Wyvon Leon Myrick
Platoon Sergeant Wyvon L. “Squeaky” Myrick served with Mike Company, Third Battalion, 4th Marines.
He was killed in action at Fort Hughes, Corregidor on 6 May 1942.
Branch
Marine Corps Regular
Service Number 241115
Current Status
Remains not recovered.
Pursuit Category
The DPAA has not publicized this information.
Capsule History
Pre-War Life
Birth
April 13, 1911
at Fulton, KY
Parents
Lee Myrick
Catherine “Kate” (Clement) Myrick
Education
Details unknown
Occupation & Employer
Professional Marine
Service Life
Entered Service
December 28, 1933
at Macon, GA
Home Of Record
1022 North Kedzie Avenue
Chicago, IL
Next Of Kin
Parents, Lee & Catherine Myrick
Military Specialty
Machine gun NCO
Primary Unit
M/3/4th Marines
Campaigns Served
Philippine Islands / Corregidor
Individual Decorations
Purple Heart
Additional Service Details
—
Loss And Burial
Circumstances Of Loss
Platoon Sergeant Wyvon “Squeaky” Myrick, a long-serving regular Marine with time spent in China, was stationed in the Philippine Islands when the United States entered World War II. An avid basketball player, he was also called “the Jitterbug Man from Cavite” for his skills on the dance floor. Myrick’s comrade Glenn McDole remembered “[sitting] for hours nursing a rum and coke and talking to the young women who waited to dance with Squeaky.”
With the outbreak of hostilities, Myrick’s outfit was re-designated as the Third Battalion, 4th Marines, and he became a senior NCO in Mike Company. He participated in the defense of the Philippines and the siege of Corregidor, where he was one of a handful of Marines assigned to man the batteries at Caballo Island (Fort Hughes).
On the night of 5 May 1942, the Japanese started their all-out assault against Corregidor itself. Fort Hughes came in for a shellacking from shore batteries and aircraft, forcing the defenders to keep their heads down and away from their weapons. Glenn MacDole related the experience under fire to author Bob Wilbanks:
Waves of planes hit the island in a continuous air bombardment. Mac decided he needed a safer refuge and ran for a small foxhole. When he jumped in he almost landed on Squeaky Myrick, and the two friends sat with heads down and tried to talk of better times while the bombs and artillery shells dropped around them.... [A] bomb hit nearby. “Mac, it’s gettin’ too hot in here for me,” [Myrick] yelled, “let’s get the hell outta here!”
“Dammit!” Mac yelled, “I’m not about to stick my head out of this hole!”
With shells falling all around them, Squeaky panicked. Mac watched, dumbfounded, as Squeaky jumped out of the gun emplacement and ran toward one of the bigger emplacements about 15 yards away. It happened in a split second. Squeaky jumped in just as a shell hit the emplacement dead center. Mac watched in horror as Squeaky and the others in the shelter were blown to bits.
Mac buried his head and cried remembering Squeaky Myrick: a likable guy, a good sergeant, and a man who loved dancing, basketball, and the Corps.
Burial Information or Disposition
In 1943, American POWs at Cabanatuan began attempting to reconcile casualty lists and create a roster of men known to be dead. Servicemen gave formal affidavits about friends and comrades who had been killed in action or died in captivity. PFC Jack W. Smith was one who testified: he told of seeing the bodies of Corporal Irving Antman and Squeaky Myrick on the day they died.
Smith’s statement was sufficient to confirm the deaths of Antman and Myrick, but he had no insight regarding the final disposition of their remains.
In 1946, an Army Graves Registration detachment arrived at Caballo to exhume remains from three known burial plots on the island. One plot was incorrectly mapped and could not be found; another was “no longer intact due to landslides and bombings” and looked like a “sheer cliff.” The third,a two-row plot located by Flag Hill, was somewhat more promising but still problematic: it was beside a pond, and many graves were waterlogged.
The AGRS men exhumed twelve partially submerged bodies from the first row – nine of which were in a mass grave. They could do nothing about the second row, which was fully underwater: “the pond at the time of burial was evidently dammed up and very low because of dry season.” One of the bodies recovered from the mass grave was identified as Irving Antman.
The whereabouts of Wyvon Myrick’s remains are unknown to this day. If he was originally buried near Corporal Antman, his body may be interred at Fort William McKinley as an unknown. Or, he may still lie on Caballo Island in one of the inaccessible burial plots.
Memorials
Next Of Kin Address
Address of parents, Lee & Catherine Myrick.
(Wyvon may have been married to another Catherine Myrick, of this address)
Location Of Loss
Myrick was killed at one of the battery positions at Fort Hughes.
The pond which troubled AGRS in 1946 is clearly visible today.
