War Archives - Page 11 of 11

Theodore Hubert Dalton

Hermitage, PA

U.S. Marine Corps, Vietnam

Even before graduating, Ted Dalton told his friends he wanted to be a Marine, and tried to get others to sign up with him. He managed to get one to go into the Marines with him.

Over strenuous objections from his father, Edward Dalton, he enlisted in the Marine Corps barely a month after graduating from Hickory High School in 1967. After completing training, he shipped out to Vietnam on December 14, 1967.

He was assigned to A Company , 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, in Quang Nam Province, near Da Nang. It was not a pretty place. According to one report on the Internet, of the 14,000 Marines killed in Vietnam, 10,000 were killed in Quang Nam Province.

In August, 1967, Corporal Dalton was wounded by a grenade; he returned to duty in early August.

In letters home, he thanked his father for being tough on him when he was growing up. He wrote that he couldn’t have made it without that.

By October, 1968, Ted was an experienced Marine, having been in combat for more than ten months. Unfortunately, experience doesn’t always guarantee survival. There is always this persistent fact: in the dark of night, in the thick of the jungle, one cannot distinguish friend from foe. Safety depends on careful planning, strict discipline, and precise execution of the plan. The slightest error in any of those aspects can result in disaster.

On the evening of October 31, 1968, something went wrong in one of those elements. Two squads of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines were positioned in the jungle to ambush enemy patrols. Their instructions were to shoot at anything that moved in front of them.

Something moved. They opened fire very effectively, killing two and mortally wounding one. Unfortunately, they weren’t enemy soldiers. They were fellow Marines.

One of those wounded was Marine Corporal Theodore Hubert Dalton from Sharpsville, PA. He was evacuated to the hospital in Da Nang.

“A friend who was there visited us later,” said brother Edward. “He said Ted was awake and in good spirits. But he was wounded in the pelvis, and the bullet lodged in his spine. If he had survived, he would have been paralyzed.”

But the hospital couldn’t save him. He died there on Friday, November 1, 1968.

“He was laid out in our home,” Edward said. “He had written that he wanted to see snow. On the day they brought him home, it snowed.”

On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial l – 40W Line 074

Thomas R. Marshall

Sandy Lake, PA

U.S. Army – Vietnam

When Sgt. Thomas R. Marshall of Sandy Lake, PA, wrote home from Vietnam, he didn’t write about the horrors of war. He wrote about how beautiful the country and the people were. That’s not surprising, because he was an artist at heart. It takes an artist to focus on the beauty that can often be found in the midst of ugliness.

He enlisted in the army while he was a student at the Shenango Campus of Penn State University. According to his brother, Malcolm, he had received several draft notices and just got tired of being harassed. That was in June, 1968, two years after he had graduated from Lakeview High School in Sandy Lake.

“He was a very good artist,” Malcolm said. “He had a very bright future. And he was a super nice guy. He married Tracy Clark from Stoneboro a couple of weeks before he deployed.”

Tom took Basic Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and Advanced Individual Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. He went on to graduate from Non-Commissioned Officer School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

He headed for Vietnam on June 18, 1969, and was assigned to A Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division in Tay Ninh Province, near the Cambodian border. As time went on, it should have been an optimistic time for troops in Vietnam. On November 3, 1969, in a major policy speech on Vietnam, President Richard Nixon made a major announcement:

“We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.”

Withdrawal of American forces, including the 25th Infantry Division, did proceed. So did the intense combat, and the continuing deaths of American soldiers – including Sgt. Marshall, who was killed by small arms fire on December 11, 1969.

He was survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm D. Marshall of Sandy Lake; his wife, Tracy; three sisters and a brother.

On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Panel W15 Line 48

Tom Fiedler

Fiedler, Tom

Hermitage, PA

U.S. Army, World War II

In 1942, a project called the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) sent recruits to colleges and universities across the United States. The intent was to create a specialized corps of Army officers to enhance the conduct of the war and the restoration of civilian governments in Europe after the war. Tom Fiedler passed a series of tests to qualify for the program. He completed infantry basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia before being sent to Westminster College.

After just one semester, the program was terminated. Since Fiedler had infantry training, he was assigned with thousands of other soldiers from the curtailed ASTP program to the 95th Infantry Division at Indiantown Gap, PA.

