Interviewer: Ellen Bassett
Transcribed by: Steven Woldridge
Proofread by: Ellen Bassett

ELLEN: This interview is taking place on May 25th, 2005 at the Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville, Illinois. My name is Ellen Bassett and I am interviewing Joseph Gray, a veteran of World War II. Mr. Gray was a Navy radioman during the war on the USS Doyen. He served his country from 1942 to 1945. I am extremely pleased to have the opportunity to interview Mr. Gray.

ELLEN: Joe can you tell me were you drafted or did you enlist?

JOE: I enlisted, I just turned twenty in the fall of '42 and they sent me down to a park for a physical and I went home and I told my family I said, "I don't want to be a soldier carrying a gun I want to join the Navy." So I went on and I enlisted in the Navy. I was twenty years old when I went in. So I went in…we were sworn in Chicago in the post office and they told me when I had signed up that I was going to go to Great Lakes. Well when I got to the post office…this is…once (?) "Sit down and be quiet and we'll tell you what to do" you know? So a little while later they came in and they says, "okay follow this guy and we're going to go have something to eat." So we went to a Fred Harvey restaurant in the loop somewhere and from there they marched us over and put us on the train. We're on the train and we're going. Well I knew at the time from Chicago to Great Lakes was half an hour on the train. So after two hours on the train I thought what the heck's going on.

ELLEN: You knew something was up.

JOE: So we evidently crossed the Mississippi River and the guy come in and he says, "Okay guys I'm going to tell you where you're going. You're going to Farragut, Idaho." Well everybody says, "where's Farragut, Idaho?" You know this thing that's going on in the news today about those two kids in Coeur d'Alene?

ELLEN: Mmm hmm.

JOE: Farragut….Coeur d'Alene is the closest town to Farragut, Idaho. At least then it was.

ELLEN: Okay.

JOE: So the train pulled in like 4 o'clock in the morning, the door opened and the snow was up to the platform of the train. "Everybody get off" he says, "we're getting another train coming in here from Los Angeles. "You guys have got to get off and stand on the platform." So at 4 o'clock in the morning we're over sitting on, standing on the platform out in no-man's land. Another train pulled in. Well we came through Chicago and you know it was Thanksgiving we had cold weather coats on but the kids coming from Los Angeles were wearing tee shirts you know. And they were standing out there freezing to death. We finally loaded on some trucks and we went over to the receiving station and we started being processed. Well, they said "because you're the boots you don't get to eat," this was Thanksgiving Day so you don't get to eat dinner until all the older people were to eat, you know. So I went through the line about 1:30… they put a turkey leg on my tray and I swore it was a baseball bat. So at 9 o'clock in the morning they gave you two shots in either arm. So by 1 o'clock, I couldn't lift my arms up. So like a dog I'm leaning over the table eating my turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day, 1942.

ELLEN: In Farragut, Idaho.

JOE: In Farragut, Idaho, right.

ELLEN: But you enlisted here in Chicago?

JOE: I enlisted in Chicago right.

ELLEN: Oh boy.

JOE: Yeah the guy told me when I enlisted, "oh you'll go to Great Lakes for basic training." Oh great…you know. So I ended up in Farragut, Idaho.

ELLEN: Well what were doing at the time when you enlisted, were you working or going to school?

JOE: I was out of school and I worked in Sears in the catalog orders warehouse in Chicago….filling auto parts on the order floor.

ELLEN: Had you done that since you graduated high school?

JOE: Since I graduated high school I had that job. So I know people today who listen to this won't believe it but my check when I come home on Friday was fifteen dollars and something for the week, after taxes.

ELLEN: I bet that went a long way too didn't it?

JOE: Well at that particular time, car fare in Chicago was seven cents. So it was fourteen cents a day to go to work and come home.

ELLEN: That's hard to imagine.

JOE: So it was seventy cents a week that cost me to go to work. And I got fifteen dollars whatever. I remember it was only fifteen dollars a week that I was earning for a forty hour week. But that was in '42.

ELLEN: '42 yeah. Well let's go back to Farragut, Idaho and can you tell me a little bit about basic training…what that was like?

JOE: Well the first thing they did when we got there, they shaved our hair until it was about a quarter of an inch…called it a GI haircut and the chief that was in charge…all those companies were 120 men in a company, so the chief (?) was a football player. I don't remember from what college but he was a football player. And I'll bet he was about 6'6" and four foot of him was legs. So he used to get us all in the grinder and he'd say ok now we're gonna' do halftime. Well when we ran halftime around the drill field, we called it the grinder, when he was doing halftime, we were doing full time, running around you know for exercise and stuff. That was pretty much you know…well, then there was a lake some distance from where the barracks were and they'd march us over there a couple times and they had whaleboats with oars and they would take us and put us, we'd have to put life jackets on, and take us out on this lake and we learned how to row a boat so that if the ship sunk we knew how to row a boat. And I'll tell you that was a, I was there like December and January, you know in the winter months and it was beautiful then but that camp was nestled between mountains on three sides and Coeur d'Alene was at the entrance to that lake that was back in there. That's one thing I've got to do before I die, I'd swore I'm come back and see that lake one day.

ELLEN: One more time.

JOE: Yeah so maybe one day I'll get back and see that. But that was pretty much…

ELLEN: Just training you for life on the ship…getting you ready?

JOE: Well they actually took us into a swimming pool and they instructed us that time that we should never have a pair of jeans with a hole in it because before we could graduate from boot camp we had to dive into a pool, take our pants off tie a knot into each pants leg and then flip it over our head to put air in the pants legs and twist the crotch area of the pants and put that underneath us, and that was a life preserver.

ELLEN: And if there was a hole….

JOE: And if there was a hole in your pants when the ship sank you didn't have a life preserver. And we actually went through that training…I don't think they do that anymore but that was back then and one of the things we had to do.

ELLEN: Right, oh my gosh. Okay so once you finished basic, where did you go from there?

JOE: Well at the time I wanted to do, learn about radio. So they give you a form and they give you three choices of what you would like to do. So I put down radio, electrician and something else. Well I never knew, at that time I didn't know about Morse Code and radio operators and what the radio operators did. But evidently they needed operators, they didn't need technicians, they needed operators. So they come in and they say okay, you're going to radio school. I went to Texas A&M Radio School. So they took the pictures of our company and put us out on the grinder on the stands and we all lined up. I've got a picture at home, 120 guys. And it was in January of '43. Well three days before the graduation ceremony they came in they said, "the following guys pack up, you're leaving for school." So a bunch of us packed our gear up and went over to the receiving station, three days before graduation from boot camp. So I never graduated from boot camp… I mean in ceremony.

