Published Nov. 4, 2006, as part of the HonorAir article
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20061104/NEWS/611040343/0/search?p=5&tc=pg

From sailor to airmen

By Jennie Jones Giles
Joe McGraw, 81, grew up with 10 siblings in the Tracy Grove community during the Depression. He joined the Navy in 1942.
“I didn’t have nothing to do here,” he said.
His father, Manning Jeter McGraw, served in World War I.
“He was gassed and got his leg broke in France,” McGraw said.
He served in the Guadalcanal region of the South Pacific on the destroyer USS Fletcher. On the way to the Pacific, the sailors sank a German submarine off the coast of Cuba.
“We were in the greatest naval battles in history,” he said. “We sunk 38 Japanese naval ships. We took care of them for what they did at Pearl Harbor.”
Out of 13 boats in the American task force, six were left after the battles, he said. The USS Fletcher was the 13th ship in the group, hence “Lucky 13.”
“It was a heck of a war,” said McGraw, who also served in the Korean War and Vietnam War. “A fellow would have to be there to believe it.”
Sailors on the destroyer rescued 578 survivors out of the water when the Northampton was hit, he said. McGraw and other sailors went out on lifeboats to pick up the survivors.
“There was a chow line 24 hours a day,” he said. “You slept when and where you could.”
The sailors also rescued the crew of a B-17 that had ran out of fuel and landed in the water.
“We just ran across them,” he said. “They had been there seven days and we picked them up.”
After more than a year in the South Pacific, McGraw served on a patrol craft, escorting ships from New York through the Panama Canal Zone.
One of McGraw’s brothers, Ray, died at Normandy during the D-Day invasion.
“If he had lived four more days, he would have been 21,” McGraw said.
When the war was over, he joined the Army Air Corps, which soon became the Air Force.
“When I got out (of the Navy), I couldn’t get a good job here so I joined the Army Air Corps,” he said.
With his naval background, McGraw was assigned to work on crash rescue boats. He served three tours in Korea.
“Once, we were steaming up the coast of Korea and a missile shot shells at us off the coast,” he said.
McGraw received a citation while serving on a crash boat.
“A plane crashed into a volcano and we were taking officers to the island to investigate, when a cyclone hit,” he said.
The 85-foot boat was fighting 75-foot waves, he said.
“Me and another guy kept it going,” he said. “We kept heading into the storm. I thought it was a goner, but it made it.”
McGraw served 18 months in Vietnam as a ground power mechanic. He was with the first group of Americans to go to Vietnam, arriving in 1963 during the Kennedy administration.
“In the daytime, the Vietnamese worked for us,” he said. “At night, they would fight you. One of our guys went to sleep and they came up and slit his throat.”
McGraw was loading Agent Orange into the planes and suffered lung damage, he said.
“But I’ve outlived almost all my family,” he said.
McGraw retired from the military in 1964. He and his wife, Dorothy, raised five children. They have 11 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.