It was the summer of 1944 and Joseph Nemes, fresh out of high school and about to turn 18, decided to swap out farm tilling for island hopping.
“I wanted to see the world,” says Nemes, who lives with his wife, Della, at her childhood home in Plainsboro. “My father was quite willing to let me go from the farm to the service. Everyone at that time was war-conscious.”
During World War II, Nemes lived on his family’s 40-acre farm on Grandview Road in Skillman. The farm was located on a hill, with more than 800 chickens producing eggs and fields of corn, wheat, barley, and oats. On clear days, the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty were visible. The road was named so after local officials visited the farm and Nemes’ mother exclaimed, “What a grand view!”
He was exempt from the draft, for the authorities wanted the family to raise food. Nemes, who turns 89 later this year, fondly recalls climbing onto a tractor as an 11-year-old, but his older self was more restless.
After enlisting in the Navy, Nemes underwent basic training and was assigned to the Naval Construction Forces, commonly known as the Seabees. The assignment was pure chance, or as he saw it then, disappointment. There was a list of more than 500 recruits, and a line was drawn straight through the list. The names on one side of the line became Seabees, and the other group was assigned to the USS New Jersey.
In the summer of 1945 Nemes was commissioned as a Seabee, 147th Construction Battalion, and he shipped out for the Pacific. The European front against Germany had concluded by then, but Japan had not yet been subdued.
Nemes estimates he landed on six to seven islands, finally settling on Okinawa, the launch pad for an anticipated invasion of the Japanese mainland. He would be stationed until 1947 at Okinawa, where the U.S. still maintains a military presence.
“The Seabees did everything from setting up the barracks to building the tents. The battalions needed food and a place to eat. You had to be organized when you took an island over,” Nemes says. “We had big pontoons in our ships. We latched six to eight together, put a tank on them, moved it from the ship up onto the beach, and handed the tank over to other soldiers. We built airfields too, with 1,000-foot landing strips. We would supply the gas and oil, whatever was needed.”
He frequently exchanged letters with Della, his high school sweetheart at the time. In a letter dated January 4, 1946, Nemes informs Della of his surprise promotion to Carpenter’s Mate Third Class, and the labor demanded of Seabees.
“I wish I had more time to write, but I need some sleep bad,” wrote Nemes. “I ache all over from the work today. We finished the foundations…I need the rest. We did a day’s pouring of cement in a half a day and we feel it too.”
Before the U.S. attempted to occupy an island, aerial bombings and Navy ship turrets would pulverize the land mass. Though Nemes’ responsibilities were not combat-oriented, he recalls the cagey tactics carried out by Japanese soldiers once their organized resistance was neutralized.
“It was kill or be killed,” Nemes says. “We had to fight the Japanese. Of course they were hiding in the trees, bushes, hills. Height was important. It was mountainous, there was no flat land. All the islands were like that, but Okinawa was the biggest. We used bulldozers as defense mechanisms, you could raise the blade six to nine feet high. The Japanese were hiding in trees, even wearing green, and shooting down at us.”
Japanese soldiers holed up in the intricate tunnel networks inside the island mountains. For hundreds of years the Ryukyuans, ethnically distinct from the Japanese, lived on Okinawa and the surrounding Ryukyu islands. They carved out tunnels in the mountains, which had multiple entrances, to bury their dead. (As a Seabee, Nemes was also impressed with the natives’ six-foot wide paths that circled the mountain. Both sides of the path were used to grow vegetables.)
“When we had taken over the islands, the first thing the Japanese do is head for the cave tombs,” Nemes says. “The islanders buried their dead in caves [because] the ground was too hard to dig into, there was a lot of shale. The natives placed beautiful caskets in tunnels. At night the Japanese used to come out and attack us and steal the food and ammunition, anything they could use to stay alive.”
The rogue soldiers would be a constant thorn for the U.S. occupiers. Even after the Japanese government surrendered, Nemes says there was trouble communicating with isolated soldiers on islands throughout the Pacific.
