My Facebook friend Shannon Ratliff-Evans keeps a faithful record of Arroyo Grande High School Eagles who have passed on. I noted today this article she posted from the local weekly, probably from 1943, citing this sailor from the high school class of 1941, the last peacetime class for four years:

I had to find out more. I’m nosy that way.

Here’s Frank’s draft card (his father, as the article notes, had died by then: Knute was a Swedish immigrant, but Frank’s mother was a Californian)

After his time at Farragut–named for a Civil War admiral–Frank would be sent to another landlocked place, Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University, for specialized training as a mechanic.

After this, Frank would go to war. I was hoping he would see service on a carrier or a cruiser or a destroyer. No. His skills sent him to the Landing Craft Unit 34 at the Waipo Amphibious Operating Base, on a peninsula bounded by Pearl Harbor’s West Loch. So, if Frank wasn’t steaming into action against the Imperial Navy, he was doing something just as important: helping to train servicemen and maintain landing craft in preparation for the costly landings across the Central Pacific in 1944-45.

Among the craft at Waipo:

According to U.S. Navy Muster Rolls, Frank (at the bottom, below) reported to Waipo in April 1944. He would be stationed there until the end of the war. But it only took a month for the war to come to him.

In May 1944, Unit 34 would have been preparing sailors, Coast Guardsmen and Marines for the invasion of the Marianas Islands, which included the horrific Battle of Saipan. The invading Marines included Archie Harloe, the son of the Arroyo Grande schoolteacher, and some of them witnessed civilians, convinced that the Americans would torture them, leaping to their deaths from sea cliffs.

That was in June. Another tragedy–this one at Waipo–preceded Saipan’s. On May 21, 1944, the West Loch, in preparation for the Marianas, was packed with the big ships, the LST’s. Mortar ammunition was being transferred to one of them when a mortar round either fell or was detonated by gasoline vapors, The resultant explosion was massive, but not as massive as the second explosion, which showered the LST’s with burning debris, which in turn set off aviation fuel and ammunition.

The fires burned for twenty-four hours. Six LST’s were destroyed. One of them, LST-480, remains alongside the West Loch today:

The official Navy casualty list cites 163 killed. That is almost certainly an underestimate. It may not reflect the deaths of Marines from the 2nd and 4th Divisions and soldiers from Schofield Barracks acting as stevedores at Waipo. Some estimates put the deaths at 1,000 young Americans.

Frank Lofquist was there, and, as fate would have it, he would live a long life–he died, at eighty, in 2003. I’ll post below a video of some South County sailors and their ships, but it occurred to me that Lofquist’s service at Pearl Harbor was just as important, and, since I just learned about the West Loch disaster, almost as dangerous.

Using the World War II Army ratio, for every American combat soldier, there were 4.3 support troops (like my father, a quartermaster officer who sent gasoline supply companies to Omaha Beach, and like Lofquist). World War II was their war, too.

Thank you for your service, Frank Hugo Lofquist.

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It was Lofquist’s war, and, of course, it was the war of the Black sailors at Port Chicago, near San Francisco. An explosion there three months later killed at least 320 of them, detailed as stevedores, when an ammunition ship blew up. What happened after is another story that needs to be retold every few years.

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