Interview with Dr. John MacDougall
Birth: March 4, 1925
Recorded on October 17, 2006
[Interview starts at 007 on counter]
Daniel Hasler: Today is the 17th of October, 2006. I am interviewing Dr. John Mac Dougall. Dr. MacDougall was a combat medic in the 104th division. His highest rank was a Technician Five. His service dates were from September 1943 to February 1946. He served in World War II and was born in Indianapolis Indiana on March 4, 1925.
Daniel Hasler: The first questions I am going to ask are just jogging your memory, and stuff like that.
DH: In what way did you did you enter the service. Were you drafted or did you enlist?
[069]
JM: I was drafted.
DH: Where were you living at the time and how old were you?
JM: I was eighteen years old at the time and I was living in Indianapolis.
DH: And did you want to join?
JM: Yes.
DH: And what was your motivation?
[090]
JM: Well it was wartime and everybody was going to serve. It was my turn and so I was happy to go.
DH: Why did you pick to serve in the infantry or in your case as a combat medic?
JM: Well, I had been in pre-med training in college prior to going into the army and that’s why they assigned me to the Medical Department of the Army. I had training as a surgical technician and when I went overseas they needed replacements for combat medics, so that’s the job I got.
DH: Do you recall anything about your first few days in service?
[154]
JM: Yeah, I do. I was enlisted at Fort Benjamin Harrison here in Indianapolis. And the first thing they do is issue you your uniforms, clothing, and equipment. I was at Fort Benjamin Harrison for about two weeks and then I was sent to Camp Grant, Illinois which was the camp where they did all the basic training for the Medical Department of the Army.
DH: What did it feel like to put on your uniform for the first time?
JM: Well, I was content with it. I had had some military training before that so I was familiar with uniforms. I had been in the ROTC in high school for a while and I had been in marching bands and things so I knew how to march and knew the manual of arms.
[233]
DH: Tell me about your training or boot camp experience proceeded and what it consisted of.
JM: Well, we were at Camp Grant, Illinois for three months and it consisted of basic soldier training as it would be in any camp, with the exception that it was focused on emergency medical care, because we were being trained to be medics and to treat war injuries─the initial care of them.
DH: I know the 104th specialized in night time raids-
JM: That’s true.
DH –and rigorously trained for them. So did they have any special training for you in that aspect?
JM: No.
DH: How did you muster the determination to get through that (training experience?)
[300]
JM: [Chuckle] Well, it was just your job. You didn’t think anything about it. I was nineteen years old by this time and I felt well trained and I felt that I knew how to do what needed to be done.
DH: I know that you served in WWII, but did you served in any other wars.
JM: No
DH: Where exactly did you go throughout your travels in WWII, and had you ever traveled that much before overseas?
[338]
JM: No, I had never been overseas before. I went over to Scotland first on the Queen Elizabeth, the QEI as it’s known now, and we landed in Greenoch, Scotland. And they put us on a train and we went down to Tidworth Barracks in England on the Salisbury Plain not very far from Stonehenge. We were there for about a month and then we moved across the channel and landed at Utah Beach. We moved up through a series of replacement depots until I got to Germany and joined the 104th Infantry Division.
DH: Do you remember arriving in Europe and what it was like?
[413]
JM: Yeah I do. We came up the River Clyde and berthed at a large steamship dock owned by the Cunard Line because that’s what the ship was. It was designed to carry about 2,500 civilian passengers and we had 14,000 troops on board. It was a little close.
DH: I know you were a combat medic, what responsibilities or duties did that position entail.
JM: Well, a combat medic is the first person who treats an injured soldier. The first thing you have to do is make sure they have an airway so they can breathe and then you stop any bleeding they may have so that they don’t bleed to death. And then at that time, the way we treated wounds, is we put sulfadiazine powder on them. There were not any antibiotics yet. But sulfadiazine and sulfanilamide had been used as antibacterial agents in civilian life. So we had sulfadiazine powder that we put on the wound and then put a compress on it to keep foreign material and dirt out of it. Then each soldier that was wounded had to take eight sulfadiazine tablets and drink a full canteen of water. Sulfadiazine has a tendency to precipitate out in the kidneys, so anyone that takes it needs to be fully hydrated─and so that was the routine. And then we had morphine sirettes that contained a quarter grain of morphine and we could give the soldier a shot or morphine if he needed it for his pain.