ELLEN: Yeah, you never got the ceremony.

JOE: So then I went to Texas A&M to school and spent four months in Texas A&M in radio school. Coming up to graduation day, they came in one day, "okay the following guys follow me, pack up, we're leaving." Twelve of us went on a raft. We went to San Diego, California, a few days before the graduation from radio school. (laugh) I never… the whole time I was in the service, never graduated from whatever it was. I was always shipped out before times, you know (laugh). So it was something. But then went to San Diego, got on the train and I'm thinking it was Houston or Forth Worth or Dallas. I think it was Forth Worth. We got on a train and do you remember seeing the old wild west movies with the old cars with the high mohair back seats and stuff and the oil lamps on the wall? That's the car we got on in Texas to go to California. Well they took off and if you opened the windows the car was full of dust, if you closed the windows, you died from the heat. So we rode in that car to Amarillo and we got to Amarillo and they come in and they says, "well you've got a three hour layover here, you guys can do what you want but you be back here in three hours because the train pulls out at whatever" So four of us said we've got to get cleaned up. So we got in a cab and told the guy, "take us to a hotel someplace where we can get a shower." So we went to some hotel but we had to beg just to go take a shower and clean up. We didn't want to use the room to the hotel, we just wanted to take a shower. Well you've got to stay the night. Okay we'll each give you a quarter or whatever it was at the time you know just so we could take a shower. So the guy he finally he gave us the towels, and we went and took a shower, went back to the depot and got on a train, a modern streamliner. They were brand new trains, air conditioning and the whole thing. So from the rest of the way from Amarillo to California, we were on a streamliner.

ELLEN: Paid off getting that shower then.

JOE: Yeah. Well no that was what we went on you know. But then…that was in June, it was pretty hot in Texas and down in the south. The train pulled into Amarillo no…Albuquerque. And the train pulls to a stop and they says "okay we're going to go to Fred Harvey's restaurant. At that time Fred Harvey had, every train depot had a restaurant that was Fred Harvey's. It was something like country buffet today and they were all over. So they open the door and the guys start piling off of the train, well this was the air conditioned train that we were on this time. Well these guys started walking across the depot platform towards the restaurant and two or three of them fell on their face because it was air conditioned on the train and it was 100 plus degrees outside; so several of the guys fell on their face. Well that also happened when we were in radio school in Texas A&M. They had an awards ceremony for some officer. He...we stood out there…he was late getting there so we're all standing at attention out on the football field waiting for this officer to get his decoration or what. And there were four or five ambulances in the back. (?) Some guy would go phfft you know and they'd haul him off in the ambulance and take him wherever to revive him or whatever. A couple of times in the service when it was really hot, it wasn't the best.

ELLEN: How long were you in radio school? Was that just a couple of months or…

JOE: Well I was four months in Texas A&M and then in June of '43, I got to San Diego and for a day or two we went to signal school. We learned to use the flags, how to signal with the flags. We had to learn that as part of our schooling so we were schooled in flags for a couple days in San Diego and then we went to Camp Pendleton, north of Oceanside, California on the southern end of Camp Pendleton they had, a little building off in one corner. And for the summer of '43, we were in more radio school and then we went out onto the range and practiced with the rifle…on the rifle range to shoot the you know. We also, in Texas A&M, the Marines and the Navy were pretty much the same at that time so the Marines…some of the Marines were at radio school and we were at radio school. So when we went out to exercise in the morning, at 5 o'clock, there was usually a marine drill sergeant. So I went through the process of you know exercising with the Marines and they taught us you know self defense and if you got in trouble how to kill somebody.

ELLEN: Something you need to know I guess.

JOE: Yeah, I trained quite a bit with the Marines at that time. Then I was in Camp Pendleton for the summer of that year and then at the end of September, we got a ten day leave before we went overseas. And so I went down to the depot, this is funny, a bunch of us went down to Los Angeles to the depot and we get in there and we say we want the first train to Chicago. So the guy goes, "go down to Union Pacific that's down there" he says "the next train that goes out at 6:35." So we go down got our tickets to go to Chicago...6:35…well it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon. So one of the guys says "there's a bar across the street let's go and have a drink and spend some time over there." So we went over to the bar and did what guys do and stuff and somewhere along the line one of us said, "I'm hungry, there's a Chinese restaurant down there, let's go get something to eat." So we went down to this Chinese restaurant and we sat in this booth and we ordered some food and I happened to look up at the clock on the wall and it said five minutes to seven. The train left at 6:35, it was five minutes to seven. So I said to the guys, "well we ordered the food, the train's gone," I says "we might as well eat and we'll go back over to the depot and we'll find out what's going on." Well we went back to the depot and we went to the counter where we bought the tickets and told him what happened he said "oh that happens all the time, go down there to another railroad" he says, "they've got a train going out at 11 o'clock tonight, take your ticket down there and tell them what you told me." And so we went down and they traded tickets so we could get on the 11 o'clock train. We made sure we got on that one. Well it turned out for the best because we got to Chicago…in those days they had what they called milk train and the express train. Well evidently the train that we missed stopped at every cow path along the way, you know, so we got to Chicago on the train that we took, we got to Chicago, twelve hours before the one we missed.

ELLEN: Oh no kidding.

JOE: Yeah! And then one guy, there was four of us, the one guy come from Michigan and the fact that he got to Chicago…he got on a train from Chicago to Michigan, he got to Michigan 18 hours sooner that he would have if…than the one he missed. So it turned out good.

ELLEN: Yeah it's funny how that works sometimes.

JOE: Yeah well the trip to come home on train was like three days and the trip to go back was three days. So on the ten day leave I had four days home.

