James McLaren Library of Congress Veterans History Project Interview

so today i'm here with uh james mclaren and i am interviewing him at the benzonia public library for the veterans history project okay james i have a few questions first of all call me jim jim okay uh so where did you grow up i i was uh born in yale michigan and kind of grew up on a farm out in emmett which is uh west of uh port hearn on the way into flint and then i lived in the city of flynn or outside the city my parents didn't always get along and i was raised by my grandmother and my uncle uh bill bill in maryland and my aunt maryland and then i would go back with my folks it was kind of a back and forth thing uh we eventually uh when i was around 12 took no about 14 14 we moved out east where my dad was from my dad was from boston gloucester massachusetts in that area and we lived in north reading i used to go into boston garden watch the celtics play basketball red sox we eventually moved up into new hampshire up in milford new hampshire and and i was there until i was uh 17 18. so did your parents serve in the military at all uh my both of my folks were in world war ii uh my dad was actually at pearl harbor when they bombed it he he was a pharmacist my grandfather had drug stores his dad and uh he joined the army back in 1940 back then you went in for a year to do your service but uh the war started and then you you didn't get out and nobody that went in really got out till after 1945. he went in thinking he he would be a pharmacist he was licensed graduated from boston college but they saw he had a license to sail in and out of boston harbor and so they sent him to tugboat school and he ended up over at pearl harbor a captain of a tugboat a big ocean going one that would go in and out of the harbor and bring uh the battleships and the carriers and he tells a funny story because my mother joined the waves and she was in the navy and he thinks he brought her ship in when she came over to pearl he said he wouldn't have that's uh my mother's side besides my mother her sister and her three brothers were all in world war ii and that was pretty atypical back then the call to duty seemed to go everywhere and my grandmother had a uh back then if you had children in the service you had stars and so she had five uh golden five stars in her window and that represented five children and i ended up with that flag eventually so were your parents happy about you joining the service uh i think my mother was my mother was my dad was and he wanted me to do other things my uncle bill had been in the navy and i always looked up to him and so i decided i would join the navy and along the way got interested in submarines so then applied for the submarine service and then you get tested for that what kind of training did you have to do for submarine submarines um i actually i joined the reserve when i was 17 and went to meetings over at portsmouth new hampshire and they had submarines over there that's when i kind of got interested in then in but i was still in high school i was in the 11th grade then and 17 yeah the following summer i went to submarine school and you uh you had quite a bit of training well first of all you talked to psychologists psychiatrists they kind of wanted to see if you were abnormal enough to join subs not many people the washout in the class was 50 60 i think and and it was pretty rigorous to get into the program to start with uh then we'd start the morning off like at 5 00 5 30 in the morning um and you just had training we had instead an escape tower there was actually one in pearl harbor and there was one in new london connecticut i brought along a picture of it they're no longer there now but years back if a sub sunk and it wasn't too deep you could escape from it and so this tower was to train you to do a sense so you would start maybe at 50 feet and then at 100 feet you would go into a pressurized tank uh maybe eight six eight ten people could fit in it and they filled it full of water and that pressurized it and there was a little air bubble at the top but then you were able to open that door that was in that tank that led to the surface then you ducked out and you started expelling your breath as you did your ascent um if there was diver station along the way to make sure that you kept expelling your air because if you didn't your lungs would blow apart so you kind of just they used to say go and blow you kind of tipped your head back and just started blowing out and it was amazing for the whole hundred feet as you went to the surface the air just kept coming out of your lungs because it had been expanded or concentrated or whatever when you were down at that depth under pressure would you say that was like one of the harder parts of training um yeah we normally saw some people fail that um no i think you either accepted it or decided to do it or not you know kind of put your big boy pants on and did it you had a lot of uh a lot of older people around giving you encouragement you know just don't worry about it just get in there and do it you know that kind of encouragement so what was your favorite part of training oh i enjoyed went to a firefighting school out in treasure island off of san francisco that was kind of interesting learning how to put fires out in a contained area that was a kind of i don't know favor but it was very interesting to learn how to do that and i think later on in life that was a reason i went and joined part of the reason i joined the fire department after the service so like what initially attracted you to submarines um i i think when i was still 17 out in portsmouth new hampshire they had there were