This is Lyman C. Irrgang. I was born in Brighton Township, Nicollet County on the 29th of April 1923. My parents were William P. and Frances C. (Sondag) Irrgang and my grandparents were Charles M. Sondag, Angeline (Reising) Sondag, Joseph J. Irrgang, and Caroline (Giefer) Irrgang. I went to school in Granby for the first three years and then went to school in Brighton Township through eighth grade. In 1936, I went to Nicollet to start high school.
During the Depression my father farmed a hundred and sixty acre farm just . . . where Buddy Giefer lives today and he only did that two years because in those days farming a hundred and sixty acres was really too much for one man because he had to do it all with horses. So you had to handle all your hay with a fork practically. And straw. I remember he’d go out four o’clock in the morning and shock grain in the fall and then he’d come in and milk a couple cows and then he’d go out with horses and cut grain.
I don’t know. It seemed like those winters were colder than they are now and also the clothes weren’t as good by far. I remember when we lived in Brighton Township I walked about a good three-quarters of a mile to school and so did a couple of my younger brothers. Some days I would go and they wouldn’t go because it was so darned cold that winter. I remember I just had a jacket and I imagine it was lined because it was pretty warm. Then I had a cap that had earlaps on it. In those days we had mittens because the gloves weren’t good enough. Your fingers individually would get so cold.
When I think of the Depression I think of where we lived at one time. We paid eight dollars a month for a big house and every night we’d go and get milk when the farmer was separating his milk after milking the cows. We’d get a gallon of milk and that would cost us a nickel. I remember working for this one farmer. He had eighty acres about a mile from the farm he ran that we lived on and on Saturdays in the fall I can remember going out in the field with him. In those days they cut the corn and shocked it and let it dry and then they shredded the dry corn. But there was a lot lost in the field so him and I would go out with a team and a hayrack about eight o’clock in the morning or maybe a little earlier and then we wouldn’t come in until maybe five at night. I know it was getting dark already. And the next thing he’d give me a quarter. And I was satisfied. Of course then you could buy a bottle of pop for a nickel and cigarettes were ten cents a pack. Although I didn’t smoke at the time.
During summer vacations I would always go to some farmer and help him, oh, probably from the age of ten through thirteen at least. I’d be away from the folks all summer and be working for somebody. I remember when I was . . . I think when I was nine I worked for Bernie Dorn’s father and mother and I know I cultivated all the corn for them that year. Hauled all the manure. And I run the grain wagon during threshing. That was hauling sacks of grain from the thresher to the granary and then dumping it. When there was nothing else going on I was pulling weeds in the garden or something like that.
Life on the farm in the 1930s was hard work. It was all with horses and the two-row cultivator was about the biggest you had for corn. Sometimes just a single row. You put up hay out in the field. It was cut one day and then dried for a day or two and then use the hay bucker and a rake to get it near the stack and make this big stack of hay. Somebody’d be up there stacking it and tramping it down and somebody’d be pitching it up to him. It was terribly hot. No air conditioning in those days. I remember one time. It was maybe about the second year I ever run a bundle team during threshing. I come home one night with the team and put them away and I suppose it was . . . well, it was always between ten and midnight when we got home. I remember going upstairs to bed and I took off my shoes and I said, oh, I’m just going to lay down for a minute. I just laid back with my clothes on and I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until morning. That was, you know, five o’clock you got up. I remember I had a blue shirt on. And that thing just had streaks of . . . where the sweat had dried and streaks of salt. And of course I went to work with the same clothes on that day.
When I was about nine years old one winter my dad got very sick and he was bedridden. So another uncle of mine dropped a truckload of wood at our place right ahead of our house. So every night when I come home from school I had to chop enough wood to fill a big wood box because that’s what we heated with. Then I had to fill the kerosene lamps, which, of course, there was no electricity there at that time and no indoor plumbing. Then I’d have to haul in drinking water. Once a week when my mother was going to wash then I’d have to haul in many buckets of water to fill this big boiler she had on the stove to heat overnight to have hot water to wash.
