Viewing page 76 of 307

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[blank page]]

[[end page]]
[[start page]]

he shouted "chocoletto, chewing gum!". Of course he got a shower of goodies. Some of it hit the water (we were about forty feet up) and if it floated he scooped it out. Then he left with a big smile on his face waving and calling, "arigato (thank you)" and "sayonara (good bye)". I felt good - it was my first contact with a Japanese person and he was just like the kids back home!

An hour or so later a tugboat pulled alongside, a rope ladder was lowered, and a short Japanese man, resplendent in his all white uniform boarded. He was met by our ship's captain and they both went to the bridge. The little man knew where all the mines were and he safely piloted our ship through the heavily mined entrance to Tokyo Bay, then docked us at a Yokohama pier.

I was very naive for a guy two weeks from his 20th birthday. Standing on the platform of a dockside Yokohama train station, I noticed a long line of our newly arrived guys leading into a building about half a block away. I was very embarrassed when I was told that it was a "house of ill repute" (but not in those exact words). I later learned that the Japanese military leaders had rounded up all the "comfort women" with venereal diseases and many American boys paid the price. That was one thing that I didn't have to worry about!

It was late that evening when we arrived at Irumagawa Air Base northwest of Tokyo. We were finally given something to eat, issued one blanket and a cot, and told that a large airplane hangar was to be our temporary residence until after Christmas. The hangar was without heat and we just about froze the first night. To complicate matters someone stole my blanket and I had to do without the next night. I spotted a cot with two blankets the next day and got it back. The second day we had decided to arrange our cots in circles and build fires in the center from scrap wood. It wasn't much warmer and it got so smokey that a couple of guys climbed the steel hangar framework and broke out the windows at the top. Instead of letting the smoke out, the wind forced the smoke down making it worse. Several of us were outside, hollowed out body size dips in the snow and rolled up in our blankets. With the snow acting as insulation around us it was much warmer than on a canvas cot with cold air circulating underneath.

Our showers in the past two and one-half weeks had been with ice cold salty sea water on board ship. It was time to bathe so we were ordered to strip to our shorts, draw a helmet liner full of icy cold water from a spigot on the outside of a building and bathe right there in the snow. The Japanese women who worked at the base giggled as they passed. I was too cold to care.

A short distance from our hangar I saw what looked like a Betty bomber. Some of us walked over to see it. We discovered that it was a wooden decoy and it would have been effective in an attack. Our Army Corp of Engineers was cleaning up the base to get it ready for our planes to use. (Major General K. B. Wolfe,

^[[2.]]