Well, I got drafted, that started it. We went into Fort Douglas and stayed there. We got our clothes and physicals and stuff like that and then they took us down and put us on the train. We ended up at Camp Bowie Texas. I don’t even know the towns outside because I went to town once and that was it. We took our basic training there and made friends. We were total strangers up until then but we started forming friendships. After we finished our basic training, we went up to Camp Hood. They call it Fort Hood now. There we took advanced training and more and more training and stuff. There was a little incident there where they needed mechanics and the ones that wanted to took an examination or a test to see how qualified they were for mechanics school. There was a guy that beat me out by one point.
I went from there to Camp Cleburne and had more training. We went out on maneuvers just like we were at war, but we were in the states. When we finished that they gave us furlough. They day we were suppose to go on furlough I went to the hospital. I guess I had the flu or I don’t know what I had but I was sick. I could have been gone 15 days if I hadn’t of gone to the hospital. When they released me from the hospital, I went back down to where our battalion was at. All that was there was a lieutenant and a sergeant at the headquarters. The whole battalion was gone. They told me to go back to the hospital. They assigned me a job in the kitchen for the hospital personnel and not the patient kitchen. I worked there for a while. Working on the cement, my knee started giving me a little bit of trouble. I went on sick call one day and they kept me in the hospital for about two weeks.
When I came back out, they gave me papers for shipment to Fort Shale. When we got up to Fort Shale, I didn’t do anything for about two weeks. The thing was that I had these camouflage clothes and they didn’t in the outfit. That is all that I had, the clothes for over seas. Finally, I was in the day room just goofing off and the company commander came in. He said, "Don’t you have any other clothes?" I said, "No." He said, "Well you go down to the supply room and you get you some clothes." He wondered what I was doing and I told him I hadn’t been assigned to anything. He said, "You get you some clothes and then report back to me." Well, I got the clothes and went back up. They assigned me a truck to drive there on the post and do this and do that.
Then I finally came up for furlough. I came home and then I took my wife Marian and our boy back with me. He was just about 11 months old. We went back to Lawton, Oklahoma. When we got there that night, we kind of had trouble getting the boy to sleep. He didn’t want to go to sleep, he wanted to play. At about daylight, we finally got him to settle down. I noticed he had crawled out from under his covers, and now this was in warm weather, I went to pick him up and move him back up to the top of the bed. When I rolled him over, he was dead. We took him back home and when we went back, I was 10 days into my first furlough. They gave me an extension of 10 days so I had 25 days of furlough.
When I came back they transferred me up to the German prisoner of war camp. I guarded prisoners. The dates and times are kind of confusing to me because we never paid that much attention to that. I was there that summer and towards fall I got orders to be shipped to Camp Shank, New York, which is a port of importation. I thought I was going over seas, so Marian came back to Utah and I went to Camp Shank. When we got up there, they processed our papers and transferred me to Philadelphia at a cargo port. A couple of days later one of the other guys were transferred down to Philadelphia so I had a buddy. We guarded the water front, checked stuff in and out of ships and guarded the storage area on the water front.
I went on sick call one day and ended up in the hospital for quite a while. When I got out of the hospital, they assigned me to a warehouse where we had deck stuff for latching cargo, deck latchings and turnbuckles and things to weld on the ship to tie the cargo down. They called me up to headquarters one day and told me that I was be transferred back to Fort Douglas. I went up to get my papers, the sergeant handed me my papers and said, "Here you lucky stiff you're going to Fort Douglas." Fifty miles from home, yea I was lucky.
When I got into Chicago, an MP asked for my papers. He took them and read them. He handed them back to me and said, "Here you lucky stiff." He didn’t know where I lived or anything. I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Haven’t you read your orders?" I said, "No, they are just transferring me closer to home." He said, "You sure did get a close transfer. You read them." I got the papers out of my pocket and read them. It said Fort Douglas separation center. I went to Fort Douglas. They processed my papers and discharged me. I was the 1000th person to be discharged out of Fort Douglas in WWII. They wanted to get some pictures. I said they already gave me my discharge papers. So I told him, "Fine where is your photographer?" He said, "I’ll have to get him up here." I said, "My family is waiting outside, if you want pictures I’ll be in Springville."
Later I signed up for the national guard. Then I decided to move out of the area so they gave me my discharge. Two months later, Korea broke out so I missed that. Actually, I had done what they told me to do. I went where they sent me. I did not go over seas.
As a guard I was just checking people on and off the ships. You had fire guard and guard duties right at the gang plank when they came aboard and back and forth. We guarded stuff in a warehouse that we did not even know what it was at the time. We had two men on it all of the time. It was loaded on a ship and shipped over seas. We found out later that it was radar equipment. It was top secret and nobody got near it. We had instructions that if anybody refused to stop we were to shoot them.
The prisoners were at Fort Shale, Oklahoma. There were probably a couple thousand there. They were German. During the daytime, there were two of us that watched 20 to 25 prisoners that we took out. They would take care of the garbage dump. We took them out in the morning. They would take lunch with them and then we would take them back at night. The prisoners had it as good or better than we did.
To add a note to that, I had a friend that was captured in the Battle of the Buldge. He was telling me that when he came out of prison camp he weighed 97 lbs.
Every so often you would pull tower guard. You had to get up on that tower and there was no trap door so you had to go out and around. It was quite tricky to get up there. If you did not make it up, boy were you in trouble in the morning. I know a situation where somebody did not make it up there because he was not exactly sober. So the company commander went up and took his watch. But don’t you think that guy was not in trouble the next day.