The latest installment in a series of reports from the 2009 American Veterans Center Annual Conference. Scroll down for the other posts.... [The Holiday Season caught up with me, and spending four-plus weeks ill didn’t help. But I’ve finally got things under control and am endeavoring to complete the series, based on detailed notes.]
“World War II – The Pacific” was the title of the session featuring Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller and former Indiana governor Edgar Whitcomb, author of the book Escape from Corregidor. As “black shoe” and aviator their stories overlapped very little, but they both displayed the traits of fierce determination and unapologetic patriotism.
91-year-old Bob Feller was certainly a “character.” I suppose at 91 you’re allowed to give your opinion without reserve, and Feller took full advantage of the opportunity. In my notes, I wrote, “Bombastic and curmudgeonly. Tough guy.” And he was, but like all the good men I had the honor of meeting orobserving that weekend, he was insightful, patriotic and tender at heart.
The session began with a video detailing Feller’s stellar baseball career and how he put it on hold to go fight in World War II. It was glowing and near-worshipful, but Feller cut to the chase as soon as it ended and the lights came back up. “What does that have to do with War in the Pacific?!” he cracked with hint of irritation in his manner.
One would think that perhaps it was the shock of Pearl Harbor that led Feller to make that leap from professional baseball stardom to wartime sailor, but he had made up his mind long before that. He said that in 1939 he met a group of admirals and generals as part of a baseball-related event, all of whom told him war was coming. During dinner that day as he sat between two admirals, he made the decision that when war came, he would join the U.S. Navy.
The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Feller was headed to sign a lucrative contract. Instead, he told his driver to divert to the recruiting station.
Feller served as a gun captain in the Pacific, where he was involved in the sinking of theBismarck[??], the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot," and Iwo Jima. His idea of adding phosphorous to bullets and shells to turn them into tracers helped his frantic gunners track the Japanese planes bearing down on the ship and flying out of the sun to avoid detection until the very last moment.
At the Marianas Turkey Shoot, was he was on USS Alabama, which had been assigned to take out a specific town on one of the islands but was never given final orders to do so. Years later he met a woman on a plane who had been a child in the town at that time. He told her what his mission had been and she explained why those orders never came: “We didn’t believe the Japanese propaganda, so we surrendered.” He told the story with fierce pride in his voice—he didn’t need to say it aloud, for somehow in that context, his message came through as clear as if he’d spoken it in his gruff voice: “Americans are the good guys and the world knows it!”
Due to his baseball skills, some of the Navy leadership wanted to stash Keller in a stateside billet so he could play on the navy baseball team. As the time for the Army-Navy baseball game at Pearl Harbor came around, Admiral Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, let it be known he wanted Feller to leave his sea duty and pitch for Navy. His ship’s captain passed on the news, but Feller reported he respectfully turned down the admiral, saying, “But I’ll see you after we win this war.”
After the war ended, Navy leadership finally had their wish and assigned Feller to the baseball team at Great Lakes (one of the naval training stations), which toured the country. He spoke of that time with joy on his face and in his words. “Beat team in the world,” he recalled.
But that happiness faded quickly as his reminiscences returned to wartime topics and he became somber again. “In those days this nation had unrelenting resolve. We had great leadership. Today, we don’t have as much,” he said, disgust edging his voice.
Throughout his presentation, Feller referred to the Japanese as “Japs,” and seemed to be without regret when it came to killing the enemy. But despite that, he alluded to having developed Japanese friendships since the war and really didn’t seem to have a prejudiced bone in his body. Harkening back to his comments about resolve and leadership (and the accompanying implied clarity), he seemed to place the war in the context of “best of a bad situation,” simply a necessity in an all-too-human world. “The only thing people in the world understand, I’m sad to say, is who has the most guns and uses them best,” he concluded with genuine sadness. Disgust crept into his voice again as he added, “Name a war that was won by talking.”
Edgar Whitcomb was a proud and confident B-17 navigator and pilot. In the build-up to WWII, he said he thought, “If the Japanese are foolish enough to start something, it’ll be over in six months.” He figured it wouldn’t be a contest: American planes would out-fight and out-maneuver the Japanese.
Whitcomb spoke with joy of his memories of being stationed in Manila before the war. “It was paradise,” he recalled with a happy sigh. But that changed the day after Pearl Harbor. Fifty-four bombers hit his base without warning, killing 100 people (Whitcomb marveled that the base hadn't been placed on alert after the sneak attack in Hawaii). This was followed by 50 Japanese Zeroes strafing the flightline, leaving the squadron’s 14 new B-17s in ashes. Whitcomb said he was never in a B-17 again. On Christmas Day, the squadron was ordered to the Bataan Peninsula.
