He never made it back to Margin Street

Sgt. Robert Kromm would have come home to Margin Street in Endicott to a welcome of hugs and joyful tears. He grew up during tough times on the short street and his mother and sisters and many of his relatives lived there.

Robert Kromm's graduation photo for the Endicott High School class of 1941. He joined the Marine Corps at Spokane that summer.

Like most Endicott High School graduates, Robert probably would have lived out his adult life elsewhere, perhaps taking advantage of the post-war veterans program to prepare for a career and raise a family in Spokane or in the western part of the state.

But he never made it back. He died serving in the Marines on Saipan in the Mariana Islands on June 20, 1944. That was just three years after he graduated from Endicott High School.

Kromm on furlough from boot camp with his mother, Eva Stong Kromm, who moved back to Endicott with six children after her husband, Phillip Kromm, was killed in a car-train accident near Colfax in 1928. Robert, five years old, sustained a fractured leg in the tragic accident. His first boyhood friend in Endicott remembered his arrival in town with a cast.

At the time of his death he was already a veteran of two campaigns in the Pacific. He fought at Guadalcanal, the first major battle after the United States rebounded from the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Robert’s growing up years in Endicott followed in the wake of an earlier family tragedy, the death of his father in a car-train collision on the Union Pacific tracks two miles outside of Colfax on the South Palouse River Road.

Five years old at the time, Robert and his father, Phillip Kromm, 43, were in a car which stalled on a railroad crossing into what was known as the Seagraves place. They reportedly had gone to a neighbor’s residence to get a load of apples.

The account in the Aug. 17, 1928, Colfax Commoner, said Phillip climbed out of the car to check the motor, realized at the last second that the passenger train was approaching, rushed back and pulled young Robert out of the car.

The report said the car was catapulted into the air by the force of the collision and it struck and killed Phillip. Robert sustained a broken leg in the tragedy.

Phillip’s widow, Eva Stong Kromm, decided to move the family back to Endicott, to a small house on Margin Street. Robert was one of seven children, six still living at home.

One of the early service pictures of Kromm was taken during boot camp in Camp Elliott, Calif. His career with the Marines included the invasions at Guadalcanal and Tarawa before he died in 1944, five days after the start of the invasion of Saipan.

Robert soon made friends with Ralph Poffenroth, a boy who lived in a house at the end of Margin Street. Ralph remembers when he met Robert. He was still in a cast from the train tragedy.

The two boys became best friends as they grew up in Endicott. Ralph, also a member of the Endicott High class of 1941, became the last person from Endicott to see Robert alive when the two got together during the war in New Zealand.

A long time resident of Edmonds, Ralph died May 7.

In a letter to the Gazette March 27, Elaine Bafus Poffenroth, who married Ralph in 1945, noted Eva Kromm’s children, as they grew older, helped with odd jobs around town to bolster the family income. Robert, as he grew into his high school years worked on Conrad Hergert’s farm, helped the school janitor, and unloaded coal and wood off railroad freight cars which were dropped off by the train.

In the summer of 1941, Robert went to Spokane to enlist in the U.S Marine Corps. He was sent to Camp Elliott, Calif., for boot camp. After he finished training, he made a trip back home.

“When Robert came home on his boot camp leave, he came to the high school to see us. He looked so grand in his uniform,” Elaine Poffenroth said in her letter to the Gazette.

The visit after boot camp was the last time Robert was in Endicott. He was headed out for the Pacific Campaign.

The battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands stretched from August of 1942 to February of 1943. The Solomons were one of the strategic battle sites selected by the admirals and generals as they made a four-year Pacific advance on Japan.

As a new Marine, Robert Kromm was just 14 months out of high school went he went into the battle with the Marines. The five-month battle took the lives of more than 7,000 soldiers on the U.S. side.

In November of 1943, 10 months after Guadalcanal, Robert was with the Marines when they landed on Tarawa, an atoll 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. Tarawa was seen as an entry point to the central Pacific and return to the Philippines. The United States sustained approximately 3,000 casualties, killed and wounded, on Tarawa.

For leave after Guadalcanal, Robert went with his division to Wellington, New Zealand. Family members know he suffered from malaria during his time in the Pacific.

Ralph Poffenroth of Endicott was serving as a radioman on the USS Louisville which arrived in port at Wellington, and the two 1941 Endicott graduates met for a reunion. Ralph was the last person from Endicott to see Robert alive.

Also while he was in Wellington, Robert became engaged, by mail, to Elaine Bafus.

Saipan in the North Marianas Islands was sought because it could be used as a base for the then new B-29 bombers to attack Japan. The Marine 1st and 2nd Divisions and an Army Division were assigned. The invasion of the island started June 15, 1944, and Robert Kromm, then a 21-year-old sergeant died in action five days later.

Elaine Bafus Poffenroth had returned to the family farm after finishing her sophomore year at Washington State College. At that time, two of the older Kromm girls, Emma and Marie, had married and lived in houses on Margin Street. An older son, Harry Kromm, lived across the street from his mother.

Usually, after a big battle in the Pacific, families at home would get reports from their children in the service, but Robert’s family heard nothing.

“Then one day Emma called me and said ‘well, we heard’ and gave me the sad news,” Elaine said in her letter.

She believes at that time Anna Weitz was the Endicott representative for the Red Cross who delivered the news.

Elaine’s mother drove her to Emma’s house from the ranch. Her mother was also at Emma’s house and Rev. Wittrick from Trinity Lutheran came to talk with them. Marie, who was away for the day, received the sad news when she came home later in the day.

