WWII Veteran Stories

I jump from gently table news in Longmont Colorado today we're talking to Vern Zurich who is also called fun girl he was sworn in at 17 but wouldn't active duty at 18 so tell me why you were assigned to the Air Corps and what were you do T's well it turns out that coming from Louisville I didn't know much about the ocean a lot of our friends went and signed up with the Navy but I coming from this landed area I chose the army went to Denver took the exam for the Army Air Corps passed it because we had good teachers in Louisville and I was four in and by and the colonel came and said we'll be calling you then go home and get prepared but then he looked at the service record he gave me and said seventeen he said oh you're too young we swore you in but we won't call you out to active duty for another year but I graduated from high school in June and then in on July 20th I was on a troop train on the way to basic training in miami beach florida well since i was from in high school without any college i went to after basic training in miami beach they sent me to Springfield College Massachusetts and that's where basketball originated so to get some extra college but then it wasn't too long I was on my way to Nashville Tennessee and then to Alabama where I went to pre-fight school and then to Florida again where I went into gunnery school finally hah navigation school of Hondo Texas and then on the way to Walla Walla Washington where I was a navigator enough b-24 bomber haha I think I did we had funny breakfast one time and we are still cadets flying in 20 and we were over the Grand Canyon and it was rough on boy did I like all of us go everybody on the play God's sake except to Pilate himself I signed up for service on my 18th birthday July 20th 1943 it's a long story but I I was in the Navy and a navy hospital corpsman with a the fifth fleet of amphibious marine force throughout the South Pacific when you're 18 you sign up and then you're sent induction paperwork I lived in at that time in Decatur Illinois which was a county seat and what happened is that a the Wabash railroad had a train schedule from Chicago through all through Illinois I owned in the st. Louis and Kansas City and so what happened was they had when they had the inductions why then there was probably 50 or so people in my Macon County induction so the what happened he got the induction you was told to report to the wall base railroad and I think it was like 2:30 in the morning and we all met there and we was met by military police and they had a roll call they put you on the train and they picked up different people as the train went toward Dearborn station in Chicago at the induction Center and so that's how it happened we get through the induction Center and they we again were met by military police they called off the roll and told us we were going to go and walk about six eight ten blocks to the induction Center and that happened to be a large Ballroom of a major hotel in downtown Chicago just off of State Street and so they might had all kinds of desks like tables you know six feet of tables one after another on down and so they ran you through first through the medical thing and they get doctors all gave you medical clearance and if you cleared why he went to the next thing they had table-setting Army Navy Marine Corps so forth and so you went to each one and and they ask you questions and this and the other and so I got down to the arm here they talked to me a while and they said oh you're going to be a Bombardier I said well I'll be done I don't know anything about that we'll teach you I said okay so I go on down through and I got down with the Navy thing and they again question though well you're gonna go in the Navy I said well I'll be darned I would just didn't I wouldn't be a bombers here how I'm in the Navy so anyway I thought well that's pretty good because in Decatur Illinois there's only 180 miles south of Great Lakes that's pretty good well you're going to go to Farragut Idaho her boot camp so I said well okay so anyway that's kind of how I happened to get into the Navy and my uncle was that's where I got my inspiration from muck of water now his pitch pitcher was in my grandma's bedroom and she always had that picture above her bed it's about this high and it's an oval shape and uh this will run got my desire to join the Marine Corps cuz I wanted to be like him you know he's standing here like a statue you know with a brim hat on leggings up to his knees you know pockets clear down to me to the top of his knees yeah I didn't have any high school experience and uh I quit in the eighth grade I gathered myself together I will know those doors she said what are you going I said I'm quitting school bang and I shut the door walked out I went back home to Mitchell South Dakota and I went back to high school I got myself through high school oh by the way the 5th division is the biggest division in the Marine Corps and that's where I ended up I ended up in the 5th division I also ended up in the Carlson Raiders I enlisted during San Diego and so I I had quite an experience with the Carlson Raiders will have them put a picture on the front of my book I'll steal them crack hi was 18 in 1944 I graduated high school in January of 44 and I started college but I wanted I wanted to go into the surface over in the middle of the war I was a kid to begin with but I wasn't a kid at that point I was a kid like 18 I considered myself a kid in those days and so I