A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (20 page)

Having served her country valiantly in World War II, Louise had one more ambition to satisfy. In 1955, at age sixty-seven, she chartered the first private flight over the North Pole. She later wrote of this, her last great adventure, in
Parade
magazine:

After nearly a lifetime of grand adventure and scientific achievement, Louise Boyd spent her remaining years in relative poverty.
²
Forced to sell the estate where she had once entertained the world's elite, she lived in a San Francisco nursing home supported by a group of loyal friends. When she died in 1972 at age eighty-four, there wasn't enough money to honor her final wish that her ashes be scattered over Greenland. Instead they were dropped over Alaska, where at least there was ice.

None of her inventions revolutionized the world, but the sheer number of them earned Beulah Louise Henry the appellation “Lady Edison.” A mechanical genius who knew next to nothing about physics or engineering, she created a remarkable array of products and devices, forty-nine of which were patented. Many are obsolete now. In an era of laser-jet printers, for example, there is little use for her Protograph, a typewriter attachment that could produce four original copies without the use of carbon paper. Still, that does nothing to diminish her achievements.

“She astonished scientists and patent officials alike,” writes historian Autumn Stanley, “not only with the number and variety of her inventions, but with their technical nature, particularly since she was completely innocent of technical training.”

Henry, who, one reporter wrote, “looks more like Mae West than the movie conception of an inventor,” received her first patent in 1912 for a vacuum-sealed ice-cream freezer. Many more followed, from mechanically animated dolls to a bobbinless sewing machine, and by 1924
Scientific American
was glowing with details of her inventive prowess. “l know nothing about mechanical terms,” she said at the time, “and am afraid I do make it rather difficult for draughtsmen to whom I explain my ideas, but in the factories where I am known they are exceedingly patient with me because they seem to have a lot of faith in my inventiveness. I have my inventions patented in four different countries, and I am President of two newly incorporated companies.”

A monument to Henry's success was her headquarters at New York's Hotel Victoria, where she also made her home. Crammed into her room were models of all her patented inventions, leaving very little space to move around. On the walls were the watercolors she had painted. “I think literature and art are far above things mechanical,” she once said. “I have painted many watercolors, but the world calls me an inventor.” Given her prolific output, it was a label she would have to live with. For not only did she work on her own projects, she was also employed as an inventor by the Nicholas Machine Works in New York. In addition, she served as a consultant to a number of companies that manufactured her creations. Clearly, her admitted lack of scientific credentials were no handicap, though her art did go unheralded.

Henry attributed her inventiveness to some “inner vision” that she said she had possessed since early childhood. An idea would emerge in her mind fully formed and three-dimensional. But it took a large laboratory and a staff of mechanics who understood her layman's language to translate her visions. She also paid pattern makers thousands of dollars to create models of what she had conjured. “Sometimes when I am trying to explain an idea to model-makers and engineers, they tell me it is against all the laws of physics,” she said, “but as that means nothing to me I just have to carve my ideas from bits of soap, complete them with rubber tubing, tape, etc., and keep talking until I get it over.”

One illustrative example of Beulah Henry's inventive process was her early idea for an umbrella with detachable snap-on covers of various colors to fit a single frame—a perfect way to match one's parasol with the day's outfit. It was a rather simple concept, but with one big problem: the snappers. A number of manufacturers turned down the idea because they said it would be impossible to pierce the frame of the umbrella with the kind of snappers she proposed. Discouraged, Henry reported that she went home one day, and “with a stone for a work bench and a hammer and nail for implements, I made a hole in the tip of that steel rib. Then I got a cake of soap and a nail file and modeled the style of snapper that would be strong enough to do duty on a windy day.” It was enough to convince one manufacturer to produce the umbrella, which went on to become a popular seller. Beulah Henry received a patent for the snapper, as well as a fat check for her idea.

“If necessity is the mother of invention,” she said years later, “then resourcefulness is the father.”

