User:Theguyhelping/history 2

My grandfather who lied about his age and enlisted May 13, 1942 just 5 days after turning 16 years old, was assigned to L Company 3rd Battalion 6th Marines as a BAR gunner. He landed with them in January 1943 at Guadalcanal where he saw his first combat. After a month at the Canal 3/6 returned to Paekakariki, New Zealand. In November 1943 he participated in the landings at Tarawa. 3/6 was landed Nov. 22 and L Company took over for 1/6 after they had suffered an intense Banzi attack the night of the 22nd. 3/6 was involved in the final push along the elongated narrow portion of Betio. From there my 3/6 sailed for Hawaii and settled at Camp Tarawa on the big island. 122 men from the battalion were selected to return stateside. Enticed by his own homesickness, as he stated, he was quite excited to return as well as two of his very good friends who were also in L Company. After returning stateside he was granted a 30 day furlough and returned home to Oklahoma. After his furlough he reported back to Camp Pendelton. "I had no idea where Camp Pendelton was, when I left to go overseas and come back there was no Camp Pendelton yet," he would remember. After arriving at Pendelton, he was put in raider training. Having suffered from Malaria contracted at Guadalcanal, he was undergoing this training which he said was volunteer and he did not volunteer. Nonetheless he was informed that their training would be short lived anyway due to the disbandment of the raiders. From there he was assigned to Company E 2nd Battalion 27th Marines. He was put in charge of a machine gun section as a Pfc. and within weeks of joining the newly formed 27th Marines he was promoted to Corporal. Eventually, with the formation of the 5th Division, they were immersed in heavy training at Pendelton and then went overseas to Hawaii where they were stationed on Hilo. From there they  trained further and eventually set sail in early 1945 with rumors about that they were going to land at Formosa, the Philippines, etc. and soon found out they were going to Iwo Jima. Landing in the first wave at Red Beach I, my grandfather lasted until March 10, 1945. In the late morning of March 10, 1945 he recalled that the early morning was pretty eerie, they had already lost a lot of guys, his own platoon commander had died 2 days before, Jack Lummus who was later posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. (Lummus was of course an all American football player at Baylor and later played for the New York Giants.   Grandpa  remembered playing touch football on Hilo with him and said when Lummus touched you, you knew it because he left a hand print in your back or chest.  He had enormous hands, my grandfather remembered.  It was like getting slapped across the chest with a boat oar, he recalled)  On the morning of March 10, E company moved out beyond airfield #3 which was under construction. My grandfather says he remembered there was a creepy fog that settled along the ground in the early morning he believed was because of the seismic activity of the volcanic island. He said when you walked and moved your foot/leg through the fog it would swirl like it was trying to coil around your shin. On that day the company was very heavily engaged over very rocky uneven ground. My grandfather remembered that an officer who he had never seen or known and did not know if he was with another platoon or a replacement asked my grandfather where his machine gun section was. After he told the officer, he asked my grandfather where another section was. My grandfather did not know and this officer had informed my grandfather that he has been in charge of that section too since the section leader had been wounded. This was the first I had been told of that said my grandfather. This lieutenant told my grandfather to locate the section and that this officer had said that their was a machine gun firing off to the south and that he had believed it was our section but was not sure so he tasked my grandfather with moving to the flank to find it. He crawled and moved over this broken uneven ground. He noted that there were quite a few felled trees something he had not seen much of on the island. He said he could hear this gun nearby firing but with the echo could not definitively tell where it was or whether it was ours or a Japanese gun. He said I took a grenade, pulled the pin and was going to move beyond this defilade I was in and if that gun was not ours I was going to throw a grenade toward it. He said he rose up and was getting read to brace himself to roll over a felled tree when "all the sudden it felt like someone ran me through with a hot fireplace poker." It knocked him back on the opposite side of the felled tree from where he started. A machine gun round had struck him in the left side of the lower abdomen just below the rib cage. The bullet passed completely through exiting his lower left back leaving a fist size exit wound. Stunned for a minute he said that he immediately realized that he was hit but did not even have time to know how bad it was as the dirt to his side started getting kicked up and spewed dust into his face and he put two and two together and realized that it was a Japanese gunner and that he still had his number. "I rolled onto my side and then to my stomach and it was almost as painful as the initial impact.  