Bob Jones was ready to serve his country in 1939 and did so for six years, but the Bellevue veteran says that was just a brief tour in his 94 years of life, and not one that defines him now.
Jones and his childhood friend, Tommy, were working as seasonal park rangers near Bellevue, awaiting a declaration of war. When the radio broadcast Nazis had invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Jones and Tommy borrowed a car and drove to Fort Lewis, now Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
“As soon as we heard that Germany had invaded Poland, we said, ‘That’s it, we’re enlisting,’ ” said Jones. “Tommy and I stayed together for the whole doggone war.”
Jones and Tommy were stationed at Fort Bragg for field artillery training, but quickly signed up for the U.S. Airborne. Following the Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor, Jones was put on a plane destined for England.
“That night there were 35 of us who flew over to England,” said Jones, adding two days later Germany declared war. “But we were already over there, ready to fight Germans. … Why we were attached to the British, I’ve never known, but I credit the British for turning me into a soldier,” Jones said.
Jones and Tommy were deployed first to North Africa to secure an airfield in Algiers, where Jones took a knife to his ribs, and then to Sicily. Two days after the Allied Forces invaded Salerno, Jones left Sicily and joined up with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, where the British would once a week send him and his fellow troops on missions to rest camps for German officers, parachuting in and taking them out. The British believed taking out high-ranking German officers would cause their troops to falter, Jones said.
“Basically, we were assassins, is what we were,” he said.
In May 1944, Jones was one of 50 from the 504th to volunteer to parachute into Normandy, about 40 miles inland from where Allied forces were fighting Germans on the coast, and take out a bridge critical to the Nazis. The 504th never managed to meet up with the 505th PIR, but Jones said back then airplane pilots would become confused about where their targets were.
“It worked to our advantage, because the Germans thought they were overrun by Airborne,” he said.
After fighting through France and being beaten back in Holland, Jones was sent to Belgium with the 34 surviving parachuters out of the 850 used during the air invasion into Holland. Following the Battle of the Bulge, Jones was sent to Germany, where he received his third injury of the war when he was struck in the right knee by shrapnel from a tripped land mine.
Following the Japanese’s surrender in 1945, Jones was granted his discharge and didn’t look back.
“I’d had it,” he said. “I’d killed too many people.”
Jones flew to Michigan, where the woman who would become his wife had been waiting for him. Bob and Helen Jones were married at her home north of Detroit, and moved to Seattle and later back to Bellevue, where they spent 47 years together, raising three children. Helen died in 1992.
While Jones had been glad to be done with his service, Tommy, his childhood friend, re-enlisted in the Air Force and would later be killed during the Korean War. Jones said fighting in World War II, he learned to not get too attached to his fellow soldiers, but Tommy had been his friend long before then, and the only member of the 82nd Airborne he kept in contact with after WWII.
Now, Jones lives a quiet life in his Bellevue home. He doesn’t go to events celebrating veterans or military funeral services. Once an avid climber, Jones said when he dies he wants to be cremated, his ashes scattered on Mount Rainier. His three Purple Hearts, he said, will not be joining him.
