ALLEN McSWEENEY

Allen McSweeney enlisted the day before he would have been drafted.  His desire for clean sheets and three meals a day led him to sign up with the Navy.  However, that did change later.  He was sent to Farragut, the U.S. Naval Training Center in North Idaho, where he quickly learned to take orders.  After Basic Training he was transferred into the Seabees at Camp Parks, California where he went through more training, and his Seabee unit was born: Construction Battalion Detachment #1067 Automotive Repair Unit.  They moved on to Port Hueneme near Oxnard, California where he underwent Marine combat training and was issued Marine combat gear but his unit really was preparing to be fighting Seabees, the branch of the service into which he was transferred. 

Seabees, originally a Civil Engineering Corps, were trained to go in ahead of invasions and put in place the things it took to support the invaders, then keep the invasion force maintained and repaired.  They also constructed landing fields, roads, and buildings.  Men aged eighteen to about fifty could join the Seabees during World War II, the only restriction being they had to be experienced in some practical field like construction or automotive repair.  The Seabee logo nicely represents what they did: it is a giant bee holding a hammer, a wrench, and a gun. 

"The Seabees were military, but different.  A different deal," McSweeney said.  "There were 90-day wonders, just kids who were officers telling experienced guys what to do.  Once we got to the Philippines and all of us got covered with mud, that kind of evened out."

"After my Marine training was completed," grinned Allen, "I got a big Uncle Sam ride to the Philippines." 

His Construction Battalion Detachment (CBD) set up headquarters on Calicoan Island off the tip of Samar Island in the Leyte Gulf, near where General Douglas MacArthur returned, and also near the airstrip where the Enola Gay landed to refuel before heading for Japan.  "We knew nothing about it," Allen noted.

Allen spoke of a difficult passage from the West Coast to the islands.  The third day out, the refrigeration unit on their ship went out and the troops were limited to one meal a day.  They were in a huge convoy, but had no way to get supplies from another ship.  They ate food left over from the crew and officer's mess, digging it out of the garbage cans when the cans were set out at night to be dumped.  They always threw the garbage and leftover food overboard at night so it left no visible trail since both Japanese submarines and planes regularly patrolled the seas. 

They stopped at the Marshall Islands.  The Seabees went ashore hoping to find food, but everything on the island had been leveled.  All that was there was a Quonset hut that sold beer and a carton of cigarettes for fifty cents.  Men from other ships also got off, most of them carrying sack lunches, so spirited trading ensued, Allen and his shipmates giving up their cigarettes for stale sandwiches.  One of Allen's ship mates had somehow gotten a little dog on board with him, and found he had no food for the animal.  All they could find had to go to the men on the ship.  Allen saw him slit the dog's throat and throw him overboard rather than watch him die of starvation, a very difficult thing for the man to do.

Allen has a picture of his first home in the Philippines.  It shows a large number of pup tents set up under palm trees in what appears to be a pool of thick mud.  It was from such an ignominious beginning that Allen and about six hundred and fifty other men built repair shops so they could fix and put back into operation jeeps, trucks, and other vehicles and equipment.  They also established a tent city composed of sixteen by sixteen foot tents, and even built a church which subsequently burned down.

McSweeney said, "There were two seasons.  One, it rained every day.  The other, it rained every other day.  My folks sent a thermometer that I put up in the top of our tent and some days it registered one hundred and forty degrees.  We had to build the tin buildings at night because the metal was too hot to handle during the day.  We had showers on the beach with pull chains to turn them on.  We were surrounded by scorpions, centipedes, monkeys, coconuts, bananas, and land crabs."

While he was in the Philippines there were about one hundred thousand men on Calicoan alone, including Army, Navy, Marine, and Seabee personnel.  It was the inlet area for the Leyte Gulf invasion.  The United States sunk more Japanese Navy ships there than anywhere else during the entire war. The battle centered around those islands was the largest naval battle the world had ever seen.

