PART FIVE

Colfax

South-central County

Military and Civilians

Working Together to Win the War

At this point I had twenty-three more folders to sort out and put in some kind of order. I went through them and pulled out nine that were either about people who now live in the St. John area or were born and raised there. The remaining fourteen are the ones we will look at in Part Five. These stories tend to run a little longer than the ones the students did because by the time I was conducting interviews I knew enough to ask a few right questions. Also I wrote faster so I got more notes than most of the kids. And, I encouraged the people I interviewed to rewrite my draft to any extent they wished, and some did that beyond my wildest expectations.

I need to say once again how difficult it is to capture oral history on paper. For one thing, the person you are listening to knows what they are talking about. They know it cold. These people who were looking back sixty years or so knew their stories amazingly well. Their recall of detail was incredible. Once they started talking I didn't want to interrupt, and at times found myself watching and listening and not writing. I had to rely heavily on the people I listened to to edit my drafts and to get dates correct and sequences in the right order. What I really got was the overall picture, a sense of what they were telling me, and a clear understanding of how the war affected their lives.

I found myself in a fascinating, consuming, ongoing history class in which I was the only student, and I was being taught by experts in their field. What a fascinating journey I took! Let me share with you what I was able to get on paper, stories edited by each of the kind men and women who let me dig around in their past so the rest of us could learn from their experiences.

The first story, oddly enough, I heard from a man who was not in World War II, but certainly had connections, experiences, and input that helped us set the context for Part Five, our segment on Colfax. When I sat down to talk with LeRoy and Wilma, he had a list of notes and was ready to go. Let's listen.

LeROY UTKE

LeRoy Utke was the youngest of eight children who grew up in Russiantown, a portion of Colfax that included the northwest part of town, roughly from about the Perkins House west out toward Green Hollow Road. The residents there were mainly descendants of Germans who had moved into Russia a few generations back, and then migrated to the Pacific Northwest.

LeRoy was eleven years old when the war broke out in December of 1941, but he was only in the third grade due to having started school in Idaho. He was two years behind when he moved to Colfax. That did put him at an advantage, however, when fights would break out between kids from Russiantown's Martha Washington grade school and the kids from Hamilton up on the hill. Those fights faded away when all the kids gathered in one high school and were united as Bulldogs.

While LeRoy was too young to serve in World War II - he did his time in Korea a decade later - he has strong recollections of that time in Colfax because of his avid interest in the war and his heroes. His heroes were his brothers and a sister who joined the military and one who worked on a farm to support the family and the war effort.

"I believe Colfax was important during that decade because we not only supported the entire military machine by wheat farming, but we also donated Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Pilots, as well as Nurses, Dietitians, and Cooks to the war," Utke stated, then began to list the reasons he felt that way.

His oldest brother, Ernest, enlisted almost immediately when the war started to build in Europe, even before Pearl Harbor. Ernest, a young kid who was kind of tired of farm work, served two hitches training Artillery Officers in Tennessee. As a youngster, LeRoy was enthralled by Ernest's tales of having to "round up those Tennessee girls every fall and put shoes on them."

His second oldest brother, Arnold, was the one who decided to accept deferment to work on a farm out in Green Hollow. He was able to help the war effort in addition to helping his widowed mother provide for the rest of the family.

His next brother, Earl, served in the United States and England, and in France after the invasion of Normandy as a Combat Engineer. Among other things, he built air fields for fighters and bombers flying out of England. Earl had held on to dreams of him and his older brother joining the Cavalry. The brothers had for years dressed in western fashion and jingled around their neighborhood on horseback. That family cowboy was greatly disappointed when he found out there was no longer a call for horse-mounted soldiers.

Orlan, the next brother in line, served as a US Army Military Policeman on Okinawa and during the American occupation of Japan. One of his duties during the occupation was to dump Japanese-made products into the harbor, as well as all remaining war materials made in the USA. Many of the Japanese items were collectibles that would be of great value in today's market. Orlan did liberate a sword for his young brother LeRoy who has since given it to Orlan's son.

Of his three sisters, Leona (Mabe) and Irene (Wagner) worked on the home front while Valda (Cooper) served in the Women's Army Air Corps in both Louisiana and Colorado. She packaged and shipped supplies to the war front.

None of them were killed or hurt. Thus the family made a long, enduring contribution to the war. LeRoy remembers being treated very well at school, like he was something extra special, because his mother had a blue flag in her window with four red stars on it. LeRoy noted also that all three brothers sent their military allotment home to their mom after receiving a stipend for themselves. Although they all came home safely, the war still had put an emphasis on that part of LeRoy's young life, one permanently inscribed in his memory.

Part of that impact came through the rationing of gas, meat, sugar, rubber, and leather products like shoes. Plus, he could not buy fire arms or ammo, a difficult thing for a new hunter around eleven years old, as well as for all the hunters in Whitman County. The local hardware store received only one case of shells for the whole hunting season. The owner of the store had more friends than shells, so LeRoy knew he wasn't going to be able to hunt ducks for a long time. Then, he learned a man he knew, a man well-known in town, had a case of Peters shells under his bed. Young LeRoy cut a deal with him. He was to get one box of shells for every five ducks he brought home to that man.

"I could get more than five ducks with one shot if I shot well," LeRoy chuckled. The deal held all through the war years, helping him provide food for his family in the bargain.

Hitch-hiking was really popular during the war, since servicemen averaged about thirty-six dollars per month. The city of Colfax built a shelter just across the river on the highway to Walla Walla where the propane tanks and gas pumps now stand near the junction to the old Green Hollow Road. The building, which held about ten people comfortably, had a peaked roof and benches inside where military personnel could sit and wait for a ride. People would watch the little building to see if anyone needed transportation. No matter how many people were in the car, they would jam in as many as they could. In Colfax, no one had to wait long for a ride.

Across the road from that ride building, a jungle-like field where Les Schwab Tires and Napa Parts now stand provided shelter for two hundred and fifty Army men who moved through the area headed for Spokane. They set up camp for one night, then entertained townsfolk who brought them food and just dropped by to shake hands with them. The next day the kids from Russiantown searched the area looking for souvenirs and found things such as packets of powdered coffee which they treasured for years to come.

Spokane was, at that time, an Air Force hub of activity. When LeRoy was about fifteen, he recalls, school would let out so the kids and teachers could watch fly-overs. Maybe thirty or forty groups of Bombers and their fighter escorts flew formation over the town during 1945, a constant source of enjoyment for LeRoy and the other kids. The P-47 Fighter was developed mostly in the Spokane area and many of them flew around Whitman County for several years. The last flights he saw before the war ended were P-47s escorting bombers.

Mayor Burns' son, Bill Burns, was a fighter pilot who most people living and working in town at that time remember very well. Bill, stationed in Spokane, provided a big thrill for the local folks by making a two-way pass up and down Main street in his P-51 each time he was in the air. Even though his commanding officer suggested he knock it off, the flights continued entertaining the kids, and adults, in Colfax.

LeRoy remembers the day he heard Dorothy Stanke, an Army Corps Nurse stationed on Okinawa, was killed by a Kamikaze plane that hit her hospital ship. What embedded it in his mind was the story that went around town resulting from her death. There was a religious group that used to hold war protests, parading in town using very harsh language like, "We hope your kids get killed in the war." The day after the hospital ship was hit they scheduled a protest. Some local citizens, offended by their words, gave them a "severe shellacking" leaving them the worse for wear in the gutter.

As the story went, a policeman walked by, looked at the protesters in the gutter, nodded at them, said, "Nice day!" and strolled off down the street.

In a more supportive vein, nearly all the kids in town saved whatever change they could and bought savings stamps. They kept their savings book from grade to grade until they had accumulated seventeen dollars and fifty cents in stamps, then they would buy a War Bond that was worth twenty-five dollars at maturity, five years later. The kids at Martha Washington School, but not Hamilton on the hill as LeRoy pointed out, were also let out of school on a regular basis to collect metal, paper, and rubber. They took those items to a central place in town, located where the Nazarene Church and parking lot now stand. It was then a motel-type business, made up of little log cabins, called Ripley's, Believe It or Not.

Billboards were popular in those days, many of which were used for promotion of war themes, like urging people to "Buy Bonds!" Whenever such a billboard would appear with Hitler or Tojo's picture on them to identify the common enemy, the Russiantown kids, frequently led by one LeRoy Utke, would obscure their faces with mud.

"It was great recreation," laughed LeRoy. "Oh, we had fun doing that."

"It was hard for people to make a living," Utke said, growing more serious. "They couldn't farm the way they had. Gas, rubber, and parts were all scarce. But we managed. We wanted to help our armed forces win the war."

When that war was over, and the Korean War was past, LeRoy married Wilma Gering, a Bulldog classmate, and they had two sons. LeRoy worked for Whitman County Engineers and Wilma worked in the telephone office that used to be in Colfax, then one of the banks, and then cooked lunch for school kids until she retired.

I really like this next story for several reasons. One, it came back with absolutely no corrections on it whatsoever. That likely was because Inez is a dear friend and I'm thinking she would rather suffer error than point out my mistakes! Beyond that, this story relates a part of World War II that few people know about, that is the extent to which the government was willing to go to cover all bases both at home and abroad. This is not only Inez Broweleit's story, but America's story personified.

INEZ BROWELEIT

Inez Broweleit was born in Dodge, North Dakota, a town of about one hundred and twenty people. Like so many families, hers moved a bit during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era. She started studying at a country school in Haliday, North Dakota, then moved on to Minnesota for the third and fourth grades while her father looked for work wherever he could get it. The school she attended in Minnesota was also a typical country school. She was not taught decimals, so her dad, whom she claims was a "math whiz," tutored her and the rest of his children in math at night. He had wanted to be an accountant but the depression got in his path, and he was only able to complete an eighth grade education. Yet when Inez got to nursing school, of the thirty-six students in her class she was the only one who could divide fractions. Her parents wanted their children to have an education and made sure all seven of them had the opportunity to be good readers, encouraging them to find little nooks in their home to quietly read as often as possible.

She and her family moved back to Dodge when she was in the fifth grade and Inez stayed there until she graduated from High School in 1944. The school she attended contained all classes first through twelfth in one compact building, replete with a spiral slide serving as a fire escape from the top floor. A daylight basement held grades one through three and the restrooms. Grades four through six occupied one side of the first floor, Grades seven and eight the other. The High School met in the two rooms on the top floor where required subjects were taught in rotation throughout the four year program.

It was in that building on December 8, 1941 that Inez and her school mates heard President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declare war. She and her family had heard the news about Pearl Harbor the day before on their battery operated radio, but it was while she sat with her classmates in their familiar high school surroundings that the sobering news of great impending change settled down on her life. Over the next year major transitions occurred at the school: all the men teachers disappeared to be replaced by women or by men who were not accepted for service in the armed forces.

"They got who they could," Inez recalls. "Our Principal was a man who had taught in a reformatory."

