The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation From Hometown, USA-Volume I: Voices of the Pacific Theater

by Matthew Rozell

  Food is a lot of fish. Although it is rotten as heck we boiled it up and made fish soup using heads, guts and even the bones. Some of the guys can't do it, but I force it down because I know there is a lot of protein in it. In fact I'm not suffering from pellagra or scurvy anymore and my eyes don't bother me much now. We also received a little extra food from the Philippine Red Cross.

  November 16 to November 23, 1943

  Started working harder now, digging deep drainage ditches. They started using their clubs. I thought these guards wouldn't be so bad, but they are as rough as those Japs at Camp I. Frank Bollinger, myself and about 50 others got beat across the back by a raging drunk supervisor about a week ago. I'm still carrying some of those club marks.

  Three and a half thousand miles away in the south central Pacific, unbeknownst to Joe and his fellow prisoners, an intense battle was winding down at tiny coral atoll called Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.

  November 24, 1943

  Not a bad Thanksgiving. Each one of us received a No. 10 food parcel from the American Red Cross. Those candy bars and the cheese and corned beef are wonderful. We stayed up until two this morning drinking coffee and eating. We will at least have our bellies full until we finish that final bit of American food.

  November 25 to December 24, 1943

  We have made connection with the Filipinos out at work and they are selling our American cigarettes on the black market in Manila and are giving us food and money for them. Hope none of us gets caught dealing with them. Japs have already said they would kill us if we got caught dealing with the Filipinos.

  December 25, 1943

  Christmas Day! Each of us received another food parcel. Also about half of us received American Red Cross GI shoes. I have gone without shoes so long now I doubt if I will have strength enough to carry those heavy shoes, especially through this deep sticky mud.

  chapter eight

  Islands of the Damned

  As 1943 turned into 1944, the objective turned to cutting off and destroying Japanese forward positons still operating in the South Pacific while also taking the Marshall and Mariana islands in the Central Pacific, ratcheting up the pressure on the enemy in simultaneous operations. Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal had shown the Japanese America’s mettle, but the first test of a new type of amphibious landing operations for the coral islands was at the invasion at Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts in November 1943. It was a three-day bloodletting and a brutal lesson for the American forces; over 1000 Marines and nearly 700 sailors were killed in less than 80 hours, and Japanese dead numbered nearly 4700, with only seventeen prisoners taken.

  The island battles of 1944 set the stage for the major operations to follow in 1945. For the Japanese, it would be do-or-die. Entire garrisons were committed to fighting to the death in a tradition that celebrated suicide before surrender, condemning them and thousands of Americans to death.

  Hailing originally from the Bronx, Ralph Leinoff was assigned to the 4th Marine Division as part of a machine gun squad.

  Tarawa

  Marines Under Fire, Tarawa, November 1943. USMC.

  Ralph Leinoff

  Tarawa was an atoll island. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a map of the Pacific, but it consists of a lot of underground mountains which really, above the water, become ‘atolls’, tiny little islands. And the operation before us was Tarawa, and we took heavy losses on Tarawa, because we were using Higgins boats, which were not able to negotiate the coral reefs. We got hung up on the coral reefs, which meant that the men all had to get to shore; they had to wade through hundreds of yards of water to get through. It’s very shallow water in the coral reefs. And of course the coral is very sharp. It would tear your shoes, and they were sitting ducks, there was no place to get cover. So we took an awful beating on Tarawa. At that time, then, it was decided that we have to do something else. We can’t use the Higgins boats—Higgins boats were good in that they were very, very fast. They moved right along. But we needed a tracked vehicle, like a tank that could float. And they invented the…the half-track, which was a true carrier, an open-top, true carrier, and that could ride right over the coral. If you got in it, it moved very slow, it didn’t have propellers on it. The cleats on the treads, the tank treads, were the propulsion device. It would push the water back and the vehicle would go forward. And it held maybe about ten men or so, but it was very, very slow moving, and we had casualties.

  The Marshalls.

  The Marshall Atolls

  With its tiny airfield, Tarawa became a necessary stepping stone to the Marshall Island atoll group, and thence to the much larger islands in the Marianas, from where the sleek, new B–29 bombers now rolling off the assembly lines at home would find the range to the cities of Japan. Here, in the Central Pacific, working in tandem with the burgeoning U.S. Navy under Admiral Nimitz, U.S. Marines and Navy flyers advanced on island after island in 1944 and 1945, supported by Navy corpsmen and Army units.

  Operation Flintlock began in early February 1944 with a joint Marine-Army assault in the Marshalls at Kwajalein Atoll, followed by a Marine landing 330 miles northwest at Eniwetok Atoll, which consisted of about 30 tiny islands. The three largest were Engebi, Eniwetok, and Parry, and all were intensely defended; aerial photography had proven that the Japanese were slowly building these islands into defensive positions.

  Alvin Peachman

  The Marshall Islands were beautiful. We came into this atoll, which was one of the most beautiful places I ever saw. The interior [lagoon] was green and the outside reef was like a large ring, never too wide, no more than about a half a mile wide. In some places it was just a few yards, or one hundred yards.

