Melvin Abadie spent two weeks in Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to the USS Appalachian (AGC-1). He was not connected to the ship itself and he worked under a Vice Admiral. From then on, they hopped from island to island to island. Guam was the first place they really had any doings with a naval landing. The Appalachian was a communication ship and always had an admiral aboard. It took part in various landings and conflicts. Abadie worked with the weatherman. He was a flagman and operated Morse Code and was rated as a helmsman, a quartermaster. He had a guy who he took orders from. Those orders were given by a senior officer. They did a lot of zig-zag moving because of Japanese submarines. They only had one conflict. In convoy, they would have two converted carriers, a battleship, a cruiser and four destroyers all around their ship and the troop ships. The ship had a crew between 300 and 400 for the regular crew and another 200 for the flag allowance.

Melvin Abadie was born on the Evergreen Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana in June 1925. He spent the first eight years of his life there. He would walk from his house to the sugar refinery as a small boy. His family had to leave the plantation during the Great Depression. His father was the principal of the plantation school. He taught grades four through six. They moved to Edgard, which is where Abadie went to high school. He was in athletics at school. He played quarterback on a football team. He went to Charity Hospital in New Orleans for a ruptured appendix. While there, his parents moved to Houma. This was in 1942. He got a job working at the naval air station there as a water boy. He met all of the carpenters and the officers. They talked him into volunteering for the Navy in March 1943. He went into the Naval Reserve and volunteered for the duration [Annotator's Note: of the war] plus six months. He was discharged at just about that. He went to basic training in Corpus Christi, Texas. He spent most of his time after boot camp at Chase Field in Beeville, Texas working in the control tower after being a linesman for aircraft. He would start and warm up the planes for the training pilots. He was there for about 15 months. He enjoyed the Navy. He went so many places and saw so many things. We are in paradise here, from what he saw.

Melvin Abadie assisted in the landing at Guam after the original landing. They first bombarded Guam before the landing. They then reinforced the main landing. Abadie never went ashore. He found out later that he had a brother on Guam then. He had four brothers who were servicemen. Everybody made it home. His oldest brother was in the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] with Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.]. He found that out after he got home. It was slow communication between them as he was constantly moving from place to place. [Annotator's Note: It is hard for him to remember exactly the order of things and he looks at some papers.] After leaving Guam, Abadie went to New Guinea for two days then to New Caledonia where he got leave and went ashore. They went to the movies. They speak French there and his buddies wanted to go with him because he speaks French. They moved from place to place that was already occupied like the Kwajalein [Annotator's Note: Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands]. They returned to Pearl [Annotator’s Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii] a few times. Once they had a seven day leave and he got to meet his two brothers-in-law. Both were involved in baseball. He returned to Kwajalein. He did not steer the boat that often. He was also in charge of all the maps. They would get updates on sunken ships and objects that would be harmful to ships, which he would plot. They would get updates every two or three days.

Life aboard ship [Annotator's Note: USS Appalachian (AGC-1)] was mostly hot for Melvin Abadie. The South Pacific was hot. He would carry a cot to the upper deck and sleep there because it was too hot below. They got caught on the edge of the Battle of the Philippine Sea. They got caught by kamikazes in both Manila Bay and Leyte Gulf [Annotator’s Note: Philippines]. There was one incident where he was above decks and a kamikaze was coming in towards them. The firepower of his ship forced the aircraft to hit the USS Zeilin (APA-3). There were no casualties. This was in Manila Bay. After Abadie left the service, he found out his good friend's brother-in-law was on that ship. You would not have known if you passed your cousin going ashore, like not knowing his brother was on Guam. Once on ship, the mail was not swift. The Army had mail calls constantly. It was lonesome but you did what you had to do and stopped thinking of home. When he went ashore in Manila, he found a place like a bar with a piano. They gathered around and sang and drank. They spent maybe three hours there. Manila was a shambles and there were hardly any townspeople out. It was just a job they had to do to get the Japs [Annotator's Note: period derogatory term for Japanese] out of there.

The ship Melvin Abadie was assigned to [Annotator's Note: USS Appalachian (AGC-1)] was one of 18 ships that took troops to Japan as an occupying force. There was a typhoon heading for Okinawa [Annotator's Note: Japan] and they were on the edge of it. Abadie had duty on the helm and it was hard to control the ship on the course they were ordered on. The bow of the ship would be pointing at the stars and then it would dive in and water would come over the bow. They finally got in the clear and wound up in Tokyo Bay. They did not go ashore in some places. They saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki [Annotator's Note: atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945]. It was unbelievable. They did not have much contact with the Japanese people. They went ashore in groups from place to place. Japan, to Abadie, was shabby built communities, but it's not like that today. The people were friendly, not hostile. After they dropped all of the troops off, they returned with empty convoys. They went back to Pearl [Annotator's Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii] and loaded more troopships that they escorted to California. That is when his duty was up. He went to New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] and got his discharge then moved back to Houma. His family knew he was coming because he called them from California. His oldest brother returned later as did his other brothers.

The USS Appalachian (AGC-1) was equipped to be the head communications ship for the Bikini test [Annotator's Note: Operation Crossroads, the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands in July 1946]. Melvin Abadie was not aboard then. People from the ship kept trying to find him for a reunion and wanted him to join. He sent his dues for three years but never made one of them. He mentioned he was in the flag allowance aboard the ship under Vice Admiral Connolly [Annotator’s Note: US Navy Vice AdmiralThomas Francis Connolly, Jr.]. He never heard from them again. Abadie had no problem readjusting to civilian life. He got various jobs. He got a job in a grocery department, then on a seismograph crew offshore. He then went back to work in a hardware store when he was offered a job by Bethlehem Supply Company of Bethlehem Steel. Three years later he got an offer from another store that he retired from. He never used the G.I. Bill. He did buy his house with a VA [Annotator's Note: Veterans Administration] loan. Abadie thinks The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] is a beautiful place. It made a hit to the public what war really was. His son-in-law wants to take him back. He thinks the country respects his service more than it did 25 years ago. They really make their words count now. The war was an experience for him.