Bill Darlington spent two years on Okinawa, during
 the Korean War and later wrote his memoirs.

He has offered to share his account of
Navy life on Okinawa during that time.

 

Okinawa: Naha Air Base

We arrived on Okinawa, at Naha Air Base, after dark and half starved. The first order of business was to find something to eat. There was a small restaurant, in a Quonset Hut, beside the air terminal. We went in. Imagine our shock to find that our money wasn’t any good. United States greenbacks were honored the world over, except on Okinawa it seemed. We were told that only Occupation Scrip could be spent here. We didn’t have any Occupation Scrip; we might as well have been broke. But, there was a guy eating in the restaurant who was awaiting his flight back to the States and he sold us all of the Occupation Scrip that he had left. It was enough to enable all of us to eat.

As we were looking over the menu, Ross said, ”They have Italian spaghetti on here. Do you realize how far from Italy we are?” The guy at the next table threw down his fork and said, “That’s a Hell of a long way from Italian spaghetti, too.” I remember that scene as though it had only happened yesterday. I don’t remember that any of us ordered spaghetti.

We called the Mine Shop and were given transportation to the living area of the base. All living quarters were in Quonset Huts that had been built when World War II ended, just 6 years before. Six years, in that salt heavy environment, barely a quarter of a mile from the ocean, had wreaked havoc with the metal buildings. We were shown to a hut with folded up cots stacked in one corner and mattresses stacked in another area. We had to carry our own beds to the hut that we were to be living in. The hut was 40 feet long, with a door in each end. It had once had windows, but those were boarded over and permanently nailed shut. It was like living in a subway or perhaps a cave.

The next morning we were taken to the Mine Shop and introduced to everybody. We could see right off that we were in a different Navy than the one we had been introduced to in our Recruit Training Center. No two people in the shop were wearing the same uniform. All were wearing mixtures of dungarees and foul weather gear. Some wore dungaree jackets; some wore foul weather jackets. Some wore baseball type hats; others wore regulation white hats. Some wore brown field shoes; others wore Navy dress low quarters. Further, the shop was decidedly top heavy with rank. Of less than 20 people, six were Chief Petty Officers. Two of them were rated Pilots.

The shop itself was right out of a Hollywood comedy. It was in an old Quonset Hut that had once been a head/latrine. It was so dilapidated and eaten by rust that tarpaper had been nailed on the ends to try to keep out some of the weather. Boards were nailed on, here and there, to help keep the tarpaper in place. There were no windows here either; just a regular door on one end and a double door, big enough to allow trucks to enter, on the other. There were 5 or 6 big drain holes in a row down the middle of the floor and pipes where commodes and sinks had been located. The floor, of course, sloped down into the drains. Whenever we tried to roll the steel dollies, on which the mines sat, across the floor, we were sure to end up with a wheel down in a drain. Then everybody had to gather around and lift the thing back up onto the floor’s surface. The mine shop was located in the billeting area, in among the huts where everybody lived. We walked to work, about a hundred feet, each morning.

We had only been there a very short while when a typhoon devastated the island. We packed all of our equipment, which wouldn’t fit into the Mine Shop, into a warehouse on the edge of the aircraft parking ramp. Since we were the last ones to put anything into the warehouse, we had to secure the big double doors. There were timbers that dropped down into brackets on the doors and on the frame of the building on each side of
the doors. Bolts held the timbers in place. We did a good job of locking up. After the typhoon had passed, the only thing left of the warehouse was the doors and the frame around them.

I had the duty when the typhoon arrived. That meant that I had to stay in the shop, alone, while the typhoon blew a goodly portion of the base away. We had taken one truck into the shop and backed the remaining trucks up against the double doors, to keep them from being blown open. I had never been in a typhoon before and didn’t know what to expect. I learned. I spent nearly all of the time that the typhoon blew inside of the truck that we had brought into the shop, but still I could hear the roar of the wind and the sound of stuff bouncing off of the sides of the shop. Water seemed to be coming in through all of the walls. It was one of the longest nights that I ever spent.

