Today is October the 19th, year 2002.
My name is Floyd Copps, and I'm a volunteer at
the National Museum of the Pacific War.
We're interviewing Captain Ken Prescott.
Is it all right if I call you Ken?
By all means.
at the ballroom of the Nimitz Hotel in
Fredericksburg, Texas.
Now this interview is in support of the Center
for Pacific War Study Archives for the National
Museum of the Pacific War, Texas Parks and
Wildlife, for the preservation of historical
information related to this site.
again I'd like to say thank you Ken for taking
the time to come over here to
lend us the story of your experience during
World War two to start out with
I'd like to ask you some of the basic questions
of where you were born when
you were born where you went to school a little
bit about your parents if you
have any brothers and sisters and then we'll
take it from there all right I
I want to make sure, do you hear me all right?
Well, we'll find out about that.
Is this what I'm talking into here?
Now do you hear me?
If I look at you, do you hear me?
You all hear me?
I guess they do.
Ken, let's shift this this way and turn you
slightly this way.
Can you put this inside your leg slightly?
There you go, that should make it better.
Try that.
I think they can hear you now.
Are we all right now? Great.
Well, my wife, who was born and raised in Sweden
and came as an adult to this country many years ago,
I always refer to myself,
after we moved to Texas from the East Coast,
I refer to myself as a southerner.
I grew up, well then people in Texas
accepted us because we were southerners.
Well, I grew up in southern Michigan,
which shows that I had a sense of humor, I guess.
But I grew up on the shores of Lake Erie,
Maumee Bay, Lake Erie, one of the great lakes,
the shallow one, and I just swam naturally.
I had a rowboat.
I had an ice boat that I raced on Saturdays and Sundays.
And then I rigged my ice boat sail on the rowboat.
And I put boards on either side of the rowboat.
And I could sail in that.
So that when the Pacific War, well,
when the war started for us at Pearl Harbor,
I immediately went to the Naval Reserve unit,
training unit in Detroit, Michigan,
and volunteered for the service for the Navy.
Now, how old were you at this time, Kent?
I was either 21 or 22.
I'd finished, was finishing college,
and I was all set to sign the papers
and be officially accepted and get a handshake
from the officers when one of the medical yeoman
walked up and said, where is your birth certificate?
That hadn't been brought up to me since I had
been born.
I didn't have the foggiest where my birth
certificate was.
Well, the officer said, well, you can't join
the Navy
if you don't have a birth certificate.
That was very surprising to me.
I don't know whether they always did that.
Well, I phoned my father and he said
I was born in a hospital in Jackson, Michigan
and the doctor's name was so-and-so.
So I took a bus to Jackson, Michigan
and looked up in the phone book
and found the doctor was there on the second floor
And when I got to the building, it looked run down,
but there was a medical sign there.
I went up, knocked on the door, walked in.
He looked up from his desk, this old man with
the gray hair.
And he said, you're Ed Prescott's son.
I said, are you sure of it?
He said, I'm sure of it.
I said, give me a birth certificate.
And that's how I got a birth certificate.
And that's how I got in the Navy.
Now that's a quick way to answer your question,
where I was born.
It was a natural for me to be in the Navy,
but my naval experience in World War II
showed me that there were many, many, many people
from the Midwest where they grew corn
taller than an elephant's ear
that wanted to be in the Navy.
They'd seen enough of the land and milking cows.
They wanted to be on ships.
And that's where I wanted to be.
But I ended up on a PT boat.
Where did you take your basic training, Ken?
Well, when I was going to Midshipman school at Notre
Dame and then later at Northwestern,
we had a speaker one day for all of the trainees.
The speaker was Mr. Kelly, tall, good-looking chap,
about six foot two.
And he was Buckley's executive officer.
Now, we don't all know who Buckley was, let
alone Kelly.
But we all know, for sure we all know,
that MacArthur, General MacArthur,
got out of the Philippines, not on a submarine
that had been brought there for him, but on a
PT boat.
And it was Buckley that got the admiral and his wife
and the nurse and their child and the top brass
that he had on two PT boats
and took them from the Manila area
to the southern Mindoro area of the Philippines.
Now Kelly told about the PT boats.
I never heard of a PT boat.
Most people never heard of them
until they got into the newspaper
when Buckley took MacArthur down to Mondaro
where an airplane landed and took the general
and his staff to Australia where he remained
and ran much of the war on the land from there.
from there. So Kelly told about these PT boats
and how they fought the Japanese airplanes
and it was pretty scary but it was interesting.
I'll tell you it was interesting. And they
ended his talk saying we will, meaning I,
Kelly, Lieutenant Kelly, I will hold interviews
of highly selected volunteers for PT training,
and I'll do that tomorrow.
Well, I got back to, it wasn't the barracks,
it was a room right next to the towers in Chicago,
and I went to the ensign who headed our,
ensign's the lowest naval officer,
who headed our floor, and I said,
there's going to be interviews tomorrow
by Lieutenant Kelly, and I want to volunteer.
I want to be first on the list.
And I was first on the list,
because I was the first one to get there.
And I had pretty good grades.
4.0 was perfect, and I was around 3.8 for all
the courses.
And I hadn't caused any trouble.
And so I got to meet Lieutenant Kelly,
and I'll make this very short about Lieutenant Kelly
when he had the interview.
He was strong.
He knew what he was doing and what he was
talking about.
But I was not an All-American football player,
and that's what they were looking for.
I was just Ken Prescott, phys ed major
that wasn't good enough to play varsity football.
So he asked me some questions about sailing and
so on,
and was amazed that I had such knowledge about sailing.
And then he asked me, well, how could I handle
a PT boat
that might go 40 or 50 miles an hour
on Japanese planes in the air?
And the engines died.
What would you do when the engines died?
And I remember this very well.
I said, there better be somebody on that boat
that knows how to run engines,
because I don't know, and I don't think I'll
ever know,
but if those engines stop,
I'm gonna yell for the engine men, or whatever
rate he is.
Well, it turned out, on our boats, we always
had two.
And he liked that answer, rather than trying to
fake it,
and so I got away with that.
Then he actually selected me for the training
as a volunteer.
