Mr. Cecil Fritz
[Born 07/08/1920]
Interviewed by Erin Biel
Recorded on 10/20/2005 by Erin Biel
Transcribed on 11/13/2005- 11/26/05 by Erin Biel
Erin Biel: EB
Cecil Fritz: CF
[Interview starts at 001 on counter]
Erin Biel: Today is Thursday, October 20, 2005. I am Erin Biel, and I am interviewing Cecil Fritz at 9325 Shady Bend Court. Mr. Fritz is a family friend. Mr. Fritz is eighty-four years old and was born on July 30, 1921. Mr. Fritz served in World War Two. Mr. Fritz was in the U.S. Army Air Force and held the following rank: captain.
Erin Biel: So you can just continue with what we were talking about earlier.
[ 010 ]
Cecil Fritz: It all started in 1940 when I enlisted in the Air Force. I enlisted for two years overseas as that was the only way you could get in the Air Force. This was the year before Pearl Harbor. After a few short weeks in the states doing whatever you were supposed to do as a brand new recruit, we were shipped to Panama. We landed on the Atlantic side by ship and then sailed through the canal over to the Pacific side. I spent my first two and one-half years down there except for a time in mechanic’s school at Allbrook Field which is still the main field in Panama on the Pacific side. Someplace along the line, I was shipped into the interior 80 miles right up to the Transcontinental Highway built by the United States to an airplane mechanic’s school. Strange place to have it, but that’s where they had it. Again, it was right on the ocean. It was not a bad existence at all. It was about a three or four-month school. That then made me qualified to go back and be an assistant crew chief or a crew chief on the airplanes that we had at the time. At that time, we were flying P36s which were powered by a big Wright Radial engine. When the war itself started, we had P40c’s brand new, but they were still pickled, not ready for flight. So needless to say, there was a lot of activity getting them ready as soon as the war started over seas wherever it was.
[ 044 ]
CF: During that period of time, I was advanced to a sergeant by virtue of the fact that I received that much pay as an assistant crew chief. I walked in the office one day and suggested that I was a good typist so I immediately had a job as a typist and a three-stripe sergeant. Things were moving rapidly at that time. There were a lot of transfers with people moving up, down, and sideways so in a very short period of time I became first sergeant of our squadron which was still just a five-striper. Within 60 days, the United States government decreed that all supply sergeants and first sergeants would be six stripes which was as high as you could go as an enlisted man. I really don’t remember what kind of pay I got in those days. Then they offered us an opportunity to take a test which was nothing. When I look back on it, it was an IQ test.
[ 064 ]
CF: They selected a few of us to go to officer candidate school which I then did by sailing from Panama to San Diego, never losing sight of land really. Then a cross-country trip and a ten-day delay in route at home in the dead of winter, January of whatever that cold, cold winter was. I was there just ten days and then another train arrived from there down to Jacksonville, Florida. We got to Jacksonville where they had snow on the ground which was really rare. I caught the Gold Coast Limited and six hours later I was in Miami Beach where it was 79°. I thought I died and went to heaven. For some reason, because we came from overseas, we couldn’t get right into the school so we worked hard at bowling every day and shooting pool. Being a first sergeant, I went in and said “hey, either put us in school or send us home for 90 days. Do something.” The answer was we were put in school the next day. So I became a 90-day wonder in 78 days- just your typical officer candidate school. I was in the same class with Robert Preston who starred in “Music Man”. His real name was Robert Masurvy. He could stand up and command 6,000 of us with no microphone and you could hear everything he was saying. It was just fantastic. We followed Clark Gable who had been in the same school six weeks earlier. Every six weeks, they turned out 6,000 guys as officers. Right after I left, they cut it back substantially because they didn’t need that many. You came out of there a 2nd lieutenant. Then came the next train ride from there, if you came from overseas, you were automatically re-assigned overseas. I never could understand that because the guys that came from St. Louis, I guess went back and guarded St. Louis.
[102]
[It] must be because they never were attacked. I was sent to Kern’s Field, Utah, which is right outside Salt Lake City. This was simply a staging area. We were there 30 days or so. Salt Lake City was a fun city to chase around downtown if you have to. Then from there, a train ride to Richmond, California and then from there a barge ride straight to a ship in the harbor at San Francisco. They wouldn’t even let us off to say we had been in San Francisco. You just went right onto the ship. The next morning, we were sailing out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge for Hawaii. Then I was in Hawaii maybe a week to ten days just to wait on another ship ride, a bad one, to the Canton Island, an island in the Gilberts 2° below the equator. Nothing but a snow-white coral reef shaped like a doughnut with a five-mile lagoon in the middle. One guy tried to commit suicide one night by trying to go across that. All he did was cut his feet on the coral because the tide was out and he was literally walking across the whole thing. Canton Island was interesting because it was a snow-white coral reef.
[123]
CF: The Sea Bees simply ground up that coral, watered it, rolled it, and made runways out of it. There we have P39 Air Cobra which is an interesting airplane because the engine was behind the pilot and a special pipeline of some kind or another went up to the front to run the propeller. We at first had a cannon shooting through the propeller. Well that was hard on the propeller because we couldn’t keep the timing just right. So then they changed all that and there was a 20 mm cannon run up the nose and six 50-caliber guns, three on each wing. So this was more of just training for the guys to get ready to go further out. That island was interesting because it was just 8 feet above sea level at the highest point. So if you had a tsunami there, you would just be all gone. It was also a base for Pan American Airways for the flights that went from the United States to Australia. In those days, they were all flying boats so they landed there in the water and they had a nice little facility there to spend the night with quarters for people on the plane and quality food. We were living on Spam. The guys caught one 300-pound turtle, rolled him over, and one of the boys from Kentucky knew how to cut him up. We put him in the freezer for two weeks to make it edible and then we, officers, served the enlisted the men and that was a big deal. We served them sea turtle and beer which made them happy. It was the only fresh meat we had all the time we had been there.
