"Then there was the last night that the Japanese left Guadalcanal in February, 1943. They’d started evacuating their troops a few nights earlier and a few of our boats got sunk. So they told us to go out there in our PT boats and just monitor what they were doing. They came in with destroyers to pick up as many of their guys as they could. And we knew they were going to leave then because we had their code. The Navy thought that they were going to take the troops around to another part of Guadalcanal—on the back side. So they put us out along the back side and let them get on their ships. And we had lost so many PT boats by then, the Navy didn't want us to directly attack the enemy ships. We were on the other side of the island from where all the activity was. A Japanese float plane came over and started to bomb us. A bomb landed, oh, maybe a hundred feet from my boat. And it could have done a pretty good bit of damage if it had come even a little closer, even without hitting me.
"The next morning, as it got light, we headed back around toward Tulagi. We went past where the Japs had been loading their guys on destroyers, off the northwest coast of Guadalcanal. Their destroyers were all gone. They’d had to leave in a hurry as it got light, because they were worried about getting attacked and sunk by our airplanes. And as we got there, we saw all kinds of Japanese troops in the water. They weren't able to get them all aboard the destroyers, and they just left them floating there in the water. I picked up seventeen of them and put them up on the bow of my PT boat, had them sitting there, and we took them back to Tulagi. I thought it was sensible, because we could capture them and be successful in doing something, finally. So we got them back to the base, and the Marines were mad as hell when I got in there. They took those Japs off our boat, and I don’t know what happened to them. But it was amazing to be out there in our boat, just floating around among all those Japs in the water and picking them up. There must've been 500 of them out there floating around. I guess some had swum out from shore, and there were some in small boats. The Japanese navy just left them, because they had to get out of the way of our planes coming up the next morning. We didn't shoot any of those Japs in the water. They’d had it, and they weren't going to fight.
"We found a Japanese officer’s boat left out there, and we brought it back to cruise around in. There were also flags in the water, and I picked one up. It was with some other stuff. They had packs that they just threw in the water. So a few of us had our photo taken with the Japanese flag, and then I sent that flag to my cousin. He's now a doctor in Washington, and he still has that flag.
