- Collection:
- Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
- Title:
- Oral history interview of Frank Parker Hudson
- Creator:
- Lacy, Margaret
Hudson, Frank Parker, 1918-2008 - Date of Original:
- 2003-08-23
- Subject:
- World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Hudson, Elizabeth Lee Pudlich, 1921-2001
Franklin, E. C.
Georgia Institute of Technology
United States. Army. Reserve Officers' Training Corps
United States. Army. Air Corps. Bombardment Squadron, 25th
Ancon (Steamship)
United States. Army. Corps of Engineers
United States. Office of Strategic Services
General Staff School (U.S.)
March Air Reserve Base (Calif.)
Ancon (ACG-4, Communications and command ship) - Location:
- Panama, Albrook Air Force Station
Panama, Chiriquí, David District, Corregimiento David, 8.42729, -82.43085
Panama, Panama Canal Zone, 8.9536841, -79.5376179437931
Panama, Rio Hato Army Air Base
Pan American Highway System
United States, Arizona, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, 32.17079565, -110.869902396303
United States, California, Riverside County, March Air Force Base, 33.89209, -117.2631
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Sumter County, Americus, 32.07239, -84.23269
United States, Kansas, Fort Leavenworth, 39.345184, -94.921703
United States, Maryland, Harford County, Aberdeen Proving Ground, 39.46686, -76.13066
United States, New York, Mitchel Field, 40.734982, -73.5944933 - Medium:
- video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv - Type:
- MovingImage
- Format:
- video/quicktime
- Description:
- In this interview, Frank Hudson recalls his service in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. After college, he became an ordnance officer in a new branch of the Army Air Corps known as Aviation Ordnance. After training, his unit spent time filling ammunition rounds and putting them in link belts to be sent to Murmansk, Russia, as part of the Lend-Lease program. His next duty was to protect the Panama Canal from Japanese attack. They discovered that bombs had been stored in revetments alongside the canal, so he spent several days loading and unloading bombs, including confiscating trucks and men from other nearby units. He recounts a story about painting bombs for less visibility from the air. He recalls how the U.S. was making treaties with Panama, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru to build bases in those countries. As a commander, he frequently traveled to each of these countries via the Galapagos Islands. He recalls the effect viral fevers had on the squadrons and their men. He was transferred to a stateside unit, where he was put into a training squadron so he requested a transfer. He was then sent to Moses Lake (Wash.) which was being built as a training base for B-29s, but it was not completed and he was sent back to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. There he ran a training program, where he trained personnel in bomb recognition. He supervised the script writing for two Army training films, "Bomb Handling I" and "Bomb Handling II," and was sent to California as a technical advisor. He discusses Consolidated Vultee building B-24 Liberators for the British under the Lend/Lease program; they were first known as LB (Land Bomber) 30s. He describes the first use of radar over the Galapagos Islands to pick up ships. He tells harrowing stories about some of his experiences in Panama. He relates the dangers of German submarine attacks, including attacks in Curaçao and Aruba, which were ports for oil tankers. He recalls his first days after the war and his time in the reserves. He explains that because he had studied the Army Courts Martial manual at ROTC, he often acted as a Judge Advocate General. He describes his philosophy of leadership and morale.
Frank Parker was in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II.
FRANK PARKER HUDSON VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW Atlanta History Center August 27, 2003 Interviewer: Margaret Lacy Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell TAPE 1 SIDE A Margaret Lacy: … and I am Margaret Lacy, and we are in the Atlanta History Center on August the 27th, and Mr. Frank Hudson is our speaker. Frank Hudson: Thank you, pleased to have the opportunity. ML: I didn't explain the introductory paragraph. You already know we're going to record what you did and where and when and anything else that you want to know about on the next sixty minutes of tape. We'll _ wrap up. You have given your name, and we have the current address, and where we are, but we need your date of birth and your address. FH: I was born in Americus, Georgia. That's in Sumter County, and I was born on the 12th of December, 1918. ML: And you were in which branch of the service in the war? FH: I was commissioned as an ordnance officer in 1941, and I served with the air force and then came back to the ordnance. ML: And the rank, when were you drafted, or did you enlist? FH: I was a senior ROTC student and went to summer camp after graduation from Tech. And that is why I got into the service on July 29, 1941. ML: Just before Pearl Harbor. FH: Long enough to get overseas and avoid what happened. ML: Where were you living at that time? FH: Where was I living, I was living at Georgia Tech until I went into ROTC camp, and then immediately after ROTC camp, I went into the service at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. ML: Can you recall your first days in the service, what did it feel like, what you did? FH: I was late for roll call. No, actually, my first, after being commissioned on a Saturday, we went back on Monday and started the special training for a new branch of the service called aviation ordnance. And we were ordered to active duty for one year and guaranteed we would be released in time enough to get home on such and such a date in, just one year of service is all we were signing up for. ML: _ where did you go after