John Bellecci was born in September 1923 in Martinez, California. He grew up there and was the student body president in high school. He then attended the University of California studying engineering. He is the oldest child with two sisters and a brother. His father was a machinist for Yuma Manufacturing Company. He saved the Navy a tremendous amount of trouble by properly remounting the cannons on the Mare Island [Annotator's Note: Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California] naval ships. He received bonuses for the work. His father had work all through the Great Depression. Bellecci was in his first term at Cal [Annotator's Note: University of California] when Pearl Harbor happened in December [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 7 December 1941]. He then signed up for the military. He continued to go to school for another six months. He was in ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] in school. He was inducted in Monterrey, California at Fort Ord. Bellecci's father was out fishing with some friends and he went to pick them up. He heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor over the radio and told his father about it all. There was concern with them being on the west coast of the United States. The Japanese actually shelled some of the small towns along the coast. They only did that in two or three places. Bellecci was sent to Camp Sibert, Alabama for basic training. It was supposed to be chemical warfare training since he was a chemist. Nearly all of the men in his group were under 25. He was there for 13 weeks. He was his team's leader. He was a good athlete and was in great shape. He has great eyesight in his right eye which made him a marksman. After basic he went to John B. Stetson University in Florida for testing. From there, he went to Clemson College in South Carolina which was a military school like West Point [Annotator's Note: United States Military Academy, West Point, New York]. Bellecci was in military engineering training there. The coach there put the Yankees on one side of the football team. Bellecci could throw a pass 50 or 60 yards. Another student could run like a deer and he and Bellecci passed the other team. The coach offered him a scholarship for after the war. His engineering training was completed at Clemson.

John Bellecci completed engineering training at Clemson [Annotator’s Note: Clemson College in South Carolina]. He learned to calculate weights for bridges, how to clear roads and remove trees. After that, he went to Tulsa University in Oklahoma. He was in a petroleum laboratory course and then became the instructor for the next term. He had worked summers at the Shell Oil Refinery in Martinez [Annotator's Note: Martinez, California]. Bellecci was tested in high school and he scored highest in the country on his Latin test. This put Martinez on the national map and Bellecci was taken out to talk to business leaders and more. This is how he got hired at Shell Oil. He learned a lot while there in the summers and on Christmas vacations. They did not even ask him his age and hired him illegally before he was 18. He was given an option by them to go to work. Bellecci was at Tulsa for 15 weeks and then he returned to the 1383rd Engineering Pipeline Company [Annotator’s Note: 1383rd Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company]. He then was supposed to go overseas. He had a two week furlough at home. Some people asked him if he was Sal Bellecci's son. He said yes. They said Sal was going to win the war by himself because of the work he was doing for the Navy on the cannons [Annotator's Note: Bellecci's father was a machinist mounting guns on Navy ships at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard].

John Bellecci boarded a ship from California to Australia. The ship went alone in September 1943. It was a converted ocean liner and took 3,000 men. They were on the dock and someone told him he was supposed to be sitting up. Bellecci said he was sitting up. The man left and came back with MPs [Annotator's Note: Military Police] and said to throw him in the brig, which they did. They asked him what outfit he was with and then told him there was no such outfit there. [Annotator’s Note: Bellecci mas a member of the 1383rd Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company.] He told them Lieutenant Greenthall was his commanding officer. It checked out. He arrived in Australia and then went to New Zealand. They landed in Hollandia and took over a half finished pipeline company. They were getting ready to invade the Philippines. The Japanese were harassing them there. The Japanese followed an American civilian plane in and then shot it up and killed a lot of them. Bellecci lived in tents there. There were four guys to a tent. Climate and disease were not issues. They were not allowed in the native quarters. He was there for six or eight months and then went to the Philippines. He went to an island and built tanks and a pipeline from the dock to pump the oil from the ships to the airfield. They did the same on the main island near the end of the war.

