Oral History Program Buddy and Carolyn Miller Interviewed by Scot Meldrum 27 November 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Buddy and Carolyn Miller Interviewed by Scot Meldrum 27 November 2016 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: Miller, Buddy and Carolyn, an oral history by Scot Meldrum, 27 November 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: CM: Stormy: CM: BM: Scot: BM: CM: Stormy: The following is an oral history interview with Buddy and Carolyn Miller, conducted on November 27, 2016 by NUAMES student Scot Meldrum. Buddy and Carolyn discuss their lives and memories involving World War II. Scot’s mother Stormy is also present during this interview. [Missing text.] Well, we’ve seen pictures of him with the airplane. In fact, I think there is one at the Museum over at Hill. I’ve seen the things he brought back: the Japanese flag that was signed by the fliers. That was your brother? No, this was my son’s father in law, Virgil Barnes. His wife is still living, however she is in a nursing home. She is very sharp, so you might be able to check in with her, because she could probably tell you some things too. I’ve got one question for you. Has he ever seen the Picture, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and the one on “Midway?” No, I don’t think I have. Those are two good pictures, if you can get hold of them. They give you a real good feel of some of the problems we faced and what started it. You don’t want that Ben Affleck thing; that is garbage. But “Tora! Tora! Tora!” is really more documentary than Hollywood hoo hah! My dad has those. He likes to watch war movies. 2 So I’m going to ask you a personal question first. How old were you guys during that period; World War II? BM: She was what? What were you four? CM: I was four the day that they attacked. Stormy: So when it ended you were eight? CM: Yes. Stormy: So you probably have better memories of the end than the beginning. CM: I have quite a few memories of things that happened in between there. The day that they hit, we were at my grandmother’s place. I lived in a very small town in Idaho. There were only a few radios in town, and my grandmother and grandfather had a radio. So there were a lot of people at grandpa and grandma’s listening to this radio. They had set me up at the end of the table, I was just sitting there listening to people talk, and grandpa has a big calendar up above the table. They were talking about all the dark days ahead, I remember that very distinctly. All the dark days ahead, and I was looking at that calendar. All these days were red, but all the rest were black. They were dark days. That’s in my four year old mind. BM: I was a little older. I was seven, and I didn’t live here, I lived in Los Angeles. Where was it? Bell, California, the greater L.A. The thing I remember on December 7, when the attack hit, the sirens blared all day long in Los Angeles. About drove me nuts, but they were afraid, and didn’t know when the Japanese would come in from Hawaii clear into the coast. 3 Scot: So you didn’t grow up here. Neither of you grew up here, did you? CM: No. I grew up in Idaho. Scot: What was it like growing up there? BM: What do you mean by growing up where? Right here in this area? Stormy: Did you move from California to here then? BM: I lived in L.A. for about five years from the time I was three till I was eight. It was somewhere around July 1942, my father moved up here as a diesel mechanic. He kept out of the war given a deferment because he had to keep the trucks running for all the supplies that were needed. Stormy: Right, for the transportation. Yes, I would think that would be very important. BM: He was a mechanic for Cummins and one of the partners. He developed some ways of making the diesel engine more efficient. That came later, after the war. Stormy: What was it like growing up in Idaho during the war? CM: Well as I said it was a very small town where I was. BM: Sugar City CM: So many people, young men, were in the war. Some were drafted and some enlisted. My grandmother’s brother enlisted three months before he would have been ineligible because of his age to go to war. Which surprised the dickens out of us all. He was a very quiet man, never had 4 any children, but he obviously felt enough concern toward his country to go to the army. Stormy: The call to duty? CM: The call to duty to do that. I don’t know for sure where he was stationed. We’ve been told he was near Astoria at Battery Russell. The Japanese did invade there by submarine, but the US didn’t want the populace to know that they were that close. He was wounded there, lost some of his hearing, and was taken out of the army. He was given a discharge. But growing up in that small town, that first Christmas after the enemy came we used to get Christmas catalogues from Sears and Montgomery, Ward. My