J.M. Graves traveled a long road in one year’s time. Until March of 1944, he had never been out of Yazoo County, and rarely out of Eden.
“I walked to Yazoo City from Eden every once in awhile,” Graves said.
Less than a year later, Graves was swimming for his life up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, halfway around the world.
Graves began his journey when he was sworn into the Navy in Jackson. He had four weeks of training, was assigned to a ship, given 11 days of leave and shipped out.
“We picked up our landing craft in Bay City, Michigan,” Graves said. “We then came down the Mississippi.”
They tied up at Vicksburg, but Graves was so green that he did not know he could have got off and called his folks from there. From Vicksburg, the ship went to New Orleans, where it had cables put around it to demagnetize as protection from enemy ships.
They then went to Manila, picked up men and sailed towards New Guinea, which had already been retaken from the Japanese. New Guinea was the assembly point. Graves’ ship was one of three that went to Manila. His was the flag ship. They picked up more men in Manila and set sail for Okinawa.
“I won’t ever forget that landing,” Graves said. “Japanese on the beach were firing at us. I thought at first that it was Australians behind us who were firing and didn’t have their guns sighted properly.
Graves’ ship, which had five officers and 24 men, was only about 100 feet in length and could carry 250 passengers at one time. It rode high in the water so that it could go into the beach.
“We picked up two Japanese prisoners and put them where the bunks for soldiers were,” Graves said. “I saw a raft with about six or eight more Japanese on it. We were going to pick them up too, but they blew themselves up.”
By the time the battle for Okinawa took place, the fanatical Japanese were desperate. Civilians were leaping off cliffs to their death in fear of the Americans. Suicide planes with kamikaze pilots were diving into ships, exploding on impact.
“We had them just miss our ship and and hit bigger ones,” Graves said.
Graves said since their ship was so high in the water, they were in little danger from torpedoes.
“You could see the water boiling and know it was a torpedo,” Graves said. “But our ship wasn’t low enough to be hit. The thing would be coming right at us, and we would know that if we had been sitting lower, it would have hit us.”
But there were many close calls. A man standing beside Graves was hit in the elbow with shrapnel.
“Our mast was shot off a couple of times,” he said.
A suicide plane soon hit an ammunition ship near Graves’ ship. When the ship exploded, he jumped off a 40-foot ladder into the action. That is when he found himself swimming frantically in the Pacific Ocean.
“I hit bottom,” he said. “When I came up, there was a stick that I grabbed and used to help get back to my ship, which had not sunk.”
Graves had swimming lessons in boot camp, but it is a lot harder to swim with bombs dropping around you.
But there were some other memories Graves took with him from his service. Gen. Douglas McArthur walked across Graves’ ship to get to the flag ship. He was wearing the wraparound sunglasses that came to be associated with him and “enough gold to last me a week,” Graves said.
Graves spent all his time on his ship and became attached to it. But he was more than ready to head back to the United States. He was the first on his ship to do so.
But Graves said he was happy for his opportunity to serve in the military.
“I wouldn’t take anything in the world for it,” he said. “It helped me so much. It taught me to respect other folks, keep up with my own stuff and raise my kids.
The Navy broadened Graves’ horizons, but none of the places he saw looked better than Yazoo County.
