Bill Saar
Friday, November 26, 2004
Today is Friday, November 26, 2004. This is the beginning of an interview with Bill Saar at his home at 4320 Oak Tree Road in Rockville, Maryland. Mr. Saar is 79 years old. He was born on November 8, 1925. He is my grandfather’s friend. Could you state for the record what war you served in? [The interview started at 1:30, concluded at 3:00 p.m. Present were Mr. Willard A. Saar, (Saar), Ricardo Dinisio, (RD), grandfather of Rachel Braun, (RB), also present, and Rachel's father, Christopher Braun, (CB)]
[007]
Saar: World War II, the Pacific theater.
[008]
RB: What branch of service you served in?
Saar: In the Naval amphibious forces.
[009]
RB: What was your rank?
Saar: My rank was an RM2C. Which is a radioman
[011]
RB: And where you served?
Saar: Where did I serve? Well, I served - you want my travels?
RB: Sure.
Saar: Okay. Let me start from the very beginning. You know what I can do better?
Because I've had, I've written something for my children.
(Pause)
That's what I think you wanted ... when you enlisted, and where you grew up, and ... Somewhat. Okay, it was 1943 that I went in and it was —the war was in full swing at that time. And I don't know whether you want a copy...
RB: Oh, I would love everything you have.
Saar: You know, and I was 17 years old and I think that I was restless at the time, sort of looking for adventure like any of the other guys at 17 years old. You didn't wait for them to draft you, you know, you just went up and enlisted. And I enlisted with a guy that lived next door to me. And we were, you know, buddies through grade school, high school, and all that. And we both went in at the same time and we booked down to the county courthouse and we were gonna join the Marines. We were gonna be big, you know, we were gonna join the Marines. We found out from the sergeant there that we couldn't leave for maybe another month, or three weeks to a month because they had to get a contingent, a full contingent, before they could send anybody out that wasn't... that wasn't. . . our mind was speaking "GO!" So we went across the hall and joined the Navy. And from there we went to Sampson, NY boot camp. From boot camp, we went to ... he went to the Armed Guard which was a gunner on a merchant marine ship.
[030]
RB: What was your boot camp experience like?
Saar: What was boot camp experience like? Well, you know, I had it pretty easy in boot camp. I had it pretty easy because I... Now I wasn't a goof-off. So I had it pretty easy because I could blow a bugle.
RB: Oh, really?
Saar: Yeah, and I would blow that bugle to put all these guys to sleep at night. I would blow that bugle to wake them up in the morning. And then I would go to classes during the time that there were other. . . where all the Navy guys would come in, the class at the time. So I learned how to abandon ship. You know, what was the tone for abandon ship, what was the bugle call for abandon ship? Or any one of those things or fire or whatever. And so, you know, I would do this so I got out of a lot of detail work.
But other than that, we went through . . . they would set off gas in houses that they had built, that were temporary things, you know, you would have to go through the gas mask. Oh, you'd probably have to do the same thing. And then they had dudes who set houses on fire, you were supposed to go through that. Then they had a thing that was like a silo. These are the things that I can remember. There's lots of things that I can't. You know, I'm 60 years . . . ago. There's things I don't know.
But anyway, they had a big, like a silo on a farm, it was full of water. And you could go into a chamber and then they let you in and you would have to go up all the way up that silo and go up to the next door and get yourself out. Or you would have to be up there and go down to the next chamber door. Now there were a lot of guys who couldn't do it. But that was one of the things that you had to do.
RB: For training?
Saar: For training. So that if you were on a ship and you were caught and you were hit and you were caught and you were in some compartment, how would you get out? And then I'm surprised there are some people that were in the Navy that didn't know how to swim. If I didn't know how to swim, I don't think that I would ever have gone to the Navy. It would scare me to death. If 1 were _ at sea and I'm floating around and I can't keep myself afloat for a period of time, that would, you know, that would be enough to do me in right there. But fortunately, I learned to swim at an early age so those things didn't bother me, but I can remember some of the guys were so scared to do this, to walk into a silo full of water and then swim upward and go in, out another door. But that's one of the things we had to do there.
And then from boot camp, as I said, my neighbor went to the Armed Guard. You didn't have any choice where to go, but they gave you tests when you went in and apparently I could tell a dit from a dot. The Morse Code. You know, when it comes through you can't hear it. Most people will not be able to distinguish between a dit and a dot. But apparently they can pick the ones out that can and apparently I was one of them. So they sent me to radio school. And then from radio school, I was sent to Camp Bradford in Virginia where we trained with the Marines.
[064]
RB: Where was your radio camp training?
Saar: That was in Bedford Springs, PA. And I can go back to that too. This
was the Navy. I thought this was the Navy to begin with and 1 found out later that I was sadly mistaken. But there it was a resort and they converted this resort to a Naval training school. And we had it where we sat down at a table to eat. We didn't have to go through a, what do you call it, a buffet line? A buffet line. We were treated very good and if this is the Navy, this isn't bad at all.
But then from there, some people were assigned to battleships, some to destroyers, wherever they were needed, wherever they had a vacancy that they had to fill. And when they got to me, it was the Naval amphibs. T didn't ask for it. I was sent lo them, the Naval amphibs. And again, that's where I ended up at Camp Bradford. We trained with Marines and we practiced our landings in the Chesapeake Bay. And after that was finished, I went to the Great Lakes Naval Training for gunnery and we trained on 40 mm and 20 mm. That probably doesn't mean anything to you.
RB: Guns?
Saar: Yeah.
RB: Where was the Great Lakes located? Where was . . .
Saar: The Great Lakes Naval Station was in Chicago. Right on the lake.
CB: Still there today.
Saar: Yeah, still there today. We were trained shooting at sleeves of planes would go along. We would shoot the sleeve. And after that we, a skeleton crew was sent to. . . and this you might be interested in. LSTs were made, most of them were made, in Evansville, Indiana.
[087]
RB: What is an LST?
Saar: It's a landing ship tank. LSTs were made in Evansville, Indiana, and Seneca, Illinois. And they made them so fast that they couldn't give them a name, they had to give them a number. That's why we don't. . . that's why I can't say that I was on the Pennsylvania, or on the Rockville, or whatever that is. I was ... you know, they were given numbers. Ours was 588. And when a skeleton crew gets there, a ship is not complete at that point. You can sail with it, but it is not complete at that point.
