The End of World War II

My father's home on Ie Shima, where he heard the news of the end of the war.  He lived in the pyramidal tent from April through September 1945. It looks primitive: but he did have a radio.

It is sixty six years ago this week that World War II finally came to its end.  I was at an event this past weekend that honored those who served and marked the war's end. I was so impressed by the numbers of people of all ages who walked from table to table; listening, talking about family members who served, and, I was impressed by the pride and patriotism I saw there.

It made me look back to my father's letters from Ie Shima, the little island off Okinawa where he was serving when the war finally ceased. Where the Japanese bombers came over each night. Where the mud was so deep it sucked off their boots. Where the mosquitoes were so thick they wore their shirts buttoned at the wrist, even in the hottest weather. This is what my father--who was not yet my father--wrote my mother when he heard the news. They had been apart since February 1945, and had been married not yet a year:

The Magical Side of Family Research: A True Tale That Surprised Two Daughters

Some costume jewelry from our mother's collection, that was a big hit at our garage sale in June of 2010. It had a treasure mixed in with it.

Last June, I had just about reached the limit of my ability to sort through my parents' possessions.  They had died within months of each other just half a year before, and I was a bit wrung out. I asked my sister--told her, actually--that if we were going to get rid of all the stuff left over from their lives--stuff I had rather ruthlessly piled in the garage--I wasn't going to be able to manage a garage sale on my own.

My sister rose to the challenge and with the help of her loyal spouse, the three of us mustered a weekend of garage sale recycling:  you take our junque, and we charge you almost nothing if you just get it the heck out of our driveway.

In the course of this exhausting event, we almost sold a precious item we shouldn't have--but something caused my sister to hold it back.  We had no idea what she had saved until this week.

The "Code Talkers": No Secret to Ernie Pyle

Pfc. Preston Toledo and Pfc. Frank Toledo, Navajo cousins, transmit messages in the South Pacific 1945.  Photo from the National Archives.

In some recent history research, I stumbled upon something surprising.  It relates to the Navajo "code talkers," whose work gained great notoriety in the 2002 film Windtalkers starring Nicholas Cage and Adam Beach.

From that film and other information I've read, I was under the impression that all in the program were sworn to secrecy and the story not revealed until 1998.  That is what is says in the film and in the National Archives' Prologue magazine (Winter 2001).

I discovered this isn't true.  The "code talker" story was published more than fifty years earlier in a national best-seller.

Mom and Dad and Too Much Information!

I've mentioned, I think, that I am transcribing my father's World War II letters to my mother, with a plan in the works to write a book.  I know at least one of you has mentioned to me she thinks I'm obsessed with my father.  I have never thought that was true. He seemed to disapprove of me somewhat and I have been in a sort of quest to find out why. But obsessed?  I hope not.

But if it were true; the enormous job of transcribing these letters has been a very good cure.  I am getting really sick of this love-lorn, baby-talkin', spelling-challenged engineer.

I hope this doesn't last forever. Then I'll never get this book done.

Remembering VJ Day: How Ordinary Men Saved the World

Capt. William Ashley Chapman showing off the pyramidal tent that was his home from the Battle of Okinawa through August 1945. When he was very old he wrote me in a funny letter: "We have here [at home] a lot better stuff than is found in any canvas tent. It is more trouble to go to the bathroom though."

This weekend marks sixty-five years since Japan surrendered to Allied Forces in the Pacific. Victory in Japan Day marked the end of Japan's strange and horrible dream of world conquest.

My father, Captain William Ashley Chapman, was there on a tiny island called Ie, across a small strait of water from Okinawa, Japan. Late in life he said there was no celebration on VJ Day among the soldiers. "Just a lot of relief."

Capt. Chapman on Ie, 1945

This is the first such remembrance day, of that remarkable time, that my father has not been here to mark. Col. William Ashley Chapman finally surrendered to his own peace in March of this year. In life, though he never once said so, he was one of the millions of ordinary American to whom we owe all the blessings of today.

The end came on August 14-15, 1945--depending on where you were in the world. In spite of it, on August 14, my father and his men were back in a slit trench as Japanese pilots bombed Okinawa. ("What was that you said, Sir, about a surrender?") That night, American Thunderbolts, flying out of Ie, shot down two more Japanese attack planes.

The momentum of a war, apparently, takes some time to halt.


