Oral History Program Charles Polson Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 05 August 1972 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Charles Polson Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 05 August 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. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Polson, Charles, an oral history by Marvin Hansen, 05 August 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 Charles Polson. The interview was conducted on August 5, 1972, by Marvin Hansen, at 913 6th Street, Ogden, Utah. Polson discusses how he got involved in the military, his job in the military, and some of the experiences he had during the war. MH: Chuck, could you tell me a little bit about where you were raised and a little about your background? CP: I was born in Utah and raised in Wyoming. I lived on a ranch until I was about 21, then I joined the service. MH: What year did you join the service'? CP: It was in 1942. MH: How did you come about joining the service and what prompted you to join the service? CP: I was working for Hill Air Force base. I knew that I would be going into the service anyway, so I decided to join when I saw the advertisement to fight with tools. So I went in as an aircraft mechanic. MH: What did you do out to hill Field? CP: I was an aircraft mechanic. MH: How did you get into that field? CP: I went to Erwin's Technical Air Industry in California for a year before and graduated from there. Then I got a job with Hill Air Force Base. MH: Tell me how you got into the Air Force. CP: Well, I went down and enlisted here in Ogden. There was a cousin of mine and we were going to go together to Fort Douglas. They promised us when we went in that we would be 1 in their together. When we got down to Fort Douglas, they sent him to Nevada and me to Kentucky. In Kentucky was where I got my basic training. I was supposed to have one month of basic training and I ted two months. It was right in the winter. It was pretty nice down there. MH: Did you have a training school that you went to after your basic training? CP: After basic training they sent me to a training school for engine over haul mechanic. I had fifteen weeks of that. Then after I took that, they sent us down to Stimpson Field, Texas. They gave us work there to do for three or two months. Then they sent us to Georgia. That was our P. O. E. (port of embarkation). Then they sent us up to camp Killmore, New Jersey. Then we got on a ship and went on over to England. That was in 1943. They kept us over in England for a year. Then I first got over to England they didn't have any work for any engine over haul mechanics. So they told us to go into some department to do what we wanted to do, so I sent to the electrical department. I rebuilt starters and generators, alternators, retraction units. I also worked on all kinds of bomb bay door motors. I worked on electronic super chargers over hauls. I worked on systems like the Minneapolis Honeywell. The types of planes were B17's, B24’s, a few B51's, a few B 38's. MH: What did you do while you were in England? Did you see a few bombings? CP: Yes, we saw London get hit. Also we saw that they hit around Cambridge some. We were at the first strategic air depot in British Saint Edmonds, and they hit pretty close there a time or two. I was there for a year, and it was during D Day. I was there and I wasn't getting any rank or anything over there. I had as high as warrant officers working under me. I decided that if I couldn't get any higher than a PFC rating doing that kind of work that I would transfer. So I asked the Captain for a transfer, and he sent me over to Brussels, 2 Belgium, and put us in a mobile repair unit with 12 men going out and picking up aircraft behind the lines. I was getting them ready so that they could be sent back to England so that they could be over hauled and put back in service again. Whenever one was down, it had to be picked up or it had to be salvaged out. Our crew was one of them that was fixing them up and sending them back. We had to travel to wherever they were, and sometimes they were out in the grain fields. Sometimes they were on the edge of a city some place or maybe they may be way out, no telling where. Sometimes they would be in mud fields. We were fighting mud over there. That Belgian mud was terrible. If you had a plane come down in that, you had a real problem getting them out. Some of them you would have to hook to Caterpillar D8's or maybe a C2 wrecking outfit and use all three of them to pull a B17 out of the mud and get it out on the ramps again. We had to repair these and get them back, and we had to call a pilot to come and get them. We would do all the running up and everything except the test flying of them. We would wake up some nights and there would be Germans strafing, trying to get these air craft that we had down. We sometimes would have up to as many as nine aircraft in one bunch, and we would have to put them all in a big circle so that they couldn't go strafing through and hit them all. We had just tents to live in. We had 20 below zero with 18 or 20 inches of snow on the ground. We had our tents out in the circle of the aircraft, and we had all the aircraft demolished except two out of seven. We had one aircraft that was ready to fly out. The ninth air force headquarters came in and said that the eighth air force had given them priority over it. So we had to fix up another in case we had to fly out. That was