James Henry Norwood was born at 101 Wheeler Street on Wheeler’s Point, Gloucester, Essex County, Massachusetts on May 14, 1901. He was the oldest of three children born to Forest Norwood, a carpenter, and his wife Geneva. Jim, or "Hank" as he was sometimes known to his buddies, had two younger sisters, Helen (b. 1902) and Gertrude (b. 1904). He was three and a half when his mother died a week after giving birth to Gertrude. The clapboard house where his father and Civil War veteran grandfather (CO. "C", 23rd Rgmt. Massachusetts Volunteers) were also born, was a stone’s throw from the cold waters of the Annisquam River. The river and Ipswich Bay were Jim's extended front and backyards, fitting for a boy destined to spend his life as a sailor. Young Jim spent many days swimming and gaining experience as a fisherman and mariner in the sloops and schooners of Gloucester.
After a year of high school, when he was fifteen, Jim left home to enlist in the Massachusetts National Guard. Many decades later, he told his daughters of being in an expedition to secure the Mexican border from Poncho Villa and his bandits. He also recalled the violence and brutality that took place during the 1919 Boston police strike, when he was among the troops in the state militia that Governor Calvin Coolidge ordered to break the strike and restore order. Jim was thankful that he didn't have to shoot anyone, though he remembered guardsmen firing warning shots into the air.
His National Guard unit disbanded after three years and Jim enlisted in Co. "K", 15th Inf., Mass. State Guard during September 1919. In 1920 or '21 he enlisted in Btry. "A", 102nd Field Artillery, National Guard, where he was serving on active duty as a horse-shoer when he signed up for a four-year hitch in the Navy at the Boston recruiting station on March 1, 1923. He spent much of the first three years at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island, where he was Yard Captain and on the detail assigned to the pre-Civil War sloop USS Constellation. One of his duties was re-rigging the seventy-year-old ship. He spent a short time on the battleships, USS Utah and Wyoming and was rated Coxswain (Boatswain's Mate 3c) on July 8, 1925. On December 9 that year, his rate was changed to Sailmaker's Mate 3c.
On June 30, 1926, Jim transferred to the patrol gunboat, USS Tulsa that would be his sea-going home for the next six years, first in Central America with the "Special Service Squadron", where he was in naval landing parties sent to Nicaragua during political insurrections, and for the last three-and-a half years, in the Far East as a “China Sailor”. At Canton in May 1929, he witnessed the aerial bombing of Chinese naval vessels in the ongoing civil strife between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. Hank was one of a small number of Navy sailors qualified to pilot the Yangtze River.
At a cabaret in Tientsin, he met and fell in love with Lydia Alexandra Kabanoff, a nineteen- year old Russian émigrée and classically trained ballet dancer. Both her father, Lt. Col. Alexander Grigorivich Kabanoff and grandfather had been officers in the Czar’s army and were killed during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Lydia and her mother, Lydia Alexandrovna Kabanoff, had fled to China in 1920.
Following a six-month courtship, twenty-nine year old James and Lydia were married by an army chaplain on Lydia’s twentieth birthday, Valentine’s Day 1931. Her mother insisted that they repeat their vows in a Russian Orthodox Church. Since Jim could not speak Russian, he was told to respond “da” (yes) to whatever the priest asked. Sixty years later, he would chuckle when his “second wedding” was mentioned. He learned to speak and write passable Russian early in his marriage and his four daughters grew up fluent in both English and Russian.
The six-and-a-half years that Jim and Lydia spent together in Asia following the movements of his ships, with summers typically at Tientsin (Tianjin), Chefoo, (Yantai), Tsingtao (Quingdao) or Shanghai and winters in the Philippines- were the happiest of their lives. With almost nine years’ service under his belt, on February 1, 1932, Hank was promoted to Sailmaker’s Mate 1c and on November 11, he was transferred to the Asiatic Fleet destroyer tender, USS Blackhawk. In March 1934 he was recommended for promotion to Boatswain, a warrant officer rank.
Jim and Lydia’s various lodgings in China, with birds and their German Shepherd, Nora ("Norka" in Russian) and her smaller canine pals, were a hub of activity for their Navy and expatriate Russian friends. The couple were both strong swimmers and regularly swam across the bay at Chefoo. With the dogs and Lydia's mother in tow, happy hours were spent in excursions with friends to the beaches and surrounding hills, hiking and picnicking.
Their eldest girl, Lydia Alexandra Norwood ("Lulie") was born in the Philippines on March 4, 1936. By then, Jim was a Boatswain, having received a temporary appointment as a warrant officer on June 10, 1935 just before reporting aboard the minesweeper, USS Finch, on July 6, 1935. From August 21 through December 4, 1937, Finch was at Shanghai during the “Sino-Japanese” incident (Second Battle of Shanghai), regarded by some historians as the beginning of World War II in the Pacific. At Shanghai, the minesweeper transported US Marines from larger troop ships to shore and evacuated US citizens from war-torn Shanghai. Occasionally, the crew sought cover from indiscriminately fired Japanese shells. Passing Japanese warships in the Whangpoo downriver from Shanghai, Finch moored in the Yangtze alongside USS Gold Star on the afternoon of August 26 and embarked 102 enlisted and three US Marine officers. Returning to Shanghai, Finch crewman observed two Japanese destroyers firing into buildings at Woosung, before disembarking the troops at Shanghai.
On August 28, 1937, Finch’s captain, LCDR Hyman G. Rickover, delivered to Hank "with congratulations" a warrant dated July 28, 1937 that permanently appointed him Boatswain, retroactive to his temporary appointment. On Monday, Sept. 20, 1937, The New York Times reported, “The United States minesweeper Finch, dispatched from Shanghai, hurriedly took 125 anti-aircraft fighters off the transport (USS Marblehead) with their guns and proceeded immediately to Shanghai to land an American anti-aircraft company on Chinese soil for the first time in history.”
On September 22-23 1937, Jim was selected by Rickover to temporarily command a US Marine detachment at the massive Shanghai Power Company Plant, an important American economic interest, for which Hank was recognized in a letter from Rickover, the future "Father of the Nuclear Navy" and longest serving US Navy officer (1922-1982). On October 4, 1937, the Chicago Tribune reported:
“Once again Americans evacuating Shanghai were endangered by shell fire. Twenty American women and children- the families of naval officers- were forced to flee below decks on the United States minesweeper Finch. Shells from Japanese warships bombarding Pootung, rich industrial center across the Whangpoo from Shanghai, whizzed over the American vessel. During the shelling Lieut. Hyman G. Rickover of Chicago remained on the bridge to move the ship out of the danger zone. He reported the Japanese displayed poor marksmanship, but said the erratic dispersion of the shells may have been due to worn gun linings. A large fire lit up the Pootung waterfront.”
The next day, after nine-years with the Asiatic Fleet and more than two-years aboard Finch, the request for a transfer to a larger ship that Jim had initiated a couple months earlier was approved by Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander-in-chief of the US Asiatic Fleet. It was the same day that LCDR Rickover was relieved of command of Finch after less than three-months, following his request for LDO ("limited duty officer") engineering duty, making him ineligible for future line command. Hank Norwood detached from Finch on October 19 and reported to his next ship, the battleship USS Texas at Norfolk, Virginia on December 19, 1937, as Boatswain and Assistant First Lieutenant. His wife and daughter followed from the Philippines the next spring.
