There were no pictures, no displays, but the words were enough Sunday afternoon as five men recalled how they fought and suffered on Guadalcanal, in Egypt and Burma, in Europe and Iwo Jima.
The auditorium at the Wake Forest Historical Museum was filled with people who had sent family members to those far-flung places and others all over the globe to fight Germany, Japan and Italy.
Willis Winston, 92, a marine, said they were fighting not just Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal but “flies, mosquitoes and malaria. Any broken skin would get infected.”
There was shelling every night, Japanese bombers coming every day at noon. The marines began to run low on ammunition, gasoline and food that August in 1941. “By October 13th, there was real fear the Japanese would come in and take the island” and they did in November.
Then the U.S. Navy saved the 20,000 men, though Winston recalled those on the island could not see the battle. They could hear the roaring of the guns and once in a while would see a ship explode.
Winston said he was on the island for six months and it was not really secure until March or April of the following year. “The Japanese still didn’t give up.”
Elrie Walton, 86, volunteered in the then-segregated U.S. Army because all his friends were signing up and served for 30 years, fighting in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He trained at first for the airborne at Fort Bragg. He was assigned to Egypt at first, then to Burma. “That was a place filled with hills and many soldiers lost their lives along the hillsides there.” (President Harry S Truman signed a presidential order in 1946 desegregating all American fighting forces, but it was not complete until 1954.)
He was with the Third Infantry Division in Korea. In 1953 he was the head of a machine gun squad on Pork Chop Hill and in the fighting everyone in his squad was either killed or wounded. He had a pistol, a rifle and a machine gun, so he shot all three intermittently for several hours at night to make the enemy think there was more than one U.S. soldier.
Walton left the service and worked in Germany and France, then went back into the army to go to Vietnam operating a machine gun in a helicopter flying above the Mekong Delta. (At this point, Walton began crying thinking about the lives he took.) However, he said he went there to do a job and he’d be willing to go again to protect the American people, even knowing he would not see his home or family again. “You didn’t have a lot of information about the larger effort. You only knew one thing: you were there to fight and kill.”
“My life didn’t change until I accepted Christ,” Walton said.
Herman Choplin, 90, joined the 35th Infantry Division, General George Patton’s division, and trained at Fort Jackson, S.C., and Fort Bragg. He was fighting along the Rhine when the 101st Division became trapped in Belgium, and Patton sent them to fight what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Choplin recalled marching three days and nights without food, all of them so cold their boots froze. He was in Europe
Choplin said he feels the war could have been won in less than six months if Eisenhower had let Patton go. “He could have wiped out the Germans, would have taken out all of them.
Choplin said he was in very bad shape when he returned home from the war, but his wife and mother pulled him through. For several years after the war he operated the Freezer Locker on Roosevelt Avenue.
George Catalona, 88, left his native New Jersey on March 8, 1943, to join the Marine Corps and train at Parris Island. He signed up for four years because if you were drafted you served for the duration of the war plus 10 years in the reserve.
After training at Quantico and Pendleton, he joined the Fifth Marine Division. Their commanding officer said, “You men are going to make history.” And they did, sailing first for Hawaii and then for a small island called Iwo Jima where they found dug-in Japanese troops occupying the high ground.
Catalona recalled he was a forward observer and on the fifth day, as he went forward with several officers, they stopped. A mortar shell landed in the middle of the group of men. One was killed, ten were wounded and five walked away. Catalona’s canteen and gear were sliced and filled with shrapnel but he was unharmed.
They left and went through a command post where they saw a marine who had been sliced in two; half his body was gone. The radioman with him screamed, “It’s no fun seeing something like that right after you almost get blown to bits.”
Joseph DeLois, 89, put in 53 years of military service between the navy, the army and the national guard. When he joined the navy he was the only one in his family to go through high school. He forged his brother’s signature six weeks before he finished high school “and I haven’t heard the end of it.”
The men were honored with a round of applause and then much praise from people during the social hour afterward.
