Kin Mason (Primary Source)

Transcript

1941 is when the US got into the war and 1942 in the spring this coach, Floyd Crutch and this is after school, gave us a complete course in first aid which we got a certificate when we finished with that. And in 1943 the State of Texas sponsored a physical fitness programme for the defence effort and wanted all the boys to be in good physical condition when they went into the service. So he set up an obstacle course on the school grounds, or on the edge of it, we used some of the high jump pits to lob hand grenades, phony hand grenades into this pit. We had some walls that we had to climb like a regular obstacle course, and he taught us marching, how to take commands and whatnot. The boys kept going into the service; our superintendent went in. Two of our men teachers, favourite teachers of mine, went into the service so they set good examples for us boys. Many of the boys quit school to go and most of us tried to finish our grade 12 before we went, but [depending] on the age of the person. So whenever... we all got into the service and were still going in and whatnot, many of us... I was not much of a letter writer but the boys that write in to our coach - he decided to get a weekly newsletter, and every week he would tell where the boys were and what they had to say and about rationing and stuff such as this, and then all that was going on at school, like the sports programmes and whatnot. As I approached the age of army or military service I was unable to get in because I’m blind in one eye, but I eventually found out that the Merchant Marine would take men like myself. So at age 17, I had just finished high school, and I went into the maritime service, Merchant Marine in the US - they call it the Merchant Navy in Canada. And they needed us in the South Pacific so instead of giving us training on the east coast they sent us to California and I was only there for a month when they assigned me to a ship in San Francisco, and we left September 1st 1944 for the South Pacific. The Dutch used to have what is now Indonesia - they called it the Dutch East Indies - and they had a big harbour which was called Hollandia. It now has an Indonesian name but at the time it was Hollandia, and it’s part of Indonesia. And we had... back and forth there we unloaded a few supplies and whatnot, and we gathered some more, but when this convoy was formed our ship was selected to carry troops. And when you form a convoy they put all the ships with troops, they put them in the very centre of the convoy, and then on either side of that line of troop ships and hospital ships they put things like oil or aeroplane fuel or gas on the ships on either side of the troops. And on the outside columns they put cargo ships, strictly cargo without personnel, for military purposes. And then the navy, of course, escorts this whole armada, if you want to call it that - there 116 ships in this particular convoy that I went in. We went up to the Philippines, to Leyte, which was now under allied control, but the Japanese would come at night and would bomb Leyte. But in the harbour they had a very vast bay there at Leyte where all the ships were - every night the navy would come around with a smoke screen and put smoke all over this harbour so at night we could go with our life jackets outside and look up through the smoke to see the search lights and hear all the noise that was going on onshore. The Japanese planes would come, but I never saw any to get shot down; it was happening maybe a mile or so from where we were so I never... we were never attacked directly. Other ships that had got there ahead of us were... some of their bows were sticking up in the harbour and whatnot; it had been a pretty rough situation before we got there. And by the time we got there, there were just these nightly raids; there was not any... we were not attacked directly.