Cape man chronicled 'two years in hell'

[thedrifter]

World War II diary to be published
Cape man chronicled 'two years in hell'
By ROD CLARKE
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS-PRESS

Every night after work, young Allan Meade lay in his bunk and meticulously recorded in longhand the events of the day. But if you think these were the fitful musings of some lovesick teenage diarist, read this passage:

"The death struggle had begun. Enemy fighters were trying desperately to break up that ring of steel that encircled us and the dive bombers. After what felt like an eternity, we finally peeled off into our high-speed approach and began our dreadful, screaming dive-bombing attack on the enemy below! The Zeros were fighting desperately now in an all-out effort to save the target below from total destruction."

As a U.S. Marine aerial gunner during World War II, Meade's "job" was fending off enemy fighter planes as his torpedo bomber roared out of the South Pacific sky to rain death and destruction on the heavily fortified Japanese military installations below.

Now Meade, 81, has gathered those yellowed pages of handwritten notes into a personal memoir of his two years in hell and entered into an agreement with a Canadian firm to publish it.

He calls it simply, "My Journey."

"I started it off in high school and into the Marines and on through the whole bit," he said, seated in the dining room of his Cape Coral home. "It was my journey all the way, and I wrote it all in the first person so someone reading it would go right along with me."

"I never heard anything about this for 50 years," said his sister, Marion Williams. "I live in Tucson, Arizona, and we live separate lives. Then all of a sudden he started sending me these clippings and pictures. It was amazing to me. I didn't realize he had been in such combat."

On Sept. 12, Meade and Williams left on a 13-day odyssey to revisit the Pacific islands where he fought and thousands of other young Americans died, and to write the final chapter of his book, which he expects to send to the publisher in October.

"Over sixty years have passed since my last journey to the South Pacific," he wrote in the opening to that closing chapter, entitled "Twilight in Paradise." "Am I a foolish old man, trying to recapture youth, or is there some strange force pulling me back?"

Meade, a Detroit native who moved to Cape Coral 17 years ago, said his journey began while listening to his father tell stories of fighting with the Canadian army in Europe during World War I, before the United States was even involved. His fervor for military service flared even brighter when his older brother George joined the Army Air Force.

"I had always dreamed of flying ..." he wrote. "Little did I know the destiny that lay ahead."

Actually, Meade said, his sister Marion eerily foretold his future when they were both teenagers. A "budding artist," she painted an oil-on-canvas rendering of the newly developed Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber dropping its deadly cargo. Little did either of them know he would soon be flying almost 50 combat missions in the Avenger.

Meade cut the painting from the canvas, sewed it on the back of his jacket and wore it for the remainder of his high school days. He turned 18, graduated and a month later enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he was accepted into gunnery school. Eight months after enlisting, Meade, now a member of the newly formed Marine Corps Torpedo Bombing Squadron VMTB-143, along with some 5,000 other Marines, boarded a converted cruise ship bound for the South Pacific.

His first tour took him to the Solomon Islands. Flying out of an American base on the island of Bougainville, he and his comrades flew missions against a major Japanese military base in the city of Rabaul. Then, after a week of R&R in Australia, his squadron was assigned to assist in the invasion of Peleliu in the Palau island chain.

Meade said his own plane was never shot down, but had plenty of close calls. The Japanese would drop phosphorus bombs into the squadron. The bombs burned so intensely they would melt an aircraft if they hit. "They tried to break up our squadron," he said, "But none of them ever hit our planes."

The war of the torpedo bombers was not an up-close-and-personal war; the pilots and gunners seldom looked into the eyes of the enemy, as the ground soldiers and Marines did. They screamed out of the sky at a 70-degree angle, 450-mph dive, dropped their lethal payloads, and sped away to reload, refuel and strike again.

Meade said that of the 22 men he shipped out with, only 11 returned home.

"To me, it's a miracle that he came back," his sister said.

The Grumman TBF Avenger that Meade flew in made its debut at the battle of Midway, earning the nickname "Flying Coffin" after five of the six aircraft were shot down.

The Avenger carried a three-man crew: the pilot; a tail gunner, who operated a .30-caliber machine gun and doubled as radioman; and the turret gunner, armed with a .50-caliber weapon.

Meade served as a tail gunner in the Solomon campaign, then switched to the turret in Peleliu. The Japanese Zero fighter planes they defended against were fast and highly maneuverable, Meade said, but vulnerable, since they carried unprotected fuel tanks. The Avenger gunners mixed tracer and incendiary rounds with conventional ammunition in an attempt to blow up the Zeros.

