Sixty Seconds of Service. This sixty seconds of Service is presented by T Mobile.
T Mobile offers exclusive discounts for veteran and military families and are proud supporters
of the National Defense Network. Visit t mobile dot com to learn more about
how they support our military community. Near San Diego, California, Imperial Beach,
veterans and active military personnel now have a new way to help shape the
way their city addresses issues affecting their population. Earlier this month, the city
Council approved the creation of the Veterans and Military Affairs Committee and outlined its duties.
We have a very vibrant and active veteran and military community within our community,
said Mayor Palomo Aguiar. I think having this committee will help us just
guide our work better. Aguiar, whom voters elected as mayor last year,
introduced the idea of establishing such a committee after campaigning and hearing across the board
there is a need for that. The coastal city of about twenty six thousand
people is home to more than sixteen hundred veterans. For more great veteran stories,
just go to National Defense Network dot com. Welcome to Veterans Chronicles I'm
Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is John de Gennaro. He is
a US Marine Corps veteran of World War II. He served in the Pacific
Theater and at the critical Battle of iwo Jima. John de Gennaro was born
in Pennsylvania in nineteen twenty six, and to put it mildly, it was
a full house I was. I was born and raised in a little town
called Yulitzen. It's about eight miles from Altoona. My family, we had
brothers and sisters. We have a family of thirteen. The Great Depression consumed
the nation for most of the nineteen thirties, but by the end of the
decade, a World war was quickly emerging. Brutal Japanese aggression against its neighbors
was followed by the German Blitzkrieg throughout Europe. De Gennaro was fifteen years old
in December of nineteen forty one when the Japanese attacked the US Pacific fleet at
Pearl Harbor. He remembers spending that day like so many other kids, when
the shocking news of the attack reached him in Pennsylvania. Well, I remember
we were playing in a playground, and these folks come out and they called
us in the house and say, hey, it says we've just been bombed
by Japanese and wow. Of course I was only very young at that time,
you know, nine forty one. Being just fifteen, de Gennaro could
not join the military right away, but once he turned seventeen and nineteen forty
three he joined the US Marine Corps. Then it was off to basic training.
De Gennaro says his active lifestyle as a civilian paid off for him in
boot camp. Well, of course, you know, I was pretty active
in civil life because I did a lot of uh actually, you know,
athletic. I was pretty well athletic. And when I got into basic training,
well I was pretty well in conditioned. It was mostly calisthetics and uh
marching with a full pack so forth, like that Malcom ship. Yeah,
at the at the range, I became a marksman. After basic training and
becoming a marksman, Dejenia was off to Quantico, Virginia to receive more specific
training in the emerging field of sound ranging. We were signed to Quantico and
that was a school of sound ranging. Okay, it was called Dodart that
time, and of course involved in UH schooling, you had to learn UH
trigonometry, and of course then we had all occasions we went on bivouac and
practice and the whole purpose was was to sound ranging, was to find locate
hidden enemy Autori paties, and that's what we did of their new Regina.
Training kept him stateside for months, but before too long it was time to
fight, and as a marine, that meant he was off to the Pacific.
By then, the US was making great strides and the island hopping campaign
against the Japanese, so De Gennaro would first see action in the fight for
Ewo Jima, starting in February nineteen forty five. His job was to use
sound ranging to locate and help eliminate Japanese artillery. But before any of that
could happen, de Gennaro and his teammates needed to get ashore. After finally
getting onto the Black Sand beaches, de Gennaro and his men were ordered to
hunker down on the beach for the night. It was anything but RESTful.
Japanese attacks made the night deafening deadly, and Dejanio says he was fortunate to
survive. My show bought. She wasn't too far from us, and they
was they were firing moators down on the beach, and I didn't actually realize
that we were so close to a Nammo dump at that time. And finally
the motor start came down and hit hit the AMMO dump, and all the
one of five howitzers, the shelves, the seventy five, the thirty thirty
calves exploded and they came up on top, clean above above us upon the
beach and burst it, and all the sand came down, came down on
me and my buddy was there. Of course, we were in the fox
all that time, and all the sand came down on me, and he
had a shovel he thought shoving me out. Of course, he got out
of himself, and we were very very fortunate to be get out of there
alive. And then the next day the patrol came up and they said some
of the shelves went down floors fifteen to eighty yards along the beach, really
injured a lot of marange and killed a lot of range from that particular instant.
