Memories

One incident that comes to mind happened at Okinawa. We were at anchor one afternoon when a Jap bomber was flying over, dropping bombs as he came across. I was on the starboard 40mm and when the first piece of shrapnel hit the gun shield this "Swab Jockey" fell to the deck. The gun captain on the port 40 said, "Gainey, don't you know you can be court martialed for leaving your battle station?" I said, "Yeah, I know that, but I'd much rather be a 'live coward' than a dead hero." The bomber was so high it couldn't be seen by the naked eye. Falling down behind the gun shield didn't make me feel guilty at all. Had I not taken cover I may not be writing this tonight.

My GQ station was at the starboard 40mm gun. Another gun crew member was Robert Finnegan. We bunked one over the other in the sleeping quarters. GQ sounded one night and in our haste to get to our GQ station Finnegan ended up with 2 right shoes and I with 2 left shoes. Later the shoe situation was resolved our attention was then focused on "winning the war in the Pacific."
Another memory is when I was given 4 hours in the bilges for "insubordination to an officer." To explain, it is important to know the behavior of the typewriter while underway. If the ship takes a port list the typewriter carriage does not move up hill. You can type Schwarzenegger and all letters will be in just one space. Port list results in the carriage moving 2 or 3 spaces when hitting the space bar. Heading into the waves, the bow would rise when topping the crest of the waves and the carriage would shift to "upper case" (all captials).

The Deck Log was a Navy form consisting of 24 spaces across and 24 spaces down, all numbers and a log had to be recorded daily. No strike overs or erasures allowed.

The officer responsible for the deck long came into the ship's office one morning and said too many mistakes were being made on the deck log, and improvements had to be made. My response was if he could find a Yeoman in the United States Navy who could type the deck log error free under any circumstances I would kiss his fanny (I cleaned it up a little bit) at muster the next morning. (Note that there were 2 other shipmates in the office at the time: The ship's Storekeeper and the other I don't remember.) Nevertheless, I was placed on report and received 4 hours in the bilges as punishment. The officer did say later he would not have put me on report had others not been present when all of this happened. —Jack Gainey
Some of the men were able to get whiskey while we were in the Pacific but it had to leave their lockers when we had Captain's inspection, so they would bring it to the laundry and I would put it in the soap bin during inspection. I didn't drink then and I still don't, but sure had a lot of friends at that time. —Hershel Mobbs
Remember the high protein bread? When we drew stores, the flour we took on was infested. What to do? No telling when we would get another supply. I decided to use it. The crew went along with it rather than do without bread. Before eating each slice we held it up to the light and picked out the black specks. This continued until orders came from Dr. Malott to deep six the flour. Later on at one of the reunions the subject came up and he said to me "Maybe we could have used it." We all had a good laugh over it. —The old belly robber Don Sawhill
Christmas Eve, 1944: Dr. Malott made us a concoction of alcohol and grape juice and we took time out from war to celebrate the birth of The Prince of Peace. What a contrast.... —Bob Thomas
The evenings at sea after chow when we gathered midship near the life rafts to shoot the bull was special. It was there the stories about great liberties at Pearl were spun or just talk about home was made. It was there we really grew to know our shipmates. Memories like that make it possible to live with the bad. —Sammy
I was in charge of the handy-billy [fire pump for pumping seawater]. It was always kept on the fantail of the ship. I came out one morning and it was gone. Evidently someone threw it over the side. Never did find out who did it. There were several other things like that. The sheet metal urinals—we had them up on a workbench topside to repair them. They got deep-sixed. —Tom Henigan