Oral History Program Zach Robbins Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 October 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Zach Robbins Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 October 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: Robbins, Zach, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 3 October 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Theodore Raty circa 1940s Theodore Raty in Europe During WWII circa 1940s Zach Robbins 3 October 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Zach Robbins. The interview was conducted on October 3, 2017 by Lorrie Rands. In this interview, Zach discusses his grandfather-in-law’s experiences serving in the United States Army during World War II. They discuss his grandfather-in-law’s journals and Zach’s experiences transcribing and translating the journals from short hand. LR: It is the third of October 2017. We are in the Hetzel Hollein Room, at the Stewart Library, Weber State University with Zach Robbins, talking about his grandfather-in- law and the collection that they offered to let us scan for the World War II in Northern Utah Project. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview. Zach, thank you again for your willingness to fit us into your very busy schedule. ZR: You’re welcome. LR: What was his name first of all? ZR: Theodore Earl Raty. LR: This is your wife’s grandfather? ZR: Yes, her mother’s father. LR: Do you know when and where he was born? ZR: He was born in 1917. I believe that it was in Idaho Falls. LR: Do you know if he was drafted or if he enlisted? ZR: He enlisted. LR: Do you know when? ZR: It’s on the documents. There’s a release document when he was released from there and it’s got a specific date. I know that it was in Montana, I think it was Missoula, Montana. 2 LR: Do you know the story about that? ZR: I heard that he had gone up there to work with his sister. His sister lived up there and they had sheep, so from what I’ve heard he was helping them on a sheep farm taking care of the sheep. LR: Was this after Pearl Harbor? ZR: This was before Pearl Harbor. LR: I know you can’t answer this, but it makes me wonder if he was kind of hearing the stuff that was happening. ZR: Well, it’s interesting because I looked at the date that he enlisted and it was probably within about a week. I was going through listening to recordings on the news about World War II and there was a very compelling report that was given where they talked about the inevitability of it and how we need to be willing to stand up and fight this giant. There’s no way to know for sure, but it’s interesting and I’m sure they were listening to the news and that news report came up just within days of him enlisting. LR: That’s just fascinating. Because he enlisted, did he choose which branch he went into? ZR: That I’m not sure. LR: Okay, which branch did he join? ZR: He did go into the army. LR: Okay, do you know where he did his basic training? ZR: He did his basic training in California. I can’t remember the name of the fort that he was in. They went up to Oregon, I think, for part of their trainings. I know that 3 they also came down and did a mock beach assault in California, just outside of San Francisco, at one point during their training. LR: Now he eventually was sent into Europe, correct? ZR: Yes. LR: Okay, do you know what unit he was with? ZR: He was with the third infantry division, and he was in the artillery. I think it was the 42nd artillery within the 3rd infantry division. LR: Do you know what army that would have been? ZR: I do not know what army it was. LR: Okay. So, he had all of those books, they look handmade, do you know the story of why he started keeping those journals? ZR: I’m not exactly sure. One thing about this, he never talked to anyone, whatsoever, about the war. Those journals he had in his chest and he wouldn’t let anyone look at them or touch them or handle them or do anything with them up till the day that he passed away. So answers to questions like that I don’t know we really have. LR: Because they are in code, you’ve taken the time to try and figure out what they say. Have you been able to walk through his time in the service through them? ZR: Ya, through part of it. I started reading through one of the journals that was in Anzio is where they were fighting. I can’t remember off the top of my head the date that they were there, but I do know that there was only two infantry divisions within the alliance that fought in Anzio. That was the 3rd infantry division of the U.S. Army and the 1st infantry division of the British Army. Those two were in 4 Anzio. I read through most of that journal. Of course, it took a while to figure out how to read it because of how it is written. As I did my study, it kind of looked as though it was written in a short hand called “speed writing” where they remove the vowels and shorten it and make it phonetically to where you add in the vowels yourself. It took me quite a while to transcribe through the first few pages, but as I was going through I was able eventually to get through most of it pretty quickly because a lot of words we repeat. There’s a symbol in there that was interesting. It was a squiggle with kind of like an arch with a dot in it and sometimes just an arch. That took a while to figure out. My brother kind of suggested that it might have been “overhead” if there was a dot there. Or just “over”. Another part of it that was interesting was