Oral History Program Art Slater Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 5 June 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Art Slater Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 5 June 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: Slater, Art, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 5 June 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Art Slater 5 June 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Art Slater, conducted on June 5, 2017 in his home in Kaysville, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Art discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Brooklyn Knight, the video technician is also present during this interview. LR: Okay. Today is June 5, 2017. We are in the home of Art Slater in Kaysville, Utah. We are talking with Art about his World War Two memories and his life. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting and Brooklyn Knight is here with me as well. Thank you, Art, for your willingness to talk. Let’s start with when and where were you born? AS: I was born in Slaterville November 8, 1917. That makes me nearly 100. LR: Yes sir you are. Wow. What was it like growing up in Slaterville? AS: Well I was on a farm, and it was nice. I enjoyed living on the farm, working with my Dad and older brother. We had a variety of things to do, farming, milking cows, irrigating, and most anything that goes on a farm. LR: Okay. What was your crop on the farm? AS: Sugar beets was one of them, potatoes, and corn. LR: Okay. Where did you go to school? AS: Grade school? In Slaterville. LR: Did you enjoy school? AS: Yeah. LR: What would you do for fun when you were younger? AS: Well mainly swimming in the river or creek, fishing, and we went hunting when I got a little older. Deer hunting. 2 LR: Why don’t you talk a little bit about World War Two? Where were you when Pearl Harbor happened? AS: At Pearl Harbor. LR: You were at Pearl Harbor?! AS: Well we had just left as a barge ship returning to the United States from Hawaii. We were still within sight of the island when the captain of the ship I was on got word about the bombing, and he was told to return to the nearest port. Well, the nearest port was under attack, so he didn’t do that. He went on across the ocean and landed in San Francisco. My parents came to San Francisco and picked me up, took me back to Utah. I enlisted in the Army Air Force and I was a radio operator on a B-24 Bomber; that was just a new plane. One of the planes had been lost that was in my squadron, and had gone down in the mountains. We were based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It went down in the mountains, and the pilot of my plane, I guess he was fairly inexperienced in flying in the mountains. Anyway, as we were out looking for the one that had crashed, as he went over a hill and he got caught in the downdraft and it was just like everything fell out from under me. I was sitting on the floor, on a side of the bomber, and close to the end. As we fell, I reached out and grabbed hold of the side of the opening, hanged there, and I was pulled right out of the bomber, but I hung on. I was just flapping in the breeze as we were falling, but we didn’t crash. When we got down a little lower, we caught the air, and buoyed us up and we went on and landed in Albuquerque. 3 The commander of the squadron that I was in didn’t know that I had nearly fallen out of the plane. He called me in to his office, and I didn’t know what to expect. I thought he might know about me nearly falling out of the plane. Instead he said he’d been going through my records, and discovered that I had an IQ high enough that I could go to officer’s training school. I was sent to New Jersey, and stayed there for a while for training school. After I finished the training, I was going with a girl who lived in Ogden. I told her that we ought to get married, and she agreed. I stopped in there as I traveled from the East Coast to the West Coast. I was going to the West Coast to catch a ship. When I stopped she said, “I thought you were just kidding,” but we went ahead and got married. We were married in the temple, and I was at home three days after we’d got married, and then I went to San Francisco. I was given a commission in the Army Signal Corps, attached to the Air Force. I was sent to the Hawaiian Islands, going back to where I had spent several years already. I was stationed on top of a mountain, an aircraft warning station, and then after I’d been there about a year, I got word that I was supposed to board a ship and join a convoy that was going to the Philippine Islands to try to retake that from the Japanese. We didn’t go right straight. We went down to south to, what’s the name of that island North of Australia? LR: I don’t know the Pacific Islands very well. BK: Is it New Guinea? 