Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508140014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
That's been the merciless rule of all wars, and World War II's Pacific Theater was no different.
Some contemporary voices question the means America used to end that conflict. From New River Valley veterans, men who fought the Imperial Japanese half a world away from home, in steamy jungles, on desolate islands and limitless seas - and lived to tell about it - you'll not hear that refrain.
Instead, they speak in unison, with regret for Japanese civilians killed by the atomic bomb, but no second thoughts about the strategic decision to use it. They are convinced the doomsday weapon ultimately saved more lives than it claimed - including their own.
Now, with the 50th anniversary of the war's end, their viewpoint is unchanged. They recall a time when the nation was united and the imperative to fight was morally clear-cut.
As Robert Price of Blacksburg said, "They started it. We finished it."
He won't buy a Japanese car
Art Tuthill, a gunner on a light cruiser, survived a South Pacific typhoon and said he got all too close to the kamikaze suicide pilots.
"We had a hard time with them. You had to shoot them out of the sky," he said.
Tuthill's ship never took a direct kamikaze hit, although many others did. "We were fortunate," he said.
A 76-year-old Blacksburg resident, Tuthill said the Navy helped train him professionally in metallurgy and corrosion, an expertise he used in his career as a consultant after the war. He also reflects on the way the war turned out for the Allies' former adversaries.
"Germany and Japan's industrial strength is in large part that we prohibited them from spending on defense and accepted that burden ourselves."
Tuthill says he admires the Japanese for their ability to work together. But he can't bring himself to buy a Japanese car.
A long-kept secret of death on the ocean
Roy Jennelle suppressed the memory for years. He didn't want to discuss - much less think about - seeing his fellow shipmates burned and dying in shark-infested waters.
"I never even told my mother and father about it," he said.
Everything spilled out one summer night several years ago, as Jennelle sat on the patio of his Blacksburg home with his son and a tape recorder.
An 18-year-old seaman, Jennelle had just finished his deck watch on a small gunboat north of Okinawa in April 1945. He was below, eating breakfast in the mess hall, when the explosion hit.
Stunned, Jennelle struggled through the darkness, up a ladder and through the hatch, to the main deck. The crippled ship listed crookedly, and he jumped into the sea without a life jacket, swimming furiously away from the wreckage.
In the oily water, grasping at pieces of buoyant debris, Jennelle bobbed for hours, watching the bodies of dead sailors and listening to the wounded scream.
Rescuers finally came. Jennelle had his hand on the rope thrown from a ship when a second explosion occurred, driving him deep underwater.
He swam to the surface and found the second ship had been hit. It was sinking and the water was scattered anew with dead and drowning sailors. When the screaming stopped, Jennelle knew the injured were dead, some pulled under by man-eating sharks.
Clinging to a canvas-wrapped bundle of debris, he was rescued about six hours later.
Jennelle, 69, a retired Appalachian Power Co. employee, recovered slowly - physically, first, then mentally. Today he says, "Nothing is accomplished by war."
The last mission of the war?
As far as J.B. Warner knows, he flew the last mission of World War II, a conflict that introduced the concept of modern air warfare.
Warner, of Pulaski, left high school to join the Army Air Corps' 315th bomber wing. He was a spotter on a B-29 bomber named "My Naked." The airplane had few guns with which to defend itself against Japanese Zero fighter planes. The plane's irreverent name stemmed from the crew members' insecurity about their exposed posteriors.
Warner targeted oil refineries in his 15 combat missions over Japan. He still recalls the fiery glow of the explosions and how they illuminated the night with a terrible beauty.
The last sortie occurred Aug. 15, 1945. "The war went on after the atomic bomb was dropped. Not many people know about that," said Warner, 70, a retired Hercules accountant.
That night Warner's squadron took off from Guam with the understanding that surrender was imminent. If Japan capitulated during the mission, radio operators were to pass along a code word: "Apple."
But word never came and the squadron knocked out another target. The surrender wasn't announced until the planes were over Iwo Jima, halfway back to base.
"If they'd have done it six hours earlier, they would have had one more oil refinery," Warner said.
The Japanese 'were pretty desperate'
"There's no such thing as an antiseptic war. You have to grow up real quick," said Bob Kreamalmeyer.
He was 18 when he joined the Navy from of his hometown near St. Louis, never having seen a body of water larger than the Mississippi River. In the Pacific, he served on a small gunboat at battle zones such as Luzon and Okinawa.
Some of his youthful innocence ebbed at the leper colony on Luzon, where Kreamalmeyer used his mechanical know-how to repair the camp's electric generator. Some of his innocence was lost on the dark nights he watched for Japanese suicide swimmers, bearing explosives that would blow up ships anchored near harbors. "They were pretty desperate," he recalled.