I drew my leg up beneath me and got to me feet and basically stumbled and tripped back over into the defilade," he remembered. "My legs went to rubber." He was eventually treated by a corpsman from another company he remembered and then a stretcher team picked him up. "One man was as good as another to them," my grandfather remembered. Along the way he remembered behind dropped several times as they struggled over the uneven ground. He was brought back to battalion then regiment. On the way to regiment he was put in a jeep and he remembered a sergeant who had a bad bad shoulder wound that cussed up a storm and told the driver he was gonna blow his head off if he did not slow down. Eventually evacuated on a Higgins to a hospital ship, before he could be hoisted up from the landing craft, my grandfather remembered "some sailor stuck his head over the side and as I was laying at the bottom of his Higgins on a stretcher with a blanket he yelled at the coxswain, "Take 'em all back we're full, we got 'em in the isles on all decks we can't take no more of 'em."  From there my grandfather was brought back to Iwo Jima and laid out on one of the beaches.  He said" I was near Suribachi, closer to it than when I landed on D-day" he said, so he may have landed on Green Beach or further south on Red I.  None the less he was operated on there on Iwo at a makeshift hospital.  After being operated on he was eventually evacuated to Guam.  For several weeks at Guam he was treated.  He was bed ridden and could not eat or drink.  "I remember the navy nurses carried .38 revolvers in shoulder holsters because they still had Japs coming out of the hills at Guam," he remembered. "I remembered the nurses rubbed ice cubes on my lips, I could not drink anything with the abdominal wound.  I wanted a huge gulp of water so bad but I could not have it." Eventually after several weeks he was able to be flown on a makeshift plane that had stretcher racks back to Hawaii. It was at the hospital at Guam he remembered that he could sit up and eventually walk but he remembered his legs were so weak that he had trouble. From Hawaii he was brought to the Naval Hospital in San Francisco. After recovering he was sent back to Santa Margarita ranch hospital at Pendelton. When he was fully recovered he was a gate guard at Pendelton and was there when the war ended attached to 7th training battalion. Since he was a 4 year guy he still had almost a year left on his enlistment and ended up back at Pendelton where his year was spent on futile working parties that included accompanying laundry vehicles back and forth to unload linens etc. Months after the war ended Pendelton became a place of mass demobilization and one such duty, according to him, involved tailoring uniforms for guys being processed out. He recalled that like an assembly line the greens of guys being processed out were passed along with a slip of paper in the pocket that had the correct ribbons needed and pertinent info for the uniform. He said a lot of guys had moved from one unit to another during the war and still had the original shoulder patch so they were cutting off the incorrect patch and sewing the correct ones on. They had bins of ribbons and put on the correct ribbons and sewed the 'duck,' as he called it, on. The floor he remembered had patches scattered all over and he went by and picked up one patch from each division and tried to grab one of each patch since he said they were going to be tossed out anyway. These patches were kept in a metal tin for years and years on the book shelf at the house. I remembered looking at them all the time and then sometime about 10 years ago they vanished. I asked my grandmother about them and she said she did not know where they were but promised they had not been thrown out. We lost  grandpa  a year ago this past May and when I went back last summer grandma had found the tin and I took it home along with all of  grandpa 's stuff including his helmet cover, uniform, medals, certificates, letters captured souvenirs etc. These patches were among the items he kept all those years. I always loved the story of how he got them and I hope you enjoy looking at them. I will do a large write up on my grandfather that will include all his stuff eventually just have not gotten around to completing it yet. Semper Fi. my orther grandpa My  grandpa  was a combat engineer with 578th Engineer Battalion of the 40th Infantry Division during WWII. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine told me that he'd seen an old military mine detector for sale at an antique store about 2 hours away from me. I had been wanting to get one and bring it in to show my  grandpa  at the veteran's home. Unfortunately, he went on to be with the Lord early on Monday morning. I was able to be by his side as he passed on, which was peaceful transition at the end of a good life. I would still like to get the mine detector (and any other items) that he would have used during his service. As far as the mine detector, the best that I have is the picture below. Does anyone know what kind of mine detector those guys would have been using during that time? This picture would have been taken sometime during 1951 or the first half of 1952. My  grandpa  is the man standing in the back. Thanks!