Dr. John Graham
[b. 11/08/27]
Recorded on 12/01/04
[Interview starts at 1’15”]
Tessa Qualkinbush: Today is December 1, 2004. I am Tessa Qualkinbush and I am interviewing Dr. John Douglas Graham, who lives at 6315 Old Orchard Road in Indianapolis, and he served in the US Navy. His rank was SK-3C.
Tessa Qualkinbush: Were you drafted or did you enlist?
John Graham: I enlisted at seventeen years of age.
TQ: Where were you living at the time?
JG: In Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.
[2:00]
TQ: Why did you join?
JG: All my other friends had gone to the service. Everybody was going to the service. The war in Europe was over, but the war in the Pacific was still going on. We just thought that was our duty.
TQ: Why did you pick the service branch you joined?
JG: A number of my friends decided to join the Navy. I just thought, well, I didn’t want to be in the Army. Somebody discouraged me from going into the Marines. So I said, maybe I’ll go in the Navy.
[2:29]
TQ: Do you recall your first days in service?
JG: Absolutely. It was in boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois with about 20,000 other men. It was about 98 degrees every day. They would run us and work us out, but at seventeen years of age, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. I remember [being] very homesick just the first couple of days.
TQ: Can you tell me anything else about your boot camp and training experience?
JG: We were in a barracks. There were two levels to the barracks. There were about 150 men in one area. We had bunks that were two high and packed in, and one area was the bathroom. We would go elsewhere to eat. They would take you out on what they called “the grinder,” which was just a big parade grounds where you would go and exercise. Then we would be taken to different areas for classes for identification of ships and planes and Navy procedures. Everyone had to follow a certain protocol – everybody had to get up at the same time and go to bed at the same time. It was a pretty full day.
TQ: How did you get through it?
JG: I guess when you’re seventeen it must be easier. We had one fellow in there who was 34 and we thought he was the oldest person in the world. He was struggling with it. But everyone else was in the same boat, and we really enjoyed each other’s comradeship. I was wondering what was going to happen to us, but everybody seemed to get along, and it just seemed that it wasn’t that tremendous of a challenge.
TQ: Which wars did you serve in?
JG: The end of World War II.
[4:20]
TQ: Where exactly were you?
JG: After I left boot camp, we were sent out to San Francisco and put on a troop ship with about 5,000 men. We sailed out to Japan, at which time they dispersed us to other bases and ships. We were actually replacing men who had been serving a longer period of time. So I was assigned to a supply ship called an AK, Attack Cargo-118. Its name was Shaula, which is actually a constellation of stars. I was put on the ship in a port in Japan. I won’t mention that all the time it took to get there was five or six days, at which time I was deathly seasick, and I was hoping I wouldn’t be put on a ship. I didn’t want to be seasick all the time. But I was placed on this ship, and we had quite a long cruise in the Pacific.
[4:49]
TQ: Do you remember arriving? What was it like?
JG: Actually, [you were] a little bit nervous about that, because you didn’t know what was going to happen on the ship [with] suddenly all these people you didn’t know. You were pretty well split up. There was nobody left with me that had been in boot camp with me because people were sent to different areas. So I was apprehensive about what was going to happen. They showed you where you were going to bunk, and where the mess hall was, and where your specific duties would be. That was kind of a scary situation.
TQ: What was your job assignment?
JG: I was a storekeeper. It was interesting. We were on a supply ship; it was like a big store. We carried dry goods primarily – clothing, sugar, flour, canned goods, things of that sort. We would go from port to port and when we would come into a port, the word would go out that we were there, and other ships would contact us and say, “Well, we need so many of this and so much of this,” so it was really like going to a giant grocery store. They would send over a landing craft with men to unload and load onto the landing crafts to take back to the other ships. The other thing that I did, which my grandchildren laugh at, we had a little ship store, and I ran the store on the ship. We sold candy and toilet things, and we had an ice cream machine, so I made ice cream for everybody. That was our job, to carry supplies around from port to port.
TQ: Did you see combat?
