Overview

Pinky, A Memoir of WWII, is the first of four volumes about a young man who couldn't wait to join the U. S. Navy and go to the Pacific. In this volume T. J. Thiggens is sixteen when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. He agrees with his mother to complete the school year 1942-1943 if she will sign his enlistment papers. He goes through boot camp at Farragut, Idaho, and is transferred to Shoemaker, California, to await orders to ship overseas. On his eighteenth birthday he boards the SS Eugene Skinner for the South Pacific; and after 23 days he arrived in New Caledonia. There he attends a Fleet Radio School, works for a time at the COMSOPAC Service Squadron; and, after almost a year on this island, he finally gets a transfer to a wooden subchaser, which is headed north into the War Zone. There are five subchasers in Noumea Harbor being converted to LCC's (landing craft, communications); and because they each have a Walt Disney cartoon character painted on their bridges, they are nicknamed "MacArthur's Donald Duck Navy". This part of the story about five wooden subchasers ends just as T. J. becomes the 'second' radio on the USS SC-995.