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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
Jack D. McConnell — Seaman First Class, United States Navy
Service Number 293 51 00 — USS Knudson (APD-101)
4 April 1944 – circa 1946
by Wm F. Stratton, May 2026
"In the Navy, the weights and measures of a man have nothing to do with his size." —Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
Jack McConnell was family. His father, Isaac William McConnell, was a brother of my grandmother Bertha Lena McConnell King—which made Jack my first cousin once removed, though nobody in Noble County ever counted that carefully. He was Cousin Jack, and that was enough.
He was born April 5th, 1926, in Green Township, Noble County, Indiana, the son of Isaac William McConnell and Oma Diffendarfer. He grew up on the McConnell place in the same rolling country between Albion and Ligonier where the McConnells had put down roots since the 1870s. Jack was the youngest of three—his sister Wiladean and brother Lee came before him. By the time he was fourteen, the 1940 census found the family still in Green Township: a farm boy who knew how to work and how to keep his mouth shut when the adults were talking.
He went to the local schools and did what boys did in Noble County: chores before dawn, school, chores after, and whatever daylight was left for himself. He was slight and lean, the kind of young man who could disappear between rows of corn. There was nothing about him that said destroyer escort or kamikaze attacks off Okinawa. There never is, with the McConnells. They are quiet people who do extraordinary things and then come home and grow corn.
He turned eighteen on April 5th, 1944.
He had enlisted the day before.
Whatever drove him to the recruiting office one day ahead of his birthday—impatience, or a dare he made to himself—the Navy accepted him at Indianapolis and assigned him service number 293 51 00. He was not the biggest man who ever signed the papers. He was not the oldest. But he was there, and he was ready, and the Navy had work for boys who showed up early.
"The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it." —Winston Churchill
Most men who joined the Navy in 1944 were assigned to ships with names that told you what they were—battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers. The ship Jack McConnell drew had a more complicated identity.
USS Knudson had been laid down at the Bethlehem Steel yards as destroyer escort DE-591—a small, fast anti-submarine ship built for convoy protection. Before she was ever launched, the Navy changed its mind. On July 17th, 1944, she was redesignated APD-101: a high-speed transport. Her job would not be hunting submarines. Her job would be carrying men who swam onto enemy beaches in the dark and blew things up.
The Underwater Demolition Teams—the UDTs—were the Navy's frogmen. They operated ahead of every major amphibious landing, swimming in close to enemy shores, sometimes in daylight under direct fire, to chart water depths, map underwater obstacles, and detonate beach defenses before the Marines arrived. The men who did it were a particular kind of human being.
The ship named for Charles Raymond Knudson—a Navy enlisted man who gave his life at Pearl Harbor so that others might live—was their ferry.
She was commissioned on November 25th, 1944, at Boston, Massachusetts. Seaman Second Class Jack D. McConnell of Green Township, Indiana, stood on her deck for her first muster and answered up. He was a plank owner—one of the original crew, one of the men who had never known her any other way. He was eighteen years old.
"The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle." —Richard Marcinko, U.S. Navy SEAL
The Navy spent the winter training Knudson and her crew. She cleared Norfolk on January 18th, 1945, steamed south and through the Panama Canal, and arrived at San Diego before pressing on to Pearl Harbor, where she arrived on February 9th for intensive training with UDT-19.
Jack watched the frogmen train in the warm Hawaiian water. They were compact, brown men who dove off the ship's sides and swam toward the reef without fuss, carrying slates and measuring lines and demolition charges. They seemed constitutionally incapable of worry.
"What's it like," Jack asked one of them, "going in before the landings?"
The man thought about it. "Wet," he said.
That was the kind of answer frogmen gave.
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." —Ambrose Redmoon
Knudson cleared Ulithi Atoll on March 21st, 1945, bound for a cluster of small islands southwest of Okinawa called Kerama Retto. The big landing—Okinawa itself—was still ten days away. First, the frogmen had work to do.
From March 25th to March 30th, Knudson supported UDT-19 in reconnaissance and demolition operations off four islands: Kuba Shima, Aka Shima, Keise Shima, and Geruma Shima. The frogmen went over the side in rubber boats, paddled in as close as they dared, then slipped into the water and swam the rest of the way. Jack's job was the ship—keeping her ready, keeping his stations manned, being where he was supposed to be when the boats came back.
On March 26th, while Knudson was running antisubmarine screen, a Japanese bomber found her.
It came in low and fast. The gun crews had been at their stations all day. The bomber dropped two bombs. They hit the water close aboard—close enough that men grabbed for handholds as the ship heaved—and then the guns found it.
"Splash one," someone said, very quietly.
