Civilian James Bush, eightyone, at home in Ajo, Arizona, in October 2006.
Water Tender Third Class
USS Terror, Cruiser Mine Layer
We had the flag over the body in the canvas, and we’d go through the whole service, and they’d say, “Now we commend this body to the deep,” and we’d pick up the board, and the bag would slide straight out and down into the water. It would disappear in a hurry.
Civilian James Bush, eightyone, at home in Ajo, Arizona, in October 2006.
Water Tender Third Class, James Bush, in a photo taken in San Diego in 1944.
Jim Bush and I were roommates on Guam in March 2006 on his first return to Iwo Jima since 1945. He was affable, talkative, and friendly, and we got along just fine. I interviewed him in our hotel room on Tuesday before we made the day trip to Iwo. I asked what had brought him back to the site of the battle. “I saw something about it on the History Channel one time,” he said, “and I wondered how you got there. I couldn’t afford it then anyway. Then a few months back I saw a little mention in the paper about this Military Historical Tour, and I called, and they sent me this literature, and I’m out here—sixty-one years later.”
“I’ll be eighty May 16, 2006. I was born in New Mexico, and we moved to Arizona when I was nine. I joined the Navy in May of 1943, stayed in a little over two years. I joined at seventeen so I would not have to sign up for the draft.
“We brought all our wounded from Iwo Jima to Saipan at the end of February in 1945, resupplied, and went and anchored in a big lagoon at Ulithi, where we went ashore to swim and dive and eat and drink beer. There was nothing there but beach. The beer was Iron City.
“The story of how we got the beer started in Pearl Harbor in January, when we were all fueled up and loading the last of our supplies. Some new young officer pulled up alongside the ship in a weapons carrier and parked it near the end of our gangplank. We told him, ‘Don’t park there,’ because we were unloading trucks and putting supplies on the ship. He said he would park where he wanted to. He was a real starchy-looking guy with a uniform that was too large for him. He didn’t look any older than me, and I was going on nineteen.
“We’d already put all the supplies we could down below. Back on the fantail we had a big old space with some tie-downs. We’d put a hundred tons of potatoes back there. A weapons carrier has lifters on it so it can be picked up and set aboard ship. Well, guess what? I stood up there and watched them guys look around all over the place, no other officers watching them, and they reached over and picked that weapons carrier up and set it onto the ship next to the potatoes, covered it with a big tarp. An hour after that we were backing out of dry dock so we could get out of Pearl Harbor before they put the gate up. They had cables down there to keep enemy submarines out of the harbor.
“When we got to Saipan, they set that weapons carrier off onto the dock, and everybody was riding around. I even went out in it for an hour or two. Some of the guys who pulled that stunt struck a deal with some of the guys on Saipan, military people. They liked that weapons carrier. They were moving to the war zone, and they didn’t have anything like that.
“Our guys said, ‘Well, what have you got to trade?’ They said, ‘We know where there are about four pallets of Iron City beer. Dozens of cases.’ Done. ‘Let’s haul it down to the ship.’ So they went on down to the ship, waited till the officer of the deck left his post, and they picked those pallets up, brought them aboard, and moved them to a walk-in cooler. Iron City beer was nasty-tasting stuff, but when we got to Ulithi after Iwo, it was really good, I’ll tell you that. It was worth that weapons carrier.
“I pitied that pore little officer, though, having to walk all the way up through that shipyard, back to his commander saying, ‘Guess what? I lost the weapons carrier.’ It took us four days to drink up all the beer.
“I served on the USS Terror, a cruiser minelayer (CM-5). It was big, four hundred seventy-five feet long, with close to five hundred on board, including the admiral and all his staff. We were the flagship of the mine fleet. When I came on in Hawaii, I asked when they laid mines, and someone in the crew told me they had used it to lay mines at Casablanca early in the war but after that we were taking the battle to the enemy and we weren’t laying mines anymore. They changed its function and moved the Terror to the Pacific to service minesweepers because we were island jumping by then.
“We went with a large number of these little boats, minesweepers, to Iwo Jima six days before the invasion. They were only forty or fifty feet long, each served by a crew of ten. They were like PT boats [fast-moving patrol boats] except their job was to cut loose the mines that had been anchored off the invasion beaches.
“It was my first combat action. I was a water tender third class. I was usually down in the boiler room. Everybody had a station to go to in the battle. I was in the mess hall, high up, so I could see out. My job was to regulate, cut off, or open valves, down below hydraulically if there was bomb damage.
