Two Veterans Look Back at World War II

Tomorrow morning, Robert Johnston will put on his dress blues and head downtown, where there will be at the Common and two cemeteries.

Frederick “Chickie” Reid will mark the day, Memorial Day, more privately.

Both Johnston and Reid are veterans of World War II; Johnston, the Marines, Reid the Navy.

Johnston, 88, survived four battles in the Pacific, including the carnage on Iwo Jima.

A Marine division had about 19,000 men, Johnston explained.  His division suffered more than 17,000 casualties, he said, which includes the wounded and the dead. More than 8,000 men died, he said.

Johnston, who was 20 when he enlisted, was commissioned a second lieutenant on Iwo Jima.

“They gave second lieutenants all the dirty jobs,” he said. He was assigned to make sure the network of tunnels the Japanese used to defend the island were empty.

To fulfill his orders, Johnston said he once walked over “15 to 20” dead Japanese. One wasn’t dead. “The guy behind me said, ‘Hit the deck,’” Johnston recounted, and shot the enemy.  Johnston brought home a souvenir of that encounter—a Japanese sword—along with his life.

The Marines’ overall strategy on Iowa Jima? “We got ‘em with flamethrowers,” Johnston, a Woburn resident for the past 55 years, said. “We toasted them out.”

Reid, 84, survived a kamikaze attack at Okinawa that killed 100 of his shipmates, a quarter of the crew, he said, on the USS Terror.  He enlisted in the Navy when he was 17. “Everybody was going,” the Woburn native said. 

“I didn’t realize what I was getting into.”

Reid’s boat was hit only six months into his service.

“If you were in that territory (on the ship)," he said, “you were done.” He had just been transferred out of that area.

“Anybody who tells you they were not scared when that hit, they’d be lying. (But) You didn’t have time to get scared (beforehand)," he recalled. 

“When this happened, we knew we were in the war.”

Both Johnston and Reid received Purple Hearts.  Johnston received two, for injuries he sustained at Iwo Jima and Saipan; Reid, for injuries from the attack on the USS Terror.

Johnston received a Bronze Star for getting men off Iwo Jima, onto a ship.

“I wasn’t any better than anybody else,” he said. “They thought it was above the call of duty.”

Both men think of friends who never made it home, the “poor kids,” in Reid’s words, “who ‘got it.'”  As he gets older, “You try not to think of it,” the former electrician, second class, said.

Johnston says he takes time on Memorial Day “to reflect on some fellas we lost, who were killed and wounded.” Some of the wounded are, he said, “in hospitals to this day.”

This time of year, Johnston speaks to students who are several years younger now than he was when he enlisted—20, “just after Pearl Harbor”—in Reading and Wilmington, about the war.

In response to his visit, Wilmington students have written that Johnston is a hero. Modest, too.

When Johnston and his three brothers were in the service—two in the Marines, two in the Navy—his mother would go into her bedroom every night, he said, close the door and pray for their safe return.

“You couldn’t tell her,” he said, “that prayer isn’t answered.”

Both Johnston and Reid attend reunions of their units.  Both see their ranks thinning.

About nine months ago, Johnston was invited to preview a TV miniseries, “The Pacific,” directed by Tom Hanks, in Boston, about that aspect of the war.  It was “pretty accurate,” Johnston said, although it didn’t cover many of the battles that he fought. He met Hanks, he said, and was interviewed by Channels 4, 5 and 7.

Johnston and his wife, Claire, celebrated a “hat trick” earlier this month:  a party for both their birthdays and their upcoming 65th wedding anniversary. 

Tomorrow, Memorial Day, Reid will go to a cemetery. He will decorate the grave where his wife, Betty, and their child, who died very young, lie. Chickie and Betty had been married for 62 years. She died 10 months ago. Chickie still plays guitar and sings in two country western bands.

Until this year, Johnston had walked in the Memorial Day parade. This year, he’s going to ride.

As for his uniform, Johnston said he weighs about five pounds more now then he did in 1942. During the war he dropped about 30 pounds after contracting malaria and jaundice. Over time, his uniform has had be “adjusted” outward, he acknowledged.

At Monday’s ceremonies, the Marine Corps League’s Color Guard is the only group that fires volleys during the ceremonies, Johnston said.  A member of the color guard, he will shoulder a rifle and fire it at the Common and two cemeteries.

“The rifle gets heavier,” he said, “every year.”