WWII Heroes: We Were Just Doing Our Jobs

by Minton, Linda E.

  “In Norfolk we loaded supplies and headed for the canal. This was interesting to see those little machines called mules pull our big ship through the canal. We got liberty in Colon, a small town in the canal zone.

  Hawaii and Guam

  “Next stop, Hawaii. We were there for three days, and everyone got liberty at least once. The enemy had made a mess of our navy there. Next was Guam. Our purpose in being there was to pick up the wounded and transport them to Hawaii. We were there long enough for some of the crew to get liberty. I was among that group. In Guam some of us went to play on the sandy beach. The Japanese living in caves fired some shots at us.”

  Asia

  Then Glen went on to Asia. “The next stop was a long ride, and we had some bad weather. I think we were out there for thirty days without seeing land. More wounded servicemen were collected in Saipan. From Saipan we went to Iwo Jima to pick up any servicemen fighting for the Allied group.

  Japan

  “The next stop was on to Nagasaki, Japan. What I saw was unbelievable! The atomic bomb was very small compared to what we have today. It completely destroyed one city and killing many people. Many of these bodies were still on the ground five weeks after the explosion of August 9, 1945.

  “The smell was awful...dead, burnt flesh. There were over 50,000 people killed. The only ones that survived were the people hidden in caves underground when they heard the planes approach.” Later, he added, “many things were incinerated, except the valleys were green. Whenever the captain went on land, he had his own big black four-door sedan.

  “The marines were there before us, so our captain wired Admiral Halsey and told him that his men had not had liberty since Pearl Harbor. We had just come from Pearl about two months ago, but the admiral thought the captain was referring to the bombings in 1941. Anyway, the whole ship’s crew, except those on duty, were given a party! The marines supplied the trucks for us to ride in and gave us a tour. Each sailor was given two case of beer.” Glen didn’t drink, so he had a lot of friends.

  “I remember seeing a bomb factory that had rows of empty bomb cylinders all lined up. Also, there was a bombed out submarine factory where subs stood upright instead of the way you think about seeing them. I was told that there were ninety Americans there; they were not servicemen and women but were missionaries and people of that caliber. I did see the detail carrying boxes twelve inches by twelve inches by twelve inches. [the remains of the Americans that were killed] This was after we had returned to the ship from our party. I never want to see what I saw on the tour again.

  Hawaii

  “The next morning we set sail for Hawaii. We made a stop in the China Sea for the night; then, the next morning, one of the anchors was stuck. The anchor windlass would not work, so the captain ordered the chief machinist mate to cut the chain with a torch. The chain was cut and permitted to drop to the bottom of the China Sea, about five miles deep. The next day we hit the worst typhoon we had ever encountered! I had learned to walk on the deck, but I felt very sorry for the soldiers we were carrying to Hawaii. Hundreds of these guys, hanging over the deck rail trying to vomit.

  “The ship was being tossed about so badly that the cooks could not prepare hot meals. So the cooks got out the peanut butter and bread. We were permitted to make our own sandwiches. The weather was so bad that for four days our ship stayed in the same spot.

  “Now we are headed back to Hawaii to unload the human cargo. Also, we had a lot of Australians. We were there for two days, and two days of liberty again. September 10, 1945—we are in the Panama Canal again and up the East Coast to Norfolk. The war is over, and we want to go home.”

  Were you ever shot at while you were in the military?

  “Last trip before we came home, somewhere in the China Sea or the Pacific, we were shot at for three days. We didn’t take it seriously. We joked that they didn’t get us! They were using six-inch shells. We could see red streaks of shots.

  “My commander pleaded with me to re-up, but I had enough. I was homesick for Louisville, Gamaliel and Tompkinsville, so I signed up to come home, July 1946.”

  Should the United States have used nuclear bombs to end the war?

  “They [the Japanese] were going to kill that many more of us. Yes, they should have done it. Stop this silly war!”

