Portraits of Courage: Ed Willis

PALMER — Despite failing his first physical, Ed Willis spent more than two years trying to find a way to serve his country.

The Palmer resident was attending a cousin’s wedding in Las Vegas the first weekend in December 1941 and heard about the attacks on Pearl Harbor on the car radio on his drive back to Barstow, Calif., where he was attending junior college.

“The world situation didn’t look too good at that time,” he said. “With the war effort cranking up, it was very difficult to study — at least for me anyway.”

At the end of the semester, he went home and tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps. He had just turned 18. However, he was turned away after he failed the physical.

Having the desire to serve his country in some capacity, Willis left college and found work doing a defense-related job near his hometown. He tried to get into service a few more times, but was turned down by the Army and the Navy. He then went to work for Shell delivering fuel to military installations.

All the while, he kept trying to enlist.

“I was still rejected and held that status until the summer of 1944,” he said. “Then a friend of mine in the Merchant Marines came home on leave and asked me if I would consider coming back to San Francisco with him and get in the Merchant Marines.”

His friend told him that he didn’t think it mattered that Willis had been rejected by the military several times. The Merchant Marines needed crews on ships to deliver troops and supplies to the warfront.

Willis went with his friend as was accepted into the Merchant Marines in October 1944.

“It was a great day,” he said. “I was very pleased and happy I was able to contribute.”

He was assigned to engine room training because of his experience as a truck driver and working at a service station in high school. After training, he got his endorsement from the Coast Guard and waited at the union hall for his assignment.

He only had to wait two days before a tanker called needing three entry-level workers. Willis found out the tanker was headed to the Pacific after he boarded. It was two weeks before they left since the ship needed some repairs — it had just been taken over from the Russians.

The ship went to Hawaii, where it was taken over by a Navy crew. Willis was sent back to San Francisco on a troop ship to get his reassignment.

“I decided I would stay with tankers since they fed better than the cargo ships,” he said. “It was harder to recruit for tankers since it was more dangerous. One of the incentives was being … fed like a Navy officer.”

Willis sailed on three more tankers during the war, including one that was part of a convoy for the invasion of Okinawa. However, his tanker broke down and went back to the Caroline Islands. A Coast Guard tanker that had been hit by a Kamikaze attack near Iwo Jima was also docked at the islands and instead of going back home, it was assigned to take Willis’ tanker’s place and head to Okinawa. Willis said that crew wasn’t very happy about the reassignment.

Willis’ tanker then headed to Hawaii for its next mission.

“We pulled into Hawaii … the day President Roosevelt had died,” Willis said. Roosevelt died April 12, 1945. “I remember I got up and went out on the deck and saw all the flags at half mast. It seemed to have a lot of meaning for everyone. He was our leader and it seemed to affect everyone.”

Willis was out at sea when he heard that the war had ended. He was a few days out from going through the Panama Canal. When news of the atomic bombs being dropped was heard, the lookouts on the ship were told to watch for Japanese subs that might want to surrender. The tanker eventually headed to Texas, where it was sent to the Pacific with aviation fuel to support the occupation.

Willis stayed with the Merchant Marines until May 1947. He went back to Barstow, where he met his wife, whom he married in 1949. She was a schoolteacher and the couple became good friends with another schoolteacher and her husband. When the husband, Tom, was laid off from his job at a Marine base, the two men conspired to come to Alaska and find jobs while their wives thought they were coming to just “check it out.”

They drove the ALCAN in April 1950 and Tom found a job at Elmendorf Air Base the day after they got there. Willis went back to get their wives and then also found a job working at a power plant at Elmendorf.

“We live in the most wonderful country in the world and should do everything we can to preserve our Constitution and the rights of all citizens, and participate in any way we can to protect our nation,” Willis said.

The Merchant Marines were considered civilian jobs during World War II. Willis said it was rumored that Roosevelt had paperwork on his desk to make those servicemen veterans at the time of his death. It wasn’t until 1988 that the Merchant Marines were finally made veterans by court order. Willis was then issued an honorable discharge certificate from the Coast Guard.