enlisted in the Navy and two weeks before my 18th birthday and on my 18th birthday day after it I went into I was called up for active duty I mean I knew I was they gave me the two weeks off to straighten out whatever I had a straight knot in my life so that I can go into the service and Cinco DeMayo May 5th is my birthday and May 6th I was in boot camp and exactly a month later June 6th we went into Europe into the war and well we had D they and naturally I wasn't involved in it I was still a boot camp I was a kid kid I was in boot camp I was in stationed up in New York at a camp called Sampson which turned lady many many many years later into an Air Force Base and now I don't think it exists anymore it's in Geneva New York on the Finger Lakes there's five lakes that look like fingers and Lake Seneca one of the fingers is where Geneva is located at the bottom part of it and that's where camp was Oh 17 I just graduate graduated from high school and 1943 and I'd come out to Denver here and I was working out here just for about six weeks and on a Friday noon I decided to go down and listen the Navy because it comes to camera I'd be 18 and then you're subbing for the draft after that and I didn't want to go in the army so I went down and join the Navy and I passed all the physicals except my weight I was very very thin only weighed 107 pounds and 108 was a minimum for my eyes so they they said I'm gonna hold your exam and everything over until Monday morning and you can come back and see if you pass so I went home and bought a dozen bananas and ate six of them before I went to bed that night I hate the other six on my way back downtown so I went down the past and that was it we we were aboard a troop train following Thursday just five days after I listed and we were heading for Farragut Idaho about 75 of us and that's where a boot camp is that work oh sure might have to go to free weights or whatever for training we got as far as Reno Nevada and they got word that the boot camp rented fair it was full quarantine never did find out why but they didn't know what to do with this so they sent us on in San Francisco so we got got there and they still didn't know what to do it so they started splitting us all up for us here six or seven there and so on so five days after I joined the Navy I was a border ship it's happiness harbor no boot camp I'm one of few of many many million serves me and never went to boot camp so I don't know how to handle a life or anything like you had to do so anyway I went out to base called Tiburon in San Francisco Bay and it was a naval net tinder babe and what what we did our boats regarded and inspect the submarine dance across the bay and we go out and lift him up to see if they were old weren't damaged and all that kind of stuff so left that's what we did I'm listed 17 years old I went to a Catholic High School in Chadron Nebraska and we had a holy day that we had to observe on December 8th and after we found out the attacked on December 7th on December the 8th I went down and enlisted it's 3 p.m. fellas tonight from school went down and then enlisted the recruiter called my father and told him that Frankie's down here and enlisted and I was going to sign him up I want to know what you think about it now I didn't know this until after the war but the recruiter and my father were friendly because they were in the VFW together and they used to attend the meetings and so dad said I don't care if he joins but I don't I want him to graduate so he told telling us he's needs glasses and he kept getting a navy so that was what I had to live with from December 8th till June he just said you you got to get your eyes fixed and so I think I bought a case of carrot juice with something and tried to correct my homeboy and I was going to get in because I want to fight war and anyway after I didn't graduate till May 31st or whenever it was Memorial Day we always had our baccalaureate services and after I graduated then I went back down and signed up and I couldn't get into about the middle of June because he had to keep up this quotas for enlistments and and about the middle of June I was sent Denver to take the oath to go on the Navy and I went in on what they call a minority cruise it was a kid hitch because you went in when your my dad had to sign for because I was only 17 years old and I know minority crews you they have to your enlistment into expires when you're 21 years old but the national emergency I had to last a little longer than that that's a navigator you were pretty good at your job huh oh right Adam he fry I should say because we flew out of Walla Walla Washington there and we flew the Cascades patrol the Cascades it turns out that the Japanese sent thousands of balloons with incendiary bombs over to the United States to start fires in our forests in our cities and disrupt the war effort and we were looking for those balloons and they were we the Gunners would try to explode the Cindy area bombs before they hit the ground so my job was to make sure we didn't hit any mountains while they were diverting the airplane toward those balloons and boy do I remember those mountains just um Mount lassen Jefferson Mount Hood while Adams mom run there I was really careful I had to be careful know where we were every second at a time so we didn't hit those mountains while we were looking for those Japanese balloons depending upon your altitude if you could see him against the sky there easier just plot but against the ground they were hard