Published Nov. 20, 2000
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20001120/EXTRAS02/11200315/0/search

Young airman persevered despite fear, hunger

By Jennie Jones Giles
He was scared, tired and hungry when he stepped out of the launch onto the island of Leyte in the Philippines.
“We just got off that ship and I was so darn tired, I sat down,” Garland Rhodes said.
And no wonder. He had just survived a suicide attack by a Japanese kamikaze pilot. The attack killed 22 men and left 40 wounded from the 345th Bomber Group of the Army Air Corps. His squadron, the 501st, along with other airmen, had arrived in Leyte Gulf on the Morrison Waite, just 10 days after the Battle for Leyte Gulf – the decisive battle of World War II that crippled the Japanese fleet, permitted the U.S. invasion of the Philippines and gave the Allies control of the Pacific.
“We had sat in the harbor for 20 days,” Rhodes said. “They wouldn’t let us go ashore.”
While waiting in the harbor, two ships, the Nelson and the Waite, were crash-dived by Japanese suicide planes.
“I have sympathy for the Cole,” Rhodes said, referring to the recent attack on a U.S. destroyer in Yemen. “That’s really hell.
“I was sitting with my back against the wall, about 10 feet from where the plane came through the side deck. The explosion made a 10-by-15-foot hole in the hull. We were fortunate it was above the waterline,” he said.
“A bunch of us went down in the hole,” he said. “I found out I didn’t know how to treat anyone. I didn’t know what to do.”

Wartime training

It had been only a year since Rhodes left the farm fields and apple orchards of Dana in Henderson County.
As soon as he turned 18, this recent graduate of the former Dana High School volunteered to fight for his country.
Basic training was, of all places, on Miami Beach.
“We trained on the golf courses and in the streets,” Rhodes said. “There were just so many people in the service, there was nowhere else to train.”
They stayed in the Havana Hotel at 13th Street and Drexel, he said.
For the next few months, Rhodes trained at Amarillo, Texas, where women instructors taught him airplane mechanics.
Then he went on to Las Vegas and gunnery school.
“That was hard,” Rhodes said. “A lot of the men had a college education, and I didn’t. I had to stay up late at night studying.”
After completion of gunnery school, he moved on to Columbia, S.C., for crew training and flight engineer training. His crew was assigned a new B-25J. They flew across the country, on to Guadalcanal, New Guinea and Australia.
One year later, this new flight engineer from the mountains of Western North Carolina was sitting on the beach at Leyte, tired, hungry and scared.

Combat missions

“The first real combat mission I flew was Jan. 1, 1945,” Rhodes said.
His crew flew two missions that day, strafing and bombing airfields on the islands of Mendano and Luzon in the Philippines.
The missions were of such great distance that they used the upper half of the bomb bay to store fuel needed for refueling, he said.
“My job was to transfer that fuel to the main tanks.”
From January to July, Rhodes was on 42 bombing missions. The Air Apaches of the 345th Bomber Group bombed airfields and destroyers, railroads and roads on islands throughout the Philippines, in the South China Sea, on the coast of China, on the island of Formosa (Taiwan), and in Indochina (Vietnam).
At first, they often went on two missions a day. Later, they might go on one mission every five or 10 days.
The B-25J got hit a lot of times, he said.
“I got scared to death one time,” he said. “A big round came through the front of the airplane and came back. It cut my pants about 5 or 6 inches and made a mark across my leg.
“It hurt and it scared me to death. I couldn’t get down. I was in the turret and I couldn’t get down. There was a fighter shooting at us, and I couldn’t get down.”
His voice trailed off and the room became quiet as he relived in his mind the experiences of war.
“I felt blood, but it was only a scrape,” he said. “The bullet went into the hydraulic fluid tank. A lot of fluid leaked out. It was all over the floor, all over the plane.”
“If we got shot down, the majority of the time the Japanese would kill us,” he said.
He told the story of a crew shot down on Luzon on a rolling-stop mission, where the bomber would start down a highway or railroad with the gunners shooting the entire time.
“We found out later from Filipinos that the Japanese had shot them and stabbed them with bayonets, right on the spot,” he said. “The Filipinos buried them.”
When the bombers would get hit, “we couldn’t tell what internal damage was done and you’d sit there the last half hour with the fuel gauge approaching zero and you’d sweat that out.
“When somebody had an engine shot out or something you’d escort them to the nearest friendly airfield as much as you could. We had several crews saved by Navy submarines.
“We had one guy who ditched, and he was the only one to survive and he stayed on a raft for 26 days in the China Sea. A sub just happened to see the raft and came and picked him up.
“One mission, we lost three bombers,” Rhodes said. “I’ve had nightmares about that one. We were going in on a destroyer.”
He stopped talking and his mind drifted back to that mission more than 50 years ago.
“We finally sank it, but it did us as much damage as we did it.”
Rhodes was sent home in July on a 30-day leave.
“I just had got home when the Japanese surrendered,” he said.
Tech. Sgt. Rhodes was discharged in October 1945.
“That war was necessary,” he said. “It had to be done. We didn’t have a choice. It had to be done.
“It was a cruel, cruel war.”

Home

Rhodes, the son of the late George Rhodes and Bessie Pace Rhodes, reminds us of the home front during the war.
“My mama had two sons and four sons-in-law in the service,” he said. “She tried to hide when the Western Union man came with a telegram.”
His older brother, Carroll, served with the Army’s 45th Infantry in Africa, Sicily and Italy.
“He was hurt twice, both times in Italy,” Rhodes said. “He received the Purple Heart and is now considered 50 percent disabled.
“My brother-in-law, Alard Hyder, was in a glider outfit before the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and was a prisoner of war.”
After the war, Rhodes returned to Henderson County. Over the years, he worked for Western Auto, Overton Wholesale for 20 years and Thomas and Howard in Asheville for 18 years.
In 1947, he married the late Margie Lorraine Jones and, in 1954, built a house on the home place next to his brother.
“I tore down the old house Grandpa built and built this one,” he said.
Rhodes has four daughters, Sharon Whitted, Delores Parris, Zora Davies and Linda Stiers; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.