Sixty-four years after the end of a war that claimed the lives of many of their generation, 132 World War II veterans left Denver on Tuesday to remember the fallen at a memorial in Washington, D.C.
“I think about the kids who didn’t come back,” said Robert Seaton, 84, who served on the light cruiser USS Columbia at Iwo Jima and other battles in the Pacific. “There were six on my battle station when we were hit by a kamikaze. I am the only one who survived.”
Honor Flight Northern Colorado funded and organized the two-day trip to the World War II Memorial and other veterans’ memorials in the nation’s capital.
The vets, including nurses who served in the war, left from Denver International Airport, where they were greeted by a bugler, honor guards, the skirl of bagpipes and more than 100 members of the military and other well-wishers.
Many of the veterans bent over canes as they made their way through the crowd; others sat in wheelchairs. They waved and flashed thumbs-up signs as they filed into the Signature Terminal for a celebration before boarding a US Airways flight.
The war, said Seaton, of Grand Lake, “was 90 percent boredom and 10 percent fright.”
Chuck Illsley, 83, served in the 9th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. “It was hell. One half of my company was wiped out. I managed to get through it,” he said.
He was 19 years old and carried a Browning Automatic Rifle as he struggled through snow and brutal cold.
He found out the war was over as he and his company camped on a bank of the Elbe River in Germany with the Russian army on the other side.
Fort Collins resident Walter Hotchkiss, 84, was a member of the infantry serving in England when the German army began the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in December 1944.
His division joined the fight. Hotchkiss, who operated a mortar, remembers soldiers pulled under a river by the weight of the mortar rounds they carried when they became tangled in concertina wire.
He choked up as he recalled going into a barn and seeing a German lying on his back with a bloody hole in his forehead. He reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out a wallet containing a picture of a young woman, probably his girlfriend. “I slipped it back into his pocket. He was my age, 19. I still think about that once in a while.”
The war deprived him and other vets of many experiences that peacetime allows the young, he said. “Between 18 and 21 is a . . . nice time to live, and I didn’t get that, but I got some other experiences, and I came home in one piece,” he said.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
