Veteran Transcript
Herbert L. White
[B. 10/7/1924]
[00:00:06 counter start number]
TH: Were you drafted or did you enlist in WWII?
HW: You’ll have to speak a little louder. Okay, now I hear little better.
TH: OK were you drafted or did you enter…
HW: No, I volunteered.
TH: OK, and…
HW: One of the reasons why, really, you knew you was gonna have to go to war, be it the Army, the Marines, or the Navy. I knew I was gonna have to go, so I volunteered, and I went up to Great Lakes Training Station. I think it was in December some time, and I volunteered to join the Navy. Not specifically the Navy Air Corps, I just wanted to be in the Navy rather than a foot soldier, so to speak, and be sent overseas into Europe. Little by little I was at Great Lakes Training Station. Normally you were there for nine weeks, for the training, but I was only there for four, and I wanted to be in the Air Corps specifically. I didn’t want to be a sailor on deck swabbing decks, so to speak. From there my first stop was Norman, Oklahoma, where I took additional educational training. After Norman, Oklahoma I ended up in Jacksonville, Florida, and that’s where… I remember being heavier than normal, so I was assigned to PBY, the old flying boats. We called them “flying ducks” because they [would] probably do [over] 100 mph in a power dive.
TH: Wow! [Counter 00:02:08]
HW: You had a blister on one side and a blister on the other side that opened up and then you attached yourself, and I was a gunner, an aerial gunner and you stood with your gun at that blister that would go so far in case you run into enemy planes, and so on and so forth. That was where some of my first basic training came from. So when all that training was done, I was qualified as an aerial gunner. When they asked us, “What theatre of the war did you want to go to?” Well, at that point in time I said Europe, I’ll go to the Navy in Europe, because there’s a big fight going on over in Europe at the time. Well, naturally they just sent you in the opposite direction, and that’s why I ended up in San Diego, California, which was alright because the Japanese were just getting into things back in that time when I got in. So that’s one of the reasons why I ended up down there in San Diego, California, because that’s where we had that aircraft carrier, and maybe one or two others. But it wasn’t enough to really go out there in the Pacific Ocean, and all the way over to Japan. But I got over to Pearl Harbor and then made a squadron there, and then for some reason, I don’t know, maybe this had to do with mental exams, or what, because everywhere you went, you took mental tests and things. So I get to Pearl Harbor and I’m there for about seven or eight days and I’m through with the exams and everything, they flew me back to the States in San Diego. And that’s where I made my first squadron. Again we flew up and down the Pacific Coast, and went all the way out to parts of Alaska and when we got up into Alaska; we were actually closer to the Japanese part of the war. We were closer there than we would have been if we had been down at Pearl Harbor. I have done a lot of flying so on and so forth. But then I took various exams, paperwork, so on and it was determined that I should be flown back to the United States, and get into this aircraft rocket program, and that’s where I ended up going to war, was over there.
TH: Do you remember arriving at your first station? Do you remember what that was like? [Counter 00:05:13]
HW: I’m sorry son…
TH: When you arrived at your first station, do you remember what that was like?
PH: When you first signed up, when you first got to your first basic training, what was it like when you got there?
HW: I’ve been in the Great Lakes. Then we went down to Norman, Oklahoma. That was the first stop for additional mental training, and then from there we were flown down to Jacksonville, Florida and there I made a squadron. But basically we were flying up and down the Atlantic coast, down into the Gulf of Mexico and so forth. But for some reason or other, I got up to Philadelphia on the training flight there and I went back down to Jacksonville, Florida, and I was told that I was to pack up my bags in Jacksonville, Florida, and that I was going to San Diego, California for the Pacific Theater War. That’s the time of traveling, you get the destination. And all along I would pick an aerial gunner training. Being a stand-up gunner on a PBY, that old flying boat, it had a blister on this side that opened up, and you stood there, and one on the other side, but it was a free standing gun. They were 50 mm guns, and I had to know how to take that gun completely apart, blindfolded, and turn around and re-assemble it, put it back together and make sure it worked.
