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Jul 02, 2012

Professor's unforgettable education: the Normandy Invasion

John McNeil has established groundbreaking school programs, led advancement efforts in literacy and math, and served internationally as a bilingual education consultant. But academic accomplishments are only part of the story for emeritus professor of education in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA.
 
His résumé includes an incredible U.S. Navy career that saw McNeil at the center of the Normandy Invasion 68 years ago last month, as an officer during the Battle of Okinawa on a ship nearly destroyed by kamikaze pilots, and as keeper of a military diary during the Korean War.
 
Gunnery officer John McNeil (left) and Captain Richard Lange on the USS Achernar, headquarter ship for the June 1944 Normandy Invasion.
And while the perils of warfare may hardly seem applicable to academia, McNeil has applied elements of his combat experience to his work in elementary and higher education, which spans more than seven decades.
 
McNeil joined UCLA’s faculty in 1956, but he first came to campus as a young man one day in 1940, when he and his parents made the drive from their home in San Diego so he could enlist in the Navy. UCLA’s Men’s Gym was being used as a recruitment center.
 
But the recruiters turned McNeil down for being underweight.
 
"They weren’t going to take me because you had to weigh 120 pounds; I only weighed 119," McNeil recalled of the incident. But he was undeterred. "It was late in the afternoon and they were closing, so I said, ‘Let me come back tomorrow and I’ll weigh enough.’ That night, my mom gave me all these bananas. The next day, I was up bright and early, and I weighed enough."
 
McNeil’s military career was launched on the battleship USS New York in a basic training cruise to Panama and Cuba. Then he was off to midshipman school at Northwestern University. Pulled into battle in the wake of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was assigned as an armed guard officer on a merchant ship transporting supplies to Allied forces, and then became gunnery officer on the USS Achernar. The attack cargo ship became Gen. Omar Bradley’s headquarters for the Allied Forces’ invasion on Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France. McNeil still clearly recalls the horrific event, which began on the morning of June 6, 1944, and saw an estimated 9,000 Allied soldiers dead or wounded by nightfall.
 
"The terrible losses were from the soldiers disembarking the ship. Hundreds and hundreds of those soldiers never made it out of the water," McNeil said. "Finally they had to stack up the bodies. For days, the stench of bloated bodies was unbearable." At the same time, McNeil admitted, he could not help but feel empathy for the German and Japanese pilots who flew to their deaths.
 
McNeil remained on the USS Achernar after the Normandy Invasion and was serving as executive officer when the ship was dispatched in 1945 to the Battle of Okinawa. The U.S. takeover of the Japanese island, an operation that would span 82 days, was the largest amphibious attack of WWII — and would also result in the Navy’s greatest losses for that war.
 
"It was 10 o’clock [at night] when we got to Okinawa," McNeil recalled. "Most of the men sensed it was a moment in history. One man had wanted to get off the ship — I couldn’t let him go. But most of them felt it was something they wanted to [do] at the beginning … before they were hit."
 
The USS Achernar would sustain 200 kamikaze attacks from the air as well as from speedboats manned by Japanese suicide bombers.

"At about midnight, I was above the bridge when it began," McNeil said. "There was a nice fellow from Kansas — he had a post up there next to a boom. I was talking to him about where he’d come from. I walked down from there to the bridge. Then … this Japanese plane hit the boom, driving the Kansan into the deck and killing him and the Japanese pilot.
 
"The ship caught on fire, and it was listing," McNeil remembered. "Just for a moment, somebody thought we ought to abandon ship." That idea was rejected, but the situation was dire. "We had lost 56 fire- and damage-control people who were trained to fight the fires, because they were the ones nearest the explosion. But [others] were able to right the ship and put out the fires."
 
The ship survived a month of nightly attacks. "It was just incredible the way that people … responded," McNeil said. "[The crew] even improvised booms so that the ship could fulfill its mission."

To this day, McNeil applies valuable lessons from his military career.
When the war ended, McNeil returned home, using the GI Bill to attend San Diego State University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English as well as a lifetime teaching credential. After going on to earn a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Columbia University, he embarked upon a teaching career which included establishing a combination junior-senior high school in San Diego to serve the children and grandchildren of Depression-era families that had migrated west.

But then came the Korean War in 1950, and McNeil was called back into military service. On the staff of Admiral James Doyle, Sr., commander of Amphibious Group One, McNeill’s first assignment was to keep a war diary, recording all units, equipment and artillery under the admiral’s command.

"I didn’t know anything about writing a war diary, [so] I wrote a narrative of what was happening in our sectors," McNeil recalled. "We had to monitor submarines and the air. I turned in what I thought was a war diary, and they were upset. They said, ‘You taught English, we thought you could write a war diary.’ So I learned the correct way to write it quickly — [broken down into] 24 hours, and to be exact."

Awarded four battle stars in the course of his military career, McNeil retired after serving as a commander in the Navy Reserves. He resumed his career in education in 1956, joining UCLA’s faculty and serving as co-director of teacher education with Professor Jesse Bond. In the classroom, McNeil taught curriculum and instruction, specializing in the advancement of literacy, mathematics and educational evaluation. He also pursued an interest in the development of bilingual curriculum materials, serving as a consultant for schools throughout the United States, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico. His contributions have earned him honorary degrees from universities in Mexico and China, and his curriculum publications have been translated into Arabic, Chinese and Korean.

While it’s been decades since his years in the Navy, McNeil, now 93 years old and still coming in to campus, credits those experiences for their valuable life lessons.
 
"I became accepting of those who are very different from me. There are so many great people who have their individual ways of making something work," he observed. "Those are probably the lessons I got out of Normandy and Okinawa. Nothing would have succeeded if only a few had been making the decisions on that ship — it had to be inclusive. And whether it’s a ship or a school, everybody’s got to be open to different ideas."
 
There’s also a lot to be said for having survived combat duty. After that, "a new situation doesn’t frighten you too much," McNeil said. "The one thing you know is that you’re on borrowed time. … It’s just the luck of the draw that you’re even here. Whatever happens — you can’t take it so seriously."