Honoring those who served in submarines

Sixteen-thousand American submariners fought World War II under the ocean in coffin-shaped metal tubes.

Their vessels were lethal but virtually defenseless if detected. About a fifth of their small force was killed at war, and now the passage of time is doing what the enemy could not.

So yesterday's service at the Submarine Veterans Memorial in Eisenhower Park was a small one, held in front of a decommissioned torpedo that was their stock in trade.

It began with a prayer by Bob Shearn, 93, of Hampton Bays, chaplain of the U.S. Submarine Veterans of World War II. Remember those who have been "called on their respective eternal patrols, that they may conduct them with success, and wind up in the port of eternal peace and joy," he asked, and "pray for peace for this troubled world."

A bell tolled as submariner Charlie Nicolas, 87, read the names of 52 U.S. submarines lost during the war. He started with the USS Sealion and ended with the USS Bullhead. To read the names of the men who went down with those ships would have taken far longer. "There were no survivors," chapter president Emil Schoonejans, 86, of Huntington, said later. "Most of them were just gone."

One of those casualties was Soloman Numair, who was 23 when he went down with the USS Golet in 1944. His sister, Mary Fisher of Massapequa, who is in her 80s, laid flowers in his memory under the torpedo. "You don't get over it for your whole life," she said. "You don't forget it. It's 66 years now that my brother was killed in a submarine, but we never forgot it for a minute."

When the service finished, submariner Joe Librizzi, 84, of Oceanside, stuck around. He was an electrician's mate on the USS Balao in the war, and recalled crawling through the 120-foot length of a 22-inch-wide air induction line to look for a leak.

"We did our job," he said. "I had a ball."

He was one of the first members of the national submarine veterans group and its Long Island chapter, he said. But the national group has fewer than 2,000 members left.

"You can't stop time," he said. "I tried, and you can't."