thedrifter
12-23-07, 08:30 AM
The things they saw
By Savannah Morning News
Created 2007-12-23 00:30
Something extraordinary happened to a group of World War II veterans when they gathered on a recent Thursday afternoon for a group photograph.
They had been going about their day in the usual mundane fashion before they started filing in for the photo, which would become part of a project aimed at erecting a World War II memorial in Savannah.
But when they introduced themselves and joked around, they quickly became comrades, buddies - even though they fought in separate battles in different theaters. Even though they weren't talking about the war, they seemed to sense in each other a shared common experience, a terrible knowledge and a brimming pride.
Handshakes gave way to playful back slaps and the easy banter of young men.
'I know you," they seemed to say to each other. 'You know me.'
Suddenly they were in line for physicals, their first days in the service. Back in boot camp, 18, 19, 20 years old, back when they thought the war would be a fine adventure.
Yet they were here and now. Men in their eighth decades, wiser, seasoned veterans who looked back on their service with pride and gravity.
'We made it,' their faces seemed to say. 'We're alive, and we did the right thing.'
This is what they did.
Ed Abernathy
Guadalcanal
Ed Abernathy was barely 19 when he and the 1st Marine Division landed at Guadalcanal on Aug. 7, 1942.
Their mission was to secure the island so the military could use Henderson Field as a launching area for bombing runs against the Japanese.
The landing was deceptively easy. The Japanese did not yet have a strong defensive unit on the island.
"We basically walked ashore with no opposition," Abernathy said. "But then all hell broke loose about three days later."
The Japanese bomber group stationed at a place called Rabaul saturated the island with bombs of all descriptions. The Japanese navy bombarded them for 48 hours.
"The ground would shake, and your ears would ring for hours after a bombardment," Abernathy said. "I just hoped and prayed that I would live through it."
The Marines also had to contend with about 20,000 Japanese troops who came ashore in the days following the landing of the Marines. Japanese troops continued to arrive for the next four months.
Abernathy's best friend was shot and killed right in front of him.
A shocking realization for Abernathy was the Japanese approach to fighting.
One day, he was part of a group sent to find a Marine patrol that had not returned. As they approached a creek that crossed the island's east-west trail, they found the lost Marines.
"We found four of them tied up by their thumbs, and they had been used for bayonet practice," Abernathy said. "The word we got from the medical people when we brought them in, it was estimated that they each had 75 to 150 bayonet wounds in their bodies, and probably half of those were made before they ever died."
Sometimes on patrol, the Marines would find a Japanese body. In the beginning, they would roll the body over only to find it was holding down the pin of a grenade. The Marines had three seconds before it exploded.
"We stopped turning over Japanese bodies," Abernathy said.
In addition to the fighting, the Marines had little food. They lived on coconuts, bananas and captured Japanese supplies of sun-dried fish heads and rice.
"You boil the rice and put the fish head in the rice," Abernathy said. "That sort of gives it a greasy taste, and that's about all you can say for it."
The Marines survived on the fish stew for nine weeks. Abernathy said he went from 155 to 119 pounds.
Hygiene also was a problem.
The only baths the men got were in leech-infested rivers once or twice a week. Often, after a bath, they wore the same dirty clothes.
The men got scabies. Their skin would peel off in sheets. They developed large sores, sometimes deep into their flesh. They battled malaria.
It would take months after they left Guadalcanal for the sores to heal.
It would take longer before Abernathy would talk much about the war, partly because nobody asked.
"It was like nobody was interested, really," he said. "I think they didn't want to know, and they were afraid of what they would hear."
That's all right with Abernathy, because he doesn't like to think about the war.
"I try not to," he said. "I try very hard not to."
H. Lance Mackey Jr.
Admiralty Islands
and the Philippines
It was Feb. 29, 1944, and it was H. Lance Mackey Jr.'s first combat experience. He and his buddies fought their way ashore at Los Negros Island in the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific.
Mackey, then 19, was in the second group that went ashore, spilling out of the open bows of landing craft.
That first night, Mackey's unit - the 99th Field Artillery Battalion, First Cavalry Division - dug foxholes on the beach. Mackey slept in a slit trench, a hole about as big as a coffin.
"I could see tracer bullets going over my head, and I could hear people who'd been shot hollering and crying," he said. "I thought I was going to die."
The next morning, Mackey and a lieutenant drove out to scout the area. When they drove past the perimeter, they came upon about a thousand Japanese bodies.
Mackey still remembers the smell.
"There were dead bodies that had been there a day or two, and they had started to swell up and stink," he said. "I didn't like it, but you get in a certain frame of mind."
