Herb Hanneman:They put us on Bataan. There were about five or six of us, maybe, that went to a little stream to take a bath, because the bath facilities in our camp was almost non-existent. We were in the nude. Our clothes were lying there. And all of a sudden, we looked up and we were surrounded by Japanese Infantry. Obviously, we didn’t speak Japanese. They didn’t speak English. But soldiers with bayonets speak pretty loud, you know.

We’d meet other groups, little by little, and pretty soon we were a larger group. Looking back now, I would guess you would say that was the beginning of the death march. We just kept marching. Finally, we got to this Cabanatuan, which was our prison camp. We were there for a year and a half. And how in the world any of us ever got through that, I’ll never know. During the night, you’d hear people screaming, “For Christ sake, get me out of here!”

Eventually, they put those of us who were able on a ship and sent us to Japan. We worked in a steel mill there. That’s the way two years went. And there was a lot of hollering there at night, too. “Where are you, Lord?”

Narrator:The war in Europe was over, but there was unfinished business in the Pacific. The fighting now focused on the islands, jungles and broad expanses of ocean leading to Japan. And there were stories every step of the way.

Don Collins:We usually operated alone in an area and that was our area. And anything that was in that area was enemy. We would attack and attack. I would say more often on the surface than submerged, for the simple reason that you could go in and you could get the hell out of there in a hurry, if you’re on the surface. Underneath, you were more vulnerable. You could hear the pinging. You could tell when they were zeroed in on you. Of course, then sometimes you were subjected to depth charging which was not a very pleasant thing.

Harry Alvey:We started getting depth charges, and a young kid, hell, I never heard of depth charge. You know, looking around and everything, and everybody was the old timer’s getting a little shook. And you could watch the expression on their face. And you know, I guess that’s the reason they get people in the military, young, dumb and don’t know any different.

Don Collins:There were times when a depth charge would bounce off the deck, and it wouldn’t go off because it wasn’t at the right depth and they were set for depth.

Harry Alvey:You’d listen for the click. As long as you can hear the click, you’re safe. It’s when you cannot hear the click, stand by. And whenever they’d drop one that was pretty close, you couldn’t hear that click and then all of a sudden, boats, they would launch.

Don Collins:You didn’t experience fear at all, because everybody had a job to do and you better be able to do your job, because everybody else was dependent. But I think you were subliminally aware of the consequences of anybody screwing up.

Harry Alvey:We were attacking a convoy and we were forced down. And we laid on the bottom for 37 hours and getting depth charged all to hell.

Don Collins:Heat, which was like 136 degrees. I mean, you’d sit down and it was hot. And you’d grab anything, it was hot to the touch. We couldn’t bring her back up again because they were up there. Finally, we decided we had to come up.

Harry Alvey:But to get off that bottom, because you’d sink down in the much and everything, we would run back and forth through the boat to break that suction. It was getting spooky because we were having one hell of a time. That’s when I started realizing, watching these older guys, you know, the expression on their faces, are we going to make it? ‘Cause we lost 52 submarines. One of the heaviest casualties of any service.

Don Collins:There were 249 subs that made war patrols, 52 subs were lost. The casualty rate was six times that of non-submariners.

Harry Alvey:The Paddle came in. And he was a good friend of mine, he was a First Class Torpedoman on there. And he asked me, “What are you doing in?” I said, “Well, I’m in for leave crew. I made five runs and I’m going back to new construction in Manitowoc.” And that’s all that was said. And the next morning, the squadron called me up to the office and said you’re now a crew of the USS Paddle. And I said, “What the hell am I going out to sea for? I’m going back to Manitowoc.” He said, “No, you’re not!” And I made five runs on the Paddle at sea for 60 to 90 days. Very few people made ten war patrols.

Don Collins:And sometimes you’d say, “Oh, my God,” you know we came awful close. I think what it was, this tension, it’s released the pressure. And so, when you did get to where you could, you let it all hang out. One time, we were overdue and presumed lost. We were late. We’d pulled in and the captain and the exec went over to see about getting some beer for us guys and having a little party. “Let’s have some fun guys, you deserve it.” And the commodore said, “No way, my storekeeper hit the sack an hour ago…” So, anyway, they came out. There was a big pair of shears. And they used those to cut the lock off the beer hall door. They brought back beer, and so on and so forth, and they were using the commodore’s jeep.

And my buddy, Dargatz, he was one of my best buddies, we said to the captain, “We’ll take care of the jeep for you, sir.” And he says, “Okay.” So, we pushed it over the end of the pier in 80 foot of water!

