Avon World War II Veteran Remembers Naval Service

From April 18, 2010, Enterprise by Mike Melanson.

Richard Sellars was 17 in 1942 and supposed to go to detention at Stoughton High School, but went to Boston and joined the Navy. He later became an aviator and belonged to a squadron credited with sinking 2 Japanese and 9 German subs.

He served on the USS Bogue CVE-9, an escort aircraft carrier that protected convoys to Europe.

His first job was to push planes on and off the elevator that brought them up from the hangar deck to the flight deck. Sellars worked his way up to become top turret gunner and his squadron usually flew from midnight to 4 AM, mostly hunting subs that followed the convoys.

They'd drop sound buoys every two miles making a square to try to pick up submarine propeller revolutions on sonar.

Once a sub was detected, they'd either drop depth charges or "The Zombie," a Mark 24 Mine that chased the sound. "It would hit that and stand up like a telephone pole, and we never got any survivors off of that, usually, that went straight down."

Submarines operated in wolf packs of between 4-7 and had a milk cow sub carrying supplies and fuel.

On Christmas 1943, they disabled a sub and took 125 men off and had Christmas dinner with the prisoners.

In June 1944, they sank two Japanese subs off the Azores in the Atlantic. They were carrying rubber to France. There were no survivors.

He got out of the Navy April 27, 1946 on his 21st birthday.

Little-Known Battle of the Atlantic. --GreGen