Earl G. Sorensen
September 2003
American Fork, Utah
Interviewed by Don Norton and Leah Johnson
I went to school through the ninth grade here in American Fork, and then I went
to tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade in Lincoln High School in Orem, finishing high
school out there in 1938. My family was still living in American Fork, but Grandfather
Christian Sorensen had a forty-acre farm out in Vineyard, east and south of Geneva.
When he got too old to take care of the farm, we moved out there and took care of it for
him. In fact, he had two farms. He had a forty-acre farm, and then about a mile and a half
from that was an eighteen-acre one. There was a house on both farms. We took the big
farm and farmed that from ’38 to ’41. There were just two boys in my family, and I’m the
oldest. My brother’s name was LaMar. He passed away in 1976.
I worked on the farm between high school and Pearl Harbor. I joined the National
Guard in November 1940. It was just something to do, I guess. Well, it was more than
that. In them days, there was no money. I mean no money. For instance, we used to resole
our own shoes. The leather for them shoes would cost twenty cents, and the nails would
cost a nickel, and we didn’t have the money. Dad got so’s he would get a tire, take the
tread off of it, and put that on the shoes. That’s one reason I joined the Guard—for that
little bit of money. They didn’t pay me very much. We was only meeting once a week at
that time, so it wouldn’t be over twelve dollars a month. Our meetings were at the old
armory in Provo, Utah on 1st West and 1st North between Center Street and 1st North.
At that time, we had 75mm guns, the old-type guns. Whenever the gun was
moved, the barrel would move only so far. If you moved too far to the right or too far to
the left, then somebody had to get back there and move the trail (trailer?) with it, so’s that
you could get the barrel around farther. This was all WWI stuff—even our helmets and
rifles.
I knew Grant Johnson [who was also in the guard] when I was going to school at
Lincoln. I didn’t know him too good at that time, but I knew him.
At our Guard meetings we would practice artillery shooting, parade around the
place, do calisthenics—whatever we were told to do, we’d do. That was Charlie Battery,
and I think there were 110 or 125 guys in there.
I don’t think I really enjoyed the Guard. It was just something to do. There were
guys in there that I knew—it was an out, just something to get out. I used the money to
buy shoes, pants, shirts, and whatever. Maybe I’d use a dollar or two to chase a girl or
something like that.
I had a girlfriend during that time. In 1939 I started going with my wife, Dorothy
Manning. She was from Lehi. In them days there used to be track meets, and the girls
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used to have a little marching band. All of ’em was in black and white—white blouses
and dark shorts—with a little visor. All of ’em wore the same outfit. That’s how I first
met her.
I’ll tell you something else I used to do to get money. I worked on the farm there
six days a week, and Sunday was our day off. So me and Clyde Wilkinson—he went to
school with us too—contracted five or ten acres of onions from Clarence Gammon down
towards the lake. On Sundays we’d go down there. You can imagine how long them ten
acre rows was. We’d take four rows at a time to weed and thin. And when we’d get to the
end of a row, we’d make seventeen cents a row.
I could do something with them onions that I bet you’ve never seen. It was called
a Jap knife, but what it was was a little piece of square wood the width of your hand.
Right here on the front of it was a knife, a blade, that we’d keep sharp. It was square
across. We’d have a band tight across the hand, so when we opened our hand it would
stay there. We could take them onions and just go like that [demonstrates] and we’d have
’em topped. We could really top onions with ’em. I remember old Clarence Gammon
asking us where we got ’em. We told him we made ’em, and he said, “That’s the best
thing I ever seen in my life.” They used to go along with them grass snippers, lay them all
in a row, then go along and cut ’em off. But we could do it three times that fast with them
knives in our hands.
When the National Guard was activated into the U.S. Army, we went to Camp
San Luis Obispo. We left Provo on March 3, 1941. We were federalized on that day. We
wasn’t National Guard anymore—we was Army as of March 3. We were federalized
because the country was gettin’ ready for war. I had been following the war in Europe,
and I knew the war was coming. After we got into San Luis Obispo we could tell by the
type of training we was gettin’ that we was gonna get into something. In fact, in July I
came home, and me and the wife got married on July 16, 1941. I told Dad—I didn’t tell
Mother or the wife—that we was gettin’ ready then to go overseas.
I said, “When we go, it’ll be a long time before you see me come back.” I was
going to go to the Philippines in the South Pacific.
Dad said, “I don’t believe those Japs will do it.”
I said, “Yeah Dad. We’re gettin’ ready for something.”
Anyway, we took all of our equipment up and convoyed up to San Francisco. We
started loadin’ the boat—the old USS Tasker H. Bliss, an old scow. We loaded that for
three or four days, putting all our guns, trucks, ammunition, food, and everything. On
December 5, 1941, we left San Francisco for overseas. We didn’t know where we was
goin’. On the way up there, I was driving a Diamond T Wrecker. We was in close
convoy, and the convoy stopped real quick. That big wrecker couldn’t stop quick enough,
and I hit into the back of one of the command cars. It done something to the winch that
was on the bumper of my truck, and it had to be replaced. When that new wrecker came
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to us, it had wrote right on the door, “Manila.” [Laughs.] So I knew where we was goin’.
We was headed for the Philippines.
I never seen anything so dumb in my life: one ship with five thousand guys on it,
and only two little destroyer escorts with it, headed for the Philippines. It was about the
afternoon of December 6, and we was about halfway to Hawaii. On the seventh when the
Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, we was all sittin’ out there playin’ cards. Nobody was telling
us nothing, but we noticed the ship turned around and headed back. The guys even said
then, “Hell, we’re going the wrong direction. We’re going back.” Pretty quick the captain
come down and told us that the Japanese had hit Pearl Harbor and we was goin’ back to
get a bigger convoy of ships and stuff. He said then, “It’ll be a long time before you get
home again.” We were probably one day outside of Pearl Harbor. We shoulda kept goin’,
but they was afraid of submarines.
We came back into San Francisco, unloaded the old Tasker H. Bliss, and put
everything on the USS Monterey and the Luraline and the Macedonia. Three passenger
ships is what they was. They had elevators and that in ’em. We loaded everything into
them and then took off for Hawaii. Of course, it didn’t take us as long to get there with
them big passenger ships as it would’ve done with that old scow that we was in. I guess
we went twice as fast.
About three or four days later, probably December 11 or 12, we landed in Oahu at
night. We didn’t land at Pearl Harbor because you couldn’t get in there. We went into
Honolulu Harbor. They said that was the fist time that that size ships had been into
Honolulu Harbor; they said they was too big for it, and they dug a twenty foot furrow in
the bottom of the ocean there, going in. But we were still put in there. It was funny
because it was like two or three o’clock in the morning when we was unloadin’. I don’t
know how them Hawaiian people knew we was coming, but they was there by the
hundreds. They was tickled to death to see us.
Everybody figured the Japs would come back and hit Hawaii again. The Japanese
did make a mistake when they hit Pearl Harbor—they should have invaded at the same
time. They would’ve took us, no question about that.
The Arizona went straight down, and them big old sixteen-inch guns was right on
the waterline. They set there for months, but they were finally taken off. That’s where the
memorial that’s there now was made. There’s twelve hundred men still in that thing. And
there’s still oil coming up. That oil will come up for the next five hundred years.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a dastardly thing to do. I mean, if you’re gonna
have a war, have a war. But to come and sneak in there like that, and catch everybody
asleep in their beds, hey. I hate them people. I even hate ’em now. I can’t get over that. I
can’t stand ’em. It was a surprise to everyone that there was an attack. But if they’d have
been listening to the people that knew what was going on, it wouldn’t have been a
surprise attack.
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There was a staff sergeant that was runnin’ the radar out in Hawaii that told the
officers in charge that them airplanes was coming in. We had patrols planes out and
PBYs and stuff. They told the sergeant, “That’s what’s coming in.” That sergeant told
’em then—he said, “No. That’s not them. There’s so many here that we can’t count ’em
all on radar.” They should have known then, because they was havin’ trouble with the
Japs then. Neither one of ’em, the general or the admiral that was there, would listen to
the sergeant. He told them that, oh, three hours or longer prior to the attack that someone
was coming. But they told him, “Go back to bed.”
We dug in and waited, expecting the Japanese to come back. We did more
training for one and a half years, and then in 1943, we hit Kwajalein. We stayed in
Hawaii for a year taking amphib training, ranger training, and firing the rifles on the rifle
range. Amphib training was just what it says—we’d take all of our gear, load into them
LCMs (Landing Craft Machine) and LCVPs (Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel), go out
into the ocean, and then hit the beach. The LCVPs and that would just drop a door down,
and you’d run out. One of them was bigger than the other—the LCM used to pack the
tanks and the trucks and the guns and all that stuff. The LCVP would just pack the
people. Ranger training was mountainous training—going over a gorge on a rope with
your hands and your feet, jumping off a fifty-foot diving board into the ocean with all
your pack and your clothes and your gun and everything on.
