* * *
Up until now, the Alamo Scouts had been fortunate. After more than one hundred missions, many fraught with extreme danger, they had never lost a man killed in action. But as the invasion of Japan loomed, that luck seemed certain to change.
Six Alamo Scout teams were preparing to go ashore in southern Kyushu in advance of the American invasion, and what they were in for was relayed to Bill Littlefield a few years after the war when he ran into Red Sumner. Sumner had gone into Japan with the occupation forces in 1945, and had the chance to tour the area the Scouts were to have reconnoitered.
“They would never have been able to get us back out,” he told Littlefield. “There was barbed wire strung on the beaches and in the water, and soldiers with dogs patrolled constantly.”
Zeke McConnell was far gloomier. Speaking after the war, the Cherokee Indian said, “Our perfect record wouldn't have lasted if we would have had to go to Japan. We would have lost a lot of men. It would have been near suicide.”
Not every Scout was as fatalistic.
Conrad Vineyard had been recruited from Company F of the 164th Infantry, which he had just joined as a replacement, fresh from the States. But word of his swimming prowess had gotten around, and Scout Martin Grimes and one other man approached Vineyard. Taking him aside and sitting under a tree, Grimes filled Vineyard in on the Scouts, “really opening up,” Vineyard recalled.
“How many men were in your squad when you joined it?” Grimes asked.
“Two,” Vineyard replied.
“How many men are in a squad?”
“Anywhere from twelve to eighteen.”
“What do you think happened to the rest?”
“Well, I guess they didn't make it.”
“We've never lost a man in action,” Grimes stated.
That impressed Vineyard, as did the promise of first-class accommodations and food. He agreed. His orders were cut and two days later he was on his way to the ASTC at Subic Bay in Luzon.
A member of the ASTC's ninth class, Vineyard and others were all eager to get into the field, and did not consider the danger they were facing.
“We felt we were invincible, that we were the master of all situations and that nothing would happen to us,” he said in 2007. “We believed we were smart enough to take care of ourselves. We all just wanted to go in and get the job done.”
* * *
Jack Dove got a preview of what was in store for the Scouts when he paid a call on an old friend, Maj. John Lahmer, at Lahmer's Philippine CP at San Fernando. The Scout leader found Lahmer, a project officer for Operation Olympic, working on a six-foot-by-six-foot color contoured relief map laid out on a table. The map clearly showed the beach landing zones.
“Do you want to see where you're going to land, Jack?” Lahmer asked. “Pull up a chair.”
Dove sat and Lahmer proceeded to go through the plan, pointing out terrain features, the coastal cliffs and narrow beaches. He told Dove of estimated enemy troop strengths and defenses, and the times American reinforcements would be arriving, plus other details, all of which, Dove later confessed, “scared the piss out of me.”
The Scouts would be put ashore several days before the main landings to reconnoiter the beaches. They would go in at night, carried close to shore by submarines. The Scouts were to bring back prisoners if possible for interrogation.
“It's going to be tough,” Lahmer said.
“Tough, hell,” Dove replied. “Our chances are practically nil.”
One Scout had an even darker forecast when he heard the assignment.
Pvt. Carl Bertoch of the Adkins Team, which was to land on Kyushu and look for sites where American prisoners were thought to be held, recalled that the men did not consider it a suicide mission. But neither did they expect to make it back.
Whether that, indeed, would have come to pass would never be tested. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber
Enola Gay
, with Col. Paul Tibbets at the controls, dropped an atomic bomb, leveling the city of Hiroshima. On Sunday, August 9, another B-29,
Bock's Car
, dropped a second bomb on the port city of Nagasaki. Three days later, the Japanese capitulated. The next dayâThursdayâa message was received by the Alamo Scout teams to cease all hostilities against the Japanese and return immediately to the ASTC at Subic Bay on Luzon.
* * *
The first peacetime mission of the Alamo Scouts commenced on September 14, when a team led by Lt. George Derr boarded a ship in Manila, accompanied by General Krueger and his staff. The ship was bound for Japan. After a stopover at Okinawa to pick up General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell at 10th Army headquarters, the ship continued on. It docked at Wakayama on September 19, and Krueger immediately established 6th Army HQ. A day later, Krueger watched the arrival of men from the 5th Marine Division, and witnessed the Japanese signing over to the marines the Sasebo Naval Air Base.
On September 24, Krueger and his party, including Derr's team, traveled to Nagasaki to view the ruined remains of the city. Staff Sgt. Clinton Tucker, a member of Derr's Team, recalled seeing steel girders twisted by the intense heat, and saw where buildings had been swept away, leaving just their concrete foundations. The blast area, Tucker remembered, was “saucer-shaped,” and extended beyond the city and up into the adjoining hills, where it burned thousands of trees and mowed down countless more like blades of grass before a scythe.
Krueger's party stopped by a torpedo factory, or at least what had been one. The factory's metal lathes and other machinery had melted and washed down gutters into culverts, where the molten steel rehardened.
The few civilians they encountered walked in a dazed fashion, as if just awakening from a bad dream. Makeshift military hospitals were filled to overflowing with victims, many horribly burned, and the most badly injured were evacuated to American hospital ships.
Leaving the devastation that had been Nagasaki, Krueger and his entourage arrived in Kyoto on September 28, where he set up his headquarters in the government offices in the Daiken building. For his living quarters, he commandeered for himself and his staff rooms at the Miyako Hotel outside of the city.
* * *
While Derr's men guarded Krueger, eight Scouts from the Adkins and Grimes teams, traveling in two jeeps, went in search of Japanese armaments. The Japanese had been told to collect their weapons and deposit them at a central location, after which infantry units came along and, under Scout supervision, destroyed the guns, usually by lining them up and cutting them in half with acetylene torches.
