One Man's Story - The WWII Record of Jack Downs



[Please understand as you read comments about the Japanese in this story that Jack does not hold any animosities toward the Japanese now. As he said, "That was another generation." We are gratified at the wonderful relationship our nation has now with Japan and her people.]

Over the last few years, history students at the University of Memphis Oral History Research Office have been involved in a project to preserve the stories of our World War II veterans and the people from what has been called "The Greatest Generation."

What follows is the result of an interview between UM student, Mr. Sean Armbruster, and Mr. Jack Downs, a long time member of Central Church, and veteran of combat service in the Pacific Theater in World War II.

Jack was asked where he was when he learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He replied, "I was a senior in high school. I was playing touch football with neighbors at a park near our home. We were surprised to hear about it. We all ran home to listen to the radio and find out about it. We didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was or anything about it!" Of course they knew of the war in Europe, but people hoped the U.S. could stay out of it. The Pearl Harbor attack dashed those hopes.

"Everybody was joining the service - it was expected. If you were not already in service, people would ask, 'Why don't you get into the service - what are you doing out?' All my cousins joined the Navy. I graduated from high school in 1942 and then joined the Navy in January of 1943. I had three uncles, all Chief Petty Officers, who had been in the Navy for 20 years or more. They had all retired the year before Pearl Harbor. The Navy recalled all of them and made two of them Chief Warrant Officers. They made the third one an Ensign and he had been in the Navy for 27 years. He knew all about boiler rooms so they put him in charge of the boiler room on the brand new tanker ship that the Navy took away from Standard Oil Company. His ship had real dangerous duty - they hauled aviation fuel across the North Atlantic."

Jack went to boot camp at a brand new camp in Bainbridge, Maryland. He signed up for Aviation Machinist's Mate School but it was full. So, one night, at about 3 a.m., MPs came and told him, "Get up, get your sea bag, and go get on the truck. We got you a school." So Jack and several others from the barracks got into the truck and were driven to the other side of the Bainbridge Naval Base. The truck stopped in front of the Hospital Corps School. Jack says they didn't want to get out, but he laughed and said the MPs ordered them out. That's how he ended up in the Hospital Corps. He had six weeks training in anatomy, physiology, first aid, and a little bit of chemistry. Next he went to Norman, Oklahoma where he worked for six months in a hospital, working in a different ward each month.

Then one day, Jack and his group were told to pack - they were going to San Diego to the Navy Hospital Corps School for Marines. Jack stated, "In the Marines, the chaplains, doctors, and Hospital Corpsmen are Navy. All the others are Marines. I was transferred to the Marines. We went to school there and when the Marines went on a 20-mile hike, I had to go with them. We'd get wherever it was we were going and they'd say, 'This is where we are camping - everybody dig a foxhole.' Soon as we'd get done, they'd come and make sure they were deep enough - then tell us we had to move forward and dig another foxhole! There was stuff like that all the time. Hospital Corpsmen had to go to Rifle Company and learn to shoot, too. In Europe, Corpsmen didn't carry rifles and shoot, but the Japanese didn't believe in the Geneva Convention, so we had to carry rifles." Jack said that in the Pacific, Corpsmen did not have white crosses on their helmets because the Japanese used the crosses as targets. Their plan was to wound as many regular soldiers as possible, but kill all officers, Hospital Corpsmen, and Radio Operators.

Next, Jack's group boarded the aircraft carrier Langley II - destination Pearl Harbor. Two days out to sea, they ran into a storm and he was seasick for the first, and only, time he was in the Navy. The men being transported and the ship's crew shared bunks, sleeping in shifts all the way. They reached Pearl Harbor on Christmas morning. They camped just seven miles from Honolulu and Waikiki Beach. "We had liberty every night and we'd go to the USO and other places. I've still got some books and souvenirs I got from the University of Waikiki. There were no civilians in the hotels along the beach - only military personnel," Jack remembers.

After six weeks of training, they were ordered to board the ship. They rendezvoused with a group of other ships and received orders to invade the Marshall Islands. They also took Enewetak, and Kwajelein. Jack remembers some of the islands were large enough to have an airstrip and others were the size of a football field. He said, "The Japanese were on all of them and they put up a pretty good fight. We went onto the island on Higgins boats. I went on the islands - a few of my men got hit." Some of the Hospital Corpsmen were stationed on the hospital ships and the others were attached to platoons. That means they were on the front lines. Jack was in "A" Company, 1st Platoon.