After the typhoon had passed, we walked and rode around to see what damage had been done. Nearly all of the Ship’s Store (PX) had been blown away. The only thing left of the movie theater was the wall where the screen was located. The warehouse, of course, was gone. Vehicles and even big diesel generators had been blown over. Fortunately, none of the Quonset Huts where the men were holed up had been destroyed, although a couple of morons had caused everything in their huts to become water soaked when they opened the doors to ‘see’ the typhoon.

I remember, how could I possibly ever forget, another typhoon that we endured on Okinawa. Hours before the typhoon arrived, all of the guys who had Okinawan girl friends could be seen going off across the paddies and along the paths through the waist high Kunai grass, toward Oroku Village. They would spend the entire time of the typhoon’s rampage with the girls and their families.

The drinkers in the hut hurried off to stock up on wine, beer, and whiskey to help them through the long, nightmarish ordeal ahead. I don’t know why typhoons always seem to be at their worst during the hours of darkness. All work was, of course, suspended until the typhoon had passed. The guys had nothing to do but drink, and that they started doing as soon as they were excused from duty.

For those of us who stayed in the hut, and didn’t get drunk, the real nightmare was just beginning. In the dead of night, with the wind roaring outside and drunks yelling and cussing inside, it was impossible to sleep. The lights remained on all night, of course.

Fights started to break out. Whiskey bottles and even heavy chairs were thrown across the hut. A couple of the sober, more responsible, men tried to maintain some sort of order but they soon realized that it was a hopeless task and gave up, letting the battle rage until most of the drunks finally passed out. The typhoon kept us locked in all through the hours of darkness. With no sleep the day before the typhoon arrived, and no sleep during the night of hell that we had gone through, we were exhausted

A new Mine Shop was being built, near the air terminal, when Ross, Saxon, Hill, and I arrived on Okinawa. Shortly after our arrival, we moved into the new shop. This time, there were no drain holes in the floor. The workbenches and storage cabinets were constructed of Philippine mahogany. There was a 10-foot high chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, all around the entire compound, which consisted of three Quonset Huts, a shed containing a 75 Kilowatt diesel powered generator for emergencies, and a building intended for working on mine firing mechanisms. It was never used for that though; it was the office of the unit’s commanding officer. This last building had a big, powerful air conditioner, one of just a few on the entire island.

The Mine Shop compound was lighted at night by floodlights, mounted on tall poles all around the compound and by lights on the buildings themselves. One great advantage of working on secret weapons, inside a restricted area with a fence and a gate that we had to unlock to let anyone in, was the fact that we could go to the shop and enjoy complete privacy from anyone whom we did not want to see. On weekends, when we were off duty, we would go and use the commander’s office and typewriter to write home. It was quiet and private, unlike the noise and activity that you usually found in the huts.

There was always somebody on duty in the Mine Shop compound. The man who was scheduled for duty slept in the office beside the safe that contained secret documents. Duty ran for 24 hours, from 8:00 one day to 8:00 the next day. The person on duty wore a .38 caliber pistol, in a shoulder holster, to designate his status. He was responsible for security of the compound while his duty tour lasted. There were other minor duties also, like driving the truck to the living quarters and chow hall each morning to bring the troops to work.

There was absolutely no work for the people assigned to the Mine Shop except for routine housekeeping of the shop and compound and occasionally testing a mine or two. We invented all sorts of games to pass the time. We had a Halicrafter Transoceanic radio. To give it more range to pick up broadcasts, we strung an antennae around the top of the poles that supported the floodlights. The antenna was made from copper cable intended for use on moored Mark 6 mines (which we didn’t have). It worked so well that we used to listen to broadcasts of Cricket matches, coming from Australia.

One person would wear a set of earphones. He would listen to the disc jockey tell the name of the next tune/song, the name of the band and the singer, if there was one. He would write these all down on a sheet of paper. Then, he would turn on the speaker and the others would listen and set down their guesses as to all three categories. After a predetermined number of tunes/songs had been played, a winner was determined.
We listened to Japanese language lessons on the radio. Mrs. Dorothy Kashawahara had a program every day that was supposed to make us fluent in ‘Nihongo’ (Japanese).

