When the war got going, I wrote to the Army: “I have had four years of ROTC and I can’t see very well, but there has to be something I could do for my country. I’m ready to be called back to duty. “Six months later I got orders to report to Camp Dodge, Iowa, the Des Moines Reception Center.
I worked through the Seventh Service Command Headquarters in Omaha. But I wanted to go overseas. Then, in January 1945, I finally received orders to go overseas, by air to Luzon Island in the Philippines.
We landed at Clark Field on Luzon so soon after it had been taken back from the Japanese that we weren’t sure whether or not it had become fully secured. We were there only a week or two before orders came down for us to get our stuff ready because we were being sent to the Philippine island of Leyte. We landed on a sandy beach just outside the town of Tacloban and were assigned to the Fourth Replacement Depot. When I walked into my assigned tent, lo and behold, there was one of my Alpha Tau Omega fraternity brothers from the University of South Dakota!
At the replacement depot I wound up doing just what I’d done Stateside, except that now the daily requests were from combat units asking for so many riflemen or machine gunners or cooks, or whatever. I will never forget how distressing that job could be at times. Here I was sending guys fresh from the States straight into combat. Down on the island of Mindanao, the Americal Division was suffering very severe casualties and would send messages like, “You gotta send us 500 riflemen, because we got wiped out yesterday.” That made me feel both like God and really depressed—with the power and responsibility to order 500 guys to go replace 500 who’d been shot, and knowing damn well a lot of them would get shot, too!
Oh, my God, the heat in the Philippines! We would often have to tie cloths around our heads to keep the sweat from dripping onto our papers. We’d quit work about 11:00 in the morning, go over to the mess hall and eat, and then go to our tent and lie there until two or three o’clock in the afternoon, because in the middle of the day it was just too hot to work. It was just stifling! Yes! I remember the heat!
Around the first of August 1945, we could tell there was something going on. You can always tell in the military, because that’s when people become more close-lipped and have a different attitude. And sure enough, they came in and said, “Pack up all your stuff to go aboard ship!” So, we got it all ready, boarded the ship, and at sea were told that we were going to the China coast, because the Sixth Army was going to invade Japan from there.
While we were on our way, we heard about the dropping of the atom bombs, and that caused considerable apprehension! What does it mean? What’s this gonna mean to us? You see, at that point we didn’t know all the facts. We knew those bombs were powerful, but we didn’t realize how powerful. Then when they told us that instead of going to China we were now proceeding directly to Japan, we thought that these new power-bombs had simply advanced the invasion date and that we still would have to fight our way in.
Then we got word that the Japanese had surrendered, but even then I was afraid. I knew that in every battle in the war so far, the Japanese troops had chosen to fight to the death rather than surrender or be captured. In the recent battle for Okinawa, where they had to have known they would lose in the end, they still fought so ferociously as to make it one of the bloodiest battles in World War II. So, now, how were they going to respond to the first foreign conquerors in Japan’s entire history about to set foot on their home soil?
When the Japanese sent a pilot out to help guide our ship through the rocks and such and into the harbor of Yokohama I felt a lot better, but when we got off the ship each of us was carrying a .45 caliber pistol and a carbine rifle.
We unloaded directly onto the pier and into trucks. While loading up I saw the Japanese eyeing us and still wondered whether some of them were about to start shooting. But, surprise! Unbelievably, they not only didn’t look like picking a fight or even hating us, but some of them even appeared happy to see us! Big crowds of them lined the streets as we drove along. They were silent, but if you can believe it, some of them actually gave us the “V for victory” sign, and I even thought I heard one of them say, “Hello, G.I. Joe.”
We rolled out on the road from Yokohama to Tokyo and stopped at Zama Military Academy, which they told us was the old West Point of Japan. There they put me and the other officers into some old Japanese barracks, and we went about setting up the Fourth Replacement Depot. We were attached to the Sixth Army, which was the one that did the invasions, but now they changed the designation to Eighth Army, which would be the one that administered the Occupation of Japan. And we became the replacement depot and deployment center charged not only with sending replacements to various military units in Japan but also with sending people home to the States.
I spent about six months in that job and then was rotated home and received my discharge.
After I came home I served in Washington as assistant to U.S. Senator Harlan Bushfield and then U.S. Representative Harold Lovre. Back in South Dakota, I was made manager of the Black Hills and Badlands Association, a tourist promotion group. With some partners I founded a stock brokerage and real estate firm in Rapid City, and served as campaign manager for Joe Foss, my old college friend and Medal of Honor winner, in his successful run for the governorship of South Dakota. Among other posts, I have served as South Dakota Highway Commissioner, a director of Frontier Airlines, a director of the National College in Rapid City, and president of the Mount Rushmore Memorial Society.
The world has been good to me since the war, and I have to say I owe much of it to the maturing experience of having been thrust as a green country kid into what amounted to an executive position in the Army, and to the human relations experience I gained there in dealing with the stream of men who passed through my office.