Interview with William B. Rice, Jr.
[b. 6/2/25]
Recorded on 2/24/07
Transcribed by Heidi Chen
[Interview starts at 002 on counter]
Erin Biel: Today is Saturday, February 24th, 2007. I’m Erin Biel here with Anisha Yadav, and we are interviewing William B. Rice, Jr. at 7200 N. College. Mr. Rice is eighty-one years old and was born on June 2nd, 1925. Mr. Rice served in World War II. Mr. Rice was in the 24th Infantry Regiment of the Army Medical Corps and held the following rank Sergeant Fifth Grade. Let’s begin at the very beginning. Were you drafted or did you enlist?
William Rice: I was drafted.
EB: Where were you living at the time?
WR: Columbus, Ohio.
EB: In Columbus, Ohio, was there a lot of racial segregation—that sort of thing?
WR: Yes.
EB: Any particular experiences?
WR: Well, too many of them—too many bad ones. Well, it was—we were—everything— living on the side of town called Flytown; it’s over near dumps and most of the people lived out of the dumps because of the Depression and everything. And it was not a very nice neighborhood. We lived in a house and when I started school I began to read some signs on there saying that it’s, “Unfit for human inhabitation.” I said, “Daddy, what does that mean?” [laughter] We lived there until it just about fell in on us. When it rained, it rained in the house too, and it was not very comfortable. It was condemned, but being out of work, my dad—my mother passed shortly after my sister was born, so he migrated from South Carolina to Columbus, Ohio. There we stayed with his first cousin; he married there again. And my first stepmother was very, very mean. Her youngest child was ten years old than my brother, and she wanted my dad to put us in a children’s home. And she had put her own children in the children’s home, and her oldest son begged my daddy not to do that. That’s worse than prison, so she put us out in the winter time. You know, we’re from the South—South Carolina—and it was cold. Put me and my sister out, and when my brother come she put him out, and then when daddy came, she put him out. So we had to try to find somebody who would take us in. And she finally got my aunt to come up and take my sister back to South Carolina. And my brother was in school, and I was just about ready to start school. They did away with the— because of the Depression, did away with kindergarten. So, I was eligible to go to kindergarten, but because of the economy they did away with the kindergarten. We just kind of lived from pillar to post for quite a while until we moved into this condemned house. That was home for about three years when we could no longer live there because the place was just about to fall in on us. That was our experience. We moved into some flats that all they had was, you know—they didn’t have no central air or anything like that or central heat—it was just some pot bellied stove. You two feet from that stove you didn’t feel nothin’. That’s the way life was. We were very poor. It was a slum area. They call that area of Columbus, Ohio “Flytown”. It was over near the dumps, and everyone was motherless and it was pretty bad. It wasn’t a very nice experience. We lived out of the dumps and garbage cans.
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EB: Why did you choose to join and fight in the war?
WR: I was drafted in the army. Yeah, I was drafted. I just turned eighteen that June, and I was drafted in August. I was in my senior year of high school, and we had won the championship the year before. And I had been approached to play football for Ohio State, Wilberforce, and Tuskegee. Being drafted like that—I was in good physical condition and everything—it blew my—it blew those scholarships, it blew it all to pieces. So I didn’t get to go to college like I wanted to. I was talking to my grandson—I had watched Jessie Owens work out and he said, “Are you guys planning to go to college, you know?” And I said, “Man, we lived in Flytown, you know. That’s the poorest of the poor,” and he says, “I’m from the ghetto of Cleveland.” And he said, “You know, if you excel—you know, do good in sports--” And he wanted us to take academic course so we could go to college. I was one of the ones that raised my hand that I would try. Some guys said, “Why you want to do all that? All you gonna be is just a laborer anyway, you know.” I said, “Well, if I go to college I’ll probably better myself and get a better job and everything else.” But being drafted that blew all that to pieces. Then, you know, after the war, GIs were going under the GI Bill, but when I got out they kept me—declared me essential and because they had rotated the doctor and I was trained and I took special training to purify water, inspect meat, inspect mess halls, and to run an aid station—all this while I was down in Texas. Me and another black was chose to take that course, and we were in a class of about thirty. We was in the class about a month, and after about a month, one fella spoke up and said, “Aren’t we in the great state of Texas?” And the professor—he was a colonel—said, “Yes.” “Aren’t we supposed to abide by the laws of the great state of Texas?” And he said, “Yes.” He said, “I demand this class to be segregated!” So, it was just two blacks in there—we were all using the same restrooms and everything, so after that we couldn’t use the same restrooms anymore. When we went on field trip, they had to bring a special truck just for the two of us blacks. At the end of the course, these guys that raised the question about segregation and color, they were the only two in there that didn’t pass. Well. they made some racial remarks about us: “You can’t teach n-i-g-g-e-r’s anything and everything.” And said, “You just favored them. And that’s the only reason why they passed.” And some the guys spoke up and said, “Well, if it wasn’t for Bill and this other fella, I never would’ve passed this grade. ‘Cause we could measure a stream of water—how deep it was and figure it flows about so and so much and you could tell how much water passed through there within a certain length of time. So several of the guys asked me to show them how to do that, so I did and they were able to pass the course. They put us through a lot of third degree and stuff like that being black and everything. When the final grades came out, me and this other black fella got the highest marks in the class. Most of the guys in there, they really applauded that because they never knew that black people could achieve something. I guess they were taught that you couldn’t teach negroes anything. All of that they put us through—they treated the German and Italian prisoners of war down there in Texas better than they did us. If we missed a bus going to town, we had to get a taxi to take us back to the—of course if we didn’t, we went to jail. So, knowing odds like that I just didn’t go to town that much. We had to walk down certain streets to the post office, telegraph office, bus station, the train station. If you were caught off those streets, they took you to jail. If you missed the last bus, you had to take a taxicab back to the camp. And that was about fifteen dollars. So, I didn’t go to town too much. Through it all, we passed that. And they taught me how to inspect meats and how to—and they sent me to another school to learn how to run an aid station so I was trained to take the place of anther doctor. I wasn’t a doctor, but I could do the same thing as a doctor would do. When I went to this outfit the 24th Infantry—it was an all-black outfit, but they had white officers. Most of the guys couldn’t read or write. I had to read their letters for them and write ‘em back, back to their folks back there. You heard the song ��They Owe My Soul to the Company Store”?
