Chapter 7
Bill in Brisbane
Bill remembered his father’s and Poonrod’s stories about the Great War, the first war. It was the trench warfare; the fighting among the dead, the shit, blood, insects, and mud. It was terrifying. Living on a ship at least had hot food, toilets, and running water. Trench warfare sounded terrible, and the idea of a warm rack with a pillow, hot showers, and food sounded a lot better than life in a trench. He had been sent to San Diego for boot camp with tens of thousands of other American men drafted. He was twenty-one and working on the rail yard with his dad in Valley Junction when the war broke out. Bill shipped out from Fort Des Moines to Naval Training Center San Diego for his bootcamp training. It took four days to cross the country by train, stopping at each town along the way to pick up additional draftees. Life in West Des Moines seemed so long ago already.
Boot camp lasted a mere six weeks. There were one hundred and twelve men in his boot camp company. The military would take men up to forty-five years old, and there were indeed a few guys in their forties in Bill’s company. The training was about military culture, rank, and shipboard life. The recruits spent most of their day marching around a gigantic parade field in formation. It seemed odd since there is nowhere to march on a ship. The training didn’t even involve real guns to march around with. There was also no gun fighting on a ship. The men in the company all slept in bunk beds with stand-up lockers against the walls in between the beds. Each man was assigned to a bunk and received one single pillow, a blanket, and a set of sheets in open bay barracks. The hair on all the recruits’ heads was shaved, and a seabag full of uniforms was issued. The dress blue and dress white uniforms stayed in the seabag. The uniform of the day was dungaree shirts with dungaree bell-bottomed pants. In the swimming pool on base, all had to demonstrate they could swim the length of the pool in their dungarees and then take them off in the water, tie the legs off, and capture air into the pants, creating a floating device. It was crazy, but it worked. There were a few guys who did not know how to swim, and they were given different duties but separated from the rest of the company. The remaining recruits ate, slept, showered, and drilled together. There were thousands of men marching in formation around the giant base carrying flags representing their division or company. It seemed simple even for him, and he was twenty-one. It didn’t matter; only faces remained in his memory. All the other recruits’ names had been forgotten. Boot camp itself was a mindless evolution that included not a single day at sea.
San Diego has always been a Navy town. Since the bombing in Pearl Harbor, its significance as an invaluable West Coast military asset was cemented. Unfortunately, for Bill, the only thing that mattered in the Navy was rank. Unless a recruit had union certification of a trade or college credits, they were all enlisted as deck seamen, engine men, gunners’ mates, or stewards. All had to strike into a job rating once they hit the fleet. Bill was fascinated with airplanes and wanted to fly. The Navy felt otherwise. The closest he would be is working on the flight deck, chalking and chaining the airplanes to the deck. Bill had never been to sea but figured if the ship got hit by a torpedo or ran into a mine, he would already be on top of the water and in a much better position to survive. He originally felt he could work his way up in rank and eventually become a pilot too, if he liked the Navy. He was so naive.
Instead, he remembered the final day of boot camp when the company commander told the recruits they should be prepared for the worst, including death. There was a good chance they would never see each other once training concluded, and the names would be forgotten. It was exactly how it went. Upon completing boot camp, Bill’s orders had him bussed directly over to 32nd Street Naval Station and boarded a transport ship, the USS Vasquez, bound for Hawaii. The ship itself was a cargo ship prior to being acquired by the Navy and painted haze gray. Standing on the pier among dozens of other new seamen, there were a few wives, kids, and girlfriends waving off the crew.
The five-day trip to Hawaii was Bill’s first experience with the ocean. The Pacific went far beyond Point Loma as far as the eye could see. The ship had not yet made it out of San Diego Harbor before Bill started feeling sick to his stomach. Like several other new sailors and Marines not familiar with life at sea, Bill manned the rails, vomiting over the side of the ship as the SS Vasquez greeted the mighty Pacific. A few moments later, the ship cleared the most southern tip of Point Loma and North Island with Bill and the others casualties already. It was a miserable feeling; the nausea, the dizziness, and the inability to make it stop. He was embarrassed. It went on for hours, long after there were no contents left in his stomach to spit out. The misery was shared equally among all the men as they clung to the railing of the ship.
