Richard N. Rogers Life during WWII. Box 4 Folder 28

Transcription

1 Eric Walz History 300 Collection Richard N. Rogers Life during WWII By Richard N. Rogers February 14, 2004 Box 4 Folder 28 Oral Interview conducted by Pamela Porter Transcript copied by Alina Mower May 2005 Brigham Young University Idaho

2 PP: How old were you on Dec. 7 th, 1941? RR: Let s see , I was nineteen. PP: What do you remember about that day? RR: I remember that me and my twin brother he was going to be drafted and my number hadn t come up yet so we both decided that we go volunteer for the navy, so we joined the navy. PP: What did you think when you heard the news about the attack? RR: Well I remember we was going to school in Phoenix Arizona, carpenter school, and I remember sit on top steps of a tall second story building and we were listening to President Roosevelt declare war and of course we was taking military training at the time of school so we went ahead and went on in. PP: Did you serve in the armed forces during the war? RR: I served in the U.S. Navy Reserves, which meant that a lot of the draftees or the ones that volunteered went into the Navy Reserve. The regular Navy was the ones that was already in there before World War II started and the reserves were called up, and the drafted and called them reserves, so I went in September the twenty first, Nineteen fortytwo. PP: So then were you drafted or did you sign up? RR: I volunteered and my twin brother volunteered, so we went together. PP: When you were there were you in combat? RR: I was near combat at all times. I was on a gasoline tanker which we took fuel to the first and fifth marine divisions and we covered the whole South Pacific. We was at sea for approximately thirty months and, we got all the nearly all the war zones to take fuel on a gasoline tanker. We had one hundred and twenty octane, we had ninety octane, we had diesel fuel and we had black oil. And wherever the Marines went to we took the fuel into with us and took it to em. I was on a camouflage ship, it was a close to a was the liberty ship, but it was made into a tanker. And there was twenty of em and they was secret tankers and we went in on those, I was on the IX-120 and my twin brother was on the IX-118. PP: Where did you serve most of the time? RR: Well we started when we left the states we took a load of fuel to New Zealand, which took us twenty seven days without seeing land and then from there we went up in to the war zone: Guadal Canal, a New Heberdie, we went to a whole lot of them places

3 all the way through, as the war progressed we kept moving along moving Northward and we went to the end of the Marshals, Okinawa, and we went in Iwo Jima, oh there is whole number of them, kind of hard to remember all the ones I ve been to, but I could dig it out. PP: That is okay. What was your rank and assignment? RR: My rank? I was a carpenters mate first class. I made it first class carpenters mate. I went into Navy as a third class carpenters mate cause I had enough training, and my twin brother went in with me with a third class rate. We both come out first class carpenters mates. And our duties as a carpenters mate was to look after the fresh water, to take the ships sounding to see if it had leaks in it, and to repair anything that needed to be repaired with a carpenters help, well, we was that. I did pump a lot of fuel, I pumped, well we pumped fuel at twelve inch hoses. PP: To other ships? RR: We could we d pump it ashore to other sometimes we would pump it three miles, sometimes the ship would come along side of us and we d pump it aboard the other ships and that s the way we d distribute it. They d lay lines, gas lines or oil lines from the ship to the beach then we d pump it ashore. PP: Did you serve in the same place as your brother? RR: No, we would cross trails twice. I d seen him once in Okinawa and, I guess twice at Okinawa and I went from When I left him there I went into China. We took fuel into China into the Green Horaway Northern China, and then after that we went into North Korea, before it become a communist nation. And we took fuel in there, and they had the highest tides in the world there and we was there and we was there in October of fortyfive, and we had to get out before the tide in there that we had to work with the tide. We dumped fuel and then they loaded Japanese rifles aboard our ship, and when we got back to sea we dumped them over the side, we had orders to dump them. Each crewmember was allowed to keep one gun, so we each collected a gun out of it. PP: Do you still have it? RR: I have the bayonet that goes with it, I don t have the rifle. PP: How did you keep in contact with your brother? RR: Well, we watch for each other s ship all the time, and I d write him a letter and then when we arrived in Okinawa his ship pulled up along side my ship and we tied together and dumped fuel from one ship to the other, and them we went of into China from there, I don t know where he went to. PP: Was it hard to get letters between you?