Jim and Lydia welcomed the birth of their twin daughters, Genevieve Elizabeth (Jenny) and Gertrude Helen (Trudy) on November 27, 1939 at Norfolk. In May 1941, he was transferred to Naval Training Station Newport, Rhode Island, where he had begun his naval career as an able seaman eighteen years earlier. On June 10, he was promoted to Chief Boatswain with the billet of Yard Craft Officer. Hank, Lydia and the three girls moved to 31 Bay Street in Newport, where on November 21, 1941, their fourth daughter, Catherine Laura, was born at the naval hospital a block away.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two weeks later, Jim requested sea duty. Instead, he was designated Provost Marshall at the Newport Training Station. Even with shore duty at Newport, he recalled not seeing his daughters awake for four months. On September 28, 1942, Jim received a temporary promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) and departed for his next duty station, Naval Operating Base, Iceland, where he was Shore Patrol Officer from October 2, 1942 until October 27, 1943, when he received orders to report to USS Alpine, a fast attack transport, then being refitted at Portland, Oregon for duty in the Pacific war theater.
Hank didn’t see his family for periods up to a year and a half while they remained in Newport during the war. After a couple months temporary duty at the New York Navy Yard, when he was able to visit his family, he boarded a train for the West Coast, arriving at Portland and reporting for duty on January 25, 1944. Alpine was commissioned on April 22 and stood out from Portland on May 7, en route to San Diego for “shakedown” and amphibious training exercises off Coronado, California through June 18, 1944, when she set out to join the War in the Western Pacific. Alpine carried her first troops and equipment that July in support of the invasion of Guam.
Promoted to Lieutenant on March 3, 1943, Hank was given the billets of First Lieutenant, in charge of the Deck Department, and head of R Division, in charge of repair and damage control on Alpine. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat "V" and the Navy Commendation with Combat "V" for his actions as First Lieutenant in leading fire-fighting crews following kamikaze strikes on Alpine during the Battle of Leyte on November 18, 1944 and the first day of the Okinawa Invasion, April 1, 1945. His commanding officer, CDR George K. G. Reilly had recommended Hank for award of the Silver Star and Bronze Star, but the navy awards board downgraded the recommendation. Reilly himself, was awarded the Silver Star and Bronze star for the two engagements.
During one of the two, deadly kamikaze strikes on Alpine, Hank was seriously wounded in his lower leg. Years later, when his daughters saw the disfiguring scar running from his knee to his ankle and asked what had happened, he told them it was caused by “shrapnel” from an “exploding Japanese suicide plane” that hit his ship during WWII. After Hank's death, his girls learned from their cousin in Oregon that Hank had refused to leave his duty station directing fire suppression and damage control, despite his wound. For reasons that will forever be a mystery, Jim never sought an award of the Purple Heart Medal for combat injuries that most certainly were severe enough to require treatment by Alpine's medical officer.
With the end of WWII, Lydia and the girls moved west from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego, California. Jim was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on October 3, 1945. On June 10, 1946 he was assigned to the USS Eldorado, the flagship of the Commander of Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. A couple of years after the move to San Diego, as a result of unintentional friction caused by in-laws on both sides of the family, Jim and Lydia became estranged, with Lydia, her mother and the four girls moving to San Francisco.
On December 16, 1948, Hank Norwood achieved the goal of every navy officer when the onetime seaman recruit turned “mustang”, received his first command, USS Karin, a refrigerated stores ship that carried provisions from San Francisco to the mid-Pacific and Far East. His success was cut-short when he suffered a stroke while his ship was off Japan a few months later. He was ordered to the Naval Hospital at Long Beach, California and temporarily assigned to the cruiser USS Pasadena for the journey back to the states.
The Navy was Jim’s life and he fought the medical review board for months, insisting that he had “never felt better”. But in the end the Navy had the last word and he was forced to retire on October 1, 1949 with a promotion to Commander because of his combat valor awards during WWII. He was 48-years old and would have never retired, if it was left up to him. Hank received a letter from the Secretary of the Navy dated November 1, 1949, that recognized his long service and closed, “May I wish for you many years of health and happiness”. That wish came true since he fully recovered from the effects of the stroke and lived another 45 years.
Hank Norwood earned eighteen medals during his twenty-six years service in the Navy, including two valor awards. Sadly and regrettably, his teenage daughters innocently gave these away in 1955. Following their mother's sudden death, the girls and their grandmother moved to a smaller apartment on South Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. An unknown man helping to move boxes into their garage, had admired the framed medals. Not thinking, but realizing they had to get rid of many possessions due to less space, the girls gave the stranger their father's medals. When Hank learned what his daughters had done, he was saddened but did not scold them or make them feel worse than they already did. Hank's daughters remain hopeful that their dad's medals will one day resurface and hopefully be reunited with the rest of his Navy ephemera that represent a long and dedicated life of service to his country.
For several years after he retired from the Navy, Jim lived in a cabin by Detroit Lake, Oregon, where he hunted, fished and worked for a time at the Detroit dam. In October 1951, Hank was on an elk hunting trip in Oregon and failed to return to camp at night. When his nephews and other members of the hunting party searched for him the next day without success, they presumed he was “lost”. Hank wasn't lost, but his “bad leg gave out” and he couldn’t hike any further. He was "pretty hungry" when he finally emerged from the woods, making his way to a stranger's house where he devoured the half-a-dozen eggs offered him by the good samaritan.
Jim had a lifelong love for reading that satisfied his hunger for constant learning. During much of the 1950s and 60's he lived with his sister Gertrude and her son in Salem, Oregon. According to the wish of his mother-in-law a couple years prior to her death in 1966, Hank’s four daughters, now grown women, were joyfully reunited with their dad, who moved from Oregon to San Francisco to be near them. Jim moved his girls to a bigger house a-half-block from the Mission Dolores Park. He lived near them until the untimely death of his oldest daughter, Lulie, in 1970.
Lulie's sudden death due to illness devastated Hank. He moved back to Oregon to again live with his sister, Gertrude, but visited his daughters for a couple months every year at their homes in Washington state and California. When Jim was in his mid-eighties, Gertrude died and his nephew told him that he planned to sell the house and move to an apartment. Jim moved back to California to live full-time with his daughters, where he divided the year between their homes in Northern and Southern California. His nephew ended up keeping the house, but Hank didn’t return to Oregon. He always enjoyed the times when he lived with his daughters, doing chores around their homes and yards, woodworking (making sure they each learned how to build a bookcase and desk), carpentry for neighbors (without ever taking a dime), anything that could be done with sailmaker's needles, scissors and canvas, cooking, playing a mean game of acey-deucey backgammon and just making up for the years he missed, until he died peacefully at Fullerton, California on May 14, 1994, his 93rd birthday.
Hank Norwood never feared death because he accepted it as a fact of life. When asked about death, he got a twinkle in his eye and said that after he died, he would join the other sailors at "Fiddler’s Green", because "sailors aren't good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell, so we all meet there." Jim Norwood is remembered for his calm strength, dry sense of humor and love of life and his daughters.
