Published Aug. 20, 2001
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20010820/NEWS/108200311/0/search

Parachuting the Pacific

By Todd Calloway
Imagine tumbling out of a C-47 transport plane into the pre-dawn sky and dropping silently toward the unknown ground below. The fear of the fall must have been numbing; the fear of landing horrifying.
As a member of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II, 76-year-old Henderson County native Zeb V. Kilpatrick Jr. made 11 jumps as a paratrooper.
And with every jump came more apprehension about the outcome.
“I guess you’d get to thinking about the one (jump) before,” Kilpatrick said from his Fleetwood Plaza home Friday morning. “Some of them got use to it, but, buddy, I never got use to it – they never had to push me out though.”
One jump in particular still raises the hair on Kilpatrick’s arms and neck when he tells the story.
“We usually jumped in remote areas,” he said. “But this mission was to jump onto the roof of, or as near as we could get to, the Manila Hotel Annex in the Philippines.”
This type of mission was unusual for Kilpatrick. His main duty as a member of the 11th Airborne Division was as an artillery man operating a 75mm Howitzer cannon, which was disassembled and parachuted along with the men.
For World War II paratroopers, landing out of the drop zone was not uncommon, and it almost always placed the troopers in the dangerous position of blundering around in enemy-held territory, wondering when or if they would run into an enemy patrol.
Looking down through the morning sky that day, Kilpatrick knew he and his fellow troopers had missed their drop zone. Where there was supposed to be a city hotel, they instead found a secluded patch of jungle four miles from their objective.
Kilpatrick and the other men were forced to gather their equipment and walk four miles to reach the hotel, which housed Japanese officers. Their mission was to take the hotel and its occupants.
“The time it took to recover our equipment and walk four miles, gave the (Japanese) officers time to desert the hotel,” Kilpatrick said. “All we found was their breakfast on the table – fish eyes and rice.”
Kilpatrick’s military career began in February 1943. The Army had just formed the 11th Airborne. He was 19 years old. His father and mother were Zeb V. Kilpatrick Sr. and Esther, and their home was in East Flat Rock.
The family owned and operated Shorty’s Pig ‘N Whistle barbecue restaurant, where he worked before and after the war. The restaurant stood where Main and Church streets come together at the Mud Creek bridge, behind the abandoned Jennings Glass building near the Fresh Market grocery store.
Putting his glasses on and sitting down at a table on his deck recently, Kilpatrick began thumbing through old photos from the war and a book about the formation of the 11th Airborne Division.
“It’s amazing how time passes,” he said as one photo caught his eye.
In the photo, a group of about 60 Henderson and Polk county recruits are standing in front of the former Fourth Avenue post office in downtown Hendersonville.
“There’s Sid Tabor, Doug Ray, Hal Potts, Grady Jones … I don’t remember them all,” Kilpatrick said, staring intently into the black and white photograph.
“A lot of these guys … it was the first time I’d ever seen any of them,” he said. “You’re thinking, ‘This is it. We’re on our way.'” Pointing out the number of men smoking cigarettes, Kilpatrick added, “They’re nervous, I guess.”
As he would soon come to realize, his nerves had not yet been stretched to their limits.
Kilpatrick’s service in the military began at Fort Croft in Spartanburg, S.C., where he volunteered for paratrooper school. He volunteered for the hazardous duty because of the $50 a month it paid, he said.
After spending a week at Fort Croft, he was shipped out to Fort Toccoa in Georgia for the Army to determine his fitness for paratrooper training. From Fort Toccoa he went to Camp Mackall in eastern North Carolina to complete basic training. Once basic training ended, Pvt. Kilpatrick was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia for jump school. He spent six weeks at Fort Benning.
“I’d never been up in a plane before, and I jumped out of one the first time I went,” he said.
After Fort Benning, he went back to Camp Mackall to prepare to move to Camp Polk in Louisiana for more training. It was November 1943.
Four months later, in March 1944, Kilpatrick was at Camp Stoneman in California with the rest of the 11th Airborne preparing to head overseas, but not knowing exactly where he was going in the Pacific.
“We left there in a couple of weeks, not knowing we were going to wind up in New Guinea,” he said.
While in New Guinea, he underwent four months of jungle training.