“A storm went by, and we got there early in the morning, woke up to a lush green island called Iwo Jima, except it wasn’t lush green. It had been bombed to smithereens.
“Some of the minesweepers had wooden hulls so they could get close to the magnetic mines without setting them off. We had demagnetizers too. The Terror’s job was to take care of those boats, pump fuel into them, service them, help with repairs. They’d come back alongside of us with mattresses hanging out of holes that had been shot in the sides not too far above the waterline. Some of the holes were big, made by forty-millimeter artillery.
“We were like the old mother hen with a bunch of chicks out there. We had a big old wooden float, like a barge, on one side, and they’d pull over and tie up to that. It had ladders going up, and we had a crane that could reach over and go down. As soon as they came in, our guys in damage repair would go over the side and see what they needed and measure it all off. They’d string acetylene torches over the side and use them to cut pieces out of the ship so they could weld plate over the holes.
“There were mines in the invasion beaches besides those in the water. I heard a lot of explosions. We had some boats with flat bottoms that could get in close, and they had rows and rows of rockets on deck, pointed out, and they’d fire a row of them, walk them up and along the beach so they covered everywhere. When one boat would run out of rockets, another would come right in behind and take over, and they marched right up the beach, taking out mines as they worked their way north, starting from Suribachi.
“This went on for three days, and we got so much damage to our sweepers from artillery fire out of the bunkers that they put the invasion off three more days. It was supposed to start February 16. I didn’t see the UDT [underwater demolition teams] guys, but I knew they were out there.
“They never managed to sink any of our sweepers, but by the end of the second day we had twenty-one killed on the small ships, and numerous wounded. We had to replenish some of the crews with people off our ship.
“We buried our dead at sea. We steamed to another volcano that had stinking smoke coming out of it, and we backed into a little cove between two reefs. I think we put an anchor down. The place we were working on deck was all covered with blood, so we washed it over the side with hoses, and when we did, that whole lagoon come up live with sharks. We shot them up real good, and they all disappeared.
“We heard later it had to do with shooting them through the liver, which exuded some kind of chemical that told the rest they were in danger, so they all left. I think that liver extract was used later to create a shark repellent to be given to pilots who could spread it out in the water when they were shot down. I don’t know if it worked or not.
“We put the dead in body bags made out of real heavy canvas. We’d cut out a section, put a body on one side, then throw it over and sew the sides together. We used big old hook needles, like carpet hooks. You’d flop the canvas over the head and stitch the needle and string with pliers. We sewed a thirty-five-pound practice shell between their feet.
“We had a board rigged up, like a heavy piece of plywood. We put hinges on it and attached a lifeline. We had the flag over the body in the canvas, and we’d go through the whole service, and they’d say, ‘Now we commend this body to the deep,’ and we’d pick up the board, and the bag would slide straight out and down into the water. It would disappear in a hurry.
“We did it that night and left. The next morning we had to come back and do three more who had died during the night. That’s why I think that volcano was something like thirty-eight miles south of Iwo Jima.
“The first day the Japanese didn’t fire at our boats at all. The first day the Japanese thought they were decoys, didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t want to give the location of their guns away by firing at us. But when the sweepers got in close enough by the second day, the Japanese would take a chance and shoot at them. They didn’t want to fire because it would expose their gun positions to ships offshore, which could then blast them.
“How did the sweepers work? There’s a cable under the bow that goes out at an angle, like a pyramid, and out at the end is a torpedo-looking device that’s got a big old cutter in it. It’s called a paravane. Your sweeper cable catches the cable holding the mine in place and slides on down to the paravane, which cuts the mine loose so it floats away or up to the surface, where you can fire at it and blow it up.
“They didn’t shoot every one. Some drifted to beaches, where they were recovered and parts of them were taken to the translator, who could read when they were made and stuff like that. I saw some that were made in 1931. Some of them were three or four feet high, and when they’d drift ashore, some of them would bust one of their horns and blow themselves up.
“When the invasion flotilla came in the dark on the morning of the nineteenth we didn’t leave; we just moved over a little ways, northeast off the Quarry, always on the move, always zigzagging. When they started in, I could look down the whole beach and see the waves of marines coming in. Some other pretty good-sized cruisers showed up too although when we arrived, it was just our ship and the minesweepers.
“On the fourth day there come an announcement that the flag was going up, and quite a few people come out on deck to see it. We headed for Saipan soon after that as fast as we could because we had so many wounded, and our doctors were working day and night on the wounded and the burned. We had people taking mirrors down so guys couldn’t see how badly they were burned.