By September, the Division was in Normandy preparing for a move to the front. While Tom’s unit was waiting for that advance, he participated in one of the most famous logistics operations of the war. Plans to build a pipeline from Normandy to Paris has to be scrapped because the army was advancing so rapidly, consuming 800,000 gallons of fuel a day. To keep the vehicles moving, the army put together the Red Ball Express, a continuous convoy of 2½ ton trucks hauled fuel in 5-gallon jerry cans from Normandy to Paris. There was no stopping. If a truck broke down, it was pushed off to the side of the road.

Fiedler’s driving days ended when he moved with his division to front-line combat. Only three weeks later, he was hit with shrapnel from a mortar or artillery round. Most went through, but there was still a piece left inside.

“I was going to go ahead,” he said,” but when I went to grab my rifle, I couldn’t because my hand was stiff.”

That was the day before his birthday.

“They sent me back to an aid station. About six o’clock the next morning somebody shook me awake. I looked up, and there were chickens on his collar, a colonel. He said, “Is your name Thomas Fiedler?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Here’s your Purple Heart.’ That was my ceremony, and my birthday present.”

Tom ended up in a hospital in England, where they removed the shrapnel. After several months there, he was returned to limited service at a redeployment camp in France, where they processed soldiers to return home. He got back home to his home in Harmony, PA, in March, 1946, with his Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

Tom Hodge

Greenville, PA

U.S. Navy – World War II, Korean War

One fine spring day in 1944, Greenville High School senior Tom Hodge became one of the 10,110, 104 men who received “Greetings” from the Selective Service System during World War II. He was sent to Erie for a physical and initial processing.

“I went to a table manned by a lieutenant commander in the Navy and a major in the Army,” Tom said. “As you put your papers on the table, they stamped one ARMY, the next one NAVY, next one ARMY, and so on. By chance I got into the Navy. I was with a boyhood friend of mine. He wanted to be in the Navy so bad he could taste it. I said I don’t care that much. We decided to talk to the officers thinking maybe they would switch it. They wouldn’t even listen to us. Later on, I was glad I was in the Navy because it worked out better for me,” he said.

During boot camp at Sampson, New York, everyone took placement tests, including one on the ability to understand Morse Code.

“I had learned Morse Code in Boy Scouts, so I got a good mark on the test,” he said.

While many from his boot camp class were sent to amphibious forces preparing for the D-Day invasion of Europe, Tom completed a five-month radio school course right there in Sampson. Along with two of his buddies, he was assigned to the radio station at the headquarters of the Fifth Naval District in Norfolk, Virginia.

“We were seaman first class at this point,” he said. “The first three months all we did was make coffee for everybody else. It was good duty. It was mostly all WAVES there and they were excellent operators and knew their business. I had a second class WAVE supervisor. She said I’m going to make a radio man out of you or know why. She did.”

After those three months, they started standing watches on the radios. For two days, they were on from 7 a.m. to 3 pm. The next two, from 3 to 11; and then two from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

“You were sleepy all the time because you never caught up on your sleep,” he said. “We had to type out all of the incoming messages and key the outgoing messages.”

The radio operators had to type the incoming messages and key in the outgoing. All messages were encoded in groups of five letters. Some were one-to-one ship to shore transmissions, while others were broadcast to all of the ships and land bases in the navy through two transmitters, one in Washington, DC, and the other in Hawaii.

“The only excitement I ever had on the radio was one evening when I was sitting on a ship to shore circuit. All of a sudden I heard this loud message come through – a repeated O O O O meaning ‘urgent.’ The ship was trying to reach Charleston, South Carolina, but they weren’t answering. I broke in and said I could forward their message to Charleston. He sent me a message in plain language, which threw me because I wasn’t used to copying plain language. They said they were being attacked by a submarine. German submarines were cruising up along the Atlantic shore, sinking a lot of ships. So I gave message to my supervisor who sent it by land line to Charleston. I never did hear what happened.”

Tom was very content with his duties there, but one of his friends wasn’t. “After about 3 or 4 months, he decided he wanted to go to sea. He requested sea duty on the part of all of us, against my will. We were sent to a receiving station at Norfolk where we sat around for three or four months. Finally our orders came through. We were being sent to be sent to the Azores.”

They sailed on a troop ship to Oran, in North Africa.

“That’s where the British early in the war had sunk the whole French fleet to prevent its ships from being captured and used by the Germans,” he said.

