September 16, 2005

Looking Back on Oroville’s Heroes

By Stu Shaner  533-8174

 

Bill Connelly and I are Co-Chairmen of the Oroville Veterans Memorial Park Committee.  If you would like to have a speaker at your club or organization, Ted Grainger and I would be happy to come and speak.  Please call me at 533-8147. Find us on the web at www.orovilleveteransmemorialpark.org.

 

Oroville Mercury February 19, 1944

 

Sgt. David Shaw Reported Lost    

Staff Sgt. David J. Shaw, 27, of Palermo, has been missing in action over Germany since Feb. 4, according to a telegram from the war department, received Friday afternoon by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. David F. Shaw.  Shaw was a bombardier on a Flying Fortress.  His parents said today he had been in combat since before Christmas, and had completed missions over Germany, Belgium, France and Holland.  He enlisted June 3, 1941, in the air corps.  At the time he was driving a truck for Guy Adams in Thermalito, but previously had worked for the Golden Feather Dredging Company.  The family moved to Palermo from Wisconsin in 1936.  Sgt. Shaw’s wife, Evelyn, is a teletype operator in the telegraph office in Wickenburg, Ariz.  They married last fall just before he left to go overseas.   The adjutant general’s office in Washington, in notifying Mrs. Shaw of her son’s death, said she would be kept informed if further details are received.

 

Italians Wash Clothes For Soldiers Amid Battle Ruins  

Pvt. Levulett Describes Effect Of War In Italy; Sees General Wilson    

Somewhere on the American Front in Italy on Jan. 14th, Pvt. Delos “Rip” Levulett, formerly of Oroville, penciled a letter to his mother, Mrs. R. H. Wallace of Klamath River, while he watched an Italian family.  The roof of the Italians’mudblock house had just been repaired after it had been caved in by an explosion.  The walls were all bullet marked.  The man, his wife and two small daughters all were working.  While the children washed the soldiers’ clothes, the father pruned a little vineyard and the mother cut grass for two oxen.  “They were more fortunate than most of the farmers,” Levulett wrote.  “They hid their little bunch of chickens and their sow.  She has a litter of pigs now.”  Most of the Italians along the battle lines find their main income in washing for the soldiers, the soldier said.  “And I believe half of them live on what they get around our kitchens…scraps and left-overs.  Levulett was due for guard duty that night so he wouldn’t get to see Joe E. Brown, who had come to entertain the soldiers.  He had missed seeing Humphrey Bogart and his show a couple days previously.  The day was nice.  But in another letter sent Nov. 29, Levulett told about endless days of wading in mud and of standing in line in the rain on Thanksgiving Day to eat turkey.  He told of having seen from a transport at sea Casablanca as a place of beauty and then of having found filth and squalor when he came ashore.  “The only Arabs I saw as we see them in movies was when I was riding on a train through a desert area.”  Shipped from Casablanca to Iran in small cars that had been used for livestock, he shared the crowded space with 29 other men for six days and nights.  The cars were half the size of an American boxcar, he said.  In Iran he was assigned to a replacement camp that was under the command of an Oroville man, Gen. Arthur Wilson.  Levulett wrote that he had seen Wilson several times.  After months in Iran, Levulett and his comrades had been loaded into the little boxcars again and shipped close to Bizerte.  Most of the men “went-over” to Sicily.  But about one-tenth of the contingent were held in Africa and then sent back to Iran, when the Sicilian campaign was well under way.  Levulett was among the latter.  In January, he was attached to an armored engineers battalion in Italy.  The letters were shown in Oroville Friday by Mrs. Wallace who was here on a visit. 

A brother of Pvt. Levulett, 1st Sgt. Elvin F. (Bud) Levulett is in the 43rd service group, with the army air corps in Italy.  The Red Cross has been endeavoring to arrange a meeting between SGt. Levulett and his brother.  Another brother, Master Sgt. Wilmer C. Levulett, who saw action in the Pacific with the air corps during the early part of the war, is now in Dalhart, Tex., where he is a line chief, in full charge of maintaining a squadron of B-17’s. 

 

Stu’s Notes:  This is all we know of Sgt. David Shaw.  Sad this is a Forgotten Veteran of Oroville, one of many.  Last weeks story about Jerry Walker brought word from Larry Shaner and Randy and John Fowler that he came home and worked for the Post Office and lived in Rancho Golden, now one of the million’s of WWII Veterans that have passed away.  I hope to see many of you at the steps of the Veterans Memorial building on Montgomery Street tonight at 6:30 p.m. as we remember those who were POW’s and are MIA’s. Some of their family members will be there.