“(We) set out pineapple plants and they matured,” he remembered of his time on the South Pacific island.
From New Guinea, Kilpatrick and the 11th Airborne moved to the Philippines, first the jungle island of Leyte and then on to Mindora Island, then to the main island, Luzon.
From Luzon, Kilpatrick jumped on Tagaytay Ridge, south of Manila, where he would stay for 100 days or so defending the ridge from Japanese troops.
“There were eight of us,” he recalled. “We dug an emplacement that was about 12 feet by 14 feet. We cut down coconut trees for the roof and piled the dirt from digging it on top.”
The men, their ammunition, equipment, food and water all were in the emplacement. There was one entrance and to get in or out the men had to crawl.
“You couldn’t stand up inside,” Kilpatrick said.
“The conditions weren’t that bad at all,” he said. “It was waterproof and ditched so the water that did get in would run off.”
It was November 1944 and the Japanese were desperately trying to maintain a foothold in the Philippines. It would be the tenacity of men such as Kilpatrick and his seven fellow paratroopers that would help the United States retake and hold the Philippines.
After successfully defending Tagaytay Ridge, Kilpatrick and the 11th Airborne moved on to Tacloban. Several Navy carriers had been sunk in the Philippine Sea, he said. But the airplanes from the carriers were able to get off the ships before they sunk and needed somewhere to land.
“Our objective was to take the San Pableo airstrip, which was near the Tacloban airstrip, and hold it,” Kilpatrick said. “It was needed for flying in and out of there.”
The next day, the Japanese sent 24 airplanes full of paratroopers and took the airstrip back and held it for three days, he said. Again, U.S. troops were able to regain the airstrip, this time for good.
Shortly after this mission, Kilpatrick was ordered back to Clark Field, just outside Manila. But on the way he was injured in a truck accident. That injury would earn Kilpatrick a Purple Heart. It also sidelined him for the remainder of the war and ended his duty as a paratrooper. He would recover in a jungle tent hospital for about four months.
Upon release from the hospital in the spring of 1945, Kilpatrick was sent to a reclassification center. But before he could be reclassified and assigned to another unit, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then a second bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered a few days after the second bomb.
Kilpatrick asked to remain with the 11th Airborne Division, since he would not have to jump anymore.
In late August 1945, the 11th Airborne Division with Kilpatrick landed in Okawa, Japan. The division was assigned as an occupation force.
“We were the first troops in Japan after the surrender,” he said. “We flew to Atsugi, Japan, in full battle gear. We were greeted upon landing by Japanese troops in full battle gear. But their backs were all turned away from the airfield. They would not face us. I think it was a gesture of humility. My personal opinion is they were ashamed.”
Like many World War II veterans who fought in the Pacific, Kilpatrick thinks using the atomic bombs to force the surrender saved many American lives.
“The bomb was a lifesaver,” he said. “They (the Japanese) had everything in the world underground. I saw it with my own eyes. I went in there. They had planes disassembled in there. They had living quarters, they were well stocked with food. … The war could have gone on for years if we would have had to take their home island.”
By September 1945, Army life for Kilpatrick had gotten back to “normal Army,” he said. A point system was in effect and soldiers who earned enough were rotated back to the United States.
In December 1945, Kilpatrick and most of his unit were getting ready to ship out when a fire destroyed the building they had lived in for four months. Several men died in the fire and everything was burnt up, he said.
“Everything except a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and one sock,” Kilpatrick said. “I don’t know why I only put one sock on. … I was very fortunate to get out of the fire. We were on the second floor. Guys were jumping out of second floor windows.”
The fire delayed Tech. Sgt. Kilpatrick’s return until 1946. He finally was back home in Henderson County in January.
Upon his return, he worked at his family’s restaurant until 1950, when he took a job with Imperial Life Insurance Co. in Asheville, which was later purchased by Western/Southern Life Insurance Co. He stayed with the insurance company until his retirement in 1983, when he was 58 years old.
Since retiring, he has played golf and enjoyed spending time with his wife of 54 years, Dorothy, and his son, Van, and daughter, Jan. The Kilpatricks lost another son, Kyle, to a blood disorder.
“As far as my part (in the war), I’d go back and do it again if it was necessary,” Kilpatrick said.