By Jan Pendzich

Ed. Note: Republished from May 19 in honor of Memorial Day.

Longtime Greenwood resident Joseph Mottle Jr. is a man with a cause.

After his high school principal arranged for an expedited graduation from Lidgerwood High School in tiny Lidgerwood, N.D. (pop. 1,200), young Mottle joined the Merchant Marine in Minneapolis in April 1944 and was immediately posted to the U.S. Maritime Service Training Station in Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., for three months of training.

He completed his training as a Seaman Second Class on June 20, 1944. As a harbinger of things to come, his certificate of graduation specified that the curriculum included 30 hours of elementary gunnery training.

Mottle was originally scheduled to serve as a messman on a ship plying the infamous Murmansk run. However, as fate would have it, when Mottle was sent to New York City to wait for his ship, the Merchant Marine asked for volunteers to go to San Francisco and he accepted that assignment.

From San Francisco he volunteered to go to Seattle where his initial assignment included delivering high-octane gasoline and metal stripping for runways to the islands of Attu and Shemya in the Aleutian chain. His ship returned from the Aleutians carrying old ammunition that had been buried and dug up.

One of Mottle's most memorable experiences was his service on the SS Sea Partridge from April 5, 1945 to June 10, 1945 during the battle of Okinawa.

According to an eyewitness account drafted by one of his shipmates, which Mottle has preserved to this day, SS Sea Partridge sailed around the southern tip of Okinawa on May 6, 1945. From reading the semaphore signals from the command ship, the sailors knew that they were headed for Ie Shima, a small island off the western end of the peninsula.

By noon of May 6, the ship had dropped anchor between Ie Shima and the main island of Okinawa. The Sea Partridge was carrying soldiers and equipment to be offloaded into LSMs (landing ship medium) for delivery to the fighting onshore.

While the Sea Partridge was anchored off the coast of Ie Shima, it was vulnerable to attack by Japanese Zeros and suicide swimmers who would try to place an explosive charge on the ship’s propeller.

An enormous smoke screen was created by smoke machine on some of the vessels in the fleet in order to conceal it from attack by enemy aircraft. However, the ship’s ventilation systems drew the smoke into the compartments below decks where the soldiers were waiting for the signal to disembark and made their life miserable.

At 9:20 a.m. on May 11, 1945, the Sea Partridge was under a red alert, which meant that enemy planes were nearby. The ship’s PA announced, “ Two Zeros at 085 – 15 degrees elevation. Gunners are not to fire unless directly attacked."

The ship was attacked by a Zero. From his position on the deck, as a member of a fire control detail, Mottle could see the bullets hitting the fuselage of the airplane but at the last instant it veered off and hit a nearby Dutch ship, the M.S. Tjisadane.

After being discharged from the Merchant Marine, Mottle always felt a sense of injustice that members of the Merchant Marine were not considered to have the status of veterans of WWII and were not included in Memorial Day commemorations.

As he remembers it, President Franklin Roosevelt had promised to confer veteran’s status on the merchant mariners but passed away before he was able to keep his promise.

Despite having served under such perilous circumstances, members of the Merchant Marine were not granted official status as veterans until Jan. 19, 1988, more than 42 years after the war had ended.

Mottle went on to serve 23 years with the Seattle Special Police providing security at the Seattle Center and 12 years as a reserve police officer with the Seattle Police Department.

He is now retired and alternates his time between Puerta Vallarta and Seattle. He usually spends his weekend afternoons at the Ballard Tully’s.