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World War II vet recalls Pacific Theater

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By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer 12:49 AM Tuesday, December 7, 2010

In February 1944, after a 13-week boot camp at Great Lakes, Ill., Charles Rymer landed on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific to serve his nation as an electrician on a ship that ferried troops and supplies to the beaches when U.S. forces made their invasions.

Rymer’s primary duty was to operate and repair the radios. Because of the nature of their missions, Rymer’s ship was engaged in combat action on only four occasions, he said, but they were also lost at sea four times.

Still, Rymer suffered two injuries. Once, he broke his arm when trying to crank an engine and ended up out of action for nearly a month because the compound fracture didn’t heal properly in the jungle weather, he said.

On another occasion, when the ship was waiting to move into a floating dry dock, he was standing at the rail mesmerized by the fish in the water and didn’t see the dock worker toss a “monkey’s paw,” a large nut used to help toss a leader rope to the boat, his direction. It hit him on the top of his head and took nine stitches.

Once, his ship was the target of some South Pacific islanders.

“We went up to an island that was a volcano, just a ring in the ocean, and the Navy had a base back there and the Japanese had taken it,” he said “There was only one place to get out of that volcano that was deep enough for ships, and the Japanese decided to scuttle their ships in the opening, but over to the side was a little shallow place that a landing craft could get through.

“So we were creeping through there and all of a sudden we saw these darts flying down on the deck.

“We looked up and there were about 10 big natives standing out there with their faces all painted white, and they had blowguns shooting at us, poison darts. They were fighting the war that way. One of our guys had a machine gun and he looked up at the skipper and said, ‘Should I take care of them?’

“He said, ‘No, they’re poor ignorant people and they don’t know that a gun could kill them.’ We went on by and out into the center of that volcano. We looked for them coming back, but they weren’t there.”

Although he was separated from his young family — he didn’t get to see his first daughter, Darlene, until she was almost 2 — he did get a chance to meet up with his brother James, a Chief Navy Hospital Corpsman on a Marine base in the Treasury Islands.

“We were going down to Guadalcanal, and I had the skipper stop the convoy in there,” Rymer recalled. “It looked like Gilligan’s Island, a little bitty inlet.”

The skipper made an excuse to stop for fresh water and told Rymer, “I’m only going to give you a half-hour, be sure you’re back here.”

So Rymer threw a dinghy overboard, pattled it to shore, tied it up to a coconut tree, and ran up on the road where he flagged down a jeep that was driven, as it turns out, by two men who reported to his brother.

“They said, ‘He’s been looking for you for a year,’ ” Rymer said.

When he got to James’ office, the brothers shared a couple of beers that James had been saving.

On Christmas Day, 1945, Rymer got his discharge and returned to work at Savage Auto Supply, but his South Pacific adventure wasn’t quite over.

“I was off for 11 days and then I went back to work for two weeks,” he said, “then I turned real yellow.”

The doctor asked, “Are you one of those guys who just got in from the Pacific?”

Rymer told him he was, and the doctor said, “You’ve got malaria.”

“I said I couldn’t believe it because I took the quinine pills every day,” he said. “I’d seen guys go mad with that stuff in the hospital. They suffered terrible and I didn’t want it.

“He said it could kill me and told me to go home, and ‘You just lay down and stay there for two weeks.’ ”

Rymer went back to work to tell his boss, and Arthur Savage told the bookkeeper to count him out two weeks’ pay. He said, “You go home and do what the doctor told you to do and if I see you up, I’m going to kick your butt.”

Rymer said the Navy wrote to him about re-enlisting for submarine duty.

“I was skinny as a rail and could get in and out of the hatches real easy,” he said. “But I said nope. I thought I could find something better to do than that. I went back to my job.”

And he stayed at Savage Auto Supply for a total of 44 years.

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.

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