4 RR: No it wasn t It d go back to the states and then go out again. We wasn t allowed to tell where we was at. Our letters was all censored, and I wasn t allowed to tell what port we was in or what country I was in at the time. But after the war ended I was still over there for a while, then they allowed us to tell where we was at and where we d been. When I left my ship, to come home after the war, I left it in Kagoshima Japan, and we rode a train across Japan a hundred and fifty miles to Nagasaki past by where they A- bombed both cites and then caught a hospital ship and sailed back to Washington, state of Washington, Seattle, we landed in Seattle February the first nineteen forty-six. PP: I bet that was a good day. RR: That was a good day, you bet. PP: What is the difference between your starting rank and your ending rank? RR: I was a petty officer when I went in, I was petty officer third class when I went in and when I come out, well after I d been there a while I made petty officer second class and then petty officer first class. PP: Oh, so it starts at third class and goes to first class. RR: It goes third, second, and first. PP: Did you make any new friends during the war? RR: I made some good friends, but I haven t contacted only a couple of them, we kinda lost track of each other after it was all over. There was only a hundred men on our ship. PP: Did you meet any old friends from home while you were out? RR: Yes I did, I met a cousin of mine at Okinawa and a we had a big typhoon there in October of forty-five and, his ship, his little ship was washed ashore, a half mile ashore and they had to wait for high tides there to get it back to sea. But I did get to visit that cousin though, while he was there and I seen my brother-in-law Barret, Ed Barret, I seen him on a ship while I was out there. While I was out there he was on a supply and I was on the Cannon tanker, but I did visit a couple. PP: How did the military training they gave you prepare you for combat? RR: Well we took on board ship where we was at, the combat we would have been in, had heavy guns on there, five inch guns, eight inch guns, and twenty millimeter guns and we was all trained I was trained as a firefighter, in other words my training, if a fire broke out I was to put the fire out. If I could. PP: So you didn t shoot any of the guns.

5 RR: I didn t shoot them, no, but we had regular men on there we called gunners, they were the guys that did the shootin, and there was a rank on there for each thing you did on there. If you was a carpenter you was classified under those rankings and yet they were the ones that did the particular jobs. PP: Is there anything you wish you knew before you signed up? RR: No, I was quite happy with the way everything worked out. Well there was five us that went from we come to Phoenix and join the navy here in Phoenix and they ship us to Treasure Island in San Francisco are and there was five of us from Phoenix and this area here went up there and there were very few who went through boot training on Treasure Island. Me and my brother and three others from Arizona all went together and we trained there in boot camp. PP: Was there anything you wish they had told you before going out into combat? RR: Not really, when ever you was in a combat zone, you was assigned watch and so you could control the ship and watch for submarines, watch for other ships, watch for airplanes, if anything like that and you would call the Generals quarters and we would prepare to fight. We did have these mines chained down in the sea to hit ships, we had a couple of these broken loose banged into our ship but they didn t go off. But a well we fired guns on them and tried to explode them but we couldn t explode them. Them big mines, they had pegs all over them so if they bumped the ship or hit something hard they d explode. We went through several mine fields, they was fixed up in such a manner, positive and negative, and if you knew what they was positive or negative charged you d reverse your positive or negative on your ship and you d go through without exploding. PP: What was your image of Hitler and Hirohito during the war? RR: Bad men, very wicked men. PP: What did you know about them before the war? RR: Well, we knew quite a bit, I was at the age where I kept up with the news prior to the world war, and we kept up with the news all the time and we knew Hitler and Hirohito and all of them was doin. We knew that they was bad people as far as we was concerned. We knew they had to come down. We fought a good war and we was united in our effort, in our soldiers, the air force, and the sailors all work together and we won that war. We re proud of what we did. We got that war wound up and ended, and it did get ended. PP: Did you know a lot about what Hitler or Hirohito were doing oppressively in their countries?

