Defining times still echo 60 years after V-J Day

[thedrifter]

Defining times still echo 60 years after V-J Day
Youthful warriors, now aged, shaped their lives fighting the Japanese
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star

Even for those who were there — on jungle mountainsides, flying over Japan, amid the sweltering stench of field hospitals — the war’s end feels like a hazy, crazy dream.

These 60 years after Emperor Hirohito gave in after the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and V-J Day finally came, the Americans who lived to tell World War II stories often recall them like something out of a book they read long ago.

For some survivors, the tale holds an essentially happy ending. World saved from tyranny. Uncle Sam marches through Europe and steams across the Pacific. Our narrators are spared, even if too many friends and too much innocence were lost along the way.

Finally comes V-J Day — noon Aug. 15 Tokyo time — with victory over Japan punching everyone’s return ticket home. The country got back to its destiny of prosperity and influence. This generation — was it the greatest? — would stretch out into suburbs and commence a baby boom that begat station wagons, TV dinners, disco and lattes.

They generally find it hard to reconcile that it was these same creaky bodies that dodged mortars while scrambling over coral reefs, fought off malaria and managed to live on skimpy canned rations that make today’s vacuum-packed field meals look downright gourmet.

When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, most of these kids were still in high school. After that day of infamy, most knew they’d end up in the fight.

“I wanted to be a hero. I wanted lots of medals. I wanted to be a Sergeant York or something,” recalled Fred Miller.

Instead, the Marines sent the stocky St. Joseph kid to baker’s school — seemingly doomed to toil behind the lines and out of the glory. But eager and not yet 18, he pressed and soon found himself one of the Corps’ youngest sergeants and working his way through swamp and enemy fire on the island of New Britain off Papua New Guinea.

You’re so scared, he thought to himself. You’re a coward.

“Then later on I heard another guy say, ‘How come I’m the only one who’s scared?’ … He wasn’t the only one.”

For four months he endured the island’s steam-bath jungle, happy for those times he could get to a beach to scrub clothes and body with sand. His company, withered and weary, went to the island of Pavuvu to rest. Some rest. Always flooding, everything rotting, and he was back on kitchen patrol, struggling to put meat on his crew with dehydrated potatoes and powdered eggs.

Then came Peleliu. In his company of 237 men, only 85 would avoid becoming casualties. He was not among the luckiest. Barely an hour into the landing, an officer sent him running not farther inland, but back toward the water to make contact with a nearby Marine unit.

On the way, he stumbled and started cussing himself for being so clumsy. Then he saw the blood on his pants. He hadn’t been a klutz. He’d been shot. Crouched in a hole, he worked to stop the bleeding from his ripped left thigh and punctured left hand.

Finally, two men from the other unit were in the hole with him.

“I immediately felt like the most secure bastard in the world. … I had two Marines there with me.”

Farm boy Hank Paustian had never been more than 150 miles from his family’s home near Buffalo, Kan. The Marines quickly whisked him to New Guinea, where his skin turned yellow from anti-malaria pills.

He was a replacement, a battlefield rookie amid combat-tested troops. He wondered whether he could prove he was as good as any other Marine.

His first test came in New Britain in late 1943, where firefights proved oddly stimulating.

“It was kind of a strange sensation, almost an exhilaration,” Paustian said. “I’ve heard people say that men who played football felt that way during their first real game. You’re highly aware.”

To this day, he can remember the mildewed scent of the jungle, the reek of decomposing bodies. He can’t recall what battle actually sounded like, just that it was unbelievably loud.

As for the enemy, they struck Paustian as almost another species. Unrelenting, they lived on less food and toted heavier weapons and had less reason for hope.

“In hindsight, I admired them. They didn’t seem human to me at the time. They were almost like varmints. It took years for me to think of them differently.”

He survived a bout with malaria, three stir-crazy months on Pavuvu, the bedlam of landing on Peleliu and a few anxious weeks on Okinawa. There was the night by a ridge with the click, click, click sound of Japanese digging beneath the very hill he was ducking behind. The next night, surrounded on the same ridge, he took machine gun fire to both legs.

After a 100-yard crawl to his comrades, a ride to a burial vault commandeered for the wounded, and a float out to the USS Solace hospital ship, he ended up stretched out with a cast on his right leg up to the hip.

He recalls lying immobile aboard a vessel under steady kamakazi attack. “I felt completely helpless.”