On July 8, 1944, one of the more astonishing, uncaptured scenes of World War II took place in the Pacific. The bloody battle of Saipan was near its end, but the Japanese forces defending the island had given no indication that they were ready to capitulate. Just the day before, in fact, they had carried out one of the largest banzai attacks of the war—a suicidal last stand in which an enemy horde, many of them wounded and armed only with bamboo spears, swarmed over the American lines. Surrender was an anathema to these people, an act of cowardly betrayal that led a number of soldiers and civilians to hurl themselves off Saipan's sea cliffs rather than give themselves over to the American “barbarians” they had been indoctrinated to fear and despise. It was this mindset, therefore, that made the scene on the island's northern end that July day truly remarkable: A lone marine private—all five feet four inches of him—corralling eight hundred battle-hardened Japanese he had personally coaxed out of their caves into willing captivity.

His name was Guy Gabaldon, an eighteen-year-old Chicano from the East Los Angeles ghetto who had joined the service the year before and was with the Second Marine Division when it stormed Saipan's beaches on June 15, 1944. From the moment he arrived on the island, the “Pied Piper of Saipan,” as he came to be called, made it clear that he would be fighting the war the way
he
saw fit. With only a smattering of Japanese he'd picked up from a Japanese American family that had semiadopted him as a kid—and an extraordinary amount of gumption—Gabaldon began making lone forays into enemy territory, usually at night, to take prisoners.

“My plan, impossible as it seemed, was to get near a Japanese emplacement, bunker, or cave, and tell them that I had a bunch of Marines with me and we were ready to kill them if they did not surrender,” Gabaldon wrote in his privately published memoir. “I promised that they would be treated with dignity, and that we would make sure they were taken back to Japan after the war.”

It was audacious, but it worked. His first night out, right after his arrival on Saipan, Gabaldon returned with two prisoners. The next night he captured fifty. “When I began taking prisoners it became an addiction,” he wrote. “I found that I couldn't stop—I was hooked.” Though at first his commanding officers were infuriated by these freelance excursions, they quickly realized that the captured enemy troops were providing valuable information that saved lives. After that, Gabaldon wrote, “I won approval for my ‘Lone Wolf ' escapades. I was on my own.”

Gabaldon used a similar routine each time he ventured out. He would approach an enemy cave or bunker, shoot any guards outside, then trick the troops inside into believing that they were surrounded. Bribes of candy and cigarettes, plus the assurances he gave in his broken Japanese that they would be well treated, achieved the desired results and hundreds were cajoled into surrendering over the course of the campaign.

“Making these daily ventures into enemy territory, getting shot at daily, and not getting wounded (yet),
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had given me a sense of self-confidence, a feeling that I would not get killed as long as I worked alone,” he recalled. “As I look back on these escapades I wonder how I survived. I believed that working alone in the jungle was the best manner in which to escape detection, and I was right. I took it upon myself to go into Japanese territory to kill and capture the enemy—my actions prove that God takes care of idiots.”

Yet for all the success the young private achieved on his “lone wolf” expeditions, they were merely practice runs for his staggering achievement on July 8. After weeks of fighting, the Japanese—many of them survivors of the previous day's banzai charge—had been pushed to Saipan's northern tip, where they hunkered down in cliff-side caves. Gabaldon managed to take two prisoners atop the cliffs that morning. They would be his conduit to the enemy entrenched below—his spokesmen, of sorts—but first they would have to be persuaded that surrender made sense. “I talked with them at length trying to convince them that to continue fighting would amount to sure death for them,” he wrote. “I told them that if they continued fighting, our flame throwers would roast them alive.”

An even bigger challenge was to make them see that surrender would be honorable; that they would be well treated, and then have them relay that message to the fanatical troops lurking in the caves below. One prisoner agreed to deliver the offer. The other, fearing he would be killed for even speaking of surrender, refused. “The one that descended the cliff either had lots of guts or he was going to double-cross me and come back with his troops firing away,” Gabaldon wrote. “Who was the prisoner, me or the Japs? This was the first time that I was caught in this type of predicament.”

