Oral History Program Robert Hatch Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 28 March 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robert Hatch Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 28 March 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Hatch, Robert, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 28 March 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Robert Hatch circa 1940s Robert Hatch 1944 Robert Hatch in England 8 September 1944 Robert Hatch 28 March 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Robert Hatch, conducted on March 28, 2017 in his home in Bountiful, Utah, by Alyssa Chaffee. Hatch discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Hatch’s wife, Susan Hatch, and Lorrie Rands, the video technician, are also present during this interview. AC: Today is March 28, 2017. We are in the home of Robert and Susan Hatch in Bountiful, Utah. We are speaking with Robert Hatch about his life and his experiences during World War Two for Weber State University’s World War Two in Northern Utah project. I’m Alyssa Chaffee, and I’ll be conducting the interview, and I’m here with Lorrie Rands and Robert’s wife, Susan Hatch. So let’s start out with when and where were you born? RH: July 23, 1921 in Woods Cross. AC: What was it like growing up in Woods Cross in the 1920s? RH: It was great. My family owned a sheep ranch, and I spent a lot of time on that when I wasn’t in school. I grew up during the Depression years, and it wasn’t too bad. My family were not too bad off, and so things were great. AC: Did you sell the wool from the sheep? RH: We sold the wool, that’s what we did. My job, I had several jobs, but it was all fun. AC: Did you have to help with shearing the sheep? 2 RH: No, we had 20,000 head of sheep, so it was pretty big. We had a company that were about ten or fifteen shearers all at once. And it would take several weeks to get it all done. AC: That’s amazing. So that kept you afloat during the Depression, then? RH: Yes. AC: How many brothers and sisters did you have? RH: When I was first born, I had a brother. He was six years older than me, and he died when he was twelve. So I was alone for seven years and then my mother had my younger brother. I had no sisters, I just had the one brother. And he lived till he was about 55. Didn’t know him very well because there was so much age difference. But he was a good boy. AC: Did you have a lot of friends growing up? RH: Lots of friends. There was one family of, if you were here in Woods Cross you’d know the Winegars. They own the grocery stores around. We lived close together, and we had a path walk between our houses, we visited each other so often. And there were three brothers, Stuart, Wayne, and Dick, and we all knew each other real well. They all died except Dick, and Dick and I are still friends and play golf. We’ve known each other over 90 years. So, that’s a pretty good friendship, isn’t it? AC: Definitely… RH: He’s the one that owns the Dick’s Store now. We were real good friends. 3 AC: What kinds of memories do you have with him? What would you do together? RH: Oh dear, well we all went to school together, but we weren’t too nice in school. We did things that weren’t too… we took a neighbors buggy, wagon really, and took it apart and took all the pieces up on top of the schoolhouse and reassembled it. We got in a little trouble for that one. LR: I can imagine. AC: So you had a whole buggy on top of the school house? RH: Yes. It’s not the same building, but it’s in the same place as when we were going to elementary school. It’s West Bountiful now, was Woods Cross growing up. AC: Do you know what the elementary school is called? RH: It’s West Bountiful Elementary. AC: How long did it take you to assemble the buggy on top of the school? RH: Oh, well it was the Winegar boys and me and a couple of others, took us about an hour. AC: That’s amazing, I’m impressed. RH: We got in trouble, and we had to take it down and we broke a couple of pieces taking it down. AC: Did you two go to high school together as well? RH: Yes we did. There was only one high school, it was called Davis, the one in Kaysville. We had to walk from our houses down on, oh, we didn’t go by 4 numbers then, but now I think its eighth west, and fourth north. And we had to walk up to second west. And the train came along there, the Bamberger, and we rode the Bamberger to school. AC: How long of a commute was that? RH: Well, it took about… it took about thirty, forty minutes to go to Kaysville, it had several stops. But we weren’t very nice on the train, so sometimes it took longer. We got in real trouble at the high school once. The football team had won the state championship or something so we were riding to school on the train and we weren’t too anxious to get there. And a bunch of us broke the air pipe off the bottom, which meant that the train didn’t have brakes. The brakes were set then, they couldn’t even move. So they had to disconnect the braking system, and we went to school without brakes. The only way you could stop the train was if you put it in reverse I guess. We went by the school and had to back up. Bunch of us got in a lot of trouble for that. AC: I’ll bet. That’s quite the story. What year did you graduate from high school? RH: 1939. AC: Was it a pretty large high school then? RH: No, I don’t think so. But it took the kids from everywhere. In all of Davis County. AC: So what did you do after you graduated high school? 