Virginia Summers joined the Army after nursing school in the Kansas City area, casually assuming she’d be sent to Europe to patch up boys fighting the Nazis. She ended up, instead, steaming through the Panama Canal and bound for the palm trees and snakes of the Pacific.

In Australia, she learned a little about anesthetics. In New Guinea, she patched up troops hit by gunfire or jungle infections.

“One guy, his flesh just rotted away. Oh boy. That smell. Bad, bad.”

There was another guy from an air transport unit she met at a dance. They were sweet on each other. His plane was lost in the mountains, and his name is lost to her now.

“He was a nice fellow,” she said.

Eventually she was on to the Philippines and the freshly wounded who came with guts full of shrapnel, limbs dangling by tendons, flesh seared by fire, a man gored by an ox.

“I don’t remember being disturbed by it. It was what you did.”

Don Scovill first fought the war in a California defense plant, having left the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Co. factory in Kansas City for adventure and better pay. He was soon drafted into the Army (relieved, actually, because he assumed his poor eyesight would keep him out of the service).

On Oahu, he left an ordnance unit after seeing a bulletin board note that another outfit needed the typing skills he’d picked up in high school. That took him to Saipan.

“When I got there, there were a jillion dead bodies around. The flies were everywhere and so were the mosquitoes. … To eat, you had to brush the flies, take a bite, brush the flies, take a bite.”

The island still held isolated Japanese soldiers who would make desperate, if ineffectual, attacks. Meanwhile, he was typing up classified reports of upcoming invasions. He talks sheepishly of his stenographic role in Iwo Jima — a landing that took far more time and blood than U.S. planners expected.

continued.....

[thedrifter]

“I hate to admit it to the guys who were fighting and dying,” he said, “but I had it pretty nice.”

It was a long way to the South Pacific from a Basehor, Kan., farm for Glenn Knapp.

Especially when he sailed first to North Africa and a torpedo sunk his transport ship, the Hugh L. Scott, off Casablanca. Knapp saw his roughest and final action on Saipan in June 1944. He was a Navy medical corpsman dashing with comrades to help Marines wounded by sniper fire.

He immediately needed a corpsman himself. A bullet sliced under his left armpit through his rib cage and then ripped apart his right arm.

“I was ready to meet my maker.”

Instead he made it to a hospital ship bed on which two previous occupants had died. The doctors took away his arm but left him wondering: How will people accept me? How will I take care of myself?

The questions are still being answered today, but his initial recovery took more than a year in an amputee ward near San Francisco. There, he would learn from Arthur Murray dance instructors how to reclaim the balance lost with the disappearance of a limb.

“You lean forward on the balls of your feet about two inches. Then you can move any direction you want.”

There stood Johnny Rodriguez, the kid from Wichita, ready to level his weapon on a fellow GI from the 24th Infantry Division in fall 1944. Japanese troops were mounting an offensive near Leyte in the Philippines, and the trembling man Rodriguez was looking at was heading out on his own retreat.

“He told me, ‘They’re coming,’ ” Rodriguez said. “I told him, ‘I know they’re coming. We still have to stay here.’

“He said, ‘I’m scared.’

“I told him, ‘I’m scared, too. If you leave, I’ll shoot you.’ ”

The next spring he was doing scout work on Mindanao in the Philippines and carrying a “Tommy gun” — great for flooding a nearby target with bullets but without much range. Pinned down, he yelled to a lieutenant bringing up a tank and thought a stone had hit him in the leg. Then he felt something warm.

Even during evacuation, he wanted to get back to his buddies.

“They gave me a shot to calm me down. I was hallucinating. I could hear myself talking, but it was like listening to somebody else.”

Jim Stokes spent much of the war training to be an engineer at colleges near his Charlotte, N.C., home. Finally, in spring 1945 he was an ensign aboard the USS Erben, a destroyer with a crew of about 300 and four high-pressure boilers to keep running.

Maneuvering off Okinawa in a carrier group, he watched the onslaught of kamikaze attacks. Some would climb impossibly high and tear straight down at their targets. Others, painted dark blue to mimic the water, would skim low with the sun at their backs.

“They were everywhere in the sky sometimes.”

The ship would start out firing its biggest guns, tossing up shells five inches in diameter. The closer a plane got, the more smaller guns would add new threads to the curtain of defensive fire. One pilot nearly hit the Erben, but tailed off after only strafing.

“He was close enough that you could see the gasoline dripping out of his plane where we’d hit him. That was close enough.”

