Last to Die

by Stephen Harding

  Tony was really a swell fellow, the best I have ever met and lived with in my army career. Tony was a clean cut kid and they can’t come any better. He was well liked by all the fellows that he associated with.

  We had a military funeral and a Mass at the Catholic Chapel for him, with all his close friends and mostly all of the squadron turned out… . As close friends, the crew and I offer our sincerest condolences.

  Sincerely,

  Frank11

  On September 17 the family received a letter addressed to Ralph and signed by a somewhat more august personage, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson:

  My dear Mr. Marchione:

  You will shortly receive the Purple Heart medal, which has been posthumously awarded by the direction of the President to your son, Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione, Air Corps. It is sent as a tangible expression of the country’s gratitude for his gallantry and devotion. It is sent to you, as well, with my deepest personal sympathy for your bereavement. The loss of a loved one is beyond man’s repairing, and the medal is of slight value; not so, however, the message it carries. We have all been comrades in arms in the battle for our country, and those who have gone are not, and will never be, forgotten by those of us who remain. I hope you will accept this medal in evidence of such remembrance.12

  A few days after the arrival of Stimson’s letter another tribute reached the Marchiones, this one a memorial certificate bearing the seal and signature of President Truman:

  In grateful memory of SERGEANT ANTHONY J. MARCHIONE who died in the service of his country IN THE SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, AUGUST 18, 1945. he stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live, and grow, and increase its blessings. freedom lives, and through it, he lives—in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.13

  On October 3 a summary court-martial convened at the Kansas City Quartermaster Depot confirmed that Ralph Marchione was indeed entitled to receive his son’s personal effects, though the single box containing those items did not arrive at the house on King Street until mid-February 1946. At about that same time the Marchione family received a small, ornate box containing an Air Medal that had been posthumously awarded to Tony by Far East Air Forces. The accompanying citation noted that the “courage and devotion to duty” the young airman had displayed during the August 18 flight reflected “great credit on the United States Army Air Force.”14

  The package containing the Air Medal would not be the last communication between the government and the Marchiones. For several months following the initial notification of Tony’s death, Ralph and Emelia received occasional letters from various agencies within the War Department regarding such administrative decisions as the final amount to be paid out under their son’s G.I. life insurance policy, the date the box containing his personal effects would be delivered, and so on. But then, in the fall of 1946, they received a letter from the Memorial Division of the Office of the Quartermaster General that contained some truly momentous news: if they so desired, the body of their only son could come home.

  THE VAST MAJORITY OF the several hundred overseas cemeteries established for America’s World War II dead during the course of the conflict were always intended to be temporary. As had been done following World War I, the U.S. government planned to consolidate the remains in a few large memorial cemeteries that would be constructed overseas and maintained in perpetuity by the federal, civilian-staffed American Battle Monuments Commission. The contingency plans developed for the final disposition of the war dead recognized that not all of the remains could be accommodated in the memorial cemeteries, however, so the next of kin of those temporarily buried overseas were to be given three options. The remains could be interred in the overseas memorial cemetery established in the war theater in which their loved one died, or they could be returned to the United States for interment in either a national or private cemetery.15

  On January 26, 1948, Ralph Marchione received a letter bearing his son’s name at the top and the signature of Major General William B. Larkin, the Quartermaster General, below. The letter announced that

  the people of the United States, through the Congress, have authorized the disinterment and final burial of the heroic dead of World War II. The Quartermaster General of the Army has been entrusted with this sacred responsibility to the honored dead. The records of the War Department indicate that you may be the nearest relative of the above-named deceased, who gave his life in the service of his country.16

