Veteran recalls Black Sheep’s rescue

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, May 27, 2006

At 81, Ray Dorbolo can look back six decades to one day that for him was the high point of World War II.

It was Aug. 29, 1945, little more than a week after President Truman announced the Japanese surrender. Dorbolo was a storekeeper aboard the USS Reeves, a high-speed transport ship in the Pacific.

For 109 days during the Okinawa campaign, the Reeves served as a minesweeper and an escort vessel. The ship was threatened during large-scale kamikaze attacks and downed two Japanese planes.

At the end of the war, the USS Reeves helped in the repatriation of American prisoners of war. For Dorbolo, the memory of those POWs, among them the maverick Marine flying ace Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, stands out as a vivid highlight in a long war.

“I was 20,” the Everett man said. “You can’t imagine it. The magnitude of that incident was overwhelming. We all had tears in our eyes.”

Boyington, raised in Tacoma, was a 1934 graduate of the University of Washington and had been on its wrestling team. A Boeing engineer, he served in the Marines, then as a civilian contract flier with the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed the Flying Tigers. They fought in Burma and China against the Japanese early in the war.

In the Marines, Boyington became a legend by leading a fighter squadron of pilots not assigned to other units. With only a few weeks to get them combat-ready, Boyington had great success with his “Black Sheep Squadron.”

Boyington, credited with downing 26 Japanese planes, was shot down in January of 1944.

When Dorbolo’s ship took on 149 people from Japan’s Omari prison camp and another POW camp on Aug. 29, 1945, everyone was stunned to see Boyington among them, along with Navy Cmdr. Richard O’Kane, a submariner honored for service on the USS Tang.

Boyington and O’Kane later received the Medal of Honor, the highest award for valor that can be bestowed on a member of the U.S. armed forces.

“Nobody knew he was alive,” Dorbolo said of Boyington. “He was a folk hero. A lot of press was aboard our ship because the war was just over. When they found out these guys were alive, it was an extra special story.”

Dorbolo remembers shaking hands with the freed POWs.

“Pappy was in pretty good shape. He had gotten himself a job in the prison kitchen,” Dorbolo said. “They talked about getting beaten up with a baseball bat and being kicked around. But he looked good. He was one tough nut.”

Boyington, who died in 1988, was recently back in the news.

In February, there was a resolution before the UW student senate recommending a memorial be built to honor Boyington. By a one-vote margin, the group rejected it, primarily because students wanted all the UW’s Medal of Honor winners to be recognized.

But comments made during the debate caused an uproar when they hit talk radio. Those comments questioned whether a member of the Marine Corps was suitable to be honored by the university.

Eric Godfrey, the UW’s acting vice president for student affairs, said Friday that the initial resolution to honor Boyington “enjoyed considerable discussion.”

The student senate ended up approving a resolution to honor as many as five from the university who’ve won the medal, Godfrey said. As a result of the controversy, Godfrey said the university received donations from Boyington supporters that may fund scholarships in his name and will help pay for the memorial.

“It was a great educational experience,” Godfrey said.

Let’s hope students had a crash course in heroes who saved the world.

“Some of those students were far removed from reality,” Dorbolo said.

On the USS Reeves, he said, POWs who needed medical attention were taken to the hospital ships Rescue and Benevolence. The rest, including Boyington and O’Kane, spent a day or so aboard before being shipped home. “Boy, did they eat,” Dorbolo said.

In October of 1945, Dorbolo went on to Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb had been dropped Aug. 9. The USS Reeves took aboard scientists and engineers led by Navy officer Harold Stassen, later a Minnesota governor and perennial presidential candidate.

Back home, Dorbolo worked for the Scott Paper Co. He married and raised two children. Now retired, he exercises several days a week at the Naval Station Everett gym.

In the 1960s, he received a packet from the U.S. Department of Defense informing him that he is “an atomic veteran.”

“They advised me to inform them should I develop cancer,” Dorbolo said. “To date, all is well.”

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.