Clyde Bysom started the war building B-29 bombers in Wichita, and ended it flying in one.

He enlisted in the Air Corps and was shuttled in Col. Paul Tibbets’ elite 393rd Squadron of the 309th Bomb Wing as a tail gunner.

He didn’t leave the States until June 1945 and ended up on Tinian — an atoll where the Tibbets group was given special accommodations and extra elbow room.

Each mission ferried a single 5.5-ton bomb. Bysom flew five.

Cruising peacefully about 25,000 feet in the “Some Pumpkins,” he passed the time listening to radio music and reading the New Testament.

Then one day the guys on the Enola Gay took off on what was clearly a special mission. Three other bombers scouted ahead, doing photo reconnaissance and weather surveillance.

“No one knew what it was until it came over the radio after the bomb went off.”

That would be the atomic bomb, Hiroshima’s doom.

Next, Charles Sweeney’s crew took off, and it was Nagasaki’s turn. Still, Japan’s surrender was not immediate. And even on Aug. 15, 1945, “Some Pumpkins” flew on.

They knew the end was near, that an abort order might come if the war ended before they dropped their large, conventional explosive on the Nagoya Arsenal. The call, in fact, came, but minutes late.

The bomb bay was empty.

Time and again, Wally Hoverder has told his grown children that they would not be around had it not been for those atomic bombs.

He spent the summer of 1945 in the Cagayan Valley in Luzon, Philippines, scaling mountains, fighting Japanese he often couldn’t see, and backed by artillery that so miscalculated the effects of the heavy humidity that U.S. shells seemed as likely to hit American positions as those of the enemy.

It took perhaps a week for news of Hiroshima to reach his unit, but it didn’t slow the nonstop jungle fight.

“They bombed and bombed and bombed. The whole mountain would shake.”

Finally came word of the surrender. The Americans broadcast it over loudspeakers, but the Japanese soldiers didn’t buy it. They kept attacking supply lines, making random raids.

“You stayed armed and ready. The war might have been over for some people, but not for us.”

Many of the veterans in this story have returned to the Pacific isles where their youth was defined.They developed a different perspective about death. Paustian, for instance, remembered losing comrades in combat time and again with more acceptance than sorrow. How different, he said, death seems in war.

“It was not like if you lost a friend now in a car accident. Their loss means a lot more to me today than it did at that time.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Event honors Navajo Code Talkers

Thursday, August 18th 2005
By John R. Crane | Journal Staff Writer

Samuel Sandoval served five combat duties in the South Pacific during World War II as a Navajo Code Talker.

Monday night, he told his story to about 30 audience members during a presentation at the Cortez Cultural Center. The event was to commemorate Navajo Code Talker Day, which was Aug. 14.

Though President Ronald Reagan established Navajo Code Talker Day in 1982, few people were aware of the 400 or so Navajo Marines who transmitted the most secure information encryption during the South Pacific's bloody battles.

In 2000, the U.S. government recognized the Navajo Code Talkers with the highest civilian medal it can award - the Congressional Silver Medal.

During his presentation, Sandoval wondered aloud why code talkers did not receive a military medal.

Code talkers saved thousands of lives, using their native language to send messages after the Japanese broke many American codes. Philip Johnston came up with the idea of using Navajo language as code because of the language's complexity, lack of an alphabet and its isolation to the American Southwest. Johnston was the son of a missionary to Navajos and spoke the language fluently.

"Windtalkers," a 2002 film with Nicholas Cage, introduced the code talkers to mainstream America, Sandoval said. But it wasn't the most accurate account, he said.

"I don't remember wearing moccasins in combat," Sandoval said to a chuckling audience.

"One good thing about the movie is it made an awareness that there are such people as Navajo Code Talkers," he added.

Decades after World War II's 1945 end, the code remained highly classified. Military orders were not to tell anyone about the code talkers, Sandoval said.

"For 23 years, we couldn't talk about it," he said. "In 1968, it was declassified. That's why I'm telling this story." Four months after the war's end, the code talkers were kept in China in case something happened there, Sandoval said. He served with the 1st Marine Division in Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Guam, Palua Islands, Enewetak Atoll and Okinawa.

Sandoval said he had to memorize 818 words - all of them used in combat. But no one could carry a dictionary because it could get lost and fall into enemy hands, he said.

For the code talkers, Australians were identified by their naval hats, Sandoval said. Braided hair distinguished the Chinese from the Japanese. During communication, a Navajo Code Talker received messages sounding like a sequence of Navajo words that made no sense. He had to translate each word into its English counterpart. Next, he used only the English word's first letter in spelling.