The bomber went into the sea. Knudson steadied and held her course. The frogmen came back that evening and said nothing about it, because they had been underwater when it happened. They were that kind of men.
"At Okinawa, the weights of battle were borne with a resolve that defied reason." —Samuel Eliot Morison
The calendar said Easter. The Pacific said otherwise.
April 1st, 1945 was L-Day—Love Day—the day the United States put 180,000 men onto the beaches of Okinawa in the largest amphibious operation of the entire Pacific war. The horizon was ships in every direction, more ships than most men had imagined existing in the same ocean at the same time.
Knudson took her station off the Hagushi beaches and began her antisubmarine patrols. She was a small ship among a vast fleet. Jack McConnell, a slightly built farm boy from Noble County, watched the landing craft go in and the smoke rise from the shore and tried to hold in his mind the scale of what he was looking at.
"You think they'll make it?" someone beside him asked.
Jack watched the beaches. "They always make it," he said. "That's not the question."
The question—the one nobody said out loud—was what came after.
"Uncommon valor was a common virtue." —Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, February 1945
What came after was the kamikazes.
The Japanese called the campaign Operation Kikusui—"floating chrysanthemums"—and it was unlike anything the American fleet had faced. Between April and June 1945, nearly 1,900 kamikaze sorties struck the ships off Okinawa, sending young pilots on one-way flights into the steel sides of destroyers and transports and anything else they could reach.
The radar picket ships had the worst of it. They stood out ahead of the fleet to give warning, which meant they were the first thing the kamikazes found. Destroyers burned and sank on the picket line in numbers that the Navy tried to keep out of the newspapers.
Knudson ran screening patrols along Okinawa's western shores through April and into May and June. The general quarters alarm was not an abstraction. Men on watch scanned the sky without stopping, because the thing that killed you came from above and came fast, and the pilot at the controls was not trying to pull out. You learned to read the sound of aircraft engines in a way you had not known was possible. You learned which shapes in the sky were friendly and which were not. You learned quickly, because the alternative was not learning anything again.
Jack McConnell was nineteen years old.
Knudson came through. On June 15th, 1945, she departed Hagushi for Leyte in the Philippines, leaving the still-burning campaign behind her. She had been in the Okinawa operating area for seventy-six days.
"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." —Nelson Mandela
She was not done.
On May 5th, between the departure from Kerama Retto and the Easter invasion, Knudson had already been sent back out—escorting the heavy cruiser USS Portland back to Okinawa, arriving May 8th, which happened to be the day Germany surrendered in Europe. The war in the Pacific registered that fact without slowing down. Knudson resumed her screening patrols and repelled Japanese air attacks until June 15th finally sent her south.
At Leyte, she operated through July 4th, then sailed from Subic Bay escorting a convoy of LSTs—the big, slow tank landing ships the crews called Large Slow Targets—back toward the fight. She put in at Guam on July 16th and picked up Underwater Demolition Team 19 again, the same frogmen she had carried to Kerama Retto. They departed Guam on July 19th, called at Eniwetok and Pearl Harbor, and arrived at San Diego on August 5th.
On August 13th, Knudson embarked Underwater Demolition Team 25.
Every man aboard understood what that meant. The invasion of the Japanese home islands—Operation Downfall—was coming. Military planners estimated American casualties in the hundreds of thousands. The frogmen would go in first, as always, to chart the beaches and blow the obstacles, and Knudson would carry them. Jack McConnell, nineteen years old, had survived Kerama Retto and seventy-six days off Okinawa, and now he was pointed at Japan itself.
The next day—August 14th, 1945—Japan surrendered.
"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." —Abraham Lincoln
Knudson departed San Diego on August 16th and steamed west.
On September 2nd, the formal surrender ceremony was held aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, in front of the assembled fleet and the cameras of the world.
On September 4th, 1945, two days after the ceremony, USS Knudson entered Tokyo Bay.
Jack McConnell stood on the deck of a ship named for a man who had died at Pearl Harbor, in the harbor of the country that had started all of it on a Sunday morning in December 1941, and looked at Japan.
It was quiet. The mountains were green behind Yokosuka. A few boats moved on the water. There was no shooting.
"Is that it?" somebody said. "Is that all of it?"
Nobody answered, because nobody quite knew what to say about the fact that it was over, after everything it had been. Knudson operated out of Yokosuka for two weeks, then got underway on September 20th for the United States.
Jack McConnell was nineteen years old and going home.
"The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time." —Abraham Lincoln
He did not go straight back to Indiana. He made his way to California, and on September 26th, 1948, he married Rosemary Kocher—a girl from Whitley County, Indiana, the same corner of the state Jack came from, found in California the way young people from the same place find each other far from home. They came back to Indiana together, back to Green Township, back to the farm.
