Mr. Bill Storm
[b. 07/07/1920]
Recorded on January 23, 2005
[Interview starts on 000 on counter]
Tory Campbell: Today’s date is Saturday, November 27, 2004. We are at Bill Storm’s house in Lizton, Indiana. His date of birth is July the 7, 1920. He was born in Indianapolis and then moved to Lizton, Indiana. His address, his current address is RR 1 Box 109, Lizton, Indiana, 46149.
[002]
Tory Campbell: Mr. Storm, were you drafted or did you enlist in the army?
Bill Storm: I was drafted in 1944 early in the spring.
TC: Where were you living at the time?
BS: Lizton, Indiana.
TC: Lizton, Indiana? Ok.
TC: Why did you join?
BS: Why did I join?
TC: Yeah, why?
BS: Because we had a war on, just to help the war effort.
TC: Do you recall your first days in the service?
BS: First days in the what?
TC: In the service?
BS: Oh yeah, sure I was inducted at Fort Harrison in Indianapolis and for a short time, maybe like a month, I was sent to a camp off of South Carolina near Spartanburg and I had 17 weeks of Infantry Training at that place. Ask another question?
[026]
TC: Mhm, tell me about your boot camp training experience.
BS: Well it was, it was pretty rough, we had a lot of calisthenics, a lot of twenty-five mile hikes with full fuel packs, it was pretty rough. It was infantry training and they had a thing called the infiltration course when you had to crawl through about seventy-five or eighty yards of almost all sand (because it was South Carolina), kind of sandy part of the world, under a machine gun fire a light machine gun, that’s why it took seventeen weeks, we did a lot of this kind of stuff, as you normally don’t do in the service or in the training and a lot of dry runs also in the beginning. We had one rifle and we had to know how to take it completely apart and complete the nomenclature of the rifle and how to take the thirty caliber machine guns apart and all this other kinds of stuff that was part of the training to do that. Is that all from that?
[035]
TC: Was anyone hurt in the training?
BS: The infiltration course was kind of a sandy type field; it was about seventy-five yards long. At one end of the field was three machine guns, 30 caliber machine guns, set up on tripods with weights on the tripod legs so it wouldn’t move around. At the other end of the field, was a dirt embankment, its called embankment, and when they fired the machine guns, the bullets would go to the embankment and our company had about sixty-four men in our training camp in South Carolina. And they took us all down there, and they just on the ground, on the far end near the mound of dirt, and on our back, two rows for men. And they fired machine guns on over the top of us so we could see the bullets, they had tracer bullets, little ball, little red balls of fire. And there were thirty of these. It did this to you for like thirty seconds and then you turn over on your stomach and then they start, start you pulling towards the machine guns and they start firing machine guns, and they were over your head, you could see, you could see the little flash. And there were two barbwire entanglements across the field, across the field. You had to go under these with a full field pack and after you got through this, you start on the field, they had pits ever so often with explosives, like dynamite and they kept blowing these off and the dirt went every way. This was really and you had to crawl full length through the field with a full field pack on your back and one rifle, you had to have with you always, you carried it with you drug the butt on the ground and the barrel end where the strap is hooked on the front and that’s how you carried it along with you. And you kept it out of the dirt and when you got to the machine gun area they had a trench that you crawl down and then into and then out of the other side with the gun, and your gun and your rifle had to be able to be fired or else you had to do it again.
[056]
TC: So, you obviously got through it and it was really hard
BS: Say it again…yeah it was pretty you actually went to sleep walking’. I actually went to sleep walking’, ‘cus you were walking in usually of columns of two. There was a guy in front of you and a guy behind you. The rhythm you could go to sleep doing this, I actually did, all the guys did, just for a moment, not all the time.
TC: Okay so, you served in World War II?
BS: World War II? Yes I did.
TC: And where exactly did you go?
BS: I went to Europe you mean after here or um?
