Samuel Whitney Richards was not an apostle (it was his brother, Franklin D., who was). Samuel Whitney Richards was a mission president and a general go-to guy for church leaders on special assignments (he was, for example, the man Brigham Young sent on a lightning-fast 1857 trip across the plains and ocean to Great Britain to set affairs in order there and call the missionaries home, in case the Utah War turned into something much bigger than it eventually did), and he served in some local and territorial political positions. But it was his brother Franklin who was the apostle.

When I was in college, I had a teacher or two who had a ship shot out from under them in WWII.

Seeing Samuel Whitney Pincock in his Army uniform (especially the hat), and knowing he was serving as a lumberjack, brings up unintended references to a famous Monty Python skit.

Maybe if Ardis offers to double my fee, I’ll submit a guest post about that other troopship sinking, which also has some Mormon (and family) connections.

Mark B., regarding “the crew abandoned us” remark, here’s a few more items I discovered:
1) The convoy was under orders to continue on if any ship were hit–to avoid additional losses–which gave appearances of being abandoned. The destroyers immediately left to drop depth charges, which added to the impression.

2)Because there was an official inquiry, the behavior of the crew is fairly well documented. My (secondary) accounts indicate that a few key officers remained on board, including the radioman (who sent the SOS) and another below decks who secured the bulkhead doors to keep the ship afloat longer. Every eyewitness account I found highlights the fact that the troops had to try and figure out the lifeboats on their own.

Ironically, nearly all of the deaths were among those who were in the lifeboats.

When I write posts, most especially the story posts that take some effort to turn from a bland fact of history into something exciting, surprising, or moving, I pay a lot of attention to *how* the post is structured. Should I start at the beginning and tell it in a straightforward way? Or would this one be better by jumping into the middle of the action and then going back to fill in the details? Can I use the historical figure’s actual words, or would they sound stilted and too high-falutin’ to 21st century ears?

If I do it right, most readers won’t even be aware of how hard I work to structure a post. That’s why I’ve been having fun examining Clark’s post and seeing how he wrote it to fit so well the needs of a blog. Unless you were looking for it, you might not even notice how he has let Whit speak for himself in his own words — but also how Clark, as narrator, moves the story along by condensing and summarizing, and maybe even writing the lifeboat scene in a better, more convincing way than Whit may have written it. You probably didn’t notice, either, how he sneaks in the necessary background information on the war and the ship itself, without making it seem like a tedious history lesson for us to slog through. The pictures help, too — literally putting a face on Whit and his doomed ship.

If you’re thinking about maybe kinda wanting to sorta try to maybe write a guest post, you could take a lot of tips from how Clark has done it here.

End of writing lesson.

Clark, thanks for sending this. We tend not to hear nearly as much about World War I soldiers and their adventures as we do about wars before and after. My grandfather went to France in 1918 — I wonder what ship he took? He wasn’t torpedoed, but was he afraid he might be, given the history of ships like the Tuscania? What was it like for my grandfather, a Mormon boy like your Whit, to be surrounded by so many hundreds of people so unlike, in some ways, the only people he had ever known, sailing off to war in a place he had never imagined visiting?

A couple of comments: That’s a remarkably short period of training–three weeks at Camp Lewis, Washington, and then another three weeks near Washington D.C. I don’t know when the U.S. Army began “basic training,” but these days it lasts for nine weeks, followed by additional training lasting from six weeks to a year, depending upon one’s specialty. Maybe the Army figured that men who already had lumbering experience didn’t need much training–or maybe the demands of the allies for men shortened the training for everybody.

And, by the way, it was “Camp” Lewis in 1917. I haven’t been able to track down when its name changed to “Fort” Lewis, but it appears likely that it was during World War II.

I wonder if the “the crew abandoned us” was really true, or if that’s just a common reaction to the confusion and fear that a soldier would feel in that situation. An American troopship was torpedoed in December 1944 just off the coast of France. The crew of the ship was Belgian and differences in nationality and language undoubtedly contributed to the confusion–but one common thread of complaints was that the crew abandoned ship, leaving the soldiers without help.