For example, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all represented the letter "a." So "tsah" (needle), "wol-la-chee" (ant), "ah-keh-di-glini" (victor) and "tsah-ah-dzoh" (yucca) meant "Navy." Because the Navajos resembled their Asian enemies, they were sometimes mistaken for Japanese soldiers and captured by U.S. troops.

"If code talkers wandered off they'd get captured as Japanese (soldiers)," Sandoval said. "We couldn't say they were Navajo Code Talkers." As for telling the code talkers' story, the Navajo Code Talkers Association is working with a production company in Santa Fe to have a documentary called "Back to the Battlefield" made, Sandoval said. In light of the U.S. government's atrocities against Native Americans, Sandoval said he frequently asked himself why he joined the service. But he accepted his role in the military.

"I learned to not think of it negatively," he said. "I had a job to do." Sandoval said he spent 36 months overseas without coming home. Commanding officers told him he would go home after 12 months, 24 months, but they broke their word, Sandoval said.

"I gave up coming home after 24 months," he said. "I guess that's how indispensable we were in that war. They needed us." Information from www.nativeamericans.com was used for this story.

http://p089.ezboard.com/fthefontmanscommunityfrm22.showMessage?topicID=742 2.topic

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Lessons lurk in story of a Pacific battle
James P. Pinkerton
August 18, 2005

If you visit the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., you will see a strange place-name on the front of the monument, just above the words, "Uncommon Valor was a Common Virtue." The place is Peleliu, pronounced pel-le-lu. It's an island in the Pacific - a sweet-sounding name with a bitter history.

A new book, "Brotherhood of Heroes: The Marines at Peleliu, 1944 - The Bloodiest Battle of the Pacific War," by veteran journalist Bill Sloan, provides a valuable chronicle of that battle. It also provides an occasion to consider the role of old-fashioned ground combat in the era of high-tech machine war.

For the 1st Marine Division, Sept. 15, 1944, was yet another "D-Day." The phrase D-Day was not unique to the Normandy invasion a few months earlier; it was the generic term to designate the commencement of combat operations. Yet the other D-Days are unjustly neglected; no U.S. president has convened an international commemoration at Peleliu, where 1,656 Americans were killed in a month of fighting, for the purpose of capturing a 5-square-mile island. For comparison, that's almost as many deaths as the entire U.S. military has suffered in Iraq in 2 1/2 years.

Sloan ably recounts the deeds of men who went by nicknames such as Ack Ack, Snafu and Hillbilly. But there was nothing unserious about what the Marines did at Peleliu: Eight men earned Medals of Honor - five of them posthumously.

Yet, at the same time Sloan raises questions that reverberate all the way to the present. For example, then-Lt. Col. Lewis "Chesty" Puller, one of the legends in Corps history, winner of five Navy Crosses, comes off badly; he is undeniably brave, but he seems careless with the lives of his men.

Moreover, Sloan asks whether the invasion was even necessary. As the United States pursued its "island-hopping" strategy toward Japan, there was considerable doubt as to whether the 11,000 or so Japanese on Peleliu posed any threat to the Americans as they made their way across the Pacific. That is, U.S. ships and airplanes had already mostly swept the sea and skies of Japanese war machines; as Sloan notes, Peleliu's force-projection capacity had been "obliterated" by American air raids six months before the Marines' amphibious D-Day.

Nevertheless, the author observes, "Yet for an assortment of reasons - some strategic, some political, some emotional, and some, perhaps, merely vainglorious - plans for the invasion of Peleliu moved forward inexorably." But, even so, a big part of the plan fell short of completion; three days of naval bombardment before D-Day were unaccountably reduced to two days. Which opens up questions: Why was the military in such a rush? Were officers with names such as Chesty too eager to get onto the ground in search of glory?

As Sloan makes clear, by 1944 the Japanese had no chance of winning the war - but they kept fighting anyway, out of suicidal doggedness. Indeed, after Peleliu, the next island battles, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, were even more costly in American lives.

Over the years, U.S. thinking has shifted. Wars, according to current doctrine, must become less "labor intensive" and more "technology intensive." In this context, to be sure, dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima was a necessity; the quick Japanese surrender saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.

But today, in Iraq, the Marines still fight pretty much as they did 60 years ago: on foot, or in vulnerable vehicles. Fighting is still low tech. That's great for gung-ho heroism, but it's costly in lives and, as the polls show, in public support.

