Account of WWII by Robert John Walker Sr.

I enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve in August 1942 and went to Salt Lake and then on to San Diego for boot training. After boots, I was sent to College Station Texas to radio operators school. In the winter of 1943 I was sent to Pearl Harbor and was stationed there for two years. It was a terrible sight to look across the bay and see the old Arizona and the Pennsylvania bottom side up and knowing that there were hundreds of men still trapped and dead down in the ships. There was still a total blackout in effect and everyone kept gas masks handy at all times. Our outfit was the head communications for all the cruisers and destroyers in the Pacific and messages were copied around the clock continuously. Messages came in five letter word code groups and had to be run through a coding machine to make them readable. It was quite interesting work and I got to see a lot of the island of Oahu. We played lots of tennis and did a lot of swimming. The only bad thing which happened was that I caught double penumonia and had to stay in a naval hospital for six weeks.

Cecil came to the island with an army engineers outfit for a training period before going on to Saipan for airfield construction. I ran down his outfit and ate dinner with them and had a really good visit. I went to seem him another time and his outfit had pulled out so I went all over the navy yards and ran on to the LST he was aboard. I got to have a short visit with him and then his outfit pulled out and I never saw him again until the war was over. During the Okinawa campaign it was interesting to find out later that our outfit tore up the airfields and his outfit built them back up again.

Three other sailors and I were given the task of painting a signal tower at Pearl and we weren't overly fond of this so we weren't putting our hearts into it. The Lt. came around and gave us a shellacing and my little buddy (Tom Scanlan) from Boston said "Well if we had been truck drivers before we came into the service we would be good painters too." The Lieutenant said that we could be sent to sea you know and this little guy said yeah we know that so two days later we were at sea aboard the Columbia head for Frisco. We thought it was for a 30 day leave, but when we got to the west coast they stuck us aboard the heavy cruiser Wichita and that is where I spent the rest of the war. This same little Scanlan was quite a character. One liberty we would go ashore and have a steak and go to a move or live musical if we could find one, and the next liberty we would go ashore and he would get drunk and I would see that he got back aboard okay. It worked out pretty well. He could be a real gem or a S.O.B. An English aircraft carrier was in town, I can't remember where and we were ashore and little English sailors irritated my friend to no end. One little fellow came up and said "I say there old matey can you direct me to the Cinema." My freind told him to get to hell out of there before he batted him in the mouth. Other times he would find two sailors fighting and he would jump right in the middle of them and talk them out of the fight and have them walking away arm in arm before they left.