Bob Rovan

U.S. Navy
Pacific Theater

“‘We know where you are, and you are not going to reach your destination.’ That scared the hell out of us.”

Bob Rovan enlisted in the Navy as soon as he graduated from high school. He served as a Petty Officer, 3rd Class on board the USS Thurston. Rovan traveled to many islands in the South Pacific during his course of duty, including Saipan and Iwo Jima.

I had intended to make the Navy my career. I tried to get in when I just turned seventeen but my father wouldn’t sign for it. I had to wait until I got out of high school. I’m glad he did that. I wanted to make the Navy my life’s work. I’d read a lot about Navy history and I really wanted to get into the Navy Air Corps. I was too short and my eyesight wasn’t good. I couldn’t overcome those two things. My mother was upset that I was leaving and my dad didn’t show much emotion because he had been in World War I. He didn’t want me to go. He said, “It’s your choice, I’d rather you enlist than wait to be drafted. You get your choice this way.”

Bob Roven pictured with his parents Mr.Tone Rovan and Mrs. Angela Rovan after bootcamp in August 1943.

My father came out as Sergeant, which is pretty good. He was born in Yugoslavia and was educated to the fifth grade. He came to the United States and learned to speak the language. Then he enlisted and got his citizenship. I thought that was pretty good for a guy who, when he came over here, couldn’t speak English at all.

I always wanted to be in the Navy. I was born in Lorain, Ohio, which is right on Lake Erie and I like the water, but I had no concept of what the oceans were like. That intrigued me. I was the only one out of my high school class to enlist. I had a friend that came in about a month later, a guy I graduated with. We ended up in Great Lakes together. He was in one company and I was in another.

I went to Great Lakes Naval Training Station just outside of Chicago, Illinois. It was a nine-week boot camp, basic training. It was brutal, especially when you mess up like I did once. I misjudged something and I was penalized for having a wet towel on my bunk when we had an inspection. The Chief Petty Officer who was in charge of our barracks said, “Rovan, you have one happy hour. I said, “Ok, that sounds good.” There was an asphalt marching area out near our barracks with a tower. Eight of us got penalized the same “happy hour” for various things. We had to walk run and do the duck waddle. I don’t know if you know what the duck waddle is. We had to get down on our haunches and waddle like a duck, with our rifles over our heads for an hour. I was in pretty good shape and I lasted; three of the guys passed out and one of them ended up in the hospital. The officer never did it again. That bordered on brutality. Then we marched and learned how to march in formation. Marching was discipline. Then we had other types of training. One thing they made us jump off was a platform into a swimming pool, fully clothed. Then we had to take our clothes off in the water. This was to teach us how to get off the ship and get rid of our clothing. That was difficult, if you can imagine taking off a shirt with buttons, and treading water.

Training was a maturing process. We had to learn how to row a heavy wooden whale boat. It’s probably about twenty feet long and seats about eight guys. We had to get it out in the storms and learn how to operate that row boat. It was pretty challenging. We learned to keep our faces clean, our bodies clean. Just everything that revolves around discipline. If somebody tells you to do something, you don’t question them or say, “I don’t want to do that.” You learn to do it right now. Discipline is the basis of the military. I respected it.

September 1943, all four of them were in boot camp together and came from the same area in Ohio.

In March of 1944, I was sent to New York City, Brooklyn Navy Yard to go board ship. I was on the U.S.S. Thurston APA 77. It’s a special type of ship that was designed just for World War II. It was a big ship, about twelve thousand tons, six hundred feet long and it carried amphibious landing craft. There were eight landing boats on the ship. They were used for the invasions. They put the boats down over the side of the ship into the water and soldiers on Marines. Whatever we had on the ship climbed down cargo nets to get in the boats to be landed on the beach. This specially designed ship had already been through two invasions, the Invasion of North Africa and the Invasion of Italy, and we had a pretty experienced crew.

We left New York and went to Scotland to practice for the invasion of Normandy. After that was over we went to the Mediterranean and made the invasion of southern France. Then we came back to the United States and I got another nine-day leave, and then we were shipped through the Panama Canal into the Pacific.

We moved around quite a bit; we got into the Pacific area January of 1945. You might be interested in the story that those of us who were on the ship got a little annoyed over. We sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii. The word was we were going to join a convoy to make another invasion. Nobody knew where except another invasion in the Pacific. Something happened to our ship and we couldn’t make the date when the convoy was leaving Pearl Harbor. We missed that cutoff date for the convoy but our Captain was so enthusiastic and enthralled with the idea of making another invasion that he went to the Commanding Officer of the Pacific theatre, who happened to be Admiral Nimitz, and pleaded with him to let us go by ourselves. This wasn’t done, because a ship alone out in the ocean is just a prime target for submarines. Admiral Nimitz somehow thought we could handle it so he sent us off. It wasn’t maybe three or four days that we were out of in the ocean away from Hawaii that we heard a radio message from Tokyo. It was a woman named Tokyo Rose, who was an American citizen who defected to the Japanese and did radio broadcasts for them. She made a broadcast that scared the devil out of us and they beamed it all over the ship. She said, “This is Tokyo Rose. I’m speaking primarily to the crew and officers of the mighty T., the U.S.S Thurston. We know where you are, and you are not going to reach your destination.” That scared the hell out of us. We made it. We had two submarine attacks, but they didn’t get too close to us.

