Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing,
testing, one, two, three, this is a test.
Okay, we're starting all over the tape, uh, and
it, um, once again, what, what was Japan
like after the war, and what was the mood of
the Japanese people after the war?
As, uh, as I was saying, the Japanese people
accepted it rather well, I thought, you know,
they said that, you know, America won the war,
so they had their rights, and we have
won the war, we would have had our rights, and
this was kind of the approach that they
had, but, uh, I think they were, for the most
part, people were living together
real well, but I felt no animosity at all.
I was in the Japanese cities all the way from
Sasabu, where there was only Island and Kyushu,
up to Tokyo Harbor, yeah, up to Tokyo, period,
and I rode their trains with them, and, uh,
I didn't find any, uh, any animosity toward speed.
In fact, you could really make a friend if you
give them a cigarette, a real good friend
if you'd sell them a pack of cigarettes, which
we could do, but it cost us a nickel, and
maybe, you know, they'll beg you for it, but
they'll give you, you know, five, $10,
$10, $10, if I could sell you a full of
culture, and that, two-sixty,
if that thing was ten or more, I'd buy it.
I find that very interesting that they, they
didn't hold, uh, well, if they did, they
didn't show it, right, on the wheel.
I, I, I didn't even care an arm, I didn't, I
wasn't armed or nothing, I went over there,
I, I, so you didn't, you didn't feel threatened?
Not at all, not at all.
None, none, so what's that?
Never did.
Never did, and we walked down the, you know, we
walked down the streets with
them, we, uh, we had our own, uh, entertainment
centers, you know, as far as, uh, USO clubs
and what have you, uh, you know, so we didn't,
we didn't go to their dancing or nothing
like that, but, no, I, I thought they accepted
us very well.
Did you, uh, were you at any time, um, get to
go to China?
Yes, I did.
Yeah, I got to go to China in, uh, it was early
in, in 1946, I guess.
Um, whenever I, whenever, when they picked me
up, uh, in Okinawa, I went, uh, to replace
Marines that had enough points to get out, uh,
on the USS Whitstone.
They had Marine detachments on cruisers and
battleships and aircraft carriers.
So I became a part of, uh, of the Marine
Detachment aboard the USS Whitstone, which
housed the
flag that ran the ferry and came with a
commander of a cruiser division, a destroyer division,
which talked in on the cruisers.
And I became a part of his flag.
And, uh, really what I was on was his mighty gore.
It was his argument.
And whenever I went over to the beach with him,
I paired a gun, but whenever I went over
there, just for liberty, I didn't carry a gun around.
Um, and then I went from the, from the Wichita
to the, to the Boston, because the Wichita
was coming back to the States to round the
ferry, and then he was coming back to the
States to, uh, for the atomic bomb test at Annawita.
And he, as he told me, he said, son, I can't
take you back with me because I just have
a third class priority, I'm probably going to
have to ride on the gasoline, can't you?
And he says, you're going to stay out here with
Captain Bryson, who was the chief of staff.
And, uh, so Captain Bryson and I and two of the
other flag members transferred to the
USS Baltimore.
And I was on there about two or three weeks, I
guess, and then I transferred to the USS
Atlanta and became a public personnel in that.
Now, I had been told that I was going over on
the beach and pulled to Admiral Nimitz's
and it was going to be his order in which I was
hoping I'd get that job.
But, uh, that never did materialize.
So I stayed on the USS Atlanta, and as a result
of that, we were given some assignments in China.
So we went to Tsingtao and then we went up the
river, I think it's the Yangtze River,
whatever it is, went up the river to Shanghai.
We were there in Tsingtao before the Communists
actually took over China.
It was just beginning of the war in 1946.
They were outside of Tsingtao.
It was more than 10,000, no shell, but no real action.
I didn't see any real action.
Q. Were the Chinese grateful for the United
States defeating the Japanese?
A. Um, I'm sure there were, but we didn't ever
discuss anything like that.
I was with them just about like I was in Japan,
but with the Japanese.
But I was there, I was just interested in
seeing the signs.
You know, we didn't have too many opportunities
to see things like Tsingtao, China, or Shanghai, China.
Beautiful old town with the narrow streets.
Wide sidewalks and people dying every night.
Doorways and just coming back from the
non-commissioned offices.
Riding in the rickshaw.
People that make their living by pulling
rickshaws around all day long. Thousands.
Had the choice to pick you out one, get in it,
and go.
Q. Different culture must have been very interesting.
A. It was.
I have said many times that I wouldn't take any
overseas assignments from my company unless
they offered me one in China.
I would have gone back to China.
I didn't go overseas in that form.
