Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Hal Demuth was digitized.
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World history interview of World War II veterans conducted by Harold Phillips for the Hamlin Library Archives in the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society. Today is the 29th of January, 2002. The veteran is Mr. Hal Demuth. You can start now.
My name is Hal Demuth. I was born in September of 1924, and I will give you a little background about my background and my life before World War II. I was born in Kansas, Ellsworth, Kansas. I tell people I was born in Central America, and it makes my wife mad, but there's nothing more central than Kansas as far as the 48 states go. I grew up in Kansas until I was 14, we moved to Colorado, and I graduated from junior high and high school in Boulder, Colorado and enlisted at that time while living in Boulder. I was a senior in high school when World War II was erupted on us in December of 1941. I was very anxious to get away from home. I had a perfectly wonderful home life and fine parents, but at that age I needed to get out and fly, and here came an opportunity that looked to be unparalleled, and so we, three of us, myself and two friends, quit school on the Tuesday following the Pearl Harbor day. Monday we went to school and listened to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio, and then Tuesday we all rode down to Denver. We hitchhiked to Denver; none of us had a car, and we enlisted. And in Denver in those days all of the services were in the Customs House, the old Customs House, which I think has been torn down long since, but at that time they were down a long hall with a wooden floor and out of each doorway was a small sign projecting out that said what the service was. And the first one that we -- when we entered the building that morning of the -- must have been the 9th of December of '41, we saw the U.S. Army was the first sign, and there was a long line of people, so we kept going down the hall, and the Navy was next. Again, pretty -- pretty popular, a lot of people. The Air Corps and the -- it was a separate room by itself, and it had its share. The last one in the line was the Marine Corps, and it didn't look crowded, so we decided that that would be our choice would be the U. S. Marines, and the only reason was that they looked like we could get in and get out in a hurry, so we did.
Okay.
We were doing a physical examination, and my two friends passed with flying colors and I failed. I was too light. At that time I was 6 feet tall and weighed about 125 pounds, and that was a little light. The recruiting sergeant told me to go home, eat bananas and milkshakes and get fat and to come back right after New Year's, that it wouldn't make any difference, they weren't going to take anybody anymore from that recruiting office until after the holidays. This was -- they had got in a lot of trouble shipping young guys off right before Christmas, and they didn't want to do that, so they were going to save us all up until after the holidays and that he would be in touch. So all three went back, my two friends to gloat about being admitted to the Marines, and me gaining weight. I gained 10 pounds between the 9th of December and the 9th of January and went back down on the 9th and took an examination, and I passed. And I was sworn in on the 10th, as were all my friends. Everybody was sworn in on the 10th, and we took a train to San Diego for boot camp. What else?
Okay. I'm astounded that -- how you got into the Marines. (Laughter) That's good -- a good story. What was your basic training like?
We had -- the normal basic training for the Marine Corps, they call it boot camp in the Marines, was I think at the time a 16-week tour, but due to the emergency declared on December the 7th or the 8th, they had shortened it to eight weeks, so we did everything that the normal Marine Corps did in 16 weeks, we did in eight weeks, and it's easy to do if you just worked 24 hours around the clock, so they kept us hopping. We -- we went to all of the boot camp requirements and when it came time to qualify for the weapons, that is a rifle and a pistol, and the Marine Corps at that time did not have a firing range large enough to accommodate the glut of people that had come in as a result of Pearl Harbor, so they shipped us all on a train, there was 1200 of us in boot camp at the time, they shipped us on a train to San Luis Obispo, California to an Army base called Camp Roberts, and Camp Roberts had big rifle ranges. They had hundred target ranges, more than one. So we spent two weeks of this at San Luis Obispo. This was in the period in February, late February, and anybody who's lived in a tent with no heat in February in San Luis Obispo on the ocean knows what I mean when I say it's cold. Oh, it was cold. I went to bed every night wearing everything, including my hat. But we got out of boot camp on the 8th of March, and we went back down to San Diego and had a parade for graduation, and it was on a Saturday, as I remember. We had a parade and got a set of verbal orders from the commanding general at the recruit depot that we were to not call home, we would not be allowed to write home because at midnight that night we were going to get on a troop ship, and we left the States on the 9th of March. We were in the -- I was in the Marines exactly one day less than two months and I was on my way overseas.
What ship was that?