parents of course had usually ordered a few things from Santa as I remember seeing that order when it came back from Montgomery, Ward. There was a picture of Santa Claus with a big black eye and the message said, “We are sorry, Santa will not be able to deliver these items. All of our things have gone to the war effort.” BM: Have you heard of the rationing of World War II yet? Scot: I haven’t learned about it, could you tell me a little bit about it? BM: Yes. They rationed shoes, sugar, everything. CM: Tires, gasoline. BM: Gasoline, you could only have so much gasoline a week, they really cut back when they went to war. 5 CM: You could get two pairs of shoes a year. You can imagine growing kids; that was a problem. My grandfather was a cobbler. He could fix shoes, and he kept a lot of people in our town in shoes by being able to fix shoes. My father couldn’t go to the army. The week before the attack he was working in a blacksmith’s shop at a mine and he took a crowbar through his abdomen. He was lucky to survive and they found at that time that he had also developed silicosis, which is like black lung in coal miners, from being down in the dust of the mines. They didn’t wear the mask and things at the time. He couldn’t go back to the mines, and this was in California at the time, so after he was released from the hospital he had to walk from California to Idaho because all the transportation was taken up. Stormy: For the war effort. CM: For the war effort. He got a few rides but basically he walked. BD: Didn’t he hop trains and all that? CM: Honey, he had a wound in his abdomen. No, he didn’t hop anything. One really big problem in our family one time was when my little sister took all the sugar stamps and pasted them on a shoe box. My grandmother’s brother said to my grandma, “Now Mary, now Mary, don’t worry, don’t worry. There’s a lot of us here we can take care of this.” So, they pooled the sugar stamps. She was only two when she did this. This was a little farther on in the war. Oh, that was a disaster! 6 One of our neighbors swallowed a nickel. It was caught in her neck. She needed to go to the hospital in Rexburg four miles away. It took nearly the whole town to get enough stamps to fill the car with gas so we could get her to the doctor. We had one doctor that covered miles and miles of territory because all of the others had been drafted. Doctor Rigby was the only doctor from Ashton, Idaho to Idaho Falls, which is about a hundred miles. Then from the east of our town clear out into Teton and west I don’t know how far west he went, but it was a huge area for a doctor, who made house calls. He would come to your house instead of you going to his office. Stormy: Which was probably good for you guys, with no gas. CM: Yes. He was able to get fuel because he was a doctor. We lived one summer in California when my dad was working in the mines. It was an open pit mine, and of course every time they blasted the wind blew the stuff all over everything and, gosh everybody got sick. It was kind of like that Erin Brockovich movie. I had developed some kind of a blood disorder. It was hemophilia, but it wasn’t. Women do not get hemophilia, but it was like that. If I got bonked, I had a very large bruise, or if I started to bleed anywhere I could bleed for a week. Literally! I remember having to wait, and wait for the doctor because my nose was bleeding. He’d come and pack it, and he would give me Dentyne gum. Well I didn’t know what to call it, so my dad gave me a 7 nickel one day and sent to me to the drugstore so I could buy some. I went up and asked the druggist for Dr. Rigby Gum. He didn’t have a clue and neither did I. It was difficult in many ways because a lot of things could not be taken care of, but we were lucky because in our small town you could keep a cow and you could raise some pigs. We did! We had meat, we had milk, we had chickens so we had eggs, and all of these things were rationed. When things would come into the grocery story like bananas or oranges, the grocer would take bags and write your name on it, and put one item per person in the bag. That’s what you could purchase. The grocer would also buy some items like eggs and butter from the townspeople to sell. My parents sold milk to the neighbors. Stormy: So he would help make sure everyone got a little bit? CM: Yes everyone got a chance at it, and if they didn’t want their bag, then other people could buy what was left. He was really good at that. We didn’t have freezers, but there was a block of freezers in the grocery store. So when the pigs were killed, or we killed the cow that we raised. We’d kill those right at home, butcher them, wrap then and we’d take it up to the grocer’s and rent a little freezer space. That’s where our meat was. If our cow had a male calf, that was fo meat. If it was female, she was a milk cow and my dad would