Billy Fyffe: World War II (Part 2)
Interviewed by Joanne McMillen
Interview date June 2004
Q: OK, as I read through this, I’m going to reflect on some things and
have Billy respond. You were out on the bridge the whole – does any one stay
inside of the destroyer when this happens, or is everyone always out on the
bridge?
A: Well, no, no, wasn’t that many on the bridge.
Q: OK.
A: There was a captain, exec, and the helmsman, me, and the signalman
up there. That’s all.
Q: And – I know we talked about this last time, but can you tell me
again exactly what your position was, what your job was at sea that day?
A: I was the CO’s speaker during battle.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: I wore a set of headphones and he relayed the message to me and I
relayed it to whoever it should go to in all the departments of the ship.
Q: Right. So. . .
A: If they said, “Start firing gun two and three,” then that’s what
I’d say – I’d say “Guns two and three start firing.” And they would.
Q: Were in proximity to you or at times did you have to move about the
top . . .
A: No, the telephone. They were quite a ways away.
Q: OK. They had phones also?
A: Yes.
Q: Now you saw – did you say you saw people coming in on glider
planes? The Japanese coming in on . . .
A: No, that was the day before that. The night before that happened.
Q: OK.
A: We was over there, but they were coming in and attacked Tacloban
airstrip. That was on the east side of Leyte. We were on the west side of Leyte
at Ormoc . . .
Q: Ah-huh.
A: . . . delivering a bunch of troops there.
Q: And the position of the destroyer was to protect troops as they
landed.
A: We were keeping lookout.
Q: Guard?
A: Guard the perimeter of that bunch of troops that was being put
ashore.
Q: I guess I had visions of the captain or someone needing to give the
orders for everyone to jump overboard – is that what happens?
A: He did. That’s what happened, yes. When we found out that our ship
was going down and he gave orders to abandon ship, well, I wasn’t going to go. I
was going to stay with him and he says “No, you’re not.”
Q: Ah-huh. Is the captain always the last one to leave the ship?
A: The captain was the last one to leave that ship.
Q: Did he make it out alive?
A: Yeah. He died this last summer in July up in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
He was 93 years old.
Q: He led a full life, didn’t he?
A: He sure did. He graduated out of the naval academy in 1933 in Group
A.
Q: You were in good hands.
A: Oh yeah, yeah, good hands.
Q: Is it difficult when you abandon ship to swim away quickly before
the whirlpool of the ship starts pulling you in?
A: Well, you can feel it, you can feel it, but you have got to get
away from the ship.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: If (garbled) when it goes by you, well, you’re going under if those
propellers are still going, absolutely.
Q: Did you say also there were sharks in the water?
A: Yeah, isn’t that funny? The water was full of sharks and none of
them attacked us. Nobody got attacked by sharks.
Q: I guess they weren’t hungry that day.
A: I don’t know. It must have been that time of the morning or
something. It was cool. Oh man, if it’d been warm out there, we’d have a lot of
them bitten by sharks, but they didn’t attack.
Q: Do they provide you with weapons to use when you’re in the water if
something like a shark should try and attack you? Do you have knives or – I
guess a gun would not be any good at that point?
A: Some of them had knives. Some of them had guns strapped around
their waist. But most of them didn’t have a thing.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: Absolutely nothing. Just like me – I didn’t have anything. Except
in my hip pocket in a waterproof pouch I had a list of everybody on that ship
and where everybody lived.
Q: Ah-huh. Was it your job to notify family?
A: No, it was my job to get that information off that ship so that the
captain could use it to notify the families.
Q: I see.
A: I carried that it my hip pocket all the time.
Q: Ah-huh. So you did have a few life rafts, is that right?
A: Had a few, yeah.
Q: Were these blow-up rafts or were they rafts that were on the other
side of the ship?
A: They were cork rafts. You know, you’ve seen the big ones about like
that and they come in a round circle like that?
Q: OK.
A: OK, that’s what they were.
Q: How long did you stay in the water before the other destroyer came
by?
A: Well, I don’t know. Oh, probably around an hour. Maybe a little
longer than an hour.
Q: OK. I just asked you that question and I’m reading through this and
it said that you were in the water for two – two and a half hours.
A: We could have been. That’s been a long time ago.
Q: Sure. And you wrote this 60 years ago, so I’m sure your
recollection then was pretty good.
A: It could have been.
Q: What happened to you after you got rescued? Did they pack everyone
up and put you on another destroyer right away or did they give you a few days
leave?
