“I drew the 0400 watch, and realized we weren’t moving.  Then at about 0500 all hell broke loose and it was better than the 4th of July!  Battleships, cruisers, tin cans and whatever else the Navy had were shelling the coast of France and it was suddenly like daylight. We were about four miles offshore and all we could do was sit and watch the bombardment.”

My father was a plumber during the depression.  He and my mother raised six children.  As I was growing up, I worked with my father cleaning out outdoor closets, but I didn’t mind the work because I was learning a trade from my dad, who had a master plumber’s license and was able to take me on as an apprentice.  Since I had made up my mind early on to become a tradesman, I went to Rankin Trade School as a teenager instead of going to regular high school.  Life was tough in those days, but we made it through as a family.  My father, who died at the age of 50 in 1940, never asked for relief payments from the government; maybe because he was descended from a long line of hardworking German immigrants who were too proud to take money they didn’t earn.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor I was listening to the radio and I remember how they broke into the regular broadcast to announce the news.  I was working as a plumber’s apprentice at the time for the J.P. Valenti Plumbing Company  in St. Louis.  In the summer of 1942, a plumber who also  worked there, Ed Boehme, asked me if I would join the Navy Seabees with him.  I found out then that the Seabees were officially known as the Naval Construction Battalion, or NCB.  Before that the NCB was known as the Civilian Engineering Corps.

Ed and I went to the St. Louis Recruiting Office in the Federal Building, downtown.  Since Ed was older and had quite a bit of experience, he was offered a Chief Petty Officer rating, and I was offered a Third Class Shipfitter’s rating.  At the time, older tradesmen were offered advanced ratings to enlist in the Seabees because they needed experienced tradesmen to do the construction work.  Ed was old enough that he didn’t have to go into the service, so he decided not to enlist. Even though I was only 19, the recruiter thought I had enough experience to qualify for Shipfitter Third Class, but I decided to wait until I was drafted.  Something told me, though, to keep that piece of paper that offered me the SF3c rating.
 

My draft notice came on 1 April, 1943, and I went to Jefferson Barracks on the 16th for my physical.  When the Navy doctor examined me, I showed him the Seabee papers from the previous summer.  It worked, and I was assigned to the Seabees, but as a seaman apprentice.  In a few days we were sent to Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia for boot camp.  We were issued the 1940 edition of the Blue Jackets Manual, which helped guide us in the process of becoming sailors.  We were at Camp Peary for eight weeks of intensive training, mostly marching and running, then running and more marching.  I was tired, but most of the mates were ten, twenty and even thirty years older than me, and they were really pooped.  My pay was $50 per month. After taking out an allotment for home and insurance, I ended up with $12 a month in spending money.

One day they put us on some trucks and hauled us to an area that we were to manicure since Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, was coming to visit the camp.  I naively answered the call for volunteer truck drivers, so they gave me a wheelbarrow.  When the admiral’s limousine finally came through all I could see was his dust.  I also remember that Bob Hope’s tour group put on a show at  the base.  It was a thrill seeing Frances Langford, Jerry Colonna and the Les Brown Orchestra, and the show gave us a big boost in morale.  I’ve never forgotten that the show was sponsored by Pepsodent Tooth Paste.

On 7 June, 1943 we were told to pack up and get ready to move on to Camp Endicott in Davisville, Rhode Island, for training at an Advanced Base Depot.  For the first time I saw our beautiful East Coast during a wonderful train ride.  It was the first time I had seen stone fences, compared to the wood fences in Missouri.  Thrilling stuff for a kid who had never been more than fifty miles from home before entering the service.

I was assigned to the 97 NCB, Company C, 1st  Platoon, where I met two men who would become good friends and shipmates for the biggest part of my time in the service.  One was Chester Spinner from Princeton, Missouri; the other was Bryant Ellwood  McGinnis of Richmond, Missouri.  Both were experienced tradesmen in their early thirties, and qualified for advanced ratings;  Chester as an Electronics Mate Second Class, and McGinnis as a Motor Mechanic Second Class.

