On the eve of his 100th birthday, Charles L Smith is thankful for a blessed — some might say charmed — life.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said in a WCPI radio interview recorded days before his centennial birthday Jan. 18.
Believed to be the oldest surviving World War II combat veteran in Warren County, Smith and his Navy cohorts endured daily artillery fire for “two or three months” as they struggled to gain a foothold on a beachfront in Italy when Americans started fighting their way toward enemy concentrations in southern Europe in 1944.
When Nazi Germany finally surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, Smith had just a few days of respite before shipping out to the Pacific as part of a planned assault on the Japanese homeland. US war planners expected that final push against the Empire of Japan would cost tens of thousands of American lives.
Plans for the invasion of Japan were kept in the tightest miliary secrecy while the men who would bear the brunt of the attack were told nothing officially. But Smith said he heard “rumors” of a massive assault, and he knew he and his buddies had been trained especially for such an amphibious operation.
The Waren countian and his fellow Navy recruits from all over America found themselves on one of three tiny islands in the Pacific within striking distance of Japan. One of the islands that Smith could see across the water turned out to be the base where the first deployed American A-bomb was loaded into the belly of a B29 bomber, the Enola Gay.
Within a few days the famous warplane took off in the early morning of Aug. 6 to deliver its payload over the city of Hiroshima. An estimated 80,000 Japanese died instantly from the blast and flesh-melting heat, and thousands more succumbed to burns and radiation sickness within days.
Still, the Japanese war chiefs stubbornly refused American demands for unconditional surrender.
Three days later US President Harry Truman ordered the second atomic bomb attack on the city of Nagasaki, claiming some 40,000 lives. Japanese Emperor Hirohito, against the insistence of his hold-out war leaders, agreed to American terms, with the official surrender coming on Aug. 15.
Smith said his battalion didn’t learn about the surrender “until about a week later.” Truman’s decision to unleash the apocalyptic power of the atom bomb — the essential fuel of which was made in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — spared Smith and thousands of other US and allied fighters the grim prospect of an invasion of Japan.
After completing his duty in the victorious US Navy, he returned to his home in the Midway community and enrolled in the small Murfreesboro college that later grew into Middle Tennessee State University, the largest four-year institution of higher learning in the state. He graduated after three years of study and found his first job as regional circulation director for the Chattanooga News-Free Press, at the time one on the South’s largest newspapers.
From there he joined First National Bank of McMinnville, later associating with two other local businessmen to launch McMinnville Concrete Products, a leading provider of masonry materials in Warren and area counties.
In his 41 years leading the concrete products firm, “there was never a short word among the three of us,” he told WCPI.
“It was a good business. I hated to see it closed” a few years after his retirement, he said of the firm whose masonry products have withstood decades of use and weathering as part of the human-built environment. The company shuttered shortly after it was purchased by German-based investors who quickly sold it off, piece by piece, to new owners.
The half-hour conversation will air this week as part of the FOCUS interview series on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI. The program will be broadcast Tuesday at 5 p.m. and repeated Saturday at 9:30 a.m.
