September 17, 2025 • 35 mins
Patrick Zilliacus was born in Finland and came to the U.S. when his father became the Finnish military attache in Washington, primarily to procure weapons for Finland's war with Russia. Left on his own in the U.S. at age 16, Zilliacus worked in a steel mill before joining the U.S. Navy in 1943. He was assigned as a torpedo man on a brand new submarine, the USS Spot.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Zilliacus explains how he was almost killed when the USS Spot went out for "shakedown" after commissioning. He also details what it was like stalking and attacking Japanese vessels off the coast of China, and how his sub sunk the Nanking Maru.
Zilliacus also tells us what it was like to be pursued by Japanese ships, how the Spot was very close to a major event at the end of the war, and what his future wife told him about Japanese atrocies committed against her family in the Philippines.
He also shares the story of how his father crossed paths with a major Axis leader long before World War II and why he does not want World War II veterans to be called the Greatest Generation.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Zilliacus explains how he was almost killed when the USS Spot went out for "shakedown" after commissioning. He also details what it was like stalking and attacking Japanese vessels off the coast of China, and how his sub sunk the Nanking Maru.
Zilliacus also tells us what it was like to be pursued by Japanese ships, how the Spot was very close to a major event at the end of the war, and what his future wife told him about Japanese atrocies committed against her family in the Philippines.
He also shares the story of how his father crossed paths with a major Axis leader long before World War II and why he does not want World War II veterans to be called the Greatest Generation.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Patrick Ziliakis. He's a US Navy veteran
of World War Two, serving as a torpedoman on the
USS Spot submarine in the Pacific. Patrick Ziliakis was born
in Finland in nineteen twenty six. His father was a
(00:32):
veteran of the First War between Russia and Finland around
the time of World War One. His dad was still
in the military when Patrick was born, and his service
took the family to Italy and a memorable encounter. Just
a couple years later.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
As a very small child, actually two years old, my
family moved to Torino, Italy, and I spent three years there.
My father was first a student and then an instructor
in the Scuola Militare, which was a number one staff
college in Europe. Every country except Germany and France sent
(01:11):
officers there. So he attended that for two and a
half years, and then he wanted to found a similar
institution in Finland called Stacolu in Finnish, and for that
he needed the teaching materials and he would then translate
(01:33):
those from Italian into Finnish in order to get those,
he had to get the personal approval of the Prime Minister,
a man by the name of Benito Mussolini. So he
met several times with Mussolini, and each time Mussolini was
not willing to let those teaching materials go. Finally he
(01:54):
made a deal. He said, if you stay and teach taxics,
I think for one semester there, then you can have
the teaching materials. So as a result of that, I
have an autographed picture of Benito in my office.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
But the adventure did not stop there. In the nineteen thirties,
his father briefly left the military, only to return to
uniform for the job that would bring the family to
the United States.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Then my father retired from the military and became the
guy who negotiated all the paper industry unions, which is
biggest industry in Finland. So Finland didn't have strikes, so
it was a big job, civilian job. Then in nineteen
thirty eight he was approached by the Finnish president, whose
(02:43):
name was Kus de Colio, and asked to go back
into uniform as the Finnish military attache to the United States.
So he moved in thirty eight to Washington, DC. The
Finnish War finished, Russian war broke out. It was just
like Pearl Harbor. They were negotiating in good faith. Seven
(03:06):
Finnish cities were bombed, just like Pearl Harbor was bombed.
So Finland ended up in war, which they didn't want.
But they were fighting. At that time. Germany and Russia
were allies, remember that, and the Germans stole the Russians
go ahead, we'll divide Poland. The Russians took one third
(03:28):
of Germans took two thirds the Allies and declared war
against Germany but not against Russia. And the Germans okayed
that the Russians would occupy Sonia, Latvian Lithuania and their
third of Poland and also Finland. But the Finns didn't
(03:48):
sit still for that. They fought. So it was in
that war that my father had the job of buying
weapons any place, any kind of weapons. He got some from,
but most of them he bought while he was in Washington, DC.
As an example, US Navy had ordered forty four Brewster
(04:10):
fighter airplanes Buster Buccaneer. Their landing gear started to buckle
after they landed repeatedly on a carrier. The Navy canceled
the order of my father bought him. Also, my father
bought the first two pet boats that Andrew Higgins ever built,
and we became great friends with the Higgins family.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
That job also allowed the Ziliakis family to become close
friends with Andrew Higgins and his family. Higgins invented Higgins boats,
the landing crafts that General Dwight Eisenhower said won the
war for the Allies. Finland also procured a number of
Higgins boats for its military. By late nineteen forty one,
(04:53):
Finland was at war with Russia, and Russia was also
at war with Germany after the Nazis invaded in June
that year. On December seventh, nineteen forty one, Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor. Ziliakis was at dinner in Washington, d C.
At the time and immediately knew this was really bad
news in more ways than one.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I was having dinner by with a guy named Stin Beck,
who was the assistant military at the sheet from Finland,
at the old New Orleans restaurant on Connecticut Avenue just
south of DuPont Circle. Of course, I was shocked to
hear that. I knew that would be bad news for
(05:36):
the United States and terrible news for Finland because Finland
United States, through no fault of them all, became allied
with one of the two greatest devils in history, Joseph Stalin. Finland,
through no fault of their own, became not allies, cold belligerent,
(05:59):
big defference with the other big scoundrel, Adolf Hitler, who
murdered almost as many people as Stalin. So that made
it for a very unhappy situation. We did not like
to be fighting on the same side as Hitler, but
we were at the time. We could do about it.
We knew eventually we would end up losing the war,
(06:22):
but at least we hoped that we could kill enough
Russians to keep our independence, and we did. They did.
I'm an American now, so I thought it was very bad.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Life was about to get a lot tougher for Ziliocis himself.
His father became persona non grata in the United States,
as he puts it, and was kicked out of the country.
His mother was also not in a position to care
for her children. She made arrangements for a younger son
to be cared for, but sixteen year old Patrick was
(06:56):
suddenly all on his own. He made his way to
get Airy, Indiana with a friend, lived with the friend's
family for a time, and worked in a steel mill there.
