Interview on January 29, 2000, with H. Dale Thompson, Seaman First Class, Gunner’s Mate, Master of Arms, LCS (L)-66, Flight Cadet, United States Navy, 1943-1946.
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I was working at Union Camp Shipyards in Savannah on December 7, 1941. After I graduated from Adrian High School in May of 1940, I went to Georgia Teacher’s College, now Georgia Southern to play baseball and football. I played there one year and then dropped out. I went to Savannah to work so that I could build up some money to try to go to bigger college to play ball.
I had been there for about four months. My duty on that day was to collect water samples from the runoff water from the paper mill. When I heard the news of the war, I went the next day to sign up. They said that I was too young. I eventually enlisted in the Navy. I wanted to fly airplanes.
I entered active service early in 1943 when I was sent to Navy Pre-flight School at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. One week before graduation, I was injured in a soccer game. I was taken directly from the soccer field to the hospital. The VA hospital was then serving the Navy Pre-flight School. I spent two weeks in the hospital and was then relieved from my duty at flight school. The doctors determined that I was not able to travel. So I stayed there for an extra 12 weeks. While I was there they found out that I had one year of college and that I could keep things organized, so I spent ten of those twelve weeks as the deck officer of the day. Even though we were at a college, they ran the hospital just like they would a ship. I learned a lot there about the management of a ship.
When my class finished, they sent me to Mercer University to Flight Training School. After three weeks I developed a stability problem with my ears and balance. I had gathered 12 to 14 hours of flight training out at the airfield near Camp Wheeler. We went out there once a day for flight training. They called me in for a physical and sent me to Charleston, S.C. to look at my ear problem, which was connected with my injury. After twelve to fourteen weeks in the hospital there, they decided that I could not fly any more due to the sinus and ear damage and my neck due to my injury.
I was given the chance to resign and transfer to another Navy unit. If I had outright resigned, I would have been eligible for the draft, you know.
So when I got to boot camp, they saw that I had the flight training and I was passed on and transferred to Ft. Pierce, Florida at the Underwater Demolition School. They never said this to me or to anyone else of us, but we got the idea that the Navy thought that we were just a bunch of misfits. I was assigned to a gunnery class and a demolition class while we were there. We spent six weeks reopening and removing the ship from the inlet at Stewart, Florida and the one at Vero Beach.
The Navy had hauled a lot of junk and stuff in there to keep the enemy from slipping in there and attacking. While I was in Ft. Pierce I played football with the Navy team. They gathered up all of that had played football before and put us on the team. I played against a fellow named Guinn “Big Boy Williams.” He was a cowboy star in the movies. I don’t remember who he played, Tampa, or some other base around. When we completed our training in three or four months, I don’t remember exactly how long, we were sent to Solomons, Maryland. While I in Maryland, a fellow named Elbie Fletcher was playing baseball for the Navy there, but I didn’t ever play ball with or against him.
We were sent there to begin forming a crew for a ship. We had a gunnery crew and when we got there we met with a radio crew and other crews. We were assigned to the ship, LCS (L)-66.
I asked, “what does the name LCS mean?” I was told it meant Landing Craft Support. We rode in troop trains to Portland, Oregon. I think the whole train was a troop train. We boarded the ship at Portland and started toward San Pedro, California to join the fleet. They had called us since we had many highly trained personnel. While we were there, some of us were sent to San Francisco to help with the SP (Shore Patrol) against the “zoot-suiters” who were causing a lot of problems there. The chief in charge of the Shore Patrol asked me what our crew was trained in. I told him that we were trained in demolition. He had ideas that there were some places that were having regular trouble.
He sent eight of us to these places and told us that he would be glad to see these places destroyed - but only during the confusion of fights in the bars. There was some confusion as to what happened among the authorities. The chief knew better and told us that.
When we got to San Diego, we ran out on three or four trips toward the islands out there and fired our guns at the firing range. From there we went to Pearl Harbor to meet the rest of the fleet. We were moving fast. When I went into the Pacific after I had resigned from the Navy Air Cadet program, I came onboard as a Seaman First Class, but because of my training in flight school, I was Master of Arms aboard the ship.
Basically the Master of Arms was in care of the crew - to make sure the crew was supposed to be where they were supposed to be at every shift and watch change.
