WAR YEARS PART 1
Answering the call - Residents of the Yakima Valley, like many other Americans, harbored some isolationism in 1939 as Germany invaded its neighbors and war spread across Europe. The Axis powers were on the march but the United States had not yet joined the Allied Forces in w...
The preacher - His buddies called him The Preacher. Little did they know this man of the cloth could shoot. Willis Walker was a divinity student at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho, when the Army drafted him in 1943. Walker, now 92, was part of the 81st In...
Farm boy turned flyboy - He flew transport planes behind enemy lines throughout World War II, but Stan Sinclair has a quick response if you ask him why he didn't want to be a glamorous fighter pilot. "I didn't want to get shot at any more than I had to," he says. Not that his pla...
The ghosts of Nordhausen - Images of bodies stacked up like so much firewood and half-starved survivors dying on their feet haunted Robert Kellman for almost 60 years. The horrors he saw as an Army lieutenant in charge of liberating the Nazi concentration camp near Nordhausen, Ger...
Speaking with the enemy - Masayuki Hashimoto never felt torn at all. As a 21-year-old college student in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the son of Japanese immigrants knew he wanted to join the U.S. war effort. "All my ancestors were from Japan, bu...
Close calls - Army veteran John Hitchcock says you never know what's going to happen in war. The 90-year-old World War II combat veteran who served with the 163rd Combat Regiment of the 41st Division was stationed in New Guinea, where steady rainfall pounded the swampy...
Not just names - SUNNYSIDE -- The names of 25 men are engraved in granite on a war monument in Lower Valley Memorial Gardens. Al Heffron knows them. He knows their middle initials, when they were born and the dates of their death. He knows their units. He knows where sur...
The best medicine - BROWNSTOWN -- From the comfort of a wood pellet fire and his favorite chair, Francis Shields laughs about World War II. Planes torn to shreds, blowing a Japanese submarine out of the water, sitting on his helmet instead of wearing it. He just chuckles. "...
Courage under fire - The pistol was what he most wanted back. But Sgt. J.L. "Rusty" Mulcahy, after he survived being shot in the back of the head on the island of Saipan in June 1944, figured he'd never again hold the .45-caliber pistol the Marines had issued him -- the side ...
The war in brief - The beginning of World War II may actually be traced to the end of World War I, in 1919, when Germany felt forced as the defeated nation to comply with an unfair and humiliating treaty. By the mid-1930s, Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany and was...
War Stories: Eleanor Mayne Paine Hayward - I was a sophomore at the University of Washington when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The next summer (1942), I landed a job with the U.S. Army Engineers in downtown Seattle, filing maps and running errands. I did not return to college in the fall. Working i...
The war at home - The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor dramatically ended the debate over America's entrance into the war that raged around the world. As eager volunteers flooded local draft board offices, ordinary citizens soon felt the impact of the war. Almost overnight,...
Lessons of rationing - If there was a line, stand in it. Something good must be at the other end. And when there's not much on the store shelves, anything might be worth the wait. That was Coriee Hall's lesson from the rationing imposed on American communities during World War...
River rescue - When Norman Mohar returned from World War II, he was angry and upset but happy to be home. Although he was never officially diagnosed, he believes he suffered from what today would be known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Now 85 and with several award...
'Everything was flattened' - A walk through Japan that consisted of stops at a hospital, a post office, and someone's home to have tea doesn't sound all that extraordinary. But consider that this stroll takes place around Hiroshima in 1945, about two months after the United States dr...
Assault on Iwo Jima - Clifton Bennett arrived on the island of Iwo Jima with his head down, crawling through the rut left by a tank in the sulfurous black sand with bullets flying all around. Even several hours after the initial Marine landing on the first piece of the Japanes...
Limited service - Albert D. Lantrip knows there are thousands of veterans like himself, those who served their country despite having poor eyesight, flat feet or bad knees. Three years after Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the Army came call...
Keeping his secret - During the early months of 1945, Hank Eider didn't know if he would live to see the end of World War II. As an American Jew at Stalag IV B, a German prisoner of war camp, Eider feared that someone would betray him and he would be taken to a concentration...
War Stories: Glenn Leuning - In the summer of 1941, the war was raging in Europe. I was 1A for the draft, so I joined the Air Forces. I was shipped to Fort Lewis, and while there was given the Army General Classification Test. Fortunately, I did well on the test. I was shipped to Je...
