Bradenton residents journeyed through the wild jungles of northern Myanmar

BRADENTON -- Two Bradenton couples have a unique connection that runs through the Gordon S. Seagrave Hospital in the jungles of northern Burma, now called Myanmar.

Stan Moloney was a patient there as a U.S. Army sergeant during World War II when the allies were trying to push the Japanese army out of the country.

A decade later, Dr. Joe Newhall, accompanied by his wife, Sue, and their three sons, practiced medicine there.

Today, Moloney and his wife, Elsa, live in retirement in the Bayshore area while the Newhalls are retired in west Bradenton.

The couples have only a fleeting acquaintance, but their respective times in Burma remain indelible experiences.

Moloney, now 94, went overseas from California by ship in late 1942, sailing to Wellington, New Zealand, and proceeding to the south coast of Australia, before heading north to Mumbai, India. Moloney and other engineers then went by rail across the breadth of India to Assam on the Burmese border.

"We received the incoming material to be used on the Ledo Road, which crossed into Burma and would extend to Kunming, China. The roads were almost nonexistent. We were there to accelerate the movement of materials," Moloney said.

A year after arriving in India, he was reassigned for a year and a half to Burma as first sergeant of a company, which operated a number of small depots. The soldiers lived in wild, primitive conditions where tigers roamed and natives hunted with crossbows.

Prior to the war's end, Moloney asked to be relieved from the first sergeant's job to move closer to the front to became part of a liaison team attached to the Chinese army.

"The rivers there were not too forgiving, Many of them were high velocity. We had to go over mountains -- the foothills of the Himalaya -- and it was slow going," he said.

He was assigned to the 12th Chinese Combat Engineer regiment, which gave him the freedom to move around and volunteer to help crew the air drop of supplies.

"We didn't ask for anyone's permission except the pilot's," Moloney said.

"We had some close calls with Japanese aircraft when we were kicking supplies out of a C-47 flying at 140 mph," he said. "On one occasion we had three Zeroes flying wing to wing with us. You could see the big round ball (rising sun insignia). They never harmed us. Maybe they were out of ammo or just decided to have a brotherly day. I think back and know that someone was looking out for us."

Although never harmed by the Japanese, he had three bouts of malaria, a bout with dysentery and accidentally stepped into a bucket of boiling water. He suffered severe burns before getting out of his jungle boots.

He spent several weeks in the Gordon S. Seagrave Hospital, which had been opened by an American medical doctor decades before World War II. After the war, Moloney married Elsa in 1946 and embarked on a construction career.

In 1995, Moloney and about 20 other Burma veterans returned to revisit the wild country they had known as youths.

Joe and Sue Newhall's experience in Burma, while different, were no less colorful.

Joe Newhall left a successful medical practice in Bradenton in 1963, and traveled to Burma with Sue and their three young sons to work at the Seagrave Hospital in Namkham, Burma.

"Dr. Seagrave had begun there about 1915, and he was still running the place," Sue Newhall said. "During the war, Dr. Seagrave was unable to stay in his hospital, and joined up with Gen. Joe Stillwell's army. He and his nurses formed a hospital unit in Assam, while the Japanese came in and used the hospital as a barracks."

The Americans heavily damaged the hospital by bombing the Japanese there, and conditions were primitive after the war.

Seagrave, a crusty character with a colorful and direct way of speaking, left no doubt the hospital was his.

"You did it his way or else," Sue Newhall said.

Or as Joe Newhall, 86, puts it: "He was very tenacious."

Seagrave wasn't necessarily the Newhall's biggest problem. After just a few months in Burma, the government began trying to deport them, saying they had overstayed their visitors visas. The Newhalls were able to stay in Burma, however, until 1965, when they returned to Bradenton.

Their family had grown by two when they adopted twin orphans. Later, one of Joe Newhall's Burmese nurses and her daughter came to live with the Newhalls and became permanent residents of the United States.

Joe Newhall resumed his Bradenton medical practice, while Sue enrolled in a creative writing course. She eventually fashioned her student writings into a book titled "The Devil in God's Old Man," which was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 1969.

"I do not believe in ghosts, but sometimes I wish I did," she writes in the epilogue of her book about Dr. Seagrave, who died in 1965. "During the 68 years that he lived in the body of Gordon S. Seagrave, he was never quiet or at peace with himself or the world. Now all that he worked for and dreamed about has been reduced to an ill-functioning instrument of the Burmese government, and he still can't rest."

James A. Jones Jr., Herald reporter, can be contacted at 941-745-7053 or on Twitter @jajones1.

This story was originally published October 13, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Bradenton residents journeyed through the wild jungles of northern Myanmar."