75 Years Later, a WWII Love Story Told Through a Sailor’s Letters Home

I normally don’t read love stories. I prefer the grittier tales in biographies and histories.

That’s what I thought I would be reading twelve years ago when the late Tom Cronin gave me copies of the letters his father wrote home from this tour in the Merchant Marines during WWII. I thought it was going to be a war story, seen through the eyes of a young man at sea. If I’d known ahead of time that it was a love story I might have been too embarrassed to read it. I would have thought it was too private. But by then there I was in the middle of it.

Pacific residents knew Frank Cronin as the man who, with his son Tom, ran the Western Auto store. He was 31 years old when he was ordered to report for the Merchant Marines Training Center at Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn. He was 6’6” tall and weighed 225 pounds. He and his wife Dorothy had two children, Tom, age 8 and a daughter Carol, “Snookie,’ age two.

The letters that Frank Cronin wrote to Dorothy between December 1943 and June 1944 tell the story of delivering men and material to the battlefields of World War II. Through it all, Dorothy’s presence was there with him for every moment.

When Frank was inducted into the Merchant Marines, he knew from the outset that he was caught up in a great adventure that might take him around the world. He was open to the adventure. He assigned 100 percent of his pay, $87.50 a month, to be sent to his wife, put $24 in his money belt, and surveyed the war preparation that was taking place at the New York and Brooklyn docks.

While he was still on American soil and could send letter home uncensored, he talked about the planes, tanks, jeeps and raw materials being boarded onto ships that were lined into convoys. 

He visited the USO in Manhattan, saw the famous high-kicking, Rockettes perform at Radio Show Music Hall and witnessed repair work the Normandie, which had suffered an explosion while it was in the N. Y. harbor. He arranged for Dorothy to come to New York so she could see it all. He met her at Penn Station and he took her to all the places he had written about.

He promised to write every day, which he did. He devised a code, by the way he addressed Dorothy in each letter she would know his destination. She kept the letters and her son Tom later placed them in plastic sleeves and bound them in a three ring binder in chronological order. At the front is Frank’s induction notice and the handwritten code that would give away his destination. 

After he completed his training, he sat on the dock and watched the other ships as they sailed down the East River and headed out to sea.  He was allowed to board a Liberty Ship. “Boy are they wicked,” he told Dorothy, “And plenty of guns on her too. They were loading steel pipe on her and she was headed for Russia.” There were 25 Merchant Marines on Board and 20 gunners mates from the U.S. Navy.

Frank was assigned to the S.S. Sarah J. Hale. She was a C-3-Z type Liberty Ship and she was brand new. She was being loaded with fighter planes and parts and all sorts of mail for the men on board. She was also going to carry troops. Frank boarded at the foot of 59^th street in Brooklyn at Pier 1.

The planes on board had British insignia on their sides, leading Frank to speculate that he was headed for England but it wasn’t to be.

“I guess we won’t go to England after all but will no doubt head for Egypt, Persia or India,” he wrote. “It’ll be a long trip.”

He had one last liberty in before shipping out. He had some drinks with the guys but wasn’t into it. He walked to a park that he and Dorothy had visited, walked over to the National Catholic Community Service center where they’d gotten a sandwich together and finally he went to Penn Station and looked at that huge space with all those people moving and stood in the very place where she had stood before she boarded the train home. He wanted to hold onto that memory of her there, next to him.

She should not worry about his safety, he wrote. The convoys were completely safe. 

“I don’t feel too bad about this now, Mom (which meant South Seas). Just stop and think what a thrill this will be, all those ships in long rows way out in front of you and Navy war ship along side and fighter planes overhead and all types of equipment tied down on top of these decks.’

The Hale, he said, was a fast ship and loaded light, carrying P-47 thunderbolt fighter planes with the British flag on their sides, “and a hell of a lot of mail bags.”

“The navy gunners say we will go into tropical waters and will go around the world as they are taking on a lot of food stuffs,” Frank wrote. “If we go to Persia and India we will go through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific then through the Mediterranean and out through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean.”

From this point on the mail would be censored, he told Dorothy, so neither of them could mention the Hale’s destination or port of call in their letters.

He left the States on March 20, 1944, little Tom’s birthday. The food on board was swell and plentiful. He could listen to the radio from New York, London and Algiers on shortwave broadcast. He wanted Dorothy to try to pick up London on the radio because “nine times out of ten I will be listening too. somewhere in the world.”

He wrote of the minutiae of life on a merchant ship, what he ate for breakfast, his job of preparing the dining room for meals, his hours on board watching the sea and the sky. 

“I may have the makings of a sailor after all, if I could only stop thinking of you and the kids,,” he wrote. “I might like this sort of life, being as I have to do it for a while.”

He traveled from New York to Norfolk, Virginia, to Gibraltar, Algiers, North Africa, into the Mediterranean to Tobruk, Libya and North Africa. He arrived in Egypt Apr. 21, 1944, then traveled through the Suez Canal, to Aden, Arabia. Arrived in Karachi, India May 1, 1944, where they unloaded mail and the P-47 thunderbolt fighters that they had started with. From Karachi they went to Bandar Shapur in the Persian Gulf, then to Australia, San Pedro, California and San Francisco California, where he would board the train for home.

American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945, an average of three ships every two days. They were cargo and troop ships that supplied battle sites in both oceans. Only four survive. One, the SS John Brown has been spruces up and is a popular free museum in Baltimore harbor.