Some good Arroyo Grande folks– which is the reason I’m writing a book–have set aside this Saturday as a day to honor our elders in the Heritage Square Park in Old Arroyo.

I was supposed to have written several books by now, according to my Arroyo Grande High School classmates, from forever ago, but Life intervened, and I am easily distracted, with a short attention span. That intensified the shock I felt when my book proposal, about Arroyo Grande’s role in World War II, was accepted by an actual, real live publishing company. Now I am nearly finished.

I spent a rewarding career as a high school history teacher, mostly at AGHS, because I was taught so well: my father, a World War II veteran, was a masterful storyteller. My Dad is one reason for the book.  My love for my home town, Arroyo Grande, is another.

What has struck me, over and over again, in researching my father’s generation, is how capricious and perverse war can be in taking the lives of young men whose first steps, or first words, first school play or first home run brought such joy to their parents.

The war would not spare Arroyo Grande this cruelty.

–There is the little boy who learned to play piano here, when the grammar school stood where Mullahey Ford is today; he would eventually pick up the trombone and the accordion and, when his family later moved to Long Beach, he would start his own dance band.  He opted for the Navy specifically to stay out of the Army and he was about to join a detail from his ship’s band in the National Anthem when a bomb straddled Arizona’s stern and blew him, dead, into Pearl Harbor. Moments later, his bandmates would be vaporized at their action stations in the No. 2 turret, just inboard from where the fatal bomb struck. The trombonist was named Jack Scruggs.

–The 1938 Arroyo Grande Union High School valedictorian was so brilliant that after his graduation from Cal, the Army Air Force selected him for a special program: He would be among the lead pilots, called “Pathfinders,” in over the target, equipped with the new radar, and his bomb group would drop their payload on his signal, when he let his bombs go. Three weeks before his first mission, he was hitching a ride on another B-17 whose inexperienced pilot flew the bomber into the side of Mt. Skiddaw in northern England. The wreckage is still there today.  His name is Clarence Ballagh.

–The farmworker first fought with the 79th Infantry Division to capture Cherbourg. Afterward, the division fought through Normandy’s hedgerows, in the death-traps the Germans had set in the bocage, but seemed to score a coup in seizing the heights above a key crossroads at Le Haye de Puits. The enemy was unwilling to let the town go. SS-Panzer units–some of the most hardened and highly-motivated soldiers in the German Army– launched a counterattack on his regiment’s position and it failed. The 79th Division eventually took Le Haye de Puits in house-to-house fighting, but Private Domingo Martinez was gone by then. He’d been killed during a furious series of assaults on Le Bot, a village just to the south.

–The Filipino-American mess attendant, the only rating to which a man like him could aspire to in the racist wartime Navy, wrote the funniest, most endearing letter a serviceman could write home. It was published in the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder, and it was the kind of letter that made you wish you had known him. Three weeks after he wrote it, near Guadalcanal, a Japanese Long Lance torpedo blew the bow off his destroyer, Walke.  He died along with a third of her crew, including the captain, and many of them died in the water. They survived the torpedo hit but were killed by the concussion of Walke’s depth charges as they tumbled to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound.  His name is Felix Estibal.

-–Before the war, he had worked at the E.C. Loomis feed store, and since he worked for the Loomises, he would have known virtually everybody in Arroyo Grande–population 1,090–and they would have known him. He served in a tank destroyer company in France–big tanks with 90 mm cannon, a counter to the German 88. On Nov. 27, 1944, his company, vastly outnumbered, blunted an enemy infantry attack that would earn the lieutenant in command a Silver Star. The next day was perverse: his platoon advanced toward a village called Merten when the lead tank destroyer ran into a ditch. A German round knocked the tread off a second, and the whole column, stalled, was destroyed. In the melee, a sniper killed Sgt. Frank Gularte. Frank Gularte Jr. was born five days later; the joy of his arrival would be muted by the War Department telegram that followed.

–His father farmed land in Corbett Canyon. In March, 1945, on Iwo Jima, he died as a replacement–in the World War II Marine Corps, the lowest form of life imaginable–a short-termer in the famed 28th Regimental Combat Team. It had been a squad from the 28th, immortalized by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, that had raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi early in the battle. He might have seen the distant flag, but he was just a stevedore then, offloading supplies and waiting his turn to be assigned to the strangers with whom he would die. That death would come during an assault on Hill 362A, honeycombed with caves and machine gun nests. His total combat experience in the Second World War was, at most, 48 hours, and he was killed 48 hours before he turned twenty-one. Louis had been born when his parents were in their forties: his death had to leave a space, for Antonio and Anna Brown, that never could be filled.

