George Holderby: Abstract | Full Story | Images and Artifacts

Before World War II, George D. Holderby was a student for two years at Arkansas Tech in electrical engineering, but money became tight and he headed for Globe, Arizona, to work with his brother. One year later, he moved to Burbank, California, and started work at Lockheed Aircraft Company on the assembly line building P-38 fighter planes. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Mr. Holderby enlisted in the U.S. Navy in Los Angeles. His education in electrical engineering qualified him to become an Electricians Mate Third Class and earned him an immediate active duty assignment instead of being sent to infantry boot camp. Right after Mr. Holderby enlisted, he was given shore leave prior to active duty, and he returned to his birthplace, Newark (new-ARK), Arkansas. On this trip home, he met his wife to be, Mildred Parrott. Months later, he proposed to her by letter, she accepted also by letter, and they married October 7, 1942, in Phoenix, Arizona.

Once on active duty, he was stationed at San Clemente, a remote and arid three-by-thirty mile island off the California coast near Long Beach. He served at the auxiliary naval airbase for twenty-three months, and the air strip there was used mainly for emergency landings by aircraft patrolling our western coast from bases near San Diego. Duty on the island included being trained to fight fires, digging numerous foxholes, and maintaining the sound-powered telephone system for the island’s operations, security, and running the movie projector. Mr. Holderby described San Clemente as “light duty in a relaxed atmosphere.” As luck would have it, also stationed on the island was a detachment of Marines, whose regimen of calisthenics and drill impressed Mr. Holderby’s commanding officer. This officer decided to have his own men toughened up by joining in the Marines’ rigorous routine. This effort began well but faded with time. During his time on San Clemente, Mr. Holderby had some off-duty time, and he and his friend Richard Swingler often used these hours to explore the areas around the base. On one outing, they found a cave at the water’s edge on the north side of the island, its entrance piled high with stones to hide the opening. They explored the rubble, found nothing but surmised that during Prohibition this cave had been used by smugglers as a cache for the illegal alcohol they peddled on the mainland. Other trips around the island provided simple pleasures; fishing was Mr. Holderby’s favorite pastime, and he learned that if he surf cast near the hordes of basking sea lions, he would catch a sheepshead fish each time his line barely touched the ocean. On another outing, they found a bird’s nest with large eggs in it. These they carried back to the base camp and in a while managed to hatch one! The tiny black chick grew into a sizable raven who enjoyed walking about the base perched on the arms and shoulders of the sailors who had raised it. Ultimately, this mascot bird returned to the wild for the duration.

The sailors serving on San Clemente were allowed to periodically rotate to the mainland on liberty. On one of his rotations, Mr. Holderby married Mildred Parrott , and they began their family with the birth of Diana Sue, the first of their three daughters in 1944. Their other two children were born after the war, and one of the family jokes Mr. Holderby enjoyed telling the two youngest girls centered on a strange but lucky event that happened to him at his ultimate wartime assignment, sea duty aboard the Amphibious Control Vessel PC 802, a 173’ ship that was part of our Pacific fleet. A while before that strange and lucky event occurred, though, Mr. Holderby participated in a number of training missions that prepared him for sea duty, including Small Craft Training School in Long Beach, California. There he worked with officers in charge of specialized radio equipment and radar to be used in the final amphibious landing of the war and the Navy’s final mission in the Pacific: the invasion of Japan. Training for this invasion to end the war then took him to Portland, Oregon, where he first saw PC 802 under construction. As the top-rated electrician aboard, Mr. Holderby had to master the new ship’s electrical system before she went to sea. The ship was commissioned January 6, 1945, and the entire crew then trained for three and one half months more on the west coast before cruising to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In May 1945, the ship sailed across the Pacific to Enewetak, Guam, Ulithi, Okinawa, and Kerama Retto. As the ship neared Japan, the officers constantly drilled the personnel who would operate the specialized communications equipment that would be used to control the landing craft carrying US soldiers ashore during the invasion. While on this voyage across the Pacific, PC 802 encountered her first typhoon off Okinawa, a Japanese island 300 miles southwest of their mainland. Mr. Holderby recalled that this typhoon lashed the fleet with forty foot waves and tossed PC 802 around violently. Larger ships plowed through the seas from wave crest to wave crest while small ships pitched over the wave crests into their troughs. He said with a smile, “I did not get seasick,” but many of his shipmates did.

