Roscoe L. Taylor US Marine Corps. USS Pennsylvania |
Roscoe L. Taylor 1913-1998 Written by his son, David E. Taylor After enlisting in 1938 at the age of 24, the rest of Roscoe Taylor's life was defined by the United States Marine Corps. And, it was a molding force in my own life. Roscoe was American to the core, descending from true pioneers that arrived in Colonial Virginia from England during the seventeenth century. His parents, Luther Wit Taylor and Mary Etta Ashcraft, met after their respective families moved to Texas in the 1890s from adjacent counties in Alabama. The Taylor and Ashcraft families had migrated from Virginia to North Carolina, then to Alabama as these areas became open for settlement. Luther Wit Taylor and Mary Etta Ashcraft were married in Navarro County, Texas on November 1, 1904. The couple later moved to Groesbeck in Limestone County where Roscoe was born November 18, 1913, the fourth child in the family to live past infancy. During the worldwide influenza pandemic of 1918, Mary Etta cared for the sick and dying of the community. In January 1919 she contracted the flu and died leaving five children. Roscoe said he did not remember his mother who died when he was only five years old, but one of his earliest memories was of a crowd of people at their house at a time he believed must have been his mother's funeral. Shortly after his mother's death the family of then three brothers and two sisters moved to Bell County, then to Williamson County in the heart of Texas where they settled near the town of Florence. Roscoe grew up in the Florence area where his father was a sharecropper and the family extremely poor. The Taylor children's lives were physically demanding with chores and farm work. One Saturday the family returned home after an evening in town to find their house burned to the ground from a lightening strike. They survived with only the clothes on their backs, his father's double-barreled shotgun and pocket watch, and the mule and wagon they were driving. Roscoe's brother Elmo was a year younger and was from all accounts an incredible baseball pitcher. Elmo threw so hard that Roscoe was the only one who could catch for him. The family lived far from town and far from the high school that Roscoe and Elmo should attend. The brothers would not have gone to high school at all except for a merchant from town who drove to their house each morning to pick them up just so they could attend school and play on the high school's baseball team. During the summers Roscoe and Elmo played semi-professional baseball in Austin for which they were paid $300 each. The future of baseball changed forever when Elmo died at the ago of 19. In 1936 at the age of 22, Roscoe joined a company of the Civilian Conservation Corps that was repairing roads in the area around Florence. He figured he would be close to home and make more money than he could as a farm hand. Soon after, though, the company was transferred to Gillette, Wyoming to fight fires burning in exposed coal veins. The fires probably had been burning for tens of thousands of years, but the United States government was determined to put them out. Roscoe learned to ice skate during the long cold Wyoming winters. In September 1938 a friend in the CCC camp talked Roscoe into traveling to Denver to talk to a Marine Corps recruiter. Roscoe said that at the time he had no idea what the Marine Corps was, but he'd had enough of the long cold Wyoming winters. The Marines took Roscoe but rejected his friend because of flat feet. He saw that friend again several years later at the naval base in Bremerton, Washington he'd joined the Navy. Roscoe's enlistment started with boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Dept, San Diego, California. He reminded me after I finished boot camp at MCRD that he had been in the "Old" Marine Corps where physical abuse was part of the making of men. After boot camp, he was transferred to Marine Corps. Sea School where the elite of the Marine Corps are trained to serve aboard the ships of the United States Navy and in United States Embassies around the world. After Sea School, Roscoe was stationed aboard USS Pennsylvania BB-38 then at port in San Pedro, California. United States Navy ships have detachments of Marines aboard to serve as security, boarding parties, and for ceremonial purposes. During the pre-World War II days, USS Pennsylavnia was also headquarters and flagship of Admiral James Otto Richardson, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet and Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. It was to Admiral Richardson that Private First Class Roscoe Taylor was assigned as orderly, bodyguard, and driver. During this period before ranking naval officers sat at desks in the Pentagon, USS Pennsylvania was the flagship of the United States Navy as well