WORLD WAR II: THE GOOD WAR
| 14,903,213 | Served (1941-5)* |
| 405,399 | Died (1941-6)* |
| 291,557 | Killed in Action (KIA)* |
| 670,846 | Wounded in Action (WIA)* |
| 74,074 | Missing in Action (MIA)** |
*Department of Defense (DOD) figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service, 26 February 2010. This figure always includes all soldiers who served during war time, even if they served outside the war arena.
**DOD Missing Personnel Office
A TERRIBLE FIGHT BUT A GOOD WAR
Two great European memoirs of World War I, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, are personal testimonies against wars that were fought with a belief in glorious death. World War I killed a generation of officers and enlisted men as if dying were the point of it all, as in ancient wars. Veterans of World War II make clear that in their war the great numbers expended were atoned for by the overriding purpose of defeating terrible enemy forces in battlefields across the globe.
For America, its allies and enemies, World War II is the defining war of the 20th century, and it was fought until it was won. The imperial Axis dictators did not ride the tide of history because, among other things, they took on the major political unit of the time: the nation state, which would not be obliterated by conquest. It became a worldwide face-off, a war that engulfed citizens and soldiers alike, leading to massive destruction and death. It also led to victory for the Allies who believed they faced an aberration, an evil that could, and would, be defeated.
World War II was the last war to engage our entire country and find a compelling role for civilians. Everyone who could, contributed, including those staying at home as civilian guards, children who hunted for foil gum wrappers, families who hung lined curtains to block the light along America’s shores, and civilians who saved on gas and cut back on coffee and chocolate to save for the soldiers. Young women flooded into jobs they had not expected to perform and enjoyed new independence while waiting for the soldiers to come home.
The service of enlisted and drafted soldiers in World War II was vast—millions signed up when they were 17 or 18 years old. In many high school classes, students awaited their turn, sometimes skipping the chance to graduate. Brothers signed up one after the other, and many served at the same time. The carnage was wholesale but far away, and even in the darkest of hours, victory was assumed by most. The United States provisioned its allies well before Pearl Harbor, and afterwards sent forces overseas. Clearly, American soldiers helped turn the tide in favor of the Allies. Not only were they pivotal to the war, but the United States became the linchpin of the postwar world, emerging from that vast enterprise hale and hearty, and the father of the atomic bomb.
Tom Brokaw, in The Greatest Generation (1998), not only gave voice to World War II veterans, but by calling them the “greatest” renewed their pride. The theme of Brokaw’s book is individual success following sacrifice. I interviewed veterans of the same war, a number of whom were encouraged to talk by The Greatest Generation and by the 1994 50th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landings. The veterans I spoke with measured their success by their lucky survival or lasting injuries, and by their swift return to normalcy, not by financial or professional success. They did not see themselves as historic figures, but as small figures in a historic war. They enlisted, or were drafted, as pawns, not knights, and remain, in their 80s, modestly proud of their role in the greatest of modern wars. We owe them thanks for their wholehearted fight, and for their sacrifices of mind and body to restore sanity and justice among nations, albeit imperfectly, as is always the case.
Meeting World War II veterans after all these years, the word that came to my mind was “gentlemen.” They are gentlemen, and gracious, in some ways perhaps made gentle by the brutality they endured. Some personally witnessed the watchword moments such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, fighting under Patton, being a POW, or liberating a concentration camp—momentous in the public view and in their own eyes alike. All would say they are proud of their contribution to the war effort, but when they recount their experiences, they sound immune to the glories of war, and this immunity probably developed from what they had to do and what they witnessed done.
The following World War II veterans are citizens of a United States they believe in and of which they are proud. They returned home in order to forget war, marry fast, and have families. They decided to put the war behind them and look ahead. They are a generation of survivors of both the Depression and the war, and they are molded by the steel of their early years. They fear war, and some are critical of the more recent US wars that seem to be extending their country beyond its original shape and purpose. Even when critical of subsequent wars, they maintain their abiding belief in, and affection for, their country.
In accounts by the oldest of the veterans in this volume, readers will see that those who survived World War II lost not only friends and comrades, but their innocence. They could not dodge this bullet: they suffered trauma, but by keeping their experiences to themselves they hoped to spare their families a secondhand trauma. They generally revisit the realities of war alone or with comrades. They do not glorify war, or for that matter, even the leadership in war. It is important to note that in World War II, generals talked to soldiers and led the troops. Whatever you thought of General Patton or General Eisenhower, they were there.
Some groups of soldiers or auxiliaries are not properly represented in the following narratives. One important omission is of uniformed women who served as nurses and other staff. I located two WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) but neither felt her story merited being included with war stories.
I wanted to make sure that, in the stories of this final segregated American war, the role of African Americans was recorded. Therefore, in addition to a narrative by an African-American army veteran, I solicited comments from other veterans. World War II had black army men, black airmen, and black sailors, although there were none in the Marines. Black servicemen were kept separate, except in the Navy, where their jobs were servile. In the Army they fought in their own groups, or served in ways only distantly related to armed combat. The general notion was that it was dangerous to arm black Americans. The Tuskegee Airmen program to train select African Americans to fly in wartime was a remarkable departure and success. The highest military and political echelons considered it best not to force integration on a segregated (de facto or by regulation) society at war. Truman desegregated the services in time for an integrated force in Korea, but it was not until Vietnam that black Americans served most fully, and in greatest numbers.
Many World War II soldiers looked forward to the adventure of war; after, older and wiser, they looked forward to coming home and having their own postwar family. They helped create and celebrate postwar America—our sentimental attachment to World War II is something that came later. Veterans were immediately rewarded by being told that they had discharged their duty to their country and to the world, and that their efforts and sacrifices were valued, necessary, and successful. They participated in the great festivities on V-E (Victory in Europe) and V-J (Victory in Japan) days, wherever they were.
When Studs Terkel published his oral history of World War II in 1984, he acknowledged that the war had become emblematic by putting the title “The Good War” in quotation marks. Its role in American history has not changed. The legacy of World War II has directly influenced every subsequent war. All generations alive today know that World War II and its outcome have defined the modern world. It gave absolute proof of US prestige, power, and domination and ended US isolationism. But our powerful nostalgia for that war can also cloud the view forward.
I suggested to veterans that they exercise a historical perspective on their own, and on subsequent (or previous) American wars. Those views, with which most of the narratives end, are important. Do veterans of a major global war believe that current US wars are worthy of this nation, and, more pragmatically, that they can be won?
Allen Jones, born in 1924 in Loone, has lived all his life in Tennessee. He finished high school in Bolivar, and went to the University of Tennessee Junior College in Martin for a year before he was drafted into the Army. He returned to college in 1946, but felt the time had passed, he had lost years, and got married. His story is about fighting through France under General Patton in the 3rd Army and being evacuated with trench foot. The interview was conducted by phone.
Before starting his World War II story, I include introductory words from his grandson Travis Jones, who was born in 1975 in Kentucky. Travis deployed to Iraq in 2004–5 and his story is in my previous book, Surviving Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories. In 2010 he deployed to Kuwait to facilitate the troop reduction in Iraq. He spoke to me about his grandfather:
There’s this commonality between all wars, that no matter how times have changed, it’s still combat. I talk more to my grandfather now, he and I share a common language having been in a war zone. He’s stock-taking now, what he did, the guys he served with. We all knew he was a World War II veteran [but] if you walked in the house you would never have known anything, he never displayed anything. He really didn’t mention much about it until after I came home. Not until the late ’90s when Saving Private Ryan came out.
Listening to him talk about what he did over there, he tried to find some sense of humor, some enjoyment, it was just so bad. He saw so much death and he saw so much hardship. He was running up a snow bank with his battle buddy and having shots fired at him, and they both started laughing about it. He said he felt so crazy at the time, might as well just laugh because we can’t think of anything else. It was horrible with death happening all the time. Hearing him talk about that, he was very honest and genuine. My grandfather might like to do one more interview just to put some stuff out.
Here is that interview.
They called all of us, warning us to get into the reserves, so we could get our education and not be affected by the draft. It didn’t sound right to me, so I didn’t get in the reserves. Within two weeks, they were calling up all of these fellows. So that made me gun-shy of anything the military had to say to me. I left college and came home knowing that I would be called up most any time. I chose the Army only because they were giving a 21-day furlough on the front end, because they were having a hard time getting people!
I was stationed at Myles Standish near Taunton, Massachusetts, about 30 miles from Boston, waiting to be shipped overseas. We were carried to the Chelsea Naval Base, loading supplies on ships. I realize now that it was because the stevedores were handling that work, and they spent a good portion of their time in the smoking rooms. It was taking a week to load up one of those ships with supplies. We old country boys, we didn’t mind working. We began to load a ship a day. It was ammunition and of course the civilians didn’t like to handle these big shells, they weren’t sure how safe they were. It was a little bit of a conflict between the workers there, if they stuck their head into a boxcar where we were working and said anything, all we had to do was handle some of that ammunition!
I ran into that idea that war was good for the country. I was in one of the smoking rooms one day, they were talking about how good things were. “Man, this war is the best thing that happened to us in a long time.” I said, “Man, what are you talking about, people are getting killed!” He said, “It’s a good thing to have a little war going all the time, it lets the people have jobs, working well back here.” I am not too sure but what some of the politicians now don’t think the same way, because ever since World War II, they’ve kept some kind of war going, all the time. I think if the people who were making the decisions to go to war had to be involved in it, it would be a different story.
During the North African campaign, they were losing troops mighty fast over there. We left in July [’43] for basic training, Camp Hood, now Fort Hood, near Waco, Texas. I was sent to England after D-Day as a replacement in the 3rd Army, they had given Patton command. The 5th Division was an Army regular division, they were sent over into combat in the Rhine. It was a very sad situation because so many of those fellows never did get to return home. Their distinguishing mark was they had a red diamond stenciled on their helmet. So the first thing we did was put mud or something over that red diamond because it made a perfect target. The 5th Division was used by Patton as a spearhead division, so we were out in front in everything, all the time. The casualties were very heavy.
I was in the hedgerow country of France. The hedgerows had been there for years upon years to the extent that the ground for the hedgerows was approximately two feet higher in elevation than the fields they surrounded. They had been the fences for those fields. Those [Sherman] tanks could not get through because there were trees growing on top of those hedgerows, on those mounds of dirt. But one of the soldiers, an old country boy, he had been around a machine shop, and he says, “I can fix that.” He went to work with a welder and he put a bulldozer blade on the front of those tanks. They could run into those hedgerows, cutting a path where tanks could roll right through. They brought in metal and made the blades for the front end of those tanks. The thing about those old country boys, they could improvise and mend most anything. That’s the way they overcame the hedgerow problem in Normandy.
I was still in the replacement pool, we just followed the front. One morning I awoke to a terrible roar. I got out of my sleeping bag and pup tent. The sky was completely filled with planes as far as the eye could see. Most of them were up high enough that the bombers had a vapor trail, and this was the second wave to Saint-Lô. That’s when they spent all day going back and forth. We were on a hill near Saint-Lô, and they were bombing and that was the beginning of what they called the Breakout. [Saint-Lô, 24–5 July 1944, was an important battle following D-Day that included the tragedy of US bombers killing US troops on the ground when red marker smoke drifted over their positions.]
They were American planes and it was a continuous roar all day long. The breakthrough came and the Germans were on the run. Patton was always in a big hurry, always in a hurry. What I mean is, I think he was probably a good general, but he lost about three times more men than the 1st or the 9th Army, either one. In any case, I was with the weapons battalion and I had two big bags of ammunition, in addition to my pack and my gun. I didn’t weigh but about 130 pounds, and I was carrying two bags and each one of those rounds weighed eight pounds and there were six to a bag, so I had about a hundred pounds in addition to my rifle and my pack.
After this big breakthrough we traveled a lot of times by truck, but three fourths of the time we were traveling by foot. Patton didn’t allow you to follow the roads, they were too vulnerable, so we were in the cross country through the railroads and streams, all the time, moving too fast. Our battles were pretty much from village to village. Sometimes we’d take two or three towns in a day. Of course, the Germans were fighting us. When they could stop, organize, they were very efficient with their equipment.
I will say the Germans had superior equipment than the Americans did, even in 1945. They had an artillery piece 88 millimeters, a breech gun. They would keep aiming those 88s directly at us, or they could use it in the regiment as an artillery piece. They had a .30-caliber gun, it was so fast, we called it a burp gun— that’s about what it sounded like, spitting out bullets about three times faster than our .30-caliber machine guns. We lost a lot of people during that time; a lot of replacements came up.
When we were near the Moselle River, we were stopped. Of course, we were told we ran out of supplies. I’m not too sure. We were just too far out in front, because the 3rd Army was between the 1st and the 9th. Speaking of Metz, this outfit of ours wanted Metz. We had the Germans on the run but we had to back up because we were ordered to, we went back probably five miles. Then we fought for weeks to gain that back because it gave the Germans time to get a foothold. We were there for three weeks. That’s when the Germans had a chance to regroup and kind of get stashed away. They didn’t cut us any slack, that’s for sure. The Germans would send out patrols at night, they were in the villages, with my glasses I could see them up walking around and maintaining their coverage. They didn’t bed down out in the open like we were.
We are talking about the early fall of ’44. That’s when we were approaching Metz in October [the final battle for Metz was November 3–17]. It had begun to snow even then, the cold weather set in. The equipment we had wasn’t for cold weather. In fact, I have found out since then that Eisenhower hadn’t planned on a winter campaign. We had nothing but summer clothing. In fact, Patton made us turn in our overcoats because they were too heavy and we couldn’t move fast enough, so we didn’t even have overcoats. They didn’t care, I don’t think. I’m just telling you that’s exactly what happened. The warmest thing I had was a field jacket that was taken off of a German, underneath my field jacket, it was quilted, and very superior to what we had. That was what I kept warm in.
The rear echelons grabbed the boots, so they never reached us. The shoes I had on were called split-cowhide shoes, and they wouldn’t keep the water out, they didn’t protect you. To make the leather go further, they split that leather, and it made for a thin piece of leather that was more like a sponge because my feet stayed wet all the time, the water just soaked through. I’m not sure I know myself what trench foot is. I don’t think there’s much difference between that and frostbite. Your feet would go wet for days, and you didn’t even feel anything, they were so cold. I had never heard the word “trench foot,” it was just a godsend that I found out what I had.
The job that we were doing, fighting from one hole to the next, you didn’t pay any attention to the fact that your feet were cold, frozen. You never took your boots off. I had two pairs of socks to begin with, and I used to keep one on each side of my coat next to my body to dry during the day, and then I would switch them the next morning. I finally put both pair of socks on, trying to keep the feet warm. We didn’t even take our shoes off at night because very seldom did we sleep with a roof over our heads. We just were out in a hole in the ground.
When we would stop, the Germans would stop and cover our area with machine gunfire and the shells and everything else. So for protection, the first thing I would do is dig a foxhole and keep my head down in, which saved me many a time because I could get part of my body down. If we didn’t, men were being cut down in front with machine-gun fire; [the Germans] were raking that area with bullets after we stopped. You were on your own. It was left up to the individual as to whether he was going to expose himself or not.
Most everyone dug a hole. I’d break limbs off of pine trees and line the bottom of that hole so I could have a dry place to live. I had one of those shelter hats, one half of that pup tent I would use as a cover for my hole, and I would stay down in that hole if I felt it was safe enough to do that. Otherwise, if I didn’t think it was safe, I would use my helmet, I wanted to be where I could get to my gun. Very little sleep did you get, maybe pass out. It was up early the next morning and on the move.
We lost a lot of people. I don’t know why, but in combat when you went into an attack, you had the feeling whether you were going to succeed or whether you would have problems. We went into the woods and I didn’t have a good feeling about the whole thing. We lost men down to one full company, consists of about 170 to 180 people. We never did have a full company, in fact we lost officers. Half the time we didn’t have platoon leaders. Fortunately it was an extremely dark night. I have never seen it as dark. The Germans came back and they had really slaughtered our company that day and they were clearly looking for us, but we wouldn’t fire because that would give away our position, we were really outnumbered.
But anyway, we wound up with about 28 people out of the whole entire company. We dug our holes, we stayed there. Then the next morning, we had the company radio, we were ordered to move over and protect the flank of our adjoining company as they went in to attack. What I had thought was, at least we’d get back to regroup and get a little rest. But there was no such thing in Patton’s Army. No R & R—he was there until the war was over, or you were yourself.
We moved over toward the next company and in doing so we passed through a little village, we stopped to take break. I stood out in the doorway there, I looked up on the hill, and there was a medical aid station. I mentioned to the fellow, “I just bet we could get some dry socks.” So I left all my gear, including my radio, gun and everything, and we walked up to the aid station and reported our position. They had a stove going and a fire there—boy, it was the first fire I had seen in a long time. I sat down and managed to pull my shoes off, and there was black all over my feet and toes. I began to try to warm my feet.
A doctor, or aide, came in and I said, “I bet you’ve got some dry socks back there somewhere, could you fix us up a bit?” He looked at us, looked at our feet. He didn’t bring socks but he brought some tags with metal, with a wire on the end of it and began to fasten that on my clothes. I said, “What’s this all about? All I want is a pair of socks!” He said, “Look at those feet!” “Yeah, they’re dirty, aren’t they?” I thought that was dirt, and he said, “Try washing it off!” They were black, there was gangrene all over the toes. So that was the end of my combat, they came and carried me back to a field hospital, from there they just kept carrying me back and back, around January [’45].
I was in Reims, France, in a hospital for quite a while. We never did get any medical treatment, all the medical treatment was on the injuries with bullets. We were then sent to England, from there I was sent back to the States in April, just before the end of the war. They sent us to what is now Fort Carson in Colorado. They wanted to get us into a dry climate where it would be more effective in the treatment. I couldn’t walk, I was a litter patient. I didn’t realize when I pulled my shoes off that I couldn’t balance. Not only that, but the pain was such in your feet. But we got good treatment back at Carson. They saved my feet.
Matter of fact, every morning at 4 o’clock they would come in and select patients for surgery. Of course the Army didn’t say anything, at least they didn’t then. One day they came to my bunk, they were talking a little, they looked at my legs, left, and then they came back again. To my surprise, they left and didn’t bother me. I never thought any more about it. The strange thing is when we came to be discharged from Carson I decided I wanted to see what was in that envelope. I opened it up and the first piece of paper I pulled out said, “Amputation ordered right leg upper two thirds.” I didn’t want to see any more. Then I realized why the doctors had been hovering around my bed making a decision. I say that the Lord was with me. It certainly wasn’t anything they did or I did.
I got home two days before the president died—April 10, 1945. I had missed two Christmases away from home. It was a shock because it didn’t seem humanly possible that we would survive, you had already prepared yourself for the fact. You just fought like hell while you were there. I was raised to work hard as a farmhand, my dad was a pretty rough taskmaster. In fact, I weighed 117 pounds when I went into the service. Of course, I grew up in the Depression, we didn’t have any money. But we were never hungry—we’d cook livestock, we learned to survive.
Today I have been very guarded about what I went through, what war was really about. The closest thing to that is this movie Saving Private Ryan. There have been a few excerpts showing war, but until you are in it, you don’t really know what’s going on. John Wayne—that’s Hollywood. I haven’t gone into the grizzly parts of battles, I don’t think it is really important because war is hell and there was never any good that could be gained by it.
I appreciate the work that you are doing. In church, a lady said, “I want to interview you about your experience,” and I said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” I was a little annoyed, and I said, “Why do you want to stir this up?” She said, “Well, we have a generation that knows nothing about that and I want to record that,” and I said, “Okay.” It disturbs me to find that our educational system, especially in this part of the country, doesn’t even touch on World War II in teaching history.
Larry Batley, born in 1925 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, was drafted at eighteen into the Army in 1943. He trained as a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) operator and was shipped to England with the 95th infantry division. He proceeded to France after D-Day where he was wounded in the battle for Metz, a city held by the retreating Germans. He also developed trench foot and was evacuated to recuperate in England, celebrating V-E Day there. Larry has saved many mementos of his service, and the narrative starts with his first letters home, with his original punctuation.
January 1944: Arrived at camp okay. Spent the day being fitted for clothing. My shoe size is now 12. At twelve noon we get a call over a speaker and we all march out and line up, then the sergeant takes us to the mess hall. For dinner we had liver and vegetables, pie for dessert. For supper we had hash, vegetables and bread pudding for dessert. It was good and plenty. I hope you don’t feel too bad because I don’t mind it at all. Went to the Post Exchange and bought this ink I’m writing with. Also a few post cards—just 24 for a dime and I sent 20 of them out. I think I may need a few references to be able to send you money, but I won’t wait too long because I know you need some money. I was kind of blue the first night I was here, but I soon got over it. I guess I’m kind of getting used to everything and Ma, I don’t mind it at all. I eat three good meals a day and I guess I’ll be getting fat pretty soon.
February 1944: Two days ago we got a blood test, a typhoid shot that was only the first. We’ve got to get three more, I know that they will also give us some for Tetanus or lockjaw. We went by bus to a place about ten miles from camp. Had a good feed and sang quite a bit. We had a good time at the USO even though I don’t dance. We had hamburger loaf for supper, beets, celery, piccalilli. Lots of nice young girls. I wish that I would get shipped out of here so I can get some mail and know what is going on, on the outside. Gee, when we left home, we thought we were getting into the War. Now, you think there isn’t any war at all because no one talks about it. Dear Ma, don’t worry about me because if you could see all the fellows coming in with over two and three kids, they got more problems than me.
[Larry continued to tell his story, reading from an account he had written earlier.] At Camp Myles Standish, one of the things that I will never forget was the day Paul Robeson came to entertain the troops. I remembered him from the movie Show Boat, in which he sang “Old Man River.” This black entertainer really put on a great show for all of us. It was so hot, but Paul kept on singing. The GIs applauded him and wouldn’t allow him to leave the stage. I remember him taking out a big handkerchief, and wiping the sweat off his brow. Finally, his time was limited and he had to leave.
Our ship sailed without an escort, zigzagging across the Atlantic Ocean. We were told the ship was fast enough, and with the zigzagging, no submarine could zero in. They allowed a certain amount of time for fresh water and the line for showers was as far as you could see. When I got into the shower, all soaped up, off went the fresh water, and on came the salt water. Believe me, I found out that salt water and soap did not mix. I was sticky for quite a few days.
On the afternoon of August 17, the USS West Point [AP-23] was sailing along the Irish coast. I remember how beautiful and green the grass was, with white cottages. We departed from Liverpool by train and were quartered at Camp Barton Stacey, approximately twelve miles from Winchester, England. Let me tell you about the double bunks we had. They were made out of two-by-fours. What they used for mattresses was heavy-duty canvas cloth filled with hay. By the time we got to use them the hay was like oatmeal and we had to shake and smooth it out so we could sleep on it. This mattress was laid on strips of one-inch banding material. The ground in the area was so hard it was like concrete. The Salvation Army club-mobile came around every day with coffee and donuts.
About the first week of September, our company traveled by truck to Southampton. I remember the busy harbor with all the high-flying barrage balloons above all the ships. We boarded a small ship and sailed over to Omaha Beach [a site of D-Day]. When we arrived there they threw a large cargo net over the side, we then climbed down into a landing craft and were taken to the beach. It was a beautiful warm summer day, not a cloud in the sky, and the beach and sand was nice and clean. And only a few months before such horror occurred on this same beach.
On the right side of the field was F Company, on the left, E Company. We had the large tent for serving meals. I remember those “delicious” meals. They served powdered eggs, shoe-leather pancakes, and lumpy oatmeal. This is where we set up our pup tents where it took two fellows to make one tent. After this came the latrine. The carpenters built a wooden box about 2 by 2 by 8 feet long, which I believe had five holes. Directly across the field, F Company had their latrines also. They were lucky, they had their own barber, he set up his shop by the latrine. I believe he figured he wouldn’t miss anyone by being there. At the very end of the field was the tent for the PX. I still have my ration card.
The day finally arrived when we marched into a small village that had a train station and boarded the train. My platoon was lucky, we got a coach car. Most of the others had to go by 40 and 8s (that was 40 men or 8 horses, that is what it was called in WW I and they still called it that). I got a seat on the left-hand side of the car, when we went past Saint-Lô it was on my side. I remember only one large smokestack standing, the rest of the town was in rubbles. The trip took us four days. We would travel about ten miles an hour and at times had to stop and wait three or four hours. I guess they did that because supplies had to go first.
The next I remember, we marched to the side of a huge hill, with tall trees and large boulders. We were told to dig a slit trench and settle in for the night. It was here where reality started to sink in. In the not-too-far distance you could hear the thunder of artillery. On the following day, we marched out of our positions to relieve the GIs of the 5th Division. It was timed so it was done late in the day while it was getting dark. I remember crossing over the Moselle River on a bridge built by the engineers, made of wood. I know now, the 5th Division troops at this time were the only ones across the river. Our squad leader would take two GIs at a time and replace them with two others from the 5th Division. Our foxholes were on the side of a hill, on the very edge of a vineyard.