[ 152 ]
CF: Then we were sent by ship from there to Macon Island. Macon is in the Marshalls which was immediately north of Tarawa, I’m sure even you have heard of “Bloody Tarawa”. We lost a great number of Marines trying to take the island. We were on an island that was like 8 miles long and at the most ½ mile wide. The tide on one side was 18 feet and the other side where we got our fresh water and desalted it. That was where we got our fresh water. The guys there flew from there up to Kwajalein and a couple of other islands bombing and strafing in preparation for our next movement towards Japan. Everything you did was to try to get to Japan. I mean, knowing that we would some day go to Japan and invade the place. Macon Island was not a bad place. It was a typical tropical island. There were a few natives that lived there. They made their living fishing, but they also had young men who would run up the trees and get coconuts for us and send them down. While I was on Macon Island, I became a 1st lieutenant, but all the time I was in the Pacific I was squadron adjutant which meant I was in charge of all the paperwork for the squadron. You worried about who was on KP, kitchen police we called it. You worried about who was on guard duty and all of those detail things. That was my job. So then from there, I caught a PBY2 which is a Navy flying boat. I loved it. We got on there and we promptly had fresh strawberries and steak.
[ 185 ]
CF: We flew back to Hawaii. We stopped at three different islands on the way as I remember, Funa Futi, Christmas Island, and Palmyra. Christmas Island and Palmyra are not all the far from Hawaii, but that’s a big ocean out there, really big. Oh, I want to say going back to camp now one day, one of the pilots said ‘let’s go see if we can find’ what’s the gal from Purdue that tried to go [fly] all the way around the world? Whatever…we went up to see if we could see. We knew the island that she had gone down at, they think she did. We didn’t find anything. But that was Howland and Baker Islands. I don’t know what chain they were in, but they were maybe 300 miles north of where we were. (Mr. Fritz backtracks to Macon Island before proceeding) Okay, back to Macon Island. We were there eight-nine months I guess and then I was flown back to Hawaii to make arrangements for our 250 enlisted men and 50 officers to come back to Hawaii for more training which was interesting. I got to fly back to do that and they all had to come back by ship. We were at a little field there called Wheeler Field which was immediately next door to Scofield Barracks which is extremely well known and got hit a lot during Pearl Harbor. Anybody that ever goes to Hawaii, they go to see Scofield Barracks which is 25 miles from downtown Honolulu and Hickam Field which was beat up pretty badly. That is right next door to Pearl Harbor where the ships were sunk and that whole tragic thing that took place on December 7th. A lot of the squadron I was in, some of those guys were there trying to fly out of there. Some of them got some kills that day of Japanese on Pearl Harbor. There, they took away our P39s away from there and gave the boys P38s to fly which is the twin boom, twin engine airplanes powered by Allison engines made in Indiana on the west side of town. After they learned to fly twin engine planes versus single engine, they loved them because you could lose an engine and still bring the plane back and not have to end up out in the ocean.
[ 223 ]
CF: Then in typical Air Force fashion, just a few weeks before we left from there to go to Iwo Jima, they took those away from them and gave them P51s. Now a P51 is the Mustang. It is still the fastest propeller driven plane made. After they learned to fly it, they love them because it was super airplane. There are a couple of them right here in town. One of the car dealers here owns one and he flies it from time to time. It is a powerful airplane. We lost a few boys flying those because they have so much torque and so much power that you had to give it all right rudder or left rudder to keep it down the runway. Every once in a while you would lose a boy who just couldn’t control it. In the meantime, we were in Hawaii for about a year. We had decent quarters and places to stay. I did. I was in an officer’s house that had just been for an officer’s family. It had like four bedrooms and very large cockroaches. We didn’t cook anything in there of course. Three of us bought a big, well-used Ford for $300 so we went down to Honolulu every weekend. We had an officers club down there that we could go in and get a milkshake and a cheeseburger for 50 cents and stuff like that. [It was] a great place to go. We were right on Waikiki Beach. We stayed often at the Moana Hotel which is still there. It has a giant banyon tree out in back that covers the complete patio area of this hotel. One morning, I went from there down to a neighboring hotel, a small one, called the Halekulani. The lady said ‘do you mind sitting with someone’ and I said that was fine with me. So she seated me with some guy. Did you ever hear of Boris Karloff? He was in old, old movies. Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre used to do these scary movies. He was the guy, I remember his fingers must have been this long; I’m not exaggerating. Very dark skin, not a negro, but dark skin. He was the nicest guy. He was just a great guy to eat breakfast with. So we were there about a year and then got our orders to go. Now when you had orders to go someplace, you didn’t know until you were out in the ocean where you were going. They didn’t dare tell you on land for fear you would tell your family somehow or other and you couldn’t go.
[ 262 ]
CF: That was one of my jobs incidentally when I got to Iwo Jima, I had to read everybody’s letter to make sure he wasn’t disclosing our location. It was terrible, you got to know who was having trouble with his wife and who wasn’t, you know, family situations. So then we were shipped out. I don’t know how long it took us. We spent one night in Kwajalein on the way, Kwajalein being one of the islands that we had been bombing and strafing before. That’s where they did some atom bomb testing after World War II. If that name means anything to you, probably not, you weren’t born. When were you born?