The SS Vasquez was crowded with a couple thousand soldiers and Marines who were just walking around about the ship or standing in line for the most part, the calm before the storm. While the soldiers wore green military uniforms, Bill and the rest of the regular ship’s company wore dungarees. The Navy guys looked like prisoners by comparison. Since he had no training, Bill was initially assigned to the galley to prepare food with other mostly young seamen like himself. He worked in the scullery washing food trays with three other guys and a large dishwashing machine. It was hot, loud, and wet from morning to night. He worked mostly in silence. It was mindless work; sweeping the uneaten food contents from a tray, spraying the tray with a high-pressure nozzle, putting the tray on a dishwasher rack, and running the rack through the machine. In one minute, the seamen on the other side pulled the hot, wet, clean trays into a stack while another guy restocked the clean trays out on the mess decks and handled the garbage. A monkey could have done the job.
It was a strange feeling sailing into war. Bill knew none of the other servicemen on the ship. The men on the Vasquez came in a variety of ages, shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. Guys would play cards, smoke cigarettes, or write letters home on the mess decks after hours. Mail call in Hawaii would be the last correspondence with loved ones for who knew how long. Bill decided to write a letter home to give the family an update on his status. He didn’t know if and when he would see them again. No one talked about the sinking feeling of potential death, but it hung over the crew like a dark rain cloud without a word being said. The simple shipboard routine became boring during the six days it took to reach Hawaii. Men were eager to get off the ship regardless of the destination, which was still not disclosed to them. The SS Vasquez was too small for that many servicemen to do much of anything except eat, shit, shower, smoke, read, and sleep until they reached their destination. The lines were long for meals, showers, and the head. If a guy took too long taking a shit, someone would inevitably yell out, “Hey, pinch it off, buddy,” or “Quit whacking your meat in there, Mac.” Everyone was named Mac, too. It was a nondescript way of addressing a guy personally without bothering to learn anything about him. When he wasn’t working in the scullery, Bill would rotate with other semen in the prep kitchen peeling carrots and potatoes or chopping up fruits and vegetables for service. These were the best days of his naval career; he simply didn’t know anything. He had little to do and lots of time to think. That was then.
Bill stepped off the brow of the SS Vasquez in Pearl Harbor with the other sailors and waited for his name to be called off a roster. The soldiers and Marines were separated into their individual branches and bussed to other destinations. Bill’s name was eventually called out, and he was bussed to the USS Dale (DD-290), a destroyer moored across the harbor at Ford Island. The ship had recently completed a brief refitting but still looked old the first time Bill laid eyes on it. It was a ship built for the first World War but was decommissioned and turned into a banana boat running loads from Central America to New Orleans. It was then recommissioned and repurposed back into a destroyer.
Bill, the ship, and the crew of the USS Dale were woefully unprepared for their first mission. The Navy was pushing recruits through boot camp and advanced training as fast as the draft selection boards could find them in their hometowns. Bill had never been out of Iowa, let alone living onboard a Navy ship in the ocean headed into war. There was an undeniable anxiousness among the crew. Over half the crew had less than one year of time in the service. Almost all held the ranks of seamen recruit, seamen apprentice, or seamen. The petty officers were guys who wore a chevron on their sleeve and were in the Navy before the war broke out for the most part. They worked and stood watch like the others but were first in line in the chain of command and the ones who truly kept the ship moving through the sea. There were only three departments for the approximately three hundred men in the complement of ship’s company: the deck department, engineering department, and the supply department. Everything below deck was the engineering department’s responsibility, and everything above was the deck department’s domain. The supply department greased the skids, as the saying went. They ran all the logistics, ordered, stored, and prepared the food, cleaned the ship daily, cut the hair, ran the ship’s store, and ran the working parties. The second day on the ship, Bill was part of a two-hundred-man working party on the pier at Ford Island that took supplies from a train car and loaded them below decks like army ants passing items from one man to the next from the pier, onto the ship, and into a storage compartment below decks for a few hours.
