It was 9 p.m. on June 10, 1945. Two young men, each carrying 50 pounds of TNT, made their way toward a coral escarpment in Okinawa, Japan.
After hours of waiting, they finally did what they were sent there to do: use the TNT to close a cave their enemies were hiding in.
One of these young men was John Krajeski, now 86, and an Arvada resident, who recently received the Silver Star and Bronze Star he was promised for his heroism and bravery on that night in 1945.
“We were having an awful time,” Krajeski said of part of his deployment to Okinawa in World War II. “Our division was being blown away, our regiment. We could not go forward on Okinawa.”
Japanese soldiers were hiding in holes found in a coral escarpment in southern Okinawa and firing at the 17th Infantry Regiment’s Company B, of which Krajeski was a member.
“The big shots were all screaming at us, ‘you can do better than that,’ but we couldn’t, we just couldn’t,” he said. “Finally, the lieutenant asked around for anybody that would volunteer to go up into this area and take TNT and blow that cave shut — the big one, where all the rough people were.”
Krajeski and a comrade from Company C volunteered.
“No one else would do it, and I had been appointed first scout for this company early on, and that kind of meant I knew what I was doing, or I should know,” Krajeski said. “I was almost 19. I didn’t know any better.”
Early morning June 10, Krajeski and his comrade, who he knows to this day only as ‘Shorty,’ woke up and were sent out with binoculars and TNT to find a route up to the main cave.
By 9 p.m., the U.S. ships — seven miles from where the 17th Infantry was stationed — stopped all flares and Krajeski and Shorty began their walk.
“It was well towards midnight when we finally crawled up that escarpment; sharp and fallen coral was making us bleed,” he said. “We got close enough we could hear the Japanese, and we piddled our pants, both of us.”
When the two made it near the cave, there were too many Japanese soldiers outside for them to complete their mission. The cave held 50-75 soldiers and their equipment, and about a dozen were outside when Krajeski and Shorty arrived.
“They were on the upper end so we could hear them,” he said. “We were right below them under a ledge, close enough to smell them. We stayed down, and shivered and waited until we thought they’d go to bed at night.”
Around 1 a.m., the Japanese soldiers still had not gone to bed, but there were only a few outside the cave. With revolvers by their sides, ready to use them if need be, the duo made it near the top of the ledge toward the cave. Then something happened that Krajeski said could only be described as a miracle.
“There was one lone Pop! and the sky light up,” he said. “Somewhere, from a ship seven miles away, somebody had fired one round of a night flare, and you get 25 or 30 seconds. They all run into their cave, and we were right behind them.
“Boom! TNT is vicious, oh man.”
As soon as they threw the TNT, Krajeski said, he and Shorty were running back down the coral, pieces showering down on them from the explosion.
“After that we knew. We looked back and there was nobody chasing us,” he said. “We couldn’t hear a sound, so the cave had to have been blown shut beautifully.”
The men then walked slowly back to their camp, where some of their comrades were up waiting for them, including Krajeski’s lieutenant.
“This was when he said, ‘I’m going to put the Silver Star in your deal tomorrow,’ and he did that,” Krajeski said. “It was dated the next day, and it’s been hidden away for all these years. I have the copy of it, but the original one was not found … we think it was burned up in the big fire in St. Louis in 1974.”
Krajeski served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, going to Korea from Okinawa and becoming a master sergeant.
Krajeski’s copy of his lieutenant’s letter was in the bottom of his Army duffel bag, which was in storage at his mother’s Chadron, Neb., home for about 40 years. He dug out the bag about 25 years ago and began his campaign to receive his stars several years ago.
After five or six years of sending letters to different governmental branches and representatives, Krajeski was reauthorized on Nov. 23, 2011, to receive both a Silver Star and Bronze Star for his heroism in World War II.
“That was the first time the government recognized that I should have them,” Krajeski said. “But they weren’t delivered to me. I called in to see when they would come, and they said, ‘Well it might be as late as September because we don’t have the money,’ but they did get the money 30 or 40 days ago and mailed them.”
Krajeski said he wanted the medals to be pinned on his Army jacket by someone he respected.
On July 11, Krajeski, his wife and other members of his family were guests of honor at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, where Maj. Gen. Joseph Anderson pinned the stars to Krajeski’s 1946 Eisenhower jacket.
“I’m now content. I was so discontented for all those years. I was scrapping them, and they were deliberately being obtuse. They just were not responding to my letters,” he said. “I felt like I have given up the bad feelings now, and I was starting to renew my love of the country.”