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William A. "Bunk" Austin: WWII Marine

BunkWilliam Albert “Bunk” Austin was born in 1925, so I was sitting once more with an almost 95 year old World War II veteran for this interview. Not everyone gets to meet living WWII heroes, and this was my second such meeting after Riverview’s very own Billy Via.

Bunk volunteered for the Marine Corps while a senior at Radford High School. I decided to begin my probing there. “So, why did you decide to become a Marine?” I asked.

“About four or five Marines came to my high school and they were trying to get people to join up, and I joined when I was a senior. I was in the pacific by the time I was 18 years old. Of course, everybody lied about their age to get in the service.”

"So, you wanted to serve."

“That’s right!” He said. “You wanted to get in to do something.”

“The country was at war.” Pastor Shahn commented with a knowing smile. The three of us were sitting on the back porch of Bunk's home in Radford.

I probed some more. “So, you’re a young man in high school with your whole life ahead of you and you weren’t concerned about getting married and all that good stuff?”

“No!” He replied simply. “You didn’t even think about that. All you wanted to do was just get in and do something.”

“That’s not as common a mindset these days” I opined.

“You just wanted to do something.” He said again. The sentiment was clearly important to Bunk. “I went through boot camp and in a few days I was in the Pacific. They just sent you right on over. They wanted people over there and they got you over there. They didn’t fool around.”

“So, we're talking about war.” I continued, “Tell me, what was that experience like?”

“Well, I went to Parris Island for Boot camp, and from there I went to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. We formed an outfit there and the same guns we trained with at Camp Lejeune, we used in the pacific. We loaded them unto a troop train and took them to California with us and from there to the Pacific.”

“What caliber guns were they?” the preacher quizzed.

“90 millimeter. The shells were about about 37 inches long.”

“That’s some serious hardware,” I thought. I did some light homework. The 90-mm guns were designed for seacoast defense, as artillery for supporting ground troops, and as antiaircraft guns. The 90–mm Gun M1/M2/M3 had a 3.5in (90 mm) diameter bore, and a 15 ft (4.6 m) barrel, giving it a 50 caliber length. It was capable of firing a 3.5 in × 23.6 in (90 mm × 600 mm) shell 62,474 ft (19,042 m) horizontally, or a maximum altitude of 43,500 ft (13,300 m). The M1 was capable of piercing 9 inches (228.6mm) of armor at 1,000 yards with armor piercing ammunition.

“They weighed a whole lot.” He finished.

“So, did you serve with others who got injured?” I was asking for the sake of the record; not because I expected a different answer than I got.

“Oh yes! There were guys who got shrapnel in them and got sent home. We would sometimes get letters from some of those guys, but it would take three or four months to get a letter.”

“Did you ever have a close call yourself?”

BunkWWII“Well, in war you never know. Going from island to island and hitting every island…” He left the statement unfinished. I knew what he was saying. “I was on four different islands. Every time you go to an island, you have to invade it.  So, there were guys who got wounded and sent back to the States. We had one guy who was on guard duty at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. He got sent to Guadalcanal, then back to the States, then joined our outfit and went back overseas with us. I get my pictures out and look at some of these guys every once in a while. I got my address book out the other day and wrote to four guys and I heard back from one of them.”

Bunk was featured in the WWII book, "Heroes Among Us" by Gene Morrell.  Bunk's duties were described this way:

Austin was primarily trained as a fuze setter. He explained the fuzes were a certain length, and the shorter they were cut, the fewer seconds the shell took to explode once it left the barrel of the gun.

For example, he explained, on board a ship, the radar operators would pick up incoming enemy planes, and with their positions and speeds, the operator would estimate how many seconds away from the ship the planes would be in a given length of time.

The shells would be passed through the ammunition bay, and then, the shell would be put in a fuze cutter. The fuze was cut down to the right length to make the shell explode in the air within a given number of seconds so when it exploded, it would be at or near incoming enemy planes.

...

Austin was on Tinian when a B-29, nicknamed the Enola Gay, took off on Aug.6, 1945, and headed for Hiroshima, Japan, where the plane dropped the first atomic bomb onto the city. “It left from the north (air) strip, and we were on the south strip,” Austin said.

new doc 2019-10-22 17.04.29_1On August 9, a second B-29 took off from Tinian and headed to Nagasaki, Japan, where it dropped the second atomic bomb. “Everybody remembers what the name of the first plane was but not many know what the second one was called. It was named Bockscar,” Austin said. (According to information on the website at www.atomicmuseum.com, that plane took its name from the command pilot, Fred Bock. The command pilot, Col.Paul Tibbets, named the Enola Gay after his mother.)

Following the destruction wrought by the two atomic bombs, on Aug.14, Japan agreed to an unconditional surrender, and World War II came to an end.

Austin remained on Tinian after the war was over and later went to Guam to await transport back to the U.S.

"Some debate whether it was the right move to bomb Japan." I said. "How do you feel about that?"

"Well, I'll tell you." He said. "I was getting my shots to go invade Japan. Now, if you're sitting there knowing that you're going to go invade Japan, how would you feel about it?"

The point was made.

"I go to schools all the time talking to the kids." He continued. "I talk to the kids and it's hard to tell them. When the atomic bomb comes up it's hard to explain to them that you got out there and killed people, because you're not supposed to do it. But you do it because you either get killed or you kill somebody. There's no two ways about it."

"Well, war is never a pretty thing." I said.

"I was watching a film just the other day." He said. "It was about some military ship that they thought the United States could never destroy.  It was supposed to be the ship of all ships, and of course, the US bombed it. And I sat there watching this movie and I thought to myself 'how did I ever get back?' So many didn't come back. War is a hard thing. You're there and you do what you can."

"You've seen as lot of suffering up close and personal." I said.

"It's like I told my wife. I've seen things that if I live to be 100 years old I'd never forget."

We sat for a while going through his cardboard boxes and manila envelopes looking at pictures from the war. There were quite a few. Among the stack of papers, Bunk pulled out a sheet that bore a poem he'd written on behalf of his siblings when his mother died. The poem was called "The Swing."

Life is a challenge we all must go thru.
You are measured by that challenge, whatever you do.
The love you give, the love you receive;
The friends that you have, and what you believe.
The things that you do, your work day by day;
To raise your family in just the right way.
To be loved by so many is a tribute to you;
And to live a life so long, that's reserved for a few.
We'll never forget the memories these bring,
Of the "Little Old Lady" who sat on the swing.

I gave it back to him and watched him thoughtfully as he rumaged through his things. Here was a soldier who obviously knew how precious life was and yet, the bloodiest conflict in human history was what defined him. Here was a Marine who willingly put his life on the line to serve his country out of a sense of sheer duty. Again, the stuff heroes are made of.

I asked Bunk whether he was saved, and he assured me that he was. The last thing I noted as I prepared to leave was his RV parked in the yard.  There was a sign on the back of it that read: "when the last trumpet sounds, I'm outta here!"

Below is an excerpt from Pastor Shahn's interview with Bunk:

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