RAYMOND SCHNEIDER
Age: 92
Born: April 23, 1918
Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Residence: Rancho Mirage
Military branch: U.S. Navy, attached to the Marine Corps 8th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion
Years served: January 1943- November 1946
Rank: Lieutenant
Family: Wife Hannah (deceased); two children, Milton Tony Schneider of Philadelphia and Nancy Spelke of Palm Desert and Pasadena; one grandchild.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Paul Chapas of Palm Desert.
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at www.mydesert.com/WWII
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As Marines climbed down rope ladders into the landing craft bound for Okinawa, U.S. Navy veteran Raymond Schneider heard someone yell for help.
“He said, ‘Hey doc, Joe has a toothache,'” Schneider said.
Once on the beach, Schneider — a dentist attached to the battalion — got down to business.
“We sat the kid down, gave him a shot and pulled his tooth out while the kamikazes were overhead,” said Schneider, who now lives in Rancho Mirage.
The 8th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion — part of the Okinawa invasion operation — positioned its artillery — 20 mm and 40 mm guns — inland to defend the island from enemy air attacks.
“The object (of occupying) Okinawa was to invade Japan,” he said.
Schneider nearly got drilled — and killed — not long after landing on Okinawa.
“I was standing on a cliff and up from the sea came a single-engine Japanese plane — he was shooting at me,” Schneider said. Luckily, “He was shot down by one of our guys.”
“I thought, ‘What the hell is a dentist doing in the middle of all of this?'” he said.
Schneider and members of the battalion's medical corps set up shop on the beach, near the edge of the ocean.
He was the only dentist in a battalion of more than 1,200 men.
“I replaced another dentist who finished his tour of duty,” he said.
Schneider's dental office was set up inside a prefab building — not as primitive as other beachside structures — but it still lacked the modern conveniences of his office in the states.
“We drilled teeth with a foot engine,” he said. “There was no electricity.”
He examined as many Marines as he could while stationed at Okinawa.
“We'd call 'em in, a couple at a time, and put them in good shape,” Schneider said.
The dental health of the Marines ran the gamut from rotten to good. Many of the men suffered from poor dental hygiene or lack of dental care — or both.
“These kids never went to the dentist,” he said. “They came from the boondocks.”
Some of the men were a little hesitant to sit in Schneider's chair.
“These big, rugged Marines were afraid to go to the dentist,” he said, laughing.
The doctors, dentists and other men of the medical corps had to dig in and watch their backs — just like the Marines stationed around the island.
“We were in the foxholes and water came in,” he said, describing the soggy sleeping arrangements. “There were periods when it would rain for days.”
The men found a way to drown their troubles — and dull the pain of boredom at the same time.
“We drank a lot because I had access to alcohol, pure, 99 percent alcohol. One night two of my friends came into my tent — we had a tin of alcohol and a can of grapefruit juice — and we sat there from 7 to 11 p.m. drinking that.”
Schneider, who graduated from New York University dental school in 1942, joined the U.S. Navy in January 1943 and spent his military career attached to the Marine Corps.
Before deploying overseas, Schneider worked at Sampson Naval Training Station in upstate New York and taught root canal therapy at the NYU dental school after hours.
“We did mass production work,” he said. “You ‘drilled and filled,' as they say, rather than pulling their teeth out.”
One young man had two front teeth that needed root canals. Schneider offered to perform the work — which was beyond the scope of his assignment.
A superior got word of his plans and confronted the compassionate dentist.
“He said, ‘Schneider, what's this — you're building up a specialty practice here? You do no more and no less than you're assigned,'” Schneider said. “Three days later I got my walking papers to go to Okinawa.”