Bill remembered the time he was in the scullery wearing a paper hat and rubber apron, blasting food particles down the sink with a jet of water from the dangling nozzle. He had nothing to do but daydream, working in silence while thinking about the family and friends back home. It was the Dale’s first mission. When the ship pulled out of Pearl Harbor, the captain told the crew they were steaming directly from Pearl Harbor to Subic Bay in the Philippines. The transferring crew members would then disembark to buses on the pier that would take them to a processing center on Subic Bay Naval Station and further to their next destination. At Subic Bay, they would either wait until their ship pulled in or they would be assigned to another ship that was headed in the direction of their destination ship. Over half those onboard were to be transferred, as the captain stated.
Bill was assigned to stay onboard the USS Dale as a permanent member of the crew. He tried to remember the captain of the USS Dale’s name but could not. However, it was him who told them over the 1MC loudspeakers in the berthing compartment that the Dale was indeed headed for the Philippines to engage the Japanese fleet. He said the inexperienced crew had done an excellent job of training during the two weeks of the ship’s existence as a naval vessel. The chiefs and noncommissioned officers were also strict about training. There were simulated flooding and firefighting drills while the ship remained in general quarters around the clock. The routine was twelve hours of work, four hours of watch, and eight hours to shit, shower, shave, and eat. The galley kept a couple of pans of hot food secured on the serving line day and night. Hot coffee was dispensed on the mess decks and officers’ mess around the clock. The fresh milk ran out in a few days, as did the eggs. He remembered the awful taste of powdered eggs and milk. It was difficult to stomach, and many opted to pass on them. It was about all he remembered from working on the Dale.
The ship never made it to Subic Bay. One morning, Bill was posted on his first and only fantail watch when the Japanese torpedo bombers appeared off the starboard side. The forward watch alerted through the sound-powered phones that they had sighted enemy planes in the air. No sooner than a voice over the 1MC speakers called for all hands to man their battle stations, the first Jap plane went whizzing over the ship. The ship’s gunners’ mates opened fire with the three-inch guns and fifty-caliber machine guns. The plane kept going off into the horizon. Bill ran to the port side of the fantail and saw another Jap plane with the big red circle coming right at them. The ship’s gun fire ensued, but it was too late. Bill saw the torpedo release from the belly of the plane moments before it was struck by gunfire from the Dale, bursting into flames and crashing into the ocean. The torpedo hit the ship’s bullseye on the port side just below the water line. The explosion was so violent that it knocked Bill to his feet. The ship immediately began listing to the port side. Bill stood up, got his balance, and made his way to the aft entryway. The hatch opened, and the door slammed back hard against the bulkhead. The ship heaved in the waves and listed further to port. Bill could see smoke billowing from the fore of the ship. The abandoned ship alarm sounded briefly, then stopped. The communications ceased when the hull buckled.Bill was thrown hard against the railing, knocking the air out of him, but held on instead of falling directly into the ocean. He was lucky he had his life preserver already on, as it partially cushioned the blow. The ship sank beneath the waves in minutes. Bill swam as hard as he could away from the burning ship for fear of being sucked down with it. He turned to look, and the ship was gone.
He bobbed in the flames on the waves and could see other crew members also bobbing in the water. There were floating bodies and guys screaming in the water. Dark black smoke drifted upwards from the ocean surface where the Dale went down. There were no man overboard boats Bill could see that were successfully launched. The surviving sailors thrashed in the water until the eventual survivors circled together, holding on to each other, bobbing in the ocean for what seemed like hours. There were only fifteen guys alive in the water. The others went down with the ship or now drifted in the open ocean with just their life preservers to sustain them. In minutes, there was nothing but sun, silence, and the faint sound of the ocean in all directions. He was sure he was now going to die with the rest of the remaining men from the Dale.
