Dale Ellis, North Ogden, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, July 16, 2003: Saving the legacy tape no. 636

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L troubl with that. We w r right next to th I land o 1p n h n t n u 1n. could see their [the Japanese] big guns up on th re. I don t know wh th r th on ammunition or what the reason was, but they didn t fire at us. Whate er th r a n was I was happy about it. Anyway, to do this we would move up a ways tom a ur and stop right there and just wait until we got the thing fixed like it should be and then move on a ways further. There we were right next to that Island of Saipan. I don t know what the deal was on that. I never did figure that out for sure. Anyway, we were quite fortunate. I thought so. We did that until that job was done. Our next invasion was the Palau Islands. The Islands of Angaur and Peleliu are two in the Palau Islands. That's where this man was that (later) found the ship (on the bottom of the ocean). So we were sweeping off Angaur. We started way out on that. That's that picture that I showed you, where those different ones were ahead of us and showing how we worked together. We had swept up over 230 mines off of there. Then, they decided that, well, we' ll just change watches from general quarters to Condition Two or whatever it was, to change the ones that had been at their positions all this time. So they changed the watch. I thought I'd beat everyone back to the shower, because they let me loose from where I was in the radar shack. I ran back there and down in my compartment, which was in the back of the ship, the after compartment, I went down there and just had on a pair of shorts. I was going up to the showers that were back there and all at once, the ship started to jump around, up and down. Then, it went dead in the water. I didn't know what had happened. I ran up the ladder from my compartment up to the main deck and worked my way up forward. The passageway I usually went by was full of smoke and steam. That 21