After graduating from Rapid City High School I attended the South Dakota School of Mines for one year, then received an appointment to West Point but flunked the physical. I had a malocclusion—a couple of my molars didn’t touch just right. So the second year at the School of Mines I wore tooth braces. Then I changed my mind about West Point and instead attended the Naval Academy.
I graduated from the academy on the seventh of June 1944. Then I was sent to a training school for the operation of LCSLS (Landing Craft Support-Large). Basically they were gunboats, 158 feet long and 300 gross tons, crewed by sixty-five enlisted men and six officers, and armed with rocket launchers, 20mm, 40mm, and .50-caliber antiaircraft guns, and a 3-inch gun up in the bow. The LCSLS were no speedboats and could cruise at only about eleven knots.
In August I was appointed captain of LCSL 121 and sent to Boston to put her in commission. In December we went down to Chesapeake Bay for our shakedown cruise. Then we headed for Pearl Harbor by way of Key West and the Panama Canal.
On April, 13, 1945, we departed Pearl Harbor and went out to Eniwetok in the Marshalls, then to Saipan, and then to Okinawa. The trip to Okinawa wasn’t too eventful, but it sure got eventful after we arrived there. We went into Buckner Bay, got resupplied, came alongside an ammunition ship and loaded up with ammo, and a few days later we were sent out to our first assignment.
At Okinawa the Japanese had begun sending swarms of suicide planes—the kamikazes—against our Navy, with such grim results that some fifteen or so warning stations had been established at distances ranging from about forty to seventy miles offshore. They were called RP (Radar Picket) stations, and their primary job was to detect and warn the fleet of incoming kamikazes. Their usual makeup was three or four destroyers plus four LCSLS. The destroyers did the radar detecting so well that the Japanese made them prime targets for attack by overwhelming swarms of kamikazes. And that’s where the LCSLS like mine came in. We were nothing more than floating gunboats, sometimes called the Mighty Midgets because, according to at least one authority, we had more firepower for our size than any other ships in the Navy. So we were sent out to help the destroyers survive by adding our firepower to theirs.
We had been in Buckner Bay no more than a week when we were given our first assignment: to join LCSL Flotilla Four at RP 15, which was the northernmost radar picket station between Okinawa and Japan. And only a couple of days after that—on the night of May 23, 1945, we were hit, and I mean really hit. According to a later report the kamikaze hit us with sixteen different waves over a period of five hours—so many that the destroyers’ radar couldn’t even keep track of them all. But all we knew at the time was that they were swarming in like bees. I don’t know how many other ships got hit, because we were too busy with problems of our own. We and the three other LCSLS were steaming in a diamond formation about a half-mile apart, with us in the rear, when a diving suicide plane crashed right short of us. It didn’t hit us, but the bomb it was carrying exploded so close to our port side that it sprayed us with shrapnel that killed two of our men and wounded six others. Also it blew a big hole in our side and damaged our steering gear, but fortunately it was far enough forward that it didn’t damage the engine room, and we didn’t lose power. One bad thing about those night attacks was that the phosphorescence of your wake would point like an arrow to your ship, and all a kamikaze had to do was follow it.
I was up in the conning tower when the thing blew, and the impact threw me from one side of the conning tower to the other, where I crashed into the captain’s chair and got my rear end severely bruised. I was the senior skipper in our division, so the doctor was aboard my ship. Later he looked at my damage and said, “I am going to give you a citation for a Purple Heart.”
I said, “No Way! Fifty years from now when my kids ask me how I got my Purple Heart, I’d have to tell them I got it for a big bruise on my butt.”
The next morning we were detached because of our dead and wounded, and also needing repair, and proceeded back to Buckner Bay. On the way we came under attack again, and I think we shot down two kamikazes. But however it was, when we returned we were given credit for six enemy planes shot down.
