The Following is an excerpt from an Oral History Transcript of Frank W. Harmon, a Navy Reservist who worked as a Radio Technician during World War II. Although the 18-year-old Harmon remembers having seen little action during the War, he does distinctly remember such events as the bombing of Pearl Harbor when he was 16, and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, while he was in the Navy. His primary source of receiving that news came from (first) the Newspaper, and (later) one of the few Radios that Reservists had,due to his position as a Technician.
The Interview was performed April 6th, 2008 at Harmon's home in Provo, Utah. The interviewer's questions have been included in this portion of the transcript.
WALKER: Let’s start out with your full name and serviceman information.
HARMON: My name is Frank W. Harmon. I served in the Navy. And the reason I was in the Navy was because my best friend who was about two and half years older than I was, was being drafted. I wasn’t quite 18 yet; I joined about a month before I turned 18. This way I could go and be with him. Since he was being drafted into the Navy, that’s where I went. And I was young enough and naive enough that when I went to the Navy, they asked me, “What part of the Navy you want to join, regular or Reserve?”I didn’t know the difference. “I just want to join the Navy,” which was a bad mistake, because it meant you were in for a fixed period of time, no matter what happened during the war. Being young and inexperienced, I went home and told my dad, and he said, “You don’t want to join the regular Navy.” I said, “Well, I’m too embarrassed to go back and let them know that I didn’t know the difference.” So, my father went back and told them. Of course, he had to sign for me because I wasn’t 18 yet. He said, “There’s no way he’s going to be in the Navy with me signing for him, so put him in the reserve.”
So we got on the train in the end of October, and it took 2 or 3 days to get to Fairgot, Idaho. As soon as we got there, they lined us up to give us a physical exam; we didn’t have much of a physical exam before that, they just checked our weight, found out we were breathing all right, and said you’re okay. So, we’re in line together, and the first thing we come to is that he has bad eyes; generally, the way he managed his eye problem was to memorize the eye chart to cover up his bad eyes. Well, he didn’t have time to memorize the eye chart, so they pulled him out of the line to check him more carefully. So he gets out of line, and I keep going on through. By the time he gets back in line, we’re in different segments (each segment was 190 people in a barracks) so we weren’t together anymore. I get over to my company, who were mostly Utah kids (of course, I wasn’t a Utah kid, I was from Central California—Fresno), and I no sooner got to the company than they told me, “Report to the hospital.” It turns out I had Albumen in my urine, which could be innocuous or it could be serious trouble. So they took me to the hospital to find out whether it was a serious problem or not. When I got to the hospital, they put me in the Venereal Disease Ward because that was the closest thing they had to keep me in while checking for albumen. The first couple of conversations went like this, “Where’d you get yours?” “Well, I haven’t gotten it,” “Oh, that’s what they all say!” So I quickly learned there was no point in trying to deny anything like that. But the corpsmen who took care of me knew that I didn’t have anything, so they kept me doing some work. They had a lot of work for me to do, moving things around the ward, and I ended up being a moving boy for a couple of days (maybe it was a week). In the meantime, they didn’t bother to check my urine. And I was smart enough to know what albumen was, so I made sure not to eat anything with albumen in it. By the time they checked again, I didn’t have any more albumen in my blood, so they sent me back. But by now, I was two weeks out of phase with my company. So I was in not only a different company, but in a company that was two weeks behind. What they did was keep you in a company for your three months of training, and when my best friend finished he went home for two week leave, but he was back off his leave before I even got home. So our intent to be together the whole war was foiled before it even began. So I go home and spend a couple of weeks, and then return.
