182 DASA 2019-2 know how to stop. I've never stopped this ship in the sea. What will happen ii I lie there? [Laughter] You can't put this group of wire lines and rope lines over the side. You may get them caught up in the propeller if we stop."' But he decided to stop. Then afterward we drifted ee wane RR re een enpS riAe ene ttn ne ee awhile and lost course completely. This problem of navigation really surprised me out there, Bob, you have lived with it for years, but it's so much better now than it was in the early days, In 1948 when we were out there all by ourselves, we had one little ship that had no way of producing potable water, The Navy would very helpfully send us a ship every four weeks with a new supply of water. On the back of the little supply ship was a smal! box-like compartment | in which 6 Marshallese boys lived. I asked the skipper of this ship, “Why do you have these Marshallese boys in this compartrnent on the back of the ship?'' lived. Actually it was a little cover on deck where they He said, "Those are my navigators!” [Laughter] “You have all the madern equipment." “Oh, we have a compass and the sextant and the usual things," he replied, ‘but we don't have radar or any sophisticated equipment on this little ship. I couldn't get along without these boys to do the navigating." CONARD: Did they stick maps? DONALDSON: No, they just used their own intuition in this case. FREMONT-SMITH: And their ears. DONALDSON: Yes, tneir ears and their eyes and their built-in compasses. The story that he told seerned perfectly fantastic, so fantastic that it's worth repeating because it’s incredible, as Wright was saying yesterday. It seems that when this skipper first arrived to take this command, he was asked to take the ship from Kwajalein to Wotje Atoll, Wotje is 200 miles east of Kwajalein. Some of you who were out there in the war remember it was the place where they used to have the "milk run.'' They would go out and bombit every day. So he set out for Wotje, His executive officer also was new; they plotted their course