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Dear Dona 12

Page 12

Closing the Ring

Landing Ship Tank was the official designation for the ship your dad traveled on to Luzon. The Navy thought that the name was adequate, they didn’t believe they deserved an official name such as those given to “Real” fighting ships. Sailors of course, being very young and with a patented sense of irreverence simply called them Large Slow Targets. Nearly forty were lost during the war so the swabs were right on the mark.

Disembarking from a large slow target, Lingayen Gulf Phillipines. US Navy Photo.

MacArthurs army charged down highway 55 towards the City of Manila. General Sasaki had chosen to leave only a few units along the 224 miles of the fertile Cagayan valley that runs down the center of Luzon. They convoys of American troops sped past Tarlac City, Angeles, San Fernando to Valenzuela on the outskirts of Manila proper. Though the allies had declared Manila an open city and had planned to bypass it. The Japanese were determined to defend it.

In the run down the valley, Some of the major guerrilla groups materialized out of the Corderillas and joined the regular tropps of the Eleventh and sixth corps. Groups led by Ramon Mafsaysay, future president of the Phillipine Republic, Russell Volckmann who was a West Point Graduate and had escaped into the mountains in December 1941 and led a guerrilla force of over 22,000 men*. Robert Lapham was a reserve Lieutenant in the 45th Regiment, Philippine Scouts and escaped into the jungle just before the fall of Bataan in 1942. Considered the most disciplined and successful of the guerrilla groups he moved into the Zimbales mountains where his 13,000 fighters fought with General Walter Kruegers sixth army.**

MacArthur ordered your dad’s team to Zimbales province where they were to be stationed in Olongapo City on Subic Bay. Subic was to be one of the prime the anchorages for the Navy as the Allies prepared for the invasion of Japan. By early 1945 the Navy operated over 6.700 ships of all types and Harbors like Subic and Manila Bay were essential to provisioning and maintenance.

Arriving at a large permanent base the team would have had the opportunity for the first time since landing on Luzon to strip off their filthy uniforms, shave and be relatively safe. For the first time in a long while the chances of being killed or wounded by artillery, Japanese bombers or snipers was behind them. For perhaps the first time your dad could stand up straight without fear of being killed. One MIS soldier said that when he moved into the Quonset hut he was to live in he was reminded that the slamming of the screen doors caused him to stand there and repeatedly open and close it because it reminded him of home so. He said it made him literally weak in the knees.

Hilo must have looked out at the country they were traveling and been reminded of his home in California. The land was gentle and planted in crops tended by families who lived on it. The feral and disturbingly inhospitable jungle, the Green Hell he and his friends had lived in for two years was replaced by a land more familiar to the farm boy from Arroyo Grande.

The island was such that a war of maneuver, where overwhelming numbers of troops and war machinery such as tanks an aircraft gave the allies a great advantage. American industry helped to turn the tide. I read of a German soldier captured in France asking his captors. “Where are your horses?” The Germans moved by horse drawn vehicles and had never dreamed of the American ability to produce. The Japanese Imperial army was equally amazed.

Highway South to Manila. War Department 1945.

The job of the MIS was to put together as much information as they could for the planners of the coming invasion of Japan proper. Captured documents, radio intercepts, military orders, maps and personal letters were to be collated in order to locate as precisely as possible every installation, road, railroad, landing strip In the islands. They even knew the home addresses of individual officers and enlisted men. It was a monumental task.

No longer suspect, Military Intelligence had long proved its worth. The battle of Midway, Guadalcanal, the island hoping campaign, MacArthurs drive up the southwest Pacific, The ambush of Admiral Yamamoto, Merrills Marauders, The mission in China supporting the armies of American General Stillwell and Chiang Kai-Chek, The battleship encounter in the Surigao Straits of the Phillipines along with the organization of the vast amounts of information obtained through all sources gave the allies an impressive view of the Japanes forces everywhere.

Housed in Quonset huts, hundreds of MIS translators worked around the clock preparing the information that would be need for what was planned as the largest invasion in history. The planning assumed multiple invasion beaches scattered around the Japanese homeland. In the coming invasion of Japan, the US navy planners favored the blockade and bombardment of Japan to instigate its collapse. General Douglas MacArthur and the army urged an early assault on Kyushu followed by an invasion of the main island of Honshu. Admiral Chester Nimitz agreed with MacArthur. The ensuing Operation Downfall envisaged two main assaults – Operation Olympic on Kyushu, planned for early November 1945 and Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu in March 1946. The casualty rate on Okinawa was to be 35% of all troops and with 767,000 men scheduled to participate in taking Kyushu, it was estimated that there would be 268,000 casualties. The Japanese High Command instigated a massive defensive plan, Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive) beginning with Kyushu that would eventually amount to almost 3 million men with the aim of breaking American morale with ferocious resistance. All men of any age, women and children were to be drilled for the effort. Thousands were issued sharpened stakes for use. The plan was for a resistance that would cause the ultimate collapse of the empire and the end of the Japanese nation. Resistance would be suicidal. Some estimates of American casualties ran as high as a million killed and wounded.

It’s impossible today to imagine what the military leaders and planners struggled with. Ordinary soldiers who were involved in the planning must have simply been sick at the thought. No one knew about the bomb. He wasn’t told about it until after President Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945. From President Truman on down the inevitability of the holocaust in Japan for all countries must have been horrific. America was already exhausted. Too many dead boys to bear. Casualties in other allied countries were much higher than ours. In Great Britian there were literally nl boys left. Generals waited impatiently for 17 and 18 year old boys to graduate and be eligible for conscription. As in WWI these children were referred to as “The class of 1917” or “The class of 1944.” Back home in Arroyo Grande, class of 44′ boys included Gordon Bennett, John Loomis, Tommy Baxter and Don Gullickson who would all be in the Pacific by wars end. It must have seemed a universe of war with no ending. Most soldiers and sailors never made it home for a visit. From 1941 you father had spent over fourteen hundred days without seeing his family. There must have many nights lying on his cot in the steaming tropics unable to sleep thinking about his family, not knowing precisely where they were, how they were being treated; would he ever see them again. There was no answer to be had.

Exhaustion would have been written on the face of your father by the beginning of 1945. He had been overseas for over three long years. He hadn’t seen his family, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with machine guns pointed inward for going on five years. Corralled in the Southwest Arizona desert, winter and summer it must have been agony for Hirokini and Ito. Until 1943 theirs could not visit them. The fact that the boys had volunteered to serve the only country they knew meant little to military administrators.

The agony of mothers is compounded by the fact that though grandparents knew he was somewhere in the Pacific they never knew exactly where or what he was doing. Headlines in the Newspaper blared massive headlines praising the military for the carnage they caused and were exposed to. Casualty figures, though not typically released to the press didn’t stop the reporters on the wartime beat from happily publishing the butchers bill.

There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan where, in the distance a small farmhouse and barn somewhere in the wheat-fields of mid-America you see an automobile being driven along a dirt road. It’s a drab green color with a white star on its door. It’s rolling through a cloud of dust of its own making. A middle aged woman in the kitchen goes about her business, rinsing the lunch dishes, her hair styled in the rolls worn by mothers and grandmothers of the time. As she moves about dressed in a red print housedress and an apron exactly like your grandmother wore, she begins rinsing the dishes in the sink. A little movement in the distance catches her eye and she looks up to see the car as it turns up the road to the house. The woman, who you know immediately is the mother of the four Ryan boys because there is a small banner hung, almost without notice by the camera, on the kitchen wall. Framed in red with four blue stars on a white background indicating four children, boys, just boys in the service. Mrs Ryan looks up, sees the car, goes back to the dishes, with her head still down it registers. Why the car is here. She looks up again and grows absolutely still, She knows. The heart goes still, scarcely breathing, she sleepwalks to the screen door and stands, her slippered feet spread, very still as the car pulls up. She does not move. Everything in the scene is in suspended animation and when the doors open, first an officer in uniform from the front then her pastor from the back door, she loses control of her legs, staggers and then slowly, agonizingly collapses on the floor boards. It goes to the heart of every mother who sent a son off to war. It’s the finest scene Spielberg has ever made.

Mrs Margaret Ryan at the window, sees the car, in that instant she knows. Note the white picket fence reflected on the glass in a way that suggests white crosses. Superb imagery. Spielberg is a master artist. Screen capture. Amblin Entertainment, Mutual Film Company. 1998

The battle for Manila was to be the most destructive operation in the war outside of Stalingrad and the final apocalypse of Berlin. In the movie, “The Pianist”* the final scene is Adrian Brodie standing in the ruins of Warsaw, Poland. Though it’s a movie set, the scale of destruction is enormous, it borders on insanity, hopelessness and utter destruction. Such was Manila.

Your father had a ringside seat working at Subic Bay. MacArthur himself had a personal attachment to the city, he had lived there for many years. His son had been born in a Manila hospital and when he was serving in the Filipino Constabulary he was often quoted that it was his favorite city. An ancient city with wide avenues and scores of beautiful old buildings shaded by tens of thousands of trees, the dignified Narra with its gorgeous yellow flowers underlayed by the fallen blossoms carpeting the walks below, the unfurling Dapdap known as the Coral Tree with it’s diamond shaped, fiery red blossom, and the huge and ominous Balete, trees renowned for their expansive, sprawling roots and branches which are said to be home for sorcerers.

Gracing the ancient streets deep in the city, “Old Manila” refers to the historic walled city of Intramuros. Manila was known for its Spanish colonial architecture and historical landmarks like Fort Santiago and the San Agustin Church. Fort Santiago (Saint James, the patron Saint of Spain) was built between 1590 and 1593 by the first governor of the Spanish Phillipines and anchored the city center.

Your dad never saw it. By the time he left the Phillipines it was a graveyard of buildings, people and culture.

When the Japanese attacked the islands in 1941 MacArthur declared Manila an open city and withdrew his troops to save it from destruction. This was not to be the case in 1945 when your father was there. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, he commander of the army withdrew his forces from the city into the mountains of the northeast portion of the island leaving Yamashita decided not to declare Manila an open city as MacArthur had done but that Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, destroy all bridges and other vital installations in the area and then evacuate his men from the city as soon as American troops arrived in force.

In spite of these orders, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 31st Naval Special Base Force, was determined to fight a last-ditch battle in Manila. Iwabuchi repeatedly ignored orders to withdraw from the city. From the beginning of February 1945 until march, some of the most vicious street fighting of the war took place. Artillery and air strikes reduced the beautiful old city to a vast landscape of roofless shells. The Japanese forces resorted to a suicidal defense, refusing to surrender and murdering tens of thousands of Filipinos, men, women and children. Accounts from US soldiers tell of rape and systematic execution of the civilian populace. For the remainder of March 1945, American forces and Filipino guerrillas mopped up Japanese resistance throughout the city. With Intramuros secured on 4 March, Manila was officially liberated, although the city was almost completely destroyed and large areas had been demolished by American artillery fire. American forces suffered 1,010 dead and 5,565 wounded during the battle. At least 100,000 Filipino civilians had been killed, both deliberately by the Japanese in the various massacres, and from artillery and aerial bombardment by U.S. and Japanese forces. 16,665 Japanese military dead were counted within the Intramuros alone.

Afterwards, City of Manila, April 1945. War Department photo.

From Subic Bay where your father was, the sound of fighting would have heard. Flashes on the horizon coming from fires and exploding bombs would have illuminated the night sky. He heard the rolling thunder of the defenders being crushed. No one really knows the number of Japanese troops and civilian Filipinos died there. At the end the Imperial Army simply executed any Filipino they could find. They burned them with flame throwers, lined them up against walls and move them down like wheat stalks, they locked them in churches and burned them alive. Women were brutally raped and then shot. It was Hell on earth. It simply cannot be imagined except by those who lived through it and those, especially the soldiers, sailors and nurses to save their sanity simply locked it away. PTSD as it is known today is not a recent phenomenon but has been known by all veterans since Thermopylae and the Phalanx’s of Alexander and the Emperor Xerxes.

Dear Dona

Chapter 13

Coming Next

The Final Blow.

Cover Photo: The Fort Santiago Gate after the battle for Manila. War Dept. Photo.

*Brigadier Russell W. Volckmann was one of the founders of the Army’s Special Forces units after the war. His experience as a partisan commander was highly valuable in the formation of that elite force

**In 1947, Lapham returned to the Philippines for five months as a consultant to the U.S. on the subject of compensation to Filipinos who had served as guerrillas during the war. He recognized 79 squadrons of guerrillas under his command with a total of 809 officers and 13,382 men. His command suffered 813 recognized casualties. However, sorting out the deserving from the fraudulent was difficult. Of more than a million claims for compensation in all the Philippines, only 260,000 were approved. Lapham believed that most of his men were treated fairly, but was critical of U.S. policy toward the Philippines after the war. “If ever there was an ally of American whom we ought to have treated with generosity after the war, it was the Philippines.” He said the U.S. Congress was “niggardly” with the Philippines, providing less money for rebuilding than that spent in many other countries, putting conditions on Philippine independence that favored U.S. business and military interests, and backing corrupt Filipino politicians who protected American, rather than Filipino, interests.