She could be one of the most irritating persons on earth. She would say, “Today our word is kimono. Repeat that, Kimono. Again, Kimono. Once more, Kimono”. Over and over she asked you to repeat the word. But, it worked. We did learn to speak a few words of Japanese.

Speaking even a word or two of Japanese (Okinawan was better), made it much easier to get along with the local folks. It let them know that you respected them and their culture and that you were trying to learn to fit in with them, rather than expecting them to adapt to your way of life. Incidentally, there is a difference in the Japanese and Okinawan languages. For instance, in Japanese, a girl is Josan. In the Okinawan language, she is Neisan. San means Mr., Mrs., or Miss, depending on whom you are talking to. Peggy San would be Mrs. Peggy. Most of us, especially those who came from the southern United States, tended to be a bit careless in our pronunciation of Japanese words. That could lead to our confusing people. It also proved to be hilarious at times to the locals with whom we were trying to speak. Word meanings change with a slightly different pronunciation or a different inflection to the word.

For most of us, Okinawa was our first experience with a different culture. We took to it like a duck takes to water. The food was an especially good bridge across the culture gap for us. We ate anything that the locals put before us. We might not eat it twice, but we tried everything. Squid was not a favorite of mine. I rather liked the taste but it seemed to get bigger and bigger as I chewed it. Eventually, there was the problem of what to do with it. It had grown too large to swallow.

Compared to us, the Okinawans had a very limited diet. It wasn’t that they didn’t like other foods or wouldn’t eat them. The war (World War II) had only ended six years earlier and the island was still devastated. It couldn’t produce more than the bare necessities. Those locals who had jobs working in the chow halls were given the same foods that the US military ate. They seemed to enjoy it. They also took most of it home to their families.

All but a few of the houses in the civilian areas were one story and unpainted. The interior walls could be slid around to provide privacy or moved back to make one big room. The floors, except in the cooking area which had no floor, were made of tatami (woven straw) mats. You had to take your shoes off when entering a house. The toilet was a hole in the floor, under which was a bucket or box that was periodically emptied into a community pit; the pit furnished fertilizer for the paddies and fields. Every home contained a shrine, a holy place for prayers. There were no beds, as westerners know them. People slept on the floor, on and under thick, heavy mats and quilts that were hidden away in small closets during the day.

The houses were heated, for the most part, by a sunken hibachi that burned charcoal. There was a pit in the middle of the floor, in which the hibachi sat. The pit was covered in summer when not needed. People sat around with their feet down in the shallow pit. A table, much like a coffee table, but with shorter legs, sat over the hole and covered the legs of those around the table. A blanket or quilt covered the table and those seated around the table up to their waists. The blanket trapped the heat of the hibachi to keep the feet and legs of those who sat around the table warm. It was a very ‘together’ thing and it made a perfect way to spend an evening talking. I only experienced it a couple of times but enjoyed it very much when I did.

The kitchens had bare dirt floors. Their stoves were very primitive and burned wood or charcoal. Sparks and burning embers fell out of them. In a wooden house, with paper privacy screens and a grass roof (which many of them had), the last thing that you needed was a combustible floor.

Some houses had multiple rooms. Some houses had terra cotta roof shingles. But by and large, they were as I have described them.

There were many small bars. They catered almost exclusively to the American military; the locals didn’t have the money to frequent bars. With their limited diet and the low cost of things at that time, a bar owner could earn his next day’s food by selling 2 or 3 bottles of beer. And they made some excellent beers.

Most of us drank sake. To be appreciated, sake must be heated to the proper degree. This develops the taste and enhances the ‘wallop’ of the stuff. Looking back over a half century, it seems that I often sat and drank a gallon or more of heated sake without any apparent effect to my state of mind or physical abilities. But, when I got up and walked away, I would walk maybe a block or two and go out as though shot in the head. It was as though a switch had been thrown, turning off my brain. I continued to walk, but most of the time I didn’t know that I was walking, or where I was going.

