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Oral History Transcript of Robert E. Holden Robert E. Holden, Sergeant, US Army Quartermaster Company 1914, Pacific Theater of Operations WWII (Pearl Harbor, Australia, New Guinea, Philippines, etc.) 1941-1945, Date of Interview: December 1, 2012 Place of Interview: Bob Holden's home Interviewer: Kevin L. Callahan, Eighth Air Force Historical Society of Minnesota; Home mailing address: 1102 26th Ave. SE, Mpls., Mn 55414; Tel. 651-253-6018; E-mail: [email protected] Outline of Robert E. Holden's Time in Service: Induction: Fort Snelling, 28 Feb. 1941 To Fort Warren, Cheyenne, Wyoming for 3 months Will Rogers Air Base 1941 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, (Served as the Postmaster) To Fresno, CA To Hamilton AFB, CA Put on the Freighter "President Johnson" for the Philippines via Pearl Harbor Turned back at the gate to Pearl harbor on the morning of the attack on Dec. 7, 1941 Returned to CA. One month in San Francisco Boarded the ship USS "Mariposa"--destination unknown After 32 days at sea, landed in Melbourne, Australia Walked 20 miles to an open horse track and ball stadium Eventually went to New Guinea, (malaria, jungle rot, heat, humidity, snakes , constant rain, 200 Japanese air raids, "Tokyo Rose" on the radio, 11 rebuilt B-17s destroyed during one air raid, etc.) Three and a half years in the war zone, and through the war to 1945. Discharged at Fort Snelling 26 July 1945, (Organization: 332 Army Air Forces Base Unit, Ardmore, Oklahoma). K: Kevin L. Callahan B: Bob Holden K: And how did you come to get inducted into the Army Air Corps? B: I came back from Duluth. There was a party going on in Le Center and it was the first draftee bunch leaving. This is in 1940 when Roosevelt now had ordered the draft for everybody. They had to sign up and go and spend some time in the service and it was a 12 month or 18 months deal. That you were supposed to be in and I just got home and went up to the party and went to the courthouse and signed up and I was in the first group that left Le Center, Minnesota in the draft. Now we were going, went into the regular Army. We're not in the . . we're in the regular Army and we were treated totally different than the things are as they are now. Regular Army didn't have transport planes. You didn't fly no place commercially. They had planes but not used commercially. There was no commercial mail or anything like that at that time, so it ended up now I'm inducted into the service, sent to . . . K: Where was your induction at? Fort Snelling? B: At Fort Snelling. K: Do you remember, I think its got a date on your enlistment record of February 28th, 1941, for your induction? 1

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B: Yeah. K: And what did they do at the induction? Did you get shots? B: Oh yeah. You got your line of shots and you got handed clothes with whether they fit or not. You got an almost set of wool clothes down. Remember for the first year or even two years after the war started, we were still getting World War I stuff. It was all preserved, which would be all the wool with the old fashioned lace legs up to the knees and you wore this leggings and everything was leather or wool. There was no such a thing as anything like it is today. K: Did you get a helmet? B: Oh yes. K: Was it a World War I style? B: Yeah. The round helmet and regular run of clothes, well then when we got to Wyoming. I was sent to Cheyenne, Wyoming and that was like a boot camp along side of the regular camp, Fort Warrens, Wyoming, and at that time it was quite an experience for me because I never'd been in school or never nothing and we did have to fall out and do a lot of crazy things for a month. Then I was sent to Oklahoma City, Will Rogers Airbase. I've never finished school but I was given the job as Postmaster of Will Rogers Airbase. Handled all of the mail. The Secret Service. All this stuff I'd pick up in the morning and at night and deliver it to the few people who that were at Will Rogers. They had three hangars built already but they didn't have any housing to amount to anything, and until they built a place for the Post Office and got civilians in, I was their Postmaster. K: What did you sleep in if they didn't have any buildings. B: They had a few barracks, but they were really building then, I mean the minute that there was one open they filled them up. Now it was a new airbase ten miles or more south of town, and there was at that time no roads there that amounted to anything, and if you knew what the red clay in Oklahoma looks like, that's what everything was around there at that time, but the Will Rogers Airbase was going to be a pretty big base but after we left there I never heard what ever become of Will Rogers Airbase. I never heard it mentioned anyplace. K: I don't know when Will Rogers died. Didn't he die in an air crash? An airplane crash? B: I don't know but that was the name of the base. K: They named the base after him. Did they have airplanes, and what kind of airplanes? B: Oh. yeah. Well the planes that they had in the regular Army, it was the Cobra [Airacobra] , or the P39, and the P-40s, and as far as the bombers I don't know of anything much about the bombers. But that was there, and then they had all the small planes that were doing a lot a training in Oklahoma City, where they were training pilots at that time. Now as we talk about, future on the . . .We weren't supposed to let the civilian population know that we were going to war, and this is the early part of it. Now it got worse and worse as we went along but, already Germany was fighting and the English were fighting over there, but we're not supposed to let anything look like we're going to war. [short break] K: We left off at Will Rodgers Airbase? B: Yeah. K: Then where did you go? B: Well that's where the company that I was in was formed. They called it a 1914 Quartermaster Company, where there was 105 of us, and we had 55 trucks ___ getting material and we had 55 trucks, and we were self-supporting where we went on the road and had our own kitchens and whatnot and whenever an infantry company or any other Air Force company were going to move, we would pull in with the trucks and move them, and when we got them to the base we went on another job. Well from there we were assigned to Fresno, California, and we hauled a lot of troops back and forth there,and the it was Hampton (sp?) Air Force Base. Now at Hampton Air Force Base I was kind of designated more 2