The ship was a new ship that was built under the U.S. President Lines called the PRESIDENT GARFIELD, and it was built to be an automobile freighter to ship automobiles to Asia, but in the building, the federal government subsidized a percentage of that cost if the President Lines would turn it back into a troop ship, if necessary. Well, it was necessary, so we became troops, and they bought bunks, and there was something on the order of a thousand of us -- no, it wasn't that -- about 750 Marines got on board in the Second Marine Provisional Brigade, and we went off to train in American Samoa. Pearl Harbor and the Hawaiian Islands were not a place to train new recruits because they were frightened to death that the Japanese would come back and finish us off, so they established bases in Pago -- near Pago Pago in American Samoa, and that's where we went, and we spent two months there -- about two months, about two or three, and then we sailed west, and we were assigned to go ashore on a small Japanese held island called Wallis. And in May of 1942 we made a first batallion strength amphibious landing that we had seen in World War II, and it was a riot because none of us had had any training in amphibious landing. And they had these flat-bottom Higgins boats, which are going to sea with a shoebox with a motor. They have about as much comfort built in as you could find in a shoebox, and they were the landing craft. And we went ashore, subdued the few Japanese -- they weren't very many -- without too much trouble. There were some casualties, but not serious, and occupied Wallis Island. And it was a communications station for the Japanese Navy, and that's the reason they wanted to take us there, they wanted to remove the threat of this Japanese relay station further for the naval forces, and so we captured the radio station, and all of the few Japanese that survived, we captured them, too. And there we sat. And we sat there for a year-and-a-half until they organized the Fifth Amphibious Corps, and they sent us to -- the group went to Tarawa. The first landing was in Tarawa. I did not get to that because by the time we had reached that stage, I had developed some serious tropical disease problems. I had malaria and filariasis, and I couldn't walk. The filariasis renders you somewhat incapacitated, and so I was confined to a stretcher, and they put me on a troop ship in the harbor at Abemama, which is in the Ellice Group, and there was a steamer at Tarawa, and they put me on a troop ship to send me back to the States. We suffered an air attack before we sailed. I was still laying on the main deck on a stretcher, and the Japanese sent twin-engine fighter bombers over, and they blew the stern off the ship and sunk it and scraped the deck twice. Each aircraft scraped -- there were two aircraft. Each aircraft scraped us twice. The most frightening experience in my entire life. I was helpless. The ship sunk. I went down with the ship. I didn't get wet because we were in a harbor, and we had only sunk about 10 feet and stopped, so we were all -- it wasn't a sinking problem. The ship sunk, but we didn't. They took -- they took us off the ship. There had been a lot of casualties. Fortunately, I was -- I was -- I wasn't injured during the bomb blast and the scraping missed me. It hit some people right around me, but I didn't get hit. Then they put me on an airplane, a DC-3 -- RB-4 I think they called them -- and at the airport in Punta Puti. I wasn't on Abemama; I was on Punta Puti. That was the staging area, Punta Puti. And they put me on an aircraft that had been used as a photo reconnaissance plane and had flown unarmed. Some armor, but not much, but no weaponry, as high as a DC-3 could run, and they had photographed aerophotography, reconnaisance of the island of Truk, and those of you who know your world war history know that was a hotbed of the Japanese, that we decided to go around instead of having a face-to-face confrontation and a battle, and I'm grateful we did. There were some 50,000 Japanese troops on that island. This reconnaissance plane made it safely back, with pictures, I gather, but in the process of that got shot up pretty bad. It was flyable, but it was full of holes, so they put six of us special cases on board that aircraft. The pilot didn't have a co-pilot, so he used -- they had put a corpsman on board with us because some of the patients needed medical attention. Two of them were on some kind of intravenous feeding. They needed constant attention. I didn't need any attention; I just couldn't walk. So we took off in this rickety airplane with holes in the fuselage, and no pilot but the -- but the crux -- or the corpsman sat up in the co-pilot seat. He didn't talk to the pilot; I guess he was comfort. And we were going to go to -- back to Samoa to a big hospital there, and from there we would -- we would rotate back to the States. In the process, the plane developed a horrible rattling gurgle in the starboard engine, and there's two of them on that plane, but only one was running at the time. And he looked for an island, saw one, made a perfect landing before the engine caught fire. It had just quit running, and there we sat. We were on Western Samoa. The main town is Apia, out on the edge of town about a mile out of town on an airstrip the U.S. had built but had abandoned when they moved west. The pilot and the co-pilot got up on a -- a stepladder out, evidently on the DC-3 they carried stepladders to look at the