I think there were about 15 of us or so that
were selected,
and then we went to Melville, Rhode Island,
where it was the PT base, the training.
And we had a squadron of PT boats there.
And I remember the first night
because we heard an awful noise.
It was in the winter.
And it was, whoo, it was like airplane engines.
And we looked up, we couldn't see any airplanes
in the sky.
And so somebody went running down to where the
water was
and there were PT boats,
and that's where all the noise of the engines
were coming.
And so we didn't learn until we got to
engineering class
the next day that the reason that some of the
PT boats
had their engines going is that it was so cold
up north,
it was so cold that the engines didn't run
on a series of times that the oil would freeze
and the crankshafts would crack open.
So they had to run the engines, not all the time,
but off and on all night long to keep them going.
But hearing the airplane engines
when you're trying to sleep is interesting.
So we got our training there.
And then this happened in the fall of 42.
of 42. Remember that the Marines went into
Guadalcanal to try to run out the Japanese
who had landed in Guadalcanal prior to August
of 42, and they were making an airstrip there.
That airstrip, if the Japanese got it finished,
their bombers could fly easily and bomb Australia
and New Zealand and get back on their tanks of gas.
That's why Japan wanted this trip at Guadalcanal.
And there's some veterans here that could
elaborate on that.
The Marines landed in August.
They had been having training in New Zealand.
They hadn't planned to go to war, really,
until they finished their training.
They did a great job.
Well, right across from Grotto Canal was
Florida Island,
and it was two little islands there,
and there was a port of Tulagi, Tulagi.
And that had been a seaplane base for the Japanese.
Prior to that, it belonged to Great Britain, to England.
So the very first PT boats came up from the
West Coast
up from the West Coast after going from the
East Coast
through the canal, and they were taken up and lifted
and put on top of cargo ships.
Is this the sort of thing I should be talking about?
So anybody can raise a hand and ask a question
if you like.
I may say something that doesn't sound right,
and then my wife would want you to raise your hand
Straighten me out. We'd like them to hold
questions till we're done. Okay, that's what
we're going to do then
What what you I won't make any mistakes and
What year did you graduate from Midshipman
school and go into all?
I graduated in December of 42 and went right
away to Melville
completed the training and and
and had air orders.
The reason some of us had air orders,
emergency air orders, was that our PT boats,
some of them were getting sunk and getting shot up
in the fall of 42.
And so the base was asking for volunteers,
again volunteers, who would volunteer to get out
get out to the Guadalcanal area, to the Tultalagi,
as soon as possible, and help man the boats,
and help the officers who were being shot up
out there.
And I was one of those that volunteered.
Again, my grades were good, I hadn't done
anything wrong,
and so I was selected, and flew to San Francisco,
and got on a ship, and that sort of thing.
OK, before we get into the real action,
let me ask you a little bit about a PT boat.
The first thing being, what does PT mean when
you say PT boat?
Well, PT, and then the phonetic alphabet is
Peter Thayer.
PT means patrol torpedo.
The PT boats that I went out to in my first boat
was a PT-61, the next one was a PT-48.
These were the very first boats that we had
that saw action.
They were 77 feet long.
The one that you see over in our exhibition there
is a Higgins boat, it's 78 feet.
And that's a different, it's built,
the hull is a little different than we had.
Our 77 foot boats were really based somewhat
on the Scott Payne boats that England had.
They were smaller than the 77 footers,
but I think the Navy bought, I think, four of those.
I wasn't there, but I believe it was four.
They experimented with them well before World
War II,
and had a competitive,
a competition for the making and the design of
PT boats,
And Elko was one that had its design.
Huckins, I think of Florida, had another design.
And then Higgins came with their design.
So the very first boats
were the 77 foot boats made of Bayon, New Jersey.
They carried four torpedo tubes.
The model here does not show torpedo tubes
because they got better torpedoes.
I got Mark 13 torpedoes, I think.
And the torpedoes that we had,
they were tried and true.
The first torpedoes were those left over from
World War I.
And I don't know how good they were in World
War I,
but in World War II, they were erratic.
I never fired a torpedo in war,
but we did it during training.
And during training, you'd fire a torpedo,
and you had torpedo tubes,
and you would train it mechanically out from
the bow.
You didn't want to fire a torpedo
and clip your bow on the way to somewhere.
So the torpedo men would crank each of the
tubes out
like that, get them away from the bow,
and you'd fire your torpedo.
Well, buddy, what'd you do with your fire?
You had a little button in the cockpit,
and you'd let it know you were firing number one
on port side, and you press a button,
and it would, boom, it would go.
It had a little cylinder on top of it,
and it filled with something like,
not at all, but something like shotgun shells.
Anyway, they went off, and the torpedo went out
of the tube.
It usually got out of the tube successfully.
Then it would go in the water, and as it hit
the water,
its mechanism set in, and its propeller began
to go,
and it had a gyro in it, and the gyro worked
in such a way that it would keep it going
in the direction in which it was to go.
Wasn't supposed to go this way or that way.
And then it had something for depth in that set
and that was to be about six feet
or whatever it was set at.
It wasn't supposed to come up,
wasn't supposed to go down,
it's supposed to zoom right there,
right in and hit that ship.
Well, we saw torpedoes in training
and later other boats saw them in training.
The torpedoes would go off
and the World War I torpedoes would go this way,
they'd go that way, they'd go up that way,
they'd go down that way.
Sometimes they'd come back
and you had to keep an eye on them.
So what you're saying,
some of those old torpedoes would go to the right,
some to the left, some would porpoise.
You never knew where they were going.
Let me ask you this.
In addition to torpedoes,
what other type of armament did a PT boat have?
Okay, well, we had depth charge, two of them,
one on the port side and one on the starboard side,
a stern, we had midships, we had two gun tubes,
not tubes, turrets, two gun turrets,
that sat up, the gunners sat up a little higher
above the cockpit, and you had twin 50s there,
and they were fed with a belt, like you see in
the movies
where the belt's going through.
So we had always had two gunner's mates.
One would be in one, two, three gunner's mates.
One in that tube, one in the turret,
the other in the other turret with the twin 50s.
