 Paula Sheil - Unpublished (On WWII) |
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Paula Sheil “If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The following is a previously unpublished work, By Paula Sheil
Part One: The Orphaned War
Dusk deepened in the Central Valley outside of Tracy, Calif. A September moon sailed above acres of corn. Bats wove through eucalyptus trees to a swelling of cricket song.
Mel Routt, set in his jaw and set in his ways, still battles a war that claimed his youth nearly 60 years ago.
"People forget. Pearl Harbor didn't last a whole hour. Over here in the Philippines, we got ours 10 hours later, and we started behind the lines just the same as when we finished," said Routt, 78, leafing through two scrapbooks bulging with yellowed press clippings and graying war photos at his ranch house on Critchett Road .
In one, maybe two decades, the voices of World War II - the "war to end all wars" - will be silenced. The last survivor will be buried with or without the mournful notes of taps and the heart-grabbing 21-gun salute.
In 1987, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs began to identify regions of the country most in need of burial space for veterans. Northern Calif. became one of the selected areas, and San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery in Gustine opened June 5, 1992. Veterans are buried in Gustine at the rate of 150 a month, said Tony Durant, the Veterans Service Officer for San Joaquin County.
The opening of five new national cemeteries in Washington, Texas, New York, Illinois and Ohio , within a two-year period (1997-1999) is unprecedented since the Civil War.
In the past two years, some 1,850 references to WWII were logged in The Record archives. Three-fourths are veterans' obituaries, the remainder are references to the war as a focal point in history.
But there's much to be added to the historical account, if history is to be believed in the coming century, about the lives of 16.5 million Americans who fought on all fronts and in all theaters of "the good war" between 1939 and 1945.
World War II killed more people, cost more money and damaged more property than any war in history - but the Allies won. Democracy and freedom won. People fought and died for those words. These are the post scripts of some survivors.
You will not find these stories in history texts, for history records the deeds and words of leaders - good and bad - but not those of a regular GI.
It's best to ask a vet for stories, before there are no more eye-witness accounts to be told.
Severely punished until death
After the war, Routt wouldn't talk about his experiences.
"When I left the Philippines , I was interrogated by a Marine Corps officer," Routt explained. "He said, 'When you get home, you are not to talk to anybody about what happened in Japan .'"
Routt's face is deeply lined, his voice tired, his arms scarred red from a bomb that pierced the engine room of the USS Canopus. The subtender was docked at Mariveles where the seaman labored in "shaft alley," in late Dec., 1941.
"I got burnt, and by then, Manilla was supposed to be a free city. MacArthur declared it to save it, but the Japs were still bombing it. I shouldn't say Japs, but I never got out of the habit."
At that time, the Imperial Japanese Empire conquests (an expansion begun in 1931) included Indochina, Manchuria, parts of China and Pacific islands of Micronesia .
Routt was evacuated to an army hospital on Bataan . When it was bombed by the Japanese, he was shifted to a jungle hospital under the trees. For several weeks, as American and Filipino troops were squeezed down the peninsula, he fought to get back to the Canopus , narrowly avoiding being sent to the front line to replace a dwindling infantry.
When Bataan fell, April 9, 1942, only four months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Routt made it back to Corregidor to help scuttle his ship and endured another 25 days of Japanese bombing and artillery barrages until Corregidor , too, was defeated.
After Bataan 12,000 American soldiers became prisoners of war. Along with 60,000 Filipinos, these captives began the "Death March" of 100 kilometers. It took from five to nine days depending where the captives started on the trail from Mariveles to San Fernando.
Earl Ennis, is one of perhaps 1,200 survivors of the Death March still alive. He loves M.A.S.H., the Hollywood take on a Vietnam medical unit. He's a big fan, too, of Hogan's Heroes, a sanitized TV version of POW life German style.
"I enjoy them because they're funny, and it takes the pressure off. There's no torture, no bad feelings," said Ennis, 78, turning off the set at his secluded home next to Smith Canal .
A series of quirky actions placed the Stockton 20-year-old in Bataan when General Edward King, Jr. surrendered the largest military force in American history.
With a couple years of junior college under his belt, Ennis enlisted in April, 1941. Figuring the war to bust out in Europe , he tried to get into the army air corps and requested the Philippines . En route, being one of few men with any college experience, he landed in the U.S. Engineering Department at MacArthur's United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) headquarters in Manilla.
"My job was to take the convoys supplies to various parts of Luzon and to Bataan . The government knew something was up, because they were starting to ship a lot of people in and supplies they could get in. For example, they shipped in a whole air corps without the planes. The planes never arrived. When I first got there, there was hardly anybody there, just infantry and a few field artillery (units). And a little air force, and then the war started."
When Japanese planes started tearing up Manilla, Ennis hustled supplies, maps and plans between Corregidor and Bataan , until MacArthur along with Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippines , left for Australia in March, 1942, abandoning the USAFFE headquarters.
The affable Ennis was sent to the 803rd Engineers of the 5th Air Force.
"I didn't get nervous until the end when we were compressed in such a small area. You know there's no help coming. You have to take it," Ennis said. "In one way (the surrender) was a sense of relief. Not that you knew what was coming. But no more shooting, no more bombs, it was kinda quiet."
Being acclimated and in decent shape, Ennis stood up well on the Death March. Many others, however, were already weak from scarce rations and no medical treatment for malaria. When men fell out, they were left to die. At San Fernando , the prisoners were crammed into boxcars. Men died where they stood suffering the effects of diarrhea and dysentery from drinking putrid water in carabao wallows along the way. About 9,300 Americans survived the march and train ride to Camp O'Donnell .
Apolinar Sangalang, a member of the Philippine Scouts, became a US Army "regular" after Pearl Harbor . For 13 years, Sangalang had played trombone for concerts and parades in the 24th Field Artillery Band.
As a kid, Sangalang's uncle taught him to sing, and the young troubadour serenaded his sweethearts. He also acted in little dramas in a local theater company. When Bataan fell, he put his skills to work.