ELLEN: Four days home. Okay so your big ten day leave and after that you got…

JOE: Well then I went back to Fort Ord when the orders were to go back I went to Fort Ord, California which is south of 'Frisco somewhere. So I don't know how long I was there but one day they come, "okay we're shipping out." So they took us by train we went up to Oakland, California and pulled in on a pier and we went aboard the Blomfontein. This was a Dutch luxury liner before the war and I guess because the Germans were sinking so many ships in the Atlantic that the Dutch people lent us this ship to use to ferry passengers or troops or whatever so I went over on the Bloemfontein. So we went aboard and the officer said, "just take your gear down and find a bunk so and so and that will be your bunk for as long as you're on the ship." So we went back up on deck and a little while later a bunch of Marines come aboard, about thirty of them….come from boot camp. We are the greatest, we are Supermen, we're gonna' show them Japs this and that and the other thing you know. So I just sat there laughing. About 20 minutes later about half the Marines were over the rail seasick. (laugh) So then the ship took us over, we stopped in Hawaii for I think water… whatever you know… supplies…because we had a lot of men on the ship. So we stopped in Hawaii for whatever. Then when I got over to the islands I was in Talahi… that was an island about twenty miles from Guadalcanal. They had a temporary tent camp there to shuffle people around you know. It was like a base on the island…you slept in tents until you got further orders and so I was there about three or four weeks. Then when I was there some PT boat over at Henderson Field by Guadalcanal said to our camp that they needed a radio operator and a cook and I forget what else. And they needed a radio operator and a radio technician and there's three of us went from this tent camp over to Guadalcanal for duty on a PT boat. Well when we got over there this captain in this PT…oh he flipped out, he says, "I asked for a technician not two operators." So we spent a couple days on that PT boat and we used a can of Spam to fish with because we hated Spam. So we took the Spam, put it on hooks, caught a whole lot of fish. We caught so many fish we put them on stringer and so the Army was hauling, …these Army Ducks were hauling…to unload the ships to take ashore you know for supplies or whatever. So we get a stringer of these fish and one of these Ducks go by, "hey you want some fish?" So the Duck would pull along close alongside and we'd take the stringer and we'd throw the stringer of fish into their boat in the Duck. The next day they come by, "you caught any more fish yet?" But we would catch… omebody on the crew knew what was a good fish to eat and what wasn't. We'd catch a good size fish and we would cook that up and eat it instead of the Spam. So I was only like three days on that PT boat so then this guy got orders, well it wasn't actually a PT boat, it was a PT boat that was stripped of its torpedo tubes and it was a ship for running messages between the islands. You know if they didn't want to put it on radio or something, a secret message. So this officer would take messages to different places on the island. So he says to us, "well you two radio operators you flip your coin and decide who is going to go with me and who is going to go back to the base over there." So I lost, I got to go back to the base, the other guy went with the PT boat wherever they went. So the few weeks I was at Talahi I had temporary duty at a seaplane base which was down a little ways out down from us. They had cut a rope between our camp and the seaplane base and you could march through the jungle from either camp you know. So the seaplane base had good movies at night. We didn't have any movies we just had tents you know. So we would go over at dark to the seaplane base and watch the movie and a whole bunch of us would shrink(?) back to where we were staying. We were walking down these…between two ruts going through the jungle and some guy says, "there's a snake in the rut here." And so we had flashlights and we flashed on it and we said, "that's a coral snake!" So I walked this close to a coral snake with my flashlight. A whole bunch of us went back to camp then… the snake never bothered one of us.

ELLEN: That's good. How long were you at that base on the island?

JOE: I was at that base, I remember I was home in October for leave then we go overseas. Then I remember having Thanksgiving dinner. The first Thanksgiving I had in boot camp, the next Thanksgiving I had at that base in Talahi, which is in the Solomon Islands. And then somewhere after Thanksgiving, I went aboard a cargo ship…it was a AK-9. And that's where I was assigned as a radio operator, on a cargo ship. Well that was just a big tub you know. So I went aboard this ship I said, "where's the toilet in this thing?" Well in the Navy it's the head. So the guy says, "back on the back go over there in the fantail." So I went back there, and here's a big…looked like a galvanized tub with one of those stainless steel, I think, like a farmer has to water the animals in the barnyard and the field? This was a big long trough on one side. And they had the water coming in one end and the drain on the other end and it had four or five sets of slats across this big tank. Well that was the toilet. So when you sat down you learned in a hurry to sit in the middle because when the ship was pitching, you know, up and down the water would go from one end and then it would to the other end you know. (laugh) So you learned to sit right in the middle and then you didn't get splashed maybe.

ELLEN: Yeah I can't imagine that would be much fun.

JOE: But I was only on that ship…I don't really remember because…that's like a fog to me. But I don't remember if that's the ship I went to Saipan on or the other one but I was only on it a short time and it went to, pulled into, Hawaii one morning, in Honolulu. And the PA system come on and says, "okay guys we're going home, get your dress blues out." Well this was when we first pulled in there and about two hours later the PA system come on, "now hear this the following men get your gear together, you are being transferred to ships that need rated men. Thirty-six men were transferred from the Alhila(?)… six of us went to the Doyen.

ELLEN: And you were one of them.

JOE: And I was one of them. That ship came back home. I was transferred to the Doyen because I was rated. They needed a new radio operator. So there was six of us… well somebody had told me before I went into the service if you go into the Navy make a friend of a cook or a baker. So one of the guys was transferred at that time with me to the Doyen was a baker named Robby. Well him and I became real good friends. I ate like a king. We would go to movies at night you know and then when the movie was over Robby would say lets go down and write letters home. So we'd go down and they'd have a couple of stools in the bake shop. We'd sit at the bread table in the common room and we'd write letters home. And Robby would say to me are you hungry and I said yeah. So he'd take his keys and goes down to the stores and gets a nice slab of ham some eggs, they had powdered eggs at that time, so he'd mix up some powdered eggs and put a little butter in one of those trays and put it in the oven and we would sit there and we had fresh bread all the time and we would sit there and have a piece of ham and eggs and write letters home. And another thing he used to do was a couple of time we pulled into Hawaii and Robby would come back with a bag of bananas. So, he'd bake a couple of banana cream pies. So when we'd get back out to sea he'd make a banana cream pie. After the movies….let's go down and write letters home. …go down to the bake shop and he'd… and have a piece of banana cream pie. There wzs a lot of good things.

ELLEN: Well earlier you were telling me about the ship, who designed the ship…and could you tell me a little bit about that again?

JOE: Oh yeah. Well after World War I, Teddy Roosevelt had the idea. These landing crafts that were in World War II was originally part of Teddy Roosevelt's idea. So when this ship was designed…there was two ships like the one I was on.

ELLEN: And this is the USS Doyen.

