Oral History Program Seth Taylor Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 7 September 1972 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Seth Taylor Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 7 September 1972 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 Kelley Evans, 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Taylor, Seth, an oral history by Marvin Hansen, 7 September 1972, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Seth Taylor. The interview was conducted on September 7, 1972, by Marvin Hansen, in Taylor’s home in Ogden, Utah. Taylor discusses World War II and the railroad and how they shipped troops. He also mentions deferments he was given. MH: Mr. Taylor , I understand that you didn't go to war at all, maybe you could tell me a little background about yourself, where you were born and raised. ST: I was born in Farr West, September 18, 1914 and educated in Weber County. We had a four room school house here in Farr West. I received my Elementary education there and went to Weber High School. Then I went to Weber College and graduated from there in 1935. At this time we only had a two year college. I then went to Logan for two years and received my bachelor of arts in science in Logan in 1937. Jobs were difficult to find. I was a chemistry major and there was very little work in the Chemistry line here in Ogden. Lots of times wished that I had gone to California or someplace like that where they had a demand for chemists. In 1940, August 23, I hired out for the Union Pacific Railroad. I went to work for 40 cents an hour. This seemed to be a real good break for me because jobs were hard to find before this life had a little seasonal work. We would thin beats, pick fruit, and top beats. We would work in the fields here in the ward. So when we got a regular job in 1940, I thought that I was real fortunate. I can remember when I had to go pass a physical. I was hoping that I would pass this physical, because if I hadn't passed this physical, I would have been turned down for work at the railroad. Many things happened to me in 1940. On October the 4th my wife accepted my proposal, and we were married. A little later on in the 1 year I was preparing to go to work one afternoon and my wife came running out and said that something was happening to the country. She said we were being attacked. I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about, so we rushed back into the house. Sure enough they were announcing the airplane attack on Pearl Harbor. This was December 7, 1940. We were shocked because we had no idea that Japan would enter into this. We figured that probably Russia would win out over Germany. At this time Russia was in the process of lend lease. This country was lending Russia many million dollars of war equipment. So when we heard this news we were really astounded. Of course we knew that we would be in war totally in a very short time. As I recall war was declared the next day. The president had to call congress together and war was declared the next day. We were in an all-out war with Japan and her ally Germany. From here on a great many things happened. We were called in to register for the draft. I went to the meeting house over to the third ward and registered. This was on the fourteenth of December as I recall. It wasn’t long until they had our serial numbers dropped into the bowl. As I recall, my serial number was 121 and my order number was 641. I was rather lucky that my capsule was drawn from the fish bowl toward the end. This gave me some kind of lease on life for a while. As I mentioned before, I worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. Our transportation system was very vital and essential in the war program. There were deferments given, and I was fortunate in getting a deferment several times. I was 1 A to begin with. Then I was 1 B as the deferments were issued. As I recall at the first, Germany wanted peace with the whole world. When we finally got into the war and had to send troops over to Japan and to Germany, we were in an all-out war program. 2 I was always under the impression that rationing was a little more strict than necessary. I think that this program of rationing brought the people to be concerned more to realize that we were in a strangulation war with Germany and Japan. As I recall the rationing program hit us pretty hard. Automobiles were out and especially as time went on. As I recall in 1944 there were no cars manufactured. So we had to make do with what we had. Tires were a very scarce commodity. The only tires a person could get were recapped tires. This was a new thing to the industry of tire making. They were using reclaimed rubber. This was of an inferior grade and didn't wear very well. In fact, we waited and waited for a tire and started to Salt Lake and it blew out before we got to Salt Lake. We had to turn around and come back on a very worn out spare tire So you can see that the tires were not in very good condition. Also, gasoline was hard to get. If we went fishing we had to pool our gasoline stamps to get enough gas to get up to the mountains for a little fishing, and this wasn't very often. I saw many trains go through the Ogden yards. We always labeled the troop trains mains. These came in very often and it interrupted the flow of the regular freight and passenger trains. They were really curtailed. The passenger trains were side tracked and also freight trains when a main would come through. They would receive the best food and linens that we could furnish them. The boys on the trains were usually in good spirits. They were laughing and singing and the whole train would be a troop train of course. They had their own K.P. departments in certain parts of the train. The boys would prepare their own meals and they would.be served on the troop trains. Of course the freight was very important too. We had many trains loaded with equipment going through Ogden. As Ogden was a big supplier of munitions we had a lot of munitions shipped cut of Ogden. 3 Ogden at this time had about 60,000 people in it. Very soon the population jumped about 20 or 30 thousand because Ogden was the hub of supplying troops with munitions and naval supplies. We had later on a naval supply depot over in Clinton. Also we had a supply for the clothing here in the ordnance depot. As I mentioned before, I saw troops go through Ogden and I saw many of the boys and talked to them. Some of them were a little bitter about going and hated to see the situation come about. It was their opinion that it wouldn’t last very long. This was what most of us thought—that it wouldn't last very long. It would be ended in a very short while. As the days and months went by, we had to recover from the severe blow at Pearl Harbor. Most of our fleet was destroyed over in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor. So it took some time where we could get back in striking distance of Japan and do any damage to any extent. I had a very good friend that had worked with me that had been in the Marine corp. He joined the Marine corp. We heard from him from time to time and he reported on the battles that took place in Hiroshima and Midway and many of these islands in the Pacific. They were really severe. Many lives were lost, and the fighting was very intense, and the boys had to flush these Japanese out of caves. It was a very tedious job to go about to make any head way. Also, as I mentioned before, the rationing we had a difficult time getting shoes to wear and items like my wife mentioned stockings. Whenever we saw a line in the downtown district, we would get into line and wait to see what they were waiting for. Sometimes you would be in a line to buy a pair of ladies stockings, and other times you would be in a line to buy some bananas or something of this sort. So whenever we saw a line we got into it to see what might be available. 