Based on a whole battery of tests, they decide what you’re going to be trained as. Fortunately my math scores were high, and I had some basic knowledge of electricity, so they assigned me to the premier training school that the Navy had, which was Radio and Electronic Equipment. It was a full year of training (we spent 12 months in training); all of 1944 I was in training. Gerald Christiansen entered the Navy the same time as I did, entered the fleet, and saw whole naval battles, with ships blown out of the water, and the whole kit-and-caboodle. I work at the temple with a guy who was in the same company as I was, and he was in the same situation. He saw at least a dozen major battles; he immediately got trained and then was off to the fleet by March of ’44, while it was March ’45 before I got off. Maybe it wasn’t quite that late, but anyhow…. I was on ship to the Pacific, and we stopped at a whole bunch of islands before they dropped us off in New Guinea. I stayed there for a couple of months, and then they re-assigned me to another island, where I was for a couple of weeks, and I got a report that said, “Fly to this Base,” because they needed a Radio Technician for this base with a couple of guys who were Radio Operators (I was the only Radio Technician). So we fly to the place, and then I had to catch a boat that took us four or five hours to the seaplane base. It was a little atoll, a strip of coral, about a mile square, the highest point above sea level was about five feet, surrounded by coral reef, and on the beach were palm trees (but all the palm trees had been stripped of coconuts because they had a typhoon not long before that, which took down all the coconuts). Then, no sooner had I got there, when they said, “We don’t need you here. We asked for you six months ago, and now most of the battle is far away from us.” So, then they told me they couldn’t use me there, and gave me a re-assignment to drive a fork lift until the war ended.
WALKER: So, you went from being a Radio guy to a Forklift driver?
HARMON: I wasn’t a Radio Operator. My assignment was to repair anything that went wrong with a piece of radio or radar equipment or underwater sound equipment or radios and transmitters; that’s why it took so long to train us. They had to train us in every piece of electronic equipment the Navy had. While they don’t have as much as they do today, they still had a lot of equipment in the fleet at that time. So I ended up at the Navy Supply Depot, since I had gotten into the aviation arm of the Navy, and that’s where they assigned me. That’s where I drove a forklift.
In fact, when I was in this spot, I had some stomach ache, so the stomach ache hit me for three or five days until I decided to go to sick bay. They poked around and tested me, then finally said, “Well, you’ve got appendicitis.” So they stuck me in an ambulance with another guy who had appendicitis and sent us to the fleet hospital which was 20 or 30 miles away. It was on the same island, but in a different direction. It so happened that I must have a high pain tolerance, because the guy that was with me was in the back, moaning and groaning like he couldn’t handle it, and I was just sitting with the driver carrying on a conversation. They operated on him first, and he was back with his company three days later. I was there for about three weeks, because my appendix had busted, and they wanted to keep me there. That’s where I was in August, when the atomic bomb was dropped. And I had the only radio (because I was in a radio outfit and my officer had brought me a radio) in the fleet hospital. So there was no place around my bunk where you could sit for the next umpteen hours because everybody was sitting around the radio, listening for when we were going to go home, or when we would have peace, and that kind of stuff.
WALKER: Describe to me your feelings at the moment when you first heard those transmissions.
HARMON: Everybody was screaming and yelling and cheering, and boy, saying, “It’s all over! We can go home!” And that was even before any peace treaty had been signed. Wes Frandsen was on a ship in the harbor where the official signing took place. They could look through their binoculars and see all of the formalities. But I wasn’t in those circumstances. I was just sitting on this island-- Samar, The Philippines. Then it was a matter of being discharged. Reservists got discharged depending on a number of things—how long you’ve been in, how long you were overseas, if you had any dependants, how much time on x, etc. And I was low in all of those categories: I hadn’t been in the service for very long, I hadn’t been overseas for long, I wasn’t married, so I had to sit a long time before I was qualified to go home.
I don’t know how [President] Monson, who is two years younger than I am, was released almost immediately. He wasn’t in very long; how he got out, I don’t know—maybe it was because he hadn’t had all the training or something like that—so they just let him out because he started school by 1946.
I was never in any kind of action. All these friends saw all kinds of things, especially in that point of the war, when the Japanese (in their last frantic attempt to get control) started using suicide bombers. These suicide bombers are pretty hard to stop, because he’s not worried about dropping a bomb, just about making himself a bomb. So they lost a lot of ships to those suicide bombers. But I wasn’t party to any of that. At the time, being a typical 18 year old, I thought it was terrible that I was missing out on all this action; in retrospect, it was probably a great blessing ‘cause that kind of action is not something you want to mess around with—to see if you can get blown into pieces and all that kind of stuff.
