JAY — Looking into the waters of Pearl Harbor to see the remains of the battleship USS Arizona is something Lincoln Grush of Jay will never forget.
Grush was not there the day 104 Japanese planes attacked American ships anchored in the harbor on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. He was in his first year of college, but another year would see him flying B-25 bombing missions in the South Pacific.
His visit to Pearl Harbor came nearly 50 years later when members of his squadron — part of the 345th Bombing Group — gathered in Hawaii for a reunion in the 1980s.
The visit to the Arizona Memorial was a somber event.
“It was obviously quite a thing they went through,” he said. “We thought about how many went down with the ship and never came up.”
A visit to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu was another reminder of the lives lost. There were rows and rows of white crosses with names written across them, his wife, Gloria, said. Most were only 19 to 22 years old, she said.
“You look down at the Arizona Memorial and know some are still there,” she said.
Oil from the ship’s decaying tanks cast a visible sheen across the water, he said.
Grush piloted B-25s and a C-47, an unarmed plane carrying freight and personnel over enemy territory.
He flew from 1942 to 1945 and at the end he piloted a B-25 carrying Japanese officials to Gen. Douglas MacArthur to surrender. The planes were painted white to avoid an attack, he said.
His first few missions were flown at about 15,000 feet, but the pilots couldn’t see anything so his commanders ordered the low flights over water and in between mountains.
Flying at 20 to 50 feet, bombs had parachutes to give the pilots a little time to get out of the area, he said.
It was a trip across water that put him on the receiving end of a bomb. A ship he was on was hit by a kamikaze plane. The hit centered below deck where the enlisted men were, Gloria said.
Grush went down with other officers to help and saw a mass of dead and wounded soldiers. Many had missing limbs, he said. Despite a blackout, lights were left on to guide the ship which came to remove the dead and wounded, she said. The lights posed another opportunity for attack.
He earned a Bronze Star for his efforts to help, she said.
His wife and family had no idea what he had experienced. He said he flew a few missions. Any information written home was blacked out of his letters, she said.
He came home with combat fatigue. He lost weight and had nightmares. But he didn’t talk much about his experiences until about seven years ago when he was asked to speak at a Wilton veterans service, she said.
After his stint in the service, he returned to Massachusetts and went to work for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was asked to help with development of an air defense system for the United States. He flew a lot to test the equipment, he said.
He went back to college and became a teacher.
The couple moved to Maine in 1967, and Grush taught at Jay High School while starting a business in North Jay called Moose Horn Trading Post.
abryant@sunmediagroup.net
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