Andrew Thomas Donaldson
| NAME: Andrew Thomas Donaldson | NICKNAME: Andy | SERVICE NUMBER: 947682 | |||||
| HOME OF RECORD: 111 New Street, Mount Clemens, MI | NEXT OF KIN: Wife, Mrs. Evelyn F. Donaldson | ||||||
| DATE OF BIRTH: 4/3/1920 | SERVICE DATES: 6/5/1944 – 12/1945 | DATE OF DEATH: 10/17/2010 | |||||
| CAMPAIGN | UNIT | MOS | RATE | RESULT | |||
| Iwo Jima | B/1/24 | 610 | Private | WIA | |||
| INDIVIDUAL DECORATIONS: Purple Heart | LAST KNOWN RANK: Private First Class | ||||||
See Andy’s wartime photo collection, courtesy of Ashley Donaldson.
Andrew Thomas “Andy” Donaldson was born on 3 April 1920 in Mount Clemens, Michigan, the only child of Robert and Marion (Griffiths) Donaldson. Tragically, Robert contracted tuberculosis and passed away in 1930. Ten-year-old Andy was largely raised by his great-grandfather, Andrew Trew Donaldson. He found much to admire in the octogenarian “AT,” a real “rags-to-riches Scot” who came to work in Mount Clemens as a blacksmith in the 1860s. The family smithy grew into Donaldson Brothers foundry – for a time, the city’s largest industrial offering – and AT went on to become a school board member, bank president, and mayor of Mount Clemens for a four-year term. Andy grew up knowing he had big footsteps to follow.[1]
AT died in 1937 as his young protege was finishing high school. Andy, who had developed an interest in airplanes, applied to the University of Michigan; after two years, he transferred to Tri-State College in Angola, Indiana to study engineering.[2] Reminded of his great-grandfather’s work ethic, Andy returned home to Mount Clemens every summer to work for Macomb Ice Service – and, likely, to visit with Evelyn Richey, a young lady who lived just a few blocks away. They were married in May of 1942, right as Andy finished his degree in aeronautical engineering, and settled in Missouri.
Andy had dutifully registered for Selective Service in 1941, during one of his summers at home in Mount Clemens. With his engineering degree, he was likely employed in a vital defense industry after college – meaning he and Evelyn could enjoy their first two years of marriage together. However, in 1944 many deferments ended and Uncle Sam came calling. It seems that Andy Donaldson received an induction notice from his hometown draft board, which required him to travel back to Mount Clemens. He hoped to join the Navy – but several other men had the same idea, and Andy went to the back of the line.
As he waited, a Marine recruiter approached the group with a call for volunteers. Nobody moved. In the summer of 1944, the Marines were well known for hard fighting and heavy casualties – not a service to be joined lightly. Seeing his sales pitch fall flat, the Marine simply went down the line, hauling out his choices. Andy Donaldson was among those thus “volunteered” for the Corps. There was no grand ceremony – just a mass induction of men reciting an oath with hands raised, a stern order to be ready to leave that night, and a dire warning to “refrain from exposing yourself to possible venereal infection or the use of intoxicants.”[3] Andy picked up a postcard and scribbled a note to Evelyn. “They picked a group of us for the Marines and that is all there was to it,” he wrote. “We are leaving for San Diego tonite – do not write until you get my new address…. We have Pullman reservations, so it won’t be too bad going out there.” He signed off with a hopeful thought: “Trying to get in Air Corps.”[4] True to his word, Andy fired off a barrage of postcards as his troop train slowly made its way across the country to Recruit Depot San Diego.
With his college degree and relevant work experience, Andy must have expected assignment to an aviation unit after completing boot camp. However, these dreams were dashed with his assignment to an infantry training school. The Corps needed front line fighters more than flight mechanics, and Private Donaldson was instructed in the use of a 37mm anti-tank gun. One of his colleagues, James A. Moore, explained the atmosphere of the training camp:
“We trainees were under tremendous pressure to prepare for future engagements. Men with technical backgrounds were not needed, or even respected by the NCOs. As a matter of fact, they looked down their noses at all of these aircraft men that were being pulled into the Marine Corps.”[5]
He spent a few months hauling a cannon around the California mountains, firing at mock targets and getting acquainted with the other men in his training group. Several of them, by chance, would eventually fight together overseas.