And we went down the river, and I can remember going down the river with Rosie the Riveter. It wasn't Rosie the Riveter because LSTs didn't have any rivets in them, they had . . . they were welded. And I remember going down the Ohio and Mississippi River. When Rosie would have her job finished, she would jump off and there would be transportation for her to go back and start on another one. And then you might go down, you might go down another hundred miles and the next one would get off and have her job done, and she would go back to Evansville and start over. How close do you live to Evansville, Indiana?
RB: We're ... a two hour drive.
Saar; A two-hour drive? Have you ever been to Evansville?
RB: No, but,. .
Saar: There's not much there. And ... we had a reunion out there years ago. I didn't go, but that's another story I'll tell you later. But anyway, as I say, in this that I've written out that, you know, my idea was that we're going down the river, this is easy. You just - easy riding. But when you get out in the Gulf of Mexico, the story's a lot different. It's a flat bottomed boat. A flat bottomed boat. You know, we - they don't even call this a ship. They refer to it as a boat. And you know, that shouldn't be. We were in a ship. We go out in the Gulf of Mexico and we had to go from ______, you know, the Gulf of Mexico through the Panama Canal and up to San Francisco and cross to Hawaii. And I can tell you a little later about an incident in Hawaii and it's in the ship's log. That I have, incidentally, the ship's log, From the day we left the United States until we got
home where we _________.
RB: Wow.
Saar: And it was classified for three years, but when I found out that it was unclassified, I sent for it and a few months later I got the whole log. And a few of the other guys on the ship did the same thing.
[117]
RB: Now how big was this boat, how many people would it carry?
Saar: Well, how many people would it carry? It all depends on ... when you're
making a landing, when you're going out and hitting the beach, we had 600
Marines. And our crew, we could sail that ship with 25 guys, 27 guys. Now
that's a skeleton crew. But we would have more than that most of the time. We might have 50 or 60 guys on it. But when you get 600 Marines on it, plus our crew, there's no place to sleep for the Marines. There's gun tubs and wherever they can put their head and to Saar your question, it varied.
[124]
RB: Do you have a picture of the boat you were on?
Saar: Yes. Here's the LST 588.
RB: Is it yours?
Saar: Yes. And there's so many things I could tell you, we could sit here all day and I could tell you so many things and half of them,... But here we are in a landing right there. And that was the 588 right there at the beach at __________ It was stuck. We couldn't get off.
RB: On page 25? . . . [Take a short break here.]
RB: Here we are at the interview.
Saar: You know, you're going to have take this and put it in chronological order.
RB: Oh, that's fine.
Saar: For example, I know that you had asked me on the phone where I had been. Like, you know, you start with Hawaii and from Hawaii you go to the Marshalls and Eniwetok in the Marshalls. And then from the Marshalls we went to the Marianas and that was the Marianas, Guam, Saipan, Tinian. And there's a place called Rota, too, maybe you've heard of that. It's a very small island. Nobody ever ... if you want to target practice, you could pass Rota and shoot at it because there were Japanese . .. that's never .. . you know, nobody's going to bother with them because they were cut off. So ... just to let them know we were around.
There were Saipan, Tinian, and . . . Guam. From there, we did the staging and preparation for invasion of Iwo.
[144]
RB: You couldn't get adventure on a flat-bottomed boat? Go off the Gulf of Mexico?
Saar: Oh, yeah, because, see, we were coming down ... we felt we weren't sailors at that point. You know, we had never been to sea. And so you're going down the Ohio and Mississippi River you're not getting any big waves. And it's a flat-bottomed boat and a flat-bottomed boat catches all of the waves. In other words, a wave comes after you and you'd go up like this and then you'd come down, slap the water. Conies down and slaps the water. It has no keel like, you know, a destroyer or something like that. This is strictly a work ship and when we got out into the Gulf of Mexico, it was riding a ship. It wasn't like sailing a ship, it was like riding a ship.
[154]
RB: Do you remember arriving at all these places?
Saar: Pretty much. I can remember Eniwetok in the Marshalls. We put the bow doors down and we'd go swimming. I can remember we were anchored off of Eniwetok and we all took a swim off... when you put the bow doors down, you'd just jump off and swim around. I remember we were swimming around there and somebody yelled .. . and you know octopuses, I guess, can get pretty big, but there was something slapping up against the ship. Well, it was like when someone yelled like that, it was like a vacuum. The guys just came up ... the guys just came out of the sea and up on that thing and let me out of here. And the thing, it just kept slapping itself against the side of the ship as it went around it.
You know, I don't think it probably would have harmed anybody, but it was just the idea that there was an octopus in the area.
RB: Oh, my gosh!
Saar: And what do we know about octopuses? But then as I say, we went from there to the Marianas. And from there to the volcano islands, which is Iwo Jima, Haha Jima and ChiChi Jima. The first President Bush was shot down in ChiChi Jima.
[169]
CB: Did you read the book, "Fly Boys?"
Saar: No.
CB: It's a ____ book. It talks about. ..
RB: All about that.
RB: Yeah.
CB: It's a book he wrote about a year ago, two years ago. It includes a discussion about the first President Bush when he was shot down and how he was rescued. It captures some of the _________ lives of eight men who were pilots who went over and flew over there in the Pacific theater and how each one of them
was shot down and some survived the plane going down only to die in concentration camps and how they talked about the, really the miraculous recovery of President Bush in the waters.
Saar: He had, I think he had a gunner in with him, didn't he?
CB: Yes.
Saar: And he died.
CB: Correct.
Saar: We don't know if it was ChiChi Jima or Haha Jima. It was either one of the two. You see, all three of them are, you know, the Bonin Islands, _________, and he was shot down there.
[181]
RB: Can you tell me about the battle of two Jima from the flag-raising, from the battle to the flag raising and from your landing to the actual departure?