The Germans occupied the town in front of us. All there was in our area was a brickyard, a farmhouse, and a few other buildings. We were able to have a hot breakfast every day. The company cooks would bring our meals in thermos-type containers that had a hot water jacket around them that would keep the food warm. All foxholes were occupied by two GIs. One person at a time was able to go for breakfast. This is when I saw my first dead German soldier. Alongside a row of grapevines, there lay this dead German. He’d turned black and someone tossed some dirt on his body and face—I surely got scared. Found out later, they believed he was booby-trapped so no one disturbed him. I picked another row to go to chow after that.
In front of our foxholes the engineers had laid land mines. One night around 10 pm, one of the mines directly in front of us exploded. Not long after, another one went off. Then we could hear someone in great pain crying, “Matka, Matka.” This went on all night, with more of the mines going off. When daylight came, the engineers cleared the field and the medics went out and picked up two soldiers in German uniforms. They were a mess. Word got back to us later, they were two young Polish boys, who the Germans issued rifles to during the day, and took them away at night. I knew that in Polish “Matka, Matka” meant “Mother, Mother.” It all came together for me when they said they were Polish.
[The battle of Metz]. On November 13, we were told that on the following day we were going to attack the German lines. The next day, E and F Company, 2nd Battalion, assembled in a field behind our foxholes. About 4:30 am we lined up behind one another Indian file, it was very dark, you could only see for about three feet. When I turned around, I could see in the dark two medics with the white circles and crosses on their helmets, and in-between them they had a folded portable stretcher. This was one thing that I did not want to see at this time. The attack was preceded by an intense artillery barrage right over the troops. What a scary feeling! I later found out that the barrage was less effective than hoped.
We began the attack at 5:45 am. We no sooner got into the open field [than] the Germans lit up the sky with flares. We hit the ground, all hell broke loose. At first, about three machine guns were raking the area, then artillery fire, and finally mortars. My rifle jammed from the mud and wouldn’t operate. As we moved through the field I was able to retrieve a carbine from a very badly wounded sergeant who was being attended by a medic. Not long after this, we ran into a machine gun firing from what looked like a cellar window. We tossed in a few hand grenades. It must have been close because they started tossing them back.
That is when I felt a burning feeling in my right leg. I knew it had to be a piece of shrapnel. I remember shouting, “I’m hit, I’m hit.” I pulled up my pant leg to check it out and said, “I’m going to keep going.” After we had taken out this machine gun, all the firing seemed to die down. It started to get light out; only about five GIs were there. As we moved forward, Lt. Crabb, from our company, was giving directions, telling us to go to our left down a ravine. We came upon some buildings, which we cleared out. One of the buildings must have been a meat market—the only thing in the store was two large hog heads hanging up in the window by meat hooks.
After clearing out all the houses on the street we started climbing up the side of a large hill. We sat down halfway up to rest, and to our right we saw P-47 bombing, strafing the town of Rozérieulles. When we reached the top of the hill, we were told this was our objective, dig in. While digging our foxhole, a fellow went by and was taking a head count and on his way back I asked him how many of us are here? He said, “As of now, 39.” This, out of three companies? I recognized only one other GI from my company. Later, I found out that Pat Fitzgerald was wounded on this same hill on November 16. He was in F Company. He and I had left South Hadley together, and [were] wounded in the same battle.
About a half an hour after being on the hill, my squad leader, Staff Sergeant Olson, came over from the other end of our line. It made me feel so good to see him. He was my mentor. This is where the sad story begins. Olson was looking for a rifle. He said a machine gun was raking that part of our line. He and two others were going to go down to take it out. By this time I had cleaned my rifle and he could have the carbine I had picked up. He took it and left. Not too long later, I heard some machine-gun firing down the hill. The two fellows came back but Olson didn’t make it.
To my surprise, on the next hill, directly in front of us was Fort Jeanne d’Arc, about one quarter of a mile away. We could see the German soldiers going in and out of the fort. Before the day was over, word got around the enemy had closed their lines to our rear. All of us on the hill were trapped behind enemy lines. We were without food, ammunition, and all I had was a full canteen of water. We were lucky—we did have an artillery radio operator with us. When we believed that the enemy might try to counterattack us, the radio observer would call in for artillery to box in around the hill, and he did this for the five days we were there.
I remember the artillery observer along with a lieutenant, lying down on the very crest of the hill. He asked for direct fire from all 105 cannons. We saw no more movement after this barrage. I know now it was Martin Weiss who was directing this artillery, he was later mortally wounded by machine-gun fire. We were finally located by our divisional artillery planes. They started to fly in just treetop level, over our positions on the hill. I could see the pilot open the right side door of the plane and kick out a bundle of ten blankets; then another plane would drop D-ration [field] bars. I remember some machine-gun ammunition belts were hanging on branches of trees and GIs were shooting the branches to retrieve them. Many of our soldiers were killed by sniper fire. Others who went down into town looking for food and water never came back. Finally, on the fifth day, around 11 AM, I turned around—what a joyous feeling I had—coming up the hill behind us was our relief column.
As we came down off the hill, they had a tent hospital already set up. That afternoon I was operated on to remove the shrapnel from my leg. It was here I was told I had trench foot. I was given sodium pentothal. All the GIs but one was operated on that day. One light was left on all night. I just can’t explain what it was like to be in this tent with all the pain these poor fellows had. [He cries.] Sorry. One nurse just walked up and down and checked on everyone all night long. The fellow next to me had a leg amputated just below his waist. The fellow across from my cot was in a cast from his neck down to his waist. The following morning they brought in a fellow with a cast from head to toe, a bar was in the cast between his knees, they had to pick him up and turn him sideways to get him into the tent.
Finally, it must have been about two weeks, I was put into an ambulance with three other GIs and taken to a hospital in Paris. The walls were painted light blue and seemed dirty with age. The lights were very dim, like 15-watt bulbs. I remember an accordion playing somewhere in one of the far corners of the ward. I was put in the left-hand corner of the ward with the trench foot patients. No one was allowed to get out of bed and had to stay off their feet. My feet were not as bad as some of the others. The fellow two beds down from me, his feet were black and his toes were like prunes.
Before I go any further, I would like to add something that General Omar Bradley [wrote]. I was under his command:
The rifleman fights without promise of either reward or relief. Behind every river, there’s another hill, and behind that hill, another river. After weeks or months, on the line, only a wound can offer him the comfort of safety, shelter, and a bed. Those who are left to fight, fight on evading death. But knowing that with each day of evasion, they have exhausted one more chance for survival. Sooner or later, unless victory comes, this chase must end on the litter or in the grave.
When I read this, it was as if he had written about me. After a short stay in Paris, I was taken to an airfield, put on a C-47, and arrived at the 124th General Hospital in southern England in a city called Torquay. I spent Christmas 1944 there. [End of written text.]
May 9, 1945
Dear Mom and Dad,
We are celebrating V-E Day and everyone is up to the square for the dance tonight. Boy, there were a lot of fireworks. They had a big baseball game in the front of the tent. It was between the enlisted men and the officers, but the enlisted men won six to two. There were lots of balloons with helium hanging up, and there were great big parachutes: one was red, one blue, one white. The beer is sure going fast. I stood at a parade this morning then went to church, ate dinner. We had a nice service for V-E Day. Well I guess I am going to close.
Your loving son, Larry
Bill Murray, born in 1923 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Army in June 1942 when he was 19. He was severely wounded in the landing on Sicily in July 1943, and spent time in hospitals before being discharged in 1944. He then graduated from high school and went to Westfield Teachers’ College and Holyoke Community College. He worked for 30 years for the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram as a photo-grapher. He is active in youth groups such as the local Boys Scouts and has guided young men toward the military. In the following narrative, Bill describes his escape from death off the coast of Gela, Sicily.
The war was on and I thought it was my duty to join the regular Army. My uncles were in the military, my mother’s father was in the German army, he migrated before World War I. My mother was born in this country; her mother and father were German out of the area of Galicia. In World War II we had some relation of ours with a Panzer unit! But people always thought: “Oh well, they are Germans.” The most patriotic people for the country were the Germans—this is the country they want, [and] this is the country they went for. I never questioned our loyalties.
When I was born, my grandfather said, “That’s your soldier, Ella.” My mother didn’t know what he was talking about. He said it the day I was born, that he was sorry I would be involved in a great war. He could see it, when he was there, they were prepared for a great war, the Germans were. They were always very military, very tactical. I was fortunate enough to make it come true.
We got over there the beginning of ’43. I was sent up to Libya and into Tunisia, out by Lake Bizerte [near the northern tip of Tunisia]. The thing that impressed me was you could see all these ships that were sunk, stacks and spars. It looked like a swamp. You could see the German soldiers trying to quit and the German officers stood behind them and any man who tried, they would shoot him. You would see they were dropping back, they were trying to get out of there, but they couldn’t—they were trapped. Even when you marched them out, they all marched just as though they were [in battle]. They obeyed their officers without any question.
The H.F. Alexander, she was a troop ship [a steamer used by the US Army in World Wars I and II], a convoy left New York. They told us we were going through Gibraltar and they were always afraid of submarines. So we were all ordered to stay off the deck and we were locked down below. You didn’t have a chance to get out of there—[if a submarine came] we were done! Got into Oran all right and they disembarked and shipped you out right away. The next day you were gone.
When I joined the unit they had just finished in Algiers and we were moving into Tunis. I was a replacement. So when we finished in Tunisia, we came back to Oran where we were refitted with new equipment. These halftracks [front half with truck wheels, back half with tank tracks] became more modernized, armored, some plating around them. I think that’s one of the things that saved us when I was on the LST [Landing Ship Tank] 313, which was hit—we were in the last row at the back of the ship. The vehicles were all gassed up, and when we got hit the explosion killed those in the immediate vicinity. I went off the fantail.
It was an aerial attack because we were going to the shore. Predominantly, when we were going to Sicily, they were telling us we were going to have all the air cover we needed, and we did—Germans! They were more prepared for us than we had thought. They announced when we were going in, what units were going! Maybe it was Axis Sally [a radio broadcaster] from Berlin, announcing for the Germans in American, “We know your unit’s coming, we know that the 16th infantry is coming, we know the 1st Division—the Red One—is coming.”
This month will be my 66th anniversary of July 10, 1943, when I got wounded in action. I survived, out of my platoon. Out of 30 men, 22 died that day as we were approaching the shore. I was on LST 313. I will never forget the number. We were offshore at midnight and we had just come through one of the worst storms that ever happened in the Mediterranean. They were getting ready to cancel the landing because so many of the soldiers were seasick.
The LSP [Landing Ship Personnel] was small—it looked like a little submarine, and that thing would go through the water. Well, I was on an LST with M15A1 armored halftrack tanks, because I was with an antiaircraft unit, the 105th, Battery D, Section 6. Each unit, they split them up among these LSTs, so a whole battery or a unit doesn’t get wiped out if it happens. The only other one that survived with me was Sheldon S. Burch from Franklin, Louisiana.
Gela was one of the most disastrous times for our battalion in the whole war. You were in the well area and we got hit by a 500-pounder, from an ME109 [German Messerschmitt fighter plane]. Flew right over, missed the first one and got us. It blew the clothes off me, burnt me, and I was wounded with metal shrapnel. I couldn’t use my arm, it was hanging on my right side, this hand was all crooked up, and I looked down and I could see the blood streaming down my chest. “Oh, gosh, what’s my mother going to say?” Which is the truth, even the boys who are dying ask for their mother; that is why nurses became so helpful for these youngsters. Just like being born over, you didn’t hear it, you didn’t know it, it was quick.
Then the next thing I knew, I wanted to live, I didn’t want to die. I heard some guys hollering, and on these LSTs between the well and the wall, the outside of the ship, there were gangways going up to the deck, so I went up to the fantail, the back of the ship, where they had dropped their cables to pull it off. The ship was burning, and these guys were, “Come on, come on, get out!” “I can’t,” I said. They picked me up and put me over one arm and I was sliding down the cable, and there was a Higgins [landing] boat near me, and the guy hollered: “Drop, drop, we’ll get you,” and that’s the last I remember.
The next thing, I woke up on the beach, sitting on the front of a jeep, and the medic comes running over and hollers, “Get a stretcher,” and they put me on the stretcher and give me morphine. The next thing I knew that night was that I was aboard the troop ship USS Barnett and they wrapped me with Vaseline and gauze because of the burns. The next day that ship gets hit, but it wasn’t that serious. Later on that day they moved us out to the hospital ship Acadia. The nurse who was cleaning me saw a chip of steel in my eye and they took that out.
I didn’t have my watch, my tags, my ID card, nothing. That 500-pounder goes off, it blows the clothes off you. It burnt many of the people, those that died, those fellows all burnt, kind of sad, they were all jammed in a spot and they couldn’t get out. You were in the center there, in the middle. If you have ever been on an LST, you can visualize it. It’s a big, long hallway this high, and all this heavy equipment is in there and you are bumper-to-bumper. Our equipment is not on deck because you have to get out down the ramp. You are holed up in there and those of us who did survive were blessed. Sheldon, now I didn’t know he was in it until I saw the listing at the 45th General Hospital with me. He was the lateral tracker and I was the horizontal tracker.
We landed in Algiers and they took me overland, to the 180th station hospital, which was a Quonset hut—very hot. Then after we had been prepped up a little bit, they put us on a 40 and 8, the French had these boxcars [that carried] 40 men or 8 horses. Then they moved us across into Morocco, and we were in the 45th General Hospital in Rabat. It was a big school that they had taken over, all marble, and actually it was cooler. These are the tags that were on you. You usually had one on your toe so when they go through checking they knew from the tag who you were. It says, “Multiple wounds face.” Face burn, the arm too. They picked the skin right off. No bones broken, but physically damaged all the way through.
Every man that was listed that day was from a different outfit: I have the list and it’s four pages. We all got our Order of the Purple Hearts on August 5, 1943. Some were from March and April, I was injured in July. If I look at the names they were from the 505th parachute regiment, the 504th parachute regiment, the 180th Infantry, the 26th Infantry, 16th Infantry, home towns from Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Wisconsin. [Shows the documentation.] The numbers after your name are your serial number. Mine is regular Army, 11070676.
I came back to the States, to Staten Island, and then they transferred us to Atlantic City, an Army general hospital on Main, the Army had taken over hotels to take care of the wounded. They were going to ship me to the Carolinas. I got upset about that. I said, “You know, I thought we were supposed to go closer to our home.” The nurse said, “Yeah, but if they don’t have an orthopedic surgeon, you’re going to have to go there. I’ll see what I can do.” I didn’t know her husband was a colonel on the JAG and he moved me to Fort Devens, where they had orthopedic surgeons, Lovell General Hospital, which no longer stands there. On the ground floor you had prisoners of war, German and Italian. They had to separate them because the Italians surrendered quicker than the Germans.
[Did Americans have to fight the Korean War?] In the sense of we had become the big brother. We have to take care of things and keep it in a proper order. I don’t believe we should try and force our way of living on them, but I can see protecting them, getting them squared away, to keep South Korea free. We would have won if General MacArthur… he got a little carried away. He was a little too gung-ho. He said he wanted Eisenhower—how did he put it?—to cover the whole area with atomic waste along the border, and he says they will never cross here. That was his attitude. But he was a fine, smart general.
A stalemate. We are going to see what this 4th of July brings. [North Korea threatened to test launch missiles on July 4, 2009.] We’re prepared for them. They can create chaos. Because this guy, Kim Jong-Il, I don’t think he’s got all his marbles. I don’t see how these guys can control all these people, other than the fact that he has the military on his side, because if he didn’t, he would have nothing.
Well, Vietnam, I think that was a waste of a lot of young men’s lives. My son put his thirteen months in there. He wrote me and said, “Oh, Dad, in daylight, the A Shau Valley’s ours, but the gooks own it at night.” The thing there is we had the power, but the problem was too much politics was involved. Because we were ready to knock them off good, and the politicians wouldn’t go for it.
Vietnam was a sad war because people here were so adamant against it, so many of these young ones didn’t want to go. The reception that these fellows that served time over there got from these people caused a breach between the public and the soldier. When these National Guards out there at the college [Kent State] opened fire with ammunition, killed some of them, people started to realize that there’s got to be something wrong. These guys were serving their country because they were told to serve their country. They were still drafting them then.
With all these young men from combat in Iraq, there were about 200,000 of them now that have been hospitalized and are being taken care of, lost limbs and such. People don’t realize that the government owes these fellows because they paid the price. Had they got hit like that in our time, they’d have died. But this time with medicine being so fast they’re able to do these savings, and that’s what gets them out.
Your biggest problem right now in Iraq, in Iran, and all those places, Afghanistan, the fact that the British gave up on them a hundred years ago. They got out of there because first of all, they’re all tribal. They don’t want a central government, they want just their chief, and that’s the way they go. Now they’ve got those mullahs, they control too much, their involvement, the religious thing. It is not for the good of the people, but for what they think.
Well, we’re going to be kept there for a while. I don’t think that we’ll only be staying there to the end of 2010 because of the fact that these people, although they are trained, they don’t have the stamina that our people do. Some of these were just naturally warrior people. There are sects: there are Sunnis and there are Shiites, as long as they have that, they don’t have like we do here in this country. These people are just for their own little tribe. The only one that got to control them was Saddam, he had them under his thumb and that was the end of it. He made his biggest mistake when he went after the Kuwaiti. We could have annihilated them then. When those kids were coming back, I was at the base, I work with USO, and I said we were going back and sure enough as God made little apples, we went back there.
The young fellows could see that we were going to go back there because we didn’t finish the job. Most of the soldiers felt he didn’t go far enough. George Bush [senior] was a good man, but he didn’t want to have a lot of casualties during Desert Storm. Then his son gets in there, he wants to rectify that. Well, it doesn’t work. He wasn’t—in my book—as good a president as his father. He was kind of wishy-washy, and he was influenced by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and they made the most money. All of a sudden, all these mess halls are controlled by contractors. We used to have our own do the cooking and now they have everybody doing it for them. Why was a man (Cheney) in that kind of position making that kind of money? He cost his government.
I thought we were wrong going in there, in one way. I don’t think we could settle that thing. I thought if we just contained Saddam, we would have been better off, instead of going in there and pushing him. We beat them quick and fast, but there was no preparation there for what was going to happen afterwards. That was the big mistake, moving without having a plan of what you were going to do afterwards. And then they let them run ragged, let them all go, they’re all gone with their tribes.
[Can we win the war in Afghanistan?] No, I don’t think so, Russia couldn’t beat them. They’ll stay in the holes in the woods, in the mountains, you can never get them all out. We are spending tons and tons of money, just having young men get hurt for nothing. Our group [in the VFW] has dwindled now, the major portion was World War II. A few of them did join from the Korean War. But after that there was a pause where things were smooth, although we got involved in South America and the Panama Canal. If you go every ten years in the history of the United States, you’ll find we had a conflict. Interventions, that’s what it amounts to. We’ve been involved in Africa, the time when so many of our guys got killed, the Special Forces men [in Mogadishu, Somalia].
[What was your reaction to the dropping of the atomic bomb?] I thought it was a very, very good thing Truman did. He had more guts than people thought. It took a couple hundred thousand, but it saved millions. We brought them to their knees and that was it. Then we went back and fixed them all up and made them one of the richest countries in the world. So the consequence was the right thing because we would have lost millions of young men trying to get ashore. I think it was a necessity.
David Cohen, born in 1917 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, tried to volunteer for the Navy—before Pearl Harbor—because he had read Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) about the muddy trenches of World War I. Even with a Navy father-in-law, he was rejected because of his eyesight. He served instead in Patton’s Army and was present for the liberation of two concentration camps, Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. After the war, David taught junior high school in New York. To this day, this ex-teacher gives talks in schools about his war experiences in the 4th Armored Division. His story sounds as if it happened yesterday.
My mother became a citizen on my father’s citizenship papers. They came from Latvia, which was part of Russia. My mother was illiterate, the voting meant so much. She would go to the store (my father was a glazier and carpenter), and practice how to write her name every September so she could go vote in November. And she would come back with her back straight, she was so proud to vote. They told her, “This is for the Democratic, this is for the Republican,” and she says, “And where is the Socialist?”
We left from Boston, and it was a horrible experience. The motor broke down on our ship. It was a converted freighter from World War I. We called it the HMS Rat Trap. I got sick as a dog, I just wanted to die. I was hoping a submarine would sink us. But anyway we survived, got to England, landed in Cardiff, Wales. We were stationed in southern England, near Bath.
We were assigned to Patton’s 3rd Army because our general, John S. Wood [commander of the 4th Armored Division] and Patton were buddies—they went to West Point together. General Wood (we were in Normandy at a breakthrough) was directing traffic himself! He crossed into the area held by the 7th Army led by “Bucking” Patch, a three-star General, and he had to leave our division. [Patton] was quite a character. He spoke to us. I am ashamed to mention the words he used. But anyway, we trained six months in England. After D-Day, July 14, we went all through France.
You hate war and you hate the idea of the army, the regimentation, but there’s one thing you have—camaraderie. When I went to radio school, I met friends, they were marvelous. First of all, before you get into radio school, you had to have a decent IQ, so you got a lot of intelligent boys, not that a college degree makes you intelligent necessarily. [He laughs.] It was wonderful, in my outfit there was that camaraderie. Even today we have a division association and you have that feeling. There was no such thing as a Jew or an Italian, Catholic, or whatever.
We had a few instances, we had this hillbilly from Kentucky, he said, “The trouble with the Army is that there are too many Jews in it.” Another time, we had a fellow from Astoria, Joel Tiger. He went into the latrine to shave and there were two guys talking, “This war is all caused by the Jews, you know.” So he got their two heads and banged them together, he was a husky guy, and he says, “I am going to kill someone someday, I might as well start now.” Anyway, our company commander got hold of it and we had a big meeting about this nonsense. We had many Jews, because most of our division came from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, so we were all mixed, Irish, Italian, Catholics, Jews, Polish.
In fact, our colonel came from Agawam [Massachusetts]— Abrams, he became a general. [Abrams] tanks are named after him. The Germans thought he was Jewish. We were on maneuvers in Tennessee, and I said (I think he was only a captain then), “Captain, I thought you were one of my boys when I first came in here.” And he says, “The family came from England, there must have been a little Jew boy hanging around somewhere.” I’d say 90-odd percent Abrams are Jews. The Germans hated him because he was no-nonsense, if they didn’t give up, he’d burn the town down. “If it is going to save one soldier, burn the town down.” He would give them [only] so much time to surrender.
But anyway, we went through France rather rapidly and a lot of good things happened. We were near Metz, France, when we got notice that we had to take all our insignias off and erase anything that was on the vehicles that showed our identification and division. We didn’t know what was going on. We were told there was radio silence; that means the radios were off. It was a big secret. We moved up to Belgium—it was the Battle of the Bulge [16 December 1944–16 January 1945]. As we were going up, when it was radio silence, I would put on music. The best music would come from Berlin—Axis Sally. She would talk, “The Jews, they are not in the Army, they are home with your girlfriends and your wives.” And then she’d play Benny Goodman playing a George Gershwin number! [He laughs.]
But I tell you, they had such spies all over. As we were going up, this was a big secret, [Axis Sally] says, “Fourth Armored Division, we know where you are. You are outside Longwy, France,” and that’s where we were. They must have had people telling them, and she was on the radio in Berlin telling us where we were! And here we had to take off all our patches. But anyway, we got to Belgium and it was cold, cloudy, and snowing, December ’44. The German airplanes came out, our planes didn’t come out, and that was kind of scary. I don’t know if it’s symbolic, but on Christmas Day, the sun came out, and the American planes came out. We relieved the 101st Airborne. Pretty rough, but I didn’t have it that bad as a radio operator. I was in my halftrack, and where they had to go sleep outside, I could sleep in the halftrack. But it was cold and physically tough there.
After January, the Battle of the Bulge was completed for us. We jumped over to Germany. It was a funny feeling, you know. When you’re in France you’re still in a friendly territory, but when you’re in Germany, you don’t have any friends any more. Patton… he just went. One day, we went 50 miles, which is just unheard of in one day’s advancement. It was radio silence, it was mostly secret, where we went… I’m not going to tell you too much about that. We crossed the Rhine in April, near the end of the war now. Germans were surrendering by the tens of thousands, the roads were clogged with prisoners, they were giving up. Everybody knew the war was over but Hitler, he had to continue fighting.
