by R. V. Burgin
While we waited to be mustered out, Ernest Schelgren and I hung out together. His wife, Barbara, flew in from Dallas to meet him and we became good friends, and remained so for many years after. My sister Ila was sending me money so I was able to go out on the town whenever I got liberty.
It took the Marines almost a month to return me to civilian life. I turned in my equipment, filled out lots of papers and sat through a final interview. I was surprised that the interviewer didn’t ask whether I had been wounded or whether I had any medical problems. When it was over the Marines paid for a train ticket back to Texas. I was in a hurry and I flew home instead.
I moved in with my sister Ila in Dallas, then took the train down to spend Christmas with my parents at Jewett. My father had set aside a calf for me, as he did for each of the Burgin children. But I didn’t want to farm. I had seen him work too long and too hard for too little. In a month I returned to Dallas and started looking for a job. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with my life.
I had already started the paperwork on Okinawa to bring over Florence. Although I had never officially proposed to her, it was always understood between us that we were going to marry after the war. I had written to her father asking for her hand. She told me once in Melbourne that he threatened to shoot “that Yank” if I came around trying to date his daughter. We had a good laugh over that. He didn’t even own a gun. Fortunately, he sent his permission.
I listed her as my fiancée, which meant she had to wait in line behind all the wives and the wives with children before she could come to the United States. Once the paperwork was approved I had to post $500 with the government. This was a technicality, in case a fiancée arrived in the United States and the couple ended up not getting married, or they got divorced quickly. Then the money would go to the young woman to pay for her passage home. If the couple married, the government would return the $500.
Neither one of us had any doubts. We longed for the day we would finally be together. I put us on the waiting list for a new refrigerator and started looking for an apartment—not an easy thing to find in the months after the war, when GIs were returning home by the tens of thousands.
I bought a ’39 Plymouth to help me in my job search. Growing up in rural Texas I had admired the mail carriers. I knew both of the rural route carriers who worked out of Jewett. I had been in their homes. They were friendly men and they had decent jobs during the Depression. I always figured that someday I would work for the federal government, because that meant job security and a good retirement plan.
I went to the Veterans Administration to see the contact officer. He was a man named Frank Mallory and he took an interest in my case. I think he took an interest in all the returning vets, because he was that kind of person.
We were sitting in his office talking and I told him I wanted to work for the Post Office. I’d had another bout of malaria and red, itchy fever blisters had spread over my chin and nose. I couldn’t have weighed more than 140 pounds.
“Are you drawing disability?” Mallory asked.
I wasn’t.
“And they didn’t ask you about it when you were discharged?”
I said they hadn’t mentioned anything about malaria or any medical problems.
“Well, somebody wasn’t doing his job,” he said. “What we’re going to do is put in for a pension and let you start drawing compensation for this.”
He showed me how to fill out the papers and gave me an addressed and stamped envelope. He also arranged for me to get on the list for the Civil Service exam for the Post Office.
A month or so afterward I got a check for 60 percent disability pay retroactive to my discharge.
In February, T. L. Hudson showed up. He’d gotten over the wounds he’d received on Okinawa. We found a boardinghouse where we could bunk together and the rent included breakfast. We became very close friends.
That month, I was notified that I had been recommended for a Bronze Star for my role in wiping out the machine-gun nest on Okinawa. This was the first I’d heard, but welcome news. I went out and bought my first and only set of Marine dress blues for the presentation ceremony, which was held in Dallas’s Oak Cliff YMCA. My dad and mother drove up from Jewett to stand beside their proud son, the only time they ever saw me in a Marine uniform.
When my health got to the point that I was able to go to work I decided to try the railroad company. They put me in telegraphy school for two months, but just before graduation I found out they planned to stick me in a little station way out just this side of El Paso. No town, no settlement of any kind, not even a gas station. Just a lonely railroad agency beside the track. I could imagine how Florence would take to that, and it wasn’t what I’d had in mind either, so I said, No, thanks. With Mallory’s help, I landed a job on the assembly line at the Ford plant in East Dallas. I worked there three months making $1.28 an hour—which was pretty good—when a letter came from the Post Office telling me to come in for the Civil Service exam.
I went to work for the Post Office on May 15, 1946, carrying the U.S. mail for eighty-four cents an hour, enduring the heat and fighting off mean dogs in East Dallas.
* * *
Back in Melbourne, Florence took the tram to the American consulate every Saturday, where she sat waiting patiently for the papers that would allow her to come to the United States. Women who had married American servicemen came and went, but there was nothing else either one of us could do but wait.
My sisters and mother were almost as eager as we were. They had been exchanging letters with Florence for more than a year. As soon as my mother found out we planned to marry, she wrote Florence that we were a simple farm family, not rich or glamorous. Florence wrote back that that was fine with her. She, too, came from a simple working-class family. After that, they hit it off just fine.