JOE: The USS Doyen, that was the eighteen(?) one and the other one was eleven but I don't remember the name of it. But it had a square stern, had two motors, twin screws. It was a square stern, from a distance it looked something like a cruiser up in the back. And his idea was to back that ship in close to a beach, lower a ramp in the back of the ship and have boats cradled in the back part of the ship and they would take off from the ship and go in and hit the shore. Well they built two ships like mine and when they took it out to test it they found out it was top heavy. They were afraid that the design wasn't the best in the world. So then they closed that back area in and made cargo hold and sleeping quarters. They designated it as a hospital ship. Now this ship was built, I don't know when it was started but it was commissioned in May of 1943. It was a brand new ship. It was something that was started earlier and a lot of people at that time didn't realize that the Germans was sinking ships in the Atlantic Ocean and we were losing a lot of ships. So they sent a lot of the ship building to California. So the ship was built in San Pedro, California. It was actually commissioned in May of '43, that's while I was still in school. And the first trip it went on was up to Alaska. The Japs had set up housekeeping on one of the islands up on Kiska, up on the Aleutian Islands. So this first trip that this ship went on was up to Kiska at the Aleutian Islands to chase the Japs off of whatever. And they… I understand they evacuated before we even had to fight and chase them back…wherever they came from you know. That's the first trip that this ship went on and then I went on it in, I don't know, around the beginning of 1944 or the end of 1943, I don't remember but I was on it for fourteen months. I came back home in June of '45 and we were married in July, the first of July of '45. The ship came back to the states in June of '45 and I was on it for fourteen months at that time.

ELLEN: Oh wow. Well you mentioned it was a new ship. What were the living conditions like? I know you said you had to eat Spam.

JOE: Oh no that was on the PT boat.

ELLEN: Oh that's right that was on the PT boat, but what was it like, the conditions on the USS Doyen.

JOE: Well, I'll tell you, the ship was a little over 400 foot long and the crew was 400. The radio room had like twenty men and our watches on the radio room were from chow to chow, from chow to midnight, and then from midnight to chow. So we had split times that we were on duty and we had three watches, every time you were on. Like if we were on from midnight to breakfast, the next day we would be on from dinner to midnight. We upped, we had four watches during the day but we upped it one. So it rotated our duty so we wouldn't get bored going, sitting at the same time everyday. We kind of rotated that. And then the fact that they assigned it as a hospital ship when they decided not to use it as a landing ship, when they designated it as a hospital ship, there were five doctors assigned to our ship. So we were a troop transport going in and a hospital ship coming out. And so every operation, as soon as the men started going to shore and getting injured the boats that would take whatever ashore would bring the injured back to the ship, we would lift them up and the doctors would take care of them on the ship. I remember at Guam, I was standing on the deck one day and I said, "what's that caterpillar tractor doing going up and down the beach?" He says, "don't you know what they're doing? They're digging a big trench." This was right at the beginning of the operation, they were digging a big trench and all the dead they were putting in this trench and covered them up. That's what this tractor was doing. During the heat of what was going on they used to bury the guys along the shoreline on the beach and then after it was secure and everything they would go back and dig them up and do the proper thing or whatever, you know. But in the heat of battle they would bury all the dead along the beach. And then there was only one operation, and I don't remember which one it was, where we were designated hospital ship. And they took Japanese prisoners aboard our ship for a short period of time. And one was an officer and one was a guerrilla. And the guy that was probably not educated as well, the guerilla… he would talk like a magpie. And they had somebody interrogate the officer, "my name is, my number is." That's it. The officer, "my name, my number"… that's it, that's all you're getting. We got no information from him at all. But the guerrilla…he talked constantly.

ELLEN: Was seasickness a problem? Probably for some but…

JOE: Well like I told you earlier we had 400 men on that ship.

ELLEN: That was on the Doyen?

JOE: The Doyen, that was my most memory of this because I was fourteen months on there. Of the 400 men we had three men that when the water got real rough, like a hurricane or real turbulent weather, the ship would roll and pitch. And three guys, one was the radar operator named Rufolo…(?) the other two I don't know who they were. But there were three guys that were excused from duty when the sea got rough, because they got sick. And that was it.

ELLEN: That's not bad.

JOE: The only time I got seasick was when we were in California practicing with these landing craft boats, you know, going into shore and stuff. We took shore lunch with us one day on these boats. We ate some sandwiches. Evidently the meat on the sandwiches, there was about two dozen of us, we got sick from that you know. We were upchucking all over the boat.

ELLEN: Oh no, that couldn't have been much fun. Do you remember some of the places you went while you were out at sea? I know you mentioned Iwo Jima and…

JOE: I'll go backwards. Iwo Jima was the last place that we were at and before that we hit Luzon in the Philippines, Lingayen Gulf then Luzon and before that was Layte… that was in the Philippines. We had two invasions in the Philippines. And then before that was Guam and before that was Saipan. I don't know if you remember when they put the atomic bomb off and they talk about letting it go…Anawetak in the Pacific? Do you remember that name? Anawetak? Anyway when we pulled up there it looked like just a great big ring of small islands. It was like the top of a mountain below the water and on the inside of that was like a big harbor and there was one place that the ships could pull in there. And we would pull in to Anawetak to transfer supplies and we would go in there and transfer supplies and take off and go somewhere else. Then the Army Corps of Engineers, somewhere in New Guinea, and they cleared out a big section and made a ball field. So we would go…the guys that weren't on duty when they would be transferring supplies when we were anchored off this island where it was at there, a bunch of us would get in a boat and we'd go…one ship would challenge another to a ballgame at this recreation ball field over on the island. And so there was a Chaplain in one of the ships that was always the umpire. Well in those days, beer came in bottles, it wasn't cans, it was bottles. So this Chaplain would get, and they would carry beer on the ship for recreation but you had to take it onto and island to drink. You couldn't drink it on the ship but you could take it to the island. They took a bunch of GI cans and they'd put a bunch of beer in them and ice and they'd haul them over onto the shore. We'd have a ballgame and have a beer and then after it was over we'd go back to the ship. Well this Chaplain, he used to take a bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other hand and he would ump the ballgame. It was either a ball or a strike. He would drink from both bottles for a ball and a strike. (laugh) He didn't call any of the game he just drank it.

ELLEN: You knew by which hand it was.

JOE: By which hand it was. Every time we had a ballgame, we did this a couple of times, and every time we went to that place for a ballgame that chaplain was hauled bodily back aboard the ship. (laugh) Oh we used to laugh about that.