Allen spoke about ammunition the Japanese used.  The bullets they fired were "all powder" with the lead part being very small.  "They wanted to put a hole in you, not kill you.  If they killed you, your buddies just had to bury you and go on.  But if they injured you, which they did with their high-powder bullets, then it took three men to take care of you.  So they got four with one bullet," Allen explained.

Life wasn't all work for the men of CBD#1067.  Sometimes they would go to the airstrip to look at the planes or they would go into Guiuan, a village on Samar, to watch cock-fights.  The Americans would trade leather shoes for goods, and the local folks would use the leather as a sharpening strop to put a very sharp edge on a small blade.  They would attach that blade to their rooster's spur and with one slash a winner was declared.  The Philippine peso was worth fifty cents at the time, and there was a lot of betting going on among the Seabees as well as the locals.  They had little else for entertainment.  The USO only entertained once while Allen was stationed there.

Allen, a Motor Machinist Mate and head of maintenance of the camp,  was not directly exposed to combat.  They had been set up far enough from the front lines so they could maintain their repair function.  Yet, they were under constant surveillance by Japanese snipers, guys who remained hidden away after the Japanese military had withdrawn, guys who didn't know they were beaten.  When the Seabees first got to the tip of Samar there were a lot of those snipers, but then the US government offered to pay one hundred dollars per head to Philippine guerrillas for each one they brought in.  And so they brought in heads, hacked off unceremoniously, and collected their bounty.  It did resolve the problem of snipers picking off Americans working on the base.

That is not what won the war, however, according to McSweeney.  "What made the difference was the large supply of equipment and goods that came to the Philippines from America.  The people at home did a tremendous job of keeping us in materials.  That made the difference." 

The biggest push Allen's unit experienced came when General Douglas MacArthur returned to Tacloban, Palo, and Dulag on the Leyte Gulf with a huge invasion force.  The ensuing battle did tremendous damage to many, many pieces of equipment which the Seabees promptly repaired and returned to the war zone. 

When the war was over, the CBD#1067(ARU) was no longer needed so the outfit was decommissioned and McSweeney was transferred to the NCB143rd Advanced Base Construction Depot (ABCD).  The depot's inventory of ninety-three million dollars worth of parts had been stockpiled for use in the Pacific Theater of Operations.  McSweeney was told that back in the United States, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and other manufacturers had all been building war material that, by an Allied agreement, was not to be brought back to the US once it was sent overseas.  So, the ABCD was faced with disposing of all that material.  Allen recalls seeing a French Navy air craft carrier being loaded totally full of American jeeps, weapons carriers, 6x6 trucks, and parts, all accepted without payment to the United States. 

Allen McSweeney returned home in June of 1946, back to St. John where he had been born on April 17, 1926.  He developed a retail farm equipment business, the McSweeney Tractor Company, which he sold upon retiring in 1980. 

He married in July of 1946.  Frances Ratliffe, whose mother was an operator for the St. John telephone office, also worked there on the night shift for four years while going to high school.  Allen and Frances had two children, five grandchildren, and inherited two more. 

Allen returned to the Philippines, as had MacArthur, doing so to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the General's promised return.  While those who organized the event expected thousands to show up, only about two hundred and fifty American veterans plus many locals attended the ceremonies.

Allen McSweeney was selected as one of three veterans who, from the deck of the U.S.S. Belleau Wood, participated in casting a wreath upon the water in honor of the brave souls who had lost their lives there fifty years before.  The three veterans were joined by Admiral Ronald J. Zlatoper, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet; the Honorable John Dalton, Secretary of the Navy; and Richard Lau who, on the morning of October 20, 1944, had the privilege of piping General Douglas MacArthur aboard the invasion site.  The celebration included a re-enactment of the landing.  Zeros flew over, coconut trees were blown up, and Marines landed on the beach. 

A memorial has been placed at the landing site.  It is a group of larger-than-life bronze statues representing the General and a dozen or so of the people who walked on shore with him.  His promise to return will not be forgotten by those who visit the site or by Seabee Motor Machinist Mate Allen McSweeney.