[553]
DH: I know that you saw a lot of men from the battlefield but did you see any combat yourself.
JM: Well yeah, I was in combat because I was part of an infantry platoon. An infantry platoon has squads of twelve men each and then they have a platoon leader who is usually a lieutenant, and a platoon sergeant who is a first sergeant, a platoon guide, a platoon messenger, and then a medic. I was the medic assigned to the first platoon of G-Company of the 415th Infantry Regiment, which was one of the three regiments of the 104th Infantry Division.
[612]
DH: The Battle of the Bulge was fought on, what some sources say, one of the snowiest winters on record. What were the frostbite cases you saw like?
JM: Well, we saw frostbite. We weren’t actively engaged in the Battle of the Bulge, we were right on the north flank of the Battle of the Bulge. We were poised on the banks of the Roer River we were going to make an assault landing in assault boats across the Roer River which had been flooded because they opened the dams upstream. The river was half a mile wide instead of 100 feet wide. We were prepared to make that assault landing on the 17th of December and it was going to be a night attack as most of our attacks were. We were going to jump off at 2 a.m. after an artillery barrage but that assault landing was called off. We didn’t know why but we found out a day and a half later that that was when the Battle of the Bulge started just south of us. The German counterattack went through the Hürtgen Forest, which was not heavily defended because that was the last place we expected an attack. So it was a surprise attack and one of the divisions that trained in Indiana at Camp Atterbury bore a lot of the brunt of that first attack- that was the 106th division. That was the division that Kurt Vonnegut was in, and he was taken prisoner to a prisoner camp. Anyway, that was our relationship to the Battle of the Bulge. And we stayed right there and occupied the territory we were on for two months while the Battle of the Bulge went out and came back. Of course, we fired harassing fire into the area but we didn’t change our position. We finally made that same assault landing that had been planned the 17th of December. We made the same assault landing on the 23rd of February. And we did it at night, just as we had planned to in the first place.
[779]
DH: What was your attitude toward during the war and how was the morale of your fellow soldiers.
JM: Our division had very high morale. We had a major general in command, General Terry Allen, who was dearly loved by his troops. He was a soldier’s general and that got him into some trouble with some of his superior officers sometimes, but he was all for the soldier and we knew that. We supported him and he supported us. We had a high proportion of former college students in the division because it was one of the divisions that was filled up when they cancelled out the Army Specialized Training program which was a college program for people in uniform. When they cancelled out that program they had all these fellows who were in basic engineering and basic college courses to fill up the ranks of the infantry. They came into our division as privates and were made into infantrymen.
DH: Did you have any contact with German soldiers, and what was your attitude towards them.
JM: Well we had lots of contact with German soldiers. First of all, we had wounded German soldiers and we took care of them just as if they were one of our own. Then we captured a lot of German soldiers and most of them seemed pretty happy to be captured. [Chuckles] There were exceptions. If we were faced with an SS unit who tended to be rather fanatic and rather loyal to their Nazi background they were angry and did not want to be captured. We treated them all the same.
[921]
DH: Can you tell me a few of your most memorable experiences from combat?
JM: Well, we had several night attacks that were memorable. But I think the most memorable of all was the assault landing across the Roer River because it was hazardous. There was a very rapid current in the river because as I say they had blown the dams upstream. So we entered the river at one point and we pointed our little assault boats which were wooden assault boats and we all had a paddle. We pointed those things upstream and we had eight people paddling as furiously as they could to try and maintain the position of the boat. By the time we got across the river we were quite a distance downstream from where we started.
DH: Were you ever captured or detained as a POW?
JM: No I was not.
DH: Were you awarded any medals or citations?
JM: I was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for heroism about mid-way through my tour in the 104th Division.
