You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  After the Quantico parade, Ryan called for a taxi and headed north on U.S. Route 1 to Washington. His destination was the Willard Hotel, on the corner of Fourteenth and F Streets, across from the National Press Club and next to Garfinckel’s department store. Ryan waited for Helen and her mother in the hotel’s French-château-style lobby, with its pillars, ornately carved ceilings, and tiered chandeliers.

  Helen and her mother soon arrived from Union Station, and Mrs. Miller retired to her room to take a rest after the long train trip, leaving Ryan and Helen alone together on a glorious afternoon in the nation’s capital.

  After getting a bite to eat, they stepped out of the hotel and joined the throngs of tourists, Red Cross nurses, and government workers enjoying the late May sunshine. They strolled a few blocks south down Fifteenth Street and crossed over Constitution Avenue in the direction of the Washington Monument, the obelisk gleaming white high over the nation’s capital from its grassy knoll on the center of the National Mall.

  But a landscape that had long been attractive parkland was now blighted by dozens of temporary war emergency buildings, or “tempos,” the cheap and shabby-looking structures of concrete and asbestos board that were hastily constructed to house thousands of secretaries and bureaucrats supporting the war effort. They lined both sides of the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and were connected by two covered bridges. The dwellings could be seen nearly the entire length of Constitution Avenue on the northern side of the Mall. They virtually surrounded the Washington Monument, and more were under construction. As Ryan and Helen ascended the knoll toward the monument, what open space was still left was now muddy pasture churned over by tractors. Trees had been transplanted and replaced by large stacks of lumber, neat piles of cast-iron pipes, kegs of nails, and concrete mixers. Mostly African-American street vendors sold soup, beans, coffee, corn bread, and succotash to the busy construction crews.

  The entrance to the Washington Monument itself was surrounded by metal benches and posted with a sign informing visitors that no photography was permitted, a security precaution taken out of concern that saboteurs might single out the national landmark. Cameras would be checked at the door, they were informed, and the sign read “Violators Will Be Arrested—Film Confiscated.”

  To their southwest, across the nearby Potomac River, Ryan and Helen could see more commotion on a patch of ground that until the previous August had been mostly swamps. There, on the opposite shore, more crews were now hard at work on what would become the largest office building in the world, larger than the Chicago Merchandise Mart and the Empire State Building: the five-sided headquarters of the War Department that would soon be known as the Pentagon.

  Walking that afternoon in Washington with Helen, Ryan later wrote in his diary, ranked up there as one of the most memorable experiences of his young life—a “thrilling moment” he would not soon forget.

  As the sun descended lower in the sky on the Virginia horizon, Ryan and Helen hailed a taxi for the trip to Quantico, making a short stop along the way to look around Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia estate along the Potomac.

  They arrived in Quantico just in time for a quick tour of the base in a friend’s car before they had to get ready for supper and an evening in the Anchor Room at the Officers’ Club, where Ryan was looking forward to showing off his girl to his fellow officers, especially the married ones.

  Helen was fascinated by the sights and sounds of the Quantico base. To the Algonquin Indians who once called the area home, Quantico had been known as the “place of dancing.” And now, in the middle of 1942, the hundred-square-mile Marine Corps base remained a high-stepping place. Known as the Crossroads of the Marine Corps, it was the nerve center of its training operations, where more than twenty thousand officers would be trained by war’s end. The base was now an intricate network of barracks, classrooms, shops, warehouses, airfields, and training areas for both officers and enlisted troops. The complex was served by three major railroads, and U.S. Highway 1 ran directly through the base. Just before Ryan had arrived, fifty-one thousand additional acres were acquired west of the highway and named the Guadalcanal area—due to the dense vegetation, numerous streams, and deep, muddy ravines that were similar to the terrain Marines were encountering on the South Pacific island of the same name.

