Enlisted - March 1945

Roland J.  Beck, who was born one half mile south of the Centerfield, Utah, city limits in 1927, graduated from Gunnison Valley High School in 1945 and his involvement in World War II. 

All through the depression I grew up as a very poor farm boy who had everything he needed to make life enjoyable, and was relatively successful though elementary and high school; but wanted to enter World War II.  I was in the ninth grade and going to church Sunday morning on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  From that day and until I got into the Navy I wanted to be a sailor and I wanted to fight the Japanese.  I was enlisted in the Navy in the March of 1945 but I had to stay in high school until I graduated.  And then went to Chicago Great Lakes Navel Training Center and then to Hugh Manly High School in Chicago to a radio technician school, the Navy was short of technicians then.  They gave what they called the EDDY test and those that passed it got to go in with the seaman first class rank, and half the boot camp and then go to radio technician school. 

While I was in Chicago the war ended and they gave us a three-day pass.  It was exciting in Chicago because we never had to pay for anything; shows were free, dances were free, theater was free, meals were free.  They treated the servicemen royally in World War II. 

After the three day pass we headed for San Diego, California where I boarded the battle ship Maryland for Pearl Harbor.  It was my first experience of what really happened in the war as I saw all the sunken ships in Pearl Harbor and the devastation that was caused by that one attack in 1941.  I stayed there for about two weeks and drank all the pineapple I could handle and had a good time.  I then boarded a hospital ship headed for the Philippines it was hauling the wounded and those in the hospitals wounded from the war, back to the states and made the round trips.  It took us 33 days to go from Pearl Harbor to Manila without seeing land in a ship that was dilapidated that had excellent quarters and lots of nurses.  As we sailed into Manila Bay it was the most beautiful sight that I could every remember while I was in the Navy.  The foliage was lush green and this was in September.  The devastation of the war could not be seen as we came into the harbor, but as we entered closer in you could see all the sunken ships, scores of them with their masts sticking up above the water or upside down.  As we got on shore we could see the piles of airplanes both American and Japanese that had been shot down during the war and piled up into great big piles sometimes ten to twenty acres in circumference and piled as high as the dozer could push them, maybe twenty or thirty feet high.  It was impossible to realize the great devastation that could happen in invasions, counter invasions, attacks, defeats, victories and success.

Crigador and Batan were piles of rubble.   I spent about two weeks in the Philippines building an outdoor theater for the natives and the sailors to enjoy.  And then I was assigned to a small destroyer escort hull that was called an APD (amphibious personnel destroyer); it held four V.P.'s (vessel personnel) that held the frogmen (about twenty man teams each of them.)  The purpose of an APD was to go in before the attack, put the frogmen ashore from these small landing craft and clear the beaches harbors of mines and make way for the attacks of the Marines or the Army.  In the Pacific mostly the Marines did the attacking and once it was secure the Army  would come in and occupy and clean up the mess and the Marines would go on to another battle.  There were five of these APD's assigned to the last major battle front in the Pacific called Okinawa and of the five of them four of them were sunk by a Kamikaze attack and the one that  I was assigned to, even though that I wasn't on it at the time, was the only one that survived the invasion of Okinawa.  The Kamikaze that was assigned sink it was sunk by the forty millimeter cannons that were used for antiaircraft.  It was quite an experience to be assigned to that ship, we were standing at attention when the Liberty Party came back in.  The Liberty Party consisted of about forty drunken sailors and the man who eventually became my boss, was heaved up on the deck.  He landed face down on that hard metal plate he was a bloody mess.  They had been in Manila and had gotten into a major battle with somebody I don't know who, but they came back all beaten up. 

Our ship had the gyroscopes necessary to sail the waters with navigating equipment and we led then a convoy of eleven LST's that were carrying Koreans back from China to Korea.  We hit a terrible typhoon and finally were making no headway at all in fact we were going backwards two knots and one of the LST's split open on one side of the hull with a big gapping hole and we had to turn around and run back around the Philippines and hide behind the island until the typhoon blew its way clear.  I remember one particular morning when the wind was blowing really hard that I went up on the deck and the ship was really rough and wavy and I was relieved from watch to eat my breakfast and I stepped out on the deck to look and two porpoises were swimming in front of the ship and jumping the waves and all of the sudden the waves rolled an awful long way down and then they went way up above my head and I grabbed the life line to hang on and as that wave crashed over the bow of the ship there was about ten or eleven sailors up there and I happened to be the only one that hung onto the life line and the rest were washed down the deck but saved by the foul weather rigging that was woven into the life lines so no one was washed overboard. 