“The Terror made twenty-five or thirty knots, always zigzagging. We made it down there that night or two days later. There were so many wounded that we had them in our bunks. The one in my bunk had a leg wound from shrapnel. They operated on him the night before we got to Saipan. That piece of shrapnel, it was about the size of a cigarette, went in right behind his knee, and they took it out way down in his calf muscle.
“There was a big sick bay. I think we had three doctors, one a nerve specialist. They were operating day and night. Corpsmen were doing all they could to help plus evaluating the injured to see who needed surgery the most. If somebody wasn’t wounded too bad, they’d come down looking for a place to put him. We probably took several hundred back to Saipan. Most of them were sailors in blue denims. I didn’t see anybody in camouflage like the invasion marines wore. I figured they were all off the minesweepers.
“When we got to the dock in Saipan, it looked like a sea of white down there, all the medical people waiting for us, ambulances lined up.
“After our R and R with all the beer in the lagoon at Ulithi we went back to Saipan, picked up more supplies, and headed toward Okinawa, then moved south down along the Retto chain, south of Japan, to Kerama Retto, to wait for the seizure of Okinawa, getting ready for the invasion of mainland Japan or the China coast.
“We were hit by a kamikaze carrying one or two five-hundred-pound bombs early the morning of May 14, 1945. They liked to come in real low, in the sunrise, but he was a little early. We had smoke screens laid down, but the wind blows that smoke around, and he saw an opening, made a loop up in the smoke, and came back and hit us right in the after stack. It made a big gaping hole in the stack and went on down through the middle of the ship, exploding down inside.
“It killed all our doctors and corpsmen, took out the sick bay, part of the mess hall and the kitchen. The officers’ quarters were right there, and all the ship’s records, everything that would burn, was up there. Losing the records caused us a lot of trouble because every shot we ever had for whatever ailment, we had to take over. I’d have to look it up, but I think we had about fifty killed and over a hundred injured. One of the MIAs [missing in action] was not found until we got all the way back to San Francisco. We had to put cables on the stack to keep it from falling over and camouflaged the damage areas with canvas painted to look like the rest of the ship.
“I was about three decks down when the plane hit. There was a terrible compression like you were inside a big bin. A vertical pipe sheltered me from the worst of it, but the explosion vaulted me down the passageway thirty-five to forty feet like a bullet, taking off skin wherever it was close to the bone. It knocked me out. I had a helmet on, but it did not protect part of my neck. The pipe protected me except for the back of my head, and I still get junk out of there, must be paint or dirt or wood from something, I don’t know what. They’ve looked at it a few times and don’t see anything, but every once in a while it’ll swell up and I’ll get some junk out of it.
“It hit us around four a.m. and we fought the fire till almost nine. We put the dead in body bags, and they were buried ashore. A friend of mine, John J. Epping, was killed, and I unzipped his bag to make sure he had his dog tags with him.
“When somebody got killed, they took all the pictures, all the address books, and stuff and threw it in the garbage, because you might have a wife at home, and you got a girlfriend somewhere else, and you don’t want them to get together. You don’t want them to see the address book and all that stuff. But I salvaged a book out of the garbage, a little diary, showing when he left, starting in Hawaii, all the way to Iwo Jima and wherever we stopped.
“I thought I’d keep that because someday something might happen and someone might want it, and sure enough, long afterward—just two or three years ago—his brother wrote the people that put on the ship’s reunion, asking to hear from anybody who knew the status of his brother John. So I sent him that diary, and he called me about two weeks later, and he was so happy I sent him that thing. Over fifty years later.
“We thought the kamikaze was a twin-engine Betty. There were two guys in it, and unbelievably their bodies were in better shape than some of the guys I saw. One was an old guy, real raggedy-dressed, and the other was younger, in a nice uniform, probably went along for the ride. They didn’t get the treatment ours did, though. We just swept them over the side with the rest of the junk.” Jim Bush got out of the service in the summer of 1946. He and his wife, Patty, were married on June 9, 1950. They had two children, David, born in 1952, and Tammi Jo, in 1958. They lived in Ajo, Arizona, where Jim worked as an electrician for the Phelps Dodge Mining Company and later operated a sand and gravel company. He has served as a Santa’s Helper, driving the sledful of toys, since 1946. He and Patty treasure their granddaughter, Tatiana, who was fifteen in 2006.
James V. Bush Jr. died in Phoenix, Arizona, November 3, 2007. He was eighty-one.