Vernon Olsen's Life story by Alexandra

Vernon Holmes Olsen was born on May 14, 1926 in Horton, Kansas. He had two brothers and one sister. Their names were Robert, Clair, and Doris. His parents, Hans Christian and Ruth, were both farmers. The things he remembered most about his childhood were doing chores around the farm and playing in barns with his friends. The chores he did were anything needed around the farm, like fixing things, taking care of the animals, and volunteering to help others. He said “They were all skills you used the rest of your life.”

His hometown, Horton, was very small. It had a population of about 700-1000 people. Vernon went to a one room school house with no electricity until high school. The war started when Vernon was 15 years old. He remembers sitting around the battery powered radio with his family listening to updates on the war. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was at his grandparents. “I remember looking at the adults seeing their reaction of what was going on. It was a little bit mysterious to me what was going on.” While most of the jobs he had before he entered the service included farm work, he also drove the school bus. He drove it his junior year in high school and it was actually only a bread truck with benches for the kids.

He graduated from high school when he was 17 years old. He could have joined the service right then, but he decided to take a year of choice and stay home to help around the farm since so many people were overseas. In 1944, when he was 18, he was drafted. He chose to be in the Navy, mainly because his father and uncle were also in the Navy and it had left an impression on him. When he left on a train for Leavenworth to get sworn in, he said leaving his parents was a very sad moment.

He traveled all over the Midwest on trains for training. He had never been outside of Kansas before, so his new surroundings were very strange to him. But, he said that everyone in other towns were very nice and helpful. He also traveled on electric lines from Chicago to Milwaukee. The training lasted two to three months and he was taught how guns were built and how to maintain them. The advanced training was in Dearborn, Michigan, at a plant where guns were made. Even though he hadn’t known anyone at the beginning, he made friends with people close to his bunk. Everyone was organized alphabetically, so he had lots of friends whose last names were close to O in the alphabet.

After training, he was shipped overseas on a troop ship that held four to five thousand troops. It took about 30 days and they stopped a lot for fuel, water, and food. One of their stops was at Pearl Harbor after it had been attacked. He said, “That was quite impressive to pull into Pearl Harbor and see all the sunken vessels and the damage that had been done already.” His first assignment was in Okinawa, Japan and then he went to Inchon, Korea. Those were just the first places though.  He also served near Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, and Japan. He went to a lot of these places in winter, so it was very cold. He also served at the helm for a little bit, where he got to steer the ship through the Formosa Straight off the coast of China.

His main duties were to keep the guns clean, as his rank was Gunner’s Mate 3^rd Class, keep the deck clean, paint the ship, and watch out for mines. Once the war was over, his duty was to preserve the guns because they weren’t being used anymore. Of all his duties, the most life endangering one was to watch out for mines, which were bombs in the water that would explode if the ship hit them. If he saw one, he would tell the person steering the ship so they could react and someone could shoot it with a 20mm gun until it sunk or exploded. One time while he was doing this, he saw a mine and the person didn’t have time to react. He explains, “I can see it like it was yesterday. I often dream about it because it was so vivid, to see this mine and what goes through your mind, and I look down, BUMP, and it didn’t go off. I was so lucky.” Had the mine exploded, he wouldn’t be here today.

He was still serving after the war ended, and what his ship mainly did after the war was take the Japanese back home to Japan from China and other neighboring countries. The Chinese were still killing the Japanese at the time, so they were saving them by taking them home. One of his most challenging trips was traveling 500 miles up the Yangtze River to pick up the Japanese. He said “Here we were fighting one week and wanting to kill them and two or three weeks you would change your heart and want to save them! Isn’t that strange?” He was never injured, but the scariest moment for him was being in a typhoon. It was very bad and they had to stay out in the water and on the deck of the ship because it was safer.

He wrote a lot of letters on victory mail in his free time. The letters were censored to keep their whereabouts a secret. He thinks the letters were delivered pretty fast, but he only got his mail at certain ports, so when he got it, he got a lot at a time. The letters he received really meant a lot to him because it was nice to hear about things back home. He wasn’t ever really scared while overseas. He just thought of it as his duty. While fear was there, duty overcame the fear.

In 1946, after two years of service, Vernon got to return home. He was very happy about being able to come home and see his family. The only medal he received for his service was the Victory Medal, but he also had badges and stripes on his uniform showing battles and places he has been. Almost right after he got home, he went to college at K-State. The Navy paid for all four years of his education in Agriculture and Engineering. After college, he had a career in seed researching and sales. He is married and has 6 kids. Now, he is retired and likes to play golf in his free time. When asked if he was proud he was able to serve his country, he says, “Absolutely. It changed my whole life.” He said it opened his mind to all different types of people and cultures.

Vernon Holmes Olsen is my grandfather, and I am really glad I got to interview him. I learned a lot about his life. I had always heard bits and pieces of stories of his wartime experiences, but never gotten the whole story. It made me realize that being in the Navy was a big part of his life and is a big part of who he is. I am very proud to say that my grandfather served in World War II!