Navy nurse - When Mary Turich Duckworth enlisted in the Navy in 1942, she had never worn pants or learned to drive a car. And she still hasn't. But Duckworth, a registered nurse, had no trouble adapting to some of the more challenging conditions in World War II and in...
'Don't worry about me' - Lyle Sylling knew he'd return home. A White Swan native, the 18-year-old enlisted in the Army after graduating from high school in 1944. He spent the next year traveling from California to Hawaii to somewhere in Japan. He wrote his family about how he e...
Third Army's repairman - For Bill Dopps, the weapons of war were a drill press and a lathe. As battalion machinist for the 145th Combat Engineers, one of the many cogs in Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army, Dopps was so busy fixing things the Germans broke as they stubbornly defe...
History of the Toppenish internment camp - The War Years were troubled times for folks of Japanese descent in the Yakima Valley. They were times of blocked phone lines and frozen bank assets. Men and women who had farmed the Valley for decades were sent to local prisons. The valedictorian of the 1...
Keeping it together - By the time Betty R. Neumeyer graduated from Yakima Senior High School (now Davis High School) in 1944, there weren't many boys left in her senior class. Most of them were serving in the war. "We were all frightened," said Neumeyer, now 81. "We were al...
Enlisting for college - James Hogan didn't even know how to drive a car when the Army made him an aircraft mechanic in the early days of World War II. A recent graduate of Marquette High School in downtown Yakima, Hogan didn't mind the steep learning curve. To him, repairing bom...
POWs on the farm - Platt Parker has hauled a lot of different freight in his many years as a trucker -- cattle, beer, apples, potatoes-- but he never had a more unusual, and dangerous, cargo than he did the summer he was 17 years old. "I was just a farm boy; I didn't know e...
64 Years of luck - One girl, probably high school age, stepped out from the crowd. As American troops marched through Liége, Belgium, on their way to the front lines in fall 1944, she walked alongside one of them long enough to ask whether he'd like to have a little ...
Worth a thousand words - It is clear before she even tells the stories: There's life in Betty Walsh's photos. The old black-and-whites, yellowed around the edges by the past six decades, are peopled by the sort of men and women you see in period movies. Straight from Central Cast...
Protecting their land - ... Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. -- Chief Joseph at the conclusion of the Nez Perce War ----- TOPPENISH -- Virginia Beavert vividly recalls how the fervor of war l...
War Stories: Elliott Manning - Here is a copy of a letter that I sent to my kids a few years back about my mom and dad's experience of Dec. 7, 1941. In recent years, I have wondered about my dad's U.S. Marine Corps service in China and the Philippines in the late 1930s. He never spoke...
Building the bomb - When the Army assigned him to work on the top-secret atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., Ben Hayward didn't know what to expect. But he was thrilled. "It was exciting," said the 86-year-old Yakima resident. "Here I was on the frontier of science and working...
Untold stories - If the sword could talk, the sons of Arnulfo Valdez would listen. All they know about its existence is what little their father has told them over the years about his service in the Pacific Theater during World War II. There was some sort of battle with...
War Stories: Sam Hunt - Because I was a December baby, I was born in Billings, Mont., and not in Yakima. My dad was an air traffic controller working at the Billings airport tower. He had been transferred to the Yakima airport tower, but the transfer was delayed because the baby...
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WAR YEARS PART 2
Love Letters - GRANDVIEW -- They forgot the rings. And the license. Even the dress. The couple-to-be got all the way to Yakima from Seattle -- a five-hour drive on a two-lane road in those days -- before they noticed their wedding-in-a-suitcase hadn't made it into the c...
WAR YEARS -- War dead list/Army and Army Air Forces - The National Archives lists 224 Army and Army Air Forces members from the Yakima Valley men who died in World War II. (The Army included the Army Air Forces until 1947, when the U.S. Air Force became a separate service.) These entries do not include home...
WAR YEARS -- War dead list/Navy and Marines - The National Archives lists 104 sailors and Marines from the Yakima Valley men who died in World War II. These entries rank at the time of death, military service branch and hometown; they do not include the manner of death. The Yakima Valley dead who w...
Life in the camp - She knows it sounds odd, but Mary Chadwick has fond memories of a Japanese internment camp during World War II. To her, it was a time of friends, family and not a care in the world. "I had a lot of fun there," said Chadwick, whose maiden name is Sato. But...
Reunion and remembrance - It took Kenneth Carvo nearly 60 years to return to Navy Pier in Chicago, where he learned to repair planes before serving overseas in World War II. Carvo was just one of eight cousins from the Yakima Valley -- all with the same surname -- who volunteered ...
