 Hi, I'm Alex. Thank you for your service. Oh, but I appreciate your thoughts. Yes, that's fine. It was about 14 years old at the time, and it was a Sunday afternoon, if I remember, and that's when the Japanese created Pearl Harbor. Yes. I was laying on the floor by the radio listening to it, and my whole family were sitting around there, got really excited about the whole thing, and so did I. At that point in time, President Roosevelt, who was our president at that particular time, wanted to declare war, and he did immediately on the Japanese at that point, and the way things were in those days, everybody was pretty active and excited about things, and I guess everybody was joining up, joining the service. You're a kid, you're still a kid at 14, you know, you think you know everything, but you don't, really, but you feel like you should be doing something to help. Yes. And that's what I did. I went ahead and was working my way through school, and I wanted to get out of school anyway because I wasn't doing that good at the time, and I started figuring how could I get into the service and go away and do my part. So what I did is took my birth certificate, and I put lemon juice on it. And I put the lemon juice on there, and I changed the 1927 to, all I needed to do was do the last figure, which was a seven, 1927 was the actual, and I changed that seven to a nine, and that, no, did I go up or not? Oh, I changed it where I was 17 years old. I hung on that for a while, and I went down to see the Naval Recruiting Officer down there, and I walked in, and of course I was kind of a bigger kid, but there were still looking for a lot of people, and I walked in there, and it says it's connected to you, and I enlisted. And you say, you sure you know what you're doing? And I said, sure I do. Yeah, I know, I know what I'm doing. So you say, well, you've got to get these papers signed. Well, isn't my birth certificate enough? No, no, no it isn't. We've got to have your guardian, right? Yeah. So my guardian at the time was my grandmother, and she said, you're not going no place. And I said, well, if you don't let me go, I'm going to go anyway. I'll go through Canada if I have to, to go out and help out, you know. Yeah. So she took me into the school, and she went to the officers there that were in charge of kids and keeping them in line where they're supposed to be. And she said, she asked a question to my grandmother, what's he want to do? And she said, he wants to go into the Navy. He said he's all set. And he thinks he can get in if he can get this paper signed, and you are the guardian. So I brought him here. So she says, yeah, I'm a little bit upset. I don't know what to do with him. She says, you might as well let him go because he's not doing an awful lot here. And I did. When we left, we signed up now. That was the early part of the year. Around January or February, we just changed. It was 1942. And then it seemed like it was the first of the year. It brought us up to 43. And I stayed around waiting and waiting and waiting all summer long. They never called me. So when you first enlisted, what rank were you at the time? I was just plain seaman at that time. Just no officer. Because I hadn't been in school. I hadn't been in school that long. Not at 14. I was getting ready to go. I was at junior high at that point. So at that point, all the people I was telling I was going into the Navy and it was week after week after week and nothing is happening. And all of a sudden, I think it was right around Christmas time that year, I got a notice to report to this building over in Albany and just to bring a change of clothes. And I went there and it was that night and they had a ton of guys there. And we started going through and they started painting numbers on our chest with like methylate. So they could identify us and they started with the shots in the arm. And all of them needles hurt and we had about four or five all at once. And just then I said, what am I doing here, you know? So to make a long story short, I passed all the tests and got all the shots and I'm worried that somebody's going to grab me by the collar and get me out of there. But they didn't do it. They were still moving through and I was supposed to be going down to down south to one of the naval headquarters place down there called Solomon's Muralin, which was a new place that just opened up and I was going through the amphibious forces. That was a different new group that they started. Did you ever hear of them? The amphibious naval amphibious forces? No, I've never heard of them before. No, no, they used and drove these things and they hit all the beaches on the invasions. And it was a little scary, but it was still fun because I hadn't gone through it yet. So I wouldn't suggest to take that route, but I don't think I'd want to do it again that way. So we went out, as I said, we went down there in there. You can't think of the name of the place at the moment, but it was right there. Solomon's Muralin was the ultimate base and that was a United States naval base down there and had to do with a new approach to invasion technology where you'd go in there and right with the troops and support them, bring them in and kind of wait for them and get them out of there if we had to. So we were using just about everything under the sun. So how long did you serve in the Navy? About four and a half years. Four and a half years? Yeah, I got out in 1946 at Lido Beach. I always had a problem with my throat because our ship got hit and that side right there. You can see these are replicas of small mortars which is kind of unique. They have mortars on a patrol boat, but that's what we did. These things, mortars, we carried 3.2-meter mortars. We carried three of them. Down below was all the ammo ammunition and it was being passed up and fired as fast as you could. We kept going and going and going and going. When they first started with that, one of the problems was they were bolted to the deck, on the floor deck. That's only a quarter-inch plate down here and these things are welded, they had them tack-welded to the place. They were breaking the seams and everything else. They didn't know what to do about it. Every time it's fired, you get this arrangement. One of the guys in the flotilla went over and got some 2x6s in some