Chapter 30 - 1944 - 1945 Stanley in the Philippine and Borneo Assaults

Chapter 30 Version 1

1944 -1945

“When they hit the Philippines, I was in the invasion of Leyte and Luzon” wrote Stanley.

On September 19^th, 1944 Stanley was approved for a rate change from Fireman Second Class (F2c) to Electrician’s Mate Third Class (EM3c) signed by Radar Electrician H.R.Berent and approved by the Rocky Mount’s Captain S.R.Patten. On October 1^st Stanley signed the appointment to Petty Officer.

The next day on October 2^nd, Stanley was “Initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the deep by Neptune Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main, and members of the Royal High Court, thereby qualifying under the title “SHELLBACK” while on a secret mission of war.” as the ship crossed the equator. He had previously entered “The Imperial Main Of The Golden Dragon” when he had crossed the 180^th meridian during the assault on Kwajalein.

His service record includes the following page including combat days January 9, 10 and 12 in 1945. 

  

                                                                                                                                                           After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the USS Rocky Mount became locked into General Douglas MacArthur’s goal to liberate all of the Philippines. Admiral Nimitz had a different goal going into 1945. Nimitz wanted to carry the fight toward the Japanese homeland as quickly as possible with a naval blockade and extensive bombing campaign. His first objectives were to be two islands closer to Japan – Iwo Jima and Okinawa - to be used as staging areas for the bombing of the major Japanese islands using the new B-29 four engine bombers. With the Rocky Mount supporting MacArthur, a newer amphibious flagship would be used at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The AGC-12, the USS Estes, was a new amphibious flagship named after Estes Park in the Colorado Rockies.

Following the October 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf and the December 11th sinking of the USS Reid, the Philippine island of Mindoro was invaded on December 13^th in order to provide a base for aircraft to cover for the upcoming Battle of Luzon. The major Japanese defenses for Luzon were near the capital city of Manila. On the western coast of Manila Bay was the Bataan Peninsula that separates Manila Bay from Subic Bay. At the mouth of Manila Bay, was the small island fortress of Corregidor. A few days after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, the Japanese invaded the Philippines pushing the American and Philippino army forces to the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor. MacArthur himself withdrew to Australia in April 1942 and vowed to return to liberate the Philippines. He ordered his troops to surrender to the Japanese as they were low on both food and ammunition.

The United States had a stormy relationship from the start with the Philippines. Admiral George Dewey defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 in the Spanish-American War. The Philippinos wanted to become an independent nation but the US wanted to annex the islands so the Philippine American War was fought over the next three years with the deaths of over 4,200 American and 20,000 Phillipino combat deaths and an estimated 200,000 in civilian collateral deaths. In 1933 the US Congress passed a law over President Hoover’s veto to grant independence to the Philippines after 10 years of Commonwealth status. This plan was put into effect in 1935 with independence to be granted in 1945.

MacArthur returned to recapture Luzon Island and Manila in early 1945 with nearly the same amphibious flagships used at Leyte Gulf. Instead of attacking Manila directly by sea, the Allied forces landed at Lingayen Gulf north of Manila as the Japanese had done in 1941. The Rocky Mount transported Major General Rapp Brush landing on shore on January 9, 1945. The landings were not opposed on the beaches but the Japanese again used the tactic of fortifying the mountains inland and relying on its kamikazes to inflict damage to ships. Meeting the troops landing at Lingayen Gulf was US army Captain Russell Volckmann.

The Philippine resistance movement on Luzon was headed by Volckmann since 1942 when MacArthur left Corregidor. Volckmann had ignored MacArthur’s order to surrender to the Japanese and escaped from the Bataan peninsula with other Philippino troops. He quickly provided intelligence on the Japanese positions to General Krueger who told Volckmann to resupply his Phillipino insurgent troops from ships controlled by Admiral Royal on the Rocky Mount. But before Volckmann could go, General MacArthur wanted to see him. When Volckmann met MacArthur he didn’t know if he was going to get a reprimand for not following orders to surrender in 1942 but MacArthur congratulated him on his initiative and made him a colonel. MacArthur also provided a PT boat to take Volckmann out to see Admiral Royal on the Rocky Mount. Volckmann would rise to the rank of brigadier general and later literally wrote the book on insurgency and guerilla tactics for the US army. He went on to found the US Special Forces which came to be known as the Green Berets.

