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Today is September 18th. I am Nicholas Chun and I am interviewing Calvin Arnold at Park Tudor School. Mr. Arnold is an acquaintance of Mrs. Lerch. Mr. Arnold is eighty-seven years old and was born on May 13th, 1924. Mr. Arnold served in World War II. Mr. Arnold was in the navy and held the following rank: Electrician’s Mate 1st class.
[00:00:33] NC: So Mr. Arnold, were you drafted into the military or did you enlist?
[00:00:38]CA: I joined the navy. I had to join the navy because my father was sixteen years in the navy so I had to join.
[00:00:54]NC: So where were you living at the time?
[00:00:56]CA: Noblesville, Indiana.
[00:01:00]NC: So you joined just mainly because your father was in the navy?
[00:01:04]CA: Basically, Yes. My whole family was in the navy. My uncles and cousins. All of us joined the navy. I had cousins, nephews, uncles who were admirals. I had two uncles who were admirals. So you had to join the navy or you got shot.
[00:01:29]NC: So, do you recall your first days in service?
[00:1:32]CA: First day of service was two days before my birthday I joined the navy.
[00:01:45]NC: So did you go through boot camp?
[00:01:48]CA: At Great Lakes.
[00:01:49]NC: In Great Lakes, Can you tell me about that?
[00:01:56]CA: I expected it. I expected it and I knew what was going to happen and it happened.
[02:05]NC: Was it tough or was it kind of easy to get through?
[02:08]CA: I expected it.
[02:12]NC: So which wars did you serve in?
[02:24]CA: World War II.
[02:26]NC: So where exactly were you stationed during WWII?
[02:29]CA: Well, Great Lakes was where I went through training. And then they sent me to Purdue. And I was in Purdue for I think three or four months and training to be an Electrician’s Mate. And I came out of Purdue as a third class Electrician’s Mate. I graduated Purdue as a Third Class Electrician’s Mate in the navy. And then I was sent to Newport News. And at Newport News and the first ship I was on was an LST for a cruise. It was the first LST built. We took it out for a check trip. And there was probably about sixty sailors on it. Fixed up with all kinds of major equipment all over the LST. Measuring pressures and so forth. Cause an LST wasn’t built as a ship. It was built as a canoe. Felt like a canoe too. And I saw it more and more and I was thinking I hope the navy doesn’t put me in one of these darn things. And sure enough we had to check all the meters and all this and everything on the LST. We were looking for a storm. We were near Newport News. First off we went to—we went east I guess. We went and we couldn’t find any storms. So then finally we went off the west side of Norfolk. And that LST just jumped up and down and jumped up and down and jumped up and down. And you jumped up and down with it. I thought “boy, I’m gonna get off this thing and I’m not even gonna come back.” And lo and behold we got back to Newport News and they put us all back someplace. About three days later, I hear my name called off in a crew and next thing I know I’m on a train heading for Texas. My first LST was at Hoboken, New Jersey. We picked it up at Hoboken, New Jersey. I looked at that and I thought, “Oh lord, what did I do so bad that you put me in this thing?” About two days later they sent us up to Hoboken, New Jersey and a bunch of things they didn’t have done were on that LST. We were there about five or six weeks, five or six days I guess. And they were trying to get it done and trying to get it done. We didn’t have a compass—they had a compass on the deck — and so they sent us back down to Newport News and we stayed there while they did some more stuff on us. You see the LST, wasn’t really built yet. And it hadn’t even fit to go to sea. They had – the Navy finally decided that they didn’t want it. The navy didn’t want the thing. But they finally decided that they’d head to Guadalcanal, when they invaded Guadalcanal they had no landings. No ships, nobody had to go ashore. Cause there were no battles for landings in Guadalcanal when they first landed. But they had no place to land crews and tanks and everything. So that’s when the navy decided “heck, we got troops and we don’t have anything else, so we need something to land people, troops and ammunition and cannons and things, so what they gonna do”? So that’s when Guadalcanal was almost lost cause they didn’t have anything but troops, nothing else. So that’s when they needed something like LSTs. So boy they said ‘we need LSTs’ well they were building twelve LSTs for England. And they came and said ‘to Heck with them’. We’re not giving them to England. We’re taking those. So we got the first LSTs going to England. Well they weren’t worth a damn. We didn’t have any laundries. We didn’t have any laundry. We didn’t have any water or nothing. First LST here and we got aboard that ship and there was no food. We had one fellow there, his dad was a senator. We lived on the island there with nothing to eat for about six, seven days. And he called the senator and boy we had food down there on —what holiday was it? What was the holiday about that time?
