For over two years, I wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper that profiled area veterans from World War II, Korea and the Vietnam War. It gave me the opportunity to sit and talk with those patriot heroes for a few hours every week, time that I cherished as I took notes while they talked, time that often included laughter and, sadly, occasionally tears. I cannot comprehend what most of those men endured during combat in service to this great nation, but I will always have massive respect for them.
Yesterday, I received the terrible news that one of my veterans, Walter 'Nub' Kirkpatrick, had died at age 92. Nub was profiled in June of 2018. In his memory, here is his story and photos in their entirety.
Veteran: Walter Earl Kirkpatrick, age 91
Branch: United States Army
Service period: November 1945 to July 1947
For lifelong Butler resident Walter Kirkpatrick,
enlistment in the United States Army was preferable to being drafted. “I was
drafted, but if you enlisted you only had to serve eighteen months and that’s
what I wanted to do”, he said. “So after three days I was given an honorable
discharge and then I enlisted right away. That’s how I got overseas, I wanted
to get out and see the world.”
That feat took some doing, though.
“I went and took my physical in March and failed it. I
had a touch of pneumonia and they wouldn’t take me. I finally passed in
November (of 1945).”
Walter grew up farming just outside of the southern
Richland county village, working the family’s two hundred twenty-two acres with
his father and 2 brothers. “The old home farm was a mile long; it went from
Lemley Road and butted up against the Knox county line. We raised corn, wheat
and oats; we never sold anything, we fed our beef cattle with it. When I was a
freshman in high school I got into raising registered hogs, Black Poland
Chinas, and at one time we had nearly 200 head of them.”
Five months after graduating from Butler High School
and finally passing the Army’s physical, Kirkpatrick found himself boarding a
train in Mansfield that would take him to Camp Crowder, Missouri for basic
training.
“I tell you what, the old platoon sergeant (drill
instructor) was a pretty robust guy. I’d work right with him doing push-ups,
though. Working on the farm, I was pretty strong.” Walter had little trouble
completing the four-month training, though he added there had been some
excitement. “Somebody accidentally started a fire in the prairie grass while we
were out on bivouac. We called it ‘buffalo grass’ and, boy, that stuff burned just
like kindling. They had us out there fighting the fire, it went close to 300
acres, and we had to fight to stop it.”
Fort Monmouth, New Jersey was Kirkpatrick’s next stop,
this time for training as a radio operator. “I didn’t like that at all. You had
to type what came over the radio, it was in Morse code and it about drove me
crazy. I told them (instructors) I didn’t think I could do it so they trained
me to install field telephones instead. They’d give them to us in pieces and we
had to (assemble) them. I got so dang good at it that, for the last month, they
made me an instructor.”
Walter was able to come home for fifteen days on
furlough after finishing at Fort Monmouth, then took another train ride to the
west coast. “I can’t remember the name of the camp in California we went to”,
he remarked, “but it was between ‘Frisco and San Diego. Then they put us on a
Victory (cargo) ship, which was 1700 troops and our equipment, and I think we
were overloaded. (Once at sea) we’d hit those waves and go way down, and water
would come clear up over the ship and down the hatches, clear down to the
second level.” Though he’d never experienced being aboard ship prior to that
transport, the Butler native said he hadn’t been afraid. “I couldn’t swim,
either; still can’t today”, he chuckled.
After first making port in Japan, (“we never got off
the ship”, he said) Kirkpatrick and his fellow soldiers then headed south. “We
went down through Corregidor in the Philippines and docked in Manila. Going
into that (Manila harbor), you’d hear it (his ship) scrape if it swayed a
little bit; it was scraping (against) sunken ships in the harbor.”
Disembarking, Walter remembered how hot the climate
was. “In daytime, it was about 120 degrees and ninety at midnight. You’d sleep
in shorts and a t-shirt and you always had mosquito nets (over the bunks).
Malaria was bad over there. I never took the quinine pills (used to ward off
malaria) but one guy, he took them and was kind of yellowish-looking. Mosquitos
never did bother me.”
Once settled in the young soldier went to work, though
not as a field telephone installer for the 4025th Signal Corps.
“I was an electrician’s helper; we were building a new
camp and needed electric wires strung. When we got done with that they needed
somebody to do the plumbing work and nobody knew how to thread a pipe. I told
them ‘I do’ because we’d done that on the farm and I was then the chief
plumber. I did the latrines, showers, put water in the mess hall; I even ran
water to a building they used as a dark room (for photograph development).”
Another military occupational shift soon followed. “I
ran into a 2nd Lieutenant I was friends with; he asked me about
switching to the MPs (military police) and told me he could get me another
stripe (in rank). That was on a Friday night and Monday morning I was an MP.”
His unit was part of the 50th Military Police Battalion.
Walter’s main duties were at the camp stockade,
guarding military prisoners. “There was one man in there, he was a 1st
Lieutenant, and he’d got caught selling black-market gasoline. He told me, ‘I
sent enough money home that I can live to be ninety and never have to work a
day.’ He was still in there when I left to come home.”
Kirkpatrick remarked
that only one prisoner had ever escaped from the stockade, his freedom lasting
a mere half-hour. “That happened while I was off-duty”, he smiled.
The young Private First Class ended his tour with the
Army and returned to Butler, working the family farm another ten years; during
that time he met wife Margareta on a blind date, marrying the young lady in
1954. Walter then began working for the J.A. Reeder Lumber Company in the
village, where he spent fifty years before retiring from the cabinet shop on
March 31st, 2007 at the age of eighty.
Kirkpatrick served the
village for twenty years on town council, was a Boy Scout troop leader, coached
baseball and was a founding member of the Worthington Township Fire Department;
he and brother Donald, a Korean War veteran, were honored during a ceremony on
Memorial Day as honorary Veterans of the Year for the village. Walter and
Marge, who have two sons, reside on the southeast end of Butler.
As for the promise of an extra stripe upon
transferring to the military police while in the Philippines?
“I never did get it”, he remarked.
Walt, US Army, 1946
Nub in June of 2018
