U.S. Navy

Walter Bunker

Walter Bunker was a 17-year-old senior at Winter Harbor High School in 1944 when he opted to leave school a half-year early and join the Navy.

“You could get your diploma if you left at mid-year and didn’t flunk boot training,” Bunker said recently. He enlisted in the Navy just before Christmas 1944, and passed boot camp at the Sampson Naval Training Base on Seneca Lake in upstate New York in early 1945.

“It was the right thing to do,” the South Gouldsboro native said of his decision to leave school and join the war effort. Bunker shipped out of Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston aboard the destroyer Higbee. The 2,200-ton class destroyer was the Navy’s first warship to be named after a woman, Lenah Higbee, a nurse in World War I.

As an apprentice seaman, Bunker’s routine duties included swabbing decks, chipping paint and cleaning heads. In combat, he passed shells to a fellow sailor who rode the carriage of a 40-millimeter gun mounted just behind the ship’s bridge.

“The guns made the sharpest noise when they were fired,” Bunker said. “That’s the reason I’ve always been half deaf.”

Bunker claims to have set one record as Higbee made its way from Boston Harbor to the Panama Canal: “I puked non-stop,” he said. The ship’s next stop was San Diego, where the crew worked through the night loading ammunition, then on to Pearl Harbor.

The Higbee made its way to the Marshall Islands where it patrolled off Eniwetok Atoll. Though the ship was not far from the island, Bunker said the crew spent three months at sea without ever seeing land. From Eniwetok, the Higbee went to the coast of Japan.

Reflecting on his World War II experience, Bunker said: “Some of it seems like yesterday, and some seems long ago.” One image will remain fresh forever: the moment the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Higbee was within 50 miles of the Japanese mainland when the bomb hit.

Bunker vividly recalls the great weather that day and walking to a gun on the port side of the ship before noon.

“All of a sudden, there was this hellish noise,” he said. “It was continuous, not a boom or a bang.” Dumbfounded, all the crewmembers began asking the same questions: “What the hell could even make a noise like that? What could make such a hell of a racket for so long?”

They would get their answer the next morning when a one-page news bulletin announced that the U.S. had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That led to another universal question among Bunker’s shipmates: “What’s an atomic bomb?”

“We never realized it killed 130,000 people,” Bunker said. “Of those killed, there probably was not one that wanted a war. That’s the sad thing. I think about that a lot.”

While off the coast of Japan, the Higbee traveled with two aircraft carriers. When planes were sent to bomb Japan, the Higbee was sent in to recover personnel from downed planes.

Bunker recalls fishing an Australian pilot out of the sea. In their brief conversation, Bunker learned that the pilot had been stationed in Trenton earlier in the war.

“What a small world,” Bunker said, reflecting on the chat he had with the pilot after telling him he lived in Gouldsboro.

But Bunker’s rescue duties also brought the toughest part of his war service, and the saddest.

At times, enemy planes flying overhead with the threat of dropping bombs on the destroyer would force the ship and crew to abandon their downed comrades and flee without them.

“The worst of it all,” Bunker said, “was that we had to leave people in the water.”

Bunker arrived home with everything he owned over his shoulder and $75 dollars in his pocket. He took a job for $60 a week as a civilian digging out pads for concrete foundations for an antenna system being installed at the naval base on the Schoodic Peninsula. He also dug clams. A year later, he and Randy Follett headed for Alaska in Bunker’s old car.

In British Columbia, they worked in a logging camp, trying to earn the fare to take a ferry to Alaska. As the weather turned brutally cold, they sold the car and took a Greyhound home.

Bunker started lobstering the next year. He continued to own and operate a lobster business in South Gouldsboro until 1981, when he and his wife moved to Ellsworth.

Bunker married Karen Willey in 1951. They raised two daughters and now enjoy the company of their three grandchildren.

Bunker served in the state legislature from 1969 through 1981, with the exception of one two-year term. He served on the Hancock County Commission from 1981 through 2001.

He continues to sell real estate, an occupation he took up when he moved to Ellsworth, and he serves as the supervisor of the unorganized territories in Hancock County, a position he has held for four years.

— James Straub