© Clinton County News

Oscar Staples

In Thursday, July 2, 2009 issue

Like most surviving World War II veterans, memories of the years they spent defending our country fill their now idle time.

Some are willing to talk about those overseas experiences while they served in one or another branch of this nation’s armed services. Others never mention the experiences because of the unpleasant memories that are conjured up.

Oscar Staples is one of those few surviving veterans from the war to end all wars who now lives in Clinton County.

Recently, Staples told Clinton County News Editor Al Gibson that he had an interesting story to tell about World War II, and during a later interview at his kitchen table, he recalled one experience in November, 1944 that has, in more ways than one, haunted him his entire adult life. On November 10, 1944, a large ammunition ship, the USS Mount Hood, exploded while moored at Seeadler Harbor, near Manus Island, just northeast of New Guinea.

The source of the explosion that destroyed the ship and resulted in a great loss of life, has long been argued, and after an extensive investigation by U.S. Navy officials, it was officially determined that the explosion had been caused by an “accident” on board - the apparent mishandling of the explosives being stored on the Mt. Hood, in conjunction with what Naval officials said were at least eight separate “unsafe procedures and practices” revealed by the investigation into the ship’s demise.

Even the Navy’s investigation ended somewhat inconclusive as to the exact cause of the explosion, noting that the “possibility of enemy action appears to have been remote”, leaving alive the slight chance that the Hood’s demise was perhaps at the hands of an enemy force. That possibility, regardless of how remote the Navy’s investigation determined it might be, is exactly what Staples is sure happened - and he was there when the explosion occurred.

Now 82 years old, Staples lives a simple life by himself in his home in the northeastern Clinton County community known as Cumberland City. Still very alert and even able to drive to town whenever the need arises, Staples is afflicted with one handicap that quickly becomes evident during any conversation.

He is completely deaf in one ear, and through the use of a hearing aid, he has only a slight level- what he describes as about one percent - of hearing in the other ear.

It was on that day in the Seeadler Harbor that his hearing problems began, and have steadily worsened in the 65 years that have followed. The explosion of the Mt. Hood is just one of many World War II memories that Staples freely talks about when prompted to recall his days in the U.S. Navy. Some of those memories bring a smile to his now wrinkled face. Others bring pauses in his voice - and even a few tears.

His recollection of that day when the ammunition ship exploded is one that causes him to pause several times as he recants just what happened across the harbor from where he was standing on November 10, 1944.

“That’s a long story,” Staples began as he recalled his experience one day recently while seated at his kitchen table. “I hadn’t said anything about that in years.”

The USS Mt. Hood was lost that day, and along with it a host of other vessels moored nearby and as many as an estimated 1,000 serviceman’s lives, most of whom were on the ship itself and a host who were aboard ships moored in the vicinity.

In Staples opinion, those men who were lost in the explosion were not only cheated out of the rest of their normal lives, but also out of the status of having been killed in an action that was deserving of a purple heart.

While there are several accounts that include eyewitness versions with varying causes for the Mt. Hood explosion, Staples has for the past 65 years, held fast that the ship was destroyed by a two-man Japanese submarine commonly referred to as a “midget” submarine.

Now 82 years old and retired from a long career as an equipment operator with the Operating Engineers union organization, Staples has many, many memories about his war-time years, and like most WWII veterans, many aren’t pleasant memories.

Two experiences in particular, have haunted his memory for the more than six decades that have gone by since his time serving our country. Staples served in the U.S. Naval fleet during the war, entering the service at the still youthful age of just 17 years.

“I went into the Navy when I was 17 - I turned 17 in December of ’43, and I went in, in January of ’44,” Staples said at the beginning of his interview. “I went overseas sometime near the end of 1944 and I was aboard a LST (landing ship tank).”

Staples said he was in charge of a 12 man crew and while en route to the area near New Guinea where the Mt. Hood was harbored, the ship he was on made several stops along the way.

“They dumped us in this little harbor, and we were waiting for a cargo ship to come in and drop a cable for us to hook on so they could tow us up to the Philippines,” Staples said.

Staples said it was then that he was given orders to take a smaller vessel and meet some crew members from the Mt. Hood to collect mail. “The Mt. Hood was sitting there in the harbor and they send word to our ship that they had some mail that another ship had dropped off, so I went to meet the mail boys,” he said. “While I was there, I was sitting there on the dock and I seen this small boat come down the gangway and it started in toward the bank - then about halfway out, I looked up and the Mt. Hood went up (in the explosion)”

Staples recalls that when he first saw the Mt. Hood explode, he had time to stand up, and a split second later, he found himself being hurled through the air from the force.