[00:08:48]Mel Arnold: Well that would be July 4th.
[00:08:49]CA: No it wasn’t July. What’s the holiday with turkeys and everything?
[00:09:00]MA: That’s Thanksgiving
[00:09:00]CA: Thanksgiving?
[00:09:02]MA: Do you guys know what LST stands for? It stands for Landing Ship Tanks.
[00:09:07]CA: and LSTs are Landing Ship Tanks and LCI is landing ship.
[00:09:14]MA: the big door would open at beaches and tanks and ships and all that. Yeah.
[00:09:21]CA: Both of these were designed for the English. The English designed this thing and they sent the drawings to our navy. And they looked at it and said ‘what the hell are we gonna do with that thing—slow thing. Twelve miles an hour was as fast as it could go. And heck they said ‘we don’t want that big thing’. LST stands for “large slow Targets” [Actually, ‘Landing-Ship-Troops’ or ‘Landing-Ship-Tanks’]. That’s what the LST stood for in the navy. The navy that’s what we called Large Slow Targets. LST and that’s what it was. We took four large shells sitting on the deck—sitting on the land. That’s why we had to go to Australia to get shells for the big stuff. We’re sitting on the beach and its going “boom, boom, boom!”.
[00:10:17]MA: Kinda off your subject here Nick, but what was the question again?
[00:10:22]NC: It was just where exactly did he go so….
[00:10:30]MA: There was an interesting story I want to ask you about. The first night that they find the LSTs off Hoboken, New Jersey. You might wanna ask him what happened that first night at sea.
[00:10:41]NC: What happened that first night?
[00:10:46]CA: Nobody had ever been at sea on an LST— even the officers. We really only had one officer that had been in the navy. And they never had any training. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. When we beached at Guadalcanal and when we left New York, they put a LCC I think it is. It’s a small landing craft that just carries troops. It could put about fifty sailors in there and run ‘em ashore. It has a little flap in front. Well the ten or twelve of us left to go to Norfolk. On board an LST. It was onboard our ship. Sitting on this LST was an LCI[Landing-Ship-Infantry] or something like that. There’s another ship sitting on top of this from Hoboken all the way down to Guadalcanal. When we got down to Guadalcanal they dropped us off. We lowered all the water out of the bottom. An LST was nothing but a bunch of water at the bottom. You either fill ‘em up or empty ‘em. And the idea of it was you had ballast at the bottom. And if you’re gonna go in to land then load up your supplies, you fill up your ballast. So you fill it back into your ship with water and the ship could go down like this. Well, you’d load it up and as you load it up you’d pump the water out back here till you get it level. Then you take off. When you get to the place where you unload you start pumping it out. And then loading it until you get it loaded back of [Unintelligible] that’s what an LST did. It’d carry products but you load it up and unload it. Well the officers didn’t know this. The officers they didn’t remember their training. Heck, we were in such a hurry the trainers they just said, “Get out of here.” And that’s the honest to goodness truth. Nobody knew what they were doing. How we won the war is because the Japanese didn’t know what to do either. They didn’t know either. It was a circus. I was on my battleship in landings—being an electrician’s mate I had three generators. And I had to keep those three generators on. And I was in the generator room and we were landing at Guadalcanal. I heard him standing where all three of my generators on. And heard him say “Drop the stern anchor” and we were going in. The transformer was turning off the energy. The steering was hooked up to it. How do we steer it? We were going all over the Pacific Ocean. And we hollered, “We can’t steer this thing” and the skipper was cussing me up a storm cause he couldn’t steer it. I shake my head and say ‘Skipper, I don’t know if the generator is gonna stay on.’ ‘Well make ‘em stay on.’ What a war boy. Boy, I don’t know how we won the thing.
[00:15:07]MA: First night at it, weren’t you rammed at sea by the LST behind you?
[00:15:10]CA: That was first night they rammed us. The LST rammed us. Big bang.
[00:15:19]MA: There were twelve of you right?
[00:15:22]CA: Ten or twelve of us.
[00:15:25]MA: And after the first week in the South Pacific you were still afloat?