Marines train with the 37mm anti-tank gun near Camp Pendleton, California in 1944.
The photographer, Lloyd E. Abbott, trained with Andy Donaldson and would later serve alongside him in B/1/24th Marines.
Towards the end of 1944, the entire training contingent – including Private Donaldson, Private Moore, Private Abbott, and almost a thousand others – were assigned en masse to a temporary unit called the 24th Replacement Draft. They shipped overseas to Hawaii, and were attached to the 4th Marine Division in preparation for an upcoming operation. “We trained as a separate unit from the division’s combat veterans,” remembered James Moore. However, this was not thought to be disadvantageous, as “we were told that our part in the battle would be that of observers, not combatants. Anti-tank men would be needed for Okinawa.”[6]
Thus thousands of green Marines shipped out from Hawaii in January 1945 expecting to see combat, but not actually participate in the fighting. As he sailed west aboard the USS Newberry, Andy Donaldson likely had two things on his mind: what to expect in the upcoming operation, and how Evelyn was faring at home. Shortly after he left for the Marines, “Ev” discovered she was pregnant; their child was due around the middle of February. As it happened, Andrew Thomas Donaldson Junior was born on 19 February 1945 – the very day Andy Donaldson arrived at Iwo Jima.
Private Moore remembered watching the landings from the deck of the Newberry, and the sudden shock of seeing Japanese artillery open fire all at once. After the first waves went ashore, the 24th Replacement Draft was detailed into working parties to unload ships on the beach.. “When we came back to our ship we were told that we wouldn’t be going back to the beach, and would we contribute blood,” Moore recalled. “However, those orders changed and we did go in. Some of these men who gave blood were shot and died of trauma.”[7]
On 24 February 1945, a contingent of the 24th Replacement Draft – including Privates Donaldson, Abbott, and Moore – were told to grab their gear and get ready to go ashore. They were going to fight after all, taking the place of killed or wounded Marines from front line infantry units. All the specialized training in anti-tank weapons went out the window: every Marine, after all, was expected to be a rifleman first and foremost.[8] According to James Moore, this detachment spent a day collecting and organizing discarded gear on the beach and awaiting further instructions.
“The next day, I was sent forward to a dugout where there was a man with a typewriter and a file system. He asked for my name, rank, and serial number. Then he handed me a V-Mail blank and told me to write home. ‘Remember, this might be your last letter ever to go out,’ he said.”[9]
Privates Donaldson, Abbott, and Moore were part of a group of thirty privates – mostly anti-tank men – placed under the charge of Gunnery Sergeant Wilton C. Fulton and Corporal Reuel D. Allison. They were taken up on the rolls of Baker Company, First Battalion, 24th Marines effective 24 February 1945; however, as that company was heavily engaged in combat at the time, they likely joined the ranks some time between the 26th and 28th – a period when the First Battalion was resting in reserve. The replacements had a little bit of time get acquainted with the world of Iwo Jima, and do a little exploring – although they had to be on constant alert for Japanese artillery or bypassed snipers as they poked around the ruined landscape.
All photographs courtesy Ashley Donaldson, from the Andrew T. Donaldson collection.
The First Battalion went back into action on 1 March 1945, assaulting an infamous defensive position known as the “Meat Grinder” for the way it chewed men up. Private Donaldson’s exact role in Baker Company is not known – he might have been assigned to carry stretchers like James Moore, or designated an assistant automatic rifleman like Private Lawrence “Slats” Trower, or any number of possibilities. His company was in the thick of the fighting starting on 3 March 1945, and Andy Donaldson probably lost his first friends in action on that day. Because they lacked the extensive training given to the 4th Marine Division back at Maui – and because they were almost all as green as grass, with only a few months in uniform – the replacements tended to become casualties very quickly.