getting about the time of the Battle of the Bulge, and they were within three or four miles of where we were. So we got gasoline cans full of gas underneath all the aircraft ready to ignite them and set them off, so that we 3 could get out of there the best way we could. We had one aircraft that had to have one engine, and four of us changed one engine in four hours. It usually takes eight guys six hours to change it. We had a radio out there so that we could listen and see where they were. We had that plane ready to fly out in about four hours’ time. That was from the time that we pulled the engine to the time that it was ready to fly. We found out that they had barely stopped the Germans about two or three miles from where we were at. So we sent this one back to England again. They moved us again down into Oreleans, France. That was a city that had been leveled as flat as anything, and it was a big city too. They kept moving us all around England. (I think he meant France and Belgium.) MH: How did these aircrafts land, was it close to an airfield? CP: They were forced down. MH: How would they get them up in to the air again? CP: We would, have them close to a grain field or something like that, and they could take off. They usually tried to land then in a grain field, or on a German dilapidated air field. The German's hangers and the like look like they were old barns or old houses or something like that. So we got to work around quite a few of them too. It was pretty good. We generally lucked out to find a place for them to land and take off. It was pretty level country. MH: Do you know anything about the Germans’ defense and what it was like? CP: Towards the last you could say that they were getting quite desperate. They sent out an order that if they should meet any Americans or take any Americans prisoner, they weren't to take them alive. They were to shoot them. We tightened up our forces too. We had machine guns and everything just in case, like we were out in the open where we 4 didn't have any protection. We had to dig fox holes and have them so that we could get down into them pretty fast. We had machine guns there all the time. While one guy kept watch the rest slept. It would have been pretty dangerous if the Germans had come in there, twelve men against quite a few of them if they happened to drop in on us. It wouldn't have been very much protection. They always had quite a few buzz bombs coming over all the time. We could hear them coming, and we would lay there in bed, and if we heard them shot off yon could figure about a 120 seconds until they would come down and blow up. We would go out sometimes and watch the gun placements firing at them. They would fire at them with tracers so that you could see where the bullets were going too. They never did shoot one very often that we could see. They were too fast for them. We had one two go off that were real close to where we were. One of them went off when it was in the middle of the afternoon. We heard one coming, and I was working on a B17, and one of the guys yelled and said that there was a buzz bomb coming so we would get out of the aircraft just in case. I went out in front of the aircraft and lay down on the ground. That Buzz Bomb hit about a quarter of a mile from where I was at, and it hit a brick home with two old ladies in it. They were all mangled up, and they were alive when they left there. They took them to a hospital. I never did hear if they lived or not. They probably didn't. At any rate, you would have never known that there was ever a home there. I watched the airplane when it went off and the concussion of it blew the aircraft so that one wing of it almost hit the ground. I could see daylight underneath the tires of this aircraft. It was a B17. Then at night we could go out and it would almost be like daylight because of motor shells and others going off. You could see pretty good almost any place that you wanted to look. 5 MH: I guess that you didn't see too much action? CP: Well, I saw quite a little bit. All the time of the Battle of the Bulge, they had truck after truck going by. There was quite a few times that they had to go up around where they were fighting to get parts and stuff from another aircraft that was forced down that was salvageable. Lots of times we had to go get a jeep from the motor pool, and they would drive us up to where this aircraft was. Quite often we would get around where they were firing bade and forth to each other. MH: Did you have any close calls? CP: The closest that I think I ever had was one night every one of us decided that we all were going to go into town and sleep in a hotel where we were warm for a change. So we went in and the next morning when we woke up, there was a German aircraft and an English aircraft and an American aircraft all dog fighting in the air. So we thought we had better get out and see what was going on. That was the time that they strafed enough that they got all but two of our aircrafts. One ME 109 German aircraft was shot down. He had made one pass around. And there was a gun emplacement out there. It was a 50 caliber, and one of the fellows got wounded in the leg. He shot him in the ankle and almost blew his foot off. His partner went out there and took a shot at him with a fifty caliber and hit him right in the head. Then he crashed a few feet from our tent. The auxiliary gas tank of this aircraft rolled under the nose of a B24. It was one that hadn't even been hit. It burnt the whole