Published Saturday, May 31, 2008

Sanders received 'satisfaction from serving my country'

The Times-Herald

The destroyer USS Cowie had shelled enemy targets for days as Allied troops hit the beaches of Sicily. Guns roared night and day, planes buzzed over constantly, and the crewmen were dead on their feet.

During a short break in the firing, Robert Sanders was allowed to leave his post and go topside.

It was brutally hot on deck, but Sanders was exhausted. He found a piece of shade beneath one of the ship's torpedoes and settled in.

He had just fallen asleep when a blast from a 5-inch gun rocked him awake.

"For a minute there I didn't know where I was or what was happening," Sanders says. "I thought it was the end of the world."

Then Sanders realized his biggest problem wasn't loud guns or a lack of sleep. The torpedo he was under was covered with cosmoline, a jelly-like rust preventative. While Sanders slept, the cosmoline on the torpedo had melted ... all over him. He was covered in the slick, greasy substance.

"I knew it was going to be trouble," he says. "I tried to wipe it off and that just made it worse."

Sanders tried everything he could find to remove the cosmoline. Nothing worked. Someone finally allowed him to take an unlimited shower ... in salt water. The grease is long gone, but the memory remains fresh.

"I didn't think I'd ever get clean," he says. "That was really a big aggravation."

Sanders didn't have such problems when he was growing up in Coolidge, Ga., just outside Thomasville. The family farmed tobacco, corn and peanuts, and Sanders spent much of his youth working the crops.

By the time Sanders was a teenager, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was bringing electricity to remote farms and farm communities across the country.

Sanders loved watching the railroad flatcars piled with power poles roll through south Georgia week after week. He admired the workers who followed the poles and envied the fancy spiked boots that enabled them to climb the tall poles.

"Those guys were a fun group, and I guess that got me to thinking about doing electrical work," he says. "It just took a while to get to it."

Sanders graduated from Coolidge Public School in 1940. He worked briefly as a dishwasher at a local restaurant then decided to move south.

One of his best friends was Christine McKinney. By the time Sanders finished high school, Christine's family had moved to Miami. Sanders missed her, so he moved to Miami and took a job at his uncle's plaster business, carrying wet plaster for 15 cents an hour. After a while he needed a change and took a job delivering telegrams.

One day he delivered a telegram to a neon sign shop. Sanders was impressed by both the business and the mess on the floor. He asked the shop owner if he needed somebody to clean up. The owner said yes, and Sanders started the next day as a janitor. But he had something else in mind.

Local electricians were required to be union members, but the shop owner let Sanders learn a few tricks of the trade. Sanders eventually got his union electrician's license. He also found time to start courting Christine.

A budding romance was interrupted by the start of the war. Sanders joined the Navy, and in the spring of 1942 was in basic training at Norfolk, Va.

After basic, Sanders boarded the cruiser USS Philadelphia. His electrician's license earned him an appointment with the ship's chief electrician.

The chief started Sanders out with menial jobs but eventually let him repair and build new heating coils for the ship's countless coffee pots. Sanders proved himself quickly and moved to more responsible jobs, including working on the ship's generators and monitoring the power supply for one of the turrets that housed three of the ship's 5-inch guns.

In July 1942, the Philadelphia sailed for Scotland, providing security for a convoy of ships being delivered to British and Russian allies. German submarines had sunk hundreds of ships in the north Atlantic, and Sanders admits he was nervous when the voyage began.

"I just hoped it would turn out right," he said. The first trip was fine, and after one more voyage to Scotland, the Philadelphia joined a 102-ship convoy headed for north Africa. At the time it was the largest combat fleet ever deployed by the United States, carrying 35,000 troops and 250 tanks for Gen. George Patton's west African task force.

In November 1942, the fleet arrived in Morocco and started bombarding enemy targets as troops and transports unloaded.

Among the Philadelphia's targets was a set of massive 133 mm guns on a cliff above the coast at Safi. It was the largest defensive battery in that part of the Atlantic. The Philadelphia and her sister ships took it out in a day.

During the action the Philadelphia's spotter planes located two German submarines that were both sunk.

In the spring of 1943, Sanders was transferred to the destroyer USS Cowie, part of the task force headed for the invasion of Sicily.

The Cowie was on station off Scoglittie, Sicily, on July 13 when the invasion began. The ship was fitted with radar equipment to guide other ships and planes through the area and toward the beaches where the assault took place. The Cowie also pounded artillery batteries on shore, blew up bridges and roads, and destroyed a column of German tanks about to overrun an American infantry regiment.

After the invasion force was ashore, the Cowie hunted German torpedo boats in the Straits of Messina, destroying several.

"It was always hot and heavy out there," Sanders says. "For a boy out of the cornfields, it was a whole different world."

The Cowie returned to New York in September 1943, and Sanders was assigned to a submarine chaser that guarded small New England harbors against German submarines.

Submarine nets had been installed at the harbor entrances to keep German subs out. Sanders' ship opened and closed the nets as American ships came and went. The weather was brutal and the job was tough, but in January 1944, Sanders' biggest problem wasn't enemy submarines, but a bad appendix that had burst while he was at sea.

While he was being taken to a Navy hospital in Rhode Island, Sanders' belly was packed in ice to slow the spread of infection. He was in the hospital a month, then got a two-week leave. Sanders knew just how to spend the free time. He headed south to Miami and on Feb. 7, 1944, he and Christine McKinney were married.

The honeymoon was short and sweet and Sanders left for Syracuse, N.Y., to study turbine engines. By June 1944, Sanders was in Fort Pierce, Fla., at the Navy's Amphibious Training Base learning life aboard an LST.

LSTs could cross an ocean or run right up on the beach to deliver troops, equipment and supplies. Sanders liked the LSTs, but says at least one LST captain didn't.

"He said he'd spent his whole Navy career trying to keep ships away from land, and now he was learning to drive them onto the beach," Sanders says. "It was an awful big adjustment."

After training in Florida, Sanders went to Massachusetts to help supervise while his new ship, LST 941, was built. When the ship was launched, Sanders became a plank holder, a member of a ship's original crew.

In late 1944, LST 941 sailed for Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides islands near Australia. By then, Sanders had a bigger worry than the upcoming combat.

Before he left the States, Sanders learned his wife was pregnant. As the due date drew near, Sanders anxiously searched the mail for any scrap of news. But the ship was changing positions so rapidly Sanders was always a step ahead of the mail. He had no idea what was happening back home.

After months of wondering and worry, Sanders caught up with his mail in Hollandia, New Guinea, and learned he was the proud father of a baby boy.

"As soon as I heard that, I really wanted to get back," he says. "It hurt not being there to help my wife and be with my baby."

LST 941 unloaded equipment and supplies for several months then headed for battle. In April and May 1945, Sanders' ship landed troops in the invasions of the Palwan and Visayan islands. In June 1945, LST 941 took part in the invasion of Borneo.

Sanders says by the time American troops landed on Borneo, all the Japanese planes had been destroyed but one. It caused a problem. One night Sanders was on deck when he heard a small plane flying overhead. He didn't recognize the plane's sound but realized it was an enemy aircraft when the plane dropped a bomb that landed directly between LST 941 and a sister ship parked right beside it.

"The blast wave was enough to blow you backward," Sanders says. "We were all glad it wasn't any closer, I'll tell you that."

After Borneo, Sanders traveled on to Luzon, Leyte and Manila. He was in Manila when the war ended.

Sanders made it back to Miami on Christmas Day 1945. His son was a year old when Sanders saw him for the first time.

"That was the best day I'd had in a long time," Sanders says. "Seeing that baby for the first time was something special."

The war was over but Sanders liked the Navy and re-enlisted. He spent the next two years in Key West. A daughter joined the family, and in 1948 Sanders decided to try his hand at civilian life.

He looked long and hard but couldn't find a job that didn't require long periods of time away from home. Sanders didn't even consider the idea.

"I'd spent enough time away from my family already," he says. "I wasn't going to do that again."

In 1950, after bouncing between short-term jobs, Sanders joined the Air Force. Several months of dodging bullets and bombs in the frozen Korean hills near the Chinese border convinced Sanders to give civilian life another shot.

Sanders left the Air Force in 1951, returned to Florida and joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He had a successful career as an electrician until he retired in 1986.

During the latter part of his career, Sanders supervised large jobs from coast to coast. He bought a small travel trailer, and he and Christine went to the jobs together, earning a living and seeing the country at the same time. They always made time to visit their two children and the four grandchildren that came along later.

Sanders moved to Coweta County in 1999 to be closer to family.

"I was always glad I joined the Navy," he says. "The war was a terrible thing, but I got real satisfaction from serving my country that way."