I went into the service in 1937, right out of high school. I wanted to get into “lighter than air” training, and they were just starting the dirigibles then. So I joined the Navy and got assigned to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The day I got there the Hindenburg came in from Germany, and I stood there and watched the damned thing blow up and burn. I was supposed to be helping pull it in, but I had just got there. I was too late to join the ground crew, so I was standing there watching. After that disaster, the Navy canceled the dirigible program and sent me all the way back to the West Coast, to San Diego and hospital corps school. I didn’t have any choice, they just assigned me to be a hospital corpsman. I didn’t mind it because I had always been interested in medical studies. I had been a Boy Scout and Eagle Scout, and we had had first aid training and all that sort of thing. So they trained me to be a hospital corpsman for six months. We trained on everything from A to Z—anatomy, physiology, first aid, minor surgery, and all the stuff that goes with it.
I graduated second in my class, and they asked me, “Where do you want to go, Cale?” And I said, “Well, I’m from Illinois so I’d like to go back there.” They said, “Well, we only had one position for Illinois, and the number-one guy in the class took Illinois. But you’re second, so you have your choice for world-wide assignments.” So I thought, Jesus Christ, being from Illinois and the Midwest, the most water we ever had there was Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. I had read somewhere about Hawaii out in the middle of the Pacific, so I said, “Oh, hell, send me to Hawaii!” That’s about as far away as I could get. So they sent me to Hawaii, and I arrived on my birthday, November 29, 1940, as a brand-new hospital apprentice second class. I was stationed down in the old Naval hospital in Pearl Harbor. I took the course for surgical technician while I was there, and I was assigned to the officers’ ward. In June, 1941, I was transferred for duty to the U.S. Naval Dispensary at Pearl Harbor.
On Saturday, December 6, I worked that evening. I was on night duty in charge of the pharmacy and the laboratory. By that time I was a second class pharmacist mate, and they had me on duty at night to take care of the sick or anyone that got hurt in the Navy Yard. I got off duty at 6:30 A.M. on December 7, and after a while I left the hospital. I started walking down the street about a quarter of a mile to the receiving station, where we had to sign in with the master-at-arms, because all the pharmacist mates lived off the post. So I signed in with him and came out, and I noticed planes flying around. Planes maneuvered every month, and the reservists and National Guard would train and have an attack on Pearl Harbor. So, I noticed the planes that morning, but I didn’t pay that much attention to them because I thought they were ours. Then I noticed they were dive bombing Ford Island and the battle wagons and were actually firing weapons, so I figured this wasn’t a mock attack. I saw one of them turn off to the right, and I saw the rising sun on the fuselage and the wings. I thought, “Hell, those aren’t our planes, those are Japanese planes!”
So I rushed back over to the receiving station, took the fire ax, and started breaking down the door into the armory. I handed out those old peashooters, the Springfield rifles, to anyone who came by. But I didn’t take one for myself, because pharmacist mates weren’t supposed to have weapons. And later I got written up for a court-martial for handing out those rifles. After the attack was over, and late in the day when I came back there, the master-at-arms says, “Don’t go anywhere. You’re on report.” I said, “For what?” And he said, “For breaking into the armory.” So I said, “We aren’t supposed to protect ourselves?” He said, “It’s all right to protect yourself, but this is peacetime, and you can’t break into the armory in peacetime when war hasn’t been declared.” But it turned out that the president declared war the next day, and they dismissed the charges and gave me some sort of award, and a carton of cigarettes!
So anyway, right after I had broken into the armory and handed out the weapons and ammunition, I went on down to Ten-Ten dock. I was just standing there observing when I heard a loud droning sound of aircraft engines coming from in back of me. So I looked around to the east and couldn’t see anything because the sun was right in my eyes. But suddenly seven or eight torpedo bombers came in very low out of the sun and flew right over me, over my right shoulder, heading across toward Battleship Row. I could see them drop their torpedoes, and five or six of them were heading to the USS Oklahoma. I could see that there was going to be trouble and injuries, and I figured I’d better get over there. So I rushed down to Officers Landing and jumped into a launch and tried to get to the Oklahoma. But I never did get there. The Oklahoma exploded right in front of us, turned turtle, and sank in seven minutes before we could even get across to the ship. So I spent the next four or five hours in the water pulling guys out and getting them into the launch. I had started to take frogman training and had the medical portion completed already. I was a second class diver and was studying the underwater demolition portion. So I got into the water, swimming around looking for survivors. There was a lot of burning oil on the water, so I’d dive down underneath, swim around, come up, take a breath, see somebody in the water, go back down underneath, and try to pull them over to the launch. I think I picked up some thirty-five people. We were just trying to save lives. Some of them, when we got to them, weren’t alive any more. Some were badly injured. Some were okay. Luckily I didn’t get hurt. We’d pull these guys out and take them ashore to the hospital if they needed medical treatment.
