1 50 1 https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/ba719012fe4a284b59c610de3cf6aad5.pdf 5b95b64dc8bde9c76253b7b1848c46ca PDF Text Text Military Oral History Interview Transcript Walter Ray Hamilton Charlotte, North Carolina 14 October 2011 CS: Chris Stouse WH: Walt Hamilton CS: This is Christopher Stouse for American Military History, October 14, 2011, Charlotte, North Carolina. Please state your name. WH: Walter Ray Hamilton. CS: Date and place of birth. WH: Sheller, Illinois in 1932. CS: How and why would you say you started your military service? WH: Well, I was raised on a farm through grade school and high school in a rural, very rural area. I had graduated from high school and I was coming pretty close to the draft during the Korean War and rather than go into the Army, I decided I would take my chances and go into the Navy. CS: How long was your service? WH: I served four years. CS: Are you happy with your service? WH: It was a very good thing for me. CS: Good, now please describe how you felt when you enlisted. WH: I was homesick at first. Boot camp was in San Diego, California. CS: How long did that last? WH: I think it was 11 or 12 weeks, that’s when you get homesick. They say San Diego is supposed to be warm but I started in February and I'll tell you, I got cold. Anyway, I got through boot camp and then I went on...we had various tests and so forth. And the training, well the physical training I wouldn't say was...we marched a lot. We did calisthenics and that type of thing, it wasn’t Marine or SEAL training. We studied a lot about ship life, nautical terms. CS: So you had a drill instructor? 1 �WH: We had a regular drill instructor; he was a chief petty officer, older fella. CS: Do you remember his name? WH: No I don't, no I don't, and it’s gone. I don't remember his name. He was a pretty good old boy, pretty fair in his heart. He was trying to train us as good sailors, of course he had no idea whether we would go aboard a ship or serve in a naval station someplace. It was just general training but like I started to say a while ago, we did take aptitude tests, I guess mechanical. If I remember correctly, I qualified pretty highly in mechanical aptitude, electrical physics and so forth. CS: So what did you do after boot camp? WH: After boot camp, I was assigned I guess it was a prep school. It was more of a technical education. The tech school was eight weeks in Norman, Oklahoma. It was more testing and I qualified to go to, I guess it was 27 or 30 weeks, something like that, electronic training. That's probably the best thing that ever happened to me. That was the start of the career which I ended up, in civilian life, pursuing. That school was in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. Sorry, Memphis, very close to Memphis. It was a very thorough school. They trained us a lot about electronics, how to troubleshoot, and electronic equipment. CS: What did you do after you graduated from there? WH: When I graduated from there, I was assigned to what was called a FASRON, at Moffett Field, California, outside of Mountain City. I don’t remember what the acronym stood for. It was maintenance for airplanes and fighter jets. I did that for two and a half, three years. After I had been there a few months, I had a little interest back at home, she was waiting for me. So I had saved some money, and rather than spend that money on a bus ride back to Illinois, I hitchhiked back, all the way from California to Southern Illinois. We got married and with my dad's help we bought a new Chevrolet car, 1953 Chevrolet. After a few days at home after the wedding and after a three day little honeymoon trip, we headed back for California. CS: What did you do when you got back? WH: When we got back, we found a little one-room apartment, one bed, couch, tiny little kitchen and tiny little bathroom. It was all we could afford at the time. I went back to work at FASRON, maintaining planes, working with radio equipment and things like that. Margie, my wife's name, found a good job and we began to eat well. CS: How long did you stay there? WH: We stayed out there about two years, or something like that. Then I was reassigned to a fighter group of airplanes and we flew F-2H3 Banshees, manufactured by McDonald Douglas. I went to more schools based on the type of equipment that they had there. One of the schools that I went to was a radar school. When I established myself within the fighter group, I maintained 2 �the radar that was in these jets. The radar didn't really guide the plane into a target, but the plane followed a dot into something. It was rather complicated piece of equipment. Every time that a plane would go out and come back in, it would have to have some new vacuum tubes put in. One of the interesting things about that, our executive officer was the first astronaut to go into a sub-orbital flight. As an enlisted seaman, airmen I guess was my title, I got to talk to him a little bit because he was very interested in the radar. After a flight, he would come in with the radar and I would meet the plane and he would always ask some questions about how it operated, why it wouldn’t do that, what was wrong with it. I kind of got to know him a little bit. I'm not saying we were buddies but he was really a neat guy. Anyway, with this flight group, we had VF-193 squadron that we practiced off the coast out there. And we loaded and flew them over to a place in Nevada. We were scheduled to go out on a carrier into the Pacific. We went over into Nevada to an Air Force base over there where the planes practiced, they had carrier landings and so forth. There was a lot of maintenance to do and I mainly worked at night. One of the interesting little things that happened to me, we wanted to get one of the planes back into the barn. Normally they had people go out and hook the tow-bar to them. I ended up taking it out and brought it back, and being an old farm boy I could do that no problem. Anyway, I let one of the wheels get off of the concrete as I brought it in and turned it and that