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“Today is September 30, 2011. I am Emma Hammer with Gabe Caceres and I am interviewing Leon Dean at Park Tudor School. Mr. Dean is 87 years old and was born on March 28, 1924. Mr. Dean served in World War 2. Mr. Dean was in The 86th Division 404th Field Artillery Battery C and held the following rank: T5.
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GC: Were you drafted or did you enlist?
LD: I was drafted.
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GC: Where were you living at the time?
LD: Hammond, Indiana.
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GC: Why did you join?
LD: I failed a test for the air force. I decided I had to be drafted.
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GC: So you originally wanted to be in the air force?
LD: Well, it was the glamour. Uh no, no reason, well except that it was fly boy for the glamour.
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GC: Do you recall your first days in the service?
LD: Yes. There had been the day we left from northern Indiana and there was a blizzard. It followed us all the way down US 41and places we had to back up; we were on a Greyhound bus. There were actually buses [there were busloads of us] and we had to back up and the buses would line up bumper to bumper and the guys would get out of the buses and push them. I had to work my way into the army.
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GC: What did it feel like?
LD: Anxiety, a little bit.
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GC: Tell me about your boot camp and/or training experience.
LD: It was pretty tough. There were two divisions at Camp Howells Texas; we went through the regular basic training. It was a lot of exercise, it was a lot of climbing walls, but it was different from the regular basic training. They assigned us jobs before we ever started training. We knew what we were training for. Whereas most GI’s were assigned to basic training and then they were assigning duties after basic training.
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GC: How did you get through it?
LD: Just hard work. Lots of classes, lots of exercise. As we got to the end of our training we had field exercises where we camped out overnight.
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EH: So you served in World War 2, correct?
LD: Yes.
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EH: Where exactly did you go during World War Two, like what camps?
LD: I was at twenty-three camps. So I don’t think you want me to list them all. But I started off at Camp Howell, Texas. I was assigned to umpire detail in Camp Livingston, Louisiana. Then I was sent to a radio repair school at Fort Still, Oklahoma. Ultimately, I was in Camp Calith in California, which was basically a holding camp where we waited for a boat that would take us into combat—in this case into Iwo Jima.
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EH: Do you remember any of your experiences when you arrived at any of these camps?
LD: I remember some totally unpleasant things when training sergeants were tough. If we broke any kind of regulations-they had their gig list and if they had any kind of unpleasant duties coming up then they would fill their gig list. I remember one time that I was gigged for not having my buttons on my shirt lined up with my belt buckle and another time I was gigged for [I don’t really remember what it was about] but I was told to get a toothbrush and clean the floors. It was funny Mickey Mouse stuff.
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EH: What was your particular job assignment?
LD: I had to somewhat select what I wanted to do in the field artillery—a firing battery. I was given some options. They said I could either be a switch board operator or you could be a radio operator. So I chose radio operator. Then I was sent to radio repair school.
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EH: What all did you do as a radio operator?
LD: First of all, one of the duties of field artillery forward observer was three of us, a jeep driver, an officer, and the radio operator repairman. The repairman would [you guys have no idea what I’m talking about] but for instance if we had to take the radio off the jeep and it would weigh ninety-some pounds, not one of those tiny little things you guys carry in your hands. It had a range of seven miles. We didn’t want it to be any bigger than that because in combat the Germans could triangulate us because lines would intercept where we were. So my job was basically radio operator repairman whose radios had wires, tubes, and transistors, basically things that you guys have no idea what I’m talking about. If we were in combat and in training also we would be directed to go to an infantry unit somewhere that was being held up by tank fire or a machine gun or something then we would direct artillery fire onto whoever our target was.
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EH: Did you ever see combat?
LD: Yes, I did. I have some good stories to tell about combat.
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EH: Would you like to share any?
LD: Well, first of all I think you might be interested in. we had completed our amphibious assault training in Camp Calvin, California and we went to San Luis Obispo California and it was just a holding camp, a small little camp and waited for a ship to take us to combat while we were there, have you guys read anything or heard anything about the battle of the bulge?
