MOUNT VERNON — It was 1943. In less than four years, Navy Seaman Cecil Orsborn had gone from sunning himself off the coast of Rio De Janeiro to firing rounds at Japanese warships in the Pacific.
By war’s end he had served on three warships and had sailed from Iceland to Australia, from French Morocco to the Mariana Islands and back again. And Orsborn, like the rest of the his generation, has never completely forgotten his small part in that global conflict.
A Navy man
Orsborn, 87, enlisted in the Navy in March 1939 and reported to Newport, R.I., for boot camp. He was scheduled to be assigned to one of the Navy destroyers that had come to town for the World’s Fair, but by the time he finished boot camp the destroyers had gone, so he was assigned to the USS Quincy, a heavy cruiser with an ominous future ahead of it.
Orsborn started his Navy career with an assignment other sailors would have envied — patrolling the beautiful beaches of South America in the early days of the far-off European War, a war in which the United States was not yet involved.
“We left the states in May 1940 and went down to the coast of South America,” said Orsborn. “We’d go into a port and be there five days, then go somewhere else. We were in Rio three times and we also visited Uruguay and Buenos Aires.”
The crew spent the entire summer south of the equator, enjoying the beaches and patrolling the waters, making its presence known to the German Navy, who had its eyes set on South American waters.
“We were just making an impression,” said Orsborn. “The Navy left ships down there, just to keep the Nazis from organizing.”
But things were heating up in the Western Hemisphere. As the summer wore on, the Quincy sailed into the neutral waters of Rio de la Plata, or the River Plate, an estuary and natural harbor that separates the South American port xities of Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In Rio de la Plata, Orsborn saw the half-submerged wreckage of the Admiral Graf Spee, a famous German warship that had fled to the harbor in 1939 after it took heavy damage in a battle with three British ships. Convinced it could not fight its way back out of the harbor, the German crew had scuttled the ship in the shallow water.
Rio de la Plata was a strange place to be in 1940. On paper, Argentina and Uruguay were neutral countries, but Uruguay had close ties to the British empire. Argentina seemed to sympathize more with the Axis powers, a sentiment that became more obvious after the war, when German military officers like Adolf Eichman fled to the country to hide from their war crimes.
According to Orsborn, British and German ships were both permitted in Rio de la Plata, but were only allowed in port for three days.
More U.S. ships began arriving in September as the Quincy headed north — way north.
War
Through 1941 the ship was stationed in Iceland, where it patrolled the waters and enforced neutrality until new orders came in. Orsborn remembers the mission mostly because of the news he received halfway through.
“We were running a convoy from the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf with three ships full of British troops,” he said. “We were a few days out of Cape Town when we heard about Pearl Harbor. So instead of going on around the Cape, we came back to the states.”
Orsborn quickly realized how lucky he had been. Many of the battleships he had missed at the World’s Fair were docked in Pearl Harbor.
Everything changed after that day.
The Quincy was quickly ordered back to the North Atlantic, where the German battleship Bismarck was being pursued by the British Navy.
Orsborn stayed with the Quincy until the summer of 1942, when he was transferred to the USS Cleveland, the lead ship of the new Cleveland Class cruisers.
The Quincy traveled to the Pacific theater. Less than three months later, on Aug. 9, the ship was sunk by the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Savo Island.
“My cousin was still on that ship when it sunk,” said Orsborn “He followed me over there because he wanted to be on the same ship. I got transferred to the Cleveland and he got killed.
“I guess the good Lord was taking care of me,” he added. “First those battleships ended up at Pearl Harbor. Then I got transferred of the Quincy two months and eight days before it was sunk.”
Still upset by the loss of his former shipmates, Orsborn settled into his job on the Cleveland. He served as a turret captain in charge of maintaining one of the cruiser’s gun turrets, and supervised the firing.
It wasn’t long before the Cleveland saw action, supporting allied ground invasions.
“The first action we saw was at Casablanca, during the invasion of North Africa,” Orsborn said. “Then we went back to the states to load up fuel and supplies before we headed over to the Pacific. We crossed the International Date Line on Jan. 1, 1943, and missed New Year’s Day altogether.”
The Pacific
The Cleveland reached Guadalcanal in early 1943 and joined up with other Navy ships whose job was to protect U.S. troop ships transporting men to the heavy fighting on the island.
The battle for Guadalcanal had raged for months and naval forces were soon engaged in heavy fighting. During this sub-battle, dubbed the Battle of Rennell Island, Orsborn watched from the Cleveland as another cruiser, the USS Chicago, took heavy damage.
