Above the outer reefs of an anonymous South Pacific atoll, a well-formed wave peels in perfect symmetry over the coral-encrusted fuselage of a Japanese Zero. 

On a distant shore in Micronesia, a procession of shapely peaks break across the rusted hull of an abandoned amphibious assault vessel. Sacred battleground meets surfer’s paradise.  I once thought this was as close as my father’s world and mine would ever come. 

The Gilberts, the Marshalls, New Guinea, the Philippines – for his generation these names conjured images of bloody beachheads, made famous during the island-hopping campaigns of World War II. Today, sojourning surfers explore many of the same island chains, aspiring to discover virgin line-ups amid sparsely-populated ocean outposts. 

I grew up in La Jolla in the 1960s, the son of a retired Marine who envisioned me following a family tradition of service to the Corps.  I aspired to be a surfer.  His hero was Chesty Puller; mine was Gerry Lopez.  From my father’s perspective, surfers were rebellious rapscallions, engaged in a pastime with no adult supervision and few positive role models. Among my peers, surfers were lionized for their athleticism, bravado and daring exploits. His neatly-trimmed crew cut, Brooks Brothers suits and spit-polished wingtips contrasted sharply with my shaggy mane, Mexican wedding shirts and flip-flop sandals.
It seemed that our visions of the world were hopelessly irreconcilable. Were there any common denominators that might unite our two camps?  How about those exotic islands?  Is it possible that their alluring breakers were ridden years ago by GIs?

I had read about Duke Kahanamoku and George Freeth as a teen. Despite what my dad believed, they were true heroes, one an Olympic Gold Medalist, the other an award-winning lifeguard.  They inspired a whole generation of surfers in the early 1930s, pioneers of a rambling lifestyle who rode waves with style and organized robust beach parties decades before Gidget and the Beach Boys popularized the sport’s image.  My guess was that when Uncle Sam came calling in the early 1940s, many of these old-timers probably volunteered for duty and shipped off to war in the Pacific Theater. 

Was it possible that some young Marine from Southern California, while wading ashore during one of any numerous amphibious landings, glanced down the beach and observed a stellar point break?  What were the odds of a 1930s surfer actually catching a few waves inside the combat zone?

I called Surfer’s Journal Publisher Steve Pezman in 1994 with that very seed of a thought. With the 50th anniversary of many of those island battles approaching, I thought it would make for an interesting and relevant story. Here were two major cultures (surfers and military veterans), firmly entrenched in Southern California and practically coexisting side by side. Had there been any cross pollenization? Were there epic surf tales just waiting to be told from a veteran’s perspective? Were there certain war stories that could only be shared from a surfer’s point of view?

 Initially Pezman was skeptical. “It’s highly unlikely,” he quipped.  “There weren’t too many surfers back then.” He rattled off several good points that quickly darkened my hopes. Surfboards of the era were too bulky and cumbersome to casually transport across the Pacific. Storage was at a premium onboard warships brimming with troops and munitions. Most officers would have frowned upon such folly. Servicemen were probably more preoccupied with staying alive than catching a few waves, and even if someone had managed to paddle out into a wartime line-up, what were the odds that that person would be alive today to talk about it?  Still, there was a hint of optimism in the publisher’s final words. “If you find such a person, I’d certainly be interested.”

My father had passed away several years ago at that point, but I still wanted to vindicate the sport of which he had been so critical.  I was determined to prove that a good surfer could also be a good soldier. With minimal encouragement I ventured out to discover the mythical combat surfer of World War II. 
My investigation began with a series of cold calls to VFW halls in Hawaii, but I soon discovered that most Hawaiian vets had served in the European Theatre. One had some great stories about skippering PT boats off the coast of Italy, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. Not until the California Surf Museum in Oceanside referred me to Leroy Grannis did I began to crack the case.

“Granny,” as friends referred to the aging surf photographer, was affiliated with the founders of the original California surf clubs of the 1930s. In fact, he was a charter member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, one of the first three organizations of its kind on the West Coast. I interviewed Granny in his trailer home, within earshot of Carlsbad State Beach. He put me in touch with many of his longstanding surf buddies, some of whom he reckoned served in various branches of the military during World War II. 