TH: Wow! [Counter 00:07:31]
HW: Now this was the kind of training you got into in the Navy Air Corps. And that takes me on down to, well from Norman, Oklahoma to Jacksonville, Florida. And then [they asked me] what theatre of war do you want, and I said, “Europe”, and that’s why I ended up down in San Diego, and from there on…then we started getting in this kind of stuff. I had a lot of training and education. I probably flew half a dozen flights or so far up off of the Belleau Wood, but it didn’t really go looking for combat because we only had those three aircraft carriers at the beginning of the war. One would be here, and one would be way over there, and one would be another place in the South Pacific to give the impression to the Japanese that we had a whole lot of aircraft carriers out there just waiting for them. That’s how they got to Pearl Harbor was on an aircraft carrier; there’s been movies made about it, but they came over in an aircraft carrier, and that’s how they bombed Pearl Harbor. It was really a waiting game, we just had the three aircraft carriers, as I said at that point in time, we really didn’t go looking for combat, we just wanted to play a waiting game making them think that we had a lot more aircraft carriers out there than they thought we had, because we only had the three. So in a way that’s the story of it, and I just wanted to be an aerial gunner in the Air Corps, rather than a sailor aboard ships swabbing decks, you know what I’m saying? Well, even aboard ships you have to be in the gunner area, gunners who paced around the deck and the sides of the ship. I never got into that…
TH: Did you ever…
HW: The first time I flew rear seat as an aerial gunner, it was in an SBD [Dauntless] and Captain Cousins was my pilot at the time. We were experimenting with a new, newer aircraft an SB2C which was a little bit bigger fighter plane, but it had a bay window underneath it, and in that bay window, we would open it up and inside you either had a torpedo or you had a bomb. You could drop them all.
TH: Wow! [Counter: 00:10:38]
HW: That was part of my job, I had to know how to do all that stuff, load it up, arm it and what have you. But one of the biggest scares of my life; me and Commander Cousins were out for a practice and that particular day, we had a bomb underneath our plane. It was the first time for him to take off the deck of an aircraft carrier with a bomb underneath our airplane. So anyway, you look at that deck, it’s not very long, it’s not like the Air Corps. The Army Air Corps you got a whole field that you got there and boom, boom, boom. You crank up the engines on your aircraft and you think it’s going to explode, then you go. And you’ve got to be ready to take off by the time you get to the end of the deck on that aircraft carrier.
TH: Or you’ll go into the ocean. [Counter: 00:11:41]
HW: So we’re down practice running, doing a few things before we went over to Pearl, and we had a bomb underneath it, is what it was, and it was the first time Commander Cousins, who was the pilot had ever tried to take off on one of those things. Anyway to make a long story short, we get to the end of that flight deck, and we start sinking down toward the water, and here we have a bomb underneath us. Well, he finally got up in the air and we was alright. When you’re a snot-nosed kid sitting in the rear seat, [there’s] not much you can do about it! [That’s] just some of the experiences, leading up to one thing and another, again eventually I ended up being aircraft rocket mobile unit number five, which, at that point in time, England had the same type of thing, and they knew how to get on and off. But for some reason or another, when we fired our aircraft rockets, they seemed to wiggle. Once they left the plane they would oscillate, where, over in Europe, that’s where we got the idea to use them, they would go straight as a string, right to the target, but we didn’t know why. So this is how I ended up at the California Institute of Technology learning a little bit about that, why it does it. We finally got things straightened out, when the pilot fired that gun, the rocket, so to speak, it would go straight. It wouldn’t leave the aircraft and then start doing this: [showed me with his hand a swerving motion, indicating that it would curve off to the side]. You didn’t know where the hell it was going. [There was a] lot of time and travel.
TH: Did you spend a lot of time on the aircraft carrier? [Counter: 00:14:00]
HW: Not too much, like I said, they flew me back to Pearl Harbor, to get into this rocket training program. I was on the carrier that’s why I didn’t spend too much time on it. I went back to Pearl Harbor, then they flew me back, believe it or not, to the States, down to San Diego to the California Institute of Technology, where I was to learn all about aircraft rockets. My next place there was five of us but we called it ARMUN Five, which was Aircraft Rocket Mobile Unit Number Five, and we stayed for awhile around the States going to different bases, Navy bases, teaching [them] how to use these aircraft rockets. About that time the war was about ready to end, fortunately it did, and I was again at another school, at the pilot training. I had all of the qualifications of being a pilot of a plane, not necessarily a fighter plane, but probably the very thing that I’ve flown in. At that point in time, the war was pretty much ended. So they [the Navy] said, “What do you want to do? Do you want to stay in the Navy, or do you want to go home?” [I said] I think I’ll stay in the Navy, and they said, well with this understanding, because at that point in time, I was a First Class Petty Officer, in rate in the Navy even though we had blue jeans, you had so many stripes after such and such, and they told me, if you continue in this program and go on to train as a pilot in the Navy, then you’re going to have to sign up for four more years. I said, “Give me the paper, and I’ll sign it and go home.” Enough was enough, I could have went on and became a pilot if I wanted to, but four years in the Navy at that time was quite enough. The only person I had back home at that point in time was my mother, and she had went through four years all by herself, so I thought it was time to go home. So I packed up my duffel bag; every time you went somewhere you had a duffel bag; a big canvas bag. Everything you owned when you was in the Navy in the way of pants, and so on and so forth had to go in that duffel bag.
