War Memoirs of Edward Hartzell Fee, Jr. (eBook)

Fritz Krieger (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9510-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This is the story of a young marine who joined the corps three months before Pearl Harbor. The book covers his enlistment, travels, and battles. Ed was a member of the first Marine division.

Mr. Krieger was born in Niles, Ohio, and grew up in Austintown, Ohio. He was graduated from Austintown Fitch High School in 1973. In 1977, Mr. Krieger received his bachelor of arts from Youngstown State University, with concentrations in English, political science, and mathematics. In 1979, he graduated with a master's degree in Economics from Youngstown State, with a concentration in Industrial Organization and Econometrics. Mr. Krieger has served as a Forecasting Analyst, a Forecasting Manager, a Director of Marketing Research, a Product Manager, a Senior Product Manager, a Regional Sales Manager, a Business Development Director, a General Manager, a VP, a Sr. VP, and a Chief Operating Officer. He has worked for Abbott Laboratories, Hoffmann-LaRoche, Cardinal Health, and ArcLight Systems LLC. Mr. Krieger holds several patents in longitudinal patient analysis and data analysis and is a recognized expert in breast-feeding trends. Mr. Krieger is part owner in Advanced Wheel sales and sits on the board. Mr. Krieger is semi-retired and spends his leisure time golfing, fishing, cooking, wine collecting, and working out. He is a level one sommelier with the court of Master Sommeliers and a second-level sommelier with WSET. He is married to Elody Krieger (nee Fee), and they have three daughters: Heidi Haydock (nee Krieger), Elise Bowen (nee Krieger), and Anne Batchu (nee Krieger). He and Elody make their home in Quail West, Naples, Florida.

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This is the story of a young marine who joined the corps three months before Pearl Harbor. The book covers his enlistment, travels, and battles. Ed was a member of the First Marine Division. As the table of contents indicates, Ed fought on Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peliliu. This is an eyewitness account of these battles with never-before-seen pictures of the battlefields and never-before-published stories. Table of Contents:ForewordChapter One: Enlistment and War!Chapter Two: The Journey to the South PacificChapter Three: Preparations for Guadalcanal Chapter Four: The Invasion of GuadalcanalChapter Five: The Battle of Alligator CreekChapter Six: The Battle of Bloody RidgeChapter Seven: The Battle of Henderson FieldChapter Eight: Leaving GuadalcanalChapter Nine: Melbourne, Malaria, and the Great Debauch. Chapter 10: Cape Gloucester and New Britain; Back to the Battlefield. Chapter 11: Rest and Recreation (well mainly) A Sojourn to PavuvuChapter 12: Peleliu: Part One: The worst is yet to come. Chapter 13: Peleliu: Part Two, Murder and SlaughterChapter 14: HomecomingChapter 15: AfterwordMy friend and father-in-law, Edward H. Fee Jr., fought with the First Marine Division in the South and Central Pacific. He had a harrowing wartime experience and many of his comrades did not survive. Luckily for us, with a combination of luck, verve, and skill, Ed survived the war and came home to Austintown, Ohio. Over late-night cups of tea, hours in the car driving to Canada or fishing together, Ed told me many stories of his time in the great world war. I do not doubt that Ed Fee suffered from some degree of PTSD. The horrors he experienced were so profound that mere words cannot capture them. Some men took to the bottle or drugs to escape these horrors; other men locked them up in a dark corner of their minds, never to be revisited. For Ed, therapy took the form of talking about it and sharing his war stories with me and his other son-in-laws. To say that I liked these stories would be an understatement; I loved these stories. He did not share many of these stories with his five daughters. And hence, I promised my wife that I would write these stories for posterity. I am confident of the location of the stories of Ed's war, which you will read in the forthcoming chapters. However, I will annotate the story if I have assumed where a particular story took place. Thus, some of my guesses must be taken cum grano salis (with a grain of salt).

Textauszug

Chapter One

Enlistment and War!

“Now, at this very moment, I knew that the United States was

in the war, up to the neck and into the death. So, we had won

after all! … How long the war would last or in what fashion it

would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care …

We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an

end … Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As

for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest

was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”

–Winston Churchill, Dec 7th, 1941.

As we all know, American participation in World War II started on Dec 7th, 1941, when the Japanese Naval and Air forces performed a surprise attack on United States Navy battleships that were resting in Pearl Harbor.3

No question was in anyone’s mind (except perhaps the Japanese) that we would win the war. However, the United States greatly underestimated the cost of victory in lives and materials, primarily because we greatly underestimated the Japanese.

And indeed, as Churchill predicted, the Japanese were ground to a powder.

But at a high cost.

Ed’s story starts before Pearl Harbor. It began when he enlisted in the Marines before WWII. Ed enlisted in the Marines on October 20th, 1941.4 Three months later, the country would be at war.

Bad luck, bad timing.

According to Merry Beth Vargo (née Fee), in 1941, Ed’s mother wanted him out of the house. He was 17 at the time and probably a handful. In October of 1941, Ed persuaded his mother to drive to Cleveland, Ohio, to allow one of his friends to enlist. Ed had no intention of enlisting; however, in Ed’s own words:

“I enlisted. My mother put me there. All mothers want their boys out of their hair. And I went to Cleveland with another boy for him to join up, and my mother talked me into joining up. That was a dumb thing, as war broke out three months later.”

