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Military Oral History Interview Transcript
Bill Downs
13 October 2011
BD: Bill Downs
RC: Rachel Crisp
BD: September 14, 1931.
RC: Where were you born and raised?
BD: In a small town called Pinetops, North Carolina.
RC: Where is Pinetops?
BD: That’s near Tarboro and Wilson, between the two of them. Actually it's in the triangle
between Wilson, Tarboro, and Rocky Mount.
RC: What branch of the service did you join and what was your rank when you left the service?
BD: Well, I joined the United States Navy and whenever I was discharged four years later, I was
an E6 sonar man first-class.
RC: I didn't know that. Can you tell me a little bit about Edwards Military Institute?
BD: (Laughs) I can tell you a whole lot because I went from second grade through junior college
there and I was not living in the barracks with the other kids...because I was one of the few,
probably the only male on the campus that was living with their parents on the campus. So,
therefore, I had the run of five campuses.
There were two little girls' schools, the first through the fifth grade... or kindergarten through the
fifth grade and sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. And then they had a high school and junior
college for girls, and the commercial college. And with the boys, they had a junior barracks, the
kindergarten through the eighth grade, and ninth through the twelfth, high school, and two years
of college. And so I lived in whatever facilities that they had for us there on the campus at the
school.
Sometimes it was in an old abandoned dorm, one time in a dispensary, or the hospital (laughs) on
the campus. And just, one was a farm ranch; I mean a farmhouse, that some of the migrants…not
migrants, farm laborers lived in. We just moved and moved and moved (laughs).
RC: Jack Lucas, who was the youngest Medal of Honor recipient for World War Two.
BD: Yes.
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�RC: He went to school with you, right?
BD: Well, he was, he may have been... yeah, that would be World War Two. He was in the
Marine Corps and he had been a cadet at the junior barracks whenever I was over there. I went
over there, and would go marching with them and would go wherever they were going and all,
but I didn't wear the uniform until I was in the seventh grade. But all the other students lived in
the dorms. And so, I was probably a tenth grader before there was another “outsider” male in any
of my classes.
RC: And that was Jack?
BD: No, Jack was at the junior barracks and he was the commanding cadet officer over there.
RC: Okay.
BD: He was the cadet major when he was 13 years old. He was an eighth grader or when he was
15. I don't know how he got away from the campus but he went and presented himself as an 18
year old and entered the Marine Corps. He was a pretty robust young man.
RC: So he looked like he was old enough?
BD: Oh, he'd convinced them that he was. And I mean he had all the significant signs [laughs]
that he was that age. I mean he was a big, overgrown child and whenever they found out in the
Marine Corps, he'd already gone through his boot camp and had got to Pearl Harbor when they
realized that he was not 15 years old. So they put him in the brig and while he was in there,
opportunity came, he found a way out. And he stowed aboard a troop transport.
RC: Full of 5th Marines, right?
BD: What?
RC: Fifth Marines?
BD: I don’t remember which group it. I guess that was it. But he went with them and I believe it
was the battle of Okinawa or Iwo Jima.
RC: It was Iwo Jima that he won the Medal (of Honor) for.
BD: Ah, okay, Iwo Jima. And while he was there he...they got under close combat with the
Japanese and they were throwing hand grenades into the foxhole where he was... or in that area.
I think that he pulled... I know he pulled two, if not three, underneath him and smothered them.
Of course they exploded, but they were not nearly as powerful as the current hand grenades. But
he had shrapnel from his toes up in his neck and I saw him after he came back and after he had
received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He came over to the junior barracks and I think I
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�was probably 14 or 15. I just heard he was over there (laughs) and I went over there to see him.
And he pulled off his shirt and let me see the shrapnel (laughs).
RC: Wow.
BD: Jack had a girlfriend over at the girls' school and she was at our table, my mom's and dad's
table where...the same table where I ate. She was assigned to it so I had a double identity with his
girlfriend and him. But he did not marry her. I don't know who he did marry (laughs). He wound
up down in Texas, I think it was.
RC: Wow.
BD: But Jack appeared in the Congress of the United States when one of the Presidents was
having his State of the Union. The President had him stand up there and I said, "I knew that
fella." (laughs).
RC: So, being at Edwards…you grew up around the military, obviously…
BD: Yes.
RC: What made you decide to join the Navy?
BD: I had part of one semester at Wake Forest and two of the young men who were in the same
house that we were renting rooms in, they were not dorms, I mean, they had dorms, but they had
overflowed, so we were renting a room in a house. The last time I saw either one of these fellas,
they had been World War Two hospital corpsmen with the Navy. Did you know that the Navy
hospital corps supplied medical attention for Marines?
RC: Hmm.
BD: And so, last time I saw them they were wearing the marine greens. When I went into the
service at age 19, I had been sent to San Diego, and about...I don’t know what week it was,
maybe the fourth or fifth, they'd already got the grades back on your...sort of like intellect IQ
(test) or something (laughs). Then placed you into an occupation.
I had expressed an interest in electronics. I had been tested down in Wilmington and though I got
all the questions right on my application for the Navy, I didn't score so high on this because I'd
never had a physics class and didn't know what they were talking about when they asked about
resistive capacitors. They did qualify me for that but they told me, "Well, what would you think
about being a hospital corpsman?" I said, "I like a dry bunk and three squares a day. That’s why I
joined this outfit. I didn’t want to get put out there on the ground."