5 RH: Well, I graduated in 39, and then I went to the University of Utah. There was a department store called Auerbachs in Salt Lake and I worked there part time when I was going to school. I was working as a clerk and in the warehouse. And later, I got a job with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. And I learned to teletype, and railroad Morse code, and they put me out on the line as a station agent. And I’d take train orders and give them to the trains, and what not. AC: Do you still remember Morse code? RH: Yes. It’s different from the regular Morse, it’s about eight characters different. The railroad had their own. Well, incidentally, because of that job, I was exempt from military. They called that war essential. If you were in a war essential job, you were exempt from having to go into the military. Well, I didn’t like that, especially after when they dropped the bomb on Pearl Harbor. I wanted to get in the service, and told the military that I was going to turn down my exemption and go in. And they said, well, will you please wait until you’re drafted? So reluctantly I agreed, and I was drafted about three or four months later. So, I got in the military in August of 1942. AC: Do you remember where you were the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked? RH: I lived down on West Bountiful, the house is still there. Friends of ours are still living in it. I was home with my father and my mother, and we heard of the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, and I had a date, and I wanted the 6 car keys. And I says, “Dad, give me the car keys.” And he says, “stupid, don’t you have any idea of what’s happening? Your whole life is going to change from now on.” And I says “why?” And he says, “Because they just bombed Pearl Harbor.” And I says “well where’s Pearl Harbor?” I had no idea. Boy, was he right. So, after I got in the military, my life changed. AC: How so? What are some of the changes you’ve seen? RH: Well, you know, in those days you didn’t get a choice of what you’re gonna do, and fortunately I was sent to Fort Douglas, and I was waiting to find out where they were going to send me and what I was gonna do. I lucked out, because I didn’t get in the infantry, I didn’t have any first hand combat to go through. I was sent up to Spokane, Washington, and joined an engineer regiment that built bridges and built airfields, built runways, that kind of thing. So, I started out as an engineer. And I was a private, I was nothing. And fortunately, I made four quick promotions to staff sergeant, and then they sent me to engineer officer candidate school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And after a few months, I graduated as a commissioned officer, Second Lieutenant in the engineers. And a short time later I was sent to Fresno, California, to an overseas replacement depot, where there were a lot of guys waiting for assignments. And they gave me my orders that said you’re an engineer, so we need engineers to be commanders of fire and crash rescue units. And you’re to pick 21 men, out of all these guys here in the records, you pick 21 people, and take them down to New Orleans, 7 Louisiana, for fire and, crash training. So, I picked 21, put them on a train, and we all went down to New Orleans, and I remember I lived in a tent on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. I was there just about a week and a half, and I got a cable that said I was to, as soon as possible, to join the 447th Bomb Group, in Rattlesden, England, to replace the commander, of the fire unit, that had just been killed. So, I had all my stuff there, and I decided to put it all in a big footlocker. I grabbed a footlocker and flew up to Boston, got on a troop ship, and sailed to Liverpool, England and I got there during the Normandy Invasion. I went down to London, and I found out that, in order to get to the base where I was going, I needed to get to a station that was about two miles away. And it was difficult to get any transportation at all, because of all the activity of Normandy. There was a fellow standing to the side of me at this counter, and he heard what I was saying to the clerk, and he says, “Yankee, I got a truck, and you can put your footlocker on the back and I’ll take you to the other station.” He called me Yankee, because if you were an American in England, we were all Yankees. So I said “great, appreciate that.” So, I went out and put my footlocker on the back. It was a flatbed and it was rather high, so when the footlocker got on the back of the truck, it was about the same height as the top of my head. So, when we got over to the station, instead of going in the front, he went in the back where all the luggage people, and as he was backing up his truck, he turned the key off, threw the door open, said “It’s 8 going to be close, Yank.” Those were his words: it’s going to be close, Yank. I had no idea what in the world he was talking about. He jumped out and he ran over by a cement wall. I didn’t know what to do so I got out quickly. And I thought, well. I went around the back of my truck to my footlocker. And I reached up to get the handles on each end, there was a loud explosion at the front of the truck, and blew the cement, blew the windows out, blew the cab full of stuff, and cement chunks and debris was flying over the top of my head and hitting the back of the foot locker. The only thing that saved me was the footlocker. I got my head behind it, couldn’t do anything else, but that kept me from getting a face full of rocks and cement from the road. And it was underneath the truck, it was hitting my legs, and cut them a little bit. But, when it finally cleared a little bit, I’m running through the dust over to where the truck driver was and he said, when he saw me, “boy that was close.” I