"One of my friends was a cook in my company, and he was able to procure some civilian clothes," said Sangalang, a 93-year-old Lathrop resident. "He says, 'I got two pairs. Would you like to have one?' I said, "Sure."
He whispered, "So we escaped through the line. All my members of my unit, all those who went to the concentration camp, died.
"What I did was remove my shoes and act like a farmer, soiled all my hands. My comrades, oh, they marched from town to town. It's pathetic."
Sangalang joined the guerrillas and disrupted enemy movement for two years. He returned to U.S. military control when MacArthur regained the islands in 1945, and was declared a U.S. citizen the next year.
"Music saved my life," Sangalang said. He played in the air force band until he retired in 1958.
Routt was captured when General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered Corregidor, May 6. The prisoners, 7,000 American and 5,000 Filipinos, were herded together in Kindley Field.
Burial detail occupied Routt for days. First the Japanese dead were cremated - one hand chopped off and its ashes sent home in a box. It was three days before the Americans could tend to their own.
"We just got wire, telephone wire, anything that was down, and dragged them to a bomb crater and threw rocks on them," Routt said. "You couldn't really bury them."
At the end of May, the prisoners were shipped across the bay to Manilla.
"Instead of taking us to the dock and unloading us, they took us out to the breakwater and put us on another barge," Routt recalled.
"Then they towed it to where we were about (chest) deep in water and had us get off and wade to shore. This was to show the Filipinos what a bunch of bums we were. We were a mess. The Filipinos, they'd bring water out and the Japanese would kick it away. The Filipinos tried to bring us food, and I saw one woman bayonetted on the spot."
His uniform was encrusted in blood from fending off an attack weeks before. Routt parried the first swipe of a Japanese soldier's bayonet thrust. When the enemy attacked again, Routt stuck him with his bayonet and had to pull the trigger to free his rifle.
"The first speech we ever got was in Bilibid, an old Spanish prison. The Japanese told us ... if you break the rules you'll be severely punished until death. Their philosophy is you can't punish a dead person, so you punish them first, then kill them."
He shipped by rail to Cabanatuan , and marched to a prison camp about 15 miles away. They were harassed by Filipino guerrillas, so the camp was evacuated and the prisoners were moved to a second camp, designated Cabanatuan, Camp 1.
After six months at O'Donnell, Ennis was squashed in the hold of a ship headed for Japan , Nov. 1942. It took him 21 days to arrive at Moji, on the island of Kyushu .
Routt spent many more months in the Philippines working a farm detail. Fed mostly rice, he suffered an eight month bout of beriberi, a disease caused from the lack of thiamine, vitamin B1. The body swells and the skin splits. Once weighing 168, Routt dropped to 86 pounds. But he recovered, learning that to survive, you have to eat whatever you can find: grasshoppers, pigweed, tree frogs, snakes and angle worms.
When he regained his health, he volunteered to be transferred to Japan in July, 1944, the freighter he was on - packed with filthy, parasite-ridden men - zigzagged for 63 days to avoid U.S. submarine torpedos.
By Aug., 1942, the Japanese swallowed the Philippines , Burma , Borneo - much of the South Pacific colonized by Europe in the past 400 years - and flexed muscle all the way to the Aleutians . Routt and Ennis, held in different Japanese POW camps, would not be freed until after the bitter blast of the A-bomb.
Pearl Harbor? Who's she?
Though the war had been churning up Europe since 1939, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland , the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor blasted America into action.
"Somebody came in and said that Sunday morning. 'The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor .' Mind you, I'm a native New Yorker and I said, 'Who's she?' Never heard of Pearl Harbor," said Ernestine Nilssen, sitting next to her husband of 56 years in the living room of their new home in a Lodi subdivision.
"If it hadn't been for Pearl Harbor, I would never have met her," Scotty Nilssen, 77, chuckled.
Seduced by his Norwegian sea-going heritage, Nilssen pined for the navy. As an Oakland boy, he'd gawk at the fleet in San Francisco Bay . He didn't know a thing about aviation, but he wound up in a squadron of Catalinas, VP-12, the navy PBY Flying Boats as a plane captain - what the air force called a flight engineer. He made daily 12 hour patrolling flights.
"I saw the first plane come in that attacked us. I was stationed at Kaneohe, the naval air station," Scotty Nilssen said. "We were the first place to be attacked because we were in the line of flight of the airplanes going towards Pearl Harbor.
"I was making arrangements to take a flying boat on the bay when I hear machine gun fire. I looked up and somebody said, 'It's the Japanese.' The planes in the bay were immediately set on fire and the crews killed. We had a rack of guns behind a glass cage in our hangar and nobody had key, so I used my foot, kicked the glass out, got myself a rifle and some ammunition, exited the hangar and started shooting."
Moments later the hangar blew.
"After the raid, we had no planes, so they sent me over to Ford Island where all the ships were damaged. They had other flying boats over there and needed extra crew. It was a mess. Everything was on fire, smoke was billowing, still two days later."
A month later, Nilssen gladly accepted an assignment to New York City to attend a training school. There the reserved blond met the vivacious Ernestine Nuth, a waitress in her family's restaurant.
"We had no men in the family to send," Ernestine said. "You have no notion of the patriotism and the gung ho spirit."
So she and two sisters and a niece enlisted in the armed forces. Ernestine became a WAVE (Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service in the Navy) following Scotty's return to the South Pacific. A consummate city girl, she repaired and maintained training aircraft for new fliers - but never learned to drive a car.
The Marines landed on Guadalcanal , Aug. 7, 1942. Nilssen arrived four months later.
"When they sent us down to fight in the battles of Guadalcanal , the PBYs were painted black and flew only at night. The British called them Catalina bombers and that was shortened to Black Cats," he said.
"We lived in the mud. We lived in a tent and you would have absolutely four inches of mud everywhere you walked. One morning I woke up and there was six inches of water coming through our tent. It rained almost everyday. Terrible, terrible living conditions and terrible food.