However, the worst moment occurred on the day Kreamalmeyer's ship was assigned to help a destroyer that had been hit by a kamikaze. He had to burn off the door hinges to a gun turret. Inside were the charred bodies of crewmen, still at their posts.
"Today it doesn't haunt me, but I can still see it," said Kreamalmeyer, 70, a retired oil company worker who lives near Prices Fork.
Watching the flag go up on Iwo
Roy L. Clowers was 32 and older than most of the other crewmen on his ship. "Just kids to me. Mostly a bunch of Northerners," he said.
Now 83 and living in his hometown of Elliston, Clowers was a truck driver who ran LSTs - the trap door boats that ferried troops and equipment from ship to shore - in the Navy. "I was there from the day it started," he said of the Iwo Jima invasion.
Clowers witnessed the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi from the harbor. He lighted cigarettes for cursing, gut-shot Marines who died before they could reach a hospital ship. He saw wounded airplanes that whirled from the sky and crashed into the ocean.
He didn't see the hunk of shrapnel that gazed his head during the height of battle, burning his cheek as it passed by.
"It would have torn my head off. I wasn't scared at first. I kept feeling my face. Later I couldn't walk. It was like the whole world had fallen in."
Clowers doesn't recall what happened next. The next thing he knew, he was stumbling on the beach, alone. There he met an American soldier, whose pockets bulged with gold teeth the GI said he'd extracted from the dead Japanese.
"No, buddy, I don't want none of that," Clowers woozily told the GI.
Racing to the rescue
As a platoon leader in the 1st Cavalry unit, C.W. Harman was among those who raced across 100 miles of Philippine jungle in 66 hours to Manila to liberate the prison camp at Santo Tomas University.
Among the internees, there were gaunt survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. "They were a pitiful sight, arms and legs no bigger than a pipe stem," said Harman, making a circle with his thumb and index finger. "They'd run to you, crying."
Hearing their stories of torture and deprivation, "It just made you shiver. It makes me hot, now. They [Japanese soldiers] were just real cruel people."
Harman, 72, a farmer and owner of a farming supply dealership in Floyd, saw many comrades wounded and killed as they fought nearby. "We were in combat nine straight months. Slept in foxholes. I was lucky and never got a scratch."
He did come home suffering from malaria, and it took two years for him to recover his strength. Now he wears a belt buckle with the 1st Cavalry insignia and enjoys attending reunions.
"Still yet, if I had it to do over again, I'd take the Pacific over those boys who had to go where it was so cold. I can stand the heat better," he said.
The frogmen were the first on the beaches
In April 1943, Clarence 'Mullie' Mulheren played in the West Virginia state basketball championship semifinals for Beckley High School. Less than a year later, he was in combat in the Pacific.
His assignment, as part of a select unit of frogmen, was to be the first wave on beaches and harbors where the Japanese waited. His Underwater Demolition Team's mission was to blow up the large metal obstacles placed to keep landing craft away from shore.
Despite antiquated equipment - no wetsuits or aqualungs - and dangerous missions, Mulheren's stealthy unit was highly trained and suffered few casualties.
"I don't really remember being scared. We were just so busy," he said.
Yet Mulheren, 71, of Pearisburg, a retired educator, said he can't forget the sea burial of a frogman who served in another unit.
He helped sew the dead man's body into a canvas sack. "I can still see him sliding out from beneath the American flag. And I can still hear him splashing in the water."
The end of the war was a great relief to Mulheren and his fellow frogmen. Potential beachheads had already been selected on the Japanese islands. It would have been their job in the invasion, already dubbed "Operation Olympic" and set to begin Nov. 1, 1945, to hit the beaches first.
'It was a hell of a thing'
"I'm very bitter about the war," Robert Price said. "I'll never forgive the Japanese."
It's impossible for him to evaluate what happened without thinking of the thousands of Americans who died at Pearl Harbor or along the brutal forced march from Bataan.
Price was 19 when he left Blacksburg High School in 1943. He served on the island of Saipan in the air corps unit that serviced bombers and fighter planes.
After the Japanese vowed to bomb the island into the sea as a retaliation for Hiroshima, "We were never so scared," he said. "We dug foxholes and tried to find a place to hide - not that that would have done any good."
The second bombing of Nagasaki and the surrender announcement that followed came as a great relief. He believes the Japanese would not have hesitated to use the bomb, had they developed it first.
Now 72 and a retired Blacksburg High School vocational education teacher, Price lived on Saipan among Japanese prisoners of war. He says he never witnessed any incidents of mistreatment, in contrast to the way the Allied POWs were treated by the Japanese.
"It was a hell of a thing."
by CNB