GC: Yes
LD: Well while I was in this holding camp, the battle of the Bulge started. The army had no idea how many Germans were going to break through. Without even cleaning the barracks, which is unheard of, we boarded a train. We went to Boston and caught a troop ship from Boston and ended up in combat. I never go into the battle of the bulge; it was over by the time I got there. I did have some combat stories. One of my favorite stories is, this has to be one of the wildest stories that ever came out of that war. We were told [our jeep], well actually let me explain the jeep situation, I rode in the back seat, of all of us. We put our rifles, our carbines, our extra supply parts for the radio and our sleeping bags, so it was just packed. We were told to go down this road and we would find an infantry company that was being held up by a machine gun. This would have probably been in mid-April before Germany surrendered and early May of 1945. So we were told to go down this road, it was a winding country road. Our lieutenant pulled his binoculars out, he was scanning the road ahead and it looked like we didn’t know where our friendlies were, and in combat I really can’t explain, but you never knew where anybody was, so we started down this road a little bit. I was trying to read the map, as well as I could, and also watching ahead and the jeep driver or course all he was doing was keeping on the road. We came around this curve on this country road and here was a German machine gun poking out of a basement window. This was the time when the German army was just disintegrating. They were out of supplies, some units were still fighting some were surrendering as fast as they could. You never knew who was where or if some superior officer would countermand instructions to surrender. It was a mix up then. So we came around this curve and here was this German machine gun poking out this basement window and our jeep driver of course slammed on the brakes and he shifted gears because he was going to get out of there but actually if the Germans would of activated that machine gun he wouldn’t have had time to back up and get out of there. At the time our fast making lieutenant reached down and said, “No, let’s act like a whole American army is right behind us.” We sat there for a few minutes and a German officer came out waving a white surrender flag. Our lieutenant said, we didn’t have guns out we weren’t ready for this situation at all. Our lieutenant said, “How many of you are there?” and the German officer said “Hundred and eighty-nine” or something like that. There were three of us, we didn’t know where we were, we didn’t know who was where. What do we do when a hundred and 189 Germans try to surrender? Our lieutenant said, “I’m in too much of a hurry” he said to those Germans “how many of you are there?” and he said, a 189 or something like that. He said, “I’m in too much of a hurry to take your surrender they’ll be somebody along soon to take your surrender”. So we drove into this village and if the Germans had known how few we were and where the rest of the Americans were then they probably would have surrendered. So we drove through this village with Germans soldiers coming out of houses and setting a rifle down and we found an apple orchard that was in flower and hid in that apple orchard and got our radio and we said, “Hey guys get some help here we’ve got a 189 Germans here and we don’t know what to do.” So we hid in the apple orchard and we got our radio, but we didn’t dare use our radio while we were in the village because we didn’t know who could speak English and who might be listening in. If we gave away that there were only three of us and we didn’t know where we were. Kind of exciting. That’s probably one of my best stories.
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EH: How did it feel when that surrender flag came up?
LD: Oh great. We couldn’t believe it. I had so many escapes. I was shot from fifteen feet away. That’s pretty close to point blank. We were just really glad the war was over.
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EH: So when you were shot at, was that the scariest point in the war for you?
LD: That was probably the worst. The one that I was just telling you about was probably the funniest. What I was talking about the whole American army behind us that was probably the funniest experience. Being fired at from that close was probably the worst.
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GC: How did they get so close to you that they could shoot at you?