He said, "Well, I've got one here that you’d be interested in. I've got a 12-month school in San
Francisco at Hunter's Point. I think you can make it in fire control school." I didn't know what a
fire control man was and I thought in fire control they were going put you down in the fire room,
going to be an engineer down there and you couldn’t see daylight and I didn’t want to go down
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�there (laughs). And so I said, "I don’t think I'd like that." But he said, "I can get you in sonar,
maybe." I said, "That sounds good." And so as it was I got down at that time when we would go
out on trials and I'd be down below after I had a six-month school.
We would be down below the main deck and sometimes two decks below the main deck,
operating the equipment. So I didn’t really gain any height on it until we had our own ship
commissioned, when I went to sea. They commissioned it at Maryland Naval Shipyard. I had
been in the Navy not quite two years whenever they sent us up there. I was the first non-rated
man, I was a seaman. I just knew I was going catch all the dirty work until my other
shipmates...the other sonar men, we had five of us going into the same ship. And so I wasn't
lonesome, I knew who was with me (laughs).
RC: Yes.
BD: But, that’s how I got into sonar.
RC: So, I guess it was kind of dark on ship…being down there.
BD: Well, there was no outside light.
RC: Yes.
BD: And whenever they darkened ship at night and after we had Taps play, you didn't even have
any lights in the compartment except just the exit lights and maybe some type of low light. You
couldn't sit there and read or play cards or anything.
RC: Yes.
BD: So, it was a unique experience. I wouldn’t take anything for it. My whole career at sea, after
I was assigned a ship, was on the USS Vammen. It was a destroyer escort, number 644. I think
now it's probably been converted into some razor blades or something. Anyway, they abandoned
it, but it had been in World War Two and re-commissioned. We had been reequipped and had
top of the line sonar equipment. All of it. Everything on it had a serial number 1 or 1a or 1b or
something.
And, I mean, we were the envy of the rest of them because they put us on the same level with the
bridge...our sonar shack. I could open the hatch from our underwater battery plot, and I could see
daylight. And if I wanted to get somewhere out near the bridge, I could see daylight out through
(laughs) the pilothouse. But, as sonar man even when I was a seaman first class, I still was being
assigned for every detail except sonar, submarine, anti-submarine warfare to report to the bridge.
I was put on the engine order telegraph, which meant I operated the signals to the engine room
regarding what engines to either back up or go forward and all I was doing was just accepting the
command from the captain.
My first experience on the ship was…I had never pulled a watch there, but they came in and got
me out of the sonar shack and said come on out here, we need somebody to operate these. I don’t
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�know why they didn't have any, but they got me out there and the captain gave me a call. We had
195 turns on the propellers. We were getting ready to do a depth charge, a pattern of seventeen
300-pound depth charges, and were going to check the watertight integrity of the ship. Here they
put me out there to relay the commands to the engine room, and I had to repeat what the captain
gave me.
He’d gotten up to 195 turns on it and he said, "Increase turns five...five turns," and I repeated it. I
reached over and grabbed the first number to my left, I put two on it. And so it would look like
295 to the people down there and then I was going to put the two zeroes on it. And it wasn't but
seconds until the captain was in there and he wanted to know, "Who the hell is on this
machine?!" (laughs) That’s what he said! I thought, man this is it. I mean, I'm before the captain!
And the executive officer had told me what to do and he just said, "Calm down, Bill. Calm
down."
I didn’t take the captain on, but I did put an oath on him and responded with an oath. I said,
"Well, 195 and 200...195 and five are 200." That's when the executive officer said, "Just lay off,
Bill," (laughs) and so, from then on I was attached to that. Every time we went to ammunition
replenishment to transfer the sick and highlights, the lines for cargo. I was on the engine order
telegraphs and even as a first class petty officer. It was a unique experience.
RC: So, where were you? I mean, I know that you were in Korea.
BD: Yes, we sailed to San Diego was basically our homeport. We were commissioned in
Maryland at a naval shipyard and Vallejo, California. And I was there six months before they
commissioned us. In San Diego I think the 5th Naval District or something and that was our
homeport. From time to time we came back and were in such places as Long Beach, California.
We were there in the yards one time and on our way over the first time we were going to Korea,
we ran into a school of porpoises or something and they damaged both of our sonar domes. They
hadn't had that frequency before and they all decided that these fish were going to come and
investigate. I mean we were in the middle of a school of them. And they broke the dome on our
sonar and our sister ship who had the same type of sonar equipment.
I don't know if any of the other ships were injured. They put us both in the dry docks at Pearl
Harbor and we were there when the battlewagons were in repair. It was big enough to hold an
aircraft carrier and maybe two submarines, just space-wise (laughs) and our little ships in there,
didn’t make a shadow in there, it was that big. It was a real interesting thing to be there for 30
days before they got to the dome and all. I mean they didn't have any backup parts for it, you
know?
RC: Yes.
BD: They replaced that and we went on to Japan and then to Korea and that was like six or seven
months tour over there, that particular time. We came back to the states and by that time I was a
third class petty officer, an E4. Whenever we were getting ready to go the second time, they sent
us up to carry an ammunition ship, to escort it, and I couldn't figure out why in the world our
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�divisions…four ships in our division. All of the destroyer escorts were assigned to this ship. The
thing was sitting so high out of the water that it looked like it was carrying no cargo and here's an
ammunition ship with us with it. We got over to Japan and we wouldn’t stay over two or three
days in a port until they moved us to another one.
We went to Kobe, Sasebo, Yokahama, Yokosuka (laughs) and all around there. I went over a
month without mail catching up with us and I got my Christmas cards on Christmas Day. It was
an exciting thing but also a depressing one because my oldest sister had her first child during that
time and the child died within 48 hours. It was a Godsend because the child was severely
deformed, that is, didn’t have any bones, which are continuous bones. It was just one bone in her
arms and webbed hands and webbed feet and yet she wrote me one of the sweetest,
compassionate letters that I ever had.