ELLEN: Well that actually answers my next question, what you did for entertainment, and you mentioned earlier about crossing the equator, that was kind of a big ceremony?

JOE: Yeah that's a ceremony, it's an old Navy tradition. And when you cross the equator, whoever was the shellback, had been across the equator before, got to initiate the pollywogs, the ones that hadn't been across the equator before. Well during my time on that ship I crossed it like six times and so they had a big courtroom and so it was a thing where if you didn't like somebody on the ship, rank meant nothing on the day that you were looking for King Neptune out in the ocean. You were looking for King Neptune so you could get permission to cross the equator.

ELLEN: Oh, okay.

JOE: So at that time they had coke bottles, green bottles, coke bottles, big heavy bottles. So one guy didn't like one particular officer. They took him up on the bow of the ship, they give him these two coke bottles and he says, "now hold these up like binoculars," he says "and look for King Neptune." Well the officer took these two coke bottles and every time he'd let them down, the guy would crack him, "I told you…!" you know. And the commissary steward at that time, he was going to save the Navy money, the food, he just came aboard, not too long before this initiation. And the food he was putting out at the time was not to be desired you know? So we crossed the equator and they put him in the sick bay for a couple of days. After that, crossing the equator, that initiation, the food changed overnight. We used to go down and we'd say to the cook, "What's for today?" And he'd say, "Mutton or 'nuttin." Well we used to get lamb from Australia and I'll tell you, it wasn't lamb it was mutton. You know?

ELLEN: Is mutton the tougher…

JOE: It's the old stuff you know. So he used to say, "Mutton or 'nuttin." And actually the food was not that…it was good but it wasn't gourmet or anything like that.

ELLEN: But edible.

JOE: Oh yeah edible. And then this baker, not Robby, the other guy, the older guy that was in the bake shop at the time. He was an alcoholic. And one time the commissary steward is going through the storeroom and they had got 17 gallons of vanilla in stores. So he was going through the stores and the reason he went through was because this baker, one day they couldn't wake him up. They took him to sick bay and they pumped his stomach and the doctor says it's was a good thing they took him and checked him out because they found out after the fact that a bunch of these gallons of vanilla had disappeared. So this guy was really sick. So they put a lock on the vanilla after that. But this baker, he took, when they made cobblers they would make big square trays of cobbler instead of pie, like coffee cake. And the cans of apricots and peaches that they used for coffee cake sometimes you know you get a can of something that is a lot of juice in it, and other times it's a lot of whatever. Well he got apricots one time that was full of juice. So he was going to make some apricot brandy, so he took two of these five gallon jugs and had apricot in them, and he put them in a cabinet, in the bakeshop, back behind some pots and pans. One day Robby and I were coming back down the gangway to go to the bakeshop to write letters. Oh my God, the odor was horrible. Robby took his key and he opened the bake shop door and there's apricot juice as the ship was rolling...rolling across the deck…apricot juice was going from one side to the other. The two gallons of apricot juice that this guy had stored in this cabinet either blew up or broke or something. And so we had two gallons of apricot juice across the floor.

(End of Side A)

ELLEN: Okay, I've got a couple questions for you about what you did as a radio man. It sounds like there were four other radio operators on the ship?

JOE: Oh no we had like twenty and on each watch in the radio room there was like four or sometimes five on watch at one time.

ELLEN: Oh twenty, there would be four or five at one time? Oh, okay.

JOE: And because we were typing out morse code and we're new at it you'd would miss stuff. So they would have two operators at the same time listening to the same transmissions. So what I would miss, if I missed a character, the other guy might pick that one up, you know. So when we copied any transmissions over the radio, there was two of us did the same basic, you know, for the important stuff. So then the transmitter in the radio room on that ship was as big as an ordinary refrigerator today. And it had tubes… this transmitter had tubes in it. They were three times as big as your cell phone today. Honest to God, I mean a lot of tubes in it but they were sometimes six, eight inches high. But we were never allowed to use that, not the big transmitter because that one traveled a distance. And we had, we called it a TBS it was a small, like a walkie talkie that you have today only it's a good size. And when we were on an operation, there would be somebody on the ship talking to somebody over on the shore with these walkie talkies that only went like a mile and the officer on the shore would say we need gauze, we need morphine, we need whatever. And we would transfer, when we were on duty on the ship we would tell the officer in charge the supplies…they need this and this and this and he would make a list and put it in a boat and sent it ashore. We were on that and then there was always, when we were traveling underway, there was always a radio operator on the bridge in the pilothouse, behind the bridge there was a room that was a pilothouse and there was big chart table there with drawers and charts and stuff and they had this little desk in the corner and you would sit in this corner and the guy that was the admiral, whoever was in charge of the convoy, he would send a message and he would say XYZ, so on so on so on whatever. And the XYZ meant…XY you'd turn right, the reverse would be turn left. So I'm at this radio one night and we had a tube that went out onto the bridge or the officer on the deck and I got this radio call…XYZ, or whatever the order was. So I hollered into the tube and the officer on deck says acknowledged. Well the captain on our ship he used to say them damn ninety day wonders. He'd said you take some kid out of college and send him to officer school and in ninety days he was an officer, he was out on, you know, the ship and old Captain McCloud (?) he was a guy in his 40's or 50's at the time, you know. He'd say those damned ninety day wonders. So anyways he used to, there was a bunk on this chartroom, a nice big leather bunk, and he spent, his cabin was down below, but he spent most of his time when we were underway, sleeping on that couch. So then the guy in command would come on the radio, "execute!" So I hollered, "execute, aye aye!" So the ship starts to turn and that ship no more started to turn when that captain's feet hit the deck and he run out on to the bridge, "Wheelman, what's our heading." And the guy says 270 or whatever it was, "come to so and so!" And he hollered, "Radar man, what's our position." " Portside, 550 sir." "You tell me when we get to 600." Or whatever. So the captain kept squealing off orders to the wheelman to change whatever and when he got that ship back into position he turns and he says, "Mr. Baxter", I am using that name because I don't remember actually. He said, "Mr. Baxter, I think you're tired." He said "I want you to go down below to officer so and so and tell him to get to the bridge NOW!" A minute later or whatever this officer come up, "reporting for duty, sir." He says, "you're now OD on the bridge" he says "and Mr. Baxter" he says, "I'll tell you what I want you to do. I think you're tired" he says "I want you to go down to your cabin and rest for three days and you read up what is the duty… officer's duties." He says, "I want you to stay in your cabin for three days. We'll have the steward bring your meals." He says, "if I see your face in the next three days" he says "I'll court martial you." That officer went down below to his cabin and nobody saw him for three days and that was it.

