{"response":{"docs":[{"id":"geh_vhpohr_306","title":"Oral history interview of Charles Walter Dryden, part one of two","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["Italy, Foggia, 41.50281055, 15.4528996096277","Italy, Foggia, Ramitelli Airfield","Italy, Pantelleria Island, 36.8314576, 11.9450395","United States, Alabama, Macon County, Tuskegee, 32.42415, -85.69096","United States, Florida, Okaloosa County, Eglin Air Force Base, 30.45907, -86.55026","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383","United States, South Carolina, Colleton County, Walterboro, 32.90517, -80.66677"],"dcterms_creator":["Brown, Myers","Dryden, Charles Walter, 1920-2008"],"dc_date":["2002-02-28"],"dcterms_description":["In part one of this two-part interview, Charles Dryden describes his experiences as a Tuskegee Airman during World War II.","Charles Dryden was a Tuskegee Airman during World War II.","VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW CHARLES DRYDEN Atlanta History Center Interviewer: Myers Brown Transcriber: Frances Westbrook INT: Please state your name, date of birth and place of birth. Charles Dryden: Charles Walter Dryden, born September 16, 1920, in New York City. INT: Where were you and what do you remember about when you heard that the United States had been attacked at Pearl Harbor? CD: On that day, well, I have to back up just a little bit. I had begun flight training in Tuskegee, army flight school on August 19, 1941. The program consisted of three phases, the primary, the basic, and the advanced phase, each of which lasted about ten weeks, a total of about eight months. OK. On Pearl Harbor Day, a week before, my classmates and I had completed the primary phase. There were eleven of us, we were the second class that went through flight training. The first class began on August 19 [he may mean July 19], 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and similarly my class started on August 19, 1941, about three months before Pearl Harbor. So by that time my class had whittled down, had been whittled down from eleven starting to four who completed the primary phase. So the four of us had been given ten days of leave to go home and celebrate and show off and all that, with our uniforms and so forth. ….. While I was in New York, my girl friend and I went to visit her brother in a hospital in Staten Island, on a ferry of course, the boroughs of New York City are waterfront. On our way home after we had visited her brother, we were riding a … bus from the hospital to the ferry. And while riding the bus, I was standing, of course, in uniform, my girlfriend was sitting, and one of the ladies on the bus said, “Soldier, do you know that we're at war?” No, I didn't. “Well, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today.” I didn't have any idea where Pearl Harbor was. And she said, “You better report to your station.” So, my girlfriend and I continued to her home in the Bronx and found her family huddled around a radio listening to the reports about the attack on Pearl Harbor. And her father said, “Charlie, do you think you're going to have to return back to Tuskegee right away?” And, I don't see why, because I'm at least six months away from graduation. And, sure enough, I left her there and I went a couple of blocks away to where my parents lived. And I found the same situation, they were huddled around the radio looking kind of worried, and my father asked me the same question. And I said, “Well, I don't think so, our training …..” But while we were there a telegram arrived from the commandant of ….Tuskegee, saying “Cadet Dryden report back to Tuskegee immediately.” So, I still had two days of leave left on my leave of absence, but next day of course I got on a train, returning to Tuskegee. So that's where I was on Pearl Harbor Day. I didn't feel very much connected with it because I was just a trainee. I knew eventually I'd go to war, but there was no immediate threat to me. INT: Now, how did you get into flying? CD: My dear, late departed mother used to tell me that when I was an infant, before I could talk, I used to take bits of paper and tear them into little bits, throw them in the air and try to say airplane, airplane, as described in my book. So it seems like when I first saw the light of day I had the urge to fly. Some people I guess want to be a fireman or a doctor or a cook or a musician. I wanted to fly. That was from my earliest infancy. INT: And what prompted you to volunteer for the Army? For the Army Air Corps? CD: Because it gave me an opportunity to fly. There had been no acceptance of applications from black Americans for Air Corps at the time. And when I read about the Air Corps beginning to accept applications, I rushed out to the recruiting office in downtown Manhattan, and got an application. I had done that before but it had been denied. But now the Army had agreed to accept their applications. As a result….Mrs. Roosevelt had visited Tuskegee in October of 1940 to check on a polio treatment center that she heard about at the VA hospital in Tuskegee. And while she was there, she saw airplanes flying around the campus area, and she asked, “Well, who's flying these airplanes?” And she was told, local people. “You mean, colored people?” “Why, sure.” And she said, “But I always heard colored people couldn't fly.” That was the result of a three year study…the students, officers and the faculties at the Army War College had conducted a study three years of the performance of black soldiers in World War I. It came to some very ridiculous, bizarre conclusions, the bottom line of which was that Negroes are a subspecies of the human family, without the ability, the capability, the psychological set-up and so forth of doing anything technical, highly technical, such as flying airplanes, or as ground support people, mechanics….radio people, to keep the airplanes flying. So that was the general attitude throughout the country, that blacks could not fly. And so she had that idea. Well, when she expressed that opinion, someone…told her that, “Well, Mrs. Roosevelt, we've been flying here for years.” And our backshafters…to explain that. In 1926 a black man by the name of Charles Alfred Anderson bought an airplane. He was 19 that year, and he couldn't find anybody in this country to teach him to fly. So, he solved his problem by teaching himself to fly. And we knew him, he was sort of our chief flight instructor when we were cadets. So, he explained to us that when he bought the airplane and could find nobody to teach him, he had a problem. Well, he found out that by turning on the motor of a propeller driven airplane, up until the time you turn on the motor to get the propeller to turning, it's just an inanimate object, just like this table or chair, there's no life or character at all. But when you turn on the motor, the propeller starts turning and the airplane starts to vibrate ever so slightly. The more power you feed to the engine, which is like stepping on the gas pedal of your car, the faster the propeller goes, and the more the airplane vibrates. If you give it full power, which is like floor-boarding your car, the propeller goes fiercely, fiercely around, and the airplane is just waiting to get off the ground, in fact, if you remove the ___ from under the wheel, the airplane will go down the runway and it'll take off. So, he said, “but I wasn't ready, the airplane was ready to go, but I wasn't.” He said it took him about six weeks of taxiing it back and forth, getting his confidence up, his feel of the airplane, and one day about six weeks after starting that, he said to himself, “Shoot, I can fly this thing.” And he gave it full power, he took off and he taught himself to fly, believe it or not. So, here's the man with whom Mrs. Roosevelt, when she's at Tuskegee, said, “I want to fly with you.” Now, she did, in spite of the objections of the Secret Service entourage that always accompanied the President or his family. And so, they flew, landed, and there's a picture of the two of them after landing, both of them big grin on their face, he because he'd just been thrilled by riding, flying the first lady of the land. And she because she was always a very liberal person, always promoting and supporting minority people, women, blacks, native Americans, and so forth. She was always against prejudice. So she had just had exploded the myth that colored people couldn't fly. And when she returned to the White House, more than likely, she pulled the President's coattails and probably said something like, “Franklin, now look here. I just flew with a black man, very well, very satisfied with it. And you are commander in chief of the armed forces, and by the stroke of a pen, you can direct the army to accept applications from black people.” And probably that was said, but I like to add my own little ….she probably also said, “And I'm your wife, and you'll do what I say.” But at any rate, when the applications were made available to us, and I'd read about it in the local newspaper, I rushed out to the recruiting station where I had been about twice before and had been denied. And I got the application and submitted it. I was less than twenty-one so my father had to sign approval. Six months later, I was called in for a physical exam and an oral questionnaire, if you will, by a board of three officers, passed them both, and then I received orders to report to Tuskegee on the 19th of August 1941. So that's how I got in. It's a roundabout answer but I had to give you the background. INT: Now what were you doing before you were accepted? Were you working, or had you been in school? CD: No, I was a college student, in engineering at City College of New York. I really wanted to be, I always wanted to be a pilot, so I figured well, if there're no black pilots in commercial ….or military, the next thing to do is to get into the design of airplanes. So I really wanted a degree in aeronautical engineering. But NYU was the only local university offering that degree, and its tuition was pretty high. My father, I, my family lived through the depression, this was back in the thirties, so it was all they could do to put the three of us through school. So instead of being able to go to NYU, I was able to get into City College where the tuition was practically free. But they did not have mechanical, I mean aeronautical, they had mechanical. So I was by, not by design I was in mechanical engineering. Wasn't doing too well at it, as a matter of fact, it turned out that was really not my cup of tea. And my grades reflected it. I'd been a good student up until then. Won math prize and all that in junior high school. But then when I got to college it was more the, I was advanced one year before my peers by going through a rapid advancement program, which wasn't a good idea eventually. It was a matter of pride, but at it turned out I was not mature in college. I was at least one year behind where I should have been. And the pace at City College was fierce. I mean, there were some brilliant students, one was a Jewish student, who really set a high pace. And I was just in by the skin of my teeth. So along came World War II and saved my face. I was able to say, I'm glad to fight for my country, before they kicked me out of college. And what happened was that, as a result of a tour of Europe by Colonel Charles Lindbergh in the late thirties, when he returned to the states, he reported to the military and to the Congress that he had observed that Germany was arming surreptitiously. They weren't supposed to arm after the Versailles Treaty of World War I, but Hitler and his gang were secretly arming the Hitler Youths and they were training a lot of aviators. And so when they decided to come out of the closet in open warfare, they just changed their civilian trained pilots into the Luftwaffe, and they had an instant fighting force, a very potent one. So Lindbergh reported that when he came back to the states and gave the alarm that we better start doing something because our armed forces had dwindled down to practically nothing between the wars. And so the Congress decided to begin a civilian pilot training program in the area of 1940 with units at a number of colleges around the country including five predominantly black colleges, Tuskegee, Howard University in Washington, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, West Virginia State, and another one, I've forgotten which one. But also at a number of the general colleges, the white colleges, including City College. So I volunteered for that and was accepted and got my private pilot's license through that program. So when the army decided to accept applications and train blacks, I sort of had a leg-up because I already had a private's license. So when I applied I was enlisted into the second class that went through flight training. We started with eleven and graduated three. And I think we were the smallest graduating class in the history of the Air Corps. The first class ahead of us started with thirteen and graduated five. And so it went. Every month there was a new class starting, and eight months later about one third of those who started completed, until by the time the program ended— you know it started on July 19, 1941 with the first class, and every month a class began, and the program closed down in June of 1946. The war was over, so it stopped training. By that time there were 994 black men who got their wings at Tuskegee, almost a thousand. And by the way, if I ever see you on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and you miss that question, I'm going to find you because you owe me a half million dollars….But that's how come I got into the military. INT: Now, tell us a little bit about the training at Tuskegee. Maybe go through a typical day. I know no two days were the same, but, try to give us an idea of what the training was like. CD: Well, in the primary phase, the first of three phases, was conducted at a field that still exists today. It's called Moton, M-O-T-O-N Field, about ten miles away from the Tuskegee University campus. It was named after the man who succeeded Booker T. Washington, who founded Tuskegee back in 1851, I think it was. So Moton Field is still in business. At that time Moton Field was just an open meadow. It didn't have any runways or anything. Even today it only has one. That's a sort of a footnote. Two or three years ago Congress passed legislature appropriating $29.1 million to bring Moton Field up to speed as a tourist attraction under the aegis of the Park Service. So that's where we started our training. And that's where Chief Anderson along with a couple of other black instructors were the instructors for the first class and my class. The number of instructors began to increase, eventually by the end of the war there were about thirty black men who were instructing in that program. And there were a couple of white instructors, too. But, now, so the typical day at the beginning of the program. The first class ahead of us, they had ground school, they had flying in the morning and ground school classes in aerodynamics and weather and Morse code and things like that in the afternoon. In the afternoon, the schedule flip-flopped, whereas we had been in ground school in the morning, we started, now wait a minute. We had flying in the afternoon, we had ground school in the morning. And then it would be the other way. And that went on until the program, with the primary phase, ended. At that point we were transferred from Moton Field and . . . we had been living in the barracks on the campus of Tuskegee. In fact, we cadets were in a converted enclosed bathhouse which covered the pool area and that's where the first three classes had bunk beds, double-deckers, all that sort of thing, while the main base was being built about eleven miles from campus. That base was built for the, well, about a million dollars, they built the base. Now that, today, you win that on a program, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” But in those days it was a lot of money and it took about a year for the base to be completed. So when we were transferred there, there were no barracks and we lived in “tent city,” we lived in these four men to a tent with a sort of a ____ and a little coal burner in the middle of the tent. Some nights like last night in Birmingham when the temperature's down to 22 it was freezing. But, anyway, that was all right. And as we were going to ground school on that new base that was being built, there were all kinds of construction machines that we had to dodge as they went lumbering by. And they were cutting deep furrows of mud, you know, all over the base. Eventually the barracks were built, the facilities on the flight line, the hangar and all those things, the tower and all were built. It became one of the most beautiful bases in the air force. It was really symmetrically designed and we were very proud of it. When the war ended, it was close down and the army allowed it to go to weeds. And, which is a tragedy because, I kinda think that because it had been believed at the outset, you know, we couldn't fly, we felt that we were being programmed to fail. They said, OK, ____ send us the best you have and we'll try to train ‘em. We don't think it's possible, but we'll try. So they started the program. Fast forward to the end of the war—the record we had was unmatched by any other outfit. We had a perfect record in terms of escorting bombers to target and back home. We never lost one, never. And no other outfit can meet, met that record. Which led eventually to President Truman desegregating the armed forces. But I'm getting way ahead of the story. The day, our days on base, the main base, where we did the basic phase of about ten weeks and when we finished that we did the advanced phase for about ten weeks. It was a very similar thing. You'd have ground school in one part of the day and fly in the other part of the day, with the other class, upperclassmen. And then the third class came along. So they did quite a bit of switching around, so each group was flying the aircraft in which it was then being trained, so that the others, our classes could go on and do their training and so forth. And eventually, uh, there were classes that were as many as 75 started. And about one third of each class finished. There was definitely a quota system operating. And so the ground schools consisted of the subjects I mentioned. As we went further on our training became more and more sophisticated. Navigation training was added, formation flying in the advanced phase, night flying, gunnery and all that sort of thing. So by the time the eight months program ended we were well rounded aviators, military aviators. And that was how it went. INT: What plane did you train on? CD: The first was a biplane called the PT-17. PT for Primary Trainer, PT-17. It was a biplane, two wings, open cockpit. Communications, there was none with the ground, but there was communication between the instructor in the front cockpit and the student in the back through a so-called, I've forgotten, some kind of tube. He would speak into a tube and there was a hollow tube that went to the back where you had it attached to your headset. So whatever instructions the instructor wanted to give you, he just hollered into the tube and you responded. As I said, there was no communication with the ground, no radio. When you finished primary, then you went into basic. And the basic, and the airplane in the primary had about 150 horsepower engine. When you moved to advanced, I mean to basic, you were in a BT, a roll-wing [?] mono plane, one wing with a sliding canopy, so you weren't out in the open air like you were in a primary plane. It was full canopy, with a heated cockpit. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't do well. But, advanced, added to the complexity was the fact that you had, you had a 400 horsepower engine which was more than twice the power of the primary airplane. You had a closed canopy. You still had fixed landing gear. You had a variable pitched propeller so that from the cockpit activating certain controls you changed the pitch of the propeller just like in a boat, well, not quite like in a boat, but anyway, for takeoffs and landings when you needed all the power, the pitch of the propeller was changed hydraulically so that it would get a deeper bite as each time the propeller went around on take off and landing. When you got up to cruise you changed the pitch of the propeller so that it didn't have to take such a big bite. Then when you finished there you, we advanced to the advanced phase and that was an AT-6, an Advanced Trainer-6 called popularly “The Texan” [?]. The Navy trained in the same time airplane. They called it the SNJ and they were all painted yellow, so they used to call it the “yellow peril.” And you went down to Pensacola, the sky was just full of the yellow perils. The airplane had a 600 horsepower engine and it had retractable landing gear which was a new feature. And it was in that phase that we learned night flying, instrument flying, we went to gunnery at a base in Florida, Eglin Field, where we learned our gunnery. Aerial gunnery, ground gunnery. And when you finished that one you, if you passed all your ground school subjects and all your aerial maneuvers, and we learned acrobatics and so forth, then you were licensed as a pilot and you had your wings pinned on . . . . So that in a nutshell was how the program went. INT: Now, when you had finished your training at Tuskegee, when were you assigned to your squadron, and what rank did you have when you left Tuskegee? CD: OK. When we graduated, we were commissioned as second lieutenants. We were assigned to squadrons immediately. I was happy that my two classmates and I were all assigned to the 99th Fighter Squadron, which was quite celebrated even at that—we hadn't done anything, we were just the first blacks in as military pilots. And there was whole lot of hype in the black press, I mean, the white press paid us practically no attention except for complaining that it was a waste of the nation's resources, and “they couldn't fly,” why waste this, you know training and all the rest of it. So we had a reputation to earn. But among the first classes that graduated, and the first class of graduates, flight graduates, three of them were assigned to the 99th Fighter Squadron to go overseas as a fighter outfit. And the other two men were assigned to the, the, uh, what's the name, the 332nd Fighter Group, which would ultimately have three squadrons, which turned out to eventually to be 301st, the 302nd, and the 30—no, I'm sorry, the 100th, the 301st and the 302nd Fighter Squadrons all together made up the 332nd Fighter Group, which overseas painted the tails of their airplanes, their P-51s, red and became known as the “red tails.” Those . . . Society of 99th Fighter Squadron which was the first one that went overseas were three of the first class, including then Captain Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who was a West Point graduate. And he and two of his classmates were assigned to the 99th. My class came along, and all three of our, I'm happy to say, were all assigned to 99. As the classes came out, the third class, four graduated, and, uh, let's see Raiford [?] was in the 99th, Knox [?] was in the 332nd, ____ was in the 332nd, and, oh, Roberts was in the 99. So of the, uh, you know, that's . . . anyway, by the time the first class graduated and got their wings was March of 1942. My class was April, and so forth. By September of 1942 we had enough graduates assigned to the 99th to make up a fighter squadron, 28 pilots. So we were ready to go overseas by October. We didn't have orders to go overseas until we had left Tuskegee on April 2, 1943, and went overseas. About five months later the 332nd went overseas and after they had been overseas about five months they picked up the 99th which by that time had a year's experience as veterans, and the 332nd became a four squadron fighter group, which is unusual. There were none other like that. But that, that was how, from training we were commissioned as second lieutenants and we were assigned to a fighting unit. INT: Now, a couple of questions. Number one, what became of the washouts? CD: That's a sad story for the washouts. Because, well, what happened to them in most cases, they became enlisted men and were trained as mechanics, or parachute riggers, or radio men or armorers [?], ordnance people handling the ammunition. Some became administrative clerks and so forth. And I say it's a sad story because, I have to use my imagination since I was not washed out, but I know, I imagine how I would have felt if I had left New York with a whole lot of hype in the neighborhood. You know, say, I would rather go and be a pilot. “I don't believe he can make it.” You know, “Who, him?”. . .'Cause I'd been building models all my life, and talkin' flying. And that's how, at that time, it was as unlikely, not implaus—it was not, uh, imaginable that a black person could be a pilot, much less a military pilot. It might have been as implausible as someone, a black person being president of the United States. So, uh, after having been accepted for training, of course, I'd been through the civilian pilot training, so I had, the neighborhood knew that I was a pilot, anyway, I'd been trained as a pilot, so they gave me the likelihood or the possibility of making it in the military. But they were, there were some dubious people in the neighborhood. OK, so go to Tuskegee, and coming back after completing your training as a licensed pilot with your wings and everything, then the doubts have disappeared. Next was, how would we do in combat, you know. One thing to fly an airplane, it's another to fly against an enemy who is determined to kill you, to shoot you down. And quite frankly, this is like a footnote almost, I had ____ myself of fear, something like the fear that President Roosevelt spoke about after Pearl Harbor when he had a fireside chat on the radio to his fellow Americans, and he said, because we were in shock. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Americans just went into a state of shock. We never believed that, number one, we could be attacked by nations across the Atlanta on one side and the Pacific. And we just thought the oceans were our country's buffer, not realizing that air power was in its infancy and would be able eventually to cross oceans, continents and so forth. So when that happened, Americans went into shock. President Roosevelt addressed the nation, trying to stiffen our backbone, saying Americans for America, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Well, I had a little feeling inside myself in terms of how will I react the first time I see an enemy aircraft with its guns blazing, firing at me with the intent to kill me. He didn't know me, I don't know him, but he's trying to shoot me down and kill me. Will I be inclined to run away from him, will I turn coward, and chicken and so forth? You don't know until you face it. You imagine, I'll be a ti-, as much a tiger as anybody else, but you don't know whether you're going to be a pussycat. It wasn't until the first time, and I happened to be leading a flight of six the first time we encountered the enemy in the air, and I saw the airplane with a big black swastika on it, and they were turning into us and their guns were firing. And there were six of us. None of us had shot down an enemy . . . we were brand new, babes in the wood. And every one of us had the motivation to decide to be the first black American to shoot down one of those SOB's. Ok? Whose philosophy was, you know, the Aryan supremacy, we're better than the whole world, and certainly than the black people. And every one of us had a brave desire to shoot, to be the first, because we knew we'd be historically heroes from then on. So we scattered. After them, not away from them. And my fears were laid to rest. I had no, I was a tiger and I knew I was a tiger. But those are some of the reactions as we were overseas. INT: Now, where was that first engagement? And when? CD: It was June 9th, 1943, over Pantelleria, it's an island off of Sicily. And, it's spelled P-A-N-T-E-L-L-E-R-I-A, pronounced Pantelleria. And when we used to refer to raids over the island, we'd call ‘em panty raids. [laughter] It's interesting about Pantelleria because it's the first time in military history that a ground target surrendered purely to air power. There were no ground troops, no amphibious invasion, nothing of that, they were just bombed, we bombed the hell out of them for about two weeks. Not just us, airplanes of all kinds, bombers, medium [?] bombers, high [?] bombers, fighter bombers. And eventually one day they waved a white flag, they surrendered, [speaks in Italian]. They had enough, and that's when air power . . ., well, before then, air power, the power of air power, the potential of air power, was ___ by the Germans, with their Blitzkrieg where they bombed Poland and France and Britain, people to their knees, and almost brought Britain to its knees, except for the very gallant and heroic RAF. But that's the first time, and of course our part in the bombing of Pantelleria was very much a part of it. My first mission was not in the air against aircraft, it was air-ground, because that's what the 99th was mostly involved in, hitting targets on the ground. And my very first mission was a dive bombing mission on Pantelleria. And as I rolled into the attack, aiming at my target, I was fascinated and almost mesmerized by shooting at this ground target. This is for real. And then I saw little red streaks going by my cockpit. These were tracers. I'm being shot at from the ground. I couldn't really believe that, from that [number of] bullets that we were flying into that, how could they possibly miss us? I expected any minute that one of them would hit my airplane and I'd go up in flames. But you didn't think about that until after you'd pull up off the target and you'd say, “Oh, my God, they could have shot me down.” INT: Yeah. What where you flying? What kind of . . . CD: B-40s. INT: B-40s. CD: Yeah, it's that kind right here. [picture] It was a good, it was a good aircraft attacker but it wasn't very good in the air against the German aircraft. From the time we entered combat in June of 1943 until the _______ in the beginning of 1944 in Italy, we only had one victory, one of our guys shot down a ____190 on a patrol mission. And we didn't have any other victories until several months later. But over _____, the Germans came down to our level. Before then they had been staying up pretty high so we didn't have a chance to engage them. But when we were attacking there, not their homeland, but they had bases in Sicily, then they had to come down to our level to protect their ground troops and so forth. And then the guys had an opportunity such that within a couple of days they shot down seventeen airplanes. So they turned the tide. And it was then that the military brass began to acknowledge, well, I guess they can shoot and fly and fight. And from that, and now, it wasn't until about three months after the 332nd had gone overseas that the air corps brass decided that they needed to expand the fighter[?] escort units, because our bombers were taking some horrendous losses, because they didn't have enough escorts to take them all the way to the target and all the way back home. So the 99th was, no, not the 99th, the 332nd, the three squadrons, 100, 301st, 302nd, were transferred from what they had been flying, B-39s, and coastal patrol, they were transferred into P-47s as escort fighters, which is a very good airplane high up, but down low it's not too good to defend itself. Great on air-ground. Well, the P-47s remained the escort aircraft about one month, and then it was decided, decided by the high brass that it, the P-47 did not have enough range to go all the way with the bomber [to the targets] and all the way home. So then the guys were transferred from the P-47 into the P-51 Mustang, which was the Cadillac of fighters at the time. But the Germans had . . . to the end of the war when they designed and put into action their jets, their twin jets, that the P-51s were excellent airplanes for all roles—air to air combat, air to ground attacks, escort and all that sort of thing. So it was when the guys got into the P-51 that they really began to shoot down airplanes. One guy shot down three airplanes in five minutes. One guy sank a destroyer with machinegun fire. And that's in the movie, if you've seen the HBO movie, “Tuskegee Airmen.” You see the actual ___ film from the airplane of [?] Pearson, on an actual mission. You see him flying at the destroyer and you see the destroyer going down from machinegun fire. INT: Wow. CD: One of our guys became an ace over the period of the war . . . He was in Birmingham yesterday. One of the guys was 103 [?], who on the mission to Berlin right near the end of, a week or two before the war in Germany ended, in May of 1945. That day eight German jets were shot down by American pilots, and three of the eight were Tuskegee Airmen. Now, two of those three have died. Earl [?] from Cleveland, and Charles [?] from St. Louis. But Dr. Roscoe Brown, who later became president of _____, he's still living, and he was in Birmingham yesterday. He shot down a German jet. INT: Wow. Now, where was your base that you were flying out of? CD: In Italy, Ramitelli is the name, R-A-M-I-T-E-L-L-I, Ramitelli, south of Rome, I think. I was back in the states, so I was not, I was back in the states as a combat tactics instructors along with seven other guys who had been sent back to the states. Before the 332nd left the states, they left from Selfidge Field, Michigan, on Christmas Eve of 1943 and went overseas. Before they left, eight of us had been sent back from the 99th to be combat tactics instructors, to teach the guys coming out of Tuskegee—every month, a new class graduated with brand new wings and no combat experience. So to pass on to them what we had learned in fighting the Germans for the five months we had been overseas, we were sent back for that purpose. Getting a little bit ahead of the story, the eight of us ended up, first as Selfidge Field, Michigan, where we tried to integrate the Officers Club, and we were told to stay out of the building, not to go in there. Well, the strategy that we guys adopted was this: that after the evening, the supper meal, we would go to the evening movie, and after the movie was over, about eight o'clock, we would go to the club in random groups of three, two, one, five, so it'd look spontaneous, and try to use the club. A lot of guys said, oh, yeah, they couldn't do that to us, and so forth. But when the deal [?] went dry and there were only three guys that were going into the club, I happened to be on leave that day. They tried to do it the first time on New Year's Day. The war was over so there was no such thing as holidays. And I was on leave with my new bride who was a nurse at Tuskegee, whom I met the night that we left Tuskegee and went overseas. Yeah, it was one of those, “Where have you been all my life?” We fell in love, and when I came back we got married. But at any rate, we were married when I came back on November 16th. OK, so we were having our first Christmas leave together, she was a nurse at Tuskegee, when the guys decided to do this. So on New Year's Eve she returned to duty at Tuskegee and I returned to duty the next day. Well, when I returned to duty, the guys told me what had happened. And so I said, well, I'm in it with you, you know. The morning of the first, the lieutenant colonel, Charles Gale [?], who was commander of the training unit, who was the guy who would be training white officers, he saw me in the flight line, in the operations building, in the locker room. And he said—I was a first lieutenant, and because I had been in the first class, I was sort of senior ranking among all the guys that were at Selfidge Field—so he said to me, he said, “Lieutenant Dryden, welcome back from your leave. How was it?” And I said, “I had a good time, how was yours?” He said, “OK until last night.” Well, the guys had told me what they had done. And I acted like I hadn't heard anything. I said, “What happened last night, Colonel?” And he told me about how the three guys had gone to the club and they encountered the base commander, Colonel Boyd [?] and the same lieutenant colonel, Gale, at the entrance to the club. And the base commander told them, this club is for whites only, and not to come in there, you have a club in the barracks, which is a bar and a billiard, a pool table. So they said, “Do you understand?” And they said, “Yes, we do.” “Now you have to leave the club.” So they [said], “Is that a direct order?” They said, “Yes,” so they left the club. Because you see, we all knew that if you disobey an order or a superior officer in peacetime, you're flirting with a long jail sentence. In wartime, it's treason for which you could shot to death by a firing squad. And they knew that, so when they were ordered out of the building, they left. And that wasn't the end of the story. The next night, another group was going to do that. And I said, I'm going to go with ‘em. Well, when we left the movie to go to the club, I looked around and there was one guy on my left and on my right, and that's it, just the three of us. So, my base commander, I mean my training squad commander, Colonel Gale, has discussed this with me that morning in the flight line, and he said, “You understand that, I want you to understand that as the senior ranking officer among the black officers on the this base, I expect for you to set the example. You understand?” I said, “Yes, sir, I do.” I was churning on the inside. All day, all that afternoon, I just couldn't, I was nervous about what we were about to do, but I was determined to join the bunch. So that night after the movie, the three of us . . . we went in the entrance and who do I run into? Colonel Gale. He turned the color of this sweater, he turned beet red. . . . He said, “I thought you said you understood.” I said, “Colonel, I understood what you said, but I don't agree with it.” Man! There's an . . . and there's an army regulation two ten dash ten paragraph 19-C that specified that any officer assigned to a base is not only privileged to use the Officers Club but obligated to support the club with his dues, his