Hill, William oral history

              Interview with Mr. William Hill

[b. 8/25/26]

Interviewed by Lara Naanouh

Recorded on 10/13/05 11

Transcribed on 11/24/2005-11/26/2005



Lara Naanouh: Today is October 13, 2005 and I am interviewing William Hill, who 
served in World War II in Okinawa, Philippines as infantry.   He was born on August 25, 1926. He currently lives at 6721 Doris Drive, in Indianapolis, Indiana. I interviewed William Hill in Mrs. Lerch's room at Park Tudor School.  Mrs. Lerch attended part of the interview.

Lara Naanouh: Were you drafted or did you enlist?

William Hill:  What happened was I knew I was going to have to go in so I thought I don't want to get in the infantry so I thought I'll go down and join the navy. "You're color blind Mr. Hill.  You can't get in the Navy."  I said "Okay." So I got my draft card and I said, "I'm not going to wait around, just take me." So, I turned eighteen the twenty-fifth of August and by September 11th, I was in.  That's how quick they called me.


LN: Did you want to go?

WH:  Everybody didn't necessarily look forward to it, but we weren't going to shirk the responsibility.  There weren't very few people that were conscientious objectors and it was a thing to do, and so I had really prepared in my mind that I was going to be going in.


LN: Where were you living at the time?

WH:  I was living on the South Hardigan in Edgewood and I had finished high school up at Tech High School in June and I was working at a company called Bowes Sealfest Corporation as a draftsman and that's when they called me.

LN: Why did you join?

WH: Because I was drafted.  Technically, I was drafted.


LN: Why did you pick the service branch you joined?

WH:  I was drafted.


LN: Do you recall your first days in service?

WH: Yes, I surprisingly went to down to the armory here in Indianapolis. It's on North Pennsylvania for my physical.  Well, I'm going to get my physical and I'll come home.  No, that's now what happened. Physical, yeah, you're in. I said "Wow!" So I didn't have any much packed with me, anything to read, or extra clothes and all that kind of stuff.  I'm just in. So I was surprised. And so they gave us some GI coffee and some cold cuts, and they said, "Ok, now we are heading south to Camp Atterbury."


LN: What did it feel like, the experience for you to just go in for a physical and they say that you're drafted? How did that feel?

WH: It was the anticipation and there was a little fear.  We took this bus ride down to Atterbury and it was right past within a block or two of my house where I was living.  I had ridden these civilian buses before full of soldiers down there at Camp Atterbury and so I had been with them and saw how rough and tough they looked.   They were older guys and here I am, eighteen, and they're in their thirties and I was a bit intimidated by these guys, but I went down there and it was a nice day in September and we went through the guard shack.  We heard them holler at us. "You'll be sorry. You'll be sorry!" Well, this is strange.  Anyway we met with a guy with a clipboard with our names and he told us to stand here.  We ended up standing in between two barracks with the busload.  It must have been twenty-five of us or so, maybe thirty, waiting there for about three hours. Actually it was probably more like five. But we were watching everything go by and worrying about this, and standing on one leg for a while and standing on the other leg for a while, and we were talking to this guy over here for a while, sitting on the grass, wondering what all was going to happen to us.

 
LN: Where exactly did you go in World War II?