The year was almost over before we learned that the gate was finally open. In early January 1947, Florence said good-bye to her family and boarded a ship at Port Melbourne. There were five hundred passengers on board, and four hundred of them were the fiancées of American servicemen. I found us an apartment. It wasn’t the little cottage I’d envisioned those hours daydreaming in tents and foxholes halfway around the world. But it was a start. I had a good job, and she was on her way. She managed the whole thing, lining up passage on the ship and a railroad ticket from San Francisco to Dallas, and wrote me to expect her the morning of January 27.
Riding east on the train she made friends with an older woman, also bound for Dallas. Florence told the woman how she met this American Marine in Australia, how love had triumphed and that she was headed to Dallas to marry him.
The woman looked doubtful.
“Are you sure he’s going to be there at the station?”
“He’ll be there.”
As it turned out, I wasn’t.
I got to the Dallas Union Station that morning in plenty of time for the train. But it wasn’t the train she was on. I inquired when the next train would be in, then went back to the boardinghouse and had breakfast. I got back to the station fifteen minutes late for the next train and finally found Florence standing in the waiting room with her luggage, her new friend standing by her side in case I didn’t show up. Florence looked just like I remembered her, only better. We hugged like any couple in love who haven’t seen each other for years. The woman from the train disappeared. We never did get her name.
Florence had assumed we would be married on February 15, her twenty-first birthday. But we had an apartment. The refrigerator had been delivered. My family had even arranged for the church and a cake. And so on January 29, 1947, two days after she stepped off the train, three years and nine months after we met in Melbourne, my Australian bride and I were married in the Saner Avenue Church of Christ.
Though we had gotten off to a late start, we were like tens of thousands of other new couples in 1947, struggling to realize the American dream. Florence loved my family, and they loved her. She learned all my mot
her’s favorite recipes and fit right in. Our oldest, Margaret Ann, was born that November. We lived in the apartment for a few more months—T. L. Hudson was our upstairs neighbor—and then bought our first house, a two-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood close in. Vicki Lynn came along in 1950, then Vanessa Jo in 1953. Florence always told her mom she was going to have eleven boys and one girl. When our fourth girl came along in 1955, we said, That’s it, and gave her a boy’s name, Terrie Lee. A few years later we bought a three-bedroom a little farther out. And in 1965, we built our dream house in the country, on a wooded tract overlooking a stream.
I put the war out of my mind and buckled down to work at the Post Office. In 1947 I had my last episode of malaria, which landed me in the veterans’ hospital for a week. I got off the mail route that summer and became a postal clerk. A few years later I started studying for the supervisor’s exam. I went from clerk to line foreman to general foreman to tour superintendent and finally to superintendent of registered mail. Each step of the way I found my old Marine experience stood me well. It was like being a section leader. As I moved from one supervisor’s job to the next, I always made it my business to find out who were the natural leaders, the ones you could depend upon, and who were the troublemakers. And like my old San Diego drill instructors, I never had to yell at anyone to get anything done.
Three of our girls graduated from college. One went to a junior college. Florence and I became grandparents four times over. And then great-grandparents, three times so far. The girls are everything we could want, smart and successful.
* * *
In 1956 I took a leave of absence from the Post Office and Florence and I took the girls to Australia to meet her side of the family. We picked up a drive-away car in Dallas and motored up through Colorado and Utah, then on through Lake Tahoe to San Francisco, where we were to board our ship. It was a station wagon, so there was plenty of room for four active children.
We were driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge. Vicki Lynn, who was in her second year of school, was sitting behind me looking out the window at a car in the next lane, when she called out, “Look, Daddy, look! There’s Chineses!”
I glanced to my left. There was a car full of Asians. Chinese or Japanese, I didn’t know which. Instantly this cold chill came over me. They were the first I’d seen since the war.
We stayed in Australia ten months. The Australians are great people. They had three jobs waiting for me when we arrived. They made us feel welcome. But in the end, we came home, to the United States.
For thirty-five years I pushed the war out of my mind. I never talked about it to anyone, period. There were two or three Marines that worked down at the Post Office. Sometimes we’d joke about the funny things that had happened. But we never really talked about the war. I just held it all back.
In 1979, I got a phone call. Stumpy Stanley, our old company commander, Bill Leyden and a few others from the First Marine Division had been sitting in a New York bar having a drink. One of them said, “We should get everybody together again.” Before they split up, each promised to call other Marines he knew from the war and pass the word along. When the call came around to me, I started calling the guys I knew. I’d kept up with Jim Burke, of course. He was living in Clinton, Iowa. I remembered John Redifer lived in Portland, Oregon. Marmet lived in Ohio. Tom Matheney lived in Monterey, Tennessee. When I didn’t know their number, I called information. And so it went until I’d found twelve people.
In 1980 twenty of us from K Company went to the Marine Association First Division reunion in Indianapolis. Gene Sledge was there, Mo Darsey, our old gunny sergeant. Johnny Marmet. Tom Matheney. The whole crowd. Guys I had spent months and even years with, guys I had fought alongside.
We’d sit around and talk. One of them would say, “Hey, Burgin, do you remember the day such-and-such happened?”
I’d say, “No, I don’t remember that.”
And they’d say, “You ought to. You were there.”
They’d talk about how this happened, how that happened. Go into details about what went on. I’d just sit there.
