No ball game

While we were regrouping at Bellows Field, Hawaii, before island hopping to Okinawa we got word that the medium of exchange on Oki was booze. Since most of us had been boy scouts, we naturally loaded cases of booze into our bomb bays before taking off. We weren't disappointed when we got there. You will notice that the background of the officer group picture is a wooden building. That building as you might guess was an officers club -constructed by those very officers in the photo. I, myself, rode shotgun with a fifth of whisky on a GI truck at midnight to a storage area to purchase one load of lumber (from the GI guard) that went into that building. This medium also provided us other luxurious amenities such as wooden floors for our tents and a wooden outhouse. The outhouse was on the side of a hill overlooking the ocean. I think it was a four holer and I don't recall seeing any officers building it - probably saved that job for the enlisted men to keep them out of trouble. One day I was sitting up there beside a pilot - don't remember who he was. He took a roll of paper and unrolled about six feet of it and gazed out towards the ocean and began to talk. "You know what bothers me," he said. "I've got all these tickets and there's no ball game." I don't know why, but for some reason, that day, I thought what he had said was hilarious. He and I laughed ourselves silly all the way back to the squadron area.

Joe Connaughton, Navigator/Bombardier, 438th Bombardment Squadron, 319th Bombardment Group