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Courtesy R. D. Turpen collection
The troop ship sailed to Nouméa, New Caledonia and unloaded. I was ordered aboard a fuel transport ship that was taking gasoline in drums to an air base on the main island of New Zealand. The ship took us from Nouméa down to New Zealand, and stopped at a rest and recreation area for fatigued Marine and Army personnel. They had a high-speed boat and fishing gear, and they lived in some cabins on the beach. They water-skied, fished and had fun for the two weeks they were allotted to be there. That week the ship was unloading its several hundred barrels of airplane fuel. The fuel had to be transported up a winding steep road to get from the beach level to the airfield. George and I played with the guys on the beach and went water skiing and fishing. The ship then went to Sydney, Australia, where we were supposed to meet the Nicholas. But by the time we got there, the Nicholas had gone somewhere else. It was a secret—they wouldn’t tell us. So we had a week in Sydney, bivouacked with an Australian family who were very nice to us, and then we had another week in Brisbane. We took the train from Sydney to Brisbane and saw a lot of the bush, complete with kangaroos and sheep. We were assigned to stay for a week at the American Red Cross House, an R&R facility operated by American Red Cross women, and that was delightful. The house was on a beach called Surfer’s Paradise. We had a wonderful time there, surfing and partying. Then we received orders to fly to Guadalcanal. It didn’t take very long for us to get there. The Nicholas wasn’t there either, but it was someplace near, so they flew us over to it and put us aboard. NAVIGATOR! I was delighted when I first saw the ship. I thought I knew what a destroyer was from my days aboard the Kilty, and then I saw this new ship. It was battle worn—it had been in a lot of action, which I knew. But I didn’t know too much more, because they hadn’t told us very much. I got the story from people on board after I got there. I originally thought I was going to be Engineering Officer because my training was in electrical engineering. I had taken all the NROTC courses in engineering, running ship propulsion plants, electrical generators, switchboards and other equipment. The captain had just promoted a Mustang (a Chief Petty Officer promoted to Ensign— “Okay, today you’re a Chief, tomorrow you’re an Ensign”), who was qualified only as an engineer. So he became Engineering Officer and I became a Deck Officer and Navigator. My qualifications to be Navigator consisted only of my training in the NROTC. I knew how to take star sights, which I had done on the yacht off San Diego, and I knew how to calculate where we were using Bowditch tables and star charts. So I was a navigator—bingo! The quartermaster, R.S. Lightsey, was truly a navigator. He really knew what he was doing. He could take the star sights, he could calculate and he could plot them. He could do everything I’d learned to do, probably better than I could. But I took the star sights from the time the Captain told me to do it. TORPEDO OFFICER I had been on board about two months, during which we were doing carrier guard and antisubmarine screen duty for a carrier group. Then the skipper called me one day and said, “We need you to be Torpedo Officer. What do you know about torpedoes?” I said, well, we had a little bit about them in school but not very much. And he said, “Okay, you’re going to torpedo school at Pearl Harbor.” Orders were cut and I went to Guadalcanal—into a pool of people waiting for transportation back to the States. They put me on a ship with what was left of the First Marine Division, which was being sent home from Guadalcanal. They had been the main force taking Guadalcanal and their group was decimated. They had maybe 40 percent of their personnel to send home, many of them wounded. I went aboard with the Marines as a result of meeting a doctor who was also going back to the States. He asked me, “Would you like to go to Hawaii through San Diego?” and I said, “Oh man, I got a wife in Los Angeles I’d love to see again!” He said, “Okay, I’ll take care of you.” Aboard the ship, we passed within 20 miles of Hawaii as we went on to San Diego. So now I had to get into a transportation pool to return to Hawaii, which took another ten days. Marge met me and we stayed in La Jolla at the San Ysidro Inn just north of San Diego, a very lovely place, until I was ordered to leave on a plane for Hawaii. Torpedo school lasted three weeks (through 20 August 1944). The school was eight hours a day in class and three or four hours in recreation around the island. The school was on Oahu, where we were able to see the surfing, Pearl Harbor, take a jeep out and scoot around where we wanted to go. It was a good school and a good experience in Hawaii. (Hawaii was not on alert at that time. The war was pretty far from there so we didn’t have real bad conditions, although they pretty much had a blackout.) I also had a week of CIC [Combat Information Center, where targets are tracked by radar] watch training and a week of Loran training, then flew back to the ship were I resumed my assignment as Navigator and became Torpedo Officer. By now, the ship was in the Gilbert Islands, where life aboard was not as stressful as it had been around Guadalcanal. Information was a little easier to get because CinCPac knew the location of every unit so when they had somebody to move, they moved him Johnny-on-the-spot to wherever he had to go. From then through December 1945, I was on board ship except to get off on an island every once in a while. DESDIV 41 Most of our duty was associated with carrier task forces, doing submarine screen and aircraft pilot recovery. Whenever we’d pick up a pilot, the carriers would send us a special thank you message. For every pilot we