locations, names of islands that they were sailing by or names of cities that they were nearby. He would not write those names down but he made it into a code and there’s a certain book in there that’s titled “Italy.” If you look at it, there’s some numbers just above the word, “Italy.” I kind of found another part where he may have had a key to the code. He had gotten the alphabet, a b c, all the way through z, and lined it up with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then he got the alphabet again in a second section and he did a b c, all the way through z, but he started from 26 and worked backwards, so “a” would be 26 and so on. What he would do is for those places, he would start with one letter, either out of the first column or the second column, he would write down that letter and the number. If it was an “a” he would put 1, if the second letter was a “b” he would put a 25. He would stagger each letter between the two. 5 LR: Oh my gosh, that just sounds so confusing. ZR: But it seems very simple. Once you have a key it kind of gets simple. LR: Why do you think he wrote in code? ZR: Well, I think just in case he got captured. I think he was just trying have some kind of sensory in it. I wondered, the little book that says, “Italy” on it, he may not have written Italy on it in the first place. He may have just put the code, then later on, when he went back through his journals and they were past that, he may have written, “Italy.” That was the key to figure out this code. LR: Now, all of these books are written in code? ZR: Yes, in the speed writing short hand. Then all of the locations are written in a numerical code. LR: Okay. So that’s not as confusing as I thought it was. ZR: No. When he says, “I woke up in the morning and this is what we had for breakfast and this is something that happened,” it’s not written in numbers. LR: It’s written in short hand. ZR: Yep. But it might say, “On this morning we sailed out of the harbor and we sailed past…” and you see a bunch of numbers. I took those numbers and I deciphered it one way with the code, then I had to kind of flip it over because you didn’t know if it started with a b c 1 2 3, or if it started with a b c 26 25 24. One way you get a word, the other it’s rubbish. You don’t know what it is. I would google that word and see what would come up and see where it would be on the map and it would show me. Also, there’s a book of the history of the 3rd infantry division that we have given you to scan, and that will also help to figure out. Because then it tells 6 the story of, “Okay, this is where we were, this is where we set off from this harbor in Italy and we headed to the south of France.” You get those words and you google them and you can see right where they went past an island or other places. LR: I understand this wanting to write and that they needed to be careful, but I wonder when he found the time. ZR: Since he was in the artillery, what they would do is instead of being on the front lines constantly engaged in battle, they would find a spot where their artillery division would set up and they would have four guns in a row and a command station. They would all get their gun off, stick it in the ground and they’d put up their camo nets, they’d get their ammo ready and pile it up. They would dig their holes and put their tents up and kind of set up camp and sometimes they would be there for a while. They would not be constantly firing, they would get what’s called a “fire mission” I believe. They had a phone and they would get a call and whoever was in charge of answering the phone would answer it and they would get a fire mission. They would be told to adjust their guns to this area, at this elevation, at this range. There was an observation post, he put in there O.P. and I had to figure that out. It took a while, but an observation post, where somebody would sit and look and watch and see if they could find other artillery that was firing from the enemy or positions of the enemy. Then they would call in, report that and they would aim their guns. LR: So he actually had times where he could just sit and write? I wonder if it helped him have some semblance of sanity. 7 ZR: Ya, I believe. That’s kind of a theory we touched around is that was one reason why he picked that up, as well photography was something that he picked up while he was there. LR: They weren’t supposed to take photographs. ZR: Were they not? LR: No, they weren’t supposed to have cameras. We’ve had a few people who have said that they snuck cameras in with them and took photographs when they weren’t supposed to. I find that fascinating that they still managed to. ZR: Ya, he got cameras. There’s one of the books, it’s a little red book, it documents photos that he took in Germany. It documents I think where he was, the weather of the day, the aperture, all the settings that he had on his camera, what way he was facing, and what he was taking a picture of. LR: So he took the time to actually write down what he was doing. ZR: So it would say roll number 76, photo 1, photo 2, photo 3, and there’s a little green canister that has a bunch of those actual negatives. It’s organized in envelopes that say roll 76, and you pull them out and up in the corner he has written 1, or 2, or 3. You can get those, look at them, and actually correspond it with the book and find out what was the weather like that day, what he was taking a picture of and where. Kind of the conditions and all of