Salvatore Buonocore

00:00
S: My name is Salvatore Buonocore. That’S S A L V A T O R E. The last name is Buonocore which is B U O N O C O R E.

I: Oh, Buonocore, is that Italian name?

S: Yes it is.

I: And what does that mean? Does it have a meaning?

S: It means good heart. I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in June 7th 1927.

I: New Haven.

S: New Haven, Connecticut.

00:00:30

I: And, how about your family, the parents and your siblings, when you were growing up?

S: Ok, I was the last of eight children. My parents are Sebastian and Marie Buonocore. They came from Italy. My mother came in 1903. My father came over in 1920. They would never want to go back to Italy

00:01:00

S: because of the conditions they had to grow up into.

I: What was the condition that when they were growing up?

S: Ok, very poor conditions. My mother came over in 1903 and her father brought her over at 13 years old. She had to go in and work and I figure a slave shop. She worked at a shirt factory as a seamstress. My father came over in 1920,

00:01:30

S: after serving 7 years in the Italian Navy. He came over on the USS America. Ellis Island their names are on the wall and my father was 27 when he came over and later years when I asked him to let’s go back to see where he came from, he never wanted to go back to Italy.

00:02:00

S: Because of the conditions, he said why do I want to go back to go to the bathroom in the weeds, to be born a peasant, die a peasant, to owe everybody in sight. The conditions that they had to live under.

I: Got it, so how about eight children? So brothers, how many brothers and sisters and where were you in between.

S: Uh, I had uh, five brothers and two sisters.

00:02:30

S: My oldest brother was 19 years old than me. My mother was married twice.

I: So you were the second?

S: Second father.

I: No, no, no, I mean you are the second in your brothers?

S: No, I was the last of all.

I: Last one.

S: I’m still the only one still alive of the whole family.

I: And the school that you went through when you were growing up?

00:03:00

S: Ok, I went to 3 or 4 different schools. Uh, back in those days they had neighborhood schools. As they had, as they closed I progressed into high school where they thought I had a talent for drawing and become a draftsman. So then I went to Boardman trade school in New Haven Connecticut.

00:03:30

S: And there you went to school for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, 11 months out of 12. You had to put in 4400 hours before you could graduate. After my third year at 17, I joined the Navy and quit.

I: So did you graduate high school?

S; After I served a year in the Navy and got discharged for the first time.

00:04:00

S: I reenlisted into reserves because I didn’t serve more than eighteen months. So I went back for another year. I was the oldest person in the class in 1947 when I graduated at 20 years old.

I: Ahhh, so did you enlist?

S: I enlisted.

I: When, 1946?

S: 1945

I: ’45.

S: and I was 17 at the time. This is when my father gave me that advice on conditions

00:04:30

S: That I would run into. He said you’re gonna be afraid. Do what you have to do. Where he came from, he was very depressed. He said no matter how bad you think this country is, this is 70 years ago, it’s still the best country in the world.

I: So why did you enlist in the middle of school years?

00:05:00

S: Because I was gonna become eighteen and they would draft you in the army. My father was in the Italian Navy for 7 years during WWI. He knew the conditions that you had to serve under. I had a brother out on the South Pacific on a LST. I had another brother Carmen that was in flying as a flight engineer on a B24 as a flight engineer.

00:05:30

S: And also he uh, he flew from San Francisco to Australia on a, they converted that B24 into a cargo airplane. So all during the war he flew on that particular, on one particular airplane after another.

I: So you knew that there was WWII ended right?

S: No, when I joined up

I: When did you join in the month?

00:06:00

S: Ok I joined….June 6th 1945.

I: June 6th

S: They put me on active duty without pay for one day. They sent me home until they got a full complement of men.

I: Did you enlist Navy at the time?

S: Navy, yes. This is why I wanted. Everybody in the family was Navy and I didn’t want to be in the Army.

I: Did you get the basic training?

S: Yes.

I: Where?