to find well our whole squadron was out looking for them so some of the planes were very effective and we're able to stop any disruption of our military effort here in the United States here's the b-24 J and it has a double tail and it has a nose turret turret up here and then there's a ball tour down here and and here's the tail gun down here and I was in the nose and I'll tell you about our crew the pilot was 23 the copilot was 20 I was 19 I was a navigator the Bombardier the Norden bombsight was visual was 23 the flight engineer was 20 all the Gunners were 18 except for the tail gunner Peter Polinsky he was 25 he was the old man of the crew we were detailed to Langley field Virginia if you can imagine going from Walla Walla Washington to Langley field Virginia and our task there was to search for German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean at night now we have completely different b-24 then called the b-24 in and it was the same as the Navy privateer but our plane was painted totally black had a single tail and I was no longer in the nose because it was loaded with radar and Loran long-range navigation and we had a radar altimeter for the pilots because we were flying at 500 feet over the black Atlantic Ocean at night searching for the German submarines the German submarines during the day ran silently on bad but at night they had to come up and charge those batteries with their diesels and that was why we had the tactic to fly at night at 500 feet searching for those German submarines but we had to be very careful because the whole idea was to surprise the Germans we did have radar and we now had a radar Bombardier not the Norden bombsight ramaa Bombardier and his he could bomb by radar with ever seen without ever visually seeing the target but we had to be careful because if they were ready for us we're at 500 feet and we would be really an easy target for a deck gunner on a submarine right after we finished boot camp you've got to go home for a week and so we backed back to Farragut and I think right toward the end of December I was put on the train and sent to San Diego at the that the old San Diego Naval Hospital in Balboa Park and at that time that was the largest most modern Naval Hospital in the world and so we what we were put into quarters there I believe it was December the 30th 29th of 30 is right at the end of the year first thing a training is a six-week training to be a naval hospital corpsman and of course all they all tell you that this all cram course you know if it's six weeks it might be a three month training but we're going to it in six weeks and they I guess they really needed corpsman at that time so it was really a bunch bunch of us and and they was trying to get us through the training and out in the field they put me on hospital or tech school which was a a I think that was a six-month training of course we and you were trained to be a an operating room technician they've been we had four major operating rooms in the Naval Hospital there and they had surgery scheduled every day four or five times so that was probably doing maybe 15 or 20 operations today there I was always on duty and for the transfer which meant that you never knew where he was going and how long he's going to be there and I think it was because they were short of hospital corpsman and so you had to be prepared to to get packed up and going within an hour and so after I got done in all my tech work in San Diego at the Naval Hospital they sent me to a hospital called Schumaker Hospital but I stayed there for a while and then after that I went to small craft training center in San Diego area there and prepared to go overseas and I was assigned to the USS Burleson a PA 67 which was a brand-new she but anyway after we had the commissioning we we met up with two or three for whatever other a pas and destroyer escorts he went wound up to in a in the South Pacific and an island called Tulagi and they went from there egg waffles an island with my group they had six corpsman and a doctor and we went ahead I don't know I must have been a hundred Marines then we got out of out of there and we went I went up the khawaja linens and again the same thing pick up troops and so forth but then we were sent on to your Litha which was a staging area and there were thousands of ships and Men hundreds of thousands of men ready to go into Okinawa I was transferred at that point to to the submarine service and I was transferred to the USS Fulton a s11 which is an assault submarine force and we was the home base was Guam there and we had thirteen submarines that was going out of Guam on out the baby tails course had us surrounded and so does the b-29 slide over and submarines all of them to put their giving us coverage to protect us because we're in troop ships and we you might said that we didn't have the facilities to fight back so they the Navy wanted to get us in there so the Air Force and the submarines DeForest wants to get us in there and the submarines picked us up in the Marshall Adams the reason we had to take you which even was because that was the shortest route to to Japan for the b-29s because they were lured with bombs and they burned a lot of fuel especially when they able rise in elevation to get away from any aircraft and there were some anti-aircraft on Iwo Jima so anyway we heard how the b-29s would life fly into Japan and then circle around come back and before they could make it even to see even before Co Jima they would crash land