EB: 1990.
CF: You’re just a kid! You're fifteen then. So you’re out there in the ocean, a big convoy of us headed for Iwo Jima. In the meantime, the Marines and the Infantry, were “taking Iwo…” well it was a horrible, horrible situation because Iwo is an inactive volcano that is just sitting there like a big hump. The Japs were sitting up there in caves and stuff just picking them off like target practice. We lost 6,750 boys there. They lost 22,000. That’s the price we paid to get Iwo Jima. We wanted it because straight south of Iwo was two islands I can think of, Tinian and Saipan where the B29s were stationed. That was our big four-engine plane that could go from there to Japan and back. We couldn’t go that far in our fighters, but we could go from Iwo to Japan and back. It was still an eight-hour trip. So they put belly tanks on the planes. They were there theoretically to protect the B29s from Japanese fighters. No Japanese fighters ever left the ground to tangle with us because they knew they didn’t have a chance. So they put belly tanks on them for extra gasoline and they would go the Japan or up to the edge of it, drop the tanks and they just went down in the ocean. Then they would do their strafing and bombing, whatever they could do, and then fly back. They were strapped in a chair, the pilots were, for eight hours, no moving, no hostesses to serve you, no bathrooms. So it was a tough flight. We lost a few boys, but we had a great rescue service set up from Japan. I wish I had a map, I would show you from Japan to Iwo. But Iwo was really developed.
CF: We had a long runway on top of the island which the Sea Bees were the first guys who came in and fixed things like that. They also fixed you a place to sleep and a place to go to the bathroom. They’re a great outfit, part of the Marines. But they plowed out, made a runway on top of a big one so that the B29s that were crippled would come back and could land there. A lot of them did. They landed and had to be repaired. Some of them couldn't make it. Some of them would just fly over and didn’t have landing gear left to land with because they had been shot at. The men would bail out over the island and just let the plan go out in the ocean. Those things were like a big boat. They would go out there and not sink. So then our guys would go out and shoot them up. We wanted them to sink so the Russians or the Japanese couldn’t get their hands on them. So it was an interesting place. (Mr. Fritz pauses to get himself a soft drink)
[ 316]
CF: On the way out there, we encountered our first not hurricanes…they were typhoons. Our ship was rolling 45° each direction. The convoy broke up because it was too dangerous. I watched a 10-wheel truck fall off the deck of another ship, just fall off into the ocean. It’s out there someplace, a brand new one if you want to go get it. So each captain of the ship was on his own to get us there. We ended up in Iwo Jima. We climbed down rope ladders off the ship onto a little barge of some kind to take us to the shore. We walked uphill, way up hill to where we were to be. Dead people all over the place, both kinds, Japanese and American. It was awful. The smell…I thought is that what I joined the Air Force to see all this? We were there I guess I was there six or eight months, something like that. In the meantime, we were told that something was going to happen to end the war. So the day that the atom bombs flew over, we knew what was happening and they made us stay clear off …no one was allowed near the runway in case one of those guys had to come back and land on Iwo.
[ 335]
CF: Simultaneously, the Army was taking Okinawa which was even closer to Japan and sadly we lost 10,000 boys there. That’s a lot of people, 10,000. Think of that. And we brag about the fact that we have lost a little over 2,000 in Iraq. Well anyway, we were there six months, I was six to eight. The atom bomb, you know, stopped the war almost instantly. So then the Army, the Air Force, and the Marines had a big thing about we had to get these boys home. We don’t know what to do with them now, we don’t need them. We had a point system that let you get away from Iwo Jima. I was #1 on the point system because I had four and one-half years overseas.
[ 349]
CF: So I climbed on a B29, I’m not used to making speeches, a B29 and flew down to Tinian Island. Now Tinian and Saipan were the islands that the B29s had been flying from to go bomb Japan. It was fascinating because you got up in the morning and there would be this wave after wave of B29s going over there. What people don’t seem to realize is that they killed many more civilians with those bombers than the two atom bombs ever did. You know people make such a to-do about how many people we killed with the atom bomb…nothing compared to what we did with regular bombers. So then to Tinian Island and so what did we do? We sat down there for 30 days. This is typical in the Army, service. Hurry up and wait. So we hurried down to Saipan, excuse me Tinian, I was on Tinian; I could see Saipan off in the distance.
[ 359]
CF: We sat around for 30 days for a ship ride, and headed for San Francisco. I remember on this ship, I don’t even remember what kind of ship it was, but it was a big one. They had a couple of wards for guys who had gone berserk. I was in one of those, but I hadn’t gone berserk yet. I mean they did dumb things like stop up the toilet with pineapple and grapefruit and stuff. Anyway, so halfway to San Francisco they changed our plans for us. They called by radio and we were sent to Portland, Oregon. I don’t know if you know your geography very well or not…
EB: I try.
[ 369]
CF: Well if you look at it, we got up at 5:00 in the morning and that was the first time we could see the United States. There was land out there. It had been a long time, two and one-half years for me. It took us until midnight that night to sail 80 miles up the Columbia River to where we docked that night. So then we were just across the river is someplace in Washington, I can’t think of the name of the town. I need my atlas.
EB: Okay, I’ll go get that. (Erin proceeds to remove the atlas from the fireplace cabinets.)
CF: What was that town? We got a train ride from … What’s that town? (Mr. Fritz points at a location on the atlas)
EB: Right here? (Erin points to verify location)
CF: Um hmmm.