[00:15:27]CA: Well, no, that was the first invasion. We invaded, the first invasion we made there was only six of us floating after that one. I’ll tell you, how you can laugh. It had to be so funny you had to laugh. You had to cry and laugh. You know it’s funny how most of those guys be crying and laughing. You had to laugh. In generator rooms you had engineers, electrical men, and engineering men for motors. Well, he and I became very good friends. He was quite a basketball player. He played for Washington. And Washington won state. And he and I would stand watch together and he was a character. He was a character. We’d stand watch together. We were standing watch one night and an engineering officer, he’d took a shower and he came down. We were working on one of the engines. On the walkway they had a can full of glue. The engineering officer comes down in his white shorts. He was going up and down the railing and as he’s going down with oil on his stuff. When he left his pants were just covered with glue. And he got back in our room and one of the officers in the room says ‘where the hell you got messed up?’ He comes back as oily as he ever had. I’ll tell you it was a circus. We won the war. Its guys like us that won the war. The officers didn’t win it. I could tell you a story, my wife kept saying— she’d get mad at me for not putting it on the tape someplace. And I got to get them on tape so you can get ‘em typed down someplace. And I got stories you wouldn’t believe.
[00:18:19]NC: Could you tell us your other stories?
[00:18:26]CA: Some of you wouldn’t want to hear.
[00:18:29]MA: Tell us about that one time where you were beached and the Japs were strafing you guys and you were at battle stations. He was the deck gunner. You might wanna tell ‘em some of those stories. You might wanna talk about some of the invasions. What did you do when you were invading?
[00:19:13]CA: Well a lot of that stuff I don’t like to talk about.
[00:19:20]NC: Could you tell us about some of the combat that you saw?
[00:19:25]CA: Well the one thing that really— a couple things I don’t like to talk about. Being the electrician, they normally tried to keep me out of the action part. Cause I was only an electrician. We only had about forty crew members and all. Because the LST we were on was really a liberty ship, well the second ship I was on. Most of my action was on the first ship. The action during invasions was the fifty caliber machine gun on the fan tail. This was fun because we went through a lot of night—they would fly at night at us all the time. After dark they’d just come down and always hit your fantail. Strafe you strafe you. Two things about strafing, one plane would go down at you sideways and drop flares. And the other would go this way and drop flares. And then they’d drop their bombs both ways then they did a little strafing. After they got the bombs dropped then they’d come and strafe you. And you’re sitting on the fantail; you got both of them coming both ways. And I think the thing—the one particular thing— the other time— two fifty calibers. We were about like you and I apart. I don’t know maybe here and that wall apart. He was a heck of a nice guy. He was a good basketball player. I’ll tell you that. And we got down behind sand buckets all the way across the front. They were about that high and you could just see across the top of them. I got down way down below as far as I could and put a couple sand bags on top of that. It lasted about fifty, twenty minutes. [Unintelligible] I set myself up and hollered over at him and hollered at him so I got up walked over and there he sat there with his head cut off. I just went berserk. [Unintelligible] Well I tell you I had to go up to my room and throw up and throw up and I never got over it. He was a good close friend.
[00:23:57]NC: Were there any other casualties on your ship?
[00:24:01]CA: Oh yes, that wasn’t too bad. Truthfully that was about the – I think we only lost about two or three people that time. We never lost a lot of people. We lost a lot of soldiers but we didn’t catch a lot of crew people. Probably eight or ten crew people is all we ever lost.
[00:24:40]NC: So after the whole combat, did you ever get any medals or citations?
[00:24:48]CA: Our skipper – our ship was awarded four medals. For four different invasions we were awarded medals. The LST 990. I could send this stuff to you. That’s mine. I got one of the LST – four invasions we received medals on. This was just mine. I gotta get all this stuff together and can I get the stuff and bring it back to you? He ran me out of the house this morning and I never had a chance to get there and get the stuff I wanted to bring with me. You’re not in a big hurry are you?
[00:26:02]Anna Kershisnik and Ravi Shah: Oh no.
[00:26:03]CA: I’d love to bring you stuff back.
[00:26:07]AK RS: Mrs. Lerch would love that.
[00:26:10]CA: I could bring you some pictures if I can find ‘em. And it would bring back my memory a lot more. And I know where you cats are now, for crying out loud. To heck with him. He’s just my son.
[00:27:02]NC: So you said your ship would get bombed at times?
[00:27:07]CA: Yeah, I can show you the letter we got for it. [Unintelligible] Not very many LSTs had that many.
