A ship discovered; a man remembered
28 Sunday May 2023
Posted in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized, World War II
Category Archives: World War II
What Inky brought home
02 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Family history, Uncategorized, World War II
Inky is the black dog in the photo with my aunt and father. They had to give him up for “bothering sheep” and found him a new home in Rolla, Missouri.
Inky ran away.
This photo was taken outside my grandparents’ farmhouse on his return to Raymondville, Missouri. Raymondville is forty miles south of Rolla, but Inky found the people he loved.
My friend Wendy Taylor read the Inky story on Facebook. We went to AGHS together. She told me that her father’s family was living in Raymondville in the 1930s. The odds are staggering because I think the YOU ARE NOW ENTERING and YOU ARE NOW LEAVING signs are on the same signpost in tiny Raymondville.
And, sure enough, my Aunt Aggie married Mr. Charles A. Taylor in Raymondville in 1912. They were both 19.
I don’t know that this Taylor is related to my friend Wendy, but I found something else out about my family.
This is Aunt Aggie, on the right, later in life. That’s her mother, the scary lady, my step-grandmother, Dorriska Rose Trail. (She died and my grandfather John, widower, married my grandmother, Dora, widow.) The noses give their connection away—DNA does not lie much—but Aggie’s a softer person and she loves her pearls. Me, too.
Charles and Aggie were living in Illinois when, sadly, he passed away at 49. Aggie would live another 38 years. I found his obituary in a Houston, Missouri, Herald from July 1942, and it contained this poignant detail:
And then I found their son in the World War II casualty books:
And then I found their son.
He’s a nice-looking boy, isn’t he? He’s remembered on this particular marble wall, along with two sailors, just two years older, who grew up in Arroyo Grande:
I didn’t remember the whole story, but Dad used to talk about a cousin who was killed on Arizona. It was Wendy Taylor’s comment that set me to thinking. I had no idea that a morning spent researching my aunt, Aggie Caroline Gregory Taylor, would take me back, once again, to Pearl Harbor and December 7, back to a war that took my Dad, an Army lieutenant, from Raymondville and Taft, California, to London and Paris.
I think it was Inky who led me to this young sailor, so his sense of direction remains unerring. What a good dog.
USS Nevada’s SLO County Connection
29 Saturday Apr 2023
Posted in American History, Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized, World War II
It’s one of the great stories of American naval history. At Pearl Harbor, here is the aging USS Nevada at the end of Battleship Row, at bottom left, just astern of Arizona, which is anchored inboard of the repair ship Vestal. You can see the concussions from torpedo hits on the outboard battleships ahead of Arizona. That ship has about twelve minutes to live.
The attack came during the morning Colors Ceremony, when bands played the National Anthem as each battleship hoisted its colors. The trombonist on Arizona’s band, Jack Scruggs, killed just after this photograph was taken, grew up in Arroyo Grande.
The Officer of the Watch on Nevada was Ens. Joseph Taussig, about Scruggs’s age, twenty-one or twenty-two. He was standing his very first watch while most of the ship’s senior officers were ashore. He was so green that he had to send a sailor over to Arizona to ask what size flag was appropriate to hoist for the morning formalities. Then the bombs began to fall.
Nevada’s band had begun to play the Anthem. They continued to play the Anthem. When machine-gun bullets began to splinter the teak deck, they paused for a moment, somehow resumed the song in unison, finished it, and then ran like hell for their action stations. (Arizona’s band ran for their stations in the No. 2 gun turret, near the bow and near where the fatal bomb hit. None survived.)
Lieutenant Lawrence Ruff was attending Mass on the hospital ship Solace at this moment. He immediately caught a launch back to Nevada, assumed command topside with Taussig as his anti-aircraft officer. The ensign had done something right, he would find out later: he’d left two of the battleship’s four boilers lit. It normally took a ship the size of Nevada two hours to come to full power, but two boilers were sufficient to get her underway. Ruff gave the command to make a run for the channel exit. The oldest ship on Battleship Row was the only one to steam away from the flames and smoke that blanketed the anchorage off Ford Island.
Sailors cheered as she passed.
