This is Ed Metzler. Today is the 7th of
January, 2017. I'm in New Braunfels at the home of
Mr. Bill Batty, and I am interviewing him in
his home. This interview is in support
of the Nimitz Education and Research Center
Archives for the National Museum of the Pacific
War, Texas Historical Commission, for the
preservation of historical information related
to this site. So, Bill, thank you for inviting
me into your home to discuss your experiences
in World War II. I'd like to start by having
you introduce yourself, full name, date of
birth, place of birth, and we'll take it from there.
Okay, good morning, Ed, and I'd like to welcome
you to our home here. I'm glad I got an opportunity
to give you a little bit of my experience in
the military. My name is William Ernest
Batty, Jr. I was born in December 19, 1925, in
Camden, Alabama. I graduated from high
school in Meridian, Mississippi. My mother's
family is all from Mississippi, so I feel
like a native of Mississippi.
SHORT, Where's your father's family from?
He was also born in Mississippi, but his family
migrated from England in about 1867, right
after the Civil War, and they finally settled
in Mississippi.
So we've got a pretty good background from that standpoint.
What was the name of the town in Alabama where
you were born? Camden.
Did you stay there or did you move to Mississippi?
I stayed there until I was 12 years old.
And then we moved, and I've moved several times
since then.
What did your father do for a living?
He was involved in several different things.
When I was younger as a kid and shortly after,
during the 12-year period, he was in the sawmill
business, manufacturing, cutting lumber from
the sawmill, hardwood lumber.
And the Depression caught it and wiped it out
from under him.
And after that, he had several assignments,
several jobs where he could find.
And finally wound up with a job with the
government Corps of Engineers on a dredge boat along
the south part of the Gulf of Mexico.
And that was when we moved to Mississippi, and
the dredge boat operated out of Pascagoula, Mississippi.
And he also was involved in some of the
dredging activity on the Tom Bigby River in Alabama
and all that general area around the southeast.
Of course, me being a kid, I enjoyed visiting
with him on the dredge boat and things of
that nature.
Do you have brothers and sisters?
No, I'm the only child.
You're the one and only.
I'm the one and only.
That's right.
So you were spoiled as a kid?
I'm sure I was to be.
I hate to say that, but I guess I was.
And unfortunately, I have only one child
myself, so he benefits from the same problem.
He has two sons, and one of the sons has two
children, so I've got two great-grandchildren.
You've got great-grandchildren.
I know.
Well, congratulations.
So, the first nine years or so in Alabama, and
then the rest of your high school years
in Mississippi?
Well, no.
I mentioned that Dad was working for the
government, and I was in the sixth grade in Mississippi.
He got transferred to the Veterans
Administration in Tucson, Arizona.
So I spent a couple of years in Tucson in high school.
Then he got transferred to Amarillo, Texas, and
I spent a year in high school in Amarillo.
Then he got transferred to New Orleans, and
from New Orleans to Meridian, Mississippi,
and so I finally graduated from high school in
Meridian, Mississippi.
You were almost like an Army brat.
That's right.
Just about.
Same thing.
A government brat.
That's true, but you know, I think it was good
for me as a child. I got acquainted with
a lot of different things, and it's easier to
make friends with new people and that type
of thing. So I don't regret it. And we lived in
some interesting places. That was my first
introduction to Texas in Amarillo, and that's a
bad place to start. Not nearly as such as
near Brownsville, which is a place to finish up.
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
So I don't find that that was too bad of a situation.
I got out of the high school with a pretty good
record, so I was alright from that point.
And then that brought us up to the time World
War II was starting while I was in high school.
And all of these schools, high schools, were
starting training people for the Army.
So you were like 16 when Pearl Harbor happened.
Yeah, about that.
In fact, you weren't quite 16.
And all the high schools were starting courses
to teach you how to climb over walls and things
of that nature.
And a lot of them started ROTC programs to
teach you how to be a soldier.
In fact, that's where I first got into the ROTC
in Amarillo.
And they had a beginning in Amarillo program at
that time.
As I got down to Meridian, they had a similar
program starting.
So I got a little bit of insight into what the
Army was like from that point of view.
And then I graduated from high school in
Mississippi, in Meridian.
And of course, at that time, the war was going
strong, two or three years into the war.
I had kept up with all the news that was on the
newsreels and the movies, as well as the newspapers.
We didn't have TV in those days, so it was news
broadcast on the radio, and seeing the
movie shorts in every movie theater had the
Wu-Tong News or something.
And you'd see what's going on in the
battlefields and such as that.
So I had a pretty good idea of what was
happening in both Europe and the Pacific activity.
And my dad had been a sailor in the Navy during
World War I, so I had a contact from that aspect.
I knew my turn was coming someday, so when I
turned 18, I graduated from high school
in 1943, and in December of 1943. And in April
of 1944, I was drafted in the Army.
Tell me what you remember about Pearl Harbor
Day and where you were and what you were doing
in December the 7th.
Okay. Well, as I say, I had been pretty well up
on what was going on in the Pacific, and
I knew that there were military activities, I
knew the Navy had a base in Pearl Harbor,
and I knew there was a lot of open space among
the islands out there.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was a chilly
day in Meridian, and I remember I was laying
down on the floor in the bedroom in front of a
gas heater reading the funny paper, and
the news came in over the radio, and at least
then I knew enough about what was happening
to appreciate what was going on.
I knew where Pearl Harbor was, for example.
A lot of people didn't.
That's right.
I also had some idea of what the Navy was all
about from my dad's experience.
So I was, oh my God, what's going to happen
next, you see?
And then in the school system and the training
programs, I knew I was going to be drafted
sometime soon.
In Meridian, we had a, what do you call it,
junior college, and so I started in the junior
College, and they were offering a training
program for technical work, building ships
and that type, machinists, welders,
pipefitters, and all that type of training
through a program
that I guess the government was sponsoring.
And I took a program on being a machinist, with
relays and drill presses and all kind
of big heavy machine work.
I wound up with about 700 hours of lab experience,
and being a machinist, thoroughly enjoyed it,
learned a whole lot, so it was good for the
rest of my life.
And we had an old man who was a machinist all
of his life.
That guy could feel it thousands of an inch
between his two fingers. Wow.
And so he was an expert teacher from that standpoint.
So I felt that was a good, helped me a lot
in getting ready for whatever.
I didn't use it, but it helped me anyway.
So then after Pearl Harbor started, and the
next thing was anyone turns 18 years old had
to be registered for the draft.
So I dutifully registered, and by April or so
of the following year, then my number came
up and I was drafted.
In the meantime, having graduated from college,
I tried to apply for officer training courses
in all branches of the service-Navy, Army, Air
Corps at that time, even down to the Coast
card of graduate school in New England. I
passed the middle exam, but I couldn't pass
the physical because of my eyesight. I wore
glasses since I was in the seventh grade.
That got me into the Army, and they didn't mind.
I couldn't see. It was all right. I
was drafted.
You could see well enough.
I could see well enough, yeah. I guess they
said, well, we'll take you for limited service,
And I guess that meant they put me in the
Signal Corps rather than the Infantry.
And I went to a reception center at Camp
Shelby, Mississippi.
Is that where you did basic? No.
That's where I was drafted, and they went
through all the shots and various preparation
analysis and whatever.
And there they selected me for some unknown
reason to go in the Signal Corps.
They put me on a train and sent me to Camp
Crowder, Missouri, to go through boot training
at a Signal Corps boot training.
Camp Crowder, C-R-O-W-D-E-R. It's in the
southwest corner of Missouri, near the town of Neosho,
Missouri. So I was there for basic training.
Signal Corps basic training is different from
infantry basic training, as you might imagine.
They teach us the fundamentals of military
activity, military training, how to handle a
gun and how to march in columns and that
type of thing. We didn't have any digging of
foxholes and that type of training.
And then from there, I stayed at Camp Crowder
into an advanced training to repairing telephone
equipment. And I was there for several more
months in training for telephone equipment,
which included a couple of weeks training at
Hollabird Signal Depot in Baltimore, Maryland.
Advanced training above what they had in Camp Crowder.
Then I went back to Camp Crowd a few more
weeks, and at that point, I was transferred
into a signal repair company in Lexington, Kentucky.
I joined the 58th Signal Repair Company in Lexington.
There was a signal depot in Lexington,
Kentucky, and this was just before Christmas 1944.
So I spent Christmas there in Lexington, and
right after that, the 58th company was transferred
to Port Jackson, South Carolina to go through
preliminary training for overseas.
And we went from right after the first of the
year, we had a convoy trip by trucks on
the road going from Lexington, Kentucky to Port
Jackson, South Carolina.