We learned how to fire an M1 rifle, how to operate a machine gun and the proper way to throw a grenade.  If you missed the target on the M1 firing range, a mate in the pit would raise a large pair of red drawers that were called “Maggie’s Drawers.”  I guess I was pretty good with the M1, since Ray McDonnell, Shorty Lyons and I graduated to the Thompson submachine gun.  In those first few weeks we did a lot of KP, too, two weeks worth, in fact.  This meant operating the dish washing machine, working in the steam pit cleaning garbage cans and peeling a six-foot high piles of potatoes.

During our stay at Endicott, we got word that the battalion had been fully formed.  Our Company C officers were Lt. William Larsen from New York, Lt. William Ablondie from Connecticut, Warrant Officer Raymond Jennings from Texas and Ensign Charles Via from Virginia.  As time would tell, we were blessed with the best officers a mate could hope for.
 

I remembered that I had the paper that the St. Louis recruiter had given me, and I went to the officer’s quarters and gave the form to Mr. Larsen.  The next day my name was on the bulletin board, announcing that I had been re-rated to Shipfitter, Third Class.  My pay went up $28 a month to $78!

The 97th was separated into two sections.  My company was in Section Two, along with companies A and D.  The Section had a complement of 1,200 officers and men, and  was commanded by Commander Maitland.  I was in the transportation detail.  The Section was then sent from Advanced Base (ABD) to Sun Valley, another part of Camp Endicott.  We went on hikes and we had war games there.  I remember that older mates like John Dolce, who was fifty years of age, couldn’t keep up.  A Jeep was always sent back for Dolce so he could stay with us.

On 28 August we returned to ABD and I went back to the transportation detail.  Bob Clarke told me to take Lt. Harvey over to pick up some gear for the personnel office.  I didn’t even know how to get that big truck started so I went back inside and asked Bob for help.  Bob showed me how to start the truck, and told me to let it warm up since the air brakes had to build up pressure before moving out.  I don’t remember changing gears because I had no idea how to do it. But we got there, picked up a bunch of furniture, and made it back safely.  That whole deal was really embarrassing.

With training over, we were issued a ten-day debarkation leave prior to going overseas.  I had to ask my Mom to send train fare, because I didn’t have enough cash. I boarded the Pennsylvania Limited in New York and 24 hours later I arrived at Union Station in St. Louis. I squired my fiancee, Dolores Fox, around town for a week. We said our goodbyes,  then it was back to Camp Endicott.

On 14 September we were told to get ready to move out on the 15th.  Nobody knew where we were going, but scuttlebutt was running high.  We marched with full pack to the train siding, boarded a train and left for New York.  When we arrived in New York we marched to the dock area and boarded the Empress of Australia, where we were confined below decks for security reasons until the ship was underway in open seas.  Our first dinner was mutton and it was awful, so bad that our officers complained to the skipper, Captain Thomas Jones, who had been an ensign during World War I.  He was astonished to see what was being served.  A quick investigation showed that the crew was hoarding good food in the hold and was serving us slop.  Captain Jones got that changed in a hurry.  There was no more mutton and no more complaining.
The next day we were allowed on the main deck to get our exercise.  The army was being transported with us and we found out later that the ship had room for 5,000 hammocks, which were stacked four high in our compartment.  I slept  in a top hammock.  One of the mates, John Lanier, was so scared of being torpedoed that he slept in a lifeboat every night.  On 30 September we started to see land appear, and we were each issued a small booklet telling us about life in England.  A truck was a lorry, an elevator was a lift and a policeman was a bobby; that sort of thing.  It explained the difference in money, too.  I still have the booklet.

At 2300 hours we were told to debark the Empress at the port of Liverpool.  We boarded a train that was waiting for us and  we arrived in Scotland the next day, with beautiful fields all around us.  We were taken to Maintenance Base 2, located on an island at Roseneath, Scotland.  We saw two large buildings.  One was Roseneath Castle, the other was called Princess Louise Castle.  We were quartered in one of hundreds of Quonset huts already built.