that. LR: That’s interesting. I know that it was something that it was the higher ups had said, “No photography in the field,” but the more I think about it, I think it’s something those on the ground didn’t actually enforce because it was a way of dealing and coping. At first, I was shocked that there were photographs. But as I 8 have listened and talked to people, I begin to realize it’s probably a coping mechanism and the commanders on the ground turned a blind eye and didn’t worry too much about it. ZR: Most of the photos he took were photos of the gun pit. There’s actually one photo that I found, which is really awesome, and I hope that it gets restored really well. It is a picture of him actually developing film right in the gun pit. You’ve got all of the ammo lined up and the camo net over the gun, you can see the gun, and he’s sitting down there with a canister and he’s developing film. LR: Wow, that’s crazy, I wonder where he found the chemicals. ZR: I don’t know. I don’t know a lot about the photography. LR: It’s amazing that you end up having more questions than answers because as you start talking you realize, “Well, what about this?” Do you know how long he was in Europe? ZR: It was several years. I think he enlisted in 1941 before Pearl Harbor happened. LR: Pearl Harbor was December of 1941. ZR: So, he either enlisted in 1940 or 1941. I believe it was 1942 that he was sent off. This is interesting too, he kept record of when they left California and all the cities that they went through and what time they hit those cities and what day they hit those cities. The drive that they took from California all the way to the East Coast to get in the ships, he kept a record of it while they were in the trucks. So you know when he got to this place in Texas, when they got Arizona, when they got to New Mexico and all of the different states there. They shipped off in 1942, and 9 he fought in Africa. After fighting in Africa, the next place that they went to was Sicily. After fighting across Sicily, they went into the main part of Italy. LR: So, did they land on Anzio? ZR: Anzio was not where they first started fighting in Italy. They started fighting further down in the boot. When they got up to a certain point where it was the stalemate or I think it was called Cassino, Italy. I can’t remember exactly, but that was a real big stalemate where nobody was gaining any ground in any direction. There was just a lot of loss of life there. The allies decided that they would try to actually set sail, go up and get above the enemy just below Rome. Their goal was to get to Rome and they were hoping with that they’d be able to maybe take some of the forces off of the front line there at Cassino and take them over to Anzio and make it easier for them to get through. They were in Anzio for four months. LR: It didn’t work the way they wanted. ZR: It did not. Four months on a 100 square mile beach head. They called it the beach head because that was another name for that battle. Just about the time they broke through Cassino, just a little bit after that, they were finally able to break through at Anzio and they met up with the rest of the troops and they went up into Rome and took Rome. After that, they went back down to where they had a port in Italy and they sailed again to do another beach assault in the south of France. They fought up through the south of France and they headed east towards Germany and they fought through the southern part of Germany. It was about the same time that Operation Dragoon happened, they also call it the 10 second D-day. It was a similar assault to D-day where they had paratroopers drop and they had the amphibious vehicles lined on the beach, but it was about two months after D-day. As the third army, I believe, was going across the north of France, they were going across the south of Germany. They got all the way to Germany and they got into Austria and that’s when the war ended. He was there all the way up to the time that the war ended. He got home, I believe in July of 1945. LR: So, May of 1945 was when the war in Europe ended, and he might have had enough points to come home. ZR: Ya, he was there all the way from Africa. LR: You said when he came home he never talked about it, in fact he never let anyone look at his books. ZR: That’s from what I hear. He wouldn’t let his kids look at them or anything like that. He would just clam up and not speak whenever they would try to bring it up. LR: Okay. It would be interesting, but it would take a long time to actually find out what’s in all of the books. ZR: Oh ya. I looked through some of the major events that happened with them, like the landing on the south of France. I found that day, and I looked through the journals and I found that day and he was really good at keeping up on all the days and that was really interesting. He talked about them being on the ship and they shot missiles. I think that’s the first time that missiles were kind of introduced into warfare. They shot missiles from the ships all night long and sent a big barrage onto the beach, getting ready for the beach front assault that morning. 