sell her to somebody else. Grandma and mother would take these big crocks about 12” so big around and about 16” tall and pack eggs in there in the summertime when the hens were laying 8 really well and we didn’t use them all. I don’t know what the heck it was but they put saw down and put down a layer of eggs and cover it with something called “water-glass.” Then they put down another layer of sawdust down and then another layer of eggs and cover the whole thing over. In the winter time when the eggs were scarce, you didn’t want to eat them as sunny-side-up eggs but you could use them for baking. Stormy: So you could stick them in bread or whatever you had to do? CM: Yes! You could use them to do your baking and things like that. There were a lot of things that people did, and because we were there in this rural area I think we made out a lot better than the people in the cities did. We had a garden; my dad had a big garden, my grandpa had a big garden, and it worked out very nicely. Things like candy were unavailable. We couldn’t get candy and ice cream and those kinds of things, but in the winter time, we’d save the cream from the milk and then grandpa would go out and break the icicles off the eaves of the house and then put them in a sack and whack away at it with the broad side of an axe. He’d bring out the old churner, and we’d save up some sugar stamps and we’d have ice cream. They used to put things in the middle of the straw stack, like onions and potatoes and things like that, and that was a good refrigerator in the winter. They would be preserved in the middle of the straw stack so we could use them during winter. Stormy: Cause it would hold in the heat, or hold out the heat? 9 CM: Keep the cold from freezing them, cause it gets really cold where we lived there in Idaho. Very cold. It was interesting, I started school during the war. The first day I walked by myself to school all by myself. My mother told me that I had a hard time remembering “twenty seventh of March.” She said, “You don’t have to say it, just tell them twenty seven days in March.” That was my birthday. So that’s what I did. I walked to school, and told the people there when they asked for my birthday that it was twenty seven days in March. We had air raid drills, we had black curtains over the windows, and we all had coal stoves that we cooked on back then, and if we had a drill we had to put the fire out so that the light didn’t show up through the chimney, that the planes could zero in on. You had to pour water in your stove, and pull the black curtains across your windows. Stormy: So that you looked pitch black out there. CM: Pitch black. We had a grain silo, a big grain silo, and they painted the bloody thing white! So they had to get busy and paint it black. Stormy: Cause at night it would stand out huh? I guess it’s good in normal times so you don’t run into it. CM: Within the last five years I guess, they took that tower down. It was no longer used so the kids were climbing it, so they finally took it down. But there were a lot of interesting things going on. We used to have to get under our desks and hold our heads, like an earthquake drill, to practice if the bombs came. 10 Stormy: Now I have a question that’s a little bit more on the sad side. At that time, did they know what was happening over in Germany to all of the people? BM: Well there was a war in progress, and it came over the radio, or on a newsreel. However, a lot of the news coming from Germany to here sometimes got a little old. Today, if it happened, you’ve got it in fifteen seconds or less because of the nature of things. But back then, they didn’t have that. Sometimes it took a few days to a week or longer to get the information from various places because of the difficulties in transportation, communication. CM: There was a lot of censorship going too. As far as the things that were happening to the Jews in Germany, that kind of thing. We had zilch. Stormy: Nobody knew? CM: Not that I know of, not where I was, we didn’t hear anything about that until the war was over. I do remember going to a movie, they had a little movie house there. My aunt and uncle from Tooele drove up to see my grandparents. My grandmother and my aunt Zill were sisters. So we all went to the movie, and they always had the Movie Town news before you saw the movie about what was going on in the war. So we were sitting there watching how the war is going on in the Philippines, and my aunt’s son walked right straight into the view of the camera with a bandage around his head and it’s trailing down the side of his head. She nearly had a heart attack. We hadn’t been told he was wounded or anything but 11 evidently it was a superficial wound because he was still ambulatory and doing okay. My dad got up and went out and talked to the man who owned the theatre and he said, “Could we run that