WWII Heroes: We Were Just Doing Our Jobs

by Minton, Linda E.

  “At eight in the morning, we left our ship and went down the netting to the landing barge, or Higgins boat. We waited and waited until everyone was ready to go, so at nine o’clock we went in and attacked Iwo Jima. We went in with the second wave. Boats were being hit with artillery all around us. The sand on the beach was so deep, you would sink down to your knees in it. It was slow going.”

  Was there anyone killed from your group?

  “Oh my, yes. Going in, we survived pretty well. The first guy that got killed going in was shot between the eyes. He was our first death. I foxholed with him the first night. He was a really good guy to foxhole with.

  “Our first really bad experience on Iwo Jima came on the nineteenth of February. It wasn’t too bad until about the twenty-third. That morning there was cold drizzle, and I was running along with Richard Hall, my buddy from California. He was blond and had a big smile. He got more letters from girls than the whole rest of our platoon put together. He was going to introduce babes to me after the war.” This sergeant said to Richard, “Come on, we are going this way.”

  “The first shell struck that morning knocked me off my feet. My nose was bleeding, and I couldn’t hear very well. I turned on my stomach and looked where Richard was and wondered if that shell hit. I looked on the ridge and saw the body of this boy. His head and one arm was gone. The only way that I knew it was Richard was he carried a Browning automatic rifle, a rifle that will fire thirty rounds at a time. There are only three Browning automatic rifles in a squad. There was a Browning rifle there. It was Richard. They dropped shells constantly.

  “It was a horrible day. I was scared, and my mouth felt like it was pulled back. I looked scared. This tough sergeant said, ‘Chick, it will get better tomorrow,’” said Arlin. “I did not recognize him. Then I noticed everybody looked that way, so I stopped worrying about it.

  “We were going to meet up at this pillbox. We got to the bottom of that ridge, and I didn’t see another soul. My rifle didn’t work, as it was clogged with sand and rust. Neither would the sergeant’s rifle. The only weapon of the three of us that was working was a forty-five pistol. We all had hand grenades, but [they were] useless against machine guns. We got up to the bottom of that ridge, and we started getting machine gun fire. We dived in behind the shell hole. We didn’t see a soul for an hour or two. Probably the biggest liar in the whole outfit came up with this Browning rifle. We told him to shoot toward the pillbox, and then we were now able to get inside the shell hole, instead of just behind it.

  “The only heroic thing that I did on the whole island is we heard this moaning, and we crawled up to the rim of the shell hole. I saw this guy from our outfit pulling himself along. He was shot in the hips and thigh so that he couldn’t walk. I said, ‘Frost, that guy isn’t going to make it.’ We ran up with my poncho, rolled him on it, and jerked him down into the shell hole with us.

  “I started working on my rifle. They were shelling the pillbox from the other side, and the Japanese were too busy to pay any attention to us anymore. The lieutenant jumped into the shell hole with us and said we are going to move out, as our rifles are not working any longer. So Frost said that somebody is going to have to move Hardin, the injured soldier. Frost said, ‘No, you are not big enough. Move out like the lieutenant told you to do.’” So Arlin left. “I never saw Sgt. Frost again.”

  “K Rations are the nastiest things in the world,” said Arlin. “I had trouble eating them. I couldn’t stand the layer of grease on top of them. The crackers were old and stale, like they had been around for five or ten years!

  “This guy that I was sharing watch with would always take the second watch. Well, the first watch is from ten to twelve. I would wake him up and say, ‘Are you awake?’ And he would say, ‘Yeah, yeah.’” Arlin said, “He would promptly go to sleep. When it’s your time to go to sleep on the front line, you are going to go to sleep because you are so exhausted. In the morning I would be ready to kill him, as they often bayoneted people on the front line.

  “Going to sleep on the front line is awful, and every night we both went to sleep.” They also disagreed about the size of the foxhole. Arlin wanted it deep, long and narrow, so a grenade couldn’t be tossed in it. His foxhole buddy “wanted [it] to be comfortable and big.” How can a foxhole be comfortable?

