I enlisted in the Navy in September 1943. They gave me a chief petty officer rating to come in, and I volunteered for that.
Then I started my training program. I was supposed to be in the Seabees. But the Navy was organizing Naval Combat Demolition Units (NCDU) and recruiting volunteers. They had us all come into a big auditorium and talked to us about the need for this and what they wanted and so forth. I met some of the needs they were looking for. I was a fair swimmer, and I had explosives experience from handling them in the construction industry.
They convinced me that I would be needed very badly, so I volunteered for that service, even though I realized it would be more dangerous than being in the Seabees. Later I went through training in Virginia, deep-sea diving, SCUBA, re-breathers, and that was the first thing we had to do in shallow water up to seventy or eighty feet deep. As the weather got colder and we could not work in the St. James River they moved us down to Ft. Pierce, Florida, which was a special training program for Naval Combat Demolition Units, and the Scouts and Raiders. I went through that program, which ended up developing into what they call the SEALS today. I was in one of the first units organized, and we were the guinea pigs.
Later, after we completed what they called “hell week” and went through the training, this was in December 1943, we were sent to Honolulu and over to Waimanalo on the Windward Shore of Oahu, and that’s where our base was. Part of our training was climbing those damned mountains up and down and also doing demolition work out there in the water. We were only there for a couple of weeks, but I did get leave in Honolulu. You couldn’t believe Honolulu at that time. Hotel Street down there was nothing but houses of prostitution from one end to the other. You couldn’t believe it. Those buildings were built right to the edge of the sidewalk, with stores on the bottom and living quarters on the top floors. But what they were was whorehouses. As you’d walk down that street, at each place where the door opened to head upstairs, I’m telling you the truth, sometimes there would be 500 men standing in line to get upstairs to visit a girl. And there were hundreds of these places.
I guess they decided we were uncivilized-type people, and they transferred us over to Maui and put us just as far away from humanity as they could. After they got us over there we went through continuous training. About that time they changed our name to Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDT. All this took place in about forty-five days from the time I left the States. Each unit was seven men, and a group of units made up a team, consisting of 120 or 130 men in each team.
We hadn’t known it, but we had been training for the invasion of Roi-Namur while we were on Maui. I’d never heard of Roi-Namur before in my life, or Kwajalein or the Marshall Islands or anything; never heard of them. Our mission was to clear the beaches of any man-made or God-made obstacles that would prevent the Marines from landing.
There was a small island off the southwest tip of Roi-Namur, and the object was to get some Marines on that little island so they could set up artillery and mortars and bombard Roi-Namur. So we went in to that small island southwest of Roi-Namur on the night of January 29, the night before the invasion on the thirtieth. We paddled to the beach in our rubber boats and made sure there were no obstacles that would prevent the Marines from landing. We didn’t really find many obstacles, because most of those obstacles were on the ocean side.
We scouted the island, which was pretty much uninhabited, and the Marines landed and set up their artillery and shelled the heck out of Roi-Namur. The rest of the Marines landed on Roi in the morning. The Marines had their own demolitions people, but they were strictly on land. We had to handle anything in the water. But if something needed to be blown up, we blew it up! However, my combat experience didn’t last too long. The Marines took only two days to secure Roi-Namur. They wiped it out and cleaned it up. They were the damnedest fighting machine you ever saw in your life.
The Japs had all the warheads for their torpedoes stored in one big concrete blockhouse, and all of a sudden the thing just blew up. They say it was the largest explosion in the Pacific during the war, other than the atomic bombs. When that thing blew, it hurled people and concrete 500 yards out into the ocean. Nobody knows what caused the explosion. Some of our people may have blown it up, or one of the battleships may have thrown a big 16-inch shell in there and hit this building, or planes may have dropped a bomb, but somehow or other the explosion occurred. If you go out there on the island today, there now is a hole that must be about ten acres across, and thirty-five or forty feet deep, but it’s a saltwater lake, and that’s the crater that explosion left. I saw the explosion. I was on Roi, and the explosion was over on Namur. I went over later and saw where it blew up.
A couple of days after that I went down to the southern end of the atoll to the island they called Kwajalein. The whole atoll was Kwajalein, and this one island was also called Kwajalein. That is the island where the airport is today. They wanted someone down there to do a piece of work for the Army. The Army had invaded Kwajalein. My team went down there, and that’s where I was injured. I was down about seventy-five or eighty feet in my SCUBA gear working on disabling some mines, and there was an explosion. One minute I was down there working on those mines, and the next thing I knew I was aboard a hospital ship. When that thing blew, the concussion knocked me out and injured me pretty badly.
When I woke up on this hospital ship, they were taking me to an Army hospital on Maui, because I was working with the Army on Kwajalein. All this time I was trying to tell them I belonged to the Navy. After a while they came in and said, “Hey, you belong to the Navy, so we are going to transfer you over to Aiea Naval Hospital on Oahu.” I had internal injuries from the concussion of that underwater explosion. I was there for quite some time, and this was in February 1944 when I got back there. Then in June they put me on the old passenger liner Lurline and transferred me to San Francisco and put me in a Naval hospital in Oakland. Later they transferred me down to a hospital in San Diego. I was getting to where I was able to get up and get around, but they wouldn’t let me out by myself. I would lose consciousness. I would bend over to tie my shoes and I’d black out; that type of thing.
So finally in October they said they’d done all they could do for me, and they asked if I’d like a discharge. All this time I hadn’t seen my daughter who was born in April 1944, so I said, “Hell, give me my discharge. I’ll take it and go home.” So they discharged me in October 1944, and I went home to see my wife and daughter in Atlanta. I still had periods of blacking out, and it was two or three more years before I ever got straightened out. But everything finally worked out.
Like I said, my daughter was born when I was in the hospital recovering from injuries received on Kwajalein. She was less than a year old when I first saw her. She grew up and got married, and she and her husband accepted a job on Kwajalein twenty-three years ago, and they have been out there ever since. They just love it. He is an electrical engineer, chief engineer for the Kwajalein missile range, and chief of instrumentation. Their youngest son was born on Kwajalein.
When my daughter and her husband first moved to Kwajalein, they couldn’t get me permission to visit the island for a long time. It was a closed island because they had a lot of secret stuff going on out there with the missile range. But she knew she had a connection to Kwajalein through me, so she wanted to get me to visit out there. Finally, in the mid-eighties, they got permission for me to visit. The first time I went back I couldn’t visit Roi-Namur, but later on I was able to go there. I recognized things, everything’s still there, and it’s such a small island. There are the Japanese blockhouses and those guns they had pointing out to sea, and they’re still pointing out to sea. Roi and Namur used to be separate islands real close together, and now they’ve bulldozed sand in between them and they’re one island. My son-in-law has about a thirty-foot boat, and we were able to go to the spot where I was injured, out in the lagoon just offshore of Kwajalein. I know exactly where we were when I was injured.
One of my sons went out to Kwajalein five years ago on a job. He worked a year and returned to the States. They rehired him, and he and his wife have been out there nearly two years now and they love it. So my daughter and one son are both working there now. I went to the ceremony for the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion in January 2004 with my other son who works in Boulder, Colorado. We stayed with my daughter and son-in-law while we were there. A most enjoyable visit.
I really don’t know how this happened, that my kids have ended up working and spending so much time on the island where I was injured during the war. Whether it was because my kids grew up hearing about Kwajalein from me, or if it’s just coincidence, I don’t know. But that little island has really become a big factor in our lives.