TC: Yeah
BS: I was in several camps in this country, I was in a camp called South Carolina, Fort Meade, Maryland, I was in Camp Patrick Henry in this country and I was on a ship that was then sent to Italy, Naples. And from there I went to a replacement camp in Casserta, Italy. And then I went to another replacement camp up in northern part of Italy, and I cant exactly tell you where it was at but it was in an area quite a ways north of Florence, because it was getting towards the end of war and they were, first the Germans, and they drove the Germans out of Italy through a place called the Brenner Pass. It’s a gap in the mountain, in the Alp Mountains. Where you can get through Adolphia, and it was up near that little place when the war ended in WWII.
[107]
TC: When you say replacement camp, what do you mean?
BS: What was it?
TC: Yeah.
BS: Well, the first one was near Casserta, north of Naples all the way up near the Arno River, the Volterno River and the camp used to belong to Mussolini’s son in law, Cansiano, there was a cattle, a dairy farm, cattle’s stuff like that a lot of silo’s and stuff like that, farm deserts and stuff like that. A short ways north of Casserta, Italy. And the next one that I was in was just north, probably quite a ways north of Florence, I can’t remember exactly where it was it, it wasn’t near any big towns. And the replacement, the place where you call a replacement camp, was where they replace the guys who were wounded or killed or belied. So as they needed help they would go off this battery of people, is that all right?
[125]
TC: yeah. Okay, do you remember arriving?
BS: Arriving in Naples?
TC: Yeah.
BS: very well, very well.
TC: In Naples yeah, what was it like?
BS: Well, it was at nighttime
TC: Okay.
BS: And we did they moved people in multiples and they did that a lot at the time. When I left Fort Meade, Maryland and moved to Camp Patrick Henry, I think it was in Virginia if I remember it right, and then when we left Patrick Henry to go over seas, we went by train and at night at like three o clock in the morning and they always move you at night time because you move a lot of men. And we boarded a ship at a place called South Hampton in Newport Virginia. And when we arrived in Naples, we were loaded off of the ship onto right onto trucks 4x or 6x and you rode it almost like a bunch of cattle because you didn’t have room for everybody to sit down so you stood up, plus your duffle-bag. Everybody had a duffle-bag you’ll have all your stuff in there and from there we went from there to the replacement camp and they took us to the replacement camp, that’s where we went. And the guy, the little cowboys, they knew exactly what they were doing.
[164]
TC: What was your job assignment?
BS: my what?
TC: What was your job assignment.
BS: My job assignment? My job assignment when I first went in I was waiting for orders for because I was sent to the replacement camp to replace anybody who was out of the, either injured or killed or whatever. So my only job was that, while I was in the infantry that was my only job. But I was only in the infantry. When the war ended it was like in May the 7th or 8th in 1945 and I was taken out of the infantry and put into a place called A port battalion where the ships come in and out and the outfit that I was in was formed sometime in 1942 or maybe later than ‘42 in a place called Oran, North Africa, on the northern coast on the Mediterranean on the Med. Sea in Oran, North Africa where it was. After Africa and Sicily and the southern part of Italy was liberated from the Germans, they moved their operation to Naples which is the port city in southern Italy and I was reassigned to that area and I worked there until I was discharged from the service. How’s that?
TC: Did you see combat?
BS: I did not. No I never got to any combat, I almost did, I almost did. They sent all my papers in one day and the next day the war ended and I was lucked out and didn’t have to go I was really happy about that.
TC: So, was there any casualties in your unit?
BS: IT was a war, I’m sure there was but I didn’t really keep up, when you are taken into the army like that you are taken in the army with people from everywhere, all over the country, and generally when you are discharged you don’t see them again. If you do its because you were really good friends. Now I had a good friend from Indianapolis and after we were discharged I lost track of him and I have no idea where he is now. I have a friend who lives in a small town from here about 9 miles, but I went over seas with I didn’t serve there with him but we took our train together here and I still contact him very regularly. He’s about my age.
[192]
TC: Tell me a couple of your most memorable experiences.
