At the age of 19, John Mappin joined the Navy and was assigned to a PT boat in the South Pacific.
PT stands for “Patrol Torpedo,” and the boats were armed to attack larger ships but small and quick enough to evade attack.
Mappin was a first class motor machinist responsible for keeping the PT boat’s engine running.
The Atlanta native served from 1942 to 1946, and he remembers one night in particular.
His boat was traveling close to the beach, as it often did, looking to intercept Japanese soldiers skipping from island to island. Suddenly, the crew was drawing heavy fire.
“Always it’s scary when someone’s shooting at you,” says Mappin, now 86. “Now it doesn’t seem all that scary but then it did because you didn’t know what or who was out there. We didn’t know if it was one person shooting at us or 100 people shooting at us. We didn’t know.”
Three men were killed, and the remaining eight began to swim toward support vessels. Besides the gunfire, the crew had other concerns.
“It was a pretty good swim,” Mappin recalls. “It didn’t bother me, but there were two or three who were bleeding and they were worried about sharks.”
Some 63 years after leaving the service, Mappin says he’s now ready to say he enjoyed his time in the Navy.
“You look back on it now, it was fun, but back then it wasn’t fun,” he says. “When you went out you didn’t know whether you were coming back or not.”
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