presence, and his _____. So, there's the Officers Club, we're officers, this is army regulation, so we're . . . “Goddammit, I'm telling you to get out of this club right now.” “Is that a direct order?” Said, “Yes, it is.” So we left. Well, every night the same thing happened for about five nights. So finally, out of frustration, the base commander closed the club for everybody, black and white alike. So we felt that we had won a victory. The whole thing is that, at . . . Major General, he looked like _ _ _ _ _, he had a big mustache, ah, what is it, it'll come to me, he caused the whole training unit to be transferred from Selfidge Field, Michigan, outside of Detroit, to Roosevelt Air Force Base fifty miles west of Charleston, in the deep South. We were transported there by a secret, by train, a sealed train, and we ended up there after an overnight trip from Selfidge, up through Canada, then down through the state of New York and _____ Valley, down to Washington, D.C., all the way down to South Carolina. And when the train came to a stop out in the boondocks, we didn't see any buildings or anything, we thought that meant we were being interned the way the Japanese Americans had been out in California. There were, about every hundred yards there was an armed guard with a carbine, and so forth. So we thought we were being interned. But we got off the train, found out that the training was supposed to be resumed at Walterboro army base. Well, on that base, there were German prisoners of war who could do things we couldn't do. At the base theater, they could sit anywhere they pleased. We had to sit in the segregated, colored section. At the base PX, they could go into the building to . . . we couldn't go in the building, it was off limits to us. We were not considered, we were the enemy. I'm getting way ahead of my story, maybe I better wait for you to ask some… INT: Fine, let's go ahead. CD: I was so outraged and so enraged and so programmed that even today as I relate this to you, I feel like Pavlov's dog, with the ringing of the bell and the dog, after awhile you don't feed him, you ring the bell and it starts the saliva. Well, when I think about [pause] contemplating how our country treated us and we had just been defeating, we had lost one of our pilots. Honoring and respecting the enemy more than we were respecting, I just lose, I lost it, I absolutely lost all discipline, self-control, and I decided, “These rednecks don't think we can fly, so I'm going to have to show them.” So on a Saturday, I [was leading] three guys flying P-39s across the base, buzzing, real low, the way we did in combat. The idea being that when you come back from a combat mission you probably, possibly are low on fuel, you may be out of ammunition, you might leak from dogfights, you're physically tired, so the idea is to get your flight on the ground as quickly as you can and not fly a square pattern. For them it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. So the thing is you come in very low, you peel off, and the idea is to, by the time the number one man is at the end of the runway, to turn out [?], the number four man is taxiing down. So it's one, two, three, four. So ostensibly, that's what I was training the guys to do. But inside I was just making a statement, if you will. And the next day, Sunday, I still was full of venom, and, and, and anger. So I decided to demonstrate attack on a water tower, ____ tower. See, the Germans loved to put machineguns around the perimeter of water towers because then if you tried to attack something in a town, you'd, as you'd come in, they'd ____ on you as you were coming in. So the thing to do is to knock out the _____ tower. _____ standing for, the German was ______, meaning anti-aircraft, ok. So I was demonstrating this using the water tower in the middle of Walterboro, South Carolina. It's still there, I went and visited there the other day, demonstrating how you come in low and if the tower's right here, you come in low and then you pull up in time to fire on it, and after you fire, you get back on the deck low, and you go, doing what the British describe as ______, in other words you don't fly straight level, you're changing altitude and so forth. So somebody on the ground getting a bead on you, you're constantly changing altitude, it's what they call _______. All right, well, both of those actions, on Saturday and Sunday were against regulations and I was grounded. And I was general court martialed. The first trial, I was, well, first of all, this is the content of this—you haven't read this book yet, you have [addressing two people in the interview]. I'm going, it'll take you thirty seconds to read it, but I won't, I think I'll take a look at it to see how short it is physically. I can recite the words for the purpose of the tape. The title of the chapter is “Dismissed” and it reads as follows: “The accused will rise and face the court. Does the accused to have anything to say before sentence is pronounced?” “No, sir.” “Having found First Lieutenant Charles Walter Dryden, a member of blah-blah-blah-blah guilty as charged, violating the 96th article of war”—which is like a catch-all. If they can't get you for anything else, they get you for that—this general court martial sentences Lieutenant Dryden to be dismissed from the United States Army Air Corps.” And that's the end of the chapter. Now, what did dismissal mean? It meant a dishonorable discharge, that's what it meant. You wouldn't be able to hold a federal job, and all that disgrace, all that sort of thing. Well, that was the sentence. The reason, that, well, there were two counts. One was buzzing the base on Saturday, and buzzing the town on Sunday. I was acquitted of buzzing the town because I came up with a big fat lie which the court somehow or other didn't recognize the truth of that lie, and they acquitted me. But on the charge of buzzing the town [means base] on Saturday there was no way I could be acquitted because the control tower operator, when he was on the witness stand, under oath, he was asked, “How low—excuse me—who was [unclear] flight when they crossed the base.” He said, “Sir, the tower is 75 feet above the ground, and I had to look down at ‘em as they went by.” So we, all four of us, were pretty low. And so I was convicted, I was sentenced to be dismissed from the service. Fortunately for me [blows nose], pardon me, there had been a legal technicality in the first trial. I had been forced to use my one peremptory challenge to get rid of a member of the court who had been heard to say before the trial, “Dryden is guilty as hell as we're going to throw the book at him.” Well, that's certainly not an unprejudiced opinion for someone going, who's going to hold you innocent until proven guilty. He had me judged already. And so . . . I tried to use a challenge for cause, meaning I would have to indicate why do you want to challenge this man off the court. And my reason was because he had been heard to express a pre-judged opinion. Well, the lawyer on the court, there's only one legal, lawyer on general court martial, everybody else was just a run of the mill officer, but the lawyer acts as a judge, and he rules on the validity of certain things, such as whether a cause given for a challenge is valid. They call him the trial judge advocate. The T.J. in my court decided that my reason for wanting to challenge this captain was hearsay and therefore could not be held valid. But, he had to go. I had to get that man off the court. Because he had made up his mind before he had heard the evidence. So I was forced to use the one, every defendant has one peremptory challenge, which you don't have to have—I just want you off the court. You don't have to say I don't like your looks, I don't like the way you sounds, I hate your guts, off the court. “I want you off the court, you've got to go.” Well, I was forced to use that one challenge to get rid of this captain. The higher reviewing authorities, noting that in the proceedings of the trial, felt that as a defendant my rights had been infringed, so they granted me a second trial. . . . [pause in tape] OK. I was granted a second trial, for the buzzing of the town, I'm sorry, of the base, and there's no way I could have been acquitted from that because of the sergeant's testimony, the tower operator's testimony. But I was granted a second general court martial trial. All the members of, you see, the members of the first trial all knew me. Two of my squadron mates who had come back as instructors were on that court, and there were five white officers. But they were officers assigned to the base, so they all knew me. The second trial, however, was total strangers, never seen me before, and so forth. And the trial was held in the city of Charleston somewhere. Well, hearing the second testimony and all, I was convicted a second time, but instead of being sentenced to be dismissed from the service with a dishonorable discharge, I was sentenced to be fined $110 a month for three months, confined to the base, that means I couldn't leave the base for three months, and suspended from promotion consideration for a year. As it turned out, it was seven years before I was promoted to captain, but I was just delighted still to be on active duty long enough to remain and retire as a lieutenant colonel after twenty-one years. And I've never really thought about it until very recently, but I really . . . I don't believe there was anybody else in the history of the armed forces of the United States who's had two general court martials, convicted of both of them and still was able to retire as a lieutenant colonel—I don't think so! But seriously, I've often wondered, if I had had a clean record, without those two general court martials, what my career would have been like. I'm sure I could have made, at least made colonel, because, a full colonel, because I could have been promoted to colonel after I had been promoted to lieutenant colonel in my last year of active duty, would have been my last year of active duty in 1961, except that in '61, in '61 the German, the Berlin Wall went up . . . it froze all the . . . no retirement, no, you know, end of enlistment, nobody goes anywhere. And so I was forced to stay for an additional year until the freeze thawed and people could leave. Well, by that time, my last assignment, what had been my last assignment, was as an ROTC instructor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And when the, when my retirement was frozen, by that time, my replacement had already been programmed to come from France to Howard and become the PAS, the professor of [?], and I would have been retired. But that was stopped. So now with this . . . reporting to duty, so we . . . about four months and then I was transferred to Air Defense Command Base in Fort Lee, Virginia. While I was at Fort Lee, I retired as a major, and when I reported to Fort Lee from headquarters, air force, I was promoted to lieutenant colonel. OK. So now when I can retire, there's no freeze on retirement, I was asked by my major command, which was Air University, based in Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama, a letter was sent to me asking, do you still want to retire. And I said, you bet your life, because Vietnam was building up, and I had already been in World War II and Korea. So I said, yes, I think I want to retire. And they, would you consider the strong possibility that if you withdraw your request for retirement that you've probably made the full colonels list in about three years. And I said, thank you very much, bye. Oh, I might have survived a combat tour in Vietnam but then again I might have been shot down and spent seven years in Hotel…whatever. So, I retired, I had had twenty-one years, and I just consider myself very lucky to have received that rank with honor. I was retired with an honorable discharge. And as I say, I've never really thought about it but I've had two general court martials . . . Some people when they read my book, read Chapter 1 and say, “How could that be, you were dismissed.” Because now if you look at Chapter 2 there's a picture from a newspaper article which indicates that I've been dismissed from the service. And people look at that and . . . I have to explain as I did to you. INT: Now, how long were you on, or involved in combat actions in Italy? For about five months? Is that correct? CD: Well, up until the end of the war. INT: So, did you go back to Italy? CD: No, I didn't ever go back, I stayed in the states, as an instructor. The unit had come back. I was the first in October and the other three in November. It was October 8. Some of us got married as soon as we got back. I married my nurse, in fact, when my airplane coming back from combat landed in Miami, I called her at Tuskegee, and she said, “Where are you? You sound so close.” I said, in Miami. Oh, she's so excited. “Are you coming by to get me soon.” “No, what I'm going to do first is report to Mitchell Field in New York and get my orders, and then you come up to my parents home in the Bronx. And just wire me as to when you're arriving.” And so a day or so later here comes this telegram, “Meet me at Pennsylvania Station,” such and such a time. And I met her, and so forth. Well, the other three guys who got married, all of them decided to stay on with their brand-new brides. A couple of guys went back immediately with the fighter group, with Colonel Davis and Lieutenant Raiford and Lieutenant Connell [?]. Both of them were first lieutenants. And Colonel Davis, the commander, well, the former commander of the 99th and now the commander of the 332nd, at Selfidge Field, he spoke to each of us individually. When he spoke to me, he said, “Glad to see you, Dryden. How's the squadron doing? I've been reading you,” et cetera. He said, now, if you continue, if you volunteer, because our orders had been changed from being assigned to the 332nd to go right back overseas that we were assigned to an outfit, a training outfit to remain in the states and train these guys, each month another group coming through. He said, “now, your orders have been changed and the only way I can get you to go back with me is if you volunteer.” He made this promise, I understand from the other guys, the same promise he made to me. He said, “If you continue to perform the way you did when I was the commander overseas, there's a very good chance that within the year you'll be a squadron commander as a major.” We were first lieutenants at the time. I said, “Colonel Davis, what a dilemma.” He said . . . I had always admired this man long time before I went to Tuskegee. I had read this black man who was a graduate of West Point. And to me anybody who graduated from West Point of whatever color was almost one step below God. Anyway, if a black man did it, he was half a step from God. And so, I, he was my hero, from years before, when I was a kid. And for him to make an offer to me, and he wanted me to go back with him, it was, if my wife wasn't such a cute lady, and . . . I would have gone back overseas with him. I don't know what my fate would have been, but anyway, I chose to stay in the states, and the other guys who got married chose to stay in the states. A couple of guys who stayed in the states, after about six months in Walterboro, South Carolina, they decided to go back overseas, with the 99th. And, when the war ended in Europe, the guys who were overseas were coming back to the states to start a brand new composite outfit, partly bomber pilots, partly fighter pilots, and then go fight the Japanese. And before they could be deployed overseas, the Japanese surrendered. And when I make presentations, I add a little footnote that the history books will tell you the Japanese surrendered because of two A-bombs on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. Oh, I like to think the Japanese surrendered when they heard the black pilots were coming. Always gets a reaction from the audience. But, that's what happened. Now, that outfit was named the 477th Bomber Group, medium bomber group. It was supposed to fly B-25s, the same airplane that Jimmy Doolittle flew off a carrier and bombed Tokyo within three months after Pearl Harbor, just to let the Japanese know, “We're going to bloody your nose. You may think you may have knocked us out, but you're going to get yours.” That kind of airplane. Well, oh, there were 450 of us who fought the Germans, and you might very well ask, what about the rest of the 992 who got their wings. Most of the rest of them were assigned to the 477th, see they were flying B-25s so you had to have a pilot and a co-pilot, you had to have a flight engineer, a navigator, radio man, and two gunners, one on each side. So it took a longer time to train them, and so the war ended before they got overseas. Well, in the course of their training, they were at Truman [?] Field, Indiana, outside of _____, Indiana. And they had to go through the same nonsense we did at Walterboro. They were told, they decided as we did at Selfidge Field, that they wanted to use the Officers Club. So they tried to use it. The base commander said, ordered them not to come back to that club. And he wrote, he issued an order, requiring each of the officers to read it and then sign it, saying, I've read it, understand, and I will comply with the order not to attempt to use the club. Well, these men were not about to accept that kind of discrimination without putting up a fight. So they decided to try to invade the club one night. The Officer of the Day, who's in charge of the base when the base commander's away at night, he ordered them not to come in, and some of them jostled their way past him and into the club. And so, they were required to sign this order, saying they would comply. A hundred and four of them refused to sign it. Now as I said earlier, if you, if you refuse a direct order in peacetime you're flirting with a long jail term. You do it in wartime, it's treason. You could be shot to death. These men knew that. So they put not only their career, but their lives are on the line. [Not only] during wartime, but in this country. That took all kinds of courage. And, and they were written, given serious letters of reprimand, which remained in their records all until 1995, when we had an annual convention here in Atlanta. And one man had, John ____, and he was court-martialed for what he did. He was accused of having jostled the officer as he was going into the club, which was like an assault on his person, so he was court-martialed. And that stayed on his record. And the other men, the other hundred and three men had these letters of reprimand on their record, for all these years, until 1995. We had the convention here in Atlanta. And, I'm very proud to say that a protégé of mine, who had been a student in ROTC when I was teaching there at the end of the fifties, the Honorable Rodney Coleman [?], who in '95 was Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for maintenance and installation or something. He used his good offices to have this whole thing expunged from the record of all of these men. It was such an emotional thing, there wasn't a dry eye in the place. Everybody was whoopin' and hollerin' and so forth. ________ was our national president at the time, and he's the guy who had been court-martialed, had left the service, became a law-, I mean he got a law degree but he could not pass the bar, he could not practice law for all of those fifty years. And his record was cleared up. So, I mention that because these were some Tuskegee Airmen who didn't get overseas during World War II, but they fought the battle right here in this country. And they, they need to be saluted, as they are nowadays. They are referred to as the Famous One Hundred and Four. I wasn't in that, I was in Walterboro, South Carolina. But that's part of the story. INT: Now, why, after you go through two court martials, you had . . . CD: My court martials . . . INT: Yeah. You had gone through those two court martials, you had suffered from all this, you were not allowed to use the Officers Club. What made you work to stay in the Army Air Corps after all that? CD: That's a good question. It related to the basic question we all face. Well, why did you want to fight for a country that treats you and your people the way it does? Well, and also, another question is, How do you account for having an unmatched record, that you did. You never lost a bomber. The significance of that, of course, is the fact that when you lost a B-17 or a B-24, which is what we escorted, you lost ten American lives. And I had it said to me, a number of times, most dramatically perhaps last year this time in El Paso, Texas, at Fort Dix, where I had a book signing, in the PX. While I was sitting at the desk, this guy came up, a white guy, and he had an Air Force cap on, he looked as old I did, and he asked me, “Where you in the outfit?” And I said, Yes, I was. The guy started crying, the tears were coming out of his eyes. And he related to me how, on a mission to Vienna, his airplane had been shot up, they were straggling, they couldn't keep up with the formation, and the pilot of the airplane was calling, “May Day, S.O.S., help, we need help.” And [?] the red tails, the Tuskegee Airmen, in the area, two of them came over, and sat in on each side of them and escorted them all the way home safely. And he went on to say, if it hadn't been for you guys, I wouldn't be sitting here. He said, “Because we'd have been shot down for sure. And as a result of having gotten us home safely, I've had children, and grandchildren, and if it hadn't been for you . . . my family owes you men our past, our present, and our future.” Well, I started to cry. I'm an emotional person anyway. But, anyway, it gives you pause to wonder, and I've been asked, and my buddies have been asked, in their experiences tracking audiences, “Why is it that you continued to persevere the way you did?” And I would say, a couple of reasons. One is, our commanding officer, West Point graduate, now a four star general, President Clinton pinned his fourth star on him in 1998, at the White House. He said, to the group, the 332nd, “If you lose a pilot don't come home.” Now, that was what your parents said to you when you were in school, was “You get anything less than an A, on any subject, you don't live here anymore. Just don't bother to come home with it.” That's what he told us, in effect. We don't know what he would have done if we'd lost one, because we never lost one. That's one thing. But more importantly is that we knew we dare not fail. If we failed, those who opposed us and that included from the very top of the Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold [ck] and all the ranking officers, people in Congress and so forth, who felt that we could not fly. And if we failed, they would, we would provide them with the quote unquote proof . . . “We asked you, you harassed us until we finally agreed to train some of your men. We asked you to send us the best you had. You sent us the best you had, and they failed, like we told you they would. So don't bother us anymore.” We could not have provided that. So many times when the ____ were on the ground, we were flying, trying to find a target. If we couldn't find our target because they were covered by cloud, we'd go find a target of opportunity. But we always produced something, so that they could not say, “Well, we told you they're cowards, you can't depend on,” and so forth. The previous question you asked me, though, why would you continue to defend a country that treated you that way. This is best answered by one of our guys who became maybe the most popular or famous, the first black four star general, Daniel “Jackie” James, who, when he was asked that question at one of the colleges he was speaking to, I understand he said, “Because America is my country. It's so simple. I was born here, I was raised and educated here. My parents paid their taxes, and I would pay my—this is my country like anybody else's.” Different from other cultural groups whose ancestors came, integrated here, voluntarily, my people got here against their will. So that makes us even more my, I have as much, almost as much a vested interest in this country as the native Americans who were here when the so-called explorers “found” this country. They didn't find anything. There were people here already. And so, I have as much a stake in America as anyone else, if not more. But then also, our thinking then, that America would someday change and live up to its promises in the Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to the Constitution, and so forth, that this is the land of the free and home of the brave, or something, where, with liberty and justice for all, and the ability to pursue happiness like anybody else, that someday this nation will live up to those words. And it so has. After our unmatched record, President Truman, with his no-nonsense attitude, said, “This is nonsense. Do away with desgre-,with segregation.” Well, that led to the civil rights movement, it led to court cases that did away with segregation in public transportation, in education, and so on and so forth. So that day is coming, it's still coming, it's not there yet. Your minority group, women, has yet to be freed from the nonsense of “you get paid less money than he is for the same for the same work.” That ain't right. So, those are the reasons why I, for one, persisted believing in America. It worries me a little bit, I must say, because I have a book up here, which would be entitled, “Thank God I'm not young, anymore.” I have eight-one years behind me, and on balance and by and large, mine has been an idyllic life. I have not had any real serious problems, physically or what have you. I encountered Jim Crow discrimination, but it was very low level as compared to Emmett Till, who was killed in Mississippi, because he whistled at a white woman. Or, the Scottsboro boys, and on and on and on. I never experienced it. Nor did my parents. There is a difference in my case and in theirs as citizens. When I was, my parents were not, did not, my ancestors did not come through the heart of slavery in this country. My parents did not go through that. They were raised in Jamaica, which had its own form of slavery until the British eliminated slavery in 1832. So, my forebears didn't go through the horrors of the Mississippis and the Georgias and the Louisianas and so forth. So there's a different perspective. But I can very much empathize with my colleagues who did come through, whose ancestors came through the slave trade and all that sort of thing. Nevertheless, all of us agree that this is our country, and we owe it our allegiance. It owes us respect, and it's coming little by little. More and more. Like I just came from Birmingham, where back in the sixties is where you had the bombing of Sixteenth Street Church, killing those four little girls. In fact, I had a book signing in Morrow, at Barnes and Noble last Saturday. There were a number of black authors, you know, Black History Month. And on my right was a man who wrote a book called “Bombingham,” and it was about Birmingham, which was known as “Bombingham.” And the experience I've just had for the last four days in Birmingham showed a complete turnaround. This is a state where, as you know, Governor Wallace stood in the doorway and said, “Segregation yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Segregation forever.” You don't find that anymore. Just retired is the chief Marshall, Phillip Marshall, who's a black man, whose father was a Tuskegee Airman. There are all kinds of signs of the change of attitude, of the people in Birmingham, in Alabama. Things happened in the last four days that I never thought I'd live to see. There was a time when for a black person to be seen embracing a white woman would have meant his death, automatically. And yet I, and in those days when there were some liberal women like Mrs. Roosevelt who might want to embrace you, you would shy it off, “no, no, don't do that, you might cost me my life.” And yet, there were so many hugs and kisses and so forth, yesterday, that it became, it made me realize that America's getting there, little by little. They're, well, I'll you what was one of the very heart warming and emotional things. Vonetta Flowers, who won the Gold Medal. She was in Birmingham, I saw her last night, I hugged her last night. And there were so many people saluting her and celebrating her, that I said to one of the guys, I said, “Why, this world has changed.” I'm glad I lived long enough to see it. But I said earlier I began to say, that I'm worried about America, because there are things happening here that worry me about the immaturity of our population. There are so many things that are happening now that I don't think should be happening. And this is a personal opinion. Right now there's a trial taking place involving Yates, the woman who's drowned five children. I used to think Susan Smith was bad enough . . . but this woman's drowned five. We had the case about three years ago in Conyers where this young man, because his girlfriend broke up with him, went on a shooting spree. I had the same girl, well, I haven't mentioned Jackie before, but I was going with Jackie, and the same day that I went to Pearl Harbor, to the hospital, that girlfriend. Well, she came to visit me at Tuskegee with her mother, spent a week and so forth, and I thought we were going to get married. But when she went back to New York, when I put her back on the train to send her back to New York, I never saw her again. Because, see, absence makes the heart grow fonder for somebody else. And so, that affair broke up. So I've been jilted, as you might say. But I've never had a thought to go out and hurt somebody because I've been disappointed. When I was raised by my parents, there were four, there were three principles whereby their raised my brother, who's six years younger than I, and my sister's eleven years younger than I. Number one, acknowledge and obey God; secondly, never disgrace this family; and thirdly, get a good education. Nowadays, [people] do things which absolutely appall me, as what they do in terms of disrespect for their own family, for adults everywhere. Shut off the camera for a minute. There are too many cases, there are too many adults who have abdicated their responsibility in raising a family, and that's where we're put on earth to do, raise kids. So, some people will say, “I don't know what to do about” a little child . . . What do you mean you don't know what to do with them. They come from this size and you go, and even when they're that size you don't know what to do with them? I advocate corporal punishment, but I don't mean like the Church of God, worship, take the children, hang ‘em up and beat ‘em. I don't mean that. I have, and I'm getting off the subject, but you're getting a chance to see inside of me a bit. I have a ______ theory of child-raising. And it is this. Until a child, of whatever culture and language, learns that language, you can, “Don't do this” until you're blue in the face. They don't know what the hell you're saying. You could growl at ‘em, you could grunt like Beavis and Butthead, and go grunting at each other . . . depending on what you're talking about. So, what you have to do, is like . . . you have to introduce to their brain the connection between the impetus of the stimulus of pain and the words that you're speaking, whether it be Russian, or Yiddish, or Spanish, or whatever it is. Not until you do that do they know what you're talkin' about. So, my granddaughter, Morgan, who's now fourteen, when her mother was divorced, when the granddaughter was less than one, hadn't learned how to talk yet—we had a cat. So Morgan used to observe the cat crawling over to the tray next to the refrigerator and eat out of the solid food part and drink the water and go about its business. So . . . she thought it was a good idea. So I saw her one day, because we had a swinging door from the dining room to the kitchen, and I happened to go in through the swinging door, and I saw her crawling over to the, and grab a handful of solid food and get ready to eat it. I said, “Morgan, don't do that.” Morgan heard my voice enough to turn around and look, see it, didn't know what I was saying. So she proceeded to . . . reach, and I said, “Morgan, don't do that.” She still didn't understand me. The third time she . . . I said, “Morgan [raises voice], don't do that.” And spanked her hand. At that instant, that child learned that much English, because the brain said to her, “We feel pain. We just heard the word . . . or whatever. We connected the sounds and the pain.” And says to Morgan, don't do that again, unless you like pain. Nobody likes pain. You may say, well, that's cruel. Maybe so, but that's the way Nature teaches us. When you see a flame of a fire, especially on a hot, a cold day, and it's warm, there's pretty yellow flames, and you must feel like you want to touch it. And you do. Do you ever do that again in life? Never! So, in a very cruel manner, Nature teaches you . . . certain stimulus that you don't do. You don't jump off a building. I mean, like a lemming, you don't go running off a cliff. You know what would happen to you. So, unfortunately in my view, there are not enough parents, or people who are raising children, who understand the basic principles of child-ra-, of programming, a human being. In our language, in the art form of cartoons, which is the best way, I think, one of the best media for training young children, pre-teenage, teenage, older ones. I understand a lot of history books use the cartoon form of teaching history and so forth. And it's a good way to get information across to youngsters. Well, about five years ago, excuse me, I saw the Simpsons. I think that was when it was introduced. And I read out it, and I watched them, and I saw how these youngsters disrespect their parents and older people, and so forth. And I was appalled because it would never have occurred to me when I was a youngster to talk back to or, you know, an adult. In fact, now I'm very normal, so there were times when my father ticked me off, and times when I hated his guts, but I learned early on that I would go to another room out of earshot, and I'd call him every name in the book. He never heard it. And that saved my bacon [?]