Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:05 | Nobody got promoted during combat in the Pacific, so Marine Raymond Mitchell came out a corporal. It was a tough time. Clothes rotting off you. Malaria and contaminated water. After the war, his unit had duty in China, where it was freezing cold after the tropics nearly killed him.
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Just before he hit the beach at Peleliu, Raymond Mitchell was asked to switch squads with another squad leader. This saved his life. Before the battle was over, he faced a long ordeal pinned down on a cliff by enemy fire.
You go from an LST to a landing craft to the beach, where men begin dying. When Raymond Mitchell hit the beach at Peleliu, the first thing he saw was the gruesome sight of dead Marines. When he got to Okinawa, there was less resistance on the landing, but some news came in that dampened everyone's mood.
Once the north end of Okinawa was secured, the Marines headed south, where they relieved an Army division. That unit had been reinforced by calling up engineers and Raymond Mitchell had to show them how to use their machine guns.
He nearly missed the height requirement, but Raymond Mitchell became a Marine, a squad leader, in fact. He shipped out with the 1st Marine Division for the Pacific and saw action from Guadalcanal to Okinawa.
He was in a sugar cane patch in Okinawa when the shells started falling. Raymond Mitchell saw two men go down and as he started toward them, another round exploded next to him. Shrapnel tore into his leg and he went down.
After recuperating in Guam, Raymond Mitchell boarded a ship to return to his unit on Okinawa. The first atomic bomb had just been dropped and everyone was stunned. When news of the surrender came, the celebration turned a little dangerous. Before these Marines could go home, though, they had some duty in China, disarming Japanese soldiers.
It was not safe to sleep at night in combat in the Pacific. The Japanese would sneak up on you and get you. Raymond Mitchell remembers those nights. There was a guy in his squad who was prone to take his helmet off until his first night in Okinawa convinced him otherwise. As they were waiting in landing craft to come in, they had a front row seat to a kamikaze attack.
In 1950, Raymond Mitchell got a notice to report for a physical. He thought he was going back in the Marine Corps because the Korean War had just broken out. In fact, he was being evaluated for a new compensation program for wounded veterans, but it got a little strange.
