A. Jack Seversen, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, September 29, 2003: Saving the legacy tape no. 637

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.J K V R E EPT MBER 29 2003 £ rc went to aipan and made the landing. I was in the fifth wave going into aipan. ixty-five days on the ship had taken a toll on some of the people. There was about half a dozen of us who did calisthenics and tried to keep ourselves in shape. BEC: They didn't have formal exercises on the ship? JAC: No, and the food was lousy. BEC: You didn't have any formal assignment to do on the ship? JAC: Well, I would volunteer for some kind of watch. On the little ship we went on from New Caledonia to New Zealand, I volunteered for gun crew. We were put on a three-inch gun. So, what we'd go is before we'd go on watch, we'd go buy a couple or three cans of beer and slide them down the barrel of the gun. Then, when we were on watch, we could open up the breech of the gun and have a beer. It was more or less an informal type thing. It was the best ship I was ever on. We would be in our bunk at six o'clock and a guy would come along and say, "If you want breakfast, get up." "Well, okay," we'd say. He'd come back about a half hour before breakfast was over and wake us up again and we'd say, "Okay, we give up," and we'd go to breakfast. We never had that kind of service before. We hit the beach at Saipan and some of the guys in our outfit only made it less than a hundred yards up the beach and they were all bushed, because of the fact that they were out of shape. Then, we went over to the island of Tinian, which was only about two miles away. We had to make a landing at a little town there. The organized resistance on Saipan and Tinian was over in a matter of less than ten days. For the next couple of months, we did a lot of patrol work because there were pockets of resistance. The Japanese would hide out in caves. We'd draw sniper fire once in a while. One time we came into this town. I don't know what its name was. There was a bank 6