A Sailor & A Bomb

Observations from the Pacific

Oklahoma

When my parents divorced in the 1950s, our mother erased that part of our lives and with my sister and me in tow, left Oklahoma. Years later, on Nov. 7, 2000, I made a brief stopover to visit my father in Newalla, just outside of Oklahoma City. We stayed up late that night watching the election results, while outside an ice storm pelted the windows. When we finally gave up the election watch, he asked if I wanted to see some old pictures stored in the office off the kitchen. For the next two hours, I sat and watched as he dug through a cardboard box full of keepsakes. Somehow he had collected our school pictures, graduation announcements, and a letter (unanswered) I had written him decades ago. The trove included a keepsake copy of my parent’s marriage certificate tucked inside a blue embossed folder, as well as his World War II journal. “You take them,” he said, “they were part of your life.”  

Saipan

My father, the son of a farmer, said he joined the navy to see the world. “Instead they sent me to the Naval Station in Shawnee, about an hour from home,” he told me that night. But by February of 1945 he was on his way to Saipan, the northernmost of the Mariana Islands some 1,400 miles across the open sea to Japan. In a battle with the Japanese, U.S. forces had won control of the island the year before. 

By 1945, the island’s strategic location was being used as a base for B-29 bombers, a port for U.S. Naval war ships, and hospitals to treat the wounded.  A fleet of Navy barges also supported the war effort from Saipan, ferrying tons of cargo to and from hundreds of ships anchored in the harbor. My father was assigned to one of these supply barges. He had finally gotten his wish.

According to the entries in his government-issue journal, his wartime experience consisted mostly of sweltering heat and a tendency for headaches.  The journal (stamped #50171), a quarter-inch thick, could have fit easily in a pocket.  Written in blue ink on lined paper, his entries are still legible almost eighty years later.  He recorded his  observations—dates, names and places—in exacting detail.  He also complained of hot, sleepless nights where the temperature reached “105 degrees in our quarters.” He was surprisingly open about missing my mother, writing that “I go to bed with Mary on my mind and I can hardly stand it.”

The war, however, was always present.  In his entry on Aug. 8, 1945, he wrote,  “My guess is the war will be over in a few weeks. The new bomb is a miracle.”  In anticipation, he predicted, “The war will be over when the nations accept the terms from the japps [sic]. We will know in about twenty-four hours.”  A few days later, at 1:30 a.m., word spreads throughout the island that the war is over.  “Ships in the harbor were shooting rockets and tracer bullets and blowing horns and fog horns,” he said. The news was a false alarm. 

But on Aug. 14, 1945, President Truman announced the official surrender, with my father noting the time at precisely 9:09 a.m.  The whole island took up celebrating a second time.  In the light of fireworks exploding above the ships, he watched four of his fellow sailors jump from the deck of his barge into the ocean—clothes, shoes and all.  “Generous quantities of beer and cake made the rounds,” he wrote. But reports the next day that, “We all drank about twelve cases of beer and about all of us got sick”. After recovering from a hangover, my father went back to longing for his “mighty sweet wife.”  On Jan. 20, 1946, he made his final journal entry. He recorded that he was aboard the USS Hornet, along with 900 sailors and 19 nurses (He kept count.). He was finally headed home, but in the name of accuracy noted he was still “2521 mi. from Frisco.”

Reality

My father didn’t go back to the farm. Instead, he and his brothers built businesses during the postwar construction boom.  He married three times, and had three daughters. He died in 2012 at age 90.  My mother remarried and taught herself bookkeeping. She never mentioned her marriage to my father, and I never told her about the wedding book. She died in 2019. She was 93.