Olaf Rose was born in August 1921 in Pontiac, Michigan, and was the oldest of four children. His father was in the construction business in the years before the Great Depression, but he could see that times would soon be difficult; he sold his construction business, bought an 80 acre farm in Lapeer, Michigan, and moved the family there when Rose was four years old. There was no electricity or radios on the farm, and Rose said he most likely learned the news about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] from a friend or neighbor. Rose dropped out of high school to help out on the farm when his father became ill. After his father recovered and returned to construction to bring in some money, Rose and his mother and siblings stayed on the farm. Eventually, Rose got a job with a roofing company in Flint, Michigan, then went to work with General Motors, and then Pontiac Motors until shortly after the United States entered the war. He and his brother volunteered for service in the Navy in 1942. They went to boot camp in Great Lakes, Michigan, took a ten day leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], then headed for California. Rose had never been off the farm, and found the train trip west long and tedious. There was more training in California, and then he boarded the big transport ship Matsonia that took him zig-zagging [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver] to Noumea, New Caledonia.

After he landed in Noumea, New Caledonia, Olaf Rose, his brother, and some other guys who had traveled together on the transport ship wandered down to the shore where the PTs [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boats] and crews were working. Rose spoke with the captain of one of the boats, and asked to go down and see the engine room. He was impressed by the craft's three noisy Packard engines, and volunteered to train as a motor mechanic, knowing he could draw on his farm machinery maintenance experience. The PT boat was a fast craft, and Rose picked up the PT-171, an 80-footer, part of the 12 boat contingent of Squadron 10 [Annotator's Note: PT-171, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 10 (MTBRon 10)]. His brother went to work on PT-168. It was a challenge, but he didn't want to be on a big ship. Life in a PT squadron was informal, and the sailors were like a "close knit family." The men took turns steering, and there were five engineers who worked in the engine room in shifts. The place was too hot to stay for very long. He went to the Solomon Islands, which were infested with the enemy. Rose said the Japanese treated the natives bad, but in his interactions with the locals on different islands, he found they liked the Americans.

Remembering the first patrol he experienced, Olaf Rose said, "It gets hot, and the boats are coming at you." The PT boats [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] would go on night and day patrols, and were set up to go after big boats like barges and troop and supply ships in the shipping lanes in the beginning. Later, they were seeking them anywhere they could find them. They also went after the enemy on the island shores. The PT-171 was well armed, with four "fish" [Annotator's Note: torpedoes], a 40mm cannon on the stern, twin 50 caliber machine guns, two 20mm guns, and a 37mm cannon up on the bow. They co-operated with aircraft, and often went out on pilot rescues. They also encountered downed Japanese pilots and marauding soldiers. On one such occasion, Rose was topside when Japanese soldiers in a dugout canoe, with what looked like natives from the island, approached. Rose was sent to man one of the machine guns, and when the PT boat rolled up on them, the "Jap [Annotator's Note: a period derogatory term for Japanese] jumped up" and "got killed," along with a couple of the natives. On different occasions, the crew would try to get a stranded enemy aboard, and sometimes they could, but the skipper would not let them swim out to rescue them. Once they had a prisoner on board, the skipper would not let the crew get near him. Prisoners were kept on top, and watched, until they could be brought into shore for interrogation. There were bases all over the coast. The PT boats consumed a lot of aviation fuel, and tanked up at those bases, although they sometimes got fuel and ammunition supplies from tenders.

During his time on PT-171, Olaf Rose took instruction from veteran engineers, and gradually got comfortable with his work. The crew got along well, and the squadron [Annotator's Note: Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 10 (MTBRon 10)] operated as a unit unto themselves. After the war, Rose kept up with many of the crew while they were living; most are now gone. Rose's brother started out on PT-168 but got malaria, and went on to the base force, not returning to the squadron until after he recovered. The two men never revealed their kinship, for fear they wouldn't be allowed to serve together. In May or June 1944, Rose had orders to go back to the United States for a 30 day leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], but turned down the opportunity because it was a long journey, and his brother couldn't make the trip at the same time. In August of the same year, he and several other PT boat crewmen went on a destroyer escort to Australia for 18 days, and returned on a refrigerator ship to New Guinea. He went back to work with the squadron, and described the incident in which he was wounded. The boat had come off patrol, and the crew had settled down to eat, when another crewman sitting on a bunk somehow mishandled a pistol, and shot Rose through the hip. He was "laid up for a few days." Once he recovered, he moved with the squadron to the Philippines.

Sometimes when the PT boat [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] that Olaf Rose served on [Annotator's Note: PT-171, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 10 (MTBRon 10)] was going for a long job that would require more than the 3,000 gallons of fuel it normally carried, they would strap rubber auxiliary gas tanks on the deck. The engines "drank up a lot of fuel" when the boat was running fast. There were usually three or four PT boats involved on those missions. Rose said that when he started, the torpedoes on his boat were shot from a tube; later they were kept in a hanger, and the crew rolled them off. He said that later in his tour of duty, his PT boat was equipped with radar, and, "That was nice." It could pick up things far off at sea, aircraft, and even submarine scopes. When they were going after a target, and the crew was in GQ [Annotator's Note: General Quarters; a call to report to battle stations], Rose was rarely topside when the PT boat went after something big; he was usually one of the two men who had to be in the engine room. The skipper's orders were relayed to the isolated area below where the engines were housed. In this section, Rose described the operation of the engines. He said the boat's ample firepower came in handy in fending off Japanese aircraft and Kamikaze attacks. He mentioned a time when the squadron was hidden beneath the bushes on a shoreline, and three American B-25s [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers] came down low and hit two of their boats; in their own defense, the PTs shot back and downed one of the planes.

