A mission of peace

All three were born and raised in small-town America, in places with names such as Monahans and Lock Haven and Winfield.

All three served in World War II and are part of what retired TV newsman Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” in his 1998 book of the same name.

All three have outlived their wives, each married for 60 years or more.

And all three climbed aboard that Toyko-bound jetliner in Seattle a month ago, despite their age and ailments, replete with the same sense of duty that propelled them into battle 70 years earlier.

But all three of these men, who eventually made Eugene their home, will tell you someone else deserves the credit.

“There’s no way in the world that I’m any kind of hero,” says 92-year-old Eldon Shields, who served in the Marine Corps during the war that ended 70 years ago this week, on Sept. 2, 1945, when Japan officially surrendered to the United States aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. “It was just trying to ease the pain a little bit by returning those flags.”

Shields, along with fellow Eugene World War II veterans Vern Thompson, 90, and Paul Boeger, 89, were part of a 14-person Pacific Northwest contingent, which included four other veterans of the war’s Pacific Theater, who made the trip to Japan between July 30 and Aug. 6.

They were on a mission to return, on this 70th anniversary of the most widespread war in world history, 70 “good luck flags,” known as yosegaki hinomaru in Japanese, that were taken as battlefield souvenirs by American and other Allied soldiers from the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers.

Made of thin silk, so the soldiers could fold them and put them in a pocket close to their hearts, the 3-by-4-foot flags contain a large red disc in the middle, the Japanese representation of the sun, and were signed by family members and friends. Some contained handprints made by their children.

The flags were returned to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzõ Abe, and other government officials representing families of the Japanese soldiers, during a ceremony on Aug. 4.

“It was an emotional trip, taking these flags back, because in Japanese culture, it is the spirit of the deceased coming back, so it’s closure for them,” says Mike Pungercar of Springfield, who helped arrange the trip and accompanied the three Eugene veterans.

Also making the trip were veterans Ed Johann, 92, of Lincoln City and Harold LaDuke, 90, Dallas Britt, 89, and Burke Waldron, 91, all of the Seattle area.

“Like a miracle”

The trip was led by and made possible by an Astoria-based nonprofit organization, OBON 2015, run by Rex and Keiko Ziak.

Rex Ziak, a writer, historian and documentary filmmaker known for his Lewis & Clark studies, and Japanese-born Keiko Ziak, founded OBON 2015 a few years ago with the hope of returning to Japan the flags they have collected in recent years from all over the world.

They formed the organization after the flag that Keiko Ziak’s grandfather carried with him during the war was mysteriously returned in pristine condition to family members in Japan by a Canadian man in 2007.

Her grandfather went missing in action during the war while fighting in Burma, Rex Ziak says by telephone. His body was never found.

Somehow, his good luck flag ended up with a Canadian collector, the father of the man who returned it to Japan.

“This was like a miracle,” Rex Ziak says.

OBON is not an acronym but the name of a traditional Japanese custom, not unlike Memorial Day in the United States, that begins in late July and ends in the middle of August, in which the Japanese pay respect to deceased loved ones.

The Ziaks asked Pungercar, 69, the son of a deceased World War II veteran and director of South Willamette Valley Honor Flight, part of the Honor Flight network that flies veterans to Washington, D.C., to see the memorials built in their honor, to help find local World War II veterans for the OBON 2015 mission.

Neither Shields, Boeger or Thompson was in possession of a Japanese good luck flag, but they were certainly aware of them and more than willing to make the trip that was paid for by OBON 2015 after last-minute efforts to get the Pentagon to help back the trip failed, Rex Ziak says.

OBON 2015 used $6,000 in savings and raised $10,000 more through the crowdfunding website indiegogo.com to pay for about half the trip, Ziak says. The rest came out of their own pockets.

“All young kids”

Britt, of Auburn, Wash., was the one veteran on the trip who had one of the flags all these years. He took it from a soldier’s body during a 1945 battle that ousted the Japanese from the small island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa, according to a story by Voice of America, the federal government’s broadcast arm.

He told VOA before the trip that, like the others, he did not realize the significance of the flags until this summer.

“It’s like if you found a dead GI and taking his dog tags off of him and being able to send (them) back to his parents,” Britt told the VOA. “That’s the only connection they would have because you wouldn’t know where he was buried or nothing else.”

During the trip, Keiko Ziak translated for the veterans what was on some of the flags.

“What struck me most of all was how appreciative the families in Japan are when they get the flags back into their family,” says Shields, an anti-aircraft machine gunner during the war who grew up in Monahans, Texas, and moved to Eugene in 1940, right after graduating from high school, two years before he joined the Marines.

“They were a very dedicated and a worthy enemy,” Shields says of the Japanese. “But when we visited, I saw a lot of pacifism. And the young people, when they talk to you, they say ‘No more war.’ ”

Shields, who owned his own construction company in Eugene that built such schools as Guy Lee and Centennial elementary schools in Springfield, and Creswell High School, had never been to Japan before this trip.

Boeger’s ship, the USS Karnes, was there at the end of the war, and Thompson was stationed there from 1945 to 1947 for postwar duty.

The men visited the Yushukan War Memorial Museum in Tokyo during the trip. The museum contains a room filled with small black-and-white portraits of Japanese soldiers from World War II.