***The nurse, LT. Sandy Davys from the film “They Were Expendable” by John Ford surrendered with the other 86 nurses on Bataan and spent the war years in the Los Banos and Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila. They all survived.

“The Angels of Bataan” War Department Photo. 1945

****”The Pianist,” the Oscar-winning film, is based on the real-life story of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist who survived the Holocaust. Szpilman’s memoir, also titled “The Pianist,” details his extraordinary survival in Warsaw during World WarII.

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Dear Dona 11

Moving Up

Michael Shannon

Your fathers original group of four hundred translators that worked in Brisbane in 1943 had been broken up into small units and was now spread all over the Southwest Pacific. Many of them now shared the privations and dangers of combat and had taken to carrying rifles. They operated just behind and into the lines and were subject to enemy gunfire, artillery and bombs. War zones are dangerous places and even those that see no actual combat are subject to the whims of the monster.

After Morotai headquarters moved up to the island of Leyte and promptly discovered something entirely new. The translators as with all staff, headquarters and support troops rarely knew what was going on in the wider war. As they advanced in the Phillipines the war began to widen out. The days of jungle fighting were nearly over. Leyte with a population of just 900,00 most supporters of the Americans was divided by a mountain range with the southern portion of the island very lightly populated The flanking coastal plains allowed the use of tanks and other mobile units for the first time. Fighting was heavy but the Japanese were pushed up the island in a series of very sharp battles. The campaigns success allowed the planning for the invasion of the main island of Luzon to go forward in a hurry.

Since MacArthur had been ordered out, Corregidor had been surrendered, the Bataan death march had taken place and most combatant Americans had been locked up in concentration camps. MacArthurs Filipino Scouts had also surrendered but not all. Army Navy personnel and the Filipinos had disappeared into the hills of the Phillipines and for three years had been roving the country formed into Guerrilla groups. (1) Filipino ex-soldiers, American service members, Naval officers and Australian and Dutch soldiers had formed lethal bands of Guerrillas who preyed on Japanese troop movements and supply convoys. The Dutch and Australian stole or cobbled together radio sets with which they sent messages to Army headquarters in Australia. They reported on Japanese ship movements and disposition of army units.

MacArthurs command arranged to deliver better radios, generators to provide electricity to the Coast Watchers were constantly on the move. A message sent in the clear or in code could be tracked by Japanese rangefinders so they picked up and got out of Dodge immediately after sending. It was highly dangerous work but invaluable to the allies. Radio message were synced with MIS translations and throughout the three years before the return the command had a clear picture of almost everything the Japanese were up to.

The base radio station dugout of the Coastwatchers Ken network in the Solomon Islands. Photo: Australian War Memorial.

During August and September 1942, 17 military coast watchers (Seven Post and Telegraph Department radio operators and 10 soldiers) and five civilians were captured as Japanese forces overran the Gilbert Islands. Imprisoned on Tarawa atoll, they were all beheaded following an American air raid on that island. The coast watchers and their teams, mainly native islanders were constantly on the move. They faced starvation, boredom and feared for their lives but none attempted to escape. Though mostly resident civilians who had worked for the rubber plantations and the petroleum companies they received nothing for their work. It wasn’t until late 1944 that that the Anzacs bestowed military officer rank on them so if killed their families would receive a pension.

Coastwatchers were also involved in organizing supplies for the Guerrilla bands. They received supplies and arms from American subs, Dumbos (2) and the famous Black Cat Catalina flying boats. They also rescued downed flyers and other military personnel who were downed or sunk along the island chains. These included the future US President, US Navy Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, whose PT 109 Patrol Torpedo boat was carved in two and destroyed by a Japanese warship in the Solomon Islands. After the sinking, Kennedy and his crew reached Kolombangara Island where they were found by Coastwatcher Sub-Lieutenant Reg Evans who organized their rescue.

In the Philippines they were to witness the roots of the local Resistance which represented the cultural and socio-economic diversity of the Philippine Islands. From socialist peasant farmers the Huks, middle school teachers, ROTC youths, to Moro (Philippine Muslim), the range of the men and women who participated in the struggle against the Japanese Imperial Army was seemingly inexhaustible.

Officers at headquarter were initially astounded when groups began showing up. slipping out of the jungles like wraiths, armed and dangerous.

At least 260,000 strong, the guerrilla forces were ill-equipped and poorly armed. They depended on local civilians for food, shelter, and intelligence. Several units recruited women guerrillas. Some took up arms and served side by side with men, including journalist Yay Panlilio and Huk commander Remedios Gomez-Paraiso also know as “Kumander Liwayway.”

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso, Kumander Liwayway. Photographer unknown. 1945

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso was an officer in the Hukbalahap, a communist guerrilla army known for their daring attacks on Japanese forces. Born in Pampanga, Gomez-Paraiso joined the guerrillas after her father was killed by Japanese forces. Known for going into battle wearing her signature red lipstick, Gomez-Paraiso quickly rose in the ranks to become a commander of a squadron. At one point, she had two hundred men under her command. Perhaps best known for the “Battle of Kamansi” in which, despite being outnumbered, Gomez-Paraiso’s squadron forced Japanese forces to retreat. After the war, her Hukbalahap Guerrillas continued their revolution against the democratic Philippine government until 1948, when her husband was killed, and she was captured. She was released and went on to become a vocal advocate for the recognition of Filipina Guerrillas.

In a marriage of convenience the guerrillas, some who had been fighting the Americans invaders since 1898 when President McKinley annexed the islands against their wishes. In the southern Phillipines, the Muslin Moro had resisted the Spanish conquest since the since the end of the 15th century. This religious war only ended with the annexation by the US in 1898. The Muslim Moros then fought the United States and finally the Japanese. Resistance was baked into their DNA. Because they hated the Japanese more they saw the alliance as temporary but expedient. Filipino Guerrilla groups fought right up until the end of the war. (3)

A guerrila group on Leyte, Phillipines, 1944. National Archives photo.

On January 25th 1945 your dad and his MIS team walked aboard LST 922. They were bound from Leyte to the island of Luzon. Just nine days before 175,00 American troops supported by over 800 ships had gone ashore at Lingayen Gulf, ironically the same beaches employed by General Homma’s Japanese forces in December, 1941.

General MacArthur himself went ashore on S-Day. There were no histrionics this time. Luzon which he had abandoned in 1941 was not only his personal goal, but erasing the embarrassment which was compounded by secretly fleeing during the Phillipines during the dark of the night in a little PT boat, PT-32 commanded by LTJG John Bulkeley (4)

LST 922 at Morotai Island, Dutch East Indies, December 1944. USN Photo

Your dad’s MIS team hefted their barracks bags and walked up the ramp for yet another trip by an LST. Commanded by Lieutenant, Junior Grade Ronnie A Stallings who was a regular Navy officer. A special but not uncommon type in the WWII Navy, he was a Mustang. Mustangs as opposed the thoroughbred Naval Academy officers were generally outstanding enlisted men promoted up from the ranks. Born in Brooklyn New York in 1924, Stallings enlisted in April 1941 and went to sea as a 17 year old later that year. He was an ordinary seaman. Assigned to a Landing Craft Infantry 487 or LCI. LCI 487 was typical of this type of LCI. It was newly built and the crew was young and inexperienced. The skipper, Lt. Stewart F. Lovell was the “Old Man” on board. Born in Manchester, N. H. on May 26, 1907, he was 36 years old when he set sail on the 487. However, most of his crew was seventeen, eighteen and nineteen year olds. His young crew gave their Skipper the nick name “Baggy Pants” because he did not acquire a proper fitting uniform after losing a lot of weight while onboard. LCI’S were 158 feet long, just over half a football field and only 23 feet in the beam. With the bridge being high and the hold being empty she rolled like a “Drunken Sailor” to use a Navy term. There are other terms for unseaworthy ships but most are unprintable. A very strong stomach would be required and perhaps the skipper didn’t have one. The Executive Officer – Ensign James T. Clinton was nicknamed “Boy Scout” because he was pale, clean cut and did not drink or smoke. Ronnie Stallings was present during the landing in North Africa in 1942 and at D-Day, June 1944 where his little ship, derisively known as “Waterbugs” by disdainful Admirals disgorged over two hundred GI’s of K Company, 18th Regimental Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Divion onto Utah Beach. Unable to back off the beach, 487 was pounded by German artillery and temporarily abandoned. Stallings was taken back to a survivors camp in England located at Greenway House the estate of Agatha Christie. With only the clothes on his back he was given an overcoat and a bag with a broken tooth brush and a razor with no blades.

His next ship was the fleet oiler USS Salomonie. He caught up with her in Panama in July as she passed through the canal on the way to Milne Bay, New Guinea. By this time a Quartermaster or QM, he would stand watch as assistant to officers of the deck and the navigator; serve as helmsman and perform ship control, navigation and bridge watch duties. QMs procure, correct, use and stow navigational and oceanographic publications and oceanographic charts. Thats the official description. Navy slang is “Wheels” because the begin by steering ships which is no mean feat. (5)

USS Salamonie Ao 26 and an LCI unloading at Utah red Beach Normandy, France June 5th, 1944.

Salamonie sailed for the Pacific Ocean via the Panama Canal on 8 July 1944 and reported for duty to Commander Service Force, US 7th Fleet, at Milne Bay, New Guinea, on 23 August. Salamonie joined the Leyte invasion force in Hollandia on 8 October 1944 and later supported both the Morotai and Mindoro strike forces. She spent the final months of the war supporting Allied operations in the Philippines after Ronnie Stallings transfer to the LST.

By the time Stallings arrived at Milne Bay he was a Chief, a rank achieved in just three years, a feat that could only be achieved in wartime. In peacetime it could take 20 years of duty, and he was just 22 years old. A 22 year old former enlisted swab made it to Chief Quartermaster. At Milne Bay he received a commission as a Lieutenant Junior Grade, and his own ship. No stateside classes, no practice, only his three years at sea as his training ground. As a newly commissioned officer he walked up the gangplank as the senior officer and Captain of his own ship Landing Ship Tank-922. He could never have imagined as a seventeen enlisted recruit that he would end up here.

Trailing their gear the team came aboard 922. Led by your father, the leader with the rank of TEC 4. Trudging into the ship were his crew, Jim Tanaka, Michael Miyatake, Henry Morisako, and Tabshi Uchigaki. Masai Uyeda, and Tsukasa Uyeda followed. Seven men, all headed for Eleventh Corps headquarters at Lingayen. General Eichelberger commanding. By this time they undoubtedly knew that the end was coming for the empire of Japan.

Eleventh Corps Badge, WWII

Dear Dona,

12th page next week Feb. 15th.

Closing the Ring*

1) Guerrilla from the Spanish Guerra. Guerrilla literally translates to “little war”. It’s a diminutive of the Spanish word guerra, which means “war”

(2) Dumbo refers to large aircraft such as the B-17 or B-24 heavy bombers which were modified to carry a large lifeboat that could be dropped to survivors at sea. They were largely replaced by the more versatile PBY Catalina which had a longer range and could land on water. The Catalina has been Largely ignored by most historians but was a major factor in air-sea rescue, insertion and extraction of personnel from Japanese held islands. The Catalinas also delivered supplies to Coastwatchers and guerrilla groups. The term Black Cats or Nightmare is the name given to the Naval and Army squadrons who flew these missions by night.

(3) The Moro people in the southern Phillipines have fought invaders from the fifteen hundreds right up to the present conflict with independent Philippine government. Nearly five hundred years of almost constant conflict has made them a formidable force.

(4) LTJG John Bulkeley is portrayed by Robert Montgomery in the 1945 film “They Were Expendable.” Directed by John Ford and co-starring John Wayne and the inestimable Donna Reed. In my opinion one of Ford’s best films. It impresses with its portrayal of the utter hopelessness of those last days before the surrender of the Phillipines to the Japanese. The dinner scene with the officers and the nurse, Donna Reed is utterly in tune with the times. By todays standards it is mawkish but it wasn’t made for now but during the war when people felt differently than they do today.

(5) The author served in the Merchant Marine. Steering a ship as long as two football fields and weighing nearly 30,000 tons is not for the faint of heart.

(6) Technician fourth grade (abbreviated T/4 or Tec 4) was a rank of the United States Army from 1942 to 1948. The rank was created to recognize enlisted soldiers with special technical skills, but who were not trained as combat leaders. Technician fourth grade. The T/4 insignia of a letter “T” below three chevrons.

