[Floyd Cox] Testing one two three.
Today is April the 12th, year 2001.
My name is Floyd Cox.
I'm a volunteer working with
the oral history program of
the National Museum of the Pacific War.
Today we are interviewing Mr. Charles Pase of Ingram,
Texas, concerning his experiences during World War II.
To start out with Charles,
can you give me a little depth about
your background where you were
born and when you were born?
[Charles Pase] Well, I'm actually an east
coaster man to begin with.
I was born in the state of Delaware,
but my folks are all West Virginia Hill country people
and I was really raised in
West Virginia where most
of my family relatives still remain.
I went to school in West Virginia and also in Delaware.
[Floyd Cox] What town?
[Charles Pase] At the town of Thomas,
West Virginia's way in the Hill Country,
way up next to the Maryland border
and Tucker County and I went to school
my later years in
late grade school and high school in Georgetown,
Sussex County, Delaware,
which is just a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
When the war began, all of my older brothers either
were in the service already or they joined up.
In fact, one of my oldest brother
had been a Marine in Peking, China.
He was with delegation guard
and came back to the States in
1938 and when they started drafting people well,
instead of waiting to be drafted,
he decided to join the army.
They made him a first sergeant and sent him overseas.
He could speak Japanese and Chinese fairly well and
he was with the Philippines
scouts at the beginning of the war.
He was captured by the Japanese at
Corregidor and for years
we didn't know whether he was alive or dead.
In fact, he's the reason
really that I joined the Marines.
[Floyd Cox] While you're talking about him,
did he come home safely?
[Charles Pase] He came home safely. He was finally
released from the prison of war camp in Osaka, Japan.
[Floyd Cox] What was his name?
[Charles Pase] Joseph G. Pase,
and he was the first sergeant in the army at the time.
His health was pretty bad and he only
survived a couple of years
after his return to the States.
I believe he died in 1948, if I remember correctly.
I was attending high school when all this was going on.
Myself, I was born in January 1926.
When I entered my senior year in high school,
or I should say when I should have
entered my senior year in high school,
I decided that things were not
going quite long fast enough, so I left home
with an avowed intention of joining the Marines.
I was a little young for it at the time,
only 16 and I had to wait until my 17th birthday
before I finally convinced my folks
that it'll be alright for me to go into service.
At the time I was working on
a cattle ranch in Southern Montana
and when my 17th birthday came up in January 1943.
I went into Billings,
Montana to join the service there,
but their quarter of 70-year-old had been taken.
They told me that my best chance to
join the service was to catch
a bus down to Denver and sign up there,
which I did and I was sworn
in on the 16th of February, 1943,
and sent by train down to San Antonio and
then cross to San Diego and
I joined a service at
the Marine Recruit Depot in San Diego.
[Floyd Cox] Is that where you underwent (crosstalk)?
[Charles Pase] My boot camp training
was at the Recruit Depot,
San Diego and as soon as we got out of that,
I can't even remember the number of my recruit platoon.
But when we finished with that,
they sent me to Camp Elliott.
Now Camp Elliott later on became
a depot I think or a camp
for fellows that were in regrets, so to speak.
But at the time I was there, it wasn't.
It was a special
weapons training center and that sort of thing.
I went to Camp Elliott for about two months and
was trained in special weapons work and the use
of both 50 and 30
caliber air cool machine guns and aircraft guns,
75 millimeter anti-tank rifles and
several different types of
small weapons and hand weapons and so forth.
In June of 1943,
I'd been in the service for about 4.5 months,
five months and I guess the core was a
little short on replacements
for the Guadalcanal Operation,
so they bundled me and about,
I don't know,1,500 other marines together
in what's called a 22nd Replacement Battalion,
and load us aboard
an old Dutch inter-island tramp steamer
that had been converted to a troop ship.
The name of the ship was M.V.
Bloemfontein and she had been on the Java, Sumatra,
Borneo run before the war,
but when the Japs took over that part of the country,
well, a skipper pulled
out and turned himself over to the American Navy.
They kept the Dutch crew and the
Dutch captain and put an American armed guard aboard.
A Navy group handled a five-inch gun on the fan tail of
this old ship and that was
our (laughing) armament. That was our troop ship.
They welded a bunch of
brackets in the major hold, the two holes.
I think if I recall,
the births were about five deep and
that was where we spent our first months at sea.
