97-year-old Ken Hartle recalls his service as a WWII salvage diver for the U.S. Navy

Above: Ken Hartle's Navy photo from 1942.
Below: Ken Hartle today, in his garden with his dog, Duke.

1913 was a long time ago.
Woodrow Wilson was elected president. Henry Ford’s famous Model T was only in its fifth year of production. A postage stamp cost only two cents. And Veterans Day hadn’t even been thought of yet.
But 97 years ago, one of our country’s last remaining heroes from WWII was born on a farm in Bakersfield.
Ambert Kenneth Hartle of Valley Center, who goes by Ken, served as a salvage diver for the U.S. Navy from 1942 through December of 1945.
“I was working as a shipfitter on a Navy yard when the war started,” he recalls. “And I wanted to get into the war. I tried to quit, but I was so valuable as a shipfitter that they didn’t want to release me to join up. So I started taking extended vacations, for a week or two, so they would have to find replacements. Eventually, they got the message and they let me go.”
His experience working on ships got him started as a shipwright, but Hartle says that he wanted to pursue a different path.
“I wanted to go into the Seabees [construction battalion],” he says. “So I went to Camp Perry in Virginia and had to go through all the boot camp stuff. Then I got sent to Gulf Port, Mississippi, where I was a part of the 105th specialists’ battalion. They took me and another guy, and they sent him off to Puerto Rico, and they sent me to Mare Island [Naval Shipyard, located off the coast of Vallejo, CA] to build destroyer escorts.”
But once more, Hartle had a desire to do something more.
“They put the word out through all the service that they needed divers, especially those with any experience,” he says. “Well, I had been scuba diving [with friends] a couple of times, up near the Golden Gate Bridge. So I volunteered.”
Hartle was one of 50 divers in his diving school class and, after completing his training in New York, was a part of the salvage efforts going on in Pearl Harbor.
“I got in on the tail end of the diving at Pearl Harbor,” he says. “It was tricky because a lot of the Japanese bombs and torpedoes didn’t go off, so we had to be really careful down there.”
The focus of Hartle’s battalion was to salvage destroyed ships and downed planes for potential repair. But the job also had a somber side.
“We’d bring up ships and planes to get them back into commission to help out the war effort,” he says. “But a lot of times, we were going in to bring back the bodies of our boys.”
As a diver first-class, Hartle was cleared to go underwater up to a depth of 190 feet, but he says, “I went deeper than that all the time. I even got in up to 288 feet once.”
His mind still as sharp as ever, Hartle recalls every detail about his service, from the names of his classmates in diving school (“Johnny Grimes was the best diver I ever worked with,” he remembers) to the name of his ship (Artillery Tug Rescue 11):
...to the exact weight of his diving suit (216 and a quarter pounds, compared to his own body weight at the time of 174 pounds):
...to the antics of the ship’s mascot, a dog the crew named Dusendorfff, who was with the ship from New Hampshire all the way to Hawaii:
Hartle is full of stories from his formative years, from surviving a kick to the face from a mule at age three, to dealing with the loss of his mother at age nine, to the subsequent move at age 13 to live with an aunt and uncle when his father was placed in a sanitarium with tuberculosis.
Always a hard worker, Hartle left home not long after moving in with his aunt and uncle to work a series of jobs up and down the California coast. He remembers working at a number of ranches, including a prune ranch in Santa Rosa that he describes as “the best job I ever had.”
At age 14, he bought a Model T for the tidy sum of $15, then later abandoned it on the side of the road when it broke down on the way to another job.
He went back to high school on his own and graduated from Alhambra High School in Martinez, CA in 1931. He went back to work at various jobs, on the west coast, and survived two more close encounters with dangerous animals while working as a cook for a mining camp.
“I was only on the job for about a month when I was bitten [on the leg] by a rattlesnake,” he remembers. “Everybody else was gone into town, so I was thinking, ‘What do I do?’ So I split [the bite] open with my knife and sucked out as much as I could. It got a little swollen, but it wasn’t as bad as when I got stung by a scorpion a few weeks later. It got me in the arm, and my whole arm ached for a long time after that. It was much worse than the snakebite.”
During the war, he had another close call when he was responsible for watching the anchor chains as they were hoisted or lowered from the ship:
The crew had a new captain, and, in his inexperience, he ordered both the anchors to be raised simultaneously. Hartle, who normally stood right next to the chains as they were in operation, had this time moved behind a small steel barrier to look at something else. The stress of hauling up both anchors, which weigh in at four tons each, caused the cast iron chain to crack, sending shards of metal in every direction.
“I had stepped over to the side, so I only got a little piece near my eye,” Hartle says. “But a big piece hit into the steel wall and stuck there because of the force from the crack.”
When his service was up, Hartle remarried (“I went into the Navy married, and when I came out, I was divorced,” he says of receiving an infamous “Dear John” letter from his first wife) after he bumped into his family’s former babysitter.
“Jeanne had been the babysitter for my wife and our kids,” he says. “After the divorce, I bumped into her when I was out shopping for a suit. We got to talking, and I asked her out. We were married for sixty years.”
Jeanne Hartle died two years ago after serving as a secretary in the Valley Center school district for a number of years.
The Hartles had three children together: Karen Dahl, who lives in Victorville, CA; Kenny Hartle, who lives in Montana; and Kathy Mayotte, who lives in Texas. The family moved to Valley Center in 1962 to open a chicken ranch, and Ken was a member of the Valley Center water board for four years, a charter member of the Rotary Club, and has worked odd jobs as a local handyman.
He still tends his own garden at his home off of Hilldale Road, and he remains an avid sports fan, especially when it comes to reading about the Valley Center Jaguars football games.
To commemorate Veterans Day this year, Hartle will be the special guest speaker for an assembly at Valley Center Middle School on Wednesday.


Hartle and his shipmates enjoying a little time off:
Hartle says that the crew would go swimming for recreation, sometimes in shark-infested waters, necessitating an armed guard on deck to keep an eye on the swimmers:
And sometimes, they ended up with a trophy:
Photos courtesy of Ken Hartle