Shadows In the Jungle (43 page)

Col. Frederick Bradshaw hoped to return to his beloved Jackson, Mississippi, and resume his law career and, maybe, make a run at state government. That dream was cut short in 1946 when he died at his home from a massive heart attack.

Bradshaw's executive officer and heir as Alamo Scout commander, Homer Williams, retired from the army in 1950. He died in a car crash in 1993.

Mayo Stuntz, the Scouts' ingenious supply officer, retired from the army in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel. Afterward, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, from which he retired in 1975. He lives in Virginia and has coauthored books on local history.

Scout Lewis Hochstrasser left the army in 1945 and worked as a feature writer for the
Wall Street Journal
for many years before becoming a publicist for the Signal Oil Company. He wrote the first unit history, an unpublished manuscript entitled
They Were First: The Story of the Alamo Scouts
. He died at his home in California in 1996 at the age of eighty-two.

Robert “Red” Sumner made the army a career, never considering any other path. While in Tokyo with 6th Army HQ, he met an army nurse named Dorothy during a blind date. After the date, Dorothy told her friends she would not be seeing him again because the young officer was “too full of himself.” In 1947, they were married at Fort Bragg and would eventually have five children. Later, Sumner continued his college education, which the war had interrupted, and earned his bachelor's degree.

Always active and with a love of the outdoors, Sumner refused to play golf, saying it was a game for “old men.”

In 1980, Sumner was instrumental in the formation of the Alamo Scout Association, and served as its director for many years. Under him, the group grew to over sixty members.

Red Sumner died at his home in Tampa, Florida, on August 3, 2004.

Philippine-born Rafael Ileto stayed in the army. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general and served as ambassador to Iran, and, later, Minister of National Defense under President Ferdinand Marcos. Ileto died in November 2003.

Robert T. Schermerhorn lived in Pomona Park, Florida, where he worked in the home construction industry. He never had any contact with his fellow Alamo Scouts until the current Alamo Scout Association executive director Russ Blaise called him in November of 2003. Schermerhorn died on May 22, 2005.

John Geiger became a rigging contractor for his family-owned business in Newark, New Jersey. He met and married his wife, Betty, and they had nine children. The Geigers have been married for sixty years and still reside in New Jersey.

Aubrey “Lee” Hall, the first Scout to receive a battlefield commission, remained in the army. Demoted back to sergeant after the war, he eventually retired as a master sergeant. He lived with his wife, Maude, in Hawaii until his death on July 19, 2008.

John McGowen, who led the first Alamo Scout mission and became the “old man” of the unit, left the army in November 1945. He worked for a year on banana plantations in Panama and Costa Rica, and was an assistant professor of economics at Texas Christian University for a year. For the next thirty years, he worked for a U.S.-based oil company, spending time in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. Married shortly after the war, and with two children, his first wife died. He met his second wife, Christine, an Englishwoman, in Crete in 1977 and they married in 1979. They resided in England.

McGowen had no contact with any of his wartime comrades until he attended a Scout reunion around 1980.

He died on October 31, 1991, and was buried by his father's side in Hartley, Texas.

Hollywood-handsome John Dove remained in the army, retiring as a full colonel. During his career he served in Germany and Saudi Arabia and did one tour of duty in Vietnam in 1967-68. He died at his California home on September 23, 1995.

Wilbur Littlefield returned to Los Angeles and graduated from law school. He hung out his own shingle for a time, then took a job as a Los Angeles County public defender. He eventually became head of the department with some seven hundred attorneys working under him. He married shortly after the war, and his wife, Vera, died in 1998. Retired now, Littlefield still lives in Los Angeles.

Irvin Ray left the army and tried different career paths. With his brother Stanley, who was also color-blind, he tried his hand at house painting. They abandoned this idea when, on a job, it was discovered they were using two different colors.

Ray joined the National Guard in 1947 and was called up during the Korean War, but was not sent overseas. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and retired from the Reserves in 1983 as a major general. Ray married his wife, Terry, whom he had known since high school, in 1949. The Rays had three children, and when their son Michael completed his ROTC training for the National Guard, his dad pinned on his new lieutenant bars.