engines, and they did, and they found evidently a broken oil line, and they used some bandages from the corpsman's kit, and they taped the pipe up, and he had spare oil, the pilot, and he wanted to lighten the plane, so he asked us, any of us if we could get off because he didn't want to have as heavy an aircraft as he did. They threw all the luggage off, and two of us volunteered to get off. I stood up, and I found I could walk, slowly, but I could walk. And my friend, that turned out to be my friend, a naval rated man who had sunk -- had went down, I think, with the YORKTOWN and in the process had broken his feet badly, and his feet needed a lot of surgical remedies, and he was going back to the States to get some orthopedic work done and then get discharged from the Navy. So the two of us volunteered to stay, and we did, and the plane took off without us, made it safely. The pilot swore that when he got to Pago Pago he would tell the authorities where we were and they would send somebody back to get us. Well, the pilot was like an awful lot of Air Force people, they forgot what they were to do, and he had forgotten to tell anyone, so we sat there for -- well, we sat there for a week. We were taken in by a Samoan family, and the family -- let me see the name. Ito -- no. It's almost like it; I'll get it. A man and his wife and they had two daughters. He had been a PO. He drove a taxicab. And the island is British, and there were no Americans on the island at that time, although they had been there about a year before, and they were well received, very favorably received by the natives, so they were glad to see Americans. The sailor's name I forget, but he said everybody called him Rockers because in his injuries he wound up with a negative arch in both feet. And he had about 10 pounds New Zealand money, and I didn't have any money at all. We didn't have any orders, no travel orders. We had no luggage. That was to come -- they hadn't gotten that off that sunken Liberty when we -- when I left, so we didn't have any luggage. We didn't have any seabags. We didn't have anything. I didn't have any money, and they never get anything in writing. All we knew was we were to head for Pago and find that Navy hospital at a place called Vaitagi, which is about 20 miles out of town in American Samoa. So we sat there on the island and Hano -- Mr. Hano, that was his name, I knew I'd think of it -- Mr. Hano and his wife fed us and took care of us and the daughters danced with us, and it was an idealic life. It was probably the happiest moment of my life up to that time. And one morning Rockers came, looking back up the hill to Mr. Hano's house, and he said there's a ship in the harbor that will take us over to Pago. And I said, how do you know? And he said, I talked to the captain. Just put us on the deck. It was only an 80-mile trip, and with that Liberty, that takes about almost a day. They had a deck load of coal in sacks they had picked up in New Zealand, that was a current steamer-type thing. So we said, we'll go, we'll catch the ship, and I seriously thought about that from a standpoint of do I go or do I stay. I was in the lap of luxury. The Hanos had treated me like a son, the daughters treated me like a boyfriend, but Rockers was older than I, and he was a petty officer, and he pointed out the problems of desertion from the Marines and all the trouble I'd get, so I went down to the ship and the captain waved us on board and the next day we wound up at Pago and went to the hospital, found the hospital, and that Air Force person had never reported us. They didn't know who we were. They didn't know we were coming, but they gave us a bunk, examined us, decided we did need to go back to the States for treatment. And I got a ship. About three weeks later, disaster floated in, and an Army transport broke early in mid war, between World Wars I and II, manned by the Coast Guard, of all things, had been in the invasion of Bogenthil (ph), and got a bomb dropped on the port side overboard, and it had sprung all the plates, so the ship had a 17-degree port list from the standpoint that all the plates that had oil were now filled with water, which was heavier and gave the ship a list, but it was floatable. And they were going around the Pacific with a big net, and they were picking up all the, as the Marines call them, sick, lame and lazy from all the hospitals. They had been to the Fijis; they had been in New Caledonia; they started out in Auckland. And the ship would float, but it was just slow and it left an oil slick wherever it went. It was still leaking oil. And so 750 of us were on that packet, and we went through -- came back to San Francisco, and it took us 20-some days to get back, and I got back about 10 days before Christmas in Oakland in the hospital. That was my experience.
That was -- what year did you get back?
Late 1943, right before Christmas. Went over in March of '42 and got back December '43.
What were you in rank, were you, at that time?
A PFC.
PFC?
Yeah. I didn't -- I didn't get promoted to corporal for a long time. I finally did, but --
In other words, but even there in the hospital chain, there was no one looking after you so far as --
Well, that's right. I spent some time in different hospitals. Finally went on duty at -- various duties. Most of them had to do with either -- they put me in training, training amphibious troops on the Coronado del -- you know, the Coronado beach strand there, the Navy took it over.