BS: Turn it on, well I grew up in this area which is a total farming area here and I have never been any place more than Indianapolis or something like that and the war came along and I got caught up in this thing and the first thing I knew I was in a foreign country and I have never done anything like that before. Like I rode for about 13 days on a ship it wasn’t going to this place and I contacted people at Lily’s, that was completely different from me I was for that, I grew up a politic, every time we moved someplace we walked we walked every place in the infantry you don’t get a ride, you get to walk and I go through these towns, the small towns, and there is always a church and these people will be out on Sunday afternoons walking with their batters and stuff like this and they carried the Virgin Mary and I never thought of anything like that. It was completely different from what I grew up as and the experience of the war around the victory, the big guns our 105 155 how its guns were completely different from anything I’ve ever seen before or heard of before. Is that good enough?
[206]
TC: That sounds very interesting yeah.
BS: back at that time in the infantry, you didn’t sleep in a house I didn’t sleep in a house or a building until I went back to Naples when the war ended. So from the time that I left the boot camp in this country and the time that I went back after the war ended I went back to Naples, I slept either outside or in a tent. We slept in tents almost all the time. We slept outside also a lot. And it didn’t matter whether if it was raining or snowing. Well, you still slept outside. We had a thing called the shelter house. You had one half of this tent and your buddy had the other half and you would fix this tent, the two halves made the tent and this is what you call a pup tent. You had to take holes in the tent and every place you went you carried this stuff with you. It wasn’t real easy I think a full field pack probably weighed maybe 50 or 60 pounds or maybe more than that I’m not sure. A rifle weighed about 8 pounds and a bayonet weighed about a pound or two, so you had close to 10 pounds just for that. And the machine guns they were very heavy you always were carrying something like that, the BL rifles which is a British type of rifle or the tripod. It was a kind of gun that had two things in the front like a tripod in the front but you couldn’t hardly carry or hold it so you always had a low budget of some sort. What is the next question please? [206]
TC: Okay, were you a prisoner of war ever?
BS: No, no, no I guarded a lot of German prisoners because after the war ended there were a lot of German prisoners of the war and they would even as far as Naples, the prisoners of war and one particularly that I remember outside of Naples, a place called Banyole, a suburb in Naples, they had a stockade and the Italians built everything out of stone and mortar. And they kept these people in this stockade and the war had ended in Europe, it was still going on in Japan but it had ended in Germany and these fellas lived in this stockade and lived in tents, and they used them. They worked in like their kitchens and some of the army installations, and they made some of the best powdered eggs you ever tasted. They were pretty good but I stood guard quite often and at that time the guards had 8 hour long duties and 16 in all and the stockade was arranged so they had two towers one off the corners and there was a G.I. in each of those and there was one who walked inside of the stockade. Where the prisoners was, and he carried a side-arm, these guys were a long way from home and there was no reason for these guys to fight at all. We would wake up at 5 clock in the morning and get ready to go to work and we weren’t really supposed to fraternize with these people at all, but when its cold and rainy and wet its awful hard to say no to a cup of coffee or a marmalade sandwich!
[249]
TC: How was your experience as an operator of the crane?
BS: When I went back to Naples, after the war with Germany finished in May or right around the first of June, they shipped me back to Naples and I lived in a big warehouse along the port area. I was with a bunch of guys that I had served with before, I had been around them for quite awhile that I knew most of them and we all lived in a building, a big ol’ warehouse and we ate army grub that was cooked on stove, we had a bar where we could buy gin and rum and coca cola and stuff like that and they trained us to operate the equipment. The army at that time, the American army operated the port completely, whosever ship came into the port, we handled everything on the ship until they left the port. We did the guard duty, we did the steam doors, we supervised the Italians. The Italians did all the heavy labor work like loading stuff out of the hatches of the ship and reloading. And we did the supervising. We operated the crane and the tow motors and all the army equipment like that in the port and it was a very enjoyable, I hadn’t been used to sleeping in a building, I slept on an army cot! But a lot of gin and stuff like that like it was a lot of fun and that is where I met my wife! I’ll tell you about that.
[279]
TC: Okay.
