On 7 December 1941 [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], Robert Taylor was throwing a football with some friends on a remote US Marine Corps base in North Carolina. It was not a base as they are now. They lived in tents in the winter of 1941. It was cold. It was a beautiful day. He left there to go to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Marines were forming for the 1st Marine Division. It was just training there, the Marines did their usual stuff. He operated what they referred to as the sick bay which included two physicians, a dentist, and a chaplain. They were the only Navy people there. He then went to Norfolk, Virginia and got a ship to British Samoa [Annotator's Note: Western Samoa Mandate; now Western Samoa] in preparation for Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands]. He enjoyed that. They were bivouacked on Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" [Annotator's Note: novel published on 14 November 1883]. The trip took 33 days non-stop. Upolu [Annotator's Note: Upolu Island, Samoa] has no port. They offloaded close to shore on boats. He was never seasick. One man had chronic seasickness. It was terrible. He laid on the deck the whole time outside his office door. There is no treatment for it when you have it. He felt sorry for him. Taylor's next training was field medical servers training in tropical medicine. The Navy then sent him to hospital administration school in Bethesda, Maryland [Annotator's Note: after combat]. He later got into Personnel Distribution.

Robert Merrill Taylor was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in October 1920. There were nine children in his family. He had eight of his own. His father was a carpet weaver who came from Kidderminster, England along with his former factory owner and all of the employees in 1898. Taylor graduated from high school in June 1939 and left for the Navy on 1 November 1939. He had a friend who would visit who was already in the Navy. He went to boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island and then to school at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia [Annotator's Note: now Naval Medical Center Portsmouth]. He trained as a Navy corpsman, which were called Pharmacist Mates then. Hospital corpsman is a more appropriate title. He requested that training. His friend was a graduate of the same school. They studied a broad range of subjects, including bed-making, all taught by Navy nurses. As he progressed in training, he was trained to be an independent duty corpsman, the only medical person on board ship. He had to learn to do inoculations, prepare medicines, and patient care. His last duty was on a destroyer in the Korean War [Annotator's Note: 1950 to 1953]. After that, he was assigned to Hawaii and then stayed in the Navy 30 years and seven months. After his initial Navy training, he worked in a hospital ward for a year. He was assigned to the Marine Corps in 1940, and when the war started, he was off to combat with the 1st Marine Division.

Robert Taylor arrived in Samoa in April 1942. The Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands] campaign started on 7 August, and they left Samoa for Guadalcanal on 18 September 1942. He went ashore in a Higgins boat [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel or LCVP] off of a troop transport. Frequently, they were left off in neck-deep water. There was no opposition at the landing site but it got bad the next day. They looked for sites for a sick bay and dug a hole for their "nest". He carried his pack and supplies in. They had several portable chests with medicines and supplies, a small library, and stretchers. There were eight corpsmen in that immediate unit. They were Regimental Headquarters Sickbay and their main function was triage for three Infantry Regiments. They would go determine who was to be treated, who was going to die, how many replacements were needed. He was assigned to Headquarters and Service Company, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. It got hairy overnight. They moved inland to be nearer the action and put up a permanent site. They offered an ongoing treatment for malaria. At mealtime, they would go to the chow line and they would pop an Atabrine [Annotator's Note: trade name for mepacrine, or quinacrine; an anti-malarial medication] tablet in the throats of Marines because they were reluctant to take them. After they left Guadalcanal in February 1943, just under 50 percent of the regiment was hospitalized with malaria. Taylor was one of them.

[Annotator's Note: Robert Taylor served in the Navy as a corpsman attached to Headquarters and Service Company, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division and took part in operations on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands from August 1942 until Febraury 1943.] They had to take cover from ship bombardment and airstrikes. They had a visitor every night called "Washing Machine Charlie". He would come over and drop flares for the subsequent bombers. There are always casualties. Two good friends of his were killed in a Japanese naval bombardment. They had dug in on the side of a hill and had slept with their heads in the hole and their feet out. There was a hit on the side of the hill that collapsed dirt on them. Taylor saw their feet wiggling but could not get them out before they both died. The division had a Graves Registration unit. They would come and identify the bodies and make the notes of religion, date and time of death, and more. They would take them in body bags from the combat zone to a rear echelon for shipping back home if possible. Some, including enemy dead, were buried on site. They had two physicians, a dentist, and a chaplain. Taylor was too green to be frightened. He just went about the work as a normal responsibility. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer tells a story of a friend of hers.] Taylor was never queasy by the blood. He never hesitated. The sick bay and the company were stabilized in the central area. They would move out and up to the front lines to be near the action. A good many of their field grade officers had been through some battles in Central America in the late 1920s. Chesty Puller [Annotator's Note: US Marine Corps Lieutenant General Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller] was one who was then a Major. He was a great guy.

