i Oral History Program Edward Kemp Anderson Interviewed by Michael Edward Anderson 27 May 2012 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Edward Kemp Anderson Interviewed by Michael Edward Anderson 27 May 2012 Copyright © 2012 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 Weber and Davis County Community Oral History Collection includes interviews conducted by Weber State University faculty, staff and students, and other members of the community. The interviews cover various topics including city government, diversity, personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ 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: Edward Kemp Anderson, an oral history by Michael Edward Anderson, 27 May 2012, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Edward and Floris Anderson Edward and Floris Anderson 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Edward Kemp Anderson. Mr. Anderson was born on December 20, 1925 and raised in Lewiston, Utah. This interview discusses his early life before, during and shortly after World War II. On December 21, 1943 Edward received his draft notice the day after his 18th birthday. Edward married his wife Floris on December 30, 1943 just before departing for military service. He continued to serve in the war until 1946, one year after the war ended. The interview was conducted on May 27, 2012 by his son, Michael Edward Anderson in the Anderson home in Washington, Utah. Also present during the interview is Edward’s wife, Floris Thomas Anderson. MEA: I was just thinking that the World War II experience is part of our family history and I think that it needs to be written down and shared with all of us. Not necessarily blood and guts kind of stuff, I’m not going to ask you those kinds of things just simple history. I always think it’s neat to hear about when you were gone that mom paid for a house, you know while you were gone. EKA: Bought a house while I was gone for eight-hundred dollars. FTA: Two years and—I don’t remember how much the payments were. MEA: So when I go into Lewiston then I tell the kids, “You know, they lived right there, that little house near Theurer’s Market. Mom bought and paid for that.” It’s neat for them to think, “We have roots in Lewiston.” FTA: Great grandpa was in the front of that in the shoe shop, he mended shoes there. 2 MEA: I always tell them about Uncle Alma. We used to go over to the flower shop and that there was a greenhouse there and we used to run around and play in that. Now, they don’t see that of course, it’s just a house there in Lewiston so there’s a lot of history. None of us has that. These are just simple questions to help us get going and see what you think. The first thing I was wondering was, what were you doing before you joined the military? You weren’t very old. EKA: I was just working on the farm. Worked on the farm and hauled coal for Elburn Kent. That’s about it. I worked at the sugar factory too, didn’t I? FTA: Oh yeah, you worked at the sugar factory. EKA: Campaigned the last month or two, but was paid good money. MEA: What was good money back then? EKA: Oh gosh, a buck and a quarter a day. FTA: He would have been going to high school if he hadn’t quit school to go to work. The teacher wouldn’t let him make up for it, so he just threw his books out the window and took off. EKA: Beet season is when you could make a lot of money topping beets. They’d give us a two week beet vacation, is what they called it, which you have your Spring break now, but it was to go to work to help the farmers get their crop in. Back in our days, two weeks wasn’t enough. I worked about a month and went back to school and asked all my teachers for makeup work. They’d all give me the makeup work but one. He said, “You’ll just have to flunk.” I asked, “What do you 3 mean?” He said, “You don’t make up work in mine. You missed that two weeks of school, you can’t do anything about it— it’s gone.” There was another guy in there that was trying to get me to quit school all year. He was sitting clear in the back and I was up at the desk and I said, “Hey Don, you still want to quit school?” He said, “I sure do.” I said, “Let’s get out of here.” We went over to the window that was open and threw our books out the window and went, and that was the last day of school for me. MEA: Wow. How old were you? EKA: I was seventeen. I only had a year to go to graduate. MEA: Did you ever go back and finish it? EKA: No. MEA: No? Didn’t have to? EKA: Back in our days, college was something that only the rich and famous went to, there were very few college degrees and you didn’t need the education back then. Now, if you haven’t got that education, you’re out of luck, but back in those days, why, if I could drive a dump truck I could get a job any place I wanted. When I got out of the service I figured I’d be able to go right to work, and out of the service, they didn’t even have dump trucks like I used to drive. Big Utes and all that kind of stuff, didn’t know nothing about that. MEA: How old were you when the war started? EKA: Let’s see, I’d be sixteen—fifteen I guess. 4 FTA: Sixteen. MEA: So it was going while you were still in school? EKA: Oh yeah. MEA: Did you get drafted? EKA: Yep, got drafted. FTA: All that stuff is in that book you wanted. MEA: We should get that out. FTA: We could get it out when we get through with this. MEA: Did you join when you were seventeen? EKA: No. I turned eighteen on the 20th of December, and I got my notice on the 21st of December. MEA: Wow. So you knew it was coming up? EKA: It was kind of a bad deal there. The people that were on the draft board were farmers up there in Lewiston. What they did is they deferred all the boys on the farm. Anytime they had somebody like me, they would grab them to try and fill the quota so they could keep their boys at home. So we didn’t get much of a chance as they did on the farm. MEA: So you got drafted pretty quick? EKA: Oh yeah. 5 MEA: Where were you living? I know you were living in Lewiston, but you weren’t attending school. Were you guys dating? What were you doing? EKA: Oh we were running around since we were sixteen, but we— FTA: Not really dating. EKA: There were four girls and there were four of us. We weren’t really dating but we would always go every place together. FTA: We would ride bikes and play the “Kick-the-Can” games. Things kids do at that age. EKA: It’s different than when we were kids though. There wasn’t any television. FTA: There wasn’t anything. EKA: The only thing we had was the radio. FTA: You made your own fun. EKA: A multi-line telephone. It’s changed so much that back in those days, all we had was each other and those kids we are talking about. That’s the only fun we had, we didn’t have any toys or anything else to play with. Had each other to play with and that’s it. MEA: Pretty much married kids within the town. You dated and married in town. EKA: I got back out of the