Combat was too much for some. A soldier in the foxhole next to Mackey put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
"He just couldn't take it," Mackey said. "He cracked up."
In the coming days, Mackey's group pushed forward and took the rest of the island.
"We just killed so many Japs you can't believe. They buried them with bulldozers. They dug a hole and bulldozed them in," Mackey said. "I was a young kid. I was mostly just in shock."
During one mission in the Philippines, Mackey and his unit had to carry supplies to soldiers who were stranded on the other side of a hill and surrounded by the Japanese.
Mackey and the other men each hoisted supplies onto their backs, along with their own packs, guns, ammunition and rain gear, and climbed the mountain. As it began to grow dark, some men lost their footing and boxes of supplies tumbled down the hill onto friends below.
They slept on the mountainside in a rainstorm.
The next morning, Mackey's feet hurt, so he took off his boots to survey the damage. He said the soles of his feet just peeled right off.
"But we got them the supplies," he said.
Harold Beddow
France
The Germans began firing as 19-year-old Harold Beddow descended behind enemy lines on his parachute from 1,200 feet. The main objective of his unit: knock out German communication centers in Le Muy and La Motte.
It was August 1944, and Beddow was part of an operation to prevent Nazi reinforcements from reaching Allied troops coming from the beaches of southern France.
Daylight was beginning to streak across the sky. The ground was cloaked in haze. They could not see whether the Germans were below them.
Before long, rifle fire rang out, and bullets hummed past Beddow.
"It would go so close to you," he said, "you would hear the whiz as it went by."
When Beddow landed, he said, he was alone. The troops had been scattered in the jump. They didn't know where they were, or how to find each other.
"I was scared," he said. "I didn't know what to do."
Then Beddow heard voices but couldn't tell whether they were Allies or Nazis. He strained to hear and realized they were American. But he said he was so scared, he forgot the password.
"I waited till they got close, then I said, 'Hey, guys.' You could hear them unlock their safeties," he said. "And I said, 'Don't shoot, I forgot the password.' "
Artillery fire was relentless. The smell of decomposing bodies was everywhere.
Earlier, at a rest stop on the train to Rome, bloated bodies had lined the road. Their eyes had popped. They smelled sickly sweet.
"Those are things you try to forget," he said. "You push it out of your mind."
This was a different life than Beddow expected when he joined the war. He had expected adventure, excitement, heroism.
"The majority of us were in our late teens. We were greenhorns when we first went in," he said. "We were going to kick hell out of everything, but we found out they kicked back."
James Mulder
Germany
They were supposed to have fighter escorts that day.
James Mulder, 21, was a navigator and bombardier aboard a B-17G bomber assigned to destroy German industry.
Even with fighter pilots trying to keep German planes off them, the B-17s still took a lot of anti-aircraft fire.
"You would see a lot of black puffs all of a sudden," Mulder said. "They put a whole bunch of it up. The whole sky almost gets black. And you fly through this stuff, and that's what rips up the airplane."
On Oct. 6, 1944, Mulder's target was a ball bearing factory in Tegel, near Berlin.
As the squadrons moved into position for their initial target run, another group was already there. Mulder's group circled away, out of the protection of the fighter planes.
They were sitting ducks for German fighters who instantly surrounded them.
Mulder saw other bombers go down as the Germans hit them. Then Mulder's plane spiraled out of control.
"I had given up, honestly," he said. "Just, 'This is it, boy.' "
Then his plane broke in half.
When Mulder woke up, he was tumbling through the air.
He pulled the rip cord, and his parachute opened.
As he floated earthward, a few Germans pulled alongside and tried to give him "crop washes" to make his chute swing out of control.
As he landed and struggled free of his parachute, he saw somebody coming toward him.
"These nice little boys - I thought they were Boy Scouts," he said. "But they were the youth Hitler group."
They began beating Mulder with rifle butts until an older boy ordered them to stop.
Mulder was shipped off to a prison camp in Stalag Luft 1 in Barth, a small town on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where he was held for nine months.
His only food came from 9-pound packages sent by the American Red Cross. They usually included SPAM or corned beef, a block of cheese, raisins, prunes and powdered milk.
Then the shipments ended.
The men survived on turnips, old potatoes and occasional canned foods salvaged from bombed warehouses.
Mulder said he lost 50 pounds.
Often the men wondered where the Jewish soldiers in their outfits had gone.
"They segregated them, put them in a separate compound," he said. "We don't know if they ever survived."
Around 3 a.m. one morning, Mulder and his buddies awoke to Bing Crosby singing "Don't Fence Me In" over the loudspeakers. They knew something had changed.