And there we went to additional training and
also field training, sleeping out in the woods
and that type of getting used to the great
outdoors and preparation for moving to Europe,
transfer to Europe.
So I don't remember how long, but two or three
months probably.
So let me interrupt you for a second.
When we talk about telephones and Signal core
in the World War II context, are we talking
about landline phones or field and infantry
portable phones or both?
Tell me what the scope is.
Well, basically what we're talking about is the
portable phones that were in a nice leather
case and you had to crank the crank to make a
call, but they had batteries in them to
take care of the actual conversation.
And they just connected one wire, one connected
to another one with a wire.
And nothing like what we see today and the type
of communication the soldiers have today.
But it would connect, say, a company with a
headquarter somewhere, and they could have
some communication back and forth.
The Army would run the wires and hook the
telephones to it, and if the telephone didn't
work, they'd bring it back to us to fix it.
So none of it, but some of it was wireless as
well, which they already knew.
No, no.
At that point, it was all wired.
Now, there was just the beginning of small
radios, but it was very few of them.
And some of them, you've seen pictures of a
soldier carrying them on his back, and the
only communication was short distances, and
that was a very limited amount of communication.
The telephone was the best thing they had
going, basically.
And there were other types of more secure
communication, like not fax machines, but
coded messages that also could be transmitted
by wire.
It was almost like a telegraph.
Yeah, and the machine itself had coded gears in
it, and our company also would maintain them.
Certain guys were trained to maintain them.
So it's like a miniature Enigma machine that
the Germans had, but you had a different kind
of code. Yeah.
And what came out of it was a garbled up
message that had to be reassembled at the receiver.
But my work was with the telephone and the
switchboard operation.
And our company had 15 units, 15 trained groups.
Each group had a shop truck.
It was a two and a half ton truck with a nice
body built on the back of it, with the most
well-equipped shop you ever saw in your life.
On each side of the body in there, there was a workbench.
It was about two inches thick and maybe 24 or
30 inches wide.
It was the best-looking maple workbench you
ever saw in your life, because it was weatherproof.
And then we had a power unit on the outside
that was enough to provide 110 volt electricity
to everything we had.
So we had a very comfortable place to work.
It had a heater in it, but it didn't have air conditioning.
No air.
No air conditioning.
Nobody knew air conditioning in those days.
Nobody knew what that was, hardly.
Unless you'd gone to the movie theater.
The theaters were the only place in town that
had air conditioning.
But anyway, we felt luckily we had a place to
get heat and get out of the rain and that sort
of stuff.
We had a little small hot plate where we could
warm up some food or anything of that nature.
So anyway, we lived pretty comfortably.
And then we had a two and a half ton truck for transportation.
And the power unit was on a trailer.
So it had a Jeep engine that was a pretty
good-sized power unit.
So it was electrical-generated?
Electrical-generated, yeah.
And so we had plenty of power, electric power,
for what we wanted to do with it.
So that was what we were training then to
operate out in the woods with that type of an operation.
So once we got through that, then we were ready
to go overseas to Europe.
And we had a train trip then from Fort Jackson,
South Carolina, to Camp Shanks, New York,
which is just up the river from New York City,
on the west side of the river.
And we were there for, I don't know, just a
matter of days or a week or so.
And then went back down to get on a ship in New
York Harbor.
Now, one of the things I recall, I thought,
well, that's going to be great.
I'll get to see the Statue of Liberty.
I've never seen it before in my life,
and as close as this close to it, it'd be nice
to see it.
So I figured we'll sail out of here,
go by the Statue of Liberty, and I'll see it.
But just as we got away from the dock,
they had all of us go downstairs for a physical examination.
And by that time, we were past the Statue of Liberty,
and I didn't see it.
One of the disappointments.
Now, did you get liberty
before you went overseas to go home?
Don't recall.
I don't think I did, to tell you the truth.
I don't remember it if I did.
So you just headed overseas with your parents?
Pretty quick, yeah.
Say, bye-bye Bill, Huh?
That's right.
And my mother was very supportive of my
activity in the Army.
She wasn't criticizing it at all.
And I know she was concerned about me being
there, but she wasn't making a big to-do of
it as far as I was concerned.
And she supported everything if I asked for
something or whatever, you know, by mail,
we corresponded.
I didn't have a girlfriend at the time, so I
wasn't burdened by that difficulty.
So she was a good support for me, and it wasn't
always crying, I'm sure, sorry to see you,
wish you could come home, none of that kind of stuff.
It was all positive.
That makes it easier for you.
Yeah, it does, exactly.
And sometimes I'll say, you know, can you send
me a bar of soap or some special thing
that we weren't getting?
And sure enough, she'd send me a note, like a
fruitcake at Christmas time and things of
that nature.
So all in all, it was positive for both of us.
What about your dad, where was he?
He was working, he was at home, but working on
whatever job he could find.
And by that time, he had gotten out of the
Internal Revenue Service, and he was looking
for whatever he could do for himself.
He tried getting into the hardware business,
and I can't remember, I think he had the
hardware store in Tunica, Mississippi while I
was in the service. Because when I got out,
I visited him once at the store.
Was he ever disappointed that you didn't go
into the Navy?
No, I don't think so. We never talked about his
Navy experience, hardly at all. We have
several pictures, you know, of him graduating,
me in my uniform and stuff of that nature.
But I don't recall any criticism of him saying,
well, the Navy was good, one way or the other.
And my thought was, the Navy sounded pretty
good, at least you get to sleep on clean sheets
every night.
And you can see the world, right?
You can see the world, that's right.
Join the Navy, you see the world.
See the world.
I saw Europe.
That was enough, probably.
That's right.
What was the crossing like?
You see pictures of guys getting on big troop
ships, you know, thousands of guys on a troop ship.
Or luxury lines.
Luxury line had been converted.
we'd had a small ship. You've heard the term
banana boat. It was a ship that belonged to
the United Fruit Company. I believe they hauled
bananas from Central America to the United
States. There was 150 of us in my company and I
believe, as I recall, there was one
other company, just the two groups on the ship.
So it was a small ship with not too
too many people on it. But it was-we got-it was
pretty some rough weather going across
the ocean. We were in a convoy, and the ship
was rocking pretty bad one way or the other.
I was lucky. I don't remember getting seasick,
but we spent a lot of time out on deck when
the weather was decent, playing cards and
anything you could do to kill time. And looking
at the ocean, you didn't see a whole lot going
on. We were in a convoy, so we weren't
going very fast.
No U-boats?
No. Well, we got about halfway across. We were
going to southern England, so we were
going to the English Channel. Somewhere about
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean there
was a submarine scare, and they rerouted our
convoy to go up north of Scotland and come
in through the Irish Sea and do that part of
England. So that delayed us a couple more
days, making the trip longer. And at least we
were safer, I guess. And we landed at Cardiff
in England and Wales. From Cardiff, then we got
on a train and went to an English army
base in Winchester, England. And we were there
for probably two weeks or so. And during that
time, we were just kind of killing time here
and there. I spent some time on KP duty and
didn't take it as a punishment. It was kind of
an opportunity. And during the wee hours
of the morning, you had access to the
refrigerator and any type of peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches
you wanted.
It was pretty nice, that's right.
And so I wasn't complaining at all from that
point of view.
So you had two weeks in the U.K. before you went.
And we got a chance to go into town a couple of times.
Into Winchester, England, a small town not too
far from Southampton.
no damage from the war in Winchester. And the
story we heard was that the German planes
coming over were bombing Southampton, but ten
miles away was Winchester. And by that
time they'd already dropped their bombs in
Southampton and gone, and Winchester didn't
suffer the pains of-
SHORT - Was Winchester inland?
BEALL - Yeah.
SHORT - Or is it off coast?
BEALL - No, it's a little bit inland, yeah.
SHORT - Okay.
BEALL - Not right on the shore.
SHORT - They've got a famous cathedral there,
don't they?
BEALL - That's right.
SHORT - I remember that saw.
I remember that song.
That's what my next story is going to be.
Well, I'm taking your stories away from you.
I'll be quiet.
And walking into town, it's my first experience
in a foreign country.
And so you'd walk down the street.
There's a lot of old buildings on all sides.
There's one beautiful cathedral that
was a real fancy structure.
It was a Catholic church.
I thought, well, that's nice.
That's about what it meant to me,
is a nice, beautiful, fancy Catholic church.
And we weren't worried about our business.
And while I was there, I got a chance to drive
an English truck into town, and of course
the steering wheel's on the wrong side, and
you're shifting gears with the wrong hand
and all that type of stuff, and driving on the
wrong side of the road.