ELLEN: Wow. Well were there any other experiences as a radioman that stick out in your head? That's very interesting.

JOE: Well at that time, the captain used to sit back there on his couch and he'd say "hey Joe, got any joe back there?" We would call coffee "joe" on the ship. "You got any joe back there in the radio shack?" "No." He says, "do you think you could get us a cup and bring it up here?" So I'd get on the telephone and say bring a couple of cups of joe up to the pilothouse. One of the guys would walk up…put two cups of coffee down and the captains says…you know he said "don't you ever tell anybody we're doing this because I'm not supposed to fraternize with the enlisted men."

ELLEN: You weren't supposed to share a cup of coffee with him?

JOE: No but he would say, "Got any joe back there?"

ELLEN: Sorry about that interruption. Besides being a radioman were there any other duties you had on the USS Doyen?

JOE: Well if you're on the ship, at one point in time…on that ship I went to Sydney, Australia. I went to Auckland, New Zealand; I went to Noumea, New Caledonia, which is a smaller island near New Zealand. I traveled to Manus in the Admiralty Islands. Like I said we were in Guadalcanal in the Solomons. We were at Manus in the Admiralty Islands. And Saipan, Guam, the Philippines and Iwo Jima. And of course we went to Honolulu. Some years after we were married, my wife says…somebody in the family made a vacation trip to Hawaii and she says, "we got to go to Hawaii." "I don't want to go to Hawaii, I've been there a dozen times."

ELLEN: Not special for you.

JOE: Well when we had our 50th anniversary… the kids, one of my sons had a timeshare. So he got us a place in Kauai. And so about four or five years ago we flew to Hawaii for a week….we spent a week over there. I got to see Hawaii and anybody who listens to this… if you go to Hawaii and you know anything about World War II, you've got to go see the memorial of the Arizona in Pearl Harbor. I'll tell you, I went aboard that memorial and I got the goose bumps, you know? And I looked at this big wall, eleven hundred and some men were still down there in that ship. And when I looked at this wall of listed names I looked up there and there were three people with the name of Gray on that chart. There were three Grays down there on that Arizona. I don't know but I mean you have to appreciate, you know, what it took.

ELLEN: That they gave their lives for…

JOE: I told my wife at the time, "when we go to Hawaii I'm going to go see that memorial." And another thing that happened, when we actually flew from Kauai back to Honolulu we went into the airport and I said to the guy at the information, I said, "we want to go see the memorial." He says, "do you see that little thing out there on the road, you go stand there and you take bus 132 when it comes and you tell the driver that you want to go see the memorial." So my wife and I we go up and stand on this road and the bus pulls up and we were you know healthy seniors (?). So this bus stopped. The driver got off the stop, there was a dozen…half a dozen or so people to get on the bus. "Stand back," he said to me and my wife, "You get up and you go sit on that seat right behind me." And he helped us get up on the bus and once we got in the seat, he said "okay now the rest of you can come aboard." Now can you imagine going to Chicago around here and have the bus stop like that. So that's what happened.

ELLEN: I know you mentioned that you brought casualties on board so I'm assuming that meant you saw some combat while you were out on the ship?

JOE: Oh, oh Christ. Umm yeah, well I'll tell you what, I don't remember the exact figures but we took short of eleven hundred men to Iwo Jima. We put them in the boat and send them ashore and at night just before dark, they would bring all the casualties that were lined up on the beach back and we'd bring them aboard. Once all the guys that were injured were aboard the ship, we'd pull up the anchor and we would go out to sea, away from the blight of what was going on and the doctors would operate.

ELLEN: Right on board?

JOE: On the ship yeah. So periodically you would hear, "there's a guy down here that needs O type blood, everybody that has O type blood come down right now." So we'd go down to the sick bay and they had a big table there and the guy would be laying on it and the guy would say, "lay down." We'd lay down next to him, they'd take a needle stick it in you, it was already stuck into him or something and you'd donate blood to whoever. I donated blood to I don't know who.

ELLEN: Wow many times probably.

JOE: Oh several times when I was on the ship but then we would go to eat and either go on duty or go back down and change dressings on whoever needed it, you know, and I had a cousin that I knew was a Marine…from looking at the casualty list and I knew that his unit was over on that island so every day I would look at the casualty list. So one day there was a guy from his company, it was I company, well Bill was in H company. So I said, "where's this guy at?" Well he's down in one of the officers cabins, he had a hand amputated. So I went down to talk to this kid and his right hand was gone, his arm was hooked in traction in this officer's bunk. I asked him, "did you know Bill, my cousin in H company?" And he says, "was he a big guy from Illinois" I says, "yeah." He says, "I know who you are talking about but I don't know if he was here or not, I never saw him over here." Well Bill was injured and he died when he was 51 years old because of his injuries. He was really beat up. But I never did get to see him until I got back home and we were civilians again. But I said to this young kid, "you lost your hand, how do you feel about that?" He says, "I'll tell you what." He says, "I don't have to go back over there, I can go home now." That was his answer when I asked him about losing his hand. There were many…I went down one day and there was a guy laying on a stretcher he had shoes on his feet and he had something …gauze over his back or something. And this was up in Luzon and we went in to hit Luzon up in Lingayen Gulf. He said he had been on the minesweeper and they went in and swept mines in Lingayen Gulf for a week before we actually invaded there. And he said that he was on three minesweepers. The first two they sunk. He says and when I saw that plane coming right at me from that side, he says, I was going over that side so his whole backside was burned. His whole back was burned. And he said they would minesweep in the Gulf all day long and nobody would bother them, they'd be there all day sweeping the harbor to get rid of the mines in the water so the ships could come in. He says just as the sun goes down, just before it would sink, in the west, he says them buggers would come in and they could come in…attacked us with the sun behind them, so he says if you're on a gun and you're looking…you're trying to shoot a plane coming at you, you're looking at the sun. I've seen, well, before that when we were traveling…going somewhere. We were going between the islands in the Philippines. I got off of watch one afternoon. I went down to my locker, there were…ships got women on them now…so in those days there was all men on the ship… so we would have troops on... they had a saltwater shower out on deck, on the back. It was like a kid's swing set in the yard, you know, just a couple A frames and a big long pipe. They had holes drilled in the pipe so then they would take one of the fire hoses and they'd hook this big thing up. And they'd hook it onto the end of this pipe and you'd go out on deck with a bar of saltwater soap and take a shower and they'd have this shower running for a couple hours, a couple times a day, you know. They turn the seawater run on and you would take a saltwater shower. So I got off of watch one afternoon. I went down to my locker and stripped down… took a bar of soap in my hand, put my shower shoes on and I had a towel over my shoulder. And I went up the ladder to go out on deck to take a shower. Well just as I got to the top of the ladder they rang general quarters. Well you get out of the way for anybody going to a gun, you know at that time. So here I'm standing out on the deck of the ship, with a towel over my shoulder and a bar of soap in my hand, shower shoes on and I look, we were fairly close to an island and I see three planes coming over the top of the trees right at us. And I said, "oh my God, I'm going to go out of this world the way I came into it." (laugh) Well when the planes went over us, the lead plane had the big red sun on the wings and the other two planes had the stars on them. So I knew it was two of our fighters, chasing the Zero. Well once they went past the convoy, our two gunners went up peeled off and pfft, that Zero burst into flames, went into the drink and our two planes peeled off and never (?).

