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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