We had a little colonel there, I guess he was probably sixty years old, grayheaded, short, and he was giving us the training. We had one guy there that was in the
training who was big boned and muscled. The colonel walked up, stood there, looked at
him, and said, “You think you’re a really tough guy, huh? You’re big. You’re tough.”
“Yeah, I’m tough.”
“Let’s see how tough you are.” He held off and swatted him in the face. “Come
on, take me.”
So the colonel made him mad enough that he finally went after him. That little
colonel had him down on the ground so quick, he didn’t know what happened.
But the colonel told him, “You’re not tough now, but when you come out of here
you’ll be tough.” That little colonel was so tough, he didn’t care. He had a little yard out
there about the size of a room. We noticed it was a cemetery, really. When a guy would
fall, break a leg, break his back, or whatever in training, he’d be hauled off to the
hospital, and the colonel would go out, build a little mound, put a cross up, and put the
injured man’s name on there. He’d say, “Well, he might as well die here. The Japs would
get him anyway. He’s not tough enough.” That’s how mean he was.
We got off the base some while we were in Hawaii, not a lot, though. A three-day
pass was pretty rare. You might get one day off. On my day off I would go down to the
bars and drink. Sometimes we’d go down to a luau and eat the native food and stuff. But
all them Hawaiians drank. I had a buddy, Raymond Sadamune, and he had a lot of
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relations in Hawaii. He was a real good lookin’ guy. I used to get to a lot of luaus with
him—he take me with him. He was a corporal under me.
I went overseas as a PFC (private first class) and I got up to sergeant while in
Hawaii. While we was there, a bunch of guys went on a cadre. I guess they was short of
people to train back there, so about half of the whole battalion was taken on this cadre
and sent back to the States. We were then filled up with recruits. The guys that went back
on the cadre didn’t come back to the Pacific. They were sent to Germany. After that, the
only time you’d get an advancement in rank would be if somebody got killed or wounded
bad enough that they had to be taken away.
I was in good shape. We’d done a lot of hiking—ten-mile hikes, fifteen-mile
hikes. When we was in California we went on a ten-mile hike, got there, and pitched our
pup tents. We’d no more than got our pup tents pitched when the first sergeant hollered,
“Roll ’em up. We’re goin’ back.”
I was in the service battery. I was in Charlie battery to start with, and then when
we got down to San Luis Obispo, we was in what was called the old square division. We
had twenty-four guns then, instead of just twelve. We had two battalions. The division
was changed to what was called a triangular division, which was actually the old division
cut in half. When that happened, we had to service our own guns. So a service battery had
to be formed. It was the 40th Division—the Sunburst Division.
As a sergeant, I had sixteen men under me and ten trucks and trailers. It was our
job to make sure that them guns had ammunition—all kinds of ammunition: the
projectiles for the guns, the powder bags, the fuses, the primers. You had two or three
different types of fuses—impact fuses, magnetic fuses, and timer fuses that you set a time
to. Even the guns, the rifles, the hand grenades, and all the rest of the stuff—it was our
job to make sure that our battery was armed. That was my job as a sergeant over this
chief of section—to make sure that the battery was armed. My battery was Charlie
battery.
We changed guns when we was in Hawaii, from 75mm to 155mm. That’s more
than twice the size. A 75mm is fixed ammunition—it’s got the brass on and the whole bit.
A 155mm is unfixed—you’ve got the projectile, the powder bag, the primer, the fuse, and
it all has to be put together before you can fire it. There’s no casing. What you do is open
the breach block on the gun, and of course the tube would be tilted up. Two guys would
go over with a little thing, and one would ram it in there. When it’d hit, the riflings, the
rotating band on the projectile would stick there. Then they’d put the powder bag in,
close the breach block, and screw the primer in. Before they put the projectile in there,
they put the fuse on, whichever type of fuse they was gonna fire. It was all unfixed.
I never did time it myself, but they was tellin’ us that we got very efficient at that
while we was down there in them islands. It takes twenty-nine seconds for that projectile,
from the time it leaves the tube until the first one would impact, wherever you was
shooting. It all depended on how far you were shooting, and that would be for about a
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seven-mile shoot. The guns would go nine miles, and the shortest range would be
probably five miles. We had three projectiles in the air at once—that’s how good we got.
A unit of fire for the whole battalion, which is twelve guns, would be fifteen
hundred rounds a day. We surpassed that lots of times, firing more than that. We’d fire
probably twenty-five hundred rounds in a day, and I don’t remember ever having to
change the tubes. We went right from Kwajalein back to Hawaii, where we took some
more amphib training and stuff. We loaded the boats again and went down to Saipan. We
took Saipan and Tinian and still had the same guns. It took us a couple of months to take
Saipan. We went into Saipan on my birthday—June 21. It took a month and a half to take
Tinian.
I connected with Grant Johnson in Provo in the Guard. I was right in his battery
until the change was made in Hawaii to a triangular division. Then I was put in the
service battery. I think one reason why that was done is because I used to be on the guns.
I come off the guns with a concussion. They used to say, “Keep your mouth open when
you fire so it vibrates in your mouth instead of your ears and stuff.” I come off the guns at
one time with blood coming out of my nose and mouth and ears from that concussion.
That’s one reason why I was glad to get away from the guns.
We weren’t given any protection—no ear plugs, no nothing. That’s standard now.
We were told, “Just keep your mouth open.” I might was well as stayed on the gun,
because that’s where we was—unloading ammunition right behind ’em. Every time
they’d fire we’d have to be right there unloading ammunition for ’em. They’d never have
more than a hundred rounds of ammunition around the gun at any one time.
The mail was all right—when you’d get it. You might not get any mail for a
month or two months. When we went down to fight, it might be longer than that. It might
be three months, and you’d never get a letter or nothing. But when you did get it, then
you’d get maybe eight, ten, or fifteen letters at a time. My wife wrote regularly. We
didn’t have any children at that time. I wrote as often as I could. During the fighting you
didn’t have time to write letters. The captain read the mail to make sure the guys didn’t
say where we was at, like, “We’re on Saipan,” or whatever. That stuff would be cut out.
If you said something like that, there’d be a big cut in the letter.
But that wasn’t V-mail. They had V-mail all right, but I never liked it. I used to
write a regular letter. We got to mail the letters free. All you’d have to do where the
stamp was supposed to be was put “free.” Of course, all it cost was three cents. But we
hadn’t been paid in months, so we never even had three cents.
I never missed a meal when we were on ship. I never got seasick.
It was a long trip from Hawaii to Kwajalein, but Hawaii to Saipan was a little
longer trip. There wasn’t a thing goin’ on in Kwajalein when we got there. There was no
airplanes or nothing. We had them ships sitting there in front of it early in the morning,
and I’m telling you, that’s the most beautiful island that I saw in all the traveling I done
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in the Pacific. It was just covered with palm trees and white beaches—just a serene little
island. I was involved in the invasion on Kwajalein. We walked in on that. Prior to goin’
in, the ships set out there and shelled it. They shelled it all one afternoon. The next
morning when we went in, instead of being a nice, beautiful island, all there was was
stumps stickin’ up in the air. All the fronds on the palm trees had been shot off. It was an
ugly island then.
The artillery never went in on the first wave, but I probably went in the second
wave. In fact, I know we went in on the second wave, because we never went in on
Kwajalein itself. There was a little island that was off of the end of it, probably five
hundred yards off the end of Kwajalein, that the artillery was put on. It was real small. I
don’t believe it was over two blocks long and 150 yards wide. The guns sitting there
crossways on the island, it was all they could do to get four of ’em across the whole
island there. It was just a little, small island.
The Japanese had an airbase at Kwajalein, and that’s what we was after. We were
still losing the war in the Pacific when we got there. When the tide started to turn was
after the fight on Guadalcanal and New Guinea. When the Japs lost down there, they
knew they’d lost. Then when we took Saipan, which was one of their main islands,
Saipan always belonged to Japan, and they knew they’d lost. Saipan is part of the
Marianas Islands. I don’t know how many islands is there, but the big ones was Saipan
and Tinian. When we went in there, I’ll bet there was five hundred airplanes up in the air,
just dog fightin’. Every few minutes one would go down in flames. All the time they was
up there fightin’, there we was going in on the island. After it was over with it was called
the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The Japs lost most of their naval aircraft right there.
