May 2, 1945 - Morning - Caught a small sea bass. Noon - Got paid. 1400 - Me and Joe Morrow (from Georgia) left the ship in a small rubber raft to fish around the ship. The current was so strong though that it was hard to paddle through it and as we were drifting away, we decided to go to one of the small islands about a mile or two from us and fish from the corral reefs there. After a lot of hard paddling, me and Joe reached one of the reefs between two of the islands and got into water up to our hips to fish. I had the life raft and as one of my hooks was hung on some corral, I had to turn loose of the life raft to unhook it. I had no more than reached for my hook when Joe yelled that the life raft was drifting away. I turned loose of the hook and started swimming for the raft but the current was carrying it so strong I couldn’t catch it. When I saw I couldn’t catch the life raft I started back for the reef and as my shoes were dragging me down, I kicked them off and then just did make the reef. And there we were stranded out in the middle of nowhere with nothing (we had lost everything except Joe still had his big and pocket knife) and me without shoes on hard coral. No ships or boats ever come anywhere within a mile or two of this island, nevertheless, we tried to send semaphore for nearly an hour to a floating dry dock, which was the closest ship to us, but we couldn’t get anyone’s attention. When we saw we were doing no good that way, we decided to swim to the nearest island to spend the night as it was already nearly dark. Joe said he would swim across first as I was already tired from swimming for the raft and he would get a log and come back and meet me if I needed help coming across. It was a pretty long swim for me, but I made it without help to where I could wade in the coral on the other side. After we got to where the trees were with their roots growing like corn shoots in the water , which was about waist high, the coral turned into mud or quicksand. It felt like quicksand and we stayed out of it as much as possible. After we waded through mud and over dead and fallen trees and roots, which took us about 45 minutes, we came to some dry land with some coconut trees on it. After we had gone a little ways, we saw some smoke and as we didn’t know whether there were Japs on the island or not, we went up to it sorta easy like, but when we found that all the stuff in the garbage dump (which it turned out to be) was American garbage, we felt better and decided to stay there and we got a fire going to keep off the mosquitos with some of the ashes. While Joe went to look around I tried to climb a coconut tree to get us something to drink, but I picked too big of a tree to climb and when I got up there, I found I couldn’t hold on while I cut a coconut bunch off, so I had to give it up and come back down. So when Joe came back fom exploring without finding anything but a path that didn’t lead anywhere in particular as he could see; me and him went and cut some coconut leaves, which were about 10 or 12 feet long and made us a bed with them close to the fire. We both lay down, but one of us stayed awake all the time. We covered up with some of the coconut leaves to keep the mosquitos off. As we lay there we could hear some fish jumping around the reefs every once in a while and the parrots, there were a lot of them on the island, kept up a big noise. And once I heard some kind of animal messing around the fire and I jumped up all at once and saw one dog and heard another one run away. They run off a little ways and barked some and after that we never heard them anymore. Just as soon as it got daylight that morning, we got up and I managed to climb a smaller coconut tree and get us a coconut a piece to drink. I cut off a bunch of 6, but all of them busted but two, but this was about as much as we could drink and it satisfied our thirst. After that we went across the island to try to signal some boat or ship. We had a job getting across the island as there was a lot of thicket and some tall grass and when we got across we had to wade through a lot of trees, roots, and logs about 100 yards just like we came through coming to the island, except it was coral bottom instead of mud this time before we could get where we could see the ships. My feet sure were hurting as I had had to go through all this barefooted and the corral sure cuts the feet. I tried to make some sandals out of a piece of plank, but I couldn’t get them to stay on my feet. When we got out where we could see the ships we hollered and signaled and flashed a piece of tin in the sun and everything, but we couldn’t attract anyone’s attention. While we were waiting there the small boat from the cerebral isle which brings its garbage to dump where we slept last night (we learned this later). Came close to the island on its way to the other side to dump it garbage. When we saw it coming close we both started hollering and waving but although we thought someone looked, they never stopped. We didn’t think we would have time enough to go across the island and catch them while they were dumping their garbage so we decided to stay where we were and try to attrach them as they came back out. But when they came back they didn’t stop even though I don’t think they could have helped from hearing or seeing us. If they did see us I guess they thought we were natives or something. While we were there we saw our ship pull out and go somewhere else but we couldn’t tell exactly where. Well about 11 o’clock we decided we weren’t going to be able to attract any attention so we gave it up and decided to go back where our fire was and try to tie a few logs together and this evening when the tide goes in toward Morotai to drift over there. When we got back on the other side though we had a surprise in store for us for there was someone already there going over the junk pile. We weren’t sure for a minute whether they were Japs or natives, but when we got a better look we saw that they were natives so we went on up to them and they were mighty good natured. They had a dug out canoe and we talked them into taking us back to our ship for some flour and some more junk. There was three of them. We got in the canoe and took off. It was a nice big canoe and as it was so narrow didn’t hardly give any resistance to the water. Those natives sure did know how to handle it too. They set out with a smooth rhythmic stroke and didn’t stop until we got to where our ship had been tied up. When we got there we asked one of the ships where it had moved to and they told us that it was at the army dock on Morotai getting water. We told the natives to take us on down to the dock which was about 4 or 5 miles, but they didn’t much want to as they said that the harbor officials would lock them up if they caught them down there. So when we saw they wouldn’t go we got them to take us to a landing ship tank repair. We didn’t have anything to give them and they seemed to understand that although they didn’t like it much. When we got on the ship it was about 1 o’clock and we got a chief to get me a pair of shoes and we caught a LSM back to the dock. Just as we got to the dock our small boat pulled up and boy were they surprised to see us. They thought we had drifted to Halamahera and we got caught by the Japs. We found out that they had just missed us that morning and the skipper had got a mariner out looking for us, also some PT boats. They had turned our names and descriptions into the provost marshal and were fixing to send our teeth charts over so that they could identify us if they found us dead somewhere. When we got back to the ship everyone wanted to know what had happened and they were all proud to see us back alive. We were not very hungry as we had eaten some coconuts and but for a skin on my leg which I had got climbing the coconut trees and my sore feet we were ok. I went and got my leg bound up at sick bay and they put me in bed for a couple of days. Boy I sure was proud to be back…