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Well, these black guys—they were from Georgia—and they had made out their allotment to their white master, or whoever it was, they got their checks and everything and some of them never did filter down to their families. They—the white officers—they put a enmity between us: the northern negroes and the ones from the South. They said we thought we were better than they were. I never did do anything like that. I did all I could to help them. When we had special classes, I did it on my own to teach them how to read and write and count—on my time and their extra time. That’s they way it was during the service ‘til we finished the course and we were sent directly overseas. We got to this outfit, but they didn’t recognize me for what I was trained for. I didn’t do any of that work until toward the end of war. They finally gave me my rank in—I was supposed to be given my rank of sergeant—technical sergeant when I joined the outfit, but I never did get it because they didn’t have me join that work until toward the end of the war. They started rotating doctors and some of their other officials away from there and we didn’t have no doctors. So the island surgeon came down to interview me and saw that I went to a specialty school to learn how to inspect meats, purify water, and do all the sanitation work plus run an aid station, sending in my reports everyday—how many on sick, whether they had a communicable disease or what kind of illness they were, we didn’t have any outbreaks of disease because the lack of medical treatment and stuff like that. All I got was a T/3, but they didn’t recognize me. I should’ve been higher ranked than that because I was running the whole—sending in the morning report, sending one to the island surgeon. I had to type up—hunt and peck. [laughter] But, that’s the way it was. It was pretty bad. It was always a lot of bickering between—the officers made sure that happened because they didn’t want us to really get along with these other guys. So some of they really knew that we didn’t think that we were better than they were—being short-changed out of their money. And I think the first payroll overseas that they were about twenty-five dollars short or more. Well, they call your name, the serial number and the amount. You come in an salute the pay officer and call the name—I knew the amount was wrong, so they counted the money in your hat and if you thought it was wrong, you didn’t say nothing; you just turned it over and salute the officer and walk out. So I turned my cap over and dumped the change—the money back out on the table and I walked out. “Hey call that name again!” So he called my name again, and they called the right amount and I took it and went on. So, I met the officer on the company street and he says, “Hey! What part of the States are you from?” I said, “I’m from Ohio.” He said, “Don’t let your education go to your head.”
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EB: What camp were you at?
WR: Camp Barkley. That was a beautiful camp—boy, this is really beautiful—it’s all laid out with nice grass, white barracks, trimmed in green. It was eight of us on the orders—two blacks and six whites. They got the beautiful part of the camp, so they drove—it looked like they went out of town. We got to some old CCC barracks—they were over there by the lagoon where all the sewage was dumped and when the wind wasn’t blowing right, Jesus!—almost died because of the stench and everything. The mosquitoes were pretty bad over there. We had to come back to the main camp to go the school and the special training and everything. After the guys demanded to be segregate we had to ride in a big old truck by ourselves—just the two of us blacks. We survived that, and then we—after we finished basic training, we got a chance to go back home. Some went Europe and I was slated to go to the Pacific. When I joined the outfit, they never did recognize me as a medic or anything like that. I just did ordinary work—just work details—until toward the close of the war when they started rotating the officers back. On Okinawa, they recognized that I had this special training, and the island surgeon gave me my rank and put me in charge of the medical. The doctor had rotated back, so I was in charge of everything. They told me I had to inspect all the mess halls—A, B, C, D, and headquarters company—and I had to inspect all the meats and they took a morning report, who all are sick and what they were all on sick call for and all that stuff. I had to type it up, and I went on and did that and it was a long time before they gave me a rank of just even the sergeant. I went on and did that work until it come time for me that they declared me essential. I supposed to have been rotated back out of the service, but they didn’t have another doctor to come in there, so I had to stay until we got another doctor. I stayed until we got another doctor. Before that, they wanted me to falsify the medical reports that I sent into the island surgeon. I had to send one to the island surgeon and one to the commanding officer of the infantry. I had to type up three of them. He said, “Did you send this in?” I said, “Yes, I did.” He said, “You should’ve checked with me first.” Well, you tell how many was on sick call, what they were on there for, if they had some communicable disease, something like that—you’re supposed to write that down. But, I found out that they wasn’t doing that. They was kind of falsifying the reports they was sending to Hawaii and the island surgeons and things like that. I told them I wasn’t going to lie about that. I said, so they took my report and the ones I was supposed to send in, I don’t what happened to them. ‘Til I finally got to the island surgeon come down to visit me. Before that, I had a jeep and an ambulance—in case somebody got hurt I could take them to the hospital. I had one guy that tried to light up a fire with gasoline and he was stripped down to the waist and where he was building the fire he had poured this gas over some water and when that streamed down, the water splashed back on and burned him over seventy-five percent of his body. He looked like somebody out of a horror show on Saturday night: great big blisters hanging off the side of his face and ?all in ____.? I know from my medical experience that everything I did for him was going to have to be undone when he get to the hospital. We had just got a doctor, too—well, the second time it happened—we just got a doctor. The first time it happened I just took the guy and put some triangular bandages on him to cover him up as much as possible, treated him for shock, wrapped him up in these big blankets and took him to the hospital. The guy was glad that I didn’t do anything else before they got a salve or something on him ‘cause that was going to make him more rawer than what he was. The second time that happened we had just got a new doctor, and he wanted everything done by the book. So, here they bring this guy in. He’s in shock. He’s burned over better than fifty percent of his body, and I said, “Well, you’re the doctor. What do you want to do?” He just stood there and wrang his hands. “Oh my God, how did this happen? Oh my God. Oh my God.” I said, “Sir, we need to do something, make a decision, or do something. This guy is in shock, he’s lost blood. Going to have to give him some plasma.” “Has this happened before?” I said, “Yeah.” “Well, you take over.” [laughter] I said, “Well, I give him some plasma.” We put these triangle bandages on him, covered him up as well as possible, and put blankets around him and took him straight to the hospital. He was glad that I didn’t do anything else because he gonna be rawer than that after they took all that stuff off of him. And if we had put any salve or anything on him—I did give him plasma. After that, the doctor kind of came down off his high horse a little bit. He wanted to do everything by the book. I said, “We’re out here in the field. We’re a long ways from being a hospital.” So he kind of calmed down. I asked him about some of the diseases these guys had—they brought them from the South Pacific. We moved from down—the South Pacific—from Guadalcanal to the Russell Islands to Saipan and Tinian, Okinawa and Kumashima. But, we never had any—I never was doing my real job anyway until we got to Kumashima and Okinawa. So, that’s really got it—doing back what I was trained to do in the first place. I was still a PFC.