00:06:30

S: I went to Sampson Naval training station in New York in Geneva, near Geneva on Lake Seneca.

I: Is it around the Seneca Lake?

S: Yes, it has become now uh, Sampson Memorial cemetery. There was an organization called Sampson WWII veterans.

00:07:00

S: I was there for all the years as reunions. They took the existing brig and made a museum out of it. There’s two airplanes, two cannons, uh two boats there. All kinds of memorabilia both for the Navy and the Air Force took over the training station after we walked away from it. The Navy walked away from it in 1946.

I: So you born two year before the Great Depression occurred?

00:07:30

S: Yes

I: How was it growing up in that period?

S: My father worked maybe one day a week. We lived near the ocean, so we fished quite a bit. Also had a garden. All during that Depression, I don’t remember ever being hungry. My father provided for us. Six step-children and two children of his own.

00:08:00

S: That was myself and my brother Dominick.

I: So you were not really hungry and you were able to maintain

S: Yes.

I: The basic life.

S: Yes, but we didn’t have the best.

I: I see, so when you joined the Navy how do they treat you in the basic camp? What kind of training did you receive?

S: Ok, physical fitness, uh, I had some previous Red Cross experience.

00:08:30

S: They asked anybody that had Red Cross experience, they had to go up on the tower and jump off the tower. I was the first one off the tower and I was the first one swimming around the pool. As I came up out of the pool, they said you’re swimming instructor of this company.

I: So you were good?

S: Many men didn’t know how to swim.

I: So you were good right?

S: Well I had- I lived on the ocean and I had to learn how to swim because my father used to fish a lot. Where he came from, Miramalfi

00:09:00

S:In, Italy was right on the Mediterranean and he knew how to swim. He made sure that at a very young age that I knew how to swim. And I used to go out fishing on a rowboat with him so, my mother wouldn’t allow me to go with him unless I knew how to at least doggy paddle. During the basic training all types of activities.

00:09:30

S: One of them was that they, they saw that I had that technical background at the trade school being a drafts- learning to be a draftsman, and also learning to be a tool maker. So they were forming a CB construction battalion with the Navy. They were gonna ship us over to China.

I: What was your MOS? What was your specialty?

S: Well, after I got out I became a motor machinist mate.

00:10:00

I: Motor machinist. When did you come to know about the breakout of the Korean War?

S: Immediately.

I: What were you doing? You were teaching in college?

S: No, I was teaching at the naval reserve station.

I: Ahhh, and?

S: We were very, we became very active. We were on standby. Some of the men that I was teaching went directly aboard ship because they had previous experience. During that three-year period

00:10:30

S: I had my orders to go aboard ship because I was an instructor. They held it back, they held back my upgrading rates. In other words, I did all my tests for my third class petty officer and my second class petty officer, which included 12 tests and a final on both of them. You had what they called time and rate

00:11:00

S: Time you were in the service plus if the rate was open. They didn’t want me to go directly aboard ship when I had the orders. They cancelled my orders the day before I was supposed to go the next morning. They uh, I got it by telegram. I had my karim up on blocker.

I: Yeah, so you are Korean War era veteran right?

S: Correct.

I: Yes and what was your main activities during the war?

00:11:30

S: Teaching. Teaching the people that were in the reserves at the time, how to repair engines. How to repair boilers. How to repair everything below decks. Everything that applies to running the ship mechanically.

00:12:00

S: If they had small crafts on the boats we were responsible for the engines on the small crafts that were aboard the they also taught us other duties other than below the deck. They brought us up and showed us how to fire a cannon, how to load it, how to aim it, how to uh. Everybody had a second duty on attack mode. So,

00:12:30

I: Did you ever meet any Navy soldier came back from Korea?

S: Yes.

I: Tell me about those. When was it and who was it and what do they talk?

S: They talk very little about what their experiences were. The people I associate now with for the past 50 years, very very uh…. Their experiences were very

I: Reserved, I mean, they don’t talk much right?

