| Features |
|
| Member Options |
|
|
| Downloads |
|
| |
|
| WWII veteran shares memories, diary of war |
|
Posted: Friday, February 26, 2010 9:06 pm
|
By JOHN BRANNON
Staff Reporter
V.L. Williamson’s service with the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during World War II provided much material for his memoirs.
He has a great book about his unit, the 74th Naval Construction Battalion, and its wartime service.
He has a rich reservoir of memories stored in his head.
He has a diary he kept from July 1944 to July 1945.
“I guess I was the luckiest person in the world during that war. It was an education for me,” he said. “I’ve been swimming in both oceans. I saw the Panama Canal and 30-something states. We didn’t have big passenger planes back then. It was troop trains, pulled by steam engines. Took all week to get across the states. We rode from Rhode Island to San Francisco.”
The son of the late Daisy and Verner Lee Williamson of the Owl Hoot community in Lake County, Williamson was born April 18, 1925. He was not endowed with a first and middle name, only the initials, V.L., after his father. “I had a time with that in the Navy,” he said.
A few years later, the family acquired 97 acres near the Walnut Grove community near Kenton and moved there.
A 1942 graduate of the former Kenton High School, he said he “stuck around Kenton a while” but knew he was going into military service sooner or later, so he volunteered and joined the Navy.
After basic and advanced training, he was sent to the South Pacific, where he served with Navy construction battalions in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands chain, specifically on Tarawa, Betio, Kwajalein and Tinian islands.
A young carpenter’s mate, he earned a humble “Sixty-six (dollars a month) plus 20 percent.” The 20 percent was overseas pay. “I sent $50 a month home,” he said. “Didn’t have nothing to spend it on. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t chew. Wasn’t no women.”
Seabees
Men of the Navy’s construction battalions were combat engineers better known to military history as “Seabees.” Handy to have around, their ranks included carpenters, stonemasons, electricians, a little of it all. It is said they could repair or build runways, barracks, office buildings and practically anything else.
And so it was on Kwajalein Island.
“We arrived on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands in late January 1944 and helped clean it up,” Williamson said. “We assisted in building and repairing an airstrip. We also assisted in building a hospital, as well as camps, roads, piers and other projects.”
Retiree
Now 84 and living in Kenton, Williamson is retired from 33 years with Texas Gas Company. “I started out planting poles on the midnight shift, wound up foreman,” he said.
Like other veterans of armed conflict, he wouldn’t talk about his wartime experiences for a long time. Like others, he’d come back home to settle down, once and for all, and leave all that war business behind.
But when he does talk of it, he seems to have total recall, expressing himself with torrents of words.
The book
Dedicated to the men of the 2nd Marine Division who fell in action on Tarawa, Nov. 20-24, 1943, Williamson’s book is replete with the unit history of the 74th Naval Construction Battalion.
An informal publication with no official title, it is 18 inches long, 11 inches wide and an inch deep.
And it is a military historian’s gold mine. In it are letters of commendation from high-ranking Navy officers thanking the 74th for a job well done. There are company and battalion rosters and many, many photos of such things as dry dock and bomb shelter construction, tent cities, Japanese prisoners, even silly stuff like a sign at the entrance of a tent that reads, “We will sign anything but a re-enlistment paper.”
The diary
If personal memories fail him, which they seldom do — he’s still sharp as the proverbial tack — he can consult a diary he kept from July 1944 to July 1945.
At the end of the day he would take a timeout from the war to pencil entries in the diary. Daily events humorous and horrible and even mundane are recorded on its pages.
About Kwajalein Island he writes: “The Japs wouldn’t leave us alone. I don’t know how many raids we went through, but it was more than enough for me, ... at least 31 raids. Some near, some not so near.”
Here are a few of the many entries in the diary:
• “July 22, 1944. Assigned to the tank farm detail. We are building steel tanks to store fuel in.”
• “July 30, 1944. Tank farm. Mail tonight. Me? Yeah. Four letters.”
• “Aug. 9, 1944. Women here from the states. Real women.”
• “Sept. 13, 1944. Got ate by mosquitoes last night. Two Marines killed about 200 yards from here.”
• “Oct. 21, 1944. Betty Hutton here for a USO show.”
• “Oct. 23, 1944. Missed out entirely on Betty Hutton.”
• “Jan. 10, 1945. Wrecked hell out of a truck this morning. Army dope ran into me out of side road.”
• “Jan. 24, 1945. Worked on new airstrip.”
• “Jan. 31, 1945. Worked on air strip. Trouble with 38th C.B. (construction battalion). They are saying we are goofing off and pulling off and sleeping.”
• “Feb. 9, 1945. Worked on air strip. Played poker last night. ... C.B.’s got 12 Japs today.”
• “March 8, 1945. Eleven killed yesterday in blast. Wounded unknown.”
Tinian
On Tinian Island, he had a hand in making world and military history. The airstrip he mentions in the diary was a new one to accommodate the U.S. Army Air Forces’ B-29 Superfortress.
The Tinian airstrip is the one from whence launched the famous B-29 nicknamed “Enola Gay” and her sister ship, “Bockscar.” On Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the A-bomb, “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima, Japan. On Aug. 9, 1945, the Bockscar dropped the A-bomb, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki, Japan.
Nazi Germany had surrendered in May 1945. In August 1945, with the advent of the Age of Atomic War, Japan surrendered, thus ending World War II.
Perspectives
The Messenger asked Williamson to share his thoughts about the current war in the Middle East. He said that after all this time — since the al Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — he wonders why we are still over there. “What good are we doing?” he mused. “Those people need help. But they can help themselves somehow. If they need help, furnish them with the stuff to fight with. But don’t go over there in battle for them. We can’t fight a 20-year war. We tried that in Vietnam and it didn’t work.”
Staff reporter John Brannon may be contacted by e-mail at jbrannon@ucmessenger.com.
Published in The Messenger 2.26.10
|
|
Printer-friendly format
|
|
|
|
