Above: Mary and Charles Young
We were glad to have reporter/columnist Randall Beech, attend the meeting as well as playwright, Catherine Ladnier whose play The Apron Strings was read at the November meeting.Below left: Flier for the meeting. Below right: Catherine Ladnier speaking with Mr. Young at the November meeting.
________Below: The Column by Randall Beach______
Randall Beach: From Okinawa’s killing fields to state’s dance halls
Young, now 90, and his wife, Mary, had driven from their home in Madison Wednesday afternoon in heavy rain so he could speak to the World War II Veterans Discussion Group at the Hagaman Memorial Library in East Haven.
Sitting at a table at the head of the basement room, Young looked out at the two dozen in attendance and wondered aloud if any of them might be his former students. “I spent 11 years teaching English in the high school here in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he told us.
Speaking without notes, Young spent the next 45 minutes recalling his experiences as a medic with the U.S. Marine Corps. His memory has continued to preserve vivid details.
“What bothers me,” he began, “is that when you see these series about World War II on TV and they get to the war in the Pacific, they spend a lot of time on Iwo Jima, then they skip to the atomic bomb. They say very little about Okinawa, the biggest and costliest battle of the Pacific.” (Historical accounts estimate 12,000 to 14,000 U.S. troops died and that more than 150,000 Japanese, many of them civilians, were killed.)
Young talked about the months spent on the island of Guadalcanal, waiting to be sent into battle. “We had no idea what we were being groomed for. Every time you went to the head (bathroom) you heard another story: ‘We’re going to Formosa! We’re going to the Japanese mainland!’”
Finally, in the third week of March 1945, they were told to move out. “That was when we heard the word ‘Okinawa.’ We were told the southern quarter of the island was where over 100,000 Japanese troops were stationed.”
“People always ask me: ‘Were you afraid?’ I can’t remember ever being afraid.” He compared a young soldier’s state of mind to “youths tearing down a highway on flat tires, thinking you’re going to live forever.”
But Young did tell us of one man, Joe, who was so nervous the night before they went into action that he overdosed on pills. He was buried at sea.
Although Young remembers Okinawa as beautiful country with deep ravines, pine trees and rice fields, when the rainy days came the soldiers and their equipment got bogged down in the mud.
“The whole area became a killing field,” he said. “If there was an enemy body nearby, you were allowed to put dirt on top of it. But the American dead had to be left, gathered up by graves registration and taken back for a proper burial.”
Young said when he is asked what was “the worst thing” about the war, “I think of flies and the bodies. The flies came out everywhere. The smell was horrendous.”
Even after American forces won control of Okinawa, Young and the others braced themselves for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. But then came the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s surrender.
In the weeks afterward, Young was in Tokyo and visited the surrounding hills. “We went into the caves, all lit by electricity. They had hospitals, machine shops, everything in there. We realized that if we’d had to attack Japan, it would have cost a million American and Japanese lives.”
Young had a second part of his story to tell us. “Three or four years ago, after I’d been teaching in Greece, we moved back to Connecticut (initially to his childhood family home in New Britain). My wife went up in the attic to store her knitting and came down to tell me, ‘There’s a box up there.’”
When he asked her what was in the box, she said: “Letters.”
“My mother was a real pack rat,” he told us. “She saved everything. I told my wife, ‘We’ll have to pitch all that.’”
But she told him the letters were from the 1940s. And so he looked through the box.
“I saw a letter from an old girlfriend (Launa Darcy) who I’d had a wild crush on in the eighth grade. I thought, ‘Oh, these are teenage love letters. I ought to get them back up to the attic.’
“But my curiosity got the best of me and I started to read. I couldn’t believe the voices: my mother, my sister, half a dozen girls, half a dozen guys. My wife said, ‘Why don’t you put them on the computer?’”
He spent the next three months doing it. The result was the publication of his most recent book, “Letters from the Attic: Save the Last Dance for Me.”
If you read the many passionate letters Darcy wrote to Young throughout the war (and his letters back to her), you would think the subtitle referred to her. But they broke up after he finally got back home; she broke his heart by marrying another man. Young dedicated the book “to the memory of my sister Betty, who after 84 years saved the last dance for me.”
Sitting at that table in the library’s basement, Young recited the lyrics: “You can dance every dance with the guy who gives you the eye, let him hold you tight...”
He flawlessly continued, verse after verse, then ended: “Don’t forget who’s takin’ you home and in whose arms you’re gonna be. So darling, save the last dance for me.”
The group applauded; some of the women sighed. Young smiled and said: “Any questions?”
A Vietnam War veteran asked him about current military conflicts and drone warfare. Young replied, “It’s such a mess, when you look at Syria. There’s just no solution to it.”
“I feel sorry for these kids today — all these drugs,” Young added. “We had it all so good in this country for so many years after World War II. We had it so good here.”
Then Young returned to what his wife found in the attic and how that box couldn’t contain everything. “I wish I had all the letters I wrote during those years. People tell me they were so funny. Going through life, humor is the most important thing.”
Contact Randall Beach at rbeach@nhregister.com or 203-680-9345.