. Okay. Well, it's a simple thing like that. You just behave yourself according to what you know the consequences will be if you don't. Okay. So here's the Simpsons, five years ago, which became and still it a very popular cartoon show, with the kids still being very disrespectful. That wasn't the end of the line. The next one was Beavis and Butthead. These two characters who like cavemen oftentimes communicated by grunts and growls and groans. I thought, are we going back to the caves? All right. Very popular show. The rest is South Park. About two years ago I learned about South Park, or maybe it was three years ago. I was reading the review of the upcoming offerings on TV for the fall season. It described that among the new offerings the most popular among kids was South Park. It described the characters, very profane and so forth. The most popular character was the most profane, Mr. ______ described as a, excrement. I couldn't believe what I was reading. So I decided to check it out. So I would not be going on hearsay. So I watched it, from about October, Mr. ____ didn't appear until about a week before Christmas. Sure enough, Mr. _____ was a turd. [interviews chuckle] He had on a Santa Claus cap [laughter] and he was taking a bath in[?] a cup of coffee with an infant on a baby's chair . . . Where are we going? Where are we going? Where's it going to end? We must be like Rome and Greece and Egypt and Britain and Germany and so forth, going down the drain, rapidly. In everything I see, I see this kind of sign of decadence, pure decadence. And I'm not a holier-than-thou, I've had more moments, I've had things that I'm going to have to answer for in a few years when I come before the Bar of Justice. But I tell you one thing. I am glad I am not in Susan Smith's shoes, or Andrea Yates' shoes, because He's going, He or She, whoever the divine power happens to be, is going to say, I gave you five beautiful children. What did you do with them? Where are they? What did you do with them? Of course, he knows what she did. I don't think the plea of insanity is going to work in that court up there, I don't think so. Although she may get off with that plea in man's court. I'm very disturbed about the direction we're going in. This next book of mine, which I told you the title, “Thank God I'm not young anymore,” will have, initially was going to have three parts, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good would cover my eighty years behind me that I've lived through and describe just the very good things I have experienced, many of them involving people I've never met, but with whom I shared the air of this planet, the environment, the social environment of this planet in my lifetime. And they've enriched my life, made it very worthwhile. The bad will cover things like I described in terms of our social environment, the abdication of responsibility by adults, the actual returning our civilization to the time of the dinosaurs and then beyond. The ugly is all the heinous acts that we have observed that are going on, and getting worse. One of the things that I'm going to harp on is, whatever became of, whatever became of the adage that, “there's no greater love than a mother's love for her child.” Whatever became of sportsmanship? and in that one I'm going to cover things like, about five years ago, Sandy Alamor, the shortstop of Cleveland, I think, spat in the face of an umpire. How disgusting! You know, when I was growing up in New York, if you spat on the street, you were, you got a ticket, you know. To spit in somebody's face. That's not bad, that's not the worst. Playing a basketball game, Dennis Rodman, going for the ball, fell into the crowd. And knocked over a photographer, whom he kicked . . . That's not the worst. Mike Tyson bit not one ear but two ears of Evander Holyfield. Whatever happened to sportsmanship? What happened to respect for other? When I was a youngster there were four classes of individuals whom you'd better respect. All priests and nuns, you couldn't miss them because they wore the typical habit. All senior citizens, you showed them respect. All women. If you were on a subway or bus and you were sitting down and a woman came and sat, stood over you, if she was older than eight years old you got up and gave her a seat. And certainly if it's a pregnant woman you got up. And if you didn't get up, everybody on that car would look at you as if to say, “Who raised you? Or, who failed to raise you? You know. And so, those were certain things which my peers and I all had to face. All of us . . . Tape II. . . . and those guys who said, well, they had this conquest, they were lying like hell. Because the . . . girls we liked were trained to respect their own selves and other people's person, and certain rules of conduct. And so, I don't understand this business of going about living in and having children out of wedlock, ‘cause it feels good—that's a hell of a rule by which you run society. That rule applied across the board, nobody would be safe. Somebody taken a liking to you, they're going to have you . . . or take your life from you, and so forth. This is why I say, I despair about the trend that I see. My label for the current pre-teen, pre-young adult and pre-teenager, generation, they have the X generation, the Y generation, the greatest generation and so forth. And I label this one the me-three generation: untrained, unkempt and uncouth. And that's what I see. Well, my wife is a woman who sees the glass half-full, and I see it half-empty. She's an optimist and I'm the pessimist. And listening to me expound as I have with you, she'll say, “That's so pessimistic. There's got to be a good side.” And in deference to her opinion, I'll say, “OK, I'll look at it and see if I can't come up with a fourth part of the book besides the good, bad, and ugly. And I must say that I've come up hope, because, for a number of reasons. In the course of signing my book, having book signings, I was at the University of Texas in El Paso a couple of years ago. And I was, during the program I was talking to some of the cadets, ROTC cadets. And that's probably the hope, that's part of . . . our hope, because these are such clean-cut, decent young people, who show their respect for elders, for authority, for each other, for themselves, and that was part of it. And then, that visit, I was taken to Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, North, New Mexico, to address the graduating class of non-commissioned officers, sergeants and so forth. And I tell you, they were so impressive. The way they carried themselves, the way they respected their commander. The way their commander respected them. It was a two-way street. The way women . . . wearing many stripes. The way some of the women were flying some of the F-117 Stealth Fighters. And I said, you know, there's hope for this country yet. More to the point personally is the fact that I had a stroke last March the tenth, almost the anniversary. And to realize I have been bemoaning the road rage that all of us experience out on the freeway, and thinking, there's no more civility in our ranks as citizens. But I've had that notion diminished quite a bit since I've become handicapped, wearing a cane. I've had so many people who, seeing me approach a door, they're coming toward me on the other side, who rush to open it for me. Or if they've come out through the door before they caught sight of me, they rush back out and say, “I'll hold it for you.” Youngsters, old people. That I'm convinced that, one man said . . . I believe, I'm beginning to believe this, there's some good in everybody. Which may become so buried with cynicism and so forth that it took a September 11 to . . . understand that we're in this boat together and we're going to hang together or we're going to separately. So, I've added this fourth thing to my book, the hope. And, I just hope that, that trend will surpass the trend, the downward trend, and that we'll become balanced and we'll start going back up to what we really as a nation deserve to have. Because we've got good principles. It's just we got a lot of bad people . . . INT: A couple of very quick questions. When did you come to Atlanta? CD: When did I come to Atlanta? INT: When did you move to Atlanta? Yeah. CD: It was in 1975. I had come back from Jamaica where I lived with my former wife. We were divorced in 1975 and was living with my sister who was in _____ up in New Jersey. And I lived with them for about a year and I had a job opportunity in Atlanta. I came down for an interview and I was accepted so I came down. And stayed on that job for about a month. I was fired. Only time I've been fired in my life. Because I had worked with a particular individual in New York, and he was a business major, an accountant, and I had learned to trust him, because he was very competent in his field, and he was very confidential. I learned something that I had confided to him and at a social event I met his wife, and I mentioned this, it was no secret, but it was just something that was confidential. His wife had never heard of it. And I said, that's the man I want. He keeps his mouth shut. He didn't even confide in his wife. Well, I wanted him to be my controller, to handle the funds in this operation. So I said, I was staffing, I said to my boss, I want X, Y, Z. “You can't have him.” Because he was pulling strings through the Citizens Trust Bank at the time. And he, I was told “you can't have him.” I said, “I gotta have him.” “You can't have him.” “I insist.” “You're fired.” And that very weekend, a friend of mine who worked at Lockheed was assigned to transfer from personnel, we know call it, whatever, to marketing. And his boss had told him in personnel, if you'll find your own replacement, I'll release you to marketing. And that's the weekend we met each other. He was at Tuskegee, I knew him formally. So that Monday morning after I'd been fired, he took me to Lockheed. His boss said, “OK, I'll take Mr. Dryden.” And Don went over to marketing, very happy. I worked for Lockheed for thirteen years, retired in 1989, so that's the story of how come I came to Atlanta. INT: And tell us briefly what you did during Korea? The Korean War. CD: What did I do there? INT: Yes. CD: I flew with an outfit called the Mosquitoes. I tell you when I first learned I was going to be assigned to the Mosquitoes, I thought we were going to be flying the ____ Mosquito, which is a heckuva airplane from World War II, but that's not it. What we were, we were air-, we were tactical air controllers, from the air, flying a trainer, a T-6 trainer, two-seats, one behind the other, no guns . . . . And our job, pardon me, was to seek out potential target, because the North Koreans were excellent at camouflage. And they would run a tank up in the side of one of their mud huts and cover it over with grass and you wouldn't even know it was there unless they had tank tracks leading up to it. And then not knowing that there was tanks and ammunition and so forth around, our troops, with extreme noise would bypass it, and they would catch them from the rear. So our job as tactical air controllers was to find such targets and direct our fighters to knock ‘em out. That's what we, like mosquitoes we're supposed to harass the enemy. Well, I flew fifty missions of that and then returned to Japan and then returned to the states. So, I had thirty missions in World War II as a fighter pilot and fifty as a reconnaissance pilot in World War, in Korea. So I survived both of the wars, and so, that's why I say I'm blessed. To have survived two wars, two general court-martials, and two wives [laughs]. INT: [speaks to unidentified second interviewer] ______, do you have any? Unidentified: I think . . . CD: I hope I haven't talked your ears off. INT: Oh, no. This has been great. There was one question I was going to ask you. Oh, going back to World War II, and knowing how the Germans viewed themselves and how they viewed not only other whites, but how they probably viewed blacks, did you, what did you think would happen, you may even know what could have happened, to Tuskegee Airmen that were shot down and captured by the Germans? CD: It's a good question. As far as I know, from . . . you see, thirty-two were taken prisoners of war. Sixty-six were killed in action. Of the thirty-two who were prisoners of war, I don't recall ever having talked to any of them who report that they were brutalized by the Germans. Uh, very few . . . but I don't recall ever having any of them say that they were discriminated against, in other words treated as less than officers, like white officers were. That their rank was respected, treated with deference as they're supposed to. I don't know about any enlist-, we didn't have any enlisted men who fell into the Germans' hand. I thought you were going to ask what is my opinion as to what would have happened if the Germans had won the war. But, I did have an encounter by telephone on a radio call-in show in Rochester, New York, in 1990 when I was on tour. Four cities in the north of New York—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, the state capitol. In fact, Buffalo, the mayor gave me a wristwatch with the state seal on it, which I wear very proudly. And I had a book signing not too long ago at which this woman came by for me to sign her book, and she was from Rochester, I mean from Buffalo. And she said, oh, you've got the state seal of my state, and so forth. While I was in Rochester, on this call-in show, over the telephone came this heavily German accented voice . . . who said, “I'm one of your former enemy.” And I didn't know what he was going to say next, I didn't know whether he was a neo-Nazi gonna spout a lot of this Aryan supremacy nonsense and so forth. But what he did say was, that, “My squadron mates and I [Luftwafters], squadron mates and I could never understand why it was that we were never able to shoot down bombers that you escorted.” We had to have been the best, and words to that effect. Now, I didn't have the presence of mind that I have now to ask for a copy of that tape, where an enemy is saying that “you are the best!” And it occurred to me since then. I'm trying through a friend of mind in Rochester see if that radio station still has that tape, because that would be proof positive that the enemy hailed us as the best that they encountered. So. That's one of the things I messed up on. This will be an interesting anecdote, I think. I see you are looking at your watch. I won't hold you much longer. INT: We're fine. I just don't want you to be . . . CD: Well, nature's going to call me to the men's room soon, so I'm going to have quit. But, again in Rochester, there was a young black woman in her late twenties, I think, who, after the question and answer period, she asked me, she said, “Colonel, I have a question. Maybe you could help me.” And I said, “Well, I'll try.” “Did the Tuskegee Airmen ever get over the syphilis?” Now, you know about the stories about the black men who had syphilis in the Tuskegee area in the late thirties. There were about 400 of them, who were deliberately not treated by the doctors at the Veterans Administration hospital. HBO made a film called “Mrs. Ever's [sp?] Boys” on that subject. HBO also made a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. Second coincidence: the lead, the male lead in each of those movies was Lawrence Fishburne. So this woman put two and two together and said, “The Tuskegee Airmen were the men that had the syphilis.” And I said, “Lord, please tell me how to teach this lady that that's a mistaken notion.” So I tried to explain to her as I explained to you. But what bothers me is, if one person could make that mis- understanding, hundreds of people probably think we're all syphilant. No, no, no, no, I don't think any of us ever had it. We would have been rushed out of the program. So, ah, there's been a lot of experiences that have come out of the writing of that book, and that [?] was a Tuskegee experience itself. In our . . . last year, the man who talked me into writing that book was a professor of history, who used to be at Spelman College. And back in 1998, no '89, when I retired from Lockheed, and I decided to do this, I had the choice of doing the book. He invited me to speak to a class of his students. And when I was through, he asked me, he said, “Well, Colonel Dryden, when are you going to write your memories?” “Oh, one of these days.” I was about seventy at the time. He said, “Well, let me tell you that tomorrow is not promised to anyone so you better get started.” OK. He went on and he gave me, he made me an offer that I couldn't resist. He said, “To go from my house to my office at Spelman I have to pass your house . . . My wife is on the staff, administrative staff at Spelman. My little boy Clarence [name?] goes to an elementary school right in the neighborhood. So, what will do is, we will come by your house and pick you up, take you to the campus, you can use my office with all the history record books, and do you know how to use a computer?” I said, “No.” He said, “That's no excuse, I'll teach you.” Which he did. And so, after about a week or two of transcribing from some handwritten chapters I had written, about three of them over a period of time, transcribing into the computer as you all know, it's fascinating how you can move a whole chapter from one part of the book to another, and so forth. Such that, he would take me to work at his office, eight o'clock in the morning. At five o'clock, he would pick up his family, go home, leave me at the office. About eleven o'clock, at midnight, I'd call my wife and say, “Come get me.” She'd come get me. Eight o'clock the next morning I'm right back there. And that's how it went. For a year and a half. I finally got it finished. I sent query letters with sample chapters to thirty some-odd publishers. I just knew that this was the great American, not novel, but anyway, nonfiction type of book. Not a nibble, except from the University of Alabama Press. The director seemed interested and he said, “When you finish your manuscript, for the whole book, send it to me and we'll see what happens.” Well, to make a long story short, he said, “The Review Committee read, reviewed and decided to publish it.” They sent it to two readers in turn who sent me their comments and suggested changes and amendments and so forth. The director said to me, “Now, Colonel Dryden, when you get their comments, remember, . . . their comments may be, it's your book. Don't let them change your voice . . . and so forth.” I followed the advice. Finally it was sent to a copy editor who put it into its final form, and there you see the result. It's in its fifth printing. It's, over ten thousand copies have been sold. It's, one copy had to be delivered to a lady where I get my clothes cleaning, ‘cause she said, “I want to buy me a new book.” “OK, I'll bring it to you.” Tape ends."],"dc_format":["video/quicktime"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Veterans History Project oral history recordings","Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center"],"dcterms_subject":["Airplanes, Military--United States","Training planes","World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American","World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American","T-6 (Training plane)","P-40 (Fighter plane)","PT-17 (Training plane)","Anderson, Charles Alfred, 1907-1996","Davis, Benjamin Oliver, 1912-2002","Rayford, Lee, 1918-1967","DeBow, Charles H., 1918-1986","Knox, George Levi II, 1916-1964","Peirson, Gwynne, 1922-","Lane, Earl R., 1920-1990","Brantley, Charles","Brown, Roscoe C., Jr., 1922-","Tuskegee Institute","United States. Army Air Forces. Fighter Squadron, 99th","Tuskegee Airmen","Stearman PT-17","Kaydet","P-40 Warhawk","P-40 Tiger","T-6 Texan","Boeing-Stearman Model 75 N2S (Aircraft)"],"dcterms_title":["Oral history interview of Charles Walter Dryden, part one of two"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Atlanta History Center"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/306"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)","mini-dv"],"dcterms_extent":["1:00:47"],"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"geh_vhpohr_307","title":"Oral history interview of Charles Walter Dryden, part two of two","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["Italy, Foggia, Ramitelli Airfield","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383","United States, Virginia, Prince George County, Fort Lee, 37.24694, -77.33442"],"dcterms_creator":["Brown, Myers","Dryden, Charles Walter, 1920-2008"],"dc_date":["2002-02-28"],"dcterms_description":["In part two of this two-part interview, Charles Dryden describes his experiences as a Tuskegee Airman during World War II as well as his military service in the Korean War and his post-military life.","Charles Dryden was a Tuskegee Airman during World War II.","over ten thousand copies have been sold. It's, one copy had to be delivered to a lady where I get my clothes cleaning, ‘cause she said, “I want to buy me a new book.” “OK, I'll bring it to you.” Tape ends."],"dc_format":["video/quicktime"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Veterans History Project oral history recordings","Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center"],"dcterms_subject":["Airplanes, Military--United States","Bomber pilots--United States","B-17 bomber","Mutiny--United States--20th century","African Americans--Civil rights--20th Century","B-24 (Bomber)","Korean War, 1950-1953--Personal narratives, American","Korean War, 1950-1953--Aerial operations, American","Training planes","T-6 (Training plane)","Race discrimination--United States","Mitchell (Bomber)","World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American","World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American","Racism--United States","Howard University","United States. Army Air Forces. Bomber Group, 477th","United States. Army Air Forces. Tactical Control Group, 6147th","Germany. Luftwaffe","B-25 Mitchell"],"dcterms_title":["Oral history interview of Charles Walter Dryden, part two of two"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Atlanta History Center"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["https://www.youtube.com/embed/hOE0QplqADM"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)","mini-dv"],"dcterms_extent":["59:47"],"dlg_subject_personal":["Davis, Benjamin O., Jr., 1912-2002","James, Daniel, 1920-1978","Terry, Roger C., 1921-2009"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"geh_vhpohr_318","title":"Oral history interview of Mortimer Augustus Cox, tape 1 of 2","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Alabama, Jefferson County, Birmingham, 33.52066, -86.80249","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383","United States, Hawaii, Honolulu County, Honolulu, 21.30694, -157.85833","United States, North Carolina, Onslow County, Camp Lejeune, Montford Point, 34.72433, -77.41441"],"dcterms_creator":["Brown, Myers; Johnson, Ahnekii","Cox, Mortimer Augustus, 1919-2001"],"dc_date":["1999-07-26"],"dcterms_description":["In part one of this two-part interview, Mortimer Cox describes his experiences as a black Marine in the Pacific during World War II. He discusses the reasons why he chose the Marines, having enlisted in the Corps as one of the first black Marines and describes the extraordinary lengths they had to go to to prove themselves. He recalls his encounters with prejudice and eventual acceptance.","Mortimer Cox was a Marine in the Pacific during World War II.","MORTIMER COX VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW Atlanta History Center July 26, 1999 Interviewer: Myers Brown Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell TAPE 1 of 2 Myers Brown: . . . full name, and date of birth, and place of birth, just some general information now. Mortimer Cox: All right, I'm Mortimer Augustus Cox. Why they named me that, I'll never know. I was born April 15,1919, in Birmingham, Alabama. MB: When did you first move here to the Atlanta area? MC: I moved to Atlanta June of 1946, September of 1946. I had decided to use my GI Bill for college education. It's interesting how I selected—everybody asks me why did you select Atlanta and why did you select Morris Brown College as school. I'm a son of a coal miner in the steel mills of Birmingham. Returning from the war and my experience in the Marine Corps said to me that—while my parents could not afford me the privilege of college, I graduated from high school in 1937. Knowing that I had the opportunity to utilize the GI Bill of Rights, I decided I would do that. I didn't see a future in the steel mill. On the basis of my experience in the Marine Corps, I wrote every black, historically black college in this country in a large city. I was concerned that I needed a large city in order to supplement my income because I was married at that time. Most of them in '46 was overfilled with the returning World War II veterans and I began to get , “We're full.” Finally I received a letter from Morris Brown in Atlanta, Georgia, and they said they had an opening and they would accept me. They wanted a $5 deposit on my room, incidentally. And I could afford that, so I took that. That's why I chose Atlanta. MB: When did you first hear of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's involvement? Do you know where you were when that happened? MC: Exactly. I'll never forget it. I was at a Sunday afternoon tea, that was what we had in my community, teas on Sunday. They were church related activities, and of course you would always go and do such exciting things as dance, maybe, but spin the bottle and kiss the girl, yes!, and we would always attend those. That was late Sunday afternoon that year, and we were there, and someone happened to turn on the radio, and we heard it on the radio, and the President was speaking, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and, of course, all of us had registered for the draft, but we were just waiting on our number to go up. All of the teenage boys were there, and the girls, and we listened for the rest of the afternoon. I don't think we spinned the bottle at all that day because we were concerned. But I can remember, I can remember the house, and quite often, if I'm in Birmingham, I'll drive past. And the lady's name was Mrs. Pittman, and as I said there's where I was December 7, 1941. But it's very clear in my mind because it changed my life. Int: When did you get drafted or enlisted? MC: In 1942, I began to think seriously, and the draft was on all young men. And, of course, I was thinking I did not want the Army because blacks were limited in the Army. I had a brother who had volunteered several years earlier and what he was doing did not impress me. Of course, the travel was always intriguing, but just the activity did not impress me. The Navy from what I had seen, I had seen blacks who were in uniform but most of them were either butlers or waited tables aboard ship. That did not appeal to me. There was a paper which was printed, a black newspaper, the Birmingham Daily World, it was a branch of the Atlanta Daily World. It was printed in Atlanta but it was primarily news about blacks in there. I saw the announcement that the Marine Corps was accepting blacks, and of course I thought this was a challenge. I realized they didn't have the kind of segregation that existed in the other major services. So I thought I would go down just to get some more information, and I went to the post office, and I found myself taking the test, and I passed the test and I was sworn in that day. I guess if I'd had to think about it, I don't know what I would have done, but when I found myself being given the oath of office and then told I was a Marine, and I was no longer subject to the draft, that of course gave me some relief. Now I did not immediately go in. I didn't know why. I went back home and from, that was June, I guess about June 12, I believe it was, and I went back home. All my friends were being drafted and were going in the service. I was home, I had heard nothing from the Marine Corps at all, and it was only in late August of '42 I received my orders. “You will report to Camp Montford Point, New River, North Carolina,” on such and such a date with a ticket aboard the train to North Carolina, and that was the first [notice] I had. When I got there, there were very few blacks. I believe I only saw about five or six blacks. That was September 1. And, of course, over the next several days they were bringing more in, so I ended up being in what we call the First Platoon of blacks, the first 40 men who began training. I was in that outfit and I began, I found myself in boot camp at that time becoming a Marine. It was very traumatic. We had a situation where there were no blacks to provide the initial training so these were all whites who were to give us the boot training, and if you know anything about what boot training incurred, it was traumatic. Those of us from the south did not have as much of a culture shock as those young men who were coming out of Chicago, out of New York, and out of the Midwest, who came and found themselves in Washington, D.C., and they'd have to move in the back of the train, so they came onboard in the camp angry. . . . Interestingly enough, most of that group of 40 men had some college, some were graduates out of college. It was a ______, why I don't know, maybe they were the ones who could pass the initial test, but they were angry and very, very hostile, so it was [difficult], because that special service group that was assigned to give us our training did it with the enthusiasm that I guess the Marines have had for 200 years prior to that, so it was an experience. It was hard to differentiate what was racial and what was required of training. The rigors of training is to get you to think as a group, so those of us who had never been into it, I had never been to a camp. Years later as I got older and began to broaden my experience, I could see that in day camp. Youngsters are taught to think as a group and be responsible for the group, so I could understand it. But I had never had that experience, and I suppose most of the youngsters who were there had not had that kind of experience so we did not know what was racial and what was training, so it was very, very difficult. Int: Did you all talk about it? MC: Very traumatic. Int: Did the southerners talk to the northerners? MC: Uh-huh. We almost took a kind of attitude that we were responsible for the group. So first of all, we felt a closeness to those black leaders who were pushing for equal opportunity for blacks, like A. Phillip Randolph and the guy who was head of the National Urban League and NAACP, who were actually talking to the President looking for opportunities for young people in service. And we felt obligations, especially those from the south. You had youngsters out of Talladega, in Talladega, Alabama, Alabama A\u0026M in Montgomery, Morehouse College and Clark [Atlanta University] here, so those educated blacks began to take an attitude that we can't let the race down. They don't want us in the Marine Corps, but we cannot fail. If we fail it will be because they just made the decision, not that we could not do it. So we began to form what we did not know were support groups at night. We would rehash those traumatic experiences that an individual had had and try to put it in perspective. And looking back during the earlier years when students began to integrate white institutions, that was one thing that I tried to get our organization, the Montford Point Marines, that's a national group of black Marines, to form those kinds of groups in the black community, to get young people to realize and see the big picture, as we would always say. You know, do your task and do it well. But it never really happened. But it was very difficult to go through that training and keep everybody concerned. MB: Now how old were you when you went to . . . MC: I tell you, I had been out of high school since 1937, so I was what, '42, 18, I was 23. MB: Were you older or younger or about the same age as most? MC: About the same age. As soon as the Marine Corps had to accept, later on in '43, the Marine Corps had to accept selective service, which was a body of men that selective service, a local selective service [office] would refer to the service, and they would be assigned out. When they began to get that kind of person, you began to get younger, more hostile blacks who didn't understand, didn't want to be in the war anyway, but they realized they had to. But that was my age. Jacksonville [North Carolina] was an experience. It was a small town that depended on the Marine barracks for its existence. But they didn't take kindly to black Marines, and the black Marines were really the ones closest to them. The Marine barracks was farther out across the railroad tracks so they viewed us as outsiders, and they felt we weren't going to be there long. I guess maybe it was assumed that “This is a trial and if they fail, it will close.” So that was our first impression. But it was, truly there were some experiences that even I remember. And being raised all my life in the south other than just going to New York or Washington to visit relatives or something, it was traumatic to me. Because there was always—in Birmingham where I was born and reared, there was always even downtown, theaters and cafés, you had all of your social organizations and your churches and school groups. But here in Jacksonville, it was a country town with very few blacks and no “black society” so it was traumatic. The bus drivers had never had to adjust to black troops. And if we wanted—the closest liberty places were either in Wilmington, New Bern or Lamar, where they had black populations, so most was ready to take a bus. But the bus drivers would always enforce segregation. You had to be in the back seat. So you formed two lines, which was unusual, you know, hard to accept because I had on the uniform just like you. But usually about four or five blacks would get on the back seat and he would fill up the bus with the white troops. So that got to be a problem, especially with those of us who were then moved up where we began to replace the special service troops and we were becoming NCO's ourselves. We had to deal with the fact that here's a youngster on leave, then he comes back AWOL and it's not his fault, because we had experienced first hand that you just couldn't get the bus. You know when only five of you can get out on that bus, you know what I mean, so they were more likely to be absent without leave. So, we increasingly began to press the commanding officer. Now it's to his credit that the person who was selected as commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Woods, accepted the position because he wanted to do it. He actually asked for the assignment, and I've heard him tell me a million times why he had, the name of the group of 51st Defense Battalion, and his pride and joy was that he, how he selected 51st. He said he selected the “5” and the “1” because of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The two persons that appear on the five and one dollar bills were most liked by blacks, and that was how he got it. But he was very, very, very fair and the only thing that really bothered me, as a colonel with the long tenure in the Marine Corps, he could look you in the eye and tell you, I can't control this, and he couldn't. But he would come up with a point with buses, he would assign the troop trucks to go to cities like New Bern and carry them on liberty. So we had our own trucks. Interestingly enough, whites who were running late and missed the last bus would be begging and pleading “let us on your bus,” because we could stay a little later, we didn't have to abide by the bus schedule. And you always assigned noncommissioned officers, so that the MPs which were old Marines that resented the blacks did not have to interface with us. So that they would always say, “Where is your NCO?” and turn them over. “I caught him doing such and such a thing.” And of course we would handle it. But it was interesting enough, I can remember one night, they found me in 1953 [43?], and I just happened to remember that because I can remember when my wife and I got our first house and quit rooming and got an apartment. They built apartments on the base for black non-coms who had a family, so the family's there. When I married, my wife and I had an apartment there. And we were laughing. In December of that year, out in Jacksonville on that coast, it was very cold. The wind is awful. Easily on a cold day you can feel little flakes of ice in the wind. But the deal is when it's cold, coal is limited. They would not let the troops, and we had to buy coal to heat the apartment, would not sell us any coal. Coal would come in and we'd go down to pick up some coal and they'd say, “No, all of this is promised.” So finally we convinced Colonel Woods, the commanding officer, we have a problem. He said what, we told him, and immediately we had a mountain of coal for the steam boiler to do the heating on the base. And he says, “That's our coal. Get you some trucks and back up the pile and get all the coal you need.” So we never bought no more coal, it was that kind of thing. But he was a thoughtful caring person. The camp was not all bad, we had some plusses. There was a young lieutenant who was assigned, he was a radical they said. I guess he was a forerunner of the so-called hippies. Robert Troop, and I had seen some movies, he was out of Hollywood, but he knew all the band leaders, the actors who were black and everything. We had a movie, but by the time we got the movies from the main base, they would be old. He had a contact in Hollywood he could call, and of course they would send movies in. Most of the band leaders then, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, he knew them, and he would have them on the base. One of the most interesting articles, I mean incidents, on the base, is that the commanding officer of the total camp, Camp Lejeune, heard that we had a black boxer who was very good. I can't think of his name, but he was coming to give us an exhibition as the result of Lt. Troop's invitation, and everybody wanted to see it. He wanted to see the bout. He came down, and the guys, like most youngsters, are noisy. And you know how you are at a boxing gig. That bothered that CO and he issued an order for all of the troops to be quiet, and of course we said you're on our turf, you know, and this is for us and you're just a guest here. He had really turned them off because at the time he came over to see the troops, we really trained the troops to be very precise in drilling and to do it exact, and it was a thing of beauty to watch those young fellows drill. And he had, in talking to them, said—he was just returning from the Pacific. And he says, “You know, I'm just back from the Pacific. I've seen women Marines, I've seen dog Marines, and now I see you people.” And I guess he was trying to make a point, I believe in my heart, now that I reflect on it, he was trying to make a point. “Now when I see you people, I know we are at war.” And, of course, the guys are afraid to boo a general, but the next time, he was coming this particular night, and the guys say, he's going to see it by himself, we're not going, and we'll just pass over the camp. And we knew, to Colonel Woods, that was going to put him in a pretty bad light to be a camp commander and be told, the commander of the total camp is coming and none of your troops will be there, so we didn't know what to do. So we decided we would declare what we called a punishment, that you will do a camp cleaning, nobody would say anything. Well, the troops go on punishment and that was going to be our way of doing it. But the colonel came in, he sent for his non-coms then and asked them, fellows, I can't let this, guys got to be there, he's going to know something, you know. But we did relent and the troops did go, but it's that kind of thing that you had openly. Int: Where was your first assignment? MC: My first assignment as I told you, I came in to be assigned to the 51st Defense Battalion. About [1943] when the war had changed, I suppose troops were addressed [?] then. Interestingly enough the whites were gone. They kept the 51st Defense Battalion, but they realized they would have to have a cadre of troops to continue training those blacks who had come in there out of the selective service, so they set up what they called recruit depot training, and Colonel Woods took that camp, and another colonel took over the 51st Defense Battalion, and he asked me if I would be one of those who would stay. He said they like my style, they like my leadership qualities, will you stay. And, of course at that time, I had—it's interesting, the story goes back to the six blacks who made PFCs. That was the first time in the history of the Marine Corps blacks ever made it. I was one of those. And I had, by this time I think I was a buck sergeant. They had to pull the whites out and they had to put us on fast track for promotion, so we were about every three months getting a promotion, and that's unheard of in the Marine Corps. But he had asked me to stay and to serve as first sergeant of “A” company, which was the first recruit training company we were going to have, and, of course, that's when I decided to get married. I says, I'm going to be here, and he told me all about the plans for apartments, and “you'll be here for the rest of the war just training troops.” Gee, that was nice. So I accepted. It was at that point that I began to get over ___. But in 1944, the commanding officer of Camp Lejeune then returned from the Pacific to do duty back in the states, he had been out long enough, and he came over, and he had seen black troops overseas. But always under the supervision of white non-coms, and he came over and saw first sergeant, black sergeant, he was amazed. He had been on Saipan incidentally, the first activity of blacks in the Pacific, but the Japanese, they didn't know that the troops had been trained. They thought all they could do was handle supplies, but when the troops came through, they laid down, grabbed weapons and began to stop the Japanese. And, of course, at that point, there was an article in Time magazine, it was right after, it was a sailor aboard the ship who grabbed the gun and actually to, began