So it was quite an experience, but I
successfully accomplished it, got back alright.
Years later, back at home, I don't know how
many years later it was, the song The Winchester
Cathedral became a popular song.
And I thought, well, that's beautiful music,
and I enjoyed the song, and it still hadn't
dawned on me that it's the same cathedral I had
seen over there.
But pretty soon it did dawn on me, I realized
that the song was about that cathedral in Winchester.
So, that made it a little bit more personal for me.
Did you have much interaction with the locals?
No, none at all.
You didn't go to a pub?
No, I didn't go to anything like that.
We didn't have any parties or anything like that.
I believe I did have somewhere in the process,
I must have gone on a date with a girl to
a movie or something.
And she asked me to go back to her apartment
afterwards and go for a little refreshment.
She did something I've never seen before.
We were going to have a sandwich with a cup of coffee.
She had a loaf of bread that was not sliced,
and she buttered the end of the loaf of bread
and then sliced the slice off of it.
Once you butter it again and slice and slice,
I'd always seen you slice it red and then
butter it.
So it's a little different than how you do things.
That was the only significant thing I can
remember from that point of view.
What time of year were you there in the U.K.?
Was that wintertime? Summertime?
It was in the early spring.
So it's early spring of what? Forty-five?
So the Normandy invasion has already occurred.
Oh, yes.
fighting in Germany, almost in Germany by now.
And the Battle of the Bulge was over with by
that time.
Yeah, that was the Christmas of 44, 45.
That was all over with.
And we were on a winning team at that point.
So, but because of the weather,
we happened to be, I mean, the submarines here,
we happened to be in England rather than France,
where they won just in the first place.
So when the weather got decent,
they did, we got on a ship and went across the Channel
into France and up the Seine River about 30-40
miles to a redeployment camp, a place called
Camp 20 Grand.
These camps were-there were several camps in
the area named for cigarette brands.
And ours happened to be 20 Grand.
There was Philip Morris and all the other
cigarette brands were represented in the names
of these camps.
And the purpose of the camp was to take guys
that were coming in and get them ready to
get rid of your stuff and go on into a battle situation.
So everything was pointed towards the
transaction from getting there to being ready
to go into Germany.
And so we were there a couple, three weeks,
I've forgotten how long, started on getting
to Germany from there by truck.
And we went through parts of France and Belgium
and finally got into the northern part and
went through Luxembourg, the city of Luxembourg.
And I recall in the city of Luxembourg, the
street signs were in French and English.
I mean permanent signs, they weren't just there
for the war.
And so they must have had an awful lot of
visitors, you know, during the Soviet time
of American visitors.
And also I saw a lot of signs with Coca-Cola
ads that were, they'd been there for years,
you know.
That type of thing.
U.S. influence there.
It was a beautiful town, small place, small
country, not as big as one of our counties.
So we got through there and got into Germany in
a little town called Munchengladbach in
the northern, northwestern part of Germany, our
first city that we stopped at in Germany.
And that was the first place we spent the night
in a German situation.
We took over, for the short time we were going
to be there, two or three days, a mansion
of some rich guy, a beautiful home, about a
three-story house, the best construction
you can imagine, all concrete and tile, and
obviously a rich guy. And down in the basement,
they had laundry tubs that were built-in tile
Laundry tubs, and they made wonderful bath
two of us for us. We could get that thing full
of warm water and take a bath. And that
was something unusual to find a place to take a
bath in those days.
That's real luxury.
Yeah, real luxury. That's right. And I recall
one time, one night I was on guard duty. All
of our vehicles were parked around the street
and outside. And I'm sitting in the cab of
one of the trucks where I could see an area.
And I hear a shot fired one time and another
shot somewhere else and another shot. I said,
my God, what's going on here? First time I'd
heard shooting and we were supposed to be in a
war. So, I kind of perked up to be sure
what was going on. Next day, I found out it was
somebody, guys over in the other place
shooting at rats.
Nothing more exciting than rats.
Nothing more exciting than rat shooting.
Now, how far from the front line would you
guess you were when you were in that town?
I mean, was it fairly close by?
Oh, no. We were a long ways. The front lines
were way up into Germany, and we were right
on the edge of Germany and France. So we were
not in there any distance at all. Not far
enough you could know what was going on. And we
did see, of course, terrible damage to
the cities that we drove through. And there was
one city, I forgot whether it was Cologne
or one of them, the damage was so bad we had to
detour around the town, couldn't get through.
And it was strictly because of the rubble in
the streets, you see. There was terrible
damage to those cities over there from that
bombing that they did on them and whatever
local artillery fire that might have been. All
the bridges across rivers were destroyed.
We were there and nobody seemed to know where
we should be. Where do you need us? And so
the captain of our company was gone ahead to
some headquarters organization somewhere
where do you want us to be? While he was there,
he happened to be in the area of a battle.
Then he came back and said, well, we were
supposed to be over there. And everything
was fine, nobody worried about that. We finally
wound up going into Nuremberg, Germany, which
is in the southern part of Germany. And that
was our ultimate objective was Nuremberg.
By this time, the war was just about over. And
in fact, I guess maybe it was pretty close
completely over. We set up shop in an old
margarine factory in Nuremberg. It was a big
place. They had a dormitory for their workers
to live in the dormitory. They had a dining
facility, a dining room and kitchen and all
that. So we just kind of took it over for
our company. Very comfortable. We were there
for just a week or two and then my group was
transferred temporarily to go out to a small
country town about four or five hours away,
east of uh no west of Nuremberg and we set up
shop in this little town and it's just our company
and that was all I mean our 15 one of 15 groups
of the of the company so how many guys in about
about eight of us okay a sergeant in charge and
how many vehicles two vehicles and the power
and the power supply four of you per vehicle
yeah something like that I never did understand
What we were there for, we never did any work.
We were there to repair telephones and there
were no telephones needing repair.
So we just kind of had to do the best we could
to look out for ourselves.
And we slept in a building that was, I guess
some German police had been there or something.
The cots in the German place didn't have any
springs in the cots.
You had a double deck cot and the cot just was
boards, a framework of a cot.
instead of a spring, like you'd expect, it was
all solid boards. And that gets pretty
hard to sleep on after so long a time, that
first fifteen minutes.
Those Germans were tough, huh?
They were tough, that's right. And we were
there then until they decided what to do about
us. But while we were there, the sergeant in
charge of our group was from the Midwest
and he was quite a fisherman. So he got some
pins or needles or whatever you could find
to bend in the fish hooks, and he went fishing
in some of the little streams around there.
So we had some pretty good fish to eat while we
were there, and we could cook them on a
little electric burner we had in the shops and
trucks. We lived pretty good during that time.
Did you do some fishing as well?
No, I didn't personally at that time. I can't
remember what I did to kill time, but he was
the one that kept us in good fish.
Did you have any interaction with the German locals?
Not that I recall, no.
Now we saw them, and by the way, the houses
around there, it was a farming type location.
And the house would have a house and a barn
kind of built into the same facility.
You go out the kitchen door into the barn type thing.
And so they had cattle and stuff in there.
And I guess the weather was, that way they
could get in and out of the weather.
But we didn't have any personal contact with
them at all.
The war was over and they called us back to
Nuremberg, you're going to the Pacific.
Well guess what, the climate in the Pacific is
very humid.
We've got telephones over here that if you get
humid they begin to get corrosion and
all kinds of stuff inside and they don't work.
So we better learn how not to get them corroded.
They set up a school in Paris, they call it
Moisture and Fungus Proofing.
So we could teach us how to do that service on
a telephone so that we'd be protected
from the moisture in the atmosphere.
And I happened to be chosen as one of the guys
to go to that school, me and another
guy from our group.
And so they gave us a two-and-a-half-ton truck
and said, be in Paris Friday morning.
So we drove from Nuremberg, Germany to Paris in
about two-and-a-half days or so.
It was very interesting.
It must have been an adventure.
It was an adventure.
At that time the war hadn't been over just a
matter of a few weeks. So the highways were
clogged with what were called DPs, displaced
persons. Now you've seen pictures of people
walking and carrying all their baggage on
their, they don't know where they're going
but they're going someplace. And the roads were
just clogged with people going on highways.
And not much traffic. The roads were controlled
by military police of the different military
organizations that happened to be in that
particular vicinity.
And as you went from one to the other, you had
different regulations on the road to what
the next one would be.
We didn't have seatbelts, so we didn't have to
worry about the seatbelts.
But each one of them, the police would stop you
and say, where are you going?
Check your papers and be sure everything's all right.
