DARWIN R. NEALEY
By Melissa Hargis and Darwin Nealey
In May of 1945 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met to divide Berlin among the United States, England, and Russia. They needed detailed maps of the area and the 659th topographical mapping outfit was chosen to make and distribute those maps. The project was to remain ultra secret, not even to be discussed within the outfits from which a special team was drawn.
Darwin R. Nealey was selected as the officer in charge of the project. He proceeded to choose the ten best men he knew, men who could do the job quickly and efficiently. As a team they prepared the Berlin map, keeping it a secret until its world-wide release. Every person did his part. They just sat down at their equipment and did the work, then when each was finished, Nealey assembled the map.
Nealey graduated from Washington State College June 10, 1941. Being a member of ROTC, he was sworn into the Army as a Second Lieutenant the same day. Instead of going home, his class had to be at Fort Wright in Spokane the next morning. His first assignment was to the 29th Engineers Topographic Mapping Battalion in Portland, Oregon. The 29th consisted of a headquarters company, photomapping company, reproduction company, and two survey companies, one of which worked in Washington and Oregon. The other survey company surveyed around Knik Arm in Alaska and also in California. The 29th Engineers was the only mapping battalion held over from World War I, so they cadred nearly all the early new mapping units for World War II.
In February 1943 Nealey was chosen to be the liaison officer to obtain the mapping photography of the Aleutian Islands. He was on joint and direct orders from the War Department, the Western Defense Command in San Francisco, the Alaska Defense Command, and the 29th Engineers. He arrived at Elmendorf Field, Alaska, the first week in March, then was sent to the advance force Alaska Defense Command on Adak with their intelligence unit. The Japanese had already landed troops on Attu and Kiska and it was apparent that line of attack had to be stopped.
The 11th Air Force, which was to furnish planes and men for the mapping project, finally came up with one B-25. The photography needed for mapping had to be very precise with a sixty percent overlap forward and a thirty percent overlap sideways with the other flights. That was very difficult for pilots unaccustomed to such work, plus the weather only offered them about three days a month air time to do it. Nealey requested four photomapping planes with crews assigned to him, and in July got two B-17s with two photographers and one co-pilot for each plane. Nealey assigned one plane to be based on Umnak and work east toward the mainland, and took the other plane west of Adak to work toward Attu. He was also assigned a Coast and Geodetic survey ship to help get the ground control.
The Army had kept the Battle of Attu a secret because they didn't want Americas to know Japan had actually occupied part of the United States. According to some reports, the Battle of Attu had killed or captured every Japanese on the island, a report proven to be untrue. While Nealey was navigating one flight over Attu, they were shot at with anti-aircraft artillery that narrowly missed them.
In addition to that, he decided to visit an ROTC friend, located on the side of a mountain on Attu with a Combat Engineer Company. When Nealey had hiked back from that visit he received orders to climb aboard a Navy transport ship and return to Adak. He slept aboard that night and the next morning he saw a footlocker and duffel bag on deck with his friend's name on them. A month later he found out the Japanese had come off the mountain and attacked his friend's outfit, shooting him in the jaw. The man was being shipped to Utah for facial surgery. The same Japanese troops had followed Nealey to his camp and, during the night, had gone down the row of officer's tents tossing hand grenades into the tents. His two bunk mates were killed.
The weather was always very difficult. Darwin told this story about the winds. "Another Lieutenant and I attended a movie in the evening at the Navy's theater. We came out into a wind that was blowing very hard. We had about a quarter mile over open ground to get to our Quonset and the wind was blowing my friend, who had a bad knee, around like a rag doll. I was finally able to grasp him and together we crawled on our hands and knees, mostly on our stomachs, to our hut. That wind blew the weather station over, but not before it had been officially recorded at 110 miles per hour. The locals called that kind of wind a Willawa, which I define as a wind blowing 100 miles per hour in four directions at once."
Nealey was pressured to get mapping photography of Kiska also, but the Japanese were occupying that island and would have shot them down. The high brass then decided to land on Kiska to re-occupy it, and trained Army troops in San Diego for that purpose. Their main objective at first was to prevent Japanese supplies from getting to their people on the island so they would starve and surrender. That didn't work.
During the last of June and early July there were five days of solid fog and bad weather. During those five days, the Japanese Navy apparently moved in with ships and submarines and evacuated five thousand troops off Kiska and got away, unnoticed by the US troops. When the US landed in early July they were surprised to find not a single Japanese remaining.
By November Nealey had completed seventy percent of his mission, but the weather prevented further work until spring. Upon returning to Portland, he was promoted to Captain and given command of Headquarters Company of the 29th Engineers. He was married in December 1944, then learned two weeks later he was ordered to be the operations officer of a new photo mapping battalion, the 659th, and was to be sent to Europe. He landed in France in February where he spent two weeks in the Lucky Strike assembly camp. The 659th was to occupy one of France's top magazine plants, the Illustration, located in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, along with a sister topo battalion pulled out of England. They built a cantonment area of tents with wooden floors for the enlisted men and the officers were bunked in the tower of the magazine plant. The purpose of the two battalions being there was to make maps of Europe which were to facilitate the Allied push to end the war, which happened soon thereafter.
They were in Paris to celebrate V-E Day.
Darwin was assigned to return home on the Queen Elizabeth. Two-person compartments on the ship were altered to care for eight to ten officers and the enlisted men slept in the hold. It was a rough trip through one of the worst storms ever in the North Atlantic Ocean. Darwin was the only one in his group to make it to every meal. The ship was going up and down and rolling so much that the dishes would slide clear across the table. The men would sit down, then pour water on the table cloth so the dishes wouldn't slide.
"Can you imagine the state room with all of those sea sick men? I won't ever forget that. I was so glad to see New York," commented Darwin. He was flown to the West Coast, promoted to Major, and discharged from active duty at Fort Lewis on May 10, 1946.
Mr. Nealey was a delight to be with. He shared a lot of information, was very detailed, and gave me a good story. I really thought this was fun and I would like to do it again sometime.