Inez had wanted to be a teacher all her younger years, but just shortly before the news of Pearl Harbor came to Dodge she had experienced another kind of change in her life. She had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord, and almost immediately thereafter determined she wanted to be a nurse. So it was that she graduated from High School on June 4, 1944 and reported for three years of classes and training on June 7, 1944 under a program sponsored by the United States government called the US Cadet Nurses Corps.

The US Cadet Nurses Corps had been established in June 1943 to increase the number of nurses in the country as quickly as possible. So many had been called upon to serve in war zones in Europe, the Pacific, and on the China-India-Burma front that there was a huge demand for nurses both at home and in combat areas. The United States Public Health Service subsidized the entire education of nursing students like Inez, including tuition, fees, books, uniforms, and a monthly stipend. The students were required to then engage in essential military or civilian nursing for the duration of the war. The program offered an accelerated three-year training period and increased the number of graduate nurses prepared for advanced teaching and specialized positions in all nursing programs. In the last six months of the program the Cadets were assigned to civilian or military hospitals to help alleviate the critical nursing shortage.

The program was in operation from July 1, 1943 through December 31, 1949. The total federal expenditure was one hundred sixty million three hundred twenty thousand four hundred and forty-five dollars. One thousand one hundred and twenty-five out of one thousand three hundred schools of nursing participated. In most of those one thousand one hundred and twenty-five schools eighty to one hundred percent of the students enrolled joined the Cadet Nurses Corps. Total enrollment in all one thousand three hundred schools numbered one hundred and seventy-nine thousand and of that number, one hundred sixty-nine thousand four hundred and forty-three were Cadet Nurses.

There were six students in Inez's High School class. Three of them went into nurses training. When Inez reported to Bismarck Evangelical Hospital School of Nursing on June 7, 1944, she immediately began a rigorous training program that prepared her for her chosen career.

Her first summer's classes which ran through June, July, and August included pharmacology, sociology, psychology, and chemistry and anatomy, both of which had labs. After two weeks respite at the end of the summer her class dropped from thirty-six to thirty-three women who continued together in a regular nursing curriculum at the hospital until they graduated on June 7, 1947. Only one failed to graduate because she dropped out six months early to get married. The women were trained not for war service, but for nursing, to serve where needed in all departments. They trained in various Operating Rooms, Radiology, Obstetrics, everything, not specializing as is done now. Most of the lectures were provided by doctors on staff.

"Some of the doctors were not nice. We were looked upon as their slaves. But, maybe respect for doctors was a good thing," Inez said thoughtfully.

The Cadet Corps women were on call at night, any night. When a woman presented for delivery, they stayed to welcome the newborn. In lab situations they were required to practice on each other, performing such things as baths, bed making, and giving injections. If they broke a thermometer or syringe they had to pay for those things out of their stipend which was five dollars a month when they started, increasing to ten dollars a month during their last year of training.

"The first time I gave a shot, a good friend was my 'patient,' " Inez said with a smile. "After I gave it to her I asked her how it felt and she hadn't felt it at all!"

Living conditions during her Cadet Nurses Corps training provided fond memories for Broweleit. The hospital bought an old mansion, the home of a Bismarck banker, and converted it into a richly appointed dormitory for the Cadets, who were considered by other medical people on the campus to be renegades. Their home for three years was decorated with gold leaf and other ornate features. The girls were assigned sleeping quarters on bunk beds in bedrooms and ten of them, of which Inez was one, slept on bunks on a sleeping porch. The spacious living room was on the first floor, as was the housemother's bedroom and bath. They had study halls plus shower rooms built into the basement.

Early in life Inez had learned good study habits. She liked to learn and did so by reading the text assigned, listening in class, and taking notes. She was able to easily remember what was relevant. While other students would burn the midnight oil cramming for exams, Inez would fall asleep with a book on her lap, then take the test. She ended up with a 4.0 average.

Life was strenuous, but also had its lighter moments. A friend, Maxine, found a woolly worm one day and put it on the open pages of a book she was reading. Forgetting it was there, she slammed the book shut. Inez joined all the nursing students who put scarves over their hair, formed a procession, and had a backyard funeral for the little woolly worm. She did mention that a cranky woman next door was constantly complaining about the fun they were having, even frequently calling the police who seemed unbothered by the young women's behavior.

The war had little direct effect on Bismarck Evangelical Hospital School of Nursing. Since it was not a military hospital they were not recipients of the wounded or prisoners of war. As the war began to wind down, senior nurses started filtering back from war service, as did many doctors.

In 1946 Inez's dad bought a stump farm in Idaho and moved his family west, leaving her in North Dakota. That year she bought Christmas presents for all her family and mailed them to Idaho, all on what she was able to save from her stipend.

Although she graduated on June 7, 1947, Inez had to work at the Bismarck hospital until July 17^th to make up for some days she had been off sick over her three years of training. Once those days were made up, she headed west on a Greyhound Bus. She looked for work in Lewiston, then at Gritman Hospital in Moscow, but was unable to get a position because nurses who were married to men taking classes on the G.I. Bill were given preference. There was no hospital in Pullman, so she finally ventured over to Colfax in October of 1947 and asked for an interview. She was granted one on the spot and told, "You're hired." Broweleit started the next Monday.

She credits her quick hire to the understanding the people interviewing her had about the reputation of the Quain and Ramstead Clinic based at Bismarck Evangelical Hospital. The doctors gathered there had been the ones who trained her and they were considered nationally to be as good as the people at Mayo Clinic.

The Cadet Nurses Corps provided Inez Broweleit with an education that served her well not only in a career that continued into the late 1980s, but also as she provided care for her husband, Elmer, and her daughter, Gail, as they sustained long term illnesses. Her dedication to nursing also inspired her daughter Chris to follow her mother into her profession.

During our interview, Bob Clegg mentioned that when he was injured he spent time in the 20^th General Hospital in Ledo, Assam, in India. Later when I was talking to Richard Stravens he told me his wife's daughter had recently met Marie Parker, a retired Army nurse, in Kent, Washington and Marie told her that during the war she had taken care of a man named Bob with a last name "something like Craig" from Colfax while he was in the hospital where she worked in India. I spoke to Marie on the phone. She has told her story in a book titled Missing Pieces - Memoirs of W.W. II, a book similar to TRIBUTE. She was pleased to talk with me and remembered very well , as she put it, "Bob Clegg was a very nice man." He still is and here's his story.

BOB CLEGG

Bob Clegg was born June 24, 1920 and raised in Colfax. He graduated from Colfax High and spent two years at Washington State College in Pullman in pre-law, then decided to work for awhile before returning to college. In October of 1941 he married Lois Elliott when they were twenty-one and nineteen years old. After he returned from World War II he went to work for Lois's dad's business, Elliott's Paint Store, the day after Christmas in 1945. He worked for the family business until 1960, then bought the store and operated it until 1977 when he retired.

When he tired of retirement, he took on the post of Manager of the Port of Whitman County for six years during which time he was involved in the leasing factor and worked with the Port Commission on grain elevators and grain transporting, plus a planeing mill at the Port of Wilma. He retired again in 1983, acquired an RV and he and Lois toured twelve thousand miles around the country. They raised one son and two daughters and he has three grandchildren. He was recently widowed and lives in Colfax, from where he volunteered for military service early in 1942.

Bob Clegg knew he was draftable. He had checked with the Director of the Local Draft Board in 1942 and found he had been classified 3A, but he volunteered anyway for Officer Candidate School, and was in the Army. He took his wife along with him to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia for his Infantry training after Basic Training at Camp Roberts in California. After thirteen weeks at Fort Benning he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Infantry. He was returned to Camp Roberts and was shortly assigned to the 2^nd Filipino Infantry Regiment at Fort Ord, California. The Regiment was then moved to Camp Cook near Santa Maria, California where it was put through Basic and Advanced Training. This took place over a two year period.

However, in early 1944 a War Department Directive was issued allowing Filipinos over the age of thirty-eight to receive a hardship discharge. Over one-third of the enlisted personnel took advantage of the Directive, leaving many officers to be reassigned.

About that time another War Department Directive was received asking for volunteers for a special Jungle Fighting Mission. Many of the officers of the 2^nd Filipino Regiment decided to take the opportunity to stay together. They were assembled at Fort Meade, Maryland and soon were on a transport ship, on their way, as they found out later, to India by way of the southern tip of Africa.

They landed in Bombay and were met by two high ranking officers who told them they were now members of Merrill's Marauders. (There is some information on the Marauders in an article titled "The Forgotten War" in Part Seven at the back of this book.) Everyone was completely in the dark as to what their assignments entailed. They then endured a seven-day trip across India, by Indian railroad, headed for Ledo. They later learned that Merrill's Marauders had departed many weeks before Clegg's arrival.

The Marauders had left from Ledo, Assam in Northern India heading for the mountains separating Indian from Burma. Their destination: Myitkyina, Burma, a Japanese stronghold. They journeyed on foot, using mules to carry their supplies. Not only were they confronted by the enemy, but also every disease known to the area including Malaria, Dengue Fever, and Typhus, plus leeches, snakes, and big jungle cats. General Merrill was stricken on that journey by a heart condition but insisted on staying with his troops. It had become obvious that by the time the surviving original Marauders reached Myitkyina, replacements would be needed since they would have just endured a horrible march through Burma, fighting Japanese troops the entire distance.

Upon Clegg's arrival in Myitkyina, it was very clear to him that the Marauders were indeed in bad shape. He then understood the reason he and the other volunteers traveling with him flew in to join the Marauders the day after Merrill's men arrived in Myitkyina.

The Forgotten War suddenly became a reality to Clegg and the rest of the volunteers. The Japanese had fortified on one side of the Myitkyina air strip, the United States troops the other. The new men were required to form units sitting under parachute material tents.

"It was a screwed up mess," recalled Bob, shaking his head at the memory of that day. "I was an anti-tank officer, but there were no anti-tank guns."

The idea was to take that northernmost outpost in Burma away from the Japanese. With minimal indoctrination they engaged a live enemy with live ammo, and lost. They drew back, then the 3^rd Battalion, of which Clegg was a part, moved north of the airstrip, with orders to set up a road block, which they established in about six hours.

"Then suddenly a Jap truck showed up," explained Clegg. "They were all so surprised to see someone at the road block that they got away. I think they were as surprised to see us there as we were to see them."

The operation was stalemated for several weeks. A few rounds were fired, and several men were killed, but not much damage was done to the enemy. The Japanese had been there awhile and were well-protected and camouflaged. The 3^rd Battalion decided to pull out and called for a B-25 squadron from China to bomb the area. That they did, but the Chinese pilots, for some inexplicable reason, dropped all their bombs in the nearby Irrawaddy River, and never touched the Japanese emplacements.

At that point, the officers in charge recognized that their units were lacking in training, so they brought up another Battalion, one that was trained, to occupy their place. After some intensive training, they moved closer to the Japanese. Clegg and six or seven other men were stationed at an outpost on a rice paddy, and one day decided to move back a bit. Just after they did the Japanese opened up on their former position with a 155 Mountain Howitzer. One of the shells dropped fifteen feet to the right of Clegg as they were evacuating and the exploding shrapnel went through his right arm.

