What follows is an interview with Donald Kirkwood, an Engineman on the USS Sailfish (SSR572) detailing his life before, during, and after his service in the United States Navy. He served in the Navy during the years 1957 to 1961. His life was not only interesting to follow, but also to write about in the accompanying vignette. I can only hope you can glean as much enjoyment and enlightenment from this as I did.

Scott: Alright to begin, could you just give me a little background information on what your life was like before the Service?

Don: I was a farm boy; I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, on a farm. And I went into the Navy right after high school. It was a...hmm lets see…6 of us, 7 of us all enlisted at the same time at Oil (?) City Pennsylvania, it was the closest town big town near where we grew up and it was the closest recruiting center. We all skipped school one day just before we graduated and we went down to the recruiting center and, umm 2 of us joined the Navy, and uh, 2…3…3 joined the Air Force, and 3 joined the Marine Corp.

Scott: And about when was all this?

Don: March of 1957, we went down to join, and as soon as we all graduated we all went to Pittsburgh and were inducted into the Service at Pittsburgh all at the same time. And we split up there and went…I went to…my buddy and I went to Bainbridge, Maryland, to boot camp…umm the 3 guys that joined the Marines, they went to a Parris Island, South Carolina for their training and the guys that joined the Air Force I don’t know where they were sent I don’t remember.

Scott: Have you kept in contact with the other guy that went to the Navy with you?

Don: Uh, not lately we did up until, maybe 6 years ago, but uh when he got out of the service he went back home to Pennsylvania, and when I got out of the Service, I stayed here in Connecticut, married my wife, which was a native of Connecticut, born and raised in this house right here (gestures all around himself) and uh so we’ve more or less lost contact but I see him at class reunion, and that’s ‘bout the extent of it.

Scott: Alright, so you enlisted, what would you say were the reasons you enlisted in the Navy?

Don: Well, in the farming country, in Pennsylvania where I grew up, there was either being a farmer, being a coal miner in the coalmines, or working around on little…uh no future jobs. So I figured that the Navy was my easiest way of getting an education, furthering my education, and traveling, seeing the world.

Scott: What was it like willingly leaving your friends and family behind?

Don: Well, it was a little hard because you were leaving everybody but having one buddy look at you who you went to 12 years of school with going into boot camp with you, it wasn’t like being totally by yourself. And I really had no trouble making friends or getting along with people so…it wasn’t like…you got a little homesick but it was alright.

Scott: Alright, you said that you were trained at Bainbridge, Maryland?

Don: Yep, Bainbridge, Maryland

Scott: How exactly do you spell that?

Don: Well, hmmm…. Love?, (voice in another room) “Yeah?” Bainbridge, Maryland B-A…. (voice of Mrs. Kirkwood) “B-A-I-N-B-R-I-D-G-E” Alright thank you. That no longer is a Naval Recruiting area…boot camp facility. They closed that up… ‘bout 2 months after I went there the closed up Bainbridge and moved everything to California and all they have in Bainbridge now is a WAVs or WACs or GRANs actually, the Navy Women’s boot camp is still there. And there’s a Radio School and the Corpsman School is all they have there to my knowledge at that facility now.

Scott: And your training itself, what were your feelings about the training, was it terrible, was it fun, was it…what was it?

Don: Well, I didn’t have it as hard as a lot of them because I caught on fairly fast and made friends quickly with the boot camp drill sergeant. And the first couple of classes we went to and tests we took I was fairly high on the tests so I got picked as one of the guys to be Master of Arms of the barracks. I still had to go through the training, but my highest priority was keeping the barracks clean and ready for inspections. So I got out of a lot of the harder training because I was working in the barracks keeping it clean. But the classes was interesting…and the rifle range, being a farm boy and hunting all the time in Pennsylvania, the rifle range was a snap for me, no problem there.

Scott: Ok, moving into your service itself, what rank did you eventually rise to?

Don: I eventually became an EN2SS, second-class engineman, and the SS stands for Submarine Service.

Scott: So, you worked in the engine room on submarines?

