Oral History Program Robert Aldous Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 15 June, 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robert Aldous Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 15 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: Aldous, Robert, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 15 June 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Robert Aldous, conducted over the phone, on June 15, 2017, by Lorrie Rands. Robert discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. LR: It is June 15, 2017. We are talking with Robert Aldous. He is in Concord, North Carolina. I am at Weber State University Special Collections, Stewart Library. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview. Robert, thank you again for your time and let’s start with when and where you were born. RA: I was born in Ogden, Utah on July 13, 1925. LR: Were you raised in Ogden? RA: I was raised in Huntsville, Utah, until I went in the service during World War II. LR: Huntsville. I should be familiar with where this is, but I’m not. Where? RA: Huntsville is twelve miles east of Ogden and it is located in what is known as Ogden Valley. The approach is through Ogden Canyon. LR: How far from Eden is that? RA: It is four miles from Eden. LR: Now I know where it’s at. RA: Also, the other village or city in the valley—Ogden Valley, is Liberty. LR: That makes me happy, I learned something today. RA: That’s good. LR: What are some of your favorite memories of growing up in Huntsville? RA: Well, having mountains surround us, and having very dramatic changes of scene as the scenery during the winters and summers. Lots of snow in the winter and very pleasant summers. In 1935, because of the irrigation developments in the 2 Roosevelt administration, they built Pineview Dam. As a result, we had Pineview Lake in the valley. My home was only two blocks away from the lake when it was at its highest, so I did a lot of fishing and a lot of swimming. We would try to get owners who had boats to give us a ride in their crafts. LR: Do you remember them building the dam? RA: Yes, I do. LR: What was that like? RA: There were a lot of trucks. There were a lot of detours relative to the highways, and it was just a trying time because of transportation from Huntsville to Ogden. They did have an electric train or railroad system that went to the valley. Shortly after the completion of Pineview Dam, the railroad stopped because it took up some of the territory the tracks were laying on. Transportation between Huntsville and Ogden became either a bus or your own automobile or truck, whatever the case may have been. LR: You said that the Pineview Dam was one of the Roosevelt projects. Was that with the WPA? RA: Yes. The WPA, I don’t know whether they worked on it, but we had a CCC camp in Huntsville. They did a lot of work of cleaning out trees and brush that were going to be covered by the water. They also built a road into Snow Basin, which I’m sure you know about. Really, that was kind of the start of Snow Basin as a ski area. Then they created a lot of picnic areas in South Fork canyon, east of Huntsville. A number of our citizens in the community were aided by the WPA programs. If they didn’t have WPA, they would have had a real tough time. 3 LR: It sounds like during the depression, those programs made a large impact on Huntsville. RA: They did. LR: You’ve kind of talked about it a little bit, but what are some of your memories of the depression? RA: My father had a job. He worked for a dairy and carried the milk from the farmers to the dairy. His job was a seven-day-a-week job. I saw my father only in the evenings. Some individuals had limited incomes and they relied on whatever they could grow in their gardens and whatever they could put together by way of canned goods or bottled preserves. That sort of thing helped them a great deal. Some of my best friends had to cope with that kind of family relationship, with items to buy and items to use. Sometimes their wardrobes were limited to maybe one pair of trousers or one shirt or two shirts. It wasn’t a closet full of clothes like we have today. LR: Besides the WPA and the CCC, were there any other programs that were available in Huntsville during the depression? RA: Of course, the reclamation programs were the ones that were really behind the creation of the Pineview Dam, and that was very important. The Soil Conservation was very prominent and important too in the area. LR: Were those both part of the Roosevelt program? RA: Yes. LR: Those are two I don’t know a lot about, so that’s really fun and cool. Where did you go to school in Huntsville? 