By Taylor Fishytnt
Raul B. Martinez spent four years in the Army’s Combat Corps of Engineers in World War II.
The combat engineers went in first, then the assault troops. Their job: keep the Army moving.
“Our unit built new roads and bridges, upgraded existing roads and bridges. [O]n New Caledonia we built a field hospital for the wounded from Guadalcanal[;] on Bougainville we set up a Saw Mill, lumberjacking trees and dragging them back to be milled. On New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, we took over a rough Japanese airstrip, upgraded and expanded it into an Allied Airfield, cleared unexploded artillery shells and built air-raid shelters for the General,” wrote Martinez after his interview of his time in the South Pacific.
The combat engineers’ job was extremely dangerous. They were on the front lines armed with bulldozers, building materials and machinery, their guns close by, but not in their hands. It was hard work, Martinez says.
Part of the Guadalcanal Campaign, the first large attack by allied troops on Japanese forces, Martinez fought in places embodying the ferocity of the Pacific war: Bougainville, also in the Solomon Islands, where the Allies thought they’d defeated the Japanese and thrown them back into the jungle; and Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands and home to Manila, the capital of the Philippines. (Here, Japanese troops massacred an estimated 100,000 civilians.)
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Martinez was 19 and living in his hometown, El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 7 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He went downtown to get some pipe tobacco and heard the news.
“When I heard all the excitement I said, ‘Well here I go,’” recalled Martinez, who noted that everybody was behind the war because they saw it as something the country had to do.
In November of 1942, Martinez was drafted and reported to basic training in Virginia, where he learned how to build and repair steel and wooden bridges, make barbed-wire entanglements and use explosives.
Martinez got sent overseas sooner than he’d initially anticipated. He was slated to attend Officers Training School, but made a Colonel mad by sleeping through a speech and got shipped out instead.
“[I was] trying to listen to the stupid stuff,” he said, but had been on duty all night and fell asleep resting his chin on his rifle. “The Colonel was infuriated by this and had my orders changed to have me sent with the departing troops overseas,” Martinez wrote.
“My captain pleaded up to the end with the Colonel and tried to explain that I had been on duty all night and that I had been slated for Officer’s Training School. At the final hour, the Captain hurried to the side of the road as we, the departing troops, marched by. I’ll never forget how as I passed him[,] he shrugged his shoulders to let me know he had been unsuccessful[,] then stood at attention and saluted me. All the other guys wanted to know why I rated a salute from the Captain.”
In the Pacific he was introduced to purple land frogs, which would sit in holes in the ground and try to pinch him.
“Cut off one claw and they keep coming with the other one,” he recalled.
“We used to go fishing with TNT … one guy would get on the shore with a block of TNT with a very short fuse and a cigarette … he would toss it in and then we’d go in and grab the fish. … [and] fried them,” Martinez said.
For the soldiers, the fried fish was a welcomed break from the usual powdered eggs, dehydrated peas and carrots and SPAM, a canned meat product that became the food of the American G.I.
“You got so tired of SPAM,” said Martinez, adding that a stray dog one of the men had adopted and named Daisy was thrown a piece of SPAM and spit it out. “Even the dog didn’t want anymore SPAM.”
The soldiers faced malaria in the island jungles. Many of the men didn’t want to take the medication they had for malaria, however, because it could make their skin a yellowish color, Martinez says.
“That’s why they came down with it,” he said. “Who the hell cares if I’m purple, yellow, whatever – there’s no girls here.”
On Luzon, Martinez learned of the capture of Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was in charge of the Japanese Army in the Phillipines. Previously, Tomoyuki had conquered the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore. He was later hanged for war crimes relating to the Manila Massacre. Martinez also heard of the atomic bombs released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the end of the war.
“We had heard that they had dropped this bomb that was like a box car full of TNT. ‘Oh, they must be kidding … that’s impossible,’ [we thought].
“We didn’t know,” Martinez said.
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After his Nov. 31, 1945, discharge at the rank of Private First Class, Martinez said he just “[Enjoyed] having a ceiling over me … and drank some beer.”
Thanks in part to the GI Bill, he later received his degree in electrical engineering, and went to work at Douglas Aircraft, one of the best-known American aircraft companies that manufactured many WWII planes and, after the war, built commercial airliners such as the DC9 and DC10.
“[H]aving an education and being able to hold onto continuous employment with Douglas, when others were being laid off, gave my family a measure of security that they would otherwise not have had. My education and then my employment allowed me to purchase my first home in an area of West Los Angeles[,] where I was not only one of a few Latinos in the neighborhood[,] but also the only college graduate on the block,” Martinez wrote.
Martinez eventually married Elena Figueroa and had one daughter, Sylvia Martinez.
His advice to younger generations: “Go to school, and stay away from the booze and fooling around.”
Mr. Martinez was interviewed in Costa Mesa, California, on June 25, 2007, by Jose Figueroa.