Don: Yeah…it started out as…well from boot camp I went right straight to Submarine School in New London, and when I finished Submarine School, I went to the Great Lakes to Engineman School. And I was trained on the 12-cylinder diesel Fairbanks (?) motors. It’s the same engine as locomotives. And then from there I went to Norfolk, Virginia and went onboard my first ship, the USS Sailfish. And I worked in the Engine room, started out as an Oiler, cleaning out the bilges and wiping down the engines and doing all the dirty work, and then as you advanced in rank, like I worked my way up to become a throttleman, and when I made Second-class, they needed manpower in Auxiliary Gang, which is Air-Conditioning, Refrigeration, Air Compressors, the uh hydraulic things. So they sent me to AC School, to Air Compressor School, and then being second-class when I got back from school, I took over the Auxiliary Gang, which they called the A-Gang or Auxiliary Team and I was in that until I got out of the Service.

Scott: This is all still on the Sailfish?

Don: I went on the Sailfish, stayed and never left it. I put four years on the Sailfish. It was a radar picket, it had a rotating, bobbing radar antenna (Mrs. Kirkwood comes in) “You might want to share this” (She hands him a large photograph of the USS Sailfish). Thank you. That right there is a picture of it coming into New London.

Scott: (Scott gestures to the men standing on the Bow (front) of the ship) Are you one of these people here?

Don: Now this was taken after we come out of the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia. So the radar scope used to be right here behind the sail (he points to a section of the sub behind the command tower about halfway along the ship towards the ship’s aft) and as I said it was round, and the scope was just like a regular radar scope. The antenna rotated 360° and it bobbed 45° up and down so you were scanning 360° around you and scanning from the water surface to the air surface and our min job was to…your radar on Aircraft Carriers was not long enough to reach from the Aircraft Carrier to land and the land radar was not long enough to reach the Aircraft Carrier. So we sat right in-between them and when the aircraft was launched going into land, if there was any problems, they’d ditch, we had them on screen so we’d know where they ditched. Or coming from the land out to the Aircraft Carrier, when land lost them, we’d pick’em up. And then if there was a land attack on the carrier, we were there as a defense, that was our main job as a Radar Picket, to protect the fleet.

Scott: So then, you served mainly around Norfolk, Virginia?

Don: No actually, I was down in the Caribbean, I was in the Mediterranean, England, but it was all peacetime, from ’57 to ’61, it was considered peacetime, it wasn’t no wartime.

Scott: ’57 to ‘61 you said?

Don: Yes ’57 to ’61, I got out in March of ’61.

Scott: Did you make any new friends while you were on the Sailfish?

Don: Oh yeah, I got one buddy that was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that came on the boat probably, oh ‘bout 6 months to a year after I did. He stayed on with me and we got out about 3 months apart and we both married girls from Connecticut, he married a girl from Hartford. He lives in Newington now, works for a water company and we keep in touch. Periodically we’ll call one another.

Scott: Who was your commanding officer during your time on the Sailfish?

Don: Captain O’Grady was one, he was quite the character. He was Irish, and he let you know he was Irish. We had a banner in the gangway going from the pier onto the ship and on each end of the banner he had big green shamrocks on it to let everybody know that he was Irish. But he was very savvy; he had a lot of good tricks. He was an older Captain, he had been in wartime, so he had lots of experience, lot of good tricks up his sleeve.

Scott: Do you remember a particular event that sticks out in your mind concerning your time in service to the country, any particular thing, like maybe a funny story or…

Don: Well, not actually funny, hmmm…well we rode out a hurricane off of Cape Hatteras

Scott: Where is that exactly?

Don: Off of North Carolina. And it was uh, quite scary, but uh…a submarine, if you’re on the surface, and you hit a storm, you most certainly stay on the surface. And if you’re submerged when you hit a storm, you most certainly stay submerged because at one point when diving or surfacing, your equilibrium is zero. And with that big sail on the top of the ship, if a wave were to hit it, a strong enough wave at that zero point, you could spin like a top and end up upside-down. So it would be just under emergency conditions that we would dive or surface in a bad storm. So we were on the surface at the time the hurricane hit and we rode it out.

Scott: So its worse on the surface than it is underneath?

Don: Oh yeah, when you’re underneath Scott, you’ve got no rollin’, no pitch; it’s just like sitting in a chair. There’s no waves, no weight, nothing to…they only times you’d get any up or down if you were diving deeper or coming up. If you’re on the surface on a calm day, and you went to sleep, and you dove and didn’t hear the diving alarm go off, and you woke up, you didn’t know whether you was up or down.

Scott: During the hurricane you were in the engine room?

