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Magee, John_WAPA-246_WAPA 4170_OralHist_Video.mp4

Jay Magee was born on November 11, 1923 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He joined the Marines at age 18, the day after Pearl Harbor. He didn’t get his papers until December the 28th because there was no place to put him. He was then sent by train to Parris Island for boot camp. This was the first time he had been away from home in his life. He was in Parris Island for six weeks. From Parris Island they went up to New River, which is now Camp Lejeune. They were built a camp and stayed for two or three months while training. Jay recalls enjoying his time in training. On Saturdays and Sunday they played cards, going down to PX with a machine gun cart and filling it up with beer and crackers. For training, they made a landings in Chesapeake Bay on a boat to see what it would be like to try to land out on cargo nets on little Higgins Boats. In July they were loaded up on Pullman cars and went from North Carolina to San Francisco. In San Francisco they got aboard the ship USS Barnett, a converted luxury liner and Jay remembers they were way down in the hole and they had bunks that were eight tiers high. They were supposed to go to Fiji, but things were happening on Guadalcanal, they were starting to build Henderson Air Field. The ship went straight to Wellington, New Zealand and they unloaded the ship and loaded it back up for combat and spent about six or seven days in New Zealand and worked eight hours on and eight hours off loading the ship. They finally headed for the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal. They got there in the early morning and there wasn’t anything in there. Jay recalls they never did see any enemy for two or three days. They recaptured the air field and built a parameter around it. One night the Japs brought in 800 imperial marines off a couple submarines and tried to break through the lines at the battle of the Tenaru, in which 800 Japanese were killed. The next morning the Marines went in with a bulldozer and dug a big hole and shoved them all in. The entire time, Jay was in the same weapons company, D Company, but his squad was assigned to the rifle company C Company. They had mortars and machine guns in D Company. Jay went in as a PFC and came out as a corporal and had been over there 30 months. C Company had a gun emplacement at the airport and they had to go out there and chop the trees down and chop the field out so that they could hang barbed wire out there, put tin cans on it with rocks in it, so if they hit the line, they could hear them out there at night. The Japs would bomb twice a day. One day the bombers were coming over and they dropped their load and missed the airport and hit the gun emplacement and Jay got buried in the gun emplacement and got a concussion, because of this he doesn’t remember much more of Guadalcanal, besides the sound of a 22 inch shell coming over his head, which sounded like a railroad car. He also remembered how they had no supplies so they lived mostly off of coconuts and limes and food they found in the empty villages. When the Army relieved them, they brought all kinds of food with them and M-1s. Jay was involved in combat on New Britain, Cape Gloucester. New Britain was a crescent shaped island, Rabaul was up in the northern tip of it, so that was an important island that cut off the supplies coming down, so that they couldn’t get onto New Guinea any more. Jay recalls it being another landing where his company never ran into any opposition on the beach. They ended up in a swamp for five days and to sleep at night they would have to chop down a tree and get in the tree to sleep with big bugs crawling on you and leeches all over you. Jay’s outfit eventually went up about the middle of the island and built a parameter around PT tender up there. Jay got orders to take a test to see if he was qualified to be an officer. They flew a little grasshopper plane up for him and he got on the plane and in the middle of the bay the plane conked out and they went down. Jay swam ashore and got someone to come help the pilot to shore, as he couldn’t swim. Jay tells of Macarthur giving them an island with nothing on it, on which the Seabees built roads and places to put their tents. From there, they were headed for Palau when Jay was told he was rated to go back to the States. Jay recalls that being a Marine in World War II was the greatest experience of his life.

U.S. National Park Service, War in the Pacific National Historical Park

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War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Code: WAPA

Guam , Guam
War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Guam , Guam
Latitude: 13.3905000686646, Longitude: 144.654006958008

ICMS (Interior Collection Managment System) : WAPA-00246
NPS Museum Number Catalog : WAPA 4170

War in the Pacific Oral Histories

2025/03/07

T. Stell Newman Visitor Center, Collections room, Safe and Shelf SLF D-01

Public Can View

Rose Manibusan, Jennifer Craig

Organization: American Memorial Park
Role: Chief Interpretation
Address: Micro Beach Road, Garapan, Mp 96950
Email: wapa_interpretation@nps.gov

Saturday, April 5, 2025 12:06:45 AM

Saturday, April 5, 2025 12:06:45 AM

Magee, John_WAPA-246_WAPA 4170_OralHist_Video.mp4

mp4

679.8 MB

Historic

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