AUDIO FILE---FRANCESCO IANNARINO

This taped conversation is about an hour long, so it is quite a bit to read. Get yourself a glass of Chianti and enjoy the visit. Unfortunately there is little documentation on the photos accompanying the text, except for the photos of Charleston field and the photos of Green Island. We have learned that Frank had traveled to or through the Phillipines, New Zealand and Australia. You will have to use your imagination to place the photos as you read the text.

This tape is one recorded recently by a family group consisting or Frank, L., B., F., Granddaughter and her husband having a discussion of Frank's military service and Frank's memory of the times surrounding World War II, as well as some family history questions.

Dad--Roosevelt came in in 1932--he was elected in 32 and then, uh, Social Security started shortly afterwards, first the WPA came in, you remember that don't you? then there was another group that--Works Progress Administration, then there was another group that took care of the forest.

F.--(showing business card to mom)

Dad--Did you ever see the one I made up?

Mom--These knees of mine are giving out, L., especially this one--I got to have them operated on.

Dad--you have one in your purse(to mom)I have so much in my pocket that I got rid of it.

F.--You gave it to mother, right?

Dad--Yeah, right I got tired of carrying around a thick wallet. I don't mind carrying around a thick wallet if it is money--

F.--Why did you decide to join the navy after the war started?

Dad--Well, I guess I didn't want to be in the army. I was 21 years old and I figured, man, I was 1A in the draft and I says I ain't waiting for someone to pat me on the shoulder and tell me that I am in the army.

L.--That sounds real familiar, I did the same thing.

Dad--Well, in the first place I tried to get in the Navy when I was 18. I tried to get an appointment to Annapolis and back in 1938, right in the middle of the Depression, you couldn't buy your way into Annapolis, you had to have a congressman or someone like that to get you an appointment.

F.--You still do, don't you?

Dad--Yeah, but you had to be politically well connected to get into Annapolis, and I really wanted to go to Annapolis and from what I could find out you had to have an appointment. I had just graduated from high school. I figured, well, here is a chance to get a free education and go into the military. I couldn't get in. So then I decided I would get into the Navy instead, you know, the regular Navy. And the funny thing is that they wouldn't take me at first. They said that I was overweight. I weighed 204 pounds, and they said that I was 25 pounds overweight. I went on a diet and went down to 179 and got into the Navy.

F.--Well, you were originator of the atkins diet? Didn't you just eat steak?

Dad--NO, no, I ate practically nothing.

Granddaughter--So you were the initiator of bulemia?

Dad--I heard that asparagus was a low calorie food and I ate a lot of asparagus. I lost that 25 pounds in just a matter of a few weeks. And then they took me in. The funny thing is that as soon as they swore me in, they gave me meal money and said go out across the street and get yourself a meal--so I went over there and got a great big steak dinner. Put that 25 pounds back on again.

F.--It is interesting that they wouldn't take you. I would think that at 6 feet, 200 pounds is not that much over what you should weigh. I guess they thought you could sink a ship with 200 pounds.

Dad--At least I got into the communications.

F.--Where did you go for basic training? Or they didn't have basic training?

Dad--They had basic training. They had boot camp. I never went to boot camp.

F.--You didn't?

Dad--Never! Never went to boot camp! I got into the Navy and they found out that I had a commercial radio telegrapher's license--radio telegraphy--they took me and shipped me to Philadelphia, I am sitting in civilian clothes. I'm sitting at an operating desk at NAI in Philadelphia. I am working ships at sea, you know, back and forth, you know, using morse code and it was something like a week or two before I got a uniform.

F.--You mean you never took training on how to use a gun?

Dad--Never, never even shot a gun while I was in the Navy. They wanted me for the technical skills. That 's what they said.

F.-You lucked out on that.

Dad--Oh, I know I did. I never went to boot camp.I went directly from NAI in Philadelphia, a navy radio station--a ship to shore station---I used to be working those ships at sea when they were being attacked by German submarines--they'd be sending SOS's and SSS's--that means they sighted a sub, not that you were in trouble. And I'd be working them back and forth, you know. Finally a class in Navy radar opened up and I was able to get into that class, and I went to the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. They sent me down there for what they called pre-radar. There was a class of 100 sailors in that whole university. Oh, did we have the run of the place! Never went to boot camp, never shot a gun ther whole time that I am in the Navy.--Spent eight months out in the South Pacific, still never shot a gun! All I did was go out there and service radio and radar equipment.

