<Begin Segment 19>

DN: Well, tell us what kind of action you saw. You, you went all the way to...

EH: Okinawa.

DN: Okinawa in this LST, right?

EH: Yeah.

DN: That must have been quite a trip.

EH: Well, living on deck, and you could get a shower, well, there were 118 sailors and 314 army personnel on board. And there was only sleeping places for, oh, I don't know, maybe about a dozen or so. And they gave us army cots. and in between all the equipment, or in the trucks or wherever, that's where you put up your, your cot, and that's where you stayed. And when it rained, get out the bar of soap, and you'd get all soaped up and it'd quit raining, so then you'd have to get a bucket of water from over the side -- salt water -- and rinse off with salt water. But you could take a salt water shower any time you wanted. But nice, warm shower once a week. And you stepped in the shower, you got wet, and you turned it off, 'cause there was a guy standin' right there watchin' it. And then when you got all soaped up, turn your shower off, get rinsed off, and that was it. That was your shower. [Laughs]

And you know, during that fifty-two days, oh, boy. We had steering engine trouble, from... we stopped at Hawaii, we stopped at Enewotak, and we stopped at Saipan, not getting, we couldn't get off, although some of 'em did, they put down a, a lifeboat and went in and got the mail for everybody. And seven, eight days before the landing... the landing on Okinawa was April 1st, at eight o'clock in the morning. And I think about eight days prior to that, the steering engine went out on the LST. So we drifted out there for six days. And we drifted within sight of Taiwan, which was then called Formosa, and now called Taiwan. And we thought, "Oh, don't let any planes come out, please don't." But during the time that we were drifting, the patrol boats that we had, two of 'em, they were these tuna clippers from out of, I think, San Pedro or something like that, that they'd mounted guns on 'em, small guns, and patrolled around us, and we just drifted along until they got the thing repaired. But one of the days, there was a submarine came up right alongside of us. And I think that's where I got a little bit of my gray hair. Whew. Everybody was just absolutely panicky.

DN: This was a Japanese submarine.

EH: Until they saw the American flag.

DN: Oh, okay. [Laughs]

EH: But then when we went in to hit the beach, we landed at two o'clock in the afternoon, and the... oh, I don't know what you would call 'em, port captain or whatever it was, told the skipper exactly where to land the LST. But there was a big rock out there, and we got stuck on that rock, and couldn't wait for the tide to come in. So one of our other LSTs pulled in, and they got a bulldozer off and a friend of mine from down in Georgia, he bulldozed out enough material so we could get off of the LST without goin' that deep in water, you know, with all the equipment. So we were a little bit late getting to the airfield, we bivouacked right on the edge of the airstrip, and that was a mistake, because we were bombed and strafed and whew... I never wanted to get out of there and... but then finally, we moved back a ways up, further up on a hill, and we could, we could watch all the... well, we had a good view overlooking Kadena, and then Yontan airstrip was over across. And one night, when the suicide planes were coming in, one came in, he cut his engines, and he... round, he landed, and they destroyed twenty-four of our aircraft on, on Yontan.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.