service and tried to make a living up in Lewiston. It wasn’t there, so I moved to Ogden. I got a job and did like you, I drove a whole week. I 6 came back after one week and I wouldn’t drive that distance for nobody. Of course, she was very good. She agreed with everything. So, I moved to Ogden. There weren’t any places to rent so I was living in a chicken coup. Finally, I got a place to rent and we drove down. I just wouldn’t drive that distance. FTA: That’s when I was pregnant with Cathy. EKA: I’d come over Sardine Canyon, the old canyon. It was quite treacherous. The roads were slick and everything and I’d been driving for a week. I left Logan and I remember leaving Logan, but the next thing I remember was the lights in Brigham. We used to have to drive through Brigham, you didn’t cut it off. I don’t ever remember going over that canyon and right then I said, “That’s my last trip.” Not going to drive all those miles. Too many hours and not enough sleep. Too dangerous. Me and two other guys moved down to Ogden until we could find a place and bring our wives. MEA: Do you remember how you felt about the war in Europe, prior to Pearl Harbor? Actually, I guess Pearl Harbor was probably a big thing. EKA: You know when you’re just a kid you don’t really think about that stuff much. FTA: You don’t know politics like they do now. You just do what you’re told. EKA: We didn’t have information. You can get worldwide information now instantly, and we didn’t have all that. We didn’t hear about all those things. Sure, you heard about Pearl Harbor, but that’s about it. I mean, Japs attacked Pearl Harbor. Now 7 they’ll tell you blow by blow, but we didn’t have that back then. News was not any more than what they had to tell you. MEA: Just got newspaper once in a while? EKA: I had newspaper and radio. FTA: My folks never took a newspaper. We had a radio. MEA: What was the feeling back then? Sometimes you hear about Vietnam and how everybody was trying to avoid the draft. It seems like back then they were a little more patriotic about things. EKA: I believe it was more patriotic back then than it has been. But then, World War II, we had to fight it. They attacked at us, we had to fight it. Vietnam—and I can’t even think of some of the others—Iraq and all this stuff, we didn’t have to do that. We momentarily did it, and World War II is the only war we’ve won. All these others we’ve lost. Every one of them we lost. There’s never been surrender since World War II. In World War II, Japan and Germany both surrendered. We won those wars, but these others they didn’t. MEA: Just kind of declared we’ve had enough and that was the end of it. EKA: Yeah. MEA: Did you have a choice of what military service to join? EKA: Yes, I could’ve gone to any of them, Army, Navy or Marines. There wasn’t any Air Force then; it was Army Air Force. I don’t know why I went in the Army. I 8 always liked the water, and when I went down there they said, “You’re physically conditioned and you can take your choice. Anything you want.” I walked right up to the Navy desk, turned, and went over and signed up for the Army. MEA: Really? EKA: I’m alive so I guess I made the right choice. MEA: You made the right choice. Did you plan on the Navy all along then? EKA: We didn’t know anything until they said, “You’re eligible,” so I didn’t have a big plan. I liked the water and I thought I’d make a lot better Navy man than I would anything else, then I went and signed up for the Army. MEA: Where’d you go to join? Not there in Cache Valley, did you? EKA: Logan. MEA: Right in Logan? They just had a recruiter’s office or something? EKA: There’s a recruiters office in Logan. In fact, we left from Logan. I got on the train in Logan and went in the service. Of course, we just went to Ft. Douglas for a start, then from there to Texas. MEA: Was Texas a big camp? EKA: Camp Fannin, Texas. MEA: What did you think it would be like there? FTA: It was nothing but sand. 9 EKA: Only place I’ve ever been in my life where I could walk in the water up to my knees and have the sand blowing in my face at the same time. It wasn’t a real good place. They didn’t use up good ground for Army bases, they were just out on the sand. MEA: How long was boot camp? EKA: Six months, then overseas. I thought I was safe for a while because at that time they had a deal that said they can’t send you overseas until your nineteen. They couldn’t send you overseas as a replacement until your 19, but they can send you over if you’re already assigned. So, I was overseas for three or four months before I turned nineteen. MEA: I can’t imagine being that young and right in the middle of that stuff at eighteen years old. EKA: Just snot-nosed kids, that’s all we were. MEA: Where did they send you first? EKA: We landed in Marsai, France. We hit the front line in the Vosges Mountains of France. They’re mountains like High Creek— cold. We spent the winter in the Vosges Mountains. It was pretty chilly. EKA: Yeah, her and mom sent me a nice Christmas. A nice bathrobe and slippers and I was in a foxhole. FTA: The one thing you got that you really liked was that Bells candy. She made sure you had that. 10 EKA: Yeah she made homemade candy and it was sure good. She made it for the Bluebird in Logan. Then she’d send it over to me. MEA: Did you get any special training in camp to be prepared? EKA: Well, yes, I took a lot of demolitions training and went to an A&P (Ammunitions Pioneer) platoon after I finished basic training. It was a little different in the fact that you did patrol work all the time and diffused mines and stuff like that. We knew how to use explosives. One time, we ran into a dynamite cellar and the lieutenant wanted me to go in there and take that dynamite out. He said, “You have the dynamite, take the dynamite out.” I said, “No problem.” I kicked the door down and it should have blown up. I looked in there and the nitro was dripping out of those dynamite sticks. I just backed out of there right quick. He said, “Well that’s a direct order.” I said, “Then fire me. I won’t go in there and touch that dynamite. I’ll blow it up, but I won’t touch it.” Another officer came by that knew what was going on and chewed that officer out and let me off the hook. Once that nitroglycerin comes out of your stick and a drop of it gets on the floor, it explodes. MEA: Wow. EKA: I handled explosives and stuff, but also every time you’d lose people on the line they’d replace them with us until they could get replacements. We spent a lot of time on the front lines. If they’d get hit real heavy, they might lose fifty or sixty people. They’d send us up and we would take their place until they’d get replacements up there. You’ve got to have so many people up there or they’ll walk over you. 11 MEA: Who were you serving under then? EKA: General Patch in the 7th Army. Patton had the 7th, then they took that away from him and gave him the 3rd Army and gave Patch the 7th. MEA: Were you in France all the time? EKA: France and Germany. Mostly Germany because we fought out of France that winter. We busted out of France and got into Germany. When we were in France, it was actually easier because you fought around the towns in France. You tried to preserve France. But when we got to Germany, we fought right in the towns up there and were blowing the towns up. We didn’t care if we blew the German towns up or not, but, we tried to conserve as much as we could in France. We lost a lot of people because you didn’t want to blow this building down, or this church house, or that cathedral up on the hill. They’d want you to preserve them. All the time that’s where the snipers were. So, we tried to take them without blowing them up and it’d get a lot of people killed. MEA: Can you tell me about your most memorable experience? EKA: It’s a funny thing. Most of the stuff I don’t even remember. I didn’t remember right after it. If you read my bronze star, for example, I can remember everything about that. I can remember getting these people who were wounded. I have no idea how I got them out of the town. I have no idea how we got back to the line. It’s all a blank. I don’t know I guess there are certain things we just blank out on and we don’t remember them. A lot of the things I can think of some of the stuff. After this 12 longer period when I think about something I think, “How did that ever happen?” or “Am I dreaming?” There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t know. MEA: Maybe it’s kind of a blessing. EKA: Oh, I think it is. I think it is. It happened several times to me, but that was the biggest thing. We had twenty-eight people that we rescued out of that town. I can remember the Germans were moving out and there was a big convoy. We were just hiding from Germans and trying to find these wounded people and we found them, and I can’t remember anything else. MEA: Was that in France or in Germany? EKA: That was in Germany. Well, I’m not sure. It was still winter. It could have been France. We could have still been up in the Vosges Mountains. MEA: Did you just get word that there were some people down and you had to get them out? EKA: We lost Charter Company. We lost C-company, the whole company. They wanted a volunteer group to go see if they could find them and I volunteered. Not to be a hero, but because I was freezing to death. I was in that foxhole and they said they were looking for volunteers, “Take me.” We got out of the foxhole and we walked all night long. I don’t know how many miles. Twenty miles or so I’d imagine. We pulled into that town and we had lost the whole company. There were 28 people left in the whole company. MEA: How many are in a company? 13 EKA: Oh gosh, I don’t know. I don’t remember. That’s just a small amount, anyway. MEA: Was that part of that article I read? It was a newspaper article I read that mom showed me in the book of remembrance. It talked about a Lewiston boy. Is that the time you volunteered? EKA: That was the first time she found out I was in combat. MEA: Really? FTA: We weren’t smart enough I guess. EKA: Salt Lake Tribune. FTA: We wrote letters back and forth all the time, but— EKA: The war was just about over when they came out, so there wasn’t much left. There is so much that I don’t remember. I remember just before the war ended I got the shakes real bad and hid it from the Lieutenant for a long time. We’d go out on patrol and I was fine, but I’d come back and sit down and just start shaking. He caught me one day and he said he was sending me back to rest camp. I said, “No you’re not, the war is going to end any day and I want to be with the guys. I’m not going to get killed after what I’ve been through.” He said, “I’m not worried about you getting killed. I’m worried about killing the guys who could kill me. Get on the truck and get out of here.” I went back to rest camp and the war did end while I was back in rest camp. I wanted to be with the company when the war ended, but I wasn’t. I was in rest camp. I had only been back there 14 a couple of days when the war ended. I wanted to be up there on the front lines when the war ended, but I was back in Marsai, France. MEA: Was it a hospital kind of place? EKA: Well, it was just a rest area. Just vacation to go back there and have nice hotels and stuff. Good places for you to stay with three meals a day and just rest, that’s all. MEA: What was it like to hear the war ended? Must have been quite a celebration. EKA: Those French people. They got the news before we did. We were eating supper and all of a sudden those French gals working in there got screaming and running around and we found out it was over. It was an experience you could say. There hadn’t been any street lights on in Marsai, France for years, and they turned the lights on. People were out there in droves just looking at the lights. French people. I’m too soft-hearted, Mike. Not much I can talk about. Cathy wanted me to do something or talk about temple and I can’t talk about the temple. There are so many miracles. When you’re working in the temple, you see them happen every day, but you just can’t talk about it. MEA: Some things are just too sacred. FTA: They are. You try to tell somebody and you can’t do it. MEA: Sometimes I think the Lord blesses us with experiences that he expects us to keep to ourselves too. EKA: Well, that’s probably true too. 15 MEA: Whenever there’s a time you have an opportunity to share it and you feel impressed that it’s what the Lord wants you to do, that’s when you do it. I can’t imagine being in an area where the lights were always out because they’d been fearful of the enemy and then to see them. FTA: They had blackouts. You couldn’t even have lights on in the house when you guys were blacked out. EKA: I got to see a lot of Germany. After the war was over, the division came home and I didn’t have enough points to come home. So, they transferred me to the third division, 15th infantry. I drove a truck all over Germany for almost a year before I got enough points to come home. I had enough points to get discharged, but I didn’t have enough points to get on the ship. You figure how many people they’d send overseas. Millions of soldiers over there taking seniority rides to bring them back. They didn’t fly anybody. We rode boats back. Ships are all you had back in those days. They had a few aircraft, but nothing they could move a whole bunch of people with. The officers would get to fly back, but we just had to wait until there was room on the boats and the ships so we could come back. I had to spend almost a year— nine to ten months—driving a truck over there. They did that for me, they changed my MOS number to a truck driver. I said, “If I’ve got to stay over here I don’t want to walk around with a rifle on my shoulder, I want to do something else. Give me a military driver’s license, I’ll drive.” I never drove a five speed transmission and 10-wheeler. I figured out of all the other vehicles in the service, I want to get one of them I can drive. Of course, I got a 10-wheeler. 