that? FH: Aberdeen and finished training in bombs and fuses and such things related to what we were going to be involved in. We were transferred to Mitchell Field on Long Island, New York, and waited for a boat . And we were there filling ammunition rounds, putting ammunition rounds in link belts, and the Russians, we shipped them to the Russian by _ for the lend-lease program in effect. We were supplying the Russians with ammunition. When I finished, when we got on the ship, we sailed to Panama. ML: Didn't go to Russia? FH: No, I wasn't going to Russia, no, no. I was going to have duty to protect the Panama Canal. So I was, went down to Panama on the ship Ancon, and we, upon arrival, we were, it was five other people, officers in the same condition as I was in. All of us assigned to Panama and none of us had on our dress uniforms, so we got off the ship, they loaded us up in the staff car and took us to a tailor downtown, in downtown Panama City for us to get our white dress uniforms and our dinner jackets so we could eat the mess at Aubrook Field. So while we're waiting for them to be delivered, they let us eat in the main dining room behind a screen. Really. ML: What was the rank you had at that time? FH: Second lieutenant, just a few days. ML: How long were you there? FH: I was at Aubrook Field and without any special uniforms, I was sent to Riohato, which was a training base that we were renting from the Panamanians, up on the west coast of the Republic of Panama. And we were on the Gulf of Panama. They had troops who would come up from the Canal Zone and do training exercises and so forth. And you could not, we could not fly an American flag, that was part of the treaty with Panama that, for us to use that base. One of the rules was you could not fly the American flag. So one thing that happened was that the day Pearl Harbor, the next morning, I had a Confederate flag flying in front of base headquarters, and it stayed there until I left. The Panamanians just loved it, and I didn't violate the treaty. But I was there long enough to outfit two companies and, we had no draftees… ML: All volunteers. FH: They were all regulars, all the officers were, whatever, but the all soldiers were regular army. Under the draft rules that no draftee could be sent overseas until we win the war. So the interesting part of it, as a second lieutenant, I commanded, I was the only officer in commanding two companies plus I was the base ordnance officer. And it converted from an infantry base to an Army Air Corps base overnight when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. We, all the bombs that we had, a very few bombs stored at Riohato, but all the bombs in the Canal Zone to take to defend the canal were in the rebuttments alongside the canal. And they suddenly realized that if they blew up one of those bomb storage places, they'd shut the canal down. So they decided to send all those bombs to me up at Riohato. So I had night and day, 24 hours a day, for several days, was unloading bombs, kicking them off the rear end of trucks. We confiscated trucks from the army corps of engineers who were building the Pan-American highway, coerced them into duty, hauling bombs eighty miles from the Canal Zone up to Riohato. And just kicking and hiding them under trees, that's all we could do with them. We had quite a few experiences with army bureaucracy I'd call it. The rules were in those days that high explosives had to be painted yellow, bright yellow. So when then, in a month or two, the drought season came and all the leaves fell off the trees, and you could see those yellow bombs for miles and miles and miles if a plane came in. So we started painting them olive drab. We got them all, got them all painted, and we had a visitor from Quarry Heights, which was the headquarters of the Caribbean Defense Command, and he said the regulations say those bombs have to be yellow. I want you to paint them yellow right away. Well, we drug our tails and about three days later, an order came out that all bombs would henceforth be olive drab. ML: They were already olive drab? FH: We already painted them olive drab. We painted the yellow to olive drab and then this colonel ordered us to paint them back to yellow. And in the meantime, they flew in all these planes, and we were overnight, I guess, the world's largest airbase, but that didn't last long. We started, they were busy making treaties with Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, and Panama for additional bases down there to protect, to put in airfields to protect against the Japanese coming in from the west. So I supervised, I had a company, I ended up with one company in platoons in five foreign countries. In those days, the company commander had to pay the men off once a month, and the only way I could get around was fly with the bombers out to Galapagos and then fly back with another crew that was flying back to another base because we all flew from the mainland out to the base on the Galapagos islands. They had lunch and then flew back so I could go out there and end up, I could go out there from Panama and end up in Guatemala or go out there from Panama and end up in Peru. So it was quite an experience but it soon started the allotment system so everybody could send money. They'd take money out of the pay and send it to a bank or to the wives or whatever those rules were. But I was transferred, excuse me, I had a lieutenant in charge of a platoon in Ecuador who had to have his phone installed in the latrine because everybody down there was getting bowel ailments of all sorts. So I got orders cut for me to go down there and relieve him for a month. And he came back to Riohato to operate in my place. But I had to take his place with the 25th Bombardment Squadron. And while I was there, secret orders came out from Washington freezing everybody that was attached to the air corps to integrate us into the air corps. And you remained in