“She and I walked up and down the sidewalk for about an hour. Then that evening my mother came in to take me home,” Elaine said in her letter.

Surviving family members learned 53 years later details of how Sgt. Robert Kromm died in the Battle on Saipan June 20, 1944. The account came from his best Marine buddy, Gerald Ross of Marysville, in 1997. Ross explained later that the reason he waited all those years was because the experience was too painful for him. Sometimes, when he came to this part of the state to hunt, he saw highway signs with Endicott posted. He wrestled with the notion of looking up Robert’s family and eventually learned that the family knew little about his service record.

He contacted the Marine Corps records department for Robert’s medals and arranged for a flag presentation at the VFW in Everett and a medal ceremony at Long Beach July 8, 1997. Recipient of the medals was Lydia Kromm Saccomanno, Robert’s surviving sister who is now 90.

Fred Cowan, another Marine buddy of Roberts, flew out from Baltimore to join Ross in the presentation.

Ross and Cowan, when they decided to look up Robert’s family, went to Endicott and learned about Lydia, Robert’s surviving sister in Long Beach.

A feature article by Stan Thompson in the Chinook Observer, detailed the event and the Marine days recollections of Ross and Cowan.

Ross met Robert at a train station. He was on his way to boot camp, and Robert had just finished boot camp and was headed back home on furlough to Endicott.

Robert and Gerald shipped out for the Asiatic Pacific Campaign in the second Battalion, H Company, 2nd Marine Division.

Ross and Kromm survived the Battle of Tarawa where they had been dropped 1,000 yards from the shore with Japanese bullets hitting the water all around them. At Tarawa, their platoon of 68 men had been decimated to 13 with Ross one of six wounded.

On Saipan, Ross and Kromm were in a mortar crew. The mortar fire was directed by a forward observer who was linked to the crew by 1,000 feet of wire. The crew had just fought their way across an airport when their observer was shot.

“Without hesitation, Robert ran to re-establish the post, all the while feeding out a long wire that linked him back to the mortar crews waiting for directional readings so they could take aim and fire their 81 mm shells,” Ross told the Chinook Observer in 1997.

Robert was on an elevated area when he and three others were killed by a Japanese shell that hit “without a hint of warning.”

Fred Cowan witnessed the hit. Gerald Ross, who had been hit earlier in the battle, had been taken to a hospital ship.

Lydia Saccomanno, who marked her 90th birthday on Valentine’s Day, remains the keeper of Sgt. Kromm’s medals, the Purple Heart, Presidential Citation, Bronze Star, Victory WWII, Asiatic Pacific Campaign, American Defense Medal and the Good Conduct Medal.

“I remember him coming home, before he shipped overseas. He’d grown a few inches taller and was tougher than nails,” Lydia told Thompson in the Chinook Observer article.

In 2005, a PBS documentary on World War II included a segment on the Battle of Saipan. It included film of the temporary military cemetery which was established on the island after the battle. The camera showed the flag at the entrance and then panned across the grave markers. The first was the burial site of a Jewish Marine, the second was the site of an unknown soldier, and the third was the temporary grave of Sgt. Robert Kromm.

Graves from Saipan were moved to the Punchbowl National Cemetery in Hawaii after the war. Robert Kromm was re-interred in the Saipan section, section 0, site 322.

Over the years, Robert’s siblings, nephews, nieces and childhood friends have visited the grave.

NOTES AND CREDITS

This article evolved from family research sent to the Gazette by Nancy Morasch Winn, a niece of Robert Kromm residing in the Spokane Valley. Larry Morasch of Chehalis, who two years ago submitted the article on the loss of Endicott pilot Donald McMahon, also contributed. His uncle Carl was married to Emma Kromm, one of Robert’s sisters. They also lived on Margin Street.

Several others contributed to the research. Carolyn Poffenroth Smith of Seattle noted Robert Kromm during the war carried a picture of him in her WSU drum majorette uniform. Robert told his Marine buddies that Carolyn was a former Miss Washington.

Winn notes after the war, the Marine Corps used some of Robert’s war pictures in a book about the Pacific Campaign. A copy of the book was sent to Robert’s mother, and a copy of the book is in the library at Trinity Lutheran Church at Endicott.

Robert Kromm’s older brother, Phillip, served in the Navy as a registered nurse and was wounded on Christmas Day in 1943 when he was serving on an 80-foot boat which exploded during refueling. He sustained a fractured back when he landed on the deck. Phillip returned home and became a prominent anesthesiologist in Spokane. He died on March 21, 2001, in Olympia.

Robert Kromm’s sister, Bonnie Kromm Gough, served in the Royal Canadian Army during the war. She married and raised a family in Seattle. Bonnie died Oct. 23, 1991, at Long Beach.

Fred J. Cowan of Gwyn Oak, Md., died Feb. 9, 1998. Cowan was actually hit by shrapnel during the landing on Saipan but remained in action and was on the front line when Sgt. Kromm was killed.

Gerald Ross, who initiated the effort to contact Kromm’s family after years of coping with the painful memories of Saipan, died Dec. 3, 2007, in Marysville.

Stan Thompson, who wrote about the presentation of Robert’s medals in the Chinook Observer, left the paper about six years ago to make his home in northern California. He is now deceased. Use of his account in this article was granted by Matt Winters, publisher of the Observer.

—Jerry Jones, editor