EB: What year was that when you were finally put to do the work you suppose to?
WR: ‘42.
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EB: Did you end up seeing any combat?
WR: Oh yeah. We was attached to the infantry. We was in combat on—they were just pulling back out of combat on Guadalcanal when I got there. They was pulling out for a rest. It was supposed to be Rest and Relaxation. The white soldiers—they went to—some of them went to Hawaii and Fiji. Our guys went to the Russell Islands where they unloaded ships and gasoline and ammunition and stuff like that. That was supposed Rest and Relaxation. [laughter] I didn’t get my rank until—the war was really over when I got my rank. They recognized me for the training I got in basic training—to run an aid station and stuff like that, to inspect meats and stuff like that. I did my first inspection on Okinawa. I gave them a bad report—all five companies: A, B, C, D, and Head Quarters Company. I gave them a bad report because their equipment was filthy, the cooks were unshaved, dirty uniforms, and the water wasn’t hot enough, all the pots and pans were greasy, and they didn’t meet none of the standards. They wasn’t screened. When the island surgeon got my report—this was the commanding officer there over the infantry—I sent him a report. I sent one to Hawaii and sent one to the island surgeon. “Why didn’t you inform me about this report?” I said, “I wasn’t instructed that I, I sent you a copy of— I sent it.” When the island surgeon found out about it, boy, he was down there in little or no time and closed down all the mess halls—all five of them. So they told them it was my fault. Those guys were about ready to kill me ’cause they shut down and served no hot meals. The island surgeon made them tear down the mess halls they had there. They served not another hot meal until they got all new mess halls, all new equipment and everything. They said, “Aw this negro, he’s just lost his mind. He thinks he’s something because he’s going over our heads and everything.” All the guys, they was throwing rocks at my tent and calling me all kind of names and everything. They served no meals—any meals at all—until they built five new mess halls. They built five mess halls in one day. Everybody who could swing hammer was brought in the truckloads and had them all screened. The island surgeon came down and inspected and they got all, everything new stoves, everything, all new equipment. They throwed away all that junk that they had there—some of it didn’t work. We got a new aid station, too—[laughter]—new ambulance. That’s the way it was. We had guys in their outfit—I wonder about some of the guys in their outfit from the South Pacific, Central Pacific, to the Northern Pacific. There was a black guy and he came and he went in all those different areas, and I couldn’t figure it out. He was with us down in Guadalcanal, Russell Islands, Saipan, Tinian, then he disappeared. He showed up again when we went to Okinawa and Kumashima. Back to Okinawa again, he showed up again. I said, “I can never figure this guy out. He’d be with outfit then he wasn’t with the outfit.” At the end of war after we dropped that second—I was in Tinian when they dropped the first atomic bomb and I was talking to—I befriended some of the B-29 pilots, and they were bombing ‘em so much that they couldn’t open up the bomb crates [as] they came in, so our guys that were off duty had to go over to the air strip and unload those bombs so they could make their runs every eight hours. Every eight hours there was a fleet taking off going to bomb Japan, somewhere in China, someplace. We got to be pretty good friends with the B-29 pilots, and he says, “Well, I can’t tell you too much,” he says, “but this war isn’t going to last too much longer. We got a secret weapon that we’re going to use on the Japanese, and when it’s done everybody will know about it.” He didn’t say nothing about atomic weapon—I wouldn’t know what he was talking about anyway. [laughter] They dropped the first atomic bomb. We were packing up on to go up to Okinawa because it was getting pretty bad up there. They dropped the second one while we were there. Some of our outfit was on Okinawa and some of it was on Kumashima—a little island about sixty miles in the China Sea. After they dropped that second atomic bomb, they [the Japanese] were contacting our interpreters wanting to know who they could surrender to. That was back in August—you know the official signing wasn’t until September—but that was the latter part of August when they was trying to surrender to somebody to stop the war. They was ready to give up then. That was some of my experience with the army there. After they had dropped that bomb, things started being different. We didn’t have to—most of the Japanese that hadn’t surrendered—surrendered. Everything was negotiating—trying to negotiate some peaceful terms.
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Anisha Yadav: Were any of those atomic bombers scared of dropping the bomb?
WR: Not that I know of. I don’t think they really knew exactly what—how much damage they was gonna do. But after they dropped that second one, everybody was really trying to surrender real quick. Really it should’ve been back August instead of September because they was trying to get ‘em—“No more bombs!” But that brought the war to an end there.
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EB: Were there many casualties in your unit?