The war had ended but John Bellecci did not know. His company [Annotator’s Note: 1383rd Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company] was put aboard a ship without being told anything and they sailed to Tokyo Bay, Tokyo, and Yokohama [Annotator's Note: Japan]. He saw an armada of ships beyond belief. He wondered why they were in front. He went to some tankers there and did gas testing. He built a pipeline to Atsugi Airfield [Annotator's Note: Yamato and Ayase, Japan] for fueling airplanes. He heard bands playing and found out they were preparing to sign the peace treaty. It was an education to see what war can be. The only thing standing in Tokyo and Yokohama were shells of concrete buildings and some steel structures. There was trash everywhere. He also flew over Nagasaki and it was the same as Tokyo and Yokohama but one bomb had done the same damage as 1,000 regular bombs. They were building living quarters and a gas station for the land vehicles. The Japanese vehicles used coke [Annotator's Note: hard, porous fuel] for fuel and could only go four or five miles per hour. Other engineering companies built big warehouses where the mess halls were. After eating, the men would put their leftovers into garbage cans. The Japanese were lined up at the garbage cans, so the men would scrape their plates into the Japanese containers. Pretty soon the GIs [Annotator’s Note: slang term for American soldiers] were bringing full meals out to them. The Japanese treated them absolutely perfectly. The prisoners of war that had been rescued were just about dead.

John Bellecci and a friend went to a place called Nikko [Annotator's Note: the site of the Toshogu Shinto Shrine] in Japan. They took an electric train there and no Japanese ever did anything untoward them. He knows of no instance where the Japanese were not completely docile. They were not sullenly defeated. He talked to one about four or five years later and he told them that they were thankful that America did not bomb all of Japan. They saw what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki [Annotator's Note: Nuclear weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945] with just two bombs. And Tokyo and Yokohama were the same with 1,000 bombs. They had completely surrendered. Bellecci stayed in Japan from September 1945 until January 1946. He had been living in an oil refinery housing. He was teaching people how to run things. One Saturday night a replacement came and wanted to see what things were like. He wanted to stop at the post office. He needed a sergeant to sign for the mail bag. Bellecci did so and they took the mail back. The lieutenant came in, which he had never done. Bellecci had orders to go to the replacement depot. The lieutenant took him there around midnight. They told him to return at six in the morning. He boarded a ship the next morning. He found out later that a friend he knew was there at the same time but did not arrive in the United States until two weeks after Bellecci did. Getting there the night before made a big difference.

John Bellecci arrived home [Annotator’s Note: in January 1946 after serving about three months of occupation duty in Japan]. He had been writing his parents that he would not arrive home until February or March [Annotator's Note: 1946]. His grandmother worried he would never be an engineer if he came home that time of year. He went to Cal [Annotator's Note: University of California, Berkeley] and registered for school and did not lose a semester. He finished up school on the G.I. Bill. It was a lifesaver. He had attend Tulsa University [Annotator's Note: Tulsa, Oklahoma] while in the Army and he taught Italian as a PFC [Annotator's Note: Private First Class]. On one occasion, an officer came up with an idea to put a water line into a tank. Bellecci told the officer it was a dumb idea. The officer said Bellecci would be court-martialed. Bellecci demanded an immediate court martial. The officer asked who he thought he was. They went to headquarters to check out Bellecci. He discovers Bellecci's background and decided to set him up to catch him asleep on guard duty. Bellecci was on guard duty and figured out he was being set up. He made an uncomfortable bench. He fell asleep and fell down. He woke up and then sat on a spike to stay awake. He heard someone coming; it was the officer and two more men. That was the only check-up they had ever done. He got away with it. After the war and he graduated from Cal then went to work for Shell [Annotator's Note: Oil Company] as he had previous experience with them before the war. They wanted him in Texas, so he took a job with the Corps of Engineers [Annotator's Note: United States Army Corps of Engineers] instead. The Corps needed help with dam building on the West Coast. He did some work for them that they liked and sent him to Los Angeles [Annotator's Note: California] for a week. They were going to pave the Los Angeles River and add walls, so it did not wash out and flood. He then met his wife. He had been traveling all over and wanted to settle down, so he took a job with Colgate-Palmolive Company in Berkeley, California.

John Bellecci does not think that American society today understands World War 2. Education is what won that war for us. After the war, he went to Cal [Annotator's Note: University of California, Berkeley]. Enrico Fermi [Annotator's Note: Physicist] was there. Fermi was one of the masters of the atomic bomb that was developed in the hills of the University of California. Fermi asked Bellecci if he spoke Italian. When he said yes, Fermi said good and that he was going to teach him. Fermi told him that the atomic bomb is peanuts compared to what the energy really is in the atoms. Bellecci feels that we do not put enough emphasis on education. Too many kids drop out of high school. He has five daughters with 12 college degrees among them. He has seven grandchildren. He told them if they graduated from college, he would give them 10,000 dollars. All of them graduated from college. In Bellecci's neighborhood, he was the first Italian to graduate in his whole neighborhood. He was embarrassed by how his friends looked up to him. We do not put enough emphasis on continuing education.