your present position. Very shortly, orders came out for the 25th Bomb Squadron to be sent overseas, and I went back to the states with the 25th Bombardment Squadron and went to Davis _ Field in Tucson, Arizona. And after one month leave and at the end, we got back and reported back to duty, and none of the fly boys could pass physical exams because of dysentery and diarrhea. And they put them all in training including me, we were all put into a training command in the 2nd Air Force. So here I am with all this experience in bomb handling with a company at Davis _ Field filling practice bombs with sand for the boys to take out and drop. And that didn't go very well, so I started complaining and sent a request for transfer. And it had to go the 2nd Air Force in Spokane, Washington, before it went on to Washington. And there at Spokane was Colonel E. C. Franklin, who had been my ROTC instructor at Georgia Tech. And he called me on the phone and says, I know what you want, you're tired of seeing everybody else get promoted and you can't get promoted because you're moving too fast, moving too many places. So he says, I'm going to get your orders over there to send you to Moses Lake, Washington. And that was a base being built for the B-29s to fly out of Moses Lake to go to the Aleutian islands and from there to Japan. It turned out we didn't need it because we took Saipan and Tinnean in the meantime, and these bases didn't ever fulfill their missions. But I was only at Moses Lake a little over a month when Hap, General Hap Arnold ordered me back to Aberdeen Proving Ground to run the school for the aviation ordnance that I had been a student, where I had been a student. So I was an instructor for several months, and then they made me chief, and then they made me, combined several sections and I became chief of the small arms aviation ordnance section at the ordnance school. We had five thousand or more students going through all the time. Some of them are on one-week course, some of them are on six weeks courses, always great time coming through and being educated in the finer points of ordnance. And we trained a lot of OSS personnel, we had a, there was a collection, museum, I think they called it, of foreign ordnance. And we were teaching the OSS which was the precursor of the C.I.A. and all these civilians came through. We were teaching them what different things were, mainly by sight because they were going behind the Iron Curtain. Not the Iron Curtain then, into German territory and reporting back. They were mostly foreigners, and they were reporting back just what they were seeing. ML: __. FH: In, I went back in early '43, early 1943 is when I went back. We kept expanding the school and training more people. I wanted to go overseas and fight so badly, but they had a rule at the ordnance school that if you had ever been overseas, you couldn't go until everybody else went. And, of course, I soon realized that that could never happen because every class that we graduated, they would pick the best students and make them instructors and send our instructors out, let them go overseas. So I just relaxed and did my job. Got married and… I supervised the writing of the script for two army training films, bomb handling. The films were on bomb handling titled “Bomb Handling 1” and “Bomb Handling 2.” And we, the scripts were for films that they were planning to shoot in Hollywood. Then they decided that they needed a technical advisor, so then the whole, they didn't know, nobody knew as much about handling bombs as I did. So I was sent out there to, over Christmas in 1944, Christmas 1943, which took me into 1944. I was in Beverly Hills with the Signal Corps Photographic Center making these films from the scripts that we had written. Santa Anita racetrack had been converted, there was no racing, and they converted it to an ordnance base so we had lots of training going on there anyway. So a lot of the shots were taken there and at _ was out at Lawrence Field at Riverside. Let's see, what else was… they had a hotel with . . . the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Hollywood was filled up with technical advisors and their families and I didn't have any family. So when I got there, there was no room at the inn. So the mother superior, secretary at the Signal Corps Photographic Center says, well, I'll take care of you. She had two young children and she had rented the Duhaney residence on Duhaney Drive. And if you're old enough to know the Duhaney, the big scandal in the oil business, _ down a lot of politicians I think, it was in Calvin Coolidge's period as being president. But anyway, we had that house, and she filled it up with… ML: _ big house. FH: Oh, it was, we had one family with three kids there, a captain and his wife and three kids. And we had, there were bachelors like myself, but it was a nice experience, and I saved enough money to come back and buy a ring and ask her to marry me. So that was, and I did get married June 3, 1944. My service continued, and when the war was over, I was offered the job of going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and doing the surveying. And the offer was that you'd come back to Twenty-nine Palms, California, and write your report and then you would be released. Well, I'd been fooled on those kind of promises before, so I said no, I think I'm going to go to Atlanta, Georgia. That's right. And I had the points system, you know the point system is what got us out. So the first day that Fort George Meade of Maryland opened up for processing of release of soldiers, I was in line. I was there and was released there in, let's see, September, October, my last day official was in January 1945. Not, January 1946. But I had a, I had time before other people by the thousands were discharged. I could go in Baltimore, I could go in, buy a suit of clothes and white shirts. And when I got to Atlanta and signed up for my career job, I needed