Remembering the Pacific

When 19-year-old Herman Eli Soblick was drafted into the Army in June 1944, he was following in his family’s footsteps. Soblick’s father, a Russian immigrant, had served in World War I, and was disabled after being gassed as a prisoner of war. Herman’s two older brothers, Ira and Sam, were drafted into the Army to serve in World War II shortly before he was.

“My father told us, ‘Be a good soldier and you’ll come home,’” recalled Soblick, who is now 87. “And we all did.”

Soblick not only survived more than a year of service in the war, but avoided serious injury. Many of his companions in the 81st Infantry, known as the “Wildcat Division,” weren’t so lucky. Forty-eight percent of the soldiers in the Wildcat Division were killed in the war.

After Soblick was drafted, he spent a couple of months training at Camp San Luis Obispo in California before being sent to Hawaii for jungle training with the Army’s 70th Infantry Division, the “Trailblazers,” and then joined the Wildcats on the Palau Islands, specifically on Angaur, an island shaped like a pork chop 500 miles east of the Philippines.

Soblick and the Wildcats fought the Japanese in the Battle of Angaur in September 1944. In two weeks of battle, they faced Japanese tanks firing, at times, from only 200 yards away, as well as machine-gun and rifle fire. While moving along the Western Railroad through Bloody Gulch, Angaur, Soblick was hit by a piece of shrapnel. He later received a Purple Heart for the injury.

Another time in Angaur, Soblick said, he was shot at by a soldier or soldiers somewhere above him, possibly on a cliff, as he was walking through a large, grassy area. He ran quickly, zigzagging in order to throw off the shooters, and somehow was never hit once, though he saw bullets hit the ground in front of him. Later, while examining his clothes, he found a bullet hole in his pant leg.

“Somebody up there was looking out for me,” he said.