Harry Alvey:Yeah, there was times some people got a little out of hand, but we took care of them and took care of each other. But an outsider, he wouldn’t understand us anyhow. And I’m sure that there’s things that took place that I’ve washed completely out of my mind. I went to a New Year’s Eve party. And when all the whoop and hollering started, I lost it. I had to walk out. Thank Christ my wife was strong enough to help me to be able to settle me down.

Well, when we were out about five or six days I guess, they discovered that we were on the wrong ship. We got down to Milne Bay, New Guinea, and PT base six was there. We had no PT training. I had never been on a PT, didn’t even really know what one looked like. We kind of saw the relaxed attitude of it, I mean, these guys would come in with old t-shirts all dyed up, and shorts, and no socks and no shoes and we thought, they’re in the Navy? So, all 60 of us thought, well, this seemed like a better deal, so we all volunteered for PT. Well, you were supposed to be 21 years old. And of course I was still 17, I think.

Bob Sonnenberg:April 16, ’44, that’s when I got my orders for it. The first crew to ever be assigned to theBattleship Wisconsinwhen it was commissioned and joined the fleet in active duty. And there all of a sudden, “Robert Sonnenberg, HM1, please report to the captain’s office immediately.” Thirty six medics on there out of the 3,500 crew members. What the hell did I do to see the captain? So, I went down there, and here it was the governor from Wisconsin and these two gentlemen. They wanted to see me. I was from Wisconsin and I was one of the few ones from the whole state that was on the Wisconsin, so I said all right. I was quite proud.

William Kail:We used to have a little song. “Some PTs do 70 knots, some do 69, if we get ours to run at all, we think we’re doing fine.” And they had three Packard engines, 1550 horsepower each, and the deck, and the turrets, and all the above structure was plywood. We were heavily armed. We could go fast. We were highly maneuverable. We also carried four 21-inch aircraft torpedoes.

Bob Sonnenberg:Nine 16-inchers, 20 five-inchers, a whole bunch of 20s and 40-millimeters.

William Kail:It was 80 feet long and 21 feet wide.

Bob Sonnenberg:Then, there were 900 feet long. With the new radar they had, you could go 16 inches, about 2,700 pounds, you could put them in your garage door if you left it open. It’s 28 miles away, you could put that 16 inch shell in there. You never went out on the deck without your ear plugs along with you. And if you were out there and they were firing a bunch of those off, a lot of noise out there. You put those plugs in and they stayed in there. You didn’t, well, we would find out in sick bay pretty soon who didn’t put there damn plugs in.

William Kail:A lot of times at night we would sneak right in with the convoy. We would actually be in with the Japanese convoy and they would think it was one of theirs, you know. And then, you kind of slip out, and line up, and fire a couple fish and run like heck! They hated PT boats. You’ve got a destroyer with maybe 300 men on it. It was an expensive ship. And of course, a PT with 12 men and two officers, and they built those things for $50,000. It was a military win if you lost three PT boats, but still got a destroyer, you know. I mean, you were ahead.

But we always had the feeling that we were invincible, we did. We, of course we knew the other boat could get it, the other guy could get it, but we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t get it, ’cause we had the fastest boat, we had the best skipper, we had the best crew, we wouldn’t get it. But of course, I guess every boat felt that way, so some of us were wrong.

Bob Sonnenberg:Every time general quarters sounded you were scared, “What the hell’s going to happen?” You were scared, but you didn’t get scared. You went to your battle station and you knew where you were supposed to be. And everybody else was where they were supposed to be. We all had a job. We were trained for ’em, and we took life serious. Who knows how long you might be there. Two hours, five hours, ten hours, who knows? As long as we had the Japs on our screens, we stayed there. We had to protect ourselves and the smaller ships… with our fire power.

William Kail:But you know, it’s an amazing thing with the PT boats, being they were made out of wood. They would have shells go right through. And in fact, in my boat, I was in the top bunk in the day room, and they called GQ, and I just reached up and grabbed, I wasn’t even sitting up yet and a white flash went through. I didn’t pay any attention to it and went out. I came back, and a hunk of shrapnel went through the bulkhead, through my pillow. And it would’ve went through just about like that. Just that quick. If I would’ve been a half a second slower. So, see? We were indestructible. Not to worry.

