Name: Zewlak, John “Smokey”
Local address: 200 Main Street (war time), 94 Ravine Drive (post war), Matawan, NJ
In 1984, John contacted the Matawan Historical Society and shared an article dated October 20, 1942, from the Perth Amboy Evening News which reported his surviving a U-boat torpedoing on September 13, 1942. He described having to go into the freezing water south of Spitzbergen (now Svalbard) and awaiting rescue, which fortunately came 30 minutes later. He described the attack on the Russia-bound convoy his vessel was a part of as massive, involving German air and submarine assets. Records indicated he returned to Boston aboard the SS Queen Mary on October 14, 1942. John advised MHS he wanted to write a book about his experience, but the German submarine archives weren’t much help in providing needed information. He became a member of MHS and made a donation to the Society at the time.
While he didn’t name his vessel, the only US merchant ship sunk by a U-Boat that date was the SS Oliver Ellsworth, a Liberty Ship that had been launched that March. In the newspaper account, his lifeboat had been destroyed prior to launch, which corresponds with the account of the ship’s history. The convoy, PQ18, was one of the most heavily defended concentration of shipping to date, and the attack described in Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval Opereations in World War II – The Battle of the Atlantic, describes the massive air/sea battle that took place that date. Nine allied ships, including two other US vessels were lost (the other US ships were sunk by German aircraft.) Subsequent records indicate the submarine that sunk his ship was the U-408, which in turn was sunk by a US Navy Catalina from VP-84 off Iceland on October 31, 1942 – shortly after John was interviewed by the newspaper. A single crewman – a member of the naval guard aboard the Ellsworth – drowned.
John was born August 14, 1917, in Shamokin, PA. On October 4, 1940, he married Matawan girl Alta DeLaura Lewis at the Methodist Church on Main Street. They subsequently had two sons, Michael (born 1944) and Peter (1945). John was employed by General Cable Company of Perth Amboy. At some point, he apparently joined the Merchant Marine (his full record is available at the National Archives.)
On October 30, 1950, a hit and run drunk driver struck and killed 5-year-old Peter in his yard on Ravine Drive while the child was in his Halloween costume enroute to a party. The driver was subsequently caught and sentenced to only three months incarceration, a testament to attitudes toward drinking and driving in 1950. Eldest son Michael, a 1961 graduate of Matawan High School and a student at Syracuse University, was a passenger in a car on the way to his summer job in July of 1962 when the driver lost control of the vehicle and it struck a tree on Tennent Road, killing Michael.
Sometime after 1964, Alta divorced John (her 1973 obituary listed her as “Miss Alta Lewis”, and no mention was made of her living husband.) John died in North Carolina on December 20, 1991. All four family members are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery.
John has no survivors left to remember him, so MHS will have the honor of doing so.
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