They Also Serve

About the Book

This is the story of Corporal Ian W. Beaton’s U.S. Army World War II experiences based upon excerpts from over 400 letters he wrote to his parents and young teen age sister from February, 1943 to November, 1945.  

Along with extensive quotes from his letters, the well-researched background text provides in depth perspectives about life and attitudes that prevailed in the United States in the 1940s.  

What makes this author’s story different is that it is not about heroic battles, but about service in a non-combat supporting role in the military.  Most of the 16 million veterans of World War II served in non-combat assignments.  “They Also Serve” is really their story.  

Corporal Beaton and his millions of comrades in all branches of the military served in every theater as well as in the United States.  Among their dozens of military specification numbers are ‘jobs” such as clerk/typist, yeoman, truck driver, cook, baker, heavy equipment operator, fireman, military policeman, drill sergeant and airplane pilot.  However, even these assignments could be dangerous occupations.  In World War II, 113,000 service men and women died from “non-battle” causes usually from unfortunate accidents or illness.

In the author’s letters, we can feel his frustration about his assigned lot while at the same time, trying to rationalize his job as to its worth measured against that of others who were fighting and dying in the most important conflict in recorded history.

This story follows the author from army induction through grueling infantry training where this young naïve very nearsighted soldier excelled in his weapons training and physical conditioning. This was followed by a two-month period of uncertainty in replacement centers in California and Pennsylvania where shipping orders were issued on a daily basis.  After crossing the United States twice in a three-week period on troop trains, the author was shipped to Dutch Harbor, Aleutian Islands along with thousands of other infantry-trained replacements.  Their role was to replace battle casualties which were expected to be very heavy in the joint American/Canadian invasion force to recapture heavily fortified Kiska Island from the Japanese.  By the time the actual invasion was launched, the 6000 Japanese defenders had been secretly evacuated back to Japan in ships under the cover of the dense fog that frequently blankets the Aleutians in the summer months. The infantry replacements became the property of the Alaskan Defense Command and they were divided up among the personnel starved non-combat garrison units stationed permanently in the Aleutians.  

The author served a total of 25 months in the barren, treeless, wind-swept Aleutians including 19 months on Shemya Island, a tiny atoll in the far western Aleutians only 800 miles from Japan.  He wrote to his parents that he felt like John Milton, the famous blind English poet who wrote the line, “They also serve who only stand and wait”.

Life on Shemya was hard with frequent “alerts” for possible Japanese air or commando attacks.  Work was on a 24-hour basis to construct a giant B-29 airbase with a 10,000 foot runway, large “T” pier,  two-lane breakwater plus all the other infrastructure necessary to support the mission of destroying the major cities in Japan.  The strategy was to literally set massive fires knowing that most houses in the Japanese cities were constructed of  wood, and Shemya would play a major role in this campaign. All this changed when U.S. forces recaptured warm weather islands in the Central Pacific which were closer to the major Japanese cities than Shemya.  In October of 1944, a huge storm (known in the Aleutians as a “williwaw”) destroyed the newly constructed “T” pier and the breakwater and pla

About the Author

Ian W. Beaton is a retired Detroit advertising agency executive who resides in Tucson, AZ. While attending Northwestern University after service in World War II, he met and later married Carol J. Lindner, his wife of 49 years.