3-29-06 Webmasters Note: Harold is alive and well as of this update and is still almost as trim and good looking as his 63 yr. old photo above. He has supplied me with other photos of those long gone days, regrettably the quality of some are not good, but I have sprinkled them around his memoir and where I could, identified the crewmen therein.
LST 920 was in active service June 1944 to July 1946. I was among the group of about thirty who was on the ship from commissioning at Hingham, Mass. to decommissioning in San Francisco.
We picked up the ship on June 17, 1944 at Bethlehem Shipyard. It was new and we took it out for a shakedown cruise to get the bugs out and see if there was anything wrong. We had to come back in for a few minor repairs.
We left there and went to New York and loaded and took off for England on July 25th. We were on our way to England, and hadn't been on the ship too long. Timberman, a gunners mate who was in the regular navy and had been in the navy a long time, just about got us in trouble. He had us smoking on guard duty. We were on gun watch smoking. It was very dark that night. The skipper, captain of the ship, came through. Nobody knew he was around. He called up and asked if we knew he had been up there. He said he came up in the gun tub and looked around. He said not to worry about it. It looked like we were doing our job. And we just had been smoking! So, luckily, we didn't get caught.
We landed in Liverpool on August 9th, refueled, and took on supplies. We started around to Southampton and on August 14, 1944 were in a German submarine attack that sank two ships that were in our convoy, EBC-72, including LST 921 our sister ship. (After the war it was learned that the submarine was U667 commanded by KL Karl-Heinz Lange. Eleven days later, U667 and all crew were destroyed when they struck a mine off the coast of France.) When 921 was hit, the whole thing didn't sink. It was cut in two with the front part staying afloat. (I saw it later where it had been put in dry dock, patched up and used for storage.) We picked up survivors. As I remember, there were 48 survivors from 921 and none from the other. An English escort, sort of like a small destroyer, was supposed to be protecting the convoy. There were three or four escorts with us. This one ran around on the side to see what was going on and the submarine hit him. The others ran off and left us. We could see them way off out on horizon. They weren't much help. After we picked up the survivors, we left and caught up with the convoy that we were with when we were attacked. We went on and left them and went on to Southampton with the ones that were wounded and unloaded them. From there we started operating across the channel from Southampton. We were on four different beaches Normandy, Utah, Lagual, and Le Harve. I think it was Utah Beach we were going into when we got a hole torn in the bottom and sank before we got in to the beach. We didn't go under; we were close enough in that we sat down on the bottom. We got unloaded. They built a ramp out to us with pontoons and got us unloaded. We got the water all out but the engine room. They sent two big tugs from England and pulled us back to England and dry docked us. We were in dry dock about 3 weeks or a month to patch it up and clean the engines. While we were there we got leave and most of us went to London . We got four days. It took half a day to go up there and half a day to come back.
Some of the fellows got kind of wild when they went out on liberty, but that didn't happen very often. You operated on even and odd days - according to the calendar, even and odd days. If you happened to be at a place where you could get liberty and it was an even day, and you were in the even number group, you got liberty. And if you were in the odd number group, you didn't get it. You got liberty if it was your day. So you could go for a long time without liberty. I went for a long time and didn't get liberty, but I really didn't worry too much about it. Some of the guys like Paul Conley, the storekeeper, and Thomas Correll, a seaman who worked with the cooks, had liberty every time any body else had liberty. They didn't get it early like some of them did, but after they got everything cleaned up and straightened up they had liberty.
After they got 920 fixed, we started operating again. We went to Le Havre a few trips and we started getting ready to come back to the states.
We had some rough water coming back. It took 15 days getting back but 21 days going over there. We landed in Norfolk. We got leave there. I don't remember how many days we did get. They gave us a different paint job. You had to have a different color in the Pacific than in Atlantic. They wanted it to be harder to see. In the Atlantic we were painted blue and gray. For the Pacific we were painted camouflage green. Maybe that made us look more like an island.
