The Patriot Files Forums  

Go Back   The Patriot Files Forums > Conflict posts > World War II

Post New Thread  Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old 03-08-2019, 10:10 AM
Boats's Avatar
Boats Boats is offline
Senior Member
 

Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Sauk Village, IL
Posts: 21,784
Arrow From Major League Baseball to paying the ultimate sacrifice on Iwo Jima: Marine was l

From Major League Baseball to paying the ultimate sacrifice on Iwo Jima: Marine was larger than life
By: J.S. Simkins - Marine Times - 3-7-19
RE: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/off...ger-than-life/

Photo link: https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/M_...MBIVJM5HHA.jpg
Harry O'Neill played in one Major League game but never got the chance to hit. He would join the Marines after the attack of Pearl Harbor and was killed during the assault on Iwo Jima. (Society for American Baseball Research)

Fans of the baseball tear-jerker, “Field of Dreams,” starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones, are well-versed in the mystique surrounding Archibald Graham, portrayed in the film during his later years by legendary actor, Bert Lancaster.

As the story goes, Graham was toiling in the minor leagues for many years when, in 1905, his dreams of playing at the game’s highest level were finally realized when the New York Giants purchased his contract.

During the waning moments of a June 29 game, Graham was summoned from the bench, for the first time, to replace George Browne in right field. With his team up to bat and two outs in the top of the ninth inning, Graham strode into the on-deck circle, confidently awaiting a chance to hit in the big leagues for the first time. But Claude Elliot flied out, ending the inning.

He’d never play in another Major League game.

Almost 34 years after “Doc” Graham — as he was affectionately known in Chisholm, Minnesota, where he practiced medicine for 50 years after walking away from baseball — made his only appearance in a Major League game, another player was writing a similar script, except his was not a story magnified in a book or immortalized through cinema.

Harry O’Neill was a highly regarded three-sport athlete coming out of Gettysburg College in 1939. On the day of his graduation, the Philadelphia Athletics — and Hall-of-Fame manager, Connie Mack — came calling, inking the 6-foot-3, 205-pound star catcher to a contract that paid him $200 a month.

O’Neill spent that season as the team’s third-string backstop, never sniffing the prospect of Major League action while relegated to the bullpen, used only when a pitcher needed to warm up.

His restriction to the pen was lifted, though, on July 23, 1939, when he was told to enter the contest as defensive substitute for the final two innings of a lopsided game between the A’s and Hank Greenberg’s Tigers.

The Tigers would go on to bludgeon the A’s, 16-3.

O’Neill would never again be called into a Major League game.

Like Graham, O’Neill was not afforded the chance to dig and swipe his cleats into the fine dirt and crisp chalk lines of a Major League Baseball batter’s box.

But unlike Graham’s universally respected leap into the world of medicine, O’Neill’s life after baseball would take him to distant corners of the world, to islands most Americans — at the time — had never even heard of.

He was bouncing between high school coaching gigs, playing semi-professional basketball and football, and last-ditch attempts at clawing his way back into Major League Baseball when the Japanese stunned the world by launching a vicious attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

O’Neill, like many Americans, responded by volunteering to fight. And less than a year later, he was wrapping up Marine Corps boot camp, donning the Eagle, Globe and Anchor and heading off to Quantico, Virginia, to become an officer.

Upon pinning on the shiny brass insignia of a Marine second lieutenant, Harry O’Neill received orders to Camp Pendleton, California, to train with the recently-formed Fourth Marine Division.

At Pendleton, O’Neill’s knack for leadership turned the heads of his superiors, and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant.

His personal life was looking up, as well.

O’Neill was newly married to his hometown sweetheart, Ethel McKay, who made the cross-country trip to California from Colwyn, Pennsylvania, to spend what little time the couple had together before a ever-looming deployment to the Pacific interrupted any semblance of a normal matrimony.

And brief it was.

On Jan. 13, 1944, 1st Lt. Harry O’Neill and the Marines of the 25th Marine Regiment, Fourth Marine Division, loaded their gear onto ships and steamed for a relentless enemy awaiting them across the Pacific.