"You just can't live that way, you need some common sense to fly these airplanes, you can't be sick. The pilot we had, one night passed out on the controls from malaria.
"While I was in Guadalcanal I got sick: denguy fever, malaria, dysentery. I was 94 pounds when I came back to the States. Denguy fever is like having the flu a thousand times over. Your bones ache all over, you're weak, you can't eat - 85 percent of our squadron came down with malaria and denguy fever. They sent us back to the states because we could no longer fly, we were no longer combat ready. The natives said it was the time of year when the natives get sick and the white man dies."
Oh, what a lovely war
Nilssen lasted longer at Guadalcanal than Ed Bryant. Of course, Byrant was grabbing ground all the time, right up until the morning he got his feet blown up.
"I guess it wasn't glamorous enough to say I was going to be drafted by the army," Bryant, 80, curling his fist around a vodka and water. "With my pugnaciousness that I had as a kid, I joined the Marine Corps. I had five brothers (and four more sisters at home) and they were all in the war before it was over. Didn't lose a soul.
Bryant anteed up with C Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Marine division and sloshed ashore at Florida Island to snipe stragglers after the 1st Marine Division swept the Japanese off Guadalcanal.
"It was supposed to be a very ... quick action on and off, being the first land offensive that was held by the United States to stop the Japanese in their progression through the islands. I read about this after I got out, I didn't know that as a private. You don't know those things. You just do what you're told - stumble along through the crap until you get finished.
After running through the night to reach a specific position at dawn, Bryant and his buddy, Pick, were up front with a Bren .303-caliber light machine gun. Only one per squad was issued; everyone else carried Springfield rifles. They were led by a Captain Stafford, and it was his first command.
The Japanese troops they were targeting disappeared into tall grass in a clearing. Bryant hid behind a tree on the edge.
"I said to Pick, 'Don't move, get behind that tree and when I give you the sign, spray 20 shots of that sucker and let it go at that.'
"The captain said, 'Where are they, Bryant?' I said, 'They are right ahead of you, Sir.' He said, 'When I give the word, charge.' I said to Pick, don't move. Believe me don't move.' Stafford moved and got hit right between the eyes. He ran out to go and he didn't get beyond the trees and down. Pick shot that sucker off, I fired a full clip and we found 20 dead in there.
"Funny thing about that story though. I told it to my brother-in-law who was in the oil business. He was flying from St. Louis to New York and he was sitting alongside a gentleman and they got to talking about the war going on and by this time I am in the states.
"He was talking to this guy, 'I got a brother-in-law that was wounded in Guadalcanal. This guy said, 'I had a son that was killed there. It was Captain Stafford's dad."
Bryant was quiet for a long minute, "You don't want to refuse orders, but you don't want to be stupid."
The morning Bryant was wounded, the soldier on watch left his post. Bryant was surprised by a Japanese attacker who rushed him with a bayonet. He had no time to get up. His Springfield misfired and he extended both legs to fend off the attack. Hershall Walker, a man Bryant calls a "dedicated killer," grabbed the bayonet with his hands. Another Japanese soldier on the ground, just yards away, fired a shot that drove through Bryant's right ankle and took the instep out of his left foot.
"That ended my military combat days right there," Bryant said. The right foot healed, the left became infected and had to be taken off four-inches below the knee, "the shortest stump you can handle a leg with."
Byrant made it back to the States, married, completed his master degree in education on the GI Bill and became an elementary principal with Stockton Unified School District.
In the late 1960s, he and several war buddies with missing limbs, formed the Western Amputee Golf Association to rehabiltate amputees and raise college scholarships.
In 1943 a special squadron of 32 P-38 pilots was assembled in Olympia, Wash. and sent to Burma because the Japanese were knocking down cargo planes going into Kunming, China. The planes were hauling supplies to engage Japanese at their air bases in Northern Issam and French Indochina (now Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.)
Bill Behrns, 79, was one of the pilots of the 459th Fighter Squadron. When his draft notice arrived in 1941, the French Camp resident was stationed at Benecia Arsenal, loading munitions. Already considered employed in an "essential service," he still allowed himself to be drafted.
Right away he applied for ordnance school to avoid KP in boot camp. When he finished No. 2 in the class, the army offered him OCS, officers' candidacy school. He declined it, and wound up transferred to the signal corps at Kern County Airport.
There he witnessed the daily maneuvers of the "Four Flying Sergeants." The whole town of Bakersfield would show up to watch the P-38 pilots from Muroc, "come in and do a big fighter peel-up and come around and land."
From that day foreword, Behrns cashed in all his chips to fly.
From Olympia, the 459th took a steamer train to Miami. They were loaded onto a B-24 and flown to Brazil, then Ascension Island and the Gold Coast to Accra, and across the ocean into Karachi, India, then to Calcutta and finally to Dhaka. There he got his first plane, No 113.
It had shark's teeth painted on it, he had his crew chief add a naked woman in a cowboy hat and boots riding a bolt of lightening and named her "San Joaquin Siren."
"I spent 20 months in aerial combat and flew 104 missions. I was shot six times by the enemy and ... made it back home to my base on a single engine - that's why I loved the P-38. The seventh time I got shot down on the Burma Road and that was not by enemy aircraft.
"At that time, I was leading the leading the squadron and we were going to dive bomb an oil and troop center ... where about 25,000 Japanese troops were marshalled.
"I went by like we were going to go passed, and then as I got them right under my wing I just flipped up over, rolled out headed on down for the town, and was looking down the barrel of an ack-ack gun. It burst all over and all of a sudden my plane jumped up in the air and everything went dead. The gun site, the engine's gone, I'm just sailing right on down."
He kept the plane in the dive, released his bomb load with a manual lever and coasted away, hoping to put plenty of distance between himself and the Japanese before he crashed.
His squad completed their bombing run and formed up with him, flying dead over the trees. He figured when his speed dropped to 170 m.p.h., he'd pull up, climb till it stalled and bail out.
