Peter Leibert's Page

At any military base, you almost always need wheels to get anywhere. Without wheels, you are stuck. The base is always a long way from nowhere, and there is no timely system for getting anywhere. You have to wait for a bus, or wait for someone to come and get you. So at Barber’s Point most people who were stationed there needed to buy a car. But sometimes you get caught with a car, can’t sell it, and you are scheduled to ship out in a week or less.

So this shipmate of mine, Vern Scarborough, and I decided to get into the used car business. We posted a notice on the bulletin board of the barracks that if you were getting transferred and were having trouble selling your car, give us a call. Maybe we could help. We got a lot of calls and actually did not have funds enough to handle too many of them at one time, but over a year or so, we had bought and sold a couple dozen cars.

The fanciest car that we ever bought, was a 1935 Packard V-16 Super Sport with black body, white convertible top and a rumble seat.

The only problem was that the owner had started to overhaul the engine because it smoked too much.

After he had removed the engine heads and some other parts, he discovered that he could not find any parts to fit that specific engine anywhere on the islands of Hawaii. It was necessary to order those type of parts from the mainland and that took time and money - and he didn’t have much of either. So when the price got right, we bought it from him - as is.

But neither Vern nor I was of the mind to overhaul that engine with or without parts. Our idea was to get it running again and then unload it. The first task was to buy some gasket material, cut out a gasket which would fit the two engine heads and then reassemble all the parts. This actually worked, but the engine still did smoke badly, in fact, very badly.

A couple cans of engine degreaser, some water to clean up the car, a can of polish, a little more elbow grease, and then we sold it - for at least twice what we paid for it. It was still running around the area - smoking a little, but not that much - when I transferred out. But it was truly a nice looking car.

The car I liked the best was a 1941 two-door Lincoln black convertible with a white top. We kept it around for quite a while using it for our own transportation. But it too had a small problem that eventually grew into a bigger concern. These were all manual transmissions during those days. In the case of this Lincoln, some oil was leaking into the clutch housing area and caused the clutch to slip whenever you accelerated. On a hill, it could get somewhat embarrassing.

We never did fix that slippage problem. Eventually we were able to sell it to a sailor who was in our own outfit. He clearly knew that the car had this type of problem and told us he was going to fix it, but he never did. That was one beautiful car.

Vern and I were both conservative types. Vern started dating a teacher that had come to Hawaii to visit her brother, our shipmate Don Merek, and decided to get a job and stay. When your business partner gets a woman in his life, it becomes time to get a second car. So we bought a green 1949 Nash four-door sedan.

Like most of the cars we dealt with, the Nash had been in some sort of a wreck and the front end always pulled to the right - a little. You got used to it, but that right front tire wore down a bit too fast.

But it was a nice type of car for the newly married couple, Vern and Bettie. They got married just before I left FAWTUPac in 1951, so I gave my share of this car to the newlyweds as a wedding gift.

Here I had been in the U.S. Navy for almost three years and the only sea time I had gotten was the six days of transit time on the General G. M. Randall. So when some of the guys in my outfit asked if I wanted to go deep sea fishing with them, I was ready to jump at the chance. But being the business man I was, I inquired about the cost and where I would get the fishing gear, and a few other questions like that.

It was ten bucks a person, there would be six guys and the boat came with a skipper, a deck hand, and five fish trolling lines - three lines off the aft, and one each on the outriggers - whatever that all meant. So I agreed to go. Aboard the boat I finally realized, that at any one time, there would be one person without a fishing line. As the newest member of this fishing group, I would be the first one. We would rotate every hour.

An hour is a long time to wait when you are the one that did not have a fishing line to tend. I was starting to begin to feel I had been taken. But no one was catching any fish anyway, so it might be a mute point. The first hour finally came to an end and I was assigned to keep an eye on the port outrigger which was now mine. Thirty seconds later and the line snaps loose from the port outrigger and I grab the pole and start working my fish. It must be a biggie and I start reeling it in.

I had just started when the guy in the aft center chair yells, “I got one! I got a big one!”. I kept reeling my fish in, when all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I see this HUGE fish leap clear out of the water straight aft and I’m hearing the other guys reel just screaming as the fish takes off. “It’s a Blue Striped Marlin,” yells the skipper. “Let him run, but keep the line taut.”