6 RR: No not a whole lot, we didn t know a lot of the things that went on. Especially when they gassed and killed so many people in their prisons camps. We knew they were mean and a lot of the Americans were treated terrible by the Japanese too and we knew that. PP: What is your opinion of Japanese and Germans now? RR: Well, I don t trust em too far. I think the average man that served in World War II probably has a little bit of a reservation there where, I don t know if they could be trust again or not. I think if they were turned loose we d have another war like we had before. PP: Turned loose what do you mean by turned loose? RR: In other words if they, we sill maintain our presence in their country, and if our presence doesn t remain there they could come back to power. PP: Is there still a presence in both Germany and Japan? RR: Yes there s presence, we have our armed forces in both countries yet. PP: When did you first hear about the German concentration camps? RR: Well I heard more about it after the war than I did during the war, can t remember hearin too much during the war but of course we didn t have radios or wasn t allowed to pick up news items. What we got is what came through the ship in other words what the ship had prepared for us, and when we get newspapers from home and so forth. We did get newspapers from home and packages sometimes it takes three months with everything in it and sometimes take ten days, so we never knew. PP: In the news did they ever report anything about the concentration camps before the war, or did they not know? RR: I don t remember of anything like that being reported in our area, of course we were too far, we was in the South Pacific, and Germany is a long way from the South Pacific. PP: Did you hear anything about atrocities or prisoner of war camps in the South Pacific? RR: Yes, there was quite a few things that took place in the South Pacific, specially in the Philippines. And a lot of the home town boys was taken prisoner in the Philippines and some of them didn t make it home and some did and they had a rough going at the prison camps in Japan. They took them back to Japan and the ones that survived, they made slave labors out of them, and you had to be tough to make it. PP: What was some of the specific incidences you heard about? RR: Well, the beatings and just regular long marches, especially for soldiers.

7 PP: Did you hear about the Batan Death March? RR: Oh yes, we knew all about it, oh yes we did. PP: Did this affect your thinking? RR: It made me feel like I didn t want to trust them. If I was ever in a position where I had to fight them face to face, or hand to hand, I wouldn t have wanted to be taken prisoner by them. PP: How did it make you feel? RR: It made me feel I didn t have any trust for them. In other words I lost all my feeling of trust for them. PP: Did you have any increases amounts of fear? RR: No, no fear, you get used to a lot of things, there s always some fear, but when you go into battle or dangerous places you re busy taking care of yourself and other around you and you don t think too much about fear. PP: What kind of food did you eat? RR: Well, we had good food. We had meat, we had a big refrigerating unit aboard ship and we would take on groceries enough and enough supplies to last us six months and then we d pull into some port somewhere, or close to a supply ship, then they d go ahead and refill our ship. I had good food, I can t complain about it. PP: Did you ever have to ration food? RR: We rationed soap, hand soap to wash our faces and hands. We ran out of it several times. PP: Did you ever run out of food? RR: No, never did. We always had food. That s one good thing about being in the navy. You always got your food, your bed, and everything right with you when night comes. It s all right there, you don t have to sleep in the jungle or out in the rain. But, we ran out of fresh water several times and when we was down by the equator every time it rained we d all take our clothes off and run out on the deck and get a good fresh water shower. Hot water showers didn t work too good. PP: How big were your living quarters? RR: Well, we had a room probably six by eight and there was six people slept in it.

8 PP: Were there bunks? RR: Yes, three bunks high. PP: Did you have any personal living space? RR: No, that was it. We had a mess hall where we could go sit down and write letters of what we needed to do when it wasn t being used for food or for dinner or breakfast or something. And there was nothing personal, no room to play ball or anything like that. It was strictly business. PP: How big was the ship? RR: My ship was probably sixty-eight feet wide, and six hundred and fifty feet long. When it was out of the water, when it wasn t loaded with fuel, it stuck out of the water twenty-eight feet. When you loaded it, it was fully loaded only five feet stuck out of the water. PP: How much fuel did it carry? RR: Oh, I can t tell ya. In the thousands and thousands of gallons. PP: What type of ships was it? RR: It was the Liberty ship converted to a tanker. That was to fool the Japanese. They couldn t figure out how we was getting our gas in to the troops. We were the ones of at least thirty or twenty ships that rode the fuel and take it into the war zone and dump it so they d have it. The merchant marine would come out and we d go back out go out of the war zone and kind of along side the merchant ship and they d re-supply our ship with fuel. And then we d go on back in and take it somewhere else. PP: Did you ever have any encounters with Japanese ships? RR: We had one Japanese submarine surface near us but we couldn t get a shot at him and he never shot at us, so I guess we was real lucky there. One of the ships, our sister ship, was down at the Philippines being loaded with fuel like it was, it lasted seven seconds afterward, hit by Torpedoes, and no survivors. PP: Did you know anyone on the ship? RR: I didn t know anyone on that one, no. And then we went to Iwo Jima and they shot at us with a torpedo up there and missed us, probably twenty-five or thirty feet. The reason why we knew we was missed was because we could see the wake of the torpedo as it went off the bow of the ship, across the front of it and went on by, never did catch one. We was only 1500 miles there from Tokyo when we was there, and we was up there all through later forty-four/ forty-five.

