Reflections: World War II

WHOOMP!

The noise and a sudden jolt shook the two men in the PBY seaplane cockpit. They look around trying to understand what had happened. Then they saw it. Water seeped up through the floor of seaplane’s flight deck.

“We hit something,” the pilot shouted. “Must have made a hole in the nose! Water’s coming in! We got to get back to the bank!”

The pilot pulled the throttle gently back to slow the engine speed. They’d been trying to take off. Then as the nose settled-and more water came. The pilot pushed the throttle forward to gain enough speed to try to keep the nose-and its hole-above the lake surface.

“Just pray we make it back,” the pilot said anxiously.

Morris W. Hancock and the pilot came to be on this US Navy seaplane by pure luck. Hancock had been on the crew of one of the last PT boat’s to escape as American and Philippine forces crumbled before advancing Japanese forces around Manila.. Now they were trying to escape in a seaplane from the Philippine island of Mindanao.

Hancock’s PT boat squadron and its exploits in the Philippines were written about in the book by William Allen White that later became the movie staring Robert Montgomery and John Wayne, “They Were Expendable.”

I chanced to meet Hancock one day in the spring of 1969. I’d always liked the book and the movie, and one night I wondered if any of the PT boat squadron’s sailors might have been from Indiana. Sure enough, in looking through the list of all the crew in the back of the book, I found: Morris W. Hancock, Southport, Indiana.

Southport was near Indianapolis, maybe 40 miles away from where I worked at the “Bloomington Courier-Tribune” newspaper in Bloomington, Indiana. I called the telephone operator (you did that in those days before computers) felt lucky to hear he had a telephone number and called. Sure enough, he was the one who’d been with the PT boats in the Philippines, and he readily agreed to an interview. The next afternoon I was at his home.

Hancock was as friendly and likable, and he enjoyed talking about being a sailor in the U.S. Navy and his service on the PT boats. He was retired from the Navy when I met him, as a small sign at the front of his house told: “Morris W. Hancock, LTJG (lieutenant junior grade) U.S. Navy Ret.”

It is probably 40 years ago now since my interview with him, and I long ago lost the “clip” of the story I wrote about him. So, this will not cover the entire story, but what I remember of the interview is fun to recall and