TED FREEMAN

Ted Freeman was born just east of St. John in November of 1919.  He graduated from St. John High School in 1938, just a year ahead of his brother Joe.  Ted and Joe both went to work in St. John grocery stores.

Joe worked at the Red and White Market and Ted worked for Tommy and Hazel Williams at Cold Storage.  Tommy kept his store until Ted and Joe came back from the service, then he retired and they took it over, no money down.  Ted had five hundred dollars in military pay saved up, he says Joe had none, so they used the five hundred dollars to open the till.  Tommy didn't want to bother with an inventory, so they just went to work.  In the next few months three people came to them, each paying fifty dollars in advance for groceries to make sure they were able to keep the store open, and Fred Kirkman did needed carpentry work for them.  He wouldn't take pay for it, just told Ted and Joe, "You put in your time for me, I'm just giving you back a little of mine."  Ted and Joe worked hard, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day and had the store paid off in two years.

Ted married Cleona in 1948.  They have three children and two grandchildren.  Ted's given name is Harold, but an uncle called him "Teddy McMechan" for no particular reason when he was a kid, and it stuck, at least until Ted went into the service and had to use his official name, Harold. 

Ted knew he was going to be drafted into the Army eventually and didn't want to be, so he went to Spokane in the summer of 1941and, like many Whitman County men, signed up for the Air Force.  He was refused because he had hay fever, so he waited until October and went back again. 

"They felt my pulse, checked to see if I had a warm body, and signed me up," Ted smiled.  That was November 17, 1941, just a few weeks before the Japanese changed the course of history.  He took his first train ride to Salt Lake City, which as it turned out was the first leg of a four-year-long round the world trip.  First stop after SLC was Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, Missouri where he had a couple of days of Basic Training before Pearl Harbor happened, war was declared, and the picture changed.

Freeman took a battery of tests in three days, instead of the standard three months, and then moved on to Illinois to Chanute Field to Air Mechanic's School where he was instructed for thirteen months, particularly in Instruments.   The Army needed teachers at Goldsborough, North Carolina, and since they were taking the top ten percent of all classes nationwide to use as instructors, Ted was sent there to teach.  Again getting on a train, he headed east.

He arrived to find himself assigned to brand new barracks made of 1x12s with cracks between the boards.  And snow was falling.  There were two little pot-bellied stoves to burn coal for heat - if they could find coal.  The men were all freezing, literally, even though they were wearing all the clothes issued to them. 

Ted met a guy on base named Jim Sproul and was telling him about their situation in the barracks.  Sproul's answer was that he knew Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was going to call him and get some action on the matter.   Ted smiled as he told the story.  "I thought the guy was nuts, but when he asked me to come to the pay phone with him while he made the call, I went along."

Sproul dropped a nickel in the phone slot and asked the operator to get him Franklin D. at the White House.  Ted could hear the phone ring and someone answer, and heard Sproul ask to speak to Franklin D., saying that Jim Sproul was on the line.  Ted heard another voice come on, then Sproul began to talk.

"These guys are freezing in barracks with holes in the walls and they have no coal to burn," he said with authority.  Then he went on to explain the situation fully.  When he finished he hung up and Ted thought, "This guy is really pulling my leg."

But the next day coal trucks came running into camp, the stoves got bigger, plumbers fixed the plumbing, and carpenters insulated the walls and finished the buildings.  As Ted got to know Jim Sproul better he learned that Jim, Franklin D., and Jimmy Roosevelt, who were good friends, used to "ride the range" together when they were younger.  He disappeared from the base in a couple of weeks, rumor having it that he was a Secret Service Agent.  Ted never saw him again.

"But we sure did get action," Ted said.

Being sufficiently warm, Ted then taught Aircraft Instrument Classes for eight months.  He felt he was not getting ahead, since he was only a corporal, so he volunteered for overseas duty.  He was sent back to Jefferson Barracks and more training and also a lot of open base time so he could get into St. Louis where there were lots of clubs, places to go, and, as he put it, "friendly girls at the USO club."

In 1943 he went to China in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations, sometimes referred to as the Forgotten War.

Freeman left Camp Patrick Henry at Newport News, Virginia in the fall of 1943 on a Liberty Ship carrying a load of dynamite.  They sailed east in a convoy, due to the number of German submarines patrolling the Atlantic Ocean. Their trip over was fraught with peril.  Three days out the Andrew Hamilton broke her prop shaft and had to drop out of the convoy to fix it, leaving the ship without escort.  Also,  Ted lost twenty-one pounds in twenty-one days between Virginia and Africa. 

When asked why, he replied, "They didn't feed us.  We got salt water coffee and salt water oatmeal, about a coffee cup full, each morning, and maybe a sea biscuit, and then the food went down hill from there the rest of the day." Not only were they not fed, Ted saw men throwing rotten quarters of beef overboard, supplies that had not been cooked, by order of the Commander of the ship, to save money which he kept for himself.  