WH: From here at Atterbury, after having to get all my shots and new clothes, we went on a coal-fired train down to Camp Blanding, Florida on the East Coast for basic training.  We were met there by some very cordial people.  It was beautiful Florida weather with the pine trees. It was kind of nice; it had nice blue skies and clouds. I said, "Hey, this is going to be great.  It's not exactly going to be a vacation, but this is going to be great!" So we got signed in, and that's how it pretty all started.  We had started out where we had to learn how to face right, face left, and turn around.  We learned how to march, how to take orders, and do everything their way, wake up early to whistles and so forth and we were generally disciplined, doing everything on their time and with a "yes sir or a no sir."   They taught us how to shoot guns, how to be safe, how to throw hand grenades, how to crawl under machine gun fire, and those basic things that a soldier needs to learn to do.  Take care of his rifle and march in order.  Take care of their clothes.  Take care of all their belongings and being subject to discipline and how to be responsible to yourself.  Eighteen year olds are not very responsible and that took some doing by the US Army, but they pretty well got it done.  I got there in September and while I was there in October, the outfit that I would join made a landing on Leyte on October the Tenth. While I was there also, there was a lot of battle going on in Germany, and the Germans made a counter attack and it was Von Runsted who made it and surrounded them. There were American soldiers at Bastogne and so the United States Army cut our training short and because of that, instead of getting seventeen weeks of basic, I had fifteen weeks of basic training, and our training was over in January. We learned a little bit about Camp Blanding.  They had prisoner of war camps there and they had Italian prisoners of war and German prisoners of war. They had German Navy prisoners of war. There was a German ship that sank early in the war called the Graff Spey. The German navy that they captured were down at Camp Blanding. And Camp Blanding was a large training center.  They trained thousands of troops and they even had their own divisions train there. It was a big base.  And since then, they have a museum there and that's about all that's left of it.  But we learned to walk on sand and be careful of sand fleas.  We learned to work together. I was trained with a fifty-seven millimeter antitank.  I was trained to be member of an antitank crew.  But everybody had six weeks of basic rifle training, but we were trained specifically for that.  And I was with people from different parts of the country, and that was the big thing about being in the army.  I same in with people from all over and different religions and so forth.  I was with people who were out in the back woods and people who lived in the city. Now there were no blacks in our group.  They were most all Caucasians because at that time, the army was separate.  They kept the different groups separate probably for more than one reason.   I came home, in a delay in route, I was home for five days in January and of course that was some sad times and then I went and took a train to Fort Ord, which was on the West Coast. They trained thousands and thousands of soldiers.  There we had a lot more training and we had to crawl under machine gun fire and do a lot of marching.  I was there for about a week. It's right on the coast and it's a beautiful camp.  Then we took a train to Fort Laughton. It was a nice train ride on up through the wood forests and  up in Washington and Oregon and up to a camp called Fort Laughton. It was originally a camp that was set up many years ago to guard the bay there in and outside of Seattle.  The buildings were just real old, but they were well kept and it was a staging area for troops to leave from there to go to the Pacific.   We had no training there and we just saw some movies and the curious thing that was there was that they had a lot of Japanese-American people there.   These Japanese-Americans had fought in a war in Italy and came through, too, at the same time.  And you could see these guys in the showers, they had scars all of over them because they had really been through a lot of battle.  Those men received a lot of awards for their combat experiences.  One of the big things at Fort Laughton was the big dice games that we had.  We had some of the biggest dice games I have ever seen in my life.  It was a dismal place.  It rained a lot.  You could look down and you could see the lights twinkling on Seattle, but you'd get very homesick there too because you knew you were going to be leaving.


LN: Tell me about your experiences going to Oahu.

WH:   We went in a small boat and ran up and down the coast and there wasn't really the danger of being sunk by submarines because the United States Navy pretty well had it patrolled.  We went to Hawaii and were there for about four weeks and we received different kinds of training and from there, the air craft would fly over the area and would yet look for submarines.   Then we were shipped out from there and went to Saipan.  Well, we had a lot of navy escort in our convoys and on the way to Saipan, we could see the planes taking off and going and bombing Japan. These were B29's.  You could see the B29's coming in and going out and the ones coming back had holes in them and the auxillary engines were smoking and so forth. Then we went on to Saipan but that was like a wake up call for me of what was going on. So then we went to Saipan, which was an island that was already secured.  We had a lot of advanced battle training; infantry training and you could still smell death in that island.  You could smell where the bodies had mold. That had all been taken care of.  We received a lot of training there and then we were shipped to Saipan and after being there for about a month, we were shipped to Okinawa.  We were on a zigzag tour there. Then we came to spot Okinawa.  You could see smoke coming up from the island.  And we didn't know, of course, what exactly what that was.  But then we had to get all our equipment ready and we were issued more ammunition and had everything on our back. As we kept getting closer and closer to Okinawa, there were more and more ships.  And then we came in there.  Then we went down over the cargo nets down into the water in these little ships, LSVP's, and then we came on in to the island.  We got so close we had to stop. This was about the last day of April 1945.  We had to stop and wait until we all went in at one time.  And in front of us there were some ambulances passing in front of us, and they were delivering wounded soldiers to these hospital ships. These hospital ships were big and white and they had all these kind of light on them.  They were filling these ships up with all these injured guys.  So this was quite an experience for us to see.  All these wounded guys, four at a time, six at a time being loaded on that ship.  So here we are loaded down, all our ammunition and all this other stuff and we were waiting to go in.  So that's another kind of a dramatic thing to remember.  So then we went on in and landed.  It was raining, so we pitched our tents in the dark and then the next morning, it was still raining so we were cleaning up all our equipment, trying to stay dry, and I'm grabbing sea rations and this kind of stuff.  Then we waited in line and then we came to a sergeant that came there and shipped us out, and then we joined our respective units. We could see Okinawa. We could see a lot of the trees and banged up and some people here and there.  We went by some artillery units and came up upon my company area, which was M Company. And man it seemed like it was really peaceful there.  And they had been pulled back from a rest they had been on. They had been on the front lines.  In the mean time, back up a little bit, during that month of April, my division suffered a lot of casualties and there were several Army divisions and Marine divisions that were in that battle. The wounded filled up three hospital ships and in fact, they needed more hospital ships than they had. So, that's what was going on.  And we had a lot of guys. We had lost a lot of men. Our division must have lost four hundred men, five hundred men and the Navy had lost thirteen ships sank by Japanese dive bombers. They're the kamikazes. They had also had fourteen or fifteen other ships and at least in the month of April, there must have been at least five hundred, five hundred kamikaze attacks on American ships, out on harbor.  That's the same harbor we came through, but the reason there weren't any that night, it was raining and they couldn't see. And I happened to see the weather reports, and that's what happened why they didn't attack us.  So I felt good about that.  I joined this group of men and they all seemed like man ,these guys, you know they're all ten years older than me and I walked into them and they're all very relaxed and they're not having their uniforms just exactly right or anything they're you know, they're just kind of relaxing bunch of guys.  I really respected these guys. So, in a few days, we had to get our stuff ready and go back in. We went out and left there in the eighth of May and we loaded up into trucks and rode for a little while. We got out and marched in mud for about forty-five minutes until the spot where we stopped.   I was just drenched.  It was raining. I had never had to exist in this kind of situation.  And so we were told to dig in that.  This is where we were staying.  You couldn't dig in the side of the hill. If you tried to get into the side of the hill, our artillery shells wouldn't hit you and it was nothing but rock.  So we would just dig out and we would just pile out some rocks and put our shelter half over these rocks trying to keep dry.  And we laid there with our legs all drawled up.  I knew this fellow from the name of Avery from Indiana.  He was my buddy, in my foxhole. That's where he stayed that night.  I think I must have gotten an hour or two of sleep because there was an artillery gun firing near us and there were a lot of hills at Okinawa and you could hear it just echoing all night. They'd fire and they'd just echo, echo, echo, and fire! Echo, echo, echo, back and forth. Anyway, it was kind of scary.  So the next morning we got up, all those new guys and all those old guys were all up and getting everything ready and we're the younger guys and we're not ready at all, scrambling around trying to get our stuff together.   We finally got it together and we all lined up and took off again around this side of this hill and there was a Japanese land mine. The Japanese had slipped through the night and put a land mine in that road so that it would blow up an Army truck or so. So we went by it and it came on through. Then farther up I saw a Japanese woman and her baby had been killed and she was lying there by a bridge.  And I was surprised because I hadn't thought about civilians being killed.  And we came on up in and our group came on up in to replace soldiers that had already been there.  They were pulling out and we were pulled in to replace them and that was the Seventh Army. We replaced those people.  And we had a fox hole already dug for us and had a tent up on it and we'd just get marked in and took their tent.  We just moved in to where it already was. It was really neat.  It was fixed so when it rained the water would run right through it and not into where you were sleeping and that was pretty nice.