to do like at Pearl Harbor, and all of that came back, so it began to take an attitude. His feeling was the troops would be better off, he looked around and saw a whole cadre of black non-coms that he didn't know existed. So he then said that he was going to begin to send black non-coms out. That must have been midsummer '44. And with my seniority and my connections with Colonel Woods, I would always miss it, [they'd take] somebody else, and finally Colonel Woods said, “Sergeant, they're going to get you, you're going to have to go, you've got to be selective.” And, of course, there was a company with a friend of his who was going over with the 36th, and he wanted me, and Colonel Woods wanted me to go because he felt that he could do a good deed through a friend of his. And of course I had to go, and that was traumatic, but I went and got in Pearl Harbor December 15, five days before Christmas, lonely, mad, and deserted, and not knowing what I was going to do. But it was Pearl Harbor and Honolulu at Christmas time, I guess it was nice. But we did, and of course, the rest is history, because in '44 we began doing immediately maneuvers and training immediately after Christmas and that led right up to February of '44 or '45 then isn't it?, yeah, '45. MB: Now which unit were you assigned to when you went to Pearl Harbor? MC: We were assigned with a unit of what they call a depot company, a battalion I guess it was, something new for the Marine Corps, which handled all the supplies. See, the Marine Corps prior to that had had encounters in which it would go ashore and was able to supply itself [by] scrimmages. But for the first time, the Marine Corps found itself out at Saipan which would need reinforcements, medical personnel, would be the only thing the same as the Army, because they were fighting the war just like an Army, but it was not equipped to handle that, so they began to come up with depot companies with full detail, armaments, you know, armaments and the whole ammunition supply. We had to supply all the troops as you went, remember, because they could only carry so much during initial action. So we were assigned to one of those companies, and we began to maneuver loading and reloading. We wore out the equipment during January and the first of February prior to Iwo Jima just training, so that by the time we got to Iwo Jima, we were just like the Army going aboard with the artillery, coming on in phases with the supplies, and that's what the company and I did. We handled more ammunition, we handled clothing, water, and all the wonderful brandy that they gave you, and that's another whole story, but that was nice. MB: But you were there training until February, and then in February? MC: Yes, we actually went to Iwo Jima and was there when the flag, every time you see that flag, it brought on a different kind of meaning, because I had no idea, I had . . . [TAPE changed] . . . I had nothing to compare it with. I thought it was difficult but I just thought that was war and it was only on reflection that it really, really . . . and the deaths, I had never seen that much death before in my life, and that of course bothered me, and I was certain that I was not going to get off. But— MB: When did you actually go ashore on Iwo Jima? Did ya'll go? MC: Yes. We went, it went by D-plus D-Day, D-Day is D and the day after is D-1. We went D-5 and that was because you just couldn't get ashore because everything just logged up and the what it was about D-5 when you actually see the flag raising on Iwo Jima, which the Japanese could actually pinpoint any island. They could look and see a group of men, they'd know exactly how to set their weapons and hit it, so that just naturally tied the troops up on the beaches, and you couldn't until . . . that's the importance of Mount Suribache and the flag raising. So, yes, when you saw the flag up, you knew that they had conquered the island where they could actually, it's a mountain, it's a top of the mountain, and they had pinpointed and all of our control so that once they put the flag up, that was a symbol to the troops that that was secure, then you no longer had to fear the being attacked with emplaced guns from their mountain. But we went in and they, we were, there was no place for you to hide with Marine Corps at invasions, whether you're going in D- or D-10, they needed you. But it was nasty black sand, just as black as that chair, and by the first full day with the body parts and the bodies, flies were big and it was a stink that you never would forget. MB: When you were on shore, how close did you guys deploy to the front, I mean, did you have people taking supplies up to the front or were they coming back to you? MC: No, you carried the supplies. The only man I lost in my company, I had 160 men in my company, and course I was first sergeant, I laugh about it now. First sergeants do nothing but receive the reports and hand it out, that's his responsibility. But it, there's no background. Iwo Jima's not large enough, very small island, not any larger I would say than what you call Buckhead, so that you're on the front line when you're there. So it is, it was an experience. Int: Did the company you were in, were they all black? MC: All black, yes. The officers were white. That's a whole different story. After the war, after Iwo Jima, we returned to Hawaii for rest and well, what they call R\u0026R. Rest and recreation. That was very good duty. We were stationed on the big island of Hilo, that's the big island of Hawaii, Hawaii itself . . . Honolulu is on Oahu . . . but it's the largest island, primarily sugarcane, pineapple, and bananas. We were assigned a camp for black troops. They had some trouble. Most of the Hawaiian, true Hawaiians, were at that time, back in the ‘40s, were on the big island and living in small cities around Hilo. Hilo was where most of the tourists would come in, that was a city like Honolulu is, but in the camp which is out in the suburbs, that was a Dole pineapple camp and they decided to put us in this camp as black troops, thought we'd get along with the natives better, which we did, it was just like being in Paradise, having been on Iwo Jima, that black sand, with no food, to be able to reach out of your window and pick a ripe banana, you know, for breakfast, eat all the pineapple you want, you know, it was quite well. But even that did not last because after about, I guess about two months after that, everybody said, well, we got the, right after Easter when Iwo Jima was secured, and let's see, the European war was over around August I believe it was of '45. Do I remember my history correct, I'm thinking about how I lived it. I can remember that, I can remember hearing, on that island, that Franklin Roosevelt died down in Warm Springs, that Truman became president and that we were gearing up at that time again to do the maneuvers again for another march. We did not know it at that time what it was going, or where it was going to be, but we were doing about the same thing we had done back in September, and after you've done it once, you did this before, you know what happened. But then in September the first bomb was dropped on Nagasaki [Hiroshima]. We did not know it, only then we had put together that we were getting, preparing to invade Japan. Because we began to do certain things. You would not have the sand beaches, which told us that we were going into a port. So we did some, we were praying for the second bomb, you know, and I still do not blame . . . . Historians now second-guess Truman about that second bomb but I thank him for it because we didn't, so that when they finally surrendered, we actually covered the territory that we were preparing to invade. And we went in the naval base on the southern island of Japan, Sasabo, the naval base in Japan. We actually made the occupation for that section of the island that we were going to, I imagine everybody took what they were supposed to do. But there is where the end, the war ended. I had been in now four years. I'd been overseas, I had rank, and they began to let you out based on the points system. And then December of '45 I had the points, and I applied at that point to be released. And of course I had an opportunity and I knew most of the people who were in charge, and they kept saying, you're going to go back on a nice liberty ship, you're not going to go. And finally I said I'll take anything. It was after Christmas and I told my wife I was coming home and I didn't. And I waited, I waited all of January of '46 and nothing good came through. Finally about the end of January, I said, I'll take whatever it is. And I got an LST, an LST is a flat bottomed ship that can pull up on the beach, and I came back from Japan on an LST. That was a trip that all I wanted was the United States, and I wanted to get back home again, I was ready for the war . . . . I am not a soldier, I would get the orders for the company _______. And the thing that bothered me, and I hear it now, on September, I mean on July 26, 1999, at 0100 you will . . . you know, move to such and such and report to so and so. That bothers me, you know, you have nobody enters into . . . I remember telling Colonel Woods the day I got my orders to report to the company that I had, and that was away. And my wife was there, alone, didn't know anyone there on the base, but I had not had chance enough to get the furniture and get everything moved, you know. And I was just about ready to tell him I'm not going to do it, they're going to have to shoot me or something, I'm not going to leave my wife here, you know, alone. She's never been away from home. But he said, “Sergeant, we're going to tell your wife, we're going to pack the furniture, we're going to see that she gets on a train, see that she gets home, you've got nothing to worry about.” I said, “Colonel, I believe you but I don't believe them other folks out there.” MB: Did, can you describe for me when you landed at Guadalcanal, what you were wearing, what you were carrying, uniform, equipage, head to toe? If you can. MC: Fatigues, I had fatigues, just straight fatigues. MB: Chamois or… MC: What we called the olive green, twill like, like this. It's about this color, maybe like these trousers. It was olive green. You had a helmet, a steel helmet, that was it. We left Norfolk, it was a wonderful trip for a country boy to leave Norfolk go down the Pacific and take about three or four days through the Panama Canal. Didn't even feel like it was cold, it was in October, and once you got down to Hilton Head, the sun was out, you pull off your clothes and lay on the beach on a nice new USS named after a county in New York, see they were having these liberty ships. And we just thought we were going to heaven, you know what I mean. And then load up in Panama, we had to wait because the ships went through the canal based on priority, and I guess our priority wasn't high enough. So we just sit there and you'd go on liberty one day and every other day you'd go on liberty and see the nice girls out there, I guess we had more money because we didn't have anything to do with the money we had, we were going overseas. But it was wonderful, and to experience the Panama Canal. That I really appreciated. It was only when we got to the west coast and we joined then the armada with the battleships, the destroyers, the other troop ships, and we went from Northern Japan because we went in the water then, no smoking at night, you know, no lights on the deck, always with your gear if you were on the topside. You could never go topside with the, not full gear and prepared to evacuate because you never knew when you were going to be struck with a torpedo or something. MB: Were you carrying weapons at Iwo Jima or were you wearing a sidearm? MC: I wore a sidearm, which didn't seem to be accurate enough, a .45. That wasn't enough. I finally took on a carbine which was a rifle and could be accurate up to about 200 yards, and I had fired it so I knew I could do it, and I wanted to be able to shoot. A .45 is alright for hand to hand combat, when you're close up on you, but you could miss, I could miss you firing if I wasn't very careful, this distance, with a .45. But carbines or something like that, but most troops carried that. The first sergeant was required with a sidearm. That looks good in the states, you want something maybe more effective. MB: Were the rest of the men in your company also carrying carbines? MC: All of them. You were issued a carbine in boot camp, that was yours. That was your baby, you kept it, you never let a piece of rust show on it, and you carried it with you. And the only time you could _____ that was when it wouldn't fire. MB: Everybody tells stories about the famous Marine Kbar knife, did you guys carry those Kbars? MC: No, no. We did not. See really and truly most of the weapons where Marines had been fighting hand to hand in World War II, they began to change. We began to see a change for that because that was a different kind of war, you began to go like down in the Pacific, you remember Haiti and all of that, well the Marines, the “halls of Montezuma” you know down in Mexico, all of that stuff, that was when they had the hand to hand combat. We did, when I first went in, jujitsu and all of that was in for hand to hand combat. But increasingly the Pacific did away from that, Japanese say they'll shoot you down, no hand to hand . . . MB: What kind of food did they give you? MC: Food was always good at installations like camp, good cooks, always. Yeah, I can remember I was telling you about Hilo on the big island of Hawaii there on the top of what is the mountain name, I've forgotten, it looked like Texas, and they have beef cows. We would send up every day and get steaks, steaks that were about that thick and about that big. And I had a mess sergeant who could really cook a steak, you know. And, well, that was it, they'd really be a roast and not a steak. But the food at all the installations is as nice as, I was reading either this year or last year, about the Marine Corps birthday, there's always a good meal. And I was thinking about it and how wonderful it was, but now in combat, you're going to have K rations, and all K rations taste alike. But Marine Corps, the only outfit I imagine attached to the Navy would be aboard ship because you've got an installation for cooking. MB: As far as your equipment, uniform, anything like that, was there any piece of equipment you thought was really useful, a real good thing to have, or was there stuff that you thought why on earth did they ever issue me this, this is a piece of garbage? MC: Marines always had good equipment, course you didn't put up with a rifle. See you were talking about weaponry. When I went in, we learned to fire the Thompson submachine gun. You see because it was hand to hand, you could move in a group of people. That was the kind of activity the Marine Corps had up until World War II. But in World War II and the type of activity that we had, we began to shift. I did fire, I fired the Thompson sub for, just for qualification. What else did I fire? We had the BAR, it was an automatic weapon, and of course every Marine up until the time I went through boot training had to fire the '03, that's the old rifle that you had to cock, and you had to fire and qualify with it before you got with the new rifle that had the, you know, you could fire, what, eight rounds? And with the, with the . . . MB: The M-1. MC: Right, right. The M-1 was relatively new to World War II, but you had to qualify. I qualified as a sharpshooter. Qualified as a sharpshooter on the BAR and the Thompson sub, and the '45, yeah. MB: Now after you were discharged and you took your GI Bill and you came here to Atlanta, went to school, what did you do after you got out of school? MC: After I finished school? I took all of my GI Bill, what, 48 months, I took every penny. The government does not now owe me anything, and I went four years through college. I really had the plan of being a lawyer. My plans were to finish Morris Brown and I took what they called the pre-law which was heavily history and government. And in the second year I joined my fraternity and one of my assignments as joining that fraternity, this Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, was to identify, you know . . . was to meet a person in the profession I intended to go into. I met a young attorney who had just finished Howard University and he gave me some advice and I kidded him about it. He died a couple of years ago, but I never let him forget it, he gave me a rude awakening. He said to me he wouldn't advise it. I really wanted some support and I asked him why. And he told me, unless you have a family who can buy you a law library and support your office for two years with at least a secretary, if you don't have that, I wouldn't advise you to suffer through law school. And I was angry when I left him, I was foaming, why would he talk to me like, why would he bust my dream. And I went back, but the more I began to think about it, that with my total investment, I had gone to college against my father's advice. His advice was . . .U.S. Steel had saved me, see during the war if you were drafted and you had a job, that company had to promise you a job when you returned. And they had given me that job and I think I worked about three months and finally I said I can't do this, this is too hard. And he said I was crazy, “you're married, you ought to be buying a home. Take the GI Bill and buy you a house,” you see, which is his right, eh, I can't do that. And I guess his wish is, then the last thing he told me and my wife, one more year, she was in junior college, she had been teaching with a certificate for two years college and while overseas I convinced her, you go ahead to college and finish college while you're, I'm overseas, that will give you something to do. Because she's going to go back to teach. “No, I don't want you to teach, you go back and finish college and stay with my daddy.” And she had another year, and he says if you go don't come back here. And I guess he still, I think he still viewed me as a child and I realized I wasn't ever going back and I felt if I went and went through Howard and got a law degree and had to go back home, I would have failed. So I made up my mind, I had changed my major. Well, I couldn't change it because I had a subject. I began to take courses in business administration. I never will forget, I went in a bookkeeping course and I think why am I doing this, I'm almost a junior and I'm going here taking a freshman course but I did. I took as many courses as I could and by that time my advisor said if I was going, I would decide to go the school of business at Atlanta University that I would not have to have, I could still get the courses, but I went through and did my two years for the master's at AU. And the last semester and my thesis, I did not have enough time but my counselor with the Veterans Administration said he wouldn't give me a check which I did not need, I had full time employment there, but he would pay the tuition and give me the supplies, so I was able to finish it, all of it under the GI Bill. Immediately after that, I had been selling home appliances. You couldn't buy refrigerators, washing machines, and all that right after the war and they were just coming. And I was very creative, did quite well, I think I made more money there than I ever did, you know just commission. But in conjunction with that, I had specialized—they didn't have a specialty in the school of business at Atlanta University then—but I leaned towards marketing and that's where my interest was. Well, connected with my selling, I knew every professor on the campus, knew every professional in the city, including Maynard Jackson's father, because I was selling them what they needed. So that, Johnson Publishing Company, at that time, Ebony and Jet, Johnny Johnson had, most of his advertisements in his magazines were cigarettes, beer, and maybe cold drinks, no hard advertising, automobiles and clothing and that kind of thing. And he in his wisdom decided that he wanted to go into that area, and he came looking for someone in Atlanta [to represent the magazines]. And he said everywhere he went and explained what he wanted, even on the campus, they'd tell him, “You need to see Mortimer Cox, he's just your person.” And I did, and I did quite well. I went with Johnson Publishing Company, and I enjoyed the work. It was travel. Johnny Johnson was a peculiar person, had a mind for it. For the first time in my life, you know, I traveled first class, because he said the people you need to meet are never in coach, you know. And I kind of like that. In the best hotels, I would go down and eat in the finest dining rooms, you know, and you would meet people. But it was an exciting thing. I was very instrumental in getting the Chrysler Corporation, advertising cars. Then clothing, Eagle suits, I remember that. And food, you know Chase \u0026 Sanborn Coffee, that kind of thing, just what the marketing gave me, that I would come out. Atlanta would always show, I remember distinctly in '52, Rich's downtown [store], and we ran a half-page ad with Eagle clothes, which was a good line of suits at that time. I wanted to set the same ad up into Rich's store for men on Forsyth Street and the buyer looked at me like “You're crazy, what, put an ad with a black magazine with the Rich's downtown?” Yes, what's wrong with it? I wanted to put my Ebony sign in the store. “Let me think about it.” So I went back and got all my friends and said, “You go to Rich's and ask for this outfit.” Now I knew all of them were not going to buy, but by the time I did it, the guy said he'd never seen an ad generate that kind of activity. And all these guys, they were college professors, businessmen, you know, ministers and that kind of thing, they could afford it. So then he said to me, “I've never had that.” He said “That's unusual and I sold some outfits.” He said, “I've got to do something nice with that ad, I don't know.” I said, “All I want to do is to get that ad, get a photographer and shoot it. And then you do whatever you want.” I didn't say it had to be up there for two weeks. He said, that's all you want, he said he can do that. So he sent the decorator and all, they set the window just like it. I shot it. Eagle has never figured out to this day how they couldn't get it done in New York, Los Angeles or anywhere else but here in Rich's in Atlanta. But they were impressed with that. I would have stayed with him but after I stayed with him almost two years, he wanted me to move to Detroit. I'd been to Detroit because I had a brother there, and Detroit had begun to deteriorate in terms of crime downtown in the city. I just didn't want to go. My wife had begun to teach, she had come over and gotten her masters and she was teaching in the public school system. I was doing quite well myself and I saw no reason. I finally told him, and he did terminate me right on the spot, sent me home. But my concern, he was rich, and as I looked back over, I'm in a position in a career that I could do, I knew I could do it, I knew I could be successful, but Johnson and Johnson had their own little magazine and the publisher couldn't afford me. So I had to make a choice. I can't afford the risk because I had put all my investment into having that kind of life. I left that company. He didn't fire me, he told me if I needed a recommendation, you know, and now that I'm old and I look back, I would have done the same thing. “And I'm going to pay you a good salary and I need to do what's best for the company. If you don't want to take it, I'll let you go.” Now that is just common good sense to me, as I age, of course I was angry at the time because I felt the man did me an injustice. That was the best he had, you know. But I left. On my way—I was in Chicago and he had given me two weeks termination pay and my vacation—and on my way, I bumped into a guy I knew who told me about a company in Owatana who was looking for a guy in sales, and it was Josten, in Owatana, Minnesota, just south of Milwaukee. He called a guy from Chicago, the guy says, “Hey, I'll come to Atlanta and see you.” I came back, he came and within two days I was headed back to Josten to learn their business of selling high school rings and supplies to high school students. I took that job, did well. I made more in that year than I'd ever made because I was, I could sell to schools, I could sell to high school girls. You had to do it on competition, and I was competing with white salesmen in the south. None of them could offer what I was. I was a black professional going into black high schools, and I could make a speech to some high school students that would make a principal of a white school say I was the best thing that had ever been in there, because they did not see black professionals. I was driving a new car, dressed nice, and that was it, so I had the edge on them. They were saying I wasn't a good salesman, you know what they was saying, you're not a good salesman, you've just got the edge on, you're a black salesman. And most of the other companies at that time were getting into looking for black salesmen to do that. Now I could begin to see some ripples. I could begin to see integration coming, and I said if I make this investment and establish it, if the schools integrate and you've still got white superintendents who control the schools, where would I be? Because this has never happened in this country before, so I had to make a decision. I'd better get into something a little bit moving. By this time, my wife was doing alright teaching, you know, working, and I began to say, you know, I'm getting older, I'd better start looking for a career. At this time, I guess, the housing authority was looking for a person, and they wanted a housing manager, and that was a pretty good salary at that time. My wife didn't like to travel either, so I left that job and went with the housing authority. And I guess the old sociology that I had, and I've always had an interest in people, I've always worked in my church, began to make a difference in the housing. I kept saying that these people, even though they're poor, want the same thing that you and I want where we live. They can't do it without a job, and how can they get a job, and I would ____ a guy who couldn't pay his rent. I had developed a plan where employers who were looking, and these were the people who were first line supervisors, I got to know them, and I could pick up the phone, I got this kind of guy, he'll come out and give you a good job, and I'd tell him it was a good job, it's got tenure, you can keep it and take care of your family. So increasingly, first line supervisors began to tell others, “I can get good people who want to work, call Cox out at Bowen Homes and see.” So, increasingly, one day the guy with the Urban League came to me and said, “You know, you're doing what we do anyway, and I can give you a better salary.” So I took it, and I went. So I enjoyed it, it was very rewarding. That's about it. MB: Thank you very much. MC: That's a picture of the first platoon of blacks being trained at Montford Point. MB: Are you in this picture? MC: Uh-huh, I can't find me. MB: You can't find you? MC: No, I've looked and looked. Now you can see the white training officers. These are the first black . . . MB: Now you're wearing? MC: Those pith helmets. Now in this book, yes, this is the first six PFCs who were promoted, the black marines who were promoted at Camp Lejeune. I was the first person, that's Bostick [?], Davis, Hashmon [?] and Johnson. He actually stayed in and upon retirement was a sergeant major. He stayed in. These two stayed in after the war. That's Huff, and that's Allen. [All talking at once.] MC: That's Cox, Bostick, Davis, Johnson, Huff, and Allen. God, I haven't done that in years. It's just deteriorating after 50 some years, and I would hate for that to happen. Fifty-six years ago today, let me tell my wife I did that. MB: So when was this photograph taken? MC: 1943. There's a picture in my dress blues. MB: And what is this rank you've got here? MC: I was a platoon sergeant. My rank, I always acted ahead of my rank, I was acting first sergeant there. They couldn't promote you fast enough. The white troops would get so angry, boy, when I made corporal. See you made corporal, in those dress blues, you would get that blue stripe and that it, that was it. Their prime hope was to make corporal so you got a blue stripe. You came in and in a short time you had it. I remember, it was in '43. My wife and I was waiting a train to Washington, where were we, Raleigh?, and I was out and two Marines came out and said, “You haven't been in service, do you know we'll make you prove that you could wear those chevrons.” You know, that red stripe down there. My wife was standing up there, and they were ready to fight, so all you got to do is just prove it, if you can handle yourself that was it. Boy, I says, “OK, I'll take you one at a time.” One came up, he gave me his best blow, I gave him my best blow, and he went sailing back. I was in good shape. I hit the other one, he went sailing back. Both of them started getting up to come again, you know my wife's standing there, she's scared to death. Two MPs turned the corner, I was never so happy to see two MPs because I'd given my best shot and they were getting up, I guess they'd been in the Marine Corps for 15, 20 years. But “prove that you can wear those stripes.” MB: [looking at photos] Tell us when and where. MC: That's December 1944 in Pearl Harbor, Honolulu. MB: Who is that with you? MC: That is my gunnery sergeant, that's the mess sergeant. McCord. That's McCord, the gunnery sergeant, and that's Sergeant Wingate, the mess sergeant. Good cook, too, good cook. MB: And the other person is you? MC: It's me. MB: And that is in? MC: Hawaii, in Honolulu. MB: Honolulu… MC: Honolulu, 1944. MB: Tell us what this is. MC: That is a diary, and it seemed to me at one of the Marine parties, someone gave me that book, and I said I was going to keep it. I did keep it completely until January of '44, I got married and quit writing in it. I did write one entry upon discharge. But the interesting thing, the interesting thing that I see in that, and I didn't know it at the time, there is no bitterness and that is amazing to me. I interpreted everything that was happening to me without the bitterness. You know, I was frustrated quite often, I could tell every time I was frustrated with troops when they misunderstood because they would usually, during boot camp, they get so angry with you, they swear that “I ever see you, you will not live,” you know. And I know that that didn't happen, because the moment they completed, they are like, what can I give you. All my life I have traveled and I would never—I was in San Francisco one year, and, why was I there? It was a police gathering in a hotel downtown and, unbelievable, this guy came over and started talking, “I know you from somewhere, I know you from somewhere,” and was pleasant. He just kept talking, he had been a Marine. And I don't even remember his name, he remembered just my features and he was pleasant, and we started talking, “How have you been” and all of this and finally he said, “Were you in service?” I said I was in the Marine Corps, and when I said Marine Corps, he said, “Sergeant Cox,” just like that, and he carried me all over the city, introduced me, “This man made a man out of me, you know.” He was either chief of detectives or something like that of San Francisco police. But it's that kind of thing that made such an impact. My brother was, worked at Chrysler in Detroit, and one day a guy said to him, you know, “The only guy I know named Cox was Sergeant Cox in the Marine Corps, if I ever see him, I'm going to kill that SOB.” You know, that kind of thing. My brother didn't say, “That is my brother.” I was visiting one day, and all it was, we were walking somewhere, and he tried to change direction. Pretty soon that guy looked and spotted me and he said, “Sergeant Cox,” hugged me. He [my brother] said, “I don't understand that, you said you were going to kill my brother.” He said, “Man, that's the way you feel, but this man made a man out of me.” And it goes across the board like that, a guy gets through. Because you do, you see a child who is brilliant, bitter, and mean turn out to be a lovely person who can do anything, and we all do, so it makes a difference."],"dc_format":["video/quicktime"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Veterans History Project oral history recordings","Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center"],"dcterms_subject":["Segregation--United States","World War, 1939-1945--Equipment and supplies","World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American","World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American","Iwo Jima, Battle of, Japan, 1945","Guadalcanal, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942-1943","Rifles","M1 carbine","Browning Automatic Pistol","Troup, Robert W., Jr., 1918-1999","Woods, Samuel A., Jr., 1893-1968","Morris Brown College","United States. Marine Corps. Depot Company, 36th","United States. Marine Corps. Defense Battalion, 51st","United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944","Browning Automatic Rifle"],"dcterms_title":["Oral history interview of Mortimer Augustus Cox, tape 1 of 2"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Atlanta History Center"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/318"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)","mini-dv"],"dcterms_extent":["1:00:52"],"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"geh_vhpohr_313","title":"Oral history interview of Mortimer Augustus Cox, tape 2 of 2","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383"],"dcterms_creator":["Brown, Myers; Johnson, Ahnekii","Cox, Mortimer Augustus, 1919-2001"],"dc_date":["1999-07-26"],"dcterms_description":["In part two of this two-part interview, Mortimer Cox describes his post-war years in Atlanta, Georgia, including his education and work experience.","Mortimer Cox was a Marine in the Pacific during World War II.","MORTIMER COX VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW Atlanta History Center July 26, 1999 Interviewer: Myers Brown Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell TAPE 1 of 2 Myers Brown: . . . full name, and date of birth, and place of birth, just some general information now. Mortimer Cox: All right, I'm Mortimer Augustus Cox. Why they named me that, I'll never know. I was born April 15,1919, in Birmingham, Alabama. MB: When did you first move here to the Atlanta area? MC: I moved to Atlanta June of 1946, September of 1946. I had decided to use my GI Bill for college education. It's interesting how I selected—everybody asks me why did you select Atlanta and why did you select Morris Brown College as school. I'm a son of a coal miner in the steel mills of Birmingham. Returning from the war and my experience in the Marine Corps said to me that—while my parents could not afford me the privilege of college, I graduated from high school in 1937. Knowing that I had the opportunity to utilize the GI Bill of Rights, I decided I would do that. I didn't see a future in the steel mill. On the basis of my experience in the Marine Corps, I wrote every black, historically black college in this country in a large city. I was concerned that I needed a large city in order to supplement my income because I was married at that time. Most of them in '46 was overfilled with the returning World War II veterans and I began to get , “We're full.” Finally I received a letter from Morris Brown in Atlanta, Georgia, and they said they had an opening and they would accept me. They wanted a $5 deposit on my room, incidentally. And I could afford that, so I took that. That's why I chose Atlanta. MB: When did you first hear of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's involvement? Do you know where you were when that happened? MC: Exactly. I'll never forget it. I was at a Sunday afternoon tea, that was what we had in my community, teas on Sunday. They were church related activities, and of course you would always go and do such exciting things as dance, maybe, but spin the bottle and kiss the girl, yes!, and we would always attend those. That was late Sunday afternoon that year, and we were there, and someone happened to turn on the radio, and we heard it on the radio, and the President was speaking, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and, of course, all of us had registered for the draft, but we were just waiting on our number to go up. All of the teenage boys were there, and the girls, and we listened for the rest of the afternoon. I don't think we spinned the bottle at all that day because we were concerned. But I can remember, I can remember the house, and quite often, if I'm in Birmingham, I'll drive past. And the lady's name was Mrs. Pittman, and as I said there's where I was December 7, 1941. But it's very clear in my mind because it changed my life. Int: When did you get drafted or enlisted? MC: In 1942, I began to think seriously, and the draft was on all young men. And, of course, I was thinking I did not want the Army because blacks were limited in the Army. I had a brother who had volunteered several years earlier and what he was doing did not impress me. Of course, the travel was always intriguing, but just the activity did not impress me. The Navy from what I had seen, I had seen blacks who were in uniform but most of them were either butlers or waited tables aboard ship. That did not appeal to me. There was a paper which was printed, a black newspaper, the Birmingham Daily World, it was a branch of the Atlanta Daily World. It was printed in Atlanta but it was primarily news about blacks in there. I saw the announcement that the Marine Corps was accepting blacks, and of course I thought this was a challenge. I realized they didn't have the kind of segregation that existed in the other major services. So I thought I would go down just to get some more information, and I went to the post office, and I found myself taking the test, and I passed the test and I was sworn in that day. I guess if I'd had to think about it, I don't know what I would have done, but when I found myself being given the oath of office and then told I was a Marine, and I was