• U.S.

Radio: Their Nephew Roy

2 minute read
TIME

Really, you’d never know there was a war going on out here. Nobody ever shoots, and I’ve never seen a Jap. I’m told they’re out here, but God only knows where.

This strange confession was made Dec. 10 by a U.S. Marine who had been to Guadalcanal, New Caledonia, Tulagi, Bougainville. He was Combat Correspondent Sergeant Roy Maypole, 29, onetime radio soap-opera impresario. He spoke too soon. When the Marines landed on Bougainville’s Empress Augusta Bay, Sergeant Maypole heard some shooting and saw some Japs.

Scrambling ashore with the Marines on bloody Cape Torokina, a magnetic wire recorder (TIME, May 17) strapped to his back, Sergeant Maypole made the first recording of a U.S. landing on Jap-held shores. It will be heard by radio listeners when & if the Marines release it. From Marine Headquarters’ accounts, the recording was of good quality, and the Sergeant acquitted himself well.

First Gravedigger. Once ashore, he found an idle generator close to the uncertain fighting, hooked on and recorded what he saw. The recorder, with its magnetized spool of wire, survived the blast of a Jap bomb ten yards away. Then, being a Marine before he was a correspondent, Maypole went to work digging graves. He dug them all day. Next morning he recorded interviews with weary Marines resting from a night’s fighting in the bush.

The Jap had been pushed out of eyeshot, and Maypole went after him. Someone told him to follow a wire to the forward command post’s generator. He hounded it through the stinking jungle, over dead trees, dead Japs, swampland, until alone Marine popped his head out from behind a log and hollered:

“Hey, you! Where are you going?”

“I’m looking for the command post. Know where it is?”

“Yes, this is it.”

“I understand that I can get a 110-volt, 60-cycle, A.C. here.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have it?”

“No, but I’ll tell you, mate. If you go up the trail another 40 yards . . . and ask those guys up there—they might be able to give it to you.”

“That’s fine! Who’s up there?”

“Japs.”

The Missus. Before he joined up, many a U.S. housewife knew Sergeant Maypole as “my nephew Roy” of The Missus Goes Ashopping, a quarter-hour comedy-quiz program six days a week on Manhattan’s WABC. He produced and wrote the show.

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