wanted to know what was close. And he explained to me about the V1s. The V1 was a small aircraft, carried a bomb that was launched by the Germans out of France and out of Germany. Aimed only for London. And they would fly, there was a jet type thing, which when I heard about it I thought there is no way we are going to win this war with a country that’s so far advanced they fly airplanes without pilots. And they don’t even have a propeller! All our aircraft have propellers and pilots! Well, anyway, he explained to me that they had been dropping these bombs around 9 London, and of course later I saw several of them. But what happens is, they fly at about 5,000 feet, and if they’re coming straight towards you, the critical area was right here, about 45 degrees. If they run out of gas when they’re right there, they would fall on top of you, they would fall about where you were. If they ran out of gas here, or way back here, you were alright. Well, he was noticing this, as he was backing up, he noticed this plane was coming and got right there, quit, ran out of gas, and so, ‘it’s going to be close, Yank’. He knew, but I didn’t. I saw several of them after that. Was quite a while before they bombed the launching sites. There were several. Well over one hundred V1s landed in London, killed a lot of people, did a lot of damage. Finally got the V1 stopped in time for the V2. The V2 was a rocket that went straight up in the air and then right down onto London. Couldn’t hear it, couldn’t see it. And followed right behind the V1. It was scary because you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t hear it, couldn’t do anything before it exploded, you didn’t know anything. Well, I made it over to the base and I joined the 447th Bomb Group as commander of the fire and crash rescue unit. AC: Wow, that’s quite a story. RH: That was the first one. From there on, I had to witness all the takeoffs, to get about twenty or thirty aircraft taking off for the missions every morning. I had to have my crew there to witness the take offs and all the landings. We had a little trouble on take offs, some of them didn’t get off the ground, 10 crashed on the end of the runways, blew up. We had a few of those. Mostly after the mission, when they were coming back from the mission, some of them were fairly shot up, a lot of the crew members were injured. The pilot would shoot a couple of flares off, red or blue, to let us know if he had trouble in the aircraft or if he had injured aboard. So that would give us a clue on what to do and where to put the equipment and everything and prepare for his landing. And our job is to, if they crash landed, to get them out of there before they all burned up, and get them into the ambulances, ready for the medical people to take care of them. And there was, let me show you, if you’re interested… This was B-17. And it had a crew of ten. Four officers, and six enlisted people. The pilot, the co-pilot was here, the bombardier, and the navigator, they were all officers. They were here in the front. All enlisted people were in the rest of the aircraft. One was up here in the turret machine gun. They had 50 caliber machine guns. Then you had guns on each side, they were called waist gunners. And then they had this guy laying in the back, he was a tail gunner. Then they had the little guy that was here underneath, and they called him the belly gunner. So there were ten people that you had to worry about. And I just wanted to show you a model of the plane. LR: So how often were you on duty? Would it be a day thing? RH: I was on the base all the time. But my crew of 21: I had a sergeant, he was a first sergeant, then I had a clerk who did the paperwork for me, and 11 all the rest of the crew was twenty four hours on, and 48 hours off. Three different crews. That was how they worked. LR: Fascinating, okay. But, as the commanding officer, you really didn’t have a lot of down time? RH: No. I lived just across the street from the fire station. And so I really never got off duty. Now, this is during the war, and when the aircraft took off, I didn’t have much to do, except waiting for when they came back. So this one day I took a little tour, like I usually did, jumped in my jeep and I went around the perimeter track. I got over to a place where the aircraft was parked. And there was a lone B-17 sitting there, and there were three guys loading bombs on this one 17. And the bombs were loaded underneath here, right here. And, I thought, well, I’ll stop in there and talk to them a minute. So I stopped and chatted with them. I says, “how come you’re just loading bombs on the one plane?” And they says “well, it’s scheduled for a special mission, and we got to get these particular bombs loaded on here.” And they’re pretty scary about it. So I chatted with them for a while and then I got the urge to go. And I thought well, why do I need to go? I don’t have anything to do. So I hung around, and finally it felt like I just had to go. So I jumped in the jeep and got almost to my office, when I heard this loud explosion behind me. And I turned around, and that, where I was, that plane, pieces were flying up into the trees, and those three guys died. They got blown up. I missed it by a couple of minutes. 