DH: What did you do to get the Bronze Star Medal?
JM: Well as I said we just did our job. It was given to me for rescuing some badly wounded soldiers and evacuating them and taking them to safety.
[1022]
DH: During the war how did you stay in touch with your family and how often did you make an effort to contact them?
JM: [Chuckle] Well, we had what was called V-Mail in those days. It was a new technique. You wrote a letter on a special kind of paper provided by the Postal Department and then they processed that so that it would be printed out in a smaller form so it was very light and did not take up much bulk in the postage. That was what was delivered to our family members that we wrote to. They sometimes had a little trouble reading it because it was reduced in size but my parents had magnifying classes and they were able to read those things. We had to be careful what we wrote and had to maintain security and not divulge our location or anything pertaining- that might be helpful to the enemy if they recovered those documents.
DH: Was that hard to do─not being able to tell your family the whole story?
JM: Well, no not really. I arranged a little code with my dad [Chuckles] before I went over there and he was able to figure out where we were.
[1105]
DH: What was the food like and how often did you get a good meal?
JM: Well, we had C-rations and K-rations and then we had hot food sometimes. C-rations were canned and they had three varieties: corn beef-hash, beef stew, and they were enough for two people. And then later in the war K-rations came out and they were more compact and better tasting and they had a chocolate bar along with the ration. Those were in great demand, the Germans liked them, and they would trade things for them. Anyhow, that was the K-ration. And then, each company had a kitchen attached to it with a mess sergeant and they provided us with fresh, hot food whenever it was possible. And there again, we had a very dedicated mess sergeant who would take great pains to get hot foods to us whenever he could. He made one mistake one time. He had prepared a fine meal of Swiss steak and he wasn’t able to get it up to us because the action was too heavy. He had it in large, sealed containers which were for field service and he didn’t want to throw it out because it was too valuable and too good. And so he kept it overnight and was able to get it up to us late the next afternoon, but by that time some bacteria had gotten into it and liked it very well and thrived on it and our troops all got sick. That was one of my challenges. I went back to the battalion aid station and got two large bottles of paregoric and some bismuth tablets and went around and dosed all our troops. I was able to keep any of them from having to be evacuated. The mess sergeant was very grateful for that.
[1255]
DH: He probably would have lost his position.
JM: [Chuckles] He would have been embarrassed by it. But he was very nice to me. He had a truck that he carried all his stuff on and later on I found a microscope that was of some value, but it was too heavy for me to carry in my field pack. But he carried it for me on his mess truck and I brought it back at the end of the war.
DH: You obviously played a very important role in saving the lives of others, but did you ever put undue pressure on yourself or feel great stress because of your responsibility?
JM: Not really. You had disappointments because some people you couldn’t help. You had to do your own triaging when you had multiple casualties you had to decide which ones had a good chance to survive and which ones couldn’t survive. You didn’t expend your time on someone that couldn’t be helped to the detriment of those that could be helped. So you had to do a certain amount of judgment in taking care of people. It was challenging. The scariest thing about it was, if you were under heavy fire and particularly under heavy artillery barrage, in order to protect themselves everybody got down in a foxhole to lessen the chance of getting hit by shrapnel. Well, if somebody got hit then he yelled for the medic and it was the medic’s job to get out of his foxhole and go across terrain to get to the guy that is injured. That was not always easy to do, but we did it, because we knew that was our job.
[1370]
DH: Was there ever a point when you were extremely scared or didn’t think you would make it out of a situation?
JM: (Chuckles) Well, we were scared a lot. It’s so noisy. An artillery barrage, it’s just, if you haven’t ever been under one you don’t realize how loud those things are. It’s frightening to be in that circumstance but, you know, you can’t do anything about it. Your trained to be there, and trained to do your job under the circumstances.
DH: Was there a special ritual that you ever did for good luck?
JM: No. (Chuckles) I wasn’t superstitious.
DH: Can you talk about the difficulties of working under severe weather especially during that winter of the Battle of the Bulge?