Sure enough, I was able to hunt down and locate a few who actually rode waves during their tour of duty.  Most of them have died in recent years, their contributions to surfing and society never fully appreciated in a region that reveres both surfers and veterans.  After corroborating most of their tales, I developed tremendous admiration for five surfers from what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” 
They were the few surviving combat surfers of World War II, and each one had an incredible story to tell.
A tanned young Dale Velzy would have made a great recruitment poster for the Merchant Marine: surfing the wartime Philippines coast with sunny skies, blue water and palm trees in the background, oblivious to Japanese soldiers lurking in the nearby jungles.

 “Black Sheep Squadron meets Bay Watch,” is how a Hollywood agent might have described the adventures of Army Air Corps veteran John Kerwin, the adventurous Hermosa Beach lifeguard who helped form the Army’s first amphibious search and rescue squadrons to pluck downed pilots from the open seas.

John’s brother Fred Kerwin watched a monstrous set of rogue waves sink a Navy destroyer before swamping his troop transport during an amphibious landing in the Aleutian Islands.
Doc Ball was among the privileged few to cross the coils of barbed wire at Waikiki following the raid on Pearl Harbor, surfing uncrowded waves with a few friends on the strangely desolate beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

Bob Johnson describes jumping from a sinking aircraft carrier at the Battle of Midway as “the worst wipeout I ever experienced.”

Velzy, the Kerwins, Ball and Johnson were among a group of pre-war surfers who joined the military in the 1940s and served in the island-hopping campaigns across the Pacific Ocean.  For them, the Marshalls and the Solomons; Indonesia and the Philippines, the Aleutians and Ryukyus were more than a theater of military operations; they also represented a surfer’s wonderland. 

Today’s globetrotting wave riders pay thousands of dollars to access the same reefs and atolls that these enterprising veterans were fortunate enough to visit more than 50 years ago -- courtesy of Uncle Sam.  I am not implying that the war in the Pacific was a beach party, but for these pioneering water men their patriotic duty also encompassed the adventure of a lifetime. After more than half a century, I was surprised to find that their memories were still vivid.

“The South Pacific has just unbelievable, really good waves everywhere,” said Velzy, who toured the archipelagos of Melanesia and Micronesia as a “wet behind the ears” 17-year-old Merchant Marine. Working aboard freighters and tankers, he helped supply weapons, ammo and fuel to numerous amphibious assaults. “Tulagi, Eniwitok, Kwajelein, Guam, Ulithi, Luzon. I’ve been to all those Islands and there’s surf on every one of them. But you caught hell if you tried surfing a lot of those places,” he added with a grin.

If it wasn’t a Japanese sniper or swarms of sharks, than it was some “hodad captain” or an armed sentry that conspired to keep military surfers out of the water. Even at Waikiki, it was almost impossible for a GI to set foot on the beach during World War II. In the early 1940s the popular tourist destination offered quite a different ambience than it does today. The leisurely postcard images of peacetime Honolulu were eclipsed by bustling wharves and longshoremen loading large crates into deep cargo holds of Liberty Ships with towering cranes.

“Everybody stopped in Honolulu,” recalled Velzy. “But you weren’t there very long. They loaded you up and you were gone. At the end of the war the damned Seabees loaded you so quickly you couldn’t even get off the boat.”

The fortunate few to secure shore leave soon discovered that their favorite beaches were cordoned with barbed wire, off limits to all but select military personnel. John “Doc” Ball, a Coast Guard Dentist, had been a surfer since 1929. One of the founding members of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, Ball ran a two-chair dental clinic aboard a troop transport.  When his ship pulled into port at Pearl Harbor, he considered himself extremely lucky to get a half-day’s liberty.

“My captain needed some dental work,” Ball explained. “I told him I had a buddy in the islands who was a dentist. I said ‘If I can get some gold from him I’ll fix you up.’  So I got the gold, fixed the captain up and he let me off for half a day. I got to go surf Waikiki. I suppose if he were an admiral I would have gotten the whole day off.”

Ball, who hadn’t been to Waikiki since 1931, said nothing was the same eleven years later. The Navy had installed barbed wire along the boardwalk and posted armed sentries to patrol the shoreline. “It was war time and they were expecting a sneak attack, so everything was kind shutdown and deserted,” Ball added. “It was just me, my friend Kay Murray, and about three other people on the entire beach.”  That was one of the few times during his four years in the Pacific that Doc Ball was able to ride a surfboard. Nonetheless, he revels at the memory of having one of the world’s most famous beaches practically to himself.
Bob Johnson, who was also an original member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, surfed Waikiki after surviving the Battle of Midway. Johnson’s ship, the aircraft carrier Yorktown, helped beat back the largest invasion fleet of its day in the Pacific Ocean. It was a major victory for the allies, but in the heat of battle the Japanese sank the Yorktown and Johnson did some unexpected swimming.