piece again, make sure that what we saw was what we saw?” He ran it again, and when Buford came into view, he slowed the thing down so we could see for sure. BM: Small towns knew a lot of things. CM: Well that’s true! Everybody knew everybody else, and you know, if there were some problems everybody just jumped right in. Like the girl that swallowed the nickel. They came straight for my mom and dad. If there was a problem they came for my mom and dad. One of the boys got a huge sliver, it wasn’t a sliver it was a chunk of wood stuck in his hand. His mom was afraid to pull it out, and of course the doctor, who knows where he was, so over to my mother, here they came! She pulled that big chunk of wood out of Buzz’s hand, and he never squawked a bit. He wasn’t very old, he was older than I was but he wasn’t very old. He just stood there and let her take that big chunk of wood out of his hand. If there was anything like that going on, they would come to my mom and dad. BM: Well there were some things that happened in that time, back in World War II. People made salve and various things which drew infection and that out. It was very common for people to do that. You don’t see that today. I remember another thing, later in the war. I had an uncle. He walked halfway across Germany in the battle of the bulge. He says it got 12 bad enough to see they didn’t get supplies like they should. He says, “We ate grass.” CM: Well there was no way to supply them, they were completely cut off. All his life, he would never drink water again. He didn’t talk about the war, we don’t know why he didn’t want to drink water anymore, but he would not drink water. He would drink orange juice, but he would never drink water again. BM: Well he drank it, but he drank very little of it. CM: We’re thinking maybe the water he had to drink was not maybe the kind of water you want to drink. BM: I remember we went to Hawaii here many years ago, and they have a big bunch of small tiles in something several feet wide. CM: Mosaics BM: They showed the various battles of the Pacific theatre and stuff like that. What would they call the area that contains all the servicemen in graves? They call it the punch bowl. CM: Well it’s been known as the punch bowl for centuries. It’s the caldera of an old volcano. It is kind of a bowl shape, and they chose that as the graveyard for the soldiers that perished in the area. BM: I think that’s in Oahu, isn’t it? CM: Then of course there is the memorial to the Arizona. BM: You ever been there? 13 Stormy: No, I’ve never been to Hawaii. His dad went on his mission to Hawaii. So he spent a lot of time there, but I’ve never had the chance to go. CM: Well, there’s always another day. Stormy: Someday! BM: In this deal, Irene’s got a copy of the advertisement so you can see it, it’s always a big white deal where you go in the Arizona and they tell you about it and what happened. But in that picture, it’s got a view from the top and you can see the white thing going around, over the Arizona but you can see the outline of the Arizona in the water. There’s one thing that was really interesting to me there when we went there. They’ve got a chapel. You go in they tell you what happened, stuff like that. There is one thing that’s very odd. A lot of people died and are entombed in the Arizona of course, never taken out. They have a little chute on the left side of the chapel. Any of the people that worked on the Arizona and died later, they can ship their bodies back and they will entomb them. Stormy: Oh return them to the Arizona? CM: If you were on that ship and survived, and you’d be surprised how many of the men have wanted to return after their death and be entombed with their shipmates. Stormy: So did you guys do like care packages or anything as a community? 14 CM: Yes! We knitted and crocheted scarves and things like that. Those that were able to knit stockings. We made bandages, even kids, we did that in school! A lot of things like that. BM: There was another thing people did too! Cigarette packages and other things and gum packages, tin foil! People would take the tin foil off and make balls out of it and send it in, and they used it in the war effort. CM: Oh and any grease from cooking or anything, we saved it in cans, took it to the grocer and it went to the war effort. In our day, as a populace we still have everything, and still fight the war too! But back then you did one or the other, you couldn’t do both. So you had the limit. The butter, which is what we talked about in order to have more guns and the bombs and the other things needed. Scot: That was rationing? CM: Yes that was the rationing kinds of things. There were a lot of things going on. My aunt, at least four or maybe five of her boys were in either the navy of the army. Harold and Harland were in the Navy and Harold was a Navy flyer. But I don’t remember