LN: How did you stay in touch with your family?

WH: Okay, the only thing we had was mail and it was censored.  From that point on, it was censored. Up to that time, it was just mail.  They had what they called V-mail, which they would take photographs of it and send it because it would become a logistics problem for the services to send mail from millions of soldiers overseas rather than sending medicine or food or clothing or artillery shells. At that time, we didn't have as many aircraft as you might imagine.  Aircraft were used for bombers. They weren't used for mail.  So, we didn't communicate that way.  And lots of time when you get mail, you wouldn't get mail everyday. You'd get mail in bunches, and guys would gather around and say "Mail call, mail call!" and that was always a dramatic time every day. And some people would get packages and some people wouldn't and if you got a package of cookies from home, you'd end up with one and everyone else would get one and that kind of stuff. But that's how we communicated. There was no e-mail and I don't know if sailors used wigwag! (Laughing)  or they used teletype (laughing) but that's how we got our mail.


LN: What supplies were you given?

WH: We were given light uniforms because we were in the tropics. We didn't have heavy clothing at all. We did have what you would call Atabrine pills we so we wouldn't get malaria and they turned us all orange.  When we were on Saipan, we took all our clothes, and we soaked them in some kind of chemical to keep mites down.  We also had additional shots we took so we wouldn't get a lot of these diseases that they had in the area. We were issued only the kind of tools that we needed with our unit.  For example, I was issued a rifle, but when I joined the unit, they gave me a carbine because that's what my unit was using, because now I was with a heavy weapons company, which had mortars and machine guns, then I had all the equipment that an ammo-bearer would have to carry was ammunition.  I'd have pouch to carry shells in, or if I was a gunner I would be carrying a tripod for the mortar, all the things to do for that mortar squad. But as far as the issue was concerned, we had steel helmets and the normal infantry pack, what they call a heavy field pack which we carried extra blankets or shoes, mess kit, first aid kit, canteen and a rifle belt where we would have to carry so many rounds of ammunition.

 
LN: Did you ever feel stressed at those times when you knew you had to go out for a battle?

WH:  When I began taking on our first hike with the men, I realized where we were going.  When I was walking with these guys, all of them older than myself, they were all kind of confident with each other, laughing and kidding each other while we were all sloshing in this mud, I felt like I was one of them.  And I said, here I am, an eighteen year old and I am walking with some real guys. I really felt confident, but back and wide of course was, what's going to happen to me?
 

