None of us looked forward to going on duty and standing our watch. Four hours on and four hours off around the clock was not an easy routine. This was especially true if you were a radioman aboard the USS Missouri, flagship for the U.S. 3d Fleet deep in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

The year was 1945. As an 18-year-old eligible for the draft, I had enlisted in the Navy before graduation from high school in Davenport, Iowa. After boot camp and radio school, at Farragut, Idaho, I was assigned to the staff of Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey aboard the Missouri, an Iowa-class battleship.

I felt honored to pull duty as a staff member with a four-star admiral. Halsey usually selected the New Jersey, another Iowa-class ship, but the Jersey had steamed stateside for some badly needed maintenance and repair. The Missouri got the call.

There were seven radio transmitting-and-receiving stations aboard the Missouri, and I usually spent my four hours handling routine communications among ships of the fleet. I had been onboard several weeks, and had not even seen the admiral. Then, I was transferred to the radio station just behind the ship’s bridge. I would be copying coded messages from several military shore stations. When decoded, these transmissions would help our meteorologists map weather conditions over possible Japanese bombing targets. I quickly came to realize the importance of my work. The safety of our carrier pilots might well depend upon the accuracy and thoroughness of the radiomen on duty behind the bridge.

To get weather information, I usually copied station NPG Honolulu or an Army station from Andrews Air Force Base on Guam. These were clear stations with little interference of any kind. But station KCT from Vladivostok in the U.S.S.R., was different.

If our planes were to raid the Japanese islands of Hokkaido or Honshu, we needed the weather report from KCT. The Japanese, knowing this, constantly jammed the KCT frequency with music, loud laughter, foreign languages—anything and everything to drown out the signal. It required keen concentration to find our signal and stay on it, while totally ignoring all the “trash.”

One evening, I was copying KCT with the usual Japanese garbage jamming my frequency. I had my eyes closed, and I was concentrating totally on that faint but distinctive signal: Dit dah dit. I automatically hit the R key on the typewriter (or mill, as the Navy called it). Dah dit dit dit, B. Dit dit dit, S.

Then, a loud voice behind me asked, “Are they jamming our station?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, my concentration broken. I hit the space bar of the mill several times to indicate missed letters. I found the signal once again.

“Are you able to copy it?” The voice again. I hit the space bar several