A: No, they took all – the survivors – and we were transferred from
that destroyer to an AKA, that’s a supply ship. And on that ship they had, ah,
they knew who needed the sailors out there. And a lot of them just went from my
ship to another ship out there. A lot of them went back to new construction. The
commanding officer, the executive officer, and myself, we were a different
breed. We got on a C-47 transport there, then flew down to, ah, oh, probably
about a thousand miles from there and then got on a C-54 and flew from there to
Honolulu. And then we got into Honolulu and the only way to get out of there was
a Pan American clipper. And the clipper was loaded with generals and everybody
else going on a hay-day, and they pulled everybody off and only the three of us
got on.
Q: Um.
A: We were loaded with aviation fuel and flew from Honolulu to San
Francisco and if unable to land, they’d go to San Diego and if they couldn’t
land there they’d come back to Hawaii. When we got into San Francisco, there was
a hole opened up in the sky and this pilot took that little dude right down
there and landed. Other than that, we’d probably have gone to San Diego. If not
there, we’d have come back.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: See, they didn’t have things then to help the pilots land like they
do now.
Q: Right.
A: They can land now in fog or rain or anything, but you couldn’t do
that back then.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: Didn’t anybody get off that ship except the three of us.
Q: Did you think about calling family at that time?
A: Oh no!
Q: OK.
A: I didn’t call my family until I got to Washington, D.C.
Q: And how long after that?
A: How long after what?
Q: After you’re destroyer went down?
A: Well, it went down on the seventh of December and on the – let me
see, probably the tenth of December – seventh – oh, later than that – probably
the fourteenth of December we were in Washington D.C. And I was on West G
Street, three blocks from the White House, in a little hotel like – hotel place
there. Couldn’t have any visitors in there. It was full of gum-shoe people.
Q: Full of what?
A: Gum-shoe people – CIC, ah . . .
Q: I’m not familiar with that term.
A: Well, Counter-Intelligent Corps people.
Q: OK.
A: And they were – they’d ship out of there one night and go to Russia
and be back there in about three or four weeks and you’d see them back in there
again.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: You went into your room and then if they happen to see you go in
and they punched a button and if you didn’t answer it they were at that door
seeing why you didn’t answer that.
Q: Was that for your safety?
A: (laughing) I don’t know.
Q: Because they were worried about you leaving?
A: No, they were worried about me having a woman in my room!!
(laughing)
Q: (laughs) Were you anxious to get back on another destroyer after
that happened?
A: Well, not really. I wasn’t. I’d been on half a dozen of them. I
wasn’t ready to go back to another one.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: That was the third destroyer that the skipper had lost. He was just
a passenger on another one that was lost.
Q: And for you? Was that the first time your destroyer went down?
A: Well, I got several of them beat up very badly underneath me and I
was transferred to another one and off we went again.
Q: OK.
A: I worked for, ah, a commodore named Abercrombie. And he looked
after me like I was a hunk of gold. I went with him. He had a group of nine
ships and when he left that ship he took me with him wherever he went.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: We’d be on one ship and it would get beat up pretty bad and he’d
say, “We’re going here. Get ready and pack and in ten minutes be down on the
gang plank.” So in ten minutes I’d be waiting for him. We’d get in a boat and go
to another destroyer.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: And we’d sail that maybe just three months or four months or maybe
two weeks then we’d go to another one. Eventually we got back to the one that
was damaged. They moved us around a lot–
Q: Sounds like it.
A: I guess that way there I got into more battles than a lot of them.
More dodging bullets than a lot of them did. I should have been getting
submarine pay because those destroyers stayed about half the time underwater
anyway – submerged!
Q: (laughs) Was that higher pay, submarine pay?
A: Oh yeah, submariners got higher pay.
Q: So you ended stating that in the end the Japs paid their price.
A: Well, they did. Yeah, they did.
Q: Yeah. I know sometimes they have, well, what I’m hearing from you
is there wasn’t an attempt to keep men together from one destroyer to the next?
A: Well, you couldn’t do that.
Q: OK.
A: It was a matter of necessity. Wherever they needed you, that’s
where they sent you.
Q: Ah-huh. Unless, you just stated you had rapport with a commodore
and . . .
A: Oh yeah, I sure did.
Q: And so wherever he went, he tried to keep you . . .
A: He didn’t try – he did! (laughs)
Q: It’s been a week since we last had a conversation.