‘I had one of these hard hats on and I had time to stand up, then it knocked me for a long ways . . . I really went for a long ways,” Staples remembered. “I always thought it was kinda funny, that I could hear the loudspeaker on the Mt. Hood make an announcement ‘now hear this’ and just then it was ‘boom’ and it blew up.”

Staples went on to say that in a few minutes, the small boat carrying the mail he had been waiting on from the Mt. Hood, reached the place where he was waiting, and it was then that he was told that the crew had seen a torpedo in the water just seconds before the explosion.

“Some say ‘no, there was no torpedo,’ but I was talking to the pilot and he told me he definitely seen a torpedo in the water,” Staples said. “He was standing up steering the boat. I talked to two or three other guys who was there and they saw the torpedo too.”

At the time of the catastrophic explosion, the USS Mt. Hood was carrying some 3,800 tons of ammunition aboard, including bombs, projectiles, fixed ammunition, rockets, powder and aerial depth bombs. The official investigation determined that the storing of incompatible items was likely a factor in the demise of the ship, along with the likelihood that the materials were being roughly handled in all parts of the ship.

While all aboard the ship, as well as aboard ships in the immediate area, were killed, there were a handful of Mt. Hood crew survivors, such as those crew members on the smaller vessel that were delivering the mail to Staples when the explosion occurred.

Other witnesses nearby reported that there were two explosions, an initial smaller explosion likened to that of a single bomb, followed a few seconds later by the larger explosion that destroyed the ship.

Reportedly, the flames and resulting smoke from the event extended about 1,000 feet in radius and rose to a height of an estimated 7,000 feet. “I went back to my ship and I tried to explain to the crew what had happened,” Staples said. “We got ready to go up to the Philippines then and they told us all of the ships were damaged and no one could take us.” Staples remembered that eventually a Liberty ship towed them to an island where they waited for instructions for their next duty.

“They towed us out and about half way there, the cable broke, so we were floating out in that deep water for awhile,” Staples said.

He said his crew was finally successfully towed to the island and it was on that first night, that he experienced one of the few humourous experiences of his war-time service.

“They told us there were at least 60,000 Japs on the island, and they told us to put guards out for the first night,” Staples said. He remembers that later in the night, while standing guard aboard his LST, he heard splashing sounds in the water and he could see someone rowing a boat, but in the darkness, he couldn’t make out who was operating the small boat.

“They was coming closer to my boat and I told my men ‘don’t shoot until I shoot’ so I yelled ‘stop’,” Staples said. “I didn’t want to shoot nobody - I was just 17 years old, you know.” It was then that Staples learned the identity of the pilot of the small boat.

“About then I heard some guy out there say ‘Hey Joe, you want girls - $2,” Staples said as he let out a loud laugh, one of the few times he laughed during the interview. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and about then, I heard all of this rustling going on behind me. In the Navy, you form a line for everything you do, so I looked around and my men were forming a line behind me. I said ‘get out of here, I don’t want no more to do with you - no more to do with this.”

Staples said he still can’t believe how close the subject came to getting killed that night - all for $2.

Most of his war recants weren’t of the humorous nature, and when he came to the part where he watched his “skipper” die right in front of him, he had to pause several times before finishing the story.

“We were putting a tank on at six in the morning, and we went into the beach and the skipper or ensign, we had, God bless him, he got cut right in half,” Staples said. “We ran up on the beach and found an Army section in a tent and they took one look at him and said there was nothing they could do - he started crying for his mama.

“He was a good friend - if you ever have what you call a ‘back-up where you trust someone sitting to your back so no one can sneak up on you, he was my ‘back-up’,” Staples said. “That’s how close we were.”

Later in that same tour, Staples and the unit he was with were dispatched to Manila.

He described his training with the Naval amphibious unit as being what in the modern day Navy would be the equivalent to the SEALS.

“We got orders to go to Manila and we were told that we were going to be doing what we were trained for - we were going into the Santo Thomas University to rescue some prisoners,” Staples said. “The prisoners were officers and their wives and kids.”

Staples went on to say that the rescue effort was a successful mission, and he made a couple of trips in to bring out those being held.

