World War II sailor remembers voices of soldiers lost in the night
(And the Texas who disappeared in the night)
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August, 1941. Prosperity had yet to filter into the hills and forests of Arkansas where Cy Roach had grown up cutting timber. Cities full of automobiles existed in some other universe - wagons and teams were more suited to dirt roads, though once a week a train backed down the spur from Waldrum, bringing goods to the country store.
The bad thing about August was the heat. Cy worked and dripped sweat. The good thing about the slow passing of another August day was getting that much closer to returning to school for a final year, which meant getting to see Joyce Williams every day.
By August of 1941, according to a Chicago Tribune story from the day, the South Pacific island paradise of Sumarai was 50 years old - that's to say, 50 years earlier European settlers made themselves at home among the island natives, building a town, a pair of hotels, a school, a bank and two churches.
A possession of Australia, not far off the coast of New Guinea, the 62-acre island became "the gayest spot in the Pacific, a rendezvous for plantation managers, a Mecca for pearl traders, gold miners, drifters and wide-eyed tourists, an oasis of liquor, gambling, and - the whispers go - women," wrote the Tribune reporter.
American yachts, complete with millionaires, made Samarai a port of call, a place where evening dress was the preferred attire, women in gowns, men in white evening jackets and white waist coats, attire suitable for tropical evenings.
Cy Roach was to become a resident of the island, where a marble stone had been placed in memory of a former island governor, Christopher Robinson.
"Died 20th June, 1904," it said. "Aged 32 years. His aim was to make New Guinea a good country for white men. This stone was set up by the men of New Guinea, in recognition of the services of a man who was as well meaning as he was unfortunate, and as kindly as he was courageous."
He had killed himself after being "rebuked by home authorities" but his vision of Samarai as a tropical island paradise lived on, to be witnessed and recorded by the Chicago reporter, who wrote of the "cricket pitch and clubhouse," walled estates and flowering tropical plants of indescribable shades.
As school began in Arkansas, as the endless party on Samarai Isle continued. But with each passing month in the opening days of World War II, the ominous cloud of invasion thickened over the mood of the islanders. The Japanese seemed an invincible force, fanning southward, moving easily from victory to victory as they island-hopped thousands of miles across the South Pacific paradise. Going ashore across snow white beaches bordering lush forests, they met almost no resistance from islanders wearing grass skirts and loincloths, living in frond huts.
By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of Cy Roach's last year of school, the campaign in the South Pacific had pushed to the northern coast of New Guinea. As news of the destruction of the American fleet in Hawaii and the U.S. entry into the war reverberated around the world, Samarai's population fled a withering Japanese assault.
Defeating American troops in the Phillippines early in 1942, The Empire of the Rising Sun reached its zenith with the occupation of half of New Guinea.
Ruling the seas, vessels from Japan regularly brought news, letters, movies, dancers, musicians and "comfort women," to the conquering troops Time-Life says, setting up its stories of the epic battles that followed with the return of American forces.
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Back in Arkansas, two things had happened by the following summer - Cy Roach had graduated and Joyce Williams had fallen in love with him.
They married after he volunteered that December for service in the Navy.
Marched away to boot camp on the Chicago shore of the Great Lakes, in preparation for his assignment in the tropics, Mr. Roach spent the rest of that winter marching in the snow.
"It was the coldest I'd ever been in my life," he said.
He spent six months in a radio school at the University of Wisconsin where the American war effort made a lasting impression.
"It was like the military had taken over the school," he said. "Whatever commitment was needed for training, we got it."
Schooled in radio operation and Morse code, he took a troop train to the west coast and then shipped out to the South Pacific, expecting to be the radio man on a landing craft, "one of those boats that runs up to the beach, drops the door and everybody goes charging out," he said. "That's what I was expecting."
Arriving in Australia he and 34 other men were pulled out of the ranks and given new orders, attached to Flight Air Wing 17.
"We understood we were going to build a permanent communication station," he said. It was good news. "It meant we wouldn't be living in tents."
Boarding a "crash boat," the outfit put out to sea, speeding toward an unknown world at Samarai.
"From that moment on, I spent the rest of the war wide-eyed," he said. Typically used to rescue downed pilots, the "crash boat" reached speeds pushing 40 miles an hour, fast for its time, and incredible if you were from the Arkansas woods.
They saw the island on the horizon - a mist above lush green forests, white houses with red roofs bright against the palms. As they came closer, the vision of paradise shifted. The crash boat slowed to a crawl, approaching a yellowed sea wall patched with moss, a jumble of twisted iron and crushed concrete.
As they abandoned their homes, the people had put the torch to their town.
"We pulled up to a shred of a pier," he said. "Six men came out of the jungle to meet us - they were army engineers. We got off the boat, they got on the boat, wished us luck and told us to boil our water. Then they were gone and there we were."
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Like the Tribune reporter, he strained trying to describe the vegetation - a jungle that seemed like an animal, living and breathing, climbing and moving.
"Those people hadn't been gone a year and already the jungle had all but covered most of the homes that remained," he said. "It was unlike anything I'd ever seen growing."
Just as the reality of a nation committed to war impressed him in Wisconsin, Chief Petty Officer Louis Ryan taught him the importance of leadership.
"There didn't seem to be anything he didn't know," Mr. Roach said. "We spent a week cleaning out houses we moved into and then supplies began arriving. He showed us how to build the Quonset huts where we set up equipment. He told us how to put together a transmission tower we pulled up with blocks and tackles on the highest point on the island - an old governor's home."
