Robert Ford Jr., 97, wiry and still ramrod tall like the soldier he once was, pads through his terraced backyard garden, pointing out the lush fall crop of arugula, lettuce and beets.
An Arkansas boy by birth, a cattle farmer and mechanic by trade, and now living with his daughter in metro Atlanta because of age, Ford now coaxes vegetables from the Georgia clay he has transformed through 10 years of composting.
He gave me a bag of fresh lettuce and a recipe to mix it in a skillet with bacon, onions, vinegar, salt and sugar.
“It’ll make you want to slap your grandma,” he said with a smile, lending me a sharp homespun phrase I must someday reuse.
Before exploring his garden, we spent a good while perusing a thick scrapbook and talking of times long past, specifically the end of World War II.
Ford was a bit player in an odd twist of history that occurred after the war was over, 78 years ago this week. But more on that later.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
Ford is a dwindling member of the so-called Greatest Generation. He went off to war and returned to become family man, a volunteer fire chief and city councilman in his hometown of Batesville, Arkansas.
His role in the war was to serve as a foot soldier, to be a replacement grunt in the long-awaited — and feared — invasion of the Japanese mainland. Hundreds of thousands of GIs were expected to be killed or maimed.
Like many of his comrades, Ford figures he might be alive because of the atomic bomb. It’s an argument that has raged for decades: Did dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 save lives?
Critics say Japan was defeated and would have eventually given up anyway. But the invasion of Okinawa just three months earlier gave a hint to the expected horror if the U.S. attacked the homeland of Japan.
According to the World War II Museum, there were nearly 50,000 U.S. casualties, including 12,520 killed, a loss rate of 35%. The Japanese rate was staggering, almost all of the 100,000-plus troops on that island died.
That 100,000 figure also carries significance. Months ago, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimated just 120,000 of the 16.1 million Americans from that war were still alive.
And I’d wager few are still able to turn a garden.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
Ford has been blessed with good health, a superb memory, a sly wit and has a repository of old memorabilia and stories.
During our visit, he presented his Brownie Reflex Synchro camera that allowed him to click off shots of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as he reviewed troops standing at attention in Saipan. The sneaky photoshoot irked Ford’s sergeant, although the future president simply grinned at Ford after hearing the shutter’s click. He figures Ike was working a future voter.
Ford then displayed an ominous leaflet dropped by the bundle over Japan just days before the atomic bombs fell. The pamphlet, written in Japanese, has a photo of five B-29 Superfortresses unloading bombs and warns citizens that four cities are about to be destroyed. It tells them “to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.”
Earlier in the war, Ford had lucked out by contracting scarlet fever, which prevented him being thrown into the maw that was Okinawa. But he, and a million soldiers like him, expected the same — or worse — on the shores of Japan.
“We were getting ready for the invasion of Japan; there were trucks and tanks and people training all over,” he said of late July 1945. “They told us this will be the bloodiest campaign of the war. They told us that Japanese children will have sharpened sticks and we might have to shoot if they attacked. Thank goodness I never had to do that.”
Among his other keepsakes is a Japanese canteen, with a name etched into it. He found it in a cave while GIs searched for stragglers on island, Japanese soldiers who would not give up and existed like phantoms in the jungle.
A year earlier, in 1944, almost all the 29,000 Japanese defenders of Saipan were killed, the last being those in a suicidal Banzai charge of 4,000 soldiers. The survivors included Captain Sakae Ōba, who ended up leading perhaps 100 soldiers and a larger number of Japanese civilians.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
For a year, American troops repeatedly searched the jungles, capturing a few soldiers here and there, although Ōba and his cohort were nearly invisible. The war ended on Sept. 2, 1945, with Japan’s surrender. But Ōba would not heed. It was his duty to keep on.
“They’d raid our chow halls and supply lines to survive,” recalled Ford. “We’d set up an outdoor movie. We’d have the jungle behind us. Sometimes we could hear ‘he he he’ in the jungle. They didn’t understand the movies but liked the cartoons.”
Ford said the Americans were not worried about being attacked. It became known that Ōba’s goal was was mainly to survive. The Japanese captain became known as “The Fox” for his elusiveness.
In late, November 1945, A Japanese superior came to Saipan to convince Ōba to surrender. He did so on Dec. 1, 1945, with 46 other soldiers, handing over his sword to an American colonel in a solemn ceremony.
It was 90 days after the Japan’s surrender. Ultimately, the saga was captured in the movie “Oba: The last Samurai.”
Ōba, the son of a farmer, returned to his wife and child, worked for a department store and, like Ford, was later elected as a city councilman in his hometown.
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