Referencing his optimistic assessment of the situation before the war started, Whitcomb said with near-bitterness, “Six months later it was over—we were overrun and lost everything in the Phillipines.”
But Whitcomb wasn’t a quitter and he resented being told to surrender to the Japanese. He gathered together a pilot and a bombardier and found a weapons carrier headed for Corregidor, thus escaping the infamous Bataan Death March. At Corregidor they were assigned to a unit of Marines tasked with defending the beach. Whitcomb reported that after 27 days of Japanese bombing and strafing, shrapnel covered the ground like snow.
When the Japanese finally made land, the American forces were ordered to surrender. “POW… Most devastating thing that can happen to you,” Whitcomb recalled with heaviness. The Japanese lined up the Americans, taking everyone’s pins, wallets, money… everything. “They didn’t know what to do with us,” he said, so they marched everyone up and down the island. Eventually the 11,000 military and civilian prisoners were enclosed in a field about the size of 3-4 square city blocks.
Whitcomb said there wasn’t even enough room to lay down in the enclosure but people could volunteer for work detail, which he did for 16 days, talking constantly about how to escape from the island. Most of his fellow prisoners didn’t seem interested, except someone Whitcomb described as a “tall Marine from Kentucky” named Bill Harris.
Harris and Whitcomb simply went out on work detail one day, then hid in a foxhole until dark. “Longest afternoon of our lives,” remembered Whitcomb. That night they swam through shark-infested waters toward Bataan by following the island’s lights, but a storm came up and they became separated and disoriented. He treaded water and miraculously found Harris again, but they ended up following the wrong lights right back to Corregidor.
Regarding his heroic and repeated escape efforts, Whitcomb said people ask him, “‘How could you do that?’ I say, how could you stop?” And he didn’t stop. After that nighttime swim and some rest the following day, Whitcomb went to a nearby village where he was fed and warned of Japanese patrols. He then walked three or four days without any food. Later he caught up with Marines of a similar bent who were trying to escape by boat every night, though they never made any progress. At one point one Marine voted to not go out and was simply left on the beach.
Determined to find people who could make better progress, Whitcomb joined up with some civilian engineers further down the beach who also had a boat. When they were finally captured, he took off his military ID and adopted the name of Johnson, a man the engineers had talked about. He was then taken to a civilian internment camp where 9 out of 10 who went in didn’t come out alive.
“In [the first] interrogation, I lied about everything,” Whitcomb said, “Then I realize, if they ask me again I’ll forget!” He feared he wouldn’t be able to keep his story straight. Fortunately for him, the interrogator would always review the previous day’s interrogations at the beginning of each session. Thus he managed to build a credible story of his life as Johnson. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, just as he was coming up against travel-related questions he couldn’t answer, he was accidentally placed for a few hours in his engineer friend’s cell and got the info he needed. Sensing he wasn’t being truthful, but frustrated with being unable to punch a hole in his story, his interrogators beat him with a pipe. “At first it was devastating,” he said. But after a few hits, “I was numb.”
Eventually Whitcomb was moved to Shanghai and repatriated to the U.S. under his alias after being listed as MIA for two years. “I was so excited,” he recalled. But due to confusion about his name and identity, he was told to contact no one until it was all sorted out. After 10 days of waiting, he was finally allowed to call home. Telling the story at the conference, his shoulders shook and he cried as he remembered hearing something he thought he’d never hear again: his mother’s voice.
Because he was an escapee, Whitcomb was told he couldn’t go back to the Pacific. All he wanted to do was go back to his unit, but instead he was assigned to fly supplies and wounded to and from Europe, which thoroughly ticked him off. Through a friend’s connections to senior military leadership, he finally was ordered back to the Pacific in 1945—to the very same base, in fact—where from B-25 planes he bombed the Japanese holding the Philippines.
As Whitcomb talked about the end of the war, tears threatened once again. “We were free,” he said with awe in his voice at the memory. “We had won.” People all around him were laughing and cheering, but he wasn’t. He walked past his old squadron headquarters, remembering his fallen brothers and thinking of “thousands who could not participate” in the celebration of victory. His sorrow in the recollection was palpable.
His voice still cracking and shaking with emotion, Whitcomb concluded, “I won no awards from war but the most precious, another 70 years in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It’s worth fighting for.”