9 PP: Did you have any trauma following the war after you got home? RR: Well, if the telephone would ring I would jump over the table. When ever a bell would ring somewhere, a telephone, or a buzzer or anything would go off it made you jumpy. PP: Why is that? RR: That was to warn ya that there was a fire or something. It was a way of warning of things that could happen or things that was going to happen. If there was an enemy ship coming towards us they d ring the ship bell so we d all be alerted and ready to go. PP: How did your life change as a result of World War II? RR: Well, I grew up. I come out when I was twenty three and I went in I was nineteen and come out when I was twenty-three, so I had almost four years. I had three years, four months, and twenty one days in the Navy. I got a good education out of it. I m glad I seen a lot of country, seen a lot of things I would ve never seen if I hadn t of been in there. I m proud to of served our country at the time. P: How did you entertain yourself out on the ship or at port? RR: Well, if we were at port with some porch way we could go ashore; we loaded a lot of fuel into Tonga Islands. We didn t go ashore everywhere we went, but a in New Zealand we went ashore and a lot of the islands we went ashore. There was nothing there other than the war games and war, but New Zealand and China and Japan. We was in Japan four days after the war was over and we supplied their fish boats with diesel fuel so they could go fishin. They thought they was about to starve out so we refueled their boats and let them go fishin so they could bring in fish into the people there. We landed at Kagoshima Japan four days after the war was over. It was a little scary, but no one offered to give us any troubles or anything. We did get to go to a few dances, and parties. It depended on whether you drank or whether what kind of life you lived` what done when you went ashore. PP: What did you do on the ship? RR: What did I do on the ship? PP: For Entertainment? RR: Well, we just sat around and visit, it s about all we could do. We did have movies on there periodically. We could go ashore almost any place we landed and they had films of all the old movie crowd out of California and all the movies. We had Bob Hope, we got to see Bob Hope in person, and a number of people we got to see in person.

10 PP: Do you remember any more of those people? RR: Well lets see there one little gal by the name of Patty Thomas, she traveled with Bob Hope. And, nope didn t see Betty Gravel. We seen a bunch of them, I can t remember which all the ones we did see. But, between the movies then they d have a we hit an island where they was havin one of the Bob Hope shows, we got to go to it, which was exciting. PP: Was he a good entertainer? RR: Very much so, a real good man. PP: Do you think the entertainment was important to the war effort? RR: It sure was, it brightened up their days. A lot of the soldiers spent weeks and months; a lot of them had real bad times over there, especially the ones in the army and the marines and the ones that actually did the hand to hand fighting and all. The fighting we would have done would have been from sea, not from land, we never did get into a battle but we were right where it was at all the time. PP: Do you know of any young men who did not return from the war, from your home town or the surrounding area? RR: At least a half a dozen or more. PP: How did this affect the families? RR: Well, the families quite saddened over it, it was it took a lot out of the families when their sons didn t come home. PP: How did they cope with it? RR: Well, most of them coped alright with it, accepted it. It was just good loyal people and a good country to live in at the time. PP: How did the community cope with it, the loss of so many young men? RR: I think everybody expected so much of it, so when one would go they d understand. They were understanding of what took place. PP: Did you feel bad at all for being one that made it home, or anything like that? RR: I felt like I was blessed to come home. I know one kid that grew up with me in the home town, name of Fred Burk, that used I used to correspond with on the islands, and, sometimes the letters would be three days old when I d get it, and I knew he was close to me, but I didn t know how close. I couldn t tell where each other was. And, I sent one