After conquering Okinawa, the remnants of war were easily apparent. In late October of 1945, Nemes rode around the island in an “overgrown jeep” with several of his comrades. He found a partially burned Japanese letter in one of the caves and mailed the stamp to Della for her collection.
“We went to Naha, Shuri line, our main battle line, Skyline Ridge and Suicide Clife,” Nemes wrote on October 29, 1945. “That is where the main battle was fought. We drove through roads that hadn’t been used since the battle. The battlefield was full of junked tanks, ammunition, and big guns. No one had bothered to bury any dead Japs so the smell was terrific. There still were quite a few unexploded land mines.”
Weather events in Okinawa were far more fearsome in the Pacific than in central New Jersey. Even when the weather was calm one had to be careful to avoid the steep cliffs.
The tombs provided refuge for Nemes and his comrades in the fall of 1945, when typhoons devastated the island.
“The winds were 200 miles. It was so fast it couldn’t even be registered,” Nemes says. “I remember waking up, I was in a canvas tent, and one of the chains was hitting me on the side. The wind was so bad you couldn’t walk. We crawled to a tomb. There were 175 ships. We probably lost half of them.”
Nemes describes one typhoon in a September 17, 1945, letter to Della.
“I spent all of last night trying to keep our tent up, had no sleep at all. We braced our frame with two by fours but they snapped like match sticks … We anchored our tents to trucks, bulldozers, rollers, road scrapers, every piece of machinery we could bring up the hill. Despite my efforts and everyone else in this tent, the tent was flattened out … The rain came down like hail. It went right through our heavy canvas tents, just tearing rips in them … All the electric poles on the island were snapped… Roads were washed out, the big piers we built were washed out. A 33-ton steel tank toppled into the ocean. Eight bodies were washed up on Brown Beach alone … I passed a scout plane airport. Some of the planes that were tied down and their wings ripped off by the winds, other were turned upside down.”
The specter of a typhoon or tidal wave were tumultuous weather events, even if the storm missed Okinawa.
“We had a typhoon and tidal wave warning,” wrote Nemes on April 3, 1946. “We nailed down all windows and barred doors, picked up and burned everything that might fly in a typhoon … Then the dump exploded. We still don’t know how … The dry grass and trees began to burn … Everyone took to the hills expecting the tidal wave. All the planes on Yonabaru Airfield took off for airfields in China. All trucks were driven on top of the hills. The Commander had all guards and officers on 24 hour watch… Needless to say everyone worked overtime and no pay for it … Everything was mixed up. Yet these orders [from the commander], typhoon get off the hills, tidal wave get on the hills. Such a life. Everything and nothing happens.”
Seafaring was treacherous as well. Below deck one day, Nemes was distracted by a loud banging against the hull of the ship. Clambering onto the deck, he peered over the railing and saw a sea mine more than six feet wide. It had unmoored from the ocean bottom and floated to the surface, apparently inert. The ship sailed past the mine, but Nemes says they turned around to destroy the mine. The mine exploded after several shots, shattering the ship’s window and damaging the bow.
“The mine kept pounding against the ship, but it didn’t explode,” Nemes says. “It almost sank the ship anyway.
While the broad events of the Pacific theater are well known now, at the time active rank-and-file servicemen like Nemes were left in the dark. They simply had to follow orders.
“A lot of things were kept secret from us,” Nemes says. “A lot of the times, going island from island, we didn’t know where we were going. They never told us when we were landing. You just had to be ready.”
Nemes was in Okinawa when the U.S. decided to drop the bomb, and like the rest of the world he learned about it after the fact.
“At the time we didn’t realize how powerful those bombs were,” Nemes says. “The Japanese cities were made out of wood. When those bombs went out, everything burned.”
While abroad, Nemes stayed in touch with high school sweetheart Della Stout via mail. Joe graduated from Princeton High School in 1944, and in his senior year he met Della, then a freshman. All the mail was also subject to classification and censorship. Before mailing pictures of Okinawa back home, Nemes had to get permission from the censor.
