Remembering Our Veterans: Voices from the Pacific Theater

Edited by Jennie Shurtleff

Over the years, the Woodstock History Center’s Oral History Committee has interviewed many veterans. Once again this year, as a way of honoring those who have served on Veterans Day, we are featuring excerpts from the oral histories of World War II veterans.

BENJAMIN LEWIS

Benjamin (Buster) Lewis joined the National Guard, the Windsor unit, in 1941. He knew he was going to be drafted and thought this way he would be with people he knew. He served in the Army, the 43rd Division, 172nd Infantry in the Pacific Theater until October, 1945. He was assigned to a crew that laid out the type of wire that was sometimes used, instead of radio, for communications. Before and after the war, he worked for Woodstock Electric.

Interviewed by Jean Conklin on June 9, 2006.

Benjamin “Buster” Lewis

 In his interview, Mr. Lewis describes a number of harrowing encounters, including being on the ship the President Coolidge near the New Hebrides Islands (in the Coral Sea) when the ship began sinking. The captain of the ship had decided to cross without a pilot. Without warning, there was a loud boom. Mr. Lewis states, “It was two mines that we hit… That big ship actually jumped to the side with the power of those mines… We didn’t have nowhere near enough lifeboats. But … everybody had vests… Well, we weren’t wearing them, but within five minutes we were!... [The depth of the water was] about six-hundred feet… The boat, when it went down, it went down tail first. It went right down, and just the top of it was sticking out… Probably twenty minutes from the time that it hit the mines … it was headed down… There might have been only one [man lost]. But the commendation for the Captain, I can’t remember his name, but he got a commendation for just losing one person… He lost a ship, but…”

Mr. Lewis was later stationed in New Caledonia, where he was trained for jungle warfare. He notes:

 “We were in the jungle for pretty near three years… Oh my God! It’s hot, steamy. It’s just like this side hill, all trees. Some monstrous big trees… we met people that were probably that high; they were little fellows … three feet tall, maybe, Tonganese… But this fellow that I spoke about, this Captain, … he had a group of them. They could smell the Japanese, and they got us out of some tight [places]…. The Japanese would go up in the palm trees, coconut trees, and shoot down on the troops. So they [the Allies] had these bulldozers with the big steel canopy on them. They’d go up to one of those palm trees, bunt it like that, and that tree snapped right off, plunk!” The Japanese soldiers in the trees who were firing upon the Allied soldiers from the trees were thus removed. Mr. Lewis notes that while the fall from the trees didn’t kill the the Japanese soldiers, it probably didn’t “do them any good.”

In addition to hiding in trees, the Japanese soldiers also hid in underground caves. Mr. Lewis states:

“You wouldn’t believe what happened in these dug-ins [caves where the enemy hid]. A fellow by the name of Jackson and myself went caving. It was probably as far as from here to the jail underground … about four or five feet wide. You could walk – stand up in it. He had a pistol from the Warrant Officer. If you pulled it quick it wouldn’t fire. So we went into the caves, just like going down that alleyway there. We’d look in here and look in there and here was silk stockings and money. You couldn’t imagine what was in there. We got about halfway down through it, and there was a place dug out and a cot in a space… He reached over with the pistol, rolled a blanket back, and a Jap sat up. He missed him no farther than from me to you! Bang!… He shot right over him. Then we couldn’t fire the gun because he had pulled it so fast … the gun was worn. But I’ll never forget that! You ought to have seen two people travel from there out to get back up…”

Caves were not the only dangers the Allied soldiers faced. One sad incident that Mr. Lewis recollected involved booby-trapped objects.

“We had two people from New York City. They looked to be about eighteen, nineteen years old. Of course part of my job was to acclimate them, you might say. So we had a meeting, and I told them if you see something you want, a souvenir or something, have one of the boys look at it… This was about 10:30, 11 o’clock. They could not even take a bolt out of a rifle. They didn’t know how to shoot it... Well, something went wrong anyway… [The Japanese] had a habit of making bombs in a little box about so long and about so thick. The boys went out, the two of them, they stuck together. We got them in the morning. 11 o’clock we didn’t have them… They found one of these boxes … and they got their bayonet and started to open it and BOOM! One of the bodies, they couldn’t find him… [The bomb] had blown him out of his shoes up into the air and he went about as far as from here to that rock, and down into the bamboo. They found him there…”

One of the more amusing events, at least in hindsight, occurred when Mr. Lewis was assigned to dig a “grease pit” for one of their camps. Grease pits were the areas where vehicles were greased, lubricated, and maintained. Digging a grease pit on a coral island was tough, but in Mr. Lewis’ case, he only had to do it once because he was never asked again. Here’s why…

“Some things are funny. When we set up camp where you’re going to be there for a couple of weeks maybe, the first thing they do is they set up the officers’ tents and a tent for the kitchen help and so forth. I was given the job of digging a “grease pit” they called it. It’s all coral, hard, and you can’t do much with it, but somehow or other… I acquired a box of TNT. So I took my boys to help get this grease pit. We’d bang, bang, bang and you can’t get anywhere, so I told the boys, “We’ll get it. We’ll dig a small hole, about a couple – three feet deep.”… So I put the TNT down, and we covered it up in good shape, and touched it off. We flattened the tents! The concussion just dumped them all! But we got a grease pit ... about six feet [deep]! I didn’t have to dig another one!”