JM: Well, early during that winter we weren’t as well equipped as we were later. We didn’t have the footgear that we needed to keep people’s feet warm and dry. But later on, they brought out a shoe-pack which was water proof and was very good piece of footgear to protect soldiers feet. We saw a lot loss frostbite and trench foot after we had that equipment.
[1448]
Ben Daugherty: What were your impressions of France?
JM: Well, my impression of France was that it was a rather run-down country. The people that we encountered were friendly but not really friendly. The German civilians were much friendlier to us after we invaded that territory. I think the French were extremely tired of war, they had bore the brunt of it for a very long time, and they were weary and wanted it to be over. They were glad to see us, but they were just war weary.
DH: When you were not working, what did you do for entertainment?
JM: Well, we played cards at times. We played some dice games and I read a lot. We had small versions of many books that we could carry in our field pack and whenever we had time we could read. Of course, you had to maintain blackout precautions. You couldn’t have lights at night that would show out a window or anything like that. So you had to make sure that whatever you used as light wasn’t visible to the enemy. But, we had rather ingenious ways of doing that. The commonest thing we used for light was a bottle full of gasoline with a rag stuck in the top. When you light the rag it will burn all night. It produces a tremendous amount of black smoke, and if you are holed up in a cellar, for instance, which we often were, we would come out in the morning and our faces were completely black from the soot from those things. I can only imagine what our lungs looked like, but we weren’t worrying about that at the time.
[1569]
DH: Were there ever any entertainers?
JM: We didn’t see any entertainers where we were. Now, we saw entertainers when we were in camp before we went overseas and we saw entertainers in England but once we got into combat we didn’t see anymore entertainers.
DH: Do you recall any particularly humorous events?
JM: Well, I can’t think of any off hand. I found a top hat one time that somebody had left behind. I put that on and that seemed to cheer up the guys a bit, and they took some pictures of me with it on.
DH: Did you ever pull pranks on fellow soldiers or were you ever the subject of any pranks?
JM: Well, yes and no. It was pretty serious business and what were doing, we didn’t take very lightly. But yes, boys will be boys, and when things were not to tenuous people would do things for a little levity.
[1644]
DH: How did you feel toward your fellow officers and soldiers?
JM: With one exception the officers in our company were outstanding, and we admired them a lot and we felt they were well trained. They were the ones making the decisions that which would save our hide, and they did. They had all been through the infantry school at Fort Benning which was the officer’s training school for the infantry and they were taught tactics. When you are out in the field in an infantry company, tactics are the name of the game. The commanding officer has to know how to deploy his troops effectively so that they are protected to the greatest extent they can be and yet have a full field of fire and can be effective in accomplishing their mission.
DH: Did you keep a personal diary?
JM: I did not.
[1701]
DH: Did you have any leave time, and if so, what did you do with that time?
JM: The only leave we had once we got into the 104th Division was in early spring, well actually, late winter after we took the city of Cologne. Cologne had been a magnificent city but once we got there you could stand up on a kitchen chair and see all over town because everything was demolished except for the twin spires of the cathedral which our air force pilots took great pains to avoid destroying. We had a little break in the action after we took Cologne because it was on the Rhine River and it was going to take a huge effort to make an assault crossing the Rhine River. And so, in groups of a half dozen or ten they put us on trucks and sent us back to the rear to a place in Belgium where we could have a few days off and get a shower and a change of clothes which we hadn’t had since we went into combat. Actually, that was planned to be a four day leave but after the second day- the third afternoon they came and rounded us up to get back on the trucks to go back to Cologne. What had happened was that the Remagen Bridge head, down south of Cologne, at Remagen had been captured intact. That meant that instead of having to make an assault across the open river we could use that bridge to get across safely. Of course the engineers immediately built a better bridge next to the railroad bridge which had been captured intact and there was a steady stream of vehicles going across those bridges from then on until we established a large bridge head on the other side of the Rhine. That was a stroke of good fortune that the American troops had, which undoubtedly saved a lot of lives because that would have been a bloody assault across the Rhine River.