"I just started to pull up and there was the Burma Road, just south of Mandalay," Behrns said. "The P-38 is a wonderful airplane for bellying in ... not like a single engine that can flip."
His buddies shot up the jungle all around him, evening the odds he could spend the night safely. They showed up the next day, found him with a hand mirror signal, shot up the jungle just to make sure they were clear, and his roommate dropped down in a Navy Dauntless and picked him up.
The A-24 dive bomber, well, that was stolen in Calcutta.
Guys from the 459th also stole and AT-6 and a DC-3 for their air field.
"The guys were probably getting loaded you know, and one guy'd dare an other and they'd go out and take off with it and bring it home," said Captain "I-didn't-drink-or-smoke" Behrns.
"When I got back to base, the CO and the flight surgeon met me in a jeep and asked, 'How are you doing Bill?' I said, 'Fine.' The flight surgeon wanted to know If I got hurt or bruised or anything broken. I said, 'I never got a scratch.' (The CO) said, 'That's good, there a flight forming over there. There's your plane."
It was good medicine after all, Behrns admitted, because by the time he got back from that mission, he'd forgotten the one he'd been on before.
That's how he survived, one day at a time, staying in the moment.
The 459th lost 28 of its 32 original pilots and filled in with replacements, but Behrns said it was nothing to cry about. Movies depicting pilots, drowning their sorrows in a beer after losing a flier just didn't ring true for him.
"That never happened. No way," he said. "You just went on."
Stateside, he was scheduled to fly P-80 Shooting Stars. His folks pressured him to come home - back to the ranch. But trucking cows was no comparison to jungle patrols on a Norton motorcycle or waking up to a tiger in camp.
Behrns and a partner set up Pacific Marine and Cyclery. When he got tired of being cooped up, he sold Mother Lode real estate where he could fly clients to the property. When he retired he was selling insurance.
"I never had a bad day," summed up Behrns war experience.
He wasn't alone in calling the war a great adventure, but some fellows found natural disasters as cruel an enemy as the Japanese or the Germans.
The sea, she's a cruel mistress
With three seaman in his division named "Charles" aboard the carrier USS Monterey, Charles Linton became "Lucky" when the bosun's mate scrawled it on his flow weather jacket in a squall. And luck mostly made the difference between living and dying.
The Monterey made the rounds of the Marianas, Saipan, Palau, Tinien and Formosa providing ship-to-shore support with her guns for troops on the islands and a home to F-6F Hellcat fighters and TBF Avenger bombers.
Linton helped load a 40 millimeter gun.
In March of 1945, less than six months before Japan surrendered, a typhoon caught the Monterey off the coast of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines.
"And it was bad one. We rode it from about 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. the next morning," Linton said. "One of the fellows working the hangar deck left a 250-gallon belly tank full of fuel on the plane that should have been taken off.
"When this typhoon started, the plane broke loose and the belly-tank broke loose, skidded across the deck and the whole hanger deck caught fire and all the planes in it.
"The planes that were topside broke loose, and they all went over the side. We lost all our planes. Everyone of them.
They also buried a dozen men at sea.
"It was rough. They sewed them up in a canvas bag, put lead in it, I guess, and took a chow table and tilted it down the side off the back of the ship, and put them on there and slid them in to the water with taps and a 21-gun salute. Killed in action. That's all you can tell their parents."
Part Two: Breaking the Axis
Fifteen months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was still unprepared to engage Hitler as he tore through Europe. The country would be occupied with the South Pacific for another year, losing momentum and morale before it would mount an offensive.
In 1939, American had roughly 333,000 servicemen in the combined branches. After Roosevelt signed the Selective Service act in 1940, and patriotism burned through the country, the combined forces totalled 12.5 million in 1945.
Ralph Brown, 79, was part of first campaigns in North Africa. He served until the end of the war pounding through Italy, France and Germany with the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1697th Ordnance Company (MM) Aviation. He never touched a plane. He was an automotive mechanic.
"Our company repaired all the trucks that serviced the airfield," Brown, said with great difficulty.
He lives at the nursing facility at the Veteran's Hospital in Livermore. His arms and upper body are in constant motion. His speech is garbled. Huntington Chorea (Greek for dance) disease killed his father and sister. His symptoms began 10 years ago.
Storytelling isn't easy.
He was wounded only once - during an air raid. Italian planes swarmed over the desert scattering the troops.
"I didn't get a Purple Heart," Brown said. "Captain said I had it. I guess if you got hurt, you deserved it, but I ran between two trucks when the planes attacked and banged up my knee."
The self-effacing Oklahoma boy scored a heart of a different sort when he met Rita DeLeo in Naples.
"He would come into town once a week," Rita Brown said. "My sister and I went to Naples College, a commercial business school and we were eating lunch in the restaurant.
"My sister said, 'Look at the handsome one by the door.' I said, 'He looks good.' She said, 'Wait till he turns around!' He was so shy, he sent his friend to talk to me."
After Brown came back to America, he continued to write to his sweetheart. At first her father said no to marriage, but when the letters continued, he consented.
DeLeo boarded a ship during the three-month window of the War Brides Act. They married the day after she arrived.
They'd be together still, but Rita can't provide the care her husband needs. She visits him when the VA hospital shuttle bus has room. She doesn't drive, and vets have priority. Still she lands a seat to Livermore about twice a week.
At its height in Nov., 1942, the Axis Empire extended from Norway to North Africa and from France and to western Russia.
American forces spend the Christmas holidays to the following summer gaining control of North Africa and preparing for the invasion of Sicily.
Oran, Africa was Dalton "Mac" McGuire's first stop in 1943, at the tail-end of the campaign. Two weeks later, he was shipped to Sicily as part of a two thousand ship landing operation.
"We took Sicily in 21 days," McGuire said. "Patton was the army commander. I thought he was a hellava man. Just before we hit Sicily, he knew we were green troops and there's 3,000 of us in a regiment. He pulled a flatbed trailer and had us all around it. He got up there - "Blood and Guts" - that was his nickname, and gave us a blood and guts speech.