4 RA: I went to what eventually became the Valley school. There was an elementary school in Liberty and also one in Eden and eventually those schools were combined into the school in Huntsville. It was then called the Valley School. I went to the Valley School through the tenth grade and then I went to Weber High school, which at that time was located at about 1100 Washington Boulevard in Ogden. I graduated from Weber High on May 20th in 1943. LR: That’s a long bus ride down to high school, wasn’t it? RA: Yes. Ironically, when I was in the eleventh grade, my next-door neighbor was the bus driver. He had a part time job, so he needed his car to be in Ogden so he could go to his job after he brought the bus down, so he had me driving his car. That year I didn’t ride the bus, but the next year, he had a daughter who drove the car. I did ride the bus that year. Of course, that’s kind of characteristic of things people did during the depression just to get by—getting part time jobs and trading employment situations. There was a lot of that going on. LR: 1943, you graduated. What are some what are your memories of Pearl Harbor Day? RA: I remember being at church and somebody came in about noontime and said, “The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor.” I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was. We did know, from the news, that there were some problems between the Japanese nation and President Roosevelt’s desires. I think he expected or wanted to see the Japanese get themselves out of China where they had been since 1937 and not be so land crazy. They were expressing desires to 5 expand Japan, and Roosevelt wasn’t exactly in favor of that. I think we had the Japanese on certain restrictions by way of trade and business finance. LR: Right. So, you were still in high school when the war started. RA: Right. I was a junior in high school. Of course, we wondered what was going to happen. There had been a draft before that. There were some preparations by way of increasing the military through the draft and a lot of efforts to get enlistments. Of course, the war in Europe was going on and President Roosevelt, was very interested in helping England as much as he could. It looked like England was trying to get all the help it could. LR: After the news of Pearl Harbor, did you contemplate enlisting? What were your thoughts, being a junior in high school? RA: I realized that if the war lasted long enough, I would either be drafted or I would have to enlist. To be drafted, I’d have to go exactly where they put me, and I wanted to fly. I wanted to get into the Army Air Corps. I didn’t want to get in the Navy. I anticipated joining the Army Air Corps as an Air Force cadet after I graduated from high school, and that’s exactly what I did. I graduated from high school in May, and in mid-June, I was in Salt Lake City signing up to become a cadet in the Army Air Corps. That all worked through, and I was called to active duty in early August of 1943. That’s where it started. LR: In early August, where did you go? RA: I went to Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas for basic training. LR: How long were you there, do you remember? 6 RA: I was there less than a month. In order to comply with what they expected in the Air Cadet Program, I would have to have had some college training, which I did not have. To fill that need, they sent me, and of course others, to colleges around the country. I went to Texas Technological College in Lubbock, Texas after I got out of basic training. I was there until just beyond Christmas. LR: So you were there for a while. RA: Yes, I was there for what probably would be called a quarter, not a semester. I had the regular college courses in addition to military physical education. I also, while there, learned to fly a piper cub type airplane, ten hours’ worth of instruction. That was rather interesting and fun. LR: Sounds like it. During these classes, besides learning some aviation, what else were you studying? RA: We were staying in the college dormitories and eating in the cafeteria, etcetera. Which is very similar to being in college except we had to be in military uniform and march to the classes, etcetera. I remember a history class, an algebra class, a geography class with current geography relative to the World War II, and first aid. Of course, the Phys. Ed after the military desire and design. LR: Did you enjoy your time there? RA: Very much so. Lubbock was a great city and I loved the university too. I hated to leave there. I left there on Christmas day, headed for Santa Ana, California. That was where they were going to test us to see if we could do all they expected to be an aviation cadet, which would put me into either a pilot training, bombardier training, or a navigator training. To my chagrin, I washed out because I blushed 7 when they asked me if I liked the girls. The psychiatrist washed me out. Then they sent me to a technical school in Denver, Colorado. That was slated for me to become an Aircraft Armorer. They asked me if I still wanted to fly and I said yes. There they taught me all about bombs, cannons, aircraft turrets, and machine guns. I arrived in Denver somewhere in early February and stayed there until June. Then I went to Harlingen, Texas, to Aircraft Gunnery School. There we learned to be gunners on B-24 Liberator Bombers. My training was in the Sperry Ball Turret, which was on the belly of the B-24 Bomber. That was a lot of fun. We shot skeet, we shot the machine guns, and along with other things that the Army expected of us. I left there sometime in mid-July. They sent us to Lemoore, California, which is probably some ninety-five to eighty miles south of San Francisco. There they put us on a crew, a ten-member bomber crew. From Lemoore, they sent our crew to Walla Walla, Washington. Now, Walla Walla is such a good city the natives named it twice. There we flew our B- 24 bomber all around the Northwest to get used to flying. We dropped sand bombs on a target area in Oregon. We were there until December. Walla Walla was a good town; I enjoyed being there. About