She was just thanking God for having given her a child that she could claim as her own. That
was a unique Christmas gift that year while we were sitting in Sasebo.
Then we pulled duty in Korea waters. Most of the first month we were there or so, we pulled the
rest of the ships in our division in Wonsan Harbor, which is up in the area of North Korea that
they had overrun. We were blockading the harbor to prevent their shipping, that is, military
equipment and all in there. While we were working with English, Canadians, and Australians on
these group exercises, not exercises…but assignments. We would have to pull back and permit
the sailing vessels who were carrying merchant ships who were flying the English flag...British
flag, let them come into the Wonsan Harbor.
It was the goofiest feeling under the sun, that here we were blockading and shooting Sampans
and being bombarded by the guns all around there but whenever they came in we would permit
people that were doing business with them. You didn't know if they were carrying copper wire or
whether they were carrying ammunition or anything else.
RC: Yes.
BD: And they were merchant maritime ships. It was a goofy thing.
RC: So if they were flying the right colors you couldn’t stop and search them?
BD: No, no, no, we were ordered to permit them in. I mean it was sort of like doing business
with the enemy. Very much like our combat in these more recent ones where nobody was
committed to winning and had all the politically correct things that they did.
RC: Yes.
BD: But we had a unique thing to happen there while we were assigned to that first tour. We
went up on the coast of Korea, all the way up to Vladivostok, off the coast of Russia. I don’t
know why they sent us up there because they didn't officially have a war with Russia. But it was
cold (laughs) and when we were coming back from that area our captain, or one of the crewmen
spotted it.
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�We pulled in to about 1000 yards or 2000 yards from the shore and were going to shoot
projectiles at a train engine (on land). We got one or two loads up there (in our guns) and they
(the Russians) already pulled it back into the tunnel where they had it hidden. It was a decoy to
lure us in. They turned loose with 155 mm, 120 mm, and 90 mm guns. They were radar
controlled and all our little old guns (laughs) were hand cranked things and would get the
asthmas, or the degree for the shots, from the fire control men. Our radar did not control the
guns.
RC: Yes.
BD: They were hand-loaded and they didn't even have a turret around them like the 5-inch guns,
we were 3-inch that you would put the stuff out there by hand and plug it. Actually when we got
under fire we had a movie going in the crew mess hall and the captain didn’t even call General
Quarters. He left one crew there and the rest were watching the movie in the crew's quarters.
They didn’t even call it off. I mean if they lobbed bombs into there, we would have lost like 60
or 80 men.
RC: Is that just because he didn’t think that there were any…
BD: No, no. He was getting the ship out of there and he just put it into flank speed, which is
maximum. If he hadn't been a masterful seaman we would have been gone out there because they
were lobbing those shells within 90 to 120 feet of us…the explosives.
RC: Yes.
BD: He cut to where they had just laid down their last one (shell). The radar was calibrating
on…calculating on the basis of our last move. And so where they had fired the previous one, we
zigzagged out of there and ran for about 20 minutes or more. We couldn't even reach shore with
our two little popguns. We didn't even have a machine gun. Didn’t have anything but side arms
and some soldier arms and those two three-inch guns. And yet, whenever we got on the other
side of Korea, we went all the way up the Yellow River into China. We ran blockade for
Sampans over there.
We had a translator on the ship; a South Korean we knew was our ally. If we captured anybody
he would interrogate him aboard ship. One night we had one that they brought out to us. They
had captured this man and had shot him. He was in sad shape. They brought him into the
officer’s mess hall and did surgery on him, the hospital corpsman. The first class chief corpsman
did surgery on this fellow, and stopped the bleeding. He was transferred, but the thing…we were
here rescuing somebody who looked like he was dead and we’re going to put him in our hospital.
There were little things that you didn’t ever understand but they were a unique part of it. I
thoroughly enjoyed my career and what I did, even when I was in sonar school. We had access to
so many places and when we got liberty, or got the weekend off. We didn’t get those weekends
off but we did have to sign aboard ship. I got to visit all over California on weekends. I was
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�accessible to my sister up there in Vallejo, California and her family. And I really had some
precious moments with them because I only had time to see them once every two or three years.
RC: Yes.
BD: I got to see all the way up to Russian River in California just by having family out there and
they would take me for trips.
RC: When you were out there, did you have shore leave?
BD: Oh, well, like I said, we went to so many different ports in Japan. Sasebo, I guess was
probably the most frequent one we went to. It was a rather unimportant one but the Navy had a
lot of ships there and it was accessible to Korea. It was on the southwest side of Japan and like
Tokyo, Kyoto…that's a part of the aging process (laughs) at 80, I'm entitled to forget some
things. Sometimes it's convenient, but we got to travel to Tokyo several times. One time a
shipmate of mine, a fellow sonar man and I went up there. They were our enemy just four years
before…and here they were, open arms, hands extended to receive whatever cash we had
(laughs).
RC: Yes.
BD: But they had some of the most fantastic tour guides…riding rickshaws, you know, pedal
ones?
RC: Yes.
BD: I remember a fellow from Midland, Texas. He and I went through sonar school together and
were aboard ship together all the way to the day we were discharged.
RC: What's his name?
BD: Phil Roberts. He contacted me after over 50 years since we saw each other on our day of
discharge. He got on a kick to meet up with his old buddies and collect his shipmates (laughs).
