About This Site
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
Sailor, Frogman's Shipmate, Farmer (1926–2013)
"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 bothered with the arithmetic. He was Cousin Jack, and that was enough.
Jack was born on April 5, 1926, in Green Township, Noble County, Indiana, the son of Isaac William McConnell and Oma Diffendarfer. He grew up on the McConnell place in Green Township, a few miles from our family's land, in the rolling country between Albion and Ligonier where the McConnells had put down roots since the 1870s. His grandfather William Johnson McConnell had married Louisa Ellen Hollabaugh in Putnam County, Ohio, in 1877 and brought the family to Indiana, where they stayed.
Jack was the youngest of three—his sister Wiladean Mary and brother Lee came before him. By the time the 1940 census found the family still in Green Township, Jack was fourteen years old, 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 in those years: chores before dawn, school, chores after, and whatever daylight was left for himself.
Then the war came, and Jack went to it.
"The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it." —Winston Churchill
Jack enlisted in the United States Navy and was assigned to the USS Knudson, designated APD-101—a high-speed transport. The Knudson was originally laid down as a destroyer escort (DE-591) but converted during construction into something more specialized and, as it turned out, more dangerous. A high-speed transport carried a particular cargo: the Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams, the frogmen who swam into enemy beaches ahead of the invasion force to blow up obstacles and chart the approaches. The men who crewed APDs lived in the shadow of these missions, running close to hostile shores while the frogmen went over the side.
The Knudson was commissioned on November 25, 1944—the same date Jack's Navy muster roll records his service beginning. She was a lean ship, 306 feet long, fast enough at 24 knots to keep up with the fleet, armed with guns and depth charges, and built to get the frogmen where they needed to go and bring them back alive.
After shakedown, the Knudson departed Norfolk, Virginia, on January 18, 1945, bound for the Pacific. She steamed through the Panama Canal to San Diego, then crossed to Pearl Harbor, arriving on February 9, 1945. At Pearl, the crew trained with Underwater Demolition Team 19—the men Jack's ship would carry into battle. UDT-19 were volunteers, every one of them, trained to swim into enemy waters wearing nothing but swim trunks, a face mask, and a knife, with satchels of explosives strapped to their bodies. The Knudson's job was to deliver them and protect them while they worked.
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." —Ambrose Redmoon
With UDT-19 embarked, the Knudson departed Pearl Harbor on February 28, 1945, stopped at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, and arrived at Ulithi Atoll on March 12 to prepare for the invasion of the Ryukyu Islands—the stepping-stone to Japan itself.
Clearing Ulithi on March 21, the Knudson headed for Kerama Retto, a cluster of small islands southwest of Okinawa. The frogmen of UDT-19 had work to do. From March 25 through March 30, the Knudson supported reconnaissance and demolition operations off four islands: Kuba Shima, Aka Shima, Keise Shima, and Geruma Shima. While the frogmen swam in to chart the beaches and blow obstacles, the Knudson stood offshore, guns ready, watching for submarines and aircraft.
On March 26, while serving in an antisubmarine screen, a Japanese bomber found them. The plane came in low and fast, dropping two bombs that missed close aboard—close enough that the concussion shook the hull and rattled every man's teeth. The Knudson's gun crews opened up, and they shot the bomber down. It was Jack's first taste of what the Pacific war was really like: the gut-churning seconds between hearing the engines and knowing whether the bombs would hit, the hammering of the ship's guns, the splash and smoke of a downed enemy plane. No time to think. Just react, do your job, and hope the next one missed too.
"At Okinawa, the weights of battle were borne with a resolve that defied reason." —Samuel Eliot Morison
On April 1, 1945—Easter Sunday, and April Fools' Day—the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific war hit the beaches at Hagushi, Okinawa. More than 180,000 troops went ashore that first day. The Knudson was there, conducting antisubmarine warfare patrols off the landing beaches while the invasion force poured ashore.
For the next two weeks, the Knudson patrolled the western shores of Okinawa. This was the period when the Japanese unleashed their most terrifying weapon: the kamikazes. Operation Kikusui sent wave after wave of suicide planes against the American fleet. Between April and June 1945, nearly 1,900 kamikaze sorties struck at the ships off Okinawa, sinking 36 and damaging hundreds more. The picket destroyers took the worst of it, but every ship in those waters lived under the constant threat of a plane diving out of the clouds with no intention of pulling up.
Jack stood watch on a ship that was a target every hour of every day. The Knudson's crew manned their battle stations at the sound of general quarters, scanned the skies, and fired at anything that came too close. Sleep was a luxury measured in stolen minutes. Meals were eaten standing up, if they were eaten at all. The tension was unrelenting—the kamikazes could come at dawn, at dusk, at midnight, or in broad daylight.