ISLAND HOPPING

It wouldn’t take long after leaving California for the young lieutenant to experience his first taste of action.

Less than three weeks after saying goodbye to his wife, O’Neill waded ashore on the 880-yard-wide, two-and-a-half-mile-long island of Kwajalein as part of an amphibious assault that made quick work of the fortified Japanese defenses.

The Marines declared the island secure in only four days, marking a significant momentum shift for U.S. forces in the island hopping campaign toward mainland Japan.

By June 1944, O’Neill and the Marines from the “Fighting Fourth” had their sights set on their next major target: Saipan.

But just one day after landing and beginning the push inland, O’Neill was hit in the arm by shrapnel from an artillery round, an injury that sidelined him for weeks on a hospital ship while U.S. forces inflicted nearly 30,000 casualties on Japanese defenses to secure the island.

Thousands of Japanese civilians would also die in the nearly four-week assault, many by their own hand.

Sufficiently healed, O’Neill rejoined his unit on July 22, just days before another successful amphibious assault by the Fourth Marines — this time on the island of Tinian, a week-long campaign that netted the U.S. and its allies an airfield that became one of the most frequently used throughout the rest of the war.

IWO JIMA

Months after the success at Tinian, the Fighting Fourth were tasked with their fourth major assault in 13 months — a small, volcanic island with black beaches and rough, ragged terrain that one Navy lieutenant, viewing the island from the bridge of a troopship, described as “a rude, ugly sight,” according to a WWII Series by the National Park Service.

“Only a geologist could look at it and not be repelled.”

At 6:45 a.m. on Feb. 19, 1945, the order was given to launch the assault on Iwo Jima.

Photo link: https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/6o...YPYPBFPNTM.jpg
Marines from the Fighting Fourth are briefed on their objective just prior to D-Day at Iwo Jima. (USMC)

A thunderous naval and aerial bombardment commenced, pummeling targets that had long been identified on maps in planning stages, while anxious Marines, including Harry O’Neill and men from the 25th Marine Regiment, looked on in awe as the hellish landscape was torn by orange bursts of hot steel, clouding the air with smoke and ash.

The 25th were tasked with the daunting assault of Blue Beach Two and scaling a towering area known as the Rock Quarry, a vulnerable sector along the extreme right flank of the attack that was in full view of elevated Japanese fortifications.

Recognizing the difficulties that lay ahead, Maj. Gen. Clifton B. Cates, commander of the Fourth Marine Division, admitted, “If I knew the name of the man on the extreme right of the right-hand squad I’d recommend him for a medal before we go in.”

By 9 a.m., Marines and landing craft from multiple other divisions covered vast sections of the beach, not yet experiencing the harsh resistance that awaited as the day wore on.

For many, the terrain itself posed the greatest difficulty.

“The sand was so soft it was like trying to run in loose coffee grounds,” one Marine rifleman recalled.

Advancing up Blue Beach, however, the ominous prediction of Maj. Gen. Cates came to fruition when the 25th Marines came under an intense coordinated barrage of rifles, machine guns, mortars and artillery.

Map link: https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/u-...P52YTZQHFY.jpg
The "Landing Plan" for the assault on Iwo Jima. Note Blue Beach 2 (bottom center), where Marines encountered some of the worst resistance. (USMC)

“That right flank was a bitch if there ever was one,” Cates commented.

Unforgiving ground made finding cover nearly impossible, with one Marine comparing his attempt to dig a fox hole to “trying to dig a hole in a barrel of wheat.”

A 10:36 a.m. message over the command net from 25th Marines to the assault’s flagship painted a picture of the dire situation.

“Catching all hell from the quarry,” the correspondence said. "Heavy mortar and machine gun fire!'

Lt. Col. Justice Chambers, who would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions on Iwo, commented on the near-impossible task of advancing up the Rock Quarry.

“Crossing that second terrace, you could’ve held up a cigarette and lit it on the stuff going by,” he said. “I knew immediately we were in for one hell of a time.”