  Dr. Halbert Gillette—US Navy

  The military is “a feeling of belonging to something special. I still miss it today.”

  In 1944, at age seventeen, Hal enlisted in the navy in Galesburg, Illinois. He had attended Galesburg High School. Coming from a large family of ten children, he was the oldest child, with eight of his siblings still living. He participated in the first helicopter development squad—VX3 development.

  Hal spent his time in the military in Miami; Kingsville, Texas; and Key West. He had prepared to go to the Pacific but found out the war was over; he didn’t have to go. He participated in the seaman to admiral program and made lieutenant commander by the time he left the military.

  He is hard of hearing today due to the firing of the five-inch guns on the carrier and destroyer. The only protection was wads of cotton.

  One interesting story was about the time he spent in Key West, Florida. In the late 1960s, he guarded President Nixon in Guam. He was in charge of a security detail. Hal said of Nixon, “He was great!”

  When Hal and Dotty were first married, they lived in Key West. Dotty said they went to ten-cent movies while they lived there. Dotty walked around looking for a place for them to live. She found a place that was over a bar and located next door to Margaret Truman’s laundry. On their first night, the bed was full of termites, and there were scorpions on the floor. Needless to say, the next day she looked for a new place to live! Hal got to shake Truman’s hand when he was visiting the Truman Little White House in Key West. The Truman Little White House, built in 1890, was the presidential getaway for many presidents.

  Later in Hal’s military career, he was in Japan, where he met with senior officers from other countries on a destroyer in the Mediterranean. During this time, he was teaching at a mine warfare school.

  After spending thirty years in the navy, Hal left and taught school for thirty years. Hal was able to attend the University of Nebraska and went on to get his doctorate later in life. He and Dotty had four children—three sons and one daughter. One of his sons was killed while climbing a mountain in Switzerland.

  Hal ended with this joke: “The marines are part of the navy? Yes, the men’s department!”

  Should the United States have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan?

  “Absolutely, glad for it. Thank goodness for it.”

  Hal said the military was, for him, “a feeling of belonging to something special. I still miss it today.”

  Wayne Guerin—US Navy Seabees

  “There wasn’t anything that Seabees couldn’t do. They built roads, and they built buildings.”

  “There are three things that I never learned to do—never tasted wine, whiskey, or beer or any alcohol in my life; never smoked a cigarette in my life; and never learned to curse. Just some things that my mother and dad told me not to do.” Wayne grew up in the hills of Stewart County, Tennessee, with four brothers, all of who were in the military.

  Pearl Harbor

  “I was a freshman or in eighth grade at that time. I registered on February 11, 1944. I was called to be examined a month later in Georgia. There were two busloads of us. By November I was ready to go overseas.”

  “In June 1944 I went into the navy in Nashville, Tennessee. I took my boot training at Camp Peary, Virginia. I was eighteen years old, and a few of the boys were even younger.

  I was aboard ship in San Francisco in November 1944. “I was assigned to the Seabees and went overseas to Hollandia Bay, New Guinea. We gathered up about a thousand marines. There wasn’t any place for them to sleep, but they just laid down on the deck. They were getting ready to invade Luzon and Manila. We transported them as far as the island of Leyte, whe
re they went ashore.

  “We stayed there for several days because the army would not let us go ashore. They didn’t have time or personnel enough to guard us, because we were a noncombat outfit. We were there to prepare and repair the airstrips. The bombers were taking off every day, and quite frequently got torn up by landings, take-offs, and bombs and what have you.

  Leyte

  “They moved us over to another island sixty miles away—Leyte. That was the first island invaded by MacArthur and his army. This was in the last week of October, and I had arrived much later. We did carry carbine rifles, that was all. So we went over to Samar in December.”

  One event Wayne described involved his ship, the HMS Sommelsdyk, which was owned and managed by the Netherlands. The Sommelsdyk, built in Rotterdam around 1941, was used during WWII. At the end of the war, it was returned to the Netherlands. The ship was repaired enough to sail, and it returned to Pearl Harbor to be further repaired.