Mom--You could have gotten hurt yourself.

Dad--Yeah, I service, radio and radar equipment, radio-altimeters, loran systems, flux eight compasses, any electronic equipment on an airplane. I sat in the service shop, when the flight came in if there was a discrepancy in the equipment, I would go out and get the equipment and take it to the shop, service it and put it back in the airplane.

L.--did they have sonar submarine detection when you were there?

Dad--What they had was not sonar--similar to it. We had a piece of equipment that you dropped into the ocean, you thought you was over a sub, see--you dropped this thing into the water and it had a parachute on it, it fell into the water and as soon as it hit the water, an antenna popped out of it. All it had was a microphone that fell down and you would listen to the microphone that was under water to see if you could hear a submarine in the water. They would drop a pattern of them, when they suspected there was a submarine in the area, they would drop a pattern and you would listen to the different ones to determine where that submarine was.

L.--So if the sub knew you were there, he would just turn off his engine?

L.--He'd would be out of luck? So when did sonar come into play?

Dad--Well, that was on the ships for a long time--there was no sonar in the airplanes. For sonar equipment, you have to be in another ship, you have to have a microphone under the ship so that you can hear.

L.--So they did have it?

Dad--Oh, they had sonar.

L.--They also have sonar in helicopters? They lower the sonar into the water?

Dad--Well if they can hover, they can lower the microphone.

L.--The things is that the subs are less likely to know that there is someone around.

Dad--The thing that we had was this microphone that you dropped, actually it was just a little radio transmitter that floated.

L.--It didn't detect anything unless there was a noise there. That's unlike sonar.

Dad--Yeah, this didn't send a signal out, it just received the signal. But we had one piece of equipment that they never talked much about. I worked on it. It was called MAD--magnetic airborne detection system. And we used it in the blimps. I used to work on the blimps too. What this was, we dropped out of the blimp this long cable that had a magnetic detector at the end of it. And, uh, you would fly very slowly over the water and if there was a large metal object under the water, it would detect it. And they were able to detect a lot, of course, they picked up a lot of sunken ships too--it detected any metallic object under the water. What happens is you know a large metal object like a submarine, the earth has a natural magnetic field, you know that is what your compass reads and any large metal object in the water would disturb that magnetic field and you could read it on an instrument inside the blimp. You know, you would be flying, If you suspected that there was a sub in the water you would lower this thing and slowly fly. You know with a blimp you could slow down to two mile an hour. You didn't have to maintain much of a forward speed to stay in the air. And we used to use those off the coast of California. We would fly those blimps off of San Francisco, off Moffett Field in San Francisco. But I had to service that. All I did in the Navy was repair stuff.

Mom--My goodness!

Dad--I might have shot myself if they ever gave me a gun!

F.--I never heard that before that you didn't go to boot camp.

Dad--Didn't even go to boot camp. Didn't even have a uniform, I was in the Navy without a uniform.

Mom--That is not true.

Dad--That is true!

Mom--I got a picture.

Dad--I know it but I was in the Navy for two or three weeks before I got a uniform.

F.--That was before he met you cause you wouldn't have looked at him twice without a uniform.

Dad--Oh, that was funny.

Mom--I would have looked at him.

Dad--They found out that I had a radio license and could operate Morse code and that was it, Cause we need people at this radio station. There were five of us there--five operators and a ship. One guy would handle the inshore patrol, another guy was on what they called the "fox" watch and another one was ship-to-shore and the fifth was a rotating person that would just rotate around and relieve the guys. You spend eight hours with a pair of headphones on and boy that, that's terrible. That's a lot of work. Or if you were copying "fox"--that was information to the fleet, you know, all in code. You'd be sitting there for eight hours on the typewriter just typing everything that comes in over your headphones. That was very tiring.

F.--It had to be kind of scary and awful when you had an SOS call from a ship.

Dad--Oh, yeah.

F.--You hear that they are under attack.

Dad--I was in Philadelphia. Them subs was running up and down the coast near Philadelphia.

