Mexican American War Stories from WWII
Joaquin Velazquez: It was rough. Well, the LST I was on. It was number 13. And to this day I'll always believe that thirteen is a bad number, because it seemed like we never missed a storm out in the Pacific.
Raymond Sanchez: What was so scary when we first went aboard the U.S.S. Saranac, our Captain's name was John J. Cross, and the first thing he told us, "If you boys are afraid to die, you don't belong on this ship”.
Announcer: As North Manila is cleaned up artillery opens on South Manila across the Pacific River.
Richard: In the Pacific, GIs encountered World War II's fiercest and deadliest battles. An elite fighting force called the Bushmasters rose to the occasion.
Marvel Bennett: We came up with the name Bushmasters in Panama. They killed the great big snakes that were called the Bushmaster snake, and that's how we got our name.
Richard: The Bushmasters were made up largely of Mexican-American men recruited from the Arizona National Guard. They trained in the jungles of Panama and New Guinea in preparation for action in the South Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur called them the greatest fighting combat team ever deployed for battle. Memories of wartime still emerge fresh and raw after so many years. My father was an 18-year-old from Sacramento when he went into the Navy, to Iwo Jima and Guam.
Rudy Yniguez: In total, I made about five invasions. Getting sailors back in from the island into the ships, you're lost out there. You haven't eaten. Dark, wet, you can't find your ship, because there's thousands out there. Small ones, big ones just bombarding that place day and night, thousands of people just floating in the water. That's hard to take.
Antonio Moreno: I was 35 days in the front. As a front-line doctor with little that I had, to try and save some lives the best I could.
Richard: Antonio Moreno from Austin, Texas served as a medic, tending to injured Marines at Iwo Jima.
Antonio Moreno: I think it was the fifth day that we landed. We saw the first flag on Mount Suribachi. It was a crude flag that was planted there with a pipe that they found there with a small flag hanging up. Well, we were really happy. We thought it was going to be over soon! That’s what they told us, that it was going to be no problem to take that island but low and behold it got rougher and rougher.
Richard: Toward the end of the war on the island of Mindanao, American soldiers were targets for snipers. But Julian Gonzalez from San Antonio was lucky. He found help from Filipino police, because he could speak Spanish.
Julian Gonzalez: The commanding officer spoke Spanish, and I spoke Spanish. And we got pretty, we became friends, and then I told him about our situation. And the first thing he did was he said, "Well, you don't have to worry no more about it." He posted a guard, a 24-hour guard, there to protect us.
Richard: Other soldiers were not so lucky. They perished in battle from disease or were taken prisoner like a young soldier named Luz Cisneros.
John Hamilton: He, of course, went into a POW camp, and ultimately he perished in a Japanese POW camp from pneumonia in 1943, but surrounded by his comrades and supported by them.
Richard: His legacy lives on at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
John Hamilton: Building 1013, which is a barracks for the Third Battalion 6th Defense Artillery, is a training barracks for advanced individual trainees. It's named Cisneros Barracks in recognition of Private Cisneros's contribution to World War II.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services