“Anything they mentioned, a name or place, they cut it out,” Della says. “Sometimes you had a letter, it had hardly anything to read.”
She still has hundreds of “lovey dovey” letters from “J.J.” The two planned on getting married upon his return.
Even though World War II ended, Nemes was ordered to remain at Okinawa to maintain the military facilities. That did not stop him from sending Della a Christmas present however.
“This skirt is made out of nylon parachute cords,” Nemes wrote on December 12, 1945. “The different colors are because the parachutes were supply parachutes, dropped to our troops from planes during the battle here. This isn’t exactly a grass skirt, all it lacks is grass and you in it…It was the best I could do here. I only wish I could give this to you in person. Until then sweet I can think of you and wait to hold you in my arms again. Happy birthday and Merry Christmas.”
In a letter dated April 3, 1946, an impatient Nemes has still not received any news about his discharge.
“Darn I miss you darling, more and more each day if that’s possible,” Nemes wrote. “Every second without you seems like a year. Remember how we went canoeing in the lake. We will have to go again this summer. Darling there is so much we have to do and see together.”
“When he went to war, I fooled around a little bit, and we got married after he came back,” Della says with a laugh. “I didn’t want to miss any dances.”
During the war, she remembers the yellow coloring her mother would add to lard to mimic butter, which was not available. Sugar and gas was also rationed, and Della’s neighbors gave the Stout family stamps so they could acquire extra sugar for the six children.
Shortly after Joe returned from abroad, they got married at Plainsboro Presbyterian Church in 1949. They recently celebrated their 66th anniversary with family at Mastoris in Bordentown, and the next day the couple attended the Memorial Day Parade in Cranbury.
Della was born and raised right across the street from the Presbyterian Church in a Parkway Avenue home where the two still reside. Della’s father, a carpenter, built the house in 1926 for Della and her five siblings. Della’s mother was a school teacher, and she says the Stout family can trace its lineage to the Mayflower.
Soon after marrying, Joe and Della moved to an apartment overlooking Palmer Square. The rent was $45.50 a month. Under the tutelage of her sister, Della worked as a bookkeeper for Princeton Municipal Improvement Inc., which managed the Palmer Square apartments, Nassau Tavern, and the Playhouse and Garden theaters.
Husband Joe worked at the American Cyanamid facility in Bound Brook for more than 25 years. He took some night classes at Rutgers, but he learned on the job at the factories and worked his way up.
“I started at American Cyanamid in the quality control department,” says Nemes, who mainly worked on the finishing of textile materials. “I was making 75 cents an hour. That was a lot of money. I worked my way up until I had a research laboratory with 20 people, and we did all the testing.”
They saved all of Della’s income, and had a child nine years after getting married, the first of three. The first big family house was in Bridgewater. Della’s father built the frame, and Joe’s father, a longtime electrician at Johns Manville, installed the electric wiring.
Joe later left Cyanamid to join the family retail business full time. The Nemes family opened a store in 1950, at first selling refrigerators and Philco TVs.
“There was nothing electrical my father couldn’t fix,” Nemes says. “I got more interested in engines, tractors, and lawn mowers. I did it as a part-ime thing. I used to come home around 5 p.m. and worked at the store until 11 p.m. The store is still open, but it’s hand-to-mouth these days.”
His store, Joseph J Nemes & Sons, is currently located on Route 206 in Montgomery. Nemes’ son manages the store, his daughter does the bookkeeping, and his grandson does pick up and delivery.
Joe and Della moved from Hillsborough back to Della’s childhood home three years ago, and they spend their winters in Florida. Their three children, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren all live in New Jersey. Nemes also has two younger brothers who served in the U.S. military. Bob fought in Korea, while Patty served in Vietnam.
They are still involved with the Plainsboro Presbyterian Church and both remain in good health, though Joe’s memory is rickety at times.
“I thought I based life first on love, the years in between are respect, the last few years are patience with each other,” Della says. “That’s the theory of living with my husband. We have lived blessed lives.”