Food. My mother always had a big garden. Clothing in those days wasn’t near as good as it is today. You didn’t have . . . for some reason we didn’t have hoods. I don’t know why they didn’t think of that. But we had caps with earlaps on. I remember that one winter was so terribly cold. I went to school every day but sometimes one of my brothers or sisters would not go. One time I went there and I had almost a mile to walk but I’d usually run because it was so cold and that kept me warm. But I got there that morning and nobody was there and I was planning on getting in and getting warm and then I had to run home again.
When the Armistice Day blizzard was in 1940 I was working for Edmund Giefer because I had worked for Grommeresch in the summertime and he only had a man in the summertime when there was a lot of work to do. One funny thing. The farmers always used to say when it rained that was a good day for hired men and ducks. Well, yeah. It wasn’t so good for hired men because then they’d always say well clean out the chicken barns. So you’d have to pull up with a manure spreader and then clean out the chicken barn and throw it in a manure spreader and take it out in the field. But during the blizzard, that day started out so nice in the morning. A little windy. But it wasn’t cold or anything. All of a sudden by ten thirty or so it was blowing to beat blazes and snowing hard and we were not prepared for it. In those days you had to haul the top off the silo because the last corn that was put in there was not very good. You had to haul that off. I remember we hauled it with a manure spreader and I . . . you had to go against the wind and the wind was so strong the horses just didn’t want to go against the wind. I had to walk behind them and slap them on the butt with the reins just to get them to go. Then Edmund and me and another hired man, Bud Larson, we had to go out and pitch hay off a haystack in that terrible wind and we could only get it as high as the rack went on the hay wagon because the wind was so strong that we’d all have to stand in a different place and then take it in and pitch it in the barn. Like I say, we were not prepared.
We had a big hay rope tied to the barn and then tied to an oak tree and then tied to the porch of the house so we could get back and forth. One guy hung onto the rope and we held each other’s hands to get back and forth. I remember we even were in the calf pens taking calf manure with trowels and . . . I mean the cow manure or the calf manure into the cracks of the building so the wind wouldn’t come through so bad. That’s about all we could do because you had to stay inside. It was just milk in the morning and milk in the afternoon.
My mother had gone to Swan Lake to church from Nicollet with the priest and Ray Zins who drove the priest. They got caught on the way home and had to stay out at Honkens. And of course there was no telephones because the blizzard had knocked so many lines down. So she couldn’t even call home and get a hold of dad and let anybody know where they were. They were out there two full days and into the third before they could get into town. And there was a number of people killed because it was November 11 and they had gone out duck hunting in the morning when the weather was good and then they were caught in different places and terrible wind and snowing and no visibility. I don’t know. I think it was between forty and sixty people that lost their lives.
Now after that storm we were out with a team of horses and a sled and we were pulling stalks of corn out from under the snow and then breaking off the ears and throwing them in the wagon. I thought, oh, my God, if I could only get out of here. That night I heard on the radio that they were taking people in the Navy that were only seventeen if they had permission from their parents. So sometimes on Saturday nights I’d get to go home for the weekend and then come back on Monday. I told my dad, I said, “I think I want to go,” because Hitler was getting grabby over in Europe and he was going into other countries at that time already and I said, “I think a war is going to start and I might as well get in and get a little ahead of the rest of the people.” Besides I had an uncle, Jack Irrgang, that lived in the state of Washington and he had been in the Navy and at that time he was in the Navy when Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world and my uncle had been in on that and he was kind of my hero. So that’s why I wanted to go in the Navy.
So December 11 . . . this was on a Friday when I heard about it and Monday my dad took me down for . . . to the Navy recruiting office for an exam and he said, “When do you want to leave?” And in those days you couldn’t have even three fillings and they wouldn’t take you. In your teeth. But I was young and my teeth were good and everything. So was the rest of me. He said, “When do you want to leave?” And I said, “As soon as I can.” The next day I was on a train for Great Lakes, Illinois. That’s where I went through training. It was about three months I think. And from there I was shipped out. Oh, I got a one-week’s leave first. Then I went back to Chicago and was shipped out to California and it was so nice there. Being nice and warm and green and everything. Went to San Diego and from there I went on a destroyer up to Los Angeles and from there on they put us, there was a bunch of us, on the USS Utah, a battleship that was used as training for airplanes dropping small bombs. They’d put twelve by twelve long timbers on the deck and everything and get them about four feet high and that’s what they would drop their bombs on and we hit rough weather on the way out to Pearl Harbor. I guess I was lucky in a way. They sent me down about seven decks and there I was down there chipping paint so it wasn’t near as rough there and I never got seasick. But some of them poor guys in my company, I’m sure they would have just almost like to die. But oh, the waves were so high and it came over the deck. We had water down the first two decks. And you slept in hammocks. So a lot of them slept on cots on the deck and the water would be sloshing back and forth and be about a foot deep. The Utah was an old ship. I think it was built in 1916. But we hit such terrible waves that they were fortressing up the bow with eight by eights.