And one police would stop, they said, how far
are you all going?
And we said, well, we're going to Paris.
I've got a family over here that needs
transportation in that direction, could y'all
take them
with you?"
And we said, yeah, we've got this empty truck,
we'd be happy to take you.
So there was a man and his wife and two teenage
girls and you never saw so much stuff they
had to take with them.
So we loaded all that stuff in the back of the
truck and took off towards Paris.
They were very appreciative of having it.
Were they French?
No, they weren't French.
I think they must have been, I'm not sure what
nationality they were.
We couldn't talk to them, and they couldn't
talk to us, you know, sign language.
And we spent one night on the road, camped
alongside the road, but we got them as far
as we could go.
And you never saw anybody as appreciative of
what you did for them as they were.
They just couldn't get over themselves in
thanking us for what we did.
And we helped them an awful lot, because as
much stuff as they had in the far distances.
And I don't know where they were going or what,
and I don't think any of the people
did because they just wanted to be better than
where they were, you know.
My house got blown up over there, let's go find
something different, something I can
think of.
But anyway, they were very appreciative of what
we had done for them.
As we'd stop for various rest breaks, we'd try
to talk to them, they were happy to communicate
with us if we could.
What did you do for food?
We had canned food.
We took Army canned food.
Okay, so you had rations and stuff.
Yeah, we had food, yeah.
And by the way, the C-rations on a can, if you
strap them to the exhaust manifold of
an engine, it warms them up.
But do they swell up when you put them on?
No, they just got hot.
Warm enough to eat, that worked out pretty good.
Drive an hour or two with it up there.
Yeah, they'd eat.
So you make a lot of plans.
And also, every soldier carries a can opener on
his keychain.
You've seen the little can opener type thing?
Yeah, the little thing.
The things like that.
So you've always got that with you, so
everything is fine.
So we got to the school, the school was a week
long, on the outskirts of Paris in some
facility, I forgot what it was.
But they told us how to insulate the contacts
inside of the telephones and stuff.
And then, okay, so the school would be over
Friday at noon, next Friday at noontime.
By this time, the war had been over long
enough, the Army had taken over the major
hotels in
in Paris for R&R type thing for the troops
in active duty in the battle condition.
And we decided, well, we're gonna spend the
night somewhere,
but we don't wanna spend the night in a big
hotel like that.
Let's go out to the edge of town,
and there's gotta be some little hotels
we can stay in and be more comfortable.
So we went on the edge of town,
and a lot of little neighborhood hotels,
with a street entrance and one room
that's the lobby and the registration desk.
All the rooms were upstairs, but the stairway
was coming down into the lobby.
And every one we went to, they were full.
No room for the night.
Sorry about that.
So we'd go to another.
We must have gone to three or four of them, and
they were all full.
And the last one we got into, we were trying to
talk to this lady.
She was French and didn't know any English at all.
We didn't know any French, so we were trying to
make out with her.
And some man came down the steps, a
well-dressed business man, had on a nice suit
coat, nice
suit of clothes.
I would say he was probably 35, 40 years old,
something like that.
And he saw the predicament we were in talking
to her.
So he says, well, can you all speak, and he
listed about six or eight different languages
that he could speak.
And one of them was Spanish.
And I had taken Spanish when I was in school.
So I could talk to him a little bit in Spanish.
He talked to her in French, and back to me in Spanish.
And we got a room for the night.
Well, that's what's at the bottom line.
That's what we're looking for.
So we spent the night there, and then the next
day, started driving back to Nuremberg.
It was a nice trip.
We had no difficulties on the road at all.
Crossed the Rhine River on a pontoon bridge,
and things of that nature, see.
Had no difficulty on the road, finding your way
around was no problem.
And we had approval to use the truck, so
everything was all right from there.
We got back to Nuremberg, and then they had, by
that time, they had instruction on what
we were going to do next.
We were going to go to the Pacific.
The Army had a plan.
We've been fighting here now for four or five
years, and we've got a lot of guys that have
been through hell and high water, and the
battles and no telling what.
And they deserve to go home.
You know, the war is over in Europe, and let's
get them, let them go home.
We got another war going in the Pacific, and we
need some of you guys over there."
So that was the breakup of the group that we
were in.
They came up with a plan, a point system, and
you earned points for what you had done.
I'm sure you've heard of the point system.
I have.
Extra points for combat.
For combat and length of service and all that
kind of stuff.
And I've forgotten the number, but if you had a
significant number of points, you could
go home.
separated those guys out of our group and sent
them back to some control place
and said, okay, now you guys are going home.
The rest of you guys now get ready to go
to the Pacific. So we went back to another one
of these camps in France and
this time they were named for cities. So we
went to a Camp Philadelphia this time.
There was close to Camp 20 Grand was one place.
Camp Philadelphia was an entirely
different place. But our purpose here was to
take all of our equipment and pack
it up and ship it to the Pacific. You never saw
such crates in your life as we had. Wooden
crates lined with waterproof paper, best
packing job you could probably conceive of to protect
all that equipment that we were going to send
over there. So we packed it all up and loaded
up in trucks and hauled it from northern France
to Marseille, down south shore on the Mediterranean
shore of France. It was about a two, two and a
half day trip down there, something like
But we had all of our trucks, must have been at
least 100 trucks or so, and all the equipment
that had been packed up, we took it all down to Marseille.
Then the truck drivers got on a train and went
back to our camp in Camp Philadelphia.
I happened to be one of the drivers, and so we
enjoyed the ride down there and back.
Going in a convoy, you don't cover too much
time in a hurry, you're not a big speed demon.
So between the two drivers, you're switching
drivers back and forth, and as you're sitting
on the right hand of the truck going up a hill,
there's a lot of bicycle traffic going
up the hill.
You see girls riding bicycles with their skirts
all the way up to here, you know.
And so I'd lean over and I'd pick up a girl's
hand on a bicycle, and while we were going
up this hill, maybe ten miles an hour, I could
pull her along with the truck.
Pulling up the hill.
So that was fun.
one. I got sitting there bouncing around in
this old heavy truck and our power supply
was in the trailer back behind us. By the way,
we had put the power supply in a crate
so it wasn't bolted down to the trailer. It was
in a crate sitting in this trailer. And
it had softer springs in it. So I climbed up
over the truck body and got back and sat
on the power supply back in the trailer. I'm
riding back there like a king, you see, with
soft springs or whatever. So I sat there for a
few minutes and said, well, might as well
get back in the truck I guess. So I climbed
back up and got my seat in the truck. Now
the way the little towns in France are arranged
on the highway, the highway comes into town
like this, then there's a center like we have
in some cases here, the courthouse or something
there, and then the road splits and goes around
both sides around here, and big trees, I mean
trees like this all along the side. So I hadn't
been up in this seat very long. We came to
one of those little towns like that and made a
turn this way and then turned back to go
and right at this point that trailer turned over.
Oh no.
You know, going around the curve. The trailer
turned over and the power supply slid out
of it and hit one of those trees and the
trailer came back on its wheels again and followed
the truck right on around and we stopped. I was
sitting on the right hand side of the
truck and I looked back and saw the power
supply hit the tree and heard the
racket going on from back there. So we stopped
and picked it up and put back in
and kept on going. That could have been you. It
could have been me. That was the most
dangerous thing I did while I was in the war
over there. But it could have been a life or death.
15 minutes later it would have been me. That's
right. I was thankful for what my time at
that point. Tell me what Nuremberg looked like.
I didn't see a whole lot of
Nuremberg. It was an old port city. And, you
know, New Orleans, there's a lot of old port
cities that are kind of similar. We didn't get
into town very much. There was one bar
that the guys got a chance to go in more than
any of the rest of them. They met all the
girls that operated out of the bar. But I don't
recall anything about it.
Now, are you talking about Marseilles or Nuremberg?
I'm talking Nuremberg.
Oh, Nuremberg.
I'll come back to Marseilles.
Oh, you said Marseilles. Well, again, I didn't
get into town in Nuremberg.
But wasn't it pretty heavily damaged, St. Bonneville?
It was, it was. But you remember there was a,
in the news you saw where Hitler had his
big meetings and he'd just been speaking to
thousands of people on stadium. That had been
converted into a, for us at least, it was a
storage place for food and all kinds of
supplies and things like that. And if you went
over there in your truck to get a bunch
of supplies, that's where you went to. But I
never did get a chance to drive through
town. I was always out in this little place out
in town.
I figured they would have bombed that back to
the Stone Age because that was kind of
the Nazi headquarters.
Well, Hitler's headquarters was right close to
his home, you know, right close there.