BS: I operated a 40 ton crane which means it will pick up the capacity of 40 tons and it has two hooks on it and one is for lighter loads and one is for heavier loads and I never tried 40 tons but I picked up some 25 to 30 tons like tanks and stuff but I never picked up anything near 40. Anyways, we worked about 8 hour shifts, we either worked like 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon or we would work from 4 until midnight. I don’t remember working any after midnight hours. We had regular shifts and all I did was operate the crane and I did nothing else but htat. I had an Italian civilian that did all the refueling the vehicle, starting it and keeping it clean, greasing it and all I did was operate it that thing, it was a lot of experience. Most of the stuff that we were loading were war stuff that had been used, it was sent back to the states or the islands down in the south pacific, they were still fighting the Japanese down there at that time. So we sent a lot of stuff down there. But the type of stuff that we were loading were like tanks, bulldozers, ford motors that they used for trucks as motors for the vehicles. One particular thing I remember they made the air fields, the big airplanes landed on, it’d be 52’s and the big bombers, they made these fields out of iron grading and they would scrape off the soil and make it smooth and they would tap it down with special equipment, and they were about 24 feet long and about 6 feet long and there was millions of them I mean a lot of them and they were supposed laying on the ground a make a nice long flat field out of them and those big bombers, they were almost as big as a 747 airplane they would land many times on these, and when the war ended they took all this up and bundled it up and sent it back to the states.
[279]
TC: You mentioned earlier that you met your wife when you
BS: You want to know about that?
TC: yeah, please.
BS: Okay, my wife was born in Naples and her mother is from Medora, Spain and her Father is from a place called Barrie, Italy. I met her when she was fairly young, about 16 years old, about 15 or 16 years old and we used to go swimming in the Mediterranean and at that time German POW run the snack bar at the beach, and they had the beach set aside just for the people, and we would go swimming and we were aloud to get two cans of beer and two sandwiches on a pass, we had to have a pass and we would swim maybe half a day, there would be 3 or 4 couples, mostly Italian girls. I kinda liked her but we didn’t get real serious at the time and I came back home in ’46 for a discharge, and I couldn’t forget her, I couldn’t get her out of my mind, so she had her friends that lived in St. Billy and I knew her also because she was one of the one who went swimming with us, she married one of my buddies, and I went to her house one day about 1948 or 49 and her name was Rita, and I said Rita, do you remember Tina’s address and she said yes and I said I think ill write to her and find out if she had ever gotten married because by that time she was about 21 years old, so I wrote to her and at that time it took about 4 days to get a letter to Naples and 4 days to get a letter back, and it was about 8 or 9 days I had an answer. And my question was, did you ever get married? And her answer was No, I am still waitin’ for you, and that’s exactly what she said. So, I wrote back and I said I may come back over there and that is what I did, I went back in about December 27 of 1949, a little bit after Christmas and I went back to Naples, and I lived with her and her family, her brother for, until February 2nd and we got married and had our honeymoon in Sorrento and I lived there until about first week of June in 1950, it took her that long to get her out of Italy, they didn’t want her to go. It was hard to get a pass, a passport, there was a lot of people getting counterfeit passports and ID’s and stuff, right after the war. Anyway, we finally got the passport and came back to this country and we have been here ever since, we go back every once in awhile for visits but not too long.
[336]
TC: Were you awarded any medals or citations?
BS: Medal, only the standard, I had the expert rifle one, the good conduct medal, the medal for the area where I served. I wasn’t wounded or anything like that. I didn’t kill anybody at least I don’t think I did. The only medal I got were the standard ones that were issued to everybody.
[376]
TC: How did you stay in touch with your family during the war?
BS: We contacted each other by mail, and we were aloud to write letters for free because they were all sent to the people with sensors, so you couldn’t tell where you were at or what you were doing but you could write, how are you? And how is the family? And stuff like that. But they would sensor your letters and it was, called V mail, and all that for free and it didn’t cost any money and I got some packages from over here, they would send packages to me and cookies and stuff like that but I didn’t telephone anybody. At that time communication wasn’t anything like it is now, it took, my wife called her mother when she first came over here in 1950, she put a call in and it took her one week to get the call in so the communication was slow. They would, we had a phone that when you press a button it rings somebody and when she talked to her, probably the call went from our town, to probably Indianapolis and from there to New York City and from there to maybe to Paris or London and from there to Rome and from there to Naples and it was connected 5 or 6 times before you actually got to talk to her and then during the conversation, the line may break off and they would have to reconnect you so to get a 3 minute call, it would take about 10 minutes to do this. It wasn’t much higher than it is now; it was about 5 dollars, which was kinda aggravating. You had to give them your number and the people you wanted to call in Naples, and in Naples they had to go down to the house where the phone was and tell them they were going to get a phone call and then seven days be at this phone at 10 clock in the morning and the call would come through, and it did but it was very aggravating, its not like it is now. Its not like you can jus pick up a cell phone and call anyone in the world, it was not like that you couldn’t. Everyone had an APO number for sending letters. And APO means Army Post Office, that’s what it means and you had a number and that number designated where you letter would go and it went to New York and from there it went to Italy…and it didn’t cost anything and they had regular envelopes to put it in, you saw it, you probably took a picture of it so you could send it, and I kept in contact with my family. It wasn’t as easy as it is now, I tell you.