WR: On Tinian there was. We had a lot of casualties there because we were to do mop up and the marines had pushed them [the Japanese] in one end—the southern end of Tinian—and we had to go back there and kind of flush them out. They was back there in caves and everything. They had children and all them. Then we was trying to starve ‘em out and some of ‘em—they was too afraid to surrender because they had told them so many lies: “Those brutal Americans.” You think we’re brutal to them, just wait ‘til you fall into their hands. But they found that we were patsies compared to the brutality they put on our soldiers. I was treating on Kumashima (we was about sixty or seventy miles from Okinawa). There, they had what they called military government that treated the natives of the island, but they wasn’t doing very much for them. Our officer allowed us to treat some of the native Kumashimians. Boy, it mushroomed on us. They—the people there had told them so many lies against us. They said that we were really brutal, and they found out that we was just the opposite of what they had said that we were. On sick call, I mean—I was working almost sixteen hours a day with the people. They didn’t—the military government—didn’t do very much for them. We did more for them than the military government did for them. These were civilians, you know. They came—they thought I was a real doctor. [laughter] They called me “Kongo hey”. Kongo hey means doctor. I said, “Why they call me—?” The little fellow who became my interpreter—I met him when we first hit the island, he had been bitten by a poisonous snake, and I didn’t understand him and he didn’t understand me. He just showed me his foot, and I could see where the snake had bit him. I got my snakebite kit, and I treated him. His foot swolled up about three times the size, and he had run a fever for about a week. Finally the fever went down and then he became my interpreter, and I couldn’t move without him. He was right there beside me. His whole family took a liking to me, and when I go through the village everybody started, “Kongo hey! Kongo hey!” And they would just block me off. I would take candy and stuff like that to give to the kids, and I come find out some of the women there they had babies but their breasts had dried up and they didn’t have enough. So I would take a case or two of condensed milk and give it to them. I make up extra calamine lotion so that they—that Japanese fly over there, I forget what they called ‘em, but they was biting the babies, they was biting the babies so that they was just raw, just like somebody took some sandpaper and just scuffed up their skin. That’s the way they looked because the flies were just eating them almost alive. We finally got the army to come over there and spray the island. They sprayed the island and it rained flies on us. Just like rain coming down, hitting the sides, hitting us. They were kind of like our housefly, but only they were red, reddish maroon color. After a couple of sprays of that DDT, they didn’t have no trouble with flies or the kids getting bitten. I would still take several cases of condensed milk to pass out the ladies because they didn’t have milk to give to their babies. When they see my jeep coming in, all hollering “Kongo hey” all through the village and everything. They blocked this roads, the street. I couldn’t get by. I bring candy and stuff like that. If I was going to an outpost to see about somebody sick out there in the evening, on my way back they would block the road again. They fill up my big ol’ fatigue pockets, stand out here look like I had breasts [laughter] side pockets filled with hot-roasted peanuts. They would give me tangerines and these little bananas—they wasn’t no bigger than your fingers over there. I guess they was trying to show their thankfulness and gratefulness to what we had done for them. We became real good friends. This one boy he wanted me to take him back: “I want to go to America.” He’d come over and watch movies with us. They’d all just go to pieces when they see a kissing scene. [laughter] Really funny. They didn’t like war movies or anything like gangster movies. They liked romantic stories and stuff like that. They’d eat that up. They’d come over and watch movies.
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We ran into a pretty bad typhoon—I’d never heard of typhoon before. The first one wasn’t so bad, but the second one that came—it just devastated us. It blew away everything: five-gallon water cans flying through the air just like Kleenex. I had to duck these water cans and everything. It probably killed you if it’d hit somebody. It just tore us up so bad. We was just living in what looked like a hobo camp by the time we got away from there. Because I was invited over to one of the families’ house for dinner and after dinner, the father of this little boy that I befriended—the snake-bitten—he came to me. He didn’t see any rings on my fingers, and so he gave me his daughter. [laughter] “What’re you going to do with her, Rice?” I said, “I’m gonna leave her right here!” [laughter] “I don’t know what to do with her.” Well, we got ready to go to Okinawa. She thought we were going back to America. Boy, he was so pleased—thought that she’s going to be able to go to America. And I said, “No we just going back to Okinawa.” I couldn’t get it over to her that we was just going back to Okinawa, not going back to America right then. “Can’t you take me?” (Her brother was my interpreter.) I said, “ Maybe if you sneak over there the day we’re going, maybe I can put you in my bag, you know, and get you aboard.” So she came over I mean real early in the morning, got in the bag [laughter]—pulled the top over her. I told her, “ No we’re not. We’re just going back to Okinawa.” I said, “I was just joking with you.” Boy, she cried and she finally came back over to the camp the night before we left. She started doing some kind of ritual—I don’t know what it was. She let all her hair down, and she’s down on her knees and she combed all her hair all around—just looked like a little, small haystack—hair all the way around her. She threw all her hair back toward the front. She cut a lock of hair back here. She throwed it over to one side and cut a lock off of this side. She throwed it over to the other side and she cut a lock off that. She rolled a big braid about this long and told me to keep it in remembrance of her. She gave me a picture of her—keep that for her. On my way back home, I ran into a guy—he just came overseas. “You got any souvenirs?” I said, “I didn’t come over here to collect souvenirs.” You do a job, and my job was finished and I’m on my way back home. He found out where I had this lock of hair, you know big, long braid of hair. He stole it! I don’t know what kind of lie he put with it. That’s the way things kind of ended for me in the army.
