Veteran Transcript
Robert D. Jackson
[b. 01/22/1927]
[Interview starts at 003 on counter]
ROBERT PAUSZEK: Today is Saturday, September 22, 2007, and this is the beginning of an interview with Robert D. Jackson at his home at 2924 River Bay Drive North in Indianapolis, Indiana. Mr. Jackson is 80 years old, having been born on January 22nd, 1927. My name is Robert Pauszek and I will be the interviewer. I am a ninth grade student at Park Tudor High School and Mr. Jackson is a friend of my grandfather.
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RP: Mr. Jackson, could you state for the recording what war and branch of service you served in?
ROBERT JACKSON: I was in the United States Marine Corps late in World War II until 1947.
RP: What was your rank?
RJ: Private.
RP: Okay, where did you serve?
RJ: I went to Paris Island which is the boot camp for the Marine Corps (and still is.) I was there for the two months of boot training. From there, went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where I served - did basic training for an additional two months. Following that, was sent along with everybody else in Camp Lejeune by train to San Diego. We went from San Diego up to Pendleton - Camp Pendleton, at Oceanside, California where we stayed for about ten days. After that period of time, we hurried on to San Diego where we spent forty-eight hours on the dock because we had gotten there two days early and the ship was late. Went aboard that ship. Went from San Diego to Hawaii where we picked up some more people and then went directly to Guam in the Marianas Islands. From Guam - at Guam, I joined the Sixth Marine Division which was forming for the first time.
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The Sixth Marine Division later went to Okinawa in April of 1945, but this is still in 1944. From [there], I was assigned to a small unit and I was attached to the Sixth Marine Division, but our smaller units went around in some of the islands, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, came into the back of the island where we had left some Japanese and tried to get them to surrender. If we didn’t get them to surrender, we had to do something with them. And we did that because they were always a menace. The rest of the island was humming with war activity and here these people are back up in the hills causing trouble. So we did that for an extended period of time, two or three months.
[We] came back to Guam and by that time Iwo Jima was over, which was February of 1945, and my outfit had left for Okinawa. Okinawa took about a month and a half [and] everybody returned. We were all then back on Guam together, and we stayed there training for what everybody knew was to be the invasion of Japan. It was never said exactly what it was, but it’s a matter of fact, subsequently, we found out that we were going to remain on Guam in training until the first of September, or so. [By] which time, we would be boarding ships and we would be in convoy, in a rendezvous off, near Guam, near the islands, but waiting to go to Japan.
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We went, we finally, my outfit got aboard its ship the last little bit of July, first part of August. And we were out off China, or out off Guam, and they dropped the bomb. The word came across our troop ship over a loud speaker that something had happened in Japan. We weren’t quite sure what it was yet. We’ll let you know later, and nobody even looked up. And then a week went by - or three days went by, and they dropped another bomb and that came over the same way. And then about twelve hours later or maybe a day later, they started saying over the loud speaker that Japan had surrendered. That there had been a catastrophic attack of some of the Japanese islands, or cities, and they had said that’s enough, we’re through. So well, we couldn’t believe that, nobody believed that. I mean no, we hardly even yawned. But as a matter of fact, it became obvious because we instantly then were diverted from our rendezvous spot north toward Okinawa, toward Iwo. We, as a matter of fact, ran into a tremendous storm that actually sunk some of our ships. They abandoned some ships. We got through that. We turned into a big bay in a town called Tsingtao where we went ashore. And we went ashore in full invasion gear, and when we got there, the Japanese - the Chinese, already knew we were coming and were waving little American flags at us.
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So for the next several weeks, we repatriated the Japanese. We had a ceremony on I believe the second day of September, where we had an old Japanese general out in front of all of us, and there were at least 5,000 Marines lined up all around him in as clean uniforms as we could find. And we accepted his surrender on behalf of all of the soldiers in that part of China and the general took his sword, we were dismissed and then we left and got busy going back into Japan picking up, going back into China, picking up Japanese soldiers.
And anybody who had cooperated with them, if a baby had been born by way of a Japanese soldier, the baby went to Japan, the mother went to Japan. Anybody who shouldn��t be left in China, should for their own safety, went to Japan. And Japan didn’t want them at all, but they went there. This took ninety days more or less. We had to stay with them because after we picked up the Japanese, if we left them alone with the Chinese, the Chinese would kill them. That is because the Japanese had been brutal to the Chinese beyond description.
