A STEP AT A TIME…BIRTH AND DEATH IN WAR

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist



At precisely 6:30 PM on Friday the thirteenth, August, 1943, the cry of a newborn child shattered the hot and sluggish summer air of tiny Peebles, Ohio, USA, located just thirty miles north of the Ohio River. It was a girl-child, born in a farmhouse bedroom of her maternal grandparents, a place that sat atop a wooded knoll in the center of town. The firstborn child of her parents, she was delivered by “Old Doc Ellison,” the bent-shouldered and white-haired physician whom for many years had seen the family through much illness and strife. Wrapped in a new quilt that her grandmother had made for her, Doc Ellison placed the rosy-faced baby in her exhausted mother’s arms. “Have you decided on a name for this pretty little girl, Roma?”

                “Her name is Linda, because I read in a book that it means ‘beautiful.’ And her middle name is ‘Lee’ after her Daddy.”

                “How’s Lee doing? Is he still at the Great Lakes Navy Boot Camp?”

                “He’s having an awful time with his stomach, Doc. The food there keeps him sick most of the time.”

“That belly of his has given him fits since he was a little kid. I feel for him, Roma.”

Like every town in the USA, as was the case across nearly all of the civilized nations in those World War II days, Peebles was a place of women and children and their elders, the able-bodied men of fighting age having been drafted into the military, some of them serving actively, some of them home or in hospital seriously maimed, or already dead and buried in family cemeteries or lost on foreign soils, their remains never to be recovered. As it turned out, because of his problem with his stomach, my eighteen-year-old father was given an honorable medical discharge before completing boot camp training. It was a physical condition that plagued him all the 89 years of his life. However, if he had gone on to serve, there is every reason to assume he would have been a “swabby” on a ship or submarine reported to the Pacific Fleet, there to fight in hotspots of the pitiless water- and air-war against the Japanese.

I was nearing seven weeks of age by the time my dad first laid eyes on me. He had missed my birth, but was home in time to celebrate with my mother the joyful event of their first wedding anniversary. Other than concerns about my parent’s brothers, cousins, and friends on active duty, our little family led a peaceful existence through the balance of World War II, dad contributing to the war effort in various factories in Dayton, and Cincinnati, as well as in Columbus, Ohio, where we finally settled permanently, and is my home to this day.

However, my family’s elation over my birth surely would have been tempered had news come via the radio or newspaper of the sinking of the “USS Cisco,” a submarine on which my dad might very well have been a crewman, if not for his bad stomach. Having sailed on August 7, 1943 from Panama for Brisbane, Australia and arriving on September 1^st to assume local patrol duties, she docked at Darwin on September 18^th for two days. While at Darwin, Chief Radioman Howell B. Rice (USN ret.) was taken ill and sent ashore to the Navy hospital. “Cisco” then put out to sea on her first war patrol on September 20^th, the only submarine on duty in her field of operation. She was never seen again. Japanese records relate a grisly tale, one of an oil-leaking US submarine sighted and then sunk by bombs and depth charges by Imperial Japanese Navy carrier-based torpedo bombers and the Japanese riverboat “Karatsu.” The brutal irony is that the riverboat was originally the U.S. Navy gunboat “USS Luzon,” captured from the US by Japanese forces earlier in the war and put to work against its former owners. “Cisco” is thus presumed to have been lost in action on September 28, 1943, which was also the date of my parent’s wedding anniversary. The only survivor among the 77-member crew was Chief Radioman Howell B. Rice, left behind in a hospital bed in Darwin more than a week before that fateful day.

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Fundraiser for Wounded Warrior Project by Linda Lee Greene

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