It strikes me that what kills men most often in warfare is not glorious bayonet charges but mistakes, in inferior equipment, in misguided orders, in inexperience, and, most of all, because of mistakes on which nothing can be blamed.  They are fate.

Maybe it’s a different kind of fate that led me to write this book.

When you research men like these something powerful happens.  They are of my father’s generation, but the more I get to know them, the more they become my sons. I miss men I have never met.

Their deaths may seem to have been impersonal and illogical, but they have great meaning. Here is why.

I am amazed at the way the young men and women who survived the war came home and put themselves back to work.

They built schools, started Babe Ruth leagues and Boy Scout troops, ran for office, started hardware stores, incorporated a hometown bank, and poured everything they had into my generation to make sure our lives were safe, to make sure our stomachs were full, to inculcate in us the need to get a good education and the desire to make something of our lives.

It is no coincidence that I grew up loving Arroyo Grande. When my family moved here in 1955, the veterans of World War II had already prepared a home for me.

They worked so hard, I think, because they knew that’s what Jack Scruggs, Clarence Ballagh, Domingo Martinez, Felix Estibal, Frank Gularte, and Louis Brown would have done, too. The generation, raised in depression and in war, to whom we owe so much, would not allow themselves to rest until they had paid their debt to the men who would never see the Arroyo Grande Valley again.

The average age of a World War II B-17 pilot was 22; gunners were around 18. These are B-17 G’s  from the 8th Air Force’s 96th Bomb Group, and an Arroyo Grande flier, Elliott Whitlock, was a 22-year-old co-pilot in a 96th squadron based at RAF Snetterton Heath in Norfolk.  His dad owned the Commercial Co. Market, in the building that now houses a cafe at the corner of Branch and North Mason.

Besides the visiting Yanks, another resident of the Heath was a small donkey that the squadron adopted and christened “Lady Moe, Queen of the Heath.” Her young admirers played baseball at the Lady Moe Ball Park and watched movies at the Lady Moe Theater. She had unlimited visiting privileges; some say she even flew a combat mission. She liked American cigarettes. Eating them.

Lady Moe reciprocated the affection lavished on her. She began to appear with the ground crews at the control tower, waiting with them as they anxiously counted B-17’s on the return of her boys from their missions.

Moe almost lost Elliott during the 24th of his 25 missions, after a March 1944 raid on Berlin. The “High ‘n’ Mitey” was on her return trip when the plane caught fire, and the pilot, Capt. Jim Lamb, was burned trying to put it out.

Lamb gave the order to bail out. Whitlock saw three chutes forward but, looking backward, he saw that the crew in the waist hadn’t responded. The fire had disabled the intercom: they never heard Lamb. Whitlock then saw how badly hurt Lamb was, saw that his chute was partly burned away, and he countermanded his skipper’s order.

Somehow a fire extinguisher appeared in Whitlock’s hands–he was unclear later as to how. He put out the cabin fire and took over the control yoke. Lamb’s hands were burned, and it took a young man’s strength to fly a B-17: pilots could lose ten pounds on a typical mission.

He would dive “High ‘n’ Mitey” to extinguish the remainder of the fires onboard, then, at painfully low altitude, bob and weave the ship through a gauntlet of German flak, back to the Channel—back, finally, to Lady Moe. His conduct that day earned Whitlock a Silver Star. He’d admit in a letter home that he, and his crew, had been terrified. In an arresting sentence, he told his parents that “your prayers are standing by me.”

A few weeks later, the same B-17, with a new crew, would be shot down over the Pas-de-Calais. The tail gunner was the only survivor.

Whitlock would survive the war to become an attorney in San Bernardino County. At the time of his death, more than sixty years after that 24th mission, a local bar journal praised his wisdom and his kindness; he was a mentor to many young lawyers. He had led a good life.

The British were sometimes dubious about the goodness of the young Yanks, including fliers like Whitlock, in their friendly invasion. We were boisterous, comparatively affluent in drab wartime England and, as one Arroyo Grande soldier wrote home, we thought “those English girls, with their accents, sure are cute.”

But there was something else the British felt, too. In 2005, they opened a little museum, in a Quonset hut near the old airfield, so that future generations could have the chance to know Whitlock and his comrades.