In nineteen forty three, the friend decided to join the service,
so seventeen year old Ziliacis did it too.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
So then they said what are you doing here? So
I said, well, I hate to tell you, but I
turned eighteen about a month ago, a little over a
month ago. Actually I turned seventeen a month before that.
And they said that where were you born? I said Benwood,
West Virginia. Then they said you have a birth certificate
(07:34):
and I said no, Can you give one? I said no,
And then they said you don't. Oh what job do
you have? I said, I have a very very important job,
vital to the war effort at the steel mill, and
you'll never be able to draft me because I'm too important.
So they what's the name of your boss? I gave
the name that called him up, and they said his
(07:56):
job is a handyman, which is at lowest job. They
had go ahead and draft him. So then they they said,
you don't sound like West Virginia. I said that's because
we were so poor. I was sent to live with
relatives in Norway, and I could speak Norwegian. So that's
(08:17):
how I got in. And oh then they gave me
a test and I said, yoh, you did very well.
You can have any branch of the service you want.
I said, which is the hardest to get into? This
said the Marine Corps. I said, that's what I want,
Marine Corps. So I went to the Oh, they sent
me to Indianapolis where they had all this stuff going on.
(08:39):
So I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. It was
late in the afternoon. He said, hey, kid, I got
a heavy date. Here's a chit. You can stay at
the YMCA, come and see me in the morning. Well,
I thought they might catch me, and I said, I
wanted to get into any service quickly. So I noticed
the Navy guy's lights were on.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
His first choice in the Navy was to be a pilot,
but that dream was dashed because he never graduated from
high school. The next choice was submarines. Soon it was
time to specialize even further. For ziliacis that meant torpedo school.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
After you go through boot camp, which is basic training.
I said, oh, I want to go to submarines. I said, no, no, no,
you had to first have a skill, learn a navy
occupation that they want on a submarine. They don't need
Bosun's mates and they need torpedomen Okay, I'll become a torpedoman.
(09:36):
So they sent me to torpedo school, also in Great Lakes,
and I did very well there, so well that I
was made a torpedomant third class as soon as I graduated,
and they wanted me to stay as a teachers. No, no,
I want submarines. And then they sent me to New London, Connecticut,
and I learned submarining and then at the end of
(09:59):
that they assigned me to a brand new submarine being
finished at Mare Island, California.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
And Zeliaka says that learning to be a torpedo man
was not as easy as he might think.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, you learn all about torpedoes. They're very, very complicated machines.
And not only are they complicated, but the torpedo tubes
that you fire them from. The torpedo firing sequence is
a complicated business. And the main reason you have a
submarine is to transport torpedoes to the right place to
(10:35):
fire them. I learned more about torpedoes and submarine school,
particularly the torpedo tubes. So what you wanted to know
about submarine school, they have these training devices where they
simulate all kinds of stuff, depth charges going off and flooding,
all kinds of stuff, and then they put you on
a really old submarine called an O boat from the
(10:58):
First World War. You go out to see and you're
submerged for the first time and the thing leaks like
a sieb. So then they put you on a limit
new Marojuana that was built in the nineteen twenties called
a S boat, and you go out to see and
then you never got on a modern submarine because they
(11:19):
were all used in the war. So they're that's it.
You graduate.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
That's Patrick Ziliacis. He's a US Navy veteran of World
War Two serving as a torpedo man on the USS Spot.
When we come back, Zilioccas is almost killed on a
sub before getting to the Pacific, and we'll hear how
the USS Spot sank the Nanking Maru. I'm Greg Corumbus
and this is Veterans Chronicles.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
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Speaker 3 (11:48):
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Speaker 1 (12:46):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest is
Patrick Ziliakis. He's a US Navy veteran of World War
Two serving as a torpedo man aboard the USS Spot,
which was a brand new submarine. The Spot was three
hundred and eleven feet long and more than twenty seven
feet wide at the beam top. Speeds were more than
(13:06):
twenty knots at the surface and almost nine knots submerged.
Ziliakis shares his thoughts of the spot the first time
he saw it, and also tells the story of its
beloved captain William Post.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Beautiful work of art, I mean wonderful And we had
a skipper, wild Bill Post William Schuyler Post his famous
all over. He was the skipper of the Gudgeon, which
is one of the maybe top three submarines in the
(13:40):
ward sinking He was crazy. He would when he read
on torpedoes, he'd go to the surface and sink him
with his five inch gun, which is very unusual. Anyway,
he got a hell of a record. Then he was
asked to take over this brand new submarine, and of
course his executive officer wanted command of the Gudgeon. So
(14:04):
he sat down with him and he said, I'll give
you my sanction on one condition. You cannot behave the
way I did. You have to be more conservative until
you get more experience. And the guy said yes, then
he want to see you on the spot. He got
a message on the radio that the gudgeon had gone
(14:26):
down with all hands. Can you imagine how he felt.
He was God to us, we do anything for him.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
After launching and commissioning at may Island near Vallejo, California,
the Spot headed to San Diego for what's known as
shakedown testing out the sub. Ziliaka says they barely averted
disaster during the shakedown process.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
We left Mayor Island, we went for shakedown cruise in
San Diego, and something very interesting happened. We were firing
exercise torpedoes. They don't blow up, they come up to
the surface and you harvest them after Los Coronados Islands
of Mexico, and one time we were getting ready to
(15:15):
load a torpedo into the tube and we accidentally tripped
it and it started running inside the submarine. That meant
that it was discharging poisonous fumes with alcohol and of
course completely obscuring everything and sounding like the gates of
Hell running. So they did the right thing. They shut
(15:38):
the watertight door, so we were trapped in there with
a torpedo and of course sounded surfacing alarm, and they
came up and just before we died from the fumes,
they got the hatch open and ventilated, but we were
passing out right and left. So I figured, I'm getting
killed before we even go into the war. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
The Spot then headed west, stopping in Hawaii and eventually
seeing its first action in the Pacific in early nineteen
forty five. It most famously sank the Japanese ship Nan
King Maru. Ziliakiz tells the story.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Well, this was a submerged torpedo attack. Most of them
were at night and they were surface attacks. This one
was a submerged attack. You raise a periscope and you
get a bearing, and you estimate his angle on the
(16:36):
bow and his speed, and then you put that into
the torpedo data computer. And then and you put yourself
on a course to be able to sink him. Then
you take another observation and you put that into the
torpedo data computer. Now the guy maybe zigzagging, so the
computer has to figure out the zigzag, and eventually the
(16:58):
computers has had the solution. He says, if you fire
the torpedoes with this particular gyro angle at this particular depth,
at this particular town. Time you'll hit him, and we did,
and the damn thing went down.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Ziliaka says the crew was thrilled at the sinking of
the Nanking Maru, but that approach to enemy vessels was
just one of multiple strategies used by Captain post Well.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
We were happiest clams at high tide, but we sunk
a lot of other ships, and we shunk them in
different ways, some of them with torpedoes and some of
them with our gun five inch gun. We also sunk
one ship by sending a boarding party. We had no
more five inch, no more forty millimeters, no more torpedoes,
(17:48):
but we did have skipper post He wasn't gonna let
it get away. This ship was by itself, it was
not in a convoy, and so we surfaced in the daytime.