[00:27:33]NC: So you said your rank was Electrician’s Mate 1st Class?
[00:27:39]CA: First class yes. I had an offer as chief if I would stay, but I wanted to go to Purdue.
[00:27:50]MA: You start out as third class and work your way up third, to second to first. Dad just passed second for his experiences. His grandfather was a chief petty officer.
[00:28:08]CA: Yeah my father really had a special rank. He was a chief. He was a chief chief. It’s not even listed in the navy listings. But he was a special chief. And I forget what it is. His funeral in the state of Ohio was the last caisson funeral ever placed in Ohio.
[00:28:42]MA: Why don’t you tell Nick and the rest of the students some of the things you were also in charge of being an electrician’s mate?
[00:28:51]CA: I don’t think so.
[00:28:53]MA: No tell ‘em about the applejack you used to make.
[00:29:00]CA: On the first ship I was on, which was the rowdiest one. I mean it was rowdy like a bunch of rowdy guys you’d never seen. We had one fellow on there that was drafted about two, three days before he would’ve had to go on. His last name was…….anyway, he liked booze. And he’s an electrician’s mate, a lot older than the rest of us and boy we had a lot of batteries. The navy had a lot of batteries, a lot of dc voltage. And we had five vocal batteries and five —ten gallon jugs of water. He kept getting bottles of —gallons of water and he kept keeping them in a special place. And we found out later, he was making raisin jack. He got me as helping him make raising jack. And boy he sure knew how to make it. And he made that raisin jack and he had a whole set fixed up. He had all the raisins and wires and things fixed up. Whole thing was set up like a like a brewery. We’d set it down in the basement, Basement!? You’re in the navy now. We put it down on the lower levels. We set it down there (unintelligible). Oh I’ll tell you, it used to get so potent after about six weeks, six or eight weeks in it’d get so potent. He’d jump up and down on the grapes and he’d get some other stuff. He’d get them with the cook so he’d get lemons and stuff like that. And he’d leave it together and he would brew it and put some sugar and something else. A few other things and boy it’d knock you right on your fanny. In fact, and this is the honest to goodness truth, we were in the steering room and all electric and we were anchored…… What’s the island just before the war ended? We won it back? Philippines. We were in the Philippines. We were anchored in the Philippines. And the war was about over. We were down in the steering room and had a couple of jugs of wine, playing poker, drinking (unintelligible) I’ll tell you, I got so drunk. I was gonna go to bed so I said “Well fellas, I’m going to bed.” I went up, we had a boat that we bought off from the natives, a little sail boat, a little row boat, it had an anchor and was tied up alongside the ship. And I got up there and I went over side and I fell overboard. I fell into that boat and knocked myself out. I landed in the boat; I landed in that boat, just like this. So about an hour later they decided to go to bed. So they go up and they can’t find me. So they all go out, they’re going around and here I am in a boat. And it’s lucky that they found me. So they get me out of the boat and take me down and put me in my bunk. They say look at that son of a-, he’s knocked out. So they couldn’t get me awake or anything so they put me on my bunk covered me up and left me there. I laid there all night. I woke up next morning and I was out like a light. It’s just lucky. That’s another thing. I’ll tell you I was lucky as the devil. I forget what they called me for a long time. They just laughed and laughed and laughed about that.
[00:34:26]MA: Well Nick you wanna know something that he’s part of? The Philippine’s island hopping that Macarthur did during the end of the war. So he had some. What were some of the islands, Guadalcanal of course; there were some of the smaller, Vella Lavella. What were some of the invasions you were a part of?
[00:34:41]NC: Could you tell us?
[00:34:45]MA: Cal, what was that other Island?
[00:34:47]CA: Guadalcanal,
[00:34:48]MA: Yeah we know that one.
[00:34:50]CA: You mean invasions?
[00:34:52]MA: Yeah different invasions. You said Vella Lavella.
[00:34:56]CA: Vella Lavella. I went through twelve of ‘em. I went through twelve invasions in the Solomons. All of them were a circus. You know it’s really funny. The British army. Boy if they weren’t something. They were something else. New Zealanders, especially New Zealanders. They were -if you wanna ever fight a fight get a New Zealander. They sure knew the answers.
[00:35:50]MA: Were they the ones who had tea time?
