![]() “It was extra wide where our battle station was, so they used it for the morgue,” he said. The ship’s crew started to bring down dead sailors. “I thought we were going to be going swimming.” “Down in my battle station, when the plane hit, it vibrated the whole ship,” Boynton said. The strike killed 27 and wounded 117, according to the Warfare History Network. “It sprayed shrapnel all over the rear of the ship, so it killed almost all of the men on the guns,” Boynton said. The one that attacked the USS Goodhue was knocked off course by the Goodhue’s gunners and slammed into the ship’s mainmast at 6:50 p.m., according to an excerpt from the ship’s log on the website Warfare History Network. “If they could knock out the engine room, if they got you dead in the water, they could pound you at will,” Boynton said. The Japanese pilots would aim for a ship’s bridge or engine room on their suicide missions. On its way to Okinawa on April 2, 1945, the Goodhue and several other transports, along with their escorts, came under attack by kamikazes. ![]() “My battle station was repair engine room, so I was just outside the engine room,” he said. All hands man your battle stations.’”īy this time, Boynton was an electrician apprentice responsible for the operation of the ship’s air- and water-cooling systems and the lifts that raised and lowered its landing craft. “You’d get this ‘ding-ding-ding-ding-ding,’” he said, and a call would go out: “’General quarters. It traveled in a convoy with destroyers on either side for protection. The Goodhue was a transport ship, with capacity for 1,500 troops. He was eventually assigned to the USS Goodhue, which departed on its first voyage across the Pacific in January 1945. I’d never had a lot of stuff they had in the Navy.” With the days of flour pudding still a recent memory, the food in the Navy was “very good” by comparison, Boynton said. Later, he crossed the United States by train for Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. Navy uniform.Īfter eight weeks of boot camp at the Sampson Naval Training Base in New York, he trained as a fireman in Philadelphia, learning how to operate boilers on a ship. It was a couple weeks before D-Day in Europe, but Boynton’s World War II service would be on the other side of the world, in the Pacific theater.Ī young Albert R. Navy a few days before his 18th birthday. He was a student at the University of Maine at Orono when he volunteered for the U.S. He graduated from Erskine Academy in 1943. When they returned, everything was as they had left it.īoynton attended North Whitefield Grammar School, just a quarter-mile from home on Mills Road. “An act of God brought us out of the Depression,” Boynton said. With $30 from the sale and a $20 gold piece, he moved himself and two of his older sons to New Hampshire for work in the logging industry. ![]() “Everybody here, from Maine, if they had an ox or a pair of horses, an old truck, they headed for New Hampshire,” Boynton said. Suddenly there was work available to rebuild the region. The storm, which would become known as The Great Hurricane of 1938, was one of the most destructive ever to strike the region, according to the National Weather Service. 21, 1938, a powerful hurricane swept through southern New England. Flour pudding is the same as you would put on the wallpaper. When he would run out of cornmeal, he would use flour pudding. “When he would run out of rolled oats, then he would make cornmeal. Boynton’s father made oatmeal for breakfast every day – if he could afford it. The family kept a garden and Boynton’s uncles would sometimes give them venison, but times were lean. “We had a horse and a cow and they were our salvation,” Boynton said. A couple months later, his father lost the mill and several woodlots he owned in the area, a casualty of the Great Depression. His mother, Addie Knight Boynton, died in January 1933, when Albert was 6. His father, Chester Boynton, ran a sawmill back across the road, and the kids helped out around the mill. The family moved across the street when he was an infant, and he has lived in the same house on Mills Road ever since. ![]() Boynton, now 91, remembers vividly the collision and the chaos that followed.īoynton was born in the building known as the mill camp on Clary Lake. Navy Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class Albert R. The Goodhue’s guns knocked the plane off course and it slammed into the mainmast instead. Oliver photo)Īn 18-year-old from North Whitefield was at his post in the engine room, which kamikazes would target in an attempt to disable ships, when a Japanese plane set its sights on the USS Goodhue off Okinawa on April 2, 1945. Navy at his kitchen table in North Whitefield. Boynton reminisces about his experiences in the U.S.
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