Las Vegas Review-Journal (Nevada) July 04, 2003
Legacy of Stellar Service
By Keith Rogers
When fireworks go off tonight, Larry Odell intends to do what he always does on the Fourth of July: Think about the founding of the nation and his Marine buddies who died fighting for it on six Pacific islands during World War II.
'I'm always kind of choked up,' Odell said last week with photos of his trip to the National Iwo Jima Memorial Monument and a group shot taken 60 years ago of the G Battery Marines spread across his daughter's dining room table.
'We'll go watch the fireworks, have a few beers and sing the Marines' song, the 'Halls of Montezuma,' ' he said.
In May, in honor of his 80th birthday, a senior military intelligence official, Robert Winchester, presented him with a U.S. flag that was flown over the Capitol. An accompanying citation noted his 'stellar service to his nation,' from Jan. 4, 1942, to Jan. 12, 1946.
'During that period, Mr. Odell distinguished himself as a machine gunner in the 2d 155 Howitzer Battalion, known as the 'Forgotten Battalion,' throughout the major battles of the South Pacific,' it read.
In the surge of patriotism that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Odell, the teenage son of a hard-rock mining assayer, drove from the Southern Nevada hamlet of Nelson to San Diego to join the Marines.
He attributes his survival of some of the deadliest battles of the war to his 5-foot-7 stature.
'They shot over my head and got the tall guys,' he said.
Odell is one of only a handful of surviving members of the Forgotten Battalion.
The unit, he said, was so named 'because when we got to another island, they would assign us to another outfit. ... That's the reason we made more landings, because we'd get switched in more theaters of war than any other battalion.'
Out of about 120 men in the 155mm howitzer battalion who shipped out from San Diego on July 1, 1942 destined for Guadalcanal, only Odell and 34 of his comrades returned to the West Coast, landing in San Francisco on board a converted bomber in April 1945.
'Not everybody got killed, some were wounded or transferred,' said Odell, who after the war married his wife, Dorothy, and worked 40 years at the Kerr-McGee chemical plant near Henderson.
The 37-day cruise to Guadalcanal aboard the USS President Jackson was an unforgettable experience, he said. The attack-transport ship was designed for 200 personnel. Instead, it carried about 2,000 troops. 'You'd get in line for breakfast, then turn around and get in line for dinner,' Odell said.
After landing, the Marines found themselves without food because supply ships had been driven away by the Japanese armada.
'Everybody had malaria,' he said. 'Our main diet was Japanese rice that had bugs in it. We'd put iodine in it and call it rice and protein. Everybody lost 20 to 30 pounds. I got down to 127 pounds after starting out at 147.'
Odell said his unit backed up other Marine units on the island and only fought Japanese soldiers 'when they found us.'
The first time he was shot at, Odell recalled thinking, 'What the heck am I doing here. ... It would rain pretty near every day. Everybody had a rash on their body. It was a bad deal.'
After the Marines gained control of that island and nearby Tulagi island, the Forgotten Battalion was shipped to New Zealand to recover. Odell regained his weight and then some, hitting 163 pounds after a steady diet of steak, eggs and bread.
By late 1943, he was heading out for another combat mission, this time in Tarawa, a white coral island that intelligence sources believed would be a stepping stone for supplies and refueling for U.S. forces to reach Japan. As it turned out, the island's size had been overestimated and the high tide at landing had been underestimated. The Japanese were dug in and waiting.
'The first few waves (of Marines) with their rifles over their heads, made them sitting ducks,' he said.
In the first 72 hours of fighting, some 2,000 U.S. troops were killed. 'After they lost all these people, they found out the island wasn't big enough' for large U.S. aircraft to land on, he said. 'I lost quite a few buddies there.'
From Tarawa, the Forgotten Battalion was shipped to Hawaii to rest up for the battle of Saipan.
'It was pretty rough in Saipan. They had big guns in caves and would run them out on rails. We were finally able to get zeroed in on them and wipe them out,' Odell said. 'It was really a struggle. We lost a lot of people there. I always made a point to dig a foxhole a little deeper than the other guys.'
The next stop, Guam, was the easiest of all the landings, he said. But a strange thing happened when Odell was setting up a machine gun nest.
'I was going behind this native hut and ran into this Japanese fellow and he's talking English. I took out my (knife) and had it up to his Adam's apple. He said, 'I'm a Marine.' '
Unbeknownst to him, until he escorted the man to his commander, he had crossed paths with a unit of Japanese-American Marines.
In February of 1945, the Forgotten Battalion found itself on Iwo Jima, a sulfur-scented Japanese island in a direct flight path to Tokyo. As long as it was under Japanese control, U.S. warplanes had to consume more fuel on their flights to aircraft carriers in order to fly out of range of enemy anti-aircraft guns.
Odell said the Japanese were entrenched in tunnels. 'You didn't see any Japanese. We lost a lot of people because they'd have an opening, and they'd shoot at us, and we couldn't shoot at them.
'At night they'd sneak out and drag the Japanese bodies back in, so only our bodies were left. It was disconcerting. We thought we weren't doing very good.'
In the end, flame-throwers prevailed to root out the enemy. 'If you could get it in an opening, the enemy had to choose either to stay inside and get cooked or come out and get fried,' Odell said. 'The flame-throwers forced them out of those caves.'
When the Marines on Feb. 23, 1945 raised the second of two U.S. flags on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, Odell was a few hundred yards away from the spot where Joe Rosenthal took the famous photograph.
'I could see what they were doing,' Odell said, noting, 'We actually hadn't taken the island at this point.'
He made it through all six battles without a wound, despite the deadly encounters only a few feet in front of his gun barrel.
'I've had to shoot them at point blank,' he said. 'But I never had to use my bayonet.'
FORGOTTEN BATTALION
From 1942 to 1945, Pfc. Larry Odell, a lifelong Southern Nevadan, served as a Marine machine gunner assigned to a 155 mm howitzer battalion. His unit, G Battery of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines fought in six Pacific battles, including two Jima. The unit was transferred so often that it became known as the Forgotten Battalion.
SOURCES: Larry Odell, Globalsecurity.org
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