We went into Kwajalein on the first day in the second wave. We set up the guns,
and as soon as the infantry established their line and started through there, we started
firing. The island wasn’t very long—we could fire the full length of the island. It was
within a nine-mile range, because we couldn’t fire more than nine miles. The Navy didn’t
do very much. They played havoc on top of the ground, but the Japs was all dug in. They
was in bunkers. They had holes with palm trees crisscrossed on top of the holes. The
artillery shell had a hell of a time gettin’ to ’em. So most of ’em had to be dug out of
there or burned out with flame throwers.
We used both impact fuses, time fuses, and magnetic fuses. The magnetic fuse
would bust before it hit the ground—maybe twenty yards in the air. That was for antipersonnel, anything that was on the ground. The time fuses could be timed so’s that they
would burst in the air, or they could dig in pretty deep before they’d go off. We’d use
them to try and bust the Japs out of them holes that they was in. We had one incident
down there where we lost nine men on Kwajalein. Our own guns exploded. In the first
one that happened, A battery had a muzzle blast, which means the shell got out of the
tube only a little ways when it exploded, maybe a couple of hundred yards out.
Then I was down talking with Grant and them in Charlie battery, and the fire
direction center called for a fire mission. They wanted to fire and was gettin’ ready to
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fire. I told Grant, “Well, if you guys are gonna fire, I’m leaving. I’ll go up to the ammo
dump and see what we got up there, make sure we’ve got enough stuff.” I turned around
and took off. I got about a hundred yards away and heard an explosion. I thought the Japs
had sent some fire our way. Instead of that it was our own gun again. But they didn’t get
the breach block closed, so the shell exploded in the gun, and some of it went out the
front of the tube, and some of it come out the back. The stuff that come out of the back
killed one of the guys that was in back of it.
I got to thinking then, because I took a lot of training in ammunition and stuff. I
went up to the fire direction center, and there was a little, cocky first lieutenant up there. I
told him, “Lieutenant, I don’t believe you should be firing that lot number with that fuse.
There’s something wrong with that fuse. You shouldn’t fire it.” We’d got the same fuse
in a different lot number, and the lot number meant that some different outfit here in the
United States had made it.
He said, “Sergeant, I’ll tell you when we’ll stop using that fuse.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
Anyway, two days later B Battery was firing, they got the breach block closed on
that one, and it exploded. The only thing left of that gun was the two wheels and the trail.
The tube and the breach block and everything was gone. We found the breach block
down the beach about four hundred yards. That was the gun that killed nine men.
I don’t know how many there was wounded by those guns, but Grant Johnson was
one of them. There was quite a few of ’em. I guess my letter says there was twenty-one.
That blast was so severe that it blowed some of the guys right out of their shoes. The fuse
was defective. As soon as they rammed it in, the jar started that fuse to timing. Just after
they got the breach block shut is when it went off. Afterwards, I went up to the fire
direction center, and I couldn’t find that lieutenant. If I had of, I would have killed him
right there.
We found out afterwards that there was two safety springs missin’ in that lot
number of fuses. The word that I got, which come from the States, was that it was
probably sabotage by our own people. (It’s just like now. You’ve got people that’s
against this Iraq thing, and they’re crazy. They sat there and lost three thousand people
there in the trade centers, and they know that these people are gonna come after ’em
again, and yet everybody’s hollerin’ about what it’s costing in Iraq. So what, it costs
money? I’ll guarantee you this—this Iraq thing’s not the last thing. You’re gonna have to
go into Iran. You’re gonna have to go into Syria. You’re gonna have to go into North
Korea. There’s no way out of it, no way. And we’re not gonna get the UN to go into
those. That UN ain’t got no teeth. They’re nothing.)
That’s about all that happened at Kwajalein. We was only there about seven or
eight days. I saw a lot of death while I was there. There was so many dead Japs on that
place, scattered all over. It was so hot down there in them islands that a dead body’d only
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lay there for a little while, then it’d swell up and bust. After the fight was over, we went
over there to bury the dead. We had a Greek second lieutenant from New York. He’d just
come in, just come out of OCS, and he knew everything. He knew it all. The guys was
reluctant to pick up stuff with maggots and everything else goin’ through ’em. “Ahh, just
grab a hold of ’em. They won’t bite you now.” He run over there and grabbed one and the
leg come off. That was the last we seen of him.
What they used to do was go over with one of them big D-9 cats, and they’d dig a
great, big, tall trench. Us guys would drag the bodies up close to that trench. After the
trench was dug, the guy driving the cat would go around and push ’em in. There’d be
dogs and cows and everything all in the same hole. That’s a hell of a way to treat humans,
ain’t it? But that’s war.
We went from Kwajalein to Hawaii. We stayed there and took some more amphib
training and stuff. Then we loaded the ships and headed for Saipan and Tinian. On the
way down to Kwajalein we bombed the hell out of Wake Island. On the way back we
bombed the hell out of it again. On the way down to Saipan we bombed the hell out of it
again. Every time we’d pass, we’d do it. I’ll bet them Japs was wishin’ they’d never took
Wake, because they’d get bombed every time we’d go past.
On Saipan, we was behind the first Marine division. They didn’t have an artillery
unit to go. That’s the reason we went on Saipan. I don’t know why we didn’t give them
our guns and let them have their own unit, but anyway they took us as a unit. Lots of
times we’d be within rifle range. It all depended on what they was shootin’ at or what
they wanted the artillery to shoot at. We’d get as close as we could to the infantry,
because we could shoot farther back all the time. It all depended on what was back
there—if there was an airfield back there we was after, we’d keep being pushed with the
infantry. If there wasn’t anything there except Japanese personnel, soldiers, to shoot at,
then we might be half a mile behind the infantry.
We had aircraft go up, little grasshoppers—paper-coated buggers. We’d send
them up, and they’d tell us what to shoot at—a cave, an artillery piece, a tank. No telling
what you was shootin’ at.
We had what were called range finders that helped us determine the range. If they
could get out to where they could see, they could tell the range, whether it was one mile
or five miles. Whenever we’d shoot at something, the range finders would give us the
range they thought it was, the coordinates, and we’d fire a smoke shell. From that smoke
shell we’d bring the guns down or up or sideways, whichever way we needed to get
closer to the target we was shootin’ at. If we still wasn’t sure, we’d shoot another smoke
shell.
When we zeroed in on the target we was after, it all depended on how big the
target was. We might shoot all twelve guns three times—that’s thirty-six shells a-goin’. If
we caught the Japs marching up to the front, bringing soldiers up to the front, we was
after them—we’d get them. That’s when we’d fire our magnetic and time fuses. The
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magnetic fuse was attracted to the ground, and it would explode about twenty yards in the
air. That was the anti-personnel fuse. That was to kill people.
The Japanese were firing mortar and artillery right back at us. In fact, on Saipan,
the old boy, the major of the battalion, put the artillery pieces down in the rice paddies.
Putting a gun that’s that heavy in the rice paddies down in the mud—I thought he was
nuts. We was shootin’ at a Japanese artillery outfit, but we was doin’ most of this at
night. We’d fire at their gun flashes, and they’d fire at our. As soon as we’d quit firing,
we’d hide, because here it comes back.
There was a ridge off to the side of us, a long ridge, and the Japs was a-shootin’
along that ridge. Whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp—all the way up and down that
ridge. Then they’d quit. As soon as they’d quit, we’d get in there and fire again. Then
here it’d come back—whomp, whomp, whomp, up that ridge. They knew that the heavy
artillery couldn’t be down in them rice paddies. They knew it. We couldn’t be in there—
but we was.
We towed the heavy artillery with what was called an M-1 tractor, a rubber-track
vehicle that stood pretty high and was run like a bulldozer with your feet and levers. It
turned around on dime. It would really go—about forty miles an hour. When we fired the
artillery pieces, we couldn’t fire them off of the wheels. You had to jack them up—they
was on jacks. Then the trail was dug in the back so’s that when they fired, they would dig
into the ground. If you fired the guns on them tires, they’d go right over backwards. My
unit had twelve artillery pieces—four in each battery. In the whole battalion I guess there
was probably 385. But ours was the only 155mm pieces; the rest was lighter, 105mm and
75mm.
I’d say about half of my unit was LDS. After the people from the East come in to
our unit, after that cadre left, I can’t ever remember an incident where anyone spoke of
religion—Mormonism or Catholicism or whatever. Nobody cared. In the first place, we
never had any LDS chaplains. We had one to start with in Hawaii, whose name was
Curtis. He was a major. In fact, I drove his command car and helped him hold services a
lot of times. I passed out the hymnbooks and everything. But I don’t know where he
went. He never went down under with us when we went to fight. He wasn’t there.