  Ship is torpedoed at Samar

  “I had worked KP all day and was on deck. The ship was torpedoed in our number one hold, in the front of the ship, and we took on water. The hold on the ship was about the size of a boxcar. This ship was huge, about six hundred feet long. We were anchored out in the bay about a mile and started taking on a lot of water. So the only thing they could do was crank up the engine and run [the ship] aground as far as it would go. The bow hit the ground, and we were about a half mile from shore. It was leaning to one side, and we were given orders to abandon ship.”

  Wayne got a little upset when he recalled the rest of the story. “It was Christmas night, and some of the men were sitting up on the rails talking to one another. When the torpedo hit, some of the men went into the sea. Well, the first thing we did was throw out the life preservers. A lot of the men were thrown overboard. The plane went down in the water. The sad thing was the Jap that dropped the torpedo was fished out of the water wearing a US life preserver! One of the Filipino guards on the shore got him. I saw him dead, lying in the back of a dump truck. We lost a few men; I don’t think it was more than eight or ten people. One guy broke his leg going down a ladder, but most of us got ashore OK.” This was at Samar, a much larger place than Leyte.

  Wayne went on to explain, “We had four LSTs. Many of the LSTs were built in Evansville or Pittsburgh, pulled alongside the ship, and we had these rope ladders, or cargo nets, over the side of our ship. It didn’t take long to get a bunch of young men off the ship. The LSTs transported us into the harbor.”

  He recalled driving a truck out the front of an LST, where the door dropped down in the front of the LST. After that “we went ashore with nothing besides what we had on. It took a few days for them to get our things out of the ship.

  Tacloban, Philippines

  “The Filipino people were nice to us, and we tried to be nice to them. There was this old Catholic priest that came down to the shore where all these men, probably about twelve hundred of us, were standing. [The priest said,] ‘Men, this church behind me is mine, and you are welcome to come up and use it to spend the night.’ Some of the men were half dressed, and some with clothes on.” Wayne chuckled. “Well, I was right behind him and spent the night in one of the pews!

  “The first night that I got there, I slept at the church. I don’t know how many of them got in there, but they were in the pews and on the floors. It took them a while get quiet and go to sleep. The next day we went up into the mountains, begged, borrowed, and stole what we could from the army, to live for about three months. The army had captured some Japanese food, such as canned wieners and tons of rice, so we ate rice three times a day.” His wife, Gail, said he won’t eat rice now.

  “Then we put up tents to sleep in. The next night we slept on the ground. Eventually we got some cots. We worked then, which was important to do. I always appreciated the old priest coming down and making that offer. Since then I have gone into the computer and found quite a bit about this particular ship and the huge stone church. Apparently he had done this many times before. This church had been used by sailors on nights like this when they came in. This area was in Tacloban, Philippines.

  “Much of the equipment was underwater and had to be redone. We were on the island of Samar for two and half or three months. Then they moved us to Leyte, where we were scheduled to do our work. From then on I spent the rest of my time on Leyte.” He was there until February 1946.

  “Seabees stands for construction battalion. We were all navy, but we did manual work repairing the airstrips and pumping fresh water out of the rivers and the mountains out to the tankers. I know when they invaded Iwo Jima and Okinawa, we learned that we had to furnish water for several days into the tankers. Fresh water was pretty scarce up there. That was our biggest job. We built roads and buildings and repaired everything. Our biggest problem was air raids. They continued to have air raids for clear up to the middle of 1945. They were aiming at the airstrip but missed their target sometimes by about half a mile or more. I worked for the army as well as the navy.

  “I was on was a troop ship with about twenty-five hundred men, plus officers. The officers running the ship were from the Netherlands. Some of the other men were Javanese. I remember them saying... gibberish, which we finally figured out was ‘the boatswain mate to report to the steam room.’ We were on the ship from November 17 to December 25, 1944.”

