In a wartime theater of death, lessons about life and honor

Three Warren veterans speak about their survival and remembering the fallen.
By WILLIAM K. ALCORN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
WARREN -- Stan Pierson, Verne Hoehn's best friend at Warren G. Harding High School and the man with whom he enlisted, was a machine-gunner credited with killing 35 Japanese during the World War II battle of Okinawa.
"Stan was killed the last day of the campaign. A sniper got him ... right in the heart. He never said a word.
"To me, they are the real heroes ... the ones that never came back," Hoehn said.
Walter Ogrean remembers a Navy corpsman who had bandaged his finger and was shot and killed the next day.
"I want to be a spokesman for those people who didn't come back ... the ones who were foxhole buddies for a day or two, or even minutes, then we'd go on the push and they'd get killed.
"All the words that these guys said before they died, I don't want to forget," Ogrean said.
Ogrean and Hoehn are right about not forgetting, said Sam Lanza, a strong advocate for veterans rights for 56 years.
But, he said, "we also have to represent the ones that are here with us now that don't know who to see and where to go. That's all I believe in. I'm beginning to believe that's what I was put on this earth for."
Final months
Hoehn, Ogrean and Lanza, who did not know each other as young men, enlisted in the Marine Corps in the early 1940s and all ended up in the U.S. invasion on Okinawa between April 1 and June 21, 1945, when the island was secured.
Just weeks later, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing the Japanese government to surrender Aug. 14, 1945.
But during those horrific months, 12,000 Americans and 207,000 Japanese, including an estimated 100,000 Okinawan civilians, died as Japan made a last-ditch effort to protect its mainland.
The three Warren residents, Hoehn, Ogrean and Lanza, sat at the Trumbull County Disabled Veterans Chapter 11 and talked about their experiences on Okinawa, and how, because of luck or fate, they survived.
Tried to play dead
Hoehn was moving on a machine gun emplacement when he got shot in the leg.
He flopped to the ground and tried to play dead. But the Japanese apparently didn't believe him, because they were sniping at his head. The bullets sprayed dirt over him as he lay there for 10 or 15 minutes wondering if he would live or die.
Finally, smoke was put up for cover, two corpsmen dragged him down an embankment, and he crawled back to a temporary hospital.
"It's funny; at times when shrapnel was falling around, I don't think I or the guys around me were particularly afraid. I was a little concerned when I got shot," Hoehn said. "I think it's fate; a bullet could have hit me in the heart, and that would have been it."
"It was not so much afraid; you had other things on your mind, like being tired and hungry, and thirsty and dirty, and hoping you can meet your goal of killing your enemy the best you know how," Ogrean said.
A different plan
Ogrean, who had his first taste of combat on the Southwest Pacific island of Guadalcanal, said a bullet went between his legs there and hit another guy in the shoulder. "It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time," he said.
When he got out of Guadalcanal, he was in New Zealand recovering from malaria. There, he decided that when he got back to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, he would learn to be a mechanic. "At least when it's raining or cold, you have a cab to get in," he said with a laugh.
But his plan didn't keep him off Okinawa.
It was not only the fighting that changed their lives, but the other men they met.
Lanza said he was angry and bitter after he was nearly killed by a satchel charge explosion.
Then he met a man in the hospital in Hawaii, where he was recovering, and that meeting changed his life.
"I was upset and feeling horrible, and the guy across from me was cheerful, and asked me how I was doing and wasn't it a beautiful day outside.
"I found out he had already had an arm and a leg taken off, and that day he was to lose another leg.
"And he was asking me how I was doing and telling me it was a beautiful day out there. That changed my attitude 100 percent," Lanza said.
Enlisted for war
The three had enlisted, not really knowing what they were getting into.
Hoehn said his attitude had been "Let's go get the Japs." He was 22 when he enlisted.
"We were downtown [in Warren] when Pearl Harbor was hit. We decided to raise hell for a couple of weeks and then go enlist," he said.
Ogrean had gone into a drugstore to buy cigarettes when he heard the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
"I told my girl, I bet we go to war. I said to a buddy, 'Let's go enlist,' and he said, 'Let's wait until after Christmas.'"
Their innocence was quickly lost when they got to the Pacific Theater and faced the kill-or-be-killed realities of war.
The Okinawa veterans, in one way or another, echoed Ogrean's sentiments when he said: "Getting out of there alive made me appreciate life so bad, it's not funny."
alcorn@vindy.com