When we was goin’ to Saipan, they knew it was going to be a real mean fight. We
had a Catholic priest there. He held services for us guys that was LDS—a
nondenominational service. We was glad to have him. After he held the services for us,
he held a Catholic mass for the Catholics. But in all that time, in all that fightin’, I never
heard one man mention religion. I don’t know if there were any returned missionaries in
my unit. If there was returned missionaries there, they never let us know it. Because a
returned missionary could hold services for you. But no one ever did, so evidently we
never had any.
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When we was in San Luis Obispo we had services. We went on a parade there in
L.A. one time, I don’t remember what the occasion was, and some of the wards down
there had dances and stuff for us.
I’ll tell you, when you talk about patriotism, I’ve never forgotten this. After
spending 3 years, 8 months, and 26 days overseas without a furlough or seeing your wife
or seeing your parents (actually it was four years, because there was time in the States
where I didn’t get to see ’em too). We got off of that ship after the war was over, and we
were stuck out on Angel Island out by Alcatraz. After a couple days there, we were
allowed a one-day pass to go to San Francisco. We was walking down the streets there in
Frisco, and I don’t remember what street it was, but in the bars there were signs in the
windows—“No dogs or soldiers allowed.” Can you believe that?
Eight of us went in one bar that was all negroes. I don’t know how many negroes
was in there, probably five or six. We tore that place apart. We busted chairs; we busted
tables; we busted all the whiskey bottles along the bar; we busted the mirrors. He was on
the phone calling the cops, but it didn’t matter to us whether he called the cops or not.
Anyway, after we tore everything up, we walked out of there down the street. Here come
the cops, three cars of ’em. They zoomed past and one of them waved at us. They knew
where we’d been. I could read his mind, “Well, they’ve just cleaned up one of them joints
we’ve been after for a long time.” They had to go see what was wrong, but we cleaned
that place right out. There wasn’t a chair to sit in or nothing.
Saipan was mean—that was a mean fight. The Japanese got smart. They got so’s
that they knew when the artillery was coming in. They was scared to death of the
artillery. They’d let the infantry get in there all right. On Saipan there was a railroad that
went through there. The Japanese piled dirt up through this whole big valley so that when
the train went, it went across level. Them little buggers was behind that with mortars. We
couldn’t reach ’em. We couldn’t get the artillery up high enough to come down on ’em.
We tried to shoot and have it explode just as it got over ’em, but that’s pretty hard to do
because you can’t tell how fast them shells is goin’.
We had a Marine general, “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. We called him Howlin’ Mad
because he was always mad. For four or five days the water was getting to high tide,
close to washing the artillery out. Smith radioed in there and said, “I’ll take this island if
it costs me a ten-ton truck of dog tags.” Instead of the general figuring out a different
way, like maybe landing troops around the back of ’em or paratroopers or something, he
made that statement. We lost a lot of men on Saipan. I think we probably lost ten or
eleven thousand men on Saipan.
Iwo was a snafu. I was not there, but I had a brother-in-law who was. Iwo was a
volcanic island. All that volcanic ash was one or two feet deep all along the shore where
they landed. The tanks couldn’t operate or nothing. The little buggers was dug in in caves
and stuff. The Marines had to burn them out. The island was only five square miles. The
Marines fight different than the Army does anyway. The Marines is gung-ho, and they
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gotta go right to the top right now. The Army don’t do that. The Army takes things slow,
but when they take a piece of ground they hold it.
There on Tarawa two Marine divisions went in. This one division went clear
across that whole island in one day. It took ’em five days to fight their way back. And
then when they did get back, the two Marine divisions stood there and fought each other
for four or five hours before they even knew it. That’s how they fought. That’s not a way
to win a war.
There was a general by the name of Smith who was over the Army. There was
two Marine divisions and an Army division on Saipan. The two Marine divisions was on
the outsides of the island. The Army division was in the middle, which meant that they
had to go up over this mountain, Mount Topachu. It was a rugged mountain with cliffs
and everything. They couldn’t go as fast as the Marines was goin’, ’cause the Marines
had tank support on both sides. We was behind the first Marine division.
This general Smith from the Army called over and asked for artillery support. We
was the only 155 artillery unit that was on Saipan, so we turned the guns around and shot
the hell outta that mountain. Ol’ Howlin’ Mad Smith got so mad about not going fast
enough that he relieved that general. He went in, got him, and took him out of there. But
when it wound up, the Army got to the other end of the island first.
What made me sick on Saipan was when we got to the other end it was rugged,
mountainous thing with cliffs clear to the ocean, straight down. Japanese people was up
on the edge of these cliffs jumpin’ off, committing suicide by jumping over these ledges.
The Americans would try to talk to ’em. We had people there that could speak their
language, trying to tell ’em, “Don’t jump! We’re not going to hurt you. Don’t jump.
Please don’t jump. We won’t hurt you.” But you’d see a woman standing there with her
baby—she’d throw her baby over and then away she’d go. I saw hundreds of ’em do
that—day after day. It was just needless. The Jap soldiers, I guess, had scared ’em so bad
that they thought we was devils. The soldiers told them, “Americans devils.” They said
we’d rape and murder them and everything. That’s why the people jumped—they was
just scared to death.
I wasn’t wounded on Saipan or Kwajalein. I was actually wounded twice. I got a
piece of shrapnel in the leg on Okinawa. I went back and had it dug out. The officers
wanted my name and everything to get the Purple Heart. I said, “Hell, I’m not hurt.
You’re not taking my name down. The first thing you’ll do is send a telegram to my wife
and mother and tell them I’ve been wounded in action. I ain’t gonna have that.” So I
never would sign for it.
From Saipan we went to Tinian. Tinian was about a mile across the way from
Saipan. Prior to goin’ on Tinian, we took all the guns, went down on the end of the
island, set there for about two weeks, and just shelled it day and night. I guess we had the
first eight or ten miles of that island just pulverized. There couldn’t have been nothing
alive on it. Of course, the Japs would move away from it anyway with all that shelling.
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Then men went over and made the landing where we’d been shelling all that time. Tinian
wasn’t near as bad as Saipan was. We went through Tinian in only a month. We didn’t do
much on Tinian other than just firing and doing our daily thing. There was no events.
You had to hold up during all this. After Tinian we was all supposed to go to
Australia or New Caledonia and get a rest. But ol’ brother General MacArthur decided he
wanted to hit the Philippines, so that’s where we went. I was on the landing of the
Philippines, on Leyte. The Japs let us in and then fought us in the back country.
But Bull Halsey damn near made a mistake there. He took half of his aircraft
carriers and started chasing a Japanese outfit that was a decoy. He was chasing an aircraft
carrier and something else, and he caught ’em. But while he was gone there was a couple
of Jap battle wagons that was sittin’ there ready to knock hell out of us on Leyte. They
was getting ready to reinforce Leyte with more troops because they hadn’t hit Luzon yet.
Leyte was the first island they hit, and it was a big island—kind of a tough fight. But I
think Saipan was worse. The worst one of the bunch was Okinawa.
When we was on Saipan we had two guys that died. Bernard Cope was from
Springville, Utah, and I don’t remember where LaMar Lambeth was from. I think he was
from Utah. After the fight was over, just like right now when President Bush says, “The
fight’s over.” Actually the fight is over in Iraq. The only thing that’s there now is the
remnants that hasn’t been caught yet. We used to go through the same thing over there.
After the island was secured, we had bands runnin’ all over that we had to chase down
and kill. That’s what they’re doing in Iraq now. That’s war. You’re not gonna go in there
like that and clear ’em or kill ’em all, no way. The Japanese had bands that you had to dig
out—you had to kill.
Leyte was a lot like Tinian was—really tough on the infantry, but not really tough
on us guys. We didn’t see near the bad fighting and stuff that we did on Saipan. We
didn’t have to get as close either. When we had the Japs all surrounded at a place called
Ormoc on Leyte, we had the artillery pieces ringed around there. We was just knocking
the hell out of ’em every day and night—just poundin’ and poundin’ and poundin’.
The Japs come in there with three transport ships and tried to reinforce Leyte with
us ringed around them. The artillery then started shootin’ at them ships, and we set one of
’em on fire. We badly damaged another one, and the other one got away. The ships had
got rid of their soldiers in the meantime, in them little boats they had like LCVPs.
Hundreds of Japs come in there in them boats. Of course, the artillery set there and fired
time fuses, just mutilated and massacred hundreds of Japanese. Ninety-five percent of
’em never hit the beach. We got them while they was still in the boats.