And then on the stern we had a Swedish model,
a 20 millimeter Oerlikon, O-E-R-L-I-K-O-N,
you think Oerlikon.
And that had, that carried something like,
I think it carried 15 or 20 cartridges
in a container on top.
So you had extra ones there in a box to put
more in.
And the 20 millimeter was very nice.
It would go boom, boom, boom.
And it went further than the Browning automatic machine
And it had more impact when it hit something.
Does that answer the question?
Yes, Sir.
How many crewmen did you have on a PT boat? Well.
And what were their functions?
And this changed as more people came out,
more sailors and more officers came out,
then we would carry extra people
when we went on patrols for training purposes.
But we always had two engineers,
really good engineers that knew what they were doing.
And we might have one in training.
We always liked to have one in training.
So the engineers, we went on patrols every
other night.
Sometimes you'd be called out
on a night that you hadn't planned to go out.
But you needed a day to fuel up the engines
and get them back in shape
and get your armament back where you wanted it
and then to rest up before you went out on
patrol again.
But you always had your two engineers.
So during the night when you patrolled,
we didn't like to go out in the daytime
unless an airplane was shot down
and we could go out and try to find the pilots.
So we patrolled at night.
And then some boats did it one way and some other.
We usually did two hour shifts.
So one engine room man would have the duty for
the engines.
And he would stand on top of the engines
with this much of his body from his belt up out
so he could have air cooling him all the time.
The other man was trying to sleep below or on
the deck.
We had to have at least three machine gunners,
gunners mates, because I just described those three.
Well, we always like to have one in training.
We only had one torpedo man.
If you see in the movies or something,
and you see the torpedo man standing next to
the torpedo
when it's in a tube during the early days,
you'll see he's got something in his hand.
he's got a wooden mallet.
And why has he got a wooden mallet?
Because sometimes you press the button
and then this conglomeration of dynamite
or whatever it was, the shotgun shells on top
that would ignite and send a torpedo out,
they didn't ignite.
Torpedo didn't go anywhere.
So then the torpedo man stood there
and he had this wooden mallet and he'd go, boom!
He'd hit it like that and that would fire it off
and the torpedo man would go.
So he was there.
We always had a quartermaster, he went down one
step from the cockpit, right under there
if you went down the steps, there's a big desk,
like this, it wasn't a desk, and that's
where the radioman was there, and we had the
radio in which we kept control and contact
with the base, and the quartermaster was there,
and the other half was this desk, and that's
That's where he had his charts, and he would
chart where we were going and how long we
were there and keep the notes up.
And then we had at least three seamen who would
be ready to do anything that needed
to be done, but to help us shove off when we
left the dock or to get us to come in and
get the lines over, they'd leave any out, you
think of any.
had an executive officer. I started out as an
executive officer. I had two officers on the boats
and then I got my own boat. What was the function
of the executive officer on a PT boat? He was to
keep his eye on everything and see that everything
went well while the skipper, which was usually
called by the crew, the skipper was the one that
had good seamanship. He could handle the boat. He
could get it up and down those huge swells and
waves in the Pacific which were so big he was
good at that and he was the one
that could maneuver the boat and get it into
the dock and the exec was the one
that was going to learn how to do all those
things. Now on the hull on the PT
boat was that made of steel just like a
battleship or was that made of wood?
The PT boats were really made of good top-grade
mahogany and
plywood they weren't plywood crafter they
wouldn't have lasted at all there
with a lot of good mahogany on it,
but the plywood closed things off,
made sections of it, and shaped the hull and so on,
but we had a good mahogany under thing.
When we didn't, there wasn't any steel anywhere.
I always thought that the windshield we had in
the cockpit,
I always thought that that was good metal,
whatever it was, and you could duck behind it,
and what it was, it was plexiglass,
And we learned about that later on.
So there wasn't really any steel.
The 50 millimeter gun tubs, they had metals.
That's in order to hold everything up.
Now, what kind of engines did you
have to propel your PT boats?
Well, we always referred to them as airplane engines.
These were the same things that were used early
and early airplanes, where they had single
engine planes,
but they had others as well.
These were Packard engines, made in our country,
I guess, in Detroit.
And they had, each one was capable of about 15,000
or 1,500 horsepower, 1,500.
1,500 horsepower, and we had three of them.
About two years afterwards, after the war started,
we had PT boats out there.
They sent some modifiers out
so that we could apply them on the engines
and you could get it up to more than 15 at high speeds.
We could do that.
Now, when we were patrolling at night,
we didn't want anybody to hear those engines.
We didn't want the Japanese to hear them
whether they were on ships or they were on shore.
So we patrolled very low speeds, always on two engines,
with the 3rd one, a center engine, idling,
ready to go if we needed it.
And we had mufflers so that the sound of the engines
turning over escaped underwater,
so there wasn't a lot of noise to it.
The problem was if suddenly you had to go somewhere
and you signaled from the cockpit that you
wanted to have
the third engine engaged, and we had throttles.
They were just like on the airplanes.
I was in a B-24 and flew that for about 20
minutes once.
And we had the same adjusters for engines
and engine speed that they had in the airplane.
And I sat down in the pilot's place,
felt very natural to feel that.
So the engine man's room, the one, duty,
who was on duty, he was to look after those engines.
Now, up in the cockpit, we didn't shift the engines.
All we did was press a button to tell the engineer
what we wanted him to do.
And he reached in and he got a big wooden thing
and he shifted the engine and then he shifted
this one
and then he shifted the center one.
And then from the cockpit, you could manipulate
the speed that you wanted,
the speed that you were going to use to do.
Was that part of your question?
Yes, Sir.
Now, I've been wondering, I've heard the PT
boat, they were called the Dungaree Navy.
Can you explain why they would come up with
this type of title for the PT boaters?
Well, yeah, I'd like to suggest for the people
who are here.
Then the PT boats were taken off of the cargo
ships that brought them to an island far to
the south, not very far from Australia, got
them in the water, and then they got towed
halfway up to Guadalcanal, and then the people
who were towing them thought it was safer
to get back there, and then the PT boats were
on their own, and they got into Tulagi Harbor.
Now, in Tulagi Harbor, there were no barracks there.
There were no machine shops there.