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or less a Private First Class at that time and then I was kind of leader with the bunch, but my job was as they were building the B-17 planes in Washington, they had pilots that would fly them to the Philippines for training and the civilians were not supposed to know it so maybe one plane went to England and one plane went to Philippines, but it wasn't Lend Lease or anything. It was just that nobody knew that planes were going. The pilots would get on a boat and come back to San Francisco, and it was my job to go pick them up and bring them back to the Air Force again. K: Did you drive a truck then? B: Like a small bus, but it was small, bigger than a station wagon. So I knew these planes were going over there and then within a short time they told me that that's where we were going. K: Now what month in '41 would . . . Is this in '40? B: Now that's in November. K: November. Okay. B: That we know the planes are gone over there. We weren't allowed to let anybody know our address or that. We weren't allowed to mark any boxes. Nothing was to be marked when we loaded our trucks on the boat to go to the Philippines, and then we got on the ship the President Johnson. It was an old freighter, still had plank floors wasn't steel and left San Francisco to go to the Philippines. R: What color was the boat? B: White with green trim. Lights on, everything. K; When did you leave the port? B: See the discharge paper tells me that we left on December 4th in the morning and I know that's right, but the government has it wrong. They have it that we left on the 5th, but it was on the 4th and we were coming into Pearl Harbor when this happened on our ship, but the trucks all got in half a day ahead of us and that's where we met up. We were in the same area as this Ward submarine. This guy is going to talk about. Three of them sailors is still alive. The Ward submarine was the one that was supposed to watch for the ships coming in and they're the ones that spotted the one man submarine. K: So the USS Ward was a destroyer that . . . B: A submarine. K: The destroyer that sunk a submarine? B: Yeah. They were a submarine. R: No the Ward was the destroyer. B: A destroyer. Oh. K: So the Ward shot depth charges or something or shot at them. B: They had 20 mm cannons in therm days and . . . R: They had a gun on the bow and they shot a hole right through the conning tower of that sub. K: Oh. That's right and the gun is out in front of the State Capital. B: Yeah. K: But they shot the first shot of World War II. B: Yeah. And that was at 8 o'clock Sunday morning. K: Now you were in the area. B: We were in the area 'cause they told us. See nobody had a telephone. Nobody had a radio. and they wouldn't tell you nothing on the boat but they did say they were going to be docking soon, and that was Sunday morning the sun came out and it was nice weather and we were all on the railing already waiting to see it. K: Could you see . . . b: No. K: Hawaii yet? B: We didn't see nothing cause they turned around so quick and never told us why we turned around. 3

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K: When did you hear that there had been an attack on Pearl Harbor? B: We were already moving along but it was kind of a . . . It came on the speaker, something, but they never told ya nothing. Really. You had to make it up yourself. (laughter) R: After you turned around what did they do to the ship? B: It didn't take long, it wasn't even a half an hour, and they had slings over the side of the boat with all the green paint the Army ____, and they were painting windows, portholes, everything was all painted green and that and they had that all on the boat. K: Did they say why they were suddenly painting the ship green? B: No. No. No. You didn't get that kind of information. There was no computers or nothing. We were so seasick for three days and then that morning it was so nice that, I mean the water was calm and nice and I remember the sun shining and it was so nice and it was around 8 o'clock. Well when they shot that thing was around 8 o'clock or 7 o'clock. K: Did you see any airplanes? B: No. K: Okay. B: If we had even suspected there was an airplane. We had no word of nothing happening. K: So the ship turned around and it was heading back to . . . B: San Francisco K: And did you dock then in a few days? B: Well it took about 6, 7, days to get that boat ready. Its a picture of the boat right in that book there. The next page. or two pages. There's the Johnson right there, and we were seasick there. I mean we were sick. It was a bad storm and we're three stories up and the water would hit ya. K: Wow. That is . . . B: And there is the Mariposa that we got on, and that's the color the ships were the day before. K: Okay. Well I'll insert some of these pictures. So the Mariposa was all white. B: Yeah. All them ships were. The normal freight before the war, and they were painting that and converted that over to, see the troops were in the hallways and all over. They had probably 2000 of us on that. K:Yeah. Did you get on the Mariposa right away? B: No it was about a week while they were getting that ready. It wasn't ready yet, and we sat on the ship underneath the Oakland Bay Bridge. K: Was there anything you could do for being seasick or did you just have to wait all those days? B: They said same way on that Mariposa we were on there 33 days before we ever saw the first bird or land or any of the . . . but when we crossed the equator everybody on the ship had diarrhea Everybody. It didn't make no difference whether you went to the mess hall or not or what. Those that ate, who had some candy bars only or ate in the ship yard or what. Everybody on the ship had diarrhea so bad, and if you can imagine 2000 people shittin at one time there was.. . K: So you were heading towards Australia? B: We don't know. K: You were just out on the ocean. B: We were on the ship. No telephone. No instruction. No nothin. K: They kept you in the dark. B: But at this time the Japanese already had all their battleships and submarines and everything and all the different islands. Within two weeks they occupied all the land they were after almost. K: Did they ship you were on use like kind of evasive zig zagging? B: There was three of us:the Coolidge, and the Lorelei, and I think we went down along the South [American] coast and over, because 33 days are a long time, going day and night steady. I don't know 4

