Once a Marine Always a Marine

Suzy Motz Hist 113 Fall 2003 Dr. Fitzharris

“Once a Marine – Always a Marine”

They were young, anxious, and eager men. Wanting to serve their country and willing to please. Knowing, but not fully knowing what they were getting into. They were thrust into adulthood, sent to foreign lands to fight for freedom, while struggling to survive.

Donald Edward Stoffer is one of thousands who fought heroically for our country in World War II. He risked his life to give us the freedom that we have today. Donald

Stoffer served our country faithfully for over six years in the Marine Corps. He was a part of the Second Division (D2-18) and also the Sixth Division. He went in as a young man without much experience of the world. He came out as a man filled with knowledge and skills, having saw things none of us will every see in our entire life.

Don Stoffer was not drafted into the Marine Corps, but chose to go into it. He was living in Iowa, where he has lived all of his life, when there was just something about the Marine Corps that drove him to it. He is not quite sure why, “but everybody that joins the Marine Corps has a reason.” One particular individual from the Second

Marine Division remembers signing up because of the uniforms. He was on his way to the postal service in town and the Marine Corps had a table outside for signing people up.

He signed up because the uniforms were good looking and he was sold on them (Follow

Me: Guadalcanal). Motz 2

After signing up and getting accepted into the Marine Corps the young men had to go to boot camp. For three months the men went through “hell on earth.” They went through training and discipline from their very first second of arriving down to their last.

The training, which is too emotional for some to talk about, was intensive and tough.

The men went through boot camp with honor, and eventually their hard vigorous training paid off.

When the war started Mr. Stoffer went to “San Diego to form the Second

Division” and then he went over seas. On November 11, 1943 Donald Stoffer with the rest of the Second Marine Division departed from New Hebrides (Heroes of World War

II). According to Heroes of World War II, “Admiral Nimitz’s major objective in the central Pacific was Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.” The U.S. realized that they needed the Marshall Islands because without them their advancement toward Japan would be slowed down. However, before the United States could go after the Marshall

Islands they had to take the Gilbert Islands from the Japanese. The Japanese on the

“coral islands not only hampered any attack on the Marshalls, but also threatened Allied communications between the central and southwest Pacific” (Heroes of World War II, p.

137). In order for the Marines to take the Gilbert Islands they had to focus on Tarawa

Atoll. “The Japanese commander, Rear Adm. Keiji Shibasaki, bragged, ‘A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years.’” However, twelve thousand marines took it in three days (Heroes of World War II, p. 138). Motz 3

The Second Division Marine Corps was a part of the “amphibious landing in world war history.” It was the “first offensive against the Japs” as Mr. Stoffer says. He remembers arriving and being scared to death.

Donald Stoffer was a line man, Sergeant, and a squad leader in the Marine Corps.

He saw a lot of combat and many casualties. He himself was wounded twice, and received two Purple Hearts. His first wound he was hit by shrapnel and his second wound he got shot trying to take a village by the airport in Okinawa. He ended up spending a year and three months in the hospital. He couldn’t talk, read, or write because of a head injury and was paralyzed on the right side. “Those doctors and nurses were supreme”, he says, and “you couldn’t beat them.”

Don Stoffer’s best experience in the service was his buddies. They are “close like brothers and sisters.” He still has four of them left and they still keep in touch.

According to some of the Marines, they tried not to get emotionally involved with being friends. There was camaraderie, but they didn’t want to get too close because of all the casualties (Follow Me: Guadalcanal). However, once the war was over and they were back home, they could share the close knit friendship. They no longer had to worry about the casualties, and they do share some very deep experiences that none of us can fully rationalize or even understand.

The Second Marine Division encountered some very harsh conditions. They were on foreign lands with extreme temperatures, little food, and not enough water. They had Motz 4 sea rations and k rations which were good according to Mr. Stoffer, but sometimes they didn’t have enough to eat. He recalls shooting a parrot, cooking it, and eating it with rice.

It was on Guadalcanal that they really ran out of food. They were told they were going to be on the island for seventy-two hours and to bring six sea rations with them. However, they finished their six cans of rations in twelve days and had no more food. For over three weeks they survived on a third of a cup of Japanese rice and some Japanese saltine crackers. They also ate some yams and lizards. They were hungry and needed food to survive, so they found lizards to eat. They skinned them and then bar-b-qued them. One

Marine remembers having a can of peas to eat. They opened the can, counted them, and then divided them up equally amongst themselves. If they were to take more than they were given they would have lost their hand (Follow Me: Guadalcanal).

The men also suffered from an insufficient supply of water. They were restricted to two canteens of water a day, which was not enough. One individual said that they probably sweated about two canteens of sweat in about an hour. There were a lot of streams on Guadalcanal, but they were too murky. Plus, they did not know how many dead bodies were in them (Follow Me: Guadalcanal).

Another condition the men had to endure was the bugs. The flies and mosquitoes were horrible. As they were eating they had to bat them away with their other hand.

Also, on the island there were iguanas. Some of them were five feet long, and a few of the men disliked iguanas/lizards (Follow Me: Guadalcanal).