  Ralph Leinoff

  Kwajalein was a flat island. It was of strategic value because it had an airfield on it, but there were no place for the Japanese to really dig in deep. They had their pillboxes, but they were able to resupply their own ships from Kwajalein, and we had to take it. And we wanted that airfield. So the Navy Air Force did a very good job of bombing the island, so when we got there it was comparatively light resistance. As I say, we had losses, but not on the scale with what was coming up.

  The 22nd Regiment of the 6th Marine Division included 21–year old Joseph Fiore of Glens Falls. He graduated from St. Mary’s Academy and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942. He described his first encounter with the enemy.

  Joe Fiore

  I made my first landing on Engebi Island in Eniwetok Atoll. I was scared—yes, I was scared. That was the first island, and the priest heard confessions aboard ship. We were up at four o’ clock in the morning, and we went down to the cargo nets into our Higgins boats. But before that, they gave us breakfast, which was a steak with three or four eggs right on top of it, and that was our last meal. Everybody said it was going to be our last meal before we get to get out of here. I was in an amphib [amphibious landing craft] with no ramps; we had to go over the side, jump maybe three or four feet from the ground. And all I could think of was, when I jump out of this thing here, I am going to be facing a Jap holding a machine gun on me.

  Well, when I hit the ground I looked around and I didn’t see anything. We had landed just at the end of the runway that we were there to take because we were ‘island hopping,’ and every time we took an island, it usually had a runway for planes—our fighter planes. We just start walking on the runway, going up to the other end of the island where headquarters was. Three or four of us were talking as we were walking; we weren’t running or anything like that because we didn’t see any Japanese. All of a sudden I looked down to the ground and I said, ‘Jeeper’s sakes, look at those little marks there! They look like Mexican jumping beans!’ Well, there were Japanese snipers way back and they were firing, and their bullets were hitting the ground at our feet! We didn’t realize it, and then we started running! We made the rest of the island in no time flat. Tony Luciano would’ve been real proud of me because I broke more records on that day!

  We secured the is
land and spent the night there, which was hectic. That’s when the Japs would try to sneak into our positions, but we had machine gunners covering us. The Navy left an awful lot of bomb craters from huge shells, 16-inch shells that exploded on the runway. So we got in those big holes in the ground—it was in the coral reef—and just dug into the side and waited until daylight. When daylight came, then they’d send back to our ships out in the harbor to get ready for the next operation, which was in the same atoll, Eniwetok Atoll. I would say [the operation] was about four days later, Parry Island, and that’s where I got my first Purple Heart.

  I used an awful lot of hand grenades in those days. As a matter of fact, I have an article that a war correspondent wrote me up on and called me the ‘Pineapple Kid.’ I used 70 hand grenades in one day and one night on that island, blowing up foxholes. And underneath the coconut trees, the Japs would build a little nest for themselves, so I was working my way up to an installation that I was going to blow up, and my partner, Seymour Draginsky from New York, Polish Jew, he was backing me up. And a mortar came into our area, and that’s when a mortar landed over to my side, and I already had pulled the pin of the grenade. But there’s a spoon that goes in the palm of your hand here [gestures] and as long as you keep that grip and that spoon doesn’t move, you can walk around the whole island all day long until you’re ready to throw it.

  Glens Falls Post-Star, May 1, 1944.

  So I went down on my stomach in a depression in the ground, and before I knew it, Draginsky had jumped on me because he figured I was wounded. Then I found out later that he was wounded too but he really saved my life. He picked the grenade out of my hand, and he threw it as far as he could and then started dragging me back by my collar. And Sergeant Wolfe came up on the other side, so between them they got me the hell out of that area. A tank was coming up and they put me in the back of the tank, and this corpsman worked on me and got me in a stretcher. And they brought me to the beach, and I ended up on a hospital ship, USS Solace, and on my way to Pearl Harbor.

  I went to Pearl. I was in there about a month recuperating from the wounds. They gave me that first Purple Heart at Pearl Harbor. As a matter of fact, Admiral Nimitz pinned that on me; someone took a picture of it, and I never saw that picture, I would have loved to have had that!

  Walter Hooke had his fill with handling pictures back at the Marshall Islands. He was tasked with a difficult duty—packing up the wallets and personal possessions of those killed in battle, to mail home to their families.

  Walter Hooke

  In the Marshall Islands [pauses, voice breaking], I had the job of securing the personal belongings of the guys that were killed, wallets and pictures and dog tags of the guys who were injured or killed. For instance, one of the people I remember making a little box for and wrapping up his wallet and picture of family and parents was the son of Harry Hopkins, who worked as Roosevelt’s aide. His son could have been an officer, but he enlisted in the Marine Corps as an ammunition carrier. So I remember making up this little box and sending it to the White House, addressed to Harry Hopkins, with his son’s dog tags and wallet....[43]

  Stephen Hopkins was just 18. His father was FDR’s ‘go-to’ man in the White House. His commanding officer, Marine Captain Irving Schechter, related the following story after noting his charge’s White House address.

