Rufus Harris signed up for Navy ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] because his dad anticipated the war might be coming. Some of the big boys taking their physicals would pass out when they got their shots. There was only Navy ROTC at Tulane [Annotator's Note: Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana] and he had not really thought about the military before that. He was commissioned in 1944. He did not graduate until after he got out of the service. He went to sub-chasers [Annotator's Note: small vessels designed to hunt enemy submarines] in Miami [Annotator's Note: Miami, Florida] for two or three months and then was sent to the Pacific to join the light cruiser USS Miami (CL-89) in March or April 1944. It took two or three months to get to the ship. He left out of San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California] and thought it might be the last time he saw the bridge [Annotator's Note: the Golden Gate Bridge]. He then spent a month in Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii] before being sent to Eniwetok [Annotator's Note: Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands] that became famous later for the testing of atomic bombs. The Miami came in there and he went aboard. Going to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, he wondered if he would make it back or not. He and his friends did not discuss it really. He was in the Fifth Fleet under Admiral Halsey [Annotator's Note: US Navy Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey]. The Miami was used almost exclusively to protect the four aircraft carriers. They cruised the Pacific and would be at sea steadily for six weeks to two months. They got provisions from tankers that came alongside. They would put cases of eggs in the sun on a steel ship for hours and nobody worried about spoiled eggs. They had good food because he was an officer. The Miami had a couple thousand men and 100 officers. The Petty Officers [Annotator's Note: non-commissioned officers in the naval services] really knew how to fight the war. Many of the members of his crew had been on cruisers that had been sunk earlier and really knew what they were doing. They trained the others. He was in a room with four bunkbeds. He was very hot most of the time. He had a mess corps and stewards. They ate sheep from Australia, and they had ice cream. When the seas got rough, he found it was good to keep something in your stomach. They had a very happy ship with no problems between the enlisted men and the officers.

Rufus Harris was born in 1923 in Macon, Georgia. He lived there for four years and then they moved to New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana]. His father was an educator, had gone to law school at Yale [Annotator's Note: Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut], and came to Tulane [Annotator's Note: Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana] as the dean of the law school. He was promoted to be the president [Annotator's Note: of Tulane]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Harris what it was like growing up during The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1939 in the United States.] He was very lucky. Once on the train with his father, he was told his salary had been cut by ten percent for the next year. That caused Harris to be very careful with his money. Living in New Orleans, he never missed a single Saints [Annotator's Note: New Orleans Saints, professional football team] game until they moved to the Superdome [Annotator's Note: sports stadium in New Orleans] and then he never attended again. [Annotator's Note: A dog barks and Harris leaves from 02:21:00.000 to 04:48:00.000.] Harris attended school at Country Day [Annotator's Note: Metairie Park Country Day in Metairie, Louisiana] and was the biggest sissy [Annotator's Note: a person regarded as effeminate or cowardly] for three years. His father got sick, and he then went to school in Good Hope, Georgia for the fourth grade. It made a man of him even at ten years old. He only stayed one year and then back to New Orleans to Lusher [Annotator's Note: now Lusher Charter School in New Orleans], followed by Newman [Annotator's Note: Isidore Newman School in New Orleans]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Harris if he remembers what he was doing when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941.] He was in the chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan [Annotator's Note: theatrical partnerships of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan] operetta. He was rehearsing in Dixon Hall [Annotator's Note: Dixon Concert Hall] at Tulane when it was announced. He was totally shocked. School went on. He was in Naval ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] and two or three weeks later, they were put on active duty on 1 July [Annotator's Note: 1 July 1942]. In 1944, the Navy called his whole class to active duty, and he was commissioned an ensign [Annotator's Note: lowest rank of commissioned officer in the US Navy and Coast Guard; O1]. He and his friends had not realized the seriousness of Pearl Harbor. They did realize what Japan was doing in Asia and what Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was doing in Europe, but he did not feel too worried about it all. He moved into the dormitory on 1 July 1942 only three blocks from where his girlfriend was living. He was in the Navy, so there was not a decision made to join the fight. He could only take orders from the Navy and that is what he did. They did not do any rationing. They went for training at Shell Beach [Annotator's Note: Shell Beach, Louisiana] and Corpus Christi [Annotator's Note: Corpus Christi, Texas]. He studied as usual. They could not leave their dormitory without permission.

Rufus Harris and his ship [Annotator's Note: the USS Miami (CL-89)] would stop at Ulithi [Annotator's Note: Ulithi Atoll, Caroline Islands] every couple of months for one day of recreation on the beach. The ship would be fully provisioned, and they might stay up to five days before going to sea again. They just cruised the rest of the time. It was dangerous to stop. They were being careful not to be hit by submarines. Soon after he joined the ship, the Japanese started sending kamikazes [Annotator's Note: suicide aircraft] and they spent their time shooting at them. They had lots of close calls. One night, kamikazes had hit all four carriers and they were all on fire. He wondered what would happen to all the planes that had to come back from missions. One by one, the carrier fires were put out and he ceased to worry. Another night his station was high up and a Japanese plane called a Frances [Annotator's Note: Yokosuka P1Y Ginga bomber aircraft] flew right over his head. It was trying to get to a carrier. He does not recall if it was shot down or hit the carrier. His fleet had 16 destroyers in a large circle. The next layer were cruisers and maybe a couple of battleships. The carriers were in the center. All of the ships were about a mile or so apart. There was a picket destroyer [Annotator's Note: radar picket, used to increase the radar detection range] about 70 miles away from the fleet to pick up on radar the Japanese planes coming in. Sadly, it was by itself and got lambasted by the Japanese. Once it came back, and the wounded men went into Harris' ship's sickbay. Their ship only got hit by shrapnel.

