Talk with 87-year-old World War II veteran, George McLaughlin, and you might be reminded of a movie: Forrest Gump.
Not that McLaughlin lacks anything upstairs––he majored in math and physics at college, and he worked for years as a design engineer in America's postwar rocket program. But like the fictional Gump, McLaughlin seems to have always been in the right place at the right time, historically speaking.
As an Elkins, West Virginia high-schooler during the Great Depression, McLaughlin joined the National Guard for the money. "I could get thirty dollars a month," he said. A number of his classmates and teachers joined up at the same time.
"Our coach, he was a lieutenant in World War I," McLaughlin said. "They made him captain. He was company commander." McLaughlin's industrial arts teacher also filled an officer's slot.
On June 6, 1941 the Army activated McLaughlin's National Guard unit into full time service as the 201st Infantry. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was still seven months away. But for all the previous year, island Britain had been holding out alone against Hitler's conquest of Europe. Mainland Europe had already fallen.
A few months prior to activation of McLaughlin's unit, the United States began supplying Britain with war-making equipment under the Lend-Lease Act. McLaughlin's call to arms was to a broomstick army.
"We didn't even have enough weapons to supply all our people in the service with weapons," McLaughlin said. "We had toy guns. We didn't have enough weapons to go around. Later on, Remington Typewriter, Maytag, everybody was making rifles."
First assigned to Fort Ben Harrison in Indiana, McLaughlin's unit garrisoned the post so the fort's former garrison, the 11th Infantry, could ship to Iceland. That overseas Icelandic deployment occurred before the United States had even officially entered the war. Soon McLaughlin's unit also headed overseas.
"On September 12th we went to Alaska for three-month maneuvers," McLaughlin said. "We were due to come back to the States on December 12th. Pearl Harbor hit on the 7th of December, and we got to stay in Alaska for two and a half years."
On arrival at Kodiak Island on Alaska's southern coast, McLaughlin's experience ran counter to proverbial Army practice. Famous for turning civilian accountants into mechanics, or plumbers into typists, in McLaughlin's case, the Army made better use of its raw material. Known to his higher-ups since high school for art skill and problem solving, McLaughlin's ability was put to work.
Assigned to a headquarters service company, McLaughlin took on a variety of tasks. On an early project, he helped replace an Army tent city on Kodiak Island with substantial barracks.
The command sent officer Harvey Bailey, McLaughlin's former industrial arts teacher, south to Seattle to procure a sawmill. With McLaughlin's help, Bailey assembled the mill on Woody Island, a smaller island near Kodiak.
GI's felled evergreen timber with two-man crosscut saws and moved logs to the millpond. McLaughlin and Bailey milled logs into lumber, and the Navy barged the boards across the water to Kodiak. As a result, soldiers soon enjoyed something stouter than canvas for bunkhouses.
Not long after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the strategist behind the surprise bombing, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, formed a plan to annihilate the remainder of the United States Pacific fleet.
The plan had Yamamota splitting his own fleet, sending two aircraft carriers northward to Alaska's Aleutian Islands with supporting ships and submarines. Japanese carrier planes would bomb American outposts in the Aleutians. Support ships would land Japanese troops to establish a stronghold and air base.
In April of 1942, hungry for a reprisal after Pearl Harbor, the United States had struck back at Japan in the Doolittle Raid. Twin-engine American bombers (normally flown from ground-based airfields only) launched from an American aircraft carrier in the Pacific to drop terror into the streets of Tokyo.
Desperate to know how American planes had managed to reach them, Japan dismissed a carrier launch as impossible. They suspected the raiders had flown from the Aleutians. In June of '42, Japan's move against the Aleutian chain would establish an air base there as a point of defense for their home islands.
But the larger point of Yamamota's Aleutian scheme was to draw the remnant of the American Pacific fleet out of its Pearl Harbor base in response to Japan's move toward Alaska. The bigger portion of Yamamota's fleet would wait to intercept the American navy in the central Pacific near Midway Atoll.
At the far western end of the Hawaiian Island chain, Midway held two American airfields. If they captured Midway, the Japanese could fly land-based bombers to hit American targets in Hawaii. And if Japan established air bases in the Aleutians, they could bomb mainland Alaska and as far south as Seattle.
As things turned out, the admiral's scheme lost something in execution. Smart as he was, Admiral Yamamota did not know American code breakers had just unraveled the Japanese navy cipher for encrypting radio messages. Listening in on Yamamota's communications, the Americans out-jumped him at every move and handed him a major defeat at the Battle of Midway June 4 - 7.