wheel sunk. We spent all evening trying to get that out. I didn’t get anything for it, they just replaced it. CS: Where did you go after that? WH: Well, then we completed our weeks out there, went back and we loaded on a carrier, the USS Ariskone. It is right now off of the Mobile, Alabama bay. It's at the bottom of the ocean; it's got fish swimming around it. They sunk it on purpose because it was old. You might have read about it, there’s a fleet of ships all over the place that have been sunk. Scuba divers go down and explore the ships, and that's where my old ship is right now. Anyway, we practiced off the coast of California, and a lot of the guys got sick. They got seasick because the waves right off the coast are very high and very rolling. CS: So what year is it now? WH: Right now we are in early 1955. So we practiced out there a couple weeks or so, came back, took some time off. I took some leave and picked up Margie and brought her back to Illinois while I went back. Then after a few weeks we loaded on the carrier and headed out across the Pacific on what was called a six-month cruise. The destination was all over...Japan...our first stop was Hawaii, which was kind of neat. And we all took leave and saw the Arizona and numerous other memorials, quite moving to see that. And then after that we loaded back on and headed back out. It wasn't every day that they would fly the planes off, but they were practicing you know, and the next stop that I recall would have been probably Japan. There were two or three times that we went into Japan for a few 3 �days. I got to see Tokyo, Yokahama, and I don't remember other names but there were about three or four different places. CS: Did you see any of the after effects of Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Were they off limits? WH: No, no I didn't get to see any of that but Japan was very primitive. You know what honey buckets were? That was the cart with a donkey pulling it, guy riding on it, cleaning out human toilets. And we were warned not to eat vegetables because they had been grown with human fertilizer. Anyway, we were there and enjoyed that, several different weekend "liberties", the ships anchor in and they bring in "liberty" boats. Then our next stop was probably the Philippines. That was an interesting place. We anchored in Manila Bay and the liberty boats would come out and get us. At that time, there was ship masts sticking up out of the water, they had been sunk during ship battles. The water wasn’t deep enough to completely cover them. Korea was over by then, when I went in in '52 right at the end of the conflict, I don't remember when the truce was negotiated. Manila Bay, we went in there, one thing I remember, I was working on an airplane, pulling out a piece of equipment, and it was hot and humid. We were pretty loose on the ship; we didn’t have to stay in uniform. I was working on a piece of equipment, trying to get a replacement back in. Prior to starting I was working on the radar and I was supposed to push the radar button and I pushed the on button and it burned me I'll tell you, and it shocked me pretty bad, I guess it was 600 volts; I was done for the day. Then we left there and the next big stop was Hong Kong for a few days. All of us went out and bought clothes. I went out and bought suits, tailor-made. A lot of sailors wanted to buy china for their moms, wives. I brought home three sets of china. My mother-in-law got some. We were in Hong Kong for a few days then we went back into Japan, we were off the coast of Formosa and something had happened. We were on alert, something had happened; I guess close to fighting, we never had a problem. We passed on by that. And then here comes, a cyclone, what do they call them? A typhoon. We were right in the middle of that thing and the carrier handled it pretty well and we had to tie the planes all down. Everything was tied down tightly with cables and we went right into that. We were called a fleet and we had destroyers and cruisers with them as backup. Escorts. I remember being able to stand on the hangar deck and look out across and there would be a destroyer and you would see him come off the tip of a big wave, tip over and then come back into sight. On the carrier they would put up water breakers on the carrier to prevent the water from coming up. That brings something else to mind. One of the things about the Banshee, they were one of the first planes that were equipped for night flights. They could land on the carrier at night. We were recovering planes that had gone out and there was always an evening night crew. We heard the alarm go off one night and we found out that one of our planes had crashed right into the back of the carrier. Back there were two “big gun tubs.” He had come in and lost power and settled into that and he hit and behind the fuselage, the plane broke in two right there. The 4 �cockpit and the nose slammed into the carrier and went right in between two pillars back there. The pilot got out; he lived and wasn't hurt at all. We all rushed out where we could see and we could see flames out there in the water. They drop their tail and release their tail hook and he hit and it broke the back of the plane and complete loss of the plane. The belly hit first, it wasn’t head on. The cockpit and nose went in 30 feet and hit a wall and stopped and the pilot walked out, fine. We knew who was flying that plane, young officer, and a lieutenant junior grade; just a really nice swell guy. We didn't know what had happened, and then the phone rang and we heard that he was ok. That was one of the exciting things that happened. After that, we went to Japan again and then we headed back. Margie was going to come out and meet the ship, at Alameda Air Station in San Francisco. I remember the ride back, we cruised right along, just kind of hanging out playing cards. We had rainstorms but that one typhoon was the worst one and that was pretty bad. I remember getting close the morning prior, coming into the bay. A lot of us were up on the flight deck, I remember