And so began my first day of deep sea fishing. I now had been at sea seven days. That evening we docked and found out that we had a 208-pound Blue Striped Marlin, seven or eight Ahi (tuna), five Ono (wahoo), three Mahimahi (dolphin, the fish, not the mammal), and 3 or 4 other 

types of fish. Everybody had caught at least two fish. We sold the marlin and a couple others to a fish market at 25 cents a pound, and most of the remaining fish for 18 cents a pound. We gave the skipper and crewman a big tip, and got about $15 or $20 each.

We kept one Mahimahi, one Ono, and one Ahi to eat at a fish fry which we held the next day. The fish fry was on the beach down at Nanakuli, about ten miles west of Barber’s Point. The food was great. Three of my shipmates on this fishing trip were married and their wives actually did the cooking.

The Hawaiian Islands are well known for their beautiful weather and with good reason. The area has a lot of sunshine beaming down on the islands. The temperature of the surrounding ocean varies between 75 degrees F and 83 degrees F, and that warm ocean completely surrounds each island keeping the overlying air temperature from varying much.

During my time on Oahu, I always had a very good tan, by California standards. To achieve this, I did spend a lot of time outdoors with daily volleyball matches, and frequent dips in the ocean. Right on the base we had Nimitz Beach, close enough to walk to, but I never did as I always had some sort of wheels available to me.

Most of the year we would have the famous trade winds coming from the Northeast. This was especially true during the Summer when it was really needed. These refreshing breezes is what cause the palm trees to sway. Another weather item of note is that most of the rains in the islands were light and gentle. Somewhere on the island of Oahu it would almost always be raining somewhere. But this somewhere was often somewhere else, and even when you started getting a little rain it was easy to fine a tree to stand under for ten minutes while the shower did its thing.

A forecaster would surely be calling these rains scattered showers. But there were some exceptions and I want to talk about one of them. Before 1950, windstorms that struck Hawaii were not called hurricanes. “Hurricanes” probably did occur as there are stories throughout recorded history about storms containing major winds. But the 1950 storm was the first one that specific data was recorded that fit the current definition of being a hurricane. And I was there in the middle of August 1950.

That morning we knew a storm was coming, you could tell. But we really knew something big was coming when the loudspeakers started blaring out the message “ALL HANDS REPORT TO THE HANGER AREA TO BATTEN DOWN AIRCRAFT”. By the time I got to where the aircraft were it already was raining, really raining, about as hard as I had ever seen it on Oahu. Guys were pushing the smaller planes into the hangers and others groups were “triple tying” down the remaining aircraft. The wind was blowing and the rain was getting heavier.

Somehow we got all the aircraft secured and the hanger doors closed. We then fought our way against the wind back to our barracks. They had lowered the tarps around the building but the wind and rain was still getting through and everything was already wet. Our job then was to try to minimize the damage by moving all the bunks to the center of the room and then move our clothes lockers to further block the rain and wind. Then we just sat out the storm.

This little wind and rain event was later named Hurricane Hiki. We were told that the wind was greater than 75 miles per hour (it must have been a lot more than that) and that the eye of the storm passed Oahu about 100 miles north of the island. I now know that hurricanes typically have a diameter of between 300 miles and 600 miles and that the wind gets faster the further away from the center of the storm’s eye. During the 50 or so years since this storm, there have been 5 other hurricane class storms to hit one or more of the islands. Extensive damage occurred on Oahu during three of these storms.

That fish fry reminded me of another distant memory. Another vehicle that Vern and I had bought was a Triumph motorcycle. Vern actually had title to it but after he started dating Bettie, he would take the Nash, so I could use his motorcycle. The Saturday morning following the fishing trip, I used the motorcycle to go down to Nanakuli Beach. This was before the days of safety helmets and safety anything, for that matter. I was wearing a pair of slacks over my swim suit and an aloha shirt. I probably wasn’t even wearing shoes as I was going to the beach to body surf in Nanakuli’s huge breakers.