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how long it did really take but we did zig zag all the time. You were never in a straight line. It was always zig zagging. K: How large was the group of ships? B: Three. K: Oh three. Okay. And that was all you had. There wasn't air cover? B: Nothing. K: If you ran into a submarine you were on your own. B: They had on the ship on the back end they had those depth charges like 50 gallon barrels that they could roll off and they had a 20 inch cannon on each side, one on each side, and there was a couple of times they dumped off depth charges but nobody knows if there was a submarine near or not. Nobody knew then. K: Did you do any kind of antiaircraft, like you were supposed to fire a gun if a plane attacked or any of that? B: No. No. No. Not. You just tried to stay alive. K: Did you see any other Japanese ships? B: Not on that trip. No. We didn't even see a bird or a tree or a rock. You'd think you'd see an island or something but we never even saw a rock. K: So the you pulled into Melbourne, Australia? B: We pulled into Melbourne, and until we found out what town it was we didn't know where it was. There was no . . . There was nothing there, only just a dock, and the other ship one went to Adelaide and one went to a different dock. We didn't all three pull in. One went I know to Adelaide and I don't know where the other one went. K: Well your photograph indicates you arrived sometime in, it looks like November of 1942? Does that sound right? B: Yep. K: And then you had a period of over three years where you were in the Pacific. Can we start the from Melbourne, Australia. What would be the next thing you did? B: Well from there the thing was . . . We didn't know at the time that all the Australian material and troops and everything were in Africa fighting, so the Australian people, all their fighting forces were all over in Africa. Well that was just about coming to an end. So I don't know over there what the dates were but then they started coming back during the next year or they were coming back from that, but at this time now there's no men or equipment or nothing in Australia. The English owned it and the English controlled it and English is hard for you to understand but if they had sheared a sheep they couldn't manufacture the wool into a coat. It had to be sent to England to be done and shipped back. The same way with wheat. It had to be sent to England and sent back as flour. I mean that's how English controlled their . . . how they controlled India, all those islands. All that stuff had to go to England and then back before the war. With all the submarines and that it got to a point you couldn't ship anything anymore because now in the early part of the war it was a lot of submarines still around, before the Air Force ever found them, so there was no Air Force. K: Did you go to other ports in Australia? B: Followed it all the ways, town after town all the ways up to the end of the road. Yeah. K: What was it Brisbane or Queensland or . . . B: Well see when you're in Australia now we're 105 guys and we have no equipment. The trucks, everything, is lost, so we're with the civilians. K: Now the trucks, were they lost in Pearl Harbor? B: Pearl Harbor, they were sunk. They were gone. The ship was gone, and no replacements, I mean now the war is going on, we're 5000 miles from home and there's no way you're going to get a plane or 5

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a truck or anything down, so the main thing was any time a boat came in, to get it unloaded, so that they could get the Hell out of there and get going again, so we no more than get there and then the next day a ship came in. The whole ship was a load of shoes for Army. That was supposed to probably go to the Philippines or someplace else but it was sent down there. Well the funny part was I got the job to go in the warehouse in this Melbourne and help clean it up so we could unload these shoes in there. The first thing I came to to have to move from one side of the building to another was Seal of Minnesota flour. The sacks of flour. (laughter). The only place it was ever made was in New Prague. Seal of Minnesota flour and here I'm moving that in Melbourne, Australia with the war just started. How in the Hell did it get there you know, and so with courtesy when I translated it all back when we were using pounds, one English pound was worth about four dollars, and the you had your shillings and that down. Well when that translate that back into American money they could buy that flour the same price that we were paying right at the mill where they manufactured it up here, so then we got into a feather was rabbit skins. I was moving a lot of rabbit skins. I was getting 70 cents. I didn't tell you that. I was getting 75 cents a pound for rabbit skins in the 30s, selling them to Sears and Roebuck. Well they were getting pretty near $2 a pound for them down in Australia and American buyers there were down there buying them to make felt hats. In them days everybody they had to have a felt hat and it was rabbit skins. Wool was the same way. We had some 4 sheep on the farm and they had sheared them and sold the wool. Well I knew we had got 33 cents a pound for the wool. Well the American buyers were paying pretty near 40 cents a pound for the wool that was in this warehouse, so I mean it was one of the wakening up things. Here I'm 5000 miles away and the price is the same on the stuff and that was Lend-Lease working before Congress ever even dreamt of passing Lend-Lease. See Congress was years behind with Lend-Lease. When they did authorize it, they already had ships over in England. They were unloading them and all over the different countries. K: Now the ship that you're trucks that you were working with that was sunk, did the Japanese hit that ship with the attack? B: Well it was in Pearl Harbor. It was right in Pearl Harbor. K: It was torpedoed or sunk with a bomb? B: Yeah. They were lost. They were gone. R: The ship with trucks had gone into the harbor before they had. K: Well if you had been there just a few days earlier you would have been right in Pearl Harbor then. B: Right. Not days. Within hours. Within the hour. K: If you were one hour different in the travel from San Francisco. B: Yeah. K: You would have been right in the middle of the attack. B: Yep. Now the irony of it was when we left Le Center, the first group, a buddy that was dating my sister was with me. His name was Tony Macabe. When we got to Fort Warren, when he was put in L Company. I was put in M Company. Well the L Company went to the Philippines the week before we went. They got through Pearl Harbor but they got to the Philippines, and he was taken prisoner of war and spent the whole war in the prison camp and came back to Saint Peter. He lived through it and I went just the opposite direction. It was just a week difference. K: Is Tony still alive? B: He died quite a few years ago. Yes. And the irony was when he came back he married my girlfriend. (laughter). K: So you kept in touch after the war. (laughter0. B: Not really my girlfriend, but all through school and that, we were buddy buddy . . . K: So at this time your rank is private or . . . ? B: In the old regular Army you had to be in there a year to get Private 1st Class. You had to probably be 6