"When you were firing that .50 caliber, it looked like a flame-thrower," he said.

Meade's memoir is rich with detail. He recalls the menu for Christmas dinner of 1943, including roast turkey, sage dressing, fresh baked sweet potatoes and buttered corn.

He lists all the enemy fighter planes his unit shot down, "who did it, and where."

A wall in Meade's home bears silent testimony to his wartime experiences: medals, ribbons and letters of commendation from President Harry S. Truman; a Japanese rifle and a 400-year-old Samurai sword he seized from a cave on Peleliu; photos of his squadron, his planes and himself, a skinny kid in a flight suit, leather helmet and goggles, a .45-caliber semi-automatic and survival knife strapped on his hip.

He still has the survival knife, the helmet, goggles and coveralls. "And I still can fit into them," he joked.

Asked if it bothered him to be driving down the highway and pass a Mitsubishi, a car manufactured by the Japanese firm that produced the feared Zero fighter planes that tried so hard to kill him, he just laughed. "Ha! I have a Nissan!"

But what does bother him is the chorus of protests that rises each August on the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "They just don't know ..." he said of those who argue the U.S. never should have used the atomic bomb. "I'm just so glad they dropped it," he said softly. "It probably saved all of our lives."

Meade shipped out of the South Pacific and headed home in early 1945, several months before the war ended. He was called up on standby in the inactive reserve in 1950 when the Korean War broke out, but was never activated.

Over the years, he has lost track of his comrades-in-arms. But he hasn't forgotten them. His memoir closes with a poem he wrote for "all the Marines who served in the South Pacific during WWII."

"We were there, the jungles of Guadalcanal,

the swamps of Bougainville,

the deadly skies over Rabaul,

the black volcanic sands of Imo Jima,

the bloody caves and ridges of Peleliu.

We were there. Semper Fidelis."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Top secret messages
Speaking tongues: WWII code walker still doesn't consider himself to be a hero
JOHN SOWELL, jsowell@newsreview.info

Samuel Tom Holiday held a rather unique job during his three years of service with the Fourth Marine Division during World War II.

Simply said, the Monument Valley, Utah, native was paid to talk.

Holiday, 71, who appeared Thursday at a Native American celebration at the Roseburg Veteran Affairs Medical Center, was one of about 400 Navajo Indians who served as “code talkers” during the war.

The soldiers would translate messages on enemy troop movements, strength and other strategic information into the Navajo language and relay them to commanders, where another code talker would translate them back into English.

At the time, Navajo was strictly a spoken language. It had never been written down. As a result, military experts believed it could be used without the possibility of the Japanese or the other Axis powers breaking the code. Philip Johnston, the son of missionaries who worked on the Navajo Reservation, suggested its use to the Marines.

The use of the Navajo language during the war was highly classified and was not publicly acknowledged until 1968, nearly a quarter-century after the war ended.

The 2002 release of the film “Windtalkers” helped publicize the work of the code talkers, but Holiday still finds that many people aren’t familiar with the work he undertook. When he served as the grand marshal of the Veterans Day Parade last November in San Diego, Holiday was approached by four people before the parade and asked what a code talker was.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., says on his Web site that military commanders credited the use of the Navajo code with “saving the lives of countless American soldiers and with the successful engagements of the U.S. in the battles of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.”

Bingaman was the sponsor of a bill in Congress that awarded Holiday and his fellow code talkers a Congressional Silver Medal in 2001. The 29 original code talkers were awarded gold medals.

They’re among the most distinguished medals issued by Congress and Bingaman said they were appropriate recognition for the work the Navajo soldiers did on the country’s behalf.

During the first 48 hours of the invasion of Iwo Jima alone, Navajo radio units sent and received more than 800 messages.

During a talk before about two dozen people inside a conference room at the VA Thursday, Holiday refused to view himself as a hero. He said he did his job proudly but that he was saddened by the deaths of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

“When you’re hungry, when you’re thirsty and you lay out among the dead Japanese and the dead Marines and it stinks and you’re dirty, you just don’t give a damn anymore,” Holiday said.

Holiday nearly drowned during a landing on the island of Saipan. Fifty yards from shore, the landing craft he was riding in capsized and turned over. He threw off his pack but it caught on a gas mask hooked to his belt. It ended up dragging him into the water. Somehow, he made it to shore. Later, a bomb exploded near Holiday and he was buried in the sand. Although he wasn’t seriously wounded, it affected his hearing and permanently damaged his ears.

Twice, Holiday was mistaken for a Japanese soldier. To infiltrate American lines, the Japanese would often dress in the uniforms of dead U.S. soldiers. Members of Holiday’s own company had to come and vouch for his identity before he was let go.

