For those who were there, it’s as if World War II happened yesterday

By Gracie Bonds Staples

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

One is a Naval Academy graduate who marched up the ranks to admiral before his military career ended. One was a Navy pilot who cries when he remembers his roommate’s death. And one is a retired air repairman who never saw combat.

Three old men. Three sets of memories from the same war. Some they’ve repressed — others they recall in vivid detail. What they can’t remember on their own, old black-and-white photos, letters and other ephemera can evoke.

But if they had just one wish, it would be that no one ever thinks of the war dead as just a number.

“What people don’t realize is they were fathers, brothers, friends, people somebody loved,” said Bob Murphy, at 89 the youngest of this group who sat with us last week and recalled their stories of World War II.

G. Earl York

U.S. and Japanese warships had clashed once again off Guadalcanal. Now Earl York was about to join the ranks.

Just two years earlier on Christmas Day, York, then a quality inspector working for Ford Motor Co., married Iris Crownover, the woman he calls “the love of my life.” War was the last thing on his mind, but he headed to basic training.

He and Iris were in Kansas when news came that York’s unit — the 369th Bomber Squadron — was being shipped to Tinian, an island in the South Pacific. In the fall, York and members of the 72 service group, responsible for servicing aircraft, shipped out.

There’s a lot about the war York says he doesn’t remember. But he says there were three things he would never forget: his serial and rifle numbers and Iris.

“She is my life,” he said in the Buckhead home they share with their son, Michael.

He wrote poems — sometimes to remind her of how he felt about her and other times to share his thoughts about the war.

Iris kept each one.

“[On Tinian] my outfit was a material squadron that took care of the planes,” said York, now 92. “Our living quarters were about two miles from the airstrips” and the tents housing Japanese prisoners of war.

From his office window, he could see the Enola Gay.

A pipe filled with Prince Albert tobacco steeled his nerve the way writing poems did.

Twice he was on Iwo Jima, he said. The first time was when he took a group of soldiers there “to see if we could get a B-29 back in the action.”

“The Japanese were fighting on the beach,’’ York said. “We couldn’t get on the island.”

The second time was when the soldiers raised American flags in victory and the war was finally over.

Bob Murphy

War turned Bob Murphy against numbers.

An Atlanta native, he was a student at Georgia Tech when the war began.

A member of the Naval ROTC, he signed up as an enlisted man in January 1942 and was shipped off to boot camp in Norfolk, Va.

There, he first saw a Grumman Avenger, the torpedo bomber credited with sinking dozens of Japanese warships.

“I told a chief petty officer that I’d give my front seat in hell to be able to fly that plane,” he remembers.

That officer said he would get Murphy into flight training, and he did. He graduated from pre-flight school at the University of Georgia in 1942 and got his wings in Corpus Christi, Texas. He learned to land on an aircraft carrier in training on Lake Michigan.

“I had to make eight landings to qualify for the Pacific Fleet,” he said. “I did it in an hour.”

Murphy soon headed to California for more training and then to the Pacific with Torpedo Squadron 1, serving on the USS Yorktown and later the USS Bennington.

“I made 70 carrier landings in all,” Murphy said.

He was on a flight going in to bomb a Japanese battleship tied up at Yokohama when the strike was recalled.

“We dropped our bombs in the ocean and returned to the base,” Murphy said.

The Japanese had surrendered but Murphy didn’t know whether to believe the news.

He was on his way home, 8,000 feet over the USS Missouri, when the peace treaty was being signed aboard ship.

He wrote to his fiancee, Betsy Osborne.

“Well, we’ve been at sea for 72 days but the war is over,” Murphy wrote. “I’m ready to come home. I need some loving.”

But first, he had a promise to keep.

Murphy had made a deal with his roommate, George Gustin. If one of them didn’t survive, the other would go to see their loved ones back home.

Two months before the war ended, Gustin was killed during a raid on Kure.

So Murphy went to St. Louis and met with Gustin’s fiancee, parents and his little sister.

“I’d rather go on 10 missions than to do that again,” he said with tears in his eyes. “That’s a real hard thing to do. It’s why I don’t like numbers.”

George A. O’Connell Jr.

Murphy and George O’Connell live in the same Buckhead community for seniors. One day, Murphy said, he overheard someone call O’Connell “Admiral.”

“I went over and saluted him,” he said.

At 96, O’Connell can recount his years on Navy battleships with precision, ticking off their names and offenses as if he just stepped off their decks.

But most of the time, he’d rather not.

O’Connell entered the U.S. Naval Academy right after high school in 1931.

“I was aiming at West Point,” he said, “but my girlfriend’s mother talked me into taking the Naval Academy exam.”

He passed it and the West Point entrance exam, too, and the choice came down to “a roll of the dice.”

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, O’Connell was assistant to the gunnery officer on the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City.

His crew escorted and supported battles all over the Pacific and Atlantic, he said.

“We got pretty shot up in the Battle of Guadalcanal, but we won,” he said smiling.

They headed to the Aleutian Islands and the Battle of Komandorski, “outnumbered two to one, but we ran them off,” O’Connell said.

He was in Okinawa when the war ended.

O’Connell said he doesn’t think about the war much, but he doubts he’ll ever forget it.

“Luckily, God gives you a memory that you can blot out.”