16 Spent all night long in the motor pool that night and drove that truck around the motor pool finding where all the gears were. MEA: You ever remember any of the men in your units? Ever keep in contact with them? EKA: No, I hear about more recently in the Marines, they have get-togethers and all that kind of stuff. We never did get close to each other. You get too close then it’s too hard to lose them. So, I just never made too many friends. I had a couple of friends though. Ira Sally, he was a professional wrestler. He was my buddy I went with him all the time. Just never did get close to them. Reece, gosh, their whole company knew each other and knew them by name and everything. I never did do that. We just stayed by ourselves. Didn’t want to make good friends because you make a good friend and then you’d lose them. It was just easier not to make them in the first place. What you want me to talk about in comparison to what there is today it just— MEA: It’s so much different when you look at what happens when a soldier is out on the battlefields now compared to what it was like when you were there. I mean, now they have all these modern things and can fight a war with enemies that they don’t even see from a distance. That wasn’t the case for you guys. EKA: That’s true. MEA: You think about back in Book of Mormon times it was even worse than that because it was hand to hand with swords and spears. I think the loss of life because of what wasn’t available to you then is certainly different than now. 17 EKA: Even what you see on television. Thousands of men on each side back in biblical days. They’d come together and kill thousands and there would be thousands of people laying all over. It wasn’t that bad. MEA: I was just wondering if you ever received any medals and citations. You talk about the bronze star, what was that? EKA: That was for going beyond and above the line of duty, but it just depends on where you are and what time it is. Everybody does spectacular things when they have to. Some of us got cited for it and some of us didn’t. I could have got a Purple Heart, but I was always against that Purple Heart. If you get killed you get a Purple Heart. If you cut your finger, you get a Purple Heart. I never did think much of the Purple Heart for that reason because there were some recipients that really earned it, but then there were some of them that just got it as a gift. We were out in our three quarter ton truck carrying some ammo and a bunch specialized stuff and we hit a land mine. It blew one front wheel right off the vehicle and blew us all out of the vehicle. We were all bruised up and we could hardly move. The guy that was driving, it’s cold there of course and he had put a regular winter glass, house glass and a piece of plywood across there for a door on the truck. That glass broke and cut his face. One thing about a Purple Heart, you have to draw blood to have a Purple Heart. That guy that was driving the truck inside that got a little scratch on his face got a Purple Heart. The rest of us just almost got killed back there but we didn’t draw blood so we didn’t get a Purple Heart. 18 MEA: You just drove over a mine? EKA: Yeah. MEA: Well, we kind of talked about what everyday life was like there that’s for sure. I always think it’s interesting when you were talking about mom sending that gift over and not knowing where you are. It’s kind of interesting that they didn’t allow you to say, “This is where I am.” They didn’t allow that? EKA: Well I could have told her. I couldn’t have told her the exact location, but I could have told her what I was doing and everything. FTA: They censored your letter. EKA: I just didn’t want her and mom and dad to know that I was getting shot at. FTA: They black it out. They didn’t let it come through. MEA: So you actually got letters? EKA: I’d send letters. Well, I’d say I sent her letters all the time, but she probably got twenty or thirty letters in one bunch. I’d get the same from her, a whole stack of letters. I hadn’t had any letters for a month and then I’d get a whole month’s supply of letters. FTA: You’d try to write every day, but what is there every day? MEA: People would write to you but it’d be months before you actually received the letter? How did you know what was going on at home? 19 EKA: Didn’t. We didn’t know after we got over there. FTA: Probably just as well because then you wouldn’t worry about all that. Worry about yourself there. MEA: I’d get homesick wondering what was going on at home. EKA: You do, but I think the whole thing is the Lord just takes care of you. As far as being scared is concerned, when I got the letter that said, “Greetings,” I was scared until I got home, but nothing that I couldn’t handle. Like I said, I think the Lord just takes care of you and makes it to where you can do what you have to do, that’s all. EKA: Some guys got sick on the boat over. They didn’t think they were going to make it. Thought they were going to die from sea sickness. We had two guys in our outfit that they took off the boat on a stretcher. I mean, they were so weak they hadn’t eaten. We were on the water for fifteen days and they hadn’t done anything but throw up for fifteen days. I never got sick. I was hungry all the time. All of them got sick. That’s fine because then I could go down to mess hall and get anything I wanted. MEA: Did you always have enough to eat? EKA: No. On the boat we did. They only fed you two meals a day, but they were substantial meals. MEA: I remember one time I was asking you about Christmas and you told me that you were able to get a good turkey dinner. 20 EKA: President Roosevelt said that every man would get a turkey dinner on Christmas and we did. Oh man, I hadn’t had a meal for months. Just cold sea rations and K rations. Ate this meal and we were all just sick, but it sure tasted good going down. They had jeeps and they’d bring food up in jeeps as close as they could get and then hand carry it the rest of the way to the front line. We got our hot meal. MEA: What was Christmas like? Just another day? EKA: Just another day. You see some of these picture shows where the Germans and the Americans both back off, but I never did see it. MEA: Didn’t happen for you, huh? EKA: No, just one day the same as another. MEA: Did you have any reminders of home with you? Did you carry anything? Picture from mom? EKA: No, I don’t believe I did. FTA: Yeah you did, I think. EKA: I don’t know. Did I? I probably did. FTA: He threw them all away when he landed at Ft. Douglas. He threw everything away. EKA: It was coming back, not going over. See, you weren’t allowed to carry anything that they could identify you by. If you got picked up you weren’t supposed to have 21 anything in your pockets or anything like that. Not a picture