Nevada didn’t make it to the open sea. Crippled by at least one torpedo and six bomb hits, she lost headway. Her run ended when Lieutenant Ruff ordered her beached on Waipo Point, leaving the narrow channel open.
And that brings us to the Shell Cafe in Pismo Beach, at the north end of Price Street in those years. The Christmas ad is from a 1939 Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder. (The Shell’s still around today, but in Grover Beach.)
It’s natural to focus on the horrific losses at Pearl Harbor, but the attackers took losses, too. Twenty-nine planes were shot down and five midget submarines sunk. Only one ship in the Pearl Harbor Striking Force, the destroyer Ushio, survived the war.
The first of the attacking planes shot down was claimed by USS Nevada. It’s better for me to let the newspaper article tell the story. From the May 8, 1942, Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder:
“…he hoped to become a baker, but found himself a machine gunner instead.” That is a fine piece of writing.
Both Melvin and his ship survived that terrible day. Here is Nevada approaching drydock after being refloated:
And these are her main batteries opening fire at German positions along Utah Beach on D-Day. Nevada was repaired at Pearl Harbor, overhauled and modernized at Puget Sound, and continued her war over 7,300 miles away and two and a half years removed from the place where the ship had revealed her heart in her run for the sea.
On June 6, 1944, Nevada was granted the honor of being the first ship to open fire on the invasion beaches.
Melvin the hopeful baker survived his war, too, but his wounds sound severe. Maybe they were a factor in his premature death in 1959. He re-enlisted three times and, after the war, retired as an enlisted man in the United States Air Force. He’s buried at Forest Lawn, next to his mother.
This is his tombstone. Sadly, there’s not enough room on it to record the way he revealed his heart, too, on December 7, 1941.
American Twilight: The Golden Gate Exposition of 1939
Featured
Posted in Arroyo Grande, California history, Uncategorized, World War II
In 1939, San Francisco’s Treasure Island was the site for the Golden Gate Exposition, a showcase dedicated to a world beginning to emerge from the Great Depression. The Exposition was a masterpiece of Art Deco design and, with California comfortably distant from Europe, tinges of optimism must’ve remained awhile; I imagine the fall of France ended all that.
The Exposition even won periodic mention in the little Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder, including this October 1939 display ad. I think the Greyhound station was in the Olohan Building, whose basement is now home to Klondike Pizza. A Klondike pizza is also good for transient moments of optimism, if I may be allowed to editorialize.
What had to be a highlight of the Exposition came in June and July 1939, when most of the Pacific Fleet, just off maneuvers, sailed into San Francisco Bay for a visit. Many years ago, my wife and my sons and I spent a delightful visit to our favorite city during Fleet Week, when we saw the Blue Angels, sailors from twenty nations, and, on a Muni Bus, a bearded lady (who was very nice) and a man who could do 360s with his dentures. I preferred the visits to the submarine Pompanito and the Liberty Ship Jeremiah O’Brien, but I’m built that way, I guess.
Here’s an article from an Oakland newspaper—with little seeming regard for what we’d call “national security” today— about the ships, and their 40,000 men, headed for the Exposition:
And here, also from British Pathe, is a remarkable video as the fleet arrives, led by battleships, then a light cruiser and finally the preciuus carriers. And then, best of all, happy sailors coming ashore for liberty.
The scale of these ships is hard to imagine, even though they’re relatively small when compared to modern aircraft carriers. A Pennsylvania-class battleship, like the one in the video below, displaced 32,000 tons, was 600 feet long and carried a complement of about 60 officers, 70 Marines and 1,000 enlisted men. These ships were small cities. And small cities need the mail delivered, even in mid-Caribbean. This film is from the early 1930s:
And the battleship in the newsreel—you had to know this was coming—was, of course, USS Arizona, lost with 1100 crew, including two sailors who were raised in Arroyo Grande, on December 7, 1941.
Maybe it’s just me, but I am a devoted fan of American film, and as a cultural barometer, 1939 was a sign of renewed confidence in the same way the Exposition was. My parents began dating that year, when their movie dates might’ve included The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Destry Rides Again and Gone With the Wind.