out there on the water and the crew disappeared the Navy came out there of btob Beatty why is the BP wise that's that little ship what looks like a shepherdess summer so it's a plane to pick up what they could find fine of the b-29 crew in the cold water which was February 19th when I was taking place then I was miserably cold out there and so they have a feeling of the rest the crew went rounded out there in that water so when we heard this we were going to take evil Jima and so I landed on the 8 o'clock in the morning on the 19th of February and I was 19 years old and I landed on well I was not on red Beach yet I was still way out there baby 500 600 yards yet and so between there and the beach here's what took place there was a huge huge battleship parked in front of the beach parallel to the beach maybe they were about 300 to 400 yards between the beach and the 10th of Tennessee battleship and I was we were to go around that we was we split up parla bar but my company went around the bow and we went around the stern and then we were to crawl along side of the Tennessee battleship and it under the turret guns which is a 49:16 is tarek Gunners and that's where we were lined up and facing the beach right as a move in so between the what happened in that area the first thing that happened was an Amtrak came around the bow I saw that came around the bow and turned and come down alongside and he got hit you know blew everything completely out of the water I mean he was gone and nobody came back up then the next thing had happened was the there another M track picked about or maybe 10 15 feet from me well then that took a hit and it will do that thing just sky-high and there was a body flying everywhere that's that makes the second one the third one on the other side of me you're looking at each other we knew as the possibility was that we were next because I had nailed that one of the POW and then a delta one about 15 feet from me so we figured we are next and the shell landed I had my arm over the railing because I was a sea ahead but I would have to do and I hit that Beach the shell landed within a foot of me and exploded under the water and before that the at the same time this was happening all at the same time a navy dive bomber was flying over and he's coming right straight at us you know with these wing guns firing and we figured that he was gone and froze to the trigger and so I had my leg over the side of that immtrac I was ready to get out of there and before I could make another move he was over here in Valhalla just ceiling and the gunner behind him looked down at us and he I know what happened he what he was thinking I'm going down with my commander one way or another I'm going on the dive bomber crashed landed right into that imp tracked my left to my left and so both of them went up in black smoke and yellow it was a huge explosion because that day bomber still had a bomb under the fuselage still carrying a bomb and we had there's two Navy destroyers we were going in both of them fired rockets from those cruisers destroyed one after another I don't know how many how many rockets were in the air Iwo Jima if you excuse me was catching hell from everything that everybody when they were keep them Iwo Jima pinned down such a leap the Japanese pinned down so that we could be ideon and so our M track got in and went parallel to the beach the rear gate opened up and out we came and I got about ten feet from my Amtrak and I got hit in the hip and the shell went through my canteen and my cup and it did not penetrate my body but it did give me a lot of damage on my hip and I had a hard time for about two three days getting around but there was another guy laying around on the floor on the ground roll around at the end of the airstrip and I could see smoke coming off his body and alongside of Bodie on the airfield number one we were there for a good three four days I'll say four days now we're all on the airstrip there a motor Yamaha airfield we had a hell of a battle going on in that particular area and it was 24 hours a day fighting it this is the way we got replenished all the time w we were also organized into caves and securing them and the what we had to do we had to fire a rifle at least three times if not for into the cave to drive the Japanese back into that cave so they couldn't soar like an aide back out that's what they were doing after we finally took the island which was on the 26th of March and our commander says okay as head back while we had five miles to go to get back to Mount Suribachi and as we were marching back we heard the muffling of gunfire laughs no fire so long at first we couldn't turn around you know where's that coming from what is it we realized after we well had walked about a mile or so a mile and a half then we realized that the Japanese were committing suicide in the case as we were walking by I would say from the 19th of February to the 26th of March there was no stress no sleep hardly at all we were just more this I had the rifle you know I'm in this position and if you took her Kurtz knows it's news now that's what she did first place I went to I went up by ship up the coastline of Japan we lay we landed them at Okinawa first and when an LST into Okinawa and LSD is a flat-bottomed boat this flat bottomed boat would open up the doors would open up this way this is the front and the panel would go down and they drive trucks and tanks off of it right onto the ground so when I got to be got to Okinawa the there