I was just below the executive officer in charge of discipline, although I was outranked by most of the crew. I kept that job until I left the ship. E.M. Eakin was our Captain. Mr. Haines was our executive officer. Mr. Eakin and Mr. Haines were mustangs. They had once been chief petty officers and had been promoted to officers. Mr. Eakin returned to the states after the war and served at the Reserve Post at Macon, where I served while at Mercer.
I was a gunner on the ship on one of the twin 40s. That LCS had three twin 40s; one on the bow, one in the midship, and one on the fantail. We had four 20mm anti-aircraft guns, two on each side. In the center of the ship next to the gun, we had eight rocket launchers that held ten four-inch rockets each. The Chief Gunner’s Mate was Gordon. Gordon was an alcoholic. When he was sober, he was as good as they came. When he was drinking, the captain would send him back to the fantail and let him keep the birds fed. Many times when he was feeding the birds, I was doing the Chief’s job.
We were sent out to a cross-roads islands out from Hawaii. We passed Guam on the way. We went toward Iwo Jima. Many of us in the Navy thought that we should not be there. The Navy was strong against attacking Iwo Jima. We thought that we should have by-passed it and starved the Japanese do death. They were dug in caves there and had underground railways to move their men.
One General went by there and cabled back not to attack. Since the LCS-66 was the flagship, our ship got all of the messages to the group commander, Commander Voglin, who was stationed on our ship. As we went by Iwo Jima, Commander Voglin ordered us to fire everything we had on the island, except for a ten percent reserve that we had to keep. We went on to the Aleutian Islands to refuel and resupply. Admiral Halsey came by the next day and got the same message. McArthur decided to attack. We were over there as an escort ship to provide anti-aircraft support. We had caught a shell in one of our screws and had to go to Guam to get it fixed. We didn’t stay there long.
When we got to Okinawa, the Navy had scouts and raiders. They were more highly trained than our personnel were, but they didn’t have the underwater diving teams we did. So ten of our people were assigned as a landing crew. When we came in toward the shore, the Japs had a bad habit of sinking anything they could to stop the amphibious craft from coming ashore. We dove down and blew up a lot of those ships. Sometimes we got help by tying lines to destroyers and letting them pull out the wrecks. We kept our landing crew active until we left, because we could not always get the scouts and raiders to go in. We worked with the Marines on these missions. We got to Okinawa the day after Ernie Pyle was killed there. He was a writer and it was like he committed suicide by going into action with the Marines to Ie Shima.
If we were not directly involved in cleaning out a snag or something in the harbors around the small islands, we spent most of our days on Roger Peter 6 and Roger Peter 15. These were code names for Radar Picket Zones 6 and 15. Radar Pickets were set up with two or three destroyers, usually two, which would move on a course for eight miles and reverse course for eight miles. We were there to stop the Kamikaze Japanese pilots from coming in toward the island. They would come in low and usually alone. That’s how we got a lot of them. I am not bragging, but we shot down a lot of them, maybe the most of any group in the fleet. We got as many as five or six a day. Our ship was slower. They had two of us on each side of the destroyer as anti-aircraft batteries. Our ship was equipped with radar to pick up airplanes. I didn’t have sonar to pick up submarines, because we didn’t draw enough water so that any torpedoes would go under us. The destroyers had sonar to pick up torpedoes.
Roger Peter 15 was closest to the island of Japan. We got most of the flak from them and we got a lot of them. LCS-66 was the flagship for the group that had twenty-four LCSs under the command of Commander Voglin. Voglin had graduated from the Naval Academy but had resigned from active duty and served in the Naval Reserve. He was a president at Dunn and Bradstreet in New York. It was because of his Navy training that we got most flak. Some of those LCSs that were destroyed at Okinawa were in our group.
Every four days, we would get relieved to come back to shore for refueling. The tankers refueled the submarines in the ocean. A lot of the time when we got back to the island we were sent to the airports to work as demolition teams. If the Air Force had any problems with unexploded Kamikaze bombs. Although most of them were duds, the Air Force didn’t want to run over anything on the runways. Gordon and me would help them. We policed the areas we had taken and removed any bombs. When the Kamikaze problem came under control, Commander Voglin sent our ship and five others into Buckner Bay. It had been named for a General who was killed in the war. We were sent there to clean out the small islands around the bay from Okinawa. There were still some people there.
Our ship was real lucky in a sense. We had a second class seaman, who by the way never graduated from high school. He grew up in the international farm community of Tampa, Florida. Everywhere we went in all of the islands; the Philippines, Japan, China, Perez could speak their tongue. Mr. Voglin would not let him get away and we all kept it a secret.
