I wanted to go off to war, and my mother wouldn't let me

William White
Spring Branch, TX

The following is an excerpt from my book Texans Touched by World War II. William White passed away in December 2003.


"I lived with my mother and stepfather out north of El Paso in an area called Kern Place, right at the edge," William White told me. "There wasn't anything north of us except desert. So I grew up out in the country climbing mountains and hunting jackrabbits.

"The senior class had just gotten back from a trip to Mexico City. Our high school played a football game against a Mexican high school, Mexico City Polytechnic Institute. This was the first American-style football game a Mexican high school had ever played. A special train took us down to Mexico City as special guests of the Mexican president. It was quite a trip; the train carried a carload of Mexican infantrymen to keep the bandits away from us as we passed through an area south of Chihuahua. A lot of bandits attacked trains down there in those days.

"About a week after we got back to El Paso, a bunch of us were at the movies with our dates when they interrupted the show to announce Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

"I had some friends who were a semester ahead of me in high school; I was 17 and they were 18 and they graduated that January. All three of them immediately joined the Marine Corps. I decided that was what I wanted to do, too. And my mother and stepfather informed me that no, in fact that was not what I wanted to do. Everybody who knows me kids me about the fact that I wanted to go off and fight a war but my mother wouldn't let me!"

"Did they just want to make sure you graduated from high school first?"

"More than that. I had committed to Texas A&M. They wanted me to go down there and at least give a shot at my degree. So I went to A&M, thinking I was well protected from the draft because they weren't drafting anyone below 21 at that time. Then in September of 1942 they changed the draft age to 18, and I knew I'd get caught up in that. You didn't get an exemption if you were in a military school unless you were already a junior or senior. So I volunteered for the Navy in December of 1942."

"What did your parents think?"

"They didn’t have much of a choice, because I was certainly subject to the draft. I didn't want to be drafted. I wanted to volunteer. Everybody I knew wanted to volunteer.

"I arrived by train in San Diego at three o'clock in the morning and experienced quite a culture shock. As freshman at A&M I had experienced a disciplined environment, but not to the degree that I was confronted with in boot camp. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but I wasn't.

"We had run obstacle courses at A&M, but nothing like what we ran in San Diego. These courses were a mile and a half long. We did calisthenics forever. Every spare moment we had to do some exercise. They didn't give us much chance to be homesick in those days; they occupied every moment of our time. We were tired when we went to bed, and we had to get up at 4:30 in the morning. At least we had good food.

"That lasted from December to February. They gave us a battery of written and oral exams to determine our qualification, and chose me for sonar school, they called it sound school then. It was in San Diego. I went there for two months then joined my ship."

"What was sound school like?" I asked.

"Rigorous. They kept us busy; everything was crammed in to short periods of time. I guess they figured if they threw enough mud at us, some of it would stick. It kept my brain busy.

"We got our sea practice on Eagle Boats, old World War I submarine chasers built by Ford Motor Co. They were top-heavy as the devil and if you didn't get seasick on those, you probably never would.

"They taught us all about the dome that emitted the sound waves. We learned to discern whether a submarine was coming toward us or going away by the sound of the echo."

"How does that work?"

"If the submarine is headed toward you, the echo comes back at a higher frequency than the sound that went out. If the echo is lower, in other words the cycles are farther apart, the submarine is headed away. And you can usually distinguish a submarine from a whale by the way it moves. A submarine can't maneuver as quickly as a whale or a school of fish. But sometimes it was hard to tell. The ship's crew would get pretty ticked off at you if you had them all called to general quarters in the middle of the night to put down ash cans on a school of fish or a whale!"

"Did you ever have false alarms like that?"

"On occasion. Once or twice I couldn't tell them apart. Fish can make all kinds of noises that will cause a sonar man trouble. Porpoises make a heck of a racket. One type of fish, croakers, ran in schools and absolutely ruined the operation of the sonar. They made a noise that sounded like a machine gun."

"How did they do that?"

"Don't ask me."

"What ship did you join after sound school?"

"I was assigned to a patrol craft, PC-1127, a steel-hulled submarine chaser. It was built in Michigan and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, where it was commissioned in May of 1943. It was 175 feet long and 27 feet wide and had 60 men and 5 officers. Later we also took on five frogmen when we joined the amphibious corps.