Do not be sad that he is gone;
But smile that he has been.
(Copyright 2017, James Henry Norwood Family)
Grateful thanks to Member JFJN for his generous sponsorship of Hank Norwood's memorial. God Bless You and Yours from his daughters!
"To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends.
To appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
After a year of high school, when he was fifteen, Jim left home to enlist in the Massachusetts National Guard. Many decades later, he told his daughters of being in an expedition to secure the Mexican border from Poncho Villa and his bandits. He also recalled the violence and brutality that took place during the 1919 Boston police strike, when he was among the troops in the state militia that Governor Calvin Coolidge ordered to break the strike and restore order. Jim was thankful that he didn't have to shoot anyone, though he remembered guardsmen firing warning shots into the air.
His National Guard unit disbanded after three years and Jim enlisted in Co. "K", 15th Inf., Mass. State Guard during September 1919. In 1920 or '21 he enlisted in Btry. "A", 102nd Field Artillery, National Guard, where he was serving on active duty as a horse-shoer when he signed up for a four-year hitch in the Navy at the Boston recruiting station on March 1, 1923. He spent much of the first three years at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island, where he was Yard Captain and on the detail assigned to the pre-Civil War sloop USS Constellation. One of his duties was re-rigging the seventy-year-old ship. He spent a short time on the battleships, USS Utah and Wyoming and was rated Coxswain (Boatswain's Mate 3c) on July 8, 1925. On December 9 that year, his rate was changed to Sailmaker's Mate 3c.
On June 30, 1926, Jim transferred to the patrol gunboat, USS Tulsa that would be his sea-going home for the next six years, first in Central America with the "Special Service Squadron", where he was in naval landing parties sent to Nicaragua during political insurrections, and for the last three-and-a half years, in the Far East as a “China Sailor”. At Canton in May 1929, he witnessed the aerial bombing of Chinese naval vessels in the ongoing civil strife between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. Hank was one of a small number of Navy sailors qualified to pilot the Yangtze River.
At a cabaret in Tientsin, he met and fell in love with Lydia Alexandra Kabanoff, a nineteen- year old Russian émigrée and classically trained ballet dancer. Both her father, Lt. Col. Alexander Grigorivich Kabanoff and grandfather had been officers in the Czar’s army and were killed during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Lydia and her mother, Lydia Alexandrovna Kabanoff, had fled to China in 1920.
Following a six-month courtship, twenty-nine year old James and Lydia were married by an army chaplain on Lydia’s twentieth birthday, Valentine’s Day 1931. Her mother insisted that they repeat their vows in a Russian Orthodox Church. Since Jim could not speak Russian, he was told to respond “da” (yes) to whatever the priest asked. Sixty years later, he would chuckle when his “second wedding” was mentioned. He learned to speak and write passable Russian early in his marriage and his four daughters grew up fluent in both English and Russian.
The six-and-a-half years that Jim and Lydia spent together in Asia following the movements of his ships, with summers typically at Tientsin (Tianjin), Chefoo, (Yantai), Tsingtao (Quingdao) or Shanghai and winters in the Philippines- were the happiest of their lives. With almost nine years’ service under his belt, on February 1, 1932, Hank was promoted to Sailmaker’s Mate 1c and on November 11, he was transferred to the Asiatic Fleet destroyer tender, USS Blackhawk. In March 1934 he was recommended for promotion to Boatswain, a warrant officer rank.
Jim and Lydia’s various lodgings in China, with birds and their German Shepherd, Nora ("Norka" in Russian) and her smaller canine pals, were a hub of activity for their Navy and expatriate Russian friends. The couple were both strong swimmers and regularly swam across the bay at Chefoo. With the dogs and Lydia's mother in tow, happy hours were spent in excursions with friends to the beaches and surrounding hills, hiking and picnicking.
Their eldest girl, Lydia Alexandra Norwood ("Lulie") was born in the Philippines on March 4, 1936. By then, Jim was a Boatswain, having received a temporary appointment as a warrant officer on June 10, 1935 just before reporting aboard the minesweeper, USS Finch, on July 6, 1935. From August 21 through December 4, 1937, Finch was at Shanghai during the “Sino-Japanese” incident (Second Battle of Shanghai), regarded by some historians as the beginning of World War II in the Pacific. At Shanghai, the minesweeper transported US Marines from larger troop ships to shore and evacuated US citizens from war-torn Shanghai. Occasionally, the crew sought cover from indiscriminately fired Japanese shells. Passing Japanese warships in the Whangpoo downriver from Shanghai, Finch moored in the Yangtze alongside USS Gold Star on the afternoon of August 26 and embarked 102 enlisted and three US Marine officers. Returning to Shanghai, Finch crewman observed two Japanese destroyers firing into buildings at Woosung, before disembarking the troops at Shanghai.
On August 28, 1937, Finch’s captain, LCDR Hyman G. Rickover, delivered to Hank "with congratulations" a warrant dated July 28, 1937 that permanently appointed him Boatswain, retroactive to his temporary appointment. On Monday, Sept. 20, 1937, The New York Times reported, “The United States minesweeper Finch, dispatched from Shanghai, hurriedly took 125 anti-aircraft fighters off the transport (USS Marblehead) with their guns and proceeded immediately to Shanghai to land an American anti-aircraft company on Chinese soil for the first time in history.”
On September 22-23 1937, Jim was selected by Rickover to temporarily command a US Marine detachment at the massive Shanghai Power Company Plant, an important American economic interest, for which Hank was recognized in a letter from Rickover, the future "Father of the Nuclear Navy" and longest serving US Navy officer (1922-1982). On October 4, 1937, the Chicago Tribune reported:
“Once again Americans evacuating Shanghai were endangered by shell fire. Twenty American women and children- the families of naval officers- were forced to flee below decks on the United States minesweeper Finch. Shells from Japanese warships bombarding Pootung, rich industrial center across the Whangpoo from Shanghai, whizzed over the American vessel. During the shelling Lieut. Hyman G. Rickover of Chicago remained on the bridge to move the ship out of the danger zone. He reported the Japanese displayed poor marksmanship, but said the erratic dispersion of the shells may have been due to worn gun linings. A large fire lit up the Pootung waterfront.”
The next day, after nine-years with the Asiatic Fleet and more than two-years aboard Finch, the request for a transfer to a larger ship that Jim had initiated a couple months earlier was approved by Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander-in-chief of the US Asiatic Fleet. It was the same day that LCDR Rickover was relieved of command of Finch after less than three-months, following his request for LDO ("limited duty officer") engineering duty, making him ineligible for future line command. Hank Norwood detached from Finch on October 19 and reported to his next ship, the battleship USS Texas at Norfolk, Virginia on December 19, 1937, as Boatswain and Assistant First Lieutenant. His wife and daughter followed from the Philippines the next spring.
