Al Daugherty: Notes from the battleground

By Ron Bracken

The .25-caliber Japanese rifle is gone now. So is the Samurai sword.

Al Daugherty gave them away to admiring friends who wanted authentic souvenirs from his time in the Pacific Theater during World War II.

The five Bronze Stars he won? Gone. He's not sure where.

The only thing the 81-year-old State College native has to remind him of his years as a member of the 319th Fighter Control Squadron is a small, black pocket notebook in which he recorded every significant date, place, event, name and address from when he was a young man far from his home on Prospect Avenue.

"The Japanese rifle, the sword, the medals -- I gave them all away," Daugherty said. "I was finished with it (the war). I didn't want them anymore. They were reminders. But in the notebook, I had a record of everyone who sent me some kind of mail while I was away. That helped keep me going."

That mail followed him from when he left State College on May 27, 1943 (the date is duly recorded in the notebook), to Camp Wheeler, Ga., then on to Fort Ord, Calif., and New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Bougain ville, Zamboanga, Mindanao, Leyte, Luzon and Osaka, Japan.

He wanted to be a pilot but was denied because he wore eyeglasses. So he became a radio operator for the 319th and arrived on Guadalcanal from the staging area in New Caledonia.

By then things had quieted considerably on the island where the Marines had beaten back the Japanese in one of the first major U.S. victories in the Pacific.

"I got in on the tail end," he said. "It wasn't like it was, originally."

While he was there, his love of flying got him a ride in a PBY 5-A one day, and fate helped him earn his first Bronze Star.

"We had just gotten up, and these F4U fighters flown by the Marines passed us," recalled Daugherty, who graduated from Penn State in 1948. "They were headed for Rabaul, where they got into combat. I was listening to the radio pretty intently and heard that one of the pilots was going into the drink not far from us. We headed there, circled around, landed (the PBY was able to land on water or land), just threw him into the plane, and the captain hit the throttle. We were in a combat area with no armament. He (the pilot) was so glad to see us."

On one of Daugherty's island stops, a major problem was jungle rot, a fungus that eats away the skin.

"There was no medical help of any kind in the jungles," he said. "Not a nurse, or even a corpsman. The Navy had everything, but they were miles away. Anyway, one of the cooks developed jungle rot in the groin area, and he came to me to see if I could help him.

"I was no expert, but I made up a formula -- I don't remember what was in it, but one of the elements was iodine -- and swabbed it on him, and in a couple of weeks he had no jungle rot. Then others, mothers with their children, started to come see me. Finally, the higher-ups decided it would be best if I stopped. I was just trying to help others."

Daugherty was at Bougain ville when Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor, was ambushed and shot down in the area.

"That was quite an emotional letdown for the Japanese," Daugherty said. "I went to see his grave."

Daugherty's tour eventually took him to the Philippines, where, on several occasions, he found himself in close proximity to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But that wasn't the most exciting thing that happened to him there.

"One night, we were all sleeping in our tents, and the guns malfunctioned on one of the fighter planes and it started spraying bullets all over the area," he said. "Fortunately, it was high enough that it wouldn't hit anyone unless you were standing up. But I rolled right out of my bed and into a slit trench (latrine). Now, you say you wouldn't do that, but when something like that happens, you do it. And it doesn't matter what's in there, water or anything else."

A bout with hepatitis landed Daugherty in the hospital for 21 days. When he recovered, he looked out into the bay and saw nothing but ships.

"They were getting ready to invade Japan," he said. "There were all kinds of ships from destroyers to submarines to (aircraft) carriers. You couldn't see the water for the ships."

The war ended before the need for an invasion, but Daugherty was shipped to Japan for a time until the regular occupation force arrived. According to his notebook, he left Lingayen Gulf on Oct. 19, 1945, and arrived in Japan on Oct. 27, where he was happily surprised.

"Our ship got stuck on a sandbar and couldn't go forward or back," he said. "So the engineers built a pontoon bridge out to our ship. When I got off the bridge, there was my brother (Robert) standing. He was the officer who ordered them to build the bridge.

"I hadn't seen him in over two years; I had no idea where he was. I walked over to him, threw my arms around him. I hugged him. I kissed him. I cried. There I was, supposed to be a warrior, and I was acting like a little kid. He was a captain and he was more conservative than me, but I didn't care if he was a five-star general. That meant nothing to me."

The two brothers were able to spend a week together. They traveled to Hiroshima, where the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Aug. 6, 1945.

"That was definitely a sight to see," Daugherty said. "It was something. Whether they were the enemy or not, that made me sad inside. I saw one or two little children and one young woman who could have been a mother."

On Nov. 23, 1945, Daugherty boarded the USS Gen. Stuart Heintzelman and sailed for home, arriving in Tacoma, Wash., on Dec. 12, 1945.

"We called it the dream boat. It was brand new," he said. "We had bunks stacked five high but we didn't care. It was a godsend."

From Tacoma, he boarded a train headed east. "I sat on my barracks bag in the area between the Pullman cars most of the way," he re called. "Every once in a while we'd stop and the USO people would give us apples, bananas, things like that. It was a blessing after what we'd been through."

Daugherty was discharged from Fort Indiantown Gap after a couple of days of outprocessing. He took a train to Lewistown and from there caught a bus that dropped him off at The Corner Room in downtown State College. It was Dec. 20, 1945. His odyssey was a few blocks from being complete.

"I had this big barracks bag with a Japanese rifle and a sword sticking up out of it," he said. "I was walking along Allen Street, between Beaver and Foster avenues, when Frank McClellan (who owned McClellan Chevrolet in State College for years) came along. "He said, `Hey, Al, glad to see you. Do you need a ride?' He took me the rest of the way home."

Daugherty arrived home un announced and knocked on the door.

"My mother came to the door -- and she's like my brother, very conservative. She just looked at me and didn't say a word," Daugherty remembered. "I walked in, gave her a big hug and went to sit by the radiator. I couldn't stand the cold after being in the Pacific for so long.

"She asked me if I wanted something to eat, and I told her I didn't care what it was, I'd eat whatever she fixed. She told me later she thought I was sick be cause I was so skinny. When I left home I weighed 200 pounds, and when I got back I weighed 135 pounds."

After graduating from Penn State, Daugherty eventually began a career with the state Department of Agriculture, from which he retired. In his home on McCormick Avenue, not far from where he grew up, there are no visible reminders of his years as a soldier. He keeps his little black notebook in a drawer, available for reference if his memory fails him.

"People used to laugh at me when I'd be writing in it," he said. "But it meant a lot to me. I'm glad I kept it."

Ron Bracken can be reached at 231-4641.