Three Officers

All of a sudden, in the last two days, I think I've come a lot closer to positive identifications on two passing references from Phil's letters, and found additional information on another.

The first two are mentioned in a condolence letter to Phil's mother and sister, written by Lt. Frederic Stott. "Fireball" Stott was 1/24's liaison officer, therefore a member of company headquarters.

And I visualize Phil in so many different instances – after we returned from the Marshalls, Phil, Joe Swayer, Chuck Bechtol and others used to be constant sitters at a nightly poker game which always lasted until the master switch was pulled at 11:30....

Or back at New River, when we all lived in huts with composition walls. And Phil living with Ed Keyes and Ted Johnson would vie with Joe Swayer and myself to see who could maintain the most unkempt hut. It normally was a toss-up, especially on the day we all departed for the west coast....

And one liberty that Phil and Joe and I had together in Honolulu. We spent the day pleasantly wandering about, betting vociferously on a baseball game we chanced upon between two youthful girl’s teams, and eventually getting back to the dock after hours and too late to get a boat back to our ship. Not at all nonplussed, we eventually attracted attention by lighting numerous matches, and boarded a harbor patrol craft. The operators enjoyed the occasion, and so for an hour and a half the three of us, and the two operators, took an extensive tour of the harbor amidst much laughter....

On board ship, most of us slept on deck where it was cooler, and Harry Reynolds, Capt. Schechter, Gene Mundy and I had a landing craft directly above the one the Eagle slept in with Joe Swayer and Frank Shattuck.

[1st Lt. Theodore "Ted" Johnson will have his own entry eventually. Captain Eugene Mundy was the battalion Executive Officer. We've already met Lt. Harry Reynolds and Captain Schechter. Ed Keyes is still a mystery for the moment, and we'll get to 1st Lt. Shattuck momentarily).

I picked Joe Swayer and Chuck Bechtol for a closer look, since their names are a little less common. At first, it seemed they were a little TOO uncommon, as nothing was showing up in any of my sources. This seemed unusual. I knew that Company A had suffered 97% casualties of the original complement that left Camp Pendleton in January, 1944. (Pause a moment and let that sink in. Ninety-seven percent. Out of 240 odd Marines in the original company, SEVEN made it through the war unscathed.) It seemed a little too convenient that neither Swayer or Bechtol, both mentioned in the pre-Namur days, would have been untouched, especially as officers.

It turns out that Mr. Swayer was the victim of a spelling mistake. All the copies of the letters that I have were typed by Gretchen Williams from handwritten originals. Maybe Lt. Stott had poor handwriting, maybe he simply misheard the the spelling, or maybe Gretchen had mistaken one letter for another - I believe Joe Swayer to be Captain Joseph D. Swoyer, Jr. of Pennsylvania.

Captain Swoyer was born 15 August, 1920. His entry on the WW2 Memorial Registry (done by the Captain himself) lists him as a "Platoon leader and Company Commander" who fought at the Marshall Islands, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. He was wounded in action, but survived the war. He died in Boise, Idaho 5 September 2002.

Chuck Bechtol was likewise tricky, and I am not yet entirely sure about his identity (it should be noted that there's only so close I can get through cross-references and inference; junior officers and enlisted men rarely show up in major documents unless they performed some exceptional feat such as winning a medal, and even when they do, they are rarely identified down to the company level. Therefore I can be 95% sure about something but not 100% - someday I'll get my hands on some official records). I tried several different spellings - Charles, naturally, and varieties of Bechtol, Bechtold, Bechtal, etc. I located a Charles Bechtold who looked promising - a 1941 Brown graduate who joined the Marines and stayed in through Korea, retiring as a Colonel. I plugged his information into Ancestry's database, and came up with very little on his military service.

There was, however, a Charles R. Bechtol. 1st Lt USMCR. Wounded on Saipan. A well known University of Washington quarterback who went by "Chuck" until the day he died in 1992. From his obituary, he sounds like the kind of guy Phil would have befriended.

(The following is quoted from the Seattle Times, July 10 1992; obituary by Shandra Martinez. For some reason the paper's website won't allow a link.)