There is what the Japanese left after they had
used the base
as a seaplane base.
The first nights that I was there, and those of us
were flown out as an emergency, although we
went by ship from San Francisco.
First nights we were there, we slept in native huts.
They called them grass huts, they're not grass,
they're woven material.
And there was no floor, we were given a blanket
and we could get four of them into this,
each one of those little huts.
And I remember one fellow broke out and he said,
he did not say holy Mackerel, but he said
something else.
He said, there's no floor in here
and we've got to sleep on the ground.
Ken, what are we gonna do about it?
I said, I'm going to roll over and go to sleep.
Now, there was nothing there.
There was no corner drugstore.
There was no cafe that you could choose your food.
There was nothing there.
Now, in the months to come, base force people came.
And they came, and they unloaded from ships
wood and this and that and the other thing.
And they made floors for tents.
And they made a mess hall.
And then people from the States came out
and they were able to cook in a mess hall.
Those boats just didn't have anything.
They had what they brought with them.
And these boats burned 100 octane gas.
You can only put so darn much.
You can only fill them up in one place.
And then when you get there, you're patrolling
all night.
You're using up anywhere from a third to a half
of your fuel.
So where do you get the rest of the fuel?
There are no gas stations there.
You can't go to an island up there
and plan to stay for two or three weeks or four weeks
if there's no way to have fuel, it's very interesting.
Well, what happens is ships come in
and they would have metal drums,
I think 50 gallon drums, I can't remember,
50-gallon drums, and in those drums
would be 100 octane gas.
And they'd unload that, come into Tulagi Harbor,
they'd unload that explosive stuff as fast as
they could
and put it on Campbell Island, a little island there.
And then how do you get it out of there?
Well, you get a handy billy.
I don't know what a handy billy is at all.
It's a little engine, and it runs on ordinary gasoline.
And you light it off with electricity
or a cigarette lighter or something
and it goes putt, putt, putt, putt,
and it creates a vacuum.
And so you stick one tube in the metal drum
and another one over here
and you put that 100 octane gas,
put that 100 octane gas in your tank.
Now it takes a lot of those drums
to fill up your fuel needs
and it takes a long time to do it.
And you do it in the daytime
and you're worried about the Japanese ships,
Japanese airplanes coming in over you.
It's a dangerous situation.
We found out right away that the gasoline
that was coming out of the drums
didn't come out super clean.
It had little flecks.
Those are the little things you get in your carotids
and go up and settle in your eye
and then you have a stroke.
But we'd have those things coming out of these
metal tanks.
So we had to make something like chamois skin,
in, whatever leather we could get, or a couple
layers of cloth, and so that gas then would
have to sift through there, and then you could
bing, bing, bing, and get rid of the flex,
because if they got into that engine, that
engine just crapped out.
Crapped out.
That's not a good word.
It would no longer run until you cleaned the
carburetors, which is hard to do on your way.
I don't know how I got on that one.
don't you see all of the supplies in the
beginning had to come out on ships
later on they had liberty ships and those
things were coming in and out with
all the stuff you needed but you need people to
unload it you need people to
get it there. Now I understand that there were
about 42 boat squadrons how many
boats were in a squadron and my next question
is what squadron were you first
assigned to? Well I was again so very fortunate
I was in Squadron 2
slant 3 which was the two earliest squadrons
were 2 and 3 and what was left
of them was called 2 slant 3 and these were the
77 foot boats. We really I think
first first they came with four then they got
four more I think they must
have had about 10 77-foot boats, but some of
them, when they were attacking, and
was not there at that early November and
October and December, that they
went over and attacked Japanese ships who were
shooting from their
ships at our Marines and later the Army on
Guadalcanal. Destroyers, cruisers, and
and battleships, and the Japanese knew how to
build them.
They were good.
Now, these little PT boats going out there,
when they first went out, four boats,
when they first went out to attack the Japanese,
they didn't, Japanese didn't know what was there.
Tokyo Rose hadn't told them that we had PT,
but they didn't know what it was,
going, and they, because 50 caliber was coming
in at them and a little 20
millimeter was coming in at them, and torpedoes
were being shot at them and
they rarely hit. But anyway, so those were the
first boats, but some of them were
shot up, some of them ran for their life after
they fired their torpedoes and
ran aground on coral reefs on the island
and ran as fast as they could into the bush.
So that meant that the crews had to kind of
figure out
a way in the boats to tow them into Tulagi Harbor
and push them in the bushes somewhere
and begin to try to repair them and rebuild them.
After a few months, by January, February, March,
we had base force there, and they could repair
the boats
at pretty good speed.
Now, what was your job when you went to Tulagi?
Was it as an executive officer, or?
Yes, the lowest rank you can have,
officer rank in the Navy, is an ensign,
which isn't very impressive.
The only one that impresses is the one
who's the ensign in the immediate family.
all the officers that looked down on the ensigns
because they really don't know anything,
and the chief petty officers who know everything,
and what we would have done without the chief
petty officers
in World War II and the Navy, I just don't know.
They were so highly trained,
they'd spent so much time in the Navy,
some of them had been in World War I,
they knew what to do,
but they didn't pay much attention to ensigns either.
They always said, yes, Sir,
saluted smartly and that sort of thing. Now to
answer your questions, what I did
as an ensign was to learn how to be an
executive officer, how to run that boat,
how to dock it, how to come in and get a line
over and then back
it off and all of that. That was easy and
natural for me because I've done stuff
similar to that on Lake Erie. That was easy for
me. I was supposed to learn as
fast as I could what everybody on that PT boat
was was trained to do so that I
knew what they were doing and if something
happened to him I could get
there and help him. Basically I wasn't training
to be the new skipper of that
boat or another boat and I was very quickly in
about two months I had my own
boat. What was the number of your boat? First
one was the 61 boat it was the
fastest boat in the squadron.
You wanna know why it was the fastest?
Yes, Sir.
Well, we'd left Tulagi, we'd gone up to the
next island,
the Russell Islands, the Japanese had just left.
And so then we lived where they had lived.
The squadron commander, I wanna make me talk to you
about my squadron commander, Jack Searles.
Jack Searles was a full lieutenant then.
and he was squadron commander.