"Before leaving New Orleans the biggest body of water I'd ever seen was Elephant Butte Lake up in New Mexico. Now we crossed the Gulf of Mexico and attended several weeks of anti-submarine training in Miami. The Navy had taken over several hotels and brought in a bunch of sailors, including Russian and English ones, to learn anti-submarine warfare.

"In the Atlantic outside Miami, we had our only encounter with a German U-boat. The Germans had developed a chemical device that would form a pocket of millions of air bubbles when it came in contact with saltwater. They called this thing a Pillenwerfer. When they shot it out of its launcher, the big air pocket would create a signature on our sonar that closely resembled a submarine. We'd get a sonar reading on the air pocket instead of the submarine, and it lasted just long enough for the sub to get away. At the time I thought the U-boat was dead in the water or stopped, but about 10 minutes later we figured out we were echo sounding on an air pocket. By then the submarine was gone.

"We stopped at Key West on the way to the Panama Canal and went into a dry-dock for a day or so. There I got promoted to sonarman second class.

"Before we put the ship in dry-dock, we had retracted the ship's sonar dome into the hull. Once we were back in the water we needed to lower it beneath the hull again. The job fell to me, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

"We hadn't started the ship's generators yet, which meant no electricity. I had to lower the dome manually. I was down in the lower sound room with a pair of headphones on, letting the skipper, Byron Voegelin, know the progress of my efforts. I had failed to put the brake on, and I lost the sonar dome and the shaft. It dropped down through the water to the bottom of the ocean.

"Once it hit bottom it was ruined; its interior was a delicate maze of quartz crystals that couldn't stand an impact like that. It cost thousands of dollars, too.

"I didn't say anything for a while, so the skipper asked me what was going on. I said, 'I'd better come up and tell you face to face.' It was particularly hard to tell this to him because he'd just promoted me."

"Uh-oh," I said. "What did he do?"

"He just grunted and grumbled a little. I'm sure he thought to himself, 'We'll never be able to do anything with these civilian sailors.' But he never said anything to me.

"We passed through the Panama Canal and pulled into a little Mexican port called Salina Cruz, south of Acapulco. No other U.S. Navy ship had ever been in that port. But there was not a thing in that town that we could pay for. The town just closed down and welcomed us for the two days we were there. It was amazing. They held a fiesta for us. We ate a lot. They fed us a lot of fish, a lot of shrimp.

"Whenever we walked by the Army constabulary in town, it didn't make any difference what rank we were, the two Mexican sentries out front brought their rifles up and presented arms to us! They wanted us to know they supported us. It was quite an experience for an 18-year-old kid.

"We refueled there and then joined the 2nd Marine Division at Pearl Harbor. In November we headed south, without knowing where we were going.

"The skipper told us through the loudspeaker we were going to a place in the Gilbert Islands called Betio, in the Tarawa Atoll. That was to be the site of our first conflict. We'd never heard of it."

Tarawa (pronounced Tuh-RAW-uh) was where the United States tested its ability to land on and capture a heavily defended beach in preparation for the long campaign of island-hopping across the Pacific. The largest island, Betio, is one square mile in size. More than 1,000 Americans died in the battle.

 "The skipper told us the Japanese resistance would be tough, but the fleet was already there, pounding the island with shells. Our ship would serve as a landing craft control vessel. We would escort LSTs (Landing Ship - Tank) to the landing zone.

"We moved in past the ships of the main fleet several thousand yards off shore. They'd been bombarding the island for several days. I've heard an estimate that they unleashed a thousand pounds of explosives per square foot on that island.

"We moved to a particular point along the beach and the landing craft came up even with us at the line of departure. When we got the word from the command vessel several miles away, we signaled with pennants for the landing craft to head into the beach. We communicated between the beach control officer and the command vessel to pass along the status of the landing parties."

"Where were you on the ship during the battle?"

"I was always up in the pilot house, where the sonar gear was. During general quarters I manned the engine room telegraph, which was also in the pilot house."

"How much of the atoll could you see?" I asked.

"Betio was the only island within eyesight. I could make out the tops of palm trees, and that was about it. It was just a tiny strip of land, not much on it, and we were about 1,500 yards from shore.

