Pacific warrior relives WWII

Sgt. Maj. Daniel Breier was on Mindanao Island in the Philippines on Aug. 14, 1945—after more than a year of bloody combat to expel Japanese troops clinging to the territory.

The naval guns of American ships idling off the coast began to fire, and Breier, thinking another attack was incoming, readied his battalion for more fighting. But the guns weren’t aimed at the enemy. Instead, they were being fired to celebrate the surrender of the Japanese Empire. The war was over.

Breier, 93, is one of about 620,000 American World War II veterans still alive out of the 16 million who fought in the war. His journey, like the tens of millions of other Americans affected by the war, started on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and brought the United States into a war that would span nearly the entire globe. Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the attacks, and Breier can still remember the intricate details of his service, as well as what he was doing on that infamous day.

He was 17 and sitting in his Queens apartment listening to a Giants football game on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted with news of the attack. He stepped out onto the streets where hundreds of others had gathered to discuss the incident.

“I guess this means war,” he thought, and then asked his mother what he should do next.

“Just wait,” she said. “They’ll call you.”

The next day he went back to his job at a defense factory in Long Island City, building hydraulic accumulators for military airplanes. He got his draft letter in 1943, and soon after he was fighting in the Pacific.

After his training, Breier shipped out to fight in Gen. MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign to liberate territories captured by the Japanese.

He started in New Guinea, where he got his “first taste of combat.” After months of clearing pillboxes, tunnels and entrenched gun emplacements, he moved on to help liberate the Philippines. The first stop was Leyte Island, and then the Island of Mindoro. Finally, he ended up at Mindanao to finish out the war.

“All the islands looked the same,” he said. He described the jungle conditions as either wet or rainy, adding that it helped keep his clothes clean.

“That’s how they showered,” chimed in Breier’s wife, Zelda, who listened to him tell his story. They have been married for 63 years and have three children.

Breier described his combat experience bluntly. He casually told a story about landing on Mindanao, where his outfit’s equipment transport ship was hit by a kamikaze airplane, and exploded yards away from him.

But occasionally, he would pause when talking about the process of clearing the islands — seemingly at a loss for words. The combat was treacherous, he said. The soldiers paid for every inch of land with blood, and the Japanese had years to dig in.

“They just wouldn’t surrender,” he said with a pained voice.

Breier also earned a Bronze Star for his service, but he wasn’t aware that he had received one until it arrived in 1965.

He said he believes he was awarded the medal for an incident on Leyte: While returning from an ammunition resupply, he found his squad being attacked from behind. He and another man drove off the Japanese soldiers and saved the lives of their companions.

Although Breier was drafted at 19 and relieved of command duty during his basic training, by the end of the war, at age 22, he had been promoted to a battalion sergeant major and oversaw more than 1,500 men.

“I think that’s pretty good,” he chuckled.

After the war, Breier was stationed in Japan. He saw immense defenses — naval gun emplacements built into mountainsides and thousands of midget submarines and planes — and believes the estimates, which projected that it would have taken a million American lives to capture mainland Japan.

“But the atomic bombs, they were the thing that did the trick,” he said about forcing the Japanese to surrender.

He was discharged from the Army in 1946, and went to college to become an accountant under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill.

“And then you got married,” Zelda reminded him. She said he never talked about his experience in the war until recently. “He’s a very modest man,” she said.

“My press agent,” he quipped.

Breier and his wife moved to Oceanside in 1969. At 93, he is remarkably spry and can remember almost every detail of his life down to the exact day.

For a few years now, he has stopped by Oceanside High School once a year on Human Resources Day to talk about his war experiences. Most recently, he was honored at the school’s 2016 Homecoming, where he received a plaque for being an Oceanside World War II veteran.

“Anything else?” he asked near the end of the interview, as he turned towards his wife.

“What are you looking at me for?” she shot back. “I wasn’t there!”