I was captain of the football team my senior year in Lepanto, Arkansas. We had a six-man football team there. I had been to a movie on that Sunday afternoon, December 7, and this friend of mine said, “Carl, they’ve bombed Pearl Harbor!” So we went down to the drugstore and stood around there, and half-a-dozen of my buddies came in, and we talked about it and decided why don’t we just go into the Navy. The next day everybody was a little hotter about it, so we called a recruiting officer in Jonesboro, and he came over. We had the whole football team there to sign up. It was the first football team as a group to join the Navy. Well, then we had publicity from all over the United States. They ran pictures of us and talked about us on newscasts. The Navy was taking advantage of this, a whole football team enlisting. It turned out I was colorblind, so the recruiting officer helped me memorize the colorblind test because they didn’t want to lose the captain of the team. It’d make better Navy publicity if they could get us all.
So then we went to Little Rock. Well, I had this leg I’d gotten torn up in football about two or three months prior to that. We were going through the physical, and we were all run through the tests in there naked. Then this old doctor wanted us to jump up on a bench, then jump down. He was watching me all the time, because he saw my leg was swollen. Well, when I jumped that leg locked up on me, and I fell right there on the damn floor. So he came over and said, “Well, Carl, I’m going to have to send you home. You come back and see me in a couple of years after you get well.” And out of the whole damn group often or twelve of us, I was the only one who failed. And that was the hardest thing that ever happened to me in my life. So I went home—all I could do was go home—and the rest of the guys went on. Incidentally, we never lost one member of that football team, not a one. Every damn one survived.
So I went back, and now I was not satisfied in school anymore, so I went to this trade school over in Paragould, Arkansas, and took a course in welding. Then, I went to the shipyards in Mobile, Alabama, but I had to wait there for my eighteenth birthday so I could go to work. From there I went to Memphis, and that was when I finally got to where my leg was strong enough to pass the physical and I could join the Seabees.
I really enjoyed being in the Seabees. I was probably one of the youngest men in my battalion. At the time I went in they wouldn’t accept you if you didn’t have a trade. But I was a welder, and I had worked for a company in Memphis building landing barges. We had six weeks of boot training and then we had an additional six weeks under the Marine Corps.
When we shipped out to the Pacific, we went over on the President Polk to New Caledonia. And immediately they put me in the transportation pool. I didn’t know how to drive a truck, and especially not one of those big old army trucks. We were driving on those little old narrow roads down to the supply depots and back, and we were hauling bombs and that sort of thing. I stayed in that transportation unit until we went to Guadalcanal, and there again I was running a truck. That would have been in August of 1943. I drove a dump truck there, and we worked a little bit on the airstrip there, Henderson Field.
I was in the Seventy-third Seabee Battalion, Company A. The companies were not specialized—we had all various talents in every one. After a while I was taken off trucks and worked with the chief as a grade foreman, spotting grades on roads and airfields, which meant that after the engineers had laid out their stakes for a road or whatnot I was to see that the dozers and dump trucks made their cuts and fills to match the stakes.
Then I worked operating a bulldozer in a coral pit. When we built airfields and roads, they were just as good as airfields and roads anywhere. Sometimes we’d have crews out dredging coral right off the reefs. Other times, like on Guadalcanal or Peleliu, we could find older coral right near shore and we could dig it out of there. But however we got it, we’d haul that crushed-up coral over to where we were working, spread it around and grade it, and then steamroll it until we had a compacted, flat, smooth surface. Then we’d load up water trucks down at the beach with seawater, and they’d haul it over to the airstrip and run up and down the length of that runway watering the coral with seawater. That crushed-up coral was still alive, and those little microscopic coral animals in there would grow together with that seawater keeping it moist, and it would set up like concrete after a few days. It would be just as solid and slick and smooth as paving. These airstrips would end up being bright white, and that was quite a bit different from the asphalt or even the concrete runways we built in the States. If we got an air raid and bomb craters, or if we got potholes, we could just patch it up with more crushed coral, water it down with seawater, and it would be as good as new. That coral was amazing stuff. We could build roads and even some foundations the same way. So for all those runways and roads we built, it was all local material, and we didn’t need to depend on anything coming in from the outside.
ABOVE: Carl Hamilton helped build this blinding white coral airstrip at Munda in the Solomon islands in 1943. These Corsair fighters (of the type Carl saw shot down by friendly fire at Munda, and later flown by Leo Dorsey) have just landed on the recently completed airstrip.