We had 80 foot boats and 77 foot boats.
There were a lot of people who were
all-stars football players.
Oh gosh, Lenny Tom was All-American tackle
from Ohio State.
Gene Berger, All-American end from Syracuse.
We had, we practically could field a
professional team.
They had so many like that.
And then they had people like Ken Prescott
that could maneuver boats and wasn't good enough
to play that kind of football.
But Jack Searles came to me and he said,
Ken, the skipper of the 61 boat is being transferred
a couple days from now, I've got his orders,
and I'm gonna turn the 61 boat over to you.
You're young, you're handsome,
but I'm turning the command over to you.
Will you accept?
Yes sir, you're the skipper starting tonight.
So he said, but there's one thing you gotta
promise me.
I said, what?
He said, I'm assigning two chief petty officers.
Chief petty officers?
And I said, what do they do?
He said, they're motor machinists, chief motor machinists.
He said, they're the best we have.
We had them when we were fighting off of Guadalcanal.
They're sick and tired of patrols.
they don't want to do any more patrols.
And he says, will you promise not
to take them out on patrol?
I said, no.
You sign them to my ship.
I'll run the ship.
And I'll determine a way that they can not patrol,
but they're going to have to work at it.
And he just looked at me and said, you're
crazy, but do it.
So I called the two on the PA system.
I called the two petty officers that came up.
they already knew that they were going to work
under me.
And I said, I understand you don't want to patrol.
That's right, we're not going to patrol.
I said, you're going to patrol tonight.
Eh, not so sure.
I'll talk, don't talk to the squadron commander.
Tonight you're going to patrol and hear me out.
When we come back from patrol in the morning,
I want you on the dock.
It was a dock that was about a little longer
than this.
It went out in the water and it was deep enough
they dynamited so you could bring a PT boat alongside.
That's where we fueled, and that's
where they would get the boat ready for the
next patrol.
All the other boats that had been out of patrol,
they had to go hide in the mangrove swamps out there
and wait their turn by rank then,
wait their turn to come in.
The fastest boat coming in from patrol
got the first spot at the dock.
And I love that.
You'd come back from patrol
and the senior man would be in front
and then pretty quick all the boats
would be sort of flanked about even
and then all of a sudden they'd all set the throttles
and it was a battle to see who got in first.
So I told the two chief petty officers, motor machinists,
that you'll be on that dock,
I won't be the first tomorrow.
I'm gonna try, but if I'm not first,
Then I'll take my turn and you work on those engines.
The next night we patrol, you go on patrol.
But you never go on patrol the nights following
I'm first in.
Well, after that, this is true, I was first in.
Those chiefs would be down at engine room.
I think they had to use gloves to get on the engines,
it was so hot.
And I always got in first.
Now, I could always beat the 80-foot boats.
They're supposed to be better.
Well, they were clumsy.
We were graceful, our 77-foot boats.
We could wear rings around them.
Now, Jack Kennedy, who slept on the cot right
next to me,
we all slept on cots on a veranda.
There wasn't any other place to sleep.
And he had an 80-foot boat.
He never got in first.
He had bad engines.
Jack Kennedy, you didn't ask me questions about Jack,
so I guess I won't tell you about Jack.
You want questions on Jack?
Well, I don't want the audience to leave,
so I'll talk about Jack Kennedy.
Well, Jack was well-liked by everybody.
He was very good.
He volunteered, he always wanted to go do things.
If he needed a boat to go somewhere, he was
ready to go.
But he did not have good engines.
The boat had been rebuilt and brought up to standards,
but the engines were bad.
One engine was always crapping out, and maybe two.
We'd be out on patrol at night.
He was senior to me.
He was a JG.
And he'd wave at me, because the moon was out there,
because he'd wave.
And he was coming over alongside to talk to me
about goodness
knows what.
And then he'd come in, he'd come alongside,
he'd back on his engine, in order to just slide in,
and one of the engines would crap out
and it would go boom against my hull.
And my crew just didn't like that
because then they had to sand it down
and try to repair it, make it look good,
and go to try to get some paint
to paint it something near what we had.
So I told Jack, I said,
Jack, when you want to talk to me or my crew,
you wait, but stay there.
We'll come to you.
And that's what we did from that time on.
Now, why is that important?
His engines just didn't act quickly.
Now, when he was cut, the bow off by a Japanese destroyer,
Is this the reason he got hit?
Well, my squadron commander, Jack Searles,
and I don't think so, but we just think
that one of the engines crapped out
even as they tried to goose it to get moving.
Who knows?
Nobody knows.
Oh, you ask me why we're a Dungaree Navy.
I gotta go back to that.
We're a Dungaree Navy because there's no,
there's no, there's no dealers.
There's no foleys. All you got is what you
brought and carried to put aboard your boat.
And that stuff wears out. It just wears out.
And so you don't wear your dress, you don't
wear this thing.
You just wear, well, you end up wearing shorts
and whatever you got for a shirt and some sort
of a cap.
that's what you wear.
And as things got on a little later in January,
December, February, when you could go to Bottle Canal,
you could get ashore and borrow the postmasters,
not the postmasters, the man,
well his last name was Master,
he was the one, Portmaster,
that borrowed the portmaster's jeep
and you'd just follow a road
And you'd either be where the Air Corps people lived,
or where the Army people lived, or where
the Marine people lived.
And you'd look for a building where
they had something in there in storage, and
you'd go up.
And if they had clothing in there, then you'd
sign a chip,
and you'd take whatever clothing you could get,
whether it was khakis, whether it was green.
The Marine green stuff was very nice.
We liked that.
And you'd take what you could get,
And you take it on the boat, and that's what
you wore.
And that's so we weren't even a Dungaree Navy,
because we ran out of Dungarees.
Well, what you're saying then is fairly informal
when you were aboard ship on one of your PT boats.
Yeah, you were never formal in either your wear
or the way you talked.
The captain, I call it the skipper,
the captain and the exec were in charge,
everybody knew it, and that took care of that.
And the motor macks were motor macks,
and they knew more than anybody on that boat,
and they did it, and I could go right down the crew,
and every one of them was proud of what they were
and what they did, and I just want to say this.
