Hey SwampWolf, you and I prolly passed each other on the streets..got there in 64 worked at NavalSecurityGroup command. Back then the island was still very remote.
Lots of things on Guam have changed in the intervening fifty or so years, Franco2shoot. My next door neighbor has a son stationed at Anderson AFB and the pictures of Guam that he sends home makes the island look more like a Hawaiian resort beach than the godforsaken rock bobbing around in the Pacific ocean that I remember. When I was stationed there, the buildings on Anderson AFB were mostly Quonset huts and we were still on the look-out for Japanese soldiers prowling the jungles who didn't know the war was over.
I still have a booklet prepared by the Management Analysis Division Directorate of Comptroller, published in early 1963, entitled "Typhoon Karen:The Day Autumn Came to Guam". As a preamble to the report, the following information was provided:
"...Twenty days 'Before Karen' (back then, before 'women's lib', all typhoons and hurricanes were given feminine names), President Kennedy imposed a Naval blockade on the island of Cuba and placed all military units on an increased readiness status...This state of readiness greatly increased the effectiveness of the typhoon preparations..." Nevertheless, "As the 200 miles-per-hour winds of Typhoon KAREN subsided early on the morning of November 12, 1962, the storm-battered residents of Guam, military and civilian, emerged from their shelters to a scene of unparalleled destruction. Never before had Guam been so lashed by a storm; perhaps never before had any island in the Pacific been hit so hard by a typhoon. Government of Guam officials estimated that 90 percent of the Island's homes and businesses had been destroyed or badly damaged, and military installations, though less ravaged than the civilian communities, had been badly hit..."
As a member of the Air Forces security force, I was armed with a Remington Rand 1911 pistol and an Inland M1 .30 caliber carbine. Times have indeed changed.
Years later, I recall reading where "Hunchback Harry" (the name Air Policemen gave to the Japanese soldier we thought was still surviving in the jungle and partially subsisting on refuse from the air base-there was some evidence to support the rumor) and a couple of his compadres had finally surrendered to (or was captured by, I don't remember which) Air Force authorities.
