The Sarpedon Society exists to find and salvage the stories of the men who fought World War II through perichoretic prosopography. Perichoretic prosopography takes its subjects from specific moments of indwelling between individuals: the men aboard a specific ship together at a specific point in time, or the names in a newspaper’s draft announcement. Through it I have found stories of lives interrupted and shaped by the largest war in human history.
How It Started
My research began as an attempt to learn more about my grandfather’s Navy service and to test the second-hand stories I heard from my dad and aunt. I gathered everything I could through consumer genealogy websites until I had the shape of his silence.
Then I found a newspaper article announcing his draft, and I decided to honor the men named alongside him by researching them as well. That became the foundation of my newspaper-based cohorts.
His time aboard the USS Sarpedon (ARB-7) gave me a place to test the methodology through a ship-focused approach. Researching every member of her crew showed me how closely the men who sailed her to war were connected.
Why Sarpedon
In the Iliad, Sarpedon is a Lycian prince fighting far from home as an ally of Troy. Before the battle at the Greek wall he asks his friend Glaucus why men like them are given the best seats, the best meat, the fullest cups and the great estates along the river. His answer is that the honors are a debt. Because they are honored, they must stand in the front rank. Death stands over every mortal in countless forms, he says, so they may as well go forward and either win glory or give it to someone else.
The ship that carried his name was no front-rank vessel. A battle damage repair ship, converted from a tank landing ship, she existed to mend other ships’ wounds and send them back into the fight. She was built to help others win glory. Then a typhoon came in October 1945, one that put many other ships ashore; and she came through it as a repairer, not a casualty. The hero in the poem is eventually carried from the field by others. The ship did the carrying.
Neither her crew nor the typhoon left an epic behind. A survival like hers earns no battle honors and tends to disappear without a record. In Sarpedon’s terms, glory can be won or it can be given, and giving it requires someone willing to write it down. That is what this Society tries to do for her crew and for the men like them, many of them never famous and some barely remembered.
Where I’m Focused Now
I am currently working on a prosopography of the plankowners of Gato-class submarines. The cohort for this project is the 192 plankowners who commissioned more than one Gato-class submarine during the war.
This website hosts my research, gives me a place to write about the men I find who do not fit the cohort, and lets me keep building the methodology in public.