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in there two years to be a Corporal, and that's another thing I didn't bring up is when we're in Melbourne and the whole group, all of us, were under a Second Lieutenant Faman from Iowa. He was the only commanding officer in the whole group. There was nobody else. He negotiated with the civilian population to rent trucks and cars and everything and open these warehouses and he was boss of all of us. We never had a roll call or never had anything like that. We were a bunch of a hundred civilians working, and we knew who the boss was. It was second Lieutenant, he wasn't even a first Lieutenant, he wasn't even a Captain, and he was in charge of everything that was in Australia for the first month or so. K: Well did things improve from being quartermaster of a boat of shoes to actual military equipment coming through eventually? B: Well we kept turning stuff over to the civilian, so we had a higher civilians have guard, otherwise the people would have lost it. You know, they couldn't have it running out, so one of us would have three civilians with us in the warehouse that day and then the next day we'd be something else. I mean we were just policing them and getting them started. Then when MacArthur fleed the Philippines and then he came down, and he was staying in the hotel where I used to go every morning to get a shave, and he was staying on the top floor. K: Do you remember the name of that hotel? B: No I don't remember the name, but it was right downtown Melbourne, and then he had some Filipinos with him and I picked them up when they got here ahead of him. They were on a different boat or a different day, anyhow, I took them down to the dock when MacArthur was coming there. They were down there guarding. I drove them down there. Well this went on with all the different Generals that were getting a ways out, so every one, there's a hundred of us but we're getting assigned as drivers to different Generals. I had the shoe General for a couple of days and the they sent him to Darwin and one of our guys, drivers, he got to take Mrs. MacArthur and her son. Her son was probably 4 or 5 years old at the time and he spent the entire war driving her. Ended up in Japan. And one of us got sent to Perth, which is a Hell of along ways off to the west, to take some General over there, so we got all split up, a little bit. K: So that driver drove across Australia to the west coast/ B: Well I don't know how they got there. The train would have been the only way. I mean if you can even think during the war, even here in this country, all the mail, everything went by train. You didn't get a letter from anyplace that didn't come on the train, even until after the war because the first planes that, at the time they used planes, was after the war, not before. K: Did you ever see General MacArthur? B: Oh yes. I seen him, but I never talked to him or that, but no, other Generals, a lot of different ones and then our company was getting refilled with, anytime they sunk a boat or had something happen on the ocean, we would get some of the survivors, so we had one Filipino, we had a couple of Russians, we had a couple of Polish sailors, and we'd be filled up as this hundred guys were being dissolved, new ones were coming in. They were all survivors. From different, and every one had a different, they were in the service, but they had a different country, but when you're out there in the open in the ocean and somebody picks you up, where do you go? K: What language problems did you have then if you had people with . . . B: Well I'll say that they had a disparate version of the dictionary. Pretty much different, so there's a lot of words that were terrible cuss words to us that was their regular, and some regular words that we use that were bad to them. A bloody battle or a bloody fight or bloody, that was terrible. That was killing somebody, and if they were going to get paid they were going to get shit on, and you know . . . K: Different vocabulary. B: It was just different interpretation of the words like aluminium. 7

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B: How do we say it? R: Aluminum. B: We say aluminum. They are aluminium. And potatoes was pronounced _____. A little different. It wasn't much. K: Well how did they Australians view the Americans? B: Oh they loved it and the people, the families, if there was girls and that, they pushed it to marry one of the Americans and they'd get back in the States. That was a push. You couldn't help but know it, and where I landed near Melbourne was where Sister [Kenny] for polio the same as at the time. Well she was from one of the towns there and the people were all asking about her all the time, and then they'd invite you to the house for a meal or something and always bragged about this trim around the wood here or that was white pine because their wood was that Tea wood which is harder than iron. You have to drill holes in it to drive a nail in it and they had pine soft wood. Things like that that you'd never dream of that were so different to them. K: Well you liked your time in Australia. B: Oh yeah. It was [a] good time. I got, me and another guy, to drive to guard duty where we'd take the guards down to these warehouses to see that they got there, and we had a Chevy car and driving on the wrong side, and we were had an office in a school house where they'd call in there. Well, a lot of times women had to go to the hospital to have young ones, [an] emergency call. It was more like family things going on. But it didn't last long because within a day or two you were sent someplace else. K: What was your impression catching glimpses of MacArthur. Did you have any impression of him? B: No. Not really. K: It was just very short. B: Normally he was the boss and that's all. To me he never was. K: Did you have to salute in a war zone? B: No. K: . . . or did they get rid of that? B: We didn't know how to salute. We never learned. (laughter). K: So then after . . . B: you know you see all this Marines stuff they go through now and that. We never had any . . . We never even had roll call very often. K: So how long were you in Australia before you moved to other areas in the South Pacific. B: We went to Tokoma and then went to Queensland and Brisbane, Townsville, and then up to Cairns, just gradually moving up, and if you . . .Its hard to explain but there was only really one road in Australia that runs along the coast all the way up to Cairns. That was the end of the road. I mean you didn’t go any further. That was . . . Now I see the maps today. They have roads all over the tropical up there and what not, but at that time the road ended at Cairns and I was on horseback even a few miles further out because one of the air pilots from the Air Force wanted me to run out and see if I could buy some whiskey in another little town up there. It was crazy. I'll tell you. K: Did your ships have to be careful with the coral reefs and all of the stuff off the coast? B: Well the coral reef is enormous. Its hard to imagine the size of it, and then being young at that time we don't understand what the coral reef''s there. Now the pictures the next one you'll see at that time when we landed there they had open fishing on the ocean. Anybody fished the whales, the manatees and that, and they ate them. That was all cooked. And that picture right there, that one you're looking at was taken off of a train in Queensland. Where that box camera, I'm sitting on the railroad car, and I see that going by, and that's at Sydney, Australia. K: So its 16 oxen pulling one log. B: How did they get them together? Why did they have to have so many? What kind of a rope did they 8