returned to a carrier, the carrier would send us enough ice cream to feed the entire crew as standard practice. Other ships in the division included the O’Bannon and Taylor, plus various others assigned to give us a normal total of four ships. We were well known ships—we had good reputations throughout the Navy and we were already decorated. We got a lot of respect in the fleet because we’d been operating together a long time. All were smart ships—all had good captains and demonstrated good seamanship—we hardly ever had collisions! ON THE BRIDGE Life on the bridge as Navigator was an interesting affair on the Nicholas because the skipper insisted that I be on the bridge at any time the ship was in sight of land. (One would never guess, without seeing detailed charts, how many places there are where one could go “bump in the night” on such a vast ocean.) This was especially true around the Philippines and the other main islands groups, where we operated, starting with the return of MacArthur through Leyte Gulf. We were in the second wave of the Leyte Gulf fleets bringing in supply ships and more firepower and so we anchored in San Pedro Bay and had a lot of activity in the Philippines. We were on the east side of the Philippines and a little north of Leyte Gulf and Surigao Strait. We were operating so much around the islands that I had to learn to sleep standing up leaning against the skipper’s chair. And that didn’t take me very long, because there were long days and nights when we were in the vicinity of the islands. The squadron staff didn’t have a Navigator, so I navigated for the squadron as well as for the ship. The Squadron Commander didn’t speak to me directly—he was a Commodore and I was an Ensign (later a Lt. (jg)—it was almost an automatic promotion. If you didn’t screw up, you were promoted after a year). Rather, he interacted primarily with the Captain—the two of them were really close. The Commodore would make the station assignments and tell the Captain where we were going. The Captain would call for a course to a new location. I got all my orders from the Captain—the Commodore’s staff also communicated his wishes to me, but I never really knew what we were doing until the Captain said “Give me a course to here,” normally followed by “Make it so.” Then whoever had the con would direct the helmsman, “half right rudder, come to course 182” and set the speed. The Commodore was on the bridge at general quarters. I can’t remember where he slept. One of his staff bunked with me in the after-most stateroom in officer’s country, port side. And there were only two of us in that cabin. The signalmen talked back and forth a lot between the ships in addition to sending official messages. Because I was on the bridge and had a quartermaster and a signalman for my immediate navigation duties, I was privy to a lot of the stuff the signalmen were talking about that nobody else heard. Battle stations were called frequently because of the Japanese airplane activity and I was stationed on the bridge. As Torpedo Officer and Navigator, I spent all my time on the bridge. I never had watch duty any place else. Once in a while, I would stand as Deck Officer when we at anchor. My recollection was that battle stations on the bridge included the Captain, the helmsman, the Executive Officer, the Commodore, his First Assistant, me, my quartermaster and signalman and a man on the engine control, which was a telegraph system to the engine compartment, to give them directions on speed and what to do for the ship’s maneuvering. From my perspective, the Nicholas was a good ship and a smart ship. It performed all its assignments really well. Everybody on board was there to do his job, and there wasn’t any screwing around. There wasn’t any fighting on the ship. There wasn’t any of the normal stuff that happened on a lot of other ships where you had a lot of jealousy going on. Everybody worked together and the ship was sharp. Captain Lyndon made that happen. He didn’t let anybody get out of line, which everybody knew, so they didn’t try, yet he was also delightful—always coming up with something funny and always cheerful, even under the most severe battle conditions we had to face, even around the Philippines when we first faced kamikazes. He was cool; he made his moves; he did what he did without being flustered and without getting excited. He was a great skipper and had a great sense of humor and a great rapport with the officers and all the men, and that’s one of the things that made the Nicholas such a fine ship to be on. SHIPHANDLING EN ROUTE TO LEYTE THE BATTLE OF SURIGAO STRAIT LUZON ANTISUBMARINE TORPEDO We had three ships in this practice and one of my torpedoes was the only one that hit the target. It went directly under the target. It was interesting to find out later that the settings that I had given the torpedo man on the tubes, he had modified slightly. So we got a hit not on what I gave him, but on what he thought was right when he finally set it. We never told the Captain about the changed setting. The practice torpedo is pictured in the web site. I did not fire any torpedoes except in practice, so it had to be a practice torpedo that was shown. Later on, around August, we started going north with the carrier task force. We did not participate in the battle at Iwo Jima but we were in the high seas nearby with the carrier group. BORNEO We participated in the recovery of the Tarakan, Borneo, loading port for fuel for the Japanese Navy. They had it heavily armored, heavily protected with troops, and it was a main source for their tankers to refuel. We mounted a full-scale attack on Tarakan, which included several days of offshore bombardment by destroyers and cruisers, with a small carrier force to provide air cover. We steamed up and down outside the reef at Tarakan bombarding the shoreline, trying to seek out locations where