CLIFFORD PROCTOR

Clifford Proctor served as an officer in the US Navy from early September of 1941 until 1945. He was in the Pacific Theater and saw action in the Aleutians and at Okinawa. He also served in the Navy during the Korean War and later in the Naval Reserves, retiring as a Captain. He was married to Dr. Elizabeth Doton, who grew up in Woodstock.

Interviewed by Ruth Hunter on May 11, 2005.

Clifford Proctor

“ I reported to … duty in my first destroyer, the USS Abner Reed DD526, where I was Assistant Communication Officer and then Communication Officer. We were sent up to the Aleutian chain where, it’s nearly forgotten these days, but the Japanese had captured and garrisoned two of the islands … Attu and Kiska. They had to be gotten out of there. They were flying small warplanes out of there. The west coast cities were all blacked out at night because they were there… We had retaken Attu and were now going ashore in Kiska and put together a small amphibious force, landing force, and to our surprise found that the Japanese had completely evacuated the place just a few days before. The only real casualty we suffered was when in the middle of the night I was, as the top watch stander, patrolling a straight line back and forth between the anchored invasion fleet and the open ocean. When making a 180-degree U-turn to go back along the patrol line, I swung the stern of my destroyer into a moored Japanese mine. It blew the stern off the vessel, immobilized it, … threw quite a few injured bodies into the surrounding sea, and entombed sixty-four of my shipmates who are still down there with their girlfriend’s pictures and letters from home in their footlockers… We’d been hit by an underwater explosion, and … we had two ocean-going tows along… The ship that was left … to us was floating almost normally. In these conditions … the structure is closed up into a tight little honeycomb with watertight compartments… I rode it down to Bremerton and then down to San Francisco where I was ordered to wait for orders to a new destroyer.

While I had that time off, I told Elizabeth to come out and we’d get married… Then Elizabeth had to go back to UVM to take her final exams at the med school, and I stayed on to wait for orders…”

Mr. Proctor’s next military assignment included time in the Aleutians and then eventually in Okinawa, where his ship did “radar picket duty.” He notes that the fleet that he was assigned to landed in Okinawa on April 1, 1945, they did not meet with much resistance when landing, “but lots of resistance inland. The fleet needed screening from kamikazes, and so a ring of so-called radar pickets, destroyers, were put around the island, and the kamikazes started knocking out the destroyers… We were a few times attacked by kamikaze planes, participated with other destroyers in knocking them down, never suffered any material or personnel casualties onboard. Soon after Okinawa fell, the main body of the U.S. Pacific Fleet moved up off the south shore of Japan and were following a routine of two or three days of bomb raids by carrier planes. Then we would withdraw a hundred miles or so south, replenish food, fuel, and ammunition, and go back up and do it some more. There was no longer any Japanese surface or submarine Navy to menace us at sea. There were just these little old aircraft and training aircraft that were kamikazes. We were doing radar picket for that operation. The kamikazes would like to tail the home bound carrier aircraft and try to land on the carrier flight deck. So, again, destroyers were posted as picket duty. The U.S. planes were told to follow their homecoming route after the bombing raids by going past a radar picket destroyer which would identify them as friendly, and which would hopefully identify any trailing kamikazes and shoot them down or at least notify the fleet that they were coming. It was while doing that on the morning of, what was it, the 6th or 7th of August about 8 o’clock in the morning, my starboard lookout said, “Big red flare over there.” Far over the horizon, not then identifiable but two or three days later when we learned about the drop on Hiroshima, it was obvious what it had been. So I’m going to tell my grandchildren I saw, my ship saw the flash… Then the second drop was [three days later], and almost immediately thereafter the Japanese surrender…”

Ruth Hunter, the interviewer, notes that after she turned off the recorder that day and the interview officially ended, Mr. Proctor “ went on to tell another story about when he entered Tokyo Bay with another man after Japan had surrendered, but before United States troops came to occupy the country. The two of them met a high Japanese officer, all the while being afraid that they might be shot at. Cliff had wondered what he could say on this occasion, when he was meeting the people that he had been fighting. He chose to say to the Japanese officer, “I admire the courage of your men,” or something to that effect. Then the two Americans went and stayed in the only building that was left standing in the vicinity. The Japanese officers and soldiers were staying there too, and again the two Americans were quite fearful. But as they were getting ready to go to sleep that night, there was a knock at the door and there was a Japanese person there offering them warm sake as a sign of hospitality. They didn’t know whether they dared to drink it or not, but fortunately they did.”