As we sailed through the north China sea and all through that area and Korea, China and Japan besides leading this LST fleet our main job was to shoot the floating mines that were still out on the ocean by the hundreds.  They had been cut loose and were floating dangerously out there for someone to hit.  They had a ball of about two or three tons of high explosives with sharp prongs with detonators on and if you bumped one of those it was good-bye to the ship.  One morning I got up and looked out over the forty millimeter turret where the guard for the mines was supposed to be watching.  He was sound asleep in the turret and I looked out and there was a mine floating about fifteen feet off the side of the ship.  They had seen it from the tower about that same time and we proceeded to warn the ships behind us and they cleared out as we waited for them to pass and then manned the forty millimeter guns and proceeded to detonate that mine.  A lot or most of the mines sank without exploding, but this particular one happened to explode  blowing shrapnel all over the ship.

We were harbor directors in Korea for about a month in Pusan and we brought back thousands of Koreans who had never seen Korea, but had been prisoners of war, prisoners of the Japanese in China, from  their birth.  Japan conquered Korea and China in 1904 and they occupied it for about forty years and they had hauled the leaders of Korea to China and the leaders of China somewhere else and made slaves of them.  The pheasants were only left and ruled by the Japanese and our process was to turn that about.  In Korea there were train load after train load of military weapons of the Japanese piled up on the docks ready to be shipped to the war areas.  And while we were harbor directors there one of our jobs was to dispose of this all of the armament.  We would go onto the train cars and load up bayonets and rifles by the hundred and use them to throw at fish swimming in the water.   Some of the guys kept them and shipped them home as souvenirs I didn't send one home because I was not interested in those kind of souvenirs.

One day I was tired of just being in the ship and in this poor little town and so I hiked a mountain behind it and I got up on top and thought it would be a wide open space like the mountains in Utah, but on top there was a village and it was full of people and they looked hostile to me and I didn't know quite know what to do and they started surrounding me I was scared.  So I reached in my pocket and I had a couple packs of gum in there.  So I broke the packs open and got the sticks out and put them in my hand and threw them as far as I could over that crowd and they turned around to run after the gum.  As they ran after the gum I ran back down the hill.  I decided maybe it wasn't wise for me to go out on my own even in a nation that we were liberating from occupation.

After being in Korea for about a month we went over across the north China sea to Singtow.  Modsung the communists leader were coming down the coast attacking the Chiang Kai-shek troops and as they made there journey we went down the coast ahead of them sometimes seeing the bodies of U.S. airmen who had been stationed there and didn't get out of the way fast enough and were shot,  but we ended up down in Shanghai.  Shanghai is a few miles up the Yangpoo River one of the largest cities in China and there became the headquarters for the 64th LST fleet that was helping the Chinese salvage their material ahead of the communists and get them over to Formosa (Taiwan).

We were there when Chiang Kai-shek took his motor launch and made a circle around the few remaining ships that belonged to the U.S. Navy.  And we put on our dress blue uniforms and stood at attention as he came by and saluted and then left.  We were the last ship to leave Shanghai before the communists came and went down the beach.  Shanghai was very interesting we were there for three and a half months.  It was tough to see those very poor people.  We would go to church on Sunday morning just two of us were Mormon on the ship and we were excused every Sunday morning to go to church.  We would walk down the beach and along the roadway and you would see people laying in about every door some of them were froze to death.  This was in January, February and March and it was very cold.  I was told that about two hundred people at night froze to death in Shanghai.  They were loaded on two wheeled carts that were pushed by two Chinese and their bodies were taken to the Yangpoo River and dumped in.

As we pulled into there we were tied up out in the middle of the river, it was about half a mile wide.  And as we tied there some sandpans came rushing up to the back of the ship to see who would be first.  One of them arrived there first and tied onto our anchor rope.  Come to find out there was a man and his wife and a little girl and the wife was very pregnant.  As we threw the garbage over the side of the ship into the river, they would use a big hook and fish what garbage they could out of the river and that is what they lived on.  And it did not take us long to know that if you put the garbage in a 5 gallon bucket and lowered it down by rope over the back of the ship about 10 or 15 feet, and they would be tickled to death to get everything that they could and they would utilize every bit of it.  What they didn't use they would save and every day some other sandpans would pull up along side and take what they couldn't use.  While we were there the little baby was born.  The normal procedure at that time was that if it was a girl baby, she was just thrown into the river to drown.  Sometimes when we had more than one ship anchored out in the middle by us and our tie ropes came to a ‘V 'and you would see the bodies of babies that had been caught in the tie ropes and they would sit there until they rotted and decayed and finally drifted loose.