[Floyd Cox] You talking about five deep five high?
[Charles Pase] Five high, yeah,
and it was a very bare-bones troop ship.
There were two latrines for
the entire ship and they were big,
long open latrines on the belly of
the ship and we were fed twice a day.
The morning meal was almost invariably
either beans or SOS and the evening meal,
lots of times had real genuine meat
I think I'm not sure what it was. I don't remember.
[Floyd Cox] The SOS is a cream beef on toast?
[Charles Pase] Yeah. We called it skinned Indian on toast.
That's not a good name for it nowadays,
but that's what we called it then.
(laughing) We also had
another name for it too which was a
little less complimentary than that.
But anyway, we did a lot of complaining.
But remember this was right after
the Depression and most of us,
in spite of all the complaining we did,
we had to admit to ourselves,
in the deepest darkest hours of the night,
it was better that we ate before
we joined the service because
the depression was hard on a lot of
us folks and there in the Hill Country of West Virginia,
it was pretty thin picking for a long time.
We went down to New Caledonia,
stopped off at Tongatapu in
the friendly islands for a short stay.
I think we stayed about three nights there
waiting for an escort to take us down to
marginally safe waters down
to New Caledonia that's down in in New Zealand.
I didn't get to see much of telling a taboo.
In those days, I was subject to
severe bouts of tonsillitis,
and during the time we were at Tonga,
I was in my breath down below too sick to
come topside and watch
the Hula dancers and that sort of thing,
which was really a sad thing for me.
I was only 17 years old,
remember at the time and I was
all brand new and all pretty exciting.
After we left Tonga,
we had an escort vessel which
was a little what used to be it looked to
me like a tuna fishing boat
that was probably a sub chaser,
actually, a very small wooden boat.
The only vessel we had as
an escort all the way down
to New Caledonia and then from there to New Zealand.
A humorous thing happened.
I was a machine gunner trained my MOS was 50 caliber,
any aircraft machine guns and they didn't have
very many people qualified like that
out of this replacement group
that I was on and the Navy guard,
of course, was handling the five-inch gun.
They had me and half a dozen
other Marines who are trained in 50 calibers
stand watch on the deck with 50 calibers in
case we had some remote chance of using them.
Early one morning we have been out of
a Tonga about five or six days, something like that.
Big ocean out there, and way off to the Southwest,
we saw a smudge on the horizon
and the captain sounded general quarters.
Our ship made a right about-face
and headed back toward Tonga as fast as we could.
I think our flank speed was about 15 Knots.
This little wooden boat in the back,
was going back and forth trying to find
anything underwater there was a danger to us.
We challenged whatever it was making
that big smoke on the southeastern horizon.
Finally, it came up to where we could catch a blinker.
It was all radio sounds.
Of course, nobody can do anything.
But it came up to where we can see the blinker on it.
I think it was the USS Tennessee.
It was at least a battle wagon
and I think it was Tennessee.
As soon as we found that she was on our side,
but we turned around and headed back to New Caledonia
again and there was some size of relief
breathe too because that
five-inch gun of ours wouldn't have reached
very far had that been something big for a Jap Navy.
Well, we continued on to the Nouméa,
New Caledonia, and debark there for about a week.
We had all visions of all exciting things.
It was a French Island, you remember,
and we practiced some rather obscene French phrases
that we could use boats and got
ashore and never did see anybody on
the island except the other Marines (laughing).
Were in Canvas pyramidal tents for the time it rained.
I think 23 out of every 24 hours while we were there.
The main reason we pulled ashore there and went ashore
was Carlson's Raiders needed some volunteers.
One morning, about the third day we were there,
we all fell out and lined up in
the rain and some captain from
Carlson's Raiders battalion went
down the ranks and picked out 27 volunteers.
Now he knew of course,
that everybody would step forward and
volunteer so rather than wasting his time,
he went down the line and picked
out the 27 fellows that he thought looked at
most either gullible or vicious.
I don t know what (laughing) probably gullible.
(laughing). I was one of them.
But I was pretty young at 17 and the officer in
charge of their replacement battalion called,
of those 27, he had two of us step
back in the ranks and I was one of the two.
He said I was trained in
special weapons and they needed that so that was
the excuse he gave for pulling me back and so long I
didn't have to go to the Carlson's Raider group.
