Richard Simon: Memories of a World War II veteran

Born in Fairmont, Minnesota, Simon turned 18 in 1943. But with so many people at war, his grandfather — the town mayor — got him a three-month deferment so he could help farm.

“I picked corn with a team of horses,” Simon said. “And then after three months, [my grandfather] wanted me to get deferred again for three months to work on the fishing crew because he had a commercial fishing business. And [the draft board] said, ‘No, we’re directing you to go.’”

Once he was in Minneapolis, an officer told those gathered about open positions: Six in the Army, two Air Force and three Navy. He chose the Navy.

“I wanted to sleep between two white sheets and not in a foxhole,” he said.

From there, he was sent to the Farragut Naval Training Station in Idaho. When asked what branch he’d like to go into, he picked flying.

“I got signed up for being a radio man and a machine gunner,” Simon said. That assignment included a pilot and a gunner — two people per plane — sent to attack Japanese battleships. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the casualty rate was high.

He was sent to Memphis for training, and learned semaphore radio, Morse code, and machine gunning. Set to graduate on a Saturday, the program was canceled the day before.

“They weren’t losing as many pilots and machine gunners as they had been, so our whole class was sent elsewhere,” he said.

“When I think back, it’s almost like a suicide mission to get on an airplane with one torpedo, and then they have a 30-caliber machine gunner,” Simon said. “There’s a lot of firepower from a big warship that hit these airplanes, so a lot of them got wiped out. That’s war, terrible thing. So, I keep thinking back — maybe that three-month delay in Minnesota kept me back three months from the war. Those three months went past, and then the war kind of settled down a little bit. That’s probably what kept me alive. Otherwise, I probably would have been shot down.”

He was then sent to the Panama Canal. At first, he was in the Pacific tower overlooking the bay — spending 24 hours a day inside. When a war-type ship came down the canal, they sent messages in code.

“It was fun up in the signal tower — I enjoyed that,” he said. When he had nothing else to, he’d ask the Atlanta tower if they wanted to chat using Morse code and a 36-inch arc light, which extended 40 miles, reflecting off the clouds.

“And they would come back with ‘Affirmative,’ and it was just, where did you come from, what state, and back and forth,” he said.

And yes, he still remembers semaphore; he not only explained the alphabet to this reporter, but recently presented at his independent living center’s amateur night.

Eventually, he moved to an office “down on the piers” in Cristóbal, a town in Panama. One of his jobs was finding places on a ship or plane for those going back to the States, both during and after the war.

He learned the war had ended through reports, but “I was still sending people back, so I didn’t get out [of the Navy] until a little bit later,” he said.

When he did leave, he returned to Minnesota, moving to California when he was 29. He was there for 18 years, marrying his wife and having four daughters.

Since then, he’s lived in Loveland, Colorado (32 years), Roseburg, and Bend. He moved to Hood River in 2020 to be near his youngest daughter.

He has just as many stories of his time after the Navy — how he could see Rocky Mountain State Park from his home in Loveland, how he enjoyed planting a big garden and building fences, and how he helped in a team effort to save a woman from drowning by locating a clothesline from a fellow camper.

Here’s another of Simon’s stories — not his, but still true: “At Camp Pendleton, Marines were practicing parachuting. One parachuter got tangled up on the airplane and his line slipped down to his ankles,” Simon said.

Once the pilot realized what had happened, he began circulating the base, trying to think of a way to end the situation.

“Two pilots were on the ground, and one said to the other while pointing to the sky, ‘What is that dragging behind that plane? It’s a man,’” he said. “They both jumped into an open cockpit airplane and flew underneath him going at the same speed, around 100 mph. He was pulled down into the cockpit.”

One more to end on: “This man went into a marine shop and rented a boat just off the coast of California. He was out there doing what you do with a boat, and a cow came out of the sky, hit his boat, and sank it,” he began.

“So he went back to where he got it and says, ‘Your boat is on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. A cow fell out of the sky and sank the boat.’ Can you imagine what he was thinking?

“And so the story was traveling around and a couple of Privates heard about it, so they got hold of this Marine when they heard about the boat. And he says, ‘Several of the soldiers here found this cow, and they were going to take it back to the base and eat it. They got him in the airplane, and then he got kind of rambunctious. So they decided, well, he’s going to ruin the airplane. So they opened up the bomb bay and dropped him out.’

“The cow came down on his boat. That’s how the boat got sunk,” he said.

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Columbia Gorge News’ annual Salute to Veterans is included in this issue. Find additional  stories about Doug Massingill, U.S. Air Force veteran, and Bill Caldwell and Dale Rollins, both U.S. Navy veterans.