Anyway, after the Ormoc deal was over, and we had killed ’em all, I guess, there
was so many dead bodies out there in the ocean. Them big ol’ D-9 cats had the blade
widened out with chicken wire—which made ’em really wide. We’d dig holes along the
beach, then the cats would go out in the ocean and push the bodies in them holes. The
bodies would get ground up in them tracks, and there would be arms and legs sticking out
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of them tracks. That’s war. That mean stuff is war. But we had to get ’em out of there. It
was either that or worry about diseases.
After Tinian we was probably there for two and a half months. During that time
we’d try to find something to do, like choose up sides and play softball and stuff like that.
The USO come in on Saipan with some women that was singers. I don’t remember who
they was, but they came in and give us a show. They used to try to help us find something
to do. Most of the time we’d try to do it ourselves. We’d play softball every day when we
wasn’t doin’ nothing.
We had cooks and medics in our unit. The cooks would never cook, but we had
them. While we was fightin’ and that, we never ate cooked meals. You ate C-rations or
K-rations or whatever you could find. There was no hot meals.
I ate every kind of ration there was. We started out with them K-rations, which is
like one of them popcorn boxes that had a little tiny can of ham and eggs compressed in
it. There’d be two or three cookies, four cigarettes, and I don’t know what else. There
was never enough to eat. But you’d have three of them a day—one for each meal. The
bread that they had, the more you chewed it, the bigger it got. It’d swell up so that if you
ate it all, why, your belly’d be full anyway.
Then the Army come out with the C-ration, which was a can of biscuits and a can
of stew or whatever. You’d get six of them a day. You’d get three of the stew or beans or
whatever and then the three cans of biscuits. The rations really started gettin’ good when
we started hitting Leyte. The Army started coming out with that ten-in-one ration. The
reason it was called ten-in-one is because it’d be ten men to one box. That was good stuff
then. It had canned peas and canned meats—lots of Spam. I got so I liked that Spam
pretty good. I still eat it; I still buy it for sandwiches and stuff now. Whenever the fight
was over, we’d have our little tents up, frying it. Now I just slice it out of the can and use
it for sandwiches or whatever.
I don’t remember the dates I was in the Philippines. While we was on Leyte after
the fight was over, a bunch of us was taken up to Mindoro—but no one out of the firing
battery, because Grant Johnson and them didn’t go with us. But all of the service battery
was taken. We loaded LSTs (landing ship tanks) and went up to Mindoro, Philippines,
which is the next island south of Luzon. We went in there and helped them make the
landing. After the landing was made, we went in there and unloaded them LSTs, which
was ammunition, gas, food—you name it. LSTs were huge—they would be wider than
this house is long. It was a regular ship with guns on it and everything.
There were great big doors in the bow that would swing open, and then the ramp
would go down. It had a real shallow draft. In fact, the LSTs would get in so far
sometimes that you wouldn’t even get your feet wet. When it’d go in, it’d take off
towards the shore and drop a great big grappling hook on a great big cable out in the
ocean. Then it would go as far it as it could go. You’d unload it, and then you couldn’t
get it back off, so it would be winched off. They’ll pull back off with that grappling hook
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that was out there. It’d be sittin’ on the sand. One thing I liked about LSTs was you didn’t
have to worry about U boats or submarines because the torpedoes would go right
underneath them and wouldn’t hit them. They was such a high draft that the torpedoes
wouldn’t even hit the ship; they’d go underneath it.
From the Philippines we went to Okinawa. We didn’t know where we was goin’
then. They didn’t tell us—they’d never tell you until you’d get a couple days before you
got there. When we steamed past Formosa, which is Taiwan now, I thought, “Man. I hope
we don’t hit Formosa.” There’s only one place on Formosa where you could make a
landing—one place and that’s all. The rest of it is sheer cliffs all the way around that
whole place. Nothing but sheer cliffs. If we’d had to make a landing there, it’d have been
pretty bloody getting in there. We didn’t go in. We bypassed Formosa and went up to
Okinawa, Japan, the first Japanese island. It was a huge island. It was big. I don’t
remember the dimensions of it, but I’m saying it was probably 185 or 190 miles long and
45 or 50 miles wide. It was like a figure eight. The narrowest part of the island, just about
in the middle, was eight miles from one shore to the next. Right in the middle of that was
an airstrip, and the Army wanted that—Yontan Airstrip. We wanted it. So that’s where
we hit. We cut that island in two. I think it only took two or three days before we had it
cut in two. We had two Marine divisions and three Army divisions. The Marine divisions
went north, and the Army divisions went south. Well, all the rugged end of the island was
on the south side—cliffs and mountains. Anyway, the Marines went through that whole
north end of the island in about a week. They only killed like 150 or 200 Japs. The Japs
had all moved to the south end, ’cause that was the rugged end of the island. I had to
laugh at General Buckner. (He got killed, by the way, on Okinawa.) We got into some
pretty heavy fighting, and he called up and asked the Marine commander, “What are you
guys doin’?”
“Oh, we’re done,” he said. “We’ve took our half. We’re done.”
General Buckner said, “The hell you’re done. You have them men on that line in
the morning at daylight.”
And the Marines was there. That put five divisions across that island. I think we
had three divisions in reserve that was still out on the ships. This is where the 24th Corps
come in, and that was the heart. I think we had twelve battalions of artillery. All of ’em
was 155mm. Some of ’em, like ours, was Howitzers, short barrels, and some of ’em were
long barrels. The long barrels would shoot fifteen miles. The short barrels would shoot
nine miles. Like I say, the Japs hated the artillery. They’d come over on one side and try
and hit the infantry, and the 24th Corps would move all the artillery over there and just
knock the hell right out of ’em. Then the Japs would say, “Well, the artillery’s over
there,” so they’d move over there. Then we’d move over there. We had ’em goin’. They
didn’t know what to do. We, the 24th Corps, from the whole war, was credited with killin’
one million Japanese, just with the artillery. Part of that 24th Corps come out of the
Seventh Divisions, which was on Atu in Alaska. Where the rest of ’em come from I don’t
know, but they was scattered all over the Pacific. The 145th was part of the 24th Corps.
We was one battalion of the other eleven. I think there was twelve battalions of artillery.
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It took us two and a half months, day and night, to take Okinawa. We went in on
Okinawa on the first day of April 1945, so it was about June 21 when we finally took the
iusland. I remember because my birthday was June 21, and it was right around then when
the fighting ended. Of course, we still had pockets here and there and all over that you
had to clean up, but the biggest share of the fighting was over.
We didn’t have any suspicions about the atomic bomb before it come out. We
heard about the dropping of the bombs over the radio. The men was tickled to death.
That’s one thing I’ll give President Truman a lot of credit for, I’ll tell you. He had to
make a bad decision there, and he knew that it was gonna cost half a million lives
between the two bombs. But if we’d a had to invade Japan, we would have lost at least a
million Americans. Japan is a bunch of islands, and you’d have had to invade each one of
them separate. You’d have had to kill men, women, and all, because they’d have all
fought. Truman asked his advisors, “How many men will we lose if we invade?”
“At least a million.”
“How many will we lose if we drop the bomb?”
They said, “At least 250,000.”
He said, “Drop the bomb.”
But that’d be a hard decision to make, wouldn’t it? But I was kind of tickled about
realizing that the Enola Gay that dropped the first bomb that come off of Tinian, the
island we had helped take.
Some of the men from the 145th and the 24th went into Japan after the bomb was
dropped. We lost our first sergeant, William Hamblin, on Okinawa. At night they used to
put a perimeter around the batteries. They’d put up trip flares, mostly, so’s that if
anybody got to movin’ around out there it would shoot a flare up in the air. It has a little
parachute with a light on it, and it will go down slow. It shines so you can see all over.
Anyway, there was some infantry guys that come past the battery, tripped one of the
wires, and set it off. Instead of the sergeant comin’ to me and sayin’, “Hey, Earl, will you
go get one of them flares and put it back up?” there was a PFC by the name of Pizetti,
and Hamblin told him, “Pizetti, you go get one of them flares, and put it back up there.”
Pizetti was an Italian kid. He went and got the flare and put it back up. The thing that he
didn’t know that I knew was that there was two different types of jumpers out there.