He knew I was going go to Wake Forest, so he got from them the information that they had for
William Downs. Wake Forest had two or three of us with the same name (laughs). They were not
any kin to me, but they had the files. Someone said here is a minister in North Carolina.
He contacted me and the first thing he said, "This is Phillip Roberts and I'm trying to get up with
Bill Downs." I said, "Phil!" (laughs) He and his wife have been to visit Faye and I twice and we
even had greetings this Christmas from them. I can still remember the wedding gift that he sent
me and your grandmother.
RC: Really?
BD: Yes. It was a great big old frying pan, an electric frying pan. The biggest one that I ever
saw.
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�RC: Did you guys get in all kinds of trouble up there in Japan on shore leave?
BD: No, I never got on report for anything (laughs).
RC: I can’t believe you weren’t thrown in the brig for something!
BD: After three years they gave me a Good Conduct Award. And that's a misnomer because all
that meant was you hadn’t had to go up before the captain or have any charges brought up
against you. I sort of kept my nose clean. I did not engage in after-hours leave. And I don’t care
to relive any of that right now (laughs) particularly not before my granddaughter!
RC: Wow.
BD: But we got to go to places like the Shinto shrines and some of those things in places like
1400 to 1600 years old. I meant just to go to Kyoto and then later on to go to Tokyo, which
became the new capital. Kyoto was the first capital. There's so much there, that was an emblem
of it being the nation's capital. They moved the new one to Tokyo and they took the same letters
of Kyoto and used it to name Tokyo.
I don’t know what any of those words mean, but we got to go there and to Yokohama and to the
other one that was bombed by the atomic bomb. I got to see the ruin that was still left there and
that was eye-opening. I think they probably still have in Hiroshima the way it was then. They
still had a chimney from an old medical college...sort of like the “Leaning Tower of Pisa.”
It was warped that way with the atomic bomb. It was one of the things that were left there. The
medical school over there had some type of shell still left. It looked like it'd been a domed
building maybe three or four stories high and everything around there had been incinerated.
During World War II we flew bombers there to destroy an ammunition factory or something
using torpedoes or shells. It was a devastated area. We got the people in there; you could see that
they were scarred. And yet they were just as sweet as they could be…they had forgotten that we
had been enemies.
RC: So this was '51? '52?
BD: It was '52 and then of course I was back in there again in '54 for another tour. I can't
remember dates, but anyway we were back over there a second time while we were still having
to run gun blockades and still having to dodge floating mines, acoustical mines, and pressure
mines. There were times they would be floating by out there and lookouts would spot them and
backup so they wouldn't drift in to us and they would put riflemen out there to explode them.
RC: Yes.
BD: So it was a…
RC: So that was off the Japan coast? Or was that...
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�BD: That was off the coast of Korea.
RC: Oh, okay.
BD: Japan though, they were open arms to us. They were very congenial.
RC: Tired of war?
BD: What?
RC: They were tired of war?
BD: Yes. And they were grateful that we didn't drop another bomb on them, because they had
seen what war could do and they lived with it and desired to have peace.
RC: Yes.
BD: They really were relieved, just about every one of them I met. I didn’t ever meet up with
anybody who treated us hostile. But one thing still haunts me…and I think probably the reason
that I'm sympathetic with people who don’t have anything...is I was waiting for a boat out to all
the other ships; the last boat of the evening. I was standing there with another shipmate and we
both had an egg sandwich. When I got to the crust of the sandwich I threw the crust, and maybe
some residue of the egg into a trashcan and two grown men were fighting over that piece of
bread. I realized just how impoverished so many of them were. You could get anything you
wanted for a pack of cigarettes in port or on board ship. They would sew your clothes, put on
your stripes, and shine your shoes. Anything!
RC: Yes.
BD: Just for a few yen. A pack of cigarettes that cost me six and a half cents a pack, I could get
a whole carton for 65 cents, because we didn’t have to pay taxes on them. That's when I really
developed a habit (laughs) I was 19 years old before I ever started smoking. I could afford that.
Anytime I wasn’t asleep or eating or standing the watch, I usually had a cigarette. That was
pretty much the way of so many of us.
RC: Yes.
BD: I didn't really take up the habit of drinking coffee like some of them did. But I learned
afterwards.
RC: See, I find that hard to believe since you like your coffee now!
BD: Well, the thing of it was, I'd seen these fellas in there who were in Korea and they’d go
around holding their backs when they were walking. You know. Their kidneys were damaged
from 24-hours a day coffee...particularly whenever you were under general quarters. I mean,
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�there were times where you would be out on exercises and you may stay under general quarters
conditions for 36-hours or more.
Sometimes it was actual things instead of just exercises. But, on one occasion when we were
going over, we were going from Sasebo down to Hong Kong. We had a Russian submarine that
surfaced within about 300 feet of us on our port side. They came by and we waved at each other.
When we left San Francisco we got a contact…it was identified as an echo from a submarine. It
was a solid echo back. It was not a whale or something…they make some noises that let you
know that they are porpoises.
They followed along with us for I think 36-hours...something like that, and it decided to leave us.
We didn’t pursue it because we didn’t have any authority to challenge the submarine. But we
sent code, American code, and we would try to send a message to it and ask him to give us their
call letters or something or identify himself. But they wouldn’t answer us. But this (submarine)
crew up on the deck and were waving at us.
I thought this was a crazy war. We never did declare a war against Korea, yet we lost 37,000
men. It's still not considered a war. They just called it a “police action.” But I did have one
shipmate that was killed. He was assigned on temporary duty to our sister ship and they took a
shell...a projectile into their fire room, which is where the boilers are and it burst a 440-pound
line. You can imagine what the super heated water felt like.
