MOULTRIE, Ga. — Clifford Anderson’s on oxygen, a reluctant nod to the emphysema. He loved woodworking and breathed in too much wood dust in the days before breathing masks came to the workshop. But despite that, his voice is strong and his handshake firm.

On Tuesday, Anderson’s mind was on politics and politicians.

“The way they are flipping and flopping around, you can’t back anybody,” Anderson said. “We thought that we fought the war back in 1944 to stop this stuff from happening.”

The war — THE War — in 1944.

A native of Illinois, Anderson joined the Navy late 1942, almost a year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He said he had two brothers in the Army. “I certainly didn’t want to follow in their footsteps,” he said.

He trained as a radio operator — then wound up serving on aircraft carriers, where most of the time was spent in radio silence.

With his radio skills under-utilized, Anderson was trained as a gunner and put in the back seat of an SB2C Helldiver, a two-man dive bomber. It was not his favorite aircraft.

“It was an all-right plane,” he said, “but it didn’t hold together too well. A little bit of flak and it’d come apart.”

He preferred the SBD Dauntless. But the Dauntless was slower, and when you’re being shot at, slow isn’t a good thing either. In all, he flew 18 missions on one of those planes or the other.

Anderson was assigned to the USS Intrepid, which was commissioned in August 1943. Anderson said his squadron, called the “Sunday Punchers,” were assigned 32 dive bombers. By the time he left the Intrepid, they had lost 33, counting the originals and replacement aircraft.

In October 1944 the Intrepid was part of Task Force 38 under Admiral William “Bull” Halsey as it prepared for the invasion of the Philippines. Anderson’s job as tail gunner was to shoot twin .30-caliber machine guns at Japanese fighter planes that threatened his plane.

“Make sure you didn’t shoot the tail off the plane you were in,” he added.

The pilot would fly as high as he could — usually around 10,000 to 12,000 feet, Anderson said — then dive at the enemy ship, drop his bomb and pull up and away from the resulting explosion. Each plane carried a 500-pound bomb and “a couple” 50-pound ones, he said.

The Intrepid made its name in the Philippines. Dive bombers and torpedo planes — many from the Intrepid — sank the Japanese battleship Musashi and damaged several other ships, including the flagship Yamato, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was part of the reason the Allies were able to eventually retake the Philippines.

But it was not easy.

Anderson told how two Japanese planes rammed themselves into the Intrepid. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the first time Japan had used this tactic, called “kamikaze,” in an organized fashion.

The World War II equivalent of suicide bombers, the kamikazes damaged the Intrepid’s flight deck so that the planes couldn’t take off or land. One pierced all the way to the hangar deck underneath, Anderson said.

“They tried to sink us but they didn’t do it,” he said.

For his role in the battle, Anderson received the Distinguished Flying Cross. In fact, he said, every gunner in his squadron did.

After the battle, called the largest naval engagement of World War II, the Intrepid headed back to the U.S. for repairs. Anderson was deployed on land after that and continued to serve in the Navy until December 1962. With more than 20 years in service, he retired.

After the Navy, Anderson joined federal service, where he helped manage what individuals or companies had access to which radio frequencies. He was responsible for several stations throughout the United States and traveled among them often from his home in California.

He had just retired from the federal service when his wife of 34 years filed for divorce. Suddenly single, he bought a pickup truck and an RV trailer and started traveling.

He said he spent a lot of time in Mexico, where he found the people to be friendly and honest — quite different from the way they’ve been portrayed by politicians lately.

“The farther down [south] you go, the friendlier they were,” he said.

He spent 12 years traveling and got married again. That didn’t work out well, either, he said.

Anderson’s sister and her husband, Margaret and Bud Casperson, lived in Moultrie, where Bud Casperson was a locksmith. He suffered from diabetes and eventually became an invalid from it. Anderson said he came down to visit with them, saw property prices ridiculously low compared to California and invested in a house. His daughter, Sally Slater, lives with him now, and a son and two other daughters are scattered across the country.

A few years ago, Anderson took his family to see the Intrepid, which is now a museum ship in New York.

“Dad walked us around and showed us his quarters and the [ready room] where he slept on the chairs because the bunk rooms smelled so bad,” Slater said.

Also, the ready room was one of the few places on the ship that had air conditioning, Anderson said.

Reminiscing about the ship and his war experiences brought Anderson back to his initial criticism about the present-day.

“I really was hoping what we did then would’ve stayed,” he said.