EB: Oh. Vancouver.
CF: From Vancouver to Seattle. From Seattle then to Chicago all on a troop train, box cars turned into so-called living quarters. But it was such gorgeous country. This is spectacular country. You can just see, go for miles and miles and miles of nothing but pine trees. Beautiful. So we took this troop train from Chicago, as I recall, we stayed on the same train right on down to Camp Atterbury where after a day or so of paperwork I was actually discharged from the Air Force. So they were getting rid of you in a hurry. But because I had only had ten day vacations in five years, that’s a long time, I stayed on the payroll for four more months. The maximum you could get was 120 days so they gave me another 120 days and so I was on the payroll, but the minute I got home which was in November or December 1945, I promptly went down to Indiana University and enrolled down there. That was the first time I had ever been on a college campus. Luce in the meantime, by then we were engaged. She had graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and was teaching school in Lynn, Indiana. Do you know where that is?
EB: I really don’t.
[ 400]
CF: Lynn is straight east of here [Indianapolis] 60 miles almost to the border. She was teaching there, teaching 12 grades of music including the marching band for basketball. See in those days, there were 780 high schools in Indiana. Okay, Lynn, Indiana is right here. Right there. We both grew up…I grew up here and she grew up here, five miles apart. So she saw to it that I got to I.U. And so the first semester I was just down there by myself living in an old army barracks with army beds and army blankets and I kept saying “is this why I went in the war for five years”. But I had decided to be a finance major. I didn’t know what I wanted to do except I knew I wanted to do that. Then we were married then that first June. So the rest of the time, we were down there together as married people. The first semester, we lived in an apartment that belonged to Will Rogers, not “the” Will Rogers, but the Will Rogers that lived in Bloomington, Indiana. Only in Bloomington, Indiana you could have a house number of 700 and something between 11th and 12th streets. You know, in Indianapolis that would be 11 something, but not down there. So between February, I mean between January of ’46 and June of ’48 I got a bachelor’s degree in Finance and then stayed one more year and got a master’s degree in finance. I went straight to City Securities Corporation which is a regional investment banking firm, Indiana’s oldest and largest, and I worked there 45 years, the last 12 of which I was president of the company. Then I stayed on the board then 11 more years. So when I completed 56 ½ or 57 years, I said “that’s enough” so I finally totally retired. My son in the meantime who went on to be an Air Force pilot has 1,800 military hours in instructing in T38s which is a Mach 1 1.3 airplane. That means it can fly faster than the speed of sound. (Mr. Fritz continues to discuss his son’s career.) You now know my life history.
[ 435]
EB: You enlisted you said. You weren’t drafted. So where were you living at the time when you enlisted?
CF: On a farm in Modoc, Indiana. [It was] 60 miles east of here where I showed you, ten miles from Lynn.
EB: So why did you want to enlist?
CF: Well, I knew I couldn’t make a living farming for the rest of my life. You know, the farm belonged to my grandfather. Some of it I liked and I enjoyed you know when we were doing the crops, driving tractors and stuff like that, I loved it. But in the dead of winter when you either were cutting wood with a cross-cut saw or cleaning cow stables and that just really didn’t appeal to me for the rest of my life. The chicken coops were worse than cow stables. The war was so big, it was already big. England was over here trying to enlist boys to come back and fly their spitfires. I seriously considered that, but I thought well, I would just rather fly for the Americans. But then I never could get in the right place at the right time to go to pilot training. In the meantime here, they might line up thirty-five guys and just draft them or most of them were officers that had been in school. If you had gone to a college, you automatically had a 2nd lieutenant or something. They’d go down the line and say ‘you’re going to be a pilot, you’re going to be a pilot…’. And see here I was fighting to get in and these guys didn’t want to go. A lot of them didn’t want to fly because it was scary flying some of those fighter planes. So that was how I ended up being where I was. I just never got around…I took up flying after I got and paid for it myself, about $2850. It was fun. I got an instrument rating. That’s the hardest part. And then I remember I got a letter from a friend of mine. He said “now that you’ve got it, brag about it, but don’t abuse it because you shouldn’t fly instruments unless you’re doing it three or four days a week in an airplane with really sophisticated equipment”. Well, I was flying airplanes that just had one radio and it cost me $10 per hour to fly. Now the same airplane at the same airport is about $97-98 an hour because the cost of the airplane and the cost of gasoline. I went out the other day to Mt. Comfort just to price it. An airplane that has the horsepower that I was flying was $97 per hour. So you can see why I’m not flying. I’d love to.
EB: Why did you choose the U.S. Army Air Force versus a different branch?
[ 467]
CF: Because I wanted to fly. I mean I knew enough about the services that those infantry guys get shot at and the Marines, you’ve heard of Bloody Tarawa, I used to fly down there to pay some of our troops down there. Tarawa had many, many losses, heavy losses because some generals or Marine commanders goofed on the tide and let these boys out in the water. They were carrying their guns like this to take Tarawa and another island we needed and they were just targets. So we lost a lot of boys there unnecessarily. There were other instances like that. So I just wanted to be a pilot. I thought you’ve got a better chance of being a pilot in the Air Force then you have in the Marines or the Infantry. I had no interest in being in the Navy. I have a son-in-law that spent four years in the Navy.
[477]
END SIDE ONE, BEGIN SIDE TWO
[ 272 ]
EB: Do you recall your first days in the service, and what those were like?