where Harland served, but the ones in the army were involved in the Pacific War. They never got into the war in Germany but they were involved in the war in the Pacific. BM: There were a lot of changes too that took place in the war. If you remember all the planes were just fighters and the big planes, and they 15 were all prop jobs back then. They slowly got into the jets later, but that was after. CM: Well, the Germans came up with a jet plane at the very end of the war. They got them in, I don’t know exactly how close to the end, but very near the end of the war because our fighters were absolutely amazed at how these planes could move and how fast they went. The scientist that built those things and the buzz bombs that went in and bombed England were also jet propelled. They were bad news, and they took all those scientists like Wernher Von Braun and gave them a pass on the citizenship and brought them here. That’s what started out business with rockets and all that kind of thing. Stormy: Nuclear War? CM: Well no, the Nuclear War we did. They had a place where they had our people that were here developing the atomic bomb. BM: It was down in Tennessee. CM: Well actually it was Tennessee where they developed it, they tested it in New Mexico. BM: Then it went to New Mexico later. But you’re aware at the end of the war we only had two atomic bombs. Now they dropped one in order to save lives, they figured we would have lost half a million men maybe if we had invaded Japan. I should say us and them. In other words you lost a lot of people. So we dropped one Atomic bomb in one place, didn’t move them 16 much. When the second one dropped they decided. See if we had dropped one in Tokyo we would have just annihilated them. They didn’t know we only had the two, but they came to the table fast at that point. Not sure if you had heard of that statistic before but we had two and that’s all at that time. Scot: Yeah I didn’t know we only had two of them. BM: They were working on more but it’s not easy to put that all together. Course today, how many nations have got bombs now? Scot: Unfortunately lots. CM: Yes, unfortunately. Scot: What are some powerful lessons that came from this that you learned? CM: For me, I learned that “The war to end all wars” does not exist. Men are men people are people, and there are always people who want somebody else’s something, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. No matter what. Germany was after more land, Japan was after more land, and they were willing to do whatever. They were willing to take their people into an area where they could be killed. In Germany’s case, they wanted “purity,” so they killed the Jews. Why they decided the Jew’s were not pure I don’t know, but they wanted “purity,” they were the master race and they swallowed that garbage whole. You look at the movies and its “Heil, Heil!” It’s like mass hysteria. Stormy: It’s amazing what propaganda can do. 17 CM: We went to Germany a few years ago, and of course as tourists we kind of stick out. Several times people would come up and I remember one woman especially spent quite a bit of time. She said, “I want you to know that we are really taking care of the Jews now. We are helping them to do these things and we are restoring the synagogues that were destroyed and we are doing all these things.” Course I really do believe a lot of people in Germany did not know what actually was going on, unless they were close to camps. Those that were close to the camps, I do not believe they could be that close and not know. Stormy: Well, how could they not smell? CM: Smell, and all the traffic going in and… Stormy: Nobody coming back out. CM: Yes. Stormy: Well you wonder, all these people are being shipped off, your neighbor’s are suddenly gone and you don’t wonder where they’ve gone to. There were some that were afraid to ask. They would say, “Don’t ask, cause you don’t want us to be shipped as well.” CM: Exactly Stormy: So I think there was a certain amount of fear there as well. CM: Very much. Once Hitler got entrenched and got his people going, it was a nation of fear for everyone. If you didn’t join the Nazi party you didn’t get a job. If you didn’t join the Nazi party you might as well lay down and die 18 because you couldn’t do anything. They were teaching the children to inform on their parents. Stormy: Cause the kids had to go off to kinderschool. CM: Yes! Well and camps, they had these camps for the Hitler Youth. They were totally brainwashed. Although we didn’t have that word in our vocabulary at that time, it came along later with the Korean War, but it was the same methods, you tell the same lie over and over people will eventually believe it. Scot: So communication was the problem. The most powerful lesson you had Buddy? BM: Well some of mine had to do with war and what would happen. Like what she