The America blanching at the cost of Iraq today is not the country that sustained Peleliu six decades ago, as well as a hundred other battles like it.

America's politico-military leadership will either have to change the way it fights wars, by substituting more machines for fewer people - or else deal with the fact that those wars will have to be brief and cheap.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Remembering World War II
By:Bill McGinty

Clearwater, Florida - The battle for Iwo Jima began on February 19th, 1945. American forces facing 22,000 Japanese stormed the beaches on would be known as D-Day in the Pacific. Nineteen-year-old Al Perry was one of the Marines of the 4th Division making their way on shore.

Alva Perry, WWII vet:
"Anyway, we got to Iwo Jima at about 4:00 in the morning and I'll never forget it as long as I live."

The island of Iwo Jima is only 4.5 miles long and just 2.5 miles wide, but with two small airfields on it, it was considered a great tactical location for both the Japanese and the Americans. The fighting was ferocious!

Alva Perry:
"Iwo Jima was one battle you fought every day hand to hand, every day!"

The Japanese had dug in. In fact, few American soldiers even saw the enemy during the fight.

Alva Perry:
"They hid in their caves, they had caves two and three thousand feet long, they even had a hospital in a cave. They had dug perfect cover on this island, they could take people to the hospital, they could do anything. They even had operating rooms there ... we couldn't find them, couldn't find them at all."

On February 20 1945, the Marines attacked the island's Mt. Suribachi in what would be a bloody three day fight. It would also provide one of the most remembered images of World War II.

Alva Perry:
"And we couldn't move. We didn't know where they were and when that flag went up. Everyone on the island cheered, the boats tooted their horns and man we were ready to fight some more."

The battle for Iwo Jima lasted 36 days; 6,891 Marines were killed and another 18,000 wounded. One of those killed was Eddie Bookwalter, Al Perry's best friend. A sniper shot him in the neck as they celebrated the end of the battle.

It's those people and moments that are still tough to talk about, even 60 years later.

Bill McGinty, Tampa Bay's 10 News

Ellie

[thedrifter]

In their 80s, WWII vets struggle to tell it all

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
Associated Press writer

VANCOUVER, Wash. — For 10 torturous days in 1943, Peter Chelemedos sailed a lifeboat across the open sea, desperately trying to find a sliver of land.

His ship, carrying war supplies, had been torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic. When no one came to the rescue, the crew set off in tiny lifeboats, sailing 1,000 miles until they hit Barbados, their scalps singed by the tropical sun. "The men used anything — handkerchiefs, undershirts. Even torn cuffs from their trousers to make coverings for their heads,'' he said.

Grasping the book he wrote about his time in the merchant marines, Chelemedos, 82, braved the far milder Washington sun to share this and other memories with other World War II veterans gathered here this weekend to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the war.

Sixteen million Americans served in World War II, and while a staggering 400,000 died in the conflict, far more returned home to lead full and productive lives. Now, the majority are pushing 80. Officials at Arlington National Cemetery estimate they are dying on the order of 1,200 a day, making large gatherings like this one among the last.

"This is it,'' said Mark Dewey, 49, a member of a local World War II historical reenactment society who was moved to tears by the stories he heard during the first two days of the reunion. "These guys are 80 years old. You've seen how they're getting around — walkers, oxygen tanks, wheel chairs.''

As the end draws near, many of the veterans spoke of the urgency of telling their stories — either for the first time, or else in greater detail than before.

"It means more to me to talk about it now,'' said Jack Sherman, 81, of Bend, Ore., who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the largest land battle in American history, drawing in more than 500,000 U.S. troops between Dec. 16, 1944 and Jan. 25, 1945.

For years, his son — who died at the age of 46 in 1993 — begged Sherman to speak about the war. "He said ‘Dad, please make a tape or something,''' recalls Sherman. "I told him ‘Shut up' and ‘Back off.' I wouldn't do it until he got ill and his kidneys failed him,'' he said, suddenly choked with emotion.

Now, even as his wife coaxed him to take a break for dinner, Sherman seemed eager to talk, recalling how during the duration of the battle he could not take off his boots, having seen several soldiers die after they removed their shoes. Their feet, aching from frost bite swelled to twice or three times their size, making it impossible to put their boots back on. "In the winter, without boots in the snow, you die,'' he said.

