February 17, 1941 - 1945

Mitchell:  Where did you go to basic training?
Elwood:  I went to camp San Louis Obispo in March 1941.

Mitchell:  Where were you stationed?
Elwood:  I spent all of the war in the pacific.  The first island we took was Hawaii, the second island that we took was the Marshal islands, third we took the Marinas islands (Sypan, Guam, Tinian).  These were the islands that the B-29 bombers used to bomb the Japanese.  Then we took the island of Mendouro.  This is the first place that we ran into the comacauze planes.  "Comacauze means the flying wind".  These plains are loaded with bombs and they would crash into the ships.  From San Francisco to Tokyo, we rode ships, which was about 7000 miles, a very long trip.  After leaving the Philippines, we went to the island of Ruykyukes, which is just off the coast Okynawa.  This took place in August of 1945. 

The Japanese surrendered.  It took five years for this to happen.  We left the United States for the Philippines on December 6, 1945.  We were about 18 hours out of San Francisco Harbor when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7.  We were on a troop ship when it happened.  Then we came home after the battle of Okynawa.  We entered the United States on the 1st of September. 

My last incident on Okynawa was after the battle each morning, four or five of us had to go out on patrol to clear all of the caves on the island which had Japanese in them.  there was a lot of caves that we had to clear them out of.  To clear them out we had to use white phosphorus grenades.  We would take turns going up to a cave mouth and throw in a grenade.  White phosphorus burns when it hits oxygen and the only way to stop the burning was to cut off the oxygen supply.  If any of them got into the caves we gave them the chance to surrender, then we would throw one in the caves.  We would give them a four second chance.  At the count of four I would throw in a grenade.  It was my turn, so I got out a grenade and pulled the pin and gave four counts.  Nobody came out so I threw in a grenade and out came a Japanese soldier wearing black robes.  We happened to be by this little farm house with a well.  He came out so fast that we didn't have time to use our rifles.  He had these black robes and I thought that he was some kind of a priest.  I found out later that he was a ranking officer and they would put on these black robes before committing suicide.

One of the run ins with the comacauze planes was when I was going from Layette to the Philippines.  We had the cruiser Nashville as our escort.  As we went past one of the small islands a comacauze plane flew out from an island and headed straight for us, but then he turned towards the Nashville.  I remember standing on deck and telling them to shoot at it.  They needed to shoot at him or he was going to hit them and kill sailors on the Nashville.  Then I realized that if they went ahead and shot that they would shoot right over us.  I looked behind me and saw about five 55 gallon drums of nitro on the deck.   The comacauze hit the ship and killed 137 sailors.  The Nashville went back to the states for repair.