"The bombardment was constant. I'd never seen anything like that. Hearing those 16-inch shells pass overhead was pretty nerve-wracking. They sounded like a fast Volkswagen, and they were about the size of one, too. We watched them hit.

"The landings didn't go smoothly. We lost a great number of men whose landing craft got hung up on the coral reef surrounding the island. Confusion took hold. But we didn't know what to do about it; we had to stay at our position. Then some landing craft came up from behind us and went in to try to rescue the men who'd been stranded out there.

"At that time, we didn't have the fancier tractors we used in later invasions. The front of them didn't come down. The later models could go right up on the beach. The vehicles we used at Tarawa didn't have enough power to back up off the coral reef if they got hung up.

"When the tractors got hung up on the reef, we watched men climb out of them into the water, hold their rifles above their heads and wade in toward shore. That was a disconcerting sight to say the least.

"We went ashore after the battle. The thing that stands out more than anything to me is the odor of dead men. I'll never forget that. By the time we got there they'd buried most of the bodies, but some still floated just off shore. I saw one of them.

"I walked around through absolute devastation. In the middle of the island I saw a particularly large reinforced concrete pillbox. The Japanese had dug in there, but the bombardment had busted it open.

"We joined the fighting at Bougainville, where the Japanese still held most of the island, but the Americans held a five-mile strip of land with three airfields off Empress Augusta Bay. We escorted PT boats to the mouth of a river near the southern tip of the island. At night the PTs went up the river to raise hell with Japanese emplacements on a ridge between the river and Bagana, a big volcano. We waited at the mouth of the river all night for them to return. We made sure no Japanese submarine got anywhere near them."

"Was this an active volcano?"

"Yes. It emitted smoke and steam the entire time we were there. In fact I may have kept an eye on that volcano even more than I did the Japanese!

"The Japanese wanted to evacuate some officers from the island. They would try to negotiate the river on rafts, then meet their submarines at the mouth of the river. It was our job to make sure there were no Jap submarines waiting for them.

"The Japanese still held that area up there because the only thing on the island that really interested the Americans was the airstrips. The entire island of Bougainville was not an objective; it was just a stepping stone. And building the three airfields there allowed our planes to attack Rabaul, the big Japanese naval base about 220 miles away.

"A destroyer joined us at the mouth of the river once, trying to do something about those Japanese gun emplacements, but it couldn't get close enough to the island to be accurate with their 5-inch guns. Since we had a smaller draft and could get closer in to shore, Voegelin had volunteered us to go up and knock them off that ridge. But I think the skipper lost interest when he realized the Japanese were shooting back at the destroyer up ahead of us!"

He chuckled. "Of course he'd already volunteered at that point, he didn't have any choice. We got within a mile of the ridge. The ship drew about 7 feet and we could get in pretty close to the riverbank. We had a 3-inch/50 forward on the bow, our longest-range weapon. We could see the ridge, maybe a mile, mile and a half away. We opened fire and we had quite a crew on our gun. It took them only four or five shots to take out the emplacement.

"Did you come under fire?"

"Fortunately, no. I think they were too busy shooting at the destroyer to pay any attention to us.

"Another group used to go up the river -- a bunch of Fijis who paddled up in canoes at night, armed only with machetes. They crept out into the jungle, caught the Japanese unaware and killed them with machetes. They had no love for the Japanese. They looked meaner than snakes to me.

"Funny thing happened when we were anchored at Tulagi, which was across the Sabo Bay. Between Guadalcanal and Tulagi there's an island called Sabo. Later they called the bay Iron Bottom Sound because of all the ships that sank there during the war.

"Our ship had found an ideal berth, close to fresh water and close to the Navy post office that had been set up there. We had gone a long time without mail. We were the closest vessel to the beach. That was good, because being so small, the only way we had to get ashore was a little dory that held five people, and it was a wet ride. We weren't like the bigger ships that carried boats so big you could stand in them and not get wet.

"We'd been anchored there a day or two when a destroyer came up behind us and signaled. I was up on the flying bridge at that time; just about everybody else was off duty. I jumped up on the light and acknowledged them. It turned out they wanted us to move out of the way so they could take our berth!