The bold marine would soon have his answer when his messenger returned from the caves accompanied by twelve armed military personnel. He recalled the moment: “This is it! This time I can't tell them to drop their weapons. I can't tell them they are surrounded…. They don't say a word. They just stand there in front of me waiting for the next move. They're not pointing their weapons at me, but on the other hand, they don't have to. If I go to fire they would have the drop on me. They'd chop me down before I [could] fire a round. I must keep my cool or my head will roll.”

Gathering all the courage that had sustained him throughout the Saipan campaign, Gabaldon sat the Japanese down, offered them cigarettes, and delivered a message he said was from General Holland “Howlin' Mad” Smith, U.S. commander of the operation, whom he called Shogun—a word to which the Japanese seemed to respond. “General Smith admires your valor and has ordered our troops to offer a safe haven to all the survivors of your intrepid [banzai] attack yesterday,” he told them. “Such a glorious and courageous military action will go down in history. The General assures you that you will be taken to Hawaii where you will be kept together in comfortable quarters until the end of the war.” The alternative, he reminded them while pointing to the American fleet offshore, was certain death.

To the lone marine's relief and surprise, he seemed to be making progress. The enemy gathered around him and smiled at his broken Japanese, while their leader, a second lieutenant (known as a Chuii), asked about medical treatment for his wounded comrades. Gabaldon assured him that it would be provided. “So be it!” the Chuii responded after a time. “I become your prisoner!” With that, he rose and took his men back over the cliffs, leaving four with Gabaldon. The hour that followed was exceedingly tense as Gabaldon waited for him to return. When he did, with over fifty men in tow, he demanded water and medicine—immediately. “Be patient,” Gabaldon responded, “I give you my word that once you have all your people here I will make contact with my troops.”

The Chuii appeared uncertain, yet agreed. And then began the mass exodus from the caves. “They started coming up,” Gabaldon wrote. “The lines up the trails seem endless. My God, how many are there? I might as well throw my carbine and sidearm away. If they rush me, sayonara! But they seem to know that they are surrendering.” As more and more Japanese emerged, their lone captor set about organizing them, separating military personnel from civilians and moving the wounded into one area. It was a nearly overwhelming task, made all the more difficult by the uncertainty of the enemy. “They want food and water and medical care,” he wrote. “If it is not forthcoming it is a sure thing that they will kill me and go back to their caves.”

Fortunately, a few marines on a nearby hill observed what must have seemed surreal to them: Private First Class Guy Gabaldon, unharmed, in the midst of an enormous swarm of enemy combatants. Gabaldon ordered one of the Japanese to use a white shirt to signal the marines, who immediately burst into action. “I was so damn busy trying to get a semblance of order, I can't remember how long it took help to arrive,” he wrote, “but I remember hundreds of Marines arriving on the scene.”

Late that night, after single-handedly capturing eight hundred enemy prisoners, the Pied Piper of Saipan did something rather ordinary: He wolfed down a K ration and went to sleep.

 

Extraordinary as Guy Gabaldon's actions were on Saipan, he was only awarded the Silver Star during the war—despite the recommendation of his commanding officer, Captain John Schwabe, that he be given the highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor. It was only after he achieved a measure of fame on the television program
This Is Your Life,
and from the 1960 film
Hell to Eternity,
which chronicled his exploits, that the Marine Corps saw fit to upgrade his award a notch to the Navy Cross—one designation shy of the Medal of Honor. “It was only with a twinge of conscience that they upgraded my Silver Star to a Navy Cross,” Gabaldon told the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
in 2004, “and to me that indicated they knew they had made a mistake.” Still, the highest award for valor remained elusive, despite the fact that he had taken ten times as many prisoners as Sergeant Alvin York, who won the Medal of Honor in World War I. Though there were some congressional efforts to properly honor the Pied Piper of Saipan, Gabaldon was still waiting when he died in 2006.