Norman Swanson, 80, a prisoner of war who spent two years behind enemy lines in Japan, spoke about his ordeal too, often glossing over the most painful parts. Asked to elaborate, he would occasionally pause to regain his composure, holding a pole to steady himself inside the POW tent.

He was a burly 16-year-old from Hood River, Ore., weighing 190 pounds when the Japanese captured Wake Island on Dec. 23, 1941, he said. He had gone to the island earlier that year to follow his brother as a carpenter's apprentice, hoping to earn a few bucks.

Some soldiers dreamt of women, he said. But for the 1,600 men taken to the hard labor camp in Shanghai, where they were put to work hauling dirt, it was food they thought about. After a while, their stomachs shrank so much, that it became dangerous to eat more than a small portion: "Once in a while, a guy would have a chance to get into the guards' barracks and pig out. Then, they'd die. Their bodies couldn't take it,''

After an hour of speaking, he cut himself off, saying: "This is the longest I've ever talked about this.'' Then softening, he said: "I want to document this.''

For Seattle-based Peter Chelemedos, it was in a poetry class at the local senior center that he began to explore the extraordinary events of Jan. 27, 1943.

"We were asked to write a poem about a sunny day,'' he said.

For some that might have evoked a summer outing. For him, it brought back the 10 days he spent sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the other men in the cramped lifeboat, his body tingling under the blazing sun.

Ellie

http://p089.ezboard.com/bthefontmanscommunity

[thedrifter]

Returning an honor
By Brian Wilson/Staff Writer

Randy James remembers the fight to gain control of Iwo Jima shortly after Marines stormed the Pacific island in 1945. Control would seesaw back and forth between the United States and Japan during the 36-day bloody fight.

James was wounded on the third day of the campaign, but that didn't stop him from moving forward. He couldn't stop.

"If you were able to walk, able to hold a rifle, no one got off the island," he said. "... I was in the sick bay just really a very short time."

The scars left from when shrapnel pierced his cheek have largely disappeared. But the memories remain.

Until recently, the Purple Heart he earned from the injury was also nowhere to be found. It had been lost sometime after it was belatedly awarded.

James, a Cleburne resident, has terminal cancer, and the Marine Corps League, with the help of U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, recently arranged for another Purple Heart to be awarded to the founder of Gotel Ministries. An update on his condition has been posted on the organization's Web site, www.gotel.org. James, 81, has a tumor on his right side that has displaced his right kidney. He also is restricted from talking too much as he receives hospice care.

On July 19, Ken Henry, commandant of the Longhorn Detachment of the Marine Corps League, asked Edwards' Cleburne office for help securing a Purple Heart. Last Monday, the medal was delivered to Edwards' office and then presented to James.

In a statement, Edwards praised James for his time in the military and the sacrifice required.

The Marine Corps League worked briskly to get a presentation together, and the medal was presented to James last week at his home.

"I didn't know this was all going on," James said. "I didn't know the [Longhorn] Detachment of the Marine Corps League was doing all this."

James' wife, Patsy Jo, said her husband was speechless.

"It was unbelievable," Randy James said of receiving a replacement medal. "It was unbelievable."

The Purple Heart is awarded to veterans wounded or killed in combat. During a recent visit at James' home, he talked about his memories of Iwo Jima and the difficulty of securing and maintaining control of the island.

But he deflected credit. Although he continued fighting after his injury, James pointed to those who lost their lives during the campaign.

"What really I want to emphasize ... [is] that those of us who returned do not consider ourselves heroes," James said. "The real heroes are those who are buried, that we left buried there at Iwo Jima."

A large parade was planned for those returning from overseas. There, James could have received his Purple Heart. But after being deployed for two years, the Marine Corps sergeant decided to bypass the gathering.

James would have been required to stay two weeks for the parade, a prospect that didn't excite him.

"He said, 'Forget the medal. I'm going home,'" son Steve James said.

Patsy Joe James recognized the Marine Corps League and Edwards for securing a replacement to the Purple Heart her husband received in 1968 but later lost.

"I'm just totally delighted they took it upon themselves to do this for him," Patsy Jo James said. "At this time, it means so much to him. It means a great deal to me, too."

Even after Randy James was honored with another medal, his focus remained on those left behind and a sign he saw as he passed by a cemetery while still on the island: "To the surviving troops: When you get back to the states, tell them we gave up our tomorrows for their todays."

