STANLEY HOLLOWAY
In 1995 CBS Reports presented a program titled Victory in the Pacific narrated by Dan Rather and General Norman Schwarzkopf. One of the people interviewed on that presentation is a resident of Pullman and a retired Marine, Stanley Holloway. He summed up one of the tensions of the war against Japan in a simple statement: "They didn't care about dying and I cared about living."
Holloway began living in 1919 in Roy, Idaho, a small town about nine miles from his family's homestead. Roy had a store, post office, and a meeting house where dances were a popular form of meeting. The family moved to Dallas, Oregon when he was still young. "We became fruit tramps," said Stanley. "We picked berries, lots of berries. The only fruit I had seen up until then was rhubarb."
He graduated from High School in 1935, then briefly attended Linfield College in McMinville studying in Business Administration. When the depression thwarted his college career he moved to Farmington in 1937 to work as a farm laborer. "It was a lovely town," Stan remembers. "There were poplar trees everywhere. It looked like a forest. There was a dance hall, a store, and three churches."
His next move was to Seattle to work for Bonneville Power. He was returning to Seattle from visiting his family, then in Amity, Oregon, when he heard some startling news on the car radio. "The darned Japs had bombed Hawaii," he said, "and I was rarin' to get after them."
He enlisted in the Marine Corps in Spokane, was inducted in Seattle, then boarded a train to San Diego for six weeks of Boot Camp where he was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 10th Regiment, 2nd Division. That unit was to change names through the years but the same men stayed together for the duration. "We changed names as we changed weapons," explained Holloway. "We started with 75 millimeter Pack Howitzers, then we had 105s, then later we became a 155 Howitzer Battalion. Today we are called the Forgotten Battalion." (There is an article about the Forgotten Battalion in Part Seven of this book.)
Stan expressed a remembered disappointment felt on his arrival at the Boot Depot in San Diego. "I was a flag waver," he said, "and I figured they would be glad to see us. But we were treated like we were not even dirt. Our abilities didn't mean a thing. They just wanted to get us ready to go to war."
And go to war he did in 1942 aboard the USS President Hayes. "I was seasick every day, but that was no excuse for light duty," he said shaking his head. After zig-zagging across the Pacific they stopped to refuel near the Tonga Islands. Their ship was fueled by a tanker that came out to meet them without escort. "Brave men," he noted.
The Hayes landed at Tulagi where Marine raiders had gone into Guadalcanal earlier to take a Japanese air strip they later named Henderson Field. The raiders had met extensive resistance. The men on the Hayes followed them in, doing mop-up duty and moving to wherever the Marines needed expert artillery fire. Holloway was with a unit that developed expertise in survey procedures, calculating range and deflection, establishing gun positions and target areas, and determining how to control a given area. When asked where he was trained for those specific tasks, he replied, "Right there."
"One thing I remember about Tulagi," he related, "was watching the USS Washington and the South Dakota line up and level the Jap transports attempting to come in to the island. Soon after we had landed, we were sitting up on a cliff one night with ringside seats watching a terrific sea battle. There was a nice little harbor there, but all that was there were PT Boats. Then the Navy showed up and put on quite a show."
Stan was pleasantly surprised when I told him one of the gunners on the USS Washington during that battle was a St. John boy named Norm Zorb, also a Marine.
"Really? A Marine from St. John?" he said. "I always thought they were sailors!"
"No. Those were Marines out there putting on that show."
"Well," Holloway smiled. "Well, well."
While Holloway's Battalion went into their initial battle on Tulagi with five hundred men, there were only seventeen of those men remaining at the end of their tour of duty. The rest had been sent home sick or injured, or were dead.
From Guadalcanal Holloway went to New Zealand for about nine months, since Army forces had relieved them on Guadalcanal. It was there that his best friend met and dated a young New Zealand woman named Margaret Stewart, a secretary with Universal Pictures, to whom he introduced Stan. Soon his friend got sent home and Stan, who remembered hearing his friend repeat Margaret's phone number, called her, and they started dating. They continued their friendship by mail when he shipped out on November 21, 1943 for Tarawa.
After what he termed simply, "a terrible battle," he was sent to Hawaii, the big island of the chain, to await replacements for the dead or sick they had lost at Tarawa. The Seabees built tent decks and regular streets for their whole outfit so they were able to quickly establish camp on the Parker Ranch on the north end of the island. "The Parker Ranch was the biggest cattle ranch in the world," Holloway noted. They were there a short time, then once again headed west, this time to Saipan where they were told they were going in to take the island.
"We began to get control right away," Stan said. "Battleships came in, turned sideways, and leveled everything on the island."
After Saipan, he moved on to Guam, which was a different kind of battle. "We were not there to destroy everything because there were civilians on Guam. Some General in Hawaii had told us not to destroy the population" They did however set up guns to fire on targets and received naval and air support.
After that battle he again was sent to Hawaii. After four years of duty, he had earned enough points to be sent home. "The rest of the outfit went on to Iwo Jima, which was pretty nasty too. I was left as rear echelon to send up supplies. The Marines got control of Iwo Jima, although a lot of them were eliminated. Our little unit was stranded in Hawaii," he said. But not for long. Even though he and the rest of the men in Hawaii were due to go home, they received orders to proceed to Hickam Field on Oahu, Hawaii to be sent to Okinawa. Their papers were routinely checked by an alert Master Gunner Sergeant who recognized they should be heading east instead of west, and put them on a ship for San Francisco.
"We got to the Golden Gate home alive in '45," smiled Stanley. He then took a train to San Diego to be discharged. It was about then the first Atom Bomb fell on Japan.
Then ranked Assistant Property Sergeant, he received an Honorable Discharge. But then, about a year later, he received a notice from the government that he had been overpaid thirty dollars for his career with the Marines. This was an overpayment on the starting pay of twenty-one dollars a month which had gone clear up to sixty dollars a month by the time he was discharged. He ignored that first letter, but then received a second one telling him the MPs would pick him up and put him in jail if he did not return the money.
"I went to the bank, got a money order, and gave Uncle Sam his thirty dollars back," Stan grinned.
Holloway had other matters on his mind. He had asked Margaret Stewart to come to the United States and marry him and had put up a five hundred dollar cash bond to secure her transport. There was one small catch in that process. It seemed Margaret could not book passage and board a ship until the bond was posted. And Stanley could not post the bond until she knew what her port of entry would be. That issue finally cleared, she sailed on a ship half-full of cargo, the other half filled with passengers. Heading for Amity, Oregon where Stanley awaited her, she sailed from New Zealand, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and up the east coast. Unable to land in a US port due to dock strikes, she finally got off the ship at Halifax, Nova Scotia. She then went to New York to make train connections across the county and decided to spend a week looking over the city while Stanley and the Red Cross tried in vain to find her.
Margaret and Stanley married in October of 1946 and raised two boys and two girls. They farmed in Farmington for twenty-five years, then both worked at WSU until they retired.
In the mid-1990s their son Clyde saw a picture in the Smithsonian magazine, a picture of the Marines landing on Tarawa, and recognized one of the men standing by a sea wall. It was his dad. That incident was written up in an article in the Oregonian which led to Holloway being interviewed for the Victory in the Pacific documentary, which effectively chronicled his life as a Marine in World War II.