CF: [I was] just like all recruits that go in. Theoretically we were in special training. You know what we were doing? I came by bus from Richmond, Indiana to Fort Harrison, five miles down the street here. There they gave us all the shots you have to have in the Air Force, and there’s a ton of them. They gave them to us all at once. They put us on a sleeper for Maxwell Field, Alabama which is in Montgomery, Alabama. You were dying. Your arm is up about twice as big as it was supposed to be. That was the first days in the service. Down there, while we did an occasional march here and there, most of the time we were digging ditches. All recruits dig ditches somehow or another, someplace or another. I don’t know why. Not fun. They do all these things and theoretically it instills discipline. That’s why they have all these guys marching and doing all these crazy things.
EB: Could you tell me about your boot camp training?
CF: That was it. Digging ditches at Maxwell Field, Alabama.
EB: That’s all they did basically?
CF: Um hmm.
EB: How did you get through it? What kept you going?
CF: Didn’t know any better. I was a 19-year-old boy. I was tough. I didn’t care. I didn’t let any of that stuff bother me. Every once in a while, some guy couldn’t cope. He’d go nuts and they’d have to send him home in a box or something. It wasn’t that hard. It was just marching, a lot of marching, and a lot of learning how to follow the orders from the commander. Not that difficult. You might think it was to watch it, but it wasn’t.
EB: What were the places that you were stationed throughout your service?
[ 313]
CF: Well they’re all in this thing (points to the papers Mr. Fritz typed about his service), but from Maxwell Field, Alabama we took a train ride to Charleston, South Carolina. I told you we then climbed a ship there, went to Puerto Rico, spent one night there on board, but we did a walking tour of Puerto Rico. Then we sailed. It only took two or three days to get on to Panama them. We went through the canal and then to Allbrook Field and to our quarters. We didn���t do any basic training there. I was in the Air Force. I did whatever they told me to do.
[ 325]
EB: So did you see combat?
CF: Not really. The pilots did from our squadron. They caused the combat. They went right into it. We lost a bunch of boys. There were a lot of unpleasant jobs. After we lost somebody, some of them were living in the same tent with me. More often than not, it was pilot error. It wasn’t because they got shot down, they did something stupid and lost themselves. My job then was to gather up all of their clothes, see that they got cleaned up somehow or another, and sent home to their parents.
EB: Were there many casualties in your unit?
CF: I can’t tell you how many, but it wasn’t any great amount. The pilots seemed to know what they were doing and pretty much did not get killed. Some of them did, but not a lot. So we weren’t like the infantry that tried to march onto Tarawa or any of those places. We didn’t do that.
[345]
EB: What was your job assignment?
CF: The entire time until after I got up and got tired of being an airplane assistant crew chief where I cleaned airplanes and started the engine, I always worked in an office.
EB: I know that you had mentioned being a squadron adjutant…
CF: Adjutant. A-d-j-u-t-a-n-t. Adjutant.
EB: Okay, and you were telling me about that on the phone. So can you go over that again what exactly you had to do?
CF: Well, as a squadron adjutant and before that I became 1st sergeant. 1st sergeant was somewhat in charge of, you were in charge of, theoretically all 250 men reported to you, 250 enlisted men, none of the officers. They reported to their own officers and the command squadron commander was always a lieutenant colonel pilot. Some of the lieutenants shouldn’t have been commanders because they didn’t know anything about that part of that. They just left it all up to guys like me to run the squadron, to see to it that the enlisted men did what they were supposed to do, that you had people on guard duty, people on KP duty, all that sort of thing.
EB: What’s “KP”?
CF: Kitchen police. Work in the kitchen. Let me tell you the worst one of those I ever had, we climb on a ship in Ft. Moultrie. As you’re going down to the hole, we were always down below someplace, as you were going down the hole to where we slept, he says “you go to the kitchen, you go to the kitchen, you go to the kitchen”. I was one of those guys that went to the kitchen first thing. So immediately I’m on board, I’ve never been on a ship, and I’m in this hot steamy kitchen where we’re serving a meal. I came out of there an hour or so later deathly seasick. We’re gone. We’re out in the ocean. That’s the worst experience I ever had. I had eight ocean crossings and the first two I was really seasick badly. So were a lot of other people. Then they invented the same thing you take now, Dramamine, to avoid that. So I bought it by the gallon.
[ 382]
EB: Were you awarded any medals or citations?
CF: Well, everybody got a good combat medal and everybody got a war zone medal for whatever war zone we were in. See, certain areas were declared war zones. Certainly there was a war zone in Iwo Jima and a couple of the islands because you know at night these little twin-engine bombers came over and maybe drop a 500-pound bomb or something. Not very exciting and not very deadly. Nobody ever got killed by one of them. So, but I was just you know, I was typing and doing paperwork, reading regulations and stuff like that.
EB: I’m guessing that you were never severely injured, or…
CF: Never. (goes on to make a joke)
[369]
EB: What was your highest rank?
CF: Captain.
EB: How did you get that rank? What did you have to do?
CF: [I had to] put in my own application. No, you just had to be, things were moving so fast that most of the guys, unless they screwed up somehow or another, and some of them did. Some of them just had to go downtown and get drunk and things like that. Well, their promotions were delayed or they didn’t happen at all, it just depended. But I behaved myself and so at regular intervals we were promoted. I remember when I was working with a commanding officer as a 1st sergeant or as squadron adjutant, I was working with a head honcho and he had to say “this guy should be a 1st lieutenant” or whatever. I remember he said to me, “make yourself a 1st lieutenant” so I did. Then I had to do the paperwork that went with it. Then one day he was making people captain and I said “I think it’s time for me to be a captain” and he said “okay”. That’s the way it was. But then after that, if you stayed in the service after that, promotions were pretty slow. I mean, you had to be in quite a while to go from captain to major and major to lieutenant colonel and on up. Then to be a general, there are one, two, three, and four-star generals. We did have two five-star generals at the end of World War II, MacArthur and Eisenhower were five-star generals, generals of the Army they were called. To get on up to general took congressional approval. It still does.