F.--Well, I heard,maybe it was at your house--they shut down the lights in New York city.

Dad--They did that often on the east coast.

F.--The submarines could see the ships with the backlight of the lights from New Yor k and the ships would show up against it.

Dad--I'd be working a ship that might be 30, 40 miles off the coast, you know, and first you'd get an SSS--sighted a sub, the next thing you know, it might turn to an SOS and he's in trouble, you know. Then you would turn it over to your supervisor. After that you try to maintain contact.

F.--I don't know whether I could deal with that, you're contact someone and they are under attack and there's nothing you can do.

Dad--No, all you can do is handle the communications. I know on the in-shore patrol one time, that was the only voice communication was the in-shore patrol, that was with the Navy ships that were close to the coast and they'd be patrolling up and down, and I would hear every once in a while that they were in pursuit of someone, and how close those things got in.

F.--Why did they transfer you to Charleston?

Dad--I went to radar school; I went to the University of Houston, that was pre-radar, nothing to do with radar, mathematics primarily, and electronics fundamentals and after I finished there, I am proud to say I finished there with a 96 average. From there they sent me to Corpus Christi, Texas and taught us how the radar worked. That was top secret stuff back then. You couldn't talk about it outside of the base. That was for four months. I was second in the class out of there. And from there we went to a receiving station waiting for assignment.

F.--You were assigned in Charleston?

Dad--No. I was assigned to Fleet Airwing 5 which was based in Norfolk. And then Fleet Airwing 5 had bases up and down the Atlantic seaboard--one in Jacksonville, one in Charleston, one in Beaufort, one in Norfolk and one further north. Our responsibility was anti-sub patrol on the east coast from Florida all the way up to New York.

Granddaughter--What made you decide to join the Navy?

Dad--I didn't want to go in the Army. I heard about the bayonets and trenches and stuff. I said that's not for me.

F.--That's kind of why L. joined the Air Force, right?

L.--Pretty similar.

Dad--I figured particularly that I had a license and had worked for a radio station before the war started. You know I had the experience.

Granddaughter--Why didn't you go in the Air Force?

L.--They didn't have an Air Force, just Army Air Force. That sounded too much like bayonets.

Dad-- I didn't want to end up in some trench somewhere, that's why I went in the Navy. I was a coward.

F.--Grandma always said that they left Italy(Providenza and Mariano) because grandpa was afraid he was going to be drafted.

Dad--Yeah.

F.--So we have a family history of--

Dad--Cowards.

L.--Draft Dodgers.

F.--Yeah, Draft dodgers.

Mom--He gets mad if I say something like that.

Dad--Hey, I was smart. I got out of that war alive! A lot of people didn't.

Mom--I'm glad you did cause where would I be if you didn't?--

F.--You might have married some rich, good-looking guy--

Dad--Yeah.

Mom--I am happy being married to this one.

Dad--In my graduating class of high school, 17 from my class lost their life in the war world II. Seventeen. My graduating class of Allegheny High, 17 lost their lives.

Granddaughter--How many were in the class?

Dad--267--that's five percent lost their lives in world war II.

Granddaughter--Wow, that's a lot.

F.--And a lot of them were in the army I am sure.

Dad--Yeah, a big percentage of them. You know we got out of high school in 1938 and we were 21 when the war started.

L.--It would be more than 10 percent isn't it? If you have 267 only about 135 are men.

Dad--yeah that's right, about 10 percent.

L.--That's about 15 percent.

Dad--You figure there would be a 55-45 ratio between the women and the men in the class, so L. is correct.

F.--Uncle Tony--was he in the armed forces?

Dad--Oh yeah. He never got out of boot camp.

L.--He made up for you there, huh?

Dad--Never got out of boot camp. What happened was he had a physical disability.

F.--Oh, Because of his elbow?

Dad--Because of his elbow, yeah. My older brother, Charlie, he fought in the African campaign.

F.--He was in the army?

Dad--He was in the army in Africa. I don't know how long he spent over there.

F.--Now what exactly happened with Uncle Tony's arm?

Dad--The story I get is that my mother was changing his diaper or something like that and he fell off the table and that's how he broke his arm.

F.--And it was never set right?

Dad--They were never able to set it right.