11 letter and it came back within ten days and it said, Deceased, in other words he died, and I found out later he died moving telephone cable, had to swim and take the telephone cable cross the certain part of a bay where they was stretchin phone lines and he drowned. PP: Was it in combat? RR: He was in combat zone, yeah he combat duty when he went. But there was a lot of them killed in Germany, some was killed in South Pacific, some was killed as prisoners of war. PP: How did you feel when you received that letter? RR: I felt bad to think that Fred was really gone. PP: Were you close friends? RR: Yeah real close, went to high school with him. PP: How old was Fred? RR: Fred was a year, probably a year older than I was. I don t know which, can t remember which branch of service he was in, but I think he was army. PP: Did you know his family well? RR: Very well, yes. PP: Did he have any other siblings fighting in the war? RR: I don t think there was any more of the Burk family that went. PP: Did you know any families that lost multiple children? RR: Not really. PP: Did you have any friends outside of your hometown that you met while in the navy that were killed? RR: Yes, one or two, maybe probably more than that, can t hardly remember. See that s been sixty some years ago. PP: How had the war affected the community when you came home? RR: Well, it was hard to get cars. We put in for a new vehicle and it took quite a while to get a car and own a car. Groceries was all the food supply was rationed during the war.

12 Gas was rationed, but we went through a terrible depression and people was out of work and so forth. Once this war was over it had kind of worked its way off from the forties to the fifties, then jobs was quite easy to get from then on. We had pretty good times since, but there been some bad days in there since, especially I was born in August Eighth, PP: So you saw and experienced the Great Depression? RR: Yeah I can remember the great depression, we went through it. Gas was ten cents a gallon, a loaf of bread was a nickel, eggs was five cents a dozen. Everything was cheap enough, but you worked for a dollar and a half a day. A dollar and half, a dollar a day was high wages those days. PP: Did you, how did you hear about the bomb in Japan? RR: I was in Sipan and only fifteen hundred miles from that bomb, and they notified through the ship channel, that the bomb had been set off, and I didn t believe it. I didn t think anything like that could be done. A lot of us didn t, we thought it was back in the Buck Rogers days, when they used to be funnies in the paper and Buck Rogers would write things on space and so one and so forth, but we thought it was another story like that. When the other one went off, we knew then that the war was over. Didn t take long to end the war after that, that bomb went off. PP: Were you expecting the war to come to an end so soon? RR: We knew it would come, but not quite that quick, it come a lot quicker than what we thought it was. The days of war were over. We had a merchant marine ship right next to us and it was three o clock in the morning and those guys shot up flares to celebrate and there was all this gasoline spilled on the water where your changing fuel from one ship to another, and a fire broke out and we had flames a hundered foot high all around us. And we had gallons and gallons of aviation gas on board, and it didn t it went out about as fast as it burnt up the gasoline of the water wand went right out. There was fire between the ships, and they left the ship side with soot and smoke. And uh, if had ever caught the tanker a fire, we never would have survived. PP: Were you worried that it might? RR: I don t know why it didn t, but the good Lord kept us was protecin us, otherwise it would blow other wise it d blowed up. One other time we had a merchant ship tried to go around us and when he seen he couldn t go round us, he cut short, he rammed our ship, and busted a hole in the ship that you could put a freight car from the rail road, through the hole on the side of the ship, and the only one we carried, Octane one hundred and twenty Octane gas, aviation gas. When ever we were done, we had that thing filled with salt water, and it busted all the degouson gear, which means it controls that positive and negative electricity on the ship. And when the other ship backed off I could see hundreds of ammunition, big ones, toward the bow of their ship as well. They give

13 orders for everyone to abandon ship, I stayed aboard, me and one colored boy, we stayed aboard. It took three days to gather the crew and get them back on ship again, it didn t go down or anything like that, but it lifted, leaned on to one side, way way over. And then when they pulled it into a port over there, a lot of underwater welding on it, put new plates on it healed the hole up. We d been out there about twenty five months when that took place. PP: So were you still out at sea when you repaired it? RR: Yeah we was we went into a little harbor there on Sipan and they shipped in a bunch of steel and done a lot of underwater welding, on that ship right there, and they rebuilt it good enough, we went to China in it after that. PP: Would you ve had any idea or any clues about the bomb, or was it a real surprise? RR: It was a real surprise. PP: Was there any rumors? RR: No, nothing. Nobody knew anything like that existed. PP: Do you think it was necessary? RR: I do. I m glad it happened like it did, it saved thousand and thousands of Japanese, and it saved thousands and thousands of Americans trying to invade their country. It was one of the best things could happen to end that war and save lives. PP: Stalin was at the Northern part of Japan, and about to come in, do [you] feel like he could have helped with the ending of the war? RR: No, when was sailing into North China with a load of fuel, we was instructed to stay out a place called Valdis Valistrote (Not sure what said), it s close to Siberia up there, if we got too close they d take you in and put you in prisoner labor camps and that s the end of ya. PP: The Russians would? RR: The Russians would, yeah. You couldn t trust the Russians, still don t trust em. PP: How did your religious beliefs help you cope with your experience? RR: It was great. I lived my religion, and it did for me what it should do. Didn t do any smoking, drinking, didn t drink coffee. I had a pretty good life. PP: What religion denomination were you at the time?