TH: Wow! [Counter: 00:17:16]
HW: And that’s your bed clothes, and so on and so forth, and your blue jeans, your dress jeans, or your work jeans and so on, and they had to be folded and stuffed in a certain way, so you could get all of this stuff into the damn duffel bag that was about that high. [He showed me with his hands the size of the duffel bag], but back in those days when a fellow sailor carries a duffel bag, and you didn’t know what was in it. Everything you owned was inside it. [It was] quite an experience.
TH: What was the food like while you were in the Navy, and in your whole experience?
HW: I’m sorry…
TH: What was the food like? [Counter: 00:18:06]
HW: Oh, [it was] pretty good. Only you ate what they gave you. You weren’t too fussy, because they fed you, even aboard ship, they had certain times that you would go down to have your meal, and you ate what they gave you, I don’t care what it was, you may have liked it or not, but if you was hungry you would eat it, because there was no point in time in your life where you was going to be fussy about the kind of food you was going to eat. All of your belongings and everything, aboard a ship or anywhere you went that duffel bag went with you and everything you owned, your dress blues, your white hats, or your work clothes, dress shoes and so on…was all in that duffel bag, you had to take it with you, because you never know where you was going to go, and you might [have] been aboard a ship, and there was little area about as big as this back porch [his porch was 10x20 approximately], and maybe half as big, and there might have been six or seven of us in there, and we had to get all of our stuff in there, so there’s not a whole lot of room aboard a ship to be fussy about.
TH: Well let’s see here… [Counter: 00:19:32]
HW: Submarines, for some reason…I didn’t qualify for submarine duties. And I don’t know why, unless it was my ears, [because] when you get in a submarine, you go down underwater several hundred feet. The pressure is very intense down there, and as a physical specimen, you got to be a pretty good physical specimen to be on a submarine duty in the Navy. But on the other hand, I could fly and go up to thirty thousand feet, and come down at [a] 30 degree angle on the dive bombing run, and get down there and go, zoom. You know the pressure in your ears is going to change, but for some reason they didn’t worry about that. But submarine duty you couldn’t go underwater. That’s just part of Navy life, and I didn’t want submarine duty in the first place, I didn’t particularly care to swim, and here I am in the Navy! In one of the training sessions we had, in the Navy, believe this, if you was aboard ship, and there was some big trouble, and you had to abandon ship, before it sunk, you got over to the side of the ship, and let’s say it was doing this [showed me with his hands an almost vertical line], tilting in the water, half of it was blowing up or what have you, and you had to abandon ship, you couldn’t be very damn cheesy, you had to jump off into the water somewhere and that’s where you had to learn how to dog paddle, but there was a certain way you had to jump off of the ship, and that was this way [showed me a diving position], hold your hands this way, so that when you hit the water, you tried to sort of jump so that you landed straight down, because if you…did and you hit the water and you didn’t do this, then your hands would go up like that, you would go down and your arms would come up like that, and you probably wouldn’t have any arms left! So there was a reason for it, who the hell would have ever thought about that? You learned a lot of things, but fortunately I never had to abandon ship at any point in time. I flew off of the rear deck of one of them aircraft carriers a few times, and they came in there blind, you just hope to goodness that your pilot knew what he was doing. Because aboard ship, oh I don’t know, the mud at the end, at the end of the ship, you had to hit it at a certain spot and then there was about eight or ten cables, stretched all the way across the landing deck of that thing. At the end of your tail of your plane you had a hook that would come down when they pressed a button, or the pilot did. And he chipped that thing a right and the hook was there, if they missed the first hook, you could catch one of the others and boy you come to a real sudden stop. But if you missed them all, you just kept going off on the other end of the ship, and I’ve seen that happen. I didn’t see it on any ship I was [on], but it has happened, I’ve seen pictures of it during the war. Some guys would come in, and their airplane was banged up pretty well, shot up pretty well, maybe lost a wheel…and they would miss those landing strips, and they would go right over, and they would go right under the cabin where the captain was standing…on the aircraft carrier. It was no fun and games being in the Navy Air Force especially when you were aboard a ship in active duty.
