World War II veteran tells his story of battles and missions

Glynn Angel

Editor’s note: Bryan Knowles is a Sparta native and a recent college graduate, majoring in history. On May 27, 2013, he had the privilege of meeting with a White County High School graduate from the Class of 1944 and talk about his wartime experiences.

Born on 21 September 1926, Glynn E. Angel graduated White County High School in the class of 1944. Following the example of many of his peers and classmates, Glynn joined the armed forces, enlisting in the United States Navy on 13 December 1944. Glynn was sent to Michigan for training on the Great Lakes and afterward to San Francisco. There he was deployed as storekeeper aboard the light carrier USS Cowpens CVL-25, nicknamed the “Mighty Moo.” The Cowpens, which had already seen extensive action in the Pacific theater at islands such as Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Palau, Saipan, and even Iwo Jima and Okinawa, had just been refitted and repaired at San Francisco, and set sail for Pearl Harbor with her new complement. Glynn recalled that the voyage from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor took five days, but he was seasick “before we got under the Golden Gate bridge.” Sickness lasted for the duration of the voyage. “I had my own personal trash can,” he remembered.After brief onboard training at Pearl Harbor, Glynn and the Cowpens set sail on 13 June 1945 to regroup with Task Force 58 in the Philippines. A week later, the new crewmembers experienced their first taste of the ship in combat as aircraft from the Cowpens hit Wake Island. The ship left the Philippines on 1 July. Glynn recalled that he and the rest of the crew “didn’t know where we were going.” The group’s assignment was to harass the coastline of mainland Japan itself.

For the next month, the Cowpens sailed up and down the Japanese coastline. Glynn described how, during the day, they would launch aircraft that would bomb Japanese targets, while at night the warships would close within range of the shore and shell what they could. The carrier deck was so small that the first planes had to be launched before the rest could be brought on deck. Takeoff space was severely limited for the first planes in a flight, which were often “catapulted” from the deck to provide extra lift. Still, aircraft disappeared below the deck after takeoff before reappearing as they gained altitude.

 “You wondered if it was gonna come up again when it went down,” Glynn said.

The force was never attacked by surface ships because, according to Glynn, “the Japanese navy was pretty nearly whipped.” Instead, he recounted, the primary threats were “kamikazes and submarines.” He described the kamikaze aircraft as little “pinpoints” in the sky as they attempted to fly above U.S. radar.

“When that pilot left Japan, he knew he weren’t a- comin’ back…you just hoped that the pilots or gunners could knock ‘em down,” Glynn said.

Glynn witnessed one stray Japanese torpedo pass near his ship but said he “didn’t know who it was after.” He described how the ships would change course every few minutes to prevent Japanese submarines from properly aiming their torpedoes. The Cowpens did not suffer any damage from kamikazes or submarines during his tour.

This action continued until the Japanese surrender announcement on 15 August. When the two atomic bombs struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, the Cowpens was approximately 75 miles offshore. Glynn recalled he didn’t see the detonation or the resulting smoke cloud but that he and the crew “didn’t know to look.” Later, a loudspeaker announced the bombs as being made in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Glynn said, “I knew where Oak Ridge was, but I didn’t know what they were building.”

The Cowpens earned the distinction of being the first American carrier to enter Tokyo Harbor. It was positioned close to the USS Missouri when the peace treaty ending World War II was signed on 2 September 1945. From its deck, her crew could see each individual in both the United States and Japanese delegations as they came aboard the Missouri to sign the historic documents. Glynn and his fellow crewmembers were attired in their white dress uniforms.

Men off the Cowpens were some of the first Americans into Tokyo itself. Glynn remembers the instructions to “stay together and not go off in ones and twos, ‘cause they didn’t know how we’d be received.” But as he and his crewmates began to explore, they found most people were simply “happy that the war was over.” Holding up some photographs of shrines, buildings, and streets in Japan, he recalled, “you’d go into some department stores…they would have some shelves empty.”

 Shortly afterward, the men of the Cowpens set sail for Formosa (Taiwan), where they picked up as many soldiers as they could carry back to the states. This was one of several voyages the Cowpens accomplished as part of the Magic Carpet operation to return American servicemen to their homes. Glynn recounted that they installed extra bunks “four high” to accommodate the maximum number of passengers.

“I had to stay in [the Navy] a long time after the war was over,” he remembered.

The Cowpens completed her final Magic Carpet run in January 1946. In August, Glynn Angel retired from military service with the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class.

Glynn showed me a number of photographs from his time aboard the Cowpens, including Dale Evans (known later for the Roy Rogers Show) performing for the crew, a monkey named “Sam” atop an aircraft propeller, wrecked remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy in Tokyo Harbor, and Japan’s Mount Fuji as seen from the ship. Another photo showed crew playing basketball in the aircraft elevator.

“You would shoot [the ball], and the ship would go like that,” Glynn recounted, gesturing as to the movement of the ship, “and you’d miss the whole thing.”

Showing one photo of an officer, Glynn said simply, “That was the captain of the ship at one time. He was an alcoholic. They got rid of him.”

Reflecting on his time in the armed forces, Glynn commented, “I don’t guess peacetime Navy would be too bad.”

Decommissioned in 1947, the Cowpens was repurposed 12 years later as an aircraft transport, along with a number of other World War II-era carriers, including the USS Lexington CV-16, which replaced the original Lexington lost at the Battle of the Coral Sea.

“Last I heard of her she’d been cut up for scrap,” Glynn said. “Probably would’ve cried if I’d seen ‘em do it. She got to be a second home.”

After the war, Glynn settled in Knoxville, where he married and raised several children and remained actively involved with his local church. I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with Glynn on Memorial Day, in 2013. Glynn passed away on 24 July 2016, at the age of 89.