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have between them? Or a chain? Why did they have to pull that big of a log? K: So these photographs you took with a box camera? B: That one I took with a box camera. The last negative I had. The last thing I had in the box camera. K: Did you take more pictures later? B: Later on we had a different situation where one of the guys in our tent worked with the gunners. He had the job of developing pictures that the fighter planes took. Every time you pulled the trigger on the gun you'd take a picture and it was black and white. Well he had the job of developing the film, so we got into more film because of that. Now these are just. . . and that's my son that just moved to Honolulu now. That right there. Grandson. And then the next picture are the aboriginals in Australia. They're like the Indians that are in this country. K: Was this a family group you met? B: No. They run wild in the northern half of the . . . and that was swamp land. I don't know where it was. That's in New Guinea isn't it? It is north of Moresby. K: Yeah. B: Its all swamp land for hundreds of miles. I mean that's all that you see. And then that next one is the city of Port Moresby. That was it. There were 2 buildings on shore where they dumped the rice and the tobacco for the native. K: So from Australia then did you go by ship and go to New Guinea? B: Yeah. K: Is that the next location? B; Went by ship but Port Moresby is where we were split up and made into two companies, and then our half was sent back to Australia where we picked up more and then that's when the Coral Sea happened. That's where on their way back to Nilan Bay (sp?). Well Nilan Bay is, it ain't even on the maps, its a place. K: Where's it located? B: Right on the very tip of New Guinea. Right in Nilan Bay is this water right in here. K: So it would be the southeastern tip. B: The real end of the island. Coral Sea was right here. K: So were you in Australia when the Battle of the Coral Sea took place? B: I was on a Liberty ship anchored on the Great Reef -- coral reef. Anchored on the . . . K: Did you know anything about what was going on up north? B: Oh no. No. That's a one thing through the war. You never knew anything. We didn't have. The telephone when we went on guard in New Guinea, you dragged a wire behind you and you tapped on it and you had certain codes that you went by and that was it. They wouldn't tell you nothing. K: Did you know Morse code or learn that? B: No. Never learned. What you had to do was that day. K:So the Battle of the Coral Sea took place. Did you then go back to Port Moresby? B: Went to Bellum Bay then (sp?). K: Okay. And that's in New Guinea? B: Now the Japs had the west side of it and we were on the east side. B: Right here is Milne Bay. K: Oh. Okay. Right on the south. B: On the end. Now the Japanese had to control all of this. We only had this much land. K: So the Japanese had sort of the north half of the . . . B: They had the whole ocean. K: Everything except for a little end of Papua New Guinea. R: Separated by mountain. 9

