Marine Served at Guadalcanal and in Korea



Once a Marine, always a Marine.  Lee Lease poses with various medals awarded him during WWII and Korea.
ST. MARY’S TODAY photo

ST. MARY’S TODAY

CHARLOTTE HALL — That dark day December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor changed the life of Elmer “Lee” Lease, 17, for good.
“I wanted to get in there and get revenge on what had happened,” Lease, now 81, said.
The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor became a defining moment in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy’s battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire’s southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant.
“I hated the Japs.” After the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, “I hated everybody. That’s the nature in me.”
Lee is a highly-decorated hero of the Battle of the Guadalcanal and is now residing at the Charlotte Hall Veterans Home. The Battle of Guadalcanal was the first major American offensive of World War II. The operation launched just two days after Lee’s 18th birthday, and won his Ist Marine Division its first of three Presidential Unit Citations.
“It was December 1941, that’s when I decided to join the Marines,” Lee said.
Lee served in the 1st Marine Division, which is the oldest, largest and most decorated division-sized unit.
Asked about his feelings during the war, Lee said, “I didn’t feel too good. I hated it.”
He said he was at home in Baltimore when Pearl Harbor was attacked. “I was on leave from boot camp.” He recalled his boot camp took place at North Carolina.
Lee was wounded in action during the Battle of Guadalcanal.
Guadalcanal is situated in the middle of the Long Solomon Islands chain, northeast of Australia. The location of the Solomons made them a key to Japanese plans for cutting off shipping between the US and Australia.
The first Marine Division had performed an amphibious landing on Guadalcanal.
In September of 1942, 6000 Japanese troops mounted a night assault against 1,000 U.S. Marines from the south with the goal of taking back a strategic airfield. The Battle of Edson’s Ridge began on September 11th and continued until the 14th before the attack was finally beaten back by the Marines. Lee was one of them.
“I was wounded with heavy shrapnel on my left arm during heavy fighting at Guadalcanal,” he said. He was then dispatched to a hospital in New Caledonia to recuperate. “After that I went back to my outfit.” He was again involved in heavy combat.
Lee said he was with the Sixth Marine Division when he went to Okinawa in Japan on April Fool’s day in 1945.
He said he was hurt on the day the Japanese surrendered. “I was going to a rice paddy. That was when I got hit in my foot,” Lee points at his right foot.
“Evidently some of the Japanese had not got word (of the surrender) and that was when I was hit,” he said.
He smiles humbly about his foreign exploits and said he had been to Japan, Cuba and Korea.
And when the Korean War began, “I went to Korea with the combat engineers.”
He said it was colder than hell in Korea, where he was stationed for seven months.
Military records show, in the Korean War too Lee had put his life in the line of fire. He is a hero of the Battle of Inchon, codenamed Operation Chromite, launched on September 15 1950. Gen Douglas MacArthur was holding the command.
During the Korean war, Lee took part in what came to be known as the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. But he jokes he was a “frozen chosen” there. “I don’t want to talk about that one,” he said. As many as 4,000 marines were wounded, but the sub-zero temperatures inflicted even more casualties than the Chinese. Though defeated, military historians call that battle a moral victory for the United States.
In that battle under MacArthur’s command 20,000 U.S. and U.N. troops faced a Yellow Giant ten times their size: 200,000 People’s Liberation Army.
Lee now wants to know where his beloved daughter is. “I got Patty. That’s my baby.”
Asked where his daughter was living now, he said, “That I would like to know.”
Lee said he was just four when he lost his parents and was brought up in an orphanage at Owings Mill, Maryland. The youngest of three, Lee has a brother and a sister.
Lee has a son and daughter and three grandchildren. “My son Arthur Leroy lives in Solomon Island.”