After a couple of weeks at Roseneath, our Company C was detached and sent to Saltash, England, to build another base.  Most of the company went by train, but the transportation detail drove trucks and equipment to the destination.  We stopped in Liverpool the first night and stayed at a hotel, which was paid for by the military.  Next day we stopped in Bath, England for a lunch of fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper, all paid for by the military. Dinner was on an army base at Gloucester.  Instead of staying in another hotel overnight at government expense, Jim Goff decided that we could make it to Plymouth by 2130 hours.  It was a tough drive in the dark with blackout lights.  In fact, for the last twenty miles or so we had to post riders on the front fenders of the trucks to avoid collisions or missing turns.  We were assigned to tents, and I moved in with Chester Spinner and Bryant McGinnis among others.

We were to build forty huts and a galley at Saltash.  My job was to haul building materials from cities and towns all over the southern coast of England.  Every time I went to a new city I bought a penny postcard to remind me of all the places I visited, and I ended up with over 300 postcards
during the duty at Saltash.  While I was stationed there, my brother Carl sent me a Dear John letter telling me that my girl friend, Dolores, had married a sailor from Nebraska.  That’s the way things went sometimes during the war.

When the base was nearly completed, Mr. Larsen called all the chiefs in and gave them notice of their next project.  We were leaving for Southampton and Queen Victoria Hospital in Netley. This was the largest building I had ever seen, three blocks long and a block wide, with halls so wide you could drive a Jeep through them.  The hospital had been vacant for ten years and Company C was given the job of rehabbing the building to have it ready for wounded soldiers when the invasion of mainland Europe started.

The building was in awful shape.  Blood all over the walls, no electricity, plaster falling from the walls and ceilings, and toilets and plumbing in shambles. Mr. Larsen told us we were going to drop the military stuff and handle this project like it was a company doing a construction job.  Everybody turned to and we got the job done without any of the mates getting into trouble after work because of a lack of military discipline.  We knew what we had to do and we did it.

Sometime in late March, I was told to drive Mr. Ablondie and 25 men to London.  We left at 0700 hours the next morning, and arrived in London that evening. We bedded down at the Charing Cross Red Cross station.  Next morning we went to the Naval Headquarters at 20 Grosvenor Square, and filed into a room loaded with gold braid.  We were told by Captain A. Dayton Clarke that the 97th Second Section would become the 108th NCB, and that our new commander would be Commander Collier.  To our relief we learned that all of our company officers would remain the same.

We were then briefed about a secret new project. We were told that if the invasion of Europe was to succeed, combat forces would have to be supplied with armor, fuel, ammunition, food and all sorts of other supplies to support large-scale combat operations.  Winston Churchill’s solution to the supply problem was to create artificial harbors to get the job done until permanent harbors could be captured, cleared and made operational.  The artificial harbors were to be built in England, transported across the channel and installed on the far shore for the purpose of unloading supply ships via floating roadways to the beach.

Then Winston Churchill himself entered the room.  It took my breath away to be in the same room with this great man. He came in with his famous black derby and a cigar.  He put us all at ease, then told us that we would be working on a new, secret project called the Mulberry Operation, building and erecting artificial harbors that would be used to supply the invasion forces.  He told us that we were all hand picked, and that he had confidence in us being able to do the job.  He added that since this was a top secret operation we would be denied liberty.  He wished us good luck and left the room.

In addition to Mr. Ablondie, Bryant McGinnis and Chester Spinner were there.  None of us could ever forget that day.  I remember that Chief Moates, Chief Slack, H.F. McAllister, Clyde Quick and D.E. Raver, among others, were there, too.

We returned to Netley, where American Nurses were already arriving to staff the rebuilt hospital, which looked new inside.  On 4 April,  I was sent to the Isle of Wight to run supplies and stores into the housing area near Cowes where the Mulberry Bridgespan crews were going to train. After about ten days at Cowes, I was sent on to Exeter, where I met Ensign Benjamin Siegelman, who was to be our crew’s skipper.

