The middle of May found us on our way to the invasion of Okinawa. We arrived here to find the fighting going full blast. The harbor was full of battered ships when we arrived. One destroyer had been broken in half by a kamikaze pilot.

     We were under constant attack for weeks. One of our duties was to take up station off the western tip of the island. This was called radar picket duty. The Japanese were sending every thing that would fly to try to stop the troopes from securing the island. These pilots would dive their airplane into the side of ships to accomplish their mission. It was very effective. The suicide pilots had declared open season on destroyers. The ship that we had been sent out to relieve got hit. We had just made visual contact with her when it happened. The kamikaze pilot hit her in the ammo storage area. She blew up and sank in a very short time. Three hundred and fifty men did not make it off the ship.

     The month of June, 1945 seemed like the longest month of the war. I felt like we never left our battle stations. On June 3rd we splashed two kamikazes in a very short time. I personally got the satisfaction of shooting one of them with a twenty millimeter machine gun. I still have the cloth banner that he wore around his neck.

     There is one picture of this war that I can never forget. We went in real close to the beach to give the ground troopes support. A bunch of Japanese solders were trapped on a cliff. Our job was to shoot at them from the sea. They had rounded up a bunch of civilian hostages and they were all mixed together. I will never forget a woman tumbling into the water. She had long flowing hair and wore a gingham dress like my mother.

     A big black man named Willy was on my gun crew. His job was to load fifty pound projectiles in the gun. He would lay on the deck and sleep until the last minute. When we picked up a bogey I would say to him, "Wake up Willy." His reply was, "Fuck dem damn Japs." At the last minute when we got the order to commence firing, he would come alive and do his job. The only time I ever saw him scared was when I got hit in the head with a piece of shrapnel. I had blood all over me and did not know it until I looked at him.

     A very strange thing happened on the night of June 25th. We had been at general quarter and our fire control radar was out. This would eliminate our chance of hitting any targets at night. About nine P.M. we picked up several bogeys headed for us. The order came to stop all engines so we would not leave any wake for them to see. As they came closer we felt sure they had spotted us. The night was almost like daylight from a full moon. All of a sudden a very unusual thing happened. The moon went into a full eclipse. It turned so dark that they could not see us.

     After the battle of Okinawa was over we went to Leyte in the Philippines. Here we joined the third fleet carrier group. On June 30th we got a new captain. His name was commander Will P. Starnes. He was from Mississippi, but did not seem like a good old southern boy. We later nicknamed him "shot gun starnes." His hobby was to shoot clay pigeons from the bow.