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After some ninety days, things settled down in China, and then all of a sudden we brought in some heavy equipment, some tanks. And we started going out into the countryside [with] marines sitting on top of tanks, with our weapons, because the Chinese Communists had come up into our part of China. And our foreign policy at the time was to support Chiang Kai-shek and try to prevent the Chinese Communists from taking China. Our efforts were feeble, some of our people got killed by the Chinese Communists, and some time in 1948, some time in 1946, it was decided that China was not worth it. We moved Chiang Kai-shek to Formosa and China went Communist. They were brutal to us. I relieved a guy on guard duty one time late in 1946 and he wasn’t at his post. I found him, his throat had been cut up by a Chinese Communist and whatever ammunition and gear he was guarding, they had carted away. This went on for months until finally it was my time to go home.
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And I had boarded a ship along with 3,500 other marines, I was told, I wasn’t sure, on a ship called the General Sherman. We left and went to Japan, and I was on guard duty on the folksel of this ship. And we were anchored, we anchored at night, and as the sun came up, right in front of me was Mount Fujiyama, which was just spectacular. We stayed there a couple of days. I went ashore on some work duty came back and started our trip home. Our trip home was forty-five days by way of the [Panama] Canal. We got in the canal and they let us off the ship one day inside a compound where we all were given milk and ice cream. And we all got sick because we hadn’t had anything like that for almost two years. Went from Panama to Norfolk and [in] Norfolk we got on trains and were sent to the Great Lakes Training Center in Chicago, Illinois. And after three or four days there, we were given our discharge, sent out the front door with no instruction whatever, go wherever you want to. So I went to Chicago, got on a train, came to Indianapolis, Indiana, and met my brother who was at DePauw at the time. He brought some civilian clothes. I took my uniform off and left it in the Union Station. Took my tee bag and I had a Japanese rifle that I carried with me for a year and went to DePauw. [I] enrolled in school and graduated in 1950.
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RP: Can you describe how you dealt with Japanese who were unwilling to surrender?
RJ: Well, if they were in a cave and they wouldn’t come out, and we tried to talk them out .A Japanese lieutenant was with us, if they wouldn’t come out, we burned them. And that just seemed like what you want to do, it was brutal. Some of them did surrender and if they surrendered, then life got good for them because a Japanese soldier that had surrendered for whatever reason were treated humanely for the first time since they were in the Japanese army I’m sure. We didn’t get many alive, but I don’t know how many we killed, but we just sort of went about our business.
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RP: What did your family think about your decision to join the Marines?
RJ: I was seventeen and so my mother had to sign and she was reluctant, but she finally did sign. My father had died in 1941. My brother was already in the Army Air Force and was a lieutenant navigator on a B-24. So it wasn’t her first experience. They were proud.
RP: Did you see much combat in your first assignment?
RJ: No. My first assignment, I did not go to Okinawa because I was off on this other venture, there was always combat where I was. But I never had a major invasion of a specific island. After I got overseas, we had of course the horrendous battle at Iwo which my outfit was not involved in. And that took thirty days, and we lost a lot of Marines. In April, we went to Okinawa which was another Japanese island and it took almost forty-five days to get through that island because they wouldn’t surrender. They would kill themselves. They would do anything but surrender. Finally, we secured the island, we left some people there, the army came in to help, and we came back to Guam and then the whole Sixth Marine Division was in Guam including my outfit. And we trained intensively in July, June and July of 1945 for the invasion of Japan. We knew that’s where we were going, although nobody ever said that.
RP: Were there many casualties in your unit?
RJ: In my particular unit when we were out doing the thing that I was doing, we lost one marine. The Sixth Marine Division had casualties at Okinawa but not many. The Second Marines on Iwo lost a large percentage of their total living population, but in my outfit no. Although I did, I was issued a blanket on Guam later on that had been the blanket of a dead marine that got killed on Okinawa. I still have it.
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RP: What would be your most memorable experience as a marine?