The Ensign took me to the dock area at Southampton, where I got my first look at the Mulberry pierheads, with their 200 x 60 foot decks and 60 foot high towers at each corner known as spuds. Commander Collier had selected Company C for the floating pierheads, Company A for the Phoenix caissons, and Company D for the bridgespans.  I was in seventh heaven, because all of my Company C mates were on board as crew of my pierhead, including Spinner,  McGinnis, Chief Trace Evans, Ed Brehl, Al Golding, Harold (Pop) Taylor, Bill Van Eck, and Sam Marmino among others.

Not to oversimplify matters, but the concept of the Mulberry Harbor system was pretty basic, even though the technology to make it all work was revolutionary.  First, a breakwater was formed to protect the unloading area and equipment from the open sea.  We couldn’t build a sea wall for that purpose, so the breakwater was formed by placing worn-out old  merchant ships, code-named “gooseberries,” in position and sinking them a couple of miles or so offshore in 30 feet of water.  Next to the sunken ships we floated huge concrete structures into position and sunk them in place.  These were six stories high, 200 feet long and 60 feet wide, code-named “Phoenix,” which were also called “coffins.”  The coffins and the gooseberries formed a semi-circular seawall to protect the inner harbor from the open sea.

Inside the breakwater, the pierheads were floated into position. The “legs” for the pierheads, which we called spuds, were then lowered to the channel floor to fix the pierheads in position.  Once the spuds were in place on the channel floor, each pierhead’s deck, built on pontoons,  was able to float up and down with the tide. That way, we were able to account for water depth changes due to the 21-foot tide along the Normandy coast. The tide was Churchill’s biggest fear, and the floating deck and spud tower system solved the problem.   Each spud also had huge motors and cables that allowed the pierhead deck to be raised and lowered electrically on each spud.  These were controlled by switches in the pierhead’s control room.
 

Supply vessels, usually LSTs, docked at the pierheads to unload their cargo.  The cargo was then moved to shore on vehicles that rode on the floating pontoon bridgespans that connected the pierheads with the beach. The bridgespans, each 80 feet long and 20 feet wide,  were also known as “whales.”

The components of the Mulberries were built in different parts of Great Britain. The pierheads were being built in Garlington, Scotland, and some of us were sent up there to help with the work because of a shortage of civilian workers.  A total of six pierheads were actually built. The spud towers  were installed on the pierheads after they were moved to the Thames River near London by our riding teams.  We then rode the pierheads down to Selsey  for training in how to place the Mulberries.  The riding teams for the coffins went to London, where they boarded the structures and floated them down to Selsey.   Other riding teams moved the bridgespans from Scotland to the Isle of Wight where they trained in putting the bridgespans in place.

We were assigned to crew pierhead #408.  The skipper assigned me to the control room, where my job was to operate the control panel’s buttons and switches that would function the spuds up and down.  Four of us were trained in how to do that.  Each pierhead had a lower level deck at each end.  One, called the engine room,  housed the control room and two large diesel engines to power the spud’s electric motors. The other end was used as our sleeping quarters and galley.  We had great food and comfortable quarters.

Our pierhead had a crew of 21 mates, one chief and a skipper.  Four mates were control panel operators, three managed the chow detail, eight were armed guards, and six were assigned to unload LSTs.  But we were all trained to do other jobs, in case of illness or casualty, and we all helped to unload if not otherwise on duty.

Each day during training at Selsey a tug, which we called Superman, would pull alongside and tow us out into water maybe 30 to 40 feet deep.  We would practice putting the spuds down onto the sea floor, letting the deck rise and fall on the spuds.  We would also train on raising the deck electrically with the electric motors.  Bryant McGinnis went to school before the invasion to learn how to maintain the diesel engines and the electric  motors and how to service and repair the inch-and-a-half steel cables used to move the deck up and down. He was good at it, and we never had a problem with either the motors or the cables. Chester Spinner was assigned to that duty as well.