Another thing that we drank, usually when we were guests in someone’s home, was green tea. The tea usually had tiny petals of the jasmine flower floating in it. There was an old couple who lived in Oroku Village, whom Ross and I visited from time to time, who served us green jasmine tea. It was not a favorite drink of mine. I found it more than a little bitter.

There was one unwritten law that nobody wanted to break. You did not drink the water, except on base where you could be sure of its purity. There were several reasons for this. One was that the ground itself was full of decaying bodies and pieces of bodies from the war. Another was the human fertilizer that the Okinawans spread all over their paddies and fields. The rain washed all of this down into the ground and made springs and wells unfit for use unless the water was boiled. That’s why we drank beer, sake and green tea; not that we really needed an excuse.

I don’t remember many restaurants; in fact I only remember one. At Koza Four Corners, an intersection where two main roads met near Kadena Air Base, a restaurant, calling itself ‘Del Monico’s’, was located. I never ate there. The reason there were no restaurants is simple; there was no food to sell.

The chow hall food was good, most of the time. I remember one time when we had dehydrated potatoes, powdered eggs, hamburger, and little else for over a month. The Navy drew its rations from an Army ration breakdown point and that was all that our cooks could get. They were ingenious in their preparation of the food that they did get. We would have scrambled eggs and creamed beef on toast for breakfast (how else can you serve powdered eggs?) For lunch it would be meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Supper was Salisbury steak and potato pancakes or hash browns. They juggled the menu around some but that, basically, was the way it went every day.

Once, we were going through the chow line and they were serving Australian mutton. Mutton is supposed to be a favorite in the Australian and British armed forces, but it isn’t in ours. Ross got a piece of meat with a tail, long and skinny, reminiscent of a rats tail, attached to it. Everybody at the table had some theory to offer, as to what exactly Ross was eating. Men who swore that they were sheepherders of long standing claimed that mutton did not possess such a tail. Ross just tucked the tail under the meat, where he couldn’t see it, and went on eating as though there was nothing different from any other meal.

I seem to be on food; I will relate another favorite memory of mine. One weekend, some of us had taken the truck assigned to the Mine Shop and toured the north end of the island. We were late coming back and suppertime caught us north of Naha and on the opposite side of the island from home. We stopped at an Army base and asked the NCOIC of an Army Regimental Mess if he would feed us.

Not only did he feed us, he treated us like honored guests. We were seated at a four-man table, with a tablecloth on it. In our mess hall we ate at long tables that seated 10 or 12 and there were no tablecloths, just grease-stained wood. There was a flower in a bud vase on the table. I don’t think that the people who ran our chow hall would have known what a bud vase was.

We had finished eating a great meal; the food looked and tasted wonderful. There was a big bowl of homemade cookies on the table. As we sat talking to the Mess Sergeant, he reached over and got a cookie and nibbled on it. Then he said, “I told them that when they messed up like this to throw these things out.” We had been eating the cookies and thought that they were fine. He took the whole bowl and left. He returned with a big paper bag full of cookies and told us to take them with us when we left. We had never had cookies, good or bad, at our chow hall.

Right in the middle of the wreckage of war, with the bare essentials of comfort, we had been given a glimpse of what one man, who really tried, could accomplish. He had shown us a touch of class where we never expected it to be. Now, a half century later, I remember him, even though we only met once and for only an hour or so.
Chuck Raley, from Pickton, Texas, was one of the Minemen assigned to our shop. He had served in the Philippines and while there had learned about balutes. A balute is a duck egg, taken from the mother just hours before it is supposed to hatch. Then, it is allowed to ‘age’. Some claim for a year or more but I don’t think that it is quite that long. It is considered to be a delicacy by most Oriental peoples. It was something of a macho thing, to eat one, among us Americans.