The Rocky Mount acted as MacArthur’s communication ship for the next five weeks during the Battle of Luzon as army troops fought their way south toward Manila. Before leaving for Leyte on February 20^th, the Rocky Mount visited recently captured Subic Bay and Mindoro Island. Accompanying the Rocky Mount to Leyte were two US destroyers and two Australian men-of-war.

On March 8^th, the Rocky Mount set sail for the next landing at Zamboanga on the southern island of Mindanao with Generals Eichelberger , White and Doe on board. The Rocky Mount stayed for two weeks at Zamboanga before departing for Subic Bay. There Brigadier General Barham of the Australian Army came aboard on April 4^th for transport to Morotai Island. Morotai is the northern most island in what became Indonesia. It was captured in 1944 in preparation for the assaults on the Philippines. While at Morotai word was received that President Roosevelt had died and memorial services for the commander in chief were observed.

On April 23^rd, Australia’s Brigadier General Whitehead came on board for the assault landings on Tarakan Island in Borneo. The shore bombardment at Tarakan hit an ammunition dump and blew up with such force that all the ships in the transport area were severely shaken.

On May 3^rd the Rocky Mount headed back to Morotai Island to prepare for the next assault. Major General Wooten, Royal Australian Army boarded for the Brunei Bay Operation in Borneo. The assault was on June 10^th. The Rocky Mount stayed in the assault area for a week before heading back to Leyte.

The stress of these successive operations took its toll on Admiral Royal. On June 18^th Rear Admiral Forrest B. Royal died in his cabin from a heart attack. A funeral was scheduled for two days later at Tacloban, the capital of Leyte Island. The sailors on the Rocky Mount avoided the main course during meals as they headed into Leyte when they learned that Admiral Royal’s body was being stored in the meat locker. On June 20^th the crew along with Admirals Kincaid, Halsey, Kauffman and other senior officers paid their last respects to Admiral Royal.

On June 23^rd, the Rocky Mount started an extensive overhaul and conversion along side the USS Vulcan at Leyte. Plans were now being drawn up for the invasion of the Japanese main islands. Operation Downfall would consist of two successive assaults with Operation Olympic, the landings on Kyushu, scheduled for November 1, 1945. But Okinawa still needed to be secured and its airfields readied for the bombing and final huge assaults on Japan.

Chapter 29 - 1967 Expo '67 & The Real World of Democracy

Chapter 29 Version 2

1967

“Do you want to go to the world’s fair in Montreal tonight?” asked John’s father at 7 o’clock on a warm summer evening. “Arlene is taking a one day trip and you and a friend could go if you want to. She is leaving at 3:00am. You just need a birth certificate and some money for admission and food.”

John asked his best friend Bobby and the two hitched a ride out of the country on short notice. When Arlene reached the turnpike, she quickly accelerated to between 85 to 90 miles per hour. She noticed that John was looking at the speedometer. “The state police cruise at 80 miles per hour so if you go over 80 miles per hour they never catch up to you. The only time I was ever caught speeding I was going 75 miles per hour” Arlene  explained.

Arlene was the wife or a widow of an air force pilot. She wasn’t sure which category she fell into. Her husband Hap had gone on a mission in Korea and never returned. As MIA, Hap was still alive and so Arlene still received the benefits of an air force wife and could shop at the Westover AFB PX. John had the Kodak Instamatic camera Arlene bought for him a the PX for a good price and John would take a “roll” of film today at Expo ’67. The Instamatic took a film “cartridge” and John had cracked open quite a few of them to develop black and white film with the 4H camera club over the past two years. John mowed Arlene’s lawn for $2.00 (just over minimum wage for an hour’s work) and fed her cats when she and her two daughters were away.

“I have to go sign some papers so I will drop you off at Expo ‘67 and we can meet back here at 5 o’clock for the return trip. Is that OK?” asked Arlene. That was fine with John and Bobby. Arlene had brought up her girl scout troop and John’s sister Susan had driven the family’s 1963 Buick Electra with part of the troop in her car. During the trip, Susan was involved in a multiple car pile up and received damage in the front and the rear. This necessitated a number of trips by Arlene back to Canada and resulted in two trips to Expo ‘67 for John.