A: Yes.
Q: Have you thought about any other stories that . . .
A: Oh, yeah, a lot of them.
Q: . . .that you’d like to talk about more?
A: I don’t think you’d want to hear about two or three battles we had.
Q: And the reason for that would be . . .?
A: Well, they were kind of messy – kind of gory.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: When – this one battle we were in, we lost four heavy cruisers –
the United States did. One was – one was Australian – Canberra, Vincennes,
Quincy, and Astoria – all those were heavy cruisers – lost them. One battle we
were in. But that night the Japs lost everything they had. That’s when this – we
hit this ammunition ship with a torpedo – that fire went up like that and made a
ball up there and it was just – lit everything up just like daylight – midday.
Q: As it close enough to your destroyer that you felt . . .
A: No, well you could hear it and see it.
Q: OK.
A: You couldn’t feel the concussion from it, ‘cause that was quite a
ways off. I imagine we were at least five or six miles away from it.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: But she went up – good-by! Of course, in another battle there at
Guadalcanal we were doing in twenty knots and went right over where the North
Hampton went down. She went down and we went right over where she went down. We
didn’t slow up, either.
Q: You knew she had just gone down shortly before?
A: Oh we could see her!
Q: You could see her, OK.
A: But they must have hit her pretty good because she took on water
fast.
Q: Ah-huh. You didn’t see any survivors.
A: No. Midnight. I never saw such dark nights anywhere in my life as
out there. Wasn’t any moon and I mean they were just pitch black. I mean they
were black. And we were using our radar and we knew where we were. I mean, our
sonar – one was SG and ASC. The SG was telling us where we were. It was taking a
picture of the whole surroundings. Every time it would go around you could see
where we were. And just showed them – just like a map – an outline of a map.
Q: Ah-huh. What was worse, getting torpedoed or having planes fly
overhead and shoot down at the destroyer?
A: Take your pick!
Q: They both sound terrible to me, but I don’t know.
A: Both of them are rather deadly!
Q: If I were on board if I felt like I had more a chance of beating it
or moving from it. .
A: But we never – I saw that day there, we never had a – we’ve had
some close calls of planes knocked down and they were just come in and ten feet
from the side of the ship, his wing would go in the water and that’d be it. And
then one went off across our bow one time and just everything got gasoline on
it. And he was knocked down.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: But one never got that close to us before.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: I saw a lot of them knocked down. We had some peculiar ammunition
back then. We had ammunition that was called centrifugal fused, and it would –
if you shot a shell and if it was going toward something, it would just build up
a resistance as you went to it – and the minute it started passing any
resistance by it, it would blow up.
Q: Huh.
A: So we got several airplanes that way. They shot – I saw – I saw – I
was standing there watching – I was on the bridge and I saw them shoot a shell
out there and just as it passed this dang Zero that was coming in, it blew up
and that Zero just – just pan caked right in the water, just like that. Yeah,
they had a lot of good ammunition out there. A lot of dangerous times.
Q: Were you ever in a position where you were at battle and you were
low on ammunition that you know of or were you pretty well supplied?
A: I don’t think so. We were low on food a lot of times. They did
pretty well replacing the ammunition. Those torpedoes – man we shot a lot of
torpedoes. We had a better torpedo than the Japs did and they wanted one of
ours, but I don’t think they ever got one. When we sank our ship – when we sank
our ship – before I got off it, they were jettisoning the torpedoes to get rid
of them. And so, they’d just go out so far and then they sank – go down.
Q: The reason in doing that is to prevent . . .
A: Keep the Japs from getting a-hold of them.
Q: OK.
A: If that ship had gone and, and just run into the beach, then they
could have had a chance of getting some torpedoes or stuff off of it, see.
Q: That makes sense.
A: Yes sir! Absolutely.
Q: Were there people on board that had the responsibility of
destroying documents when the ship was going down?
A: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had a job doing that.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: If I had my duty . . .
Q: Did you have a paper shredder?
A: If my duty station was down on the e-send machine - that’s an
electrical coding machine – all of our messages came in on that and we sent them
out on that. It was a machine about this wide, about that tall, sat down in a –
and the funny part was they had a part that broke on it. A little arm that broke
on it. And we had a machinist’s mate on there and he took some montel metal and
made the part and put it on there and it run better with that part he’d put on
than it did with the new one! And then when we got in port, they made us turn
that in and get another one.
Q: Ah-huh. Wasn’t regulation?