*Apologies to Sir Winston Churchill.

Michael Shannon is a writer from California. He knew Mister Fuchiwaki personally.

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Dear Dona,

Page 7

A Long Way From Arroyo Grande

Written By: Michael Shannon

When your dad was transferred up to Port Moresby with his team he was introduced to a place he never imagined while he grew up in Arroyo Grande.

He certainly read Tarzan of the apes when he was a kid and must have imagined the African jungle as it was described by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the time honored way of writers, Burroughs himself never ventured any closer to Africa than Chicago. As kids, the places we know outside our own existence are described in a way that rarely has much relation to the real place where the story takes place. No less your fathers generation whose visual images wee formed by Life magazine or the jungle movies he saw at the Mission or Pismo theaters. It’s not much different today. Moviemakers are rarely too concerned with an actual location when they are creating a mythical place.


I’ve been to Papua New Guinea. I can testify as to its holding the title of one of the greatest hell holes on earth. When Hilo arrived in Port Moresby with MacArthurs headquarters the port itself was a tiny backwater of the colonial British empire. Papua New Guinea had a population of approximately 3,000 people, 2,000 natives and about 800 Europeans.

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1943

Port Moresby was a small British administrative center at the time, with only two track dirt roads connecting nearby coastal villages. The city was dry for eight months out of the year, from June to January, and locals had to depend on rainfall or transport water from other areas. For a place considered one of the wettest place on earth and because it was in the rain shadow of the Owen Stanley range it received only fifty inches of rain annually. It seems like a great deal if you grow up in Arroyo Grande where the average is about 19 but your dad would soon find out what real tropical rain is all about.


Imagine the introduction of nearly 18 thousand allied troops into the area. The general and some of his staff took over the British administrative buildings but almost everyone else lived in tents. There is no real way to experience the climate unless you go there. New Guinea is just about four hundred miles south of the equator and in the western regions the annual rainfall exceeds 125 inches a year. Think of that in feet. It’s raining there today and tomorrow and the next day and so on and so on. Plus its more 90 degrees and the humidity is roughly the same. Don’t worry though, it will cool off at night to about 85 or a little more. When the sun is out it can cook your skin in just a few minutes.

Port Moresby tent camp, 1943.

Flora and fauna? New Guinea has one of the most diverse ecologies on earth. It is home to every kind of biting, stinging and poisonous insect, even the wild dogs are dangerous. Think about birds, the Hooded Pitohui is extremely poisonous, and isn’t the only one. Some cockroaches can grow to six and seven inches long. There are nasty scorpions, stinging hornets, bees, caterpillars and moths, moths of all things. You want some relief? Go for a swim where in the ocean which is home to the deadly stonefish, killer sharks, Poisonous stingrays, remember the Crocodile Hunter? And snakes, sea snakes, very deadly and my personal favorite the “Two Step Snake,” if he bites you, you get two steps and you die.


The biggest killer in human history thrives in tropical climates and was responsible for more deaths in the Pacific than even the most horrific combat, especially for the Japanese Imperial army which was notoriously casual about the well being of it’s troops. Statistically somewhere around 95% of Japanese combat soldiers died of disease or starvation during the campaigns in Papua New Guinea.

Sidewall Tent Living, Port Moresby.

If all of that was not enough, living in a sidewall tent, sleeping on folding cots under mosquito netting you could also fall victim to Dengue fever commonly referred to as Breakbone Fever for which there was no vaccine until 1997. Add to this list Yellow Fever which killed tens of thousands during the building of the Panama Canal, Chagas, a parasite you get through the bite of the apply named “Assassin Bug.” Add Cholera which is transmitted through contaminated water and all kinds of parasites such as Hookworm, Roundworm, Whipworm and Tapeworm.


For Americans, disease was responsible for about 10% of deaths in the Pacific war but in the casualty column it was by far the biggest cause of loss. At any given time about 4% of US troops in the Pacific were unavailable for duty.

The MIS boys were ordered up by MacArthur in early 1943. He had around sixty who were loaded with their gear aboard the Australian navy’s transport HMAS Kanimba and sailed to Ferguson Harbor at Port Moresby. When they arrived there was almost no accommodations for them. Troops were billeted in camps scraped out of the brush. It would be months before Navy Seabees arrived and began building an airfield and erecting the ubiquitous Quonset huts so familiar to anyone who has ever lived in the Pacific islands.
Army service soldiers from the 93rd Division (Colored) worked around the clock unloading supply ships and building shelters, kitchens and other necessary support structures including showers and laundries.

His Majesty’s Australian Ship Kanimba unloading at Port Moresby, 1943. Australian War Museum photo.

In one of the funny things regarding race, which was an ongoing issue, the white officers and troops had only cold water showers but the Black troops built themselves hot water showers. Your father said the Nisei showered with the African Americans. Apparently the white troops never figured this little act of defiance out. A small rebellion but a taste of a future army*

At Port Moresby, your father and the others on his ten man team moved into their tents and quickly began digging slit trenches. The Japanese sent bombers on a regular run down from Rabual to pound New Guinea. The sound of bombs rattling down from high above sent soldiers diving head first into their fox holes and trenches. When your dad first arrived the ground troops had not pushed the Japanese army far enough to stop the harassment. It would be their first experience of the shooting war but not the last.

As a farm boy Hilo certainly knew about digging. Nikkei Archive photo.

The workload of the translators was very heavy. Because combat in New Guinea was unceasing as the allied troops slowly pushed the Japanese Northwest and out of the island, documents, letters and personal journals stripped from the vast number of dead** Japanese troops which by this time the allies understood to be of significant importance.

A Detail from the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Warship and Officer list. National Archives.

The battle of Midway in 1942 was partially won because of the MIS. Radio intercepts by the translators along with the breaking of the Japanese Naval code by the code breakers at Pearl set the stage for the ambush of the Japanese carrier force headed to Midway island in the northwest Hawaiian island chain and a good bit of sheer luck blunted the Japanese carrier navy which would never fully recover. It was the first nail in the coffin of Imperial Japans plans for the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

American commanders initially resisted using MIS nisei for their intended purpose, the gathering of information about the enemy. Thanks, however, to the persistence of a haole plantation doctor from Maui, Major James Burden, and the work of the nisei themselves, attitudes changed quickly. Major Burden took an MIS team to the South Pacific. They had to work hard for a chance to prove themselves. Nisei with the 23rd “Americal” Division in New Caledonia worked around the clock to translate a captured list of call signs and code names of all Imperial the Japanese Navy ships and air bases.

Major Burden and the nisei pushed to get closer to the action, and some wound up on Guadalcanal, where they made a big discovery: the joint operational plan for Japanese forces in the South Pacific.
Found floating in the Ocean it was brought ashore by New Caledonian natives and turned over to an Australian Coast watcher who arranged to get it to the 23rd’s headquarters. The Mis translators quickly discerned it’s contents and forwarded the documents to Army, Navy and Marine senior officers in Hawaii and Maryland. The hubris of the Japanese high command in not changing codes or plans meant that US forces in the Western Pacific were able to use the information to follow troop movements, fleet assignments for the rest of the war. Just this one thing validated the wisdom and the expense of the Army in forming the MIS teams.

There was more to come.

Above: SIMINI, New Guinea, January 2, 1943: From left, Major Hawkins, Phil Ishio and Arthur Ushiro Castle of the 32nd Infantry Division question a prisoner taken in the Buna campaign. Information from POW interrogations produced vital tactical information countless times. National Archives photo.

Next: Dear Dona, page 8. Moving up towards Japan. Maurutai, Luzon, Leyte, and Okinawa.

*Presiden Truman integrated the armed forces. On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, creating the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces.

**The 23rd Infantry Division, more commonly known as the Americal Division, was formed in May, 1942 on the island of New Caledonia. In the immediate emergency following Pearl Harbor, the United States had hurriedly sent three individual regiments to defend New Caledonia against a feared Japanese attack. They were the 132nd Infantry Regiment, formerly part of the 33rd Infantry Division of the Illinois National Guard, the 164th Infantry Regiment from North Dakota, and the 182nd Infantry Regiment from Massachusetts. This division was formed as one of only two un-numbered divisions to serve in the Army during World War II. After World War II the Americal Division was officially re-designated as the 23rd Infantry Division, however, it is rarely referred to as such. The division’s name comes from a contraction of “American, New Caledonian Division”. The Americal Division was involved in ground combat in both World War II and Vietnam.

***From the Owen Stanley Mountains in New Guinea to Luzon, Philippines, the 32nd Division walked that long, winding and deadly combat road for 654 days of intense combat, more than any other American unit in World War 2. The Red Arrow was credited with many “firsts”. It was the first United States division to deploy as an entire unit overseas, initially to Papua New Guinea. The first of seven U.S. Army and U.S. Marine units to engage in offensive ground combat operations in 1942. The division was still fighting holdouts in New Guinea abd the Phillipines after the official Japanese surrender.

****The 93rd (Colored) was a combat trained division led by white officers. The “Blue Helmets” as they were known were almost never used in combat but reduced to labor battalions. The Division had shown in WWI in France that they were a fearsome outfit but in this war they were rarely given the chance and were reduced to no more than “Hired Hands.”

Cover Photo: General Frank Merrill posing with Japanese-American members of the Marauders. Fourteen Japanese-American service members with the Military Intelligence Service served as translators and codebreakers (Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

Michael Shannon is a lifelong resident of California. He writes so his children will know where they come from.

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Dear Dona,

Page 6

Author: Michael Shannon.

Auckland, New Zealand. 1943 population, 1.642 million people with a revolving population of soldiers and Marines. The New Zealand government was very concerned about the Japanese because without the Americans to defend the island they were in trouble. You see, the Anzacs were in Italy, the Mediterranean and North Africa, as well as Japan in south-east Asia and other parts of the Pacific. They weren’t home and the islands, just like Australia were desperate for the Americans to help defend them. Japanese submarines were patrolling the waters between New Zealand and Australia. In 1942 the United States navy had just barely stopped the planned invasion of Port Moresby in New Guinea. The reason was its close proximity to both Australia and Asia. The Japanese viewed Port Moresby as a key point to launch aerial attacks on the northern part of Australia. They could have closed the sea lanes from the U S to Australia and New Zealand. Troops fighting to defend New Guinea, the Anzacs, Dutch and MacArthur’s undertrained, rag tag 32nd division from Wisconsin and Michigan were slugging it out with Japanese in the fetid, rainy jungle of the southeast of New Guinea trying to push the Japanese back along the Kokoda trail and down the Owen Stanley range toward the coast. Soldiers on both sides had to literally crawl on their hands and knees because the slopes were so steep and slippery from the constant rain. There was no more brutal fighting in WWII. Nisei translators later found Japanese diaries which describe starving soldiers butchering and eating the Australian dead. The Japanese were literally starved out.

Soldiers were granted time away from the ship in Auckland. It was a chance for the Americans to sample a culture quite different than their own. For the Nisei who were well acquainted with ethnic hatred it brought to mind some curious observations. The Kiwis’ didn’t consider the translators outsiders. Neither did they dislike the black support troops from the ship and ones stationed at the army camps ashore. This was a big difference from the way white Americans treated their fellow citizens. On the voyage over, great care was taken to segregate troops of color from their fellow soldiers. Contrary to what is written in history books, violence towards minorities was common in our military.

On June 12, 1942, five transport ships carrying US Army troops arrived in Waitematā Harbour in Auckland. This marked the beginning of the “American invasion” of New Zealand, which lasted until mid-1944. The New Zealanders were quickly disabused of their inherent like of their fellow allies.

US troops march down Queen Street, Auckland, 1942. New Zealand Herald Archives photo.

Between 15,000 and 45,000 American servicemen were stationed in New Zealand, mostly in camps in or near Auckland and Wellington.There were cultural differences between the Americans and New Zealanders. New Zealand women found the US servicemen to be handsome and polite, and they had more money than New Zealand soldiers. They were better dressed than the local troops and being young and very far from the moral strictures of home had few reasons to show anyone respect. Women of all kinds were “fair” game, the way they saw it. This led to romantic entanglements between American troops and New Zealand women. “Overpaid, oversexed and over here” was the watchword for the New Zealanders. The locals saw it as an “American invasion”. Many New Zealand soldiers resented the idea of relationships between New Zealanders and American soldiers, leading to tense relations between the two parties.