I was tooling along at about 35 miles per hour when I spotted the group gathered under a tree on the beach. So I quickly turned off the road to stop and park near where they were. As the front wheel of the motorcycle hit the beach sand, that vehicle came to a total halt - but I did not. I flew at least 20 or 25 feet and landed face first in that sand. It was a good thing it was “soft sand.” Of course “soft” doesn’t really fit here. That soft sand did not make a soft landing for me. It was hard. Luckily, it was my head, or I could have gotten hurt.

The use of the motorcycle also reminded me of one time when I was riding up the Pali from Kailua. At the time, it was the only road to Honolulu across the island. The road was rather narrow and twisty. The Pali is what they call the pass at the top. The Hawaiians have a lot of stories about this pass including one where the warriors under King Kamehameha pushed all the enemy warriors off the cliff to their deaths.

The Pali road twisted and wound up that steep cliff where the warriors fell. At the top of the pass, there is always a wind and on this day it was really blowing pretty hard. Usually I was in a car when I came this way, so as I made that last curve just before the top the wind caught me and after a twist this way and one that way, I became sure that I was going to be soon landing on the top of those warriors bodies that were supposed to be down at the bottom. Somehow, I did not lose it, but I still remember that ride.

And speaking of rides, on occasion, a couple of “line people” would get assigned to travel about 25 miles to Ford Island where the carriers would dock. This was the same Ford Island that was Battleship row during December 7, 1941. Our job would be to pre-flight the planes that had been brought in by some carrier.

Daily, we would drive to Ford Island in one of our squadron line jeeps that had a power unit built-in. Some of our jeeps had a Hawaiian license plate, some did not. Some had a front windshield, some did not. When you drove on the base the jeeps with a windshield always had it folded down over the engine, so you got use to driving that way.

Since I had a Hawaiian drivers license, I usually was the driver in these types of situations, and so one afternoon we were approaching Waipahu heading back to the base when a policeman pulled us over. I knew I had not been speeding so was sort of surprised.

He asked me for my driver’s license and then he started with the litany of sins that I had committed. “You didn’t signal when you turned left back there (this was before turn signals - you had to do it by hand), then I noticed you didn’t have a license plate on your vehicle, and you don’t have the vehicle registration, and you are missing your windshield, nor are you wearing safety glasses, and you don’t have a rear view mirror. I will have to confiscate your vehicle and give you a ticket.” Oh boy!

My buddy and I started to talk about what to do with all this and during that process I mentioned that we could probably walk down to the elementary school and get my cousin, who is the principal, to give us a ride to the base. The cop says, “You know Miss Lillian?” I said, yes, she’s my cousin. And he says, “well, okay, I’ll let you go this once, but make sure you have a licensed jeep next time.” I have no idea whether he was really going to confiscate the jeep or not, but the next day we took a jeep that had a license, a registration, and a windshield and a rear view mirror.

One more little story and then I will close this chapter with a departing saga. While at Barber’s Point I regularly attended church on Sunday’s and eventually joined the church choir. I had never sung in a four-part singing group before this. After trying tenor, they moved me to Bass. Evidently my voice from junior high days had deepened. In those days, almost all the songs sung in a Catholic service were sung in the Latin language. All the hymns were in Latin, the entire mass including the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Santus, and so on were in Latin.

I actually remember some of that music. The first song that we worked on became one of my favorites. I am almost certain it was a TTBB arrangement.

O Bo- ne’ Je- su, mi- se- re- re no- bis, qu- i- a tu cre- a- sti nos,tu re- de- mi- sti nos, san- gu- i- ne tu- o pre- ti- o- sis- si- ne.

It wasn’t too long after I arrived at Barber’s Point before the Korean War came along. There was a lot pressure almost immediately for Aviation Electronicsmen (radiomen that flew), to volunteer for temporary duty flying as radioman on transport planes, or to sign up for Combat Aircrewman school. The TAD to transports didn’t interest me, but I did sign up to go to Combat Aircrew School. They didn’t take me. I was colorblind per their test, and I was too tall.

So I settled in with my duties at FAWTUPac and watched many of my friends go off to war flying transports or attending Aircrew school. One of the things that also happened early in the Korean conflict was that they took a lot of our planes, put them on carriers and shipped them to Japan. We eventually started getting replacement crews and replacement airplanes, but things were not the same. For one thing, the replacements were mainly reservists who had been working in a nice cushy job back home, then got activated and sent away to fight some war. Their attitude sometimes was not that great.