LN: What was the food like? Give us an idea of how many meals you had a day, and were there any food shortages?

WH:  What we had were C-rations, which consisted of two cans of breakfast, dinner and supper.  Two cans had drinks and breakfast cereal. You just put water in them and that's all it was.  And then there were some heavier things like meat and beans and maybe some spaghetti.  But all we had were six cans a day and everyday we were issued those six cans.  That's all we had.  We had mosquito lotion. We would have Chelsea cigarettes, matches occasionally, and a can opener. That's about all we had.  Fortunately, we were not Marines.  They lived a lot on cheaper stuff than we had. Nobody got fat on this stuff, but we had enough nourishment that we could survive on it.  


LN: Did you have any free time?

WH: We're talking about combat time. We're not talking about much free time at all except because I was in the mortar section; we were not busy all the time.  Now we had telephone contact, not necessarily radio, but telephone contact with the front line officers. When they would call for artillery, they would call for mortar support.  Then they would call us and they would say "We need some mortar support, and such and such in the area. Be prepared to lay down a blanket of fire in such in such an area."  They would call and say. "Alright, just go!" We would go down and get in this crew, and they start loading and firing these mortars. Well, when we fired these mortars, we fired it until they wanted us to stop. We laid down this field of fire in front of our troops.  And when they would see the Japanese trying to advance they would lay down this fire right on them, right where this blanket of fire was, and then after it was over and it was taken care of, we didn't have anything to do. So we would play cards. That's about it.  Take a bath. [Laughing]


LN: Did you keep a personal diary?

WH: No, I didn't keep a diary. 


LN: What did you think of officers or fellow soldiers?

WH:  We didn't particularly like officers and that was drilled into us in the basic training. You do what they tell you to do.  If they say ten pushups, you do ten pushups.  If you they say you're not going to eat for four hours, you're not going to eat for four hours. We got to a point where we didn't particularly care for that and there was animosity between groups of people. And so, officers did that, of course, to command respect and discipline. It has to be. People have to be told what to do, and they have to do it. If not, we would have no organization at all. So, it's a necessary evil.  So, anyways, it depends on what end of that stick you're on, how you're going to react.  Our officers in combat were well respected and whatever they said we would do. Even our sergeants, they told you something, you do it.


LN: Did you see much combat?

WH:  While we were at this spot called Koghi Ridge, we were probably two hundred yards or three hundred yards from the actual front line.  The front line soldiers were the riflemen. We were back in support.  There were machine guns that were set to cover a field of fire in front of our men and likewise the borders were set to have a field of fire to protect these men while we were on duty.  Because we were back this far, we did not see as much combat as the front line men because obviously they're the ones taking the grim.  We're the ones supporting them. Well, when we were at Koghi Ridge, we helped carry the wounded back.  We helped with our fire. We also helped run our telephone lines up there. That's what we did.  My squad was on the end and we were over there where we could see new troops coming up.  You could see two nee men coming up and you could see the look on their faces. They had all their new clothes and some of those people were not going to be around the next day.  When they go right up to the front line, they may get killed that day.  That's what we saw when we were there. Now we did see at this Koghi Ridge an American tank that had been blown out and there was about a two-foot square opening where a Japanese shell was coming in and knocked that tank out. While we were in there, my buddies and I would go scavenging around to see what we could find. In there was an American leg. It was still in there.  It had maggots on it. Still there.  That leg had probably been there for two weeks.  But there were two Japanese soldiers that were lying there too.  And they were all puffed up.  Not too far from me was an Okinawa woman and she had been dead for a long time and there were flies and everything all around.  We had big flies as big as your thumbs because of the dead.  These flies were from the dead bodies. We tried to eat one day and the flies were so bad, I went over and buried that Okinawa woman and covered her up so we could eat.
 

LN: Was there humid weather?

WH: Yes, it was humid weather.  We all had to wear long sleeves because of the mosquitoes.
 

LN: How hot was it?

