World War II Veteran Joe Palicte

Living History

By Pia G. Abelgas

To tell the whole story of Joe Palicte’s life would take days and a hundred pages. After all, his story line spans 75 years, nearly as old as the history of Filipino Americans in California. His eyes, which once must have been as brown as his skin, have seen a reality that most of us can only glean from books and movies.
To hear him remember his yesteryears is to hear a personal account of someone who has lived history: from the migration of Filipino workers to California, to the capture of a German submarine in World War II, to the national turmoil of the ‘60s, to the growth of Filipino organizations in Los Angeles in the ‘80s and ‘90s .

It started in the first half of the 1920s when his parents left the island of Cebu, Philippines, aboard a steamship filled with Filipinos hired by the Dole Pineapple Co. to work on plantations in Hawaii. He was born in 1924 in Hilo, Hawaii - the first of a brood that later included two brothers and two sisters.

His family then boarded another ship in 1928 on its way to California. They landed on the port of Los Angeles in Wilmington, then a farming and fishing town near the Long Beach harbor. Some Filipino families aboard that ship scattered to other cities in Central and Northern California, where Filipino immigrant workers were in demand, but his family stayed where they landed.

His parents worked in the fish canneries in Long Beach and, during off-season, in nearby farms owned by the Japanese. His dad died two years later, the same year Palicte started his formal education, and his mother remarried a Filipino from Leyte.

“I remember my first day in kindergarten, when I was five or six years old,” he said. “You know how? I remember because our neighbor’s kid walked me to school. That must have been four or five blocks.”

Back then, there was only one other Filipino family in that town. Wilmington’s population consisted mostly of Caucasians, some Mexicans and a few Japanese.

He studied at Avalon Grammar School until sixth grade then at Banning High School from seventh to 12th grade.

His mother opened their house at 709 Banning Blvd. to single Filipino men in their 20’s who were just starting a new life in America. He said he learned his Tagalog from these men, having only heard Bisayan from his parents before. He remembers listening to the young men recount their city escapades, tell tales of home and boast of the beautiful women they had conquered in America (but Palicte recalls seeing only Caucasian, Mexican and African American women around the house — there were very few single Filipinas in America then).

In 1940, the whole Palicte family moved to San Fernando Valley where they took up what was called “truck gardening,” a small family-operated farm. They still owned the house on Banning Boulevard but they could no longer live there. The whole town of Wilmington had suddenly sprung up oil wells, after one of the Palictes’ neighbors discovered oil under his backyard. The Palictes’ received oil royalties from their property until the wells finally dried out.

By this time, the war in Europe had already started. Palicte’s teenage years were filled with war stories, both heroic and tragic, and threats of being drafted into service if America ever got involved.

“This was a very big concern because we were being warned that in due time we’ll be in service,” he said. He was selling newspapers at street corners then and every day brought new rumors that America would step in.

And when the country did, the teen-age Palicte could not wait for his turn.

“My stepfather forced farm work on me, not education. To him, education was a waste of time. I hated manual labor so when the draft came, I thought, ‘Take me, take me,’” he said.

“I wanted to go because the adventure was with the war,” he said. “A lot of people were afraid of going to war, afraid of dying. Their fear overrides adventure. What’s death? I had no fear.”

But back then, Filipinos seeking to enlist were denied because “aliens” were not permitted to serve in the military. Young Filipinos were trapped by their nationality: in 1934, the U.S. government revoked the “national” status of Filipinos in the U.S. and declared them to be “aliens.”

Filipinos lobbied to be allowed to fight for the United States. In 1942, the U.S. War Department formed the Filipino Battalion, which would allow only “volunteers.” That year alone, over 8,000 Filipinos voluntarily joined the 1st and 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiments, according to data published by the Filipino American National Historical Society.

A year later, citizenship was granted to Filipinos who were in the U.S. prior to 1934.

So at 18, in 1943, Palicte joined the United States Navy, the only military agency accepting men Palicte’s height which was slightly above five feet.

He joined at the height of World War II but he never saw any actual battle.

“The Navy was so modernized that we didn’t see the enemy at all,” he said. “The only time I saw them was when they were captured or their bodies were floating in the water.”

His duty was lookout for the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Guadalcanal. He was usually stationed at the forward end of the ship and would spend nights with just a pair of binoculars and a phone to contact the officers in ship’s headquarters and the other three lookouts.

“There would be nights when it would be boring. I’d just talk to the other guys at the other ends of the ship. My duty was at midnight and that’s when weird stories would come out from these guys. After a while, the officers would say ‘cut it out!’”

There would also be nights when the storms were fierce and ocean’s vast emptiness would be broken by huge waves that to Palicte looked like mountains rising from the water.

He often wondered why he never saw any planes during his shift. He thought night would be the ideal time for the Germans to go on an air raid, with the blackness of the sky a perfect cover.

