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Mr. Metzler: Who made the parts for these ?
Mr. Doig: It was Gray Marine. Gray Marine was the manufacturer of most of these diesel engines we were using. They, well, I won't get ahead of myself but we just trained there and the first group of ours that we went into the Naval destroyer in San Diego base there, a group of them got sent to Atoo in the Aleutians, that was the first group that left our place, first group that we knew that got shipped out. That didn't last very long, I think they were back before we knew it. It was just a quick deal. We learned we were going to wind up getting in harm's way when we left there. Mr. Metzler: So you're starting to figure out where you might be headed. Mr. Doig: Yes, I asked for a transfer and a guy said, you're crazy, the only place you're going to go is west. So I said, I don't care. I've been kicked out of every bar in San Diego and I said, I'm ready to get out of here and it wasn't but a day or so and I wound up on the USS Ashland. It came in and no one knew what it was. We'd never seen it before and no one had ever seen anything like that before. They were all very curious about what it was. It had lots of guns hanging off of it. It had a hole in the middle of it and no one could figure out what it was. Mr. Metzler: So LSD was? Mr. Doig: Landing ship dock. That's a big ship, 450 feet long, and what it did was it ballasted down, it had tanks all over it and it would ballast down and drop the tailgate on the end and the welldeck inside that was the whole width of the ship three hundred feet long and we had fourteen landing craft inside there with tanks in them. Just as soon as the water would come up and we'd float, we'd dry them up and make a landing. Mr. Metzler: So if you were going to do a landing with the ship, you'd get in as close as she could and... Mr. Doig: You'd say five miles if she could ... Mr. Metzler: And they would go out the back...
Mr. Doig: We'd go out the back of the ship and head in to the beach and line up in whatever unit you were supposed to hit the beach at and they had different groups running in at different times and we were all supposed to be on a time schedule and the only landing I made there was at Tarala. The boat I was on got tangled up with a line. We left the ship around three o'clock in the morning to make a landing and ...
The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with James Doig. Doig joined the Navy in December of 1942. He completed Diesel School, repairing landing craft engines. Beginning August of 1943, Doig served in the fire room aboard USS Ashland (LSD-1). While he was aboard, the Ashland participated in the assaults on Kwajalein and Eniwetok. In the late 1944, Doig was transferred to USS Kenton (APA-122). They transported troops to the Philippines and participated in the Okinawa invasion. Doig was discharged in February of 1946.
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