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David Cordell
Hollis,
I am taking the liberty of reproducing your three posts from five years ago (this very week), as well as this photo. Nice looking man!
THREE POSTS FROM HOLLIS HEYN, FEBRUARY 2015
Haven't yet read your long post about your dad, Sandra...very eager to do so after classes today. Starting in 1979 my dad began meeting with his Navy squadron yearly. At that time he began writing about WW2 experiences, one from Iwo Jima in March 1945 some weeks after the Marines invaded but when Japanese were still emerging from their various "hidey holes". I'll dig out that narrative and share later. When we travelled to Mexico for vacations something about being in a different culture would prompt nightmares. We were all staying in one big room together and I remember waking up to my father's screams. My mom woke him and calmed him down and I heard him say that the dream was about the Japanese capturing my mom and us kids. Other than a few other of his nightmares I heard in my childhood, my father never talked about the war until 1979 and then it was mostly how wonderful his friends were particularly since he was the youngest in the squadron. I had the great honor of attending one reunion when it was held here in STL in 1989. Boy did I get the royal treatment from his buddies and heard such wonderful things about my grandfather who died when I was an infant. They all talked about my grandparents meeting them all at a layover at Dallas's Union Station and how beautiful and stylish my grandmother was. My grandfather took one of the guys under his wing when the guy's wife was dying in East Texas. The guy was sent home, got off the train in Dallas where my grandfather met him, took him to their Lakewood home, fed him and then drove him to the hospital in East Texas. Happy news is the wife survived and beamed at me as the husband told the story at the reunion dinner table. My father, of course, was holding back the tears as am I right this moment.
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Below is my father's description of his time on Iwo Jima:
Our crew was part of the first group sent to Iwo Jima from Tinian on about March 19th or 20th. The airstrip was "secured", but the Marines and the Army were fighting the Japanese at the north end of the island.
Sierkierski, Bodie and I slept on cots in a small tent, surrounded by Marines in foxholes. One of us remained at our plane each night. Throughout every night, Japanese inflitrated from an extensive system of underground tunnels, setting off trip-flares; this was followed by intense fire and explosions.
Our mission was to find and destroy Japanese picket boats which were advance warning of our B-29 raids on Japan.
The following events may not be in proper sequence:
We had been out that day on a search flight and had landed close to sunset. All the enlisted crewmen were at the planes. Just after dark, the air raid siren sounded and we went into a large shell crater. Word was passed that we were about to be bombed from Japan and that the Japanese on Iwo would conduct a "Banzai" charge in conjunction with the air raid. I recall taking the Thompson sub-machine gun with me from our plane.
After a time, the all-clear was given and we went to our tent to sleep. The next morning we learned a flight of Japanesse "Betty" bombers had been sent to bomb us, but had been shot down by our P-61 NIght-Fighters. Early in the morning, the Japanese on Iwo did make a Banzai charge on the bivouac area of the P-61 pilots, killing and wounding a number of them. As far as I know, all the Japanese were killed by the Marines. The aftermath of that charge was horrible.
I believe it was the next day that all of our planes attacked two Japanese picket boats running one behind the other. We strafed and fired rockets at them and they returned 20 millimeter machine gun fire. We made, I believe, two strafing runs and when we left, the picket boats appeared to be burning and sinking slowly. I think our plane sustained a minor hit in an oil line.
The next day, March 27th, we were again on a search flight. I remember that flying at 8,000 feet ice was forming on my turret dome. Our pilot, Fox, came on the intercom to tell us that we were seeing Tokyo Bay in the distance. We turned and went back to Iwo Jima. When we landed, we saw one of our planes had crash landed on the airstrip. The plane had been flown back to Iwo and landed by H. Saddler AMM1/C, after the pilot, Lt. (J.G.) Lee Wilson and co-pilot, Ens. D.A. McCarthy had been badly wounded by 20 millimeter hit in the cockpit while attacking a Japanese picket boat. Saddler had never before landed an aircraft. I later learned that he was awarded the silver star for saving the lives of his crew.
The next morning, March 28th, we did not fly, but I met on the airstrip with R.R. Henn, AOM2/C, who was in Saddler's crew. He described the ill-fated flight in detail and took a photograph of me standing near the airstrip with Mt. Suribachi in the background.
We returned to Tinian the next day and were happy to get a shower, clean clothes and something besides K-Rations to eat.
I have that photo of my dad with Mt. Suribachi in the background but it is of such poor quality don't think it's worth a scan. He was presented the Air Medal on August 11 in Maryland for according to the newsclipping "effectiely strafing enemy gun positions despite intense anti-aircraft fire during the period of September 1944 to March 1945." He was AOM3c in the USN. Before fighting in the Pacific his squadron was assigned to the Carribean looking for German subs.
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For those interested: My dad has one more written short piece that I cannot access from home - only school. This third and last entry is his recollection of being sent on leave back to the States in April 1945 and hearing of Roosevelt's death. The transport was this huge plane that took forever to take off from the water and evidently was pretty fancy compared to his other transports. If I remember correctly, many of these military men were sent home before the possibility of being sent back a few weeks or months later to invade Japan. Truman's decision saved a lot of our soldiers' lives. Possibly had the US not dropped the bomb, some of us wouldn't have been born.
One story my dad told me about that spring leave was that he took trains eastward from California but started hitchhiking maybe in New Mexico. He called his Dallas parents when he was in Lubbock giving them a sense of when to expect him. My grandmother told him later that my grandfather waited out on the front porch for hours, and my dad reports that my grandfather saw him get off the street car right on the corner of Abrams and Vickery where my grandparents lived - 6403 Vickery with the beautiful wooded sloping backyard with a fishing pier to the little lake the neighbors all shared. My grandfather, who was shorter than my 6'1" dad, picked him up and wouldn't let go for some time. My grandmother told my dad later that my grandfather stopped going to the movies because he couldn't stop crying in the newsreels - so worried about my dad and classmates and neighbors' kids and on and on. I also have letters from his parents to my dad that my dad saved. During that Feb./Mar. 1945 period their letters to him have a frantic tone because they weren't receiving any letters from him since evidently he couldn't write during that period which included Iwo Jima. My grandmother also saved all of his letters - although my dad was careful what he wrote to them, I still see some blacking out by censors.
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