Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Salvatore Castro

Levittown resident served in the South Pacific during WWII.

By John Williams, BucksLocalNews.com


Bullets fired from Japanese infantry whizzed overhead and Corporal Salvatore Castro took cover in the rugged terrain of the dense Philippine rainforest.

Three days earlier his battalion had just started a six mile prowl through the jungle. He and his unit had come to a big valley shaped like a horseshoe, bare of vegetation due to all the fighting; they spread out and took shelter in fox holes.

Just as he thought the worst had passed, grenades began to shower down on top of his unit’s position. They exploded from all directions with a fierce veracity. Many of his fellow soldiers – some of whom he trained with – perished in the attack.

“I was instructed to shoot in the general area of where the Japanese troops were firing from,” Castro, 85, said. He took his Browning automatic rifle and fired into the directed area.
“So I shot, but that exposed my position,” Castro said.

“As the grenades began exploding, I caught pieces of shrapnel on my legs and arms and, quite frankly, all over,” he said. “Most of it missed me, but I still had foreign objects like stones and clogs of dirt kicking up at me.”

He immediately started feeling the pain and began to bleed.

“I passed out and rolled down this hill,” Castro recalled. “I heard my battalion call to ‘pull back’ and I heard them leaving the area. I started crawling up the hill screaming for their assistance because I didn’t want to be left behind.” He assumed that the rest of his battalion thought he had died.

“I finally got up the hill and managed to catch up to them,” he said. “I still have nightmares sometimes about that moment. I wake up screaming.”

It all started when Castro was a mere adolescent.

He said joining the military was an ambition of his for a while. Before the war started, he aspired to be a pilot. His plans took a detour though after he was drafted in October of 1943 in his senior year of high school.

“I was assigned to infantry,” Castro said. “My basic training took place at Camp Blandey [a military installation outside of Jacksonville] and lasted 17 weeks. After training, they sent us home for a two week furlough.”
After his furlough, Castro was sent to Fort Ord – a disbanded Army post on Monterey Bay in California – and on March 20, 1944, he and his unit embarked on a three-week trek across the Pacific Ocean en route to New Guinea.

“We were attached to the 32nd Division who were already in combat at a small town named Aitape,” Castro remarked. “We got there around the beginning of July and in about a week the Japanese began their offensive.

“We ended up killing some 9,000 Japanese who ambushed us,” he said. “So, we pulled back and prepared for the next invasion, which came not too long after on Sept. 15, 1944 on the island of Morotai,” a member of the Molucca Islands in New Guinea.

Castro said the island wasn’t well occupied and that it stretched only about 50 miles long. It was all a part of General Douglas MacArthur’s strategy of island hopping dubbed “Hittin ‘em where they ain’t.”

Our mission at Morotai was to destroy a Japanese radar station and setup a United States controlled radar facility,” he stated.

“Information intelligence told us that there were about 3,500 Japanese ashore, but mostly service troops,” which Castro said wasn’t a huge threat. “Apparently, the Japanese were told to create fake camps to create an illusion, so we thought we were outnumbered. We fought them head on and were relieved by men in the 33rd Division.”

By the time he left the South Pacific, he had developed Jungle Rot, a type of tropical, fungal parasite that was often contracted by soldiers overseas. He was treated for the fungus while in Hollandia, New Guinea.

“It nearly killed me,” Castro said. “Penicillin helped relieve the fungus.” He said that Penicillin was his saving grace. Then on Feb. 20, 1945, he was permitted to return to the United States because of the complicated nature of his injuries.

“I quick grabbed my bags and got out of there. We stopped in Hawaii for a day to refuel and then shipped out to San Francisco. It was a great feeling seeing those Golden Gates,” Castro said in a relieved tone.

A military hospital train took him across country to Camp Upton in New York, where he recuperated and attended shows featuring Hollywood personalities such as Lena Horne and Irving Berlin. He even met and spoke with actress and film star of the 1930s and ‘40s, Jean Arthur – he even got her autograph.

He got discharged on Christmas Eve, 1945.

“I was in New York and there was a horrible snowstorm,” he stated. “We stayed in these wooden shacks – it was very cold – so I wore every bit of clothes I had and I was happy to get out.”

The Army had asked him to join the Reserves, but he declined. He served a total of 27 months of active duty in the military.

He attended Drexel University and received his degree in Mechanical Engineering. Not long after, he returned to school and earned a degree in Electrical Engineering because the devices he worked on at work required knowledge of electronics.

“We designed centrifuges and flight simulators,” he said. “I got involved with Environmental Tectonics Corporation (ETC) where we designed pilot training systems.”

He got involved with the Guardians after a close friend of his died. He is currently an active Guardian of the Washington Crossing Cemetery.

“I knew he was going to be buried in Washington Crossing Cemetery and I wanted to be in his honor guard,” Castro said. He volunteers in the office once a week – usually on Tuesdays.
Castro reflected on the enormity of military enlistment in the wake of World War II.

“When the Japanese hit the U.S., we only had a about a half million men in the service.
Eventually we had 16 million people join the service.

“It’s incredible.”

His parents emigrated to Cuba from Spain in 1917, where they met and traveled to the U.S. Salvatore was born in Newark, N.J., and moved to the Philadelphia area in 1948 and got married to his wife, Elenor.

Retired Army Corporal Castro moved to Levittown in 1953-54 and bought his house in the Highland Park section for $13,500.

“When you’re overseas there’s not much to get away from,” Castro divulged. “Living in foxhole isn’t great and living in tents in the South Pacific was very hot and uncomfortable. The best moment was when we got on that boat to go home.”

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