Virtually every member of the Badgers' 1942 football team — which went 8-1-1 and was awarded the Helms Foundation national championship — was in the military within a few months of the season-ending victory over Minnesota. The Badgers served with distinction in various branches in both the Pacific and European theaters and Denver journalist and author Terry Frei, the son of '42 Badgers guard Jerry Frei, chronicled it in his book Third Down and A War to Go, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in hardback in 2004 and in a revised paperback edition in 2007.
Although his teammates included sophomore Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch and future NFL standout Pat Harder, the undisputed star and immensely popular and respected leader of that team was two-time All-American end Dave Schreiner, who came from Lancaster and also was the Big Ten MVP in 1942. On the 70th anniversary of Schreiner's June 21, 1945 death, this slightly adapted and condensed excerpt from Third Down and a War to Go begins late in the Battle of Okinawa.
Schreiner and '42 Badgers tackle Bob Baumann both were in the same Marine company, and Baumann was killed in action earlier in the month. Another Badger, Len "Bud" Seelinger, also was on Okinawa with another unit.
This is not for the squeamish or the overly sensitive, given subject matter and terminology used at the time.
As the Okinawa campaign continued, the men of A Company grew even fonder of Dave Schreiner.
"We were not foxhole buddies or anything like that," recalled Private First Class Ed Liguori. "He was my lieutenant. He knew me as Eddie. They all called me Eddie. One day, we had gone two, two and a half days without food or water. There were a few cans of cheese, but we didn't have much water. He disappeared. An hour later, he comes back up the hill where we were in our foxholes, and he had a box on his shoulder. In it were extra large cans of grapefruit juice. I still remember the color. They were tannish and greenish cans, with no name on them or anything. I don't know where he stole it from or where he got it. But here he comes up this hill, and we all took three slugs of that grapefruit juice. I can't have grapefruit juice now because of medication, but when I could, every time I drank grapefruit juice, I thought of Dave Schreiner."
"We had some officers who were, very frankly, (bad guys)," said PFC Jim Harwood. "Most of the officers we had were good guys. They weren't going to run you up for some little infraction that didn't make any difference anyway. Dave was one of those types of guys who was lenient. He wasn't going to give you a lot of hell for nothing."
On June 18, Schreiner wrote his parents on American Red Cross stationery.
Dear Mother and Dad — Rec'd letter of June 6 from you. Enclosed was a clipping about Johnny Walsh. No I didn't get any bronze star on Guam. I've still got my medal. I can feel it when I put my hands behind me. We've been eating very well of late. Fresh meat, good canned food etc. And I've been sleeping a lot. Boy it's good to rest. Will write next chance I get. Don't forget a company commander is a pretty safe spot. Much love, Dave
On the night of June 19, Bud Seelinger, with the 29th Regiment, tracked down Schreiner and gave him several cans of fruit. The two Badgers again spoke of Baumann, and they were hopeful the fighting was coming to an end. Japanese had died by the thousands, and the organized resistance was lessening. But there was one more major pocket of resistance on the southern end of the island, near a gap in the American lines. By then, runner Vic Anderson had been wounded and evacuated, but he later heard from his buddies that Schreiner was sent out on what Anderson and others view as a needlessly dangerous mission near the west coast of Oroku Peninsula on June 20. Anderson said the mandate came from a "new silly-ass major who didn't know that we didn't go out after dark or after 4 or 5 o'clock, when the Japs would set up a lot of traps. He said, `Dave, you take that squad down there and see if there are any Japs in that gully and valley.'"
Schreiner Marine buddy Gus Forbus, who by then was in a hospital at Tinian in the Mariana Islands, heard that an officer who joined the unit late in the battle ordered Schreiner to check on the lines. "The report I got on it was that they were putting in the lines for the night on the 20th, and he wasn't satisfied," Forbus said. "He wanted Dave to check it out. He was an Annapolis man, but he couldn't pour water out of a boot."
In 1993, former Marine John McLaughry wrote his memories of that day:
My platoon of M-7's was assigned to provide fire support for the 1st Battalion in an attack on the last enemy stronghold at the extreme southern point of Okinawa. The immediate objective was some very rugged terrain, an escarpment of boulders, sheer rock and caves . . . rising to nearly 300 feet. Prior to the attack Dave was moving his company into the line adjacent to the company our M-7's were to support and I talked very briefly with him. He then, with a couple of his men, disappeared into the rocky area leading toward the Kiyama Gusuku hill mass.
So McLaughry remembered the patrol as a three-man mission, including Schreiner, and he believed it had a theoretical legitimate strategic justification in a prelude to an attack on the holdout Japanese troops. However, that leaves unanswered the issue of whether the patrol could have been delayed to the next day or was needlessly risky in the final stages of the battle.