Captain Chapman with his men on Ie. Behind him and to the left you can see the pyramidal tents they lived in. And behind that you can see the strait of water between Ie and Okinawa and some US ships at anchor there. Behind them to the right you can see a US military cemetery with white markers topped by an American flag.

So it wasn't until August 19, 1945, that my father stood on the runway at Ie, with the other American soldiers, and watched in silence as two Japanese Betty Bombers landed on their airstrip. The Mitsubishi planes, nicknamed "Bettys" by the GIs, were a real curiosity to the Americans, who had seen them only in combat. Per the instructions of General Douglas MacArthur, the Bettys my Dad saw that day had been each been painted white with a large green cross.

A few weeks later, my father was witness to history in another way. He and his men were ordered to board ships for Sasebo, Japan, where they were to rebuild and maintain a damaged runway, as the Occupation got underway. Sasebo is just across the bay from Nagasaki, where the atom bomb was dropped that ended the war.


A half century later, I found an old scrapbook kept by his mother and there, amidst the torn and crumpled pages, I found an undated article from an Alabama newspaper that described what he had seen there. The article was headlined: "Homewood Boy Visits Scene of Atomic Bomb Destruction," and reads in part:

"Captain Chapman, now stationed at Sasebo in Japan, wrote as follows [the article says in quoting him]: 'We drove down to Nagasaki. In the area close to where the bomb went off everything is leveled to the ground. The stench of the dead is still present ... Anyone who had the starting of a war in mind should see Nagasaki and I believe he would change his plans.'"

He and the men and women of his generation did not ask for this mission. America, in fact, did everything it could to stay out of the war that the Axis nations were brewing up in their terrible cauldron.

But when it had to be faced: they faced it. Calling them heroes almost trivializes what they did. They were not heroes. They were ordinary Americans who did a job that had to be done. My Dad served for five years. And he, like all the others, was thrilled when it was over. "I'm like President Roosevelt," he would say. "I hate war."

"EXPECT TO BE HOME SOON DON'T WRITE FURTHER" my father telegraphed my mother on November 9, 1945. "WILL CONTACT YOU ON ARRIVAL. ALL MY LOVE DEAREST. ASHLEY." So many guys were sending wires home, the operator got only one of my Dad's initials right and misspelled his last name. But it arrived at the right house anyway.

And who were these men? These battle-hardened conquerors?

"What was it like there?" my mother asked my father as he stepped off the train.

"Aw. The Japanese kids were really cute," he said. And then he kissed her.

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Memorial Day Tribute: Capt. Ray Kidd

Captain Raymond O. Kidd.

On this Memorial Day weekend, I thought you might be interested in the story of a World War II officer my father knew. His name was Raymond Kidd and he was an engineer from Bedford, Virginia.

The two men met when their reserve units were activated just before the war. Then, they roomed together on the ship that took them to a "secret destination" in March 1942. Though Kidd was a few years older, the two young men from the South had a lot in common. They were both quiet, studious, Presbyterian, non-smoking teetotalers. Ray had dark red hair and a Cary Grant cleft in his chin.

My father is standing at right in this wartime photo: Capt. Ray Kidd is standing at center. I think this photo was taken in the States before the two engineers went overseas.

It was only at the very end of their journey that their CO told them they were headed to Ascension Island where they had an airport to build and ninety days to build it in.

Times were tough at first: the men worked twelve-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Their heavy equipment didn't arrive for several months so they made their tools out of what the desert island had to offer--which wasn't much. There was very little water on the island, so they were limited to the drinking water they had brought with them in large oil drums. When their resupply ship was sunk, the men went on half rations of chow and were limited to a quart of water a day. When they had time, they swam in Comfortless Cove to wash in the seawater.

Captain Ray Kidd, far right, with Lt. Herb Schiff, just out of the sea on Ascension Island.

The location had one thing going for it: nobody bombed Ascension during the war. It was a dry, windy, dusty, jagged piece of volcanic rock in the middle of nowhere: but the only men who were killed in action there, fell off a bulldozer.

Kidd, as the senior of the two friends, outranked my dad. In fact, he was the envy of all his friends because he already had a sweetheart back home--though it was seventy days before any mail arrived on Ascension, and when it finally did appear, the first batch was all second class mail! You can imagine the groans as the men opened those advertisements, circulars, and Army training manuals that had been forwarded from home. It was another month before the real mail appeared and by then, it had been piling up so long, some of the men like Ray, whose sweethearts had written them daily, had 200 letters arrive at once!