Then, all of a sudden it would flash through my mind, and I could see it again as plain as day.
I started attending the reunions every year after that.
At the 1983 reunion, Stumpy Stanley said to me, “I talked to Jim Kornaizl the other day. He said to tell you hello.”
“Who? You talked to who?”
“Jim Kornaizl.”
“I don’t know a Jim Kornaizl.”
“He sure knows you. That’s for sure.”
It bugged me after that that I could not recall Jim Kornaizl. The next year, 1984, we held our reunion in Milwaukee.
A guy was coming down the hallway toward me in the hotel. The moment I saw him, it all came back. The flash of the shell. He and T. L. Hudson on the ground, wounded, and Kornaizl twitching from head to foot.
Why I had put that out of my head I do not know. I had remembered Hudson getting hit. But not Kornaizl.
We talked for a while. He had spent eighteen months in the hospital. They had put a steel plate in his skull, and when he started having convulsions again they opened him up and cleaned it out and put in another steel plate.
Within a few years I got to the point where I could talk about the war any time, any place, with anybody. It got me thinking: This needs to be told, what we went through.
Florence and I had the air-conditioner man out to the house the other day for a little preseason maintenance. He was looking at the pictures on my wall, at my KA-BAR in its frame, at the flag and the Bronze Star I got in 1946.
I asked him if he’d ever heard of Peleliu.
No, he’d never heard of Peleliu.
I didn’t figure he had. I told him we’d had sixty-five hundred casualties in thirty days on that little island. I didn’t tell him about the flies and the maggots and the rot, the bad water and heat and caves, about how you never knew where the next bullet was going to come from.
The big famous battles—Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. Everybody’s heard about them. Nobody’s heard of Peleliu. They don’t teach history anymore.
So I made up my mind to teach it. There’s only a few of us left who know anything about Peleliu. When we started our reunions we had 250 on our roster. Now we’re down to forty. We lost five since our last reunion. Only a few of us are left who remember. We have to tell the stories, so this and future generations will know what happened. So it doesn’t get forgotten.
* * *
What sticks with me now is not so much the pain and terror and sorrow of the war, though I remember that well enough. What really sticks with me is the honor I had of defending my country, and of serving in the company of these men. They were good Marines, the finest, every one of them. You can’t say anything better about a man.
Semper Fi!
Selected Bibliography
OVERVIEWS
Costello, John. The Pacific War 1941-1945. Perennial/HarperCollins, New York City, 1981.
Dear, I. C. B., general editor, and Foot, M. R. D., consultant editor. The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1995.
Hammel, Eric. Pacific Warriors: The U.S. Marines in World War II, A Pictorial Tribute. Zenith Press/MBI Publishing Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2005.
McMillan, George. The Old Breed: A History of the First Marine Division in World War II. Zenger Publishing Company, Washington, D.C., 1949/1979.
Rottman, Gordon L. U.S. Marine Rifleman 1939-1945. Warrior Series #112. Osprey Publishing, Midway House, West Way, Botley, Oxford, England, 2006.
NEW BRITAIN AND CAPE GLOUCESTER
Bielakowski, Alexander M. “New Britain” in World War II in the Pacific: An Encyclopedia. Garland Publishing, Inc. New York City, 2001.
Hough, Major Frank O., USMCR, and Major John A. Crown, USMCR. The Campaign on New Britain. Historic Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C., 1952.
Miller, John, Jr. Cartwh
eel: The Reduction of Rabaul. United States Army in World War II. Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., 1959.
Nalty, Bernard C. Cape Gloucester: The Green Inferno. Marines in World War II Commemorative Series. Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C., 1994.
PELELIU AND PAVUVU
A&E Television Networks. Our Century: The Bloody Hills of Peleliu. The History Channel, 1995 (DVD).
Camp, Dick. The Last Man Standing: The 1st Marine Regiment on Peleliu, September 15-21, 1944. Zenith Press/MBI Publishing Co. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2008.
DeHart, Bruce. “Palau” in World War II in the Pacific: An Encyclopedia. Garland Publishing, Inc. New York City, 2001.
Faith, William Robert. Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York City, 1982.
Hallas, James H. The Devil’s Anvil: The Assault on Peleliu. Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 1994.
Hope, Bob, with Linda Hope. My Life in Jokes. Hyperion, New York City, 2003.
Hough, Major Frank O., USMCR. The Assault on Peleliu. Historic Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C., 1950; reprint: The Battery Press, Inc., Nashville, Tennessee, 2000.
MacMillan, George. “They Called It a Rest Camp: The First Marine Division on Pavuvu.” Harper’s, October, 1949, pp. 36-45.
Moran, Jim, and Gordon L. Rottman. Peleliu 1944: The Forgotten Corner of Hell. Campaign Series #110. Osprey Publishing, New York City, 2002.
Phillips, Sidney C., M.D. “You’ll Be Sor-ree!” Artcraft Press, Mobile, Alabama, 2001.
Pollins, Perry. Tales of a Feather Merchant: The World War II Memoir of a Marine Radioman. Merriam Press, Bennington, Vermont, 2008.