Four days into the assault, meanwhile, Marines on the other side of the island had taken Mount Suribachi, eventually raising a replacement American Flag — after the original was taken down — on Feb. 23, a moment made iconic by photographer Joe Rosenthal.

Nine days later, the first damaged U.S. bomber returning from a raid on Tokyo was able to land safely on Iwo Jima’s Airfield No. 1.

The Marines were making headway, but much fighting remained.

Photo link: https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/1K...N6HWO6TNS4.jpg
Comm Marines from the 4th Marine Division establish radio contact on Iwo Jima. (USMC)

For O’Neill and the 25th Marines, territorial gains through the Rock Quarry and the Turkey Knob — a section of the island referred to ominously as “The Meatgrinder,” and one critical to securing the second airfield — were much harder to come by.

On March 6, O’Neill was engaged in a day-long fight near the Turkey Knob when he managed to find what he perceived as decent cover — a bomb crater he shared with Pfc. James Kontes.

“We were standing shoulder to shoulder. Harry was on my left," Kontes said in a 2009 interview with the Bucks County Courier Times. "We were looking out at the terrain in front of us. And this shot came out of nowhere.”

Kontes watched his lieutenant collapse, the sniper’s surgical round tearing into O’Neill’s neck and severing his spinal cord.

Harry O’Neill was dead. He was 27 years old.

AFTERMATH

It would be another 20 days before Iwo Jima was officially secured.

O’Neill was buried in the island’s cemetery alongside nearly 7,000 other Marines.

Two years would pass before his body returned to the United States, when he was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.

Over 1,800 Marines from the 4th Marine Division had been killed on Iwo Jima, and another 7,200 wounded.

The total number of casualties incurred by the division accounted for more than 50 percent of the division’s total force.

The 5th Maine Div. Grave site photo: https://www.armytimes.com/resizer/xJ...T4QWRGXWHU.jpg
A clipping showing a cemetery dedicated to the Fifth Marine Division on Iwo Jima, with Mt. Suribachi looming in the background. (AP)

“At Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, I saw Marines killed and wounded in a shocking manner, but I saw nothing like the ghastliness that hung over the Iwo beachhead,” noted Marine and combat correspondent, Lt. Cyril Zurlinden.

“Nothing any of us had ever known could compare with the utter anguish, frustration, and constant inner battle to maintain some semblance of sanity.”

A month would go by before Ethel would receive official notice of her husband’s death from the Department of the Navy.

In death, O’Neill was immortalized, becoming one of just two players with Major League Baseball experience to be killed during World War II.

Elmer Gedeon was killed in 1944 when a B-26 bomber he was flying was shot down over France.

Weeks after news of Harry’s death had reached his family, O’Neill’s sister, Susanna, wrote a letter to Gettysburg College, breaking the tragic news to the coaches and faculty of the athletic department where Harry had wowed so many as a three-sport star just a few years prior.

“We are trying to keep our courage up, as Harry would want us to do," she wrote. "But our hearts are very sad, and as the days go on it seems to be getting worse. Harry was always so full of life that it seems hard to think he is gone.

“But God knows best, and perhaps someday we will understand why all this sacrifice of so many fine young men.”

Ryan Spaeder, Marine and co-author of “Incredible Baseball Stats,” contributed to this story.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personal note: My Uncle Bill (nickname Willy) was also in WWII in the Marines during these island battles. He suffered the after effects the rest of his life. Many of his best BUDS were lost or severely wounded. He had terrible nightmares and his spirit was lost after that war. He died by cerous of his liver from heavy drinking and died in his bed. Never married after the war and stayed in the house with his Mother until the day he died. He was a swell guy but had many issues that he re-lived - day after day - just couldn't hold a job and couldn't work through the events of that war. God Bless you Willy and all the men like him - who suffer these God awful wars.

Boats
__________________
Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
sendpm.gif Reply With Quote
Sponsored Links
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is On

All times are GMT -7. The time now is 10:37 AM.


Powered by vBulletin, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.