Petty Officer to Lieutenant to the End of the War

From Los Angeles Herman went to Seattle on a coastwise voyage aboard the Liberty ship Charles J. Colden. It may have been simply a way to get him to Seattle where on April 10, 1945, he was appointed Lieutenant (j.g.) in the U. S. Maritime Service and, concurrently, the U.S. Coast Guard, the dual status accorded Merchant Marine officers and petty officers. He was also issued a new Maritime Service ID card (below).

Two days later, President Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, and the nation went into mourning even as the war effort intensified on both fronts.

________________________________

THE END OF WORLD WAR II

Germany capitulated in May, 1945. With no indication that Japan intended to do the same as the Allies fought their way toward Tokyo via Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the U.S. Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6. Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th, and Japan surrendered three days later.

The war was over and the aftermath began.

The official paperwork in the Pederson archive contains no reference to these history-making events. The certificates, ID cards, gate passes, discharge certificates and expense accounts reflect only the unremarkable facts of Herman's daily worklife.

Personal reaction to the events of the war would have been restricted to such correspondence with parents and friends as he was able to conduct from a slow ship in a theater of war.

__________________________

Herman would work for another year for the Shepard Steamship Co. under the aegis of the U.S. Maritime Service, most of that time as purser-corpsman on the Elmer A. Sperry, a Liberty ship which made a ten-month voyage to China and back between May, 1945 and March, 1946.  

______________________________