Unfortunately, at the same time, the Japanese attack on the Aleutians succeeded. June 3rd and 4th of 1942, carrier-launched Zeroes bombed the United States navy base at Dutch Harbor on the island of Unalaska toward the eastern end of the Aleutian chain.
Japanese bombers did serious damage. American response was frustratingly impotent. American pilots sacrificed themselves and their planes trying to strike a death blow against the two Japanese aircraft carriers. But dense fog typical of the area screened the enemy fleet from American detection most of the time and killed American pilots who became lost flying blind through the weather in search of the enemy.
After the attack at Dutch Harbor, the Japanese landed troops on Attu Island near the western end of the Aleutian chain and farther east on Kiska where they established an air base. The United States military responded by island hopping out the Aleutian archipelago, planting air bases as fast as they could.
McLaughlin shipped first to Adak and later, farther west down the island chain. January 12th, 1943, McLaughlin arrived with a landing force on the island of Amchitka within 50 miles of the Japanese air base on Kiska Island. "We had Army engineers. We had Seabees," McLaughlin said. "They were building landing strips on those islands."
As construction went forward on Amchitka, the Japanese sent bombers from Kiska daily to harass the work. "One or two planes would drop a few bombs and strafe us," McLaughlin said. "They'd try to strafe us in the dinner line. The Army changed dinner time every day, so they couldn't depend on when we'z gonna be there."
During a Japanese air raid on January 24, McLaughlin jumped into a foxhole. When he landed on a stone at the pit's bottom, his leg bent unnaturally, tearing some tendons. Though McLaughlin received treatment for the injury, it presented recurring problems.
Early on, McLaughlin's drawing skill landed him a good Army job. "They assigned me to service company at headquarters to be in plans and training," he said. On Amchitka, operations officer Colonel Otway Binns put McLaughlin to work mapping. At the start of the war, the Army had no detailed maps of the Aleutians, McLaughlin said.
"All they had was outline maps and charts for the Navy," he said. "Nobody lived there. Maybe a few Aleuts. There were five on Amchitka when we went in there. We sent them back to Sitka [on mainland Alaska] for their protection."
McLaughlin went to tracing the one available map of Amchitka. "We had one map from the Army engineers," he said. "Binns had one copy. I had to make enough copies of that so commanders [on the island] could plot out their gun placements." McLaughlin traced Binns' map at a drawing board, then ran out copies on a blue print machine in the engineers' office.
Previously McLaughlin worked a special assignment for Major Kilgore of the 11th Air Force. For Kilgore he made contour models of Aleutian islands for pilot training. To do this, McLaughlin viewed aerial reconnaissance photos through a stereo viewer, noted the contours and elevations, and converted the information into large three-dimensional island models, mounted on boards.
Arranged on a hangar floor, the large models mimicked the Aleutian island chain. Pilots looked down from a catwalk above to learn the look of the islands in actual flight, to identify individual islands and features.
While strategically less significant after the Japanese disaster at Midway, Japan's possession of Kiska and Attu insulted United States sovereignty over the Alaska Territory. The United States moved to regain the islands in spring 1943.
The Americans would strike Attu first. Overthrowing Attu's smaller garrison at the end of the island chain would leave Kiska's larger force and its airfield strategically isolated from Japan.
Selected for the Attu invasion, the American 7th Army Division, trained in the California desert for combat in North Africa, shipped for Attu instead. Major General Albert Brown led the division on to the island. Ill-equipped, poorly prepared (and cut off from substantial air or naval support by heavy fog), the American invasion bogged down. In the mountainous terrain, the Japanese were dug-in on commanding heights.
"They had holes in the mountains just like a bear's den," McLaughlin said. "For anybody attacking, all they had to do was just drop the gun down and just mow 'em off."
Expecting to secure the island in a few days, the 7th Division went ashore in standard issue leather boots and field jackets. When the battle drug on for 20 days, the 7th Division suffered heavy losses from exposure. "A lot froze their feet, and they had to be amputated," McLaughlin said.
“The 4th Infantry out of Alaska went to help,” he said. “The 4th Infantry, 11th Air Force and the Navy won the battle. The Navy could lay offshore and fire into 'em, and the Air Force could bomb. The 4th Infantry was ground troops. With the 4th Infantry were the Alaskan Scouts.”
An irregular unit, the Alaskan Scouts were recruited from frontiersmen in the territory. Familiar with the rigors of the region, the Scouts exemplified "rough and ready."
