William James O’Reilly is the father of Bill O’Reilly, a popular television show host, radio personality, political commentator, and writer, who is the author of “Killing the Rising Sun,” published in 2016, which contains the following excerpts concerning his father:

The USS ONEIDA is a new ship, commissioned just last December 1944. … A young ensign from Brooklyn, New York, is among the ship’s officer corps.  He is twenty-one and quick witted, the son of a New York City policeman.  In his nine-month stint aboard ONEIDA, the recent graduate of the navy’s V-12 Navy College Training Program at the College of the Holy Cross has seen action off the coast of Okinawa, witnessed defeated Japanese soldiers up close when the ONEIDA ferried 1,050 prisoners of war to Pearl Harbor, and experienced all manner of weather – most of all rain, heat, and tropical humidity.  In one month’s time, the ensign will even endure a typhoon aboard ONEIDA. … The ensign will do his duty, whatever happens, but he would like to make it home alive.  There is a young woman waiting for him. … On September, 17, 1945, the young ensign from Brooklyn is terrified that a typhoon may sink his ship eight hundred miles southwest of Tokyo.  The USS ONEIDA has just arrived in Okinawa’s Hagushi Bay after five days in Jinsen, Korea. … ONEIDA powers away from Hagushi Bay as quickly as possible. …The attack transport will stand a better chance of avoiding damage if it can outrace the storm. … The tall ensign from Brooklyn who recently graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, came aboard the ONEIDA ten months ago.  As with the other sailors, he goes through the daily routines of life on board the ship: four-hour watch, regular meals in the officers’ mess, and the utter off-duty boredom that defines life at sea.  Soon, the ONEIDA will take part in the joyous exodus known as Operation Magic Carpet.  Hundreds of US ships – even massive aircraft carriers – are clearing their decks for the thousands of soldiers, sailors, and marines who need a lift home.  After enduring a brutal period of war, these men and women deserve nothing but the best, and the ensign knows it.  Back in Brooklyn the ensign’s father and mother are waiting to see him walk through their front.  But that will not happen soon. … He has been ordered ashore to help rebuild the defeated nation.  On November 26, he will begin a six-month tour of duty at the Naval Communications Facility in Yokosuka, working for Radio Tokyo.  It is the ideal job for a young man blessed with an easy wit and a way with words.  Whether or not he will be released from the Navy after that or be forced to serve another year or two is unknown. … My father was always nostalgic for the navy and fascinated by World War II.  He firmly believed he would have been killed if MacArthur’s land invasion had come to fruition.  His ship, the USS ONEIDA, was set to ferry hundreds of marines close to the beaches of Japan.  Only later did my father find out that thousands of Japanese kamikaze pilots were waiting to attack the US fleet.  The carnage would have been devastating. … And so it is that Ensign O’Reilly, his wife, and their two children, built yet another traditional American family over the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. … My father was convinced of one certainty, which he shared with me on a few occasions – that his very existence, and therefore my life as well, was likely saved by a terrible bomb and a gut-wrenching presidential decision that is still being debated to this day.