"Bigger ships would sometimes bully smaller ships out of the best berths, you see. I took the message down to Voegelin in his wardroom and he grunted and growled and wrote out a message. I went back up on the light and signaled that our skipper wanted the name, rank and date of rank of their commanding officer.

"Of course I'm sure the destroyer crew thought since we were just a little PC, we didn't have much rank aboard. They signaled back that it was such and such lieutenant, US Naval Reserve, 1940.

"Voegelin saw that and laughed and had me send back, 'Sorry, cannot comply. Signed, Lt. Commander Byron Voegelin, US Navy, 1936.' So the destroyer backed off, and we all waved to it as it left!" He laughed gleefully.

"We returned to Pearl Harbor in spring of 1944 for modifications to the ship. We painted camouflage on our hull. We took on five frogmen and four Marine communications personnel. And we added so much communications equipment, the ship looked like a porcupine when we left the harbor.

"In Hawaii most of the crew got to spend a week at a Navy rest camp at Waianae on Oahu. We weren't used to that kind of treatment! We could order anything we wanted for breakfast. Didn't have to do anything. We had the beaches to ourselves. We didn't have surfboards, but we wet our mattress covers, fill them with air from the brisk breeze, tied the end in a knot and made air mattresses. We rowed them out to 'catch a wave.' Boy, what a ride!

"And the Andrews Sisters put on a great show for 300 of us in an amphitheater. Those girls were tireless! They'd still be out there performing right now if they could, but we had to shut down about 2 a.m. They sang a lot of popular songs, including Rum and Coca-Cola and I Can Dream, Can't I?"

"Radio equipment and seats were installed in the pilothouse for these Marine communications specialists to use. They added new bunks for them and the frogmen.

"These frogmen had the job of swimming up to the beach the night before a landing operation. We'd drop them off fairly close to shore and pick them up several hours later. They made sure no obstacles blocked the beach so the Marines could make a good landing. They had to clear out explosives and barricades. I wouldn't want that job, but they all seemed pretty enthusiastic about it. They were the forerunners of today's Navy SEALs.

"We went to Kwajalein. It was the fleet's embarkation point for the Marianas operation -- Guam, Saipan, Tinian. We took on supplies there, and we knew we'd go into combat soon because we had fresh eggs and fresh fruit. That only happened when we were going into combat."

"What did you think about that?"

"All of us were anxious for that kind of thing. We were trained in combat and didn't want to just sit there. We were pleased that we'd be doing something. We didn't know what we'd be doing -- they never told us anything until right before it happened."

"What was Kwajalein like?"

"It was one heck of a big atoll. I looked out across it, and I'd never seen so many ships in my life. The entire Fifth Fleet was there. Hundreds, possibly thousands of ships of all kinds: Carriers, battlewagons, cruisers, and untold numbers of transports and tenders.

"One of the items brought aboard was Australian lamb, or mutton as we called it. And nobody in the United States Navy cared anything about mutton. The ships took it on because they were ordered to take it, but then they threw it overboard. And you could look out across the atoll and see big hunks of mutton floating everywhere." He laughed.

"We took our position close to some LSTs and then one morning the fleet got underway and headed west. We knew we were getting close to wherever we were going around the 16th of June, when six Japanese torpedo planes attacked us. I suppose they wanted to sink some landing ships, knowing thousands of men were aboard them.

"One made a run on the destroyer USS Black, our command vessel. We were just aft and starboard of the Black and we saw the torpedo plane, a Kate, pass by close enough for us to see its two-man crew. When their torpedo bombers got ready to make a run they got down close to the water and started to bob up and down. This one did just that, aiming straight for the Black. Then we blew him out of the air with our 3-inch/50-caliber gun. We always maintained the Black owed us their gratitude because they shot at him with everything they had. They just didn't have as good a shot as we did.

"During the air raid we lost communications with the 'talker' at the gun and I went out there to tell him his telephone wasn't working. I got too close behind the gun and a 3-inch/50 shell casing flew out and landed on my right foot, breaking the big toe.

"The other Japanese planes made torpedo runs on LSTs. I don't know if those pilots knew it beforehand, but attacking an LST from the air was suicidal. Those ships had 20mm guns just one right after the other on each side, and they could throw up one heck of a lot of lead. They shot the planes down.