nose off of it. So as a result, it completely demolished that one. When we got out there after all this had quieted down, went into the tent, and a shell had been shot completely through the tent, and it went three inches above the top of my bed. That thing exploded in there. Everything was so pulverized—the tent and everything that we had 6 hanging in there. Our bedding and everything was so pulverized with metal that it ripped up the tent quite a bit. So I went in and took a picture of the tent inside with the flaps closed, it was so light in there. I think that if we had been out there all of us probably would have got it. There was something that night that told us to go to a hotel, so we did and that was what happened. MH: Did you see many German prisoners at all? CP: There were a lot of them that ate right in our chow line. They would have ten or fifteen at a time that would be in there. They would eat right there in our chow line with us. MH: What was your opinion of them? CP: Oh, they were just as good as we were. They were people who didn't want to fight any more than we did. They looked to me like that they were just as content to be there as they were to be home. They were out of the fighting then, and they quite enjoyed it. At least those fellows acted like it. They weren't barbarous or anything like that. They were just like you and I. They acted as though they knew it had to be done, and they were doing their duty. When they got over there with us , they weren't barbarous with us at all. MH: Did you see any officers on the other side? CP: Yes, there were a few officers that were in prison. They were under guard. They would take them through in B17 or C47 or something like that. It was quite interesting. There weren't any one of them that thought any more than what we thought. They were just doing their duty. MH: What would happen to these prisoners of War? 7 CP: They would take them probably back to the United States to some prison camp. I never did hear for sure where they took them. Of course they had a few small prison camps over there, but I don't know just where they were. MH: How long were you in the service then? CP: I was in the service three years, one month, and twenty-one days. When V.E. day was declared, I was in France right on the outskirts of Paris. We got in trucks and decided that we would go into Paris and see what was going on. Boy, in there they were going crazy! You would get in the city limits and the people were all out in the streets running around going crazy you know. They were drinking and everything else. We decided that wasn't any place for us, so we were just going to go around the block and go back. It took us two hours to get around the block. They would climb all over the truck and just acted like they were a bunch of ants. They were crazy. They just didn't care what they did. There were some people that were stomped to death and everything else. It was quite a site. MH: What was your opinion of some of the countries at that time? CP: Belgium and Luxemburg was just as high a class of people as the Americans. Some parts of England were real good, and some parts of England were real low. The English don't like to work too well. They like to have their tea times. They work for an hour, and then they have tea, and then they work for another hour and have tea. Then they got to have two or three hours for noon. Then they work for another hour and have tea. Then they work another hour, and then they quit. They were quite good people most of the way through. There we were, it was kind of the slum of England. The French were terribly lazy and dirty. I didn't like the French at all. MH: What was the reason why you didn't like the French at all? 8 CP: Mainly they were dirty in there morals. They would never clean up anything. They were quite a messy country. They talked about having their fashions and everything over there in Paris. When I was over there, I couldn't see that there was any fashion. It didn't look to me like that they were as far along as the United States was, even considering the time. In Belgium, just as soon as you get over the line you could tell a difference. They scrub their sidewalks and kitchen floors, and they polish their door knobs. They keep their homes painted and everything is just beautiful. There were wider streets. In Brussels, their streets are just about like they are here in the United States. They had American cars running on them. Of course they had foreign cars, but they did have a lot of American cars. Then on V.E. day they put us on C 47's and took us back over to England. We were there for a month or two. The second strategic air depot was where we were. We were there for a couple of months, and then they brought us back home on the Queen Elizabeth. We were just three and a half days coming over. They were trying to break a record for the queen Mary. They really brought us home in a hurry. There were 23,000 soldiers on the Queen Elizabeth coming back. They packed them on there like sardines. MH: You didn't tell me what you thought of the Germans and their country, maybe you could tell me a little bit about that? CP: Well, I didn't get into the country so much, but I got into Luxemburg. Their houses were nice. I mean the buildings were nice. They were quite well advanced. They were clean. They were a lot like the Belgians. They kept everything pretty well clean. After we got back into the United States, we were coming across Ohio and they declared