Peter Cugasi

By Tim Chicirda, BucksLocalNews.com

When speaking with Peter Cugasi about World War II or the Korean War, stories about other military officials and what they did for this country are not far behind. This local veteran, who often submits stories to BucksLocalNews.com and other area publications, loves to inform people of what occurred during these times of battle, and more importantly, loves to make children, husbands, wives and grandchildren proud of the accomplishments of their families.

Now, it's Cugasi's turn for his story to be told. A veteran of both the second World War and the Korean War, the Levittown resident devotes an entire bedroom of his home to various plaques, photos and memorabilia.

Cugasi was a member of the United States Naval Armed Guard. This division of the Navy was in charge of delivering weapons, men or anything else needed to allied forces across the globe.
A gunner's mate on the SS Edward Paine, the SS Thomas Sim Lee and the SS Simon Willard, Cugasi visited such places as North Africa, Sicily, Bombay and Pakistan.

As a gunner's mate, Cugasi was in charge of firing the guns on the deck of the ship, if the need presented itself.

However, with these convey ships so low to the sea, fighting was far from the smart tactic.
"One torpedo and we were gone," said Cugasi.

This is why the Armed Guard duties were not to attack, but simply to deliver; however, if they were attacked by the enemy, they were forced to fight back. This is when Cugasi would man the guns and, according to Cugasi, it happened a number of times during his military career.
The Armed Guard would fight to defend their ship until the bitter end. Gunnery officers would seldom give the instructions to abandon ship.

"As long as guns were firing, we were to keep fighting," said Cugasi.

In fact, according to Cugasi, common protocol followed by the Armed Guard was to continue fighting, even as the ship began to go down. This was near certain death if a ship was in an area such as the waters off the coast of Russia in the winter.

With temperatures around 30 to 40 degrees below zero, soldiers in rowing lifeboats were "frozen to the oars" after only about 10 minutes, according to Cugasi.

Russia, coincidentally, was the site of Cugasi's greatest accomplishment in World War II. During the war, Russia lost over 20 million people and were in dire need of materials and bombs.
Cugasi and members of the Armed Guard were in charge of bringing tractors, tanks, locomotives, bombs and firearms to Murmansk, Russia in what was dubbed the "Murmansk Suicide Run."

This ominous title was given because about 300 ships were sent on this mission with only about 200 surviving.

"I was one of the lucky ones," said Cugasi.

In 1993, Yuli M. Vorontsov, the Soviet Union Ambassador recognized the 50-year anniversary of Russia's involvement in World War II, specifically the "Murmansk Suicide Run."

Two hundred and fifty American soldiers were honored, including Cugasi. They were given medals and toasted a shot of vodka.

"The Ambassador told me that if we hadn't made those deliveries, we would have lost the war," Cugasi said, reflecting on his great accomplishment.

Cugasi, who will turn 85 next month, still remembers being honorably discharged on Veterans Day and remembers thinking to himself: "If I could only live to see 65"

A Christmas story

Though this article promised to be purely about Cugasi, a tale told by the Levittowner was more than appropriate for this December 25 issue:
A good friend of Cugasi and fellow Murmansk suicide runner, Pete Burke, remembered a story of being frozen in the middle of the sea on Christmas day.
With no way to get a Christmas tree, Burke and company, who were on a different ship than Cugasi, put a mop in a bucket and hung hangers from it to create a Christmas tree.
Pete Burke is now deceased, but Cugasi says: "his story remains with me at Christmas time."

Glenn Hall

By Petra Chesner Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com

From Oregon to Pearl Harbor, the U.S.S. Granville (APA 171) was steered through the Pacific, travelling a total of 63,151 miles between Dec. 1944 to Jan. 1946.Glenn Hall spent most of his military time aboard that ship. "The U.S. got me in Dec. 1943. I turned 18 in March 1944," he said. He was inducted in the Navy in March 1944.

Hall, now 83, was a U.S. Navy Pharmacist Mate 3/C assigned to the ship after going to Sampson Naval Training Base in Bainbridge, Md. He grew up in York County, Pa.

As a veteran, Hall has many more stories to tell. One is of the attack on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, which "occurred in the evening when the war was supposed to be over.
"We shot down the kamikaze," Hall recalled.

"When all the guns are going off, you feel pretty helpless because you don't have anything to fight back with. The gunners did a pretty good job, they shot it [the kamikaze] down," he said.

"They usually would come at dusk," Hall continued. "They were difficult to see [because of the altitude they would fly.] They would just dive a plane into a ship. Every night they'd come over. We were sitting in the harbor You could expect them."
Hall said the destroyers and escorts off the coast of Japan were hard hit by kamikazes.

"They would come into the harbor badly beaten," Hall said about the Americans.
The Japanese were the enemy. But after the war was over, Hall said he had "the most startling experience and the most memorable. We had taken troops to Japan to a small fishing village on the Inland Sea of Japan.

