PEA RIDGE — He was just 17 in 1944. He’d been out of high school for one year and went to a junior college, but he wanted to serve his country. So, he lied.
Don Wheeless, now 86 years old, told the enlistment personnel he was 18 and joined the U.S.
Navy during World War II.
He clearly remembers the bombing of Pearl Harbor that propelled the United States into the war.
“I was in high school. I remember the terrible pictures of all the ships that were blown up,” Wheeless said, adding that he was stationed near there when he went to radio school.
“I had just graduated from high school, I graduated in 1943,” Wheeless said. “What was there to do? I went to a junior college, but everyone was going to war.
All my friends were in the service.
“It was a patriotic duty. We didn’t have many draft dodgers,” he recalled.
Wheeless and his wife, Marjorie, live just west of Pea Ridge in the Plentywood Farms area. He and one of his sons, Jay Wheeless, were part of a contingent of veterans and their guardians who flew to the nations capital Saturday for an honor flight.
The couple chose northwest Arkansas as their home after finding it during vacations fromIowa.
“When I retired in 1981, we moved to this area. When I was working, we liked to take our spring vacation the last week in March,” he said.
“We headed south on Hwy. 71through Kansas City. When we hit the Arkansas border, everything started to get green.”
Over the years, the family made several trips to northwest Arkansas and after a friend bought land here, he, too, bought land, built a house and moved here.
The couple’s two sons were in junior high and high school. Jay graduated in 1983 from Bentonville High School. Jim Wheeless graduated in 1985 from Pea Ridge High School. The couple also has two girls, one lives in Iowa and the other in Houston. They have two grandchildren and one greatgrandchild.
During the war, Wheeless was a radio operator. The baby of his family, he has an elder brother and sister, Wheeless remembers his elder brother “flunked thephysical” for joining the service.
“My mother’s real quiet.
She didn’t say an awful lot.
My dad didn’t either ... I’m sure I saw a few tears in her eyes,” he said, adding that soldiers weren’t able to contact their family much then except through mail that was always censored.
A farm boy from a small Iowa town, Wheeless said Cedar Rapids was the biggest town he’d seen before joining the Navy.
“That was quite an experience,” he said. After boot camp, he was allowed a week at home, but two days of it was taken on the train ride getting home. Then he shipped out.
“I was sent to Pearl Harbor for radio school.
Oh, I tell ya’, my eyes were opened when I was thrown in with the city slickers,” he smiled. “We had all kinds of kids there from the big city.
There were a lot of peoplefrom the south.
Wheeless served in the Pacific on USS Knight DD 633. “We joined the fifth and third fleet headed toward the invasion of Japan,” he said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of ships.”
“In the meantime, they dropped the two atomic bombs, so that caused the Japanese to want to surrender,” he said. The ship he was on was then converted to a mine sweeper and was used to sweep out Tokyo Bay.
“This is the thing that stuck in my mind. Everything was toward the military in Japan. The civilians had nothing. The mess cooks would put the garbage can over on the dock. It wasn’t a half an hour later when thepoor little Japanese were putting their hands in there and eating it,” he said.
Wheeless got to come home in 1946.
He joined the reservewhile in college in order to earn a little money. He got married Aug. 19, 1950, then three months later got called up to the Korean Conflict.
As a radio operator hewatched many changes including going from all Morse code to “plain language.”
The honor flight was sponsored by Wal-Mart and Tyson.
News, Pages 1 on 05/09/2012