Irv Ray died on April 24, 2004, while Michael was serving in Iraq; Michael did not make it back for the funeral.

William Blaise was discharged from the army on October 3, 1945, and reenlisted the next day. He was assigned to Company A, 703rd Military Police Battalion and did military burial details at Arlington National Cemetery, where his job was to help carry the caskets to grave sites and fold the flag. In 1946 he married Elaine Haas and they had two sons.

Blaise left the army on February 28, 1947, and moved to Merrick, Long Island. There he took a job as assistant paint foreman for Plant 3 of Grumman Aerospace in Bethpage. During the Apollo moon mission days, Blaise helped work on the lunar modules. He retired in 1980 and moved to Port Richey, Florida. Bill Blaise died on July 26, 1997.

Medic Dominck Cicippio left the Scouts in February 1945 and returned to his unit. That April he was shot through the leg by a Japanese sniper. Infection set in and he nearly lost the leg. Both he and the leg recovered, and he returned to Norristown, Pennsylvania, and took a job with Valley Forge Sheet Metal. He met Rose Chiccarine and they married in 1950 and had two sons. The younger, Jimmy, contracted leukemia and died in 1980. Cicippio used his medic skills to help his son through his final days. Cicippio died on March 16, 2004.

Scout team leader Robert Shirkey went to law school and became a lawyer in 1950. Recalled during the Korean War, he served with the 5th Regimental Combat Team. Discharged in 1952, he resumed his law career, but remained in the Reserves. He retired in 1984 as commanding general of the 89th Reserve Command, making him the last remaining general officer to have fought against the Japanese. He lives in Missouri.

William F. Barnes served as head coach of the UCLA Bruins from 1958 until 1966, and is a member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. He lives in Los Angeles.

Terry Santos attended college under the GI Bill at San Francisco State University. He became a hydraulic engineer. Retired, he remains active with the Alamo Scouts Association and still lives in his native San Francisco.

William Lutz became a Methodist minister after the war and has since lost contact with the Scouts.

Oliver Roesler returned to college and became a logging engineer. His neck wound earned him a 10 percent disability, and the thirteen dollars a month he got from that helped pay his tuition. With his two brothers and his father, he started a lumber company. He still lives near Seattle and enjoys salmon fishing. He said he is not sure he'd join the Scouts again, but said, “I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.”

He still carries the shrapnel in his neck.

William E. Nellist, a man who was not big on taking orders, remained in the army for a while. On three occasions the CIA tried to recruit him, but he said no, worried that it would interfere with his hunting and fishing. Instead, when he left the army, he became a plumber, saying he did not want a desk job. Nellist and his wife, Jane, had two sons. He died on September 5, 1997.

Thomas Rounsaville spent thirty-two years in the army, serving in the Korean and Vietnam wars. In 1965 he commanded the ground forces that freed white captives being held by rebels in the Congo. Rounsaville retired in 1973 as a colonel, and died on April 16, 1999.

Galen Kittleson also stayed in the army, joining the Special Forces in 1961 with the rank of command sergeant major. In 1970, at the age of forty-five, Kittleson was in Vietnam, where he was part of the raid at Son Tay to free American prisoners in North Vietnam. That action, plus another POW rescue mission later, made him the only man in U.S. military history to take part in four POW raids in two wars. He retired to Iowa, and died on May 4, 2006.

Andy Smith, Kit's buddy, played minor league baseball for the Chicago White Sox, the Cleveland Indians, and the St. Louis Browns. Recalled for both the Korean and Vietnam wars, he served in both conflicts as a case officer for army intelligence. Later in life, Smith taught at several different schools for the Department of Defense, including the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He retired in 1975 as a master sergeant and died on January 18, 2000.

Conrad Vineyard returned to California. After college, he married and had two daughters. Vineyard worked as a civil engineer and researcher, mostly in Golden, Colorado. After his wife died, he remarried, and today he and Priscilla live in Colorado.