JG: I did not. I was fortunate. I did lose some friends during World War II, and I was fortunate that by the time I was done with training, the war in Japan was just over. The atom bomb had been dropped twice. I was fortunate that I didn’t see combat. But I did see a great deal of the Pacific Ocean! We were all over the Pacific.
TQ: Were there any casualties in your unit?
JG: Well, the history of the ship was that it did not come into combat. There were no casualties. We did have a death on our ship. A young man fell about three floors off of a ladder into a hold where they had things stored. But as far as wartime casualties, the ship did not suffer any.
[8:06]
TQ: Tell me a couple of your most memorable experiences.
JG: Probably the most memorable thing is when we were coming from Japan to the Philippine Islands and we were involved in two typhoons. A typhoon is like a hurricane on water. The winds got up to 150 miles per hour and it threw our ship around so much that we really thought we were going to sink. This type of ship, which was called a Liberty Ship, had a propensity for breaking in half in big storms. The winds were so fierce, it took all the paint off our ship, tore all the communication system off the ship. We came out of the water so high that the rudder was spinning and it broke, so we were just floundering around in the ocean. Things in the galley or the mess hall, the big equipment, got loose and slammed from wall to wall; we had landing craft on deck which were cabled out on great big cables, and they snapped just like matchsticks would. You actually had to strap yourself in your little bunk or you would have fallen down. That went on for several days, and we thought surely we were not going to get through that. But fortunately, we did, and with some tugs they got us into a port in the Philippine Islands. We went into dry dock to have repairs made. So that was a scary one.
And another one which was interesting was crossing the Equator. There’s quite a ritual in the Navy for what they call “pollywogs”, those are the Navy people who haven’t been across the equator. They have this big ceremony with King Neptune and a queen, and they put us through some rather vigorous exercises to initiate us into those who had gone over the Equator. That was quite interesting.
Perhaps another thing to mention is that we were in Nagasaki just a few weeks after they dropped the atom bomb. To see that giant city devastated, just nothing left, and the few people that you’d see just [had their] heads down. It was a tragic situation to see nothing but flattened buildings and not a single tree.
TQ: So you were actually in the city?
JG: In the city, yes. So those were the memorable things.
TQ: Were you awarded any medals or citations?
JG: No, no medals or citations. But just for serving in those areas, I received the World War II ribbon and the Asiatic-Pacific ribbon and we weren’t sure if we were qualified for the Japanese Occupation ribbon. But not a citation, just something you receive when you serve in certain areas of the world.
[11:27]
TQ: How did you stay in touch with your family?
JG: Unfortunately, all we had at that time was just the mail service. We weren’t able to phone, no e-mails or anything, so we just lived through mail call. Of course, sailing around, it was hard for mail to keep up with you. You went from port to port, so when it did, we were just tickled to death. Sometimes you would get several weeks’ messages at one time. That was the only way we could really keep in contact with our families.
TQ: What was the food like?
JG: The food was variable. When you’re hungry, sometimes anything is good. But it was passable. They tried to keep a decent amount of food. One thing we did miss, though - on that type of ship, they didn’t have many facilities for fresh foods, so when we did get into a port where they could get fresh food, vegetables and fruits, it was a treat. But they kept us going.
TQ: What did you have?
JG: They would serve most everything, sort of a meat and potatoes diet. They would sometimes have some strange things, creamed beef on toast and so forth on Saturdays and some mushy stuff. I just came across a menu from Thanksgiving and they had a fabulous-looking menu, everything you could imagine, but it really wasn’t too good. The turkey looked a little strange and the ham was a little discolored, but we got by. Nobody starved.
TQ: Here’s a good question. Did you have plenty of supplies?
JG: [laughs] Yeah, except for the things I mentioned, the fresh things. But, well, it depends ��� we had an awful lot of sugar and flour. But they really kept up pretty well. Of course, we would sometimes get things when we came into a port that we didn’t carry.
[13:35]
TQ: What does a supply ship carry, really?
JG: Our ship primarily was carrying dry goods, and by that I mean we didn’t carry anything that was perishable. We had huge holds, which were storage areas, of sugar and flour. We carried a lot of cases and canned things. And we even had clothing! Dungarees and t-shirts, things of that sort. So it would be like a store that had everything except fresh products.
