A Flash of Green Read online

  A FLASH OF GREEN

  ©1987, 2015 Charles Sprague McCandless

  Published by Hellgate Press

  (An imprint of L&R Publishing, LLC)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems without written permission of the publisher.

  Hellgate Press

  PO Box 3531

  Ashland, OR 97520

  email: [email protected]

  Editor: Sandra McCandless Simons

  Cover Design: Shaun Webb

  e-book version ISBN: 978-1-55571-811-4

  print version ISBN: 978-1-55571-810-7

  Contents

  Foreword by Sandra McCandless Simons

  ONE: Graduation and the First Construction Job

  TWO: Fort Ord, Monterey, California

  THREE: Hawaii

  FOUR: Sunny Jim McCandless

  FIVE: Joining the Navy

  SIX: Myrna and Flight School

  SEVEN: One Last Vacation

  EIGHT: The Navy

  NINE: Military Flight Indoctrination

  TEN: The Naval Aviator

  ELEVEN: Shore Patrol: Honolulu

  TWELVE: Liberty

  THIRTEEN: Pearl Harbor

  FOURTEEN: War

  FIFTEEN: The Battle of Midway

  SIXTEEN: Guadalcanal

  SEVENTEEN: Oak Knoll Hospital, Oakland, California

  EIGHTEEN: Camp Parks, California

  NINETEEN: Camp Hueneme

  TWENTY: Sailing to Ulithi

  TWENTY-ONE: Ulithi Atoll

  TWENTY-TWO: Peleliu

  TWENTY-THREE: Back on Ulithi

  TWENTY-FOUR: Typhoon

  TWENTY-FIVE: Saipan

  TWENTY-SIX: Iwo Jima

  TWENTY-SEVEN: The Philippines, Samar, and Manicani Island

  TWENTY-EIGHT: The War: The Final Chapter

  EPILOGUE

  Charles Sprague McCandless in 1944.

  Foreword

  I CAN STILL PICTURE MY FATHER SITTING IN OUR LIVING ROOM READING. Nearly every evening, he would settle into our couch and read tome after tome about war, particularly World War II. As a teenager, I wondered why he didn’t read books on other topics—or fiction by notable authors. I now understand that he was trying to put himself in the context of the events that occurred around him during his years in the Pacific Theater. My dad was walking to his duty post at Pearl Harbor when he saw the U.S.S. Arizona bombed, he was shot down during the Battle of Midway, and he was a frogman at Iwo Jima; but it wasn’t until many years later that he understood how these experiences fit into the overall strategies and chain of events in World War II that we read about today. And it wasn’t until he wrote this book that any of us in the family even knew about his role in these historic battles.

  In 1987, Dad told me that he had written a memoir and asked if I would help him shape it into a book. He gave me a typed manuscript and said he’d like about twenty copies—just enough for family and a few friends.

  I was in publishing at the time and started reading the manuscript, red pencil in hand. The book started with my dad’s descriptions of his life before the war, and I enjoyed learning about my father as a young man: his first jobs after graduating from college in 1939, his decision to go to Hawaii in the early 1940s, and his first flying lessons. But as these stories led to his wartime experiences, I had a mix of feelings—amazement, surprise, pride—and a deepening sense of just how much his experience in the war shaped him.

  We knew that my dad had been at Pearl Harbor. But he rarely spoke of these experiences, even to my mother. We had no idea that he had been a dive bomber pilot at Midway, crashed his plane at Guadalcanal, or served as a Seabee in Ulithi Atoll, Peleliu, and Saipan. We did not know that he was a frogman at Iwo Jima, or struggled to get out of the Philippines after the Japanese surrendered in 1945.

  Sometimes, I felt as if I was reading a good war novel; then I would remember that I knew the main character and the action wasn’t fiction. For the first time, I had a small window into what it was like for my dad to live through the war.

