My grandfather served on various subs during and after the war too. His biggest break was that one of his cousins or uncles (has my family's last name "Romanek" and played on the Army's football team pre-WWII) was a good friend with a Navy officer (I believe a lieutenant) in the navy stationed at the major east coast sub yard. This luck on top of my grandfather being fluent in German (my great grandfather was a German who immigrated to Warsaw after WWI and then to America well before WWII) and one of the best welders at the time they saw enter the navy during the draft got him stationed after training for special assignment to his brother's friend's base to be on the welding crews that were involved in the dismantling of some captured U-Boats. After that was done he was put on a welding crew at the base to repair and retrofit subs coming in on the East coast. After the war he immediately got another special assignment and was assigned to repair and make seaworthy an older post-WWI era diesel sub. Once ready for the trip through panama to Pearl he was to sail with it and the crew and await further orders. It was a harrowing trip they made in convoy with another patched up mothball sub. Their conning tower had some major leaks, the largest being around the seal of a porthole in the conning tower (unweldable so he couldn't fix it as he would explain). As they cleared the Florida panhandle on their way to Panama they hit a hurricane and got picked up outta the water and spun around pretty bad since they couldn't submerge to safety due to the leaking conning tower. They lost all their engines but my grandfather was eventually able to help get one of the four engines working. They made contact with the second sub then and got a tow the rest of the way to Panama from her. Battered and bruised they made it eventually to Panama, got the parts they needed and fixed all the leaks in the conning tower. They had fair weather for the rest of their trip to Pearl. Upon arriving at pearl he learned his special orders were to prepare the sub for the Crossroads nuclear tests performed shortly after the war in the pacific. Due to delays and postponements he ended up sitting around Hawaii with not much to do but enjoy the sights for the remainder of his service time before he was shipped back home.
My grandfather was a welder before WWII (due to his profession at the time he was the last of three brothers to join the Navy in the draft because he couldn't enlist due to his employer already buying him outta the draft... threatened to quit if his boss bought him out the next time, so when his time finally ran up he came home to a draft card). He was the third from the front in the Navy line at the draft when a Marine Sargent informed the first ten they would be marines due to a shortage of draftees volunteering for the marines that day. As my grandfather got his turn in the line he approached the navy clerk sitting at the front behind a desk, processing each man's paperwork as their turn in line came up, stamping the first men's paperwork when done and placing it into the "Marines" bin on the corner of his desk. He went down the lines, asking rhetoric questions to my grandfather. The last line before the bottom of the last page, where the stamp would go, listed a draftee's last or current occupation. As the clerk stamped the page and was already halfway to dropping it into the bin marked "Marines" he paused and asked "you were a welder"? My grandpa proudly confirmed it and added that it was for 6 years at a home refrigerator plant now manufacturing tanks. The clerk replied "We really need some GOOD and EXPERIENCED welders in the Navy." and swiftly dropped it into the previously-empty "Navy" bin on the opposite corner of his desk without a single sound of disagreement from the Sargent. The was the first fortune he had as most of those marines ended up not coming home or being wounded during their various pacific tours.