RJ: Well, I don’t know. I suppose one of the most memorable would be that first venture in a cave trying to get the Japanese to surrender. But it was truly an emotional experience to finally be told by someone who knew that we were coming home. It just seemed like that was never going to happen, that we were going to have to remain in China and fight the Communists and we didn’t feel as though that was the place.
RP: What did you and your men do if you had any free time?
RJ: Well, we had no free time in the States. We got one weekend off one time at Camp Lejeune [and] we went into Jacksonville, a little town in North Carolina. Absolutely not a moment off when you were in boot camp. We went to California and in San Diego we were given a weekend pass. It was just one night. I did go to Los Angeles. We stayed in Hollywood, some of us, and I met my brother who was stationed in Nevada at the time. He came and we had dinner together and then he had to fly away and I had to go back.
RP: What were living conditions like?
RJ: They were very basic. Boot camp was barracks where there were eighty-two people in a single barrack. Camp Lejeune was tents which we slept with the sides rolled up. It rained all day long everyday it seemed. In China, when we finally got everything settled down, we occupied a Japanese school that they had built to educate their own children. And this was very nice. It had running water, it had bathrooms, and it had a kitchen that we took over, and we housed an entire battalion of Marines in this particular Chinese school. Everyday rickshaw drivers would come by and if you could get out, if you had a pass, you would get in a rickshaw and he’d take us downtown in Tsingtao which was a big town, there was a million people in there.
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RP: How did you communicate with your family during the war?
RJ: There was mail. Many times the mail couldn’t get to you. Sometimes it would be ninety days before we would hear from home, but we wrote letters all the time and then we had a chance to mail them. Sometimes my mother would get half a dozen letters at the same time because I hadn’t had an opportunity, but that was always there. There was obviously no communication otherwise.
RP: What did you go on to do after the war?
RJ: The day after, the day after I got home I was at DePauw. I enrolled. I started DePauw then I think in January of 1947 and graduated routinely in seven semesters in 1950. The day after I graduated on Sunday from DePauw, I enrolled at Northwestern MBA program in downtown Chicago and stayed there for a year and got a MBA. Then, we were married the following, as a matter of fact, my wife graduated from DePauw. We were married on Friday. She graduated on Sunday and I graduated on Monday. So we had a busy week.
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RP: Did you continue any friendships you made while in the service?
RJ: Yes. I have a friend Alfred Reeves Hunter III who lives in Philadelphia on the Mainline - a great guy. We’ve been together a dozen, two dozen times, since that time. He’s been here. I’ve been to his house. I knew all of his three wives. Now the poor guy has dementia and he hardly knows me when I call, but he acts like he does and then we talk for a few minutes and then that’s about it. But I have a lot of other friends that I hear from, from time to time. For the first fifteen or twenty years, we got lots of Christmas cards and sent lots of Christmas cards.
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RP: Do you any photographs of you while you were in the service?
RJ: Yes, but I don’t know where they are [laughs]. We have a photograph with me, with a helmet on and an M-1 slung across my shoulder and three or four other guys and we’re looking up in a tree as if we’re pointing to a Japanese soldier and this was North Carolina [laughs].
RP: Did you join a veteran’s organization?
RJ: Yes, I’m a member of the American Legion. I was at one time a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. My proudest membership is the Service Club of Indianapolis. There are a hundred and eighty five of us, and I never miss a meeting if I’m in town. We meet on Monday at the Knights of Columbus, right over here, and many, many very close friends.
RP: What type of activities did your organization have?
RJ: Well, the Legion does nothing but drink [laughs]. The Legion tries to maintain a high profile involved in veterans’ needs, and they do that. The American Legion has been a very good organization. It’s difficult to get, it’s about to die simply because young veterans don’t join anything. My children, well they belong to a country club and that’s about it. I belong to many a number of clubs and still do.
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RP: How do you think your service and experiences that you had in the military affected your life?
RJ: Well I think, I was proud to have served whether or not it shames anything that ultimately would have happened. I know this, that two years in the Marine Corps is an experience and caused me to respect the Marine Corps. I am proud to have served, but whether it ultimately changed anything, I don’t know. I started out when I went to college in 1944 to become a chemical engineer at DePauw. When I got back, I entered saying that I wanted to be a chemical engineer. I was assigned a chemistry professor as an advisor, we talked a few minutes, and he said, “What are you doing as a chemistry major, you don’t belong here.” [laughs] So I changed to business and I’ve been involved in business in one kind or another since.
