Following the storms - Soldier’s deployment to Pacific came as World War II came to close

By Carolyn Cole
Published on June 26, 2008

World War II veteran Vernon Herschberger counts himself among the lucky — he was deployed late in the war, which may have saved his life.

Herschberger was assembling aircraft for Boeing in Wichita, Kan., when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps — the precursor of the Air Force. His job was putting the skin on B-29 bombers at that time.

His division had just started building gliders used by the Army in Europe as a one-time transport of soldiers to the front.

“On the airplane everything had to be exact, but on this glider, if it got within an inch, you could tie it together,” he said. “They would let it go on through because it was a one shot.”

Herschberger was sent for training at a base in Arizona before later shipping out of Fort Lewis, Wash., for the Pacific Theater. He left his family in Kansas — a young son and his wife, Kathryn, who gave birth to the couple’s first daughter about nine months later while Herschberger was still overseas.

His flight made stops at Hawaii and Johnson Island. Just before the KC-35 craft took off again, an engine fell out of the plane onto the runway. Herschberger said the plane stopped a few feet before the runway ended at the ocean.

The plane took off the following day carrying 10 men and about 1,500 pounds of mail.

“We had a couple of boys who had never flown before,” he said. “They turned as white as a sheet because the water was right there.”

The plane’s crew stopped at Anawetok for refueling, just missing a typhoon that passed through the night before.

“There was 12 inches of water on the runway, but we had to land,” Herschberger said.

They flew on to Sypan and finally Iwo Jima, weeks after one of the bloodiest battles in World War II. The U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima started Feb. 19, 1945, and fighting lasted more than a month. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, more than 20,000 were killed and 216 were taken prisoner. More than 6,800 Americans died, 19,000 were wounded and almost 500 were missing.

The Iwo Jima Hershberger remembers was almost peaceful, with the exception of occasional Japanese kamikaze pilots targeting military bases.

“After I went in there wasn’t too much actual hand-to-hand fighting,” he said. “There were a few kamikaze pilots who would come in every now and then, they would dive into anything they thought they could kill anybody with. You could hear them coming — the roar of their fighter planes.”

About 10,000 soldiers were stationed on Iwo Jima when Herschberger was there — an island of only eight square miles. The Americans made their camps on land but made some use of the Japanese bases, a vast underground network of caves. The Japanese had also built a railroad around the island.

“It was pretty much blown out of business after we (the Americans) landed,” he said.

He was assigned 7th Fighter Command stationed out of the Air Intelligence Office, set up in the shadow of Mt. Suribachi, the site of Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of five Marines raising the U.S. flag in battle. Herschberger’s main job was to inspect Army units on the island, making sure other soldiers were following orders and running a neat ship.

“If they knew you were coming, the mess hall would be spotless, but if not, it might not be up to par,” he said.

The unit provided support to squadrons of P-51 Mustang. P-38 Lightning, P-29 fighter planes and their pilots, flying missions thousands of miles away into Japan.
Crossing the Pacific from Iwo Jima to Japan was risky business. During the spring of 1945, a formation of B-29 bombers went down in a typhoon. Herschberger said no one survived.

Herschberger’s base hummed about the atomic bomb a few weeks before the weapons were detonated Aug. 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, Japan, and three days over Nagasaki. Herschberger said pilots stationed at Iwo Jima escorted the planes carrying the weapons to their targets.
It was estimated more than 220,000 people died on the days of the bombings and thousands more later from illnesses related to radiation exposure.

“The A-bomb is just unreal,” Herschberger said. “It did a lot of damage, but it did bring those people into compliance with our way of thinking.”

Six days after Nagasaki, Japan announced its surrender. World War II officially ended Sept. 2, 1945.
Soldiers set to work dismantling camp and preparing to ship home. Herschberger said they were ordered to drain motor oil from trucks, tanks and cars and push the vehicles into the ocean.

“They just got rid of it any way they could,” he said.
Soldiers climbed aboard a troop carrier, and about two hours into the trip home, the ship hit a typhoon.

“We were in that typhoon all of the way until we got up north of Honolulu,” he said. “That ship took on water all four ways. I never was so sick in my life.”

They landed in Los Angeles to a feast. Herschberger and his comrades pigged out on ice cream, which they hadn’t seen in 14 months. The next morning he traveled to Fort Carson, Colo., where he was discharged from the Army.

Once he returned to his family, Herschberger took training to become an automotive mechanic specializing in body work. He worked for repair shops and car dealerships, moving to Oklahoma City in 1950.

It was in a garage when a tire exploded in his face, ripping down to his bone, that Herschberger first faced his mortality.

“I came closer to getting killed when I came home than I did overseas,” he said.

A decade later, Herschberger started selling auto parts, at times traveling the state and others working in parts stores. In the 1970s, he started his 25-year career selling insurance.

His wife, Kathryn, died in 1992 after a long battle with liver cancer, and a few years later Herschberger was diagnosed with diabetes. He had a stroke in 2000, and moved into Strawberry Fields Retirement Center.

While his three children live in the Oklahoma City area and look after him, Herschberger said he tries to remain active. He is president of the Strawberry Fields Resident Association, volunteers at the Mustang Senior Center Crafts Store and is active in the Mustang Senior Supporters.

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