EB: How did you stay in touch with your family?
[429]
CF: Letters. Not often. My mother wrote to me every Sunday, mailed it on Monday morning from a little town near Richmond, Indiana, Greensfork, Indiana, and I had it to read on Tuesday at noon in Panama. Then when you get in the Pacific, it might take a week to ten days to get a letter from home. By then I was getting letters from Luce and some other old girlfriends I didn’t tell her about.
EB: Really?
CF: No.
EB: So what was the food like?
CF: What was what?
EB: The food? What was it like?
[436]
CF: It varied at different places. When we were in Hawaii, we had good food. We had our officers’ mess, we called it. Some of it was a mess, but we had a good cook, some old boy from Kentucky that knew how to cook. He was in charge of the officers’ mess. We had quality food all the time. On the islands, Canton Island was the first place. The only meat we had was Spam. They still make it, you know, they still sell Spam. Have you ever eaten any?
EB: No, I haven’t.
(briefly engage in a conversation about Spam)
CF: But you got to places like Iwo and even on Iwo, we had, I remember we had big gallon cans of bacon shipped over to us. The first day we were there, the same cook promptly set up his field stove, whatever they were, and had fried eggs and pancakes for the boys, the first day. That’s a miracle because that night people were shooting at each other and there was all kinds of gunfire during the night. We lost a couple of boys. I was amazed that he did that. So food varied. Some places it was just boring, very boring and other places it was good.
EB: Did you have plenty of supplies?
CF: We never had Thanksgiving without turkey. No matter where you were, the Army and the Air Force are good about that. I don’t know about the Marines. I’m sure they did too.
EB: Did you ever keep something special for good luck or anything like that?
CF: No, I just made myself captain, and that was it.
[465]
EB: How did people entertain themselves?
CF: Well, in Panama, you could get a pass and go downtown to Panama City. You had to be careful where you went. Panama City was a tough, rough place. They had opium dens down there before we ever heard of it in America. It is the melting pot of the world. I mean, nobody down there is full-blooded anything. So, but the guys still went down there. Most of the time, we stayed in the canal zone. The canal zone is an area were gave back to them, Jimmy Carter did. It is five miles wide, five miles on each side of the canal, that’s the canal zone. That was still American. We’d go down there and shoot pool, go bowling. We used to bowl for a dime a line. (begin discussing present-day bowling fees)
CF: So we’d go down and bowl ten lines, stuff like that. I don’t know, we always found something to do.
EB: Were there entertainers?
CF: Oh, the USO had shows constantly, well not constantly, but from time to time at your base. I remember I went to a Bob Hope show when I was in Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. Good ol’ Bob Hope, Francis Langford, and whatever his band is called, Jerry Cologna, and all those people. We had a place that seated 12,000 people and they crammed 20,000 in that night. So you had some of that. We even had some of that on Canton Island, that little stinking island down there in the middle of nowhere. We had some USO troops come down. I remember one of them was Ray Bolger. Did you ever hear of Ray Bolger? He played the tin man in the Wizard of Oz? Yeah. He’s a dancer. So we had some good shows, but we had regular movies. Down there, here we were 2° below the equator and it really wasn’t that hot during the daytime. We had a breeze off the ocean all the time. But we would go to the movies and sit there in leather jackets because it would get cold at nights, really cool. It was a great place to watch movies.
EB: Where did you travel while in the service? Well, you didn't really have any vacation time you said.
CF: No. Ten days. The coldest ten days of the year, 20° below each morning. It was the winter of something, I don’t know.
EB: What were your prominent emotions while serving?
CF: While where?
EB: While serving.
[508]
CF: Well, I don’t know that I had any. Every day was different. Every day you, I mean sometimes you were just stuck with an area where nothing changed so you just went to work and did your thing and went on. You developed some good friendships. I still have Christmas cards I get from guys I was with in Panama. The same thing on Hawaii, especially the three guys of us that bought the 1934 Ford for $300. When we had to be shipped out, I sold it. One of them had already gone ahead on a ship earlier. He got to Iwo and I got to see him about a minute. He had a grenade cap go off in his hand so he had to come back to the United States and have many surgeries after that. I heard from him for a long time. He lived in… Someplace in New York state. Our flight surgeon we had the whole time were in Iwo was a doctor up in the place where the Olympics were held up in New York State. We had a crazy guy that was a captain that was our radio officer from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. His name was Timothy Conley Foohey. He loved to get drunk and have the MPs after him. “What’s your name?” He’d say “Foohey”. Oh yeah. He’d go through this about five times, and then he’d whip out a list, he carried all kinds of identification. He was Timothy Conley Foohey. We had another officer there that was, I forget what his title was, but he was a captain. He was right here in town. I used to see him after the war quite a lot. He had a business in town here. John, I can’t think of his name. When you get to my age, you forget your grand kids’ names. I call them Fred. I’ve got four granddaughters and I just call them Fred. You know, Raven, Julie, Laura, that’s too hard….and Corey. I don’t know, there was always something to do. You found something to do. When we were in Hawaii, we had two great baseball teams, one on the Air Force and one in the Navy. They were made up of all major league ball players. They drafted these guys into the service, or they put them in. And all they did was play baseball or the USO. They entertained the troops. So I got to see famous people like, I became a Yankee fan because they were all Yankees that we had in the Air Force, Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, Scooter Rizuto, Pewee Reese, all those guys.
