| Summary: | (6:51) Mr. Shockley describes coming home at the end of 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 6
Clint Alley: So you, you came home, you were on your way home, then, right after the war ended.
Paul Shockley: Well, not right after the war. The cease-fire ended in ’45, MacArthur signed it with the Japs on the Missouri, battleship Missouri. The World War II wasn’t over until December 31, 1946. Most people think that the war was over in ’45. In fact, you could go downtown and stop anybody on the street and ask them when was World War II over and they‘ll tell you that it was over in ’45.
CA: Um-hm. So, it was really over in ’46.
PS: December 31, 1946 and they still put it on the calendar. I’ll show you, just a minute.
CA: All right.
PS: It took me almost a lifetime to convince my own family that the war was over in ’46.
CA: Wow. It’s, it’s right there on the, that’s a VFW calendar?
PS: Yeah.
CA: Nineteen forty-six, December 31. That’s right.
PS: That’s right.
CA: Well, I’ll tell you I didn’t know that either. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.
PS: Is that right?
CA: Yes, sir.
PS: Well, you have to live and learn. The cease-firing stopped and the war was over in Europe in ’45, but in the Pacific we still had so much trouble in Burma and China and all that there was still fighting going on. And there was so many islands and so many places that the Japs didn’t know the war was over, that the fighting had ceased. You remember the every other one they cut off?
CA: Um-hm.
PS: Well, we didn’t go back and tell each one of them, say, “Hey, the war is over. We won. You lose.” They didn’t bother to tell nobody.
CA: I’ve heard that some of them stayed in there for ten, fifteen years before they knew the war was over.
PS: One of these, what is it that one, one guy stayed thirty years or something.
CA: I’ve heard, I’ve heard about that. Yes, sir.
PS: Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of them that stayed a long time.
CA: Um-hm.
PS: On Okinawa, I think, that was the last battle. It was Iwo Jima and then Okinawa. And that’s where the Jap stayed, I think, thirty years and then he, he still wouldn’t surrender till his commanding officer come and told him that the war was over.
CA: So, in Hollandia, when they, when they signed the cease-fire was there a big celebration when that happened in, in Hollandia?
PS: Oh, yeah, we all got drunk and had a good time. Yeah.
CA: Well, you came home, let’s see, you said you tried to find work when you came home.
PS: Oh, yeah. Well, course, from Hollandia I went to Tacloban, Leyte and then from Tacloban, Leyte I went to Samoa City, and I actually caught a ship out of Samoa City in the Philippines and came back to the states, PA-134. I mean, I had quite an ordeal from—I was one of the last ones to leave Hollandia, New Guinea; everybody else was gone. And then we had about 5,000 Japs that came down out of the hills and there was fifteen or twenty of us left, that ship come by and picked us up. And we had a line drawed and had a English speaking Jap and they’d furnish us servants every day to come down and cook for us and wait on us till our ship come in. We had a radio and we knew it was coming and we had a line that none of them could cross; they had to stay back. And they had the, they took over the Air Force’s camp and the Army camp and, and the Navy supply depot’s operation. And of course, they left food and everything, you know, the deep freezers was full and the storeroom was full. They had plenty of food, you know, more food than they’d ever had in years. So, they was perfectly willing to, you know, stay away from us. But, they’d be shot if they come down past a certain area. And there was only one building that was a, a wood building, and that was a two-story post office; it was on the pier at Hollandia and it was right on the dock and that’s where we lived upstairs till we left. And then we went to Tacloban, Leyte and then from Tacloban to Samoa City and then caught PA-134 and come back to the states. I think it was thirty-four days to San Francisco. And then from there, they got my orders mixed up and I went aboard, a, a weather ship, the USS Hutchison and went to Alaska for a couple of weeks and then come back and went to Alameda, California and then they seen I’d been in the Pacific and hadn’t been home and they give me a thirty day leave and then they sent me home. And then I come back and they, they sent me to Pensacola, Florida, I mean, Ponchar—Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans and I stayed there till I got discharged.
CA: Um-hm.
PS: And then in the meantime they found out how old I was and all, you know, and, and they was deciding on what kind of discharge to give me and they give me a under honorable condition discharge, it wasn’t honorable, it wasn’t dishonorable, it was just like you’d attended high school, but you didn’t finish, but you didn’t not, you just attended.
CA: Yeah.
PS: And I appealed it and got an honorable discharge.
CA: Um-hm. And then did you come back to Alabama after that?
PS: Yep. I come back to Albertville. And I went to a veteran’s trade school at Guntersville and finished high school and in ten months I finished three years. That’s pretty good.
CA: That is pretty good.
PS: Yeah. But, you got to think that, I mean, I’d done been around the world and seen a lot and, and got more education than most of the people that went through the ninth, tenth and eleventh and twelfth.
CA: Um-hm.
|
|---|
