- May 3, 2024
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The memories are still vibrant after 70 years.
Wayne Grant
News Editor
Tall and trim at 91, John P. Boswell seems like he got out of the Marine Corps yesterday. There's a feeling of the military in his salty language and confident manner.
As I visited him to talk about the surrender of Japan in 1945, he was reading an email from a buddy and fellow World War II veteran. He shared the photos from 70 years ago, showing sailors and Marines on liberty on a little-known island in the western Pacific, enjoying dry land and sunshine.
“On the island most of them stripped and laid around,” he said. “A lot of sailors worked below decks. They were so white, many guys were burned,” he laughed.
The island was Mogmog, part of the Caroline Islands, where the U.S. military was staging for a planned invasion of Japan.
Photos from the war years cover one wall and family photos cover another in Boswell’s cozy office, in a house a block away from the Halifax River. One photo shows a massive armada of ships, ready to sail to Japan if the order is given.
On board the USS Missouri
Boswell was stationed on one of the ships as an orderly, really a body guard, for Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, chief of Naval operations for the Pacific area. His duty took him to the deck of the U.S.S Missouri where he witnessed Japanese dignitaries sign the Instrument of Surrender on Sept. 3, 70 years ago. (It was Sept. 2 if you were on the other side of the International Dateline.)
Famous photos of the ceremony show the ship deck packed with men in uniform.
“They were correspondents from all over the world,” Boswell said. “McArthur invited them. Not that he shouldn’t have.”
Gen. of the Army Douglas McArthur had recently been named Supreme Commander for the Allied Power, and he is the one shown most often in historical photos. But other officers also signed the papers, including Nimitz, who Boswell believes should receive more credit for the victory.
“Nimitz was in charge of the Navy,” he said. “The pacific area was a Navy operation, you know.”
He said the press was looking for MacArthur, who sought publicity. Nimitz, on the other hand was quiet and laid back.
“But he was a superb human being,” Boswell said. “He was a stoic person. He was unheralded because he wasn’t colorful.”
The orderlies for Nimitz, including Boswell, were with him 24 hours a day. Boswell remembers while on Guam, Nimitz would go for a walk in the morning. While the Marine orderlies wore starched khaki, Nimitz would often wear shorts, and he would joke with Marines.
“We’d be soaked, and he would say, ‘Is it hot enough for you?’” Boswell said.
Destruction preceded the atomic bombs
History tells the role atomic bombs had in the surrender, but Boswell says people don’t realize the damage done by the firebombing campaign. He flew over Tokyo, and saw a major world city leveled by fire. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the firebombing
“Lemay said we don’t need an atomic bomb,” he said. He was referring to Gen. Curtis Lemay, who was in charge of the Strategic Air Command.
Boswell, who grew up in Massachusetts, joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor, and said the Marines were a small operation at the time, nothing like the fighting force they would become.
“At Parris Island, we slept in tents,” he said. “But the Corps grew up to be hell.”
Asked what he remembers the most about the surrender on the USS Missouri, he said it was how the Japanese officials were treated with dignity and respect by the American military commanders.
Even Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who had been a POW for four years after being captured in the Philippines after the fall of Corregidor, didn’t “lord it over” the Japanese, Boswell said.
He remembers how skinny Wainwright was after his years of captivity.
“He must have weighed about 120 pounds,” he said.
Boswell credits the growth of America after the war to the GI Bill.
“The returning military were able to go to college,” he said. “The way the country grew after the war, it never would have happened without the GI bill. “
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Boswell retired to Ormond Beach in the late 1970s. He had vacationed at Ellinor Village in the 1950s and decided he wanted to retire here.
“Ormond Beach was a nice little town in the 1970s,” he said. “Now they are bringing industry and business. We moved down here to get away from all that. “
The interview ended because Boswell was picking up a fellow veteran, who lives in a nursing home, for lunch.
“You have to get them out every now and then,” he said, striding across his lawn to his car.
Veteran lunch bunch
Leading up the surrender of Japan, the U.S. military took over island after island in the Pacific Ocean. Bob Doran was on the beach on Iwo Jima when he saw the flag raised on Mount Suribachi.
“We were so excited to see it,” he said. “All the ships were blowing their horns. But the fighting went on for another month.”
Doran, who was commissioned on the beach at Iwo Jima as second lieutenant, meets for lunch each week with other veterans, including Boswell.
While Iwo Jima was a tough fight, Okinawa also took a lot of sacrifice to capture. Many destroyers, which protected the carriers, were sunk off the island.
Bob Kropp, another regular lunch member, was on a destroyer attacked by kamikaze, but he didn’t see them coming.
“I was in the engine room,” he said
The guys at the lunch table come from various eras, from World War II to Vietnam, but they all have something in common, a past service in the military.
The war stories sometimes come out, but they are usually not the topic of conversation at the weekly lunches. Along with a lot of laughter and good-natured kidding, they talk about everything from politics to sports to computers.
“You’ll get some strong opinions at this table,” said David Carter, 89, who served in the Navy.
Stories of Corregidor, Battle of the Bulge, Okinawa and many other places are still being told by people who were there. But these words will someday only appear in the history books.
“There aren’t many of us left,” Doran said.