After the war, Holiday and the other code talkers were told they could
not talk about their work, even to their families. That made it difficult on the men and they were not able to go through a full tribal cleansing ritual until years later, when they were finally able to share their stories.

Holiday held some resentment toward the U.S. government. When he and other Navajos joined the Marines, they were told their families would be provided a home. That promise was never fulfilled and Holiday said he was saddened that he couldn’t provide that for his mother and father.

After the war, Holiday worked several jobs before becoming a Navajo police officer. He later worked for a coal company. He has also served as a medicine man, following in the tradition of his father, Billy Holiday.

Holiday’s wife, Lupita, accompanied him on the trip to Oregon. They drove to Roseburg from their home in Kayenta, Ariz. They were joined by their daughter, Helena Begaii, one of their eight children.

Begaii said only about 50 of the code talkers are still alive. Her father is one of only four or five code talkers who regularly speaks to
audiences, she said. Doing so energizes him, she said.

“It reassures himself that what he did wasn’t for nothing,” Begaii said.

Mike Burpee, a Roseburg resident who attended Holiday’s speech with his wife, Cheryl, said he has long been impressed by the heroism of the code talkers. Burpee, whose family operated a diner in Littleton, N.H., said he heard stories of the code talkers from former soldiers who stopped in to eat. That was long before the work of the code talkers was declassified.

“These guys were responsible for saving tens of thousands of American lives and it’s nice to be able to see one of them in person,” Burpee said.


• You can reach reporter John Sowell at 957-4209 or by e-mail at jsowell@newsreview.info.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

POW recalls Bataan death march, Nagasaki
By TRAVIS DUNN/Staff Writer

BARSTOW -- Fat Man killed about 45,000 people at Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Kai Martin, a Marine Prisoner of War, was one of the few Americans in the city when it disappeared in a mushroom cloud, and he was one of the few Americans, if not the only one, to crawl out of the nuclear crater alive.

Martin's three years of penal servitude for the Japanese ended that day. His captors, and most of the other prisoners, were vaporized by the blast.

Martin, now 88 and living in retirement in Victorville, doesn't often talk about his war experiences.

"I don't understand why anyone would find this interesting," he said. "I don't think I'm a hero. I just did these things because they had to be done."

This is coming from a man who earned almost every military medal conceivable -- three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Cross and three Brown Stars -- and who tells of his escape not only from Nagasaki, but from the Bataan death march.

At 88 he still able to get around on his own, although he now walks with a cane, and his mind is far more lucid than most people 60 or 70 years his junior. In Martin's battle against old age, old age appears to be losing.

Martin was one of the 13 POWs honored Friday at a luncheon held at the Marine Corps Logistics Base, Barstow. The brief synopsis of Martin's military career provided at the luncheon barely gave a glimpse of the years of horror and violence Martin experienced during World War II, and no mention was made of how Martin finally escaped from captivity in the radioactive fires of Nagasaki.

That's probably because Martin never talks about these things. He wrote a small booklet, "That There Will Be War No More," about 15 years ago. But he only self-published 150 copies, and he still has about 30 of them.

Martin returned to the United States in 1945 weighing 88 pounds, and he is certain that another winter with the Japanese would have killed him. Thanks to his bad behavior as a prisoner, Martin was sent as a slave laborer to Nagasaki -- an assignment that probably saved his life.

First he worked for Mitsubishi, then on underground bomb shelters. He and another prisoner, a Chinese man named Kim, were working in the shelter when Fat Man vaporized the city.

"We were protected," Martin said. "Not that we had the slightest idea what it was. We had never heard of an atom bomb."

The two prisoners initially thought there had been an earthquake. But when they rushed to the surface, they found that the guards "were just evaporated. There wasn't anything left." The factory, which once stood above the shelter, was gone.

The two men walked to the only place they knew -- the prison camp where they spent their nights. Along the way they encountered the living dead -- Japanese fried by radiation, some of them missing limbs, all of them stumbling around like zombies.

Kim may have survived the blast, but he died after stepping on an unexploded bomb, three days before the Japanese surrender. Martin went on alone, living on rice and dried fish that were probably radioactive.

"I don't know. I ate it, and I'm still here," Martin said.

Rescued after a few days by the U.S. Navy, Martin was taken to Okinawa, then to San Francisco. He would settle eventually in Los Angeles, where he worked 30 years in the insurance business and volunteered for a suicide prevention hotline on his spare time. He accumulated doctorates in psychology and philosophy. He married and had three children, and today is a great-grandfather.