You had had that one amphibious landing?
Yeah, I'd be an expert.
I see. You talked about your training. Did they give you any training at all, amphibious type of training?
No. No. We had never seen a cargo net until on the side of the ship that took us over to Wallis Island from Samoa, it was called THIS ISLAND, it was a Navy transport, and they out -- they put a cargo net over the port side -- I guess over the port side, and lined us all up on the main deck and said, now what you do is you climb down this thing and the boats will be at the bottom. And I had never been on a cargo net in my life, but we climbed down and we had a few casualties. We had a casualty in my boat. A fellow carrying about a 50-pound walking -- walkie-talkie radio, in those days they were huge, he fell and badly shattered his arm. They got him fished out of the water. He had bounced off the boat and then landed in the water. They fished him out, and they hoisted him back up on the main deck with a sling, and that's the last we saw of him and the radio.
I hope it was a calm day. Because if the water is rough, that's an impossible task to come down those.
Oh, it -- it was -- yeah, the water wasn't bad. We had a -- a typical, with the islands around there, they didn't really have any intelligence on where to put the boats as far as adequate water. That's what killed them at Tarawa, if you'll remember reading your history there, they landed them a half a mile offshore in a wooded -- on fire. The native -- the Japanese on Wallis Island had alienated a few of the natives. There weren't very many natives on the island, maybe 500, and they had no contact with the outside world ever, and the Japanese, and they brutalized them. They killed a few of them. They really were very hard on the native population. As a result, the natives just abandoned wherever they were living and went to the interior of the jungle and lived there exclusive of the Japanese. The Japanese didn't go after them and do anything to them. They just -- they left. They left. But the natives saw us come ashore. Later I learned, after I learned to speak to the natives, they didn't know we were different from the Japanese. We wore a thing on our heads, we carried a thing in our hands, and we were huge, none of which they had, so they thought we were just more Japanese. They avoided us like the plague. One thing they didn't do is go tell the Japanese someone was coming, so we landed almost without anybody seeing us. It wasn't until we got inland that we ran into them. But so I learned that that was the whole amphibious operation. But by that time, when I went to training, I was on the shore defense crew of -- we stayed ashore and the recruits would come at us, and we fired -- we had blank fire, and we had some live fire with a fixed machine gun, a fixed elevation machine gun, and the only thing I did that was -- that was -- that I felt good about, I had a -- came across a crate of rotten oranges, and I stuck a 2-inch canon cracker in an orange, and I blew it up, and do you know that makes the most satisfying roar like a grenade, and it smears wet stuff all over the recipient whose first thought is, oh, my God, it's blood; I'm dead. And so we went from then on, the training crew that I was with, we bought a -- we didn't buy, the mess hall would give us crates of oranges, and in those days there's lots of them in California, crates of oranges, and then we'd -- on a truck driven over every morning. We'd lived at the marine base, we'd take the truck over to Coronado every morning, but there was a girl, and we would pour them out and stick a 2-inch canon cracker in there, and then each of us had a box of matches, and we'd lay behind the sand dunes and lob them over, and it created the juice.
A much better prank than a firecracker or --
Oh, yeah, yeah. It smeared them all over with this gooey stuff. It was really a -- we -- oh, we had a -- we had a lot of fun with that, and -- but that was the only training I had was just by doing it. Right now they have more sophisticated equipment.
When were you declared -- when were you released to go back to duty?
In May or -- in late -- no, in middle of May of 1944.
'44. So from May of '44 you were --
I was then bouncing around the country. Most of it was either an MP -- I was an MP in San Francisco and in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania at a big supply depot. They sent me there for guard duty, and then I was an MP in San Francisco at the end of the war. I was discharged from San Francisco.
When were you discharged?
In January the 10th of 1946.
'46?
Four-year hitch. I put in the four-year tour.
All right. So you ended your term, not because of any number of points or stuff like that?
No. They didn't do it for regulars.
Oh, that's right.
Regular, yeah.
You were regular?
Yeah. I was regular, so it didn't make any difference about your points, and I had to finish on my hitch.