Even though the men suffered from brutal conditions, they still managed to do little things to keep themselves entertained. One member of the Second Division Motz 5 remembers dressing up a Jap skeleton as a Santa Clause, which they later got yelled at for

(Follow Me: Guadalcanal). Mr. Stoffer says that the Japs entertained them a lot. “They

would throw flares at night and stuff like that, so we couldn’t sleep. So, we did the same thing.” The men, however, became sleep deprived because they received no real sleep.

They were half alert and half asleep (Follow Me: Guadalcanal).

After Guadalcanal, Don and his division went to New Zealand. The men said they weighed about 110 to 120 pounds after Guadalcanal (Follow Me: Guadalcanal). At

New Zealand the men trained for Tarawa. They hit Tarawa and then went to Hawaii where they once again trained. They also ended up going to the Marianas Islands which include; Saipan, Tinian and Guam.

On June 15, 1944 the Second and Fourth Divisions of the Marine Corps started

Operation Foreigner, the invasion of Saipan. The men who already had experience were not anxious to get on the beach, but the new comers were. The newcomers did not know what faced them, whereas, the already experienced men had a good idea of what was ahead (Follow Me: Saipan). “Saipan was defended by approximately thirty-one thousand Japanese troops” (Heroes of World War II, p. 156), which waited for the

American assault.

At Saipan the Marine Corps suffered from many casualties. “By the end of the first day the 2d Division had taken over five hundred dead; the 4th Division’s losses exceeded its casualties at Roi-Namur” (Heroes of World War II, p. 156). After three weeks of war the U.S casualties amounted to 3,400 dead and 13,000 wounded (Follow

Me: Saipan). Motz 6

In the video, Follow Me: Saipan, some of the men from the Second Marine

Division recall “Suicide Cliff” in Saipan. The cliff is about a two hundred foot drop, and

at the bottom there are rocks and the sea. The Japanese women would take their children and babies to the top and jump off. Below the cliff, there were a lot of bodies floating around in the sea from all of the suicides. The women did this because they were told that the Marines would rape and mutilate them if they were taken as prisoners. As one

Marine says, the Japanese “are tenacious fighters.” You either killed them or they killed you (Follow Me: Saipan).

The Marines were put under a lot of pressure and stress fighting for our country.

Each man handled it differently and most of them did something special for good luck.

Don kept pictures of his girlfriend in his billfold. However, not much time passed before the pictures got wet and you could no longer see the actual pictures. He however, wrapped them and kept them with him anyway. They were important to him and it was his source of good luck.

Don Stoffer went from the Second Marine Division to the Sixth. They needed line men, so he went. However, he only lasted for three days in the sixth division before he got “shot for good.” He has many memories about World War II, but in particular he remembers when they were winning. The navy pilots up above in the sky would dip there wings as if to say, “hello there.” He says that most of them cried. “Big tough

Marines, but we cried anyhow.”

While in the service Mr. Stoffer did not keep a personal diary because they were not allowed to. “We couldn’t take pictures or anything”, he says. They did not even Motz 7 keep in close touch with their families, because they couldn’t. In “those days it was not easy”, said Don Stoffer. He wrote his mother about once every six months. One of the

letters he wrote home, however, didn’t make it because it got sunk in the harbor with the ship it was on.

When the war ended Don Stoffer was in the hospital. “Six years and three months later and they discharged me from the marine barracks at thy Great Lakes.” Don says that usually they discharge you from the hospital, but his first sergeant said “no” and would not allow him to be discharged from the hospital. Therefore, they moved him to the marine barracks where he was discharged from.

After serving our country for over six years, Don recuperated for a year and then went to work for General Mills. He worked at General Mills for thirty-five years, where he was a clerk in the customer service area. He used a weight so he could write, but he didn’t really have to worry about his war wounds affecting his work. Donald never went back to school, but his wife helped him a lot with his reading and writing.

Don Stoffer is currently a part of the American Legion and the Second Division, which are veteran organizations. The Second Division gets together once a year and talks, or “can banter” as Don puts it. When the group gets together they have Marines who are active today who talk to the war veterans. The Marines today tell them that they

“are good, but not as good as we are now, because we have a lot of power, fire power, and you guys wouldn’t last three days with us.” “But that’s good”, Don says. Motz 8

Don is thankful to be as free as we are today. He is not for war, but sometimes it is necessary. Other people “don’t have the freedom like we do” and Don along with the rest of us hope that ours lasts. As Don says, “freedom takes a lot, deaths and everything.”

Donald Edward Stoffer has served the United States very faithfully for many years. In doing so he has received two Purple Hearts, five Battle Stars, three Presidential

Citations, an Asiatic ribbon, an American Theater, and a Pre-Pearl Harbor ribbon. He has gone through a lot of events that none of us can even fathom today, in helping bring the

United States to where we are currently. Donald Stoffer has lived up to and beyond the saying, “Semper Fi” which means “Always Faithful” in the Marine Corps, and for this we must be thankful and recognize him.