But they did have the Nuremberg Trials after
the war, and there was a building to have
the trials in.
A nice place, yeah, that's right. So it
apparently didn't get too much damage, and Marseille
I didn't see any major damage there either, see.
And that's because, you know, the southern
extent of France didn't see that much combat.
No, that's right, they didn't.
And they gave up too quick, you know, and Paris
didn't get any damage at all.
I was just getting ready to say that.
The French actually, maybe in the end, were
pretty smart after all.
But they sure gave up quick, didn't they?
Yeah, that's right.
But I did see a lot of Paris.
What did you think of Paris?
I enjoyed it.
This camp where we were was about 50 miles from Paris.
And while we were there getting everything
packed up and ready to go, they made arrangements
to, well, you know, we've just come back from
the war, and Paris is a big thing, everybody
likes Paris, you know, let's make arrangements
so our guys can see Paris.
And so we had a truck every day that would take
ten guys or so into Paris and spend the
day and come back.
So I was, I got one trip in then and I'd have
to drive the truck for another trip to
go in there.
And so we did it several times, enough to get
all the guys a chance to go and see Paris.
And you took a lot of pictures and showed us
the way around, and you get acquainted
with the city.
It was a big deal.
Everybody enjoyed it.
Paris was the place to go.
I remember at that time, military or the USO or
somebody was making arrangements for big
programs in the United States to come over and
put on a show in Paris.
Did you go to one of those?
I went to one of them, yeah, one night.
and it was, I had it around the tip of my tongue.
It wasn't Bob Hope, Huh?
No, it wasn't Bob Hope.
It was one of these question and answer type shows
where you get to ask your question
and if you know the answer, you get $50
or something like that.
Yeah, well it was quiz shows.
Quiz shows.
And it was a well-known quiz show in this country.
I knew it, I'd watched it when I was at home.
So I went to that, so at least I could write
home to my mom
and say, look, I went to see this thing.
While I was there in the school,
I didn't get a chance to do anything like that.
But anyway, all the guys enjoyed going to
Paris, and I enjoyed two trips in there that way.
Did you have letters back home and care
packages from home over there?
Oh, yeah.
A lot of them.
Were you a faithful letterman?
I wrote quite a few letters, and my mom
answered them all.
And by the way, we had V-mail.
I don't know whether you're familiar with that.
I've heard of it.
But go ahead.
Tell me about it.
If you wrote a letter on pen and paper, then it
had to be censored by an officer in your group.
And if he saw anything that was questionable,
he'd cut it out, and then he mailed it on
to where it was going.
And it took about two or three weeks to get an
answer, maybe longer than that, to get
home, get an answer, and get it back to you,
you see.
So by the time you got the answer, you'd
forgotten what the question was.
But anyway, somebody came up with the idea of
V-Mail. And the purpose of V-Mail was you
write your letter on a special form and then it
could be transmitted electronically from
that form to a similar form in the postal area
in the United States. And then they put
it in the envelope and mailed it to where it
was going in the United States. As a result,
you'd get there within two or three days
instead of being two or three weeks. And that was
a big help. And of course, you were limited in
how much space you had to write. You couldn't
say page two or anything of that nature. So
you've got this limited space of two or three
paragraphs and that would be about all you
could write. But it was wonderful to have
the speed with which you could get the word
across. And then they could do the same thing
back to you as a V-Mail coming back. And the
Army had good mail service. You've seen APO's
and such as this. They kept up with where you
were pretty darn good. And you would get
mail at least every day or two or three times a
week. And mail call was one of the biggest
things that could happen in a day's time. And
each group had a mail clerk. So the mail
clerk took care of outgoing and incoming mail.
Then they'd have a mail call whenever the
mail came in. Everybody was there waiting for a
letter from home. You could also write
to your friends in some other APO area. I did
that a couple of times. I had a cousin
that was in General Patton's army over there,
and I wrote a note back and forth to him a
a couple of times. And same thing, we got
mailed back that way. So it was a good service.
Who was your commanding officer? Who did you
report to? A captain you mentioned earlier.
A captain was the head of our company. Can't
think of his name now. He was a good guy,
but he was the highest rank we had. And we
didn't report to a division or some other
regiment or anything of that nature. We were a
support to anybody that needed us. For example,
In Europe, the fighting forces were in
divisions and those divisions were armies and
they fought
various areas.
There was also an area that supported the army
with gasoline and all kinds of supplies.
That was called the communication zone, which
was from the battle zone back several hundred
miles, I guess, to all the supplies that had to
be carried forward into the battle zone.
And so that area was called the communication zone.
Now we were attached to what we called the
advanced section of the communication zone.
So we were right up just behind the fighting guys.
If you had a telephone that needed repairs,
bring it back to us and we'll get it back
to you pretty quick.
We didn't ever have to do that, but that was
the theory behind it.
Did you ever get your hands on or get a chance
to look into what the Germans used in the
way of telephone system? No, we didn't. We
didn't get in a place where they were capturing
anything. No, not whether they were leading the
technology idea or not. I'm sure they
had good stuff. Another thing, you're talking
about their equipment, one of the prize items
was a pistol, a German pistol, a Luger. And the
Army frowned on us getting Lugers, you
that was stealing. And so they didn't like that
idea. And I didn't get one myself, but
I saw guys that did get one. Then they had to
hide it because if they got caught with
it, that's a bad offense, you see. But it was a
prize to take home with you. So very
little looting that I saw went on. And the
other thing in Germany, the government didn't
approve of you having an association with the
German people. That was verboten. There
was a term for it, I forget now what the term
was, fraternization. You couldn't fraternize
with civilians, men, women, or children, or
whatever. It wasn't a matter of keeping you
away from the pretty girls, it was keeping you
away from the civilian population. And
so that kept you from getting acquainted with
the Germans, you might say, to that degree.
So I don't know of any case where we had an
occasion to have any interface with German population.
When you were in Germany, did you ever see any
of the autobahn systems that they had built?
Yeah, we did.
And that's a beautiful system.
It was beautiful back then.
Oh, it was then.
And what you're looking at is superhighways
that are two lanes wide in each direction,
separated by a wide median of strip or something.
and then they'd be going up all through the
mountains and whatever. A beautiful deal.
I remember one of them, we came across this, it
was a valley, and a big road going down
here and there was a river down at the bottom
and going back up again. You go down this
thing and then the bridge at the bottom was
bombed out. So you had to go around the bridge.
Be alert when you're on the Autobahn when you
come to a bridge.
See, that's what resulted in our interstate
highway system.
Eisenhower saw it, and he said they'd got a
good idea, so he started the international
highway system.
It's not very noticeable, I don't think, but
I've heard that part of the deal of building
the interstate highways,
there had to be a one-mile straight stretch
every so often in order to land an airplane on
the interstate highway.
On our interstates? I didn't know that.
I've heard that. I haven't seen it in print,
but I've heard that that was part of the
specifications for the highway.
I've never heard that.
See, they were military. They built for the military.
Oh yeah, that was the original. It was moving
military equipment and manpower.
That's right. So that's why, as an emergency
landing strip for an airplane, they wanted a
straight stretch somewhere very often that you
could find.
And I've never seen on the highway, I've never
been able to say, okay, this is a straight stretch.
Yeah, there's a straight stretch. Yeah.
Now, recognizing you never did any hand-to-hand
with Germans, but Germany was the enemy and
you were a patriot and an American.
And we were the victor.
Yeah, and the victor.
How did you feel about Germans and Germany
then, and how do you feel about them now?
I had no animosity towards the German
population, as far as you kind of felt sorry
for the population
because they'd been through so much problem.
The other thing is you've got some of the
Germans that were, should we say Nazis, and
then other Germans that were just like you and me.
We believed the North was right, and the
others, to do what they had to do, they became Nazis.
How much of it is sunk in as whether I had to
do it or whether I wanted to do it, we
don't know.
But we had no, as far as the average German
citizen, we had no animosity towards them that
I could see.
And we had an awful lot of them after the war
was over, German soldiers, that were working
for us as helpers in our camp.
In fact, in Camp Philadelphia, they had taken
care of the routine maintenance type stuff at
the camp.
They wore the same uniform I did. The only
difference was on the back of the uniform
it had P.W. painted in big letters, Prisoner of
War painted in big letters. But if you
faced the guy face to face, you couldn't tell
the difference. If you saw him from behind
you could see it. Now, we were living in large
tents, 24 men in a tent. And these tents were
lined up like this with a walkway between more
tents here.
This is at Camp Philadelphia.
How far from Paris was Camp Philadelphia?
It was about 50 miles.
