Page 137 - Anthology

AWARDS, CITATIONS AND CAMPAIGN RIBBONS

Precedence of awards is from top to bottom, left to right
Combat Action Ribbon - American Defense Service Medal (with Fleet clasp)
American Campaign Medal - Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal (4) - World War II Victory Medal

I served aboard the USS Hunter Leggett (APA-14); a Harris-class attack transport ship. Hunter Liggett
and her US Coast Guard crew were ordered to the Pacific in April 1942. We departed Norfolk, Virginia, on
9 April 1942 and stopped at the Panama Canal Zone and Tongatapu, the main island of the Kingdom of
Tonga. Then we moved on to Wellington, New Zealand. We arrived on Wellington on 28 May 1942. We
arrived off Guadalcanal the night of 6 August 1942. We were assigned to the third wave of the assault.
We landed at Lunga Beach and sent Higgins boats to aid in the initial landings on 7 August 1942.

Before our landings, the Navy Battleships lobbed artillery shells on the island. When we got close, they
stopped. During the first hour, I thought it was going to be easy. We thought we were going to clean
house. We actually thought there was nothing left. But I started seeing Marines getting hit all around me.
We were getting hit by 240mm Japanese mortar fire coming in on us from all around. When those rounds
hit, they would throw you up into the air and when you hit the ground, they practically buried you in the
dirt. We had wounded and dead Marines; I didn’t, at first see any of them killed. I braced up. I remember
saying to myself: This is war; this is not a game, I’m in a war! I got my head together and told myself to
smarten up.

What went wrong was that we didn’t expect the Japanese to have those 240mm mortars on that ledge.
When those big shells exploded, man alive, they just blew everything apart.

Japanese Type 45 / 240 mm Howitzer

It took me less than an hour to get my senses back. I saw men all around me wounded and killed. I
knew I was in danger. I lost a lot of friends that day; I can’t remember now just how many, but it was a lot.
I was not physically injured – by shrapnel, that is. But, a 500-pound bomb exploded less than a hundred
feet from me, and I was thrown into the air and hit the ground so hard that I could not move, hear, or think
straight for quite some time. I got out of it and that is what really counted; at the end of that encounter
there was no celebrating. We were tired and thankful to be alive.

I stayed on the island for five months.