HOLMES BEACH – Rounding the Key Royale golf course, Jim Finn and Dick Rowse talk about things, mostly lousy swings.
But one thing they don’t talk about – their military service in World War II.
“It just never came up,” Rowse said, that is, until the day last November that his wife handed him an article in the Anna Maria Island Sun about Finn’s upcoming Honor Flight to Washington D.C.
As he read Finn’s story, it hit him, like a bombshell out of the past.
First Place
Feature Story – Profile
2012
The golfing buddies, who live just over a mile from each other in Holmes Beach, had been in the same battles in Okinawa and in Saipan – one on land, one at sea – and never knew it.
“I played golf with him all these years,” said Rowse, who served on a Navy gunboat. “We were both in Okinawa at the same time. I was on a ship there and he was on land. We were doing the heavy work in the water.”
And Finn, serving with the Second Marine Division, was doing the heavy work on the ground in the infamous battle that took the life of U.S. war correspondent Ernie Pyle, and was immortalized in several films.
Later the two men served at the same time in Saipan, said Rowse, whose ship escorted submarines in and out of the island and found and destroyed enemy mines.
On Saturday, their mission will be nearly as taxing, considering they’re in their 80s. They will make a one-day, 23-hour whirlwind trip to Washington D.C. with about 70 other veterans of World War II on an Honor Flight.
The trip is sponsored by the Rotary Club of Anna Maria Island, who invited the veterans to apply for the program.
Since 2005, the project has taken more than 63,000 World War II veterans to the nation’s capital for one-day, all-expense-paid trips that include visits to war memorials, including the World War II Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Volunteer Rotarian “guardians” accompany the veterans.
The Island Rotary Club is joining with 52 Southwest Florida Rotary Clubs to organize the trip, spokesman Barry Gould said.
There will be flag waving, song singing and a hero’s welcome in the nation’s capital.
And there no doubt will be lots of memories.
Wartime
Rowse signed up with the Navy as a 16-year-old kid in 1943 and served in the Atlantic theater for a year and a half, then in the Pacific theater until he was discharged as a yeoman first class in 1946.
“In those days we could get in that young,” he said, adding that most guys would do anything to avoid being drafted into the Army and serving on the ground.
The same year, Finn, 17, convinced his mother to sign the papers to let him join the Marines. He had wanted to join right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but he was only 15 at the time.
After basic training, Finn sailed for a secret destination in the Pacific, with orders sent over a modified clothesline from another ship. It turned out to be Tarawa, a small Pacific Island where the Japanese had an air strip.
Finn’s was the only Marine division going in, he recalled.
Three days later, the infamous battle ended with 4,690 Japanese out of a force of 4,836 dead. The Marines, having lost 997 of their own, were in charge.
The division left for Hawaii, then Saipan, then Okinawa.
There, they fought in another infamous battle – this one three months long – that produced the highest toll of American casualties in any campaign against the Japanese, according to Army records. American battle casualties were 49,151, of which 12,520 were killed or missing and 36,631 wounded, with non-battle casualties totaling 26,211. In all, 36 ships were sunk and 763 planes lost. The Japanese lost 110,000 lives.
Rowse, who keeps Japanese war memorabilia on his garage wall, was in Okinawa from the day of the invasion until several months after it was over. Finn got a break and got out of Okinawa earlier, he said.
Later, Finn’s division occupied Nagasaki after the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on the city, which ended the war in the Pacific. He compared the devastation in the city to “a hurricane.”
After the war, Rowse finished high school, then served in the reserves, which got him drafted for the Korean “conflict,” as it was called at the time, which he spent working for the draft board.
Rowse later worked with a family business, then with Smith Realty on Anna Maria Island, then Engle and Volkers, until his retirement. Finn worked in advertising for industrial clients.
Somewhere along the line, they both learned to play golf.
Chances are, they will have more to talk about on the golf course next week than their swings.