They spilled into the yard. The Germans had evacuated. The town had been liberated by the Russian tank corps.
When he was shipped home, Mulder called his fiancee, Isabelle, now his wife, to make wedding plans. They were married two weeks later.
James D. Chavers Jr.
Iwo Jima
James D. Chavers Jr. had felt the shockwaves of bullets screaming six inches above his head. He watched as friends were shot. He saw napalmed Japanese bodies, and he shivered in the cold and rain.
Sixty-two years later, recalling the bravery of a friend named Christopher still makes Chavers cry.
Chavers, then 21, and the 4th Marine Division landed on the island of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. The Allies needed it as a base for fighter planes to escort bombers attacking the Japanese homeland.
One day, a replacement rifleman joined the division straight from boot camp. Chavers talked with him for a few minutes, then the boy had to move out. He got a few yards before he was shot in the chest.
"Christopher ...," Chavers said, his voice breaking, "went after him. Christopher went out and rescued him, carried him on a stretcher."
Chavers looked down, a pause meant to change the subject, but then resurrected the thought himself.
"Never forgot it," he said. "It was dangerous, because they would shoot the stretcher bearers, medics. They would shoot the corpsmen, so that was brave. Yeah ... yeah. Can't help but think about it."
Chavers' group had landed on the beach and made it 200 or 300 yards inland. Then they moved further down the beach and spent four days pinned down, targeted by Japanese soldiers with rifles who were dug into caves on the island.
They were shelled repeatedly by Japanese artillery.
As they moved further off the beach into rougher terrain, Chavers and his fellow Marines huddled behind rocks at night, not knowing whether Japanese soldiers were on the other side.
"The whole place was scary," he said.
Then the rain would come and Chavers and his buddies trembled in the 40-degree weather.
One day, Chavers said, he was walking along a path. He stopped for a moment and felt something quivering beneath his feet. He looked down. It was a half-buried Japanese soldier dying in the sand.
Still dedicated
Still, after everything, the veterans to a man said they would do it again.
"I would like (my family) to know what I went through to make a better world," Abernathy said. "At the time I was doing it, I had no thought or anything about a better world. But I think we saved the civilized world. ...
"And I'd like for them to understand that I was part of that, and that I'm proud to have been part of it, and that I would do it again."
Ellie
By Savannah Morning News
Created 2007-12-23 00:30
Something extraordinary happened to a group of World War II veterans when they gathered on a recent Thursday afternoon for a group photograph.
They had been going about their day in the usual mundane fashion before they started filing in for the photo, which would become part of a project aimed at erecting a World War II memorial in Savannah.
But when they introduced themselves and joked around, they quickly became comrades, buddies - even though they fought in separate battles in different theaters. Even though they weren't talking about the war, they seemed to sense in each other a shared common experience, a terrible knowledge and a brimming pride.
Handshakes gave way to playful back slaps and the easy banter of young men.
'I know you," they seemed to say to each other. 'You know me.'
Suddenly they were in line for physicals, their first days in the service. Back in boot camp, 18, 19, 20 years old, back when they thought the war would be a fine adventure.
Yet they were here and now. Men in their eighth decades, wiser, seasoned veterans who looked back on their service with pride and gravity.
'We made it,' their faces seemed to say. 'We're alive, and we did the right thing.'
This is what they did.
Ed Abernathy
Guadalcanal
Ed Abernathy was barely 19 when he and the 1st Marine Division landed at Guadalcanal on Aug. 7, 1942.
Their mission was to secure the island so the military could use Henderson Field as a launching area for bombing runs against the Japanese.
The landing was deceptively easy. The Japanese did not yet have a strong defensive unit on the island.
"We basically walked ashore with no opposition," Abernathy said. "But then all hell broke loose about three days later."
The Japanese bomber group stationed at a place called Rabaul saturated the island with bombs of all descriptions. The Japanese navy bombarded them for 48 hours.
"The ground would shake, and your ears would ring for hours after a bombardment," Abernathy said. "I just hoped and prayed that I would live through it."
The Marines also had to contend with about 20,000 Japanese troops who came ashore in the days following the landing of the Marines. Japanese troops continued to arrive for the next four months.
Abernathy's best friend was shot and killed right in front of him.
A shocking realization for Abernathy was the Japanese approach to fighting.
One day, he was part of a group sent to find a Marine patrol that had not returned. As they approached a creek that crossed the island's east-west trail, they found the lost Marines.