as the flagship of the Pacific Fleet. Antoher distinguished officer on the ship. Captain Robert Cushman, commander of the Marine detachment, later became Commandant of the United States Marine Corps. Pearl Harbor was homeport to the USS Pennsylvania and her sister ship USS Arizona BB-39, both Pennsylvania class battleships. As bodyguard, Roscoe accompanied Admiral Richardson on the walks he took beside the harbor or aboard ship while at sea. As driver, he often had to ride in the passenger seat because Admiral Richardson liked to drive the car himself. Admiral Richardson was from Paris, Texas, and Roscoe developed a true fondness for this other Texan. In 1939, the USS Pennsylvania left Pearl Harbor on a cruise scheduled to take the ship around the world. The battleship sailed south across the Equator then back north through the Panama Canal on its way to New York City and the World's Fair. After stopping at several Caribbean Islands, the ship was in port at Newport, Virginia when orders came to return to the Pacific. The United States was concerned about the Japanese Empire's actions in the western Pacific. In February 1941, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel relieved Admiral Richardson as Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet and took command of then Corporal Roscoe Taylor. Roscoe wasn't as fond of Admiral Kimmel as he was of Admiral Richardson. Admiral Richardson had lived and worked aboard ship; Admiral Kimmel had a home and office on-shore. On December 7, 1941 when the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel was Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. As an historical aside, only days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt formed the Roberts Commission to investigate the attack. The commission found that Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet and Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, and General Walter Short, Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department of the Army, were derelict in their duties and singularly responsible for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Within a month the commission publicized those findings, publicaly vilifying the two men. Admiral Kimmel was relieved of his fleet command in mid-December 1941 and Admiral Chester William Nimitz was designated Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas. Kimmel was reverted to the rank of Rear Admiral, and retired in March 1942. Every succeeding investigation found that there was no dereliction of duty on the parts of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, that blame was, in fact, very wide in scope. But, the damage to the men's careers was already done. The families of these two men have made several attempts through amendments and resolutions in the United States Congress to have the President of the United States reinstate the men to full rank, so far without success. My mother had always told me that my father was in Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack, but that he wouldn't talk about it. One evening in the mid70s my parents were at our house in Irving for dinner. I knew that that night "Tora, Tora, Tora" was being shown on television. He was always ready to get back home, but I tried and somehow succeeded in getting him to stay until the movie started, and he got interested in it. While the band played on the deck of the USS Nevada during the raising of the Colors and Japanese planes zeroed in on the harbor I asked him where he was when the attack started. He said he was Acting Quartermaster that weekend and that he had a small detachment of Marines on the deck of USS Pennsylvania raising the Colors. He heard gunfire, then explosions, and then a plane flew low over the ship. At that point he said he looked up and saw a big red spot on the plane's wing. When I asked what he did next he replied that he pulled out his sidearm and shot at it. Since then I've had in my mind a picture of this John Wayne-sized man standing on the deck of a battleship firing at Jap Zeroes with a .45. It wasn't until maybe 10 years later while home for Christmas from Connecticut that we heard the rest of the Pearl Harbor story. One evening after dinner with the whole family gathered round, the grandchildren asked their grandparents how they met. One story led to another and finally digressed all the way back to Pearl Harbor. With tears running down his cheeks he recalled how he let 11 Marines and Sailors to their battle stations at two 5-inch gun turrets on an upper deck of the starboard side of the Pennsylvania that morning early in the battle. At 0906, while USS Nevada was making its run for the harbor entrance, a strafing attack against the Pennsylvania began. Roscoe took cover in a passageway connecting the two 5-inch gun turrets about the time a