some submarines out there and i got an opportunity to go on a few of them and um just got intrigued right then so was there a part of military life that was like hard to adapt to or did you fit right in um adapting yeah i didn't make a lot of friends when i was in school really i was always more to myself i think and so i think it was hard to learn to get along with everybody in a close confinement but once you got comfortable doing that then you made friends for life so how did you keep in contact with your family and friends at home back then i'm really not not much while i was gone for a few years my uh one of my cousins uh patty wrote me a lot of letters and my grandmother who helped raise me wrote me some letters so how long were you in the service well i joined the reserve when i in 64 and i find i was discharged in 1970 when i left the service in 68 i had done my uh obligated time for active duty and went to i had two uncles that were in the fire department in flint in the city of flint michigan and my one uncle bill who had helped raise me told me to come to flint and he would assist me getting on the flint city fire department and kind of went that route and got on the fire department i see you brought your uniform today can you tell me a little bit about it this was atypical back in the 60s you had a rating on the side and this is an older one i think this was one that i had left at home at one time i had a couple others that we cut up and made my wife constance helped me make uniform for the kids for my one son brandon made him a small navy outfit so she'd cut one up and i brought along a set of jumpers a lot of bell bottoms is what they're called and these are called dress blues um a lot of people don't know uh they were first of all the difficulty in using them if you had to go to the bathroom because you had 13 buttons to undo but there was 13 buttons on them and that represented our colonies which these type of uniforms obviously aren't around anymore okay are those awards or certificates for these are some of these are i think have more on the table this was one that i certified in submarines um some of the other ones uh were after i was out of the service after you qualify in submarines it's a rigorous thing to become qualified you have to learn every everything in a submarine and that means every valve every line that you can go into any of the compartments and you can identify or sit down and draw that complete system let it be the fresh water system or the electrical system in a submarine you have to be able to operate everything in a submarine even though you might be uh as a sonar man or a torpedo man etc you can do any any of your fellow brothers jobs to get awarded your your dolphins which are coveted uh you um and when you think you have a booklet that you would have filled out as you go through the sub and uh each uh department uh the head of that department marks it off that you've learned it and then in the end the executive officer and the engineering officer and the cobb which is the chief of the boat the highest enlisted man and chief on the sub walk you through and as you go through different departments they might ask you uh what would you do in this situation or that situation so you need to be able to answer all that and eventually uh if you're correct you pass and you're awarded your dolphins which are on that uniform right there um 50 years later if you're still alive if uh these were mailed to me i didn't even know they were coming and it's i didn't even know about it it's called the holland club and these are certificates pointing out when the year i was qualified on one sub and the fact that it's been 50 years so it's kind of club to be proud of if you enjoy being older i think and that's all these three were and i was ordered it from two different places uh i'm not sure one is a club uh in michigan called the holland club uh the escolar and escalar base it's in michigan that's a submarine club and the other is a national i also belong to the international submarines association too which i joined i'm a life member and i think back in 10 or 15 years ago so you said earlier that some people have like special jobs on the submarines what was your special job i was a sauner man saunderman yeah and putting a cook they did a lot of it in the galley too i used to do a lot of i used to hang around the galley and cook a lot um everybody kind of did everybody's job but you were specialized in something i also used to lock we used to train and deploy udt's underwater demolition teams some of the front runners of seal teams marine recon reconnaissance teams too and we would lock them out of the sub underwater in a skate tank and they could swim in and do pre uh pre-invasion uh estimates uh it was like training for them so can you tell me a little bit more about what you would do as a summoner exactly well we'd listen to whales yeah yeah uh here we just i was usually worked six times six hours on and six hours off back then was your uh shifts so to speak and uh you would just listen uh for any uh any strange noises uh other ships and that type of thing we also did we didn't have radar men normally on submarines because usually it was an underwater thing but the sonar men also handled the radar equipment as you were coming in and out of port or if you were on the surface so can you tell me how you felt the first time you went on like in a submarine you know um like were you nervous or oh yeah definitely nervous uh they uh the first thing you do is uh you're the low low man on the pole so to speak and so you get every nasty job there is they all try to mess on all the fellow people in the subs