Fred Amorose, WWII

WWII Vet overcame injury and illness to fight at Guadalcanal and numerous battle sites

By Tamara Stevens
Special to Emmet County

Fred Amorose can recall many memories from the four years he served as a Corporal in the United States Marine Corps during World War II. Some memories are good, bringing a smile to his face, while others inspire awe and amazement, and others elicit terrifying images.

But the Petoskey man doesn’t remember much of what happened after the mortar fell into the hole he was in and exploded next to him. He remembers very clearly everything leading up to it, though, and at 92 years old those memories are still emotionally charged.

“Our orders were to hit Guam,” Amorose said. “There were two forces. We hit one part while the other force hit the other side. We (the United States) bombed and shelled that island so hard, you would have thought there was no way anything could have lived after that,” he tells, shaking his head.

He and his unit of Marine Raiders Battalion landed on the island of Guam in the South Pacific Ocean in an LST, (Land-Sea Transport ship), “where the entire front end of the boat opens up,” Amorose describes. Their unit headed inland, where they immediately ran into enemy fire.

“The front lines of battle were marked with big, white oil clothes on the ground for the air support so they could see where to drop their bombs,” Amorose explains. “There was a lot of fire. We kept moving and went beyond the white markers. There were four or five of us. There were Japanese artillery shooting mortars from a nearby valley.”

The small island of Guam, the largest of the Marianas, is only 30 miles long and 9 miles wide. The Japanese captured the island and its residents on December 8, 1941, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and occupied it for two-and-a-half years. Guam was subject to fierce fighting for nearly three weeks in 1944 when U.S. troops recaptured the island on July 21. Amorose saw firsthand the intense battle.

“We jumped in a hole, another fellow and I,” Amorose said, choking back tears. “A shell came down and hit right next to me, between me and the other guys. The next thing I knew a Navy corpsman (medic) who was attached to our outfit had me piggyback style and was carrying me out of there, back behind our front lines. I had shrapnel in my hip. I blanked out. The other fellow (who was on the other side of the mortar shell) was killed. One of our planes came over and dropped a bomb to hit the Japanese emplacement.”

That was the only time that Amorose ever saw a bomb drop. He said it was like watching it in slow motion.

The corpsman’s last name was Ellington. Amorose’s unit called him Duke, after the well-known trumpet player. Duke carried Amorose for an impressive distance at a dizzyingly fast pace and laid him down behind some large rocks.

“He dressed my wounds and gave me a lot of morphine,” he recalls. He remembers a lot of blood running down onto the ground and ants coming up to it.

“I can’t remember anymore until I was on the hospital ship,” Amorose said.

Navy hospital ships were stationed off shore for the many injured. The ships would wait until they had a full load of wounded soldiers before heading toward Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Amorose remembers his stateroom being very well appointed, and he thinks the ship might have been a cruise liner before the war broke out. “They would commandeer ships and other equipment,” he said.

The injured Amorose was taken to a large Naval hospital called Ieya Heights, located on a hillside overlooking sugar cane fields and pineapple farms. Once he was released from the hospital, Amorose was taken to a convalescent camp for several days. He and other recovering soldiers stayed in tents with the sides rolled up. His younger brother Joseph was serving in the Navy and was stationed at the other end of the island in Kaneohe Bay. Using a secret written code they had devised, Amorose wrote to his brother and told him where he was recovering.

“One day I was on my cot with the tent sides rolled up when I saw these white pants walk by,” Amorose said.

Then he heard his brother’s voice ask, “Anybody know where Amorose is?” The two brothers from Boyers, Penn., had a pleasant visit half-way around the world in the beautiful Hawaiian islands.

Amorose never heard what happened to the corpsman who carried him out of the heavy shelling and saved his life by stopping the bleeding. He didn’t know where the corpsman was from.

“I don’t remember how I got on his back or how we got out of that hole,” Amorose said, thinking back all these years later. “All I know is that mortar shell hit between us in that hole. I had a pack of hand grenades hanging on my belt, right on my hip. I think those grenades broke up the mortar that hit me and might have prevented worse injuries.”

Hand grenades wouldn’t explode if hit by outside forces. The pin had to be pulled. They were designed to have a seven-second delay, allowing soldiers enough time to aim and throw the deadly grenade. The Japanese quickly learned about the delay, Amorose said, and would brazenly pick up the grenade and throw it back at U.S. soldiers. So Amorose and others had to count to five or six before throwing the grenades.

At one point during the war, a batch of grenades was manufactured with a defect – there was no delay built into them, he said. They would explode immediately, killing or injuring the soldier who pulled the pin. “They immediately recalled all of those,” he said.

Amorose was trained in all types of weaponry, and he used them all during his experiences in the South Pacific islands. After rubber boat training off the coast of California, he and his unit were sent to the New Hebrides Islands in the Pacific Ocean for more island and jungle training. His unit went “on patrol looking for Japanese” quite a bit. Then they were transferred to the island of Guadalcanal. The Guadalcanal campaign raged from August 1942 to February 1943. The island was secured by the time he was there.