[183]
Saar: Okay, the landing where we did was, being on the bridge, and during a landing like that, I'm not on a radio getting code or anything like that. It's ship to shore. You're in the wheelhouse and the radio is a ship-to-shore, so you can talk and listen to what's going on from other ships or somebody that's in danger or something like this. And that's where I was when we went in. I was in the wheelhouse. And we knew we were going faster than what we should be going and we all looked at each other and now the captain's on the _________ and he's the guy that hollers down the pipe, and says, you know, all decks full or all this or whatever. And we're waiting for him to say as we see the beach getting closer and closer, "all decks!" Where's this "all decks full?" If we go up on that beach, we'll never get off. Well, he did say "all decks full", but it was a little late. And not only that, we hit an obstruction, a vehicle that was already - had sunk -
and it tore off our port - bent our port engine and propeller. We had twin screws on it - the LST and this port - starboard - screw and shaft was done away with. We had no power. So we couldn't get off the beach so we were there two days and while we were there for two days, we took mortars, mortar shells, shots what we think came from the Suribachi. Of course you can't tell when it's small arms where it's coming from, you know. For two days, we were under fire.
RB: Did you feel like you were just a sitting duck there?
Saar: Well, we were a sitting duck, yeah. As you can see, many things, I've seen it on television where there's just one ship there and the other ship pulled off. So when you go onto the beach, there's a beachmaster. A beachmaster tells you where to go, by ship-to-shore radio. Let's say I want you at Red Beach, of course we had maps and all that. I want you at Red Beach 1 or 2, pull in, go, all that stuff. And that's the way we went in. Then what you would do first is to let off your tanks. Let them off first. And they'd go in. At Two it was all sand and a lot of them sunk. And they'd sink right into the sand. They couldn't get anywhere. And then next you'd let the ropes off the side and the guys climbed out on the ropes and they hoped that you're in far enough so that they can get - if they go too far in the water they know they're gonna end up to here or something like that. Then after they're on it, we go on it because we have lots more materials to load off. That's how we got stuck down there, but at times you could . . . there was just one ship was left down there because the others would go off after they left their cargo off, but you couldn't pull it back on.
[225]
RB: Do you think as you were landing, were the men taking fire from the enemy as they. ..?
Saar: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you can see that picture, what was it, the LST
thing?
CB: _____________Italy, 1945?
Saar: Where was that? Yeah, you can see if you look back you can see men all over there just laying down.
[232]
RB: And what was your role on the ship at that time?
Saar: Radio operator.
RB: Yeah.
[233]
RB: Did you see combat?
Saar: Well, if you call that combat, sure. You're getting shot at. Of course, you're not like the poor Marine that's on the beach. I mean, you've got steel around you and stuff like that. Like in our wheelhouse, you know how the portholes are on a wheelhouse all the way around a wheelhouse? Well, you have plates that are screwed up above it, but when you hit the beach, you unscrew that, turn the plate around to cover that porthole, but you have a little thing like, you have you can see out of, okay? You see guys like myself, we were pretty well protected. But being down there for two days, if you had to go somewhere you crawled from gun turret to gun turret, on your hands and knees because you didn't want to snipered or something like that.
[245]
RB: Were there any casualties in your unit?
Saar: In our unit? Whatever you say a unit is, I don't know what you mean by a
unit.
RB: Were you fighting with a battalion or were you just a radio operator?
Saar: We let off the Fifth Marines. Did they take many casualties? Oh, yeah. Many, many, many casualties. Like the Fifth Marines were at Beach 1. And that's where, that's where . ..
[251]
CB: When they were preparing you for this mission, what did they tell you in terms of what they might anticipate there at Iwo Jima?
Saar: Well, they might have to ______, but it never got down to me. You know
what we were going to anticipate. In fact, I know this, I know that we thought we were gonna take up 2 or 3 days. They thought it was going to be, you know, a real pushover. And they sent many, many ships to do it in three days; battleships like the Indianapolis that used to fire over our heads and shoot into the Surabachi where they had a cave and that gun would come out on a railroad track and that gun would come around like this and go around like this. You'd say, if you were in its way, you'd say "keep going, keep going, keep going!" But they really weren't after us. They were after the big ones, They were out beyond in back of us. And the Indianapolis was one of those that fired and of course the Indianapolis has quite a history. I don't know if you've read about this. You know, at first, we used to, we could say, "where is the Indianapolis?" Nobody knew where the Indianapolis was.
CB: There's a lot of controversy about that ship.
[270]
Saar: The Indianapolis went, as I understand it, but I can't understand how it did it, but I talked to a sailor that I played golf with. But I mean he was in the service for 20 years. And the Indianapolis was there firing when we were there, then all of a sudden it wasn't there. It went back to the United States and picked up the atomic bomb, and brought the atomic bomb back to Saipan. Did you read that?
CB: No, I hadn't read that.
Saar: And they took that, the atomic bomb weighed so much, that they dumped it into - well, put it in an LVT which is just a small thing and they were afraid the LVT was going to capsize, that's how heavy that bomb was. But then the Indianapolis left then and it was gone for 1 don't know how long. It was headed I think for Guam and it was sunk. And most of the guys never got picked up.
(unintelligible)
(This is about at Counter No. 670 - rest of Side IA garbled)
Tape 1, Side B
Saar This shows all the action. It talks about everything, the beaching, you know, we had air raids, on and off all the time, we had to make smoke to try to cover our ship. Half the time the smoke thing didn't work. I remember being on the bridge and the guys trying to work the smoke, make smoke, and they would be cussing and cussing and you would have to crank, you know, to make smoke and it wouldn't work. So those things were . . . well sometimes they'd work, I guess. Let's see, when did the fight... we had several air raids just before that. And one thing that we really liked that time was a black widow. That was a fighter plane. Radar helped. And they could shoot the planes down, the enemy planes. That usually happened at night. When air raids took place it was usually at night and those black widows would go up there and knock them down or chase them home. You know why they needed Iwo, don't you?
RB: No.
[376?]
Saar: They needed Iwo. It was only eight square miles and it looks like a lamb chop, or a pork chop. And they needed Iwo because it was halfway between Japan, Tokyo, whatever, and Guam, Saipan. We had B-29s on Guam and B-l O's on Saipan and they would leave on a raid to Japan, but they couldn't make it back sometimes. Sometimes an engine was out and they had to make it home with three engines or two engines or whatever they and also they would be running very low on fuel. So you're talking about probably, probably Iwo is probably 700, 500 to 700 miles between Japan and the Marianas. So they needed something where when these planes came back from bombing Japan, they needed a place for them to land because they were either out of fuel or they were shot up. But they could still make it there. But we would see so many.. . first we would see them come over on their way to Japan and there would be so many of them they would practically shut off the light from the sun when they went between the sun and the earth. They would practically kill off the sun, there were so many of them flying.