He had a three inch gun he started shooting with. Well,
we had small arms fire, so we killed the gunner
and destroyed the gun, and then the crew all kind
(18:11):
of disappeared. We didn't see anybody, so we put our
bow next to his bow. We sent a boarding party
of three guys over with satral charges. They looked down
into the hatch. There was nobody there. They went down, planted,
the chargers lit, the fuse ran like hell damn things,
so went off shipped sunk under our crew. They were
(18:33):
swimming around. There was one more guy swimming, so we
picked up all four of them. The fourth guy was
a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy by the
name of Sushitawa. We took him a prisoner and he
was wonderful guy. Everybody liked him. He played poker very
well and he helped us clean up and everything. Then
(18:57):
we turned them over to the Marines in midway.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's Patrick Ziliakis. He's a US Navy veteran of World
War Two serving as a torpedo man on the USS
Spot submarine. Still to come the Spot's proximity to a
critical moment late in the war, and why Ziliacis does
not care for the term the Greatest Generation. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles.
(19:24):
I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Patrick Ziliakis.
He's a US Navy veteran of World War Two serving
as a torpedo man aboard the USS Spot submarine. Earlier
Ziliakis told us about the sinking of the Nanking Maru.
Now he takes us into more detail about how the
spot lurked off the coast of China looking for Japanese
(19:47):
targets of opportunity, but he also explains the intense danger
that followed attacks on the surface.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
First of all, you don't see the target. You are
told by on radio that there's a convoy coming down
the coast of China headed south. And the convoy has
six ships in it, two escorts, six marous armed merchantmen
and two escorts. And they try to describe they this
(20:17):
time they call them destroyer escorts, but they were different.
And they're coming down the coast, and you the estimated
time of if you pick a place where they're going
to be at about midnight, and you make sure that
you're at the same place at midnight and that you're submerged.
(20:37):
So then sonar picks it up, and when you're right
in the middle of the convoy, you surface and you
fire all of your forward tubes. There's six forward tubes,
four aft tubes. You fire them at the biggest targets
you can find. You already picked them out on sonar
and of course, you feed all this into the computer,
(20:59):
which helps you you have a solution. When you come up,
you fire them at those ships. Some of them hit,
some of them miss, and the Japanese sent up a
green starshell, which tells the escorts you're there. Tills all
the ships to scatter. After you fire the torpedoes, you
(21:21):
turn out and you run like hell, and you fire
the after tubes and you might hit some more ships.
Then you just run at flank speed on the surface
and the escort slowly gain on you. In this particular case,
it was more like one am or maybe one thirty am,
(21:43):
so by the time they caught up with us, we
were on the surface still. The reason was that it
was only fifty five feet under us, and we needed
sixty five feet to be concealed. So we kept going
and we were looking for a little deeper water and
(22:03):
we started firing at each other. We hit him once
with our five inch gun at the waterline. He was leaking.
We didn't know that. We also hit his forward turret
so he wouldn't turn. At the same time, he had
an airshell go off and we had to secure. We
had one guy lost his foot, one guy who lost
(22:25):
his front teeth. One guy that got a shell splinter
in his spine, so we had to secure the gun,
take the gun crew down, and all we had were
our forty milimeter Boue Force guns forward and a half,
so we were shooting him him with those. I was
on the bridge. He got so close I could see
that the Japanese soldiers sailors wore green uniforms with green
(22:50):
caps like that. And then in the final minute that
we dove, we had to get one of the wounded guys,
a guy who lost his foot. Clark down and he
was bleeding so much. I was slipping in his blood
going down. We dove and he was trying to ram
us at that point he missed us by about that much.
(23:11):
So then then the other guy caught up and they
were both depth charging us, and we were crawling along.
He thought we would go to the port to go
to deeper water, but we stayed straight and plowed in
the mud. We might have been even sticking up a
little bit. Anyway, Eventually he gave up because he was sinking.
(23:36):
We sunk the one. The second one kept after us,
dropping depth charges, and I think he exhausted the depth
chargers and then then by this time we were getting
into deeper water, and then we got into those those
anchor chains I told you about. I mean, there was
one example of a of an underwater attack.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
As Ziliacis explained, one of the most effective weapons against
submarines were depth charges. He now explains what it was
like to try to evade the depth charges and what
it was like staying below the surface sometimes for days
to avoid Japanese warships.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Only by maneuvering. First of all, you go to silent running.
Everything is shut down, You shut down pumps that make noise,
and so then you maneuver in ways. You try to
go deep, but of course we couldn't go deep that time.
You go deep, you go quiet, and you maneuver in
weird ways that he's not likely to follow. Now, of
(24:36):
course his sonar is pinging on you all the time,
and then you just grit your teeth deeper you go
the safer you are. Our maximum depth was five hundred.
One time we went to five point fifty just because
they were getting us with depth charges. So then you
just pray, like hell, you can't do anything to that
(24:59):
guy doing it to you, But you can't defend yourself. Then,
of course, you can only stay down as long as
you have power in the batteries and air to breathe,
and the old stories that when you've been down a
long time, you're not breathing air, you're breathing farts and
foot sweat. One time we were down for seventy two hours.
(25:21):
We were moving at one knot and everything was turned off.
