Nineteen
Forty-Five
My Personal Experiences at the
End of the Second World War
© Copyright 2008 – Carroll
Williams
In the spring of 1945 our landlord sold our little clapboard cottage at 301 Southeast Ninth Street in Ft. Lauderdale. The new owner wanted to occupy the property. We packed up and moved to 820 N. W. 2nd Avenue. The house we would live in for the next year was a shotgun house on a narrow sandy lot in a sparsely settled section of Ft. Lauderdale. A tall coconut palm stood on either side of the front walk. The north and east sides were surrounded by a dense palmetto thicket populated by armadillos and rattle snakes. The roof leaked like a sieve as we were to discover when the rains began in June as the rains always do in Florida. Tropical rains mark the beginning of hurricane season.
We didn't own any furniture so the move was relatively easy. Dad was still somewhere in the Pacific serving as Engineering Officer for a fleet of LCI’s. He was busy driving the Japanese back to their home islands. Mom packed our things in cardboard boxes and we moved. We had done this so many times before that it came as second nature. Mom called our new rental agent many times before the owner of our little shotgun house agreed to fix the roof. In the meantime we manned the bucket brigade as we called it during every rain storm. We set pans under as many leaks as we could, and emptied them into buckets when they filled up.
The hot water heater stood in the back yard behind the kitchen. It was my duty to step out back and light the gas burner every time we wanted to heat water for a bath. We always had to remember to go out after our bath and turn off the gas burner or the heater might explode and blow away the entire back side of the house.
Our house was plagued with mice. We could hear them in every wall day and night. I was the great mouse hunter. I set out a dozen traps every night. I got pretty good at selecting baits and placing traps. I always caught a bunch. When we moved into the place on N. W. 2nd Avenue World War II was just winding down. The Germans had already surrendered in Europe. The Japanese were still holding out in the Pacific. I started a mouse graveyard in the sandy soil of our back yard. Each time I buried a mouse I would make a little wooden grave marker and put a Japanese name on it. I could vicariously fight the Pacific island-hopping warfare with the U. S. Marines by imagining that I was killing off the enemy one by one.
My little brother Mac was still pre-school at age four. Bob was in ninth grade at Ft. Lauderdale High. I would start sixth grade at Northside Elementary in the fall. Bob had his circle of friends most of whom were model airplane enthusiasts as was he. Mac attended a pre-school during the regular school year, but his care would fall pretty much to me during the summer months when Mom was at work. Mom worked at a candy and confections store downtown.
I was a dreamer and adventurer. I wandered far on my trusty old bicycle which Dad purchased second-hand in Melbourne before the war. He acquired the bike from a fellow with whom he car-pooled to work at his State Road Dept. job. Dad was always fixing things up, and was quite good at it too. He stripped the old paint and rust from the frame and repainted it red. He put on some new tires and tubes, and some handle grips. All-in-all it looked good to a kid who never expected to ever own a bike.
During the summer of 1945 I often rode north to 10th street and followed it east to the beach. The causeway there is now known as Sunrise Boulevard where my friend George lived with his grandparents in a dilapidated house trailer. We called it the 10th street causeway back then. I'm not sure it had any other name. I always knew when I was getting close to the beach by the aviator's oxygen mask hanging in a power line over the Intercoastal waterway. You could spot it from a couple of blocks away. The skies over Ft. Lauderdale were alive with military airplanes during the war. The mask had fallen from one of these aircraft and its straps had hit the wire. It had spun around several times and became wrapped firmly on the power line. It was there for several years until it either disintegrated from the elements or perhaps blew off during a hurricane. It survived the hurricane of 1945, for it was still up there after that great storm passed. I saw it again in the late 1950’s.
In the fall we were warned to take shelter in Northside Elementary School. The building was concrete and very substantial. We took some food and bed covers and went to the school early in the afternoon. In the hours before dark, Mac and I wandered out into the patio with other kids from our neighborhood. We enjoyed the rising winds and spitting rain. Eventually the adults rounded up their kids and got us all back inside. The night passed with no damage to the school or neighborhood even though the hurricane roared right up the coast barely offshore. The next day we saw photos in the newspaper of a tragedy which occurred when two men in a sailboat tried to rescue their dog which had washed overboard. One of the men drowned. This made an impression on me that life was not permanent. But like most kids I didn’t dwell on that idea for very long.
In the fall Japan surrendered and World War II came to an end. Dad came home for a couple of months before being assigned to the Naval Ship Yard in Long Beach, California where he supervised the preparation of a fleet of obsolete ships to be blasted at Bikini Atoll in three atomic bomb tests. The world was changing rapidly.