| |
ONCE A MARINE ALWAYS A MARINE!!
3-K-6
2nd MD
Well! Here it is Christmas again and the year, 2002 a couple of weeks away, wow! So I'm kicking 77 in the ass and I hear that as World War II guys are getting out of here at the rate of one thousand a day. Seems just a short while ago when back in the early forties, I ran away from home and spent several years working on farms, became a logger and worked the lumber mills of Oregon.
Having worked with my back and dropped out of school at seventeen, I was ready for the Marine Corp. Well! I became a taxpayer, paid killer and after boot camp and line camp, I was ready to show my skills. So on D-Day, June 15, 1944, I landed on Saipan. They got four thousand plus, of our guys but we killed twenty five thousand of their guys. We took no prisoners.
Then we went to Tinian with a lot of replacements. When it was all over we set up camp on Saipn and started training for the next one. They brought out this model of a rock called Iwo Jima. We had just completed two landings so our division was committed to floating reserve. We were about three miles off shore when our guys hit the beaches. It was like you could reach out and touch the beach, with the zeros strafing, the really big stuff shelling our guys and no movement to get off the beach.
SADDLE UP!!
And we would stand by the cargo nets to disembark.
STAND DOWN!!
No room on the beach.
Up and down fifteen or sixteen times. Everybody pissed on the stand down order!
D+3 we sailed away leaving seven thousand, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen year old, well trained Marines, dead on Iwo Jima.
We went back to Saipan to continue training for our next action. About the middle of May 1945 we set sail for Okinawa. Our job was to sail into the China Sea and pretend we were going to land on the West Coast, while the actual landing would take place on the other side of the island. April 1, 1945, we formed up and gave the Japs a real April fools day.
The Kamikaze Jap planes were diving at our ships. One hit the troop ship sailing next to us, right in the prop and rudder. Over a thousand troops jumped overboard.
We stood by and in an hour or two, they fished everyone out of the drink so we took them in tow and headed back to Saipan.
We started training for the big one, the invasion of Japan. We had models, maps, everything needed for D-Day in October. Our division was the spearhead for the landing. We all knew we were dead! With over ten thousand dead on Okinawa, we knew that the invasion of Japan would cost us plenty.
August 1945 two A-Bombs saved our lives. My two years in the South Pacific caused many a Jap not to see the sun rise. I was nineteen years old and the war over.
There is no such thing as an "ex" Marine or "former" Marine.
ONCE A MARINE ALWAYS A MARINE!!
|
|
Search & Site Map