WH: It was pretty hot. It was rainy and hot.  While we were there, our artillery would come over, and you could hear them like fish women.  And at night, the Japanese artillery came in on us.  Because we were back behind, the artillery shells couldn't necessarily get us because we were behind a hill.  We were in a [death a lay] position.  There were some Japanese artillery pieces on railroad cars and they would take these out at night and fire them and then slide back in again and they couldn't find them.  So finally, they used sound to find where these were, and they finally found them. It took them four or five days to find them. They would come out every night, bang!  Shoot a few around and slide back in again.  Then one night I had guard duty and the artillery shells came in and those artillery shells were just landing right in the hill in front of us just shaking the ground.  One time, an artillery shell came over one side and you could hear the shrapnel coming over and we dove against the wall. A big piece of shrapnel with big jagged edges came up and lit behind us. I wish I kept one.  I found one just about like it and kept it.  But that was scary.  That was about one of the scariest nights I spent. It was about, six or seven of those shells that came in. We didn't know when they were going to stop.  You could hear them screaming coming in, screaming.  Then they would echo and roar in the hillside.  You didn't know if one of them were going to get you or not. But that was scary.  It was landing so close it was shaking dirt down.  That's how close it was. That happened at Koghi Ridge.  That particular ridge and so forth had been taken about a week before we got there.  It had been taken by the Seventh Infantry Division.  We came in and took their place because they had sustained a lot of losses and our division picked up a lot of replacements such as myself to come in and fill the lines.  And so that meant our division must have took in a thousand men as replacements for all the men that we had lost.  Whenever these units were filled, they were filled by my green men. Say they had lost a third of their men, they would get a third of their men and they would all be green.  They had never seen combat before and that's what we were seeing coming up on my right side and on my left side.  The guys coming up were taking to fill up our replacements.  As troops advanced ahead of us, we ran a range of our guns of our mortars so then we would move up.  Then we moved up and I could see there were some Japanese flame-throwers.  Americans were going in and cleaning out these Japanese caves and pillboxes with our flamethrowers.  They were throwing these flamethrowers to get these guys to come out.  If they didn't come out, they would burn them up.  We saw some of that.  We came on around past that and then we set on to camp and just before we got to this camp, there was a great big pile of Japanese bodies and they would burn them up with flamethrowers.  They just burnt them to crisp.  It was a great big cloud of black smoke.  This was a span about twenty-five by twenty-five at about five feet deep of Japanese soldiers and civilians that were all dead. They burnt them up to a crisp.  That was to get rid of diseases.  It didn't look very nice, but what are you going to do? There is no place to put them.  So they burned. That wasn't very good.  Then, that first night, I went on patrol through these little towns.  I was on patrol and the Japanese fired on us and we hit the dirt.  We came to a little town and we scouted around and there was nobody there.  But then we came on back and shipped out the next day.  Then, the sniper fired on us once and then we went on down around two or three at a time.  All of a sudden, I heard a noise, and it was a Japanese clicking a hand grenade.  Japanese hand grenades have to be hit on something and then they go off.  He hit this hand grenade and then killed himself.  I was there just after it happened.  I heard a click.  A click and the guy killed himself.  Then the guys went around him, and they were going through his clothes trying to find watches because his clothes were still smoking and they tried to take his helmet off and see if they could find a Japanese flag, see whatever they could find on him. He was still warm while they were going through his body.  Then that night as a Japanese slipped through the lines and a guy tried to catch him and couldn't catch him, he slipped down through this and they set up flares.  About nine guys went down and they killed him.  You could hear him crying, crying like a baby.  They finally killed him.  But, that's the way it goes. You see your own buddies getting killed so if there's one getting killed, big deal.  We came from there and we went on around. I could see some Japanese marines firing their rockets and they had it on a bank and they were firing these rockets into the combat area.  There was a thirty-seven millimeter and a tank gun there and they were firing, firing right into the caves.  They could fire a straight shot right into the caves.  It was a thirty-seven millimeter.  It's a pretty good size. It's about an inch and they were firing those.  We came down south and they had trapped a Japanese down in this last stand.  The Japanese wouldn't give up.  They just had to wait to be slaughtered.  They were committing suicide. They were taking civilians and pushing them off cliffs.  They were killing thousands.  The Japanese soldiers and so forth had hardly no ammunition and probably had no food, water, no medical care, and that's how the situation was down there.  And we were just killing them off by the thousands.  There were about a thousand Japanese that finally just gave up.  We killed another 99,000. Our division was credited with killing around thirty thousand.  Now that's a lot of people. It's gruesome.  But we were trained to be gruesome.  We had a lot of artillery and we had a lot of machine guns.  We had a lot of hand grenades.  If you read in that book, you'll see hand grenade fights went on all night. I don't have photographs of that, but if you read that article in that book, you'll see where they had hand grenade fights all night.  In fact, I talked to one of those guys that was in that today.  Hopefully, I can get him for an interview.   Because I was in a heavy weapons company, we lost five men.  Five men were killed.  We had several wounded, but they were from artillery and there were most of those people in the machine gun sections, because we were pulled back.  We were back, behind.  You could fire mortar up and you can't get shot at because we were behind a hill rather than shooting straight on to somebody with a rifle.
 

LN: Were you a prisoner in war?