RP: Do you recall the day your service ended?
RJ: I’m sorry.
RP: Do you recall the day your service ended?
RJ: Very well. I was in a line, this was in, I’m going to say January of 1947. I was in a line at the Great Lakes Training Center and all I had to do was get a blood test and sign a release paper. The guy who was giving the blood test, I was in long line, had blood all over him. He sticks somebody in the arm and it squirted. By the time I got fifteen or twenty feet from where I was going to get my blood, I was crawling. I was that close to
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fainting. He got down on his hands and knees laughing the whole way and gave me my blood test. I signed up and they gave us new uniforms and I went out the door. I don’t know what date that was, but it was a very pleasant day.
RP: Is there anything else that you would like to add that we have not covered?
RJ: I don��t know, I would recommend that any eighteen-year-old young man today, who does not have his head about him, is not really too sure what he’s doing, is not doing well in school, seriously consider joining the Marine Corps. It will be for that guy a life altering experience and all for the better. And I’m not suggesting a life in the military, but I’m suggesting some time to get your head cleared and be brought to. And I guarantee you that person will leave the Marine Corps feeling proud that he had served. And like everybody else that went, I found the military, after it was over with, a very rewarding experience. I’m not going to re-up though [laughs].
RP: You know I never asked you specifically why you decided to join the Marine versus another branch of service.
RJ: I don’t really know, I had a cousin who was in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps was a prominent branch of service. I just sort of wanted to do that. I had no specific reason.
RP: Were any of your friends in the Marines?
RJ: I had two friends in the Marine Corps, but we did not serve together. We were off [in] different directions the whole time.
RP: Okay, going back to your first days in the service, can you tell me about your boot camp experience?
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RJ: My boot camp was eight weeks and it was a very life altering experience. It took you into a whole different world and it was a, you know, sort of a twenty- four hours a day for eight weeks of something like you had never done before. And as a result, you were definitely a different person. When you finally got out, you felt like you were, had done something worth while. You sort of became a Marine. They gave you a little emblem that said you had completed boot camp and now you were off and going. So it was kind of a special thing for me and for every other marine who went through it.
RP: Where exactly was the boot camp?
RJ: It was in Paris Island, South Carolina. We had two boot camps, one there and one in San Diego, California.
RP: Okay, do you remember any of your instructors?
RJ: I remember two of my drill instructors. I had a drill instructor who was a five stripe gunny sergeant, whose name was Sabo and he had been on Guadalcanal. He had been involved in heavy activity and he was something that we looked up to and he was tough. Another one that we had was, oh I can’t think of his name right now, but he was a corporal and he was the one who primarily took care of us on a day by day basis. They were all Marine veterans that had seen duty overseas and had been involved in the real war.
RP: Mr. Jackson, what was the hardest thing you had to do in boot camp?
RJ: Hardest thing we had to do in boot camp...I suspect that it was, oh a twenty mile hike that we went through the swamps and it was meant to be difficult, and it was. We had a very heavy pack and it went on for about eighteen hours. Everyday was difficult.
RP: What helped you get through these first days in boot camp?
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RJ: Well, you couldn’t fail, you know, it would have been awful to have said I can’t do this. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t say that. You were in, and you were in until they turned you loose. So you just, you had to do what you had to do and everybody did it. I knew of no one that said put me out of here because if you had you would have been of course kind of laughed at.
RP: You told me about attending DePauw after the war, but I never asked you, was your education supported by the GI Bill?
RJ: Yes it was, 100%. And I went on and got a masters degree at Northwestern and that was mostly supported. I had to pay for the last two semesters of that, but the GI Bill of Rights was a blessing to us that [we] got out of the war.
RP: So what do you think about the GI Bill and its significance and how it really helped educating the military?
RJ: Well, you can’t say enough. It was, it was remarkable because of the sixteen of us that were in the service, a very large percentage of those people took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights to go to college, not you know half or anything like that. But very much more than the normal population that would have gone to college. The GI Bill of Rights was one of the best federal programs that there’s ever been.
RP: Alright, thank you very much.
RJ: You’re welcome Robbie.
[Interview ends at 417 on counter]
