Local veteran Stan Leedy looks back

By Michael Wanbaugh

On a cold and dreary St. Patrick’s Day, 1946, Stan Leedy stood on the deck of the South Shore train station in South Bend waiting for his parents to pick him up.

He waited and waited and waited some more. They never showed.

“I was starting to get pretty upset,” Leedy remembers. “I was cold and soaking wet from getting rained on.”

Born in his grandparent’s home on South Seventh Street and raised in Goshen and New Paris, Leedy had just spent the past three years of his life in the Navy, trolling the Pacific Ocean during World War II. He was ready to get home.

Across the street from the train station there in downtown South Bend was the LaSalle Hotel. Tired of waiting in the rain, Leedy decided to go over and have a drink in the hotel bar.

“Sure enough, there was my mom and dad drinking beer, enjoying St. Patty’s Day,” Leedy said. “So, I joined the party.

“That was a St. Patty’s Day I’ll never forget.”

In the Navy

In the spring of 1942, Leedy was a senior at New Paris High School and had studied music for several years. He loved to sing.

America had not been at war long, and it wasn’t going well. The music teacher decided to produce a patriotic musical. Leedy scored the closing act of singing “God Bless America.”

All the lights in the auditorium were turned off. Leedy walked on stage and sang his heart out with a single spotlight shooting down on him.

“They turned down the house lights and everybody stood up and clapped,” Leedy said. “To this day I get a lump in my throat when I sing that song.”

Leedy graduated later that year and then enrolled at Ball State College. It was not a university yet. He studied a year at Ball State before he was drafted into the service.

He said he was lucky and was one of the few to be allowed into the Navy.

“I wanted to get in the Navy in the worst way,” Leedy said. “I didn’t want to go into the Army.”

Leedy was sent to the Great lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago for boot camp and assigned to Greenway Camp.

The unit trained for 10 weeks, and Leedy was given a series of vaccinations for small pox, diphtheria, yellow fever and dingy fever.

“My arms were sore the entire 10 weeks,” he said.

Close call

Basic training was unpleasant for Leedy, but he enjoyed his next assignment at Corps school. He was being trained to be a corpsman and potentially a medic. He was transferred to the Shoemaker Naval Hospital in the Livermore Valley between San Francisco and Stockton, Calif.

Leedy was assigned to a maintenance crew at the hospital. His job was to lay linoleum as the newly constructed hospital buildings were completed.

“I was a worker at that point, that’s right,” Leedy said. “We would lay all the linoleum. That was hard work. I think that’s why I have trouble (getting around) today.”

He was also continuing his medical training. One day his lieutenant came up to Leedy and ordered him to report to the sick back. He did, but was puzzled by the order since he felt fine.

For the next couple days Leedy was kept in a semi-private room. He was given no medication and later released.

“I just couldn’t figure out what was going on,” Leedy said. “I went back and talked to my lieutenant.”

Turns out the 3rd Division Marines were gathering up field corpsmen. Undoubtedly such an assignment would put Leedy directly into the heat of combat on the beaches of Pacific Islands.

He had been spared that assignment by the lieutenant.

“If he hadn’t done that, I would have been a medic for the Marines,” Leedy said. “Not that I’m chicken, but I’d just as soon not do that.”

Off to war

About a month later Leedy got a ship order and reported aboard the U.S.S. Winged Arrow in San Francisco, which was bound for Hawaii.

The ship could carry 4,000 troops, including their equipment, trucks and jeeps. The ship had a hospital unit that had a fully-equipped operating room and 20 hospital beds. Leedy was one of the ship’s 21 corpsmen who were divided into three shifts.

From Hawaii, Leedy’s ship went to the island of Saipan to pick up troops for an invasion of the Philippines. They picked up additional troops at Leyte and headed for the Lingayen Gulf off the shore of Luzon.

Battleships, cruisers and destroyers started shelling the beach, Leedy said. Several hours later he watched as landing crafts as far as the eye could see headed toward shore.

“It was terrible to see our men wading ashore,” Leedy said, “and the Japs firing point-blank at them.”