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I thought things were better when I got back because there wasn’t as much segregation as there was when I left the United States. We were all on the same troop ships and everything. But when I got back to Ohio and Indiana, it was the same as it was before I left. I couldn’t find a job. I had three jobs waiting for me—three letters for—I know that these plants never did hire any black people. I showed up. “Somebody’s played a practical joke on you. This is not even our stationary.” So I looked over in another desk and I picked a letterhead there. I said, “This is the same. I’m gonna be black, but I’m not dumb! This is the same stationary.” “Well, you need to see Mr. So-and-so.” Finally, one fella said up there, “We didn’t hire any black people.” They refused to give me unemployment compensation for a while ‘til they found out that it was true about they would not hire me. I wasn’t doing much trucking freight there in Ohio, so my wife—my girlfriend—she was living in Columbus then. She had to move back to Indiana with her people. She said, “Why don’t you come over here. You might find a better job.” I trucked freight over here in Indianapolis, and I saw this place down the street from the Eli Lilly. This guy says, “Oh, you don’t want to work there. All black people do there is sweep and mop.” One guy said, “One thing: they don’t never lay off. They don’t never strike.” I said, “That’s where I need to be.” So, I went and put an application in Eli Lilly. I did janitorial work there for three years, and I was speaking to everybody. A guy said, “Why are you speaking to all these people? They don’t care nothing about you.” One day a guy come up and I spoke to him and said, “Good morning.” I always had a good word for him. “What’s the good word for the day?” I always had something good to say to him. He wrote a little something on a little notepad and said, “Take this to personnel.” So I took it to personnel and when I got to personnel he said, “Do you know what this is about?” I said, “No.” He said, “You have been selected to be the first black to be trained to be a laboratory technician.” So I was one of the first blacks trained at Eli Lilly to be a lab technician. I was that for thirty-seven years until I retired after forty years and eight months. I was able to buy and pay for my home, nice car, go on vacations and stuff like that. We went everywhere. We had nine kids—five boys and four girls. We went everywhere. They couldn’t figure out how I could afford to go and stay in hotels, resorts. We’ve been to the Dells, we’ve been to Atlanta, Georgia, St. Louis, every amusement park within five hundred miles of Indianapolis, we’ve been there—Zoo and camping. How can you afford to have all those kids as you got? My wife never did work. I said, “You gonna be a stay-at-home mom because I never knew—had a mom that was in the home. I had to do the cooking and everything else for myself. These kids are not going to be raised like that.” So, the ones that wanted to go to college, I was able to put them through. The ones that didn’t want to go and chose to do something else—all right. I let them. I wanted you all to be college-educated, but some of you didn’t think you needed it, so you turned it down. Some of them wanted it later on—too late! [laughter] I’m retired now. I said, “There was a time that you could’ve got it, but you chose not to have it. You didn’t think you really needed it.” The ones that got college-educated are doing fine. My son that’s got his boys here [Park Tudor] at school—they hired him on—he got a degree in electronics and robotics. I had just retired and Lillys was building three thirty-million-dollars robots. So one of them quit and this guy—the technician—just was flying back to California. He said, “Well you’ve got Rice’s boy.” They were talking about Mark, my son Mark—Jalen and Justin here in school. “Put him—let him see what he can do on that robot.” Put Mark on there, and in less than fifteen minutes he had it humming. That guy—his boss called me at home… [side A ends at 588]
EB: I just have a few questions about the end of the war. How much were you paid during the time you were serving?
WR: I was paid fifty dollars a month.
EB: During your service, did you feel as if your unit was short-changed at all because it was a black unit
WR: Oh yeah. We didn’t have uniforms. Sometimes they’d jump on us because we were wearing marine uniforms—our shoes wore out—marine shoes and our shoes wore out. They were sending them some place to be half-soled and never did come back. [laughter] The outfit was below the level, really, units should’ve been. When I first joined the outfit, they didn’t let me inspect nothing because it was below standard. I was at Okinawa and Tinian before they let met start doing anything medical, other than being aid man.
[601]
Kathryn Lerch: When you were on Guadalcanal—that would’ve been ‘42—what was it like there?
WR: They had just finished taking Guadalcanal. Pretty bad shape. A lot the areas we couldn’t go into because they hadn’t cleared up all of the mines, and they had a lot of live ammunition that could go off. And the malaria was pretty bad there—very bad. Most of the guys were coming down with malaria. Most of the hospitals just full of guys with malaria. We didn’t have even enough medicine to go around there.
KL: Atabrine?
WR: Yeah, atabrine. That kind of helped a little bit—didn’t do too much. Took so much atabrine these guys—the whites of your eyes and your fingers all turned yellow. The whites of your eyes would just be yellow because of the atabrine. You had to take one before you get in the mess hall. Some of ‘em they’d act like they throw in the back of their mouth—throw it back over their head instead of taking it. I guess that’s the best that we had during that time. Malaria was pretty bad. Those guys—down there the temperature was 105 in the shade—and we got these great, big, ol’ army medical blankets on them and they’re shivering. They sent us to the Russell Islands for—that was supposed to be Relaxing and Recreation—unloading ships, stacking up ammunition, fifty-five gallon barrels of gasoline and stuff like that. They just dumped that out there. They wasted a whole lot of stuff—a lot of food. Some times they had refrigerators for it and sometimes they didn’t. A lot of the stuff went to waste, especially the meat because they send the meat in there and didn’t have the refrigerators to keep it cool, keep it from spoiling.
[622]
KL: Where was the source of the meat? Did they get it from Australia?
