Don Brown, Shawnee, was starting his senior year at Shawnee High School when he was drafted in September 1943, two months after his 18th birthday and as fierce fighting raged on all World War II fronts.
One year later he was a U.S. Navy Seabee on Pelelu, assigned to build a military hospital, but instead, in a foxhole amid Japanese gunfire from mountainside caves, helping support Marines as they fought to capture the South Pacific island.
Last week, Brown who later earned more than 300 hours of college credit and spent a 41-year career in education and research, mainly as a Kansas college professor, recalled his wartime service.
Born in Shawnee in 1925, Brown lived in Earlsboro through ninth grade. His dad was a barber. There was no money for Brown to go to college so the family moved to Shawnee so he could attend high school half-time, trade school, half-time.
While it was not government policy to draft high school students, Brown’s family later learned the draft board was calling up anyone who had worked in the oil fields.
Brown had done seismograph work the preceding two summers.
“When they said ‘let’s go,’ I had a month before I had to report,” said Brown, now 83.
Brown tried to volunteer for the Air Corps. He easily passed the mental test but without his glasses, failed the vision test.
He was assigned to the Seabees. “I didn’t know anything about the Seabees. Nobody did until John Wayne made the movie, “The Fighting Seabees.
“I tell people John Wayne and I won the war in the South Pacific,” Brown quipped.
The day after Christmas 1943, Brown was on a troop carrier converted from a banana scow that previously transported bananas from South America, zigzagging its way across the Pacific from California to the Russell Islands north of Guadalcanal.
They changed course every five minutes to confuse possible enemy submarines.
Brown had had 21 days of basic training in Virginia, advanced training including rifle range in California and a 10-day leave back home.
At one of the islands in the Russells, “they kicked us off at 11 a.m.,” Brown said.
“There were 1,600 on the ship but 300 in the group I was in. We had been gathered from all over- from Maine to Nevada. Nick the Greek was from New Orleans,” Brown said.
Their primary job was to build air strips but there, they were replacements for men on R and R leave.
Brown’s group was soon moved to the 33rd Seabee Battalion on a horseshoe-shaped, lush jungle-covered coral reef named Green Island, and attached to the New Zealand army.
The New Zealanders “weren’t afraid of man nor beast,” Brown said. But, “they would cycle back from the front lines to get their tea.”
Brown’s construction group built a base for PT boats, cut down a coconut plantation to construct an air strip for fighter planes, then built a landing strip for B-24s.
Before the latter was finished, B-24s were making bombing runs on Truk. “They shot our planes all to pieces,” Brown said. “One B-24 coming back, the pilot was all shot up and he landed on the bomber strip that was still under construction.
“There was a grader right in the middle of it. The pilot and the grader operator were both killed.”
His group was attached to the First U.S. Marine Division when, later, they were sent to Pelelu Island, between Guam and the Philippines.
“They wanted to build a hospital on Pelelu so they could bring patients from Luzon” which Japan still held in the Philippines.
Pelelu was “a very big Japanese stronghold,” Brown said. It was 1944.
“The Marines were going to take it in three days but it was probably more like two or three months. The Marines had the highest casualty rate on Pelelu of any battle they were in,” Brown said.
“They sent us ashore. We were support troops for the Marines. The island had a big Japanese airstrip with 144 aircraft on it. I was dug into a fox hole on the ocean side. My buddy was dug in nearby.
“Our aircraft dropped a bomb right in the middle of the airstrip so the Japanese aircraft couldn’t take off.”
Bloody Nose Ridge, at 200-plus feet elevation, was the highest point on the island. “It was full of caves in which the Japanese were embedded. The Japanese had been on the island for years and years,” he said.
“We shuttled ammo to the Marines,” Brown said. One night as they were unloading shells from a landing craft, a wave splashed up causing Brown to not see the distance from the step. He injured his back when he stepped down, thinking it was a few inches when in fact it was three feet down. He had back surgery in 1987 but the injury still bothers him
Brown also suffered coral blindness that cut his eyesight in half.
The air strips they built were coral the Seabees dug out, spread, then “we rolled the coral down to where it was like cement.”
After the Japanese airstrip on Pelelu was captured, Brown’s group “filled up all the bomb holes, scraped up their planes and used it for our planes.
“The strip was right next to Bloody Nose Ridge and they were shooting at us as we were trying to clean it up,” Brown said.
Brown’s military support /construction outfit was doing maintenance on by then secured Pelelu when the war ended. Luzon was free, too, and the hospital they’d started, wasn’t needed.
SHAWNEE, Okla. —