"'I've got 3,000 men here and I want 3,000 killers. If you're not a killer, you won't come back.' Then he said, 'Now gentlemen,' he reached up and pulled off his helmet, "I want you to join me in prayer.'"
The Sicily campaign called for coordinated efforts between all branches of U.S. forces, and the bugs hadn't been worked out yet. A night drop of paratroopers spooked the ground forces.
"It was the biggest boo-boo the army, navy and anybody ever made," McGuire said. "They didn't notify us they were coming in. We were shooting our own men out of the air."
By mid-1943, American air power began to make headway, targeting factories, marshalling grounds and rail yards.
Pilots of the German Focke-Wulf FW 190 and the Messerschmidt Me-109 proved tough adversaries, however, in the defense of Sicily, Sardina and Italy.
Herb Ross, a P-38 squad commander of the 48th Squadron of the 14th Group, led a decisive aerial battle over the Rome rail yards.
As a boy, Ross was torn between music and aviation. He studied music and his band played Stockton nightclubs right up until the war broke out. He'd already been taking flying lessons, so he enlisted in the cadets.
By the date of the Rome engagement, he'd flown a dozen missions where P-38s provided cover for the B-17s on their bombing runs.
"The enemy planes would bear down and we'd turn into them. Then we have to go back to the bombers. The standing order was to stay with the bombers. About every third mission, at least one guy would get shot down," Ross explained.
The enemy planes would swoop down, fire and climb back to an unreachable altitude. These offensive strikes were very effective.
"They would yo-yo on us and go back to their perch ... I began to think this was ridiculous. We were always on the defensive," he said.
When Jimmie Doolittle - General James Doolittle - visited his base, Ross was all over him the minute Doolittle asked the captain how it was going.
"I blew up," Ross thundered. "God dammit Jimmie, we're losing people. We want to be on the offensive. We're on the defensive. They're yo-yoing on us. They are eating us up."
The slip in military protocol, a captain addressing a general by his first name, Ross can only attribute to his worship of his flying idol.
Doolittle sympathized, but the prevailing tactic remained an order.
That day, 48 fighters and 96 bombers rendezvoused 150 miles off the coast of Italy and set up a staggered pattern of planes at different altitudes. The plan was to make landfall 100 miles south of Rome, reach an IP (initial point) 40 miles inland, make a 90 degree left turn, reach a second IP 40 miles from Rome, and turn outbound so they could drop their bombs and head out over the Mediterranean where it would be easier to rescue any downed pilots.
"I sat 2,000 feet out in front, doing a gentle escort," Ross said, his hands flowing in an S-curve.
But the lead bunch of B-17s hit the first IP and turned 45 degrees to the left prompting Ross to split from the pack, and take one squadron of fighters to follow these 18 planes with 180 men aboard.
"I took my 12 airplanes and I thought if I stay with the B-17s and we get 20 or 30 ME-109s, we're all going to get shot down ... So I left the B-17s and climbed up to about 35,000 feet with my 12. This way I could keep them in sight and be off to one side, S-ing through the air."
Five minutes later 30 Me-109s swarmed into view. Ross told each of his pilots to pick a man. If he couldn't shoot the enemy down the first go round, he was to grab some sky.
The change in tactics paid off. Quickly the 109s started to scatter. About half split, making the fight one-to-one. Ross shot down two planes, feeling pretty smug.
Back on the ground, he's jubilant. They've shot down a dozen enemy planes and the bombers weren't touched.
"It was a turkey shoot," Ross told his CO, Troy Keith. "He said, 'Herb, you left the bombers, you could get court-martialled.'"
Instead Ross was awarded a Silver Star and promoted to major. There after, fighter tactics became the discretion of the fighter group leader. He earned "ace" status for shooting down a total of five enemy planes and retired a full colonel in 1967.
For most men, however the war had no glamor at all, even though the tide was slowly turning.
Harold Crosby was 19 and assigned to the 672nd Port Company of the army's 514th Battalion.
"A port battalion was a slave unit," laughed Crosby, now 75, and a pastor in Stockton. "This is job white folks don't want to do, so niggers do it... just go over there and issue supplies: gasoline, automobiles, guns, food, clothing whatever was needed."
Crosby waded ashore on the Normandy beach, six days after D-Day. There were no landing barges for this black outfit. They climbed down rope ladders wearing their backpacks, held their rifles over their heads, and their chins up. Crosby bumped up against bodies in the surf.
"The dead men ... had been washed up by the tide, killed when they tried to invade that beach six days before. All the ones that got knocked down on the beach, I guess they picked them up and buried them," he said. "But there were others killed in the water, and the tide took them out and the tide brought them in."
With the Germans pushed back beyond the cliffs, the 672nd settled into abandoned foxholes and watched the artillery fireworks. For the next six months, Crosby unloaded ships.
Then he was sent to a military police battalion to guard German prisoners somewhere near St. Lo, France.
"Prison camp was a fenced-in area with tents for the prisoners," Crosby said. "On an average day, you'd take them out to do work that the port battalion would normally do - a lot of repairs and picking up wrecked equipment, things like that."
Prisoners wore American-made uniforms with POW in large letters on the back. They ate what the American troops ate. "We didn't starve them to death like some of the other countries did our prisoners," Crosby said.
For the first few days, rations were on the menu. Then "good, solid food" arrived.
"You'd get ground beef and spaghetti and a lot of cheese ... we'd get steaks and chops and all that kind of stuff."
No disabling dysentery for this recruit - he was felled by his appendix. And Crosby enjoyed his hospitalization.
"I'll tell you, this that was the only time that I found an area that was not segregated - in a field hospital. They take you in and the first bed empty was yours. If there was no bed, and another field hospital was close, they put you on a truck and took you over there... But if it was next to a white guy, it was ok. That was your bed.
"The treatment was really nice. In fact, I wrote my mother a letter and told her I was in Heaven."
