The deck logs of USS LSM-87 constitute the primary source documents for this project. My father ordered photocopies from the National Archives some time in the late 1990s; my discovery of these logs ultimately led to the idea for this project.
Unfortunately, the copies that remained in dad’s box were incomplete: Many days were missing, and some pages were not readable. I visited the Archives in College Park, Maryland in the summer of 2018 to complete the set, and I discovered that the reverse side of every log page (called the “columnar sheet”) had been omitted from dad’s collection. The documents that I scanned and merged into the files at their appropriate places are colored blue, as the Archives required me to copy onto blue paper.
The reenactment project benefits greatly from the existence of photocopies of two books that are not in the National Archives: the ships “Rough Log” and its “Night Order Book”. I found photocopies of both of these books alongside the deck logs in my father’s papers.
The rough log is a handwritten book of notes made during each watch, and the ship’s officers used the rough log as a reference when typing up the daily deck log entries. Notably, the rough log includes quite a few observations and notes that were not transferred to the official deck log. These additional notes provide substantial color and insight into daily life on the ship. The rough log is complete for every day of the ship’s life. My belief is that Lt. (jg) Kurzinski kept the rough log in his personal possession when the ship was decommissioned, and that it passed to his grandson Mark Kurzinski. Mark provided photocopies to my dad during a reunion of LSM-87 shipmates that my dad organized in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
The night order book is a handwritten book of notes made by the ship’s commanding officer before the beginning of night watches when the ship was at sea. It contains explicit instructions for the Officer of the Deck, and each night’s instructions end with “Read the standing instructions in the front of this book”. The last entry in the ship’s night order book is 31 December 1945 – 1 January 1946. LSM-87 returned to San Francisco on New Year’s Day 1946, and Lt. McDevitt was relieved of his command the following day. I suspect that Lt. McDevitt kept the night order book and that my dad received the photocopies from the Captain’s daughter at one of the reunions, but I am not at all sure.