From Guadalcanal, his unit was sent to the rainforest covered New Georgia Island in the Solomon Islands on a secret mission. The Japanese had a submarine operation using New Georgia Island. Amorose’s unit was ordered to land at night in a small bay inlet on one side of the island, march through the jungle for an estimated 12 hours and set up a base camp to guard and patrol for the enemy.

“We were traveling through the jungle, at night, crossing streams, carrying our rifles over our heads. We were wet a lot,” Amorose said. “We took that pace for 36 hours (much longer than anticipated). We lost a few good men, and it wasn’t a big detachment.  We even lost our top sergeant.”

They arrived at the predetermined location for a base camp. The Japanese had a strong detachment just a few miles away from them. “We didn’t bother each other,” he said. For 42 days they observed the Japanese. Twenty-one nights out of the 42, a Japanese light plane would fly over the Raiders’ base camp and harass them.

“We nicknamed him ‘Washing Machine Charlie,’” Amorose said. The plane would conduct strafe shooting at the base camp with a small caliber machine gun, or drop bombs near them.

“Our orders were to hit the strong Japanese detachment with our small one,” Amorose said. “Our objective was to hit them to get an estimate of how strong they were.”

At one point, Amorose’s squad got pinned down with heavy fire. They were using a large log for cover. “The Japanese were shooting at us, and I had two machine guns. I always carried a ram rod to clean a rifle. One fellow came over to get mud out his rifle with my ram rod. The Japanese saw him and started shooting, but they hit the log. Chips were flying all over and hit him so hard he thought he’d been hit.”

They were pinned down overnight. They didn’t dare build a fire or even move.

“When it’s dark in the jungle, it’s dark,” Amorose said. “It was too dark for us to try to get out.”

Eventually, they were able to get out. A lieutenant saw Amorose and his squad of five men coming out of the jungle. “He thought we were ghosts. They had lost so many men in the fight.”

The Japanese finally pulled out of that area. Their lieutenant estimated there were at least 5,000 enemy troops to their small detachment. Years later, Amorose surmised that it was near New Georgia Island where John F. Kennedy’s PT boat was hit. New Georgia Islands are a chain of seven islands surrounded by coral reefs. One of the islands is now called “Kennedy Island” because it is where JFK was stranded during WWII.

With Guadalcanal as their central base, Amorose’s unit was sent out on numerous patrols and missions throughout the islands. One time the Navy’s CBs, Construction Battalion, came in right behind his unit with heavy equipment to build a runway for airplanes. Amorose’s unit cleared the way through the field, making sure there were no enemy forces ready to ambush the CBs.

While on Guadalcanal, their base was a few miles from Henderson Field on a beautiful, sandy beach. One day, Amorose and the other men in his unit began to see large bombers leaving the airfield, one after another. They were moving the bombers off the field so they wouldn’t be easy targets for the enemy.

“We thought, ‘The Japanese must be coming,’” he said. “We were right on the beach. We wanted to watch the show. The officers wanted us down in the foxholes. But we stayed up to watch the air fights, which were quite a ways from us. It was just like in the movies. But this was real, and we knew it.

A broken leg, then malaria

Amorose was also sent on patrol to Tulagi Island, where a huge battle took place in May 1942. Called the Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo, it was both a land and sea assault. “There were a lot of ships that went down in there (between the islands),” he said.

“I broke my leg on one of our skirmishes,” Amorose said casually. He was walking next to a Jeep through the jungle when the Jeep hit a downed tree, and as the tree snapped up it hit Amorose’s left leg. He was put in a walking cast. Orders came for his unit to move out again, but his commander told him he couldn’t go with the cast on. Amorose was “downtrodden.” He wanted to stay with his unit. They left on a small ship. He ended up cutting off the cast.

“I walked up to the Sergeant Major and asked if I could go now?” Amorose said.

When the transport ship got Amorose to the ship his unit was on, a cargo net was lowered for all the men in the outfit to climb up. “I could feel it, but I was bound and determined to stay with my unit and go.”

He didn’t know what the mission was or where they were going. The U.S. forces had attacked and invaded Saipan and Tinian.

“They were holding us in reserve to make sure they were secure,” Amorose said. “At night we would zig zag back and forth. They pulled us back and we anchored at Enewetak (or Anewatak) Atoll in the Marshall Islands.”

A large coral atoll of 40 islands, Amorose remembers it as being sandy beaches with no trees, all bare.

“We were swimming with someone always on shark watch,” he said. “We could see the fins coming, and we’d all get out of the water.”

To build up morale, Amorose’s unit was sent to Auckland, New Zealand, for leave, and to wait for replacements. They traveled on a Dutch ship called the “Bloom Fontaine,” which Amorose said was not nearly as nice as the hospital ship he rode on to Pearl Harbor. While on the long journey to New Zealand, Amorose developed symptoms of malaria after training and patrolling in rain forests and jungles. The medicine given to soldiers every day would keep malaria suppressed. While on the transport ship, he ran out of it.