Another source of tension was US servicemen’s attitudes towards the Māori. White soldiers from the 31st “Dixie Division” from the south were not “comfortable” with Māori soldiers. The government published a guide book for US servicemen, titled “Meet New Zealand” which reminded the Americans that “the Maori today occupy a position in society socially and politically equal to that of any pakeha or white New Zealander”. The Prime Minister’s office said that New Zealanders should “be friendly and sympathetic towards the colored American troops, but remember that they are not accustomed in their own country to close and intimate relationships with white people. Anyone finding themselves in the company of both white and black American troops was advised to “avoid unpleasantness”. Quite the understatement.

During this time, hotel bars closed at 6 pm and masses of drunk soldiers were then ejected into the streets. This was known colloquially as the ‘six o’clock swill’. Around 6 pm on the evening of 3 April 1943, fighting broke out between US servicemen and New Zealand soldiers and civilians outside the Allied Services Club. The brawls spread to the ANA (Army, Navy, and Air Force) Club in Willis Street and then to Cuba Street and continued nonstop for hours. Civilian and military police attempted to break up the fights, but only finally subsided as the US soldiers left town on trains back to their camps. 6×6 army trucks returned the passed out drunk and those damaged by the shore patrol and the MPS. Courts Marshalls were ordered then cancelled for lack of any evidence, another understatement.

The Japanese also understood the value of propaganda. Japanese leaflet. 1943 US Army Archives

When your dad arrived with the other Nisei, the New Zealanders accepted them as equals but their own countrymen, far less so. Any thought by the translators that their service would reduce the racism of white troops was an unlikely dream. They had to be very careful.

A fight on 12 May 1945 in Cuba Street involved over 150 Māori and US servicemen. This fight was definitely racially motivated: Māori troops were angry at their treatment by the Americans, who tended to treat them the way they treated black Americans. Military reports stated that “Maoris from whom statements were taken allege they have been insulted by the Americans and have been told by Americans not to ride in the same tramcars, drink in the same bars, eat in the same cafes and that they should walk via back streets or step off the sidewalk when American soldiers approached. The Americans call them black curs an N*****s and have consistently insulted the Maori race. Imagine traveling halfway around the world only to find the same intolerance and hate as in your own home town. The only modifying thing was that the New Zealanders accepted both the Blacks and Japanese translators with no reservations. They were welcomed in New Zealand’s establishments and into their homes as well.

Because the MIS translators were considered so valuable, General MacArthur ordered them to be sent to Brisbane, Australia immediately. When they stepped off the ship in Brisbane, and were driven to army headquarters the first thing they were told was to avoid places where American soldiers hung around. Just like Auckland and Wellington, Brisbane had seen vicious riots on more than one occasionAmericans had worn out their welcome.

By late summer of 1943 the offending division had been moved to the front in New Guinea where they again failed to distinguish themselves in the vicious fighting on the Kokoda trail where the Imperial Japanese army had been pushed back over the Owen Stanley range of mountains by the Anzacs. At nearly 14,000 feet, the battles in the clouds as the news called it, the Aussies not only fought the Japanese but triple digit heat, little water, almost no food and what they did have had to be hauled up the nearly vertical mountains by the New Guinea natives who supported the Anzacs, the so called Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels. “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” was the name given by Australian soldiers to Papua New Guinean water carriers who, during World War II, were recruited or forced into service to bring supplies up to the front and carry injured Australian troops down the Kokoda trail during the Campaign. Over the four arduous months, the Fuzzy Wuzzys helped secure an Australian victory by forming a human supply chain along the Kokoda Track, moving food, ammunition up and wounded soldiers down from the front lines. 625 Australian soldiers were killed during the Kokoda Campaign, and over 1,600 wounded. Additionally, in excess of 4,000 soldiers became casualties due to illness. More than 150 Papuans died as members of the Papuan Infantry Battalion or as carriers of critical supplies and wounded along the Kokoda Trail.

New Guinea auxiliaries helping an Australian soldier down from the Owen Stanley mountains. Australian War Museum photo.

the Australian and New Zealanders finally defeated what was to be Japan’s last attempt to invade Australia and cut the sea lanes from the United States. The battles now moved to the northern end of New Guinea. Port Moresby was secure and planning was underway for the next step up the island chain towards Japan itself.

MacArthur moved his headquarters from Brisbane to Port Moresby in New Guinea. Your dad and his other translators packed up and went with him. They were working seven days a week. Hundreds of thousands of diaries, letters home and military communications were being processed every week by the MIS translators. Rather, as you might imagine just a primarily local project, it had become necessary due to the volume of documents being found in caves, the bodies of dead Imperial troops and radio intercepts to establish a communication network that encompassed the men with MacArthur like your father and the cryptographers at Pearl Harbor, the language school at San Francisco’s Presidio and the school at Fort Snelling in Minnesota. A network was set up to handle the radio traffic between places and to provide air transport to move the thousands of crates of captured documents.

Leaving the comfortable billets in Brisbane, your father and his crew packed up and moved to the decidedly less cushy environs of Port Moresby, New Guinea. They would have to get used to the new arrangements. It would be a long time before they saw a solid roof over their heads or a decent shower. It would be canvas and cold water from here on out.

Tent 29. Camp Chelmer, Indoorooplily, Queensland, Australia. November 1943. Joe Iwataki photo

Dear Dona . Page 7 Coming December 27th.

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Dear Dona,

Page 5

By Michael Shannon.

The group of sixteen translators from your dad’s class arrived by train at the siding in Pittsburg, California. Pittsburg was the major debarkation point on the west coast for those heading for the Pacific War Theater. After a week confined to barracks at camp Stoneman, Hilo and his fellow graduates found they would be leaving by ship in a few days. They could see the skyline of San Francisco shimmering under clear sky’s just across the bay but were not allowed to visit owing to the high commands orders that all Nisei be confined to base for their own safety. The danger from their fellow soldiers was real, particularly the Marines who were across the bay. To prepare Marines for what was coming all Japanese were brutally vilified in speech and print. Such indoctrination is common to all wars no matter the country. Propaganda yes, but no less dangerous especially to those who had not been exposed to combat yet. There had been several serious incidents where Nisei in uniform were assaulted by groups of soldiers and sailors. Feelings ran very high.

Camp George Stoneman, Pittsburg, California, 1943. National Archives

Stoneman was brand new, completed just two months before your dad arrived. The camp was named after George Stoneman*, a cavalry commander during the Civil War and later Governor of California. In addition to almost 346 barracks (63 man), 86 company administrative and storehouses, 8 infirmaries, and dozens of administrative buildings, the 2,500 acre camp held nine post exchanges, 14 recreation halls, 13 mess halls, a 24 hour shoe repair and tailoring business, one post office, a chapel and one stockade. Overall, the camp was a city unto itself. It had a fire department and observation tower, water reservoir, bakery, Red Cross station, meat cutting plant, library, parking lots and 31 miles of roads. For recreation, Stoneman boasted two gymnasiums, a baseball diamond, eight basketball courts, eight boxing rings and a swimming pool and bowling alley. Officer and enlisted clubs provided everything from reading rooms to spaghetti dinners. The camp also contained the largest telephone center of its day, with 75 phone booths and a bank of operators who could handle 2,000 long distance calls a day. Stoneman even had USO shows featuring stars such as Groucho Marx, Gary Moore, and Red Skelton. Lucille Ball once donned a swimming suit to dedicate an enlisted men’s club.

Camp Stoneman had a maximum capacity of 40,000 troops and at one time ran a payroll of a million dollars per month. Leaving camp to the docks where transport ships waited meant departing the camp at the California Ave. gate and marching down Harbor St. to and catch the ferry at Pittsburg landing. Many “Old Timers” recall the day when they would shine shoes, sell newspapers, round up burgers and and cokes in service to the troops to earn some coin. It is said that when the troops were departing or being “shipped out” they would toss their remaining coins or dollars to the local children as their was no longer any need for American currency where they were headed.

Camp Savage was pretty small by comparison and the Nisei soldiers must have been amazed. Mostly farm boys from California or fisherman’s sons and plantation workers from Hawaii, Stoneman dwarfed old Fort Bliss. The fort covered half the acreage of the entire Arroyo Grande valley and had forty times it’s population.

After a week the men were told to pack and be ready to catch a ferry across the bay to pier 45** where they would board for an unknown destination.

Foreground, pier 45, 1943. U S Naval vessels in background.

The Army and the Navy had chartered dozens of passenger ships from home fleets and foreign flagged companies. Operating out of San Francisco were several that had flown the company flags of the Dollar Line,*** American President Lines and the Matson Line. Famous luxury liners in the Hawaii trade such as the SS Lurline, Monterey, Matsonia, Maui and the Malolo were now being operated by the US Army Transport Service. These ships in particular, because of their size and speed were referred to as “The Monsters.” Just three of them, They traveled alone, rarely needing warships for protection as most naval vessels couldn’t match their speed. This was considered protection enough from Imperial Japanese submarines. They could also make the 6,725 nautical mile trip to Auckland, New Zealand without refueling. Thats where they were headed though only the Captain knew it. Everyone else was in the dark.

USAT Lurline pulling out of San Francisco, fully loaded with over 6,000 soldiers, sailors and Marines. US Heritage Command Photo. 1943

Steaming under the Golden Gate bridge and out past the Farallone Islands she left the treacherous Potato Patch to port and headed southwest. She picked up her escorts, three Fletcher class destroyers and the Cruiser USS Indianapolis. The officer of the watch rang up full ahead on the telegraph, the engine room lit off all the boilers, smoke poured from the stacks, bow wave arched higher and they headed for the sunset.

The Nisei found their quarters for the trip and were pleasantly surprised. They were to stay in two converted first class cabins on the promenade deck. A pre-war cabin for a trip from San Francisco to Honolulu cost $200.00 in 1940. ( $4,509.49 today ) The boys joked that they were getting a really good deal. They also felt lucky because they knew the berthing decks where the soldiers were stacked as much as six high in their pipe bunks breathing the odorous air, a mix of cigarette smoke, and dirty smelly clothes. The ships laundry was out of operation for the trip. There were too may passengers, so going on deck for some fresh air had to be done in shifts. Likewise chow. You stood in long lines for hours in order to eat. Almost as soon as the ship hit her first Pacific roller, the unbelievably foul smell of vomit began sluicing around the below decks. There were pails but they soon overflowed. Miserable doesn’t describe it. They were young though and adjusted as best they could. There was no where to escape anyhow.

At the beginning of the voyage the Nisei were restricted their cabins for fear that there might be trouble with the soldiers and the crew. Later it was thought that perhaps getting to know them was the better course of action. Everyone was notified of the decision and everyone was allowed to mingle. During the day the decks were completely covered by soldiers, mainly replacements for the 32nd, Red Arrow, Wisconsin National Guard, the 37th, Buckeye Division, Ohio National Guard, the 41st, The Sunshine Division from the states in the Pacific Northwest and the 23rd or Americal Division. All of them involved by this time in heavy fighting in New Guinea.

Each day the soldiers practiced with the bayonet, cleaned their rifles, sharpened knives and convinced themselves how tough they were. They averaged just about twenty years and their hubris came from being young and having almost no exposure to life outside the mostly rural areas they came from. Many had never seen a Japanese in their lives.

For the Nisei the release from their cabins turned out to be a mostly positive thing. As they got to know each other they found out how much alike they really were. A farm boy is a farm boy no matter his ancestry. In the trek north to Japan the soldiers would come to value very highly their new Nisei friends who would share all the hardships of combat with them and whose translation skills would save hundreds of lives.

Still they talked about the problems communicating directly with the enemy, in the language of one’s parents. The idea was incredibly fraught with personal feelings especially for the Kibei who had the greatest exposure with Japan proper. To some it presented difficult questions about identity and heritage. For many Japanese Americans, it was difficult to reconcile using the Japanese language for American victory when their dog tags bore the address of the camp back home in the United States where your parents were incarcerated. In many cases, the translators had had no opportunity to even visit families and the addresses that listed Manzanar or Tule Lake California, Gila River and Poston Arizona, Amache Colorado or Rowher, Arkansas must have caused pain every time they looked at them.

So here they were, a small contingent of specialized troops traveling with thousands of Caucasians whose suspicions and hatred was dangerous to them, whose families were locked behind barbed wire in concentration camps and whose President had written about his decision to intern Japanese Americans was consistent with Roosevelt’s long-time racial views. During the 1920s, for example, he had written articles in the Macon Telegraph opposing white-Japanese intermarriage for fostering “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood” and praising California’s ban on land ownership by the first-generation Japanese. In 1936, while president, he privately wrote that, regarding contacts between Japanese sailors and the local Japanese American population in the event of war, “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu or in California who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp.”

Imagine the confusion on the one hand and the desire to fight for a country that didn’t want you on the other. Like my father said when questioned about the issue, “You cannot understand it because you haven’t lived it.” And of course thats true as far as it goes. Today, we have far more documentation of those events than was possible during the war when the public was restricted to almost none.

