Nov 11, 2008 - 07:05:14 CST
(This is the last in a three-part series on stories by World War IIveterans. Today, Leo Voll recounts his experiences.)The first of the important dates in his life that Leo Voll of Mandan can tick off is that he was born July 4, 1913, near Heil.
He's 95 now, but in 1940, it was still the Depression, and Voll, then 27, was working construction in California.
Voll found building roads around Crater Lake at 40 cents an hour a good job, he said. "Better than the CCC's dollar a day or the Army's $21 a month."
But one day his boss tells Voll he's got to sign up for the draft. He doesn't want to, but his boss says sign up, or you get 20 years in jail or a $10,000 fine. Well, Voll said, "I guessed I didn't have either one of those, so I signed up for the Army."
Voll was drafted in mid-December 1940 to serve one year with the 17th Infantry, 7th Division.
During the next year, amid rumors of a war that might be coming, Voll and his fellow soldiers were shuttled between training - making foxholes in the California Hills, at Needles, desert training in the Mojave, maneuvers driving vehicles blindfolded - and ocean duty, guarding a line between San Francisco and San Diego, or guard duty at Monterey, Fort Ord.
And then it was December 1941. Voll's year was nearly up.
Except, on Dec. 7, 1941, he said, "The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And I was stuck till the war was over."
The first battle
In 1942, Voll was back out on ocean guard. "Then three ships ... loaded up 2,000 of us, the 17th and 32nd Infantry. We were on the ocean a month, to Dutch Harbor, Alaska," he said. Word had it that the Japanese were invading the Aleutians, the curve of islands southwest of mainland Alaska.
There, the men had to study a map of the Aleutians, particularly the islands of Kiska and Attu. Rumor was that there were 2,000 Japanese on Attu, he said.
It was a foggy morning in the snow at Attu, Voll said: "The morning of May 11, 1943, we unloaded."
Voll remembers unloading machine guns and carrying everything over the snowbanks. Walking about half a mile, they met the Japanese, he said. Voll remembers an officer ran away; they didn't see him again for 23 days, which was how long the battle lasted, he said. When they did see him again, he was no longer an officer, but a buck private, Voll said.
It was on May 12, "the next day, Col. (Edward P.) Earle got shot right through the head," Voll said.
With no buildings, the men lived in snow for 23 days, on C-rations only. No bread or water, just canned egg and hard crackers, he said.
No coffee, either. One day, Voll remembers, the cook tried to make some coffee in a 5-gallon bucket. The Japanese saw the steam rising and shot at it. Blew up the coffee and killed the mess sergeant, Voll said.
"They made us pick up bodies, make graves in the snowbanks and bury the Japanese. The Seabees (came and) loaded up the Americans like cordwood."
During the battle, Voll got hit in the hip by a mortar shell and couldn't walk for a month, he said. Later, when he applied for a Purple Heart, he was told that since it didn't put a hole in him, "no hole, no Purple Heart."
The second battle
In July 1943, "they took all of us crippled guys to Adak, Alaska," in the Aleutians, Voll said. "They sorted us out. A Dutch ship took those that could walk to Hawaii."
His next stop from there was the Marshall Islands, which Voll remembers as "a big mess. The big guns on the ship knocked down all the coconut trees."
"All the Japanese were killed, and that was battle number two," he said.
The last battles
Then it was back to Hawaii for a month's rest, then get ready for the Philippines, Voll said. He was at Leyte in 1944 and with the battle and aftermath, was there for more than a year, cleaning that up, cleaning up the bodies, he said.
In March 1945 "they took us to Okinawa," his last battle, he said. They arrived in Okinawa on April Fools Day. It was a bad morning, Voll said. Suicide planes struck, and Voll had just gotten out of the hold when one hit.
"The pilot killed himself, but the bomb didn't go off," he said.
By August 1945, something big was about to happen.
On the morning of Aug. 6, Voll and his fellow soldiers were told to watch the sky at a certain time, "and we watched," he said. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Voll said, "We seen the smoke."He shakes his head: "All those innocent people," he said.
The war was over.
Voll's brother-in-law was on the USS Missouri, where Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender. Voll doesn't think much of MacArthur or his corncob pipe: "He said 'I will return,' but when he returned, the war was almost over."
After the surrender, Voll said, "the docs checked us over and loaded us old-timers for home."
But nature didn't make it that easy. Coming home in September 1945, Voll remembers his ship got hit by a big typhoon at Guam: "We had to turn against the typhoon. Water was coming over top of the ship. We had to go downstairs and lock the doors against the water."
Finally, after 30 days aboard, the ship landed in Seattle and Voll got a steak.
He still relishes the memory of that steak. Because, he said, it was "the first good meal for years."
All told, Voll served four years, eight months and 20 days, he said. "Got shot at many times. On Leyte, a big shell mowed down all the medics. A bullet (once) grazed right past my belly and hit a Jeep; blew a big hole in it.
"In foxholes all the time, all those years. Nearly blown out of the hole many times."
Back in the States, Voll was hospitalized for malaria. "A terrible fever," he said, for which he took Atabrine tablets. After a week in the hospital with malaria, dengue fever, "about everything," he said, he was discharged.
It took a year, but he finally started receiving a pension; $30 a month.
Voll had rented out his little trailer home in California during the war, but the renters had run it down, so he sold it and came back to North Dakota to try and get work on the project that became Garrison Dam. He couldn't get on there then, he said, so he went back to California and Oregon, built a house, got married. He and his wife, Frieda, had two children.
After five years, they returned to North Dakota again, rented some land and began farming. Over the years, Voll also worked at powerhouses at Stanton and Beulah, at carpentry, building houses and barns.
Voll worked until he was 90, he said
Today, his wife, bedridden with diabetes, is in a nursing home in Elgin. But with the help of his nearby son and daughter-in-law, he's able to live alone.
(Reach reporter Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@;bismarcktribune.com.)
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