And then we'd know approximately when they were going to come back. And when they'd come back, we'd look for them and being 1 was on the radio I would know ail of what was going on. And they were told to set the controls and let it fly out to sea, but everybody jump. There were eleven guys on a B-29 so you'd count one, two, three, four, five ... until all of those guys got out safe and then you'd take your LCTs [LCVP] which were not an LST, cause the big lift goes off hydraulically, on an LCT and they would go out and pick up the guys. They needed Iwo and they needed an airfield fast, the Seabees did that. So right after the Suribachi, they went in to try to kill off the rest of the island and get that airfield in order and the planes came in not long after. You'd see them coming down, take off. You'd see many of them going in the ditch.
[000?]
RB: Where did you go after Iwo Jima?
Saar: After we left Iwo, we went back to Guam. We had a port engine that we -- and here's a picture - there we are in dry dock in Guam. So we had to get the port engine fixed and then after we got that we went back to Iwo and there was . . . . . they were pretty much geared up at that point. And then we were given orders to go to Okinawa and I think I have something here about Okinawa. We went to le Shima. Did you ever hear of le Shima? Did you ever hear of Ernie Pyle?
CB. Hmhm. He was from Indiana.
Saar: Was he from Indiana? He was killed there and he was a very prominent wartime correspondent. That's where they killed him. We were by le Shima and then we went into Buckner Bay which was a big - they had most of the fleet there - Buckner Bay and that's where the kamikazes were sent to hit whatever they could hit. Most of them wouldn't spend any time with us 'cause we weren't worth it. But they went after the big ships. And they sunk over three ships. And what they did was they sent so many kamikazes over that they didn't have anything left after that and that's why, when the atomic bomb was dropped, they didn't have anything - they didn't have a plane to send over to hit us. So we had it, you know, pretty easy. But it's a good thing the atomic bomb was dropped because if we had to, if we were in Buckner Bay waiting for Marines to come aboard, because we were going from there to Honshu and from there to Japan.
RB: So you saw the blast at Hiroshima [Nagasaki]?
Saar: I didn't see it. The guys at topside saw if. I happened to be in the radio shack. But I think - how many miles were there - we were 400 miles maybe from Nagasaki or Hiroshima, did I say?
RB: Oh, you were 350 miles from . . .
Saar: We were 350 miles and the fellows saw the blast - the double streak or something - they saw and they thought it was an ammunition dump that was being blown up. It so happened that it was ______ and it was later found that they could see it from 1400 miles away, to Guam.
RB: Wow.
Saar: Now that's something when you can see something 1400 miles away. But I didn't see it, but the other guys saw it.
[000]
RB: Can we go back and talk about the distinction between the first flag raising and the second and ___ ?
Saar: Oh, ________? You see, nobody knows we had 600 Marines on board. We don't know which ones went up were from our ship. They could have come from other ships. But we were probably the closest one to Suribachi and the supporting guys went up Suribachi. So he could have been on ours. He doesn't remember. He doesn't remember what number because if you go look at a number, but if it was a name he might remember, he might remember the name of the ship, but not remember the number. It would be something at this point in time. They had landing on their minds when they left that ship and you could see them leave the ship, you know. Young guys that - some of them were weeping, some were crossing themselves, you'd see them go over the side. You just said a prayer - glad that I wouldn't have to go over the side. Up there I was _______.
RB: On the first flag raising they used a small flag?
Saar: They used the small flag, yeah, and then for the second one, they got it from an LST and your grandpa tells me it's was from the Coast Guard. Whenever you say Coast Guard you're supposed to stand up. [Laughter]
Saar: Every time we say Coast Guard down there, and we're having tea or something out back, every time there's two of them from the Coast Guard and we give them a hard time and when the word Coast Guard - they never fail to stand right up at attention!
CB: You mentioned somewhere you had written Charles Lindberg was the only soldier that was present for both the first and the second flag raising, is that right?
Saar: Oh, no, he was not in the second flag raising.
RB: Oh, he wasn't?
Saar: Oh, no. I didn't say that. Would you repeat that?
RB: Charles Lindberg was in the picture of the first raising of the flag and is the only man living today of both the first and second flag raising.
Saar: Oh, okay. Nobody's living today and there hasn't been for several years.
[000]
RB: Did you know Rene Gagnon?
Saar: Yeah, okay, I know about him. He - you know, we had 600 Marines aboard ship. There's no place for them to go. Nobody has space of their own, really. We're a little boat, not ship, boat. And he somehow found his way up to the bridge and into where the radio shack was. And he came in and I asked the boy what he wanted and he just said hello and "I'm interested in the radios, you know" and he just wanted to talk. Well, I could have sent him out, but I, you know, and I find out that he's a very friendly guy. So we talked and he - you know, the next day he's up again. Well, I'm not going to say something to somebody and what the heck, I knew why he was there, he was there to get out of work parties. And I would probably have done the same thing if I could do it.
But he wanted a Navy sweater, the blue Navy sweater. And he had a Marine shirt and I liked those Marine shirts. And I told him, yeah, I'll swap you a sweater for a shirt. And we did. And I took that home and T had it for a couple of years. That shirt. Where it got to, whether my mother threw it out or what happened I don't know, to this day I don't know. But to this day I don't have that shirt. 1 never could find it and I always wished that I had it.
But what's interesting, too, is that I talked to Charles Lindberg and you know, Rene Gagnon, he said, yeah, I knew him. He had no use for him. The first raising, second raising. That first raising guy said no. There was this guy, they called him Hollywood. In fact, that's what that guy, that Lowry, the ____ photographer, called him Hollywood. I can't find it. ___________. This was, oh yeah, here it is. Before it - 40 man patrol. And it worked its way up the north face of Mt. Suribachi. Accompanying them was Sgt. Lewis R. Lowery. And he was the photographer for the leathernecks. The magazine of the Marine Corps - that - Leatherneck was the Marine Corps magazine.