How I was assigned to the submarine service I have no idea but I’m glad that I was and I was sent out to Pearl Harbor and my orders were for further transfer to the USS Narwhal SS 167. But in the meantime I worked in the torpedo shop in the morning and went across the bay to torpedo school in the afternoon. Then about August I was sent down to . . . aboard ship to the Narwhal. Now we went to sea, oh, about the last week in October. We’d just finished working. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon and word came down to take on food supplies, oil and torpedoes and go to sea with secret orders. We didn’t know where the hell we were going. So we worked all day and then we had . . . we worked all night until about noon the next day when we finally got done taking torpedoes aboard and making them ready and putting them in the tubes and so forth. And then I was lucky enough to get the four to eight watch. So then at four o’clock . . . we got underway about noon and four o’clock I got to go on watch until eight and from then on . . . they wanted to make it tough on us and assume it was a regular war patrol so they could see what people could stand. So for forty-eight days I worked all day and then had the four to eights in the morning and the four to eights at night. So it was . . . my day was from about three thirty until eight thirty every day.
I heard the news about Pearl Harbor first hand. We’d got in from Wake Island on that forty-eight days I was telling you about on Friday evening, December 5, 1941, and then Friday night one section had liberty and Saturday evening I had liberty and went to town. I can’t remember what we did in Honolulu but on the way home, about . . . on the way back to the ship about eleven o’clock at night I run into Jesse Jensen from Nicollet and he was at an outdoor beer garden and roller skating rink. I talked to him a while and he said, Well, come over tomorrow to the USS Oklahoma and then we’ll go over to the USS Arizona and see Ed Wentzlaff.” So that’s what I was doing the morning of Pearl Harbor. I was shaving and I saw them drop a regular bomb on Ford Island, which was a Navy Air Force base . . . airbase across the bay. It had been common to see planes practicing and they would drop one pound bags of flour and then they knew if they hit their target or not. I said to the guy next to me shaving, I said, “Look at there they’ve got a live one in with some of the dummies.” And about that time a plane come by our barracks and turned and we could see the rising sun on the wings so we knew it was Japanese. About that time the master at arms come and said everybody back to their boats. And on the way down . . . because at that time we didn’t have no air conditioning and the duty section stayed aboard and the other two sections could go up to the barracks and sleep. On the way down to the . . . back to the boat I saw the USS Arizona blow up. My God! The flames must have gone . . . I don’t know . . . I’d say five hundred feet into the air. Because it just blasted up. And then . . . so naturally I did not get to go to the USS Oklahoma and the strange thing was Jesse Jensen was killed on the Oklahoma and Gerry Leonard’s brother, Ed Wentzlaff, was on the Arizona and he lived. And he’s still living today. I know where he lives.
We had an officer there who had us try to train our six-inch guns on the high altitude bombers that were flying over. And of course those guns, six-inch guns, wouldn’t train that high. And it took quite a while before they got to our magazines and we got fifty calibers and twenty-millimeter guns out. And our duty officer and the duty officer on the USS Dolphin who was tied up next door to us, shot down a plane. It landed right on our stern. And about three days later they fished the plane out with the pilot aboard and he was all swollen up and everything. That was my first death that I saw real close. But during December 7 they brought many people that were burned and soaked with oil in right next to us because we had a pretty good hospital on the base. That’s where they were taking them to.