Bill was not sure how long he had been asleep. He was still in the water but now separated from the others. He briefly panicked. How could he have been separated from the others? The sun was setting. His hands were wrinkled and macerated. He was thirsty. Who knows how long he had been in the water? He looked around. There was an island in the distance. It was miles away but the current had pushed him towards it. It would take the entire night to be pushed there by the currents. He was thirsty. He couldn’t remember the last meal he ate but it was on the Dale. It would be dark soon and he would be floating alone in the ocean with no water. The water was warm and his life preserver was still snugly secured. He began to think about sharks. There was no way he could see them. It was July and hot during the day but still warm at night. He hoped he would be spotted by an American patrol ship responding to the ship sinking if an SOS was sent before it went down. He would not be able to see any ships at night as all would be sailing with their lights at dog zebra, no running lights at all. He wondered if this was the end of his life. He never had sex with a girl. He never flew in an airplane. He had tasted whiskey, beer, and wine and none of that seemed like much of an accomplishment. He thought about his funeral back in West Des Moines. Who would be there? He could hear a preacher giving his eulogy, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to honor an American hero. He was called to duty to serve his country in battle and did so bravely. He was either eaten by a shark or never found….” He wondered if they even have funerals for guys that were never found. He would be considered killed at sea from the sinking of the Dale. Sooner than later, curious sharks would find him. If not, surely the equatorial sun would rise high overhead and scorch him into dehydration within another day. He needed the tide to direct him towards the island he saw fading in the light. Alternatively, the current would take him further out to sea, where there was nothing.
He broke down and cried. He tried to remember the map of the Philippines that was posted in the passageway of the Dale for the crew to familiarize themselves with when walking through the passageway. There were hundreds of islands in the Philippines. They all looked alike on a map, some bigger than others. He had no idea where he was.
The following morning, a small wave crashed over his face, startling Bill back into reality. He was still alive. It was sunrise. He turned in the water and saw the island very close. It looked much bigger from this vantage point. It was still too far to swim towards, but the current was indeed pushing him towards the islands. He sighed. He looked in all directions, but there were no ships. He had floated a long way from the previous night’s position. He looked back towards the island when a wave crested, and he swore he heard the sound of a motor over the wave. His heart soared. It was a patrol boat coming from the island in his direction. The boat came closer, and he noticed there was another boat behind the first. It too was a patrol boat and not a ship. The previous crew must have signaled S.O.S. before the ship went down, and these patrol boats were sent to look for survivors. Whoever was coming meant they controlled the nearby island where the boats were launched from.
What Bill did not know is the Japs were fleeing the island, and American and Filipino partisans were counterattacking. Bill could not tell if the boats were friend or foe, only that they were capable of stopping, and they were headed right at him. Unfortunately, for Bill, the patrol boats were Japanese and fleeing from their base on the island. When the patrol boat came close enough to see, he could clearly see the white flag with the big red circle on the fan tail. His heart sank. He had to think quickly. He was exhausted. His only play was to fake being dead. He had a good chance of drifting to the beach with the current. If he could make it to the island, he could possibly hide. Anything was better than drifting in the open sea without water. As the patrol boat got closer, he lowered his head and closed his eye, feigning death. Bill squinted his eyes as the Jap patrol boat approached. The pilot slowed the motor on its approach. A sailor yelled out in Japanese, “Not our life jacket. American.” Bill had no idea what was said, but it was indeed the enemy. The ship accelerated and sped off with the other in the distance until they were out of sight. It was a terrifying moment. Fortunately, for Bill, they were only checking to see if the body spotted through binoculars was Japanese. A dead American floating would not be retrieved from the water. The interlude was encouraging. It gave him hope. He stopped thinking about the end of his life.
He was not less than a mile from the beach. Not long after the Japs fled, he first saw what appeared to be a ship appearing in the distance between the waves. As the sea swelled and he rose again, he looked in the same direction, and indeed it was a ship. It was much bigger than the patrol boats. It was a gray military ship too. It was heading right at him and the island. He wasn’t sure if he should wave his hands or play dead. As the waves bobbed up and down, he caught sight of it again. Indeed, it was a military ship. It was a frigate or destroyer, he assumed. It was not a battleship or aircraft carrier. Each time the waves sank into a trough, the ship disappeared. The waves would swell, and the ship appeared closer, bearing straight at him. The cycle repeated for several minutes until it was close enough for Bill to see men on the ship. They were white. His heart soared. He started waving his hands frantically in the air. He could not read any of the flags hanging from the yardarms, but one of them looked like the British flag. Better yet, there was no big red circle on a white flag anywhere. The ship looked larger and larger as it approached.
