Comments on: Guest Post: Cornelius Gilliam: Fifty Years of Life, A Century of War

By: CurtA

CurtA — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:09:59 +0000

Richard. Good comment. and Mark B., To prove again that all history is a network, my personal history has an item about my seasick voyage to Korea in October, 1950 was on a liberty ship on rough seas. When we arrived at Pusan, our ship, the USNS James O’hara, named for a Medal of Honor winner, tied up next to the USNS Leonard Brostrom, named for a Medal of Honor winner from my Idaho hometown. I played football with his younger brother. Then my return trip the follwing year was on the uSNS Sadao S. Munemori, another MOH winner from the most decorated unit in the European theater.

Some may have noticed an article in the Church News a couple of weeks ago about Brostrom’s medal which is now exhibited in the Church History Library. The researcher who gathered the information on Brostrom was our friend and fellow historian Sherman L. Fleek, West Point Historian and Lt. Col. (retd).

By: Richard H. Shaw

Richard H. Shaw — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:32:54 +0000

Cornelius Gilliam was my 3X great uncle. I find it interesting that he persecuted early Mormons and helped drive them West, where they flourished. Also, some of his descendants, both Gilliams and Shaws, married into the LDS Church. Ironic. It just shows what happens when you develop a hatred for something and try to extinguish it or drive it out. Leave things and people alone, and they will either thrive or fade away, all on their own.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:07:09 +0000

The Liberty ships were an amazing development. Traditional shipbuilders and naval architects said that their design was lousy and the process of building them was flawed, that the ships would fall apart in rough seas and on and on. But the U.S. needed shipping–a lot of it–to transport men and materiel to Europe and the Pacific. It’s true that the ships were ungainly, unstable in all but the calmest of seas, but as Curtis points out in the original post, the U.S. built a huge number of them during the war, and they succeeded in carrying untold tons of cargo with relatively few break-ups. (It’s unfortunate that one of those had to be the SS Joseph Smith!)

Henry J. Kaiser, who had built Hoover and Grand Coulee Dam, built a huge number of the ships, and made a lot of money in the process.

One Liberty ship, the Robert Peary, was built in a record time of seven days! (They used a modular construction method, so many of the parts had been built before in other locations and the assembly itself was completed in that week.) But by 1944 the average time to build a Liberty ship was six weeks.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:23:25 +0000

Thank you for this post, Curt. It’s one of those things that shows how everything in history is linked to everything else, not neat and tidy and isolated the way history was taught in school.

Also, while I suppose some crewman aboard the Brigham Young might have know who he was and made some cracks about plural marriage or whatever, it’s unlikely that had there been a Mormon aboard either Gilliam that he would have been aware of the connection. I wonder whether knowing something about the man a ship was named for would have affected how you felt about your assignment or crew … not that they didn’t all have more urgent things to think about, but I’m wondering how I would feel serving aboard the USS Lilburn Boggs?!

By: CurtA

CurtA — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:19:08 +0000

Kevin,

The SS Joseph Smith was in a convoy from England to New York in January 1944 when she began taking water rapidly and drifting off course. The order was given to scuttle her and she broke up in front of the Canadian ship Fort Crevier, which scraped over her and received hull damage. All 67 crew members of the Joseph Smith survived, but she went to the bottom.

The SS Brigham Young was launched August 17, 1942 but was not commissioned until May 1943 after being renamed the SS Murzim March 1943. The Murzim (nee B.Y.) had been fitted as an ammunition ship and shuttled around the South Pacific, being under fire in Leyte Gulf, earning one battle star. After the war, she joined the reserve mothballed fleet in Suisin Bay, Calif. The last time I drove I-680, you could still see the many ships sitting there rusting.

By: Researcher

Researcher — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:47:54 +0000

Wonderful post! It is so interesting to learn about historical connections like this.

By: kevinf

kevinf — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:26:19 +0000

I’m reminded of the quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”.

A reminder that both the protagonists and antagonists in our Mormon history are not as one dimensional as we would like to think. Our cultural memory of him is not fond; others found valid reasons to honor him. Thanks for this, Curtis. I also had no idea that there were liberty ships named after our first two church presidents. Any clues about what happened to those ships?

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:20:15 +0000

Great post, Curtis.

But I can’t understand why anyone could take exception to the weather in Chicago in February! : )

(Having lived through three such Februarys, I suspect only someone arriving from the Yukon might have considered it an improvement.)