12 Well, another day, we found out that a lot of the times, if they flew into Berlin it was a long way to go from our base. So a lot of times, they didn’t have barely enough gasoline to get back to the base. I call it a base, station, where they were assigned. And this one day, was about six o’clock in the morning, I got this banging on the door. I lived across the street from the station, and they said hey, there’s been a big explosion out on the airfield, they said we better get out there to see what you want to do. So, I quickly got dressed and went over to the station. There was one truck left, and I got this one clerk, I said “drive us out there, get going.” And, we found out, if, after they load the aircraft with gasoline, if the crew chief would run up the four engines for a few minutes, and then cut them all off, the gasoline truck can come back and put a little more, what they call topping off the tanks. Would give them just enough gas sometimes to make it back without too much worry. So, this one day this gasoline truck was loading the plane. And they pulled up a little ways, to let the crew chief run the engines for a few minutes, and he was going to back up and… top off the tank, put some more gas in. So he pulled up a little ways in front of the plane. The crew chief started running the four engines for a few minutes, and somehow, I don’t know, they were called shocks, that were put in front of the wheels here so that the plane wouldn’t go forward. Where here, he didn’t have the shocks, or they jumped over the shocks, when he was revving up the plane, and it jumped forward, and the props 13 chopped into the back of the gasoline truck, so you can imagine what happened. Was a big explosion, gasoline made a big fire. Everybody ran out. Disappeared. And, the gasoline truck exploded. Set fire to everything around, including a couple of other planes. My crew went out, and they just jumped on the first plane they could find that was burning, and left the original one that was burning so badly. And when I got out there I could see that it was pretty useless, and this one plane, the first one that caused it all, was burning fiercely. And I thought, when it starts burning white, it’s going to explode. And when I got there, I looked over there, and it was ready, it was going to go. And these guys were working on this plane not very far away, and I told the one boy to get the truck with them out of there, and I yelled at the others. And there was a ditch that went alongside the parking ramp, and I yelled over and pointed at the plane that had started this whole thing that was getting ready to go, and I yelled at them to jump into the ditch that lay alongside. There was six of them, and I pointed over there, and they saw it for themselves, and all of them ran and jumped in the ditch. And I ran over there to try to make the ditch myself. But I didn’t make it. The plane blew up, and the concussion blew me off my feet, and landed me on my stomach, and kind of dazed me. I looked back toward the explosion, and here comes a big ball of fire right for me. Was one of the engines off the aircraft, and it had a piece of the propeller hooked to it, and it was bouncing along like that and it was heading right 14 for me. I didn’t have time to move, I couldn’t stand up. And I thought, well, Robert, this time, you’ve had it. So I just laid there and it came and hit right alongside me, bounced over the top of me, and went out into the field. Hit my right heel, just ticked it, and I wasn’t hurt. I got up, run over to where the men had jumped in the ditch, and they were all coming out. And all of them were fine, except one didn’t make it. He was hit in the belly with a piece of shrapnel. So I was anxious to get him to the hospital. Had one of the guys run up and let the ambulance people know we were waiting there. So they came and took him up to the hospital. So I got out of that one. AC: Wow, that’s amazing. Did the man in the gasoline truck get out? RH: Yeah, it was only the crew chief. He hit the back of the gasoline truck. He just left the plane, wasn’t much he could do. AC: So accidents like that were fairly common on base? RH: Yeah, not quite so bad, but, I had three pretty close, close shaves like that. Let’s see, can I think of another one… LR: Let me ask you, what type of equipment would you use? RH: We had 135 gallon pumping truck, and then we had a 2000 gallon water truck. Unfortunately, there was no water out on base, so all we had was what we carried. And you were pretty limited to what you could do, so a lot of it was, they lucked out. LR: So you’d have to assess which fire was more important to fight? 15 RH: That’s right. And in that instant, like I told you, there was several aircraft that caught on fire, and we couldn’t end them, so we just let them burn out. There wasn’t anything we had left to do. By the way, I got a soldier's medal, for they said I saved those six guys. LR: How long were you at this specific station? With the 447th? RH: I got there during Normandy, 6 June, ’44. And I was there till the end of the war. At the end of the war, they sent me to army headquarters at St. Germaine, France, and from there, they said they wanted to move the headquarters to Germany. And would we go, to me and a couple other guys, up to Germany, to find a place for the headquarters to come. And, that’s a whole other story, but, course, this was right after the war. And there was no place for us to stay, just the two of us, and a lot of the buildings around had been bombed and kind of a mess. We saw this one house that had a crack down the middle of it, and we thought, well, that looks like a good place, maybe we can stay. So, we went to the house, and a guy and his wife and about a twelve year old daughter answered the door. We told them we wanted to look at the upstairs, because we needed a place to stay. So, okay, we went upstairs and looked at the, hey, there’s some blankets and separate rooms, let’s stay here. Said okay. We told the owner we were going to move in upstairs, as