the first of December, they sent us to Hamilton Field, which is just north of San Francisco in California. I was there a few days and then they sent us to what was then Fairfield-Suisun Airfield, located halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco. We were there until Christmas Eve. We were told to, “Report to the flight area, they have an airplane for you. You’re going to Hawaii.” When we got to the slight area, there was a man waiting for us. The pilot said that we had to take one person off the crew to put 8 this man on. He was a radar operator. The pilot didn’t like the top turret gunner for some reason. He told him he was getting off the crew and moved me from the bottom on the plane to the top. I became the top turret gunner on a B-24. We left Christmas Eve and spent Christmas day in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. We got there just after all the Christmas dinner was consumed so all we got to do was pick at some of the turkey. I was there one day, and then they sent us on our way to, eventually, New Guinea. We stopped on the way at Canton Island, which is an island out in the South Pacific. We spent overnight there. We went next to Guadalcanal and spent the night there. Guadalcanal, of course, was one of the famous islands that the Marines and others took from Japan during World War II. Then we went to Nadzab, New Guinea, which is near the eastern shore of New Guinea. At that point, they assigned our crew to a bomb group somewhere in the Western Pacific area. We were there probably two weeks. Our crew was assigned to the Ninetieth Bomb Group, which called themselves the Jolly Rogers. They were stationed at the Island of Biak, which was a little island off the shore of northwestern New Guinea in the Dutch East Indies. We went there, joined the Ninetieth Bomb Group and we flew our first combat mission from there to Davao, a city on Mindanao Island in the Philippines. That was the beginning of our combat tour. Do you want me to continue, and how much detail? LR: Oh, absolutely. I’m enjoying this immensely so, absolutely. This is a lot of fun for me. RA: On Biak, we found that there were still Japanese soldiers in some of the cliffs behind our camp, our living area and our squadron and group headquarters. 9 These folks were up there starving to death and they were coming down occasionally and stealing food from the mess halls when they could, and that created a problem. I wasn’t there very long because we had the radar man on our crew and they decided they would utilize him elsewhere. They sent us on temporary duty up to the Philippines to the Island of Leyte. There, we went to Tacloban Airstrip. That was on the eastern side of Leyte. The American armies were still fighting on the western side. We were to fly from Leyte to some places where there were raids. The first target they picked for us was at a place called Takao, which is in southern, Formosa of which is now Taiwan. On our third mission, we tried to go up to the same place, but our radio went out, so we had to fly back to base. They were having air raids at Tacloban the night we got back. We got there just about dark. Our tent mates were shown some fox holes where they could go if there was an air raid, but the foxholes were full of water. Because of this air raid these fellows hopped out of the tent, and got into the foxholes that were full of water. There were a couple of explosions that happened nearby sounded to us like bombs going off. I thought if I was going to die, I’ll die dry, so I didn’t go out. We found out the next morning that these explosions were anti-aircraft guns shooting, so my crewmates were upset with me because they had to get out in the water and I didn’t. There were many times when interesting things happened like that. We made a flight out of Tacloban when we went to Hong Kong, China and tried to find a Japanese ship with radar, which we were unsuccessful in doing. We got back, and our outfit had moved from Biak to Mindoro Island in the 10 Philippines, so they sent us from Leyte to our own outfit in Mindoro. From Mindoro, we flew most of our missions to various other spots in the Western Pacific, many of them being to places in Luzon, which were still being taken from the Japanese and were in combat conditions. Many of the planes and supplies that were being used by the Japanese in Luzon, Philippines were being sent there from what is now Taiwan, so we were doing a lot of bombing of targets there trying to stop some of these materials from coming down and helping the Japanese in Luzon. We also bombed Corregidor two times, which is an island out in the Manila harbor. Of course, that’s one of the places that General MacArthur left from when he left the Philippines after the Japanese moved in on him. We also bombed Batan two or three times. We made a bombing run to Clark Field where we had some problems with the aircraft. Our engines were failing and we landed our aircraft in a dried up rice paddy, a large one that was being used as a fighter emergency field. Our pilot was a very sharp guy and he put the plane down there. The engines were down to one by that time. He saw he didn’t have length enough to roll on so he hit the brakes on one side of the plane very hard and caused the plane to ground loop at the end of the space he had for landing, a very shrewd move. He saved our lives, but we had to leave the