S: They didn’t talk much, but you knew that some of them had purple hearts. That they, the experience and the conditions they had to live under and fight under were very horrendous. They uh, how can I put it, they were different people.

00:13:30

S: The conditions that they had to fight under, they are different in the respect that them. I’m a hawk when it comes to, you hit me I want to hit you back, but I don’t think that solves anything. I see what these guys have gone through, their mental conditions are still at ragged edges at times. They don’t talk about what they did, but they

00:14:30

S: They understand what, what our guys are going through now and support anything that’s going on.

I: I had many interviews with the Navy who actually were in the Korean Sea around the peninsula during the war and they were saying that we were much better because we were not in the trench.

S: That’s correct.

I: Not in the foxhole and they were able to take showers and they were able to eat hot meals every day.

00:14:30

I: And there was kind of feeling that they had, but still that living condition in the small ship even though it’s a big still your living quarter is very limited.

S: That’s correct.

I: And there are not much things to do other than just working in the ship in the ocean so you don’t go anywhere. That was kind of limited living conditions to them.

S: Yes it was very, very limited and we uh, we made do we had…

00:15:00

S:…movies and we had uh, kind of a library if you wanted to read you to you – I did a lot of studying to try to upgrade my rate. In other words to progress in. I progressed up to motor machinist second which is equivalent to a Staff Sergeant in the Army, but uh, I kept, I ended up as a

00:15:30

S: Engineman diesel, first class and I have my rate and my album, what it looked like it had three red stripes on your left hand, left arm. Also, I used to talk to people about that. They said yeah you had good- pretty good meals, you had a pretty good clean bunk, but you drowned if they went to extreme

00:16:00

S: That’s why they in boot camp, they taught you to jump off a tower so if you have to jump off a ship you’d do it correctly.

I: Ok, you said you were in the rescue mission too?

S: Yes, the first year I was in the Navy I was air sea rescue. We were on standby like a fire department on 24 hours a day. If a seaplane came in on the seaplane harbor hit a piece of debris or in distress, we immediately had to go out after that

00:16:30

I: Where? In Norfolk?

S: In Norfolk. They had a seaplane harbor there. Back in those days they had a lot of flow planes.

I: Were there any case that you actually in rescuing?

S: Yes, Yes.

I: Tell me about that.

S: The first time an old sea duck came in, the bi-wing airplane. It nose over for pontoon. Because I was the engineer on that first rescue, I had to walk the wing .

00:17:00

S: Into the cockpit. The cockpit was open about 2 inches, so I slid. I slid the canopy back, I couldn’t find, I mean to this day I couldn’t find a release to that harness that was holding the pilot because he went forward and a bump on his head that he hits the instrument panel. So, I took my knife out and I cut him away and he kind of cussed at me about trying to kill him.

00:17:30

S: I could remember to this day. Other times that we went out after planes they have hit and sunk and we had to buoy them for our YSD Derrick ship with a diver aboard to go down, sling the airplane, bring it up, put it on their deck, the pilot still in the cockpit. That was very

00:18:00

S: Dramatic. It still leaves a scar with me. Even though I have no one shooting at me. I still saw an awful lot of that kind of thing and it wasn’t very pleasant.

I: So you were an engineer in the air sea rescue mission team.

S: That’s correct.

I: Yeah and you had to deal with those problems in the aircraft.

S: No, in the boats.

00:18:30

I: In the boats, but the aircrafts that you had to deal right?

S: That’s correct.

I: The pilots, ok.

S: Uh, we uh, sometimes they’d come in and hit a piece of debris on the catalina’s or the mars bigger, bigger airplanes. We had, we go out with a boat with a pump on it and throw a build pump in that boat and tied into it and then towed it into the seaplane ramps which at that point in time,

00:19:00

S: They had a crews that took that plane from us and we untied it and we went back to our base to get back on standby. We were on standby 24 hours a day, once every three days I think I was. And each weekend you had two 48 hour weekends. One 64 hour weekend. I could get on a train or a boat to go back to Connecticut for a weekend.

