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Anthony's First Marriage and the Navy, 1941 to 1943

Anthony and Gloria, 1920 to 1943

Emil and Rose’s son, Anthony, married twice. His first wedding took place at Wilmington, Delaware, at 8 p.m. on 6 December 1941, the eve of Pearl Harbor, before the city’s acting mayor. His bride was Teresa Marie McCafferty. Anthony gave his age as 21 and his birth as 19 October 1920 at Wayne, and his home as Pierce Street, Philadelphia. The certificate calls him Italian and her Irish, and both were single and marrying for the first time. It names her parents as William McCafferty and Mary Cullen, both born in Philadelphia, and his as Emile Squitiere, born in Italy, and “Lucy Belfonte,” born in Pennsylvania. Among the witnesses was a Gloria Squitiere of Philadelphia. The groom’s birth date, birthplace and father all fit, so he is almost certainly this Anthony, and the witness was probably his sister. “Lucy Belfonte” was probably his stepmother, Lucy, whose surname from her first marriage was Barlafante. His mother was in fact Rose Ross.

The certificate gives Teresa’s birth as 25 April 1923 and her age as 18. She was probably born two years later, on 25 April 1925. Her father was a Philadelphia policeman who owned his home in 1930 and was a patrolman in 1940. In 1930 William McCafferty, 39, and Mary, 38, both born in Pennsylvania, had eight children at home: Margaret, Rosa, Anna, Helen, Mary, Francis, Catherine and Teresa, then 5. In 1940, in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward, William, 51, and Mary, 50, had Teresa, 14, with Catherine, Frances, Anna and a younger sister. Teresa’s obituary in 2004 named four sisters, among them Catherine (Mrs. Phillip Kories), Rose Spingler and Frances Sheehan.

When Anthony registered for the draft on 16 February 1942, he was working for the Maytag Washing Machine Company and named “Theresa Squitiere” as the person who would always know his address. The card describes him as 5 feet 8½ inches tall and 155 pounds, with brown eyes and hair, a dark complexion and an appendectomy scar.

Gloria married Anthony Prosperi at Wilmington in 1942. He was a tailor at John Wanamaker’s, the store where Emil worked as a fitter, and his parents, Joseph Prosperi and Imelda De Filippio, were both born in Italy. Anthony Squitiere, then living at 1633 South 22nd Street, was a witness. If the Gloria of 1941 was his sister, as she probably was, brother and sister each stood up at the other’s Delaware wedding within a year. Many Philadelphia couples crossed into Delaware to marry in these years.

Anthony enlisted in the Naval Reserve at Philadelphia on 23 August 1943, with the service number 818-34-09. His discharge lists every station he passed through, in order: the Naval Reserve station at Philadelphia; the Naval Training Station at Bainbridge, Maryland; the amphibious training base at Solomons, Maryland, both within a day’s rail journey of Philadelphia; the U.S. Coast Guard at Bay City, Michigan; USS LCI(L)-1065; the Receiving Ship at San Francisco; and the U.S. Naval Hospital at Oakland, California. It gives no dates for the stations. He completed no trade school and earned no certificates, though other motor machinists on LCIs commonly went to a diesel school first. He rose from apprentice seaman to seaman second class and then to motor machinist’s mate third class (MoMM3/c), a sailor who ran and repaired a ship’s diesel engines.

A Landing Craft, Infantry (Large), or LCI(L), was built to carry a company of soldiers across open water, run its bow up onto a hostile beach, drop two narrow ramps and put the men straight onto the sand. About 920 were built. The Navy called them craft, not ships, because they were under 200 feet long. The first plan was to ship them overseas in sections and assemble them there, but the plan was dropped, and the LCIs crossed the oceans under their own power. Their crews called them “Elsie Items,” from the signal-flag names for the letters L-C-I, and also “Lousy Crate Indeed”.

LCI(L)-1065 was 158 feet 5½ inches long and 23 feet 3 inches wide, and drew 5 feet 4 inches of water forward and 5 feet 11 inches aft when loaded. Two banks of four General Motors 6-71 diesels, four to each shaft, turned twin propellers whose blades could change pitch. Together they gave 2,320 horsepower, a top speed of 16 knots and a steady 14. She displaced 236 tons empty, 264 tons when landing troops and 419 tons fully loaded, and could go 4,000 miles at 12 knots on 110 tons of fuel. Her crew was 4 officers and 24 enlisted men, and she could carry 6 officers, 182 soldiers and 75 tons of cargo. She mounted five single 20 mm guns, one in the bow and two on each side of the wheelhouse. Her only armor was two inches of plastic splinter protection around the gun tubs, the conning tower and the pilot house. Her radio call sign was NVQS.

She was built by the Defoe Shipbuilding Company on the Saginaw River at Bay City, Michigan. Harry J. Defoe had founded the yard in 1905 to build gasoline launches and boats shipped in pieces for assembly elsewhere, and it built 154 ships for the Navy from 1939 to 1945. Defoe built its hulls upside down, so that nearly all the welding could be done from above, and then rolled them over. LCI(L)-1065 was laid down on 28 April 1944, launched thirteen days later on 11 May, and commissioned on 16 May, eighteen days after her keel was laid. She was commissioned not at the yard but at the U.S. Coast Guard station at Bay City, which took the LCIs as they came off the ways and trained their crews. LCI(L)-1064, the hull just ahead of hers, was commissioned there the day before.

Anthony was received aboard on 16 or 17 May 1944, from the Coast Guard training detachment at Bay City. He was one of her commissioning crew, and he was already at Bay City when the ship was finished. The muster rolls of the crew carry him aboard without a break from then through 30 September 1944, the last roll before the ship was lost.

A single photograph of the ship’s company survives. The ship lies alongside a pier, port side to the camera, with roughly twenty-eight men drawn up in two ranks, one at the rail of the main deck and one on the pier below. The officers and chief petty officers stand in front on the pier in visored caps and neckties, and the rest wear white hats and working dress: dungarees, khaki and blue shirts, and a few dark jumpers. The family identifies Anthony as the man at the far right of the rank on deck, bareheaded and in working dress. No caption or key comes with the picture, so the identification rests on the family’s word. Its date and place are not recorded. The clean hull and gear, the finished pier with buildings behind it, and the full company posed for the camera suggest it was taken in America soon after the commissioning, but no record says when.

As a motor machinist’s mate, Anthony worked in the “black gang,” the engine-room crew, in the two engine spaces aft. They tended the eight diesels, the reduction gear, the controls of the propellers, the two 30-kilowatt generators that supplied the ship’s power, and the fuel and oil systems. The spaces lay below the waterline, reached by ladder, and the men there worked by signals from a pilot house they could not see. On a ship of twenty-eight men, everyone also stood watches, manned a gun and handled lines. Frank Nemetz, who served in the engine room of the sister ship LCI(L)-982, described the engine spaces as the place you went down into and stayed. Anthony’s battle station is not recorded. A crew list published by the veterans’ association of the LCIs, whose source is not given, names the engine-room men above and beside him: Motor Machinist’s Mates Second Class Cucksey and Kempf, Firemen Dineen, Eddinger and Nashlon, and Electrician’s Mate Marble, with Pharmacist’s Mate Huber as the ship’s medic. No muster roll confirms the list, so these men possibly served with him. His shipmates named in the June 1944 muster roll are listed in Appendix E.