[1834]
DH: When you were in the field, did you go out as a platoon or a similar sized group?
JM: Yeah, we went out as a platoon. An infantry platoon has three squads, three rifle squads, and each squad has twelve soldiers. There is a squad leader who is a sergeant and an assistant squad leader who is a corporal. Then, each infantry company has three rifle platoons, and then they have a fourth platoon which is known as the weapons platoon. In that platoon they have machine guns and mortars which are heavier weapons and can be more effective in fire power. So that’s what constitutes an infantry company.
DH: Did you develop any close friendships with any of your fellow soldiers.
JM: Yes indeed. We became very close and very good friends and many of us remain good friends to this day.
DH: Do you still keep up with them and talk to them?
JM: Our division has a reunion every year. My wife and I attended it in August, and there were about 700 survivors of our division there. It was an enjoyable thing to do. The name of our division was the Timber-Wolf division and we have an organization, of course this is the National Timber-Wolf Association that puts on these reunions, and then we have an association called The Timber-Wolf Pups. These are sons and grandchildren of people that were in the unit itself and they attend the reunion with us.
[1930]
DH: Now going back to a medical standpoint, what were the symptoms of trench-foot and frostbite, and what did you do to treat them?
JM: Well, trench-foot, the more correct name for it is Immersion Foot and it comes from just having your feet wet continuously. It interferes with the small vessel circulation of the foot, ulcers can develop, and if it gets too bad you can develop gangrene. Frostbite is a cold injury where the outer layers of the tissues become dead or necrotic. It’s a difficult thing to assess because you don’t know how deep the injury is and we didn’t have any accurate way of measuring that. We do now, we have ultrasound, and we can determine those things. It was all done by observation and feel at that time. The treatment was to get the soldier evacuated so that the soldier didn’t lose his foot. That was getting back to a rear place were he would have more effective treatment. We only gave very rudimentary treatment and then we called back to the battalion aid station and they would send out a litter full with four litter bearers. They would take our soldier back to the battalion aid station and that was the first area of evacuation. There wasn’t much done there except to reassess the degree of the injury and then they went back from there to what is called a collecting company. That was run by a medical battalion, the 329th Medical Battalion, which was attached to our regiment and each regiment had a collecting company. Many injuries could be dealt with there so that the soldier could then go back to duty, but if they had more serious injuries than that then they would have to go back to a field hospital. Many times they would have to go on back to a general hospital.
[2046]
BD: When did you arrive at Utah Beach?
JM: Utah Beach? It was about one month after we got to England. I don’t remember the exact date but it had to be late in October of 1944.
DH: Do you recall the day your service ended?
JM: Yes, it ended on February 8, 1966.
DH: Were you relieved or sad or indifferent?
JM: Well I was very happy to get out on that date because the second semester of school down at IU in Bloomington began on the eleventh and I was very interested in getting back in school in time for that semester. I almost made it. I was supposed to be sent back to Camp Atterbury to be discharged and that would have been a five day train ride and that would have made me too late for that semester. So I went down to Fort Mac Arthur and got discharged there and then I went to Long Beach. There was an air station there for the air transport command and they had a put a veteran’s insignia which was then called a ruptured duck. It was an eagle but it designated you as a discharged veteran. I peeled that off and went to this air transport command and didn’t tell them that I was out of the service. They were able to put me aboard a C-47 which was the military equivalent of a DC3 and I was able to fly back and get home quicker. They didn’t land in Indianapolis but they were headed for Newark from Long Beach, California. They were supposed to land in Memphis and then Columbus and when we got to Memphis the pilot told me that the field in Columbus was below limits and they wouldn’t be able to land there unless it cleared out. I didn’t want to take that chance so I bailed out in Memphis and hitchhiked home from there. But I got home in time to get down to school for the second semester. I had called my dad and asked him to get me enrolled and find me a place to live which he did.
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DH: Was your education supported by the GI Bill.?
JM: It was. The GI Bill paid for our books and our tuition, which then was $44 a semester, and they paid us $75 dollars a month for living expenses.