00:19:30

S: So I didn’t have it that rough. Directly aboard a ship in combat. I’m a very lucky individual.

I: When were you discharged?

S: Two times. One August 5th in 1946 and the second time, August 5th 1954. I was in Farragut unit, F unit in uh,

00:20:00

S: Instead of being just six weeks we went 12 weeks to boot camp.

I: So why were you discharged from Navy and went back to high school?

S: Okay, they had a point system after the war ended, ok, and they disbanded an awful lot of people. So I was in the first time, one year one month one week. And they uh, as I got discharged to go home.

00:20:30:

S: They said if you’re not in for 18 months you’re going to get drafted again. So I didn’t want to go get drafted into the army, so I reenlisted into the Navy.

I: But, you went back to high school in 1946? 47? 46?

S: ‘46 and ‘47 because I got out August 5th of ‘46 and that September I went back to school.

00:21:00

I: ‘46 September

S: Yeah, 1945. ’46, ‘46

I: And you did graduate in 1947 right?

S: Yes.

I: What was the name of uh, high school?

S: Boardman Trade School.

I: Could you spell it?

S: This is your honorably discharge emblem of 1946 which called a ruptured duck.

I: Okay, but could you tell me the name of your high school?

S: Boardman Trade-

I: B-O-A-R-D?

00:21:30

S: Yeah, trade school. And later on they changed the name to Eli Whitney Boardman Institute of technology.

I: In New Haven?

S: New Haven, yes.

I: Did you know where Korea is?

S: Yes.

I: At the time was?

S: Yes, because we did social studies in trade school.

I: What do they teach about Korea?

S: Not much to be honest with you. I knew where it was and that we had people there.

00:22:00
S: I also knew that uh, the implication between Japan and Korea and some of their history, but not much more than that. I knew that yes we should go there. I agreed with that, even at a young age, that communists was not for us.

00:22:30

S: When we lose our freedom, we lose everything. My father taught me that from where he came from, the suppression of him himself in Italy.

I: You know that Korea was completely devastated at the end of the Korean War and do you know anything about Korea now?

S: Yes

I: What is it? What do you know about Korea now?

S: In fact I worked for Carrier air conditioning company for 34 years and we designed a rotary compressor.

00:23:00

S: And we have it built over in Korea.

I: What was that name of company again?

S: I’m not sure. My company I work here was Carrier. But they went over to Korean built company.

I: Daewoo. Daewoo and Carrier had a partnership.

S: Yeah, isn’t it still quite a few on the DMZ right now?

I: They are the Korea Defense Veteran.

00:23:30

S: Oh, ok.

I: They are not Korean War veteran because they stationed in Korean Peninsula after the war right?

S: My father always told me back in those days, they don’t like this country, go back to where they came from. There’s a whole thing right there. You’ve got to be proud of what we are and what we stand for and I’m pretty proud of my people that came over from the old country that realized this.

00:24:00

S: I’m glad I’m born in the United States. If I was born in Italy with my father and my mother. The water wasn’t even good enough there. So they lived from hand to mouth for money. My grandfather bought my mother over and my father’s uncle brought him over in 1920 and like I said to you before.

00:24:30

S: He never wanted to go back. He never even wanted to go visit anymore because of the situations and the depression that they had at that time. His father was- couldn’t afford him.

I: So you, your service, honorable service during the WWII and during the Korean War has made this country prospering. The strongest in the world and has contributed to what Korea is now so.

00:25:00

I: I respect you and I thank you on behalf of Korean nation for your service and I really appreciate that you are sharing this story with me and with the Korean War Veteran’s digital memorial.

S: I didn’t do enough. I didn’t do a tenth of what my fellow veterans, Korean veterans did over there. I feel that uh, I can’t say I did enough, I didn’t do enough.