was going to be a tornado so they made us go back out to sea they said these flat bottom boats can end up on the beach in a tornado so for two days I didn't get out of my bunk I was so seasick because it a tornado and anyway eventually I ended up in Tokyo Bay and it was around Thanksgiving and I met an old friend of mine an old a young friend of mine who was a cook in the Navy and had turkey for Thanksgiving on a ship with him name was Marty Katz he lived up the street from me in Brooklyn and then I was sent to a place called omen ro which was on the main island with Tokyo is and by rail it took 24 hours going up north and then West to get through the peninsula where this Japanese airbase was that we had taken over and I was stationed there for a couple months three months four months doing photographic work I had my rating a third class petty officer which is equivalent to people who don't know petty officer as opposed to Army it's the same as a buck sergeant a three striper but I have one stripe in a navy and I worked in the photo lab there had a photo interpretation squadron and we did training but it wasn't anymore for invasion the training it was just regular Navy training and I was there until I got transferred to one the photo interpretation squadron it's called which also produced pictures and flew around photographing of Japan and other places I have to put my flight time in and well they are the equivalent medals of these ribbons of places I've been stationed at and none of them are for war anything well yeah they are actually they have American theatres the Asiatic Pacific the mochi is the occupation forces in Japan I had with my rifle I was an expert riflemen and the honorable discharge I enjoyed being in a Navy for me was a nice life but couldn't wait to get home I went overseas from San Francisco and went to a me on eBay and do getting and was there for a short amount of time a couple of weeks and then I was sent down to Brisbane Australia to a supply base down Britain Australia which was very plush duty and I was eventually sent back up to New Guinea for a short period time again and then to the Admiralty Islands where I went aboard a ship there called the yf6 19 which YF stands her yard freighter a very glamorous name it was about a 300 foot long double deck barge is really what it was and we didn't have a propeller and never screw or anything so we had to be told wherever we went so we followed the battles up Pacific and we came in 50 miles or so 75 miles behind the accurate action then as they became disabled they come back get the parts from us just and we when we were told the tow boat was ordered to cut us loose if we're under attack from the submarine and the theory there was that we had citizens shallow-draft flat bottom that a torpedo could not reach that high others whereas the tow boat could be summer so so uh fortunately we were never attacked so well aboard this YF 619 a friend of mine had had this monkey I don't know how he got it I haven't any idea but it was a very small little monkey the Dame with Charlie and so he got transferred and he couldn't take it with him so I inherited the monkey I was the radioman and I'd made radium and second during the war and when I went back in in Korea I came out as a radium in first class always on the ship of putting commission in July 1944 and was on it too remainder of the war until December 45 yeah and we saw quite a bit action we operated with the carrier's a lot because it was a new ship and we could keep up with the carrier's when they were launching and and landing planes and we had quite a bit of armament as far as they were concerned rather than lesser models or older models because we had twin mounts on forward we had two twin months as a destroyer very maneuverable and yeah and we were cited for by the Secretary of the Navy cited us for our combat duty during radar picket duty off Okinawa we had a deal with Teleca that was the biggest enemy we had kamikazes our suicide airplanes that they they'd dive into you we were with a ship called the deck store when she went down and just as I stepped out there I could see the bow of the ship going down and people in the water I could hear the engines changing rhythm from the captain changing trying to get up get as close as he could we threw off all our rafts and life savers to when they were act landing the troops in Okinawa they needed some protection against the enemy to coming in and attacking him and and the outside boundaries keeping the planes from going in this is jacket is what we were around the base underneath well most the time to run the base on the course underneath the heavy jackets with the fleece but this over here is the insignia of the Army Air Corps this is my rank up Air Force lieutenant and over here this is for the 4th Air Force which was the Air Force that we flew in around the for taking the United States of America here are my wings my Navigator wings and then this is a depiction of the b-24 bomber [Music] well 19 well I was out by the time I was 20 so it's just progression of being able to do the job and finally after a period of time they say well you're doing ok we'll give you a promotion now it's called up for the Korean War but I was working at at office Field California for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which became NASA and I and the director sent a letter to the army though that that I was in a crucial job classification so I didn't have to go to the Korean or I had the opportunity