Roanoke man is 1 of 4 brothers left to talk about World War II 

Tomorrow’s the day we remember American troops who died serving their country . Today, let’s extend that just a bit to also recall all the ones who returned from battle but are no longer with us.

Howard Weaver, 85, has memories of both. The native Roanoker is a Navy veteran of World War II; the youngest of four Weaver boys sent off to battle; the only one who survives today.

Listening to him gives you a renewed appreciation for the term “the greatest generation.” Howard and his brothers — Billy, Glenn and David — served in some of the most significant incidents of the war and its aftermath.

What follows are the stories Howard related about the Weaver boys and their service to this country. The details are dimmed a bit by the fog of passing years. They certainly aren’t all happy. But they’re real, and their drama and import remain.

Billy: Killed in action

The Weavers lived on Salem Avenue near the intersection with 13th Street Southwest. “It was a great big house,” Howard recalls, and the family needed one.

Howard’s father, William Weaver, was a locksmith for the city of Roanoke. Howard’s sister, Peggy Perdue, recalls he was a carpenter, too. Their mother Eva was a homemaker. Together, the couple raised nine children — five boys and four girls — whose births spanned two decades. Howard was the youngest of the boys.

By April 1944, Howard was 16 and a junior in high school. A service flag with three blue stars hung proudly on the Weavers’ house, signifying that Billy, Glenn and David Weaver were all off at war. The oldest son, Jack, did not serve.

Billy worked in the city school system’s textbook warehouse, but he had been drafted into the Army Air Corps. He trained in Puerto Rico, then embarked for Europe on the SS Paul Hamilton, one of many Merchant Marine “Liberty Ships” built during the war to ferry troops and cargo.

The Paul Hamilton was part of a large convoy in the Mediterranean Sea on its way to Italy. On board were 47 merchant crewmen , 29 Navy Armed Guard and 504 Army air personnel. The ship was also fully loaded with munitions.

On April 20, 1944, right around dusk and off the coast of Algeria, a squadron of German bombers attacked the convoy. One of their torpedoes struck the Paul Hamilton, which because of the munitions erupted in an enormous explosion.

The ship sank within 30 seconds. Everyone on board perished; only one body was ever recovered.

“I remember my mother got a telegram that Billy was missing in action,” Howard recalled. “The telegraph boy was on a bicycle. He delivered it sometime around noon.

“She opened it, oh, she just broke down, and, you know, she just couldn’t believe it. About 14 days later she got another telegram stating he’d been killed.”

Glenn: Part of the D-Day invasion

Glenn Weaver was the third oldest of the four fighting Weavers. Like his elder brother Billy, Glenn also worked for the city school system. But a young, single and healthy man in the days following Pearl Harbor stood little chance of not being drafted, Howard noted.

“They was drafting. Just as soon as you turned 18, you were gone.”

Glenn was plucked by the Army, first as a paratrooper. His closest brush with death came during training in Georgia, before he ever went off to war — and just after he’d jumped out of an airplane.

“His chute opened and then collapsed,” Howard recalled. “He landed on top of another paratrooper’s canopy, right in the middle of it, just before they hit the ground.”

Glenn survived that accident but wound up in the infantry. While Billy was aboard the SS Paul Hamilton and headed for a tragic fate, Glenn was in Britain, preparing for the D-Day invasion. He was in the second wave of troops that landed on Omaha Beach, Howard said.

“He drove a jeep; he was assigned to a captain. He fought all the way from Normandy, through Belgium and into Germany. And then the war was over.”

Glenn returned to Virginia afterward.

“When he came back, he moved to Richmond, looking for work,” Howard said. “He didn’t get married for a while.”

After Glenn did marry , he and his wife had a son, Larry, who owns a Richmond machine shop today.

Glenn went on to a career in the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry, and by the time of his retirement was director of the Division of State Labor Law Administration, a job that took him all over Virginia, Howard said. He died in 1995, at 72.

David: Spying on the enemy

Among the Weaver brothers who lived through World War II, David Weaver had by far the most hair-raising stories. At the time he was drafted into the Army, he worked for the telephone company. He was the only Weaver brother who was married when he went off to war, and he left a pregnant bride at home.

