Part 1.2 The Covers of the Book of Life Henry Irvin DeGraw
Henry Irvin DeGraw
As
a child in 1930, the family lived at Missaukee.
He attended Elementary School to Year 8.
At
the time of the next census in 1940, he was a labourer and lodging with the
Green family. They had a daughter aged
17, named Eleanor.
In
1941, he joined the US Military, and served in the Navy.
He
married Letta Belle French in 1946 and they had 4 children.
After
the war they lived in Cadillac in Michigan.
He later married Evaline Rauch in 1967.
Henry died 1st March
2004, in Sandford, aged 83. He is
buried at the Midland City CemeteryHis brother, Almon DeGraw compiled the family history and he alludes to Henry marrying three times, but there is no evidence of that. Just perhaps Eleanor Green was his intended, and then events in Hawaii changed the everyday lives of young American men forever.
Henry's
story is best told by his sons and daughters.
Telling
his ancestor's stories, is the purpose of this Family History Compilation.
Henry DeGraw’s Ships kept Sinking. Story from his children
Many World War ll. sailors did not survive sinking ships. Henry DeGraw of Midland Michigan, survived four. The last one nearly took his life.
On his twenty-first birthday, 25th April 1941, DeGraw enlisted in the U.S. Navy. It was eight months before Pearl Harbour. After taking basic naval training Naval Station Great Lakes (NAVSTA Great Lakes) is the home of the United States Navy's only boot camp, located near North Chicago, in Lake County, Illinois. and Little Creek, Virginia for specialist training and gunnery school, he was assigned to a transport ship in Baltimore, Maryland and set sail to New York, Nova Scotia, Iceland and Archangel Russia into the White Sea.
Convoy PQ 18 was an Arctic convoy of forty Allied freighters from Scotland and Iceland to Arkhangelsk in the Soviet Union in the war against Nazi Germany. The convoy departed Loch Ewe, Scotland on 2 September 1942, rendezvoused with more ships and escorts at Iceland and arrived at Arkhangelsk on 21 September. From 12 to 21 September PQ 18 was attacked by bombers, torpedo-bombers, U-boats and mines, which sank thirteen ships at a cost of forty-four aircraft and four U-boats. The convoy was defended by escort ships and the aircraft of the escort carrier HMS Avenger which used signals intelligence gleaned from Ultra and Luftwaffe wireless frequencies to provide early warning of some air attacks and to attempt evasive routeing of the convoy around concentrations of U-boats. United States Navy Armed Guard and British Naval and Royal Artillery Maritime Regiment gunners were embarked on the freighters to operate anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons, which made air attacks more difficult and because of inexperience, occasionally wounded men and damaged ships and cargo, with wild shooting.
The convoy handed over its distant escorts and Avenger to the homeward bound Convoy QP 14 near Archangelsk on 16 September and continued with the close escort and local escorts, riding out a storm in the Northern Dvina estuary and the last attacks by the Luftwaffe, before reaching Archangelsk on 21 September. Several ships ran aground in the storm but all were eventually refloated; unloading the convoy took a month. Because of its losses and the transfer in November of its most effective remaining aircraft to the Mediterranean to oppose Operation Torch, the Luftwaffe effort could never be repeated.
Note from Suzanne - PQ18 convoy. Oliver Ellsworth PQ 18 suffered losses The avenger.
Henry DeGraw recalls’ “On the third day out of Iceland, Henry’s convoy came under fire and an enemy torpedo sank the ship. For fourteen hours, Henry DeGraw and seven other crewmen bobbed along on a barrel raft in freezing water.
A minesweeper eventually picked them up. A minesweeper is a very small ship, without enough room for 8 extra men, they were transferred to an English cruiser, HMS Celia”
(Celia was one of the escorts of Convoy QP 2, which departed from Archangelsk, Soviet Union on 3 November and arrived at Kirkwall, Orkney Islands on 17 November. Celia was part of the escort from 11–13 November. wikipedia).
“In 15 foot waves this was no easy task in North Atlantic Sea. The only heat on the ship was in the officer’s quarters, so they put us in there to thaw out,” he added. “After we thawed out, we helped man the guns on the Cruiser. On the way to Archangel Russia, we lost three ships that I served on” Henry DeGraw said, almost with amazement. “I kept moving from one sunken ship to another.”
“We shot down a number of enemy planes with my gunnery crew and sank one submarine” Henry went on to say; “ we lost about forty ships out of seventy ships, plus cargo.” In all that Henry DeGraw remained unharmed.
He was not so fortunate on another voyage, he boarded an American Cruiser in Archangel, sailed to Scotland while being buffeted by 25 foot swells, six weeks later was on a convoy to North Africa. In a skirmish there, DeGraw was wounded by shrapnel in both legs and returned to New York.
After recuperating for three weeks, he was assigned to a refrigerator supply ship which anchored at Charleston Key West, New Orleans, Cuba and on through the Panama Canal. Arriving in Brisbane Australia in late June 1943 a trip half way around the world headed for Sydney Henry DeGraw recalled, “While our ship was docked for supplies and weapons in Sydney Harbour for six weeks, his crew fired upon the two Two-man Japanese midget submarines.
On the night of 29 May 1942, five large Japanese submarines positioned themselves 56 kilometres north-east of Sydney Heads. At 3.00 am the next day one of the submarines launched a reconnaissance aircraft. After circling Sydney Harbour the aircraft returned to its submarine, reporting the presence of 'battleships and cruisers' moored in the harbour.
The flotilla's commanding officer decided to attack the harbour with midget submarines the next night. The next day the five submarines approached to within 11 kilometres of Sydney Heads, and at about 4.30 pm they released three midget submarines which then began their approach to Sydney Harbour.