He spent thirty days in the 20^th General Hospital in Ledo, Assam, India. It was staffed by University of Pennsylvania medical personnel. "The Army would recruit medical personnel who had trained together and worked well together to staff field hospitals. They knew what to do as a team," Bob explained. "I got really good care. They also sent other teams, like railroad people who were sent to India. Two Battalions of train people were sent to upgrade the India transportation system. They had a rough go for three years, not from artillery, but from disease like dengue, malaria, and yellow fever."

When he had recovered he was sent to China to train Chinese Infantry Officers, some of whom had been in the military fifteen years. "Their methods and tactics were antiquated," said Bob. "We had to work through Chinese interpreters, but they were all intelligent men who spoke perfect English."

When asked if the Chinese officers understood what they were being told, Clegg shrugged and said, "I never knew. The proof was in the practice."

The southwestern area of China has traditionally contained the dregs of China. Governors of other provinces for centuries have sent criminals and derelicts to the Yunan Province to rid themselves of problems. Even as early as Marco Polo's travels, that reality was notable to him. That made it difficult to get the people there to work as a team against the Japanese.

When the A-bomb was dropped, Clegg and the other men stationed in China were not at all aware of what had happened for many days. But soon he was told to fly over the Hump to Calcutta. From Calcutta he was shipped out headed for a Mediterranean Cruise that ultimately would take him home to Colfax. While he had three attacks of malaria while in China, he only had one slight recurrence after his return, something for which he is grateful.

His summed up in one brief statement his attitude about serving in the China-Burma-India war. "In that kind of a mess," he shrugged, "You make the best of it."

Another nice man is the main character of this next story. I often asked the men and women I interviewed "what happened then?" kinds of questions. When I asked John, "What happened when you got to Europe?" he replied, "They kept shooting at me!" Well, Ok, yes, I guess it was a war.

JOHN ELLIS

John L. Ellis was born in Burns, Wyoming and unlike most people who migrated west to Whitman County, he moved east, first to Iowa, then to Chicago, Illinois where he lived in 1940. His father, who had an idea that war was pending, hoped to prepare him for what appeared to be his future by sending him to Kemper Military School in Boonesville, Missouri. There he became interested in flying and got a private pilot's license. He married Lorna Hinz from Anamosa, Iowa in December, 1942, but they didn't move to Colfax until 1953.

Meanwhile, he signed up with the Air Force in the spring of 1942, when indeed America was at war. After Basic Training, he spent nine months in Cadet School in such exotic places as San Antonio, Brady, and Dalhart, graduating in December 1943. He found he had at least a little advantage in being able to survive Cadet School. Since he had flown before, he was able to manage PT-19s, BT-13s and twin engine planes easier than some of his fellow Cadets. When he got into a B-17 he even felt free to buzz the prison in Anamosa, Iowa as a form of greeting to his wife who was living with her parents near that institution while he was in the service.

After his training was completed he flew to England. The flight took twenty-one days, due to bad weather in Iceland and Greenland, plus mechanical problems. His reply to the question, "What happened when you got to Europe?" was, "They kept shooting at me!"

That was certainly the story of bombers flying out of England during the war, in his case in the early spring of 1944. He flew two missions on D-Day and says he was really glad to be up in the sky looking down on all the chaos going on below him on Omaha Beach.

He flew over Berlin twice, both of those experiences, Ellis says, were, "Real scary. There was real heavy flak, that is pieces of metal shot from ground anti-aircraft guns, and lots of fighters coming at us."

The first time he flew over Berlin, a piece of flak the size of his thumb put a hole in the floor of the cockpit of his plane and was spent in his combat boot, but didn't injure his foot. His second Berlin mission saw a larger piece of flak come through the windshield. His co-pilot had his hand on the throttle and the flak skimmed his knuckles, flew past John, and hit the flares on the cockpit wall behind him, igniting them and causing sparks to fly all over the place. The flak then bounced back and hit him in the back of the neck. Fortunately he was wearing his flight jacket, a leather jacket commonly worn by pilots, and a flak suit, designed of kapok to protect from just such flying objects.

"Kapok flew!" John exclaimed. "And I felt that thing lodge on my neck." He retrieved the piece of flak and still has it, mounted on a piece of wood by his grandfather. It is about the size of an index finger, with really rough edges. That flak came a flight-jacket-and-flak-suit's thickness from doing him great harm. Their bombardier got hit on that mission too, but he was not seriously injured either.

"Other than that, I had a really odd tour of duty," John said. When he said earlier in the interview, "They kept shooting at me," he didn't just mean the Germans. "We had more problems with our own side than with the Germans," he said. "We did take a lot of German flak and a lot of fire from German fighters. But we lost a tail-gunner, not to the enemy."

They had been briefed to make a bomb drop on target, then make a sharp right hand turn to clear the area. When they got to the target they were told to vacate. He had to slide under another plane to follow that order and when he did a B-17 started dropping its bombs.

"He dropped bombs from our radio to the tail, hitting and killing our tail gunner. That was the really sad part of our tour of duty," Ellis said.

His rudder was bent over and both elevators were full of holes from that accident. "We still made it back to base," he said. "The B-17 was a good plane."

Another mission he flew when he was at the mercy of American fire, found him coming around some mountains and flying right into a dog fight between some P-51s and some German ME-109s. One of the German 109 pilots was trying to out-run a P-51 who was hard after him. The German flew by so close John could see his face clearly. The American shot at the 109 and hit John's plane, putting out two engines and setting the wing on fire. Again, the B-17's two remaining engines got him safely back to base.

There was yet another time they were deep into Germany and the last bomber out of the target area that night. His co-Pilot saw another B-17 come up under him. He put his plane into a whip stall to avoid hitting the other plane which resulted in either torn gas lines or gas tank damage, he was not sure which. This time they didn't make it back to England but had to put down in the North Sea after they lost two engines, then a third went out for lack of gasoline. The B-17 had life rafts on each side of the plane above the pilot and the crew was able to deploy them when they hit the water since the plane didn't sink for about twenty minutes.

He had been on the radio with the British Air-Sea Rescue who had stayed on with them for the whole time as they were running out of gas, getting them positioned for rescue. The rescue people steered him across the North Sea from boat to boat keeping him as close to rescue vessels as possible until he finally went down. It was the 31^st of July and yet the water they went into was so cold they knew they could last only a few minutes if they actually stayed in the water. The rafts they inflated saved them from hypothermia and kept them alive until help arrived.

"The Brits had a terrific air sea rescue team, " John said, shaking his head as he recalled their well executed response to his critical situation. They found him and his crew with a one-engine-on-top Walrus sea plane built to hold two people. When his crew had been pulled on board, there were twelve people in the plane and it was too heavy to take off. They taxied on the water for three hours until they got connected with a rescue boat.

The bombardier on the plane was a historian who later wrote to the Royal Air Sea Rescue and got a copy of the orders written to go pick them up. John has copies of that correspondence to remind him of the job well done by the British on his crew's behalf.

In addition to dodging American fire, John Ellis flew missions twice to deliver supplies to the French Freedom Fighters in the French Alps. They set out to drop parachutes attached to canisters holding guns, ammo, toilet paper, food - whatever the French needed to survive against German attack and occupation.

The first mission required them to drop their canisters in a narrow valley where the Freedom Fighters were pinned down by Germans entrenched on the mountain tops lining the valley. The planes had to fly wing tip to wing tip down into the valley with Germans shooting at them as they went in. They were in such close quarters that some parachutes caught on the wings and tails of other planes coming in behind them. The second mission was to a more open space where they had to fly over at five hundred feet, taking ground fire from German troops. "There were heavy reprisals from those missions," John said. "The Germans went in and shot up some little towns, killing civilians who received some of the things we dropped."

Ellis spoke of R & R after his North Sea experience at an English estate where he was awakened at 6 a.m. and asked if he wished to have tea. That was a later call than what he usually expected. He and his crew were awakened at their quarters at Bury St. Edmonds between one and three in the morning for general briefing followed by pilot briefing prior to six to ten hour missions.

Although it took him twenty-one days to fly over, after he completed his thirty-five missions he returned on a ship in just eleven days. He and his wife moved to Colfax where they raised one girl and two boys and he owned and operated a concrete plant for twenty years, then sold out and retired, or at least retired in his own way. He has worked at different jobs that interested him such as the Town and Country men's clothing store that was on Main Street for so many years and is now part of The Clothes Horse.

John is proud to say his North Sea story has found its way into the Air Force National Archives. One John Winslet kept a war-time diary in which he included the story, and that diary now resides in the archives.

Whenever I asked anyone in Colfax who we should interview, they all said, "Talk to Harry Fries. He was at Pearl Harbor." So I did. Here's what Harry had to say.

HARRY FRIES

Harry Fries was in the aft wash room of the repair ship he was assigned to on December 7, 1941. He heard explosions coming from Hickam Field on Ford Island and wondered why practice runs had been scheduled on a Sunday morning.

He went up on deck and then he saw them.

Wave after wave of Japanese airplanes were swooping down over Battleship Row, some skimming just fifty feet over the water, some barely missing the rigging on his ship. One pilot flew so close to him he could see the man's face. That pilot waved to Harry as he flew by! But the Japanese pilot didn't fire or drop a bomb or torpedo on Harry's ship. His target was the United States fleet of Battleships.

The repair ship Medusa on which he stood was in a place of relative security above the northwest side of Ford Island right off Pearl City and away from the bulk of the battleships docked in Pearl Harbor. The next day, the Medusa was scheduled to tie up next to the Battleship Utah, which Harry was soon to discover had rolled over after taking a torpedo, leaving few survivors. The Utah was a target ship for the enemy because it carried sophisticated gear the Navy had developed for use when firing their armament. The difference of one day kept Harry out of the apex of the biggest sea disaster in history.

Fries later learned that one man caught in the hold of the overturned Oklahoma tried to organize a couple dozen men still alive and get them to safety. He urged them all to hold hands and make their way out of the ship by going through a hatch which was then beneath them and under water. That hatch would lead them outside of the ship and they could then swim their way to the surface, if they could hold their breath that long. Only three would go with him. They survived. The rest did not.

Harry Fries believes the Japanese made one very big mistake in sighting on crucial targets, a mistake he felt no regret about. There was a group of gigantic oil tanks standing in Pearl Harbor that were full and had quite recently been painted up, all bright and shiny. Apparently the Japanese figured them to be decoys and ignored them entirely. Had they hit those tanks, there would have been a tremendous fire.

The Medusa survived the attack and stayed in Hawaii until the spring of 1943, with Harry Fries on board.

Harry had been born in Lexington, Nebraska, moved around a bit with his family, then settled in Pullman where he enlisted in the Navy for six years, being inducted on February 11, 1941. He was sent to San Diego for training, then boarded the Medusa on September 18, 1941 and set sail for Pearl Harbor.

