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Surviving Servicemen
Petty officer Paul Sanderson and WAVE Pauline duck the rice as they leave the church after their wedding.
Flight Instructor From Otway
America’s cause was right, they knew, and for most members of what has been termed, “The Greatest Generation,” their participation and survival in World War II’s horrific battles, fought on foreign soil in defense of Democracy, helped rather than hurt them. They returned home to become stable citizens who bought a home, raised a family, usually remained married to the same person 60 years and more, paid their taxes, voted, worked toward retire...
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‘I Didn’t Win No War’
WHEELERSBURG – Robert Taylor “Bob” Johnson would have had time after graduating from high school to earn a college degree before the Army drafted him for duty in World War II. If so, he might have gone through the war as an officer rather than a buck sergeant in a foxhole in Belgium, manning a machine gun and a 90-mm antiaircraft gun. Johnson completed his first three years of formal education in Portsmouth, attended the one-room school at Fro...
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Ray Simpkins, kneeling, far right, is shown with other airmen undergoing advanced flight training in 1943 in Kansas.
Ray Simpkins, B-24 Bomber Pilot, Army Air Force
PIKETON — American infantrymen were on ground level with enemy soldiers, eyeball to eyeball so to speak, and the killing that had to be done was sometimes personal and gruesome. But the men who flew the big four-engine bombers, which were so instrumental in turning the tide of war against Germany in World War II, were usually 25,000 to 32,000 feet high when they dropped their bombs on enemy installations. They killed at a distance without hav...
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Top: Crayton Burns pauses in his Portsmouth home in front of his World War II medals and honors. Above right: Two honorary POW and Philippine liberation caps awarded to Burns lie atop a book detailing the heroics of American military forces and their Allies during the early days of World War II in the Philippines.
Crayton Burns Survived POW Camp
Crayton Burns pulled off his shirt in his Portsmouth home on Gilbert Avenue to show a visitor the scar left along the side of his neck and across his shoulder and down along the left side of his chest. The scar was left by a Japanese Samurai sword wielded by an officer of the Japanese Army while Burns was a prisoner of war in the Philippines during World War II. Such swords were used by the Japanese in some instances to behead captured Americ...
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Williams Was A World War II Bridge Builder, Flat Fixer
By G. SAM PIATT PDT Staff Writer WHEELERSBURG — A hernia kept Everett Williams from taking part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944), but he caught up with World War II in early 1945 just west of the Roer River. Williams, now 90, was a timber worker, horse trader and muleskinner in the Pine Creek Valley northwest of Wheelersburg when his call came from the draft board. He took basic training in Missouri as a part of the Army’s 10...
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Don Traylor, in his World War II Army uniform, is flanked by his son, Gary, left, and grandson, Brian.
Bogged Down At Anzio Beach
SOUTH SHORE, Ky. — Like a lot of other young men in the South Shore-Portsmouth area in the summer of 1943, Don Traylor didn’t have to worry about finding a steady job. A job with excitement. He was 19 when the U.S. Army sent him an invitation to come to work. The job involved a scenic cruise across the Atlantic Ocean and up the Mediterranean Sea. There was an extended hike through the mountains of Italy and a visit to Rome. Disadvantages of t...
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Submitted photos Inset, Web is shown in boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in 1944. Above, An Avenger torpedo plane takes off from the deck of the USS Natoma Bay (CVE 62) during the battle of Okinawa. Damage to the flight deck caused by the kamikaze attack can still be seen. G. Sam Piatt/Daily Times At right, Omer “Cobby” Webb looks over some of his World War II battle awards.
Biggest Naval Battle In History
SOUTH SHORE, Ky. — Just two months after graduating from McKell High School in May 1944, Omer Glenn “Cobby” Webb was a sailor on board the USS Natoma Bay, pulling out of San Diego and steaming for the war that was raging in the Philippines and surrounding Pacific islands. “I looked out toward the city as she disappeared on the horizon, and I remember I couldn’t shake the feeling that nagged at me,” he said. “I felt that I wouldn’t be coming ba...