Robert Taylor went on a patrol on a training site on Upolu, Samoa. His unit [Annotator's Note: Taylor served in the Navy as a corpsman attached to Headquarters and Service Company, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division] had gone there initially to protect the Seabees [Annotator's Note: members of US naval construction battalions] who were building an airstrip. During that time, they trained day and night. One night, they were practicing attacking an enemy command post. Taylor got to the command post and blew it up, much to the surprise of the Marines. On Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands], he went forward, but he never fired at anything. His weapon was for his protection. He did go on the lines and pick up casualties. Taylor came under fire once when alone between the front lines and the hospital. He was guarding some medical equipment. There were snipers all around the area. He was scared to death then. Other than that, he was never afraid of anything. In theory, the Geneva Convention made it so wearing the red cross on his arm was protection against enemy fire. In practice, it sometimes made a convenient target for the enemy. In one triage area, they had 12 to 14 troops came in and were laying on the ground. The physician would just point and nod "up" or "down". One man had half of his head blown off and he indicated not to bother with him as he was going to die. That was always hard.

Robert Taylor slept in a hammock with netting for mosquitoes. They had tents. The chaplain was like the Red Cross guru and he kept supplies in a tent. The doctors, dentists, and chaplain were in one tent. The Marines had field kitchens and would be in a fixed location. In there, they went through a chow line for their meals. Out of there, they lived off c-rations [Annotator's Note: prepared and canned wet combat food]. He was close to all of the battles. They moved with the Marines. They were never the target of any of the action. He remembers Christmas at Cape Gloucester [Annotator's Note: Cape Gloucester, New Britain, Papua New Guinea] in 1943. Taylor was disabled with malaria after he returned from Cape Gloucester in 1944. He experienced seven bouts of malaria in America. He was in the hospital for one bout in Australia. He left Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands] in February 1943 for Australia. They stayed there until September when they went to New Guinea and planned the landing for Cape Gloucester. They were building landing strips to prevent the enemy from taking over Australia.

Robert Taylor made the landing [Annotator's Note: on Cape Gloucester, New Britain, Papua New Guinea] on LSTs [Annotator's Note: Landing Ship, Tank]. The landing was unopposed. It was the day after Christmas 1943. Somehow, three Red Cross workers were on one of the ships. One hill was the target for a weapons unit in H&S Company, 7th Marines [Annotator's Note: Headquarters and Service Company, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division]. The aerial and naval bombardment before the landing had neutralized the hill already. They were hampered by heavy rains two to three weeks before then. A friend Taylor made in Samoa, had made him a tapa cloth. Taylor gave it up to a wounded Marine who did not have a blanket. He never saw it again. Everything was wet including their clothing, food, and ammunition. Taylor left there to return to the United States. There were fewer casualties at Cape Gloucester than Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands]. More of those were illnesses and not combat-related as well. There were a number of corpsman and these were the first replacements for them. Taylor left on a ship that did not have beds, they had rugs on the deck. The Marines took the field kitchens on the ship for them. They went to Brownsville, Australia and then boarded a small carrier, the USS Copahee (CVE-12). They rode that to San Diego [Annotator's Note: San Diego, California]. He went to Saint Albans Hospital in New York [Annotator's Note: Naval Hospital St. Albans, New York, New York]. He met the woman who would become his wife at the gasoline rationing board. Everything was rationed. He was married in February 1945. He met the physician he was with at Guadalcanal when he went to a convention of military surgeons in New York City. The physician was the officer in charge of a medical field research laboratory that modified all of the equipment in the combat areas. He invited Taylor down to work there. He then went to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. He also became a full-time baseball player for the Quonset Flyers. He left there in 1949 and went to school in Hospital Administration. He was commissioned and things got nicer.

Robert Taylor retired from the Navy on 31 May 1970. He had worked at a medical research laboratory at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina. He was among three other people who had also been on Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands] on the front lines. They redesigned all of the equipment. They made things lighter and updated medicines. They also devised a new labeling system for the medicine bottles to keep them on when wet. The equipment they carried was tremendously heavy and they manually carry stretchers. The laboratory also developed selection criteria for psychologically examining enlisted people to officer ranks. They developed night vision equipment. There was a lot of give and take in the processes. They never had a good evaluation by a Marine on the equipment. They had one Marine who served as a sewer for them for the canvas and netting. All hospital corpsman at the time were fortunate if they got more than six months ashore at one time. They either went back to a ship or the Marines. Taking the job at the laboratory ensured Taylor did a lot of shore duty. When he retired, he had been on shore duty for five years in Pensacola [Annotator's Note: Pensacola, Florida]. His assignments had included public affairs, newspaper editor, and supervising the enlisted training program. He had played baseball all that time. He later went to work as a salesman in a sporting goods store. He served on a lot of different boards. He retired as a Chief Warrant Officer 4. He considers himself very lucky. He returned unscathed. He is heavily committed to veteran's organizations. He was very fortunate, and he feels this work gives back.