The Medusa was launched April 16, 1923 and commissioned September 18, 1924 at Puget Sound in Washington. She was designed as a fleet repair ship for major repairs beyond a ship's own capabilities, without benefit of a Navy Yard. She was equipped with foundry, blacksmith, electrical, pipe, carpentry, machine, and motion picture shops. Her machinery included lathes, radial drills, milling, slotting, and boring machines as well as optical repair apparatus, armature bake ovens, and coil winding machines. She also had a large laundry, bakery, and refrigeration units. Her deck rode about fifty feet above the surface and her superstructure extended another fifty feet. The ship had a huge hold that could have contained a two bedroom house with room for a car to drive around it. The repair ship was put to good and immediate use repairing other ships damaged in the surprise attack.

Harry's ship had some mounted guns and gunner crews, one of which crews he was a member. Gunners were commonly strapped in on a 20mm gun, knowing they were to stay in place regardless of what went on until the gun didn't need him any more. If the ship was hit, all on board knew they had three minutes until the ship would sink. Harry considered what his chances might be if his ship were caught at sea without destroyer protection as they moved on to other islands to repair stricken ships. He decided in advance he would go down with the ship rather than get in the water and hit a depth charge which might harm men around him when it exploded.

On April 4, 1943 the Medusa did indeed get underway for a combat area. At Efate, New Hebrides she found more than enough work to keep her and her crew busy for the next year. On March 27, 1944 she departed for a series of shorter assignments, first New Guinea, then Guadalcanal. As they moved from island to island they saw no action from enemy ships nor were they attacked by airplanes, Kamikaze or otherwise. The only serious situation Harry's ship and crew faced was once when they grounded on a coral reef. The ship rocked from side to side finally floating free at high tide, much to their relief. On June 1 she steamed to Sydney for repairs to her hull damaged by that grounding on Buna Shoal before continuing on to Manua.

Mid-January 1945 Harry and the Medusa departed for Hallandia to join a convoy for San Pefro Bay where she serviced ships engaged in the capture of Luzon, other Philippine Islands, and the Ryukyus until July 18. After the A-bombs fell, she steamed to Manila, from where she eventually headed back to the United States.

Harry Fries, in the meantime, had returned stateside earlier in 1945 because he had leave coming. He was then stationed at the San Diego Navy Station, from where he was discharged. He pulled Post Office duty there, "good duty," according to Harry. It was while he was in San Diego that he and Elsie got married.

He and another sailor, Lissie from Texas, worked alternate days. When Harry decided he wanted a week off to marry Elise, he asked, "Who will stand by for me for a week?"

Lissie answered, "I will for you this week if you'll stand by for me next week."

"Done," said Harry, and so they each worked their own shift and also that of the other for a week, and got a week off without the Navy knowing about it, until now.

One of the moves Harry made when he was a youngster was a year spent in Denmark. A few years ago he and his wife Elsie, mother of their two children, took a trip to Denmark with the express intent of finding a Danish bakery he had told her about for years. Elsie just could not believe anything could be as good as Harry described that shop's Danish pastries to be. Happily, she discovered it was everything he had said it was!

Leonard Guptill is one of those men who grew up in Colfax just in time to see war break out in Europe. He joined early and stayed late, and married a WAVE somewhere toward the end of the war.

LEONARD GUPTILL

Leonard Guptill was born in a log house with a sod roof on a homestead near Wanetta, Montana in 1917. They had no plumbing, electricity, telephone, or central heat. They hauled water in barrels from a spring a mile away. His dad dug several wells, but never hit water. A painting his sister did of his first house hangs on the wall of the Guptill's home, a reminder of how things were when he was young.

There wasn't actually a town in Wanetta. Some neighbors distributed the mail and his folks scratched the land, which was in cattle country, hoping to raise enough to sustain their family of six boys and a girl. They moved to Oregon when Leonard was six years old, then the family split up in 1927. His dad moved to Colfax and his mom stayed in Oregon City, so Leonard jumped back and forth a lot. He and one of his brothers made one trip on a freight train when he was fourteen years old, riding the rails from Vancouver, Washington to Hooper, the closest the line ran to Colfax. The brothers walked from there, only catching a couple of short-distance rides on the infrequently traveled gravel road that ran from Hooper to Colfax.

When they were with their dad the boys batched with him and his dog and walked or hitched-hiked to school. Leonard graduated from the eighth grade at Kamiah, or Skene, a one-room school that had three students the year he finished, the other students being seventh and fifth graders. They indeed could tell stories of walking many miles through the snow to school from way out on Parvin Road. He graduated from Colfax High in 1938, having missed several years of school due to moving so often.

He did farm work in Whitman County while in Europe the Brits and Germans warmed up their local war, each turning to their allies to join their battle. Leonard saw what was coming and decided he wanted to get in the branch of service he preferred, so in February of 1940 he joined the Navy. He again rode the rails, this time in a passenger car, first class, to San Diego where he was in Boot Camp for eight weeks. He then went into Radio School, which he didn't like at all. After a month he found that the dits and dots all ran together, and so in July of 1940 he transferred to the Mississippi and headed across the Pacific.

On July 24, 1940 he crossed the equator headed for Christmas Island. He noted that people in the area were still looking for Amelia Earhart who had disappeared three years earlier. The equator crossing called for some good-natured hazing. Some of the shellbacks, ones who had crossed before, dressed up as pirates and in other ridiculous costumes. They had fashioned a long sack of garbage which they made the new crossers crawl through, and insisted that some of the men to stand guard in diapers holding toilet paper rolls up to their faces as they would binoculars. They had to run a gauntlet while some of the men gave them a whack, but none too hard. The certificate he got for enduring the hazing made it all worthwhile. Guptill ended up crossing the equator around fifty times, and also made an Arctic Circle crossing for which he earned a handsome certificate and the right to spit against the wind.

He and the other sailors spent a lot of time polishing brass. Before the US engaged in combat the Navy required all brass be shined every day. Once the fleet was in combat they let the brass dull down to keep from being easy targets. They also scrubbed decks. They had big stiff brushes they worked with, using salt water to rinse. The briny water ruined their shoes so they worked bare-footed, causing blisters to rise on the tops of their feet from the intense tropical sunshine.

When they reached Hawaii the Mississippi tied up alongside the Arizona. "The guys from our boot camp were split between the two ships," Guptill said sadly. "The ones on the Arizona are gone."

"But we lived the good life in Hawaii for a year or so," Leonard said. "We had good liberty, the weather was great, and duty was easy." Then in May of 1941, much to his disappointment, the Mississippi was transferred to the East Coast and he went from Hawaii to Iceland. From June to December of that year, the Mississippi operated with the Atlantic Fleet, guarding commerce on patrol duties in the area between the East Coast and Iceland and acting as a covering force for convoys and lines of communications. During that time scouting and searching operations conducted in the vicinity of Iceland included a search for the Nazi battleships Shornhorst and Tirpitz, then suspected of violating United States neutrality. "There were a lot of German subs prowling around too. We had lost a couple of destroyers," Guptill said. "And this was before we were at war with Germany. We never did find those ships."

It was a miserable six months for the crew. It was bitterly cold, one of the worst winters on record. Leonard recalls that as a Sailor Third Class he had to stand in the range finder, a steel box high atop the ship, from where they aimed all the big guns aboard ship during battle. It was used as a look-out post the rest of the time. During the worst storm he ever encountered, in fact one of the worst recorded in the North Atlantic, the men standing duty had to be tied into an upright position in the range finder in order not to be swept overboard by the surf reaching that highest point on the ship. They lost three airplanes off their deck, plus all the guns, ones that were bolted down. A steel ladder up the side of the ship was ripped off and curled up by the crashing surf and the ventilators shipside were all smashed. Although the ship displaced thirty-two thousand tons and had a top speed of twenty-one knots, when she would hit a surging wave head-on during that memorable storm, the ship would stop dead in the water.

After telling about the storm, Leonard kind of smiled and said, "But at night when we were in our hammocks it was kind of nice. No matter how far the ship rolled, our hammocks would just kind of sway and stay level."

Guptill's battle station was three decks below in the powder room. He worked among 100-pound bags of powder which he loaded on conveyors that sent the powder to the gun turrets. It took four 100-pound bags of powder to fire one shell. There were twelve 14-inch,

50-caliber, 65-mile range guns that fired one ton projectiles. The gunners received their firing orders from a spotter in the range finder atop the ship and their firing power from Leonard and other sailors three decks below.

The morning of December 7, 1941found the Mississippi and her sister-ships of Division Three among the very few undamaged battleships then in the United States Navy. Leonard and most of the ship's crew were on the fantail watching a movie around 7 p.m. on the 7^th when they got the word Pearl Harbor had been attacked. The movie stopped and they were called to battle stations in case there was some action brewing near them. They maintained a twenty-four-hour patrol for several days. He was assigned a watch with an officer where he examined every inch of the ship for sabotage.

"It was the first time I had been all through the ship," Leonard noted. "As it turned out everyone on board was loyal. We didn't find anything."

After Pearl Harbor had been hit, the Mississippi headed back to the Pacific through the Panama Canal. They stood patrol duty on the West Coast, then in August of 1942 Guptill was assigned to a newly commissioned ship, the USS Nassau. It was an Escort Aircraft Carrier docked in Bremerton, commissioned to ferry airplanes to fighting ships in the South Pacific. After trial runs and fitting out activities in the Seattle area, the ship was underway for Pearl Harbor on October 14. They were hauling planes, loaded wing tip to wing tip on the flight deck. They had to be lifted on and off with a crane. They sailed with no escort.

"We never saw an enemy ship or plane. We did see some shot up planes that were returning from battle. But I never had to carry a gun, didn't have to sleep in mud. We carried replacement airplanes to ships that would go into battle zones where they could fly off the carrier and do damage."

In the middle of 1943 Guptill was promoted to Chief Petty Officer, the highest ranking enlisted man in his division. Later that same year he became seriously ill and was placed in a Navy hospital for six months, after which he was assigned in July of 1944 to the Navy Supply Depot in Clearfield, Utah. That distant site, far enough away from possible attack, was a safe place to gather, box, and ship items to the front. The supply personnel would put enough of each item needed on the front lines into crates, each marked with numbers for easy identification when the crate reached its destination in the South Pacific. The crates were packed on pallets that were able to float. The pallets, or base loads, were designed so that when a unit took an island they would have all they needed to set up camp. "When they were ready to set up they had no problem finding a particular tool. The base loads were complete down to silverware for the Captain's dinner table," Leonard said, rather proudly even after all these years.

In 1945 he had to return to the hospital once again, this time to Oak Knoll in Oakland, California. But there had been a change for the good in his life. While in Utah he had met a young woman, a WAVE named Lorayne Wuerffel, from Noblesville, Indiana near Indianapolis. Lorayne had enlisted and gone through Basic Training at Hunter College in New York, then attended Storekeeper School in Milladgeville, Georgia. After completing her schooling she transferred to Clearfield, Utah where she met Leonard.