airplane there because it wouldn’t take off from that short place. Those are some of the things that happened along the way. Then we flew several missions. Our radar operator, after about six missions, went with our commanding officer to a target in Formosa. They were shot up by anti-aircraft and the plane either exploded or crashed radar operator, Jim Roberts, was killed 11 in that crash. Then had a gunner put back on our plane his name was Newt Harrington. We continued bombing situations in Formosa, in the Philippines and then we started hitting targets in China. I hurt my knee and couldn’t fly on about three missions, so I was flying with other crews to make up my missions and catch up with my crew. I went on the first daytime raid to Hong Kong in China, and I was flying with another crew. Then we hit Canton. I’ve flown to Saigon in French Indo China and I flew two missions to destroy a bridge in French Indo China. We then were assigned to knock out an oil refinery in Borneo. Our crew flew four missions to knock out this oil refinery at a place called Balikpapan. In most of these situations the anti-aircraft fire was pretty tough. One of the missions was to Formosa in a place called Heito. We had about a 120 millimeter shell go right through our wing behind number three engine and explode just after it got through. It was only about fifteen feet from me, but all the shrapnel went to the rear, fortunately for me, but it hit our tail gunner in the rump, hit one of the waist gunners in the eyebrow and the other waist gunner in the eye. That was Newt Harrington, and I think he lost an eye. That’s the last we saw of Newt. Then they put a man on the crew named Bob Yarrington. Yarrington and I became good friends. He’s still alive and he lives in Columbus, Ohio. We contact each other occasionally. Our co-pilot decided that he was going to get himself a suntan. He got his cot, laid it out in the sun and he went to sleep. He got himself a good sunburn, so bad he couldn’t wear a parachute harness, so he couldn’t fly with us. They put a man on our crew whose companions called him Dog. His name was Darrington. Then 12 had a Darrington, a Harrington and a Yarrington, all similar type names. He started flying our plane when the pilot decided he wanted to have a nap. I think we were hitting a place in China, and when the pilot went to sleep Darrington thought we should get there faster, so he increased the engine RPM and lo and behold we didn’t have enough fuel to get back to our airstrip on Mindoro. We had to land at Lingayen Gulf that had just been taken from the Japanese. They had just made an airstrip there. These are the kinds of things that happened to us. We had a situation also one day when one of the clerks in the orderly room of the next squadron, which was only about two hundred feet from our tent, came in, looked under his desk and there was a big snake which happened to be a cobra. He, fortunately, was wearing a side arm, a pistol, and he pulled it out very slowly and shot the cobra in the head. It scared the devil out of us. We started looking for snakes. One of the fellows on one of the other crews found a Filipino that would sell him a mongoose, which is a deadly enemy of the cobras. Once we got a mongoose around the place, we felt a little more at ease. My last combat mission was number forty-two, incidentally, but let me back up. The day we had the shell go through our wing and wound three men, they counted twenty-eight holes in the airplane. We had holes before that, maybe five, two or three, something like that, but twenty-eight; that plane was just riddled. Now, let me get to the last mission. Our last mission was to go out of Okinawa. We had a brand new airplane that had just come from the factory. We took it up there, and we were to load two thousand pound bombs in it. Now being the armorer on the crew, I had to be in charge of loading the bombs. We had to 13 crank the bombs in by hand. We were supposed to hit a dry dock area in southern Japan where they had some cruisers they were working on. That was okay. However, Admiral Halsey, in the Navy, found out about the fact that we were going up there and he didn’t like it. He wanted that bombing to be an all Navy bombing. So we were told to take the bombs out, two thousand pounders, and put hundred pounders in their place. Those were to be dropped on an airfield at Shanghai, China. We didn’t take too long to take the two thousand pounders out, but it took us almost all day to put the hundred pounders back in their place. We had to put something like eighty hundred pounders in to replace eight thousand pounds of two thousand pounders. You sort of get an idea of some of the things we had to do. We ended up flying over Shanghai and we were second plane in formation. Our procedure was to wait until the lead plane dropped its bombs and then our bombardier dropped our bombs. The lead plane dropped its bombs, our bombardier hit all the things he needed to do to drop our bombs and nothing happened. This was a new airplane and all the bomb delivery devices were electric and something was wrong with the electric system in this new plane. We were carrying our bombs but couldn't get rid of them, we were losing our place in the formation. Our pilot, he looked at me and he said, “Hey Aldous, you get in that bomb bay and get rid of those bombs.” There’s a catwalk that goes through the