"After we secured from General Quarters the chief pharmacist's mate gave me what medical attention he could. He punctured the toenail with a needle to drain it and wrapped the toe to keep it immobile. I didn't miss any action because of it; on such a small ship, there's no room for anyone to be inactive for very long, and the injury wasn't severe enough for them to send me anywhere for medical attention. There was a hospital ship in the area, but they had room only for the gravely wounded, certainly not for something as minor as a broken toe. So I stayed on my ship and stayed on duty. I still have problems with that toe in wet or cold weather."

"How did you feel while watching this battle?" I asked.

"I was fascinated by the sight. I wasn't afraid at the time, but I was later! After it was all over, everybody was rattled. But in the middle of it, the adrenaline kicked in and kept us going.

"We were with the 1st and 3rd Marine divisions, which were scheduled to land on Guam on June 21, 1944. The 2nd and 4th Marines had already landed on Saipan on June 15. That invasion turned out to be more difficult than expected, so instead of landing on Guam we were held in reserve in case we were needed to reinforce the Saipan operation. We waited for word on whether we'd be needed, and it turned out we weren't. We'd been floating around out there since June 6, and that can be rough on ships like LSTs loaded full of men and little PCs. So on July 5th we put in at Eniwetok to replenish our supplies. Ten days later we left for Guam again.

"On the way to Guam we heard on the radio about the landing at Normandy. We were pleased it was a success but we were also kind of put out, because we thought we had put together the biggest amphibious landing operation ever assembled, and now we were gonna get kicked off the front page! We were glad Normandy happened, but it happened at the wrong time for us because we were real proud of what was going on in the Pacific."

"What do you remember about the Guam landing?"

"We put the first wave on the beach at 0830 on July 21, 1944. I remember when we were heading for our line of departure, we moved across the bow of a battleship, I think it was the USS Washington, and it fired all its 16-inch guns toward Guam at the same time. It scared the devil out of everybody. Those things were loud and they were only a couple hundred yards behind us. The shells went right over our heads. We hoped their gunners were accurate.

"The Japanese put up a tough defense at Guam. They had several gun emplacements on the Orote Peninsula, north of where we were landing, and they had us in their bead. An SC, a 110-foot wooden sub chaser, was engaged in operations much closer to the beach than us, well in range of the Japanese mortars. The Japanese were very skillful with their mortars. If they fired twice and didn’t hit you, you'd better move before the third shell hit, because it was gonna get you. One of them hit the SC right at the 40mm gun on its bow, went on in and blew the whole bow off it. It sank. We were a couple hundred yards away and we moved up to rescue four survivors. Other boats picked up some too. We got out of mortar range as fast as we could.

"The Japanese gun emplacements were hard to hit by naval gunfire. Navy dive-bombers flew in to give us a hand with them and we could hear the pilots talking back and forth over the radios. One pilot did a run on a gun emplacement and all kinds of smoke went up when he hit it, and as he flew away he said, 'Set 'em up in another alley.' Apparently they were having a good time.

"As we stayed at our post at the line of departure the landing craft came up, circled us and lined up and then went on in. We were up 55 hours with no sleep. When things had settled down, we alternated four and four (four hours asleep, four hours on duty) and I was able to go down below. I sat down on the deck in the forward crew quarters talking to a friend of mine, and that's the last I remember. I fell asleep sitting right there.

"After all the equipment and supplies had been landed, we went ashore. I do remember one thing about Saipan and Guam both, particularly Saipan: they were just beautiful, emerald green islands. I spent quite a bit of time on Saipan; we were there while they built the air base. We saw the first B-29s land there. First time I'd seen one, and it was the biggest aircraft I'd ever seen in my life. Several of them landed at the same time. I was entranced by them.

"My ship got the responsibility of pulling aircrews out of the water if they had to ditch the aircraft on the way back to Saipan after a bombing run. We called this the dumbo run. I know that doesn't sound very nice, but we called it that because if they ended up in the water and we had to go get them, they were dumbos for being there. So we kidded them and called it the dumbo run, and they thought it was funny too. We also escorted submarines out on their runs until the water was deep enough for them to submerge.