[14:27]
TQ: Did you feel pressure or stress?
JG: I didn’t really. It was kind of lonesome being away, and that storm was a little pressure, but other than that, we would get to a port, go on liberty, and visit and we played in a basketball championship on Christmas Day in the Philippines. So there were some other things to keep us entertained. We had some movies on board. We would sit outside and they would project them on a great big sheet they had hung up. We played a lot games. Board games, just to keep busy. We had a little library aboard the ship. I read most everything they had, it wasn’t too big. They tried to keep us busy and entertained.
TQ: What was that about the Philippines on Christmas Day?
JG: They had a basketball tournament on a little island in the Philippines, so our ship—I was on the team, and we won the championship. It was called Manikani Island. So we thought that was big deal, we won a basketball championship. And since you mentioned that too, when we were in the Philippines, we would get to go to—we didn’t a chaplain on board, if we were on a port we would go to a church, a native church or whatever there was, a facility where they had a chaplain. It was pretty much all denominations, no particular denomination.
TQ: Was there anything special you did for good luck?
JG: Well, during the storm, we prayed a lot! But no, not particularly, I wasn’t superstitious.
TQ: You kind of already answered this one, but how did people entertain themselves?
JG: Well, pretty much as I said. Reading, and of course there was no television, there wasn’t any radio you could pick up, so there were a lot of card games. A lot of big poker games too. We would be paid once a month and there was no place to spend it, so sometimes there were some big card games going on. I stayed out of it because I was not a very good poker player. We kept busy.
[16:35]
TQ: Were you on leave ever?
JG: The Navy would call it “liberty”, and yes, when we would go to some of the ports in the islands, we would just go in – they would take us in by smaller boats that we’d carry. We would just visit around. Half the ship would get to go part of the day, and the others would go the rest of the day. When we came back and decommissioned the ship, we would get liberty. We were in Seattle at that time. Liberty could consist of just part of a day, or an evening, I don’t ever recall having a weekend liberty. But that’s what the Navy had, liberty.
[17:31]
TQ: Where did you travel while in the service?
JG: We started out in Japan, and as I mentioned, we were in the Philippine Islands, and then we skirted places like Okinawa and then we went to China. We were in Shanghai, which was an amazing area, and we left Shanghai and went down across the Equator to the Admiralty Islands which are north of Australia, to an island called Manus. We went there to pick up some heavy earth-moving equipment and construction equipment and Seabees, which were the construction battalion that the Navy had. We were to bring that back to the States. And Manus was interesting because it was a staging place for the invasion of the Philippines. So that’s where they had taken a great deal of military equipment and then transported it up to the Philippines. So from there, we came back to Hawaii, we were in Honolulu. We did have liberty in Honolulu. And then up to Seattle, and our ship was decommissioned, which means it was taken out of service. I was assigned to a smaller ship in Seattle, but we never went out to sea, and they decided to discharge people. From there I went home.
TQ: Sounds good to me. Do you recall any humorous or unusual events?
JG: I think the most unusual event was crossing the Equator. It’s a big deal in the Navy. You were given a summons to appear before the court of King Neptune. And they gave you this list of things that you were guilty of. So if you hadn’t been across the Equator, you were called a “pollywog���. And I was guilty of cheating the royal barber because I had real short hair, and being insulting to shellbacks. They had them all dressed up as the king and the queen and the princess, and you had to appear before them. They helped you along the way with some prods and an electric thing, they’d dunk you in a tank of water, and they’d make you drink this awful-tasting stuff, they’d swatch you on the behind, shave your hair... and it was humorous to them, but not too much to me. [laughs] But we survived. And actually, it goes in your record that you crossed the Equator. It’s a big deal in the Navy.
TQ: Did you pull any other pranks on people?
JG: Oh, we did a few things. Some of the people had some of their sheets messed up on the bunks, but there wasn’t anything too bad that I recall.
TQ: Do you have photographs?
JG: Yes.
TQ: What are your photographs of?
