The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation From Hometown, USA-Volume I: Voices of the Pacific Theater
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THE THINGS
OUR
FATHERS SAW
The UNTOLD STORIES OF THE
WORLD WAR II GENERATION
FROM HOMETOWN, USA
Volume I:
Voices of the Pacific Theater
Matthew A. Rozell
Woodchuck Hollow Press
Hartford · New York
Copyright © 2015 by Matthew A. Rozell. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following: ‘A Rain of Ruin’ previously published by Andy Doty in Backwards Into Battle as ‘Into Combat’/ ‘They’re Running Out of Gas’; and various short quotations credited to other previously published sources. Please see author notes.
The conclusions reached in this work are solely those of the author and should not be attributed to any of the institutions mentioned in this book.
Information at woodchuckhollowpress@gmail.com.
Maps by Susan Winchell-Sweeney.
Photographic portraits of Robert Addison, Daniel Lawler, Dante Orsini and Gerald West used courtesy of Robert H. Miller.
Front Cover: “Marines Under Fire, Tarawa, November 1943”. Official USMC photograph. USMC Archives. Used with permission.
Back Cover: 27th Infantry Division, Saipan, July 1944. Signal Corps., United States Army. New York State Military Museum. Used with permission.
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rozell, Matthew A., 1961-
Title: The things our fathers saw: the untold stories of the World War II generation from hometown, USA-voices of the Pacific Theater / Matthew A. Rozell.
Description: Hartford, NY: Woodchuck Hollow Press, 2015. | Series: The untold stories of the World War II generation from hometown, USA-voices of the Pacific Theater, vol. 1. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015920700 | ISBN 978-0-9964800-0-0 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-0-9964800-1-7 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American. | World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Pacific Ocean. | United States. Marine Corps--Biography. | Military history, Modern--20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Veterans. | HISTORY / Military / World War II.
Classification: LCC D810.V42 R69 2015 (print) | LCC D810.V42 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/8173--dc23.
www.matthewrozell.com
www.teachinghistorymatters.com
Printed in the United States of America
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW
For the mothers who saw their children off to war,
And for those who keep the memory alive.
27th Infantry Division. Saipan, July, 1944.
‘An abandoned Japanese baby is adopted by front line medical unit of the 27th Div. The baby was found with a scalp wound, in the arms of its dead mother, by a tank crew during the fighting below Mt. Tapotchau.’
New York State Military Museum.
Dying for freedom isn’t the worst that could happen.
Being forgotten is.
― Susie Stephens-Harvey, reflecting on her brother,
Stephen J. Geist
MIA 9-26-1967
I hope you’ll never have to tell a story like this,
when you get to be 87.
I hope you’ll never have to do it.
― Marine veteran of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima,
to his teenage interviewer
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW
The Storytellers (in order of appearance):
Harry ‘Randy’ Holmes
Gerald Ross
Joseph Fiore
Dante Orsini
Joseph Minder
Richard M. Gordon
Dorothy Schechter
John A. Leary
Robert Addison
Gerald West
Thomas H. Jones
Alvin Peachman
John Parsons
Ralph Leinoff
Walter Hooke
Irving Schechter
Nicholas Grinaldo
John Sidur
Daniel Lawler
John Murray
James Butterfield
Robert Blakeslee
Sanford Berkman
Arthur LaPorte
Herbert Altshuler
Walter Hammer
Andy Doty
Bruce Manell
Katherine Abbott
Mary Butterfield
John Norton
Joseph Marcino
THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Hometown, USA
Twilight
‘A Nightmare like World War II’
Hardwired to History
A Higher Purpose
A Sunday Morning
‘Where the Heck is Pearl Harbor?’
The Day of Infamy
The Defenders
Retreat to Bataan
Retreat to Corregidor
The Bataan Death March
The Fall of Corregidor
Captivity
‘Fifty Men to a Bucket of Rice’
Into the Fray
Practicing for the Doolittle Raid
Internment
Miracle at Midway
A Turning Point-Guadalcanal
22 Miles with a Pack and a Rifle
The Landings
‘Confusion to the Extreme’
The Battle of the Tenaru
Edson’s Raiders Come Ashore
The Battle of Bloody Ridge
The Battle of the Matanikau River
Malaria
Striking at the Serpent’s Head
Sea Action
The Vast Pacific
The Destroyer Escort
Rescue
Captivity-Year 2
‘Someone is Getting a Cruel Beating’
‘Made to Dig Their Own Graves’
‘The Mothers Back Home’
Islands of the Damned
Tarawa
The Marshall Atolls
The Marianas—Saipan, Guam, and Tinian
The Hell of Peleliu
Captivity-Year 3: The Hellships
The Holds of Hell
Torpedoed
39 Days in the Hole
The Sands of Iwo Jima
Flag of our Fathers
‘I’ve got a good one for you, Doc.’