WH: No, I was never a prisoner in war.  I'll finish up just a little bit here and I'll probably wind up what I have to say about the battle conditions.  Anyways, we were there at this last spot and were dug in along this side of this hill and because we had these Japanese all captured, they tried to sneak around at night.  We set up trip flares around the area so if they came in at night, they'd trip flares will be up, and their will be a flare to pop up and you could see them up there. I came up and around and it was my turn to guard that night and there were a couple of Japs that tripped the flare and I was on guard and I used my Browning automatic rifle and I can't say for sure if I hit them or not, but there were two dead Japs there in the morning.  I can't swear that I hit them, but I had no remorse whatsoever. If I had killed them, I just killed them because it was either going to get me or I was going to get them. I had fumbled around in the dark trying to put my shot - I shot twenty shots about that fast, as fast as you can shoot. Twenty shots came out of that gun and then I had to put another magazine in there and I wondered if never going to get this magazine in.  I was really worried about that.  Artillery came in on us one time and also there was some evening time we fired on something in the evening time and we could hear the Marines over on the other side and Japanese would try to slip through at night and they would yell at us "Halt, halt!"  You could hear the Marines firing at them and shooting at them after they said, "Halt!"  'Cause what the heck, if that was an American, you'll tell them to halt?  What's he doing out there in the first place? At that point in time, Alton and I, my good buddy from Boonville, Indiana, and I would take off and start hunting for things.  We were dumb because sooner or later, we could get killed pretty easily.  Alton and I went out and we found some civilians places and civilians. Alton and I brought in about thirty civilians.  We discovered a bucket of water and we could see this water.  No Americans brought out this bucket of water and they were living back in this cave.  We brought these people out and there must have been about thirty of them altogether and we took them back to civilian camps.  It was a real slaughterhouse there.  Civilian deaths were estimated to have been between one hundred and one hundred and fifty thousand.  Total Americans needed to take that island was around two hundred and fifty thousand.  Two hundred and fifty thousand counted all the Army divisions and all the Marine divisions and all the medics and all the Navy. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans were involved. The Navy lost more than the Army, and there were four Army divisions there.  It's hard to say about the Marine losses and the American losses.  The Marines lost around thirty-eight hundred or so.  I think the Army lost about forty some hundred and then the Navy was around forty-five hundred.  It was something like that.  In other words, it was close to twelve hundred. Twelve thousand five hundred men had died on Okinawa.  Our division itself lost seventeen hundred. In total casualties, the 96th Division took more casualties than any other division there.  But we had a high kill ratio from what we accomplished and so forth.  Okinawa itself was a tremendous logistic problem for us; delivering supplies and how much supplies that came in from other places.  But above all this, there were millions and millions of rounds of ammunitions and shells and a lot of medical supplies and food.  The Japanese had their problems, but they were pretty well abandoned and they lost ninety thousand to a hundred thousand people.  Ten thousand gave up.  So many of those civilians were lost, about one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand.  It's hard to officially say.  The last big battleship was sunk.  The Yamamoto was sunk near Japan.  The cruiser Indianapolis was hit there in the perimeter.  They were hit there and were sent back to the states for repairs and they came back and brought parts of the atomic bomb back.  The Indianapolis brought parts of the bomb back. That was assembled there at Tinian and that's what they bombed Japan with.  We were told in June that the battle was over and of course we were very jubilant and so we actually got to sleep in tents, get a haircut, and take a bath.  They had a mobile shower unit and they would pump water out of the stream, run it through some diesel engines, heat it up, and make showers we would go in and take a nice hot shower.  We would get in the truck and ride back in this truck over dusty roads, but anyways you got to take a shower, which was really nice.  We got to see movies there, finally got to see a movie.  And it wasn't for very long. In August, there was a typhoon that came through and so it got rid of us and they told us to get off the island.  We got off the island as a division.  And then I was in a typhoon on an LST, which was a harrowing experience, riding in a typhoon with an LST, which is a flat bottom boat and we were fortunate enough for everyone to get packed to and to be safe.  And we heard the news of the atomic bomb aboard ship.  We could hardly believe what we were seeing, hearing, or reading.  We talked about that it was a possibility of the end of the war and then we heard about the second one and we thought, "hey, this is great." This is really great.  So we finally landed on Mindoro Island outside of San Jose.  We camped there. Then at that particular time, they told us that war was over.   We were all very happy about that because we knew that it was going to be pretty bad because later on we learned that we were slated to go into Tokyo.  But everybody there was glad that the bomb was dropped.  As far is it being a moral thing to drop the bomb, I guess they could debate that for years. The main cities of Japan were already obliterated.   Five major cities in Japan were completely demolished.  The Japanese had plenty of chances and plenty of time to surrender.  Two more bombs wouldn't have made that much of a difference.  Killing people is always bad.  To solve a problem with killing people is a bad option to take, but we find that that is even useful today.  I know that there are better ways to solving problems than killing people.  But, we had a job to do and we did it, and I guess you could be proud that your side won.  But as far as killing people, none of us were proud of that.  But we're glad to be back.  There are men in my division that are still in hospitals.  There were at least twenty-five hundred mental cases that you hear hardly anything about.  You hear about the deaths and the injuries, but you hear very little about those mental cases.  Mental cases meaning battle fatigue. Stuff that they have some traumatic incidences that their mind can't deal with.  And we still have some of those today in Iraq, lots of them.  But we're all glad to be back.


