Richard McEwen was born in Silver Creek, New York, and lived there with his parents and two siblings until he was eight years old. At that point his father, who worked for the New York Central Railroad, was transferred to Toledo, Ohio. The Great Depression did not affect his father's job; nevertheless, McEwen worked all through high school. After graduation he attended the University of Toledo, and was clerking in a grocery store that had the radio playing when the announcement was made about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. McEwen said folks initially discounted the news because the population had been fooled the year before with an "invasion of Mars" prank [Annotator's Note: McEwan is referring to the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Welles' War of the Worlds which inadvertantly caused a panic among listeners who took the broadcast to be a real news report], but it finally sank in that there had been an actual raid. McEwen said it was "alarming." He was underage at the time, so couldn't enlist, but during his junior year he signed up as a V-7 [Annotator’s Note: V-7 US Navy College Training Program, 1940 to 1945] candidate in the Navy. This enabled him to complete his undergraduate work at the university, and he went into service in October 1944. He attended a Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School where he studied navigation and seamanship for three months. He interviewed to go into volunteer PT-boat [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] service, and was chosen because he was "honest" in admitting that he knew nothing about boats or the water, and that he wasn't "keen on dying."

Initial PT-boat [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] training for Richard McEwen took place at Newport, Rhode Island, where he learned to handle a high-powered craft, and to land at a dock without damaging the boat. There were no mock battles or anything of the sort, according to McEwen. After completion of the course, he got married, intending to use his furlough for a honeymoon. But his leave was cut short, and he soon reported to New York for assignment. He was shipped to Taboga Island on the west side of the Panama Canal for further training. He recalled an occasion when the squadron was running in V formation, and because of a miscall, his and another PT boat were involved in a head-on collision at 35 knots that resulted in a hole in his vessel big enough for a jeep to drive through. McEwen stayed there for 90 days with nothing to do but "train, train, train." They were not near enough to Panama City to go there for entertainment, and aside from an officers club there was little to do in the way of recreation. They sailed on a tanker that was transporting PT boats in its well decks to Brisbane, Australia. As a casual officer he had no duties, so he slept most of the way. From there, the Navy sent him to Madang, New Guinea to join Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 18 as executive officer [Annotator's Note: second in command] of PT-371 [Annotator's Note: PT-371, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 18 (MTBRon 18)].

The boats were scattered around little islands, each with a pier, and Richard McEwen said the sailors ate their meals on the beach, "like Boy Scouts," around a fire with a grill. The PT-boats [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] were too hot for any interior use. At night they slept in Army mosquito hammocks. They kept the boats in condition and the armament operating, and had intelligence, such as it was, briefings on occasion. And they would routinely go out on runs, usually using only one of the three engines in order to save gasoline. Consequently, they rarely reached the boat's maximum speed of 55 knots. McEwen noted that they never had any contact with the Japanese fleet; the targets on which the PT boats concentrated during this time were Japanese supply barges that typically had one machine gun mounted on the bow. He does remember, however, a night when they took the PT boats out on patrol and got tangled up in a US Navy carrier convoy. McEwen said it was thanks to their IFF, the radar that identifies friend or foe, that their relatively little boats were not fired upon. The PT boats were variously armored, but might sport a 40mm cannon on the stern, 37mm guns "down the bows," and twin .50 caliber machine guns "everywhere you could put them," screwed into the wooden deck at the gunnel edge. The crew would scavenge the .50s off of damaged aircraft at the nearby Army Air Force field; the activity was called "moonlight requisition." After about six months, the skipper of PT-370 was transferred, and McEwen took over that position until he finished his service in the Pacific. He was 13 months in combat, about the maximum allowed.

Describing PT-371 [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat], Richard McEwen said that it had a big "day room" up front, on each side of which were bunks for the enlisted men. Then came the cockpit, and alongside it was the skipper's [Annotator's Note: the captain of the boat] bunk on one side, the exec's [Annotator's Note: the second in command of the boat] bunk on the other. Behind that was 3,000 gallons of gasoline, then the engine room and the fantail where they stored "flotsam and jetsam." To get underway, the skipper started with the bow high, and McEwen said that at high speed, only the screws [Annotator's Note: propellers] were in the water, and it was fun running it and a good duty to look back on. The crews came from all over, some very young, and McEwen found it interesting to see how quickly "American men can learn and do." He pointed out the differences between the Higgins-made and the Elco PT boats, and revealed that he actually served on Scott-Paine-built PT boats the whole time he was in the Pacific. The Navy had purchased only four of them from the Canadian company as an experiment. Unlike the other two models that were 80-footers, Scott Paines were 70 feet long, and operated more like an Elco than a Higgins boat. McEwen continues with a description of the torpedoes in this segment. He left PT-371 because of a promotion, and became skipper of another Scott-Paine, PT 370. The 371 was ultimately burned on the beach of one of the islands at the end of the war.

During the 13 months that Richard McEwen was in combat, he described the Japanese activity where he was as a "backup war," rather than an "aggressive forward war," and there was less combat than McEwen felt there should be. The tactic, on both sides, was mostly shore battery. The PT-boats [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boats] would run very close to the islands to find the enemy bivouac locations, often sustaining damage from a coral reef head. McEwen pointed out that the nature of the marine plywood construction of the boats was such that under steady pressure it was as strong as quartered steel, and he called it an "adequate hull for the sea." One scary incident happened when they came under heavy machine gun fire on a shore patrol mission, and as they pulled out of range, the cook sent up an alarm, shouting "somebody's dead." Closer inspection proved that a can of ketchup had been hit, and sprayed sauce all over the crew's quarters, making it look like a massacre site. There were 12 men aboard PT-371, two of them officers. McEwen said PT-boat service was more difficult in the earlier part of the war, during the time when President John Kennedy [Annotator's Note: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States] was in the Pacific. [Annotator's Note: Kennedy had been the skipper of PT-109 from April 1943 to 2 August 1943.] McEwen enjoyed the entertainment provided for the troops, and had the good fortune to see a show staring Bob Hope and Frances Langford.

The talk among the men about their home life was very interesting and mostly wholesome, according to Richard McEwen. He came back to the United States in December 1945, and was assigned to Notre Dame University to teach celestial navigation. Coincidentally, he was the officer of the day on both V-E Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945] and V-J Day [Annotator's Note: Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945], and didn't get to celebrate either occasion. It was the radio that brought both messages. McEwen had just received orders to go out again when the Japanese surrendered. He got out of the Navy in December 1946. McEwen credits his military experience for advancing his "people-handling" skills, which was very helpful in his postwar life. He also learned to worry about the thing he could do something about, and not the things that weren't in his control. He found his time in the Navy to be "a pleasant experience," and he would do it again if he had to. McEwen kept in touch with a couple of the friends he made during the war, but found some had no interest in maintaining contact. People got on with their civilian lives. He has never gone to any reunions. McEwen feels it is more important to study the causes of the war, rather than the war itself, because the equipment is so different today than it was then. He thinks the importance of institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] is to show people how devastating the Second World War was: "the statistics are very heavy," and not all military. War is a terrible thing, but it helped him to understand people from his own country and their priorities.