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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Dad and Nagasaki

Before I had ever seen this photo, my father described to me his eyewitness astonishment at the the devastation of Nagasaki and the "leaning smokestacks" he saw there in September/October 1945.

On this August week in 1945 the world was changed forever with the release of the atom bombs at Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

We could debate forever the efficacy of the decision to use these terrible weapons; but one thing you can say--nobody has been foolish enough to start a world war in the sixty-four years since.

My father was on Ie Shima, a tiny island less than a mile from Okinawa, when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The American fighter pilots, who flew from the airstrip he had built and was maintaining under daily bombings by the Japanese, said they could see the mushroom cloud that day when they went up on patrol.

Over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. The A-bomb there ended the war and thus may have saved at least a million lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. But the end still came at a terrible cost.

It was all over very soon after that, and my father--on standby to be part of the invasion of the Japanese home islands (scheduled for November 1945)--was relieved, along with the rest of America, that the horrible war was finally at an end. On September 23, the U.S. Marines came ashore at Sasebo to begin the Occupation and shortly afterward (and before the typhoon hit on October 8, 1945) my father and his Army Corps of Engineers aviation battalion also came ashore in Sasebo to occupy and improve the airfield there.

My father on steamy Ie Shima, July 1945.

He never spoke much about the three months he spent in Sasebo. He and my mother had married in Spokane, Washington in 1944, after a rather brief courtship. When they met, Dad was getting ready to go overseas to be part of the Battle of Okinawa. When he came home in November 1945, she reports that all he said was: "The Japanese children were really cute."

It wasn't until many years later, when I was visiting my grandmother in Spokane and we were paging through her scrapbook, that a newspaper clipping caught my eye and began to fill in some of the blanks. Dated September or October 1945, it was headlined something like this: "Captain Chapman Visits A-Bomb Site" and told about my father's visit to Nagasaki, quoting him on the destruction he had seen there. I wondered what he had been doing there? I wondered why he had never mentioned it? I wanted to ask him about it. But until recently, I did not.

In recent years, with the onset of his illness, my Dad has been talking much more about his memories of World War II, so I've begun to research the War's end in the Pacific, the part of the conflict about which I've known the least. Sasebo, where my father was part of the first days of the Occupation, is just 29 miles across a very small bay from Nagasaki.

According to the Marines Corps archives on the Occupation of the Sasebo/Nagasaki area, dated September 1945: "Lieutenant Colonel George L. Cooper later recalled: '[Nagasaki] Ground zero appeared to have been a rather large sports stadium [actually ground zero was bounded by the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and by the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north] and all of us were categorically ordered to stay out of any place within pistol shot of this area. The result of this order was that everybody and his brother headed directly for ground zero as soon as they could, and in no time at all had picked the area clean of all movable objects."

Which explains why my father toured Nagasaki. The war was over. He, like every other G.I., was bored and wanted to go home. He, like every other G.I., wanted to see the most amazing site in the world that was, in his case, just a jeep ride away. He went sightseeing. And what he saw there was so terrible he didn't speak about it for sixty-four years.

What was there, I asked him recently? "What was there? Nothing was there. It was flattened. Just those tilting smokestacks. Nothing else."

In May of this year, my father was diagnosed with leukemia/lymphoma. We're not yet sure what the treatment will be since he has a number of other ailments, but this week, during a visit to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, I told the doctor of my father's visit to the A-bomb site at Nagasaki. She raised her eyebrows. Leukemia/lymphoma can sometimes be connected with exposure to radiation. So we're looking into it further.

My father is going to be 90 in four months and, according to his doctor, something else is likely to take his life before this new disease does so.

But the connection is food for thought. He may be paying the price for a soldier's curiosity. He was very surprised to still be alive at the end of the War, he says. He probably thought he was now invincible.

Captain Chapman (third from left, back row) with his men on Ie Shima. Behind the group, you can see the small channel of water that separates Ie Shima from the hilly terrain of Okinawa. Behind the group of men on the other side, you see what looks like a rice field surrounded by a white picket fence, topped by a tall flag post sporting an America flag. Those are graves and the white wood are the crosses. July 1945.

Securing the Surrender: the Occupation of Japan

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