That was April 5th. We got a message that they had to take a communication center, that it was a dangerous spot. This infantry battalion in our division went there and they radioed back that it wasn’t a communication center—it was a concentration camp. They wanted all the doctors, the ambulances, nurses. We went in there hours later. I took pictures. When we got into the camp [Ohrdruf, a concentration camp associated with Buchenwald, was liberated on April 4], now this is a small camp, near Gotha, Germany. I remember the inscription on the Opera House that Germany was the home of Brahms, Goethe, and Beethoven, and when we got in there, there were about 50 to 60 bodies laying all around. [Shows his pictures.] These poor souls were alive just hours before we got there, but the Nazis, rather than let them live, clubbed them to death, you could see the blood, they shot ‘em. And some of them they took on trucks and moved them further east to another camp where they gassed them, like Nordhausen [a sub-camp of the concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau] had a gas chamber.
This place was small, a labor camp. The bodies when we got there were warm. You could see the blood was caked in the mud. You see [shows a picture]—this is all blood. If [the striped pajamas] were blue, then they were Jewish. If they were gray, they were non-Jews. Not only Jews that he killed: eleven and a half million, six million were Jews, six million were non-Jews. Gays, of course, and mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah Witnesses. They killed Catholic priests and nuns if they helped a Jew or were dissidents of any kind.
This is where they lived. Rats, all kinds of vermin. No running water, no bathrooms of course, they just had pails. The twelve million that died, they were not all gassed or burned, they had dysentery, typhus, malaria, and malnutrition. Millions died of malnutrition. This is where they lived, just a straw mattress. And this is outside the camp, these fences were double-wire and they were electrified. One of the men told me that people would become despondent and they’d run over and jump on the fence and commit suicide. They weren’t all Jews there, there were French and Yugoslavs, a lot of Polish and Russians because you know Hitler was out to exterminate the Slavic race too.
Well, we went back to our outfit, and there was a memorandum from Eisenhower that he wanted all available troops to see the camp. So we went back and came in with Eisenhower. He was there and that’s [showing a picture] General Bradley. This is an inmate, a survivor, but Eisenhower looked at him and asked the interpreter to ask him a question—why he looked so healthy compared to the others? He said, “Well, I was a trusty, and they gave me extra food.” Eisenhower was no fool. He looked at him and said, “I don’t believe this son of a bitch. Lock him up.”
Eisenhower turned green, shook his head, and said, “God, you have to have a strong stomach to take this.” This is Bradley, the head general, and this is the interpreter telling him what I just told you about these people. Then all of a sudden, there was a commotion and a jeep pulls up with General Patton with his shiny helmet, his two pearl-handled guns, and he struts out and he looks into this place, and he came out and he heaves up. He started to scream at the top of his voice, “You should see what these sons of bitches did, see what these bastards did,” and, with Eisenhower and Bradley standing next to him, “I don’t want you to take a f—ing prisoner,” he yelled.
Colonel Sears, he made the mayor and all the townspeople come in and see what was going on. The mayor and his two sons, they made them dig graves for these bodies. The mayor told Sears, “I didn’t know what was going on,” and Sears says, “You are a lying S.O.B. The smell alone will tell you what was going on.” Let me tell you, the smell—never, never, if you were there, you will never forget the smell. It stays with you, it was awful. You smelled burning flesh, decaying bodies, and of course all the human waste and garbage altogether was God-awful. I don’t know how they even survived. The people knew what was going on. Most of them couldn’t do anything about it. Why didn’t they? The Nazis would have killed them.
Eisenhower made a statement, “The waste, just think, any one of these children might have been a scientist (or doctor) to find a cure for cancer.” We had a captain doctor, John Scotti, from Brooklyn, a real fine human being. He got so upset in Ohrdruf, he went in the middle of the street and he started to scream. “Now I know how the Germans found a cure for malaria and typhus: they burn them and gas them and then burn them.” You want to curse, if you ever had some of them Germans, you want to take your gun and shoot them. Scotti blew his stack and Patton, who was a big macho, he threw up, and Eisenhower turned green.
That’s where they burned them. [He show a photo.] In Washington, DC, I gave the pictures to the Holocaust Museum. You could see the skulls here. They didn’t have ovens, they didn’t have gas chambers in this camp. Above the hill they had this place where they burned them. You see this in the back? That’s not dirt, that’s all human ashes. The reason it’s white, they poured lime on it. You can see, there was still a body that was not completely burned.
We stayed there for a few days, we left and we went further east toward Weimar. We went into Buchenwald, a major camp. The 6th Armored Division got there a few hours before we did and it seems there were bodies laying all around there. In this camp there weren’t just a few hundred. Buchenwald, that’s where Elie Wiesel was, they had 50–60,000 there. We drove in there and we saw this body in the middle of the road, and the sergeant says, “Don’t feel bad about it, he was the only Nazi guard left.” One of the Polish inmates recognized him and took a gun from the American soldier and put three bullets in him and they just let him lay there. But you could see how fat he was, he was a Nazi guard, so there were no tears shed over him.
These bodies were all over the place, thousands and thousands. This is the graves registration. You can see the bungalows or sheds where all the people lived, the “hotels,” there were 60,000 of them. Buchenwald, when we got there, they kissed our hands, our feet, crying. They wanted food and we were told not to give them any food. But I gave them crackers, and I had chocolate, my K-rations [combat rations], I gave them my cigarettes, they smoked, I didn’t smoke. But the British had given them food—I think they had liberated Bergen-Belsen before—and naturally you are going to have compassion if they ask for food. They ate it so fast and stuffed it down, and their stomachs had shrunk so that it exploded, and many of them died. The irony of it all, they over-ate.
And this is the crematory. They would put them on a gurney, and they would slip them in the oven like they do pizza pies. Well, we knew that there was something. When we were in France, we picked up a Russian who had escaped a slave labor camp. He stayed with us a couple of nights, he explained to us that there were slave labor camps and how awful it was. That was the extent of it. We didn’t know that went as far as extermination camps, how cruel it was.
A Polish diplomat [Jan Karski], he was put in the camp and he escaped and the Polish underground got him to England and he told Churchill. He also came to America to tell Roosevelt what was going on. This diplomat said that Felix Frankfurter was there and had said, “Don’t make any waves.” That was a period of anti-Semitism and Felix Frankfurter, which is wrong, said, “Don’t make waves.” You can’t keep it quiet, that’s why it happens.
That was April. From Germany, we went into Czechoslovakia, we ended up not far from Pilsen. The war was over, and the Russians were not far from us. People were so nice. They knitted shawls that I sent home to my wife and my mother-in-law and they gave us painted plates, a little town. Before we left Czechoslovakia to go back to Germany as occupation troops, we woke up around 4 o’clock in the morning, all the tanks, all the trucks, were covered with roses. This was the people, overnight this was their way of thanking us.
A lot of my buddies and myself went to the 16th Armored Division, they were in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia, ready to embark to go to France and go home. I see a kid in an American uniform, so I walk over to him and say, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” He looks at me and he says, “Ich sprech Yiddish echit,” that means, “I speak Jewish too.” So I start talking—the kid’s name was Izzy, sixteen years old, he was taken from Poland when he was 12 years old. He went through three different camps, he was husky and a streetwise kid.
In the last camp, he was befriended by one of the German soldiers who used to give him extra bread. Izzy made friends with somebody, he called him his cousin, another kid from Poland. One day this German guard came over to Izzy and said, “They are going to move you tonight. If I were you, I would escape from the train. They are taking you to a camp where they are going to gas all of you.” This was what they did. Rather than let them live, the war was practically over, but anyway, Izzy, he went on the train with this other kid, Morty.
This was the plan: they were going to jump out the window when the train went around the bend; there was a guard on top, he couldn’t see them when they jumped out. They were picked up by a German farmer and slept in his barn, they told the farmer that they were two Polish kids that escaped. The farmer took them and gave them some food and gave them a shower. When he saw them in the shower he says, “You are going to have to leave, I can’t keep you, you’re Jewish.” But he didn’t turn them in—he just told them to leave.
They were picked up by an American artillery unit. There were two Jewish kids in the unit, both of the soldiers wrote to their parents to see if they could get these kids into America. The only way was if someone signed for them so they wouldn’t be a burden on the state. They also met some major who said he knew somebody who could smuggle them into Marseilles and then into Palestine. So Izzy asks me, “Where should I go?” I said, “Izzy, if I were you, I would go to Palestine.” I gave him my address and phone number. I got a call from Izzy, he was working for this kosher butcher [in Roxbury, Massachusetts], the father of one of the kids in the unit. This was 1948.
He tried to trace his family, his mother, father, three sisters, and two brothers—they were all killed in the camps. He was the only survivor, no relatives, nothing, that’s why he adopted this other kid—they made themselves cousins. He got a job as a painter’s apprentice in the Bronx. He calls me up one Friday, so I picked him up, brought him over to my house, my mother made a nice chicken Friday night dinner, and he stayed overnight. This is 1948–49.
Anyway, I lost his address, and he must have lost mine. I used to tell my wife, “I’ll bet he went to Israel, fought in the war and got killed.” I was always curious whatever happened to Izzy. About twelve years ago, this woman said, “You and your friend Donald Gosselin are doing a wonderful thing going around and telling the kids about the Holocaust. My brother and his friend in the Army took up two Jewish kids who escaped from camp.” I told her about Izzy, he changed his name, she gave me a phone number and address, so I wrote a long letter.
One night I was out, my wife says, “Oh my God, you got a call from Izzy.” He called up, he and his wife were crying, they finally met their cousin. Izzy put his name on the Internet, one day, Izzy gets a call from Antwerp, Belgium, a young fellow says I am your cousin. Izzy’s mother had a brother that lived in Belgium. He was married and had a little girl, when the Nazis came in to Antwerp, they put the girl in a convent. The parents were sent to Auschwitz—they were killed, and the girl was brought up a Catholic. [He laughs.] She didn’t know, she got married, had two children. One of them was an engineer and he wanted to know about his roots, so he was able to trace the name and he found out he was Jewish. He found out that he had a relative in America, he called Izzy up and he came to America. He was married to a Jewish girl in Belgium and Izzy and his wife went to the wedding in Antwerp, so he got to see a relative.
He opened up his own little market, a real entrepreneur. He was no dummy, a shrewd kid, a real survivor. In fact, he went to Israel when he was 72 to be bar mitzvahed—he had been taken into camp before he was thirteen. “You know, David, Hitler couldn’t beat me, that cancer isn’t going to.” He died of cancer.
I believe there is a just war and a bad one. What we did to the Indians is certainly not a just war. A bad reason for going to war could be to take over an oil field, just for an oil company, was this President Bush’s reason? Was he angry because they tried to kill his father? It seems ridiculous, but it could be true. Could he be that petty? The men he had around him, between the vice president, Wolfowitz, and those jokers, I just wonder if they believe in some form of imperialism. They want America to be shown as a powerful country. I would hope I am wrong, but that might be a theory.
Most of the fellows I was in the Army with felt there was some justification. That Hitler—forget the concentration camps—had taken over Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, so it was scary. These were all our allies. Like one guy said, “If he takes over England, he’ll try to take over America. We’ll all be speaking German.” In other words, there was justification. There wasn’t—like today with Iraq and Vietnam—that antiwar feeling. World War II, they felt that we were there for a reason, a good reason.
I think Obama is making a mistake if he goes into Afghanistan. One election in Iraq is going to be a panacea? The Iraqis are probably sorry we invaded—at least they had some jobs and food when Hussein was there, it was negative, but at least they had something. My philosophy is: I believe in my country, they say right or wrong. I believe in my country, right. If it is wrong, I want to make it right! That’s my belief.
Raymond Elliott, born in 1924 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an African American who served in World War II from December 1942 to 1946 as an engineer, building landing strips in the Pacific. His father served in World War I as a “Buffalo” soldier in the African American 92nd Regiment in France; his regiment was decorated by the French government with a Croix de Guerre, the highest military honor. Ray graduated from McGill University in Montreal as a chemist, worked testing for radioactivity, including the loop water on the Nautilus submarine. He later worked on heat shields for the Apollo space program. He still talks to students, especially about serving in a segregated army. Ray adopted the Bahá’í religion, which focuses on the oneness of the human family.
The time that I went into the service, in the North there was separatism, the blacks had their own grocery stores, their own doctors, and their own barbershops, partly because the blacks wanted separatism. The other reason, of course, was we weren’t welcome into many situations. My attitude at the time: no just, equal opportunities were available for Blacks because there was institutionalized racism.
Now the institutionalized racism in the South was written laws, but in the North it was de facto. De facto segregation is a weird experience, there were reasons given for denying us different rights in the ’40s when I was growing up. I was raised in a white community, I was never immersed in the black culture. I was sheltered from building a defense against being treated less than equal.
When I went into the service, it was a shock because I was going to immerse [myself] into an all-black culture, a black segregated Army. It was, in one way, a joyful thing, because I had always wanted to be amongst people who looked like me. Especially to live with them, I didn’t have that experience. But I wasn’t prepared for the treatment—without respect or dignity, or trying to take away my manhood by treating us like we were less than human, not equal.
It seemed that most of the white officers we had were young officers from the South who had gone through the 90-day wonder program of becoming an officer, and not well trained. They didn’t seem to be that compassionate toward another human being, they just seemed like they enjoyed treating us in cruel ways. It was the human relationships that were the invisible wounds that we suffered in boot camp. There is a worry too, Blacks can sense when a person is a redneck, is prejudiced, has some hatred towards you. That was the most difficult thing, to be ready to fight and die for this country and be treated with such attitudes. When we deployed, it was worse. Apparently, the [officers] they put in charge of us were the bottom of the barrel.
The Army did not explain to us why we were segregated, why the Army was segregated. We had all kinds of thoughts. The government was afraid there would be riots if they put the Blacks together [with whites]. Many of the cities did not want black troops to be stationed within their areas. The government didn’t want to confront the South, Jim Crow laws. In order to have unity in the Army, they had no choice. They should have had in place some social officers to share with us the reasoning—that would have made such a difference.
I didn’t volunteer. I wanted to join ROTC at Northeastern University, in order to avoid going in. Mainly because of the way they had treated my dad when he came back from the First World War and he couldn’t join the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cambridge. I had [black] friends, “That’s a white man’s war, we are not going to fight, we should be fighting here in this country for justice.” I knew that it was a segregated army, and I was tricked into joining the service. I was walking downtown, and these recruiting officers called me over. I was eighteen years old, and I said, “No, I am going to sign up in the ROTC, at school,” and they said, “You can sign up here for ROTC.” I signed up and two weeks later I got a telegram saying that I had to report to the standing army.
I had a choice of what branch I wanted to serve in. Tuskegee fighter pilot program, which was just beginning in [July] 1941, I went in ’42, I applied to be a fighter pilot. I was accepted for that program and so they sent me to Biloxi, Mississippi where I was in training. After being there a month or so, we would be interviewed by psychologists, and they’d ask us questions related to how we would react if we were in a fighter plane. I went in to a psychologist and he asked me if you ever fainted in your life before. I said, of course I fainted three or four times. I told him the circumstances. I said, “But these were unusual circumstances.” And he looked at me and says, “Don’t you think it’s unusual circumstances if you are a mile up in the air in a fighter plane, a million dollar plane (he had to mention the million dollar plane)?” So he says, “We are not going to be able to accept you into the program. But you do have a choice to be a bombardier.”
I didn’t like the idea of just dropping bombs so I signed up for survey, map-making. Of all places, I was sent to Franklin Technical Institute in Boston, back home, and not only that, but Franklin Technical Institute is where my dad went.
I was in the combat engineers, in headquarters, the company surveyor. They turned over dynamite every two months because it becomes unstable, they lock you in this room and you have to slowly turn them over. We used this dynamite to clear areas for airstrips. We had to blow up obstacles in our path, tree stumps, rocks, big boulders, and even small little hills had to be demolished. You’re talking about almost a mile-long airstrip you would be building, in the bush. Coral was perfect for a landing surface. The main island where we were doing most of the work, which was our final destination, was Okinawa.
We were prepared to invade Japan. The Marines were going to go in first and secure the beachhead. Then we were going to come in and lay the airstrips. A couple of months before they dropped the A-bomb, we were being prepared to engage in that. I’ll never forget that because it made us think this is the beginning of a third world war, this is crazy! It was frightening. I was there before the bomb was dropped and afterwards. I was in the South Pacific from ’43 to April of ’46.
One of the things that was really discouraging to us was the USO was sending entertainers around the world and in this country, and never did we have them come to entertain us. A lot of them were black entertainers. In Hawaii we were at a camp but a segregated section. Overseas, we were never stationed near a large white army camp, and that’s where the entertainers were going. We were stationed outside in black camps, bivouacked in tents away from the whites to avoid any conflict or riots, or disruption of unity in the army. The big point was to keep unity: if they were going to win, they had to be united in fighting [for] the cause.
But we kept our anger down. When we first went in, we were all young, we were fiery, we were ready to fight back against any kind of a derogatory attitude toward us. In the North, we were African Americans, but we mixed, we had some Southern Blacks, they were more passive. “You can’t win. The white man, he’s got his foot on your neck, he’s going to keep you down,” “When we get out, we’re going to fight against racism.” So we had that bonding from the beginning, to channel our anger rather than toward each officer (we used to joke about knocking them off when we got into battle) but to channel it toward a cause, a purpose, and that cause was when we got out, we were going to fight against racism.
We had a symbol, somebody got out of control, reacting like he is going to fight back, or curse out an officer and then end up in the brig, “Hey brother, remember…” and we would show the double V sign. [He holds up both hands, each with two fingers forming a “V.”] Most of us were 18 or 19, when you have authority challenging you, reprimanding you for doing something which you feel crosses the line, without respect, you have a tendency to react. So when we saw this happening, when the officers were treating another black soldier without respect, we would get close, and [give the sign to] just cool it. We tried to calm each other down. The double “V” was reported in the black newspapers, but the rest of the media didn’t pick it up.
I feel we planted the seeds of the civil rights movement. When we got back, we were going to take advantage of the GI Bill. Then we are going to organize with the NAACP and other organizations, and we are going to march on the South. Some of them had crazy ideas (these are young kids talking) we’re going to confiscate some tanks from Ft. Devens and we’re just going to move in on some of these areas where they had had so many bad experiences. They were trying to think of some way, now that they were trained how to fight, now that they are organized, that they could be militant. But that was only in their imagination.
My feeling was to educate the young folks, especially the young Blacks getting ready to be organized to go south and do boycotting. I’d experienced what it was like with insulting racism in the South, what it felt like to be chased by a mob, these experiences scared the daylights out of me. I became the NAACP youth advisor for Lawrence-Haverhill and Lowell, Merrimack Valley, over a hundred kids. We’d train them how to react when they are confronted with any kind of challenge, and to act with nonviolence.
The Blacks did channel their anger into joining the Black Muslims. I went when Malcolm X was visiting the mosque [on] Blue Hill Ave, Dorchester [Boston] to try to talk to him about not having this anger toward whites. He started talking, “The white man’s heaven is the black man’s hell,” on and on. Finally, he called up his daughter, about seven years old, “Who’s this?” and he showed her a picture of Marilyn Monroe. And she said, “Daddy, that’s the devil.” He went on and on brainwashing his own children. [But] the magazine [Muhammad Speaks] was incredible, all about little known facts about black history, the black Pharaohs, great civilizations, great inventors—we heard about Charles Drew. Then we heard stories about how white soldiers were refusing black blood, sacrificing their lives because of prejudices. We heard stories about a black bank of black blood for black soldiers.
I think about Obama. Many blacks think of him as a black Moses because he is trying to raise consciousness about human relations, how we relate to each other. Speak softly with a big stick is the way the United States always is, “We’re the best, we’re number one.” “If your country doesn’t do right we will come over there and we will straighten it out” rather than know about other peoples’ situation, other peoples’ government. I think Obama is going to encourage people to be more tolerant, more understanding of other civilizations, other peoples in the world. We are global, so we’re going to have to deflect war, learn how to talk with each other rather than just threaten each other. I think what will help prevent future wars is for people to talk with people around the world.
The Buffalo Soldiers was a cavalry that was organized right after the Civil War in 1865. It was an all-black cavalry and they were commissioned to fight on the Western frontier against the Native Americans. [They were] called “Buffalo Soldiers” because the Native Americans thought that their hair was very similar to the hair on the buffalo—curly and dark brown. And they were vicious and very courageous fighters, Buffalos were. The legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers was passed down to the 92nd and the 93rd regiment, which were a standing army, a black regiment in the Army during and after the First World War.
My dad was a member of the 92nd Regiment that fought in France, and his regiment received the Croix de Guerre, the highest honor that the French government could give to any soldiers. The reason he fought under the French command is because no white [American] commander was willing to be in command of a black regiment. So the French government offered to have them fight side by side, truly integrated. They proved that they were not only valiant and courageous warriors, but that they could fight side by side with the whites without racial riots.
When my dad came back from the service after being honored by the French, he was not welcomed in the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He had a right, but you see there was de facto segregation in the North, and they had different ways of either demeaning your application, or not to accept you on some bogus reason. “To hell with this, we are not going to keep trying to become members, not welcomed, so we will form our own.” Dad formed the first Black Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He became the commander of that post and I have documents from their archives.
My father never talked about it, the only way I knew was when I saw the picture of him with the Buffalo Soldiers [insignia] on his sleeve. He never talked about the experience, none of them ever did. That left such a bitter taste in my mouth about fighting for our country. I was going to serve, but they didn’t want to serve me. I wanted to carry on the legacy of my dad that history did not do. That’s why I’m so excited about giving talks, to be able to pass this information on. It’s part of American history and the young people—white and black—should know that.
Bob Tyler was born in 1924 in Hartford, Connecticut, graduated from high school in 1942, and enrolled in the University of Michigan, planning to be a forest ranger. After a semester, he decided to enlist in the army, becoming an infantryman. He was offered officer training but turned it down because he had a low opinion of the lieutenants he observed as an enlisted man. He was a private, first class, all the way to Northern France, where he was made a staff sergeant. He was also briefly captured by the Germans and managed to escape back to his unit by hiding under grape leaves in a vineyard. He worked at Mass Mutual Insurance for 36 years after the war.
The Americans and British, French, and some of the Italians had pushed the Germans out of Africa, September of ’43. We landed in Casablanca, Morocco, quite a coincidence because that was just the time that the film Casablanca came out. I actually saw it in Casablanca! I, as well as dozens of beginners who hadn’t been in the front, crossed Northern Africa over to Tunisia by train, closer to Sicily.
A few days later, we got into Navy ships where I found the food was a lot better than what they gave us in the Army. We had C-rations, like a Campbell’s soup can, you had little lighters, stove-like things you could put them on with a mug. Most men hated it, but I love food so much it didn’t bother me at all. [C-rations: three 12-ounce cans, meat and beans, meat and potato hash, or meat and vegetable stew and three bread-and-dessert cans. In 1942, the Navy had color-coded K-rations: brown for breakfast, green for supper, and blue for dinner. Within these colored boxes was a plain tan box twice dipped in wax in order to keep the contents waterproof. A can opener, a wooden spoon, four cigarettes, chewing gum, sugar, and biscuits came with each meal. Breakfast: canned cheese product, canned meat product, compressed cereal bar, powdered coffee, fruit bar, water-purification tablets. Dinner: canned meat product, candy bar, powdered beverage, salt tablets, matches. Supper: bouillon powder, candy, powdered coffee, toilet paper.
By the time we crossed Africa and headed into Italy, the Americans, British, and French had driven the Germans out of Sicily, and made a landing in Italy. Near Pozzuoli, south of Naples, I joined the 3rd Infantry Division, and I was in the 15th Regiment, Company L. That division was just due for R&R, so I had ten days of not fighting. During that ten-day period I was able to get into Naples, it had all been bombed trying to drive the Germans out.
I was on the front lines, trying to push the Germans north out of Italy. It was front-line fighting, door-to-door fighting in cities in Italy, and sometimes it was in the farmlands. The Germans were in the towns defending themselves in different buildings. We would fire our rifles and of course there were artillery guns used from the back, and our airplanes were also bombing at the same time. In fact, that became a greater fear than the Germans—our being hurt by our own forces. Throughout the whole 30 months of my experience, from March of ’43 to August of ’45, 17 months were on the front line.
After a few months of trying to advance toward Rome, the whole 3rd Division was to make an amphibious landing in Anzio, 100 miles south of Rome. On the way up I developed hepatitis, yellow jaundice, which gave me a temperature of 106. That probably saved my life because I didn’t make the Anzio landing until ten days later. When I did, most of my company’s soldiers had been killed. The Germans didn’t resist as hard as they might have on that day, but ten days later, they began to resist heavily. They were in the mountains over Anzio and they could shoot right down at us, and a lot of my buddies were lost there. They didn’t wipe out the 3rd Division, but they wiped out several dozen soldiers that were part of it.