And that brief moment of renewed self-confidence, of hope, is what makes the images of these ships and their young men so poignant to me. These are the fates of some of the ships cited in the Oakland newspaper article above:
As devastating as the photograph above is, both destroyers were salvaged, rebuilt and returned to duty, as were the damaged battleships. One of them, Nevada, which made a heroic run under attack for the Pearl Harbor exit channel, was, on June 6, 1944, hurling 14-inch shells at the Germans defending the Normandy invasion beaches. Nevada, in fact, was granted the honor of firing the opening salvo that day.
One of my favorite lessons in U.S. History was devoted to the construction of the Oakland Bay Bridge, truly, to steal a term, an engineering marvel. It, and its sister bridge, are emblematic of the way we responded to the Great Depression.
We responded to the shattering of our confidence at Pearl Harbor with new ships and old ships pulled to the surface from Pearl Harbor mud and made new again. Vast fleets of warplanes, tanks, trucks, artillery and small arms, Spam and K-ration Lucky Strikes, a labor force that went to war— a third them women and many of them killed in factory accidents—and over 400,000 young men killed in combat, all of these made up our response.
These things happened because of a generation that, before the war, was dismissed by intellectuals as pleasure-seeking, selfish and shallow. This was my parents’ generation. My parents were hard-working, generous and deeply read. I became a history teacher because of the values they instilled in me.
Learning about the Exposition, in what remains—after a fair amount of European travel (Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Munich, Salzburg, Florence, Venice, Rome) with twenty to forty of my closest teenaged friends, my students—the city I love the most. The Exposition reminded me of my mother and father and their generation. If this was a twilight time in our history, followed by four years of wartime dark, we were still here in the morning.
The Lost Boy
18 Saturday Feb 2023
Posted in Uncategorized, World War II
The past isn’t dead. It even isn’t past.
–William Faulkner
The American submarine Albacore holds one of the most distinguished service records in the World War II Navy. She is credited with ten confirmed sinkings and three probables One of her victims was a light cruiser, 3300 tons, and another, astoundingly, was the aircraft carrier Taiho, 30,000 tons, seen here in the sub’s periscope just before she was sent to the bottom.
Albacore was on her eleventh patrol when she hit a mine of Hokkaido, the northernmost Home Island, in November 1944. She sank with all 85 of her crew. This is the submarine in San Francisco Bay for her final refit in May 1944.
Albacore was lost for seventy-nine years, until last week, when Japanese marine archaeologists found her at 800 feet. This is one of the photographs they took; more will follow once they can send a submersible to more fully explore the wreck which is, of course, also a tomb. It will be treated with respect.
One of the Americans lost was a twenty-two-year-old seaman from just over the county line, from Taft, where I was born. Jerrod Reed joined Albacore’s crew on October 24, 1944, when she left Pearl Harbor. The sub topped off her fuel tanks at Midway and then headed for the Western Pacific, for Japan, and there Albacore disappeared.
It was determined later that she’d struck the mine on November 7. Seaman 1/c Jerrod Reed’s combat role in World War II lasted two weeks.
From a January 1946 edition of the Bakersfield Californian:
You can find poignant records of World War II servicemen online, on the website ancestry.com Among the records are their draft cards. Here is Jerrold’s (if you’re familiar with Taft, his home address isn’t unusual at all):
I found him again in the 1939 Derrick, the Taft Union High School yearbook. He’s at top, at far right, a trombonist in the school band. He, of course, has a counterpart here in Arroyo Grande: Jack Scruggs, the trombonist on Arizona’s band, was killed on December 7 by bomb concussions—near misses— off the battleship’s stern moments before fatal bomb forward blew the ship apart.
He’s such a nice-looking young man, and maybe that’s where the hurt comes from from a terrible event that happened seventy-nine years ago.
I think the girl with the curly hair is nice-looking, too. This photo is from the same 1939 Taft Union High School yearbook, and that girl, a senior, was a classmate of Jerrold’s.
That’s my Mom.
December 1944: The Ardennes, Belgium
21 Wednesday Dec 2022
Posted in Uncategorized, World War II
This photo was taken on December 21, 1944.
