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PFC. LEHMAN KLOB

Carried a bullet for 13 months

     It was February of 1942, following the fall of Singapore, when Pfc Lehman Klob was a rear gunner on a B-24 Liberator bomber that this Farmington airman suffered an injury more serious than first thought. 

    A newspaper account of this man's adventure tells how he was twice injured, and received the Purple Heart.  It also points out the young man carried a Japanese bullet in his body for 13 months, doctors having thought he suffered only a flesh wound to later find out the slug from the machine gun had worked its way from his hip to his stomach. 

     It was 13 months after he volunteered for service but only weeks after arriving in the South Pacific that his first injury occurred. 

     While returning from a bombing expedition to the Island of Bali, Klob's squadron of five bombers was attacked by a fleet of nine Japanese Zeroes as the American planes neared their base in Java. 

     The bomber on which Klob was flying was struck by over 3,000 bullets, according to news account, but he was the only one of the nine-member crew to be wounded.  A machine gun bullet struck him on the left hip. 

     All five U.S. bombers reached their base and Lehman was treated by Dutch physician.  They believed he had sustained only a flesh wound and after a few days he resumed his duties with the bomber squadron. 

     The Americans later were driven back by the Japanese "whose air strength then greatly outnumbered that of the Allies in that area." 

     Early in March of 1942, Lehman's right foot was struck by "a piece of shrapnel which inflicted a painful but not serious wound." 

     Klob's hip injury began to bother him again in November and he entered an Army hospital in New Guinea.  "There an x-ray examination disclosed that the machine gun bullet which had struck his hip in February had passed upward and lodged in his stomach." 

     The bullet was removed in abdominal surgery 13 months after he suffered the initial wound.  He recovered fully from the surgery with the exception of a complication that resulted from a severed nerve.  That complication caused his left leg to be "greatly stiffened." 

     Klob was returned to Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis where he spent two months.  He was able to get back home on furlough to visit his parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Klob, during that hospital stay. 

     A relative told The Daily Journal in March that Klob, who was living in Florida, died several years ago.

 The DAILY JOURNAL, St. Francois County., Wednesday, April 26, 1995.

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