V.J. day. Of course everyone on the train, every time it stopped, they would have to go off 9 and buy a case of beer. They had beer floating around there just like a river. They were sure drinking. Everybody was sure tickled. I don't think that there was over half a dozen of us that didn't drink while we were coming back. We sat back and watched them. We got quite a kick out of them. MH: Did you get to see any Russians while you were over there? CP: No. MH: You never did say what you did over here while you were in the service here? CP: It was mostly going to school and taking my basic training. I spent about a month in the hospital because I had an operation on my spine. I spent about twenty days home, and that was when I got married. They told me that I wasn't going to be able to go ever seas with my outfit, so they told me that they were going to get me an agricultural discharge, so that I could go back on the ranch. They put it through. But it didn't come through until I was half way across the Atlantic. So I went on over. MH: Could you come back at all? CP: No, I couldn't. They were in too hot of waters to turn around and bring someone back. MH: They wouldn't let you come back once you got over there? CP: No, they wouldn't let me come back once I was there. They needed everybody that they could get over there. MH: You said that you had an operation? CP: It was a cist that was on my back. They took it off for me. It was in the Brooksfield General Hospital. It was really a nice hospital. It was a real big one. They really gave us good treatment over there. The only thing was that they had a lot of officers that were 10 doctors and the like. Some of them were getting experience, and some of them were just doing their job. MH: What was your opinion of the medical? Did they treat you well? CP: All in all, it was really well. They knew what they were doing. They were really doing a real good job. It was real good overseas too. They had some good hospitals set up over there. Anything that we ever needed , they sure took care of us in good shape. The only time that we ever came close to ever needing a hospital was when our tent burnt up. There were three of them that were put in the hospital and I was supposed to have gone to the hospital but I didn't. I just went over and visited them. They were going to make me stay, but I couldn't. MH: When your tent blew up what happened to all of your clothing and bedding? CP: It all went with it. Everything burnt up. The master sergeant that was over us went to put some gas and oil mix into a tank that we had above a stove. That was all that we had for heat over there. We couldn't find no wood or anything like that. So we were burning oil with a little bit of gas mixed with it. Of course that was 100 octane fuel that we had mixed in with it. The stove was hot, and he happened to spill a little bit on the stove and it ignited; and then he threw the can of oil that he had out the door of course that was on fire. He had everything scattered all over. We had fire all over the place. MH: So you lost everything then? CP: It was just before Christmas, and our presents had just come from home. We had them there, and they all went and everything. We didn't even get a chance to even open them. MH: Was the mail service very good over there? 11 CP: The mail service was as good as they could get it I guess. We would probably go for a week or so, and we wouldn't get any mail; and all of a sudden we would get 8 or 10 letters. It was always that way. It seemed like It came in on bunches. It wasn't very steady. We would go for a long time without any mail, and then when it did come, it came all at once. When we were going over to England we had a real bad storm on the Atlantic. We were on the Queen Mary. There was a real bad storm. We were fighting that pretty hard, and the winds were real high. It was snowing and raining and everything. When we got part way over they got on radar that there was some subs that were close. So during the night, all of a sudden, we heard the engines stop running. They reversed them and we had to go back 500 miles to miss these subs, and that delayed us about a day. We would have to go two minutes one direction and then we had to turn and go two minutes another direction. So every two minutes we would change course. That way they couldn't keep any trail of us. We got around them all right. When we got into Glasco, Scotland, the pilot of the Queen Mary said that was the first trip that he had any doubts whether he was going to bring us in again. He said if he had gone over one more degree when that wind was blowing out there, he said he wouldn't have been able to handle it at all. It would have gone on over and collapsed. MH: When you went across, you didn't go across in a Convoy did you? CP: No, we were all alone. They just turned us lose, and away we went. They had their orders of how they were supposed to go like two minutes one way and two minutes another way. They were to zig-zag across the ocean, and that way they could keep them off the trail. They couldn't tell exactly where we were at. We heard some firing. What they saw, I don't know. They didn't tell us. We did hear some cannon fire off the Queen Mary. 12 MH: What kind of ship was the Queen Mary? CP: It used to be a luxury liner. Then they converted it over to an Army transport. All of that was really plush in it too. They had swimming pools in it. They had theaters and dance halls. All this when we went over, was changed