So this went on for several hours. After that I went back over to the receiving station, and that’s when they told me they were writing me up for a court-martial for unauthorized distribution of firearms. Then the master sergeant gave me one of the old Springfield rifles and told me, “Don’t let anybody in or out who doesn’t belong here.” I said, “Okay.” So, I’m standing there on guard duty and the medical officer came down, and he comes up to the front door and I snapped to attention and saluted him. He said, “Cale, what are you doing here?” And I said, “Well the master-at-arms says nobody in or out who doesn’t belong here.” Then he said, “Cale, pharmacist mates don’t carry weapons. You carry first-aid kits! I’ll have a little job for you later on.”
Well, the little job he had for me later on was being in charge of the burial detail on the USS Arizona. This was a really difficult assignment, because I had become close to some of the guys on the Arizona. We had gone through basic training at Great Lakes together, and some of them were my closest friends in the service. Even later when I was a corpsman on Guadalcanal, I didn’t really get to know any of the Marines when we’d go on patrol, because I was assigned to a different group every day. So, I reported down there on the Friday after the attack with half a dozen people, and we had hip boots and gloves clear up to our elbows, and we started to take off bodies. I went aboard the Arizona, and the back part of the ship was still just above the water. Suddenly I became sick. I’d never been on a battlewagon before, and as I came aboard it was slightly rocking back and forth. I also saw ashes blowing off the ship. Those were ashes of people who had been burned to death, and I wondered how I was going to pick up ashes of some of these burned people. That’s the first time I’d ever been sick like that in my life. It was partly from the ship motion and the smell, but partly because I wasn’t able to do anything, and it was human beings’ remains being blown off the ship in the breeze.
So we went onboard and started to find bodies. There was one coming out of a hatch. I saw his helmet coming out of the hatch, so I went to pick up the helmet and there was no head. I opened up the hatch, and there’s the rest of the body inside, but there was no head. So we picked up that man and put him in a seabag and sent it up to Red Hill, which was the emergency burial place for the Pearl Harbor dead. I was keeping meticulous notes. Every time I picked up a body I thought if I kept a good record of where we found them, they could tell who the person might be because he may be near his duty station. We found a whole bunch of bodies in the fire control tower. There was a ladder that went up there, and they were stacked in there like sardines—solid charcoal about three feet tall. And we’d have to try and spread them apart. An arm may come off or a leg may come off or a head may come off. And we’d just try and get one whole person and put it into a seabag and send them to Red Hill. I guess they were trying to get away from the fire and climbed up there.
So, we could get down as far as the second deck in the back part of the ship, pulling off bodies. And that was very gruesome duty. I worked on that detail for about a week. Most of the rest of my crew were seamen. I just happened to have been put in charge. I realized that some of the bodies we were recovering may have been guys I knew. But at that time we didn’t have dog tags. We didn’t get those until after Pearl Harbor. But on December 7 no one had anything like that, so it was impossible to really identify the bodies, they had all been burned so badly. The ones down in the water, the fish had already started to feed on. Some of them had some things in their pockets, like a little knife or something, but it wasn’t enough to identify them. So I never knew if I took some of my friends off the ship for burial. Toward the end of this duty I reported back in to the master-at-arms, and he said, “I’m sorry Cale, but it looks like you’re headed for a court-martial again.” So I said, “What did I do this time?” He said, “You’re keeping a war diary.” I said, “But I’m not keeping any war diary. I’m taking meticulous notes on where we find the men and how many there are and how many we sent up to Red Hill.” He said, “Yeah, but you can’t keep a war diary in a time of war. And you can’t tell how many men are going and where they’re going.” I said, “There must be some kind of a circumstance where this is allowed, because we are taking off bodies, and these people can’t do any harm to anybody. They’re not going to fight again.” But the master-at-arms said, “Yeah, but that’s the Navy regulation, and you broke it.” So they called me over, took my notes, said it was a war diary, and had them burned. I told the commander, “What the hell is going on? I’m in charge of a burial detail doing my duty. Don’t call me in because I’m keeping a war diary. It’s a war all right, but this is no diary. Those were my notes.” “Let it go,” he said. “What caused it?” I asked. He says, “The chief warrant officer down at the dispensary reported you for doing this.” So I went down there and asked this chief, “Why did you do that?” He says, “You haven’t given me any alcohol lately.” I was in charge of the pharmacy and laboratory, and every once in a while I’d give him a pint of 180-proof medical alcohol. After they finally found out what this was all about, they gave me another award, and another carton of cigarettes! And I still don’t have any court-martials in my record.