EB: They all played?
CF: They all played baseball for the Air Force-great team. Joe DiMaggio was just like a movie. The game was tied and in the last of the 9th with two people out, Joe stepped up, and hit one over the fence just like he’s supposed to. So that’s what we did for entertainment there.
EB: How were you influenced or impacted by your fellow men?
[ 554]
CF: I ignored them (jokingly). Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know whether you were influenced by them or not. I mean some of them wanted to be, I never drank, so that made me an oddball except there were always some other guys that didn’t drink. I never had a drink in my life and never smoked a cigarette. So you just found people that did things the same way you did. There was no point to me going down to the local tavern with these guys sitting there drinking all evening. What would that accomplish? Nothing. Unless you got drunk and some of them got in trouble. We had a pilot from right here in Indianapolis, Thomas Quinn, one of our P51 pilots and on Iwo he flew into a one-inch cable one day. He caught it in the front of his wing. It came back with a piece of cable like this. He was a nut. He got drunk one night down on Waikiki Beach in his motel room. He decided to rearrange it so he decided to throw the mattress out the window. The MPs took out after him and he commandeered him a ten-wheeler, a truck, and headed back for base 25 miles up and over to Scofield Barracks area. He got the truck sideways in a bridge, a small bridge, so what did we do to punish him? Just kept him from becoming a captain from 1st lieutenant for about an extra eight or nine months. That was his punishment.
EB: So did you ever keep a personal diary or something?
CF: Right here (points to himself). That’s hard, because you forget exactly. I knew I was on these islands, but exactly how long I didn’t know.
EB: Were you well aware of what else was going on around the world at the time?
[581]
CF: We all had a magazine, a newspaper I should call it, called “Stars and Stripes”. It was pretty current and pretty good. So yeah, you read that. We had radios on Hawaii. Yeah, you knew what was doing on. You know that there was a big war going on over in Europe. You know that if that ever ended, you’d get….see we were many times could have done things so much quicker if we had had more spies, more troops, more planes, more of this, and more of that, but they were intent on finishing that war first in Europe. The day that was over, then we started getting all of these things and it made it easier to finish up the war. We were in a bad war and a big one. We lost half a million troops.
EB: What did you think of your officers and your fellow soldiers?
[593]
CF: They were just a bunch of nuts. They were just people just like me. Most of them. I shouldn’t say. I have no idea how many came back. But those that had any brains took advantage of the GI Bill just like I did and got a college degree so that they could go out and make a decent living. Some didn’t. Some…everybody isn’t designed for college. Some people “just can’t” think of going to class and so on. So some were farmers and went back to work on the farm. Some came back and were auto mechanics and they became auto mechanics. I didn’t stay that closed to them to find out what all they did. In the meantime, when I was at I.U., I used to see these guys and we’d talk about World War II, all of us did, so you know they were just all very much alike. Most of the guys took advantage of the GI Bill. I got called back to Korea. They called back a lot of WWII officers. I was called back to be an instructor at Shepherd Field, Texas. By then, we were married and had a son two years old or something like that. Maybe he wasn’t that old, I don’t know. I didn’t want to go back into the war. I had been there long enough. We went to Scottfield, Illinois, had physicals and all that stuff. The physical was more thorough than anything I had ever had in civilian life. They were pretty good. So they said well if you feel like you shouldn’t have to go, you can go see an officer, some kind of review board who will look at your record and see what they decide. The review board was on man, Major Minor, I’ll never forget his name. Sounds like a musical. So he said “how come you don’t think you should go?” I said “I was overseas four and one-half years”. He said, “that’s good enough for me”. So he gave me a six-month delay in route, in other words my orders hadn’t changed, but I had six months before I had to show up at Shepherd Field, Texas. Well in six months, they had so blooming many old WWII officers they didn’t know what to do with them so they quit taking them in. So that was my Korean War experience.
EB: How were you changed after returning home from war?
[622]
CF: Heavier.
EB: The food got to you?
CF: Heavier. When I went in I was a farm boy. You know, we really worked hard on the farm. I weighed 148 pounds. I came out at about 178. I hate to tell you what it is now.
EB: Oh no. I won’t ask. So, emotionally and mentally were you changed at all?
CF: Well, yeah. I suppose you were. You appreciated the fine food and the fine housing and the flush toilets, you know, you appreciated the fine things that we have, but some people aren’t grateful as to what we have. I came out with a pretty good job. I was the second highest paid graduate from I.U. that year from the Business School with a master’s degree. I made the magnificent sum of $300 per month. Now that’s better than $21 per day once a month. I got the job because Mr. Peterson that owned City Securities called down to Harry Saurain, the head of the Finance Department, and said “I want a master’s degree guy to be our statistician”. Well, statistician my elbow, I was a general flunkey for the other guys that ran the company. I worked for really two people. One guy ran the municipal department, the municipal bonds and tax exempts and the other guy ran the corporate division. So I worked for those two people; I was their gopher. Then one of them quit at the end of five years so I inherited his job and then the other one died another eight or nine years later and in inherited his job. So all of a sudden I had all of it and then I was finally president of the company. In the meantime, I had hired some young men to help me, particularly one, Jim Martin, who is now, well he was president, but he quit being president because he wanted to just do deals which he does very well and makes three times what I made. That’s automatic now. These kids make good money. But you have to go to college and get a degree to do it, at least a masters, if not more.