“We brought back a few women and some kids, not young kids, but older kids, and we took them out and put them aboard an AP8 that was going to Australia,” Staples said. “Then the USS Mercy came in to the harbor - it was a big hospital ship - so they let us come into the harbor and they took all of the prisoners out to the hospital ship.”

In his next wartime mission with the amphibious unit, Staples was witness to another sight that would forever be etched into his memory. We went to a place called the Walled City - it was the only place they were fighting there, but there was dead people laying everywhere,” Staples said.

Staples said that among the dead bodies, were countless babies that had been killed. Locals in the area reported to his unit that Japanese soldiers would take the babies and swing them up into the air, catching them on their rifle bayonets.

“Come to find out, they were killing these babies because they were from women they (Japanese soldiers) had raped and these babies were half Japanese and half Filipino, and they didn’t want to be accused of raping women,” Staples said, pausing for several seconds as he recanted the story and using his hand to wipe tears from his face. “That’s the way they killed the little babies.”

Staples said he made friends with one young girl while he was in the Philippines, and he eventually went to the family hut to meet the young girl’s family.

It was there that the young seaman witnessed another harsh reality of how the war had affected the residents of that Philippine community. “I went with her to the thatch hut she lived in, and when I got inside, there was pieces of hair and bones stuck up all over the walls of that hut,” Staples said. “She went over and touched each one of them and each one was someone in her family. The Japs had thrown hand grenades into them and blown them all up. She’d go to one patch of hair, and that was ‘Grandma’, another patch of hair, and that was ‘Mama’ ”.

“I felt so sorry for those kids, you know,” he said. Staples remained in the Navy after World War II had ended, leaving the armed services branch in 1949.

One of his last missions after the war included an assignment in the Philippines where he was part of a group of sailors who retrieved money off of the ocean floor in a harbor there.

“Before the war had started, they had gone out into the harbor and dumped pesos - bags and bags and bags - millions of pesos into the harbor to keep the Japs from getting them,” Staples said. “We went out there with divers and the whole bottom seemed to be covered with bags of pesos. They wouldn’t let me keep even one for a souvenir, but anyway, we got all of the money off of the bottom of the harbor.”

Staples said he returned to the United States in 1946, and had a hard time adjusting to the “quiet” away from the battle. Remaining in the navy, he requested to be returned to the Philippines, but was never assigned to a return trip.

With all of those memories going through his head for the past sixty plus years, it was the idea of all of those who died in the Mt. Hood explosion that have haunted him the most, knowing that those 1,000 men never received the honor they deserved.

“I felt so sorry for those men on the Mt. Hood - it killed lots and lots of men, and even men who weren’t aboard that ship,” Staples said. “They wouldn’t even give these guys a purple heart, which they should have had.” Staples research into the event has produced materials in regards to the official U.S. investigation into the explosion.

Those documents note that the ship was likely destroyed due to an accident in regards to the handling of the ammunition, the soldiers aboard who were killed were determined to have not been killed due to enemy actions.

Staples is convinced, however, that the Mt. Hood was destroyed not due to an accident, but rather from enemy actions. “It was a torpedo,” Staples said.

He’s also convinced that being in the vicinity of the Mt. Hood explosion contributed to his eventually going deaf, as well as to other episodes that followed in the months after that event.

“It made me go deaf,” Staples said. “After that, my ears would be ringing and I’d black out and forget things. I would think back, and there would be a month or so that I just couldn’t even account for - maybe it was just my youth and having seen these things, but I’d just black out.”

Still, he stresses that he wanted his story told not for his own benefit or notoriety, but because of those 1000 lives he witnessed being snuffed out in that single explosion on that November day in 1944.

“This has bothered me ever since it happened. That, and over in Manila, seeing those babies.” Staples continued, pausing once more for several seconds as his eyes filled with tears again. “Those boys on that ship, they deserved more than they got and that’s all I care about, that their story gets told - they just deserved more than that.”

As we head toward this upcoming holiday weekend, the celebration of our Independance, and with picnics and fireworks on our schedules, we should stop and remember those men and women who have fought - and died, in the wars and conflicts of the past and present, so we Americans can continue to enjoy our freedoms.

Many of those men and women had their lives snuffed out in incidents like the Mt. Hood explosion that Oscar Staples described. As he put it - they deserved more than they got.