Olaf Rose said they did not go out every night, and they kept the engines tuned up, so there was not much work done on the engines at sea. After a patrol, Rose said, he liked to refuel as soon as they returned; the skipper had to report for a briefing, and the crew tried to catch up on sleep. Occasionally, they were on patrol during an amphibious invasion landing. Going close to shore could be dangerous, not only because of the enemy fire, but also because the boats could get hung up on sand bars or reefs. Rose said they once had to "yank" another PT boat [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] off a sand bar. He said the PT boats came under heavy aerial attack in the Philippines. In Rose's opinion, the PT boats were a "bad" offensive weapon, unless it was attacking with its torpedoes, because it was a small boat with small guns going after big boats with big guns. Rose said he didn't know if it could be called a "suicide outfit," or not. And, he pointed out, there was no safety; the craft was all wood that could, "stop nothing, not even small stuff." In this section, Rose described the procedure the engineers used when the boat was carrying out an attack. Before the war ended, Rose left the Pacific, and flew on a C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft] from the Philippines to Honolulu, Hawaii, then caught a "flattop" (Annotator's Note: aircraft carrier) that had a fenced-off hole in its deck from where a plane crashed through it. It moved swiftly, and he had nothing to do but keep his bunk clean.

When he was fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, Olaf Rose hated the enemy, but as the years have gone by, he admits, "They were just like us." But, he was quick to say, when they started firing, he was scared. When bullets whistled by, he wanted to crawl under the deck paint. But it was a job he had to do. He returned to the United States on leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] in May 1945. He and his soon to be wife used the gas stamps both their fathers had saved to travel the hundred miles between their two homes. At the end of his leave, he went to Boston [Annotator's Note: Boston, Massachusetts] where he met about 15 other PT boat [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] men and stayed in a motel until he was sent to Melville [Annotator's Note: Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island]. There he maintained an Olympic swimming pool. He was not required to attend machinist's school, he supposed, because he had already done on the boat training. To demonstrate his mastery of the engines, Rose describes how he changed the superchargers on two engines, one on his own boat, then another once he was detached from PT-171 and reassigned to the base force.

Olaf Rose recalled having served under three different skippers on the PT-171 [Annotator's Note: PT-171, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 10 (MTBRon 10)]. He had worked a year on the boat when he was shot [Annotator's Note: Rose was accidentally shot in the his by one of his fellow crewmen]. After his recovery, he took a leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] and went to Australia. Rose lived with a buddy in a rented room, and enjoyed the renowned Australian hospitality. When the leave ended, he moved to the shore bound base force in the Philippines where he served from August 1944 to May 1945. Rose never ventured further than his base while he was there. He earned his stripes while he was overseas, and achieved the rate of Motor Machinist's Mate 2nd Class, or MoMM2c. At the height of his service overseas, Rose was made the machine troubleshooter for the entire squadron. He admitted getting into trouble with the chief for dodging the approval process in acquiring a replacement supercharger, and was threatened with a court martial. Rose made an appeal to his skipper, who had become the commanding officer of the squadron, and no more was said about the matter.

Olaf Rose became acquainted with, and courted, his future wife by mail from the Pacific. When he came home on a 30 day leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], he finally met her, and married her while he was still in the service, stationed in Newport, Rhode Island. The couple rented a cabin near Rose's base [Annotator's Note: at the time, Rose was based at the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island], and his wife worked two jobs to keep them financially afloat. On the day the war ended, the Roses and other friends were enjoying a movie when the newsflash brought everyone into the street to celebrate. He had enough points for discharge, and was shipped to Nashville, Tennessee, where his Navy career ended on 8 December 1945. He regrets not having taken advantage of the G.I. Bill to further his education, but he was determined to stay out of debt. When he went into the Navy, he took a military leave from his last place of civilian employment, Pontiac Motors. On returning to Michigan, he went back to his old job, built a home, and fathered two children. In 1950, he was made supervisor of the plant, and after 35 or 36 years of employment, Rose retired from Pontiac in 1978.

Olaf Rose said he suffered no lasting effects from the war, and had no trouble transitioning from sailor to civilian. He got along with his life. Reflecting on his most memorable experiences of the war in the Pacific, Rose recalled it was a really hot job to be in pursuit of the Japanese enemy, and he admits to being scared, although he said it was quite an experience. He feels a lot more soldiers would have been killed were it not for the atomic bombs. His hasn't talked about his time in the service, but he feels it important that upcoming generations know what happened in the Second World War so they can avoid getting embroiled in such an engagement ever again.