After a week there, they took a train to Port Lyautey, Morocco, then flew on a B-24 to Lajes Air Base on Terciera Island in the Azores. It’s a small island, only about nine miles long and six miles wide, with two small towns, Praia de Vitoria and Angra do Heroismo.

“I remember them well,” Tom said. “I use to go to them on liberty.”

Tom manned radios with a “split circuit” controlled with a toggle switch. One ear heard messages from Bermuda, New York, Norfolk, and Agentia, Newfoundland; the other from Londonderry (North Ireland), Paris, and Port Lyautey, Morocco. Besides the international messages, they handled a lot of air-sea traffic with ships in the area.

“So I encompassed the entire North Atlantic on those two circuits,” Tom said. “When traffic came in, I flipped the toggle switch so I could only hear with one ear to keep from being confused.”

One night he heard a message from Norfolk.

“I knew all the WAVES at radio station there. I sent a message, ‘What is your call sign?’ It turned out that I knew her. So I started asking her questions in Morse Code: what’s so and so doing, how are things in Norfolk, blah blah blah. This was during the war. That was strictly forbidden. A Long Island station captured all this on the log, so the captain of our base got a notice that someone was doing unauthorized transmission. They looked back and sure enough there were my initials on the log. I got a Captain’s Mast, a low-level disciplinary action – basically, a reprimand.”

When the war was over the “point system” was used to determine eligibility to go home. As one of the youngest, Tom had the least points.

“So I was one of the last to leave,” he said. “I had option to go back on B-24 as its radio operator. We landed in Argentia, and were socked in about a week. Then on to New York City. I had never been there. You could go anywhere on the subway for a nickle.”

When Tom was processed out of the Navy at Bainbridge, Maryland, he was receptive to the pitch they gave about joining the inactive reserves.

“It sounded good. We wouldn’t be called up unless there was a war,” he said. “Then in late forties, there was trouble with Russians, so I signed up for active duty. I didn’t hear anything for several years. During that time I graduated from Thiel College with bachelor’s degree, got married, and had two children.”

Then came the Korean War. Tom was activated. After refresher training, he was assigned to the reconditioned USS Wasp aircraft carrier.

“During re-commissioning, Eleanor Roosevelt and Bernard Baruch came aboard and spoke,” he said. “Captain McCafferty, the ship’s captain, said he would see to it that the Wasp would be a taut ship. And he did. He was a good captain.”

The USS Wasp had 3000 people on board, including the radio crew of 50 men. There were ten radio shacks, each with five radios.

“We weren’t too busy,” Tom said, “but during General Quarters (emergency alert), all radios were manned. I was a pretty good operator so they assigned me to radio central during GQ.”

The Wasp headed for Guantanamo Bay for a shakedown cruise. On the way, they had operational exercises.

“Landing on an aircraft carrier is very difficult,” Tom said. “The ship would be tossing backward and forward and side to side. They had to catch a cable that brought them to a halt. We lost two new pilots right out of training who missed the cables and didn’t have the power to take off.”

The carrier didn’t have the same planes all of the time. “Squadrons would come and go. We always were glad to see the squadrons leave because that meant chow lines would be a lot shorter.”

Tom was released from active duty almost exactly one year after he had been recalled. He credits the Navy with giving him discipline which made him a better person.

“I went in as an immature kid,” he said. “For the first six or eight weeks I was so homesick I could hardly stand it. But once I got into radio school and had something to learn, I enjoyed it from that time on.”

That’s not too surprising, given the nature of his duties. “I was always warm and comfortable with a mug of coffee right at hand.”

Valentine Ambrose Ochs

Ochs, Valentine

Ochs, Valentine Ambrose

Sandy Lake PA

U.S. Army – Vietnam

It was one thing to find an enemy unit in Vietnam. It was quite another to destroy it. When things weren’t going their way, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were very adept at slipping away into the jungle to fight another day.

The solution was to cordon off the unit – completely surround it so it couldn’t escape. The classic example of that was the action at the end of April and beginning of May, 1968, a couple of miles northwest of Huế.

Valentine Ambrose Ochs, a mortar man from Sandy Lake serving with the 101st Airborne Division, was involved in that action.