when I worked for Lockheed and other companies to go to the Washington DC much later and give talks at the Pentagon regarding some of the things we were doing and you see generals and admirals all over the place and here's a lieutenant colonel that we were meeting with the notaire Colonel is fairly high guess where his office was in the basement so that shows about how important I might have been as a first lieutenant we had navigation we'd go into the navigation training area to see all the stars we kept shooting the stars and also we had a teller for practicing bomb bombing a knight was a backup Bombardier so well I might say that my claim to fame since you asked how important I was okay I bombed the United States it well it turns out that it was my turn to be the Bombardier and it was at night and the petard was all lit up so we could see him and there I am working the northern bomb site and had concentrate dials for the two of them for the right hand and two of them for the left hand and you're going back and forth with you had to read be fairly agile with your fingers in order to keep your crosshairs on the target and so it came time to for the bomb to go when I said bombs away but it hung up in the bomb hung up in the bomb bay and I called a pine I said oh we're hung up and so what he did as we left the bombing ranges was in Boardman Oregon centrifugal force took the bomb out and I said oh I'm in trouble now and fortunately though I told the debriefing officer about the bomb the next morning there was an article in the paper said unknown missile crashes through roof of Tavern that's right the b-24 was designed and built by consolidated Aircraft Company in San Diego California and Fort Worth Texas and pretty well hand-built and they needed more of these bombers they were heavier and they carried a heavier bomb load to the b-17 and were faster so they went to the Ford Motor Company and Willow Run Willow Run Michigan to build them and the production line was a mile long and there are more b-24s built and then the other warplane during - but you know we'd beyond the on a runway the head of the runway getting ready to take off and as a pilot would push the throttles forward sometimes he would say let's see if this old Ford will fly we've had emergency landings - we landed at Luke field Arizona on an emergency landing one time when it's a fighter pilot station and all the fighter pilots came out to see the b-24 and as we were getting out of the plane there's Tim the crew was 10 10 of us the pilots were the fighter pilots were all counting one two three four five six seven eight nine ten people on this bomber and then came time to take off and the runways were fairly short at the fighter fighter fields so they were all came out to see us if we were going to be able to take off her butt and well let me just recount what happened one time we're on a strafing range and we're at 500 feet and the Gunners are all strafing with their machine guns we got a engine on fire well 500 feet engine on fire is pretty bad can't bail out and and what are you gonna do they can really have problems with the pilot started climbing he went up to 2,500 feet and he dove the airplane and got really high speed and - blew out the flame because of the the the air blowing flies so quickly and we were going back to Walla Walla Washington and we pointed out we had an emergency clearance to land directly and we were on three engines and we landed and there was the fire trucks and there were the ambulances and there everything like that and we looked at the engine and there was oil all over that engine that had caught on fire but fortunately we got it out and made it back safely he was from Louisiana the copilot was from Georgia and the gunner some of the Gunners were from New York and then Peter Polanski that was from Hamtramck close to Detroit I think and then we had a fellow from Utah I was from Colorado so we had a quite a crew from almost everywhere in the United States we were up at 3 o'clock in the morning and we had the general briefing at 5:00 in the morning then we broke up into the separate group Bombardier navigator is Gunners and I plotted our course had time to plot the course and make sure that if I preflighted my part of the airplane that all my instruments were working we took off at 8:00 then in the morning and flew for six hours landed at 2:00 in the afternoon and then we debrief for another hour and then finally we're off the next day and we flew every other day rather than everyday oh yeah so there's the the pilot was really careful he said if something happens to me I we've got to get back get the rest of the crew back so he sat me down in the copilot seat and said now you're going I could fly the v.24 level fairly easy we said now you're going to land it so now never come I'm coming up on the runway and all of a sudden the runway is over here so I give it right rudder we didn't have hydraulics so we just had a really user strength then I put gave a right rudder now the runways over here no let's you're over here I couldn't I couldn't line the plane up with the runway and then we're going down getting closer to the runway and the copilot's calling out the airspeed 150 140 130 125 120 get the nose down with that I jumped out the copilot seat nice at all take over so I'd never get land to be 24 sometimes we had a hard landing and we say that was the copilot that land at that time about war and we're doing that but would there's a funny feeling in somehow