  “A good friend of mine awakened with a Jap getting ready to kill my foxhole buddy.” Arlin’s friend jumped up and couldn’t get to his rifle, so he knocked the Jap out with his helmet. Then he got to his rifle and killed him.

  “This guy jumped down in my foxhole and said, ‘My foxhole buddy goes to sleep every night.’” Arlin said his foxhole buddy did too. So they were able to switch foxhole buddies, so their lives were not in more danger.

  Arlin and his platoon were foxholed down in a valley of sand. “They first tried to bring supplies over to us by truck,” he said. “The Japanese knocked out the trucks. Then they tried to bring them over by jeep, but they knocked them out too. So now they are short on food and ammunition. Now they were trying it by using men, and only one got through—probably twenty to twenty-five men. We were watching them kill those guys.” There was a cliff above, and they were firing on them from above. The one who got through asked Arlin if he would pass out the mail to his outfit. Arlin said, “Yes, I will.” So the guy said, “I got to get back before dark, or I will get shot by my own men.”

  “I was sending it up by air mail—tearing off the corner and putting sand in it, and then calling out a name. One guy had three letters. I called and called to no avail. I thought that maybe he was across this ravine on the next ridge. So I stood up to call him. We were on a ridge where we were shot from the cliff. You left your foxhole by jumping up and rolling past the line of fire. I was stupid. I was passing it out by air mail. Arlin called, ‘Poppin.’ Poppin was a soldier who had a letter.

  Were you ever injured?

  About this time I felt this thing on my jaw. When I put my hand up, I was bleeding profusely. This red-complexioned guy turned completely white when he saw me, because he had lost his whole fire team a few days before that. I said, ‘I think I have been shot.’

  “It didn’t hurt except where it burned my neck. The other guy went to find a corpsman. Then I had to get back across that valley. The corpsman wrapped me. They couldn’t get tape to stick because of my beard. He had to wrap it first one way, then another. It looked like my head had been half blown off.

  “Getting back across this no man’s land from the ridge, I would look for shell holes and zigzag across that way. I was looking for a command post so I could get everything taken care of. There was a guy where a shell had torn his chin off, and his face was covered with blood. ‘I am heading for the command post,’ [I said]. ‘Come with me, and I will get you there.’ So I led him back to the command station. The next morning the bandages bled, and this side of my head looked like it had been blown off. I saw a guy from my outfit and gave him the three letters. He said, ‘I will get those to him. Thank you.’

  “About nine o’clock in the morning, they loaded us in a jeep made into [an] ambulance and took us to the beach. We were waiting for someone to take us to the ship. Everyone said, ‘We don’t have orders to pick up the wounded.’ We were there until two o’clock in the afternoon. Nobody would take us to the hospital ship. Finally this corpsman said, ‘The next sailor that comes by will take you guys, or he’s not leaving this island.’ This guy came by, and the corpsman told him to take us to the ship. Again, the sailor says, ‘I don’t have orders to pick up wounded.’

  “He pulled the bolt on his carbine and said, ‘You have your orders now. If you don’t take these guys back to the hospital ship, you are never leaving this island.’ He said, ‘OK, I’ll take them back.’

  “They took the wounded over to the hospital ship on a Higgins boat. A guy with a megaphone dropped a net down in the Higgins boat that we were in. ‘All you guys that can climb, go ahead and climb on up and get aboard,’ [he said]. They had tw
o corpsmen down in the boat with the wounded. I started climbing the net when the guy with the megaphone said, ‘Don’t let the guy with the bloody head climb.’ They pulled me back down and made me lay down flat. If I don’t get to see the horizon line, then I get seasick. I didn’t want to get sick and choke. If I start to vomit, I will choke to death.

  “When the corpsmen were working with another guy, I started climbing up the netting. Again they were able to reach me, but this time they stuck me with a needle, and I floated back down. When I awoke, I was aboard the ship. This was my exit from Iwo Jima.

  “I was here for three weeks. I went to the hospital on Guam. It was monsoon season, and it poured down rain. They delivered my sea bag, and nothing in it was worth keeping except the Bible the Griffin War Mothers had sent to me.” Everything else in the bag was trashed—his clothes, the shorthand note from the waitress in the café in Hawaii, his shoes, and other things—except the Bible, which he had read every night since he’d left home. He was indeed a strange marine.