On the way to the Lingayen Gulf, corpsmen were told that five of them needed five of us to go ashore during the invasion, Leedy said. And they had to be men who weren’t married.

Leedy was picked because he was one of just five single guys in the group. They went in along with the third wave of the landing invasion.

“We got on the beach and the five of us dug holes like you wouldn’t believe,” Leedy said. “The corpsmen would bring the wounded down to the beach. We would tag them for a ship and they would be taken there.

Leedy was on the beach for about 24 hours before they returned to the ship.

“There were some badly wounded guys,” he said. “I really hadn’t had that kind of training. There were shells going off all around us. I kept telling the guys to keep their heads down.”

‘Bad stuff’

On the way back to Saipan, Leedy’s ship carried about 100 severely wounded Japanese soldiers. He was the head corpsman on a ward that had 10 wounded Japanese soldiers. He worked 20-hour days for nearly two weeks.

The ship eventually went back to the states for repairs before heading back to Hawaii and Guam to meet up with its convoy.

“We weren’t ever too sure where we were going,” Leedy said. “They wouldn’t tell us that. They don’t ever tell you anything.”

One day before they arrived at Iwo Jima, they were told of their destination.

“When we got on station, the battleships were firing their 16-inch guns right over our heads,” Leedy said. “You can’t imagine the sound of not only the shells hitting Mt. Suribachi, but the noise the shells made as they passed over our heads.”

As Leedy and his shipmates waited on the wounded, they would occasionally walk up to the ship’s flying bridge and look through to the telescope to see what was happening ashore.

“That,” Leedy said, “wasn’t the best of things.”

From there, Leedy’s ship joined a large ship headed northwest. Again, he wasn’t told of the destination.

“We knew something big was going to happen,” he said. “Then we went to Okinawa. That was some noisy, bad stuff.”

On Easter Sunday, 1945, Leedy’s ship was part of the landing on Okinawa. Troops were discharged and the ship was anchored. One night, Leedy was heading toward the sick bay when a Japanese kamikaze fighter pilot was aimed right at the ship.

At the very last minute it hit the water and exploded. Nobody on the ship was hurt.

“That,” Leedy said, “was very scary.”

Bad typhoon

Soon afterward the ship was to take wounded men back to Pearl Harbor, but it got caught up in a horrific typhoon.

A lifeline was strung from the bow to the stern. Anybody who had to go out onto the deck had to be hooked to the line.

During the storm a call came to the sick bay. A man was on the deck and he was hurt. Leedy and one other corpsman were told to go get him.

“We hooked to the line and went out there,” Leedy said. “When we got to him he was bloody and banged up, but we got him back on our stretcher. I don’t know how we ever managed that.

“It was so rough. If you were at the bow of the ship you couldn’t see any water. If you were at the stern, you couldn’t see anything but water.”

After taking on ship repairs in San Francisco, Leedy’s ship was headed back to battle in August 1945. It was about 75 miles south of Hawaii when Leedy and the rest of the crew received word that an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

“You can’t imagine how happy we were,” Leedy said. “Excuse my language, but we had one hell of a party.”

Coming home

Once Leedy finally found his parents on St. Patrick’s Day, they came back to New Paris. Soon afterward Leedy began working at the Penn Electric Switch Co. in Goshen for 75 cents an hour.

While working the assembly line, Leedy met a pretty young lady in the office named Barbara Jean Pence. They dated for several months and were married on a cold December night in 1946 at the Fish Lake Lutheran Church.

The Leedys went on to have three daughters – Rebecca Jean, Elizabeth Ann and Laura Lynn. They now have seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Leedy was barely 20 years old when he entered the service. It was an incredible part of his life. He was witness to some of the bloodiest, most important battles of World War II. If he had his choice, he would rather it hadn’t happened.

“Nobody likes war,” Leedy said. “I didn’t like any of it. But, I’ll tell you what. I think it was necessary.”

Even as Leedy approaches 86 years old, there are images of the war that remain etched in his memory.

“The war was a terrible thing,” Leedy said. “I think about the war every so often. You just can’t do without it once you have it.”

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