Page 38 - Amarrilo Senior Link Magazine Spring 2019- Online Magazine
P. 38
Cleatus Lebow Cleatus Lebow Remembers
the Indianapolis
- and Who Was With Him
by Jane Bromley
He asked He graduated from high school
one class of in Abernathy in 1941 and was
high school inducted into the U.S. Navy in
students why Lubbock on February 12, 1943.
they thought After boot camp and several
America was months of training at the naval
involved in base in San Diego, he got
that war. sailing orders for Pearl Harbor.
One student However, a storm diverted their
answered, ship to San Francisco. It was the
“We dropped only time the young sailor ever
a bomb got seasick. After 30 days on Goat
on Japan, Island, he was transported on an
and they LST (tank landing ship) to Pearl
retaliated.” Harbor and then assigned to the
The old USS Indianapolis. He remembers
veteran thinking, “What a sleek good-
responded looking ship.” And then “We set
emphatically, sail for the adventure of this ole
“No, no, country boy’s lifetime.”
no! You’ve
got it all The Indianapolis was immediately
backwards.” involved in battles at the Gilbert
He knows Islands and the Marshall
how Islands, the raids at Palau and
95-year-old Memphis, Texas important it is that history is Yap, and the Marianas, where
resident Cleatus Lebow has been recorded and taught accurately, they captured Saipan, Guam,
telling his story as long as he can so he continues to relate his own then Tinian and later the Palau
remember to anyone who will experience. Islands. In February and March
listen. Sometimes when he talks 1945, the ship participated in the
about it, including preparing Cleatus grew up on a farm in raids on Honshu and Nansei,
for this article, it causes his Abernathy, Texas - one of 11 then the occupation of Iwo
nightmares to return. But he children. They worked hard, Jima and after that Okinawa.
keeps telling it, to illustrate the as most people did in the Cleatus received eight battle stars
sacrifice of tens of thousands of Depression Era. They “chopped on his Asiatic-Pacific ribbon.
mostly young men who were cotton in the summer, pulled “As a rangefinder operator,
willing to give their lives to save bolls in the fall and chopped up I had a ringside seat with a
our country from the evil that railroad ties in the winter for perfect view of all the action.
wanted to conquer it during firewood…All in all, it was a The toughest, bloodiest, most
World War II. happy childhood.” horrifying landing was at Iwo
Jima. It is nothing short of a
38 Amarillo Senior Link