The lights were turned off. Everybody went into their bunk.
Who wasn't on watch, Even some of the ones who
were supposed to be on watch were told to go
in the bunk. You breathe less. It's not a happy situation.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
After two tours, the Navy ordered a change in command
aboard the USS Spot. Ziliaka says. The new captain was
perfectly fine, but it was impossible to follow wild Bill
Post in that role.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah. His name was Seymour, Jack Seymour, and it was
a perfectly good skipper. But everybody loved Posts so much
that they didn't really give Seymour much of a break.
We had one incident. We were getting close to Japan
and in the daytime we saw a Koba class heavy
(26:16):
cruiser and we said, God, let's sink that son of
a bit. I think it was probably wounded in something,
but he said, no, they have big guns. We got
from went away from him, and we never forgave him
for that, but it was the right call. It just
we didn't know. We were just used to sinking anything
(26:39):
we saw.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
The war ended, of course, after the US dropped atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August nineteen forty five.
On August ninth, the USS spot was not far from Nagasaki,
although Ziliyaki says he and the rest of the crew
were oblivious to what was happening nearby.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
We were not that close, but we were pretty close,
and we knew about Hiroshima, but we didn't find out
about Nagasaki until after we surfaced. I mean we didn't.
We weren't close enough to hear the bomb or anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Another major development happened in those final days as well.
Russia finally entered the war against Japan. Ziliyaka says that
accomplished a couple of important things. First, the USS spot
no longer had to worry about accidentally targeting a Russian vessel.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Then, of course, the big thing was that the Russians
got into the war. During the entire World War Two,
except for the last five minutes, the Russians were in
peace with Japan. They were trading with Japan. We saw
Russian ships crossing the Sea of Japan headed for Nigata.
We couldn't sink him.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
There were Russians, But Ziliyakis also believes the Japanese ultimately
surrendered because of Russia's entry into the Pacific War.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Reson the Japanese made peace was not the atomic bomb,
it was the Russians. They knew that occupation under the
Russians would be absolute hell, like it was for everybody.
The Russians were the cruelest, meanest occupiers of anybody, more
(28:20):
worse than the Japanese rape of nine King and all
of that Russian did ten times as mut So the
Japanese were very anxious to have the Americans occupy because
Americans were good occupiers.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Russia definitely had a horrible reputation over its treatment of prisoners,
and the Japanese, who were incredibly vicious as captors themselves,
undoubtedly preferred Americans as the occupying force. But Siliakis already
knew all about the Russian cruelty. The USSR had a
wretched reputation from its invasion and brutality in Finland. But
(29:00):
Ziliakas also knows plenty about Japanese atrocities. His future wife
was living in the Philippines during the war and told
him of the horrors inflicted on her own family by
the Japanese occupiers.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Her father and her uncle were both tortured, in the
case of her uncle tortured to death in the case
of her father close to death. They quartered Japanese soldiers
in her home, and fortunately their officer was born in Denver, Colorado,
(29:34):
went to Japan on a visit and was drafted, and
she was very sick. She had something. He rode on
his horse to the Japanese dispensary, got some drugs, gave
him to her saved her life. She was there when
MacArthur invaded and General Yamashita, who was in charge of
(29:57):
the Japanese troops, had made a deal with Philippian President
Laorell who was president during the occupation. Was so popular
he went into the Senate after the war, so he
was a guy who was able to deal with the
Japanese and had them leave enough food so the Filipinos
could eat and live. And in a change for that,
(30:20):
he said, we're not going to have any uprisings, and
they didn't, except for a few gorillas. What he didn't
know was that MacArthur was going to invade. As soon
as MacArthur invaded. Lately, they cut off all the food.
They were trying to starve the Filipinos into submission, and
my wife shrank into skin and bones. Interestingly, one of
(30:44):
my classmates was Neil Rutledge, the son of Supreme Court
Justice Wiley Rutledge. He was given the job when they
had war crimes trials of defending General Yamashita, and he
found a true story out and he saved him. He
was sent to prison, but he wasn't executed well.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Many Americans went home after the war or after some
time on occupation duty. Ziliaka says he stayed in the
US Navy reserves for several years.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I got out of active duty, but I never stayed
in the reserves, and I went on cruisers. You how
to Panela on different places. One time I went to
Key West. I had a submarine base there. I spent
the day on the German submarine U twenty five thirteen,
which was so far superior to ours. That is a
(31:37):
good thing. The Germans didn't build many of them. They were.
I mean it was it could stay submerged much longer,
much faster, he could dive faster. It some incredible submarine.
And I did other reserve stuff. I taught stuff. I
somehow the Navy went crazy and gave me a commission
as an ensign and even promoted him into lieutenant junior grade.
(32:00):
But I was obsolete by that time, and because they
weren't putting reserve officers on nuclear submarines, so they wanted
me to go in and naval intelligence because I spoke
a lot of languages. But they wanted to send me
to the school in Monterey, and I couldn't take the
(32:23):
time off for my work, so they gave me an
honorable discharge.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
But during those ensuing years in the reserves, Ziliakis did
have additional opportunities to visit Japan and interact with the
people who had once been our enemies. He says he
had no trouble being friendly with them right away, since
his primary animosity was still aimed squarely at the Kremlin.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Extremely well, because to me, I was an American citizen
by that time, and my duty was to the United States,
and so I pursued the war with the Japanese. Any
American could the best I could. However, I hated Stalin
(33:05):
a lot more than I did Hideki Tojo. He was
number two after Stalin. So I had cousins fighting in
Finland against the Russians. So I was in kind of
a split situation, and of course my father was kicked
out of the country. I had a cousin in Finland
(33:25):
who was cook on a Finnish submarine, the Vessy Easy.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Patrick Siliakis is now ninety nine years old. He is
proud to be part of the World War Two generation,
but don't you dare tell him it's the greatest generation.
He wants the Vietnam generation and others to get just
as much recognition as World War Two veterans.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
They were treated like dirt when they came back. The
greatest generation, whoplaw, they deserve as much and Korean War
is another one Korean War or they didn't get acclamation.
I don't want to be called the greatest generation because
I'm no greater than those guys, the guys that came
(34:09):
back from Iraq, they deserve every bit as much praise.