If you're a longtime Seattle resident who knows anything about Husky football, you've heard of Charles "Chuck" Bechtol, a starting quarterback at the University of Washington in the late '30s.

Mr. Bechtol was not only known for his prowess on the football field but also as a fixture on local golf courses and as a labor negotiator. He died July 5 at Providence Hospital in Everett.

When Mr. Bechtol was told a year ago that he had pancreatic cancer and only two months to live, the 73-year-old started making a list of things he had to do.

Topping the list was getting in six months more of golf, and seeing the Huskies in the Rose Bowl. He accomplished both.

"He always had goals to keep him looking toward the future," said Gretchen Bechtol, his wife of 51 years.

The two met at the UW in the late 1930s. She said she fell in love with him because of his honesty and integrity.

"He was true blue, you could always depend on him," she said.

Although he also earned letters in baseball and basketball, Mr. Bechtol focused on football and track, while earning a business degree. He was the Huskies' top shot-putter for three seasons and captained the football team in 1939.

After graduating in 1940, Mr. Bechtol married in 1941 and joined the Marines in 1942. During World War II, Mr. Bechtol was shot in the leg while fighting in the Battle of Saipan. He received the Purple Heart.

Mr. Bechtol credited his football experience with helping him during the war and in his life.

"(Football) helps anybody, anywhere in the ability to put out when you have to," Mr. Bechtol, then 28, told The Seattle Times in 1944.

His oldest daughter, Chris Gabelein, 46, said her father was her hero.

She said she loved being known as Chuck Bechtol's daughter.

"I would always go into places and people would say, `Bechtol. I know Chuck Bechtol.' They knew him as a Husky quarterback or for his golf or for his work at PACCAR," Gabelein, said.

After the war, Mr. Bechtol was hired by the UW as assistant athletic director. In 1953, he was hired by PACCAR Inc, as personnel director of the Kenworth Motor Truck Corp.

He was eventually named vice president of industrial relations and was involved in hiring and labor negotiations.

"Chuck Bechtol was admired by business and union leaders alike as a tough no-nonsense labor negotiator; with his fair and straight-forward style he developed good friends on both sides of the negotiating table," said David Hovind, president of PACCAR Inc.

"In the 23 years at PACCAR, Chuck showed a superior ability in recruiting, a talent he also shared with the University of Washington in bringing outstanding players into their football program," Hovind said.

After retiring in 1976, Mr. Bechtol divided his time between fishing at his beach house on Whidbey Island and playing golf at his home in Palm Desert, Calif.

Mr. Bechtol is survived by wife and two daughters, Chris Gabelein and Ann Green of Whidbey Island; brother Robert Bechtol of Sequim, Clallam County,, stepsister, Jane Argo of Mill Creek, and six grandchildren.

I should also note that just because all of these officers were quartered together does not mean they were in the same company; especially aboard ship. In The Last Lieutenant it was noted that the 24th Marines shipped off to Iwo Jima in three ships, each carrying a battalion. 1st Lt. Shattuck mentioned in a letter that he was a platoon commander in the same battalion as Phil, but distinctly not the same company. Also, Captain Swoyer never jumped from platoon command to leading A Company - while it wasn't unheard of for lieutenants to jump from a platoon in one company to command another, it was less common than promoting from within, on the rationale that they had worked more closely with the other officers and men in the company. In A Company, February 1944, the platoon leaders were Phil Wood, Roy Wood, Harry Reynolds, and one other - possibly Ted Johnson. There were a selection of other Lieutenants, like Fireball Stott, at Company HQ; still others like Gene Mundy at Battalion HQ. 1st. Lt. Bechtol could have filled any one of those capacities in any of the companies of First Battalion; Swoyer, presumably a 1st Lt. in early 1944, probably lead a platoon in one of the three rifle companies. In 1944, before the officer "class" was bled out, individuals were selected to attend Officer Candidate School - "OCS" - at Quantico based on performance in boot camp and education. (Enlisted men who broke the barrier to a commission were known as "mustangs" and usually had a personality to match the nickname). Phil had attended Swarthmore and was beginning at Yale; Irving Schechter had passed his bar exams in 1940; Chuck Bechtol had graduated from the University of Washington; Eugene Mundy had attended Northwestern; Fred Stott was an Amherst man and there's a chance that Ted Johnson was as well. This occasionally led to friction between officers and men, as sometimes happens between those who have been to college and those who haven't, and reinforced the gap between those leading and those to be lead. (These of course were officers who had trained with the men; replacement officers were a very different kettle of fish).