An enemy force of unknown size was discovered to be holed up in the village of Phuoc Yen, in a bend of the Song Bo River. Fortunately, the NVA forces inside the village also didn’t know the strength of the force that would be thrown against them. In the early hours of the operation, they could have escaped by attacking the first elements being put in place. Before they did, they were surrounded by companies from three American battalions, elements from local Popular Forces, and the “Black Panther” Company of the 1st South Vietnamese Army.

With the enemy completely trapped, the American forces attacked relentlessly with artillery, helicopter gunships, and Air Force figher-bombers. After five days, 107 NVA soldiers surrendered, leaving the bodies of 419 of their comrades in the village. By this time, our attacking forces knew that they had eliminated the 8th Battalion, 90th NVA Regiment. Until that day, no other NVA force had surrendered en masse to an American military unit.

Unfortunately, PFC Ochs did not live to see that happen. He was killed by small arms fire during the battle, just 28 days after he had arrived in Vietnam.

He was the son of Mr. & Mrs. Charles Ochs, Sandy Lake.

On the web site www.vvmf.org/thewall, his nephew, Tobias C. Ochs, posted the following tribute:

“Valentine Ochs was a kind caring young man. He loved his country and served it well. the news of Valentine Ochs’s death came on his dad’s birthday. All seven of his brothers and sisters will never forget their older brother. He was killed on April-28, 1968, a day that his family and friends will never forget.”

On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Panel 52E Line 41

Vincient “Jim” Mongiello

Grove City, PA

U.S. Navy – World War II

Vincient “Jim” Mongiello’s father Ben opened a harness and leather repair shop in Mercer after settling there from Italy.

“When the United States got involved in World War I,” Jim said, “Father closed his leather shop and volunteered for the army. He fought in four major battles with the Fourth Division in Europe. And he wasn’t even a citizen.”

That set a good example for Jim. He joined the Navy even before he graduated from Mercer High School.

“In the class of 1943, if you had passing grades, you could leave and go into the service and receive your diploma. In January I joined the Navy. My mother received my diploma in May.”

After training, he sailed on LST 177 across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the flat-bottomed LST does not do well in the tumultuous waters of the open sea.

“I got seasick on the first day out of New Orleans. An officer caught me lying down. He shouted at me to get to work. I walked out on deck, and here’s the captain with a bucket to upchuck in – he was seasick, too. The rule was, if you were seasick, you worked anyhow.”

Barely 18, Jim was the ship’s “oil king,” responsible for taking on all fuel, dispensing it, and accounting for it.

“I had 57 tanks to take care of. At eight every night I had to have a report on the captain’s desk.”

LST 177 participated in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Anzio beachhead, and southern France. As the war was winding down, Jim came back to serve Shore Patrol duties in Philadelphia.

1967 and 1998, he organized 27 reunions of the LST 177. He collected LST memorabilia, including LST 177’s bell and helm (steering wheel). He sent most of it to LST 325, which is still afloat as a museum in Evansville, Indiana.

Throughout his life, Jim was very active in his community, serving 26 years on the Mercer borough council, and being involved in many organizations, including the Masons, United Methodist Men, VFW, American Legion, and Ducks Unlimited. As an alumnus of Mercer High School, he organized many reunions for his graduating class. In 2010, he was inducted into the Mercer High School Alumni Hall of Fame.

William Perrine

Perrine, William

Sharon, PA

U.S. Army – Desert Storm era

On February 22, 1991, hundreds of U.S. tanks and other vehicles massed in eastern Saudi Arabia to attack the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. The unit responsible for getting fuel to them was the 475th Quartermaster Group from Farrell, Pennsylvania.

How did such a responsibility fall on an army reserve unit?

During the 1980s, the Department of Defense reduced the active army, assigning logistical and other tasks to reserve units. In the end, there was no regular army petroleum group.

“We were it, basically,” said Bill Perrine, who had joined the unit in the early 1970s.

That didn’t result in a lack of preparedness, thanks to the exceptional commitment of reservists such as Bill.

Through the 1970s, he served one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer. That changed dramatically during the 1980s.

“The 475th became responsible for supplying all the fuel for the not just for the army,” Bill said, “but also for the air force, marines, and navy. Our job was to get petroleum supplies to anyone who needed them in a theater of operation. We had to figure out how to make that happen.”

It was an awesomely complex job that required Bill to spend as many as 100 active duty days a year.