Three or four months after Anzio, the 3rd Division got into Rome. They didn’t allow us to make the grand entrance that the conquerors of Rome had, only the upper echelons of soldiers got to go in at that time. Several days later, I went into the Vatican area, didn’t see the Pope, but it was a beautiful, beautiful area that the Vatican had there in Rome. We had pushed the Germans far enough north of Rome so that I actually bought my mother a pocketbook, which she enjoyed very much after I got back. That was one city we purposely did not bomb, so there was no damage at all. The people were like our best friends. We were told not to go into their homes for food because the Germans supposedly had confiscated their food, [to] have enough for their army. The Italians—Mussolini did join Hitler as you probably recall—were friendly.
Then all the Americans regrouped and started going up the Rhône River valley. The Day of the Panzer was written by Jeff Danby, whose grandfather was killed on the thirteenth day. He was a tank commander, helping us move up north through southern France. Unfortunately, a hidden German tank caused an explosion that hit his tank and incinerated it. So his grandfather was gone, and that’s why he wanted to write a story about how his grandfather died. I corresponded with Jeff from 2002 to 2008 when his book was published, telling him what I am telling you now, answering his questions. He quoted me in this book several times.
I forgot to mention that on the day that Jeff Danby’s grandfather was killed I was captured. We had advanced too fast. The Germans made an entrapment (came in behind us), later I found that there were thirteen of us captured, but only three were in my company. We were put onto different vehicles that the Germans were using to make their retreat. About three days later, we were bombed heavily by the American artillery and the American bombers… [As it happens], my older brothers both were in the US Army Air Forces, one flew out of England and one flew out of Africa. I never knew which was which, but I waved [at] our P-42s or B-17s.
My capture was very, very scary. The three of us were in a vineyard, and when we realized that we had been surrounded by the Germans, we dropped our guns and held our hands up. When the Germans approached, we shouted that we were not going to fire. We were afraid to death, because you didn’t know whether they were going to shoot us. We rode in different cars, because one car might be knocked out by one of our own bombs, then we would get into a different one and go further north, again in the Rhône River valley. I talked with the soldiers that had captured us, most of them were from Poland. Of course I asked them, “Why are you fighting for Hitler when he captured your country?” But as far as they were concerned, Hitler was good, so you see all the Polish people didn’t resent being captured by the Germans.
In any event, about the third day we decided we were either going to be killed by our own bombs or by the captors if they got mad at us holding them up. The three of us made a break for it when we were all getting out of the vehicle because the artillery started. We ran from the highway through a grapevine field. In France, the grapevines leaves are much bigger than they are here, saved our life! The three of us hid under grapevine leaves because we escaped around noontime. We didn’t want to be picked up again by the Germans, they were walking through this same vineyard, because it was safer in the field than on the road, the north-south railroad was being bombed too. We stayed there until it got dark. The Germans walked as close as you are to me [two feet]. They couldn’t see us, we pulled the grapevine leaves down over us, and when it became dark we started to walk south again because we knew that’s where our company would be. I was captured in a town called Allan [near Montélimar, Rhône-Alpes].
When we got back [August 30, 1944], we didn’t know if the Americans would think that we were Germans. So we held our hands up, “We’re Americans, we were captured three days ago, don’t shoot.” It worked. I went back to Company L, 15th Infantry Regiment, and proceeded up again north. It was later that I found out that more than three of us were captured, they didn’t all get back. I don’t know whether they were shot, or hit by our artillery. We continued advancing up north in France for another two or three months, fighting the Germans again. We went past Lyon.
One day three of us from L Company got into a barn that had ten huge wine tanks, twelve feet in diameter. They were full of bullet holes—and we hung our canteens to fill up with French wine. We were told not to go to the French homes because they wouldn’t have enough food, not true in this case. A French couple invited me and two other soldiers to come to their home and have dinner. We did, even though it was against regulations at the time. In Europe, they don’t have three courses, they have six courses and each is served individually. It was quite a feast and we didn’t get court-martialed for it!
I went through Alsace-Lorraine. It was December of ’44, standing in foxholes, with or without your shoes, did damage to your feet. We were never supposed to take our shoes off, but when they are soaking wet and you’re standing in them, you take them off. [It] also happened the first winter—Anzio was in January of ’44, and just before my feet froze. So I was back on a hospital ship. They wanted to amputate, but I said no, my toes weren’t that blue. I still have all the toes. I have a 30-percent disability (in each foot) because of the frozen feet.
Then again in the winter of ’44, after Christmas, I was cited for the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and a Purple Heart. It was into January 1945 when my feet caused me to be evacuated. They brought me all the way from near the Rhine, through Paris (which I never saw because I was in an ambulance), over to a British hospital, outskirts of London. While my feet were recuperating, a couple of generals were going around different beds and awarding Purple Hearts. So I called one of the generals over and I said, “Does this qualify?” because I had been nicked by a bomb fragment at the same time my feet froze. He said, “Yes, it sure does.” It doesn’t show any scar now it was so minor, but it was at that time bloody enough to earn the Purple Heart, which I have.
They returned me in March ’45 from London by ship, back home. By then my oldest brother, whom I mentioned earlier was a B-17 pilot out of England, had completed his 25 missions and was back in America. We were allowed to go home. It was an event of great emotion to say hi to my father and mother. I was still alive. My brother said, “How come you didn’t tell us that you had the Silver Star or Bronze Star?” I said, “I didn’t know I did.” The only thing I know is what was written up in the award presentation [for action on December 26, Bronze Star, and December 27, Silver Star, 1944] that they gave me some time between March and August ’45. I had no idea. In fact, I have very little recollection of why, except that it was pretty heavy fighting, both door-to-door in the French cities as well as in the fields.
That’s pretty much the end of the story. I felt that with my two years of frozen feet I wouldn’t make a very good ranger, so I started college again at Trinity College in Hartford, September ’45, got married in ’47. After discharge, I didn’t join any of the military-type clubs, the American Legion where you stuck together with your buddies that you knew. I just tried to completely eliminate the war from whatever I was trying to do from then on.
I thought we should have gone after Hitler much sooner than we did. I didn’t disagree with our going into Iraq either because I thought that Saddam Hussein might be another Hitler. That’s why I think we went in and I still think the same. We should have tried to stop Hitler when he took over Poland and France, Austria and other places. The world did nothing to stop him. You don’t want to be called a warmonger and people who said let’s join England were called warmongers. It would have been a hard fight to get us to join earlier—there were enough people who disagreed with going into the war.
I don’t think we were very much aware of al-Qaeda terrorists until very recently. I agree we should have gone into Afghanistan after Iraq because the terrorists there were very, very active against us. The Muslim religion, if you read about it, is as holy as Christianity, it’s just that there must be a bunch of them that don’t follow it, like a lot of Christians.
I think we ought to do our best in Afghanistan. The president was right in sending another 30,000 troops. Whether we will ever win or not remains to be seen. I think we should. Whether it can be done or not, conquer the terrorists or al-Qaeda, I still don’t know what the difference is. I think we did the right thing in Vietnam. Too bad that so many people didn’t think it was the right thing. That’s really why we lost that war.
Rich Kells, born in 1922 in Greenfield, Massachusetts, lives a few doors from the house in which he grew up. He and four brothers all served in the army. He graduated from high school months before Pearl Harbor and worked at a mechanic shop. When he found out he was being deferred, he immediately went to the post office and signed up in 1943, and was deployed to Europe. He pursued the Germans up the Rhône Valley until he was captured. He spent the remainder of the war as a POW, and has a collection of the postcards and telegrams that radio-listeners sent his mother to tell her he was alive as announced by Axis Sally on German radio. After the war, he worked at the Boston and Maine Railroad as a yard conductor for 35 years.
We got on ship July ’44, landed in Naples, Italy, just after the war in Sicily. Salerno, our camp, was on the battlefield. Who do I run into but my younger brother! He went in the service six months before me. We were at the depot, which is for any unit that had lost men and needed to bulk up their forces again. I finally wound up in the 45th. My brother wound up in the 3rd Division, which was a very big division in the war. I’m going to leave Italy now, and we are going to go to Southern France. We landed in Sainte Maxime, got all our gear, put on our hiking shoes, and we hiked for quite a distance. Eventually, we wound up near Grenoble, and this is where I started getting a taste of what the front line was.
We were going into combat, and some of the people were coming back and were mentioning a couple of things I don’t want to repeat. [He consults a map.] On August 15, we invaded southern France at Sainte Maxime. We were at Grenoble Falls August 23; we cleared Bourg [-en-Bresse] of snipers on September 4 and lost contact with the enemy. September 5, Lons-le-Saunier, Ornans, and Vercel [-Villedieu] were occupied without a fight. On September 7, the battle for Baume-les-Dames began and Baume fell to the 45th Division on November 26. I got captured some place up in here at Niederbronn [-les-Bains]. This is the route that the 45th Division “Thunderbirds” took.
Once we got into France, we walked and walked and walked. We went through towns, villages, and the people gave us apples and flowers, the only time I got any thank yous. I’m going hurriedly through this combat because I like to skip over that, I’ve never talked to anybody too much about some of the things that went on. We were fighting all the way up. We can probably skip over all my fighting and get into a week or two before my capture. The fighting is what every combat soldier goes through—basic things that anybody would recognize. I’m a foot soldier, rifleman. I had an M-1, one of the best rifles in the war.
I’m going to go right into my capture, if you don’t mind. About a week, ten days before my capture, we were in a holding pattern and we knew the Germans were there, we could see them, so we moved up, we got our shovels and we dug slit trenches— not foxholes, which are down deep, just enough to protect my body. We made them nice and big and put logs over the top of them, keeping shrapnel from getting at us. We jumped in the German foxholes after we moved them out.
This is November, just before Thanksgiving. We were told they were going to pull us back because we had been on line and we hadn’t had a rest for quite a while. We were going to have our Thanksgiving dinner in a nice secure hotel back of the line, Hotel Cosmopolitan. It’s amazing that I am 87 and I am still coming up with this. They pulled us back and another division relieved us. Who gets left behind to tell these people (because they are fresh over from the United States) what the veterans know about? The next day I went back and gosh, it was a nice hotel, fantastic. We were able to shower and shave, first time in I don’t know when.
Our bazooka team got blown away, so they needed to replace the bazooka. This is how I got captured, incidentally. This friend of mine, Bill Banning from Boston (I tried to track him down after I got home and I never could find him), they set up a target, an old piece of junk a hundred yards away, they were looking for a bazooka team. You slip the ammunition in this tubular thing and then you hooked it up with batteries and it’s mainly designed for knocking the treads off of tanks. We accidentally, and I mean accidentally, hit the target—so who’s the next bazooka team? Bill Banning and me. My God, that was bad duty.
We’re back in the hotel and word comes up that the unit that replaced us got in trouble and they were getting hammered on line. This is the day before Thanksgiving, the turkeys are on the table and we are going to have turkey and the whole fixings, they were warm, and we got orders to move out. God, we moved out back to the same general area and that was a bees’ nest for Germans. We now had a field-made lieutenant, second lieutenant.
There was one building there that they were going to use as a command post, alongside a roadway. The lieutenant said to Banning and myself, “You go up a hundred yards, and dig in and hold.” I said—I can remember this—“Well, where are the Germans?” “They’re not anywhere around.” This is the new lieutenant. So we moved out and dug in alongside of the road, there was a culvert and we moved into this hole with the bazooka. Carrying an M-1 rifle and the bazooka and ammunition, I could have lightened it up a bit if I had taken a pistol but I tried pistol target practice and I couldn’t hit anything, so I kept my M-1 rifle.
As we were going up to dig in, I looked off about 150 yards and saw this person walking along on a ridge all by himself. I took it as a civilian and I didn’t pay any attention to him. He was giving away our position, he could see us too—this is what I figured out before I got captured. We no more than got dug in than the Germans started coming in with artillery. We’re veterans now, we’ve learned a lot from just being on line, and we know that they’re keeping us down in our holes. You’re not going to get up because you’re going to get hit by shrapnel.
The squad of Germans (about eight to ten people) were shooting away from our hole, they knew exactly where we were, but the bullets were glancing off the road. They deliberately avoided killing us right then: they were trying to tell us, We’ve got you pinned down. So my partner noticed what was going on. I can remember his saying, “You want to call it quits?” I answered, “Do we have a choice?” And we of course didn’t. Now we’re getting the signal “Kommen sie out mit the hands up.” We understood that.
We got out, put our hands up, we walked up this little knoll where they were above us. They had complete control. We’re now in the hands of the Germans and our troops are shooting furiously at the Germans and us. The troops behind me could see this action; we were in touch with one another. When the Germans started shooting at us that alerted the main part of our unit. Believe it or not, I was screaming and yelling to hold the fire and it got back, so whoever gave the order to fire gave the order to cease fire.
You won’t believe this one—remember I said that we were in a holding pattern and the Germans were nowhere near? Over the knoll, down in a ravine, we were marched back to this building, fantastic, with all the typewriters and clerical people, you wouldn’t believe. Not 200 yards away from where we were and nobody knew they were there. They were of course looking for information. We were being interrogated. Of course they weren’t getting anything because you don’t have to give anything but your name, rank, and serial number. Richard Kells, PFC. They were looking for information as to where the tanks were located, who my commanding officer was. I can remember saying, “I’m not telling you.” Well,” he said, “I’m telling you, it’s Captain Robinson.” They had all that information anyway—they’d captured a lot more people than myself and Banning. We were eventually all gathered up en route to the main holding camp for POWs.
While we were there, we had a little postcard we could fill out to let our parents know that we were okay. I wrote my message down. By now my mother has already got the telegram that I’m missing in action. You know Axis Sally? She took all this information down that I had put on the postcard saying that I’m okay, and read it off the radio. Would you like to see some of those telegrams [and postcards] that my mother received? Axis Sally sent this over the airwaves, and all the ham radio operators from Canada and the United States picked up this message and my home address, wrote to my mother, sent telegrams, saying that I was okay. One post card from Ohio said the location was presumed to be Stalag 3A [this was correct], Luckenwalde. [A sampling of postcards.]
Providence, Rhode Island, January 24:
Dear Mrs. Kells: On a German short wave program from Berlin, this evening I heard a message for you. It was from PFC Richard W. Kells, serial number 31416714 saying, “Don’t worry, I will send you an address soon. I am all right, all my love.” I am sure you can write to and send packages through the Red Cross. Sincerely, yours, Teresa Lowenberg.
From Rochester, New York:
Dear Madam, last evening I picked up a German broadcast containing a message for you from your son, Private First Class Richard I. Kells, he is a prisoner of war, well and safe.
Another:
I received a message from your son PFC Irving Kell: “Dearest Mother: Don’t worry. I am a prisoner of war in Germany. I am okay and no wounds. I am anxious to hear from you. Contact Red Cross for my writing address.
After they interrogated us, we walked and we walked and we walked, we finally wound up at a barn in a farmhouse where we bedded down, of course being guarded by several Germans. I’m still on this [west] side of the Rhine River. Now it’s morning, we headed out again, walked to a small town that had a little POW holding camp and we were being interrogated again. It had a red cross on the roof of this building—from the air, you see the red cross and you don’t bomb hospitals and POW camps.
When we got to this town, there was a bunch of German civilians there to greet us, not what I would consider a very cordial greeting. When I was back at the Hotel Cosmopolitan, I got new clothing and my field jacket had a 45th Division insignia on it. [The Germans] got two air raids, and they associated the 45th Division patch with the Air Corps [US Army Air Forces] because it was a golden eagle [a thunderbird], so they took me for being in the Air Corps. They were throwing stones (not rocks) at us, they were mad, needless to say, they just wanted to let their anger out at us.
There was a P-51 strafing emplacement in this little town, I could see it had a box bomb on it, a fast little plane. He came over and he was being shot at, I could see tracer bullets, and he spotted us, he tipped his wing over a little bit, and he waved his hand at us. I saw him, I saw the bomb come out of the plane and hit a building just beyond where I was. It tore the whole side of the building off but didn’t start a fire. We were told to get out there and wave our jackets so that the pilot wouldn’t strafe us—the German soldiers didn’t want to get bombed either!
We were moved to some railroad station, put in boxcars heading back into Germany. We were moved to one of the main POW camps. When we got up there, I thought the whole United States Army was POWs, there were tons of them! It was around the Battle of the Bulge. We were housed in factory buildings, and they always kept the officers and enlisted men separate. We had French, Russians. That night, while we were sleeping, the RAF came over and they bombed that railroad station that we just left but they missed their target and they got a direct hit on our officers’ building—unbelievable.
We still are not getting anything to eat. A little rutabaga soup, a grass soup, and cheese, the smell of it was so bad I couldn’t even eat it, as hungry as I was. The rutabaga soup—you might find a little piece of rutabaga in some hot water. I’m not exaggerating, and the grass soup was so bad, and one slice of bread with some kind of jam on it. This is our diet for the whole length of time I was in prison, if you want to call them meals, maybe three meals a day. We always got our slice of bread. Some of it was dated, printed on the loaf itself, 1938. The bread was all buried in-ground and as they needed it they used to dig it up and feed it to us. The bread looked like it was rolled in sawdust. I remember the dates.
I’m going to backtrack again, if you don’t mind. Another detail they had us do was to dig foxholes, or slit trenches for them, outside of the camp. This is January. The reason for that was the Germans got word that the paratroopers were going to parachute into this military camp. They flew over, the Americans weren’t kidding, they dropped leaflets telling the Germans that if the war wasn’t over by such and such a date, we’re going to bomb your camp.
We were up near Berlin, the Americans did all the daylight bombing and strafing, and the RAF, the Royal Air Force, the British, did the night bombing. The Americans were awfully good about living up to the rules. The Americans bombed that military camp. They had incendiary bombs and they hit our compound, so when we came back [from work] there were a bunch of Germans, mad Germans now—they had hit warehouses full of canned cheese, Hershey’s candy bars, anything that would keep. The next day our detail was to go clean up from the bombs. Because we were hungry, this guy bent over to get some candies, and a German guard kicked him in the head and on the body. But that, I’ve got to say, was the only act of brutality that I saw.
Now the war is really beginning to wind down. The Russians are coming in on one end of it, and the Americans were squeezing them. One more thing is the lice. They had built nests in any seam I had, crotch area, and in my head—they were taking over. I’ve got to mention the fact that all this time I was in prison, five or six months, I had the same clothing on that I got from the Hotel Cosmopolitan, same socks. The Germans were going to give us a pair of socks—you know what they were? They were a square piece of cloth. I used it to brush my teeth with, since I didn’t have a toothbrush, none of that stuff that is necessary to keep yourself clean.
Then one day they said we are going to let you have a bath— the Red Cross is about to come in. The bath turned out to be a big, huge wooden vat. I don’t know how many people had taken their bath in there before me, but it wasn’t drained out. I don’t remember going to the bathroom. We didn’t get enough to eat to go to the bathroom. I stripped down, got in the tub, took my so-called bath, got out, put the same infected lice-ridden clothes on that I had had on for five months anyway, and then got back to the infested bed that I was assigned to. The lice are still with me.
Finally, the war is beginning to come to an end, and we are going to be moved one more time back to Luckenwalde (not “Buchenwald”), the name of the town where the main camp was. They had huge circus tents set up, the prisoners congregated from east, west, north and south. The Russians liberated us. They got there before the Americans did, and they lobbed a couple of artillery shells into the camp to let the Germans know to get out. There were Finns and Swedes, all kinds of prisoners. So now all we had to do was wait for the Americans to come in with the trucks. The gates were wide open.
Now we are not happy with the Russians at this stage of the game. The Cold War has already started. After a couple of days the Americans came, and in the meantime I went downtown a couple of times—we were still trying to get something to eat. The German civilians were begging us to stay with them, because now the Russians are taking everything they could from the Germans, and the Germans wanted us because if the Russians saw an American there, they wouldn’t touch them. Of course, we didn’t stay.
We were lucky. They were close to taking us back to Russia with them. Finally the Americans came, loaded us up on the trucks. I didn’t know when Hitler killed himself, but I knew when Roosevelt died and Truman took over. I’m now in American hands, in a de-lousing building. The lice came out of my body in droves. Of course they had a pile as big as this house full of American clothing, burned it. We were stripped down and given all new and clean clothing. They didn’t shave the head, they just put the powder on. They scampered out of there! [He laughs.]
This was in Hildesheim [near Hanover]. We were loaded onto C-47s headed for Le Havre, France, Camp Lucky Strike. Our pilot came in too fast and he started to climb up on the rear end of another plane that had landed just ahead of us, he went off the runway into a big gully. There we landed in a heap. [He laughs again.] My first plane ride, and we crash! Nobody got hurt other than bumps and bruises. They gave us something to eat. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a lot. Our stomachs had shrunk so they were very careful. Then all of a sudden we could eat anything— chicken, pasta, eggs, [our] legs actually filling out, pasta, I guess that puts on weight.
[Rich at first did not want me to relate the following story, which he had never before told, but later he left it up to my discretion.]
The one thing that I didn’t mention was this guy came back and he says, “I just shot a German medic.” I didn’t want to mention it because we were always drilled, any medic, anything with a red cross on it, you don’t shoot. Why did he mention that to me? I don’t know. You’re the only person I have mentioned it to. That stuck with me all my life. He shot a German medic. Geez! He didn’t say he killed him; he said he shot him, kind of bragging about it. He had the same information that I had, going into combat there are certain rules.
Of course in World War II we had no choice, they attacked us. We had to retaliate, we can’t lay down and let them walk all over us. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, and Vietnam, and I don’t know how we got mixed up in all those. I think what we’re most afraid of right now, the weaponry that Iran has got and North Korea has got. They’re close to having a [nuclear] bomb, the whole works, somebody’s got to step up and stop these people who are aggressors. This country [US] I never figured was dealing for a fight, I always figured there was a reason for it. Apparently [in Iraq] there wasn’t.
Ahmadinejad is not going to listen to Obama. He’s well on his way to getting [a bomb]. If everybody has the bomb, good-bye earth. It was just Russia and United States for a long while, but now some of these small countries are getting in on it.
Colonel Don Ryan was born in 1920 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and orphaned during the Depression when his mother left him with a couple she knew to “watch” him for $10 and never returned. Upon graduation from high school, he planned to attend the University of Minnesota and its medical school. Instead, at sixteen he joined the National Guard and volunteered for the Army before Pearl Harbor. He also fought in Korea, and became fast friends with a famous North Korean pilot who defected to the United States. Don flew SAC planes during the Cuban missile crisis, and was wing commander of Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts before he retired. His story of meeting and marrying his wife is typical of the period.
We were overseas with the first American contingent to land in Europe in World War II on January 26, 1942. We were learning how to shoot the British 25-pounder cannon, and they called us all in to have an IQ test. Two weeks later I found myself back in the United States at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the infantry officers’ school. I was a second lieutenant, and ended up as a first rifle platoon leader of K Company in the 65th Infantry Division, Camp Shelby, Mississippi.
While we were there, they took us over to an airport because the Army Air Corps [renamed Army Air Forces] was on a recruiting drive. [He shows me framed pictures.] I walked up to the pilot of the P-51 Mustang and I asked him, “How do you get to drive one of those things?” He said, “Sign here.” One week later I was in the Army Air Corps. We had to go through the usual pre-flight primary, basic, advanced, and this is a picture of me in 1943. That was a PT-19 and that was my first solo flight in an airplane. I think that the reason they took the picture is in case we didn’t show up again, they would have something to send home to our folks. Since that time, I have flown the C-45, C-46, C-47, C-123, B-17, B-25, B-26, B-29, B-36, B-52 airplanes, and I also flew fighters, an F-51, for seven years. I’ve flown 12,000 hours.
While I was in the 109th Fighter Squadron, there was a sign over the entrance to our briefing room: “Victory is in the mind of the pilot.” So you’ve either got it or you haven’t got it. I was the only one who survived [training] out of five. The reason my other fellow students washed out is they couldn’t do the spins and stalls. I picked up a brand-new B-17 in Wichita, Kansas and I flew it over to England. That’s me and my crew in Rushton, England in 1944. I was 24 years old at that time and my crew was anywhere from 19 to 23. After the war in Europe, I flew back to the States and said goodbye to my crew and I joined the Minnesota Air National Guard because I had always wanted to be a fighter pilot. That’s a P-51 Mustang, the top fighter in the world at that time. I flew that for seven years, 1946–52.
While I was there, we were recalled to active duty. I was now a registered fighter pilot. The interesting thing about my National Guard duty after the war was that we had a lot of notable individuals in my unit. My squadron commander had sixteen airplanes to his credit in World War II. I was in the 109th Fighter Squadron, the 31st Air Division. One of the noteworthy individuals was Joe Foss, Congressional Medal of Honor, 28 airplanes to his credit in World War II, Marine pilot, front-page news all over the world. He was a squadron commander of the unit out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was at Minneapolis, at the 109th.