Marine correspondent Don Petit's later dispatch said Schreiner had walked ahead to scout. According to the dispatch, gunfire from a cave suddenly ripped into his left side. Vic Anderson said he heard it happened this way: "A Jap with a Nambu machine gun stepped out of a cave and shot him." Petit's dispatch said a grenade exploded and fragments tore into both of his legs. McLaughry's written recollections made it clear he was skeptical of Petit's version.
McLaughry's account:
The attack had not yet jumped off when word came that Dave had been hit, shot by a sniper. There was no word on his condition. Because of my platoon's connections with Dave, over the next few hours we tried to get as much information as possible and did hear on good authority that a bullet had hit him in the chest area, lodging in his spine.
Schreiner was shot in the upper torso. Despite the myths that spread both immediately and over later years, that's indisputable. The medics treating him and those who saw him remembered the upper torso trauma years later but weren't sure if there were other wounds. That said, even those interviewed acknowledged that they saw so many deaths, involving both friends and those they didn't know, that circumstances sometimes ran together in their minds. Plus, they admitted the passage of nearly sixty years could make memories — even of very jarring incidents — become foggy. So, Schreiner might or might not have been hit by grenade fragments.
Regardless of the nature of his wounds, men from the patrol rushed to get Schreiner back to the unit's lines. William Ramey, a corpsman and pharmacist's mate, recalled working on Schreiner. He said he heard that Schreiner had gone out on that advance patrol with a first sergeant. "We were trying to get plasma started," Ramey recalled. "He told me, `Doc, they pulled a sneaky trick on us!'"
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| "The last words he spoke, that I heard, anyway, were, `If any of you guys think I'm crying, I'll get out of here and kick the (expletive) out of you!' That stuck with me all those years." |
Some of the men, including Ramey, who also knew who Schreiner was and respected him immensely, took that to mean that Schreiner had been ambushed while accepting a surrender from Japanese. Word from the command post later trickled in to support that inference. (Depending on one's definition of sniper, that could gibe with the story McLaughry heard.) Ramey believed Schreiner meant "they tricked him into coming down and shot him." He didn't remember Schreiner mentioning a white flag, but he drew inferences and later heard others talk of a faked surrender. "It's been a long time," Ramey said slowly. "But somebody's last words like that, they stick with you pretty good." Ramey's high regard for Schreiner, and his familiarity with him, virtually guarantees he didn't mix up the circumstances of Schreiner's injuries with anyone else's.
Contrary to myth, many Japanese and conscripted Okinawans — about 10,000 — surrendered on Okinawa. In Typhoon of Steel, the brother-author team of James and William Belote noted that surrenders increased from an average of about 50 per day from June 12-18, to 343 on June 19, and then to 977 on June 20, the day Schreiner was wounded. Japanese soldiers indeed were allowing themselves to be taken prisoner on the day Schreiner was on his final patrol. Still, the Belotes wrote, the Japanese soldiers who surrendered were exceptional, because most members of the 32nd Army still fought to the death. U.S. estimates of the Japanese battle deaths on June 19 and 20 totaled 5,000.
Charles Pulford, a private first class posted to the headquarters company, served as a runner for Barney Green before Green's death. He said he was at the command post the day Schreiner suffered his wounds. He didn't hear direct discussions between Schreiner and officers at the command post. Yet he was adamant that word of those discussions spread through the command post — along with the news that Schreiner was shot during a faked surrender. Pulford wasn't sure which officers came up with the plan, but he said that planes dropped white pamphlets over the area. "The Japs were told that if they wanted to surrender, they would wave these pamphlets," Pulford recalled. "I remember when the planes came over to drop them." He believed it happened late in the afternoon. Though his first thought was that it happened on the day Schreiner was wounded, he wasn't certain of that. But he was certain that Schreiner contacted the command post on his patrol.
"Being there at the C.P.," Pulford said, "I heard that Dave had called back to find out what to do. They dropped these pamphlets, and evidently Dave had seen Japs waving them. . . . He was told to take an interpreter and crawl up there and see what he could arrange."
Who told Schreiner that?
"I imagine it had to be the commanding officer at the C.P., or it might even have been regimental," Pulford said. "Then shortly after that, we heard that he had crawled up there, and when he raised up to talk to them, they machine-gunned him."
Schreiner went in and out of consciousness after he was brought back to the lines.
PFC Ed Liguori was in his foxhole when he heard someone yell, "The lieutenant's been hit!" He scrambled out of his foxhole and went to where Ramey was treating Schreiner. "He was unconscious, breathing heavily, and it was so sad," Liguori recalled. "He wasn't moving. He wasn't talking. There might have been a moan. They were giving him plasma. They were giving him fluids through his ankle because the blood vessels collapsed. I didn't know anything about it at the time, being a young, dopey kid. But later, when I was teaching, I learned about these things. They couldn't find any blood vessels in his arm, so they were administering plasma in his ankle. I guess they found a vein down there."
