Richard Stravens

Richard Stravens was born in Spokane in 1924 and moved to Colfax when he was just two years old.  He attended Colfax High School, and in March of 1943 was drafted into the Army.  He and three other local young boys were loaded on a bus in Colfax with a guy named Bill Munson in charge.  They rode to Pendleton, Oregon then hopped on a train headed for the Salt Lake City Induction Center on March 15, 1943.

From Salt Lake City he was sent to Camp Polk, Louisiana.  "I'd not like to go there again," commented Dick.  It was there that the 173^rd Field Depot was organized.

The State of Louisiana is divided into parishes instead of counties, and the parish next to Camp Polk was really wild.  For seven months those young men could step over the parish line and see all kinds of things they hadn't heard about back home.  Besides the night life, they spent a lot of time on maneuvers out in the alligator infested swamps and they were told to watch for the deadly Coral snake.  Stravens was not overly impressed with life in Louisiana. 

The next stop for the 173^rd Field Depot was Alexandria, Virginia.  It was from Virginia that he shipped out on a Liberty Ship that had brought German war prisoners across the Atlantic.  They had to board the ship through tunnels built to hide the prisoners from the public.  The ship carried only dehydrated food, the same food used to feed the German prisoners who had just disembarked.  So Dick and his buddy, Bob Kathman from LaCrosse, got jobs working at night cleaning up after the Baker.  The rest of the men aboard ship had to eat prisoner food for twenty-one days. 

"I tried to sleep in a bunk the first couple of nights," he said, "but the prison bunks were stacked so close together, I could barely turn over.  And there was the matter of trying to sleep in a stack of twenty bunks crammed full of vomiting, sea-sick soldiers."  Once he got a night job, he   found space on the deck where he could sleep during the day.

"There were so many ships, over four hundred in our convoy, I couldn't see beyond them all.  Destroyers all around us were dropping depth charges to try to catch some German subs.  They were all over.  We were twentieth in from the rear of the convoy on a Merchant Marine ship with twenty Navy gunners on board.  We were guarded by several Navy Destroyers and Cruisers.  If your ship broke down, the convoy would go off and leave you.  Our ship had some trouble and we kept dropping further back in the convoy until finally we got whatever it was fixed."

Stravens spent two months in North Africa, long enough to earn a European Ribbon.  Then he again shipped out, this time on a British ship at night from Oran.  Two of the ships in that convoy were sunk before they got to the Suez Canal.  All the men in his ship were sent to the bottom of the ship during the attack.  The next day they came out and saw their gun turrets had been shot off. 

"I was really going Limey," Stravens smiled, "Eating all that marmalade and crackers." 

Their ship had to wait in Alexandria for access to the Suez Canal.  He and Bob Kathman, a guy who liked to sketch pictures, had smuggled a dog on board when they left Virginia.  It was so crowded topside that the dog walked between a man's legs and when Dick looked up at the guy's face, he was looking at Roy Glasser from Colfax.

After they went through the Suez Canal, they stopped at Aden for a day, then sailed across the Arabian Sea to Bombay, arriving twenty-two days after leaving North Africa, making that forty-three days on the water.

They stayed in Bombay only one day, then were loaded on narrow gauge cattle cars headed for Calcutta.  "That was real comfy," Dick said.  "There were no seats, just some benches.  I think the last passengers were sheep or elephants, or something like that.  It smelled real bad." 

They spent a week on that railroad stopping in little villages where they could buy little bananas.  They had a cook car, but the cooks would wait until they stopped somewhere.  Then they would set the stoves off of the train and the train would sit there while they cooked food and everyone ate.  The train stopped for many reasons, one of them being a herd of elephants on the track.  There was no way to move elephants, so they sat and waited. 

In Calcutta they were loaded on a river paddle-wheeler and went up the Brahamaputra River which they navigated until they hit a railhead close to Burma.  Once again they stopped now and then for various obstacles such as a flock of vultures that descended upon them.  The birds had a wing span of up to six feet. Some of the guys were feeding them like you would seagulls at the ocean.  One guy nearly got his arm taken off doing that. 