And, before that, there was the figure incorporated into a stained-glass window of the local parish church. It would be reasonable to expect a traditional image: an angel, for example, looking earthward to proclaim Christ’s birth.

There is, instead, an American in his flight suit, looking heavenward, toward a risen Christ. The window is a poignant reminder of the constancy of the people of Norfolk, who learned to love the young men who had made little Lady Moe their queen.

…In the spring of 1945, an Arroyo Grande sailor and a native of Luzon, Camilo Alarcio, would find himself fighting for his life and for the life of his ship off the Japanese coast in after-combat action that went beyond the dramatic: it was miraculous.

Alarcio, as Felix Estibal had been on the doomed destroyer Walke, was a mess attendant, assigned to the aircraft carrier Franklin. In March 1945, Franklin’s 100 aircraft were engaged in raids on Kagoshima, Kyushu—the seat of the prefecture from which most Arroyo Grande Japanese had emigrated—when the Japanese struck back on March 19.

It was a little after 7 a.m., and Alarcio likely was serving breakfast, which that day included the Navy’s infamous powdered eggs, to some of Franklin’s 3,000-man crew when a Japanese “Judy” bomber somehow penetrated the carrier’s defense screen and made direct hits with two 500-lb. bombs. More than thirty aircraft, their ordnance and their fuel lines were packed on the main deck: Franklin seemed likely to share the fate of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor striking force when, at Midway in June 1942, American fliers had discovered four of his carriers, their flight decks laden with bombs, gasoline lines and aircraft, and sent them to the bottom in flames.

The bomb forward flipped a 32-ton elevator high into the air. like a flapjack, in a pall of smoke, instantly killing hundreds of crewmen. Twelve of the 13 pilots in the famed Marine Corps “Black Sheep” Squadron, based, since the beginning of the year, in Goleta, died in their ready room. The concussion knocked survivors flat. The second bomb exploded belowdecks. These were, or appeared to be, two mortal wounds.

It wasn’t over. Secondary explosions shook the carrier as fires reached twenty more aircraft, fueled and ready for flight on the hangar deck; those fires continued, throughout the day, to set off stores of bombs, rockets, anti-aircraft ammunition and aviation gasoline. At one point, the violence inside Franklin made the 32,000–ton ship shudder and spun her, like the needle on a compass, hard to starboard, where she lay dead in the water. She then began to list ominously to starboard, threatening, as the hours passed, to founder under the weight of the thousands of tons of water used to fight the fires onboard. 

The explosions had killed or wounded a third of the carrier’s crew–the biggest single-ship toll since Arizona–but the survivors refused to give up on their ship and their home. Among them were Alarcio and a man, from shipboard Mass, well known to him: Father Joseph T. O’Callahan. Franklin’s chaplain was immortalized that day in a moment of combat footage that shows him, with immense tenderness, giving the last rites to a dying sailor. Survivors remembered him everywhere as the ship struggled to survive–he was easily identified because of the white cross he’d painted on his helmet–encouraging his boys, directing fire control parties, and leaning in close to hear the weakening voices of those who’d been wounded. He was constantly motion as were his lips, constantly in prayer.

O’Callahan would win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

While her crew worked to stabilize the ship, the cruiser Santa Fe was a constant companion alongside, fighting fires and evacuating the wounded.  Eventually, Franklin was taken under tow, but only until her boilers could be re-lit and she could begin to make for Ulithi, in the Caroline islands, for emergency repairs. Two admirals had recommended that the crew abandon ship. Instead, 24 hours after the bombs struck, Father O’Callahan had fallen asleep halfway down a ship’s ladder and Alarcio and his shipmates were able to return to the task of feeding the crew: they were making Spam and bacon sandwiches.

Franklin’s voyage would not end at Ulithi. She would put in at Pearl Harbor and then, on April 28, 1945, the “Big Ben.” her scars still visible and grievous, would return home, to New York harbor and the Brooklyn Naval Yard.  The carrier’s flight deck that day is shown below.

The ship would survive, and so would Camilo Alarcio, who would live to be 97. He became the much-beloved father and grandfather of a large, vital and attractive family; his children and grandchildren would make their mark in Arroyo Grande as superb athletes. 

A single adjective in his obituary and on his tombstone seems to summarize his character, and the characters of his brother Franklins, best: “Devoted.”