Then when I did get back on board, the torpedo planes come right down behind us and they were only flying fifty, seventy-five feet high because they were going to drop their torpedoes and if they dropped them from too high and they went down they’d hit bottom. I think the water there was about twenty-five feet deep because we drew seventeen ourselves. And the torpedoes would go across from behind us and straight to the battleships where they were tied up about . . . almost a half a mile away from us. Then horizontal bombers come over after the torpedo planes and they knew just how high to fly because at that time everybody was . . . we all had our guns going and everybody was firing at them. They were firing tracers so you could tell that our ammunition couldn’t even get up high enough. It just . . . turned and came back to earth under the planes. Now they suspected that the Japs would send a landing force in so they called us all up to the base and gave us thirty-aught-six rifles but we carried them around all day and nothing happened.
I made eleven war patrols during the war and they were, most of them, sixty days or darned close to it all the time. I was on the USS Narwhal to start with and then USS Rasher SS 269 and then the USS Cod SS 224. The Narwhal was one of three big boats and they were clumsy and were built in 1930 so I wanted to get on what we called a fleet-type boat. They were all the same size, three hundred and twelve feet long. Had six torpedo tubes in front and four in back. So the way you did that, you got off the submarine you were on and you went in the relief crew and you worked on other submarines that were coming in from patrol. So I was sent over and I was working on the USS Wahoo SS 238 and I got talking to an officer and he made arrangements that I would be in the regular crew on the Wahoo and go out with them. In the meantime my chief torpedoman from the Narwhal come and asked me would I want to come back aboard there because he says, “We’re going to Australia after this next war patrol. I know it,” and I never did find out how he knew that. But anyway, a torpedoman named Dunn, had broken his arm and they needed a replacement and he wanted to know if I . . . and I said, “Well, if you can tell me that for sure we’re going to Australia,” I said, “I’ll make one more run.” Several days later the Wahoo went to sea and was lost with all hands.
So I went out with them and we went to Sydney, Australia. On the way we sunk a ship and we got hammered. There were five destroyers and we were out in kind of open water and they would make an X and one would listen for us and then those four would take and criss-cross us and drop depth charges on us. I don’t remember how we got out of that but we finally did and we went to Australia. There the boat went to sea and I was left at Sydney and I was supposed to go back around to Perth, Australia and get back on it and I went around to Perth and then I got on Rasher. I made two patrols on there and we really had good patrols. Sunk a lot of ships. I remember one of them was we got three hundred and forty depth charges. Three hundred and forty-seven depth charges. I’ll never forget the number. Man oh man! Well, then I got off there. Still trying to get on a fleet boat and they sent me by train all the way around Australia. Nine days. It was actually an army train and oh! For meals they’d stop and the army cooks would make mutton. I never got so God darned sick of mutton. I haven’t ever had it since and don’t want it. The one thing I remember from that trip is stopping and then these Aborigines would throw . . . what do you call it? [Boomerang] Those things that you threw out in the air and they come back to you? I can’t think of the name right now. And another thing. Once I was looking out and I thought that looks like stubble field but it’s moving. Just acres and acres! And here it was gol-darned rabbits. Just looked like the whole land would be moving. I never seen anything like it since.
I had some good commanding officers. One of them was Commander Willard R. Laughon on the USS Rasher. He was the best torpedo shot I ever saw. And on the Rasher we went out for training to train new guys for five days before we went to sea and we had this guy named Westerhaus. Well, when you dove, the lookouts went down. One went to the wheel. One went to the bow planes and one went to the stern planes and one was a messenger and when it was time to relieve one of them everybody said where’s Westerhaus? Well, he was famous for walking off and hiding and everything else. Not paying attention to his job. And we couldn’t find him. Must have left him topside. So we surfaced and the water was pretty darned rough and we had a hard time getting next to him. And somebody threw a heaving line. That’s a light line with a ball, lead ball, on the end so it will go. He caught that and they pulled him aboard and you just had to pry his fingers off that thing. They had a seaplane come out and take him back to Australia. But he was dead already when they took him. So. He should have paid more attention to business.