When our 61 boat went out on patrol,
we went out to do what we were ordered to do.
We were ordered to go to take patrol all night
between Cape Esperanza, Guadalcanal, and Sabo,
which is an island that divided the water distance
between Guadalcanal and Florida Island,
and we'd patrol back and forth, two of us there,
so that if any Japanese ships came down,
we could get the word out immediately what they were
and how many there were and send our torpedoes towards.
Well, basically, what we were,
I likened this to my crew.
Gosh, they were young.
They were so young.
The chief motor Max, my god, they were my age
and older.
But the crew, I think our youngest said he was 18.
I don't think he was 18.
I think he was younger.
They were all of them less than 20.
They were so young.
But they had been trained.
They knew what to do for their specialty,
and they were proud of them.
Now, when we would get together and talk
about what we were going to do.
It was like we were a basketball team,
and we were getting ready because we're
going to play Middleville tonight.
And the goddamn Middleville team, they beat us
last year.
They aren't going to beat us this time.
We're going to do what we need to do to win.
Every time we went anywhere to do anything,
we knew we could do it.
We knew we could do it.
We were a team.
And I think that's typical of the PT boats.
We were informal, we were proud of what we were,
we were proud to serve with the people we were serving,
and we were good.
We were not only good, by George,
we were the fastest naval craft to float in the war.
Nothing could go as fast as we could.
Now, I tell you, that makes you proud.
And we were proud.
Later on, when cruisers and destroyers of ours
would come in and we'd go off, we'd just
burn rings around them and so on.
And they'd be blinkering so fast,
we couldn't even take messages.
But we weren't going to run them down,
and they weren't going to run us down.
But they weren't quite so pleased to see us
running that fast around them.
Go ahead, some more questions.
I'm talking too much.
No, you're not.
This is exactly why we're here.
Describe, if you will, Ken, a typical mission where
did you have any missions where you had some
action against,
say, merchant ships or Zeros, fighter planes?
Just describe one of your more memorable actions
that you were involved in.
Well, frankly, the patrols and the things
and the boats than I was out there,
we rarely had action.
We rarely had action.
It was airplanes in the air at night
or above us when we were coming back.
And we were exchanging metal bullets with them.
And I never got hit.
My boat didn't get hit.
It wasn't that I was clever, it just didn't get hit.
They came up behind us, and if I was the senior boat,
then the boat behind me got machine gunned,
and that's often what happened.
And they were wounded, and we never got wounded.
We were all right.
We never did any of the great things
for which the PT boats are done.
We were always sent out on missions,
and we patrolled where the Japanese were coming
or were supposed to come and didn't come
or where the submarines were going.
I never knew how we were gonna tell the submarines.
We'd go on submarine patrols.
Unless they came up and said that they were
a friendly submarine or a Japanese submarine,
we never would have known.
What you're saying, you didn't have sonar.
We didn't have any equipment for submarines.
One came up one night right beside me
And it came right up, right beside us.
And the only thing we had was depth charges.
And the radio man came running out.
He says, don't do anything.
He said, it's friendly.
Because the base had radioed that there was a friendly
submarine in our area.
He just came up and looked at us and went down.
But I've got to tell you about Jack Searles.
Because I can't go on forever.
I'll go on as long as anybody stays
or you keep asking questions.
I want to go back.
I want to go back to December of 42,
when they only had about eight PT boats there.
And I described briefly about Tulagi
and their living conditions there.
I wrote the name down.
It was 9 December of 42.
And Jack Sarles later became squadron commander,
but he was the captain of a boat at the time.
There came two highly classified radio messages
to our base.
We had a radioman, we had a radio up on a hill
so they could take messages.
And they were almost identical messages.
One was from Admiral Halsey
and the other was from Admiral Nimitz.
And it said in effect, I'll just read what it says.
Well, I'm gonna read what it said.
What it said is that on this very night,
the message came in on this very night around
20 hundred,
around 8:00, a Japanese submarine I-class,
which is the biggest submarines the Japanese had,
the most modern submarine they had,
they had the ability to carry a float plane,
I don't know how they did that,
And then they had a three-inch gun
mounted that they could do it.
It was the most modern they had.
And the messages said that around 1800,
is that what I said?
No, 2000 at the time.
But just as darkness was coming,
this Japanese submarine would come to Cape Esperance,
which is a little cove off of Guadalcanal Beach
where the Marines landed, the north-south,
or easternmost tip, and there was a little cove
behind it,
and the submarine would surface there,
and it carried a very important Japanese SOB in caps,
S.O.B., that's not Navy, that's what's used all
the time.
And then at the end of the message said,
there are no naval forces available
other than PT boats.
Sink that submarine.
That was the message, it was about three sentences.
And so the officers, there were, let's see,
if there were eight boats, four boats, eight boats,
times two officers, 16, plus two senior officers,
maybe 18 officers, they got together
and they were looking for volunteers
of boats that were ready to go out.
Not all boats were ready to go out.
They hadn't completed fueling and so on.
Jack Sarrell says, my boat's ready and I'll go out.
And another boat said, my boat's ready,
I have fuel and I can go out.
So those two boats left Tulagi.
And this is told to me by Jack Sarrell,
who was later the squadron commander
and we were very close and we still are.
He's still alive.
He's four years older than I was.
He said they started out of Tulagi.
As you can imagine, here's Guadalcanal,
and across there's a very small island.
That's Florida Island, and that's where Tulagi was.
And then up from that, you had Russell Islands,
and then way up there you had Bougainville.
So they left the two boats,
and they headed on a false course.
They headed for,
hunted Florida Island coast
as if they were going up the line.
Well, we didn't have anybody up the line.
as if they were going up towards Bougainville.
In case there was somebody on Guadalcanal
watching to see what was going to happen to the
PT boats,
because dusk was coming, they could see, I
guess, that far.
And there are airplanes in the air.
And Tokyo Rose gets her information
from goodness knows where.
And as they left Florida Island, it suddenly
became dark.
And they just speeded over to Cape Esperance.
So we had two PT boats there,
presumably a submarine under the water.
And they idled their engines
because they didn't want to make a whole lot of noise.
And so Jack Searles kept his boat pretty close
to the tip of Cape Esperance.
