Robert Parks

Before joining the Navy, I was employed by a Chevrolet dealer as a bookkeeper. You asked me how I heard about Pearl Harbor? I went across the street to a filling station, and the fellow who worked there was listening to the radio. We were just dumbfounded! This was a cowardly act, because you do not attack a nation without declaring war first, but they just walked in there. No warning, no declaration of war--it was a very cowardly thing to do.

I was high on the draft list, and they were going to put me in the Army. When I reported, the Army draft board wanted me to come back the next day for evaluation and so forth. I had missed the last bus, and I was stranded in a snowstorm in Salina, Kansas with no money and no place to stay. So I went down to the Navy office, and two hours later I was in the Navy and going to Kansas City. This was January 1942. The Navy was the right decision for me. I was raised on the farm, I did chores in the mud, and I walked to school in the mud. I didn’t want to go into the Army and tromp in the mud. In the Navy I was going to do just the opposite.

I was sent to the Naval Training Station in Great Lakes for three weeks of boot (basic) training. I was later sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for technical training as a gyro technician to maintain compasses and other electrical equipment. My entry-level pay was $21.00 a month, less $6.60 for insurance. In May 1943 I went aboard the destroyer escort USS Levy for commissioning as a first-class electrician’s mate. The ship was named after Uriah P. Levy, a British Naval officer. He later purchased Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and restored it to its current priceless condition.

The USS Levy was a destroyer escort, a rather slimmed down version of a fleet destroyer. It was specifically designed for anti-submarine patrol. They were good at this, but not much good for surface combat. We spent a short time in the Atlantic before sailing for the South Pacific. We reported in at New Caledonia, just east of Australia, and then went to duty in the Solomon Islands, which was a hot spot at the time. Our supply base was in the New Hebrides. Guadalcanal was the southernmost limit of the advance of the Japanese, and it was here that combat began in earnest. We spent about nine months in the Solomons. After the northernmost island, Bougainville, was secured, we began to move into the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. There were weeks of patrol and endless escort runs. I remember the invasion at Bougainville rather well as we were pretty close in, and it was a bitter fight. There was an active volcano close by which erupted steam and debris all the time. There are several islands in the Solomon chain, and we saw all of them many times.

ships in his group.jpg (42775 bytes) Life was pretty hard all this time. We stood watch for 4 hours on and 8 hours off. During your time off you tried to catch some sleep, but that didn’t always work. There were often battle stations and maintenance work to do when we were off watch. It was awfully hot since all of these islands are on or near the equator. The steel hull of the ship would not cool down enough to sleep until midnight. I had a bunk that was about 6 ½ feet long, 2 ½ feet wide, and a mattress that was about 2 inches thick. I had a footlocker that was about 2 ½ feet square, and that was where I kept whatever personal belongings I had. We ate in the mess hall, and we had a shower when there was water. Recreation was infrequent, and consisted mostly of a trip to the beach where you could walk among the palm trees. We were only allowed two beers, and they were often warm and not well cured.

Life was hard, and the conditions were tough, but let me tell you it was far better than the alternative. If we had not done what we did, the Germans and the Japanese were going to take over the world, and they were already well on their way. We didn’t realize this until much later. Very few servicemen that I have known ever complained about going, we were glad to do it. I hate to contemplate what this world would be like today if we had lost some of those battles. If we had been driven off the beach on D-Day, if we had lost that battle at Leyte Gulf or at the Solomon Islands and they had gotten into Australia, they would have had that end of the world covered. If the Japanese had gotten from Guadalcanal to Australia, I doubt if we would have been able to stop them. We were that close to losing.

When we were involved in combat, of course I was scared! But we were very busy, and we had a lot of work to do that required a great deal of concentration. One of the enjoyable moments was when we had crew who were crossing the Equator for the first time. They were called "Pollywogs" and after being initiated became "Shellbacks", and there was a little bit of horseplay involved in this. Perhaps the old "Shellbacks" were a little overzealous. It’s an old Marine tradition, and as far as I know it’s still in force today. Click on the certificate and you can see it up close.

By 1944 The Japanese Navy had been slowly destroyed, and we were getting the upper hand. At this time we moved around more, escorting oil tankers up to the aircraft carriers and battleships.

It was during the summer of 1944 that we supported the invasion of the Mariana Islands and were involved in the first battle of the Philippines. We were part of was the largest naval force ever assembled. I remember looking out the morning we left and seeing nothing but fighting ships as far as I could see. It was an awesome sight. We spent a lot of time escorting ships for this task force.

flag raising at guam2.gif (18041 bytes) It was at Guam that we were involved in close-in support of the landing craft. We were assigned to patrol close to shore. Enemy shore batteries were shooting out and the battleships were shooting back. Shells were going overhead in both directions! When the Japanese realized they were about to be beaten, about 3000 of them went to a cliff on the north end of the island and jumped off. The ocean current washed the bodies down along the shoreline, and we could see bodies all around us. The stench was terrible. We developed skin rashes from the filth, which bothered us for some time.