LD: That’s another long story. This was a rainy, misty April day, we and the Germans were wearing raincoats. They sent us to an OP which is an observation post. They sent us to an OP at the top of a hill. We were to watch for targets--called targets of opportunity they sent a wire truck with us and the wire truck driver were supposed to drive the wire from wherever we ended up back to our firing battery. Firing by telephone was a lot safer then firing by radio so we took a wire truck [back] we parked the wire truck by the woods. We went up this ridge, we couldn’t see anything because it was raining by this time; it was four or five o’clock in the afternoon. There were some magazines back in the wire truck we couldn’t do anything. We weren’t firing at anyone because we couldn’t see anyone. So I went back to get my magazines out of the wire truck. I was going to go back up to the ridge top and the area had been a timber operation of woods where they had cut timber out of a bunch of trees. So I started back up to the wire truck and I saw these two Germans riding a machine gun and obviously they were heading towards our OP. So I thought if I can get around these Germans I can pick them off before they get their machine guns turned around on me. What I didn’t realize was that where there were German machine guns, there were also German rifle men. So I was stalking getting around these guys with machine guns and another guy I found out later was stalking me. The building wasn’t good to begin with it had trees growing out around the stumps. This building was even worse. I heard some kind of noises and I turn around and there’s a German with a rifle pointed right at me. He hesitated just a little bit and that gave me a chance to fall backwards and his shot went over the top of my head. You asked for the most dangerous, and that’s probably the most dangerous as you can get. I saw his eyes when he realized he had missed and the next shot would be mine. In a situation like that you can’t believe how fast your eye reacts to things like that. But I did see his eyes when he realized he had missed and he knew the next shot was going to be mine. So I went over backwards and shot with one hand and I got my shot off. I have no idea whether I got my shot off or not. I was a lot more interested in getting out of there than I was falling off to see what I had done. Then I would crawl around to see if there were any Germans around near me and crawled some more. Then I finally realized those Germans, as confused as I was, had no idea how many of us there were. I began to yell like I was directing soldiers. The last time I saw these machine gunners was when they were getting the machine gun in position to fire and they did fire a few rounds but they weren’t even close. They didn’t even see me at all. Then I would yell directions like, “Dave, move your gun to the right.” They had been putting tension on this OP and one of the Germans was focused on his Jeep. My shot worked. There was someone else in the area but they did get close to the Jeep. He was getting ready to shoot one of the Jeep drivers, but our lieutenant shot him and he was carrying a couple grenades in his pocket. That Jeep, of course, had all kinds of cult signs or whatever and we tossed a grenade into the Jeep. But, there were three of us up on that hill side where we had set up the OP all three of us escaped back. I escaped back to the wire truck. By that time it was dark and you don’t do much in the dark in combat. The next morning there were guys coming in through the woods and you could tell they were Americans. So that was the scariest.
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EH: Were there many casualties in your unit?
LD: We had no real bad casualties in all. Our first casualty we had was when [the fire battery had a kitchen] guys would leave the houses they occupied and they would go through the kitchen in the mess hall and get their food and scatter again. So these guys were lined up through this mess hall and one of our guys had picked up a German assault rifle and he was trying to get the magnesium out of it. One of our buddies said, “All you’ve got to do is push that button there.” So he fired the rifle and the bullet ricocheted off the roof and hit this guy in the hand. That was the first casualty we took.
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EH: Were you awarded any medals?
LD: No. We would have been in the combat campaign but I don’t remember any.
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GC: How did you stay in touch with your family?
LD: We had mail services. It was several weeks old by the time you could write them back and give them an answer, but the mail had to go back the troop ship.
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GC: What was the food like?
LD: Not descriptive, we ate better than many people. When we were out in the field, away from the fire battery, we had boxes of food we would carry with us.
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GC: Did you have plenty of supplies?
LD: Yes, where I was.
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GC: Did you ever at any point feel pressured or stressed?
LD: Well yeah, anytime we were in a combat situation we were stressed.
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GC: Was there anything you ever did for good luck?
LD: No, just take a day, whatever that day off.
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GC: How did people entertain themselves?
LD: After the war ended in Europe, we were sent to the Philippine islands and by about that time the war was over. We had USO’s and entertainment people from Hollywood.
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GC: What kind of people from Hollywood did they have coming over?
LD: Oh I remember one time Barbara Holton was there and several stars.
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GC: What did you do when you were on leave?
LD: Most of my leaves I had time to go home. They rotated us home while I was in Europe and back in the states. We had thirty days after we came back from Europe before we were ready to go to the Philippines. We had a thirty-day leave and that was good.
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GC: Do you recall any particularly humorous events?
LD: Well, the one story I told you about the big German machine gun was probably the wildest story you’ll hear from the war. Well, let’s see, this was after the war was over in the Manila area. Another guy and I had a Jeep assigned to us and we had decided we would go to the U.S.O. and we drove around and around and couldn’t find a parking place and finally found a place and started to park and here’s this Filipino who worked at the U.S.O. The U.S.O. was built for entertaining and to make the soldiers feel at home. They had libraries in there. This girl was [I don’t know where she was going] probably a twenty-four-year-old and started down this road and we saw these guys, Filipino guys, ganging up on her. We parked the Jeep and the Jeep had a spade and an axe hanging in the back strapped to the side. We grabbed the spade and the axe and charged toward the Filipinos and of course they scattered and ran. She did invite us over for I believe it was our Thanksgiving Day dinner. You know, it was unusual.
