David Wilfong - Editor
This month marks the 25th anniversary of what should have been a sad event for Rockwall County, though nobody in Rockwall knew about it while it was happening.
In the early days of May 1984, visitors on the Rock of Gibraltar looking out across the thin stretch of water that separates the Iberian Peninsula from the northern coast of Africa would have seen two ships moving slowly along the horizon traveling from right to left, traveling no faster than seven knots at the most. Leading the pair would have been a powerful modern workhorse, an ocean-going tug. The swell of the vessel churned frantically as powerful screws attacked the currents to move the combined weight of more than 7,000 tons of steel through the water.
Following that ship, they would have noticed what was obviously a more refined, if not somewhat weathered lady of the sea. This ship carried the unmistakable appearance of a World War II vessel and was at least three times the length of the tug pulling it. Though she had spent almost exactly four decades in ocean water and was now being helped along by a much younger cousin, she was still holding her own against the elements.
There were no identifying marks on the vessel. Even large numbers painted across the bow were long gone. There was no way of visually establishing an identity for the ship.
But she did have a name — and she did have a story to tell. In fact, this was not the first time she had passed through this doorway to the Mediterranean. She had been here before, only that time it was under her own power.
On Sept. 9, 1944, a keel was laid in the production yard of Kaiser Shipbuilding Co. in Vancouver, Wash. After two months of construction APA 230 was launched into the Pacific and then made its way to Astoria, Ore., where it was received by the U.S. Navy.
On Jan. 14, 1945, the USS Rockwall was commissioned under the command of Capt. Charles W. Roland. The ship was named for the smallest county in what was at the time the largest state in the nation — Texas.
Joshua Bowen was an ensign and the combat information center officer on board the Rockwall when she sailed out of port from Astoria. The ship made its way south toward San Francisco, a brand new ship with a brand new crew cutting its teeth in ocean-going travel.
“Some of our crew, that was their first experience at riding a ship on the ocean,” Bowen said laughingly in an interview for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. “They had a little upset in their tum-tums. Some of them were at the rail and some of them were sick in bed for a while.”
The USS Rockwall did not actually begin bona fide military operations until after Germany had surrendered. The Japanese were still a problem and fierce fighting was still going on in the Pacific islands as the American fighting force worked diligently to take and retake islands to create a series of “stepping stones” to the islands of Japan proper.
The USS Rockwall supplied troops to that effort, working the supply chain from Pearl Harbor out to the areas of conflict.
In the book “Letters from the Pacific Front” by Philip J. Magnan, a young Jim Magnan (the author’s father) boarded the USS Rockwall on May 14, 1945, for deployment to Okinawa where the ship finally docked on June 10. His father praised the Rockwall, as the ship was a new model at the time. The Navy had been using “hand-me downs” at the beginning of the war in the Pacific.
Fears persisted throughout the journey as a desperate Japan had begun resorting to kamikaze attacks by pilots, who showed preference for opportunities to find troop transport ships miles out at sea.
The Rockwall was lucky in that it never took a direct hit. But she did sail directly into harm’s way to deliver its payload of military human resources to places like Guam, Okinawa and Iwo Jima.
“At Iwo Jima when we got there ... the fighting was still going on,” recounted Bowen. “When the ship got in that vicinity and dropped anchor they put out small boats and we had ‘smoke boats’ that were going around us to camouflage the ship with smoke. At that time some of the destroyers and ships on the other side of the island were being attacked by kamikaze planes. We could listen to the radio and hear what was going on. It was pretty severe fighting.”
There were some easier days as well, and Bowen fondly recalls finding a quiet island beach where crew members took a jeep ashore for some recreational dune driving, relaxation and swimming.
The USS Rockwall would end up earning one battle star for its service in the Pacific theater, though its combat service was less than a full year. Japan finally admitted defeated on Aug. 15, 1945. The Rockwall did make a call to port in Japan shortly after the surrender was made official.
It was the atomic bomb that drove the Japanese to surrender, and it was the atomic bomb that drove the USS Rockwall to its next assignment. Continued atomic tests called for the USS Rockwall to deliver men and materials to a tiny and unknown string of islands in the Pacific called the Bikini Atoll.
The USS Rockwall ran a supply line from San Francisco to the islands. Fortunately, the Rockwall was spared the fate of many of her World War II siblings as she was not placed out in the water as a testing target to gauge the effectiveness of a nuclear blast. A total of 13 ships were directly destroyed by the two atomic bomb tests conducted there, including two of the USS Rockwall’s sister ships — the USS Carlisle (APA-69) and the USS Gilliam (APA-57). Because of radioactive contamination after the fact, all but 12 of the remaining ships were intentionally sunk.
“I didn’t expect it to be as big as it was from that distance,” said Ray Beatty who watched the explosion from the deck of the USS Rockwall and later recounted his experiences for a Tennessee television station. “But it was like a huge column of water rose up, and it was filled with ships. One battleship was a ways up ... the Arkansas ... I’m sure it weighed about 60,000 tons.”
Beatty went on to say that he and other enlisted men watched the blast even though they had not been issued protective goggles, simply because the atomic bomb was so new and mysterious that no one wanted to miss it. After the tests were over, Beatty and other sailors found themselves desperately scraping barnacles from the sides of the USS Rockwall to try to minimize the retention of radioactive water that the ship had sailed through.
It was in the following year, March 1947 that the USS Rockwall saw its first stint of inactivity. It was decommissioned and sent to join other vessels that would sit idle in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.
The USS Rockwall was revived from reserve status four years later in March 1951. For the next four years the ship served transport lanes on the Atlantic side of the globe. During these years she transported troops to bases in Germany, was part of exercises off the now notorious Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and toured the Mediterranean with the Sixth fleet.
The USS Rockwall entered the Reserve fleet again in June 1955 and decommissioned on Sept. 28. Her ownership was transferred to the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) on June 23, 1959. For two decades the Rockwall sat waiting for her services to be needed again. At least once the Rockwall was put on the disposal list and then pulled again. A memo on her file card kept by MARAD notes, “Reserve fleet memo of 7-23-70 strikes this ship off the scrap list as of July 1, 1970, and returns it to retention status.”
But the call to return to service never came again, and eventually — though painstakingly cared for as part of the James River Reserve Fleet — her age caught up with her.
On Nov. 18, 1983, the order came for her to be sent off to the Mediterranean ... one last time.
On May 4, 1984, the USS Rockwall slowly pulled into port in Barcelona, Spain. A proud and honored warship, the Rockwall had made the last leg of its final journey through ocean waters that at one time had included vast, and threatened, convoy lanes in both the Pacific and Atlantic. The ocean-going tug released her and moved away as a group of much smaller tug boats moved in and surrounded her to gently guide her into a waiting dock.
Her ownership was transferred to Balboa Desguaces Maritimos, S.A., a Spanish corporation which operated a scrapping facility at the port. There, the USS Rockwall’s journey had reached its end and she was dismantled, piece by piece.
The tons of metal that once provided transportation and protection for members of the United States armed forces were melted down and recycled into the never-ending commercial flow of raw materials.
What is left of the naval attack transport named for the smallest county in Texas now exists only through a wide spectrum of countless products made from recycled steel — and of course, the memories of the hundreds of sailors that manned her during her best days at sea.