These GI’s are members of the 104th Infantry Division, the “Timberwolves.” The division had done part of its training at Camp San Luis Obispo. Now, six months after they’d arrived in Europe, these GI’s take a smoke break during the Battle of the Bulge, the horrific weeks-long battle fought in the Ardennes. The photo was taken just inside Germany, but the Bulge crossed several borders. The heaviest fighting for men like these would last into late January and it would come in the mountains and dense forest that mark the Ardennes.
It was the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years.
I’ve never seen a starker contrast in borders than the one between Holland and Belgium. Holland is flat enough to roll a tennis ball for miles, and the roads help. They’re smooth and noiseless. In the pastures that flank Dutch roads, the happiest cows I’ve ever seen would placidly watch the tennis ball roll by.
Then you see the Belgian border. The Ardennes, mountains and forests, rise so suddenly that I was reminded of that terrific animation of Paris rising in the film Inception.
And so the Ardennes is where Americans like these GIs in the 104th were essentially inhaled by the urgency of the the Battle of the Bulge, which had caught the Allied high command, suddenly desperate for riflemen, flat-footed.
Because they were mostly replacements, rookies, the high command hadn’t listened before the battle opened to the reports of tank engines and trembling trees shedding snow beyond the American lines. Sherman hadn’t listened to the reports of movement in the trees near Shiloh Church, either.
Then the Panzers came, followed by the infantry who were, along with Caesar’s Third Gallica and Thomas Jackson’s Confederate “foot cavalry,” possibly the finest soldiers in history.
Art Youman of Arroyo Grande, of Easy Company, was there, too, in Bastogne. So was James Pearson of Templeton, lost with his B-26 crew—their plane, “Mission Belle,” is seen here with an earlier crew (they look young, don’t they?)—shot down over a Belgian town, Houffalize, the day after Christmas. So was Manuel Gularte of Arroyo Grande, a crewman on a 155-mm “Long Tom” cannon whose work had helped to delay the German advance on a Belgian town, St. Vith.
Once again, I am stunned by a “cow county” so small—33,000 people in the 1940 census—soon to be outnumbered by 96,000 servicemen from Camp Roberts in the north to Camp Cooke, near Lompoc–that contributed so significantly to World War II.
I heard a war story I did not want to hear a few days ago. It was a guy about my age, maybe with the tread worn down a bit more than mine, but his Dad was a member of an Army cavalry scout unit during the Battle of the Bulge.
They were among the units that found the bodies of more than eighty GIs who’d been machine-gunned—murdered—by a Waffen-SS unit in Malmedy, Belgium on December 17. They had surrendered and were unarmed.
His father’s unit stopped taking prisoners after that, the man told me. And so the Germans they murdered for the next six months became some of the fifty million casualties this war produced, in a war that demonstrated that humans were as efficient at killing as the Spanish Flu, with its fifty million victims, had been in 1918.
It was a horrific war in which Americans were not blameless. In writing Central Coast Aviators in World War II, I noted that airmen could never completely rid themselves of the memory of burning human flesh that came to them in updrafts over cities like Dresden or Tokyo. The Army executed 102 GIs for crimes against civilians during World War II, so we were capable of much more personal brutality, too.
But it’s a telling statistic that, in nation fighting to preserve democracy and destroy the racism fundamental to National Socialism and to Japanese chauvinism, that 83% of the soldiers executed for rape were Black Americans. The irony would’ve have escaped us then and would probably escape 30% of voting Americans today.
And, as to the debasement that war can confer, even on Americans: in Eugene Sledge’s masterful With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, he remembered a fellow Marine absently tossing pieces of coral, like basketball free throws, into the skull of a dead Japanese soldier; the top of the man’s skull had been neatly sheared off by machine-gun bullet or a shell fragment. Even Sledge, who was not a blameless man—war debases all in mostly equal measures—was sickened.
Fifty thousand Americans grew sickened by the war and deserted. For a time, a gang of them took control of Paris and tried to run the place the way Capone had run Chicago.
The miracle, one author has noted, is that only fifty thousand GIs deserted.The vast majority didn’t. Here, they were farm boys and Poly students (usually one and the same) and store clerks, farm laborers and high-school football heroes, even the guys with Coke-bottle glasses whom nobody took seriously–not until they proved to be someone different altogether in places like the Ardennes.