Steaming day and night the group of ships headed southwest, zig zagging to reduce the chance of torpedo attack and on the seventh morning those on deck sighted Diamond Head. A soldier from Ohio turned to the Nisei next to him who was from Kaimuki, Oahu and asked if that was what Japan looked like to him, the Nisei replied “It looks like home to me.” As Bob Toyoda told the story years later he laughed at the confusion on the face of the Ohio boy who was going to war against a country he knew nothing about, not even where it was.

SS Mariposa, USAT enroute to Auckland New Zealand, July, 1943. Australian War Memorial photo****

Much to the dismay of the passengers, especially the translators from Hawai’i, the escorts turned to starboard and headed for Pearl Harbor but the Mariposa turned to port and picked up a compass bearing of 150 degrees south-southeast (SSE). It was going to be another long, long three weeks aboard.

Dona page 6

From the promenade deck, Hilo and the other translators could just make out the smudge on the horizon that they knew by now was Auckland, New Zealand. Six thousand seven hundred miles and a month at sea and no one aboard was any more anxious to get to shore than they were.

*General George Stoneman was a cavalry general in Grant’s army. He is mentioned in the song “The night they drove old Dixie down.” His name would have been well known to southern boys.

**Todays home of The San Francisco Maritime Museum and known as the Hyde Street Pier.

***The old Dollar Line owned by Robert Dollar has through mergers become the American President Line.

****This very likely the ship Hilo traveled on.

Cover Photo: SS Lurline in war paint leaving San Francisco for the southwest Pacific.

Michael Shannon is a writer from Arroyo Grande California.

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Dear Dona

Written by Michael Shannon

Page Four

Unlike the American military where mail was censored and journals and diaries forbidden the Japanese Imperial Army thought the differences in language would make ordinary Japanese as indecipherable as any code to an American reader. The head instructors at the MILS schoolalso knew that Japanese soldiers were brutalized by their superiors and would likely be resistant to the treatment the British were using on captured Afrika Corps German troops where violence and intimidation were routinely used to coerce confession and information. As many of the instructors had lived in Japan for extended periods of time they knew the Japanese were generally very kind and the spirit of co-operation was instilled in them from birth. The culture of Japan was bound to duty to the Emperor and higher authority, but they also believed that force would not be enough to get prisoners to break down. Instead the language program not only include reading a writing and the general makeup of the Japanese soldiers battlefield strategy and tactics but a heavy emphasis was put on Japanese society, geography and religious beliefs. The idea was to draw a picture of the individual soldier in an attempt to establish rapport with him. They planners knew that they would resist brutality because that was a soldiers daily life in the Imperial Army. Instead a cautionary approach was adopted where kindness and not only assurances of kind treatment but whenever possible knowing about the persons home. Differences in prefecture, religion, the social mores of a particular part of Japan helped build trust between the interrogator and the prisoner.

American government sponsored propaganda was designed to present the enemy as a monolithic structure, all Japanese being of the same mind. Depictions of the Japanese were as vile and hateful as the propagandists could make them. It was impressed upon the American public that they needed to be eradicated. This conveniently swept under the rug the fact that, just like the US they were a diverse people with many different beliefs. Led by a military dictatorship whose war aims were no less than domination of the entirety of east and Southeast Asia.

The two largest religions were Shintoism, the official state religion and Bhuddism which originally came from China and was characterized as a forign religion. Various western religions were also represented particularly the Methodists. In 1940, Christians in Japan united in a declaration of church unity after the Religious Organizations Law required all Protestant churches to merge into one.

Japan had religious freedom during World War II and there was separation of church and state. It was not a theocracy. It is correct to say that most religious people were pro-war at the time.

During the pre-1945 period, Japan moved into political totalitarianism, ultranationalism, and fascism culminating in Japan’s invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931. This was part of an overall global period of social upheavals and conflicts.

Regardless of the political reality the instructors knew that the average Imperial Japanese soldier would have far less interest in politics and much more allegiance to his family, friends and the local village life. All of these observations dictated a much more friendly and kind approach than the Germans were getting from the British. Establishing a connection between the Nisei interpreter and the prisoner was an important part of the curriculum at Camp Savage.

The very first class which started on June 1, 1942 was made up of 200 enlisted men, 193 Nisei and 7 Caucasians. The entire class, which had been moved from the Presidio was made up of soldiers who had already enlisted before the war and were considered regular army. Their studies had begun in San Francisco and it wasn’t until after order 9066 was signed in February of ’42 that they moved east.

There were three types of student classification. There were Caucasians who had studied abroad or attended universities where they studied Japanese The majority were Nisei, American born citizens who had varying degrees of language experience. Some had attended locally run Japanese schools which they attended after regular public school classes and came from homes where the Japanese was spoken. The third classification were the Kibei, A subset of Nisei who spent a significant part of their youth in Japan, usually for education, and then returned to the U.S. They ranged from students who had gone to elementary school, many from Japanese high schools and some University students. The Kibei were terrific asset to the MIS because of their familiarity with Japanese culture at all levels.

The terms the Japanese used to describe what generation they were from were introduced to Western American cultural language in the late thirties. Hilo’s immigrant parents were referred to as Issei or First Generation. The 2nd generation like Hilo and his brother were Nisei or 2nd generation. Sansei were their children, the ones I went through school with.

Families wealthy enough to send children to Japan were relatively uncommon. Kibei (帰米, literally “go home to America”) was a term often used in the 1930’s and 40s to describe Japanese Americans born in the United States who were studying in or had studied in Japan. Many Kibei got trapped in Japan when war broke out between Japan and the U.S. In a sense, they became stateless because they were Americans living in Japan, labeled as the “enemy” in both.

The Kibei were the foundation blocks of the school at Camp Savage. Because the service would need soldiers to read fluently, translate to careful english, have some background in Japanese cultural, both civilian and military classes were on educating each student in a curriculum that matched both his background, Nisei or Kibei, and the specialty he was being trained for. Graduates would operate in teams where each member had one of the key components they studied at Savage.

Savage was an apt description for both the curriculum and the school. Foremost in their minds must have been the consequences they likely faced if they failed. The military is essentially faceless. You have a serial number because thats how you are identified. Transfers aren’t exactly blind but primarily rely on number that are needed here or there. For the Nisei soldiers at camp Savage, that meant that failure meant transfer back to your original unit. In Summer of 1943, nearly all Nisei in the various units of the army were transferred to the 100th Infantry Regiment, a mostly Hawaiian unit made up from the Hawaii National Guard. Trained in Mississippi and Wisconsin they shipped out to Italy in September of 1943 and were immediately thrown into the battle for Salerno in southern Italy near Naples. They spent the next eight months in nearly constant combat in some of the most vicious fighting of WWII. Every Nisei at Savage knew of this and what the price of failure would be, immediate transfer to the 100th as a replacement. They weren’t cowards, far from it, but they also understood the reality.

Your father lived in one of those tarpaper shacks for six months. I’m sure he had his turn rolling out of his cot at 4:30 am and priming the stove. He may have been lucky in the placement of his bunk, next to the little coal stove would have been as good as it got. Having a bunk on the end of the row would not be the best place to be in Minnesotas winter. Tarred paper is not among the greatest insulators. In fact it dwells pretty near the bottom. You can poke a pencil through it with no effort. Those shacks were drafty and pretty close to sleeping out of doors. In the morning they must have smelled. A confection of bad breath, farts, nearly dead hunks of coal giving off a noxious vapor and the clinging smell of cigarettes and uniforms they were not able to keep clean. Hanging just below the rafters a white cloud of condensed vapor from the mens breathing which would melt a drip as the room and the day heated. Soldiers had to do their own laundry, in tubs and basins outdoors with rough alkaline soap. Avoiding that chore would have been paramount.

Barracks at Camp Savage with stoves. US Army photo. 1943

Being young and soldiers they would have laughed at their predicament and blamed the army in no uncertain terms. Grousing soldiers have alway found the military to be the villain. SNAFU* was the word in WWII.

The classrooms were a better place to be. Semi-permanent buildings, well heated and clean would have been a relief. Luckily student were relieved of all the most basic duties that a soldier normally carried out. There was no drilling or inspections, no standing post in the middle of the night, all the little annoying things that the regular private has to put up with. The Army was desperate to prepare them for their combat jobs and made sure they had no more distractions than absolutely necessary.

After six months in the classroom, class C-10 at Camp Savage walked out of the classroom for the last time and stood in front of one of the remaining log buildings and stood for a class picture. Everyone smiling and glad to be through the grinding curriculum.

1942 1943 Camp Savage MIS Niseis. Your fathers class.

Hilo received a promotion to Tech five, an enlisted rank slightly below Corporal.** Like the others, he walked back to his hutment to open his official orders. He would have opened the manila envelope with the printed label, Official, Department of the Army and like all soldiers held his breath while he slid the paperwork out. Along with his service record was a single page warning him that he was now a holder of a Top Secret Clearance and was liable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Official Secrets Act not to share or divulge any information as to his assignment or duty station under penalty of law.

Every MIS soldier carried a Secret designation. Information on the school and its graduates, their purpose was to be a closely held secret. This designation was to be enforced for a period of fifty years after WWII. The Military was concerned about the fact that they had interpreters in the Pacific theater whose importance could not be overstated.

Hilo’s parents who were housed at the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp had been visited by the FBI. Every MIS graduate had been thoroughly vetted before they were ordered overseas. This must have been very confusing to Hirokuni and Ito who would have been interrogated by two agents who gave them no information at all about the reason. Hilo wasn’t even mentioned during the questioning. The were and would remain completely ignorant of the reason until the war was over.

The second sheet of paper stated his destination; future duty station and was clipped to a set of official orders and travel vouchers. He was to report to Army headquarters in Oakland where he would travel by available transport to the Southwest Pacific Theater of Operations immediately. There would be no leave as Nisei soldiers were not yet allowed to enter the restricted zone to see family.*** Censorship rules meant that he could not tell them his destination just that he was being ordered overseas.

MIS interpreter PFC Geo Hara leaving for the Pacific, 1943. Densho Archive photo

Hilo himself wouldn’t have known his actual destination. He wouldn’t find out until his ship passed Hawaii so sensitive was military command. Some of the instructors at Savage were returnees and would have shared general information but not too much. He could have likely guessed that it would have been the Western Theater of Operations under General MacArthur but where? He was left to wonder.

Page Five coming Saturday November 23rd.

Destination, Southwest Pacific theater of operations and the real war.

Notes on text:

*SNAFU, Situation Normal, All f****d Up.

**The Army forbid the Nisei commissioned rank until late in the war. All MIS personnel were enlisted or noncommissioned rank.

*** Restrictions on visitation were lifted for servicemen in late 1943.

Links to other chapters in the series.

Page one: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12268

Page two: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12861

Page three: https://wordpress.com/post/atthetable2015.com/12872

Michael Shannon is a writer living in the Central Coast of California. He went to school with many children, whose parents were survivors of the camps in his little farming community of Arroyo Grande, California..

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Dear Dona

Written By Michael Shannon

Page One

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Dear Dona,

Something in your note about not knowing what your dad did in WWII struck a cord. I have some research from the Manzanar story so I though I’d look into your dads service in World War two.

Most people have very little or no knowledge of the Japanese Nisei experience. I’ve interviewed people of that generation who had no idea that there were Nisei soldiers at all. In fact, there were none in the Navy, Marines or Air Corps, only the Army and its nurse crops accepted Nisei and only citizens at that.

I’m sending you this to pass along what I found about your dad’s service. One of the complaints of military men is the constant record keeping they must do. The funny thing is that once they are separated from the service the records go who knows where. Perhaps they are stored in cardboard boxes at the back of the warehouse pictured in the first Indiana Jones movie. Who knows? In any case some can be found in order to fill in a family’s story. In a way its a treasure hunt. There can be quite unexpected results. In fact its like assembling a puzzle when some of the pieces are missing.

The difficulty for children is that wartime veterans are extremely hesitant to tell them what their experience was like. There are a few reasons why that is so. One, the kids have no background experience or education to make much sense of it. Two, in the case of combat veterans, the stories are too horrible to contemplate telling your own children. Third, their hope is, that surely the kids will never have to experience their fathers hell for themselves.

Most sons and daughters of veterans never hear much about the parent who actually served. In WWII, somewhere around 12% of all regular army soldiers saw combat in which their was actual shooting. The average combat soldier was involved in combat for a period of around forty days. By comparison soldiers in Viet Nam averaged 240 days and in Afghanistan close to 1,200 days. The difference wouldn’t matter to your father. One day at a time is how it’s done.