A: Well, it worked just as good as the other one.
Q: So when you destroyed – what – you destroyed documents? Or you
destroyed equipment?
A: Oh, yeah. Yeah, when we left the ship, the documents were all
destroyed, yeah, they were. Absolutely.
Q: I don’t imagine – I haven’t heard you talk about a situation where
a destroyer or individuals on a destroyer may have been captured. If you had to
leave the ship, nothing like that happened?
A: Well, we were out there and when we come in after the incident
happened. The USS Helena, I think, was an eight-thousand ton light cruiser and
the Japs hit it and just the chief pharmacist’s mate and the chief bosun’s mate
were the only two that got off that. It blew up. It was a light cruiser – I’m
not sure of the name of it.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: They hit it and boy it just went sky high. And one of them – the
chief bosun’s mate, he got off to do something and the other guy got off – maybe
it was a doctor, I’m not sure. But anyway, just those two survived out of a
whole crew.
Q: What was the way that you received information about the war – the
happenings of the war – what was going on in different places?
A: Oh, well, we had radio people on there and it was on the air all
the time – coming in – you could hear the kk-kkk-kk-kkkkk-kkk . . . and they
were sitting down there typing down what happened everywhere all over the world.
And they’d put out a little newspaper with that news on there. I thought that
was pretty good.
Q: So it if was good news or bad news it was shared with all of the
men on board?
A: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s right.
Q: What was the longest battle experience you were in?
A: When – in the navy?
Q: Ah-huh.
A: Well, I guess – I think MacArthur started us to work one day and
eighteen months later we got relieved! (laughing)
Q: (laughs) Well, that’s true. I guess my question had more
intense firing type scenario . . .
A: Oh, I’d say maybe three days.
Q: Three days of firing back and forth with other ships and planes?
A: Yeah, yeah.
Q: It has to be very stressful.
A: Yeah.
Q: Where was that? Was that the time your ship went down? No. . .
A: No, it wasn’t that one then. That didn’t take long for that to
happen.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: Oh, we were landing troops two or three different places and it
took a long time. We – we went in and we bombarded the landing place to get the
Japs off of it. Just beat the tar out of it. And then we’d go back out and, ah,
heave-to out there and just stand – float in the water – and then they’d send
the troops in, see? Of course, now, some of those lasted several days.
Q: And you’d get fired while you were sending the troops in?
A: No.
Q: No?
A: No. We generally had fired before they went in and then if they
asked for some shell support, then we’d give them some. Guadalcanal was – well,
we went to several of them. Ah, I can’t think of the names of the islands now. I
didn’t go to Iwo Jima. Didn’t go to Okinawa. But I hit most of the rest of them.
And, ah, all of them were about the same. You go in and – I sat – we sat out
there and watched battleships send those sixteen-inch shells in there. Boy,
don’t think they make a swishing sound when go through the air.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: I ain’t lying! Man! They’re sixteen inches, man, they’re five foot
high. They’re big, big shells. Ours was just five-inch thirty-eights, so they
were about that big around.
Q: About ten inches?
A: No, no, no, about that big around. They were about that big around
and about that long. And the powder was in canisters, ah. . .
Q: Were those as powerful as the large ones?
A: What, the canisters?
Q: Right.
A: Oh yeah, the powder in there was just as powerful as on the big
guns. It just had a smaller gun to shoot the shell out of.
Q: OK.
A: Ours took one thing of powder after . . they might put just hunks
of powder about that thick, not that thick, sixteen-inches wide – they might six
or eight of them in there or ten of them in there to shoot that shell. Boy,
don’t you think they didn’t shoot that ship, boy. . . absolutely!
Q: I’m sure they did. As I recall last time you said you didn’t have
much leave time. You were pretty much out at sea. . .
A: Oh, we accumulated leave and so, then, when we’d go to get to port,
particularly when we had a ship overhaul, then they’d let us go home. I got to
go home one time in the war.
Q: OK, and for how long was that?
A: Thirty days.
Q: Wow.
A: We came back to the states several times, but no leave. Sometimes
they wouldn’t even let me go on an overnight – they wouldn’t even let me off the
ship overnight. I had to stay aboard ship and everybody else went to (garbled).
Q: Is that because they were on the alert?
A: No, that’s because of the job I had.
Q: OK.