At the time, I didn't
know whether I'd be disappointed or not,
but when I found out what the raiders did,
I felt maybe it wasn't too bad deal for me
to go back in the ranks after all.
From New Caledonia, we
went down to Wellington, New Zealand.
I joined the second Marine Division
at Kent McKay's crossing,
which was just north of Wellington
on the way toward Palmer's and North.
That's where I did my training from July 1943 until
we pulled out for a little-known atoll
in the Gilbert Islands called Tarawa.
Do you have any question? (laughing) I
get pretty windy about this.
[Floyd Cox] Let me ask you. You had
some training before you set out for Tarawa.
What did this entail?
Did you practice landings?
[Charles Pase] I'm glad you asked that because in thinking
back, I'm not quite sure whether we
had Colonel Shell was I believe our lieutenant
colonel in charge of the battalion whether
he had some premonition of what
was going to happen or not.
I don't know. But I was with the Second Battalion,
Tense marines, which was an artillery outfit.
Now, the first second battalion in those days,
in the early part of the war was a pack house or unit.
That means we had little 75
millimeter howitzers that could be
broken down into small enough loads that there
could be manhandled by two or three men.
They didn't have to be pulled by a prime mover.
[Floyd Cox] They're carried by hand.
[Charles Pase] They're carried by hand or towed by mules.
We didn't have any mules in the moraines.
All we had was privates and PLCs,
and they did (inaudible) of the howitzers.
That meant of course, that they could be moved in
small boats onto beaches quietly without the necessity
of having tanks or prime movers to carry them.
That was the sort of weapons that were most
logical to use in places like the Guadalcanal,
the Gilbert Islands, the marshals,
and even on (inaudible).
During our training, I was a machine gunner,
so I didn't have to stand on the gun crews.
We had our own section and our job was
to defend and protect
the guns against the infiltrators or against
any Japanese infantry attacks.
We did a lot of training on
some areas of New Zealand
and I don't know the name of the places,
but one of them was up on a mountain.
There was snow-covered for a good part of
the time I was there in July and August.
We went down to Hawkes Bay for
one of our major training areas
and we trained in rubber boats.
The machine gun I was assigned
to was a 50 caliber air-cooled,
and it had a fairly heavy receiver
and ammunition of course, was pretty heavy too.
Instead of trying to carry it
ashore on your back while we had
to go ashore on something a little bit more substantial.
But instead of going on a Higgins boat or an Amtrak,
we loaded these things and
practice landing from rubber boots.
It so happened that the entire world,
that was a very good thing because they had
difficulty getting the Higgins boats,
and Amtrak ashore but we were able to move in with
rubber boats fairly easily and I didn't
have to wait ashore when we finally
get to Tarawa, I went in on a boat.
Anyway, it was exciting there at Hawkes Bay.
We mounted our machine guns on
these big rafts and fired them from the sea at
targets thrown out in the water and had a lot of fun,
made a lot of noise and everything.
(laughing) We had no idea
how are we going to use this training but it
so happened that at Tarawa we
did find ashore in those same boats,
while most of the infantry and
some of the other guns had to go ashore
with either way to shore or wait
until their turn they
could take them on Higgins boats for sure.
[Floyd Cox] Once you've finished your training and you
were headed, did you know you were going to
Tarawa after you got
on your troop ship or when were you told?
[Charles Pase] At the time we had no
idea where we were going.
I'm sure the officers knew because we
had maps where that showed where we were going to land,
but the names of
the islands and the reefs and blanked out.
We didn't really know.
After we left New Zealand,
after we left Wellington in October,
we left Wellington harbor, I believe,
in late October 1943 and took off in a convoy.
I was aboard a small troop transport called
the USS Funston, Frederick Funston,
named after a small town here in Texas I believe.
We sailed into the new Hebrides islands and made
a mock landing on the new Hebrides
and all got fouled up.
We landed on the wrong beach and some of
the guns were lost,
the machine guns and I think maybe some of
the other equipment was lost in the surf on the way in.
Very typical landing but
it gave us a lot of practice and we could see
the problems we'd have getting
ashore in whatever island we were going to.
We didn't know at the time.
Once we boarded ship again and
pulled out for rendezvous,
then we were told that it was
an atoll in the Gilbert Islands,
formerly under British dominion,
but captured by the Japanese in the early part of
the war and fortified.
