Memories of war never fade
Six area residents recall challenges of surviving grueling fight in Pacific.
Navy medic Jack A. Daugherty of Oakwood risked his life under fire from Japanese soldiers to treat a wounded Marine in a trench on Iwo Jima.
Army nurse Anna K. Beall of Dayton left the shores of America for the first time to sail across the Pacific to treat injured U.S. service members in the Philippines.
And Marine Victor Fornes of Miami Twp. clung to a cargo net on the side of a ship while a Japanese Zero swirled toward the warship.
Seven decades after the Japanese surrender on V-J Day — Aug. 15, 1945 — the memories of those who fought in the island chains of the Pacific duringWorldWar II have never faded.
“I think we in the Pacific have been forgotten to some extent because we celebrate (the D-Day invasion of ) Normandy but you never hear about Peleliu or Tinian or Okinawa,” said D. Ralph Young, 90, of Centerville, who is a published author writing a book about the war in the Pacific.
After Germany and the Nazi regime were defeated in May 1945, America turned its full attention to Japan. The final Axis power refused to surrender in bruising and bloody island and sea battles until U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands, ended the war and changed the world.
Japan would formally sign the documents of unconditional surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
The surrender came nearly four years after America was ushered into war by Japan’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
In the ensuing years, American factory workers ramped up massive industrial output to become the Arsenal of Democracy, families sacrificed on the home front through rationing and buying war bonds, and the United States took the controversial step of sending at least 110,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps during the war, estimates show.
The war’s toll was immense: 400,000 Americans killed and more than 60 million dead worldwide in a devastated Europe, North Africa and Asia.
Accounts of war are best related by those who participated. Six of those accounts are presented here so that they will always be remembered.
D. Ralph Young, Centerville
D. Ralph Young, who survived four major battles in the South Pacific, credits his mother’s prayers for bringing him home safely.
“I guess the thing I remember most is bombs exploding so close to our ship that they actually sprayed water onto the ship,” the retired engineering consultant said. “A few feet in either direction and I wouldn’t be here talking to you today.”
The massive explosion on the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood was his closest brush with disaster.
The captain of his attack transport ship, USS J. Franklin
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The Bell was half a mile away when the Mount Hood exploded, killing several hundred people. “Even from the distance we were, it knocked all of us flat on the deck,” he said. “That was the closest call and it was not from an enemy source. It was one of our own making.”
On another occasion Young, who was a gunner’s mate, and his fellow sailors dug foxholes on the beach to survive Japanese strafing as they unloaded supplies for Marines coming ashore.
One day, he and fellow troops discovered a Japanese soldier hiding in a strand of bamboo trees.
“He had expended all of his ammunition and so all he had was a bayonet,” Young said. The enemy soldier was cut with a machete in the struggle to subdue him. A Navy medic gave him a blood transfusion.
“Didn’t go well with some of the soldiers because they didn’t think they should waste the blood plasma on the enemy,” said Young. “I have to confess, I felt sorry for him.”
Jack A. Daugherty, Oakwood
Under threat of enemy fire, Navy hospital corpsman Jack A. Daugherty crawled inch by inch toward a Marine struck by a bullet from the rifle of a Japanese soldier.
Daugherty told a Marine near him to cover him so he could reach his wounded comrade.
“I told him if you throw smoke grenades this way, you give me cover and fire, I’ll get him,” said the 90-year-old Daugherty.
When he reached the trench the Marine was lying in, he discovered the bullet had struck the wounded man’s back.
“It looked exactly like someone had branded him across his back and that’s what made him raise up,” said Daugherty, a retired oral surgeon. “That stung him pretty much.”
He pulled out a bottle of brandy. “I said ‘Here, take this,’” Daugherty said. “He took a sip of it and said, ‘It looks like you need it worse than I do.’”
Trapped, they waited until dark to return to a U.S.-held position.
“We were both pinned down for at least nine hours,” he said. When they finally moved under cover of darkness, they were “screaming and yelling” to keep other Marines from firing on them.
However, they found empty foxholes. The men had been ordered out of the area.
“I was so mad,” Daugherty said. “I wanted to shoot the guy who made the order to pull back and I went in there.”
Daugherty was presented the Bronze Star for coming to the aid of the wounded Marine.
He was on the island of Iwo Jima when the American flag was raised in one of the war’s most iconic symbols. Afterward, Iwo Jima became a base to launch long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers against Japan. Ever-present reminders showed the toll of the flights.
“When we were on Iwo Jima, we’d see planes coming back and they would come back with two engines and the tail shot off,” he said.
As the United States fought dug-in Japanese troops who refused to surrender, the troops prepared to invade Japan. “They showed us a picture of where we were going to land, and boy, it was nothing but a cliff. Rugged as could be,” he said.
He asked a military officer how the Marines would scale the cliff.
“He said, ‘By rope.’ Oh, geez, when I heard that I was telling my buddy this will be the end of the Marine Corps. There will be no Marine Corps after that.”
The invasion never happened. Japan’s surrender came days after U.S. planes dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki Aug. 9.
Daugherty heard the news on the island of Guam.
“They said the atomic bomb (was dropped),” he said. “The war is over.”