Page 101 - Senior Link Magazine Fall 2025 - Online Magazine

hospital. Those planes were coming down right over the
top of everything, and you could see the pilot right up
there in the plane. At the same time, they'd make a bomb
run, they'd machine gun, you know, strafe. Bullets was
going everywhere, and I figured, ‘Boy, I'll never see the
end of this day.’

“The worst thing was all that oil, from where the ships
were torpedoed… It was all burning. When you'd get a
patient that had been in the water, he'd be black (with
oil and burns], and you couldn't tell—whether he was
burned real bad or just covered with oil, because they'd
have to swim through that burning oil.
OD (Officer-of-the-Day) told me to go get the ambulance
and start picking up patients. “I had some stretcher bearers that would pick up the
patients. They rode in the back, and they'd start giving
“I started over to the corpsmen's quarters, and I saw first aid. When we got to the hospital, the OD would
this Japanese plane that had been shot down. He just tell us what ward to take them to. Most of them went to
splattered out across the ground right in front of me. I burn wards.
ran and jumped in a ditch when I saw him coming, and
he went right over me.” “I couldn't get but one person in the ambulance with the
gurney. After the second trip, there was so many I just
For two full days, Jim made trip after trip “down to threw the stretcher on the dock. I started stacking them
the docks to pick up patients and take them back to the

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