Shortly after my commissioning in April 1944, I joined the crew of the new USS LSM-67 in Little Creek, Virginia. I was with her for three eventful years, culminating in taking command in January 1946. We had just entered San Francisco Bay, and the ship’s only other remaining officer, the acting captain, was departing. I was unmarried, not yet eligible to be demobilized. Thus, I became one the Navy’s youngest ship captains and began one of the most challenging times in my long and eventful life.
We called our ship the “Fighting 67,” because with her we had engaged in more amphibious landings—including nine in the Pacific theater—than any other LSM. She had been commissioned in September 1944 and was one of the fleet’s workhorses. With a maximum displacement of 1,000 tons, the 206-foot ship carried 55 enlisted and six officers, including the group doctor, as well as a combat load of six Sherman tanks, an array of other vehicles, crews, and embarked infantry.
In action in the Pacific, our first-wave assault landings had included three major landings in the Philippines and Borneo. As the war progressed, the powers that be decided on 18 June 1945 to invade the Japanese main island of Kyushu in Operation Olympic, scheduled for 1 November 1945. I was serving as LSM-67’s gunnery officer and communications officer, and in that latter capacity had acquired the Olympic operations plan. Scanning the intelligence annex, I felt sick to my stomach. There was no way we could have survived that landing. The U.S. estimate of the costs of a main islands ground campaign included some 500,000 casualties. The Japanese had estimated their casualties at some 20 million. I had just turned 23 and had less than four months to live.
Operation Olympic was never to be. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and on Nagasaki on 9 August. Six days later, Emperor Hirohito broadcast that Japan had surrendered. The official surrender took place on the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. For me, on the Fighting 67, this was like getting a last-minute, death-row reprieve.
Our ship was now tasked with bringing surrendered Japanese troops to assembly areas in preparation for travel back to Japan. Incredibly, one of our prisoners turned out to be a general who had commanded troops against whom we had been fighting. Somehow, I learned that he had gone to German Staff College in Potsdam in the 1930s and was still a German speaker. In turn, I had learned a good bit of German in high school and had taken a course in military German at Berkeley.
We had one of the most interesting conversations I have ever had. I kept asking him why he had made so many (in my opinion) clearly stupid moves. He agreed they were stupid, but he underscored that his orders had come from the top in Tokyo and had to be obeyed. I instinctively shook his hand and saluted him, for which I was given a bad time by our other officers.
When the prisoners had thinned out, the Navy gave us the new mission of moving Filipino constabulary officers to outlying islands to help quell the budding Communist-led Hukbalalap rebellion. Then the Fighting 67 headed home.
When we passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on 11 January 1946, I was in command. My top priority was immediately to get a shipyard availability to overhaul our worrisome main engines and check out our beaten-up hull. I was told LSM-67 was going to be scrapped, not eligible for repair. This did not stop the Navy from ordering me to pick up a potentially dangerous cargo of steel pilings at Port Hueneme and haul it all the way around to Jacksonville, Florida. Such was the saga of the Fighting 67.