  After reading his memoir, I asked my dad why he ended his story in 1945. He explained that when he finished writing about the war, he had nothing else to say. It was those experiences that profoundly influenced his thinking, shaped the fearlessness with which he started and ran two successful businesses, and solidified his decision to go from being a devoutly religious Christian to an atheist. It was a piece of his life that he had kept largely to himself, and he thought it time to share the experiences that had so greatly affected him with his children and grandchildren.

  Thirteen years after his death, I feel it is important to share my dad’s stories with a broader audience. This slice of one man’s journey provides a glimpse into both our country’s history and the realities of war. History books can relay the facts of each battle and analyze the strategic decisions of the leaders at the time, but it is only through the sharing of individuals’ unedited stories that we see the texture and detail in the threads that make up that larger tapestry.

  It is these personal stories that remind us of the extraordinary things that ordinary men and women do during times of war: they take risks, win struggles, and witness losses that most of us cannot even imagine. While these experiences are often too terrifying to explain to those who weren’t there to share them, they are important for all of us to hear. Without these stories, we cannot fully understand or consider the consequences of being at war. Nor can we appreciate the courage, strength, and sacrifice it takes to safeguard the freedom and security that we experience everyday in the U.S.

  My dad’s memoir fills in a piece of the World War II tapestry that he spent so much time studying. As I read it again, I feel an everlasting sadness that he is no longer here, but I am thankful that he took the time to record his story for his children and grandchildren. It is an engaging and remarkable story—we often joke that my dad had nine lives. But it also provides a first-person perspective on the important events of the war. By publishing it beyond our family, I hope to bring this piece of history alive for those who were not there to live it and inspire others to tell their own stories for future generations.

  —Sandra McCandless Simons

  Navy recruiting poster aimed at recent or soon-to-be college graduates.

  ONE

  Graduation and the

  First Construction Job

  STANFORD UNIVERSITY IS LOCATED ON LAND WHICH was originally a horse farm. It was the summer home of Leland Stanford, whose hobby was raising horses for carriage racing and thoroughbreds. Because Leland Stanford called his country place The Farm, many students and even the newspapers also refer to it as The Farm. President Herbert Hoover, one of Stanford University’s first and most prestigious graduates, gave it another name, The Country Club, because it was a small, expensive university in a beautiful country setting and had a golf course, stables, and polo fields.

  The forty-eighth annual graduation commencement of the Stanford Country Club was to take place June 18, 1939, in the Greek Amphitheater on campus. I was to be one of about 800 seniors to graduate that year, and it was a large class considering the entire undergraduate school enrollment was less than 3,600.

  On Saturday night the week before graduation, I went to the senior ball with a lovely girl named Betty Crawford. I wore a white tuxedo, and she was dressed in a beautiful white formal and wore the orchid corsage I had sent her. We went to dinner at L’Omelette with a gang of friends, drank too much champagne, danced until 2:00 a.m., partied some more at a friend’s house in Menlo Park until 4:00 a.m., and then drove up into
the hills to watch the sun rise over Mt. Hamilton, still drinking champagne. On Monday morning after the dance, I had to go to work on my first professional job as a construction surveyor. Earl C Thomas, Professor of Highway Engineering at Stanford, had contracted to perform all the surveying for the construction of what is now the Permanente Cement Plant in the hills behind Cupertino. To accomplish this, Thomas hired six of the twenty or so graduating civil engineers to fill out the skeleton crew of more experienced professional surveyors. One of the requirements for getting the job was that we had to start work a week before we formally graduated. Finals were over so there really wasn’t a problem. We’d just miss some good parties.

  The regular working week was six days. The pay was excellent and we could work overtime. My job was particularly interesting as my party of five was assigned to lay out a mile long conveyor system which would bring new limestone down the mountain from the quarry to the plant.