or an address or anything like that. All you had to do was say your name, rank and serial number when you got picked up. So we didn’t really carry anything. FTA: Had your dog tags and that’s it, wasn’t it? EKA: Oh yeah, I carried them. That’s the same thing as giving your name and serial number is all. So they could identify you when you get your head blown off. MEA: When we were just little boys that you bought us some Springfield 30-06 military rifles. You used to tell me that in the winter those were pretty reliable, but those automatics weren’t so good in the winter. What did you carry? Did you switch out? EKA: I switched for a couple months there. I happened to find one. They didn’t issue them. The snipers use that Springfield like I got you guys. MEA: With the peep sight? EKA: No, it didn’t have fancy scopes on them. I could knock the scope off because I couldn’t use that and use a peep sight just exactly like the ones you have. MEA: When I couldn’t shoot? EKA: I don’t know, dog gone thing. That sight fell apart and everything else. You had the worst luck when it comes to guns. FTA: Guns? Not only guns, everything he got. 22 MEA: I just know dad’s a dead eye shot with that peep sight. I couldn’t hit anything and he shot a porcupine off a tree and said, “There ain’t nothing wrong with that gun.” So, you’re a pretty good shot. EKA: Well, it was the same peep sight on the M-1, on the automatic too. MEA: Oh really? EKA: That’s the same sight that all your military weapons had. So it wasn’t like changing sights, it was the same thing. MEA: So you used an M-1 and then you used the Springfield? EKA: Yeah. They’d freeze up and you could hardly open them. The bolt, you could grab that and even if it’s frozen up you could grab that and open it. It only had 5 shots and the M-1 had 8. At the same time, I’d rather have five that I know will shoot than 8 that I didn’t know if they would or not. I think you’ve seen in some of your war shows— guys pounding on their M-1—trying to get them to open so they could get them cocked and shoot. MEA: Not too reliable. EKA: They probably were, probably what you get in your own mind. At times I didn’t know, but I’m sure it was very few. All they have to do is not open once and your show is over. I went to a Springfield for a month or two there. In fact, I mostly didn’t carry an M-1, I carried a Carbine. MEA: Oh really? 23 EKA: Yeah, I carried the Carbine because we usually had other stuff to carry besides just the rifle. We carried Carbines so we could carry ammo. When we’d go on patrol we’d like to go on patrol with the Carbine a Grease Gun, or a little automatic. Full automatic Grease guns is what they’d call them. That’s just what they looked like is a little Grease gun with an iron stalk and everything. A lot of times when you go on patrol you were just trying not to let the Germans rest and keep them scared. You’d go up there and the artillery observers would spot a congregation of them. They’d take a patrol in there, sneak up on them, throw a couple of hand grenades and empty out a couple of those guns. Then they’d turn and run and we’d stay and fight. We’d just turn and run back for the line. So when they lay down and tried to get a little rest, in the back of their mind they’re thinking, “Are those guys going to come and bother us again?” We’d just keep them nervous and worried all the time. I carried a full automatic for a while and called in a raid platoon. All we did was go out and raid camps like that. That was good duty too. You talk about food, we’d have to go out every night in front of the line companies and in the day time we went behind the lines and got hot meals. That was pretty good. As long as we didn’t mess up and give ourselves away, you figured, those guys we were raiding weren’t shooting back. You’re looking for someone to shoot at so you go throw grenades and shoot a couple of clips of the automatic and take off. Those guys are still docked, they’re not trying to shoot back. By the time they wise up, we’re gone. As long as we didn’t get caught going through the lines getting back through there. That was pretty good because we’d get good hot meals. 24 MEA: I know you’ve seen the movies with Bob Hope when he does the USO shows. Did you ever see any of them? EKA: I’ve seen one of them. MEA: Did you? Who did you see? EKA: Bob Hope. In fact, he was late to the show because he tried to run a road block and they shot at him. Shot the gas tank out. Stupid. He put on a good show. It was their dirty show, but not real dirty. Well, today they would be clean shows, but back then they were dirty shows. He put on a real good show. I don’t remember the girl that he had with him, but he had girls and he told some jokes. Some of the jokes were pretty raunchy and some of the girls would leave you a lot of thoughts to think about what they were thinking. The everyday movies are worse now than the Bob Hope shows back in those days. For instance, Bob Hope got an awful big fine on the radio before they had television. He said, “The new women’s swimsuit is going to consist of two thimbles and a cork.” They cut him off, but it was too late. He got it out before he got cut off. Oh man, was he ever reprimanded and got a big stiff fine for saying that thing. MEA: Things were different then. EKA: Nobody would think anything about that now. Back then that was a terrible thing to say. MEA: I just remember watching the variety shows with you back in the good old days when they had them, and always watching Bob Hope T.V. 25 EKA: I only got to see one of his shows, but I did get to see one. He put on a show in Stuttgart, Germany when we were there. MEA: Did you ever play any pranks on your buddies? EKA: Not to speak of, but they were pulled that’s for sure. MEA: Did you ever get to come home? EKA: Once. After I finished basic training, I got to come home one time and that was it. MEA: Once you went overseas that was it? EKA: I went overseas and stayed there until I got discharged. MEA: How long were you there? You said you had to drive trucks for nine months. EKA: I was overseas about a year and a half. MEA: What were you doing all that time, Mom? Just worrying? FTA: Working. That’s when I worked for Dr. Kragen. My first family. EKA: I never realized how much of the stuff I forgot all about until you asked me questions. Most of it left me. Well, that was a few years ago. FTA: Well, that was over sixty years ago. MEA: What was the year when you went? EKA: Forty-four. FTA: We were married on the 30th of December of 1943. 