Sixty Years Ago
So was my First Sgt., Top Healy. I asked him what the flag-raising meant at the time.
Someone said, “Hey, they raised the flag !”. Great! Now get your fuckin’ head down.P.S. If you took 10 celebrities and their opinions, then wadded them all up together, they wouldn’t amount to a pimple on Top Healy’s ass.
Posted by Oink
02/20/2005 at 09:07 AM
My Dad was in 16 major engagements in the South Pacific and had two ships blown out from under him. My Dad was a Navy man. He made no bones about it between the Navy and the Marines. He said, “If I was laying on a beach I would want to see the Marines landing too. These are the last guys you want on your ass if you’re Japanese.”
Bishop Fulton John Sheen said in 1941: The pacifist thinks that the alternative to war is peace; it is not. Sometimes the alternative is oppression. Sometimes certain God-giving rights and liberties can be preserved only by resistance to that which would distroy them. And to defend certain basic God-given rights and liberties is not immoral but righteous.
Bishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) A Declaration Of Dependance [1941]
Posted by Z Woof
02/20/2005 at 01:26 PM
One of my close cousins, who is still living, made the Bataan Death March and lived to tell about it. The meaning of Pearl, Bataan, Corregidor, Coral Sea, Midway, the Canal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo and Okinawa, and the sacrifices of the men who fought in such battles, are never forgotten in this household.
Especially when some scumbag like that fat moujik from Flint is spewing his garbage all over the legacy handed down to us by such men.
T, I hope someone in your family has made voice recordings of the stories your cousin has to tell.
They’d be priceless family heirlooms!
They would, Vilmar, if he could be persuaded to make them. Like a lot of men who “saw it,” he never was one to talk about such things very much. I am willing to share, however, the high points of what I know about his experiences.
He had joined the Army in September 1939 and was shipped out to the Philippines in late 1941. He had only been there a little over two weeks when Pearl was attacked. He was captured when Bataan fell (4/9/42), made the Death March up to Camp O’Donnell, and was held there about a year. His term for the place was “death factory.” After that year at O’Donnell, he was taken to Japan to work in the coal mines.
According to him, they worked the POW’s in the mines in groups of ten, and warned each group that if one tried to escape, the other nine would die. The POW’s got a bowl of rice and cabbage leaf soup twice a day. Once, when he was sick, he was placed in what the POW’s called “Zero Ward.” POW’s were sent there to die. During this time, his weight went from 145 to 75 pounds.
Meanwhile, the government listed him as missing, and then dead, and a memorial service had been conducted in his hometown. You can imagine how thrilled all the family and neighbors were when he came back after the war.
At the time Nagasaki got the A-bomb, he was assigned to work in mines nearby, and was outdoors at the time the city was hit, near enough to hear the blast and see the mushroom cloud. It was only later, of course, that the POW’s learned what had happened.
After the POW’s were liberated, he had to spend six months in hospital before he could come back to his hometown, where he has lived ever since.
He is not bitter now about what happened to him. If he was bitter, anyone could understand, but he is not that sort of chap. In a bio published in his hometown newspaper in 2003, he was quoted as saying: “I thank God for giving me the courage and strength to endure the torture, the beatings and the humiliation to come home to the greatest country in the world”.
Hope this is of benefit....
Thanks for sharing with us!