On 4 June, Superman came by and we tied the lines to him and headed out to sea, just like always.  But on this particular evening we didn’t stop.  Ensign Siegelman told us we had orders to do what we had been training for, and that we were crossing the channel for the far shore.  The trip was slow, since the tug could only do four knots while towing the pierhead and the channel was choppy.  We put on our Mae Wests and our helmets, which had a two-inch blue stripe at the brim to identify us as Navy.  I drew watch along with three other mates.

That evening, Chief Smith was in the galley, enjoying some rum, and all of a sudden he died at the table.  He had been in the First World War, and was about 50 years old.  That made the whole crew somber.  Some mates carried the chief up on deck while I was on watch and wrapped him in a tarpaulin. Later, officers came aboard and took Chief Smith’s body ashore. I suppose he is buried somewhere in France.

The next morning we were out in open seas and in the far distance we could see other pierheads and coffins being towed.  That evening, 5 June, we looked up and saw a lot of planes and gliders headed for the far shore. I drew the 0400 watch and realized we weren’t moving, but I couldn’t see much.  Then, at about 0500 all hell broke loose and it was better than the 4th of July! Battleships, cruisers, tin cans and whatever else the Navy had were shelling the coast of France and it was suddenly just like daylight.  We were about four miles out and all we could do was sit and watch the bombardment.

I never saw so many ships in one area..  Barrage balloons were tied to some of them to keep enemy planes from strafing.  I was still on watch when shrapnel from enemy fire cut across our steel deck, making a hell of noise.  As daylight came we could see land mines explode on the beach, and with our binoculars we saw bulldozers pushing bodies into a pile. Superman pulled us in closer and we let the spuds down about a couple of  thousand yards offshore.  It was about 1000 hours, 6 June, 1944.

The commanding officer of the American Mulberry operation (Mulberry A), was the same Captain Clark who briefed us in London.  Captain Clark  was controlling the operation from a subchaser, using a bullhorn.  The first step in constructing Mulberry A was setting the breakwater, and we couldn’t do anything until that was done.  Superman came by and told us we were at Omaha Beach, off St. Laurent-sur-Mer.  Mulberry B, the responsibility of the British, was located at Gold Beach, offshore from the town of Arromanches.

We heard that the 111th NCB was in on the invasion, too, and that they were operating motorized barges to take army units ashore.  That day we watched airplanes get hit, and saw that the Coast Guard picked up one of the pilots.  But at that point I really didn’t see much opposition from the enemy. We could see the gooseberries being sunk, and the Phoenix coffins being placed to form the breakwater.  As nightfall approached we watched the Germans attack an LST and other craft with artillery fire.  We were  hit several times by shrapnel rattling across the deck, but there were no injuries and no damage.

The next morning we could see that there was a road on the beach, and equipment was rolling inland.  We saw a land mine explode and saw another body go flying into the air. We knew by the noise of the guns that the army was making progress inland, but we had no idea how slow that progress was until much later.  Superman came by and towed us inside the forming breakwater until we were about fifteen hundred yards offshore, where we put down our spuds to anchor the pierhead in position.  Captain Clark ordered Pierheads 406 and 407 into position, and things really started to hum.  Our pierhead was about 600 feet away, directly behind them.
 

On the morning of 10 June, D+4, we could see that the breakwater was in place.  Every night, German planes came over at 2300 hours and dropped  their bombs for about a half-hour.  We prayed that our pierhead wouldn’t get hit, but bombs did hit one of our bridgeheads and we lost a bridge span team. Luckily our pierhead was never hit, but I was really scared throughout the bombardment.  By D+9, one of the bridgespans was in place, and 406 and 407, which had been connected together, were hooked up to the beach.  Some Seabees were actually able to walk onto the beach.  On D+10, 16 June, ships began to come inside the harbor to unload men and cargo onto pierheads 406 and 407.  The first LST tied up, unloaded in less than an hour, and was on its way back to England for another load.

Mr. Churchill’s idea was working!