The two engineers from the South, Ray Kidd and Ashley Chapman, in a grainy photo taken on Ascension Island. I found it in my father's things after his death in March.

The 38th Engineer Combat Regiment completed the airfield by its deadline and once that was done, the Army needed a team to run it. The command split off the 898th Engineer Aviation Battalion for that job, and Capt. Ray Kidd was named CO.

By this time, my father was ready to take orders to go just about anywhere else--even though that would inevitably mean a much more dangerous assignment. But Ray Kidd asked him to stay for another year to help keep Wideawake Field running, and my dad agreed. They were close friends by then and--I think it is only fair to add--the chow on the island had improved considerably. One of the mess sergeants had commandeered a compressor and they were now serving ice cream for dessert.

In the spring of 1944, Captains Kidd and Chapman were finally sent back to the States for leave and retraining. Kidd made a bee-line to Huntington Park, California where he married his sweetheart. Next stop was Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington. Dad checked into the Bachelor Officers' Quarters and Ray and his bride found a small apartment. The men trained on the new specs of the planes the Allies were building for the expected invasion of Japan.

After two years on an island inhabited only by soldiers and sea turtles, almost all of the men got married that summer. My Dad was no exception. He met Faye Ellen Latta at a dance. Six weeks later they married, with Ray Kidd and Herb Schiff standing up for Chapman at the altar. Six weeks after that, he and Kidd and the other engineers were on a ship headed to Okinawa. It was the spring of 1945 and the years on Ascension were a cakewalk compared with what lie ahead.

In March 1945, aboard ship in the Pacific, Kidd got word that his wife had had their first child.

At left, what was then known as "V-mail". In it my father tells his parents about Kidd's new baby.

Dad wrote home: "Poor Ray Kidd doesn't know whether he is a papa or a mama. I guess it is pretty hard on him ... " I think that means the men didn't yet know whether Ray's baby was a boy or a girl. It was a boy, and the son was named after him.


At right, Capt. Ashley Chapman on Ie Shima.

The 1902 Aviation Engineer Battalion landed on Ie Shima off Okinawa one day after journalist Ernie Pyle was killed there. Captains Chapman and Kidd were company commanders and there they faced daily and nightly air raids. The Americans soldiers jumped into slit trenches when the siren wailed; but sometimes they just had to keep on working. Often the raids took place in the middle of the night. The night of June 24, 1945 was one of those times.

On June 26, 1945 Mrs. Raymond Kidd got a letter from Chaplain J. Loftus who was himself in a hospital recovering from a shrapnel wound:

"It is with deep sympathy that I write to offer my condolences on the death of your husband and my good friend, Capt. Raymond Kidd. He was killed instantly in a bomb shelter during an air raid, when a bomb exploded about fifteen feet from the entrance to the shelter. I was with him at the time and know he did not suffer, because he did not utter a sound. This happened at 2:45 a.m. on the 24th of June."

The war ended six weeks later.

My father with his company in Ie Shima. Behind them to the left you can see the channel and beyond that Okinawa. Behind them to the right you can see a flag flying and beneath it, the American Military Cemetery. Capt. Kidd was buried there in Row #11, Plot #2.

Capt. Kidd was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star. "By his keen judgment, technical skill and devotion to duty, Captain Kidd made a substantial contribution to the success of the Ryukyus campaign," the citation read. Col. Branner Purdue pinned the medal on Kidd's widow. My grandmother saved the clipping and a copy of the chaplain's letter in her scrapbook.

The awarding of the Bronze Star.

Most of the things I know about this story, I have learned since my own father's death, as I've read through the piles of old clippings and letters he left behind. We didn't talk about this much nor think about it as the living history that it was.

On Memorial Day weekend, 2010, I wanted to share Capt. Ray Kidd's story with you. He and the others who sacrificed with him made the relative peace and enormous prosperity of the last six decades possible for all of us. I hope his family won't mind my telling it. I know they paid a terrible price for his courage.

But there must be a special place in heaven for guys like Ray Kidd. I'm hoping he was there with a handshake to greet my father when the two old friends were finally reunited.

