Richard Miralles was born in July 1924 in Anderson, California. He was an orphan. His parents separated. He lived with his grandmother for a while, then with a cousin down the street. He had a brother and a sister. They found a home with a nice Christian woman. Miralles went to war in February 1942. It was tough during the Depression [Annotator's Note: Great Depression; a global economic depression that lasted through the 1930s]. Miralles was four years old when they moved in with her. They had enough to eat. They had no electricity, water, or toilets inside the house. She cooked on a wood stove. She took care of them and did a great job. Miralles was going to join when he got out. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] during his senior year of high school. He joined the Navy in February [Annotator’s Note: of 1942].

Richard Miralles went to boot camp and trained for two months. Then they went to different schools. Miralles went to radio and gunnery school. At the end of boot camp, there was a big parade. Then he went to aviation and radio school. They went into a radar building. They had to do everything by memory. They went into gunnery school and were put into a situation like they were dealing with a dive bomber. They were taught how to field strip machine guns. Then they went to San Diego [Annotator’s Note: San Diego, California]. He was assigned to Bombing Squadron 21 [Annotator’s Note: 21st Bombardment Squadron]. They spent four months in Hawaii training, and then went to to Fiji Island. Miralles got fungus in both ears after swimming in the river. Miralles was playing baseball and broke his little finger. They put a cast on it and put a wire through his finger. His pilot dumped him because they thought he would not get back in time. He had to join another pilot who was a trainee. The new pilot saved them a few times. He was 22 years old and Miralles was 18 years old. Miralles was the top gun on machine guns. When they first started, he rode facing forward. Then he had to turn around. It feels like falling backward off a cliff on a chair. They were training. On Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands], they were in Air Group 11. They were under MacArthur’s [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area] Cactus Air Force. They did not have any carriers to put them on at the time.

Richard Miralles thought Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands] was miserable. They had mud on their shoes and it rained every day. It was hot and humid. They lived five in a tent and slept on cots. They had mosquito netting over their beds. He encountered the Japanese during bombing runs. One night, there was a Japanese man in their chow line. He was starving to death in the jungle. They put him in the compound they had for prisoners. Miralles did not have much love for the Japanese. Some of their people had been captured. They were mutilated with their tongues cut off. They would shoot men down in parachutes. Miralles would write letters home. They had horse shoes and would play the game. Sometimes they would bomb ships or the Japanese in the hills. He did not know if he would make it back. One day they were hit by a lot of bullets in the right wing of the plane. Another plane came in and the rear gunner was dead. They had some bad missions. On one mission, they were dropping bombs on an airstrip. The plane did not raise when the thousand-pound bomb was supposed to drop. It was teetering under the plane. When they dropped the bombs in the jungle, it would cause the trees to drop in a circle. The pilot told Miralles to bail out. They were over enemy territory and there were about 25 sharks in the water. They thought as soon as they hit, the bomb would blow. Miralles and the pilot bailed out.

Richard Miralles was at Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands] for four months. They made the first daylight raid on Bougainville [Annotator’s Note: Bougainville, Solomon Islands]. It was 600 miles away. They had to get a wing tank to make sure they made it there and back. Their plane caught fire and they had to bail out and find another plane with a wing tank. There were about 20 Zeros [Annotator's Note: Japanese Mitsubishi A6M fighter aircraft, referred to as the Zeke or Zero] above them. When they went on their dive, the guns broke loose. Miralles was hanging onto the guns because he thought they would tear the tail off. They were hit in the engine. They continued to fly. They did not want to be captured. They made it to a Marine base and landed on the beach because the engine went out. They were jumped by two Zeros. Miralles got about five shots off, then the guns were out of business. When they got to the base, they found the Marine pilots and talked with them. When they got back home, they spent a week in San Francisco [Annotator’s Note: San Francisco, California].

Richard Miralles got word on his 18th birthday that they were going home. He went on liberty [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] for 30 days. Then he was assigned to a torpedo squadron. They went aboard the USS Hoggatt Bay [Annotator’s Note: USS Hoggatt Bay (CVE-75)]. He was on there for a year and a half. He was made a radioman on the ship. He hated the torpedo squadron. It was not as hectic as flying. He favored flying. They started with the invasion of Ulithi [Annotator’s Note: Ulithi, Caroline Islands]. They were sinking submarines around the Philippines. Some of their ships were taken out by kamikazes [Annotator's Note: Japanese suicide bombers]. One morning, a kamikaze was after their ship. The five-inch gun took one shot and blew him up in the air.

Richard Miralles was bombing the Philippines. A pilot had dropped two bombs into his bomb bay. The bombs blew up and killed the crew, 14 men in total. There was a kid on fire. A guy grabbed a blanket and put it on him, but then that caught on fire. Miralles sprayed him with a fire extinguisher and that killed him. It was a horrible scene. He remembers when they were in Bougainville [Annotator’s Note: Bougainville, Solomon Islands] they were dive bombing. The third plane dropped a bomb down the smoke stack. There were 5,000 to 10,000 troops on the ship. The ship sank within eight minutes. They did not talk much about it.

Richard Miralles left the squadron and went aboard the ship [Annotator’s Note: USS Hoggatt Bay (CVE-75)] as a radioman. He was in charge of the IFF [Annotator's Note: identification, friend, or foe] gear. He built a transmitter and then found out he did not need it because the radar would do it. They shot their planes off with a catapult. He would check all the planes out with their IFF gear. He got special accommodations with advancement and rate. They came back to the States after that. He went on liberty [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] for 30 days. His promotion was turned down. He was mad at the Navy after that. They were going to send him to Memphis, Tennessee to work as a gunnery instructor. He wanted to go to Nevada because that was closer to his home in Reading, California. He went home after the war and got a job. He went to college and got a degree in forestry using the G.I. Bill [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment]. He went to work for the California Department of Forestry for 30 years.

Richard Miralles accepted everything that came to him because he knew he could not change it. They did not talk about the war. He had a hard time finding friends from the service. They are going to have a small reunion. He is going to fly in a plane again. When he came back from the war and graduated from college, he hitchhiked across the United States. Then he went on a motorcycle cruise in Europe and went through 15 countries. He spent five and a half months there. Then he returned home and got a permanent job in forestry [Annotator’s Note: with the California Department of Forestry]. He wrote articles for the newspaper. They had a fire up by a prison camp. Miralles was in charge of eight inmate camps and youth camps. Miralles went to check on how the fire was going, and they said it was good. He starts back and sees the fire roaring up out of the canyon at him. One of the inmates was burned in the fire. The flames were going up the mountain. Miralles went back down to the area that burned already. There were a lot of times he had to take his pickup truck and drive through the flames to get through it. When he went through Europe, it was the first year they had opened Spain to tourists. People in Spain were starving. The people would kill them and take everything they had. His most memorable moment was when he came up out of the airplane with the machine guns. He served to protect the country. He knew if they did not win the war, they would be in trouble. The war gave him opportunities. He used the G.I. Bill [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment] to go through college. He is very proud of his service. He wants people to realize there was a war. He thinks people need to know the history. We could have been under Japanese rule. He thinks the museum [Annotator's Note: The National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] is great. Future generations need to know things are not just handed to them.