"We did these kinds of things for a long time. We found it boring work and didn't like it. One thing that still irritates us is that we weren't involved in Iwo Jima. The ones who went there were the ones we’d operated with for so long. Some of the PCs we'd been with got to take part. We were on the dumbo run, so we didn't get to go. But we were part of the Okinawa invasion."

"What was Okinawa like?" I asked.

"Okinawa gave us a shock; it was our first introduction to the kamikazes. A bunch of our ships, mostly destroyers, had set up a radar picket line around the north part of the island. Their primary duty was to let the rest of the fleet know when Japanese aircraft headed their way.

"These destroyers had to stay out there for long periods of time, and our job was to take the mail to them. You'd think that was not very hazardous duty, but in this case it was. One day as we were passing mail over to a destroyer, a large group of kamikazes attacked it and several other ships nearby. When we heard the kamikazes were coming we scrambled to get our lines off the destroyer. We pulled away and hauled ass, heading east. Minutes later, we watched the planes coming in. The amazing thing to me was, our ships could fire everything in the world at them and they wouldn't even move. It didn't affect them at all.

"I watched one of the kamikazes slam into the port side of one destroyer. It exploded amidships and sank. I believe the planes hit and damaged several other ships in the area that day."

"What did you think when you saw these suicide attacks?"

"We had no idea what was happening, really. We'd never seen it before. That was our first experience with any kind of terrorist operation. We were amazed that anybody would do that.

"The Japanese also used a lot of suicide boats in Buckner Bay, so when we anchored there somebody had to be on watch all the time to make sure nobody came close.

"Then a typhoon blew up and forced us to leave the bay. It ran right over us. And during the typhoon, the Japanese pulled a high-altitude bombing raid on us. The problem was not that they were accurate, because Japanese bombers couldn't hit anything. But we all had to go to general quarters in the middle of that 160-mph wind."

"That must have caused you some problems," I observed.

"It did for a small vessel like us, because our bow would go under and a solid wave would go clear over our mast. That was not pleasant. Every time the bow went into the water the ship quivered. At general quarters you have a lot of people up on deck, all the guns are fully manned. All these people were totally exposed to the storm."

"Did you lose anybody overboard?"

"Fortunately, no. But it was a scary ride. We took some pretty critical rolls, maybe 50 degrees. We could see the other ships, all spread out around us, every time we hit the crest of a wave. The typhoon tossed us around like that for more than 24 hours. Many men got seasick."

"How often did you face kamikazes during the Okinawa battle?" I asked.

"They came every day for several days. We got very little sleep during that time. Even when we were off duty, we were afraid to sleep."

"Were you constantly worried one of those would hit your ship?"

 "Terrified."

"So it was pretty effective as a terror tactic?"

"Absolutely."

"Did you ever go on Okinawa?"

"Briefly, to pick up a Nisei sailor who spoke Japanese. Our ship had a big set of speakers on it. We went up close to the cliffs on the north end of the island and the Nisei tried to talk the Okinawans out of jumping."

I didn't think I'd heard him right. "Out of jumping?" I echoed.

"That's right. Civilians were jumping off the cliffs. I guess they were afraid of Americans. We moved back and forth under the cliffs, with this Japanese-American man shouting into the speakers, pleading at them not to jump. Large numbers of people jumped, including women carrying their babies, older children, old men. We were close enough to see their facial features. I personally watched dozens of them jump and land in the rocks and water at the bottom of the cliffs."

"How high were these cliffs?" I asked in disbelief.

"Quite high, possibly even a couple hundred feet high. I was stunned. I couldn't understand why they were doing this. The Nisei pleaded with them, 'Don't do it! You have nothing to fear from Americans! We will provide you with medical treatment. Please return to your villages!'"

"Had they been lied to by their leaders about how they would be treated by Americans?" I suggested, groping for an explanation.

"Possibly," he said, and the conversation faltered for a moment.

"After Okinawa," he then continued, "we went to maneuvers at Subic Bay in the Philippines to prepare for Operation Coronet. That's what the invasion of mainland Japan was to be called. We were supposed to hit one of the islands in Japan. We practiced landings for several weeks. We knew it wasn't going to be a cakewalk.

"We were tied up at Leyte and had a movie showing on the bow. It was Madame Curie with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, and it was about the discovery of radium. This was around the 10th of August. We heard on the radio that the Japanese were considering surrendering. The atomic bombs had been dropped but we hadn’t heard about them at this point.

