I never met my Great Uncle Eugene but from what I’ve read and been told by my dad, Eugene was a pretty brave guy. He was the oldest in his family and when World War II came around he joined the US Navy and became part of the crew on the submarine called the USS. Golet. On June 14,1944 the Golet was lost on the northeast coast of Honshu, Japan. Japanese antisubmarine forces attacked an American submarine that day and The Golet was the only sub in that area reported missing. The fighting in the Pacific was heavy back then and it came as no surprise when my family received a telegraph pronouncing Eugene “Missing In Action”. But when someone said that you were missing in a submarine it really meant that you were dead but no one had found your body yet. All eighty two men were killed but Eugene was the only Manitowoc native sailor to give his life while serving on a Manitowoc-built submarine.

His family had worked out a system to know where Eugene was by the way he signed his letters. When he signed Sincerely Yours, his family knew things could go bad in a hurry. Eugene died at the age of twenty years old and his body was never found.

Even though I never knew my great uncle, I know he is someone that would have been worth looking up too because he did something that I would never be able to have done. I just would have liked to have met him before he died to hear what he would say about his experience.
Maybe he was scared at the possibility that he would die.

And who would be able to blame him?

But I don’t think so. If he had been scared then he wouldn’t have signed up in the first place. He knew what could happen and took that risk. I find it interesting that I was born on the 52nd anniversary of the day when the submarine was lost and think of it as a reminder of what happened on that fateful day in 1944.