At the top, Lt. Schrier (spelling?) and a small party of men rolled over the lip and into the crater. This was after they had raised the first flag. Two men found a 20 foot length of pipe and tied the flag to it. Six Marines shoved the flag into the ground, raising the first flag atop Suribachi. This Lew Lowery snapped the photo. Those pictured of this not so famous photograph are - Henry Hansen and he was killed right after; Lt. Harold Schrier (spelling?), Pvt. James Michaels, Cpl. Charles W. Lindberg. And it says laughing at the Hollywood Marines. James Rokeson. One of the guys refused to - one of the guys up there with them -refused to get in that first raising. He thought, "oh, this is ridiculous. Why should you take my picture raising the flag?" If he would have taken it - gotten in there and gotten his picture taken, he would have gone down in the history books. Let's see, I forgot that Lowery fell down into the crater.
CB: Did the second group that went up actually that actually did the staging of the posed one -
Saar: The second one was Rosenthal. And he was not a Marine - he was just a
correspondent or photographer.
CB : Who came up with the idea to stage the second one?
Saar: Well, because they came up with the second flag - they wanted a bigger flag up there and he went up and he got up there and by that time they had ______ at the top and he wanted a picture and when they raised that second flag, these guys put the pole in and he shot it and he became famous - Rosenthal.
CB: And where were the first ones that actually raised it, where were they at this time?
Saar: Where were they? Yeah, why weren't they. . .
CB: Yeah.
Saar: They had come back down. Some of them had –
CB: One died.
Saar: Yeah, well, they were - well Lindberg - they had to fight right after they got the flag up - soon as they got the flag up. The Japanese were so incensed that they charged them and Lindberg had the flamethrower and he got some and some of the other guys got the other ones. But I know Hansen was killed and I know that Lowery at that time had fallen in the crater and saw the other guys bringing the other flag up. But the second one was a staged deal. The first one was for real. I think those guys that raised the first one have a gripe.
CB: They really resented the glory and the recognition the second group . . .
Saar: And Lowery took the picture of the first group. He was a Marine photographer whereas Rosenthal was just a correspondent.
[400]
RB: Did you stay in touch with any of those guys over the years, after the war?
Saar: Oh, yeah. I spoke with Charles Lindberg, well, I say, I still, this last reunion and the reunion before. He was there. But he's missed many of our reunions before then. And he's been made an honorary member of the LST 588.
405]
RB: Do you remember where you were the day that it was announced that the Allied Forces won? The day the war officially ended?
Saar: I think-the only thing I can say is - let's see. _____________. Oh, let's
see, do you want me to go through Chinese first?
RB: Sure.
Saar: Okay. Well, I'll go through .... Go through like chronological order. And I
forgot to tell you, . . ._______ several points here. After the official surrender, I was in Buckner Bay at the time of surrender and we had heard, as I said before we were ready to take on Marines to go for the invasion of the mainland, and that's when we heard that the war was officially over. First, we heard a rumor of it and a day later we heard that it was a fact. But it was rumor at first. And then it wasn't true and then it was true. But, I can't, the date, do you have the date or something?
RB: Sure, sure, yeah.
Saar: Okay. We're all at Buckner Bay. We're waiting for orders to load up with the Marines to land on the mainland of the island of Honshu. On August 9, 1945, an even more powerful bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. It was hours later that we heard where the Japanese were talking of surrender. Just talking of surrender. So after the first surrender, we thought, well, I'm going home. You know. The war's over!
Next thing I know we get orders to go to China. And China, our mission was to take the Japanese prisoners that were now prisoners - because they had invaded China. They had come down through, you know, Mongolia, and so now it's not Mongolia. Now it's Manchuko, I think. They have changed all their names, like Peking is now Beijing and stuff like that. But anyway, we took Japanese back to Japan, then we take some of the slave labor Chinese in Japan back to China and we made about two trips. And we'd take them back to __________ in Japan. And then we took, because Chiang Kai-shek was fighting Mao at the time, we took, I remember we took nurses up to northern China to a place called Chin-Wang Tao, for nurses for Chiang Kai-shek's troops - nurses for them. Then we made another trip back to Shanghai and went back to Tianjin and places like that, to Tsing Tao, you've heard of Tsing Tao Pier?
CB: Yeah,
Saar: Tsing Tao to fight the - well, whether we were legal in doing this, I don't know. You might not want to mention that. Because 1 don't know if... international law or something. But. .. and let's see. What’s next?
[458]
RB: What did you do in the days and weeks after the war ended?
Saar: That's what we were doing.
RB: A lot?
Saar: Transporting troops. Troops up to China. Japanese to Japan. Chinese from Japan back to China.
[462]
RB: When did your tour of duly end?
Saar: It... I think it was April of'46. So the war was over in '45. So '46 it had ended but I wasn't home until after May.
[466]
RB: How do you think that your family felt about the war?
Saar: Well, they were very concerned because everything that they got was like our - were cut up. And I don't know who cut it up, but every letter I wrote they said it was just like some big cutting dolls out or something. Anything you said, they suspected. They cut it out. It was all censored. And you would ask, . . .
[473]
RB: Where did you grow up?
Saar: Waverly, Pennsylvania. Northeastern Pennsylvania. Real nice town.
[475]
RB: A question on military life. What did it feel like ____________?
Saar: What was it like? Well, you know I never regretted military life. I think I could have gone and signed up again, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the shipmates, today they're like a family. You can read the one thing beside the picture there. I'm not in that picture because I was a day late, but they have my name on it because we all met and the reporter came out and . .. down in Alabama and wrote that up. But we were like a family and we are to this day. And the thing is, the women are into it — our wives are into it as much as the men. And now we're to the point where we have more women than we do men. I think the men have died off. But
they still keep coming, the women! The women still keep coming, the wives. In fact, we're going to have ... we decided that.. . that was a class reunion ... but then after we got home, one of the women have said it was shame to break this family up. You know, her husband passed away years ago and she's going to hold one in Nebraska next year.
[495]
RB: How many were in your group initially, back in 1943, and how many survived the war?