[382]
TC: Uh, well, during the war what was the food like?
BS: what?
TC: what was the food like?
BS: what did I feel like?
TC: food
BS: feet?
BS: when I first went in it wasn’t too bad it, we had a lot of lamb chops and stuff like that and in the army camp it wasn’t too bad and when we went over seas we had rice, sea rice’s and Kay rice’s and they were mostly dehydrated type food and stuff that had high energy content in it, so you could get maybe a fruit bar and it was a high energy type thing, to keep you going, and then we had a bunch of beanie weenie’s, do you know what they are? Beanies with little weenies in them, we had some of those and everything was in a small can or a carton, and usually the sea rice’s would have 3 or 4 cigarettes in it and stuff like that, that would keep for a long time, and everything was waterproof. It had a wax on the outside of it, so if it got wet, then it would soak it up. And you would carry this stuff with you, and if you were in a replacement camp like I was a couple times, you would get cooked food but it wasn’t that good. They would cook a lot of the food for the people that lived around Naples and Rome. They would cook like coli flour and they would cut the stuff up and put it in 15 gallon sized cans because you could feed a lot of men at one time and they would throw flour in it and cook it, and it would keep you alive but you wouldn’t eat it. Not sitting here at this table, you wouldn’t eat it. We had to eat it. I survived it; I’m still alive after 84 years.
[417]
TC: How did people entertain themselves?
BS: We had things that we played. We played games and we did a lot of sitting around. We did a lot of waits. In the army you do a lot of waits. It’s always, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait and we were always sitting around, doing something, we played some baseball and then a lot of the stuff we went to, one thing I remember we had to sit outside on a hillside and listen to shells go overhead from rifles and machine guns and you had to be able to distinguish between the two. And they would fire these little things that came out of these big guns, and you could hear them go through the air, they made swishing noise and you could actually see it, it looked like a small bug way up there. And we did a lot of training doing that; we didn’t have a lot of time to fool around with something else. We were always looking for a girl to go out with.
[441]
TC: do you remember humorous or unusual events?
BS: We were told in the service that you should never give you gun to anybody, like your pistol or your rifle, whatever. Never give that to anyone. And we went back to Naples when the war ended with Germany we went back to Naples, I was there for about a year, working in the port, and there were a lot of policemen around Naples and they always wanted talk to the G.I.’s and they carried these little berretta guns on their belts. And one day a guy came up to me and he was talking to me and I said can I see you gun? And I didn’t tell anyone that I did that, and that was the funniest thing I ever did. War isn’t really funny but sometimes I kind of took it too far. I was on guard duty on time on a British ship out on the port area and they burn coal out there for the fuel to run the propellers and stuff like that and I stood there for a while and I got awful thirsty and I said, do you guys have a glass of water I can have? And they said no but I can get you a cup of tea. That was kind of funny too.
[454]
TC: Okay, umm did you and your friends pull any pranks or do anything like that?
BS: No, I don’t ever think so.
TC: Okay, did you keep a personal diary?
BS: No, no diary.
TC: Do you remember the day that your service ended? The last day?
BS: The last day of my service? Yes I do.
TC: Okay tell me a little about it.