JG: Oh, just some little—actually, that’s too bad because very few people had cameras, and a couple of guys had a camera and they would share some film with us. I’ve got some photos of—well, of course in boot camp they always take photos there, some photos of our ship, and a few of the people on our ship, and a few shots and postcards from the countries I visited.
[21:08]
TQ: What did you think of officers or fellow soldiers?
JG: Well, being in the Navy, there aren’t soldiers. But the officers, I didn’t have too much contact with the officers, and the ones that I did were really very pleasant. I think the biggest thing was that they had served a little longer than I had, and they were so happy that the war was over. They were ready to get their service time over with and go home. They really weren’t too hard on us. The skipper of the ship, the lieutenant commander, we hardly ever saw him. But the other people I was with, we were all about the same age, and the interesting thing was that they were from all over the United States. So it was fun knowing people from other parts of the country.
[21:58]
TQ: Do you recall the day your service ended?
JG: Yes, I do.
TQ: Where were you?
JG: I was in Seattle. You have to go into a place where they muster you out and they give you a quick physical examination, give you a little money to get a ride home. I went downtown in Seattle and I bought this red jacket that I’d seen in the window in one of the department stores. I was always wearing blue and white for all the time we were in the service, so I took that box under my arm and got on the train and went home. I was pretty happy about that. Oh yeah, you remember that day you get out.
TQ: Do you still have your red jacket?
JG: [laughs] No, I don’t. I still have whites, a uniform of a white blouse and pants. I still have that. I can still get into it, but I think it was issued large. No, I don’t have that red jacket; I don’t know what happened to it. I always loved red. That was a happy day.
TQ: What did you do in the days and weeks afterward?
JG: I got home and decided I wanted to go to the University of North Dakota. I didn’t get home until late August, and school started in September. So I got home, went to see my dad and my stepmother and sister, and went off to school almost immediately. So I was able to get home in time to enroll and start in September.
TQ: Did you work or just go to school?
JG: I worked every summer on the railroad. Every summer for seven years, making a little extra money even after I was married; I was still going to school. My wife was helping support me. I still worked every summer on the railroad.
[24:15]
TQ: Was your education supported by the G.I. Bill?
JG: Yes, it was.
TQ: What’s that?
JG: The government gave – if you chose to go to school – they had a program where they would actually support you, they would pay your tuition, and you would get a monthly check. The sad thing is that the tuition was so cheap that it really wasn’t very much, but you wanted to be independent. I used up my G.I. Bill because I was in graduate school. It was all used up by the time I got to medical school, which cost a lot more. But you would get a monthly check, everybody got the same amount. I’m not quite sure of the exact amount, but it was around $100, which was pretty good back then. But they would pay for your tuition and your books. Anybody who had served honorably was eligible for the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill was predicated on how long you had served, though. If you served a year or two years or three years, that would tell how much you would continue getting the G.I. Bill. If you had been in the service for five years, then you could go to school for five years, free, so to speak. So most of the people in school, when I went back in 1946, of the men in school, probably seventy percent were servicemen.
TQ: Did you make any close friendships while in the service?
JG: I really didn’t. The sad thing is that once you got back and they went back to their part of the country, you really didn’t keep in contact. I had several very close friends that I hung out with all the time. It’s sad to say that your lives go different directions; you don’t get in contact with them.
TQ: Did you join a veterans’ organization?
JG: I joined the VFW, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I could have joined the American Legion; the American Legion is an organization of anybody who’s ever served in the armed force. For the Veterans of Foreign Wars, you had to serve outside the United States. I decided I would do that because I had been outside the United States. Also, I wanted to play on their softball team. [laughs] That was the only organization I joined.
TQ: [laughs] Basketball, softball, you really—so what did you go on to do as a career after the war?
JG: I went into medicine.
[26:00]
TQ: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?