  Ryan was attached to the headquarters squadron at the Marine Corps Air Station located on the base, where he was undergoing instruction at the air station’s communications school and gaining more flight experience. He now spent most of his time in class, which he found covered a lot of material he was already familiar with from his engineering studies at Georgia Tech. He was also taking his turn, like all Marines, qualifying on the rifle range. In between he gained more flight hours in special aircraft designed to fly at night. He also was assigned some flights to deliver new aircraft to Marine Corps units on the East Coast and in the Midwest. There were ferry flights from Quantico to Floyd Bennett Field in New York City and on to the Squantum Naval Air Station in Quincy, Massachusetts, outside Boston. On other occasions the aircraft deliveries took him south and allowed him to drop in to see Ma, Uranie, and Helen for a quick visit—sometimes overnight but mostly for just a few hours, enough time for a meal.

  These trips were not always routine. One in December took him to Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in a blizzard, flying only with the aid of instruments because there was virtually no visibility from the cockpit. On several occasions the weather forced him to land on an alternate airfield and wait for the skies to clear. Even landing at Quantico could cause a little too much excitement at times. One day Ryan looked out to see a Navy pilot overshoot the runway and come around for another try. He then watched in horror as the pilot missed the runway again, landed in the marsh, and nosed over. The pilot was killed instantly. It wouldn’t be the last time Ryan would see a perfectly qualified pilot die not at the hand of the enemy but in a crash. Aviation was still inching toward adulthood at the start of World War II, and equipment breakdowns, foul weather, and limited training all posed serious dangers.

  Ryan gave Helen a tour of Turner Field, the main airfield where Navy SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, F4F Hellcats, and the Marine Corps’s newest combat plane, the F4U Corsair, were being put through their paces. He showed her the tennis courts down in the Hollow, the boat dock where he went sailing in the Potomac on his days off, and some of his hangouts. One of his favorite haunts was Hostess House, the former bachelor officers’ quarters in the Cinder City section of the base where a shabby old man did balancing tricks on a bicycle and a blind boy made change in the adjacent post exchange, or PX, where there was a theater and beer garden in the back. Hostess House was run by Mrs. Katherine De Boo, a wonderful, spectacled lady in her mid-sixties who had been a fixture at Quantico since 1925, when she arrived with her sergeant major husband and quickly became known and loved as simply “Mother.” In her role as official hostess, she welcomed visiting parents, chaperoned girls on dates with Marines, arranged dinners and celebrations, and was a sympathetic ear to many. On Mother’s Day she would receive flowers and gifts from Marines stationed all over the world. Marines fighting on Guadalcanal heard a radio message she recorded for them.

  Ryan and Helen drove through the heart of Quantico Town, with its small, compact streets of residential houses and commercial buildings, whose motto was “Trouble-free and heart strung to the Marine Corps.” The main thoroughfare, Potomac Avenue, led east from the train depot toward the river and was lined with barbershops, restaurants, and jewelry stores. To the sound of the frequent train whistles, shoe-shine boys hawked their services along the curb in the reflection of the shiny fenders of the black and white and gray sedans parked diagonally on both sides of the street. On the corner of Potomac and C Street was the Star Café, across from the Nationwide Grocery and the New Way Grill, the Greek diner with its stucco walls, woodpaneled bar with circular mirrors, and cozy booths with Formica tables, almost alway
s crowded with Marines.

  Ryan and Helen returned to his quarters to get dressed for supper. On their walk to the Officers’ Club they stood at attention together for the evening colors. Ryan realized that in all the excitement he had forgotten to pin his lieutenant’s bars on his shoulders. He dashed back to his room, but they were too late for supper with the officers. “So we ate at the New Way of all the places in the world,” he recorded.

  An evening of dancing in the Officers’ Club followed before Ryan and Helen left at midnight for the ride back to her hotel in Washington so he could see her and her mother off on the 3:15 a.m. train for Charleston. Ryan then waited around the station for the “reveille special,” arriving back in his barracks room just before dawn on Sunday, where he wrote a special “note” with the typewriter Ma had given him for his birthday and tacked it into his diary:

  Well, here I go again. I am in love—and this Miller girl is terrific. To say she is the most different girl I’ve ever known is being rather conservative. Her spontaneity, possible naiveté, straight-from-the-shoulder forwardness, absolutely un-subtle way she lets me know who’s boss, is absolutely something new and different to me. I just don’t know what kind of girl she is. She is, tho, absolutely charming—somebody that you definitely take pride in introducing to somebody else. She’s just too much for me at times—such as when I handed her that corsage of red roses and then leaving the club in Nick’s car. But she sure is some girl!

