Sunday, March 15, 2015

My Father’s Navy Service – Part 1 – Overview

Over the past few days the country of Vanuatu has been in the news as they have experienced what some are calling the worst cyclone in the history of the South Pacific.  I have a connection to Vanuatu as that is one of the places my father served during WWII.  Back then it was known as the New Hebrides.  Here is the story of my father’s service.



My father, Vernon Harold Russell, served in the United States Navy during World War II.  His assignment those years was aboard the APc-101, a small “coastal freighter”.  Only 103 feet long, the ship ferried supplies to many of the smaller islands which could not be serviced by the larger transport ships, either because the island had no port at all or the port was very shallow.

After coming home from the war, he never talked a great deal about it, although he had a number of souvenirs of the various islands (a musical instrument made from a coconut shell, a tapa cloth, etc.) and he had a scrap book with black and white pictures of the various islands he had visited (the South Pacific islands were not tourist destinations in those days so the inhabitants were still half-clothed “natives”).

Nearly all the pictures in this album were purchased by him when the ship was docked at the various islands.  A few of them are postcards, some have labels, a number of them have a copyright symbol or a picture number scratched on the negative that shows as a white number in the corner of the print.  From my research, it appears that most of the pictures were taken during the 1930’s or early 1940’s, although some of them are known to be copies of earlier photographs that were being recirculated at the time. 

Here are a few links to copies of some of these pictures:



When he returned from the service he mounted them in a small picture album which he could only half fill.  The album had heavy black paper and he labeled them in gold ink in his fancy script writing.

He never talked much about his war years and so the album was mostly unseen by others during the remainder of his life.  Over time, the paper in the album began to deteriorate and most of the gold ink faded to only indentations or scratches on the paper.  After his death as my mother began cleaning and clearing out the house, she gave these to me for safe keeping.  In order to preserve this record of his Navy service, I scanned them into a computer and have attempted to decipher what his labels were for each picture.  With much effort I have been able to discover most of what he wrote, but some of them will remain undecipherable.

Here are a list of the countries where these pictures were taken:

Bora Bora
Espiritu Santos (New Hebrides)
Fiji
Hawaii
New Caledonia – Noume’a

Samoa

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