Captain Clark estimated that it would take 12 days to put Mulberry A together, but Seabee ingenuity, hard work and long hours got it done in ten days. Over the next twelve days about 34,000 tons of supplies were unloaded onto pierheads 406 and 407.  At that point our pierhead, 408 had not yet been hooked up with bridgespans.

Then, on 19 June the harbor installation was hit by a terrible storm, with winds of up to 70 mph, and the waves grew taller and taller.  Some of those giant Phoenix units in the breakwater were swamped by the huge waves and began to fall apart.  The water inside the harbor became very rough.  Small craft were uncontrollable and they began to crash into whatever was in their way.  We lost three of our spuds when larger ships crashed into us.  An LST that hit the left corner of our pierhead put a gash into the pontoon and that corner of the pierhead’s deck sunk We never did become operational.

In all the confusion, Superman came alongside and gave orders to abandon ship.  We were to jump from the pierhead onto the tug wearing our Mae Wests.  When it was Bill Van Eck’s turn he wouldn’t jump for fear he wouldn’t make it.  He told the skipper he would stay with the ship, but he was ordered to jump.  When he did, the tug moved a bit and Bill dropped into the water. Chester Gremillion and I grabbed Bill and got him to the first two rungs of the pierhead’s straight ladder and he was pulled out of the water.  The skipper ordered the mates to tie Bill to the ladder, and he was then dropped onto the tug, ladder and all.

The tug took us to another bridgespan that was still intact and we all walked off onto the beach.  Twenty of us decided to ride out the storm in a bombed out church just off the beach.  After a couple of hours an army truck came by and took us to the Seabee camp a couple of miles away. We stayed at the camp after the storm ended while welders repaired the gash in the Pierhead’s pontoon.  Pierhead 408 was refloated and I became a stevedore along with Chester Spinner and Bryant McGinnis as we loaded light salvage onto the deck.

 After about two weeks of cleanup work a tug came by and the skipper said we were going back to England.  On 3 August we were towed across the channel into a cove at Falmouth and the pierhead was taken over by the  British Army.   The Port at Omaha was ordered out of commission, although the British Port at Arromanches continued to operate.  We found out later that construction of the British port began later than ours, and hadn’t been damaged nearly as much because it was in an area where the waters were protected by the Calvados shelf.
 

From Falmouth we went to Tilbury, about 25 miles from London on the Thames River, where we were put to work building two new Phoenix coffins.  I shared a tent with Chester Spinner, Bryant McGinnis, Ernest Heinricks, Wayne McLaren and Irv Anderson.  My job was to drive a truck hauling dry cement to the mixer at the construction site.  We worked hard, because we admired our skipper at Tilbury, Commander Edward Honen.  The Commander  went through our chow lines with us to make sure we got good food in return for our hard work.  He was a man’s man, and he hated goldbrickers.  If he saw a bunch of mates sitting on pots in the head, he would say “when you get up from that seat there had better be some crap in there.”

Tilbury was right in Buzz Bomb Alley and we heard a lot of them heading for London.  If the rocket motor stopped, we headed for cover, otherwise we stayed on the job.  Once in a while that happened, probably because the Germans were after a pipeline junction located in the field across the road from us that fed petroleum across the channel into France.

On October 10 we were transferred to Teignmouth, England for some rest and recreation on the Devon coast. While there we were shipped over to the New Amsterdam, the ship that was to take us back to the good old USA. After an uneventful trip we landed in Boston and went on to Camp Endicott.  We enjoyed a welcome home party, then we were given 30-day passes and I headed by train for St. Louis.  Twenty-four hours later I was home again with my family.  The leave went by in a hurry after a lot of socializing.  Before I knew it, I was back on the train to Camp Endicott.

When I got back I found out that the 108th had been broken up and mates were being put in other battalions.  I tried to get into Mr. Ablondie’s new outfit, but he told me the complement was full.  I ended up in the 1081st CBD (Construction Battalion Detachment), with Chief Trace Evans and several mates from the 108th NCB, and Mr. Via as my officer.  That made it all OK by me.  We went to school to learn about the South Pacific, and left Endicott for the west coast on 8 January, aboard a train that was a string of box cars.  The bunks in our box car were four tiers high and there was a long, sliding door with a window in it on one side and a head on one end.  We were headed for Port Hueneme, California, and we traveled via Chicago, St. Louis, Albuquerque and Needles, California. It was a five-day trip.