But it was not expected to be
any problem because the Navy promised that they
would have all the Japs killed by time we
got there with their heavy gun,
big guns and that thing.
We really weren't all that worried when we
left. The new Hebrides.
I don't remember the names of the battleships.
I think that Texas may have been one.
Pennsylvania, I think is one of the ships with us.
We pulled up to the island of Tarawa about
midnight and hove to and about 4:30 in the morning,
if I remember correctly, sometime around that,
about daybreak, the big ship
started shelling the island at Tarawa.
And it looked to
me like there couldn't be anything left alive after
those shells with nearly ton each and big broadsides,
16-inch guns broadside after broadside.
Navy planes from some carriers were laying out
of sight off to sea from us,
came in and dropped bombs in
the (inaudible) beach and all that thing.
It looked to us like they're pretty safe landing.
We had just gotten there and our job was mainly to take
whatever survivors were left as
prisoners and that (inaudible).
They bombed and shelled until, I don't know.
This was a long time ago and
my hours maybe not very good.
But I think some time to around
nine or 10 o'clock in the morning,
all the infantry got
into the Higgins boats and moved off to
align her departure and tried to get her the beach.
And of course, the story
is well known that they were unable to cross the beach
with most of the boats and the men had to walk from
the outer reef three, four or 500 yards, unprotected,
completely unprotected in the face of
Japanese machine gun fire to the beach.
We lay off shore occasions there was
a Japanese naval gun that tried to reach
us and they dropped several shells close
by our troop ship
and frightened the captain a little bit.
He picked up his anchor and
moved back up by another half-mile out to sea.
Because one thing he didn't want
was 600 Marines trying to swim
around from a ship that just went
down (laughing) in the lagoon.
But we were still close enough
that with our field glasses we can
see what was going on and it was a very sickening thing.
We had watched these lines of Marines climb out of
the Higgins boats as it worked up onto
the reef and then try to walk ashore.
Occasionally we'd see a man disappear.
Maybe two or three then away another man had
disappeared and then just drop into
the water and we couldn't see the blood, of course.
But we knew what's happening?
These men were being picked off by
the machine gun because we can see
that machine gun bullets
hitting the water like raindrops.
We can see it working along
and made us pretty sick because all of a
sudden it became abundantly
clear that the Navy had not been able to stop
all defenders and we're going to go
against the contested beach with
absolutely no cover whatsoever.
It made us think of what the fellows must have
faced at (inaudible),
during the war with what's 25 years before in France.
We knew we had all problems then.
The beach was very small and they did not call us,
assure that first or even the second day
(noise) and the afternoon of
the second day we got to where we were to go to shore,
but we were not going to land on (inaudible).
Helen was the code name for
the main island that the Japs were defending.
Instead we were to land at by Ricky,
I think was the name of the small atoll
facing (inaudible) or Helen.
And we were to set up our guns there,
primarily machine guns, and stop
any attempt to retreat of the Japanese down the chain.
Any that might try to escape
the juggernaut that was working them over on
(inaudible) and a number of
Japs had already escaped before we ever got there.
But once we got there and set up our lines,
we pretty were close to beach to any further, Japs.
A number of them tried it but we stopped all of them.
That was my relatively simple job on Tarawa.
[Floyd Cox] Your initiation. (crosstalk)
[Charles Pase] My initiation. I was
17 years and ten months old at
the time and here's an interesting thing,
and I didn't think about it at
the time but I had been suffering from recurrent
attacks of tonsillitis and remember I mentioned
that island of Toga (inaudible).
I was sick and couldn't even go topside.
I got another attack of tonsillitis
after we left the new Hebrides and I was
sick in my bunk down below when we
pulled in to (inaudible).
But I hid it from my core man,
Packy was the young man by the name core man Packy.
Because I was afraid that if he found out that
I was running a fever of 104, 103,
whatever it was and couldn't eat,
he wouldn't let me go ashore with my group and
I was terribly afraid of
what's going to happen to shore up the Japs.
But I was even more afraid of
staying back from my crew and not doing my job,
not helping the guys over there.
When I want to ashore a Tarawa,
I could just barely stand.
But I went ashore with my group and oddly enough,
after I got ashore, I don't remember
the tonsillitis at all.
I think there was other things
happening that wiped that out completely.
