E AST O REGONIAN
WEEKEND, SEPTEMBER 21, 2019
Honored
to serve
Pendleton resident celebrates 98th birthday,
reflects on service during World War II
Staff photos by Ben Lonergan
Walt Ronish, a 98-year-old World War II veteran, stands for a portrait in the living room of his daughter’s Pendleton home wearing his Army uniform jacket.
By PHIL WRIGHT
East Oregonian
PENDLETON — Walt Ronish of Pendleton cele-
brated his 98th birthday Monday, Sept. 2, Labor Day.
At 98 years and a day, he recalled some of his labor
from World War II.
“We were all gung-ho in those days, you know
that,” he said.
Gung-ho to enlist in the military and take on the
Axis powers in Europe and Asia. But Ronish didn’t
get to go in when the United States entered the war in
December 1941. He was a logger in Denton, Montana,
he said, and that earned him deferments. But by the
summer 1944, he was aching to go. His uncles served
in the Army in the First World War, so the Army it
would be for him.
“I wanted to serve like the rest of the boys,” he
said, and he told his boss he was going and he told
his wife, Glenola. They had been married about three
years.
The Army sent him to Camp Robin, California, for
basic training. He learned to be an auto mechanic and
to use a rifl e and bayonet. The training, he said, was
to the point: “You either were doing good or you got
booted in the butt.”
Ronish graduated from basic on July 24, 1944.
That memory still brings a lump in his throat.
“It was good seeing all them boys,” Ronish said. “I
was proud — that’s what I’m trying to say.”
Ronish said he no longer recalls the units he served
in. Those numbers and designations have faded in his
mind. But he remembered getting seasick on the ride
over to fi ght in Japan and Asia. He didn’t see heavy
combat but served in New Guinea, the Philippines
and Okinawa. The amphibious assault of Zambo-
anga in the Philippines carries one of his most pain-
ful memories.
After U.S. forces secured Zamboanga, Ronish
said, he and other soldiers were above an airfi eld and
watched as a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver fl ew by. They
waved at the two-seater fi ghter plane. Several hun-
dred feet later the engine conked out and the plane
crashed into the waters off the island. The two men
inside died.
He choked up. He said that was hard to see them
go that way.
Ronish said he never took a bullet but broke his
ankle at the battle of Okinawa. That effectively
ended his time in the fi eld. The Army fl ew him in a
big Douglas C-54 Skymaster to a hospital in Guam.
There, he said, he “got the yellow jaundice.”
Infectious hepatitis was the top nuisance of the
war. The disease attacks the liver, thus jaundice is an
obvious symptom.
“I turned yellow,” Ronish said. “I mean I was yel-
low. I was as yellow as a pill.”
Many of the men were just as sick from the disease,
he said, and just after he healed up from the fracture
and the hepatitis, the U.S. prepared to invade Japan.
President Harry Truman cut that off, he said, when
we “dropped the bomb” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ronish had to endure one more stretch of misery
on the ship back to the U.S. The hospital vessel track-
ing to San Francisco plowed through a typhoon, he
said, and the storm about sunk the vessel.
“I was sick already,” Ronish said. “I didn’t need
that.”
The years after the war he returned to logging, and
he and Glenola raised a family. They were married 76
years, he said, and she passed away in 2017.
Now he lives with his daughter, Sonja Ronish, at
her place in Pendleton. She said the family came out
for her dad’s birthday, and he loved it.
Walt Ronish attributed clean living to his long life.
“I never smoked, never drank or chewed,” he said.
“Just worked.”
And while his Army uniform does not fi t as snug
as it once did, he treasures it and what it means to
him.
“I was honored to serve,” he said. “That’s all I can
say.”
A collection of Walt Ronish’s photographs of him-
self and his fellow soldiers from their deployment
during World War II lays on the table in his daugh-
ter’s house in Pendleton.
Walt Ronish reminisces over photos as he sits at the dining table in his daughter’s living room in Pendleton.