‘Machine gun fire opened up like you wouldn’t believe’
WWII veteran from Hurricane shares stories of mountain combat
HURRICANE – Crouched inside a shallow foxhole on an inky black night atop a ridge in the Philippines, Roland Hall was on high alert. A patrol of Japanese soldiers tripped a booby trap. Several grenades exploded. There was shouting. Then nothing.
His heart raced. Any shape and shadow could be the enemy. He didn’t want to shoot unless he knew exactly what he was shooting at. Discharging a rifle at night provided confirmation of your whereabouts to the enemy.
Hall was thousands of miles away from his home in Hurricane, Utah. It might as well have been millions.
“In the starlight I could see a large object in a shadowy area and I figured it was somebody trying to sneak up on me,” Hall remembered. “He was just inching forward a few feet at a time. The moon came out and then, finally, daylight. That guy who was sneaking up on me was a dead coconut log.”
Eyes have a way of playing tricks on soldiers in combat. Hall was a member of A Company, 188th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne Division during the closing stages of World War II, rooting stubborn Japanese troops out of the hills of Southern Luzon.
Now 97 and still living in Hurricane, Hall is a sought-after speaker at veterans events 78 years after the end of the deadliest conflict in recorded human history.
He cuts a handsome figure in his dress uniform. Funny thing: He never
“When I think about it, it’s almost scarier to me now than when it was actually happening. But I was there to do a job.”
Roland Hall, 97-year-old Hurricane resident and World War II veteran
wanted to be a paratrooper.
“I went to Fort Douglas and signed up for the Navy,” Hall recalled. “My dad applied for a 30-day deferment for me because we had a crop of wheat growing in our farm in the Apple Valley area. I was the one who operated the harvester. When I went back to Fort Douglas, they were already signing me up for the Army. They said the Navy is full, but we have some openings in the Marine Corps.”
Marine Corps? Hall had heard about the adversity the Marines faced in the Pacific. And they had the reputation for being a little rough around the edges. “I said, ‘Nah, those Marines are too tough for me, I’ll just stay with the Army.’”
Hall arrived in Leyte, Philippines, as an infantry replacement in January 1945. While the paratrooper units were made up of volunteers, glider regiments were not. Hall was assigned to the 188th GIR after the heaviest fighting had taken place on the island — but there was still time to die.
He recalled one instance when his unit was taking a break while on patrol in a ravine. They heard a pop that sounded like a Japanese knee mortar. Then an explosion about 40 feet away.
“The guy next to me said, ‘Ouch that’s hot!’ He had a three-quarter inch, diamond-shaped piece of shrapnel in his forehead right between his eyebrows,” Hall said. “A guy with a pair of small pliers pulled it out of his head.”
Later that day, while at the bottom of the ravine, a squad to his right was ambushed. “Machine gun fire opened up like you wouldn’t believe. There was a lot of lead flying around and I didn’t know when they were going to turn it my way,” he said. “There was a coconut tree about 4 or 5 inches diameter just in front of me. I took cover behind that.”
Luckily for Hall, they were shooting at the squad down in the ravine. Tanks were called up to knock out the Japanese emplacement.
“They dropped explosive shells right in those holes — they found at least half a dozen holes,” Hall said. “I had been out there in the open, about 50 yards away.”
Later in the day an US Army artillery piece began striking Japanese positions. Hall was watching, happily, when a piece of shrapnel sliced through the air a few feet above him – a friendly reminder to keep his head down.
“When I think about it, it’s almost scarier to me now than when it was actually happening,” Hall said. “But I was there to do a job.”
Later that summer, Hall’s unit was pulled off the line and many of the men took jump training. They became fullfledged paratroopers.