  Wayne summed up the Seabees by saying, “There wasn’t anything that Seabees couldn’t do. They built roads, and they built buildings.”

  Brothers Finding Each Other

  Wayne’s brother, Ray, was also in WWII and in the army. He was stationed nearby and would come up to Leyte to visit Wayne.

  “My brother came up to eat with us on weekends, because the food was better in the navy,” Wayne explained. “He was about my size, and I would slip him a pair of dungarees and a shirt, and he would go through the chow line with us. We managed to get away with it.” His brother has since passed away.

  Wayne said that he heard “the largest naval battle that was ever conducted was in Leyte Gulf. It was an unpleasant time. The Japs came down from the big island of Luzon and made bombing runs. They were not very successful. Any airstrip that they could tear up, we had to repair. The airstrips are made of coral. We furnished this machine that used the coral that they would dig out of the sea. It is like the limestone rock that we would crush. They would roll it out as firmly as they could, and then we had a steel mesh that fit together and hooked. They covered the strip and sometimes planes would hit too hard and had to be repaired. The big problem was when you had an explosion when the plane failed to get into the air properly and the bombs would explode.

  “We had planes that guarded the airstrips from the Japanese bombing raids. We had the Mustangs, the main fighting planes, and the B-24 Liberators. It is a four-engine plane with twin tails, and they would leave in the morning and fly to Formosa or Taiwan.”

  Japanese prisoners

  They captured many Japanese who were hiding in the hills. “We would find them half-starved and bring them back to camp. At one time there were about five hundred Japanese prisoners in camp. There were about fifty soldiers guarding them day and night. We fed them and took care of them. Doctors took care of their injuries, and if one of them died, we buried them. We weren’t mean like the Japanese were. It is hard for me to forgive what the Japanese did. Then they would ship them out to other places.”

  Wayne reminisced, “It was an interesting time for an eighteen-year-old person who had never been anywhere to speak of, except in the hills of Tennessee. I don’t recall any sailor griping about anything. I never heard anything like that. I am really proud to say that.” However, he said, “Now, there were arguments or fist fights, but that’s what happens with a bunch of young men.” Like many men who enlisted during WWII, two or three would decide to join the military together. Wayne had a picture of himself and three other guys from his area.

  What did you think of dropping the bomb on Japan?

&
nbsp; “I think it was the best thing that they ever did. I could give you a reason, if you want. I don’t see any difference, if you had a brother and he was going to be killed. Shooting him with a rifle and getting it done at one time. I don’t hold anything against President Truman or anyone that made the decision. Because there is no doubt in my mind that it saved a lot of lives. The Japanese intended to use all civilian people that were able to walk and carry a gun to protect those four big islands. I think we saved more Japanese lives than we did American. I really do. If we had invaded each of those islands with rifles, bazookas, and cannons bombs, I think we would have killed a lot more people than we did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima! I think it did end the war. Every one of my buddies was happy, because we had seen so many terrible things that the Japanese had done. So I am for it. I hope it is never used again.”

  Did you see any shows or movie stars?

  “I saw the all-soldier show, This Is the Army, written by Irving Berlin, who, dressed in his WWI uniform, attended the show.”

  Irvin Herman – US Navy

  “The Japanese were hiding away from the beaches on the island.”

  Irvin, born and raised in Pennsylvania, graduated from high school in May 1943. On August 9, at age seventeen, he joined the US Navy and reported to the US naval training station at Great Lakes, Illinois, for eight weeks of boot camp. Next, on November 1, 1943, naval training radio school followed in Indianapolis, Indiana, for five months of schooling to become a radio operator.

  By March 15, 1944, Irvin was on his way to Oceanside, California, by train. He joined the JASCO, or Fourth Joint Assault Signal Company. The 4th JASCO consisted of navy radiomen and signalmen and marine communications and supporting personnel. They trained on the sandy beaches of Alyso Canyon outside of Oceanside, digging foxholes and setting up radio equipment.