World War II veteran Chuck Roberts (right) was in the U.S. Navy. / Provided photo
CHUCK ROBERTS
Age: 91
Born: July 6, 1919
Hometown: Denver
Residence: Cathedral City
Military branch: U.S. Navy; USS Dionysus (AR-21)
Years served: Nov. 21, 1944- March 2, 1946
Rank: Shipfitter first class
Family: Wife Angie; one child, Carol McGarry of St. Louis; three grandchildren; six great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
World War II veteran Chuck Roberts worked as a shipfitter aboard the USS Dionysus. “We called her the ‘Drunken Greek’ repair ship,” Roberts recalls. / U.S. Navy photo
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Chuck Roberts worked as a shipfitter aboard a Navy repair ship, the USS Dionysus, during the waning months of World War II.
“We called her the ‘Drunken Greek' repair ship,” Roberts said, laughing.
Dionysus is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, ritual madness and ecstasy, according to Classical Greek mythology.
Stationed on the tiny South Pacific island of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, Roberts and the crew of the Dionysus repaired damaged ships that sailed into the floating dry dock installed at the 2-mile-long, quarter-mile-wide land mass.
Eniwetok is the largest of 40 small sand and coral islands in the Eniwetok Atoll.
As a shipfitter, Roberts repaired the big, hulking parts of a damaged seafaring vessel.
“Anything to do with the body of the ship the hull, superstructure,” he said.
“Superstructures are made out of aluminum plating,” he added.
Entertainment options were few on this “Gilligan's Island”-type setting.
“There wasn't much to do,” he said. “You hope to find good-looking girls, but you never found one. But we saw a lot of them when we got home,” he said, grinning.
Some of the guys took a little bit of a risk in order to interact — in at least some small way — with the opposite sex.
“We used to swim around a barricade,” put up to keep the sailors from fraternizing with the native women.
“We talked to them — we didn't understand them — but we talked to them,” Roberts said.
Later, after the men were back on their own side, “They told us we weren't supposed to be there,” Roberts said.
“We told them we didn't know the barricade was there,” he said, laughing.
Roberts said the closest the crew got to any action was when the ship sailed into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender ceremony taking place aboard the USS Missouri.
“We were in the group of ships that were there,” he said. “The repair ships were part of the flotilla. There were three large Japanese ships in Tokyo Bay. The U.S. had quite a few large ships there.”
Roberts' career as a shipfitter began in Long Beach not long after graduating from North Denver High School in Colorado.
After his father died, his mom moved the family to Southern California, where the teen found work at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.
Before the war broke out, Roberts, a civilian at the time, was in San Francisco, preparing to go overseas to work at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.
“Four of us signed up at the same time to go to Pearl Harbor,” he said. “By the time we got to San Francisco, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”
The surprise attack delayed Roberts' trip by about two months. When he finally arrived, he set to work in the bombed-out harbor.
“I helped raise a lot of those ships that sank,” he said.
After two years, Roberts was sent home.
“As soon as I got back, I had to go to boot camp in San Diego,” he said. “I ended up in the Navy.”
“Then they sent me up to Washington, where I picked up my ship, the USS Dionysus,” Roberts said.
Roberts, by now a veteran shipfitter, joined about 600 other similarly skilled men on the repair ship.
“All the men had some craft (trade) that had to do with the ships,” he said.
The voyage across the Pacific was peaceful for the most part.
After completing his military service in March 1946, Roberts returned to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, where he worked as a shipfitter until his retirement in 1973.
Roberts, who regularly attends services at Church of Nazarene in Cathedral City, is a big Los Angeles Lakers fan.