They married on July 31, 1945. "The Navy paid for our honeymoon," beamed Leonard. He was transferred from Oak Knoll to a Naval hospital in Glenwood Springs, Colorado in August and was there until November 2, 1945 when they were both discharged. "The Navy was real good about letting Lorayne go with me," he said.

After the war Leonard farmed, then served as the Post Master in St. John. Lorayne worked as a rural carrier after their children were in school. He and Lorayne raised three children, have seven grandchildren and five great grandchildren. Leonard spoke of his own grandparents who had seventeen grandchildren in the service in World War II. Only two didn't return. Four of the other Guptill brothers served, one a Seabee in the South Pacific and three in Europe. "We all made it back," Leonard Guptill said quietly. That is a lot to be thankful for.

Don Hart loaned me a really good book titled Target of Opportunity, written by a man who was one of his roommates in England during the war. The book told of Don's experience with a British Air Sea Rescue team. A good number of people loaned me books about their units, priceless volumes that are not replaceable for the most part. I appreciated so much the opportunity to read those rare books and have shared as much from them as possible, as I did in Don Hart's story.

DON AND BETTY HART

Don Hart flew P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs with the 78^th Fighter Group for three hundred and forty hours of combat during World War II. The Thunderbolt carried armor-piercing bullets that were fired in half second bursts. Hart flew four/lost four of those P-47s, planes that were known to out-dive any other airplane. The Mustang burned only half as much gas as did the Thunderbolt, that is only fifty gallons per hour, so the Mustangs could fly past Berlin from England bases, and get back safely. They both carried two five hundred pound bombs on their wings.

The man who flew those war planes was born in Walla Walla in 1923, where he recently joined the Walla Walla High School class of 1941 for their sixtieth class reunion. That class has had a reunion every ten years, thanks to the efforts of one of their classmates who has organized it every single time. After high school Don went to work for Boeing and was working as a riveter on B-17s when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The building he worked in was camouflaged over one night, as was the entire plant. It was made to look like a village from overhead. Anti-aircraft guns were installed and air raid shelters very quickly built, the expectation being that Japan would bomb all military equipment manufacturing plants.

Not many women had worked at Boeing until the war started. First young women started coming to work, riveting alongside the men. When grandmas started punching the time clock, Don Hart decided it was time to go. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on December 14, 1942 at the Walla Walla Air Base. He passed the physical and then took a three hour test that asked one hundred and fifty questions.

"I took one look at it, figured I would have to answer fifty questions an hour, and started in," Don said. He recalled a couple of questions, one having to do with gear ratios, and one asking the nickname of the P-38. He answered those and enough other questions correctly to pass the test and was in the Army Air Corps.

First stop was Pre-Flight School at the Santa Ana Air Base which is now John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He spent nine weeks in classes that included plane identification and learning codes. Next came Primary School at Blythe, California on the Mojave Desert. He had always wanted to fly, getting that desire from his father who flew in World War I, and Primary was his first opportunity. His flight instructors were mainly "spray pilots" who taught them in two-seater PT 22 Ryans. He soloed after ten hours. His next move was to Lemore, California, which is now a Navy base. There he took classes and moved to PT-13s, which were low-wing single seat planes, to complete his Basic Training.

Then he was ready for Advanced Training which he took at Luke Field in Phoenix, Arizona. Luke Field was named for a World War I pilot who was known as a "balloon buster," or a flyer who shot down helium and hot air balloons used by the Germans. Don flew a P-40 Flying Tiger for ten hours at Luke Field but spent most of his time in the air in AT-6s, logging about one hundred eighty to two hundred air hours by the end of his Advanced Training. Yet another train trip took him to Abilene, Texas where he attended an Overseas Training School and first flew a P-47 Thunderbolt for about one hundred and fifty hours. After completing Overseas Training he was transported to New Jersey and shipped out on the Queen Elizabeth along with about seventeen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other military personnel including six hundred nurses.

"Competition was keen," Don smiled, "But they were all nice girls."

After landing in Clyde, Scotland, the airmen mounted a train and rode through blacked-out England to join the 78^th Fighter Group, 82^nd Fighter Squadron at Duxford. "We lived a good life at Duxford," Don admitted. "We paid a Batman, as they called them, a pound a month to clean our quarters, make our beds, and shine our shoes." Duxford had been a Royal Air Force base during World War I.

Life was not entirely easy for Hart while he was stationed there. He flew seventy-six missions, over three hundred hours, then put in an extension for another fifty hours, only forty of which he flew before the war ended. One of his more harrowing missions has been published in a book written by Hart's room mate at Duxford, Lt. Col. R. A. Dick Hewitt. The book, titled Target of Opportunity, gives a detailed account of Hewitt's life and times with the 78^th Fighter Group, 82^nd Fighter Squadron, 8^th Air Force. He uses Hart's experience of having to bail out over the North Sea to show how Britain's Air Sea Rescue teams operated.

Hart had skip-bombed a flak encampment and in the process sustained some damage to his plane. As he was flying back to base over the North Sea his prop ran away, his engine froze, and then quit dead. He quickly decided to ride it down to one thousand feet and bail out. When he got free of his plane he barely had time to pull his D-Ring to open his chute before he hit the water, almost playing it too close. Don inflated his Mae West and attempted to inflate his dingy which had been slung beneath his butt. It was then he remembered he had played hooky from class the day they were taught how to inflate the little life raft in front of him. As he bounced around in frigid waters, with strength brought by desperation, he sheered off the cotter pin holding closed the valve on the CO2 bottle. The dingy partially inflated, and with his last ounce of strength he pulled himself into it and was at last on top of the water instead of in it.

He had been flying with his flight leader Major Conner who saw him go down. Conner called ASR (Air Sea Rescue) to give them a fix on Hart's position. A Royal Air Force Wellington flew over in just fifteen minutes to drop rations and a mummy bag to help him stay warm and alive until a launch could reach his position, but he was so cold and tired he could not work his way into the mummy bag. That very mummy bag is now on display at the 8^th Air Force Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

The launch showed up in about an hour, before he was overtaken by hypothermia. Major Conner stayed with him, flying in circles, marking his position until the ASR arrived. At that point, Conner's gas supply was low and he flew back to Duxford. Three days after he was pulled out of the water, Don Hart was assigned another mission and was once again in the air.

About a month after the war ended, Hart headed home. He flew this time, on a B-17. They landed first on the Azores off Spain where they were weathered in for seven days, then flew to Newfoundland, then on to Bradley Air Field at Hartford, Connecticut. He was taken by train to Chicago where he was placed in charge of a troop train attached to a passenger train headed for Seattle. It took four days to travel from Boston to Fort Lewis, his final destination. When the train arrived at that Washington military base, all the other personnel had to march off to quarters while Hart boarded a recon car that was there to meet him since he carried all the records of the cross-country trip.

Don joined the Reserves and, having an efficiency point of 4.0 and having been in rank two years, he was promoted to Major. He had thought he would be going to Japan, but, as he said, "They dropped the big bomb."

Instead he went to San Angelo, Texas where he served as a tower officer for some time until he finally asked the big question: "How do you get out of Texas?"

The answer was to sign up for overseas duty. He did that and was sent to Germany as the House Procurement Officer in Straubing. His job was to clear civilian housing so the occupation forces could bring their wives and children to Germany to live with them.

"We took any house with a bathroom," Hart explained. The defeated Germans were given four days to get out of their houses after Don and his interpreter, whose father was a high ranking officer in the Nazi forces in Africa, explained to them what was going to happen. "I was the most hated man in Straubing," Don stated.

While in the Army Air Force Don sent home over three thousand dollars he made playing poker. His mother saved his money and when he came home he was able to start farming which he did for forty-five years. He married Betty and raised two boys and a girl, all of whom have served in the military in a variety of capacities while also earning advanced degrees in law, education, and business.

Betty Hart was in school at Eastern Washington State College during most of the war. She recalls giving her food stamps to the dining hall in the dorm where she lived so they could get food to feed the students, most of whom were women. She worked in a drug store while attending classes and during summer vacations. They rarely got any cigarettes or candy, since sugar was at a premium. When they did get a small shipment it was held under the counter for special customers. Betty related how she and the other girls would buy leg coloring, something like pancake makeup, to put on their legs so it looked like they were wearing silk or nylon hose. She said it dried easily and didn't rub off. Those who really wanted people to believe they were wearing hose drew a seam up the back of their legs with an eyebrow pencil. Those who had hosiery took extremely good care of them and if they got a runner, they would have it repaired. Repair ladies, who were usually very busy, would set up shop, that is a chair and a table, in places like Woolworth's or Newberry's. The repair ladies would reweave the run with a gadget made of wire.

Don and Betty discussed the rubber shortage and rubber drives where people were encouraged to give up their tires.

Betty said, "The government needed the rubber and rationed gas to protect the tire supply. We were not told until after the war that access to the rubber plantations had been cut off by the war, making it a larger problem than gas."

Don added, "I kind of think it was not so much that the government needed old rubber as it was that they were trying to keep people from driving and using gas."

Whatever the reason, at least we saved enough gas and rubber to keep Don Hart flying for nearly three hundred and fifty hours which was enough for us to win the war.

Coming up in this next story is some information that may come as a surprise to younger Whitman County residents who didn't know the Japanese had laid siege to Washington's West Coast during the early years of World War II. So many things have been purged from our history texts books, but the ones who were there can tell us about it, as Merle Hutchens did.

MERLE HUTCHENS

Merle Hutchens was born and lived in Pomeroy until 1941. He graduated from high school in 1936, worked on his folks' ranch, then registered for the draft in the fall of 1940. On April 7, 1941 his number came up and he was drafted into the Army. He reported to Spokane, then took the train to Ft. Lewis, near Seattle, where he was taken to the main fort to spend three days, according to Merle "in a lot of buildings giving out a lot of information." All the men who reported were sent to various groups, over seven hundred going along with him to North Fort Lewis for the next three months. They were divided into battalions of three hundred and fifty men, each battalion filling four barracks.

The 144^th Field Artillery had recently moved north from Santa Barbara. That unit was composed of service, headquarters, and three heavy artillery gunnery batteries. Merle was assigned to gunnery battery C. There were four gun sections in each battery, and twenty-two trucks in each battery. When he told them about his farm experience, he was put in the motor section, spent six weeks doing a little bit of everything, then worked in truck maintenance for the next two years.

He did, however, have an occasional change of venue after December 7, 1941. Every two to three weeks the Army rotated battalions back and forth from Fort Lewis out to Westport, on the Washington coastline. He and the other soldiers in his unit were sent to guard the coast against Japanese planes and boats, many of which were spotted in the months after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

"We got some," Merle said, speaking of the Japanese under siege by the 150 heavy artillery posted on the coast, "and then they drew back after about three months."