  Irving Schechter

  ‘Hopkins, I see you have been in officers’ training and I’m somewhat puzzled as to why you should show up here. There is no mention of your flunking out of OCS [Officers Training School].’

  ‘No, sir,’ he answered, ‘I did not flunk out; I just got damn sick and tired of getting the needle about my having some kind of an easy job because I was Harry Hopkins’s son. My dad has believed in this war since it started and so have his sons. I’m anxious to go overseas and back up what my father stands for because I stand for the same things.’

  ‘Okay, Hopkins,’ I told him, ‘we’ll get you into machine guns in the morning.’

  Well, we went into the Roi-Namur part of the Marshalls around the beginning of February. Our battalion went ashore on Namur... whenever you have to kill a few thousand Japanese, you always lose men yourself. One of the Marines we lost here was young Hopkins. He had kept his machine gun going right into the middle of a banzai charge until he took a bullet in his head.[44]

  The Marianas and environs.

  The Marianas—Saipan, Guam, and Tinian

  Fiore lost his original outfit and took up duties in the 2nd Marine Division as a flamethrower for the invasion of Saipan in the Marianas. In mid-June 1944, just over a week after the Normandy landings in France, 20,000 Marines of the 2nd and 4th Divisions landed with heavy casualties. Reserves of Marine battalions and the Army’s 27th Division followed a few days later.

  Ralph Leinoff

  In the Marianas, we had the islands of Saipan and Tinian. Now that’s getting close—they were about 1,500 miles south of Japan, you had to go up and down these valleys and there was a lot of vegetation in there. Now the island is only about 18 miles long. It’s shaped something like an upside-down monkey wrench. You know what a monkey wrench looks like? You turn it upside-down you got an idea of what Saipan was like. It had a sugar mill and they had agriculture. It was a very beautiful island, actually... These are not coral islands, now. The Marianas were actually sandy beach islands, and we were able to get in with faster vehicles, but of course the amount of fire that we took was enormous, compared to what happened at Kwajalein.

  The Japanese managed to stake out a number of snipers and they took their toll. And it was very hard to find out where we were being shot at from, so we took a lot more losses on Saipan. We lost a lot of men there getting on that island, and that took more than five days. It took us about three weeks or so to get up to the north end of the island, and in that three weeks we suffered casualties, but less and less each day. The worst casualties were suffered by the Army, which went up a low section of the island. The Japanese had re-formed and it was a nasty battle between so-called banzai fighters and the Army. They were able to break through the Army lines and get all the way back to the Marine Corps artillery, it was Marine artillery that would stop them.

  The Marines on Saipan were joined by the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, a New York National Guard unit federalized in October 1940. Many of its members hailed from the mill towns north of Albany, and it was the 27th which would bear the brunt of the biggest banzai attack of the war. [45] Before the final attack, the Marine commander expressed his unhappiness in front of war correspondents with the progress of the Army soldiers, and had the Army general relieved of his command. In fact, in the attack to follow, three members of 105th Regiment would be awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously.[46]

  Nicholas Grinaldo of Troy was a 23–year old sergeant who would receive two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star for his actions on Saipan. In an interview with the NYS Military Museum’s Veterans Oral History Project, he explained the situation.

  Nick Grinaldo

  The 27th Division got stuck in the mountains fighting. We had to fight cave to cave, hand to hand sometimes. And we had a General Smith, Ralph Smith, one hell of a good man. And he was relieved by this Marine general, ‘Howlin’ Mad’ [Holland M.] Smith. From what I understood back then, the reason he was relieved of his command was that the Marines said we could not keep up with them. Well, Jesus Christ, they had tank support down in the lowlands which we didn’t have! They confiscated half of the 27th’s artillery… and we were supposed to keep up with them! The best we had was 60 and 81 mm mortars, and half the time you could not use them because of the terrain. There were mountains, gulches, hillsides, caves dug into them. That’s the way it was, it was really rough going up through the goddamn mountains! As much as you tried, you could not keep up with them. You go past a cave, so small you never noticed the opening. The next thing you know, you’re getting shot at from behind.

  John Sidur was a 26–year old sergeant from Cohoes, New York,
and would also receive the Bronze Star for his bravery at Saipan.

  John Sidur

  We had this cave, and we had two Japanese [Japanese-American] guys from the Hawaiian Islands, they didn’t carry any guns or anything, but they were smart. They walked right into the cave and talked to the Japanese soldiers. They weren’t going to give up. Our two came out and told us, and then went back in and told them they had five minutes before we are going to shell them. Then they went back in and told them they had three minutes—all of a sudden we heard the screaming of women and children! We told them to let the civilians out. The Japanese wouldn’t let them out, that was their protection. So it came down to… they blew the cave up! How many people were killed, we don’t know, but that cave was closed. They exploded it with dynamite!