ELLEN: Boy I'll bet that was scary.

JOE: Yeah, I'm standing on deck with a towel on my shoulder, I'll go from this world the same way I came into it, you know. I don't remember that time but we were traveling and general quarters rang and I look behind the ship and there's a two engine bomber way up there coming down. And I watched that guy come all the way down and there was an aircraft carrier called Kitkum Bay that was traveling with us; and this two engine bomber hit the back elevator of this aircraft carrier, and they were bringing a plane up or down or whatever and the elevator was halfway up at the time. And this bomber hit that elevator and went sliding down the hangar deck of that carrier and put it out of commission.

ELLEN: Man, wow. Well you mentioned earlier that you did assist the doctors.

JOE: Oh yeah, you know that picture I showed you earlier...with Doctor Watson? He was a bone specialist, so he amputated a guy's leg right below the knee. And so back then I mean, anybody who was standing around doing nothing, "hey give me a hand!" Do this or that you know? Well this doctor, he had a hacksaw, they called it a surgeon's hand, it looked like a weird hacksaw, and he's cutting on this bone and dressing it down or whatever. London Bridge is falling down, he says. (laugh) In situations you've got to do something to keep your sanity. So he gets this guy's leg disconnected and everything and this young kid is standing alongside of me there, he's holding this guy's leg and his shoe is still on it. And he says to the doctor, "Doctor, what about this guys shoe?" "Throw it in the trash can, he's not going to use it again" So the kid threw the leg with the shoe in the GI can. When you first went overseas and these marines come aboard, oh they were supermen they were the greatest and everything like that. I just laughed. And you know when I went down aboard that ship to go overseas, I said to me, "I'm coming home, I'm coming back." And the whole time, almost two years I was over there, I mean there was things happening that bothered you you know, but I said, I'm coming back. I only got injured once. I picked up a typewriter and cut my finger. But I never got a Purple Heart. But I really feel fortunate that I am one of the people that had spent almost two years over there and I come back without a scratch, you know?

ELLEN: Well which kind of leads to my next question. I'm sure that you brought a lot of casualties on board that didn't make it. What did you do with those men?

JOE: Well I think I told you earlier, we took short of eleven hundred Marines. I don't remember if they were (?) Marines or (?) soldiers but it was eleven hundred men that we took to Iwo Jima and we were there two weeks, unloading supplies and sending them to the beach on a boat. And every night, just before dark, all the guys that were on the beach, the casualties, they would bring them with the boats back to the ship and we would lift these guys and put them wherever we could place them. The doctors would work on them all night we'd work on them all, you know, all night, and patch them up. When we left Iwo Jima, we went back to…they had set up a field hospital in Tinian, which is one of the islands in the Marianas, near Guam. And we took close to five hundred men to that hospital. Of the eleven hundred men we took to Iwo Jima, we took almost five hundred back to a field hospital after Iwo Jima.

ELLEN: Oh gosh, were there burials at sea?

JOE: Oh yeah. Almost, at Iwo Jima, almost every morning, 8 o'clock we'd have a burial at sea. Either the captain or some officer…there was a specified thing that they said at the burial. And they read this prayer often. They said, "Now we commend you to the sea." And they had a thing they called the Ironing Board. It was hinged onto the rail of the ship and every ship had a sail locker and they had canvas, and this canvas maker would make a shroud and they would put the body in this canvas bag, they would put belts around it with weights on it. And they would put him on this, they called it the Ironing Board, it was hinged onto the rail of the ship (?) and two guys was at the head of this Ironing Board, and then when the chaplain or the officer or whoever read the service, he said, "now we commend you to the sea" these two guys would pick up the Ironing Board and the body would go down into the drink and then these two guys would take the American…you always had the American flag over a burial, and this flag, these two guys would fold it up into the triangle and take it to the post office or whatever and send it home to the family. I said, I tell you when my wife died last year people said, "how can you take that?" I think I was acclamated(?) from watching… I have seen more burials than most people. And most of them have been at sea. Almost every morning at Iwo Jima, we would have one, one morning we had three, one morning we had five. You see these guys go into the drink and…

ELLEN: Yeah I think you're right…it just becomes part of the…

JOE: But like I said, when I got on board the ship in Oakland, California, and went overseas, I said to me, "I'm going to come back." And I went over there and didn't get a scratch.

ELLEN: Except for your typewriter injury.

JOE: Yeah, a typewriter. (laugh)

ELLEN: Which you didn't get any medals for.

JOE: No but I'll tell you what, when I came back…the ship came back to San Pedro, where the shipyard (?) was built in Long Beach, and I walked off of that ship and I put down my foot on the ground and I said nothing, in the rest of my life, is going to bother me, and that's how it's been.

ELLEN: Well were you on board when the war came to an end?

