TWO BROTHERS LOST TO WAR AFTER THE ARMISTICE

Floyd (L), Friend, Lewis (R), New Guinea

Gold Star Flag, Emporia, KS

My nephew Mike Davis recently acquired a box of documents at a family reunion in Kansas that was primarily collected by my grandmother Davis who had three sons that were immediately called into service along with hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in WWII.  Mike assembled all of this family treasure into scrap books along with other supplemental research.  When I recently received the book on these three sons, I was immediately surprised by seeing a small surviving flag that I knew was special.  I was just a young child during the war, so my recollection of events is weak, but I do vividly remember the small flag with three stars that our grandmother proudly hung in her front window.  Two of the stars represented her sons Floyd in the army and Johnny who was assigned to a destroyer escort, while the third silver star honored uncle Lewis who was assigned to the 251^st Hospital group and didn’t survive the horrors of the war.  Our grandmother kept newspaper clippings of all the local young recruits that went off to war and was dedicated to the work of the Gold Star Mothers organization.  One of those young men was Harold A. Spatz from nearby Lebo, Kansas who flew on the infamous Doolittle raid over Tokyo.  When his plane along with the others ran out of fuel on their return he was captured by the Japanese and executed by firing squad on October 15, 1942, the day I was born.

My Uncle Floyd Davis arrived in the Pacific Theater in 1942 with the 8^th Fighter Control Squadron and remained there to witness our US brass flying to secure Japan’s surrender in 1945.  Their mission was to set up and man the new radar equipment that had been developed in England to detect incoming enemy planes and coordinate the US 8^th Fighter Squadron planes’ response.  Mike also found a book written by J.C. Stanaway & L.J. Hickey titled Attack and Conquer about the 8^th fighter group and the control squadron.  Soon after arriving in Australia, the radar control squadron was assigned to set up a defensive radar position atop a mountain off the SW coast of New Guinea.  Before long they spotted an invading fleet of seven troop barges close to their position.  They were able to radio in for air support which sank all the barges but not before about 400 troops had made it ashore.  The men were ordered to destroy their equipment and get the hell out of there.  It took an arduous sixteen days of maneuvering on foot through quicksand, rivers and thick jungle growth while enduring lacerations, fungus and malaria before they could be rescued.  We don’t know if Floyd was on this mission, but we do know he was there at that time and contracted malaria on the islands.  Most veterans didn’t discuss much about the war.

Uncle Lewis also found himself on the island of New Guinea working with the destroyed minds and bodies of innumerable young men at a makeshift hospital.  They both were amazed when they discovered that they had traveled on totally separate secret paths around the world in the midst of a world war and were only about thirty miles apart!  Lewis was able to get a short pass to visit his brother and they wrote back to the states that they had a great reunion with some of Floyd’s squad.

Both young men survived the war and were close to the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri.  Louis reenlisted and was assigned to a post in Georgia.  An investigation reported that after falling asleep on a noisy train in the dead of night he awoke from what could have been a frightening nightmare with the sound of planes strafing incoming wounded and he bolted outside to his death.  Floyd returned safely back to Kansas but never recovered from the alcohol that consumed his body in the midst of the jungle warfare and he eventually succumbed to it.  The unimaginable circumstance that ripped these young men from life on an American farm in the heartland and deposited them in the middle of a Pacific island jungle hell didn’t take their lives then, but it held on until it succeeded.  

After reflecting, I realized that the horrific experience for Floyd and Lewis had to create a PTSD result which nobody was prepared to acknowledge or treat at that time.  May they and their mother now be united in peace.