Liberty at Noumea, New Caledonia Was Not a Sunday School Class

The bloody battle for Okinawa wouldn't be over until June 21, but the USS Pickens had done its job, including rescuing survivors from three ships, and on June 4 we set sail for Noumea, New Caledonia. a French possession in the South Pacific. Once we arrived liberty was granted to one-third of the crew at a time. We were excited to see what  the island had to offer because it had been months since we had left Hawaii. Visits to the Solomon Islands, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa couldn't qualify as liberty under any standards.

Three buddies and I left the ship in   the middle of the morning to see what this French city had to offer,  After wandering around we visited the ship service store, checked  out its offerings, ate some ice cream ( a rare delight), and I acted as agent to buy an Eisenhower jacket for a British sailor.  We had no transportation or any way to explore the island so with little else to do we decided to visit a bar.


The place we entered could have been the scene from an old west movie, consisting of some rough planks over some barrels or other support.  Since I had never had an alcoholic drink, I took the suggestion of one of our group that we order Tom Collins, "which is very like lemonade."  That's what we drank and it tasted okay.We left the bar and wandered around some more, finally deciding to go back to the ship and watch the movie which would be shown at dark.

Someone of the group suggested we find the bar we had gone to earlier, have one more drink and then go back to the ship.  We went to a bar that was identical to the first one but the drinks tasted terrible. We tried another bar and the drink here was horrible, so we left to return to the ship. We left the dark bar out into a bright sun and suddenly I felt strange and fell against a building, then staggered across the narrow street to fall against a building there.  My buddies were in the same condition but some way we managed to get the dock where a Pickens boat was awaiting us.  Crew members who were posted there just for that purpose helped us and others, some of whomwere in worse shape than we, into the boat.  They took us back to the ship where other crew members somewhat undressed us and put us in our bunks.That was my only liberty in Noumea, and I saw the brilliance of having one third of the crew man the ship and one third take care of those on liberty.

From there we went back to Saipan and then on to San Francisco, arriving there August 3 to load on troops to invade Japan.  Thank goodness the atom bombs dropped on August 6 and 9 persuaded Japan to surrender August 15.