26 MEA: So you’d been married a year? EKA: Before I went in? Just a couple of months. MEA: Really? Married a couple months and then away you went? That’s not time to have a relationship. FTA: No. I don’t know if we’d have done it differently. We’d done it because he was leaving and they had a special section at the temple for military. That’s why ours is on the 30th. EKA: The temple was closed, but they opened it up for one day for the military guys. MEA: A bunch of you just showed up and went through your endowments and you got married after? FTA: At Logan Temple. You had to climb up all those stairs. Back then you couldn’t get anything like a wedding dress or anything. This other couple had a veil made out of that knit stuff and every step she took to go up there she’d rip, rip, rip. She’d step on it. They were the first to get married and when the guy told them to kiss, they gave a big smack. Grandma Anderson said, “Don’t you do that.” She didn’t want to get embarrassed. It was quite a deal that day. A special day. A day to remember. MEA: Were you in a wedding dress and everything? EKA: No, she didn’t have one. She borrowed the clothes that she got married in. FTA: Aunt Ivy gave me a blouse and a skirt. 27 EKA: A blouse and a white skirt. FTA: The rest was just the temple issued. MEA: Do you remember the sealer? EKA: I don’t. FTA: It’s probably on our marriage license. MEA: Where’d you go on your honeymoon? FTA: Salt Lake on the Galloping Goose MEA: What’s the Galloping Goose? EKA: A train that used to go to Lewiston—the Utah Idaho Central. MEA: Is that where you got on? EKA: No we got on in Logan and stayed at the temple square hotel. FTA: We stayed there also when he came home. Didn’t we? EKA: No, we stayed at…I can’t remember the name of it now. FTA: New House. EKA: New House Hotel. Mom and dad got us a room there. We did stay at the temple square hotel. In fact, when we stayed there it was a brand new hotel. It hadn’t been opened very long. FTA: We didn’t even know where to go to eat or anything. 28 MEA: I was going to ask you, what did you do for your honeymoon? Go out to eat? Go to a movie? FTA: We went about two feet and then to the hotel because we were scared we’d get lost. EKA: Country hicks. We were afraid we’d get lost if we went any place. There was a drug store on the corner there that had pretty good food; we’d eat there most of the time. We didn’t do much of anything. FTA: Well, I’ve never been any place in my life. MEA: So, Salt Lake was quite an adventure? FTA: I’d been to Salt Lake once when my grandma took me. EKA: We rode on that Galloping Goose and when we got to Salt Lake, we got off the train and were afraid we’d get lost so we hailed a cab down. I said, “Can you take us to the temple square hotel?” He said, “Yeah, it’s right there.” The old Vanberger station, there was just an alley between that and the temple square hotel. We got off the train about twenty feet from the train was the hotel. MEA: They knew you were from out of town. FTA: There was this box on the wall, we didn’t know what it was and we didn’t dare mess with it. Finally, found out it was the radio, wasn’t it? 29 EKA: Well, it wasn’t the radio it was just a speaker. What they had was a central place where they could play music, and you just had to push the button on the box. I didn’t know whether it was for room service or what it was. FTA: What was it that we were just laughing about? Oh, somebody next door was celebrating the New Year and light was showing through. We were laughing our heads off. Remember? Trying to listen to what was going on in the other room. EKA: We went to one station while we were there. I can’t remember where we went, but we went to a live show. MEA: How long were you in Salt Lake? EKA: I think we stayed there two nights. FTA: Then, we went back home and stayed with his parents until he left. EKA: Yeah, we stayed with mom and dad until I left. MEA: How long? EKA: A couple months. When I got home, I owned a home. She had bought a home. MEA: For eight-hundred dollars. FTA: His uncle gave us a stove. I bought a kitchen set and a bedroom set. Mother and dad gave us a couch. Back in those days, we didn’t even have a fridge. We had an ice box. EKA: I don’t think we had a telephone, did we? 30 FTA: No. EKA: I didn’t think so. Now, you’ve got these things here that… MEA: I know. When you got home did you stay and work in Lewiston, or is that when you left? EKA: I stayed in Lewiston for a couple of years, but just couldn’t make enough money. FTA: We tried the floral business. EKA: We bought into the floral business with Uncle Al and Aunt Ida. There just wasn’t enough money there. Both of us got out of that and I worked as an auto mechanic up there at the Jim Bridge for a while. FTA: That and the sugar factory. EKA: I took the sugar factory and I drove a dump truck down the road from Richmond to Trenton on those back roads. I helped build those back roads. I was working at the sugar factory and driving dump truck. I got scared and quit the dump truck. I wasn’t getting hardly any sleep at all. I’d go down there, take out that dump truck and go dump my load. I’d come back in we’d be talking and they’d say, “Boy, did you see that big herd of cows on the side of the road?” I didn’t see them. One time I came back there and they said, “Those kids are going to get killed playing on the side of the road there.” I never saw those kids. Right then I decided, “I can’t be doing this. I’ve got to quit.” I’d work graveyard at the sugar factory from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and had to be at the dump truck from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 31 p.m. The guys would cover for me for that last five to ten minutes while I’d go get on the other job. I was only home about five hours a day. It just wasn’t enough. MEA: What was it like coming home? When the war was ended and you came home, was there welcome in the community? Or you just came home? EKA: No, just came home. They showed all that stuff about World War II and the big parade back at New York, but that wasn’t anybody that had been in combat. They were the state side “Joes” that never went overseas in the first place. They had a whole bunch of big celebrations, but we were fighting people and we didn’t have any celebrations at all. We went quiet and we came back quiet. FTA: I don’t know if they had anything in Ogden. EKA: Seemed to me like you said they did because you said that Craig had taken you there. I think it was in Ogden they took you and they had a parade or something. They did right after the war ended though. They had some celebrations, but when I went, I went all quiet and when I came back, I came back all quiet. Only trouble I had was I couldn’t take any prisoners to Uncle Ed on the farm. They had a German prisoner of war camp in Preston and they’d use these prisoners up on the farm. Uncle Ed was having a rough time and I was helping him all I could. I said, “Let’s go get some prisoners.” He said, “They won’t work.” I said “Oh yes they will, I guarantee you they’ll work.” So he said, “Alright, let’s go.” Had to be armed, so I went and got my shot gun and we went to Preston. We got ten of them all ready to go and they found out I was just out of the service from Germany and they wouldn’t let me have them. They were afraid I’d kill them. 32 