4 AS: I think so. Anyway, we went down there, joined a convoy, and landed on the Philippines on the island of Leyte. After I landed on Leyte, we moved in a little, just about a mile or two, and set up tents. Being an officer, I and another officer had a tent to ourselves. We put a cot in the tent to sleep on, and I guess it was about the first day after we put up our tent, I had stretched out on my cot, and I was reading something out of a book that I had brought with me. I heard a hissing sound, so I looked up and there was a big cobra. I was just stretched out on my cot, I was naked from the waist, I just had shorts on, and a cobra was looking right at me. His head was about, oh, fifteen inches away from my bare ankles. All it would have had to do was just go like that, and I’d have been dead in a couple of hours. Then I heard a voice speak to me, and actually it was the Holy Ghost. It said, “Don’t move.” I didn’t know how to handle cobras so I didn’t move. I just laid there. The voice said, “Do you remember a board that you put by the bed yesterday on the ground there? Very, very slowly move your arm up and drop it over the side of the bed, and get a hold of that board.” It was about four or five feet long, and it was narrow on one end. The voice said, “Now very, very slowly, raise the board up. You’re to use it as a club. Get it up above your head and when I say yes, swing at the cobra, and aim it about six inches below the head.” So I did. I very, very slowly raised my arm up, dropped it over the side picked up the board, raised it up like this, and then I swung at the cobra. I hit the cobra about six inches below the head, and knocked it down. I jumped up with this 5 board and rushed down where the cobra was on the ground and beat the cobra to death. Another time, it was about a day later I guess, we were right at the base of a hill. The Japanese had had a command post on that hill, and some of my men wanted to go up there and look for souvenirs. I thought, “Well, I’ll go with you.” We went up on the top of that hill, and on the way up, we saw a lot of dead United States soldiers, marines and so on, who had died and been killed by the Japanese. I got to the top, and we were separated. I followed this one trail that went down this way, and I got down there so far and all of a sudden I was told to stop. I stopped, looked around, seeing if I could see any Japanese around. I didn’t. Then after I didn’t find anything, I was going to move on but I looked down, and there was a string going across the trail hidden by a pile of coconut husks. If I had taken another step or two, without stopping, I’d have kicked that string and I would have set that bomb off. There was a bomb on the end of that string into the coconut husks. I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. I went back up the trail a little bit, took my rifle and shot at that pile of coconut husks, to try to detonate the bomb and keep somebody else from being killed. A few days later a senior officer woke me at about two o’clock in the morning. I was sleeping in a foxhole, and he wanted me to go to Tacloban to find some pilots. In the Air Force, their reconnaissance planes pilots, they’d been sent to go to Luzon and they’d lost track of them, and I 6 was to go out and find them. Well, I didn’t know anything about our planes or our pilots, but I had to go. I went up to Tacloban, and as I was going in to the dock area, I saw this barge was parked right there. There was a man sitting on a post above it, and when I saw him, I stopped and went over there. I told him that I was looking for these three pilots with the reconnaissance planes. He says, “I know where they are. I took them out to a ship and I just came back.” He told me the ship, and I told him that I was supposed to tell them to return to the base with their planes. I went out north a little further, to where there was a signal guy communicating with the various ships, with his blinker. They didn’t use radio at that time. I wanted him to send a message to these pilots on this ship, and he wouldn’t do it. He said, “Look at all these papers.” He had a stack of papers about so high. “These are messages that are ahead of you. It will take me about an hour and a half to send all of those. Do you want to wait for those?” I didn’t know what to do. I had the pilots and the ships located, but I couldn’t get a hold of them. I thought, If somebody who has authority could send a message to the pilots and have them return to their home base,” but the only person I knew, and I didn’t know him personally but I knew of him, was General Hodges. I didn’t know how to get ahold of him, but I thought, “I can’t send a message out there, and put his signature on it.” I think it was the Holy Ghost again that spoke to me and said, “Make the message, sign the general’s name to it, and take it to the blinker operator and he’ll send it out.” I said, “I don’t have authority to 7 use the general’s name.’ The voice said, “If you don’t do it, you’ll fail in this mission.” I went ahead and I wrote that order out, telling the pilots to return to the base and signed the general’s name on the bottom of it. I took it to the blinker operator and he took the message from me, and he didn’t hesitate at all. He knew I wasn’t General Hodges, but he took it and he sent the message to the ship, directed to one of the pilots whose name I had, that those three pilots were to return to their camp. And they were to do it immediately. So I accomplished that mission. I wondered if I’d be court martialed for signing the general’s name, but I wasn’t. About a week later, I was called in to the office of my commanding officer, of my unit, and I was expecting him to tell me when I was to appear before the court, but he never even mentioned that. All he did was he congratulated me on getting those pilots. He didn’t say a thing about General Hodges, which was a great relief to me. LR: Is there another story you’d like to share? AS: Well, did I tell you about being stuck in the river? LR: Well, I and another officer, he was senior to me, were to set out to find a place to erect a radar set. We got a jeep and headed off to find a location and we got stuck in the river that we were attempting to cross. On the other side of the river, there were seven boys, ranging in age from about three or four up to about fifteen. We got stuck in this river, and this friend of mine, the other officer, was a smoker and he had a pack of