Watson, Jack

Jack Watson was born March 9, 1924 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  His mother died when Jack was only 10, and family circumstances saw Jack and his siblings put into an orphanage.  The times were difficult for the family, but Jack worked hard there and at the monastery school he attended during most of his teen years, finding ways to keep busy in Depression-era Pittsburgh.  He was a junior in high school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and while Jack followed the news about the war, he did not understand the implications of this moment at first.  He went on to graduate high school and enrolled in Penn State for the fall of 1942, but he quickly realized that school was not for him at this point, and he enlisted in the Marines.  Soon he was off to Paris Island for basic training, and Jack remembers it as a tough physical test.  He was selected for special training, as it was decided that Jack would be ideal for a radio/radar specialization, a program he began at Camp Lejeune that would see him move on to Chicago and Grove City and finally Treasure Island. All that specialized training saw Jack declared an essential non-combatant, but the circumstances changed and Jack found himself on Maui, part of the 24th Marines.  This was a combat unit, and after intense training in Hawaii, then men set off across the Pacific on their way to Iwo Jima.  They were to be held in reserve, but the plans did not unfold the way the top brass would have liked, and a 3-day plan turned into one month of intense combat, where the 24th were called upon to do their part.  Jack found himself in life-altering hand-to-hand combat on a number of occasions, as he and his men worked to dislodge the stubborn Japanese forces.  They did survive that, and afterwards they were back in Hawaii, training for the invasion of Japan itself.  Jack remembers that they did not expect to survive that, and that they greeted the news of Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb with relief.  Training in Maui wrapped up, and the men were sent back home based on their points accumulated.  Jack received his discharge in Chicago, and he returned to Pittsburgh, ready to put the demons of combat away and to figure out his place in postwar America.  We interviewed Jack via zoom in January 2021 – a special thank you to the Veterans’ Breakfast Club and Jack’s daughter Sue for facilitating this.