“I guess you could call it the worst wipeout I ever experienced,” said Johnson, who served as a combat photographer at the time. “The carrier was first hit by dive bombers, then torpedo planes. A bunch of them came in. I was up on the deck at the time, taking pictures. A bomb went right though the deck and exploded in the fire rooms that powered the engines, so we were dead in the water for a couple of hours waiting for the second attack to come.”

Then came the torpedo planes – the coup de grace. The Yorktown took two more hits and was listing heavily at about 3 p.m. when the captain gave the order to abandon ship.  Johnson and his crew mates lowered themselves by ropes from the flight deck into the sea.  “We were in the water for probably an hour or two,” he said. “I remained pretty calm. I’ve always been a good swimmer. I played water polo for UCLA, so I was confident. The problem was a thick film of oil we had to swim through. There were a number of destroyers in the water at the time, circling around, but they couldn’t stop. They had to keep moving because Japanese submarines were reported in the area. Eventually I was picked up by a destroyer. They had an assembly line set up. One guy would pull you out of the water, another would wipe your face off and shove a cigarette in your mouth, the next guy would light the cigarette then push you on.”

The Yorktown survivors were ferried back to Honolulu, where Johnson met up with Palos Verdes Surf Club buddies Jimmy Reynolds and Hal Landis. They decided a surf session at Waikiki was the perfect prescription to clear their heads and have some fun.

“We didn’t talk much about the Yorktown,” recalled Landis, who was assigned to a patrol-torpedo boat squadron stationed at Pearl City Yacht Club. “Hoping to forget the war for just a little while, we went to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which was a recreation center for submariners. Jimmy and I had a couple of Tom Blake paddleboards stashed away there. I knew the athletic director, so we didn’t have any trouble getting onto the beach.”

Johnson said he went surfing every chance he had, “but that (session at Waikiki) was really one of the few occasions I had to get into the water during the war.  Most of the surf I saw was from the air – at a very high altitude.”

The Kerwin brothers envisioned pretty wahines and warm tropical beaches when they joined the armed forces in 1940, but they were in for a chilly awakening. All five of the Hermosa Beach baker’s sons ended up in the sub-arctic region of the Aleutian Islands.

“There was a lot of water moving up there,” said John Kerwin, who joined the Army Air Corps.  “Always on the lookout for waves, I went out to a place on Amchitka Island one day. I kept hearing this surf. I could hear it almost five miles away. As I approached I could feel the ground shake like an earthquake. I came up to a cliff about 50 feet high, looked out and saw these great big combers coming in from the arctic. I sat there riding them in my imagination, but it was too big and too cold to seriously think of going out.”
According to Fred Kerwin, the Aleutian weather was extremely unpredictable and often quite deadly.  When his invasion fleet sailed into Amchitka harbor in January of 1943, the Coast Guard Coxswain said he had never seen it so calm. “The water was real glassy, there was hardly any wind and the sun even came out, which was unusual there. It was absolutely beautiful. 

“Pretty soon a quick wind, what they call a “Williwaw” started coming up, and I’ll tell you in less than half an hour it was so rough you couldn’t believe it. Rough seas, a very big swell.

“Our ship, the Arthur Middleton, was heading into the harbor and there was an escort destroyer (the USS Worden DD-352) stationed at the bay entrance. The destroyer for some reason pulled anchor… and had their stern cloaked to the rocks. I don’t believe they realized the swells were getting that big. Before they could get under way and turn, their bow swung around. They were the first ship to sink.  I remember my ship was starting to hit bottom and one of my officers said ‘Don’t worry about it Kerwin. It’s just an earthquake.’ But we got to rocking pretty hard and I was knocked on my fanny. We were fortunate to get all our barges off successfully. We saved all but 32 of the crew.”

Fred later skippered landing craft in other amphibious assaults, most notably at Tarawa and Eniwetok.  John was eventually transferred out of the Aleutians and almost packed off to Europe before the Army Air Corps redirected him to Gulfport, Mississippi to form the 13th Air Force’s first amphibious search and rescue squadrons – the SNAFU Snatchers. Their job was to fly out behind bomber squadrons in PBY Catalinas, also known as flying boats, and “pull downed crew members from the drink.”  He was assigned to Dutch New Guinea, landing in Port Morseby on his 30th birthday.