I don't even know whether I kept the fever or not.
But when I got ashore from there on I
was busy doing other things I
don't remember anything about the attack of tonsillitis.
I got over it okay apparently.
My group, the Second Battalion, 10th regimen,
as we had not had to land on the main island of Helen,
we had not suffered the casualties
like the other units did.
When they rounded up
the last of the Japs to finish them off,
they loaded all of those outfits that had been
badly mauled and sent them off to Hawaii.
My outfit was given
the rather unpleasant job
of doing some police work on the island.
(crosstalk) I think we stayed about five days.
There weren't any Jap survivors,
but our job was to bury carcasses.
How these men had
been by the time we got through with it,
four or five days later,
most of the dead on the island had been laying out in
a tropic equatorial sun
for anywhere from three to five days.
[Floyd Cox] That's American and Japs (crosstalk).
[Charles Pase] Americans and Japs.
Now we had Graves Registration people
who are taking care of the Marines.
If we found a Marine,
we flagged him and moved on.
Somebody else took care of that
with all of the paperwork,
had to go with it, collecting dog tags,
any material from the pockets of the man,
and get any personal items.
That was all handled by Graves Registration.
But the rest of us, our job was to locate
the Japanese or the parts of Japanese that we could
find and put them in
big long trenches and they were covered with bulldozers.
A number of (crosstalk) islands.
[Floyd Cox] Let me ask you this, Charles.
How did you feel when you were doing this?
I know you were young.
Was it impersonal?
[Charles Pase] I'll tell you this in a minute.
I had read a lot.
I was an avid reader back in high school,
even though it's a little dinky school
in southern Delaware or in West Virginia.
We had pretty good library facilities
and I read an awful lot.
I'd read all of the stories
about the South Pacific and everything.
The local Gilbert Islanders had been
moved away by the Japs down to the far end of the atoll.
There were none on Helen or by Ricky when I was there.
But our officers apparently saw somebody had gone down
and picked up a bunch of them to
help with the graves detail.
I worked with maybe 20 or 30 Gilbert islanders,
strong, sturdy husky men.
But interestingly enough, and
I don't quite know why this was.
They were all either very young or very old.
Somebody said that the Japanese
had conscripted many of the men of able,
a working man and move them to
other islands to build fortifications, that thing.
But the men that I worked with were very sturdy,
very clean cut, very islanders.
I had a great admiration for them and they
helped with the handling of the Japanese bodies.
It was pretty bad. On that island
of about 300 acres or thereabouts,
there were some 6,000 dead bodies.
That will be what? Twenty per acre?
[Floyd Cox] Roughly, yeah.
[Charles Pase] Roughly 20 dead corpses per
acre on that little island that had been
laying out in the sun for upwards on a week,
and you just had to close it
off from your mind entirely.
[Floyd Cox] Did you wear a gas mask
or anything else for your nose?
[Charles Pase] No. I just used the
cloth saturated with seawater,
and wrapped around my head with just my eyes showing.
Most of us did that.
Some people used gas masks,
but the gas mask did not feel to the smell very
much. It was pretty bad.
All I remember is very, very indistinct.
I cannot remember very much specific details except
this sturdy Gilbert islanders working with my
platoon collecting pieces of humans and move them all.
If we found a leg, we tried to see whether it
was an American leg or a Japanese leg.
If it was American leg,
well, we'll put it on one pile.
If it was a Japanese leg,
we threw it in a trench and cover it up.
For a 17-year-old, it was a very rude awakening
as to what war was really like.
By the time we boarded
ship for that quick run to Hawaii,
nearly all of the glamour of war
against the empire of Japan had pretty well worn off.
We knew it had to be done and we
knew we were the ones that could do it,
but there was no more any fun in it,
and we were not looking forward to anything except
when we raised the last flag and we
can whole sail for home.
We boarded the ship, I think it was the Harrison.
I'm not even sure about the name of
that particular ship that took us
back from there to Hilo, Hawaii and where we set up
Camp Tarawa for training
for the next jump into the Western Pacific.
[Floyd Cox] If I might, Charles,
I'd like to ask you about when you landed on Tarawa,
you said this was about a day and
a half after the initial landing,
the first wave, so to speak.
Can you tell me that experience
about going in on these rubber boats,
how it looked, what you saw,
and were you still under fire?