14 RR: I was LDS. RR: And have you been LDS all your life? RR: No, I joined the Mormon church when I was over in Treasure Island California in nineteen forty-three, some time in forty-three. PP: So that was while you were in the Navy? RR: That s while I was in the Navy. PP: Did you keep in contact with any young ladies while you were out at sea, or write letters to any women? RR: I wrote to Virginia, your grandmother. I got a big box of letters she wrote me, and she a big box of letters I wrote her. I slip one to another girl every now and then. PP: Where did you meet Virginia, how did you know her? RR: Well, I went to church in Berkley California and met her in Berkley California and we was engaged for three years all the time I was in the navy, all time I was over seas. Then I came back and I surprised her on February the fourteenth I come and got her out of bed early in the morning on the fourteenth of February of forty-six and we got married the twenty-first. PP: The twenty-first of February? RR: Yes, we ve been married fifty-eight years in February, February the twenty-first. PP: So, where did you get married? RR: We got married, had a civil marriage in Berkley and then we went to Salt Lake City and was married in the Salt Lake Temple. PP: How much time passed between letter between you and Virginia? RR: Oh, sometimes it would be two months or three months and then sometimes three weeks. When you get them, sometimes you get four, five or six of them at once. PP: So, did she wait for you? RR: Yeah, that s what we did. PP: So, did you propose to her before your left? RR: Oh yes uh huh, I didn t give her a rings until after I got home.

15 PP: How much time did you have to get to know her while you were in California? RR: Oh probably, almost a year. PP: So were you stationed in California for that whole time? RR: Treasure Island California. I stayed there until they shipped me to San Pedro, California, and they built these ships and then we went on those ships, then went on out over seas. PP: Were you able to have any contact with the church while you were out at sea? RR: Oh yes. I stopped at the Tongan Islands, visited a ward in Tongan and then I visited one in New Zealand. And, what we did, where ever the service men would hold their meetings I d always, if it was possible, I d go meet with them, go ashore and meet with them. But as far as the towns, like I say is what Tonga and New Zealand, where I seen regular wards. Others it was just a service members met on Sunday. Might have been air force, marines, whatever was there, they d all meet. PP: So you didn t have services on board the ship? RR: No there was only two LDS boys on there, me and one other one from Salt Lake City. PP: Were you able to bring any religious material such as the Bible or? RR: I had the Book of Mormon with me and the Bible both. PP: What things were you allowed to bring, on the ship, with you from home? RR: Not much of anything other than family pictures. Did have much way of carrying much of anything around with ya. Some of them, we d buy guitars or violins or something every once in a while, if we get to a place where they could be bought we d buy one. We did a little music on the ship, but not a lot. PP: You mentioned that there were African Americans on your ship? RR: We had two yes. PP: Could you tell me about that? RR: Yeah, they were quite comical, they did a lot of scrapping between themselves, but they used them on there to take care of the officers mess, in other words they fed the officers and cooked the officers meals and so on and so forth.