After the defeat in the first battle of the Philippines, the Japanese fleet retreated to home waters. We invaded the Philippines at Leyte Gulf in October 1944 and met no naval opposition. A few days later, the subs sent word back that the Japanese fleet was coming out and was headed south. Admiral Halsey took all the big ships and headed north. He left us with only destroyers and baby flat tops (small aircraft carriers). The Japanese had three old battleships in some port that we knew nothing about. They attacked us from the rear the next day, and we could only send destroyers out to slow them down. This was pure suicide for the destroyers. In my opinion, the Admiral in charge of the task force made some serious mistakes because he did not call Halsey for help.

wpe58.gif (163500 bytes) The Commodore of our squadron told the radioman to radio Halsey for help. He did, but he used voice radio, sending a message to Halsey to get back here quick, we are being attacked and can’t defend ourselves. The urgency of the message on voice radio got Halsey’s attention, and he sent a task force back and saved our lives. The radioman was supposed to send a coded message, which would have been a disaster. I would not be sitting here if he had taken the time to encode the message, which might not have gotten through. The news media made a big story of this brash radioman calling the Admiral of the Fleet on voice radio. The radioman, John McCullough, was here at our reunion a few years ago, and we had another chance to thank him. He was reprimanded for saving our lives. This is probably the most outstanding memory of that time for me.

Shortly thereafter, our lookouts saw what they thought was an enemy plane flying with our planes and asked the Admiral in charge for permission to shoot. Permission was denied. Soon the Japanese plane flew right by our port side, and we couldn’t shoot. THEN the Admiral granted us permission to shoot -- the dummy. I will never forget the escapades at Leyte Gulf.

Later we were in Manila harbor. The carrier Princeton blew up while we were in port. We went alongside the cruiser that had the her survivors and gave them some blood.

We came back to the States in December of 1944 for repairs, and I got four weeks’ leave. When I stepped ashore in San Francisco, it was the first time I had seen civilization since we'd left the Panama Canal a year and a half ago. This was the only time I was off the ship in four years.

1st Japanese surrender.jpg (56089 bytes) After the repairs, we returned for more action. We apparently did not have anything urgent to do, and for some reason we were trying to arrange the surrender of some small islands occupied by the enemy. We succeeded, and the Japanese officers came out of the jungle in full dress uniform, came aboard the ship, and signed the surrender document for Mille Island. This was the first surrender of Japanese territory. I witnessed it, and I have a picture of this historic event. This was a feature article in Life Magazine in September 1945. Good old USS Levy.

During the invasion of Okinawa and Iwo Jima we were back with the main fleet and were out on the picket line when the suicide planes began their attacks. Boy, they were stupid! We were the first line of defense. The pilots were chained into their airplanes, and their bombs were armed and they took off. It was a death sentence, and they knew that. Their objective was to take as many of us with them as they could. Why they were crazy enough to do that we didn't understand. They believed that they would be immortalized or something. They were fanatics, and that is why they were so dangerous. These attacks were very hard to defend against. We tried to bring down as many as we could before they would hit the big ships. There were too many of them but we did what we could. Even one of those planes could put a carrier or a destroyer out of commission, and that was their objective.

Dropping the atom bomb probably saved our lives, and I know it saved thousands of others. Whenever I hear anyone argue that we should not have dropped this bomb it makes me irrational.

Our last assignment was to disarm Wake Island. I have pictures of that event. We took an inventory of what was on the island, then we took all the weapons that were left there and dumped them in the ocean. We tried to find the remains of any of our servicemen who were there. The officer in charge was the last man to leave Wake Island, and he was all business.

Some time after the repairs, some natives escaped from an island that was occupied by the Japanese. They asked us for help to go back and save their tribe. We took several of them on board for the trip to the island. They all carried knives 2 or 3 feet long at their sides. One of them slept in my bunk on the way up. We were accompanied by an LST that would carry the natives who were being held as slaves by the Japanese. We arrived during the night, which was pitch black, and let the natives off. They knew where the guards were posted, proceeded to dispatch them, and got their tribe loaded onto the LST in the dark of night. The natives were grateful to us. We went back past this island a few days later, and the Japanese opened fire as soon as we showed up. They were apparently quite angry!

When we left the Atlantic in 1943, we were fighting a losing war. The Germans were sinking one third of the ships in every convoy that went out of that harbor toward Europe. If we had not made that landing on D-Day, I’m not sure we would have won this war. And that one was won by a few quirks of fate really. I don’t have any input on that really, but we could start to see things turn around at Guadalcanal. It was still a long hard road up the Solomon Islands. Things started to pick up after that. My greatest achievement was keeping that ship functioning in the war zone. I have seven battle stars of the ten that were awarded.

The crew and the officers all got along pretty well. Sure, there were a few fights, but mostly we were all good friends. We saw mistakes being made, even by the naval officers. But anybody who doesn’t make mistakes isn’t doing anything. For many years I hosted a reunion of the ship’s company here in Kansas City. The company was about 180 people, but there are fewer and fewer of us that are still living.

When we finally got home, I had two ambitions: to get as far away from the ocean as I could, and to stay there. What I want people to remember about this time in history is that we fought a desperate battle and won. And we saved the world.

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