  From where we were working, we could look down on the beautiful Santa Clara Valley—hundreds of acres of neat, green orchards extending from Los Gatos to what is now Fremont, San Jose, and Palo Alto. Most of the little towns, such as Sunnyvale and Campbell, were nearly obscured by the fruit trees. The Diablo Mountain Range stood in the background. When I first started, I carried the lunches and heavy bundles of wooden stakes and was in charge of all other portable paraphernalia. Another one of my jobs, which I later came to regret, was to grub out the poison oak.

  This was my first surveying job, and by the time it was over I had pretty well learned the trade. Not all was sweetness and light, however. The party chief was Ike Stage, an old pro who thoroughly disliked college men, especially if he believed they were taking a job away from an unemployed professional surveyor.

  When graduation day arrived at the end of my first week of work, the weather was beautiful. My Grandfather and Grandmother McCandless, Grandfather Sprague, and my mother attended the ceremonies. Unfortunately, Grandmother Sprague, who was eighty-five, was in poor health and to her great disappointment and mine was unable to make the trip. With all the pomp and tradition, the graduation ceremonies were impressive, and the day couldn’t have been more perfect, with one exception—I had a bad case of poison oak all over my body. I was terribly uncomfortable! However, on the Monday following graduation, I was back on the job, still in charge of portable paraphernalia and still itching.

  A couple of weeks later one of the men was transferred, and Stage was forced to promote me to a rear chainman’s job. Stage never did stop bitching. He screamed and swore at me the whole time, nicknamed me Bub, and kept complaining about lousy college men and how unlucky he was to have them. Fortunately after six weeks, Stage was transferred. My classmate, Bud Cameron, became chief of party and immediately appointed me his instrument man. From then on everything was fine except that the job terminated at the end of September.

  The old Permanente Cement Plant is still operating (1988). Today when I drive between Los Gatos and Sunnyvale, I look up at the mountain behind Cupertino and see the conveyor zigzagging up the hill just as we laid it out forty-nine years ago.

  At the end of September, 1939, when the job was over, I loaded my Ford, said good-bye to my friends, and headed for Los Angeles. I had planned to stay home with my mother and grandparents because I hadn’t seen them to any extent since I graduated from high school and because my Grandmother Sprague was eighty-five and failing. I had always had a very close relationship with Bidy Sprague and felt that under these circumstances I should stay around for awhile. The family was very pleased to see me and have me stay with them. The first thing I had to do was to get a job. My friend, Henry Layne, a structural engineer from Stanford, had opened his own shop in the Architect’s Building near City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, so I went to see him. Sure enough, Layne had engineered the Sears-Roebuck high rise, and Ford Twaits, the contractor who had just obtained the contract to build it, needed a good job engineer.

  I applied and got the job. It consisted of all field surveying and layout, checking all dimensions of the work daily, calculating and ordering all materials, developing and keeping track of construction costs, and maintaining “as built” plans plus miscellaneous charts. I loved the job and knew then and there that I’d be a building contractor someday. One thing that made it more attractive than highway construction was that you could live in the city, and I always liked the city better than the country, probably because I was brought up in the city.

  The superintendent was a Swede named Oscar Ericson, who was a good boss to work for. One of his dictums was that when I calculated and ordered concrete, sometimes two or three hundred yards, I’d better be right. If I were five yards off, I had to buy him a new hat, which could get expensive since a hat cost five dollars and I only earned a dollar an hour, the same as a carpenter. In eight months, I think I bought him three hats.

  Soon after buying Ericson his third hat, I was called into the head office of my boss, Mr. Ford Twaits. He said his company was entering into a joint venture with McDonald-Kahn, Morrison-Knudsen, and some others to build Fort Ord just north of Monterey. The Fort was to accommodate 30,000 men and serve as a major west coast marshaling camp for the purpose of training recruits and forming new army divisions. He offered me a job as staff engineer, which was a considerable promotion since I’d also be chief surveyor for the entire project. This was a chance for me to be involved in the design and layout of streets, sewer, water systems, and drainage for virtually a medium sized city -all from bare land.