long as he behaved himself he could stay. That sounds screwy now, but then, we would have shot each other just a few weeks before, or months before. Anyway, we stayed, 16 and there was no water in the house, no running water. No heat. This was getting cold weather. And my buddy said, look, there’s a window just above the bathtub. He says why don’t we build a fire in the bathtub? Maybe we can get some heat and all the smoke can go out the window. And I says, well, I don’t think so, but we could try it. Said, well, what are we going to burn? And I said, well, there’s a chair in the hallway. So we took the chair, broke it all up, threw it in the tub, started it on fire, but the smoke was…it wasn’t any good. And we put that out. There was a dumbwaiter in the hall there, and we says, there must be something in the basement. So we went down into the basement, and two of the sides of the room down there was pigeon holes, and each one of these holes was a bottle. We looked, and it was champagne. It must have been sixty or seventy bottles of champagne. So we loaded the dumbwaiter with champagne and hauled it up where we were, and maybe we tasted it a little bit. But the main thing is, hey, we need something to flush the toilet, so we poured the champagne into the toilet bowl so we could flush the toilet! We later found out that the guy that owned the house owned the champagne factory in town, that’s how come he had so much. And he said to us, if you guys won’t break up any more of my furniture, I’ll see that you can get—he didn’t care about the champagne—I’ll see that you get two gallons of heated water every morning. And we said, whoa, great, we 17 won’t. So that was pretty nice. And he did what he said. And he would give us the water every morning for a while. The only way we could bathe was, one of the old hotels, it wasn’t open, but it had hot spring water. They had different rooms with tubs for the water and we could reserve one of the rooms to have a bath. And the German ladies were assigned to put the water in and get the towels and all of that stuff. All we had to do was go there and bathe, if you wanted. So, I went there. In those days, you had what they called non-fraternization period. We weren’t supposed to deal with the Germans. We weren’t supposed to be carrying on conversations with them. This one lady that took care of this room where I was having this bath, I don’t know how we got started on it, but she was trying to teach me how to count in German. And I go ein, svein, drei, feir, and the word five was fymp, I think, but some way I get a foomp or a fump, and she thought that was the funniest thing she had ever heard. She was just… bust out laughing. So we kind of got a little friendship going there. And I had some candies that came to me in my rations, and it was illegal, but it was coming up Christmas and what not and she had some kids. So I gave her the candy, to say to give it to her kids. And a few weeks later, I got an order to meet with these guys that were searching houses for weapons, or anything that looked like it might be stolen from Americans, especially weapons. And I was given a section of the city for the houses to go in, to have these guys 18 search. Well, as it turns out, one of the houses was this lady that I just told you about. And when these guys saw the candy, they thought that it was illegal, so they took all the candy. I’m sure that the lady thought that I did that on purpose. I felt bad about it, that I couldn’t do anything. AC: Did you guys continue speaking after that, or was she pretty angry? RH: I didn’t, I left shortly after that. LR: What town were you in in Germany? RH: Wiesbaden. AC: Were you ever afraid that the man whose house you were staying at would try to come and cause some harm to you and the other soldier you were with? RH: You know, the worst part was the Hitler Youth. These were young kids. And when they found out there were two officers living upstairs, they would put piano wire across the sidewalk, where we went, at about where it would catch you in the head. And of course it was dark, there was no light and you couldn’t see anything. And if you run into this wire, your tendency was to jerk your head to the side, so what that did was put a big gash in your head. So after a while when that happened to us, everywhere we went at night we would put up our hand so the wire would hit us on the wrist. And during the daytime, if they saw us coming up the sidewalk, they would hook arms, about four of them, and come down towards you. You either had the choice to confront them or to go out into 19 the street. Well, we elected to go out into the street, and boy, they thought that was really good. So as soon as they got by us they would all bust out laughing, look what they did for us. So that was, that was the worst. And they would often string cables across the road, for jeeps, about the height of your head. And if you didn’t see them, it would decapitate the drivers and the people in the jeep. So there was that kind of a thing. We had to watch for that. But, after I got through that assignment, I was sent back to catch a ship out of Camp Top Hat, in, oh, where did we go, Sue, when we were there? SH: What’s that? RH: What was the name of the country? Wasn’t Germany, it was… SH: France? RH: No… oh, well. The Mannequin Piss? SH: Belgium. RH: Belgium, right. SH: Brussels. RH: Brussels. That name that I just mentioned was a statue of a little boy and his father came looking for him, and he was standing on a ditch bank, peeing into the water. They put this statue up, out in this town. And he, doing his thing, and he found him. And it’s called Mannequin Piss. AC: So back to Germany, how long were you stationed there? RH: I’d been there about six months. 