cigarettes in 8 his pocket. He stood up in the jeep, and he waved these cigarettes and all he said was, “Cigarettes, push! Cigarettes, push!” The kids came streaming out into the river, and they practically carried the jeep out of the river. They got on the shore, and the other officer gave them the pack of cigarettes. They distributed them among all the kids, and they all took cigarettes just like they were starving for them, even the little kids from three or four years of age were taking cigarettes and smoking. There were some who hadn’t waited there, when they saw us, they headed for the nearest community, I don’t remember the name of it, and told them that a representative of General MacArthur was coming. When we got down into the community, we discovered that they thought we were official representatives of the General. They had closed everything and they coroneted all their efforts to preparing a huge banquet. All the people in this community were invited to attend this banquet, and they had us, this other officer and myself, talk to them as representatives of the general. After we got through talking, they offered us a place to stay for the night, to sleep and they offered each of us a Filipino girl to sleep with during the night. The other officer took the opportunity, took the girl in the bed with him, but I refused, so I didn’t have a place to sleep except under kind of a little canopy with a net. I slept with the bed bugs and the mosquitos that night. We never did find a place to erect our radar set. 9 It wasn’t long after that experience that we were called to return to Hawaii, which we did. We were going to stay there for just a short time and then join a convoy that was going to invade Japan. The convoy was all ready to go, and we had loaded aboard a ship, and we had a new commanding officer. He wanted to get acquainted with all of us, so he had this banquet. As we sat down at the banquet, there was alcoholic drinks that were passed out down the table where we were seated. My companion knew that I was a member of the LDS Church and that I didn’t drink, and he told me to turn my cup over. The new commanding officer said, “Who doesn’t drink?” This fellow officer, Lieutenant Callas said, “Lieutenant Slater doesn’t drink.” The general said, “Why not?” “Because he’s LDS.” At that, the commanding officer picked up his chair and carried it down to where I was seated, and several other of his staff picked up their chairs and followed him and came down to where I was. He knew a little bit about the LDS Church, and he asked me a lot of questions about my missionary work among the Hawaiian people. Then he asked me if I would mind changing my assignment from working with the radar to becoming the chaplain. I told him okay, I would. I was going to be the chaplain to all the troops that were embarked for the invasion of Japan. That night, before we were to leave, that was when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and we were all disbanded and sent home. The war was over. I guess that’s about all there was to it, I just went home and my 10 parents met me at San Francisco, and took me home, and that was about the end of the war. LR: What did you do after the war? AS: After the war was over, I entered BYU as a student and I had the GI Bill. We were supposed to get some education, so I went to work, got my bachelor’s degree at BYU, and then went to New Orleans and entered Tulane University, and got a MSW. I was psychiatric social worker, and I worked in that capacity throughout my career. Then I was employed as an instructor at BYU and I worked there at BYU for twenty-five years. I retired from there and that was the end of my military operation, or experience. That was just about the end of my life, except that they can’t seem to get rid of me! I keep hanging on. LR: Is there anything else you want to talk about. Is there any other story you want to share? AS: Oh, there was one gruesome thing that I witnessed in the Philippines after we’d landed there. The Japanese sent some planes over Leyte, where we were landed, and they dropped paratroopers around us. This one paratrooper came down and the soldiers were shooting at him as he came down, and he landed about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty feet from where I was standing. As he landed, some Filipinos rushed out of the bushes they had been hiding in, and they tore his clothes off, took their machetes, and they just started chopping him up. There were some pigs 11 in the bushes nearby, and as they cut off an arm or a leg they’d throw it to the pigs, and the pigs would eat it. That was a gruesome thing to witness. LR: Yeah I’ll bet. AS: Did I tell you about our ships being sunk by the Japanese? LR: No. AS: That was gruesome too. After we landed, our ships left Leyte Gulf, and started steaming up north. They left several destroyers there in Leyte Bay for protection of those of our landing, but as soon as they moved north, the Japanese fleet with aircraft carriers, battleships, and so on, came streaming around the South End of the island. Our destroyers went out to meet them, but the destroyers are no match for battleships, and our destroyers were sunk, all of them were destroyed by the Japanese navy. The bodies from these destroyers, were washed ashore, and sharks ate some of them. Arms and legs washed up on the beach and I could see that, and that was a gruesome thing. LR: I’d bet. What unit were you in in the Army? AS: Well, I was in the Air Craft Warning, where we set up the radars so we could see, catch planes that would fly around, and hopefully we’d shoot them down. LR: Okay, thank you again for your time.