“She was right across from us,” he said. “Two planes came off of the island and we couldn’t see them until it was too late. The Chicago opened fire but then the Japanese could see them and they got torpedoed.”
The ship was soon lost to the bottom of the Pacific.
The Cleveland survived the Battle for Guadalcanal, and many more engagements in “the slot,” a heavily traveled Pacific waterway bordered by many islands.
“We’d go out on patrol almost every night in the slot,” said Orsborn. “It was close to where JFK lost his PT boat. We’d patrol through and if we saw a Japanese boat we engaged them.”
More battles followed, including the Invasion of New Georgia, the sinking of a Japanese cruiser near the Solomon Islands and the decisive Battle of the Philippine Sea, a massive air-sea battle involving dozens upon dozens of ships, ending in a back-breaking defeat for the Japanese.
Orsborn talked little of the heavy action during this time period, stressing only that he felt continually lucky.
“We had around 20 engagements and we never lost a man,” he said. “Somebody was definitely looking out for me.”
Finally, in the fall of 1944, the Cleveland took a break.
“By then our guns were wore out and we had to go back to the states to get the ship repaired,” he said. “We hadn’t been home for a long time and we all got 23 days of leave to go home and see our families.
“It had been 2 1/2 years since I had seen them and I didn’t even know where mom and dad lived,” he added. “They had sold their farm in Morgan Township and moved to Utica. So I got off the bus, walked up the street until I saw someone I knew, and asked them where my mom and dad lived.”
The visit was a short one. Soon enough, Orsborn was back on the Cleveland and the Cleveland was back in the Philippines. There, he got another surprise.
Although he didn’t know it yet, his combat days were over. But Orsborn faced one more challenge before he could breath easy.
“One day they sent six of us to shore; they just dumped us out on the beach and gave us orders to report to Washington, D.C.,” he said. “We didn’t have any transportation, no way to get meals, just orders to go home.”
He later learned the Navy was commissioning a new ship, the USS Portsmouth, and they needed experienced veterans to man the crew.
“They were putting a ship together and I guess they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to get a crew,” Orsborn joked.
The sailors spent the following days fending for themselves, island hopping on passing military transport planes. They stayed in screen houses on the beach when there was room; they slept under the coastal stilt houses when there wasn’t.
After nearly two days, they were able to catch a transport to Guam and get a meal. From there the group split; three of them caught another flight to Honolulu.
“That flight was really plush,” said Orsborn. “They even had a steward who gave us pillows and the next morning we got breakfast and we landed in Honolulu that afternoon.
“That was the first civilized place we had seen for awhile.” he added. “We told them about our situation and they took care of us. I ended up on a civilian molasses tanker. It took 15 days to sail from Hawaii to LA.”
Orsborn didn’t mind the long trip.
“Fifteen days where I didn’t do anything but eat three meals a day,” he laughed. “I finally made it back home to see my folks again and then I had to go to D.C.”
Winding Down
In Washington, Orsborn received 12 weeks of training, where he learned “how to do the job he had already been doing.”
“I was in D.C. when president Roosevelt died and then I got my orders to report to the Portsmouth,” he said. “I was the only turret captain on the ship; there should have been at least four.”
Luckily, the ship never saw the Pacific Theater. Orsborn’s war was finally over. He got the news while docked in Cuba, where the Portsmouth was taking a “shakedown cruise,” working out the new ship’s bugs.
For the war-weary sailor, a career in the military was not in the cards.
“They had a point system and if you had enough points you could get out,” he said. “I had enough points to do just about anything I wanted so I left and came home.”
Life slowed down after that.
Orsborn returned home to Knox County, where he reunited with his two veteran siblings, an older brother who served with the U.S. Army in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines, and a younger brother who had joined the Merchant Marine until he was old enough to serve on a Navy destroyer escort.
Orsborn settled in Utica, where he married and raised two children, finally retiring from his job at the gas company at age 62.
He has lived a full happy life. He has also suffered permanent hearing loss, a gift from the USS Cleveland and the 1,500 rounds of 6-inch shells he estimates were fired on his watch.
Orsborn thinks often about his days in the military — the beaches of Buenos Aires, the cold arctic winds of the North Atlantic and the war-torn waters of the Pacific, still littered with watery graves.
“Sometimes I’ll wake up in the night and just think about something that happened. ... I get reminded of it a lot,” he said.
The memories still seem to come easy, with just a few snapshots of the amazing amount of life one sailor managed to live during seven long years when the world’s oceans were a much deadlier place than younger men could possibly know.