"A couple of us are walking down the street [probably the only street in the village]," he continued. "This Japanese woman came out of her house and in English said to us, 'Would you like some tea?' We said, 'Okay.' So, she served us tea."

"We said, 'Why did you do this?' She said, 'Because I'm a Christian.'"

Part of war was death, Hall recounted. The second person in his high school class, who was killed in WWII, was Joseph Ensminger. "He was my best friend," Hall remembered. "He was a paratrooper and was killed in France. I didn't find out about it until long after it occurred.

"He wanted to be a cinema photographer in Hollywood. He was a minister's son," Hall noted.

After Hall returned home from the war, Ensminger's father kept asking Hall to come to his house. "I couldn't do it," Hall said, teary-eyed.

For Hall, one strong impression about serving in WWII was that the U.S. Navy was segregated. "We had black sailors, but seldom saw them aboard ship. They were separated. They worked in the galley - in the kitchens."

Inside the ship, there were guns under the water line where the ammunition and powder were stored. "They had to be sent up to the guns," Hall said. "Guess who did it? That was their battle station."

Hall said, "You just didn't see these guys. They didn't come to sick bay. They were in different parts of the ship."

Hall is a member of the Morrell Smith Post of the American Legion in Newtown. Until recently, he marched in the annual Memorial Day Parade.

Initially, Hall was assigned to a hospital as a corpsman. "We did rudimentary patient care under the supervision of registered nurses, who were officers in the Navy."

Then one day, his life changed. "I happened to be in the office where they 'cut' orders [which means you are assigned to other places]." He asked the chief petty officer to let him know if anything came up on the list.

"I'm in the office again and he said, 'I have something here - it's an APA.' I said, 'What's an APA?'''

He replied, laughing, "It's a ship," Hall said. "What did I know? I just wanted to get out of that bloody hospital. I wasn't the only one who didn't know what an APA was." Aboard the ship, Hall assisted with clean-up after surgeries, among other chores.

At the time, the U.S.S. Granville (APA 117) was brand new. "We engaged in what was called 'The Navy Shakedown Cruises,'" he said, "which were essentially efforts to train the crews and to make sure the equipment, motors and guns in the ship worked."

The main objective of an APA was to get the troops onto the beach. War correspondent Al Crocker wrote, the APAs carried "triple A-1 priority in ship building and promises to carry tougher punches to [Japanese Admiral] Hirohito's sprawling midsection and jaw than perhaps event the B-29."

A professor emeritus at Bucks County Community College (BCCC), Hall completed his bachelor of arts degree in political science and history at Lebanon Valley College in 1949. His master of arts degree is from George Washington University. He won a Fulbright Award to teach in the Netherlands for a year.
After his retirement from BCCC in 1989, he returned to teaching. He had started his teaching career in a small one-room schoolhouse in York County where there were 52 students, grades 1-8.

Travis Manion

By Janine Logue, BucksLocalNews.com

For 1st Lt. Travis Joseph Lemma Manion, joining the Marines was not a career choice, but rather a call to duty.Son of Janet and Tom Manion, Tom being a former Marine himself, Travis was born on Nov. 19, 1980 at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. For the first 10 years of his life, Travis and his family moved around a lot because of his father's duty as a Marine.
Finally, the Manion family settled in Doylestown, where Travis attended school at La Salle College High School before entering the United States Naval Academy.

After graduating from the Naval Academy in 2004, Travis followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Marines.

Travis completed his basic training in Quantico, VA, where he finished at the top of his class. He was assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force Camp Pendleton, CA.

Not long after, Travis was sent to Iraq for his first tour of duty. During this first tour, Travis worked to uncover weapons and even lent support to the 2005 elections.

Travis returned from his first tour in March of 2006 and was not scheduled to return to Iraq until March of 2007. However, because of his previous experience in Iraq, 1st Lt. Manion was selected to be part of a Military Transition team. In September 2006 he was pulled from 1st Recon to train with 10 other Marines that would be attached to an Iraq Army Battalion in Fallujah, Iraq.

On Dec. 26, 2006, only 9 months after returning home, Travis was again deployed to Iraq.
It was during this second deployment, on Sunday, April 29, 2007, that 1st Lt. Manion and the other soldiers were caught in an enemy ambush in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq.
Sadly, Travis was struck and killed by an enemy sniper's bullet while trying to draw fire away from the wounded. He was only 26 years old.

On Friday, Dec. 5, 2008, in an hour long ceremony at the Doylestown Courthouse, Travis was posthumously awarded both the Silver Star and Bronze Star with Valor. Tom and Janet Manion accepted the honor on Travis' behalf. Lt. General John Allen was on hand to present the award.

"In every possible way Travis Manion exerted his positive influence to his fellow Marines and the Iraqis he served with," said Allen during the ceremony. "Travis strode like a giant wherever he went."

Also at the ceremony was Major Joel Poudrier, who served with Travis in Iraq.
Poudrier made no attempt to hold back his emotions as he spoke of Travis, breaking down several times during his speech.