  The biting wind blew in off the Potomac and whipped across Turner Field. From the confines of the control tower at Quantico, where he was pulling the code watch, Ryan peered at the mercury as it dipped to near zero, and looked out at the thick gray clouds that seemed to permanently block out the sun and the moon. The year 1942 was drawing to a close, and Ryan was “becoming bored actually to death.”

  Back in June, when he was preparing for the final exam in the communications course, Ryan received orders for his next assignment. He felt a tinge of disappointment to learn he wouldn’t be going anywhere. Instead of being transferred to a Marine Corps unit heading overseas, as most of his fellow officers were, he would be staying at Quantico. He proved to be so adept in radio communications that the Marine Corps wanted him to teach the training course to new officers.

  His daily routine usually began before dawn in Quarters 314B, followed by a workout in the gym—sometimes he was lucky enough to find a sparring partner—and then it was breakfast and off to teach the finer points of radio communications in one of the crowded classroom buildings next to the air station. In the afternoon he was back teaching another section.

  Having been a highly rated math instructor for his fellow Navy reservists while he was at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, as well as a drill leader, Ryan was uniquely qualified for the instructor post. His military superiors had pegged him early as someone who should be given heightened responsibility, and he had striven to live up to those expectations.

  “This is a student of outstanding ability who has been one of our company commanders for two weeks,” one officer concluded in the fall of 1939, when Ryan was in reserve training at Georgia Tech. “Can give complete instruction in drill and manual. Was head of our mathematics department. And checked out with 16 words per minute in radio. Recommend that you give this student heavy responsibility.”

  When he was accepted two years later for flight training and reported to Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, he was selected as the wing commander, responsible for the sixty flight cadets in his class. Soon he was showing other cadets how to wear their uniforms correctly and giving the men pep talks about willpower and heart.

  His desire to lead also made him be hard on himself. He had a keen awareness of where he fell short, whether it was in his relationships, his studies, or his flying. “My flying smells from one end of the field to the other,” he noted after one particularly disappointing checkout in the air. It was a drive that eventually propelled him to graduate second in his cadet training class.

  Ryan had been preparing for an important role in the unfolding events since he saw the blaring headlines in the evening editions of the newspapers back in 1939. Germany had invaded Poland.

  “Little man, what now,” he wrote in his diary that day, spending the ensuing hours close to a radio to keep up with the hum of news about France and Britain declaring war on Germany.

  Ryan had followed the advance of events with a growing anticipation that the American armed forces would have to act and that ultimately he, too, would be called upon to play a part. Imprinted in his memory, for instance, was May 27, 1941, while he was doing Navy Reserve training near Atlanta, when Roosevelt declared a national emergency. That October, when he arrived for flight training in Jacksonville, he learned that a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Reuben James, had been torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Iceland by a German U-boat, the first American warship to be sunk in the war—two months before Pearl Harbor.

  Even in those early days he had detected a shift in people’s attitudes. It was subtle at first, but there was a collective anticipation that America would not be able to stay out of the war and that the country would have to come together to be ready. On a bus ride from Atlanta to Charleston in April 1941, Ryan noticed the change in the passengers around him.

  “People traveling are more friendly and talkative than they were a year ago,” he recorded in his diary.

  Sunday, December 7, 1941, had been Ryan’s traditional day off. He awoke in room 239 in his barracks at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, went to breakfast, and walked over to the 11:00 a.m. base church services. He then took the bus into town and got off at Riverside Avenue next to Memorial Park, where he strolled along the banks of the St. Johns River in the Florida sunshine, enjoying the warm, wet breeze and the hyacinths floating by the seawall.