[Charles Pase] No. The Japanese coastal gun
had already been silenced by that time.
On the afternoon of the second day,
they loaded us into large rafts and moved
the pack howitzers and their machine guns.
I guess we must have been lying maybe
a mile and a half or two miles offshore.
We moved in, and I don't exactly remember how we did it.
We either go through a break in the reef or something.
We got over the reef, anyway.
[Floyd Cox] I might ask you right there,
what was your method of propulsion?
Were you rolling or?
[Charles Pase] No. We had outboard motors.
We had an outboard motor. I don't
think it was very big motor,
so we just coasted through.
They weren't designed for high speed moving, of course.
These were rafted.
You're supposed to use if the ship goes down,
that thing.
(noise) The equipment we
had was fairly heavy for a life raft.
The pack howitzers were
the 75 millimeter little howitzers,
were broken down into units
that could be handled by two or three men at a time,
so they were not very large,
nothing like the big field guns,
the 105s and 155s.
The machine guns that I was with were
air cooled 50s and air cooled 30s,
and they were relatively light
compared with those at least we
broke them down into smaller pieces.
The thing that was most impressive and disheartening,
seconding, I suppose you'd say,
we'd been about a day and a half in
that warm tropical water
from each hour the previous morning,
and there were hundreds of marine bodies.
We couldn't even begin to count them.
We had to work our way through these corpses,
these floating bodies of
marines that had not made it to the beach.
We stared our way through them as carefully as we could.
There'd be an occasional bullet hit the water
somewhere around us where maybe a Jap
would thought he could reach us for his guns.
But we had no casualties
on the way into the beach at all.
My outfit didn't lose
a single man on the way into the beach.
We set up our guns
facing Helena to cut off any retreat down the beach.
I think that after we got there,
I'm pretty sure that no Japs cut through
because we manned a very small line
very heavily for the 24-hour period
until the island was secured.
[Floyd Cox] Did you have any Jap attacks
while you're in that line?
[Charles Pase] Well, I'm not sure
whether you call them attacks or retreats.
Yes, a number of Japs did try to break through.
Armed Japs tried to break through,
and they fired at us, and we fired back,
and that thing, but there was no concerted attack.
The Japs on Tarawa,
they were mainly rooted in their fox holes
and bunkers and they had to be rooted out.
There was no frontal groups moving
down the island like you were at Saipan and Tinian,
for instance, or Okinawa.
The ones that we intercepted were
basically the ones we're trying to move
away from Helena and set up some resistance,
and the other part of the atoll,
and our job was to stop them.
[Floyd Cox] Would they be moving in groups
or would they be like individuals or?
[Charles Pase] Mostly individuals,
although there were several groups of
half a dozen that were trying to get through,
but they were very small groups in any case.
[Floyd Cox] Now, to get back to
you after you were finished on Tarawa and
you went into Hilo and to camp Tarawa that you set up,
what happened after that?
[Charles Pase] Hawaii was a beautiful place.
This was a big island.
Of course, Hilo is on the big island.
There's a very large cattle ranch.
They're called the Parker Ranch,
one of the world's biggest and at
least to the American cattle ranches.
We set up Camp Tarawa,
I believe at a place called Kamuela,
a little interior village.
Kamuela was close to where Camp Tarawa was.
The entire division is up there,
and we were getting replacements.
Mainly from the second and fourth regimens
were so badly hit.
The eighth regiment too were pretty badly chewed up,
but we're waiting for replacements and retraining.
I don't exactly know how to say
much about the training we had there.
We were a bit surprised though we
trained mostly on lava beds,
a very rough terrain,
very hot and dry cactus covered.
Not at all what we expected Hawaii to be.
Now, the part of the island that was raising
pineapples and all that thing
was entirely different part of Hawaii.
We were amazed at the difference between the leeward and
the windward side of the island
as far as vegetation is concerned.
But we got training
in every type of terrain you can imagine,
everything from jungle to cactus covered level slopes.
It was very interesting from that standpoint.
We had limited leave.
There were a few incidents
of marines that when we first landed,
I don't exactly know how to defend them.
I suppose they were not shell-shocked or anything,
but they were angry at life or the world,
or civilians or the Japanese-Americans or
Hawaiian-Japanese people that lived on Hawaii
and several fights occurred in the saloons and
Halo and Honakawa and Kona some of the other places.