Rosebud - Sure, the men went to war and the women went to work during World War II as the nation pulled together. Their stories have been chronicled for years. But there were others who got caught up in the changes swirling through a nation at war. They are the ch...
Brothers in arms - Martín Yáñez Sr. was buried in 1991 after he lost his war against lung cancer. But it was the war he won 46 years earlier that his family remembers most, his relatives said. Martín, his older brother José María a...
War Stories: Vernal Allen - World War II erupted unexpectedly, frighteningly and dramatically for me, and changed forever my outlook on life, just as it did for everyone else who lived through it. I was a seventh-grader, living with my family in Wyoming on Pearl Harbor Day. We shar...
Marching with the POWs - The foreign names and long-ago dates take a while to remember, if they can be remembered at all. The details of the events that occurred 65 or more years ago in places that can be difficult for a kid from Kansas to pronounce are retreating into the foggy...
WWII Braceros - World War II was the watershed moment of Latino settlement in Washington state. The expulsion of the Japanese left a precarious situation in the economy of the Yakima Valley. It came at the worst possible time for farmers. The U.S. commitment to supplyin...
Adventures in teaching - Lucille Johnson had to hoard her nylons -- the government only allowed one pair a month. But, alas, girdles and corsets were still permitted. For a time, the War Production Board considered limiting the use of rubber for what were then called "women's fou...
War Stories: Bessie Bennett Rawson - How well I remember the Sunday morning in 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. My family spent the entire day gathered around the radio in stunned silence, trying to make sense out of all they were hearing. At the time, I was a 17-year-old girl attending Y...
A product of ROTC - Maury Smith comes from a time when military service felt natural for the average college student. He attended Washington State College, the Pullman school now known as Washington State University, as the country braced for war in the years leading up to t...
'It was past time' - It was a sense of patriotism that led Art Robins to join the Navy during World War II. He had just started a career building boats in San Diego, where he lived with his wife and 1-year-old daughter. Robins was exempt from the draft because he had just co...
Telling his tales - Peggy Ludwick grew up hearing her dad's stories about the war. About joining the Iowa National Guard in 1941 as a way to get out of Waterloo because of his ragweed hay fever, then a year later finding himself in North Africa in the infamous battle at Fond...
Secondhand memories - The letter from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area, arrived during Mike Murphy's second birthday party. His father, Jack, had been killed three days earlier -- Nov. 15, 1943 -- in New Guinea. He was a ...
The kindness of strangers - Before he was drafted into the Navy, Charles Anderson had never ventured far from home. All that changed in January 1943. The fresh-faced 18-year-old left Pennsylvania and found himself in Chicago, then Florida. At the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, he...
Before Pearl Harbor - As the sun rose on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Carl Dry was ready to sleep. Dry, a 21-year-old aviation machinist mate at Kaneohe Bay Naval Base in Hawaii, had spent all night installing fuel tanks in the flying boats used to patrol the Pacific Ocean. Af...
Grim and grimy - It wasn't the 27 terrifying combat bombing missions over Europe. Nor the sight of Allied planes being shot down all around him. Nor the strafing of his B-24 by German anti-aircraft missiles. No, what made the biggest impression on Merlin Martin were the...
'They needed nurses' - Naida Hurlburt hadn't considered military service as she embarked on a nursing career. Then along came World War II. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the military called for volunteer nurses to help provide medical care in the field and in hospital...
Aboard the Superfortress - Bill Schmitt had a feeling. No, it was stronger than that. His first sighting of a B-29 Superfortress bomber at the Kansas air base during training made him certain about the outcome of the task facing him and the millions of other Americans in the fina...
Letting it out - He's cheerful, joking here and there about his service in World War II, shrugging off most of the trauma he endured with a breezy, "I was lucky; I only lost my hearing." He laughs about hurrying home from the war in the Pacific to reclaim his sweetheart a...
War Stories: Reva Blomé-Bunnell - I was born July 6, 1944, in St. Louis, Mo., so am a true "war baby." I had an older brother, 6, and an older sister, 2, so Dad was exempt from enlisting at that time. However, that did not stop him from helping the war effort in any way he could. He star...
War Stories: Norma Baird - After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, our president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declared war on our enemies. This awakened the patriotism of the American people, and all wanted to help our country. At the time I was living in Los Angeles. I was a very eager...
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