They constantly amaze me. I keep returning to them because the debasement of recent history compels me to. I have learned that the cruelty of war, a cruelty some of them practiced, is always overwhelmed by other, more important, American traits: generosity, humanity and courage. We must not forget that.
The Ever Popular Pismo Poko Parlor, 1938-1942
20 Friday May 2022
Posted in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized, World War II
A friend asked me about a token found–I presume by a man with a metal detector–that read “Club Poko, San Luis Obispo.” (You can find sometimes on eBay, similar tokens to one of Pete Olohan’s saloons on Branch Street.)
A search revealed no stories or ads on a Club Poko in San Luis Obispo.
However, there was Pismo Poko, an arcade/amusement parlor at 520 Cypress, Pismo Beach, which seems to have operated between 1938 and 1942. More on these places:
* * *
1930s Arcades
Arcade patrons flocked to coin-operated peep show machines, shooting galleries, grip and strength testers, stationary bicycles, slot machines (in some areas), machines that dispensed fortunes or candy, and other mechanical amusements they could play for as little as a penny.
During the 1930s, David Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball
(1931) and Raymond Moloney’s Ballyhoo
(1932) introduced pinball to arcades. As pinball designers added bumpers, flippers, and thematic artwork, pinball surged in popularity, even as some local legislators banned the game because they associated it with gambling, organized crime, and delinquency. Nevertheless, over the next three decades arcade owners replaced many older mechanical novelty games with pinball machines and electromechanical baseball, target shooting, horse racing, shuffleboard, [foosball] and bowling games. Pinball machines ruled arcades until the late 1960s when new more sophisticated electromechanical games such as Chicago Coin’s Speedway.
–Rochester NY Democrat and Chronicle
Why “Poko?” From an article on arcade games:
Poko-Lite was produced by Glickman Co. in 1937. Glickman Co. released 19 different machines in our database under this trade name, starting in 1937.
Other machines made by Glickman Co. during the time period Poko-Lite was produced include Treasure, Sailorettes \’42, Scandals 1942, Anti-Aircraft, and Archery.
This game appears on a list of games manufactured between 1931-1939 which was published in the January 1940 issue of the Coin Machine Journal.
* * *
Pinball machines had an unsavory reputation in the 1930s-1940s; they were perceived as akin to slot machines, a form of gambling. A dozen were seized by the SLOPD in August 1941 for operating without a city license; in January, there’d been a spirited City Council debate on whether to allow them at all. They voted to license pinball but ban taxi dances. So it goes.
Here’s a display ad for the Pismo place from May 1940:
Another 1940 ad from the Telegram-Tribune:
520 Cypress is today the site of a modern motel, which straddles the corner of Main and Cypress.
Why did Pismo Poko go out of business, evidently in 1942 (there are no newspaper references thereafter, but plenty of both display and classified ads between 1938 and 1942)? The influx of local soldiers would’ve made Henry T. Betsuin, Prop. a fortune.
So I looked him up. “Betsuin” sounded Filipino to me, which made sense, since Pismo had a vibrant Filipino community (almost all men; Filipinas were not allowed to immigrate.)
There wasn’t much on him except for this curious note on a ship arrival in San Francisco from Kobe:
“Tokunosuke” is definitely a Japanese name; but he seems to have gone by “Henry T.” instead. If he was Japanese, that explains why Pismo Poko disappears after 1942. Henry T. would’ve been in an internment camp.
So, if that didn’t exactly answer the question, it raised several new ones–and it led me down a sad path, to the impact of Executive Order 9066, whose 80th anniversary we’re observing this year.
The combat photographers
13 Sunday Mar 2022
Posted in Uncategorized, World War II
Some are condemning the work of New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who captured the indelible image of the Ukrainian family struck down by a mortar round in the city of Irpin.
I disagree vehemently. If you Google “Alexander Gardner Antietam,” you’ll find the most horrific photographs of the casualties of war ever published, the record of what remains the single deadliest day of combat in American history, in September 1862
Unlike Gardner’s images, Addario’s was relatively restrained–the family likely died from the concussion of the mortar round’s impact or the needle-like shrapnel that the detonation can generate. They almost appeared asleep, which, to me, made the image even more powerful and even more moving.
