From the editor: Two to remember

I knew one of the two men. There was no way for me to have met the other.

They were friends from grade school. They played together on the Esther, Missouri, high school basketball team—although, technically, both lived in a town then known as Flat River, a rough lead mining community, where Norman Rockwell images butted up against the reality of fistfights between teens from rival cities. They graduated into a world emerging from the Great Depression. Both men joined the Marines.

One was my uncle, Harold Thomas. Unable to find steady work, he enlisted in 1939. He considered himself lucky to be assigned to “the best duty” in the peacetime Corps—China. Through 1940 and ’41 he served as a legation guard in what is now called Beijing, already in Japanese held territory.

It was a world on edge. Fighting had broken out in Europe. And Japan had been gobbling up bits of China in bloody chunks for a few years. The Marines posted in the ancient capital city had a front row seat, but could do nothing to stop events.

The other man was named Darrell Cole. He worked for a bit, took stints in the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps then joined the Marine Corps in 1941, as a musician.

He enlisted in October. Two months later, my uncle awoke to learn that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and found Japanese troops surrounding their compound.  Just over 100 Marines manned the legation, encircled by several thousand of the enemy—and tens of thousands nearby. The men wanted to fight. In fact, at one post Marines showered with weapons broken from crates, trying to wash the packing grease off to render them usable. But their commanding officer ordered them to strike the colors.

Harold Thomas was a prisoner of war, from the day it started for the U.S. At some point in 1942, Darrell Cole sent a letter to Thomas’ family, letting them know Harold was tough enough to survive—and that he planned to kill as many of the enemy as possible.

My uncle survived, from the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor to September of 1945, when Americans located his POW camp outside of Niigata, Japan. He suffered from a number of ailments caused by poor sanitation and a lack of nutrition. He endured diarrhea that was almost constant. He was beaten on many occasions. His skin was stretched taught over his ribcage. Harold Thomas weighed just 112 pounds. And he was lucky.

Darrell Cole repeatedly asked for transfer out of the field music unit. He fought on occasion, but was always rated a bugler, until Iwo Jima.

On February 19, 1945, Sgt. Cole and his men were pinned down on that island’s black volcanic sands by a complex of Japanese bunkers. They had called for tanks, but, as one historian wrote, Darrell Cole refused to wait. Moments earlier he had single-handedly silenced Japanese pillboxes. Now he went forward again, armed only with a pistol and grenades.

He did this three times, grabbing more grenades each trip. As the Congressional Medal of Honor citation reads, “he ran the gantlet of slashing fire a third time to complete the total destruction of the Japanese strong point and the annihilation of the defending garrison in this final assault.”

The musician, high school basketball star and itinerant worker, Sgt. Darrell Cole, died instantly afterward, when a Japanese grenade exploded at his feet. He was—and remains—an American hero, honored with the nation’s highest award.

My uncle survived the war, living until the early 1970s, when the damage caused by malnutrition caught up to him and delivered heart failure. He received a Purple Heart and a service medal for his three and a half years of constant torment. He hated the Japanese until his death. He once shredded a Christmas tree when he saw “Made in Japan” on one of the bulbs.

On Memorial Day we honor great men like Darrell Cole, who gave the ultimate sacrifice in a moment of incredible bravery. The holiday is not for those who survived America’s wars, however damaged by the experienced.

Too often we lump all forms of service into vague concepts, such as “bravery” or “defending our nation.” I would say both men in this case were brave. It would be difficult to honor my uncle for actively defending the U.S. He was merely tossed into a chasm for the duration. Before that, he was dangled in a precarious situation, along with the others in north China.

But both men—Cole and Thomas—deserve our thanks for their sacrifice, at least in my book. And both deserve to be remembered, along with all the others.