The draft was right on me, so I went and signed up in the Coast Guard. I volunteered for sea duty. We shipped out to the Southwest Pacific and went across in a cargo ship, an AKA. We got to Hollandia, New Guinea, and there’s where we got our LST. It was quite interesting, and Hollandia was quite a base. We’d go back there for supplies and take a big company of either Marines or Army and make an invasion on up the coast. We must have done about ten or twelve invasions up there. Then we headed to the Philippines, and then we made one over in the Dutch East Indies, over at Morotai.
On an LST there’s an upper deck and then there’s a lower deck, and we’d fill that upper deck and the lower deck with troops, vehicles, or whatever you had for a landing. We unloaded everything out the big bow doors that would swing open when you got to the beach. A ramp would let down and you’d roll things right on to the beach. There was an elevator there in the bow, and you could lower things down from the upper deck and roll it right out on the beach.
I had sixteen months’ duty over there, and it passed pretty quick. We had a Frenchman that was a skipper for a long time, and he was out of New Orleans. He was pretty rough, but he was a brave soul. He’d take our ship and more or less stick his neck out, as well as his crew’s. One night we were in convoy off the coast of New Guinea somewhere. We’d unloaded up the coast and were heading back empty, with just the crew on board. So it’s the middle of the night and one of our LSTS got torpedoed. In those situations the convoy would usually go on in a group, because it was dangerous to stay behind to help a ship that had been hit, to leave the protection of the other ships. But our captain said, “Well, we’re going to stay behind and help this ship.” There was one other LST that stayed back with us to help. There must have been fifteen to twenty ships in the convoy, but two of the LSTS stayed back, and one LST towed the ship that had been hit. One of the destroyers also stayed back with us and tried to protect us. Of course everyone thought the skipper was pretty brave, because we would have been a dead target for more torpedoes.
When that LST got hit, I didn’t hear the explosion, but I heard GQ going off. On our ship the GQ alarm was a bell, and it would be like, “Ring, ring, ring, ring,” a real solid ring, real fast. My GQ station was in the front of the ship near the big gun, a three-inch gun. There was one in the front and one aft. I wasn’t on the gun crew, but I was up there just to help the gunners mates. So I was up there at my GQ , and we stopped to help the other ship. It had been hit but it wasn’t burning, it was listing. Some of the crew of this ship that had been hit were thrown into the water, so I got orders to man the small boat, the LCVP , and I went out and picked up a couple guys that had their life jackets on. It was dark, of course, and it wasn’t real easy to find them. But they were hollering, and even though it was a danger to have any light, we had a flashlight we used to see them. The LCVP was noisy, so I’d have to throttle down and listen for them yelling and then go in that direction.
One of them had been doing guard duty in the aft gun turret, and he just got thrown right into the ocean by the explosion. Luckily he had his life jacket on. You talk about a guy happy to be picked up! He was smiling, and after I picked him up he said that when the torpedo hit, it threw him so doggone high in the air he thought he’d never hit the surface! And when he plunged into the water he thought he’d never come back up.
After I picked those guys up and they were alive, I had a kind of a feeling of accomplishment. My mission had really been taken care of, I’d saved some lives; so I wasn’t near as enthusiastic after that as I was before. I was ready to go home. I had a sort of sense of completion of things.
We had two or three attacks by those suicide Jap planes. There were several times when we got real scared, because you could see that it’s a suicide plane and it’s heading right your way. Of course a lot of times they’d tell you, “Hit the deck!” and we’d lay down, but you’d keep watching. I remember one time one of those Jap planes was heading right toward our ship. He looked like he’d picked us out of all of the rest of the ships around us, and you could even see his smile and everything. He was that close. All the guns were turned loose on him. He was firing away, too, but just before he got to the ship he turned right a little bit through all this ack-ack, and he was weaving right through it and didn’t seem to get hit for some reason. And he turned and headed off down toward a destroyer, and that destroyer got him just like that. This was at Lingayen Gulf. It was really scary. Of course everybody was scared, but we never did get hit.
There were five boys in my family, and I had a brother in the Army and one in the Navy and I was in the Coast Guard. While I was overseas one thing that was real distressing to me was that I lost my brother in Europe. At that time we had a very compassionate skipper. He was a different skipper from the Frenchman. But I never will forget that he wrote my mother the nicest letter, but it was a pretty trying time there for awhile. And it wasn’t too many months afterwards that I was able to come home.
But mainly boredom was the problem, and a lot of people tried to pass it off by reading a few books and magazines. Some of them would just do a lot of extra sleeping. I’d do some reading and try to pass it off that way.
After I came back from sea duty I was stationed up at the Coast Guard base in Seattle. Of course, the war in Europe had just gotten over as I was coming back, and we kind of thought we might have to go back and invade Japan. But then they dropped the bombs and that was that. I stayed in touch with my shipmates for years, and we’ve had a few reunions. I made three or four of them.
But war is for young people. They can take things like that. I think there was something about being a young man out there in the Pacific that probably helped me mature more, and to assess values a lot better. So I guess it had a lot of good effects. It’s a rough experience as you go through it, but I’m glad I went through it. And I’ve always been proud to have played a small part in the war. I think our generation can take some pride in what we did out there in the Pacific during WWII.