SS Jeremiah M. Daily

SS Jeremiah M. Daily


Email from Jim Flaugher to Bob Cyphers:

I hope you got my short message last night.  I have a couple of years on
you.  I will be 78 next July.  You were 19 and I was 21 when we had our day
with destiny on the Jeremiah Daily in 1944.

The soldier with his fingers shot off was probably Malcolm Crabtree from my
company.  He was the first man I saw when I got up off the deck.  He came up
and showed me his hand, saying "Look what they did to me".  I am sorry to
say I didn't help him.  Just behind him, the foredeck was covered with men
wrapped in flaming gasoline.  We couldn't do much.  

Another man and I tried to help our First Sergeant.  He was still standing
when we tried to lead him away. Every piece of clothing and all his skin had
been burned off .  We literally lifted him off the soles of his shoes.  It
was impossible to give him a morphine needle from the syrette we each had in
our first aid kit.  The only skin he had was on the soles of his feet.  We
were able to walk him back to the shelter of the after deckhouse, under the
platform for the 5-inch gun.  Just as we got him there, the gun crew got off
a round.  When the gun went off over his head, he said, "Don't let them get
me".  That was all I ever heard him say.  A destroyer soon tied up near the
stern and we were able to get him, another badly burned man from our
company, and a number of other wounded and burn cases aboard. When they had
all they could take, they started back to Hollandia.  Both of our badly
burned men died on the destroyer the second night out.

We didn't get off the ship and on the beach until the next afternoon.  We
quickly dug some shelter holes, then formed up for roll call and made out
our casualty report.   I still have that copy of our roster where I checked
off each name and noted, if not present, whether killed, wounded or missing,
as we could best determine at the moment.  While we were calling roll, a
Japanese plane came over the tops of the palm trees and strafed us. 
Luckily, we had no further casualties that afternoon.  We were under almost
continual air attack, night and day, for the next week or ten days, or until
we got an operational air strip on the island.   After that, it was just
sporadic raids, usually at night. These lasted through January, when the
invasion of Luzon took out the Japanese airfields that were hitting us.  We
did take a few more casualties, but no more deaths from enemy action.  We
did lose one man to disease in December (probably meningitis).  We suffered
a great deal in the first month from dysentery and in January we were hit
with an epidemic of hepatitis (from bad water). I was in the hospital with
hepatitis from around January 15th to March 1st.

Our company was slow in getting replacements, and with the large number of
men in hospital from sickness, we missed out on the invasion of Okinawa in
April, 1945.  We were up to strength by mid-summer, though, and were
preparing for the invasion of Japan, scheduled for November, 1945, when the
atom bomb ended the war.

A day or two after we landed, our company commander, our new First Sergeant
and I went to the armed forces cemetery being laid out on Leyte.  Under
several tarps were 90 to 100 unidentified bodies, most of them off the
Daily.  We weren't able to identify any from our unit.  The bodies were not
just burned; they were cooked.  We had barely finished looking at all of
them when the Graves Registration men hurriedly began to carry them off to
the graves they had already dug.  There was no further chance of
identification, and having been dead for several days, burial could not be
delayed.  The total casualties on the Daily were about 250 killed, wounded
and missing.  This was out of approximately 500 men aboard.

I have to tell you how we picked the Daily.  Our company commander was
ordered by headquarters to find a suitable ship to transport his unit to the
Philippines.  They let him make the decision because he knew best what we
needed to carry our men and equipment.  He and I and another enlisted man
first looked at a British tramp, about the size of a Liberty.  It had a
Malay crew and our commander was a little unsure about this.  I assured him
that the Malays were among the world's finest seamen and had served on
British ships for generations.  The real reason we turned them down,
however, was a large pen of goats the crew kept on the afterdeck for food. 
Weeks later on a Leyte beach I came across a bunch of dead goats washed up
on the sand.  Could they have come from this ship?

Knowing we needed all the deck space we could get for our equipment, we
decided to wait and look for another ship.  A day or two later, we were
called to look at the Daily.  It was the first Liberty we had been on, but
we knew immediately it was the ship for us with all its deck space and hatch
covers to put our trucks on.   We told the Master we had chosen his ship and
hurried back to headquarters to relay our decision.   Within a week a crew
of Australian carpenters had gone aboard and built an over-the-side toilet
and stairs for access to Holds Three and Four.  When we boarded the Daily
each man was given a two by four-feet sheet of plywood to sleep on.  We
could put it wherever we found room.  Usually, I crawled under a truck on a
hatch cover.  It wasn't as stuffy as the holds and the truck gave me some
protection from the early morning showers prevalent in the tropics.

I understood that the Daily came into Brisbane empty after discharging a
cargo of bombs in Calcutta.  Was this true?  Some of our men visited the
Daily several times while she was still off Leyte to search for any of our
personal belongings and equipment that could be salvaged.  They told me the
5-inch gun crew borrowed all the ammunition they could from other ships and
kept up an unrelenting fire on Japanese aircraft as they came in over the
bay, shooting down two enemy planes before they left.  Can you verify this?

Regards,
Jim Flaugher
j-flaugher-8@alumni.uchicago.edu

Note from Bob Cyphers:

The Daily was credited with downing 4 aircraft, which were painted on the
smoke stack.  The other newspaper had a picture of them.

Bob Cyphers