Your father saw active combat against the Japanese Imperial Army on the islands of Luzon in the Phillipines and went in on the first wave in the invasion of Okinawa. The battle for Okinawa drug out over nearly three months, from April 1st until June 22nd 1945.* Okinawa was the last major battle of World War II. It was the bloodiest battle in the Pacific War. It involved 1,300 U.S. ships and 50 British ships, four U.S. Army divisions, and two Marine Corps divisions. The U.S. objective was to secure Okinawa, which would remove the last barrier between U.S. forces and Imperial Japan. By the time Okinawa was secured by American forces on June 22, the United States had sustained over 49,000 casualties including more than 12,500 men killed or missing. The fighting was absolutely vicious with the Japanese fighting to the last man in most cases. The battle caused more than twice the number of American casualties than the Guadalcanal Campaign and Battle of Iwo Jima combined, with the Japanese kamikaze effort causing the American Navy to suffer more casualties than any previous engagement in the Atlantic or Pacific. The Navy suffered the greatest loss in its history.

The U.S. Navy lost 32 ships and aircraft, and 368 ships suffered damage during the Battle of Okinawa, . The U.S. Navy also lost 49,151 sailors, with 12,520 killed or missing. The Japanese by comparison lost more than 110,000 military personnel killed, and more than 7,000 were taken prisoner during the fighting.

The number of Japanese surrenders was unusual for the Pacific war. Most of the credit must go to the personnel of the Japanese American members of the Military Intelligence Language Service or MILS as it was known. Both your father and uncle were members and attended the Army’s Japanese language schools.

So how did he get there. The answer is multifaceted and complicated because as always anyone history when its being written is like a juggler trying to keep too many balls in the air..

When I was researching the series on Manzanar I used, as my primary sources two Japanese American archives which were put together after World War two and have grown year by year ever since. Collected were diaries, letters, newspapers and radio news, family photos and most fascinating; oral histories by a very wide cast of characters. Generals, politicians, researchers and thousand of ordinary citizens who lived through the concentration camps.

When I talked to people in that generation, many whom I knew personally, I learned that the community, the community of the same age, those in high school or younger who were coming of age in the late thirties lived quite a different life than many might imagine. What they though about one another was different than the preceding generation.

Looking through the old yearbooks from that time it’s easy to see Nisei kids were completely integrated into teenage life. Sports and clubs, social events all featured mixes of kids from all backgrounds.

My dad was a scoutmaster in the late thirties and kids like Haruo , Ben Dohi, John Loomis, Gorden Bennett and Don Gullickson along with my father told me funny stories about camping together and there wasn’t a hint of any racism. Stone went to HS with my father and was a life long friend. Personally, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that Leroy or Masaki was any different than I was.

Quite obviously there was discrimination by older folks and would be a great deal after Pearl Harbor but amongst those kids who who were in or just graduated in the years before the war there was little. Contemporary accounts in the local papers list Nisei kids names in all the kinds of chatty articles written about the goings on of youth. My fathers Boy Scouts listed the names of many Nisei kids and interviews with them showed me that they were friends no matter their skin. It strikes me that that generation saw little difference amongst themselves. They spoke the same high school language, they dressed alike as kids do, they combed their hair the same. Nisei boys played baseball, football and basketball together and as now, kids for the most part supported each other against the machinations of adults.

My own experience as a high school teacher illustrates my point. Adults, teachers and administration might publicly dislike your style of dress, or how you wear your hair but the kids themselves will put up a united front against any perceived transgression into the territory they reserve for themselves. You yourself will remember girls climbing the trees at school to protest the dress code. I’m sure ethnicity had nothing to do with that because kids unite over things they find unfair. Your dads friends would have felt the same.

A case in point, I never heard a disparaging remark from any adult I knew who went to school with your dad, uncle or any other Nisei because they knew who they were. They weren’t “Japs,” they were friends. That foul term was reserved for the Imperial Japanese, not friends.

When your father graduated from Arroyo Grande High School, the old brick one on Crown Hill in 1936 the Japanese Imperial army had invaded Manchuria and was moving into China, the Rape of Nanking was the next year. Mussolini, 1928 had annexed Libya and in just the year before your dad’s graduation had instigated the war in Ethiopia where he used poison gas, tanks and air power against tribal armies armed with old muskets and spears. Hitler had opened the first concentration camps in 1933, just one year after he was elected to office. In little Arroyo Grande all of this would have been news. Radios and newspapers published world news. Young men were not much concerned I’m sure about all of this conflict, it was worlds away from the lives of rural farmers. was the possibility of war. Arroyo Grande was far, far away from world events.

The next three years would mean a great deal to the lives of the young and as events were to prove, terrible things to the were coming to the 126,948 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States, 74% of whom lived in California.

Crown Hill High School, 1941

Your dad graduated Arroyo Grande HS with the class of 1936 and was working for your grandfather until late 1941 when he decided to follow your uncle Ben into the service. He was inducted on October 31st, 1941 just a little more than a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor. No one knew that was coming of course but by that time the German army along with their allies the Italians had overrun France, Holland, Belgium, and most of western Europe, They had occupied Norway and were advancing on Egypt in north Africa. Greece was under Nazi control and most of eastern Europe as well. German submarines were slaughtering ships transporting material to Britain in the north Atlantic. On the 2nd of October the German army launched operation Tornado which was a continuation of the previous years invasion of Russia.

In the far east the Imperial Japanese army had invaded and conquered Manchuria and was steamrolling across China. The general staff in Tokyo was in the final stages of planning for the surprise attacks that were to come at Pearl Harbor, the Phillipines and the rest of Southeast Asia.

No one in the United States could have possibly missed the threat to the country by these events. On October 17, 1941, the German U-boat U-568 torpedoed and damaged the destroyer USS Kearny off Iceland, killing 11 and injuring 22. The day your father raised his right hand in Los Angeles and swore to defend his country disaster struck in the early morning hours in the north Atlantic. While escorting convoy HX-156, the American destroyer U.S.S. Reuben James DD-245 was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 115 of its 160 crewmen, including all the officers.

The draft had been instituted by congress in September of 1940. Called the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, it required all men between the ages of 21 and 45 to register for the draft. This was the first peacetime draft in United States’ history. Those who were selected from the draft lottery were required to serve at least one year in the armed forces. Once the U.S. entered WWII, draft terms extended through the duration of the fighting.

Although the United States was not at war at the time, many people in the government and in the country believed that the United States would eventually be drawn into the wars that were being fought in Europe and East Asia. Isolationism, or the belief that American should do whatever it could to stay out of the war, was still very strong with almost half the Americans polled saying we should stay out. But with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, Americans were growing uneasy about Great Britain’s ability to defeat Germany on its own. Our own military was woefully unprepared to fight a global war should it called upon to do so.

The first number drawn in the 1940 U.S. draft lottery was 158, which was announced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 29, 1940. Your father along with your uncle must have thought that it was better to volunteer than wait. The thinking at the time was that it was better to have some choice in where and when you served than be at the mercy of a blind system of quotas.

Hilo registered in Arroyo Grande on the 16th of October 1940. He may have waited to be called up because of your grandparents. Under the exclusion act they were not allowed to own land or a home and so like most Isei, rented. The land below the Roosevelt highway in the Cienega where they farmed and lived was rented. For tax and census reasons your uncle Ben was listed as the head of the family though he was just 24. I’m sure that was all just on paper though. Your grandfather certainly ran the show since with only your aunts left at home he was able to continue farming for the next five months until they were hauled off to Tulare and then to Poston, Arizona on the Gila River, the concentration camp where they and your aunts remained until 1945

the Poston concentration camp, Gila River, Arizona where most of the Arroyo Grande citizens where held.

Your father reported for active duty in Los Angeles on the 23rd of December 1941. There he took the oath to defend the constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic. Five months later his family was locked up behind barbed wire and held inside by soldiers armed with rifles and machine guns.

Name Hiroaki
Race Japanese
Marital Status Single, without dependents (Single)
Rank Private
Birth Year 1917
Nativity State or Country California
Citizenship Citizen
Residence California
Education 4 years of high school
Civil Occupation Farm hands, general farms
Enlistment Date 23 Oct 1941
Enlistment Place Los Angeles, California
Service Number 39167146

Nisei men reporting for Army induction, 1410 East 16th Street Los Angeles, CA, 1941

Page Two

Coming on October 26th, 2024

It’s pretty easy to form a picture of your great grandparents taking your dad to the old Greyhound bus depot at Mutt Anderson’s cafe, his parents wearing their best clothes as they did for important occasions. In 1941 they would have both been wearing hats, he in his Fedora and she with her go to church best, purse on her arm and those sensible heels women wore then. The family scene is always the same, father looking prideful and the mother just on the edge of tears but holding it all in so as not to embarrass. Hilo would have walked up the steps into the bus and found a seat, maybe at the window so he could look out and see mom and dad. All of them giving a subdued, shy wave as your grandparents hearts broke. Perhaps your mother was there too. My guess is she was………..

  • I was born on the day Okinawa was invaded.
  • The cover photo, The Brothers taken in 1945.

The writer is a lifetime resident of Arroyo Grande California and writes so his children will know the place they grew up in.

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The Irrigation Ditch

By Michael Shannon

Kids that grow up on farms and ranches are like the pups. They are always on the lookout for Dad coming out of the house and headed for the pickup truck. They know that he will lead them towards adventure. It doesn’t matter what that is, it’s just the opportunity to go somewhere with him. The dogs think the same way. The front seat of the old truck with it’s torn upholstery, and sagging springs, even the broken one which lies in wait like a rattlesnake has room for all. Over on dad’s side the viper, it’s one fang hiding just below the tattered hole where his butt slides when he’s getting out, he misses it most of the time but once he’s worn those Levis long enough they will bear the mark of the just missed.

Bumping down the farm roads, still rutted from last winter kids hold on swaying left or right depending on how many holes and ridges dad can miss.

Pride of place rules apply, the youngest sitting next to dad resting his towhead firmly against pop’s Pendelton’s sleeve, the middle brown haired one with the cowlick, squished in the middle and the oldest owning the door. He has arms long enough to reach outside and push down the chromed door handle because the inside has gone missing. My dad never focused on trivial things like hunting up an Allen wrench and digging through the cluttered tool box in the back in the remote possibility that the missing handle might be there. He used the drivers door.

Some days we drove past the tin sided pump house, the very big electric pump humming away inside pulling groundwater up and forcing it through the buried 8” pipe that ran along the uphill side of the fields. At regular intervals stubs of pipe, each one with a threaded caps stood sentinel like so many soldiers waiting for orders.

In the nineteen fifties most irrigation was fed by ditches plowed at one end of the field. Small stand pipes screwed into the risers delivered water under pressure to fill the ditch. From the ditch, siphon pipes drawing from the main ditch delivered the water to the rows along which grew the plants. Tomatoes, Celery, Lettuce, and Broccoli were all irrigated this way.

My dad with his shovel on his shoulder patrolled the dozens of rows to make sure that each one was irrigated evenly. Controlling the water by sliding the little gates on the siphons to slow or hasten the water on its way. Back and forth, back and forth like a soldier on duty. He slogged through the muddy rows building small temporary dams to slow progress, the goal being to make sure the water reached the end of the quarter mile long rows at the same time.

Simple looking to the uneducated observer the practice dates far back into the mists of time. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were watered this way. The ancient Sumerians funneled water from the Tigris Euphrates river system to grow grain and fruit trees in the Fertile Crescent. Canals were built to bring the water down from the Zagros mountains in present day Iran to supply the cities of Mesopotamia more than twelve thousand years ago. The technology has not changed to this day. It’s simple but elegant in the way that successful technologies are. You can still see row irrigation on farms and ranches all over California. No doubt little Babylonian boys and girls played in the ditches just the way we did.

Simple but complex in the doing. The water had to be channeled in a way the provided maximum saturation of the soil for the plant to thrive. Our farm had at least four types of soil mix and each one dictated how the irrigator worked. Too dry and hot weather could kill the delicate plant before it could be irrigated again, too wet and the roots would drown and kill the plant. Water was applied differently for crops which had just been fertilized. Consider the age of the plant and it’s harvest time which the farmer knew to the day. Tractors are heavy and soft wet soil will compress and crush a plants roots. So, it’s not just a man out standing in the field, it’s a skill.

There are certain mores involved, at least for my dad. Plow a straight furrow, water highlights a crooked line and he was always checking the neighbors to see if theirs were arrow like. A small thing I suppose but it is part of what I learned from him which was how important it was to do a job well no matter its importance.

Running the water across the road onto your neighbors field was a major faux pas and dad took pride in never letting that happen. Our uphill neighbor’s irrigator, Roque ran his water onto us all the time. Dad would privately grind his teeth, muttering under his breath about lazy men but when he talked to Roque about it Roque would laugh out loud and tell my dad, “I never do anymore, Mister George” and laugh again. Next day he would do it again. My father never said much to him because he was so irrepressibly happy that it was impossible to take any serious offense. It’s difficult to fault a man that laughs.