“We got a white bloke in the water to starboard reported by deck watch, Sir,” the boatswain’s mate on the bridge of the Royal Australian Navy ship Balmoral called out.
“Big eyes, Boats,” the captain called out to the petty officer of the watch standing just outside the port bridge door in front of the enormous binoculars dubbed, Big Eyes.
“Roger that, sir. We got a white mate in the water wearing a life preserver and floating. He is not a Jap. He has dungaree blue sleeves on. He is waving his hands.”
“He could be a bloke from the American ship that went down yesterday. I saw that in the message traffic. He’s floated a long way from his last position. Let’s get him out of the water before it gets worse around here, mates. Deploy the motor whale boat on the double,” the captain on the bridge commanded. Within seconds, the man overboard alarm sounded, and half a dozen boatswain’s mains gathered around the ship’s davit and prepared the boat to be lowered into the sea. Bill thought he saw a British flag flying on the fan tail of the small boat dangling from the davit by cables and mechanical winches. He felt so relieved. He had never felt so happy in his life. He was going to live. Soon enough, the motor whale boat pulled alongside and threw Bill a life preserver to cling to. He swam the short distance to the floating ring and placed his arm through the ring. Two sailors on the motor whale boat reeled him in. “Out for a swim were ya, mate?”
“Oh my god, you saved my life,” Bill gasped as he lay on his back on the firm deck of the motor whale boat. “Here ya go,” one of the Aussie sailors handed bill a canteen of water and pulled him up to a sitting position. “Drink some water. We got plenty on the ship.”
Bill clenched the open canteen and drank half of it before he withdrew it from his lips to breathe. “There were a couple of Jap patrol boats that came up to me floating. I don’t know how long ago, but it doesn’t seem long ago. It was today. Oh my god, this is fantastic,” Bill said as he took another healthy chug of water off the canteen.
“How did you end up in the water, mate?” the other sailor who had helped reel him asked with the same accent.
“I was on the Dale. It was a destroyer out of Pearl Harbor. We were out maybe a week or two. The captain said we were near the Philippines, I think. Then the Japs hit us with a torpedo plane. It was a terrible scene. The ship sank in maybe ten or fifteen minutes. There was a group of us floating. We got separated.”
“There has been a lot of fighting all right, mate. The Japs are hot all over these islands,” the same sailor asserted.
“Where are you guys from, England?”
The helmsman laughed and shook his head. “It is true, the Yanks. Everyone of you thinks we are from England. No, mate. We are Australian.”
“The kangaroos? Oh, that is right. You are British, or were British.”
“Just like you Yanks. Now look at you getting plucked from the sea by Australia’s finest.”
“I am alive.”
“Yeah, for now. We are getting the hell out of here too, mate.”
“Where are we?”
The helmsman answered, “We are somewhere in the Philippines. The Japs have overrun most of it. But we are back in there kicking their asses now. There’s been a lot of fighting. But you are coming with us, mate.”
“Where are we going?”
“Brisbane.”
“Where is that?”
Two of the sailors looked at Bill and shook their heads. One of them replied, “God, save the queen. Australia, mate.”
Bill laid back down on the deck. He was exhausted. He could hear the powerful engine under the deck boards turning the propeller through the water. It was music to his ears compared to the eerie silence of floating alone in the sea for hours. He thought about the other guys on the Dale. Surely, they were all dead. There were at least a couple hundred guys on the Dale. His mind raced thinking of individuals’ faces and guys that he worked with in the galley. He knew many of the crew deep in the bowels of the ship went down with her. Soon the motor whaleboat came alongside the Balmoral and Bill was taken to the medical department onboard the ship for evaluation. The ship resumed its course and exited the area in the opposite direction of the fleeing Japanese patrol boats.
Bill was briefed on the situation as he was tended to by the crew of the Balmoral. General Douglas MacArthur had been safely evacuated to Australia months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. General Jonathon Wainwright surrendered tens of thousands of Filipino and American troops to the Japanese on the southern tip of the island of Battan in the town of Corregidor. The Americans were in retreat and the entire Philippines fell to the Japanese. The Dutch East Indies and French Indochina still remained in Japanese control. The ship was now returning back to Brisbane to resupply. The coastline of Australia had been bombed and the ship was being recalled for coastal defense. He was given some underclothes, socks, a pair of coveralls, and a pair of boots from their ship’s supply department.