Don: Yeah I was in the engine room; I was a throttleman at that time, running the engines. And uh, we were taking 45° rolls; she would lay right over, snap back up and roll over the other way.

Scott: So who else was with you in the engine room at the time?

Don: Just myself and my Oiler. When you was on watch in the engine room, there were two of you, two people manning the fore engine room and two people in the aft engine room, a throttleman and an Oiler on engine room watch. In Auxiliary, you was by yourself. So we stood three section watches, you stood four hours on and eight hours off. And there was only 3 of us in the Auxiliary Gang so you stood watch by yourself.

Scott: So an engine room on a submarine, what would it look like down there?

Don: Uh…hmmm…two big soup cans lying on their sides with a three foot aisle between them. And these soup cans were as enclosed as a casket, but we had them painted, each engine room had their own paint décor that trimmed their engine to suit their lighting. It wasn’t the drab navy grey that the outside was painted with. We had painted our engine room painted a cream color, and the other engine room was painted a mediocre blue and then in the control room, the room with all the controls and gauges and stuff, we had soundproof booths built in there so we could keep out the noise. Well, you still got the noise from the engines but not as much. And on the doors on the booths we had the ships insignia painted on it. We had a Puerto Rican fellow that was my Oiler who was a very good artist, and when he was on watch and he didn’t have any work to do he would just sit there and draw and paint.

Scott: So where you guys were at the throttle, were you guys in a soundproof booth?

Don: Yeah

Scott: And in there, since this is an engine room it probably smelled like diesel right?

Don: Yes diesel

Scott: Was it overpowering or was it…?

Don: No, you get used to it. It a…you talk about funny stories, when you went ashore in the winter time, course the Navy has the wool blues and they would pick up the diesel odor, you didn’t smell it but you’d walk into a restaurant or a bar, and you never had to worry about finding a seat (he chuckles) they would move away from you because they could smell the diesel and you were so used to it you didn’t smell it. And you could send your clothes to the cleaners and no matter how many times you cleaned them that diesel smell stayed in that wool, it stuck to it, it never came out.

Scott: In the engine room, since it was an enclosed are, it would be really hot right?

Don: It would get hot and we had your main induction for bringing in fresh air for around the engines and it had a cover about…that size (indicates a size with his hands) about 10 by 12 that we would pull, it was an inspection cover, and we would pull it off and let cool air, that was our air conditioning unit. The rest of the ship was air-conditioned, but your engine rooms was not air-conditioned.

Scott: Ok, lets talk about after getting out of the service. How was your life like after the four years in the service?

Don: When I got out it wasn’t that hard a transaction really. I got married right after we got out and got a job at…the first job I had was working at a gas station in West Hartford for two months until I got married, and after I got married I went to my honeymoon and then got a job at Dunham and Bush in West Hartford building air-conditioning and refrigeration units and putting my education from the Navy to good use. I worked there for 5 years and at the end of 5 years I left Dunham and Bush and went to work at Chandler Evans in West Hartford in the maintenance department doing air-conditioning and refrigeration work, hydraulics…Jack of all trades master of none when you work in maintenance in a big shop, but I specialized in air-conditioning and refrigeration, and I worked there until I retired 2 years ago.

Scott: Did you ever have a desire while you were out to go back into the service?

Don: A couple times I thought about joining the reserve.

Scott: Did being in the service change you perspective on life, change how you viewed the world?

Don: It gave you the knowledge about how other people lived. Serving with guys on the boat from almost every state in the Union, you got their way of living. And then when you travel overseas, down the Caribbean and the Islands, you got tot see how desperate the people were down there, try to survive. It was quite educational.

Scott: So you would say that the most important thing you learned in the service was how to deal with other people?

Don: That was a main part of it because living on board a submarine in close quarters you had to learn how to get along with people, if you didn’t then you didn’t stick around too long.

Scott: Any other thing you can think of that I didn’t talk about that you want to say about your time in the service, anything at all?

Don: Offhand I really can’t Scott

Scott: Anything about the hurricane story then?

Don: Well, this is kind of interesting, on the front of the sail’s superstructure was a steel door that went in from the deck level up to the bridge and this door was held down by 8 steel interlocking bars that held the door to the front of the superstructure. And the force of the water ripped that door right off the sail. So that is one experience you have of the power of water. we lost the door, you didn’t even know it came off until the storm finished and you got a look at it. It literally ripped the door right off.