About mid-1942, Hutchens was sent to the desert of California for further artillery training. He was told he would be sent to North Africa to support the British. After four months, he was shipped to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri where he was preparing to go to Africa. Then England gained victory and there was no need to send more American troops to Africa. Hutchens was supposed to be in Missouri one week, but ended up being there three months, during which time he got two weeks leave and went home.

In November he was on the move once again. The 144^th Field Artillery sent Merle off to Camp Miles Standish near Boston and the word was he would be catching a boat for Europe. That finally happened on December 29, 1943. His unit was the first to load so they got billeted on the top deck at the back of the boat. The next day the C.B. Alexander finished loading up and headed for England.

"They told us the trip would take seven days, straight across," Merle remembers. They were part of a convoy of boats so thick all around the Alexander that there were ships as far as he could see. "Then we heard there were a lot of German subs in the Central Atlantic, so we circled north. The trip ended up taking nine days."

They landed in Liverpool on January 9, 1944 and boarded trains for a forty mile trip to some empty buildings that had been converted into barracks. They remained in England until June 6, 1944 when they shipped out to Utah Beach on the Normandy Coast of France. He was there on July 16 when the St. Lô breakthrough established American domination on the northern shores of France. Merle remained in Normandy for six weeks hauling supplies and maintaining trucks on the battlefield. The 144^th then began to move across Northern France to Brussels, Belgium, close to the coast where boats and artillery were coming in from England. He and the men in his unit moved supplies for eleven weeks along a 75-90 mile stretch of ground that was constantly under fire. This assignment was known as the Red Ball Express.

"Then we got to Germany," Merle said quietly. That would have been December 16, 1944 when they pushed through to Achen and Bastogne on the border and then on into Cologne, Germany on the Rhine River. He saw Buchenwald, the first concentration camp he was to see, in April after it had been converted for use by occupation troops.

The 144th pushed on into the middle of Germany, to Heidelberg with Merle Hutchens working along the front lines keeping motor vehicles repaired and moving ahead while under enemy fire. He tells the story of a time when they were moving down into Germany. They had stopped in a little town for two or three days. He had parked his service truck behind a building and dug a hole he planned to sleep in that night. He was then told he had to be inside a building.

"Well, the rooms were all full but I noticed a stairway to what looked like it might be an attic. I climbed up there with my bedding. There was just an open space at the top of the stairs big enough to lie down. The roof formed kind of an A-shaped space overhead, oh about ten feet long and six to eight feet wide. There was a window on each end up at the top of the peak. So I laid down and fell asleep. Along about daylight a German shell came through that A-shaped roof, coming in one window and out the other. It hit a house across the street, going through that roof the same way. No one was hurt. If I had been standing, it would have got me. That was the closest I came to getting hit."

Hutchens went on to say, "We were in five major campaigns: Normandy, Northern France, Battle of the Bulge, Rhineland, and Ardennes, and also in the occupation campaign in Central Europe. Out of the one hundred and eighty men in our battery, only one was killed, and that wasn't in combat. A young kid from California was coming down a hill in a service pickup. It tipped and rolled and he was killed. Other than that, we all came back. There were lots of close shaves and I dug a lot of fox holes. We were always close to the front lines and faced land mines and German artillery, but we all made it through except that one kid."

Merle was discharged September 29, 1945 having attained a Technician Fourth Grade rank. He received the European-African-Middle Eastern Theater Ribbon, an American Defense Ribbon, and a Good Conduct Medal. He shipped out for New York and then flew from New York to Fort Lewis. He came to Colfax where his folks were then farming in Green Hollow. He farmed until October before going to work for Jones Truck and Implement for twenty years repairing and maintaining International tractors, combines, and trucks. In 1967 he went to work for the State Highway Department doing vehicle maintenance for fifteen years before he retired. Meanwhile, in 1947, he married Louise Leinweber. They have one daughter and one granddaughter.

One day when I was in the Council on Aging office, two women came in selling Friends of The Library Cookbooks. As we talked I mentioned the book we were putting together and one of them suggested I talk to her father-in-law, Harold Kirkpatrick. From Harold I learned about CASU units and gained more appreciation for the tremendous part supply divisions played in the war and what it took to keep the entire operation running.

HAROLD KIRKPATRICK

Harold Kirkpatrick was born to teenage parents on a farm near Indianola, Iowa. In the summer of 1918 his family drove a 1915 Model T Ford to Idaho where his dad commenced farming, later moving near Lapwai Canyon. When he was six he started his education at a one-room school. He liked spelling and went on to win a gold medal in a five-county spelling bee. He rode a sturdy Shetland pony the four and a half miles from the farm to Reubens High School, where he graduated in 1931. He worked in Blister Rust until he saved four hundred and fifty dollars, mostly at sixty cents an hour, then started college at the University of Idaho, majoring in accounting.

He met Gladys Smith in 1935 and soon began dating her, riding bicycles on the gravel roads around Moscow and treating her to ice cream cone and bags of popcorn for five cents each. They married in May of 1940. In the meantime, Harold had taken flying lessons and had become a pilot. In the summer of 1941 he was offered a job with the audit section of the Army Air Force, based at Vultee Aircraft, salaried at two thousand dollars per year.

On the weekend of December 6^th that same year he and Gladys drove from Long Beach to Fort Ord to visit friends. As they entered the gate at the Seventeen-Mile Drive around Pebble Beach Golf Course, the gate keeper told them about Pearl Harbor.

Soon they were moved from Vultee to the Douglas plant near Long Beach where they were building fighter planes. Kirkpatrick requested a commission from the Navy and was made an Ensign in March of 1943. After training at North Island in San Diego, he was sent to Navy Supply School at Harvard where his wife and first two children joined him. After a short stay in Jacksonville he was sent to Sanford, Florida. He was then sent back to California and assigned to Carrier Aircraft Service Unit CASU #40, destined to be shipped overseas from San Francisco.

CASU 40 was encamped originally at the dirigible base at Moffett Field, just south of San Francisco, California. He was given a one hundred thousand dollar budget to gather supplies which he took to Alameda Naval Air Station for shipment into the Pacific.

When his unit was ready to ship out, his commanding officer and Kirkpatrick flew on a four-engine clipper plane so heavily loaded they had to make three runs across the bay to lift off and it took eleven hours to get from San Francisco to Honolulu. He then boarded a two-engine PBY and flew for ten hours to Christmas Island, then flew to Canton Island, then Funa Futi, and on the fourth day they got to Efate.

"That ocean is awfully big," said Harold. "The navigators did well finding those tiny atolls all over the ocean."

The Seabees had set up Quonset buildings for his unit's five hundred and fifty men. Harold had the only source of money for payroll. Men could draw up to a certain amount of their pay in advance, and Harold would count it out by hand and pass it to the Chief who would count it out to the man. "The money we got on the islands got really dirty," Kirkpatrick recalls.

He had two fine Chiefs, one helped with payrolls, clothing, laundry, and supplies. The other was a commissary steward who saw that three meals were served daily. The men were charged with taking planes from aircraft carriers, uncrating them, flying them and getting them ready to go to forward areas as replacements.

It was so humid on the islands that they had to leave a light on in the closet to help dry their clothing and shoes. They slept under netting to keep away the mosquitoes. The heat was oppressive, but they soon got used to it.

Later they moved to Espirito Santo, still in the New Hebrides. They were once slated to go to Emirau, and on the way Harold stayed one night on Guadalcanal. Early in 1945 CASU 40 was sent home, but Kirkpatrick only got as far as Honolulu. He flew back out to the islands the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. He saw new bombers land on a small island on their way to the front, barely having room to land. He reported to Harold Stassen who later ran for president many times. Stassen sent him to Tarawa to salvage things worth sending back, such as engines. Harold was in the communications shack the night they first heard about the atomic bomb falling on Japan.

"We, of course, were very glad, since we knew that invading Japan would have meant a great loss of life and equipment," Kirkpatrick stated.

When it was time to head home, Harold hitched a ride by plane back to Pearl Harbor, but had to ship out on the carrier Saratoga, which was very full. The enlisted men slept on hammocks seven tiers deep and the officers had cots in the mess hall, but they had a nice easy crossing. The ship had to stay at sea an extra half-day so they could come in under the Golden Gate Bridge for viewing by the public. They were on the first carrier to come home.

"The bridge was lined with people and I still have the newspaper that told of our return to Alameda," Harold noted.

He got a job in Spokane with the IRS and received his C.P.A. certificate in 1948, then moved to Colfax in 1949 where, early in 1952 he and Lee Utgaard started their partnership and he and Gladys raised their five children.

This next story has a story within it that will tug at the toughest of heart strings. It again reminds me that we can go about our daily life, see people on the streets, in stores, at the bank or post office, and have no idea what has gone on in their lives. It is good to know people like Johnny, people who survived not just the war, but life itself.

JOHN MABE

John Mabe was on his way back home from Spokane to Colfax about 6 p.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941. He and the people with him in his car were talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor when they were hit head-on by an oncoming car. The State Patrol arrived at the scene at 9 p.m. to find John's wife broken and trapped in the car and another passenger nearly scalped. Yes, Johnny Mabe remembers where he was the day Pearl Harbor was hit.

Mabe was born February 24, 1919 and raised in Colfax, one of thirteen children in his family. He left school to work for Fresh Laid Farm, a chicken hatchery just east of Colfax. "It's all gone now, but at that time I was mother to ten thousand chicks a week," he grinned.

After he recovered from that horrible accident, John tried to volunteer for the draft. "I figured if this country was good enough to live in, it was good enough to fight for." The draft board didn't see it his way since he was married and had a little girl, Donna. After he had pestered the woman running the Colfax draft board long enough she told him to go home and she would call him when his number came up. He remembers her telling him how hard her job was. "I feel like I am sending people to their death," she said.

When his number came up in the first part of 1943, he joined the Army's 75^th Infantry Division, 275^th Combat Engineers. "Nobody wanted that job," Johnny said. "We had to go in in front of the infantry and dynamite mine fields."

"Wasn't that really dangerous?" I asked.

"Not if you know how to do it," was his simple reply.

Seeing the doubtful look on my face, Johnny said, "No, it's really not dangerous. Sometimes we'd dynamite buildings, blow up mine fields. We'd go in with a detector and then string prima cord, an explosive, around the mines we'd find, just kind of string it around the field," he explained as he drew an imaginary line on the table in front of him. "Then we'd tie a square knot where the two ends came together, attach one cap, then go back a ways and blow 'em up. It was quick. The prima cord ignited at nineteen thousand two hundred fifty feet a second."

Turns out Mabe had done some dynamiting before he joined the Combat Engineers. As a young man he had blown stumps, had blown ice out of bridges and river channels, and had done some pre-splitting dynamiting for Whitman County, using ten thousand pounds of dynamite over by Rock Lake, and ninety boxes near Oakesdale. Although Mabe had done a lot of explosives work, the Army set about training him. "I never did do it their way," he confided. "They didn't know how to do it safely. I just went in and did it right."

