If you ever ask a veteran to describe their wartime experiences, usually there is not much shared. The scars may be too harsh to reopen, and the memories need to stay locked deep inside. It was the same with my father. A member of the “greatest generation” who lived through World War II, my Dad was 17 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He lived in far upstate NY, just south of the Adirondack Mountains in South Glens Falls. It was a small town with lumber and paper mills the main business of the town. It was a small city much like the fictional Bedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life” fame. Not much happened there, and as a young guy in such a place, their imagination could run wild. Thinking about being shipped out to London, or Hawaii, or some other exotic place was breathtaking. In addition, with the Japanese surprise attack, patriotic fervor was rampant.
My Dad couldn’t wait to join, but as a 17 year old, he had to wait until he turned 18 and it drove him crazy. He told me once that he found out that the Navy sometimes looked the other way when it came to age limits. This turned out to be untrue, but while exploring this Navy option, he discovered that there was a big need for men to join the Seabees and that he would be shipped out quickest if he joined them after turning 18. There was a reason for this as the Seabees were a Naval Construction Battalion. These were the guys who went in first on the beachheads to build barriers for the troops before the main attack. They were sent into jungles to carve out airstrips for planes to land. The logo for this group of warriors is men carrying a shovel in one hand and a gun in the other. It was possibly one of the most dangerous parts of the armed services to join, but it was exactly what my Dad was looking for, and he decided to join the Navy Seabees. In early 1942, he found himself in the South Pacific in Pearl Harbor as the U.S. began their island hopping campaign on their way toward Japan.
As a young boy in the 1960s, I asked my Dad what WWII was like, but he never told me much. Later in life, as I grew older, he did share a few tidbits. One of the memories he shared was later in his Navy journey. After being part of the island hopping campaign, he was a SeaBee trying to complete a landing strip on a nameless South Pacific island. Japanese bullets were strafing the bulldozers and men building it. Three Corsair fighter planes running out of fuel appeared in the sky and had to land or fall into the sea. He told me how they landed on the half-finished runway, and as the pilots jumped out of their planes they yelled to my Dad to be careful not to touch their scorching hot machine guns, as they had just come out of a dogfight with Japanese Zeros and had shot down the plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto who was the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were the type of stories he would share.
Without a doubt, he was in a number of blazing “hot zones” and he was less open about these stories. One of the most critical WWII battles in the South Pacific was on Guadalcanal. It was a lengthy battle lasting five months from late 1942 into February of 1943. Incredibly, only 1,600 U.S servicemen lost their lives, but over 20,000 Japanese were killed. My father was there and it was one of the few direct actions he shared with me where he participated...it’s a bit chilling.
It was a Sunday, and in Navy parlance, it was a "make and mend" day for the sailors. By Navy tradition, a day to clean up your uniform, polish your shoes, and make yourself shipshape. At Guadalcanal, after weeks of hard combat, it was basically a day to chill out, have a beer, and relax.
That afternoon everyone was out in a clearing playing baseball, drinking beer, and horsing around. Spread out on the field, there were about 300 Sailors, Marines, and SeaBees. It was a beautiful South Pacific day with a light warm breeze, brilliant sun, and not a cloud in a picture perfect blue sky. My father was one of these guys, and although he usually would have been playing ball, he had been bitten by so many mosquitos that he was lounging in the grass trying to ignore the itching.
Suddenly out of nowhere, flying extremely low, a lone Japanese dive bomber appeared just above the palm trees. My Dad told me it seemed so unexpected on what was a casual day that it took everyone by surprise. The Jap bomber dove toward the center of the clearing. The Japanese loaded their bombs with anything they could find to increase the lethality (shrapnel, rusty nails, etc.). The pilot released the bomb so low that by the time the Marines and Seabees heard the bomb screaming toward them, they didn't even have a chance to hit the dirt.
The bomb exploded.
My Dad told me that by the time he got up on his knees after the blast and looked around him, it seemed that everyone was untouched as if nothing had happened. Then he started hearing groans and cries for help. The bomb had drawn a straight line down the center of the field, cutting it half. The angle of the way the bomb landed caused the shrapnel to spread 180 degrees - and luckily my Dad was on the right side of the explosion. All the sailors on my Dad's side were fine, but the other half of the field was completely wiped out as if the ordnance knew which side of the field to obliterate. He said it was like a knife cutting everyone on the other side of the field in half. Dozens were killed, blood, arms, and legs were strewn everywhere with scores wounded, but in a world war and especially at Guadalcanal, scenes like this played out somewhere every day.
The way Dad told me this story you could tell it contained a memory of incredible sadness, a memory he didn't want, but he also worded it in a matter of fact sort of way as something that wasn't totally an unusual occurrence. Dad only told me that story once and never mentioned it again. I always wondered what other memories he had that he didn't share...
When I fall asleep at night, my thoughts and dreams are about my family, reliving past exploits, or future vacations, and the like. Yet someone with memories of action from WWII (or any war) fall asleep with something far different. After hearing this story, it was hard to think about what my Dad must have dreamed about before falling asleep...or how often these memories and experiences seeped in. I never found out, but have never wavered in appreciating the sacrifices guys like my Dad made to ensure our world is better because of what they did.