Then the big blow. We got word in the spring of 1951 that President Truman had extended everyone’s enlistment for one additional year. I had been scheduled to get out in June 1951, so this went over like a lead balloon. Then we heard an announcement that Truman was coming through on his way to meet with General Douglas MacArthur. Security was going to be very tight when he visited our base, and they were going to do this or that to make sure it was tight.

You know how they tightened Security? They locked up all the rifles and took our handgun ammunition away from us. Rumor had it that there were a lot of our servicemen that didn’t like being called up from the reserves, or, in my case, have their enlistment unilaterally extended for another year.

Truman did come by, sitting in the back of a big black convertible and weakly waved to the line of sailors who were passively standing by the side of the road, and that was it. At least I think it was Truman. They drove past doing about 40 miles an hour (in a 15 MPH zone). Seems to me that it wasn’t a happy occasion.

But life went on. We continued to test the island drinks at places like Trader Vic's where they served Zombies and Scorpions, continued to request songs at the radio booth located within the drive-in at Kalakaua and King Street, and nightly joined the mosquitoes at the outdoor theater movies where we would get sprayed with DDT. Every other free moment was spent playing volleyball, drinking beer at the white hat club, or swimming down at Nimitz Beach. I had a great tan during those days.

Sometime during June 1951, I spotted a note on our barracks bulletin board. “Looking for Trade. Aviation Electronicsman. Patrol Squadron Six. Duty at Atsugi, Japan.” For some reason it sparked my interest. My brother was in Japan, and maybe that was it. But anyway, I gave the number a call and the next day went to personnel to fill a Request for Transfer paper. The guy that I was going to trade duty with was an AL chief, three pay grades higher that me, but he assured me that it would be no problem. And it wasn’t a problem. On July 12th, I got the word that the transfers would be approved.  

However, the next morning, I suddenly came down with a pain in my stomach. Everyone I mentioned it to concluded that it might be appendicitis. So after lunch I went to sick bay to have it checked out. The next thing I knew I was being signed in at Tripler Army Hospital.

Well, it did not turn out to be appendicitis, but I had a serious infection of my navel. They started a series of tests to make sure that it was not an internal infection. Treatment was Penicillin shots four times a day. I eventually was told that it was a fungus infection that likely was caught from swimming in the ocean and my not keeping the navel clean. It was a type of infection that would recur and so they wanted to remove my navel and while inside they wanted to take out my appendix. I was one of three patients that was in the hospital at that time with the same type of infection.

I didn’t like the idea of not having my navel and told the doctor so. “Well, we could make you an artificial navel,” and so we agreed. I would have a navel operation in an Army hospital, but they would try to get a naval surgeon to assist with the operation. Yes, I now have an artificial navel.

I was on the third floor east ward of the hospital. It was the dirty surgery ward - infections, burns, accident injuries, and bullet wounds. There were three long term residents who had come to Tripler from Korea with burns over most of their bodies.

Despite being all wrapped up, these three guys seemed to be a happy bunch. Once I watched as they changed the bandages for one of them. Believe me, it would be hard for me to be happy.

During my stay there, we had a lot of excitement one afternoon as corpsmen began moving in more beds and rearranging patients. During the next hour about a dozen ambulances pulled up down below so we knew that something big had happened. It was after the normal time for lights out when we finally got our first new patient. It turned out that they were from Schofield Barracks and had been injured when a mortar shell exploded just as it cleared the barrel. Fragments had gotten almost everyone within 50 feet.

I spent 42 days in Tripler. In those days, you spent a lot of time in the hospital before they even let you out of bed. The Red Cross took good care of us by visiting most days, and when you were mobile, taking you on a field trip. I visited the Vanderbilt yacht on one trip, and saw the Kodak Hula girls on another.

One weekend, I was really surprised when about 15 or 20 members of the Barber’s Point Catholic Club dropped by to visit me. They let them all come in. After they spent a minute or two learning about my situation, they then spread out and visited with the other 50 or so patients. I thought that was great.

On August 22, 1951, Tripler let me loose and I returned to FAWTUPac to find out whatever happened to that transfer to VP6.