"We found four of them tied up by their thumbs, and they had been used for bayonet practice," Abernathy said. "The word we got from the medical people when we brought them in, it was estimated that they each had 75 to 150 bayonet wounds in their bodies, and probably half of those were made before they ever died."
Sometimes on patrol, the Marines would find a Japanese body. In the beginning, they would roll the body over only to find it was holding down the pin of a grenade. The Marines had three seconds before it exploded.
"We stopped turning over Japanese bodies," Abernathy said.
In addition to the fighting, the Marines had little food. They lived on coconuts, bananas and captured Japanese supplies of sun-dried fish heads and rice.
"You boil the rice and put the fish head in the rice," Abernathy said. "That sort of gives it a greasy taste, and that's about all you can say for it."
The Marines survived on the fish stew for nine weeks. Abernathy said he went from 155 to 119 pounds.
Hygiene also was a problem.
The only baths the men got were in leech-infested rivers once or twice a week. Often, after a bath, they wore the same dirty clothes.
The men got scabies. Their skin would peel off in sheets. They developed large sores, sometimes deep into their flesh. They battled malaria.
It would take months after they left Guadalcanal for the sores to heal.
It would take longer before Abernathy would talk much about the war, partly because nobody asked.
"It was like nobody was interested, really," he said. "I think they didn't want to know, and they were afraid of what they would hear."
That's all right with Abernathy, because he doesn't like to think about the war.
"I try not to," he said. "I try very hard not to."
H. Lance Mackey Jr.
Admiralty Islands
and the Philippines
It was Feb. 29, 1944, and it was H. Lance Mackey Jr.'s first combat experience. He and his buddies fought their way ashore at Los Negros Island in the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific.
Mackey, then 19, was in the second group that went ashore, spilling out of the open bows of landing craft.
That first night, Mackey's unit - the 99th Field Artillery Battalion, First Cavalry Division - dug foxholes on the beach. Mackey slept in a slit trench, a hole about as big as a coffin.
"I could see tracer bullets going over my head, and I could hear people who'd been shot hollering and crying," he said. "I thought I was going to die."
The next morning, Mackey and a lieutenant drove out to scout the area. When they drove past the perimeter, they came upon about a thousand Japanese bodies.
Mackey still remembers the smell.
"There were dead bodies that had been there a day or two, and they had started to swell up and stink," he said. "I didn't like it, but you get in a certain frame of mind."
Combat was too much for some. A soldier in the foxhole next to Mackey put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
"He just couldn't take it," Mackey said. "He cracked up."
In the coming days, Mackey's group pushed forward and took the rest of the island.
"We just killed so many Japs you can't believe. They buried them with bulldozers. They dug a hole and bulldozed them in," Mackey said. "I was a young kid. I was mostly just in shock."
During one mission in the Philippines, Mackey and his unit had to carry supplies to soldiers who were stranded on the other side of a hill and surrounded by the Japanese.
Mackey and the other men each hoisted supplies onto their backs, along with their own packs, guns, ammunition and rain gear, and climbed the mountain. As it began to grow dark, some men lost their footing and boxes of supplies tumbled down the hill onto friends below.
They slept on the mountainside in a rainstorm.
The next morning, Mackey's feet hurt, so he took off his boots to survey the damage. He said the soles of his feet just peeled right off.
"But we got them the supplies," he said.
Harold Beddow
France
The Germans began firing as 19-year-old Harold Beddow descended behind enemy lines on his parachute from 1,200 feet. The main objective of his unit: knock out German communication centers in Le Muy and La Motte.
It was August 1944, and Beddow was part of an operation to prevent Nazi reinforcements from reaching Allied troops coming from the beaches of southern France.
Daylight was beginning to streak across the sky. The ground was cloaked in haze. They could not see whether the Germans were below them.
Before long, rifle fire rang out, and bullets hummed past Beddow.
"It would go so close to you," he said, "you would hear the whiz as it went by."
When Beddow landed, he said, he was alone. The troops had been scattered in the jump. They didn't know where they were, or how to find each other.
"I was scared," he said. "I didn't know what to do."
Then Beddow heard voices but couldn't tell whether they were Allies or Nazis. He strained to hear and realized they were American. But he said he was so scared, he forgot the password.
"I waited till they got close, then I said, 'Hey, guys.' You could hear them unlock their safeties," he said. "And I said, 'Don't shoot, I forgot the password.' "
Artillery fire was relentless. The smell of decomposing bodies was everywhere.
Earlier, at a rest stop on the train to Rome, bloated bodies had lined the road. Their eyes had popped. They smelled sickly sweet.
"Those are things you try to forget," he said. "You push it out of your mind."
