Poised for invasion, war ended
A week after graduating from Rogers High School, Andrew Berg was on his way to being a Navy sailor.
He’d turned 18 in February 1944, and with the draft there was no question he’d be called up, only a decision on what service he’d pick. “I was always sort of interested in the Navy and world travel.” At the time, there were posters urging young men to “Join the Navy and see the world.”
For the next nine months, Berg didn’t travel any farther than about 30 miles. He went to boot camp and then radio training at Farragut Naval Training Station across the border in Idaho. That all changed in May 1945, when he got orders first to California, and then to Hawaii, for assignment on the USS Auburn, an amphibious general communications ship.
Before leaving, he mentioned to his father he was worried about being seasick. Don’t worry, his father assured him, your Viking blood will see you through.
“I think it was pure brainwashing, but he was right,” Berg said recently.
The Auburn was one of hundreds of ships anchored off Okinawa for the invasion of that island, and it was the communications center for the troops making the landing then moving ashore. The ship bristled with radio antennae and was considered so vital to the operations that whenever Japanese planes were spotted, it was cloaked with a smoke screen. That made Berg feel safe at the time, although recently he learned that the antennae were so tall they actually stretched above the smoke.
One of 125 radiomen on board, he would take the coded messages coming in in Morse code and type them on paper. Six decades later, he can still tap out the dots and dashes of Morse, and type more than 100 words per minute.
After Okinawa, the ship returned to Pearl Harbor to prepare for the expected invasion of Japan. It was there the crew learned the atomic bombs had been dropped, and, a few days later, the Japanese were giving up.
Before the formal surrender in Tokyo Bay, the Auburn steamed for Japan and arrived in Sasebo on the west side of Kyushu Island to accept the surrender of the port city, which Berg and his shipmates would have invaded if the war hadn’t ended.
“The Japanese admiral approached (the Auburn) in their launch, and their sailors were trying to look as cool as possible. But they were fighting 4-foot swells, so they didn’t have much luck,” recalled Berg, who was on deck because he wasn’t on radio duty.
The bay at Sasebo was like a Norwegian fiord, and when Berg looked up at the large gun emplacements on the surrounding cliffs, he remembers thinking, “My God, we would have had to invade this place. We would have been in enormous danger.”
The ship continued to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the sailors could look from the ship but not go into the city. “I’m glad they didn’t let us go ashore. They looked like a cinder-glob of black ruins.”
But Berg has no doubt that dropping the atomic bombs was the right thing to do: “We didn’t start the war, after all.”
Out of the Navy in June 1946, Berg was enrolled in Washington State University that September, one of about 3,000 veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill.
He was in the food brokerage business until 1970, when he returned to school to study for his second career as a geologist with the U.S. Bureau of Mines.