Don Hendrickson was a high school boy on Dec. 7, 1941. He can’t say for sure where he was that Sunday.
“I was probably in church,” the 85-year-old said.
It wasn’t like now. There was no TV, no instant news. And he had his own concerns, the boy did chores at home as his widowed father worked at an Everett lumber mill.
On Thursday, Hendrickson sat in his kitchen in Marysville, in the remodeled 1905 farmhouse where his grandparents lived before it became his childhood home. He has lived there most of his life.
He couldn’t clearly recall the exact moment, 66 years ago, that he heard about the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress to ask for a declaration of war, and called Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.”
Another date lives large in Hendrickson’s memory: Dec. 10, 1945.
“That’s the day a troop ship brought us back into Tacoma. I’ll never forget, it was my dad’s birthday,” he said. “I don’t know how they knew I was on that boat, but my dad was there at Fort Lewis. He had a 1941 Plymouth, a five-passenger coupe.”
Between 1941 and 1945, Hendrickson grew into manhood. Like so many thousands of young Americans, he was tested by combat during World War II. While Japan had once seemed a faraway point on a map, by the end of 1945 he had served there as part of U.S. occupation forces.
He’s modest and sparing with details, but what he endured on the islands of the Pacific is as plain as snapshots in his scrapbook. In one picture, he’s in shorts, and so thin that his chest bones are painfully prominent. “I weighed 128 pounds when I came home,” said Hendrickson, who is 5 feet, 10 inches tall and now has a sturdy build.
After graduating from Marysville High School in 1942, Hendrickson married. His wife, Marian, died in 2000. Drafted into the Army in 1943, he was trained at Camp Roberts in California before shipping out on an 18-day voyage from Oakland, Calif., to Brisbane, Australia. “I was already sick before we went under the Golden Gate,” he said.
A member of the 41st Division, 163rd Infantry, a regiment made up mostly of Montana men, Hendrickson saw his first combat in the islands of New Guinea. He was involved in landings at Aitape, where an airfield was seized from Japanese forces, and at Wakde Island.
“That was a hot one,” said Hendrickson, who described being in “some bomb crater” and losing his partner while stringing communications lines. “All hell broke loose,” he said. “I got up and took off, my partner didn’t follow.” He can’t remember the man’s name, but will never forget his red hair. Japanese snipers up in coconut trees were firing on Americans. “A sniper got him,” he said.
After Wakde came the island of Biak, northwest of New Guinea. Hendrickson suffered from yellow jaundice and was hospitalized at Hollandia in New Guinea. “I was down to skin and bones. The sanitary facilities were terrible,” he said.
Still to come were landings on the Philippine islands of Mindoro and Mindanao, where Hendrickson took trucks ashore. “I was always loaded with ammunition. We had to waterproof our trucks. If you didn’t do the job right, you didn’t make it ashore,” he said.
On Mindanao, he was wounded. “They needed ammunition on the front line. We had to cross an airstrip. The Japanese had dug in caves,” he said. The plan was to make the run at night, and find his way back to a foxhole. When the foxhole he had prepared was occupied, he was hit by shrapnel — “in my lower butt.”
Evacuated from the beach, he was taken to a Philippine hospital. He was there three months before returning to battle. He was at Zamboanga, on Mindanao, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrender soon followed, but Hendrickson’s war wasn’t over.
With occupation forces, he arrived in Japan in September 1945, and was with a motor pool about 25 miles from Hiroshima. “We didn’t know anything about radiation. We drove right down into Hiroshima,” he said. He had Thanksgiving dinner in Yokohama that year, and the next day got on a home-bound ship.
“I’m no hero,” Hendrickson said. “I don’t pretend to be a hero, but I did everything they asked me to do. I did what I had to do.”
Back home, he had an apprenticeship as a machinist, then worked nearly 30 years for the Scott Paper Co. He settled down in Marysville and raised his family.
“I remember Pearl Harbor, but that’s a part of my life I like to forget,” he said. “Now I’ve got some grandsons. I hope they never have to see anything like it.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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