Jim and Lydia welcomed the birth of their twin daughters, Genevieve Elizabeth (Jenny) and Gertrude Helen (Trudy) on November 27, 1939 at Norfolk. In May 1941, he was transferred to Naval Training Station Newport, Rhode Island, where he had begun his naval career as an able seaman eighteen years earlier. On June 10, he was promoted to Chief Boatswain with the billet of Yard Craft Officer. Hank, Lydia and the three girls moved to 31 Bay Street in Newport, where on November 21, 1941, their fourth daughter, Catherine Laura, was born at the naval hospital a block away.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two weeks later, Jim requested sea duty. Instead, he was designated Provost Marshall at the Newport Training Station. Even with shore duty at Newport, he recalled not seeing his daughters awake for four months. On September 28, 1942, Jim received a temporary promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) and departed for his next duty station, Naval Operating Base, Iceland, where he was Shore Patrol Officer from October 2, 1942 until October 27, 1943, when he received orders to report to USS Alpine, a fast attack transport, then being refitted at Portland, Oregon for duty in the Pacific war theater.
Hank didn’t see his family for periods up to a year and a half while they remained in Newport during the war. After a couple months temporary duty at the New York Navy Yard, when he was able to visit his family, he boarded a train for the West Coast, arriving at Portland and reporting for duty on January 25, 1944. Alpine was commissioned on April 22 and stood out from Portland on May 7, en route to San Diego for “shakedown” and amphibious training exercises off Coronado, California through June 18, 1944, when she set out to join the War in the Western Pacific. Alpine carried her first troops and equipment that July in support of the invasion of Guam.
Promoted to Lieutenant on March 3, 1943, Hank was given the billets of First Lieutenant, in charge of the Deck Department, and head of R Division, in charge of repair and damage control on Alpine. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat "V" and the Navy Commendation with Combat "V" for his actions as First Lieutenant in leading fire-fighting crews following kamikaze strikes on Alpine during the Battle of Leyte on November 18, 1944 and the first day of the Okinawa Invasion, April 1, 1945. His commanding officer, CDR George K. G. Reilly had recommended Hank for award of the Silver Star and Bronze Star, but the navy awards board downgraded the recommendation. Reilly himself, was awarded the Silver Star and Bronze star for the two engagements.
During one of the two, deadly kamikaze strikes on Alpine, Hank was seriously wounded in his lower leg. Years later, when his daughters saw the disfiguring scar running from his knee to his ankle and asked what had happened, he told them it was caused by “shrapnel” from an “exploding Japanese suicide plane” that hit his ship during WWII. After Hank's death, his girls learned from their cousin in Oregon that Hank had refused to leave his duty station directing fire suppression and damage control, despite his wound. For reasons that will forever be a mystery, Jim never sought an award of the Purple Heart Medal for combat injuries that most certainly were severe enough to require treatment by Alpine's medical officer.
With the end of WWII, Lydia and the girls moved west from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego, California. Jim was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on October 3, 1945. On June 10, 1946 he was assigned to the USS Eldorado, the flagship of the Commander of Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. A couple of years after the move to San Diego, as a result of unintentional friction caused by in-laws on both sides of the family, Jim and Lydia became estranged, with Lydia, her mother and the four girls moving to San Francisco.
On December 16, 1948, Hank Norwood achieved the goal of every navy officer when the onetime seaman recruit turned “mustang”, received his first command, USS Karin, a refrigerated stores ship that carried provisions from San Francisco to the mid-Pacific and Far East. His success was cut-short when he suffered a stroke while his ship was off Japan a few months later. He was ordered to the Naval Hospital at Long Beach, California and temporarily assigned to the cruiser USS Pasadena for the journey back to the states.
The Navy was Jim’s life and he fought the medical review board for months, insisting that he had “never felt better”. But in the end the Navy had the last word and he was forced to retire on October 1, 1949 with a promotion to Commander because of his combat valor awards during WWII. He was 48-years old and would have never retired, if it was left up to him. Hank received a letter from the Secretary of the Navy dated November 1, 1949, that recognized his long service and closed, “May I wish for you many years of health and happiness”. That wish came true since he fully recovered from the effects of the stroke and lived another 45 years.
Hank Norwood earned eighteen medals during his twenty-six years service in the Navy, including two valor awards. Sadly and regrettably, his teenage daughters innocently gave these away in 1955. Following their mother's sudden death, the girls and their grandmother moved to a smaller apartment on South Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. An unknown man helping to move boxes into their garage, had admired the framed medals. Not thinking, but realizing they had to get rid of many possessions due to less space, the girls gave the stranger their father's medals. When Hank learned what his daughters had done, he was saddened but did not scold them or make them feel worse than they already did. Hank's daughters remain hopeful that their dad's medals will one day resurface and hopefully be reunited with the rest of his Navy ephemera that represent a long and dedicated life of service to his country.
For several years after he retired from the Navy, Jim lived in a cabin by Detroit Lake, Oregon, where he hunted, fished and worked for a time at the Detroit dam. In October 1951, Hank was on an elk hunting trip in Oregon and failed to return to camp at night. When his nephews and other members of the hunting party searched for him the next day without success, they presumed he was “lost”. Hank wasn't lost, but his “bad leg gave out” and he couldn’t hike any further. He was "pretty hungry" when he finally emerged from the woods, making his way to a stranger's house where he devoured the half-a-dozen eggs offered him by the good samaritan.
Jim had a lifelong love for reading that satisfied his hunger for constant learning. During much of the 1950s and 60's he lived with his sister Gertrude and her son in Salem, Oregon. According to the wish of his mother-in-law a couple years prior to her death in 1966, Hank’s four daughters, now grown women, were joyfully reunited with their dad, who moved from Oregon to San Francisco to be near them. Jim moved his girls to a bigger house a-half-block from the Mission Dolores Park. He lived near them until the untimely death of his oldest daughter, Lulie, in 1970.
Lulie's sudden death due to illness devastated Hank. He moved back to Oregon to again live with his sister, Gertrude, but visited his daughters for a couple months every year at their homes in Washington state and California. When Jim was in his mid-eighties, Gertrude died and his nephew told him that he planned to sell the house and move to an apartment. Jim moved back to California to live full-time with his daughters, where he divided the year between their homes in Northern and Southern California. His nephew ended up keeping the house, but Hank didn’t return to Oregon. He always enjoyed the times when he lived with his daughters, doing chores around their homes and yards, woodworking (making sure they each learned how to build a bookcase and desk), carpentry for neighbors (without ever taking a dime), anything that could be done with sailmaker's needles, scissors and canvas, cooking, playing a mean game of acey-deucey backgammon and just making up for the years he missed, until he died peacefully at Fullerton, California on May 14, 1994, his 93rd birthday.
Hank Norwood never feared death because he accepted it as a fact of life. When asked about death, he got a twinkle in his eye and said that after he died, he would join the other sailors at "Fiddler’s Green", because "sailors aren't good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell, so we all meet there." Jim Norwood is remembered for his calm strength, dry sense of humor and love of life and his daughters.
Do not be sad that he is gone;
But smile that he has been.
(Copyright 2017, James Henry Norwood Family)
Grateful thanks to Member JFJN for his generous sponsorship of Hank Norwood's memorial. God Bless You and Yours from his daughters!
"To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends.
To appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
James Henry Norwood was born at 101 Wheeler Street on Wheeler’s Point, Gloucester, Essex County, Massachusetts on May 14, 1901. He was the oldest of three children born to Forest Norwood, a carpenter, and his wife Geneva. Jim, or "Hank" as he was sometimes known to his buddies, had two younger sisters, Helen (b. 1902) and Gertrude (b. 1904). He was three and a half when his mother died a week after giving birth to Gertrude. The clapboard house where his father and Civil War veteran grandfather (CO. "C", 23rd Rgmt. Massachusetts Volunteers) were also born, was a stone’s throw from the cold waters of the Annisquam River. The river and Ipswich Bay were Jim's extended front and backyards, fitting for a boy destined to spend his life as a sailor. Young Jim spent many days swimming and gaining experience as a fisherman and mariner in the sloops and schooners of Gloucester.
After a year of high school, when he was fifteen, Jim left home to enlist in the Massachusetts National Guard. Many decades later, he told his daughters of being in an expedition to secure the Mexican border from Poncho Villa and his bandits. He also recalled the violence and brutality that took place during the 1919 Boston police strike, when he was among the troops in the state militia that Governor Calvin Coolidge ordered to break the strike and restore order. Jim was thankful that he didn't have to shoot anyone, though he remembered guardsmen firing warning shots into the air.
His National Guard unit disbanded after three years and Jim enlisted in Co. "K", 15th Inf., Mass. State Guard during September 1919. In 1920 or '21 he enlisted in Btry. "A", 102nd Field Artillery, National Guard, where he was serving on active duty as a horse-shoer when he signed up for a four-year hitch in the Navy at the Boston recruiting station on March 1, 1923. He spent much of the first three years at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island, where he was Yard Captain and on the detail assigned to the pre-Civil War sloop USS Constellation. One of his duties was re-rigging the seventy-year-old ship. He spent a short time on the battleships, USS Utah and Wyoming and was rated Coxswain (Boatswain's Mate 3c) on July 8, 1925. On December 9 that year, his rate was changed to Sailmaker's Mate 3c.
On June 30, 1926, Jim transferred to the patrol gunboat, USS Tulsa that would be his sea-going home for the next six years, first in Central America with the "Special Service Squadron", where he was in naval landing parties sent to Nicaragua during political insurrections, and for the last three-and-a half years, in the Far East as a “China Sailor”. At Canton in May 1929, he witnessed the aerial bombing of Chinese naval vessels in the ongoing civil strife between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. Hank was one of a small number of Navy sailors qualified to pilot the Yangtze River.
At a cabaret in Tientsin, he met and fell in love with Lydia Alexandra Kabanoff, a nineteen- year old Russian émigrée and classically trained ballet dancer. Both her father, Lt. Col. Alexander Grigorivich Kabanoff and grandfather had been officers in the Czar’s army and were killed during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Lydia and her mother, Lydia Alexandrovna Kabanoff, had fled to China in 1920.
Following a six-month courtship, twenty-nine year old James and Lydia were married by an army chaplain on Lydia’s twentieth birthday, Valentine’s Day 1931. Her mother insisted that they repeat their vows in a Russian Orthodox Church. Since Jim could not speak Russian, he was told to respond “da” (yes) to whatever the priest asked. Sixty years later, he would chuckle when his “second wedding” was mentioned. He learned to speak and write passable Russian early in his marriage and his four daughters grew up fluent in both English and Russian.
The six-and-a-half years that Jim and Lydia spent together in Asia following the movements of his ships, with summers typically at Tientsin (Tianjin), Chefoo, (Yantai), Tsingtao (Quingdao) or Shanghai and winters in the Philippines- were the happiest of their lives. With almost nine years’ service under his belt, on February 1, 1932, Hank was promoted to Sailmaker’s Mate 1c and on November 11, he was transferred to the Asiatic Fleet destroyer tender, USS Blackhawk. In March 1934 he was recommended for promotion to Boatswain, a warrant officer rank.
Jim and Lydia’s various lodgings in China, with birds and their German Shepherd, Nora ("Norka" in Russian) and her smaller canine pals, were a hub of activity for their Navy and expatriate Russian friends. The couple were both strong swimmers and regularly swam across the bay at Chefoo. With the dogs and Lydia's mother in tow, happy hours were spent in excursions with friends to the beaches and surrounding hills, hiking and picnicking.
Their eldest girl, Lydia Alexandra Norwood ("Lulie") was born in the Philippines on March 4, 1936. By then, Jim was a Boatswain, having received a temporary appointment as a warrant officer on June 10, 1935 just before reporting aboard the minesweeper, USS Finch, on July 6, 1935. From August 21 through December 4, 1937, Finch was at Shanghai during the “Sino-Japanese” incident (Second Battle of Shanghai), regarded by some historians as the beginning of World War II in the Pacific. At Shanghai, the minesweeper transported US Marines from larger troop ships to shore and evacuated US citizens from war-torn Shanghai. Occasionally, the crew sought cover from indiscriminately fired Japanese shells. Passing Japanese warships in the Whangpoo downriver from Shanghai, Finch moored in the Yangtze alongside USS Gold Star on the afternoon of August 26 and embarked 102 enlisted and three US Marine officers. Returning to Shanghai, Finch crewman observed two Japanese destroyers firing into buildings at Woosung, before disembarking the troops at Shanghai.
On August 28, 1937, Finch’s captain, LCDR Hyman G. Rickover, delivered to Hank "with congratulations" a warrant dated July 28, 1937 that permanently appointed him Boatswain, retroactive to his temporary appointment. On Monday, Sept. 20, 1937, The New York Times reported, “The United States minesweeper Finch, dispatched from Shanghai, hurriedly took 125 anti-aircraft fighters off the transport (USS Marblehead) with their guns and proceeded immediately to Shanghai to land an American anti-aircraft company on Chinese soil for the first time in history.”
On September 22-23 1937, Jim was selected by Rickover to temporarily command a US Marine detachment at the massive Shanghai Power Company Plant, an important American economic interest, for which Hank was recognized in a letter from Rickover, the future "Father of the Nuclear Navy" and longest serving US Navy officer (1922-1982). On October 4, 1937, the Chicago Tribune reported:
“Once again Americans evacuating Shanghai were endangered by shell fire. Twenty American women and children- the families of naval officers- were forced to flee below decks on the United States minesweeper Finch. Shells from Japanese warships bombarding Pootung, rich industrial center across the Whangpoo from Shanghai, whizzed over the American vessel. During the shelling Lieut. Hyman G. Rickover of Chicago remained on the bridge to move the ship out of the danger zone. He reported the Japanese displayed poor marksmanship, but said the erratic dispersion of the shells may have been due to worn gun linings. A large fire lit up the Pootung waterfront.”
The next day, after nine-years with the Asiatic Fleet and more than two-years aboard Finch, the request for a transfer to a larger ship that Jim had initiated a couple months earlier was approved by Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander-in-chief of the US Asiatic Fleet. It was the same day that LCDR Rickover was relieved of command of Finch after less than three-months, following his request for LDO ("limited duty officer") engineering duty, making him ineligible for future line command. Hank Norwood detached from Finch on October 19 and reported to his next ship, the battleship USS Texas at Norfolk, Virginia on December 19, 1937, as Boatswain and Assistant First Lieutenant. His wife and daughter followed from the Philippines the next spring.