[Part I: WWII, racism and courage; Part II: General Petraeus; Part III: Band of Brothers; Part IV: Seabees; Part V: WWII Heroes of the Air; Part VI: Iwo Jima; Part VII: U.S.S. Mason; video excerpts from various sessions are posted at navytv.org.]
“World War II – The Pacific” was the title of the session featuring Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller and former Indiana governor Edgar Whitcomb, author of the book Escape from Corregidor. As “black shoe” and aviator their stories overlapped very little, but they both displayed the traits of fierce determination and unapologetic patriotism.
91-year-old Bob Feller was certainly a “character.” I suppose at 91 you’re allowed to give your opinion without reserve, and Feller took full advantage of the opportunity. In my notes, I wrote, “Bombastic and curmudgeonly. Tough guy.” And he was, but like all the good men I had the honor of meeting orobserving that weekend, he was insightful, patriotic and tender at heart.
The session began with a video detailing Feller’s stellar baseball career and how he put it on hold to go fight in World War II. It was glowing and near-worshipful, but Feller cut to the chase as soon as it ended and the lights came back up. “What does that have to do with War in the Pacific?!” he cracked with hint of irritation in his manner.
One would think that perhaps it was the shock of Pearl Harbor that led Feller to make that leap from professional baseball stardom to wartime sailor, but he had made up his mind long before that. He said that in 1939 he met a group of admirals and generals as part of a baseball-related event, all of whom told him war was coming. During dinner that day as he sat between two admirals, he made the decision that when war came, he would join the U.S. Navy.
The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Feller was headed to sign a lucrative contract. Instead, he told his driver to divert to the recruiting station.
Feller served as a gun captain in the Pacific, where he was involved in the sinking of the
At the Marianas Turkey Shoot, was he was on USS Alabama, which had been assigned to take out a specific town on one of the islands but was never given final orders to do so. Years later he met a woman on a plane who had been a child in the town at that time. He told her what his mission had been and she explained why those orders never came: “We didn’t believe the Japanese propaganda, so we surrendered.” He told the story with fierce pride in his voice—he didn’t need to say it aloud, for somehow in that context, his message came through as clear as if he’d spoken it in his gruff voice: “Americans are the good guys and the world knows it!”
Due to his baseball skills, some of the Navy leadership wanted to stash Keller in a stateside billet so he could play on the navy baseball team. As the time for the Army-Navy baseball game at Pearl Harbor came around, Admiral Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, let it be known he wanted Feller to leave his sea duty and pitch for Navy. His ship’s captain passed on the news, but Feller reported he respectfully turned down the admiral, saying, “But I’ll see you after we win this war.”
After the war ended, Navy leadership finally had their wish and assigned Feller to the baseball team at Great Lakes (one of the naval training stations), which toured the country. He spoke of that time with joy on his face and in his words. “Beat team in the world,” he recalled.
But that happiness faded quickly as his reminiscences returned to wartime topics and he became somber again. “In those days this nation had unrelenting resolve. We had great leadership. Today, we don’t have as much,” he said, disgust edging his voice.
Throughout his presentation, Feller referred to the Japanese as “Japs,” and seemed to be without regret when it came to killing the enemy. But despite that, he alluded to having developed Japanese friendships since the war and really didn’t seem to have a prejudiced bone in his body. Harkening back to his comments about resolve and leadership (and the accompanying implied clarity), he seemed to place the war in the context of “best of a bad situation,” simply a necessity in an all-too-human world. “The only thing people in the world understand, I’m sad to say, is who has the most guns and uses them best,” he concluded with genuine sadness. Disgust crept into his voice again as he added, “Name a war that was won by talking.”
Edgar Whitcomb was a proud and confident B-17 navigator and pilot. In the build-up to WWII, he said he thought, “If the Japanese are foolish enough to start something, it’ll be over in six months.” He figured it wouldn’t be a contest: American planes would out-fight and out-maneuver the Japanese.
Whitcomb spoke with joy of his memories of being stationed in Manila before the war. “It was paradise,” he recalled with a happy sigh. But that changed the day after Pearl Harbor. Fifty-four bombers hit his base without warning, killing 100 people (Whitcomb marveled that the base hadn't been placed on alert after the sneak attack in Hawaii). This was followed by 50 Japanese Zeroes strafing the flightline, leaving the squadron’s 14 new B-17s in ashes. Whitcomb said he was never in a B-17 again. On Christmas Day, the squadron was ordered to the Bataan Peninsula.
Referencing his optimistic assessment of the situation before the war started, Whitcomb said with near-bitterness, “Six months later it was over—we were overrun and lost everything in the Phillipines.”