As I have.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Still. Ziliacis is mighty proud of his service as a
teenager in a new country fighting to free the world.
And he's also thankful for the US Navy having.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Done well enough to get US citizenship while I was
in the service, to become a commission officer, and to
have my education paid for. In other words, I love
this country and I loved the Navy. The Navy was
(34:45):
good to me.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Patrick Ziliakis is a US Navy veteran of World War Two.
He served as a torpedo man aboard the USS Spot
in the Pacific in nineteen forty five. I'm Greg Corumbas
and this is Veterans Chronicle. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus,
(35:11):
and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of
the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American
Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans
Center on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at AVC update.
Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full
(35:32):
oral histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe
to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks again for listening and please join us next time
for Veterans Chronicles,
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Patrick Ziliakis. He's a US Navy veteran
of World War Two, serving as a torpedoman on the
USS Spot submarine in the Pacific. Patrick Ziliakis was born
in Finland in nineteen twenty six. His father was a
(00:32):
veteran of the First War between Russia and Finland around
the time of World War One. His dad was still
in the military when Patrick was born, and his service
took the family to Italy and a memorable encounter. Just
a couple years later.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
As a very small child, actually two years old, my
family moved to Torino, Italy, and I spent three years there.
My father was first a student and then an instructor
in the Scuola Militare, which was a number one staff
college in Europe. Every country except Germany and France sent
(01:11):
officers there. So he attended that for two and a
half years, and then he wanted to found a similar
institution in Finland called Stacolu in Finnish, and for that
he needed the teaching materials and he would then translate
(01:33):
those from Italian into Finnish in order to get those,
he had to get the personal approval of the Prime Minister,
a man by the name of Benito Mussolini. So he
met several times with Mussolini, and each time Mussolini was
not willing to let those teaching materials go. Finally he
(01:54):
made a deal. He said, if you stay and teach taxics,
I think for one semester there, then you can have
the teaching materials. So as a result of that, I
have an autographed picture of Benito in my office.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
But the adventure did not stop there. In the nineteen thirties,
his father briefly left the military, only to return to
uniform for the job that would bring the family to
the United States.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Then my father retired from the military and became the
guy who negotiated all the paper industry unions, which is
biggest industry in Finland. So Finland didn't have strikes, so
it was a big job, civilian job. Then in nineteen
thirty eight he was approached by the Finnish president, whose
(02:43):
name was Kus de Colio, and asked to go back
into uniform as the Finnish military attache to the United States.
So he moved in thirty eight to Washington, DC. The
Finnish War finished, Russian war broke out. It was just
like Pearl Harbor. They were negotiating in good faith. Seven
(03:06):
Finnish cities were bombed, just like Pearl Harbor was bombed.
So Finland ended up in war, which they didn't want.
But they were fighting. At that time. Germany and Russia
were allies, remember that, and the Germans stole the Russians
go ahead, we'll divide Poland. The Russians took one third
(03:28):
of Germans took two thirds the Allies and declared war
against Germany but not against Russia. And the Germans okayed
that the Russians would occupy Sonia, Latvian Lithuania and their
third of Poland and also Finland. But the Finns didn't
(03:48):
sit still for that. They fought. So it was in
that war that my father had the job of buying
weapons any place, any kind of weapons. He got some from,
but most of them he bought while he was in Washington, DC.
As an example, US Navy had ordered forty four Brewster
(04:10):
fighter airplanes Buster Buccaneer. Their landing gear started to buckle
after they landed repeatedly on a carrier. The Navy canceled
the order of my father bought him. Also, my father
bought the first two pet boats that Andrew Higgins ever built,
and we became great friends with the Higgins family.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
That job also allowed the Ziliakis family to become close
friends with Andrew Higgins and his family. Higgins invented Higgins boats,
the landing crafts that General Dwight Eisenhower said won the
war for the Allies. Finland also procured a number of
Higgins boats for its military. By late nineteen forty one,
(04:53):
Finland was at war with Russia, and Russia was also
at war with Germany after the Nazis invaded in June
that year. On December seventh, nineteen forty one, Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor. Ziliakis was at dinner in Washington, d C.
At the time and immediately knew this was really bad
news in more ways than one.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I was having dinner by with a guy named Stin Beck,
who was the assistant military at the sheet from Finland,
at the old New Orleans restaurant on Connecticut Avenue just
south of DuPont Circle. Of course, I was shocked to
hear that. I knew that would be bad news for
(05:36):
the United States and terrible news for Finland because Finland
United States, through no fault of them all, became allied
with one of the two greatest devils in history, Joseph Stalin. Finland,
through no fault of their own, became not allies, cold belligerent,
(05:59):
big defference with the other big scoundrel, Adolf Hitler, who
murdered almost as many people as Stalin. So that made
it for a very unhappy situation. We did not like
to be fighting on the same side as Hitler, but
we were at the time. We could do about it.
We knew eventually we would end up losing the war,
(06:22):
but at least we hoped that we could kill enough
Russians to keep our independence, and we did. They did.
I'm an American now, so I thought it was very bad.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Life was about to get a lot tougher for Ziliocis himself.
His father became persona non grata in the United States,
as he puts it, and was kicked out of the country.
His mother was also not in a position to care
for her children. She made arrangements for a younger son
to be cared for, but sixteen year old Patrick was
(06:56):
suddenly all on his own. He made his way to
get Airy, Indiana with a friend, lived with the friend's
family for a time, and worked in a steel mill there.
In nineteen forty three, the friend decided to join the service,
so seventeen year old Ziliacis did it too.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
So then they said what are you doing here? So
I said, well, I hate to tell you, but I
turned eighteen about a month ago, a little over a
month ago. Actually I turned seventeen a month before that.
And they said that where were you born? I said Benwood,
West Virginia. Then they said you have a birth certificate
(07:34):
and I said no, Can you give one? I said no,
And then they said you don't. Oh what job do
you have? I said, I have a very very important job,
vital to the war effort at the steel mill, and
you'll never be able to draft me because I'm too important.
So they what's the name of your boss? I gave
the name that called him up, and they said his
(07:56):
job is a handyman, which is at lowest job. They
had go ahead and draft him. So then they they said,
you don't sound like West Virginia. I said that's because
we were so poor. I was sent to live with
relatives in Norway, and I could speak Norwegian. So that's
(08:17):
how I got in. And oh then they gave me
a test and I said, yoh, you did very well.
