Photo by Derek Redd
World War II veteran Joe Gompers said the time he spent serving in the U.S. Navy on the USS Bannock was the “greatest experience of my life.”
WHEELING — At age 100, Joe Gompers feels that his time serving in World War II was “the greatest experience of my life.”
“You can’t imagine how fast you grow up,” he said.
Gompers’ grew up in fast forward when he joined the United States Navy, going from first-year college student to overseeing dozens of men on a ship in short order. Those years serving in the war from 1943-46, he said, helped mold him into the man he would become.
Gompers had just started his first year at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland when the war began. While at college, he joined a V-12 unit, a Navy college training program that was designed to supplement the force of commissioned officers in World War II. Gompers said such officers were nicknamed “90-day wonders” for the way they reached officer status.
Eventually, he was assigned to the USS Bannock. Gompers said his arrival on the ship was an eye-opening experience itself. On his first day, when he arrived at the mess hall for dinner, no one spoke to him, simply pointed to where he would sit. Everyone in the mess hall snapped to attention when the captain arrived to eat, then snapped to attention again when he departed.
Finally, he found out from a warrant officer why the mood was so unusual.
“He said, ‘You probably wonder what’s going on.’ And I said, ‘Well, this is my first assignment aboard a ship. I don’t know what goes on. I’m just going with the flow,’” Gompers said. “He said, ‘We just had a mutiny on board.’”
Gompers spent three years on the Bannock and sailed to many sections of the world, from Panama to Aruba to Saipan and Tinian to Okinawa and Iwo Jima. The ship’s main job was to tow drydocks to different areas following invasions.
Along the way, Gompers said he learned a plethora of valuable lessons, especially in terms of leading men. Leadership came early for Gompers in the Navy. He was just 20 and 21 years old when he oversaw a 40-man deck crew. That, he said, was where that rapid rise to maturity was most important.
“It gave you the feeling of the necessity of leadership,” he said. “You had to know psychology. You grew up real fast, otherwise they’d consume you.”
Gompers remembers one specific event that tested his leadership mettle, and ultimately pushed him to new levels. Gompers had a chief in his crew that had been in the Navy for about 15 years before Gompers arrived. That chief was a good man to have, except for one problem — he had no patience for “90-day wonders.”
“He knew exactly what had to be done and he was one of my right-hand men,” Gompers said. “But he despised me because I was a ’90-day wonder.’”
One day, the Bannock was salvaging ships out of Buckner Bay in Okinawa after a typhoon hit. Of the 200 ships in the bay before the typhoon arrived, only 11 were left standing. Gompers received orders from his superior to have lines attached to a Landing Ship, Tank to tow it out of the harbor by 5 p.m. that day.
Gompers relayed those orders to the chief, who balked, saying the men wouldn’t do it until they were able to eat. Gompers told the chief the task needed to be completed immediately to make the deadline, but the chief insisted on food first.
“Well, at that point, I have about 40 men standing there wondering what I’m going to do,” he said. “I thought this was make or break for me, one way or another.
“So I said, ‘Chief, you’re on report. You can go to your quarters and stay there until I give the orders to have you released,’” he said. “And I told the men, ‘Now get that line over to the LST now.’”
Gompers worked with that deck crew all the time, he said, letting them know he could get his hands as dirty as theirs when it came to work. That instance is what he felt made him on that ship, because if he didn’t do something at that point, he wouldn’t have been able to give orders to anyone.
The next day, he visited the chief in his quarters. Gompers told him he understood he didn’t like 90-day wonders, but he also knew that if orders weren’t followed people got court-martialed.
“And I said, ‘Now we’re either going to be friends, or you’re going to rot in these quarters of yours until we get back to the States,’” Gompers said. “So he stuck out his hand and said, ‘Mr. Gompers, can we be friends?’ And from that day on, he was the best person aboard the ship to help me.”
Gompers eventually became executive officer of the Bannock, and on the day that chief was discharged, Gompers was on the gangplank to see him off.
“As he left, he came up to me and said, ‘I just want you to know you’re the best damn officer I ever served under,’” he said.
When Gompers left the Navy as a first lieutenant, he returned home and enrolled in law school at the University of Virginia. He enjoyed a long career in the legal profession, serving at one point as Ohio County prosecutor and spending two years in the West Virginia House of Delegates.
As he reflects on his time in World War II, Gompers doesn’t consider himself a hero. He never picked up a gun, never fired a bullet at an enemy. The Bannock, he said with a chuckle, was so small “no submarine would dare waste a torpedo on it.”
Yet he will always hold the utmost respect for the men who were on the frontlines, dodging bullets and mortar fire and risking their lives to fight for their country against the Axis powers. That’s what Gompers wants people to remember about World War II.
“The unselfish sacrifice that all these kids from 17 to 21 made at that time, they were all very patriotic,” he said. “They were willing to fight. They wanted to fight and they knew damn well that when they went into battle, most of them would not come out. And they were still there to do their job.”
