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| William C. Kowinski, Seaman, circa 1943-45 |
I had just started work on this series of tributes to people who died in 2022 when I got word that a member of my own extended family passed away.
My uncle, William Charles Kowinski, died on November 30. In a few weeks he would have been 97 years old. Beyond family and those who knew him (and that advanced age), he was notable as one of the last surviving 1% of the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II. In fact there may be as few left as around 100,000. As of the beginning of this year now ending, there were just 9,675 living in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, including my uncle.
Until recently I’ve only known him to even refer to his wartime experiences once, and that was a single comment I overheard as a child. A few years ago, however, he began talking about them, and went public for Memorial Day in 2020.
Bill dropped out of high school after his second year to join the Navy. He told me that since both of his older brothers were found medically unfit for the armed services, he felt it was up to him. He wanted to serve his country.
After basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois and further training at Pearl Harbor, he joined the crew of 2700 aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania in September 1943. He was 17.
The Pennsylvania was classified as a super-dreadnought battleship, built in the first decade of the 20th century. She was too advanced to see action in World War I (she ran on scarce diesel fuel instead of coal) and by the time World War II began, she was limited by older technology, particularly radar. But the Pennsylvania was used heavily to support troop landings, recon and other activities in the war in the Pacific with suppressing fire. It’s probably why, as Bill told me, this ship fired more rounds than any other in the history of war. I can't even imagine what it was like to be in the bowels of an enormous ship while those huge guns were firing for hours and days at a time.
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| Bill in 2020 |
Bill had barely a month to get used to the ship when the Pennsylvania began shelling Makin Atoll, where it was under fire from Japanese planes, and shaken by an explosion on a smaller vessel nearby.
In October 1944, the Pennsylvania was tasked with providing covering fire for activities in preparation for the assault on Leyte in the Phillippines. It was there, in the Suriago Strait, that the Pennsylvania was present and tangentially involved (chiefly anti- aircraft) in one of the decisive naval battles of the war, where US forces defeated and mostly destroyed the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy. This was probably the battle that as a child I heard my Uncle Bill mention—he said that ships were “bottled up” (or prevented from leaving the Strait—probably referring to Japanese ships as much as American), an expression that stuck with me.
The Pennsylvania returned to San Francisco in February for overhaul and training, probably preparing for the expected final assault on Japan itself, and didn’t leave again until July 1945. After bombarding Wake Island, the ship arrived at Okinawa on August 12, as the flagship of Task Force 95. Fighting had been going on for that island just 400 miles from Japan since April. However, by the time the Pennsylvania arrived, the first atomic bomb had destroyed the city of Hiroshima in Japan on August 6, and another atom bomb obliterated Nagasaki on August 8. Afterwards the US had communicated its terms for Japan’s surrender.
But at about 8 p.m. on its first night at Okinawa, a torpedo from a Japanese airplane ripped into the Pennsylvania. The explosions awoke seaman Bill Kowinski, catching a few hours of sleep before his midnight watch. “From that moment on it was chaos,” he told a newspaper reporter in 2020. He followed his orders—“You just wanted to do what you could to save the ship.”
There was a huge hole in the ship’s side, but that area was sealed off (at the cost of 20 lives, including those killed in the explosion) and the ship survived. Three days later, the war was over, so the Pennsylvania became the last major ship to be damaged by enemy fire in World War II.
Temporary repairs began there and later in Guam, before the ship sailed for port in the state of Washington, USA. Meanwhile, a young communications officer was tasked with organizing the burial at sea of those who’d died. His name was Johnny Carson, known until then for doing magic tricks and telling jokes to entertain the crew. He was a funny guy, who claimed he once pranked an admiral.
While my Uncle Bill and the Pennsylvania were at sea on their way home, my mother and father were married. They'd met while working at a war plant. Bill was honorably discharged in February 1946. That summer, the Pennsylvania was back in the Pacific (without him) as a floating guinea pig in the first postwar atomic bomb tests called Operation Crossroads, which began on the day I was born.
Bill told me that his most frequent job on the Pennsylvania was fixing radios. After obtaining his GED from Greensburg High School, he followed up this talent by studying radio and television repair in Chicago, probably on the GI Bill and possibly at Devry Institute, for my father later took their correspondence courses on the same subjects.
But Bill soon began working for the Elliott Company, an engineering and manufacturing firm of turbines and related technologies. He retired 36 years later as a quality control engineer. His obituary notes that his goal was to enjoy retirement for at least as long a time as he was employed, and he succeeded. He’d been born in western Pennsylvania, and except for war service, worked and lived there all his life, and died there. But during retirement, he told me, he and his wife Carmella traveled to every state in the Union.
Like his older brother Walter (my father), Bill married an Italian. Many years later he would reverse-engineer a recipe for lemon pepper pasta that he tasted on a visit to Carmella’s ancestral home in Italy, and won a newspaper competition for it.
I have a photo of Uncle Bill talking to me during a family outing on a beach when I was four. He and Carmella had two daughters, Carmen (“Carmie”) and Charlotte, and they, too, were part of my childhood. When I was about 12, I needed a “sponsor” to stand behind me during the Catholic ritual of Confirmation, and I selected him. At the crucial moment he was supposed to place one hand on my shoulder, and at the actual service he added a sacrilegious squeeze.
We reconnected as adults—old adults—by letter, email and phone the past several years, and he helped me with Kowinski family history. He was sharp and funny past the age of 95. I remember him as a complicated personality who became a happy and generous old man. May he rest in peace.
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| Rose Severini in the center of this Easter tableau at my grandparents, in perhaps 1964. Except for my sister Debbie and me (standing), all the children are Rose and Carl's. We're holding up Easter pastries made by my grandmother. |
Earlier this year, we lost someone from the other side of my family, my aunt Rose Severini. I remember the first time I saw her as a child, when my Uncle Carl brought her home to his parents (my grandparents) in Youngwood, PA. She was very pretty and almost as tall as Carl—the tallest person I knew—and I caught them sitting in the same living room chair—at the same time!
Soon she was Aunt Rosie, and their wedding reception at the Penn Albert Hotel Roof Gardens was a highlight of my childhood, as it was probably the first time I’d ever heard a live band.
As Rose Morozowich, she grew up on a farm in western PA. I remember visiting there a couple of times in my childhood. She and Carl had five children, and eventually nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. As is common in “mixed marriages” of non-Italians and Italians, the Italian side of the family became the family center, so I would see her frequently through the years at family dinners at my Severini grandparents. Eventually, she and Carl took over this function until her own family was grown and dispersed.
In addition to their home in Murrysville, she and Carl had their own farm in Indiana County, and they also traveled, especially after Carl’s retirement. When I saw them last in 2019, they told me how many cruises they’d taken, a number I’ve forgotten but seemed to me enormous. On that occasion my sisters and I visited them in the home we’d come to know very well over the years. It turned out to be shortly before they gave it up and moved closer to one of their daughters in central PA. By then they'd endured the tragedy of losing their youngest child to illness, Steven, one of their two sons. They were married some 67 years. I remember Aunt Rosie with great affection.
Rose passed away from the effects of a stroke. She was 91. May she rest in peace.
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