The Guys Left Behind
Captivity-Year 4: The Copper Mine
Hell, Revisited
Mittens Made of Grass
A Rain of Ruin
The First Mission
Into the Air
The Bomb Run
Perdition
The Death of the President
Inferno
The 15th Mission
Into the Ocean
The Unwritten Rule
The Morality of War
The Kamikazes
Crossing the ‘T’
Ulithi
Setting Sail for Okinawa
‘We’re Going to Be the Target’
‘I Lost Many Friends’
Typhoon of Steel-Okinawa
‘Mud and Total Extinction’
The Children in the Cave
Evacuating the Wounded
‘You’ve got nothing to work with, Jimmy.’
Redemption<
br />
Unbroken
‘A Question Until The End of Time’
Bundles from Heaven
The View from Tokyo Bay
The Redeemed Captive
‘Lost is the Youth We Knew’
Resurrection
Finding Randy
About this book/ Acknowledgements
NOTES
Preface
In the study of World War II, we are tempted to teach and learn the history as if the way things turned out was somehow preordained, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Americans and their allies were destined to win the war from the outset. Because we know how events turned out, we tend to read the history with a sense of inevitability. Nothing could be further from the truth. By listening to persons who lived through these troubling times, we gain critical insights that make the study of the past all the more relevant; indeed, I would argue, more urgent. More importantly, their recollections amplify crucial points that should be essential to our understanding of World War II, but are often overlooked.
It is easy to forget that during World War II the United States would be essentially engaging in two full-blown wars at the same time, taxing America’s resources and families to the hilt. Many had expected to be in the fight sooner or later in Europe where it had raged for two years; few expected it to begin in the Pacific. But that is where the story of American involvement begins, and it is also where it would end.
So imagine your world now, and turn it upside down. In this narrative, we focus on the stories of the Pacific War as told by more than 30 survivors who were fortunate enough to return. This is what they saw, and brought back with them to the communities surrounding “Hometown, USA”.
“Near Falls-Finch, Pruyn & Co., Inc. on Left”
Glens Falls-Hometown USA
LOOK Magazine, 1943-44.
Courtesy Crandall Public Library,
Folklife Center, Glens Falls N.Y.
Introduction:
Hometown, USA
During the greatest conflict humanity has ever known, a cluster of small towns in upstate New York sent its sons and daughters off to war. In 1945, after six years of savage fighting, the devastation was unprecedented and incalculable. Between sixty and eighty-five million people—the exact figure will never be known—would be dead. Overseas, the victors would be forced to deal with rubble choked cities and tens of millions of people on the move, their every step dogged with desperation, famine and moral confusion. American servicemen, battle hardened but weary, would be forced to deal with the collapse of civilization and brutally confronted with the evidence of industrial scale genocide.
We walked around. The people, the civilians, were looking at us wondering what we were going to do to them. And, oh my God, the scars on their faces and burns. Oh God, it was sickening. Women and children—it was just sickening.
World War II would become the gatepost on which the rest of the 20th century would swing.
Just what did our fathers see?
*
The story of World War II has been told many times, but only recently have we allowed those who actually lived it to speak for themselves. The narratives in this book are reflective of many of the places in the United States 75 years ago, but most have never been heard before. They are drawn from those who returned to the communities surrounding the “Falls” in the Hudson River some 200 miles north of where the river joins the sea at New York City. Over a span of six months in 1943 and 1944, LOOK Magazine dispatched a team of photographers to Glens Falls, New York, and its environs for a patriotic six-article series on life in what was then dubbed “Hometown, USA” to a national audience.[1]
“Children pledging allegiance to the flag at Broad Street School”. LOOK Magazine,1943-44. Courtesy Crandall Public Library,
Folklife Center, Glens Falls N.Y.
Esthetically and demographically, it seemed an apt decision. The counties on either side of the waterfalls on the Hudson River, Washington and Warren, give rise to the Adirondack Mountains and the pristine waters of Lake George to the north. To the east lay Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont; just to the south, Saratoga with its historic racetrack, a summertime destination for over 100 years. Beyond Saratoga lay the industrial city of Troy and the state capital of Albany, less than an hour away by rail or automobile. In the early days these counties played pivotal roles in the formation of the United States, given their geographic strategic importance on the Great Warpath, the almost unbroken stretch of water linking New York City with Canada. It was around the vicinity of the “Falls” that watercraft had to be taken out and portaged. Two major fortifications were constructed here by the British during the French and Indian War, and this was the setting for James Fenimore Cooper’s classic The Last of the Mohicans. Half a generation later, a British army sweeping through here would be repulsed by county sons at the Battle of Saratoga.