Bob Sonnenberg:It’s just talk. Unless you see it. And you go through it. How it makes a person feel. When you see the Japs strafing our landing forces, you get that goddamn gun going, shoot them son-of-a-bitches down before we had too many of our bodies floating in that water. That was our big thought, get them down.

George Bloczynski:When I was drafted, they took us down to Milwaukee. I think it was a post office. They had two of us in a room there all stripped down. They were checking for marks and scars, you know, to identify the body, I guess. But, anyway, a guy came in and said, “You guys get your clothes on, you’re going to be Marines.” The other guy just cracked up. He was screaming, “I don’t want to die.” I don’t know what happened to him, but I wound up as a Marine.

Clayton Chipman:Up to a point, say the day before D-Day, I was a kid having fun. There were many models of Higgins boats, but the one we were on had two 50-caliber machine guns. They asked volunteer to handle ’em. So, I volunteered. We were sitting up there, and we could see shells bursting, and the smoke and sand, and things going hundreds of feet in the air. And that’s when I started to think, people are getting killed here, what the heck am I doing here? And a little later, we hit the beach. Everybody runs off. And we’re taught what to do to spread out and so forth, but to our left was three rows of dead marines, just lined up as they got off. And I think one of the first concepts that came to my mind was there’s absolutely no control here. There’s absolutely no control.

Larry Landgraf:There were three or four hospital ships involved in a typical invasion. We probably were one of the smaller hospital ships. We were the oldest hospital ship. The first hospital ship the Navy had, I think, the ship was commissioned in 1917. We thought we did a great job being that close. Of course, I couldn’t see what was going on outside. You could hear it and feel it. You could hear the roaring of planes from time to time, and explosions, and things like this. Because we’d sail right up, as close as we could to the shore and drop anchor. And there was a constant parade of landing craft coming and they’d bring ’em right in on stretchers.

Clayton Chipman:The beach was being shelled and that was going to continue to be shelled. And there was no use staying there and taking it, so. I heard one of the officers call out and he says, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” He said, “This is no place for us!” So, we started moving up. I think the airfield was up 350 to 400 yards. And it took us all day to get up there. We didn’t see any Japs at all. Of course, there was firing going on. They were all concealed.

George Bloczynski:But they told us we gotta go in because if they don’t, they’re going to push us off the island. Off to our left was the Mount Suribachi. They were still fighting on that, shooting mortars at us. I heard one coming in, I dove into a big shell crater. There were two Marines lying in there, up against the side, and I wound up right between them. So, when the shell landed and exploded, I reached out and smacked these guys on the rump. I said, “Come on,” I said, “I’m in the mortars, I know what they’re shooting.” They were both dead, so I got out of there real fast. I heard another one coming, so I dove into a tank track. It landed right in front of my head. It kind of scrambled my brains a bit, you know. I got up, I started to run. I ran up to where they were digging the guns in. Sergeant says, “Hey, kid,” he said, “I saw that. I thought you bought the farm.” I said, “Sarge, how come I’m not dead?” He says, “Too close.” He said, “If that had have landed a little further away, it would have blew your head off.”

Larry Landgraf:And they asked for volunteers to work in the surgery because this person had an unexploded 40-millimeter shell about six inches long right in the pelvic area from the front.

I was joking with my associate, and the doctor said this really is pretty dangerous here, because this happened before on another hospital ship. It exploded and killed everybody who was in the room. So, that kind of quieted us down a little bit.

He had covered each of the instruments with rubber tubing so that there wouldn’t be any metal on metal.

Eventually, the doctor_surgeon who was chief surgeon got this shell out and placed it in this basin with the cotton in it and walked out of the operating room and threw it overboard. And then we finished up sewing up the patient.

George Bloczynski:We were getting a pasting because they could fire at us from both sides. And I got up that one morning and I looked out. And there on top of the mountain they were putting the Old Glory up. Now you talk about a good feeling. I let out a “Whoop,” and I said, “Look at that!” Here, everybody turned and looked, and here is the flag flying up there.

Clayton Chipman:I think within a minute and a half, two minutes, everybody on the island knew what it was. And it was really a morale booster to look around and see the American flag flying up there because that meant nobody’s going to be shooting at our backs as we moved away from Suribachi. Before the battle they figured that it would be a three to five day battle. Well, it took 36 days. We lost a little over 28,000 men.

Larry Landgraf:The operating room was almost going from morning to night and we’d finally get a break. They’d ask us to get a couple of hours sleep and then you couldn’t sleep. But as long as you were needed it seemed like we were able to go for 48 hours almost at a stretch without stopping. We’d take time out a break to go eat and we’d still have our operating room clothes, and they might be bloody. But you’d quick grab a bite and went back to it.

