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Miles Patrick and his buddies from the 1018th Army Engineering Bridge
Company were jam-packed aboard a troop ship headed for a rendezvous with
death.
"Me and my bulldozer were going to be in the first wave to hit the
south end of Kyushu Island. There was no question in my mind. I wasn't coming
out of that invasion alive."
Patrick, now 72 and a longtime Pasco resident, had written his will, leaving
his wife and young son whatever would be due him as a casualty of World
War II.
The USS General Pope, with 5,500 men sleeping in bunks stacked six high,
plowed the seas advancing 500 miles every day.
Every day brought seasickness, tedium and terror.
"I was scared to death. And every mile that brought us closer to Okinawa,
I got more scared."
Some soldiers, sailors, Marines and pilots only thought they would be part
of the upcoming invasion of Japan's mainland.
But Patrick knew.
The 120 men of the 1018th had been attached to the 6th Marine Brigade scheduled
to make the initial assault on Kyushu, one of Japan's four main islands.
From the huge port in Marseilles, France, the troop ship Pope traveled to
the Panama Canal. There, while the Pope waited its turn to get through the
locks, Patrick sent a telegram to his wife in Wenatchee.
The 1018th's bridge-building equipment was on a freighter that had left
the day before.
"We had been told we were part of the strike group going into the south
end in October 1945, and that we had to hold that island until the spring
of '46 when the main force would hit the mainland of Honshu."
Thoughts of the awaiting enemy and heavily fortified Kyushu consumed Patrick.
"We knew the Japanese were a fierce people who would fight to the death:
theirs or ours."
Like others who spent the long days on the Pope rolling dice, playing poker
and dreaming of home, Patrick showed no fear.
"There was never for any of us a question of who would win that war.
We knew we would. It was only a question of how, and of how many of us would
be left."
The Pope had been at sea for a long, hot month when science intervened in
its destiny.
On Aug. 6, 1945, there was an announcement on board about the bombing of
Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon.
"A nuclear bomb didn't mean anything to me, but I had a buddy who had
studied chemistry and he knew all about atoms."
The Pope continued toward Okinawa as the war raged on, the next two days
passing uneventfully.
On Aug. 9, the United States dropped another atomic bomb over Nagasaki.
"All I could think of then was hallelujah ... surely it would be over."
It was not.
"But I was less nervous. I keep thinking that by the time we got to
Okinawa, Japan would have quit. If you don't have the notion that someone
will be shooting at you soon, you feel better."
There was laughter on the Pope. Even the powdered eggs tasted better.
Five days later, the Pope's whistle blasted and the men were assembled on
the main deck to be told Japan had surrendered.
"There was hollering and shouts of joy. Grown men cried. It was such
a relief to know I'd go home to my wife and boy. Once everything settled
down, we all sat around in our own thoughts."
At about the same time, Patrick's wife, Grace, and her sister were glued
to a radio in the small home they shared in Wenatchee while their husbands
were at war.
There was a knock on the front door and Grace Patrick's heart raced.
There was a man standing there with a paper in his hand, and she hadn't
heard from her husband in weeks.
It was a war bride's worst nightmare: a telegram.
Hesitantly she opened it.
"Thinking of you at this time," was the weeks-old message from
her husband.
Her thoughts raced: At what time? Where was he? What was he doing? Was he
dead?
Later, as the Pope was diverted to Luzon Island in the Philippines, she
got her answers.
They chuckle today about that telegram's unromantic message.
"We couldn't say just anything," Patrick explained. "There
were some prepared and preapproved sentences I could choose from."
Patrick was discharged early in 1946. He returned to Oregon State University
for another six months to finish his mechanical engineering degree.
By September 1946, he'd been hired by General Electric as an engineer at
Hanford. He transferred later to Battelle-Northwest and retired after nearly
40 years.
The wounds of the war remain raw. "I can't be objective. Too many of
my friends died."