Ray Mombelardi

Ray Mombelardi was born in Englewood, New Jersey in October, 1926, and served in the United States Merchant Marine service from January 1942 to April 1952, during both World War II and the Korean War. Mombelardi served in the Pacific and North Atlantic oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea.

While a sophomore in high school, Mombelardi changed his date of birth on his birth certificate from 1926 to 1923 and traveled to New York City, where he joined the Merchant Marine service and was issued official “seaman’s papers,” without required parental permission, at the age of 15. He was following in the footsteps of his father, who had spent a considerable amount of time at sea, and when his parents discovered his subterfuge, they accepted it.

The adjustment from high school to ship life proved difficult for Mombelardi, who was, he recalled, assigned a “man’s job” for the first time in his life – and he was careful not to disclose his real age to his shipmates. The first ship Mombelardi sailed on was the S.S. City Service Fuel, which left New York on January 26, 1942. Aware of prowling German submarines, the crewmen initially used flashlights on deck at night to perform their duties without providing a beacon to the enemy, although that practice was halted for safety reasons.

Following his initial voyage, Mombelardi elected to go to the maritime school in New York harbor for further training. The three month stint at the school enabled him to improve his knowledge of seamanship and gunnery. On completion of the course, he traveled to San Francisco by train and spent three weeks on the Coast Guard base there, before returning to New York, where he shipped out on a tanker to Aruba to pick up a cargo of gasoline for delivery to England. The ships merchant seamen worked on were, although performing military tasks, privately owned, and, although they were involved in risky wartime activity with a very high casualty rate, the sailors were considered civilians rather than military men.

On the voyage from Aruba to England Mombelardi spotted a torpedo coming towards his vessel. He notified the bridge, and luckily, deft “zigzagging” saved the ship from being hit. The North Atlantic was a battle zone, and attacks on shipping could occur anytime and anywhere. When Mombelardi first crossed the Atlantic, his ship was not armed, but on subsequent voyages, he was often detailed as a member of a 20-millimeter cannon crew during “General Quarters” drills. While he was in England, Mombelardi’s father was killed when his ship was torpedoed in the Caribbean. He did not learn of his father’s death until he was granted shore leave after his return voyage to the United States. 

The most important supplies carried by the ships Mombelardi served on were gasoline and munitions, highly explosive cargos. In convoys across the Atlantic, visual signals and Morse code were used to communicate among vessels in a convoy; radio silence was imposed because of the possibility of message interception by enemy submarines. Convoy discipline did not permit stopping to pick up survivors of torpedoed ships if submarines were still in the area. Mombelardi felt that the Atlantic was a more dangerous ocean than the Pacific because German submarines were common and aggressive. When entering the Mediterranean through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, American ships were also cautioned that “Frogmen” might swim out to ships and place magnetic mines on them. Mombelardi witnessed one ship explosion attributed to this tactic.

Following service in the North Atlantic, Mombelardi shipped out of Los Angeles to Sidney, Australia. On his initial voyage across the Pacific, he tripped onboard, broke his ankle and spent two weeks in the hospital on arrival. After his release, Mombelardi sailed on a ship loaded with gasoline, ammunition and food for Milne Bay, New Guinea, where he saw sunken Japanese ships in Finch Haven. He continued in service on the same ship, which usually traveled alone around the Pacific and not as part of a convoy. Mombelardi heard that Japanese submarines would torpedo a ship and then surface to machine-gun helpless survivors in lifeboats and in the water, leading him to conclude that they were worse than the Germans.

Mombelardi said that when a merchant seaman was either missing in action or reported captured by the enemy, or even once he had to abandon ship to a lifeboat, his pay was stopped, and once released, merchant seaman POWs were expected to find their own way home. He recalled that he and his shipmates were considered second-class citizens by the military, even though they were involved in military activities. When ships were being bombed by Japanese aircraft, however, Mombelardi remembered that he wished he was in the safety of a military man’s foxhole instead of on a ship filled with highly explosive ammunition.

Mombelardi told the interviewer that at the end of the war in the Pacific, Merchant Marine ships were assigned to bring surrendered Japanese soldiers from around the Pacific Theater back home to Japan. They also returned tired, wounded or dead American soldiers, in addition to unused bombs and other munitions, from the war zone to the United States, although he was not involved in these duties personally.

After the war, Mombelardi returned home for about a year or two and worked for a small newspaper. In 1949, he received a call giving him an opportunity to work as a seaman again. He sailed out of New York, bound eventually for Saigon, and stopped in Japan, where he thought tensions between American occupiers and the Japanese were still high. After stops in Vietnam and the Philippines the ship returned to Japan and continued to sail in the area. The Korean War broke out in the interim, but his ship never docked in Korea. He recalled that the crew was told that they should scuttle the ship rather than surrender it if the enemy seemed about to capture it.

Ray Mombelardi and his comrades from the Merchant Marine service had to wait a number of years before gaining official World War II veteran standing, due to their unusual status of officially being civilians although involved in combat and suffering casualties. In the postwar years he ran a sport fishing charter boat from Bricktown, New Jersey and became a member of the Dennis A. Roland Chapter of the Merchant Marine Veterans of New Jersey. He was awarded the New Jersey Distinguished Service Medal, the New York Distinguished Service Medal, the Front Line Britain 1942 Medal, the China Memorial Cross and the Yugoslav War Cross.

Additional Resource:

• News 12 New Jersey: ‘Everybody wanted to do something.’ 94-year-old World War II veteran reflects on time with Merchant Marines