DH: Going back to your travels through Europe, what other cities did you go through besides Cologne?
JM: The first German city we were in was Aachen and then Eschweiller and then Weisweiller. We were at Jülich on the Roer River. Our assault landing was made into a village called Huchem-Stammeln, but our division was spread out more widely of course.
Some of the units went into Düren and other towns along the Roer. Then we crossed the Erft Canal and the first big city we took was Cologne. That was quite an accomplishment we felt. Then after we went across the Rhine River, we traveled pretty fast. We would travel in trucks to catch up with the armored units that had gone on ahead and then we would go out and make assaults along with the armor in a combined operation. Bitterfeld was another large city we went to. When we finished, we finished on the Elbe River, the junction of Mulde and Elbe Rivers in a town called Dessau. We were not allowed to cross those rivers; the deal had been cut at the Yalta Conference. It allowed the Russians to come up and meet us on the other side of the river. We were there for about two weeks before the Russians came up. We were a little frustrated because we thought we ought to go ahead and take Berlin, but that wasn’t the deal.
BD: Did you often have the advantage of armor?
JM: Yes we did. It wasn’t routine, and it depended on the terrain and whether there were areas that they could operate in. But often we did and sometimes we would actually ride on the armored vehicles.
DH: Were you always well supplied and had the materials you needed?
JM: Yes. Our supply process was very adequate. I could get anything I needed-that I could carry from the battalion aid station. Although at times we would capture some German supplies and in some ways they were better than some of the things we had.
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DH: What is the thing that makes you the proudest about you and your fellow soldiers during the war?
JM: Well the most pleasing thing is that everybody was enthusiastic about what they were doing. It was a different war than some of the wars we have had since then. We knew that everybody back home was giving 100% support and that has not always been the case. So that was very satisfying and made it easy to be a good soldier.
DH: What advice would you give a young person today serving in the military looking back home and seeing that the nation is not 100%?
JM: Well, we have a magnificent military right now because they are all volunteers. And they have a high esprit de corps and good morale. They are all very well trained and they don’t question what they are asked to do. They just do it and that is important. If I had been in one or two of the wars that have occurred since the war I was in I would have been very disenchanted to be in the service because of the lack of firm support.
[2382]
DH: When you took the city of Cologne, how was this different from earlier combat?
JM: It wasn’t (different). Whenever you went into a city it was house-to-house combat and the techniques for that were well established and people knew how to do it. You were at closer range. You know if you are out on open terrain then you are going across fields and farms to farms and village to village. And then the other distressing area to be in is the woods, which there were lots of in Germany, is if you are fighting in the woods when an artillery shell comes in it explodes when it hits the trees. So you are being bombarded from above which is very unpleasant if you are in a foxhole because unless you have a roof on it you are exposed. Our guys got very ingenious however, of making roofs for their foxholes if they were going to be there long enough to use it.
[2438]
BD: Did you ever have to put yourself in danger to treat a patient?
JM: Very often. Yes.
DH: What was the first story about the war that you told your son?
JM: I can’t remember. Most of us that were in combat didn’t talk about it very much when the war was over. Most of the war stories that I heard from other people were from guys who didn’t hear a shot fired in anger and that annoyed me for a long time, but I got over it.
END OF SIDE ONE, BEGIN SIDE TWO
[2539]
DH: If you could do anything over during the course of the war would you do anything?
JM: No, I felt extremely fortunate. I was one of the very few medics in our regiment that didn’t have to be evacuated and I count my blessings for that. I give a lot of the credit for that to Lt. Joel Wright who was our platoon leader because as I said he knew tactics and he knew how to accomplish our mission without being too exposed.
BD: The city of Dessau is known for architecture, what was the condition of the city when you saw it?
JM: It wasn’t damaged too much. It had been bombarded some but, for example it only took our guys about three days to get the brewery back in business. Of course, we confiscated anything that we needed. When we went into a city if we needed a house for our platoon headquarters then we would take one over. Most of the areas that we went through most of the civilians had already evacuated the area because they had anticipated that there was going to be military action in that area. But as the war went on we moved faster and they didn’t have time to evacuate so by the time we got to Dessau, there were still a lot of civilians around. They were glad to see us, they welcomed us, and they felt that we were liberators rather than conquerors.