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K: Well did you organize the supplies for that area, for the British and the Americans or what were you doing? B: Its whatever came. We had no control of this. Whatever the government over here would send a ship and if it got there it got there, and if it didn't that's just how it was. You didn't know what was coming next, and most all of the World War I stuff was gun since: the thirty odd, Springfield 30.06 and old pistols and all the clothes and the rations. C-rations. We had the regular C-rations in the old can with the two hard tacks in there and a piece of candy and a cigarette. I mean and there was a soup. You had a little dried up thing that would make a cup of soup and you dissolved it. K: How did it taste? B: Well it wasn't all that bad. I mean when you . . It tasted better than the coconut. You know there was some cattle on the island in the coconut plantation. Now that cattle won't go in the jungle but where the coconuts were they could survive. Well when we butchered them and ate them then there was no more meat because you had no refrigeration and you couldn't keep anything, you just butchered a cow and a hundred of us ate a lot of meat but Australia they shipped one time a whole load of sheep. A whole ship. That's all they had on the ship. Pulled up to the dock and turned them all loose on the plantation. Well that meant that for every day we'd butcher 5, 6 sheep and fresh meat. We had mutton. Well if you can imagine a bunch of new guys butchering sheep. Get the wool mixed in with the fat and everything, and it was always served like cut in inch square chunks and boiled so that's the way it was always served. K: Well you had a chance to meet some of the local people in Papua New Guinea then. B: Well the local people were the natives, and they couldn't even talk to their own kind ten miles up the bush because they never traveled that far. They had a different language but see what helped us a lot, helped the Army, the missionaries would go to the places and take the kids out down if they had an island out in the ocean that was a small island where they could clean it off and get rid of the mosquitoes and that so they wouldn't have malaria and all this stuff and they'd have a, train the kids in religion and English, and then the kids go back on the mainland after a month and teach the elders. That was how they really helped us because the little kids that were 10, 12 years old you could talk to and get some words out of them, but not the elders. No. K: How did the people on New Guinea feel about the Japanese and the Americans? B: Oh they hated the Japs cause word had been coming down the line all the time where, well they were massacring, just killing them off and what not. and the natives they were like to me they remind you of monkeys. They wanted to imitate you. They wanted to do what you're doing. They wanted to learn. They were most inquisitive people you ever encountered with. Now you wouldn't . . . Its hard to even imagine that a broken glass from like from a mirror on a truck, a little piece of glass and they could see themselves, they never had anything like that. That would be the whole tribe would be around looking in the mirror if you could find them a piece of broken glass, and on the islands there there was no really big meat or anything. They never had the. . . It was mostly rats and fish and stuff like that, but if we . . .There was wild hogs on there but they had no guns or no way of treating them but they used to dig holes and try to get a hog to fall in the hole, but the way they operated right there, we'd catch a little pig when he's small and then they kept him in the camp or raised him until he got big just like we do here and then like Thanksgiving was their big day when the . . . And they knew how to tell time by the moon and the sun. You talked to them and they always you know, the day and when its going to be and what time. They all, their time, time was the sun. They had no watches and the little money they had had holes in it, the Australian government had, and it could be tied around the neck cause they had no pockets, cause no clothes to wear stuff on. K: Did you have problems with the tropical disease? You mentioned malaria. B: Everything. 10

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K: Did you catch those diseases? B: The Jungle Rot, malaria, the . . . Anything that come by I had it. Diarrhea. K: Any treatments for malaria then? back then? B: Yes. When we first got there was a tablet that looked like a quarter. It was white. that was pure quinine. that was the quinine and that would give you a headache for about 2 hours every time you took one of them. And then they come out with Atabrin. I think it was Atabrin they called it. The little yellow pill. We had to take that twice a day, and that was alright. That was like taking aspirin. K; How long did you suffer from malaria? Is that a lifetime thing? B: You get it over and over and over. First you break out with a terrible temperature. That was terrible. and then you get the chills. The chills was terrible. Then you have diarrhea. Then you have the shakes in a week and if you're lucky and didn't die then you'd get over it, but maybe a month later you get the same damn thing over again, and its hard for you to conceive where we were we were pretty lucky. We were on kind of clay ground, so the natives would dig a trench in the ground and throw that ground up on the heave, and that was your bed, cause there was always, every day, it was raining and that, and water would come down running through the trench, but you lay down on the side, face the ground, and then the natives try to take care of you and you had diarrhea while you tried to make it two, three feet away from there and . . . K: Were there other things like Dengue fever and there's a lot of diseases. B: A lot of them came down with that yellow jaundice, and the fungus was the bad. Fungus just grows in the air and it affects your earing or different things. The natives they would get a big lump on them or like their testicles would be great big, what not. Kind of like her there why you know it was, all kinds of shapes you see. There was no end to it. K: Well you've got a photo graph of a gigantic looking locust. B: That was at night while you're going to sleep now you can imagine that's just one bug. (laughing). K: They grow big in that area. B: And the noise at night. And oh God, but what was the most scary was snakes. There was every kind of snake you can imagine, and in the evening you better, if you're going to sit on something, you better make sure it wasn't a snake on it, and brush it off. K: Well did you stay then in some kind of barracks on the land. B: In New Guinea? No way. It was tents. But we kind of helped ourselves if we got near where there was bamboo and that was the only bolt that I can imagine that was at Milne Bay before the war and was there during the war and we went sailing on that once and the wind blew us right into Japanese area and thank God they didn't see us and next day we spent, I spent a night on that out in the ocean. The next day the wind got up a little higher and blew us back into the bay. K: And Milne Bay is M-i-l-i-n-e? B: Yeah. The town is Gilegile. K: That's G-i-l-e-g-i-l-e B: Yeah. But that's not on the map son any of this new stuff they have all new names for that. K: Did you ever get more trucks that came in? B: Well a few. I mean we . . . and then about in '43, probably '44, we did get more trucks. That was after they drove the Japanese out of Dobadura and Buna and that, we got more trucks in and then the ships were able to get to us better then. K: Now were you . . . B: We only had in New Guinea the longest road I knew was ten miles long, and I drove 2000 miles a month on that, just back and forth hauling from the ships all the stuff bombs and what not up. K: Were you bringing it to an airfield? B: Yeah. At Dobado was an airfield. It was kind of high up in the mountains, and that's where the 11

