NORMAN ZORB

Norman Zorb was born and raised in St. John on what is now the Hollingsworth place out toward Ewan.  He went to school in St. John first through fourth grade, then completed fifth through eighth at Kamiak School near Rock Lake.  Norm spent his first year of high school in Ewan, and when that school closed he finished back in St. John.  His dad farmed back in the days when everything was done by horses. 

Zorb went to join the Navy in 1942 along with George Wagner and Bill Brophy, two other St. John boys.  "The Navy didn't seem too interested in us," Norm said, "So we went across the hall and joined the Marines." The day after the three boys joined the Marines Zorb was off to three months of Boot Camp in San Diego.  He was moved to "Frisco" then shipped out to Hawaii March 7, 1943.  He was assigned to the Washington and stayed on her until the end of the war. 

When I asked him where he saw action, he replied, "I didn't see any at all.  I spent my time behind a steel wall." 

It turns out that steel wall was a five inch gun mount, one of five on the Battleship USS Washington.  What was going on beyond his range of vision was, however, a very vital part of the war in the Pacific.  Norm seemed to want to tell the story of that ship rather than talk about his own service in the Marines.  He handed me a book titled U.S.S. (BB-56) Washington from which the ship's detail below was drawn.  Largely, the ship's story is Norm's story. 

He spoke sadly of the demise of his ship.  It was decommissioned after the war and offered to the State of Washington to be used as a memorial, but the offer was refused.  The State of Ohio wanted the movable goods aboard her, but a museum in Olympia claimed them, then stored them in a basement never to be seen in public.  Her hulk was sunk out in the Pacific.  It seems the old battleship was outdated and it was easier to sink her than to cut her up for scrap.  Norm talked about some ships that had found permanent harbor along the East Coast and wished the Washington had found such a berth.

The USS Washington served thirty-eight months in combat zones after being commissioned May 15, 1941.  During that time she sunk the Japanese Battleship Kirishima and Destroyer Ayanami in night battles on November 14 and 15, 1942.  She set a record, steaming for 31,494 miles in seventy-nine straight days, sinking more combat tonnage than any other U.S. Battleship in World War II.  She also shot down twelve enemy planes, bombarded ten enemy islands, and repelled fifty-three air attacks.  She fired 3,535 rounds of sixteen inch shells; 28,062 rounds of five inch projectiles; and over 350,000 rounds of twenty millimeter machine gun bullets.  The Washington was never hit nor did she lose a man to the enemy.  In her remarkable history she earned fifteen Battle Stars.

The Washington was a North Carolina Class battleship, one of the first "fast battleships" built to compete with all of the post World War I capital ships constructed by foreign Navies.  Her distinctive design incorporated an innovative hull shape, propulsion system, and layout design.  The maximum beam of her hull was not directly amidship as with most battleships, but at about three quarters aft.  Machinery spaces were concentrated in that region, making her sufficiently compact to pass through the Panama Canal.  She was propelled by two inboard propellers mounted on a skeg, a narrow vertical extension of the hull that extended from aft of the third turret to nearly the stern.  Skegs were added for hydrodynamic reasons, the skegs forming a channel to direct the flow of water under the ship, reducing drag and increasing its maximum speed, which was thirty-two knots at full steam.  The most important advance on the Washington was the layout of the main battery.  No ship before it had mounted nine 16-inch rifles, in triple turrets, each weighing nearly three thousand tons.  This configuration provided some of the most powerful weapons ever put to sea.

The main battery could fire a one ton shell nearly twenty miles.  Its SG surface search radar, used to obtain fire control information, limited the need for visual references to a target.  The main battery was supported by a secondary battery of twenty 5.38 guns mounted in ten twin turrets distributed on both sides of the Washington's superstructure.  That battery was used against both surface vessels and aircraft.  The skill with which they were fired contributed as much or more to their success as did the weapon.  The gunners built up their skill to firing twenty-two rounds per minute, preventing even the Japanese Kamikaze aircraft from penetrating the intense barrages created by the 5.38s.

From behind the steel wall of the front right turret of the five turrets on the left side of the ship, Norm Zorb fired his share of those 28,062 rounds of five inch projectiles.

The Washington started out in the Atlantic, setting out from Casco Bay, Maine on March 26, 1942 heading for the North Atlantic.  She returned to New York City on July 21, 1942.  Then, in August, she moved through the Panama Canal and headed west with a three destroyer escort destined for three years of the greatest sea and air battles in history.  When she reached Hawaii, Norm Zorb got on board.

The names of the battles the Washington fought in, with Zorb at his post, are names that screamed from the headlines of newspapers all over America at that time: Okinawa Gunto, Guadalcanal, Savo Island, Solomon Islands, Gilbert Islands, Kwajaelein-Majuro, Marianas, Coline Islands, Leyte, Luzon, Shoto-Iwo Jima, and the China Coast.

Japan had taken a wild run, gaining an empire of over twenty million square miles of Asia and the Pacific, an area five times greater than that taken by Germany at the height of its conquest.  That rush of power continued until the Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in the first American offense of the Pacific war.  The tactics it would take to win the war were forged and enforced there: the US would land Marine and Army assault troops, supported by ground attack aircraft and Naval gunfire, on island stepping stones to Japan.   The Seabees would follow ashore and build docks, roads, and airfields to support the next rung up the ladder.  The success of that tactical plan is the history of the war in the Pacific.

It would have been fitting for the Washington to finish her wartime career in Tokyo Bay.  However, after a major overhaul at Puget Sound Navy Yard in July and August 1945, she passed through the Panama Canal arriving in Philadelphia October 17, 1945.  She then became part of the Navy's magic carpet carrying veterans home from Europe.  On her second trip she weathered eight terrific storms in as many days.  After that valiant service, she was decommissioned and sent to her watery grave.

Meanwhile, Norm had returned to Bremerton and remained there until the end of the war.  Once released from the Marines he went to work in a veneer plant in Olympia .  He met Shirley Junge who had worked there during the war to replace men who had enlisted in the military.  He and Shirley were married June 1, 1946 and raised two boys and three girls while Norm first worked for a Ford agency, then went back to farming.