Shore leave

My Dad in 1948 or 9 sailing his dinghy the Lazy Susan somewhere near Naskeag Point in Maine.

Two years earlier he’d been demobilised from the US Navy having served as a radio operator on USS LSM 169 - a medium-sized ocean going landing ship in the fight to retake the Philippines from the Japanese.

On 15 May 1945 his ship was landing troops and machinery at Mariveles Bay on the Bataan Peninsula that forms an arm of Manila Bay. This was part of the battle to retake Bataan three years after the Japanese invasion and the subsequent and infamous Bataan Death March.

The ship hit a Japanese mine and many soldiers and two crewmen were killed in the explosion and terrible fire that followed.

The ship was abandoned and the fire eventually put out. It was towed to Subic Bay and for the next 12 months it was home to my Dad and the crew.

Eventually the ship was decommissioned. Dad hoped he’d be flown back to the US and discharged but luck was not on his side. He was transferred to flag ship USS LSM 474 and spent the next three months paying off crews on many of the US Navy vessels in the Philippines. By now he had accumulated the points to be discharged but he was kept on as an essential crew member and took part in the 30-day voyage to steam the 474 back to the west coast of the US.

Somewhere along the way in those years he contracted TB and spent time in a US Navy hospital in New York State. It later horribly recurred as he was studying at Yale and he spent nearly a year in the Gaylord Farm TB Sanitorium in ... guess where ... Wallingford, Connecticut.

And where is my mum now? In a care home in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

Lest we forget, eh. The name Wallingford touched both their lives although 67 years apart.

The Sanitorium fees we50 cents for electricity. That’s about £720 a week in today’s money.

I’ve added an extra of the USS LSM-474 unloading 5th Marine Division Tanks at Sasebo, Kyushu, Japan, September 1945. (Japan surrendered in August 1945).