no longer subject to the draft, that of course gave me some relief. Now I did not immediately go in. I didn't know why. I went back home and from, that was June, I guess about June 12, I believe it was, and I went back home. All my friends were being drafted and were going in the service. I was home, I had heard nothing from the Marine Corps at all, and it was only in late August of '42 I received my orders. “You will report to Camp Montford Point, New River, North Carolina,” on such and such a date with a ticket aboard the train to North Carolina, and that was the first [notice] I had. When I got there, there were very few blacks. I believe I only saw about five or six blacks. That was September 1. And, of course, over the next several days they were bringing more in, so I ended up being in what we call the First Platoon of blacks, the first 40 men who began training. I was in that outfit and I began, I found myself in boot camp at that time becoming a Marine. It was very traumatic. We had a situation where there were no blacks to provide the initial training so these were all whites who were to give us the boot training, and if you know anything about what boot training incurred, it was traumatic. Those of us from the south did not have as much of a culture shock as those young men who were coming out of Chicago, out of New York, and out of the Midwest, who came and found themselves in Washington, D.C., and they'd have to move in the back of the train, so they came onboard in the camp angry. . . . Interestingly enough, most of that group of 40 men had some college, some were graduates out of college. It was a ______, why I don't know, maybe they were the ones who could pass the initial test, but they were angry and very, very hostile, so it was [difficult], because that special service group that was assigned to give us our training did it with the enthusiasm that I guess the Marines have had for 200 years prior to that, so it was an experience. It was hard to differentiate what was racial and what was required of training. The rigors of training is to get you to think as a group, so those of us who had never been into it, I had never been to a camp. Years later as I got older and began to broaden my experience, I could see that in day camp. Youngsters are taught to think as a group and be responsible for the group, so I could understand it. But I had never had that experience, and I suppose most of the youngsters who were there had not had that kind of experience so we did not know what was racial and what was training, so it was very, very difficult. Int: Did you all talk about it? MC: Very traumatic. Int: Did the southerners talk to the northerners? MC: Uh-huh. We almost took a kind of attitude that we were responsible for the group. So first of all, we felt a closeness to those black leaders who were pushing for equal opportunity for blacks, like A. Phillip Randolph and the guy who was head of the National Urban League and NAACP, who were actually talking to the President looking for opportunities for young people in service. And we felt obligations, especially those from the south. You had youngsters out of Talladega, in Talladega, Alabama, Alabama A\u0026M in Montgomery, Morehouse College and Clark [Atlanta University] here, so those educated blacks began to take an attitude that we can't let the race down. They don't want us in the Marine Corps, but we cannot fail. If we fail it will be because they just made the decision, not that we could not do it. So we began to form what we did not know were support groups at night. We would rehash those traumatic experiences that an individual had had and try to put it in perspective. And looking back during the earlier years when students began to integrate white institutions, that was one thing that I tried to get our organization, the Montford Point Marines, that's a national group of black Marines, to form those kinds of groups in the black community, to get young people to realize and see the big picture, as we would always say. You know, do your task and do it well. But it never really happened. But it was very difficult to go through that training and keep everybody concerned. MB: Now how old were you when you went to . . . MC: I tell you, I had been out of high school since 1937, so I was what, '42, 18, I was 23. MB: Were you older or younger or about the same age as most? MC: About the same age. As soon as the Marine Corps had to accept, later on in '43, the Marine Corps had to accept selective service, which was a body of men that selective service, a local selective service [office] would refer to the service, and they would be assigned out. When they began to get that kind of person, you began to get younger, more hostile blacks who didn't understand, didn't want to be in the war anyway, but they realized they had to. But that was my age. Jacksonville [North Carolina] was an experience. It was a small town that depended on the Marine barracks for its existence. But they didn't take kindly to black Marines, and the black Marines were really the ones closest to them. The Marine barracks was farther out across the railroad tracks so they viewed us as outsiders, and they felt we weren't going to be there long. I guess maybe it was assumed that “This is a trial and if they fail, it will close.” So that was our first impression. But it was, truly there were some experiences that even I remember. And being raised all my life in the south other than just going to New York or Washington to visit relatives or something, it was traumatic to me. Because there was always—in Birmingham where I was born and reared, there was always even downtown, theaters and cafés, you had all of your social organizations and your churches and school groups. But here in Jacksonville, it was a country town with very few blacks and no “black society” so it was traumatic. The bus drivers had never had to adjust to black troops. And if we wanted—the closest liberty places were either in Wilmington, New Bern or Lamar, where they had black populations, so most was ready to take a bus. But the bus drivers would always enforce segregation. You had to be in the back seat. So you formed two lines, which was unusual, you know, hard to accept because I had on the uniform just like you. But usually about four or five blacks would get on the back seat and he would fill up the bus with the white troops. So that got to be a problem, especially with those of us who were then moved up where we began to replace the special service troops and we were becoming NCO's ourselves. We had to deal with the fact that here's a youngster on leave, then he comes back AWOL and it's not his fault, because we had experienced first hand that you just couldn't get the bus. You know when only five of you can get out on that bus, you know what I mean, so they were more likely to be absent without leave. So, we increasingly began to press the commanding officer. Now it's to his credit that the person who was selected as commanding officer, Colonel Samuel Woods, accepted the position because he wanted to do it. He actually asked for the assignment, and I've heard him tell me a million times why he had, the name of the group of 51st Defense Battalion, and his pride and joy was that he, how he selected 51st. He said he selected the “5” and the “1” because of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The two persons that appear on the five and one dollar bills were most liked by blacks, and that was how he got it. But he was very, very, very fair and the only thing that really bothered me, as a colonel with the long tenure in the Marine Corps, he could look you in the eye and tell you, I can't control this, and he couldn't. But he would come up with a point with buses, he would assign the troop trucks to go to cities like New Bern and carry them on liberty. So we had our own trucks. Interestingly enough, whites who were running late and missed the last bus would be begging and pleading “let us on your bus,” because we could stay a little later, we didn't have to abide by the bus schedule. And you always assigned noncommissioned officers, so that the MPs which were old Marines that resented the blacks did not have to interface with us. So that they would always say, “Where is your NCO?” and turn them over. “I caught him doing such and such a thing.” And of course we would handle it. But it was interesting enough, I can remember one night, they found me in 1953 [43?], and I just happened to remember that because I can remember when my wife and I got our first house and quit rooming and got an apartment. They built apartments on the base for black non-coms who had a family, so the family's there. When I married, my wife and I had an apartment there. And we were laughing. In December of that year, out in Jacksonville on that coast, it was very cold. The wind is awful. Easily on a cold day you can feel little flakes of ice in the wind. But the deal is when it's cold, coal is limited. They would not let the troops, and we had to buy coal to heat the apartment, would not sell us any coal. Coal would come in and we'd go down to pick up some coal and they'd say, “No, all of this is promised.” So finally we convinced Colonel Woods, the commanding officer, we have a problem. He said what, we told him, and immediately we had a mountain of coal for the steam boiler to do the heating on the base. And he says, “That's our coal. Get you some trucks and back up the pile and get all the coal you need.” So we never bought no more coal, it was that kind of thing. But he was a thoughtful caring person. The camp was not all bad, we had some plusses. There was a young lieutenant who was assigned, he was a radical they said. I guess he was a forerunner of the so-called hippies. Robert Troop, and I had seen some movies, he was out of Hollywood, but he knew all the band leaders, the actors who were black and everything. We had a movie, but by the time we got the movies from the main base, they would be old. He had a contact in Hollywood he could call, and of course they would send movies in. Most of the band leaders then, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, he knew them, and he would have them on the base. One of the most interesting articles, I mean incidents, on the base, is that the commanding officer of the total camp, Camp Lejeune, heard that we had a black boxer who was very good. I can't think of his name, but he was coming to give us an exhibition as the result of Lt. Troop's invitation, and everybody wanted to see it. He wanted to see the bout. He came down, and the guys, like most youngsters, are noisy. And you know how you are at a boxing gig. That bothered that CO and he issued an order for all of the troops to be quiet, and of course we said you're on our turf, you know, and this is for us and you're just a guest here. He had really turned them off because at the time he came over to see the troops, we really trained the troops to be very precise in drilling and to do it exact, and it was a thing of beauty to watch those young fellows drill. And he had, in talking to them, said—he was just returning from the Pacific. And he says, “You know, I'm just back from the Pacific. I've seen women Marines, I've seen dog Marines, and now I see you people.” And I guess he was trying to make a point, I believe in my heart, now that I reflect on it, he was trying to make a point. “Now when I see you people, I know we are at war.” And, of course, the guys are afraid to boo a general, but the next time, he was coming this particular night, and the guys say, he's going to see it by himself, we're not going, and we'll just pass over the camp. And we knew, to Colonel Woods, that was going to put him in a pretty bad light to be a camp commander and be told, the commander of the total camp is coming and none of your troops will be there, so we didn't know what to do. So we decided we would declare what we called a punishment, that you will do a camp cleaning, nobody would say anything. Well, the troops go on punishment and that was going to be our way of doing it. But the colonel came in, he sent for his non-coms then and asked them, fellows, I can't let this, guys got to be there, he's going to know something, you know. But we did relent and the troops did go, but it's that kind of thing that you had openly. Int: Where was your first assignment? MC: My first assignment as I told you, I came in to be assigned to the 51st Defense Battalion. About [1943] when the war had changed, I suppose troops were addressed [?] then. Interestingly enough the whites were gone. They kept the 51st Defense Battalion, but they realized they would have to have a cadre of troops to continue training those blacks who had come in there out of the selective service, so they set up what they called recruit depot training, and Colonel Woods took that camp, and another colonel took over the 51st Defense Battalion, and he asked me if I would be one of those who would stay. He said they like my style, they like my leadership qualities, will you stay. And, of course at that time, I had—it's interesting, the story goes back to the six blacks who made PFCs. That was the first time in the history of the Marine Corps blacks ever made it. I was one of those. And I had, by this time I think I was a buck sergeant. They had to pull the whites out and they had to put us on fast track for promotion, so we were about every three months getting a promotion, and that's unheard of in the Marine Corps. But he had asked me to stay and to serve as first sergeant of “A” company, which was the first recruit training company we were going to have, and, of course, that's when I decided to get married. I says, I'm going to be here, and he told me all about the plans for apartments, and “you'll be here for the rest of the war just training troops.” Gee, that was nice. So I accepted. It was at that point that I began to get over ___. But in 1944, the commanding officer of Camp Lejeune then returned from the Pacific to do duty back in the states, he had been out long enough, and he came over, and he had seen black troops overseas. But always under the supervision of white non-coms, and he came over and saw first sergeant, black sergeant, he was amazed. He had been on Saipan incidentally, the first activity of blacks in the Pacific, but the Japanese, they didn't know that the troops had been trained. They thought all they could do was handle supplies, but when the troops came through, they laid down, grabbed weapons and began to stop the Japanese. And, of course, at that point, there was an article in Time magazine, it was right after, it was a sailor aboard the ship who grabbed the gun and actually to, began to do like at Pearl Harbor, and all of that came back, so it began to take an attitude. His feeling was the troops would be better off, he looked around and saw a whole cadre of black non-coms that he didn't know existed. So he then said that he was going to begin to send black non-coms out. That must have been midsummer '44. And with my seniority and my connections with Colonel Woods, I would always miss it, [they'd take] somebody else, and finally Colonel Woods said, “Sergeant, they're going to get you, you're going to have to go, you've got to be selective.” And, of course, there was a company with a friend of his who was going over with the 36th, and he wanted me, and Colonel Woods wanted me to go because he felt that he could do a good deed through a friend of his. And of course I had to go, and that was traumatic, but I went and got in Pearl Harbor December 15, five days before Christmas, lonely, mad, and deserted, and not knowing what I was going to do. But it was Pearl Harbor and Honolulu at Christmas time, I guess it was nice. But we did, and of course, the rest is history, because in '44 we began doing immediately maneuvers and training immediately after Christmas and that led right up to February of '44 or '45 then isn't it?, yeah, '45. MB: Now which unit were you assigned to when you went to Pearl Harbor? MC: We were assigned with a unit of what they call a depot company, a battalion I guess it was, something new for the Marine Corps, which handled all the supplies. See, the Marine Corps prior to that had had encounters in which it would go ashore and was able to supply itself [by] scrimmages. But for the first time, the Marine Corps found itself out at Saipan which would need reinforcements, medical personnel, would be the only thing the same as the Army, because they were fighting the war just like an Army, but it was not equipped to handle that, so they began to come up with depot companies with full detail, armaments, you know, armaments and the whole ammunition supply. We had to supply all the troops as you went, remember, because they could only carry so much during initial action. So we were assigned to one of those companies, and we began to maneuver loading and reloading. We wore out the equipment during January and the first of February prior to Iwo Jima just training, so that by the time we got to Iwo Jima, we were just like the Army going aboard with the artillery, coming on in phases with the supplies, and that's what the company and I did. We handled more ammunition, we handled clothing, water, and all the wonderful brandy that they gave you, and that's another whole story, but that was nice. MB: But you were there training until February, and then in February? MC: Yes, we actually went to Iwo Jima and was there when the flag, every time you see that flag, it brought on a different kind of meaning, because I had no idea, I had . . . [TAPE changed] . . . I had nothing to compare it with. I thought it was difficult but I just thought that was war and it was only on reflection that it really, really . . . and the deaths, I had never seen that much death before in my life, and that of course bothered me, and I was certain that I was not going to get off. But— MB: When did you actually go ashore on Iwo Jima? Did ya'll go? MC: Yes. We went, it went by D-plus D-Day, D-Day is D and the day after is D-1. We went D-5 and that was because you just couldn't get ashore because everything just logged up and the what it was about D-5 when you actually see the flag raising on Iwo Jima, which the Japanese could actually pinpoint any island. They could look and see a group of men, they'd know exactly how to set their weapons and hit it, so that just naturally tied the troops up on the beaches, and you couldn't until . . . that's the importance of Mount Suribache and the flag raising. So, yes, when you saw the flag up, you knew that they had conquered the island where they could actually, it's a mountain, it's a top of the mountain, and they had pinpointed and all of our control so that once they put the flag up, that was a symbol to the troops that that was secure, then you no longer had to fear the being attacked with emplaced guns from their mountain. But we went in and they, we were, there was no place for you to hide with Marine Corps at invasions, whether you're going in D- or D-10, they needed you. But it was nasty black sand, just as black as that chair, and by the first full day with the body parts and the bodies, flies were big and it was a stink that you never would forget. MB: When you were on shore, how close did you guys deploy to the front, I mean, did you have people taking supplies up to the front or were they coming back to you? MC: No, you carried the supplies. The only man I lost in my company, I had 160 men in my company, and course I was first sergeant, I laugh about it now. First sergeants do nothing but receive the reports and hand it out, that's his responsibility. But it, there's no background. Iwo Jima's not large enough, very small island, not any larger I would say than what you call Buckhead, so that you're on the front line when you're there. So it is, it was an experience. Int: Did the company you were in, were they all black? MC: All black, yes. The officers were white. That's a whole different story. After the war, after Iwo Jima, we returned to Hawaii for rest and well, what they call R\u0026R. Rest and recreation. That was very good duty. We were stationed on the big island of Hilo, that's the big island of Hawaii, Hawaii itself . . . Honolulu is on Oahu . . . but it's the largest island, primarily sugarcane, pineapple, and bananas. We were assigned a camp for black troops. They had some trouble. Most of the Hawaiian, true Hawaiians, were at that time, back in the ‘40s, were on the big island and living in small cities around Hilo. Hilo was where most of the tourists would come in, that was a city like Honolulu is, but in the camp which is out in the suburbs, that was a Dole pineapple camp and they decided to put us in this camp as black troops, thought we'd get along with the natives better, which we did, it was just like being in Paradise, having been on Iwo Jima, that black sand, with no food, to be able to reach out of your window and pick a ripe banana, you know, for breakfast, eat all the pineapple you want, you know, it was quite well. But even that did not last because after about, I guess about two months after that, everybody said, well, we got the, right after Easter when Iwo Jima was secured, and let's see, the European war was over around August I believe it was of '45. Do I remember my history correct, I'm thinking about how I lived it. I can remember that, I can remember hearing, on that island, that Franklin Roosevelt died down in Warm Springs, that Truman became president and that we were gearing up at that time again to do the maneuvers again for another march. We did not know it at that time what it was going, or where it was going to be, but we were doing about the same thing we had done back in September, and after you've done it once, you did this before, you know what happened. But then in September the first bomb was dropped on Nagasaki [Hiroshima]. We did not know it, only then we had put together that we were getting, preparing to invade Japan. Because we began to do certain things. You would not have the sand beaches, which told us that we were going into a port. So we did some, we were praying for the second bomb, you know, and I still do not blame . . . . Historians now second-guess Truman about that second bomb but I thank him for it because we didn't, so that when they finally surrendered, we actually covered the territory that we were preparing to invade. And we went in the naval base on the southern island of Japan, Sasabo, the naval base in Japan. We actually made the occupation for that section of the island that we were going to, I imagine everybody took what they were supposed to do. But there is where the end, the war ended. I had been in now four years. I'd been overseas, I had rank, and they began to let you out based on the points system. And then December of '45 I had the points, and I applied at that point to be released. And of course I had an opportunity and I knew most of the people who were in charge, and they kept saying, you're going to go back on a nice liberty ship, you're not going to go. And finally I said I'll take anything. It was after Christmas and I told my wife I was coming home and I didn't. And I waited, I waited all of January of '46 and nothing good came through. Finally about the end of January, I said, I'll take whatever it is. And I got an LST, an LST is a flat bottomed ship that can pull up on the beach, and I came back from Japan on an LST. That was a trip that all I wanted was the United States, and I wanted to get back home again, I was ready for the war . . . . I am not a soldier, I would get the orders for the company _______. And the thing that bothered me, and I hear it now, on September, I mean on July 26, 1999, at 0100 you will . . . you know, move to such and such and report to so and so. That bothers me, you know, you have nobody enters into . . . I remember telling Colonel Woods the day I got my orders to report to the company that I had, and that was away. And my wife was there, alone, didn't know anyone there on the base, but I had not had chance enough to get the furniture and get everything moved, you know. And I was just about ready to tell him I'm not going to do it, they're going to have to shoot me or something, I'm not going to leave my wife here, you know, alone. She's never been away from home. But he said, “Sergeant, we're going to tell your wife, we're going to pack the furniture, we're going to see that she gets on a train, see that she gets home, you've got nothing to worry about.” I said, “Colonel, I believe you but I don't believe them other folks out there.” MB: Did, can you describe for me when you landed at Guadalcanal, what you were wearing, what you were carrying, uniform, equipage, head to toe? If you can. MC: Fatigues, I had fatigues, just straight fatigues. MB: Chamois or… MC: What we called the olive green, twill like, like this. It's about this color, maybe like these trousers. It was olive green. You had a helmet, a steel helmet, that was it. We left Norfolk, it was a wonderful trip for a country boy to leave Norfolk go down the Pacific and take about three or four days through the Panama Canal. Didn't even feel like it was cold, it was in October, and once you got down to Hilton Head, the sun was out, you pull off your clothes and lay on the beach on a nice new USS named after a county in New York, see they were having these liberty ships. And we just thought we were going to heaven, you know what I mean. And then load up in Panama, we had to wait because the ships went through the canal based on priority, and I guess our priority wasn't high enough. So we just sit there and you'd go on liberty one day and every other day you'd go on liberty and see the nice girls out there, I guess we had more money because we didn't have anything to do with the money we had, we were going overseas. But it was wonderful, and to experience the Panama Canal. That I really appreciated. It was only when we got to the west coast and we joined then the armada with the battleships, the destroyers, the other troop ships, and we went from Northern Japan because we went in the water then, no smoking at night, you know, no lights on the deck, always with your gear if you were on the topside. You could never go topside with the, not full gear and prepared to evacuate because you never knew when you were going to be struck with a torpedo or something. MB: Were you carrying weapons at Iwo Jima or were you wearing a sidearm? MC: I wore a sidearm, which didn't seem to be accurate enough, a .45. That wasn't enough. I finally took on a carbine which was a rifle and could be accurate up to about 200 yards, and I had fired it so I knew I could do it, and I wanted to be able to shoot. A .45 is alright for hand to hand combat, when you're close up on you, but you could miss, I could miss you firing if I wasn't very careful, this distance, with a .45. But carbines or something like that, but most troops carried that. The first sergeant was required with a sidearm. That looks good in the states, you want something maybe more effective. MB: Were the rest of the men in your company also carrying carbines? MC: All of them. You were issued a carbine in boot camp, that was yours. That was your baby, you kept it, you never let a piece of rust show on it, and you carried it with you. And the only time you could _____ that was when it wouldn't fire. MB: Everybody tells stories about the famous Marine Kbar knife, did you guys carry those Kbars? MC: No, no. We did not. See really and truly most of the weapons where Marines had been fighting hand to hand in World War II, they began to change. We began to see a change for that because that was a different kind of war, you began to go like down in the Pacific, you remember Haiti and all of that, well the Marines, the “halls of Montezuma” you know down in Mexico, all of that stuff, that was when they had the hand to hand combat. We did, when I first went in, jujitsu and all of that was in for hand to hand combat. But increasingly the Pacific did away from that, Japanese say they'll shoot you down, no hand to hand . . . MB: What kind of food did they give you? MC: Food was always good at installations like camp, good cooks, always. Yeah, I can remember I was telling you about Hilo on the big island of Hawaii there on the top of what is the mountain name, I've forgotten, it looked like Texas, and they have beef cows. We would send up every day and get steaks, steaks that were about that thick and about that big. And I had a mess sergeant who could really cook a steak, you know. And, well, that was it, they'd really be a roast and not a steak. But the food at all the installations is as nice as, I was reading either this year or last year, about the Marine Corps birthday, there's always a good meal. And I was thinking about it and how wonderful it was, but now in combat, you're going to have K rations, and all K rations taste alike. But Marine Corps, the only outfit I imagine attached to the Navy would be aboard ship because you've got an installation for cooking. MB: As far as your equipment, uniform, anything like that, was there any piece of equipment you thought was really useful, a real good thing to have, or was there stuff that you thought why on earth did they ever issue me this, this is a piece of garbage? MC: Marines always had good equipment, course you didn't put up with a rifle. See you were talking about weaponry. When I went in, we learned to fire the Thompson submachine gun. You see because it was hand to hand, you could move in a group of people. That was the kind of activity the Marine Corps had up until World War II. But in World War II and the type of activity that we had, we began to shift. I did fire, I fired the Thompson sub for, just for qualification. What else did I fire? We had the BAR, it was an automatic weapon, and of course every Marine up until the time I went through boot training had to fire the '03, that's the old rifle that you had to cock, and you had to fire and qualify with it before you got with the new rifle that had the, you know, you could fire, what, eight rounds? And with the, with the . . . MB: The M-1. MC: Right, right. The M-1 was relatively new to World War II, but you had to qualify. I qualified as a sharpshooter. Qualified as a sharpshooter on the BAR and the Thompson sub, and the '45, yeah. MB: Now after you were discharged and you took your GI Bill and you came here to Atlanta, went to school, what did you do after you got out of school? MC: After I finished school? I took all of my GI Bill, what, 48 months, I took every penny. The government does not now owe me anything, and I went four years through college. I really had the plan of being a lawyer. My plans were to finish Morris Brown and I took what they called the pre-law which was heavily history and government. And in the second year I joined my fraternity and one of my assignments as joining that fraternity, this Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, was to identify, you know . . . was to meet a person in the profession I intended to go into. I met a young attorney who had just finished Howard University and he gave me some advice and I kidded him about it. He died a couple of years ago, but I never let him forget it, he gave me a rude awakening. He said to me he wouldn't advise it. I really wanted some support and I asked him why. And he told me, unless you have a family who can buy you a law library and support your office for two years with at least a secretary, if you don't have that, I wouldn't advise you to suffer through law school. And I was angry when I left him, I was foaming, why would he talk to me like, why would he bust my dream. And I went back, but the more I began to think about it, that with my total investment, I had gone to college against my father's advice. His advice was . . .U.S. Steel had saved me, see during the war if you were drafted and you had a job, that company had to promise you a job when you returned. And they had given me that job and I think I worked about three months and finally I said I can't do this, this is too hard. And he said I was crazy, “you're married, you ought to be buying a home. Take the GI Bill and buy you a house,” you see, which is his right, eh, I can't do that. And I guess his wish is, then the last thing he told me and my wife, one more year, she was in junior college, she had been teaching with a certificate for two years college and while overseas I convinced her, you go ahead to college and finish college while you're, I'm overseas, that will give you something to do. Because she's going to go back to teach. “No, I don't want you to teach, you go back and finish college and stay with my daddy.” And she had another year, and he says if you go don't come back here. And I guess he still, I think he still viewed me as a child and I realized I wasn't ever going back and I felt if I went and went through Howard and got a law degree and had to go back home, I would have failed. So I made up my mind, I had changed my major. Well, I couldn't change it because I had a subject. I began to take courses in business administration. I never will forget, I went in a bookkeeping course and I think why am I doing this, I'm almost a junior and I'm going here taking a freshman course but I did. I took as many courses as I could and by that time my advisor said if I was going, I would decide to go the school of business at Atlanta University that I would not have to have, I could still get the courses, but I went through and did my two years for the master's at AU. And the last semester and my thesis, I did not have enough time but my counselor with the Veterans Administration said he wouldn't give me a check which I did not need, I had full time employment there, but he would pay the tuition and give me the supplies, so I was able to finish it, all of it under the GI Bill. Immediately after that, I had been selling home appliances. You couldn't buy refrigerators, washing machines, and all that right after the war and they were just coming. And I was very creative, did quite well, I think I made more money there than I ever did, you know just commission. But in conjunction with that, I had specialized—they didn't have a specialty in the school of business at Atlanta University then—but I leaned towards marketing and that's where my interest was. Well, connected with my selling, I knew every professor on the campus, knew every professional in the city, including Maynard Jackson's father, because I was selling them what they needed. So that, Johnson Publishing Company, at that time, Ebony and Jet, Johnny Johnson had, most of his advertisements in his magazines were cigarettes, beer, and maybe cold drinks, no hard advertising, automobiles and clothing and that kind of thing. And he in his wisdom decided that he wanted to go into that area, and he came looking for someone in Atlanta [to represent the magazines]. And he said everywhere he went and explained what he wanted, even on the campus, they'd tell him, “You need to see Mortimer Cox, he's just your person.” And I did, and I did quite well. I went with Johnson Publishing Company, and I enjoyed the work. It was travel. Johnny Johnson was a peculiar person, had a mind for it. For the first time in my life, you know, I traveled first class, because he said the people you need to meet are never in coach, you know. And I kind of like that. In the best hotels, I would go down and eat in the finest dining rooms, you know, and you would meet people. But it was an exciting thing. I was very instrumental in getting the Chrysler Corporation, advertising cars. Then clothing, Eagle suits, I remember that. And food, you know Chase \u0026 Sanborn Coffee, that kind of thing, just what the marketing gave me, that I would come out. Atlanta would always show, I remember distinctly in '52, Rich's downtown [store], and we ran a half-page ad with Eagle clothes, which was a good line of suits at that time. I wanted to set the same ad up into Rich's store for men on Forsyth Street and the buyer looked at me like “You're crazy, what, put an ad with a black magazine with the Rich's downtown?” Yes, what's wrong with it? I wanted to put my Ebony sign in the store. “Let me think about it.” So I went back and got all my friends and said, “You go to Rich's and ask for this outfit.” Now I knew all of them were not going to buy, but by the time I did it, the guy said he'd never seen an ad generate that kind of activity. And all these guys, they were college professors, businessmen, you know, ministers and that kind of thing, they could afford it. So then he said to me, “I've never had that.” He said “That's unusual and I sold some outfits.” He said, “I've got to do something nice with that ad, I don't know.” I said, “All I want to do is to get that ad, get a photographer and shoot it. And then you do whatever you want.” I didn't say it had to be up there for two weeks. He said, that's all you want, he said he can do that. So he sent the decorator and all, they set the window just like it. I shot it. Eagle has never figured out to this day how they couldn't get it done in New York, Los Angeles or anywhere else but here in Rich's in Atlanta. But they were impressed with that. I would have stayed with him but after I stayed with him almost two years, he wanted me to move to Detroit. I'd been to Detroit because I had a brother there, and Detroit had begun to deteriorate in terms of crime downtown in the city. I just didn't want to go. My wife had begun to teach, she had come over and gotten her masters and she was teaching in the public school system. I was doing quite well myself and I saw no reason. I finally told him, and he did terminate me right on the spot, sent me home. But my concern, he was rich, and as I looked back over, I'm in a position in a career that I could do, I knew I could do it, I knew I could be successful, but Johnson and Johnson had their own little magazine and the publisher couldn't afford me. So I had to make a choice. I can't afford the risk because I had put all my investment into having that kind of life. I left that company. He didn't fire me, he told me if I needed a recommendation, you know, and now that I'm old and I look back, I would have done the same thing. “And I'm going to pay you a good salary and I need to do what's best for the company. If you don't want to take it, I'll let you go.” Now that is just common good sense to me, as I age, of course I was angry at the time because I