Earle N. Ahlquist died recently in Scarborough.
You don’t know him, do you?
Name doesn’t ring a bell?
That would all have suited him just fine.
Earle’s claim to fame with me (not him) is that he was a veteran of the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Remember that famous photo of a bunch of soldiers working really hard to pick up a giant flag on a long pole and working together, straining, to get that flag – which is at a 45-degree angle in the photo, planted in the ground on a battle site? That was Iwo Jima. Island off the coast off mainland Japan.
Many historians consider Iwo Jima the bloodiest battle of all time for a Western Civilization country, certainly the bloodiest one of World War II.
Libby-Mitchell Post 76 guys in Scarborough had great pride in Earle Ahlquist and always “stuck up for him,” they said, because he would never tell anybody about his military accomplishments.
Ken Dolloff used to say, “75,000 soldiers invaded Iwo Jima. One-third were either killed or injured in battle.” That is a high ratio.
Earle once told me, when I met him in l984, “I was a Marine. I went ashore off the boat like thousands of other boys did. Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you three was going to be hit.”
He said he initially had a feeling of guilt about surviving the war. “Why I wasn’t hit, I don’t know. Why were the guys beside me hit?”
Iwo Jima was important because the Japanese were using it to launch planes to attack Allied planes that had made it that far to attack the Japanese mainland. ?“We had to gain control of Iwo Jima,” Earle told me once. “It was very important. We did it.”
I met Earle in my 1984 campaign for the Maine Legislature. I had gone to school with a one of his kids years earlier at Scarborough High.
I met him door to door. He lived in what we called North Scarborough.
“Let me know how I can help you,” he said in a soft-spoken way.
I said, well, gee, perhaps I could put up a sign on your lawn. If you would like some brochures to give to your friends, that would be great. He said to give him 20. “I will give them out at the (North Scarborough) Grange Hall at the bean supper next week,” he said. “I will ask Barbara (Griffin, bean baker!) if it is OK.” She said it was.
I saw Earle after the election at the grocery store. He congratulated me on winning, but added: “I felt I could have done more.”
I was speechless. A veteran of Iwo Jima. Wounded in battle. Purple Heart. U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith personally called his parents to tell them Earle was OK, recovering in a hospital in the Pacific Theater.
Telling me he “could have done more.”
Maybe Iwo Jima was enough. Maybe our society said, “Good job,” when he and others got back. “Take a seat. Put your feet up.”
Couldn’t tell Earle that. Nope. The work of him and so many WWII guys I was fortunate to have as “tribal elders” growing up in Scarborough never let up.
That’s what made them The Greatest Generation. They genuinely didn’t think they were.
But they were.
R.I.P. Earle.
Dan Warren is a trial lawyer in Scarborough. He can be reached either by private Facebook message at Jones & Warren, Attorneys at Law page, or by email at jonesandwarren@gmail.com.
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