pointed out, the war to end all wars. CM: That’s the one thing about growing up in a small town. We knew everybody in town, I could go down every street and tell you who lived in which house. When you have that kind of thing going on, everybody watches out for everybody else, and that can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing. I remember we had the lady that lived just a block from me. Ugh, she was a real snoop. We had party lines and she would spend all day listening on the party line for what was going on in town and things like that. She kept track of when we went on our dates and when we got home, and one of my boyfriends pulled into my driveway and yelled, “MRS B! WE’RE HOME! YOU CAN GO TO BED NOW!” 19 Stormy: Oh that’s funny. You need to explain party lines for the boys. BM: You didn’t have things like you have today. CM: You know your telephone, you have several people on one line. So when the telephone rang, you had to count the rings to know if it was your line. If you were first on the line, you got one ring. If it rang twice, it was the guy further down. Three rings it was the guy even further down, and you’d have five or six people on the line. My girlfriend’s number was JR45, and you’d dial that in, or to begin with, pick up the phone, “Number please,” JR45. Stormy: Cause you’d have an operator. CM: Yes, and then she’d plug it in and it would ring five times, and Mary Lou would pick up, “Hi!” Stormy: But Mary Lou and Mrs. B. could be listening to Mary Lou and her conversation. CM: She could pick up the phone and listen to everyone on that line. Scot: It’s kind of like how at my nan’s house I could pick up the phone from Nana’s room and listen in to the other phones from the other places of the house. Stormy: Only it’s not just in the house, it would be all over the neighborhood. BM: See today in electronics they’ve got to the point where you can send from a few to hundreds of things over the same wire. It keeps it separate from everyone else because of the frequencies or whatever used. I used to 20 know electronics since that’s what I did in the Navy. I joined in the Korean War to avoid the Army, and then the war was over six months later but that was one of the greatest things I did because I got a testimony of truth. CM: My seminary teacher taught us Billy Sunday recordings. Billy Sunday was a big league baseball pitcher at one time, and he found “Hallelujah Christ” and he was funnier than all get out. He made a lot of recordings about various religious subjects, and they were really nice. That was our seminary, nothing to do with our church, it was seminary. Stormy: So where were you when the war ended? Do you remember? CM: I do! I was at my grandma’s house, she lived just down the block from my house and I spent a lot of time there. I was down at grandma’s house and it came over the radio that the war was over. I grabbed some pot lids and marched up and down the street wanging away at the pot lids, and I was eight. I knew the war was over and people would quit dying and that my cousins would come home. But I really didn’t have as much understanding of the whole war as I have learned. I’m very fascinated, I read, we watch the documentaries this kind of stuff. I read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book. Oh I couldn’t tell you how many books on World War II, because it was such a horrible thing. In Korea, the kid that had been our school president was killed on Pork Chop Ridge, he was a Japanese boy. His brother had been in World War II in the Go for Broke unit. They were not very good to those Japanese kids, and he woke up one morning with trouble with his eye. He 21 said he was blind in one eye they told him to get in line and do your work. By the next morning he was completely blind in both eyes. That’s the way he lived his life, and then his youngest brother, Roy, was killed on Pork Chop Ridge. Eighteen years old. Stormy: So Buddy, where were you when the war ended? Do you remember? BM: Just home! Let’s see it was in Salt Lake City, my dad in 1944 bought a home an acre out in Salt Lake County. But other than being in a specific place other than home, let’s see, at that time school would have been on and so we’d be going to school, coming home. I remember we were over two miles from school so we went in the school bus instead of the white van. We were out a way from town. CM: That was in September I think it ended. BM: No. May. It was earlier in 1945 CM: Ok, whatever. It was cool, I remember it was cool in Idaho. BM: It was Germany in May, but I think you are right. Was it August? CM: Yes it was August and September. BM: August was when they dropped the Atomic bomb in Japan. So probably in August 1945 the Japanese gave up. Germany had done so back around May. We had been on the ground with them with Patton. You ever saw the show Patton? Scot: No. CM: There’s another one! 22 BM: It’s a good one. There’s a bit of French, what do you call it, swearing. CM: Patton was a profane man. BM: It’s not the greatest. But it’s one of the best. “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and then Patton is on Europe and what he did. It’s guys like Patton rough as they were, would save this country. Stormy: They just got in there and dug in. CM: One thing you have to know about Patton… BM: He believed in the past he’d been in wars way back a thousand years before. I’m sure he studied all of this and then convinced himself he had been there. CM: Well, however he came to it, Patton had a funny side to him. He did believe in reincarnation, that he had been born a warrior, and in this life he was scared to death that he was going to pass this life without being a warrior in it. When the war started he could not wait to get in and fight. He wanted to fight. Stormy: Well I’ve been in Germany they’ve got a statue of Patton and they’ve got his tank and stuff. CM: Yup. He was a character. I read a book his son wrote, it was called “Before the colors fade.” There’s another book out there by that name but it’s not about Patton. Stormy: I think he was the one who was responsible for making sure that all of the camps were filmed and had pictures. I think he said, “If we don’t do this 23 people will say it never happened. You need to make sure you get movies, you need to take pictures.” Which is why we have so much documentation of the Holocaust. Scot: So Patton? CM: General Patton. George Patton. Stormy: Cause he was in Germany, and he was part of the liberation. It was appalling, it really was. Scot: So he was fighting from within? Stormy: Well he was American. But his war station was in Germany. Did he go in through the Battle of the Bulge? CM: Yes! He’s the one that relieved them! They were at his big meeting with all these generals and things. “What are we going to do about these poor guys that are stuck up here and surrounded?” I do remember the Germans had sent the commander there at that place where they were surrounded and cut off and nobody could get to them. The German’s sent in a thing, “Surrender now and you’ll live otherwise we’re going to annihilate you.” The response went back, “Nuts.” Patton says, “I’ll be. A man that can do that has got to be saved! I can get my troops there.” They had just been in a big battle, but he said, “I can get them there,” and I’ve forgotten the timeline, but they came right off that big battle and marched a hundred and fifty miles I think, my numbers are not really good sometimes. In the winter, colder than all Billy heck, and he took his men, 24 and they marched through the mud and crap and got up there and saved those people. They cured the Battle of the Bulge. What the Battle of the Bulge was is we had a line where our people were set up. Here’s us and here’s Germany. Well Germany concentrated their troops at one point. This is a last ditch effort for Germany, and they hit that one point, then the line bulged, and they were cut off. Stormy: Did you hear about the phantom unit, where they went in and they didn’t really have tanks? CM: Yes! That’s where they stuck Patton! He got in trouble. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He was always insulting someone by saying something or not saying something. He couldn’t win. All of our allies were upset because of something Patton did. So they built all this fake army, airplanes, tanks, the whole works, and Patton was the General of a fake army that didn’t exist. But the Germans really respected Patton. Those German leaders, their generals knew that Patton was a very formidable foe, and believe me when they figured he was amassing a bunch of people out here they were in trouble. Just as the guys thought they would, they brought troops into a place, to defend a place, from an army that didn’t exist and relieved the tensions on the other ends of the line. Stormy: They had sound effects too. CM: Oh yeah, they did a good job. Stormy: It was really cool. I watch a documentary about that. 25 Scot: A fake army. CM: A fake army, and Patton was sent there because he was in trouble. Oh my word he was so upset over that. BM: He was still one of the best generals ever in World War II. CM: Yeah, he was. BM: In the European theatre. He wanted to get into the Japanese too. Scot: So is there anything we didn’t talk about that you would like to add? Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t get to? BM: Well, you might be aware of the Japanese and what they did over there, we heard a lot of it where they took and they used, what do you call it? CM: Flame throwers. BM: Flame throwers, where in the caves and all the places we went in, they shot the flames out to help get em out, because they would not dislodge very easily. The Japanese would fight to the end. CM: They were tough. BM: We fight wars a lot differently today. You kill a civilian, they holler like made. Hey war is war. I don’t worry about those things anymore, if somebody is doing what’s wrong and annihilating people like the Germans did, and we have some of that in some of these countries, hey you go in and take it out. If you see some of the German cities they had then, all the buildings were shot. CM: It was just rubble. Berlin was destroyed. 