Published Aug. 7, 2000
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20000807/EXTRAS02/8070315/0/search

Pacific was soldier’s battleground

By Amy B. McCraw
Anti-aircraft gunner Carl McCarson spent the final days of World War II in a military police unit assigned to looking for the remaining Japanese soldiers on the island of Cebu in the Philippines.
Some natives on the island knew about the unit’s mopping-up operation so they told McCarson and his buddies the day they saw Japanese soldiers in the area.
“We started running, trying to locate them in the underbrush,” 79-year-old McCarson said on a recent summer day as a thunderstorm began to rumble outside his Brooklyn Avenue home.
As the American soldiers moved into the brush, McCarson heard the unmistakable pop of a hand grenade being detonated.
“I knew what it was, but I didn’t have time to react,” he said.
A split second later, the man directly in front of McCarson fell with the grenade blast.
But when the soldiers began to look around after the blast, they found a dead Japanese soldier in the brush.
The soldier who fell in front of McCarson survived the blast with only a few cuts on his face from the ground debris that sprayed into the air when the grenade went off under the Japanese soldier. The enemy soldier had used the grenade to commit suicide.
“It was a pretty gruesome thing,” McCarson said.
At the time, the 24-year-old said he was “just thankful it was him instead of me.”
Now, more than 50 years later, he said he often wonders why the Japanese soldier committed suicide rather than throw the grenade toward him and the other American soldiers.
“I could never understand,” he said.
McCarson, a Henderson County native, turned 21 on the 29th of December in 1941, just three weeks after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
When the United States joined the war after the attack, the draft picked up. McCarson got his notice in July.
“I expected it. It didn’t bother me,” he said.
After basic training and a few stops along the way, McCarson spent seven months in Fiji before being shipped to the Solomon Islands with the 251st Coast Artillery Anti-Aircraft Regiment.
The Marines landed on the island of Bougainville, part of the Solomon chain, during the first part of November 1943. McCarson came on shore Nov. 20.
While there, the 251st was broken up and McCarson became part of the 746th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion.
In March 1944, the Japanese launched an attack and nearly overran McCarson’s position.
His outfit fired 90 mm anti-aircraft guns until his commanders made the gunners part of a provisional infantry.
“That was something we didn’t expect,” he said. “We were the last resort.”
The American troops held the island.
McCarson spent 14 months on Bougainville enduring heat, rain and high humidity along with the mosquitoes, scorpions and centipedes of the jungle.
He also fought in battles off and on during his time on the South Pacific island.
Once while in the middle of artillery fire from the Japanese, McCarson was in a machine gun pit when a shell landed nearby.
“It landed just over from us. The concussion knocked me over,” he said. A canvas covering fell on top of him, but he was not injured.
McCarson said he did not remember having time to feel fear.
“Things like that happen, and it happens so quick,” he said.
McCarson pulled out of Bougainville in the spring of 1945 and headed for the Philippines.
The anti-aircraft guns he fired were used as artillery in support of the infantry because by that time the Japanese military had lost its air force.
As the war drew to a close, he was shifted to a military police unit assigned to locate the remaining Japanese soldiers on the island.
He was a sergeant with the MP unit when the soldier in the brush decided to commit suicide rather than become a prisoner of the Americans.
McCarson was discharged on Jan. 3, 1946, with a victory medal and three bronze stars for his work in the Solomons and the Philippines.
And despite the close calls, he had survived the war with only a piece of a brass shell casing lodged in his thumb and a dislocated finger from a softball game he played while waiting to return home from the Philippines.
Four brothers who also served in the military, including three who fought overseas, also returned home safely after the war.
McCarson came home, married his wife, Gertrude, in 1947 and took up carpentry.
Over the years, he discovered that the thundering guns he fired during the war had permanently damaged his hearing.
“They just told us to put cotton in our ears, but that didn’t do any good,” he said.
He said he continues to think about his time in the war almost every night. Sometimes those memories still haunt his dreams.
“I think about the close calls, about the work, about the camaraderie,” he said. “It’s not distressing. I know what little combat I was in was just a drop in the bucket to what a lot of them went through.”