Ed Blum

U.S. Navy
Pacific Theater

“I’m sitting next to two friends of mine, shipmates on either side, and all of a sudden a plane goes ‘zoom’ right over us.”

Ed Blum was sixteen and living in the Bronx, NY when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted as soon as he could, joining the Navy and becoming a Radio Man, Third Class. During the war, his ship was stationed in Hawaii, the Marianas Islands, the Marshall Islands, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and China. Blum earned 6 medals during his time in the Pacific.

When the war started I was one month short of my 16th birthday. I was living in New York, in the Bronx.

My brother was home on a leave and he took me to the movies. My brother was already in the army. We found out when we came out of the theater that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and that we were being attacked. My brother says, “Well, they started it.”

I wanted to enlist because that was the thing to do. My brother said, “You are too young; you’re going to have to wait.” I tried to enlist in the Cost Guard and they turned me down. In other parts of the country, kids used to forge their signatures. Really — they used to forge! There were 16 year olds being killed, just like in the Civil War. I waited until I was 17. I went in with a good friend of mine, Jerry, and he wanted to go into Navy. So, we joined the Navy.

My rank was radioman, third class. I was officially a radio operator but then I went to radar school for two weeks, which was in Atlantic City. Radar was really coming into its own then.

Ed Blum, 1943, Boot Camp, Sampson, N.Y.

My first days of service weren’t very happy. I remember that the winter 1943 was cold. I went to boot camp all the way in upstate New York on one of the lakes. it took us all night to get up there with this train.

When the train dropped us off we were greeted with an apple and I think a cup of coffee. Welcome to the Navy. That was our breakfast. We were taken off to the center where we were going to be sworn in. We started getting these injections for different things. Then we got our clothing and everything else, which we put in a big C bag. I forgot what it weighed, but it was heavy. I don’t know what it’s like today in the modern Navy, but back then it was crazy.

Well, the first thing I experienced was when we hit a hurricane—a typhoon. Low and behold, this kid form the Bronx did not get seasick! I must have been one of a few people who didn’t. But there was one time when I said, “Oh God, this is it.” The ship was going in every direction. Our Captain was a World War I commander. He had been out to sea before and he was good. He kept this ship from overturning. That was my first or second day out at sea—going through this hurricane. We went through others out in the Pacific but by then I was used to it.

When I had gone to radar and radio school, evidently they found that I had a talent for high speed operating, because that’s what I was assigned to most of the time. We learned Morse code and learned how to type. You had to type very fast, very fast. I was good at it, even though I never knew how to type until I went into the service. I was up to around 40 or 50 words a minute. You had to. There was code coming over through the earphones and you had to type three of four words behind. When you started typing blocks of words, you couldn’t keep up so you had to remember words. It takes training; not everybody did it. I wish I had it now—that kind of thought—because I don’t remember from one moment to the next.

1944 or 1945, Panay, Philippines, Ed Blum’s Ship, U.S.S. Estes.

I wasn’t a ground person, but I did get to shore on a few of the places. I was at a number of islands during invasions, but we didn’t have to go ashore because we were the commanders of the ship. Too many islands were heavily fortified and the casualties would have been too much. In most cases it was the Marines. Like they do now, they are the ones that take the brunt of the fighting in the beginning.

I did experience several kamikaze attacks. We shot one down. We missed getting hit a couple of times. Also there were kamikaze swimmers, which very few people knew about. We had swimmers and I drew duty a couple of times; once it was at Hiroshima, at night. We had to climb down these cargo nets and go into one of these boats that we used to have aboard ship for invasions and things like that. Our duty was to be on the alert for these kamikaze swimmers and the bombs or whatever it was that they had tied on their backs. I saw rows of ships being hit by kamikazes. For a while, we acted as a hospital ship until a regular hospital ship did come in the area.

Ed Blum, 1944 or 1945, on ship.

One night we were at this little island called Ulithi. This was an area where hundreds and hundreds of ships were preparing for the invasion of Hiroshima. Everything was so peaceful and quiet. We had a movie shown to us that night. Movies were taken in the stern or the fantail of the ship, when nighttime fell. I’m sitting next to two friends of mine, shipmates on either side, and all of a sudden a plane goes “zoom” right over us. When I say right over us, it couldn’t have been more than 15 feet. I poked one of my friends and said, “Was that a Japanese in that plane?” He said, “I don’t know,” and I said, “I don’t know either, but there was a round circle on the wing.” Thirty seconds later there was a boom and explosions all over the place. Evidently the pilot went into one of these tiny little atolls. He must have thought it was a battleship, and that’s what he went into. Then, all of a sudden, we saw these big explosions. There was a small aircraft carrier and a couple of other ships that got hit. Next thing we know the movie is off, general quarters was announced, and everybody just scrambled and went to their posts. The kamikazes had come from another island that we had bypassed because they said casualties would have been too much.

I saw kamikazes again, later, in Okinawa. We would put our destroyers out and they would act as picket ships, to spot the Japanese kamikazes coming in. The Japanese would fly right along the water where it was very hard for the radar to pick them up. It happened to us at Okinawa. We didn’t know until the last moment, when general quarters were announced. I remember I was up on deck. I was looking out and all I saw were these planes just coming right along the water. They started firing first. All I remember was going smack down on the deck

1945, Ed Blum at the end of the war sitting on gun because he and his shipmates had nothing else to do but take pictures.

I’d been to Pearl Harbor few times on and off during the war. That first time we were there it was three years after Pearl Harbor Day. I remember we spent that Christmas there. We went to a luau and things like that. When we would go on deck and just stand about we could see the Arizona, well what was left, lying down there in the water. This was long before any of the ceremonies or the platforms or anything like that were built. There were a few other ship that were sunk too. One was the U.S.S Utah. There were other ships, because some of those other ships that were sunk and raised or just badly damaged were all repaired. Many of those ships were with us when we went into Hiroshima and Okinawa with the naval bombardment.

Later when we got to Pearl Harbor we were told that instead of going home, because the war was over, we didn’t have the points that we needed to be discharged. So, we were sent to China. We went to Shanghai and we took command of the Seventh Fleet. The Seventh Fleet still exists today. It was there in Shanghai that we were notified that we all should be happy that we were in Shanghai instead of invading Japan.

We didn’t find out until several months after the war was over we had been scheduled to take part in Operation Coronet. Operation Coronet was the first of two invasions of Japan. I think was around November of 1945. That’s when we got to China, so we all were happy. Because we knew that the casualties were going to be tremendous.

I remember when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was between California and Pearl Harbor. As we were going out there we heard about the first one. At the time, I had no other thought that it was a good idea to drop the bomb. It was a bad situation but it ended the war. We had no idea about all this radiation or anything.

Now, I have to be honest with you. It’s hard to think about it. When you get older you always hope—whether you’re born in the 1600s or whenever—that hopefully you will grow wiser and always have an open mind. It was a very difficult decision, and if all of you young people feel that it was a horrible thing to do, I can’t blame you. But you have to remember—if you go back to the days of the throwing machines they were able to make five hundred years ago—tossing fiery oil into castles and things—that was the new way of breaking down defenses. There are wars where you are being overrun and there are certain weapons that you’ve developed that the other countries don’t have and you use them. It’s horror. I admitted in my diary, “Thank God the war is over. But thank goodness that President Truman had the guts to do it.” We didn’t know what was going to happen if we didn’t. We were going to invade the islands of Japan. Thousands and thousands of lives, American lives, would have been lost.

There was no doubt in my mind, because at that time it was happening I was 19 years old. Today, I have absolutely no ill feelings against anybody.