20 AC: And then you went from Germany to Brussels. RH: To Brussels, then got on the troopship and came home. And I was assigned to Tucson, Arizona, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, as an engineer and fire marshal. And I was there three years and sent to March Air Force Base, Riverside, California. March was the headquarters of the 15th Air Force, and I was made the Fire Marshal for the 15th Air Force. And as such, I was sent to schools. I went to Arson school at Texas A&M, and Arson school at Purdue University, and then I was sent back to England. And I was fire marshal for all the American bases in England for three years. When I finished that, I came back to Travis Air Force Base in San Francisco. And while I was there, I got a phone call from the office of special investigations, which is, you might call it the FBI of the Air Force. They asked me, they said, we know you know a lot about arson. Would you be interested in coming to Washington and going to a special agent school, become a special agent and do arson investigations for the Air Force? And I said sure. So I was sent back to Washington, graduated from the special agent school, and was assigned to Hill Air Force Base. And at Hill, where do you think they would put me? They put me in the unit that did arson investigations, right? No. They didn’t. They put me in charge of the unit that did background investigations for top secret clearances. So, my job was to investigate all these people that needed to have top 21 secret. And I run this unit for three years, and then they said, how would you like to be a counterintelligence agent? So I was sent back to Washington, went to counterintelligence school, and shipped to the Middle East, to Turkey. Lived in Turkey, and I did counterintelligence, spy work, in the Middle East for three years. AC: What year was that? RH: I got sent over there in 1961, until 1964, or 1965, and I spent all that time in Turkey. And I traveled to Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, and Syria. Hated Syria. It was spooky, but it was kind of fun. I can tell you, some stories I couldn’t tell you, but there were a few stories. LR: I know enough not to ask. What type of a personal life did you have during this time? It doesn’t really sound like you had much of a personal life. RH: Well, you didn’t have your family to begin with, over in England when… I liked the military. My wife at the time, before Susan, hated it. And she had troubles, she was in the hospital about every station I went to, and so she was having trouble. And we had a couple of boys, and they went to the various schools. One of them went to English school, and the daughter went to English school. And, then when I went to Turkey, they went with me. I says “I’m going,” and my wife says, “Well, I’ll go if you quit the military after your assignment in Turkey,” and I said, “okay.” So after I finished the Turkey assignment, I retired from the Air Force. LR: Okay. Looks like you retired as a Lieutenant Colonel? 22 RH: As a Major. LR: I can never remember which one is which. RH: They’re exactly the same, Major and Lieutenant Colonel, except one is brass and the other is white. That one’s brass. I went in as a private, came out as a Major. And the flag up on top, I was sent on an honor flight, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. LR: I know what that is. RH: I got that flag, and also that World War Two medal that’s hanging on the side there. LR: That’s really cool. AC: What year were you and your first wife married? RH: Two months before I went into the service. June of 1942. AC: Oh, okay, so the whole time then. Interesting. RH: During the war, she wasn’t with me. I was gone for a year and a half. LR: How often were you able to communicate with your wife while you were gone? RH: Well, I could write letters, which I didn’t like. And she didn’t like it either, so we didn’t have a whole lot of communication. AC: So you said it was a year and a half, was that while you were out in England, then? RH: Well, you know, I went from England to France, from France to Germany. Oh, I forgot one thing, but when I got through in Germany, I was asked if I 23 would go to Switzerland and, a lot of, I guess I should explain this... Sometimes when they’re flying back from a mission, the planes couldn’t make it, either because of gas or mechanical troubles. They would fly into Switzerland, and land in Switzerland, which was a neutral country. They weren’t in the war. And the crews, after they landed, were supposed to contact their bases and get back to their bases. Well, some guys decided, hey, this is too good, I’ll just stay in Switzerland, meet the Swiss girls and get married and have a great time. So that’s what happened with some of them. They were deserters, as far as we were concerned. So I was directed to go into Switzerland, locate these guys, all I could. I didn’t have the authority to arrest them or anything, all I had to do was identify them, locate them. So I went all over Switzerland, locating deserters. AC: How would you find them? RH: It was kind of easy, you’d start talking to people, and they’d say, oh that American… So I’m sure I missed a lot of them, but I did locate several. Whatever happened to them, I don’t know. That wasn’t my job. All I had to do was find them. AC: And you just had to report back to… RH: I just took the report and reported back to the military. AC: Interesting, so the Swiss people were pretty easy to work with, then. They helped you with finding these people pretty