A: When we got into port I had to make sure that the log got off, the
mail got off, everybody got off that had a transfer coming, and everybody who
was received on there was received properly. It was quite a hassle from a guy in
my position on there. And lots of times I just didn’t make it. Of course, I’ve
had the exec come in an tell me, “You stay aboard,” and that’s the end of that.
The last exec that I had was a pretty good guy, pretty good guy. He died of
Alzheimer’s.
Q: Did he?
A: Yeah.
Q: You lived through all those battles with a visible enemy and it’s
the invisible enemy that finally kills them, huh? The Alzheimer’s.
A: Yeah, yeah. Had a pretty good bunch of them. Pretty good crew on
those destroyers. Had to have. They had to function. I heard of – like the USS
Blue, it just disappeared and they don’t know what happened to it. I know what
happened to two destroyers because they were with us on picket duty in that, ah,
in that, ah, typhoon out there. But you never saw one blown out of the water or
anything. I mean, some of them got blown out of the water, but I never saw them
blown out of the water. Well, they were just a powder keg from tip to stern.
Q: Sure.
A: Everything on there – every cranny on there was chuck full of
ammunition or gunpowder or something. When – (laughs) what was funny, when were
going after a submarine, we’d go over where he was and they’d drop those six
hundred pound depth-charges. Boy, now they were about like this and about that
wide and they weighed six hundred pounds. They’d go down and they just life the
tail of that destroyer up like that. It come out of the water and those screws
would just be going like that! (laughing)
Q: Ah-huh. Ah-huh.
A: Did you hear that?(referring to his hearing aids)
Q: Yes, I did. Are you getting feedback?
A: Yes, I did when I was doing something a minute ago. These are
different – they have a little button on them. You press it once and you get two
of them – you that? OK, that takes out all the excess noise.
Q: I see.
A: You press it again – got three of them. I can talk on the
telephone.
Q: Oh, that’s great.
A: And then you press it again – one – and it’s back to normal again.
They’re quite expensive, they are. You don’t see many of them built like this.
I’m practically deaf. As a matter of fact I went down to the Veteran’s
Administration and they, ah, checked my ears, and they come up D-E-A-F – 100
percent disability on that.
Q: In both ears?
A: My ears, yeah. I got that in the navy. I, ah, I was back handling –
helping load – I was putting the powder in on the gun and the other guy was
putting the shells in and they were firing them and they were going along there
and the concussion blew my damn ear plugs out of my ears and I couldn’t reach
down and put them back in and so when I did, well, I couldn’t hear anything. And
I couldn’t hear for three days. And the doctors told me, well, he says, “Don’t
worry,” he says. Your hearing will come back. But when it did I never hear good.
I never did. I tried. But that was screwy as heck running around there not being
able to hear anything.
Q: Especially in the position that you had! You relied on hearing
a lot.
A: (laughing) Oh yeah, I did, you bet. Yeah. Then now, just
recently I went down to, to Ada to see about my disability down there and they
took a – tested on my ears down there. And I was deaf down there, too.
Q: Well, you do a great job for a man who has limited hearing –
virtually no hearing.
A: Yeah, I don’t have hardly any hearing.
Q: Do you read lips?
A: No. Now, these have a little, little adjustment to them. See that
little thing there? You can pull on it – you can pull them out. But right
underneath it there’s a little thing I turn and I can adjust them where I hear
better or – if – I have to have them about like that or I can’t hear.
Q: When did you start wearing your hearing aids?
A: Oh, several years ago. But it’s really gotten bad the last two
years. Really got bad. And it all happened because of that gunfire.
Q: You could tell the difference when your hearing came back that it
was not what it was prior to . . .
A: Oh yeah, that it wasn’t going to be like it was, right.
Q: Did you consider going to get some medical assistance at the time?
A: I tried to (laughing). I couldn’t get in the VA down here for sixty
years.
Q: I was thinking when you were on board ship or at different times. .
.
A: Well, no. The hearing was just different, but I could hear. And it
didn’t start getting – piling up onto them until I was about forty-two years
old. Then, it hit.
Q: During World War II, how many battles do you think you’ve been in?
A: Oh, many, many, many battles. Ah, on this thing here (handling a
piece of paper), this I had fifteen – I had seventeen major battles on the South
Pacific right there on that one. Then I had one over here on the Asiatic Pacific
– something else I was in.
Q: Did you tell me about that battle?
A: Huh?
Q: Have you told me about that battle?