Brian Wilson can be reached at 817-645-2441, ext. 2337

Ellie

[thedrifter]

'We came back up strong'
60 years later, WW II vet recalls Hawaii attack, its aftermath
This story appeared in the Antelope Valley Press on Thursday, September 1, 2005.
By DON HALEY
Special to the Valley Press

When World War II veteran Orion "Skip" Lippert reflects on the significance of events at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Friday, his thoughts and emotions will be stretched between two of the nation's most historic warships - the battleships USS Missouri and the USS Arizona.

Friday is Sept. 2, the 60th anniversary of the ceremony aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay where surrender documents were signed to end World War II in the Pacific. The "Mighty Mo" is now a museum and battleship memorial, and Friday will be the scene of a 60th anniversary program.

The Missouri is tied up just a few hundred yards from the gracefully arched memorial spanning the rusting remains of the sunken USS Arizona, a hallowed reminder of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that plunged America into World War II. More than 1,100 sailors and Marines died on the Arizona that day, the largest single loss in the Navy's history.

"These two ships are giants in our history," said Lippert, a Palmdale resident who was an 18-year-old Army soldier serving at a coastal artillery camp just 12 miles up the beach from Pearl Harbor when Japanese pilots began hitting his site and other military targets at 7:55 a.m. that Sunday morning nearly 64 years ago.

"You stand on the Arizona Memorial and look down at the old battered hull and think about all the men who died that day … not just the 1,100 on the Arizona itself … but everyone on the island," Lippert said solemnly. "This is where the war started for the United States. We got kicked down pretty hard that day, but we came back up strong and inundated the Japanese with military power.

"And then you look over at the Missouri … that's where the Pacific war ended … where the Japanese juggernaut yielded to civilization," the Pearl Harbor veteran continued proudly. "It's an emotional experience to see them both at the same time."

Lippert was uninjured in the strafing and bombing attacks on his camp. About 15 minutes after the attack began he saw black smoke billow high above the distant harbor. A Japanese bomb had pierced the Arizona's main deck and exploded near the forward ammunition magazine, sinking the ship in minutes and touching off a fuel oil and munitions fire that burned for several days.

He and seven other troops were quickly dispatched to a .50-caliber anti-aircraft gun site near the harbor's entrance, where they remained on alert for the next three days.

Lippert said that in the immediate hours after the carrier-based air strikes all the troops could think about was a "pending" invasion by Japanese forces.

"We just knew it was coming," he recalled. "If it had, we might have fought some of World War II in Georgia."

Many men and women old enough to remember the simple surrender ceremony aboard the Missouri six decades ago likely will recall images of GIs crowded around and on the small "O-1" upper deck of the battleship, next to the No. 2 16-inch gun turret.

The surrender proceedings were brief, with Gen. Douglas McArthur, in a rumpled khaki uniform, collecting signatures on the documents from U.S. and Allied officials and the Japanese delegation. But Lippert's thoughts on Friday always will drift back across the placid water to the serene Arizona Memorial.

"A buddy of mine is still aboard her," Lippert said reverently. "He's Bob Griffith, an electrician's mate whose name is up on the panel inside the memorial. He and I were friends at Hoover High School in San Diego. I didn't know Bob was aboard her until my mother told me in a letter a few weeks after the attack. Bob's father had a little health-food store and my mother shopped there. As kids, we saw each other at the store and in school. So the Arizona still means much to me … maybe more than most people."

The morning of the attack, the Arizona had a crew of 1,513 officers and enlisted men, of which 1,177 were killed - nearly half of all military fatalities recorded Dec. 7 across the entire island of Oahu. The Navy, over a period of several years, recovered 229 bodies from the wreckage, but an end to recovery and salvage work left 948 crewmen permanently entombed in the battered hull.

Lippert, a native of California and a long-time member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, was living in San Diego when he joined the National Guard in 1939. His unit was called to Army active duty in 1940 and arrived in Hawaii just before the year's end. It was based at Camp Malakole, north of Barber's Point on Oahu's western shore. Lippert later served in the Fiji Islands and on Guadalcanal before returning to the United States in August 1945 for his Army discharge.

Lippert never saw the Missouri during the war years. His first look at the 887-foot-long ship, 279 feet longer than the Arizona, was in March of this year on his most recent visit to Hawaii.

"It's berthed at a pier built off of Ford Island, right where the battleships Oklahoma and the Maryland were tied up during the attack," Lippert said. "The Maryland received some damage, but the Oklahoma was hit hard and capsized … trapping over 400 who died inside. Like the Arizona, it never sailed again."