16 PP: Did they have, what ranks did they have? RR: They was just regular, when I was first class they start them out at the bottom, twenty one dollars a month, and then they can make up to thirty dollars, and after they d been a while they d get two white stripes. What I had was a petty officer and a seaman, seaman first class. They could make seaman first, that s as high as they got. PP: Is that a higher rank than yours? RR: No, no mine was, I had next to the highest of enlisted men on the ship. PP: Were you enlisted? RR: That s what we were called, enlisted men. PP: Even though you signed up? RR: Volunteered, even though we volunteered you re considered enlisted men and officer. If you was an officer you was an officer, just a regular enlisted man, then you was enlisted. In other words they did call you volunteers on the ship. I do know anyone knew you volunteered on the ship unless you told them. PP: Do you feel like there was segregation on board? RR: Not really, everybody treated everybody good. Wasn t nobody mistreated each other. We had Italians, Germans, Russians and Negroes and so forth, there was no We had one Mexican boy on there, he couldn t talk English. I might tell ya a funny little story on him. When we was getting ready to leave the states Greer Garson was a movie gal and she was married to a Richard Nay and he was an officer aboard our ship and she was Catholic and they dressed us in white, in our white clothes and had us all stand out on deck and she handed each one of us a Catholic metal. And when she got to the one, we call him Chungle, means monkey, she said Chungle and said Are you an Italian, and he looked at her with his pretty white teeth and said, Chit no. And everybody burst out laughing. That means, S-H-I-T no. he didn t know it was a bad word. He could talk enough English to understand everything, but that was the answer he gave her. He was born in the United States and then went to Mexico to live, and they drafted him out of Mexico and put him in the U.S. Navy. PP: So he didn t grow up in the United States? RR: He didn t grow up in the United States, he grew up in Mexico. PP: If he didn t serve in the war would he have been in trouble with the United States? RR: Sure, he was a U.S. citizen. They went down across the border and got him and brought him up and put him in the Navy and he was with us.

17 PP: Did you have any Japanese Americans? RR: No they was all, they was left behind and they didn t serve with us or Chinese or Japanese, we didn t have either one. PP: Did you ever see any of them serving in the Pacific at all? RR: Never did, no. PP: Did they have German Americans serving in the Pacific? RR: Yeah there s a lot of German Americans, but they was loyal to the United States. PP: So they allowed German Americans? RR: Yeah, Uncle Kenny, he s a German American. PP: Is he full German? RR: Yeah, he s full German. PP: What are some of the most vivid memories of World War II that you experienced? RR: Well, getting to see the United States soil again. PP: How was that? RR: That was one of the greatest feelings I ever had. We got in at day break at Seattle Washington, at pier 91 and hadn t seen any white ladies in three and a half years, and we went into a restaurant, a Greek restraunt, in Seattle, the guy wanted to know what we wanted, and we ordered milk shakes and hamburgers. He got mad at us cause we ordered a bunch of milkshakes and hamburgers and called us a bunch of bad names so we tore up his restaurant. PP: Why did he give you such a hard time? RR: He s tired of sailors around I guess, sailors and marines, those that come in there. We turned the chairs over, broke the table legs, we did a lot of things, then went out and mixed in with the crowd in the streets and nobody ever bothered us. PP: Did you ever find a milkshake and a hamburger? RR: I don t think we ever found one, no. A lot of us hadn t seen anything like that in a long time, so we was ready for the hamburgers and the milkshakes.

18 PP: They don t have those on the ship then? RR: Oh no, heavens no. PP: How long did you stay in Seattle before you were able to go home? RR: Oh, I was there about a week, almost a week, and then we rode a train from Seattle to Long Beach California, to San Pedro and they put us in cattle cars and they didn t have no tops on em. And they had beds laid down and we got up in them high mountains and that snow was so deep. The old train was stopped and it s cold, we all went to bed and put everything we could over the top of us to keep us from freezing. PP: Why didn t they put you in real train cars? RR: They was short of transportation, any way of transportation. The boys was coming home so fast, they couldn t hardly handle all of them PP: So, did you go home first or did you see Virginia first? RR: I went back to Berkley and saw Virginia and we got married on the twenty first. I seen her on the fourteenth of February. That s how many years ago today was that? Forty-six to that s fifty-eight years. I hit Berkley, I had to go to Long Beach and get it sorted down there, and I caught a train back up to Berkley. PP: Ho did it feel to finally see Virginia? RR: Well, it was great. PP: Were you excited? RR: Everybody was excited and we had a lot of things going on, and then we rode a train over to Salt Lake City, and we took a bus from there down to Nutrioso. The bus broke down and things was kinda messed up for us. We finally made it. Then in December of forty-six we moved to Pheonix and spent thirteen years, then went to Safford and spent another eight- nine years, then moved back to Nutrioso and been there ever since. PP: How did your family feel when it was finally time for you to come home? RR: They was all grateful to get us home. PP: How about your Mother and Father? RR: Well, my dad didn t live very long after we got home, he lived just about a year. My mother, they was ready for us to be home, they was looking forward to having their sons and daughters home again.