Weston Frandsen and I were in pretty close to the same time. But he was a Signalman. A lot of times they couldn’t send radio signals (in case enemy subs picked up the signals), so they did it by flags—you know, the whole ‘A-B-C-D-E-F-G’ [makes hand gestures in a signal flag formation]—and they could do it fast enough, since they knew their code [demonstrates hand gestures again].
My best buddy who I entered the service with, that’s what he went into, was Radio Operating, and he became so good at it that he ended up at a big facility in San Francisco that transmitted to the whole Pacific Ocean. So he was in a pretty nice setting for those years.
WALKER: I’m really intrigued by this radio that you had with you while you were at the hospital. Tell me about it.
HARMON: Well, first off, it wasn’t one of those ‘carry-around’ radios; we didn’t have those in those days. It was a plug-in-the-wall radio. This was in the days of pre-portal radios. In order to have a portable radio there, the power supply would have to be so heavy you’d be carrying around a twenty-pound box.
WALKER: In you backpack?
HARMON: Yes, it was. The guys who were designated as the Transmitters had backpacks that were HEAVY. The power supplies in World War II electronic equipment all ran test tubes and high voltage kinds of things that you had to have quite a bit of battery power to operate it. This radio I had was strictly plug-it-in-the-wall, like any other household radio.
In World War II, all the electronic equipment was big and heavy. The radar systems that you use on a battleship were so big that we literally had to crawl inside of them when we would repair them. I mean, they were whole cabinets, and they could have 20,000 volt turners on them, and in order to keep from getting yourself killed, you had big bars that were attached to the frame, and you’d touch of the hot spots to short out all of the capacitor charges, where they store voltage. If you were to put your finger on one of those things, you could get a 20,000 volt charge, strong enough to knock you over—I mean, kill you. So before, you’d have to go *tcheu tcheu tcheu tcheu* [demonstrates with hand movements to the left, right, up, and down], and then you could crawl inside of them to fix them. So, everything was big and heavy. Even the systems that were on planes (as I was going through a seaplane base), their radio equipment was powered by big, huge car-type batteries (like the ones you see in a car today) that had a lot of capacity.
So, nothing was light like the stuff that you’re used to in today’s world of portable radios. They did have transmitters that they did use portably, but it was more like a backpack. If you were the guy chosen as the contact person, you’d have to carry that. And frequently, it was only code, because voice transmitters took more power than the Morse code transmission. It wasn’t until the Korean War and Vietnam War that you saw more portable stuff.
WALKER: During WWII, then, everything was big and bulky?
HARMON: Big, and heavy and bulky, and very hard to carry around. They had radios, but transistors didn’t exist them, and of course, every tube you had was a piece of glass with tubes on it and all the other elements of the system. And you not only had the elements of the system, but you also to carry around a power supply, which would take a lot.
In World War I, you didn’t even have that. They used things like pigeons, and flags (like my visual). You only did that a little in World War II.
On a ship, they had transmitters. But if you started using a transmitter, the enemy might pick up your radio message. They used those mostly on planes.
I don’t remember whether we had a newspaper delivered to our house or not, as a youngest. If we did, I was never interested enough to read it. The way we got heard of Pearl Harbor (since it occurred on Sunday, December 7th), the branch where we went to Church in Fresno was about 15 miles from our house, so we went there by car. And on the way home from Church, which would be at whatever time, we would pick up the Sunday Paper on the way home, and that’s where we first heard about Pearl Harbor. We had radios that plugged into the wall, and that helped later, though.
I turned 16 just two weeks before Pearl Harbor. So the period of time that I could drive the car was two weeks because as soon as Pearl Harbor occurred we started gas rationings. With gas rationing, nobody could buy more than five gallons of gas per week, unless you had a car that required you to do a lot of traveling, but we didn’t get permission to do any of that. So immediately my father, who worked at a government experiment station as a horticulturist, rode his bicycle five miles to work, and I rode my bike everywhere I went. I had a girlfriend who lived on the other side of town, so I would ride to her house, pick her up, get on the bus to go to a movie, go to her house to pick up my bicycle, and ride home. That was our transportation. That was the transportation of that era, because even if you could buy gasoline, you couldn’t get tires. There was no way to buy tires for your car and that sort of thing. So our car was strictly church use. We only used it to go to Church.