place and he made a sandwich box when you were a kid. He made a sandwich box bigger than the gun emplacement. You see sands inside of that and the gun is set down on that right on a real sand. It was just like a soft pad. That was the biggest break we got. You would break these things, tack-welded in many places. You couldn't rough them up too much. When you're about to fire the mortar, you're sitting nice and comfy on the sand. You got it. LCIs had ladders and they went down to the water. As they went down that ladder, especially over in Europe, they were just shooting those guys as fast as they walked across that ladder the Germans were at that time. I was not over there thinking, goodness, I was always in the Pacific by the time I got to the place. I was trying to find a couple of notes and I got a complete bunch of data on my whole turner out there in the Pacific and every island I went to and every invasion that we had we were involved in. They would grab us for everything. From taking garbage to someplace, believe it or not, or going out there and what we had on the back end of these things were what they call smoke smokers. They had Okinawa out there where I was. They ended up anyway. Okinawa, they had the kamikazes out there. Did you ever hear of the kamikazes? I think so. Yeah. Well, they were pretty bad stuff. They caused a lot of stuff like this kind of a mess where they got up and died right into the ship and made a terrible mess out of a lot of things. Yeah. So what was your favorite place while traveling? What was that question again? What was your favorite place while traveling? Before I got involved, it was a boat. It was a ship. That was 137 foot long. That was my home. I was on that one or two other ones. At the same time. And as long as I'm bored, I was fine. But after a while, I shouldn't say after a while. The first time I got there, the first time they were firing at us, they sprayed across the deck. And I was on, that was my gun position was here. They called it the general quarters. It's right there. This was before the invasion. They shot right across here. I changed at that point. I was really scared. I was really scared. I'm not kidding you. Just being 15, you think you got it. But you don't. What else do you want to know? I don't know anything about those kamikaze. I probably started to tell you that we had the smoke machine on the back of this. And what they did with the smoke machine was we had a number of these, maybe 15 or 16 LCI's lined up on the windward side of the harbor. And we let smoke go over cover the entire anchorage where they had all the boats, all the big boats. They were hidden, they couldn't see them. But they got so frustrated they didn't care if they saw them or not. They were diving right down into that smoke. Trying to hope they're hitting something. All right, so what my questions are, why did you enlist? I enlisted because that was the the way I felt and everybody else did about their country. They loved their country and they wanted to defend it and keep it. And I enlisted for the same thing, to go out there and kill the enemy and get this war over with. So which years did you serve? Which year? Yeah. Let's see here. Let's see, I got in there in 1943 although I joined 42. Remember I told you that lag we had between? So I got there in 1943 to 1946. All right. So besides Maryland, where did you travel? Where did I travel? Oh my goodness sakes. Saipan. I should have brought you a list of that too, but I didn't. Just about everything from Ulythi. Ulythi was kind of the main place to come in and you anchored there usually. And from that point you joined your group and you went different places. And I didn't bring a list of every place I went, but I can remember a lot of them. There was like Saipan, Kenyan, Guam, went to Japan, went over to see a China. I followed the minesweepers after the war up there which was scary. They were cutting mines and we're standing over here with rifles and we're trying to blow the mines up. I mean that's kind of scary. Sometimes you look over and you miss one and it's going by the ship and it's scaring you. If you ever hit that thing, you're trying to destroy them. They were cutting them loose and getting them out of there. There was cleaning mines after the war. Instead of going home like I figured I was going to be doing, I could provide you with a whole list of places that I went. I have them but I didn't bring them with me. I didn't think I did anyway. So while you were on the ship, what was your job? I was a communications, I was a signalman. And I did nothing because we couldn't use radios at the time. And that was up on, you see that flashing light there? Yep. Okay, it's not flashing. I don't mean it's flashing, but that's my communication means all in Morris code. Do you do much of that? Uh, I don't. Probably not. Yeah, probably not. Probably not. Okay, but that's what we use. And flags, like A, B, C, D, E. That's the only way we got our messages back. Matter of fact, I would get, the skipper was up there with him and he said, you ever tell anybody? I said, I can't read that stuff. But if you tell anybody, you're a dead man. I don't want anybody knowing what we're doing. So don't tell anybody anything. And that's the way we held off. But we sent messages back and forth from one boat to the other. And it was quite interesting. You felt very important and that was during your daytime stuff, not during the battle. When you were on general quarters where you had to go ahead and prepare to fight, defend yourself, you, I was here on this gun. There was a gunner on this 20 millimeter here. There was a 20, 40 up here. And there was one on each quadrant. These were 20 millimeters. Nothing up here. Yeah. And then after that, after that, after that was over, then you go ahead and do your thing as far as going back to your regular duties. Very interesting. Yeah, it was. Yeah. It was a very good time. Yeah, I'm wearing my dog tags too, actually. Yeah, I wanted to see them. So there's mine. Okay, Alex, okay. I'm seeing that was month of the military child, April 21st, 2017. 