FTA: Yeah, they’d top beets right next door to the Doctors where I worked we’d watch them out there topping beets? MEA: It’s interesting that they’d bring them all the way there to Lewiston from Preston. EKA: Yeah that was a prisoner of war camp in Preston. MEA: They must spread them all around the country. EKA: Yeah they were. FTA: Not in one place. EKA: I don’t know why they were still there because that was a year after the war was over. They hadn’t sent them home or something. I don’t remember what the deal was, but I know when I first got out of the service they had a prisoner of war camp in Preston. Crazy world. FTA: You’re getting a history lesson. MEA: I didn’t know that at all. MEA: We’re going to look at this book of remembrance and dads going to share some of the things he remembers about the stuff that mom saved. EKA: That’s Ira Sally, the professional wrestler that used to know. MEA: He used to tell us a little bit about him. Is this over in France? EKA: In Germany. MEA: In Germany where it’s all bombed out? 33 EKA: I didn’t even know you had all those pictures of me. FTA: It’s not something you have out every day. EKA: You can see that we’re real smart taking pictures, aren’t we? All those shadows; can’t see anything anyway. This is in Germany. MEA: You really bombed them out it looks like. EKA: I have a hard time seeing much about it. This is showing you everything pretty much bombed out. Their fortresses are houses over there. They’re all cement rock and cement houses with walls a foot and half thick. Nowadays it wouldn’t mean very much, but back when a flight of B-17’s went over Stuttgart, they would spend 3 minutes over Stuttgart and level it. The whole town was leveled in 3 minutes. Now, they shoot one shell over there and level it. Back then that was a lot of bombs they used over there. That picture right there, for example, that’s the Carbine I carried. That’s a German pistol I had at the time. A guy offered me more money for that pistol than what it was worth. MEA: This is an article that I don’t know if I’ve seen. It says, “Lewiston Man was Cited With the 100th Division of the 7th Army in Germany 1st Battalion Headquarters Company. The 398th infantry has been awarded the Meritorious Service Unit Plaque. EKA: Meritorious Service Wreath, I forgot that. That’s the one that’s on the sleeve. I don’t know whether you took that off or not too. She stripped my jacket and all my ribbons and everything on it. She took all that stuff off and I didn’t know how 34 to put it back on. It was put on there in the right places by the right people and she took it all off and washed it. Its wool and it shrunk. It was half big enough for me after she got through with it. I’d like to have had that. FTA: That was a terrible thing to do. I was trying to be so nice. EKA: I don’t even know what awards I received. I forgot about that Meritorious Service Wreath. MEA: It says, “By direction of the President… the Meritorious Service Unit Plaque is awarded to the First Battalion Headquarters Company, 398th Infantry for superior performance of duty and achievement of a high standard discipline. The 100th (Century) Division, of which the 398th Infantry is a part, fought through the Vosges Mountains in France, cracking the proposed German Winter line there, seiged the famous Maginot Line city of Bitche for three months and finally captured it for the first time in the city’s two-hundred years history. Breached the Siegfried Line and drew the Germans on the Southern end of the Western front back across the Rhine River at Ludwigshafen and deep into Southern Germany. Most recently, before the wars end in Europe, the 100th had captured the key Nazi rail and communications center of Heilbronn, after a bitter nine day battle. The fanatical German stand at the city 100,000 was called the most determined defense the Nazis put up of their homes soil. Later, the 100th cooperated with the first French Army. EKA: There’s the whole thing right there. MEA: You didn’t remember that? 35 EKA: Bitche, France was why we had such a hard time taking that. There’s a big cave up above the town there and they’d take 88 artillery guns. They had two 88’s up there and they’d shoot direct fire at you. It’s a shell about that big around and any time we moved, they’d shoot at us like that and we couldn’t knock them out. Finally, we did. I guess that must have been an enormous cave because Sally Berlin, we’d listen to her when we’d get a chance. We went up above on top of the mountains and led charges down on rope and blew the cave up and Sally Berlin came on that night and said we got the name of the “Bloody Butchers of Bitche” because they said we killed over two-hundred people in that cave. They had a fort in that town, an old Robin Hood type fort and they supplied the Maginot Line. It was talking about that in there. They had underground all the way to these pillboxes they could send people or guns or ammunition and anything they wanted from that fort. They’d come up from under the ground. Everything was underground. Bitche was Maginot Line, but the Siegfried Line was the same thing. They had a central place, we’d go there and hit those pillboxes and take them. Figure everything was taken and go on through to the next row of pillboxes. We’d be getting shot at from the ones we just cleared and we couldn’t figure out how. That’s how, because we’d get too hot for them and they’d leave the pillboxes. We’d get there and throw hand grenades in there which would kill anything in the pillboxes, but they wouldn’t be in there. After we’d get by they’d go back up in the pillboxes and start shooting at us again. “Bloody Butchers of Bitche.” MEA: That was quite a big deal then to get that handed. 36 EKA: Yeah, that was a rough stand there we had. We lost a lot of people in that. The “Bloody Butchers of Bitche.” MEA: She was a German radio announcer? EKA: Yeah, that was just amazing. We landed at Marsai, France and took all our patches and everything off before we left the states. Everything was top secret. We landed in Marsai and Sally Berlin came on the radio and welcomed the 100th Division. They knew all about us. They knew how many of us there was and they knew where we were going to go, where we were going to hit the front lines. They knew everything. We just laughed about it because everything turned out that way. Your people tell you that they’d make the password up to five days in advance. She said, “Get your pencils and papers out. Here’s your password for the next thirty days.” And she was right. MEA: So they knew everything. EKA: Knew everything about us. That deal called us the “Bloody Butchers of Bitche,” it wasn’t 30 minutes after we blew that cave up that she’d come on the radio and tell us what was done and how many people were in that cave. MEA: Enemy behind your lines or something. EKA: She did us a lot of good really. We just loved to listen to her programs. She played music on