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Retired teacher credits luck for survival
By KEVIN FLOWERS
Morning News staff reporter (1994)
U.S. Navy Lt. j.g. Jim Hoffman believes "the luck of the draw" is why he's alive today. Hoffman,
who served in the Navy from 1942 to 1944, was a gunnery officer who manned anti-aircraft artillery on merchant ships. "It was a little-known phase of the Navy, but a big and important one," Hoffman
said. During his service, Hoffman was assigned to vessels which made five Atlantic Ocean crossings and two Pacific Ocean crossings in a period of two years. He was on the USS Esso Utica when it delivered a
cargo of planes and four million gallons of gasoline to Allied forces in Liverpool, England two days before the D-Day invasion. One event would change his perspective on life. In late February
1944, Hoffman was serving on the ship Paul Hamilton in the Mediterranean when he was transferred to a different vessel. Two months later, that ship would be obliterated by a German bomber at Bari, Italy, and all
498 men aboard would die. The ship was finishing her fifth voyage, carrying a cargo of high explosives and a large contingent of Army Air Force personnel, as part of a massive convoy, when it was attacked by 23
German bombers on April 20, 1944. When the smoke cleared, the ship was gone. It was the costliest Liberty ship disaster, in terms of human life, in all of World War II.
Reports from the scene indicated
that a nearby ship, the SS Fitzhugh Lee, had its deck covered with pieces of steel, debris and oil and had all its guns knocked out by the explosion. Hoffman, a retired Erie School district teacher, said he
found out about the tragedy about a month after the explosion. "Had I stayed on the Paul Hamilton, I would not be here today," Hoffman said. "I just consider it the luck of the draw that I
wasn't there, that I wasn't killed. I had a lot of friends on that ship who were killed. "It's the whole underlying theme of the incident, to me, the luck of the draw. It kind of regulates your
fate," he said.
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