easily. Did they know who you were? 24 RH: They knew I was American; that was about all. I used a cover in Turkey. Once I got to be an agent, you took off the uniform, your rank was then classified. Nobody knew what you were. The reason for that was, if you were interrogating somebody with a higher rank, they would give you different answers if they thought they were higher than you were. So they never knew whether you were a general or a private. So, that’s the reason the ranks were classified. And so I went around England, Middle East, dressed in civilian clothes, and I just told them I was a sort of a well to do American, just over there on vacation. Just, as a visitor. And getting through some of the borders was a little bit difficult, sometimes. And you were always a little frightened that they would somehow identify you as what you really were, you know, a counterintelligence agent looking for information. AC: Did anybody ever figure it out? RH: I never got caught. AC: Did you have to learn a few foreign languages in order to do that? RH: No, I thought it was better. I liked to know enough of the one language that, if I saw a group of guys talking, I’d like to know what they were saying, especially at borders. Cause they’d take my passport, and then go over there and get a group of guys together, and I would like to know what they were talking about. But I really didn’t…. if I was just an American over there on a vacation or a sight-seeing trip, what would I know about the 25 language, see? So I really didn’t understand a lot of it, and I thought it was better if I didn’t know it. Now, I wish I knew another language, but we don’t. AC: That is very interesting. So you knew just enough to pick up on some conversations here and there? RH: Yeah, so I got to where I could do pretty well in Turkey. There was a coup in Turkey… well, all this stuff’s coming back to my head. There was a coup, you probably heard of it recently, there’s been a couple of coups in Turkey. Well, I was in one. My daughter was going with a man whose father was a colonel in the Army. This was in Turkey. And one morning, he came banging on the door, and he says, “I thought you might like to know, that there’s a coup going on, and the Army is taking over the radio station and they’re trying to take over the whole country.” And we didn’t have phones or anything like that. I said, “well, thanks for letting me know,” and I thought, well, I better get to my boss, who was the counterintelligence chief, and he lived three or four blocks up the road from where I did. I thought, well, I better get the car and go running up there. So I jumped in and got in the car and got just a few houses away from him. And I was stopped by this army of guys. They all had rifles, and they grabbed me and jerked me out of the car, and put rifle barrels in my stomach, wanted to know what I was doing. And I said, well, you know, I live in that house right there and that I’d been on a trip. And so I said I’ll drive up to the 26 house, they said no you won’t. They kept me surrounded, and they pushed the car by hand up to my bosses house, which I said was mine, and they said, you stay in there and we never want to see you again. So then I went up to my boss, and he was out on the balcony. He says I saw everything that was going on. You think those guys would have rifles in your belly was all, there was twice that many down on the side of the road. I said thanks. He says, well, we got to get to the embassy, and the American embassy was about six blocks away. I said wait a minute. Those guys see me again, I’m done. He said, “Let’s go the back way, we’ll walk down through all the backyards, down through the trees.” So that’s what we did, we made it, they didn’t catch me. I made it down to the embassy and we made it up to the roof. And the Turkish air force was shooting into the Army headquarters there, and in order to do so, they almost had to fly on top of the American embassy. And pretty soon, we got word: If you guys don’t get off the roof, you’re going to be next. So we got off the roof. The coup didn’t work, and so far never has, but I got out of that one. AC: So the streets were just pretty chaotic then, during the coup? RH: Yeah, you couldn’t do anything. AC: Wow, stay inside. Try not to be seen. That’s amazing. So you said you didn’t much like Syria, was it also pretty chaotic and violent out there? 27 RH: Syria was terrible, I hated it. And the borders are difficult to get through. And you never knew whether they believed you or not. And, you didn’t want your identification known, really. I had to be an American, but, I wasn’t about to tell them I’m a special agent working with, you know. AC: So did you tell them you were a tourist in Syria as well? RH: Oh yeah. AC: Did you family go with you to Syria? RH: No. I took them to Saudi Arabia, once. Later my son later did a LDS church mission there. RH: But you were, you were always worried about your identification. You didn’t want to be identified. AC: Were there ever times that it felt close, that you felt that someone was onto you a little bit? RH: Couple of times. We had one, I can tell you this one. We didn’t trust this guy that we had been watching for a few days. And we thought he was an agent for Czechoslovakia, but we weren’t sure what he did. He went out every morning from his apartment, lived up on the 5th Floor, and we decided, let’s search his house. So we had agents that are locksmiths and special photography people and all this. So, we waited for this guy to leave, like he always did every morning. And we said, “Well, we’ll wait for this guy to leave, and then we’ll go in.” So, he