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by Ronald Russell
(The following originally appeared in Veterans
Biographies, distributed during the annual Battle of Midway commemoration
in San Francisco, June 2006)
Eighteen-year old John Gardner didn’t really know
what he wanted to do after graduating from high school in 1940. College was a possibility, but not the
universal goal for all that it is today.
A factory job was an easy choice in his central California town, but he
knew there were family men who needed those jobs worse than he did. On something of a whim, then, he decided to
take the battery of tests for enlisting in the Marine Corps—the Corps was very
small in those days, and only a few of those who applied were accepted. Gardner didn’t think his chances for passing
were all that great—he didn’t consider himself superior to the average young
man of the era, and most of them failed the tests. You can guess what happened next: out of eleven candidates who applied the same day as Gardner, he
was the only one who passed. Two days
later he was on his way to boot camp in San Diego.
After recruit training and field telephone school, he was
assigned to the 6th Marine Defense Battalion (MDB), which deployed to Hawaii in
June 1941. Its ultimate destination was
Wake Island, which would have doubled the size of the garrison there, and some
of the battalion’s equipment was actually sent to Wake in advance. But a change of plans sent the unit to
Midway instead, in order to relieve the 3rd MDB which had toiled exhaustively
on the atoll for a year, building up its facilities. The 6th MDB then became Midway’s garrison, which continued to
grow in strength as the possibility of a Japanese invasion began to surface.
During the battle, PFC Gardner was the field telephone
talker with an artillery battery on Sand Island. The guns at his position were trained to the northwest over
Welles Harbor, from which an amphibious assault was expected, and were well
hidden during the Japanese air strike on the first day of the battle. He particularly remembers the enemy aircraft
that crashed in the middle of Sand Island, and was closely inspecting it while
movie producer John Ford was filming the wreckage. Gardner believes he is one of two Marines visible in that scene
from Ford’s famous Battle of Midway documentary.
He returned stateside after the battle and spent the next
two and a half years in telecommunications training assignments. May 1945 saw Staff Sergeant Gardner deployed
once again to Hawaii, one of 50,000 Marines preparing for the invasion of
Japan. The end of the war shifted him
to China instead, where he served until the end of his second enlistment in
1947.
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