The last Lieutenant of the day, 1st Lt. Shattuck, became a family friend after the war.

Marine Corps Hospital

July 26, 1944

Dear Mrs. Wood,

I’ve hesitated to write to you, knowing full well how utterly inadequate anything I would say to you would be, and not knowing what I will say that would be of any good to you at this unspeakable time of Phil’s death. But I will say this, that at this moment I am on my way back to the States, and have hopes of getting shore leave, during which time I should like to stop in and see you and your daughter if it be at all possible. He spoke to me often of both of you. Do you expect to be in New York around the end of August or September? If not, where shall I look for you?

I was another Platoon leader in the same Battalion with Phil. The last time we spoke together, like everyone else he was dog-tired, just going on nervous energy and because you had to – there was no one else – his face thickly covered with the red volcanic ash from the island. We were digging in for the night. Being close by he had come over to say hello. He sat down beside me where I was cleaning my carbine. Occasional shells were dropping on the ridge, but we’d long since passed the stage of worrying about them much, despite their effectiveness. We talked briefly about how things were going – not too well; gaining steadily, but paying heavily. I remember our asking each other for a slug from his canteen, and both of us were “all out.” Then a short argument about which stood up better, Luckies or Camels, against moisture and banging about, each sticking up for his own brand, which we smoked, being unable to drink. (Speaking of drinking, we had our last beers together in Pearl Harbor before leaving for good, and I remember thinking then as we clinked bottles that it might well be the last time one or both of us held a bottle.) Some days later, I gather from men who were there – I had been hit and evacuated by then – a patrol he was with ran into some hot stuff in a ravine, and he was hit by a machine gun bullet. Harry Reynolds, another officer in Phil’s Company, tells me that when he got back to Phil a short while after he had been hit with some help, he was dead…. Please forgive me if I have been presumptuous or unfeeling in thinking that however [hard] they may be to take, you would want at least some of the details.

Two years ago I met Phil at O.C.S. in Quantico, which we left together for New River and afterwards California, the Marshalls (Namur) and Saipan. During that time we had become as brothers. Ruth, my wife, was very fond of him too. He saw us through the earliest months of our marriage in New River, and later in California. Perhaps you remember his going to our wedding a year ago December in New Jersey.

He was loved and respected by every officer in the Battalion who knew him, and that includes almost everyone, for the majority of us had been together in that outfit for a long time. The “Legal Eagle” we called him, from the day he was made recorder for courts-martial back in New River. I used to kid him about his dusty-colored moustache, but it did make him all the more sapient.

Crossing to Saipan we slept under the stars on deck in the same boat, and used to talk long into the night about everything from God to women’s clothes. More often than not, his judiciary mind settled the questions that arose better than mine, which tended to be overenthusiastic or over-critical. In consequence we generally overslept and missed breakfast each morning…. But it is as bitter, if not more so, as it is sweet thinking on these things. And I am probably boring you, so I shall stop.

But if there is anything, anything at all that I can do for you, Mrs. Wood, please be sure to let me know. The address here is that of my wife – the surest way of reaching me, since I don’t yet know where I’ll be stationed.

Sincerely,

Frank Shattuck

1^st Lt., U.S.M.C.R.

Howard Francis Shattuck would not fight again after being hit on Saipan - his second Purple Heart. He returned to the States to be with his wife, attended Harvard Law School and became a respected international lawyer. His experiences in World War Two made him "determined to help build a world in which peace and democracy could be secured by the rule of law" and for many years he championed peacekeeping work for the United Nations. Twice annually, the American Bar Association gives the Francis Shattuck Security and Peace Award "to an American lawyer who exemplifies the promotion of security and peace through the international rule of law.... Courage, creativity, initiative and leadership, or promise of future leadership, will characterize recipients of the Francis Shattuck Award."

Frank Shattuck died in Darien, CT, 2 April 1997. He was seventy seven.