LESTER BISHOP
Lester Bishop was attracted to a poster published in the fall of 1940. It read,
"Enlist Now in the National Guard of the US
For one year of Active Duty
Ages 18-45
Join Company E 161st Infantry at Pullman
Before September 16
Serve your Country now with men from your Home State."
What attracted him then, at the end of the Depression, was money and an opportunity to get out of Pullman and see some of the world. Also, he was a student at WSC (WSU) and if he joined the National Guard, he wouldn't have to take ROTC.
He didn't think seriously about war, or fighting to defend his country, although now he realizes Japan was on a collision course with the United States and they could not be impeded. Japan had already taken Manchuria in 1931and China in 1937 and was extending in all directions. He recalls President Roosevelt going to Chicago, the heart of isolationism, to deliver a speech in which he described Japan as having a contagious disease called "Aggression." He said we needed to quarantine that kind of disease, thus his speech became known as his "Quarantine Speech." That speech was followed by a U.S. embargo on further petroleum exports to Japan in 1939. Japan had been buying 90% of its 
petroleum needs from the United States.
Charles Lindbergh was also speaking out in 1939 and early 1940 saying the wars in Europe and Asia were not our fights and we should stay out, that Hitler was not really all that bad. The British at that time were not so upset with Hitler and were even inclined to take his attitude about Jews.
"Things were not so different as they were in World War I," Bishop stated. "The entangling alliances of Europe remained the same. We as a nation were determined to stay neutral. Why then was the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941? For one thing, it would have cost a lot to move it. And Roosevelt was hoping to delay the inevitable. We had stolen Japan's Diplomatic Code Purple from the Japanese Embassy in New York City and knew what they were thinking. We didn't have their Military Code until June of 1942, but Nimitz knew when the Japanese fleet would be at Midway and knew something was happening there."
It was within that context of uncertainty and reluctance to commit to war on either front that Lester Bishop enlisted in the Washington State National Guard on August 2, 1940. He was called to active duty on September 16, 1940, for one year. After a cursory physical that said he had a pulse, he reported to Fort Lewis. (A history of the formation of Company E and how it ultimately meshed with the 25th Infantry Division is found in Part Seven toward the back of this book.)
Bishop went through the soggy winter-weather training session the west coast of Washington state provided, then after a year of training and maneuvers he boarded a train on December 6, 1941, intending to travel to San Francisco, then be shipped to the Philippines to temporarily bolster the few troops there. His one-year enlistment had been arbitrarily extended six months by the US government so he would be in the Philippines long enough to finish out the eighteen month long commitment he now had to Company E of the Washington State National Guard. The next day, as they neared Dunsmuir, one of the fellows on the train, who had a Zenith wave magnet radio hooked up, heard some startling news. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
Bishop's destination changed immediately. Although the military machine didn't quite know what to do with those three thousand National Guard men, it was clear they wouldn't be going to the Philippines. Once he got to San Francisco, his first assignment, in the meantime, was to guard Fleishacker Zoo which fronted on the ocean beach in San Francisco. He finally moved through a port of embarkation on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, had his shots, got his dog tags, and shipped out along with three thousand Guardsmen plus however many sailors, heading for Honolulu on the Matson Line ship, the Lurline. He was on one of three Matson ships sailing in convoy that had been outfitted quickly to carry troops. They built bunks four deep in the swimming pools on board. The men of Company E had fresh water showers, hot water, and the Matson cooks and stewards aboard to provide three good meals a day for the four and a half days it took to make the crossing.
"We were the first expeditionary force to leave the United States in World War II," Lester noted.
When he arrived on Oahu, he left the comfort of the Lurline and was loaded into a little box car so cramped he could neither sit nor stand. Delivered to the Schofield Barracks at midnight, he was allowed no light. Only blue flash lights were permitted to protect them from being targets in an air raid. "They were clearly anticipating further attacks," he commented. He was shown to a bunk in a cement three-story barrack, spread out mosquito netting, and settled down to have his first experience with bed bugs. The next day they had to strip all the mattresses, treat them with kerosene, and put the legs of their bunks in cans of kerosene which pretty well took care of the problem.
Bishop spent a year in Hawaii, some of which was devoted to building barbed wire defenses on the windward side of the island in anticipation of a Japanese landing. It was during that year that Company E became part of the 25th Division, and received training that changed them into a fighting force that left Hawaii December 6, 1942, ready for war. All bets were off for the duration as far as his enlistment for one year was concerned. He was in the Army until he "should be separated at the convenience of the government." Lester Bishop was headed for Guadalcanal.
Lester started Christmas day of 1942 having Navy beans for breakfast. Three days later he landed on Guadalcanal at Henderson Field, which is still there. "The First Marine Division had been greatly reduced in securing Guadalcanal and had also taken malaria rather lightly. The Japanese owned most of the world's supply of quinine and the German development, Atabrin, hadn't appealed to the First Marines," Bishop noted. "When we went in we took malaria seriously, began to drain swamps and exert some control over the mosquitoes. However," he said, "Even with our approach to malaria, we experienced a seventy percent casualty rate from the disease."