You can have any branch of the service you want.
I said, which is the hardest to get into? This
said the Marine Corps. I said, that's what I want,
Marine Corps. So I went to the Oh, they sent
me to Indianapolis where they had all this stuff going on.
(08:39):
So I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. It was
late in the afternoon. He said, hey, kid, I got
a heavy date. Here's a chit. You can stay at
the YMCA, come and see me in the morning. Well,
I thought they might catch me, and I said, I
wanted to get into any service quickly. So I noticed
the Navy guy's lights were on.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
His first choice in the Navy was to be a pilot,
but that dream was dashed because he never graduated from
high school. The next choice was submarines. Soon it was
time to specialize even further. For ziliacis that meant torpedo school.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
After you go through boot camp, which is basic training.
I said, oh, I want to go to submarines. I said, no, no, no,
you had to first have a skill, learn a navy
occupation that they want on a submarine. They don't need
Bosun's mates and they need torpedomen Okay, I'll become a torpedoman.
(09:36):
So they sent me to torpedo school, also in Great Lakes,
and I did very well there, so well that I
was made a torpedomant third class as soon as I graduated,
and they wanted me to stay as a teachers. No, no,
I want submarines. And then they sent me to New London, Connecticut,
and I learned submarining and then at the end of
(09:59):
that they assigned me to a brand new submarine being
finished at Mare Island, California.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
And Zeliaka says that learning to be a torpedo man
was not as easy as he might think.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, you learn all about torpedoes. They're very, very complicated machines.
And not only are they complicated, but the torpedo tubes
that you fire them from. The torpedo firing sequence is
a complicated business. And the main reason you have a
submarine is to transport torpedoes to the right place to
(10:35):
fire them. I learned more about torpedoes and submarine school,
particularly the torpedo tubes. So what you wanted to know
about submarine school, they have these training devices where they
simulate all kinds of stuff, depth charges going off and flooding,
all kinds of stuff, and then they put you on
a really old submarine called an O boat from the
(10:58):
First World War. You go out to see and you're
submerged for the first time and the thing leaks like
a sieb. So then they put you on a limit
new Marojuana that was built in the nineteen twenties called
a S boat, and you go out to see and
then you never got on a modern submarine because they
(11:19):
were all used in the war. So they're that's it.
You graduate.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
That's Patrick Ziliacis. He's a US Navy veteran of World
War Two serving as a torpedo man on the USS Spot.
When we come back, Zilioccas is almost killed on a
sub before getting to the Pacific, and we'll hear how
the USS Spot sank the Nanking Maru. I'm Greg Corumbus
and this is Veterans Chronicles.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
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(12:25):
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Speaker 1 (12:46):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest is
Patrick Ziliakis. He's a US Navy veteran of World War
Two serving as a torpedo man aboard the USS Spot,
which was a brand new submarine. The Spot was three
hundred and eleven feet long and more than twenty seven
feet wide at the beam top. Speeds were more than
(13:06):
twenty knots at the surface and almost nine knots submerged.
Ziliakis shares his thoughts of the spot the first time
he saw it, and also tells the story of its
beloved captain William Post.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Beautiful work of art, I mean wonderful And we had
a skipper, wild Bill Post William Schuyler Post his famous
all over. He was the skipper of the Gudgeon, which
is one of the maybe top three submarines in the
(13:40):
ward sinking He was crazy. He would when he read
on torpedoes, he'd go to the surface and sink him
with his five inch gun, which is very unusual. Anyway,
he got a hell of a record. Then he was
asked to take over this brand new submarine, and of
course his executive officer wanted command of the Gudgeon. So
(14:04):
he sat down with him and he said, I'll give
you my sanction on one condition. You cannot behave the
way I did. You have to be more conservative until
you get more experience. And the guy said yes, then
he want to see you on the spot. He got
a message on the radio that the gudgeon had gone
(14:26):
down with all hands. Can you imagine how he felt.
He was God to us, we do anything for him.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
After launching and commissioning at may Island near Vallejo, California,
the Spot headed to San Diego for what's known as
shakedown testing out the sub. Ziliaka says they barely averted
disaster during the shakedown process.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
We left Mayor Island, we went for shakedown cruise in
San Diego, and something very interesting happened. We were firing
exercise torpedoes. They don't blow up, they come up to
the surface and you harvest them after Los Coronados Islands
of Mexico, and one time we were getting ready to
(15:15):
load a torpedo into the tube and we accidentally tripped
it and it started running inside the submarine. That meant
that it was discharging poisonous fumes with alcohol and of
course completely obscuring everything and sounding like the gates of
Hell running. So they did the right thing. They shut
(15:38):
the watertight door, so we were trapped in there with
a torpedo and of course sounded surfacing alarm, and they
came up and just before we died from the fumes,
they got the hatch open and ventilated, but we were
passing out right and left. So I figured, I'm getting
killed before we even go into the war. I didn't.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
The Spot then headed west, stopping in Hawaii and eventually
seeing its first action in the Pacific in early nineteen
forty five. It most famously sank the Japanese ship Nan
King Maru. Ziliakiz tells the story.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Well, this was a submerged torpedo attack. Most of them
were at night and they were surface attacks. This one
was a submerged attack. You raise a periscope and you
get a bearing, and you estimate his angle on the
(16:36):
bow and his speed, and then you put that into
the torpedo data computer. And then and you put yourself
on a course to be able to sink him. Then
you take another observation and you put that into the
torpedo data computer. Now the guy maybe zigzagging, so the
computer has to figure out the zigzag, and eventually the
(16:58):
computers has had the solution. He says, if you fire
the torpedoes with this particular gyro angle at this particular depth,
at this particular town. Time you'll hit him, and we did,
and the damn thing went down.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Ziliaka says the crew was thrilled at the sinking of
the Nanking Maru, but that approach to enemy vessels was
just one of multiple strategies used by Captain post Well.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
We were happiest clams at high tide, but we sunk
a lot of other ships, and we shunk them in
different ways, some of them with torpedoes and some of
them with our gun five inch gun. We also sunk
one ship by sending a boarding party. We had no
more five inch, no more forty millimeters, no more torpedoes,
(17:48):
but we did have skipper post He wasn't gonna let
it get away. This ship was by itself, it was
not in a convoy, and so we surfaced in the daytime.