They were, in death, so oddly beautiful and so completely innocent. I couldn’t look away from the image until I finally had to. Maybe, in losing their lives, in the anger their innocence provokes in us, they will save the lives of many others.
There’s another side to this terrible event. A video captured this man, a volunteer, at the moment the mortar round detonated. He disappears, and then, in a dense layer of concrete dust, someone seems to drag his inert body away.
You can hear Addario and other journalists shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” when they see the family across the street.
That’s not the whole story, and the whole story is about the value of human life. Addario found out that the man in the video, the Ukrainian volunteer who disappeared in the dust of the explosion, had in fact survived.
That was important to her. Another photojournalist captured Addario’s image moments before the fatal mortar round, when other rounds were landing all along the street where she was shooting.
The man in the video, in this image, had pushed Addario to the ground and he was covering her body with his.
He was willing to offer the American stranger his own life.
I’ve been agonizing, as all of us have, over Ukraine. When I found out that Addario’s protector had survived, I let out, involuntarily, something that approached a sob.
Ukraine is so instructive. In my memory I haven’t seen anything like this since Rwanda, when the depths of depravity–in today’s case, Putin’s–are offset, if only incrementally, by human beings with far less power but far more courage, far more generosity of spirit.
In the middle of reporting the genocide in Rwanda, with a parade of refugees walking painfully—toward safety, they hoped—behind him, the superb CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen, during what might well have been a live shot, suddenly realized the enormity of what he was covering. He began to cry.
It was one of the most powerful moments of reportage I’ve ever seen. Petersen reminded us that these faraway people—Black people—were our brothers and sisters, a concept that many Americans still have difficulty understanding. Petersen’s tears affirmed our shared humanity.
And so I found another brother in the man whose name I don’t know who more than likely saved Lynsey Addario’s life, This was so that she could take the photograph that has reminded us, too of our humanity, of the family that my heart will remember until the moment of its last beat.
The Medic
11 Friday Mar 2022
Posted in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized, World War II
I’m speaking in Santa Maria next week about our county’s World War II commemoration—the eightieth anniversary of the war, and of Japanese internment—when I wondered if any Santa Maria Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) had been among the town’s 55 wartime casualties.
Because of his surname, Makoto Yoshihara was at the bottom of the list.
He was actually born in Morro Bay; his parents moved to Guadalupe where they ran a boarding housel and pool hall. Makoto played football for the Santa Maria Saints, joined or was drafted into the Army in October 1941. His parents, like our Arroyo Grande neighbors, went to the Rivers Camp in the Arizona desert. The photo below shows evacuation day in Guadalupe, and I knew that Guadalupe had a prominent Japanese-American presence, but the numbers surprised me: Two hundred people were taken from Arroyo Grande, 400 from Santa Maria, but 800 from little, beautiful Guadalupe.
About two and a half years later, the insult heaped on our neighbors would be intensified by the headline that first reported Makoto’s fate. From the January 25, 1945, Santa Maria Times:
It is, of course, jarring to read. A month later, once Makoto’s death is confirmed, the newspaper softens its tone:
And you’re relieved at the slight change in tone until you read where his parents received that terrible telegram from the War Department. Everyone—everyone—behind barbed wire in the desert would’ve known almost instantly what had happened to Mr. and Mrs. Yoshihara’s son. The tarpaper barracks walls would’ve done nothing to soften the sound of a mother’s weeping for her only child.
Makoto had wanted to be a mechanic. This must be his high school senior photo. He looks like a serious young man.
Which is why the Army—my father, a World War II veteran, would claim to be surprised by this—did something right. They made this serious young man a medic.
Another surprise came, at least for me, in the article with the insulting headline. Makoto was not a member of the famed 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team, nor—since served in the European Theater—was he a Nisei intelligence officer, like so many local men were, the ones who underwent, at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, the same tough training that the 4-4-2 endured.
