PEORIA – The murky Illinois River has her little secrets.
“She’s full of surprises and often a source of unexpected help as in the war years, when she completed the unbelievable task of transporting 700 warships, including (28) submarines from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and ultimately to the Atlantic Ocean,” according to a January 1954 article in the Journal Star titled “Old Lady Illinois’ holds mystic charm for veteran riverman.”
Submarines in the Illinois River? It almost seems unnatural, but a U.S. Navy procedure manual from 1944 outlined the journey the subs would take from their birthplace in Manitowoc, Wis., to New Orleans via the Illinois River, right through Peoria’s front yard.
“You
probably didn’t know this,” said Jim Hafele, 67, a retired Navy man. “Nobody around here knows about this. That’s why we did this.”
Saturday morning, submarine veterans from different wars, most members of the United States Submarine Veterans, Inc., dedicated a monument at Liberty Park on the city’s riverfront to the subs that passed through the area and eventually entered the Pacific Theater in World War II.
“I worked damn hard to get it here” said 7l-year-old USSVI Peoria Base member Ernie Crowl of the large granite memorial with a submarine etched at the top. “I’m proud of the fact that we’re bringing history to life for people around here.
Bill Thiesen, curator of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum In Manitowoc, was invited to speak and give some background on how the ships made their way through the sometimes shallow waters of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.
The subs were brought to Chicago via the Chicago Sanitary Canal. They were commissioned in Lake Michigan, and were then taken down the Chicago River to Lockport, where they entered the Illinois River, Thiesen said.
The subs were aided through shallow water by a floating dry-dock ship that transported them one at a time during a two year period starting in December 1942. The periscopes were taken off of the ships to allow them to pass beneath the bridges, Thiesen said.
In New Orleans, torpedoes were loaded on hoard the subs, and the vessels made their way to Panama where the wont through trials and exercises before they entered the Pacific front, Thiesen said.
Jim Welch, chairman of the USSVI Peoria Base, said he still gets a share of strange glares when he tells people that subs passed by Peoria’s Riverfront.
“I think their reaction is the same as mine when somebody first told me about it,” the 57-year-old Cuba man said.
Welch said in the 1960s — he wasn’t sure exactly when — he had just returned from his Naval training when an old man told him a story about standing guard on the bridge in Havana while a Manitowoc submarine passed through.
“I just stood there and smiled and nodded,” Welch said. “I should have listened to my elders.”
Brothers Bill Peterson 74, and Buck Peterson, 77, both of Walnut, lost their brother on one of the subs, the USS Kete, which apparently sank somewhere in the China Sea in 1945.
“There were 52 (Manitowoc) subs that were sunk and two they don’t know what happened to them *,” Bill Peterson said.
One of the two was the Kete. Their brother’s ship was never found.
The Petersons attended the small ceremony to remember their brother, who was 21 when he died.
The back of the new memorial bears the message, ‘Four Manitowoc submarines, the Golet, Kete, Largarto and Robalo, along with 336 officers and enlisted men were lost during the war.”
“It’s a
wonderful memorial,” Bill Peterson said.