“We planned the logistics from the time the petroleum comes out of the ground, through the refineries, into ocean-going tankers, to deep sea ports or across the beach, into the bladders, into the trucks, into the little refuelers, all the way to the guy’s jeep out in the field.”

They also participated in strategic planning to counter a variety of possible scenarios, such as a potential Russian invasion in Europe through the Fulda Gap. Then the attention shifted to Iran and Iraq.

“The war plans we wrote during the late 1980s got used in the early 1990s during Desert Storm,” Bill said.

Of course, planning isn’t enough; training is also necessary. The 475th participated in petroleum logistics exercises both in the United States and overseas.

When Bill took a job in Wheeling, WV, in 1987, he transferred to the 1036th U.S. Army Reserve school which was also in Farrell but required less time.

During Desert Storm, Bill was activated to teach in the Petroleum School in Fort Lee, Virginia. To his disappointment, his requests to serve in Iraq were turned down.

Bill remained in the Reserves until he retired from the military in 1993.

William Rauber

Rauber, William

Wheatland, PA

U.S. Army – Vietnam

When he joined the army, William Rauber of Wheatland was following a military tradition established by his father, Drago Rauber. But Drago was never a part of the American armed forces. Born in Croatia, he served in the Croatian and British armies.

William was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1948. He was three years old when his parents emigrated to the United States. They settled in Wheatland, so William attended Farrell High School. He enlisted in the army in March, 1967.

He arrived in Vietnam on April 2, 1968, assigned to the Headquarters Company of the 6th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 9th Infantry Division. That made him part of the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta, probably heading into combat aboard the descriptively named Brown Water Navy.

The Mobile Riverine Force was a joint military operation between the U.S. Navy and the 9th Infantry Division. The soldiers were inserted into combat and extracted either via modified Navy vessels or helicopters. One Riverine veteran wrote that the typical tactical plan was to go up and down the rivers and canals until they were shot at. Then the Navy would blast the area with .50 caliber machine guns and other weapons, then land the infantry to pursue the enemy. It was dangerous, wet, and intense duty.

He was there barely enough time to get his feet wet. Probably a couple of weeks after arriving, he told his parents in a letter that “tomorrow we are going out for two to five days.” They received that letter the day after they were notified that he had been killed in action on April 25.

He was survived by his parents,three sisters, and two brothers.

On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Panel 52E Line 10

William Smith

Smith, William

Hermitage, PA

U.S. Army – Vietnam

In the late 1960s, dropping out of college, even temporarily, was risky business. Bill Smith sat out the winter semester in his senior year because he had to ride his motorcycle to get to YSU. His plan to complete his degree in the warmer spring weather appeared to be doomed when the draft board sent him a draft notice. Fortunately, they agreed to postpone his induction until he graduated.

So right after graduating in 1968, Bill was in the U.S. Army, qualified to attend Officer Candidate School. The only branches available were the combat arms.

“I don’t know why,” he says, “but I chose infantry.”

Maybe not the best choice. Life in infantry units in Vietnam could be unpleasant and dangerous, especially for second lieutenants. That seemed to be where Bill was headed when he was sent to jungle warfare school after completing OCS.

Bill’s choice wasn’t so bad after all. He was assigned to the security detachment at the largest ammunition dump in Vietnam. What could be safer than being close to tons of high explosives capable of leveling the terrain for miles around?

Bill’s job was to keep that from happening. Before he arrived, the site’s security was in the hands of ordnance personnel who were neither trained nor equipped for the job.

“We did things differently,” Bill said.

With everything from tower guards to electronic surveillance, chain link fences extending four feet into the ground, mortar and artillery units to do recon by fire, and even guard dogs, Bill’s security detachment had to confront only one attack during his year there.

“By attack, I mean saboteurs trying to sneak in,” he said.

It turned out to be three young teenagers carrying satchel charges.

“We killed them. That hurt. But that’s the kind of war it was.”

But lack of action doesn’t mean lack of danger. That became apparent when the facility was closed down toward the end of Bill’s tour. All the ammo was transported to an RVN dump ten miles away. The night after the transfer was complete, the RVN dump blew up.

“We stayed in a bunker and watched it happening on the other side of the mountain,” he said.

His wife at Fort Benning heard about the Qui Nhom ammo dump being blown up. Contact with Bill through the Red Cross allayed her fears.

She was blessed when Lt. Bill Smith returned without a Purple Heart.