over; and they put bunks in it so that they could put more soldiers on. The Queen Mary was eleven stories high. It was about five above the water and six underneath the water. We had to go down several stories to get to the lunch room, you know. Sometimes we would get to walking around and get lost. One time I was lost for three hours before I got back to where we were supposed to be. They said you could take one of those coal fired locomotives and set it right down in that smoke stack. MH: How was the ship armed? CP: I don't know how it was armed. They wouldn't let us into those parts at all. They had them pretty well armed some way, but I don't know how. That was off limits to all personnel. They didn't want to take no chance at all because of sabotage. The only ones that they would allow in there was ones that were part of the crew. We did get down to see the big engines that they had on it. They were real monsters. MH: You said that when you were in the air force that they didn't promote you from a PFC. Yet you were telling all the Warrant Officers and all of these people of higher rank what to do. How come was that? CP: After we got in this electronics in England, they sent us to school. It was B17 electrical school. When we got back from that, they had us teach different ones that come in there the B17 electrical class. We had about four guys under us to teach how to do these units. One of the fellows that was learning from me was a warrant officer. He was just as nice as 13 any of the rest of them. He wasn't pulling any rank or anything. He just sat right down there and learned it just the same as any of the rest of the guys. There was one guy that was a sergeant and one that was a corporal and one that was a private, then this warrant officer and then myself. As we did the work, I had to teach them how to do it. More or less just an instructor, and when the ratings came around they would just send them over to the engineers or somebody like that. They wouldn't bring them over to the hangers where they belonged. MH: You said that you worked out at Hill Field as a mechanic. Did they have you doing the same kind of work? CP: About the same thing. It was pretty close to the same type of work. We worked on B17's out at Hill Field too. This was bomber base that I was at in England. We did have about the same kind of work. MH: Did they put you in there because they knew that you knew the job? CP: When I enlisted I asked for Air Force work. Then of course, I had my papers from the school. They probably placed us on account of that. We had had a complete line of A. and E work aircraft maintenance, from California. When we had graduated from the school in California, we were qualified after we took a twelve hour test that we took on aircraft. We had to make sections of wings and things like that. We had to make patches on these sections, to show that we knew how to do it. When we got through with this test, we were qualified to take the test for the civil aeronautical authorities which I should have done, but I didn't. I would have been a lot better off now if I had have done. MH: What was it like when you worked out at Hill Field during war time? 14 CP: It was good. The work was good and everything, but they had us on midnight shifts and things like hat, which was kind of bad. The first time I worked out there, they didn’t have much hard surface or anything. It was just about all gravel. It was hard pulling airplanes around where you wanted them. They had some guys for crew chiefs because it was a new thing at the time. They didn't have as good of crew chiefs as they have now. They were kind of inexperienced. They weren't too developed around there. The reason was because Hill Field was brand new around 1941. We would have to go out there on the line and work on them. At that time when we went out on the line, we were working on some what they called the A 28's. They were a two engine light bomber. We did a lot of work on the he had quite an experience one day when we did some work on this one and the pilot came in and got it. He took off, and then he had to land around Provo or some place around there. He had taken off and he had left his flaps closed on the mesial of the engine. Those flaps, when they are closed, will hold all the heat in. He got this engine so hot that it melted the propeller that blows the fuel into the carburetor and melted that. So, he was bragging around to someone how he had blown up an engine on this airplane. It happened to be that our crew chief was down there on TDY. Boy, right away they got all the authorities, federal and some CAA in there to check it out and see what the trouble was. Immediately they blamed us guys that had worked on it. So when they called them in and asked them about it, they called every one of us in that knew about it. They wanted to know what had gone on. So we told them. Finally, they called the crew chief in, and he told them what he had heard, about this fellow. They went out and checked it and found out that he had done it. It wasn't any sabotage. That it was kind of stupidity as far as the pilot was concerned. I imagine that he 15 got quite a chewing out f o r i t . It could have been a mistake. He could have been a green pilot and not known. At any rate, it was close enough that the federal government was in on i t . MH: Do you have anything else that you want to add? CP: No, I think that pretty well covers it. MH: I want to thank you f o r what you have said here today. 16