BS: When I came back to this country after the war, we landed in New York and they took us across to a place called Camp Kilmun, New Jersey. And they gave us new clothing and stuff. And they shipped us off to the western part of Wisconsin to a place called Camp McCoy. And that is where I got my discharge. Before they gave us our discharge, actually I was there for about a week, they took us into a little town, I can’t remember the town’s name. But they took us there and there was a field there and an army got up on stage and guys like me were there to reenlist for another 2 years or whatever, of course I said no. I had enough of the army. So they gave me traveling money to get home on. A few dollars. So we went down to the railroad station, I cant remember what line it was but it was on the border of Wisconsin, and they had one person selling tickets and about 50 G.I.’s walked up there to get tickets to go home, and the guys, I think It was lady and I don’t remember for sure. It was a ticket master, and they were trying to sell a ticket to the person and they were talking and going on and on and kept yakking and then the train came down the track. And then it stopped and it was headed for Chicago and everyone of those G.I.’s got on the train without a ticket including me and we filled it up. You couldn’t even walk down the aisle. We were in the dining car, or sitting in the middle of the aisle. And I got to Chicago and I had to take a train all the way to Indianapolis and that’s where I got off to get to my home. And I didn’t want to wait till the train, because the train was like 3 hours from now to Indianapolis from Chicago and I said no I don’t wanna wait that long. I had been gone for 2 years and I was ready to go. So I walk out to the corner and there was a greyhound bus line and so I went in and gave him my bus ticket and the man said it was leaving in 30 minutes and I said I wanted to be on it! So there I had the train ticket and the bus ticket. That was about July the 7th, about my birthday and I got on the bus and the guy sitting next to me was also an army guy so I talked to him and he said that he was stationed in Chicago but he was going to Indianapolis to visit someone and I said would you like another ticket to the train so I gave it to him. That was my last day. My family was all glad to see me.
[475]
TC: What did you do afterwards? After?
BS: I went back to work the same place I had worked before. I had worked for this company. I went to work for them in 1940 and about 3 and half or 4 years later I went into the service and they had a law that probably still have it that if you are drafted into the service that the company that you were working for had to take you back on the same job or a similar job when your time was up. So I went back to the same company. In fact I worked for them for 42 years.
[509]
TC: What was the company called?
BS: It was a J.D. Adams company and then they were sold to Internal Lifting House and then later on it was sold to Murphy Standard people and that makes more space for equipment and that’s what I have my pension from.
TC: Did you work or go back to school?
BS: After I got out of service, they had a thing called the G.I. bill of rights, and the army would pay for your tuition if you wanted to go to college and they would pay your tuition and so I did this, I took a leave from the company that I worked for, I went to Purdue, by the way for almost a year, and I finally decided I wanted to go back to Italy.
[520]
TC: So did you make any close friendships while you were in the service, people that you still talk to today?
BS: Close friends in the service or the civilian life?
TC: In the service.
BS: In the military? Yeah I had some close friends. One of them works at a restaurant near me, he is almost as old as I am, we were inducted in the service together, we went to the training together and we went over seas together and then I lost him. All the time that I was in Italy, a year and a half, less than two years, I never saw anybody that I knew. And there were a lot of guys in the service and a lot of them were in Italy and I didn’t know any of them and one of my jobs as a crane operator was to remove the weights away from the ship when they sailed, especially the ones hauling the guys over for discharge, because at the end of the war, they hauled a lot of the G.I.’s home for discharge. I had been in service long enough for discharge. And I was standing there waiting there to do this job to remove the gain weights from the ship and somebody hollered from up on the ship, “Hey stormy!” that was my old nickname, stormy and I looked up and here’s a guy that I went to school. He had been there the whole time and our paths never crossed.
[526]
TC: Oh, that’s nice. Did you join a Veteran’s Organization?
BS: I joined the American Legion when I first came home because there was one of those where I live now, but they finally closed it up and I didn’t join any others besides that.
[541]
TC: Did you military experience influence your thinking about war?
BS: It did in a way, I am concerned about war because I know what the people are going through, the things that are involved in that, and sometimes I wonder if its necessary if its better to negotiate than fight, but that’s jus in my opinion. Sometimes you can’t negotiate with people. That’s lots of trouble that they are having now.
[544]
TC: Do you ever attend reunions for Veterans?
BS: No I have no never attended a reunion. A lot of veterans don’t.