This was a different life than Beddow expected when he joined the war. He had expected adventure, excitement, heroism.
"The majority of us were in our late teens. We were greenhorns when we first went in," he said. "We were going to kick hell out of everything, but we found out they kicked back."
James Mulder
Germany
They were supposed to have fighter escorts that day.
James Mulder, 21, was a navigator and bombardier aboard a B-17G bomber assigned to destroy German industry.
Even with fighter pilots trying to keep German planes off them, the B-17s still took a lot of anti-aircraft fire.
"You would see a lot of black puffs all of a sudden," Mulder said. "They put a whole bunch of it up. The whole sky almost gets black. And you fly through this stuff, and that's what rips up the airplane."
On Oct. 6, 1944, Mulder's target was a ball bearing factory in Tegel, near Berlin.
As the squadrons moved into position for their initial target run, another group was already there. Mulder's group circled away, out of the protection of the fighter planes.
They were sitting ducks for German fighters who instantly surrounded them.
Mulder saw other bombers go down as the Germans hit them. Then Mulder's plane spiraled out of control.
"I had given up, honestly," he said. "Just, 'This is it, boy.' "
Then his plane broke in half.
When Mulder woke up, he was tumbling through the air.
He pulled the rip cord, and his parachute opened.
As he floated earthward, a few Germans pulled alongside and tried to give him "crop washes" to make his chute swing out of control.
As he landed and struggled free of his parachute, he saw somebody coming toward him.
"These nice little boys - I thought they were Boy Scouts," he said. "But they were the youth Hitler group."
They began beating Mulder with rifle butts until an older boy ordered them to stop.
Mulder was shipped off to a prison camp in Stalag Luft 1 in Barth, a small town on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where he was held for nine months.
His only food came from 9-pound packages sent by the American Red Cross. They usually included SPAM or corned beef, a block of cheese, raisins, prunes and powdered milk.
Then the shipments ended.
The men survived on turnips, old potatoes and occasional canned foods salvaged from bombed warehouses.
Mulder said he lost 50 pounds.
Often the men wondered where the Jewish soldiers in their outfits had gone.
"They segregated them, put them in a separate compound," he said. "We don't know if they ever survived."
Around 3 a.m. one morning, Mulder and his buddies awoke to Bing Crosby singing "Don't Fence Me In" over the loudspeakers. They knew something had changed.
They spilled into the yard. The Germans had evacuated. The town had been liberated by the Russian tank corps.
When he was shipped home, Mulder called his fiancee, Isabelle, now his wife, to make wedding plans. They were married two weeks later.
James D. Chavers Jr.
Iwo Jima
James D. Chavers Jr. had felt the shockwaves of bullets screaming six inches above his head. He watched as friends were shot. He saw napalmed Japanese bodies, and he shivered in the cold and rain.
Sixty-two years later, recalling the bravery of a friend named Christopher still makes Chavers cry.
Chavers, then 21, and the 4th Marine Division landed on the island of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. The Allies needed it as a base for fighter planes to escort bombers attacking the Japanese homeland.
One day, a replacement rifleman joined the division straight from boot camp. Chavers talked with him for a few minutes, then the boy had to move out. He got a few yards before he was shot in the chest.
"Christopher ...," Chavers said, his voice breaking, "went after him. Christopher went out and rescued him, carried him on a stretcher."
Chavers looked down, a pause meant to change the subject, but then resurrected the thought himself.
"Never forgot it," he said. "It was dangerous, because they would shoot the stretcher bearers, medics. They would shoot the corpsmen, so that was brave. Yeah ... yeah. Can't help but think about it."
Chavers' group had landed on the beach and made it 200 or 300 yards inland. Then they moved further down the beach and spent four days pinned down, targeted by Japanese soldiers with rifles who were dug into caves on the island.
They were shelled repeatedly by Japanese artillery.
As they moved further off the beach into rougher terrain, Chavers and his fellow Marines huddled behind rocks at night, not knowing whether Japanese soldiers were on the other side.
"The whole place was scary," he said.
Then the rain would come and Chavers and his buddies trembled in the 40-degree weather.
One day, Chavers said, he was walking along a path. He stopped for a moment and felt something quivering beneath his feet. He looked down. It was a half-buried Japanese soldier dying in the sand.
Still dedicated
Still, after everything, the veterans to a man said they would do it again.
"I would like (my family) to know what I went through to make a better world," Abernathy said. "At the time I was doing it, I had no thought or anything about a better world. But I think we saved the civilized world. ...
"And I'd like for them to understand that I was part of that, and that I'm proud to have been part of it, and that I would do it again."
Ellie