I kind of sewed it up like I would a baseball glove. We got Jones back to the hospital ship. The doctor asked the pharmacist mate if he treated the wound. Someone said, “hell no, he fainted.” They told him that I did it. After a few days, Jones got better and was able to use his hand like normal.
When we got to the islands with our rocket launchers we did better than they did in Europe. They had tried it over there, but it didn’t work because they could not get in as close to the shore as we could. We could go to the shore line and if we got stuck, the Captain would send four men over the side, who knew what they were doing, to pump sea water to wash out the sand from around the bow.
One morning Commander Voglin came to us. He told us that there was a group of Japanese soldiers on a ridge and asked us “did we want to warm up their breakfast?” We fired our rocket launchers and guns in there. The next day the Army told us that there were over three hundred dead Japanese soldiers up there. Our ship got all of them.
One day we got a flash message from a another ship. I came from a man named Hubert Moore. We called him “Pig” Moore. “Pig” lived near us and lived across from the store in a house owned by my daddy in the 1960s. The message said “Welcome to the Shooting Gallery!”
Because I had been discharged from the Air Cadet program and resigned from the Naval Air Corps, I got orders on July 31, 1945 to report to flight school at the University of Georgia to see if I could fly again. When I left the Pacific, I thought that the war would last another one hundred years. We thought that we would have to invade the island of Japan and in China and that the Japanese would fight to the last man. On the day they dropped the first atomic bomb, August 6, 1945, I was near an island between the Philippines and Pearl Harbor. We were told that the war was about over, but that night the Japanese threw two torpedoes at us. I was ordered to return to the states by the first available transportation. When I arrived in San Diego around Labor Day weekend of 1945, I got to go to a show. Mr. Wilkes, who was a lieutenant on our ship, was a son-in-law of a man, who was president of a local branch of the Bank of America. I went with some of Mr. Wolfe’s family to see a show with Veronica Lake, the movie star in it. When I was introduced to her, she liked my southern talk, and asked me to dance with her. I wanted to go on a plane, but I ended up on a slow damn cargo ship. I stayed at the University of Georgia about eight weeks before
it closed. Mamma and Daddy came up to visit me there. I was sent to Iowa Pre-Flight School at the University of Iowa at Iowa City. That was some of the most beautiful country I had ever seen. I took some college courses there. From there I shipped off to Flight School at Corpus Christi, Texas.
I lacked twenty hours of flight time to graduate from flight school. I had finished most of my training except the flight hours. At the time, the head of the flight school at Corpus Christi was a Marine Colonel who had been a ace war hero. The Navy issued an order that all men less than 26 years old to be commissioned as Ensigns. We would have to sign up to extend our time or sign up in the Naval Reserve for four years on active duty. I asked for permission to see the commanding officer of the base. I went in and told the Chief the problem I had. He said, “you have got to do one or the other.” I said, “Excuse me, Chief, but I don’t have to do a damn thing.” The Marine colonel came out of his office and said, “What’s all this big talk out here?” I said, “Colonel, they are discharging men with fifty six points and I have fifty nine.” I told him, “I have been accepted to Mercer University Law School on June 10, 1946.” He said, “The Hell you say!” “Where did you get 59 points.” I told him, “ I was covering him out there on Roger Peter 15 and Roger Peter 6.” He
tried to get Washington to waive the requirement for re-enlistment, but they wouldn’t.
I was sent to Great Lakes Naval Training Center to be discharged. I wanted to go to Seattle, but I went to Great Lakes instead. After I was at Mercer for six months, the school decided that it would be mandatory for us to take R.O.T.C., but I was in the Navy Reserve for four years. I spent fifteen days at Yorktown at the Mine and Warfare School between Spring and Summer quarters. I also went to Jacksonville and Pensacola Naval Air Station for fifteen days. I was dealing with the aircraft there, not flying , but looking after the planes.
The rest of my war experience came in February of 1950. I had come to Dublin in Sept. 1949 after I passed the bar. I was married in December of 1949. The War Department ordered me to report to Charleston, South Carolina to report for duty and eventually I was to go to Korea. I contacted Cong. Carl Vinson’s office to help me. Cong. Vinson had always kept up with me. I got the order rescinded since I was only obligated to serve until May of 1950.
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