Clayton Chipman:There was an area they called the “meat grinder,” because it ground up so many people. And someone gave me two pockets of hand grenades and said, “Go close those five caves.” And I ran up and threw hand grenades in each cave. I came back and as I ran across that field to get back with the people that we were working with, the tank, I saw a roll of Japanese money. And as I ran I just bent down, scooped it up, put it in my breast pocket. I didn’t have that money one minute, and they started shelling the tank. And that’s where seven of us got hit all at once. I went back to the aide station, I was hit in the left shoulder. They took off my jackets and, “Oh, you got a million-dollar wound.” It’s probably worth more than a million to get out of there.

George Bloczynski:They’d shell us, and how they kept from hitting us, I don’t know. I think the Lord must have been watching because, they blew everything else apart around us. I saw them bringing the dead back and piling them on the truck, one on top of the other, and they filled the entire truck. And they’d drive in and come back and get another truckload.

Clayton Chipman:They took us to the hospital ship. I was looking out over the rail at Iwo and I could see all the explosions taking place. The first thing I though of was “God, I deserted those buddies who are still getting killed out there,” and I thought, “Jeez.” There was no hesitation to cry. You always think of tough Marines. Well, I guess they’re not so tough when it comes to that.

George Bloczynski:One fellow that took my place, I was supposed to be the 60-millimeters, and he was going to be on the 81s. So, he asked if it was all right if we traded. So we went over and asked and, “Sure, that’s okay.” But then, when we got up on Iwo, a fellow came by and said, he says, “Your buddy just took a mortar shell in the chest, blew him all to heck.” So, there but for the grace of God. That was a tough one.

Larry Landgraf:One other memory that will stick with me forever, I think, was a Marine sergeant who had been wounded right above the hip. And he already had gangrene set in at this time. I knew he was going, and it wasn’t anything that we could do. So, I just spent time. Anyway, I held his hand when he died. And he wanted me to check with his girlfriend. Those kinds of things you never forget.

Larry Landgraf:There were three or four hospital ships involved in a typical invasion. We probably were one of the smaller hospital ships. We were the oldest hospital ship. The first hospital ship the Navy had, I think, the ship was commissioned in 1917. We thought we did a great job being that close. Of course, I couldn’t see what was going on outside. You could hear it and feel it. You could hear the roaring of planes from time to time, and explosions, and things like this. Because we’d sail right up, as close as we could to the shore and drop anchor. And there was a constant parade of landing craft coming and they’d bring ’em right in on stretchers.

Clayton Chipman:The beach was being shelled and that was going to continue to be shelled. And there was no use staying there and taking it, so. I heard one of the officers call out and he says, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” He said, “This is no place for us!” So, we started moving up. I think the airfield was up 350 to 400 yards. And it took us all day to get up there. We didn’t see any Japs at all. Of course, there was firing going on. They were all concealed.

George Bloczynski:But they told us we gotta go in because if they don’t, they’re going to push us off the island. Off to our left was the Mount Suribachi. They were still fighting on that, shooting mortars at us. I heard one coming in, I dove into a big shell crater. There were two Marines laying in there, up against the side, and I wound up right between them. So, when the shell landed and exploded, I reached out and smacked these guys on the rump. I said, “Come on,” I said, “I’m in the mortars, I know what they’re shooting.” They were both dead, so I got out of there real fast. I heard another one coming, so I dove into a tank track. It landed right in front of my head. It kind of scrambled my brains a bit, you know. I got up, I started to run. I ran up to where they were digging the guns in. Sergeant says, “Hey, kid,” he said, “I saw that. I thought you bought the farm.” I said, “Sarge, how come I’m not dead?” He says, “Too close.” He said, “If that had have landed a little further away, it would have blew your head off.”

Larry Landgraf:And they asked for volunteers to work in the surgery because this person had an unexploded 40-millimeter shell about six inches long right in the pelvic area from the front.

I was joking with my associate, and the doctor said this really is pretty dangerous here, because this happened before on another hospital ship. It exploded and killed everybody who was in the room. So, that kind of quieted us down a little bit.

He had covered each of the instruments with rubber tubing so that there wouldn’t be any metal on metal.

Eventually, the doctor_surgeon who was chief surgeon got this shell out and placed it in this basin with the cotton in it and walked out of the operating room and threw it overboard. And then we finished up sewing up the patient.