When it was ruptured they were just like steam crabmeat…it was a tragic thing. He had been just
put over there for 60 days of temporary duty and that was the only one we had aboard there from
our ship that was killed. The only one we had on there who got a Purple Heart was a boy from
Alabama.
He and I used to go on liberties together. He was a clean-cut kid, he was straight-laced. We had
our bunks in the same compartment with the deck force and the gunner's mates. When we were
commissioned and I went aboard ship we were at operations with radar and radiomen and we'd
stand watches with them even over there in Japan. The first time in Korea for the radar men. We
would go in there and help them with the plotting and relaying messages to the Marine
emplacements in Wonsan Harbor.
They would give us requests for the coordinates for bombarding the Koreans. They chased a
rabbit pretty far (laughs) but we got under fire in Wonsan there one night they got a little extra
ammunition and they just decided to give us a thrill and we had to lay down. We had several
times to lay down smoke screens because they didn’t have the type Russian guns that they did up
there as when we were coming back from Vladivostok area. I assume that they were North
Koreans. They might have been Chinese. But anyway, when we got under fire that night we had
an executive officer who was being sent back to the states whenever we would get to port, two or
three days later he was going be sent back for his discharge.
He had been called up as a reserve, and he didn’t want to go back, he wanted to stay in. But
when we got under so much fire that time, and they were just emptying their guns, it was like
being fish in a bowl, the captain was in his officer's quarters and he gave a call up to the bridge
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�and said, "Put the officer of the day on. What kind of a sailor would run from a fight?" He came
up and took the command and relieved this man who was the executive officer (laughs) and just
days later he was going out.
I had two captains on there, both of them finished in the top five in their class at Annapolis. They
were the first ones that we had on our first trip over to Korea. One of them got to announce the
winner of the election between Stevenson and Eisenhower and when he got on the PA, he
announced that the winner was Eisenhower. You could tell it in his voice he was excited about it
happening that way because Stevenson was a Southern democrat from Tennessee and here
Eisenhower was the big hero of Europe and had a chest full of ribbons.
Everybody liked Ike. He would bring us sandwiches out there and things of this nature. If we
were in port he would come by and see that we were cared for…he was just a real champion. We
had any number of those. My anti-submarine warfare officer was a fellow, Couch, from
Alabama. The University of Alabama, Bama Tide. We had another officer from Texas; just
about as raunchy (laughs) they were real happy people. They would play tricks on one another
and one of the most notorious ones I knew was that this officer from Southern Cal, who had been
on the rowing team down there, he was a prankster.
He was always getting calls down from the captain and he got up one night... he was on duty and
he was going down to call his relief to wake him up. We were edgy when we were in waters with
floating mines. This was after we had seen the train. He took a flashlight and he came to his
relief and turned it on and came right at him and he said: "LOOK OUT FOR THE TRAIN!"
When he did, the fellow officer jumped up and he hit his head on the bunk above it and the
captain of course found out about it.
He restricted him to the ship for three or four days. But they were all friends of mine. We didn’t
go on liberty with them, because that was a “no-no.” But aboard ship we were just another one
with them. It was enjoyable. When I was there in the sonar gang we had a real skillful man who
was our senior petty officer and had 18 years in. He had been an instructor at the sonar school
and out in the fleet and he was well respected by many of them out there because he'd trained
them.
He was sent back and assigned other duties and at that time I was second and I later advanced to
first-class and I was the senior petty officer in the sonar gang. I got within two months of the
time I was supposed to be discharged, they sent a chief sonar man there...one rating higher than I
and he came in there with a chip on his shoulder. He was a pain in the neck. He would go into
the chief’s mess hall and would get up and leave him. They wouldn't even sit in there and eat
with him. He was just ornery.
RC: Yes.
BD: He came up there one day and I was having the 8pm-12am watch that night on the
quarterdeck. We were in port at this time he said, "Downs, come out here. I'll take you up here
on the quarter…up on the deck, and you can help me rig a stage. And clean the sides of the
underwater battery plot and the sonar shack." We were having some kind of inspection the next
12
�day. Phil Roberts was with me in our sonar shack. We were the only two in there and so
whenever he said that to me, Phil went over and turned the latch on to the thing that locked it
through the bolt on the door, so nobody could come in. And I didn't ask him why.
But this man kept mouthing off to me and I told him I said, "Look, I'll go out there and help you
rig it and help you bring the water and cleaning materials but I'm not going over that side. You've
had all day to get one of these seamen to go out over the side. Whatever it takes, but I'm not
going over. You get out there and I'll hand it to you." And that's when Phil was certain we were
going go to fists with each other.
This man would challenge everybody under the sun. But that day with two of us in there and the
door locked, he didn't challenge. I said, "Phil, what in the world did you do that for?'' He said, "I
thought you were going to get in a fight with him and I was going swear that he took the first
punch at you and we weren't going have anybody to swear otherwise."
He was going to bear testimony to the fact that this chief had taken me out on it. But he went and
got some seaman apprentice and stuck him over the side to clean the thing. This was already past
the work hours and he'd decided then that it was time to do something that he'd been told to do
that morning or something and he was going put on me. He was indebted to me because he
didn’t know the equipment that we had.
He had never even worked with it when he was assigned to us. He didn’t know how to maintain
it and they had to get ready to go back to Guam. They were going to Guam so I was working on
my equipment, tuning it and checking the supplies and things for us. I guess he decided that he
would eat crow and we didn’t really have a congenial relationship after that, but he didn’t ride
my back again.