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Japanese had control of that but when the Australians came in over the mountain, the foot soldiers, now this is all foot soldiers, and drove them out of there then we were able to land there, but we didn't get them out of Buna on the coast. We still had to fight them all the ways out, but we were able to get planes over the mountain, and C-47s did all the hauling. C-47s ____ they'd fly through them little cracks in the mountains. You'd see trees there and trees there and they're going down. K: Well did they drop supplies for the troops with parachutes? Or did they have other . . . B: No Well the ones I was in they just kicked it out on the ground. Everything. But then when we moved all our stuff was in the plane. We just landed. Got it all out of there, Let the plane get the Hell out of there because the Japs, their Zeroes, only had about two, three hundred miles from where we were landing where they could have. K: Were they coming off of Rabaul, or ships, or? B: Yeah. Rabaul was the main Japanese island in the Pacific. Supply hound (sic.). The ships could get there. The planes but airborne aboard the dock (sic.) and it was big and it was, there was no way that we could go in and run them out of there, but we went around them. We never went in there. Never took it. Just went around it. K: So in New Guinea you have photographs of bats that are a foot in diameter. This must have been a strange environment for a kid from Minnesota. B: Turning back to that bat, can you imagine in my lifetime none of us ever seen one like that, and then they come out like 50 or 100 at night. They only come out at night and they're flying and their trying to land in the tree, and no matter how careful they are they always break branches and make a hell of a noise, and you're laying guard and you hear that noise. What in the hell is it a bomb up there or what? And then they knock a coconut loose and did you ever see a coconut falling off of a tree? It hits the ground. It will bounce at least ten feet, so if you're under that tree you don't want to have one of them coconuts come down and hit ya. Oh. them bats were so big. Oh, you can't imagine. Well you can see the picture. That's a big coconut tree he's nailed on and the lizards were the same. There'd be a lizard up in that tree and you're wondering if he was coming down to eat you or not. and there was red ants in all the coconut trees. It was the red ants that really bite ya. I mean if you did anything on the coconut trees then the ants would really attack, but on the trunk of the tree was black ants, and we used to take like a black ant and just out it up there 6 inches above on the tree. Them red ants would have that black ant. Just pull him apart but they wouldn't go below the bark line. Just where the bark line was. The black ones lived below and there was different kind of ants altogether but they sure didn't get along. K: Well after New Guinea was secured what was the next area that you were at? B: Well we just . . . This map here would show it real good. Once we got on this side we followed this all along and Rabaul is over in here. We'd follow that all up to the. . . K: So you worked your way up the north side of . . . B: I've had 11 boat rides that were over a week long on different ships. Old Dutch ships. K: Were these moving up the coastline? B: Yeah. Every time we moved. K: Well now the battles on the Solomon Islands with Guadalcanal . . . B: That was all over here, see, and we were kind of sending supplies from here too and when they needed it. We loaded PT boats and gas here. We were loading PT boats with gas so when they're fighting. This was terrible. This old. That was some of the worst fighting in the whole war right there. K: The Guadalcanal campaign. Yeah. B: It was terrible conditions and everything happened like if you were two days late or you lost the battle. It was to be there . . . You know the whole war, if you studied the whole war in Europe or anyplace it was all being a month ahead of time. A month later you never would have gotten them out of there, and that was Roosevelt was hand was doing all this planning and Congress was always against 12

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it. Everything they did was stalling and he was trying to get going. I've had books of the planes. B-17s and that where all the blueprints they were going to build it in 1936. Roosevelt had given these designers guaranteed them 10% profit to design these planes and that, so they were ready to build when the war started, they already had that. They didn't start from scratch designing them, and it was only Roosevelt that had all this stuff ready. K: Well the cover of Life magazine from December 1st, '41 has a flying B-17, so they had an awareness of the need for air power if its on the cover of Life magazine. B: And that blueprint I gave it to my son-in-law in Salt Lake City. I had three books at one time and he works with McDonnell Douglas and he was interested in planes. Now that is in Buna. That cemetery and our . . . within two or three months you wouldn't even be able to find that place with the jungle'd grow over it. And that was a fight that never was recorded. Nobody ever heard of that, taking Buna. K: So it went from a cemetery that was very neat and orderly and crosses that were white to jungle. B: Well they just .. . That was just done in a hurry. They didn't even bury the Japs. The Japs were still laying there when I was there, what was left of them. Now that's the planes that they flew to the Philippines and they salvaged them out and sent them to Australia. I think there were 11 B-17s and they worked on them for a year getting the guns on it and everything to go on a bombing mission and then when they flew them into Milne Bay, the airport was ready for them, the Japs came over with 24 bombers and incendiary bombs and burnt every one of them, plus all the gas we had and the stuff around. And I was standing on that strip when they bombed dropped all those bombs on them. On the north end. They came in from the ocean. I'm up here and they dropped the bombs. They didn't even make it all the ways up. K; And you could see what was going on? B: Oh yes. You could see the planes. We never shot one down. We didn't even have a fighter to shoot them down. The antiaircraft that was firing under them was Australian, just came in from Africa and they were quite a bit short. . . K: So was that completely destroyed? There weren't any B-17s left on the ground? B: Not in Milne Bay. They destroyed every one where they spent two years rebuilding them out on the Philippines. And when we flew to the Philippines they didn't have guns and that because they were only flown there to train pilots and it wasn't war yet. K: Well did you ever get in a situation where the bombs were falling close to you? B: Every night. Every night. But only maybe one or two planes and drop maybe 5, 6 bombs, in the jungle. How when everything was dark how are they going to hit ya. If you heard the bomb you knew it went past you. If you didn't hear it well it was pretty scary. Now the Air Force told us when the come up with the A-24 I think it was they called it the Widow. It was a black two engine plane . That was going to be their night fighter and going to shoot them down. Well I never heard em ever shooting a Japanese plane down at night. Never heard of it. Ever. Now you'd think that they could follow the exhaust pipe or something and seeing the flames or that to get 'em but I never heard them ever getting one, but one Jap outwitted them one time. He was up there and the fighters after they're up there an hour or two they decided there give it up. Well when they came in at Tobadura and were going to land, they turned the lights on on the airport so that he could come in and land. The Jap plane followed them. He probably was up pretty high but he followed that guy in and dropped his bombs just past the airport which was only oh half a mile from where we were sleeping and it hit the ammunition dump where it had all the ammunition, and that stuff was going off for hours. K: Were you losing people in your company? B: Well crazy things happened. Plane crashes and stupid things. One guy was going through a tunnel in Australia, he sticks his head out of the train and gets his head cut off and stuff like that, you know a lot of those pure stupid. 13