Scott: I hope nobody was hurt

Don: No, no. When you’re on the surface you got your officers on the bridge standing up on the top, and you usually have one communications person, somebody up there with headphones communicating down below. And then you have two lookouts on the bridge and they’re up there any time you’re on the surface. So they were drenched. But being an engineman, my only time on the bridge was one time when we had a fog watch off of England. And the fog was so dense that we had guys on the bow of the boat, on the stern of the boat, and 2 lookouts on the bridge, all on radios to the lookouts coming into the port in England. I was one of the ones stuck in the stern. But that was the only time I did any deck work, the rest of my time I was below.

Scott: Was that before or after the hurricane?

Don: That was after, that was just before I left the service when I made the trip to England. That was about 6 months before I got out.

Scott: Wow. You’ve been all over the place haven’t you?

Don: I’ve been to the North Atlantic, I’ve crossed the Equator, and I crossed the Artic Circle, one trip under the ice…all over the place. On the submarine, you had to know every part of the boat and your job…well you had to know everybody’s job and your job A-1. And when I say everybody’s job I mean that if I was stranded in the torpedo room and they had to fire the torpedo and were shorthanded I had to know how to fire the torpedo. If I was in the radar room, how to use the radar scope, if I was in the radio shack…

Scott: So you had to be a jack-of-all-trades and also be an expert in your own field.

Don: If you didn’t know the whole boat, you didn’t get in. And to do that they gave you one year to learn, to qualify. And on the Sailfish, they gave you a booklet that was about that long (gestures a size about 10 inches) and this thick (gestures a size about 2-3 inches). And it had every system on the boat in that book. And we had to make a drawing of that system and then trace it out through the boat. Like when I was qualifying it wasn’t that hard for me because most of the piping and everything was part of auxiliary and main propulsion. But the chief or whoever was questioning you on that specific phase of it would say “Well, where’s this valve?” And you had to be able to take him and show him where that valve was and part of your piping systems on a submarine are all inter-connectable, like you could have a fuel line and a hydraulic line and say the fuel line broke, you could cross-connect and run fuel through the hydraulic line to bypass the rupture in the fuel line and then bring it back. You could cross-connect any piping system on the boat. Our favorite one was the number 1 sanitary tank. We could cross-connect it to the air horn, it was a bug horn in front of the sail, and you could cross-connect them. And when they blew the air horn, it would also blow the number 1 sanitary tank. It was a dirty prank. But its to explain how you could cross-connect things.

Scott: So as a boat, it looks pretty long, so it was defensibly capable, it had torpedoes like you said and such?

Don: We carried about…3, 6, 12, 18…we carried 18 torpedoes foreword. We had no torpedoes aft… a lot of the old diesels had a torpedo room fore and aft, but the Sailfish, being a radar picket, we only had one foreword, we didn’t have any aft. What we had aft was sleeping quarters and auxiliary machinery space where the Torpedo Room would have been. We also had back there two big air conditioning units, we used them for air conditioning but we could swap them over for heat, like when we was underneath the ice up North. You pipe hot water through the boat to heat, or you pipe cool water through the boat to cool it.

Scott: So was living on the boat a comfortable experience?

Don: Well it was, well I can’t say it was comfortable, but it wasn’t as bad as the old World War II U-Boats. And they were tight quarters; all we had was a bunk with a mattress. And the bunks where I was, in the aft sleeping compartment, we had 8 bunks high and you had maybe two feet between, when you was laying flat on your back between your belly and the bottom of the bunk above you, you had maybe two feet. I liked the top rack because nobody would bother you lay there and nobody would try to climb over you getting out of or into their bunk. It was tight quarters.

Scott: About how many people were there total?

Don: On the Sailfish there was a hundred and five total compliment, that’s officers, chiefs, and enlisted men. But our boat was diesel-electric.

Scott: What’s that?

Don: Now see everybody thinks that the boats ran off of straight diesel. The boats were actually diesel-electric which means that the diesel does not directly power the boat; it powers a generator, which powers the electric motor to the boat. Everybody thinks the diesel turns the props like on a motorboat on the lakes, but it’s not that kind of a motor. The motors were driven with electricity, not fuel.

Scott: I see. Well Mr. Kirkwood, that about does it for my questions. I thank you for your time and it’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Don: As always Scott. Tell you Grandparents that we said hello.

Tape ends