"The sharks ate better than we did," he chuckled.  "But, they caught him and the Commander of the Andrew Hamilton ended up in jail over that forced starvation diet," Ted said with a great deal of satisfaction.  

 They finally arrived in Oran, North Africa just after there had been a big battle there.  He saw cement ships which had been built in the US to haul merchandise one way, then to be disposed of.  They had been dynamited and left in the bay to protect it from enemy attack.  From Oran they sailed on through the Mediterranean where they saw some action off Crete when their convoy had a brush with some German planes carrying aerial torpedoes.  Ted saw a torpedo flash by his ship, one that looked like it was going to hit him.  But it swerved and hit the ship behind him.  There were twenty-five hundred men on that ship; only five hundred  survived.

They sailed on through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal into the Arabian Sea and on to Bombay.  There they were loaded onto rail cars known as "forty or eight" cars.  They could hold forty men or eight horses.  They rattled on through Delhi and New Delhi to Karachi all the time seeing lepers begging for money along the railways.  Then they flew a C-47, which held twelve to fourteen men, up the Assam Valley to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, to a major military staging area.  From there they flew into Burma to a place where they fueled up to fly the Hump into China.

Ted recalls the Burmese people as clean, very neat, small people who had perfectly groomed hair and wore white clothing that they kept immaculate.  They would sweep the dirt floors in the Americans' quarters, serve excellent food, and make them "real tea from fresh tea leaves."  Leaving those fine folks behind, Ted flew over the Himalayas, at eighteen thousand feet without oxygen, into Kunming, China. 

They landed at the first American base over the Himalayas.  It had been the headquarters for the Flying Tigers before Ted got there.  They then flew to Hengyang, the base for the 14^th Air Force, 23^rd Fighter Group, 75^th Fighter Squadron.  He served under Commander Tex Hill, a Flying Tiger and, according to Ted, "One of the finest officers I ever saw or heard about.  He led his men.  He didn't just tell them 'You go do it.'  It was more like 'Follow me.'  He also had eighteen kills, or downed enemy planes, to his credit."

One of the officers took Ted to the flight line and asked him what he did.  Ted answered, "I'm an Instrument Specialist." 

The guy asked, "Yeah, but what do you do?"

They ended up making him a ground crew chief on a P-40.  The P-40 was a fighter, interceptor, ground strafer, dive, level, and skip bomber, bomber escort, and reconnaissance air craft.  The P-40 was hard to work on.  If one plug went bad, he had to change the whole bank.  But he did enjoy taxiing them down the runway at fifty miles per hour.  They were outnumbered forty to one in the war area over the Hump, yet their kill rate was twenty to one over what the Japanese flew in the area. 

The group Ted was with evacuated bases frequently.  "The plan was to draw the Japanese who occupied eastern China as far into China as they could, bomb behind them so they couldn't retreat, and then starve them out," Ted explained.  "But, it didn't work." 

It seems the Chinese were not good fighters and had virtually no training in what was then modern warfare.  Plus, the US would take in food and arms and the locals would loot it and disappear, leaving their villages undefended from the Japanese who were overrunning China.

The Japanese bombed at night.   Ted and the other ground crew personnel would put the P-40s in hiding at dusk in revetments, which were holes dug in the hillsides by the Chinese.  When Japanese bombers would strike, leaving huge holes in the ground, the villagers would immediately come with baskets and refill the holes so by morning no one could tell where they had been hit.

About a year later the P-51s came in.  "The P-51 was a dream," Ted said.  "When they first came over the Hump we had them all lined up on the air field.  Tokyo Rose sent in thirty-eight planes, the P-51s took off to meet them, and only seven Japanese planes returned to base - no losses for the US.  When she came on that night Rose said, 'So, you have new airplanes.  We took a beating, but we will be back.' "

Tokyo Rose, a Japanese-American who was born and raised in Los Angeles, broadcast radio messages to the men in the Pacific, always telling them things like, "Don't you wish you were home with your wife and family?"  She always seemed to know exactly what had happened as it happened.  She later was convicted of treason and served a long prison term.  Ted's buddy took a radio from a wrecked plane, rewound it to get her station and, with the help of a rebuilt battery, they enjoyed the music that came along with her unwelcome yet informative propaganda. 

When the war was over Ted was still in China.  Orders came to pack up and head for home.  He flew into Calcutta, India, then boarded the ship Marine Robin where he got real milk and lots of food on the journey home.  He again sailed east then north along the coast of China up to the Aleutian Islands.  The sea was so rough there were many moments when the ship was just five degrees from turning over.  They finally docked in Tacoma and Ted once more took a train ride, this time home to St. John. 

"I traveled around the world, free of charge.  It only cost me four years of my young, innocent life," Ted smiled.  "It wasn't so bad, though.  I did the easy part.  I loved to work on airplanes.  I missed the airplanes much more than I missed the war."