Anyway, my squadron commander came up to me and he said, “Don, you always wanted to be Joe Foss.” I admired him, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I said, “Yeah.” “You can join me.” [So] I flew as the squadron commander’s wing man out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We landed and said hello to Joe, had a cup of coffee with him. I was awestricken with this famous guy, and I said (we were going to fly with Joe up to Grand Forks, North Dakota), “Joe, are you going to do a few whirligigs in the air?” and he said, “If you’d like.” I said, “Just a little bit if you will.” So he did that, and I stayed right on his tail. We landed at Grand Forks. When we got out of the airplane, Joe put his arm on my shoulder, and said, “Don, you should have been a fighter pilot.” I consider that the greatest compliment I’ve ever had in my life.
When the war was over in Europe, I flew my B-17 back to Bradley Field, Connecticut and I turned it in. I said goodbye to my crew, and I was personally assigned to B-29s down in Laredo, Texas. In the middle of that training, the Japanese gave up. I like to feel that they knew I was in B-29s and gave up. That war was over.
When you came home on leave in World War II, the restaurants and everything were open 24 hours a day. With the war effort, everybody in the US workforce was on three shifts. If you’re looking for a girl, go into any bar, any time of day or night, and they had just got off of work. [Marge Winship] was a telephone operator in Northern States Power Company, an 8-to-4 job. We were both 25 in 1945 when we met. She was quite a gal.
The war was over, tickertape parades all over Europe, Chicago, New York. My tickertape parade involved, “Hey, Ryan, you’re discharged, see you in the next war, goodbye.” I jumped on a train in Laredo, Texas and I rode it up to my hometown in Minneapolis. It was 11 o’clock at night, I went into the phone booth. “Hello?” It was her father. I said, “Could I speak to Marge?” “Who’s this?” I said, “This is Don Ryan.” “Just a minute.” Pretty soon: “Hello?” “Is that you, Marge?” “Oh, is that you, Don?” I said, “Yeah, the war is over. I didn’t get killed in either the European or the Pacific wars, so let’s get married.” This is Monday. She said, “Okay, when?” I said, “How about Friday?” I had met her a few times as a date. And we were married five days later.
I had no money, no job, five bucks in my pocket, no place to live. So I rode the bus over to her place, knocked on the door, and it was her father. “I’m Don Ryan, I’m going to marry your daughter.” [He laughs.] It’s a wonder he didn’t set the dogs on me. We stood by a Christmas tree and said our vows. As we walked out the door her father said, “Have you got any money?” I said, “No,” and he said, “Here’s sixty bucks.” What was sixty bucks in 1945—$300?
When I told Marge we were going to get married, she told her father that I didn’t have any work. I’d been a bomber pilot in the war. He gave me a job with Otis Elevator Company as a mechanic’s helper. “Pick up that tool box,” and I would carry the toolbox around behind the mechanic. “Give me that 12-inch wrench,” so I would give him a 12-inch wrench. I was there about a year, and then they made me a mechanic and I installed Otis elevators. I held that for about a year and then they made me a sales representative for five states—Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Iowa—and I sold elevators.
We were married 57 years. Everybody was getting married right away. I had enough brains to feel, even though I was madly in love with her, that I wouldn’t do that to her because I was going back into combat. I could have been killed. Wouldn’t that have been something, to marry a girl and live with her for a weekend and go to war and get killed, she’s a widow? I was able to figure that out.
I had always envied the other kids in the neighborhood because they had a mother and father. I didn’t. I was boarded out as a kid. In those days of the Depression such things happened. My mother left my father when I was a year old. She brought me over to a house in Minneapolis and she said, “Would you take care of my Don for a week, I’ll give you ten bucks.” She knew the people. She never showed up again and my father never showed up again. So these people kept me and when their son and daughter got married, they didn’t have room for me in the house, so I slept on the screened porch in Minneapolis for two years. Thirty below zero, I would go to bed with all my clothes and shoes on. They were good to me but they didn’t have any room for me.
I also earned all my own clothes. From the time I was about ten years old, I had a routine in the neighborhood. I would scrub floors, basement steps for the different wives, ten cents or twenty-five cents. I always had money. In the meantime, to make more money, I joined the Minnesota National Guard. I was sixteen, illegal. My National Guard outfit was called to active duty, by that time I was a staff sergeant, an enlisted man. After the war, I had to change my date of birth from 1918 to 1920. They commend you, they don’t criticize you for that.
In regard to World War II, I think that was a worthwhile effort on the Allies’ part. It was necessary. Hitler was obviously a crazy man. When he was developing a new Reich, he was imposing his will on Poland, he was berserk. He had gotten delusions of grandeur; he lost hold of common sense. World War II was a good, worthwhile effort on the Allies’ part. All the other wars have had a political aspect.
Ed Borucki was born in 1920 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and enlisted in the Navy in July 1940 after working at the Springfield Armory as an apprentice machinist making M-1 rifles. He was assigned to the USS Helena, CL-50, a light cruiser. He was in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941 and tells the story of what happened on his ship, where 33 men were killed. He now distributes literature at public events illustrating his involvement with the beginning of the war and the events of Pearl Harbor. He received a degree in education from Westfield State College, and taught business in the Chicopee high schools for 23 years.
I didn’t go into the Navy for travel or adventure. [He laughs.] I am number four [in my family] and first to enlist in 1940. My mother was a widow with seven children. She had a very rough life. My father died when I was 11 and there was no help like we have nowadays for people like that. [Walter, my brother] enlisted in the Navy the next day after Pearl Harbor. He was killed when his ship was in a convoy, the USS Ingraham [DD-444] on August 22, 1942. He was nineteen. So I was a Gold Star brother and my mother was a Gold Star mother. That meant you lost a person in the war. There were four Borucki bothers, and we all served in the Navy in World War II. One served in Ft. Lauderdale, and another served in Sampson, New York. When the five Sullivan brothers were killed on ship, the Navy decided if you had someone killed to keep you on shore duty instead of exposing you to conflict.
[Ed shows the letter to his mother concerning his brother’s death and adds the information in brackets.]
Secretary of the Navy to Mrs. Anna Borucki, Holyoke, Mass:
After full review of all available information, I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion that your son, Walter John Borucki, seaman second class, Navy, is deceased. Having been officially reported missing on 22 August 1942, he was a member of the crew and serving for the USS Ingraham. That vessel collided with another vessel [a big oil tanker] and sank in the North Atlantic as a result of poor visibility due to weather conditions. [Eleven were saved out of a couple of hundred]. According to section 5 of public law 490, 77th Congress as amended, your son’s death is presumed to have occurred on 23 August 1943, which is the day following the day of expiration of an absence of twelve months.
I extend to you my sincere sympathy in your great loss. You may find comfort in the knowledge that your son gave his life for his country, upholding the highest traditions of the Navy. The Navy shares in your sense of bereavement and will feel the loss of his service.
Signed, Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy
On the morning of December 6, 1941, the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, we were in port in Pearl Harbor. The next day, at quarter to eight, I went to the engineering office to pass out liberty cards to the off-duty watch, and while I was doing that, the general alarm sounded. “Man your battle station, Jap planes attacking, break out service ammunition, this is no drill.” I hesitated— nobody’s going to bother us on Sunday morning. We dashed to battle station and I was knocked against the wall of the bulkhead by a torpedo, which hit just where I’d left. So I was saved by thirty seconds, and 33 of my shipmates were killed.
It was an aerial torpedo. The Japanese preferred using them. The torpedo blast killed a lot of people who were at the wrong spot at the time. It destroyed my office, which was just above the engine room. We shut off the valves and secured the watertight doors. We were on the first deck then, we weren’t on top deck where we could see everything. After about two hours the all-clear sounded and we went on deck and carried out the dead and wounded. I remember the barber, at six foot two and 220 pounds, we had a hard time getting him up the ladder. He said, “I’m sorry I am causing you all this trouble.”
On December 6, 1941 on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, my shipmate Salvatore Albanese from Flushing, New York, brought me a ham sandwich and on December 7 he was killed. The Arizona was burning. [Alongside] our ship was the USS Oglala (CM-4), a torpedo hit under them and hit us, it destroyed the Oglala, a wooden minesweeper. Of course they only had a few ambulances there. It was a nightmare. “I don’t believe it, it’s not happening. How could it happen?” We were peaceful there, big and strong, we never thought the Japanese would attack us. After the battle there, we wondered what would happen if they invaded. They announced on the public address system that Roosevelt had declared war. He said that the 7th of December would live in infamy.
[He sings.]
Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor
As we go to meet the foe
Let’s remember Pearl Harbor,
As we did the Alamo.
We will always remember
How they died for liberty.
Let’s remember Pearl Harbor
And go on to victory.
[© 1941, Lyrics: Don Reid, Sammy Kaye; Music: Don Reid]
I was transferred to the USS Rockaway [AVP-29], a seaplane tender, in Seattle, Washington, April of ’43. I had been commissioned in October of ’42. We served in the North Atlantic—went to Wales in the British Isles, the famous coal port. Of course we were on oil burners then. I got sent back to sea. I was on a troop transport bound for the invasion of Japan. The date for invading Japan was August 14, 1945. We were in Pearl Harbor when they announced the Japanese surrender. We still proceeded to the Philippines. I had enough points, [so] I was one of the first ones to be discharged, on October 15, 1945. I was a chief petty officer and chief yeoman in 1944. I felt anger about [Japan], but now I have a Japanese daughter-in-law and my [other] son is in Tokyo teaching at a Temple University branch—management. [He laughs.]
[On] our ship, the Blacks got the food, took care of the officer corps. If you were black that was the only thing you were allowed to do. They weren’t allowed to shoot machine guns. They were restricted to taking care of the officers, feeding them. One of the black mess attendants, his captain was wounded and he took him aside and saved him and went to the machine gun and started shooting it. In ’44, Truman started to eliminate segregation. I didn’t see that because I wasn’t involved after that.
There are only 5 to 10 percent of people who were at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked on December 7, ’41 still alive. Most of them are gone now. I’ve been back seventeen times. My seven sons have been back. I took my three grandsons, my wife. [My] sons haven’t served—they said Dad did enough service there. I lost 33 shipmates, I lost a brother. How many people have something like that? In our veterans’ group, only two other Pearl Harbor survivors had brothers killed in World War II. I had all my friends killed there, so I was involved. We help to remember all these sacrifices, these lives. I would like to see more patriotism, more participation. Show the flag, love of country, participation in events, volunteer more, participate in ceremonies. Salute, stand up and hold your hand over your heart when a flag goes by, and when they play the “Star Spangled Banner.” Join the American Legion and help them out there, offer scholarships, poppy drives. I had a sign that said, “If there wasn’t a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t be a Nagasaki and Hiroshima.” It saved a half million Americans.
[If you were Truman, would you have used the bomb?] Yes.
George Bush, the money [for Iraq] was all off the balance sheet, he didn’t ask anybody to sacrifice something. Some were involved, [some] weren’t involved at all. It seemed far away. [Korea?] We weren’t really prepared and that’s the problem, they didn’t have any equipment and supplies. We made a big mistake after World War II, with all the equipment and cutting everybody out, instead of keeping the Armed Forces big and strong as they are now. Korea was a police action instead of a war.
[What were your opinions about Vietnam?] I was against the war. We had a convention in New York City in ’69, our group of Pearl Harbor veterans. We wanted a parade from our hotel to a veterans’ memorial there to place a wreath and they wouldn’t allow us, they were worried about disruptions with the antiwar people. [Iraq, Afghanistan?] I think we are sacrificing too many people. It shouldn’t be this way. We were ready to go in there, as Paul [Wolfowitz] says, you have to get a swarm of people to go in there and the secretary of state [Madeleine Albright] says, “What’s the army for [if not to fight]?” Bush had propaganda about the nuclear equipment and supplies there.
Charlie Sakowicz, born in 1926 in Whately, Massachusetts, was left holding on to a wooden plank miles from the coast of Japan after his aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin [CV-13], was bombed on March 19, 1945, losing more than 700 men and wounding 300. For days he drifted away from help, just holding on. Afraid of sharks and abandoned, he was finally saved by a ship and taken to Hawaii. He has never forgiven his captain calling those that abandoned ship cowards and traitors because, technically, the order to abandon ship had not been given, even though the ship was burning. The Franklin made it back under its own steam to New York harbor to a triumphal welcome.
I heard about so many friends going into the service, so of course I asked Mom, got a hard “no.” Finally she said sure, so I joined— at that time, 17 was fine with the permission of your parents. I was assigned to the newly commissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin. We used to call it Big Ben, [but] it wasn’t named after Benjamin Franklin, it was named after the battle of Franklin [in Tennessee, in the Civil War].
I sailed off in ’42. The aircraft carrier was the first Essex type, the biggest one at that time. I don’t remember the first fight, but we had plenty. We’ve broken a lot of records, we’ve had more skirmishes, more fights, than anybody at that time. Went through the Panama Canal to the Pacific. After that, they found that they had to build a carrier or a ship only so wide—the Franklin had to take their gun mounts off because they couldn’t get through. It took us about four weeks because every time you go through [a lock] you had to take the gun mounts off. They are five-inch guns, the mounts are like 40 by 40 feet.
Lots of times the bogeys (the Japanese aircraft), we would spot 20, 30, 40 of them. The fighters take off and an awful lot of times they’d fight for minutes and then they would skirmish and break up and take off. Then we were at Leyte, we had, God, thirteen real fights in Guam or in Saipan, which was just take off and bomb what you can, hope for the best. It was possible to fly over Guam and if the action was not severe (I was an aerial gunner, not pilot), dip yourself and you can see where thousands of poor Guam people were either pushed, or bulldozed by a Caterpillar, a lot were already dead, over the 972-foot stone cliffs [by the Japanese].
[He shows pictures, taken on board the Franklin, of two Japanese captured when they ejected from their plane.] The pilot was probably about 18. His Emperor was his God. They didn’t hit the ship, [if] they were suicide, okay, they didn’t make it. They flew in low, they got hit, because it was a bomber (they call it a “Betty”) and these two Japanese went off into the water. They were picked up, everybody wanted to see them, touch them. The younger one was the pilot, the older one was the gunner who had more responsibility. He was supposed to drop [the bomb] when the pilot told him.
We found out one day that they both were dead. The walls of those compartments are rough—not cement, but a texture like that. These guys were watched by the cops, and I don’t know if the police left them. They took a paintbrush and a toothbrush— they were sharp. They managed to slice themselves to commit suicide. I imagine the younger boy did it. If he was a kamikaze pilot, he would have hit the ship, not torpedoed it.
They informed us how close we were to Japan. I can never forget that, 27 miles [some accounts say 50 miles]. Captain Gehres was a John Wayne hero. In all the things we went through, he should have not been where he was. He wanted to get in there and fight, that’s all there was to it. He got a big medal, he was honored and everything else. Up to the point where we got hit, islands by the dozens we bombed, and always hoped to get back to the carrier. I never had any problems, thank God.
[On March 19, 1945], the loudspeaker said we were in amongst a lot of Japanese planes and one of them was coming in lower than the carrier deck—we always thought he dropped a torpedo, a bomb that hit us midship that started it all. [We take a break from this story while he composes himself.] That morning of the attack I was having breakfast, it was around 6:30 am and I could hear the ship’s alarm, then we heard the bomb. Before the bomb, we started getting the hell out of the lower deck, I believe it was the 5th or 6th deck [below] there were four of us who hit the stairs at the same time to get up to the hanger deck and the flight deck while it was going on.
As we got up there, they were automatically closing the hatches. I was the second or third fellow, we couldn’t make it, we were in that compartment, it started to fill up with water, the hatches were tight. I figured this was it. Another seaman, might have been an officer, maybe a group of firefighters, happened to come and open up the latch. From there we were right close to number five gun turret, which was ablaze.
I didn’t go much further, five feet, and we knew what was going on [the ship] was listing so badly. This is when Captain Gehres got in trouble after he got back to the United States, for not sounding General Quarters, when everybody goes to their stations. They found out later he knew what was going on at the moment with the machinery and the ship, and he didn’t have to do it, and he didn’t do it. “Abandon ship” is another call, then you can leave. [Gehres did not make the call to abandon ship.]
We left because it was on so much of a tilt. I was scared, I said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Luckily I hit nothing in the water. A lot of them were killed because they hit planks. It’s like this: here’s the carrier, the gun mounts are here, that’s when one of the bombs got through the steel hanger deck to the ammunition deck and blew up. There were mounds of torpedoes, and that’s when I went off into the water.
When we got into the water, the cruiser [the Santa Fe] was alongside, picking up some of the guys, while everybody was fighting [the fire]. They didn’t bother—that’s bad, it’s true—they didn’t bother to pick us up there beside the boat, because [the current] was so strong, it was pushing us out, maybe a group of 500, 600, 800, pushing us out. We were still being not picked up from the water. They were being taken off the deck [instead].
We knew enough to get out of there. From where we were, midship, we’re floating, we kept hitting the ship, people are sliding off. We started [drifting] away. The reason [Captain Gehres] didn’t pick us up is because the tide was pushing us out. Frankly, if you read between the lines, [Gehres] was going to be demoted. He never was—he got promoted. At that point, I am out far enough and the cruiser is pulling away because of the currents, he couldn’t do much for it, just stop the ship from burning.
In the meantime, we were holding on to anything we could. I had a plank from the flight deck, that’s wood, I believe they are about ten inches wide and four or five inches thick. We had about eleven feet of that, and we held on. We were hoping that we were going to get picked up but the current was too quick. We’re going out farther; the ship’s pulling a lot of drowned sailors with them.
It never straightened out ’til the next day. I read this later: the captain got some of the mechanics, the firefighters got the [ship to] level off a little, and got a little power, so they straightened out a bit. When they pulled into New York City, they had a big tilt. They got [the Franklin] to run about five or six miles an hour. The ship under its own power and being towed by another ship, got into the Navy Yard in New York, and then to San Diego, and all the guys that were on it then got medals, some 500 of them.
In the water, we just floated, watched and watched and seeing death, maybe seven [on the same plank]. None of us were talking about the crew or the ship, just holding on. [Could you see the ship?] Oh, yes. We could still see it, you could see it just leaving us. It was dead in the water for a while. Then they started the engines, started to pull away. At that point, I think [the captain] in his mind thought, “You bastards, I never gave general orders to abandon ship, so as far as I’m concerned, all you that are out there are deserters.” That came up in the court martial. But then they decided he was there, these admirals sitting in Washington didn’t know what the hell was going on—he did. He got promoted too.
[How long were you in the water?] I told everyone seven days, but it was probably three or four days. All I remember is hoping that if [a shark] took a bite that was the only one. They brought a bunch of ships in to pick up what was around. After we got picked up, the guy came down and got us, they pulled you up, and bang, black, a towel in your eyes. [They] took that oil and grease away quickly. Take a damp alcohol cloth, and it will go.
From there I got to Hawaii. In the hospital is where I met Walter Lewandowski from West Street [in South Deerfield], too. He was fighting that night for the championship of the Hawaii boxing and they had bulletins, and he saw my name. He said, “Christ, that’s Joe’s kid.” He called his wife and she called my folks. They were astonished because it could have been around the 25th that he told my parents.
There are 3,300 men on that carrier, but there were many that never made it. At least [the] 500 that stayed on the carrier all got medals. Gehres said all the guys that they didn’t pick up but who were picked up by the tin cans, the cruisers or ships that were in the area, were bastards and he was going to see to it that they all were dishonorably discharged because they didn’t get back on the carrier. He said they could have come back to the carrier. Horseshit. The ships alongside picked up who they could, figuring that the ship is going to go down. He said the ship was fine, didn’t burn out, had power, Captain Gehres wanted those ships to bring back those men! He called them traitors because they wouldn’t come back. He did save the ship, you’ve got to say that. Gehres retired from the Navy in 1948 with the rank of rear admiral.
[What happened to you when you got home?] I got back to Boston, checked in with the officer of the day, OD, and he said I have no assignment for you yet, but it will be posted tomorrow. So they posted it and I was to go out on a cruiser, that’s about the third ship in the line of heavy ships. [The officer] looked down again, and he said, “You know, Charlie, you’ve got about 4,300 hundred points, yes, you do, son. You deserve them.” And I said, “I need 2,600, right? I’m the hell out of here,” and he let me go. If you had 2,600 points, you could be stationed in Hawaii for six months.
The colored pilots, their squadrons are just now receiving their rightful medals and honors. They were top pilots, Jesus, those guys were good. Truthfully, the African Americans on my ship, in my mind—a lot of jobs were done by them only because they were black and no one else wanted to do them. We had one guy who got so enraged with it, he was from Boston, he choked an officer and they flew him off. They weren’t treated right, you know that. Thirty, forty years after the war, they are just giving praise to those guys who should have been getting recognition.
I don’t understand why we’re fighting in Afghanistan. Why doesn’t someone say, “Hey listen, two countries tried to help them out, didn’t work.” [England and Russia.] I was upset that they had our troops there, and now it’s not only 60,000, but 80,000. I say, if they want to kill themselves, for Christ’s sake let them kill themselves. Who are we to tell Iran you can’t develop a bomb? I don’t understand it. Only because our man says, “Well if he’s gets it, he’s going to use it.”
You’re just killing our troops for nothing. If you want to help that country, fine. Go over there and flatten it. I may be all wrong, but I think America is too big. They stick their nose in everybody’s business, they shouldn’t. We’ve helped countries, Vietnam and other places. Right now, Afghanistan, but you know they’re going to go back right to where they started. A lot of these countries don’t want help. You got out of Vietnam, haven’t you learned a lesson? [Can America win a war in Afghanistan?] Never, never. What have you won? Afghanistan, you can’t stop the fighting.
Lionel Brindamour was born in 1925 in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and served in the Navy 1943–6. His ancestors came from Canada to the United States in 1847, with an earlier forebear immigrating to Canada from Chinon, France in 1756, and serving in General Montcalm’s army in the French and Indian War against the British at Fort Ticonderoga and the Battle of the Plains. He asked me to incorporate a text he wrote about his wartime experiences into our oral interview, which he later edited. With his wife’s encouragement, after they put their children through college, he got his GED and a diploma from Holyoke Community College in 1973.
I’m going back 66 years. I never really talked about it much. I never joined in the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars. When they had the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, it brought back a lot of memories. I watched Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation. So anyway, I joined the American Legion back about ten years ago.
I enlisted in the Navy April 14, 1943. I was 17. All of us took a train to Geneva, New York, to the Sampson Naval Training Station. We were asked what kind of ship we wanted to be on. I said, “I’d like to be on a battleship,” but I didn’t end up on a battleship. [He laughs.] Two or three hundred [of us] were put on a troop train bound for San Francisco. We left San Francisco about the middle of June 1943, going under the Golden Gate Bridge and going by Alcatraz. We went on an LST—a Landing Ship, Tank. You’ve probably seen them in the Normandy invasion: they would hit the beach and lower their ramps, tanks or jeeps would drive out.
The voyage took about a month across the Pacific. We arrived at Noumea, New Caledonia. A few days later, five of us were assigned to the USS Bobolink [ATO-131]. From 1918 until World War II started, it was a minesweeper. When World War II started, it was converted to a seagoing tug, a big difference from a battleship! It was a small ship, crew of 65 to 75. I was promoted to Seaman 2nd Class; before I had been an apprentice seaman. As soon as we were aboard, the ship left bound for Guadalcanal, an island in the Solomon Islands.
By the time we reached Guadalcanal I was very sick and taken off the ship in a stretcher. I was told I was delirious, stayed in the hospital for about six weeks. I had spinal meningitis, probably caused by passing cigarettes from guy to guy on the ship. I was put in isolation, [and] I had a pharmacist’s mate who took care of just me. I remember fierce headaches. The doctor told me what saved my life was penicillin. I assume that it was prioritized for the military, not widely used on civilians at that time. There were a lot of Marines and sailors that had been hurt in battle, especially the Marines. They had some horrific wounds.
The Solomon Islands were a chain of islands, going mostly north, up to Rabaul, the Japanese base on East New Britain Island, Papua, New Guinea. We used to bomb and strafe Rabaul a lot, naval battles and dogfights were fought. The Americans took one island at a time going toward Rabaul, Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Russell Island, Munda, Rendova, and a lot of other islands, like stepping stones. When I arrived, Guadalcanal had already been taken because that was in 1942 and I got there in 1943.