Saar: Well, there were only a couple who didn't survive the war. Most of them
survived the war. And, but some of them died young. This one died, and this one died. Oh, god,... this was maybe a couple of years after the war. But we originally had a crew ... as I say, you can see what a skeleton crew of 25 to 27 men. Now you take the ship that was recently, I say recently it was three years, within the last three years, that came over from Greece, do you remember that?
CB: Yeah. Took it down to Alabama?
Saar: Yeah, I went down to see that.
CB: You did?
Saar: And I met the guys down there. And that... they let that ship go from Greece, but they told them not to go. They were given orders not to go, but these 70 guys used their own money to go over there. Go over there a couple of months in advance to get that thing so it would start and run. And they weren't about to be held in Greece and have them say "no." And they took that thing across the Atlantic and I'll tell ya . . . I did have connection with one of the wives by the internet and she was taking all the information for the guys. The guys would send it back to her, you know, and then she would give it to the news people, stuff like that and I had contact with her. And those guys were all over 70 years old.
CB: Can you imagine that?
Saar: All over 70 years old bringing that tub, rusty tub that you think it would get out there and one of those waves would hit it and it would sink, but it came into Alabama down there and I met a few of the guys, I don't know them personally, but I went aboard the ship. The LST did not look anything like, you know, the LST I was on. I mean, its profile was the same, but inside it was different. Like my radio shack wasn't like their radio shack and things like that. I liked mine better.
[526]
RB: Whatever happened to LST 588?
Saar: It went to the Philippines and they just gave it away.
[528]
RB: Did you continue your interest in radio since the war?
Saar: It's ingrained in my brain. The code taking. I mean, I'll never ... I guess
because I... I guess because, you know, every word I look at I do it in code. I mean, I'll do it in code. I mean, if I look at yards, you know, with yards, yard, I would go dot dit dot, dot dit dot dot dit dot dot dit dit dit. [-.--,.-,.-.,-..]Spells yards.
RB: Wow.
Saar: So it's ingrained here, you'll never forget that when you're doing it hour after hour after hour. And I could use to be able to take this stuff at about 30 words per minute. In other words, I would be typing and when that stopped, I would still have in my mind what was there and type another two words after. You had to type. To do it, you had to type 70 words per minute.
RB: Okay.
RB. Was there anything special you did for good luck or any charms or little things you did for preparing yourself or do for a mission?
Saar: No. There had church services. I went lo church services. I had no charms, nothing like that.
[546]
RB: How did people entertain themselves?
Saar: Well, you know, when we were in a harbor, like you know Guam was pretty well settled. So was Saipan. Although in Guam, they were still fighting, you know, back in the . .. way back in the jungles. In fact 30 years later after the war, this Japanese soldier came out of the jungle. Thirty years after the war, you know, the
war was over.
RB: Are you kidding me?
Saar: No.
Saar: They just found that one guy from ... he was from North Korea. Just six months ago.
Saar: That soldier that had defected at one point during . . . now this was from World War II... now this was the Vietnam . .. the Korean War. The Korean War. Korea, where one guy defected and went over with the North Koreans and he married a North Korean. And just about six months ago, they gave him a very light punishment.
Saar: Well, you know, the guy, he's ill and ...
CB: Yeah, that was what, 50 some years after the Korean War ended.
RB: Wow. "
RD: This guy came out after 30 years. How did he last 30 years back in the jungle all by himself?
Saar: There were trails up on that ________.
RD: Well, true. Well, this is ridiculous. Unbelievable. Because the Filipinos kept going up with their army, their military, with their loudspeakers and leaving leaflets, saying hey, the war's over. Come on down. 30 years. How it turned out, he just walked down and he became a hero in Japan.
[569]
RB: Do you recall a particularly humorous or unusual event _______? The octopus was one, right?
Saar: The octopus was one. Let's see. I know ... Well, I can ... it's ...
(unintelligible - buzzing - rest of tape appears to be blank)
-------------
2nd tape
[588]
Saar: What did irritate me was Tokyo Rose. Ever hear of Tokyo Rose?
RB: No.
Saar: Well, when you were over in that area, they had a powerful station in Japan.
Tokyo Rose used to broadcast to the troops at sea, over in the China Sea and all around that area. The East China Sea. And she used to play songs that we knew back home before we had left. Like "Don't sit under the apple tree" and things like that. American songs, they would sing. Then they would say at the end, hey, you know, where do you think your girlfriend is now? And things like that, you know. It was very entertaining and what I would use to do then was take the guys out and pipe the troops so the guys could hear it, you know. Tokyo Rose was really entertainment for us. But the idea of Tokyo Rose, it was supposed to make us feel bad, feel as though we should be home and not out there and break your morale. But it did the opposite.
RB: Now back home, your parents, back in ________, did you have any other siblings in your family?
Saar: My sister.
RB: Was she involved in the war effort at all?
Saar: No. She was involved in the Republican Party.
RB: Same thing.
Saar: She was president of the Young Republicans of North Eastern PA.
RB: And did your father serve in the military also?
Saar: No. No, he was too old.
RB: No, but I mean when he was young, . . .
Saar: No. No.
[624]
RB: So what prompted you to want to be the first in your family to go into the military?
Saar: Well, it wasn't that I was the first in the family, that I did it. It was because, well, my buddy and I wanted to be part of it and ships. Submarines were being found off the coast, you know, of Carolina and they were finding even up in Massachusetts they were offshore. And you would hear about it, and you'd think, you think, and then you would have buddies who came home from the war, that they were out there and they were coming home. Guys that were maybe three years older than we were and had graduated from high school and were coming back and ... you know, so they would come back on leave and we'd talk to them and some of them wouldn't come back on leave. Some of them were . . . never made it. So we got mad and then I'm sure that there's a little adventure that we wanted to attach to that. But like I say, patriotism. There was ... I could say that plus adventure, you know.
[666]
RB: What was your parents' reaction when you told them you . ..
Saar: It was thumbs down.
RB: Oh, really?
Saar: Yeah. But Dad knew they had no sway at that point. We were going. Whether you don't like it or not, we were going.
[678]
RB: Did you work or go back to school after the war?