George Bloczynski:We were getting a pasting because they could fire at us from both sides. And I got up that one morning and I looked out. And there on top of the mountain they were putting the Old Glory up. Now you talk about a good feeling. I let out a “Whoop,” and I said, “Look at that!” Here, everybody turned and looked, and here is the flag flying up there.

Clayton Chipman:I think within a minute and a half, two minutes, everybody on the island knew what it was. And it was really a morale booster to look around and see the American flag flying up there because that meant nobody’s going to be shooting at our backs as we moved away from Suribachi. Before the battle they figured that it would be a three to five day battle. Well, it took 36 days. We lost a little over 28,000 men.

Larry Landgraf:The operating room was almost going from morning to night and we’d finally get a break. They’d ask us to get a couple of hours sleep and then you couldn’t sleep. But as long as you were needed it seemed like we were able to go for 48 hours almost at a stretch without stopping. We’d take time out a break to go eat and we’d still have our operating room clothes, and they might be bloody. But you’d quick grab a bite and went back to it.

Clayton Chipman:There was an area they called the “meat grinder,” because it ground up so many people. And someone gave me two pockets of hand grenades and said, “Go close those five caves.” And I ran up and threw hand_grenades in each cave. I came back and as I ran across that field to get back with the people that we were working with, the tank, I saw a roll of Japanese money. And as I ran I just bent down, scooped it up, put it in my breast pocket. I didn’t have that money no minute, and they started shelling the tank. And that’s where seven of us got hit all at once. I went back to the aide station, I was hit in the left shoulder. They took off my jackets and, “Oh, you got a million-dollar wound.” It’s probably worth more than a million to get out of there.

George Bloczynski:They’d shell us, and how they kept from hitting us, I don’t know. I think the Lord must have been watching because, they blew everything else apart around us. I saw them bringing the dead back and piling them on the truck, one on top of the other, and they filled the entire truck. And they’d drive in and come back and get another truckload.

Clayton Chipman:They took us to the hospital ship. I was looking out over the rail at Iwo and I could see all the explosions taking place. The first thing I though of was “God, I deserted those buddies who are still getting killed out there,” and I thought, “Jeez.” There was no hesitation to cry. You always think of tough Marines. Well, I guess they’re not so tough when it comes to that.

George Bloczynski:One fellow that took my place, I was supposed to be the 60-millimeters, and he was going to be on the 81s. So, he asked if it was all right if we traded. So we went over and asked and, “Sure, that’s okay.” But then, when we got up on Iwo, a fellow came by and said, he says, “Your buddy just took a mortar shell in the chest, blew him all to heck.” So, there but for the grace of God. That was a tough one.

Larry Landgraf:One other memory that will stick with me forever, I think, was a Marine sergeant who had been wounded right above the hip. And he already had gangrene set in at this time. I knew he was going, and it wasn’t anything that we could do. So, I just spent time. Anyway, I held his hand when he died. And he wanted me to check with his girlfriend. Those kinds of things you never forget.

Airplanes

When we trained and we’d go to a different base and land and refuel, and eat and then come back, they had guards standing around it, because nobody could even hardly look at it. Because it was such a secret, you know. And what were we? We acted like big shots, right. I mean, you know, we capitalized on it. That’s human nature, of course.

William Starke:My first combat mission was Christmas Day, 1943. We were top cover at 30,000 feet, leading a bunch of B-24 four_engine bombers. We got about ten minutes from the target, and I thought “Starke! What are you doing here? It’s Christmas Day and you’re going to get killed! You’ll probably be dead in the next ten minutes!” And I panicked. I thought, “I’ve gotta get out of here!” I can remember, “I’ve gotta get out of here!” And every instinct in my body said take that 38 and just get the heck out of here while you’re still alive. But of course, I didn’t.

And all of a sudden all hell broke loose. And there were planes all over the sky. And we called in “Bogies, 10 o’clock high. Bogies, 2 o’clock high. Get that guy off my tail.” All that sort of thing. And I just stayed with Bill Green. Wherever he went, I went. I just stayed right with him, back and forth. We couldn’t leave the bombers. We had to stay over the bombers and attack any of the Jap Zeroes that came in to attack. And he would fire, and I would fire. And we’d see pieces coming off and smoke, and just on and on. And it was just unbelievable. And all of a sudden, ten minutes later, it was all over. And we came back and they had the pilots’ debriefing afterward. And I listened to these veteran pilots. “Well, we saw three cruisers and about 15 destroyers in the Harbor, and there were so many planes on these different…” I didn’t see any of that! And I thought, “Boy, I’m not long for this world. I’m not cut out for combat.”