And your experiences when you were the most scared when you were being scraped --
That was -- that was a low point. Another low point was when they put me on a troop transport in the first of August in San Diego. I had been training in San Diego for the invasion of Japan, and I was one of those that they were going to have go for the invasion of Japan, so they -- and they trained a lot of us in Pearl Harbor -- or in Hawaii and they trained another bunch in San Diego, and so they put us on a troop transport, and by coincidence, it was another American Presidents Line. It was the CLEVELAND. CLEVELAND -- President Cleveland -- put us on a troop transport and we were going to sail west, and I thought I had, you know, I had been lucky the first time out, but I didn't -- I didn't know how long you could push that, and I wasn't too pleased about that assignment. So we got on the ship right before it was to sail, and they had dropped the bomb. And they came in and they said, okay, all you regulars with less than six months on a hitch, stand up, and they took us off the ship.
Uh-huh.
(Laughter) I said -- I said at first the crews talked me into enlisting as a regular rather than as a reserve. I could have it either way. It's your choice when you get in.
Right.
But he said -- he said, you don't want to be a reserve. He said, nobody likes reserves. You want to be a regular. Ask me. And, boy, was I glad.
So that was in '45 then, I suppose.
Yeah, in -- let's see. We dropped the bomb in August. This was -- yeah, this was the first week in August, I think it was, and they were -- they were preparing a big contingent to go over and take the Japanese back, you know, to take the homeland. In August, ____+, and then of course they dropped the bomb anyway, and it was essentially over for us.
So you were released in San Francisco?
In San Francisco. January, San Francisco, 1946. Went back to Boulder. I had another problem; I couldn't get into college on the GI bill. But I hadn't graduated from high school because I left too early, so they wouldn't take me at the University of Colorado, which was right next to my mother's house. You know, I was within half a block of the campus, and I was a little upset about that. So I went down to the high school, local high school, Boulder High -- at that time they only had one -- and I knew the principal. He had been the principal when I left, and his name was Gamble, Mr. Gamble. And Mr. Gamble was still the principal, and I went in, and I was wearing my uniform because I didn't have any civilian clothes yet when I got home, and I'm not sure he remembered me, but he remembered the name because my brother was younger than I and had just graduated from that school with a pretty good grade. He was -- I think he was the -- what do they call them, the summa cum laude and the other. He was one of the top students.
Valedictorian? Salutatorian?
----+. Yeah, well, anyway, I think that he thought that I was his brother, you know, he got the names mixed up because my grades weren't that good. You know, they were okay. And so I told him my problem, I couldn't get into college because I hadn't graduated. So he got my transcript out of the files and said, yeah, but I didn't finish half of a year, so I didn't get any credit for the senior year I was there. So we chatted for a while and he says, why don't you come back and take a few courses between now and graduation and you're good to go for graduation? Can't do that. Got to get a job and work. Okay. He said -- he said you went through boot camp? Yeah. He said that ought to be worth a credit for PhysEd. I got a credit for History. I got a credit for World Geography. I got a credit for Civics.
What did he base those credits on?
Civics because I worked for the government; I ought to know how it runs.
Yeah.
World History because I traveled around every part of it. American History because I had engaged in part of it. PhysEd because I had gotten -- gone through boot camp and survived. And I wound up with enough credits to graduate that morning. He gave me four. I think I needed four, and he gave me four, four credits and called and said, fix up this transcript to show the four credits for senior course, and I'll sign it. And I -- by noon I had my graduation. I had rode up to the -- up the hill to the campus. It's just up the hill from the high school, the university is, and rode in there, and ----+, I was in.
Did he give you a rationale for the credits being issued?
No, he just gave me one for -- let's see. One for World History -- Geography, one for World History, Civics, PhysEd. That's all I needed. And the university said, you need 16 credits to get in, and that was 16 credits.
I've spoke with others that received academic credits for their military service, but yours is the best.
Well, I -- I just -- I just -- they had -- I don't think Mr. Gamble had run across that before. And as I say, I think he thought -- he had gotten me a little confused with my younger brother whose grades were extremely good, and I think he thought, gee, this guy's a genius, so ----+. I, in turn, I campaigned for his election to the State House of Representatives. He was going to run the next fall, so I -- I volunteered ----+.
Did he win?
Yes, he did.
Good. Did you use the GI bill?
Yes. The GI bill was -- was very good to me. I got four years of undergraduate and then I went back to graduate school, and I still had some time left on it, so I got paid for the graduate school, too, so I got two degrees out of it, but learning fast.
What were your degrees in?
Electrical engineering.
Oh, so did I.