Makoto instead served in the 83rd Infantry Division, a unit that had a thoroughly White pedigree—the 83rd was traditionally an Ohio outfit, from the state that produced a batch of mediocre presidents, and here, probably the only Nisei among 10,000 White boys, was Makoto Yoshihara, the medic from Guadalupe, California. The Ohio boys probably had never seen the ocean. Makoto probably never got the chance to see fireflies, one of the natural wonders that make Midwestern summers, despite their oppressiveness, delightful.
He must’ve been lonely. And, if only at first, he must’ve endured racist attempts at humor.
The only other local Nisei G.I. I know of that served in a non-Nisei unit was Arroyo Grande’s Mits Fukuhara, who served in a tank battalion; Mits and his battalion missed the fighting because the war ended before they could join it.
Makoto didn’t miss the fighting; in fact, he saw some of the worst combat of the Americans’ war. The 83rd and his regiment, the 330th Infantry, got into a slugging match with the Wehrmacht in the Huertgen Forest in September 1944—the photos below give an idea of the terrain there— in a horrific battle that would last for two months. The nearest approximate I can think of in the American experience would’ve been the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, where dense forest broke Grant’s infantry companies down into little knots of men, separated by trees and dense foliage that made it impossible to see each other—or the enemy. Lee’s men appeared as shadows, mirages, and disappeared in the smoke, because the muzzle flashes from Enfields or Springfields set the Wilderness afire. The fires burned the wounded alive.
(In 1945, after Germany’s surrender, fires swept the Huertgen and detonated unexploded artillery shells. The war hadn’t ended at all for the scores of German civilians killed by buried ordnance that had been intended for soldiers.)
The battle for the Huertgen was a debacle. The Americans suffered nearly twice the casualties the German defenders did and they had to pull back and reorganize in December.
Somehow Makoto Yoshihara survived those two months in the forest.
And then, in December, the 83rd Division would face the Germans again in the massive offensive that we remember as the Battle of the Bulge, fought during one of the coldest winters in Europe in thirty years.
Makoto didn’t have to face that second, epic battle. Somewhere in the not-quite-lull in between, he died. The divisional after-action reports for the day he died, December 22, are bland; they suggested units relieving other units and the straightening of lines; battlefront housekeeping. But when you get down to the battalion level, the reports cite heavy German resistance, nighttime attacks, and cold. Always the cold.
The way he died once again confirms the Army’s wisdom in assigning him to the 330th’s Medical Detachment. The Santa Maria Times kind of redeems itself, thanks to the Bronze Star citation’s wording, in this article from September 1945:
Makoto died saving a brother G.I.’s life because medics were favored targets for snipers; if you can kill a medic, the five or six wounded soldiers he might’ve saved will die, too.
(Above): Tragic bookends: Makotto’s draft card, its spelling uncertain, and his family’s application for a military tombstone.
Makoto died 5,000 miles away from Guadalupe’s row crops, its Mexican restaurants, honky-tonks and the sand dunes and the vivid ribbon of ocean beyond.
His body was returned to America in December 1948 aboard the prosaically-named Liberty Ship Barney Kirschbaum, one of the war’s industrial wonders; Kirschbaum’s duplicate, Jeremiah O’Brien, made the trip in reverse in 1994, sailing from her berth in San Francisco to England and then to the Normandy coast where she’d done duty in the invasion of the Continent in 1944; O’Brien is the last of the 6,000 ships that supported the D-Day landings.
Accompanying Makoto’s coffin on Kirschbaum were the coffins of Orville Tucker of Arroyo Grande, killed on the second day of the Battle of the Bulge—five days before Makoto knelt over the wounded soldier— and Stanley Weber of Oceano, who died the next month in the counteroffensive that erased the Bulge and drove the Germans back.
The coffins, of course, would’ve been flag-draped. That’s an important detail, because belowdecks on Kirschbaum’s long voyage home, there were no “Japs;” no Ohioans, no Californians. These were our young men; even in death and even in the eighty years that separate our lives, they remind us that we, all of us, belong to each other.
Sgt. Harry Chapek, American.
13 Saturday Nov 2021
Posted in Arroyo Grande, Uncategorized, World War II
A lot on my mind with this one.
Harry Chapek was a young Arroyo Grande man killed in action on the Belgian-German border, near the Siegfried Line, in September 1944.