After I left the hospital, I had to get back to the ship. I went to the beach master [harbor master], “Can you tell me where the USS Bobolink is so I can get back to my ship?” I was told it was due in Tulagi, 20 miles away. “How do I get a ride over there?” He said, “We have a PT boat that is going over there.” I got to Tulagi and asked the harbor master where the Bobolink was. I was told it had just left for Russell Island. Again, I asked for a ride. The harbor master said, “We have an LCI,” a small amphibious ship, so I got a ride up to Russell Island and finally found my ship.
I didn’t have any clothes in my sea bag or locker. I was told they were thrown overboard with my mattress by orders from the hospital, so I got all new clothes. I resumed my duties, and made Seaman 1st Class soon afterwards. The USS Bobolink did many jobs, such as towing barges for target practice for destroyers, and towing ships damaged in battle. At this time, October 1, the island of Vella Lavella had been invaded. The LST-448 had been dive-bombed by Jap planes and was damaged. The crew had been taken off, so we took it in tow back to New Caledonia. While en route it was discovered that the LST was sinking, so we cut the cable or rope and let it sink [October 5, 1943].
A couple of times while I was on board we went to a recreational island where the guys were given two cans of beer or soft-served ice cream. Once in a while, they used to let us go swimming in port near the ship. They had a sailor with a rifle on the bow, and a sailor with a rifle on the stern, watching out for sharks. If they saw any sharks they would fire a couple of shots to scare them away. Our ship went up and down the Solomon Islands, known as the “slot,” many times.
I stood gun watch on the starboard 20-mm gun tub looking for Jap planes, ships, or submarines. Sometimes I stood a wheel watch, steering the course given to you by the officer on watch or the quartermaster. While waiting for transportation back to the States, myself and other sailors were assigned to storing bombs and ammunition in a big cave supervised by an Australian officer. I left New Caledonia around December 1943. I was a passenger with many other sailors on a French luxury liner converted to a troop ship. The ship was called the USS Rochambeau (AP-63), captured from the Vichy government by the Americans [April 1942].
I arrived in San Francisco sometime in January 1944. I left on a Union Pacific train bound for Springfield, home and family, and arrived four and a half days later—changed in Chicago to the New York Central. I had 21 days’ leave, which I enjoyed very much. I needed home cooking, peace of mind, and relaxation. Being on the train for almost five days, there was a lot of soot and dirt, [so] I got in the tub when I got home. My father came into the bathroom—he wanted to check if I was all in one piece, if I had any wounds. [He laughs.] I said, “I am still here, all in one piece.”
Fifty of us were sent by a Navy transport ship to the island of Abemama, a small atoll in the Gilbert Islands. Abemama had not been damaged by shells, so the island looked pristine, lush, and beautiful, like a Dorothy Lamour movie—like South Pacific. In our time off we fished in a beautiful lagoon like you see in the movies. The only problem was it was filled with sharks and barracudas—the native guys used to come fishing with us and they would take the hook out of the barracuda’s mouth. If we wanted coconuts, the natives would shimmy up the tree and get them for us. I was in Abemama about four months. The Jack Benny USO show came to the island. Jack Benny, Rochester [played by Eddie Anderson], I can’t remember if Mary Livingston was there, and his radio gang. It was nice to hear his jokes, see girls sing and dance. About a mile away from our camp, there was a native village that was out of bounds to the sailors. Once in a while, we would see a native woman walk on a road near our camp—they wore nothing but grass skirts. For a bunch of guys 17 and 18, seeing native women with their breasts exposed—we were not used to seeing that.
Around July 1944, the base was closed. We were taken off the island by an LCI to Tarawa and we flew back on C-47 Army transport planes. In July 1944, I was assigned to Waipio Amphibious Base in Pearl Harbor, another shore base. Some of the other guys were assigned to ships (my luck!). By this time I had been promoted to coxswain, a third-class petty officer. Our duties were the ships coming in the lock, to keep them from going too fast, not to make waves, making the water rough. I spent a lot of time in Honolulu; my only problem was I was always running out of money.
I was stationed there for about five months and became bored and asked for a transfer, hopefully to a ship. The war was passing me up and I wasn’t going to see anything. Two weeks later, I got my wish. The date was now late January 1945. About a thousand sailors were put on a navy transport ship and left for the Philippines. We were sent to the island of Samar. It was a hellhole there. Mosquitoes, scorpions, bugs, and snakes were all over the place. You had to empty your shoes out in the morning. All around the base they had a big round fence, eight or nine feet high, because a lot of the Filipinos had elephantiasis, all kinds of diseases. At night, after supper, we used to take the extra food from supper and give it to the natives. I wished I was back in Pearl Harbor. I said to myself, “You dummy!”
Around March 15, a hundred of us were told to pack our gear. We were being assigned to the USS Epping Forest LSD-4, a big amphibious ship. Three officers and a hundred men were assigned to the ship as a permanent boat group. I had a crew of four, myself as coxswain, a fireman to take care of the two diesel engines, two seamen to take care of the lines. From Samar we sailed to Leyte in the Philippines and our boats picked up eighteen General Sherman tanks and their crews.
On March 27, the largest invasion force in the Pacific left Leyte and other bases with 1,500 ships bound for Okinawa. Endless ships. Our boats from the Epping Forest were in the first wave to hit the beaches with tanks, soldiers, Marines, and supplies. Before we hit the beach, the boat officer talked to the crews, giving us advice to unload our tanks and back off as soon as possible. Being out in the Pacific didn’t mean we knew what had happened elsewhere. I hadn’t heard about Iwo Jima, how horrific the landing was.
On April 1, 1945, all our boats on the Epping Forest hit the beach with our General Sherman tanks. No fire from the shore except our ships shelling the beaches. As I was driving to shore in my boat, I went astern of the USS Texas (BB-35), a big battleship, her guns firing, my ears were ringing. Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were shelling the beaches, rocket ships were launching rockets. As my boat approached the beach, I expected it would be blown out of the water. But, as we hit the beach, nothing happened. There was no resistance. The Japanese didn’t want to expend their troops fighting on the beaches. They pulled back and fought later. We were lucky.
Air attacks continued throughout the morning. Late in the afternoon most ships in the group received orders to retire for the night. Almost as soon as the anchor was weighed three Jap planes appeared over the ships. They were met with heavy antiaircraft fire, but two managed to crash into ships nearby and the third crashed alongside a destroyer. My God, that was a Fourth of July celebration! All the ships were firing, 20 millimeters, 40 millimeters, and all antiaircraft guns, debris coming down, spent shells hitting the deck. I was wearing my steel helmet and life jacket, which helped.
For three months all our boats were assigned to unloading Liberty Ships, bringing in cargo of all sorts and unloading troops. The thing I remember the most was when our boat was assigned to unload an ammunition ship. They loaded our boat with 155-mm artillery shells (that’s the biggest shell there was). A big storm came while being loaded. Our boat was smashing up against the ship. I thought for sure the shells would start exploding. It was scary. We couldn’t unload our boat for almost a week, with a bunch of shells, so we were stuck with them, no ship would let us tie up to them so we could get a meal. We ate K-rations, once in a while we were able to get a can of Spam, or some boned chicken. I remember sleeping on the steel deck with no bedding. When it rained, we were exposed, no place to hide.
One morning, our boat was assigned to bringing in Marine casualties to hospital ships. I believe this was a big push at the Shuri Line (Japanese defenses on Okinawa). My boat had to go up a small river for about five miles, at the mouth of the river I picked up two Marines to direct us where to go. When we got there, there were a lot of casualties. They were taken to our boat by Navy corpsmen who were giving them plasma. A lot of them had bad wounds. We went back down the river and took them to hospital ships. We made two or three trips.
Another assignment our boat officer gave us was to pick up— I didn’t care for this —dead Jap bodies. We were told to drag them to the outer edge of the anchorage, as far as we could. We got a boat hook and hooked it around their waist and then just dragged them along and brought them out further in the ocean so they wouldn’t be in the way. We picked up one or two dead bodies. They had uniforms. I assumed they were kamikaze pilots. Their bodies were all swollen up, and they didn’t smell too good. Fortunately, we never found any American bodies. I’ll never forget that experience.
After we left Okinawa July 1, we headed for Guam. In my personal belief, after our ship was repaired, it would come back out to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. I left for my leave August 1, 1945 and during my leave the two atomic bombs were dropped. I never expected in my wildest dreams that I would be home for V-J Day. It was really exciting, everybody celebrating, hugging each other. What a relief to know that I was to survive the war. The bomb was a surprise to me. I had never heard of the atomic bomb. We thought it was okay—saved us from the invasion of Japan. I learned later that the first phase of the invasion of Japan was code-named Olympic and was set for November 1, 1945 to invade southern Kyushu, Japan. I thought the war was going to pass me up, but it didn’t.
I was in the naval reserve for four years after I got out of the Navy. My four years expired about two months before the Korean War started. The North Koreans had invaded South Korea. We were protecting Asia. We’d been pretty well brainwashed on communism. North Korea is hostile, just like they were 50 years ago, the same attitude. I kind of thought we shouldn’t have gotten involved in the Vietnam War. I can understand the feeling of other people—we were defending the world against communism—the Chinese and Russians want to take over Asia, Vietnam. It was, I wouldn’t say, a stalemate, because we had to evacuate. My wife and I were both against our invading Iraq. We thought it was none of our business. The possibility of getting killed or wounded, for what? I was surprised that Colin Powell was advocating the invasion; he wasn’t like Bush and his crowd.
World War II was a necessary war, very patriotic. We were just defending our country, willing to die for it. In Okinawa, there were almost 5,000 killed, just sailors, and between Marines and Army, over 12,000. Tarawa wasn’t a big battle but the landing troops really got slaughtered. When I was hitting the beach in Okinawa, I was thinking about Tarawa. But even on the Pacific, we were right there, and we didn’t know what was going on. Guys only listened to Tokyo Rose for music, they disregarded everything else [propaganda]. Nobody believed what she said anyway. They had all the popular music. I had seen Wake Island (1942), and all these other movies. They inspired you to be patriotic. I believed that Hollywood stuff.
My neighbor next door, their son just joined the army and I just heard that he’s ready to be sent to Iraq. I feel bad for him. The parents, the worry they are going to go through, the young man, all the hardships they are going to have in Iraq and Afghanistan. I imagine that my parents must have gone through agony with me. That’s why I wasn’t anxious for our participation in Vietnam and Iraq. I knew all the hardships that would come.
Charlie Allard, born in 1924 in Springfield, Massachusetts, served three years in the Navy on the USS Fayette, APA-43, an Auxiliary Personnel Assault ship. He was a 3rd Class Pharmacist Mate, helping “beach parties” made up of a doctor and medics who evacuated the wounded from beaches in the South Pacific. Having been a boy scout, he said he knew something about first aid and was selected to go to Portsmouth, Virginia, for six weeks to train. His six invasions (1944–5) were Kwajalein, the Marianas (Guam), Palau Islands (Peleliu), Leyte, Luzon (Lingayen Gulf), and Iwo Jima. When he returned home he drove an ambulance for the fire department for 31 years.
We never expected Iwo Jima to be that bad [and] they say Okinawa was worse. We had a beach party with eight corpsmen and a doctor. They went in about the fifth wave, and they set up a tent where they come out of the line and get first aid on the beach. Whenever they get morphine you are supposed to mark it on their head when they had it, you’re not supposed to give it [again] too soon. Some of them had already passed away. When they were getting the beach cleaned up, they sent them out to the ship instead of looking for a place to put the dead. If they started bleeding again bad, they’d put a tourniquet on. Or if they were in a lot of pain, “When did you have your last morphine?” Give them a shot of morphine before they could get back aboard ship. We had two operating rooms aboard ship.
You know what surprises me? You would think that some of the medical men over there in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of those doctors would have a nervous breakdown with seeing casualties that bad all the time. Dr. C., the one that was in the beach party, someone told me at one of the last reunions that he cracked up after Iwo Jima.
When you get 30 wounded there, you walk along a passageway along the whole side of the ship, ten or fifteen field stretchers, two wooden poles with canvas attached and a four-inch leg on each pole to keep it off the deck. We used to take blood from quite a few people before an invasion, because you never know how much you are going to use. [Blood type] is right on your dog tag, and everybody had their dog tags all the time.
All young guys—I went in when I was 17. Like this Marine, we could have saved his life, we cut his leg off because unfortunately, he stepped on a land mine, and it was just hanging. When they take a leg off, they cut it and sometimes you have to push the skin back up so you can cut the bone back another inch, and pull the skin down and turn it all over so it will heal back over the bone. Some can handle it and some can’t. This one Marine was only 19. “I don’t want to go back home this way.” So we put the Thompson light splint on him. “I’m all done, I’m no good anymore.” He pulled the splint off during the night when nobody was around and died because of shock. What the hell. When you have got a hundred casualties aboard ship, we only had about 30 corpsmen, some of them had to sleep some time.
Everyone was so damned disgusted about Pearl Harbor. As the war went on you heard about Midway and the Philippines, how the Japs were treating the prisoners over there. Just between you and me, I never did see a Jap prisoner. Some of them would blow themselves up before they would be taken prisoner. We used to have a ship’s paper, Bataan death march. You know what they did on Tarawa, what the Japs did? They knew where we were going to invade the island, so they cut down palm trees and put anchors on them so when the boats went in they couldn’t get to the beach, they hit the trees that were anchored out there. It was like a coral reef that they made, only out of wood.
Tokyo Rose—we’d turn the radio on, and she would say where the ships were. She’d say, “We know where you are going, you are going to Iwo Jima. But wait till you get there, you’re in for a surprise.” They wanted to scare you. After Iwo Jima, Okinawa was the last invasion. After that, we were ready to load troops, we were ready to hit Japan. And if they ever hit Japan— Oh my gosh, I don’t know how many casualties, it would have been like D-Day over in Europe. [The atomic bomb?] Oh, were we glad to hear that!
I’ve read a few articles about the black Tuskegee pilots. That must have been a great outfit. They went through hell to begin with. When I first went in the Navy, we had Blacks aboard ship. They set up the officers’ table when they ate and they cleaned the officers’ rooms. That’s all they did—waited on the officers, served them, it was like walking into a restaurant aboard ship. The deck officers, they sat down, and the black guys, all in white, white pants, and white jackets. But when it came time for me to get out, they were beginning to come aboard ship as gunners’ mates and signalmen, they were regular shipmates.
After I left Portsmouth, Virginia, I went down to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. One day, I got a bus going to town and the bus was pretty well filled up. There was a seat in back of the driver and I sat there. A few minutes later an older black woman came on and she’s standing up there holding on to the seat, and I said, “Here, sit down.” Boy, that bus driver stopped the bus, “Hey, sailor, get back there where you were. She knows she is supposed to be at the back of the bus!” I felt about that high because I wasn’t brought up that way. In fact, we had black kids at school, in West Springfield, we treated them like anybody else.
[The Korean War?] I can’t understand why we had to be over there. Put it this way: Pearl Harbor, there was a reason. Wasn’t Pearl Harbor part of this country at that time? No? I think Guam is a territory too. Actually, I don’t know that much about the Korean War. I often wonder, “Why are we over there?” We had a reason for [being] over in Europe. I never heard anyone say actually why we had to go over to Korea.
Afghanistan and Baghdad, they claim that we are over there because of those two planes in New York. But I think there’s a lot that Uncle Sam won’t tell us. [Obama] wants to send more troops over there again and he’s going to bring some back in another couple of months. They say they want us out of there in another couple of years, but look at the car bombings that are going on over there all the time, they can’t even control that now. Look at the civilians they are killing over there, my God, every time a car bomb goes off—50, 60 people.
Look at it: we’ve been there over six years now. I shouldn’t say this, [but] are they better off now than they were then? I mean we’re still fighting in the same area, aren’t we? Whenever there’s a war, the economy usually picks up. You don’t read anything about the tanks and army vehicles that are going over there. Every now and then you will see that one of them burned up. They’re mostly General Motors, aren’t they? All you think of General Motors are cars, what about all the plants that make the military vehicles? They must be booming now.
Don Walker, born in 1925 in Springfield, Massachusetts, served in the Navy chasing U-boats in the Atlantic, and after the Japanese surrender, helping repatriate Japanese soldiers from the Pacific Islands that were bypassed by the advancing Americans. Don tells a story about a Japanese flag covered with writing that he took from a Japanese soldier, and how he returned it 31 years later. After the Japanese surrender, he taught local boys on a Pacific Island how to play baseball, and tells all his stories with great humor. After our interview, Don turned his narrative into a booklet for his family. He worked in the insurance business after the war. He died of cancer in December 2010.
The war was on and they had an entrance exam for naval officers’ training. I took that in my high school senior year and I passed it, much to the surprise of my parents and myself. [He laughs.] Two weeks after graduation, I was in the Navy at Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts, that’s where I met Dottie, my wife, a graduate of Jackson College, the girls’ college of Tufts. My officer’s training lasted less than a year, because I flunked out! [He laughs.] There’s my report card. That’s an “F” for naval organization. That’s because I missed that mandatory weekly orientation meeting. You know where I was? Visiting Dottie at her dorm! [He laughs.] The best part of going to school was her. Sixty-two years we’ve been married. I would have had a commission. I probably would have been dead, too.
I went to Newport, Rhode Island, where I went to fire control school. Electrical, mechanical operations, the guns, the directors, the electrical circuits that go into firing guns, antiaircraft, depth charges, and all that stuff, it has nothing to do with flames. Came out a third class petty officer, went to Norfolk, Virginia and picked up the ship for the first go-round out to the Atlantic Ocean. The DE destroyer escort 139, USS Farquhar, after an Admiral Farquhar [from the Civil War].
We were in what they called a “killer group,” a protective shield around an aircraft carrier (we called them baby flat tops) with four other Destroyer Escorts (DEs). We were looking for trouble with the U-boats, because they had decimated shipping before the war and in the early part of the war, laying off the eastern seaboard looking for ships supplying England. The wolf packs were all over the place. The Germans had developed a submarine that was like a tanker, and they would rendezvous with the wolf packs and refuel them at sea, so they didn’t have to go back all the way to Germany or Norway to refuel.
Some people have heard the name “wolf pack” but don’t realize what it is. It’s a group of submarines, U-boats we called them, and they operated in a pack, just like a wolf pack. The U-boats hunt together so they are more effective, more productive as a whole group. If they could get us (destroyer escorts) they would, but they were looking to slide by us and get the carrier. They had what they used to call the shoestring play. You know the old story of the guy saying, “Your shoe’s untied” —when he looked down, he popped him and gave the guy quite a going over? They put a U-boat to the surface over here, and the idea was we’d attack it, but there would be another U-boat over here, submerged, and while we were concentrating on the one we could see, they would torpedo us from the side—a decoy system. They had a lot of tricks they pulled, but we got wise to them after a while.
You haven’t lived until you have been in the North Atlantic. We had waves that were 40 to 50 feet high, on the flying bridge I was looking up at the crest of the wave. I guess it bothered some of the guys but for the most part we were pretty seaworthy people. I was 18—it was an adventure. In a sense, it wasn’t a war for us. But as we became more accustomed to what was going on, we became a little more serious. Then we were concerned about getting home. The realization came: Maybe you don’t get home, this is for real. [He laughs.]
By the time we had contact with a U-boat, we usually had a pretty good chance of sinking it. We had 24/7 sound gear that sent out a ping that when it hit something, echoed back. Then they got a direction and a range on it and the conning officer [the officer in charge of directing changes in course or speed] would direct the ship toward the U-boat. The first thing that happens when the soundman got a contact, they send a chemical alarm over the PA system on the ship. They call that a chemical alarm, but it was three buzzes, so you knew there was something brewing somewhere. Then the conning officers would begin to move the ship for the attack.
Depth charges were dropped off the fantail of the ship and we had passed over the target by the time we fired. The hedgehog was fired ahead of us and consisted of 24 depth-type charges. Most people think of depth charges as the tin cans that go off and blow up, but anything that goes off under the surface is a depth charge. In an ahead-thrown attack they only went off if they hit something because it had a fuse on the front that was armed by rotation. It went up in an ellipse and came down and the U-boat was theoretically in front of us. We destroyed a few whales.
Most of the time, there were no survivors on the U-boat. It usually cracked and blew up under water and when that happens, there’s very little chance. By that time they were trying to escape the attack they would be down 3–400 feet. There was one that did surface and they captured it and towed it to Argentia, Newfoundland. The Americans went aboard and shut off all the valves. They saved it. They apparently had set the U-boat to be scuttled—that was a favorite trick by the Germans when they didn’t want it captured. The crew would get into their boats or be in our boats, they had delayed bombs on them.
In fact, the one that we sunk, I fired the depth charges, it was set at 50 and 75 feet to go off. One of them set off almost as soon as it hit the water, which means it was in close proximity to a magnetic field. It blew our fantail ten or fifteen feet out of the water. We saw nothing. It wasn’t until after the war when we got the German records that we found out we’d sunk it. Sometimes we put sonar boards in the water, and then had to shut everything off of all the ships that were in a certain area, and then we would listen if there were any sounds coming at all from underneath. At times you could hear banging and so forth.
The Allies broke the German code in World War II so we could intercept their messages and we knew what they were doing. We found out later Admiral Dönitz, who was in charge of all the U-boat operations, had ordered six of them just before the end of the war to come over to the East Coast and do whatever damage they could, in April of ’45. That’s why they shipped us to the North Atlantic.
After we got up there, we heard the rumor that the Germans had sent the U-boats and they had V-2 rockets like they were putting over England, and they were going to do a last-minute harassing of New York, Washington, a last gasp. We had heard the rumor, but we never heard that the Germans had anything to transport those rockets. As we talked with the Germans later, they never had any capability to do that, but it panicked the East Coast. It’s like the country now that has a nuclear bomb, if they don’t have a rocket to deliver it with, what are they going to do except plant it through terrorists?
So they sent four aircraft carriers, one of them was ours, and 42 DEs up to the North Atlantic. Our station was just below Iceland. They got one of our DEs, the Frederick C. Davis, DE-136, on April 24, 1945. Operation Teardrop. All of a sudden one night, one of the destroyer escorts caught the surfaced U-boat recharging the batteries. They tried to ram it but it was so rough that the waves pushed it off. They couldn’t man the guns because they were taking on so much water. So the U-boat submerged and one of the other DEs got U-880 later with depth charges. U-1235 and U-518 were also sunk. Three down, and three to go. Later, U-546 was sunk, with 32 survivors taken aboard one of the DEs. Four down, and two to go.
The final part of this is we had to go into Argentia to refuel and when we went back out again, on May 4th or 5th, we got a contact early in the morning, about four or five o’clock. I happened to be on watch that morning on the flying bridge, and the U-boat had got inside the screen of the carrier. The DEs made a semicircle in front of the carrier, and she was in the middle. They didn’t care about us—they wanted that carrier. They got in on our starboard beam and we picked them up and we made an immediate right turn, and I personally fired the thirteen-depth charge attack. The charges went off very shallow. We saw U-boat 881, the last one of the six that left Norway. That was two days before the war ended. I always felt kind of bad for the guys in that U-boat.
The sequel to that was, years later, one of our torpedo men with his wife was over in Germany, I think it was Berlin, and they were going out to dinner, and they stopped at a bar to have a beer. They got talking with a German girl there about the war, and it turned out her brother was on that U-boat, U-881, that we sunk. She went home and got the list of all the crew that were on that U-boat.
We were anchored in Pearl Harbor when the war with Japan ended, on the beach watching a movie. They stopped the movie. It was typical of the movies in the Navy, it was used so many times and passed through so many ships, that the film was brittle and frequently broke going through all the sprockets in the camera. When it stopped, everybody was cheering, another busted movie. Well, the guy came on the microphone and said, “We have to inform you that the war with Japan is officially over. It is now V-J Day.” Nobody said a word, it was so quiet, it was eerie. We thought it was a ruse of some sort, then he came on again and reiterated what he had said. We said, “Wow, this is it.”
I liked the Navy, I didn’t have anything to run away from. I just thought it would be nice to be home for a change, but we didn’t go home. We headed for Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands and we took on 7,000 pounds of rice to feed the Japanese soldiers in the Caroline Islands, and took the surrender of the Japanese there. The American forces bypassed a whole bunch of islands out in the Pacific. We hoped the Japanese on these islands knew the war was over; they had radio contact I am sure. [But] when we went into the harbor at Ponape their dual guns were trained on us, we were afraid to death we were going to hit a mine or they were going to shoot at us. We weren’t sure they knew the war was over.
We went right in to Ponape harbor, and sent a landing party on the island, and the Japanese surrendered. We were with another ship, the USS Hyman DD-732 destroyer. It was bigger all-around than a destroyer escort. The Japanese came aboard that ship, took down the Rising Sun flag and replaced it with the Stars and Stripes. The formal surrender papers were signed aboard the Hyman by officers of the Japanese Army.