Really? Where did you go to school?
Virginia Tech.
Oh, that's a good school.
Was your Master's in --
Oh, the same thing.
Same thing?
Yeah.
I got my Master's in physics.
I would have probably liked physics better. I really enjoyed physics and mathematics.
I took physics because I wanted to know why.
Yeah. I can understand that. I took all the physics I could take that supported the course in graduate school that they needed. I needed more hours than I got in the Physics Department, basically, but I enjoyed it.
Had you been involved with any girls while you were in the service --
No. Not really.
____+ and stuff like that?
No. No. Nothing that hung on. I did have a -- met a girl that was a part of my tour in the Marines after I got out of the hospital was to go to a convalescent camp up in Oregon, a place called Plymouth Falls, Oregon, and I spent about eight or nine months up there convalescing, and then went back on duty, and I met a girl up there I used to write to a lot.
That was the real thrust of my question. Was there any trouble writing letters back and forth to your family?
Not after I got back to the States.
I expect they couldn't find you when you were --
Oh, the mail, in early 1942, very little got into the Pacific that had to do with mail. We were short of food, we constantly ran short of rations because they just didn't have the ships and the logistic net they needed to support, and there was thousands, millions of people over there, and they couldn't back them up, and so they sent -- the best things to hope for was ammunition and medicine, and we ran out of chow a couple of times.
Did you have any kind of R & R facilities at all?
No. Not a thing.
There was no R & R?
And no tour of duty. You stayed over there until they wore you out, one way or the other. In my place it was filariasis. It was so bad I couldn't walk. I could walk, but I had trouble. And then this convalescent home up in Plymouth Falls was designed to take all the Pacific Marines who had had malaria, filariasis, or both, and take them up there and in a sense it was doing some research in what would help them, because there's no cure for either at that time, malaria or filariasis, and they have since developed all kinds of things, but no cure. The only cure was resting. And they -- and we had physicals all the time. We were getting a physical maybe once a week.
Did you have any reoccurrence?
No. It turns out both of those diseases are caused by infection from a mosquito, but not the same strand of mosquito, but a mosquito, and if you can get away from the constant reinfection that we were subject to, constant reinfection, the mosquitos would bite us again, you can wear them out; they just leave your system. I had by the end of 1940 -- let's see. I got to get my dates straight. By the middle of 1945 all my swelling had gone down from the filariasis. People call it elephantitis in this country ____+. Anyway, all my swellings had gone down and the only time I had a reoccurrence was about four or five years later one of my arms swelled up, and they attributed that to filariasis.
But they didn't have any pills for you to take as of then?
No. No. They do now. I think they have all kinds of pills now.
When I was in Korea, we had to take pills all the time.
We took -- well, for malaria, now, we took Ativan. It started out with quinine, and then they went over to Ativan, and Ativan turns a bright yellow. Have you ever taken that stuff?
No, I've never seen it.
Really?
So you took Ativan?
So we took Ativan. But once we got out of the tropics and got up to -- the only reason they picked that convalescent home up in Oregon is that there wouldn't be any mosquitoes that would have any kind of relations to the mosquitos in this, related to, and so that -- and that worked for me.
We had to take pills in Korea, and then after we got back to the States, we had to take pills to bring us down off of the pill we had been taking.
Oh.
Pills and shots.
The only thing I got when I got discharged, one of the medical people -- well, they give you a medical for discharge, you know, and one of the medical people said, you were exposed to leprosy. And I said, well, I lived on an island for a while, and they had a lot of lepers in the native population, and so he said, well, leprosy is extremely difficult to catch. But he said, you don't have it. Hanson Disease, they call it Hanson's Disease. Anyway, you don't have it, but he said, just to be on the safe side, would you mind -- and this was ____+, would you mind taking a blood test once a year for five years? He said, we'll pay you wherever you are, you just keep us posted, and so I did that. I -- I can't remember. It was a Navy medical office I wrote to every year and gave them my address, and they'd -- everyone's permitted to have a blood test, and I didn't have to do much except go to some local doctor. One case I went to a recruiting office in Denver and had a blood test.
What did you do after you got out of college?
I graduated in '49, and I got a -- I was commissioned as an officer in the Coast and Geodetic Survey. It's a group of mapmakers that has a commission corps, and when I got in there were 200 of us all told, I was the 230th, and -- as an ensign, and I stayed there and I persevered. And they changed the name to NOAA finally, it's now NOAA, and incorporated the Weather Bureau and a few other things, but I retired from NOAA in 1967. I was a commander when I was retired.
