U.S. NAVY

Allison Bishop

While more than 8,000 miles from home, Allison Bishop found the can of sardines pictured to the right of this article — originally packed in his hometown of Gouldsboro — buried in the sand on a South Pacific island.

The can is one of two battered scraps of metal that stir Allison Bishop’s painful memories of three difficult years spent in the South Pacific as a U.S. Navy quartermaster during World War II.

“When we came back from the invasion of Bougainville, we tied up in Tulagi, an island across from Guadalcanal, and they let some of us go ashore,” Bishop, 81, recalled 60 years later from his home overlooking Birch Harbor.  “I was walking along the beach, and I looked down in the sand and there was a half-buried sardine can. When I picked it up and brushed it off, I just couldn’t believe it.”

While standing on a beach some 8,000 miles from home, Bishop stared through tears at the can’s weathered label: “Beach Cliff Brand Maine Sardines, Packaged by Stinson Canning Company, Prospect Harbor, Maine.”  “That was home-sickening, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I was born in Corea. The people back home who canned those sardines, I knew them all.”

Bishop’s other “relic” of his Naval career is a small scrap of fuselage from a Japanese kamikaze plane. It’s a grim reminder of the morning of Jan. 13, 1945, when a suicide mission dropped two 550-pound bombs on the USS Salamaua, ripping a hole below the waterline of the escort carrier’s hull as it steamed off the Philippine island of Luzon.  As the ship’s quartermaster, it was only by chance that Bishop wasn’t among the 93 sailors burned and injured, the five blown overboard and presumed drowned or the 14 others later buried at sea.

“The quartermaster is in charge of the ship’s clocks, and January 13 was my day to wind them,” he said. “I wound the skipper’s, the executive officers’ and the first lieutenants’ and was on my way to the galley.  “Everything was going perfectly that morning, quiet and calm, and then those sons of bitches hit us like a flock of fleas. I had just started down the gangway between the officers’ quarters and the hangar deck when that thing hit.

“For some unknown reason, they never did find the clock that was on the wall of that galley. That’s where she went on through, putting one hole in the side, just below the waterline. There were 21 men in the engine room, and every one of them got out, one at a time, through a manhole.  “We found the pilot of the plane at the very, very bottom of that ship,” Bishop said. “We scraped what was left of him into a five-gallon bucket.”

Bishop’s eyes filled with tears as he remembered the aftermath of the attack.  “I had the privilege of helping to bury those men at sea,” he said. “Some of them were real good buddies, I want to tell you.”  A later assignment found Bishop aboard the USS Ticonderoga as the carrier cruised a crooked course that started east of the Philippines and ended, 69 days later, just east of Tokyo a few days after the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.

“We sailed into Tokyo Bay and pulled alongside the USS Missouri,” he said, the ship that would host the formal surrender ceremony on Sept. 2, 1945. “I was shaky; all the hatches were wide open and everything was lit up like a city. You never knew if the word had gotten out to everyone, or whether there was a submarine that might still attack. I didn’t trust them.  “They say ‘forgive and forget,’ but I’m an old hard core. I never forgive,” he said, fighting back tears, “and I damn sure will never forget.”

Following his discharge as a quartermaster third class on Jan. 21, 1946, Bishop was decorated by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal for “extraordinary heroism in action against enemy Japanese forces in air, ashore and afloat in the Pacific War Area from Aug. 31, 1943, to Aug. 15, 1945.” He later received a similar citation from President Harry S. Truman.  After returning to Maine, Bishop resumed lobstering, fishing out of Corea from 1948 until retirement in 1996.

“I was one of the very, very fortunate ones,” he said of his years in battle. “I went through three years without a scratch, but a lot of them didn’t. A lot of them never came home.  “We did our job, and we did it with honor. That’s why we are living in a free country today.”