Andy made it to 8 March 1945 before he was hit. “We were engaged with the enemy in rather rough territory,” recalled James Moore, who was also wounded that day. “It was all gulches and ledges and caves – plenty of cover for the enemy, but not much for us.” [10] Baker Company lost nine men killed and thirty-five wounded in a single day of fighting; it was one of the company’s single bloodiest days of the entire war. In the fracas, Andy Donaldson was hit by shell fragments in the left knee and hands. It was a “million dollar wound” – not permanently disabling, but debilitating enough to get him off the island for good.
Private Donaldson was sent back to the beach, then shuttled out to the hospital ship USS Solace lying at anchor offshore of Iwo Jima. The ship was soon filled to capacity and departed, carrying wounded men first to Saipan, and then on to Hawaii for treatment. Donaldson was admitted to Navy Hospital #128 at Pearl Harbor and spent a few weeks convalescing as his shrapnel wounds healed.
A medical survey deemed Donaldson fit for duty, and he returned to Baker Company in May of 1945. The 24th Marines was busily rebuilding its strength after the terrible bloodletting on Iwo Jima, and much of their time at Camp Maui was spent resting, training new Marines, and reorganizing squads, platoons, and companies. With the emergency of combat no longer a pressing issue, more care was taken in examining the backgrounds of individual men. In June, Andy Donaldson was transferred out of Baker Company to the Regimental Weapons Company – an outfit armed with the 37mm anti-tank guns he knew how to operate, and where he should have been all along. He was reunited with a number of his old buddies from training, all of whom had fought on Iwo with rifle companies, and got a chance to enjoy the occasional off-base liberty.
The administrative wheels were still turning for Andy Donaldson. As the war entered its final days, the need for anti-tank gunners faded. Men with technical backgrounds suddenly found their services required elsewhere. In the fall of 1945, Private Donaldson was at last transferred to an aviation unit – the Third Marine Air Wing at Ewa Field, just outside Pearl Harbor itself. On 31 December 1945, the “3rd MAW” was officially deactivated and its personnel reassigned or released for discharge. Andy Donaldson was eligible to return home, and arrived back in Mount Clemens in January 1946.
With the war behind him, Andy Donaldson was free to follow his chosen career path. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio; Andy was hired as an aeronautical engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and worked there for thirty years. He and Evelyn raised two children, Andrew and Wendy, and eventually became grandparents. In his spare time, Andy built detailed models of planes and the ships he sailed on during World War II. He displayed them in a cabinet beside a treasured souvenir – a small jar of black volcanic sand from Iwo Jima.[11]
Andy Donaldson passed away on 17 October 2010, at the age of ninety. He is buried in Dayton Memorial Park Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.
Footnotes
[1] Ashley Donaldson (granddaughter of Andy Donaldson), correspondence with the author, December 2020.
[2] Tri-State is now Trine University.
[3] From an order included with Andrew Donaldson’s effects, courtesy Ashley Donaldson.
[4] Andrew Donaldson to Evelyn Donaldson, 5 June 1944.
[5] “James Moore” in Bruce M. Petty, Saipan: Oral Histories of the Pacific War (McFarland & Company: Jefferson, NC, 2002), 109. Moore was a professional “aircraft man,” drafted out of an engineering job at Douglas Aircraft.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] All Marines spent time at the rifle range at the end of boot camp. While there was a minimum score to qualify, this seems to have been waived during wartime in the interest of getting more men through training, and some replacements arrived on Iwo barely understanding how their rifle worked or how to throw a grenade. Not so Private Donaldson, who is wearing the badge of an expert rifleman (the highest possible qualification) in his profile picture above.
[9] Moore, 109-110.
[10] Ibid., 110.
[11] Ashley Donaldson, correspondence with the author, December 2020.
Friend of his Grand Daughter Ashley, she shared it on social media and I’m a sucker for WWII history and first hand personal accounts from those who were there. Thank you for memorializing their stories for others to enjoy and respect the sacrifices of so many for the Grand Idea of protecting this Nation we all love and cherish.