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GC: What were some of the pranks that some of the others would pull?
LD: One I remember was when one of the guys, a sergeant, had stayed with his family off-post. He came back Sunday night in time for first formation on Monday. He came home one night and he had been short sheeted, have you heard the term ‘short sheeted’? You take a sheet and fold it in half and then tie the ends down. Then someone would get in the bed [all houses have a sheet board] and he couldn’t get his bed to open up. That was probably the funniest prank we ever pulled.
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GC: Do you have any photographs?
LD: There are some photographs in this thing here. There was one. The interesting thing was that this cap was called a garrison hat and we weren’t allowed to wear those. But the photographer had us put on several items that we would put on for the pictures to send home.
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GC: What did you think of the fellow officers or soldiers?
LD: Some were jerks and some were good guys.
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GC: Did you ever have any altercations with any of them?
LD: I did have some with sergeants. I never had any with officers there was no point.
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GC: Did you keep a personal diary?
LD: No, we weren’t allowed to. The reason we weren’t allowed to was when we were in combat, if Germans found a diary they would put it with someone else’s.
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EH: Do you recall the day your service ended?
LD: This is another one of these escape stories. We were on our thirty day [unintelligible] and we were loaded on a train [put our luggage and stuff on a train] and we were dropped at our first hundred miles. We didn’t know what to do or when the wall would end so they went ahead and loaded us on the train to the Philippines.
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EH: What did you do in the days and weeks following the war?
LD: Everybody knew the war was over and it was just a matter of time until we got out.
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EH: Did you go back to work or school?
LD: Yeah, back to school. I went to Purdue after the service [after I got home].
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EH: Was your education supported by the GI Bill?
LD: Yes.
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EH: Did you make any close friends while in the service?
LD: Yes, this came from one of my close friends. And this I snuggled back. We weren’t allowed to take anything [for instance silverware] home. I smuggled this compact into a shirt. When I started school I kept this because I might use it sometime. I went into landscaped design, horticulture landscape design, and I thought I might be able to use it. One of my roommates was in electrical engineering and he liked this. It’s just a natural piece for that kind of work. Engineering in that is just [unintelligible]. So I traded him this for a rifle. It was his grandfather’s and unique and was actually an antique. So I traded this three years after I was teaching in Homewood, Indiana. Thirty years ago I actually got a letter from this roommate saying he had no more use of this and he’d like to send it back to me. I said, “Well I will send you the rifle back.” He said, “No, don’t do that because I’ve already replaced it with one just like it. And so he sent this back to me.
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EH: Did you join a veteran’s organization?
LD: I was in the American Legion for a while and I withdrew a few years ago.
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GC: What did you go on to do as a career after the war?
LD: I went to Purdue School of Agriculture and majored in horticulture. Horticulture is small plants, shrubs, trees, insects, and diseases, landscape architecture. I majored in that. I started teaching at Crown Point, Indiana. I taught there for twenty-five years then moved to Elkhart, Indiana.
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GC: Did your military experience influence the way you thought about war or military in general?
LD: Yes.
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GC: Was it a positive change or negative?
LD: Oh yeah, I certainly supported it. It was the age of the Vietnam War and I supported the GI’s who had to deal with this.
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GC: What kind of activities does your post or association have for the Veteran’s Organization?
LD: After several years I withdrew from the American Legion. I was just too busy to keep going. I don’t know if that answered your question or not.
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GC: How did your service and/or experience affect your life?
LD: The military, of course. That was more than three years of my life. I escaped and in that respect it certainly affected my life.
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GC: Is there anything you would like to add that we have not covered in this interview?
LD: No. You’ve done a great job. I taught with the FFA Program, are you familiar with the program?
GC & EH: No.
LD: It’s a program for high school youth involved in agriculture of some kind. Of all the things I coached, was a FFA interview contest. I’ve watched you guys and you’ve done a great job.
GC & EH: Thank you.
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