It was right on the Seine River
in northern France.
That brings up another comment.
One Sunday afternoon
we were laying around,
didn't have anything to do so we walked over
and the bank of the river was kind of a sloping
area down here and we saw
an American freighter
going up the river towards Paris
and the flag was at half
half-saf on the ship. I wonder why that is. We
hadn't heard anything that would be half-Saf.
It turns out President Roosevelt had died.
SHORT, And that was the first we'd heard about
it, was seeing that ship with a half-Saf.
SHORT, That's the way you found out.
BEALL That's the way we found out. And it was several
hours later when we found out somebody knew why
the flag was at half-Saf. Now why we didn't
get that word quicker, I don't know.
SHORT, The war was still on when you saw that.
Yeah, that may have been 20 grand, count 20
grand. That was in March.
Where were you when the war in the European
theater was over, VE Day? Were you up in Germany?
No, we were in Germany at that time. Somewhere
around, after we'd been in Nuremberg and this
other little town. And I don't remember there
being anything different than yesterday.
So just another day.
Just another day.
There was no drinking and cheering in the streets.
But now that's different from when the war was
over in Japan.
Now when that was over, we were in Marseille.
Let me finish this story.
We took all the trucks down there and they were
shipped, hopefully, to the Philippines.
Then we all went back to Camp Philadelphia on a
train, a 40-in-8.
You've heard that term, the French term for a
40-in-8 train?
It's a railroad car like a freight car.
big enough for 40 men or 8 horses. That's left
over from World War I. It's just an open
boxcar with some air strips around the top. But
you could put 40 men in it or you could
put 8 horses in it. So they called it 40 and 8.
And it was there for World War II and World
War I.
That's probably what they hauled some of the
Jews off to the concentration camps.
It probably is, yeah. So that's what we rode
from Marseille back to.
with a real luxury ride, huh?
That's right.
And you slept on the floor, see?
Well, if you were German, you were used to that.
Yeah, that's right.
And if you had to go to the bathroom,
you'd wait till the train stopped,
and you'd get off the train and do whatever you
had to do.
So it was a rough ride,
but that was the only way you could get there.
Now, they did have passenger trains,
but we didn't rate one of them.
But anyway, riding the trains,
the train would stop at various places
in railroad yards and things like that,
and you'd be sitting there for a long time.
You didn't know when it was gonna start up again,
but it might be 15 minutes, maybe three hours.
But while you're there, you look around,
there's a lot of railroad cars stopped in this yard,
and the French people ship wine in tank cars,
and the tank cars are made out of oak wood,
and the tank cars are old,
and they've been shipping wine for many years.
So the wine seeps through the bottom of the tank
and drips out the bottom of the car.
So we'd take a can and go out through two or
three cans
and that car would put the can under it,
this one put the can under it.
Come back in 15 or 20 minutes and check your cans
and there'd be a good bit of wine in there.
So is that how you became a French wine connoisseur?
That's right.
And you go back and tell them,
The wine over in that car is better than the
one in this one.
Yeah, that's red wine, that's white wine. Yeah.
So we all had to...
I have never heard of that story.
Well, that's...
And the longer you stayed in the railroad yard,
the more of the cars you found that were
dripping, see?
So that was... you have all kinds of things to
take advantage of.
We didn't have any cheese to go with it, but we had...
Yeah, got it.
...the wine.
So all those little things helped to pass the
time of day. Yeah.
Have you ever been back to France after the war
was over?
I went back in 1992. My wife had to go over
there on a business trip and I went with her.
I was retired at the time. But we didn't go up
to the battle zone. She was in Paris, so
I was only in Paris with her.
Well, at least you got to say hello to Paris.
Yeah, that's right. And then, I told you, my
family was from Europe, from England. So
Joyce was in a meeting in Paris, and she had to
go to a meeting in Portugal the next week.
We both went to Paris.
The next week I went to England, and she went
to Portugal.
I went to England to try to-
Where in the UK is that?
Where did you go in England?
Just outside of the city of Manchester.
Manchester was the airport I went to, and-oh, I
can't think of the name of the town.
The name of the town is famous for stainless
steel and knives and things like that.
Oh, Sheffield. Sheffield.
That's where my folks are from. Sheffield.
Oh, okay.
Industrial town.
And so that's where I was going.
Now, I had heard that all the churches in
England had the historical genealogy records
of all the people.
So I got there Sunday morning, found this
church in town, so I waited until the church
service was over and then I went and talked to
the preacher.
I told him that's what I was looking for.
He said, oh, I'm sorry, he says, three or four
years ago we transferred all that stuff
over to the state archives.
And you can find there, they've got a place, he
told me where it was in town.
And you can go down there tomorrow and see what
they've got.
So I went down to the bar and there was a sign
on the window that closed.
It seemed like they were doing a bank holiday.
And in bank holidays, even the pubs are closed.
For several days, that is a serious situation.
For several days, I was just sitting there as a
tourist with no place to go.
And so I said, well, I'd like to see the place.
I got on a bus, one of the local buses,
and all the buses were going to Sherwood Forest
or some kind of Robin Hood name. Nottingham.
Nottingham, all those names would be on the
thing of the bus.
So I got on the bus, and I've forgotten which
one it said.
rode all through town and got out to the end of
the line, and everybody's off the bus
but me. I'm sitting there on the bus waiting
for them to turn around. And the driver says,
just as far as I go, do you want to get off? I
said, no, and I told him in order to him.
He said, well, we're going back. So I rode back
down with him. But anyway, that's how
I spent my time doing that, looking at the town.
They had a museum downtown. I went through
the museum, see how they lived in those days.
So, let's go back to Marseille. You were in
Marseille when the Japanese surrendered. Right.
So, was there a big party there or not?
We were there in Marseille and the ship was
there also. And so, we were there going to
get on the ship like tomorrow. And we had all
the people lined up in tents and all the
ship was lined up in the harbor, already
stocked with provisions for where it was going. And
and then they dropped the bomb in Japan. Well,
you never saw such excitement in your life.
When the bomb was dropped.
When the bomb was dropped. And I guess it was,
there were two bombs. Now, I don't remember
which one I'm talking about. I didn't know
there were two bombs at that time. We may
have been talking about the second bomb, I
don't know. It was the one that ended the
war and the second bomb ended the war.
Yeah, well that was the Nagasaki one, finally
caused it.
But anyway, as soon as we heard the war was
over, everybody that had a gun was shooting
up in the air. And we were in a camped area
that was all rocks, gravel. You could hear
the bullets falling in the rocks. I went and
got my hard hat and put on. Luckily that one
didn't come too close to them, but you could
hear them. And it was nighttime, so you could
hear them falling in the rocks. But everybody
was happy as could be, see.
Well, then the next day we didn't get on the
ship. And nobody knows what to do. You know,
We've got a bunch of guys here, we've got a
ship here, and we don't need them in Japan.
And they don't have enough points to go back home.
What are we going to do with them?
Somebody said, well, Hell, they're already
there, put them on a ship and send them back
to the United States.
So that's what they did.
They put us on a ship there and went back to
Norfolk, Virginia.
It was just a freighter?
It was a freighter.
It was a bigger ship.
It was a freighter that had been redesigned to
carry troops.
And the holes, they had to put bunks and stuff
like that.
But since the situation was as it is, they put
500 more guys on the ship than it had
facilities for.
But nobody cared.
You know.
Get me home.
If you had to sleep on deck, that's all right.
That's okay, too.
It was September.
The weather was nice, and so everything was fine.
We left late one afternoon, I think, and the
next morning we went through Gibraltar and
out into the ocean. All through the
Mediterranean, that ship was just like this
room, just solid.
It got in the ocean and it should be in the rocking.
The Atlantic, North Atlantic is something different.
It's something else. Well, that's when a lot of
guys started getting seasick. And as I
said, there were more guys on there than there
was facilities for, so it was not too good.
The food service was down below in a hole, and
you got down below in the kitchen and
the steam and the smell of food and a bunch of
guys standing around. It's not the most
appetizing place in the world. Even though the
food is decent to eat, you don't feel
too good and the thing is rocking. You can't
see out. So it wasn't too enjoyable. A couple
days later it settled down and everything was
all right.
We got back to Norfolk. Again, they didn't need
us anywhere. So they said, okay, here's
your orders for a 30-day furlough to go home,
travel orders to go home.
So they sent me back to Camp Shelby,
Mississippi, which is 50 miles from home, and
30 days furlough.
But before the 30 days was up, they said,
here's 15 more days.
We don't need you to steal his 15 more days.
Take 15 for you.