JOE: No, see the war ended, the Japs ended, August 14, 1945. And after Iwo Jima in February I don't remember where we went after, we went a couple of places, delivering casualties or whatever. So the ship come back to California, at the end of June of 1945. And then I got a thirty day leave. Well I came home and on July 7th of 1945, we were married. I got married. Now that was five weeks before August 14th, when the Japs finally said, "we quit," you know? So we, my wife and I were in Long Beach, California, on August 14th, 1945 when the Japs announced that they were finished. Well I happened to be on watch that afternoon and it was four o'clock in the afternoon when it came over the radio that the Japs finally said I quit, you know. Well like I said we went from meal to meal, chow to chow. So I got off watch and I went to eat something and at that particular time, there was a telephone on the ship that you could make a telephone call, local, to anyone you wanted to, but if you made a long distance call, you had to go over to the pay phone on the pier. So being young guys and ingenious the way we were, in order to get off the ship to go home to my wife, at the time, I had to go make a long distance phone call. Well we had set it up with the guy who was on the gangway, when you leave the ship you sign out, you put the time down and you sign out. And we would say to the guy that was, and this was the guy who was on a watch with the officer, "3:30, (name) (?) 3:30." So an hour or so after we left, he would scratch our name off this afternoon list, 3:30 the next morning he was still the guy at 3:30, Joe's coming back aboard, put me back on at 3:30 the next morning. So at 6:30 on August 14th, I went over to make a phone call. And we lived, they had a trailer court, I mean they were little boxes that they put them in for when the ships were in for repair, so when I got back to the place where my trailer was, there was a guy, oh this is funny, there was a guy and he's standing there and he says, "where you been we've been celebrating but all the drinks are gone!" He says, "I think I got something hidden under my bunk, just a minute." Well in those days, card table chairs were wood, so this guy turned around and he started for his trailer and there was a card table chair, and he hit that card table chair with his knees, and he fell forward and his chest hit the back of the chair and he went down the sidewalk like somebody was pushing him like a wheelbarrow. This is the honest truth, he gets up, this glass that he had in his hands, there wasn't a drop on the sidewalk. But the following day his forehead looked like he'd been through a meat grinder.

ELLEN: So they were celebrating back there.

JOE: They were celebrating yeah, I missed out on the initial part of it, yeah. So when he went into the trailer he couldn't find anything to drink so I drank Coke or something or whatever it was. But I'll tell you when I was aboard the ship, on duty at 4 o'clock on August the 14th, and I'll tell you, all those ships in that shipyard, they were bouncing in the water. Horns tooting and everything…it was something else.

ELLEN: So I guess at about that time you were done with your service; or soon after that?

JOE: Well the ship came in for repairs. I was home for the month of July and I got married while I was home and we lived in these little trailers right near the shipyard. So the other half of the ship went home on basically the month of August. So I was back on the ship in August when the Japs surrendered and the other half of the ship was home on leave. Well around the end of August, near Labor Day, the ship was ordered and was ready to go back out again. So we went aboard the ship like, around Labor Day sometime, I don't remember…the first part of September. And we didn't get too far out when one of the engines that they had just overhauled…kaput. And we were supposed to go out there somewhere, I don't know. Well anyway, we were reordered to go up to Oakland, California to find out what was wrong with this particular engine or whatever. So before we got up to Oakland, they came in and they said okay, we're going to start sending men home and they're going to be sent home on a point system. And I think if I remember right, it was like 41 points, and it was so many points for every year you were in, and so many points for this and that and everything. Well by the time my ship got up to Oakland, California I had 41 points, so they say okay, you can go home. Pack your gear up. So they put me on a train and they sent me to Great Lakes. So on September 29th, 1945 I was out. I was home.

ELLEN: Alright. And then when you were out of the service did you go back to work for Sears?

JOE: No, no, no, no. The first thing I did when I come out of the service is some friend of my wife's had an apartment down on Washington Blvd, in Chicago. So we rented that for about a few months and I worked at Donnelly, the printing company. They made telephone books at that time. And I worked there for a few months and then I found out about a job at Sunbeam so for about three years I made toasters and waffle irons and stuff like that. But I worked for Sunbeam for about three years. And then my sister called up one day and she says, "Tommy's looking for this contractor and he needs a carpenter." Well my sister knew that I always wanted to be a carpenter…you know, work with tools and stuff. So I called this guy up, this contractor, and I said, "you need a carpenter?" And he says "yeah, are you a carpenter." And I say, "well I want to be." He says, "well you go down to the Union Office in Chicago and you ask for Frank," whatever the guy's name was. "You tell them I sent you down there and I need you right now." So I went down to the carpenter's Union Hall and I asked for this guy, "oh yeah" he says, "fill out these papers, and I'll be back in a minute." So he comes in and picks up the papers and says, "come with me." So we went into another room somewhere…great big round table and three old guys sat there as gray as I am now. And they said, "sit down!" So I sit down at the table with these three old guys around and this one old guy looked at me and says, "you want to be a carpenter huh?" I said, "yeah." He said "were you in the service?" I said, "yeah." He said, "where were you?" and I told him and he says, "oh, okay." He says, "what's a spreader?" I says, "that's what farmers use to put manure out on the fields with a spreader." "You'll do!" (laugh)

ELLEN: That was good enough.

JOE: "You'll do," he says. I got a carpenter's card and in 1952 I went to work as a carpenter. And that's what I did the rest of my life.

ELLEN: Did you manage to keep in touch with anybody you met in the service.

JOE: I sent Christmas cards for a few years afterwards. There was one guy that I really liked, his name was Leslie Steel and he lived in Challis, Idaho and a few years after I sent a Christmas card, (?) it came back no one at this address. When you're over…at that time… you didn't become friends with anybody because tomorrow they might be going over the side in the drink you know and you'd miss them.

ELLEN: Yeah, I can see that.

JOE: Whoever was there at the time…that was your friend. I never really made friends.

ELLEN: Except for the baker.

JOE: Yeah, with the baker.

ELLEN: There was an ulterior motive there. Well is there anything else you'd like to add, or anything else you want to cover?

JOE: No, I don't think so, no.

ELLEN: I appreciate you coming in, I am just fascinated with what you had to say and I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. We all do.

JOE: I'll tell you what, I have a daughter in law, and a few years ago...I think it was during Desert Storm and I come into their house one day and I say, "Oh, turn the news on." "Don't turn that on dad, that's boring," she says "that's…it's depressing," And she will not listen to any news that's on the radio. She will not listen to any news that's on the radio. She says that's depressing. It's depressing…she don't want to hear that.

ELLEN: Well, I'm going to go ahead and…

END OF INTERVIEW