But Whitcomb wasn’t a quitter and he resented being told to surrender to the Japanese. He gathered together a pilot and a bombardier and found a weapons carrier headed for Corregidor, thus escaping the infamous Bataan Death March. At Corregidor they were assigned to a unit of Marines tasked with defending the beach. Whitcomb reported that after 27 days of Japanese bombing and strafing, shrapnel covered the ground like snow.
When the Japanese finally made land, the American forces were ordered to surrender. “POW… Most devastating thing that can happen to you,” Whitcomb recalled with heaviness. The Japanese lined up the Americans, taking everyone’s pins, wallets, money… everything. “They didn’t know what to do with us,” he said, so they marched everyone up and down the island. Eventually the 11,000 military and civilian prisoners were enclosed in a field about the size of 3-4 square city blocks.
Whitcomb said there wasn’t even enough room to lay down in the enclosure but people could volunteer for work detail, which he did for 16 days, talking constantly about how to escape from the island. Most of his fellow prisoners didn’t seem interested, except someone Whitcomb described as a “tall Marine from Kentucky” named Bill Harris.
Harris and Whitcomb simply went out on work detail one day, then hid in a foxhole until dark. “Longest afternoon of our lives,” remembered Whitcomb. That night they swam through shark-infested waters toward Bataan by following the island’s lights, but a storm came up and they became separated and disoriented. He treaded water and miraculously found Harris again, but they ended up following the wrong lights right back to Corregidor.
Regarding his heroic and repeated escape efforts, Whitcomb said people ask him, “‘How could you do that?’ I say, how could you stop?” And he didn’t stop. After that nighttime swim and some rest the following day, Whitcomb went to a nearby village where he was fed and warned of Japanese patrols. He then walked three or four days without any food. Later he caught up with Marines of a similar bent who were trying to escape by boat every night, though they never made any progress. At one point one Marine voted to not go out and was simply left on the beach.
Determined to find people who could make better progress, Whitcomb joined up with some civilian engineers further down the beach who also had a boat. When they were finally captured, he took off his military ID and adopted the name of Johnson, a man the engineers had talked about. He was then taken to a civilian internment camp where 9 out of 10 who went in didn’t come out alive.
“In [the first] interrogation, I lied about everything,” Whitcomb said, “Then I realize, if they ask me again I’ll forget!” He feared he wouldn’t be able to keep his story straight. Fortunately for him, the interrogator would always review the previous day’s interrogations at the beginning of each session. Thus he managed to build a credible story of his life as Johnson. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, just as he was coming up against travel-related questions he couldn’t answer, he was accidentally placed for a few hours in his engineer friend’s cell and got the info he needed. Sensing he wasn’t being truthful, but frustrated with being unable to punch a hole in his story, his interrogators beat him with a pipe. “At first it was devastating,” he said. But after a few hits, “I was numb.”
Eventually Whitcomb was moved to Shanghai and repatriated to the U.S. under his alias after being listed as MIA for two years. “I was so excited,” he recalled. But due to confusion about his name and identity, he was told to contact no one until it was all sorted out. After 10 days of waiting, he was finally allowed to call home. Telling the story at the conference, his shoulders shook and he cried as he remembered hearing something he thought he’d never hear again: his mother’s voice.
Because he was an escapee, Whitcomb was told he couldn’t go back to the Pacific. All he wanted to do was go back to his unit, but instead he was assigned to fly supplies and wounded to and from Europe, which thoroughly ticked him off. Through a friend’s connections to senior military leadership, he finally was ordered back to the Pacific in 1945—to the very same base, in fact—where from B-25 planes he bombed the Japanese holding the Philippines.
As Whitcomb talked about the end of the war, tears threatened once again. “We were free,” he said with awe in his voice at the memory. “We had won.” People all around him were laughing and cheering, but he wasn’t. He walked past his old squadron headquarters, remembering his fallen brothers and thinking of “thousands who could not participate” in the celebration of victory. His sorrow in the recollection was palpable.
His voice still cracking and shaking with emotion, Whitcomb concluded, “I won no awards from war but the most precious, another 70 years in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It’s worth fighting for.”
[Part I: WWII, racism and courage; Part II: General Petraeus; Part III: Band of Brothers; Part IV: Seabees; Part V: WWII Heroes of the Air; Part VI: Iwo Jima; Part VII: U.S.S. Mason; video excerpts from various sessions are posted at navytv.org.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bismarck_Sea
That would make sense, since sometimes when I was taking notes I would get so far behind I'd leave out words by accident because I was distracted by what was being said at the very moment. I'll change the post to reflect the Bismarck Sea.