Five World War II soldiers

by Rona Simmons

October 24, 1944 was the deadliest day for American service members in World War II.

The day’s grim record tally—2,600 KIA—didn’t make headlines. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor, or D-Day, or the Bulge. It was just an otherwise average day of a gargantuan global war. A war that, in the end, had no average days.

VBC member, historian, and self-described “military brat” Rona Simmons chronicles the day’s tragic events across the globe in her new book No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944.

The book is both an engaging history and a beautiful testament to the human side of war, telling the stories of ordinary Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines who died that day—clerks, radio operators, cooks, deck hands, machinist mates, riflemen, and air crew members

Below begins an adapted excerpt from No Average Day. It includes an account of the POW “hellship” Arisan Maru, whose sinking accounted for two-thirds of the deaths that day.

October 24, 1944, was the 1,052nd day of America’s participation in World War II. It was a Tuesday. The first American soldier to die that day did so at a Japanese prisoner-of-war (POW) and slave-labor camp in Hanawa, Japan. The prisoner, Paul Miller, a US Army private first class, knew he was near death. His breath was shallow and slow. Every joint and muscle in his emaciated body ached. His fingers were stiff and unresponsive. He knew he would not return home or ever see his family again. But hours before dawn broke, he harbored one bright thought: he would not be forced to labor in the mine when the guards came for him at daybreak.

The last to die perished minutes before midnight aboard a landing ship returning from the Philippines to its base in New Guinea. Far below deck, Seaman Wanza Matthews was settling in for the night. His thoughts turned as they often did to home and his mother and father, and he pondered what he would write in his next letter home. In an instant everything changed. An Imperial Japanese Navy submarine that had been tracking the landing ship attacked. The volley of torpedoes failed to sink the ship, but it sent twenty-two men, including Wanza, to their deaths.

The day may have dawned like any other grimy day of World War II. But on this particular Tuesday, 2,600 Americans, including Paul Miller and Wanza Matthews, would perish.

No Average Day book cover

They fell in locations scattered across the globe in large and small battles. They died while engaged with the enemy in hand-to-hand combat; by small-arms, machine-gun, sniper, and artillery fire; by missiles, rockets, strafing, torpedoing, and dive-bombing. They died from stepping on land mines, drowning, freezing, burning, being crushed in the wreckage of their aircraft, or hurtling to the ground when their parachutes failed to open or were shot full of holes. They died suddenly as a result of a heart attack or traffic accident or finally relented to death after a prolonged struggle with disease or malnutrition. They died from beatings, stabbings, and beheadings and by taking their own lives. Some were casualties of friendly fire.

They came to the military from small towns across the country, like Waycross, Georgia; Mason City, Iowa; and Gunnison, Utah. Most grew up as members of lower- and middle-income families, in households with four, five, and six siblings, and many had only a grammar school education. But they were not of a kind—in their midst were white and black soldiers, as well as Hispanic, Native, and Japanese Americans.

For the most part, they died not in one of the major air, ground, or sea battles, but in lesser-known incidents. They died on obscure photo-reconnaissance patrols, training exercises, and seemingly safe and mundane and supply-ship convoys.

Some were frightened to their core, while others forged ahead into the teeth of enemy fire, oblivious to or in spite of the obvious peril. Regardless of heritage, place of birth, gender, or age, they were Americans. And whether draftee or volunteer, each one served for what they held dear—their family, their friends, their faith, their country, and their freedom.

Compared with the losses of the war’s other major participants, the 2,600 American lives lost on that one Tuesday may seem insignificant. They were, for example, a fraction of what historians estimate were lost during any one day of arguably the greatest battle of the war: the six-month Battle of Stalingrad. While estimates vary by source and are fraught with error, losses in Stalingrad averaged more than 5,000 per day and left over a million Russian soldiers dead.

Regardless, the American losses were nine times the average of 300 American fatalities per day from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the surrender of Japan in 1945. They far exceeded what the political and military leaders and the families on the home front had come, albeit reluctantly, to think of as normal.

Portraying the last moments of these individuals is like stepping through a field laced with land mines. Uncovering what occurred to one individual and at what hour in any battle of any war is an exercise fraught with error. For the stories taking place at sea, war diaries, action reports, and ships’ logbooks proved invaluable. These sources provide as accurate an account as can be rendered amid the chaos of war. They note, for example, when a ship’s crew sighted the enemy, at what day, hour, and minute they took evasive or offensive action, and they chronicle the results of those actions.

Rona Simmons, Author of No Average Day

Accounts of those who died in skirmishes on the side of an unnamed hill while hunkered in foxholes and slit trenches far from their command post, however, naturally lack any pretense of precision. The last moments of these soldiers may have transpired without witnesses, and hours or even days might have passed before anyone located, counted, and identified the fallen.

Further, unlike prominent World War II military and political leaders who left behind correspondence, diaries, and memoirs, or who have had their lives recorded in countless biographies, most of the soldiers mentioned here left little or no record behind. A son or daughter, a grandson or granddaughter, might have saved a faded and fragile letter on vellum or a hazy sepia-toned photograph. A Silver Star Medal commendation or the digitized copy of a soldier’s draft registration might sit in an archive. Finding these details involved months of scouring US military archives, books, magazines, and articles; watching videotaped interviews; and, here and there, perusing memoirs, letters, journals, and photographs the soldiers’ descendants graciously contributed . . .

Finding the bits and pieces that remain of these “small” lives has been for me like discovering flecks of gold in a rock-strewn stream. In gathering the color and binding the bits together, I hope to have made their stories whole. And I hope you will realize as I did that their deaths were not small deaths, after all, that they were not average people, and that Tuesday, October 24, 1944, was no average day.

* * *

The University of Missouri Press will release No Average Day this year on October 24 and Rona Simmons will be our guest on VBC Scuttlebutt this fall on October 24 for the book’s launch. You can order the book and contact Rona at ronasimmons.com.

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