Oral History Program Wilford Young Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 1 May 2018 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Wilford Young Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 1 May 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Young, Wilford, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 1 May 2018, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Wilford Young 1 May 2018 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Wilford Young, conducted on May 1, 2018, by Alyssa Chaffee. Wilford discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Michael Ballif the video technician, and Wilford’s son Harold were also present during the interview. AC: Today is May 1, 2018 and it’s about one o’clock PM. We are here with Mister Wilford Young and his son Harold, speaking about Wilford Young’s life and experiences during World War Two. My name is Alyssa Chaffee and I’m here with Michael Ballif, and we’ll both be interviewing you today. Mister Wilford, I’d like to start out with asking, where were you born? WY: Sanpete County, Utah, November, 1st, 1923. HY: Fairview, wasn’t it Dad? WY: Fairview. AC: What do you remember of your childhood in Fairview? HY: What do you remember of your childhood Dad? Tell them about the house you lived in. WY: Well, we converted our living quarters from an old chicken coop, and we survived for several years in that. My Dad was a schoolteacher for quite a few years, and, then he lost his job during the Depression. For the war years. I don’t know what you want to here about, but I have some incredible stories. Where’s the picture? HY: I’ll go there. WY: The big years for the war, let’s see, 1945 was when the war ended, and we were sailing towards the Philippines and, our radios were clattering away, “Yay, the 2 war is over!” All the crew jumped for joy, it was so exciting. After all this time, the war was done. We just got word that the atomic bomb has been dropped at Nagasaki and that we were supposed to change course and head over to Japan. We were to arrive in the harbor of Nagasaki, and there we had to sweep the mines in the harbor and blow them up, so that it wouldn’t damage any other ships coming into the harbor. But the thing that was so exciting for us, the crewmen and officers of the ship, to see, was these men that were running over the hillside. They had spotted our flag. It was so exciting because these guys were Americans that had been held by the Japanese. They wore tattered clothes and their shoes were worn out. They saw us so far out, and they hailed us and said “I can’t wait to get home, can we come aboard your ship?” We said, “We can’t do that until we get these waters clear. We’ll give you some clothes, and if you wait, we’ll give you a feast like you’ve never seen before. So, it was a while, but we finally got them all fixed up with clothes and shoes. After that, we went in the city and went around in horror, and we saw Nagasaki. We saw the remnants of a whole city that had been bombed. One single bomb destroyed a whole thing. One single bomb. We took pictures. We saw these citizens walking around. There were few to no survivors. It was just incredible. We just stood around, looking, man, look at what one single bomb has done. This is wowing. We took some pictures, and I put those in my book. So these prisoners of war survived the whole thing. One single bomb, destroyed the whole valley. Nothing left, between all the mountains. We couldn’t believe that. 3 But there it was. We saw it with our own eyes. We thought, if war ever comes to this again, there will be no civilization left. We knew it could never happen again. Well, so we had been through several typhoons, and we came close to getting blown up. We, were assigned to the China Sea, and clean up all the mines in the water, and we told a guy to get his gun out and shoot all these mines and blow them up. It was like looking at Old Faithful in Yellowstone, water shooting, just straight up from the explosions. And so, this one day, I was going to go up on the top of the place, wondering where everybody’s gone. Then I see all the members of the crew. They had stopped the ship, and went into hiding because this one mine had blown up the wall, it was huge, and the splash was so big, the top of the mine came and dropped right beside the ship. So we had blown it up, and it splashed all over. Another exciting moment: we saw one mine in the water. It was so close to the ship. These things, once they blow up, you’re done for. So, I say, “hey guys, look what we got here. There’s a mine, just floating on top of the water.” I reached out with a broom handle and touched it, just off the side of the ship to push it back. If I had knocked one of these little horns sticking out, it would have been blown up. Once they blow up, it’s curtain for you. It's the end. Everything goes away. You say goodbye to everything. So it was that close to the ship when I reached out there, and pushed it with a broom handle. We were that close to being blown up. So, that was a close call. Then, another time, we were caught in a typhoon. We were supposed to be in the safety of a harbor, as the typhoon was going by 100 miles an hour. We 4 thought we were safe where we were, so we tied our ship to a big buoy and we thought we were secure. But, we looked out the windows, and at the other ship we were tied up to, and said, “Hey those guys are getting underway in the middle of a typhoon.” We checked again and, “Hey, it’s not them, it’s us. We’re adrift.” So we were adrift and running in a big typhoon. We were blown all over. We got the crew together, started the engines up, and in the meantime, banged into another ship. It didn’t see us. Just, behind us were seven ships. We almost hit another big ship, we thought for sure we were gonna sink and crash a big whole