In Minnesota, Irene Zieske led a pretty sheltered life. She'd never been around "colored people" and she'd never met a Jew. Army life was the perfect place for this "people person."
Because she wore glasses, Zieske fought the army to let her in and won her first battle. She signed onto the staff of the 217 General Hospital in England where she helped evacuate the southern hospitals in preparation for the Normandy invasion. Then she transferred to the 28th Field Hospital and moved to the glider base at Memberry Field.
"I remember June 6, D-Day so vividly. The planes were so thick you couldn't even see the sky. The planes were coming from Scotland and England, all going south," Zieske said.
At 84, her memory is not as good as it was when she gave her account to a meeting of the WWII Warbird Group in Stockton in 1986. She leafed through a thick envelope full of pictures, recalling stories about the men and nurses she worked with.
Two months after D-Day, she was on Utah Beach with Patton's 1st Division.
"Then I remember the day we went over. We got the casualties from there. I cry to this day. Boys with legs off," she choked, "A lot of these fellows had SIW, self - inflicted wounds in order to get home, to get away. These kids, 18, 19, 20, we had wards full of them.
"With General Patton's 3rd Army we moved every day, almost. I lived in tents for almost two years. We'd set up hospitals and tear them down. Move, move, move, everyday.
"We had three platoons with six nurses in each platoon. And we'd leap frog. As Patton went ahead, a platoon would follow him. If we left a particular place, the second platoon would take over and we'd pack up and follow."
They pushed through six countries: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, German, Austria and Czechoslovakia, in less than 10 months. They moved so fast, one time the field hospital was set up behind enemy lines and Zieske discovered two dead Germans when she trotted off to relieve herself.
Patients that couldn't be patched up and sent back to the line were picked up by nurses in the sky.
"Air vac nurses - we called them the debutants," Zieske said. "We were in mud and squalor and they'd just fly back to England and sleep in sheets."
Soldiers would be transported by C-47s from field hospitals to station hospitals 10 to 15 miles behind the lines. If they needed more extensive treatment, they would be sent to a general hospital, and perhaps even stateside.
A "sky" nurse, Josephine Moffat paid her dirt dues in North Africa. She has spent so much time in a hospital setting, she's very comfortable at the VA hospital in Livermore. At 83, her health, especially her heart, is failing. She went overseas in Jan., 1943, with the 802nd Air Evac Squadron.
"There were too many patients to remember. The only one I remember was the man that my husband saved on D-Day. He described to me what really happened," Moffat said.
She met John Felix Russo from Boston at the staging area in New York. A graduate of MIT, Russo was an electrical engineer who could speak French, German and Italian. He was a lieutenant with the 58th Field Artillary and and asked Josephine to marry him on their first date. Once in Europe, they lost track of one another.
"When you are over seas and you are in a battle zone, you can't just get married, belive it or not," Moffat said. "John found me through the Stars and Stripes. That's the paper for the military. We were married in in the Cathedral at Polarmo, Sicily, on Dec. 17, 1943. Before we got married, we had to get permission from our commanding officers and Eisenhower."
Russo died at Omaha Beach.
"He was the man's shield. And (the man) told me that this happened," Moffat said. "I was evacuating him from Omaha Beach."
Captain Edward P. Moffat married the widow in 1946 and repectfully allowed his wife to keep a picture of herself and Russo by her beside throughout their marriage. He died in 1966, and she called it quits.
"I had two beautiful marriages and four wonderful children," she said.
Subhed
With Africa in Allied control, most of Italy liberated and the Russian front reduced, the Axis was concentrated in Europe and Scandanavia with the exception of Sweden.
Walter Mayer spent the war with his knees drawn up to his chin in "fetal position," as the belly gunner on a B-17 with the 96th Bomb Group of the 338th Bomb Squadron.
A taller, heavier man wouldn't have been able to squeeze himself into the ball turret - on the other hand, Mayer, 74, can still squeeze into his dress uniform.
The Lodi resident was drafted at 18, as the war ground up troops and "replacement" units were needed.
He's got his worst mission pegged: June 21, 1944.
"We shuttled from England to Russia, and after we landed the Luftwaffe came in at night and destroyed 64 out of 77 bombers. Now that's my own account.
"There's a book here in the library known as the 'Poltava Affair' by Glenn B. Infield. Our accounts may not be concurrent, but it was a hellava beating that the 8th Air Force took that night."
One German survellance plane buzzed them in the evening. It was followed by a Heinkel 111, that handily destroyed the entire air field and set the planes on fire.
"It was referred to as the Little Pearl Harbor disastor," Mayer said. "We were double crossed by the Russians."
The attack dispersed roughly 700 men into the Russion woods. For 21 days he avoided capture, and was rescued by Air Transport Command. By July 11, he was back in England and prepped for his next mission.
A year later and after 33 missions, Mayer had the points to go home.
"The call came for volunteers to get the prisoners out of Japan. I knew what it was like to be rescued, and I thought it was my turn to reciprocate," he said, his eyes welling with tears.
In the same time period, another Lodi resident was shot down with no hope of rescue. On a July 7 bombing mission over Leipzig, Germany, a B-17 in the 401st Bomb Group, 615 Squadron lost an engine.
"We were about five minutes from our target and No. 1 engines blew up, so we had to feather it," said Merle Warner, 79. "Well, you can't stay with your formation when you only got three engines, they'll out run you. We had to drop below them and had to drop our bombs."
The Germans jumped them in the air. Firing a .50 caliber machine gun from an open door behind the wing, Warner did his part in the hopeless battle. The tail gunner and the bombardier were dead. He never thought he'd be forced to parachuted from a flaming plane at 26,000 feet. He though wrong. On the ground, he was quickly captured and gathered up with the surviving members of the crew.
"The U.S. was losing planes every day," Warner said. "The camp I was in started in April, 44. Stalig Luft 4 held 10,000 air force enlisted men only. (The Germans) had two camps for the officers and two for the enlisted men, all for guys shot down."