The biggest problem on Rufus Harris' ship [Annotator's Note: the USS Miami (CL-89)] was a typhoon [Annotator's Note: Typhoon Cobra, or Halsey's Typhoon, on 18 December 1944]. They did not have much warning. The seas got worse and worse, and the ship began to pitch and roll. They were barely making headway. Sadly, three destroyers [Annotator's Note: USS Hull (DD-350), USS Spence (DD-512), and USS Monaghan (DD-354)] turned over with almost a complete loss of life. His cruiser's bow went down, and he did not think it was going to come up. The front of the ship twisted and bent. Water came into his cabin like a firehose. The damage control crew shored it up against the number one turret. The Pittsburgh [Annotator's Note: USS Pittsburgh (CA-72)] lost its whole bow. They had to go back for repairs. Harris just tried to stay out of the crew's way. This was in December 1944. They did not go back for repairs until mid-May [Annotator's Note: May 1945]. He had been receiving mail. He was engaged and he had an early wedding because of the typhoon. He had a 20 day leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] and they went to San Pedro [Annotator's Note: San Pedro, California] where the ship was. He liked Southern California and thought about moving there. He mostly corresponded with his girlfriend, but also with is parents. His younger brothers were made to write him letters every Sunday. One brother joined the Navy as a flight surgeon and went to the South Pole with Admiral Byrd [Annotator's Note: US Navy Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.]. The other brother joined the Navy and went to Italy for a year. He stayed in San Pedro and the war ended. Harris had to go back out to the Pacific and went to Tokyo [Annotator's Note: Tokyo, Japan] for one day. Harris thought that while the atomic bomb [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] killed a lot of people, it saved a lot. He was surprised when he heard about it. His first thought was gleeful.

Rufus Harris went to Tokyo [Annotator's Note: Tokyo, Japan] for one day. On his last trip, he had just gotten married and was thinking about what he was going to do when he got back. He became a lawyer. He remained in the Naval Reserve for several years. He was transferred by Shell Oil [Annotator's Note: Shell Oil Company] to Baton Rouge [Annotator's Note: Baton Rouge, Louisiana], and it was not practical to stay in, so he resigned. It was lucky for him because a few months later the Korean War [Annotator's Note: Korean War, 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953] started, and he would have been back in the Pacific. Harris had a lot of duties on his ship [Annotator's Note: the USS Miami (CL-89)]. He had to signal when to launch their sea planes [Annotator's Note: Vought OS2U-3 Kingfisher catapult-launched observation floatplane]. The ship rolls and if you shoot the plane off at the right time, it takes off. If you shoot it off at the wrong time, it goes into the water. He tried to avoid sinking the plane. He was also in charge of any seamen found guilty of any Naval regulations, either to prosecute or defend them. Most of the time on the ship was fighting the kamikazes [Annotator's Note: Japanese suicide aircraft]. Unfortunately, he was the youngest ensign [Annotator's Note: lowest rank of commissioned officer in the US Navy and Coast Guard; O1] aboard and his assignment was not very important. He stood by controls on the top of the ship that would be used if the main controls were damaged. That did not happen. He thought the kamikazes were a strange way to try to save Japan. He could not imagine how he would have felt if his country had asked him to try and kill people by killing himself. He only held the war against Japan. He thought they were an up-and-coming country but were very bloodthirsty. He read and heard about how they treated the prisoners of war but was not upset. He hated the Nazis worse than the Japanese. As a 21-year-old, the way you look at the world is entirely different than how you look at it later. He became really aware of the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and of The Holocaust [Annotator's Note: also called the Shoah; the genocide of European Jews during World War 2] after the war.

Rufus Harris does not recall celebrating the atomic bomb [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] being dropped on Japan. His most memorable experience of the war is the typhoon [Annotator's Note: Typhoon Cobra, also referred to as Halsey's Typoon, on 18 December 1944]. They had a famous weather predictor [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana], Nash Roberts [Annotator's Note: Nash Charles Roberts, Jr., meteorologist], and if he had been there, he could have steered the fleet away from the storm. Harris decided to serve because he was in ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] and had no choice. The war caused him to get married sooner than he would have. That was not unusual then. His service sticks out as one of the big events of his life. He was very lucky not only just to live, but to be on a ship where everybody was as happy as you can be on a ship in wartime. He would not have wanted to be a Marine in the trenches. He is afraid the war does not mean enough to America today. He thinks there needs to be more thought of our [Annotator's Note: the United States] future. Hopefully we can have the leadership to steady this country. He thinks The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] is important and needs to teach the war to future generations. The time may come when we [Annotator's Note: Americans] all have to get together to handle or control whatever foreign problem we have.