By Kim Hilsenbeck.
When Gerald Doyle, 86, steps on the plane that will fly him to Washington, D.C., he said it will be a beautiful thing.
Doyle is one of about 100 Central Texas veterans of World War II to so far receive an Honor Flight – an all-expense paid trip to our nation’s capital to visit the war memorials, including the one of the war in which he took part as a young man.
“I’m very excited about the trip. I feel very honored that I was selected,” he said.
And glad he was still around to be chosen.
“In a few years, we won’t be around,” he said in a recent phone interview. “We’re dying at about a 1,000 a day. There were millions of us [in that war].”
On the younger side of many of his fellow vets, Doyle said, “I was a baby when I went in the Navy.”
He was living in Rosalind, Long Island at the time.
“My older brother was in the Air Force, stationed in England at the time,” Doyle recalled. When I turned 17, I just told my ma, ‘I gotta go.’”
That was Aug. 1944, nearly three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Doyle said his mother balked, but then gave in.
“Off I went,” he said.
The next two years were a whirlwind for Doyle. First to Lake Geneva for Boot Camp at the Samsom Training Center. After 12 weeks, he went to Rhode Island to the replacement depot. This is where he learned about the different types of ships in the naval fleet.
He requested the USS Amsterdam, a Cleveland Class cruiser that was 610-feet long and 71-feet wide.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said.
But before he could board any ship, he was sent off to two different schools – first to Little Creek Virginia for Combat Information School, next to Brigeteen Island near Atlantic City, NJ for radar school. It was gunnery radar.
“I operated an axle radar machine; it was very secret at that time,” he said.
Doyle and his fellow sailors then left for Norfolk, Virginia.
“They call it ‘Poop City,’” he said. “I cleaned up that word for you.”
Why did they call it S*** City?
“They treated sailors like dogs,” he said.
Once on board the USS Amsterdam, Doyle said it was time to “christen our ship.”
The USS Amsterdam had about 1,000 sailors and 200 officers on board, according to Doyle.
He said they went on what he called a “shakedown cruise.” That’s naval slang for taking a brand new ship out to sea and wearing it out, making sure everything works. Doyle said they ran the ship hard and fast.
“They start training sailors on how to run a ship by doing that,” he said.
The ship headed south in the Atlantic Ocean.
“We went off the Carolinas and ran into a storm.”
That night, the sailors had pasta for dinner.
“There was spaghetti all over the place,” he said with a laugh.
Next, they headed to Guantanamo Bay and on to Trinidad then through the Panama Canal headed out to the Pacific Ocean.
By the time they reached Hawaii, on the way to Japan, Doyle said they had about 60 “permanent sea sickers,” who were left in Hawaii were ambulances were waiting.
Where was the ship going?
“We were heading for islands in the Pacific, catching up with the sixth fleet,” he said.
By this time, it was August 1945. His ship went up to northern Japan.
Doyle said, “We were ready for an invasion, but we got word they dropped some kind of bomb and that was the end of that.”
That ‘some kind of bomb’ was the first atomic bomb ever used in wartime. Nicknamed “Little Boy,” it fell from a US B-29 bomber called Enola Gay and destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6. Three days later, a US B-29 bomber named Bock’s Car dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” on the city of Nagasaki.
VJ – Victory over Japan Day – was declared a week later. By Sept. 2, WWII was over.
He and his shipmates witnessed some of the destruction when they sailed into a Japanese port.
“It was devastation and flat,” he said.
Doyle’s naval career lasted about another 11 months, during which he spent several of those in the hospital with hepatitis.
The end of his military career was a train trip from Los Angeles back to New York where he was discharged.
“My travel pay was a nickel to ride the subway because I lived in Manhattan,” he said.
Life then went on for Doyle. He went back to complete his high school career and started a job with the Woolworth Company where he became the assistant manager for four years. Then he sold restaurant equipment. Along the way, he got married, had three children and got divorced.
He ended up moving to Minneapolis. He spent the remainder of his career with Montgomery Ward Department Store. He also married the woman he called “my love.”
“We spent 44 years together. She got dementia, then had a major stroke and it was all over in eight days.”
Did they make good memories?
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
Doyle lived with his daughter in Buda for about three years after his wife passed away. He moved out to Lockhart a little more than a year ago to Golden Age Assisted Living.
When he thinks back to his time in the Navy, he said he has always felt cheated out of being part of the war.
“I was disappointed. I felt guilty that I didn’t do my part,” Doyle said.
Not long ago, a new friend of Doyle’s, a vet who lives at the same facility, said, “Your willingness to go made all the difference.”
