By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

US Navy veteran Andy Byrd ,82, served in the North Atlantic and South Pacific during WWII. (Michael E. Keating/The Cincinnati Enquirer)

MOUNT CARMEL - Join The Navy. See The World.

It sounded pretty good in 1940 to Andy Byrd, a teenager growing up in the cotton mill town of Fries, Va.

There were no jobs - the great Depression had taken care of that. Young men determined to make their way in the world had to leave hardscrabble life behind; start fresh.

So when a young Navy recruiting officer showed up at the Civilian Conservation Corps camp where Byrd was working, he didn't have to say much to convince Byrd that the Navy was the life for him.

WWII MUSEUM

On Memorial Day weekend, the National World War II Memorial, which opened to the public Thursday, will be dedicated in Washington. This is the fourth of seven weekly Enquirer profiles of local WWII veterans who plan to attend the dedication ceremonies.

BATAVIA TWP. MUSEUM

English students in Stacy Recker's Amelia High School classroom have created a World War II museum that will be open to the public from 6-8 p.m. Thursday in the school's multipurpose room, 1351 Clough Pike. This is the final piece to a project the students have been working on since September. They will be showcasing five artifacts - replicas or originals - that tie in to a theme they picked to research about the war. Among the topics to be showcased are uniforms, movies and music.

"I'd get three square meals a day, a steady paycheck, a place to sleep and I'd get around to see the world, just like it said on the recruiting poster," Byrd said. "Sounded like a pretty good life to me."

As it turned out, it was a good life for the next six years, although one that was not without danger, whether it was crossing the North Atlantic on board a destroyer tender in Nazi submarine-infested waters or scanning the skies for Japanese Zeroes on board a destroyer escort in the South Pacific.

And it was a life not without sacrifice in the form of months of loneliness and isolation at sea.

But it was an experience that provided Byrd, who moved to the Cincinnati area about 40 years ago to work for Cincinnati Gear, with a lifetime of memories. They are memories that have recently been on his mind as he and his wife, Nonie, count the days until they board a bus with friends from American Legion Post 72 and head to Washington for the May 29 dedication of the National World War II Memorial on the National Mall.

For more than 500 miles, as they cross the Alleghenyand Blue Ridge mountains on their way to Washington, Byrd and his fellow veterans will share their memories with one another.

For Byrd, 82, the memories go back to 1941, before the United States had officially entered the war but at a time when President Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program to send the British armaments to fight off Nazi Germany was in full swing.

Cargo ships carrying supplies to the British were being sunk beneath the waves of the North Atlantic by German U-boats with regularity. Byrd was a young seaman assigned to the USS Melville, a destroyer tender assigned to the U.S. Navy force escorting the cargo ships across the Atlantic.

There were times, Byrd said, when convoys of 100 cargo ships would leave U.S. ports and half would be sunk by the Germans.

"They were killing us right and left," Byrd said. "But eventually, we got the upper hand."

By the fall of 1943, Byrd - by then a petty officer - was assigned to the USS Duffy, a destroyer escort ship that sailed from San Francisco to join the Fifth Fleet in the South Pacific.

There, the USS Duffy was involved in some of the major campaigns of the Pacific Theater.

Life on a ship in the middle of the South Pacific, Byrd said, "was mainly just hot."

"There was no air conditioning; the only fans on board blew nothing but hot air and you never went below deck, because you would roast down there," Byrd said.

Byrd remembered the time the crew of the USS Duffy took seven prisoners - Japanese soldiers who had been cut off on a tiny atoll from the main Japanese force. What he remembers most, he said, "was the fear in their eyes."

"They couldn't understand why we didn't just kill them," Byrd said.

The USS Duffy is still a part of his life. Since the 1980s, Byrd and his wife have traveled around the country for reunions of the ship's crew. But the numbers of surviving crew members are dwindling. The World War II generation is dying at the rate of 1,056 veterans per day.

It is one reason why the trip to see the World War II memorial means so much to Byrd and his comrades at Post 72.

"We're lucky to still be around to see it," he said.

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com