Surviving Servicemen: Jennings Ferguson

[thedrifter]

Surviving Servicemen: Jennings Ferguson

By G. SAM PIATT
PDT Staff Writer
Published:
Sunday, December 14, 2008 10:50 PM EST

While American soldiers, marines and the air corps fought World War II on land and in the air against Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific, U.S. Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class gunnersmate Jennings Ferguson was fighting a war of a different sort.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill dubbed it "The Battle of the Atlantic." It was fought on and beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The Sub chasers vs. the Wolf packs � the U.S. destroyer escorts vs. the German U-boats.

Ferguson, who dropped out of Wheelersburg High School and joined the Navy in September 1943 as a 17-year-old, spent his two years as a sailor onboard the USS Otter DE 210.

His destroyer escort helped put one U-boat and its crew on the bottom of the sea and took another one captive with its crew of about 70 men intact.

There were 218 men on the Otter, which was 306 feet long and about 37 feet wide.

"We were family," Ferguson said. "We slept and ate together and fought together. I know this sounds crazy, but the few times I got home on leave I couldn't wait to get back to the ship. We wanted to fight the Nazis."

The seemingly unsinkable ship also fought the elements. It went through the heart of a South Atlantic hurricane that had sustained winds of 128 mph. Once in the North Atlantic, up around Norway, the ship iced completely over, the added weight threatening to sink it like a rock.

In early 1941 the Germans announced that ships of any nationality taking war supplies or food to Britain would be torpedoed. The U-boats ranged from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic. They hunted in wolf packs of eight or nine, sometimes as many as 20.

"We were a killer squadron of six ships to a squad," Ferguson said of the destroyer escorts. "Once, north of the English Channel, we formed a convoy of 22 ships on the hunt for one German submarine. We chased it about eight hours.

"We broke into groups of three and the Otter and two others dropped our depth charges right on top of the sub, which was down about 60 feet. We saw lots of oil and debris on the surface, but no survivors."

From 1939 through 1945, the German U-boats sank 3,500 allied merchant ships and 175 warships.

At the same time, 783 U-boats were sunk. During the last two years of the war, the Allies sank submarines faster than U-boats could sink Allied ships.

The Otter was built in Charleston, S.C., and was commissioned there in 1944. Ferguson and his shipmates went to various schools for training, took the ship on a shakedown cruise to the Bahamas, and headed out for the war.

Ferguson saw many atrocities on his more than a year of war duty on the Otter. One DE in his convoy was torpedoed by a U-boat and went down in 12 minutes. Of the ship's compliment of 218 men, 78 were rescued. The Otter picked up eight of them and later life-lined them across to a bigger ship.

Ferguson said he plucked one of them out of the sea. "He was clinging to a 4 x 4 with a life jacket on. I pulled him on board. He was nearly frozen. He was shaking so he could hardly talk, but he whispered in my ear, 'God bless you, mate.' I took him to the galley and held him in my arms while I fed him two bowls of steaming soup. He survived."

The sub taken captive by the ships in the Otter's squad actually surrendered a day after Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over. It had a crew of about 70.

Seventeen of the German submariners came on board the Otter and Ferguson, as a gunnersmate, was placed in charge of them. A Prize Crew went on board the sub and stayed with the others during the four days it took for the Otter to tow the sub into Boston Harbor.

''My 17 prisoners were convinced I was going to kill them," Ferguson said. "They didn't realize the war was over. I ate with them, slept with them, and after I divided up two cartons of cigarettes among them finally convinced them nothing was going to happen to them. They lightened up, and when they started talking, I found that several of them spoke English."

Ferguson was discharged Dec. 22, 1945. He had married Juanita Hay of Wheelersburg while home on leave June 22, 1944.

They have five daughters: Brenda Preston, Connie Kaltenbach, Debra Thompson, Viki Ferguson and Shelli Cottrell.

Ferguson worked 40 years for the N&W Railroad and they live now on a quiet street in Wheelersburg.

For years after the war Ferguson had bad dreams of fishing dead and mutilated bodies out of the water, of gathering their personal belongings to save for their families.

He would not talk of his war experiences with his wife or their five daughters. But after the Otter crew began holding reunions around the country, he began to loosen up and talk a little of those days at war on the wild Atlantic.

There have been nine reunions and he said the one held last year was the last. Of the 218 men he served with, only about a dozen, as far as he can determine, are still living.

The Otter is on the bottom of the ocean. It was among a group of decommissioned ships that went down under an awe-inspiring mushroom cloud from a test of an atomic bomb in the Pacific Proving Grounds.

Which leaves one to wonder, Ferguson said, about how eager sailors of today would be to go down to the sea in ships.

Ellie