it all the time and do you think your loved ones are waiting for you back there and all that kind of stuff. We just got a kick out of it and we loved the music she played, so it was just very interesting. When we landed in Marsai, 37 France, she came right on the radio told us we’d landed and that we were going to meet German crack troops in the Vosges Mountains in France and that’s exactly where we went. How she knew, I don’t know. There had to be somebody on our side of the line who was feeding her information. A spy of some kind. She knew a lot more than we did. We didn’t know where we were going, but she sure did. MEA: This other thing says, “Edward K. Anderson 3-9-9-2-6-8-8-5 Private 1st Class 398th Infantry Regiment for Meritorious Achievement in action during the period of 6 November 1944 to the 23rd of April 1945 in France and Germany as an ammunition bearer in an ammunition and pioneer platoon. Private Anderson performed his duties commendably throughout this period of combat operations. He displayed outstanding courage and was initiative on 5th December near Lincoln, France where 6 members of his platoon, he helped to evacuate six casualties under intense enemy fire for several hours aided his comrades in riding off a desperate hostile counterattack. The repelling of which substantially contributed to the capture of Wingen. He entered military service from Lewiston, Utah.” MEA: So, your dog tag number, you remember it still? EKA: 3-9-9-2-6-8-8-5. MEA: Here’s another group of you in the mountains. It says, “Just outside Bitche, just before we made our attack on the 15th of March. There’s a pillbox behind us that were in for borage of artillery. Just came in and the German planes striked and 38 so the battered pillbox looks pretty good.” So it’s a picture of a pillbox, group of you around it. I wouldn’t have known what a pillbox was if you hadn’t told me. There’s a pretty handsome guy with his shirt off. It says, “My darling, the paper’s not very good, so I am sending the magazine with all the pictures.” These look like pictures of France and some of the sites. Cathedrals. FTA: Why don’t you see that sketch of your dad? MEA: I saw that. Who did that? FTA: Who did that for you? Do you remember? MEA: There’s a name on it but I can’t read it. MEA: It says Sally. FTA: I wondered if he was an artist. MEA: Who was Sally? EKA: Don’t remember that either. EKA: He was a professional wrestler. His wife got after him until he had to give it up. Then he went into show business. Got him a little band called, “Yodeling Ike and the Texas Rangers.” He said, “There wasn’t any one of us that’d been to Texas.” “Yodeling Ike and the Texas Rangers.” He could yodel that’s for sure. MEA: “So it’s your first day in the Army and you want a raise in pay? Certainly its worth more now after I learned the work would be easier.” You’ve got a bunch of postcards. 39 MEA: Here’s another article on the 100th. “Once again the Wheel of Fortune brings the 100th division rest inside the fold of VI Corps guiding sentry division for the third time with the headquarters under which it received its baptism of fire. In war, Major General Withers a duress 100th division, served twice under the Veteran Corps direction. First, upon entering the line in November 1941, in the Vosges Mountains and last in the struggle for Heilbronn in March and April of this year, separated and ordered under other control in each of these campaigns, the division recently became an occupational unit of the headquarters. The woods were dense and the hills steep in Vosges.” EKA: Sergeant Ingel Britson was the platoon sergeant. Lieutenant Jamson was a Lieutenant. He was the one that sent me to the rest camp that said he’s not worried about me getting shot he’s worried about me shooting the guys going to shoot him. MEA: It talks about the atomic bomb. Were you back home by then? EKA: No, when they dropped the atomic bomb, the 100th division hadn’t come home then. We were preparing to go to Japan, but decided to stay there when they dropped the atomic bomb and ended the war. The 100th division came home and I didn’t have enough points to come home. MEA: So after all you been through there getting you prepared to go, another one? EKA: If they hadn’t used the atomic bomb we probably would have made it over there, but they figured a lot of people were going to get killed when we get to Japan. We didn’t have to get Japan, they surrendered before we had. 40 MEA: This says, “August 6th, President Truman today announced that an atomic bomb has been used against Japan for the first time with power equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. In a statement issued at the White House, Mr. Truman revealed that sixteen hours ago, sometime Sunday, and American airplane dropped one of the new bombs on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons. He said it had more than 2,000 times the blast power of British grand slam which is the largest bomb ever in the history of warfare.” EKA: A lot of history in that book right there. MEA: I’ll say. You have a German swastika. Japan surrenders. BJ Day. MacArthur. Douglas MacArthur must have been there. You have a long thing called, “Loving a Soldier.” A poem? Here’s your citation for the Bronze Star. This is the same one that I read. FTA: I can’t believe there’s so much history in that book. MEA: You got a recommendation for the Sustained Superior Performance Award. “Twenty-five Aircraft Sheet Metal Recruiters WG-10 and intermediate levels.” That was at Hill Field. Well, we got quite a bit. Anything you want to add? EKA: There’s stuff I forgot all about, then you see stuff in there that I don’t remember happened. FTA: You got those two German friends that were writing to you telling you to come home and never answered back. Weganer, something? 41 EKA: Vernor. A lot of things I should have done and didn’t. FTA: Like what? EKA: Answer those kid’s letters. 42 Appendix Pill Box 1945. Just Outside of Bitche just before we made our attack on the 15th of March. It is a pill box behind us that we were in. A borage of artillery just came in, and the German planes just striked, so the battered pillbox looked pretty good to us. Ludwigsburg, Germany Bitche, France St. Lewis, France Bitche, France My Darling, the paper is not very good so I am sending the magazine with all the pictures. 43 44 Ludwigsburg, Germany Bitche, France St. Lewis, France 45 Bitche, France Bitche, France Bitche, France Ludwigsburg, Germany Bitche, France 46 47 Lt. Jamson our platoon Lt. and Sgt. Ingel Britson our platoon Sgt. Ira A. Salley, Carver Street Waterville Maine. Ludwigsburg, Germany Stuttgart, Germany This picture is not just a blur, it is just the view of Stuttgart. My Darling, this is a picture of us when we were pretty regal and as you can see it wouldn’t hurt us to get close to a razor and also get about 2 inches cut off my hair. 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78