A: Which one? All of these (looking at a piece of paper)? No, no. I
tried to find my navy record – I’ve got one – see, my navy record was burned up
up in St. Louis several years ago. They reconstructed it and the, the
engineering officer that was my boss on the Patterson when I was a log room
yeoman, he had – he was the one that signed off and remade that record and he
left Pearl Harbor off of it! He says I wasn’t on the Patterson, but if you look
right on the back of that thing there, it says I was on the Patterson on 7
December.
Q: Ah-huh. Ah-huh.
A: And that’s my discharge!
Q: Ah-huh.
A: Now that’s so tiny you can’t even hardly read that.
Q: The back of it?
A: The back of it. I can’t open that, no, that’s. . .
Q: No, its permanently mounted.
A: They’ve permanently mounted it.
Q: It certainly is a piece of history, being there at Pearl Harbor.
A: Huh?
Q: That is certainly being where history was made, being at Pearl
Harbor.
A: Yeah, that was kind of tough, I mean, ah. . . boy, I’ll tell you
what, I wish we’d have – I wish they’d have told the battleships and the other
people in there that they were coming in, but they didn’t.
Q: Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, what was your life like being
in the navy?
A: What was my what?
Q: Your life like being in the navy? Did you go out to battle as much
as you did after?
A: Well, no, we – we did a lot of training.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: We were constantly training. We were having maneuvers and
everything all the time. I mean. . . once in a while we’d come in and swing
around the buoy out there in Pearl Harbor for about a week, but generally we
were out training. That’s amazing. I was kind of surprised that they had so much
of it.
Q: So after Pearl Harbor, the training was over and you were in the
real-life situations.
A: Everything then was for real.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: You want a Coke?
Q: I’m fine. I brought some water today, thank you.
A: I’d offer you some coffee, but my wife – the things that . . .
Q: The filters?
A: She can’t find them.
Q: That’s fine. Do you think about the men that you knew often from
the destroyers?
A: Yeah I’ve got a list of them.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: I’ve got every one of them and where they were assigned to off that
ship.
Q: Have you had a reunion?
A: Huh?
Q: Have you had a reunion of any kind?
A: Oh, yeah. I went to a reunion up in, ah, Sky – some kind of big
resort up in Wyoming, ah, six or seven years ago, and one of the officers were
there off the ship – a guy by the name of Ogle. Elvin C. Ogle – he come out of
the academy in 1938, not too bright. He and another guy named William K. Ratliff
came out in ’38. The skipper, he come out in ’27. His name was Frank R. Walker,
and the executive officer was named Miles Hunter Hubbard, and he came out in
1936. And then we had, ah, ah, Harry Grimshaw Moore was the gunner officer and
he came out in, ah, ’29. And, and Richard Star Craighill came out in ’29. He was
an engineering officer.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: Strange I know all those names, isn’t it?
Q: Those names and those dates. It’s pretty amazing. I have to think
the years my daughters were born in!
A: (laughing)
Q: What was your last battle? Do you remember your last battle on the
destroyer – your last tour out? What was that like?
A: Last battle. Ah, outside of when my ship was sunk?
Q: Ah-huh. Or was that the absolute last time? After your ship sank,
did you not go out to sea after that?
A: No, the flew me back to Washington. . .
Q: Right, but I wasn’t clear if you went out after that.
A: Nope. I got to Washington and the skipper says, “Would you like to
go back to sea with me?” And I says, “Na, I don’t think so. Have you got a brig
around handy?” (laughing) He says, “OK,” he says, “we’ll fix you up.” So they
shipped me to Treasure Island, that’s a man-made island out in San Francisco
Bay. You know where it is?
Q: No, I don’t.
A: It’s right off of . . .
Q: I know where San Francisco is.
A: . . . Goat Island is the original island there and right down below
they’ve built a place called Treasure Island.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: And they had a World’s Fair there.
Q: Ah-huh.
A: I think in ’36 they had it there. And I shipped there and then I
stayed there about two – three weeks and they sent me down to the Eleventh Naval
District Headquarters in San Diego and I became the top seated control officer
there. That’s a hairy job! Yup, I did.
Q: So your first battle was . . .
A: Seventh of December.
Q: Pearl Harbor.
A: Yeah.
Q: And your last battle was when your destroyer . . .
A: No, well, that’s – that was the last battle when my destroyer went
down.
Q: Right, that was your last battle.
A: Aren’t we going to talk about the army?
Q: We’re going to talk about that, but that’s Korea?
A: That’s Korea.
Q: That’s Korea – we’re still on World War II. W