After the invasion of Normandy, Bob Rovan and Bill Snell (right) taken by a New York street photographer in October 1944.

My duties on the ship were to take care of the electrical power in the engine room and other places on the ship. There’s a certain order that you get called General Quarters when the entire ship gets mobilized. My job in General Quarters was to be the radio talker. I had a set of earphones connected to the control tower, the bridge, alongside with a machine gun mount. My job was to relay the message down to the machine gunner. That was my General Quarter’s duty. That was kind of exciting.

We also went to the island of Saipan. The Japanese had controlled it but the United States military took it over six or eights months prior to our getting there. There were two island, Saipan and Tinian. Tinian was just basically a flat rock with a large airfield. That’s where the B29s took off from. It was about eight hundred miles to Japan from there and was the base the air corps used for their bombing runs to get in Japan.

We got there and we practiced for an invasion. Finally we got the word that we were going to attack an island called Iwo Jima. That was the bloodiest invasion. It was just another rock, a little mountain. You have probably seen pictures of the raising of the flag. Mt. Suribachi comes up above sea level about five or six hundred feet. The marines took that finally after eight or ten days of brutal battles. There were five men who were photographed placing the flag up there and one was an Indian from Northern Arizona. He was portrayed in a movie; poor guy just couldn’t handle it and became an alcoholic. He died at a pretty early age, but he was involved in raising that flag. From our ship we could see the flag up there. That made everybody pretty happy that we had finally taken that island. It was a terrible fight; a lot of Marines were lost on the beaches. The Japanese had made tunnels all underneath this mountain and they lived there in those tunnels. You throw a hand grenade in there and they had a lot of turns in the walls. If you threw a hand grenade down one of the tunnels and blew it up, there would still be more tunnels behind that little place. It was a very long and tough battle.

I was in two invasions in the Pacific and two in the Atlantic/Mediterranean theaters. We had two sub-marine attacks and numerous airplane attacks, but there were only two times that I got really frightened. One was stupidity on my part during was the invasion of Normandy and then the second time was after the invasion of Hiroshima. Mostly, it was exciting and I enjoyed it. I had a good bunch of friends on the ship and I enjoyed my job and doing my part helping.

The second time I got frightened was the invasion of Okinawa. Have you heard of the Japanese kamikaze pilots? Just like the suicide bombers of today. They give up their lives for the emperor and killed themselves with the planes. As long as there was a ship, they were going after it. So I’m standing there with this machine gun mount and I see this plane coming over towards us. It was getting pretty darn close and I start realizing it was a kamikaze pilot. I couldn’t see his face. Just about the time I could see his face, a shell from our gun exploded under his right wing and put this thing up like this and went right into the ship behind us and blew that up. I was a little concerned. The kamikaze guy, I can still see his face. Of course, our shell hit the wing and fortunately he missed our ship and hit the ship behind us.

Looking back, my parents must have been really upset with me. I was a terrible letter writer. I would write to them, but we couldn’t tell them things. We couldn’t tell them where we were or what we were doing. So I would just write maybe once a month or something like that. As a parent now, if my kid would have done that, I would have kicked his butt. Parents like to know what’s happening to you. Even if you can’t tell them too much, at least you can always address their concern. I was too young to think about things like that. I was just worried about myself.

Being seventeen, eighteen years old you don’t have the same concerns about what’s going to happen to you as you would if you were twenty-two or twenty-three. The Navy was fun for me and I enjoyed it. I didn’t like some of the work but they didn’t give you too much choice. I can’t say there was any stress. I volunteered and so I knew going in that there might be some pressures, but I was to naïve to understand. If you aren’t frightened you don’t understand the situation that’s how I felt.

Bob Rovan, pictured far right, one of the “electrical gang” who worked aboard the USS Thurston.

To keep ourselves entertained, we played cards. We all had duty stations and I was in the engine room sometimes for eight hours straight. You had time to eat and sleep and I studied and that increased my rank. We played cards and shot craps, told stories, told lies. Typical man stuff. We talked about home—a lot of talking about what home was like and what you were going to do when you got out of the Navy. You just to find things to do and some of the guys had people send magazines and books. There wasn’t too much time that you had to relax. It was pretty hard to relax in the bunks that we had. The bunk were about that far apart. You got in one guy’s butt is in your face practically and your head back here. You get up and boom you hit your head on the bunk above you. You don’t spend a lot of time in your bunk.

When I enlisted, I was going to stay in for twenty years. Something changed my mind, but I have no idea what or why. I spent three and a half years in, just so I could get out.

When I hear people talking about war, it doesn’t have an impact on me; I’m interested in their experience in the war. I thought I did what was asked of me and appropriate for that time in my life. I don’t have any regrets or stress related to it. I don’t have any flashbacks. When you are only seventeen or eighteen years old the severities of those things kind of just go in your head. There was no problem with that.

I always felt that I was fortunate I got to see three quarters of the world that I never would have seen if not for the Navy. Otherwise in the Navy treated me pretty well. It gave the experience and the security that I might not have gotten without that experience.