Kid in the Navy

“It’s the one place on earth where they call me ‘The Kid!’”
So said 90-year-old Red Oak resident Alvin Dee Hays, World War II veteran, as he prepared to leave to attend the annual Navy Seals Muster at the Navy Seal Museum in Florida last weekend. It will be the fifth time he has attended.
Hays was born in Kirksville, Mo., and raised mostly in Iowa. He attended country school near Silver City for a few years, and then graduated from Strand School in 1943. “The Kid” enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1944 at the age of 17.
Father signed
“I had to get my dad to sign for me,” he explained.  “At first I wanted to enlist in the Army, but my dad, who served in the Army in France in World War I, had too many bad memories of the foxholes and the mud. He said he didn’t want me to have to go through that.
“I had a teacher who had two nephews that had been in the Navy, and they had nothing but good things to say about the Navy, so my dad said he would sign for me to enlist in the Navy.
“I got called up in May of 1944 and went to boot camp at Great Lakes. After that, 24 of us were sent to Little Creek, Va. Everybody else went to the West Coast.
‘Nothing to lose’
After we’d had about a month of small boat training at Little Creek, the Chief Boatswain got up on the podium and said they needed volunteers for a special assignment. It was about 10 in the morning and he said we had until 4 p.m. to think about it. If you want to participate, have your bags packed by then, he said.
“Well, I was young and every day seemed exciting, and I figured I didn’t have anything to lose.”
The assignment he accepted was for the “Scouts and Raiders,” the forerunner of today’s Navy Seals.
“We were put on a train and rode all night, with no idea of where we were going. We ended up near Jacksonville, Fla., but where they put us off, there was no town, no nothing.
“‘Grab your bags boys, everybody off the train,’ they said. ‘A little way down the track there will be a crossroad, and there will be transportation to pick you up.’ The transportation turned out to be cattle trucks. We crossed a bridge onto an island, and one guy spoke up, asking, ‘Where are the barracks?’
Higgins boats
“The ‘barracks’ were tents on the beach. From then on, we were in Higgins boat training.
“‘You guys are here for one purpose,’ they told us. ‘It ain’t gonna be easy! It’s a 12-week course, but we’re gonna do it in 6.’
“A Higgins boat is about 35 feet long, and can carry 25 to 30 marines plus a crew of four. We would go out 5 or 6 miles after dark, regardless of the weather or the tide, then get into our inflatable rubber rafts and land on the little islands around there. We were supposed to search and report what we found. We also had to assume there were ‘enemies’ on the islands.
“Some of our training included bookwork, learning to recognize all kind of ships and planes in silhouette, our own as well as the enemy’s.
“When we had finished training, my crew of four was assigned to the USS Dauphin APA 97. It was a transport vessel, which carried 33 Higgins Boats, each with a crew of four. We sailed through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor, and from there to Hollandia, New Guinea. Our forces had retaken New Guinea by then, but you could still hear rifle fire all night long.
“We made our first landing at the very southern tip of the Philippines. Our assignment was to scout places on the islands that weren’t yet secure.  They would come get us in the middle of the night and say, ‘You’ve got a mission.’ We would blacken up and dress – no wet suits in those days – and then go up on deck, where a chaplain would pray over each of us. They gave each of us a small New Testament bible, and I carried it with me throughout my days in the service. After that, there was no more verbal communication between us, only hand signals. We would get our rubber rafts to within a couple miles of the beach and swim from there. We were to find out the conditions for landing. Was there coral? Soft sand? How deep was the water? How far was it from the edge of the beach to cover? The whole idea for this kind of unit with this kind of assignment came after the landing at Normandy, where too many died because they didn’t know how deep the water was and what kind of conditions to expect.
“Once the scouting was done, the invasions began, and our job then was to transport troops to shore, take supplies to them, and then retrieve the wounded and dead and take them to the hospital ship. Invasions were always done during the worst possible weather.”
Hays participated in seven major invasions, including the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and many other smaller invasions.
“After both atomic bombs were dropped and Japan finally agreed to an unconditional surrender, all the Allied ships in the area lined up in formation to enter Tokyo Bay. The Missouri was first, and that’s where the surrender was signed. The ships were lined up single file, with 300 yards between them, and the line was 28 miles long. We were fourth in line behind the Missouri, and from where we were, we could watch the ceremony. After the signing, we were directed to change into our combat fatigues, get into our Higgins boats and board every Japanese boat in the harbor, and take down all the Japanese flags. Each of us was allowed to keep one flag for ourselves.”
All four of the men in Hays’ team survived the war, and came home to their families. Hays soon met and married Selma “Rusty” Abraham, and they will celebrate 70 years of marriage in December. They have four children, Linda, Steve, Leslie and Rachel; 10 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. They are both in good health, and live in a condo in Red Oak.
For 60 years, Hays remained mostly silent about his war experiences, but since taking the first Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., in 2008, he has begun to share them. The museum where he will be visiting this weekend is located on the exact spot where he trained more than 70 years ago. And no doubt one of the friends he meets again there will refer to him as “The Kid.”