LEONARD GUPTILL

Leonard Guptill was born in a log house with a sod roof on a homestead near Wanetta, Montana in 1917.  They had no plumbing, electricity, telephone, or central heat.  They hauled water in barrels  from a spring a mile away.  His dad dug several wells, but never hit water.   A painting his sister did of his first house hangs on the wall of the Guptill's home, a reminder of how things were when he was young. 

There wasn't actually a town in Wanetta.  Some neighbors distributed the mail and his folks scratched the land, which was in cattle country, hoping to raise enough to sustain their family of six boys and a girl.  They moved to Oregon when Leonard was six years old, then the family split up in 1927.  His dad moved to Colfax and his mom stayed in Oregon City, so Leonard jumped back and forth a lot.  He and one of his brothers made one trip on a freight train when he was fourteen years old, riding the rails from Vancouver, Washington to Hooper, the closest the line ran to Colfax.  The brothers walked from there, only catching a couple of short-distance rides on the infrequently traveled gravel road that ran from Hooper to Colfax. 

When they were with their dad the boys batched with him and his dog and walked or hitched-hiked to school.  Leonard graduated from the eighth grade at Kamiah, or Skene, a one-room school that had three students the year he finished, the other students being seventh and fifth graders.  They indeed could tell stories of walking many miles through the snow to school from way out on Parvin Road.  He graduated from Colfax High in 1938, having missed several years of school due to moving so often.

He did farm work in Whitman County while in Europe the Brits and Germans warmed up their local war, each turning to their allies to join their battle.  Leonard saw what was coming and decided he wanted to get in the branch of service he preferred, so in February of 1940 he joined the Navy.  He again rode the rails, this time in a passenger car, first class, to San Diego where he was in Boot Camp for eight weeks.  He then went into Radio School, which he didn't like at all.  After a month he found that the dits and dots all ran together, and so in July of 1940 he transferred to the Mississippi and headed across the Pacific. 

On July 24, 1940 he crossed the equator headed for Christmas Island.  He noted that people in the area were still looking for Amelia Earhart who had disappeared three years earlier.  The equator crossing called for some good-natured hazing.  Some of the shellbacks, ones who had crossed before, dressed up as pirates and in other ridiculous costumes.  They had fashioned a long sack of garbage which they made the new crossers crawl through, and insisted that some of the men to stand guard in diapers holding toilet paper rolls up to their faces as they would binoculars.  They had to run a gauntlet while some of the men gave them a whack, but none too hard.  The certificate he got for enduring the hazing made it all worthwhile.  Guptill ended up crossing the equator around fifty times, and also made an Arctic Circle crossing for which he earned a handsome certificate and the right to spit against the wind.

He and the other sailors spent a lot of time polishing brass.  Before the US engaged in combat the Navy required all brass be shined every day.  Once the fleet was in combat they let the brass dull down to keep from being easy targets.  They also scrubbed decks.  They had big stiff brushes they worked with, using salt water to rinse.  The briny water ruined their shoes so they worked bare-footed, causing blisters to rise on the tops of their feet from the intense tropical sunshine. 

When they reached Hawaii the Mississippi  tied up alongside the Arizona.  "The guys from our boot camp were split between the two ships," Guptill said sadly.  "The ones on the Arizona are gone."

"But we lived the good life in Hawaii for a year or so," Leonard said.  "We had good liberty, the weather was great, and duty was easy."  Then in May of 1941, much to his disappointment, the Mississippi was transferred to the East Coast and he went from Hawaii to Iceland.  From June to December of that year, the Mississippi operated with the Atlantic Fleet, guarding commerce on patrol duties in the area between the East Coast and Iceland and acting as a covering force for convoys and lines of communications.  During that time scouting and searching operations conducted in the vicinity of Iceland included a search for the Nazi battleships Shornhorst and Tirpitz, then suspected of violating United States neutrality.  "There were a lot of German subs prowling around too.  We had lost a couple of destroyers," Guptill said.  "And this was before we were at war with Germany.  We never did find those ships."

It was a miserable six months for the crew.  It was bitterly cold, one of the worst winters on record.  Leonard recalls that as a Sailor Third Class he had to stand in the range finder, a steel box high atop the ship, from where they aimed all the big guns aboard ship during battle.  It was used as a look-out post the rest of the time.  During the worst storm he ever encountered, in fact one of the worst recorded in the North Atlantic, the men standing duty had to be tied into an upright position in the range finder in order not to be swept overboard by the surf reaching that highest point on the ship.  They lost three airplanes off their deck, plus all the guns, ones that were bolted down.  A steel ladder up the side of the ship was ripped off and curled up by the crashing surf and the ventilators shipside were all smashed.  Although the ship displaced thirty-two thousand tons and had a top speed of twenty-one knots, when she would hit a surging wave head-on during that memorable storm, the ship would stop dead in the water.