His training started after he was inducted at Fort Douglas, Utah. When he first got there he found a towel tied to his bunk one night and learned that meant he would be awakened early for KP. "I told them, not me. I don't want dish pan hands!" He knew he was being shipped out at midnight that night, so felt free to decline the offer. When he got to Fort Leonard Wood the barracks there were not yet completed. He had one advantage though, the First and Second Lieutenants had to do KP because Mabe and the rest of the enlisted men had not yet been officially attached since there were no officers on duty. Finally, a cadre of officers from Iceland were brought in and the 75^th Division was activated. The men had no idea where they would end up, but they did travel to Texas and Louisiana for maneuvers, spending three months in Louisiana. He was assigned to deliver supplies all over the area, through swamps where the Coral snakes roamed. He and another guy were sent out once to find specimens of snakes, spiders, scorpions, and rodents so the new recruits would know what they looked like.

He was sent to Breckenridge, Kentucky for more training, then to Camp Shanks, New York where he boarded the Aquitania, the third largest ship in the world at that time. The ship was too fast to go with a convoy, so they set out alone, changing course every seven minutes, dropping depth charges "every little bit," as they sailed across the Atlantic in seven days. The Aquitania could change course much more quickly than could German submarines, so they changed course constantly, zig-zagging to prevent a sub from being able to line up and shoot at them.

They anchored a mile out from Glasgow, Scotland at night. Next day they shuttled in, picked up trucks and equipment, and proceeded to South Wales, then across the channel to Belgium.

Mabe fought in The Battle of the Bulge, in weather thirty-five to forty degrees below zero. His unit had been issued mummy bags. They liberated some OD - olive drab or order of the day - blankets which they sewed into those bags to help keep them warm through France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and into Germany.

Mabe blew up mine fields all the way, the right way, so it was not dangerous. The Americans, he said, didn't lay down mine fields at the front lines because they intended to move ahead and didn't want to have to cross their own mine fields to get to Berlin. He and the other men had been given instructions to throw all caution to the wind, not to think about any bullet but the one with his name on it.

"I told the young 90-day wonder who told us that that I wasn't concerned about the bullet with MY name on it, it was all those that said 'to whom it may concern' that I was worried about. He didn't seem to like that so much."

Johnny told about one time when he had been sent out in a truck on a reconnaissance mission toward Strasbourg, Germany to locate mine fields. He had a map, but had trouble following it due to the changes caused by warfare. All of a sudden he drove into a German village where German troops were lined up for chow with their mess kits in their hands. They all stood and stared, totally surprised to see an American truck drive into town. Johnny quickly did a U-turn and drove out. No shots were fired. He later found out he had been twelve miles behind enemy lines. When he tried to get back to his outfit, they had moved out and it took him two weeks to rejoin his unit. During that time, his family at home was told he was missing in action.

When it was time to head home, he boarded a Rockhill Victory Ship and sailed out of Marseilles over rough seas that rolled the ship fifty-two degrees, so far over the stacks dipped water at one point and only a wave hitting the side of the ship kept them from capsizing. It was on that trip he learned to prevent sea sickness by keeping a jar of green stuffed olives in his pocket and never looking down. They only got two meals a day, mostly sea water oatmeal, but when they got to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey he had a big steak he still remembers. He was flown to Fort Lewis on June 6, 1946.

He then hopped a bus to Portland, Oregon where his sister lived. He called her and it was then that he found out his family had been notified he was missing in action, but never was told otherwise. They had a joyful reunion in the Portland bus station.

He also had a not so joyful reunion with his wife. When he got stateside he called her only to hear from her that she had divorced him, remarried, and was expecting a child. And, from that day on he was prevented from seeing or contacting his daughter, Donna, because her mother wanted her to grow up thinking her new husband was the girl's father. Johnny Mabe spent thirty years wondering where his little girl was, what she looked like, how she was doing, was she well. From February of 1946 until June of 1976 he had no idea what happened to his daughter.

Then the phone rang and a man's rough voice began asking him questions about his life. He grew angry and nearly hung up when the man said, "There is someone here who wants to talk to you."

"Daddy? This is Donna," said that someone.

His daughter had been looking for him all over the country. She lived in Spokane with her husband and family, and finally had found him in Colfax. She had seen his picture and when she came to see him on June 13, 1976, she knew immediately she had found the right John Mabe, her father.

John Mabe now has three grandchildren, four great grandchildren and three great great grandchildren. The man who had determined he would die in combat to keep America free, has lived to enjoy that freedom with his family.

The following story is only a tiny fraction of the information Merle Merry shared with me. He also loaned me a book published by his Battalion. What was unique about that book, called The Saga, was that it contained photographs Merle had taken while he was in combat. Some of his work is included in TRIBUTE too. Thanks, Merle, for all your good suggestions and punch lines.

MERLE MERRY

Merle Merry carried a camera with him as he moved through France and Germany during World War II. Some of the pictures he took appear in a slim hardbound volume titled The Saga 390 AAA AW BN (S.P.) United States Army, published in Munich in August of 1945. All those letters represent the words Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion (Self Propelled).

The title page of The Saga contains a drawing of his Battalion's insignia, the Gollywampus Gremlin, conceived and designed in 1943 by George Ward, a former Disney artist. The Gremlin, a whimsical character, nowhere near represents the strength and determination expressed in the story of the men of the 390^th who moved into the Battle of the Bulge, under General Patton's orders, on self propelled half track machinery carrying artillery designed to bring down Hitler's mighty air force. And - as Merle Merry's pictures along with those of other photographers show

- they did just that.

Merle Merry was born in 1923 about a mile from where he now lives in Colfax, the youngest of a family of four. His family moved around a bit during the Depression years when there were no agencies to help anyone. They came back to Colfax where he attended Colfax High School until he joined the Army in 1942, before he graduated. He later received a diploma. He graduated with a Military Degree, having earned points or credits for his military service. He has remained in touch with his classmates, even recently heading his fifty-fifth class reunion.

Merle recalls when he was barely in high school, back in the 1930s, how his brother discussed with him an impending war with Japan. His brother said, "We are going to have to fight Japan. We are sure shipping a lot of scrap iron somewhere."

Merle put that remark made so long ago together with a conversation his wife Harriet had with an aging Japanese-American woman just last year. She told Harriet, "If you hadn't dropped the bomb we would have fought you to the death."

But the war with Japan was not the war Merle Merry was to fight. After receiving Anti-Aircraft training at Camp Haan in California and also at Camp Irwin on the Mojave Desert where they shot at targets towed by airplanes, he and the Battalion were sent by train to Boston where they received additional training at Cape Cod, shooting at targets towed over the ocean. The refitted English ship they were to take overseas was put in dry dock for several weeks so they missed the convoy they were to sail with, arriving solo at Gerock, in Scotland, a month after the Normandy invasion.

The beaches had been secured, as had the land for about twenty-five to thirty miles inland. They went in on Utah Beach, a "friendly landing on a nice sandy beach" according to Merry. They went in at high tide until their LSTs settled in the wet sand covered with swirling tidewater. They waited for the tide to change and for the waters to move out from around their landing craft. Then they lowered the front and drove their self-propelled half-tracks out onto drying sand. Their rigs had "3^rd Army" painted on their bumpers, but that insignia had been taped over before they went in for the landing.

"We didn't want the Germans to know we had a third army," he explained.

One of the sights of war he remembers were big horse-drawn wagons the Germans used to move guns, reminding him of the all-out use of materials employed by both sides. "We were fighting a material war," Merry commented. "Germany had samples of the best, high quality, precision pieces, but they could never produce enough to win the war. Because of the effort of the American people back home, we had lots of all kinds of supplies and equipment, everything we needed. That's why we won the war. Equipment now is far more technical."

Merry was in Munich when the A-Bomb was dropped. "We had no idea what that meant," he said. "It came out in the Stars and Stripes [a military newspaper] that we had dropped an Atomic Bomb and no one knew what to think about it."

About eight months before that revelation about America's war power came to Merle, the Allies were facing a major thrust by Hitler's forces which came to be called "The Battle of the Bulge." Merry was camped near Metz with a convoy of over one hundred armored half-tracks, expecting, as were the Germans, that a big battle was brewing. It was an extremely cold New Year's Day in Europe in 1945. His unit had taken the engines out of some of their self-propelled half-tracks and were overhauling them, believing themselves to be on a temporary break. Then the word came they were to move out the next day. They put all their machinery together again overnight, and moved out as ordered with eight inches of new snow on the ground, the leafless trees creating to Merle's photographer eye a scene from a Hollywood movie.

General G. S. Patton ordered the attack on the Bulge in the face of doubts expressed by other military minds. "I trained 'em. I know they can do it," he declared, and history proved him quite correct.

Merle Merry's personal experience of the Battle of the Bulge included seeing his Battalion set a record for the number of German planes they shot down in one day, twenty-four, a hard record to beat. Since Merle was attached to an Intelligence unit, he and some other men were assigned to pick up pieces of the planes to prove they had downed that many. While doing so, he also took pictures with his little folding Kodak, a camera with two Waterhouse stops, fixed shutter, and fixed lens that used 120 film.

Merry continued to document what he saw and near the end of the war he was able to set up a dark room in a German woman's basement. That enterprise didn't work out so well. In an attempt to be helpful she, thinking his processing chemicals were dirty water, threw them all away. Later on, when he got to Lenz, Austria, he discovered that some of Herman Goering's many, many prosperous businesses were located there, one of them being photography supplies. He and some other G.I.s crawled through windows of the deserted building and liberated enough supplies to develop pictures the rest of their time in Europe.

There were plenty of scenes worth photographing, but some remain fixed in his mind. Merle tells of being in a small town where the people spoke both German and English. A G.I. was petting a dog when one of the local women expressed surprise that he would be so kind to an animal. It was obvious Hitler had hoodwinked the German people into believing Americans were monsters, incapable of simple kindness.

On the other hand, Merry also remembers watching prisoners who had just been set free from concentration camps eating raw meat off of the bones of horses that had fallen dead in the streets, leaving the bones absolutely clean. Those horses had been driven to death pulling wooden wagons, frequently the fleeing German military's only available conveyance for hauling their equipment and supplies.

Merle had to wait until January of 1946 to ship out for home. He had moved from one "Cigarette Camp" to another waiting for orders. The camp sites were named after the popular cigarette brands like Luckies, Camels, Chelseas, Chesterfields, and Wings because the guys would sit and wait smoking endless packs of cigarettes, having nothing left to do.

Once on board the light cruiser Reno, they took the North Atlantic route, in the dead of winter, going only four or five knots due to damage to the ship. The six day cruise took ten days in waters so rough they were many times just two degrees from turning upside down. Merle experienced sea sickness that only abated when he was called upon to run the movie projectors, there being two in order to run films without a break in the action, S.O.P (Standard Operating Procedure) in those days.

