Ninety-nine year old Navy Veteran recalls Pearl Harbor, D-Day, WWII actions.
Eighty years ago, then 19-year-old Lloyd Rice was a bilge rat on Navy destroyer escort when he first heard the news about D-Day. “We heard about it right away,” Mr. Rice recalls.
Lloyd Rice, born in Steuben County, Indiana, moved to Jackson, Michigan, at the age of 16.
The next year, he was leaving a movie theatre when he walked out and heard the news that America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, catapulting the country into the middle of WWII.
“I was drafted,” Mr. Rice said. “I graduated high school on a Friday. The next Friday, I was in Detroit for my physical examination.”
Rice joined the Navy and became a diesel mechanic for a destroyer escort that patrolled the Atlantic looking for German submarines.
Many of their missions included escorting ships carrying troops and supplies across the ocean, deterring the enemy submarines that prowled the area.
“On D-Day, we were in the Atlantic near the equator looking for submarines,” Rice said.
These efforts were part of a continuous 18-month patrol in the Atlantic. Rice says the ship didn’t return to port the entire time.
Lloyd Rice recalls one incident where their destroyer was dispatched to the location of an English freighter that had been sunk by an enemy submarine. After 3 days of searching, they were able to locate survivors of the ship floating at sea and brought them aboard.
“One thing that surprised me, one of the guys we rescued said after the ship had sunk, the enemy sub surfaced, the captain came out and spoke perfect English,” said Mr. Rice. “And he said you can come aboard the sub as prisoners of war, or swim to the nearest land. They chose the nearest land. We found them before they got to land.”
After the deployment, Rice returned on leave to the United States, and then deployed on a ship headed for the Pacific when they received word that the Japanese had surrendered.
After the war, he became a carpenter and retired at the age of 65. After retirement, he worked at the local Jackson Home Depot hardware department for 19 years, retiring again at the age of 96.