F.--And he didn't want to show it was deformed.

Dad--Yeah, it was. That should have never took him in in the first place.

L.--When I went in the service you had a physical before they let you in.

Dad--They should have never took him in.

F.--So they just discharged him?

Dad--Yeah, they discharged him. They gave him a medical discharge. He went to boot camp somewhere around Chicago. I am trying to think of the name of it.

F.--In the Army?

Dad--In the Navy.

F.--So he joined before you did?

Dad--No.

F.--And he was married by then?

Dad--Yeah, he was married by then.

Mom--He was older than you too.

Dad--Oh, yeah.

Granddaughter--Do you know any of the stories of the African one?

Dad--As I said, he(Charlie) went to Africa, he went with the army to Africa.

Granddaughter--Did he tell any of the stories?

Dad--My older brother wasn't a communicator. He never talked much, you know.

Granddaughter--Grandma(B.), tell the story about the bananas. Remember you told me when you were pregnant with mom(F.) grandpa would bring you bananas. Tell that story.

Mom--I don't remember it.

Dad--What happened was when I went overseas, your mother, well, before I went overseas, your mother(B.) came out and stayed with me. I was in San Francisco waiting for my ship and she stayed with me for a couple weeks. I didn't want her by herself, so I sent her back home to stay with my parents. And my father used to worry about her because she was so thin. And he found out that she like bananas so he used to bring a whole stock of bananas home and hang them in the cellar--you know they would be green and they would hang in the cellar. No one was allowed to eat them but her.

F.--When mom got married she was 5'7" and weighed 108 pounds. She could have been a model.

L.--That wasn't all that thin for those times.

Dad--I could count her ribs.

L.--But how old was she.

Dad--20

L.-That wasn't all that uncommon. You are talking about the 30's. From the pictures I have seen of her, she didn't look that thin. My mother looked like that for instance. She wasn't that tall, but she didn't weigh 100 pounds.

F.--I think women were thinner, a lot thinner.

Dad--Remember that picture you sent me of her in the backyard of the house on Mt. Troy Road, she was wearing a coat. That's one of my favorite pictures of her.

F.--What is this story about, you were telling us last time about when you were in San Francisco? Were you waiting to be shipped overseas.

Dad--Yeah, what had happened was the squadron that I was with, we couldn't fly to Hawaii non-stop, so we had to wait for a ship, one of those baby flat-tops, and we loaded the planes onto the carrier and then we waited for transportation that brought us out to the South Pacific.

F.--Well, what do you mean baby flat-tops?

Dad--During the war, this country needed a lot of aircraft carriers. The Kaiser shipbuilding company volunteered to build these baby flat tops.. They took a standard cargo ship, stripped the top deck off and put an aircraft carrier top on it, with the island and everything, converted these little merchantmen into aircraft carriers. They called them baby flat-tops.

F.--I have heard the term before but I didn't know--

L.--They weren't big enough to take off from?

Dad--Oh yeah! They didn't take off from them,no. They had a steam catapult on it, but they landed on the ship. And they carried 16 planes. You take a big carrier carried a hundred planes like the Essex class, but I was on the USS Tulagee which was a baby flat top and we had sixteen airplanes on it.

L.--What kind of airplanes? PBY's?

Dad--No they were either TBM's or TBF's, F-6F's, you know. Those kind of planes.

L.--They shot them off with steam catapult?

Granddaughter--How did that work?

Dad--Well, the catapult is underneath the main deck, and there was a hook on the thing, and they hook them on and WHEw! in a matter of a few hundred feet you're doing a hundred mile an hour.

L.--Just the opposite of when they land.

Dad--And I'll tell you that baby flat-top won the submarine war. You know I was with the anti-sub patrols when I was in the Atlantic fleet. At first we would spot a sub and fly over and drop depth charges on it. Well, the submarine captains learned pretty quickly that these PBM's and PBY's flying at a hundred mile an hour were sitting ducks. They wouldn't submerge anymore; they put five inch cannons on the submarines and they shoot the PBY's down when they were just coming over the horizon, you know. In addition to that they (the subs) would operate in the mid-Atlantic where we didn't have the cruising range to get them. Then they started using these baby flat-tops that carried torpedo planes that carried depth charges, and they cruised up and down the Atlantic and catch the submarines in the middle of the Atlantic where they figured no airplanes could go. So they would fly off these little baby flat-tops and they just decimated the German submarine fleet.