I'm not trying to say I was an antagonist, but I just had all of him that I could take [laughs]. I can
still remember one night, we had a young man in our compartment, after they moved us from the
operations division, and they put us in the gunnery division... all the sonar men were in the
gunnery division, now you imagine!
The reason they did it was because we had to maintain our depth charges and the head thrown
weapons and forward patterns for weapons and things. We had to maintain them so we had to
work with the gunners' mates because we had to take the primers out of the depth charges. The
depth charger was fragile, because your hand friction could set those things off. It was pretty
highly explosive stuff.
So they put us in the gunnery division and we were in there with the deck force...that's the boats
and gunner's mates. We had had a compartment just for the operations division and they put us in
there with all the engineers that came through the same compartment. So I got to know
everybody on that ship. The first time they sent us over there, when they commissioned the ship,
it could accommodate 187 men and maybe something like 15 or 17 officers. But they assigned us
over 300 on that thing. All of them didn't have bunks, you know, it's sort of like being on a
submarine where there're hot bunked.
13
�You get out and somebody else gets in. It was a mess for that first trip over there. I mean, we had
over 100 more people on that thing than what we were entitled to. I don't remember now, but it
was a whole lot. I made some friends there. I have had three of them to contact me. Two of them
came to visit me. And some of those fellas are trying to write a history. It was a unique
experience, all of it. And I'm glad I was there because it made possible for me to come back and
finish my college education.
RC: Yes.
BD: And it pretty well covered my expenses. If I had gone ahead with my medical school…I
was accepted in '57, the fall of '57, and I left in about February of 1958. I would have been in the
class of '61. I had all of that taken care of by my GI Bill, basically. But what happened…when I
withdrew, being under duress to do it, they considered that I had abandoned college. If you were
out over three or four months or something in your studies in pursuit of your degree, you lost
your GI Bill. And I didn’t have enough money to continue.
RC: Yes.
BD: And that's how I left med school and the Lord called me to something else.
RC: Well, I was going to ask…did your time in the service have any influence on you becoming
a minister?
BD: I'll tell you what. I've never had any experience that I didn't see entering into plans for my
life. I meant by that that the two most influential courses that I ever took as far as strengthening
my convictions about my Christian faith, was the study of embryology in preparation for school.
When I came back out of the Navy in January of 1956…'55 (laughs) I'll get it right in a
minute...when I came out in '55, I had less than a week at home before I enrolled at Wake Forest.
I couldn't enter into the chemistry courses...basic chemistry courses because they didn't have a
first semester course, so the chairman of the biology department was my faculty advisor and he
said, “I see that you want to go to med school. You're going to need two courses and you can do
that this semester, embryology and comparative anatomy. Both of them were rigorous classes
and I thought…I don’t need to think about this when this man is the head of the department. He
will have to okay the recommendations in med school for the biology department. Actually you
had to go to the chairmen of biology, chemistry, and physics, and get departmental interviews
with the faculties and a composite recommendation for med school.
So I took him at his word and I got in the class and took embryology and that was one of the
most revealing courses I ever took. The first trimester of pregnancy was not only the discussion
of the growth that was happening but the microscopic scale of the human embryo in the first
trimester of pregnancy. When I encountered that passage of the scripture from the psalms that
said we are fearful and wonderfully made…everything I saw gave me insight to nature, as well
as, in babies and everything else. So we're God's children.
14
�Then I took neuro-anatomy in med school. That’s the whole nervous system, the special senses
and all. You study the human eye and the human ear, taste, the special senses. I don't know how
anybody can accept Darwin's theory on the birth of a child. I don't...it boggles my mind that they
could swallow whole the theory of evolution because there’s too much evidence of a divine hand
in the creation of a child. I believe with all my heart the opening chapters of the Book of
Genesis.
That that's the way the Lord intended it to be…that he honored us by giving us privilege. So I've
been a champion for opposing abortion on demand. I know what spontaneous abortion is. I saw it
with Sarah Catherine and her first pregnancy. No, I'm sorry, it was probably her third. She had
miscarried twice. But one of the most moving things that I had in med school was a visit to a
nursing home, a rest home, with my brother-in-law who was a Baptist minister.
We visited a woman…one of his parishioners from Asheville. She was probably 94 or 96 years
old. Then I went as a student to an autopsy... and there was this woman that I had seen a month
before. That was when I came face to face with…what I mean, that woman was ready for it. My
last autopsy…there was a kid who'd endeared himself to everybody and he was fighting for life.
All the nurses and doctors would come by and they cooed at him. He wasn’t an infant, he was a
young child. For my last autopsy here was this little fella. That may have entered into my loss of
desire to pursue (laughs) medicine.
RC: Yes.
BD: Its all those things that I studied there. I appreciate having studied physiology,
pharmacology, and neurology. I don't feel like any of it was wasted. I have a greater appreciation
for life and a greater desire to see people have quality in their life, whether it's materially or
education.
RC: Do you think that if you had decided to be a corpsman, it would have changed your...
BD: I probably would have been drafted into the Marines if I had finished corps school.
RC: Yes.
BD: Because that was the big demand during that time. The corpsman. Just about anybody who
was a corpsman...even a career man...they pulled time with the Marines.
RC: Yes.
BD: That’s the reason so many of these gentlemen received the Congressional Medal of Honor. I
think one of the first recipients in the current conflicts over in Afghanistan, was a hospital
corpsman with the Navy.
RC: Yes.
