In December 1942, Joseph Kohn joined the US Marine Corps Reserves while attending Rider College in NJ. In July 1943, he was called to active duty and attended Duke University in Durham, North Carolina for officer training under the Navy and Marine Corps V-12 program. In November 1943, he purposely flunked out of officer training and was sent to Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego for basic training. After this, he was sent to Camp Pendleton for advanced training in Field Artillery as a forward observer. In 1944 he was sent to the Pacific as part of a replacement battalion and was later assigned as a field artillery forward observer with L Battery, 4th Battalion, 15th Marines, 6th Marine Division. He worked with a front-line infantry unit by calling in and adjusting supporting artillery fire. Kohn landed with the Division on Okinawa on 1 April 1945. He was promoted to Corporal in July 1945, and became a squad leader with the Assault Platoon, HQ Company, 2nd Battalion, 22nd Marines, 6th Marine Division, and trained for the proposed invasion of the Japanese home islands. In October 1945, Kohn’s unit was sent to North China to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. While there he served with Headquarters Battalion, 6th Marine Division in Tsingtao, China as a Jewish Chaplain’s assistant and did extensive civil affairs work among the European Jewish refugees. Kohn was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps on 7 March 1946. After the War, he graduated Rider College, where he was president of the school’s Hillel chapter, and became a public school social studies teacher in Metuchen. He eventually moved to Lakewood, NJ where he became the principal of the Ella G. Clarke Elementary School for over twenty years. He also served as the youth group advisor and President of Temple Beth Am in Lakewood and the President of the local Kiwanis club. He raised a son and a daughter in Lakewood, before retiring and moving to Lake Worth, FL in 1989. His personal papers and photographs of his wartime experience are a part of the USMC personal papers collection at the Marine Corps University, and he was profiled in the book “Gyrene: The World War II United States Marine” by Wilbur D. Jones, Jr. – Shared by Stuart Kohn