F.--What is the size of these merchant ships?

Dad--Four or five hundred feet.

F.--The Essex class?

Dad--About eight hundred to nine hundred,

F.--So about half...

Dad--about half the size of a normal aircraft carrier.

F.--And I guess much faster.

Dad--Well, we could make fourteen knots.

F.--No, I mean much faster to build.

Dad--Oh, yeah, Kaiser was turning them out--I was watching a program on the History Channel. They were talking about these ships. They had gotten it down to building one of these ships in a few weeks. I'm telling you they were turning them out by the hundreds. Normally they would build a ship from the ground up. Kaiser devised a way of building them in sub-assemblies, and they would move whole sections of the ship--and every one was identical. Just like building a car, they would move a whole section of the ship to where the shipways were, where the ship was being assembled then weld them together. In a matter of a few weeks you had a completed ship. Because they weren't all being built on the whey, you know. There was a good story on the History Channel on how Kaiser did that. Of course, they called them Kaiser Coffins, but...they were slow.

F.--But they won the war.

Dad--On the ship I was on, we could make fourteen knots top speed which is about fifteen miles an hour.

F.--It would take a while to get to Hawaii.

Dad--It took us 28 days to go from the Phillipines to San Diego.

L.--It is ironic that we destroyed the German u-boat fleet with boats made by Kaiser.

Dad--Yeah! 28 days out in that Pacific Ocean.

F.--Longer than it took your parents to come to America.

Dad--Yeah. Of course that's eight, ten thousand miles from the Phillipines to San Diego.That was a long trip. I played a lot of cribbage on deck.

Granddaughter--Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?

Dad--I was working for a radio station in Wheeling, West Virginia at the time. In fact I was on duty when the old teletype started banging away you know. I am on duty working at the station, well--they go bing, bing , bing when a bulletin comes in. At that time they never stopped binging. So I goes back into the room where the teletype was and tore the sheet off and it tells about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mom--You were married then?

Dad--No, we weren't married then.

F.--Well, I guess I never heard--you went to school, in high school but you went to some kind of radio school?

Dad--I went to a radio school after I got out of high school. That's right, and they got me a job in broadcasting.

F.--So that's where you got the job in Wheeling?

Dad--Yeah.

F.--Then after Wheeling, you went to North Carolina?

Dad--I started out in a radio station in North Carolina, then I went to Wheeling and then I got a job at a Pittsburgh radio station. I only worked at that station for less than a month. From there I went into the Navy.

F.--I knew you didn't work in Pittsburgh.

Dad--Yeah, I worked in Pittsburgh.

F.--I knew about North Carolina, I don't think I knew about Wheeling.

Dad--I only worked there a couple of months, then in Pittsburgh it was only a couple of weeks and then the war...when I started I was waiting to get into the Navy.

F.--Well, was it, when you were out of high school and working, did you have the sense that there would be a war?

Dad--No

F.--There were no threats or?

Dad--What was going on in this country at the time was these so called demonstrators or peaceniks going around, "America First" and all these different groups going around, you know, "Keep America out of European wars". You know that the war was going on in Europe at the time, and there were a lot of demonstrators and things like that about keeping out of the war and of course, the minute the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor...

F.--Well, what do you think about these stories that Roosevelt knew that we were going to be attacked?

Dad--Well, I hear a lot about it and sometimes I wonder if they were true or not, but nobody has been able to prove it.

Granddaughter--How did you feel when you first read those bulletins (about the attack)?

Dad--What? When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? That's when I decided to join the Navy. You couldn't walk down to the recruiting office in the Navy, you could in the Army but you couldn't in the Navy and get right in,

F.--They didn't take everybody. They figured give him to the Army, he'll work off those 25 pounds.

Dad--But they finally took me.

F.--Smart move on your part.

Dad--Oh yeah, I'm glad of that. God knows what would have happened to me if I ended up in the Army.

F.--But you know grandmother was lucky that she kept all of her sons.

Dad--She was.

F.--A lot of people didn't.