Life became routine and night always brought the war. In the radio room the shift was 6 hours on, 12 hours off, seven days a week.
"One man would be on a weather frequency, another on ships and another on planes," Mr. Roach said. They transcribed every message, translating code.
"It always seemed like everything began happening at once, around ten or eleven at night. Our objective was to disrupt their supply lines - we had these lumbering old float planes - PBY's, maximum air speed about 150 miles an hour. They went out to bomb Japanese freighters. Those guys with all the braid on their uniform, the scrambled eggs on the hat - they'd start piling in the radio room, taking information, waiting for information, wanting to know where this boat or that plane was - engagements start with a plan, but circumstances change."
It was intense work, and frequently eerie, layered with death.
"A pilot would radio he was going in - sometimes that was the last you'd ever hear," he said, and waiting in the silence, every five minutes, dutiful entry was made - "no signal."
Coming ashore in September, 1943, in December, the men had the communications post up and operating, punching signals 1,200 miles over the open seas with optimum conditions. By August, 1944, 4,000 troops packed the tiny island as American forces prepared for invasion of the Philippines.
That month, Mr. Roach's outfit advanced, moving to an island called Windy, near the equator. By fall they'd advanced again, this time to Morotai, then an island in the Dutch East Indies. No sooner than the Americans got a toe hold in the Philippines, his outfit moved to Clark Air Field, the island of Luzon, where the retreating Japanese had abandoned a sea of planes, fighters and bombers lined in tidy rank and file.
"They were in perfect condition, but the Japanese hadn't had the fuel to get them into the air," Mr. Roach said. "I saw that and thought to myself, 'This deal's about over.'"
It was February, 1945. By May, he'd earned a 30-day leave.
An obliging officer signed his orders, smiled and wished him luck in finding a way to get back to the states.
"It was sort of like the day they'd put us ashore at Sumarai," he said. "A man was expected to use his wits."
Being in communications gave him an advantage, an awareness of troop movements and transports. He bummed a plane ride south, back down the Philippines, found a ship bound for California and was given quarters "somewhere down in the bottom of the boat."
Men stacked in bunks sweltered in heat as they crossed the equator.
"I crossed it four times," he said. To pass time they played cards, hunted shade up on the deck where, for weeks on end, there was nothing but ocean in all directions, stretching to the horizon.
Military time was suspended at sea - his 30 day leave didn't begin until he came ashore in San Francisco. The trip home took 30 days - the trip back took another 30. The news in the Pacific was all about the pending invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Mr. Roach was steaming back toward the war when two atomic bombs dropped on Japan ended the war in the Pacific.
Back on duty, he was assigned to the USS Brazos.
"It was a big tanker, commissioned in 1918," he said. The Brazos joined a convoy, ferrying some of the thousands of occupying troops toward Japan.
"That trip was the only time I ever really got scared," he said, citing his good fortune with work that seldom put him directly in harms way. A few times he'd been in places being shelled, "but nobody was ever shooting right at me, personally," he said.
It wasn't a fear of bombs or bullets - it was nature.
As the convoy steamed northward, in the ship's radio room, "every half hour they were breaking in with warnings about a typhoon," Mr. Roach said. "We were heading right into it."
The men kept thinking the captain would change course. He didn't. They sailed straight into the storm.
"I never got it," Mr. Roach said. "There was a whole ocean out there, with no limit on the routes we could have taken to avoid the storm and still get where we were going."
It lasted four days.
"This old boat wasn't welded - it was riveted," he said. The ocean, like the jungle he'd seen when he first arrived - seemed to be a thing alive.
"The waves were like buildings - one minute you'd be up on the crest, looking 40 feet down at the sea. The next moment you'd be back down on the sea, looking 40 feet up at a wave. Then the ship would bust right through the middle of one of those waves - you could hear those riveted plates popping and feel them shifting. You kept expecting the boat to break apart under the stress."
Even so, the Navy got him to where he was supposed to be, then discovered there wasn't really an assignment for him. For the first time in years, he was free to think of something besides the war. In spite of a commander's efforts to dredge up work essential to the war effort, Mr. Roach's mind focused on home.
Working within the system, he managed to maneuver in fine military fashion into a situation where protocol mandated his shipping out for the states. A long month later he was back on the west coast.
Joyce had been working in a ship yard there; arriving in the states he found she'd gone back east, finding work closer to home, near a base at Norman, Oklahoma.
It took two weeks for the Navy to put together a group of 250 men to board a troop train headed for Norman. Cy rode with his thoughts - the countless nights in radio rooms at this post or that, voices of pilots crackling through the night as they swooped in on bombing runs - "I'm going in - " the times that was the last ever heard from those men, soldiers who'd never get to make this last trip back, going home.
Somewhere in another night, still hundreds of miles from Norman, the train stopped.
"All I can tell you," Mr. Roach said, "is that we were somewhere in the Texas panhandle." He smiled the smile that makes his blue eyes crinkle.
"We got off the train to stretch and there was this one fellow - I've got no idea who he was, but I've always remembered him," Mr. Roach said. "It seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere, but he knew where he was and he pointed out a hill."
"Boys," the unknown soldier said, "I haven't seen home in four years and it's just over that hill. I guess that discharging business is gonna have to take care of itself."
Picking up a duffle bag, he walked away.