Joe Griesbach:They had two runways, like this, and all the planes were all stacked around it. And they would go off one at a time like this. It was a 10,000-foot runway, it was two miles. It would take well over an hour to get everybody off. But then you flew up by yourself. We would form about 100 miles off the coast. So, we would circle, circle until everybody joined up. Then we’d go all in, three squadrons of airplanes, dropping those bombs and then getting out of there. They’d send their fighters up. You could see them come off the airfields. The Zero was a wonderful fighter. They would come through the formation. They came from the front, ’cause your rate of closure’s so fast. If we’re going 250 and they’re going 300, 550 miles an hour you’re cutting through. And at times, you could see the fighter as he went through. You could look at him and you could almost see the guy’s face as he went through, you know. But the B-29 in a formation like that was very formidable. Their firepower was just unbelievable.William Starke:We were almost more afraid of navigation than we were the Japs. When I became Operations Officer, I was leading the squadron then. And I would just sweat blood coming back, ’cause all those fellas are behind you, relying on you to do the navigating. And they’re not paying any attention to what’s going on. They’re just following you. And you better be right. You just better be right. By the time you’re getting a little low on fuel, and you’re looking at your maps, and sometimes you’d see islands and things that weren’t on the map and you’d think, “Oh my gosh, is this really right? Am I really right?!” And I’d come in and land and they’d say, “Jesus, Starke, how did you ever do that?” And I just… Oh, it was crazy.

Joe Griesbach:Here’s Japan up here, all the Japanese islands, the northern part. Then halfway down, about 700 miles, is Iwo Jima. And below that are the Marianas Islands. That’s Tinian, Saipan, and Guam. We flew out of Guam. But you see, you had to go 1,500 miles to Japan. You had to drop your bombs, and then 1,500 miles back, over water. Now, you can see that’s a long time to fly. If anything got shot out on you, or you had mechanical problems, where you gonna land? So, that’s why it was so important to take Iwo Jima. Thank God for the Marines! If that island wasn’t taken, maybe the air war against Japan would not have been successful. We’d have lost too many crews. The Air Force, really, you cannot compare it to the ground forces. You just can’t. I will always take my hat off to any of the people who are in the ground forces. I mean, because to me, that is war. We, in the Air Force, are a little bit clean, to a certain extent. It’s a clean war. You don’t realize what you’re doing.

William Starke:(imitates rapid fire) And you could smell the smoke from the gun barrels. And you had those bombs, under the wings. We could do a lot of damage. Oh, and we did a lot of damage. We killed, I’m sure we killed thousands of Japanese soldiers. Terrible to say now. But it was kill or be killed.

Phil Hendrickson:The English 696 was a destroyer. I was First Lieutenant, that means you’re in charge of the damage control, the deck crew and all that. We were with the carriers. Always for the ring with the carriers. We were not bombarding the shore. We were protecting the carriers for their flights. Okinawa, we lost 13 destroyers and 80 more destroyers were hit. We were, not running out of destroyers, but we shouldn’t be in that position.

Jerry Hansen:Arresting gear is the cables that the planes hook on when they land. Our job was to, when a plane landed and he caught a cable before yours, was to throw a lever and get your cable down so they wouldn’t hook on two cables. And likewise, to make sure you didn’t throw it down if he didn’t catch another cable. Because if he didn’t catch a cable, he would run into these barriers.

Wes Todd:Coming in, you just couldn’t wait to land again. When they’re going to take you aboard, you finally see all the carriers starting to turn into the wind. And then you breathe a sigh of relief, we’re going down now. The Landing Signal Officer is looking for you. This is roger. That means, “Now I’ve got you, don’t look at your instruments again, because I’m gonna tell you what to do.” You know, to keep peeking, you’re gonna miss what he tells you, like this is fast, this is low, this is low and slow, this is high. But then, when he gives you a “roger” you know you got it pretty good. And you’re looking down there, he gives you a “cut.” Well, then you quick cut the throttle and duck your nose and kind of pick out the center of the deck, because you may be a little off.

Jerry Hansen:I don’t know, I just thought that like the fighter pilots were half nuts anyway. Just to be one. The planes, when they landed, they’d come as fast as they could.

Wes Todd:Once you stop, they push you back. And you give it full throttle to get out of where this guy is going to land right where you’re leaving. And then you hear “kaboom!” this guy landing right where you were. And actually, as I remember, it was 17 seconds, what they tried to give you after you landed, 17 seconds to get out of the way.