within you what would happen to those Germans where's they if we sank and then we think about what would happen to us if they'd shut us down panic and terror and suffering and it's a terrible thing and so I didn't want anyone to think I was glorifying more in any way this ship being brand-new we was out only a couple of days and we had difficulty kind of funny this ship started shaking like that and I guess that propeller was loose we had to go back to the small craft training center for a couple of days and so the rest of the guys down in convoy because he was still had submarines out in the area that was dangerous to us so anyway after a couple of days they fixed our ship and we hurried back out to get to the convoy and they slowed down but we never did catch up and one of the craziest things that happened they when you're training you wouldn't believe it now in Thanksgiving Day they had a schedule waited you had to go to an autopsy and you believe him Thanksgiving Day at 7:00 in the morning yes we had to cook the part of training go through that so then he'll get done with that and you're supposed to go ahead and have Thanksgiving so then on April the 1st 1945 April Fool's Day Easter Sunday and that was when we made the invasion in Okinawa in the early stages before you always you always had to supply ships in first closest and then the troops and so forth and back behind you had destroyers you had cruisers you had the battleships and it was just a constant barrage of shelling day and night 24 hours a day over the top of you we was fairly close to the island still that we could get our troops in we had kamikaze is flying over several times and they were at that point they the pilots were strapped into planes and they were actually suicide bombers trying to bomb and bomb on the sill on the ship so you know there's so much happening all the time you don't think about like anything you know you just do what you're told to do and get her done and so the only thing that I do remember is Mojave in Okinawa a river that ran from the capital up and down into the ocean and they didn't have any casualties started to go in and that all happen on and farther and so we had some lcvps which is landing craft vehicles which are small boats they can take get into Shore and so we was four or five of us quorum were assigned to go in them with other they had other ApS around to doing the same thing so we wouldn't up the river a little bit and they brought the wounded back and on stretchers and they laid them along that Bank there and we would pick them up and then take them out to the hospital ship and the b-29 that was in the front I was watching him coming in and the other two went down and he was he was coming in and the nose of that b-29 was pretty much leveled with me and I thought oh my god he's not gonna make it and I was watching and the nose of that b-29 hit the end of the airstrip bounced up and skidded into a bomb hole and all the way all the way across to the other side that ball almost skidded and picked up the nose again and he skidded till he actually he stopped right out in front of me right straight in front of me maybe fifty feet from me I never heard so many bullets hitting the b-29 I bought him a beat which is really was a Japanese fire and the crew all ran down jumped out ran all in all kinds of directions one of the guys I wouldn't like this you know thought I had cover and he started running towards me and uh he jumped down beside me and he hit me on the back and said damn am I glad to see you and then when we got to the ship our troop ship we boarded we were going up the steel ladder to get on deck and there were two Higgins boats parked alongside the troop ship with wounded Marines on board the Navy personnel they were so careful handling those wounded guys I mean some of those guys you know some of the legs were dangling about half off you know and to see those guys those Navy corpsman I'll never forget them they were so concerned about handling of wounded marine it was precious and in Sarah Bochy we had a battle that was going on for at least two to three days in that area and finally my commander yelled out I need some volunteers we need to have more support on on the Mouser ability the top of Mount Suribachi nice as al ghul sir and so I ran over there and I start climbing up the side of the mountain guess who here comes IRA Hayes so we both climbed the mountain together and we got what we 10 feet below where the flag went up finally so what happened was that there were snipers all over that mountain and you could see what's the thing what she had to do is look for a blue smoke which came out of those caves from a rifle fire and and so what happened was that we had to help the guys with double drops four to six guys at that time trying to raise that flag and flight was so big four by eight flag and the wind was blowing that flag around so strong they'll it was actually moving those guys around they they had a hard time trying to get that pipe up into the air and I err he says to me he says I think I'll go up and help them increase that pipe I said you go for iron I'll cover you he said okay and he took off and he got it up there so that's one y-you see the statue of the flag raising the hands in the air like this now Saira Hey [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Longmont Channel

Views: 2,773

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Id: LU5eX62Y7I8

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2019