Had you been doing mapping?
Yeah, Geodetic mapping in Florida. That is the precise mapping, and then mostly hydrographic on the charts. We went charting in the North Pacific and the --
Back to the Pacific?
Yeah, back to the Pacific. Central Pacific and North Pacific, the Bering, the Chukchi, Arctic Ocean, Caribbean, North Atlantic. I think I probably left someplace out. I think that's basically. The different ships, we had our own ships, and so we -- I spent 18 years floating around except when I was -- they gave me a break for a few years ____+, so --
Did you marry?
Yes, I did. I married the girl I met in college, in Boulder, the same girl I'm still married to, 52 years ago. I married right after I graduated. We were married in probably December of 1949.
So you had a lot of time away from home?
Yes, I did. Our cruises were six months. We would go out six months and stay in six months. We started married life, at least getting married and then we spent three months in idealic bliss, and then I sailed, was gone for six months and came back and kept at it for several years. And my wife, fortunately, was a nurse. Fortunately because she could always get a job, run to the local hospital and get a job as a nurse, so -- and that kept her out of mischief, and then when I'd come back, she'd tell them I quit.
Did you use any other VA benefits?
I bought a house --
So you bought a house?
-- on the GI bill. Yeah, the first house I ever owned was in Alexandria in 194 -- in 1961. I think that's right. I got that on the GI bill.
How did you get lined up in Winchester?
Well, I was looking -- when we lived in Alexandria, Virginia, I ----+ when I got out of the coastGuard in '67, I wound up at a research company in Alexandria, Virginia and was there for 20 years, and we got restless. My wife liked Victorian furniture. She collected -- her mother had it before her, and we wanted an old Victorian house, and we saw -- so we started looking around Northern Virginia, and we couldn't find anything we liked that we could afford, and we got to Winchester on a newspaper ad for a fine old Victorian house in Winchester that was for sale. And we came up to look at it, but it had been sold, but the agent, local agent, said that there was a lot more of them around and if we would work with him, he would show us what was available, and we did. We found a house in Winchester that we could afford. It was kind of run down. It was a lot run down, and a good address, a nice building, and so we bought it in 1983. Started looking in '82 and bought the house in '83 and moved back here.
And you've lived in the house since then?
Yes. Been here almost 20 years. Be 19 years this year.
That first house you looked at, was that called the Gables?
Gables. Yes, it was the Gables, and it was -- when we looked at it, the agent told us it had been sold, and it had, and we would go by and look at it in the flesh instead of its newspaper picture, and we were glad we didn't get interested because it's 10,500 square feet, and that was a little larger than we had in mind. So we just kept looking, and now we wound up we're across the street at the other end of the block from the Gables, so it's good over there.
Looking back, can you account for why you wanted to enlist, especially so quickly?
I think it was because I was restless. I was bored with high school. I was looking for any excuse that would allow me to get out of home without running away and without tearing up my family. My family is a very loving family, took very, very good care of myself and my younger brother. But I -- was just time to leave. I either had to go have a great adventure or split. So coincidence and Pearl Harbor and one thing and another, and hear about it, everybody wanted to rush off and get in the service, and man, I led the way, as quickly as I could. And that's -- it was not really patriotism as much as it was just -- it was here's a good opportunity. I didn't want to miss it.
And other than giving you the opportunity to serve your country, was the service of any magnitude?
Oh, it was -- oh, I hope to tell you it was. I have to give credit to the United States Marine Corps because when I got in the Marine Corps, I could use a little guidance, and I had to grow up, and I did grow up. They saw to that, and they also gave me a tremendous boost, and I have a real knack, a knack, it's a talent, and it's to say it's a talent in solutions to problems that bother, mechanical or electrical problems, I'm a -- I'm a real one for finding a solution. Now, it may not be pretty, and it may not be all that convenient, but it works. And I made a whole career of that. I got into research engineering and rolled around all over the place in measuring things. People want to measure something and they didn't know how to go about it, and so I was in that field. I'd come up with solutions on how to measure things, and it was extremely interesting, and I got -- I got a lot of that from the Marines. I didn't learn the electronics from the Marines, but I sure learned a lot about if you are faced with something, you have several solutions available. One of them is just to sit and whimper, and the other one is to run away, and the third one is to figure out how to get out of it, and that's where I really developed some talents.