But in the spring of 1942, the likelihood of Martin achieving any of these things was almost zero. Martin had originally been drafted into the Army and stationed in Bataan, where the Army surrendered after a brutal Japanese assault. The survivors were then subjected to one of worst war crimes in history.

Martin not only survived the death march, where he saw others prisoners bayoneted and decapitated on the road, but he managed to escape. While his guards were busy with another POW, Martin slid off the road over a ledge. He lay still in the bushes, playing dead, and the death march marched right past him. He escaped to Corregidor in a canoe.

Martin's escape and military experience so impressed a Marine colonel that Martin was immediately transfered from the Army to the Marines as a master gunnery sergeant. Such a transfer was rare back then, Martin said, but possible under the extreme circumstances.

He was stationed at Monkey Point in Corregidor. Again Martin soon found himself in an unlucky position -- the Japanese took Corregidor a month after Bataan fell. Again Martin managed to survive -- he is the only survivor of a unit of 138 men -- only to suffer through more than three years of prison, torture and slave labor.

Martin returned home from Nagasaki filled with an absolute disgust for war, which he calls "the ultimate human stupidity." He is by no means a pacifist; he believes that the U.S. involvement in World War II was a necessary fight against evil regimes. But most of the wars since then strike him as senseless.

"We're still in Korea, we should never have gone to Vietnam, and I don't know why we're in Iraq," he said.

Today Martin, who drives himself around without assistance, works to comfort those scarred by war. He regularly visits, throughout the High Desert, eight families of men killed in Iraq.

And he's still a Marine.

"In the other services you get discharged," said Martin, "but in the Marines, you're a Marine for life."

Contact the writer:

(760) 256-4123 or travis_dunn@link.freedom.com

Ellie

[GySgtRet]

All three of these Marines hold a precious commodity. Ther heritage of worriors and their wisdom. I really enjoyed reading there stories. There are a lot of lessons learned in their experiences. If our government could be trusted with this knowledge it could wisely be used to stop war and arguments in general.

[thedrifter]

Forgotten battalion
World Warr II Marines spent 3 years battling the Japanese, fought in five major battles
By PARIS ACHEN
Mail Tribune

When Ashland resident Arnold Meads returned from World War II in November 1944, it had been nearly three years since he had seen his fiancee.

"It was unbelievable just to have him back and alive," said Beverly Meads, now his wife of 60 years. "It still makes me cry to think about it."

Meads, 85, was a member of the 3rd Battalion of the 10th Marines, 2nd Division, now dubbed the "Forgotten Battalion" because of its unusually long deployment island-hopping in the South Pacific Ocean.

Desperately needed to block the advance of the Japanese, the artillery placement battalion was attached to various infantry battalions to fight in five major battles in Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Tarawa, Saipan, and Guam and in three years.

"You begin to get the idea that in the area of rotation, three years and five major campaigns is a lot," said Nelson Roetter of Indianapolis during the battalion’s 19th annual reunion Friday in Medford.

About 20 of the 45 surviving battalion members gathered at the Rogue Regency Inn for the four-day reunion.

While the number of battalion members diminishes every year, the stories about their adventures have continued to flow since the reunion began in 1986 in San Francisco, Meads said.

Meads and Roetter, 83, were in charge of communications for the battalion. The problem was most of the time there was no one with whom to communicate, Meads said.

After the invasion of the Guadalcanal and Tulagi islands in the South Pacific, the Marines were able to see the battle on the island of Savo on Aug. 9, 1942, in which the Japanese destroyed four major cruisers.

Other U.S. Navy ships harbored at Guadalcanal and Tulagi to deliver provisions to the troops fled the islands after the destruction before unloading all the supplies.

Some 12,000 troops, including about 500 from the "Forgotten Battalion," were left for more than two months with inadequate supplies of food, medicine and toilet paper and without any military air support.

"We felt like we had been deserted, like we had been stood up," Roetter said.

The Marines said they later learned that the Guadalcanal-Tulagi Invasion was key to preventing the Japanese from using an airfield in Guadalcanal to launch attacks on the Allied supply line from Australia.

"The Japanese had a design to occupy part of Australia," Roetter said. "This was a hurry-up operation to stop the southeast movement of the Japanese."

In fall 1944, U.S. military officials asked battalion members how long it had been since they had a furlough. When the Marines said it had been three years, the battalion was disbanded, and the soldiers went home.

"It felt good," Meads said.

Reach reporter Paris Achen at 776-4496 or e-mail pachen@mailtribune.com.

Ellie