It took almost three weeks to get back to Brisbane. Bill talked to many of the guys on the ship on the mess decks or in the enlisted berthing. Bill determined that the Aussies were much like the Americans with their goofy accents. They thought the same of Bill commenting on the way he spoke. None of them had ever been to America. One guy could even impersonate the voice of Hollywood star John Wayne for a laugh. The ship was designed in a similar manner as American ships with the same nomenclature, ratings, ranks, watches, officers, and enlisted guys. Bill was not a member of the ship’s command, nor in their navy, so he did nothing for the three weeks other than carry on about the ship, talking, eating meals, sleeping in a bunk, and talking to the ship’s crew. Bill remembered none of their names as there were too many to remember, but all were nice to him and usually started off, “Hey, ain’t you the yank we pulled out of the drink, mate?”
Upon arrival in Brisbane, Bill was transferred to a base set up at the Gatton Agricultural College, an area just outside of Brisbane. The grounds and its buildings were taken over by the US Army 153rd Station Hospital and became a triage hospital treating the war wounded. Bill’s military orders and records went down with the Dale. It would take months for the Navy to even respond to a request for duplicate orders and records for seaman apprentice William Meade. The Army wasted no time trying to verify Bill’s story. Army officers interviewing Bill could tell by talking to him that he was indeed an American sailor. He was allowed on the base and given the uniform of an army private to wear until he could be relocated to another Navy command. The Army was also in no hurry to ship Bill anywhere without direct orders. The hospital needed stretcher bearers. The wounded could be stabilized at sea, but transferring patients from ship to shore often required muscle simply to carry stretchers, supplies, and equipment around the base when there were no wheeled carts available. The 153rd was understaffed for the size of their operation. The Philippines and Indochina fell to the Japanese, and the wounded and deceased arriving in Brisbane skyrocketed. The college’s buildings were insufficient in size to house the entire 153rd, so canvas tents were erected on the campus as makeshift barracks, operating rooms, recovery rooms, and an overflow field kitchen.
After a few days of being a stretcher bearer, Bill was grateful he was not some of the guys he was carrying. He had never seen so much pain, agony, and despair. Men were covered in bandages hiding wounds that were life-changing burns, gunshots, shrapnel buried in flesh, missing limbs, and eyes. The men carried off the brow of ships and placed into the awaiting ambulances were lying impotent on the stretcher, completely emasculated by the reality of war and the future the rest of their lives if they were conscious. Some were unconscious and could not speak. The ones that could, Bill would try to comfort them by telling them they would be fine and they would be headed home as a hero. Deep down, he knew most of the casualties would return home, and everyone that knew them previously would feel terrible when they saw what remained of their service member. Bill kept his head down and never asked about his records, orders, or pay. The Army took him at his word and paid him like a private until his actual records could be verified. This was completely fine with Bill as there was hardly anywhere to spend the money. He worked seven days a week but never stood a fire or security watch because he wasn’t in the Army. He had twelve hours a day to himself, which was four more hours than the fellow soldiers got. Bill kept this to himself, but the other privates figured it out when his name was never placed on the watch bill. This became a point of agitation amongst the roughly twenty stretcher bearers and orderlies that were assigned to the 153rd. When the duty sergeant explained to the others, Bill had no military records to even document any impromptu training he would receive. Until then, he was untrained and limited in what his participation would be.
To even out the disparity, Bill was never assigned to the interior of the hospital, where the lighter work of pushing patients in wheelchairs and helping them in and out of bed was needed. Every day, it was he and another rotating soldier humping the dead bodies in the body bags off the pallet lowered from the ship to the pier and then stacked on top of each other in the ambulance. After the deceased were loaded, transported, and unloaded at the hospital, the pair would return to the pier and retrieve the wounded. Some days there was light traffic at the pier, so Bill would be temporarily assigned to the field kitchen tent to cook, serve food, or clean. Other days, he would be involved in large fifty-man, or even one hundred-man, working parties unloading various supplies from the incoming ships bound and then loading them onto others with the Australian stevedores.