front bomb bay and the second bomb bay that’s eight inches wide. Of course, there are devices and things on both sides of the bomb bay holding the bombs in, but they also take this space of walking along that little walkway, so I couldn’t 14 wear a parachute. We had to have the bomb bay doors open at two hundred mile an hour wind and with my trusty screwdriver, I had to pry the little lever on the bomb rack to release the bombs so they would go out of the plane. That took me, I don’t know how long, but I certainly had a white knuckle experience out there getting rid of the bombs. I finally did it without falling out. That was my last bombing mission. That was on July 24, 1945. The Atom bomb was dropped on August sixth. Our outfit was moving from Mindoro Island in the Philippines to an island called Ie Shima, which is a little island just off the coast of Okinawa. While we were on an LSD Navy ship, on our way up to Ie Shima, the Atom bomb was dropped on August sixth. When we got to Okinawa, we were overnight, they had an air raid and some kamikaze Japanese planes came in and were trying to drop bombs on some of the ships in the harbor in Okinawa where we were stopped for overnight. I was sleeping on the deck and the hull was all filled with trucks and materials. The sailors shot a lot of anti-aircraft guns at those Japanese planes. I remember waking up the next morning and finding shrapnel in my bed. When we got to Ie Shima they were talking about a war ending. The Japanese finally sent two Betty Bombers down to Ie Shima. Their personnel in there were picked up to go down to Manila and meet with General MacArthur to make arrangements for the signing of the surrender, which occurred in early September in Tokyo Bay. I stayed on Ie Shima until sometime in mid-September. I got a ride in the transport plane to Manila where the Twenty-Second Replacement Depot was sending men home to the United States after the war was over. Most of the transportation was done for persons who had been 15 prisoners of war in Japan during the war. I finally got put on a Dutch ship heading for San Francisco out of Manila. It took us twenty-eight days to make that trip. This ship had German built engines that weren’t running too well and there were two days that we drifted. I got to San Francisco sometime in October. They had put me on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay for five days, and then I went by train to Salt Lake City where I went to Fort Douglas for Separation Center. I stayed there two days. The last day, they had my discharge ready. They said, “Hey, you’re going to have to go to a lecture on joining the reserves. It’ll take an hour. Or you can sign right now and get out of here.” I said, “Hand me the paper and let me get out of here”, which I did. Well, as it turned out, I went to Weber College, what is now your university, which was a college at that time, for two years. I then went to Utah State University for two years. I then married my first wife Carol during my second year at Utah State. I graduated from Utah State on the sixth of June in 1950. The Korean War started the twenty- fifth of June. On the twelfth of July, I got a telegram ordering me back in the service, for one year, during the Korean War. That’s what my impetuousness cost me, one year of an additional war. So I will stop at this one if you want me to because that was all my World War II stuff. If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them. LR: I do. Mostly, I just have one. You said you were trained as a ball turret gunner and then for some reason your pilot didn’t like the top turret gunner. Which did you enjoy more, the top or the bottom? 16 RA: Well, the top’s much more comfortable. The bottom, you can’t wear a parachute and you got winds blowing through it. You take the same temperature as the air that’s outside, so it was cold. If the ball turret mechanically fails, you can’t get out of it, and I could with the top turret. It wasn’t, let’s say, a prison. LR: If you’d have gone to that reserve training instead of signing the paper, you wouldn’t have been called up during the Korean War? RA: That’s right. In 1947, I signed up for I think it was three years. It was 1948 I guess. I re-upped again in the Air Force Reserve, so that’s how come I was in the Air Force during the Korean War rather than the Army Air Corps. I flew thirty-two missions during that war, in B-29 Super fortresses. LR: Was it hard to go from a B-46 to a B-29? RA: Yes, it was. The gunnery systems were completely different and, of course, most of us reservists who were called in during the Korean War had experience in the B-17s or B-24s, and they had to train us to accommodate the systems in the B- 29. Now the B-29 also had pressurized cabins where we didn’t have to wear oxygen masks. They were much more comfortable to fly in. But, the gunnery system was such that instead of having just one turret, I was a left waist gunner in that aircraft during that experience, they had two turrets on the bottom of the plane, two turrets on the top of the plane and a tail turret. I could, from my gun site in the left waist, if necessary, fire both bottom turrets at one time and the tail if it wasn’t being used by the tail gunner. The same thing is true of the top turret. They called him the central fire control man. He could fire the two top turrets and the tail turret also. Of course, the