bomb came through the top deck and hit one of the turrets. He was blown into the bulkhead, burned on his back, and knocked unconscious. He awoke dazed and injured to find all of the men in the gun turrets dead. At that point he went below decks and helped distribute ammunition for the remainder of the battle. He never sought medical aid for his wounds because he said there were too many others much worse off than himself. USS Pennsylvania was the least damaged battleship in the attack on Pearl Harbor. On that fateful morning it was still in dry-dock for hull and screw repairs and not berthed at 1010 dock as it was normally. Repairs had been scheduled for completion on December 6, but were running behind. Ten-Ten dock is adjacent to the naval base and across the harbor from Battleship Row. USS Pennsylvania berthed at 1010 dock for the convenience of Admiral Kimmel so he could get ashore and board his flagship easily without the use of a water-taxi. Two other ships, Oglala and Helena, were berthed in place of the Pennsylvania at 1010 dock that morning. Both were hit by torpedoes, Oglala suffered significant damage. Two weeks later, just before Christmas 1941, USS Pennsylvania sailed for San Francisco for repairs to damage sustained during the Japanese attack. After leaving Pearl Harbor, the Captain notified the crew that because of structural damage the 14-inch guns could not be fired and that the barrels of the anti-aircraft guns were burned out during the Japanese attack. Roscoe said if he'd found that out while the ship was closer to shore he would have jumped overboard and swam back to Honolulu. In San Francisco, Roscoe was reassigned to security duty aboard a Scandinavian luxury liner being refitted as a troop ship. He and the rest of the Marine detachment lived in the plush officer's quarters aboard the ship for six months during the reconstruction. It was in San Francisco on a blind date set up by a Marine friend named Howard Hanson that Roscoe met Leona Violet Bryson late in June 1942. Leona came to Oakland from Mulberry. Kansas to live with an aunt, uncle and cousins who had moved to Oakland earlier from Kansas. Six weeks later Roscoe was transferred to Camp Matthews north of San Diego as a small arms instructor. He must have had quite a line because he talked Leona into coming to San Diego from Oakland. From San Diego they took a train through Mexico to Yuma, Arizona and there were married on August 23, 1942. He remained stationed near San Diego until February 1944 when he was sent to the Pacific and served on a dozen islands including New Caledonia, Pelelau, Batan, and Midway islands ripe in Marine Corps. history. After the war in 1946, he was again stationed in San Diego, this time as a naval artillery instructor at Marine Corps Sea School. The summer of 1950 found Roscoe in Korea. His gun crew daily traveled mountainous back roads infested with the North Korean Army. When they saw something that looked suspicious they stopped, set up the 105mm howitzer, fired a few rounds, then loaded up and moved out hopefully before they took any return fire. In the fall of 1950 as the United Nations Fleet assembled off the coast, Roscoe's unit was taken aboard ship to take part in the amphibious landing of the First Marine Division at Inchon, South Korea. By early December he was at Chosan Reservior in North Korea where the Communist Chinese attacked, driving the United Nations troops back south. On December 4th in a valley just a few miles from the South Korean border with Chinese Regulars on the hills on either side racing to cut them off, he received a bullet wound in the knee. After making it to safety in South Korea, Roscoe got his first ever airplane ride to a hospital in Japan. He later said it was worth being shot just to get out of Korea. While in Japan he found an old Marine buddy that was stationed there. Roscoe spent weekends at the home of this friend and his wife while recuperating from his wound. When he was informed that after he recovered he would be sent back to Korea, his friend created a position that Roscoe could fill to satisfy the remainder of his overseas duty requirement. He never went back to Korea. After returning from Japan he was stationed at Camp Pendleton, Camp Del Mar, and then Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Roscoe usually left home in the mornings and returned home in the evenings in civilian clothes. People who didn't know him might have thought he worked a any of the myriad jobs in the San Diego area, but he was always a Marine. While stationed at Twenty-Nine Palms he would leave early on Monday morning and carpool the 180 miles to work, returning Friday night. If Roscoe had one regret during his time in the Marine Corps he said it was the periods that he spent away from his family. In 1955 during a period when the United States