After a few days, Warner was packed in a rail car bound for Frankfort. His interrogation was more than disconcerting.
"And the Gestapo said to me (my dog tags had my home town, which they didn't do later, and my address on them along with my name and serial number) ... 'Oh, I worked for the Union Pacific Railroad from Lodi and Stockton to Bakersfield and I'd go hunting in Big Bear Lake, down around Bakersfield.' I don't know yet today whether he was here or not, but a lot of them had been here, that were the guards in the camps. They went back to Germany because they thought Hitler was the greatest thing that ever lived."
In captivity, Warner received a slice of bread and a potato a day. He was given a monthly Red Cross parcel which included: powdered milk, raisins, prunes, sardines, cigarette and a candy bar.
"I never changed my clothes," he said. "I had one shower the year I was a prisoner. I was still was wearing the same clothes when I was liberated."
The year 1944 was about gaining and holding ground. For every sir strike, somebody had to maintain a foxhole and keep pushing the Germans back. Patton had stretched his troops out so far in France, it took week for supplies to catch up to him. He was stalled in the north, out of fuel. Both sides prepared for the last drive.
In May, 1944, a Japanese-American unit was loyalty tested in the European theater. The 100/442 Regimental Combat Team received their "baptism of fire" north of Rome, plugged all the way to Florence and crossed the Mediterranean to Marseille.
"By the time we reached the front line, it was up in Northeastern France, when we caught up with Patton," said James H. Kurata, a member of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. "We were used as part of the offensive, because it was sort of stalemated. In the meantime, of course, the Germans had put out a lot of mines. It's a lot harder because they are dug in, and you have to uproot them again. That's what we were used for, so we suffered fairly heavy casualties."
In 1941, he was studying engineering at the College of the Pacific when he was drafted. After Pearl Harbor, he and all Niseis, first-generation Japanese-Americans, were pulled from combat units and "neutralized" in desk and supply jobs while U.S. military commanders pondered what to do.
While Kurata proved his allegiance to America, his family was ordered from their Acampo grape farm and interned at Rohwer, Ark.
"They activated the 442nd primarily to offset the hatred against Japanese-Americans in this country," Kurata said.
Its ranks were made up of hundreds of volunteers from the Hawaiian Islands, whose families were not rounded up and sent to internment camps, he added.
"Most of the younger people in the military wanted to show their loyalty and this was one way to gain their confidence in us. That our soldiers were just as brave, and this was our country and not Japan," Kurata said.
At full strength, the 442nd numbered about 4,000 or 5,000, with companies of infantry, a battalion of light artillery and an engineering unit. Kurata fired a 105 millimeter Howitzer.
Between Oct. 23 and Nov. 1, the regiment fought through the Vosges Mountains and liberated Bruyeres, a small town that erected a memorial to the unit for their actions.
In the battle for Bruyeres, Kurata received a battlefield commission and was promoted to lieutenant. His unit was pulled back for some rest. Another company rotated in to rescue the 36th from Texas, the "Lost Battalion," which was surrounded by Germans.
"There's a lot of people who believe that the 36th had enough people that they could have used their own people to rescue them. They used us because we were expendable," Kurata said. "I don't know how many of the 36th Battalion were killed before we got there. But we suffered 600 casualties to save 200 men."
Of course, the war had its lighter moments when the unbelievable had just become funny.
Don Nover, 76, a resident of O'Conner Woods in Stockton, was assigned to the 220th General Hospital. He never threw sulfa powder on an open wound or drug a man back from a machine gun nest, but his first major assignment stateside showed what other perils awaited an anxious war time population.
At Fort Eustis, Vir., Nover was assigned to the VD section.
"Jesus Christ, after two weeks working that I wouldn't touch a girl unless I had gloves on," Nover laughed. "It was a riot. Oh, God. And we had to put up the sign, 'She may look clean, but...' Venereal disease was a big thing in the army. Take my word for it.
"And we used to have to trace these cases down, try and find the carrier... A soldier had gone home on furlough. He had sex on the train going home with one girl, got home and had sex with his wife. Then he ran into an old girlfriend and had sex with her - this is like in a seven to 10 day furlough. When the train came back he had sex again and when he got back to camp he had sex with somebody else ... something like five or six girls. So go trace this down, who gave it to who, when and how."
Epilogue
Liberation on two fronts
It was the beginning of the end. All winter, the Allied forces waged an offensive against the Germans, striking hardest at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. New Year 1945 began with MacArthur regaining control of the Philippine Islands. The Russians came pouring in on the Eastern front through Poland, causing a flood of Allied prisoners to be evacuated by the Germans in a last ditch effort to regroup.
"The Germans took us out of our camp and moved us across to Stettin, into open country out there, and said we were going to another camp, three days away," said Warner, the captive B-17 waist gunner from the 401st Bomb Group. "Well, we marched 90 some days, and never did stop."
Through two to three feet of snow, the ragged prisoners slogged. Warner stole chickens, milk and worm-ridden kohlrabi from cattle cribs along the way. He slept in the snow in open fields. He marched 400 miles to Uelzen, and was packed into unmarked rail cars and shipped to Magnaberg.
"I was standing there in the car and the air raid alarm went on and I thought, 'Oh, man.' I looked out through the little hole in the car and here come two B-26s right on the deck and that what's they were after most of the time marshalling yards, but they went over us and didn't hit us."
Like the "Hell Ships" between the Philippines and Japan, these were unmarked trains that the Allies often targeted unaware they were blasting their own.
At Magnaberg, Warner was held for two days with no food, and then he was packed up again and marched east.
"We made a big loop and came back to Bitterfield, walked another 100 miles, I think it was ... a bunch of British soldiers went through us, they marched everywhere they went and they said, 'Your president's died.' Most of then had been captured for four or five years, but they were more disciplined than we were. I remember them coming up the road and I hear this old bagpipe squealing like a bunch of pigs under the fence and this k-thunk, k-thunk, k-thunk, every foot hit at the same time."