TH: It sounded like you always had plenty of supplies with you when you were on your ship. You never had a shortage of supplies-ever? [Counter: 00:23:58]
HW: No, well I don’t really know because I wasn’t that part of the ships company, there [may have] been a shortage of food, that’s why you didn’t have a selection of food…because the food aboard ship was designed to last so long for a certain number of personnel aboard the ship. I’d say there was three or four hundred of us aboard ship. Well you had to have enough food aboard ship if you’re out in the ocean, to last three, four, five weeks: however long you’re going to be out there. So there [was an] awful lot to be done aboard ship during the war time or any other time, even peace time. You’re just out there for seven or eight days aboard ship during peace time, you still have to have x number of food portions per person, per personnel. So you soon learned you’re not going to be real choosy.
TH: Were there ever entertainers onboard your ship, or as you were traveling?
[Counter: 00:25:23]
HW: No, not during the war, if you was an entertainer and you knew how to sing, or you knew how to play a banjo, or guitar or what have you, things like that might have been musical instruments, if you might have been aboard ship, but you couldn’t take them aboard with you. You just had to give that part up, if there was going to be any music done, it basically was singing. It’s really close quarters when you’re onboard an aircraft carrier like the Belleau Wood, and that was one of the smaller ones. These we got today, my gosh, they’re about as long as three football fields, would you believe that?
TH: Yeah… [Counter: 00:26:23]
HW: There’s sure to be a captain aboard an aircraft carrier that big. It takes a certain amount of room to even turn around a half circle…you damn well got to know what you’re doing. It takes a lot of people, and there might be three decks and people on each deck; the top deck, two, three, four of the bottom ones, down there so far those guys down there are in the engine room. Those sailors, they’re mechanics; it’s up to them to keep those engines going up to…speed. Life aboard carriers is really something else, especially one of these big ones like we got nowadays. There are only certain ports in the country that some of these big aircraft carriers nowadays can even get into because they’re so big and so tall and they draft the part of the ship that you do not see is underwater, so you got to make sure that the canal you’re going into to get aboard shore…is deep enough, you just can’t take it in anywhere. It’s not like going here in Eagle Creek. It’s really… let’s just hope there’s no more war. I don’t think there will be, but the atomic bomb, I think ended that kind of stuff. I’m 39 now; of course I lie a lot too. The thing that disturbs me, and possibly your dad, as old as we are, after WWII, the Japanese lost that war, but nowadays; they went into war without firing a shot, they’re making more money and people are dumb enough to buy their products and their cars and so forth. I wouldn’t let a Japanese made car pull up in my driveway. That’s the way we would feel about it. This is true; you will see a lot of Japanese-made cars nowadays, good automobiles I guess. But to me, I think back to what we’re talking about now and I say, well, they lost the war, but here now they’re winning the war without firing a shot. Because we’re buying all their damn cars, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. The key is making a little bit of difference.
TH: Did you ever come in close quarters with the Japanese while you were on your ship?
[Counter: 00:29:36]
HW: No, I didn’t, not the ship that I was on because again, I wasn’t aboard the carrier for too long when I was flown back to the states to go into this aircraft rocket program. Why? I don’t know, but when you’re in the service, at least back during the war days, you were constantly taking mental exams…question and answer…and you were graded, and all the paperwork and tests that I took, for example when I was in Great Lakes Aircraft Training…we had mental tests, I think the lowest score I ever had…on any of my test papers was a 98 out of 100. This probably had a lot to do with final decisions made as far as what I was going to do and where I was going to go. Because a lot of the poor guys just didn’t have quite that good of grades, for some reason or other, because I would usually get pretty good test papers when I was in school; grade school, high school. Back then it didn’t make too much difference whether it was an A or an A+ or a B or what have you, maybe that’s the way they grade you today, I don’t, know do they?
TH: Well, something like that. [Counter: 00:31:28]
HW: Yeah…all this started in 1941; I was in the Navy for four years, got out in ’46. After all that time, I just thought I’d like to be a pilot in the Navy Air Corps. That’s where Norman, Oklahoma and some of that other stuff came into play, and they says well, if you’re going to be a pilot, that’s well and good, but if you flunk out then you have to sign up for four more years in the Navy, and I says goodbye, and I went home the next day.
TH: So what did you do in the weeks afterward, after your service ended?