“I realized that the German navy did not have aircrafts but they had thousands of submarines,” Palicte said. “They used the submarines to hit the ports used by the Allies.”

During one of his shifts, he saw two long rows of transport ships silently gliding parallel to the destroyer. The ships carried American troops on their way to Normandy Beach.

Two days before the famed D-Day, near the coast of North Africa, Palicte witnessed one event that became the highlight of his tour of duty.

“It was noon when the alarm sounded,” he said. “We heard the officers say, ‘All hands, find your battle station!’ I went up and saw a German submarine on the right hand of the ship. We had found the sub through sonar but we didn’t know if they had shot at us and missed.”

Palicte said their crew’s job was to sink the enemy but they captured this one instead.

“A lot of people did not think it was possible to capture the German sub. In order to catch it, we had to use depth charges, explosives that look like barrel tanks, and tossed those into the sub. The explosives hit the tail end and hit the rudder. The Germans abandoned ship but one man stayed and started shooting at the aircrafts. We gunned him down.”

Out of the nearly 50 German crew, only one man was killed. The rest were captured by the Palicte’s ship and five destroyer escorts.

“You know what touched me? I was on the top deck and they had a ceremony for the German who died. The medics had wrapped up the man and placed him in a casket (that was an interesting casket because it had a hole on one end so it would tip over and the body would be dumped on the ocean). Everybody in the destroyer had to stand at attention and give respect,” Palicte recalled. “And I thought, ‘Oh, Americans are good people. They have respect for the dead even though it’s the enemy.’

The whole crew was forced to swear to keep the capture a secret for two years.

“When I got back on land, I spent days and days at the bar. My Pinoy friends were plying me with lots of beer to get the story from me,” he said, laughing.

The captured German submarine, known by the code U505, is now housed in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Palicte’s Navy career lasted exactly 2 years, 10 months and nine days - cut short because the war was over. His two younger brothers had also enlisted as part of the 1st and 2nd Filipino infantries.

After Palicte was discharged, he found himself at a crossroads.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “I tried boxing, fought five or six times but decided that there was no future for me there. At my height there weren’t that many opponents. Americans were bigger than me.”

Without a college education, he went back to working in fish canneries and on farms. His big break came in 1949 when he was hired by the Douglas Aircraft Co. to work in the assembly line “riveting skins” on airplanes, particularly on the DC-8, which was only developing then.

After nine years, he was discharged.

“My dream was to go to engineering but most of my colleagues were discouraging me because I had no college degree,” he said. But he didn’t let that stop him. When he heard about an opening for a draftsman at Rockwell in Downey, he applied for the job.

“I didn’t know anything about the job but I bluffed my way,” he said. “There was a demand for workers then because of the mission to the moon.”

Palicte’s engineering career skyrocketed because of that mission. He said he considers the fact that he eventually became an associate engineer, without so much as a college education, his biggest achievement.

It is only now, almost half a century later, that he is finally getting that education. In 1998, Palicte earned his associate in arts degree in technology with a minor in business administration and a certificate of achievement in business management from Cerritos College in Norwalk, Calif.

He has taken photography and art as a hobby. At the age of 75, he continues to take business courses at the college. He wants to open a business, but he thinks that it would take a younger man to pursue his plan.

“I can’t do much of it anymore. It’s too much work,” he said. He takes classes now mostly to keep his mind active. He said one his biggest fears is growing senile.

“I’m writing my memories down in a memoir while I can still remember,” he said. He surrounds himself with pictures of his family: his first wife, a California-born Filipina, the love of his life who died in 1971 of complications from asthma; his eldest son, Bruce, already in his 40s, who was born with brain damage and now lives in a care facility; and his three daughters — Denise, Janice and Roseanne.

He keeps a huge poster filled with cut-out photographs of his family in his one-bedroom apartment at a moderately upscale senior housing complex in La Palma, Calif. The poster was a gift to the whole family, all five generations of it, during last year’s reunion. Some of the photos are already colored with age, sepia-toned compared to the full-color ones of the younger generation.

He has a hard time keeping up with the family tree: almost all of them have second, even third, marriages with children from each one. But he looks forward every year to their reunion. They’ve already made reservations for this year’s event at a park - their family is so big they usually take up the whole park.

He remains involved in Filipino organizations in the Long Beach area but he fears these groups would slowly disappear with the older generation.

He knows his life is rich with history. Filipino American students all over the nation study stories such as his in their university courses. This is why he turned over some of his pictures, mostly of him and his wife in their 20s and their wedding, to the Los Angeles Public Library’s historical archives. His photos are now part of the library’s “Shades of L.A.” collection, a collection of immigrants’ stories before 1940.

There are gaps in this re-telling of his story. To narrate his whole life — every momentous occasion, every brush with history, every lesson learned — would have taken us days and a hundred pages.