“If the bombers got shot down,” said John, “it was our business to drop our Cats in there and rescue them.  We’d often see our guys parachuting in after their planes went down in flames. These guys would be black, just toasted. God bless ‘em. That’s how we lost Bob Westbrook. He was a great surfer. They shot him down in a P-38. A lot of good men gave up the ghost. My brothers and I were all fortunate to make it back home alive.

“Boy it was beautiful down there though. You’d think you were seeing all the islands in paradise, but you couldn’t possibly see them all. There were thousands of them out there and if you were up high like we were in those Cats, you would see a lot of good surf. I was always asking the boys, ‘Hey drop it down. Look at that cove breaking over there.’ And of course they were saying, ‘Oh, that crazy surfer’s at it again.’ ”
Kerwin was fortunate to be in the water as much as he was in the air. He was responsible for training 750 lifeguards in the art of air/sea rescue – “Everyone from farmers to iron workers. A lot of them would say ‘I was a lifeguard back in Virginia Beach,’ or ‘I was a lifeguard in Chicago.’ Hell, you’d get them in the water and they didn’t know what to do out there. I wasted more time and almost drowned more people than I can recall. The guys that really knew the water were guys like me and my family, lifeguards and surf club people.”

Kerwin witnessed a lot of good surf on the north coast of New Guinea – and a lot of sharks too. “Tiburones. Big ones. I remember some screwball that was ready to dive off the fantail one day. He got up there ready to go swimming and I looked down and there was a big bunch of sharks. We didn’t know that the ships around us had dumped all their garbage and the sharks were just like wildfire. Have you ever seen carp go after food? You know how they make the water churn? Well there were the sharks, just like that. Sharks were everywhere, but I would still go surfing. Every time I would see those things swimming around down below me, I would just keep my feet up above the water. Of course I had a big paddle board.
“Down there you built your own. I built mine out of plywood and canvas – whatever I could get my hands on. I wouldn’t call it the best board I ever owned, but it did the job. I used to ride it a lot around Hollandia.  I had to wait for the tide. The tide went way out. To get out to the deep water you had to wear your boots. Of course I had my hands full. I carried a Thompson sub-machine gun everywhere I went. The jungles were full of Jap soldiers – thousands of them. But they were as scared as I was. I also carried an axle from an old Japanese truck. I’d walk out on the reef about a quarter of a mile, drive the axle into the coral and hang my gun and my shoes on it. If I didn’t do that I would have never got back to shore. My feet would have been chewed all to hell.”

Other SNAFU Snatchers thought Kerwin was nuts paddling out in the surf by himself. “None of them surfed, none that I came across.”

There weren’t many surfers around in World War II, according to Velzy. “Every once in a while you might see a guy bodysurfing and you’d ask, ‘Hey, where the hell are you from?’  They were usually from Southern California somewhere. Maybe an Australian every once in a while.  Most of the Hawaiian guys got sent to Europe."

Velzy also remembers good surf in New Guinea. He remembers the mud, rain, snakes and malaria as well. “It was a son-of-a-bitch down there. Whatever the soldiers and marines told us, we had to pay attention. There was very little fooling around. In Sumatra I did a little surfing in the Malaya Straits. When the wind comes up with the monsoons there, it will blow you right out to sea, so it probably wasn’t too smart to be out there. I also went to Borneo a couple of times and I saw some waves there. But that was a no-no because a lot of Japs were around sniping.”

“There were a lot of ports where I would see waves from the ship and go out of my mind. I’d be waiting for mail or some damned thing, looking at perfect surf and thinking ‘Man, why can’t I go ashore.  Making paddleboards on the ship was kind of a no-no, but I did it anyway. They were… kook boxes, made out of plywood, but they came in handy. I was sneaking off the ship all the time to go surf. They would say ‘No shore duty. No liberty.’ Well, over the side I’d go and do it anyhow. When they caught me they’d log me 10 days pay and confiscate my board. The Captains were rednecks, all of them. Very few were beach guys.”  I couldn’t help but think of my father when he said that.

