The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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Olpe -

Walt Rathke hadn’t planned to become a part of history when he was sent to Hawaii during World War II. His size and abilities as a communications technician did that for him.

Rathke, now almost 90, and a cousin met with recruiters at the time to see what options they had to be placed in areas of their interests.

“They wouldn’t promise anything,” Rathke said.

So, the young men went home and waited until they were drafted.

Rathke was assigned to the Air Force in November 1942. He went to Atlantic City, N.J., for basic training, then was sent to a base outside Long Beach, Calif. Eventually, after reassignments in the California desert, Portland, Ore., and Everett Wash., he was sent to John Rogers Naval Air Station in Hawaii.

There, his job installing and repairing communications systems in airplanes allowed him to enjoy the surf and the sun during the day and go to work in the late afternoon or early evening. Base leaders didn’t want repairmen driving Jeeps on the tarmac to reach airplanes until all of the planes had come in for the day, he said.

Hawaii, in wartime, wasn’t overwhelmingly enjoyable beyond the beaches.

“I didn’t like it. Too many people,” said Rathke, whose ranch home in the Flint Hills is miles away from Olpe. “The time I was there you couldn’t even walk on the sidewalk. You walked in the street, there was so many people.”

“The climate was nice,” he added.

Rathke’s work partner was named Ralph Latshaw, who came from Indiana. The amount of time they spent working depended upon the number of radios needing repairs.

“Sometimes we’d work three hours, sometimes we’d work ’til 5 in the morning,” Rathke said.

The military liked small, wiry men like Rathke and Latshaw because they could crawl easily through the 37-foot, padded fuselage area that housed some of the communications wiring, as well as stored bombs.

The systems were surprisingly consistent, he said. All wires were coded and numbered, with connectors interrupting the lines every few feet along the fuselage; if repairs were needed along the system, they could be made cleanly, once they found the problem areas.

The radios’ assemblies were consistent, as well.

“They were so accurate you could blindfold me and I could run it both ways,” he said.

Those skills likely caused officials to choose him and Latshaw when changes were needed on radio frequencies of a squadron of B-29s that had landed at Rogers one night in August 1945.

The B-29s were massive, Rathke recalled.

“If I remember right, they were 99 feet front to back and 141 feet wing span,” he said. “I don’t know why I remember that. They were pretty big creatures.”

The planes had been of interest to the men because they came in with their own crews, their own mechanics and no apparent need for assistance from anyone at the base.

“They were set up so nobody knew about it,” Rathke said.

They had everything they needed — except for a communications technician to change the radio frequencies so the crew could communicate in the Saipan area.

Rathke and Latshaw had finished their evening’s work and settled into a deep sleep when they were interrupted.

“It was the middle of the night they found out they didn’t have anybody to do that,” he said. “It was some of the big-shot guards that woke us up.”

The men were taken to a fleet of six airplanes and told to change their radio frequencies to those that were in use in the Saipan area. Rathke and Latshaw did as they were told and when they had finished, they were warned to “keep our mouths shut,” Rathke said.

At the time, he had no idea what was happening nor why there was such a need for secrecy. During war time, the “why” was inconsequential; doing the task according to orders was what mattered.

A few days later, when the planes returned to Hawaii, Rathke understood.

One of the planes that parked at the base was No. 82, the Enola Gay. The radio frequency changes Rathke made enabled the planes to fly to Japan and maintain communications while crews dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

There were six more planes that came in with the original group, though Rathke said he didn’t believe they had been used on the mission.

The bombings, the first and only use of atomic bombs against humans, prompted the Japanese to surrender and ended the Pacific Theater segment of World War II.

By February 1946, Rathke was about to be discharged from the Air Force. He was a buck sergeant when he made the repairs, he said, and a staff sergeant shortly after.

He was summoned to base headquarters before leaving and, somewhat concerned at the time, was relieved to learn that Hawaiian Airlines was there to meet with him and another technician.

“They wanted to hire us,” Rathke said. “To heck with that. We were going home.”

He returned to the Lyon County area and started a welding and mechanic shop in Olpe, and worked for a time for Loren Walrafen building houses in Emporia. Later, he was able to settle into the career he truly enjoyed, that of a cowboy taking care of cattle in the Flint Hills. It’s a career he continues even at 89 years of age.

Sometimes, though, he thinks back to the war and the role he unwittingly played.

“How often do you get a chance at something like that?” he asked.