Following the American Revolution, the early settlers engaged in agricultural pursuits such as dairy farming and later, sheep raising. Mill based operations on the river were centered around the upper falls at Glens Falls and the lower falls just downstream at Hudson Falls and evolved into significant lumber and papermaking operations. With the opening of the Erie and Champlain Canals two generations after the Revolution, new worlds opened up, but the “North Country” counties remained relatively small in population. Living here required hard work in all four seasons, but it was a quiet, close‑knit place to raise a family, like many rural areas across America.
Then the war came.
*
Like most every other community in America, from the outside this region seemed untouched by the war. As documented by LOOK, life went on to its rhythmic beat—children went off to school, the mills hummed, department stores filled their storefront windows, and farmers sowed and reaped according to the seasons. The beat quickened as young men and women stirred to volunteer, notices arrived in the post box, and many left town for the first time in their lives. Life went on but was now accentuated by rationing, victory gardens, blackouts, and paper and scrap drives. Soon, the arrival of telegrams announcing sons missing or captured, teary phone calls from military hospitals, or worse, the static rings of the front porch doorbell would drive this war home into the heart of “Hometown USA” with the fury of hammer blows. Things would never be the same again. Like the ‘hard times’ of the Great Depression in the decade preceding, this war affected every family. Few American communities would remain unscathed by the emotional detritus of World War II.
“General Electric’s Fort Edward plant is the only completely government financed factory in the Glens Falls area. A half of its workers live in Glens Falls. Above, Jean Fitzgerald, Eleanor Penders, Phoebe Francato and Ruth Lopen test synchronized motors for automatic gun turrets on our largest bombers.” LOOK, 1944.
There was a family that lost two sons in World War II. The family got a telegram on a Monday that one of the boys was killed, and that Thursday they got another telegram saying that his brother had been killed. There were about 35 young men from Granville who were killed in World War II, and I knew every one of them.
Thus the war came, and went. Of the sixteen million Americans who donned uniforms, nearly three-quarters of them went overseas. Most returned home to a nation on the cusp of a change not imaginable to their younger selves who had struggled through the Great Depression. The GI Bill of Rights brought new opportunities everywhere and the economy began to boom. It was best to forget the war and to get on with normal life.
I’ve had a nightmare down through the years. When I worked at the paper mill sometimes I would be working on something, with all the noise and whatnot, and I would go back in the battles and I could almost smell the gunpowder. I would see all the action for a few seconds. If you had waved your hand in front of me, I would not have known you were there. I was right back there.
“Normal” life. Except that maybe it was not going to be that easy.
*
&n
bsp; Twilight
Nearly seventy-five years after the beginning of those dark days, the twilight of living memory is now at hand. Day after day we open the newspaper to see that more veterans have passed on, and we are suddenly on the other side of the “bell curve” of deaths per day—the downhill slope. Nearly 550 passed each day for 2014. In just 20 years, the World War II generation will have all gone the way of the veterans of World War I and the Civil War.
I don’t know exactly when I was struck by the notion that that this day would come, though on some cosmic level I have been planning for it for years. I was born twenty years after the war began, and I grew up in the company of men and women who fought in World War II. Probably like most kids my age, I had no idea of what they did, and like most kids, I did not think to ask. I was raised in this sleepy hamlet on the “Falls” in many ways not unlike their generation, an innocent in an intact home surrounded by brothers and sisters and community-minded parents. I seemed to draw strength from the study of history at a young age, spending my summer mornings wandering in the woods down near the waterfalls that gave the town its name, searching for evidence of colonial skirmishes and settlements of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. As I got older I became interested in the conflicts of the twentieth century but remained blissfully unaware of the veterans who were all around me. Some of my teachers in school were veterans of World War II but I don't remember anyone ever specifically launching into a story about their time in the conflict. It's also possible that they did, but I was not paying attention.
In the late spring of 1984, all of that would change. On television I watched as the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings was being commemorated over in France. Thousands of American veterans joined their Allied and German counterparts for a solemn tribute and reunion tours of the battlefields where they had fought decades earlier. Many of these men would have now been just hitting their stride in retirement. It was also the first time in nearly 40 years that many would be back together to ruminate on their reawaking past. And here it was that I woke up, and was moved.