Keith Tillotson
Manila (1944)
We hit Manila, and there were a lot of ships anchored out there. You had to catch a boat to go over to Manila. They're pretty sharp, those people in Manila. All those natives in those places – they're not dumb people, you know. They'd come out to the ship in their little boats, and sell you stuff. Like, "Here's some money, if you'll give us cigarettes." They give you this no-good Japanese money in bundles. "Oh, that's a pretty good deal!" Then, when you went ashore, you're wading in the stuff. You were just walkin' in Japanese currency right out in front of the banks. They just dumped it all out.
On the troop ship we're watchin' a movie – Mutiny on the Bounty. I must have seen that twenty times. You'd exchange movies with other ships if you could, but this particular time they just showed it every night. Mutiny on the Bounty. Everybody's walkin' around imitating the characters in the show. Charles Laughton – I thought he was a great actor, fantastic.
We're settin' there in port, lookin' at movies, and you could see the shells lobbing back and forth. They got tracers on some of them, you know. A shell that you can see – maybe one out of every ten has got a tracer, and you can see where that went like lookin' at the back of a jet airplane or a rocket. You can see these shells go back and forth – the war's still goin' on over there.
This island, the Americans only had a strip of it secured. There's still snipers out there. In fact, one Merchant Marine got shot right through the head. A sniper got him.