19 PP: How about your brother Leonard, how was it to see him? RR: He had, ha had a pretty good time, about as good a time as I did. In other words about as safe as I was. PP: Did he ever have any close calls? RR: Yeah he was at Okinawa, he went in there one time had a gun battle in there where all the battle ships and the Japanese planes was flying down from the sky and ramming the ship, I was a suicide deal. I guess the lead went everywhere. They was shoot shoot shootin. PP: I m wondering, you seem very willing to answer questions, I know that a lot of World War II veterans have a hard time talking about the war. Why do you think it is different for you than it is for other veterans? RR: I wasn t in the real bad stuff like a lot of them was. We was in the battle field, but we didn t see the actual fighting. We was a supply ship. Ours was considered a supply ship, fuel supply. And they d go in and fight their way in and get a gas line set up for and we come and pump it in and they d protect us all the time we was there. A lot of them, the old soldier, the poor old soldiers and marines that fought in them jungles, their lives was terrible. PP: Did you ever have any experiences that you have a hard time talking about? RR: No, I guess not. PP: I just have a couple last questions. How do you look at war differently now, or do you look at war differently? RR: Well, a world of difference. Different world, a different kind of war, they ll probably never be another one like World War II. Where we fought with ships and guns and airplanes and guns and; it d be a modern war now days. Everything will be modernized; I don t think another war could ever string out like it did in World War II and World War I or the Korean War. PP: How did your out-look change from age nineteen, when you went into age twentythree when you got out, how did war differ? How did you look at it differently? RR: I was just happy to be home, and just happy I was able to serve the country when it needed me. RR: Did you have a different opinion of war? RR: No I sure didn t. I figured it was necessary.

20 PP: Did you have anything that made you, I guess, grow up in your opinions of war? RR: Yeah, being able to look after your own affairs, you grow up in a hurry when you re in a place like that. PP: Well that concludes my interview. RR: Well it has been a pleasure to tell a young lady like you all that went on, I didn t have the worst of it, and didn t have the best, but I did go through it and survive it and I m happy that I came out healthy and in as good shape as I did. PP: Is there anything else you would like to say about it? RR: Well I ll think of a lot of things after we re done. PP: I tried to cover a lot of areas. RR: Well, I hope this will work out for ya. PP: Wait I have one more question, how was the selection process in sending you to Europe or the South Pacific, did you have any choice? RR: I guess we didn t have any choice, I guess it depended the part of the country you lived in. I guess if I lived on the East Coast over in New York City somewhere I probably would have gone the other way, went into Europe. This way being on the West Coast I was assigned to the eleventh navel district and it took care the Pacific, the South Pacific and North Pacific and most of my time was spent down in the South Pacific, and as the war got to an end, we got northward until we reached Japan. PP: Did you ever see Hiroshima and Nagasaki? RR: I seen them from a distance, I passed by them both on a train. PP: So you never stopped in Hiroshima or Nagasaki? RR: I seen some of the buildings where the steel was melted and so forth. I didn t go into the city to see all of it. I seen it from the distance. PP: What did you see? RR: Destruction. It is hard to believe that one bomb would do as much damage as one bomb would do when it took a thousand or ten thousand others to do the same thing. PP: Would the destruction have been greater if they had hit Tokyo? RR: Oh yes, I think they was wise in leaving Tokyo out of it.

21 PP: Do you know what the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki were and why they selected them? RR: Not for sure, no. PP: Were they smaller in size compared to Tokyo? RR: Oh, yes a lot smaller. PP: Did you go into Tokyo? RR: No, I didn t go into Tokyo, I m trying to remember what port I left out of, I can t remember now, when I got on the hospital ship to come home, they just used it for transportation. PP: Did you meet any Japanese ladies while you were there? RR: I met some Japanese ladies and danced with them. PP: How did they treat you? RR: Very very nice. Mother and dad come and watch their daughters. They had a Japanese band, and they played the old fashion music, Old Black Joe, you remember the old song Old Black Joe. A lot of the old old songs. They had violins, saxophones, and a mandolin and sometimes a piano. PP: Did they seem bitter at all? RR: Well they looked at you strange like, but it would be hard on you to have strangers some into your country. Yeah come in and take over. PP: Did any of them say anything mean or were they just? RR: None of them did anything mean. PP: One more quick question, did you have children directly following the war? RR: Took five years to have one daughter and we adopted two more, we feel real luck. PP: So was that a part of the big baby boom? RR: We had our first child in nineteen-fifty, Peggy. PP: During the height of the baby boom?

22 RR: Yes.