right guy could do the same thing I could do. 17 LR: Wow, that’s kind of interesting. Speaking of your time in the Korean War, was there a difference in attitude between the two wars? RA: I would have to say so. When we went into the Air Force, they decided to have a new uniform for Air Force men, which was a blue uniform. Many of the civilians thought we were bus drivers instead of being in the Air Force. The civilians did not really appreciate the servicemen like they did during World War II. Like I say, many people thought we were bus drivers instead of part of the military. That affected such things as people being kind to you, giving you rides etcetera, etcetera. LR: It’s interesting. So, do you think that the entire country had a different feel for the Korean War as well? It wasn’t just, I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to ask, but it just seems like the overall attitude for the Korean War was not like it was during World War II. RA: That’s true. It wasn’t. I think the media didn’t, oh I hate the word glamorize because that’s not what you have in a war, but they didn’t sensationalize it much. It was more contained in a small area of the world as a result of World War II, which was in Europe and the Asia and Pacific too. Also, World War II brought the country out of its depression and things were still going pretty well for people during the Korean War as far as their own living situations were concerned. I thought they didn’t have the drive and the problems they had just come out of during the depression as World War II developed. Does that make any sense? LR: Yeah, it does make sense actually. It’s interesting. During World War II there was a lot of rationing that went on. Did that carry over into the Korean War? 18 RA: No. That’s one other thing that probably created the difference, because the rationing was over. You could buy anything, for example, women’s hose, gasoline—you didn’t have to have stamps for gasoline, etcetera. LR: When you were done with your time in the Korean conflict, you had already graduated from Utah State. What did you do? RA: We flew back. I didn’t have to come back on a ship after the Korean War, thank goodness. My year was almost up on my last mission over there and they flew us home. I went to Spokane, Washington. I went in on August 12th and I got out on August 12th so I went in one year. They were true to their word. I went to Salt Lake City and applied for a teaching job in the Granite School District, and I didn’t get to first base on that. I went to Weber County, and a man named Parley Bates, who had been my principal at Weber High, was the superintendent of Weber. They had just had a situation where they wanted to send the junior high school from Huntsville to the Wahlquist School which is just west of the Utah General Depot. The courts, on that appeal, decided to keep the school in Huntsville. They had released all the junior high teachers because of the original court case and now they had to fill the places with new teachers. I applied to Mr. Bates and he said, “Oh, I’m sure glad you came in here today.” He said, “I’ve got a position in Huntsville, your hometown, where you can teach in the junior high school”, which I did. I was there for five years. So, that’s what happened to me. Now, after that I was a principal, an elementary principal for three years. Then, I got a job in the central office being a teacher merit pay person. That was an experimental program. A man from North Carolina came out to see what we 19 were doing in Utah, and he was a very convincing man. He convinced me to come to North Carolina and be his assistant in a very similar program, which I did. I lasted one year because my first wife became very ill and I had a chance to get her back to Utah. Ironically enough, there was a new superintendent in Weber County, and he offered me a job to come back and be his assistant which I accepted. I went back to Utah, back to Weber County, where I was an assistant superintendent for about six years. Then, I had an offer from a superintendent in Lynchburg, Virginia, a man who I’d known the year I was in North Carolina, offered me a job. That was a position to work with the desegregation of the schools, which was ordered on them by the courts. I did that for three and a half years. Then the man that I worked for originally in North Carolina had become superintendent in Burlington, North Carolina. He offered me a job to come to Burlington and be his assistant, which I accepted. I was in that job until eventually I became the director of special programs until I retired in Burlington in 1990. So, I was in the school systems for thirty-nine years after the war situation. LR: When you were working in Virginia with the desegregation, what was that like? RA: I wasn’t too popular. It was challenging, let’s put it that way. I had a lot of interesting things happen to me, both good and bad. I was, at one time, fearful that somebody would shoot in the front of my house where I was living so I had my little kid’s bedrooms in the back of the house. Then there are certain times when I went and I did some things with some of the people, including some of the African American groups, where things just wonderful took place. It was a good and a challenging experience both ways. 20 LR: It sounds like it. Well, are there any other stories you’d like to share? RA: Let me go