  In the late afternoon, as he walked into a mad rush of cadets at the Hotel Roosevelt on their way back to the air station, he was told of the news of the Japanese attack and jumped in a taxi with four of them. He wired his sister Claudia the next day to tell her that he would have to miss her and Leonard’s wedding the following weekend at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  But as 1943 now approached, he was only reading and hearing about the unfolding events from the newsreels in the base auditorium or, in rare cases, fellow officers who arrived in Quantico from the combat zone.

  He was still flying but less frequently. There were more ferry hops to deliver new planes to far-flung air stations and fields, others to transport VIPs up to the Navy Yard in Washington and back. Much of it—like the flyover he did for a July 4 celebration near Richmond—was intended to keep him proficient and increase his total flying hours.

  He was determined to be a tough but conscientious instructor, yet the days seemed to drag on as he watched his fellow Marine officers get their combat orders and depart Quantico. After one typical day of teaching a communications class, he wondered in his diary whether he was doing little more than “reading them to sleep twice a day.” The only real action, and there wasn’t much of it, came on the nights he was on the code watch, pulling a shift on the air station as the presiding communications officer for Quantico’s flight operations.

  “How bored can a man get?” he wondered.

  He felt he should be doing more. His sense of purpose was only fueled by being a Marine. The Corps has always considered itself a breed apart from the rest of the military branches—a tradition that traced to its founding in the early years of the Republic. That was especially true in World War II, when the Marines were handed a singular mission. While the Navy, the Army, and the companion Army Air Corps were engaged against several enemies in Africa, Europe, and Asia, the smaller and more elite Marines trained to fight only one: Japan. Unlike the other branches, which to fill their ranks relied on the draft initiated by Congress in 1940, the Marines insisted on taking no conscripts and accepted only volunteers like Ryan. Those who flocked to the Marine Corps since Pearl Harbor—and so many did that the Marine Corps had t
o turn people away—were consciously signing up to fight Japan.

  But to his increasing frustration, Ryan was not yet one of them. He grew more eager for a new assignment when one afternoon he walked down to the Marine Corps schools at Quantico to hear three officers—a colonel, a major, and a captain—give a talk about their experiences in the Solomon Islands. For the first time he was also shown confidential photographs of the brutal fighting against the Japanese on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.

  “My morale hits another low,” he wrote in his diary. “I am just bored to tears with the lack of action. I can’t stand being just another guy.”

  One high point came in early November when Ryan senior made a surprise visit to Quantico. Father and son weren’t particularly close and seldom saw each other in the years since Ryan senior left Grace and the children behind. But each May, Ryan dutifully called Dad on his birthday, and the two exchanged letters and visits from time to time. Their relationship was rooted in the age-old desire of accomplished men to see their sons compete with their peers and strive to make their mark—and in sons’ primordial yearning to make their fathers proud. Their early bond survived the breakup of the marriage, and while he had been fiercely protective of his mother, Ryan had fond memories of his father. Like when he had driven him to Charlotte, North Carolina, to participate in an amateur boxing competition. Ryan senior had watched proudly as his namesake, then a wispy teenager with outsized dreams of being a boxer, aggressively sparred with the bigger and more practiced boys.

  Ryan’s father was certainly proud of him now. He had come to visit several times during 1941, when Ryan was in flight training in Jacksonville. One afternoon Ryan got a surprise call at the training squadron telling him that his father and eight-year-old half brother, Vance, were waiting outside the gate. The two Ryans got a haircut and then rejoined Vance and Ryan’s stepmother, Sarah, for dinner at the steak house in the lobby of the George Washington, the fifteen-story luxury hotel in downtown Jacksonville. The next morning, while Sarah went shopping, Ryan took Dad and Vance for a tour of the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Little Vance was already well on his way to being an aircraft aficionado and gazed wide-eyed at all the airplanes taking off and landing. But he was even more mesmerized by his older brother, the real-life military flier.