| Place a Classified | Subscribe today | July 4, 2009 |
|
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Intense experience
POCATELLO — When H.B. “Bud” Hildreth came home from the recruiter’s office and announced that he’d enlisted in the U.S. Marines, his father, a World War I Navy veteran, was taken aback.
“Oh my god, that’s a fighting unit,” Bud’s father said. “Yeah, well I joined ’em,” Bud replied. More than 65 years later, Hildreth remembers clearly the events that eventually led him to Okinawa, Japan, as part of one of the largest invasions of World War II.
Hildreth was based with Marine Air Group 33 in Kadena Field, which the allies had taken over from the Japanese in a hard-fought battle. The base was a strategic key in the air battle in the Pacific. Trained in Morse code, Hildreth transcribed brief packets of numbers and letters that had to be decoded by a trust officer.
“There were messages there, but we didn’t know what they were ... we didn’t know where they were coming from, either,” Hildreth said. Hildreth thinks much of the information related to weather conditions. That suspicion arose in part when an Associated Press reporter handed him an article as Hildreth was readying to board a ship for home.
“He said, ‘Would you like to know what you guys were doing? Maybe you’d like to have this.’” The man handed Hildreth a press clipping that he still has. The story lauded Marine Air Group 33’s record, which shot down 224 Japanese planes and flew more than 25,000 combat hours during the Okinawa campaign.
It detailed how the group flew nearly 10,000 sorties from April 10 until June 21, losing only two planes to aerial combat and 44 by anti-aircraft fire and 12 to rough flying conditions. Hildreth has his own powerful proof of the pitched battles on Okinawa. In his scrapbook is a time-lapse photo he took. Silhouettes of two fighter planes on the ground are outlined by tracers of hundreds of projectiles streaking across the night sky.
Two other events are still vivid in Hildreth’s mind. One indelible memory is of walking with a friend on the base’s landing field. “I just happened to glance over my shoulder,” he said. “My god, it was a Zero.”
A Zero was the Allies’ name for the lightweight fighter aircraft operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, often used in kamikaze operations. “It dived right towards us, skimming the ground,” Hildreth said. “We couldn’t find anything to get behind or a hole to get into.”
Hildreth and his companion were saved when the base’s anti-aircraft guns shot the plane down. The other memory relates to one of the seminal events in military history.
On Aug. 9, 1945, the B-29 bomber Bockscar landed at Kadena Field after dropping the atomic bomb “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. The plane had re-routed to Okinawa due to low fuel. “There were guards around .... thick as flies,” Hildreth said. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki spelled the end of Hildreth’s service, although it was some time before he arrived back in the U.S. “It took a month or two or three to get ships to get us all home,” he said. Hildreth’s discharge was sped up due to his mother’s illness. He was allowed to come directly to Pocatello and received his discharge at the Naval Ordnance Plant. He and his wife, Edna, settled in at the property on which he had made his first down payment at the age of 17. “I was working since I was 13, and I had a little money saved up,” he said. He had been interested in purchasing a car, but his father steered him toward a parcel on what is now West Hildreth Road, between train tracks and the lava flow, close to what is now the site of Century High School. “You might have only one piece of land, but you’ll have dozens of cars,” Hildreth recounts his father saying. More than 60 years later, the 85-year-old Hildreth still lives on the property, where he and his wife of 64 years have raised a family, run cattle, farmed and had a dairy operation. “It was pretty good advice, even if he was an old horse trader,” Hildreth said with a smile. Article RatingReader CommentsSubmit a CommentCommenting RulesWe encourage your feedback and dialog. All comments are subject to deletion by our Web staff.
|
|
Comment
Rate
Report a Comment
