| Summary: | (4:21) Mr. Shockley describes his Coast Guard service in the Pacific during World War II.Florence- Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Paul W. Shockley
January 27, 2010
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 4
Clint Alley: Now, you said the other day that you were, you were in the Philippines when MacArthur went ashore.
Paul Shockley: Yeah, I was there.
CA: What was that like? Was that a good experience? Did that feel pretty good?
PS: Well, that, that was a good experience, you know, the fighting was over and everybody was going home, waiting to get enough points and it was a good feeling you know regardless of how long you’d been over there. I was over there over a year and it seemed like several years and course he, ah, he had to walk ashore and they had to take a movie of him coming ashore where it would look to suit him and the, it was rumored that he come ashore three times before he was satisfied with the way it looked. I don’t know that he actually did it, because we were anchored off a mile away from him, but, ah, it’s pretty, pretty true that he did that.
CA: So it was true that he had kind of an ego, didn’t he?
PS: He had a big ego. He had a big ego.
CA: Oh, me. Well you were, so you were in the South Pacific when they dropped the bomb.
PS: I was.
CA: Okay. Were you, were you nearby the, the mainland when that happened?
PS: No, I wasn’t. I don’t know exactly where I was to tell you the truth.
CA: Um- hm.
PS: Course we was at Tacloban, Leyte or Samoa City or somewhere in that area of the Philippines, I believe, I don’t, I might be wrong and we might have been back at Hollandia, New Guinea cause we, we went there three times and we spent a little, little time there. They give the ship I was on when all the crew got off of it, they turned it over to the Philippine government for them to use to do whatever moving and, and transporting people and all that they needed in the islands. And there are no records of my ship nowhere in the archives. It says that it was built in 1944 and then I believe it was either ’ 47 or ’ 49, it says the Navy took over the ship in ’ 40—, the first of ‘ 46 to ‘ 49 is lost. I mean the— from ’ 44 to ’ 47 or ’ 49 there’s no record in the archives whatsoever, nowhere. But I’ve got a complete record, documented, from different islands and the different places and everything, everywhere we went. Pictures and certificates where we crossed the equator, if you can see, dated, that was during the war. I kept a journal just for my own personal record and as far as I know, I’ve wrote to everybody and there’s no record whatsoever, but I know exactly what happened to the ship from day to day.
CA: Wow. That’s great.
PS: And I’ve got the documentation to prove it, which you can see some of it, you can see the ship. The ship was sold for scrap iron. They changed the name of the ship, they always change the name of the ship when they’re gonna blow it up or sell it or sink it with our own guns or whatever. But they always, each ship lives its life and then at the end it changes its name and some other ship is sunk and all, see. You understand what I’m saying?
CA: Yes, sir.
PS: All right. In other words, they would, they wouldn’t say that they took the 282 after its tour of duty and sold it for scrap iron. They changed the name to Jekyll, that’s an island off of Georgia. And they sold it for scrap iron in ’ 49, I believe it was, or ’ 59, I can’t remember, it was probably ’ 59.
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