I went to the University of South Dakota, and that’s where I got my ROTC commission as second lieutenant and was called to action in 1942. Our corps headquarters, IX Corps, ran the Desert Training Center where they were teaching all the tank crews how to chase Rommel across North Africa, and we had 400,000 troops under us. I was the Special Services officer, on the staff of the general, and I was the only staff member who wasn’t a West Point graduate.
It was all a Regular Army thing in those days. From there we ran the Louisiana Maneuvers, and then we went to Fort McPherson at Atlanta and handled all the troops in Georgia, Alabama, and the whole South— training them. From there we went to Hawaii—this would be late 1943 or early 1944—where we started planning the invasion of the main coast of China. We were at Schofield Barracks, that’s where our headquarters was, and we stayed there and did our planning. And then we went to the Philippines, to Leyte.
We had a helluva great general in Hawaii when we shipped out to Leyte. General Ryder headed the Thirty-fourth Infantry Division that led the attack on Anzio. Also, he was a former commandant of cadets at West Point. He liked me, I guess, for the reason that I was an athletic guy and he was too, and he’d played first base on that team where Omar Bradley and Eisenhower played. When we were getting ready to leave Hawaii he said, “Ken, you know MacArthur hates booze. He doesn’t like any liquor in his command whatsoever. He’s dead set against it.” And he says, “We gotta get around that. We’re going to the Philippines, to Leyte.” So, he says, “I want you to go and get some medical chests, those metal chests with Red Cross on them. Get as many as you can get. Get with the medics and see how many of those you can find. Then go to the Officer’s Club and have them order liquor, and fill every one of those chests with as many bottles of liquor as you can, and mark on the chests, “Medical Supplies.” I got “Southern Comfort,” “Three Feathers,” and “Ten High,” and I filled a hundred, at least, of these footlock-ers with the Red Cross on them. We took this booze to the Philippines with us. Anyway, that’s the kind of general old General Ryder was.
The real battle for Leyte was over when we got there. However, we were there soon enough afterwards that we took several captives—dug them out of caves and things of that kind. Some of them were still hiding out there. But anyway, that’s my memory of Leyte—digging those guys out of the caves, and doing our planning.
And by that time it had changed. Instead of China we were going to invade Japan. We were to be the Strike Force Command. We had two Army and one Marine division assigned to us. These were the units that were gonna hit the beaches.
In the invasion, we were to lead the strike. We were to be in charge of the corps over the division to hit the mainland of Japan in southern Kyushu. What I was involved with was Special Services—the morale of the troops—to provide what little amenities you could in a battle like that, and see that they had plenty of supplies of that nature, that there were chaplains available, the humanistic side, the recreation side of what the hell we are going to do with these people when we get them over there.
A lot of these troops, like the Seventy-seventh, had fought their way from island to island coming across that damned Pacific Ocean, and they were getting a little tired of it. So, they needed something to spruce them up. You had to fire them up again, and this was very important. We had every big-name entertainer, from Bob Hope to Spencer Tracy, everybody coming over there to try to get the troops pepped up while we were doing this planning. The fighting in the Philippines was about over then, and we were waiting to do this next step, so the troops had a lot of time on their hands. We had to do something to keep them happy.
So then we got orders to leave Leyte and steam toward Kwajalein and assemble our armada for the eventual invasion of mainland Japan. Kwajalein was to be our staging area.
Forever burned in my memory, if I live to be as old as Methuselah, is that morning as our command ship is approaching Kwajalein. I can see it now just like it had happened this morning: The sun is coming up and we’re steaming toward it. And here, as we come over the horizon were these hundreds and hundreds of masts of ships. Our armada fleet, the invasion fleet, spread out before us as far as you could see, silhouetted against the sun coming up, and it’s a scene I’ll never forget. It just was— I’m quivering now, even thinking about it—an unbelievable sight. That silhouette, that sun coming up over that ocean, and seeing that enormous power, the ships, the aircraft carriers, everything spread out there before you. It was just awesome.
So then we joined them, anchored, and waited, but Old Harry dropped the Bomb shortly after we got there. When I heard about the A-bombs, it was shocking and even unbelievable. We had no idea there was a weapon like that. But mostly, I think I felt relief—tremendous relief—thinking “Oh, my God! Now we don’t have to go through this.” We knew that in such an invasion we were in for trouble. Intelligence knew they were expecting us at any time, and were expecting us about where we were going to be. So, yes, the news was terrific. I don’t remember dancing for joy, but I probably did. As a lifelong Republican I never voted for Harry Truman, but today he’s one of my favorite presidents!
When the Japanese gave up, our part of the armada was diverted to Hokkaido, the northern island. And another thing that—like Kwajalein—I’ll never forget and I can still feel, was the apprehension of coming off that gangplank to step foot on Japan. I was the fifth officer in line coming off that gangplank, and there were seventy-five or a hundred Japanese standing there. We had all checked our .45s at our sides before we came down that ramp, and we all had the feeling: “What’s going to happen? We’ve been fighting these people for four years, and now, hell, we’re walking on their homeland.” So maybe some kook there might take a shot at you, and in modern days you’d really be afraid. It was late in the afternoon, starting to get dusk, and we thought “Holy Toledo!” and were looking both ways at the same time to see what was going to happen. But they were so submissive and sullen and quiet. The apprehension was sure there, but they turned out to be very cooperative with everything we asked them to do.
And at IX Corps headquarters, we became the military governors of the island of Hokkaido. We had the Kurile Islands that we were in charge of, too, and while you were standing on them you could see the Russian mainland on a clear day, and they didn’t like us that damn close. So we had Russian officers come join our headquarters. They ate with us, and I’ll never forget how they’d sit over in their corner talking and drinking that vodka—they had more bottles of vodka than we had glasses of water on our table—and they’d eat those breakfasts of cold fish and cold tomatoes and drink that vodka.
After we got settled down in Hokkaido, we took our whole corps headquarters staff and went down to the exact area of the beach that our troops were to hit. And I’ll guarantee you, the invasion would have been murder. The Japanese had concrete emplacements two- and three-feet deep with machine guns and all types of cannon pointed exactly where we were coming in, just as if they had read our battle plan. We all agreed when the general said, “My God! This would have been even worse than we thought!” We’d have softened it up with air and sea bombardment, of course, but even so it would have been absolute slaughter on both sides. It was unbelievable! Just like they’d had our map! I walked it. I went into some of those dugouts and concrete emplacements, so this is not secondhand—I was there, and it was unbelievable.
We had developed a casualty figure of 50,000 in our briefings, as I recall. And then we saw it would have been even worse than we expected. Anyway, we were thankful we didn’t have to do it, and those who want to ban the bomb and wish it had never been dropped can sit around with their teacups in the Waldorf-Astoria or somewhere and talk about it, but to have been there and had to go through it—Well, probably I wouldn’t be here today.
So now we had all these troops that had worked hard at winning the war. “Ken, we’ve got to keep these guys busy. We’ve got to have things for them to do.”
Number one: Close all the red-light districts and have all the girls tested. Then open them wide again. And here was another number one: There was a great fine-beer brewery in Hokkaido where they made their beer with a rice base—and it’s the best beer I ever drank—but anyway, they had no more metal left to make bottle caps. So the general says: “Ken, your first job is to contact Schlitz and Budweiser and every brewery you can and get all the beer caps over here that you can immediately. We’ll make arrangements for the Air Corps to fly a special plane with beer caps so these guys can have some beer. We gotta keep these guys entertained, and no way can they have beer until we get bottle caps.” So a week later when a plane came in with beer caps, we opened up the brewery, and everybody was happy!