We had time to get off the ship. We went on the island and we started playing softball. Of course the native kids in the village wanted to get in the game but they didn’t know quite what to do. So we decided that we’d teach them how to play baseball. We sorted them out by size, made teams of them, and we made a diamond that we played on but we shortened it up a little because they were little kids. We had a regular Little League going on over there, and we were coaches, batting practice, pitchers, and everything else. We had these kids playing baseball like you wouldn’t believe. They were so adaptable! They were terrific.
I was there six months. We were under orders to take all the Japanese Army off the island, put them on their own ships, and send them back to Japan. But you know, the Japanese Navy didn’t have many ships, and sometimes it would be two or three weeks. Our job was to see that they got out to their ships and didn’t have any weapons on them.
An interesting thing happened. While I was on board one of the transports standing watch, this Japanese soldier came aboard with a knapsack. He had a Japanese flag sticking out the top of it and I thought it would be nice to have for a souvenir. So, I just pulled it out of his knapsack. He was upset and was he mad! I had a Thompson submachine gun, so I just prodded him with it. He was jabbering away something awful when he left. I said, well, I got a nice souvenir, one of these big flags with the rising sun, all kinds of writing coming out from it. I kept the thing and it went home in a sea bag, and I never knew what the writing on it was.
One day I got a call from our home office. They had several Japanese insurance people over from Tokyo. I invited one of them (Ichiro Moji was his name), an assistant to the president of the Meiji Mutual Life Insurance Agency of Tokyo, to the house for dinner. This was in 1977. We played pool, darts, and had a couple of American beers. I think Dottie said to me when we were down there, this guy must know what that thing says. I had it in a plastic bag down cellar.
So I went and got it, spread it out on the pool table, and Mo looked at it, and he looked at me, and the tears started coming down his cheeks. I told him where I got it and what I did to get it. He said, “You have done this man a grave injustice. You have taken something very sacred from him. These names from the rising sun are all of his family and his friends who signed it and gave it to him before he went to battle, and wished him success in battle, and a safe return home.” I said, “Oh, Wow. I’m in trouble now.” [He laughs.] I felt badly, I really did.
So I thought about it for a minute and I said to him, “Mo, this is crazy, but why don’t you take this flag back to Tokyo and see if you can find this guy.” They found the guy, believe it or not. He was in Kobe, Japan. They ran an ad in the newspaper with a 6.4 million circulation, and the next morning this guy called. He took the bullet train in. His name was Jiro Ueda and he owned a liquor store. Thirty-one years later. That gave me a lot of personal satisfaction. I committed an act of piracy, if you really want to know, I stole something on the high seas at gunpoint. Little did I know when I took it how the ending would be. I thought it would just be a souvenir.
Vietnam was not a popular war, that’s a problem… were we really threatened? I think that is where the real issue lies. In World War II we were threatened, you could see what happened in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, you could see the creeping Nazism take over. Then the Axis was formed by Italy and Japan, and I think everybody felt this was it, so they got behind it. It took everybody at home to pitch in and do what they had to do. It wasn’t always building arms but it was sacrificing at home for sugar and coffee, so people were in the war. Today we don’t feel anything about a war, except maybe taxes, but that’s in the aftermath usually. The people who lose a loved one know what’s going on; for the rest of us, it’s something we read about.
[Korea?] I was more concerned about Russia than I was Korea. Even though we weren’t fighting Russia, they were communists and we were fighting the communists in North Korea. My concern was escalation, that Russia would enter the war [as] the Russians were training the North Korean pilots. So I had a great concern not about the Korean War itself but about what it might lead to. If Russia got involved, we thought we would be in World War III.
Vietnam was like the Korean War, it was far enough away so we didn’t fear it spreading to our homeland. We were complacent. Most Americans thought, “Why get involved?” We seem to mind other peoples’ business because [we] envisage a threat from a different culture and a different philosophy than we have as Americans. Most of it is human rights, as far as I can see. I support this because of the atrocities that some of these regimes put upon their people.
I think what’s going on today is nothing but an outgrowth of what we’ve seen before in Vietnam and North Korea, and Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and others before them. I feel badly for the people who don’t have the opportunities in life that the United States seems to give. Not to say we are perfect by any means, but we don’t have to worry about what we say in the open like many of these people do. I feel that at the same time we are right, it costs us a price to be free and has throughout history. I think we need to continue to do that for our own freedom and for the freedom of our future people in the United States.
Iraq? We need their oil, human rights is just the mask, that appeals to more people. I think a lot of the problems that we have now are because of the materials that we need—oil, particularly. Human rights we use as a shield, but really, we’re after something else usually. These people resort to violence to obtain what they want. They want to conquer us anyways, they don’t like us, because of what we have done in the world. [He laughs.] Just looking at it from the outside in, I’d say that maybe we win the war, we leave there, and they go on fighting among themselves, and that’s what’s going to happen in Afghanistan, too. These people have their different cliques, they don’t like each other, they don’t know how to get along together.
Some guy like Hitler or Mussolini or Kim Jong-Il takes hold of the situation, that’s where the atrocities start, to maintain power they have to kill people, that’s where the human rights deal comes in. I think we’re pulling out [of Iraq] now, we’re going to turn it over to them. In Afghanistan the Russians had to leave because they couldn’t get to the mountains. Look at what is happening in Iran—they can cause disruption.
I go on the assumption that nobody is a winner in a war. I pretty much stick to that, and I have for many, many years. I even thought that way before I went in the Navy. I think wars are inevitable because of the way people are taught to think. I just don’t think that anybody wins a war. We’ve been fortunate in this country because we’ve never had the experience, after the Civil War anyway, of having been attacked and having the desecration and all the mess that occurs with dead bodies. We’ve been very fortunate in that respect. But I think if we were ever attacked, which we saw a little bit of in 9/11, that people would get a different viewpoint of who wins a war, and probably more so in today’s world.
Regarding the larger impact of using the bombs, I was dead set to get those Japanese, they had killed so many and tortured so many going back to when they invaded China. And the Corregidor mess, the hundred mile march where they bayoneted so many of these people, that I was all for “let’s get them.” If I got killed, that’s where I wanted to get killed, I wanted to die in the big field. I had no remorse whatsoever; I was delighted.
I guess at the time I was, but now I feel maybe it would have been better if they dropped it up on top of that volcano they’ve got over there, Fujiyama, to show them what would happen. It was tragic to see so many civilians killed by the bombs. The Japanese doctor we visited on the transport told us graphic stories of what he found after the blast at Hiroshima. But some of the Japanese officers that were in charge, they didn’t want to surrender even after the second bomb went off.
In some recent times, it’s hard to know who’s the enemy. It happened in Vietnam too— they didn’t know who was friend and foe. Complacency with today’s situations can lead nowhere but to another disaster down the road. We must be vigilant and very alert to threats to our way of life. We must act quickly to safeguard what Americans have fought so hard to preserve. God Bless America!
Paul Seamans, born in 1923 in Malden, MA, served in the Navy reserve chasing submarines and blowing up mines, and retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander. He attended Tufts University on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He served in the Pacific from the winter of 1943–4 until March of 1946. After his return he finished college, taught at the US Naval Academy, and later became the principal of an elementary school for 25 years. His is a typical story, starting with the Depression.
Dad went dead broke during the Depression. When the money began to be distributed, WPA, PWA, CCCs, he went to work on the sewer along with a bunch of World War I buddies. We used to put Shredded Wheat separators [the three layers of biscuits of Shredded Wheat were separated by a layer of cardboard] in our shoes and you cut them out as inner soles, because our shoe soles were worn out. We had a banana and Shredded Wheat for maybe five or six years. One of the cheapest things you could eat in those days was fish. Mom would send me down to the market, they would take out a codfish, which had been cleaned, and wrap it up in newspaper.
I went out to the Pacific Ocean where I started as the fourth officer on the SC-1363 [submarine chasers were not named], then the third, then I was the executive officer for not quite a year, then I was bumped up to be the commanding officer. I was the commanding officer for the better part of a year, brought the ship home, and decommissioned it in March of 1946. We were advanced on the basis of training, experience, and the recommendation of the commanding officer, who was leaving.
We spent more of our time shooting up mines than chasing submarines. By the time we got out there, there were submarines, one of them I think sank the USS Indianapolis (CA-35), that unfortunate boat that went west and didn’t zigzag, and it was torpedoed. You may or may not remember that it was many days, if not weeks, before the Navy got the idea that it had a lost ship. At that time many of the crew had suffered [883 of the crew of 1,199 died, the largest single loss of the war]. There were Japanese submarines still extant, and that’s what we were there for.
My ship was put in with a group of ships that made up a very large convoy, went to Guadalcanal. I often had the idea that they didn’t really know what to do with us. The only island that I saw that had Japanese on it was Peleliu, and our ship was there on the invasion, this was in September of 1944. We ran within a hundred yards of the beach, if you can picture a horseshoe of ships, the ships in the middle were usually destroyers, metal craft and more important than we were. Our particular position was on the left-hand side. We were strictly a visual watch, and radar. Our participation was simply by way of 7 x 50 Bausch & Lomb binoculars.
About my ship. We had depth charges, port and starboard, and we had two K-guns. A K-gun actually looks like a “K.” The depth charge is held on one side of the K with a cable, and on the other side a large cartridge is inserted. You fire a cartridge on the left side, and it kicks the many dozens of pounds of depth charge overboard. You drop a pattern—they are supposed to be dropped at such intervals that they form a diamond, to enclose the target down under the water. All I can tell you is that when these torpedoes go off, you think that you’ve been torpedoed because the rear end of the boat rears right up in the air. Your feet—it almost hurts because water doesn’t compress, you feel it.
The mines that we shot at were floating mines that had been let go from their tether due to wind and waves over a period of time. Their only danger lay in the possibility that they might be run into by a boat, which happened. You’d be coasting along as part of a convoy and someone would announce, “There’s a floating mine!” Then it was like a shooting gallery. They were all horned mines. First of all, the mine was always spherical. There were bumps on it that looked like tin cans. In order to explode the thing, you had to knock one of those cans off. That had a trigger, which initiated the major explosion of the sphere. I never saw one blow up expect by dint of our own shooting.
Every ship at that time was eligible for a black man, the officers were entitled to a steward who was to make their beds for them, see that they had clean sheets, polish their shoes, check their lockers to make sure their clothes were all hung up straight. It was crazy, because we were all college boys. We asked him, “What would you like to do?” He said, “I’d like a gun.” We had two .50-caliber machine guns that had just been installed, so we gave him the one on the left hand side and he shot it a few times and he seemed to know what he was doing, so that was his duty for the rest of the war. He also helped in the galley. He had learned to cook opossums at his father’s farm down south, O.B. Jordon, I think was his name.
A terrible typhoon hit Okinawa in the fall of 1945, October 9. The wind blew a record 205 miles an hour. Some of the crew and I put on our night-vision glasses, stayed up all night on the flying bridge watching this tremendous blow. The rain felt like BBs in our faces. When we went into Unten Ko at the north end of Okinawa, several of the boats were tied up to what were really telephone poles stuck in the mud. We tied up beside an Army supply ship, a smallish steel ship. We put our towing gear completely around their superstructure and where many, many ships went ashore. Our draft was less than that of the Army ship when it went into the mud; we still had two or three feet of water under us. We didn’t go under.
We talked to the port authority to find out what was going to happen to us, we were supposed to go sweep mines in Japan. The port authority looked at us blokes and asked how long we had been away and said, “You’d better go home,” so we got our marching orders. I was the captain. We got lost! We got out of Guam, and our gyrotropic counts went down, so all we had was the magnetic, which we never used. We were going to Kwajalein, and I think it was about a three-day trip and it rained. I could navigate well, the sky cleared the morning we were supposed to get in, and by God, I tell you, we must have been 30 or 40 miles off course.
There are seven stars in the big dipper. [He names them.] With all these wonderful names, you can’t use them for navigation because they are too far down on the horizon, not bright enough. The North Star, which is due north, you can’t use either because it isn’t bright enough, you can’t catch it in your sextant. The sextant is made of a split mirror; half of it looks at the horizon and the other half of it looks at a star. When you’re navigating you have a slide on your sextant and you move it until you have the horizon touching the star. Then it will tell you how many minutes and degrees it is above the horizon. The positions of all of the stars are tabulated in Greenwich, the height of the star above the horizon, for every minute of every hour of every day. When you translate that at sea, you have to accommodate your navigation to the land difference between Greenwich and where you are. You have to have a Bowditch [navigation chart], which will explain to you the difference.
You use first-degree stars, like Vega. We had a star chart, we put it down on the deck, used a flashlight, covered over the front end of it with tin foil, made a little pin prick in the middle of it. We could shine the pin prick on the various stars, figure out what their name was. You need three stars for a triangle. After you’ve got your fix on three stars, you leave the deck and you go down to the chart house, and you pull out some tabulations, and running up and down there would drive you crazy until you learn how to do it—you can get your fix in fifteen minutes.
I went from Seattle, Washington, to Chicago, and I hadn’t talked to my parents. The telephone operators had control of a bank of telephones, and I stepped to one of the girls, and she said, “You know, you young men are always in a great hurry!” I said to her, “You know, I haven’t been home for two years.” “Go take number five, right over there!” She knew right away, here was a Navy man who had to be patted on the back.
There is a very famous picture of a sailor man bending a lady over and kissing her in New York. I didn’t get home to that, my ship didn’t get decommissioned until March 1946. There was no great celebration when boys of my generation went home [although] we were certainly welcomed home with open arms to our families. I was in the little tiny community of Richmond, New Hampshire, the people were all quiet, they were loving, and there’s no question that they were appreciative.
When I went back to Tufts and we had our first class, three or four Jackson girls came in and took a look over the audience. They walked down the aisle and there was a little girl who sat down beside me, she never said a word to me and I never said a word to her. But it was so touching to have a warm-bodied girl, some of our boys hadn’t seen a woman in over a year. So here was this darling little thing, came to sit beside me, and the warmth of it was really very touching.
[Korea] You will remember that that was called a police action, not a war. MacArthur got into trouble with Harry Truman because he wanted to dictate how things should go. Boy was he wrong! He was a braggart, he was a pompous sort of fellow, he was in the Pacific what Patton was in Europe, Patton who had the ivory-handled pistols. Do you know the Bonus March? [In 1932, desperate World War I veterans converged on Washington to demand their promised bonus wages. President Hoover called up the Army (led by MacArthur, and including both Eisenhower and Patton), to destroy their encampment and scatter the protesters.] He [MacArthur] was in charge of kicking them out of Washington, and his aide was Eisenhower, of all things. That was terrible.
Russell Brocklesby, born in 1915 in Greenfield, Massachusetts, served from March of 1944 to February 1946 as Navy mailman, 3rd class. Married before he enlisted, his pay was $150 a month, with $85 going to his wife Helen. He considered his ship, the USS Randolph, a very lucky ship, as while undergoing repairs, the USS Franklin sailed in her place and was torpedoed with great loss of life. After the war, Russell was a lithographer in Minot’s Printing and Bonding Company. His background was Scots-English; his father, a millwright, had immigrated from Liverpool. There were eight children in his family and nine in Helen’s family, which was originally from Nova Scotia. Russell died in November 2010.
When I got down to Turners Falls, [the recruiter] had me in the Army. I told one of the officers, “I was supposed to go in with the Navy.” He said, “You have to go through this board” —there was an Army, Navy, and Marine officer. So when I went in with the army doctor, he said, “What’s the matter with the Army?” I said, “Not a thing’s the matter with the Army, but I enlisted in the Navy.” We kept talking (my brother Earnest was in the Navy, and my youngest brother, Robert, was an officer in the Navy, he’d been in college). The Navy officer reached over, took the papers and said, “A good Navy man.” [He laughs.] And that’s what it was.
The officer was from [nearby] Northampton, and he said: “Russ, we have to have someone in the post office with the mail coming in for the boys.” “Well, I don’t know anything about a post office,” and he said, “Besides, it is ten dollars more.” “I’ll take it.” [He laughs.] I told an officer, “You know, I’m not really interested in saving stamps for Uncle Sam, I want to be top side.” “Russ, you have got to have a G-Q [general quarters] station.” “I know I do, I want to be on a gun, a military gun.” He got me on a 20-mm, I was right where I could see the planes come in and run off, under any attack. It was two of us on it, one loading and one firing.
I was on the USS Randolph, CV-15. That ship was made in one year. Many aircraft carriers were brand new. Our ship carried one hundred planes, TBMs [Avenger], two different kinds. I was where I could see them come back from a raid, see them land and different ones crack up. That’s where I lost a lot of my hearing, because our gun was right near the five-inch guns and they make a terrific roar. I talked to the [veterans’] agent years ago in Greenfield, and he said, “Well, you should have complained when you were in the Navy.” “Well, I didn’t because I wanted to get out after it was all over.” So I did lose out there.
We never knew where we were going, because they didn’t want anything that would leak. I always figured we had a very good ship and a very lucky ship. A bunch of their [Japanese] pilots (of course they were all doomed, they weren’t supposed to come back), twenty of them flew from some base, coming in to bomb the ships in Ulithi, but very few of them made it. The one that made it was the one that came right into our fantail, under the flight deck [March 11, 1945]. It had a bomb and it blew up. We’ve got pictures of the damage. We were repaired right out there by a repair ship—they used to park right next to [us].
We could tell when the planes were coming in because the big guns on all the ships would start firing when the planes were miles away. The destroyers and escort ships would pick that up first and they would send messages back. The cruisers could fire the big guns; they had what we used to call the Buck Rogers Show. When it got close to a plane, it would explode. When they were firing, we were quite a ways away. Our loudspeaker would announce an attack, our guns were firing when they were diving on us. Our 20-mm guns (the 40-mm had more of a range), I couldn’t say the actual range, but it would be close.
One plane, whatever hit it, the pilot of that ship came out in a parachute and landed right close to our ship. We were always told, “Don’t shoot the pilot,” because if they picked them up [alive], they gained information from them. They weren’t supposed to parachute out, they were supposed to kamikaze, their duty.
We were getting prepared to go on a raid of the Philippines when the Japanese were there, but we couldn’t go because we got hit by this kamikaze. So the ship that took our position was the Franklin [see narrative by Charles Sakowicz, page 73]. When they left they were in the position we would have been in, they got hit and there were 700 casualties [at least 724 were killed]. The ship came back [to New York], it was leaning, just like this. Like I say, we had a lucky ship and a good ship.
Our ship made one of the first raids on Tokyo, the first carrier in Tokyo Bay. We came from Ulithi [raids were conducted against Tokyo, February 16–25, 1945] on this maneuver. Then when they dropped the atomic bombs, we were getting ready to pull out of the area. The planes that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were big heavy planes. They wanted all the [other] planes to get away, so when these big planes came in there would be nothing in the sky, they didn’t want anything to interfere with that position.
We went to Europe a couple of times to pick up GIs to bring them home. On the hangar deck they put up rows and rows of cots. I was on the flight deck and I bumped into Charlie Moroz, who graduated in the same class in Greenfield. Half of our people aboard ship were given a 30-day leave, so there was a lot of room. This one night we’re having steak for supper and I went to Charlie and I said, “Come on down tonight, we got steak for supper.” He said, “No, I’m not going down, we are having hot dogs. If you knew how much I missed Silver Arrow hotdogs!”
We went to Naples, Italy—the Italian boys that were taken prisoner were all being taken back. I can remember them looking at Naples in the harbor, a lot of sunken ships saying, “Poor Napoli, Poor Napoli,” so much damage in the harbor. They were happy going back. They were carrying the buckets and delivering the meals—they ate good! Rows and rows of cots, a lot of poker games.
Our soldiers that were taken captive by the Japanese, my God, the torture—they would make them march mile after mile, if they fell down, they would shoot them. I know a boy from Greenfield, he was shot, [on a] march into a prison camp. We’ve got pictures that our plane had taken with “prisoners of war” marked on top. Of course, we wouldn’t bomb them. It’s known that the Japanese had beaten some of the American boys. The American-[held] prisoners were always treated well, fed well.
“The Jolly Roger,” was the name of the ship’s paper. This is announcing the death of the president. There’s a picture of a boxing match on board ship, a boxing ring, an African American and a white man. These fellows were sailors and they used to put these matches on, a lot of ships had boxing teams. The colored had their own quotas, they didn’t treat them very good, a lot of them were in the post office.
Jim Duncan from Alabama, he worked at the post office. When we were getting ready to come home, I had a chance to get another rate, second class petty officer. Duncan enlisted for four years, had more time. I said, “Give him a chance,” and he got second class. In the end, he was running the post office. He made out good, he was smart, too. Jim Duncan’s mother baked us a pecan pie. We called it “pecan.” She said, “‘Pee can’ is what you put under the bed! ‘Pecun’ is what you call the pie.” [He laughs.]
We fought the Second World War because we had to. If we let them take over Hawaii, the Japanese would have taken charge of the whole Pacific—that would cut us all off from that part of the world. What they did to our boys, the ones that were destroyed there, my God, whole ships sunk, they bombed Pearl Harbor, just mutilated the whole area. All ships sunk, battleships with all the men aboard, and that’s the way they left it.
[What about Germany?] Most people knew that eventually we’d have to get in there because they controlled whole countries over there. They had a very strong army. They trained for it for years and years and years. Listen to them talk, Hitler, you could see he was like a crazy man. All of those countries that had been run by the Nazis—France, they had to do as much to [try to] destroy the United States because we were very aggressive. Nobody stepped on our toes.
[Why did we fight in Korea?] That’s a good question. Well, North Korea was going to take over South Korea. If they can do that, then they’re going to go after something else to try to get control. I don’t think the [US] soldiers in Korea had the training. It was very cold and they didn’t have the right clothing for it. I don’t think that the American people knew a lot. I think they were so sick of fighting in war, and they went back, they had kids, and they knew what they would have to go through. [Vietnam?] People were sick of wars. They had kids, they didn’t want them to fight.
Edward Wells, born in 1926 in Montague, Massachusetts, speaks to school children about his experiences in World War II, surprising them that as a child he saw Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades. He starts his narrative by repeating what he tells students, including his memories of post-atomic bomb Nagasaki and an Australian prisoner of war from Japan whom he helped repatriate. After the war, for three decades, he was a science teacher and a school principal in Braintree, Massachusetts.
I grew up in suburban Boston. You knew something was going to happen. It came to me quite vividly when the Hindenburg, the German dirigible, flew over the school, the fire drill was sounded, we went out and there was this beautiful, gothic Queen Mary floating in the sky, with a small biplane circling it. I was eleven years old, and I looked up and there were four bright red swastikas on the tail. At that time, all the newsreels and radio shows became concrete. Churchill had the personality and the vocabulary, brilliance, to do what people needed. He was the antithesis of Hitler. He could roll off a phrase and people believed him, and they didn’t cower.
Falling asleep with my 15-cent earphones on, the radio stations, which were in the habit of signing off at dusk, came thundering on at one in the morning because Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland, in September 1939. I did wake up the house. To me it was important—it was a sea change. In 1939, I was no longer eleven; I was thirteen. The English and the French had made clear to Hitler that if he invaded Poland they were at war with them. That did not slow Hitler down and he captured virtually all of Europe, at which point we knew we were committed.
I went to a Bruins game at the Boston Garden and they announced Pearl Harbor to an unbelieving, captive audience. I said to the children this morning, you had your own Pearl Harbor on 9/11. Coincidentally, the number killed was approximately the same in both incidents. You can remember where you were when you found out that New York had, in effect, been bombed, along with the Pentagon. I related going home from the Bruins game and my Dad said, “Well, you’re fifteen now, this will probably be over [before you are eighteen].”
Two years almost to the day, I myself, aged 17, was in the Marines. I told the kids that I had a nice cruise in the Pacific with a few interruptions. There was nothing heroic about joining: we were at war, a world war. My graduating class in high school happened to have an even 100 men, virtually all of them ended up in the service. I decided on the Marine Corps. My total time was 31 months. I was at sea about a year.
My ship’s name was USS Cape Gloucester, CVE-109, an Escort Aircraft Carrier built in Bremerton, Washington. I took a troop train to the West Coast, went out of San Diego. First landfall was Leyte Gulf, which was a staging area. The USS Indianapolis, CA-35, the [heavy] cruiser, 700 drowned [883 of the crew of 1,197 died, with 300 going down with the ship, and many more dying over the next five days before 317 were rescued], was sunk by a Japanese submarine [July 30, 1945, four days after delivering the first atomic bomb to Tinian]. They were supposedly controlled from Leyte Gulf, the messages were mixed up so they didn’t send any help. Those men, those kids, because they were kids, they simply drowned.