We, on the other hand did our best to get a muddy as possible. Because we were too little to handle a shovel we used natures backhoes, our hands. The main ditch was about two feet wide and a foot or so deep, enough to drown a child I guess, but no one, us kids or my father seemed to be the least bit concerned. On the uphill side we used our hands to dig canals so we could make the water run where we wanted it. The canals went nowhere and the only purpose was to get the water to run freely. This was our first lesson in understanding hydraulics. Each little ditch had to be just off level in order to make the water move in whatever direction we wanted it to go.

Since our fields were a mix of alluvial soil and heavy adobe they made the worlds finest mud. You could add enough water to make it slurry which was really great for throwing at the pickup because it stuck like glue. A little bit dryer and it made great little adobe buildings to go alongside the ditches. Certain combinations were terrific for slicking down a brothers hair.

There were plenty of stems on the ground leftover from last seasons crops that could be woven into rafts and not far away, an old abandoned Diamond Rio flatbed truck draped with blackberry vines. The leaves could float GI Joe on his way across the Rhine River. The occasional Sycamore leaf blown up from the creek served as major people movers. Sadly many a GI Joe lost his little plastic life by being swept away on Tidal waves never to be seen again. Leaves have no handrails and though Joe can float he cannot under any circumstance swim. Pretty sure cultivators are still occasionally turning up their tiny corpses while working those fields. GI Joes may perish but their little bodies never decompose.

When we were just a little older we would hunt through the packing shed and corn crib looking for small pieces of left over wood and with a little ingenuity, a nail or two and a ball peen hammer make them into many kinds of ships and boats. Nails driven into the sides stuck out just like battleship cannon, or so the six year old mind imagined

Dozens of ships in the Japanese fleet were lost to a barrage of dirt clods fired from behind the pickup. No invasion of the Broccoli ever succeeded. As children of the second world war we understood the importance of fleet actions. Clods when lofted as high as we could toss them made very satisfying splashes. We didn’t need a game bought at the dime store we had endless resources in which to make our own games. No one I can remember ever told us the truth of things to crush our imaginations. That would come soon enough.

My little brother would crawl up the running board and lay on the front seat and nap when he got tired. Jerry and I kept it up until it was time to head back to the house. Dad’s boots and Levis would be soaked with mud and water to the knees and we could of passed for Mudmen ourselves. We had accomplished much though, held off an invasion, built hydraulic systems and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. When you grew big enough you might get the privilege of riding the running boards back to the pump house, going inside through the tin door with its screech owl hinges and using both thumbs push the big off button on the pump.Stay a moment as the big electic pump wound its way down from its jet engine howl to silence. Little things like that mean a great deal to little kids. They understand that you earn responsibility.

Back at the house it was strip, leave the clothes on the back porch floor and run and get in the big oversize porcelain bathtub for a good scrubbing. Scrub brush on the bottom of the feet, rolled up washcloth pushed as far into the ear as mom could make it go and then a big fluffy towel, try not to slip on the wet linoleum floor, “Careful, careful,” mom cautioned over and over again. Trying to hold onto three slippery wet boys at the same time.

Funny thing I remember, Mom and Dad never scolded us for being dirty, they always seemed to be as delighted as we were.

No one ever gets over playing in the mud. Shannon Family Photo, Lake Nacimiento, CA.

“Can we do it again tomorrow, can we Daddy?”

Michael Shannon grew up on a farm in coastal California and has mastered the irrigators art himself. He has masterful shovel skills, can lay pipe and knows the secret to using baling wire to clear Earwigs from overhead Rainbird sprinkler heads.

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It’s Not Vegetables You’re Buyin’ Lady,

Its a mans life you hold in your hands.

Discing, 1960. Family Photo.

My dad’s family were farmers in Ireland. That’s what they knew. Like all immigrants they came to America for opportunity. They came because laws in Ireland held them captive in a system of government that placed no value on small farmers. Just twenty years before my great-grandfather was born, it was still illegal to educate Irish children. An Irishman could not vote nor own land unless he was of the ruling class. The Potato Famines of the early 1800’s began the drive for immigration in which 1.7 million Irish came to America between 1840 and 1860. This flood from Ireland continued, unabated for 50 years. Today there are about 36 million americans of primarily Irish descent. Only about 6.4 million Irish still reside in Ireland.

An Irish crofter, as farmers were known, held property in trust from the large landholders who actually owned it. The average Irish small farm was roughly one eighth of an acre. Can you imagine living and growing subsistance crops on a piece of ground only 5,400 feet square? Thats about 75 by 75 feet! The United States, stretching for over three thousand miles to the west was an almost unimaginable thing. It was near impossible to imagine how large it was. Even today people of this country cannot imagine it’s size.

My great-grandparents, the Greys, Samuel and Jenny were from Ballyrobert Doagh, a crossroads on the river Doagh in County Antrim, Ireland. They came to America on their honeymoon in 1881. The sailed on the packet ship State of Alabama which ran a circular route from Glasgow, Scotland to Belfast, Dublin and Cork. Once loaded, it made passage across the north Atlantic. Those trips took as much as 12 weeks to make. The ships themselves were combination steam and sail which was somewhat of an improvement over the so called “Coffin Ships” that made the trip some thirty years earlier. During the Irish Diaspora as much as half the steerage passengers might die enroute. All of the major destination cities in the United States and Canada featured mass burial grounds filled with the hopeful.

They boarded the States Line ship “SS State of Alabama” in Belfast and arrived in New York on the 6th of June, 1881 after a quick summertime passage of just 18 days.  Sam and Jenny made it to New York harbor where immigrants were held in quarantine on board until cleared for landing. Once cleared they at disembarked Castle Gardens on the lower end of Manhattan Island.

Sam Grey worked all kinds of jobs as he made his way west to California, arriving finally in San Leandro and then down to the the Salinas valley where he grazed sheep. His wife Jenny had relatives living in the Oso Flaco area of California and eventually they came here. They rented some land along Division Road and he grew potatoes of all things. Ironic, but a decent profit. My grandmother was born in that little house, the second of there eventual seven living children.

That child grew up to be my dads mother, one of a family of farmers and dairymen that included McBanes, Mcguires, McKeens, Moores, Greys and Shannons. Today politicians refer to this as chain migration but they are fools. Family following family has always been the rule, always will be. The Irish didn’t ask for any hand out; they wanted a way out and they were willing to work to get it.

Agricultural servitude is term applied to those that work the ground for pay, usually meager. It applies not to just the field laborer but the owners too. My father, the grandson of Samuel Gray was one of these men. He was raised on a dairy farm as they used to be called because not only the milk cows were raised there but the oats to feed them. My grandparents also raised beans, peas, tomatoes, hogs, turkeys and for comic relief, many, many dogs, some who stories are legend in our family. No goats though, Grandma said that only shanty Irish raised Goats, plus the church taught that animals with cloven hooves were unclean and satanic. Thats the way she thought and thats the way it was.

Annie Shannon, my grandmother about 1925. She is 40. Hillcrest Dairy, Arroyo Grande, CA. Family photo ©

Dairies are the chains that bind the farmer to the ground. Cows are milked two or three time a day and the dairyman follows the old rule, “Dark to Dark,” when he works. Little boys like my dad and uncle learned the lesson early for they had to begin pulling their weight as soon as they were big enough. Kid chores like feeding chickens and collecting eggs and as they grew, the load became heavier. As teens they rose before dawn, went up to the barn to help with the milking and then the bottling and cleaning. Off to school for the middle of the day, they returned in the afternoon for the evening milking. Every day seven days a week, twelve months of the year including all holidays. The cows took no time off and neither did the customers.

When I was little my dad was farming in the upper Arroyo Grande Valley. He grew what are known as row crops. Vegetables like celery, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes and string beans were what he raised.

Unusual for a farmer of that time, Dad was a 1934 graduate of California Berkeley. He once told us that the main reason he went to college was, one, my grandmother had graduated Cal in 1908 and she wanted him to go, two, his father wanted him to study the law but most of all he went because he’d read Frank Merriwell at Yale, a pulp fiction book from the early twentieth century about Frank’s grand adventures at Yale. He and my uncle Jackie used to walk up to the old Union hall, fondly known as the “Rat Race”, which was at the corner of Mason and Branch streets. On Saturday afternoon they’d plunk down a nickel and sit down in one of the wooden folding chairs or the eclectic collection of press back chairs salvaged from somebodies kitchen and watch what were still called Flickers because they did,flicker Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and the madcap cops from the Mack Sennet studios made kids laugh. The “freshman” starring Harold Lloyd or “College” from Buster Keaton told an age old story. They had storylines that led Dad to visualize college as a place where Nerdy grinds were picked on by strapping young athletes, ignored by pretty girls but somehow managed to save the day by winning the big game on the very last play. The pulp novel, “One Minute to Play”, which we still have features a football hero forbidden to play in college by his pastor father. A hundred years have passed since Dad and uncle Jackie sat on the edge of their chairs in that drafty old dance hall but the plot remains the same. Those things, he said were his primary reason. They were a good as any. And he did have a great time to boot.

He came home to Arroyo Grande after graduation. It was the middle of the great depression when work and money were scarce. Businesses were barely hanging on and opportunities were few and far between. Choices had to be made.

Farming and ranching were familiar things to him though he later said that he didn’t want to be a dairyman because the work was so relentless. He chose row crops instead. Which, when you think of it is only slightly better. It’s still six and one half days a week, dawn to dusk though it slows in the winter some. Fewer crops but more adobe mud, there is your trade off.

Slogging your way down the rows dressed in oilskins holding the slippery handle of your 12″ Broccoli knife, slippery with mud, hands with no gloves in the rain, cold at 7am, still nearly dark. Left hand grasping the stalk below the leaves, a blind slice, the cut and throwing the severed head through the air and into the cart being pulled behind a wheel tractor. The driver and the tractor set the pace and it’s relentless. Head down, sucking mud, mind numb, no time to think, just do the job. For minimum wage. They tell themselves that there is no one who will do the work and some pride is taken in that. What else can you do?

It’s like the old saying, a boy tells his father after his first day of bucking hay, “I sure hope I don’t have to do this for the rest of my life.” Before he knows it, sixty years on he’s still doing it. Life is like that.

There is just something about the orderly manner in which crops are grown. All the preparation and finally after walking through the planted but still barren fields looking for that tiny two leaf sprout which ever and ever again promises that life will renew. That is the true farmers delight.

My father never bought a new truck in his life. He though of it as showing off. He didn’t glad hand or seek out the company of other farm men and contractors, no breakfast meetings at Goldies with the three percenters and the reps from NH-3 or the seed salesman. It was wasted time. If he needed them they were just a phone call away. Though all of that is a tried and true way of doing business he considered it a waste of time.

Time was better spent managing his crops for he was extremely proud of produce. As a boy I worked in his packing sheds, wherever they might be. He had more than one ranch. He would take me out to the Berros ranch or up to the one on the Mesa and I would pack vegetables. One of the keys to understanding my father was to know that he would never cheat you; ever. Every vegetable is those boxes was to be perfect. The prize tomato on the top was exactly like the one on the bottom. In a flat of Chinese peas which held hundreds of pods, every one had better be perfect. It’s what he expected of you and its what he produced for the buyers. In that way he taught me to be meticulous about any job I did. As a 13 year old I didn’t get it, it made the job slow and monotonous but somehow the lesson stuck. I’m not sure if he saw it as a lesson but It’s what he expected of himself and it was the same for me. I thank him for that.

I remember riding with him in the pickup and dad pointing out the farmers who couldn’t plow a straight furrow or ran their irrigation water onto their neighbors, those things mattered to him. It’s funny because our tractors lived outside and were dirty and rusty and in the slowness of winter the weeds grew up around them and they looked abandoned. He didn’t care about that, they just had to run. Their only purpose was to serve the crops. Crops, perfect, tractors, not so much.

My dad was thirty three when I was born. When I was a pea packer he was in his middle to late forties, his prime years and had been a farmer for a quarter of a century. By the time I graduated high school he’d been at it for thirty years. He’d seen a lot of changes in farming in that time but was about to face the death knell of the family far, consolidation. After the wars population surge there were many more mouths to feed in America and the pressure on the smaller family farms to remain profitable increased.