I did get one leave during the war. We had to come back for a three-month overhaul at Mare Island, California and I was in the last group to go home. And when I was getting ready to go back to California this gal was going with me and Root Dauffenbach give me a bottle of brandy and this night I and this girl and two guys . . . two other guys from the Narwhal that were on the same train, we drank that bottle and then about five thirty in the morning kaboom! We had had a hot box on the Great Salt Lake in Utah and we had just started out and were making eight knots about they figured when a freight train coming some way didn’t get the word and ran right into the back of us and oh! It was wartime so some of the cars were steel and some were wood and the steel ones naturally jumped and went right through and smashed all the wood ones and oh! It was really a mess. There was eighty people killed and a hundred and twenty-five I think it was, something like that, injured. I went up in the air and come down on my chest on the couple seats ahead of me and it was just . . . the car was full of dust. And by the time we found our way out and everything there was a half of a soldier laying there on the commode. He evidently had been leaning against the window and when our car went through the wooden car ahead of us it just cut him right in half. Another guy was trapped between our car . . . well, he’d been in the wooden one ahead of us and he was trapped up to his hips and rescue couldn’t get to us because there was just the one track across the Great Salt Lake and they give him a cigarette and a couple shots and he died right there standing in the wreckage.
One thing I remember about the war is we got the word to go to this . . . I forget what island it was . . . and catch this ship that was hit. A Japanese ship that was headed there and we were supposed to try and catch it before it got there and we didn’t make it. It was on the way into the harbor when we got there. So we followed it in and the captain was busy trying to get a shot at it and it never tied up or anything but was still slowly going into port and there’s twenty-five planes above us and there was ships tied up to the dock and he was . . . had his hands full trying to keep track of everything. All of a sudden we could hear . . . sound travels under water pretty good. We could hear this torpedo coming at us. I thought oh, my God! Nobody’s ever going to know how we got sunk. I said I got about twenty seconds to live. Because I knew about how fast they went and probably what distance they fired it from. And here it come and finally right by us it went. Then another one, and doggone if that didn’t go by us too. We deduced that the destroyer tied up there had fired two torpedoes. Fired it at the periscope not knowing which way we were sitting. We were sitting with our stern toward that destroyer so one went on each side of us. If we’d have been going the other way both of them would have hit us broadside.
Another time I remember . . . I don’t know how the hell they caught us in open sea like that, or we sunk a ship or what. But then there was four destroyers and one would sit and listen and then the other three would come sliding across where they thought we were and drop a couple depth charges. And that lasted for . . . oh, they dropped fifty-some charges I think it was. But they never did hit us. We were at three hundred feet and that’s what that boat was built for in 1930.
Also, one time on that boat playing cards in the after torpedo room a guy looked up at the pressure gauge for outside for the torpedoes topside and he, “Oh, my God,” he said. And the two hundred pound sea gauge was . . . hit the stops at two hundred pounds and it was broke. Here we found out we had got to almost six hundred feet because this diving officer had a bad habit of saying “Well, you were supposed to say flood from sea to a tank or pump from a tank to sea and he always had to use the word flood.” Here he thought the guy on the trim manifold was pumping out and he was flooding in and we had gone down to six hundred feet in this boat.
Enemy ships. If I remember right we had thirty-three on the submarines I was on. Good size ships. And then . . . we’d always sink small fishing boats that had . . . maybe they’d have sails on and then a diesel motor but they wouldn’t use that motor if the sails would take care of it. There was enough wind. We’d send a working party aboard and if they were carrying rubber or anything that could be used for the war for the Japs then we’d sink them. We’d sink them with the guns because they weren’t big enough to waste a torpedo on. One time we were already tied up to this one and here a Jap plane come in on us. Of course we broke the mooring lines and everything and immediately went down. So that left the boarding party on that ship. But this airplane dropped a bomb on us, which missed naturally, and then we dove and he circled around and come back and dropped another one and missed on that one too. But there we were with these guys on a strange fishing boat. When we come up that night to look for them there were so many that we had no idea. And this went on for two days. Of course they had radioed the USS Blenny SS-324 and a couple other submarines and the Blenny picked them up one day and brought them back to us.
