shipped back to England for the invasion of Normandy. Some had seen severe action.” Upon his return, Kalkow left the Merchant Marine and signed on with the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. After being assigned to the Henry Gibbons, a 489-foot troop transport, he made three more Atlantic crossings while working as one of four ship’s bakers. Two of those crossings involved bringing war brides and their children to America from a staging area in Belfast, Northern Ireland. “The Irish Sea was still heavily mined, so we needed an escort and a pilot to take us through the minefields,” he said. “One of those crossings was very rough, and there were a lot of scared and seasick war brides. You could hear babies crying, all across the Atlantic. Many of the crew had children back home, and they related to those families and children as if they had known them all their lives.” Kalkow was discharged in April of 1946, less than a year after graduating from high school. Not finding work in Newburyport, he made his way to Hartford, where he found a job managing medical supplies and food inventory for a hospital. At that hospital he met Jane Cooper, a Scottish-born psychiatric nurse who became his bride just after Christmas in 1949. John and Jane Kalkow will mark their 58th anniversary on Dec. 27. Of the more than 215,000 mariners who served aboard wartime transport ships, an estimated 8,300 were lost at sea and another 12,000 were wounded. Of those 12,000, at least 1,100 died from their wounds. “If I had been born a few years earlier, it’s possible I wouldn’t be alive,” Kalkow said of his brief service. “And I was very lucky not to get on the Murmansk run to Russia, where so many ships were torpedoed in waters that were so icy that the survival rate was terrible.” — Tom Walsh