| Summary: | (4:06) Mr. Shockley describes being attacked by the Japanese as he drove a fellow soldier to the airfield at Hollandia, New Guinea.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Paul W. Shockley
January 27, 2010
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 7
Clint Alley: You had a life education, didn’t you?
Paul Shockley: Yeah, I had an experience. There’s no way that I could sit and tell you everything and everywhere that I went through and all, you know. I will tell you one hair-raising experience that I have nightmares about. I don’t like to really talk about the bad experiences and don’t, but I will tell you this one experience. The airport at Hollandia, New Guinea was about fifteen miles from the dock and we would rotate who would take the people out to the airfield and we’d know that—the airfield was just a flag sticking up in the ground and the ground was level; that was the airfield—and we’d know when the plane was coming in and we’d take the Army or Navy or Air Force or whatever it was that was gonna catch a plane to fly to the Philippines or somewhere to get onboard a ship or fly home. So, it was my time to take this lieutenant and he’d had a lot of combat duty and he was excited, he was a young fellow; he was the only one. So I took a jeep, and I couldn’t drive very good, I, it’s where I learned how to drive and I’m just sixteen years old. And I take him out to the airport, we get about halfway out there, and anybody that’s ever been on New Guinea, it’s nothing but hills and mountains and jungle. The road up to the top going out to the airport on several different occasions is on the side of a bluff and you could look over and you could drop off a thousand feet and the road wasn’t very wide either, you know, because they wasn’t building a superhighway, they was just getting by. The Japs was bad about getting in the top of the coconut trees and staying up there, sometimes they’d stay there till they died, and then they would shoot the Americans when they come by and all. And he was telling me all his life history, happy, and we’re driving fast as we can with road conditions and all of a sudden I hear this loud noise, you know, and I knew it was a gun going off. Something splattered all over me and I looked and they’d, they’d blowed his head off and of course blood went all over me and I turned that jeep around in that narrow space that they say is impossible to turn around and I went back to the dock where I come from and I didn’t know whether I was running into more ahead or what, you know, so I, I turned around and went back and going back to the dock and of course they met me and all. They sent a squad of Army out and they went out and I think they killed three or four out there. I took them and showed them where the, it had happened. And that was an awful experience, I mean, you’re talking to somebody and then all of a sudden you look over and they’ve got their head blowed off, you know, and you’ve got blood splattered all over you.
CA: Yeah.
PS: I have nightmares at night and I don’t know where I’m—where I—I was in the paratroopers later on in my career and I didn’t, I don’t know whether I’m gonna fall out of an airplane or, or drown in the water or what. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me.
CA: You served on air, water and land didn’t you?
PS: Yeah.
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