Depth charges. I know there was over a thousand total because the quartermaster would . . . it was his job to count them and tell what direction they come from and whether they were below or above us. Well, the captain knew whether they were below or above us or pretty close or not but he didn’t always know what direction. It was stress because you got so nervous. Every depth charge, when it hit the water and then went down so far, that’s when they would arm and we could hear it click and it ALWAYS sounded they were behind us. Then pretty soon kaboom and you never knew if it would be behind you or ahead of us or side or anything. So there was a lot of stress. I was very nervous when the war ended finally.
How do you keep in touch with your family during the war? It’s not very easy. Usually you go out to sea for two months. Then you come in and you’re in port maybe a month. You get to go to a hotel or something for two weeks. And somebody else does the maintenance on your submarine. Then you come back and you have a grueling four or five days with . . . because they take one third of your crew off and send them back to the U.S. for new construction and then you get one third of the crew that are all rookies and have to be trained. So you go out for four or five days and just diving and battle stations and fire drills and collision drills and all this stuff day and night and then you come back in and you load up with torpedoes and fuel and food and by that time you’re ready to go on patrol again. So the only thing you can do is write while you’re in port and then you couldn’t tell them anything. So I always said somewhere in some water. That’s about all they knew about where I was.
The food was good but you always ran out of milk early. Probably in two weeks at least and you always had . . . oh, I forget what the eggs were but they were already . . . did they call them dried eggs I think? They didn’t taste too bad but they weren’t as good as fresh ones. I can tell you that. And one time . . . I don’t know if we got . . . cockroaches come in with the food supply or what. Anyhow we had cockroaches and the poor cooks couldn’t do enough about it. They’d bake bread and then we’d have to take a slice of bread and hold it up to the light and pick out the cockroaches. Oh, yeah. Oh, fun.
When you come in and you went to the hotel you were on your own. You could do anything you wanted. You didn’t have to be at a meal. Meals were certain times but if you felt like getting up and going to breakfast you could and if you didn’t you didn’t have to. And then you could have dinner or supper. You didn’t have to be there for that but you could.
My first inkling that the war was over was . . . I think the war ended in August . . . like the 13th or something. We got into Australia a couple days before that. Here the poor Australians didn’t have a lot of things . . . .a lot of ways to celebrate but they were walking up and down the streets and dragging tin cans and having a good time. I don’t know what made it . . . I suppose they thought the war was going to end in a couple days on account of the second atomic bomb had been dropped by that time. Shortly after that we left Australia and went to New Zealand for four or five days and that was nice too. New Zealand was good. And after the five days when we left New Zealand we went to Panama and then to Miami. We unloaded all our torpedoes in Panama. Then we went to Miami and were there about two weeks and had visitors days. Then to Philadelphia to put the boat out of commission.
In Philadelphia I met a gal and when we left Philadelphia I went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to get on another submarine and then she came down there and we got married. Chuck was born in 1947. This was 1946 when we got married. Chuck was born in 1947 and Barb was born in 1951. Now let’s see. I was on a number of boats after that. I went to Panama for a year and my wife didn’t go along because I guess we found out we were coming back and whatever. Then I was at New London, Connecticut for about a year and then we went to the West Coast. Oh! First I went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire and put the Valador in commission. That was the newest boat we had and it was going to be stationed on the West Coast. So then my wife took a train out there and we went around there and I operated on different boats out of San Diego for seven or eight years. Then I went to Nuclear Weapons School for guided missiles that were fired from submarines and then we went out to Hawaii and was stationed there until I retired.
After the Navy I got home just in time to take the exams for Postmaster job at Nicollet and I got it. I was there until 1972. In 1960 . . . just before . . . one month before retirement we were divorced and then I came home and got the Postmaster job. In 1968, I married this other girl from Mankato and she died in 1977. Chuck lived with me in Minnesota and Barbara was at her mother’s for a couple years and then she come and stayed with us and went through high school here. Then after that she joined the Air Force and did thirty years in the Air Force. Chuck, after three years in the Marine Corps, mostly in Vietnam, graduated from Mankato State and became an accountant. Now he works for the Minnesota Historical Society in Minneapolis. So I see him many weeks of the year because he has a partial business down here in Nicollet restoring old cars.
Otherwise, that’s about my story.
Minnesota Historical Society, March 4, 2006