was supplying advisors to Southeast Asian countries before the start of the Vietnam War, Roscoe was an artillery advisor to the newly formed Royal Thai Marine Corps. He was in Thailand for a year and, again, on return was stationed near San Diego at Camp Pendleton. In may 1958 when he was thinking of retiring fro the Marine Corps after 20 years, he received orders transferring him to the First 4.5" Rocket Battalion at the Marine Corps Reserve Training Center, Dallas, Texas. The Marine Corps sent him home to Texas where he retired in September 1959 after almost 22 years of service to our country. I remember as a child the many times I went with my father when he usually had to work one Saturday a month. At the age of ten I believe I could have single handedly fired a 105mm or 155mm Howitzer, or a 155mm gun because those were my toys at Camp Pendleton and Camp Del Mar on those Saturdays. When other kids were playing war in their back yards, I was playing war in Marine tanks. One summer when I was nine or ten a friend from boot camp, Trotter, his wife and two sons were in San Diego at our house. (Marines were always known only by their last name.) Trotter was stationed at Twenty-Nine Palms and I went home with the Trotter family to spend a couple of weeks in the desert. As it turned out, the first week I was there Trotter was transferred to North Carolina. I had to go back home. At four o'clock one morning I was put in the front seat of a six-by between two Marines hauling something to Camp Pendleton where my father would pick me up. What I remember most about that trip is that there were miles of jackrabbits eating grass growing through cracks in the highway. The goal was to run over all of them and I believe we did. Trotter died in North Carolina a couple of years later and his family stayed at our house before his funeral in San Diego. The significance of other marines connected to my parents when I was a child is only now becoming apparent. Tommy Dale, whose family was close to our for years in San Diego, was a Marine aboard the USS Pennsylvania wounded during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He survived those wounds only to lose his legs later on a Pacific Island. Bue Tinker was a Marine sergeant on the Pennsylvania and later a daily car-pool partner to Camp Pendleton. I went to work with my father at Twenty-Nine Palms the last week he was there before leaving for Thailand. During the sweltering desert afternoons we went to a dude ranch to swim. I thought then what a great job he had. We ate a lot of ice cream, and the Marines in the barracks helped disarm some of the various kinds of ordinance I always seemed to collect (some rather loudly, I remember). I was always very interested in the tools of my father's trade. When I was about twelve years old my friends and I made regular trips to the San Diego Police shooting range located in a canyon near our home. We befriended some of the San Diego County Jail trustees that worked there and would sneak in to watch the goings-on. We ultimately always got discovered and thrown out. But, the real treasure was in the dump where we found all sorts of cast-off ordnance, including the used canisters of smoke and teargas grenades. When we dug deep enough we found the handles and pins from grenades, and were able to put them back together. I figured I was a grenade expert at the time. Probably during a grenade discussion, my father said in passing that he had brought a hand-grenade home from WWII. I asked him if it was a live grenade and he replied that as he recalled, it was but he wouldn't show it to me. When my parents were at the grocery store one day, I remembered that WWII hand-grenade and searched until I found it in its padded black cylindrical case at the back of the top shelf in my parents' closet. I unscrewed the head from the body of the device, pulled the pin and let the handle up enough to get a stick under the spring-loaded firing pin. I took it apart and found that it was already disarmed. I don't remember exactly how I approached the grenade subject again, but he finally got it down from where I'd replaced it in the closet for me to see for the first time again. Afterwards, I gained possession of that yellow fragmentation grenade which was thrown across our yard in San Diego countless times by my friends and me. In 1958 when we moved to Texas I went to high school in Dallas and was in the ROTC. One of the first requirements was to learn to fieldstrip an M1 rifle and put it back together. I told my father about this and the next evening he brought an M1 home from "the office" so that I could practice. I'm sure I was the only student involved in that particular kind of homework. I remember he also brought home a Browning Automatic Rifle and a government issue .45 just in case I had to study those too. |
