Jerrold W. Reed

The past isn’t dead. It even isn’t past.

–William Faulkner

The American submarine Albacore holds one of the most distinguished service records in the World War II Navy. She is credited with ten confirmed sinkings and three probables One of her victims was a light cruiser, 3300 tons, and another, astoundingly, was the aircraft carrier Taiho, 30,000 tons, seen here in the sub’s periscope just before she was sent to the bottom.



Albacore was on her eleventh patrol when she hit a mine of Hokkaido, the northernmost Home Island, in November 1944. She sank with all 85 of her crew. This is the submarine in San Francisco Bay for her final refit in May 1944.


Albacore was lost for seventy-nine years, until last week, when Japanese marine archaeologists found her at 800 feet. This is one of the photographs they took; more will follow once they can send a submersible to more fully explore the wreck which is, of course, also a tomb. It will be treated with respect.


One of the Americans lost was a twenty-two-year-old seaman from just over the county line, from Taft, where I was born. Jerrod Reed joined Albacore’s crew on October 24, 1944, when she left Pearl Harbor. The sub topped off her fuel tanks at Midway and then headed for the Western Pacific, for Japan, and there Albacore disappeared.

It was determined later that she’d struck the mine on November 7. Seaman 1/c Jerrod Reed’s combat role in World War II lasted two weeks.

From a January 1946 edition of the Bakersfield Californian:


You can find poignant records of World War II servicemen online, on the website ancestry.com Among the records are their draft cards. Here is Jerrold’s (if you’re familiar with Taft, his home address isn’t unusual at all):


I found him again in the 1939 Derrick, the Taft Union High School yearbook. He’s at top, at far right, a trombonist in the school band. He, of course, has a counterpart here in Arroyo Grande: Jack Scruggs, the trombonist on Arizona’s band, was killed on December 7 by bomb concussions—near misses— off the battleship’s stern moments before fatal bomb forward blew the ship apart.


He’s such a nice-looking young man, and maybe that’s where the hurt comes from from a terrible event that happened seventy-nine years ago.

I think the girl with the curly hair is nice-looking, too. This photo is from the same 1939 Taft Union High School yearbook, and that girl, a senior, was a classmate of Jerrold’s.

That’s my Mom.