In 1943, Christmas Day for Woodrow King began with a German torpedo
By Jon Kocan
CNHI News Service
STILLWATER -- Most people are lucky enough to spend Christmas at home but there are times when that is not possible.
For one World War II veteran, Christmas 1943 is a day he will never forget.
Each year, Stillwater resident Woodrow King gathers his family around him to tell the story that began in the Indian Ocean on Christmas Day in 1943. King, born in Braman, was serving in the U.S. Merchant Marines on the Jose Navarro, which was transporting mules, ammunition, Sherman tanks and other equipment.
King came off the helm at midnight Christmas Day and got to bed around 3 a.m. after socializing with shipmates. From out of the darkness came a German torpedo that struck the ship around 4 a.m. A loud bang woke King and he immediately discovered water in his room.
King headed to his station and began to lower lifeboats. As water filled one side of the ship, it began to list.
As one lifeboat was being lowered, one end of the ropes got away and King watched the ship's third assistant fall 50 feet to the water below. King rushed down a rope ladder and pulled him into the boat and then returned to the deck to continue lowering lifeboats.
King said the captain was the last off the boat and, as dawn broke, the entire crew floated in the Indian Ocean in eight life boats. King said that the first day, a periscope could be seen circling the stranded crew and hull of the torpedoed ship. After the submarine surveyed the situation, it torpedoed the ship again and sent it to the bottom of the ocean.
The mules that were onboard tried to clamber in the life boats and the crew had to fight them off. The mules began to draw sharks to the area and, soon, the stranded crew had to be careful to keep their arms and legs inside the lifeboats.
After two days in the blistering sun and shark-infested water, the crew was picked up 175 miles off the coast by an English Corvette with an Indian crew.
King said they were first taken to a camp in India and then traveled by freight car three days before arriving in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). There, the crew stayed in an English/Australian recuperation camp.
It was not until April that King's mother was informed that her son was alive. The British failed to notify anyone of the rescue and families of the crew assumed they had died.
King went on to sail on three more ships before the war ended. After the war, he moved to Blackwell and married his wife, Juanita Temple, in 1946. The influence of Billy Graham and others persuaded King to become a Christian in 1955 and he and his wife later spent more than six years in Jamaica as missionaries.
After returning from Jamaica, King settled in Cushing and opened a Dairy Queen and ranched cattle before moving to Stillwater a year ago.
Jon Kocan writes for Stillwater NewsPress.
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