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K: Well after New Guinea then did your unit move to another part of the Central Pacific or the South Pacific or where? B: We were on our way up to Luzon in the Philippines. Just before getting ready to go in to Iwo Jima and that. And my time had run up already. I'm already in there. I was the last one out of the hundred and five that started out, and they said I could go home, gave me the papers. K: The others had left already for home? B: Well they had gone. I mean there was nobody left of the company, original company, I'm the only one. R: So you were all done then some time in, end of '44? B: In '45. R: In '45, okay. B: In '45 they gave me papers that I was done, but they didn't give me transportation. R: You're done but you have to stay here (laughing). K: Where were you when that happened? B: I was on Numfor Island which is 10 miles across and that Japanese were on one half, we were on the other half. We're landing planes and everything and they were still on the other half, but they had no guns or nothing and all the islands were left like that, but they gave me the papers. I had to get my stuff off of the boat cause they were already on their way to the Philippines, and I had the papers and I don't know how long it took me but I hitchhiked from East Indies back to Brisbane, Australia . K: Getting on different kinds of transportation? B: Wherever there was something going, I had the papers I was allowed to get on. R: What island were you on when they gave you papers? B: Numfor and you can't find it on there. Its such a small island.' K: Its not on the map. R: Close to what was it? B: It was right on zero equator. I'd been there for 6 months and right zero equator. Right on the equator. K: We've gotten to the point where so you were discharged and then after you were discharged did you come back to Minnesota? B: No I was. . . I got on a boat at Brisbane and by the time I got to California, the war was over. K: Okay. And did you have a any celebrations when . . . B: No. Nobody ever knew I was gone or nothing. Nothing ever. K: And could you summarize what you did after the war? B: Well after the war I was . . . went to Dunwoody for eighteen months and I got a job with George C. Ryan and I was with them 33 1/2 years. R: Fixing big machines. B: Just fixing machines. And I don't to this day understand how they ever made an airplane fly enough to make one whole mission. I can't even comprehend how one engine would fly that long because we couldn't make Budas (sp?), International, GMC, Cummings, Briggs and Stratton, we couldn't make any of them engines after the war run when we'd sell them and there was a warranty I'd always guarantee the week or month or whatever the deal was and they never made it that long without something wrong , and real serious wrong, like tow different materials that were wrong or like taluses (sp?) that ate holes in iron and gaskets that leak so bad right from day one, and so many things. International had one of the worst ones was they had a pipe plug put into the oil pump in the bottom of the engine and the material in the pump was different than the cast iron plug they put in and that plug would fall out no matter how you tight you tightened it it would work out and the engine would not get any oil burn the engine up. Well how in the hell did they ever get them planes to fly? Even today to fly that far. K: Well let me just summarize your enlistment discharge papers here. You were in the combat area 14

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around 3 1/2 years Is that right? B: Yeah. K: And you had an Asiatic Pacific Theater Service Medal, American Defense Service Medal with Bronze Star, six overseas service bars, a lapel button was issued. I suppose that's what . . .I'm not sure what the lapel button was and four discharge emblems. Emblems were issued. B: They don't say nothing about the big one was the Presidential Citation. K: No that's in here. Decorations. Distinguished Unit Citation Badge. And also Good Conduct Medal. Is that all of them? B: That's. . . My medals are nothing. It would just be lying, but that one picture in there where you said the plane with the lights shining, the ack-ack shells. K: Oh yeah. Here I'll get that. B: Now if you can imagine every one of them streaks is one of 5 bullets going up and .50 caliber they had mostly all exploding tips and all that stuff had to come down, and when the plane flies over you and all this stuff going up it all comes down. Well you can imagine what it does to tents. It never holds water any more (laughing). K: Did you ever get hit by the spent shells? B: No. But you made damn sure that your foxhole that you dug had something over the top of it. K: Okay. Was there any other questions Roald that you can think of that I covered that was a major area? R: No. You got it all. K: Bob was there any other areas that you think i missed that were important? B: The whole thing was important. (laughing). K: Okay. Well thank you. B: It was . . . you can't comprehend how big the Pacific is and like here you can't imagine the money lost in five minutes. I mean the thing come over and not even have a fighter. We're Air Force. We don't have a fighter to even go after one of those planes. Well then about a month afterwards the P-38 came up. They never would have made it with (sic) we had the P-38. But we didn't have the P-38s then. When the P-38s came out the whole world changed. K: Well I want to thank you very much. This has been a very interesting interview. B: But this. . . Can you imagine how much stuff is coming down. This is just like two seconds. That was a . . . When I was sitting there I counted 200 times I was bombed and that's when I got to thinking, God if you go hunting and shoot at a squirrel 200 times you're going to get hit one time (laughing). K: So you felt like you were kind of lucky to survive this. B: Yeah. K: Yeah.

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