When a regulation barred Ed Maresh from enlisting in the Navy at the age of 16, he changed it.
Not the regulation: He changed his age.
After an unsuccessful trip to the recruiter’s office, Maresh did a little shopping on the way home and found what he needed to forge the date on his baptismal certificate.
That’s what got Maresh into the Navy during World War II.
The Vancouver resident is a member of a group known as Veterans of Underage Military Service: people who signed up before the legal enlistment age of 17.
It wasn’t like Maresh had a lot of better options. He’d already been on his own for a while. The youngest of nine boys, Maresh wasn’t getting along too well with his stepmother. He dropped out of school as a sophomore and left his home in Woodburn, Ore., to work graveyard shift in a Portland shipyard.
He eventually moved in with the family of his best friend, Clair Vandehey. When 17-year-old Clair — known as Buddy — said he was enlisting in the Navy, it sounded like a good idea to Maresh.
On Oct. 14, 1943, they went to the recruiting office in Salem, Ore. When the Navy recruiter asked how old the boys were, Maresh said he was 16.
The recruiter told Maresh: “Come back next year.”
Buddy told the recruiter: “If you don’t take him, you don’t get me neither.”
When they boys got home, Mrs. Vandehey asked if they were sailors.
“No, but we’ll take care of it tomorrow,” Buddy said.
Maresh finally told her what was going on. He’d bought a small bottle of ink remover on the way home.
“I was born in 1926. I put 1925 on my baptismal certificate. She looked at it,” Maresh said. “She looked at me.”
Then Buddy’s mom said, “I don’t think that will work. Get me some ink remover.”
She redid his forgery in a delicate hand, Maresh said, and then told him: “Now we’ll both go to jail.”
The following day, Buddy and Ed decided to take the train to Portland and enlist there instead of going back to Salem.
“Who did we see but the same guy who’d been in Salem the day before. We got out quick,” Maresh said.
They figured the recruiter probably split his time between two offices.
“We waited until 2 p.m.,” and when they returned to the Portland office, “he wasn’t there.”
After boot camp, Buddy went to gunnery school and wound up on an attack transport in the South Pacific. Maresh took internal combustion engine training and was assigned to a patrol escort craft in Alaskan waters during the Aleutian campaign.
In addition to watching for Japanese submarines, his shipmates had to worry about the weather. Their ship was only 187 feet long, Maresh said, and it really got tossed around when wind gusts topped 100 mph.
“Waves were 55 feet high. We had to take them at 45 degree angles. If we hit them straight on, we’d have 50 feet of water come over our bow.”
Their skipper knew the pattern of the waves. But one night, as they were negotiating one wave, they were hit by a rogue that slammed into them from a different angle.
“It turned us 180 degrees and we lost all our power for a couple of minutes. The ship rolled to 57 degrees; at 57 degrees, it’s easier to walk on the bulkhead than on the deck,” Maresh said.
To keep the ship’s superstructure free of ice, “We rigged up a flexible steam line so the deck force could hose the ice off to keep us from capsizing,”Maresh said.
As combat operations transitioned, Maresh eventually wound up on a cruiser in the South Pacific as the war neared its conclusion.
Looking back on it a few days ago, Maresh said he’s glad he enlisted — even if it wasn’t what you’d call legal. He became a petty officer at 17, assuming a leadership role when his hometown friends were still in high school.
“It was the best thing that could have happened to a 16-year-old,” he said.