Chuck had gotten a balute while in one of the villages. He was determined to eat it and, by so doing, to gain prestige in the eyes of the rest of us in the shop. He made everybody leave the shop while he partook of this gourmet treat. We stayed outside for ten minutes or more. When we came back in, Chuck was throwing up in a garbage can and poking, with a stick, a perfectly formed, fully feathered, little duck that was in the bottom of the can.

None of us thought any the worse of him because he couldn’t get the duck down. Truth to tell, none of us could have either. Chuck was the only one who ever tried that I know of.

Ross and I used to visit an old couple, he was around 70, and she was in her 50s, who lived in Oroku Village. Papa San would serve us something that still makes me shudder when I think of it.

He would retrieve a dark brown chunk of something from under some clothes in the corner of the room. It looked, for all the world, like a big piece of a rotten tree stump. Then he shaved off some very thin slivers, with a wood plane, and poured a little soy sauce over it. This he served to us and we ate it. He told us that it was dried fish. It might have been.

Hill drank. He drank a lot. He drank daily, from sun up until he fell asleep at night. One time he developed a terrible case of athlete’s foot. The hot, moist climate of Okinawa, in summer, was perfect for the growth of fungus. My ears haven’t produced wax since I was 20 years old, because of a fungus infection that I contracted on Okinawa.

Hill went to Sick Call at the dispensary but there wasn’t anything that they could do except paint his feet purple and give him a slip that allowed him to wear open shower shoes, so that his feet could stay dry and less hospitable to fungus.

He started coming to work (wearing his shower shoes) carrying a big bottle, with a label on it that said it contained Listerine. He had gotten the bottle from who knows where. Several times a day, in plain sight where he could be seen, he would sit down and pull off his shower shoes. Then he would proceed to pour a little from the bottle onto his feet and rub it in well. When nobody could see him, he would take a long, deep drink from the bottle. He had filled the bottle with sake. Soon, all of us except our commander, and the Chief Petty Officer in Charge, knew what was going on. Those two never did get wise to what Hill was doing.

Somebody, I can’t remember who, bought a pig, a real pig. We built it a pen in the corner of our compound and fed it corn flakes and milk that we stole from the chow hall. When it was about 60 pounds or so, we paid an Okinawan to butcher it for us.

Chief Brown (Ross called him ’Swampwater’) was from Louisiana and he claimed to be an expert barbecue chef. We turned the pig over to him. He had us dig a pit near the Mine Shop compound and he roasted the pig in that. It was delicious. He really was an expert.

Ross, at that time, wore a big handle bar mustache. It, like his hair, was red. He was very muscular. He had gotten an entire leg from the pig and was eating it like a big drumstick. He had grease from the pig all over his face and hands. He was wearing only his shoes and dungaree pants. He looked, for all the world, like some barbarian from medieval Europe or perhaps a Viking that you might see in a movie. Whichever you thought him to be, there could be no doubt what so ever that he was thoroughly enjoying that pig’s leg.

This was during the Korean War. Big formations of B-29s would come up from Guam and circle while the B-29s from Kadena Air Base, on Okinawa, joined them.

Then the combined air armada would drone away toward Korea. Once, one that had been disabled crashed into the sea near Naha. Several days later, having somehow remained afloat, it washed ashore near the north end of the runway at Naha Air Base.

It was decided that we would paint the interior of our new shop. Chief Wiggins, at that time our Petty Officer in Charge, went to scrounge some paint. He came back with some 5 gallon buckets of blue aircraft lacquer and some white lead paint used on ships. Obviously, we couldn’t take 5 gallon buckets up on step ladders while we painted, so he sent Ross and I to the dump to find and bring back some smaller cans to put the paint in.

When we arrived at the dump, there were several Army six by six trucks unloading unopened cases of outdated C rations. Case after case went into a big, growing pile. Ross and I just sat and watched what was going on. Nothing was wrong with the rations except that the shelf life date had expired. There were cases and cases of good food being thrown away; food that was, to be honest, better than what we were often fed in the chow hall. It was an opportunity that we could not pass up.