WR: Yeah. New Zealand. Australia. A lot of goat meat and sheep. A lot of lamb, mutton, and stuff like that. Every once in a while they would come up with ox meat. That was pretty good. Toward the end of the war, they started coming up with sides of beef and stuff like that. Well, they had a lot of pork, and I tasted that pork the first time we got some pork and it didn’t taste right to me. I didn’t care very much for pork, and everybody was sick, coming down with dysentery and diarrhea. Once again, at Okinawa we were supposed to get two trucks of beef, and there they brought us eight pieces of pork for a whole battalion. The guys carrying it across their arm, folded over like a coat. And I’ve been trained to inspect meat��meat’s suppose to be rigid. So I turned it down. Boy, they ready to crucify me. All the mess halls’ sergeants (five of them: A, B, C, D, and Head Quarters Company): “Oh, we can doctor it up.” “You’re not going to doctor this up ‘cause I’ll get chewed out if somebody gets sick.” So I had to call the island surgeon to come down there. I said, “They want me to okay this bad pork. It needs to be thrown away.” He had to come down there in a hurry because they was ready to crucify me. We were promised a truckload of beef, and they brought these eight pieces of pork—so slimy they couldn’t even hardly hold on to it. They sent it back, and they guy said, “Who do you think you are? You just think that because you got a little rank and da-da-da-da, you think you somebody import—turn down this meat.” They was out there throwing stuff against the little medical building there—just throwing rocks and cans and everything they could throw at me, calling me all kinds of names. About three hours later, here comes this truck, beef almost falling off of it. “Oh serg you know your job! You know exactly what you’re doing.” I said, “You were ready to kill me a few hours ago.” The island surgeon told me, “If you don’t think it’s right, just give me a call on that phone. I’ll be down there to your rescue.” At the end of the war, my six months was just about up, and our officers there—aw, they had the biggest blow out party you ever want to see in our life: boy, all kind booze and stuff. I don’t know where they got it. They had dancing girls and music. That was the night before—they was supposed to leave out the next morning at eight o’clock. They had a commercial jet to fly them from Okinawa back to the United States. I heard all these trucks come in. I looked at my watch—I said, “This is just seven, you know.”
[658]
I looked out to this guy—I noticed when he come in, stay a month or two, then disappear. G-2—army intelligence—just like the FBI. They took—shackled all of those officers. They was taking stuff out of their post exchange, and sending it back to the United States to be sold on the black market. I had bought a smoking jacket from one of those B-29 pilots when I was on Tinian with a great big dragon on the back and it come down a little past your waist. It was a beautiful thing, made out of silk. They wanted the smoking jacket. I didn’t want to sell it. I had that and a set of pajamas I was gonna bring back to my girlfriend—my wife now. They come up with some kind of law, so everything bought in China and stuff like that from those B-29 pilots have to go through Customs and sold at this Post Exchange. I had a big diamond table napkin, canvas, napkins—big table cloth—all the same color. I think twelve napkins to go along with it. I had a small one too. They confiscated all of that. Only thing I saw was the small table cloth and the napkins on the Post Exchange. I didn’t see none of the other stuff. I never see the smoking jacket or anything like that. They let me keep the pajamas I had for my wife. They had been taking stuff out of the Post Exchange and sending it back to the United States to be sold for full price—Parker 51s, pens, wrist watches, stuff like that. They hand cuffed ‘em all. This one guy—I thought he was just a sergeant—he come out had his full uniform on. “Get him! Get him! Get him!” They had him all shackled and chained up. I don’t know where they took them at. They left. They had been stealing from the guys, telling them that they’re busted down, but they were pocketing that money. A whole lot of illegal stuff was going on. Cigarettes they were sending back to the United States to be sold in on full price and everything. There was a lot of stuff there that was going on—that wasn’t on the up-and-up.
[685]
They was looking the other way. I said, “I thank the Lord for my experience. I didn’t get hurt or anything like that.” I treated a lot of wounded, and I saw a lot of men die—[emotional pause]—young men. And some of them, I don’t know—some people don’t believe in heaven and don’t believe in the hell—but they were screaming. “You see all the flames around me!” Water just dropping like somebody just poured dropped a bucket of water on these guys. All these young men dying for I don’t know what, but that’s war. I don’t wish war on nobody. It’s a lot of people suffering—children. Those native people over there didn’t know what was happening around them, but they were suffering because of the war. I would go to town, go through villages, I would take extra food and stuff like that to make sure they had something to eat. I would treat ‘em when they come to the camp and everything. They had some diseases we didn’t even know about. I know I was taking a risk, but I said, “Well, that’s what a medic is supposed to do.” It could have been one of our guys, but I said, “We’re still supposed to be human beings. God made all nations and races of people.” I didn’t think we should lose our dignity. At the end of the war, I saw these guys raping of these native women over there. I broke up all of it I could. “Well, they’re the enemy! They’re the enemy!” I said, “No. Don’t let the war make us animals. You got to go back—you got sisters and you got mothers and aunts and stuff like that. You won’t want nobody to do them like that—that way. You go back to America and you be doing the same that you’re doing over here. America—it’s bad enough. But if it turns into something like that, it will be terrible.” I tried to look at everything from the positive side. I said, “Well, I did my best to help humanity out.” [pause because video tape is replaced]
[712-717 pause]
WR: I speak Japanese pretty good while I was over there. You don’t use it, you lose it. [laughter]
AY: You learned the Japanese from a translator?
WR: No, I picked it up with my little adopted son over there. He would help me out quite a bit. Well, we had these little books that was supposed to help us out. “Konichiwa” or “Kambou”. [laughter] I got so I could talk pretty good.
AY: You could understand them talking back?
WR: Well, some of it was a little different in different parts of the island, but basically it was just about the same.
[728]
ER: During your service were you able to stay in touch with your family?
WR: Oh yeah.
ER: Did you tell them all that was going on?
WR: Couldn’t. The mail was censored. You couldn’t tell them exactly where you were or what was going on. You couldn’t send them any pictures or anything like that.
ER: Were any of your siblings serving in the war then?