David reported for duty on Dec. 31, 1942, at age 20. By the summer of 1943 he was part of a three-month campaign Allied forces waged to wrest control of the central Solomon Islands from the Japanese.

He was a scout, a soldier who stealthily entered enemy territory and reported by radio on land and water movements of Japanese. It’s one of the most dangerous military jobs there is.

The Army sent him on a five-day mission to the island of Vella Lavella, then occupied by the Japanese. As he came ashore he cut himself badly on sharp coral reefs.

David hid in the jungle for a few days, then made his way to a high perch above the village of Paramata, where he began radioing back information to Allied forces. But his cuts from the reef had become badly infected, and besides that he’d been stricken with malaria.

“Two of the island children found him,” Howard said. “They went home and told their father, who happened to be a medical doctor and the chief of the tribe.”

The chief brought David back to the village and tended his injuries and illness for almost a month. During Japanese patrols, the villagers hid him under a hut so he wouldn’t be captured.

“The hut was round,” Howard said. “He saw [Japanese troops] walk all the way around it, and he was underneath the hut, hiding.”

Eventually, somehow, the villagers were able to get David back to his Army unit. After a hospital stay, he was sent back to fight. Before the war was over he’d fought 165 days in the Battle of Luzon, in the Philippines.

David returned to the States in December 1945, to meet a son who was almost 3. He and his wife had two more children. One of them, Donna Weaver Johnston, self-published a book, “Daddy’s Letters, 1942-45,” about his wartime experiences.

But David never fully recovered from the trauma of the war. For most of the rest of his life, he had a severe drinking problem, Howard said. He took his own life in 1975.

Howard: A witness to Bikini Atoll

In terms of drama, Howard Weaver’s war stories pale in comparison to his brothers’. Unlike them, he volunteered, for the Navy. That was early in 1945, when he was just 17. He figured his chances were better at sea.

“I went to daddy and asked him to sign for me,” Howard recalled. “I said, ‘I want to join the Navy.’ He said, “You want to do what?! We already lost one of your brothers!’ But I explained it to him and he signed for me.”

Howard trained in Maryland, then was shipped off to California, where the Navy put him on another ship bound for the South Pacific. Eventually he wound up as a fireman first class on the USS Enoree, a tanker ship that ferried fuel between Arabia and the Pacific theater.

“We refueled other ships,” Howard told me. “It was my job to change the burners in the boilers. … I worked 35 feet below the main deck. It was so hot you couldn’t hardly breathe.”

The Enoree never saw battle action, at least while Howard served on it. “But I sure as hell was scared of it,” he recalled. “My main fear was where they had laid mines.”

Howard had signed up for the duration of the war plus six additional months. He ended up serving longer, though.

The greatest action he saw came after the war, on July 1, 1946, when the Enoree was ordered to the Marshall Islands after it had returned from another refueling mission in Arabia.

The tanker was 12 miles from Bikini Atoll when the U.S. exploded its first postwar atomic bomb. Called Operation Crossroads, it was an experiment so the military could better understand the effects of nuclear weapons on naval ships.

The sailors were given pieces of black glass to hold in front of their faces to protect them from radiation burns, Howard recalled.

“I saw a hell of an explosion, that’s for sure,” Howard said. “It rocked the ship. … That was some experience for an 18-year-old.”

Howard’s service in the Navy ended on July 24, 1946. He returned to Roanoke, where he met his wife, Ruth, and they married. They had a daughter, who lives in Georgia, and now there’s a grandson and two great-grandkids.

He worked 40 years for OREN Roanoke Corp., as an electroplater, retiring in 1990. Ruth died in July.

Today, Howard lives at Our Lady of the Valley retirement community on north Jefferson Street in Roanoke. He’s on dialysis three times a week. Last week he was in the hospital recovering from a mild heart attack and pneumonia. He sounded strong and chipper on the phone Thursday and Friday.

I was introduced to him by Roger Peters, his friend of 26 years. He said it took Howard five years into their friendship to even mention the war. The stories of him and his brothers have dribbled out haltingly ever since.

They were poor, scared kids, biting their nails in service to their country, doing the best they could. None of them sought glory. All of them had guts.

God bless Howard, and his brothers, and all the others. You can’t tell stories like theirs often enough.

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