And the other boat he sent a little further down.
So they would wait.
Suddenly very close to the appointed hour the
Japanese submarine came up surfaced
Didn't like what it looked and went down both
PT boats saw them
Saw that submarine come up and then it came up
by that time
Jack had Jack Searles had moved his
PT boat
Just where he wanted it and he thought to he
told me he says I
Think he's gonna come right back up where he is
because there's not a lot of water there if he
got that far
That's where he is and he'll come up and it did
came up Jack
He had here was a stationary target that came
up and here was Jack. He's aiming right at it
The torpedo tubes have been turned out
When he set off two torpedoes
One of them fiddled around out there and disappeared,
and one of them hit that submarine amid ships,
and it sank that submarine.
It just went down.
The other PT boat
radioed a message,
supposed to keep radio silence,
and said that he had found
a Japanese craft there,
and he was beginning to shell it.
And so he did, and I think that was one
that was coming out probably to be helpful.
Now, when he got back to the base,
Jack Searles asked the commanding officer,
who then was lieutenant commander,
and he said, I want to send this message.
And this is the message he sent to Admiral Nimitz
and to Admiral Halsey, the other senior one.
He said,
submarine, let's see,
fired two fish,
that's torpedoes, two fish.
Submarine sank. Sank,
submarine, now let me do it again.
Found and sank submarine with torpedo.
One last big Japanese S.O.B.
This is J.G. sending a message to two senior admirals.
Boy, were they overjoyed.
Now Jack Searles later on commanded another squadron
Other squadron, Torpedo boats,
and he was a wonderful, wonderful person.
Now if you want to know what happened to the
other PT boat,
they both came back to the Tulagi base,
he was ready to go, and he went out on his patrol
the next night, that's how fast he went.
And he had attacking Japanese warships,
and he was hit, sunk, and all of the crew
members lost.
Now, that's sort of the way it was with PT boats,
who got there in October and went through January.
They were having those kinds of engagements.
But that was a wonderful thing.
The PT boats were the only engagements available
and they sank.
Who was the SOB?
He was the senior general that was going to relieve
the other army general who hadn't done a good
enough job
killing Americans.
So he was there, and he was going
to square that thing away.
Surely, I've answered all the questions by now.
But if there are some more.
Due to the time factor, I know your career.
We just got started on an assignment
over in the Pacific.
However, due to the time factor, today I
I think we'll conclude this interview and allow.
Oh, how could it end anything better
than what Jack Searle's dead?
That's right.
Oh, and I didn't even time it that way.
But he's a wonderful man.
Wonderful man.
So I'd like to invite any questions
from anybody sitting in the audience.
Have you got any questions, Willie,
that you'd like to ask?
Yeah, it's been a very long time,
so did you have your wedding lights?
So, you have to have some sort of reason.
To find out whether the ship is in service.
Well, what a wonderful question.
Running lights.
Can I answer it?
Yeah, repeat the question.
Well the question is, did we have running lights
and did we use them?
Yeah, sure we did.
We used them in Newport when we were maneuvering
and stuff like that.
And other ships had running lights at night.
Makes the long story very short.
It's pertinent.
I, after having malaria and jaundice and all
kinds of stuff like that in Bougainville,
I was sent back on to the base in Melville for
a limited time on leave.
And when they were getting ready to ship me
out, they had a very, brand new way to test eyesight.
And you'd go into a Quonset hut on the base in
Melville, Rhode Island, and you'd go in
and you'd sit there for maybe 20 minutes or a
half hour.
They wouldn't let you read anything,
no light in there, it was all dark.
And then they'd begin to turn on lights of
different colors
and you were supposed to call out and say what
they were.
And that was the main basis and it was much
more than,
well, I did that, waste of my time.
I could have been the officers club.
There were a lot of things I could have done,
but I did that test because I had to.
if I was going back to the Pacific.
Then I get called in two days time
and to the main office in Melville
and they say, well, we can't send you out
back to the Pacific for two or three reasons.
You've had malaria and jaundice and all that stuff.
But anyway, we're not gonna put you on any
ships anymore
because here's what the people,
highly qualified people, they weren't PT people,
they were from Washington, running this thing,
and they tested your eyes, and you're blind,
you can't tell the difference between red and green.
I said, what difference does that make?
And so they read down there, he cannot go out
on PT boats in the Pacific area or anywhere else
because he can't, he doesn't know the color
of running lights, he can't tell the difference.
So I went down and talked to those people,
I said, well, that's awful that you write this.
And I said, what makes you think we're using
running lights
in the Pacific?
We don't want anybody to know we're there.
We never use running lights.
I never saw one in the Pacific.
They didn't like that.
So that answers your question.
We didn't use running lights.
The Japanese would see them, and we'd see them.
That's not only I have maybe big ships down and
ports down south somewhere
We're using running lights. We had them we
didn't use them. I never turned one out of my life
Any other questions? I have one question for okay
Did any of your acquaintances get killed?
during World War II in PTs. I understand that
there were 308 PT crewmen killed
during World War II, and my question is, did
you know any of them personally? Were
they personal friends, any of these 308? Well,
yeah, there was there was one we
trained together in Melville, and he got
married just before we left, and we were
waiting to ship out of San Francisco. His new
wife was there with him. They were a nice
couple. They were very friendly. Then in
Tulagi, I think it was March of 1943, the P.T. Tender,
Niagara. P.T. Tenders, when they came, it's a
whole other story. I could tell you about
P.T. tenders, but the P.T. Tender Niagara was
leaving and half of Squadron 6, the
80-foot Elko boats, were going with the Niagara
to New Guinea because that's
where a whole new field of action and P.T.
boats hadn't been there yet and
they were going to send over half of that
squadron. The squadron commander
taking this group over, came to me one day
when they were getting ready and packing,
and said, Ken, I want you to come
and be my executive officer.
We're going to New Guinea, that's where the
action is.
I've watched you, I want you to be my executive officer.
And I'll tell you, after we get to New Guinea,
I will make you captain of my PT boat
because I am the senior officer,
and I will run the squadron,
and I will come to your boat when I need it,
but I'll make you,
so I could have been promoted from executive officer
to, very quickly, to have command of an 80-foot boat.