We waited until the Army trucks left, then we started loading the C ration cases onto our own truck. We did remember to get the paint cans. We took the rations back to our shop. Then we all sat around opening the cases of rations. We divided everything into piles of like items, that is, all cans of ham steaks went into one pile; all cans of Salisbury Steaks went into another pile; etc. After we had opened and separated all of the cases of food; we stored it in the closets where we kept our electronic test sets. The rations contained ham steaks; Salisbury Steaks; a kind of stew; some hard crackers; small cans of jam of different flavors; cigarettes, the old Lucky Strikes, in the green packs; chewing gum; matches, toilet paper; and even can openers.

We had a hot plate and a coffee pot in the shop. Since the rations were far better food than we sometimes got in the chow hall, we ate there in the shop many times until the rations were gone.

Incidentally, the aircraft lacquer was not suited for painting fiberboard walls. The morning after we painted the shop, we came to work to find the dried paint rolled up, like wallpaper, where it had peeled itself off of the walls and rolled down onto the tops of the workbenches.

There was a transformer installation in our compound, five electrical transformers sitting on a wooden platform just above the ground. There was an eight-foot chain link fence around the transformers, to keep careless folks from being fried by accidental contact with the bus bars.

It had been raining heavily and water was standing in a deep puddle under the platform on which the transformers sat. It was decided that two of us, Pop Warner and myself, would shovel sand under the platform in order to eliminate the standing water.

We were shoveling away when I turned to speak to Pop and made contact with the input bus bar on the transformers. I had just looked at his face when it appeared to fly apart, much as if you had been looking into a mirror when it shattered.

I could hear the electricity running through my body, a deep hum. There was no pain, no feeling at all. I fell to the ground but I didn’t feel that, either. I never did completely lose consciousness and remember thinking that if I did I would never awaken. I was struggling to regain my feet but couldn’t seem to do so. I became aware of a great pain in my chest. I later learned that the pain and my inability to regain my feet were caused by one of the others kicking me back down onto the ground, to keep me from standing up and falling over onto the bus bars.

I was taken to the Navy dispensary, where the burns on my back were treated and I was kept under observation for about six hours.

I had been shocked by the input voltage, which was very high, 43,000 volts, but which carried practically no amperage. The transformers dropped the voltage down but converted it to a higher amperage so that it could be used in our shop. Had I touched the output side of the transformer, I would have died.

During the rainy season, our new shop was flooded when the swampy land next to our compound overflowed. Clear water was running in one end of the shop and out the other. Small fish, which looked a lot like sunfish or crappies, were actually swimming around in our shop.

We got an empty 5 gallon acid bottle (the acid was used in the batteries of homing torpedoes), rinsed it out, filled it with fresh water, and proceeded to catch several of the fish and put them in the bottle. The fish soon turned snow white, turned over onto their  backs, and floated to the top of the bottle. I guess that we didn’t do a good enough job of rinsing the acid out of the bottle.

Several of us took the truck assigned to the Mine Shop and went sight seeing in the north of the island. We got up into the hills, driving along dirt roads that were much too narrow for our truck. The slightest mistake on the part of our driver would have sent us tumbling down the mountain. Roland Stockwell was afraid. He was probably the only one of us with enough sense to realize the danger that we were in.

As we made our way along the narrow dirt road, the edge of the road was actually crumbling under the weight of the truck. Roland kept repeating, over and over, “I tell you men, we’ll all be killed”. The rest of us thought that was hilarious.

We were lost. We had no idea where we were or how to get down out of the woods where we found ourselves. Finally, we spotted an old man, a charcoal maker, with a bundle of wood that he had cut. Ross had the driver to stop the truck. Then he asked me for my cigarettes and lighter.

Ross went over to the old man. They bowed to each other. Ross offered him a cigarette and lighted it for him. They squatted down beside the road, Okinawa style. Ross began to talk and to use a sort of sign language. The old man began to draw in the dirt with a stick and to explain his drawing. Finally, the two of them stood up and bowed again. Then, Ross came back to the truck and said that he knew where we were and how we must go to get home. He took us straight out of the mountains and we made it home with no more problems.

 

 

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