There was an anti-personnel mine that jumped, and there was a flare that jumped. Pizetti
put an anti-personnel jumper up. When them guys come back they tripped the wire again,
and the sergeant run out them to tell ’em, “Hey, watch what the hell you’re doin’. You’re
tripping these wires. Get the hell out of here.” They tripped the wire, it exploded pretty
close to him, and a pretty good-sized chunk of it hit him in the groin. He bled to death. I
was friends with him. He was our catcher on our softball team. I was a left fielder. After
he got killed and they was gonna go to Japan, there was a bunch of us—including me,
Grant, Batley, and I don’t know how many others—that was scheduled to go home. We’d
16
been there all through the war, so we was gonna be shipped out and replaced. The captain
come over and ask me if I’d take the first sergeant’s stripes and stay with him. If I’d a
been single, I probably would have done it. But, I was married and I hadn’t seen my
parents or nothin’ for four years. I thought, “No, sir,” and told him, “No way. I wouldn’t
stay if you’d make me a major right tonight.”
There was quite a celebration when the surrenders came out. Of course people
were really happy. They knew it was all over. As soon as them bombs was dropped, they
knew that war was through. I don’t remember the exact day I left Okinawa. I know it
took us twenty-eight days to get home. I came home on the old Tasker H. Bliss. That
thing had made it through that whole war. That old rusty bucket was the one that took us
home.
They was still scared that some of the submarines hadn’t gotten word yet about
the war being over, so we took the long route around. We left Okinawa and went to a
little island called Ulithi. From there we went to Guam. Guam’s where we traded ships.
We got off the one we was on and got on the old Tasker H. Bliss.
We was twenty-eight days going from Okinawa to San Francisco. It was kind of
funny. There was nobody there to greet us, nobody there waving a flag—nobody. It was
just a dull day. The only thing that happened was there was a little boat, a pretty goodsized boat, that come out there that had a flat deck out on the bow of the boat and a guy
and a girl dancin’. We looked at ’em like they was nuts. But anyway, they was dancing,
trying to show us they was happy that we was home. Goin’ under the Golden Gate Bridge
is an experience. Going one way it ain’t too good—coming back it was real good.
We come home on a train to Salt Lake. My wife and my dad and mother met me
at Fort Douglas when we got off of the bus. We wasn’t separated then. Dad and Mother
and my wife met us there the night we come in. I went home, stayed there for a couple
days, then went back. I got out on September 10, 1945. They didn’t keep us after the war
was over. I mean, they wanted us out of there.
I was married July 16, 1941, and I come home in September of ’45. I was with my
wife two days before I went overseas. My wife worked out on the farm with Dad and
Mother while I was gone. (Dorothy died of cancer in December 1985. We have two
daughters.)
Dad had gave up the farm by the time I come home, and he was living here in
American Fork, runnin’ a chicken ranch. Everybody was in chickens in them days. What
I done when I come home was bought the other half of the chicken ranch. I raised
chickens there for two or three years till the eggs got down so low that it was costing you
more to feed ’em than you was gettin’ out of ’em. I had the chickens counted—I think I
was runnin’ four thousand hens, layers. I owed the rolling mill up here about four
thousand dollars for feed. I told Dad, “Well, if the price of eggs ain’t up this week, them
chickens is gone. I’ve counted ’em and know how many there is. I can get about a dollar
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a piece outta each one of them chickens, and that’s just enough to pay that feed bill.
They’re gone.” Eggs never went up.
I had one coopfull that Mr. Heber Grant Ivans, who was running a little chicken
hatchery down here, kept some chickens in. He had one coop with roosters in there, and
he was keeping the eggs for the hatchery. I told him, “Well, you’re gonna have to move
your chickens somewhere. Get the roosters out of there and take them somewhere. I’m
done.”
“Oh, you can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t do that. I’ve gotta have it.”
“Well, I’m not gonna go any further in debt in feed. I’ve got just enough chickens
in there to pay that feed bill off, and that’s where it’s gonna go.”
He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You give me your chickens, and I’ll go
up there and pay off that feed bill. And I’ll rent your coops for fifty dollars a month.”
I said, “Mr. Ivans, you just made you a deal.”
Then I went to work down at Geneva. I was there for, I don’t know, about six
months or something. Ol’ Leo Van Wagoner was the chief of police, and he come after
me to be a police officer here in town. I thought, “Well, I might try that.” I went down,
and there was a guy by the name of Lefty Freestone that was a big shot at Geneva and
was doing all the hiring down there for the open hearth. I went and talked to him. I said,
“Lefty, they want me to go on the police force. But I’m not gonna go unless if I don’t like
it I can come back.” He said, “Any time you want to come back, all you gotta do is call
me the day before, and I’ll have you here the next morning.”
So I left and spent two years on the police force. But, I didn’t like that, diggin’
them people out of them wrecks and stuff. I told the wife one time, there was a guy and
his wife by the name of Harwood that come around the corner one night. The road isn’t
like it is now. It used to have a bend down there with a pretty hard turn. About three
o’clock in the morning they come around that corner and didn’t make the turn. Both of
’em was drunk. They run into the back of a car, and her head went through the
windshield. I was all alone. There was only one cop on a shift at that time.
Old Forey Driggs, who used to run the beer joint here, had his house right there.
He was standing in the doorway. I opened the car door, and blood was just squirting out
of her. I was trying to hold the blood in her head, and I told him, “Forey, call the
ambulance.” He did. We got the ambulance there and got her stabilized and gone. My
shirt was nothing but blood. I went home, and the wife just about took a fit when she seen
all that blood. She thought I was shot or something, I guess. I told her then, “That’s all. I
went through that in the war. I ain’t gonna go through it again.”
The next morning I called Lefty and asked if I could come back. He said, “You
bet. Be here Monday morning at eight o’clock.” I worked day shift down there and swing
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shift on the police force for two weeks and got that behind me. I finally wound up staying
at Geneva for thirty-three years.
I think all of the men went through a little bit of effects from the war, but it all
depends on how much you dwell on it. There’s two things that they was wrong on during
the war. They used to tell the people here, “Whatever you do, don’t talk about it. Don’t
say a word about that war when they come home. Don’t say nothing.” When I come
home, that’s all I knew. I’d been at it for over three years. I’d mention something about
the war, and the wife and Dad and Mother would clam up and wouldn’t say nothing. I
thought, “Man, they’re weird. Don’t even answer you.” I couldn’t wait to get back to
camp, to tell you the truth. But that’s wrong. What they’ve gotta do is the men have gotta
get it out of ’em. They can’t hold it in ’em. They’ve got to get it out, get rid of it.
I didn’t stay in the reserves. I wisht I hadda done. But if I hadda done I’d have
been into Korea, and I didn’t want that.
I talked the war out with Dad quite a bit, when he realized what I had to do. Plus,
I talked to other buddies, others that had been through the war. That helped. We went to a
lot of reunions. We had a lot of fun at reunions. Close to half of my unit was from Utah.
There used to be five of us that used to go to the reunions—me, Grant, Keith Batley, Jim
Christensen, Bob Loveless, and Warren Thomas. They used to call us the wild bunch.
Keith Batley’s still alive. He lives in Orem and runs Batley Plumbing. He was over here a
month ago. (Keith Batley died in early 2005.)
I knew Grant Johnson a long time. The only thing is Batley would probably know
more about the everyday thing that Grant done, because Batley was in the same battery.
He slept with him all the time; see, where I wasn’t. I was in the battery, then I’d be out,
then I’d be in. Every time I’d go into the battery with ammunition or whatever, I’d
always run ol’ Grant down, find out where he was out and what he was doin’. I was
interested because he was just a real good friend. We always hit it off good together.
Grant was a good man. He was a good soldier. A good soldier is one that does his
job and keeps his mouth shut, does what he’s told. When the fighting was over, we didn’t
get around the batteries too much. I would see him everyday when the fighting was
going, but when the fighting was over with, then I wouldn’t see him for a week, two
weeks, or a month.
We were kind of look-alikes too. When we was on that parade down in L.A., the
ward had a dance for us. Grant had a dance with this girl, the prettiest girl on the floor.
She told him, “You’ll be number three or four,” whichever he was on the list. Anyway, I
don’t know where Grant went. He took off and went somewhere. Pretty quick she come
over and says, “Here’s our dance. Come on.” I said, “Oh okay.” I got up and danced with
her. He come back, and I was dancing with her. I don’t think he ever did forgive me for
that. We did look quite a bit alike, and that’s why that girl got us mixed up.
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Whenever you’d go in to get new clothes and stuff, there was only two sizes that
you got—either too big or too little. That’s like the first pair of shoes I got—I could have
jumped right out of them they was so big. We went on a hike there in San Luis Obispo,
and when I come back I had blisters all over my heel and everything. That doctor seen
them shoes and said, “Good God, soldier, don’t you know what size shoe you wear?” I
said, “Yeah, I do, but they don’t.” You know how they used to take care of them blisters?
I had blisters on my feet, the bottom of my heel, the sides, and all, that was as big around
as a four-bit piece and puffed up. The doctor would take a hold of ’em with a pair of
tweezers, cut ’em open, drain all the water out of ’em, then take an iodine stick and stick
it in there.