Dad--I had one relative that almost died at Anzio, in Italy--he was my father's brother's son. A cousin, yeah. He almost died at Anzio.

F.--What was his name?

Dad--He was a Henry. He was Charlie Henry too. He told me the story there, he says he could speak Italian so they landed on the beach at Anzio,s and he's talking to one of the natives there, you know where are the German?. Well, this guy led them into a trap, you know, ambush, and he got shot. He could speak Italian so he acted as an interpreter. The guy just led them into an ambush. He got all shot up.

F.--But he came home?

Dad--Yeah. He told the story about what happened to him.

F.--Did you know a lot of your relatives?

Dad--Oh yeah, I knew a lot of them.

F.--Cause, I don't remember ever meeting anybody. I know grandmother had a couple of sisters who lived in Pittsburgh.

Dad--No, I guess not. She had, her name was Carmella, she had a sister Carmella and she had a sister that lived in Midland, Pa. and my father's brother lived in Carnegie, Pa. I knew some of them. I just didn't know them all.

F.--Well, who lived on the Southside?

Dad--Well, that was Carmella, we called her "sacarmella" "Sa" is aunt.

F.--Oh, because Aunt Rosie saying something about when grandmother's sister died, I thought Carmella died a long time before but no one called grandma to say that her sister had died.

Dad--I didn't hear about that story. Well, I know she died in Italy, the one.

F.--Carmella did.

Dad--Yeah, she died in Italy.

F.--But what about your father's family? Like you said your uncle?

Dad--My uncle, he had a brother(grandpa). I think his name, what was his name? He ws in business with him. My father was in business with him. They had the Spragalli Fruit Company. There were three of them, Spragalli and the two brothers. I don't know what his name was but we used to call him "schway". I don't know what that means in English. And of course he had another brother who lived in, no that wasn't his brother that was my mother's sister who lived in Carnegie. I have all these records on the computer but want to get them into a better program.

F.--I'll have to look for this. I don't know if we can copy it or not.

Dad--You really need the instructions with it too.

F.--Maybe I'll look for one, this Family Tree program.

Dad--The funny thing is the MOS based program that I have is called Family Tree also. It's a clumsy program and it is hard to enter stuff and it is hard to work with. Some of these new programs you can put pictures in and everything.

L.--My cousin is doing a family tree, Family Tree maker, and she uses a thing that is on the web.

Dad--You showed me a book one time that your dad had of the McDonald clan.

L.--I don't remember that.

Dad--Yeah, it was put up in book form.

F.-Well, maybe it's from Scotland. Some of them did come from Scotland.

L.--Yeah, but my actual relatives, I am talking about. She uses a thing that's on the web. It's a web-based program.

Dad--You showed me a book. It wasn't hard bound. I remember seeing it. I remember you showing me.

L.--My dad didn't show it to you? Where were we then?

Dad--You were in Phoenix at the time.

L.--Phoenix?

Dad--Yep, I seen this

L.-My dad didn't put anything together.

Dad--It wasn't from your dad, it was something that was pretty generalized about the McDonalds. I can almost describe the book, probably about it wasn't a hard cover book, probably like a magazine cover--something like that...

The conversation continued for at least another hour. Dad continued to talk about his time in the USNavy. Dad also told us about the time during his Navy career when he was waiting in San Francisco for a transport ship to take his squadron to the South Pacific. During this period of time dad worked (freelance) on the Liberty ship construction as an electrician, on the days when he was not required to report for duty with the Navy. Dad said that he usually had a couple of days off duty and he and a partner would hitchhike into San Francisco to work. The money dad earned from this freelance work paid for mom to travel to San Francisco and stay with him until he shipped out. Dad laughed and smiled wistfully when he said that his first child was conceived during this time. We had run out of tape, so that it was not possible to record this final part of the conversation.

In 2003 Frank and his wife B. traveled to Charleston, South Carolina one last time to remember the places where they met and fell in love. To the right is a photo of the altar of St. John's Cathedral where the couple married more than 60 years ago. The seemingly endless miles and long days of driving were well worth the effort for the memories the trip evoked. Thank you for giving B. and Frank that one last time .............. a time to recapture the beginnings of their wonderful love story........a love story that will never end.

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©2010 Franciene McDonald