The motor launch tied up at the small-boat pier in Seeadler Harbor in New Guinea to disembark a dozen men from the ammunition carrier USS Mount Hood. The date was November 10, 1944. Led by the ship’s communications officer, Lieutenant Lester Hull Wallace, the group had several errands to run on shore before returning to the ship. Wallace planned to take a couple of men with him to the f leet post office to pick up mail. Others were headed to headquarters to obtain charts and manuals. Two had dental appointments and two were on their way to the brig. The sailors were just splitting up when a tremendous blast knocked them off their feet. W hen they looked out into the harbor, they were stunned to realize that their ship was being wracked by explosion after explosion.
Seeadler Harbor was off the northeast coast of Manus Island, 250 miles north of mainland New Guinea. It was one of the finest anchorages in the Southwest Pacific Theater, measuring 15 miles long and four wide, with ample depth for capital ships. The army had taken the island from the Japanese in early March 1944 and within days U.S. Nav y Seabees had begun to build a major advanced operating base capable of supplying and repairing the ships of Admiral William F. Halsey ’s Third Fleet as it supported General Douglas MacArthur’s leap-frogging drive along New Guinea’s north coast to retake the Philippines. That same month a survey ship marked out more than 600 moorage sites throughout the vast harbor. The Manus base grew over the summer and became dotted with hun-dreds of buildings—mostly Quonset huts used as barracks for thousands of sailors and as warehouses for the vast amounts of materiel necessary to carry on the war.