BD: But he was with the Marines…
15
�RC: D you think that if you had been a corpsman you would have finished med school or do you
think you would have stayed in?
BD: No, no, I probably would’ve been soured of it (laughs) if I had stayed in.
RC: Yes?
BD: What?
RC: Yes, I can imagine.
BD: We had a doctor assigned to us one time when we were...we had what they called the
division commander of our division, which were eight destroyer escorts. They put him aboard
our ship and so he was higher ranked than our captain, but he had command over eight ships in
this division. I was going to throw out a tidbit but I can't remember now what I was chasing. See
that's what I told you was going happen (laughs). I hit a snag and stop. Oh, but the doctor that we
had aboard ship…he was an obstetrician gynecologist...on a ship that didn't have a woman on it!
That's where the navy had put him. I got to talk to him a whole lot while I was an enlisted man.
He would be out on the deck and coming around. We were not permitted to go down there just
anytime during the day and he didn’t have to unless you were sick. Then they would transfer you
to a vessel that could take care of you.
RC: Yes.
BD: He was out there and he wasn’t even in the same milieu that the rest of us were in (laughs). I
don't even remember whether the fella smoked or not, but he was like a fish out of the water.
You can imagine spending that much time and getting an education and doing a residency after
four years of med school, an internship, three years of residency and they stick you out there on a
destroyer escort with a bunch of dirty old men. Those were some of the things that I knew I
didn’t want to do.
RC: Yes.
BD: (Laughs) But I did do vascular research so that was really not in the Navy that was after I
left med school.
RC: Did you do your four years in the navy and leave or…
BD: No, I didn't stay in. I had an opportunity to reenlist. In fact, I was going tell you that Phil
Roberts, you know, I may have mentioned, that both of us had the opportunity to apply for
officer's candidate school on the basis of our rank...I mean our rating and our grades on our
competitive scores.
RC: Yes.
16
�BD: But no, I didn't have a desire to want to stay in there till I was 1962. I didn't want to be an
admiral.
RC: You would make a good one.
BD: (laughs) No, I wouldn't! I'd have been an ornery cuss! I'd been so miserable with the service
that by the time I got that I would have never made it.
RC: You know what I've never asked you?
BD: What?
RC: If you’ve had a nickname?
BD: Oh, I've had handfuls of nicknames. Bill's a nickname?
RC: Well, yes. But I mean like...
BD: When I was in boot camp, I went in there with a group of men from North Carolina. There
were eight of us who were sworn in the same night. They took us right from the office in Raleigh
and put us on a train and sent us to Atlanta, Georgia, and on up to San Diego. There
were four of us. One of them was a student at NC State, another one had been to UNC, and one
was seeking admission into ROTC at Duke. So we had a Dukey, a Tar Heel, and a Wolfpacker.
And they found out I had gone to Wake Forest for the better part of one semester. They knew
that my heart was there, so they got to calling me “Deacon.” Everybody in my platoon when I
was in boot camp knew me because I was the mail clerk. I wasn't tall enough to be the head of
my column; I had two taller men ahead of me. But I would always get sent out early to go get the
mail for them and then come back and call mail. Then they placed on me responsibilities for
accounting for every rifle making certain that they were all still available, that they were still in
their possessions.
So each morning I would go around to each bunk and see if they had their rifles and get a head
count. I had a lot of opportunities so they got to calling me “Preacher Deacon.” Some of them
didn't know what a deacon was so they called me preacher. I thought isn’t this something? That's
how ironic…because that's where I wound up!
RC: Yes.
BD: But I didn't have any intentions of it. I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was six years
old. I did before even my brother Posey…
RC: So you wanted to be a doctor, but you went into the Navy?
BD: What?
17
�RC: Was the Navy to pay for your school?
BD: Well, we had what you call the GI Bill.
RC: Yes.
BD: And if you’d been in the military and pulled as many years in there as I did, you would have
36-months of schooling paid for.
RC: Yes.
BD: And I finished the rest of my college in three semesters and two summers. I went every
summer session and finished in August. It was on the 11th of August, and on the 18th of August
I married Patsy. I entered med school on the first day of October. So, I didn’t have any real break
in over four years.
RC: Yes.
BD: After I came out of the Navy, I failed the six weeks portion of the three-trimester course and
I knew it was going cost me a year to make it up. So I just asked for permission to withdraw.
And when I applied for readmission I didn’t have the opportunity to get in. They had it filled up
with transfers from other schools and from the University of Havana when Castro took over
down there. So I did vascular research for 26-months and then went to work with Roche
Laboratories as a medical service representative...or as a detail man as they call it. I did that for
nearly five years before I went into the ministry. But all that took care of the other.
RC: Yes.
BD: It's sort of a circuitous way to get there.
RC: Well, you got there.
BD: Having gone through seminary…I came out and decided to go to truck driver training
school. After I served churches for 25 years (laughs) and came to Johnston Community College
here in Smithfield, I finished my eight week course...eight hours a day...40 hours a week, driving
trucks and tractor trailers. I got my class ACTL there at age 59 (laughs) and so I spent those last
seven years of employment driving for hire.
My first job was with a company hauling rock and asphalt. And sometimes I would make over
76 hours, that was the most I ever had in one week. Some of drivers had as much as 92 hours in a
week. They didn't have to keep a log that you have to for interstate trucking. As long as you
could stay out there and drive a truck they were paying, you could stay out there and work.
So I did that and then whenever they decided to shut down for winter because they didn’t have
the equipment that they do now for keeping the asphalt warm, they let us all go. The ones that
18
�were hauling asphalt, they just kept a few of them to haul other handling that they had for
removing trash or whatever it was. But I got a job with the florist and my job with them was with
a wholesaler.