Master Sergeant McLaughlin travelled with Colonel Binns from headquarters on Amchitka to participate in the Attu invasion as observers. McLaughlin remembers encountering an Alaskan Scout seated on a heap of enemy dead, going through their pockets. Asked what he was about, the Scout replied, "Looking for yen. So far I've got about 30-cent's-worth."
Hemmed in and out-numbered, Attu's Japanese garrison ended the battle by sacrificing themselves in a suicide charge. About 3,000 Japanese soldiers died on Attu. McLaughlin remembers only 16 being captured as prisoners.
Later when American forces landed on Kiska, they found the island deserted. Using fog as their ally, the Japanese had already evacuated the garrison by ship and slipped quietly away.
The struggle for Attu holds a unique position in World War II history. "That was the only [land] battle that occurred on United States soil," McLaughlin explained. "Alaska was a United States territory at that time."
By 1944 the Army had a points system for returning individual soldiers to the United States. If you had earned enough points, you could fill a service slot stateside.
McLaughlin and Colonel Binns both had the magic number, so they struck a deal. If the first ship in were a Liberty ship, a freighter, McLaughlin should go, Binns suggested. If it was a troop ship, the Colonel would ride. McLaughlin agreed.
He and Binns were friends, McLaughlin explained. "He was operations officer. I was operations sergeant."
When the first ship to dock was a Liberty ship, Binns talked McLaughlin out of his berth. "He said, 'If you let me go, I'll treat you right some day.'" McLaughlin recalls.
The sergeant gave in, and the colonel sailed off into the sunset. That would be west. When he climbed aboard, the colonel was unaware the ship was still outward bound.
The vessel spent the next three weeks calling westward along the Aleutian chain before ever turning toward the United States. A few days after Binns' bon voyage, a troop ship arrived and McLaughlin embarked. "I was back to the States four weeks before he got there," McLaughlin smiled.
He spent four days riding a train cross-country from Seattle to Fort Mead Maryland, where he received ten day's leave and went to see his girl.
George McLaughlin met nurse Allena Rae Hickman through wartime letters. George's older brother paired the two, asking Allena if she would write to his kid brother, a lonely soldier in Alaska. The two had been writing back and forth a couple of years.
"She was in the hospital in Parsons, West Virginia, 20 miles from my hometown," McLaughlin said. "I got off the bus there and went straight to see her. I met her on Sunday, had a date with her on Tuesday and married her on Thursday the same week," George said. "And that was 62 years ago."
His bride was an officer, an Army nurse, a 2nd lieutenant, and she outranked George. To remedy that, McLaughlin headed to Officers Candidate School to become an officer himself.
When his injured leg kept him from being commissioned, he landed an enlisted job at the Pentagon doing aerial photo interpretation. He was helping with plans for the invasion of Japan.
When his job was suddenly counted too sensitive for an enlisted man, the brass he worked with had McLaughlin discharged as a master sergeant and immediately commissioned a 2nd lieutenant. After buying new uniforms, McLaughlin was back on his job the same day.
The change brought regrets. "I had more authority as a Master Sergeant than I had as a 2nd lieutenant," McLaughlin said. It was one of the few regrets of his military service. For the most part, he spent his Army years near headquarters, rubbing elbows with men you find in the history books. Some were larger than life.
McLaughlin met forceful, loud-spoken General Simon Bolivar Buckner shortly after arriving at Kodiak, Alaska. Son of a Confederate General, Buckner headed Alaska Defense Command. Bending rules and breaking them when he had to, Buckner managed to bring a totally unprepared, frontier Alaska to a state of readiness as the anticipated Japanese assault arrived.
McLaughlin remembers a day at headquarters when the general brandished a bottle of White Horse scotch. "You see that?" Buckner asked, pointing to the white stallion on the label. "That's the emperor's white horse. I'm gonna ride that son-of-a-bitch down Main Street Tokyo."
Buckner later died in a mortar blast on Okinawa, leading American ground troops in the invasion of that Japanese home island. The general was just a few islands away from keeping his promise.
"I'm the most fortunate individual in the world," McLaughlin said, "because I got to meet all these people and be with them. I'm 87 years old," he smiled. "I've always had a good time. I've enjoyed everything I ever did." |
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| Master Sergeant George McLaughlin (age 22) stands with a section of a contour model he crafted of the Aleutian Island chain during his assignment to Alaska during World War II. Pilots used McLaughlin’s models to learn the look of the Aleutians from the air. |
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