About two years ago, the “Travel” section of The New York Times included a list of things to see in Hawaii. One recommendation was “the U.S.S. Missouri, an American battleship.” The wording implied there’s nothing special about a battleship today and nothing unusual about the Missouri.
This particular ship, however, held the world’s focus 70 years ago today, anchored in Tokyo Bay with her anti-aircraft guns manned. Seven other American battleships, including the Mississippi, surrounded her as the Japanese, at a mess table on the Missouri in Tokyo Bay itself, surrendered to end World War II. (John R. Henry, a Columbus native, was there reporting for the International News Service.)
Including European deaths, 291,557 Allied soldiers died so the Missouri could anchor there. From April 1 through June 22, 1945, the Department of the Army says 12,427 of them died at Okinawa: 4,582 Army men; 4,907 sailors; and 2,938 Marines.
That’s 12,427 men killed in 11 weeks of fighting in “hell’s own cesspool,” as one man put it, in the last battle before the invasion of the Japanese mainland 325 miles to the north. (In the first 15 months of the Iraq War, 632 Americans died fighting, says the Defense Department.)
Here’s the start of an Associated Press dispatch on June 13, 1945: “Fighting was so fierce that in 36 hours battling for the slope of one hill, 137 men in a single Marine company, including all of its officers, were killed or wounded.” The Americans killed 107,000 Japanese on Okinawa in those 82 days.
The 2,938 Marine deaths included at least one from Lowndes County, Willard Earl Conn, a private first class with the First Marine Division. Born in 1925, he had to get signed permission from his father, Russell, to enlist, then spent 29 months overseas.
Private Conn’s story re-surfaced in 2003 when Mississippi University for Women professor Tom Velek’s students interviewed eight veterans and family members in a World War II oral-history project begun in 2002. Student Leslie Lott discussed the war and Conn with his sisters, Virginia Humphries and Mary Sheppard.
One of their brothers died very young, but their six other brothers were all in the service over the years. Willard and James, his elder by three years, were in the Okinawa cesspool.
Wounded by a grenade, Willard made his way to a hospital ship. But its relative safety (the Navy lost 36 ships and those 4,907 men at Okinawa) meant little to Conn: “I am worried about James. I’ll be glad when I can go back to battle where James is,” he wrote to the homefront.
And he did go back, and helped as a leader. The sisters told Ms. Lott that he was guiding a tank to relieve his pinned-down unit when a Japanese shell hit the tank. The bouncing fragments mortally wounded Pvt. Conn, an event his brother saw.
A letter from James and a notice from the War Department came on almost the same day to the Conn house near Steens. “Should we read the letter from James first?” the sisters asked themselves. At some point, two soldiers came to the house, found Russell plowing with two mules and gave him official notice of Willard’s death.
A three-paragraph Commercial Dispatch story on May 30 based on James’ letter says Conn died May 11 “aboard a hospital ship where he was taken for treatment of his wounds.”
Conn died at 19. His physical journey ended with his Feb. 12, 1949, burial at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Cemetery on Pleasant Hill Road, 12 miles east of downtown Columbus.
He lies under the marble military marker with the dates of his life and “PFC 7 Marines. First Marine Division.” Opposite that gravestone a family marker says, “He gave all” — a verifying echo of the veterans memorial at the cemetery entrance that says: “All gave some. Some gave all.” Twenty-five feet away is the grave of the brother he worried about, Corporal James Conn, who died in 1975.
Willard Conn received two Purple Hearts with Gold Stars and, “for extraordinary heroism,” the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor. Part of the citation says “…exposing himself repeatedly to intense machine-gun and mortar barrages [he] reorganized his men and inspired them to continue the savage fight…”
When we go to cemeteries like this all over the country, we realize: it’s regular people who drive the American war machine right into the enemy’s home waters. When we see the simple graves of citizen-soldiers, we see that, for thousands of World War II families, the day came when reality made trite the phrases we use — “loss,” “sacrifice,” “life cut short,” “the future denied.” A cemetery’s silent acreage contrasts with the tumult and cesspools that send soldiers there.
Notes: Pvt. Conn’s burial came nearly four years after his death. Such an interval seems long. But the Feb. 11, 1949, edition of The Dispatch that announces the arrival of Conn’s body by train from Atlanta, says that two other Lowndes County war dead, Will Jones and Rodney Stanley, would be buried Feb. 13. Both Jones and Stanley had been dead more than four years.
Dr. Tom Velek’s oral history project at MUW prompted this article. Brent Thompson, in the Columbus office of U.S. Rep. Trent Kelly, and researchers at the Library of Congress offered great help finding details about the U.S.S. Missouri.
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