Local veteran served in both WWII and Korea
After first spending more than a year on rough Pacific Ocean waves in one war, U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Bill Martin found himself on the rugged hills of Korea, fighting another war.
“The Army sent me to Fort Benning, (Ga.) to give me some intensive officer training,” Martin said after having served in the U.S. Navy during World War II just six years prior. “This training included field combat, mortar shell firing, map reading and field night maneuvers in the rain and in the cold weather.”
Born in Brownsville, Texas, in 1926, Martin grew up in Texarkana, mainly because his dad was initially from Genoa, Ark. This led the family to come back up from deep south Texas to live in Texarkana while Martin was still growing up.
Martin joined the U.S. Navy at age 18 in 1944 and served as a Seaman First Class aboard a troop transport ship in the Pacific during World War II. During the battles to retake the Philippines and Okinawa, Martin helped defend his vessel against Japanese suicide “kamikaze” warplane attacks.
Following the war, Martin returned to Texarkana to work for a short time in plumbing before quitting that business in about 1947 to go to college.
After going to Texarkana College for a year, Martin transferred to Ouachita Baptist College in Arkadelphia, Ark. There, Martin joined the college’s U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Corps before going on to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. There, he joined that university’s ROTC program and became a commissioned U.S. Army 2nd Lieutenant while studying agriculture. He graduated in May 1951.
However, no sooner had Martin graduated when the Army called him up to go to Korea, which was by then already a year into its civil war.
“The Army sent me to Seattle, Wash., to catch a boat to Korea,” Martin said.
Martin first arrived in Japan, where he received assignment to the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division before being deployed to South Korea. There, Martin found himself and his platoon participating in the tail end of a near death-grip battle between United Nations ground forces and Chinese troops over a relatively small piece of real estate called Heartbreak Ridge. This fight took place in the hills of far southern North Korea just north of the 38th parallel.
“We were sent there to the ridge to help relieve other units assigned there,” Martin said. “It was said that the ridge got its name from some officers who said that the casualty rate on that ridge was heartbreaking.”
Martin also remembers the cold weather as well as the combat.
“We were there for a year between December 1951 to December 1952, with nearly eight months of it in combat. We also got there in time for the snow and ice weather. It would get down to at least 10 or 15 degrees below zero in the winter there.”
Martin added that as time went on, the enemy learned how to acutely sharpen his combat skills—especially when it came to sniper firing as well as mortar shell firing.
“We would get enemy mortar shell fire both day and night,” Martin said. “They could nearly put a mortar round right into your back pocket. We started putting sandbags and pine logs over and around our dugouts and foxholes, along with some dirt and rocks. But the enemy’s mortar shells would shake our dugouts and cause our pine logs, dirt and rocks to collapse in on us. We had to rescue men buried and trapped beneath the logs. We could rescue some, but not all of them. When we cleared the logs, we could see where some of the men, who were already dead, were diving for cover when the shells hit.”
Besides the dugouts, Martin said these types of enemy shells also struck U.S. tanks while enemy foot patrols would attempt to outflank and infiltrate behind the American front lines.
“They would try to cut through barbed wire at night, which separated each side’s front lines. Then, they would send their foot patrol soldiers to cross over the lines and slip in behind us,” he said. “We managed to cut some of them down with our BARs (Browning Automatic Rifles).”
Even when both sides make fatalities out of each others’ soldiers, the use of an enemy soldier by the other side doesn’t necessarily end when that soldier is deceased. This is something Martin found out
“Often, we would go through their wallets and find pictures of their moms, their dads, their brothers, their sisters, the wives and their girlfriends. But when I did this, the thing that I found out the most was that they were just like us. To this day, those pictures of the family members they left behind still haunt me.” —Bill Martin
while serving in Korea—especially when it came to intelligence gathering.
“After coming upon deceased enemy soldiers, we would go through their pockets in order to find any evidence we could to see if they were mounting a major counter offensive,” Martin said. “This included finding clues as to their ages and their ranks, as well as whether or not they were on leave or were about to go on leave.
“Often, we would go through their wallets and find pictures of their moms, their dads, their brothers, their sisters, the wives and their girlfriends. But when I did this, the thing that I found out the most was that they were just like us. To this day, those pictures of the family members they left behind still haunt me.”