Bill’s routine continued on for weeks and months. He felt he was lost in the shuffle. The US Army personnel would rotate in and out of the base. Some would take the arriving ships to their next location, while others would just not be accounted for on the morning rosters. They had been instructed to clean out their lockers and report somewhere for transfer. Even the sergeants that were giving the charge of the stretcher bearers and orderlies would also change out. In a way, it was perfect for Bill as little was expected of him beyond his shift. A couple of weeks would go by, and the other Army temporary-assigned soldiers would be transferred to another unit, not Bill. Bill was fine with being on shore. He didn’t care if he ever went to sea again. He wasn’t sure if he would ever swim in a pool again after the sinking of the Dale.
His mornings usually began in the chow hall with the other orderlies and stretcher bearers. It wasn’t a dining hall, per se; it was more of a large, green, canvas tent with long tables and benches on a dirt floor. The lights were kept on at night, and someone had wired up a speaker so men could hear the British Broadcasting Company give daily briefings about the war. The radio and the BBC kept everyone abreast of the battles. There was a large map set up in the field kitchen, which doubled as an off-duty spot to hang out, smoke cigarettes, and talk about their homes. There was a large map of the South Pacific posted in the field kitchen for the men to monitor progress in the battles. The islands were either pinned with either a red or white thumbtack; red for Japanese and white for Allied-held positions. Bill had never heard of any of the South Pacific islands when the Dale went down.
Over the period of a few months in Brisbane, he had seen the map turn from mostly red to mostly white thumbtacks. There was a post office on base to mail cards home, but no details could be sent on the cards, and all were surely scanned by Army staff at the post office. The postal stamp would have an Australian stamp indicating where it was sent from, but there would be no return address provided. Bill sent a single postcard back to West Des Moines that simply read, “Still Alive!” and postmarked with an Australian stamp.
There was no one from the Navy looking for Bill. Surviving the sinking of the Dale created a window of opportunity to lay low, and Bill took every precaution to keep his head down. From time to time, superiors would ask what a Navy sailor was doing on the base, and his reply of his ship being sunk and placed on temporary duty as a stretcher bearer sufficed. The postcard home, however, would let the family know that he survived the sinking of the Dale, if they even knew that much. There was no way he could explain to his family what had transpired in the few sentences able to fit on the back of postcards.
In the first few weeks, there were stories from guys all over the base talking about the Australian women. The scuttlebutt going around was that the Americans were overpaid, oversexed, and over here. Australian soldiers and sailors made about 70% of what the Americans made in the same ranks doing the same jobs. The Americans also had access to their PX stores on base. These stores were stocked with the American goods coming in on American ships meant for American soldiers and sailors. The Americans were much more hands-on with the Australian women, and the Australian women didn’t mind the extra attention they had not received before. The influx of tens of thousands of American men with erections and extra money to spend started numerous fights with the Aussies. Eventually, there were deaths and dozens of injuries and beatings on both sides, and the Americans were then restricted to the base camp by sundown. What came down from MacArthur’s staff was to save the fighting for the Japs. This meant instead of getting drunk and chasing skirts in Brisbane on a day of liberty granted for rest and relaxation, a movie screen would be rolled out under the tent in the field kitchen and show a movie picture until taps at 10 p.m. There was a war to focus on and not fighting with the locals and fucking their women. Sex-starved men in their twenties and thirties that have just come from days and weeks at sea cannot be controlled by orders from anyone once alcohol and females are involved. The men must be restricted to the ship or post.
There were soldiers talking about getting blow jobs and banging some of the Army nurses in closets and empty barracks, but Bill believed most of it to be embellishments by guys trying to act cool. The American nurses were not as loose as the Australian women because they too were on active duty and could be reprimanded for sexual encounters with active-duty service men. It was exciting work, and Bill felt proud to be able to do his war part. He wasn’t hiding from the war. The orderlies and stretcher bearers literally did all the heavy lifting on the base camp.