Did you stay in contact with that family from that ---- that you were --
I did for -- or Mr. Hano and I wrote each other till I guess when I got out of college. It was several years. I mean, it was when I was in college. It was a spasmodic correspondence, maybe once every six months we exchanged letters, but it was such a fine thing for him to do because we had no money -- well, Rockers shared his New Zealand money with me, and we couldn't -- you know, we didn't need money on the field because Mrs. Hano did everything. She did our laundry; she fed us. We slept right with the rest of the family. They're really fine people. They took me up on a -- Mr. Hano wanted to make sure I didn't miss the big thing on British Samoa, the big tourist attraction, and may still be, was the burial place of Robert Louis Stevenson. He died in American -- or British Samoa from tuberculosis. He had come down there for his health, and he had lived there for about seven years and then he died and they buried him. And his Samoan name was Tusitala, which means the teller of tales. And they just, they absolutely revered him. And so he has a marvelous grave on the side of this mountain. It was a torturous trail up the mountain to get there, and I wasn't in all that great shape and Rocker wasn't either, but Mr. Hano insisted that we -- we go up and see the grave, and to make it easier on us, he got two horses, (laughter) and, you know, these were ____+ things, and I don't know where they came from, initially, but they were pretty well shot, but he got two horses, and we used a banana pad as a saddle. They'd just take banana leaves and wrap them around the horse. So we got aboard these things, and riding that thing was harder on me than walking, so I wound up -- I really -- and Rockers rode his pretty much all the way up and down. I walked. I just walked mine and led it. We did go up to the grave, and it was a beautiful view from up there. I mean, you see the sweet bit of harbor and the Pacific, and it was really quite a scene. And, as I say, that's almost like a shrine, and it may still be, although I'm sure that generation has been long gone.
Did NOAA take you to any of the islands you had been on as a Marine?
No, except -- no. The only island that was even in the Central Pacific was Hawaii. I lived there for a few months with NOAA, but most of my work was in the Aleutians. I have been on -- I think I had been on every Aleutian island. I'm not absolutely positive. I don't -- I can't think of one I missed, plus all the islands in the Bering, and then we got up and we went through the straits of Prince of Wales and we went up into the Chukchi and worked up in there, but I never did -- NOAA took me down to the Caribbean. I went to -- oh, went down to Puerto Rico and did some surveying off of there. But I never have been back to the Pacific. I've never been below the equator again.
Did you receive any awards or commendations from that?
We got the Presidential Unit Citation in the Marines. I would have gotten a Purple Heart except -- because we were bombed on the Wallis, but it was after the island was secured, and the Marines were very picky about the combat zone, because I got my face smashed up, but it was after.
By an air raid?
Yeah, it was an air raid, and what it -- it says, if I can piece it together, they dropped a bomb, probably a fairly small one that didn't go off, and it landed in the midst of a fuel supply shack that they had knocked together with logs and some packing crates, and they had drums of regular gasoline in order to run the generators, the lights. And I went to the door of the shack to draw some gasoline, and they said give us some gasoline, so I got a five-gallon can, went in there, two of us, and when I opened the door, the whole place exploded, and I have no idea. We might have been smoking; I don't know. I smoked then and so did the guy in line next to me. And we might have, but I doubt it. I don't think we had been smoking, but whatever it was, it was either a delayed action or a spark in there and it punched -- maybe something dropped, the bomb dropped through there and gas was leaking and we set off a spark, I don't know, but it blew the building up, killed the guy with me. I don't even remember his name, but he was dead. But it blew. I would say the only reason I lived through it was that the door of the shack was made out of planks, vertical planks, well made, I mean, sturdily made, heavy wood, and it blew the door off, and the door just caught me like a bulldozer blade and shoved me back about, oh, 25 feet, I guess, and I landed in a brush pile, but none of the flames got to me because I was behind that door.
Is there anything else you'd like to add to this interview?
Well, I can't think of anything. I think that in the long run probably the best thing that ever happened to me was World War II from the standpoint of experience in shaping my life. It's kind of like anything else, would you want to do it again? Heavens, no, but I'm sure glad I did.
Do you have any reason for having survived all the things that happened to you?
Well, I think I'm just lucky. Ultimately, it will catch up with me, but so far it hasn't, and I've always felt that there's a place with my name on it and I just haven't got there yet.
Just hadn't got there. Thank you very much.
My pleasure.