He was a member of the 81st Tank Battalion, 5th Armored Division and is buried at the American Cemetery at Henri-Chapelle, near Liege, Belgium.
Those are 81st Sherman tanks in the photo.
He was almost killed once before, in 1938. He was a driver for the Arroyo Grande Trucking Company, which stood at the site of today’s Bank of America–the photo of the site is courtesy of the Martin family. (That’s the old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the left background, built in the 1880s.) It was a vital part of the economy of our little farm town on California’s central coast, population 1,090 in the 1940 census.
He was driving near Elwood, just south of the Gaviota Pass, and less than an hour north of another beautiful California place, Santa Barbara, when a horse threw three little girls and galloped out into the highway in front of Chapek’s truck.
The impact killed the horse and the truck veered into a tree, where it caught on fire. Chapek was stuck in the cab, which in turn was buried by vegetable crates.
But that night there was a PTA meeting at the Elwood School, which is still there today, and a parent and a janitor ran out to the truck, dragged Chapek out–he was waving his arm out the cab window–and knocked the fire down with two of the school’s fire extinguishers. Four years later, a Japanese submarine shelled Ellwood.
Six years later, a German artillery battery, covered by dense fog, fired a barrage that landed on the 81st’s “A” Company; it was probably the devastating explosion of .88 shells that killed Chapek, awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.
Growing up, he was a close friend of our friend George Shannon, who farmed near us in fields along Huasna and Branch Mill Roads, peppers and string beans and I think Brussels sprouts, among other crops. Mr. Shannon was an admirable man.
That’s my Mom serving dinner to us Gregory kids and to the three Shannon boys. You can tell how much she thought of them because dinner’s being served on the Irish lace tablecloth.
Chapek was an admirable man, too. As was his father, Matthias, or Mat. That’s Mat with the Arroyo Grande Boys’ Band about 1909. He probably lured potential juvenile delinquents away from a life of crime with a tuba or two.
He taught two generations of kids how to play musical instruments. Longtime teacher Ruth Paulding was one of them. The middle school’s named for her. Wayne Morgan, also an Eagle Scout, took up the violin thanks to Mr. Chapek. He was killed on December 7 on USS Arizona, along with another Arroyo Grande musician, Jack Scruggs, a trombonist in the battleship’s band.
I know something about the waves of immigration to Arroyo Grande, for example, from the Azores, Japan and the Philippines. Mat Chapek was from Bohemia– today’s Czech Republic.
It turns out that on upper Cherry Avenue–then called Leedham Lane–Arroyo Grande had a “Little Bohemia.” The Chapeks lived there, as did the Huebners, as did the Marsaleks.
That struck because one of my favorite books as a sophomore in Mrs. Flatt’s sophomore English class at AGHS, was Willa Cather’s My Antonia, about a girl from a family of Bohemian immigrants to Nebraska, to the Great Plains. It’s not more than six pages in before an inordinately large rattlesnake makes its appearance. That snake, and what I read later about the toll laundry and ironing took on frontier farm wives, bending their spines and hunching their shoulders—effectively and mercilessly transforming them into human question marks—remained with me always.
Arroyo Grande’s not much like Nebraska. The climate here is mild and the growing seasons overlap. But both places produce incredible wildflowers. This is field mustard near the foothills east of Arroyo Grande.
So Antonia and Chapek, the children of Bohemian immigrants, are linked in my mind now, even though Nebraska and California are so distant. The cemetery at Henri-Chapelle is more distant still—over 5,000 miles away from the foothills and the farm fields and the wild mustard that both Chapek and I grew up with. The distance, as the poet Whitman wrote, avails not. Sgt. Chapek’s life is now connected to mine. Time, Whitman also wrote, avails not. Arroyo Grande is my home town. Nearly eighty years after George Shannon lost his friend, our town survives both of them. It does so because of them.
It’s their gift to us, you see.
I a now a friend of the American Overseas Memorial Day Association Foundation in Belgium, which is a small honor. But that means I can now pay tribute to Sgt. Chapek on their website, and so draw recognition to the man with far greater honors.
A Work in Progress 