back to Korea. I did not fire one shot in self-defense during World War II. One day a group of Zero planes looked like they were approaching us and somehow, somewhere, some P-38 American fighters came to our defense and chased them away. I didn’t fire one shot at a Japanese plane. However, they shot a lot of anti-aircraft at us and they made a lot of holes in our airplane, wounded some men. I did not doubt that was a trying experience. In fact, I am still what you call flak happy today. When something makes a loud smashing sound, I tense up because of the flak that I endured during that war. During the Korean War, they had some Russian-built jet airplanes, fighter planes, stationed right on the North Korean border in Manchuria and they were chasing us. They were called MiG-15s. They didn’t have very long range, so the area they went to was limited. We called that MiG Alley. One time, we went in with a group of forty B-29s and they come up with the MiGs and they shot six planes down. That was in April of 1951. A few days later, twenty B-29s went up and they shot three down. We went up one time with four planes and they shot one of us down and two were shot up so bad they had to land in South Korea. Ours was the only plane that made it back to Yokota Air Base in Japan. The Korean War was no walk in the park at all. LR: No, it doesn’t sound like it. Well, I’d like to close with my final question. It’s a question that I’ve been asking all of the individuals that I’ve been interviewing and it’s this: How do you think your time during World War II affected the rest of your life? 21 RA: Well, right after World War II, I thought I’d go home and things would be rosy. I apparently had what now is called post-traumatic stress syndrome, and for a while I didn’t like myself, I didn’t like anybody else. That’s when I first went to Weber College. My first semester there, I guess they were quarters, I got a D in College Algebra because I wasn’t with it. I finally shook it off and started behaving better, let’s put it that way. It was a great lesson to me that you can change your life if you so desire. By the time I got to Utah State, I was a much better student and, I think, a much better person because I just decided not to pity myself anymore. LR: One day you just kind of woke up and said that’s enough I’m going to change how I’m acting? RA: Well, it was more than one day. It took a few days for that to kind of soak in. I had some friends at Weber; there were four of them and we were kind of buddies. We were all forestry majors, and we spent more time in the pool room and more time drinking beer and more time not doing what we should be doing than was the case. Interestingly enough, do you know who Boyd K. Packer was? He was my locker mate at Weber. I had the top locker and he had the bottom locker. When we four would plan something, we did it by my locker. We could look at Boyd Packer and the expression on his face was, what’s the matter with you guys? One time, we asked him if he’d like to come shoot pool with us. He didn’t say a word, but the expression on his face could have knocked us down. It was a situation where eventually I just decided that I wasn’t doing myself any good or anybody else and slowly I managed to get myself thinking in a more 22 advantageous way. It took several months, I’ll have to say that. I think it stayed with me, let’s put it that way. I got to see parts of the world. I got to see individuals, all kinds of lifestyles, something that never would have happened had it not been for World War II, so it was a tremendous experience to have had, even though it had its disadvantages, a lot of advantages too. LR: Well, thank you for that. I appreciate your stories and your candor. RA: Considering all of the above, I would like to add a little review of what eventually became of my family. On October 28, 1949, I married Carol Beatrice Payne in Ogden, Utah. Carol and I had two children, Vickie Sue and Alan Robert. Carol became deceased by suicide on July 31, 1964. Following this heartbreaking experience, I recuperated and courted, then married Alta Mae Kidman in Logan, Utah on September 21, 1965. Mae and I had two sons, Mark Daniel and Scott William. My Children are noted as follows: Vickie Sue married James E. Budge. They have four children, a daughter and three sons. After being a housewife and raising their kids, she was hired as a Library Assistant at the local community college. She then accepted employment as an Administrative Specialist for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in Lynchburg where they presently reside. She now enjoys the life of retirement. Alan Robert married Theresa Fuhrman. They became the parents of five children, one girl and four boys. Alan is the owner and operator of seven Hills Coin and Jewelry located in Lynchburg, Virginia. He also owns several farms in 23 Phenix, Virginia. Alan and Theresa are divorced, and Alan is now married to Vicky Gallier. Mark Daniel is married to Cari Jean Cole. They have three children, one girl and two sons. Mark is a medical doctor specializing in Digestive Health. Their family resides in Concord, North Carolina. Scott William is married to Monica Hinojosa Ledezma, a native of Bolivia. They are the parents of two daughters. The family lives in Palo Alto, California where Scott is a mechanical engineer employed by Google in Mountain View, California.