I used to see Grant after we got home. When he was riding his motorcycle he was
working at Geneva. I was a foreman there and used to drive in all the time. I’d give Grant
a ride. This one day I says to him, “Grant, I wish to hell you wasn’t riding that
motorcycle. You’re getting too old for that stuff. You ought to give that motorcycle up.”
“Oh,” he says, “I can ride it good.”
“I know you ride it good. I’ve watched you. Trouble is, Grant, other people don’t
see you. That’s the problem.” My hell, it was only just two or three days after that until
he got into that mess [and was killee].
I have a knife. It’s my government issue blade. I got it when I went into Saipan.
It’s a Marine issue. We was back of the Marine division, so we was issued that knife. It’s
for hand-to-hand combat. It’s the Kabar brand, and I’ll tell you that knife skinned and
gutted two elk and one deer. You feel that sharpness, and it will still cut you. I made the
handle. I kicked the windshield out of a Jap airplane on Saipan.
This airplane was damaged. I guess we hit the motor or something, because the
pilot had to land. When he landed he landed in a sugarcane patch, which let him down
pretty easy. It tore his wing up pretty bad, but it didn’t kill him. The canopy was pulled
back and he was gone. There were three of us there. The other two wanted to go get him,
and I wouldn’t let ’em go. I said, “No way. He might be sittin’ in there with a gun. He’d
kill us all before we even knew where he was at.” So we left him. We went in the
airplane with the idea of getting him, but he was already out of the aircraft, and I wasn’t
about to hunt him out in that sugar cane patch. We probably never would have found him
anyway, ’cause it was a huge patch.
So I went into the plane and got the metal and the plastic that I used for my
handle. To make the handle I cut the plastic, which is Plexiglas, into squares. Then I
bored a hole into each one of them squares so’s it fit on the handle. I smelted and poured
the aluminum on the front of the knife. I stuck it down in the sand and poured the
aluminum around it. It was a square about two inches. Then I put all that plastic on there
and tightened the nut down that was on the end of the handle. Then I put it down in the
sand again and poured another aluminum square where the nut is on the back, and it was
pretty good-sized.
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After that, I just whittled it out with a file, crocus cloth, and sandpaper. The red
color is paint. I put it around just on the inside of the hole. There’s an aluminum washertype thing in the middle, and I think there’s a brass one in there too. They aren’t just
regular washers—they come off the aircraft too. I poured the aluminum right over the
nut. All my buddies in the service battery saw me working on this. They’d all say, “What
are you doin’? What are you doin’?” “Makin’ a handle.” I didn’t know how to do it.
That’s just how it wound up. I knew about what a handle should look like. I just kept
whittling at it until that was the product that come out of it.
I don’t think the war had that much of an impact on me. It’s something that we
had to do. It’s just like these kids that’s there now. The thing that makes me sick with
these kids that’s in Iraq and Afghanistan is they’re volunteers. They volunteered for that
Army, and now, because they’re over there, they want to come back. They’ve only been
there ten months. Everybody says, “Oh, ten months. They’ve been gone all ten months!”
I tell these guys up here when they talk about it, “Hell, they’ve not even been over there
long enough to dig a foxhole yet.” Ten months is nothing.
But they’re a volunteer army. They volunteered for it. Now even their wives back
here are demonstrating to bring them home. You can’t fight wars like that. You’ve got to
have people that are dedicated to fight a war. My wife was almost a stranger when I came
home. Not only that, but all of ’em was scared of me. I guess they was afraid I’d go off
my rocker or something. I don’t know what the people told them or what they saw
watchin’ them newsreels and all the rest of that stuff.
That’s another thing that’s bad right now. There’s too much television on these
wars. There’s too many congressmen going over there and looking around. They ought to
keep the politics out of it and let these generals and the men fight the war and do like they
did in WWII. When the public found out anything in WWII it was usually three or four
weeks after it happened, if they ever found out about it. But you take over there right
now, we’ve not lost three hundred men yet. If we have, it’s just barely three hundred. We
lost twelve thousand right there on Okinawa alone in two and a half months. That’s a
difference in a war.
[Leah: I was interested in what Earl said because I think this is what Grant would
be saying. In Vietnam it was the same way. What did they do? They had six months of R
and R? The government would take their wives over to some island to be with them and
everything like that.]
Go to Hawaii.
[Leah: Hawaii or Australia or somewhere like that. The thing you just said that
was important to me was the guys that were in Vietnam that were guards that joined the
Army for any reason, that was their job. Why don’t they go ahead and go over there and
do their job and keeps their mouth shut for as long as it’s gonna take? And then come
home.]
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That’s right. That’s right.
[Leah: When we had the dedication of our monument, someone from Channel 2
asked me, “Mrs. Johnson, which of the holidays causes you to relate more and become
closer to the veterans?”
I said, “I’m not sure what you’re saying, young man.”
He said, “Well, I asked you a simple question. Which holiday means more to
you?”
I said, “Mister, every morning when I wake up I look to the east mountain and
first off I thank my God for giving me another day. Another thing I thank my God for is
those veterans who gave their lives to keep this country free for me, for my children, for
my grandchildren, for my great-grandchildren. Why do you need a holiday?”]
I have a guy that calls me every Veterans Day. He never misses. I never see him
all the whole time of the year. I hunted elk years ago with him, but I never see him any
other day. But on Veterans Day he’ll call me on the phone. He’ll say, “Earl, I just want to
say one more time how much I appreciated what you guys done for us in WWII. I’ve read
some of them things, and I’ve seen some of that stuff, and I don’t know how you took it. I
don’t know how you stood it. I just want to thank you.” Every year he’ll say the same
thing. His name is Elden Ford, and he lives in Orem.
Here’s a bad thing about Vietnam. To me, Vietnam was not a war. In a war you
gotta be buckle to buckle to a man., face to face, either kill him or be killed. In Vietnam,
they’d take them helicopters out, stick the men in a place, let them fight for two or three
hours, then pick ’em up and take ’em back for a hot supper. That’s not war. If the
politicians would have stayed out of that Vietnam, we’d have won that. That’s what’s
wrong right now with Iraq. You take Iraq right now. What gets me is, I’ve been a
Democrat all my life, and I’ll admit it. That’s the only place a working man can go is
Democrat. Any of these people who vote Republican around here are voting against
theirselves. Because a Democrat is the one that’s after jobs, he’s after social security, he’s
after the poor people. I got a letter the other day from the Democratic National
Committee wanting a donation. Well, I’ve been watching these guys. I’ve been watching
Kerry, I’ve been watching Davis, I’ve been watching Lieberman. I’ve watched ’em all
and listened to ’em. And there ain’t a one of them nitwits that will win. They can’t beat
Bush. I don’t care what Bush does. I wrote them a letter and told them, “No, I will not
give you a donation to any one of those people that are running right now. What you guys
have got to do, instead of criticizing Bush, is start telling the people what you’d do if you
was in that same thing. What will you do to change it?” That United Nations? No way.
They ain’t got no teeth, no nothing. Any time you’ve got a country like Syria that’s
president of the security council, you’re in trouble. Syria hates us—they all hate us over
there. France and Germany? I wouldn’t give them two the time of day, neither one of
’em. We’ve had to bail France out and liberate them twice in a hundred years. Germany
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don’t like us ’cause we’ve kicked the hell out of ’em twice in a hundred years. But these
guys runnin’, the only one that makes any sense to me now is that Dean. But I believe
he’s just a little bit too bullheaded and stuff. But I’m not satisfied with what Bush is
doin’. Bush went into this thing half-cocked. He didn’t figure any of this stuff out.
[Leah: Going back to a question earlier, first off, the number of the 145th, and of
course I’m including the whole 24th Corps because they were not from Utah, most of ’em.
You guys went in with the 24th Corps. When you left Utah, you were 100 percent. When
you left and went down to San Luis Obispo, you were 100 percent from Utah. But when
you came out you were not, and he made mention that they were not buckle to buckle like
you guys were. But ten days afterwards, boy, you were fighting for your country, this is
what your president ordered you to do and everything, you were devoted to the cause,
and you were friends. Some of the better friends that Grant has had are from the ones that
were brought in from these other divisions.]
Mine too. I’ve kept in touch with a lot of these other men.
[Leah: JD Smith was from North Carolina, there was a fellow from Wisconsin,
and Junior from California. In fact, Grant was reprimanded by this one that they didn’t
talk religion, because he’s now joined the LDS Church. We were in San Diego and
visited with he and his family, and then they came up and visited with us. He said to
Grant, “Why didn’t you tell me what you people had?” Grand said, “I was too busy
staying alive.” In WWII there was a meshing together of all races, creeds, and colors.
