Charles Harrison was born in March 1921 and raised near Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father was head cashier for a utilities company, a job he was able to keep, and the family maintained a big garden, chickens and a Jersey cow, so they "didn't have a tough time" during the Great Depression. While he was in high school, Harrison was a lifeguard at a local lake, and he listened to the stories of the professional wrestlers who frequented the beaches for their suntans and workouts. Most of them had been Marines, and they were the deciding influence for Harrison's decision to enlist in that branch of the armed forces. In September 1939, Harrison left for boot camp in San Diego, California, and he said it was mostly brutality. He went directly from training to the 15th Regiment tactical unit, the 1st Defense Battalion, under B. D. Godbold [Annotator's Note: US Marine Corps Captain Bryghte D. Godbold], in the three inch antiaircraft battery.

When he arrived on Wake Island [Annotator's Note: with the US Marine Corps' 1st Defense Battalion] in August 1941, Charles Harrison said it was under "urgent circumstances." The island had to be fortified, and the Marines were working from dawn to dark every day of the week to get the gun emplacements and the beach defenses ready. There was also a large American civilian construction organization [Annotator's Note: the civil engineering company Morrison-Knudsen] working on the site. Harrison had been trained as a crewman on a three inch antiaircraft gun in San Diego, and had continued that training in Hawaii, but on Wake Island he was assigned to the range section, manually operating a "height finder", a Sperry M7 three inch antiaircraft directional instrument. He visually tracked incoming targets through scopes, and the machine transferred coordinates to the gun crew for accurate fire. Harrison noted that Japanese aircraft almost invariably came in at maximum range for the three inch gun. He said the sound of the surf blunted the sound of the enemy aircraft approach, and they usually came out of the sun, making them difficult to spot. Even with the obstacles, Harrison's battalion accounted for heavy Japanese aircraft losses. In December, the Japanese launched a major assault on the island, and during one heavy bombardment, Harrison's battery took a direct hit. A fragment cut his 1903 Springfield rifle cleanly in two. He said it was like losing a member of his family as he had been taught to love and revere that rifle.

Charles Harrison was having breakfast in the mess hall on Peale Island when he heard a runner from the detachment shout the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He said everybody rushed toward their assigned positions, but before they knew what was happening, a heavy rainstorm broke through the clouds, along with Japanese bombers. Harrison said the planes came in low enough for him to see their bomb bays open and the bombs drop; he had only a few seconds to take cover. As soon as they could, the crew jumped on their gun, but got off only a few rounds before the enemy flew off. They were bombed almost every day afterward. The island's radar was yet to be delivered, so the troops had to depend on "eyes and ears." Still, they did fairly well. Harrison said that on a number of occasions, "our little fighters" skillfully dispatched Japanese aircraft. He laments that he has forgotten, maybe purposefully, an awful lot, but recalls that the Japanese seemed to have pretty good intelligence about the gun positions, and targeted them. As he recalls, the gun emplacements had to be moved twice, during the cover of night. The civilian construction workers pitched in with the Marines, passing ammo and helping where they could. The defensive positions had sandbag barriers for shelter, which saved a number of lives. Harrison was issued a Browning Automatic Rifle [Annotator's Note: also referred to as the BAR] to replace the Springfield [Annotator's Note: .30 caliber M1903 rifle] the enemy destroyed, but the first time he tried to use it in combat, it jammed, and he never fired a round with it. Before the Japanese launched their amphibious invasion of the islands surrounding Wake, Harrison does not believe the average Marine realized the gravity of the situation, and they were confident they could "shoot the hell out of them." No one anticipated the hordes that would storm the island by the shipload.

On 11 December 1941, Charles Harrison was at Toki Point, which had a panoramic view, and could see five ships approaching Peale Island. The ships broke formation, and began to scatter. Harrison heard the radio traffic, and said the gunners were "cussing" all the while the officer in charge kept shouting for them to hold their fire. The wait paid off, however, because his strategy to do maximum damage to the enemy fleet was realized. The Marines felt very good about how they repelled that attack, and were proud of the performance of their aircraft as well. Other than having a "bird's-eye view" of that episode, Harrison's experience was limited to working through the daily air raids, "burning his eyeballs out" trying to detect enemy planes. Part of the time he was on the scope of the Sperry M7 fire director, and could watch the dogfights. He said it was always good news when a Japanese fighter plane was unable to return to its base in the Marshall Islands. One American pilot, Harrison remembered, had his goggles shot off during an engagement, and still survived. Many planes came back to base crippled, were patched up, and returned to service. Harrison got to know several of the pilots while he was in prison in China, and said they were "mighty fine men." Harrison said that altogether, the Wake detachment were good Marines with fine officers. After the 11 December attack, there were rumors of a rescue fleet, but none ever showed up, and Harrison said that was pretty hard to take; but the Marines became more determined once they knew their destiny was in their own hands.

