When World War II broke out, Eugene Hall had no problem deciding which service branch he would join.
“My father was principal at Jett High School,” Hall, 88 said. “He was also the head of the (Warren County) draft board. He told me, ‘Gene, the Army’s not for you. Join the Navy. You’ll have a bed to sleep in, three meals a day and you’ll be on the water. You won’t be sleeping in the mud.’”
On June 28, 1944, Hall, then 18, enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
It was move that sent him to Europe in time for the Battle of the Bulge and to the Pacific in time for Japan’s surrender, ending the war. In between, he saved the lives of two men.
But before he traveled, Hall left Warren County for the Navy Training Center at Port Deposit near Bainbridge, Md., north of Baltimore, for training.
“I was there for 30 days,” he said.
“Boot camp,” as he called it, involved more than drill, exercise and learning about the Navy. There were work details and one experiment.
“One day, they got us all together and the chief petty officer got us for a work detail to unload a rail car full of salt,” he said. “It was bags of salt stacked 12 feet high, and we couldn’t step on the bags. We built us a set of stairs and unloaded that car a bag at a time. We finished unloading that car and started on another before it was time to stop. The next day, we were told to unload more salt. My hands were so tore up, I couldn’t do it. I told ‘em, ‘Look at my hands, they’re so messed up, I can’t unload salt. So they sent me to unload honeydew melons for the officers (mess).”
Then there was the mustard gas experiment. Hall was part of a group detailed to test clothing treated with a chemical that was supposed to protect the wearer from mustard gas, which causes severe blistering where it touches the body.
“They thought the Germans were going to use mustard gas in Europe, and they had this treated clothing they wanted to test,” he said. “The Army wouldn’t let their people test it, so they got us. There were about 6 to 8 of us in a 10 (foot)-by-10 (foot) room. We wore gas masks and we walked around in a circle in the mustard gas.
“They got rid of the gas and we took the masks off and stayed in the clothes for 30 minutes. We then took them off and were examined by a doctor to see if anyone had suffered any problems. We all got 10 days leave after that.”
After boot camp, Hall was a member of a naval armed guard detachment, sailors who were assigned to man guns on merchant ships to provide the ships crossing the Atlantic and Pacific protection from submarines and enemy aircraft. The sailors were responsible for handling the 5-inch and 3-inch guns and 20mm automatic cannons placed on the ship.
“The ship we were assigned to was the John Prince, we were taking cargo and six-bys (trucks) to the port of Antwerp in Belgium,” he said.
The ship arrived the same time as the Battle of the Bulge, a major German offensive in the Ardennes, a large forest area that covered Northern France and Belgium and Luxemburg.
“They didn’t know how far the Germans would get,” he said. “If Antwerp were attacked, the ship would be moved, but we were told, ‘You’re on your own.’ We had to carry side arms, and we were under attack from “buzz bombs” (German rocket bombs) the whole time.
“It was day and night, you’d hear them coming over. If they got two the nine o’clock position (holding his hand at about a 30 degree angle) you worried. When it got to 10 o’clock (holding his hand a little higher) you could relax, ’cause it wasn’t going to hit you. When we went to town, we had to walk in the street because the shock from the bombs hitting would break the glass in the buildings.”
After returning to the U.S., the John Prince went to the Mediterranean with another load of supplies. Forty-eight hours after it arrived at its destination, Germany surrendered.
The ship returned to the U.S., and moored at a Virginia port on Chesapeake Bay. “We stayed there for 30 days,” he said, “before leaving for the Pacific.”
It was during that layover that Hall saved his first life. He said he was walking toward the bow of the ship when he saw several men throw another man overboard.
“That shocked me,” he said. “He went into the water and nobody did anything. I ran and found a rope and threw it to him and told him ‘take it,’ and pulled him in. I was 19-year-old kid at the time, I was just shocked no one tried to help him.”
The John Prince left the U.S. for Saipan and then went to Okinawa. While the ship lay at anchor in Okinawa, Japan surrendered. The ship soon left the area for the South China Sea to escape a powerful typhoon.
“That weather was rough,” Hall said. “The captain had the boat going into the waves at a 45 degree angle, and when it hit a wave, the back of the ship would go up and the propeller would be spinning in the air. You could feel it.”
When the ship’s fantail went down, he said, it went underwater.
“I was standing in the hall inside the ship and a man, a merchant seaman, passed and was going to the fantail,” he said. “I told him to be careful because of the water. He went out, the back of the ship went down, and I heard a scream. I looked outside, and he had been knocked from the ship and was holding on to a thin piece of rope. That’s the only thing that saved him from going in the water.”
Hall grabbed the man and put his legs about a gun mount to keep from going in himself. Several shipmates then came to pull him and the man back on board.
When the John Prince returned to the U.S., Hall was transferred to San Diego. He was discharged in 1946 at New Orleans.
He remained in the Navy Reserve for several years, and later had an insurance business in Vicksburg. “I missed Korea,” he said. “I really didn’t want to go there. I had had enough.”
His time on the John Prince, he said, was interesting, adding he still wonders why he reacted to save the two men he pulled from the water.
“I’ve saved two men and I don’t know why I did it,” he said. “I guess I was just so shocked the no one else was trying to save them, that I felt I needed to act.”