JG: A little bit. Sometimes I have feelings that maybe everybody should have to serve. But then if somebody were to say, well, what about your own children? Then you look at it from a different aspect. Being seventeen years of age, I might incidentally say that the service wouldn’t take you if you were seventeen. You had to be eighteen years of age. So in order for you to go into service when you were seventeen, you had to have permission from a parent. My father had to sign a form allowing me to go, as I thought later in life must have been awfully difficult for him. I would not have had to go at that time. But I was fortunate, because I didn’t know I wasn’t going to end up in combat. But I was fortunate because of my age that I didn’t. I had some pretty strong feelings. As I looked and saw what happened in Japan, and later in life when people talk about the terrible atom bomb, the devastation – which it was terrible. But I am absolutely convinced that if something hadn’t have happened, we would’ve invaded Japan, and we would have lost a million men. I sometimes vacillate; I support the armed forces a great deal. Fortunately, none of my children ended up in the service. But I still support it and think it helped a great deal. I really think that at seventeen, I learned a lot.
TQ: Do you attend reunions?
JG: I don’t. I never did, and it was just recently, as I mentioned to you before this, that I found out there are a few people still looking for contacts who had served on that ship. But I’ve not gone to any reunions. They do have them; I think probably some of the ships that were a bit bigger. We had about 250 men on our ship. Aircraft carriers would have about 5,000. So maybe reunions are a little easier for them. I often have thought it would be interesting to see some of those men again.
TQ: This is rephrasing the other question, how did your service and experience affect your life?
JG: I think it helped me mature. I made a comment at a talk I gave one time, I said, here we were back in college and we had all these men – about seventy percent of them had been in the service – and many of them served in some terrible battles and had gone through some terrible ordeals. They weren’t lucky like me, didn’t get into combat… but here we were in college, and I never remember anything disruptive in class. I never remember any protests, I never remember anybody confronting a professor, I don’t remember anybody fighting in the halls – I mean, we had a good time; we did everything. But we had a certain respect that I think came out of serving. I think it made a big difference in how people interpreted things.
[28:30]
TQ: Is there anything you want to add that I haven’t asked about?
JG: No, except that as I’ve gotten older and seen all the terrible conflicts we’ve been in and this is kind of a strange statement, but World War II was a “popular” war. We’d been attacked, and everybody felt they had to go. Everybody wanted to do something. I remember one fellow from my hometown who was devastated because they had a party for him and he was leaving, and he came back because he flunked his physical. They couldn’t keep him, and he was devastated. So you just prepared. I was in high school, and you knew that when you were out of high school, you’d be going in the service. It was thing that you were going to do. You didn’t think about it, you didn’t think about avoiding it. In fact, you wondered, gee, I hope I don’t flunk, I hope I can get through. So it was interesting and different. As I mentioned, several fellows I played sports with were killed in the service, and you thought, gee, I’ve got to do something, replace them. But whether that’s a strange interpretation, or that’s just the way it was…
TQ: Anything else?
JG: No, I think it added a lot to my life. Fortunately I didn’t lose too much time from school. I think I was very, very lucky. I got to see a lot of things in the world and find out that there are other people in this country that are a little different than you, but we’re all about the same, and once you pick a man and give him a short haircut and put him in a uniform, everyone’s the same. You don’t have any special people then.
TQ: What were your friends like?
JG: Oh, they were really nice. We were kind of innocent, and one of us came from Rhode Island, and they didn’t know anything about North Dakota, where I came from. But we were great buddies. We would go on liberty and do goofy things. We had so many lectures, we never got into any trouble. We weren’t in any brawls or anything. But we did enjoy Hawaii and going to the beach. We were innocent kids, we behaved ourselves, and they were good buddies. I hate to never keep track of them again. It’s sad in a way.
TQ: Those people who are [searching for] those who are still around on your ship, do you know them?
JG: It’s interesting. The only one they could come up with, Tom [Dr. Graham’s son] found a name, and I didn’t keep track of everybody on the ship. But I knew some Barnes fellows in college and other places, but that’s the only name they’ve come up with. So I might get in touch with the family, the family is the ones trying to get the information. So I want to see if we can match each other up.
TQ: Anything else at all before I hit the stop button?
JG: No, I was proud that I went in and again, I still think of how lucky I was that if I had been a year older, I might have been in some combat situations. I wanted to, but I was fortunate; I got to see the world. I think it helped make me a better person.
TQ: Thank you very much!