I spent a summer at Jack's place in 1951, when I was fourteen. I was a skinny kid—five feet ten inches and a hundred thirty pounds, all knees and elbows—and Jack put me to work from the day I arrived.
Jack had a pinto horse, and he entered it in the races at the Noble County Fair. Since I was light and a good rider, Jack put me up as jockey. It was a bareback race—no saddles—which made the whole enterprise considerably more hazardous than it sounds. You grip with your knees and lean forward and pray the horse doesn't decide to stop while you keep going. I won three heats but ended up second place overall. Jack seemed to think that was respectable enough. I thought it was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to me.
Jack had a way with animals that went beyond farming. He could get young crows to stay around the place untethered—free to fly off any time, but choosing not to. He taught them to talk. One of those crows had a vocabulary of twenty to thirty words, which is more than some people I've known. Jack taught me how to talk to them too, how to repeat the words slowly and clearly until the bird picked them up. It was patience work. Jack had patience to spare. I've thought since then that patience was probably what the Pacific made out of him, or maybe what he already had and the Pacific just confirmed.
That same summer he taught me to castrate hogs. This was not a skill I had previously aspired to, but on a farm you learn what needs learning and you do what needs doing. Jack showed me once, supervised me twice, and after that I was on my own.
I also got behind the wheel of Jack's surplus WWII jeep—the olive-drab kind that had probably seen as much mud somewhere in the Pacific as it ever saw in Noble County. Jack used it as a tractor, and my job was to drive it pulling the hay baler through the fields. After the baling came the real work: offloading the bales into the hay mow. If you've never thrown hay bales up into a barn loft in an Indiana summer, I can tell you it will put muscle on a skinny boy faster than anything else on earth. By the end of that summer, I was still skinny. But I was a different kind of skinny.
I never thought to ask Jack about the war that summer. He didn't talk about it. He was a farmer, and the farm did not wait for conversation about things that were over. I was fourteen and more interested in the pinto horse and the crows than in muster rolls and kamikaze attacks. The Navy would come for me in a few years and I would begin to understand, but that summer it was just Jack, and the jeep, and the smell of hay in July.
"Other things may change us, but we start and end with family." —Anthony Brandt
Jack farmed in Green Township, Noble County, Indiana, for the rest of his working life. He and Rosemary raised seven children on that land. He was the kind of man who came home from the war and did not make a great deal of it—who put the uniform away and picked up where the farm left off, because that was what there was to do, and the farm did not wait.
He was also the one who kept the McConnell family reunions going—year after year, organizing them, making sure the word got out, setting up the tables, and bringing the family together. The McConnells scattered over the decades the way families do, but Jack held the center. I attended my last McConnell reunion in 1981, and the tradition was still going strong. That was Jack: the man who kept things together, whether it was a ship's gun station, a hay baler, or a family.
Rosemary died, and in July 2004 Jack married Charlotte Johnson Duncan in Columbia City, Whitley County.
He outlived most of what he had seen. He outlived the Knudson, which was sold for scrap. He outlived most of the men who had stood at general quarters with him off Okinawa while the kamikazes came in on the picket ships. He outlived the war itself by nearly seventy years.
Jack D. McConnell died on October 21st, 2013, in Green Township, Noble County, Indiana—the same township where he had been born eighty-seven years before.
He had enlisted the day before he was old enough to.
He had stood on Knudson's deck on commissioning day and answered his name.
He had been present on Easter Sunday 1945 when 180,000 men went ashore at Okinawa.
He had looked at Japan from the deck of a ship in Tokyo Bay, two days after the war was over, and watched it be quiet.
And then he had come home to Green Township and grown corn for sixty-seven more years, and said very little about any of it.
That was Cousin Jack.
Jack D. McConnell (1926–2013) was the son of Isaac William McConnell and Oma Diffendarfer of Green Township, Noble County, Indiana. His father Isaac was a brother of Bertha Lena McConnell King, making Jack a first cousin once removed of the author. Jack served as a plank owner aboard USS Knudson (APD-101), a high-speed transport, in the Pacific from November 1944 to 1946, and was present at the landings at Okinawa on Easter Sunday 1945 and in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender. He married Rosemary Kocher on September 26, 1948, in California, and later Charlotte Johnson Duncan in July 2004. He is buried in Noble County, Indiana.
Sources: USS Knudson (APD-101) Muster Rolls and Reports of Changes, November 1944–March 1946; GEDCOM record @I466, Stratton-McConnell-Bell genealogical database; Naval History and Heritage Command, DANFS; National Museum of the Pacific War.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.