The Japanese continued strafing and bombing, and Charles Harrison said the Marines were on the alert for another invasion attempt. Early in the morning on 23 December [Annotator's Note: 23 December 1941] the Japanese attacked Peale Island, bombing out his battery's range equipment. The crew moved over to the remaining battery, close to the airstrip and the rocky beach. The Japanese ran an old destroyer aground, and the American three inch guns were firing armor piercing rounds straight through it. Harrison could see the burning superstructure from his position, and he could hear machine guns firing at the enemy soldiers who were coming ashore. He said the Japanese rushed in, almost shoulder-to-shoulder. Harrison's buddy got the Navy Cross for a hundred kills with a .30-caliber machine gun during that encounter. Harrison's BAR [Annotator's Note: Browning Automatic Rifle] jammed, and he was "out of business." One story that sticks in his mind is about a really big Marine who grabbed an enemy by his head and broke his neck. They had no idea how the fighting was going on the other two islands, but later heard that all the Japanese fighters who went ashore on Wilkes Island were killed. In the case of Peale Island, the Marines were holding, and couldn't believe the order to surrender. But when Marines from other positions began to come, unarmed, toward the central command post, Harrison knew "that was it." He believed the Japanese fully intended to shoot them. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and their necks were hooked together with communications wire, and Harrison said the Japanese were digging a trench in which to bury them along the beach. He said it was like something out of a cheap movie [Annotator's Note: Harrison chokes out a laugh] when a "little weasel" in a white navy uniform came up on a bicycle, "peddling his ass off and waving his hands." He brought orders from the commander of the Japanese fleet to take the Americans prisoners. It was a close call, according to Harrison. The wires were cut, and they were herded to the airport, where they waited miserably, sitting on the crushed coral without food or water, for a couple of days before boarding the Nitta Maru for the trip to the Orient.

Charles Harrison said the trip on the Nitta Maru prison ship was miserable. It docked in Japan, but didn't stay there, and traveled on to Shanghai. They were marched to an old Chinese army camp at Woosung. Luckily, the camp was under the scrutiny of several neutral governments, so the prisoners got decent medical care and enough food to survive, and were treated better than those in Manchuria and the Philippines. Officers worked in the prison garden, enlisted men worked with picks and shovels. The Japanese commanding officer there was Yuse, a "ruddy little guy" who was very brutal, and enjoyed watching his guards push people around. He met his death after eating a watermelon; it was rumored that he was poisoned. Harrison's impression of another evildoer, the so-called "Beast of the East", Kanji Ishihara, was that he was a total coward who took advantage of his position to be a big shot and enjoyed torture. Harrison said he was sure he was sentenced to prison time for war crimes. From Woosung, Harrison was transferred to Kiangwang, in the same area of China, where the prisoners unknowingly worked to build a Japanese rifle range, which was illegal, but the Japanese paid no attention to the officer's complaints.

According to Charles Harrison the prisoners maintained discipline in the prison camps under good leadership. There were classes and exercise programs, and the unit held together. Harrison remembers that some packages trickled through the Red Cross into the camp from the United States. It was a real treat, after eating rice and potato peeling soup, to have boxes of goodies. When asked if he recognized the name "Shanghai Jimmy James", Harrison said it was known to every Marine who ever served in China because he ran a bar and restaurant frequented by the area's most beautiful girls, descendants of Russian revolution refugees. In the spring of 1945, Harrison was moved up the Yangtze River trough Nanking to a railroad marshalling yard near Peking, as it was called then, at Fengtai. Between Nanking and Peking, there was a "great escape" staged by a Marine from northern China who fled to safety in Chongqing. The rest of the prisoners spent the summer living in an old warehouse somewhere along an ancient travel route that was still trafficked by camels. They were moved by rail through Manchuria and the entire length of Korea, and worked for a while on the docks at Pusan, loading raw salt. After a month back aboard ship, they disembarked on the west coast of Honshu in a clean and scenic fishing village called Susa. Then they moved to the northern tip of Honshu, across the straits to Hokkaido, and were marched up the Hokkaido mountains to work in a coal mine until the war ended.

Charles Harrison said the war was over just in time, because none of the prisoners of war he was among could have lived through the combination of brutal cold, starvation rations, and working conditions. To some extent, news of the waning war was trickling through. Harrison's buddy taught him to read the newspaper that was wrapped around the parcels of food brought to the mines, and they translated reports about the atomic bombs. From that point on the Japanese attitude at the camp changed. Within a week or so, American aircraft began dropping basic needs, including salt, sugar and flour. Then U.S. Army troops arrived and trucked the prisoners out. When he was being evacuated, the pilot few Harrison over Tokyo to see the wreckage, and he knew the ordeal was ended. Harrison said he felt that if he had lost faith in his own country's ability to bring him through he might have died like so many others. He looks back with mixed emotions, and the Veterans' Administration has told him not to think about it. [Annotator's Note: Harrison chuckles.] Harrison said he did what he had to do to avoid being pushed or slapped around in the prison camps. He knows of nobody as thankful as he is to have survived.

After liberation, Charles Harrison was taken to a Guam fleet hospital, and thought it was heaven. The galley was open all night, and he gained back some of his weight. After a few weeks there, he was sent to a hospital near his home so he could take leave and visit his family. When the war ended, Harrison had six and a half years tenure in the military, and he stayed in the Marines. Jobs were scarce, and he decided the Marine Corps would be a good career. He continued under the command of the same officer he served with in the war, which pleased him greatly. He was commissioned during the Korean conflict, and eventually took an examination which allowed his commission to remain effective permanently. He retired in September 1969, after having served as an executive officer of a battalion in Vietnam and achieving the rank of major.

Charles Harrison said that the war, and especially the tough things that he went through, made him more thankful for everything, including his wife who has made old age worth living. He saw a lot of good deeds done during the war, and does not remember witnessing any cowardly acts on the part of any American. Harrison is very proud of his time in the Marine Corps and the past record of all of America. Because they did their job well, the success of the war gave all branches of the American armed forces justifiable confidence. He thinks the war changed the world, especially considering what might have been if Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] had not been stopped. He is convinced that the good leadership of people such as "Franklin D" [Annotator's Note: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and John F. Kennedy made America what it is today. Harrison credits all the training and experience he had in the Marine Corps with his own survival, and with giving him the life he enjoys every day.