  “After I came back from the hospital, everyone was acting strangely. I was sent down to have work done on my jaw.” He was mistakenly sent to a psych ward. After he was reassigned to another ward, “the guy next to me was studying to be a Methodist minister. Out of fifty men in his outfit, only three were not wounded or killed.

  “After I left the hospital, I returned to my outfit. We were training for the invasion of Japan. We would have invaded Japan on November 1, 1945. We knew where we were going to attack...everything. Instead we went into Japan as occupation troops. I was acting sergeant. We had a new lieutenant in Japan. My guys on guard kept complaining that this lieutenant kept trying to surprise the guys on guard. You have to scare him badly enough that he won’t come climbing by. They both had Browning rifles. When they said, ‘Halt, halt, halt,’ the lieutenant about died, and he could see sixty rounds coming his way. Well, that stopped that. He never came down through the hills again.”

  Where were you stationed in Japan?

  “The southernmost part of Japan, Kyushu. Our marine division was disbanded. The captain came around and said, ‘You do some sketching, don’t you?’ Mostly they were paintings of guys’ girlfriends. He asked, ‘Could you take an aerial photograph of this section we are in and make a map out of it?’” Arlin thought, I haven’t done maps since the seventh grade. “So I made a map of that area.” The captain also asked, “Could you take this map and an interpreter and go up in the hills and find the caves where things are stored and the building where things are stored? Then turn the map over and survey what is in all these things.”

  Arlin said, “We did this. They had lots left to fight with. The interpreter asked, ‘Want to ride back to camp?’” They found this little train or tractor. He drove it back to camp for all the guys to see. “It was used to haul torpedoes down to the submarines during the war.”

  My Only Regret

  “This captain who did legal things in the military wanted me to go with him to collect war crimes materials. ‘I think you would be handy to have along,’ [he said]. ‘Do you drive?’ Yes, I drive. ‘I would like to bring you along with me. You have enough points to go home. It might extend the time you might be overseas. Undoubtedly six months, and maybe as much as a year. Well, we will be in Formosa and Korea and down in the islands. The orders for you to go home will come here, and we may not be here.’ Oh, I wanted to go home. I always thought since what is a year in this ninety-year period? What a fool I was.” Instead he went to Nagasaki for three months.

  Do you think we should have dropped the bomb on Japan?

  “It was necessary to stop the war. They were well prepared to fight. Oh my, yes. We had prepared to invade Japan before the bombs were dropped.”

  Wilbur Meyer – US Navy

  “Two days later, this same Jap sub sunk the USS Indianapolis.”

  Wilbur was eating lunch at Edwards Drive-In on Indianapolis’s south side. He was wearing his hat with the USS Catfish on the front—a sure indicator that he was a WWII veteran. An interview was scheduled for the next day, September 11—it seemed like a fitting day. Wilbur was born on January 20, 1924, so he is ninety-three years old and very sharp about details.

  What do you remember about Pearl Harbor?

  He related a story in which he was working at a filling station on that Sunday morning. A fellow came in and said, “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Wilbur said, “Where in the hell is Pearl Harbor?” He went on to say, “It was coming... Germany and Japan were sneaky. I don’t trust the Japanese. They are like a pit bull—they will turn on you without you knowing it.”

  Wilbur was in the Navy for forty-two months, from December 23, 1942, to February 15, 1946. He was eighteen when he went into the navy and went to Great Lakes for boot camp. He went to service school as a machinist. His first ship was the USS Protector ARS-14. He was assigned to the engine room and went to Alaska. It was a repair and salvage ship that picked up sunken landing craft and anything that was underwater.

  In February 1944 he volunteered for submarine duty. Wilbur went to sub school in New London, Connecticut. He asked for new construction, so he got the Catfish around February 1945. Construction started on the Catfish on January 6, 1944. It was launched on November 16, 1944. The men slept on barges while it was being built. They practiced on simulators so they would be ready when it was completed. He was a “plankie”—that is, when you commission a boat, you put the boat in commission.