11 So, they got up in the morning and they had their “duck” and they had their gun on the “duck” and they took off with that and it took them a couple of hours, I believe, to get to shore from the ship. During that time, he wrote about how there was machine gun fire happening at them as they were coming in. They were ducked down in the boat, in the duck, trying to avoid the machine gun fire. There was bullets hitting the water all around them, and he mentions that he just snuck up and took a picture. He just had to get a picture. I don’t know where that picture is, but I wish that I could see that picture, it would be interesting. He mentions that in his journal, and then they got onto the beach and they went on to fight from there. I also read about the day that they took Rome. They were constantly moving. They would get an order to go to a certain station, they’d get to that certain station, they’d pull a gun out, they’d start digging their trenches, they’d get the tent set up and they’d immediately get a call and say, “We’re moving forward.” They’d take it all down and they would move forward and they’d get there and they’d get the guns set up and they’d start getting things set up and they got a call and they’d say, “Okay, we’re moving forward.” They were just making a whole lot of progress that time and it was about twenty-four hours that they were constantly setting up, taking down, and moving forward. They’d fire some rounds out of the gun and then move forward. I can only imagine they were just tired—reading that, they just kept going and going until they got into Rome. I think that when I get these back, the one thing I want to do is find some of those 12 key days, points, and things that happened and see what he was experiencing that day. LR: I think it would be a great project to go through and figure out his time in the 3rd infantry, because there is plenty of information. ZR: Ya, because the 3rd infantry division, that book that he brought back, he had two copies of it. His brother, I believe, was actually in the 3rd infantry division as well, because there is another Raty in there that matches one of his brother’s names. I think he was one of the foot soldiers, his brother. LR: I think someone else interviewed was in the 3rd infantry division, because he was at Anzio, and he was in Africa. Interesting, I’ll have to go back and look now. Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that specifically involves him and the stuff that you guys are letting us scan? ZR: Well, how we came about this was that when he passed away, his daughter, Joanne, was able to get these records. She inherited all of his war stuff that he had left over, which included his dog tags. There was a chest and a bunch of photographs, these journals, some maps and post cards that he got while he was there. When they were first looking at it they couldn’t figure out what he was trying to write. It didn’t make a lot of sense. They had tried to pursue someone who would be able to help out, a scholar. But they weren’t able to get that going and my wife was telling me about this and I thought it was really interesting. I asked her aunt if we would be able to look at a couple of them, because today we’ve got the internet and we’ve got google. I thought maybe I could look up short hand, and maybe I can type some of the stuff in shorthand and see if 13 there is any kind of way to decipher it. When we got it, I started looking at it and you know it said, “WOKUP” and I said, “Oh that looks like ‘woke up.’” It’s not WOKUP, it’s woke up. It said, “MRNG” oh maybe that’s “morning.” “Woken morning,” and I started seeing these words. Some of them were just O.P. and I was just like, “What’s O.P.? What does it stand for?” So I started looking up stuff like that on google to try and figure that out. With so many documents on google, you can find all kinds of information about it and you can kind of start putting the puzzle pieces together. There might be some words that I didn’t get quite right but it started pulling together and making a lot of sense of what was going on. They’ve had these for years, since 1998, but it hasn’t been until just couple of years ago that my wife and I started going through them. When we were able to transcribe several pages and bring them back and show them to her aunts they were fascinated. I was like, “This would be an awesome project to go through,” but it’s a lot. He’s got so many. There’s so much information that he put in, which is awesome, but it’s a lot of time. So, to have somebody have the time, maybe for their thesis project. LR: I just think it would be brilliant if somebody wanted to learn more about that, take a semester and just if it’s one book. I just think that would be fascinating. How long did it take you to get—because you’ve done one whole book, right? ZR: I haven’t even gotten through one whole book, and its two months is all that is in that book. Both months are during the time that he was in Anzio. It took me a while to be able to read it almost fluently. I sat down for several hours looking through it and as I was looking through it, I started typing it out and trying to write 14 it out in full length instead of just putting WOK—I would put the full word, “Woke up.” I would add other words because he would just put “Woke in morning.” So I put, “Woke up in morning,” and try to put it in brackets to show that he didn’t write it. I was able to get through, I think one month. It was a lot of pages, because one day would take about at least one full page of an 8 X 11 sheet at 12 font just single space. It was about four to six pages depending on the day and how much happened during the day in his journal. So the journal is pretty thick. LR: Ya, I’ve seen some of them are handmade, I find them beautiful. Did you ever meet him? ZR: I did not. LR: This might not be a fair question for you having never met him, but as you’ve been able to learn about him, through his journals and his information, how do you think his experiences affected him? ZR: I think they affected him quite a bit. I’ve heard a lot of stories about him. One gift that he picked up from the war, I’ve heard that he could listen to a car drive by and just by the sound of it he would tell you what make and model it was. LR: Wow. ZR: There’s a part while he was in where he’s always saying, “Heard mustangs fly by. Heard a spitfire fly overhead. Heard enemy bombers, two M bombers,” which is two motor Mitchell bombers, which is one of the planes that we used. He would say, “Heard it.” Didn’t necessarily see it, he heard it. One of the days I came across he said, “Learned a few months back that you could tell what planes are flying overhead by the sound of their motor.” He learned that from somebody, 15 and he started listening to it and he could identify planes just by the sound of the motor. When he got back I know that he had a lot of car parts. He was really into mechanical stuff and so he would work on it. He would fix up cars and even took an old car up to the North Fork area and they got permission to have a mine and they started digging out a mine. They took this old car, lifted it up on rocks and wrapped a cable around the back tire and put the cable up on a pulley and that’s what they used to pull the buckets of dirt up and drop it back down. They used the engine of the car to run the wheels forward or backward and used it as a pulley system. That’s something that was kind of a hobby that he picked up, or an interest that he had. Another thing is his photography. When he got back to Idaho Falls and after a little while he moved down here to Ogden. He met his sweetheart and he ended up living in Ogden, building a home in Ogden and raising his family here just near the Ogden cemetery. He started working at a photography store and so he was developing film and what not there. There’s some documents that I’ve found that indicate that was one of the jobs that he got when he got back home. He passed away in in 1998 and he had PTSD the rest of his life. I’ve heard that he was never the same after the war. My wife just has a memory of him being in a nursing home and he had Alzheimer’s. She says that her grandpa would grab her wrist. She remembered one day that he grabbed her wrist and held on tight, so much so that it was hurting her. She tried to get away and she couldn’t get away and it really frightened her. It kind of had a negative effect on how my wife looked at her grandfather. But as she has read these things and learned more 16 about it, she’s kind of had a reverence and an awe from the sacrifice, and it kind of explains more of maybe why he did that. Being in Alzheimer’s and not really understanding what he’s doing, it’s hard to tell if he was thinking about something in his past and he was just holding on really tight and frightened or exactly what the circumstances were in his mind. LR: Wow, I have a lot of reverence for that generation and what they did. Thank you so much for your willingness to sit here and talk to me about him and especially the story of how you guys came into discovering who this man was. It probably helped your wife a lot too, to see him from a different point of view. Is there anything else you’d like to say before I turn it off? ZR: Oh ya, absolutely. I’m trying to think. Not really, other than I’ve really enjoyed learning more about him, he’s a family member of mine now. To have that connection with somebody who has served is really quite inspiring. It’s really amazing to hear the stories, even though he would never tell anybody else’s stories he wrote them down and we have them to be able to look back on it and see what he really went through. LR: That’s the best part is that he wrote them down. ZR: Oh ya, absolutely. I was expecting, because it’s war and how graphic is this going to be? It wasn’t too graphic. There’s some things that he mentions about how his friends, somebody that he knew got killed when they were landing in Anzio. He mentions about how somebody got back from the front line and told them that they had counted over 400—he termed them “Krouts.” It was World War II. It was 400 Germans that had died in the barrage. Whether it was their 17 barrage that they had sent or what. But most of it is talking about what time did he wake up when was he on duty for the phone, what firing missions did they get, what did they have for breakfast, what did they have for lunch, and what did they have for dinner. The time that he spent playing checkers in the tent with so and so, it’s a lot of just day to day things and it gives you an idea of the day to day experiences that they have. Not necessarily just the moments that were the craziest, the most intense. It was just day to day. It’s really an interesting perspective to look at, how they had the time to play checkers, I would have never of thought of them sitting there in the middle of war playing checkers. It was really neat to see that. I think that I’ve learned a lot about him. I never got to meet him, but I know his daughters have had their experiences with him. From what I hear, the war definitely did have an impact on him and who he was and maybe some of the temperament or attitude or things that he dealt with the rest of his life. LR: That can only make sense. ZR: Well, that’s it. Thank you. LR: No, thank you.