He continued speaking about his enlistment:

“So, once you are caught in there (the service), and a world war starts, that’s a sad day. I wrote my mother a sad letter that day. The letter said, ‘Well, I made a mistake. I let you talk me into joining the Marines, and I am sorry it happened.’” 5

Thus, on October 20th, 1941, he returned from that trip to Cleveland as a Marine recruit. Ed did his basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina. He then did some advanced training (radio and communications) at Quantico. We don’t know much about Ed’s basic training, but there is one story I would like to relate.

New River Marine Base (now called Paris Island) is remote, and Ed wanted some weekend entertainment.

On the first off-duty Friday afternoon, he wanted off-base. In Ed’s words:

“I asked a fellow how a guy got off base and to civilization for a weekend pass. The fellow said, ‘Go just outside the base gate and get a city bus.’

I did.

There were 500 marines there. I finally walked into tiny Beaufort, North Carolina. There were no girls there that weekend. I joined five other guys who rented the sergeant’s car the following Friday. It was a beat-up old clunker with no windshield. We went to Columbia, South Carolina, about 120 miles away. On the way back, they were all drunk and passing a quart of hooch 6 around. I slouched down in the center of the back seat, saying every prayer I knew. They talked about a mutual ‘lady’ that made love at random and held a threatening butcher knife to the guy’s anatomy, saying, ‘Don’t Hurry.’ I will never do that again!

Monday after 5 p.m., I took the now empty bus into Beaufort to look around and to see if I could solve the problem of getting off of that base for the following weekend. I really wanted to go home, but it was 800 miles away. Impossible!

The town was nothing; a taxi stand, a couple of stores, and a bus terminal. I wandered into the bus terminal and looked around…. nothing. Idly, I asked the lone attendant, ‘Do you have extra buses for charter?’ The man was very kind, ‘Yes, for cash, son.’

Ed replied, ‘Could I charter a whole bus this Friday for a weekend? We’d leave here at 5 pm and get back at daybreak Monday.’

‘Well, that depends,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t know.’

The old man looked at me. ‘Well, close or far?’

‘To Washington D.C.?’ It was more of a question than an answer.

‘You would have to pay for every seat”

‘How much is each seat, round trip?’

‘$8.40, there are usually 48 to 50 seats, that would be, umm, $420’

‘Could you pick us up in front of our battalion headquarters tent on the base?’

‘Sure’

‘Would I have to pay for it all now, or could I give you part now and the rest when the bus picks us up?

‘How much have you got?’

‘$100’

‘One charter bus to Washington D.C. Friday at 1600 hours. Remember, you have to have the balance of $320 to hand the bus driver before the second person boards the bus. OK? I can’t return your deposit if you don’t go.’

I collected the $420 to the penny. We went. The first ticket was the most difficult to sell. Some guys in my own tent said, ‘I am giving you this $8.40, but if that bus is not here at 5 o’clock, I’m going to kill you, boy.’ They all thought it could be a con game.

By Friday afternoon, almost half the company had purchased tickets. We had classes very close to the company street, where we were to meet the bus. Each guy slipped away to ‘go to the John’ and came back ready to go on leave. They looked at me so hard that I feared for my personal safety. At 4:30, the bus drove up the company street and shut off the motor. The readout over the bus driver’s head said, ‘Washington D.C.’

Whew, were they happy.

Me too!

The entire bus signed up for the same trip next week. Over the next three weeks, I booked 11 buses and handled about $4,500 in cash.”

War is declared:

We have an excellent account of Ed’s attendance in the House of Representatives to witness Roosevelt’s speech asking Congress to declare war on Japan. Zachary Fee Vargo authored this well-written piece which contained information of which I was not aware. I have rewritten the article for consistency of style. Zach wrote this for a 10th-grade high school history project.

The story goes like this: Ed was on his way back to the Marine base on Parris Island (other accounts say Quantico or Austintown), arriving in Washington, DC, by train early in the morning on December 8th, 1941. He had just spent his leave visiting his family.7 As luck would have it, this was the same day that President Roosevelt was to give his famous ‘Day of Infamy’ speech to ask Congress for a declaration of war on Japan. Miraculously, Ed received a ticket to sit in Congress and watch Roosevelt’s speech.

How Ed received that ticket is an exciting story in its own right.

Below is my recantation of Zach’s narration of Ed’s recollection of December 8th, 1941:

Ed arrived at Washington’s Union Station on Dec 8th at 7:00 a.m. He recalled that the city was a beehive of activity. Zach writes, “Washington’s streets were cordoned off, and hordes of people crowded around the capitol and the white house. “

“What are all of these people doing out so early?” Ed asked a bystander. The stranger replied, “The president is going to address the opening session of the 71st Congress today. He will declare war on Germany, Italy, and Japan.” 8 Another man added, “FDR, all senators, congressmen, and world leaders will be coming down this street this morning.”

Ed said he wanted to see that speech; he wanted to be there. He...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.3.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9510-7 / 9798350995107