LN: Could you discuss what happened after you came back from war?  Did you go back to school, education-wise?  Did you keep in touch with a lot of people?

WH:  When we were in the service, they had a Veterans organization that they formed.  We all knew that we would get in the VFW or an American Legion but there was another group called the Americans Veterans Committee.  And so we joined it back there in Mindoro.  And when we left there, my division went home and then I got shipped to a port company.  Then I got shipped to another army division called the 38th division.  While I was there I got a chance to get on an army newspaper staff.  I became part of the army newspaper staff at Manila for several months.  There were a lot of civilian newspapermen that got on this newspaper and the Army didn't like what they were printing so replaced them with people like myself.  I went in, and I came on in with no experience and helped run that newspaper.  I became the city editor and I handled the news and I had reporters and so forth.  That was my job.  I enjoyed that job.  Then, I came home, and I didn't join any organization afterwards.  But my division has a web page and we communicate all the time, on this web page.  And we keep track of each other.  A lot of people ask about what happened to my friend and any information and lots of times I help find information.  I am still in contact with two or three people right now.  We had set up our division, had reunions, and we had forty-eight reunions.  We have had our last big reunion in Washington D.C.  So now we are changing over to a new descendant group.  It is a reserved army unit, it is the backbone of it.  But they are forming this new group to keep the heritage and the history of our division going.  We have had our last official reunion in this past July.  And now we are going to have another one in next July, which will be the one where they're working together with the transition group.  There are going to be a lot of people asking and sending in letters and so forth about their experiences with the army and with the division. And they're going to have a last big newsletter, comes out twice a year, and they're going to have a last big issue that will come out in November or December.  The last big issue is of the guys who they have had this going for forty-eight years.  So we have a lot of camaraderie and we have a lot of mail contact and they even have regional groups get together.  There is a Ohio group that gets together and there is a Pacific Western Oregon group. They get together. We came from the Midwest and the West.  There are not very many people out in the East or the South that were in our division..


LN: What was your career after the war?

WH:  I went back to work for the company I worked for and that was where I met my wife.  And then I went to work for Allison and I worked there for thirty-nine years and retired from there sixteen years ago.  That has been the bulk of my employment.  I retired out of there in 1989 and I have been retired from then ever since.  Since that time, I have written my memoirs and a copy of those are in the National Archives on a CD.


LN: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?

WH:  Well, yes, I think of course it broadened it in one sense.  Like I said before, if we have to go to war, it has to be the last resort.  Solving problems this way is a form of barbarianism.  You see, you have Hitler, you have Mussolini, you have Japan, of course, you have Saddam Hussein, and you have Franco in Spain.  You had leaders in China, all dictators, and Stalin and so forth.  And we have people to take over and they seize the political instrument.  The political instrument as far as I am concerned, democracy is the best where we can talk our problems out and work together without being dictated too. Now whatever form this takes is pretty well up to the people, but freedom has to be defended. Freedom has to be understood. Freedom has to be protected.  There are many ways to protecting freedom. There is freedom of press, freedom of expressing yourself, freedom of assembly as it is outlined in the constitution.  But humanity is best served by solving problems without war.
LN: How did your service and experience in war affect your life?

WH: We are at that point in time where people still solve problems by war.  Over a period of time, we are going to get out of that.  We do not know how long it is going to take.  I went back in the year 2000, to 1904  in the genealogy records and I found an Indianapolis Star and there were some articles in there that I took an interest to the headlines.  One of them was a headline about "When are we going to solve racial prejudice?" and there was an article in there about the churches and the period of time, wanting to have forums and talking about that.  That was 1904.  There was not a big article in there on the curing of cancer, in 1904.  I take a look at that today, how far as we as a people have we come? And frankly, I am a little disappointed.  Why are we not putting our resources into these things? And I am sure we can say, well we have been in a lot of cancer research, but we still have a lot of racial prejudice in our country, and if politicians would quit playing one group of people against another, we would all be much better served.  


LN: Do you enjoy being interviewed by people after the war?

WH:  The story needs to be told, even though it has been told a thousand times, it needs to be told.  I wrote my memoirs. I thought well, I hadn't seen that much, but it was an experience that I had and my kids, my grandkids, my great-grandkids need to know.  I think we all can learn from each other, but we have to listen to each other first.  And we can't just say they're sixty years old and they have white hair so what do they know? I think its best that we can pick the brains of some of these people and we don't necessarily appreciate our parents telling us you do this and you do that.  We kind of block it.  What if we listen to our parents?  What will we learn from them?  Sometimes, we can learn from somebody that is not our parent.  And so I remember one time, asking an older man while I was working in a factory before I went to service, what do you tell a young man, like myself, what can I learn from you?  And he said, "Well son, don't ever go out with a girl that you won't marry."  And I thought that was significant.  


