When you eventually went overseas, did you have any contact with civilians? Yeah. When I went overseas, I was in the Air Force by that time. It's kind of funny. We left San Francisco, and 33 days later-we didn't know where we were going-we were unloaded offshore in New Guinea. This is a way far away from anywhere, and the natives down there were still-and many of them still are they call them Aborigines. Those people are uneducated-they're natives-and their whole life is tribal, and we were told not to have any communication with them. I'd found a cat that had come off of an aircraft carrier, and she was my tent pet, and one day she disappeared, and I found out later that these Aborigines eat cats. No, we didn't have any contact with them? Did you have any contact with civilians when you were in the United States? Not really. We were more or less kept busy, and were kept in military organizations and so forth. Our contacts were not high. When I was in Manila in the Philippines later-we were stationed in New Guinea for one year and in the Philippines for about nine months-we had some contact with the Filipino people. I had a Filipino houseboy, and we had Filipino cooks, and I had Filipino airplane mechanics. Some of them were pretty good. We did have that kind of contact with Filipino civilians. Where else were you stationed at overseas besides New Guinea and the Philippines? That's it. That was about twenty-two months. When you did you have contact with the Aborigines and the Filipinos, how did they treat you when they saw you? They knew that the Americans would not hurt them. They were very afraid of the Japanese, and they went way back into the jungles and hid and stayed as far away from the Japanese as they could. My houseboy had a large wound on his thigh where a Japanese soldier had bayoneted him, so they were cruel. When you were traveling overseas, were you on one of the aircraft carriers or on a battleship?
Interview with Frederick T. Phillips, a captain in the US Air Force during WWII. He answers questions about his time in the military and life after the war.
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