“The minute you quit taking it, the symptoms appeared,” he said.

He thought he’d feel better once they landed in New Zealand and he could get some fresh milk and vegetables. By the time they arrived at the Naval hospital in Auckland, he was too weak to stand.

“I was cold and weak, so I lay down on the hospital steps,” Amorose said.

A doctor went over to him and took his vitals and told Amorose, “By all rights, you should be dead.” While in the hospital, the malaria came back so severely that he was vibrating with the chills so badly his bed was shaking.

After several weeks in the hospital, Amorose was finally well enough to get liberty and go to the city. He sat down on a street car/tram that operated in the hilly city. Sitting directly in front of him was the fellow from his home town in Pennsylvania who had enlisted with him. Amorose hadn’t seen him since boot camp. He did his basic training on Paris Island, South Carolina, before being assigned to guard duty in a Navy yard in Washington, DC.

“A colonel came around asking for volunteers,” Amorose said. “I wanted to get into the thick of things, so I volunteered.”

The Marine Raiders training camp was at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in the mountains. They lived in tents, with a few barracks, but it was “pretty primitive.” From there they went to Oceanside, California, then overseas for rubber boat training in the New Hebiredes Islands.

‘The Marines taught me a lot of things’

After he recovered from malaria in Auckland, his unit was sent back to Guadalcanal. His orders took him to New Georgia Island, then to New Caledonia, to New Zealand, to Guadalcanal, to Guam (where he was injured), then to Pearl Harbor for recovery. He was scheduled to go to Okinawa, but the armed services had developed a point system by that time, and Amorose had earned enough points to come back to the states. That was 1944.

He was sent to the U.S. Naval Air Station at the mouth of the Patuxent River in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. The Naval Base is home to the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. Amorose worked there on guard duty until his discharge in 1946.

“I don’t regret a thing,” he said of his service. “If I could come out the same way, I’d do it all again. The Marines taught me a lot of things. They taught me self confidence. In boot camp, they made you think you were better than anyone else – and you thought you were. It was quite an experience.”

Amorose came home and within the first year he was married. He met Marilyn in his home town of Boyers, Penn., while she was visiting an aunt. Marilyn was originally from the Detroit area.

“I knew her six weeks (before he proposed),” he said. “We’ve been married 67 years.” They had four children — two boys, two girls — and have suffered the loss of two of their children.

Amorose began working again for U.S. Steel, where he worked after graduating from Grove City High School in Boyers before enlisting. He admits to starting out at the bottom of the ladder and working his way up through the ranks to Construction Foreman. When they closed the mine in Pennsylvania in 1959, he was transferred to the Roger’s City, Michigan, limestone calcite plant. After 43 years with U.S. Steel, he retired in 1983.

Three years ago their son-in-law, Dave McBride, and their daughter, Joy, purchased the one-story house next to theirs overlooking Little Traverse Bay. Amorose and his wife moved from Roger’s City to Petoskey where they have a spectacular view of Little Traverse Bay in Petoskey.

“A lot of fellas go to Army reunions, but I never did,” Amorose said. “I never stayed long enough in one place to get to know the other guys well enough to keep in touch after the war. After leaving Guadalcanal, I went a different way.”

Amorose is modest about his exploits and it isn’t until he is asked if he earned any medals that he admits to having a handful of combat and service medals and ribbons.

“I didn’t get any medals for bravery or anything,” he said, as he opens a box to reveal his hard-earned Purple Heart.

WWII facts about the Marine Raiders:

The Marine Raiders were elite units established by the United States Marine Corps during World War II to conduct amphibious light infantry warfare, particularly in landing in rubber boats and operating behind the lines. “Edson’s Raiders” of the 1st Marine Raiders Battalion, and “Carlson’s Raiders” of the 2nd Marine Raiders Battalion, are said to be the first U.S. special operations forces to form and see combat in WWII.  Four Raider battalions served operationally, but all were disbanded in January 1944 when the Corps made the decision that the Raiders had out-lived their original mission.

The 1st Raider Regiment was redesignated the 4th Marine Regiment. Near the end of the war, the 4th Marines went on to earn additional distinctions in the assaults on Guam and later Okinawa. Many of the men who were formerly assigned to Raider units went on to serve with distinction during 1944 and 1945. For example, three of the six men in the iconic photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima were former Raiders.

During the war, a total of 8,078 men, including 7,710 Marines and 368 sailors, were assigned to Raider units. Raiders received a total of seven Medals of Honor and 136 Navy Crosses. The Marine Raiders were the precursor to the Navy SEAL task forces. Films such as “Gung Ho!”in 1943 depicts the 2nd Raider Battalion’s raid on Makin Island; and “Marine Raiders” in 1944 is a fictional account of the 1st Raider Battalion on Guadalcanal.