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My War- Ulithi Atoll
August - November, 1945
© Harold Arnold
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My War- Ulithi Atoll August - November, 1945
© Harold Arnold
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| The Navy
sent me to the Philippines in July 1944. From there I was sent by
C-47 cargo plane to Palau and from there on a destroyer escort to Ulithi
for assignment with SLUE-34, the standard landing craft unit that serviced
the many cargo ships accumulating war supplies for the planned invasion of
Japan. Of course when I arrived thought the war technically not yet
over the final surrender negotiations were in progress and every one knew
the Japanese invasion would not be necessary.
SLCU-34 was base on Sorlen Island one of the islet that ring the huge protected Lagoon that at the time may have had 200 Cargo ships loaded with war materials and supplies. The SLCU-34 ship company was probably near 1000 men operating and maintaining the fleet of LCVP and LCM landing crafts needed to load and unload and move cargo from ship to ship. Click Here for an interesting Ulithi Web site that includes information on Ulithi including its WW II story and a NASA Shuttle picture. Also there is the story of the 1944 American occupation displacing a small Japanese weather station garrison. They put up a substantial fight that resulted in the tragic death of the young daughter of the native chief. This story is told on the linked site. On Sorlen we never saw native women and rarely men. The natives were segregated on a single islet that was strictly off limits to navy personnel. My initial assignment was in the Evaporation Station that manufactured the many thousand gallons of potable water required by the island personnel. The process was to use diesel fuel to vaporize sea water that after condensation forms near pure fresh water. I hated this work principally because my shift was the graveyard 12:00 midnight to 8:00 AM. Sleeping in the tent living units was really difficult because of the heat generated by the tropic sun. Fortunately within a few weeks I was transferred to generation station watch which is what I had been trained for and I much preferred the 4-hour on eight off shifts. There were two generator stations each with 3 100 KW Diesel driven 3 phase AC generators. I was by my self responsible for shutting down units as load declined and starting up units as load picked up in the morning. I had to keep an eye on the meters but still I remember reading the H.G. Wells "Outline of History" the 3-volumes of which I still have today since I was able to acquire them when we closed the vase a few months later.
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For
recreation on Sorlen we were limited to three activities, the beer Garden,
the Movies, and messing around the lagoon and islands in the boats.
Frankly I the beer garden did not press in my mind any where near as much
as the one at Guam where I was assigned after Ulithi. I do, however
remember it as we got 2- 12 oz cans of
Pabst Blue Ribbon or other Stateside brew each day. One reason I may not remember it, was that it was open only for an hour between maybe 5:00 and 6:00 PM. When I had watch at that time I missed it. Of course that would have been no more than 1/3 of the days. The Movie was open air with a Hollywood film old or new shown after dark every day. We sat on palm log benches. I remember watching a showing of the 1940 Gary Cooper film, "Royal Canadian Mounted Police" in rain gear in a deluge with forty mile-per-hour winds compromising the structural integrity of the screen. On the Ocean side of the Island was a sharp corral surf capable of cutting through any shoes available to us. It was not the place for swimming. On the lagoon side, the water depth made a quick droop off to real deep water just a few feet from the shore. In earlier times it would have been idea for swiming, but with several hundred ships in the lagoon each emitting its raw sewage, swimming was out of the question. This left boating as the only water related recreation. available to us. Our officers seemed to turn a blind eye to our use of the boats for our own recreational purpose. Even my group that normally had no connection to the boats had no trouble arranging the use of them. That is what we were doing |
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when these pictures were taken with a small camera belonging to one of our group. I now have about 45 of these pictures. Since the later pictures I took on Guam with my own camera were lost when my baggage disappeared from a navy baggage check station on TI, these are the only personal WWII pictures I now possess. The pictures inserted here are about a 1.5X enlargement and through the magic of the scanning software and the Photoshop editor the image detail and contrast is better than the original. All of these pictures were taken on a single afternoon during which we explored the lagoon beaching at several islets to explore and take pictures. Returning to our Sorlen Island we photographed some of the facilities there including the beer garden, the movie theater, mess hall, Water Plant, and more . These are the pictures appearing here and on the second page. After leaving the Sorlen dock we kept a sharp eye for sharks. We had heard stories of other groups shooting sharks after throwing out as bait a box of the frozen Australian ox liver that was weekly served in our mess hall. The word was that the sharks appreciated it far more than us sailors. Coming to the surface for it made the sharks an easy target from the boats. We saw no sharks and never participated in such a hunt. We each took our turn piloting the LCVP. It was a powerful craft with a single inboard diesel engine designed for landing personnel and small vehicles on an enemy beach. My turn at the wheel is shown in the first picture. I also appear in picture #2 (second from right) and in picture #3 in the center. The boat in #3 is harbor patrol craft. Two names of others in the pictrues that I remember are Alvin Aaron Baldwin from Oregon and Ralph Bearden from San Benito Texas. I am not entirely sure about the spelling of either of these last names. Baldwin or Ballwin is the short guy in the white sailor hat in pictures 3 & 4.. Bearden I think is on the right in picture #4. I had a call from Baldwin once in the late fifties. After the war he had joined the air force and when he called he was a sergeant with short class assignment in San Antonio. As it happened I was away when he first called and we never connected until he had completed his class and was about to return to his base As a result we missed meeting and lost contact. The Naval War ship in picture #5 is a destroyer, These pictures were take in October 1945, and by that time much of the ship population had already departed but some remained including this destroyer and quite a few in the background of Picture #1. Readers probably have already recognized the structure picture in #6 as the beer garden. Within a few weeks of my arrival at Ulithi the war ended and immediately we began the process of deactivating the base. within a month most of the cargo ships and returned Stateside. On Sorlen deactivation involve disposing of all of the unit equipment including the boats, machine shop equipment and tools, mess hall equipment, the generators and everything not attached to the ground. While a few of these items were returned to the States, most was 'deep sixed" in the lagoon. When I departed in mid November 1945, our island was substantially broom clean and from the deck of the LCI taking me and some 100 of my Sorlen Mates to Guam for reassignment, the lagoon appeared almost empty Click Here For More Picture (Page 2)
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Ulithi Today |
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