Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson Page B

and Yap. Most recently, she had lent her guns to the destruction of Japanese ships at the critical Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was hard to believe the battle-scarred destroyer was little more than a year old. And as soon as Shepard joined the crew,
Cogswell
wasted no time in restocking and returning to the heat of battle.
    In recent months, the Japanese navy had begun to crumble, and the United States realized that an all-out assault on Japan itself was finally possible. The
Cogswell
was needed for the next phase of the Pacific war: establishing military bases on some of the volcanic islands south of Japan, which would become staging grounds for the full-scale attack.
    The
Cogswell,
built at the famous Bath Iron Works in Maine, was a two-thousand-ton workhorse of a destroyer, capable of reaching nearly forty miles an hour. Her duties were to provide artillery support to ground troops, to find and destroy submarines, and to escort and rescue other ships. She carried more than three hundred men, including up to twenty officers at any given time.
    As junior officer of the deck, Shepard’s first job was to man the ship’s internal telephone circuits. The secretarylike job bored him, and he immediately requested a transfer to the gunnery division, which he considered “a promising prospect.” Still, he was so junior—“the junior J.O.,” he called himself—and the ship so full, he was forced to sleep in a hammock stretched across another officer’s cabin. At first his primary concern was to “get my own bunk.”
    Japan soon gave him more to worry about.
    After two days at sea, a Japanese torpedo ripped into the hull of the USS
Reno,
a cruiser traveling directly behind the
Cogswell.
Men sleeping on
Reno
’s top deck were blown overboard, and the rest of the crew jumped from the fast-sinking ship into the sea. The Cogswell U-turned and began plucking sailors from the oily waters as the
Reno
struggled to stay afloat. Shepard recognized two of the exhausted men as academy classmates.
    “Have been running into all kinds of people that I know that are in our class,” he reported, somewhat nonchalantly, in a letter to a friend. “Why, only a few days ago we picked Joe Schwager up out of the oil-covered waters.”
    Cogswell
pulled 172 of
Reno
’s sailors and officers aboard, then slowly escorted the damaged cruiser away from submarine-infested waters toward safety. Three days later, a vicious typhoon struck the
Cogswell
and its convoy, tossing the ships around like bath toys for two days. That was followed by occasional but thwarted attacks by Japanese suicide planes. When she finallyreached the apparent safety of the U.S.-occupied port on the atoll of Ulithi, the
Cogswell
was hit with reports of Japanese mini-submarines prowling the lagoon, and Shepard and the crew stayed at their battle stations through the night. Just before daylight, one of the enemy subs fired on a Navy tanker, and dawn bloomed with the exploding tanker’s demise. The crew was killed, but
Cogswell
helped hunt the Japanese submarines, four of which were sunk by U.S. ships. At the end of his first month as a seaman, Shepard’s ship was awarded a unit citation for rescuing the
Reno
’s crew and then escorting and protecting the wounded ship.
    Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, the belligerent, blood-thirsty commander of the Third Fleet, praised the entire
Cogswell
crew for “a brilliant and courageous piece of fighting.”

    The war in the Pacific was the Navy’s war. Its ships, its planes, and its Marines (which were and still are part of the Navy) wrenched Pacific islands from Japanese hands, one by bloody one. Far from home and seemingly overmatched by enormous and well-trained Japanese forces, the Navy made surprising progress in its efforts to establish military bases on the islands south of Japan, in preparation for an expected assault on the enemy’s homeland.
Cogswell
and the hundreds of other ships in the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet,