For almost two years during World War II, Harley J. Wenninger manned a big gun on one of the most combat-hardened Navy vessels in the Pacific, what one writer called “the unbeatable ship that nobody ever heard of.” A protector of aircraft carriers and troops landing on hostile shores, it had a task of honor at the Japanese surrender 80 years ago.

Wenninger grew up outside Allentown in the farming village of Greenawalds. His father, born to German immigrants, was a skinny but strong-as-a-bull World War I veteran from Cincinnati. While training for the Army Ambulance Service at Camp Crane in Allentown, he met a local girl he wouldn’t forget.

Maude Frantz became William Wenninger’s bride several years after he returned from France. They had two daughters and two sons, Harley being third in line. The two-story frame house they rented on Whitehall Avenue had an outside toilet, no running water and only a parlor heater to beat winter’s cold.

“Half the time the fire was out because we bought cheap coal, all slate,” said Wenninger, 99, of Wescosville. “In the morning, you had to start a whole new fire and take the ashes out. We’d sit and pick the coal out of the ashes and re-burn it.”

Like almost everyone else around, they didn’t have a car. William took a trolley to Fourth and Union for his job with the Allentown-Bethlehem Gas Co., today’s UGI. In 1950, he saved three men overcome by carbon monoxide at a factory being built on 18th Street.

Harley did odd jobs and earned enough to buy a bicycle, $15, so he could hook up with friends and shoot hoops. Admission to high school basketball games cost a quarter, which he got by removing ashes from a neighbor’s house.

The Wenningers grew fruits and vegetables in their backyard, and during Prohibition, William brewed his own beer. Sometimes a meal for six was just a pot of potatoes and a bottle of ketchup. At 13, Harley started hunting with a double-barreled shotgun he borrowed from a great-uncle. He shot rabbits and pheasants that ended up on the dinner table. “That was good eating then.”

For three summers, he lived and worked on a produce farm on Huckleberry Road, starting at $1.25 a week. “Soon as school was over, they’d come and pick me up in a truck, and I wouldn’t go back home until school started.” He knocked on doors to sell onions, apples and other goods, and worked a stand at a farmers market behind the Sears, Roebuck store at Seventh and Turner. On the farm, he tended the two horses that pulled the plows and sprayers.

In 10th grade, Harley quit South Whitehall High School, now Parkland. He didn’t like it, though he had played basketball there for two years. Instead, he made mattresses for the Army at Komfo Products on Lehigh Street just below the Little Lehigh Creek.

With the U.S. at war, he worried about being drafted into the Army — he didn’t want to sleep in foxholes — so in fall 1943, he enlisted in the Navy. He was 17.

After boot camp at the Sampson station along New York’s Seneca Lake, he and other recruits rode a train across Canada for five days, sleeping in the seats of old Pullman cars and eating a slew of beef tongue sandwiches. Their destination was Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

That’s where Wenninger, now 18, boarded the USS San Diego, a gun-laden antiaircraft light cruiser built by Bethlehem Steel. It had just aided in the capture of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands and was back in the States for an upgrade. On Jan. 4, 1944, it steamed out of the bay to join a carrier task force at Pearl Harbor.

In his own words

I was a kid. I’d never seen the ocean. I’d only been away from Allentown once, and that was to visit my grandmother in Cincinnati.

For starters, I didn’t have a bed for three days. I laid on the deck and used a sea bag for a pillow until they found me one. I was really sick for a couple days. They gave me Saltine crackers. I got over it and was fine after that, even in typhoons.

They made me a deckhand, chipping paint and doing all kinds of stuff that had to do with maintaining the ship. Then they promoted me to first-class seaman.

They had a ritual for us “pollywogs” crossing the equator for the first time. We had to do things like go head-first into a can of garbage and roll a potato up toward the bow with our noses. There was this fat, ugly guy who wore a diaper smeared with mustard, and we had to kiss his rear end.

Our ship had guns all over the place — 20 millimeters, 40 millimeters and 5-inch guns, and torpedoes. Everybody had a station.

After a while, I got to be a third-class gunner’s mate. My station was always on the 5-inch gun in the second turret from the bow. We had two guns in the turret. I was the shell man on the starboard gun. I’d take the shell out of the hoist and put it on the rammer tray in front of the powder case. Then I’d pull the lever to load the shell and powder into the breech.

The powder man wore big asbestos gloves up to his elbows. When the gun fired and the powder case ejected, he’d catch the hot case and throw it out a little hatch onto the deck. Then he’d get the case coming up out of the scuttle and lift it into the tray for the next shell.

There was a dummy machine back on the fantail that we trained on. We’d have competitions, and the fastest powder man and shell man would get free gedunk ice cream. Gedunk was the ship’s store where you could buy snacks and cigarettes. In that hot weather — and it was hot as hell — ice cream was a real treat.

Lucky Strikes were only a nickel a pack, 50 cents a carton. When the smoking lamp was lit and we had a working party, like for getting stores aboard or refueling or loading ammunition, the guys that smoked drifted away. The rest of us had to keep working. So I started smoking.

All the time I was on that ship, I was never on the bridge, never in the boiler room, and never down in the magazine [where ammunition was stored]. You went from your bed to the chow hall to your station, and that was it. You went up ladders and crawled through hatches. It was like being in jail.

I slept right in the bow. There was no air conditioning. It was just hot air coming down through the fresh-air tubes to the floor. We’d take our sailor hats and hook them on the tubes to deflect the air up, so we could have some comfort.

When we went through storms, man oh man, it was bad. One was so bad, we tied ourselves in our beds so we could sleep. Two straps, across the chest and legs. My bunk was the middle one. It was the best of the three, because you had to go up a ladder to get into the top bunk, and the other one, when you rolled off it, you were on the floor.

Every day, the ship had general quarters at sunrise and sunset. If you worked midnight to 4, and you got off at 4 and sunrise was at 5, you had to go back to your battle station. Sleep was pretty hard to get.

The food wasn’t too bad. I could eat anything. The best thing I got was SOS, ground-up hamburger on toast. A lot of people hated it. I loved it. We’d get watery, powdered eggs. Pork chops were always floating in grease. They had to ladle them onto your plate. When things got really tough, the flour the bakers used to make bread would get little black bugs in it. You had to pick the bugs out of your bread.

The thing is, we never knew where we were. They never told you where the hell you were going. You go here, you go there, and that’s it. Nobody ever explained anything to you. We were close to carriers all the time. The Japanese planes went for them. At Leyte in the Philippines, we were watching a movie on the fan deck, and all of a sudden a kamikaze came in and hit the back of a carrier next to us. In about five seconds, 750 guys were back at their stations.

We fired our 5-inch guns to support the invasions, to get the guys off their landing craft onto the beaches in the early morning. My first battle was the landing at Kwajalein [in the Marshall Islands].

The shells weighed 54 pounds. When we were bombarding a beach, the guns were horizontal, almost level to your chest, so you’d have to lift the shells high to load them, sometimes to eye level. Every third round was a tracer that would light up the beach.

Sometimes we went through 50 or a hundred rounds on one gun. The noise was deafening, and we didn’t have earplugs. We might be firing for a couple hours. The guns would heat up, and the grease on the breeches would get like liquid, and there’d be grease on your face and hands. Sometimes the barrels would get so hot, the paint would peel off.

We couldn’t see anything from the turret, but they had hatches on either side of it. One time, either Saipan or Iwo Jima, we’d made our run. We opened our hatches and saw explosions and vehicles moving on the beach.

Every night around chowtime, we listened to Tokyo Rose on the ship’s loudspeaker. She was saying how the Japanese were winning the war, that they just sank another carrier and all that bull. Everybody got a kick out of it. We knew she was lying.

We were in seven typhoons. Our ship could make a 47-degree list, and one time we went to 45, so we almost capsized. Sometimes you didn’t see daylight for a couple days, because everything was hatched down. We didn’t know what day it was. The worst part was I was in the bow. It always went up before the fantail did, then we’d go down, and half the time the fantail was still in the water. Up and down we went. Up and down. Up and down.

I went 12 months before I ever stepped on land. We got to a little island called Mogmog [in the Carolines’ Ulithi Atoll]. They let us go ashore for two hours and gave us each two cans of beer. Then we went eight more months without getting off. Even when we were in dry dock for repairs, we had to stay aboard.

That was almost 20 months without stepping on land.

Epilogue

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, the San Diego crew heard that the Japanese might soon seek peace.

Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the 3rd Fleet, chose the San Diego as the flagship of a task force that would enter Tokyo Bay after the surrender. It would be the first major Allied warship in the bay, having won the honor due to its exemplary record and the competence of its captain, William Mullan.

The San Diego led three destroyers, two seaplane tenders and a high-speed transport into the bay Aug. 28 and anchored about a mile from the large Yokosuka Naval Base.

“The Japanese had to identify all their artillery on the surrounding hills with white sheets,” Wenninger said. “Everything was white, like it had snowed. They had one-man submarines, suicide jobs that looked like big, oversize torpedoes. They had them piled up on the beach like they were on sale.”

On Aug. 30, the San Diego covered Marine landings on the bay’s eastern shore and the boarding of a damaged battleship, the Nagato. It moored at the Yokosuka base, becoming the first Allied warship to dock at Japan’s homeland. Yokosuka’s commandant arrived to surrender the base.

“I remember seeing the Japanese walking down the dock. The Marines were frisking all of them. We were top-side all over the place, hanging off the masts and over the side of our ship, anyplace where we could get a good look.”

Halsey and Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz came aboard that afternoon.

The San Diego began its homeward journey on the historic day, Sept. 2. It passed the USS Missouri about the time the Japanese signed the surrender document on the battleship’s deck. Steaming out of Tokyo Bay with 250 officers and men as passengers, it headed for San Francisco.

Since 1942, the San Diego had covered 300,000 nautical miles without losing a man in combat or sustaining any major damage. It earned 18 battle stars, second only to the carrier USS Enterprise.

Wenninger walked away from his ship in its namesake city, but his stint in the Navy wasn’t over. “I was home for a little while and then I had to go back, because I didn’t have enough points to get out.”

For the next six months, he helped steer the attack transport USS Calvert, another Bethlehem Steel product. It steamed to the Philippines to pick up troops for the occupation of Japan and to bring men home.

Wenninger was honorably discharged in April 1946 at Bainbridge, Maryland. “I ran to a phone to get a cab to a railroad station and get the hell out of there.”

Back in Allentown, he was a roofer for the L.A. Acker Co. and then a UGI pipefitter. He stayed with the gas company for 37 years, retiring as a customer service supervisor in 1987. A lifelong outdoorsman, he belonged to a hunting camp in Centre County. On his 90th birthday, he shot a buck there.

Seventy-four years ago, he and high school pal Dalton Schaadt founded the Parkland Trojan Alumni Varsity Club, which continues to support Parkland School District athletics, award scholarships and bring alumni together. Wenninger is still a member.

One evening in the late ’40s, he drove his new Ford convertible to the Superior Restaurant on Hamilton Street near Eighth. He had brought a buddy to pick up his girlfriend, who worked for Bell Telephone. She and two other girls from the company got into the back of the car. One was Olive Best, originally from Red Bank, New Jersey, and the daughter of a Jersey Central Railroad agent. Wenninger said to himself, “I’m gonna latch onto that one.”

Olive, an Allentown High School graduate, wouldn’t marry him until he’d gotten his GED diploma. He earned it in 1950, and the next year, they said their vows.

They had two daughters, Anne Wenninger and Jane Oskam, and traveled the world from Iceland to Australia and Europe to China. In 1974, they moved from 20th and Washington to a rancher Wenninger built in Wescosville, where he helped build others.

Olive was a prolific journal keeper, filling volumes with her writings. After retiring from Bell as an assistant manager, she volunteered at Lehigh Valley Hospital for decades. She died in 2020.

Wenninger has attended reunions of the San Diego crew, but not since the one 10 years ago.

In 2004, he and Olive went to San Diego for the dedication of a memorial to what its builders called “a great crew, a gallant ship.” Sixty years earlier, the San Diego carried him far from home on a perilous adventure.

“One minute you never were anyplace, and all of a sudden you’re all over the world. I was never scared, but I was glad when it was over, you know, to get home and do the things that normal people do.”

C. David Venditta is a freelance writer.