they try and mess with your head quite a bit they enjoy doing that they might send you off on a wild goose chase to get something which is non-existent but you don't know that you know and so they might tell you to go to this compartment or go see so-and-so uh and get this and he would say well i don't have it i gave it to someone else they played games with you for quite a long time before they finally let you settle in they wanted to make sure that you were going to fit in yeah so they kind of kind of tested your patience and and i don't know your mind you know how you were going to behave under stress so can you tell me a little bit about your like first assignment after training uh was on the on the sub on the west coast called the perch and we were signed out of a longer poll in the philippine islands you everybody knew the first thing you did was mess cook to start with before you decided to in other words you helped in the in the kitchen which is a room about uh half the size of this room to feed 100 people out in the after battery it was called so you you did that and then you might uh you sat on the bow planes with the stern planes the dive planes all the new youngest people sat there and that was uh steered and the ship underwater to go up or down and that type of thing so you might spend usually four hours sitting at a bench with a wheel in front of you maintaining the depth of certain depth and you'd have an officer and a chief behind you directing you and then the executive officer might be in in the room with you or the commanding officer or the diving officer different officers took turns so how long would you be in a submarine at a time um and the diesel boats normally you would be out for a couple of months at a time like not surfacing no not on diesel boyd's boats as much uh they uh not not like the nuclear but we a lot of times we stayed down a week or so we had a snorkel system so we might come to the surface uh and take a swim call if we were out in the middle of the ocean somewhere uh the dis the advantage was you didn't get to take a lot of showers on these subs and everybody smelled you had the smell of diesel fuel on you all the time it was in the air uh and body odor that type of thing uh i found that taking that swim call in the ocean with this salty water i i wasn't impressed so i volunteered to do the shark duty and that's where we usually had two at least two of us uh with a rifle and while the fellows were swimming i kept an eye in case any sharks came by can you explain what swim call is that's where we surfaced out in the middle of the ocean stopped and everybody uh a lot of them uh didn't have a bathing suit uh some guys did but there wasn't any much modesty and you dove in the ocean and swam around and took a break so what did you do for recreation when you're on the submarine uh we used to get back in the 60s we before we left we would get quite a few movies uh and so we would have movies uh usually maybe three times a week and a lot of times there were even current movies that had just been released the movie industry made sure the submarines got those that the navy did if we were near another sub sometimes we would trade movies where we both would uh surface and or meet up and we would send a line over with a pulley and a basket and we would send our movies over and they would send some back sometimes if one of the subs was low in a certain type of food flour or something and they had extra we would trade that way too so um so did you do anything for good luck before you went down under the wall good luck yeah i guess let's see on the sea lion we had a picture of a gal in the uh by the diving station we used to pat her on the butt before we went to the dive mode you know okay um so sorry so how did you like are you still in touch with your friends that you met on the submarine only a couple um actually i was the youngest being that i went in in the submarine so young i got to know a lot of the uh a lot of the older fellas that had been in like 20 years or 25 years you know we're getting ready to retire we're left over from world war ii they've all passed away so we've had quite a few die of cancer submarines like in all maybe ships were notoriously filled with asbestos all the piping was wrapped in asbestos so which they've now found out you know was is not healthy um actually on on the uh one of the fellows i know is over in the philippines that retired and he's in his 90s now i actually have a uh bob a friend is down in detroit and he and i were in at the same time he was a couple of years older there's only about maybe eight or ten that i know of that are still alive so what was what would you say the best part of your uh experience was i think being being with uh with men that you can trust that you depend your life on it's it was an honor to be with them to get to serve with them you could you could leave your wallet laying on on your rack on your bed uh full of money and it would be there when you came back you trusted them a hundred percent with everything and you defended them and stuck up for them so do you recall any like humorous or unusual events that happened um seeing my wife's in the room i'm gonna remember a few i mentioned the shark duty where we would look out for uh sharks while the fellas were swimming and uh we had a young officer had come on board and he came up to me and asked me if i knew how to use it it was an old m1 rifle and i told him i thought i did if i knew how to load the thing well he he immediately ran to the officer up at the deck and told them that you know that i was didn't know how to use it and they knew that what i had said they all had a