WR: No. When the Vietnamese War was going on, my two oldest boys—they were drafted. I was working, I was cutting the grass part-time. When I wasn’t working at Lillys, I was cutting grass. I was on nights, so I was cutting grass in the daytime. That helped me get a little extra money to put a down payment on the house and stuff like that. He had a son—Lawyer Scanlon, one of the top corporation lawyers here in the city…[digression from 768 to 772 about Lawyer Scanlon’s son who opted out of the conscription for the Vietnam War]… Congress declared war over there—police action—so it was just a police action. There was going to be steps taken—you can’t draft a person and make him serve over there. So even if he was drafted, you had to opt out because that was just a police action. I had two boys—my two oldest boys were in the serve—they were in basic training. When Mr. Scanlon—he was a top corporation lawyer here in the city—he sent the letter in for me. He said, “Aw, you just sign it, and I’ll just send it in. Your boys will not leave the States unless they want to.” Son Billy and David—Billy didn’t leave the United States. He stayed here the whole time. David wanted to go overseas somewhere. He decided—he asked me if it was okay for him to go to Okinawa since I had already been there. They was really fixing up Okinawa really good. They had better highways over there than we had back here. They didn’t like interstate over there. More people were killed on those highways over there than was during the actual fighting. They were up there racing the big ol’ ducks on the interstate.
[761]
While I was waiting for the ship to come in to come back to the United States, I was going to different parts of the island—Naha, Shuri Castle to watch the boxing matches and stuff like that—some of the oriental shows they was putting on.
KL: When you were on Okinawa, where were you located? The southern end or the northern end?
WR: Southern end.
KL: How big a camp area was set up? You were there after the initial landings that spring?
[766]
WR: Well, when we came back from Kumashima—before we went to Kumashima, we was not in any basic location. We was just—they just throwed us off the ship. Then come find out we was in a live mine field, sleeping in the tall grass. [If] one of us had rolled over the wrong way, it killed all of us. Come that morning, I was up stretching around, but everybody used the same path through the tall grass and everything. A marine come out and he cussed at us, “What the in the sauce are you doing over there? You’re in a live mine field!” Nobody got hurt. It didn’t kick off a one. Everybody walked through the same path, where the grass was already pushed down. I said we could’ve rolled over the wrong way and killed us all. I guess the good Lord was still on our side. He wanted us to live a little while longer. They start building Okinawa up—they was doing a lot, building Shuri Castle and Naha and different places up. Sometimes you get disgusted by some things that happening. When we came back from Kumashima, they really started building up Okinawa really good. We went moved into an area where it used to be naval hospital—Quonset hut—They left all the medications there. Boy, it was beautiful place there. We stayed there ‘til my time was up to be rotated back. I was ready to go. I was ready to leave over there.
AY: Because you were in a black unit, were you treated any differently when you were sick—like any of the members [of the unit]—than the white patients? Were you treated as well?
[789]
WR: No. They wouldn’t let our guys even go to the hospital, unless they’re about half dead. Some of the guys that were fooling with those native women over there, and they got some kind of skin disease. Crustacean went across their bodies just like a scab. They were discolored. One fella, he was light skinned, this stuff went across his face like that and down across body and it was just a crustacean—like a scab, real rough like alligator hide—it was some kind of venereal disease, I guess, they had got from these native women over there. I was mixing up different things that guys said was helping some of those guys. I added a little stuff to it. It started doing a little better for some of the guys, but not all of them. We had guys that were sent back to Hawaii because they were so messed up. I don’t know what happened to them after that. Some of that was syphilis, and some of the guys went blind. A lot of bad things happened to them. They was drinking a lot of the stuff that the native people drank over there. Some of the guys lost their mind. It drove ‘em crazy, and some of ‘em went blind drinking that stuff. Then they was drinking torpedo fluid. They was draining through some way through potatoes or something like that and getting most of the poisons and stuff out it. Some of them was trying to smoke the Japanese tobacco over there. Coming in busting my thermometers because the temperature is so high. It was like, “Feel like the whole top of my head is coming in.” Sticking thermometers in, boy, that thing go all the way to the top. I said, “You all get that mercury in you.” Then they was smoking that Japanese tobacco, and it was doing the same thing. “Aw, they just need to be cured.” They it laid out there on mats and put tangerine juice, orange juice, and rum stuff on it. “Smell this. Boy, this is just right!” Soon they smoke a big batch here, they bring in there and couldn’t even take the temperature so high. I said, “You guys got more guts than brains in our heads. Childish, crazy stuff.” They was drinking—they found what they thought a keg of Japanese beer, and it messed up a lot of guys. I was not a drinker. They gave us a case of beer a month down there, and a package—a case of cigarettes. I never drank or smoked. When I’d come in, somebody’s paid—there’d be twenty-four dollars under my pillow for the beer and so much for the cigarettes. For a while, on Kumashima, there was no cigarettes there to be smoked. They was policing the area, getting old cigarette butts and putting them together and putting them in a pipe and smoking it again, mixing that with Japanese tobacco and stuff like that and knocking the top of their heads off, coming there with the temperature so high. “Why you guys that lucked out look like you all be glad that you got cured off of something like that bad habit?” But they wanted—liked to go back to the same old stuff again. Some of the diseases they caught from those women, you know, having sex with them. We didn’t know what they were. It was indescribable. We just bundled them up and sent them to Hawaii, to the command hospital there. I don’t know what happened to them from then on. I said, “I ain’t coming to war to get all messed up there.” Guys—they got more guts than I did, experimenting on that stuff and fooling with those women. We had movies and talks—doctors coming from the United States, talking to them about having sex with those women over there, some of the disease we had not even known in America. Guys will be guys. Some of them are messed for life. Some of them said they never would come home because they didn’t their families to see them in the shape that they were in. I said, “War is a terrible thing. So many things that happen through the war.” I was talking to some of the guys after the war was over. They were still want to rape the nurses and different things like that. I said, “Look, don’t let the war make an animal out of you. You gotta go back to the United States, and you do those kind of offenses, you going to jail—and you gonna go there for quite a long time.” They don’t listen to me. I said, “Well, at least I did try.”
[862]
EB: Did you stay in touch with any of the fellow servicemen?