At Buckner Bay we turned over our dead and wounded and then went alongside a repair ship to get patched up. First, though, we had to go alongside an ammunition ship and offload all the ammo we had. Leaving the repair ship I was up in the conning tower and saw discolored water dead ahead. I knew it could mean trouble and told the officer of the deck, “Come left.” Then I proceeded to leave the tower. But somehow his signal down to the helmsman had gotten screwed up. When you go down the steps from there you are facing aft, so I saw our stern was swinging in the wrong direction. I ran into the pilot house and told him, “Engines back full!” but it was too late. By that time we had run up on a coral reef. When the tide went out we were sitting up there high and dry as if we were in dry dock. Well, we had been at sea ever since Boston, which was about three months ago, so we took advantage of it to clean out our strainers and perform other hull maintenance.
The fleet commander had put in a recommendation that night for me for the Silver Star. Then on the next morning he saw us upon that reef and sent in a letter of admonition. I didn’t get the Silver Star; I got the Bronze Star with a combat V. I was told by one of my friends on Admiral Turner’s staff that the reason was that the letter of admonition and the recommendation for a Silver Star arrived at the same time. A classmate of mine who happened to be his flag lieutenant said the admiral tore them both up and said, “Let’s give him a Bronze Star.”
When the tide came in we floated right off that reef with no bottom damage at all. Then we proceeded back out to the picket station where we suffered a couple more air attacks, but nothing dramatic happened to us at all. However, on the evening of June 11, while we were out there, LCSL 122, skippered by a classmate and good friend of mine, Dick McCool, got hit pretty badly. She was attacked by two kamikazes at the same time. One was shot down just before it got to her, but the other one crashed into the starboard base of her conning tower, and its bomb went on through the ship and exploded on the port side. Dick was on the conning tower when it hit. He had shrapnel wounds and bad burns, but he managed to get over the portside rim of the conning tower, grab hold of the receptacle for the running lights, then drop down to the other deck. By this time the ship was very much on fire, but he went below and pulled out a couple of his sailors from stations down below decks. Another LCSL came alongside and took off the wounded, and we came alongside and helped to fight fire.
Dick got the Medal of Honor for his action that night. I later saw a copy of his citation. It said in part: “Although suffering from shrapnel wounds and painful burns he proceeded to the rescue of several men trapped in a blazing compartment, subsequently carrying one man to safety despite the excruciating pain of additional severe burns. Unmindful of all personal danger, he continued his efforts without respite until aid arrived from other ships and he was evacuated.”
After the war we were up in Tokyo Bay and given the job of running around the harbor taking liberty parties from the big ships up to Tokyo and bringing them back, and that’s how I met my wife. We were picking up this liberty party from the cruiser Columbia, and on the way back the naval aviator that had the observation aircraft on the cruiser was onboard, and I was talking to him about wanting to go into aviation. He said, “We’ve got a great group of nurses coming over from one of the hospital ships and we’re going to have a little dance on the fantail, so why don’t you stay alongside and join us.”
So I sent a message to Flotilla Command that we had some kind of a generator problem and would have to remain alongside the Columbia until we could get it fixed. So we remained alongside, and, to make a long story short, I went to the party with him and met an Army nurse who was there. She was assigned to a hospital in Tokyo, so I would run up to Tokyo every now and then to see her. Finally, before I left Tokyo to come back, we got married. It was a whirlwind romance. We met in the fall and we got married in January. Then she left and was sent back to the States. For our honeymoon, the Army gave us a free week in the honeymoon suite of a big luxury hotel up on Mount Fuji.
When I left I was commander of Task Force something or other—I don’t remember the number. I was the senior skipper of the LCSLS that were returning. We went from Tokyo down to Guam, Guam back to Hawaii, and from there back to Long Beach. I left the ship in Long Beach.
Then I went into aviation training and became a Navy pilot. When I got out of the Navy I went to work for North American Aircraft as what they called a Sales Engineer-Pilot. I was supposed to give demonstration flights for the customers and handle the sales of the airplanes to them. Then I left flying and went fully into the marketing. When I retired I was head of North American’s International Operations, which handles the sales of all their aircraft overseas. I got to travel all over the world, met a lot of good people, and I loved it.