in the side of the ship. We went under orders to prepare to abandon ship in case we sink and we can’t save the ship. We did all we could do in the meantime; plug up this hole the best you can, maybe we can try to save the ship. It took us a while but we finally plugged up the hole, and the sun shone in our eyes, and we came out of it. Here’s the ship. Here’s my ship. HY: And he was the captain. WY: So, well, it took us a whole month to repair the damage to the ship, so they gave us time to repair. And finally, it was good to go back to sea again. So, we were in three or four different typhoons. They were so fierce. We heard on the radio, four of our other ships, they were out at sea, caught in the middle of the storm, and we had to say goodbye. They got us on the radio. “Fellas, we can’t go over these waves, they’re too big, so, this is the end of the show.” We never saw those guys again. These waves are so huge, they just swamped their ship. Those sailors, in these ships, they didn’t survive, and were lost in the middle of the China Sea. 5 HY: So Dad, the soldiers, the Americans, that when you first went into Nagasaki, those were prisoners of war? WY: Yes, they were prisoners of war. They had been kept in starvation and some died during the war. They saw our ship coming into the harbor, and they recognized our flag in joy. There, the American flag. That is the flag I have in my possession. I took it around, showing it off all over the city, in schools. So, it’s such a special flag. Yeah, they managed to survive the war, and we gave them new clothes and equipment. HY: You were able to talk to the Japanese when you landed? WY: Yeah, we had a Naval intelligence operative, a Japanese security man, and he kept us going in the right direction when we got into the harbor. We were pleased to get acquainted with him. MB: What was the name of the ship that you commanded? WY: YMS-401. MB: Okay. HY: So, it was a minesweeper. What does the Y stand for? WY: Yard Minesweeper. That’s the definition. So, here we were, going home, and I told these guys, “tomorrow, at nine o’clock, you’ll see the Golden Gate Bridge and you’ll know your home at last.” And I couldn’t believe it. After the months and years that we had been at sea. The Golden Gate Bridge. It was my job, as we went into the harbor, to take down the flag. I kept that flag, and the special maps we used. I kept those for posterity. I have all these maps we used for navigation all over the Pacific Ocean. 6 AC: I have a question. I’m not very familiar with minesweepers, so it sounds like, basically, you go in and you take out the mines, they don’t blow up other boats. Is that correct? WY: Five different types of mines, you had to know how to explode them. There were some that were covered with slime that would attach to ships, some that could pick up the vibrations of ships, other mines that would blow up by sound. There was one group of Japanese guys, in Nagasaki going around, helping us to explode the mines. They were in an old sailing junk AC: How long were you on the mine sweeper for? HY: About three years. WY: It was quite exciting. We had a mascot, a dog. He didn’t want to stay on ship anymore, and finally, when we came to land, our dog just jumped right into the ocean. One of our guys took off all his clothes to jump in the water. He’s just paddling, so we had to lower a boat over the side of the ship we said. “Okay guy, we’ll have to go rescue our dog.” The dog smelled land, and he wanted to get to shore. We were at Nagasaki when this happened. HY: Tell them about your Christmas. WY: Oh, yeah. We were looking for a way to have Christmas, so, we decided to take our preserves, and wrap them all up. We made decorations out of our gum wrappers. And then, we went ashore, and we got, a tiny Christmas tree, and that was our Christmas. AC: What year was that? WY: 1945, after the war was ended. 7 AC: Were you still in Japan? WY: Japan, yeah. AC: Would you tell me a little more about the liberation of the POWs? Did the Japanese just let them go or did you have to fight for all of them? WY: They were no longer captive. HY: So they just let them go? WY: They let them go. AC: So it was peaceful surrender? WY: I think it was everybody trying to survive after a nuclear bomb went off, no we can’t worry about these people, we have to let them go. AC: That makes sense. WY: Yeah, after that bomb went off, the whole valley was just, just destroyed. HY: So do you think, do you think those prisoners of war knew that American ships were coming? WY: They had an inkling. When we came in, they were yelling and they let us know they were excited. Those guys, in their raggedy clothes; it just choked us up to see what they had been through, how they survived. They walked a long ways, and they had hardly any food. HY: So in this picture right here, it shows you guys actually lifting a mine out, out of the water. So is that, is that one that’s like safe to be lifting up? WY: Yeah, yeah. We had to be careful what we were doing. MB: When did you join the navy? 8 WY: When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I joined the Navy. I wanted to go into the Navy. I could become an officer if I did, so I went in and volunteered to join. HY: So tell them about this, Dad. WY: Okay. As a cadet at Columbia University, I was given the opportunity to conduct the Navy band, and they had tryouts to see who was going to be the student director. And, they picked me. They said, Mr. Young, you’re number one guy. You beat the other guys out. You’re gonna be the student director of the Navy band. That was a special day for me. Wrote all my family, told them guess who’s the student director? HY: You were, you went to the Naval Academy, right? WY: Right. My friends, decided to take the draft and go when they were called. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to join the Navy, and I did so I could choose where I went. For training I went to BYU, University of New Mexico, Columbia University, all these different places. They had a pretty tough regimen to go through, and if you were gonna survive, you’d be the cream of the crop. Because they’d make sure if you go to war, you would be okay. I knew I was going to have some tough experiences. HY: Did you ever get seasick? WY: Two times. The first time I went aboard a shipway, the first time I got seasick. The next time I was, is was after we had rebuilt our ship after hitting an explosion. I got sick then too. Both times it took me a while to get my sea-legs again. WY: It was 1943. 9 MB: So you went straight from the Naval Academy to the Minesweeper, okay. AC: So two years of school, the rest service. HY: Before you went to Japan, you went to Okinawa? WY: Yeah. Yeah, it was a huge invasion. HY: Tell us about that. WY: Well, that was the biggest fleet of ships I ever saw. We were scattered all over the ocean. There were, minesweepers, submarines, you name it. We converged on Okinawa. Our battleships were here out at sea. The ground force would call the battleship or the radio if they needed fire. They shoot a shell so huge, that big around. They spotted where they were supposed to hit. Then they blew it up. HY: So they were that accurate. WY: Yes. The explosions were that close to the people. These guys were bringing up these huge cannons, shooting. You can’t believe it. There’s nothing bigger than these when they blow up. But, the Japanese were so good at hiding in the hills that it took us a long time to clean out the area. WY: One thing that we had to do. Was to make smoke, to hide the battleships and the cruisers, to keep it all hidden out of sight, so that these suicide planes, as they were coming up, couldn’t see them. A lot of these planes would be spotted with the spotlight and get blown up. HY: So you were protecting the big ships from the kamikaze planes, right? WY: That’s right. HY: With the smoke screen. WY: It was our job to make smoke screens. We had to make a lot of smoke. 10 HY: Weren’t you worried they would come after you, I mean… WY: No, we were so small, they didn’t pay any attention to us. One day, the chaplain came to us. He had a problem. He was so used to big ships that when he got aboard our little ship, we made him sick. He couldn’t conduct his services. HY: He was used to being on the big ships? WY: He was so used to the big ships, that when he came on our ship, we were rocking all over. He couldn’t handle it. President Roosevelt, he died before the war ended, and was followed by President Truman. He became President and he thought about invading Japan. He wrestled with the idea, “should I send these men to battle?” But after olchana he says, “I can’t do it. It would be suicide for thousands of Japanese men. “Well I can’t do that. I got to send the bomb.” So, the Enola Gay was put a-ship. HY: How did you find out that the bomb went off? WY: They had guys keeping track on the radio, they used the bomb, then they decided that we never can do this again. AC: Did you have any special celebrations aboard ship when you found out the war was over? WY: Yeah, the radio announced it. We were headed for the Philippines, and the radio says, “Change course. The war is over. Go, head straight on to Japan.” So the guy that was steering the ship turned her around, and we all headed straight on. And there was more cheering then you’ve ever heard. It was like children, we were so excited. “Guys, the war is over!” It was one of the most exciting moments in my life. But the most exciting part to me was rescuing these POW survivors as 11 they came in. It was so tender, after what these guys had been through, and now their free, they’re able to go aboard our ship and be rescued and taken home. No more hiding. That was, in my heart, the biggest moment of the war. AC: What were some of your day to day responsibilities on the ship? WY: The job that I hated worst of all, was being the censor. Can you imagine? The censor has to read everybody’s letters, and he knows he’s going to cut it all to pieces. I finally put my foot down, I’m not going to do these letters, I can’t stand it. I’m not going to do that. I had to read all these letters, love letters, to make sure they weren’t sending anything about where we were. I told them that you can’t tell these guys all this stuff. AC: Had you met your wife yet, during the war? WY: I met here several days before the war, but we really only dated after I went home. When I came home, I wanted to join the Utah Symphony. And I joined the Utah Symphony in Salt Lake… are you LDS? AC: I am. WY: Are you LDS? MB: Yeah. WY: Anyway, the landlady I had in Salt Lake told me that I got to go to my ward instead of where I was going. I had been going to my sister’s ward. So my landlady said that “you need to go here to your own ward.” So I said, “okay, I’ll do that.” And I got there. Went to church, and I saw her, talking to the bishop. It turned out to be President Hinckley’s ward. And this lady, that I quite liked and I 12 invited her to go to. The Do-Drop Inn. Harman’s Kentucky Fried. It’s still there. It doesn’t look like it did, but it is still there. I liked what I saw, so we got married. A little while later, I got a bouquet of flowers, and gave them to my landlady. I told her that you were the one who introduced me to my fiancée. And we set a date six months later, to June to be getting married. So, so we’ve been married now, how many years has it been? HY: 1949 was when you got married, so what is that… AC: Well, almost 70 years, right? Almost 70 years. HY: Yeah, yeah. AC: Congratulations. WY: Yeah, my wife’s in this building. You can meet my wife, see this flag, she can talk… AC: Thank you so much, I appreciate it. WY: Thank you for listening.