Except the blacks, but we got that in Korea.]
You haven’t heard of an incident yet in Iraq or Afghanistan where one soldier has
given his life to save another one. Like in WWII, if somebody throwed a hand grenade in
to them, he’d dive on it and kill hisself rather than to see any of his buddies get it.
[Leah: Or if a man was wounded someone would go try to bring him back so that
he had a chance for survival and gave his own life if he was wounded himself.]
That’s just like Senator Bob Dole was saying. As badly wounded as he was, he
had people go in there and drag him out, or he’d have been dead. He knows who they are.
[Leah: You find this a lot. “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to kill these people.”
Just like Earl just said, you either do it or you be killed. You don’t wait about it. You
don’t wait for someone to take over for you. I think, to me, it’s a lack of patriotism and
love of country that this younger generation has. I’ve listened to this Iraq deal; I’ve
listened to service persons, men and women, out of Salt Lake that were in the National
Guard. Earl took twelve dollars a month in the National Guard because he wanted the
money. Now what are they making because they want the money, and they’ve all got
good professions?]
Not only that, they want the retirement out of it.
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[Leah: Or the education. What happened, the veterans’ organizations from WWII,
you guys are the ones that got the GI Bill, you got your VA hospital insurance benefits,
all these other things. WWI came home and sold apples on the street, didn’t they? That’s
how they made their living. But because of coming together and uniting…]
I’ve said this a lot of times, and I’ve looked at this younger generations. I’m
talking about kids right now that’s anywhere from seventeen to twenty-five years old.
You look at ’em around here, and if they’re ever drafted, and if we ever get into a world
war like we had in WWII, we’ll lose.
[Leah: Another thing, they’re an I and Me generation. But going back, I know
how old Grant was in ’40 when you went to San Luis Obispo. He had just turned eighteen
years old. By the time that he was over there, like you were, four years, he was twentytwo. You were just kids. You were babes in arms. I look at these pictures of Grant, and I
could just cry.]
We was all just kids.
[Leah: You were kids. You were eighteen years old.]
I was born June 21, 1921. I was twenty years old when I joined.
There was a state representative for this area, but he wasn’t my representative. I
don’t know if he was Republican or Democrat. He’s a slant eye as far as I’m concerned.
[Laughs.] I never look at the Made in Japan stuff anymore, because 90 percent of the
stuff that we buy is made out of this country.
[Leah: Looking at Topaz [Japanese relocation camp, near Delta, Utah], and all
these people they brought up there, now they want the government to pay them, some of
these POWs that we had, that we treated. We brought them here to Orem and let them
pick fruit and all these other things. They want the government to compensate them. Our
POWs and the MIAs who we don’t even know about, they were not treated to sundaes,
freedom to go out in a beautiful orchard to look at the blue sky. Our POWs were not that
way. We needed Topaz.]
Oh yes, it’s been documented that there were hundreds of Japanese spies on the
West Coast at the beginning of the war. I’ll tell you what, this Raymond Sadamune, I was
telling about that was my buddy, that was a corporal under me, never would write to his
mother. I used to have to tell him, either write to your mother or I’ll send you out to dig a
slit trench. So he’d write to her. Anyway, on the way home, we was going across the Bay
Bridge over to Oakland from San Francisco. He said, “Sarge, I’ve got something to tell
you.”
I said, “Yeah, what’s that?”
“Well, my dad is Japanese.”
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That just about floored me, because he looked Hawaiian. Black bushy hair, dark
skin, and everything. I didn’t know what to say. But anyway, I never said nothing. We
walked up, he knocked on the door, and his dad come to the door. The first thing his dad
said to him was, “Son, how many of them sons of bitches did you kill?” He was on my
side right there. He said, “I’ve been saving a gallon of wine for the last eighteen years for
a celebration. And today’s the day.” So we drank his wine.
But I would never trust one of ’em. I asked him about that, because his dad was
one of ’em that was taken off of the coast and taken to Utah. I said to him, “What did you
think about when they done that? Didn’t that make you mad?”
He said, “Oh no. You cannot trust Japanese. The first thing a Japanese thinks of is
their Emperor. He comes first, and nobody else counts.”
I said, “What about the ones that’s born in this country?”
“They think of the Emperor because he’s a living god. Nothing else counts. You
can’t trust ’em.”
I said, “In other words, you don’t feel bad about going down there?”
“No. They had to do it.”
[Leah: We don’t hear a lot of that stuff up here.]
He said you can’t trust Japanese, but I knew that. He didn’t have to tell me that.
There was a Japanese battalion that fought in Italy, but you’ll notice they were
never shipped that way. There’s a lot of difference. Put them over there fighting their
cousin, and there’s a lot of difference what they would have done in the Pacific and what
they done in Italy. There were some in the Pacific as translators. We had one or two in
our outfit. In fact, at least one of ’em was killed going into a cave trying to talk ’em out of
there. They weren’t allowed to go in anymore after that. They’d talk to the Japanese in
the caves, and then tell us, “They’re not going to come out,” so we’d blow the cave shut.
There on Okinawa about a year ago one of them huge caves was opened up, and there
was fifteen hundred Japanese in that cave, all sittin’ there on their butts, lined all the way
around it. Sittin’ there on their butts with their arms folded, just skeletons. Fifteen
hundred of them. They had tanks and everything in there. The people who opened the
cave up didn’t touch anything. They closed the cave back up and left it.
We used artillery to close the caves. I was involved with some of that, but I never
fired the gun. We used to be sent out on patrols too. This is another thing. After the
organized resistance had fell, we used to be sent out on patrols. We’d patrol these caves
and stuff. Whenever we’d run into one of ’em, we’d try to talk to some people that was in
there. We didn’t know if anybody was in ’em or not. But if we didn’t get any answer,
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we’d go on top of the cave with what was called a bell charge. We’d stick a couple of bell
charges on top of that cave and then go down and set ’em off. The whole works would
just cave right in.
There’s another reason why I started to hatin’ the Japanese. This Leonard Cope
and LaMar Lambeth that I talked about earlier, they was huntin’ souvenirs on Saipan.
They had been told not to, because there was still a bunch of Japanese here and there, like
it is in Iraq. They went anyway and run into a Jap pillbox that had three Japs in it. The
Japs killed ’em, both of ’em. The next day when we went in there to get ’em, the Japs had
’em hung up by their heels, had cut their privates off, and stuffed them in their mouth.
From then on, we never took a prisoner. That ended the prisoner deal.
We was on patrol on Saipan one day, and we found one Jap in a cave. This is
before the Leonard Cope deal. We got him out and took him back to camp. The captain
said to me, “Sergeant, you’ll have to take him back to the rear and turn him over to the
MPs.” I said, “No, sir. I’m not going back there tonight.” It was starting to get late. There
was one place on the road where the Japanese was ambushing us, and snipers was killin’
one or two every night with trucks and stuff going past. It’s just like they’re doin’ over
there now.
The captain said, “Sergeant, I told you to take a man with you and take that son of
a bitch back.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He didn’t make it back to the MP’s.
I’d no more than got into camp and that captain sent somebody after me. I went
over there and he said, “Sergeant, did you take that man back to the rear?”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “You’re a damn liar, Sergeant. I heard you shoot. Take a man down there
in the morning and bury him.”
I said, “Yes, sir.” That’s as far as that went. It’s just like I was saying, it’s either
your life or theirs. My life would have been in jeopardy trying to save his, taking him
back to the rear. I wasn’t about to do it. He wouldn’t have done it for me. He’d have
killed me right there in the hole where he found me, just like he did Lambeth and them.
I’ll tell you, them three Japs in that pillbox, they paid dearly for that. They were
burned up with flame throwers. Boy, you could hear ’em screaming for half a mile.
All in all, I have been blessed. I was blessed with a wonderful wife, and a
wonderful dad and mother. I’ve been blessed with two beautiful daughters, five
grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
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God has also blessed me with wonderful friends, whom I am very grateful for:
Leland Hampton, Jack Doyle, Ted Southwick, Charles Roach, James Hindley, Dean
Rigby, Wesley Omer, and Chris Hriensen.
When I was in the war in the South Pacific, I didn’t think I’d ever make it back,
but God seen to it that I did. That was sixty years ago, and I’ve often wondered where all
that time went. Time flies by real fast, whether you’re having fun or not.
I’m eighty-three now, my eyes are not good, and I have a pacemaker in my chest
for my heart. Other than that, I feel good, about sixty-five or so. I golf with my friends
everyday and take care of my yard. God has been good to me.
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