The outer-harbour defences detected the entry of the first midget submarine at about 8.00 pm, but it was not identified until it became entangled in an anti-torpedo net that was suspended between George's Head and Green Point. Before HMAS Yarroma was able to open fire the submarine's two crew members destroyed their vessel with demolition charges and killed themselves.
The second submarine entered the harbour at about 9.48 pm and headed west towards the Harbour Bridge, causing a general alarm to be issued by the Naval Officer in Charge, Sydney. About 200 metres from Garden Island the submarine was fired on by the heavy cruiser USS Chicago.
The submarine then fired its two torpedoes at the cruiser. One torpedo ran ashore on Garden Island but failed to explode. The other passed under the Dutch submarine K9 and struck the harbour bed beneath the depot ship HMAS Kuttabul where it exploded, killing 21 sailors (19 Royal Australian Navy and 2 Royal Navy). The submarine then slipped out of the harbour, its mission complete.
The third submarine was sighted by HMAS Yandra at the entrance to the harbour and was depth-charged. Some four hours later, having recovered, it entered the harbour but it was subsequently attacked with depth charges and sunk in Taylor Bay by vessels of the Royal Australian Navy. Both members of the submarine's crew committed suicide.
The two submarines that were recovered were identical, and their remains were used to reconstruct a complete submarine, which toured New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia before being delivered to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 1943, where it remains on display[1].
The records held by the National Archives and the Australian War Memorial on the midget submarine attack are listed in the table below.
In the South Pacific
In October 1942, during a march considered one of the cruelest in modern military history, 1,200 ill-equipped, untrained American troops from the 32nd Infantry Division endured more than a month of suffering on the Kapa Kapa en route to the north-coast battlefields at Buna, where the Imperial Japanese Army was waiting.At least two men died of exhaustion during the crossing, and the rest were physically shattered by the trek. Remarkably, after nine weeks of fighting in stinking, hip-deep swamps full of floating corpses bloated by the heat, the Allied troops finally dislodged the Japanese from Buna. But the victory came at a cost. According to General Robert Eichelberger, the commanding officer, fatalities "closely approached, percentage-wise, the heaviest losses in our own Civil War battles."
The soldiers' memories are still searing. "If I owned New Guinea and I owned Hell, I would live in Hell and rent out New Guinea," says Buna veteran Bob Hartman.
After 6 weeks in Sydney, Australia; Henry left Sydney on the USS Chicago’ after taken on additional weapons and supplies headed for Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea and sailed into the Coral Sea Battle. DeGraw volunteered for undercover surveillance on landing barges and help set up guns along the shores. A Japanese radio sending station was causing a lot of problems for the Allied forces.
Henry DeGraw with sixty men went into the jungle some forty-five miles inland which took over 3 days to reach. They located the Japanese hospital with about two hundred patients along with about twenty doctors and nurses with another sixty Japanese at the radio station. “Our orders were to find, destroy and return” Henry remembered. ‘ Even the nurses came out stark naked with hand grenades in each hand ready to throw them. We left nothing standing of the facilities, or anyone alive. Only lost one man in the operation.”
Going back to Buna Harbour, PNG. to land troops and deliver nitro wit then man crew, they found thousands of Japanese bodies floating in the Harbour the result of a battle known as the ‘River of Blood’.
Without that happening, injured and unconscious, I would have drowned. I was later told; I was picked up by a helicopter, with a hook on a line attached to my ammunition belt and lifted me up and then I woke up two days later in the Royal Brisbane Hospital Australia. I had mangled a number of vertebra in my upper back and tore four ribs from my spine. The barge and the ship sunk in the battle and never saw the rest of my crew again. They did send me my machine gun and someone stole it before I could add it to my war souvenirs”.
In December 1943, While delivering troops to Finschhafen, (80 kilometers east of Lae on the Huon Peninsula in Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea.) Henry DeGraw remembers "Our Barge took a direct hit by Japanese aerial bomb” DeGraw explained “ I had a .45 caliber Thompson machine gun strapped to my back, which saved my life as I was blown up from the ship, I came down over the gunwale, the gun catching on the side.
Three weeks later DeGraw was flown to Oakland Hospital California, then to a Recuperation Camp in Yosemite Park California. From December 1943 until May 1944, DeGraw never took a step. ‘My parents were notified that I may never walk again, but thanks to the doctors who tried a new therapy, I recovered,” DeGraw said gratefully.
Henry DeGraw returned to limited duty at Treasure Island, off the California coast, where he was a guard over prisoners and worked in ships service, an operation much like an army or air force post exchange. DeGraw had his duffel bag packed and waited to be shipped overseas once again. “they never called my name” he said.
Henry’s brother Everett, (Edd) was in the five island invasions, including Leyte and was on Iwo Jima when the American Flag was raised at Mount Suribachi, Iōjima, Ogasawara, He survived the war without injuries.
After the WW11. Henry DeGraw worked in the oil fields in Michigan, Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico and eventually formed his own excavation company called Midway Construction.
In the late 2002. Henry was rebuilding the old farmhouse at Jennings and had an accident, falling from a scaffolding inside the house; fracturing a vertebra in his neck. After spending some time in hospital and care recovered but had to take an easier lifestyle with an oxygen tank beside him at all times.
After a time in hospital from Pneumonia… Henry died from heart failure on the 1st March 2004. Midland Michigan.
Thanks to his daughter, Suzanne DeGraw, her husband Tom McMurray, and his daughter in law, Maree Ann Herron DeGraw, for the family research and information.
http://www.navy.gov.au/history/feature-histories/japanese-midget-submarine-attack-sydney-harbour
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