And newspapers were much more common in that day, since newspapers are now going by the wayside due to television and internet; we got our news from the local newspaper.
WALKER: What was the typical paper you would get?
HARMON: It was the Fresno Bee. Now, Fresno was a pretty good sized town back then; it’s definitely a lot bigger today, but it was roughly the same size as Sacramento. It’s probably at least doubled in size since I was there. When I lived there, we had one branch of the Church- but all of the little neighboring towns had smaller branches, simply because Fresno was a larger town than the rest. Now, Fresno has about 4 stakes, and a Temple. So that suggests the kind of growth that the Church has had in California. That was in the ‘40’s, so it’s been at least 60 years. But even in California, the Church grew much faster than it did in NYC, or on the East Coast, probably because there were a lot of transplant Utahans to move there, and more effective missionary efforts to bring in more converts. Whereas on the East Coast, the Church wasn’t growing as well, except in the last twenty years. In the last twenty years, the Church has grown rapidly back there.
When we lived [in NYC] in the early ‘50’s, there was a Ward in every major burrow: the Bronx had a ward, Brooklyn had a ward, Manhattan had a ward, Queens had a ward, and every one of those units that I just described had millions of people. Now, every one of those places has at least five or six wards. Of course, a lot of places where the Church is now growing are with the Black populations. We’re getting a huge, huge influx of Blacks into the Church. There’s even a ward right now that is right in Harlem, dominantly Black, and in the three years it’s been there, it has probably tripled in size. I happen to have a niece and a nephew, who live there, and they are among the few Whites in the ward, but it’s very popular and growing very fast.
WALKER: What sort of contact did you have with home during the War? And what kinds of perspectives of the war did you see?
HARMON: Everything was by mail. In fact, in my household, a long distance phone call was something that you never wanted to get. The only time you ever got a phone call from relatives, someone had just died. It just was not done. Getting a long distance call was tantamount to getting negative news; it just was not done. What you had to do was always go through an operator, for one. You couldn’t just sit down and dial in the area code for St. George, Utah, like you do today. You’d have to get on the phone, dial the operator, and say, “I want to make a call to so-and-so in St. George, Utah, and they’d find the number, then call it, and ring them up. “This is the operator with a call from St. George, Utah,” or vice-versa, and we knew it was a negative thing. I wouldn’t have called my folks no matter where I was, because a telephone call was tantamount to a negative message. I would be in Chicago or Idaho, I was even in the Bay area one time, but I wouldn’t call my folks, because it was long distance. And it would have to go through an operator who would say, “So-and-so is calling…” Just knowing that much about the situation was bad. In fact, when I knew that I had leave and that I was going to come home, I always told them I would be home later than I arrived. I always arrived before what they supposedly knew, ‘cause I didn’t want them worrying about what was going to happen to me. If I figured that I was going to be home Thursday, I would tell them, “Well, I might be home by Friday afternoon,” and then I’d get home on Thursday afternoon so that they wouldn’t have to worry about me.
From overseas, they didn’t even know where you were because we only used some sort of numbering system that said, “APO #such-and-such,” and they wouldn’t even know whether you were in New Guinea or whether you were in Samoa, unless they had some sort of inside track on where things were. But they also censored your letters. For example, if you wrote home and said, “I’m on Samar, in the Philippines,” they would blank it out.
WALKER: Did you have any experience with the Office of Censorship?
HARMON: No, not directly. But I never wrote anything that would’ve said where I was anyhow.
WALKER: So, you personally didn’t get censored that much?
HARMON: Well, I don’t know, because I don’t remember going to the mail that I wrote my folks and checking that. But it was a regular routine to censor all mail. So, I’d write once a week (I suppose). But all of my information was generic, so it didn’t have too much meaning. Because all of your physical needs were taken care of, I had no place to spend money, and (by and large) I didn’t even collect my pay. When we first went in, my memory has that we earned $28 a month. I think I got to almost $50 a month, but I just shipped it all home. I didn’t even cash a check, because there was no need for me to spend money. I didn’t drink, or look for girls, so I just sent it all home. And that was the money that I lived on during my mission. I just spent the money I had saved during the war, and the time I was in the serve paid for my entire mission. I think that the mission was $40 a month
