Published Nov. 19, 2001
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20011119/NEWS/111190308/0/search

Veteran fought Japanese fire with fire

By Jennie Jones Giles
Hendersonville High School’s quarterback led his team to an outstanding season in 1941. Not a single opponent crossed the goal line at a home game, but he couldn’t outrun his duty to his country. Within a month of graduation, quarterback Carroll Strider was a Marine.
“I wanted to be a part of getting out and getting done what needed to be done,” he said, referring to the war America was fighting against Japan and Germany.
Strider’s first initiation into battle was in November 1943 at Tarawa – one of World War II’s most savage battles.

Tarawa

Tarawa, a ring-shaped coral reef within the Gilbert Island chain, is today the capital of Kiribati, a nation of many small islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean. In 1943, some 5,000 Japanese held strongly fortified positions on the three-mile long, 1,000-yard wide atoll.
Strider was with the Marines 2nd Division, Company C, 1st Battalion, 18th Regiment. He had trained with the engineer battalion in water supply, but on this, his first battle, he was assigned the job of demolitionist and flame thrower. This was the first time flame throwers had ever been used in battle.
“We went down the net beside our ship into Higgins boats landing craft,” Strider said, “and then circled out to meet with the amphibious tractor.”
Tarawa was the first time amphibious tractors – amtracs – had been used in assault landings, and there were only enough for three assault waves.
Strider was in the second wave of landings on Red Beach 3 at the far western part of the island.
“My amtrac went all the way to the beach,” he said. “I didn’t get my feet wet. I got off right there on the beach and huddled by the (coconut log) seawall.”
Military planners had hoped a high tide would carry the other landing craft over the shelf of coral, but later assault waves of Marines hung up on the reef.
“They dumped them out and some of them went straight down,” he said. “And some were wading in and they were getting cut up badly by the Japanese – all those bodies were floating around.”
Marines had to wade several hundred yards, with 75-pound packs on their backs and no place to hide.
“Eddie Albert (television and film actor) was out there in one of those Higgins boats trying to pick up Marines out there in the water,” Strider said.
Strider not only had on his combat pack, but also a demolition pack, two 5-gallon cans of diesel fuel and a flame thrower.
“We did not go far over that seawall before landing in a trench with some dead Japanese, but soon found out all were not dead,” Strider said. “One of them shot the Marine to my right and then drew back into a recess in the trench. We first threw a grenade in to follow him. To make sure, our flame thrower put a burst in the same direction. One Japanese came running out and heading inland. His body was ablaze, but he did not live to feel the pain, as he was immediately hit by multiple rounds coming from beach side.
“On Tarawa, you could hear Marines yelling for a demolition man or a flame thrower,” he said.
Within 76 hours, the Marines had taken the island, but 1,113 were killed. Another 2,290 Marines were wounded.
After the battle had ended, Strider said he found and opened a military-looking chest.
“In it was a Japanese flame thrower,” he said. “It was almost like ours, except it was painted sand brown, and it had two tanks. Ours had only one tank. I turned that flame thrower over to an officer on the beach. By the time we went to Saipan, our flame throwers had been modified.
“It was also during this time that I saw the Japanese soldiers with their toes in the trigger of their rifles and the muzzles under their chins; also, the swollen bodies of the dead, both Marine and Japanese, both on land and in the water. I had seen men hit next to me in the trench and on the run – pieces and parts here and there – it was not real, but on that day there was the smell to go with it. It cannot be described.
“I will never forget that day,” he said, “and even when returning there 50 years later, flying over and just looking at that small atoll, that smell returned.”

Saipan

Strider, now in Company A, moved with the rest of the 2nd Division to Saipan in the Mariana Islands.
On the morning of June 15, 1944, 20,000 Marines of the 2nd and 4th Divisions came ashore on Saipan to fight a four-week battle.
“I went in the afternoon waves,” Strider said. “I was with water supply. We set up our distillation unit to purify salt water on the beach.”
As soon as the Marines fought their way past the airfield, “we moved on up to where we could drill some wells down to get water to use purification units because we could put out a lot more water.
“Distillation is a slow process and we needed to get more water to the troops,” he said. “It was 100 degrees probably, or in the 90s ó it was hot. The farther we moved, we got fresher and better water.
“Over the mountain there was a spring with a good supply of water. We set up a water purification unit there to supply the division, the hospital and several other units.”
In the late 1980s, Strider went back to Saipan with members of the 2nd Marine Division Association.
“That same spring is being used to supply the west side of the island and furnishes the Japanese hotels,” he said.
Strider noted the Japanese have many memorials on the island, which today is a commonwealth of the United States. He said there is only one small American monument on the beach. The association dedicated a monument in honor of the 2nd Division Marines.

Okinawa, Nagasaki and home

“It was Easter morning (1945) off of Okinawa that the kamikaze came in,” Strider said.
He and other Marines were on the USS Hinsdale, inside the third deck of the ship with their combat gear on and ready to go up when “there’s an explosion and the ship goes pitch black and it starts tilting to one side.
“We go up the ladders and the troops were in line – no rush or commotion – in an orderly manner proceeding to topside.”
They were transferred to another transport ship and returned to Saipan.
Strider arrived in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 only a few weeks after the city was leveled by the atomic bomb dropped by the United States.
“The first night, as we were leaving Saipan for Nagasaki, when night came, we didn’t have to turn off the lights or batten down the hatches – all the lights were on,” he said, as he remembers the lyric “when the lights go on again all over the world.”
“Just several yards from where we set up our purification units (at Nagasaki), there was a Japanese family – an old Japanese man was sitting out front,” he said.
During the next few days, Strider would bring the man rations, cigarettes or other items, and each time “he had to give me something back,” Strider said.
He still has a small jade Buddha and other items on a shelf in his Tryon home given to him by this elderly Japanese man.
After two weeks in Nagasaki, Strider returned to the United States via the northern Pacific route.
“It was the worst weather and storms that I’ve been in on the ocean,” he said. “We had to lash ourselves into the bunks.”
Strider remembers that he lost a lot of good friends during the war and “I saw a lot of things that a young person doesn’t need to see at that time of life.
“When I remember, I like to remember the good parts – the sunshine, the beach, the water and the coffee,” he said.
“The true heroes aren’t here,” he added. “They’re still in other places – they didn’t come back.
“The reason some of us committed our time and lives to the military is in order to ensure peace and the defense of our country, which has given us what we and everyone else enjoy.
“Every day is a gift. It’s not something we have rights to or deserve – we’ve been blessed,” he said.
Strider, 78, was discharged from the Marine Corps in December 1945. In the fall of 1946, he entered N.C. State University, where he joined the ROTC program.
With a bachelor of science degree in engineering, he received a commission in the Army. At that time, the Marine Corps did not accept new enlistments of married men because of a shortage of family housing.
In 1956, he received a master’s degree in civil engineering from Harvard Univ­ersity. He retired with the rank of colonel in 1974 with 30 years of service. Strider has served in Germany, South Korea, Vietnam and throughout the United States. He has received numerous medals and commendations and is involved in many church and community activities.
He married Sybil B. Cashwell of Durham in 1947. They had three children – Linda Strider Haynes, Harry Ernest Strider, and Carroll Davis Strider Jr., who died in May 2000 – and five grandchildren.