From The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy's First Carrier into Tokyo Bay, by Nathan Canestaro (Grand Central, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:
The greenness of Cowpens’ personnel presented a major challenge for Captain McConnell. Teaching any crew to operate and maintain a complex and untried ship is a difficult task, and in Cowpens’ case these problems were compounded by the fact that most aboard were as new to the Navy as the ship itself. Men who had already served at sea were few and far between; most had only the basic skills taught in the Navy’s boot camps and training centers. Only weeks before, they had been civilians from all walks of life—countless Americans from small towns and big cities, factory workers and farmhands, or kids fresh out of high school. This was not unique to Cowpens; each one of the CVLs [light aircraft carriers] departed for the Pacific with more than 70 percent of their complement having no seagoing experience. The old Navy saying was that it took six years to make a sailor, but McConnell had only a matter of months to take this green mob of men and forge them into a combat-ready team.
Youth was one thing that the officers and men of Cowpens had in common. The bulk of the enlisted men were only seventeen or eighteen years old, while most of the ship’s junior officers were only slightly older, with two to four years of college under their belt. There were only a few men aboard who were in their thirties or forties, mostly Captain McConnell and his senior staff. One of the ship’s newly arrived Marines, George Terrell, was seventeen and described his shipmates as “just a bunch of green kids.” In his estimation, 90 percent of the crew was as young as he was. “A man got to be twenty-one [and] he was looked up to as a senior citizen,” Terrell explained. “Even the pilots that flew these hot fighter planes were kids. By the time they got to be twenty-five they were veterans… most of them were between twenty-one and twenty-two.”
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Only a handful of the Moo’s complement of 107 officers had prewar experience or Naval Academy degrees. Instead, most were reservists—fresh out of college or civilian employment, and recent graduates of the Navy’s three-month crash course officer training program, earning them the moniker of “ninety-day wonders.” The number of reservists so significantly outnumbered the career officers that it sometimes seemed to them that they were strangers in their own Navy. More officers were in training in 1943—120,472—than there were total personnel in the Navy in 1938.
One of the few trade school boys assigned to the Moo was Lt. Frank Griffin “Grif” Scarborough. He graduated in the Academy’s class of 1942 and served one cruise aboard Enterprise as an ensign. He was a rarity aboard the Moo, as he was one of the few who had actually fired a weapon in combat. Although Scarborough started the cruise commanding a gun crew, the Cowpens’ senior assistant engineer was suddenly reassigned, leaving a position that needed to be filled. This wasn’t just a matter of a gap in the organizational table. The ship’s senior engineer was a thermodynamics professor from Penn State with no experience operating a ship’s power plant. McConnell and his executive officer, Cmdr. Hugh Nieman, wanted a seasoned officer to help him grow into the role. Given Scarborough had a degree in engineering, and the bulk of his fellow officers were either aviators or ninety-day wonders, Grif recalled, “Suddenly I was the man of the hour—I became senior assistant engineer of the Cowpens by default!”
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