“We are afraid to get in our bunks so most of us slept on the deck topside. We can man the guns etc quicker.” (Diary entry, May 13, 1945)

Earl Harvey Morris

Earl H. Morris, Great Lakes Naval Training Station, December 1943 [detail] War: World War, 1939-1945 Branch: Navy Unit: USS Walke (DD 723) Service Location: Normandy Beach, France; Mindoro and Lingayen Gulf (Philippines); Tokyo Bay, Japan; Okinawa Island (Ryukyu Islands) Rank: Quartermaster First Class Place of Birth: WI

Earl Morris served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, aboard the USS Walke in both the European and Pacific Theaters. On D-Day, the Walke was in the midst of the action, lobbing bombardments to support the invasion. Later in 1944, she sailed into action in the Philippines, helping to liberate those islands from the Japanese. Morris kept a secret and admittedly illegal diary of the Walke’s final action in the war, in the waters near Okinawa. For almost two months in the spring of 1945, he detailed almost hourly enemy kamikaze runs on his and other ships, revealing that the action off Okinawa was just as intense as the battles taking place on land.