EB: Do you recall the day your service ended?
CF: Yeah. I was down at Atterbury. My parents, and Luce, and my sister came down to pick me up. You know, at home, the whole family gathered around. Then I just wallered around and didn’t do anything until, this was early December. So the rest of the month and January, I just went back and forth to I.U. enrolling and that sort of thing. Then I think I actually started school about February 1st.
EB: That was December of 1945?
CF: Um hm.
EB: What did you do in the days afterward? Anything to readjust back to normal life?
CF: I ate a lot. No. It wasn’t that hard.
EB: Was your education supported by the GI Bill?
[660]
CF: Totally. To show you how far it goes, when I did my master’s thesis on that typewriter that this was typed on, my wife typed the main part and then we rented a typewriter with pica type which is 12 letters per inch, is that right? Something like that. This is elite, the other way around, to do the footnotes. So you take one page out, put it in and put in the footnotes in smaller type. She typed all of that and the government paid her 10 cents per page to do it. In the meantime, she was over at I.U. and was assistant music librarian. She already had her degree and had taught two years. She was assistant music librarian until I got my masters. Then that year, she taught nine miles out of town at Unionville. She taught all 12 grades of music out there and you know, made decent money. So you just took a day at a time. You just blended in and did whatever seemed like the right thing to do.
EB: Did you make any close friendships while in the service?
CF: I still get some Christmas cards from a couple of guys, but no, not like you do outside because you know this guy is in Pikipsee, New York and this guy is in Alison. Some of the guys maybe did. I didn’t.
EB: Did you join a veteran’s organizations?
CF: I went to one Reserve Air Force Meeting and ran into a guy named Gene Brown there that ran a big company here in town that was a big architectural firm that used do 90% of the school buildings here in the state. The big thing I did when I got out of school was financing all of these new school consolidations. You see we have 300 high schools now. We used to have 780. All of these people had new buildings like you have at North Central, or you’re at Park Tudor. Well, we did the financing for all of that. It was up in the billions. (Mr. Fritz temporarily loses his train of thought) So she [Luce, Mr. Fritz’s wife] was working down at I.U. and I was working and then she taught the one year. Then when we got out, child number two and child number three came along. She thought about going back to teaching and actually did teach one year up here. Our first year up here we lived in Fortville. You know where that is? It’s out U.S. 36 out that-a-way. So she taught one year at Charlottesville, Indiana which is straight east of Greenfield on U.S. 40 about ten miles. That building is now torn down. She taught one year, but other than that, I just worked all the time. We’ve built ten houses. We occupied our time building houses.
EB: Did your military experience affect your perspective towards war at all?
CF: Well, I don't want any more wars, but we still got them. I don’t know. Yeah, I suppose it did.
[705]
EB: I read that you are a 32° Mason.
CF: Yes.
EB: So what exactly do you do as a Mason?
CF: Nothing. Pay annual dues. I’ve never stuck with it. If you want to go down there and work hard, you know the Scottish Rite Cathedral is the biggest thing down there on North Meridian, you’ve seen that surely?
EB: Uh huh.
CF: Every square inch of that thing has oak trim. Everyplace. It has a dance floor that is on springs so it levels itself. If you had to rebuild it today, you couldn’t do it because the craftsmen that did it are just not available. But to go down there and work nights and be away from the family, I never wanted to do that. I have nothing done anything in blue lodge which is your first 3°. Everybody is a 3° mason. They try to get everyone to do that. No, I’ve not done anything with it. Most guys don’t. They have big memberships, but not that many work at doing the degrees and you now, I didn’t. I spent hours, we became charter members of Epworth Methodist Church out here at 65th and Allisonville and that was 40-45 years ago. I was in complete charge of raising all of the money to build the church. I worked hard in the church for quite some time until we really got rolling and got going good. Luce was the first piano player. All we had was a piano for the first church. We used to meet in the lodge in the American Legion Hall in Broad Ripple until we got this church built. So I worked on that and she worked on that. At about age 37 she took up organ so to make it easier we had a big organ in the basement which was then replaced with a really bigger one, the same size the church has. She played that for a long time and that was her thing. I never really did stop working at the church. I don’t do it now. I just sing in the choir. Somebody has to sing bass.
EB: Did you attend any of the reunions?
CF: I went to one. I went to my 50th high school reunion. I had pictures. Remember I was in a graduating class of 11, eight boys and three girls. I had pictures of these eleven so I had them blown up a little bit, took them and put them in front of each place where they sat that night at a banquet. You could see them, they looked down and would see the picture and then they’d look across table and see the guy over there and say it can’t be the same person. But that’s the only one we’ve ever gone to. You know, a rural school. It’s a consolidation now so you have three or four schools involved.
EB: What school did you go to?
CF: Modoc High School.
EB: And you only had eleven kids?
CF: Um hm.
EB: Is there anything else that you would like to add that I haven’t really asked you about?
CF: Well in the process of writing this [papers listing his actions during service] and sitting there typing it, I don’t know if you were interested in the military career so I pretty well covered, obviously I didn’t cover the day-to-day activities, I don't even know what they were. I pretty well covered my military career though.
EB: It looks like it.
CF: There are a lot of places where I did a lot of different things, but I always after that first encounter in Panama where I walked in and said, “I type,” I was always in the office. They don’t shoot at you in the office.
[Interview ends at 750 on counter]
END SIDE TWO