[2696]
DH: After the war what did you do?
JM: Well as I said I got back in college and finished up my pre-medical education and went to medical school. When I finished that I took training in surgery and became board certified in both general surgery and thoracic surgery and that’s what my career was the rest of my life. I practiced until 1993, 13 years ago, when I was 68 and that’s when I retired.
[2761]
DH: Did you join a veteran's organization?
JM: I did lately. I didn’t for a long, long time and I think I may have given you a hint about that. Most of the people that I knew that were in high positions in veteran’s organizations were doing it for political reasons and most of them had not been combat veterans. We had two governors of Indiana, for example, that established their political credentials by being national commanders of the American Legion. One of them, in my opinion, was one of the worst governors we ever had. So I was not enchanted with veteran’s organizations. But I will tell you what changed my mind. I went to a Tri-County mental health luncheon down at the Indiana Roof one day as a guest of a law firm. The guest speaker that day was Colin Powell who was chairman of the joint chief’ of staff. There was a huge crowd there. There must have been a thousand people there in tables of ten and they were all the people who run Indianapolis. They were the law firms and business concerns that contributed to have the tables. When General Powell took the podium there was a little military band up in the balcony that had been playing martial music. He asked that military band to play the four service songs: the army, the navy, coast guard, and the air force songs. He said I want everybody in here that is a veteran of one of the one of those services to stand up when your service song is played. Well, when they played the army song I stood up, and other people stood. When they got done I looked around the room. I was the only person at my table of ten that was standing, and only about 5% of the people in the room were standing. That’s the first time that I realized that the people that are running things these days─most of them have never had any military experience. That gave me the incentive to become active in a veteran’s organization. Of course, the American Legion national headquarters is here in Indianapolis and we have an American Legion Post. It’s the only one in the country that is all doctors and dentists and so I joined that American Legion Post and I have been proud to be a member of it since.
[2986]
DH: In the days and weeks that followed your return from the war, did you experience any post war trauma?
JM: No. No, I was just very relieved to be home. Actually in our division the timing could not have been any better. Because of the reputation we established for our effectiveness in Europe we were chosen as one of the divisions to participate in the invasion of Japan. So they wanted to get us back here and get us trained in assault landings from the ocean. We were assigned to Camp San Luis Obispo out in California and we were supposed to practice assault landings on the beaches there. Well, they sent us back as soon as they could because they were in a hurry to get us through that training. So we got back to the states sooner than many of the troops in Europe. We landed on the east coast and we were from all over the country so they gave us a thirty day furlough at home after which we were to show up in California for this training. Well that happened to be the month of August and while we were home President Truman made the decision, a very good one in my opinion, to use the atomic weapons to end the war- which they did. So while we were home on furlough the war in Japan ended. So that was a great relief to all of us, and probably saved many of our lives.
DH: Do you feel that people still appreciate the sacrifices that you and others made today?
JM: Yes.
BD: What were your thoughts on killing people?
JM: Well I didn’t have to kill anybody. I was a medic and under the rules of the Geneva Convention we weren’t allowed to carry weapons and we weren’t supposed to shoot anybody so I didn’t have to.
DH: Any other reflections? This is going to be sent to the Library of Congress so this is your chance to make your mark.
JM: Well I think your questions have been very good and to the point. No, I don’t have any great philosophy beyond what I have already said. I may have already said a little too much.
[3187]
DH: Just one more question. You mentioned the foxhole roofs. How did they make those?
JM: Well when you were subject to those tree bursts it was because you were in a forest and the shells were hitting the trees. Of course in a forest like that there was plenty of wood around and so you could dig a foxhole and then make a roof out of tree limbs and that would give considerable protection.
DH: Thank you.
JM: You are welcome.
DH: You have been a great interviewee.
