https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/family-traditions-lancaster-county-veteran-opens-up-about-wwii-service/article_77919d1a-a6ab-11e6-8f38-f36205b91207.html
TOM KNAPP | Staff Writer | November 11, 2016
Jack McSherry Jr. was admiring 30-foot-high waves shortly before midnight in the North Atlantic when a particularly aggressive swell broke over the bow of his ship and washed him overboard.
"I was stupid," he recalls. "The sky was black, the ship was rolling. I was on my way to the bridge, and I stopped to look at the waves."
When the wave crashed over the deck, 17-year-old McSherry raced for the nearest hatch, but the water slammed into him and carried him over the side.
"I was overboard. I was in the water," he says. "But I managed to grab a line."
McSherry -- who was serving on the USS Houston, a light cruiser, in the spring of 1945 -- wasn't due on the bridge for another 45 minutes, he says. Had he lost his grip, he wouldn't have been missed until it was far too late for his shipmates to save him.
"I would have been a goner," he says. "But I pulled myself up ... and I walked into the pilot house. Someone said, ‘You're all wet.' I yelled back, ‘No, I'm not!' No one said anything after that."
For McSherry, the U.S. Navy was a family tradition. His father, Jack McSherry Sr., enlisted in the Navy in 1907, serving two years with Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, working on a scientific cruise to Alaska and serving on several ships in the Atlantic during World War I.
The elder McSherry, who was discharged from active duty in 1923 and entered the Naval Reserve, was recalled in 1941 and served during World War II on minesweepers off the Atlantic coast and as an instructor at the Quartermaster Schoolin Bainbridge, Maryland.
All three of McSherry Sr.'s sons followed his wake into the Navy.
The oldest, William McSherry, enlisted in 1943 and served as a chief electrician's mate on the battlecruiser USS Guam.
The middle son, David McSherry, enlisted in 1944 and served as quartermaster 2nd class on the escort carrier USS Shamrock Bay.
Jack McSherry Jr. was the youngest, enlisting as soon as he turned 17 in 1945. He, like his father and brother David, trained as a quartermaster.
"Being a quartermaster is the best job on the ship," he enthuses, surrounded by Navy, World War II and brass band memorabilia in his Conestoga home.
"You steer the ship. You help with navigation," he adds. "I was always on the bridge. I always knew where we were going, what we were up to."
McSherry got seasick on his first cruise, but after that he loved rough seas.
After the war, he was transferred to the USS Huntington, a light cruiser stationed in the Mediterranean.
He wasn't required to swab the deck like many of his mates, but he did it anyway.
"I kept the pilot house spotless," he says proudly. "That was my hangout."
As much as possible, he kept in touch with his father and brothers by mail.
Asked about high points in his service, McSherry boasts about the time he piloted the ship into port at Livorno, Italy. The harbor, he says, was filled with sunken vessels, and he had to steer his 83-foot-wide ship through an 87-foot gap between shipwrecks.
He made it through "without scraping the paint," he says, beaming.
He also remembers saving his ship from a collision with a whale, and accurately gauging the ship's bearing and speed by eyeballing the waves.
He also "did a lot of dumb things," McSherry says: Walking an extra 12-hour shift on shore patrol because he couldn't find his relief. Being robbed at knifepoint in Egypt, only to be saved by a fez-wearing carriage driver who charged him for the rescue. Crawling through the pyramids at Giza, which were not yet open to tourists, led by a pair of torch-bearing locals.
Or hiking across the border near Trieste, Italy, only to discover years later he had crossed -- twice -- a live minefield.
The one that made his shipmates hoot the loudest, though, was the time he walked into a bar near the naval yard in Brooklyn at midnight -- and ordered a glass of milk.
"I didn't drink," he says.
McSherry was discharged from the Navy in 1949 as a quartermaster 3rd class.
McSherry has been married 58 years to Irmgard McSherry, with whom he has an interesting backstory.
"We were bombing her during the war. Seriously," he says with a grin. "She was a kid at the time. We were bombarding Berlin day and night, and that's where she lived."
They met after she moved to the States in 1957. He spied her at a dance at the Conestoga Country Club, he recalls. Because she didn't speak English, they communicated through sign language and a form of pidgin English.
"She was a pretty good-looking girl," he says, "but it was difficult at first."
Born near Shamokin, McSherry has been an engineer for nearly 65 years. He still works with his son, Jack McSherry III, designing buildings, dams and bridges.
"It's something to do," McSherry, now 88, says. "What else would I do with my time?"
He lived for a few years in Lancaster in the late 1950s, helping to design and build the city's water treatment facilities in Columbia, then settled in the county permanently in 1963.
He has two sons, Jack and Patrick McSherry, and a daughter, Ellen Harter.
Sometimes, he and his wife take cruises, and if the captain allows it he still steers the ships.
Two years ago, on a cruise to Mexico, McSherry went to the bridge to watch the quartermaster in action, "but there was no one there. The wheel was turning itself. It's all controlled by GPS now."