In World War II, there was no feeling that we wouldn’t win. The Atlantic is a moat on one side and the Pacific is a much bigger moat on the other side. In my opinion, recent immigrants [to the US] really understood that Hitler couldn’t be mollified. I was in with a lot of the kids here who lived on lard and bread—that was the Depression, the kids of immigrants. They couldn’t accept a Europe that was dominated by a man like Hitler.
Then I go on to say it was an interesting and exciting adventure, there were some bad spots in it, and I insist on saying I have only one combat star, a battle star, so they don’t think I’m a decorated veteran. North of the Philippines, off Okinawa, by then the war was beginning to slow down. We had kamikazes, they hit the USS Pennsylvania, BB-38 [battleship], which was moored next to us, we witnessed a bridge or two flying off ships. I never considered myself even in danger. “Well, that’s tough.” That’s a teenage kid talking.
We were north of the Philippines (this was in a ship’s book that was sent out afterward), covering minesweepers, which were laying mines and clearing up Japanese mines so the Russians could come over from Kamchatka. If it had come to that, there would have been hell to pay. The mines were swept out of the way in the most primitive fashion: we had hillbillies up on the bridge popping off the mines [with guns]. Then putting down new mine fields that the Japanese wouldn’t be familiar with, in effect, strangling them, so that the invasion by the Russians would be successful. The [atomic] bomb short-circuited that whole process.
My boat was an experimental escort carrier with Corsair F4 fighters—the Wildcats, the bomber. It was to cover the sweepers and let them do the job and clear the ocean safely, so from the Asian mainland the Russians could successfully invade Japan. By then, we were gathering troops for exactly the same purpose. Speculatively speaking, if the Russians had gone into Hokkaido, or northern Japan, they would have held on to more than the Kurile Islands, which they still hold, and we probably would have divided Japan up into Honshu and Hokkaido being one and Kyushu and Okinawa being the other. But the successes kept coming. MacArthur, who was so easy to dismiss, had a brilliant strategic thing—island hopping had never been done and he carried it right up to Japan.
I end up with a story about a young Australian who was drafted by his government to protect the empire, as I say rather sarcastically. He was from an impoverished place in an impoverished country, Perth, in the outback of the outback. He also weighed 65 pounds, because he had spent the last four years in Japanese prisons. He had been captured in Southeast Asia and his unit was loaded on four old rusty tubs and sent to Japan to work the factories. They were systematically starved although the Japanese themselves didn’t have much food. I used to show a picture— he looked just like they did in the European concentration camps.
We were pulled up in Nagasaki Harbor, and he came aboard our ship. The man had to be deloused and cleaned up. We liberated quite a little food for him, and he entertained us with stories of the war, without any bitterness. Of course, he was lucky to be alive and he was glad to be alive, but he didn’t blame his government, or the Crown, or the Americans who sank three of the four vessels as they went to the Philippines, or the Americans who had just wiped out an entire city [Nagasaki, 9 August 1945]. He didn’t personalize his hate in any way, and was one of the more remarkable people I’ve met. He wasn’t an educated man; he’d probably lived on a dirt-poor farm. He had a rather unhappy adventure, but survived it, even though he left half of himself physically in Japan.
I spent three days in Nagasaki, tied up. The water evaporators were tied down; they didn’t try to distill water because the whole harbor was quite radioactive. All the fish were dead. There were no regular occupation forces, there were a couple of cowboy Marine outfits that were patrolling. The Japanese were very subservient under those circumstances. The prisoners were ecstatic to be picked up, fed, and deloused. We took them down to Okinawa, then they were divided up. I’m sure the most serious cases were given air flights.
Harry Truman had to make up his mind: do we drop this [bomb] or don’t we? My first reaction as a still-teenage kid when it was dropped was, “Why didn’t he drop it on Yokohama Bay instead of dropping it on a city?” I have apologized for a lifetime for us doing that, because I don’t believe he would have done it to Caucasians. I have no way of proving that. I personally cannot justify wiping out a whole city. You had a semi-wrecked country, they had been firebombed, which can take out a whole city, too. They were a wrecked country, and they were trying to comply with a few international laws and get those people [POWs] out of there, get them back.
Even as a teenager, I couldn’t believe we could bring ourselves to wipe out a city twice. When Hiroshima was bombed I was about 300 miles south in the Okinawa area. The bomb had gone off, people had flown in, and the defeated Japanese cooperated to the point where they put these men [POWs] on trains to go down to Nagasaki because the Allies insisted on it and the Japanese complied. Nagasaki happened to be one place where [my] small carrier went in and cleared the decks and gave accommodation to about 700 prisoners for a short trip down to Okinawa.
I got an official thing a few years ago from the Defense Department, if you were at an atomic bomb test or at Nagasaki you may apply for radioactive disability. Well, I was in my seventies then, I’ve lived this long, I didn’t absorb too much radiation. [He laughs.] We were there roughly three days. We stayed out of the water, we had stored water, I didn’t go on land, a few of the officers went on land, and they were at more risk. I know people who were granted radiation things.
But I was a little cynical about the VA. I think of all the people who didn’t get much compensation for being killed. I’m not cynical about the whole thing, I think we did very well as a nation, we came together, we were unified. People ask me about how we handled integration in the Marine Corps, and I say it was very simple. When I went into the Marine Corps in 1943, there were no Blacks in the Marines. That’s a bold statement—kids absorb that. That was the Marine Corps official policy. The Navy had stewards. I watched movies where they would put a black gunner on, but he’s a steward. In general quarters, he’s assigned to a gun, of course.
Truman began to change things—of course, he had the Tuskegee experiment. As late as Korea, and I have read this in print (that doesn’t make it true) but Caucasian officers were reluctant to put rifles in black hands. Most of the black people say, “Oh yes, I worked in the construction battalion.” That’s from the Civil War onwards, you don’t find Blacks. I was personally very pleased to see Obama get [elected] and I’m a registered Republican. I remember Massachusetts Republicans, they were the Congregationalists and abolitionists, the party of Lincoln. [As a child] I saw Civil War veterans in the Memorial Day parade.
The unsophisticated attitude of present-day America, people don’t want to know about the Iraq war. They don’t understand why we are there. A lot of mistakes were made by George W. Bush. We’re repeating some of the imperial mistakes of Great Britain in trying to use our size and strength to control people.
The position we’re in now—we have no way of analyzing what we’ve just done and where we’re going. We are not out of Guantanamo, we are not out of Iraq, and we are not out of Pakistan, which is going to be the kicker. I’m sympathetic with the situation we’ve allowed ourselves to drift into, but I think it’s a very bad mistake to look for villains. You can say George Bush did it, well, the administration, granted, acted stupidly. But this is a reason-less time. I don’t see anybody willing to talk about Iraq. We are over there for our purposes. We haven’t announced anything that people can endorse. I’m afraid that Obama’s going to be sunk by it unless he can find a way around it.
Walter Kostanski was born in 1923 in Irving, Massachusetts. He was in the Navy Armed Guard protecting key shipping on privately-owned vessels during the war, serving for two years on the Esso Rochester. After the war, he went to Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania for a year, but his ambition was to play major league baseball (he tried out for the Chicago Cubs and the Brooklyn Dodgers), as he had been an MVP pitcher in the All-Western Massachusetts League. He served in the state legislature for 14 years and then was registrar of deeds for 24 years. He has worked hard to get recognition for the Armed Guard, a part of the wartime Navy not well recognized.
We were forming convoy outside of New York in the North Atlantic, quite a number of ships. I should mention that we carried 150,000 barrels of high-octane gas, and then we had twelve P-38 airplanes tied down on deck, and had those delivered over to the Army. It was a new plane, and they were fighters, and they were going to escort bombers there.
I was a member of the United States Naval Armed Guard. Now, the Armed Guard, it was 150,000 of us that were gunners, signalmen, radiomen, assigned to the merchant ships. Our job was to try to deliver the supplies to Europe, in this case England. The Merchant Marine ran the ship, our task was to man the guns for protection. The Armed Guard was established on April 15, 1941, a part of the Navy that many people have never heard of. “We Aim to Deliver,” was our motto, and we did deliver. We felt very proud of that statement.
I emphasize the United States Navy Armed Guard because nobody knew about us! This is why they called us “the orphans of the sea.” And yet, we were trying to get those supplies protected, because you had troops, you had all kinds of cargo that the Armed Guard was assigned to. On our ship, there were thirty of us Navy crew, with a Navy lieutenant that was assigned to us. About a hundred between the Merchant Marine and ourselves, the Merchant Marine ran the ship, the skipper was a Merchant Marine. When you got into the service, you learned responsibility and discipline. We were attacked at Pearl Harbor, the Germans were moving, they probably would have been in our back yard if we didn’t move in.
Coming out of Manhattan, there were German submarines hanging out—there was quite a battle for the North Atlantic. A half hour out of New York, we had a German submarine attack, about twenty miles out, this is where your submarines would park themselves, starting from Nova Scotia, going right down to New York, and down to Florida. The submarines were so close they could see the lights of New York. Eventually, you had black-outs right along the whole coastline. This was my first trip, I was loading the 20-mm gun; there were two of us on a gun. The submarine, we never saw it, we did have a few escorts with us, destroyers and some Coast Guard that dropped depth charges to try to shake off the submarines. I think they probably scared them off. There was no surfacing of a submarine.
We journeyed on to Liverpool, England, where we left off the P-38s. Then we continued on up to Scotland, discharged the gasoline, came back to the United States, and then journeyed on to Aruba. That was an oil refinery, Dutch Oil. Then we took a load of Navy [diesel] fuel, we journeyed over to Dakar, Africa, you had the Free French there then, because the attack on Africa was in ’42. We left off that load of Navy fuel, and then we came back and stopped at Curaçao, another refinery—you had Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad, all oil refineries. We loaded up, went through the Panama Canal, and headed out to the Pacific.
We stopped in New Guinea, Port Moresby, and discharged our fuel there. They shot us up to Aden, Persian Gulf, which is Iraq on one side, so we loaded up with fuel and we brought that back and let it off in Wellington, New Zealand. After Wellington, we came back though the Canal and loaded up again at Trinidad and then headed back out to the Pacific. We were supposed to go to New Guinea and discharge our oil, but in the meantime, they sent us up to Leyte Bay. That was November 11, 1944. MacArthur had arrived a few weeks before I got there on October 20, 1944. We hadn’t gotten that news. A lot of what we got was scuttlebutt—you really only knew what you were doing.
The news we got was more of the Japanese, Tokyo Rose! When you are out at sea, the only thing you have is the radio. Recreation, if you want to call it that. Being in that vicinity, she played some good music, we appreciated that. Her propaganda we didn’t pay too much heed to, we just let it fly off the top of our heads. In the meantime, they tell me that she was a Japanese-American. [Multiple broadcasters worked under the name “Tokyo Rose.”] That was why we were tight-lipped, to make sure nobody got any information: “Loose lips sink ships.” That was for our own protection that we were quiet. Whenever we went into port or anywhere, we didn’t know where our destinations were until we had practically gone out to sea. Other than that, we were always in the dark.
The time we got up in Leyte, it was a real hot place, the kamikazes there were just being established, suicide bombers. Matter of fact, as we were going in, there was one that came down but missed us, thank God. It was nighttime when this happened, that’s why we didn’t open fire. What happened is that somebody among my shipmates had a port hole that was open—in the evening, you locked everything up, tighten up, make sure there’s no light. The reason this suicide came down, he saw that light. He crashed on the tail end of our ship, but we never did have to shoot because we couldn’t see it anyway.
That was quite a welcome there! Once we got inside Leyte Harbor, three times a day we’d have suicides come in and attack us, almost like a routine that they had, more so going toward the evening when it was tougher to spot them—they had the sun behind them. We had no radar. They even had a hospital ship known as the Mercy in the Bay, but there were many, many ships there that were hit by these suicides. [You saw this?] Oh, yeah.
Matter of fact, we were credited as a tanker for knocking out the Japanese bomber that was coming down—the United States Navy recognized that was our hit. Being a tanker, at that time fuel was very, very valuable. Of course, to identify a tanker was a stack on the stern, other than tankers, your stack is in the middle of the ship. They were painting a lot of your ships grayish. We were a target: we would refuel into other ships—destroyers, other naval vessels. As I say, a target, more so that you have two ships hooked up to you to refuel—you’re a big target, as a matter of fact.
Two years I was on the Rochester. Then they put me onto another tanker, the Gulfcrest, and then I had an Army transport, the Belle Isle. This was a trip that I was taking up to Greenland to take troops to relieve troops on the Army air base [Narsarssuak]. Of course there was a submarine nest within the Nova Scotia area. This was the same run that the four chaplains went down on, that ship was the USS Dorchester [February 3, 1943]. What the chaplains did was they gave their life jackets to the soldiers. We had that same run, no radar, but the Coast Guard, Navy did have radar, and they could pick out these submarines, depth charges also, that helped.
My dad was in World War I. He was in Poland, [and] he came over here to this country a young man. He worked in the coal mine, paper mill, but during World War I they had the Polish-American group that they organized, went up to Canada for their basic training, and then they shipped them over to France. That’s where he fought, he told me.
To me, the bomb is very, very scary. You’re not dealing with the A-bomb, you’re dealing with the [H]-bomb, a thousand times more potent. The North Koreans now have, it is really scary. To me, you’re just killing off people again such as we did on the A-bomb. We used it on the Japanese but it did save us from having a lot of our own boys getting killed. The Russians took over Poland and I don’t think it should have happened, giving them Eastern Europe, Poland. Communism to me, you can’t trust them. The North Koreans, the Russians, and the Chinese, they are killing us off economically. We are buying all their stuff, and I feel very strongly that in this country we should buy American. It’s going to cost a little more, you’ve still got to appreciate this country and support it.
We went to war in Korea to protect the South Koreans, because they are our friends. The Chinese sent troops, they backed up to North Korea. We still have the guards over there. You try to have confidence in your leadership of your country. When they asked us to go in, we did. We had confidence in President Roosevelt and even President Truman. That was a tough decision to make to drop the bomb, but you’ve got to give these guys credit— Roosevelt and Harry Truman, for leadership.
I don’t know about Vietnam. In regards to the leadership at that time, it was very confusing. It was a tough war, more so that you didn’t come out a winner. A lot of lives lost, a lot of sacrifice. We didn’t know that much about that country. There you go— depending on your leadership. We’ve got to follow no matter where you go, for your country. Everyone probably has ideas of what should have been done, what shouldn’t have been done.
The whole world seems to be in turmoil. Since World War II, I don’t think we have really settled down war-wise. There’s a lot of bitterness in this world, dangerous world. [Iraq/Afghanistan?] I think I would go back to saying, your government, your CIA, you have got to depend on somebody for the information; these people put their lives on the line. I have the highest respect for the CIA. This is getting back to the Iraq war, who was right and who was wrong for us to go in there. I think if we didn’t go up to Iraq, this Hussein, he was a vicious guy, he murdered close to a million Iranians [Iraq–Iran War, 1980–8]. He was on a move to really hurt people. [Kuwait?] That’s right, we went in there. Here we [are] trying to help, but then you get yourself involved and you’re trying to pull out, and it’s tough.
World War II we knew that once we kill off our enemy, the war is over, period. This way here, like North Korea, we still continue to have guards. I think they need leadership too, the Iraqis. They are really poor people. When I was up in the Persian Gulf, we got fuel there. I could see the natives on the docks, and they’re all eating out of one bowl, with their hands. And oh, the heat over there! To me, these poor soldiers that have got to fight over there; I have a real feeling for them. We thought that World War II was going to end all wars and it hasn’t. It seems to be worse now than World War II.
Tom Herrick, born in 1927 in Lakewood, Ohio, graduated from high school in 1945 and with the draft still in force, took the entrance exams for the Merchant Marine, in which he served 1945–7. He became an economics professor after receiving a BA, MA, and Ph. D from the University of Chicago. His first interview focused on his experiences in the Philippines, South America, and the Caribbean in the Merchant Marine. His second interview is his account of American wars from World War II to the present, as follows.
World War II was a unique event, the civilized against the uncivilized. This is encapsulated in Churchill’s famous speeches, and the good guys won. If you read Churchill’s speeches, the two key ones in 1940 were “We shall fight them on the beaches…” at the time of Dunkirk and the Fall of France, then about two months later, as the Air Battle of Britain was coming in, “This will be their finest hour.” This is the first time a major world leader [says] we are fighting to maintain civilization.
I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization…. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age…. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that… men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”—Winston Churchill, 18 June 1940
But World War II in turn created a situation in which we had a falling out of the Allies. This is a very common situation, almost axiomatic. You have a successful war where the allies work together and then shortly thereafter there is a falling out. Allies become enemies and this occurred almost immediately with the Soviet Union after World War II.
So the problem as we go into the Korean War and then into the Vietnam War, is to view that in terms of our relationship with the Soviet Union, the Cold War enemies. The policy that was established after World War II when the Soviet Union and America and its allies became enemies, was the containment policy. It hasn’t changed very much—it was developed by George Kennan, an official in the State Department. The idea was that because we could not physically conquer the Soviet Union, or we would not conquer the Soviet Union because we would have to use atom bombs to do it, therefore we would contain the Soviet Union and the Soviet allies.
That led in turn to the Korean War and then the Vietnam War, both hot wars on the periphery, the Soviet area of influence. They were advertised as such. Particularly in the Vietnam War the idea was that we were supposed to fight the communist North Vietnamese, which were supposedly allies to the Soviets, and this would be at the periphery. Also in the Korean War, North Korea fell within the Soviet sphere of influence and became communist, hence the fight at the periphery. You could see that these wars related back to the falling out of the Allies from World War II. The fact that we interpreted that as an active threat is another question.
The Korean War was a war almost by mistake. The only reason that we could legally fight the Korean War on the side of the South Koreans was through the UN, and that is the device that we used, with a resolution that went through when the Soviet Union had been AWOL on the Security Council of the UN. There’s a lot of speculation on that: did the Soviet Union intentionally absent itself during a period of several months, in early ’50? [The self-imposed boycott by the USSR of the Security Council was putatively an objection to the US recognizing Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan as the real China rather than Mao’s mainland communist China.] Did the Soviet Union intentionally pull itself away, or was it a mistake on the part of the Soviet Union? What we know from the archives in the Soviet Union is that the Soviets did view [North] Korea as a rogue state.
That became a UN operation and the US was the major participant. The Korean War went back and forth, stopped roughly where they started. It was worth it because [it] was and is a manifestation of the containment policy. One of the problems [was] that South Korea was in the hands of a rather brutal dictatorship, Syngman Rhee. We were allies of Syngman Rhee; coming in to support a lousy government is somewhat parallel to the situation in Vietnam and currently parallel to the situation in Afghanistan.
The North Koreans felt that they could conquer South Korea because of the obvious weakness of the Syngman Rhee government. They were quite successful, they pushed us all the way down to the perimeter around Pusan and that was used as the base for the American troops push back. The Korean War was successful: it held the perimeter on the Soviet Union and the Soviet allies, the Cold War.
MacArthur was old, that was his last job. He was the peacetime director of that area of the world and all of a sudden he is put in this position as an active commander. He got a lot of brownie points by doing the Inchon attack that cut off the North Koreans. That of course led to the Chinese coming in and the possibility people were talking about, atom-bombing a corridor between Korea and China. Whether it was seriously considered or not, it was too dangerous, so we had the firing [of] MacArthur. Here was an isolated war on the periphery and it was touch and go whether you were fighting the Soviet Union.
The Cold War started as early as 1946, with Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. We actively fought the Soviet Union in a peaceful manner in Turkey and Greece, and we were successful there, holding these frontiers. World War III, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, was very much talked about. The Soviets and their allies would not use their bombs because they would be assured of that, and we in turn established the Air Force Command (SAC) where 24/7 there were atom bomb planes and submarines going all around [the world] constantly.
Vietnam is a fascinating war because this was part of the containment policy and the perimeter war: the dominos, [if] South Vietnam was going to go communist, Thailand and all the others would presumably fall. A lot of aspects of it were completely phony. The war came about presumably because of the attack by the North Vietnamese on an American ship: the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was pushed through the Congress, gave a blank check to support the war, very similar to what we did in Iraq. It came out that the Gulf of Tonkin attack was a lie by LBJ. Therefore the question—this was a tactical war, a war on the perimeter, a holdover—was it really necessary?
The fact that it became a hot war and did not go atomic is the good side of it. The fact that there’s a lot of nastiness going on in the Vietnam War [is] the bad side of it. As you look years after the war, North Vietnam, a hardcore communist country, is doing everything it can to become capitalist to attract foreign investment, a “little China.” You could argue the Korean War was very much in the cards because of North Korea ending up being an ally of the Soviets. It’s quite possible if things had gone slightly differently in the case of the Korean War, they would never have gotten into the Vietnam War.
[Vietnam] was a complete mistake, a completely unnecessary war. As nasty as the North Vietnamese were, it was a Vietnamese civil war, north against south. I think a better policy would have been let them fight it out between themselves. China was not a lock-step ally of the Soviet Union in that operation, and that was being pointed out in the press at the time. The ordinary GI who was over there fighting might very well wonder, What am I doing here? The domino theory probably was baloney. World War II was an absolutely necessary war, a conflict between the civilized and the uncivilized… but the Vietnam War is basically a civil war, an unnecessary war [for us].
There are two Iraq wars. Bush senior’s Iraq war, in ’90, was quite successful. It shows the role of collective security, which was the idea behind the League of Nations and the UN. The diplomatic devices that were created at the end of these major, tragic wars (World War I, World War II) worked quite well. Iraq invaded Kuwait and Kuwait was part of our collective security. The Iraq I war is probably the most successful way that you should fight a war: you accomplish your aim, which was to free Kuwait, and in the process you destroy the army of Iraq. But we did not go all the way to occupy the capital and deal with Saddam Hussein.
Iraq II is the war that followed after 9/11. That was a completely phony war, manufactured by Bush II. One of the points oftentimes overlooked is that the Bush II policy of preventive war was actually established before 9/11 [and] 9/11 was used as an excuse to activate it against Iraq. The idea was in the neocons’ view: if we bring democracy (whatever that is in the Middle East) to Iraq, that will have a spillover effect elsewhere in the Middle East. All of which will lead to a solution in Israel, which is a completely unbelievable concept, a national fantasy: if I do “A” (particularly in foreign policy) that somehow that will cause “B” to occur, which in turn will cause “C” to occur.
Bush II had in mind this civilizing role in the Near East as part of the foreign policy of America. The neocons coined the phrase the road to Jerusalem is through Baghdad, but they could have easily said the road to Jerusalem is through Saudi Arabia. They lost or we will lose, disastrously, Iraq, and it is only a matter of time before Iraq will go back to the way it was before.
The world is awash in oil. That Iraq happens to be sitting on the second or third most known reservoir of oil is completely irrelevant—there is oil everywhere. When Iraq was on good terms with the world, they were exporting something like six, seven, or eight million barrels a day out of their substantial reserves. Now all of a sudden the UN (American) resolution to boycott the export of oil out of Iraq, their exports were cut down to 4 million a day, even with the tightest of constraints. That argument does not hold water. The market for oil is fungible.
As you move into Afghanistan, the problem emerges: what are we doing there? It has been officially acknowledged that there are less than a hundred, less than fifty al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. If we really would be fighting in a country because we wanted to stop the expansion of al-Qaeda, logically we would be at war with Pakistan. When we talk about war on terror, terror is a tactic, so a war on terror is actually like a war on mosquitoes. It’s a misuse of the term. It’s obviously contrary to both domestic and international law. You could argue that you don’t even have to have an act of war; you can just enforce the existing laws against that sort of activity.
That suggests that it is not a good idea to confuse that with a war against one country by another. The best tactic when you are up against foreign terrorists or terrorists who happen to be physically located in some foreign country is what we did shortly after 9/11 in Afghanistan when we went in there with a small contingent of CIA, Special Forces, and so on. We almost got Osama bin Laden! The idea of going in gangbusters with a declared war doesn’t make much sense. The Afghan war will just boil down to [a] Special Forces sort of thing. This is what we are doing in Pakistan. Pakistan is an ally, we’re not declaring war on Pakistan, but we do have various military activities to fight where we think al-Qaeda is, with the drone aircraft and all that. Our involvement with Afghanistan will simply fade but we will keep forces working sub rosa.
We get involved in Vietnam, now Afghanistan, and Iraq. If a controlling or an interested power is to have power overseeing the operation, the way to run the show is the way the Brits ran the show when they were colonial overlords in India and elsewhere. You make deals with opposing groups on the ground, tribes, the Sunnis, the Kurds in Iraq. The same thing in Afghanistan, you have different degrees of Taliban, and other groups there. So if you have an overlord position, the smart way to do it is to make deals. For six months you are making a deal with “A,” maybe six months or a year later you are going to be dealing with “B,” “A” is going to be your enemy. If we stay in Afghanistan, that’s what we ultimately have to do.