“He was a good clean boy whose memory will remain in this office long after the war has passed into history,” stated an Elgin Courier-News editorial in May 1945.
His little brother Bob followed him into the Navy, became an Elgin city garbage man and then an Elgin police officer. Bob put in 31 years on the police force and, at age 81, is still going strong in retirement, active in the Elgin Church of the Nazarene and Elgin Area Historical Society.
His sister, Pat, became a farmer’s wife and lived to be 65. She died just four years before a new century came in.
His brother Richard served in the Marine Corps, moved to Indiana and became a prison warden. He died in 1981.
His brother Willard spent nine years in the Navy. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis but lived into middle age.
LaVerne Schroeder, the oldest of this clan of five, a former apprentice in The Courier-News composing room, died a fiery death in the service of his country before he even saw his 18th birthday. What remained of his body lies in a veterans cemetery in Rock Island, Ill. But Elginites should remember his life every Memorial Day as those who attend the services at Bluff City Cemetery see a memorial built around a two-ton anchor from the destroyer minelayer USS Aaron Ward, the ship LaVerne died 70 years ago during the last major battle of World War II.
“I was 11 when he died” and can’t remember a lot about LaVerne, Bob Schroeder said as he sat with his wife, Judy, at their kitchen table on Elgin’s west side. But his 11-year-old memories remind Bob that LaVerne “was a really good tree climber.” The family found out just recently that he had been seeing a girl from Huntley — but only when a friend was driving that direction, since LaVerne himself had no car.
The Schroeders lived in South Elgin, not far from the quarry. After graduating from Willard School’s eighth grade, LaVerne attended Elgin High for awhile. But for some reason Bob’s not sure of, LaVerne left school around November 1943, when he was 16. He went to work in The Courier-News composing room, preparing the lead type that would be used on the printing press.
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It was a tradition in the Schroeder family to serve their country, and in those war years, almost every able-bodied male American was being drafted. But LaVerne wouldn’t have been draft age yet when he joined the U.S. Navy the same month the Allies invaded Normandy.
Bob isn’t sure whether LaVerne felt especially patriotic. But he has a hunch why his brother joined. Bob recalled that during the Korean War, “One day my father (Harry Schroeder) just announced that tomorrow we were going down to the recruiter, and I was going to join the Navy, just as he had done during World War I.” Bob suspects his father said something similar to LaVerne as soon as LaVerne turned 17 on June 1, 1944.
LaVerne was assigned to the new destroyer minelayer Aaron Ward, a ship that had been named after another destroyer that had been sunk by Japanese planes during the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign. After working out its new-ship kinks, the Aaron Ward was sent to Adm. Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet just in time for the invasion of Okinawa, right on Japan’s doorstep.
Japan’s surface navy and carrier air power virtually had been wiped out the previous year in the battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. But Okinawa still would turn out to be the bloodiest in the history of the U.S. Navy. Without surface ships or well-trained pilots, the Japanese attacked the invasion fleet with thousands of land-based suicide “kamikaze” planes, crewed by young pilots who purposely plunged their bomb- and gasoline-laden aircraft into American ships. The Allies’ losses included 34 ships sunk, 368 damaged and 9,000 sailors killed, wounded or missing.
The most dangerous sea duty of all in that campaign was to sit on what Spruance called “the radar picket line.” This was a line of little destroyers standing guard between the main fleet and Japan’s air bases. The destroyermen’s job was to see when the next wave of kamikazes was flying over and to warn the carriers, battleships and supply ships behind them in time to get ready.
On May 3, LaVerne and the Aaron Ward were on picket duty when she was attacked by 10 kamikazes. LaVerne was assigned to an anti-aircraft gun mount.
LaVerne and the other gunners shot down two suicide planes. But the third one dropped a bomb that knocked a hole in the ship, then crashed into the superstructure, spraying burning gasoline everywhere.
Flames and exploding ammunition covered the deck above while the engine room flooded. Damaged steering left the ship unable to move except in a lazy circle. Over the next 52 minutes, five more Japanese planes would crash into the Aaron Ward or hit her with bombs, turning her into what looks in photos like a pile of twisted scrap metal. Her main deck was only 18 inches above the waves. She went dead in the water.
The surviving crew made a herculean effort to save the ship, and it actually worked. She was towed to a harbor in Okinawa, then limped 12,000 miles across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal and all the way back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
But Seaman Second Class LaVerne Schroeder was dead, along with 41 crewmates. Fifteen had been burned or mutilated so badly that their bodies could not immediately be identified.
The Aaron Ward’s ordeal was told a few years later in a book “Brave Ship, Brave Men,” written by retired Navy officer Arnold S. Lott. Lott told the tale so eloquently that the book went through three printings and was described by Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz as “the finest story of the war that I have been privileged to read.”
“We thought he had been killed immediately when a kamikaze crashed into his gun mount,” Bob said. “But at one of the crew reunions, someone told us LaVerne had just been wounded by that. He was carried below deck, but then another plane hit where he was and killed him.”
The family didn’t hear about the teen’s death until a telegram arrived May 28, more than three weeks after the battle. Bob recalled he was riding his bike late that afternoon near a gravel pit in South Elgin when another boy ran up to him and shouted, “You’ve got to get home. Your brother’s been killed.”
LaVerne’s body was buried on Okinawa for a few years, then moved at the family’s request to the veterans cemetery in Rock Island.
In November 1945, Harry Schroeder read in The Courier-News that, with peace at hand and more undamaged ships than the Navy knew what to do with, the battered Aaron Ward was going to be scrapped. Harry wrote a letter to the Brooklyn Navy Yard asking if he could have a gun, bell or anchor from the ship to remember his son by.
“In due time, Mr. Schroeder received an answer,” Lott wrote in his book. “The Navy would consider letting him have a clock or an anchor. The anchor was heavy, the letter explained. Perhaps he would rather have the clock. Mr. Schroeder said he’d take the anchor.”
The Navy declared the ship’s starboard anchor to be government surplus and sold it to the Schroeders for the scrap-iron price of half a cent per pound. Harry Schroeder mailed the Navy a check for $20. The Navy put the anchor on a railroad flatcar bound for Elgin.
When the two tons of iron arrived at Elgin’s Chicago & North Western station on July 16, 1946, Bob recalled his father went to get it and found the shipping bill for $35.43 had been marked “Paid” by some patriotic railroad official.
For five weeks, the anchor was displayed on Fountain Square in Elgin. Then it was moved to the Schroeder yard in South Elgin and propped against a box elder tree. On Memorial Day 1947, it was moved to the sidewalk outside the Elgin Navy Club, on State Street between Chicago and Highland.
When the Navy Club gave up that building a quarter century later, the anchor was moved again to its present concrete memorial pad in Bluff City Cemetery.
“At odd times, the anchor has had a visitor,” Lott wrote when the anchor still sat outside the Navy Club. “An out-of-state car will roll down State Street and stop opposite the anchor. A man will get out, look up and down the busy street, look at the anchor again with unseeing eyes. At such times, the grimy red buildings fade away, the fields around the town turn from green to restless salty blue, and the thunder of long-silent guns comes echoing back as planes again smash down from the sky.
“Anyone who fought on Radar Picket Station 10 needs only to see the starboard anchor of the Aaron Ward to remember the ship, the picket line, the battle, the fire, the blood and the broken bodies.”
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