Dan Lawler and James Butterfield

Matthew Rozell (to student audience): Dan Lawler and James Butterfield- they represent a generation that is quickly and rapidly disappearing from our midst. The things that these gentlemen had to go through when they were only a year or two older than you  are right now are the things that they wish you will never have to experience, and I think that is why they came in today. 

We are going to hear from some gentlemen who were at Peleliu and Okinawa- Dan Lawler was there, and James Butterfield was there.

Dan Lawler: On September the 14^th of 1944, we hit the island of Peleliu. Peleliu was 4 miles long and 2 miles wide. As your teacher told you, there was about 10,000 Japanese in there. 7 went in with the first assault raid. I was with the machine guns, as you see the machine guns are up here (points out poster). The temperature was from 102 degrees at night to 120 at daytime. We ran with 2 canteens of water and at noon we had water. On the second day, we ran across the airfield and I got hit with a shrapnel in my back. So they took me out of there. Jimmy Butterfield was still with us.

James Butterfield: I served with the First Division where Danny served with the Fifth. The object of going into Peleliu was to secure the airport and to draw troops from the Philippines because of the factor that we were getting ready to go into there. I served with Jesse Pooler, he was a colonel then and our object was to take the airport. Three days after we were on the island we were declared unfit for combat because we did not have enough people. That’s how bad we got shut out. So a lot of us were shipped  to other regiments

 As you said before, you wonder how these guys lived there...it took us 24 hours to get off the beach. One of the bloodiest battles we had was Bloody Nose Ridge. Out of 30 companies, with 250 men in a company, 30 men walked out of there -30 men able to walk, not all killed, didn’t all get wounded-the heat also got to us. 

 It beat the division up good. It was a tight battle and we did secure the airport, and troops did come in from the Philippines, which made it a little easier for General MacArthur to get into air. It amazes me how these guys lived. 

I’m not a big guy and when I looked at these Imperial Japanese Marines we were up against...and when these guys came at you, you said, ‘Uh oh!’... they gave us a good fight.

DL: The casualties we had were 1,252 killed, 5,075 wounded. 12,000 Japs were killed.

JB: We were almost wiped out there. I was in the second battalion and we were almost gone. They did a good job on us after the first three days. As I say we joined up with other people, Danny got it the second day, I was fortunate to go all the way through Peleliu. 

After we got out of Peleliu, we went back to the island of Oahu to regroup, as they were bringing new people from the states to build the division back up again. This was when Walter and Art were getting ready for Iwo Jima and we were headed to Okinawa. Easter Sunday, April Fools day, I thought that was quite appropriate, in retrospect...

DL: Let’s get back to Peleliu a little bit. John Murray, was Hudson Falls, he just died a year ago, he was on Peleliu and he had his kneecap blown off. Harold Chapman was from Gansevoort, he got killed in Okinawa, and Jimmy got hit there. The four of us left Glens Falls together. 

MR: What was your job, Dan?

DL: Machine gunner.

MR: You were a machine gunner, and these are posters you brought in. What are we looking at here exactly?

DL:  The (Browning .30 caliber machine guns) were very good guns, you could throw them into the mud, they always worked. 

There was another thing you asked about, a change of new coming in. At the end of Okinawa, a plane went by and it made an awful lot of noise and I said to a guy, ‘What’s that?’, and he said, ‘Well that’s the new plane, the air comes through and comes out the other side’, and I said, ‘Oh Boy, this is a guy whose gone.’ That was the first time we saw the jets.

MR: What was your job, James?

JB: I was a rifleman. I had a fire group, and I was their leader. 

As they say the four of us, Danny, Chappy, Jack, and I, the went over seas together. Danny and Jack went to the First Regiment and Chappy and I went to the Fifth Regiment, so we  saw a lot of each other. Chappy got killed May 5, and I got hit on May 19th, 1945 at Okinawa.

MR: Today’s the 19^thof May, it’s the anniversary of your wound, 55 years ago.

JB: Yes. I got it twice, they (the Japanese) weren’t satisfied the first time, so... I got rifle fire the first time and the second I got the mortar shell.

MR: Same day?

JB: Same day. That ended my career in the Corps.

DL: The Americans that were killed on Okinawa is 12,250. There was 36,361 wounded. Now we’re talking about a whole army here, plus 3 divisions of Marines. The island was 36 miles long and 4 miles wide and there was over a million people on it.

JB: At Okinawa our duty was to take and secure that airport. Wherever we went, that was our first duty, take it, secure it, and hold it.

DL: To put a little humor in this, after it was over with there was, they had these girls that were left over, Okinawa girls, were doing our washing and every time I walked by the washing thing they’d say ‘kichi guy’ and laugh and I said, ‘What the hell are they calling me kichi guy for?’. So it took a long time and what they were talking about was because my hair was curly at that time and they had never seen curly hair before.

MR: There were a lot of civilians who living on Okinawa.

JB: Yes, that was a problem for us that we didn’t have before. Some of our jobs was to round up civilians, finally they got put in stockades because they were dropping too many grenades in our laps.

MR: What do you mean by that?

JB: They came over to talk to you and dropped a grenade in your lap, you know, they’d want to bum a cigarette, and their job was to get rid of us.

MR: And this was after most of the battle?

JB: No, this was right during the battle. You know you didn’t fight every day, guys couldn’t fight every day, you were on the move a lot. We never ran into villages. In fact, we ran into fresh meat, which we hadn’t seen in a long time. Up in Okinawa they had cows, chickens, pigs, they had nice gardens...  Okinawa was a beautiful island, lots of farms. Our orders were that if we took anything we were issued invasion money, and we were supposed to pay these people if we took a chicken, but some of those chickens we’d put a .45 through and we kept on going. It was hard with the people because you didn’t know what to expect... patrols would go out into the villages and stuff and get ambushed by the Japanese and the people who were living there, you think they were defending. So that’s when we were ordered to take them out, put them in stockades. That wasted a lot of time, slowed us up too.

DL: Mr. Rozell, you asked about the casualties, now much to our sorrow we killed 150,000 Okinawans on the island.

MR: These are all civilians?

DL: These are civilians, right.

Copyright © 2001,2007 by Matthew A Rozell and Hudson Falls CSD. All rights reserved.