"[During the ambush] Travis willingly made himself the sole target," said Poudrier. "He was the only thing standing between the determined will of the enemy and his men. Travis carried a heavy load with ease and grace. He had a big smile, a big laugh and was a big figure. Yet his humbleness made him all the more impressive."

In addition to the Silver Star and Bronze Star with Valor, the Manions were also presented with items from Combat Outpost Manion, one of only two outposts in Iraq that have been named for an American.

"Today we celebrate his actions," said Captain Chad Rounds, who made the Combat Outpost Manion presentation. "Travis set a ferocious precedent of leading by example. He is still setting such an example today as individuals we can find strength in his leadership, and each and every one of us can aspire to it in some way."

Walter Hicinbothem

By R. Kurt Osenlund, Correspondent

Not every war veteran has fond memories of time served. In this very column, dozens of men and women have shared painful recollections of harsh conditions, lost friends, and near-death experiences. Levittown resident Walter Hicinbothem, a former quartermaster (QM) with the US Navy who fought in WWII, has plenty of those same mental and emotional scars, but what the 83-year-old recalls most about his stint in the armed forces are the good times.

A junior, Hicinbothem was born to father, Walter, and mother, Florence, in Bronx, NY in 1925. He soon saw the arrival of two younger sisters, Gertrude and Alice. When Hicinbothem was still a child, the family hopped the state border and relocated to Linden, NJ, a Union County city that borders Staten Island. It was there that Hicinbothem graduated from Linden High School and, in 1943, at age 18, he enlisted in the Navy.

Like most former soldiers, Hicinbothem's first military memories are those of boot camp. Straight out of the gate, he takes a decidedly positive look back. "That was a great, great time for me," he says of his undoubtedly strenuous six-week initiation, which took place in Newport, R.I. "The military teaches you to take care of yourself."

Hicinbothem remained in Newport for more teaching, attending QM school through the fall of '43 and into the winter of '44. The highlight of that period? Bowling.

"We didn't have much time to get off the base," Hicinbothem says of himself and his peers, "but whenever we did, we went to Boston to bowl. We'd play the duck pins and the candle pins [two variations on the traditional, ten-pin game in which the pins are shorter and thinner, respectively] - they were tough to knock down."

That January, Hicinbothem headed to New London, Conn. to further his education, completing submarine school by the following June. While he says the new institution's tight training schedule left little time for hitting the lanes, the jokester quips that the region taught him how to "play 'cahds' while driving a 'cah.'"

But that's not all it taught him. By August of 1944, Hicinbothem was at sea, making good on the skills he'd picked up throughout the previous year. Among them were overseeing the battle station helmsmen, maintaining the vessel's log and the captain's log, assisting in the torpedo rooms and navigation department, and calculating courses via chromometers - "charting the stars to secure locations."

Hicinbothem saw five war patrols during his time of service, most of them taking him through the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, on board the USS Black Fin submarine. On his initial run, he and his crew took out their first "victim," a 4,000-ton Japanese ship, off the coast of the Philippine islands of Luzon. The outfit then went south and landed in Perth, Australia for some "R&R," where they engaged in hunting of a different sort.

Armed with rifles and led by a group of Aussie orphans with whom they lodged, the sailors hit the outback, on the prowl for kangaroo. Though Hicinbothem claims to have dined on rabbit and lamb on his trip Down Under, 'roo meat never ended up on the menu.

"Those doggone kangaroos jumped faster than any of us could shoot," he says. "They jumped right over our heads! Nobody hit anything."

It certainly wasn't always fun and games for Hicinbothem. By the time he was formally discharged in March of 1946, he'd evaded numerous aerial attacks, duked it out in a torpedo battle with a Japanese Shigure destroyer, and faced underwater terror as his sub sustained depth-charge damages. But he healthily holds tightest to the more pleasant experiences, which managed to follow him through his post-military life.

In 1949, he married his wife, Virginia, and the two moved to Linden's neighboring town of Elizabeth. He went to work as an operator in a chemical plant in 1951, during which time he earned his certificate in engineering from Rutgers University. The couple moved to New Brunswick and then to Levittown in 1963, where they've remained to this day. After yet more schooling in radio electronics, Hicinbothem scored "the best job (he) ever had" with RCA, which employed him until his retirement in 1982.

With Virginia, Hicinbothem fathered six children: Eileen, Peggy, Tom, Pat, Carol, and David. He's also a grandfather of 13 and a great-grandfather of five, with one more on the way. He and Virginia have spent much of their lives traveling, around the country and around the world. In the US, the two have gone as far north as Nova Scotia and as far south as Key West.

They've been to Japan and visited Hawaii eight times (once for seven straight weeks). Thanks to his long-standing membership with the US Submarine Veterans of WWII, they've attended annual conventions in "all parts of the country." Not a bad way to rack up more great memories.

"The Navy was good for me - I sowed my wild oats. I had a good time in the service. I learned a lot and, overall, had a great experience." He says it with a smile.