“I never saw a Japanese soldier alive, but when I saw all these pictures in that gallery, you know, they was all young kids like us,” says Thompson, who was a motor machinist aboard the USS Megrez during the war and an industrial electrician working in Northwest lumber mills for years.

“We was all just young. And we done what we was told to do, and they did what they was told to do. I had no wrong thoughts of them, because they was following their orders, too.”

Backing the bombings

The trip was a physically difficult one for the aged veterans. Not only did they endure 10-hour flights to and from Tokyo, the week they were there was the warmest in Tokyo in 140 years of recorded history.

Temperatures were above 95 degrees for eight straight days, with a high of 101 (Tokyo’s all-time high is 103). Fifty-five people died during the heat wave, and about 11,000 were hospitalized, according to various news reports.

“That’s the only place I think I perspired real good,” jokes Thompson, who grew up in Winfield, Kan., and dropped out of high school before joining the Navy.

On their return from Japan, Boeger and Shields were ill with respiratory viruses.

LaDuke, of Kent, Wash., was ill on the flight home and immediately taken to a VA hospital, upon getting off the plane in Seattle, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia, Pungercar says. LaDuke has reportedly recovered, Pungercar adds.

Although in Japan at the end of the war, Boeger never set foot in Tokyo until this trip.

“The Japanese were great people,” says Boeger, a radioman aboard the Karnes during the war, who was born in Lock Haven, Pa., and raised in State College. “They were kind and really made us feel at home.”

The men flew home on Aug. 6. — 70 years to the day of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima, which, along with the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, killed more than 200,000 and forced Japan’s surrender.

“I was kind of worried about that,” Boeger says. “But they just didn’t say anything. No problems at all.”

Seven decades later, Boeger and Thompson say the United States did the right thing by dropping the bombs.

“It saved millions and millions of lives,” says Thompson, who moved to Eugene in 1964 with his wife, Evelyn, who died in 2009.

“After four or five years, people were getting tired of fighting, and it was time to end the war,” says Boeger, who moved to Eugene in 1970 with his wife, Clarine, who died in 2011 after 63 years of marriage.

Loss of limbs and lives

World War II, which officially began in 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland, took the lives of between 60 million and 72 million worldwide.

Russia alone sustained an astounding 11 million military casualties and 7 million civilian casualties, according to the World War II Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate future generations about the sacrifices of the 16 million Americans who served in the war.

Other staggering numbers from the war: Six million Jews killed during the Nazi Holocaust; 5.7 million Polish civilians killed; 3.5 million German soldiers killed; 1.3 million each for Japan and China.

The United States sustained about 405,000 military casualties during the war.

Asked to recall his most vivid memory of the war, Shields, who fought on the South Pacific islands of New Guinea, New Britain, Palau and Anguar, lets out a sigh and thinks for a moment before saying, “I … I don’t want to talk about it.”

He later clarifies:

“I played such a small part. I went through that dumb war and I never got so much as a scratch, and there were a lot of boys who lost their limbs and their lives.

“I’m certainly no hero. It’s not something I’ve thought a lot about. I don’t want to relive a bunch of that stuff.”

Many of Boeger’s memories of the war are tucked away in a burgundy-colored photo album labeled “Paul’s Military Album.”

Flip through the pages filled with black-and-white photographs and you come to one of a young man with a pompadour of dark brown hair. Above the photo it says: “Killed in action, USS Karnes, Okinawa, Best Friend.”

It’s been so long that Boeger doesn’t remember the fellow sailor’s name, or his hometown, only that he was a radioman like himself and the guy he felt the closest to, the one he spent time with when they went ashore on liberty.

The young man was in a control boat being lowered into the water, recalls Boeger, who after owning his own service station in Minnesota had a 22-year career in the Army Reserve. The ship was going fast, and the boat hit the water and flipped the men out into sea.

“And he was the one who didn’t make it,” Boeger says. “They never did find his body.”

“I never said much”

Another vivid memory for Boeger involves the death of 45 men aboard the light cruiser Birmingham, on May 4, 1945.

“We were anchored at Okinawa, and we were under Japanese suicide plane attacks,” Boeger recalls. “And the cruiser Birmingham was anchored behind our ship … and all of a sudden they started firing, and I saw this Japanese plane come over, and it hit the Birmingham. And that was a moment you think about, those people that died, and the pilot who committed suicide, more or less.”

Thompson remembers his days aboard the Megrez during the Battle of Saipan in June and July 1944 in the Northern Mariana Islands, north of Guam.

“Every night, a Japanese jumped off a cliff,” Thompson remembers. “And all through the day, we could look off the side of the ship, there’d be some (Japanese) body floating by us.

“And for some reason or another, they was all dressed in white. … Why? I don’t know.”

Hundreds of Japanese civilians and soldiers, fearing capture at the hands of the United States on Japanese-occupied Saipan, committed suicide by leaping to their deaths off Suicide and Banzai cliffs, on the northern tip of the island.

Boeger says that once the war was over, he rarely spoke of it.

“I never said much. My boys never knew I was in the service, and I never said anything to my wife, until the last few years, I guess.

“We had three sons, and they were all in the military. Our oldest served in Vietnam, and the youngest served in the Army, and the second son served in the Navy. They would start asking questions, and then I would give them what I wanted them to have.”

Boeger recalls the wounded Marines his ship would pluck off South Pacific beaches, “all the suffering they went through, and some of them didn’t make it. You try to forget what you saw and to put it out of your mind.”