He had a three inch gun he started shooting with. Well,
we had small arms fire, so we killed the gunner
and destroyed the gun, and then the crew all kind
(18:11):
of disappeared. We didn't see anybody, so we put our
bow next to his bow. We sent a boarding party
of three guys over with satral charges. They looked down
into the hatch. There was nobody there. They went down, planted,
the chargers lit, the fuse ran like hell damn things,
so went off shipped sunk under our crew. They were
(18:33):
swimming around. There was one more guy swimming, so we
picked up all four of them. The fourth guy was
a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy by the
name of Sushitawa. We took him a prisoner and he
was wonderful guy. Everybody liked him. He played poker very
well and he helped us clean up and everything. Then
(18:57):
we turned them over to the Marines in midway.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's Patrick Ziliakis. He's a US Navy veteran of World
War Two serving as a torpedo man on the USS
Spot submarine. Still to come the Spot's proximity to a
critical moment late in the war, and why Ziliacis does
not care for the term the Greatest Generation. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles.
(19:24):
I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Patrick Ziliakis.
He's a US Navy veteran of World War Two serving
as a torpedo man aboard the USS Spot submarine. Earlier
Ziliakis told us about the sinking of the Nanking Maru.
Now he takes us into more detail about how the
spot lurked off the coast of China looking for Japanese
(19:47):
targets of opportunity, but he also explains the intense danger
that followed attacks on the surface.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
First of all, you don't see the target. You are
told by on radio that there's a convoy coming down
the coast of China headed south. And the convoy has
six ships in it, two escorts, six marous armed merchantmen
and two escorts. And they try to describe they this
(20:17):
time they call them destroyer escorts, but they were different.
And they're coming down the coast, and you the estimated
time of if you pick a place where they're going
to be at about midnight, and you make sure that
you're at the same place at midnight and that you're submerged.
(20:37):
So then sonar picks it up, and when you're right
in the middle of the convoy, you surface and you
fire all of your forward tubes. There's six forward tubes,
four aft tubes. You fire them at the biggest targets
you can find. You already picked them out on sonar
and of course, you feed all this into the computer,
(20:59):
which helps you you have a solution. When you come up,
you fire them at those ships. Some of them hit,
some of them miss, and the Japanese sent up a
green starshell, which tells the escorts you're there. Tills all
the ships to scatter. After you fire the torpedoes, you
(21:21):
turn out and you run like hell, and you fire
the after tubes and you might hit some more ships.
Then you just run at flank speed on the surface
and the escort slowly gain on you. In this particular case,
it was more like one am or maybe one thirty am,
(21:43):
so by the time they caught up with us, we
were on the surface still. The reason was that it
was only fifty five feet under us, and we needed
sixty five feet to be concealed. So we kept going
and we were looking for a little deeper water and
(22:03):
we started firing at each other. We hit him once
with our five inch gun at the waterline. He was leaking.
We didn't know that. We also hit his forward turret
so he wouldn't turn. At the same time, he had
an airshell go off and we had to secure. We
had one guy lost his foot, one guy who lost
(22:25):
his front teeth. One guy that got a shell splinter
in his spine, so we had to secure the gun,
take the gun crew down, and all we had were
our forty milimeter Boue Force guns forward and a half,
so we were shooting him him with those. I was
on the bridge. He got so close I could see
that the Japanese soldiers sailors wore green uniforms with green
(22:50):
caps like that. And then in the final minute that
we dove, we had to get one of the wounded guys,
a guy who lost his foot. Clark down and he
was bleeding so much. I was slipping in his blood
going down. We dove and he was trying to ram
us at that point he missed us by about that much.
(23:11):
So then then the other guy caught up and they
were both depth charging us, and we were crawling along.
He thought we would go to the port to go
to deeper water, but we stayed straight and plowed in
the mud. We might have been even sticking up a
little bit. Anyway, Eventually he gave up because he was sinking.
(23:36):
We sunk the one. The second one kept after us,
dropping depth charges, and I think he exhausted the depth
chargers and then then by this time we were getting
into deeper water, and then we got into those those
anchor chains I told you about. I mean, there was
one example of a of an underwater attack.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
As Ziliacis explained, one of the most effective weapons against
submarines were depth charges. He now explains what it was
like to try to evade the depth charges and what
it was like staying below the surface sometimes for days
to avoid Japanese warships.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Only by maneuvering. First of all, you go to silent running.
Everything is shut down, You shut down pumps that make noise,
and so then you maneuver in ways. You try to
go deep, but of course we couldn't go deep that time.
You go deep, you go quiet, and you maneuver in
weird ways that he's not likely to follow. Now, of
(24:36):
course his sonar is pinging on you all the time,
and then you just grit your teeth deeper you go
the safer you are. Our maximum depth was five hundred.
One time we went to five point fifty just because
they were getting us with depth charges. So then you
just pray, like hell, you can't do anything to that
(24:59):
guy doing it to you, But you can't defend yourself. Then,
of course, you can only stay down as long as
you have power in the batteries and air to breathe,
and the old stories that when you've been down a
long time, you're not breathing air, you're breathing farts and
foot sweat. One time we were down for seventy two hours.
(25:21):
We were moving at one knot and everything was turned off.
The lights were turned off. Everybody went into their bunk.
Who wasn't on watch, Even some of the ones who
were supposed to be on watch were told to go
in the bunk. You breathe less. It's not a happy situation.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
After two tours, the Navy ordered a change in command
aboard the USS Spot. Ziliaka says. The new captain was
perfectly fine, but it was impossible to follow wild Bill
Post in that role.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah. His name was Seymour, Jack Seymour, and it was
a perfectly good skipper. But everybody loved Posts so much
that they didn't really give Seymour much of a break.
We had one incident. We were getting close to Japan
and in the daytime we saw a Koba class heavy
(26:16):
cruiser and we said, God, let's sink that son of
a bit. I think it was probably wounded in something,
but he said, no, they have big guns. We got
from went away from him, and we never forgave him
for that, but it was the right call. It just
we didn't know. We were just used to sinking anything
(26:39):
we saw.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
The war ended, of course, after the US dropped atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August nineteen forty five.