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World War II Dad: Remembering the Best of Times and Forgetting the Worst

Beards? No shirts? After almost five years of war, the battle-hardened Americans had dispensed with many of the formalities. My father is at right on Ie Shima near Okinawa, 1945.

For my father, with his sad disease of lost and confused memory, his participation in World War II is the one constant in his conversations these days. He told me recently that he's sorry he hasn't been able to get to know my sister better but that being away at war all that time must be why he hasn't seen her since she was born. The war was over sixty four years ago, and my sister wasn't born until he returned from overseas, and he sees her frequently. But this is less and less clear in his mind.

He talks almost exclusively about the first two years of World War II, during which he served as a unit commander and aviation officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, he was sent aboard a converted ocean liner to Ascension Island, where he and his men had orders to build what became Wideawake Field. It was used by 25 thousand planes ferrying supplies, troops, and munitions into the CBI theater. And, it was about the safest place a young officer could be in those first bloody years of World War II. It was isolated and exotic and quite an adventure for the kid from Birmingham and perhaps that's why he talks about it all the time today.


Consequently, I was very interested when I came across an album of photos that had apparently been kept by my mother's mother, my Grandmother Latta. It includes photos of my Dad during the second phase of the war for him, on a little island called Ie Shima, a place he served that he almost never talks about. There, on Ie Shima, he was in harm's way during the part of the war (he told me once long ago) that he didn't think he would survive.

Captain Chapman showing off the swell accommodations he had on Ie Shima.

The island is one of the Japanese islands in the Ryukyus chain, the best-known of which is Okinawa. Fighting on Okinawa in the early months of 1945 was so terrible that the Pentagon told the President he could expect at least a million casualties in the invasion of Japan, that was expected to come next. While U.S. troops mopped up on Okinawa, on April 16, 1945, U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army Infantry swept onto Ie Shima where there was an airfield that had to be neutralized and could be reused in the days ahead. The fighting was bloody there too.

The uniforms were old and worn. Captain Chapman with his men on Ie Shima. He returned from Ie with a Bronze Star. Today he doesn't remember anything about receiving this award for valor.

Dad once said Ie Shima was secure when he arrived. But I've looked at his Army records now and the history of the war and have learned that Dad arrived on Ie Shima on April 22, 1945 and that the last assault on U.S. troops on Ie took place during the night of April 22-23. While he and the Corps of Engineers were rebuilding the airstrip on Ie there were daily assaults by Japanese planes. "We just kept on working. We had to. We were on a deadline," he once said to me with a shrug. "I felt kind of sorry for those Japanese pilots. They flew over and dropped bombs on us, but every piece of artillery on the island opened up on them. They almost never got away."

My Dad's friend, Capt. Ray Kidd, was killed as the result of just such an assault. It was just two weeks before the war ended.

And there were thousands of bodies--both Japanese and American--that had to be buried in those early days on the island. Being on Ie Shima was not the fascinating, exotic, assignment that being on Ascension Island had been. Being on Ie Shima was really being in the war. Maybe your mind would want to forget it too.

The company commanders during the good years on Ascension Island. Captain Ray Kidd is at far left. 2nd Lt. Ashley Chapman is second from right.

Dad has always said that journalist Ernie Pyle was killed on Ie just one day before he landed there. The record shows that Pyle was actually killed on 18 April, four days before my Dad got there. But Pyle's death was devastating to American soldiers and they were probably still talking about it when my Dad and his unit landed. Pyle was a journalist who traveled with soldiers and wrote about their lives back home and the daily grind of their lives in wartime. In fact, his death on Ie calls to mind the closing scene of The Story of G.I. Joe, a movie based on Pyle's dispatches. As their officer lies dead after a battle, his men, one by one, file by him. One soldier takes off his helmet and says: "I sure am sorry, sir." That's the way American soldiers felt about Pyle's death on Ie.

My sister and I wonder why my father's memory record is stuck on the months he spent on Ascension Island. But, maybe that was the last period in his young life of absolute optimism, before he knew about the really bad things that can happen. Maybe that was the end of the innocence for William Ashley Chapman, the much beloved son of Roy and Mary, who made it safely home from war and still, deep inside the recesses of his brain may wonder why.

My sister Kimberly was born after my father returned from World War II. She laughs at this picture, taken in Palo Alto, California, because the cars look so old. But we always remind her that they didn't manufacture automobiles during the war so she really isn't of Model T vintage.

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