  It was June 1940, and I had been in Los Angeles eight months. I’d had a good time in L.A. I’d made several friends at work and some old high school friends were still around, including Harry Smith, Bill Bernstein, Frank Gifford, and Jack Dixon. Besides, when you live on the edge of Hollywood, there’s no end to the single girls, three of whom I dated regularly, although I can’t remember their names. We went to parties, dances, and to the beach almost every weekend. I liked to dance and was a reasonably competent surfer. Furthermore, I’d purchased a beautiful silver-colored, one-year-old Packard convertible, which didn’t hurt my social position one bit. I’ve always had a love affair with flashy cars, and that car was one of the best. I had a lot of fun.

  TWO

  Fort Ord, Monterey, California

  ON JUNE 3,1940, I KISSED MY GIRL FRIENDS AND FAMILY good-bye and loaded my belongings in the silver Packard. The next morning I put the convertible top down and headed for Carmel, California. It was about an eight hour trip along the coastal route, Highway 101. It started out to be a beautiful warm day, but as I approached Salinas the weather began to cool and the sky became overcast. I pulled into a gas station to fuel the car and put the convertible top back up. I remembered that the coast in this part of California fogged over during the summer. It turned out to be a long, foggy summer and an unusually rainy winter. The sun hardly showed itself during the entire eight months of my stay on the Monterey peninsula.

  I arrived in Monterey about 4:00 p.m., settled in a hotel, and telephoned the contact I’d been given. It turned out to be James McClary, a Stanford civil engineer who’d graduated a year before me. Since our last names both, started with “McC” and because of the penchant Stanford professors had for seating students according to the alphabet, I sat next to Jim in a number of classes and knew him well.

  “Hi, Mac, I’ve been waiting to hear from you.” He said and then invited me to his home for dinner that night, where I met his wife Jane. It turned out that Jim was a nephew and male heir to the Morrisons of the Morrison-Knudsen Construction Company, the biggest contractor in the United States. Jim was to be Chief Engineer of the new project and I would be in charge of all field surveys. It was to be a fast track job, the construction would be carried out concurrently with the design, which would be only a few steps ahead. I was to report to the job office in Monterey the next day at 0700. My pay was to be $2 per hour for the first eight hours and $3 per hour for all overtime. We were to work forty-eight hours regular time an
d twelve hours overtime a week - $132 a week. This was a bonanza! A good apartment was $30 a month; a four bedroom house was $50 a month; and the best steak dinner in town was $1.50. I could save $400 a month and live like a king. I surely was in luck.

  The next day I reported to work and was asked to figure out how many surveying parties and what equipment I would need initially. Then Jim asked me how long it would take me to make him a topo map of the 1,000-acre property. I studied the matter awhile and told him I’d like to split the property into four areas. Then once we started, I could give him the field data for one area per week, providing I could work seven ten-hour days. He was to have an office crew under my direction plot the field data daily. I could work three six-man crews on a 250-acre area at one time. I didn’t think we could go any faster and still be sure the data was accurate because each day’s plot had to be rechecked by me, personally, in the field.

  Jim gave me a surprised look and said, “Jeeziz Christ, there’s no way you can go that fast.”

  I bet him a steak dinner for four people at any restaurant the winner chose that I could. I didn’t have the fourth person for dinner, but I figured I could find a date even though I had no days off. Jim took me up on the bet, and I could see he was pleased because he said, “Mac, you’re my kind o’ guy!”

  I replied, “Thanks, Mac!”

  I found my date more easily and sooner than I had expected. In the personnel office I was interviewed and signed up by a cute, freckled, red-haired young lady. I checked her left hand and, seeing no wedding band, confessed to her in a dejected, unassuming way that I was lonely, bored, friendless, and worried about my new job. I asked if she’d have dinner with me that night to add a little cheer to my very dull life.

  She looked me straight in the eyes and replied, “I don’t believe a word of it. I think you’re a wolf, but I can handle wolves. I’ll have dinner with you.”