The Adkins Team, in particular Sgt. William E. McCommons, was also assigned the task of sifting through almost five hundred samurai swords to select the best ones to be given as souvenirs to Krueger and his top staff. For this, McCommons enlisted the aid of a Japanese general, who helped him pick out the six swords of highest quality. These were passed along to 6th Army HQ. He then had the general select the next best sword, which McCommons kept for himself.
* * *
The end of World War II found Bill Littlefield in California. He had been given a forty-five-day furlough on the guarantee that he would return to duty in the southwest Pacific. He agreed.
“I'd have done anything to get back to the U.S., even for a little bit,” he later recalled.
But now the war was over, and his orders to return to duty never came through.
For Conrad Vineyard, the war's end came even before he had a chance to ply his Alamo Scout skills. His class never graduated from the ASTC, and Vineyard himself was returned to the Americal Division, from which he had been selected for Scout training weeks earlier.
His return happened so fast, he had to leave some of his possessions behind, specifically, his uniform with his new Alamo Scout patch, a round red, white, and blue patch designed in 1944 by medic Harry Golden, which bore the likeness of an Indian superimposed over the façade of the Alamo. He had sent his uniform to be dry-cleaned.
“Can I go pick up my uniform at the dry cleaner?” he had requested when news of his return was handed to him.
“No,” was the terse reply. “Your orders say you leave immediately.”
He never saw his Alamo Scout clothes again.
Vineyard ended up being sent to Japan with his division, coming ashore at Yokohama. He recalled the people were “very gracious” and they traded eggs for cigarettes. This was a far cry from the hostile reception he expected and the possible trap he and other GIs were warned about by their officers.
* * *
Terry Santos had been fighting on Okinawa since early June. The 11th Airborne had been dispatched to the island as reinforcements to fill some of the gap left by heavy American casualties. There, amid the bloody fighting at Naha, his friend and commander, Red Skau, had been killed.
Now the fighting was over, and Santos, who during the course of the war had won two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars with the V for Valor, and a Purple Heart, was called into his regimental commander's tent.
“Santos,” the officer said. “You have more than the required eighty-five points to be sent home, but I'd like you to go with us to Japan, to be one of the first Americans to set foot on Jap soil.”
“Are you crazy?” Santos said. “I've been waiting for this chance to go home since I joined the army.”
The officer tried again to change Santos's mind, but without success.
“Well,” he said. “There's nothing I can do to stop you.”
“I know there's not,” Santos replied.
Terry Santos arrived in San Francisco on October 8, two days before his twenty-fourth birthday.
* * *
A lot of the Alamo Scouts were in Santos's position. Two days before Krueger left for Manila, word went out to the 154 Alamo Scouts, staff, and overhead personnel that any man with the needed eighty-five points who wanted to go home could do so. The rest would join Krueger in Japan, or could opt to return to their original units for separation or reassignment. Scouts who wished to go to Japan were reassigned to the 6th Ranger Battalion, while those who were being sent home would await transport in the Philippines.
On October 10, Red Sumner hauled down the Alamo Scout flag for the last time, and officially closed the Scout training camp.
“I took down the flag and shut off the lights,” he later said.
During the twenty-one months since John McGowen's first mission to Los Negros, the Alamo Scouts had conducted 106 more, for a total of 108. They had killed an estimated five hundred enemy soldiers and had taken sixty more prisoner. But more important, they had provided Krueger and, by extension, MacArthur with much-needed and accurate intelligence that paved the way for victory in the Southwest Pacific.
The experience they gleaned was valuable, so much so that after the war's end, the Defense Department conducted interviews with the Scouts and incorporated their techniques and training into new textbooks for amphibious warfare, especially in regards to scouting, patrolling, intelligence collecting, raiding, and guerrilla operations. These firsthand experiences were later taught to fledgling officers at West Point and the Infantry School at Fort Benning, as well as other military training centers.
But while the army lauded the activities and skill of the Scouts, unlike other elite units, such as the Devil's Brigade or Merrill's Marauders, it was not until 1988 that the Alamo Scouts, now reaching retirement age, were granted the right to wear the Special Forces shoulder tab. At that time, they were recognized as the army's first Long Range Surveillance Unit at a service at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
On March 13, 2008, a plaque honoring the Alamo Scouts was dedicated at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Fifty people attended, mostly family members. Only four of the aging Scouts, Terry Santos, Bob Buschur, Jack Geiger, and team leader William Barnes, made it to the ceremony.
The reason for this delay in recognition was because, until the late 1980s, Alamo Scout missions were considered classified. The men, as they were discharged, were basically told to go home, resume their lives, and shut up about what they did during the war.
Why their missions were classified was never explained, but the abrupt disbanding of the unit without any form of recognition, not even a pat on the back and a “well done,” left a bitter taste in the mouths of many of the men.
EPILOGUE
Through the Years
The Alamo Scouts officially disbanded in Kyoto, Japan, in November 1945, almost two years after Krueger first selected Col. Frederick Bradshaw to organize and train the elite fighting unit.
Now the war was over, and for many, that meant a return to home and family, trying to pick up their lives where they left off. Others, forged by the army in time of war, made the military a career.
General Krueger retired to San Antonio in 1946 and bought his first home. There he wrote a book entitled
From Down Under to Nippon: The Story of the 6th Army in World War II
, which was published in 1953. His life, however, was far from one of peaceful retirement. In 1947 his son James was dismissed from the army for conduct unbecoming an officer, and in 1952 his daughter Grace was convicted of stabbing her army husband to death while he slept. She was tried by court-martial and sentenced to life with hard labor. She was released in 1955 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that military trials of civilians were unconstitutional. In 1962 Krueger Middle School was founded in San Antonio. Krueger died at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on August 20, 1967, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was eighty-six years old.