I didn't go over there for any long duration job.
I did go in Germany and Belgium and Holland.
But if they had put me in China, I would have
gone. I would have been glad to go.
Q. Do you keep in touch with anyone that you
were stationed under there?
A. I do keep in touch with the people that I
served with on the Atlanta.
In fact, I told you I went back to San Diego.
That's the group that I went back with.
I don't have any of my friends that I was in.
Actually, whenever I was an infant from my line
company, we called it, I don't have any of
those people that I have any contact with.
I've lost contact with every one of them.
I never did see Strickland anymore.
All I know is he was from Iowa.
Strickland was the one that was number two when
we fell out and counted off 1212.
When he left, I never did see him anymore.
That was the last person that I had trained
with through boot camp and what training we got
in Camp Perfume.
It was a little bit until I got there and
camped out.
So I don't have any contact with anybody that I
actually packed a rifle with.
I don't have any contact with the people that
we received when we were each.
There's about 14 of us still alive.
There's 39 of us still.
And we still meet once a year.
We met in Tegel, Ohio last year.
We met in Delaware this year, in San Diego.
They found me in 1989.
I had a friend that came through Texas in the
70s and stopped at a service station there.
A service station I used to work at when I was
a teenager.
A fellow by the name of Wesley Powell went home
and said,
Do you have the phone book?
He gave it to me.
He started going through and said, Who are you
looking for?
I said, I'm looking for a stove bomb.
He said, Well, there's none of them here.
They all moved down to the coast.
He said, I don't really know where they live
and don't have any of their addresses.
So he left.
He went on.
I was served with him on the USS Atlanta.
Then in 1989, he went back through the island.
He asked for the same service station he asked
for the telephone book.
They gave him one and he looked through it.
His brother had moved back up there.
So he found a stove bomb.
He called him.
Bob told him my telephone number and everything.
He said, I feel like I'm living here.
So he called me that night after he got back
down there.
That's where he was found.
He said, Is this Jeff Stovall?
That's right.
This is a fellow that used to go by the name of Smokey.
His nickname was Smokey.
That's what they called him.
I said, That's right.
He said, Do you know a Braxton?
I've known one in my life.
Bob Braxton was serving with him on the phone book.
I said, Are you talking to him?
He said, We're going to have a reunion in
Philadelphia in September.
That was about July, I guess, of that year.
I said, I'll be there.
So that's where I got acquainted with him.
I'd like to say there was about 14, 15, or 16
of them.
I got email addresses about 7 or 8 of them.
That's good.
Of your experience in World War II, what was
the one thing that you would like to forget most?
I think the Okinawa Campaign would be the part
that I'd rather not.
I hadn't gone into very much detail when I did
there, but that's the one thing that I'd like
to think about.
I think I'd have to go back to the rest of it.
I think you could say it's kind of like showing
me on the phone.
It went all that bad.
I'd put a good line on it.
But that part of it, that five or six points
there, that's something I'd like to forget.
Have you seen any war movies that kind of bring
you back to that experience?
Or you don't like to watch them?
No, I don't mind.
I've watched Midway.
After Cpl. McCune grounded those kids up there
in Parris Island and they made the D.I.
That's not a war movie, that's a craning film.
Jack Webb was a drill sergeant.
I have that tape.
I have that picture shown here.
I watch it.
I can relive what I went through when I was a 17-year-old.
I used to watch Combat whenever it was on TV.
That's an early man in his 60s, I guess.
Dick Morrow was a sergeant.
It was strictly war.
That's the kind of way you look at your lives.
I don't have time to think about my life.
All of the things that I've seen, all the
deaths that have occurred and stuff like that,
I just think, well, that's just another combat
where you live with yourself.
How was it adjusting to the civilian life once
you came back?
It wasn't really all that easy.
There was a different mentality in America, and
there always was a different mentality
here now, even on the field.
I can remember when we finally got the
opportunity to come back to the States,
whenever we sailed into the harbor out there in
San Francisco,
we had a big sign there that said,
Welcome home, well done.
We met the Catalina ferry going out to Catalina.
We were happy to see an American, especially in
the civilian life.
We all had to have a way to pay attention to it.
When we got back, we docked there in Los Angeles,
and people didn't really care.
They already forgot the world we were in at the time.
They treated us like we were someone they'd
never forgive.
It must have been very disappointing.
I saw some of it in the war.
For such a thing, it was a popular war.
I saw how we got treated.
We got back, and the war had been over for a
year and a little over a year.
We were just a necessary evil like those things.
In Japan, they treat them worse than that.
They spit on them.
I say Japan, I mean Vietnam.