  The letter went on to explain the options available to the family, but cautioned that if they chose to have Tony’s remains returned for private burial they should undertake “no funeral arrangements or other personal arrangements” until they received further notification about the status of their request. Not surprisingly, Ralph and Emelia opted to have their son brought home for burial in the cemetery belonging to St. Aloysius Church, and they returned the form bearing their choice within days of receiving it. Their rapid response was not matched by the government, however, and it wasn’t until June 10 that they received a letter from a Major Richard Coombs of the Memorial Division acknowledging receipt and acceptance of their “Request for Disposition of Remains.” On that form Ralph had designated Fleischman’s Funeral Home in Pottstown as the receiving facility, and had then asked that Tony’s remains be transported to the house on King Street for a viewing. Coombs replied with what was obviously a boiler-plate response:

  When the remains of your son are returned, the casket may not be opened while all custodial rights and responsibility for the decedent rests [sic] with the Department of the Army. However, upon delivery of the remains to the next of kin or the authorized representative of the next of kin, the Government relinquishes all rights and responsibilities. Therefore, if the next of kin so desires, the casket may be opened, providing such action does not violate federal or state public health law.17

  Coombs’s assumption that the Marchiones’ use of the term viewing meant they intended to open Tony’s casket is understandable. Many family members of servicemen killed overseas were unaware of the realities of mortuary operations in the theaters of war and assumed that their loved ones had been “prepared” in the same way they would have been in a civilian funeral home. The reality was quite different, of course. American military personnel who died abroad during World War II, whether they were killed in action or succumbed to illness or injury, were only very rarely embalmed. The time and materials that would have been required to “prepare” thousands of bodies would have been prohibitive, and the need to inter corpses quickly in order to prevent outbreaks of disease meant that the only “preparation” most bodies received before burial was a rudimentary cleaning. Moreover, very few corpses were buried in caskets—again, the logistics involved in getting caskets to the far-flung battlefields would have interfered with the shipment of ammunition, fuel, and other vital war supplies. Most of the deceased were, like Tony, therefore interred wrapped in canvas shelter-halves that did little to protect the remains. And in the Pacific, high temperatures and humidity, coupled with often very acidic soils, promoted rapid decomposition.

  In keeping with Ralph and Emelia’s wish that Tony come home, the Memorial Division issued a “Disinterment Directive” to the Island Command Cemetery as the first step in the repatriation process. Quartermaster Corps policy decreed that all of the deceased in a particular temporary cemetery be disinterred within the same relatively short time period which, of course, meant that several hundred to several thousand sets of remains then had to be dealt with. In Tony’s case, this meant that though his “incomplete, badly decomposed skeletal remains” were disinterred on July 7, 1948, they were not processed (in this case an administrative term) and placed in a hermetically sealed casket until November 5.18 The casket was enclosed in the standard compact shipping case and loaded aboard a C-54 transport with many other identically protected sets of remains and flown to the U.S. Army mausoleum on Saipan. On January 25, 1949, Tony’s casket joined 4,500
others in the holds of the U.S. Army Transport Dalton Victory, which sailed the following day for Honolulu, where an additional 1,300 caskets were put aboard.

  California’s Oakland Army Base, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, was one of fifteen designated distribution centers for repatriated remains.19 Dalton Victory arrived at the huge port complex and logistics hub at 8:45 on the morning of February 16, the fourteenth “funeral ship” to offload its sad cargo at the installation since the beginning of the Pacific repatriation program in September 1947. A memorial service honoring the ship’s “passengers, deceased” was held at Dock Three with Major General James A. Lester, commander of the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, as the principal speaker and with military personnel and relatives and friends of the deceased in attendance. The solemn event closed with military chaplains offering prayers and benedictions, and a bugler sounding Taps.20