And while that a move was going on, we had two marines actually
cling enough with a fire trying to put the farm down. So one of
them didn't make it, and of course the other one he finally got it
put out. The fight for Iwo Jima was far longer and much costlier than
any of the American commanders could have imagined. But early on Degennaro and so
many other marines received a massive dose of inspiration when their fellow marines took Mount
Surabachi and raised the American flag above it, and John dj Narrow had a
perfect view of it. This marine had a tripod with a telescope. He
hollered at me, hey, marine, come on down. He says,
you want to see history made us? So I went. So I went
down. He says, come on, look through that telescope. I looked
up there. By God, there he was. The first time he was
the first time I saw the flight being raised. And then, of course,
you know, they raised it a second time. They went down to
the ship and got a much larger flag to be brought up to be placed
up there. For more than a month, the battle on Ewo Jima raged,
and finding and eliminating Japanese artillery became a critical priority. Dejennaro now takes
us inside that work and the many different calculations they conducted to determine exactly where
they needed to strike every time the Eneview would fire. We went prior to
that though, we had to check out the microphones, so we had to
we had to put a canvas cover around the microphone that's covered with dirt and
they'll be clapped our hands and of course the needles at our base would move
because we're picking up sound. Any sound was very delicate because it's so during
the process of all that. Whenever the whenever the Japanese father their weapons or
the microphones will pick the sound on them. Okay, it would come down
to the wires intometer it would register and course we have positive signs and minussigns,
and how we determined where that position was. Of course, prior to
that, we had a map with O Hooi Reguma and we had colaw business
on each end of the allan. When we had set the the authility pieces,
we make sure that they were in a grid, knowing what the cordons
were, and we knew where the cordons were at the other end of the
allen, somewhere in that area where the Jets had their artillery. That's the
only way we could tell, oh, well they were by the Cordin's So
anyway, when they fired, the sound comes into the microphones, it comes
into our command posts. Of course, like I said before, we would
get a we get a series of plus readings and series of minstreams. So
the more plus reasons we got, the more accurate accuracy we was getting to
the to the position. All of that work was done to pinpoint the enemy
artillery positions. Then it was time to collaborate with American artillery to fire on
those positions, and they got good at it, really good, so good
that Dejonnaro's unit was recognized for the effectiveness of their work in neutralizing the enemy.
So after we get all that data, of course we had a log
walk. We knew exactly between one hundred to two hundred that the plus rds
was in range, so we had to calculate the elevation, the range and
a distance for the artillery. So they set the things on our eyepiece,
and then we had a fourth verine and a fifth division they had to do
the same operation. So that night, at nine o'clock at night, we
had an artillery branch, so they all fired at one time with all this
data we gave them okay, and they fired for about one hour solid.
The next day we had a foos or and they knocked out a lot of
artilleries. At the end of the campaign, which is about thirty some days,
they knocked out fifty Japanese artilleries and we got a presidential citation on that.
We had two instruments with in operations and we had two follows offered.
I was one of the operators, and I make sure that the posts were
secured. But during that time, because you know, we have some filtrations
from the enemy, sometimes they convenion, you know, and if they see
something like that, they were tearing up. You know what. Luckily they
didn't come around that close. In thirty six days of fighting at Iwo Jima,
the US suffered nearly seven thousand killed and roughly twenty thousand other casualties.
The island had been one, but at a very high cost. At that
point, the Marines thought even tougher fighting was ahead in attacking Japan itself.
Two atomic bombs in August of nineteen forty five convinced the Japanese to surrender and
a land invasion would not be necessary. That news came as a relief to
Degennario and many other Marines. In reflecting upon the plans that would have been
followed if Japan had not surrendered, Degennaro says the toll in American lives,
in particular his unit, would have been horrifying if we had to evade Japan.
We divaded Fatiable anyway, they told us that we had to go through
this canal to get into Satiable, and if we had to invade that they
had artillery on each side of the channel. We would have never made it
through that channel. I think our whole division would have been wiped out really
if we had to go there. So we were very fortunate that the war
was over. Instead of a bloody and protracted ground campaign, the Marines and
other US service members found themselves on occupation duty in Japan. Dejanio remembers having
pretty basic duties and getting along well with the Japanese people, but several months
later he got the assignment that he and everyone else wanted most going home.
Well, when we got there, they're very they were very friendly, and
we couldn't drink their water or food because we had to carry purification tables for
our water just in case, you know, we had to have water,
and we had to go through an area where we had to disarm uh some
Japanese troops all their weapons, rifles and all that stuff like that. We
got there in November and then of course you know they had points. Didn't
have forty points in discharged and I had that many. We packed up,
we we boarded the boat. We went to back to Camp Pendleton, and
then from there we took a train all the way into Great Lakes, Michigan.
That's where we were discharged. I remember it was on April the sixth.
We were in nineteen forty six. We were discharged. Dejannara was enthusiastically
welcomed back home, but he did bring some vestiges of the war back with
him, one in particular that his brother couldn't wait to use. My dad
brother came to the railway station and picked me up. Of course I had
to carry a part of the sea bag, and of course we all picked
up a Japanese thirty one thirty one rifle. So in order to ship we
had a territor apart, it screw apart. We had a shipping back and
our seabacks went also. So we've been by a couple of months after that
we got off seabags and my wife was intact. Later on, of course,
you know, we had we had to regiter to the courthouse. And
then of course my brother he was he was a hunter. He said,
hey, I like to use that for hunting seasons. So he why not
use a hunting season. That's John de Gennaro, a decorated US Marine Corps
veteran of World War Two and the Battle of iwo Jima. Upon returning home
in the spring of nineteen forty six, de Gennaro worked as a surveyor for
the city of Altoona, Pennsylvania, for the next forty four years. About
six months after this interview, mister de Gennaro passed away at the age of
ninety six. We were to meet him and to share his story with generations
to come. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this
is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of
the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org.
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