Published July 3, 2000
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20000703/NEWS/7030320/0/search

Scouting gives Marine the skills he needs for war

By Jennie Jones Giles
In 1942, Jack Jones was returning home from a Scout meeting. As he walked up the hill from Rozier’s Curve, in front of where the Blue Ridge Fire Department is located today, he set three goals for himself – to become a scoutmaster, to attain Royal Ambassador at his church and to be a Marine.
“I wanted to go in the Marine Corps, I’d already made up my mind,” he said.
His wish came true, and by October 1943 he was on his way to Parris Island, S.C.
The Marine Corps sent him to schools at Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, Calif. – radio operator school, field signal school. He learned to operate radios as a forward observer with the artillery and on landing craft, and to put up communication lines. He trained with Dutch Marines at Camp Lejeune and with Navajo Code Talkers in California.
And he earned the nickname “Deacon” Jones from reading the Bible so often.
“It’s important for boys to be in scouting to learn to be prepared. I could name over and over the times I used scouting,” he said. “That’s the reason I was a radio operator. I had passed the radio merit badge, the signaling merit badge and knew Morse code and semaphore, so they sent me to all these schools.
“Our Scout patrol in East Flat Rock formed the ‘Scout commandos.’ We were preparing ourselves to go in the war. So when we did have to go, we were prepared and in good shape.”
He left California with the 21st Replacement Draft in June 1944 for the Pacific island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands.

Island of Saipan

He arrived on Saipan after the main battles for the island were fought, and he was assigned to the 2nd Division, 10th Artillery Regiment, 4th Battalion as a forward observer.
“When we entered the harbor at Saipan, we saw from the ship some of the bodies of the Japanese and islanders who had jumped off the cliffs and committed suicide,” Jones said. “The Japanese had convinced the civilians that Americans would kill them all and torture them, so they jumped off by the hundreds into the ocean.
“There were hundreds and hundreds of Japanese troops hid out in caves and jungles after they declared it secure,” he said. “Every once in a while they’d sneak in at night and kill an Army guy or a Navy guy or a Marine. Several Marines got their throats slit in the dark.”
“We were living in tents on the side of Mount Topachi,” Jones said. “Besides contending with Japanese troops sneaking into camp, we had air raids and would have to leave the tent and run to the boondocks.”

Battle of Okinawa

Late in March 1945 the 2nd Division boarded ships and headed out to sea for the island of Okinawa.
The Japanese had governed Okinawa since 1609.
Only 325 miles from Japan (Kyushu island), Okinawa was a critical island for the Allies. Capturing it would secure command of the East China Sea, open approaches to the Yellow Sea and provide bases for future operations against the Japanese in Japan and China.
Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 1,400 ships gathered off the beaches of Okinawa for the largest amphibious operation of the war in the Pacific.
The Navy’s battleships began firing at the beaches.
“We got in landing craft and headed towards the beach,” Jones said. “We got out there, right offshore, and started circling. We circled and circled around and around and around for two or three hours and then headed back to the ships. The next morning, we did the same thing. We did that three or four days.
“We found out that we were drawing the bulk of the Japanese armies from the other side of the island. We were a decoy.
“We pulled offshore some distance, battleships were still firing, and that’s when the kamikazes started coming in,” Jones said. “One night I saw a kamikaze hit a hospital ship, with big Red Cross markings on it.”
Kamikazes were special Japanese suicide air attack units. They struck the ships off Okinawa by the hundreds, sinking dozens of ships and damaging hundreds. The Allies expected thousands of kamikaze to hit the Allied invasion fleet scheduled for Japan.
Ships carrying the 2nd Division pulled farther out to sea and a typhoon hit.
“It was the highest swells I’d ever seen,” Jones said. “I’d estimate they were 100 feet high. I was on watch on deck and the ship would go up on a swell and I’d be up there holding on to a mast, kind of sideways.”
On the way back to Saipan, Jones and a Marine buddy made slingshots. Upon their return, they immediately set off into the jungle to gather papaya and other fruit.
“While we were gone, the Japanese had swept up out of the jungle and caves and had been using our camp and mess hall,” Jones said. “And here we were, off in the jungle armed only with slingshots.”
Eight months after the main battle for Saipan, the Army made a sweep of the island and killed about 500 Japanese troops, he said.
The 2nd Division began training for the invasion of the islands of Japan.
While training on the island of Agrahan, “they dropped that bomb on Hiroshima. We just left, returned to Saipan and began packing.”
While preparing to leave Saipan, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Operation Olympic was the code name for the plan to invade Japan, scheduled to begin in the fall of 1945, with the 6th Army with 10 infantry divisions and three Marine divisions – the 2nd, 3rd and 5th.
The 2nd Marine Division was to hit Japan around Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu in Japan. They set sail for Nagasaki.

Occupation of Japan

At first, the Marines stayed in a partially bombed-out railroad depot, sleeping on ponchos on the floor.
“We could see all the destruction, railroad tracks twisted every which way and nearly every building destroyed. There were pitiful-looking people everywhere,” he said.
While walking down the tracks, Jones and a buddy discovered a hole in the cement. It was a tunnel.
“We crawled back in the tunnel about 20 feet, then a tunnel turned to the left and there were steps,” he said.
The steps led to a room, with other rooms leading off of it. They discovered remnants of a printing press, a Roman Catholic New Testament, a Bible distributed by the YMCA and other Christian literature.
Once he saw trucks carrying Allied prisoners of war freed from prison camps.
“They were haggard, malnourished and gaunt-looking,” Jones said.
The 10th Regiment was designated a military police regiment during the Japanese occupation, assigned to enforce the peace. They trained with .45 caliber pistols next to a burial site where the Japanese buried prisoners who died in the camps.
“A Marine burial detail was digging up the graves, putting the bodies in body bags and taking them out on trucks,” he said.
Jones said the Japanese people were friendly and kind and never gave any trouble.
Occasionally, they had to break up arguments or fights between Koreans and Japanese.
“All the Korean people the Japanese had enslaved in Japan were just set free,” he said. “They had no way of getting home at the time. They were roaming around while preparations were made to send them home.”
Most of his time during the occupation was spent near the towns of Sasebo and Nagasaki, where he made many Japanese friends.
In July 1946, the Army replaced the Marines. The 2nd Division returned to Camp Lejeune. Cpl. Jones returned to Henderson County on Aug. 1, 1946. His family had saved 283 letters he had written.
Before leaving for the war, Jones attained Eagle Scout and Royal Ambassador at his church. In 1948, he became scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 610 in East Flat Rock, his old troop, serving as scoutmaster for 21 years and in other capacities to the present.
He worked for more than 30 years with the Hendersonville Post Office, with the majority of that time as rural letter carrier.
He has volunteered for 19 years with the Old Buncombe Genealogical Society – so called because old Buncombe County originally covered most of Western North Carolina – and is a member of the Henderson County Genealogical Society, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion, the Rural Letter Carriers Association and the Carolinas Chapter of the 2nd Marine Division Association.
He has two daughters, Jennie Jones Giles and Connie Jones Aiken; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.