Conversation with my favorite WWII veteran: sharing 95 years of life

New Albany, MS– Today is Veterans Day, November 11th, the anniversary of the World War I armistice that began at 11 a.m. on Monday, November 11, 1918. The guns went silent at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleven month,” as a reporter wrote 98 years ago today. None of those veterans are still around. The last of them, a British Army veteran named Florence Green, died in February 2012, at age 110.

Florence Green

Of the 16-million Americans who served during World War II, an estimated 855,000 are still living on this Veterans Day. One of them is among my best friends. I talked with him on the telephone last night. Two weeks ago, I spent a few hours with him at his home in Pontotoc.

He is also a veteran Ole Miss fan. There may be a few non-alumni who have been loyal Ole Miss sports fans longer than Phillip Johnstone, but there cannot be very many. The first Rebels game he attended was a baseball game in Oxford. “They played in a pasture, an open pasture, by the football stadium,” he says.

He has watched the Rebels — football, basketball, baseball — play in Oxford and on the road several hundred times. “I don’t think it would be as many as a thousand,” he says, “but I went to all the home football and basketball games and many of the baseball games for a good many years.” The last Ole Miss game he attended was a couple of years ago.

Phillip Johnstone and I have been friends for well over 30 years. When we met in 1983, I was a young man and he was close to retirement as accountant and secretary-treasurer of Pontotoc Electric Power Association (PEPA). Now I’m an old man myself, and Phillip turned 95 years old six months ago, on May 4th.

Phillip Johnstone

Saturday night, October 29th, I drove to Pontotoc to watch a couple of ball games with him at his home. It was Game Four of the World Series, Cleveland at Chicago. More importantly, and simultaneously, Ole Miss was host to Auburn at Vaught-Hemingway.

“Auburn’s got a helluva offensive running game. They’re hard to stop,” he said as we watched the Ole Miss defense struggle in the fourth quarter. Auburn was ahead and Ole Miss couldn’t do much on offense.

With about six minutes left on the clock, and Ole Miss not able to move the football, Phillip said, “I’m gonna give up. Been nerve racking watching this,” and he switched to the World Series Game. But he didn’t give up. After watching a few minutes of Cleveland thumping the Cubs, he switched back to the football game, and we watched to the bitter end, Auburn beating the Rebs 40-29.

Then back to the World Series game, where the Cubs weren’t doing well at Wrigley. Phillip recalled that Chris Coghlan, who was traded twice during 2016 — Cubs to the Athletics during winter trading and back to the Cubs in June — had played third base at Ole Miss before being drafted by the Marlins in 2006. Baseball can be boring. Cleveland was beating the Cubs pretty soundly, so he turned off the sound and we started talking about World War II.

Phillip Johnstone, 15th Air Force of the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1943 -1945

Phillip Johnstone served in the 15th Air Force of the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1943 until he mustered out in 1945. After basic training at Keasler Field, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, he was assigned to an Army Air Corps unit forming in Oklahoma, City.

Before deployment overseas, his unit spent several days at a base across the Hudson from New York. “I spent every night in New York City,” he told me, as we glanced occasionally at the silenced World Series. “The people there were so nice to us. I think I went to every theater in Manhattan. We went to Madison Square Garden, saw the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.”

But all good things must end.

‘They shipped us to North Africa on an old banana boat,” he recalled. “Took a long time to get there.” The U.S. Navy had requisitioned a number of these boats, called “reefers,” from the United Fruit Company. The reefers had large refrigerated cargo holds and also had the capacity  to carry passengers. Phillip was probably on what the Navy commissioned as the U.S. Tarazad, which made several trips to North Africa with troops and food stores.

The slow old “reefer” landed on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, near Algiers. Then “they loaded us into open rail cars and shipped us to Tunis,” a distance of about 500 miles. There General Jimmy Doolittle, then commander of the 15th Air Force, was gathering war planes, crews and supplies for the invasion of Italy.

The Allied invasion of Italy was launched September 3, 1943, and Phillip Johnstone’s outfit ended up at Bari, a port on the Adriatic Sea, at the top of the Italian boot heel. The British Royal Army and Navy were the primary Allied presence at Bari. “We lived with the British,” he said.

On the night of December 2, 1943, the port of Bari was struck in a surprise attack that killed about thousand sailors on boats in the harbor and another thousand civilians close by on shore. Johnstone’s outfit escaped most of the attack “except for one stray bomb.” However, the attack, known during the war as “Little Pearl Harbor,” took the port out of action until February 1944.

Being entirely ignorant of the attack on Bari, I asked Phillip if the surprise attack was from the Italian air force or the Germans.

“It was the damned Germans,” Phillip replied. “The Italians didn’t have an air force. The Italians didn’t have anything — except for a few good barbers.” (In fact, the Germans had used about 100 Junkers Ju 88 bombers in the successful sneak attack on Bari.)

The Johnstones, on their 50th wedding anniversary

Phillip Johnstone returned after the war, married and went to work as a civilian for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Then he worked for the Internal Revenue Service, first in Tupelo and then in Greenville, MS. He and his wife Rachel, a native of Indianola, returned to Pontotoc in 1957, when he went to work for the PEPA. Rachel taught mathematics in the Pontotoc Public Schools, and they raised a family, two daughters and one son.

Rachel died in early 2007, and Phillip continues to live in the three bedroom home they built just a few hundred yards from his family home on Montgomery St.

Until a few years ago, Phillip Johnston traveled every year to a reunion of his 15th Air Force unit, but they no longer get together. “Most of my friends have died,” he said. “Several right lately.”

My friend Phillip lives on, still very keen of mind, and devoted to his family, his remaining friends, Ole Miss sports and the United States of America. He is also very pleased that Trump beat Hillary.

I think I’ll call him, see if we can get together awhile this evening, have a sip of bourbon or split a beer and toast all the American Veterans. Maybe we’ll include their future Commander-in-Chief, as well.