But most of the time, for the Quonset huts or other buildings we were putting up, concrete would work better for the slabs we’d build them on. So whatever concrete that would come in, we’d survey and lay out where they wanted things, pour the slabs, and then put the Quonset huts up on those slabs. Those Quonset huts went together just like a jigsaw puzzle. We’d unpack the parts and lay them out and just put them together. We built some docks, but not many. We were usually moving too fast to make anything very permanent. Instead of docks they used lighters, which were steel pontoons buckled together. They’d go out to the cargo ships and get loaded up and bring things right to the beach.
The first invasion I was in on was at Munda, New Georgia, on up in the Solomons chain. We went in on LSTS. We landed on a little island offshore, and then we crossed the bay in small amphibious vehicles they called “ducks.” And that’s when the action was still going on at the beach. The Marines were already going in, and they were in front of us. I think when I went in it was about the middle of the day. I don’t think I was afraid, I don’t think I had any fear, but there were a lot of thoughts going through my mind, like, “Where am I going? What’s going to happen? “ You didn’t really have time to be afraid because you were busy all the time, and moving. And it was so danged muddy—we were in mud up to our knees when we hit the beach.
We didn’t get fired on when we were landing. We were firing at them with our artillery, and we had our observation planes directing our fire. The Marines had the Japanese driven back a mile or two. We shot down one of our own planes, and that was the second plane in our history to be shot down by our own artillery. He was an F4U, a Corsair fighter, flying low. We were lobbing those mortar shells in, and one of them hit his wing and knocked the plane down. But even though he was low he somehow got out, and his chute had just opened when he landed in a tree. A couple of guys from our outfit went over and got him out of the damn tree, and I guess he was okay.
When I got to the beach, my buddy and I took a Jeep back to where we were going to set up a little temporary camp at the airfield. The Japs had started to build a coral airfield there. Our job was to immediately get that airfield setup so planes could land. We started out in that darn Jeep and got maybe a quarter of a mile when the Jeep mired down in mud up to the doors, and we spent the better part of that day trying to winch it out.
So we got that airstrip at Munda repaired and expanded and built more taxiways and roads with coral and set up Quonset huts and got things arranged into a nice base there.
Our next invasion was Peleliu. They brought that First Marine Division in there, and God, they were tough fighting boys. Of course those Japanese were dug into those coral tunnels, and they couldn’t get them out. It was just a maze of tunnels through those coral hills.
We had a lot of confusion on the beach when we into Peleliu. If you can imagine all these hundreds of men going in and the shelling from battleships and cruisers going on, and all you can see is all this firing and smoke. We were still on the ship, just far enough in to be out of rifle range. There were some rifle bullets that did hit the ship, and one or two guys got hit. Then the Marines started in as the first wave. After that they started dumping those danged pontoons off the LSTS, and we were in the water towing those things in and buckling them together to make a floating jetty. Eventually we built a big causeway where they could unload the tankers and so forth.
Then we moved right on in, and within two or three days the Marines had got the Japs pushed off the airfield into the hills a quarter of a mile beyond, and we started filling the holes in the runway. There again, like on Munda, the Japs had built a small coral airstrip, and our job was to get it operational and then expand it. Our bombers had made craters in the airstrip, and the Japs had filled the holes in with coconut logs. But that made them mushy, so we had to go in with shovels and drag buckets or whatever and dig out those craters and then fill them with good coral, which would be solid. I think it took us about two or three days to fix up that airstrip. We had to start taking coral out of a hill near the shore, where we found our source. And we used up most of that hill.
Our planes taking people to the Philippines, to Tacloban or to Luzon, would land at Pelelieu. The men would stop at the transient camp and wait until there were aircraft available to take them on to the Philippines. There was an island just across from Peleliu called Angaur where the bomber base was. They landed all the big planes over on that base. We carried equipment back and forth over there, but we never set up our camp there. The Seabees setup a good permanent-type camp on Peleliu, and we lived quite comfortably there after we got things together.
I hit the States right when the war ended. I had been overseas about twenty-eight months and had enough rotation points to come home for ninety days leave. So I got on board the train and came back to Arkansas. I had been home in Lepanto about two days when they dropped the first atom bomb. And I thought it was so great that we finally had something that would stop that war.