[00:35:52]CA: Oh yeah. I opened the door. Shells falling all around the place and I open the door to the engine room – Gallery and the door opens and one of these guys says, “I say there old timer, close the door we’re drinking tea right now.” They were something else.
[00:36:26]NC: So were you ever stationed anywhere else besides – Was your unit ever anywhere else besides Guadalcanal, Philippines?
[00:36:35]CA: Oh yes, first time I went over, we went to the Solomons. We invaded twelve islands in the Solomon’s. Fifty Islands, twelve different Solomon islands we invaded. And replaced them and then I came back overseas and got twenty days leave. And then I want back to…. We invaded the Philippines. That was such a sad place, really a sad place. Filipinos had a really rough time in it. They had no liberties, no – women I’ll tell you. Women, you can’t believe how women lived in that country. It’s just terrible… it still is. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. It’s a crying shame that some countries are just in the condition they are and it’s too bad that they have no way of changing. The world is just like that.
[00:38:26]MA: Well on that picture of the LST, you wanna show them where your fantail battle station was?
[00:38:36]CA: Well there’s not much to tell.
[00:38:39]MA: You were at the back of the ship. Were you stationed back here?
[00:38:41]CA: Yeah. Back in there.
[00:38:43]MA: Where was the engine room? Was the engine room back there?
[00:38:50]CA: No, no, no, no, no, The LST was… The LST had the bow up here. It’s unusual; it shows you how stupid it was. You see this was a gun here and here was a gun here. There was no protection. We had to change all this. This is a picture of the ship but we changed all this. We took all this down and all this down and changed it so that you couldn’t have a gun here that you could shoot at people with, this gun here and this gun here could shoot each other. So we had all this, all this was taken down and we changed it, we moved them down into here. Up here and down here. This was the steering room back here. [Unintelligible] This was just the deck. And you had an after deck back here and there were two rooms to get out of, you can’t see ‘em. Right in here is two ways to get down to the engine room, one right here and right in here. Truthfully, this was a good ship, just didn’t have any speed.
[00:40:30]NC: Did the ship have a name?
[00:40:36]CA: Some of ‘em had names. Truthfully, I think it was according to who their captains were. Most of the captains were not navy people. They were GIs made officers and given offers and truthfully they’d have a naval officer under him to just have a liberty ship to get a little navy philosophy to it. But occasionally you found some of these officers became pretty good navy officers.
[00:41:29]NC: So you were talking about getting strafed by the Japanese, your ship was bombed?
[00:41:37]CA: Oh yeah. We took - Two times we took bombings.
[00:41:41]NC: Were you ever injured, you yourself?
[00:41:46]CA: Oh yeah, not me. The bomb—when you’re sitting back here right there and they’re strafing you from here. The bombs are falling right back in here into this area here. Bombs that they used, they dropped in the air, landed on the surface, bombs go this way. They land in the water and they go this way.
[00:42:25]NC: So if the ship was damaged by the bombs-
[00:42:29]CA: Yeah we catch holes.
[00:42:32]NC: So they had to get repaired?
[00:42:35]CA: That’s what happened here. The bomb landed on the water and the shells come up over here. He was cut off from the shell coming through his head. That happens a lot of times on these night time drills. They’d drop the bombs and the bombs just came across the ship.
[00:43:06]NC: Oh it was all at night time?
[00:43:07]CA: Oh yes, dark, the bombs were making pictures for you. It’s a nice sight. It kinda gets scary but I mean—
[00:43:31]NC: So do you have any other stories you want to share with us about combat?
[00:43:37]CA: Oh, I have a lot of stories. I have ‘em all in my head right now. I kind tried to push them away as far as I can. I get headaches sometimes. But it’s been a real experience, I’ll tell ya. When I look back it was a real experience. I’m glad I did it. But boy I tell you, I wouldn’t want to do it again. Made a lot of friends. They’re the kind of friends you make friends. I have a friend now, Fred Anderson, lives in Chicago. He was a radioman. He and I are the best of friends. His mother and father, they’d take me as their son. Always do call me son. It’s kind of like a family. It’s just the kind of relationship we had you know as friends in the navy. I think truthfully, and I mean this, I think it’s the best thing for a young fellow to take a year or two in the service of his country. And you get the best out of it. I honestly believe that’s the best place to go. This country needs more people like that, the guys sitting on the hill, sitting on the —but I’ll tell you, truthfully, I would like for you to let me take a couple— I’ve been having headaches.
[End of Interview]