At Expo ’67 the dominating pavilions were the US and USSR buildings as this was the height of the cold war. The Russian’s building had a sweeping roofline on a rectangular footprint while the US pavilion had a number of pop culture items on display in a large Buckminster Fuller inspired geodesic golf ball. The roofless structure leaked in many places when a thunderstorm moved through but it was dazzling in the sunlight. John bought some foreign stamps from Canada for his collection to go along with some Vatican stamps purchased at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The Canadian pavilion also had a nice selection of books by Canadian authors and John bought one as a souvenir of the trip. “The Real World of Democracy” was written by University of Toronto professor C. B. Macpherson. In it the author questioned whether rule by the majority would eventually lead to supression of the minority. Macpherson was also credited with inventing the concept of “possessive individualism” in which the individual owned his skills to be sold on the open market and owes nothing to society at large. He argued against this view as opposed to Ayn Rand who supported it.

“I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded

Communist ‘cause I’m left handed

That’s the hand to use well, never mind”

-Paul Simon’s A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission) - 1965

In the US civil rights and integration were being pursued by “negroes” who were now looking for a racial group name change to “black”. In 1968 John and a high school classmate Mike headed out to UMass in Amherst one evening to see civil rights advocate Julian Bond. The venue was an auditorium that was filled to capacity. Mr. Bond was a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives. He had declined to cast a vote for Democratic segregationist Lester Maddox when the general election of governor of Georgia failed to give a majority to any of the politicians running for governor and the Georgia House of Representatives was called on to decide the who the next governor would be. In 1960 Julian Bond co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – SNCC and led civil rights demonstrations and voter registrations in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. He also led student protests over Jim Crow laws in Georgia in the early 1960’s. Mr. Bond eventually was a founding member of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Georgia State Senator for many years. John expected to see an angry black man but found a well dressed, short haired, soft spoken, articulate and educated person advocating for equal treatment under the law.

“our liberal-democracy, like any other system, is a system of power….It is a system by which people can be governed, that is, made to do things they would not otherwise do, and made to refrain from doing things they otherwise might do. Democracy as a system of government is, then, a system by which power is exerted by the state over individuals and groups within it. But more than that, a democratic government, like any other, exists to uphold and enforce a certain kind of society, a certain set of relations between individuals, a certain set of rights and claims that people have on each other both directly, and indirectly through their rights to property. These relations themselves are relations of power” - C B Macpherson’s The Real World of Democracy p4

Stanley sat by his pool and recalled his shipmates on the Rocky Mount. “We had negro members of the crew working in the kitchen.  There were guys in the crew who were segregationists. If they thought they were not getting the proper respect from a negro, they would gang up on him at night when he was alone and throw him overboard in the middle of the ocean.” After some time passed and it seemed the story was not going to continue John asked “So what happened to the white guys that threw the black guy overboard?”

“Nothing” replied Stanley.

A few days later, Stanley, Joe, John and an employee of  Zywar Brothers were having their 10 am coffee break. The Zywar brothers did general contracting, house building and ran a retail store for lumber, Dutch Boy paint, and hardware from a store on Northampton Street. They built custom houses from Longmeadow to Northampton including Arlene’s house on Sutton Place in Easthampton. Each floor plan was uniquely designed by Stanley on a large drafting table in the spare bedroom of his house. Above the drafting table was a stuffed four foot sail fish Stanley had caught down in Florida – its sail fin proudly displayed. John worked at Zywar Brothers during the summer and on Friday nights and Saturdays during the school year. Before going to kindergarten, he thought his name was “John Zywar Brothers”.

John had his usual, a jelly donut or a Boston cream donut and a chocolate milk – a repeat of breakfast Joe and John had at the Hampton Grill on Ferry Street a few hours before. The town and the high school that John went to had no non-white minorities in it. “I heard a story from the police last night. A black guy drove into town and went into a restaurant near Main Street. The police were notified and an officer came and sat down at the lunch counter next to the black guy who just was served his meal. The officer told the black guy that if he wanted to leave town with his manhood intact, he would get up and leave town now. The black guy put down his fork, got up from the counter, paid for his meal and left town.”

That evening, John finished reading The Real World of Democracy.