The 390^th originally had nine hundred members, some of whom were lost in Europe. The remainder have had forty-seven reunions since the end of the war. There are one hundred and twenty members left now. Usually forty-five or fifty, including wives, show up at their gatherings. Quoting figures he heard at the Washington State World War II Memorial Dedication and Unveiling Ceremony held Friday, May 28, 1999 on the Capitol Campus in Olympia, Washington, Merle speaks of seventeen million military men and women on both sides lost in World War II. Fifty to sixty thousand of those fallen American military personnel are buried in Europe, most of their graves marked with Italian Marble crosses. Of those fifty-sixty thousand people, six thousand were from the state of Washington.

Merle and his wife Harriet Merry have visited military cemeteries around the world, photographing many sites. One that is of special interest to Merry is the Hamm Cemetery in Luxembourg where General Patton requested his body be buried. On a warm summer day as many as ten thousand local people make their way down a single lane road to his grave site, many bringing a lunch and spending some time reflecting on the life of the American General who refused to let them die or give up. Patton was buried with four thousand American soldiers, but his remains were later removed to a knoll away from the others to save the cemetery from the multitude of footsteps of those who come to honor him.

Merry and one of his Army buddies laid a wreath on Patton's grave. He trained them. He knew they could do it. They just wanted to tell him thanks.

Here is a saga out of the China-India-Burma Theater of War. I spent a lot of time looking at maps and discussing geography with Richard Stravens. He went completely around the world while in the military and he used to have a world map with all his travels marked on it, but it has disappeared temporarily, so we had to go to an old 1940s Atlas to get all the names right. He even double-checked with Bob Clegg to make sure the Brahamaputra River was the one he sailed up into Burma. That's dedication! That's Richard Stravens.

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.

There are two more stories I want to add to the Colfax section. They are both about local people who didn't come home, Dorothy Mildred Stanke and Howard Scholz.

When I started looking for a military nurse to interview, I drew a total blank until I talked to Leroy Utke. He recalled a nurse, a local woman he knew about, but she had been killed in action. About all he remembered of her is in his story earlier in Part Five. So I started asking questions in earnest. I went to my expert people finders, Peggy Welch and Donna VanTine, Council on Aging's time-share receptionists, and Vicky Cochran, Chanda Reynolds, and Sharon Doramus, a trio of COAST employees, all of whom seem to know EVERYONE in town, and set them thinking about a nurse. Care Managers Sue Hallett, Muriel Jordan, Scott Nelson, and Charles Klaudt, our Registry Manager Deb McKay, and our Financial Officer Cindy Zaring got in on the game and one of these good people came up with the name Sally Krom. I found her in the phone book, only to find out when I called her that she was the wrong Krom (one m). Sally suggested I call Ellen Kromm (two ms), who, to confuse the issue, has been called Susie all her life. I called Susie Ellen Kromm and she indeed had been a nurse, but not in the military.

However, she told me she did have an old scrap book given to her by a woman she had taken care of years ago, one Grace Ellis Stapleton, who, incidentally, was the first woman, according to the scrap book, ever to be elected to a city office in the history of Colfax. I met with Susie who generously loaned me the scrap book, pointing out several articles in it about Dorothy Stanke. Stanke's heart-wrenching story, gleaned from those decades-old articles, is published here in tribute to her and all the Whitman County nurses who served at home and abroad during World War II.

DOROTHY MILDRED STANKE

An article appeared in the Colfax Gazette-Commoner on Friday, June 9, 1944 with a lovely picture of Lieutenant Mildred Stanke in the uniform of the Army Nurse Corps. Dorothy, as she was commonly called, had been assigned to duty on the U.S.S. Comfort, the first non-converted hospital ship ever built by the Army. The ten thousand ton Comfort was the first hospital ship to be completed of the three ordered constructed by the Army. All other Army hospital ships had been converted from other types of ships. She was commissioned for service May 5, 1944 at Los Angeles Harbor in a joint Army-Navy ceremony. Stanke boarded the Comfort on May 26, having received her assignment while at Camp Stoneman, California. When she wrote her parents on May 28, the sailing of the ship was still awaiting orders. Dorothy mentioned to her family that her quarters were more roomy than any others she had enjoyed while serving on other converted transports or in military camps.

The Comfort was designed as an ambulance, but it was in reality a nine-deck floating hospital. She flew only the Red Cross banner, an the Christian and American flags. She carried no secret devices or arms but was subject to being stopped and boarded by the enemy for inspection and traveled the sea lanes fully lighted. The mercy ship had two operating rooms with beds for more than seven hundred patients. Her medical and surgical accoutrements were comparable to those contained in the finest modern first-class shore hospital of the day. Its dental operating units were designed to handle all types of plastic surgery. There was even a psychiatric ward to handle mentally disturbed patients and a pharmacy equipped with needed drugs.

Born in Oakesdale, Stanke graduated from Colfax High School with the class of 1938. Since her childhood days she had planned to become a Nurse. Lieutenant Stanke received her early training at St. Luke's in Spokane and was at the Bryant & Weisman clinic in Colfax for three months awaiting her call. She was one of thirty-two Nurses on the ship's staff, each of whom had already seen action overseas.

Less than a year later, on May 1, 1945, an articled headed "Colfax Nurse is Feared Lost" appeared in the Colfax paper. It went on to say, "Lt. Mildred Stanke was last reported on bombed ship." Her parents believed her to be serving in the surgery of the Comfort when it was attacked by a Japanese suicide pilot about fifty miles south of Okinawa on a Saturday night. No word from her or the War Department had been received by relatives since the attack, but Stanke had still been on the ship when she last wrote a letter to her parents postmarked April 25. The Lieutenant had reported in her letter that there were thirty-eight women on the ship, thirty-four of whom were Nurses. News reports on casualties said nine women were killed and one was missing.

On May 7^th, the War Department announced to her parents by telegram that First Lt. Mildred Stanke, 25, Army Nurse on the Navy hospital ship Comfort was killed in action April 28 near Okinawa. She was known to have been working in the surgery when the attack plane crashed and exploded, destroying part of that section. It was later reported by Army Nurse Muriel Nelson, "Death occurred quickly after the attack." Many other people who knew her were quoted in local papers.

First Lieutenant Ruby D. Lewis wrote, "Dorothy was the hardest working Nurse I've known. Naturally she was on duty when we were hit. Those who died didn't suffer or know what had happened."

Captain Etta M. Larson was quoted as saying, "It may truly be said Dorothy died in the service of her country and humanity."

And Barbara Munter, a Red Cross worker, summed up what all of the other writers expressed in this tribute: "Dorothy had so many sweet and lovable qualities that it was always a pleasure to be around her either at work or at play. Her real friendliness toward everyone made us all respond whether that person was a patient, a corpsman, a doctor, or a Red Cross worker like myself. I have heard the other girls praise her nursing highly and that is the highest tribute one Nurse can give another."

Lois Scholz, a member of Council on Aging & Human Services' Board of Directors, offered the following set of correspondence as a tribute to her husband Bert's brother, Howard Scholz, a Marine who was killed in action and buried at sea. The first document is the text from a Western Union telegram young Scholz's parents received informing them of his death. The second document is a hand-written letter Howard's wife, the former Nancy Rogers, received from his Commanding Officer. The third is a letter, again originally hand-written, to Bert and Howard's father from Lieutenant M. J. Roscio in response to a letter Mr. Scholz had written to a Captain Evans.

HOWARD SCHOLZ

WESTERN UNION

NO I CK 69 GOVT WASHINGTON D C 855 PM 13^th

MR AND MRS ALBERT J SCHOLZ PARENTS ROUTE NO 2 COLFAX WASH

Deeply regret to inform you that your son Second Lieutenant howard

A Scholz USMCR died of wounds received in action in the performance

of his duty and service of his country Report shows that your

son's remains were buried at sea with appropriate military honors.

To prevent possible aid to our enemies do not divulge the name of

his ship or station Please accept my heartfelt sympathy. Letter follows.

A A Vandergrift Lieutenant General USMC Commandant

of the Marine Corps

In the field

6 Nov. 1944

My dear Mrs. Scholz,

We have just returned to base from our invasion of the Palau Islands where your husband gave his life and I want to offer you my sincere sympathy in your hour of bereavement.

I know only too well what you are going thru, having lost a kid brother at Saipan in June.

I thought you would like to know the circumstances about Howard's death. His platoon was assigned to land the artillery and on September 15^th we landed under very heavy mortar and gunfire. Howard was in the lead tractor of his platoon and upon reaching the beach found it mined quite heavily. He got out of the tractor in order to guide his platoon thru the land mine field and when a short distance inland a Jap threw a hand grenade into the lead tractor. Howard ran around the tractor in pursuit and in doing so moved directly in front of a pillbox and was hit by machine gun fire in the side and shoulders. He was immediately rushed out to a hospital ship but died the following day, Sept. 16^th and was buried at sea on the same date.

I know there is little I can say or do to help in a time like this but I do want you to know that Howard was an excellent officer, well liked by officers and men alike, and he will be ever missed by all members of this command.

He fought and died like a true Marine, on the field of battle in the service of the country we all love - "Greater love hath no man"

Again my deepest sympathy and if I can be of service at any future time, please feel free to call upon me.

Sincerely,

Chas. B. Neven

Lt. Col. USMC

28 Jan 1945

Sunday

South Pacific

Dear Mr. Scholz;

I read your letter written to Capt Evans, Dec 30^th with great interest. At the outset I wish to offer my heartfelt sympathy for the great loss you have suffered in this most horrible conflict. I was executive officer of company B and was quite close to Howard. Being married and living in Oceanside while at the Boat Basin, Howard was kind enough to ride me home every evening.

He carried on with his work very diligently and was thought of very highly by his boys. It was really shocking to them in combat, and they felt his loss very greatly. So you & your folks can be most proud of Howard's achievements, because he was a fine officer and a gentleman.

I would have written much sooner but I'm sure Capt Evans included all the officers and men in the company in his letter of sympathy and condolence.

At the present time I am Company Commander of the H&S Co. of this Battalion. Being roommate of Capt Evans, I couldn't forsake the opportunity to answer you after reading your kind letter. I wish you would convey the contents of this letter to Howard's wife a very sweet girl. I guess she remembers me, as we rode home together on a few occasions.

We are still continuing our training and the boys are working every day and doing a remarkable job. The weather has been terrifically hot for the past 2 wks. It appears the rainy season is approaching since we had an abundance of rain yesterday and today. The officers here enjoy a little volley ball after evening chow and it serves as good recreation and conditioning. We have movies about four times a week and various athletic games for the men.

If ever, I come with(in) distance of Colfax, I certainly will drop in to see you. The men and myself of this organization are certainly grateful for your most welcomed invitation. My home is in Cambridge, Mass. Way back on the east coast and quite a distance from Wash. I have always wanted to see the State of Wash and hope some day I can realize my ambition.

I must conclude now with best wishes to Howard's wife and your family.

Respectfully-

M. J. Roscio

1^st Lt. USMCR