Glenn Hall

By Petra Chesner Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com

From Oregon to Pearl Harbor, the U.S.S. Granville (APA 171) was steered through the Pacific, travelling a total of 63,151 miles between Dec. 1944 to Jan. 1946.Glenn Hall spent most of his military time aboard that ship. "The U.S. got me in Dec. 1943. I turned 18 in March 1944," he said. He was inducted in the Navy in March 1944.

Hall, now 83, was a U.S. Navy Pharmacist Mate 3/C assigned to the ship after going to Sampson Naval Training Base in Bainbridge, Md. He grew up in York County, Pa.

As a veteran, Hall has many more stories to tell. One is of the attack on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, which "occurred in the evening when the war was supposed to be over.
"We shot down the kamikaze," Hall recalled.

"When all the guns are going off, you feel pretty helpless because you don't have anything to fight back with. The gunners did a pretty good job, they shot it [the kamikaze] down," he said.

"They usually would come at dusk," Hall continued. "They were difficult to see [because of the altitude they would fly.] They would just dive a plane into a ship. Every night they'd come over. We were sitting in the harbor You could expect them."
Hall said the destroyers and escorts off the coast of Japan were hard hit by kamikazes.

"They would come into the harbor badly beaten," Hall said about the Americans.
The Japanese were the enemy. But after the war was over, Hall said he had "the most startling experience and the most memorable. We had taken troops to Japan to a small fishing village on the Inland Sea of Japan.

"A couple of us are walking down the street [probably the only street in the village]," he continued. "This Japanese woman came out of her house and in English said to us, 'Would you like some tea?' We said, 'Okay.' So, she served us tea."

"We said, 'Why did you do this?' She said, 'Because I'm a Christian.'"

Part of war was death, Hall recounted. The second person in his high school class, who was killed in WWII, was Joseph Ensminger. "He was my best friend," Hall remembered. "He was a paratrooper and was killed in France. I didn't find out about it until long after it occurred.

"He wanted to be a cinema photographer in Hollywood. He was a minister's son," Hall noted.

After Hall returned home from the war, Ensminger's father kept asking Hall to come to his house. "I couldn't do it," Hall said, teary-eyed.

For Hall, one strong impression about serving in WWII was that the U.S. Navy was segregated. "We had black sailors, but seldom saw them aboard ship. They were separated. They worked in the galley - in the kitchens."

Inside the ship, there were guns under the water line where the ammunition and powder were stored. "They had to be sent up to the guns," Hall said. "Guess who did it? That was their battle station."

Hall said, "You just didn't see these guys. They didn't come to sick bay. They were in different parts of the ship."

Hall is a member of the Morrell Smith Post of the American Legion in Newtown. Until recently, he marched in the annual Memorial Day Parade.

Initially, Hall was assigned to a hospital as a corpsman. "We did rudimentary patient care under the supervision of registered nurses, who were officers in the Navy."

Then one day, his life changed. "I happened to be in the office where they 'cut' orders [which means you are assigned to other places]." He asked the chief petty officer to let him know if anything came up on the list.

"I'm in the office again and he said, 'I have something here - it's an APA.' I said, 'What's an APA?'''

He replied, laughing, "It's a ship," Hall said. "What did I know? I just wanted to get out of that bloody hospital. I wasn't the only one who didn't know what an APA was." Aboard the ship, Hall assisted with clean-up after surgeries, among other chores.

At the time, the U.S.S. Granville (APA 117) was brand new. "We engaged in what was called 'The Navy Shakedown Cruises,'" he said, "which were essentially efforts to train the crews and to make sure the equipment, motors and guns in the ship worked."

The main objective of an APA was to get the troops onto the beach. War correspondent Al Crocker wrote, the APAs carried "triple A-1 priority in ship building and promises to carry tougher punches to [Japanese Admiral] Hirohito's sprawling midsection and jaw than perhaps event the B-29."

A professor emeritus at Bucks County Community College (BCCC), Hall completed his bachelor of arts degree in political science and history at Lebanon Valley College in 1949. His master of arts degree is from George Washington University. He won a Fulbright Award to teach in the Netherlands for a year.
After his retirement from BCCC in 1989, he returned to teaching. He had started his teaching career in a small one-room schoolhouse in York County where there were 52 students, grades 1-8.