Virgil Blanton
Age: 89
Born: June 28, 1921
Hometown: Upland
Residence: Thousand Palms
Military branch: U.S. Merchant Marines
Years served: April, 1942 - October, 1945
Rank: Second officer
Family: Wife Dottie; two children, Linda Martin White of Thousand Palms and David Blanton of Big Fork, Mont. and Borrego; two grandchildren, Adam Martin (deceased) and Scott Martin.
More
On the night of July 4, 1942, Virgil Blanton found himself floating in a wooden life raft 250 miles off the coast of Cuba.
For Blanton and other merchant mariners aboard the SS Andrew Jackson — a World War I- era vessel recently pulled out of dry dock — the fireworks started when an enemy torpedo rammed into their ship.
“The torpedo hit about 9 o'clock,” Blanton said. “My watch stopped at 9:05.”
“It was a wreck,” Blanton said, describing the ship. “It didn't have any cargo. It could only do eight knots. The sea got pretty rough. We lost the convoy by dark.”
Earlier that evening, Blanton had gone down below with a deckhand to learn how to make a waterproof bag to protect his seaman papers.
“We were just finishing when the torpedo hit,” Blanton said. “He just left.”
He said the deckhand found his way in the dark to the door and closed it behind him.
“I'm just a kid,” Blanton said. “It was my first time at sea. I didn't know the ship very well.”
The seaman probably didn't realize Blanton was still inside.
“He locked the watertight door to keep the ship afloat,” Blanton said. “It was dark — I couldn't see my way out. I'm trapped. I said, ‘I better get on my knees and make peace with my maker.'”
Something told him to go to a porthole, but when he found the porthole and opened it, he could only get an arm and his head outside.
“Then I turned around and the moonlight was shining right on that door — it just wasn't my time,” to die, he said.
Blanton opened the steel door and scrambled out and went forward on the ship, in time to see the captain climbing down the cargo net into a lifeboat.
Blanton clambered down the ropes and joined the other 20 or so men huddled in the 18-foot-long boat.
When they were a couple hundred yards away, they could see the SS Andrew Jackson tilting on its side.
That was about the time the German submarine surfaced.
Someone on the lifeboat said, ‘Put out the light, they're going to ram us.”
“This big old submarine came right at us,” he said. “A man on deck had a light. He was looking for souvenirs.”
The sub, “Stuck another torpedo in her,” he said. The Andrew Jackson was sinking stern first and was underwater in about 30 seconds.
Then the sub just cruised off, he said.
The next morning, at daybreak, the survivors saw a U.S. Navy amphibious aircraft patrolling overhead.
“They signaled down to us,” Blanton said. “They went on. We didn't see another soul or another raft.”
The lifeboat, loaded down with supplies, provided enough food to sustain the men — but the choices were few — and not real tasty, including malt-flavored pills that dissolved in the mouth, and “some kind of sea biscuit — dry and hard as a rock,” Blanton said.
One of the men aboard, who had been severely injured, died in the lifeboat.
“Then the sharks began to follow us,” he said. “Great white sharks — as big as the boat. The guy was so ripe and the smell was so strong by the third day.”
The men didn't want to put him in the water during the daytime and watch the sharks feast on his body.
“We waited until it was dark and we pushed him over the side,” Blanton said.
“Here, I'm just a month out of cadet school and I'm floating around in a lifeboat,” Blanton said. “I was sea sick. I was sicker than a dog.”
“We were lucky enough to have an old seaman,” who knew his way around the waters near Cuba.
Four or five days after loading into the lifeboat, the men made it ashore at Havana.
A woman, married to a naval attaché, arranged to have a big feast for the men — shrimp, lobster. “Anything we wanted to eat, we could have,” he said.
But the men barely finished showering and cleaning up and getting ready to eat when their dining dreams were dashed.
“Here comes the Cuban navy and the interned us,” he said. “They said we were here illegally. They picked us up and put us in a compound and gave us a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, a pair of tennis shoes, a pair of dungarees and a shirt — and black bean soup.”
The men were released hours later and were put up at a hotel, where they stayed until they were flown out to Mobile, Ala.
Not long after arriving, Blanton was assigned to a cargo ship, bound first for New York, then across the Atlantic to England.
“We hauled everything,” he said. “We carried 200-pound bombs, 500-pound bombs, shells, shoes, sealing wax, typewriters, cigarettes, all kinds of dried food.”
The cargo ships made round trips from the Straight of Gibraltar up through Africa, where, “They were chasing (German Field Marshal Erwin) Rommel out,” he said.
Blanton and his shipmates were part of a huge armada that invaded Oran, Algeria, and while on the high seas, were subjected to torpedo and German dive bomber attacks.
After returning to the states for a brief respite, he went aboard a “reefer” — a cold storage ship — delivering fresh food to ships and military installations on islands in the Pacific, including Ulithi, Eniwetok and Saipan.
As a child, in the late 1920s, Blanton traveled “Grapes-of-Wrath”-style from the dust bowls of Texas to California.
Along the way, his parents and four older siblings stopped to pick cotton or perform menial work to earn enough to put gas in the tank and food in the family's bellies.
The Blantons were a family of survivors. Virgil Blanton and four of his brothers served during the war — two in the Navy and two in the Army.
All returned home alive.
