by Lisa Wittmeyer
Local historian
On Friday, July 11, 1952, The Landmark Newspaper published a photograph titled “Scene in Korea” and captioned “three boys from the Platte City area in a happy get-to-gether visit.” It was the first meeting of these friends for over a year.
Olie Benner, Herman White and Paul Whitters, the Marines in that picture, previously had been together on Friday, Jan. 19, 1951. On that “game night,” Paul found his friends in the bleachers of Platte City High School’s gym. They played on its court several years earlier, Paul for Platte City where he graduated in ’46 and Olie and Herman for Camden Point where they graduated in ’46 and’47. Through 4-H club, Paul first became friends with Herman. All three grew up nearby on farms. The Whitters farm was about one mile west of Tracy.
“When I found Herman and Olie at the basketball game,” explains Paul, “they told me they had joined the Marines in St. Joseph that day. They were leaving for bootcamp on Monday.” Like them, Paul had tried unsuccessfully to enlist at Kansas City. So the morning after he saw Olie and Herman, Paul followed their example, drove to St. Joseph and became a Marine. Shortly after this they reported to recruit training battalions at San Diego. Olie then transferred to Camp Pendleton.
Although they trained separately, Olie suspects that they all traveled by the same boat brigade to Korea. In August, Olie joined a tank unit in the mountains near Panmunjom, Herman joined one of the 1st Marine Division’s machine-gun platoons, and Paul helped with communication lines in a mobile signal company attached to a Corsair ground support unit.
In March of 1952 when the 1st Marine Division moved from the east-central front to western Korea, Paul happened to meet Herman who suggested, “Let’s go up and see Olie.” All did not go as planned. “We got lost,” says Paul, “We ended up on the road to Panmunjom. No one was to go there. Three MPs in a jeep told us, ‘Get the hell out of here!’”
The military had constructed a building in this place for diplomatic meetings. Fortunately, Paul and Herman found their way to Olie’s platoon which Paul describes as “on line” or in the mountains overlooking a field of battle. Although the next closest platoon received incoming artillery, Olie’s escaped attack and he safely met his friends a short distance down the mountain.
How these Platte City boys enlisted as Marines during the same week also came about through friendship, in this case between the Benners and the secretary of the local draft board.
Born in 1928 to Bessie and Claude Benner, Olie (pronounced O-Lee) grew up on a farm known as the “old Harrison place” three miles north of Platte City. He attended Woodland school in his early years, graduated high school in a class of five girls and two boys, and planned on becoming a farmer and raising corn and tobacco like his father. But when the Korean War broke out in June of 1950, he knew he might not be able to do this. Before the spring of ’51, he faced the same dilemma as Paul–join the military or take a chance on being drafted.
Olie thought taking a chance was too risky. He explains, “If I put in a crop and got drafted like what happened to some of the boys in WWII, it would be disastrous. I would lose the crop. So, I decided I would volunteer, serve my three years right away and come back to farming.”
As it happened, he received a phone call which forced him to act on this decision and changed not only his but also Herman’s and Paul’s life.
That family friend and secretary alerted Olie that if he planned on joining, he needed to do so, “Now.”
She would be mailing the draft letters that coming Monday night with one arriving to his address. “I got ahold of Herman,” Olie explains, “and Herman says, ‘I’m going with you.’ He was a year younger than me, and he may not have been drafted. But anyway, we were together.”
The next morning in St. Joseph when Olie and Herman could not immediately join either the Navy or Air Force, they found a Marine sergeant who simply asked, “When do you want to go, in the morning?”
During the daytime in Korea, Olie slept in a cave and in a tent camp he serviced his tank, tightening the tracks and cleaning its guns. At night, Olie manned the tank. Despite the dangers of drawing artillery fire, his tank and others were fitted with spotlights which he describes as being “bigger than an old washtub.” The crew sergeant flipped the lights on and off, long enough to help the infantry in the valley below to see ahead and spot the enemy’s position and to keep the North Koreans on edge, but not long enough, Olie hoped, for them to zero in on his unit’s position. One night this changed.
Olie and several others heard an infantryman below them calling for help. They answered that call. As they carried injured soldiers up the hill, a tank was hit. Had anyone been in it, says Olie, they would have been killed. This was the only night that the enemy pinpointed their position.
Herman by then had experienced combat during the Battle of the Punchbowl in September, 1951.
Paul’s duties varied. Initially he installed communication lines in the countryside, often attaching the lines to trees and running wire along the ground, trying to hide it best as he could. When his company moved, he moved with them and set up new lines. “I mainly ended up though as a gopher–all over running errands, picking up or delivering things from one outfit to another,” says Paul.
Even a journey of a short distance could take several days on gravel or dirt roads and “right through creeks” as Paul describes. “We would find Army units to eat rations with and stay the night with along the way.” Although the military tried to move civilians out of a five-mile radius of operations, Paul saw Koreans living in mud huts with straw roofs, plowing their fields with tree trunks pulled by oxen and threshing the grain by throwing it into the air and letting the wind take the chaff. They lived in great poverty, as he recalls.
In the picture showing him in a meeting with Olie and Herman, a Korean woman in the background is washing clothes, beating them with a stick or rock by a creek.
When the three Marines returned home, they did not speak of war. Olie explains, “Anything that happened over there we never mentioned then or in the little while we were together. That was a great day but wasn’t long enough. It was a great time.”
Paul recalls as well that they celebrated on that day by drinking their month’s ration of beer – three cans each.
Paul did not tell his friends until later of his plan to write to his wife, asking her to submit the photo to The Landmark. Each of their families saved the picture when it was published. A little over three years ago, Olie showed me this newspaper clipping, yellowed but carefully preserved, as is Paul’s copy. J.D. White and Teresa Gutshall of Platte City, Herman White’s son and daughter, found the clipping in their father’s album about his military service.
Although promoted to sergeant after a year in Korea, Olie never placed the stripes on his uniform. He finished his enlistment as a turnkey in California. During that time, farming changed with more equipment needed, so he pursued a career with TWA. In 1959, Olie married Catherine Murry who had been born in Platte City. Until her passing in 2003, they made their home in Liberty, Mo., where they raised three children. Olie passed away in 2020 at the age of 91.
Herman was awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded while defending Hill 749. Several months after the picture was taken, he left Korea. As a sergeant he trained Marines in the use of cold weather gear in the Sierra Nevada mountains before returning to Platte City, where he married Jeanee’ Dallam. They made their home on the land where he had been born and where he farmed for many decades. He passed away in 2017 followed by Jeanee’ two years later.
Paul also finished his tour of duty as a sergeant before returning to his wife Barbara Bills. They raised five children and lived in Platte City and several other places while Paul pursued an insurance career. Barbara passed away in 2006. Paul resides in Platte City and is active in its VFW Post 4055 and First Christian Church.
This year marks the seventy-third anniversary of the start of the Korean War in 1950. Before an armistice was signed in July 1953, the lives of nearly 37,000 Americans were lost. Another 103,000 Americans were wounded. Around 7,500 are listed still as missing in action. According to the National Archives, of those American service members who gave their lives, 940 came from Missouri. Fortunately, a greater number returned home.
Many photographs and newspaper reports remain tucked away in albums and drawers. Each potentially tells a story, as does this picture of three friends who honorably served their country and who met one afternoon in the middle of the Korean War to share a “happy get-to-gether visit.”