good laugh over it although that officer was very wasn't very good to me for a long time after that okay uh humorous she asked um the first person regardless of uh how many years you've been in uh but usually the younger people when you go on you're in charge of the coffee pot which is a large huge coffee pot everybody drink coffee and so you were in charge to make sure that the coffee was made all the time the first thing i did uh scene i kind of knew knew about it is i tore it all down and carried it into the galley and started soaping it up well one of the chiefs came by and saw what i was doing and started screaming at me because you never wash out a coffee pot with soap and so i was told never to touch in that coffee pot again and that got me out of that i think a few of the fellows knew exactly why i did it but and actually later on when i went on the flint fire department that happened to be their role you had to make the coffee at the fire station and the first thing i did was tear their coffee pot apart and started soaping it up and they told me never to touch their coffee pot again at the fire station and they sent the word out to all the other stations because when you were new you used to travel the different to not let me touch the coffee pot so you said you would spend weeks under like underwater in the submarine how often would you get to go home and visit family well uh i went home once in two years wow yeah you you get 30 days leave time a year but in the submarines the yeoman station on board actually was the one that kept track of the records so nobody was ever charged you kind of got to take off for a week here and there but your leave time wasn't charged against you so when you eventually got out of the service you could accumulate i think two years leave time normally everybody got paid for that league time so how would you say your years of service have changed you i think i learned to respect a lot of respect for people that that care about other people and i find myself disappointed people that don't don't behave properly so what would you say for future generations that are thinking of going into the service i highly recommend the submarine service it's exciting uh it's changed a lot since i've been in being nuclear there's basically there's not very many i don't think there's hardly any diesel bolts left they've all changed and so it's all nuclear and usually they are out two months at a time completely underwater but it's an exciting career and they still they get to learn that fellowship with other people and how to get along so i see you have some badges next to you can you uh tell me a little bit about those they're uh these are just uh these are just the uh every sub had its own uh type of a uh like the perch perch had that insignia and the sea lane had this one and these are patches you could wear on a vest or that type maybe at a gathering um this medal came with the holland club and like i said i wasn't even aware of it and and uh can you uh hold that up you can see that i have a another one that came from the vfw a few years back that was sent to me uh that was from a vfw club uh down in emmett michigan that my actually great uncles had started the vfw club in hemet when they came back from world war ii and so so do you remember the day your service ended the day it ended uh it was late in 1968 not the exact day so did you return home afterwards or i did my dad had a business but i had already had been talking to my uncle out in flint and so i wasn't in new hampshire very long i went to flint and there was 300 people that were trying to get two positions on the fire department and i luckily because of my uncle's influence i got on the flint fire department became a fireman i found after a couple of years i didn't didn't enjoy living in the city the fact that i'd always kind of lived in the country more and i had been coming i had a place up in uh on the other side of the state uh north of alpena on grand lake i had a little cottage and but i had come to this side of the state a few times and i had a friend up here who had been on the fire department a plumber and so i decided to leave the fire department my uncle was very disappointed that i did and i came up here and started working for a plumber for a while and eventually got into construction so how would you say being in the military has affected your view on it um my view i think i think it was an honor to be in the military and uh highly recommend if a young person not sure what they want to do with their life i think it's good training good rigorous training i think it helped me in my life so are there is there any messages that you would like to leave for future generations or people who are watching this video uh well this country's in a turmoil right now with the politics but it's happened before and you know previous uh i think they need to look back in history and that seems to be being lost right now current in our time i think young people aren't trained aren't instructed in the history of this country enough that they're not realizing how this country was founded and on the principles and and maybe need to learn to get along a little better and discuss the issues uh rather than this division that's going on now in this country uh is there anything else that you would like to say that didn't come up in this interview no this is very nice i wasn't aware of all this that went on that these were being sent out so i thank you for allowing me to do it thank you

Channel: Remembering Benzie

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Length: 35min 14sec (2114 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020