Our colonel lined us up one day and said that if there's
any more fighting that
involved American civilians and his marines,
well, we would wish that we were back on Taylor again.
After this lecture that Colonel Shell gave us,
there was no more trouble (laughing) on that standpoint.
We knew what he was talking about anyway.
But in general, the islanders all the week crowded.
There were thousands of us and only a few of them,
and so they were overwhelmed.
But they were pretty good.
Basically, they put up with a lot of
crap and we tried to be reasonable about it.
We made some friends with some of the islanders and it
was an enjoyable place we had to leave it.
In fact, double we had to leave it
because we had a pretty fair idea where we're going.
It was wrong. Where we were
going was not at all where we thought we were going.
[Floyd Cox] Where do you think you were going?
[Charles Pase] We thought we're going to
take truck in the Carolines.
That would look like tar away except
multiplied by about 10.
We weren't very happy about that.
(laughing) But anyway, we trained there until she was,
I can't remember March or April,
no later than that because our landing at
Saipan was later on.
I can't even remember the date we
landed on Saipan just offhand,
that's my senior moment, has lost it for me.
[Floyd Cox] In your next assignment was to go to Saipan?
[Charles Pase] Yeah, our next assignment
was to go to Saipan.
We did a lot of practice landings
with larger boats this time.
We weren't going to use right life rafts.
The next time we're going to leave it
either M tracks or ducts or
LCTs or LSTs because we're
going to go to a much larger island
with much heavier equipment.
It'd be tanks with us this time
and it would have prime movers to move
the 75 pack howitzers and 105s.
We were looking at much larger equipment and
bigger ships this time than we
had in the Gilbert's and in the marshals.
Of course, the marshals had been taken in
the meantime by different marine divisions.
It's going now, operating?
Anyway after we got our replacements
and all training there at Camp Tara on
the island of Hilo of the big island of Hawaii,
we boarded ship and went to
Pearl Harbor to pick up the rest of our supply ships,
our escorts and that thing.
While we were there,
an interesting and rather tragic thing happened.
A bunch of LSTs next to us,
were lined up side-by-side in order to get
assure you had to go from
one LST to the next LST to the next LST,
to the next LST to the PR.
We did this, those who are on the LSTs,
I remember the Marine were on the LSTs,
I was on a troop ship myself at the time.
We didn't get a weekend pass,
believe it or not, in Honolulu.
The only time I was able to get assure of
Honolulu was this one time.
A couple of days before we were due to sail,
a fire broke out on one of the LSTs and it blew up.
A group of LSTs tied together and one of them
loaded with ammunition and equipment,
paraphernalia started burning very
fiercely and we can see it just a short distance away.
The sailors on the LSTs next to it,
did everything they could to break the more in lines and
get their boots underway and get
them away from that ship that was burning.
I think they did.
I think all of them got away
from it except the one that was burning.
But it was a terrible mess.
It was exploding and burning and
I don't know how many sailors and marines were
killed in that one ship.
That landing ship was an LST.
It was a fairly good sized boat
and loaded with all heavy equipment,
tanks and so forth with their fuel.
It was a pretty hot piece
of material that was blowing up.
Now, I think several others caught fire too.
It was not just the one. I think several others
were badly damaged or sunk.
But it didn't delay us a bit.
They closed ranks, they pulled
the holes away or the hulk's way got them away.
We just sailed for Western rendezvous with
that much fewer equipment
and missing those two or three or four LSTs.
We never did hear much about
the details of what had actually happened.
There was a lot of scuttlebutt going around at the time,
but everyone was afraid
they'd have been sabotaged and that thing,
because we were all very nervous at the time.
We had no idea. We didn't
really realize that the Japanese Americans,
residents of Hawaii and California, and Oregon,
and Arizona and Washington,
were just as loyal Americans as we German Americans
or we English Americans.
We were halfway willing to believe that
something bad had happened involving Japanese.
It hadn't, of course, had nothing to do with it.
But it was just an example of the paranoia that
occurred not only among
our military but among the civilians back home as well.
It was a very sad aspect
because the Japanese Americans labored under
a much greater burden
than the rest of us for the duration of the war.
I was very sorry about that.
We all were when we found out what
we had done to those loyal Americans.
It was a very dark spot
on American history as far as I'm concerned.
[Floyd Cox] This is the inside one.