LN: Is there anything you would like to add that we have not covered in this interview?

WH: Yes. I spent some time in the Philippine Islands and I really learned to adore these people and their customs.  When I was in the Army newspaper staff, we took over this newspaper press and so forth from the Japanese.  The Japanese had all this equipment and we took it over.  We hired Filipinos to work with us.  They helped us editorialize and so forth and they spoke better English than we did.  I learned a lot of the customs and I really had a lot of respect for the Filipino people.  The Japanese just ravaged their country and killed thousands of them, and it's just despicable what the Japanese did to all of those people.  And you go back and see what happened in the battles that took place in Manila and so I really liked the Filipino people.  Most of them spoke English.  They have sixty-seven dialects in their country and they also teach English. They could talk to each other through English and predominantly the Filipino people are Muslim and Catholic. A lot of them are Catholic.  They are very friendly with the other American people.  It was a good experience with people.  One of the other big things that I learned about people all over the world, we are all pretty much the same. We want the same things.  We want peace.  We want understanding. We want prosperity. We want health. We want education and we want it for other people too.  We want to live in a safe society, a clean society, and we want to have respect and equal opportunity.  I don't care what race you are or what country you are living in, this is what we all want.  It makes no difference.


LN:  What rank did you hold in World War II?

WH: When I got in combat, they gave me a private first class and then when I went into the army newspaper staff I became a technician for the F grade, T-5.  That's when I left. I was a T-5.  


LN:  I want to know about this book that you have. What do you have to share with me? Did you write this?

WH: Yes this spiral book was my creation, used for reference. There is one story about a local actor you may want to hear about and it is covered in the division book. In the army we all had pin-up pictures of girls to remind them of one they would like to come home to.  Well at that particular time, have you ever watched old television?  They used to have this Paw and Maw Kettle.  Well she was a rough and tough lady.  Her name was Marjorie Maine.  And so our division chose her as our pin up girl because she was a battler.  She was not a beauty queen. They chose her.  Her name was Marjorie Maine.  So they said Marjorie Maine is a rough gal for a rough outfit so we chose her.  So when the division came home, she met them.  Here is a picture of her.  She met them. She is from Fairland, Indiana.  Marjorie Maine was an actress and she made several movies and so forth.  Now, they have a reincarnated one of Marjorie Maine. They're going to have reunions of rough gal and rough outfit.
  

LN: Thank you very much for being here for this interview.  I am very grateful that I had the opportunity and chance to talk to you. 

WH:  When you read and  see these real battles and these guys, in this division book you will not believe it.  Not all of our men were honor winners.  You have got to read their stories of the Medal of Honor winners. Just read those five stories of those guys that got that Medal of Honor. Now, I don't know how much of this stuff you're going to want.  Here is cable gram I sent to my wife. No, I was not married. She was only my girlfriend.   I carried this all the way through.  These are my telephone numbers of people I met.  I carried this.  This is a picture of my fiancé and me.  I just gave her a ring, while I was home for five days.  There she is with my coat. Here is my school.  I went to Tech High School over here.  There were nine-hundred and fifty in my class.  
	We went back to Okinawa afterwards.  I haven't talked about that.  We went back to Okinawa, my son and I.  While we went back to Okinawa, we had a tour guide there, by the name of Don Denker. Don was our historian of our division.  He had taken several people tourists.  So we went over there with him. We were there five days, and I got to go back to the old place where I was.  We got to go up to these battlefields.  They explained these battlefields, what happened here and there.  And then we went back to the peace gardens where they had the names of everybody that died, Japanese and Americans on these big marble slabs, all their names.  And of these guys here, this guy here, (shown in a book) his brother died there.  And so he went back to see where his brother died and went to back to see where his name was on, and put a wreath there.  There is another lady there.  Her name is Brubaker.  She was the daughter of the general that was killed there.  There was General Simon Boulevard Buckner that was killed there on Okinawa.  No, I did not know him. He was the general.  He did not know me, either. He was killed there.  An artillery fire came in and killed him.  Well, he was the highest ranking officer killed in a war; I'm not sure about that.  He was killed by an artillery fire, and it hit a coral reef, and the coral reef killed him.  But anyway, she came back with us.  And they named a street, in one of the army bases for her.  We went in 2001.  There is a picture of myself and my son.  I still keep in contact with a lot of these guys.  Now, there are five guys from the 96th, one, two, three, four, five.  At least five guys there from the ninety-six division.  Three of those guys still carry schrapel.  They still carry metal around.  They'd been hit. (Shows more pictures of the men.) We got to hear all the stories, talk about camaraderie and I still am in contact with all of these guys on the Internet.  Frank Bolton, Don Denker and Glen Koster.  I still have my old dog tags and I still have my army boots that are part of my uniform.  [Talks more about the pictures in books.]