When the paint job was finished, we loaded and went up some narrow river and picked up a battle ship anchor chain. We took off then and went through the Panama Canal and up the west coast. When we were going up the west coast the water was kind of rough and due to the way we were loaded, we were trying to break apart. We had the battleship anchor chain in front and 500 barrels of gasoline in the back of the tank deck. We were heavy on the ends and giving in the middle. That happened one night. I stayed up with the ship fitter and we welded on that thing all night trying to keep it from breaking apart. I wasn't much good at it, but I could weld a little. (But this water wasn't nearly as rough as the water we were in coming home. It was MILD to the side of that. I guess really it was rougher coming from England back to the states than it was going up the west coast. We didn't have anything on the ship coming home. We stopped in California and unloaded the anchor chain.
We went on to Seattle, Washington. We changed loads, part of it. From there we went to Hawaii, and from Hawaii to Saipan. We switched some load there. From there we went to Okinawa. While we were unloading in Okinawa we were in a suicide plane attack. We didn't get hit because they covered us with smoke. They didn't see us I guess. After we got unloaded, the next day we left there and went to Guadalcanal. From Guadalcanal we went to New Caledonia.
It wasn't my night for liberty when we were in New Caledonia. I had shore patrol duty I had to pull that night. I was on the gate where the ones that had liberty went through. I stood for 4 hours and watched them go out for liberty. Paul Conley came back with his head all cut up. I came back to the ship with him as he came in and took him to sick bay. He wouldn't let them sew it up. They came and got me. He said he wanted me to hold his hand. I went up there and comforted him a little while they sewed his head up.
We didn't have any dress code on 920 much. The only time we had to put uniforms on was when we went out on leave or got off the ship for something to get supplies or something like that. Tee shirts and dungarees was what we usually wore. Everybody wore them.
We came back to Guadalcanal and headed towards Okinawa. We stopped at a little island, small recreation island, with nothing on it. While we were there the war was over. Setting there waiting, they said we had orders (but I don't know if that is true, knowing how talk gets started) and were supposed to join the convoy on a certain day for invasion on the Japanese mainland. We went back to Okinawa and unloaded what we had on the ship and reloaded and went to Korea. From Korea we went to China, from China to Japan and back to Okinawa. We continued that route approximately 6 months, moving army equipment from Okinawa to Korea and then going to China and getting a load of Japanese civilians and taking them back to Japan. We hauled one load of Kamikaze suicide pilots from China back to Japan. We had about 1000 of them on that load. We hauled around 1000 civilians each load. We hauled women, men and children. I don't know why they were in China, but we were moving them out.
During the time we were moving stuff off Okinawa to Korea a typhoon was supposed to be coming in. They sent us out to sea to ride it out. But somehow we went around it. When we got back in, it had hit, but we had no effects of it. It did a lot of damage right where we were at when they sent us away.
We took six marines on board when we were hauling Japs from China to Japan. They thought they were really living it up on there with us. They were having good food and not having to do a whole lot. We had pretty good food most all the time - not like the soldiers. They had it rough.
On our way home, we were in rough water for about 24 hours that pushed us back 100 miles. I am thinking it was between Guam and Hawaii, but it could have been between Okinawa and Hawaii. Anyway we were on our way to Hawaii when it pushed us back
I had the most of my watch duty on the wheel. That is where you steered the ship around - helmsman, I believe you call it. I set there and looked at a little compass not much bigger than a speedometer. It would show you what degree you were on. They would give you a degree course to steer and you tried to hold it as close to that as you could. When you'd get in rough water sometimes you couldn't hold it within 20 degrees. I'd spend four hours on duty and 8 hours off when we were underway. I was helmsman from the time we left England until after Forrest Dunagan left the ship in February 1946. (Forrest drowned at Burnside, KY the following July 1946.) After J. L. Smith left, Forrest Dunagan took over as master of arms. After Forrest left the ship, I moved up in his place and took over as master of arms. When I got discharged I was acting chief master of arms, acting chief - I was only second class. You didn't do anything much - walked around over ship checking things - every night I checked everything to see that it was fastened down and reported to the duty officer.
4-6-06 Webmasters Note: I feel obliged to add this excerpt from an e-mail I received from Ensign Reed after his reading of bo'sun mate Dunagans webpage.
Larry, Harold's addition looked really great. Harold was one of 3 cousins that were in the crew - there was the older Forrest Dunagan, then Harold, and youngest Paul Conley. They were 3 of the best of our crew, conscientious and dependable.