But then report back to your company in Camp
Campbell, Kentucky.
So the 58th Signal Repair Company was going to
reassemble in Camp Campbell, Kentucky.
And so this was 45 days at home.
And then I got an order to go to Camp Campbell
with personal transportation.
They didn't provide, the government couldn't
provide transportation, so they said use personal
And it would pay you ¢3 a mile.
Oh, but they would pay you.
They'd pay you, yeah. Three cents a mile at
that time.
But one of the guys in the group was from New Orleans.
So he had to go from New Orleans to Camp Campbell.
So that goes right about where I was.
He stopped picking me up. I rode with him back
to Camp Campbell.
And then within a few days, everybody got back
to Camp Campbell.
And they didn't need us then, so the
organization was dissipated.
So you went up to Camp Campbell to get
discharged and come back home?
Well, not discharge, but to get out of the organization.
We were assigned to different places for some reason.
I was assigned to a signal construction
battalion, building telephone lines and that
type of
thing, in Camp Campbell.
And we hadn't been there more than a few days,
and they transferred that organization to
Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
So I went to Fort Bragg with this construction
outfit, and there I was assigned as a lineman,
climbing telephone poles, that type of thing.
And very shortly after I got through that, I
got assigned to the motor pool as a truck
mechanic in the motor pool.
And very shortly, I was made the motor sergeant
in charge of the whole motor pool.
We had about 20 and 25 trucks, and I was in
charge of maintenance of all the trucks and
assignment of the trucks for duty every day and
that type of stuff.
So I enjoyed that.
And that's where I was when I got discharged.
That's right, because you didn't get discharged
until 1946.
That's right, April of 1946.
And that was late September or early October
when I got transferred over there.
So I had that much time from October to April
of next year that I still had to serve.
And so I was discharged out of that assignment,
and I was promoted to a staff sergeant while
I was in that motor sergeant job, which I felt
like I did pretty good getting promoted
in the two years I was in the service.
But then they gave me transportation to go from
there back home.
Did you ever try with the idea of staying in
the service?
Several times, yeah.
I was very comfortable as a sergeant, I did a
good job, and I didn't have any connections
at home with my mother, so I didn't have a
girlfriend or wife or anybody else at home.
So I thought very seriously about it, and the
word was that our group, the organization
was going to be transferred from Fort Bragg to
Governor's Island, New York, which is New
York Harbor, and that'd be a big deal, you
know, being in New York City. By God, what
you could do on your time off in New York City.
So I thought very seriously about it.
But then I got thinking, you know, I don't know
whether I like this life for the lifetime
or not, so I better get out and go to college.
So I got discharged in April and then went
back home and started back to schooling in
September of that year at Mississippi State
College. As a result of telephone work, I got
interested in electricity, so I got my
degree in electrical engineering. Went through
the degree with the government assistance,
the GI Bill, which was one of the greatest
things the government ever did. And it's still
working for guys that are coming out of the
current military. So it was a good deal all
way through. I got it through through the
Mississippi State and then luckily I
got a job when I got out with the IBM corporate
and a week later I started IBM
and it's the rest of my career for 38 years. No
other company. So that was my
career and as a result of that I stayed in the
front line of IBM
electronically, you might say, for a little
while. That was before computers hit the market.
I got trained on some of the early computers. I
was working in Birmingham, Alabama, as a
repairman for their equipment. It was all
electromechanical up to that point. I happened
to be one of the youngest in the office, and
all the older guys hadn't even heard of electronics.
The boss sent me to a school of electronic
computers, so I was the first one to get into
that part of the work in Birmingham.
After the war, did you stay in touch with any
of your old buds from the war years?
Yeah, I did.
I stayed in touch with three of the guys in
Christmas cards, and one of them in Montana.
I liked him for a long time until he died, and
his wife sent me some pictures that they
left it with him. And another one, he was a
farm boy from Arkansas, and he and I stayed
in touch for a long time. We had a lot in
common. And then somewhere, Christmas card
wise, I lost track of him. I don't know what
happened. And the third one was a close friend.
He lived in Massachusetts. He worked for the
telephone company in Massachusetts. So when
When he got out of the Army, he went back to
the telephone company again and everything
was fine.
Did you ever have reunions of your outfit?
No, we didn't.
The outfit disappeared and it wasn't like you
have today with some of them coming back together.
We had no connection, no official connection
with anybody in the group.
Now, this one guy in Massachusetts, he and I
stayed close together for a long time.
In fact, we're still close together even though
he died.
And if you've got time, I'd like to fill you in
a little bit on there.
During our active working years, he was working
for the telephone company in Massachusetts.
I'm working for the IBM Corporation down here.
And a lot of times we were writing back and
forth letters, back and forth, and sometimes
at night he'd be working a late shift on a
switchboard or something, and he'd call me
up and we'd talk for an hour or two on the
telephone at 2:00 in the morning.
We took free meals on the telephone, see.
So we stayed in touch all these years.
And one of his sons graduated from a flight
school in San Antonio, and he and his wife
came down to be there for the graduation, and
they stopped and visited us in Austin.
How long ago was this?
That would have been in the late, early, late 70s.
Okay, that long ago.
Simon was graduating from a military flight
school in San Antonio.
So that boy graduated from the school there and
now he's retired from the Air Force.
His last assignment in the Air Force was a
pilot on one of his aerial tankers.
And he got discharged and now he's a pilot for
UPS on their freighters.
He also had another son that was-oh, let me
back up.
I never met his kids.
I met his wife when he came down here going to
see the kids, but I never met the kids.
In 2010, I believe it was, he and his wife were
celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary.
And then the kids were setting up a party, and
they called me and said, would you like
to come?
Don't tell Dad you're coming, it's going to be
a surprise, but we'd love to have you come
up to the party.
Oh, we'll be happy to.
So Joyce and I went up there.
He says, major hotel reservation, call me when
you get in town.
So I called him and said, we're here.
Well, I tell you, we told dad you were coming.
We didn't want to surprise him too much.
Yeah, you wanted a too big a surprise.
That's right.
So we told him you were coming
and we'll meet you tomorrow for lunch at the hotel.
So that was a big deal.
We enjoyed it.
We met all of his kids.
And the whole time, we were there several days
and just kind of felt like part of the family.
And they took us in like part of the family.
And that relationship goes way back.
Oh yeah.
Well, it's still going. In fact, that's why
you're here. Because one of the sons, I took
him over. He was here visiting with us. I said,
well, the best place to go is that museum
over in Fredericksburg. So we went over to the
museum, and he was amazed.
So now this is tying it all together with how
he ended up at the museum.
That's right. So we went and we started, and
then it took him so long going through, we
only got halfway through. He was reading every word.
He said, you can't do that.
And he was reading everywhere, taking pictures
of all the displays and whatever.
So when we got halfway through the museum,
he had to leave.
He said, but I'm coming back, he said.
So back in December, he came back.
But anyway, that's when we went out and left
out there.
I signed the thing there.
The law.
And there's a question about being recorded
like this.
I said, yeah, I'd be glad to do it,
but I don't have time right now.
and we'd come back later.
That's fine, okay.
So later then, he came back in December,
we went over, and instead of starting in the middle
and going, he started at first again
and went all the way through.
No, you can't do that.
We had all day, so he started at first
and went all the way through it.
And then when I got out, at the same time,
I stopped at the office there, told the girl,
oh, I'm sorry, the guy that does it is not here
right now,
but I'll give you his phone number.
Well, yeah, we just needed to make this notice.
And that's how you got involved.
Yeah, well, that's true.
And the next thing was, you called me.
There's a long story about the son that was
over there.
My friend's name, Harris, married a girl in Massachusetts.
And his wife's brother was in the Army, in one
of the Airborne Divisions.
Anyway they were jumping, he was a paratrooper,
they jumped in D-Day and right after D-Day.
You may have heard that there was a battle
called Market Garden, have you heard of that?
I have.
I also miss.
He was killed in that jump in Market Garden,
this boy's uncle.
Now, of course, he wasn't his uncle then
because he wasn't born at that time.
But as a result of that, and when he got old
enough, he knew about his uncle being killed
in the war, and he's been dedicating his whole
life to find out what happened to his uncle.
Uncle's organization has had a lot of meetings,
annual meetings, reunions. This boy was quite
active in the management of the reunions. They
had one in San Antonio in 2015, maybe,
and he invited George and I to come down to it.
We were there the whole time. It was a
week-long deal. And so I met the whole idea.
And that organization is still active in the
Army, and they were stationed at Fort Bragg,
and three of the guys from Fort Bragg were
over here at the meeting, and then San Antonio.