Next, they were taken to Guadalcanal. It was one year after the Marines captured the island from the Japanese. The island was controlled by British troops and the Australian Air Force, but Jack said, "That Island was 90 miles long, and there were still lots of Japanese hiding in the jungle. There were lots of mosquitoes too. We slept in six-man tents with mosquito nets around our beds. There were coconut palm trees by the millions. The ants would get up in the trees and eat all around the coconuts and then the wind would blow them down. Those coconuts weren't round - they were shaped like a football and when they hit the ground, they could bounce anywhere. We had to be sure we wore our helmets. If they hit you, it could break a bone, knock your teeth out, or if they hit you in the head, they could knock you out. When we went on training hikes, we would spot papaya trees. Our Lieutenant would let us break ranks and get three or four apiece, then we'd go back on the hike. We did jungle and amphibious training there on Guadalcanal. We practiced climbing down cargo nets and getting into Higgins boats. We had boots, full uniform, and leggings on, and carried a pack on our backs. It was over 100 degrees there as we practiced and we would be out in the hot sun for hours in full pack and everything. The only thing we could take off was our helmets, but our hair was cut so short and I got overexposed to the sun. I had to have treatments at UT for several years because of the damage to my scalp."

All the training was for their next assignment - the invasion of Guam. Jack said, "That was a hot beach, I mean, good night. My company was in the third wave with orders not to stop on the beach. We weren't supposed to stop until we were behind the enemies' fortified pill boxes. The landing crafts pulled up far enough to let us out behind the pill boxes. We didn't go in front of them because there were booby traps all around there."

The Navy ships had been shooting those pill boxes but the shells would bounce off, so the Marines had to attack them from the rear where there were wooden doors - the only way in or out. Jack remembers, "You could hear the Japanese committing suicide because the amtracks had flame throwers and they didn't want to burn to death. You could hear the hand grenades going off inside. We landed with the 4th Marine Regiment and were the first provisional brigade in. We went through one banzai attack. The Japanese believed if they died in combat, they'd go to heaven. To start a banzai attack on us, they would line up the water buffaloes in front, then they would put the old men, then the women and children using all of them as a shield. They thought we would be out of ammunition or reloading by the time the soldiers broke through at us. But they never did get to our line - we stopped them."

"At that time, I wasn't supposed to be shooting any. I was supposed to be looking to see who was hit. I would give them first aid and put a tourniquet on their arm or leg. If they had a chest wound, we'd plug that up with tape front and back because their breathing would be very painful, then evacuate them. But if the pulmonary artery was hit, they'd die in three minutes. The ones that had priority in evacuation were the ones with abdominal wounds. They were first even above head wounds and amputations. They had to be operated on within 4 hours or they'd die of peritonitis. They were first back to the company aid station and then to the ships. I had a blast concussion and I notified the company aid station to relieve me. They said, 'Are you shot?' I said no and they said 'Forget about it. We'll take care of it later.' I couldn't even feel my right side. I couldn't feel a pinch or nothing. Ten days later I came down with Dengue Fever from the mosquitoes. We couldn't use nets in the foxholes. I'd say 60% of the men on the frontlines would come down with malaria or Dengue Fever. I'm glad I didn't have malaria because it stayed in the bone marrow for 7 years and could come back on you if you got run down. Dengue Fever gave us pain in our joints and vertebrae, high fever and diarrhea for about two and a half weeks but then it was over. When I reported my fever, the Navy hospitals and ships were full so I was sent to the 77th Army Division Hospital." To add misery to the combat and disease, there was the rain. In the rainy season, it rained 3 or 4 times a day, and 3 or 4 times a night. In the daytime, all the moisture made them hotter and at night it made them cold, and they just stayed wet.

From the Army hospital, Jack was sent back to Guadalcanal for more jungle and amphibious training. Then, on Easter morning, they invaded Okinawa. Jack says the original landing was not as bad because they had staged a fake landing on the other side of the island fooling the Japanese into pulling all their troops to the wrong beach. They landed without being attacked - Jack says that was a "cold" beach.

"We went in 500 yards or so. The first night, Japanese kamikaze Zeros, suicide planes, were trying to hit the hundreds of ships off the beach. Artillery shells and antiaircraft shrapnel rained down on us, and there were no trees or anything for shelter because the Navy's pre-invasion bombardment had leveled all the trees. Man it was rough that first night. We couldn't watch much of the battle because we were busy keeping our heads down, but we saw some. The ships put up umbrella type antiaircraft and it would tear up the Zeros, but they (the Japanese) did hit a few ships. That was a rough, hot night."