  Six days after the memorial service Tony’s casket began the next leg of its journey to Pottstown. Before dawn on Tuesday, February 22, Master Sergeant Edward V. Trittenback, the senior noncommissioned officer designated as the escort for Tony’s remains and those of eleven other individuals, supervised the loading of the shipping cases aboard a U.S. Army Transportation Corps funeral train made up of fifteen “mortuary cars.” These were converted six-axle “heavyweight” Pullman passenger carriages with the seats removed and a wide baggage door installed on one side, locking metal racks on the walls to securely hold the caskets in their shipping cases, and with all but two of the windows blanked out.21 Each car carried between fifty and sixty-six caskets, and the remains aboard each car were grouped by the state or region that was their ultimate destination. In the case of the train bearing Tony’s casket, the last six cars bore the remains of personnel from the Midwest and would be dropped in Kansas City, whereas the leading nine cars holding remains bound for East Coast cities would travel all the way to the New York Port of Embarkation.22

  The funeral train’s cross-country odyssey ended at the Brooklyn Army Base—Distribution Center No. 1—on March 2. There the caskets were removed from the mortuary cars and transported to a temporary mausoleum adjacent to the base’s vast, eight-story-tall enclosed loading and transfer structure, Building B. Over the following weeks the individual caskets were sorted according to their final destinations, draped with American flags, then taken by hearse or military ambulance to local civilian railway stations and put aboard trains bound for the deceased’s home town.

  In Tony’s case, the final leg of the long journey home from Okinawa began before dawn on Friday, March 18. Under the supervision of Staff Sergeant Luke E. O’Shaughnessy, an aerial gunner and combat veteran who would be the official individual escort from that point on, the casket bearing the young airman’s remains was loaded into a military ambulance and driven from the Brooklyn Army Terminal mausoleum to one of the Army piers on the east bank of the Hudson River. The vehicle drove aboard an Army-operated ferry for the two-and-a-half-mile passage across the river to the Navy pier complex at Bayonne, New Jersey, from where the ambulance departed for the short drive to Jersey City. The flag-draped casket was loaded aboard a baggage car of the Jersey Central Line’s Train No. 601, which rolled into Pottstown’s small central station at 11:38 A.M.

  The Marchiones had been notified by telegram the day before of the time the train bearing Tony’s remains would arrive, but had chosen not to meet it. They instead relied on two of Tony’s friends and former crewmates, Frank Pallone and Rudy Nudo, to handle things at the station. The two men, both now civilians, had been contacted by the U.S. Air Force’s Memorial Affairs Branch several weeks earlier and asked if they would “attend” Tony’s remains once they reached Pottstown.23 Both had readily agreed, and had arrived the day before to a warm, highly emotional welcome from Ralph, Emelia, and the girls. Pallone and Nudo introduced themselves to O’Shaughnessy on the station platform, and the three men shared a taxi as they followed the hearse bearing Tony’s casket to the Fleischmann Funeral Home at 258 Beach Street. There the firm’s director took official custody of the remains, the young escort departed, and Tony’s two comrades settled down to wait as a mortician and his assistant moved the casket into a preparation room to perform the examination required by both state law and the military release form the funeral director had just signed.

  The Marchiones planned to hold a visitation and Rosary service in their home the night before their son’s funeral Mass, with Tony’s casket resting on a flower-bedecked bier in the small living room. Although the June 1948 letter from the Quartermaster Corps Memorial Division’s Major Coombs had stated that the casket could be opened once the Army had relinquished control, the initial examination at Fleischmann’s put any such possibility completely out of the question. The mortician determined that the state of the remains—incomplete, disarticulated, and badly decomposed—made it impossible under Pennsylvania’s public health laws. Fleischmann’s funeral director passed the decision to Pallone and Nudo, who relayed it to Ralph and Emelia.24

  In keeping with the Marchiones’ wishes, Tony’s casket was transported from Fleischmann’s to the family home on King Street on the afternoon of Sunday, March 20. Throughout the day and into the evening relatives, neighbors, friends, parishioners, and members of the larger Pottstown community came to pay their respects. Framed pictures of Tony at various stages in his too-short life stood atop end tables and on window sills, and a vase of early spring flowers graced the small dining room table. Over the hours many fond stories were told, tears were shed, and quiet laughter at some remembered childhood antic of the young man who had gone to war occasionally lightened the atmosphere of loss that pervaded the small row house. At 7:30 the Reverend William M. Begley began the Rosary service, after which the home slowly emptied except for the family and Pallone and Nudo, who spent the night in Tony’s old room.

