Raymond Robert Muskat
Era: World War II
Military Branch: Navy
Raymond Robert Muskat served in World War II in the Pacific Theater.
He served in the U.S. Navy. He was at Fort Snelling waiting for his Army assignment when an opportunity to serve in the Navy appeared. He went to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, where he was still in boot camp at the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. He was assigned to the Manicani Island, Leyte Gulf, on a ship repair base in the Philippine Islands.
Mr. Muskat, whose rank was Seaman 1st Class, worked in the Naval Base dispensary.
Mr. Muskat was born in Waunakee, Wisconsin, the son of Roman and Ida Musket. He graduated from Leroy High School, in Leroy, Minnesota, in 1946.
Source: Veterans’ Memorial Hall veteran history form; veteran’s account
“In February of 1944 as a sophomore in Leroy, MN, High School, I say Navy enlistees, returning to visit friends and teachers at school during their “boot leave,” looking so very sharp in their dress uniform. I decided also to enlist in the Navy. A favorite uncle in his early 30s had enlisted in the Navy rather than wait for the draft to pluck him for the Army, and my dad was quite proud of his Navy brother. I asked my father if he’d sign an age waiver for me, since I had just turned seventeen. He agreed to do this for me and drove to Rochester, Minnesota, for me to enlist into the Navy.
“I was given a physical exam and told that I was 4-F for the Navy due to varicose veins. I said, ‘I don’t have varicose veins!’ The doctor pointed to a slightly raised spot on the inside of my left calf about the area of a dime.
“I was crushed . . . I couldn’t tell my friends or anybody that I was ‘4-F,’ about the worst kind of ‘F-word’ for me at that time.
“After school I went into Dr. Morse’s office to see whether he could help me. He said, ‘Ray, I can fix that vein so that you’ll pass the next physical. All I have to do is give you a shot into that vein to dry up that little spot.’ So, he gave me the shot—no charge . . . A year later, when the draft board called me to service when I was eighteen, I passed the physical with flying colors! But now I’d be sent off to an Army camp somewhere, I thought. As I hung around the Fort Snelling waiting for my assignment, more luck was in store for me: a runner came out with a clipboard yelling, ‘The first fifty men to get over here by me will be leaving on “the 400” for Great Lakes naval Training Center within the hour!’ I was at the head of the line.
“Because the war ended with our dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima while I was still in boot camp, the Navy wasn’t prepared to change its training courses overnight. While many of the luckier companies got to go to downtown Chicago for a huge V-day celebration/parade, etc., my company 953 stayed on base and even attended a class or two. Most of our training classes were of no interest any longer; we’d fall asleep in a class where we were being taught how to identify Japanese ships by their silhouettes at night: battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and carriers. The non-racial name ‘Japanese’ wasn’t used, only ‘Jap’ or ‘Japs.’
“At the end of eight weeks, our training was completed and we got a long-awaited two-week boot leave. I divided my time between Leroy, Minnesota, where I had a girlfriend, Beth, and Cataract, Wisconsin, where my family had a farm. My dad was proud of me and offered to drive me back to Great lakes. Dad and I said, ‘Good-bye,’ and I prepared to ship out for the Philippines, ironically, on September 2, 1945, the day that General MacArthur and the Japanese Emperor signed the World War II peace accords on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
“Now that the war was over, I found it very exciting to leave Treasure Island and sail out under the San Francisco Bay Bridge to Samar. None of us new sailors knew where Samar was, but for two weeks we (about 8,000 of us on a maiden voyage Liberty Ship roughly 100 yards long—I paced it off) rotated jobs: washing dishes, serving food, scrubbing decks, sweeping, etc., on our way to help decommission bases so the real veterans who survived some horrible fighting a few months prior could come home to their families. After we arrived at Samar, it seemed that the Navy didn’t know what to do with us: we simply sat in the hot sun for a solid week before they unloaded us onto small landing barges that took us to Guiuan, Samra, to a tent camp where we lived quite primitively for about a month before they shipped us onto the tiny island of Manicani, a ship repair base. Offshore about 1,000 -plus feet there were three to four dry docks of variable sizes on which ships of all sizes, from the largest to the smallest, could be lifted out of the water for repairs.
My first day’s work was on a dry dock, where a group of us had to clean up the pieces being trimmed off around a huge truck-sized whole in the side of a ship that had been blown open by a mine. Thanks to watertight hatches, the ship still floated, even with the big hole in it. Everything we touched was full of heavy black grease and oil, almost like tar. I started looking around and asking career petty officers who would be staying on the base whether I might be able to get reassigned to another jog right on the base, expressing an interest in the base hospital or the smaller dispensary. So it turned out that I was needed in the dispensary, where I helped with the morning and evening sick calls, beginning with the rate of HA2c. After the sick call was over, one of us corpsmen often had to make a two-mile trip up to the base hospital, where a sick sailor could recuperate.
In my spare time in my barracks on Manicani Island, I’d often work on my senior high school English correspondence course via the University of Wisconsin USAFI Education Program hoping to earn an English credit. My plan was to take a batter of GEDT test upon my discharge back in the States and maybe get a high school diploma. One of my buddies there in the barracks reading asking me one day what I planned to do when I got out of the service. I said I didn’t really know, maybe I’ll join the ’52-20 Club’ for the first year. He asked if I wasn’t going to go to college. I told him that I didn’t know of any man in my whole large family relationship who went to college. He promptly planted a seed in my mind: ‘Any returning serviceman who doesn’t use the GI Bill to get a college education has rocks in his head!’
"On returning to Leroy, Minnesota, after discharge, my former boss’ wife told me she’d gotten a call from Mr. Lechner, the high school principal, who wanted me to come in to see him. When I got to the principal’s office, Mr. Lechner not only gave me a high school diploma but also a copy of everything else graduates normally receive. My name was included with the list of thirty-five seniors graduating in 1946 from Leroy High School."