Once the typhoon abated, the ship sailed on for the Phillipines, and it was on this part of the voyage that the strange and lucky event befell PC 802. While cruising at night along the east coast of Mindoro, Phillipines, the sonar man on the bridge heard through his headphones the telltale sound of high speed propellers. He immediately reported this to the Commanding Officer, both men knowing this sound meant a torpedo was headed for the ship. Before the CO could execute the order to stop the ship, the torpedo slammed into the starboard bow. It did not pierce the hull nor did it explode. Years later when telling his two youngest daughters Sharon Kay and Mary Anne about this escape from danger, Mr. Holderby kidded them that if it had not been for that particular dud torpedo hitting PC 802, they probably would never have been born!

Near Iloilo on the Phillipine island of Panay, PC 802 again resumed training for the invasion, but soon the ship received a message saying that World War II had ended. On August 6th 1945, the Air Force’s Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. On August 9th, our Air Force dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, and these two devastating explosions caused the Japanese to surrender on August 15th. As a result, the US Army and Navy did not have to invade Japan. This saved countless American and Japanese lives.

And so PC 802 cruised to Buckner Bay on Okinawa to join the task force that would carry out the occupation of Japan, Korea and other lands the Japanese had conquered during the war. While at anchor there, Mr. Holderby saw a line of forty or so four-stack destroyers come into the anchorage. Thinking of this memory he said, “It was a sight to behold.”

At Buckner Bay with the burden of fighting lifted, PC 802’s officers helped their men celebrate the war’s end; many in the crew celebrated heartily, and Mr. Holderby remembered the time saying, “I never again attended a party like that one.”

Soon the ship was ordered to head for Korea to carry out the occupation mission there, and they rendezvoused with two American officers who had parachuted into South Korea. These officers had joined up with their South Korean counterparts, who arranged for river pilots to guide PC 802 and other ships into Inchon harbor so US troops could be put ashore. By this time, he had been promoted to First Class Petty Officer, and Mr. Holderby had been on sea duty long enough to earn the right to head home, and this he did aboard an aircraft carrier, the Anzio, which had been converted to carry troops. They sailed for San Francisco, but enroute they ran into a second typhoon, again off Okinawa. Fortunately this time Mr. Holderby was aboard a much larger ship, and the ride was not entirely miserable. Men slept on cots tied among the aircraft on the hanger deck, and every so often a bucket broke loose and bounced and clattered across the deck, and in their postwar mood, the men were amused. Looking back on his service, he summarized it by saying, “I seemed lucky throughout the war.”

Mr. Holderby was discharged in Long Beach. Several years after WWII, PC 802 was transferred to the South Korean Navy and re-commissioned Samkaksan, PC 703.
To begin civilian life anew, Mr. Holderby attended the Milwaukee School of Engineering and learned to design heating, cooling, and electrical systems. With years of experience and by passing various tests, he became a registered Professional Engineer. He started his own consulting engineering company, in St. Albans, West Virginia. Eventually, his career took him to Clarksburg, WV, and soon after to Charleston, WV.

After the war, Mr. Holderby’s first contact with a shipmate was with a man who had taken pictures of the PC 802 and its crew during the war. The second occasion for contacting shipmates came many years later. In 1995, Mr. Holderby used a computer and a ship’s roster to locate his comrades for a reunion in Delavan, Wisconsin. Of the 72 men on the roster, 29 had passed on, but 21 attended. Looking back on that day, Mr. Holderby said that the best part of the reunion was that “[My friends] were so appreciative of my locating everyone. They enjoyed it as well as I did. [We didn’t plan another one because] …by that time old age was creeping up on us and we couldn’t all travel.”

George Holderby: Abstract | Full Story | Images and Artifacts