He had lost all contact with the Alamo Scouts until discovering their Web site a few years ago. He has been an active member of the Alamo Scouts Association ever since.

Robert Buschur ended the war as a private, although he was considered an “acting platoon sergeant.” Sent to Korea after the end of World War II, he remained there until December 1945, then returned to Ohio. There he married Rita and they had twelve children. They still live on their farm, and in 2007 he attended his first Alamo Scout reunion.

Harold Hard, a witty man who never said an unkind word about anyone, his daughter recalled, returned home, where he married his wife, Marie. They had three children. Hard died in December 1995, just shy of his fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Zeke McConnell had been asked to go to Japan after the war, but with more than eighty-five points, he declined and returned to his family in Washington. He went to work as a painter at the Cushman Indian Hospital, where, in 1946, he met and married Mae Ladinne Duffy. They had five children. McConnell later worked for the City of Seattle in the maintenance department, and was active in the local Boy Scouts as a scoutmaster. An exceptional archer, he enjoyed giving bow and arrow demonstrations with his son, Lester. McConnell retired in 1980 and kept up a lifelong friendship with Bill Littlefield.

In January 2007, Littlefield hurried from Los Angeles to be at the bedside of his desperately ill friend. McConnell died on February 4, 2007.

William McCommons, whose job was to select samurai swords for General Krueger and his staff, returned to college. Prior to the war he had attended the University of Illinois on a scholarship, studying geology. He volunteered to clean test tubes in the laboratory at Halliburton. He did that for a month before he was drafted. After the war, Halliburton gave him five years' back salary and a new job. He bought his own business, a small oil company, in the 1950s. He married, had four children, and spent twenty-six years as a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts. McCommons died in 1998.

George Thompson came home and earned his law degree. He was later elected to the Missouri Supreme Court. The Alamo Scout team leader died on October 17, 2005.

Australian Raymond “Moose” Watson, an Alamo Scout instructor and head of the New Guinea “Police Boys,” stayed in the army and was promoted to major. In 1947 he was appointed a Member of the British Empire, allowing him to use the prestigious M.B.E. after his name. Watson died in Australia on July 27, 1998.

“Baby” Lois McCoy, now Lois Bourinskie, who was carried out of Los Baños at age three days, graduated from the Providence College of Nursing in Oakland, California, in 1966 and worked at Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, as a registered nurse. Widowed more than twenty years ago, she still lives there, painting watercolors and acrylics.

While the Alamo Scouts never captured the Japanese commanders they sought in the Philippines, American military authorities eventually did.

Generals Yamashita and Adachi were among a number of Japanese civilian and military leaders placed on trial for war crimes.

Adachi was convicted for issuing orders that encouraged the execution of Allied airmen and in connection with the maltreatment and arbitrary executions of other prisoners by men under his command, and sentenced to life in prison. While imprisoned at Rabaul on September 10, 1947, he used a rusty paring knife to commit ritualistic hara-kiri.

Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, was tried for crimes committed by men under his command, but to which there was no direct evidence linking his complicity. His being tried for “command responsibility” became known as the Yamashita Standard, although critics of MacArthur claimed the only crime Yamashita committed was defeating the egotistical American general.

Yamashita was found guilty and hanged on February 23, 1946.

APPENDIX A

McGowen Team:
John R. C. McGowen, Paul A. Gomez, John P. Lagoud, Walter A. McDonald, Caesar Ramirez, John A. Roberts

 

Barnes Team:
William F. Barnes, Louis J. Belson, Warren J. Boes, Aubrey Hall, John O. Pitcairn, Bobby G. Walters, Robert W. Teeples

 

Thompson Team:
George S. Thompson, Jack E. Benson, Joseph A. Johnson, Theodore T. Largo, Anthony Ortiz, Joshua Sunn, Glenn L. Heryford (last mission addition)

 

Sombar Team:
Michael J. Sombar, James R. Crokett, Ora M. Davis, Charles F. Harkins, Virgil F. Howell, David M. Milda