Saar: Oh, yeah. Yeah. After the war, I came back and I thought 1 wanted to be ... I know that there was.. . Okay, first I had to come back to go finish . .. because I left after my Junior year. So I had my senior year to make up. And then this is what my mother and father said. Okay, there's nothing we can do, but will you promise us one thing? Will you come back and finish high school? So I did that. And my buddy did too. And we went for six months straight solid to not. . . with younger people. But they had a place in Scranton where we could drive over 10 miles and we went there every day and there were G.l.s there and then we had permission to _______.
And then when we were offered our diploma, we could have taken it as of that year or they would have given us a diploma as of the year we would have graduated. It would be our choice. And then I went to Leiceister Junior College in Massachusetts and got an Associate's Degree and took the credits that I had there, took them to the University of Scranton. I finished a year at the University of Scranton and I found after that year, and it was a total beginning, that there were some credits that they would not accept. That they gave me the impression that they had accepted all my credits at the University of Scranton, but there were a few credits they didn't take. That meant that I had to go my fourth year plus the fifth and I wasn't about to go -1 would go one more year but I was not going to go that fifth year. And at that time I was getting older and I wanted money in my pocket and I had a job offer as a trainee and I took the job as a trainee. That's where I spent the rest of my life or the rest of my career.
RB: And where was that?
Saar: At the Sears Roebuck & Company.
[745]
RB: Was your education supported by the G. I. Bill?
Saar: Yep.
[746]
RB: Did you join a veterans organization or. ..?
Saar: 1 did for a short period of time. When the veterans organization _________. When you go to a VFW, no, there's another one that the VFW ...
CB: The American Legion.
Saar: American Legion or something like that. I don't know which one it was, but one or the other I joined for a very short period of time. T think because you could get dinner at a very reasonable price and you could get your beer,.. .But it didn't have any attraction for me any more.
[763]
RB: How did your service and experience affect your life?
Saar: How did it affect my life? I think it certainly made me a better person. In the service, you learn to respect, you learn respect for officers, you learn discipline. And I probably needed a lot of discipline. And I would say that's how it affected my life. It gave me discipline. And it helped me through the day. _______ You should be in the army - it'll straighten you out. But it did and it did – you learned respect. And again, you fight together, you're a family together, and it has an affect on you. On your life.
I'm solidly behind what we should being doing now is a graduate from high school is that he spends two years in the service, one year physical training and other training, military training, the second year on the borders of the country. And after the second year, then they have earned maybe one year of college, two years of college at the government's expense. I don't believe they should go right out of high school and into college. I think there should be a period there, hey look, I want to get things together. So many people go into college and they change their course right after two years and if they were out for two years, they'd have time to think about it. And there would be a lot of those people that would be. . . say, hey, I like this kind of life. Then it would build up our reserve fighters, army or navy. But I think that they should spend two years and get.. . earn credits for college. And we would always, you know, have enough men. We wouldn't have to call. That's what it did for me. That's the outlook it gave me. And as I say, it taught me discipline ______ respected. I respected authority. I respected the guy that was my boss. The guy, the officer that was above me.
RB: Your buddy that went in the military, what was his name?
Saar: Guy Megarge. M-e-g-a-r-g-e.
RB: And is he still alive?
Saar: He's still alive and he still calls me. Talk twice a year.
CB: You stay in touch after all these years? That's great.
[802]
RB: Do you have many close friendships you made during the service?
Saar: Oh, yeah, because we have reunions and you know, you're glad to see your old buddies. They don't look like what they looked like ... 60 years ago, but sure, you make a lot of buddies in the service. And they're lasting, you know, they're lasting friendships.
[816]
RB: Arc there any stories or anything else you wanted to put down for the record?
Saar: Well, you know, I know that you'll walkout of here and I'll think of several.
Well, I'll tell you about the ... it was 1985. I was out in Ohio. To see my sister and brother-in-law. And my brother-in-law and I went out to play golf. And after nine holes, there was only two of us, after nine holes another couple came in and said, "do you mind if we join you?" On the back nine. We said no, come right along.
So after the 18 holes, then we went in and had a drink. We got to talking and we found out this guy was in an LST and he was about to go to California for a reunion. He was on an LST. I was on an LST too. And he said, yeah, we're going out there to a reunion. Well, I said, I don't know about any reunions. He said, well, what ship? I told him, and he says, well, I have a national LST newsletter and I'll look at it. He said, who... you're staying with your brother-in-law. What's his telephone number? And I thought.. . Jim gave him his telephone number and I didn't think any more of it. And we got home and about two hours later we had a telephone call. He said, "do you want to know something? LST 588 is having a reunion in Charleston, South Carolina." I said, are you sure it's LST 588? He said, "yeah, and it says that the fella you should contact is in Dayton, Ohio." I said, yeah? And he says his name is Barger. And I said, "Barger! I know Barger."
And I got on the phone and I called and this is funny, and I called and Mrs. Barger answered. I said, "Mrs. Barger, this is Bill Saar and I was on the LST 588 with" . .. now this is in 1985 ... "with your husband," and there was silence. And then next thing I hear, I hear a little whispering in the background. Something like that. First, he gets on. "You say you are Bill Saar?" I said, "yeah, I am Bill Saar. Don't you remember me, Barger?" He said that "the Bill Saar that I knew on the LST 588 is deceased." I said, "no, he's not deceased. He's speaking to you right now and he's alive and well." Well, he couldn't get over it. In fact, he wrote to everybody that he could write to and I have the letter he wrote . . . somewhere in here is I am listed as deceased in this book. Yeah, well, what happened was this. Incidentally, ___________14,1 fooled them. ___________. He wrote a letter and this was August 23, 1988, and he said, "Greetings, 588'ers. This is our final letter before the reunion on October 7, 8, and 9. We must apologize for an unintentional error we made some time ago. We have listed Willard A. Saar, Radioman, as deceased. Are our faces red! Mr. Saar is alive and well. He lives at 432 Oak Tree Road, Rockville, Maryland. _______. His phone number is ..." and so on. Do you know he sent that letter out to all the guys. My telephone was ringing off the hook. When I got home, my telephone was ringing off the hook. He _____________. .. you were dead. But I can say one thing. I'll see if I can find it here. I have ... here it is. I've had one memorial already. There's a memorial service.
RB: Kind of Mark Twain.
Saar: Right there.
RB: Is this all the people at your memorial service?
Saar: Yeah.
