I was in the Army and trained as a radar operator. We formed up in California and shipped out on a vessel called the Sea Pike. When we started from the coast of California that morning it was nice and warm and the sea was calm, but by afternoon when we were out in open water the wind came up from the north, the sea got rough, and by nightfall I don’t know how many people were sick. There were 2,750 of us on that ship, and except for maybe the crew, I’d say that 95 percent were sick at the same time. I don’t know whether anybody ever ate or not. I never saw or tasted of food for over twenty-four hours, and I was vomiting over and over and over again. There wasn’t anything in me to come up, but I kept vomiting anyway. But after I got over that I never was sick again. We had some more rough water before we got to New Guinea, but I never had any more trouble.
Well, they got us over there and transferred our group to an LST, and we ended up going ashore on an island called Morotai, right next to a bigger island named Halmahera. It turned out that it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I was prepared, and I was expecting almost anything. We knew our job, and the best information they had on Halmahera was that it was a big, long island and heavily defended. The Japs had airfields and fighter planes and coastal defenses and everything. Now, around in behind them was the little island of Morotai, and the best information we could get was that there was only a small force of Japanese on the island. They had started an airstrip there at one time. They had cleared off some of the palm trees and had made a preliminary start on an airstrip, and then they had discontinued it. But they had a small force of men on the island.
A short time before we invaded, a submarine went from Australia up to the waters between Morotai and Halmahera. They intercepted a native in a canoe. They took him on board and got a statement from him, and he described from his own personal knowledge the force that the Japanese had on the island of Morotai. He said they had no coastal defenses or anything like that. So they told us all of that in detail. The Japs knew we were coming, there was no question about that, but they thought we were going to hit the big island of Halmahera and take their airfield and, bang, bang, bang, go from there.
So our unit slipped in behind and hit this island of Morotai. We had rocket ships and destroyers and cruisers, and, sometime before daybreak you could see the flashes of all the guns. What I didn’t know about at that time was the big battleships; they had started from a different point and a different direction, and when we opened up on Morotai they opened up the big guns on Halmahera. So that didn’t give the Japs any time to leave Halmahera and come around and interfere with us. So our forces fired everything they had. They had told us as much as they knew about what to expect, and none of us had any fear that I know of. They called us to breakfast that morning at 2:30 A.M., and for a change we had steak! We had eaten dehydrated stuff for so long! They had moved us from the tip of New Guinea in four days by LST, and they had trucks on the deck of this LST. SO as soon as I finished breakfast I went out and climbed up on top of the highest truck that I could find, so that I could see. I just wanted to see everything that went on, so I stayed up there the whole time while they were bombarding the shore.
After that was over they pulled in close to shore, and we went down a landing net into water about waist deep and waded ashore. General Douglas MacArthur was down the shore just a little ways, but someone carried him in, he didn’t wade! But anyway, so far as I know, not a shot was fired at us from anywhere on shore. I never saw a shot fired there and I never heard of one being fired. It was just a routine affair, and we didn’t think anything about it, hardly.
We got our radar setup that day just as soon as we got ashore. We had a big truck and a big generator that furnished the power, and then it was hooked in to searchlights. You could turn it on automatic and the searchlight would follow exactly where the radar pointed. Or the operator could take it over any time he wished and operate it manually. When he tracked an enemy plane with the searchlight on it, as soon as he released the manual control it’d snap back to automatic control, and the radar would make the light track the plane.
We started unloading our equipment and getting it in operating order, and we worked as hard as we possibly could getting organized and set up. We got through just before dark that night, and soon after dark the first Japanese plane came over. I don’t know what type of plane he was, but we picked him up on radar just like that. A minute or so after we got him on radar, they turned the searchlight on and he was in the beam, just like a butterfly. And the antiaircraft guns brought him down right quick.
We only stayed on Morotai about four days. Out four-and-a-half miles away toward the big island of Halmahera there was a little coral atoll; they called it an island but it was just a coral spot, and they moved our unit out there, out in the bay on this little old coral reef called Sem-Sem. We ended up staying more than a year on that tiny island, and during that year I got off that island one time. They let me go back to the island of Morotai for a day or two toward the end of the war. All that time there were about twenty or so of us on this little island less than a mile long and less than a quarter-mile wide at the widest. It had a higher spot on each end, and in the middle it came down to where at high tide the water washed across—so we were really on two little knolls, and each was only a few feet above sea level. We were on duty day and night. If the red alert was sounded from the mainland or anywhere, we got up immediately and were in action. On Thanksgiving night and on Christmas night—that would have been in 1944—we never got one wink of sleep either night. Just as fast as one air raid was over and the all-clear was sounded—before we could even get undressed—another raid would start and the red alert would go on again. Those two nights were the worst we had. On that Thanksgiving night, over at the airfield on Morotai we lost forty-eight big bombers on the ground, loaded with gasoline and explosives. I never did hear the number of fighter planes and things like that that were lost, but it was bound to be tremendous. With the bombs dropping, those airplanes were exploding, and our little coral island four-and-a-half miles away was just a shakin’.
There was no freshwater on Sem-Sem. They had to bring it to us on barges. They put it in empty gasoline drums, and a whole lot of the time it seemed like they didn’t even rinse the gasoline out of those barrels. You could still see it floating on top of the water, and taste it. That was the only thing we had to drink or cook with or take a bath with in over a year. When the war finally ended I sure was glad to get off that tiny little island!