By BILL McKINNEY
Morning News staff reporter
It was supposed to be a little three month walk in the woods.
Twenty three months, countless battles and a Silver Star later, Bill Hill began suspecting that the Army might have stretched
the truth a little bit.
Hill, at age 18, entered the U.S. Army at the end of 1941, right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in a surprise raid that spelled the beginning of the end for the Axis powers.
""I remember lying in front of our radio listening to a ballgame. They broke in with word that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
""I woke my father up and told him about it. We weren't
sure where Pearl Harbor was and the ballgame came back on and I didn't think much more about it until the next day, when it all came out in the newspaper.
""I went to the Federal Building to enlist.''
Asked why he enlisted, he explained, ""I heard the drums.''
Needing permission from his parents, he found that his mother was against the idea. His father, on the other hand, agreed to sign for him
and, three days later, Hill began processing.
He became a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers and wound up in North Africa, serving there until the end of 1943.
It was about then that he realized he
wasn't advancing in rank. When he asked he found out that the guys making rank fastest were in the infantry.
Hill went the Army one better.
He not only transferred into the infantry but volunteered for an
elite group of fighters called Merrill's Marauders, a group that would wreak havoc on the Japanese Army in Burma.
He also got his wish, a promotion to first lieutenant. He was the only platoon leader-engineer in
the group and took over a pioneer and demolitions unit and later, as casualties mounted, an intelligence and recon unit.
Of the 3,000 original men assigned to the Marauders, only 100 were left when they emerged from
the jungles of Burma to be reorganized and filled out with replacements into the 475th Infantry MARS Task Force, forerunners of today's Special Forces.
Besides those killed in action, the Marauders lost men to jungle
diseases and many had to be evacuated because of both disease and wounds.
The Marauders' initial mission in early 1944, the one that was only supposed to last three months, was a trek down the winding Ledo Road, more
popularly known now as the Burma Road, to help British and Chinese troops take a Japanese airstrip at Myitkyina.
""The airstrip was strategically located. We wanted it and they had it. It was a
simple as that.''
Beginning at the top of the road in North Burma, the Marauders became the first U.S. ground combat force to meet the enemy in World War II on the continent of Asia. Those first meetings came in
late March and early April in the Hukawng and Mogaung Valleys.
The American force was teamed with Kachins, mountain tribe people, to act as a guerrilla force. They leapfrogged ahead of an oncoming Chinese
mechanized army and blocked sections of road behind Japanese troops, cutting off their escape route and trapping them.
It was a lethal game, hampered by a terrain in which the Marauders were forced to carry equipment
by mules, animals for which Hill still holds a special place in his heart - so special he wrote a poem about them.
The strategy was sound but didn't always work in favor of the Americans, who considered themselves a
forgotten force.
They often went days without food and medical aid, dying of wounds because they couldn't get to proper treatment, burying their own dead along the road because there was no graves registration support
unit following them.
""In my mind I came to believe we were supposed to be an expendable force and nobody thought we'd get as far as we did,'' Hill said.
""I helped bury six guys outside
Tonkwa. We were resupplied by air so we wrapped them in parachute fabric, took them outside our perimeter to our right flank and buried them near a pagoda so they'd have some kind of mark.
""I could go
there today and put my foot on the grave,'' he said, his eyes turning cold.
It was at Tonkwa when the Marauders learned about the D-Day landings.
""There'd been quite a bit of small arms fire and suddenly
the Japanese stopped shooting. Everything was still. It was scary. We weren't sure if they were preparing for a major assault or what was happening.
""It stayed that way for awhile.
Then word came to us that the Allies hit Normandy. We figured the Japs must have heard it, probably six or seven minutes before we did.
""The minute we heard, we said a prayer.''
Hill, for all his
crustiness and despite words he sometimes uses when talking about his old enemies, respects the men he fought.
At one point along the Burma Road, at Nphum Ga, Hill and his men were surrounded by Japanese for more than
two weeks.
""They were the Emperor's Own, Imperial Puppet Marines. They were good. They were tough and they'd spent a lot of time in the jungle. But they suffered, same as us.''
On down
the road, at Kutkai, Hill would win the Silver Star for bravery and a second cluster to his Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds to his face and body, as well as stab wounds.
His citation, after noting Hill's wounds, reads, in part:
""While under devastating artillery and mortar fire, Lt. Hill directed the evacuation of his wounded and remained as rear guard when his unit was
ordered to withdraw. He was then separated from his unit as darkness approached.
""Lt. Hill continued to call 4.2-inch mortar fire on his own position and the summit of Hill 232 until approximately
2030 hours at which time contact with him was lost.
""...fearing Lt. Hill had been killed or captured, Capt. Willis, company commander..., ordered another assault on Hill 232 using two platoons of
Headquarters Company.
""Finding little resistance, the assault team reached the summit and was challenged by Lt. Hill. On identification the assault team approached him and found his position littered
with forty-seven enemy dead.
""During the night Hill infiltrated the enemy position and created havoc and confusion to a degree that they withdrew to a position nearer the Burma Road.''
Hill single-handedly took and held an enemy position that night.
Hill says bravery had nothing to do with what happened, and he said he certainly didn't kill 47 enemy soldiers.
""I was scared and they were
confused. I found if I fired one round, they'd fire a thousand. I'd fire and run to another location and toss a grenade. They'd end up shooting into each other. It worked good.''
Ironically,
after years of no contact, Hill received a letter in February of this year from Willis, who had spotted a piece Hill wrote in a military magazine and knew, ""It just had to be you.''
After Kutkai came the
savage battles for the airstrip, a chunk of land that had to be taken and retaken several times before the Allies owned it.
It was fighting that Hill missed. He was stricken by a severe case of malaria somewhere
between Kutkai and the airstrip.
The fighting at Myitkyina came at a tremendous cost to the Marauders, destroying them as an effective fighting force.
Hill lost a lot of friends as a result of both the savage
fighting and jungle diseases in Burma. His own military medical record would make most doctors cringe: twice wounded, struck by malaria, dengue fever, jungle rot and amoebic dysentery.
From Burma he was sent on
to help guerrilla units in China fight the Japanese near Canton, skirmishing along the Yangtze River.
Finally, except for inescapable memories, World War II ended.
Hill went home - a hero to many, a survivor to himself.