On August ninth, the USS spot was not far from Nagasaki,
although Ziliyaki says he and the rest of the crew
were oblivious to what was happening nearby.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
We were not that close, but we were pretty close,
and we knew about Hiroshima, but we didn't find out
about Nagasaki until after we surfaced. I mean we didn't.
We weren't close enough to hear the bomb or anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Another major development happened in those final days as well.
Russia finally entered the war against Japan. Ziliyaka says that
accomplished a couple of important things. First, the USS spot
no longer had to worry about accidentally targeting a Russian vessel.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Then, of course, the big thing was that the Russians
got into the war. During the entire World War Two,
except for the last five minutes, the Russians were in
peace with Japan. They were trading with Japan. We saw
Russian ships crossing the Sea of Japan headed for Nigata.
We couldn't sink him.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
There were Russians, But Ziliyakis also believes the Japanese ultimately
surrendered because of Russia's entry into the Pacific War.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Reson the Japanese made peace was not the atomic bomb,
it was the Russians. They knew that occupation under the
Russians would be absolute hell, like it was for everybody.
The Russians were the cruelest, meanest occupiers of anybody, more
(28:20):
worse than the Japanese rape of nine King and all
of that Russian did ten times as mut So the
Japanese were very anxious to have the Americans occupy because
Americans were good occupiers.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Russia definitely had a horrible reputation over its treatment of prisoners,
and the Japanese, who were incredibly vicious as captors themselves,
undoubtedly preferred Americans as the occupying force. But Siliakis already
knew all about the Russian cruelty. The USSR had a
wretched reputation from its invasion and brutality in Finland. But
(29:00):
Ziliakas also knows plenty about Japanese atrocities. His future wife
was living in the Philippines during the war and told
him of the horrors inflicted on her own family by
the Japanese occupiers.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Her father and her uncle were both tortured, in the
case of her uncle tortured to death in the case
of her father close to death. They quartered Japanese soldiers
in her home, and fortunately their officer was born in Denver, Colorado,
(29:34):
went to Japan on a visit and was drafted, and
she was very sick. She had something. He rode on
his horse to the Japanese dispensary, got some drugs, gave
him to her saved her life. She was there when
MacArthur invaded and General Yamashita, who was in charge of
(29:57):
the Japanese troops, had made a deal with Philippian President
Laorell who was president during the occupation. Was so popular
he went into the Senate after the war, so he
was a guy who was able to deal with the
Japanese and had them leave enough food so the Filipinos
could eat and live. And in a change for that,
(30:20):
he said, we're not going to have any uprisings, and
they didn't, except for a few gorillas. What he didn't
know was that MacArthur was going to invade. As soon
as MacArthur invaded. Lately, they cut off all the food.
They were trying to starve the Filipinos into submission, and
my wife shrank into skin and bones. Interestingly, one of
(30:44):
my classmates was Neil Rutledge, the son of Supreme Court
Justice Wiley Rutledge. He was given the job when they
had war crimes trials of defending General Yamashita, and he
found a true story out and he saved him. He
was sent to prison, but he wasn't executed well.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Many Americans went home after the war or after some
time on occupation duty. Ziliaka says he stayed in the
US Navy reserves for several years.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I got out of active duty, but I never stayed
in the reserves, and I went on cruisers. You how
to Panela on different places. One time I went to
Key West. I had a submarine base there. I spent
the day on the German submarine U twenty five thirteen,
which was so far superior to ours. That is a
(31:37):
good thing. The Germans didn't build many of them. They were.
I mean it was it could stay submerged much longer,
much faster, he could dive faster. It some incredible submarine.
And I did other reserve stuff. I taught stuff. I
somehow the Navy went crazy and gave me a commission
as an ensign and even promoted him into lieutenant junior grade.
(32:00):
But I was obsolete by that time, and because they
weren't putting reserve officers on nuclear submarines, so they wanted
me to go in and naval intelligence because I spoke
a lot of languages. But they wanted to send me
to the school in Monterey, and I couldn't take the
(32:23):
time off for my work, so they gave me an
honorable discharge.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
But during those ensuing years in the reserves, Ziliakis did
have additional opportunities to visit Japan and interact with the
people who had once been our enemies. He says he
had no trouble being friendly with them right away, since
his primary animosity was still aimed squarely at the Kremlin.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Extremely well, because to me, I was an American citizen
by that time, and my duty was to the United States,
and so I pursued the war with the Japanese. Any
American could the best I could. However, I hated Stalin
(33:05):
a lot more than I did Hideki Tojo. He was
number two after Stalin. So I had cousins fighting in
Finland against the Russians. So I was in kind of
a split situation, and of course my father was kicked
out of the country. I had a cousin in Finland
(33:25):
who was cook on a Finnish submarine, the Vessy Easy.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Patrick Siliakis is now ninety nine years old. He is
proud to be part of the World War Two generation,
but don't you dare tell him it's the greatest generation.
He wants the Vietnam generation and others to get just
as much recognition as World War Two veterans.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
They were treated like dirt when they came back. The
greatest generation, whoplaw, they deserve as much and Korean War
is another one Korean War or they didn't get acclamation.
I don't want to be called the greatest generation because
I'm no greater than those guys, the guys that came
(34:09):
back from Iraq, they deserve every bit as much praise.
As I have.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Still. Ziliacis is mighty proud of his service as a
teenager in a new country fighting to free the world.
And he's also thankful for the US Navy having.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Done well enough to get US citizenship while I was
in the service, to become a commission officer, and to
have my education paid for. In other words, I love
this country and I loved the Navy. The Navy was
(34:45):
good to me.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Patrick Ziliakis is a US Navy veteran of World War Two.
He served as a torpedo man aboard the USS Spot
in the Pacific in nineteen forty five. I'm Greg Corumbas
and this is Veterans Chronicle. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus,
(35:11):
and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of
the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American
Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans
Center on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at AVC update.
Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full
(35:32):
oral histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe
to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks again for listening and please join us next time
for Veterans Chronicles,
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