seeing the Golden Gate Bridge coming in. Anyway, we came into Alameda and unloaded and the squadron had already flown off and went back to Moffett Field. They flew off before the ship had docked. They need about 40 knots of flight deck to get enough lift. I might talk briefly about the experiences watching planes leave. We always had to have a radioman when the planes were flying off the deck. You know what catapults are? The planes are tied onto the catapults and they’re told to rev it up to 100%. These were jets now. The earphones were on to save your eardrums. You look at one plane, he’s still there and you look at another one and he's gone, flying. There were some prop planes; we didn't have them that were on another squadron there. A single engine, but very powerful. They would drop and go out of sight. They lost altitude, then picked up and were gone. All that happened, Margie brought my mom and dad out to California. They had hardly ever been out of Illinois. You could call them poor but they didn't know it. It was a good living back then. She brought them with her. It was really something. They were all at the dock when we came in. Margie, my wife, said my dad was watching that ship come in. It was just creeping because you can't maneuver a ship that large and dad said that's bigger than anything I've ever seen. I can just imagine his eyes. Anyway, then I went back to work, planes started flying again off of Moffett Field, and then it came time for me to be discharged after four years. We loaded everything we had and headed back. Of course I had the GI bill. I had gained a real good background in electronics, all the latest type of stuff. I went to school at DeVry Tech and lived in Chicago a little over a year. I decided to make a career and went to work for a telephone company, AT&T. Sometime by the time I was stationed at Moffett Field, they had three big huge high hangars. The big airships, dirigibles had to be kept, huge. There was a time when the doors were open and rain would drop on the inside. They were experimenting with vertical takeoff. They had a prototype there and they had a harness there for it and was being protected by cables but they could experiment with it. It was preliminary testing which later became the 5 �Harrier jet. They still use something similar to the harrier, a version of it. But I made a career out of electronics. And here we are today, Chris! I'm done talking, ha-ha. CS: Could you tell me about crew life? WH: We were tight, pretty good buddies. We would play cards in the evening and games like that. You kind of get tired of it when you’re at sea quite a while. The cooks weren't bad, food was pretty good. It was pretty crowded but nothing like a submarine or destroyer or anything like that. The design of the carrier is somewhat different from the one I was on. While I was still in the service, they were building a deck on the left side and it went off and the planes launched at about a 30-degree angle. There were lots of supplies on there; it's so deep in the water, a lot of room down there. The liberties were mostly 24 hours and we would generally go sightseeing and get a meal. One evening some of us went out to eat and what did I order? Steak. I ordered the steak. I don’t remember ever sampling Japanese food. We were kind of given warnings as to what to stay away from. Now it’s much more civilized, I guess you'd say. Anyway, the service was good for me. Otherwise I would have probably been a poor farmer. CS: Okay, thank you very much for your time. WH: Thank you. 6 � https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/588754554253c74e33510b227d21d5d0.mp3 92ad5fa38a00a39349aee3bee24aa093 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian State University American Military History Course Veterans Oral History Project Description An account of the resource Each semester, the students of the American Military History Course at Appalachian State University conduct interviews with military veterans and record their military experiences in order to create an archive of oral history interviews that are publicly accessible to researchers. The oral histories are permanently available in the Appalachian State University Special Collections. The project is supervised by Dr. Judkin Browning, Associate Professor of History at Appalachian State University and all interviews are transcribed by the student interviewers. Copyright Notice: Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project’s audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Veterans Oral History Project, University Archives and Records, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC). Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed. Hamilton, Walter R. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview. Strouse, Christopher Interview Date 10/14/11 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 42:11 min Copyright Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project's audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used. Tag Illinois, Navy, Moffett Field, USS Ariskone, Tokyo, Japan, Manila, Philippines Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Walter R. Hamilton, 14 October 2011 Description An account of the resource Walter R. Hamilton enlisted in the Navy and served four years. He was trained in maintenance for airplanes and fighter-jets. He served a six month tour of the pacific following the end of the Korean War. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hamilton, Walter R. Stouse, Christopher Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="UA.5018. American Military History Course Records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/167" target="_blank">UA.5018. American Military History Course Records</a> Extent The size or duration of the resource. 6 pages Subject The topic of the resource Hamilton, Walter R. Veterans Korean War, 1950-1953 Personal narratives, American United States Interviews Language A language of the resource English electronic training FASRON Korean War Navy Walter Hamilton