So it was a big deal. And now they're called
- it's not the 508th, it's the name of the
organization, but it's not just the
508th, it's the 508th friends and family. Most
of the guys are gone. There's still
a few of them, but now they've got the friends
and family of the guys that are keeping the
organization going. So it's an active
organization, and this guy's most active in it,
and he's
one of the leaders in it now. And that's why we
were, the second time, over at the museum
in Fredericksburg to go finish the old deal,
obviously. But the other side of the coin
is at the anniversary meeting up to now, I met
all of his family, and this boy included,
But I also met another son who was in the Navy.
And this son was a lieutenant commander in the
Navy in Washington, D.C.
And he was up there in Massachusetts at the party.
So we were talking about this and the other.
He said, I said, well, he'd been there for
almost two years.
He'd been overseas, been a lot of different locations.
And the lieutenant commander was a pretty good
rank in the Navy.
And so he said, my next assignment is going to
be, I'm going to be the commander of a
Navy training school in Meridian, Mississippi.
Guess whose hometown is Meridian, Mississippi?
Okay, well he thought he was going to the tail
end of the universe.
He grew up in Massachusetts and to go to
Mississippi, what could be worse?
And anyway, I told him, that's pretty good,
Meridian is my hometown.
He didn't know that.
when we were talking, he didn't know that.
So we told him that.
So, well, he sympathized with me, I guess.
And then it came time for the assignment.
He would invite us to come to this
change of command ceremony.
And that's a big deal in the Navy.
Not much that I've seen in the Army
until you get something like Fort Hood.
But I guess every Navy organization
has stretched it out pretty good.
So he invited us to come to the,
It was gonna be next year, February sometime.
Well, it turns out, I gotta also,
I'd be there if the creeks don't rise.
By the time we got home from there,
the creeks started to rise.
I got a note from my son that my grandson
was getting married in Las Vegas the same weekend.
Now, which place do you go to?
We decided in the interest of family relations,
we better go to the wedding.
Well, anyway, the Navy changed the date of this
thing to some later date. We got to go
to Bozeman.
You got to go to Bozeman.
And so we went over there to his initial
assignment. And he was there two years. He
loved it. He
got promoted to captain while he was there. And
he had done, apparently, a good job. He
loved Meridian as anything could be. He was a
big fish in a little pond, see?
Yeah, sure.
people in town, all the big wheels in town,
took him into all the meetings. He was part
of the crowd, you know. And so he thoroughly
enjoyed his assignment.
So Meridian wasn't so darn bad after all.
Wasn't bad after all, no.
Let me ask you one last question about World
War II. You went into the Army as an 18-year-old
kid, you know, didn't know nothing about the
world, although you'd been around the U.S.
And two years later, you came back from overseas.
Tell me how your Army and World War II
experience changed you and the way you looked
at life.
Well, that's a good question, and I don't know
how to answer it.
It made a man out of me, let's put it that way.
I looked at things like, what's my future going
to be?
And by the way, I changed my pattern of future
from when I first went in the service.
I thought I was going to go to school as a
chemical engineer, but my experience with
telephones and that, I became an electrical
engineer, that was my theory.
So I immediately went to college and most
everybody at school was veterans.
We all had the same idea, let's do this thing
right and get a good job.
Not how much fun can we have going somewhere
and having a party.
Which may have been where you were when you
were young and went into the Army, but when
When you came out, you were mature, huh?
That's right.
And it was so busy with new people coming into
school, the school didn't have a place
for us.
I had to live off campus while I was there, so
I didn't get associated with that much
of the evening hours with the kids in the dormitory.
But everybody was veterans.
I bet there wasn't five kids that were going to
school there.
There were a few girls that were just out of
high school and going to school there,
but mostly it was all veterans.
We had a different idea about life, you know,
and we wanted to study and learn what we could
about whatever our goal was.
And likewise, in the ROTC, I took the ROTC part
of the school deal and got a commission
as second lieutenant in the artillery.
And it included a summer deal in Fort Benning, Georgia.
And by the way, while I was at Mississippi
State, I became the regimental commander for
all the cadet corps at Mississippi State, which
I thought was a pretty good honor.
But I enjoyed the military part of that there,
too, you see.
And so it was a growth period in school as well
as in the military.
And I had no qualms at all about how bad the
military is or anything of that sort.
I have a good place in my heart for the military.
So all those kind of things, I guess I'd sum it
up and say it made a man out of me.
And I appreciated things that my mother was
doing, I appreciated how she was getting along
with Dad being out of town most of the time and
all that sort of stuff.
And again, at the time, I didn't have a serious
girlfriend connection.
So I didn't have that hanging over my head, if
that's the right word.
I did have a meet my future wife on a blind
date while I was in school, which is an interesting
thing to tell you that too.
Maybe when you cut the part.
Yeah, I'll cut it off and then I want to hear
your story.
So all those kind of things made you appreciate
life and appreciate living among the townspeople
being off campus.
So what other things about your World War II
experience can we talk about while I've
got you on the air here?
Well, I think you've pretty well covered most
of it, yeah, with a lot of ground.
And again, there's nothing in there that I'm
sorry for, nothing that I hated while I was
going through it.
I was lucky that I didn't have a bad boot camp
like some people do, and had a good commanding
officers all the way through. So I had no
qualms of problems with them.
You had buddies that you connected with and
stayed in contact with?
Yeah. We had buddies that we made trips to
Paris together and we took pictures, you know,
that type of thing. So all in all, and again, I
was the youngest one of the bunch.
You were the baby.
In fact, going through the basic training at
Camp Crowder, Missouri, I guess I had never
been in a bar before, coming from Mississippi,
you see, and that's not part of our culture.
So one of the guys that was in our group, also
in the basic school, he was 35 years
old or something.
We call him the old man.
And for some reason, he hadn't gotten drafted
through all the younger period, but he got
drafted at 35, I got drafted at 18, and we
became friends while we were going to school.
So one night, we went out to a hotel bar, and I
said, what do I do now?
So he told me a good drink to order, and I got
one, and everything went good from there on.
I didn't get drunk on the way home or anything
like that.
So I guess that would be an experience.
And then he and I stayed in mail contact with
each other until he died years later.
And he lived in Montana, so I never got a
chance to see him.
But since he died, I had two or three letters
from his wife, and she sent me pictures of
guys that said, hope you can identify some of
these pictures.
But anyway, that would be a good connection.
And the fact that he was older than I was, and
any of us in the group, so we all called
him the old man.
Well, I want to thank you for spending the time
sharing your experiences.
I have interviewed a lot of World War II
veterans, but never anybody from the Signal Corps.
So you're a first for me, and I found it very enjoyable.
Well, I'm glad it worked out.
I'm kind of proud of the fact that I was there.
As I said, I didn't do anything worthwhile.
But I think somebody wanted me there anyway,
and we did what they asked us to be doing.
I have to be proud of that.
As I've told people, I was in the Army for two
years and got one Battlestar, but I never
heard a shot fired in anger.
But you didn't have to dodge the bullets coming
down from overhead from a celebration for
each of you.
That's right.
and the thought of going to Japan to be a part
over there. And I tell you, I've seen
the battle plan for the invasion of Japan and
that is one hell of a thing. You can't
conceive of a military operation as big as that.
Normally the operation was peanuts compared
to what they had planned for over there. And
right now the thing that bothers me the most,
You find people that say, oh, what a horrible
thing it was to drop the bomb in Japan.
We killed 100,000 people.
How terrible can that be?
How could Truman make a decision to do
something like that?
The fact is, he made the best decision possible.
He made a decision that saved more than 100,000
lives, and most of them were ours.
People today don't realize the situation.
We've got too many do-gooders or tree-huggers,
however you want to call them, and don't believe
in killing people.
And war is made to kill people, but primarily
the other guy, not me.
And over there, it would have been both of us.
We would have lost 100,000 Americans as well as
100,000 Japanese.
We lost 13,000 just in Okinawa.
That's right, see?
So you don't appreciate that until you stop and
look back and think, it was them and not
us. Now that's bad and it's horrible and all
the good things that go with it, but any war
is horrible.
SHORT - Yeah, war is...
LEE - And war is designed to kill people, the enemy.
SHORT - It's like George Patton, General Patton
said in that introduction to the movie
Patton he says I don't want you to give your
life for your country I want the
other poor bastard to give his life for his
country. That's what make him a hero.
Anyhow I want to thank you for spending the
time with me. Glad to do that. Thank
you for what you did for our country. Thank you
I appreciate that. And you guys
truly are the greatest generation. Well we did
it not trying Howard but it just
came out that way.