Jim and Lydia welcomed the birth of their twin daughters, Genevieve Elizabeth (Jenny) and Gertrude Helen (Trudy) on November 27, 1939 at Norfolk. In May 1941, he was transferred to Naval Training Station Newport, Rhode Island, where he had begun his naval career as an able seaman eighteen years earlier. On June 10, he was promoted to Chief Boatswain with the billet of Yard Craft Officer. Hank, Lydia and the three girls moved to 31 Bay Street in Newport, where on November 21, 1941, their fourth daughter, Catherine Laura, was born at the naval hospital a block away.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two weeks later, Jim requested sea duty. Instead, he was designated Provost Marshall at the Newport Training Station. Even with shore duty at Newport, he recalled not seeing his daughters awake for four months. On September 28, 1942, Jim received a temporary promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) and departed for his next duty station, Naval Operating Base, Iceland, where he was Shore Patrol Officer from October 2, 1942 until October 27, 1943, when he received orders to report to USS Alpine, a fast attack transport, then being refitted at Portland, Oregon for duty in the Pacific war theater.
Hank didn’t see his family for periods up to a year and a half while they remained in Newport during the war. After a couple months temporary duty at the New York Navy Yard, when he was able to visit his family, he boarded a train for the West Coast, arriving at Portland and reporting for duty on January 25, 1944. Alpine was commissioned on April 22 and stood out from Portland on May 7, en route to San Diego for “shakedown” and amphibious training exercises off Coronado, California through June 18, 1944, when she set out to join the War in the Western Pacific. Alpine carried her first troops and equipment that July in support of the invasion of Guam.
Promoted to Lieutenant on March 3, 1943, Hank was given the billets of First Lieutenant, in charge of the Deck Department, and head of R Division, in charge of repair and damage control on Alpine. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat "V" and the Navy Commendation with Combat "V" for his actions as First Lieutenant in leading fire-fighting crews following kamikaze strikes on Alpine during the Battle of Leyte on November 18, 1944 and the first day of the Okinawa Invasion, April 1, 1945. His commanding officer, CDR George K. G. Reilly had recommended Hank for award of the Silver Star and Bronze Star, but the navy awards board downgraded the recommendation. Reilly himself, was awarded the Silver Star and Bronze star for the two engagements.
During one of the two, deadly kamikaze strikes on Alpine, Hank was seriously wounded in his lower leg. Years later, when his daughters saw the disfiguring scar running from his knee to his ankle and asked what had happened, he told them it was caused by “shrapnel” from an “exploding Japanese suicide plane” that hit his ship during WWII. After Hank's death, his girls learned from their cousin in Oregon that Hank had refused to leave his duty station directing fire suppression and damage control, despite his wound. For reasons that will forever be a mystery, Jim never sought an award of the Purple Heart Medal for combat injuries that most certainly were severe enough to require treatment by Alpine's medical officer.
With the end of WWII, Lydia and the girls moved west from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego, California. Jim was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on October 3, 1945. On June 10, 1946 he was assigned to the USS Eldorado, the flagship of the Commander of Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. A couple of years after the move to San Diego, as a result of unintentional friction caused by in-laws on both sides of the family, Jim and Lydia became estranged, with Lydia, her mother and the four girls moving to San Francisco.
On December 16, 1948, Hank Norwood achieved the goal of every navy officer when the onetime seaman recruit turned “mustang”, received his first command, USS Karin, a refrigerated stores ship that carried provisions from San Francisco to the mid-Pacific and Far East. His success was cut-short when he suffered a stroke while his ship was off Japan a few months later. He was ordered to the Naval Hospital at Long Beach, California and temporarily assigned to the cruiser USS Pasadena for the journey back to the states.
The Navy was Jim’s life and he fought the medical review board for months, insisting that he had “never felt better”. But in the end the Navy had the last word and he was forced to retire on October 1, 1949 with a promotion to Commander because of his combat valor awards during WWII. He was 48-years old and would have never retired, if it was left up to him. Hank received a letter from the Secretary of the Navy dated November 1, 1949, that recognized his long service and closed, “May I wish for you many years of health and happiness”. That wish came true since he fully recovered from the effects of the stroke and lived another 45 years.
Hank Norwood earned eighteen medals during his twenty-six years service in the Navy, including two valor awards. Sadly and regrettably, his teenage daughters innocently gave these away in 1955. Following their mother's sudden death, the girls and their grandmother moved to a smaller apartment on South Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. An unknown man helping to move boxes into their garage, had admired the framed medals. Not thinking, but realizing they had to get rid of many possessions due to less space, the girls gave the stranger their father's medals. When Hank learned what his daughters had done, he was saddened but did not scold them or make them feel worse than they already did. Hank's daughters remain hopeful that their dad's medals will one day resurface and hopefully be reunited with the rest of his Navy ephemera that represent a long and dedicated life of service to his country.
For several years after he retired from the Navy, Jim lived in a cabin by Detroit Lake, Oregon, where he hunted, fished and worked for a time at the Detroit dam. In October 1951, Hank was on an elk hunting trip in Oregon and failed to return to camp at night. When his nephews and other members of the hunting party searched for him the next day without success, they presumed he was “lost”. Hank wasn't lost, but his “bad leg gave out” and he couldn’t hike any further. He was "pretty hungry" when he finally emerged from the woods, making his way to a stranger's house where he devoured the half-a-dozen eggs offered him by the good samaritan.
Jim had a lifelong love for reading that satisfied his hunger for constant learning. During much of the 1950s and 60's he lived with his sister Gertrude and her son in Salem, Oregon. According to the wish of his mother-in-law a couple years prior to her death in 1966, Hank’s four daughters, now grown women, were joyfully reunited with their dad, who moved from Oregon to San Francisco to be near them. Jim moved his girls to a bigger house a-half-block from the Mission Dolores Park. He lived near them until the untimely death of his oldest daughter, Lulie, in 1970.
Lulie's sudden death due to illness devastated Hank. He moved back to Oregon to again live with his sister, Gertrude, but visited his daughters for a couple months every year at their homes in Washington state and California. When Jim was in his mid-eighties, Gertrude died and his nephew told him that he planned to sell the house and move to an apartment. Jim moved back to California to live full-time with his daughters, where he divided the year between their homes in Northern and Southern California. His nephew ended up keeping the house, but Hank didn’t return to Oregon. He always enjoyed the times when he lived with his daughters, doing chores around their homes and yards, woodworking (making sure they each learned how to build a bookcase and desk), carpentry for neighbors (without ever taking a dime), anything that could be done with sailmaker's needles, scissors and canvas, cooking, playing a mean game of acey-deucey backgammon and just making up for the years he missed, until he died peacefully at Fullerton, California on May 14, 1994, his 93rd birthday.
Hank Norwood never feared death because he accepted it as a fact of life. When asked about death, he got a twinkle in his eye and said that after he died, he would join the other sailors at "Fiddler’s Green", because "sailors aren't good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell, so we all meet there." Jim Norwood is remembered for his calm strength, dry sense of humor and love of life and his daughters.
