In 1983, Beverly Grosz Evans sent a questionnaire to her grandfather Richard Furness with a series of questions about his life. The following answers pertain to his military service.

Beverly: Tell me about your brothers.
Dick: Gilbert [Gilbert Sessions Furness] was the most studious of the four of us and he won a Rhodes scholarship but he died in the war in October 1918. I was allowed leave from the Great Lakes to go home for the funeral. I heard about his death by wire—there was no long distance phone service.

B: What else can you tell me about World War I?
D: I read about the war in the newspapers. Gilbert went to Minneapolis to enlist. I was a junior in high school then. In my senior year, I went to Minneapolis before graduation and enlisted in the navy. I graduated in uniform. I was sent to Norfolk, Virginia and assigned to Hampton Roads on a ship. Then I was sent to Portsmouth, Virginia as a lighthouse tender.
I was discharged in July 1919.

B: Tell me about your part in World War II.
D: I joined the navy again, as a boatswain’s mate. I was sent to Fedela, Africa [Fedhala, Morocco] in November of ‘42 assigned to the Tasker H. Bliss, a troop transport. The Germans sank it and I had no ship, so I was stationed in Casablanca, then later in Oran [Algeria].

I was on standby for replacements for any ships that were sunk in the Mediterranean as they ferried troops on invasion barges to Italy. I stayed on replacement duty until 1943 going back and forth from North Africa for twenty-seven months.

I got rest leave to the States and went to Salem, Oregon where my wife and children had moved to be close to her family. I returned to duty in January 1944 to another ship which boarded in New York and was on its way to Florida. By the time we reached Washington D. C. we learned the ship had been sunk. I had various jobs then including Shore Patrol, until I was put on crash boad [should be boat?] duty rescuing planes from the ocean—mostly from Miami to the Bahamas.

I was in Miami when the war ended. I was discharged and went by train to Oregon. I took my family back to North Dakota because my job was waiting for me there and at that time, I became Veteran’s Service Officer, too.

B: Were you trained to do anything useful in the service?
D: Service training—survival!

B: What is the biggest lesson you learned about war from being in the war?
D: War is hell!

Richard Furness (1900)