felt the man did me an injustice. That was the best he had, you know. But I left. On my way—I was in Chicago and he had given me two weeks termination pay and my vacation—and on my way, I bumped into a guy I knew who told me about a company in Owatana who was looking for a guy in sales, and it was Josten, in Owatana, Minnesota, just south of Milwaukee. He called a guy from Chicago, the guy says, “Hey, I'll come to Atlanta and see you.” I came back, he came and within two days I was headed back to Josten to learn their business of selling high school rings and supplies to high school students. I took that job, did well. I made more in that year than I'd ever made because I was, I could sell to schools, I could sell to high school girls. You had to do it on competition, and I was competing with white salesmen in the south. None of them could offer what I was. I was a black professional going into black high schools, and I could make a speech to some high school students that would make a principal of a white school say I was the best thing that had ever been in there, because they did not see black professionals. I was driving a new car, dressed nice, and that was it, so I had the edge on them. They were saying I wasn't a good salesman, you know what they was saying, you're not a good salesman, you've just got the edge on, you're a black salesman. And most of the other companies at that time were getting into looking for black salesmen to do that. Now I could begin to see some ripples. I could begin to see integration coming, and I said if I make this investment and establish it, if the schools integrate and you've still got white superintendents who control the schools, where would I be? Because this has never happened in this country before, so I had to make a decision. I'd better get into something a little bit moving. By this time, my wife was doing alright teaching, you know, working, and I began to say, you know, I'm getting older, I'd better start looking for a career. At this time, I guess, the housing authority was looking for a person, and they wanted a housing manager, and that was a pretty good salary at that time. My wife didn't like to travel either, so I left that job and went with the housing authority. And I guess the old sociology that I had, and I've always had an interest in people, I've always worked in my church, began to make a difference in the housing. I kept saying that these people, even though they're poor, want the same thing that you and I want where we live. They can't do it without a job, and how can they get a job, and I would ____ a guy who couldn't pay his rent. I had developed a plan where employers who were looking, and these were the people who were first line supervisors, I got to know them, and I could pick up the phone, I got this kind of guy, he'll come out and give you a good job, and I'd tell him it was a good job, it's got tenure, you can keep it and take care of your family. So increasingly, first line supervisors began to tell others, “I can get good people who want to work, call Cox out at Bowen Homes and see.” So, increasingly, one day the guy with the Urban League came to me and said, “You know, you're doing what we do anyway, and I can give you a better salary.” So I took it, and I went. So I enjoyed it, it was very rewarding. That's about it. MB: Thank you very much. MC: That's a picture of the first platoon of blacks being trained at Montford Point. MB: Are you in this picture? MC: Uh-huh, I can't find me. MB: You can't find you? MC: No, I've looked and looked. Now you can see the white training officers. These are the first black . . . MB: Now you're wearing? MC: Those pith helmets. Now in this book, yes, this is the first six PFCs who were promoted, the black marines who were promoted at Camp Lejeune. I was the first person, that's Bostick [?], Davis, Hashmon [?] and Johnson. He actually stayed in and upon retirement was a sergeant major. He stayed in. These two stayed in after the war. That's Huff, and that's Allen. [All talking at once.] MC: That's Cox, Bostick, Davis, Johnson, Huff, and Allen. God, I haven't done that in years. It's just deteriorating after 50 some years, and I would hate for that to happen. Fifty-six years ago today, let me tell my wife I did that. MB: So when was this photograph taken? MC: 1943. There's a picture in my dress blues. MB: And what is this rank you've got here? MC: I was a platoon sergeant. My rank, I always acted ahead of my rank, I was acting first sergeant there. They couldn't promote you fast enough. The white troops would get so angry, boy, when I made corporal. See you made corporal, in those dress blues, you would get that blue stripe and that it, that was it. Their prime hope was to make corporal so you got a blue stripe. You came in and in a short time you had it. I remember, it was in '43. My wife and I was waiting a train to Washington, where were we, Raleigh?, and I was out and two Marines came out and said, “You haven't been in service, do you know we'll make you prove that you could wear those chevrons.” You know, that red stripe down there. My wife was standing up there, and they were ready to fight, so all you got to do is just prove it, if you can handle yourself that was it. Boy, I says, “OK, I'll take you one at a time.” One came up, he gave me his best blow, I gave him my best blow, and he went sailing back. I was in good shape. I hit the other one, he went sailing back. Both of them started getting up to come again, you know my wife's standing there, she's scared to death. Two MPs turned the corner, I was never so happy to see two MPs because I'd given my best shot and they were getting up, I guess they'd been in the Marine Corps for 15, 20 years. But “prove that you can wear those stripes.” MB: [looking at photos] Tell us when and where. MC: That's December 1944 in Pearl Harbor, Honolulu. MB: Who is that with you? MC: That is my gunnery sergeant, that's the mess sergeant. McCord. That's McCord, the gunnery sergeant, and that's Sergeant Wingate, the mess sergeant. Good cook, too, good cook. MB: And the other person is you? MC: It's me. MB: And that is in? MC: Hawaii, in Honolulu. MB: Honolulu… MC: Honolulu, 1944. MB: Tell us what this is. MC: That is a diary, and it seemed to me at one of the Marine parties, someone gave me that book, and I said I was going to keep it. I did keep it completely until January of '44, I got married and quit writing in it. I did write one entry upon discharge. But the interesting thing, the interesting thing that I see in that, and I didn't know it at the time, there is no bitterness and that is amazing to me. I interpreted everything that was happening to me without the bitterness. You know, I was frustrated quite often, I could tell every time I was frustrated with troops when they misunderstood because they would usually, during boot camp, they get so angry with you, they swear that “I ever see you, you will not live,” you know. And I know that that didn't happen, because the moment they completed, they are like, what can I give you. All my life I have traveled and I would never—I was in San Francisco one year, and, why was I there? It was a police gathering in a hotel downtown and, unbelievable, this guy came over and started talking, “I know you from somewhere, I know you from somewhere,” and was pleasant. He just kept talking, he had been a Marine. And I don't even remember his name, he remembered just my features and he was pleasant, and we started talking, “How have you been” and all of this and finally he said, “Were you in service?” I said I was in the Marine Corps, and when I said Marine Corps, he said, “Sergeant Cox,” just like that, and he carried me all over the city, introduced me, “This man made a man out of me, you know.” He was either chief of detectives or something like that of San Francisco police. But it's that kind of thing that made such an impact. My brother was, worked at Chrysler in Detroit, and one day a guy said to him, you know, “The only guy I know named Cox was Sergeant Cox in the Marine Corps, if I ever see him, I'm going to kill that SOB.” You know, that kind of thing. My brother didn't say, “That is my brother.” I was visiting one day, and all it was, we were walking somewhere, and he tried to change direction. Pretty soon that guy looked and spotted me and he said, “Sergeant Cox,” hugged me. He [my brother] said, “I don't understand that, you said you were going to kill my brother.” He said, “Man, that's the way you feel, but this man made a man out of me.” And it goes across the board like that, a guy gets through. Because you do, you see a child who is brilliant, bitter, and mean turn out to be a lovely person who can do anything, and we all do, so it makes a difference."],"dc_format":["video/quicktime"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Veterans History Project oral history recordings","Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center"],"dcterms_subject":["Race relations--Georgia--Atlanta","African Americans--Employment--Georgia--Atlanta","College integration--Georgia--Atlanta","Woods, Samuel A., Jr., 1893-1968","Rich's (Retail store)","United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944","Integration--Georgia--Atlanta"],"dcterms_title":["Oral history interview of Mortimer Augustus Cox, tape 2 of 2"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Atlanta History Center"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/313"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)","mini-dv"],"dcterms_extent":["13:36"],"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"geh_vhpohr_316","title":"Oral history interview of Lorenzo Bell, tape 1 of 2","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["Austria, Vienna, Vienna, 48.20849, 16.37208","Italy, 42.833333, 12.833333","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383","United States, Georgia, Richmond County, Augusta, 33.47097, -81.97484","United States, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County, Philadelphia, 39.95233, -75.16379"],"dcterms_creator":["Brown, Myers; Johnson, Ahnekii","Bell, Lorenzo, 1925-2001"],"dc_date":["1999-07-09"],"dcterms_description":["In part one of this two-part interview, Lorenzo Bell recalls his experiences as a black soldier in Italy and Austria during World War II. He describes his training and life in an artillery unit, and relates experiences as a black soldier in a segregated army.","Lorenzo Bell was a soldier in Italy during World War II.","VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW LORENZO BELL Atlanta History Center – July 9, 1999 Transcribed by Stephanie McKinnell Myers Brown: First of all, would you state your name and today's date, and that'll do it for the first question. Lorenzo Bell: Alright, my name is Lorenzo Bell. The date is July 9, 1999. MB: What was your place of birth and where did you grow up? LB: What was my place of birth and where did I grow up? I was born in Augusta, Georgia. I grew up during my early teen years in Augusta, Georgia. I was later, after my 17th birthday, I migrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. MB: What year were you born? LB: What year I was born? It was 1925. MB: When you moved to Philadelphia, what prompted that move to Philadelphia? Did your family move there, or did you move there by yourself? LB: When I moved to Philadelphia, and what prompted my move to Philadelphia was I wanted to get a good government job. My family did not move there. I was there living with an aunt on my mother's side. MB: What did you do once you moved to Philadelphia? LB: When I was in Philadelphia, what did I do when I was in Philadelphia? First I was 17 years old. I had to go get a working permit from a local school to be able to work. After obtaining the working permit, I got a job working in the shipyard, well the navy yard actually, in Philadelphia. And I worked as a sheet metal mechanic helper. And I worked on the battleship USS Wisconsin, which it took three years to complete. MB: Was that the only ship you worked on, did you just focus on working on that one? LB: Yeah, the only ship we worked on and what we focused on was mostly the USS Wisconsin. MB: Were there other African-Americans that were working on the same project with you? LB: Sure, there was a quite a few. MB: As you were doing the work there at the shipyard, were the, was there must interaction between the blacks and the whites working on the ships, or did everybody kind of stay to themselves, how did that work? LB: Well, what I actually was going on while I was working the shipyard, everybody had to mingle. Everybody had a job to do, and they had a supervisor who would come around in the morning and would tell them what the blueprints, what had to be done. There was no controversy. Most time that was spent, that I spent was going checking out tools. And after checking out tools, I would come back to the job and would assist the mechanic. MB: What year did you start working in the shipyard? LB: I started working in the shipyard in 1944, no, let me see, I started working in the shipyard in 1943, it was September of 1943. MB: When was your birthday, when did you turn 18? LB: I turned 18, well, when did I turn 18? It was that November 8, 1944. I turned 18 in Philadelphia. But because my friends were going in the service, I moved my age up, instead of November 8, I moved to October 16 in order to get in the service, and then I was drafted earlier. MB: What day did you actually get drafted, when did you… LB: In January, I don't know what year did I actually get, I believe I got drafted in January of '44. But I was set on the a three-week leave to get business and everything straightened out, so I had to return to service on the 17th of February, 1944. MB: And you wanted to do the war? LB: Sure I wanted to go into the, did I want to get into the war, sure I wanted to go. Because all the boys at that time were leaving, they wanted to go into the service. Matter of fact, I asked for the navy because I had been working on the ships, and what they gave me?, army. MB: And how did you get drafted, because I would think working in the shipyard would have been a protected war industry? LB: How did I get drafted, because I'm a nonessential worker. Only essential workers were deferred, given a draft status. Or if I had been 4F, that's what they classified that wasn't qualified physically to go into the service. MB: Once you were drafted, you went through those number of weeks where you had to get everything in order. Where were you sent for your basic training? LB: My basic, well it was, sent me for my basic training, I was sent to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. Yeah it has always been our fort. And we did about 6-8 weeks of basic training. MB: What basic training, and you actually got into some wartime experiences, when you look back did you think your basic training had you prepared you for that? LB: When I look back to see whether my basic training prepared us, yeah we were well prepared because most of the recruits at that time were just out of high school, and they were mostly boys from the, from the east coast. We were fairly small because they selected us for a field artillery, and at that time you didn't have any blacks in the field artillery. It was considered as a high branch of service. The only thing that the blacks was selected to go in the most was quartermasters or a trucking outfit or some rear echelon duties. So we were considered privileged. In taking basic training, there was another white outfit called the 16th field artillery. We were called the 16th separate field artillery. So that was a disparity among the two groups. MB: Were the drill instructors, were they white or black? LB: Our drill instructors were white at basic training, yeah our drill instructors, they were white. MB: Did you want to go into the war even though you knew you might be doing trucking or quartermaster? LB: Did I want to go into war? MB: Even though you knew you might be doing a lower type of job? LB: Did I want to go in the war knowing that I might take a lower type of job? Sure, I wanted to go into the war because we felt that was a privilege, and we took pride in serving our country because the black press had been pleading, why couldn't we, we was Americans, why couldn't we take part in the war. They had papers such as the Pittsburg Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, they were all _____ why the Negro couldn't fight, it was his country as much as anybody else's. MB: Right. So when did you actually get your assignment to the field artillery? Did that happen as you went in? LB: I actually got my assignment to the field artillery when we passed basic training, we were shipped to Ft. Wachucka, Arizona while we was assigned to the 92nd Buffalo Division. And this Buffalo Division was the forerunner of the cavalry during the Indians, during the wars with the Indians and their troops were Buffalo soldiers helped in the struggle then, so we was the forerunner, it was the forerunner of our outfit. MB: Give us your full regiment, company, battalion, division, give us the whole nomenclature all the way up the chain. LB: All right, you want the whole nomenclature of my outfit. OK, we went to the Ft. Wachucka, AZ, we was assigned to the 92nd Division. The division consists of infantrymens, artillery mens, medics, and you have certain breakdowns, which I have a book that will break it all down to you. But in my outfit, we had, the five we had in the artillery, that was four battalions: 597, 598, 599, and 600. OK, the 597 and 598 battalions, they were, had the 105mm howitzer. The 598 and 600 had the 155mm howitzers. And each battalion had a ____ that was in charge, and each battalion had four companies: Co A, Co B, Co C, and Co D. I don't exactly know how many men at that time consisted of, but I'd say around 10 men to a company. MB: Which company were you in? LB: I was in B company. MB: Of the? LB: 598, which company was I in, Co B, 597 field artillery, 92nd Division. MB: When were you first deployed outside of the United States? LB: Well, we left, we were first deployed outside of the United States when we went to Italy. I believe it was in September of '44. We went in from ____, Italy. We went immediately to a camping area, and we stayed there for about a week, living in what we call shelter halves. Each man had a half of a tent, and boy did it rain in Italy during that time. It seemed like the monsoon season hit Italy when we was there. Then we got assigned, so each artillery had to support an infantry battalion or regiment rather, and that was their job. We stayed in the rear echelon somewhat between 6 and 7 miles behind the infantry. And our job was to supply the infantry or whoever with fire when it was needed. They would call down a fire mission and say battery B 20 rounds charge 5 side wheel ___ 5 command. Each shell has 7 charges, powder bags. Alright, you had a gun, you had a man that opened the breech, and you had a man that was put the shells together, put the shells and drop the charges in, and pass it along and slid in the breech, and you had a man to close the breech. Then a man would pull the lanyard cord to fire the gun. My job, I was a gunner. So therefore, when a command came down, battery B elevate 15 degrees or depress 20 degrees right so many degrees or left so many degrees. My job was to get on that gun straddle the leg and look through the sites which was somewhat centered to a surveillance pole which have red lights facing and we would aim on it. The enemy couldn't see the light but we could see the light because we were facing it. And line off of that particular sight which we were going to depress or elevate so many degrees. And then after we got that, we commenced firing whenever the order came down. COUNTER 182 But each charge would determine how far the shell was going. If you put five shells that means that we're going to shoot five miles. Seven shells was the maximum. If you wanted to shoot seven miles. Mission would come down, like if the infantry sent out a patrol and they got caught, they wanted a smoke screen. So they had to bail them out. We _____ the fire. If a convoy, enemy convoy came on, they said if we see an enemy convoy because we had a man up in the observation, up near the front line, that would call down for a fire mission on the convoy. After we completed the mission, the call would come down, mission competed. MB: The infantry unit you were supporting was an all black unit as well? LB: An all black unit, because we were, the unit we supported, it was an all black unit. But there were times we went along with the Japanese division, yeah the Nissei division, the 442nd. It was one of the most, it was actually a sacrificial lamb. More Nissei's that any other soldier got purple hearts than any other soldiers during World War II. They was fierce fighters. We were assigned tot he 5th Army, General Mark Clark's army. And also was assigned to us the 750th tank battalion, we were with them also. They had an _____ which the aircraft were flown on the aircraft, and we was assigned with that outfit. But the Germans, we were fighting the Germans, but the Germans had what they ____, and I remember they were screaming ammunition. The Germans what they would do is paint a bullet with the red cross and they had their guns on half tracks. They would load our guns from the side of a building and fire on us and load them back and we couldn't tell where the muzzle blast was coming from. But we couldn't fire on them unless we got instructions from Washington or the command headquarters because we was thinking that they was a hospital. That's the kind of tactics they were using on us. MB: How much were you subjected to incoming German anti-battery fire? LB: We were subjected to incoming German battery fire practically every afternoon. During that time we had to go back about two miles to get our food. Two or three men at a time. German's would see us going back, and they would, with a large man would fire on us and they would pin us down sometimes. We had to wait ____ to get our food. We used to laugh about our guys only old men was in service with us. They were, some was 40 years old. But what had happened was, _____ back to get defense jobs and they got caught in the draft, and they were complaining about they couldn't run until the Germans started firing on us, and boy. We were due. We went into a place, we had to first dig those guns in, cover them up with cover with sandbags on the side. We'd be _____ made place for ourselves. And then we would dig a big hole in the ground maybe 5 feet, 6 feet, or maybe about 8, and get logs and put over the top and fill sandbags and put a tarpaulin over it. And that's what we stayed in. We had candles and flashlights while we was fighting. And we fought in shifts. We had twelve hour shifts. We would fight 12 hours, then the next crew would relieve us. We didn't stay on the front line the whole time, next shift would come on. They would stay from 12 to 12 the next day then we went on at 12 the next day till 12 at night. That's the way the war was fought. MB: What were you issued as far as personal sidearms, were you issued Garands or M-1 carbines, or just revolvers, or did you carry anything? LB: Well our personal weapons that we were issued were 30-30 carbines. Semiautomatics. We had a clip that would hold 15 rounds. Some would have another clip wallet to the back so all they'd have to do is flip clips and actually we could have 16 rounds because we could keep one round up in the chamber and that would give us 15 more rounds of ammunition. MB: What did you think of that gun, was it good? LB: Yeah, it was pretty good. There was a lot of play in, course you had to be steady with it. It had a lot of recoil and it would jump around, but as far as it being accurate, it was really accurate. MB: Did everybody on the gun crew have one? LB: Sure, everybody had a gun. He had to carry the gun at all times and keep it, keep his gun, you know maintenance on his gun. That was required every day. Same thing about this howitzer. After we fired a fire mission, we had to go and swab them out and clean them up. Because they would tell us we was indispensable, but those guns, it would take months to get a gun but they could get a new troop. So we kept our equipment in good shape. During the rain, we would take the guns and turn them down. ______ shoulder, turn the barrel down to carry that way. MB: Ya'll had 105's, right? LB: Yeah, we had 105's, that what ammunition we had. MB: How often did you have to move the guns? Did ya'll move them forward as the infantry advanced or did ya'll pretty much stay put? LB: How often did we move the guns? Depending on how often they actually advanced. Sometimes we would stay in one position for two months just mainly firing on convoys and what have you. Then as the infantry, in one case, going through I think it was Luka, Italy, we advanced so fast, we went into an area before the infantry got there. So _____ told our commander that if he didn't get us back as quickly as he could, he was going to court martial everything, every button he had on his outfit. But we usually stayed in a position place for quite a long time. We stayed in a town like Pisa for quite some time until all the people there knew us almost by name. COUNTER 298 MB: How did the Italian people see you, how did they respond to you? LB: Well, how did the Italians respond to us, at first they were a little curious. Because there had been so much propaganda. Some of the troops that came through, the white troops, had told them that we were cowboys, we ate babies, we had tails, don't have no dealing with us. But when we got to a town and we took up time with the children and there was a lot of candy and cigarettes that we would give. At time for our meals some of the fellows, you know, see we didn't get but one mess of food, he would get two, he would come back for seconds in order to feed the children and their families. So _____ when we came there, and they cried when we left. We go out, a typical example would be a radio. When we came, when we went up the coast up to Genoa, we came back to _____, and that was a posted sign off limits. There was one time I was young, which was ______ spoke up for his troops. He tore the sign down and said my troops help took this town, and this will be their town, so he put that town off limits to nothing but the 92nd division. MB: You had mentioned to us in a previous conversation about how your unit managed to get back Columbus' ashes or something like that, can you tell us that story? LB: Yeah, up in Genoa, Italy, I guess it was during his birthday, some of the Italians had taken Columbus' ashes and hid them in the mountains. So we had a big ceremony and we restored the ashes. The 92nd division, they had a black choir with probably from the 40's and 50's and probably into the 60's was called Wings over Jordan, a singing group. I think they was from out of Cleveland, Ohio, but I know it was Ohio. And they came over and helped us in the celebration, and that was quite a feat for us. That brought back a lot of good feelings among everyone. I may also mention that in order to keep the morale up, we had shows that come over. There was a show called Shuffle Along that _____ Cicily. OK, then we had sport events. We had football, spaghetti bowl between the Japanese soldiers and the 92nd division troops, in the 92nd division. And we had USO's. MB: Who won the football game? LB: I can't recall, I don't believe we did, but anyway, I can't recall. Because we had one player that he played football in Atlanta, his name was John Moody. Moody, he played on that team, but he had been a Morris Brown student before going in the service? Int: Did it make you feel better, did you like it when… MB: Sure, sure, it built our morale, it really helped our morale. And when we went over and we saw the black red cross, USO workers. And we saw a lot of blacks that came out of Ethiopia was there, because you know at one time Italy went down in Ethiopia. They was there. So whenever you see a black that would make us feel good. We took, we felt proud, you know. You would see such shows, blacks, it would built our morale up. Int: Did you get lots of letters, when did the mail come? LB: Well, when did the mail come and the letters that we got? Int: ______ stay in touch with you all? LB: No, it wasn't hard to get in touch with us, but the mail had to come through the APO. We would get it, sometimes it would be a month late. People would send us packages, they ____ some two and three months earlier. And we could never mention where exactly we were, we would always say somewhere in Italy in order to, in order to offset the enemy. Int: You weren't allowed to say where you were? LB: We were not allowed to say where we were, but we could just only say somewhere in Italy. And our APO No. was a New York, APO New York. That was the European theater of operations. Int: You said that you were called colored, did the Italians and the Germans have any names for you? LB: We were called colored, other names, did Germany have names for us? The Germans had a lady they called American Axis Sally, and they would throw leaflets telling us why we were over there fighting, we did not have anything to fight for. Int: They just passed out to black soldiers? LB: They passed it out, leaflets. Int: Not to everybody, just the black soldiers. LB: Well they did drop it from the air. They'd drop it and it would tell us why are you over here fighting? The Germans are not your enemy, the Americans are your enemy, that's who you should be fighting. They were trying to ____ our morale down, but we didn't go for that, we didn't accept that. But the Italians never did, the Italians accepted us COUNTER 428 TAPE 1 SIDE B COUNTER 001 …. as their liberators. Some of the ____ they were just there, thought they were just there. They didn't try to win friends, __________. I don't mean to be sounding like I'm being prejudiced or biased or anything, but that's the truth. And we were there, they were just amazed, they would come up to us and rub our skin because, they had never seen a black before. And they would come up touching your back, thought you had tails, and after they find out we were human same as anybody else and how they acted, they were very friendly and had no trouble out of them. Now occasionally a guy would pull a few tricks like selling cigarettes, they were gypping them out of cigarettes or something like that sometimes. I still have a ten pack of cigarettes in a carton they would have five backs and maybe had some sodas or something in the bottle. When they open it up and pay for it, they find no cigarettes. Anyway ___________________ at the bar. A black soldier was no good, you know that black soldier was no good. But we had our own club that we'd go to and had trucks that would carry us every night or every day whenever we wanted to go. MB: Was there, kind along the same line that you asked, I don't know if we picked it up, but US troops, they referred to you as colored units, is that right? LB: Right. The US troops referred to us as colored units. Colored or Negro. At that time, we didn't have any blacks known as blacks or Afro-Americans, we were known as colored or Negro. MB: Was that a term you found particularly offensive, or what would you have, if that wasn't acceptable, what would you have preferred to have been called? LB: At that time, do I consider those terms to be offensive? No, because we had been conditioned for a long time that we were colored. And whenever we signed any kind of major, or paper, or any value, you made a race, we always would be colored and later would be either Negro. That was accepted during that time, that was an accepted name. But the one name that we could not accept was the n-word, nigger. Now we were offended a lot of time by that name, we were called that. Int: Did anyone call you that? LB: Oh sure. Sure. Did anyone call us that name, niggers, oh sure. Let me give you one incidence in the United States. We were traveling from Ft. Bragg coming through Atlanta. We ate at the, on Decatur Street at a place called the Metropolitan Café. We had meal tickets. The white troops went to Rich's, they ate at the Magnolia Room. So _____ back up to Union Station, we were going to Arizona, it was a troop train. When we got to Little Rock, Arkansas, now this is as vivid to me as if it were happening today. The porter came through and said he would have pull the _________. We wanted to know why, and he said it would best if we pull the ________. Now I know at that time, we couldn't even have, it might have started it out going through Little Rock, AK. We could not be on a troop train. So we met a lot of racism. Course there was a cloud at that time of the South but we met a lot of racism. Not only did the fight the war over there we had, some of the troops had to fight a war right here. I recall a time, one incidence, here in Georgia, a black _____ came through, I don't know exactly what time it, but he got shot just driving through the town, so there has always been hostility during that time. So things haven't always been like that anymore, you know. Int: Did you sometimes see the colored troops that were left over in uniforms and supplies, brand new stuff? LB: Oh sure. Well most of our equipment was new, the equipment was new, we got new equipment. Course that's the thing about it, a lot of time we were hard… Well the equipment that we got, once a week if we could, we would go back to the rear echelon and take a shower, and we'd get a clean outfit, everything clean, socks. At night we would take socks off and put them to our chests and dry them out because we were in a lot of snow over there, and we got clean. Int: So almost every week you got like a different uniform? LB: Yeah if we could get back to the rear echelon, we'd get sprayed and get a different uniform, I mean a change of uniform, clean uniform. MB: Was there any, well talking about uniforms, was there any particular piece of uniform or equipment that you thought was a really good thing to have? I mean, on the same token, was there any piece that you thought was worthless and lot of guys threw them away and got lost or something like that? LB: Well any good uniform that I though was valuable or we could use or wasn't no good, for example, when I went in the service, everybody was issued these, what they call thermal underwear now. I never could get any because they didn't have my size. And I went through the entire army without having a thermal underwear. Int: Were they too small? LB: Yeah, because of my size, I never did get them. See you would get in what you were issued. If you were issued a sweater, what were those kind of jackets that we had?, I can't recall the name of them now. If ______, that's what you got. There was one case that in Italy, they had some troops over there from, called Sengalese, they were from out of Africa. There were ____ with the British, yeah, I think they was attached to the British. They would, they went barefoot, and they were going on the front lines, sneak up on the enemy and cut his neck and like an outpost and sneak up and wake the enemy up and he would just panic to see that, but they were getting paid by the ears, and then _____ they were cut. And so one asked me for a jacket, he had one of these British ____ jackets from, field jacket, and I didn't know what he was saying, he ______ and so I didn't want to do, and he got so mad and said they ever pull this knife, these swords, whatever they call them, sabers, or whatever, they're going to have cut _____ after they cut themselves. So I gave him my jacket, so I went a long time without one. COUNTER 92 MB: So when you were talking about what you ate, you usually went back to the rear and ate, two or three miles. So usually you were getting hot food, right, from a kitchen, or were you eating C-rations? LB: Well, the food that we were getting when we went back to the rear echelon, it was usually hot food. Now, most food that we got was dehydrated food such as eggs, milk, and each day, we got a bar of candy, chocolate candy, and a pack of cigarettes. And at that time, they had a different brand of cigarettes, I think such as Lucky Strikes, Camels, and ______. There were seven guys in the group that had been smoking the same brand of cigarettes. By me not smoking _______ Camels, I'd always give them to somebody else or something like that. The only time that we ate C-rations we were moving so fast that we couldn't get nothing else and we got C-rations. But the infantry, they were the ones that got most of the C-rations. Int: What was your favorite piece that you ended up using the most of your equipment, was there something that you used everyday? LB: Well, the favorite piece of the equipment that I had to use everyday, I would say was my helmet. The reason I say my helmet, because we would take what I call a can of canned heat and light it and put the helmet over it and get hot water to shave with. We had a net to go over our helmet to camouflage. Also we had a net that go around our gun to correspond with the terrain, so that would be most important that I used everyday. MB: When you moved the gun, were the guns moved by deuce and a half's or? LB: When they moved the guns, the guns were moved by we had _____ movers, 2 ½ ton trucks. And we rode. We didn't walk. We rode everywhere we went. The infantry was all the unfortunate, we were fortunate to ride. And we had this song about When the Caissons Go Rolling Along, we roll along in the trucks. MB: What was your first engagement, what was the first time you guys actually participated in combat action? LB: What was the first time that we participated in combat? I believe I was in Pisa, Italy. We got our first dose of comat. MB: That would have been in, when? LB: That was in '45 I believe it was, '45 because we stayed in the area a long time without doing anything, just waiting to be called, and that was in '45. I don't know why I think it was, I can't say exactly what month it was in, because we had our big push in November of '45 I think it was, but we had been fighting before then, but we got the enemy pushed and we kept them going. But occasionally we, now I came in contact in Pisa with some misfortunates to a lot of the troops, but I was fortunate. There was a guy in our outfit named Howard Bellamy from Indianapolis, Indiana, which you call ____town. We were in Pisa, and we