  He played a lot of basketball for the sub basketball team. In January 1945 their team was ranked thirteenth. He played a lot of ball waiting for the Catfish to be commissioned.

  Japan

  Wilbur said, “We went to the South Pacific, 4 May 1945, Key West, Panama, Pearl Harbor, and [I] was assigned to Guam. On August 8 the first war patrol of the Catfish, and it was sent on a special mission to locate a minefield off Kyushu, Japan.”

  Wilbur went on to say, “We had the new special underwater equipment, plotting mine fields—sound gear or mine plotting sound gear. Mines were put in a pattern. They [the Japanese] knew where they were, but we didn’t. It worked fine straight ahead but didn’t work so well off to the peripheral. The mine cables would scrape against the side of the hull. The cables were attached to the mine and went down three or four feet.”

  In one story he told, Wilbur and his crew were trapped for three or four hours about fifty miles from Nagasaki, near the southern end of Japan, where the atomic bomb was dropped. They couldn’t find their way out of the minefield. Wilbur said, “The auxiliary officer thought he might have to relieve Captain Overton because he was getting antsy.” Finally, they worked their way out and found an opening to escape the minefield.

  Guam

  In another incident they left Guam about July 28 for station. Two days after that, the USS Indianapolis was sunk. “A Japanese sub fired two torpedoes at us. They had to go to a hard right to split them. The order was ‘all ahead flak, hard right rudder’ toward the torpedoes. The captain came running into the control room. We knew what was happening. The torpedoes were coming toward the starboard bow.” Wilbur explained, “When a torpedo is coming toward a sub, you need to turn and split them. They missed us by about twenty-five feet.” The Japanese sub commander was interviewed about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and he said they had missed a sub two earlier, which was the Catfish. Wilbur said, “Two days later this same Jap sub sunk the USS Indianapolis.”

  Wilbur was called Red in the navy, since he had red hair. His job on the sub was to blow the water out of the hole. He was the high-pressure man. If you blow negative—blow water out to go up. Always repeat what they said to make sure of the commands.

  The captain of the Catfish, Captain Bill Overton, was called in the inquest about the USS Indianapolis. He was asked, “Why didn’t you report the near miss of the Japanese sub?”

  Captain Overton replied, “I am here, aren’t I?” The captain was very conservative. He had sealed orders—they tell what to do, and the orde
rs didn’t say to engage the sub. “He felt it was more important to plot minefields instead of [playing] cops and robbers,” said Wilbur.

  After reading In Harm’s Way, by Doug Stanton, one question stands out: could things have ended differently for the Indianapolis if the captain of the Catfish had reported their encounter with the Japanese sub?

  On July 1, 1971, the Catfish was transferred to Argentina. It was renamed the Santa Fe. Wilbur said it was involved in the British action about Argentina and sunk at dockage during the short Falkland Islands war. Wilbur said, “I wore a black armband to school for three days.” It was towed to deep water and sunk. That was the end of the Catfish!

  As a sidebar, Wilbur said, “The Catfish was out of radio contact for a week while on the way to Argentina.” They went into some place and partied for a week, then went on to deliver the sub to Argentina. Wilbur said, “It [the Catfish] was the flagship of the Argentina navy. They had one sub and one cruiser. I knew they were in trouble!”

  What do you think about dropping the bomb on Japan?

  “Truman made a wise decision. We would have killed a lot of Japanese and our soldiers. They would never have surrendered. They were superstitious and thought the world was coming to an end when the bomb was dropped.”

  When Wilbur came back home, he continued his college education at Indiana State. He’d had one quarter done in 1942 when he’d joined the navy. He got a year and a half credit from the navy, for sub construction and diesel electric. He changed his major to industrial arts and PE. He became a secondary school teacher at the smallest school in Indiana, near Greensburg. There were fifty-nine students in the whole school. Then he taught at schools in Sunman and Plymouth, Indiana. Finally he taught industrial arts at Franklin Township from December 1956 to 1986, when he retired from teaching.