Things changed months previously in October of 1944 when MacArthur, as the appointed head of the US Army Forces of the Far East by President Roosevelt, and tens of thousands of American and Filipino troops converged on the island of Leyte. Twenty percent of the members of the 153rd Station Hospital were sent forward to the amphibious operations and jungle warfare that were unfolding in New Guinea and further into Leyte. The sea battles in the Gulf of Leyte were the beginning of the end of the Japanese Imperial fleet for all intents and purposes. The remaining Japs were dug in deep in position across the islands and inflicting heavy casualties upon the American and Filipinos as they preferred to die where they stood than surrender in most situations.
Bill was eventually informed that his duplicate records and new orders had arrived. He was to transfer with the 38th to Luzon and further in towards the recently recaptured Subic Bay Naval Station in the Philippines. A field hospital was quickly being rebuilt as the retreating Japs elected to burn the outlying town of Olongapo. Most of the structures on the base were looted and burned, denying the Americans any immediate utility from the base. Subic Bay was eventually demined by mine sweepers, then men and material started pouring in to Subic Bay. It once again became a key major deep-water port for the US Navy in the Pacific. A temporary camp was set up on the base to house and feed the troops that emerged victorious from the jungle as the Army engineers began rebuilding the base around the clock.
Bill couldn’t remember the name of the cargo ship he rode from Brisbane north around the coast to Darwin. Several of the ship’s temporary passengers changed out ships, and Bill was transferred to the USNS Mercy, already moored in the port of Darwin. The Mercy would return to Subic Bay with a full accompaniment of Navy doctors, surgeons, nurses, and staff to handle thousands of wounded. Bill thought the Mercy was a wonderful ship to sail through Indochina and towards the Philippines. It was the biggest ship he had been on yet and much more steady out at sea. She was decked out with all the medical gear initially required to rebuild the hospital in Subic Bay and assist in getting the base up and running again. The showers were warm, and the food was better than the makeshift field kitchen back in Brisbane.
There were nurses onboard the Mercy, and a few negro nurses too. It was the first time Bill had seen negro women have a job off the farm. They laughed and joked like women do among themselves, but they kept to themselves and away from negro sailors in the galley from the steward’s department. They did the same work the other nurses did. Bill figured there were Black soldiers that would be wounded, and the negro nurses would be required to tend to them, but saw no wounded Black soldiers aboard the ship. Bill was in a berthing with fifty soldiers, sailors, and Marines he did not know. All of them were from various commands and being forwarded on to other ships or bases.
When the ship pulled into Subic Bay, the boilers were left on, and the ship transferred its power lines over to the yardbirds on the pier who plugged them in to a grid that gave the base an additional electrical power source. The Mercy itself was a giant power generator as well as a hospital for the wounded. Fuel could be transferred to the ship simultaneously to keep the boilers running continuously in port if need be. A Navy petty officer informed the men in the berthing they would be assigned to a fifty-man working party working in triage until their assigned ships pulled in. There were many wounded already transported to the base awaiting the Mercy’s arrival, needing immediate attention. The working party would assist in loading all of the passengers incapable of making it onboard themselves. Some would be loaded by crane, and some would need to be carried directly into a field sick bay or surgery unit for immediate attention. The view from the catwalk as the Mercy pulled into Subic Bay looked ominous. The pier had been demolished, and what was left of the buildings on base that could be seen from the deck of the Mercy were little more than burned-out dark patches of rubble.
After the initial wave of patients were loaded onto the Mercy, the fifty-man working party from the berthing was assigned the disgusting job of sorting and burying the dead. For the next week, the men mustered on the pier in the morning after breakfast and were then driven in Army trucks into the jungle a couple of miles. The jungle was an opaque green forest of palm and palmetto trees. Gigantic ferns and thick, dense underbrush made it impossible to see through, let alone traverse it without a machete. Eventually, the truck would stop at a different clearing in the jungle somewhere around the base each morning. The area had been cleared by Allied troops, and their job was to collect all dead and any possibly surviving wounded men. There were no survivors being brought in. There were hundreds of bodies. The stench from the decaying bodies was overwhelming, and there were no gas masks to cover their faces. It was disgusting work, and the fifty exhausted men, covered in the blood, sweat, shit, and mud of the deceased, formed a single-file line at sundown each day to load back into the truck to take them back to the Mercy for a hot shower, hot meal, and bunk to sleep in.