Bishop went on to detail the 25th Infantry's approach to preventive medication for the dreaded disease. "I was issued four Atabrin pills a week and was to take half a pill a day, and a whole pill on Sunday. They were distributed before mess by an officer tossing the half pill into my wide open mouth. Most of us took the pills, but some guys wanted to contact malaria to get a two week vacation and a hospital bed to sleep in. They would hold the pills in their mouths, then spit them out. When the brass finally figured that one out, they made us fill our canteen cup half full from a Lister bag of water, and they watched while we drank water after taking the pill."
While Bishop never fired a shot in anger on Guadalcanal, he did survive three hundred and one air raids while he was there and saw spectacular displays of search lights, tracers, and distant bombings while never being close to hand to hand action. He and the other Company E boys learned to dig fox holes to protect themselves from direct hits. When bombs hit they spread shrapnel out over level land and foxholes kept them below that level. He recalled one soldier from the Bronx who had determined he wouldn't be digging a foxhole, because, he said, "Woik is fa suckas." After the first close-up air raid Lester heard the distinct sound of sand being rapidly and repeated moved by his New York comrade who even built a coconut-palm roof over his foxhole. One young fellow dug a hole so deep he couldn't climb out of it. The war had indeed surrounded Lester Bishop.
His next combat action was on New Georgia where his first duty was to bury forty-seven dead Americans. From mid-July until the end of October 1943 he saw serious combat in the steamy jungles of that island. The government chose to issue him a camouflage suit, one of the most uncomfortable pieces of equipment imaginable. It was one piece and zipped from the top down. "Picture what that meant when you had to urinate. You'd have to take off all your equipment and zip all the way down. We all cut a fly in them and since our underwear had long since disintegrated in the humid weather, that worked out all right. You do adjust," he said, and we agreed that Americans have an uncanny way of making do with what is handed them.
Bishop added proof to that concept in his telling of how he and his platoon of nineteen men survived in the jungle with only an occasional food drop, most of which landed in trees they couldn't get to. Lester and the men tried to make the best of it. "We had terrible food. All dried, no fresh food of any kind. When we were out on patrol we had no stove, no utensils, nothing. We ate C rations. We were able to hack off small hunks of mahogany from dead fall trees and that made a fairly hot and almost smokeless fire. We cooked Vienna sausage on sticks over those open fires. Some times we would get K-rations that had ten meals in them and some peanuts. The guys counted them out so each one of us got exactly the same number of nuts. The C rations had one of three meals: meat and beans, hash, or stew; plus a biscuit, some powdered coffee, some chocolate and some lemon power, and four cigarettes and a little bit of toilet paper. I got so I couldn't keep the meals down. I'd eat them, but they would come back up. I lived on biscuits and lemon powder."
Once they had trekked the twenty miles from Munda to Bairoka Harbor the company kitchen caught up with them and the level of food improved. They then had canned lambs' tongue, which the company cook would simmer in catsup, skin and all. He and his platoon were then put out on a trail block about five miles from the rest of the company, too far away for the company to feed them. Lester then became the platoon cook. He learned to cook rice in a helmet. "The first couple of times I did that the rice was green from the camouflage paint, but after awhile that burned off," he smiled.
He also, five miles out in the jungle, created an oven he used to bake strawberry and raspberry tarts from a sweetened basic biscuit mix and jam that came in their rations. The oven was a forty mm shell case made of aluminum, one that had held perhaps eight to ten shells used for anti-aircraft guns. The case was about a foot square and two and a half feet long. One end was solid and the other end was held in place with a sort of screw attachment with a rubber gasket on the end. After one or two uses the gasket had burned away so the oven no longer produced a burned rubber smell.
"We were able to build a rack for the oven to hold it in place over the fire. I was able to bake tarts, but was never able to do a pie crust," he lamented.
In July of 1944 Lester Bishop was due to have his name put into a merit drawing from which a few names were drawn. The ones drawn would be rotated stateside. His friend Clink Lockhart drew the names at company level and Bishop's name was drawn to go into the Regiment drawing. He declined to go to that drawing, knowing he never won anything, but to his surprise his name was drawn and he was able to return to the States in 1944. It was assumed he would stay in the service, possibly to be sent overseas again after six months stateside. He was sent to Texas where he came down with malaria and so was not allowed to go back overseas for six months, even though he had asked to be transferred back to Company E, 161st Regiment.
From Texas, he was sent to Louisiana, still on active duty. From there he was sent on a War Bond tour. He and some other combat veterans traveled the country encouraging people to buy bonds, which they could do for the price of admission to see and hear their heroes who had survived the war in the Pacific.
When he got back to Pullman he returned to school, taught in Rosalia for a time, farmed, then worked at WSU as a Hydraulics Technician, retiring in 1982. He married Maxine Krueger and they raised two children, a boy and a girl.