Daddy and me, first birthday 1946. Family Photo

The Vegetable packing houses which contracted with the individual growers and the advent of huge grocery chains increased demand for production. For example my dad grew celery on contract for a local packing house which sold celery to grocery chains all over the country. No longer did the little local trucking company haul your produce up to the San Francisco markets or down to Los Angeles. Your celery might be going by train to New York or Chicago and in bulk, orders made up of the crop from a dozen small farms. Some farmers, more businessmen than growers formed co-ops or bought out the individual family farms. This allowed the large grower to make demands of the brokers and introduced economies of scale to lower their production costs. This worked against the small farms like my dad, the Betitas, Kawaguchi’s, Cecchetti’s, the Silva brothers and My great uncle John Grey. Their was no more growing land available and they began to be squeezed out of the markets. It wasn’t as if there produce was inferior but when it came to essential services they needed they were forced to wait in line. What this meant is that vegetable market prices which fluctuate literally hourly are a target everyone is shooting for. A delay in harvesting and shipping can be very costly and when a large grower demands that his celery be cut and shipped on the day or days your crop is scheduled for it can cost you your profit. This in our little valley. Imagine Ralphs demand that a vegetable broker not only meet what they are willing to pay but that the broker must supply every Ralphs in California or even the nation. No family farm can do that and thats why they have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

In the nineteen sixties you could count down from the site of Santa Manuela school to the dunes by family name. Biddle, Grieb, Donovan, Talley, Antonio, Evenson, Fernamburg, Cecchetti, Ikeda, Kawaguchi, Shannon, Sullivan, Coehlo, Berguia, Gularte, Waller, Reyes, Betita, De Leon, Dixon, Fukuhara, Marshalek, Fuchiwaki, Saruwatari, Taylor, Kagawa, Kawaoka, Matsumoto, Nakamura, the Obyashi brothers, Sakamoto, Sato, Kobara, Sonbonmatsu, Hiyashi and Okui. There were Phelans, Donovans and Elmer Runels too.

The Betita Boys, 1960’s running string for pole beans. Used by permission

See, the thing is you gotta be in it to win it. Farming takes a gamblers approach. Farmers know that farming is an extreme investment. Finished crops return a very small percentage on the money you put into them. Equipment is expensive if you look at the cost of just an individual item like a Caterpillar. What few think about is the add ons, the Disc, Harrow, plow and the roller. There is gasoline and diesel, oils and grease to be paid for. You have to have a tank to store the fuel. Unless you have kids of an age a driver must be paid. Seed, fertilizer, pesticides and the cost of running the water pump. Who moves the irrigation pipe? How about the crop duster?

Where is the labor to be had. That’s rough and dirty work usually done by folks with few other options which in itself brings problems of attendance and theft. Drinking before, during and after the job. This is the kind of work done by the desperate. People so poor that they will steal lettuce knives, the baskets used to pick vegetables, shovels or even your shirt if you leave it lying about. For us this problem was abated with the introduction of the Bracero program which brought young Mexican men into the country to replace the field workers who were in the military. After the war the soldiers didn’t come back so the immigrant program was continued. Until 1964 this program supplied nearly five million workers to farmers in 24 states.

We, and most of my friends grew up with these guys which, I think gave most of us an appreciation for different cultures. To leave your home and come across the border to work for people who didn’t speak your language and had no interest in your culture was a form of bravery that I understood.

Nonetheless the small farmers struggled and when we had an early, very hard freeze which killed nearly every crop in the valley it spelled the end for many. Bank loans were not forthcoming, there was no crop insurance, no Federal subsidies and in most cases no cash on hand to pay your vendors. Bankruptcy was an option of course but men like my father and especially my father would never admit total defeat. The bills were piling up and some companies, even ones run by close friends were demanding payment. I can’t imagine how he did it but he just put his head down and paid what he could. It took years to crawl out from under the debt. He forbid my mother who worked to pay off one dime, it was his debt. The big freeze was only one disaster. Down in Berros the deer were bold enough to come into the tomato fields and eat the fruit in broad daylight costing thousands of dollars. He got a permit from the county to shoot them but you had to dress them out and deliver them to the county’s general hospital which became a huge job in itself. He had to give it up. I was a senior in high school then. One year storm winds blew down acres and acres of pole peas, the mainstay of his operation. You could look out our kitchen window and see the field with the ripe, producing vine lying flat on the ground. One winter there had been so much rain that the tractors could not get into the fields to harvest the celery. Crop loss, natural disaster and the dominance of the larger operations was like one step forward and two back.

I can’t imagine the courage it took to move ahead but in 1980 he had, had enough. He and my uncle sold my grandmothers cattle ranch and he used the money to retire. In those days it was rare for a farmer to have a pension and most depended on Social Security to survive. So he took some of the money and bought a lot in town and I built them a retirement home. He always said he wanted it there so he could see the old home ranch where he was raised. Just like the home I grew up in where you could look out of the kitchen window and see the crops grow and the neighbors pass by the new house had that big picture window next to the kitchen table where he could sip his coffee and see where his life began.

Mom and Dad with their three sons in 1986. New house. Family Photo

So they left the ranch near the four corners and never looked back, his last and favorite dog moved to the junkyard on Sheridan Road up on the mesa and they settled down in the new home at the corner of Pilgrim and Orchard streets. Mom and Dad lived quietly there, she passed away first and he followed a few years later. He missed her because he loved her so and his last years were lonely and like many old folks slightly bitter for what was lost. Weighed on the scale of life I believe there isn’t enough Gold on earth to level his worth as a man; old fashioned in his beliefs but a superb father which is what counts with me. It’s funny but as a little boy I called him Daddy which I outgrew as children do but at the end thats what he was, my Daddy.

  • Cover Photo: Jackie and George Shannon on the dairy. 1922. Family Photo

Michael Shannon is a writer and a son. He writes so his own children will know their history and who they are.

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THE GHOSTS

Michael Shannon

I met Billie at the door. She had the Key. She handed it to me and I slid it into the old mortise lock on the side door and pushed it open. The rusted hinges resisted the movement a little but finally allowed us in. The narrow hallway ahead was redolent of dust and the peculiar smell I’ve always identified with old buildings. Ahead, the stairs to the 2nd floor lodge room were nearly covered on the left by stacks and stacks of newspaper galleys collected by the Historical Society from the old Arroyo Grande Herald. Some of the newsprint had come from former owner and publisher Newall Strother’s home on old Musick Road, found there upon his death stacked nearly to the ceiling in every room. A gift unintended, left us by a man who just couldn’t bear to throw them away.

Dim light with legions of dust motes drifted slowly in a tiny breeze from somewhere in the old building. Up the stairs there were windows at the second and third floor landings, lighting the stairs with the particular glow of dirty old glass, aged and coated inside with decades of smoke and outside by the grime blown against them by weather. A filmy yellowish khaki, gently drifting cloud that only exists in old unused buildings. It tinted all vision.

“Let me show you the lodge room, no ones been in it, I think, for many years,” she said. I followed the little woman up the stairs. Dressed in slacks, what looked to be a mans old dress shirt, girls old-fashioned tennis shoes, her grey and white hair taking a glow from the old windows, she led the way up.

Her name was Billie and I had known her literally all my life. She was the granddaughter of Don Francisco Branch, the first of the Rancheros to bring his family up into the northern part of the old Spanish Cow Counties in 1837. He received a land grant from the Mexican government of nearly seventeen thousand acres of un-cleared nearly virgin land which had remained untouched by any but the few Chumash for thousands of years.

Billie’s father, Thomas Records, from another pioneering ranch family, had married Miss Lucy Jones, a granddaughter of Francis Branch. Billie was historical royalty in the little town we lived in. She kept things. My dad said that she and her sisters weren’t called the “Record sisters” without reason. She had a house full of stuff and a mind chocked to the brim with notions about who did what and how. She knew the bloodlines, the natural intermarrying of citizens in small towns. If you needed someones antecedents, she knew them.

Me and Billie in Madeline, California 1946. She’s 31, I’m 1. Family Photo

She and my father grew up together and had always been great friends. When Dad found my mother, Billie took her right into the Arroyo Grande family. She was the kind of person that, when you saw her on the street there was nothing to do but to pull over and talk to her. After my father died she came to the house with a box of, you guessed it, records. She had squirreled away news clippings, letters and other things about our family. In the box were my fathers high school football and basketball varsity letters. She had put them away and saved them for seventy years. That’s a story I wish I knew. I’m sorry that I never had the chance to ask her or him why she had them. He went to Arroyo Grande High School, she, Santa Maria but somehow she ended up with them. There is a story there, lost forever I think.

We were at the old hall, Odd Fellows 253, because as a new board member she wanted to give me a guided tour of the old building. The local History Society had recently received title to the nearly one hundred year old building for the grand sum of one dollar from the last surviving member, Gordon Bennett. The board and membership were fixed on the idea that we might secure funding to refurbish the old landmark.

Built in 1903 as Lodge 253, the old building had lain vacant for years. The Arroyo Grande Sandstone of which it was made had come from the old Patrick Moore quarry on my grandmothers ranch.

Left, Thomas Shipman brother in law to Jenny Gray, Annie Shannon in back with her mother Jenny and Maggie Phoenix in front of the hall.circa 1905. Family Photo.

We were at the old hall because as a new board member she wanted to give me a guided tour of the old building. The only time I had ever been in it was as a teenager. I had gone with my father to pick up his blue ribbon won for the best Chinese Peas at the Harvest Festival vegetable contest. The local farmers display of all the different vegetables grown in our valley took up the entire first floor. While we were there he pointed to the big windows in the front of the building and told me that my great-grandfather Shannon’s body in his coffin had been displayed there when the ground floor was the towns undertaking parlor. What does a kid say to that, I couldn’t imagine such a thing but I’m sure it was true, they used to do things like that. He said my grandfather who was a member of the Odd Fellows had taken him down when he was just twelve to see Dad Shannon, as he was called, as his body lay in state. In the window, not a church, but in a window.

The local History Society had recently received title to the nearly one hundred year old building for the grand sum of one dollar from the last surviving member, Gordon Bennett. The board and membership were fixed on the idea that we might secure funding to refurbish the old landmark.

At the first landing a quick turn to the right led into the lodge room. This was where the members met. It was obviously well used, the old carpet was faded and threadbare in places. The benches along the walls had seen better days, their varnished seats rubbed bare by generations of shifting bottoms. The curtained windows their muslin drapes transparent and fraying at the bottom filtered the sunlight creating a sense of timelessness as if the members had just left. I suppose they just had in a way.

The tour finished we turned and stepped onto the landing to head back down. I stopped and asked Billie where the next flight up went and she said it’s just an old storage room I think but you can look if you like. She turned and headed down, I turned and headed up the short flight. Just curious.

The door was closed, the old stamped doorknob mounted in its long rectangular faded brass plate turned stiffly. As the door tuned on its hinges the unmistakable odor of age greeted me as I stepped inside the dim interior. It wasn’t a storage room at all. Festooned with cobwebs nearly invisible in the gloom was a full sized six pocket pool table. Covered with the dust of decades it’s woven leather pockets still held the ivory balls fallen there during some last game played long before my birth. Two pool cues embedded in the cobwebby drift of aged dust lay on the felted top as if the players had just left for a meeting downstairs. Scoring beads hung from a long leather string indicating the final score. Overhead was a gas light fixture, its copper tubing rising to the ceiling and from there to a brass valve on the wall. Each burner had a age caked glass chimney under a brass shade, four of them once providing light to the table. Near the door was an ancient porcelain mercury switch that controlled a single light bulb hanging on old, old Ragwire directly over the sink. Electricity must have been installed sometime after the gas fixtures. A back up I suppose.

The sink was simply an enameled iron square basin. It was cradled in a pair of iron, triangular brackets mounted to the wall. The rusted old brackets had the image of a camel suspended in the frame. The drain was straight and likely just ran outside the wall and down the side of the building, simple and practical.

A small table and two cane backed chairs stood guard, one with a frayed seat. One old glass stood solemnly on the table, the bottom holding the dried remnants of whatever it held last.

A shiver ran down my spine. This was the place members retired to have a nip, play some pool and share stories, smoke or chew a five cent cigar. A place where hats didn’t have to be removed for ladies, for there would have been none. Breath slowly, squint a little and you can see Judge Webb Moore lounging in a chair tipped against the wall as Jack Shannon and Hu Thatcher chase the ivories around the table. Warren Routzhan and Ben Conrad confer in the corner, waiting their turn while Fred Jones and Harold Howard laugh over a George Grieb Joke. No Odd Fellows title needed here, no Noble Grand, no Rebekahs just some good hard working men sharing their time.

None of them would have been caught dead in a real pool hall for they were respected members of the little community they lived in. Here, on the third floor hideaway the rules were different. as they should be.

I waited a bit, then quietly closed the door knowing that I had surely caught a ghost.

Michael Shannon and his extended family have lived in Arroyo Grande, California for six generations.

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