At Port Hueneme I was put on boiler watch, 24 hours on and 24 hours off.  I was running out of money and I had time on my hands while waiting for further orders.  I had heard that the Sierra Paper Company was hiring servicemen part-time, so I applied for a job at $1.00 and hour.  Anytime I needed extra money I went down to the Sierra Paper Company and put in an eight-hour shift and put eight bucks in my pocket.

On 25 May we shipped out for the Far East aboard the George F. Elliott.  We stopped over in Hawaii for four hours, then joined a convoy of about 20 ships.  We stopped at Eniwetok Atoll, where we were allowed off the ship to go swimming. By this time Henry Hoover and I were so bored when we got back aboard ship that we asked the ship’s crew if we could help them with their chores.  We chipped paint and painted like real sailors.  In return we got to eat their food, go to their movies and have the run of the ship.  They even washed our clothes for us!

We made one more brief stop at an island in the Marianas for another swim in shallow waters. Finally, afer 32 days, we arrived at Buckner Bay, Okinawa, on 5 July.  We set up a camp in tents about 2 miles inland, close enough to the fighting for the city of Naha that we could hear the gunfire.  Our job was to build a water purification plant.  I was assigned as a plumber, working for Gene Silliman, who was a master plumber and was also from St. Louis.  We found a spring, and ran 4" steel pipe from the spring to the area designated as the water purification plant site. Two storage tanks were built, each 40 feet in diameter and 20 feet high.  Nearby a huge galley and a heavy equipment workshop were under construction.  There were still snipers around, so we had to be careful about that, but nobody got hurt that I’m aware of.

The weather people in our outfit told us a bad storm was coming, and that we should batten down anything that might blow away.  When that storm hit it bent steel girders and took off the galley roof, even though we had strung steel cables over the roof to keep it in place.  We heard that the winds were as strong as 70 to 90 miles an hour.  The place was a mess, but we got everything put back together. So now I had gone through two bad storms in about a year, one in the English Channel and another on Okinawa.

On September 2 the Japanese formally surrendered, but we didn’t know it because we never got news until later.  Since blackouts were no longer necessary, we put up a movie screen and benches.  We even wired the tents for electricity.  On 15 November the commanding officer offered me a promotion to Chief Petty Officer if I would sign on for four more months to complete the project on Okinawa.  I thought it over, but turned it down.  I had enough points for discharge  and Mr. Valenti wanted me back home to work in his plumbing shop during the post-war building boom.  The holidays were coming up too, so I decided to go back home.  The next morning a jeep took me down to Buckner Bay, where I boarded the Lucky Lucy for the trip back home.  The trip to San Francisco took only eight days compared to the 32 days it took to reach Okinawa.

We were sent to Treasure Island to await orders.  On 5 December my name came up on the bulletin board.  I went to personnel, where they gave me a pass to board a train headed for St. Louis.  I arrived in St. Louis’ Union Station  on 7 December.  From there we were taken to Lambert Field, from where I was honorably discharged from the service on 8 December, 1945. It was four years and one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and I was happy to be home.

I settled into a really good life after the war.  I went back to work for Mr. Valenti and worked there for 15 years, counting the time I was there before the war.  I married my wife, Virginia, on May 29, 1948.  We had two girls, Barbara and Nancy.  In 1958,  I bought the business from Mr. Valenti and changed the name to the Dierkes Plumbing Company, which I operated until my retirement in ___________.

As for my service, I guess once you’re a Seabee, you’ll always be a Seabee.  I’m still involved with the 97th and 108th NCB reunions, and I still publish Beelines, a quarterly newsletter that is mailed to a list of about 300 Seabees and their surviving family members.  The only members of pierhead crew 408 who have survived to this day are Bill Van Eck, Sam Marmino and me.