The StoryCorps Mobile Tour returned to Fort Myers in February and March 2024 to record meaningful conversations with people about their lives.
Each Monday, we’re highlighting some of the compelling stories from our fellow Southwest Florida residents.
In this installment, we hear sisters Jan Doetsch and Karla Doetsch Wheeler share stories and remembrances of their their parents, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II, and how they met just after the war ended.
Transcript:
KARLA DOETSCH WHEELER: Our father was just one in a million, and we were both very, very close to him.
JAN DOETSCH: Now, through our lives, our lifetimes, we had absorbed stories about him. And we, you know, we knew that he had been wounded twice in the South Pacific when he was in the Marine Corps in World War II, and there were other stories that we had sort of absorbed. First of all, I want to tell the story about how he ended up in the Marine Corps. He was in his first year at the University of Maryland when he got pneumonia. So, he dropped out and immediately got a draft notice from the Army and signed up for the Marine Corps, and they took him and they trained him, and they shipped him out to the South Pacific.
KARLA: Wow.
JAN: Where he was, as I say, wounded twice. So, Daddy was wounded first on the eighth of February, 1944. They got transported to the Marshall Islands. Just after they had landed and set up their camp a shell hit the camp, and he was wounded in his left thigh by a fragment. Snd so they shipped him out, they patched him up, and they sent him back. The next time that he was wounded, this was a serious wound, was on Saipan. This was June 15, 1944. He celebrated his 20th birthday, he told me, while they were at sea going from Pearl Harbor to Saipan. They're landing on an LCM, which is a landing craft mechanized, just as a shell hits the water; a Japanese shell hits the water and it bounced the craft, bounced Daddy out into the sea, and when the craft came down again from its bounce, its ramp trapped daddy's right leg at the ankle between the ramp itself and a coral reef. And he was underwater, and he was facing the wrong way to even try to get himself out. So he thought, “Well, this is it.” And then a hand reached down and freed him. He never knew who that was; never knew who that was, but he did not expect it. He thought he was a goner. He spent the next 18 months in the Naval Hospital of Philadelphia. So that's where, unfortunately, gangrene set in, because this was bad injury. And they were going to amputate. They told him, “It looks like you're going to lose that leg, but we have this new drug just came out that if you want to, we can try.” So he agreed. They said “It's called penicillin.” And he told me, that needle gauge was so big, and the serum was so thick, and it took so long for them to do this that he was ready to say, “Stop! Just take the leg! Just stop! Take the leg! Yow, yow, yow,” because it really hurt, but he prevailed and saved the leg.
KARLA: Wow.
JAN: Yeah.
KARLA: Quite the story. So, when you speak about the Marine Corps, I just get all warm and fuzzy inside because our mother was also in the Marine Corps during World War Two,
JAN: OH, Yes, Yes.
KARLA: And the two of them met right after the war ended In 1945. They met in a little bar in San Francisco where they were both stationed.
JAN: Our mother, she was a sergeant. She was an executive secretary to a general out there. She and her friends, her girlfriends in the women Marines were sitting at a bar, at their bar stools. And there was a group of male Marines, and one of them said loudly enough because he wanted to be overheard, “Hey guys! Look at that babe over there with a big, beautiful brown eyes!” And she swiveled on her seat to face him. Oh, by the way, he was a private, and said “They're big, beautiful blue eyes, private,” because, of course, they're all in uniform, and she was a sergeant. So that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and more than that. They must have started dating right away, because they were married, what Karla?
KARLA: Well, like four weeks later,
JAN: Five weeks later.
KARLA: Five weeks from when they met later. Yep, they had a good, solid marriage for 52 years until separated by death.
JAN: They certainly did.
KARLA: I wanted to mention too that I recall mother saying that her shining glory as a Marine was when the United Nations was founded. And there was the big convention to, whatever they call that, when it's the first founding of a big, huge body like that, and all the dignitaries are there from around the world. She was chosen to represent the United States women Marines, and she just felt like that was her greatest glory as a Marine. So, we are the proud Daughters of two World War II Marines; both incredible human beings, and I'm sure that all the years that they were our parents, that many of the qualities that we admired came from their Marine Corps background.
JAN: Oh, absolutely.
JOHN DAVIS, HOST: That was sisters Jan Doetsch and Karla Doetsch Wheeler. Their conversation was recorded in Fort Myers through the StoryCorps Mobile Tour. This is WGCU News.
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