RB: Wow! Did you get a copy of the eulogy for you?
Saar: So I was going to get two memorial services, right?
RB: Wow! This is hilarious.
CB: The news of your death has been greatly exaggerated. _______, right.
RB: Oh, man.
CB: William A. Saar. No, Willard A. Saar.
Saar: You know, that wouldn't happen in a million years. To meet somebody in
another state that far away, out in Ohio, and find ... to be able to click and find .. . you know, 1 think they had four to five reunions up to that one. And to find someone just like that on a golf course and have that spark. And I think I have gone to every reunion since.
[909]
RB: How often do you have them now? Every year?
Saar: Okay.
RB: And how many are left from your crew?
Saar: Well, you know, we don't know, but we think we're down pretty low. You see, there could be some strays out there, but they've never been able to connect them. So either they're dead or ...
RB: How many went to your last reunion?
Saar: There was like five, okay. There were like five men and six women.
RB: Okay.
Saar: But now, there's some of them that weren't there because they were unable to get there. Out in Ohio, there's a very good friend who's had heart implants and all hat stuff and there's another that can't walk, has to walk with a walker. And I don't know, about four other guys. And that would be the total. Of the original crew. You see, we did have. .. If you look at that, you'll find a lot of names. But they would come in prior to a beach landing, and they would only be with us maybe a couple of weeks so we never considered those guys crew. So they had to register their name, we had to put it in the ship's records, but they're not regular crew members. So you see a lot of them there, but there's regular crew who go on to have the reunions. Those other guys were probably on maybe five or six different ships sometimes.
[954]
CB: You know, one of the themes that came through in this book, "Flags of Our Fathers", that I thought was very telling. I would be very curious as to your take on it. They talk about how these young men had seen the horrors of war at such a young age that they really wanted to return to a life of normalcy and they didn't want a lot of attention in the spotlight. They really wanted just to have their home, their family, that's really vital to them. And for a lot of them, they became very involved in their local communities. They were givers and always gave back to the family, their communities. Is that some of the experience you've seen personally and with some of your colleagues?
Saar: They don't want the attention.
Saar: They really wanted just to, yeah, to return to a life of normalcy.
Saar: Oh, yeah, I would say definitely. I would say definitely that many of them were like that from World War II. I know a couple of them like Kerry,...
[Unintelligible]
RB: We're from Indiana. We're diehard Republicans.
[989]
RB: To quote, is there one thought about your wartime experience or just war that you want to share with future generations?
Saar: Well, you know, first you try to prevent war. You don't want war. You try to prevent it by talking and this, they blame the Bush administration that he didn't do enough of that. But I don't ______ and I have to agree with the fact that first you have to talk, talk as long as you can. But there's a point where you can't talk any more, you have to act, and I think that to be on the offensive is better than being on the defensive. And I think that was the situation with Bush. That we had a menace out there. And it's not only this country, it's in many countries, and we have to face it. And if we don't face it now, we're going to have to face it later. And it will be bigger than it is now, so it's just like Afghanistan. He could have let that go another couple years, something like that, but we went in there and did the job. Things are going exactly right in Iraq, but they will. And 1 think that we should always be alert to the fact that it's not right to be on the defensive
RB: Do you have children?
Saar: Do I have children? Yeah.
RB: Did any of them go into the military?
Saar: No. I wanted ... I tried to get them to go to the Naval Academy. But during that time, kids didn't want that. Graduates didn't want that. So they didn't do that thing, but other schools. One went to Virginia Tech and graduated from Virginia Tech and the other one went to Penn State. And then I tried _________ on my grandchildren. It didn't seem to work either right now. Maybe in a couple of years. I'll keep at them. Cause they aren't ready yet. But I would love to have someone go to the Naval Academy.
RB: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Saar, and this interview is concluded.
Saar: But one thing . . .
Saar: I can think of these things all along, you know, and I'll probably think after you leave of things that happened that were funny.
RB: Oh, great.
[994]
Saar: Anyhow, I can remember one guy that he was ... he was on the bridge. He didn't have his helmet. He couldn't find his helmet. He was from Yonkers, New York. And he couldn't find his helmet and there was an air raid. And he was beside himself. And he grabbed a bucket and he pulls this bucket down over his head and he tripped and he fell down ... he fell down into ... what do you call...
CB: The ladder.
Saar: the ladder ... he fell down ___ the steps. In the Navy you don't call those
steps. He fell down the ladder, went clang, clang, clang. That was sort of funny. But he was the guy that was always saying, "where's our air force, where's our air force? Why aren't they here?!" Every time there was an air raid.
[1001]
RB: Were there any pranks that you ever pulled?
Saar: Any pranks that I ever pulled? I don't think so. I do have a picture here of the guy - he's Italian. Let's see, where is it? And he's the guy I want to get, that I thought that, I'd get the Mafia. And maybe you could get hold of this guy. Right there. He's the guy that took my Lugar.
RB: Oh that’s the one?
Saar: Yeah
RB: What happened?
Saar: Well, I took this Lugar off a Japanese prisoner and the officers, you know, Japan had Lugars because Germany---they were Allies. But that guy has my Lugar to this day. I took this off one.
[1015]
RB: Did you get any souvenirs?
Saar: Oh, I don't have any souvenirs. Oh, I'll show you one. One ... look this...
RB: The sword?
Saar: No, that's from World War I. That was my grandfather's. That's a bayonet you put on the end of a gun. But look at that. Look at that Chinese guy.
RB: That's you?
Saar: That's me.
RB: Wow.
Saar: See how he does my eye. You know he did it with a pin and a __and leaned
up against the ship and we let him climb up the side and this is in the Wang Poo River. He climbed up the side. We just set there and he did that in no time at all in charcoal.
RB: Beautiful, beautiful
Saar: That's charcoal. But you notice how the Oriental eyes in it. Anyone want a drink of water?
RB: No.
Saar:__
RD: They made you good looking, though.
Saar: Hey, I was a lot better looking than that.
RB: The interview started at 1:30, concluded at 3:00 p.m. Present were Mr. Willard A. Saar, (Saar), Ricardo Dinisio, (RD), grandfather of Rachel Braun, (RB), also present, and Rachel's father, Christopher Braun, (CB).