On April 14, the Knudson departed Okinawa, escorting the battleship USS Nevada to Guam. They reached Guam on April 19, and the Knudson proceeded to Ulithi Atoll, where she debarked UDT-19 on April 25. The frogmen had done their work. Now the Knudson had new orders.
"The sea is everything." —Jules Verne
On May 5, 1945, the Knudson departed Ulithi to escort the heavy cruiser USS Portland back to Okinawa. She arrived on May 8—the same day Germany surrendered in Europe, though the war in the Pacific ground on with no end in sight. The Knudson resumed screening duty around Okinawa and once again faced Japanese air attacks. She repelled them until June 15, when she finally departed Hagushi for Leyte in the Philippines.
Arriving at Leyte on June 18, the Knudson operated in the northern Philippines until July 4. She departed Subic Bay, Luzon, escorting an Okinawa-bound convoy of LSTs—the big, slow tank landing ships that the crews called "Large Slow Targets." The convoy reached Guam on July 16, where the Knudson picked up UDT-19 again. They departed Guam on July 19, called at Eniwetok and Pearl Harbor, and arrived at San Diego on August 5.
At San Diego, the Knudson embarked Underwater Demolition Team 25 on August 13. Everyone aboard knew what was coming: the invasion of Japan itself, an operation that military planners expected would cost hundreds of thousands of American casualties. The frogmen would go in first, as always, and the Knudson would carry them.
The next day—August 14, 1945—Japan surrendered.
"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." —Nelson Mandela
The war was over, but the Knudson's work was not. She departed San Diego on August 16 and arrived in Tokyo Bay on September 4, 1945, just two days after the formal surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri. Jack McConnell, the farm boy from Green Township, stood on the deck of his ship in the harbor of the enemy's capital. Whatever he felt in that moment—relief, pride, exhaustion, disbelief—he kept to himself, as McConnells tend to do.
The Knudson operated out of Yokosuka, Japan, until September 20, then headed home. She arrived in San Diego on October 11, 1945. For the next seven months, the ship carried personnel and supplies to bases across the Pacific—the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, the Admiralty Islands, the Philippines—the slow, unglamorous work of dismantling a war. On April 20, 1946, she departed Manila Bay with homebound veterans embarked and arrived at San Pedro, California, on May 12, 1946.
The USS Knudson was decommissioned on November 4, 1946, and entered the Pacific Reserve Fleet. She had earned one battle star for her World War II service. Her crew earned the right to go home and never speak of it again, if that was their choice.
"The real heroes are the ones who come home and put their lives back together." —Unknown
Jack came back to Indiana, but not right away. On September 26, 1948, he married Rosemary Kocher in California—a girl from San Diego County whose family had been there since before the war. The wedding photos show a young man who looks older than twenty-two, which is what the Pacific did to you.
Eventually Jack and Rosemary settled back in Noble County, where Jack returned to the land and the life he knew. He farmed in Green Township, near Albion, living out his years in the same country his grandfather had worked.
"The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time." —Abraham Lincoln
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. That summer I learned things they don't teach in school.
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, which Jack seemed to think was respectable enough. I thought it was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to me.
Jack had a knack with animals that went beyond farming. He had a way with crows—he could get young ones to stay around the farm untethered, free to fly off anytime 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, and Jack had patience to spare.
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. It's the kind of education that stays with you whether you want it to or not.
I also got behind the wheel of Jack's surplus WWII jeep—the olive-drab kind that had probably seen as much mud in France or 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.
"Other things may change us, but we start and end with family." —Anthony Brandt
Jack was also the one who kept the McConnell family reunions going. Year after year, he organized them, made sure the word got out, set up the tables, and brought the family together. The McConnells scattered over the decades, the way families do, but Jack held the center. As long as he was running things, people came back. 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 radio, a hay baler, or a family.
Jack never made a fuss about his Navy service. He didn't march in parades or join the VFW speaking circuit. He was a McConnell, and McConnells did what needed doing and came home and got on with it. But the Navy muster rolls are there, and the ship's log is there, and the record is clear: Jack D McConnell of Green Township, Noble County, Indiana, sailed into the most dangerous waters of the Pacific war on a ship that carried frogmen to enemy beaches, shot down a Japanese bomber, weathered kamikaze attacks off Okinawa, and steamed into Tokyo Bay when it was over.
He died on October 21, 2013, in Green Township—the same place he was born eighty-seven years before. He never left Noble County for good, which tells you everything you need to know about what mattered to him.
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 aboard the USS Knudson (APD-101), a high-speed transport, in the Pacific from November 1944 to 1946. He married Rosemary Kocher on September 26, 1948, in California. He is buried in Noble County, Indiana.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 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.