26 BM: We tried to bomb mainly the installations, the factories, and all that produced the munitions and so they were careful about a lot of the places. But as things went, if it got bad enough we’d bomb the whole thing. Today we don’t do that and we pay for it because then later they come back and they’re into trouble just like ISIS now. Hey it doesn’t matter whether the Germans, Japanese, ISIS, or by whatever name people are called, all of this war and back then, it’s all the same side of the ledger, to try to annihilate the Lords race called mankind. That’s what it amounts to. I don’t know how you can put something like that in maybe a report, but we’re in a race with the Lord, and the only thing that will stop all this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Because until people want to respect and love and help each other, you don’t have much going. CM: When you talk about the Japanese soldier, he was taught that you fought till you die no matter what, and for years and years after the war was over they were still finding Japanese soldiers in some of these islands who did not know that the war was done and they were still holding their position. Stormy: Because that’s what they were told to do. CM: I mean there was nobody there to fight, but in their little old islands they were still dug in. BM: Have you ever heard of the term Kamikaze? Scot: Oh! Yes. 27 BM: Sacrifice their life, fly the planes right into the ship. So sad, and that’s the same thing we’ve got today isn’t it? People strap themselves with stuff and blow them up. Whether you do it with a plane or any other way, the technology in how they do it is different. Scot: But the methods stay the same. BM: Yeah, remember one thing, Satan and his hosts haven’t lost their memories, you and I when we came to this earth we lost ours. So he knows a lot about us. There is a lot of interesting spiritual highlights in this, if you study. CM: During the war there are great reports of men who literally felt the hand of God guiding them. I remember one pilot went against all of his training because the voice that talked to him was very insistent that he do something else, and he saved the plane and saved the men and brought them through and felt that he had been talked to from the other side. He felt there was another co-pilot in that plane. There is a lot of that in books you can pick up. Yes it’s an interesting era to read about. I’m sure the one we’re in now, once the historians get all the information, will be just as interesting. Stormy: Tumultuous times. BM: Remember these three, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” “Battle of Midway and PATTON.” Stormy: Oh yeah, and I’ve seen that one. 28 CM: That’s the one that turned the war in the Pacific. BM: The other one is “Patton.” Those three are three of the best that really give you a sense of what happened. You know, on the ground and things like that. In fact the admiralty in “Tora! Tora! Tora!” CM: Yamamoto. BM: In essence made the statement in the picture and apparently it’s real from what they recorded and things like that, he made the statement, “I’m afraid what we have done is awaken a sleeping giant.” Instead of what they were trying to accomplish. Stormy: Yeah, that’s true. BM: We had far more power than they did. I remember in the 50s… CM: We were totally unprepared. Stormy: Complacent, we were complacent. BM: I spent 1954-1956 on a tour of duty in Japan. The people there were just kind and some of the nicest people you will ever know. The leaders were the problem, but I remember I learned a lot of things having been over there. It’s interesting what happens when we get on the ground with people. We did have to take them out unfortunately back then. CM: One of my good friends, Junko Blocker was a Japanese girl who had been working in factories as a teenager. That’s how they supported their war effort, they just used every body, kids, whatever. They were bombed one day and she ran from the factory. She took bullets across her abdomen. 29 Stormy: She survived? CM: She survived it, but she was never able to have children. She married an American Sergeant. Stormy: War is tragedy. BM: Yes it is. CM: It is for everyone. It is for everyone no matter where you are, whether they are marching through your city or not. It is a tragedy for everyone, it touches everyone. Stormy: We really appreciate you taking an hour to talk to us. BM: Good luck to you.