TC: How did your service and experience affect your life?
BS: Well, that’s kind of a tough question. I am more taller about things, more understanding about being able to get along with problems that comes up. It hasn’t changed me too much I don’t think. Next question.
[552]
TC: Can you tell me another interesting story?
BS: Okay, some of the experiences I’ve had working in the port, we sent a whole bunch of equipment from World War II from Europe and the landing strip for the big air force, the air bombers were made out of a like a gritting material. And it took a lot of bulldozers to clean it to level off the field, because these had to lay on flat fields. So I was bulldozer one day, and these things weigh 25 tons each, and the crane capacity was 40 tons. They pull them in there and I picked them up by the crane and set them on barges and the barges were pulled by a crane. They had Italian guys helping on the barges, and I was setting three bulldozers per barge and they weighed 25 tons as their capacity and the barge was 80 tons. And 3 of these weighed 75 tons and that’s enough to put on the barge. So we had some new officers come into our company. They had never worked in a port and they were what they called lieutenants, second lieutenants, officers candidates and one of them walked up to the crane and said, “soldier, how many barges or how many bulldozers are you putting on the barges?” I said, “well only three sir, the barges capacity is 80 tons and each bulldozer weighs 25 tons.” He said, “oh you can put more than 3 on there, you can put as many as you can on the barge.” So I said okay. So I rearranged the bulldozers on the barge and started putting more on there. I think I had 7 on there, I remember and on one end of the barge was about 12 inches under water and the other was barely out of the water. I had to go to dinner, and I got back and the lutenant was standing there and he said, “Soldier! Get those off those barge.” I said, “Sir, you said to put as many as I can on there and there is room for one more.” He didn’t like that too well. But anyway, we took the bulldozer back. That was some experience we had. And one time the British were bringing tanks to ship back to England. They had one tank pulling another tank. So the back tank was being pulled by a bunch of tanks. And they came in the port and they came down the street parallel to the water line.
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SIDE TWO
BS: One experience I would have was in the port area, the Italians worked on the ship, loading and unloading the ship, the shore men would walk into work from some of the outlying towns and maybe work 24 hours straight because they had no way of transportation so they worked long hours in the port. And they would be sleepy and have a sleep at work and one of them would step off into the water, always something happened and one guy drove off into the water, one guy was on a motorcycle that drove off into the water. Everyday there was some experience like that going on. There was no dull moment. The motorcycle dude, there was actually a couple of navy boys and the motorcycle sergeant had been driving and he was riding and he was just standing there talking to us about loading a crane on a flat truck and these two soldiers walked up and says, “You ride that cycle?” and the sergeant said, “yes,” and they said, “can we have a ride on it?” and he said, “Sure, you know how?” and they said, “yeah.” And they jumped on the cycle and the cycle was pointing right towards the end of the dock and it went straight to the water. And one of the guys, the one who was driving the cycle, one of them jumped off the cycle before it hit the water. And the port is always covered with debris, pieces of wood, oil off the ship and stuff and they come out of there looking terrible. They looked good when they went into the water but bad when they came out. There was always something going out that was kind of exciting. Next question.
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TC: Sounds exciting. Is there anything that you would like to add that we haven’t covered in the interview, anything?
BS: Any what?
TC: Any?
BS: I didn’t mind being in the service all this time, it was kind of tough at first because I grew up in a farming area, a really quiet type of environment and all of the sudden I was getting shots and going out with nothing on but a raincoat and getting shot on my arms and stuff and eating food that I didn’t really care about and infantry was really one of the roughest parts of the service. That is where the action is, where you meet the enemy all the time. Even though I wasn’t in combat, I still went through some of the stuff. I didn’t mind doing this, but I was kind of glad when it was over with. I probably wouldn’t go back and do it over again if I was a young man and new about it I probably wouldn’t reenlist unless they really, really needed the help. I don’t necessarily believe in war but sometimes it has to happen, whether you like it or not. That’s all I want to say.
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TC: Thank you.
BS: I haven’t gotten really important to say about it, I went and served my time and I was glad to do it and I am glad it’s over with.
TC: Thank you very much and thank you for your time.
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