One more night Warner spent in a field, this time dodging P-51 fire. They were so close.
In the morning, he scaled another hill and found himself back at Bitterfield. Half their numbers -1,500 of 3,000 - are alive to see the American flag flying above the school house.
"So anybody tells you an American flag doesn't mean nothing," Warner choked, "don't let them tell you that, because that's freedom."
Roosevelt dies in April. The same month, Mussolini is executed. Hitler dies in May. It's as if the kings had been checkmated with a slew of pawns still on the board.
About 25 miles outside Munich, the war ends for MaGuire of the 45th Infantry. He's survived the war, he's survived Patton.
After establishing a compound for German prisoners, he was sent to Dachau, Hitler's western-most concentration camp.
"When I first saw Dachau, they had railroad cars," McGuire said. "They call them 48s (WWI-vintage 40X8 cars) beside the prison camp and somebody had opened all the doors and there were bodies from the car all down to the ground. There was an incinerator that ran 100 yards or better and it had a track. They threw those bodies on the track and the bodies would go through the incinerator and the ash would fall down."
The troops were cleared out for fear of typhus and typhoid.
McGuire took over a house outside the compound, already occupied by a displaced Polish family. They were communicating with wine, schnapps and the accordion, when they heard a knock at the door.
"This big Pollack about 6'2" opened the door and said, "Dachau commandant. That I understood," McGuire said, "He was the commander of the prison. I had my sidearm on. I stuck it in his face and said, 'You're my prisoner."
With MacArthur in the Philippines, Toribio "Terry" Rosal finds himself liberating countrymen he has never known. American-born Rosal was working in a Richmond fish cannery when he was drafted in 1942. His duty as part of the 1st Filipino Regiment of MacArthur's 6th Army was to serve as the generals "eyes and ears" in the islands and to rehabilitate the civilians.
"We gave them food we recovered from the enemy. We gave them clothing. We took care of their wounded," Rosal said. "We were just a small outfit - maybe 30. There were lots of young girls dressed in burlap sacks. I saw old people suffering from malnutrition."
Food, rather the lack of it, was a major issue for most everybody.
"You walk about the barracks and in most army camps you'd hear talk about girls. Here it was all food, nothing else but," said Ennis, the Death March survivor liberated from a Kanose, Japan carbide factory. "How my mother cooked or my wife cooked this. Here's a recipe for that..."
He pulled out a tiny black notebook, the kind a GI was apt to record girls' numbers in and opened to a recipe for Christmas cake pencilled on yellowed pages:
"8 ounces butter, 8 ounces flour, 12 ounces current, 8 ounces sultanas, 4 ounces Cast. sugar, 3 ounces shredded mixed peel, 4 eggs, little cinnamon and nutmeg.
"Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs thoroughly one at a time. Add spice. Sift flour and add fruit and peels. Mix all well together. Add a little spirit. Line greased tin about two thicknesses of greased paper. Bake moderately, hot oven. Keep in air-tight container."
Routt, held to starvation rations in Omuta, Japan arrived home less a toe. He built cribbing to maintain coal mine tunnels at Camp 17 on Kyushu and worked mainly in a g-string.
He already had a bruised place on the middle toe of his left foot. The split-toed shoes he was issued in the winter, made the hurt spot even more tender. He asked for bigger shoes and was told to come back in the afternoon and "we'll take it off."
"You had two choices - to do what they told you or they buried you," Routt said. So he returned.
"This doctor's name was Hewlett. He was an army captain. Of course the Japanese are there. They put me on a gurney. The minute he touched my foot I raised up, and he give me two little white pills. I raised up again. He said, 'You better lay down this might hurt.' I said, 'Doctor, I feel better if I'm watching you."
The doctor opened a flap of skin on the top of the foot to the offending toe and laid it back. Then he took needle-nosed pliers and pulled the bone out, laid the flap back and sewed Routt up.
The pills he'd been given were compressed rice flour.
He continued to work barefoot in the mines, then unloaded boxcars and was shifted to farm detail when he heard a plane overhead. The first was a weather plane.
"A while later, we heard another plane. He was rumbling along, he had a different groan to him and he went over and he turned. When he got over Nagasaki, he kind of dipped a little bit. The sound of the props and everything all changed, real heavy. What he did was pick up more speed, then he was gone.
"About that time they hollered for us to get to work. We stood up and that bomb went off ... a mushroom formed. When it went off, all along the back of Nagasaki's mountains there was a blue streak that went around. They tell us that was static electricity.
"Then it blew out and collapsed. Actually you heard two explosions. We could feel the wind from it and we could smell the odd smell, which they told us later was ozone.
"The next day we went out on a clean-up detail, most of the city was burnt up. They had us picking up stuff and here comes a big flight of our planes. We counted 500 of them and they were still going over.
"It was said that the spirits were all coming home, (the Japanese) told us that when the war ends all the spirits come home, so we figured that must be about the end of it.
"They assembled us in the morning on the parade ground. The Japanese commander got up there with his interpreter and told us that the war had come to an end and that we'd soon be going home.
"Then our camp padre, a Dutch Catholic, got up and told us, 'When you get home, remember that you won't be able to tell anybody about this because they won't believe it. They'll say you're the biggest bull-slinger that ever come to town. There's going to be a bigger war than we had, there's going to be a lot of heroes. And you better keep your mouth shut."
When Routt was recovered by fresh American GIs, they looked "superhuman" to him, and his appearance made them cry.
In Sept., Routt along with 10 other ex-prisoners of war, announced the filing of a class-action suit against five major Japanese companies for their treatment of POWs during WWII: Mitsui & Co., Inc, Mitsubishi International Corp., Nippon Steel, Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd., and Showa Denko.
"I want to see that some of us are compensated for the rest of our lives Rout said. "I've been asked, 'What do you think would be the right thing to ask for in compensation?' I say, "I have to answer that with a question, 'What would you sell your youth for?'" |
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