They spit on them.
We were used to them, and they came back.
Getting off the subject a little bit,
do you feel that the event on September 11th
united the country like World War II did?
Closest thing I've seen in the United Congress
since World War II, since that moment.
It really did.
I think it was dissipating pretty fast.
Congressmen were a lot overconfident in the
dissipation of the patriotism.
A lot of people didn't want to mention patriotism.
I was just reading my American Legion book, and
they're talking about the expelling of America
in the educational process.
One of the things that some of the people have
been asked not to do is talk about patriotism.
That's in this moment.
I just got my book this day.
We're still patriotic.
I'd like to have a Congress that would say what
is best for America.
What is best for my money.
What's best for my agenda.
I'd like to know what's best for America.
You can't say that it's been perpetuated like that.
That's the right word.
They've got some of the same mentality I guess
that I was talking about a while ago that we had.
You write for me, I've got mine, you get yours.
I was just reading an article in the Legion's book.
It said that last year we had to work from May
the 3rd before we paid all the taxes that we
were working on.
Now that's gone up to May the 17th.
They said that if you really studied it and
thought about the 718 billion dollars in
regulations that you paid also,
all of the companies that have been regulated
by the government, some of them are totally unnecessary,
but you were working more like working for the Jews.
Just pay the taxes, pay for the regulations.
It's not a philosophy.
I don't want to name any of the congressmen.
All I can see is their agenda.
They have an agenda that they want to get to
and they don't really care what's best for them.
I don't, for the life of me, I can't understand.
I worked in the industrial, well I just quit
working in 1997 so I was only 50 years and I
was just going to live in it,
born and raised in it.
And after the life of me, I can't see how
anybody could use the arguments that are used
about not drilling
or finding all of the oil that they possibly
could in America for whatever reason,
so that we wouldn't be dependent on somebody else.
Or not even that, just so that we had their own.
What is there about a piece of land that they
voted on last week not to disturb that nobody's
going to see?
I don't know how I live up there. The caribou,
they claim whenever we put the Alaskan pipeline
in, how we're going to disturb the caribou,
there's more of them today than there was then.
We didn't disturb them too much.
Like I think they really like that warm
pipeline there because it's cold up there in
the summertime.
I don't have much sympathy for people that
stand in the way of progress or whatever their
agenda is.
I'm about ready to wrap this up. Is there
anything you'd like to add before we finish up?
I don't want to talk too much about it already,
but I enjoyed thinking about what we discussed
here tonight.
I believe it, you know, because it's part of my life.
The one thing that I can say, I never have
depended on anybody else.
After I graduated from high school and even
during high school when I started working, when
I was 11 years old, I always had some sort of a job.
I've never depended on anybody else in my life.
I've done it all myself.
I believe that I could have done it no matter
what the circumstances would have been.
I've been fortunate in my dad to work for the
federal government to work for the pipeline.
Still in all, I believe that people could be
more certain in their pursuit of their
well-being than allowing somebody else to take
care of them.
I hate to see that. I hate to think that we're
taxing people to take care of somebody else who
doesn't really care where they work.
Well, Mr. Staub, I want to thank you very much.
I appreciate the time and effort that you
helped me put into this project. Once again,
it's been an honor knowing you, meeting you.
It's very interesting. I get a little feel for
what happened back then, which is very, very important.
I can't remember that four or five years ago.
It doesn't seem like it. It's kind of a detail.
I guess really and clearly that what I've told
you here tonight is probably something that I
never have told anybody else.
Very little bit of it. Not disinclusive, for
sure. Well, they do know I was in New England,
so I'm proud of it. I don't think you'd have to
know me too long until you find out that I did
serve in New England.
I've been accused of it. I'm proud of the fact
that I did. I'm proud that I had my future to
serve in the country. I'm proud that I still
got the patriotism.
I enjoy the memorial service that they have
here on May the 30th every year. I enjoy the
Veterans Day service that they have on November
the 11th every year.
Here, you know, I still attend all the books. I
think I had something to do with the Veterans
Memorial out there. Dr. Victory. That was his idea.
I'm glad that we finally got something. I think
that's a pretty place. I hate that the park
board actually decided to use that to have his
talk against police yesterday.
I guess it was yesterday or the day before he
said that they didn't indict those police
officers, you know, when the public was going
to be indicted.
We're a band of laws. We don't convict our own
people. We've got a system. That's the way he
makes his life. He makes his strength.
I hate that. That's something, as far as Mark
is concerned, I hate to see the fact that we
are America.
Once again, Mr. Stowe, thank you very much and
I really appreciate it.
I really enjoyed it. Thanks again.