Karl Peters
Age: 84
Born: April 10, 1926
Hometown: Greensburg, Pa.
Residence: Thousand Palms
Military branch: U.S. Merchant Marine
Years served: 1943 - 1970
Rank: Chief Engineer
Family: Wife Jackie; two children, Karl Peters Jr. of Vallejo and Douglas Markwell Peters (deceased); one grandchild.
More
Karl Peters' service in the U.S. Merchant Marine spanned nearly 30 years and included tours of duty in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Peters got an early jump on his seafaring career.
“I quit school in the 10th grade. It upset my mother, who was a longtime school teacher,” Peters said.
“I asked her to help me buy a 1930 Model A Ford and a buddy and I drove out to Oregon,” where he had arranged to live with his sister and her husband.
Peters' brother-in-law wasted no time in laying down the law with the 16-year-old.
“He said, ‘If you think you're going to sit on your butt out here,'” Peters laughed, recalling the conversation.
Peters got the message and quickly went out and found himself a job.
“I dug petunia bulbs for a while,” Peters said. “Then I went to work in a shipyard.”
He worked as a mechanic building Liberty ships — U.S. troop ships built quickly, and in great numbers, during the war.
He learned about the merchant marines through a fellow worker.
Peters, who was now 17 — still too young to join the service without parental approval — quit his job and traveled back to his home in Pennsylvania to get his mom to sign for him.
The day Peters was scheduled to be sworn in, he went horseback riding with a friend and had an accident, severely injuring his neck and back.
He spent a month in bed, recovering.
Once he was sworn in, Peters attended training on Hoffman Island in New York Harbor, where he received his Fireman/Watertender, Oiler endorsement from the U.S. Coast Guard.
Peters started out as a “wiper,” the lowest rank in the engine department, he said.
He performed menial maintenance tasks aboard Liberty ships, but quickly worked up the through the ranks.
“We sailed through the Mediterranean most of the time — and the Persian Gulf,” during World War II, he said.
“We carried a lot of general provision stuff,” he said. “We carried a lot of stuff on deck,” including tanks.
He later shifted from Liberty ships to tankers.
One time while Peters' ship was traveling in a convoy, they stopped in Gibraltar during a submarine warning.
One ship didn't maneuver properly.
“They didn't make the correction and rammed us,” he said. “I'll never get over this: The radio operator, he ran out stark naked telling everybody to ‘calm down and don't get nervous,'” Peters said, laughing.
The ship took on water in the hold, but after some repairs, she was back on her way.
Peters said a number of countries at that time were vying to get oil from the Persian Gulf.
Peters' ship, loaded with steel I-beams used in construction, landed in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia.
“They were digging channels, preparing for the eventual outburst of all that oil,” he said. “There was a lot of competition between the U.S. and British.”
The Saudi movers and shakers were invited to come aboard, where stevedores waited on their visitors and the ship's officers.
“Four of five sheiks — they were all drinking tea up there with the captain,” he said.
Peters said a dive bomb attack in the Mediterranean rattled the young mariners' nerves.
“You talk about a bunch of scared kids,” Peters said.
He said it sounded like sirens going off when the aircraft went into a dive and released their bombs over their target.
“They got several ships in the convoy,” Peters said.
Peters was aboard a ship in Russia near the end of the war in Europe, when the crew, while unloading food and other cargo onto the docks one morning, saw Russian soldiers marching their German prisoners.
One of the prisoners must have made a pass at a woman or said something out of line, Peters said, and the man was immediately punished.
“They shot him in the hand,” Peters said. “They blew his hand away. There was a lot of bitterness between the Germans and the Russians.”
The guns and other armament on merchant ships were manned by U.S. Navy sailors. There were about 10 Navy men aboard with 30 or 40 merchant marines.
The Navy guys, who worked night shifts, standing guard on ship, raided the refrigerators, and by morning, most of the food had been picked over.
“We nicknamed them the ‘ice box commandos,'” Peters said, laughing.
During the war, merchant marines were responsible for carrying two-thirds of all cargo leaving U.S. ports in support of Allied operations overseas.
Merchant sailors suffered a greater percentage of fatalities (3.9 percent) during World War II than any branch of the armed forces, according to historic accounts.