Phil Hendrickson:With the carriers, the flight deck is a little oily. They move planes, and you use a little jeep to hook ’em up take them to the stern. But here is a jock coming back, hits the brakes, and he slides over the side with the jeep, rides it. And he can’t swim. And no life jacket. Unbelievable, these things happen. And as he goes down, his jeep hits one of the life rafts hung over side of the carrier. He comes up right next to the life raft and we pick him up. True story!

Jerry Hansen:It came over the loudspeaker, “Meatballs, meatballs!” which was what, you know, the Japanese sun, or whatever it was, we called it “Meatballs.” All of a sudden, this plane came in and, you know, just knocked us to the floor.

Phil Hendrickson:We were under attack by many Japanese planes. One of them dove in with two bombs, right where the island is, the conning tower and that sort of thing, on the Bunker Hill. And she was a pretty sick ship.

Jerry Hansen:This fellow that worked with me all the time, his nickname was the “Mouse.” As we tried to climb up on the flight deck, the whole thing was all burning already, so there’s no way we’re going to get up on the flight deck. It seemed like everything was on fire. And then another one hit. And the Mouse said, “Hey, we’ve got to jump over the side.” And I said, “Not we, Mouse. I’m not jumping over the side. Here, anyway.” And so, we gave each other a hug and he jumped.

Wes Todd:We were over Okinawa doing our regular close-ground support. And now, we’re flying back to the fleet. TheBunker Hill,the code name was “Viceroy Base.” And we kept calling them, “Viceroy Base,” I remember in the squadron, you know, looking back and forth. Then we saw in the distance this smoke and we figured that was our ship. And it was. And we got there, and guys were jumping overboard. The destroyers were following the carrier to pick up guys that were in the water. So, we were told, to any stray guys that you see out there, that maybe a destroyer couldn’t see, you could zoom this guy and let the destroyer know.

Phil Hendrickson:Before we went along side, they were jumping off and we picked up several. And that’s not an easy thing to do with a destroyer. Either you’re six feet off the surface or you’re 16 off when you roll. But we were assigned the stern. And we kept that position and took our emergency hose we had three or four of them, and flooded them with water over through the stern and down into the ammunition decks.

Jerry Hansen:And then the destroyers turned their hoses on where we were, so, clear the air a little bit. We could breathe. And there must’ve been 75 or 100 sailors there that couldn’t go anywhere else. Somebody came along and said, “If we crawl along this side here, there’s a path we can get forward of the fire,” which was, you know, like 400 feet. So, some of us thought we might as well give it a try. And you know, I went with them. And I don’t even know how we got there, but we finally got in front of the fire.

Wes Todd:But then, now, we started running low on fuel and we couldn’t come aboard the Bunker Hill. So, the Enterprise called us and said, “You can come aboard us.” TheBunker Hillwas Admiral Mark Mitscher’s flagship. He was from Sparta, Wisconsin, you know. So they brought him over, also, to the Enterprise in a destroyer.

Phil Hendrickson:We had 50-some people transferred by breeches buoy, that’s where you cast a line over and you pull it like a trolley. They get in a bag, a little canvas bag and they pull him over. And we transferred Admiral Mitscher. And we were delighted.. He was a small man, but he really looked beaten at that time, I’ll tell you.

Jerry Hansen:We really burned for like 24 hours, though, burned through the night and into the morning, different things burned. Well, the next day, the destroyer started coming back, bringing people back that had jumped over the side and they picked up. And I’ll be doggone if the Mouse didn’t appear there. We saw each other and he says, “You’re still alive?” And I said, “You’re still alive.” And it ended up that he said he swam for about five hours. And the whole fleet went over the horizon. And I says, “Why did you keep swimming?” He said, “There’s nothing else to do.”

Wes Todd:We flew back to Guam, where we met theBunker Hillagain. My wingman and I were split. And so he wasn’t on this hop over Okinawa. He was on the ship. And I didn’t know if he was alive or not. You know, after, when there’s almost 500 killed, you know, who’s alive? But I walked into the shower, and here he’s taking a shower, too. And, you now, he says, “Hi, Toddy.” I said, “Hi, Mac, how you doin’?” I think you tried to be offhand, you know.

Jerry Hansen:I had nightmares for about 20 years. And goofy things that, you know, I’d see Jap planes coming at me, like they’re aiming for me. But I’m over it now.

