PART SEVEN Oral Histories and Family Memoirs - Mountain Light ...

And I thought, “Well, all the other young guys are going, and I don‟t want to sit here. What am I going to
feel when all those guys come back if I didn‟t go?” And I said, “Okay, I‟ll go too.”
So I caught a bus to Spokane, went up, I think it was the Bon Marché Building, where this
enlistment place was for the Air Force. Went in there and enlisted. Stayed that night in Spokane, next
night caught a troop train to Ft. Lewis at the station up there on Third Avenue on this end of town. Two
guys had to sleep together in the bottom bunk. One guy was drunk, I remember, and wet the bed and the
other guy got up and sat up all the rest of the night! They took us in army trucks with the canvas over the
back, out to Ft. Lewis. That same drunk, got outta the truck, looked around, and said, “I don‟t think I like
it here,” and started to walk away.
I was in the combat zone, the Burma Campaign. Flew over it, near it, got a Battle Star for valor,
won the Presidential Unit Citation over there too, in that CBI theatre. During the war, World War II,
gasoline was rationed, tires were rationed. You had to go before some kind of board, the governing board,
to even get a tire. See rubber was very scarce because the Japanese had taken all the islands where the
rubber had come from, where our imports come from. Even whiskey was rationed. Ya know, you couldn‟t
go to the liquor store and buy whiskey without coupons. I don‟t know why but I know it was. Yep. They
gave you some after a flight—they gave you seven ounces if you wanted it. But I mean I think I got one
case of beer which they supplied us. One case of beer that whole year I was over in India. Took showers
in cold water. There was no hot water. Cold water all the time. Shower in it.
This one time we were delivering gas from India to China over the Himalayan Mountains at about
25,000 feet. One engine failed mechanically, so we had to salvo four hundred gallons of gasoline to
lighten the planeload so we cold safely fly into China and land. It was a B-24, what they called a
Liberator. It was a famous bomber too; it was comparable to the B-17. I never was in a B-29, they used a
B-29 to drop the A-Bomb. I saw one of them but I was in B-24s, B-17s, as a crew member. Road in a lot
of C-47s. I was a crew member in a C-54 too.
Some people will say that the B-24 was the better bomber; some will say the „17s. They both
were a four-engine bomber built by different [?] companies. B-17s, they were toughies. You know there‟s
documented proof that some of those after they had done a bombing run over Germany, when they was
really bombing Germany, you know—flak and so on what they encountered as they made their runs over
their bombing targets. Some of them had three engines shot out—only one engine going, and with one
engine they got back across the English Channel and landed safely in England.
Went to Kunming one time; that was when that airplane engine quit on us. Then we had to stay in
China I think three days until we got a new engine put on. The radio operator and myself went into town
at night. Talk to the girls. I remember one little Chinese girl, she couldn‟t have been over twelve years
old, thirteen maybe. Came into that restaurant where we were eatin‟ and propositioned us—twenty
American dollars. We didn‟t, of course. But I see another incident. I sold a carton of cigarettes on the
black market in China for ten bucks. Those Chinese, those people around those airbases were Chinese and
when an airplane would land those people would come around—ten dollars for a carton of cigarettes. It
was against the law.
I was stationed in India and we‟d fly to China, but we wouldn‟t stay in China, only long enough
to unload our gas and check the airplane out and come back. In India we lived in what they called “basha”
huts, all constructed out of bamboo. It was very damp and humid. The monsoons would come, rain all
day, everything was damp, everything would get moldy.
We never, very seldom got to a town. I went to a town a couple times. You‟d see the Indian
people, some were Protestants, some were Hindus, and each religion hated the other religion. If a Hindu
cast his shadow, if his shadow touched a Mohammedan, the Mohammedan would have to go home and
take a bath. And of course the women had their faces covered; only place was where their eyes could look
out of. Of course the highlight there was where I stopped to see the Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders
of the World, at Agra, India. And I saw it a couple times more from the air on a moonlit night, that big
dome just glowed. It was beautiful down there; all made of out of marble. They said it took eighteen
years—20,000 laborers—eighteen years to build this. Some king, some ruler of India built this in honor of
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