decided to go to the USO. While we were in the USO\u003c Bellamy said lets go get some vino, you know that's the word, Italian word for wine. And you got the blanco and the rose, so we would go into town and get some wine. We'd been gone about 15 minutes and the USO blowed up. But this is what happened. They had stowed some mines from the sea, the New Guinean sea I think it was, into the basement, and some kind of way they were set off. I had one buddy, his name was Bill, and he was from Memphis, but he got saved because he was sitting on a piano stool and it blew him behind the piano, but we missed that incidence just by about 15 minutes. Because we decided to go to get wine. MB: In your company, did everybody survive the war? LB: My company was very fortunate. We had one sergeant which we told him if you have anything wrong with your lines, your sight, do it before nightfall. And he didn't adhere to the command to the request. And he went out that night and he got shot. And there was one incident where that the Germans fired into our position between where we were staying, but it happened to be a dud, didn't go off. MB: So if all of those counter artillery barrages, they really didn't accomplish much except to keep ya'll pinned down? LB: Keep us pinned down mostly. And kept us away from getting at the food or what have you. But we didn't know effective with ours because we had the air force over there with us. We had, I think the 332nd Air group with us, they came out of Tuskeegee. They were very effective, and they called them the, what was it, the word for black in German, you know the German air force called Luftwaffe, but they were very fortunate in supplying our air power. MB: Where were you when you heard the Germans had surrendered, and where did you get that information? LB: It happened in '44? Oh, where was I when the Germans surrendered. I believe we were up near around Genoa and we heard that the Germans had surrendered. And we said now we know when we'll be going back home. So in November I think of that year, the deactivated the 92nd division and they started this points system which is points, so many points for each 6 months you stayed in service. And if was rumored that the unit was going to come back to the United States as a whole, but some of the guys said that they came back to the United States, it wasn't going to be the same because there was going to be a lot of destruction because they felt like they were entitled to a lot more than they were going to get, so they decided they would deactivate the outfits and send them on a points system. So therefore, I was shipped, and a few more of us were shipped to Vienna, Austria by freight, packed in like cattle, on a freight car to Vienna, Austria to join the 3478th trucking company, it was a supply company. MB: What did you do once you were there? LB: When we were there, and what did we do when we were there in Austria? We hauled supplies, we got stuff like for the armored troops, we got American liquor for the officers, we went to place in the mountains that people needed rations and food to carry them the food, and the 5th Army rest center up in, I think that was ______ Garden, one of those places, that we carried food and picked up supplies. Int: Everyone that was doing that was black? LB: Was everything doing that with us, yeah they were black. They were black. Now when we were in Austria, the city was divided into four zones, sections. There's a section for the French, a section for the Russians, a section for the English, and a section where I was stationed. And we went from one section to another section, we had to use a pass to go through. The Russians were the only troops that were allowed to carry artillery pieces, I mean, their guns all the time. We couldn't carry guns, they carried their guns all the time. So we would make different areas like _________ and take up supplies in the trucking outfit. Go ____________ and pick up different things for the outfit, and I got to become dispatcher for the outfit. I was assistant dispatcher, and the ______ so my job was in charge of to make sure all the vehicles were in good running order and keep a record of a, a log of the maintenance work to be done and make sure each vehicle had two drivers assigned, make a report on what details each man was supposed to carry out and perform and then turn in that report to headquarters every day. MB: When did you finally get discharged? LB: I was discharged, when did I finally get discharged? I was discharged in June 11, 1946, at Ft. Dix, New Jersey. Because I went back to Philadelphia for a brief stay, then I came back to Augusta. MB: How did you end up coming to Atlanta, and when did you come to Atlanta? LB: How did I end up coming to Atlanta? Alright, my first wife, I put emphasis on first because this is my third wife, but anyway, my first wife she was an Atlantan, and she wanted to come back home, and I had been working at Camp Gordon and they had a reduction in force, and so I came to Atlanta to seek employment, and that's how I got here to Atlanta. When I got to Atlanta, my first job was with the Atlanta Broom Company. That's where I worked for a while. My father-in-law, he was instrumental in getting that job for me. And then I was __________ to work as a food chemist _______ called the Dairy Tech Corporation. It was out there in Sage Hill, it was __________ right down from Channel 5, I call it channel 5, and we was manufacturing chemists for ______ ice cream plants, and I got that job, I stayed there almost 25 years, but we moved to Doraville after I was there about 18 years, we moved up to Doraville. MB: What year then did you move to Atlanta? COUNTER 264 LB: I came to Atlanta in I think it was September or October 1953. And I've been here ever since. MB: I have heard, and I don't know how true it is, maybe you can clear it up for us, that the white officers that were put in charge of all black units generally tend to be southerners, was there any truth to that? LB: Was all white troops that was put in charge of the blacks was southerners? Well I can't say all but the majority was southerners. Now, I must give this due respect that all those white officers, were not all you might call racist because one of the best officers that I met, he was from Mississippi, white officer. Most of your racists came from your top brass because they wanted perfection. What they did, this is what happened. They conscripted a lot of the troops, the black troops, prior to World War II, they had a work going on called the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the guys in this, the government were paying them money to dig sewers and ditches and drains, and whatever. So when the war started, they got those guys. Threw them in the army. None of them was _________, a lot of them had never worn a suit of clothes until they got in the army, _____ or something like that. So they tried to teach them in schools, at Ft. Wachita they had these schools, and they would teach them how to be a good soldier, how to comply with the law, what it meant to be a private. Private Pete was a good boy, Private Pete was a good soldier, and that kind of basic, they taught them how to read. So naturally when they perform on the battlefield, there was a little cowardice, there was a little frightening, but as a whole, they stood up and fought. There was some misjudgments when one of our generals, he directed fire and killed a lot of his own men because he _________ should have been. When things went wrong, the black officers got the ____ for it because a lot of them were incompetent. I'm not saying this out of context, you got outfit put together real quick because ________ Jones _____ he was the brother-in-law of __________ who was chief of staff under President Truman. And he wanted to make a big showing, he wanted to make esprit de corps out of his black troops. He wanted to make a big showing. When he took over, and when we got assigned to the 5th army under General Mark Clark, he too, himself, he wanted to be like this General Patton. He wanted to be another Patton, and he wanted everything in perfection, and if something went wrong, he always thought that the troops were not _________ couldn't do a good job. And our General, he felt that regardless of how much education some of the black soldiers had, they still weren't qualified to do a good job. And the only time he really spoke up for us was when we went into the town of _________ and he declared the town off limits to everybody except the 92nd division since they took that town it was their town. But he felt, to show how incompetent he was, during the Korean war, they sent him to the Korean war and he failed. Int: You got a good conduct medal because of what, good conduct? LB: I got a good conduct medal, yeah I got a good conduct medal and I got two campaign medals. The good conduct medal was for being out of trouble, not getting intoxicated, not getting in fights, and you know, getting along with your fellow soldiers? Int: Did a lot of people get in fights? LB: Oh yeah, there was quite a few scuffles, you know, there was a lot of people, and whenever you find a bunch of men together, there's going to be ribbing and get drunk and resent one another, you know, so there was a few scuffles. There was nothing that the MPs couldn't handle because they ruled with an iron fist. We had MPs in our outfit, you couldn't compromise with them. Well, I ain't going to say bad as storm troopers but they used some of those tactics you know what I mean? MB: Your MPs in the 92nd Division, were they black or white MPs. LB: The MPs of the 92nd Division, they were black. But they were ________ to the _____ the white _____, the were _____. They couldn't hear nothing but he said do, and that was carry out, that was the law, they were the law. But there was a lot of incompetence, but in spite of all that, soldiers fought well in my outfit, but the ______ 92n was one of the best field artillery outfits all around, we got highly recommendation, we got highly praised. General Coburn, he was one of the best qualified, he was a white general. We had a lot of officer was a little mediocre, you know frightened. Who wouldn't be frightened when you face an enemy like those Germans were fierce fighters. But the propaganda, one thing I said, propaganda didn't get to us. We received the Stars and Stripes everyday telling us what's going on on the western front, what was happening over in the Pacific and how it was trying to tear morale down, so we didn't pay any attention, and what General Patton was going, how he was advancing, so we got information. COUNTER 409 TAPE II SIDE A COUNTER 000 Int: When you got back home, did you feel like you got respect from everybody or did you feel like white Americans didn't feel like you did? LB: When I got back home did I feel like I had the respect of everybody? I was still young. All I wanted to do was get me a good job and get married. I say that was all I wanted to do, and I got, I went in as a boy, I came out as a man. I lost all my young teenage years, from 18, I lost those. So I didn't know anything about 20 years old, 19 years old, those years went by me, I was in service, so all I wanted to do was get me a job and settle. But there was a buddy of mine, he enticed me into going to school, he said lets go back to school, he said the government will pay you to go to school. So we got enrolled in college and we were getting $65 a month I think it was for going to school. And after I got married, the amount increased to $102 or something like that a month. But anyway I… [tape repeats until COUNTER 32] went to that school and got interested in school so I stayed in school. But my first primary reason, I just wanted to get out of the service and get home. But I can't say whether I got the respect. Because when I get home, things were very cheap then. They had a system they called the 52/20. They would try to place you in the same type of work you were doing before you went in the service. So what we would do, we had to go down to the unemployment office and sign up each week if you were, couldn't find no job, you would get $20 a week until you got a job. So the jobs at that time, base salary at that time was averaging $20 a week on the job. By the time we took our social security, we were getting something like $18 or something. So we said what the heck, we working for $18 something week and I'm going to get $20 and not work. So we refused those little old jobs, it was menial work like working in the brickyard or some menial task, and it was supposed to give you some _____ of the work you were doing when you was in the service like truck drivers, that's what they put me down for. My spec called for me being a truck driver after I went through that trucking outfit. I couldn't get the jobs so we stayed around and got the little money every week. So there was no jobs much to do at that time, but there was no welfare. Everybody was working because ______ was so cheap then. MB: So when you went to school, was that on the GI Bill? LB: When I went to school, that was on the GI Bill. MB: And where did you go to school? LB: I went to Payne College down in Augusta, GA. MB: What was your degree in, did you graduate from Payne? LB: No, I was lacking two hours. MB: Two hours? LB: Two hours. I got married and I was lacking two hours. Then I came to Atlanta, and I was going to transmit my transcript and do up here and got connected as a food chemist and didn't want to leave, so my major was social studies and my minor was secondary education. But I never pursued it because this guy that I got with, he trained me into doing chemical work in this ice cream and dairy supply company. And I stayed there for almost 25 years. MB: When did you go and work for Oglethorpe? LB: Went to Oglethorpe back in 1981. MB: And you just… LB: I started out as a custodian, there was an opening for maintenance, they put me in the maintenance, and I stayed there until 1990, and I retired in December of 1990. I came back as a part time worker in July of 1991, and I stayed there about six years, stayed there until nineteen, got away now, but anyway, I went back to my old job and worked there six weeks and I couldn't make it. There was so many new products and there was a little animosity among some of the workers because I came in, they made me a production manager and they though that it should have been given to somebody within the position that had been there, and so they wouldn't tell me nothing, you know wouldn't work for me, so I gave it up and went back to Oglethorpe. The job, my position was still open, so I stayed at Oglethorpe until March of ‘9_, as a part time worker, maybe working three days a week, because I was on social security. At that time I could only make so much money. MB: We'll stop this. Mr. Bell tell us a little bit about this piece. LB: Alright about this piece here, that piece was made from a shell, a 105 mm howitzer shell. I contacted with an Italian machinist. He wanted some shells to make to some equipment some stuff he wanted to make, and he asked me what would I like to some memorabilia, and I said, well could you make you a little wine glass or wine, and so he made this with the shell from a casing of one of our mm howitzer shells, and he put my name on it, and _____, Italy on it. MB: Can you turn it a little bit so we can see what's on the other side there, you're going the right way. Yeah, keep turning it. So an Italian fellow made this? LB: Yeah, he made this for me, he was a machinist and he had, after you get the names on it, show you how the top comes off. MB: Go ahead and show us how the top screws off. LB: Alright the top screws off, you see the screws up in there, and here you see you got a, just like a wine glass. You know over there, if you go to their house and they're having a meal, they'll ask you ____, and just like to me wine to them just like we drink water here, and if you left you'll insult them if you didn't accept the wine. And they made some very good wine. But anyway, this is supposed to symbolize the shell, like our shells, that was the shell part that came out and this was the housing where they sit, and but they were like that, so that's what this is symbolizing. You see how the bottom, work piece of art he did on the bottom left. They said Italia, _____ Italia in Italy. MB: This picture here… LB: Tell you about this picture here, this picture here was salute to a 48 states, I think that was during Independence Day. And this is my outfit, that's _____ 597th field artillery. But I think I am missing from this picture, I think I was on details or something. You may note each gun has someone ____ that's how they had ____ gun, we had four guns in our company, B company. And each other company had four guns. This is my outfit, it was during a ceremony we had over there, down in Pisa, Italy. I don't know what the occasion was, we always had some kind of celebration or ceremony for something that happened back in the states. But anyway, if you see ______ the little guys with their eyes squatted, that's my picture. MB: We're going to try to focus in on your picture. Tell us about this little photograph here. LB: This was a photograph where the ashes were being carried to the next resting place of Columbus. They had been brought down from the hills where the Italians hid them during the German occupation, campaign there. So this is being taken away now to the final place, where the second place, where they're going to put them back to the original place and store it, I don't know where the resting place was, but this is going back to the original place. MB: OK, tell us about this photograph. LB: This picture was the soldiers is giving the ashes that were brought down from the hills to put them on the caisson to be carried out to its original resting place. And that's the division chaplain, he was giving the invocation ceremony, and the group that was behind there was a famous Wings Over Jordan, that was the famous black choir that used to sing during the 50's, 40's and 50's. Come on the radio every Sunday morning, they were noted for their spiritual singing, and they were over to help us celebrate. The soldiers holding ashes and… MB: OK, what is this? LB: This is the Wings Over Jordan choir, they came all the way to Genoa, Italy, to help us celebrate this occasion, a momentous prestigious occasion. They were a singing group, sang back in the 40's and 50's and it was a famous spiritual group. And so they came over, and that's what they were doing. And we were really proud to see them, anybody from the United States at home, it made us, it lifted our morale, it was a great morale booster to see them come all the way overseas to be with us. That was the band that played for all occasions for the division, the entire division would march and do ___ the band was there to play. MB: All African-American band? LB: All African-American band. 597th Field artillery, 92nd Division. MB: Where was this picture taken? LB: That picture was taken in Pisa, Italy. MB: Are you in this picture? LB: Yeah, I'm somewhere but I don't know where it is, I wouldn't be able to find me, I think I'm on the tail end. Because usually they would have the tall men in the front and let it escalate down, and I'm in the background or somewhere, I don't know where I am in that picture. MB: So was this taken in probably '45? LB: Yes, in '45. MB: Tell me about this again. LB: This was some kind of ceremony we was having, Verazze, Italy, I don't know what occasion it was for, I can't recall, but it was for some kind of occasion. That was part of the band, some kind of victory celebration, probably some kind of victory celebration. MB: Alright, who are these fellows? LB: These are members of the 347th trucking outfit. This picture was taken in Vienna, Austria. This is taken in '45, well very end of '45, '46?, I can't remember. '46. MB: Are you in this picture? LB: I am in this picture. MB: Which one are you? LB: There I am right there. MB: Right there. LB: Uh huh. MB: Do you know who any of these other fellows are? LB: No I don't. I know this guy he was from Kansas City. This guy here, he was from New York. Mel, he was from North Carolina. This guy here, he was from St. Louis I think. But I don't know. Johnny, he was from New York, but I don't know where they are, I never heard them anymore. Once we left… MB: Tell me what this is. LB: This here is a pass for, it says Vienna, Austria, back in 1946, the latter part of '45 and early part of '46. Each soldier needed a pass to get through the four different sections, mainly the northern section, the French section, the British section, and the western section. They would need a pass to go from one section to the other, with your name on it and on the other side… MB: Yeah, go ahead and turn it over for us. LB: OK. On this side you see here, the note that you've got the four different country flags. And each, there's writing in Russian, French, and American. MB: And you said something about when you were in Vienna that Americans and the French and British weren't allowed to carry weapons? LB: No we were not, only the Russians, they're the only ones that carried weapons. And also the Russians, when we was in that trucking outfit, we had to take our steering gear and ________ a chain to the ________ and loop it around the steering gear and lock it whenever we'd get out of the truck because the Russians were stealing the trucks. MB: The Russians were stealing the American trucks? LB: The American trucks. They were taking them. And the Russians, they didn't ask for anything, like they wanted something, they would just take it. MB: How did the Russians respond to you, both being black and also as an American? LB: We were the, we would ask them different questions. They would say _____ the won't, they would just take it. But they didn't, they were very friendly, but they would give us schnapps, not schnapps, vodka, the ___ vodka, sometimes we would exchange vodka with them for gasoline, gasoline for vodka they wanted gasoline, but anything they wanted they would take it, they didn't ask. Didn't have the courtesy to ask. COUNTER 242"],"dc_format":["video/quicktime"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Veterans History Project oral history recordings","Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center"],"dcterms_subject":["Artillery--United States","World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American","World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American","105mm Caliber gun","United States. Army. Infantry Division, 92nd","United States. Army. Field Artillery Battalion, 597th","United States. Army. Regimental Combat Team, 442nd","Wings over Jordan (Choir : Cleveland, Ohio)","Philadelphia Naval Shipyard (Philadelphia, Pa.)","United States. Army--Artillery","United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944","Buffalo Soldiers"],"dcterms_title":["Oral history interview of Lorenzo Bell, tape 1 of 2"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Atlanta History Center"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/316"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)","mini-dv"],"dcterms_extent":["1:50:00"],"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"geh_vhpohr_317","title":"Oral history interview of Lorenzo Bell, tape 2 of 2","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["Austria, Vienna, Vienna, 48.20849, 16.37208","Italy, Varazze, 44.3592996, 8.5753273","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383"],"dcterms_creator":["Brown, Myers; Johnson, Ahnekii","Bell, Lorenzo, 1925-2001"],"dc_date":["1999-07-09"],"dcterms_description":["In part two of this two-part interview, Lorenzo Bell describes his experiences as a black soldier in Italy and Austria at the end of World War II. He describes his post-war life and the racism he encountered at home.","Lorenzo Bell was a soldier in Italy during World War II.","VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW LORENZO BELL Atlanta History Center – July 9, 1999 Transcribed by Stephanie McKinnell Myers Brown: First of all, would you state your name and today's date, and that'll do it for the first question. Lorenzo Bell: Alright, my name is Lorenzo Bell. The date is July 9, 1999. MB: What was your place of birth and where did you grow up? LB: What was my place of birth and where did I grow up? I was born in Augusta, Georgia. I grew up during my early teen years in Augusta, Georgia. I was later, after my 17th birthday, I migrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. MB: What year were you born? LB: What year I was born? It was 1925. MB: When you moved to Philadelphia, what prompted that move to Philadelphia? Did your family move there, or did you move there by yourself? LB: When I moved to Philadelphia, and what prompted my move to Philadelphia was I wanted to get a good government job. My family did not move there. I was there living with an aunt on my mother's side. MB: What did you do once you moved to Philadelphia? LB: When I was in Philadelphia, what did I do when I was in Philadelphia? First I was 17 years old. I had to go get a working permit from a local school to be able to work. After obtaining the working permit, I got a job working in the shipyard, well the navy yard actually, in Philadelphia. And I worked as a sheet metal mechanic helper. And I worked on the battleship USS Wisconsin, which it took three years to complete. MB: Was that the only ship you worked on, did you just focus on working on that one? LB: Yeah, the only ship we worked on and what we focused on was mostly the USS Wisconsin. MB: Were there other African-Americans that were working on the same project with you? LB: Sure, there was a quite a few. MB: As you were doing the work there at the shipyard, were the, was there must interaction between the blacks and the whites working on the ships, or did everybody kind of stay to themselves, how did that work? LB: Well, what I actually was going on while I was working the shipyard, everybody had to mingle. Everybody had a job to do, and they had a supervisor who would come around in the morning and would tell them what the blueprints, what had to be done. There was no controversy. Most time that was spent, that I spent was going checking out tools. And after checking out tools, I would come back to the job and would assist the mechanic. MB: What year did you start working in the shipyard? LB: I started working in the shipyard in 1944, no, let me see, I started working in the shipyard in 1943, it was September of 1943. MB: When was your birthday, when did you turn 18? LB: I turned 18, well, when did I turn 18? It was that November 8, 1944. I turned 18 in Philadelphia. But because my friends were going in the service, I moved my age up, instead of November 8, I moved to October 16 in order to get in the service, and then I was drafted earlier. MB: What day did you actually get drafted, when did you… LB: In January, I don't know what year did I actually get, I believe I got drafted in January of '44. But I was set on the a three-week leave to get business and everything straightened out, so I had to return to service on the 17th of February, 1944. MB: And you wanted to do the war? LB: Sure I wanted to go into the, did I want to get into the war, sure I wanted to go. Because all the boys at that time were leaving, they wanted to go into the service. Matter of fact, I asked for the navy because I had been working on the ships, and what they gave me?, army. MB: And how did you get drafted, because I would think working in the shipyard would have been a protected war industry? LB: How did I get drafted, because I'm a nonessential worker. Only essential workers were deferred, given a draft status. Or if I had been 4F, that's what they classified that wasn't qualified physically to go into the service. MB: Once you were drafted, you went through those number of weeks where you had to get everything in order. Where were you sent for your basic training? LB: My basic, well it was, sent me for my basic training, I was sent to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. Yeah it has always been our fort. And we did about 6-8 weeks of basic training. MB: What basic training, and you actually got into some wartime experiences, when you look back did you think your basic training had you prepared you for that? LB: When I look back to see whether my basic training prepared us, yeah we were well prepared because most of the recruits at that time were just out of high school, and they were mostly boys from the, from the east coast. We were fairly small because they selected us for a field artillery, and at that time you didn't have any blacks in the field artillery. It was considered as a high branch of service. The only thing that the blacks was selected to go in the most was quartermasters or a trucking outfit or some rear echelon duties. So we were considered privileged. In taking basic training, there was another white outfit called the 16th field artillery. We were called the 16th separate field artillery. So that was a disparity among the two groups. MB: Were the drill instructors, were they white or black? LB: Our drill instructors were white at basic training, yeah our drill instructors, they were white. MB: Did you want to go into the war even though you knew you might be doing trucking or quartermaster? LB: Did I want to go into war? MB: Even though you knew you might be doing a lower type of job? LB: Did I want to go in the war knowing that I might take a lower type of job? Sure, I wanted to go into the war because we felt that was a privilege, and we took pride in serving our country because the black press had been pleading, why couldn't we, we was Americans, why couldn't we take part in the war. They had papers such as the Pittsburg Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, they were all _____ why the Negro couldn't fight, it was his country as much as anybody else's. MB: Right. So when did you actually get your assignment to the field artillery? Did that happen as you went in? LB: I actually got my assignment to the field artillery when we passed basic training, we were shipped to Ft. Wachucka, Arizona while we was assigned to the 92nd Buffalo Division. And this Buffalo Division was the forerunner of the cavalry during the Indians, during the wars with the Indians and their troops were Buffalo soldiers helped in the struggle then, so we was the forerunner, it was the forerunner of our outfit. MB: Give us your full regiment, company, battalion, division, give us the whole nomenclature all the way up the chain. LB: All right, you want the whole nomenclature of my outfit. OK, we went to the Ft. Wachucka, AZ, we was assigned to the 92nd Division. The division consists of infantrymens, artillery mens, medics, and you have certain breakdowns, which I have a book that will break it all down to you. But in my outfit, we had, the five we had in the artillery, that was four battalions: 597, 598, 599, and 600. OK, the 597 and 598 battalions, they were, had the 105mm howitzer. The 598 and 600 had the 155mm howitzers. And each battalion had a ____ that was in charge, and each battalion had four companies: Co A, Co B, Co C, and Co D. I don't exactly know how many men at that time consisted of, but I'd say around 10 men to a company. MB: Which company were you in? LB: I was in B company. MB: Of the? LB: 598, which company was I in, Co B, 597 field artillery, 92nd Division. MB: When were you first deployed outside of the United States? LB: Well, we left, we were first deployed outside of the United States when we went to Italy. I believe it was in September of '44. We went in from ____, Italy. We went immediately to a camping area, and we stayed there for about a week, living in what we call shelter halves. Each man had a half of a tent, and boy did it rain in Italy during that time. It seemed like the monsoon season hit Italy when we was there. Then we got assigned, so each artillery had to support an infantry battalion or regiment rather, and that was their job. We stayed in the rear echelon somewhat between 6 and 7 miles behind the infantry. And our job was to supply the infantry or whoever with fire when it was needed. They would call down a fire mission and say battery B 20 rounds charge 5 side wheel ___ 5 command. Each shell has 7 charges, powder bags. Alright, you had a gun, you had a man that opened the breech, and you had a man that was put the shells together, put the shells and drop the charges in, and pass it along and slid in the breech, and you had a man to close the breech. Then a man would pull the lanyard cord to fire the gun. My job, I was a gunner. So therefore, when a command came down, battery B elevate 15 degrees or depress 20 degrees right so many degrees or left so many degrees. My job was to get on that gun straddle the leg and look through the sites which was somewhat centered to a surveillance pole which have red lights facing and we would aim on it. The enemy couldn't see the light but we could see the light because we were facing it. And line off of that particular sight which we were going to depress or elevate so many degrees. And then after we got that, we commenced firing whenever the order came down. COUNTER 182 But each charge would determine how far the shell was going. If you put five shells that means that we're going to shoot five miles. Seven shells was the maximum. If you wanted to shoot seven miles. Mission would come down, like if the infantry sent out a patrol and they got caught, they wanted a smoke screen. So they had to bail them out. We _____ the fire. If a convoy, enemy convoy came on, they said if we see an enemy convoy because we had a man up in the observation, up near the front line, that would call down for a fire mission on the convoy. After we completed the mission, the call would come down, mission competed. MB: The infantry unit you were supporting was an all black unit as well? LB: An all black unit, because we were, the unit we supported, it was an all black unit. But there were times we went along with the Japanese division, yeah the Nissei division, the 442nd. It was one of the most, it was actually a sacrificial lamb. More Nissei's that any other soldier got purple hearts than any other soldiers during World War II. They was fierce fighters. We were assigned tot he 5th Army, General Mark Clark's army. And also was assigned to us the 750th tank battalion, we were with them also. They had an _____ which the aircraft were flown on the aircraft, and we was assigned with that outfit. But the Germans, we were fighting the Germans, but the Germans had what they ____, and I remember they were screaming ammunition. The Germans what they would do is paint a bullet with the red cross and they had their guns on half tracks. They would load our guns from the side of a building and fire on us and load them back and we couldn't tell where the muzzle blast was coming from. But we couldn't fire on them unless we got instructions from Washington or the command headquarters because we was thinking that they was a hospital. That's the kind of tactics they were using on us. MB: How much were you subjected to incoming German anti-battery fire? LB: We were subjected to incoming German battery fire practically every afternoon. During that time we had to go back about two miles to get our food. Two or three men at a time. German's would see us going back, and they would, with a large man would fire on us and they would pin us down sometimes. We had to wait ____ to get our food. We used to laugh about our guys only old men was in service with us. They were, some was 40 years old. But what had happened was, _____ back to get defense jobs and they got caught in the draft, and they were complaining about they couldn't run until the Germans started firing on us, and boy. We were due. We went into a place, we had to first dig those guns in, cover them up with cover with sandbags on the side. We'd be _____ made place for ourselves. And then we would dig a big hole in the ground maybe 5 feet, 6 feet, or maybe about 8, and get logs and put over the top and fill sandbags and put a tarpaulin over it. And that's what we stayed in. We had candles and flashlights while we was fighting. And we fought in shifts. We had twelve hour shifts. We would fight 12 hours, then the next crew would relieve us. We didn't stay on the front line the whole time, next shift would come on. They would stay from 12 to 12 the next day then we went on at 12 the next day till 12 at night. That's the way the war was fought. MB: What were you issued as far as personal sidearms, were you issued Garands or M-1 carbines, or just revolvers, or did you carry anything? LB: Well our personal weapons that we were issued were 30-30 carbines. Semiautomatics. We had a clip that would hold 15 rounds. Some would have another clip wallet to the back so all they'd have to do is flip clips and actually we could have 16 rounds because we could keep one round up in the chamber and that would give us 15 more rounds of ammunition. MB: What did you think of that gun, was it good? LB: Yeah, it was pretty good. There was a lot of play in, course you had to be steady with it. It had a lot of recoil and it would jump around, but as far as it being accurate, it was really accurate. MB: Did everybody on the gun crew have one? LB: Sure, everybody had a gun. He had to carry the gun at all times and keep it, keep his gun, you know maintenance on his gun. That was required every day. Same thing about this howitzer. After we fired a fire mission, we had to go and swab them out and clean them up. Because they would tell us we was indispensable, but those guns, it would take months to get a gun but they could get a new troop. So we kept our equipment in good shape. During the rain, we would take the guns and turn them down. ______ shoulder, turn the barrel down to carry that way. MB: Ya'll had 105's, right? LB: Yeah, we had 105's, that what ammunition we had. MB: How often did you have to move the guns? Did ya'll move them forward as the infantry advanced or did ya'll pretty much stay put? LB: How often did we move the guns? Depending on how often they actually advanced. Sometimes we would stay in one position for two months just mainly firing on convoys and what have you. Then as the infantry, in one case, going through I think it was Luka, Italy, we advanced so fast, we went into an area before the infantry got there. So _____ told our commander that if he didn't get us back as quickly as he could, he was going to court martial everything, every button he had on his outfit. But we usually stayed in a position place for quite a long time. We stayed in a town like Pisa for quite some time until all the people there knew us almost by name. COUNTER 298 MB: How did the Italian people see you, how did they respond to you? LB: Well, how did the Italians respond to us, at first they were a little curious. Because there had been so much propaganda. Some of the troops that came through, the white troops, had told them that we were cowboys, we ate babies, we had tails, don't have no dealing with us. But when we got to a town and we took up time with the children and there was a lot of candy and cigarettes that we would give. At time for our meals some of the fellows, you know, see we didn't get but one mess of food, he would get two, he would come back for seconds in order to feed the children and their families. So _____ when we came there, and they cried when we left. We go out, a typical example would be a radio. When we came, when we went up the coast up to Genoa, we came back to _____, and that was a posted sign off limits. There was one time I was young, which was ______ spoke up for his troops. He tore the sign down and said my troops help took this town, and this will be their town, so he put that town off limits to nothing but the 92nd division. MB: You had mentioned to us in a previous conversation about how your unit managed to get back Columbus' ashes or something like that, can you tell us that story? LB: Yeah, up in Genoa, Italy, I guess it was during his birthday, some of the Italians had taken Columbus' ashes and hid them in the mountains. So we had a big ceremony and we restored the ashes. The 92nd division, they had a black choir with probably from the 40's and 50's and probably into the 60's was called Wings over Jordan, a singing group. I think they was from out of Cleveland, Ohio, but I know it was Ohio. And they came over and helped us in the celebration, and that was quite a feat for us. That brought back a lot of good feelings among everyone. I may also mention that in order to keep the morale up, we had shows that come over. There was a show called Shuffle Along that _____ Cicily. OK, then we had sport events. We had football, spaghetti bowl between the Japanese soldiers and the 92nd division troops, in the 92nd division. And we had USO's. MB: Who won the football game? LB: I can't recall, I don't believe we did, but anyway, I can't recall. Because we had one player that he played football in Atlanta, his name was John Moody. Moody, he played on that team, but he had been a Morris Brown student before going in the service? Int: Did it make you feel better, did you like it when… MB: Sure, sure, it built our morale, it really helped our morale. And when we went over and we saw the black red cross, USO workers. And we saw a lot of blacks that came out of Ethiopia was there, because you know at one time Italy went down in Ethiopia. They was there. So whenever you see a black that would make us feel good. We took, we felt proud, you know. You would see such shows, blacks, it would built our morale up. Int: Did you get lots of letters, when did the mail come? LB: Well, when did the mail come and the letters that we got? Int: ______ stay in touch with you all? LB: No, it wasn't hard to get in touch with us, but the mail had to come through the APO. We would get it, sometimes it would be a month late. People would send us packages, they ____ some two and three months earlier. And we could never mention where exactly we were, we would always say somewhere in Italy in order to, in order to offset the enemy. Int: You weren't allowed to say where you were? LB: We were not allowed to say where we were, but we could just only say somewhere in Italy. And our APO No. was a New York, APO New York. That was the European theater of operations. Int: You said that you were called colored, did the Italians and the Germans have any names for you? LB: We were called colored, other names, did Germany have names for us? The Germans had a lady they called American Axis Sally, and they would throw leaflets telling us why we were over there fighting, we did not have anything to fight for. Int: They just passed out to black soldiers? LB: They passed it out, leaflets. Int: Not to everybody, just the black soldiers. LB: Well they did drop it from the air. They'd drop it and it would tell us why are you over here fighting? The Germans are not your enemy, the Americans are your enemy, that's who you should be fighting. They were trying to ____ our morale down, but we didn't go for that, we didn't accept that. But the Italians never did, the Italians accepted us COUNTER 428 TAPE 1 SIDE B COUNTER 001 …. as their liberators. Some of the ____ they were just there, thought they were just there. They didn't try to win friends, __________. I don't mean to be sounding like I'm being prejudiced or biased or anything, but that's the truth. And we were there, they were just amazed, they would come up to us and rub our skin because, they had never seen a black before. And they would come up touching your back, thought you had tails, and after they find out we were human same as anybody else and how they acted, they were very friendly and had no trouble out of them. Now occasionally a guy would pull a few tricks like selling cigarettes, they were gypping them out of cigarettes or something like that sometimes. I still have a ten pack of cigarettes in a carton they would have five backs and maybe had some sodas or something in the bottle. When they open it up and pay for it, they find no cigarettes. Anyway ___________________ at the bar. A black soldier was no good, you know that black soldier was no good. But we had our own club that we'd go to and had trucks that would carry us every night or every day whenever we wanted to go. MB: Was there, kind along the same line that you asked, I don't know if we picked it up, but US troops, they referred to you as colored units, is that right? LB: Right. The US troops referred to us as colored units. Colored or Negro. At that time, we didn't have any blacks known as blacks or Afro-Americans, we were known as colored or Negro. MB: Was that a term you found particularly offensive, or what would you have, if that wasn't acceptable, what would you have preferred to have been called? LB: At that time, do I consider those terms to be offensive? No, because we had been conditioned for a long time that we were colored. And whenever we signed any kind of major, or paper, or any value, you made a race, we always would be colored and later would be either Negro. That was accepted during that time, that was an accepted name. But the one name that we could not accept was the n-word, nigger. Now we were offended a lot of time by that name, we were called that. Int: Did anyone call you that? LB: Oh sure. Sure. Did anyone call us that name, niggers, oh sure. Let me give you one incidence in the United States. We were traveling from Ft. Bragg coming through Atlanta. We ate at the, on Decatur Street at a place called the Metropolitan Café. We had meal tickets. The white troops went to Rich's, they ate at the Magnolia Room. So _____ back up to Union Station, we were going to Arizona, it was a troop train. When we got to Little Rock, Arkansas, now this is as vivid to me as if it were happening today. The porter came through and said he would have pull the _________. We wanted to know why, and he said it would best if we pull the ________. Now I know at that time, we couldn't even have, it might have started it out going through Little Rock, AK. We could not be on a troop train. So we met a lot of racism. Course there was a cloud at that time of the South but we met a lot of racism. Not only did the fight the war over there we had, some of the troops had to fight a war right here. I recall a time, one incidence, here in Georgia, a black _____ came through, I don't know exactly what time it, but he got shot just driving through the town, so there has always been hostility during that time. So things haven't always been like that anymore, you know. Int: Did you sometimes see the colored troops that were left over in uniforms and supplies, brand new stuff? LB: Oh sure. Well most of our equipment was new, the equipment was new, we got new equipment. Course that's the thing about it, a lot of time we were hard… Well the equipment that we got, once a week if we could, we would go back to the rear echelon and take a shower, and we'd get a clean outfit, everything clean, socks. At night we would take socks off and put them to our chests and dry them out because we were in a lot of snow over there, and we got clean. Int: So almost every week you got like a different uniform? LB: Yeah if we could get back to the rear echelon, we'd get sprayed and get a different uniform, I mean a change of uniform, clean uniform. MB: Was there any, well talking about uniforms, was there any particular piece of uniform or equipment that you thought was a really good thing to have? I mean, on the same token, was there any piece that you thought was worthless and lot of guys threw them away and got lost or something like that? LB: Well any good uniform that I though was valuable or we could use or wasn't no good, for example, when I went in the service, everybody was issued these, what they call thermal underwear now. I never could get any because they didn't have my size. And I went through the entire army without having a thermal underwear. Int: Were they too small? LB: Yeah, because of my size, I never did get them. See you would get in what you were issued. If you were issued a sweater, what were those kind of jackets that we had?, I can't recall the name of them now. If ______, that's what you got. There was one case that in Italy, they had some troops over there from, called Sengalese, they were from out of Africa. There were ____ with the British, yeah, I think they was attached to the British. They would, they went barefoot, and they were going on the front lines, sneak up on the enemy and cut his neck and like an outpost and sneak up and wake the enemy up and he would just panic to see that, but they were getting paid by the ears, and then _____ they were cut. And so one asked me for a jacket, he had one of these British ____ jackets from, field jacket, and I didn't know what he was saying, he ______ and so I didn't want to do, and he got so mad and said they ever pull this knife, these swords, whatever they call them, sabers, or whatever, they're going to have cut _____ after they cut themselves. So I gave him my jacket, so I went a long time without one. COUNTER 92 MB: So when you were talking about what you ate, you usually went back to the rear and ate, two or three miles. So usually you were getting hot food, right, from a kitchen, or were you eating C-rations? LB: Well, the food that we were getting when we went back to the rear echelon, it was usually hot food. Now, most food that we got was dehydrated food such as eggs, milk, and each day, we got a bar of candy, chocolate candy, and a pack of cigarettes. And at that time, they had a different brand of cigarettes, I think such as Lucky Strikes, Camels, and ______. There were seven guys in the group that had been smoking the same brand of cigarettes. By me not smoking _______ Camels, I'd always give them to somebody else or something like that. The only time that we ate C-rations we were moving so fast that we couldn't get nothing else and we got C-rations. But the infantry, they were the ones that got most of the C-rations. Int: What was your favorite piece that you ended up using the most of your equipment, was there something that you used everyday? LB: Well, the favorite piece of the equipment that I had to use everyday, I would say was my helmet. The reason I say my helmet, because we would take what I call a can of canned heat and light it and put the helmet over it and get hot water to shave with. We had a net to go over our helmet to camouflage. Also we had a net that go around our gun to correspond with the terrain, so that would be most important that I used everyday. MB: When you moved the gun, were the guns moved by deuce and a half's or? LB: When they moved the guns, the guns were moved by we had _____ movers, 2 ½ ton trucks. And we rode. We didn't walk. We rode everywhere we went. The infantry was all the unfortunate, we were fortunate to ride. And we had this song about When the Caissons Go Rolling Along, we roll along in the trucks. MB: What was your first engagement, what was the first time you guys actually participated in combat action? LB: What was the first time that we participated in combat? I believe I was in Pisa, Italy. We got our first dose of comat. MB: That would have been in, when? LB: That was in '45 I believe it was, '45 because we stayed in the area a long time without doing anything, just waiting to be called, and that was in '45. I don't know why I think it was, I can't say exactly what month it was in, because we had our big push in November of '45 I think it was, but we had been fighting before then, but we got the enemy pushed and we kept them going. But occasionally we, now I came in contact in Pisa with some misfortunates to a lot of the troops, but I was fortunate. There was a guy in our outfit named Howard Bellamy from Indianapolis, Indiana, which you call ____town. We were in Pisa, and we decided to go to the USO. While we were in the USO\u003c Bellamy said lets go get some vino, you know that's the word, Italian word for wine. And you got the blanco and the rose, so we would go into town and get some wine. We'd been gone about 15 minutes and the USO blowed up. But this is what happened. They had stowed some mines from the sea, the New Guinean sea I think it was, into the basement, and some kind of way they were set off. I had one buddy, his name was Bill, and he was from Memphis, but he got saved because he was sitting on a piano stool and it blew him behind the piano, but we missed that incidence just by about 15 minutes. Because we decided to go to get wine. MB: In your company, did everybody survive the war? LB: My company was very fortunate. We had one sergeant which we told him if you have anything wrong with your lines, your sight, do it before nightfall. And he didn't adhere to the command to the request. And he went out that night and he got shot. And there was one incident where that the Germans fired into our position between where we were staying, but it happened to be a dud, didn't go off. MB: So if all of those counter artillery barrages, they really didn't accomplish much except to keep ya'll pinned down? LB: Keep us pinned down mostly. And kept us away from getting at the food or what have you. But we didn't know effective with ours because we had the air force over there with us. We had, I think the 332nd Air group with us, they came out of Tuskeegee. They were very effective, and they called them the, what was it, the word for black in German, you know the German air force called Luftwaffe, but they were very fortunate in supplying our air power. MB: Where were you when you heard the Germans had surrendered, and where did you get that information? LB: It happened in '44? Oh, where was I when the Germans surrendered. I believe we were up near around Genoa and we heard that the Germans had surrendered. And we said now we know when we'll be going back home. So in November I think of that year, the deactivated the 92nd division and they started this points system which is points, so many points for each 6 months you stayed in service. And if was rumored that the unit was going to come back to the United States as a whole, but some of the guys said that they came back to the United States, it wasn't going to be the same because there was going to be a lot of destruction because they felt like they were entitled to a lot more than they were going to get, so they decided they would deactivate the outfits and send them on a points system. So therefore, I was shipped, and a few more of us were shipped to Vienna, Austria by freight, packed in like cattle, on a freight car to Vienna, Austria to join the 3478th trucking company, it was a supply company. MB: What did you do once you were there? LB: When we were there, and what did we do when we were there in Austria? We hauled supplies, we got stuff like for the armored troops, we got American liquor for the officers, we went to place in the mountains that people needed rations and food to carry them the food, and the 5th Army rest center up in, I think that was ______ Garden, one of those places, that we carried food and picked up supplies. Int: Everyone that was doing that was black? LB: Was everything doing that with us, yeah they were black. They were black. Now when we were in Austria, the city was divided into four zones, sections. There's a section for the French, a section for the Russians, a section for the English, and a section where I was stationed. And we went from one section to another section, we had to use a pass to go through. The Russians were the only troops that were allowed to carry artillery pieces, I mean, their guns all the time. We couldn't carry guns, they carried their guns all the time. So we would make different areas like _________ and take up supplies in the trucking outfit. Go ____________ and pick up different things for the outfit, and I got to become dispatcher for the outfit. I was assistant dispatcher, and the ______ so my job was in charge of to make sure all the vehicles were in good running order and keep a record of a, a log of the maintenance work to be done and make sure each vehicle had two drivers assigned, make a report on what details each man was supposed to carry out and perform and then turn in that report to headquarters every day. MB: When did you finally get discharged? LB: I was discharged, when did I finally get discharged? I was discharged in June 11, 1946, at Ft. Dix, New Jersey. Because I went back to Philadelphia for a brief stay, then I came back to Augusta. MB: How did you end up coming to Atlanta, and when did you come to Atlanta? LB: How did I end up coming to Atlanta? Alright, my first wife, I put emphasis on first because this is my third wife, but anyway, my first wife she was an Atlantan, and she wanted to come back home, and I had been working at Camp Gordon and they had a reduction in force, and so I came to Atlanta to seek employment, and that's how I got here to Atlanta. When I got to Atlanta, my first job was with the Atlanta Broom Company. That's where I worked for a while. My father-in-law, he was instrumental in getting that job for me. And then I was __________ to work as a food chemist _______ called the Dairy Tech Corporation. It was out there in Sage Hill, it was __________ right down from Channel 5, I call it channel 5, and we was manufacturing chemists for ______ ice cream plants, and I got that job, I stayed there almost 25 years, but we moved to Doraville after I was there about 18 years, we moved up to Doraville. MB: What year then did you move to Atlanta? COUNTER 264 LB: I came to Atlanta in I think it was September or October 1953. And I've been here ever since. MB: I have heard, and I don't know how true it is, maybe you can clear it up for us, that the white officers that were put in charge of all black units generally tend to be southerners, was there any truth to that? LB: Was all white troops that was put in charge of the blacks was southerners? Well I can't say all but the majority was southerners. Now, I must give this due respect that all those white officers, were not all you might call racist because one of the best officers that I met, he was from Mississippi, white officer. Most of your racists came from your top brass because they wanted perfection. What they did, this is what happened. They conscripted a lot of the troops, the black troops, prior to World War II, they had a work going on called the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the guys in this, the government were paying them money to dig sewers and ditches and drains, and whatever. So when the war started, they got those guys. Threw them in the army. None of them was _________, a lot of them had never worn a suit of clothes until they got in the army, _____ or something like that. So they tried to teach them in schools, at Ft. Wachita they had these schools, and they would teach them how to be a good soldier, how to comply with the law, what it meant to be a private. Private Pete was a good boy, Private Pete was a good soldier, and that kind of basic, they taught them how to read. So naturally when they perform on the battlefield, there was a little cowardice, there was a little frightening, but as a whole, they stood up and fought. There was some misjudgments when one of our generals, he directed fire and killed a lot of his own men because he _________ should have been. When things went wrong, the black officers got the ____ for it because a lot of them were incompetent. I'm not saying this out of context, you got outfit put together real quick because ________ Jones _____ he was the brother-in-law of __________ who was chief of staff under President Truman. And he wanted to make a big showing, he wanted to make esprit de corps out of his black troops. He wanted to make a big showing. When he took over, and when we got assigned to the 5th army under General Mark Clark, he too, himself, he wanted to be like this General Patton. He wanted to be another Patton, and he wanted everything in perfection, and if something went wrong, he always thought that the troops were not _________ couldn't do a good job. And our General, he felt that regardless of how much education some of the black soldiers had, they still weren't qualified to do a good job. And the only time he really spoke up for us was when we went into the town of _________ and he declared the town off limits to everybody except the 92nd division since they took that town it was their town. But he felt, to show how incompetent he was, during the Korean war, they sent him to the Korean war and he failed. Int: You got a good conduct medal because of what, good conduct? LB: I got a good conduct medal, yeah I got a good conduct medal and I got two campaign medals. The good conduct medal was for being out of trouble, not getting intoxicated, not getting in fights, and you know, getting along with your fellow soldiers? Int: Did a lot of people get in fights? LB: Oh yeah, there was quite a few scuffles, you know, there was a lot of people, and whenever you find a bunch of men together, there's going to be ribbing and get drunk and resent one another, you know, so there was a few scuffles. There was nothing that the MPs couldn't handle because they ruled with an iron fist. We had MPs in our outfit, you couldn't compromise with them. Well, I ain't going to say bad as storm troopers but they used some of those tactics you know what I mean? MB: Your MPs in the 92nd Division, were they black or white MPs. LB: The MPs of the 92nd Division, they were black. But they were ________ to the _____ the white _____, the were _____. They couldn't hear nothing but he said do, and that was carry out, that was the law, they were the law. But there was a lot of incompetence, but in spite of all that, soldiers fought well in my outfit, but the ______ 92n was one of the best field artillery outfits all around, we got highly recommendation, we got highly praised. General Coburn, he was one of the best qualified, he was a white general. We had a lot of officer was a little mediocre, you know frightened. Who wouldn't be frightened when you face an enemy like those Germans were fierce fighters. But the propaganda, one thing I said, propaganda didn't get to us. We received the Stars and Stripes everyday telling us what's going on on the western front, what was happening over in the Pacific and how it was trying to tear morale down, so we didn't pay any attention, and what General Patton was going, how he was advancing, so we got information. COUNTER 409 TAPE II SIDE A COUNTER 000 Int: When you got back home, did you feel like you got respect from everybody or did you feel like white Americans didn't feel like you did? LB: When I got back home did I feel like I had the respect of everybody? I was still young. All I wanted to do was get me a good job and get married. I say that was all I wanted to do, and I got, I went in as a boy, I came out as a man. I lost all my young teenage years, from 18, I lost those. So I didn't know anything about 20 years old, 19 years old, those years went by me, I was in service, so all I wanted to do was get me a job and settle. But there was a buddy of mine, he enticed me into going to school, he said lets go back to school, he said the government will pay you to go to school. So we got enrolled in college and we were getting $65 a month I think it was for going to school. And after I got married, the amount increased to $102 or something like that a month. But anyway I… [tape repeats until COUNTER 32] went to that school and got interested in school so I stayed in school. But my first primary reason, I just wanted to get out of the service and get home. But I can't say whether I got the respect. Because when I get home, things were very cheap then. They had a system they called the 52/20. They would try to place you in the same type of work you were doing before you went in the service. So what we would do, we had to go down to the unemployment office and sign up each week if you were, couldn't find no job, you would get $20 a week until you got a job. So the jobs at that time, base salary at that time was averaging $20 a week on the job. By the time we took our social security, we were getting something like $18 or something. So we said what the heck, we working for $18 something week and I'm going to get $20 and not work. So we refused those little old jobs, it was menial work like working in the brickyard or some menial task, and it was supposed to give you some _____ of the work you were doing when you was in the service like truck drivers, that's what they put me down for. My spec called for me being a truck driver after I went through that trucking outfit. I couldn't get the jobs so we stayed around and got the little money every week. So there was no jobs much to do at that time, but there was no welfare. Everybody was working because ______ was so cheap then. MB: So when you went to school, was that on the GI Bill? LB: When I went to school, that was on the GI Bill. MB: And where did you go to school? LB: I went to Payne College down in Augusta, GA. MB: What was your degree in, did you graduate from Payne? LB: No, I was lacking two hours. MB: Two hours? LB: Two hours. I got married and I was lacking two hours. Then I came to Atlanta, and I was going to transmit my transcript and do up here and got connected as a food chemist and didn't want to leave, so my major was social studies and my minor was secondary education. But I never pursued it because this guy that I got with, he trained me into doing chemical work in this ice cream and dairy supply company. And I stayed there for almost 25 years. MB: When did you go and work for Oglethorpe? LB: Went to Oglethorpe back in 1981. MB: And you just… LB: I started out as a custodian, there was an opening for maintenance, they put me in the maintenance, and I stayed there until 1990, and I retired in December of 1990. I came back as a part time worker in July of 1991, and I stayed there about six years, stayed there until nineteen, got away now, but anyway, I went back to my old job and worked there six weeks and I couldn't make it. There was so many new products and there was a little animosity among some of the workers because I came in, they made me a production manager and they though that it should have been given to somebody within the position that had been there, and so they wouldn't tell me nothing, you know wouldn't work for me, so I gave it up and went back to Oglethorpe. The job, my position was still open, so I stayed at Oglethorpe until March of ‘9_, as a part time worker, maybe working three days a week, because I was on social security. At that time I could only make so much money. MB: We'll stop this. Mr. Bell tell us a little bit about this piece. LB: Alright about this piece here, that piece was made from a shell, a 105 mm howitzer shell. I contacted with an Italian machinist. He wanted some shells to make to some equipment some stuff he wanted to make, and he asked me what would I like to some memorabilia, and I said, well could you make you a little wine glass or wine, and so he made this with the shell from a casing of one of our mm howitzer shells, and he put my name on it, and _____, Italy on it. MB: Can you turn it a little bit so we can see what's on the other side there, you're going the right way. Yeah, keep turning it. So an Italian fellow made this? LB: Yeah, he made this for me, he was a machinist and he had, after you get the names on it, show you how the top comes off. MB: Go ahead and show us how the top screws off. LB: Alright the top screws off, you see the screws up in there, and here you see you got a, just like a wine glass. You know over there, if you go to their house and they're having a meal, they'll ask you ____, and just like to me wine to them just like we drink water here, and if you left you'll insult them if you didn't accept the wine. And they made some very good wine. But anyway, this is supposed to symbolize the shell, like our shells, that was the shell part that came out and this was the housing where they sit, and but they were like that, so that's what this is symbolizing. You see how the bottom, work piece of art he did on the bottom left. They said Italia, _____ Italia in Italy. MB: This picture here… LB: Tell you about this picture here, this picture here was salute to a 48 states, I think that was during Independence Day. And this is my outfit, that's _____ 597th field artillery. But I think I am missing from this picture, I think I was on details or something. You may note each gun has someone ____ that's how they had ____ gun, we had four guns in our company, B company. And each other company had four guns. This is my outfit, it was during a ceremony we had over there, down in Pisa, Italy. I don't know what the occasion was, we always had some kind of celebration or ceremony for something that happened back in the states. But anyway, if you see ______ the little guys with their eyes squatted, that's my picture. MB: We're going to try to focus in on your picture. Tell us about this little photograph here. LB: This was a photograph where the ashes were being carried to the next resting place of Columbus. They had been brought down from the hills where the Italians hid them during the German occupation, campaign there. So this is being taken away now to the final place, where the second place, where they're going to put them back to the original place and store it, I don't know where the resting place was, but this is going back to the original place. MB: OK, tell us about this photograph. LB: This picture was the soldiers is giving the ashes that were brought down from the hills to put them on the caisson to be carried out to its original resting place. And that's the division chaplain, he was giving the invocation ceremony, and the group that was behind there was a famous Wings Over Jordan, that was the famous black choir that used to sing during the 50's, 40's and 50's. Come on the radio every Sunday morning, they were noted for their spiritual singing, and they were over to help us celebrate. The soldiers holding ashes and… MB: OK, what is this? LB: This is the Wings Over Jordan choir, they came all the way to Genoa, Italy, to help us celebrate this occasion, a momentous prestigious occasion. They were a singing group, sang back in the 40's and 50's and it was a famous spiritual group. And so they came over, and that's what they were doing. And we were really proud to see them, anybody from the United States at home, it made us, it lifted our morale, it was a great morale booster to see them come all the way overseas to be with us. That was the band that played for all occasions for the division, the entire division would march and do ___ the band was there to play. MB: All African-American band? LB: All African-American band. 597th Field artillery, 92nd Division. MB: Where was this picture taken? LB: That picture was taken in Pisa, Italy. MB: Are you in this picture? LB: Yeah, I'm somewhere but I don't know where it is, I wouldn't be able to find me, I think I'm on the tail end. Because usually they would have the tall men in the front and let it escalate down, and I'm in the background or somewhere, I don't know where I am in that picture. MB: So was this taken in probably '45? LB: Yes, in '45. MB: Tell me about this again. LB: This was some kind of ceremony we was having, Verazze, Italy, I don't know what occasion it was for, I can't recall, but it was for some kind of occasion. That was part of the band, some kind of victory celebration, probably some kind of victory celebration. MB: Alright, who are these fellows? LB: These are members of the 347th trucking outfit. This picture was taken in Vienna, Austria. This is taken in '45, well very end of '45, '46?, I can't remember. '46. MB: Are you in this picture? LB: I am in this picture. MB: Which one are you? LB: There I am right there. MB: Right there. LB: Uh huh. MB: Do you know who any of these other fellows are? LB: No I don't. I know this guy he was from Kansas City. This guy here, he was from New York. Mel, he was from North Carolina. This guy here, he was from St. Louis I think. But I don't know. Johnny, he was from New York, but I don't know where they are, I never heard them anymore. Once we left… MB: Tell me what this is. LB: This here is a pass for, it says Vienna, Austria, back in 1946, the latter part of '45 and early part of '46. Each soldier needed a pass to get through the four different sections, mainly the northern section, the French section, the British section, and the western section. They would need a pass to go from one section to the other, with your name on it and on the other side… MB: Yeah, go ahead and turn it over for us. LB: OK. On this side you see here, the note that you've got the four different country flags. And each, there's writing in Russian, French, and American. MB: And you said something about when you were in Vienna that Americans and the French and British weren't allowed to carry weapons? LB: No we were not, only the Russians, they're the only ones that carried weapons. And also the Russians, when we was in that trucking outfit, we had to take our steering gear and ________ a chain to the ________ and loop it around the steering gear and lock it whenever we'd get out of the truck because the Russians were stealing the trucks. MB: The Russians were stealing the American trucks? LB: The American trucks. They were taking them. And the Russians, they didn't ask for anything, like they wanted something, they would just take it. MB: How did the Russians respond to you, both being black and also as an American? LB: We were the, we would ask them different questions. They would say _____ the won't, they would just take it. But they didn't, they were very friendly, but they would give us schnapps, not schnapps, vodka, the ___ vodka, sometimes we would exchange vodka with them for gasoline, gasoline for vodka they wanted gasoline, but anything they wanted they would take it, they didn't ask. Didn't have the courtesy to ask. COUNTER 242"],"dc_format":["video/quicktime"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Veterans History Project oral history recordings","Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center"],"dcterms_subject":["Racism--United States","World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American","World War, 1939-1945--Participation, African American","Moody, John, 1918-","Wings over Jordan (Choir : Cleveland, Ohio)","Paine College","United States. Army. Transport Service, 347th","United States. Army. Infantry Division, 92nd","United States. Army. Field Artillery Battalion, 597th","United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944","Buffalo Soldiers","347th Quartermaster Truck Company"],"dcterms_title":["Oral history interview of Lorenzo Bell, tape 2 of 2"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Atlanta History Center"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/317"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["This material is protected by copyright law. (Title 17, U.S. Code) Permission for use must be cleared through the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center. Licensing agreement may be required."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)","mini-dv"],"dcterms_extent":["18:53"],"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"geh_vhpohr_189","title":"Oral history interview of Nancy B. Brazell Brooks","collection_id":"geh_vhpohr","collection_title":"Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, 28.0, 3.0","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018","United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383","United States, Louisiana, Rapides Parish, Camp Livingston, 31.416973, -92.400298"],"dcterms_creator":["Kyle, Glen","Brooks, Nancy B. Brazell, 1930-"],"dc_date":["1939/1991"],"dcterms_description":["In this interview, Nancy Brooks describes life in Atlanta during World War II. She describes her family's reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her uncle was a civilian contractor there and helped with the cleanup. He also worked with the army in Korea and Vietnam. Her family entertained and sometimes boarded servicemen who were either traveling or injured. She recalls rationing, including coping with baggy rayon hose, since there were no nylon hose available. She also describes public transportation, the black market and segregation during this time. She attended Auburn University because Georgia Tech was not co-educational at that time; she wanted to study architecture. She describes her father's \"essential\" occupation of refrigeration engineer, and how that allowed him more gasoline for his travels. She also describes the nursing career of her aunt, Diana Rusk, who went overseas as a maxillofacial surgical nurse for the troops. 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