Life was very, very cheap.  You would see men unloading ships all day long and at noon time they would break one sack of rice open and give each guy all the rice he could hold in his hands and that would be his dinner and that would be his pay for the day.  They would sell anything and everything for food and clothing.  They would sell themselves, their mothers, their daughters; anything that they had you could buy for a rotten candy bar or cigarettes or anything of value to them.  Money that was exchanged there was two dollar bills mostly; hundreds of two dollar bills floated around Shanghai and they were used on the black market.  I found out rapidly that it wasn't money they wanted, it was cigarettes or candy bars and while we were given a carton of cigarettes a week and you could trade those cigarettes for a show ticket, for a meal for just about anything you wanted and that was the medium of exchange while we were in Shanghai.  Some in the guys participated in the black market to a large sale.  They would go to the ship store and buy clothing and then take it and sell it on the streets.  Those that were caught were taken back to Levenworth, Kansas where they were discharged dishonorably from the Navy.  I didn't participate in this activity either, nor in the purchase of other things that were not satisfactory for me.

By the time we left Shanghai we counted on the ship that we had 86 men at the time but war compliment was a 125 but by the time we left there, there were only 3 of us who had not spent time with a girl.  It was well known the exploits of the sailors with the young girls in Shanghai.  I was glad to leave there and there was so much disease going on that we got seven shots a week four on Friday and three on Saturday; you were usually so sore in your arms that you didn't enjoy going out on liberty.  But they did have a USO and a Red Cross facility there where we could go and bowl or play other games, lots of activities that they tried to provide for us.

The church we went to there was in one of those large nice hotels and it was run primarily by the Army.  There were 22 converted, usually white Russians or Chinese, to the church in those three and a half  months that I was there and they had a thriving branch going.  I often wondered what happened to those people when the war ended.  And wondered if the church opens up there, if they will ever come back.

I had the opportunity to visit numerous islands out in the Pacific.  Midway, where the great battle was; Guam, that was nothing but a bombed out storage area.  They had put coral reef all over the top of the island and had stacked huge supplies of ammunition and war material.  I had the opportunity to go back there 40 years later and see what had happened.  The Island of Timon that was nothing but runways for B-29 bombers and B-17 bombers;  the only one that was still open was the runway where the Nola Gaye took off  to drop the nuclear bomb on Japan.  All the others had grown over with foliage and was just a little lighter green than the others.

My experience in the war had nothing to do with battles except the battle of Bloody Alley in Shanghai.  This was an alley where the Chinese,  if they were in larger numbers would beat and rob the sailors and if the sailors were in the larger numbers they would beat and rob the Chinese.  And one day I was asked to go down Bloody Alley with some of the sailors that were going because someone had really been beaten and robbed while they were down there.  So I went with the group down through Bloody Alley with the sailors and it was an experience that I did not want to repeat.  But I guess it was all right to experience it.  If you got through Bloody Alley you went to what they called the bar district, and there was lots of bars, and lots of drinking, and lots of prostitution, lots of other stuff that went on that didn't appeal to me at all, but it was quite an experience.

The other Mormon on the ship was Deon Hubbard and he was the pharmacist mate, the only doctor we had.  And every night after we came back off liberty we would come back a little early and I would go down with him to the sick bay and help doctor the sailors that came back all beat to pieces because of what went on in the alleys in Shanghai after dark.  People who were starving to death and would do anything to get something that would sustain their lives.

We sailed across the Pacific again and through the islands and spent another week in Hawaii.  Then to San Diego and then left San Diego and went down around the Panama Canal up to Norfolk, Virginia and decommissioned a ship.  There were hundreds of ships in Norfolk all in moth balls.  You scrubbed them down, cleaned off all the paint; you repainted them all in a dry dock and then put cosmoline on all of the equipment, all of the guns,  flood the barrels, tighten them up and put the ship away.  To my knowledge they are still sitting there in moth balls or being torn to pieces to build  newer modern ships.

I came out of the Navy with a great appreciation of the values of freedom and the things that we enjoy in the United States a great blessing for each of us.  I hated the Japanese all the while I was growing up but I have come to love them.  We have a Japanese daughter now.  She came to us as a sixteen year old foreign exchange student and now she is in her mid thirties and has three children, but she comes to see us every other year from Japan and they are the most patriotic people and the most understanding of the values of freedom.  They  recognize the great blessing that America has been for Japan.  Her father happened to be in Shanghai the same time that I was there at the end of World War II.  He a defeated army man going back to a defeated country and me a victorious sailor man from the victorious country.  But we have great empathy and understanding. 

