An email letter from Prof. Loyal Gould, who taught in USST some ten years ago. Before he retired, he was the Dean of College of Journalism in Baylor University. For ten years, we have kept correspondence between us and I always knew him as a professor and a renowned journalist who had interviewed President Kennedy and President Johnson until I received this email from him. HE WAS A WAR HERO FIGHTING GERMANS WHEN HE WAS ONLY 15!

Dear Lule:

I am happy you enjoyed your trip to Australia. I was there once, when I was 15 and in the U.S. Navy during WWII. I too liked it very much (and drank my first bottle of beer which I did not like) although the time spent there was very short. It was there that I turned 16 and thus was eligible to do what I had been trained for as a member of an underwater demolition team, i.e., to blow up Japanese ships as well as German ships supplying JAPAN WITH much needed military hardware. As soon as we left Australia, we headed toward Japan and a huge German submarine built to transport large loads of anything the Germans wanted to ship across large distances and in the process to hide from the U.S. military. In this case, the submarine which the U.S. had tracked with sonar equipment from Germany all the way to the approaches to Japan carried Zeiss optical equipment. We caught up with the vessel about 100 miles from Yokahama where we met a U.S. submarine onto which I was transferred.

After I was on board, we followed the German submarine under water straight into Yokahama harbor and waited under water until nightfall. The sailors on board the German submarine remained on their vessel throughout the night. When the officers on the submarine that carried me reckoned the German crew was sleeping, I was put into a torpedo tube with a tank of oxygen strapped to my back and a pair of goggles plus 10 pounds of explosive plastic and shot into the surrounding Japanese waters by means of an air pressure device that sent me hurtling about 50 feet below the sea's surface before I came above water. I then swam the remaining distance to the German submarine, attached the explosive just below the sub's water line and set the timer to explode in 15 minutes. I then swam faster that I ever had before to the designated spot where the U.S. sub surfaced, opened the conning tower and I climbed aboard. The sub dove and we headed toward  Yokohama  where all of us on that vessel participated in the invasion of that island. We had been told that if we survived the invasion we would head to Japan for the invasion of that country. But the atomic bomb intervened and we ended the war alive. I later learned that 174 German sailors aboard
that submarine that I demolished perished in the explosion and the sinking of their vessel. I never did get back to Australia. Cheers, loyal