James Pratt, 92, can still vividly see the smoke-filled skies over the Pacific and hear the sounds of the enemy aircraft darting in and out of view as he tried to get a shot from his gunner’s seat.
He recalls all those sleepless nights, wondering if this was the time an enemy submarine would get his ship in its sights.
He remembers the storms on the high seas with waves three times taller than any building he had ever seen growing up in Calhoun County.
He remembers Okinawa, Hiroshima, the Philippines.
“It runs across your mind every day, especially at night,” Pratt said. “There’s something about that you don’t forget.”
Pratt was raised in the Pleasant Hill Community. He got the call for military service in May 1944 when he was 18 years old and was sent to Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg for examination.
“We left there and went to Bainbridge, Maryland. I was inducted (into the U.S. Navy) there,” Pratt said. “I was only there about two weeks and I took pneumonia and lost my camp.”
He had originally requested to serve in the Army after being drafted, but he was placed in the Navy instead. Pratt’s father did all he could to keep his son from going into the service at all.
“They told him he had six boys and I was the oldest one, still young enough to go in,” Pratt said. “After I got my questionnaire to fill out I had taken the measles. I went to Dr. Hardin here in Calhoun City and he told my dad, ‘You don’t have anything to worry about, that’s those German measles. Just see that he don’t get wet. If he gets wet, he’ll probably take pneumonia.’ Well, the creek was up in Wofford Bottom so I went in swimming so I could take pneumonia and wouldn’t have to go,” Pratt said with a laugh. “But it wasn’t until two weeks after I was in the service I got it.”
After overcoming his illness, he went on to boot camp and got to come home for nine days that October.
“When I got back, they shipped me from Maryland to Seattle, Washington. I rode a troop train for seven days and nights.”
“When we got there, we were building a ship. Once we got it finished and christened we had to take training on board the ship going from Seattle to Astoria, Oregon for firefighting school. I was afraid to get on the ship because it was brand new and it was the first time I had ever been on the water.”
He recalled sitting below deck for some time when he asked one of his crew mates when he thought they might ship out.
“He said we’ll be getting off the ship in a few minutes,” Pratt laughed. “I couldn’t even tell we had left.”
They departed Oregon in February and began transporting troops and supplies to Guam and then back to California to pick up Marines to deliver for the invasion of Okinawa.
Pratt was an anti-aircraft gunner on his transport ship sitting behind a 20 mm gun.
“Suicide planes were the worst thing,” he said shaking his head. “I saw a ship just in front of us hit. That was scary to see. We picked up all of them we could.”
Pratt talked about the approach to Okinawa and how the sky was filled with smoke and enemy planes.
“You would be buckled in on that gun and if it was daytime you had a sight you could look through, but if it was at night you were just shooting the traces,” he said.
He talked about the pressure of knowing the fate of his ship could be hanging on him making the shot, keeping those planes from crashing into his deck.
“I can still see it and feel it,” he said thinking about the experience. “It was loud. We didn’t have earplugs back then, and I lost hearing in one of my ears because of it.”
Pratt said their ship ran in dangerous waters all the time with lots of enemy submarines.
“You never really could sleep at night because the whole time you were on the ship, you were subject to run into a mine or submarine. If you went to sleep, you weren’t sure if you would wake up or not. The constant stress was one of the worst parts.”
Another duty was standing watch from the crow’s nest high above the ship.
“I remember climbing that tall ladder to the top of the ship into a little basket,” Pratt said. “The ship would rock back and forth and it would feel like you were going to turn over. I didn’t like that at all.”
The storms at sea were different than anything he experienced in Calhoun County as well.
“We would drop anchor and just ride it out with the ship headed full speed ahead into the wind,” Pratt said. “The next day the ship would have drifted 50 miles.”
Not all the bad experiences were necessarily at war. Pratt recalled a time they docked at Manila and they were given some free time.
“They decided to let the guys on the ship have a break and they let half the ship go sight-seeing in the afternoon, coming back at 5 p.m. and then the rest could go from 5-10 p.m. I was in the second group and we walked all over the island, what was left of it, and we were on our way back when the SP got us and locked us up,” Pratt said. “Nobody was supposed to be out over there after 5 o’clock in the evening so they locked all of us in jail. I think there was about 60 of us. We finally got word back to the ship and they got us back at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.”
Pratt recalled the time they crossed the equator and all crossing for the first time had to undergo initiation.
“They saved up all the garbage, chicken guts and that kind of stuff and had them in a great big trough. They stripped you down to your shorts. They’d shave x’s in your head and then push you in that pool and dunk you.”
There were whippings and more involved as well.
“That was a bad experience for sure.”
Pratt also had duties his white crew mates didn’t have.
“On the ships back then there weren’t many blacks and they made us serve the officers,” he said. “We had 64 officers on the ship. They didn’t eat the military food. They bought their own food, and we had to cook it and serve them, but we also had to be on gun, too.”
Their ship had just loaded up with troops and were headed to Tokyo when they got word the war was over. It’s been more than 70 years since his World War II experience in the U.S. Navy, but it remains at the front of his mind every day.
“I’m 92 years old and I still remember all my military numbers to this day,” Pratt said. “I remember all of it. It’s always there.”
He returned home to Calhoun County where after a few years of farming he worked for E.L. Bruce Company for more than 22 years before leaving to work in Vardaman for two years. He returned to Bruce to work at Weyerhaeuser another 18 before retiring.
“I worked on that same spot (in Bruce) for almost 41 years,” he said. “I remember going up on those tall stacks of lumber and working the green chain.”
“I’m blessed to be here,” he said. “When I think about a lot of it I have to give credit to God. It was just you and the good Lord most of the time (out there on the ocean).”