Any military veteran who surfs can appreciate the difficulty of transporting and maintaining a surfboard in combat conditions – especially the bulky models of the early 1940s. Kerwin’s surfboard ultimately fell victim to Japanese hand grenades at a place called Bully Ridge on the Philippine Island of Mindanao.
“We landed there at sundown and it looked like a good place to camp. It overlooked the lagoon and the Japs had cleared off all the vegetation, although we didn’t know that at the time. We threw our stuff on the ground and hit the sack.

“We got up the next morning, and I had used this partly destroyed tree to hang my clothes and belongings on, and guess what was attached to them all? About 30 hand grenades with the pins out. Fortunately those things didn’t work too well or I wouldn’t be here. We ended up blasting my board with those grenades. It had taken a beating, so we saluted it with a couple bottles of beer and blasted it to pieces.”
“The Philippines was a great R&R place after we took it back,” said Velzy. “I sailed all around Corregidor in a bonka, a 45-foot sailing canoe, with a whole bunch of Philippine guys and a couple of Navy men looking for surf. There was surf all around there from what I can remember. The waves slapped across the cliffs there pretty hard. You could surf the hell out of it, but there was no beach there – a bad place to lose your board.”

Just east of the Philippines, on the island of Ulithi, Doc Ball had the good fortune to cross paths with Bob Johnson late in the war. It was a rare opportunity: two surf buddies from California, thousands of miles from home in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during World War II, enjoying their own private luau amid balmy tropical breezes and crystal clear waters. They were some of Ball’s best memories of the war.
“I was wardroom mess treasurer at the time,” said Ball. “So I fixed Bob up with a bunch of good stuff: fresh vegetables, bananas, whiskey, you name it. We went body surfing with an original pair of Owen Churchill swim fins and explored some of the smaller islands, climbing up palm trees to pick coconuts. Man it was beautiful out there among those trees – the ones that hadn’t been blasted. If we were going to be in a combat zone, I thought it might as well be in the South Pacific.”

A few days later Johnson shipped out for Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific Theater. Johnson, who had abandoned the sinking Yorktown at Midway, found himself back on a flattop, in the thick of the action again.

“The Natoma Bay was a small carrier and we had covered just about every landing in the Pacific,” Johnson recalled. “But we hadn’t seen anything like the resistance at Okinawa. We got hit with a suicide plane. It went right through our flight deck.”

Stationing himself in a classic surfer stance, Johnson buried his fear and held his position calmly in the center of the fury, photographing the calamity as it happened.  In his photo album are pictures of the June 7, 1945 kamikaze attack, the fire it caused, and the resulting hole, the size of a large Pipeline tube, right through the Natoma Bay’s flight deck. 

The battle for Okinawa cost the lives of almost 13,000 U.S. servicemen. After 50 years, it still wasn’t an easy subject for Johnson to discuss. His emotions were clearly visible as he recalled the carnage.  Eight weeks later the Japanese surrendered and World War II came to an end.

“After the war I wanted to go back and surf some of the (island) spots I visited, but I never got the chance to,” said Ball. Instead he went home and wrote a book, “California Surfriders,” which is still available in reprint. At the time this article was researched and written, Ball was 87 and living in Eureka, California. He was still skateboarding, and would occasionally venture down the coast to visit his favorite break at Shelter Cove.

Dale Velzy returned to Hawaii to surf along Oahu’s North Shore. Velzyland, one of the more popular breaks there, carries his name. He eventually established a surf shop in San Clemente with partner Hap Jacobs. He was 70 years old when he was interviewed.

At age 76, Bob Johnson resided in Point Loma, overlooking the aircraft carrier berths for the Pacific fleet. The only time he said he ventured out onto the water anymore was in the comfort of a sailboat.

Eighty-year-old John Kerwin lived in Irvine, California when he was interviewed. Although he had recently suffered a stroke, he would visit the Huntington Beach Pier to watch the younger surfers. “I’m telling you,” he said. “They can do things on their boards today that we never even dreamed of.”

Fred Kerwin, 78 at the time he was interviewed, was retired and living in San Marcos, not far from the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, where he and his brothers were honored in 1997 for their contributions to the sport.

 Even though my father passed away when I was a teen-ager, and I was never able to convince him of the merits and benefits of surfing, I am certain he would have liked Velzy and John Kerwin. I saw a lot of his characteristics in them and imagined that they all would have developed a solid rapport with each other over a bottle of beer. Perhaps, if he had met them, my father may have even acquired a begrudging respect for the sport of Hawaiian royalty.  After all, in the end, what Marine wouldn’t want to walk on water?