After telling about the storm, Leonard kind of smiled and said, "But at night when we were in our hammocks it was kind of nice.  No matter how far the ship rolled, our hammocks would just kind of sway and stay level." 

Guptill's battle station was three decks below in the powder room.  He worked among 100-pound bags of powder which he loaded on conveyors that sent the powder to the gun turrets.  It took four 100-pound bags of powder to fire one shell.  There were twelve 14-inch,

50-caliber, 65-mile range guns that fired one ton projectiles.  The gunners received their firing orders from a spotter in the range finder atop the ship and their firing power from Leonard and other sailors three decks below.

The morning of December 7, 1941found the Mississippi and her sister-ships of Division Three among the very few undamaged battleships then in the United States Navy.  Leonard and most of the ship's crew were on the fantail watching a movie around 7 p.m. on the 7^th when they got the word Pearl Harbor had been attacked.  The movie stopped and they were called to battle stations in case there was some action brewing near them.  They maintained a twenty-four-hour patrol for several days.  He was assigned a watch with an officer where he examined every inch of the ship for sabotage. 

"It was the first time I had been all through the ship," Leonard noted.  "As it turned out everyone on board was loyal.  We didn't find anything."

After Pearl Harbor had been hit, the Mississippi headed back to the Pacific through the Panama Canal.  They stood patrol duty on the West Coast, then in August of 1942 Guptill was assigned to a newly commissioned ship, the USS Nassau.  It was an Escort Aircraft Carrier docked in Bremerton, commissioned to ferry airplanes to fighting ships in the South Pacific.  After trial runs and fitting out activities in the Seattle area, the ship was underway for Pearl Harbor on October 14.  They were hauling planes, loaded wing tip to wing tip on the flight deck.  They had to be lifted on and off with a crane.  They sailed with no escort. 

"We never saw an enemy ship or plane.  We did see some shot up planes that were returning from battle.  But I never had to carry a gun, didn't have to sleep in mud.  We carried replacement airplanes to ships that would go into battle zones where they could fly off the carrier and do damage." 

In the middle of 1943 Guptill was promoted to Chief Petty Officer, the highest ranking enlisted man in his division.  Later that same year he became seriously ill and was placed in a Navy hospital for six months, after which he was assigned in July of 1944 to the Navy Supply Depot in Clearfield, Utah.  That distant site, far enough away from possible attack, was a safe place to gather, box, and ship items to the front.  The supply personnel would put enough of each item needed on the front lines into crates, each marked with numbers for easy identification when the crate reached its destination in the South Pacific.  The crates were packed on pallets that were able to float.  The pallets, or base loads, were designed so that when a unit took an island they would have all they needed to set up camp.  "When they were ready to set up they had no problem finding a particular tool.  The base loads were complete down to silverware for the Captain's dinner table," Leonard said, rather proudly even after all these years.

In 1945 he had to return to the hospital once again, this time to Oak Knoll in Oakland, California.  But there had been a change for the good in his life.  While in Utah he had met a young woman, a WAVE named Lorayne Wuerffel, from Noblesville, Indiana near Indianapolis.  Lorayne had enlisted and gone through Basic Training at Hunter College in New York, then attended Storekeeper School in Milladgeville, Georgia.  After completing her schooling she transferred to Clearfield, Utah where she met Leonard. 

They married on July 31, 1945.  "The Navy paid for our honeymoon," beamed Leonard.  He was transferred from Oak Knoll to a Naval hospital in Glenwood Springs, Colorado in August and was there until November 2, 1945 when they were both discharged.  "The Navy was real good about letting Lorayne go with me," he said.

After the war Leonard farmed, then served as the Post Master in St. John.  Lorayne worked as a rural carrier after their children were in school.  He and Lorayne raised three children, have seven grandchildren and five great grandchildren.  Leonard spoke of his own grandparents who had seventeen grandchildren in the service in World War II.  Only two didn't return.  Four of the other Guptill brothers served, one a Seabee in the South Pacific and three in Europe.  "We all made it back," Leonard Guptill said quietly.  That is a lot to be thankful for.