The Missouri, the last battleship built by the United States, was launched in January 1944 and was ready for combat operations the following December. During the spring and summer of 1945, its firepower helped wrest the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa from Japanese military forces. After securing its place in history as the Japanese surrender site, the Missouri's service continued when it supported American troops in the Korean conflict and during Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East in 1991.

The ship has been a museum and memorial, operated by the nonprofit Missouri Memorial Association, since January 1999.

"As you look around on the surrender deck, it's natural to think about how the war ended," Lippert continued. "Most vets will say the two atom bombs were needed to end the war, otherwise an invasion of Japan would have caused astronomical casualties on both sides … in the millions."

For many years the National Park Service has been conducting an underwater research study of the Arizona's crushed and deteriorating hull to understand the corrosive processes that are slowly weakening it. The Park Service believes several hundred thousand gallons of oil still are contained in the ship's fuel bunkers and would be a serious environmental hazard if the corroding hull and tanks gave way.

Park Service studies are expected to produce a management plan to minimize the fuel oil hazard and provide options that would preserve the sunken hull. Public input concerning preservation options and the future management plan is being accepted by the Park Service.

Successful preservation actions would be applied to other historic iron and steel vessels, like the USS Utah, on the opposite side of Ford Island. It, too, was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941, and is the final resting place for 58 crew members. The vessel, resting on its side at a 38-degree angle, still is visible from a small memorial site.

"These ships are more than memorials … they're shrines," Lippert said. "We've got to preserve and save them."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Battleship events mark end of WWII
By CAROL COMEGNO
Courier-Post Staff

CAMDEN
The official announcement of the formal surrender of Japan blared over the intercom of the battleship New Jersey on Friday, as clear as it must have been the first time it was heard on board by its sailors and Marines 60 years ago in the Pacific Ocean.

This time it was followed by a booming salute from one of the ship's 40 mm guns as it fired from above the main deck and over the Delaware River, where the ship is now a museum.

The Burlington County Musical Society Concert Band played a soft and moving rendition of The Navy Hymn.

The events were part of a solemn ceremony on board the historic battleship to mark the 60th anniversary of the official end of World War II.

"I am just glad we dropped the (atomic) bomb," said Bob Cassel of Mantua, an Army veteran of World War II. Cassel, 90, a retired chemist, is the oldest volunteer on the ship and likes to do various chores to keep the battleship looking spiffy.

"I felt we had a great leader in Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur. He was a key to organizing a peaceful Japan after the surrender and we should never forget that war."

The re-enactment of the 1945 radio transmission on Friday announced, "Formal surrender of the Japanese Imperial Government, Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and all Japanese and Japanese-controlled armed forces wherever located was signed on the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay at 0908 hours (9:08 a.m.), Imperial Time, 2 September 1945."

Russell Collins, 80, of Palmyra, heard the words of the surrender signing the first time when he was a machinist on the New Jersey helping keep the No. 1 engine working. The surrender was signed on a sister ship of the New Jersey, the USS Missouri, now also a museum in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Collins and his shipmates believed the surrender should have been on their ship, which was more decorated during World War II than the Missouri and had been in more naval battles. But President Truman specifically ordered the surrender be on the Missouri, named for his home state.

"We were all so glad the war was over, but to tell you the truth, I more remember when the surrender was first announced . . . about two weeks earlier," he said, thinking about how he wanted to get home after two years in combat.

"We were on deck and all tossed our hats up in the air with joy. Some went overboard. Ship's horns blared in the harbor at Guam where we were. Then the officer of the day came on the ship's intercom and ordered no more throwing of hats," recalled Collins, also a volunteer who was in the audience listening Friday. "There was no more celebrating."


The official message of the surrender signing was also sent Thursday via Morse code and then verbally to the ship's amateur radio club on board by the battleship Missouri on Thursday night. It came over at 8:08 p.m. -- the exact time the papers were signed on the Missouri (9:08 a.m. Imperial Time in Japan).

A former New Jersey crewman from the 1980s happened to visit the ship Friday.

"I had no idea what the history of this great ship was until I served aboard from 1981-1984," said Daniel Fletcher, 45, who worked in the engine room, "but I got a taste of what war was like when we fired for two days into Beirut after the Marine barracks there was blown up. It was devastating," he said.

Reach Carol Comegno at (609) 267-9486 or ccomegno@courierpostonline.com
Published: September 03. 2005 6:11AM

Ellie