Walton M. Watkins

In the middle of his senior year at the age of 17 and a half Walton Watkins became a Marine. The picture above shows that he was so young. He had no idea what was in store for him over the ocean. He joined the First Marine Division and participated in campaigns in Peleliu, New Britain and Pavuvu in the Solomon Islands, Iwo Jima, Saipan, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. He didn’t know how many hundreds of deaths he would see. He didn’t know he wouldn’t come home for four years. He didn’t know he would be a very different person. 

     He had many experiences during World War II. Here are some of his words, “We went up to the equator on flat bottom boats for 23 days. We then went in on the first wave and lost 30% of the company when we landed on the coral rock. After fourteen days of fighting they pulled us off the line because there were not enough people. Sixteen of us made it. We had started out with 280 men.”  

      And another quote, “ We went to Guadacanal and got replacements from the states and trained them…We had a full company now with 260 new ones. We were then on our way to Okinawa…we took the air base and fought our way 30 miles wide across the island…We fought to take the hills, the mountains and the tunnels; and we finally took it. It was August 1945. Three days before the surrender, we pulled off the front lines because there was only 18 of us left.” 

Even though the war was over his four years wasn’t over yet. So he was sent to Ten Sin, China to help get the Japanese in the hills to surrender. Finally in 1946 he returned home to Moselle, Mississippi. 

After he came home to Moselle he was very nervous and shook up. He would get books to read and spent a lot of time reading. He had several old maid aunt school teachers who lived nearby. They told him that if he could concentrate enough to read books, that he could go on to college. 

He and his friend, Rayford Haigler, went to Jones County Junior College. He did well there and then went to Mississippi State where he earned a degree in Agriculture.  He married my mother (see more about this story in the July calendar story). He had been a reserve officer at Mississippi State and was called back into service in South Korea. He left for Korea when his new son was only three days old. He spent 18 months in Korea. 

Our Daddy didn’t talk about the war when we were children. Occasionally he would say a Japanese word when we were walking in the woods. When we would ask “How much longer, Daddy?” He would answer, “moskoshi.” That meant a little more. There was an old trunk in a storage area that was full of his war memories. We knew we were never to go in there, but of course, when no one was around we would open the trunk and examine the  scrap books, medals, strange money, and even a Japanese flag with Japanese writing and blood!  It was only in his later years that he began to go to Marine reunions and share some of his experiences with his family. 

Maybe one day I will write down more of my daddy’s stories. While he was at Mississippi State he wrote letters to my mother. He also wrote more letters from Korea. In my mother’s later years she kept all those old letters in a box and would read them and smile. She never would let us read them. Now that she is gone, I have requested the box of letters. Maybe at Christmas when we are all together we will read the letters together. We will imagine what their lives must have been like and be thankful for our parents, Walton and Margrea Watkins.