Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180094
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH STROTHER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Regret that it had to, yes. Learn from the horrific aftermath that it never wanted to again, yes. But apologize for the quick end it put to a bloody slaughter the Japanese had started? No.
I was stunned to learn from recent news accounts that, because of the devastation the A-bomb rained on those two cities, the Japanese see themselves as victims of World War II.
Usually, it is the winners who rewrite history.
Perhaps the generation of Americans that fought and won the war failed in one duty only: telling their kids about the epochal events they had so recently survived.
Richard Knoll was 20 the February after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He had been aching to get in the fight, but his parents - my grandparents - wouldn't sign the necessary paper giving their permission. When he turned 20, he told his mother: "Sign or not, I'm going in. And she signed."
His older brother, Raymond, was in the Army, a draftee called up before Pearl Harbor, when America's leaders were trying to rebuild its military as they watched with growing alarm another aggressor - Germany - winning the war in Europe. Whatever branch of the service you join, he advised Dick, don't go in the Marine Corps.
"That had to be the one," Dick recalled when I phoned him the other day. I heard his soft, low chuckle.
Uncle Dick was the hell-raiser of the family, and after Pearl Harbor, he had figured to raise plenty of hell. "Somebody had clobbered your country, and we were going to clobber them back." So he joined the Marines, took his training, and joined the Hornet at Pearl Harbor. He was aboard when the aircraft carrier went down Oct. 26, 1942.
I never heard Dick talk about the war when I was growing up. My generation saw plenty of movies glorifying the battles and the Allied victory, and the kids I knew were vaguely aware that most of our dads and uncles had served. But the events were no more real or immediate for us than Hollywood Westerns.
My mother was the keeper of the family history, though, and when I was a little older than a little kid, I heard that Uncle Ray had served in Africa, Italy, France and Germany, and had been wounded twice. (He was a forward observer for an artillery outfit, Dick told me, and served in Patton's 3rd Army. He won the Bronze Star.) And I knew Dick had been aboard the Hornet, and had been a scout-sniper behind Japanese lines. Apparently I knew more than his own children.
"My sons have told me that I should have told them all about it," Dick conceded. "How do you tell somebody what it feels like to be in combat?"
He never mentioned the war, but not because he suffered any private agony over it. He says he just never thought about it once he got home. "We went in to fight a war, knock out the enemy, and go to our jobs back at home." It was not extraordinary. It was, he thought, what everyone did.
Well, almost everyone. Dick was a bricklayer, and he could have gotten an exemption as a skilled worker needed to build munitions plants and such. His co-workers who did told him he was a sucker. "I told them, 'You live with your conscience, and I'll live with mine.'''
Now, when I ask about his war, he says there's not much to tell. He was with the 2nd Marine Division on Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian. He spiels off the names of islands where some of the war's fiercest, bloodiest jungle fighting occurred.
You've left out a few details, I told him. Mother said you gave up your life jacket to someone when the Hornet went down?
The low chuckle. "Yeah, some dumb sailor didn't know how to swim and he was floundering around." Dick survived to "hit on the third wave on Saipan, then went over and took Tinian." He ripped open his shin on coral on one of the islands and it never healed. The Marines finally sent him to a hospital in Idaho early in '45, and he finished out his four years stateside.
In Europe, "their war was an altogether different war; they fought more long-distance. Ours was short-distance. We had a lot of hand-to-hand stuff in the Pacific." Ray saw thousands of Germans surrender; few Japanese would.
"I got kinda fed up with the war in Saipan," Dick said. One of his best friends was killed, and "we had to take women and kids out of caves." Japanese soldiers were hiding there, but "we knew there were civilians, priests and nuns in these caves. The way you find out if a cave is a bad cave or a good cave is, we went in and looked. If we were shot at, we blew it up. If not, we brought the kids out and the meds would take care of them." They were in bad shape.
"We watched them on the suicide deal," islanders and Japanese leaping to their deaths from a cliff. "We were at the base, and we couldn't reach 'em. We were trying to talk [them into surrendering] with loudspeakers." For the first time, his voice sounded grim.
Critics of Truman's decision to drop the bomb say now that it wasn't necessary; Japan was on the verge of giving up. Dick doesn't buy that.
Overwhelmingly, the Americans who fought the Japanese believe the military would not have surrendered - no matter what its government wanted to do. No one can know for sure. But the men fighting their foe hand-to-hand knew the enemy in a way scholars never can.
by CNB