2017. And then right here, this is my dad's. Oh, good. So did they have body armor back then? What's that? Did they have body armor back then from penetrating boats? Very little of anything. You had shields in front of the guns. I didn't put them on this. That's the only thing that saved me. When we had that explosion down there, just all that, a lot of that shrapnel just came right through here. And I had the gun turned that way and I had these two quarter inch plates right in front of me. Right there, while the gun went through those two holes or through that line there. Yeah, you can see. Like right here, could you like duck down behind here, like behind the mortar? There were two plates, pretty close to the barrel. Okay? Yeah. And in front of it. And through, visually through the gun itself. And that was the way you were protected. And it just so happened when that mortar hit and it blew up, my gun was positioned, I don't know, something told me to turn the thing. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know. Somebody up top knows more about things than I do. It protected me. I just had few pieces in my neck and my arm. And I see my knee got open. It was under the plate. So what did you do in your free time? I worked to keep your ship clean. And your equipment too? And your equipment, yes. And repaired what any particular damage that you had. And in many cases they found out things that they were doing that were wrong. Obviously firing mortars too fast, the barrels would heat up and they would jam and you couldn't get them out of there. That's dangerous. That gave us some problems. But you learned an awful lot. I mean this was a gun hole, get it done. Get it done in dust. Get it done the best way you can. Get in there and get out. Sometimes you've got to think a little bit about what you're doing. We learned a lot when they became a darn good flotilla. That's a number of these, probably 14 different boats were in that one flotilla. They all traveled together and did their thing. So what did you do as a kid? As a kid? One time they shot at us the first time and they came pretty close. I waited a while but I said to the skipper one night up on the accounting tower there when we were up on duty. I said, you know I think I want to get out of here. I said I want to go home. What? I said I want to go home because I'm only 15. He says you're only 15? It's too bad. As you go home when the rest of us go home they'll get back to duty. That's the way it went. That's the way it ended. I never brought it up again. But I still wanted to go home I'll tell you. We got through it. We had about, I don't know, I couldn't tell you how many different operations we had. Not physically I'm talking about attacks and stuff like that and patrols and things that were going on. People trying to sneak from one island to another island on a log and all kinds of stuff. Picking up people all the time. So we were busy. The only thing you could really do is read or kind of torment your fellow man so to speak. We did some of that, you know, the jokes. You know what goes on. So what did you eat while you were on the ship? Very, very little. We didn't have a real good meal. A lot of hamburger, not hamburger, but canned spam and we had powdered eggs and we had powdered milk and it wasn't the greatest food in the world. We couldn't pull up to any place where you could just walk up the plank and go to a diner or something like that. Not out there. I mean while you were on the island somewhere you could find something like fruit or... There was coconuts and stuff like that. Every so often you might run into something or grab a hole. And they had 3.0 beer or something like that on occasion you could have a beer on there. I wanted the island to go over there and have a party or whatever you wanted to do. You got a shot at it anyway. So how many friends did you make while in the Navy? All of them. Quite a bit. Our crew was about 37 people. 37 people? That's about it. You're pretty close together all the time. It's not as tough as a submarine is but it was the next thing to it I think. You can get aggravated really quick. If you let yourself. Do you any good where you're going to go? The other side of the boat? That's about it. We did. We got along pretty good. If you were a type that was causing problems or something like that you didn't have any friends. If you're on a friend you better play the game. So to speak. So what was basic training like? Basic training? Basic training. It's just what you see basically. It's what you see in the movies and so on and so forth. You march, you fire, you learn how to fire the rifles because you're in an amphibious group and you got to do all that stuff. That was before they had seals and all that. So did you enlist or were you drafted? I enlisted. Remember at the beginning we talked about going down to the naval recruiter and he thought I was kind of, are you sure you know what you're doing? Of course they weren't supposed to take me, I guess. And I think he knew. He didn't say anything about it. But he has a quote or two that he's got to get filled. So they just get this guy and I'll get him in there. I had to go anyway. The only one I scared was my grandmother. So I felt sorry for that. But especially when she got the word that I had been wounded and that was kind of tough. When we had the explosion, we got the word to abandon ship. I was probably one of the first one to go but that was the one over the side. And they tried to pick me up when it was going in. And I said, no, no, no. I'll give it a pump boat that I can, something I can get out of here, really. You probably jumped right off here or there, right? Well, no, I was here. That was my gun position was here. So I went right over there, right down like that. Wow. Yeah. And they had these small pee boats that were bringing the military in and they were going back out to the hospital ship. So they dragged me out of the water and I don't remember if I could talk too much. I was a little bit scared, I guess. I didn't do too much talking and then they put me on a hospital ship for four days, I guess it was, I was on that and I finally got my voice back. So how cold was the water when you jumped in? I was saying, no, if I remember, it probably wasn't like a big tank or anything like that. It was just that from this point here to there is probably 20 feet maximum. Yeah. Thank you for the interview and for your service. Oh, pleasure. You helped me out because I haven't done this in a long, long, long time. Yeah. Thank you.