| The early months of 1944 may have been a race, of sorts, between Burnell's OCS application and his local draft board. The local draft board seems to have won. Or, Navy basic training may have been a prerequisite to entering OCS. In any event, he was in seaman recruit training near Chicago before going to OCS. | 
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| Burnell is third from the right on the bottom row, looking the very model of a 35-year-old Seaman Recruit. He seems to be taking it rather well, under the circumstances. Many of the faces in this picture don't look particularly young; by 1944 most of the younger men had already been drafted. | 
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There must be millions of iconic images of World War II recruits like this one in old scrapbooks around America, in this case with Burnell posed against a simulated shipboard background. |
| Ah, much better. OCS, at last. He attended OCS in Hollywood, Florida, at a resort hotel that had been converted to military use for the duration. He told me how hard it was for him, at age 35, to run miles down the beach as part of the physical training. | 
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Burnell, perhaps after further post-OCS training, was assigned to Naval Armed Guard duty on a civilian transport ship, the S.S. F. Marion Crawford, operated by McCormick Lines. It's not everyone who gets to go to sea on a ship named after a Victorian author of romantic and Gothic novels. Note the gun position mounted on the bow of the ship; his Armed Guard crew would have manned it. |
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Burnell's ship made wartime stops at the Isle of Wight, Rotterdam, Cherbourg, Algiers, and Bari, Italy, among other ports of call in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The danger from U-Boats on the North Atlantic had abated by late 1944 and 1945 and the Axis was in retreat in Europe. There was time for shore leave and sightseeing. Life as a Navy officer on a civilian ship was probably not the worst duty imaginable. One of the advantages of being an officer, apparently, was the ability to grant yourself shore leave.
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| Burnell kept a camera handy on board his ship and took pictures both from his ship and on shore leave, and later collected them in a scrapbook. He also had an 8MM movie camera and took some movies (on black-and-white stock) at sea and on shore. I used to look at those movies when I was young but I don't know what became of them. | 
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Burnell once described the contribution of his ship to the war as something like "Carrying toilet paper to Europe and bringing prisoners back." That sounds like the self-deprecation expected of a veteran, but his ship did carry prisoners back from Europe. |
Burnell, like most veterans, served not heroically, but diligently and honorably, at a time when the nation needed diligent and honorable service at least as much as heroic service. Whether he volunteered or was drafted, he did everything that his country asked of him. Millions of very ordinary citizens like him together accomplished something extraordinary, the likes of which we may never see again.
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Burnell's life took another turn after he left the Navy in 1946. He managed a summer resort for a few months, he was editor of a weekly newspaper for a time, and he eventually found a new career in labor union work. He achieved much, and gained great respect, in his new community of Riverside, California. But that is another story.
Last revised September 18, 2015