Mel Jacob:I had my skivvies on. That’s all I had. And then after a while, I took them off because the sun during the day was so hot. And I would put it over my head, you know, to keep from getting sun blind. The nights were cold and the days were hot. We had a problem with sharks. Awful bad problem with sharks. And I lucked out. I don’t know if I was just too skinny or what, but they’d come close. I never was attacked by a shark. Oh, God. And the worst problem was the screams, the high-pitched screams of some of the ones that did get attacked by sharks. Yeah.

Wesley Scott:Saipan was just a place to get ready to do something that we didn’t want to do, but knew it had to be done. We were going to have to do when we got to Japan. They took, we told the men, ‘Look, it’s going to be a massacre.’ Because our guns were not something you put on the shore. They were nine and a half tons. I could see them sinking in the sand. I could see the airplanes flying over, you know. We aren’t set up to repel them. I could see all of that. We talked about that. Didn’t know about the atomic bomb. It’s a funny thing. We were close enough to Tinian, so that, on the PA system, if we were listening we could hear the news. So the day they dropped the bomb, they announced it on Tinian that it had been a successful mission. That’s when we found out. I wish they could have found some way to end the war, other than that. But I do not regret that they did it, because I, we would have lost hundreds of thousands of men. You know, the fight to the death on the beaches would have been something to behold.

Mel Jacob:The next worse thing outside of the sharks was the guys breaking down and drinking salt water. And that, it goes right out of your mind. They just see things that are not there. They think that theIndianapolisis right down there below them, they want to swim down there and get something from the canteen. Or, they see something on the horizon. They see a ship that is not there. And they’d slip off their life jackets and swim away. Didn’t get too far.

Harry Whitehorse:We were supposed to go to Japan. This is before the atom bomb was dropped. We were supposed to go to Japan as a feeler movement. And they were sure that the Japanese would defend their homeland. We figured this was a suicide mission, because they were going to send only four ships. When that bomb was dropped, you could see the light up the horizon. Come on up deck, take a look at this, you know, we’d look at it, the sky was bright. It was daylight. And it lit up just like it was an arc welder going on, a big arc welder. But we never realized what it was at that time. It was something new to us. They told us that what they dropped was an atom bomb. We said, ‘What’s an atom bomb?’ But they wanted to fight on in spite of that. So they dropped another one, you know. There was Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. Let ’em know that, hey, we got all kinds of ’em. But they only had two at that time. If they would’ve said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna keep fighting,’ it would have been really bad. But I’ve always said that Harry Truman was my big hero. He was the one that okayed that they drop the bomb, because he saved a lot of lives. He also saved a lot of Japanese lives, too. But there’s a lot of people saying they should have never used the atomic bomb. But far as I was concerned, that was the best thing for everybody.

Mel Jacob:Then that PBY came and he says he could see actual survivors being eaten by sharks … in the water. So, he landed his PBY, against regulations, in choppy seas. And Taxied around and picking up survivors and putting them all on the wings. But in the meanwhile, when word got out that theIndianapoliswent down, then there were ships that came from all directions. I think one more day, I don’t think there would have been any survivors. I really don’t. We were pretty much ready to give up. Three hundred sixteen survivors. So, we lost 880 men, 880 good men. The war ended. Then they released that about theIndianapolistaking over the two atomic bombs. In fact, I believe it was the second bomb, they wrote, ‘For the crew of theUSS Indianapolis.’ They wrote that right on the side of the bomb that we dropped on Japan.

Coming Home

Don Collins:When we came through the Golden Gate, there was Alcatraz. But right above Alcatraz, from the angle we came in, there was a huge sign that said, “Welcome Home!” We had fun with that.

Clayton Chipman:I was on guard duty, caught the guard duty, when word passed around that we were going under the Golden Gate Bridge. And that was the only time I ever left my post. I ran out there. I was going to see that bridge. Just total elation to be home. We changed just like flipping a coin. Our language changed. Our plans changed because we knew there were going to be plans. You know, before, we weren’t quite sure.

William Starke:It was just marvelous. We just couldn’t believe the war was actually over. Got back to San Francisco, 21 days later, passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was great.

Herb Hanneman:Our ship came into San Francisco, it was a regular flotilla of ships that came in, but ours was the only ship that had POW’s on it. And as we came under the Golden Gate Bridge, all of these other ships, they were hooting and hollering, throwing their caps up in the air. And our ship, there wasn’t a sound except just crying. We were just so happy to get back.