  The grief-tinged celebration of Tony Marchione’s life continued the next morning at 9:15, when a hearse returned to the King Street house and loaded the casket for the short drive to St. Aloysius—the place where Tony had made his first communion, attended catechism, and may have hoped to be married one day. The Requiem Mass began at 10, with the Reverend John F. Campbell as celebrant, the Reverends George Hiller and David Leahy as concelebrants, and Pallone and Nudo among the pallbearers. The service was well attended, and many of those present added their cars to the procession that followed the hearse bearing the flag-draped casket to the older of St. Aloysius Church’s two cemeteries.25 There Anthony James Marchione—the young man who bears the sad distinction of being the last American killed in combat in World War II—was laid to rest with full military honors in the St. Paul’s Section, Plot 68, Grave 3. As a bugler played Taps, Father Hiller intoned the traditional final petition: “May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.”

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

  ONE OF THE CARDINAL rules in both journalism and the writing of history is that one should never become emotionally involved with the people one is writing about. As reporters or historians we are supposed to remain detached and objective, weighing evidence and facts and following them wherever they may lead us regardless of our own beliefs, preconceptions, or prejudices. In more than three decades as both reporter and historian I have done my utmost to adhere scrupulously to that rule, and have—for the most part—succeeded.

  But not in the case of Anthony Marchione.

  I obviously did not know the young airman personally; he died seven years before I was born. But when I first heard about him—in the course of writing a long-ago small book about an odd and not very successful U.S. Army Air Forces bomber called the B-32 Dominator—I was immediately intrigued by his story. Here was a young man who, like millions of his contemporaries, was swept up in the national effort to defeat Japan and Nazi Germany. Like those many millions of others he was taught a deadly skill and then dispatched to faraway lands to employ that skill in the service of his country. And, like hundr
eds of thousands of other young Americans who’d put on the uniform, he’d been killed in the performance of his duty far from home and family. And yet, Tony Marchione was different from all the others who had died in that global conflict, because he holds the sad distinction of being the last American killed in combat before the September 2, 1945, surrender of Japan officially ended World War II.1

  It was not merely Tony’s enduring place as a footnote in the history of America’s participation in World War II that captured my interest, however. Despite the many differences in our lives and backgrounds, I felt a close kinship with the young man from Pottstown. We both came from close-knit families, grew up in small towns, and entered the military at roughly the same age. And while serving our nation, Tony in World War II and I during the Vietnam period, we both suffered great misfortune. Though I survived mine—an armored vehicle accident that left me hospitalized for the better part of a year and disabled for life—I identified only too well with what Tony must have been feeling in those first few seconds after he was hit. The surprise, the blinding pain, the frenzied efforts of buddies trying their best to stop the bleeding and, worst of all, the sudden realization that this might actually be it, the unexpected end of a too-short life.

  As I moved through my career—and the very interesting, joyous, painful, thrilling, and often calamitous events that have constituted my personal life—the idea of writing about Tony and the events surrounding his death never left me. Indeed, I wrote several short articles over the decades that touched on the events of August 18, 1945, in various ways, though always in the context of the B-32 and not focusing on Tony. I was able to locate and interview many of the people who took part in the final air combats over Tokyo at a time when their memories were still relatively clear and their willingness to provide documents and photographs was limitless—sadly, all but a very few are gone now—but owing to the “busyness” of life I did not attempt to tell Tony’s story in detail until the fall of 2008. The resultant article, published in Smithsonian’s Air & Space, only brushed the surface of what I knew to be a much broader and deeper story. I resolved to tell that tale as thoroughly and completely as possible, and this book is the result.