I didn't want to leave my crew.
They didn't want me to leave,
and I did not leave my crew.
Now, almost 40 years later or whatever it was,
at a PT reunion, I noticed one of the PT officers
that was attending was this very one
who was taking half of this squadron six over there,
and I'd never seen his name before.
So I went up to him, he didn't look the same,
I introduced myself.
And I said, well, I'm the one.
And I started telling him, he said, I remember you.
You wouldn't go with me to go out over to New Guinea.
And I said, well, I didn't want to leave my crew.
He said, that's all right.
He said, you're lucky.
I said, why?
He said, I wouldn't be talking to you today. Why?
He said, I had another one, another officer.
I made executive officer.
And he was killed.
And I said, my god.
I didn't say that, no.
My wife wouldn't like that.
I said, oh, my goodness.
Was that Bond, B-O-N-D?
I can't remember right now his first name.
He said, it was.
And he was my friend.
And I never knew the address of his wife,
So I couldn't contact her when I came back to.
So he's the only one that was close to me that
got killed.
Jack Kennedy and I were very, very close together.
And he almost got killed.
That's a story in its own.
That's a whole other story.
Are there any more questions from the audience?
Yes, Sir.
Was Ken involved in any rescues?
The question was, were you involved in any
rescues at Sea?
No, we were sent out.
Two boats were sent out to Offa Tulagi because
a pilot had come down, his plane had crashed,
and there was reason to believe that he was in
the water off of Sabo Island.
It was in the daytime.
boats, the duty boat and my boat, we went out
quickly. The other boat actually rescued
him because they spotted him before we did. No,
that's all. I was never involved in
the other rescue mission than that one.
One other question. Yes.
Now, let's talk about the names now,
because a lot of people don't know what E.T.
10s are.
I'm a whole different story,
but you can give me a little bit of that.
Well, if you're all, is that all right?
You got another tape?
Well, a lot of this stuff, as you and I
discussed before,
we'll get into much deeper detail
at a more in-depth interview that we have
planned in the future.
Well, touch on this, if you will, Ken.
If it's all right with the crew.
If it's all right with the visitors, if it isn't,
then they'll leave.
So we could still do it.
Well, I think the first PT tender, I'm sure it
was the first,
was called the USS Jamestown, AGP-3.
And it was built in Philadelphia Navy Yard.
but it was built in Philadelphia.
It was then the largest and most luxurious yacht.
It was given prior, much prior to World War II
to the military, to the Navy,
and it was converted into sort of a gunboat status,
and it actually took a naval midshipman
on cruises during the summer, and it did other things.
Then when the war broke out, it was decided
that you needed a PT tender.
Now, the PT tender was converted.
Amid ships, it was made out of a major machine shop.
And mechanics were there, and equipment was put
in there.
they could do, presumably, anything that had to
be done
in the repair and maintenance and upkeep of PT boats.
They could, they had the capability
of lifting an engine out, there were three of them,
a stern, and lifting it out of there
and bringing it in and setting it in a cradle
and working on it to try to find out
why it was always crapping out or what the
problem was.
The Jamestown could make any other kinds of repairs
to gun mounts or whatever it was.
They were very, very good in equipment.
It had a huge freezer area up forward
for meats and produce that had to be kept cold.
It had the capability of washing clothes, good
dungarees, whites and all that.
It had a complete crew and then we had rooms so
that on the Jamestown you could take a
a squadron of boats from Talagi, and you could
take them to another island, and then in that
other island, the tender, the Jamestown, did
this, it would find an alcove where it could
sneak in, as close as a coral would let it, to
the trees and the mangroves.
And then they made, because they hadn't taken
it with them,
the Jamestown made a mesh out of materials
and sprayed it green.
And then they put that hanging from trees over
the boat
so that the Japanese soldiers, you know, for months,
if an airplane was in the air, it was Japanese.
You heard an airplane in the air, head for the foxhole.
Damn Japs are back.
but the Japanese planes had trouble
trying to see the Jamestown.
Now it was anchored in the hobby, they'd sink it.
So they had it as close to the coral as they could,
and you could feed officers on there.
They had a ward room,
they could feed the officers on there.
They could make food for the crews of the PT boats.
The food could be taken ashore,
that you'd come alongside.
I think we must have had by war,
I've never counted it,
there must have been at least 20 tenders.
Some of them, one of them, the Niagara,
remember when I told the story? Right.
Half a squadron, six for New Guinea?
The Niagara was the tender that went with it.
is they went around the corner of Guadalcanal,
going south towards the New Hebrides,
and then they were gonna circle back up.
They just got to the end of Guadalcanal,
and there were two Betty bombers,
Japanese bombers up there,
and they just kept dropping sticks of dynamite down
and bombs down on the Niagara.
They never hit it,
but they had so much exploding around it
that it was catching fire,
And so then the PT boats, talking about a
rescue mission,
they rescued the whole crew of the Niagara.
They got everybody aboard
and then took them all back to Tulagi.
But they lost all their dungarees, all their equipment
and everything they were gonna take to Niagara.
And Tokyo Rose, man, everybody knows about
Tokyo Rose,
but if they don't, we'll do that another time.
She, oh, I gotta tell you about Tokyo Rose
you three are so popular. Tokyo Rose, I think,
had gone to school sometime in England. She
had a very nice way of speaking English. It was
almost natural to her. She had a nice
feminine voice. When you don't see any women
around, you can make a feminine voice very
nice when you hear it. Hers was nice. Then she
would come on the radio. You could tune
her in on the radio and the PT. Or if you're on
a base, if you had a radio you could do
something else with, you could tune in Tokyo
Rose. And it was always nice to tune her in.
She had such nice stories to tell you about.
But it was always telling you about Japanese
engagements that the Japanese had won. Or warn
you and say, we know you there in Tulagi
and we know what you're doing and I don't know
why and she was right many many times and when
she came in on the Niagara thing she said I
told you about that that but anyway so Japanese rose
was she was very popular because there wasn't
much on the radio to listen to
she played a lot of music huh yeah anything
anything else any other well thank you
I'm overwhelmed by the applause.