'Memorial Day is sacred to me'

Paul Carlson at his home in Milton Mills (The Lebanon Voice/Harrison Thorp photo)

MILTON MILLS - When Army veteran Paul Carlson, his body ravaged by typhus, was loaded onto a hospital ship headed from New Guinea to Brisbane during World War II, he looked around at soldiers and Marines who had been fighting the Japanese on the front lines and realized that although he lay perilously close to death, himself, these warriors were in far more dire straits.

"I thought my sickness was so bad, but they were in worse shape," he said softly on Sunday as he sat under a parasol in the driveway of his Milton Mills home.

Carlson not only survived a three-day coma and 106-degree temperature wrought by the severe strain of typhus he contracted, but went on to finish out the war in the Philippines waiting for orders to attack the Japanese mainland at Okinawa.

Those orders never came, thankfully, once postponed due to a typhoon, and later due to a hasty surrender by the Japanese after atomic bombs devastated the major cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Carlson, now 94, was part of Company C of the 841^st Engineer Aviation Battalion, a battalion that specialized in building airstrips and bridges as part of the war effort in the Pacific Theater.

"The Marines would go in and secure the beachhead, then we'd go in and build an airstrip so planes could cover them as they fought," he said.

Using rolled steel netting, Carlson's battalion could put down a 5,000-foot runway in less than two days.

In the Philippines his battalion constructed a bridge that accommodated vehicles and a railroad.

A Filipino family that befriended him and a friend of his by the name of Wilson promised the two they would name the bridge the Carlson-Wilson bridge, Carlson chuckles.

"I never looked in to whether they did that," he says.

Much of the war for Carlson seemed to have been spent in transit, he said. After doing some basic at Atlantic City, where they put him up in a hotel and they did parading on the famed Boardwalk in 1942, he was transferred to Denver, Colo., and then to Leesburg, Fla., where they trained on runway building and learned marksmanship.

Then they were sent to San Francisco by troop train. Carlson remembers they were on strict orders to speak to no one at station stops and told to pull down shades when they approached the platform.

"They didn't want anybody to know it was a troop train," he remembers. One sergeant was desperate to let his girlfriend know he was on his way to war and smuggled a letter to her to a bystander at a station.

"He got caught on the station platform," Carlson said. "They busted him to private."

When his battalion reached San Francisco, they were loaded onto a converted cruise ship and left for Australia.

"The women who were in the service got all the good cabins up top," he said. "Us in Company C we were about 30 feet below the waterline. It was next to the engine and you could hear it roar all the time. And boy was it hot down there. You had to climb a ladder straight up out of a 4 by 4 hole to get up top."

Carlson said one night when his company had gone topside to get a breath of fresh air one of the servicemen lit a cigarette.

"All hell broke loose," he said. "We started zigzagging, because a Japanese sub could have seen the match. We all got sent below-decks and we never got to go up topside again during the night."

It took the ship just 10 days to make it to Sydney where they stayed about two weeks before moving on to Brisbane.

From there they sailed to Goodenough Island, a staging area, where they stayed before getting orders to go to New Guinea to build an airstrip after the Marines had secured some of the island.

That's where he contracted the typhus.

"I remember being on a stretcher and being carried by these two fellows and they were taking me to a field hospital," he said. "They went in (to a field hospital) and got the papers on me and laid them on my chest and then went back in.

"I picked up the papers and saw on it that I had typhus," he said "I was like oh no. I'd heard only 10 percent of the people who got typhus survived.

"I went to the field hospital and there were about 20 beds on each side. The guys all had typhus. The one on my left died, and the one on my right, too."

But Carlson survived and made it to the hospital ship and the hospital in Brisbane where he recovered after about six weeks of treatment.

Carlson, who ended with the rank of sergeant by the end of the war, is as passionate about Memorial Day as he is self-effacing of his own sacrifice and service.

"I know today a lot of people will probably be thinking of their own loved ones who've passed, but they should think about soldiers, especially those that never came home," he said. "Memorial Day is sacred to me, it's like I want everyone to think the way I do, to reach out beyond your own family, think about those who lost loved ones in service."

Carlson also laments the change to a Monday holiday from the traditional May 30 date of Memorial Day.

"It's gotten way too commercial," he said. "People are going to their camp or on holiday. No one's thinking about the veterans."