After about three months of that, I went to work with them for 90 days or so. One of the
customers told the owner not to send me there anymore. They said I was rough-handed with the
flowers and she spent time picking out the ones she wanted, she didn’t want me to bruise them
(laughs). So I had to find me a job. I went over to the Mayflower Trucking Company and the
man who was my first driving instructor; he went with me on my first trip in a truck.
He had gone to work with them in charge of the drivers with the fleet and hired me. I was the
oldest one in my class and because he was too young, he was 19, and I was 60 (laughs). Mutt and
Jeff or the white headed man and the kid. It was a neat experience. I worked for them and the
City of Raleigh. I've done a little bit of a lot of things. Never was master of any of them. But I
love my youngins and my grand-youngins and I’ve got a whole heap of them. Faye and I
received grandchildren and great-grandchildren and children from all over the world. They’ve
asked us to be their papas and mamas and grandparents.
RC: Yes. Well, is there anything else that you want to talk about that we haven't touched on?
BD: Well, I didn't tell you about my sporting. I did play...did go out for football in sonar school.
RC: You did not!
BD: Yes I... I didn't tell you about it?
RC: No! Tell me about it.
BD: While I was in sonar school they had tryouts for it. And I had played in four football games.
I went out for football and by the end of the fourth game we didn’t have enough able-bodied
people out there to even go. I walked through the drills, you know, in the week. We only had 27
to start off with and we got down to where we had less than 22. We lost ten of them. We
cancelled the rest of the season and so I went for an end and a place kicker. I stayed with it
through the first four games of the season and realized it was a matter of cronyism. I mean, it
really was.
The coach had evidently been a good player for Michigan State but he was a “good old boy”
with the others…some of them had been with the fleet…the first class petty officers and chiefs.
He had been in there probably 12 or 15 years. Those who come back out of the fleet to go there
were not necessarily in the training commands. At that particular time they had been in
there…they played together. They would come out there and go through the motions. But many
of them would not even come to practice.
They came out there dressed on Friday night or Saturday afternoon or evening...whenever we
had games. And you wouldn't see them again during the week. They knew the plays, they
thought, and the old coach would put them in there. And after the fourth game I said this is a
19
�losing battle and it opened up that I could go to a ship, a destroyer escort, right in the town of
Vallejo, where my sister and her hubby lived out in California. They put me in close contact with
my family. So I bumped a fella who was lower-ranked in my sonar class than I get on there
(laughs) and so that’s how I got on the Vammen.
RC: Wow.
BD: And so I mean I chose it. I mean, they gave us choices on the basis of our positions in the
class. I did it because it was in Vallejo and I knew it was there and hadn't been commissioned.
And it really made a difference.
RC: Yes.
BD: I made some lifelong friends. I've had two of them that I have maintained some contact
with. Two of them were really buddies of mine went on liberties while I was in sonar school. But
they were with me for two years before they went into submarines. One of them came to visit
Faye and me before we were married. We were engaged.
He called us from the Outer Banks and said he had never been to North Carolina before. So he
said while he was here he would come by and see Downs (laughs). No, I had some fantastic
buddies in the Navy that I wouldn't take anything for. That picture up there, I think I did that on
my first liberty in Sasebo, Japan. The Japanese artist that used colored pencils…it looked pretty
much like I did but I had a skinnier facial features and a longer nose than I think I've got
(laughs).
RC: I love you. Thanks for doing this with me!
BD: You’re welcome.
RC: An hour and thirty five minutes!
BD: Oh, my goodness!
RC: I could sit here and listen to you talk for another two hours if you wanted to.
BD: No, I'll tell you what...Faye told me not to be verbose (laughs).
RC: I would love nothing more than to sit here for another two hours and listen to you talk.
BD: No, I've got all kinds of tales about my shipmates.
RC: Well, if you want to tell them, I'd love to hear them.
BD: (Chuckles) No, well, not for the record.
20
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Appalachian State University American Military History Course Veterans Oral History Project
Description
An account of the resource
Each semester, the students of the American Military History Course at Appalachian State University conduct interviews with military veterans and record their military experiences in order to create an archive of oral history interviews that are publicly accessible to researchers. The oral histories are permanently available in the Appalachian State University Special Collections. The project is supervised by Dr. Judkin Browning, Associate Professor of History at Appalachian State University and all interviews are transcribed by the student interviewers.
Copyright Notice:
Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project’s audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Veterans Oral History Project, University Archives and Records, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC).
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed.
Downs, William
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview.
Crisp, Rachel
Interview Date
10/13/11
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
1:38:18 min
Copyright
Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project's audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used.
Tag
Pinetopes, Edgecombe, Navy, Edwards Military Institute, Jack Lucas, Congressional Medal of Honor, sonar, USS Vammen, destroyer escort, Korea, San Diego, Japan, Wonsan Harbor, China, Wake Forest, Tokyo
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with William Downs, 13 October 2011
Subject
The topic of the resource
Korean War, 1950-1953
Downs, William
Veterans
Personal narratives, American
United States
Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Rachel Crisp interviews Bill Downs about his experiences in the United States Navy during the Korean War. He grew up on campus at the Edwards Military Institute, and eventually began working in sonar aboard the USS Vammen.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Downs, William
Crisp, Rachel
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a title="UA.5018. American Military History Course Records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/167" target="_blank">UA.5018. American Military History Course Records</a>
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
20 pages
Language
A language of the resource
English
Edwards Military Institute
sonar
US Navy
USS Vammen