"There were six different divisions, Army and Marines, side by side on Okinawa. We thought the enemy would make a stand on the north but they made it on the south so we went there and fought them. I was in the 6th Division on the front lines. We'd be on the move all the time and it rained a lot. We didn't take our shoes off at night because we didn't know if we were going to have a counter attack. We were so tired, there wasn't much time to think about anything. We were so exhausted at night that there would be others standing guard so we didn't get infiltrated on and get knifed or blown up by a grenade in our foxholes. The worst experience was with a lieutenant on Okinawa; he was shot in the stomach, and they wouldn't evacuate anybody at night - nobody, no matter how they were wounded. So I sat in the foxhole with him and he was in pain. I felt so sorry for him. He wanted me to take his wedding ring to return to his wife but I had been warned not to do that. Somebody might get the wrong idea about why I had it and I could have been court-martialed. It was hard to do, but I did my best to convince him that they would send his ring back home with his dog-tags. I held him in my arms and prayed with him. I tried to stay awake with him but I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was dead. He had died in my arms during the night."

"We were in the battle for Sugarloaf Hill. We got 2 battalions over a bridge then the Japanese blew it up. We had to call for amtracks and tanks because the Japanese were trying to annihilate us before anyone else could get to us. On Sugarloaf, at first, there wasn't any contact, but the Japanese had dug holes and hid, then ambushed us. Man, there were a lot of people hit and shot and wounded. If the Japanese got hold of the wounded, they tortured them and took their watches and rings and stuff. It was rough. We kept going and took the hill."

"After we got back down, I was kneeling down administering plasma to a wounded Marine when a Knee Mortar went off. They were bigger than a grenade and the Japanese were very accurate with them. Shrapnel ricocheted off my helmet and went into the top of my shoulder. It was about an inch and a half or two inches long. It went into me about an inch and half right next to the artery by my jugular vein. It was hot lead and burned something awful inside. I was afraid it would rupture the artery or vein. I got somebody to open a package with a sling and I put that on and kept working. After about 2 hours, I couldn't stand it any longer so I went in a jeep with some other wounded Corpsmen to the company aid station and then to the ship for treatment. That's how I won my Purple Heart."

After he was treated, Jack was sent back to Guam. He was there when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. At the news of the Japanese surrender, Jack says the guys went wild and crazy they were so glad. Some of the men had been over there in almost nonstop combat for 3 years. Jack was asked, in light of the current debate about dropping the atomic bombs, what were his thoughts. "They saved millions of men's lives by dropping those bombs. If we had invaded Japan, it would have been a slaughter on both sides and millions would have been killed. The bombs saved a lot of lives," he stated. Jack's battalion was being transferred to China for occupational duty. However, Jack had completed his 24 months in combat (the limit for corpsmen) and he was sent back to the States. He sailed back on the Portland, a heavy cruiser, sharing bunk space with the ship's crew all the way to San Francisco. When he got there, he was assigned to ride on convalescent trains to accompany wounded soldiers going to New York. He made several of those journeys, then he was told his last journey would be on a train headed to Charleston, South Carolina - home! Jack says, "I said HOORAY! The train went all the way to the 6th Naval District in Charleston. I was discharged 3 days later. That was February 1946. My mother and dad came 102 miles from Columbia to get me. When I got my discharge papers, I found out they had left off some of my records because the regular Yeomen weren't there to type them. I was told I'd have to wait 3 more days to fix it and I said no, my family is here and I'm ready to go. I don't care about it!" he laughed. He was just happy to be home and back with his family.

Jack said he is still in contact with some fellow veterans. "One boy, a Jewish boy, a Hospital Corpsman, he lost his leg below the knee in a mortar attack. His name is Marvin Morris - he lives in Illinois. Then another boy named Whitaker - he is in New Hampshire. He was a Hospital Corpsman. We still send each other Christmas cards every year. Most of the others have died you know, because I'm 84 and they just died before me."

Asked if it was hard re-adjusting to civilian life Jack replied, "No, no. My friends were coming home from the service, too. We'd get together and talk. We enjoyed that and we were so glad to be home. There were 5 boys from Columbia, in my neighborhood, and we all ended up in the same battalion half way around the world. How about that! I was in the Navy and they had all joined the Marines at different times and we all just ended up there together. We'd get together over there and share letters. The main thing we wanted was a letter from home with pictures in it. We would get a box from home and we would get together and divide it up. Our mothers would send us canned fruit or fruitcake in a can and we'd share it. That was the best part of all of it - we were together through everything and we all came home."

Our thanks to Jack, and his interviewer, for sharing this amazing story; the students involved in the project judged it to be, by far, one of the best. We have been given a glimpse of the sacrifices made at a crucial point in our history so we could remain a free nation.



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