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Polishing Up After World War II
WHEELERSBURG — Walter Marley turned 18 in February 1946 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in April, nearly eight months after Japan signed the unconditional surrender document with the United States and its Allies, ending World War II. However, Marley and others who served in the military in 1946 qualify as World War II veterans. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and other such organizations, for the purposes of establishing World ...
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From left, Fred “Jack” Riggs, Kenneth Johnson, James Lawson Jr. and Boyd Adkins Jr. relax Aug. 21 on the breezeway at Riggs’ home in Wheelersburg.
Memories Of War Linger On
WHEELERSBURG -- Almost 65 years have passed since those days when Boyd N. Adkins Jr. manned the cockpit of a P-51 Mustang, a long-range, single-seat fighter plane. He provided cover for the big, lumbering B-17s and B-24s on their bombing raids over Europe. But time can’t erase the memories of the atrocities of war he experienced first-hand. Some are still so painful that he can’t talk about them without his voice cracking and his eyes wateri...
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Coming To The Aid Of Chiang Kai-shek
For Judge John Bell Marshall, a Naval officer in World War II, most of the war went pretty smooth. It wasn’t until after the war was over, actually, away off there in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea, that things got a little exciting for him and the complement of 23 officers and about 230 crew members on board the repair ship USS Adonis. There was that one adventure, unique in that hardly anybody knew it was taking place, when six Americ...
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Local Architect Helped Naval War Effort
When he graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1938, James Donaldson knew his vocational calling was to be an architect. His father, Charles M. Donaldson, was a long-time Portsmouth architect. He served in World War I and started the business right after the war. He designed many of Portsmouth’s early school buildings. Young Jim had worked for his father’s office off and on since he was 8 years old. And so that fall he was off to The Ohio S...
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From left, Jack Bailey, Al Varhola and Mark Fleming stand with the Washington Monument in the background on their July 11 trip to see the National World War II Memorial in Washington.
Surviving Servicemen: Local Veterans Tour WWII Memorial
Some 65 years after they fought in the Pacific Islands, on the European continent, and on the Atlantic Ocean to preserve freedom in World War II, three Portsmouth men made the trip to see the memorial dedicated five years ago as a symbol of gratitude to them and to others like them. It was appropriate that Al Varhola, Jack Bailey and Mark Fleming made the trip together for their July 11 tour of the U.S. National World War II Memorial on the Na...
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Quartermasters Ate Steak
SOUTH SHORE, Ky. — Dudley Morton spent 4 1/2 years in the Army during World War II, participating in campaigns and invasions in Northern Africa, Tunisia, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Southern France, Rhineland and winding up in Central Europe in the shadow of the Eagle’s Nest, Adolph Hitler’s mountaintop retreat, when Germany surrendered to end the fighting in Europe. It was Feb. 28, 1941, more than nine months before America entered the war after Ja...
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He Handled Heavy Lifting
Harrison “Brock” Brockett, 89, who lives today in Portsmouth’s Hill View Retirement Center, graduated from Parish High School in upstate New York, 30 miles from Syracuse, and was working as a truck driver when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The very next day found the 21-year-old at the recruiting office hoping to enlist in the military. “It was so crowded with volunteers that they couldn’t process them all. They told me to go home...
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Right: Bob Ramey today — suffering no ill effects from his tour of atomic-bombed Hiroshima nearly 64 years ago.
Surviving Servicemen: The Ship’s Doctor
Bob Ramey of Portsmouth served on ocean-going Merchant Marine ships during World War II, and he still wonders today if it was poison gas the Army offloaded from his ship and left buried on that Italian beach 60 miles north of Naples. “The Army began moving these large canisters — resembling acetylene tanks — from the ship to the beach, and buried them,” Ramey said. “In the mountains north of us, the German Army was fighting desperately and fie...
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