World War II Honoree
World War II Veteran
Joseph W. Bibler
Branch of Service
U.S. Navy
Hometown
Valparaiso, Indiana
Honored By
Risen Savior Lutheran Church, Chandler, AZ
After completing one year of college at Valparaiso University, his Naval career began upon joining the Navy’s officer training program, July 1, 1943. His orders included 3 semesters of Liberal Arts at Notre Dame University followed by 6 weeks of a pre-midshipman program at Asbury Park, New Jersey, then a 4-month midshipman’s intensive training school at Columbia University in New York City. Upon graduation as an Ensign at St. Johns Cathedral, he enrolled at Harvard University to learn Naval Communications, which became his specialty. Subsequent orders included joining the Saginaw Bay CVE-82 as a Communications Officer; he boarded the ship in dry dock in San Pedro, California while it was being repaired for further long range duty in the South Pacific; it had previously been in the battles of Lingayen Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Phase I Okinawa. The ship embarked for Hawaii and South Pacific at Guam, Okinawa, Mariana Islands and Tacloben in the Philippine Islands. It was in the Philippines, after the war ended with Japan on August 15, 1945, that the Saginaw Bay CVE-82 picked up 1200 Army soldiers for transport back to the states. The main threat to the ship was floating bombs, specifically large round canisters filled with explosives-these were let loose by the Japanese. All sightings were communicated to all ships in the fleet, via encrypted messages, with latitude and longitude readings. The ship had banks of typewriter-type machines with encoding machines-each month, new code books were received in order to decipher messages. When the ship went through the Panama Canal, it was wider than the 108 feet allowed, necessitating cutting gun sponsons, then reattaching through welding after passing through the locks. Prior to the ship’s decommissioning he was named Head of the Communications Department. The ship was decommissioned on 19 June 1946 in the Boston Naval Shipyard Yard, at which time he returned home. He remained in the Naval Reserve.