Veterans Day

[charlesb]

I always remember my Dad on veterans day. He left home at 17, lied about his age and joined the last active horse cavalry outfit about six months before Pearl Harbor.

He trained in west Texas, joining in long marches over the desert on horseback, and making expert on the mounted pistol course with a .45 auto. He would ride through the course firing at targets on one side, then the other while managing the horse. He once told me that the reason he shot expert was because the horse knew the course so well and did not flinch when the 45 went off in close proximity to its head.

He put in a lot of time on guard duty on one of the bridges that went over the Rio Grande into Mexico, and shot thousands of rounds of .22lr as the Cavalry was generous with the ammo and encouraged the troops to practice regularly on jackrabbits etc..

Then the war started, and the 112th cavalry was shipped off to New Britain, in the Philippine Islands.

The jungle was tough on the horses, attacking their hooves so my Dad had to part with his horse. All of the mounts were shipped off to Australia, and the 112th Cavalry became the 112th Regimental Combat Team.

Dad was issued a Thompson sub-machinegun, and this is what he used throughout the rest of the war, for the most part.

His outfit was tasked with a rubber-boat beach landing, but the Japanese had ack-ack guns concealed in the jungle and wiped out 70% of the outfit. Dad ended up in the water and was picked up by a destroyer, where he had to stay for a month until the ship was back where it could deliver him to his outfit. They assumed he was dead, and only had a few of his personal items in a little cake tin that I have to this day.

The Army in its wisdom took away everybody's 45 autos while he was stuck on the destroyer, issuing them to officers only but a friendly Aussie gave Dad a .455 Webley revolver. He would crimp the rim of .45 auto rounds so that they would fire in the Webley, and this was his sleeping companion thereafter.

His Thompson had been issued to somebody else, and Dad got a 45 caliber "grease gun" which broke its extractor the first time he ran a burst through it. The captain told him to disassemble the gun and toss the parts in different directions into the New Guinea jungle. They issued him a selective-fire M1 carbine then.

He spent two years in New Guinea, in the vicinity of the Druinimore river, being resupplied by C-47's and making patrols though the jungle. The M1 .30 carbine proved ineffective when his group faced a banzai charge across a shallow jungle river, so he traded it for another Thompson when he got back to the main camp, near the coast.

The Japanese had not been resupplied for some while, were starving in the jungle and often appeared in US uniforms because the Japanese uniforms had rotted away. Supply drops from the Army C-47's often became a bone of contention in the jungle between the US and Japanese troops.

Once Dad and a few of his buddies were sent to check out an abandoned airstrip inland, and he ended up getting stuck guarding and helping carry an injured Japanese soldier being taken back to the main camp, so he could be treated and a destroyer could pick him up for internment.

On the trail, troops would make disparaging remarks about the injured Japanese soldier, threatening him and acting "big dog" about what they would do to him. My Dad got sarcastic with these guys, telling them that if they were really wanting to kill a Jap, they only needed to hump a few miles up the trail they were on, in the that direction that he was coming from.

Eventually Dad caught so many tropical diseases that his captain wrote him a ticket to go home. Because of this, he missed out on the cushy occupation duty in Japan which the combat team participated in, a few months later.

As I was growing up years later, my Dad would go dove hunting every year but never expressed any interest in deer hunting, camping or anything like that. - He had put in his time camping out during the war.

When I was a kid, he was recalled to guard the local 49th division armory during the Berlin crisis, and every year we would go to the 112th Cavalry reunion in Dallas where the cigarette smoke and story telling was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. I got to know a lot of the guys who made it back at these reunions, including his cigar-chewing captain who sported a pure white flat-top and looked quite gruff but would give me a candy bar every time I saw him. It was interesting to see him try to smile.

In the Vietnam era, the Army war college made a study of Dad's outfit, who faced similar conditions and an Army researcher came to the house to interview Dad. Later on I got a copy of the resulting report. Then, just a few years before he passed on, another Army guy showed up and interviewed Dad again.

My Dad edited the 112th Cavalry Association's newsletter for years and knew most of those guys personally. All or almost all of those guys are gone now, like my Dad.

We should remember when we meet a veteran that they have done us all a big favor. They deserve our respect and gratitude, and in some cases they have great stories to tell.

Happy veteran's day!

[bearandoldman]

Proud of your dad bud. Had an uncle and an old friend the were in the paratroops and jumped into a lot of fighting in the battle of the bulge. Another uncle saw action in the Pacific. None of them talked much about it.

[blue68f100]

My dad served in the 406th http://www.406thfightergroup.org/ as a mechanic to keep the planes in the air. He never has talked much about the war. He was in Germany at the end of the WWII and some of the stories he have told are about the pilots that flew the planes. Since he had to keep them flying he say first hand on how they wear shot up. His last reunion was about 8 yrs ago and there was only a handful of them left. Over the last 5 yrs he has started talking about some of the things that happened. All that served are Hero's in my book.

He was issued a Thompson and said he could not hit any thing with it, beside carrying all the ammo required for it was heavy.

[Medicine Hat]

My heartfelt 'Thank You' goes out to all veterans.
WWII vets were my heroes as a kid. All my uncles served. Most would never talk of what they did / saw.
One is still with us, at 90 years old, and is just now willing to talk about -some- of his experiences on Iwo Jima.
My own Army time was 16 years, but I never experienced things like our WWII vets went through.

[greener]

Great story, charles