Dawn was minutes away and fog was so dense that visibility was near zero as the USS Pickens entered San Francisco bay August 3, 1945. I was on the radar, my guts in a knot, and the navigator rushed in every minute to ask for the range and bearing on landmarks so he could fix the ship's position. I strained to watch the radar s closely as little blips appeared on the screen. Another radarman was trying to plot the blips to see if they were moving or stationary. Each blip was a buoy or a fishing vessel heading out to sea and I had seconds to determine which was which.
We had left San Francisco 10 months ago, heading first to Hawaii and then to places like the Solomons, New Calidonia, Saipan, Guam, Tinian and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We had been told that we would leave in a few days after loading on troops and equipment to be a part of the first invasion of Japan.
We made it in to our designated anchorage spot without hitting a fishing boat. We would make many more visits to San Francisco after the war, being part of the Magic Carpet, bringing troops home from the South Pacific. That was in the future; now we wanted to make the most of this visit, perhaps the last time we would see our country.
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