When Pauline died she and her father came all the way over from Japan to do a Buddhist burial ceremony for Pauline.  I am grateful for them and have been in their home in Tokyo; a very humble home, but a substantial for what the Japanese have.  And I appreciate them.  And I appreciate the Japanese people and have a great love for them.  It seems like when you're young and a war is on, you have different values than when you're old and have seen the ravages of war and know what it can do.  And it isn't wicked men fighting each other, it is common folk that are caught up in the battles of leaders of nations and don't want to, but they have to fight for what they know is right. 

I might explain a little bit about what it was like from 1941 to 1945 here on the home front.  I was going to high school at the time and even before that when the war had not yet come to the United States, but the war economy had started and the United States was building ships and tanks to send to Europe to fight the Germans.  All kind of things went on.  One of the things I remember doing is that we picked milk weed pods to use in the making of life vests.  The pods as they ripened  were full of those little silky seeds and we would gather those and they would take them and dry them out and then use that materials in the life vests.  We spent days and days and days gathering sackfuls of those pods to donate to the cause of the war.  And they would be shipped to places where they were making these life vests.  The sewing plant in Manti was a parachute plant at that time.  They made parachutes for the Air Forces to use in both their paratrooper and for the men on the planes in case it was shot down. 

Every once in a while we would have someone come back to the high school and talk to us.  I remember Alva Sorensen coming back after the D day in Normandy.  He had jumped off the landing craft with a 90 pound radio on his back, was shot in the knee, and just about drowned.  But he came back on crutches with a broken knee and talked to the high school students about what happened at the war.  I remember the gold stars going up in various homes.  I remember my cousin Clay Rosenvall, who was in the Philippines at the beginning of the war, went through Crigador and Batan and the Death March, finally was on a ship to Japan when it was sunk by an American submarine not knowing who was on that Japanese ship, and was lost at sea. 

I have been to the Philippines after all of this happened and I have looked at the huge war memorials that are there and of the list of all of the names of those who were killed in the Philippines during World War II.   I found three of them there from Gunnison Valley. 

We had very few people to work and the sugar factory was going full blast and as I was a senior all of the boys had jobs.  I went to school one day before Christmas time and I was the only senior boy in school that day.  I went in one of the empty classrooms and lay on the desk and went to sleep.  I was working the swing shift 4  p.m. to 12 midnight at the sugar factory 7 days a week besides doing the farm work.  The principal Peyton Alexander came in and said, " Roland,  why don't you go home and get a good sleep so you can work that night shift at the factory." So I did.

Gas was rationed; we got two gallons a week, if you needed your car for other purposes.   I was one of the very few that had a car in high school.  I think there were only two senior boys at the time that had cars; Clyde Rosenvall was the other one.  We got "A" card stamps regularly for the two gallons, but if you had a need for your car to help the war effort, you got a "B" coupon.  Because I was working at the factory at 4 o'clock I could drive my car to school and I got a "B" coupon so that I could buy gas so that I could drive to work that night at 4 o'clock.  It also helped that I was dating the daughter of the lady who was over the rationing board and had the coupons available to give.  If you were a farmer you got "R" coupons, and we being big farmers got a whole stacks of ‘R' coupons and so we weren't hurting for gas anytime.

I remember that a few people from California came up here to hunt at that time and they would save gas for the year in all kinds of cans and come up with cans full of gas so that they could make it up here and back so that they could hunt deer.

The whole economy, everything that you did was related to the war effort and lots of volunteers.  They had war bond sales at the shows every Tuesday night.   Cy Anderson run the show house and we had jack pot night, but they sold war bonds there and people would buy hundreds of dollars worth of war bonds every Tuesday night to help the war effort.  These war bonds would mature at $25, $50, $100, but you bought them for $17 or that relationship; $37 for the $50 war bond. 

Every time a young man would go into the service we would have a farewell party for him at the church house.  They would do a dance and donate money and give them a royal send off to go to the war.  The boys that could not make it to the war because of physical handicaps were left to farm and others that were essential in the farm effort received deferments to go.  And lots of these were kind of looked down on because they couldn't go to the service.   I was one of the lucky ones that had the opportunity to go, but did not have to go to the front lines and did not have to suffer the great consequences of fighting the front line battles of war.  Only about 10% of those that were in the service actually spent time on the front lines fighting the battles; most of them were support groups and the liaison, and fought from way back.  But those that were on the front lines really paid the price; and all paid the price even those who were on the home front working two and three jobs to keep things going.  It was a total one hundred percent effort by everybody involved.  And you were proud to be involved in this, whether you were in the military or not.