"We stopped the movie. This was the best news we'd heard for a long time. But a problem with the Japanese surrender had to be worked out. We didn't know what was going on other than a lot of talking back and forth between Japan and the Allies. It turned out the Japanese were trying to preserve the integrity of the emperor.

"Looking back on it now I don't think that was the proper thing to do. I think the emperor should have been tried along with all the other war criminals. But, letting them have their way on that one point brought the war to an end.

"I think it was the 15th of August when we heard on Armed Forces Radio that Truman had announced the war was over. Everybody celebrated by hollering as much as we were allowed to while we were on duty. We had no formal celebration. We had to attend to business because we were still going to Japan, as occupiers rather than attackers now.

"The first place we landed troops was a beach near Wakayama on Honshu. We conducted the landings just as if it was a combat operation. As we escorted our transports to Japan, we reached the mouth of a channel that led into Honshu, and found it had been mined.

"Our boat followed two minesweepers in to shore to pick up a chart of the channel so the transports could get in. A surly Japanese naval officer came aboard and brought the charts to us. An American paratrooper officer accompanied him and translated for us. The Japanese officer went back to shore, and we took the charts out to the transports that had been waiting out there for an hour or so.

"We hadn't had any ice cream for a year. Our skipper had us signal to the lead transport, 'We have charts for you if you have ice cream for us!'" He laughed. "I don't think they'd ever had anybody deliver an ultimatum to them like that. They sent us some ice cream, so we gave them the charts.

"We put some troops on the beach near the big naval base at Kure. Some of us went ashore and five of us went into Hiroshima."

"What did you see?"

"Devastation." He paused for a long time, trying to find words to describe the scene of an atomic bombing.

"No buildings still stood downtown, just a few on the edges of the city. A lot of the wreckage still smoldered, six weeks after the bomb had been dropped. We saw no people anywhere. The place was deserted. Cleanup hadn't even started yet."

"What did it feel like, being there?"

"I was anxious to get out, to tell the truth. The place was eerie to me. I wasn't sorry the bomb had been dropped, by any means. It just felt creepy, so still and eerie, like being on the moon. I knew one bomb had done this. We stayed about 30 minutes and all of us decided almost at the same moment that we wanted to get out of there.

"I had just enough points to go back home almost immediately. I was one of the first men on my ship to come home. We boarded the USS Santa Fe, a light cruiser, at Saipan and went back on the Magic Carpet run, directly to San Francisco without even stopping at Pearl Harbor. The ship was so full a lot of men had to sleep on the deck. After serving on a little PC, the amazing thing to me about this ship was that you could walk down a deck and not get wet."

"What was the homecoming like?"

"Words are not available to describe it. We saw big signs on the hills around the bay, 'Welcome home' and things like that. The Santa Fe had not been back since it left the States, and it had its homecoming pennant flying from the mast. The length of the pennant is determined by the number of months overseas. That thing extended all the way from the mast to the stern.

"We tied up at the dock, welcomed by a band and a huge crowd of family members waiting for their boys. My family wasn't there; they didn't get word I was coming back. Went to Terminal Island and they paid us for the previous four or five months, but they didn't have enough room for us to stay the night on base, so they gave a group of us a 48-hour pass. We stayed in the Mark Hopkins Hotel. In the restaurant the next morning each one of us ordered a quart of milk and a dozen eggs. We hadn't had any eggs the whole time we were overseas, except when we were about to go into combat.

"The San Francisco train depot was a madhouse. It seemed like everybody in the world was traveling at once. I looked for the window to buy a ticket to El Paso; must have been a hundred civilians in that line. The ticket agent spotted my Navy uniform and said, 'Come on up here.' So I went ahead of everybody. Got my ticket, got on the train and went home.

"I'd told my family when I'd be home, and they were there to meet me. But they didn't recognize me when I got off the train."

He laughed. "I was five-foot-seven and 120 pounds when I left. When I came back three and a half years later, I was six-foot-one and 160. I'd been out in the sun so long in the South Pacific, my skin was the color of mahogany. They looked right past me until I got right in front of them."


--Stephen Neal Manning