Do not be sad that he is gone;
But smile that he has been.
(Copyright 2017, James Henry Norwood Family)
Grateful thanks to Member JFJN for his generous sponsorship of Hank Norwood's memorial. God Bless You and Yours from his daughters!
"To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends.
To appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
After a year of high school, when he was fifteen, Jim left home to enlist in the Massachusetts National Guard. Many decades later, he told his daughters of being in an expedition to secure the Mexican border from Poncho Villa and his bandits. He also recalled the violence and brutality that took place during the 1919 Boston police strike, when he was among the troops in the state militia that Governor Calvin Coolidge ordered to break the strike and restore order. Jim was thankful that he didn't have to shoot anyone, though he remembered guardsmen firing warning shots into the air.
His National Guard unit disbanded after three years and Jim enlisted in Co. "K", 15th Inf., Mass. State Guard during September 1919. In 1920 or '21 he enlisted in Btry. "A", 102nd Field Artillery, National Guard, where he was serving on active duty as a horse-shoer when he signed up for a four-year hitch in the Navy at the Boston recruiting station on March 1, 1923. He spent much of the first three years at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island, where he was Yard Captain and on the detail assigned to the pre-Civil War sloop USS Constellation. One of his duties was re-rigging the seventy-year-old ship. He spent a short time on the battleships, USS Utah and Wyoming and was rated Coxswain (Boatswain's Mate 3c) on July 8, 1925. On December 9 that year, his rate was changed to Sailmaker's Mate 3c.
On June 30, 1926, Jim transferred to the patrol gunboat, USS Tulsa that would be his sea-going home for the next six years, first in Central America with the "Special Service Squadron", where he was in naval landing parties sent to Nicaragua during political insurrections, and for the last three-and-a half years, in the Far East as a “China Sailor”. At Canton in May 1929, he witnessed the aerial bombing of Chinese naval vessels in the ongoing civil strife between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. Hank was one of a small number of Navy sailors qualified to pilot the Yangtze River.
At a cabaret in Tientsin, he met and fell in love with Lydia Alexandra Kabanoff, a nineteen- year old Russian émigrée and classically trained ballet dancer. Both her father, Lt. Col. Alexander Grigorivich Kabanoff and grandfather had been officers in the Czar’s army and were killed during the Red Terror in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Lydia and her mother, Lydia Alexandrovna Kabanoff, had fled to China in 1920.
Following a six-month courtship, twenty-nine year old James and Lydia were married by an army chaplain on Lydia’s twentieth birthday, Valentine’s Day 1931. Her mother insisted that they repeat their vows in a Russian Orthodox Church. Since Jim could not speak Russian, he was told to respond “da” (yes) to whatever the priest asked. Sixty years later, he would chuckle when his “second wedding” was mentioned. He learned to speak and write passable Russian early in his marriage and his four daughters grew up fluent in both English and Russian.
The six-and-a-half years that Jim and Lydia spent together in Asia following the movements of his ships, with summers typically at Tientsin (Tianjin), Chefoo, (Yantai), Tsingtao (Quingdao) or Shanghai and winters in the Philippines- were the happiest of their lives. With almost nine years’ service under his belt, on February 1, 1932, Hank was promoted to Sailmaker’s Mate 1c and on November 11, he was transferred to the Asiatic Fleet destroyer tender, USS Blackhawk. In March 1934 he was recommended for promotion to Boatswain, a warrant officer rank.
Jim and Lydia’s various lodgings in China, with birds and their German Shepherd, Nora ("Norka" in Russian) and her smaller canine pals, were a hub of activity for their Navy and expatriate Russian friends. The couple were both strong swimmers and regularly swam across the bay at Chefoo. With the dogs and Lydia's mother in tow, happy hours were spent in excursions with friends to the beaches and surrounding hills, hiking and picnicking.
Their eldest girl, Lydia Alexandra Norwood ("Lulie") was born in the Philippines on March 4, 1936. By then, Jim was a Boatswain, having received a temporary appointment as a warrant officer on June 10, 1935 just before reporting aboard the minesweeper, USS Finch, on July 6, 1935. From August 21 through December 4, 1937, Finch was at Shanghai during the “Sino-Japanese” incident (Second Battle of Shanghai), regarded by some historians as the beginning of World War II in the Pacific. At Shanghai, the minesweeper transported US Marines from larger troop ships to shore and evacuated US citizens from war-torn Shanghai. Occasionally, the crew sought cover from indiscriminately fired Japanese shells. Passing Japanese warships in the Whangpoo downriver from Shanghai, Finch moored in the Yangtze alongside USS Gold Star on the afternoon of August 26 and embarked 102 enlisted and three US Marine officers. Returning to Shanghai, Finch crewman observed two Japanese destroyers firing into buildings at Woosung, before disembarking the troops at Shanghai.
On August 28, 1937, Finch’s captain, LCDR Hyman G. Rickover, delivered to Hank "with congratulations" a warrant dated July 28, 1937 that permanently appointed him Boatswain, retroactive to his temporary appointment. On Monday, Sept. 20, 1937, The New York Times reported, “The United States minesweeper Finch, dispatched from Shanghai, hurriedly took 125 anti-aircraft fighters off the transport (USS Marblehead) with their guns and proceeded immediately to Shanghai to land an American anti-aircraft company on Chinese soil for the first time in history.”
On September 22-23 1937, Jim was selected by Rickover to temporarily command a US Marine detachment at the massive Shanghai Power Company Plant, an important American economic interest, for which Hank was recognized in a letter from Rickover, the future "Father of the Nuclear Navy" and longest serving US Navy officer (1922-1982). On October 4, 1937, the Chicago Tribune reported:
“Once again Americans evacuating Shanghai were endangered by shell fire. Twenty American women and children- the families of naval officers- were forced to flee below decks on the United States minesweeper Finch. Shells from Japanese warships bombarding Pootung, rich industrial center across the Whangpoo from Shanghai, whizzed over the American vessel. During the shelling Lieut. Hyman G. Rickover of Chicago remained on the bridge to move the ship out of the danger zone. He reported the Japanese displayed poor marksmanship, but said the erratic dispersion of the shells may have been due to worn gun linings. A large fire lit up the Pootung waterfront.”
The next day, after nine-years with the Asiatic Fleet and more than two-years aboard Finch, the request for a transfer to a larger ship that Jim had initiated a couple months earlier was approved by Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander-in-chief of the US Asiatic Fleet. It was the same day that LCDR Rickover was relieved of command of Finch after less than three-months, following his request for LDO ("limited duty officer") engineering duty, making him ineligible for future line command. Hank Norwood detached from Finch on October 19 and reported to his next ship, the battleship USS Texas at Norfolk, Virginia on December 19, 1937, as Boatswain and Assistant First Lieutenant. His wife and daughter followed from the Philippines the next spring.