the Japanese had gun emplacements to defend the port. The entrance to the port was through a cut in the coral reef, 500 yards wide, and it was the only place for 20 miles on either side of this entrance where you could go across the coral. The coral was 10 feet under the water and it was a very large reef so any ship that didn’t make that entrance to Tarakan was going to be hung up on the coral and probably lose its hull. Only after entering this channel could we verify our position via radar contact on the Borneo coast. We did our last day of bombardment and, in the late afternoon, the fleet turned and steamed directly away from Tarakan at fleet speed (20–25 knots). We steamed that way with zigzag courses until midnight, when the Nicholas had orders to return and lead the landing forces into this channel entrance to Tarakan Harbor. We steamed back without zigzagging at 30–35 knots until we were close enough to the coral so that I should, as a navigator, be able to find that opening. We made one turn to the left as we came within 500 yards of the reef. We made one turn to the right and steamed into the cut, where we gained the expected radar contact. We were in the middle of the channel! The landing forces were coming in behind us in LSTs and they were a mile off the reef when we hit the entrance. There was no gunfire from the Japanese. Either they didn’t pick us up or we destroyed their capability to detect us so that, as we went down the middle of the channel, the LSTs caught up with us and followed us in and made their landing. The harbor was small but we had room to get in, turn and go back out after the landing ships came through. That’s what we did. When we got into quiet water again and things were quieted down, the skipper wanted to know “How’d you do that?” Lightsey and I looked at each other and laughed and I said, “We navigated!” And the result of that was a commendation for navigation, which came along later. TOKYO BAY When the day finally came to set up in Tokyo Bay for the surrender activities, we met the Japanese destroyer Hatsuzakura several miles out at sea. Japanese pilots and charts were taken from the Hatsuzakura to allow us to navigate through the extensive minefields that lay outside and in the entrance to Tokyo Bay. We took the Japanese on board from their destroyer under full General Quarters The Nicholas was given the assignment to lead the Missouri and its accompanying destroyers and cruisers into Tokyo Bay. We had a thousand yard-wide channel, which was a fairly big channel but which required several turns, which were critical to getting through it without getting into some of the mines. They had three kinds of mines indicated in their minefields. So it was a very dangerous place. The Captain asked me—with the Japanese on board and looking at their charts—if I could navigate from their charts. It was no problem because they had ranges on the land. We had Mount Fuji, we had a couple of other high points, which were both radar-indicated and visually indicated so we could take good bearings all the way through this fairly long channel. So I told him, “Yes, we can navigate on these charts.” He said “fine” and stood the Japanese navigators against the back of the bridge, put an armed guard on each side of them, and told them, “You guys stay there and shut up.” Lightsey and I navigated the ship. We were really busy because of the course changes required to get through this maze and we had the entering fleet behind us. We made our way through this maze into the harbor, where the Missouri anchored and we anchored nearby. The other ships followed, so that we had probably 20–25 ships in Tokyo Bay surrounding the Missouri. We were very nervous about the Japanese because of their previous treachery and lack of honor in the war, so that it was a very critical two or three days before the ceremony. SURRENDER, REPATRIATION AND HOME On 2 September, we were given the duty of carrying dignitaries for the surrender ceremony from Yokohama Custom House Pier to the Missouri, and we have pictures, which I took, of almost all the people who came on our ship. Then we were anchored close enough to the Missouri so that we could see the signing ceremonies through our binoculars quite clearly. It was a real thrill to be there for the conclusion of the war with Japan. Following the surrender, our ship was given the task of going north to Hokkaido to bring home prisoners of war. We made several trips doing that, and those men were given all the care that we could provide. Most of them had their wounds taken care of and their health restored. Many of them were flown home. We left Tokyo Bay on 1 October and arrived in Seattle 19 October 1945. We had some duties to do after we left Tokyo, but they were minor and we steamed directly into Seattle. We spent a few days in Seattle and then steamed to San Francisco for a few days. I think the reason for doing that was to give the men a chance to see home again. Then we went to San Diego, and I was discharged 2 January 1946, from the discharge center at San Pedro. AFTERWARD I went to USC to interview possible employers. I decided go with General Electric in February. I reported to GE about the middle of February in Los Angeles and spent the next few months there because there was a long bitter strike and the plants were closed. I was transferred east as soon as the strikes were settled. I started in on the test program in Schenectady, New York about the middle of May 1946. I was in the Naval Reserve and tried to join an active reserve unit in the Schenectady, Albany, or Troy area. There were so many returning at that time that all of the units were fully staffed. There was no place for me to be active. I resigned from the Reserve in 1953; thus I ended my career in the Navy. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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