Remembering Local World War Two Veterans Who Served In The Philippines

By: Bob Boyer

 

There is much to write about this year, for me personally, as we approach Veterans Day, November 11. That is why I started with the October issue in which I wrote about Father Brendan (Jack) McKeough, a longtime friend. This month I will add further details about Fr. Brendan in the Philippines. I will also salute three other veterans from Northeast Wisconsin who also served there, and who died since Nov. 11, 2020.

Father Brendan John (Jack) McKeough, November 11, 1922- November 13, 2020:

Jack McKeough was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He attended Saint Norbert College in De Pere for two years before being recruited by the Army in the fall of 1942. After training, which included intensive language courses in Italian and French, he was assigned to an Army Engineering unit headed to the Pacific Theater. He chuckled about Army logic when telling me this. Jack McKeough (he didn’t become a priest until after the war) spent a full year in the Philippines with the 87th Engineers, from February, 1945 to January, 1946. In last month’s column I focused on how he came to meet and love the Filipinos. This column is more about his war experiences.

As the combat troops pushed northward against the Japanese in Luzon, so did the 87th Engineers, to the Sierra Madre Mountains on the northeast coast. Their assignment was to keep the hilly mountain roads open for the infantry. When I interviewed Fr. Brendan he told me that “the Japanese were rooted in caves in the mountains.” He and some others explored the caves after the combat ended. “As we got further into one cave, we were hit by a sudden wall of stench of dead, rotting bodies. The flame throwers you know.”

For Jack, who guarded the engineers as they worked, his time (“precisely 100 days” he recalls”) in the Sierra Madres was marked chiefly by rain, heat (“it was always hot in the Philippines”), guard duty, and “the meat wagon.” These wagons were large, covered trucks that brought the corpses of both armies down from the front lines every day. Jack did have one somewhat lighter memory. Igorot women, local indigenous people, worked for the engineers doing heavy lifting on the roadwork. They were hardworking (“big hands and muscular arms”) and friendly “always smiling”.

The fighting finally wound down after more than three months in the mountains (MacArthur declared the Philippines “liberated” in July of 1945). Jack’s unit was moved to southern Luzon, to San Francisco, close to Manila. A month later the war ended. Jack had mixed feelings about his last few months in the Philippines. There were the “pimps and prostitutes,” he recalled sadly, but there were also the kids: “they couldn’t wait for school to start!”

The three other Northeast Wisconsin veterans remembered here all died in January, 2021.

William “Sully” Sullivan, November 24, 1924-January 1, 2021: William graduated from Waterloo High School and promptly “began driving milk truck”. He used that skill well throughout his lifetime, including during the war. He rose to the rank of Tech 5 and was stationed on Leyte, Philippines, where he was “a heavy truck driver.”

After the war William became a truck driver for Schneider Transport. Even after retirement he drove truck, a dump truck, in the Green Bay area, well into his eighties. Sully and his wife had thirteen children, including one son, Mikal, whose name is etched on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Sully found Mikal’s name there, thanks to an Old Glory Honor Flight. Another memory, on his 95th birthday, was his last visit to Schneider Trucking, where he was “treated like a king for the day, even blowing the horn one more time.”

Donald Nohr, September 5, 1926-January 16, 2021: Don served in the 86th Blackhawk Division in the war. This division was one of the relatively few that served in both Europe and the Pacific. It fought in Germany in the final days of the war there (Germany surrendered in May, 1945, Japan in August, 1945). The Blackhawk Division was sent to the Philippines, arriving there as the war ended, but while there were still pockets of Japanese resistance.

Donald later returned to Denmark, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. He married and became a classic Wisconsinite. He and his wife enjoyed raising a family. Donald became a supervisor at Lake to Lake Dairy and enjoyed hunting and fishing.

Francis John “Buddy” Hoff, November 30, 1923-January 21, 2021. “Buddy” graduated from Green Bay West High Schoold in 1941. He enlisted is the U.S. Navy at the beginning of the war, just about six months after graduation. He became a torpedoman on the USS Haley in the Pacific. The Haley saw action at Leyte Gulf in October, 1944, a pivotal naval battle of the Pacific Theater.

Buddy was another Wisconsin classic. He worked for the Milwaukee Road Railroad (later the Soo Line), eventually becoming an engineer. He was a family man, a Boy Scout Leader, an organizer of lectors in his church, St. John the Baptist, Howard, outside of Green Bay, and a member of the National Guard. And, of course, he and his wife were great square dancers.

Doing research on these veterans is personally gratifying. Their obituaries, clearly written with love by family, reflect men of bravery, humility, and family values. I find that they also had a sense of humor, an often underappreciated virtue.

I welcome your comments at Robert.boyer@snc.edu.