Shortly after that they assigned me to the First Marine Division, the Fifth Regiment. I’d never been on any duty like that, and they told me I’d learn fast. So they put me in a vehicle and took me over to the Marine camp, which wasn’t too far from Pearl Harbor. Shortly after that we shipped out to invade Guadalcanal. I landed with the Marines there in August 1942. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t been briefed or anything on what was going to happen. I didn’t know what happened in the field. I was trained in trauma wounds, as well as what they called “death and medialogical matters,” which is how to handle dead bodies. But I never had any field training. There were some other people who came with us from the States, and they had to show me what to do. I only had my whites with me, from working in the hospital, so I had to dye them in coffee grounds to get them khaki. So I was wearing a coffee-grounds khaki uniform as a hospital corpsman in the Marines.
I would usually go out with a platoon on patrol. In my pack I had gauze compresses, plasma, blankets, so a wounded guy could be covered up and wouldn’t go into shock, and we always had a lot of sulfa powder.
The first time I went out with a platoon somebody got shot, and they started yelling, “Doc, corpsman!” You run out and try to help, and that’s when you may get shot. And getting shot at was quite a bit different from anything I’d experienced before. I never got the feeling anyone was shooting at me at Pearl Harbor. The first guy that I had to deal with on Guadalcanal was already dead. Many times when you went out to fix somebody up he was already dead. All you could do was put him over on the side, take his dog tags, and remember where you put him so you could pick him up on the way back if you were continuing the patrol. We’d either send the wounded back with somebody, or we’d pick them up on the way back.
When I’d get called over to someone who’d been shot, the first thing to do was to find out what happened, to figure out the nature of the wounds. A lot of times they’d be bleeding underneath their uniforms, and you couldn’t tell what kinds of wounds they had unless you got to him and his arm was blown off or his leg was blown off, or he got shot in the head. But he may have a sucking wound in the chest, a hole in his lungs, and he’d be having a hard time breathing, then you’d try and patch the hole up so he wouldn’t be losing his air. But if there was bleeding from underneath the uniform, you would have to cut the uniform off of them. You’d cut the pants leg down the seam and split it open, or cut open their shirt. The first thing was to try and stop the bleeding. If you could, you’d try to put on some kind of tourniquet between the wound and the heart. Then you’d sprinkle a lot of sulfa powder over the wound area, patch them up, give them a shot from a morphine Syrette, and bind their wounds. Some of them went back to duty, and some of them you’d have to call for a stretcher to haul them back to the first-aid tent.
But these Marines were really tight with each other; you know, there is that “Semper Fi” stuff in the Marine Corps. They all had trained together, and everybody looked out for the other people. So when one of the Marines would get shot, his buddies would get real concerned and try to help. I was an outsider, but for them the corpsman was the main person who could save their lives, and they’d protect the corpsmen against anything. In that way the corpsman was the best buddy they had! There wasn’t anybody else who was going to come out and patch them up when they got shot.
The conditions were very miserable on Guadalcanal. It was very hot and rainy, and especially hot and humid at night, and there were lots of mosquitoes. We all took those great big orange malaria pills, which turned us yellow. Even though we were taking the pills, a lot of guys got malaria anyway. People would get a lot of bites. It was so hot at night that some of the guys would strip down, and then the mosquitoes would bite them. I kept my clothes on to try to minimize the bites, and we had some mosquito repellent you could rub on your body. But the problem was that for some skin areas that were exposed, like your neck, you would perspire and dilute the repellent, and that’s where the mosquitoes would bite.
I was on Guadalcanal for a month or two. Then one day I got orders to report for duty to Illinois! This was a pretty big shock, and of course I thought this was great, first because I’d get off Guadalcanal, and second because I was from Illinois, and that’s where I had wanted to go in the first place. I went back through Hawaii and had to spend some time there. They did all kinds of testing on me to make sure I didn’t have malaria or any other diseases. While I was there, on December 12, 1942, I got married to a woman I’d met when I was stationed there before the war. And then we moved to Illinois, and I never got back to the Pacific during the war.
While I was based in Illinois, my wife thought it was too cold. She was from Hawaii and wanted to go back there. So I requested a transfer, and it took six different assignments before I got back to Hawaii, but we finally got there in 1947.
I have never had problems with bad dreams or nightmares from my various experiences. I often wonder, geez, I’ve seen people in bad shape at Pearl Harbor, and people shot and dying at Guadalcanal, and I don’t dream about it. I just don’t think about it. I’ve never been back to Guadalcanal, and I’ve never wanted to go back. And I’ve never wanted to go back to Korea or Vietnam either.
I’ve always liked living in Hawaii. I met my wife there, I got married there, and I’ve lived there since the late 1940s, except when I had assignments to Korea or Vietnam. But in all that time of living in Hawaii, I never went over on the USS Arizona Memorial, because I knew my friends from basic training had been killed on that ship. When I came back from Vietnam in 1974, that’s the first time I went over to the Memorial and looked at the list of names of the dead they have there. I went down the list and thought, “I knew that guy, and that guy, and that guy….”