by The soldiers’ mission was as dangerous as it was daring: a more than 500-mile journey through a mountainous jungle in northern Burma to seize a Japanese-controlled airfield in World War II.
The threats were constant: fierce attacks by superior numbers of enemy troops, monsoon rains, tropical diseases and malnutrition.
When the airfield was finally taken three months later, only 130 healthy soldiers remained of the 2,600 who had crossed into Burma in 1944 with the Merrill Marauders, a legendary unit that was one of the forerunners of the Army’s elite Special Operations. the 75th Ranger Regiment.
On Dec. 26, Russell Hamler, the last surviving member of the Merrill Marauders, died at a Pittsburgh veterans hospital, his son Jeffrey said. He was 99 years old.
Hamler left high school to enlist in the Army when he turned 18, in June 1942. Originally sent to Puerto Rico, he volunteered, like all the men of Merrill’s Marauders, for a secret mission with expected casualties of up to 85 percent. .
“Essentially, they didn’t think any of us would make it through,” Hamler said. remembered many years ago.
Mr. Hamler, a private first class, was not the unit’s leader. But he experienced the full brunt of jungle combat behind enemy lines as much as any member. He fought in three of his five major battles, as well as many smaller engagements, armed with a Thompson submachine gun.
“The jungles were full of Japanese,” he said. remembered. “We shot a lot because they kept coming.”
After Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded Southeast Asia and captured Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indochina. An American general, Joseph Stilwell, was forced to make a humiliating withdrawal from Burma (now Myanmar). Allied leaders agreed in 1943 to send a force back to Burma, what Winston Churchill called “the most formidable fighting country imaginable.” It would be a long-range penetration unit, challenging Japanese control of the northern half of the country. The men would only have the weapons and supplies they could carry on mules or on their backs, and additional supplies would occasionally be dropped from planes by parachute.
General Stilwell appointed General Frank Merrill to command the unit, officially the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional).
The dense bamboos, tangled vines, and banyan trees of the jungle, where men marched single file in stifling tropical heat and humidity, were as much an enemy as the Japanese. Dysentery and malaria were endemic.
Hamler walked until his boots had holes, then walked barefoot before receiving new shoes on one of the parachute drops, he recalled in 2022 in a published interview with Carole Ortenzo, a retired Army colonel and member of Mr. Hamler’s extended family. The leeches sucked blood from her limbs and the insects “pierced your arms,” she said.
The army primarily supplied K rations, providing only 2,830 calories a day to men who burned much more energy. Hungry soldiers threw grenades into rivers, skimmed dead fish floating on the surface, and cooked them in their helmets.
“There had to be absolute silence at night in the jungle because any noise invited bombing by the Japanese,” Hamler said. Couples of men dug trenches so that one could sleep while his friend stood sentinel. When it was time to change roles, the sentry pulled a rope tied to the sleeping man to wake him up without making a sound.
In one of the Marauders fiercest battlesBeginning in late March, Mr. Hamler’s Second Battalion was entrenched in a hilltop village called Nhpum Ga, which was surrounded.
In a siege that lasted 10 days, the Japanese fired mortars and heavy artillery before banzai charges by intrepid soldiers willing to meet volleys from the Americans’ Browning machine guns. The Japanese advanced close enough to mock the battalion’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. George McGee, for his name, according to a 2013 story, “Merrill’s Marauders,” by Gavin Mortimer. A Japanese-American interpreter for the Marauders, Roy Matsumoto, got close enough to enemy lines to hear of a planned dawn attack and then alerted his comrades about it.
The mules killed in the raid rotted and attracted swarms of worms. When they ran out of drinking water, the men suffered dehydration and delirium and attempted to cut bamboo to suck water from their joints.
Early in the fighting at Nhpum Ga, Hamler was hit in the hip by a mortar fragment and remained pinned in his trench for more than 10 days, until Americans from the Third Battalion stormed the village, at the time named ” Maggot.” Hill” by the Americans, and the Japanese withdrew.
The Marauders lost 57 men, 302 wounded and 400 enemy corpses. General Merrill himself suffered a heart attack just before the siege and was evacuated.
Command of the Marauders passed to Colonel Charles N. Hunter, who later wrote a critical report accusing General Stilwell of sending men still recovering from jungle illnesses back into combat. The report sparked a congressional investigation.
A 1962 film, “Merrill’s Marauders,” directed by Samuel Fuller, made a hero of General Merrill but horrified many veterans of the unit, including some who considered Colonel Hunter their true leader, according to Mortimer’s book.
In May 1944, three months after the Marauders entered Burma, the airstrip of the heavily fortified town of Myitkyina, the key objective of the mission, fell to the American and Chinese troops who had reinforced them. In August, the city itself was captured. The Marauders disbanded a week later.
All said, the unit suffered 93 combat deaths in Burma and 30 deaths from disease; 293 more men were wounded; eight were missing. Another 1,970 men were hospitalized at one point due to illnesses, including 72 with what was described as “psychoneuroses.”
After the Battle of Nhpum Ga, Hamler was evacuated in April to northern India, where he spent five weeks in a hospital. He was transferred back to Pennsylvania and he served as a military policeman until he was discharged in December 1945. He was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.
He became a mechanic for Trans World Airlines and retired in 1985.
Russell Hamler was born on June 24, 1924 in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, the son of Robert Hamler, co-owner of a bus company, and Margaret (Schweig) Hamler. He attended Mt. Lebanon High School.
In addition to his son Jeffrey, Mr. Hamler is survived by another son, James. His wife of 71 years, Imelda Hamler, known as Jean, died in 2018.
In 2022, the Merrill Marauders were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, after a lobbying campaign by a handful of veterans and surviving family members.
Mr. Hamler received his medal in a ceremony near your house. He said that “people who have not killed” do not realize the horror of war. Speaking of the children dying in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said: “I would like to see them ban wars.”
He proposed a body of international leaders to solve the world’s problems. “This group would get together and solve things with words instead of bullets,” he said. “I would like to see a world at peace.”