In a bizarre twist, PFC Cal Danielson — the young Marine from Rio, Wisconsin, who as a teenager had met and worshipped Schreiner — was in the area and also heard the word that Schreiner had been hit. He was with the First Division's 5th Regiment. "Somebody said, `Lieutenant Schreiner got it!'" Danielson remembered. "I rushed over there. I'm not sure exactly what I said — it was a long time ago — but I tried to say something about football and how tough he was. I was pretty shook up."
PFC Vern Courtnage, a driver who did work for companies in the battalion, had transported Schreiner often, and he saw him right before he was loaded onto a jeep to be taken to an aid station. "He was on the ground, on a stretcher, with a covering over him," Courtnage said. "The corpsmen were working on him, and they loaded him into the jeep. My friend drove the jeep; his name was Duane Carey. We loaded him onto that jeep, and everybody was wishing him well, and he was conscious. The last words he spoke, that I heard, anyway, were, `If any of you guys think I'm crying, I'll get out of here and kick the (expletive) out of you!' That stuck with me all those years."
The men watched their lieutenant leave in the jeep. They had seen their buddies die, they had crawled over bodies as if they were rocks, and they were steeled to death, even as they knew it might come to them.
But, god, why Schreiner?
James Singley, the PFC in the weapons company who had served under Schreiner on Guam, was near Schreiner's company that day on Okinawa. He immediately heard one of the inaccurate stories about Schreiner's wounds. "Word came down the line that Dave had gotten shot by a sniper right between the eyes," Singley said. "Now, when somebody who was well-liked got shot, we always passed the word down the line. Word came down that that's what happened. You never knew whether it's what happened exactly, but that's what came down the line about Dave."
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| The men watched their lieutenant leave in the jeep. They had seen their buddies die, they had crawled over bodies as if they were rocks, and they were steeled to death, even as they knew it might come to them. But, god, why Schreiner? |
Obviously, if that had happened, Schreiner would have died immediately.
But it's illustrative of the way stories — often inaccurate — spread among the men.
Schreiner underwent emergency surgery at a field hospital. But there wasn't much hope. David Nathan Schreiner died the next day, June 21, 1945. He was twenty-four.
The doctors let his buddies know that even if they had managed to save him, he probably would have been paralyzed.
The official dispatch makes no mention of a faked surrender. That raises the question: Why cover that up? If Schreiner died as he gave the benefit of the doubt to surrendering Japanese, that doesn't render his death less tragic than if he had been struck down by a sniper or a soldier emerging from a cave. In fact, in June 1945, yet another example of Japanese battlefield treachery would have been appropriate as the nation braced for an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
However, if Schreiner's death was the indirect result of being ordered to try to arrange a surrender, and the pamphlet drop ended up endangering Schreiner and others, there would be reason to create a more conventional battle scenario for Schreiner's death. It would save face for the officers who had ordered Schreiner to attempt to arrange a surrender.
Danielson, the Marine from Rio, said that in his brief encounter with Schreiner after he was wounded, he didn't hear Schreiner say anything about an ambush, but the word quickly got around that Schreiner had said something along those lines before Danielson arrived.
Judy Corfield, Schreiner's niece, said that her late mother (and Schreiner's sister), Betty Johnson, attended a Sixth Marine Division reunion in Chicago in 1996. At the reunion, several members of Schreiner's platoon told Johnson that Dave indeed had been accepting a surrender, under a white flag, from several Japanese. The story, handed down orally, was different from the version Charles Pulford remembered from being at the command post. According to the account Betty Johnson heard, Dave had been wary as the small Japanese party approached him, and when the Japanese soldier in front bowed, he had a rifle hidden behind his back. A Japanese man reached forward and fired the rifle at Schreiner, and another tossed a grenade.
Connie Sherman, Schreiner's longtime friend, recalled that after the news of his death reached Lancaster, the story circulating around town was that he had been shot in the back.
So there are conflicting stories about Schreiner's death, and they almost certainly will never be resolved. However he was mortally wounded, Schreiner's death on June 21 came just hours before Major General Roy S. Geiger declared that organized resistance had ended and the island was secure. Geiger had succeeded Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner as commander of the forces when Buckner was struck in the chest by an artillery shell shard and killed on June 18. Geiger's declaration was premature; isolated resistance and U.S. mop-up operations continued.
Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commander of the Japanese 32nd Army, committed suicide on June 22.
Tenth Army commander Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell declared the campaign over on July 2.
Bud Seelinger had lost two teammates on Okinawa. Other Seelinger buddies were killed, too, but he couldn't help being more torn up by the deaths of Baumann and Schreiner. "He was just heartsick," recalled his wife, Mary Elaine Seelinger. "He was broken up."
He wasn't alone.
"Just a beautiful man died," Vic Anderson said sadly, years later.
Schreiner's final letter home arrived in Lancaster on June 25. He was already dead. His parents didn't know that as they opened the letter with his return address in the left-hand corner.
Lt. David N Schreiner Co A 1st Bn 4th Marines 6th Mar. Div. FPO — San Francisco
And they read their son's reassuring final line — the one about a company commander being in a relatively safe position.