WR: They didn’t like me. Officers that I told you at first—they turned most of the guys against me because I could read and write and count, do a lot of things they couldn’t do. I wrote letters for them, and they put it in ‘em some way or another that I thought I was better than they were. Some of the guys I won. They saw that it was just a bunch of propaganda and lies that they was putting. They would try to flip the northern blacks against the southern blacks. We didn’t have but a few northern black people that could read or write or count anything like that. They was cheating them out of their money. They didn’t know what they was supposed to collect from the Army.
KL: Speaking of cheating out of things, you mentioned that your medals took you sixty years to get your medals.
WR: Yeah. I just got my medals last June [2006].
KL: Can you tell us maybe why the delay in that or the rationale behind that?
[875]
WR: They told me here that their records got burned up about the 24th Infantry Regiment. Some way or another they had a fire in Kansas City [St. Louis NARA] and burned up all their records. As we were landing at Okinawa, we were under suicide plane attack. As I was watching the History Channel, here come all this stuff back on there. That guy had the camera must have been behind me somewhere ‘cause he saw the same thing I saw. This suicide plane was coming right at the ship that I was—it missed our superstructure just by a few feet. Hit the next ship—it wasn’t there the next day. This girl was trying to me the benefits—Ms. Richardson. I told her to write the History Channel. They sent her as stack of stuff this thick about our outfit, so they couldn’t go along with that lie anymore. They didn’t have any record that I was serving in the South Pacific, 24th Infantry, all-black outfit. They had to drop that tale.
KL: What ship were you on that had these suicide bombers coming at them? Was it part of the Navy, your ship?
WR: I had ‘em all written down some place. I lost that. I didn’t want to remember that ship. The food that was on it was terrible. That food was rotten. If it wasn’t for the Christmas boxes I got for Christmas, me and quite a few of the other guys would’ve starved to death. I had a about five or sixes bags full of boxes of Christmas stuff. We eat that every day until we finally got to where we got some decent food. But that food on there was terrible.
ER: What sorts of medals did you earn?
WR: For the different combat areas that I served in: South Pacific, Central Pacific, South of Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Saipan, Tinian, another for Okinawa and Kumashima, good conduct medal. Tina took that picture. She had that book? My son just bought a case to put my medals in. These are the medals that I got here. [Rice shows picture of medals ]
[910]
ER: Did you end up joining any veteran organization?
WR: I joined Veterans of VFW—Veterans of Foreign Wars. But, I went a couple and all they did was drink. I was not a drinker or smoker, so I didn’t see no need in me paying money to join an outfit like that that I wasn’t take part in. I just didn’t go back no more. They wrote me and tried to get me to re-up and everything for Veterans of Foreign Wars and talking about what they gonna do better and this and that. But I didn’t. I’m just glad to get away from the war.
ER: When exactly were you to go home? When were you allowed to go home?
[925]
WR: We got back to—they sent us back here to Atterbury. I came through four days in Columbus. It’s right in the middle of Columbus, Ohio—right in the middle of the city. But they sent me back here to Atterbury, and they had put some temporary filling in my wisdom teeth—they were coming in. I was trying to get them to put some permanent filler in there, so I spent about three months here, trying to get them to do that. I found out that they wasn’t going to—they kept, “Come back in two weeks. Come back in a week.” Just kept postponing it, so I just went on home. Came on back to four days, and I went to file for unemployment compensation. They had sent me three letters. I had three letters waiting on me, and I know these people did not hire black people at all. I got on it the next day, and I went to two of them that one day. They asked them that there was veterans coming back. They didn’t say whether they were black or white. I said, “This war did do a whole lot of good. They are training as an apprentice.” I went to see about these jobs. “Well, somebody’s played a practical joke on you.” He says, “We didn’t even send this out.” I said, “You need to see Mr. So-and-so.” So they start passing me around there in the office. One of the last fellows I saw, he said, “This is not even our stationary.” I reached across a desk there and picked up—I said, “This is the same letter head as I got here. I might be black or negro or whatever you want to call me, but I’m not dumb.” “Well, you better see Mr. So-and-so.” Then I went back to another fellow that talked to at first. He says, “I don’t make the rules and the policies for the company. I’m sorry it turned out like this. We didn’t have no way of screening. We didn’t know who these letters was going to.” So, I didn’t get a job in Indiana [Ohio]. They didn’t want to pay me compensation. They said, “Well, you turned down those jobs.” I said, “I did not turn them down. I showed up the wrong color.” I thought maybe I could do better in Indiana, so I came over here. I was really kind of disgusted with the Army and Ohio. I didn’t think things was just that bad over there. That’s how O ended up in Indiana. I married my wife. She was from Indiana. She was staying with her sister. Her and her sister migrated back here to Indiana. That’s how I wound up in Indiana.
KL: Do you have any other final comments at all on your experience, what you brought out of this, perhaps, for you personally, what you gained from this experience and how it changed your life for the future?
[974]
WR: Well, I found out that people are just people. There’re good people and there’re bad people in every race and ethnic background. There are good Japanese and bad Japanese. Good American, bad negroes—colored, whatever you want to call it. Good and bad. You just got to seek the best of people to run with. I didn’t let color become a thing with me. I got a lot of white friends and we’re just like that. And they respect me and I respect them. They’re not back stabbers. They’re some that put on a front. Every once in a while things would slip out. You could see what they really were—they wasn’t what they said they were gonna be or lived up to what they pretended to be. After getting into Lillys and became a lab technician, I found out I had a lot of enemies and they did a lot of things to make me look bad and try to make me the goat of everything that went bad, that went wrong up in the lab. I found out who I could trust and who I couldn’t trust…
[994] end of essential part of interview
[digression about unfortunate events at Eli Lilly with other black employees; ended up becoming being promoted to lab technician for Lilly]…[the rest of the interview is Rice explaining pictures from war experience]