[Counter: 00:32:18]
HW: Oh, not really…I got home, well actually, I didn’t want to sign up for another four years or anything, so I just stayed home, and I was out of high school, [I had] good grades there; I just started going to work as a civilian. My first job was over at Stewart Warner, there on Kentucky Avenue and Harding Street. I worked for them for about three or four years…I’m a west side person all my life, born and raised in Shelbyville, Illinois. My dad brought us over here. I was just a snot-nosed kid, and why my dad brought us over here from Illinois I don’t know. Work I guess, because that happened during the Great Depression days, in the thirties, and you know how rough that was. We ended up over here in Indianapolis. Again I was born in Shelbyville, Illinois not Indiana, cause that was farm country. All my relatives and everything were farmers back in those days. [I] used to pick corn by hand and do a lot of fishing, but you sure as hell don’t do [it] now days, as far as the farmers are concerned. Anyway we ended up over here in Indiana and Indianapolis. So I became a west side person, all my life when I was about twelve, thirteen years old I guess I lived over on West Washington Street and Warman Avenue, and there used to be a big empty space over there we called the crazy house, have you ever been over there around Tibbs Avenue and West Washington Street? Well, you know that great big wide open space now that’s full of homes and this and that and the other things, that, believe it or not, insane people was over there. [That was] the first thing that was ever over there, that’s off of Tibbs Avenue, was a building, and the people inside were just not all there…they called it the insane asylum, and that’s exactly what it was, not anymore. From that day on I’ve been a west side person all of my life, I lived on Washington Street; I lived on Warman Avenue there by the church across from the crazy house. [I] lived in Speedway, back during the depression days, jobs were hard to find. We might live in one house for a month at a time, and then we didn’t have money for the rent so we had to move. I hope that never happens to you, and I’m sure it won’t. That’s what it was like back in the depression days, even before I got into service. That’s one of the reasons why I volunteered to join the Navy…I ended going over on West Michigan Street by Holy Trinity Parish, just another house we were living in, and I says, well, World War II is here. If you’re going to have to go be drafted, so you might as well just volunteer, and that’s the way my Navy career started. I just went to Great Lakes Naval Training Station and there boom, boom, boom, one place to another, and I ended up being an aerial gunner and an aircraft rocket specialist and machine gunner.
TH: Wow… [Counter 00:36:59]
HW: [There is a] lot of stories I could remember to tell. One was, I had a fellow [who’s] name was “Red” Bullock; Don Bullock came from Dallas, Texas, red-haired kid. He didn’t want to, for some reason or other, be where he was at aboard these flying boats, those old PBY’s. You had to make sure, one of our jobs on those planes was to make sure that, you’re standing here stationed standing up, and your gun’s out here, a free gun, you [have] got to make sure that once you get so far around that the damn gun quits firing even though you don’t want it to, maybe because you’ll shoot your own end of your wing off [from] your own airplane. I’m not kidding you. We had gunnery practice on these flying boats, so they’d have another plane flying out beyond here a little bit with a bag [he meant to say flag] on the back of it, that you was supposed to shoot at, it was a white flag, I don’t know how long it was…[or] how far away it was, but you had to shoot at that flag, and if you hit it, your bullets had colors in them…and we could tell when we got down on the ground, if any of your bullets had hit that flag or not, which tells us, well, hell, you’re a pretty good gunner…so this Bullock kid, it’s his turn to stand up here and shoot this damn flag going by. So he’s all ready to go and, boy, he was ready to fire and he pulled back on that handle on the gun, and the whole damn thing come out in his hand. So he just turns around and he threw it out there, and I think he hit it with the handle from the gun! [It] was funny, but all part of training, all part of Navy life.
TH: Wow, are there any other stories you have that are like that? [He didn’t hear that question]
[Counter 00:39:29]
HW: It was a long haul, four years, bottom line; they wanted to know if I wanted to be a pilot. They said, “You got to sign up for four more years if you’re going to stay and be a pilot,” and I said, “Goodbye”. I had enough points in service back at that point in time. If you remember, you accumulated so many points for the number of years [and] months [of] service… you had, and once you got enough points or when the war ended then you could go home, or you could go ahead and continue in the Navy. I said, “No, bye, I’m going to go home, I ain’t going to sign up for four more years,” four was enough. So in a way, it’s been a great trip, at least I’m home safe and sound, I think that’s another knock on wood.
TH: Well thank you so much for letting me interview you. [Counter: 00:40:35]
HW: Well that’s alright, I’m glad I can talk.
