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