"...So I went to San Diego to wait for a ship they were building in Oakland. Got thirty days to leave home. Went back and waited some more. There were twenty-five landing boats for the ship and they made up the boat division in San Diego. I was ship fitter for the boats so was separate from the ship's crew in a way about four hundred fifty men all told and they all knew me. One good thing, I did not have to stand watches which was very nice. I was subjected to call any time day or night which only happened a few times in ten months that I was aboard ship.
August, the boat division went up to Oakland and aboard ship, back down to Diego for shakedown, back to Frisco to load up and we were off for the Admiralty Islands. Sixteen days underway alone, never saw a ship or land - 6200 miles. Had a very nice trip. About the first man I saw when I got ashore was Irv Flesher. And next day Jess who was mail clerk on his ship as he had over twenty years in the post office came ashore to pick up his ship's mail, saw my ship tied up. Of course he saw the number, K.A. 88, and came aboard. I had expected we would meet up but not that quick. We were both in there several days. He was over for Thanksgiving dinner with me. Then we left, went down to the lower end of New Guinea to Milne Bay and stopped there and other ports picking up a load. Got a lot of army trucks and negro drivers, back up to Manus before Christmas. Jess had been down to New Britten and got a load of troops, the 44th division, I believe, had been there a year and never seen action. That was Karl Winters Division. But the way he told it, when he got home, like they had come all the way from the Solomons. Were in Manus which is part of the Admiralty Islands and all the ships were bunching up there for the Phillipines again. They had already taken Leyte in October. I was over to Jess' ship for Christmas.
Next day they started pulling out for Lingayen gulf invasion, west end of Luzon, which was where the Japs first landed when they came through there. First landing was about January 1. We got there two days later. We unloaded, there was some suicide planes hitting them, wo they got out as quick as possible. We picked up two boat crews from another ship that had gone off and left them. Back down to Leyte a few days and then down to Biak and picked up the 41st Division. Hitchhiked out to where M. Company was camped and gave the boys a thrill. There wre only four of them left in the company. Unloaded them at Mindora and back to Leyte for a month, loaded up mostly troops and headed for the last battle of the Pacific: Okinawa.
One day I noticed a bunch of soldiers looking at me and talking among themselves. Pretty soon one of them came over and asked me if I had been on the Funston. I said, "No, but my brother was." His ship had taken them into Leyte in October, six months before.
We let our boats off about 8:00AM the first morning at Okinawa. They took what troops we had and it kinda gets you. Those boys had been living with us two or three weeks, eating and playing cards, visiting and we were loading them in the landing boats to land on a hostile beach. You knew they would not all come back. They would wave as they pulled out, and it wasn't funny. It wasn't like Iwo Jima, not much fighting on the beach. It was an airfield and the Navy had blasted it for a week, so they got ashore o.k. Then the ship up-anchored and pulled in close to shore where with field glasses we had a grandstand view. Very interesting. It wasn't long until the Seabees had tractors and bulldozers out there leveling the airfield so planes could land. Trouble was everybody was trigger happy and when our planes started landing, they were shot down by our own men.
That night after dark, the suicide planes started coming down. About three hundred miles from Japan and any old wreck could come that far to head into a ship. First one came in everything was shooting at it. Could not see how it got that far. It just cleared our mast and hit the ship next to us, right in front of the bridge. Part of it went through the main deck into the mess hall. They all carried explosives and averaged killing forty men when they hit. That was one battle when the Navy lost more men than the Army.
Next night some ships thought they would pull out to sea and not be so likely to get hit. We did, but next morning we were coming in just at sunrise. We were at General Quarters when here came one heading for us. Well, you can't start shooting until they are quite close, and they are coming fast. Not too much time in there. Anyhow, our number 1 gunner, a 1st class, up on the bow, twin 40, got him and it hit the water in one big splash. Everyone hollered and yelled like it was a rodeo or ballgame. The whole thing was quite interesting. After that the ships felt safer to stay in the harbor. One destroyer took five suicide planes and it back to Seattle. It was tied up there when I got back. How many men were lost, I don't know. We were there eight days and glad to get out in one piece. As I use to tell the boys aboard ship, "Either you get killed or you don't. Why worry either way?"
Ernie Pyle's press boat was moving around the bay when we were there. It had a big sign on it. A few days after we left, we heard he was on a little island close by and a Jap sniper had got him in the head. About the next day, F.D.R. died.
So we made it back to Pearl Harbor. Was there ten days when the discharge I had applied for when I received word Emma (wife) had a heart attack and was puny arrived. So I left the old Uvalde, told the boys good-bye. They were a good crew and it takes a cruise like that to make you very close, eating and sleeping in close quarters and when you get into the danger zone, you never know what will happen with subs and mines in the water and suicide planes overhead. But it turned out fine. We had a great cruise, spent the winter below the equator. It was never hot while we were underway, but when we stopped it closes in on you. Being a World War 1 veteran and a volunteer and older than the rest, you have to keep up the moral. Chief Zimmerman that died last year said the only time he saw me worried was when I got word my wife was sick. So I took a troop ship to Seattle, around there ten days and discharged...."
Clarence Alonzo Robinson
Harlem, Montana
1973