By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
The teenager who joined the Army to start a new life in 1939 got that and more when the United States was brought into World War II.
Joe Salvo was 17 when he left his family at Rimersburg near Clarion to join the
Army in December 1939. The U.S. Army then was the 17th largest in the world. By the time he got back to the States in 1945, Salvo was leaving an Army second only to the Soviet Union in size.
Salvo followed
the Army on its odyssey, going from the frightening days in the early part of the war to those at the end when it was a powerful force overcoming the fanatical resistance put up by the Japanese.When the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor, Salvo was with the 925th Antiaircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion at Camp Stuart, Georgia.
That might seem like a safe distance, but now that the U.S. was in the fight, the Army was
taking no chances. That evening, the 925th was put into trucks and driven to Baltimore, MD to set up defenses around the Martin Aircraft factory there.
A few weeks later, Salvo and his unit were sent to Brooklyn
and loaded into transports. From there, a convoy traveled along the East Coast, through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific to reinforce garrisons in that theater.It became 50 of the most miserable days Salvo ever
spent.""Oh, God, it was terrible,'' he recalled from his Highpoint Towers apartment, 2314 Sassafras. ""I was seasick. I had diarrhea. I lost 15 to 20 pounds. They fed us two meals a
day and they were garbage.''The ship was the John Ericsson. To shake off any possible submarines, it zig-zagged all the way to Melbourne, Australia.
The convoy that they were part of unloaded the first American troops
to reach Australia in the dark days of one Allied defeat after another in the Pacific. The arrival of Americans was greeted enthusiastically by the Australians.""We couldn't believe how well they treated
us. We couldn't buy a beer there; they always paid.''
After some time billeted at an old Australian mining town called Bendigo in New South Wales, the Americans were sent to New Caledonia, an island under Free
French rule. There, the American units were expected to merge with Caledonian troops to form a whole new infantry division, the Americal Division.
The bi-national organization never took place, but an all-American
division was formed anyway, keeping the original name. Salvo remained a part of the division until he was sent home at war's end.""There was all kinds of confusion that first year of the war. You never
knew what to expect.'
'New Caledonia in those next few months looked like it could become the front lines. The Japanese in mid-1942 were still on the offensive, still swallowing up more islands."
"We were
sweating it out,'' Salvo, a staff sergeant, said of that month of May. ""We thought we were next.''
They weren't. The Japanese were stopped - first at the naval Battle of the Coral Sea, then on
the island of New Guinea and then again at Guadalcanal.
In early 1943, the Americal was sent to Guadalcanal after the Marines had defeated the Japanese there. Here, as they would on a half dozen more islands
before the war ended, the 925th set up its antiaircraft weapons around the perimeter of the island's airfield, providing security against enemy air attack.
They would go on to places like Munda, Bougainville, Green,
and then to Leyte in the Philippines. They were equatorial islands where the daytime temperatures reached 120 degrees, then at night the temperature dropped low enough that they needed blankets.
It went on for
Salvo for 39 months, broken up by a one-month leave back to Rimersburg in the winter of 1944-45. By this time Salvo had quite a tan and was quite accustomed to warm weather.""Here I was in the middle of
winter with this deep tan, and all I wanted to do was sit on the furnace register, I was so cold.''
He was one of six brothers in military service, a distinction that brought honors from the local American Legion post
to his parents.That visit home was the only civilization Salvo saw after his unit left New Caledonia.
To pass the time, the men learned to get in good with the cooks.""Then we'd get them to give us some of
the big tins of raisins they had. We'd get some dry yeast, five pounds of sugar and put it all in a five-gallon can and let it sit in the jungle."
"We'd wait three or four days until it was really
working up,'' he said, smiling. ""Then we'd strain it through a cheesecloth and get a snootful. It was called raisin jack.""You could always tell when someone had just come back from drinking
some of it - the bugs would be following them. Their breath would be so fruity from drinking this, that the bugs homed right in on them.
''In the Philippines, Salvo was ready for a change. He had been part of
the gun crew since the war's start, but now he asked to be a mess sergeant.""I had to learn fast how to cook. The men in the battery didn't like it at first."
"But it wasn't bad. Once
in a while, we would get frozen food shipped in. Most of the time it was dehydrated potatoes or cabbage or onions. I'd soak it in water and then put it on the stove.""We just had to do the best we could
with what they gave us.''There were plenty of pineapples and bananas.""I ate bananas until they came out my ears.''The experience did him well.
After the war, Salvo stayed in the Army for three more years as
a recruiter. He came to Erie in 1950 and would work at local restaurants and taverns. Not long after he came to Erie, he also met the woman he would marry in 1962 - Tennie.They remain together today. Tennie is
recovering from a tough bout with cancer. Through the darkest moments of the fight against the disease, and even today, Joe has been at her side, working to rebuild her strength."
"She's my Tennie,''
he says, his eyes bright. ""She's everything to me. She's really something else.''In fact, he says, no difficulty in the war, including that 50-day ship ride, including heat, malaria and the dengue fever, was
as tough as the prospect that he might have lost his wife when the cancer was at its worst.""That was tougher than anything,'' he said. ""Anything.''