4 We changed grocers several times during the war. If you knew the right party in some of the grocery stores, you could get some of these delicacies like bananas and different fruits that were imported. We had a grocer that would take care of us in this manner. It was sort of a black market affair. You sort of had to look out for yourself too. Sometimes we would trade stamps like meat stamps for gas stamps and this would sort of work out to the person's advantage to have a few extra meat stamps or a few extra stamps to buy gasoline. We had sort of an exchange for bargaining for different stamps to get some of these hard-to-get commodities. I recall to the first attempt to manufacture the bomb. We were suspicious that this was what was taking place, we knew that Germany was probably on the very brink of discovering nuclear fission. Should they have gotten it, the world would have been dealt a severe blow. So we were hoping and praying that this event would take place in our country. We were hoping to be the first to achieve the nuclear fission. When we were successful in the manufacturing of the atomic bomb and the president gave permission to use the bomb on Japan, we felt that he did the right thing because many lives were lost over in the Pacific. Many boys gave their lives, and when this atomic bomb was dropped it brought the Japanese to their knees at a very earlier time had it taken place had they had to fight the enemy out of these caves and caverns and underground cities. So when the war came to an end, we were very joyous and happy about this event knowing, too, that the fellows could come home then. It wasn't long after the atomic bomb blast that war came to a close. MH: Did you see any prisoners corning on the troop trains at all? 5 ST: We saw prisoners come in on these trains and they were unloaded and taken into the compound in what we call Second Street. This was only a mile from where we live here. They were mostly Italian prisoners that were brought into our community. They were quite a large number as I recall. They were guarded very closely on the excursion on the train over to the compound. They kept these prisoners very closely guarded. They had high fences with a double fence with one within the other. They had dogs between the two fences. They had lights completely surrounding the compound. So there was quite a lot of effort made to see that these prisoners didn't escape. Most of these fellows were Italian. MH: What was your opinion when you saw them? ST: We felt more bitter toward the Japanese people than we did the Italian people because we felt that the Italians were indirectly concerned about the war. The Japanese people were directly responsible for us being brought about into the war. Some of these Italians would come out and help on some of the farms because of the labor shortages. They would have them do some of the long jobs that required some time and patients. MH: The Japanese, did they have a farm where they put a lot of Japanese people? ST: The people that lived here were just a family. I imagine that the whole family wasn't over six or eight. I always thought that the Japanese people that were in this country were given sort of a raw deal. Actually, ninety percent of them were good American citizens. They were inducted into the services; however, I don't think any were sent to Japan. They were used to help in the non-combat part of the war, like doing work around the ordnance depot and places of this sort. I am not sure. They might have gone over the other way toward Germany. I always thought that these people bad gotten sort of a raw deal. They were all rounded up and they had to register and make their allegiance to the United 6 States. I think many of them, if they had the actual need or necessity to fight hand to hand with the Japanese in Tokyo, these people would have given their lives for the United States. MH: How was it working for the railroad at this time? Was it a lot of hard work and a lot of overtime? ST: This is true. We had a good many hours and we put in a lot of hours. We worked seven days a week in many cases. People were doing a lot of work that they wouldn’t have done at any other time. If you know that your country is depending upon you to see that the transportation is going through and that the trains are prepared to take the munitions and haul out the war equipment and the troop movements, we knew that this had to go through. Like I mentioned before, the men were very cooperative and very few that laid off. There was a minimum of absenteeism. The jobs were manned at all times. The fellows that operated the trains were very cooperative too. They would stay on the job for many hours at a time to see that these trains were moved through fast and on time and sometimes ahead of time if possible. We had many changes in our railroads. We had many of our baggage cars changed over so that they could use them for troop trains. Some of the accommodations weren't the best. They were sent through in a very orderly fashion, and a very speedy fashion. They made sure that the troops got through first. Transportation at this time was very difficult, had very little transportation as far as the general public was concerned. As I mentioned, if you went on a trip on the train, you would have to wait your turn. The passenger trains were second and third to the movement of freight and the movement of troop trains. We knew that World War II was a trying time, and we knew that we had to win this war, and we knew it was by cooperation 7 that it would be won. It seems like when something of this sort happens everyone cooperated and does their very best. They go all out to see that the soldiers and the troops were furnished with the best that could be. I am sure that this really united this country when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. It really brought everyone to show their patriotism and show their unity and to show that they were sure that this country would win out. MH: I would like to thank you for this interview and what you have said 8