They finally got to Panotola which was surrounded by tea plantations.  Panotola was about forty miles from Ledo, the jumping off point to the Ledo Road which connected to the old Burma Road.  The Americans took over the Panotola tea plantations and their metal-roofed buildings that had been used to dry tea.  There were shelves already built into those open walled buildings, so the 173^rd used them to warehouse parts.  They turned it into a base depot near the jumping off point to get over the Himalayas, over the Hump.

"The British had not been able to build a road over the Hump, so the Yanks came in and did it," said Stravens.

The Ledo Road and the Burma Road were amazing engineering feats.   The Ledo Road stretched six hundred miles from Ledo to connect with the Burma Road.  A pipe line was laid at the same time, connecting with the Burma Road pipeline, making it a total of fourteen hundred miles long.  The road and pipeline zig-zagged back and forth over mountains that stood over twenty thousand feet.  It took fourteen days to drive the Ledo and Burma roads.

He once flew over the Hump during Monsoon season in a C-47, a metal plane with no padding.  He noticed when he first got on the plane that there was oxygen and blankets.  When a quarter of an inch of ice had formed on the inside of that cargo plane, he understood what the blankets were all about.

When they had been over the Hump about six months, they had the base all set up to receive goods from India, supplies that were earmarked for Russia.  When the first trucks came rumbling over the Ledo Road, Dick was part of the Honor Guard that welcomed them when they arrived at Kunming.  He was filmed by a newsreel crew and people at the Rose Theater in Colfax saw him.  "I knew how to march," Dick smiled.  "Andy Chesnut's dad, a World War I vet, taught three of us young kids how to march and do it right."

From early in 1944 to August 1945, Stravens lived in Kunming, China.  "It was rotten.  There were dead people along the roads.  The  depot buildings were made of mud brick walls with towers on the corners.  There were lights like prison lights on the towers.  The officers stayed outside the compound, across the road.  That was okay with us.  We received ordinance supply, trucks, tires, and automotive parts.  We kept all the vehicles going.   It was a small city.  Chunking, then the capital of Nationalist China, lay one hundred miles north.  It was more the size of Spokane.  We went back and forth a lot between them.  We were bombed every once in awhile.  The hostel and barracks had been built in line with the air strip.  When Jap bombers came in, we got in trucks and left the area until the bombing was over."

They did have some easier times.  There was a girl's school in town called Kunming University, where they met some very nice people.  The school was on about five acres, nice, fenced in, walled, with guards.  The professors there had mostly gone to school in the US and spoke very good English.  The girls were from well-to-do families and were closely watched.  The 173^rd men went with the girls on campus boat rides and to other campus events, but did not take single girls off campus.  Dick was invited to dinner with five other guys and they were treated very nicely.  They met some girls that evening so they could then go to the dorm and ask the house mother to see particular girls.  She was a "no nonsense" woman who spoke excellent English, and in no uncertain terms let the servicemen know her girls would be treated properly.

In August 1945 after the war was over, Dick's company split, part of them flying to Shanghai where they unloaded supplies that had been intended for the invasion of Japan.  Everything that the United States had brought into China was turned over to the Chinese Nationalists.  But, things were changing in China.  The communists were taking over, quickly easing the old regime out of power.  "Chiang Kai-shek gave us all a medal, then he went to Taiwan," Dick said. 

His unit stayed until December.  The enlisted men were put up in hotels where they were not restrained in any way by officers.  They had houseboys and lots of free time.  Dick Stravens was assigned to ship out on a flat-top staffed with fresh Navy who all got sick at sea.  They stayed one night in Hawaii, then sailed to Seattle where he was discharged January 16, 1946, completing his free trip around the world. 

He caught a bus, a double-decker loaded with returning G.I.s, to Colfax where he opened a Shell Service Station downtown.  He married Dorothy Geiger, a nurse at St. Ignatious Hospital.  He was widowed and now lives with his second wife Bernadine.  He has one son.  He spends his time fishing, hunting, and making whirligigs and bird houses that Bernadine paints.