William A. Redmond Memoir - Illinois Digital Archives

So there was some exciting times. I never shot anybody and nobody shot at me but I had
times that I was called upon to make judgments that I hadn't really been trained to do.
Q: Did you receive any kind of training of any kind relative to what you were doing?
A: Not for that kind of stuff. I did for security stuff. See we used to go out - originally
we used to go out into plants that were producing material for the navy, and to try to set
up methods and things to safeguard the integrity of the system. And then we'd also go
into navy bases and the ammunition depot at Bayonne, New Jersey, and those places, and
try to set up some kind of program to prevent sabateurs.
We had another one, they - remember they captured those sabateurs on Long
Island. They gave those to me too, I had them for a while. And Winston Churchill came
to that base. He didn't stay very long but that's where he landed. So it was exciting, I
mean even though I wasn't actually in a theater of war. Responding to fires and I had train-
ing in fire fighting.
So I enjoyed - you know, it's hard to say that you enjoyed a wartime experience but I was
very proud of being in the navy. I was proud of my uniform and. . . . As I say I was one
of the few that, you know, was really doing something that was interesting and some of
it was in the line of my training, either the legal training or the training I got in the navy. I
gave some thought to staying in the service afterward, But the navy never bargains with
someone, they won't tell you where they'll put you. I then had a young baby and I didn't
want to go to Alaska or some other places, maybe the Aleutians. So I came home.
Q: During your initial experience when you were looking over some of the war factories,
was there much indication of sabatoge?
A: No there wasn't. The only reason is that I don't think there was any sabateur. You
know you get into that, you get some really funny experiences. I had to go all the way
down to - from Cincinnati, I was stationed in Cincinnati, and I had to go down to Wheeling,
West Virginia. Somebody had reported something very suspiciou~l in a plant that was manufacturing
war material and when 1-got there the thing was that there was an epidemic of
athletes foot in the drafting room. And of course you know everybody would write a letter
and stamp it secret and you never knew what the hell was in it. That was one of them.
Another one, I had to go - somebody had overheard in a tavern, overheard a plot to invade
the continental United States. In a saloon some fellows were talking about anchoring of
a ship some miles offshore and then driving some kind of tube into the bottom of the ocean
and the tunneling and coming up in Detroit. (laughter)
Another one, we had to go - you had to go investigate all this stuff. Another one was
that somebody asked - they were at a dance and they asked the band to play the Star
Spangled Banner as a dance number and because they refused, why, they were accused of
being Nazi. The report that we got was about Nazi sympathizers. We didn't know what
the hell it was until we got there.
Then there was two brothers that were . . . let's see, let me get this straight. I guess they
weren't two brothers. A Polish fellow and two German kids, of German extraction, they
weren't German. They were at school in MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], the
engineering school. And the Polish kid's room was in between the two German kids'
rooms. So before anybody got into war they had - remember all the fuss about the Sude-
ten Land and the Polish Corrider and all that sort of stuff - the German kids announced
that this Polish kid's room was the Polish Corrider and they were going to come and take
it over. And they had Nazi flags and they would parade in there. And then of course when
war broke out these guys were MIT kids and pretty well trained you know and they wanted
William A. Redmond Memoir - Archives/ Special Collections - Norris L Brookens Library - University of Illinois at Springfield - UIS