left. Now, if you had cell phones and all that stuff, it would be easy. But we didn’t have cell phones, 28 we had to do everything personally. So we were told that he had gone, and so the locksmiths got in, opened the door, and we went into his place. And we decided which area we wanted to search, we’d have photographers take pictures of that area. And then we’d go searching through there, see what we could find. Then theoretically when we’d get ready to leave, we’d check the area against the photograph to see it looked the same when we left. Well, we got going in there and we got the word that the guy was coming back. He carried a weapon, and we knew he did that. And we had weapons under our arm, hid, but we didn’t want to get into a shooting problem if he caught us in his apartment, what would he do? So, we got word he was on his way back, so what do you do? You can’t go through the photography and all that bit, and so I went out way down in the end of the hall. And I thought, well, if he comes in, I’ll just walk up the hall past him, because he didn’t know me, like I was a member of the apartment. Well, instead of him coming up to his apartment on the 5th floor, he stopped, and apparently saw a friend or something, and stopped on the 3rd floor and went in. And when we found that out, we went back into his place, did everything we could, checked it against the pictures, not knowing if he would come up. We got in there, checked the pictures, slammed the door, and left. AC: Didn’t even see you. 29 RH: He didn’t, he didn’t. We found out who he was, later, and we followed him all over after we found out what he was doing. LR: After you retired, did you come back here? RH: Yes. LR: Okay. And how did you meet your current wife? RH: She had just graduated from BYU, and so she went to work for the same department as I did. LR: So you have two children? Is that correct? RH: I had three by the first wife. She’s deceased. And Susan and I have one. But Susan and I have been married longer than the first wife. I wish I had had Susan during the war. She likes it. She would have been good. AC: What year did you and Susan get married? RH: 1976. AC: Okay. You guys have been together a long time. RH: Yeah, forty some odd years. AC: So what did you do career-wise after you retired? RH: After the military? I was in the Department of Social Services, and I was the director of welfare in Salt Lake City. And I was that for about three years, and then I was made field director of all the welfare offices in the state. So I traveled all around. I was a private pilot, so I’d fly. Had my airplane down here at the airport in Bountiful. And I would fly from one office to another, which is kind of fun for me, but I didn’t have to… I saved 30 them money, but I didn’t have to stay overnight at hotels. I was flying in and flying back. But I went to every welfare department in all the cities. I retired from that job after twenty years. AC: What is the age gap between the children from your first marriage and your child with Susan? Is there a pretty large age gap? RH: Yes, 30 years. My first daughter, she’s 73 years old. My second daughter is 34. And my two sons, of course, both of them married and got kids and grandkids, they were a few years younger than the daughter. One son was born in Travis Air Force Base, and the other son was here in Woods Cross. So… but I traveled quite a bit. And… I’ve had sort of an interesting life. AC: Definitely. RH: I look at it as three different ones. First, before I went into the military, during the military, and after the military. Three different lives, completely. LR: I can understand that. AC: What do you think are the long lasting impacts of World War Two on your life? RH: Uh… well, don’t do it again. I was real fortunate that I wasn’t put in the infantry and did first hand combat. I was pretty, pretty fortunate for that, I thought. On the other hand, I escaped getting killed a few times. Even after I was out of the service. Susan and I were visiting friends in New Jersey, and we decided to leave. It was in the evening. We flew out of the 31 Newark Airport, in New Jersey, on the 10th of September, before the planes flew into the towers. We missed that by twelve hours. Flew out of the same airport, grabbed the plane, passenger plane, and we flew off. We were amazed looking at the two towers. Twelve hours later, they flew out of the same airport, flew passengers into both towers. So we missed that by twelve. Then I came home. Remember the big East wind we had here? LR: The big east wind? RH: Just a couple of years ago? LR: Oh yes, I remember that very well. RH: Well the wind was really blowing here, and Susan and I were watching my flag out there. I got a flagpole out there, and it was really going, and I thought all it’s going to do is tear it up. So I don’t want that, I want to go out and bring it down and bring it in. So I went out, and hauled it down, and I had a terrible time trying to disconnect it, because the wind was blowing in. Finally got it off, came running into the house. Threw it over there on the couch, and went back and looked out my bedroom window to see things. One of the big pine trees blew over, grabbed the flagpole, broke it off at the top, and the flagpole and the tree were out, over the retaining wall out in the street. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had been out there by the flagpole. I missed that by a minute. AC: You have nine lives. 32 LR: Well, you’ve been talking for a long time. I appreciate what you’ve given us. These have been some great stories. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate your willingness to talk.