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28 Dr. Wassell was awarded the Navy Cross with the citation:

For especially meritorious conduct, devotion to duty, and utter disregard of personal safety while in imminent contact with enemy forces and under attack from enemy aircraft in caring for and evacuating the wounded of the United States Navy under his charge in Java, Netherlands East Indies, about March 1, 1942.

The battleships are the glamour girls of the Fleet. After them come the svelte, smart cruisers; then the vixen destroyers and the bulldogging submarines. These get the front page when the stories are told. Less publicized, but no less important in the long, arduous job of making naval war, are the supply ships; especially the fleet tankers which keep these other ships supplied at sea for long periods.

This is the story of the U.S.S. Pecos, one of the fleet tankers which operated in the southern Pacific in the days when the Japanese were sweeping south.

The Pecos was in and out of Surabaya after the battle of Macassar Strait. As it became all too clear that Java was the next item on the Japs' list, the race began to salvage all valuable war materials and get them away to the fighting ships and to Australia before the Japs moved in. In Tjilatjap, the Pecos stayed on as she had the last source of fuel in that area. Rather than dump it in the storage tanks on the beach, and run the chance of the Japs getting it, she stayed until she had refueled all of the ships in that area. When she left Tjilatjap, she had only about 4,000 barrels of fuel left, and the original mission was to try to get some more. (Where, is still a military secret.) It was during this stay in Tjilatjap that the Pecos' medical officer, Lieutenant Joseph L. Yon (MC), U.S.N., became acquainted with Dr. Wassell. They worked together on the injured men from the Marblehead and the Houston, who had been brought to Tjilatjap.

As the Pecos reached the mouth of the river going out of Tjilatjap, she received word that the U.S.S. Langley had been bombed