TERRE HAUTE —
In 1943, 19-year-old Ezell Odom was on the sandy beach of a tiny South Pacific island about 7,000 miles from his parent’s home in Terre Haute.
Odom was lying flat on his stomach, looking down the barrel of a rifle, watching for any sign of a Japanese attack.
He was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, serving on the tiny Pacific atoll of Funafuti, about 2,600 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands. He was part of a U.S. military effort to keep the Japanese out of the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the last years of World War II.
“I laid out on the beach many a night looking down a rifle barrel, my squad behind me,” Odom said. “My job was to protect the water distributing unit.”
In addition to being a proud Marine, Odom has the distinction of being one of about 300 Montford Point Marines still living. Montford Point — a U.S. military training facility near Camp Lejeune in North Carolina — is where slightly more than 19,000 of America’s first black Marines received training from 1942 to 1949.
The now 88-year-old veteran, along with his wife, Lillian, spoke with the Tribune-Star last week in their Terre Haute home.
Joining “A Few
Good Men”
Odom was born in the north-central Tennessee hamlet of Cross Plains. He met Lillian at Union High School in Gallatin. The couple will celebrate 63 years of marriage this summer. They are the parents of three daughters and have seen their family grow with the addition of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even four great-great-grandkids.
Odom’s father and mother, Thurman and Roberta Odom, moved to Terre Haute in 1942. But Ezell Odom, after attending Wiley High School for only one week, returned to Tennessee to finish school because many of his classes wouldn’t transfer.
“The counselor up there at Wiley told me, she said, ‘You’ve got enough credits to get you halfway through Indiana State [University], but they’re no good here,” Odom recalled.
Five days after finishing high school, Odom had to report for military service. It was the spring of 1943 and World War II was raging. Odom took a couple of days to visit his folks in Terre Haute, then returned to Tennessee to enlist at an Army camp in Tullahoma. It was there, in a room full of about 350 other young black men, that a marine recruiter noticed Odom.
“What about you, slim? Interested in the Marine Corps?” the recruiter asked.
Odom wanted to join the Army Air Corps. A tremor in his hand might have prevented him from being a pilot, but he still hoped to be in the air in some capacity. But, on that particular day, the Army didn’t need any more Air Corps members, Odom learned. The next thing he knew, he was a Marine.
Bombing raids
According to Odom’s book, “A Montford Point Marine,” which is available at the Vigo County Public Library, the eight-week Marine boot camp was “hell,” but he survived it. Eventually, after still more training, Odom found himself in the Marine’s Seventh Depot Company aboard a transport ship that would cross the equator and eventually reach the Solomon Islands in the western Pacific. There, Odom and fellow Marines boarded “an old rusty freighter” — dating back, Odom believes, to World War I — and set out for Funafuti, a cluster of South Pacific islands in as remote a location as exists anywhere on earth.
Upon their arrival at Funafuti, the Marines set about digging fox holes.
“It was just like trying to dig out in the street,” Odom recalled of the volcanic rock terrain. Still, the Marines soon found a good reason to dig: Japanese air raids.
Not long after Odom’s arrival, the Japanese bombed Funafuti. Their goal was to knock out a small airstrip just north of the tiny island that was home to Odom and his fellow Montford Point Marines.
“I was living right here,” Odom said, pointing to an island on a hand-drawn map of Funafuti. “Some of the bombs fell clear down to there and I lived right there.”
The true horror of the war hit home the next night, in yet another Japanese bombing raid. This time, two Navy sailors who were maintaining the nearby airstrip were killed when a bomb scored a “direct hit” in their fox hole, Odom recalled.
“They picked them up in five-gallon cans,” he said.
On-the-job training
After those raids, the fighting moved north and for months, there was little action on Funafuti. What was once a bustling harbor became practically devoid of ships, Odom said. It wasn’t even clear if the military’s top brass remembered there were Americans there. Indeed, at one point during Odom’s service, his mother received a letter from the Navy asking if she knew the whereabouts of her son.
“Of course, she didn’t know where I was,” Odom said, laughing. “I didn’t know where I was. In World War II, they didn’t tell you where you were going, and most of you didn’t know where you were when you got there.”
As was normal during the war, Odom’s letters home were censored to delete any reference to where he was stationed.
“I received several letters with big holes in them,” Lillian Odom said.
After some time, a transport ship finally arrived to convey the Montford Point Marines to their next destination, Hawaii, where Odom would spend several months until the end of the war.
While in Hawaii, the Marines continued to make contributions to the war effort in various ways. Odom, by now a “three-stripe sergeant,” replaced a corporal, who was in charge of heavy equipment. Odom recalls how he learned to operate a crane for loading and unloading cargo. The corporal, who was white, demonstrated using the crane once, then had Odom repeat the task. The corporal told Odom to move a second load, which he did. But by the time Odom turned around, the corporal was gone.
“That dude took off and I haven’t seen him since,” Odom said, adding that was all the training he received. The next day, Odom taught two of his companions how to work the crane.
Incomplete records
Contrary to military policy at the time, Odom and other Montford Point Marines often worked side-by-side with white Marines.
“We became more integrated quicker than the regular services because there were just a few of us,” Odom recalls. “The [policy] was they’d never put you together, but they had to. So we got to be known as the ‘integrated outfit. There wasn’t no way you could perform your duty without being together.”
Despite the various duties Odom performed in the war, his discharge papers only credit him with being a “stevedore,” someone who loads and unloads ships. Odom commanded a squad that handled dump trucks, cranes, road and pier building equipment and more, but his discharge papers do not reflect any of that work. Nor do they show he served in Hawaii.
“We did everything,” Odom said. “We got no credit for it at all. There’s nothing on the back of my discharge that says anything about any of that service I did there.” And when it comes to noting any combat experience, Odom’s record simply states: “None.”
That omission troubled Odom for many years, he said. The Marine’s official policy was to limit black troops to common labor, he said. And black Marines were not to serve with any white Marines of lesser rank.
At the time Odom served, he was unaware of the Marine Corps policies.
“A whole lot of things about blacks in the Marine Corps that I didn’t know till I was out,” he said. “Had I known it before I went in, I probably wouldn’t have went in.”
“I’m on my way home”
Still, Odom is a proud Marine veteran. He is a member of the VFW as well as the Marine Corps League.
Yet, “I don’t go to them,” he said.
While Odom never had any desire to make a career out of military service, he did undertake civilian jobs for the Army and the Air Force before ending his career as an employee of the U.S. penitentiary at Terre Haute.
“I’m not a career military type,” he said. “Now, in a war, there’s a reason to be in the service. But when the war is over, I’m over.” When the war ended and Odom returned to Montford Point to be formally discharged, he was told he could earn a fourth stripe if he would re-enlist for another 69 days.
“I said, ‘Thank you, but no thanks. I don’t need it now. I’m on my way home,’” Odom recalled. “To me, the military is for war and war is hell and hell ain’t no place I want to spend a career.”
Presidential honor
• On Nov. 23, 2011, President Obama signed a bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the Montford Point Marines. Along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal is the nation’s highest civilian honor.
• For more information on the Montford Point Marines, visit the Montford Point Marine Association website at www.montfordpointmarines.com.
Arthur Foulkes can be reached at (812) 231-4232 or arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com.
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