Jim and Lydia welcomed the birth of their twin daughters, Genevieve Elizabeth (Jenny) and Gertrude Helen (Trudy) on November 27, 1939 at Norfolk. In May 1941, he was transferred to Naval Training Station Newport, Rhode Island, where he had begun his naval career as an able seaman eighteen years earlier. On June 10, he was promoted to Chief Boatswain with the billet of Yard Craft Officer. Hank, Lydia and the three girls moved to 31 Bay Street in Newport, where on November 21, 1941, their fourth daughter, Catherine Laura, was born at the naval hospital a block away.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two weeks later, Jim requested sea duty. Instead, he was designated Provost Marshall at the Newport Training Station. Even with shore duty at Newport, he recalled not seeing his daughters awake for four months. On September 28, 1942, Jim received a temporary promotion to Lieutenant (junior grade) and departed for his next duty station, Naval Operating Base, Iceland, where he was Shore Patrol Officer from October 2, 1942 until October 27, 1943, when he received orders to report to USS Alpine, a fast attack transport, then being refitted at Portland, Oregon for duty in the Pacific war theater.
Hank didn’t see his family for periods up to a year and a half while they remained in Newport during the war. After a couple months temporary duty at the New York Navy Yard, when he was able to visit his family, he boarded a train for the West Coast, arriving at Portland and reporting for duty on January 25, 1944. Alpine was commissioned on April 22 and stood out from Portland on May 7, en route to San Diego for “shakedown” and amphibious training exercises off Coronado, California through June 18, 1944, when she set out to join the War in the Western Pacific. Alpine carried her first troops and equipment that July in support of the invasion of Guam.
Promoted to Lieutenant on March 3, 1943, Hank was given the billets of First Lieutenant, in charge of the Deck Department, and head of R Division, in charge of repair and damage control on Alpine. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat "V" and the Navy Commendation with Combat "V" for his actions as First Lieutenant in leading fire-fighting crews following kamikaze strikes on Alpine during the Battle of Leyte on November 18, 1944 and the first day of the Okinawa Invasion, April 1, 1945. His commanding officer, CDR George K. G. Reilly had recommended Hank for award of the Silver Star and Bronze Star, but the navy awards board downgraded the recommendation. Reilly himself, was awarded the Silver Star and Bronze star for the two engagements.
During one of the two, deadly kamikaze strikes on Alpine, Hank was seriously wounded in his lower leg. Years later, when his daughters saw the disfiguring scar running from his knee to his ankle and asked what had happened, he told them it was caused by “shrapnel” from an “exploding Japanese suicide plane” that hit his ship during WWII. After Hank's death, his girls learned from their cousin in Oregon that Hank had refused to leave his duty station directing fire suppression and damage control, despite his wound. For reasons that will forever be a mystery, Jim never sought an award of the Purple Heart Medal for combat injuries that most certainly were severe enough to require treatment by Alpine's medical officer.
With the end of WWII, Lydia and the girls moved west from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego, California. Jim was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on October 3, 1945. On June 10, 1946 he was assigned to the USS Eldorado, the flagship of the Commander of Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. A couple of years after the move to San Diego, as a result of unintentional friction caused by in-laws on both sides of the family, Jim and Lydia became estranged, with Lydia, her mother and the four girls moving to San Francisco.
On December 16, 1948, Hank Norwood achieved the goal of every navy officer when the onetime seaman recruit turned “mustang”, received his first command, USS Karin, a refrigerated stores ship that carried provisions from San Francisco to the mid-Pacific and Far East. His success was cut-short when he suffered a stroke while his ship was off Japan a few months later. He was ordered to the Naval Hospital at Long Beach, California and temporarily assigned to the cruiser USS Pasadena for the journey back to the states.
The Navy was Jim’s life and he fought the medical review board for months, insisting that he had “never felt better”. But in the end the Navy had the last word and he was forced to retire on October 1, 1949 with a promotion to Commander because of his combat valor awards during WWII. He was 48-years old and would have never retired, if it was left up to him. Hank received a letter from the Secretary of the Navy dated November 1, 1949, that recognized his long service and closed, “May I wish for you many years of health and happiness”. That wish came true since he fully recovered from the effects of the stroke and lived another 45 years.
Hank Norwood earned eighteen medals during his twenty-six years service in the Navy, including two valor awards. Sadly and regrettably, his teenage daughters innocently gave these away in 1955. Following their mother's sudden death, the girls and their grandmother moved to a smaller apartment on South Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. An unknown man helping to move boxes into their garage, had admired the framed medals. Not thinking, but realizing they had to get rid of many possessions due to less space, the girls gave the stranger their father's medals. When Hank learned what his daughters had done, he was saddened but did not scold them or make them feel worse than they already did. Hank's daughters remain hopeful that their dad's medals will one day resurface and hopefully be reunited with the rest of his Navy ephemera that represent a long and dedicated life of service to his country.
For several years after he retired from the Navy, Jim lived in a cabin by Detroit Lake, Oregon, where he hunted, fished and worked for a time at the Detroit dam. In October 1951, Hank was on an elk hunting trip in Oregon and failed to return to camp at night. When his nephews and other members of the hunting party searched for him the next day without success, they presumed he was “lost”. Hank wasn't lost, but his “bad leg gave out” and he couldn’t hike any further. He was "pretty hungry" when he finally emerged from the woods, making his way to a stranger's house where he devoured the half-a-dozen eggs offered him by the good samaritan.
Jim had a lifelong love for reading that satisfied his hunger for constant learning. During much of the 1950s and 60's he lived with his sister Gertrude and her son in Salem, Oregon. According to the wish of his mother-in-law a couple years prior to her death in 1966, Hank’s four daughters, now grown women, were joyfully reunited with their dad, who moved from Oregon to San Francisco to be near them. Jim moved his girls to a bigger house a-half-block from the Mission Dolores Park. He lived near them until the untimely death of his oldest daughter, Lulie, in 1970.
Lulie's sudden death due to illness devastated Hank. He moved back to Oregon to again live with his sister, Gertrude, but visited his daughters for a couple months every year at their homes in Washington state and California. When Jim was in his mid-eighties, Gertrude died and his nephew told him that he planned to sell the house and move to an apartment. Jim moved back to California to live full-time with his daughters, where he divided the year between their homes in Northern and Southern California. His nephew ended up keeping the house, but Hank didn’t return to Oregon. He always enjoyed the times when he lived with his daughters, doing chores around their homes and yards, woodworking (making sure they each learned how to build a bookcase and desk), carpentry for neighbors (without ever taking a dime), anything that could be done with sailmaker's needles, scissors and canvas, cooking, playing a mean game of acey-deucey backgammon and just making up for the years he missed, until he died peacefully at Fullerton, California on May 14, 1994, his 93rd birthday.
Hank Norwood never feared death because he accepted it as a fact of life. When asked about death, he got a twinkle in his eye and said that after he died, he would join the other sailors at "Fiddler’s Green", because "sailors aren't good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell, so we all meet there." Jim Norwood is remembered for his calm strength, dry sense of humor and love of life and his daughters.
Do not be sad that he is gone;
But smile that he has been.
(Copyright 2017, James Henry Norwood Family)
Grateful thanks to Member JFJN for his generous sponsorship of Hank Norwood's memorial. God Bless You and Yours from his daughters!
"To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends.
To appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