more clothes, and you go to Parks Chambers or Zachary's or Muse's, and there was nothing hanging on the shelves, nothing. And you'd sit down and they'd bring out one suit and they'd ask you to try it on. The Navy boys, the Navy officers had it great because they had white shirts when white shirts just weren't available. It was quite an experience. So I never shot at anyone, no one ever shot at me. I had experiences that were life-threatening, but nothing happened. I survived. ML: _ paying. FH: No, uh. ML: How many different countries were you in? FH: Guatemala, Panama, two places, David and Riohato, skipped the Canal Zone, I just go in there and get out and had my wisdom teeth taken out. Flew nine hundred miles to get my wisdom teeth removed. Ecuador, Peru, and the Galapagos Islands, they're on Ecuador so that's really one country. One of my experiences happened within two or three days after the war started. We had a, the airplanes that were there before they started bringing in our B-30s which we later called B-24s, we were making their B-30s. I believe Consolidated _ was building them for the British in the lend-lease, and when we got in the war, they just, I say converted them to right hand drive, left hand drive, whatever it is. And we just took them off the assembly line, and it was the first use of radar. The British had developed radar, they get credit for that. And we were using it flying from the mainland out to the Galapagos Islands to try to pick up any ships that might be coming in, from all these bases, flying out there and going back everyday. And so they never left a square inch uncovered by using the radar. And we had the B-24s and the B-17s, several different versions of the B-17s. But when I got down there, we had B-18s, and that's like an old DC-3 converted into a bomber. And we had a report there was a sub in the water out off our base, and they rushed a B-18 out and in taking off, it flew into a barracks. And it killed a colonel, engineer officer, and a major, the head officers there, and they were playing pinochle at night. And there was no fire, no explosion, but all the bombs were laying out in a disabled airplane, I tell you it was disabled. It lost an engine, there were just two engines, and it lost an engine on take off, and just curved right down into the barracks. I, surveying this situation, decided that the thing to do was to get the fuses out of the bombs and get the bombs out of there because the fuses were armed. They pulled, the weight of gravity, momentum and everything else ripped the bombs out of the bomb racks, and the fuses armed that way. And that's the dangerous situation when we had four or five hundred pound bombs that were armed, two of them were armed in the nose and one of them was armed in the tail. And I, we didn't have any real flood lights, operating with flash lights, and I decided that the safest thing to do was just let everything sit there until daylight. About this time, this colonel who was the base commander, he came rushing over and took a look at the situation. He says, get them out of there. I said, we're going to wait to daylight, with all due respect, blah, blah, blah. He says get them out of there now. So I called for volunteers and got one sergeant who was a, wonderful troops, always had wonderful troops. They got into troubles of all kinds but I kept them out of trouble for real, never had one prosecuted but had plenty of reasons to save their souls. Keeping on duty, one sergeant was willing to go in with me and we went in and we slowly extracted the fuses and handed them out one at a time. Of course, we evacuated the area, had to do that. So that was the beginning of the bomb… ML: Did you know what you were going to get out, _? FH: Did I know, no. No, it was definitely risky business because the fuse is armed, if you just bump it, it'll blow up the bomb. We got those, we got them defused, and then of course took the bombs out and put them bomb in the bomb _, they weren't damaged at all, the steel case bombs full of TNT. And then once I was flying back from Guatemala City to Riohato and the group commander was, I was on his staff, and he was the pilot for this trip. And he was, they had just changed out of, the work order had come out from Washington to put these new spark plugs in, these are Pratt and Whitney engines on the B-17. And the work order came from Washington, everybody to change to these new plugs. Well, these new plugs fouled up right quick and we were out over the water, and we had silence. You couldn't, unless you were actually ditching, you could not call for help or anything. So this B-18, we didn't have enough chutes for the people that were on it, a lot of people were traveling, staffs and so forth going. And we, I guess we were about 500 miles out when we lost one engine. They feathered the props on that engine, so we were running on three engines, which is not unsafe, but it wasn't long before another engine got rough on the same side. And the first thing you know, you had to kill that engine, tore the engine out of the wing. The backfiring was, you know, slapping the side of the aluminum, where we were back in the back of the plane. As we were approaching David, which a city in the northern republic of Panama, and we had an airbase there that was owned by an airline. And they had a little tower out there with one man with a red and green light, that's all it was. Tower is twenty or thirty feet high. And he was up there with a red light and green light. Panagra was the airline that owned this, and it was a grass field. And as we were approaching, one of the engines on the right side started acting up. And we didn't even make an effort to go around or anything else. Radio silence and all these other problems came in. But that tower operator realized something was wrong and it was a Panagra plane, it was at the end of the runway revving up for take off, and we came in over the top of him askew with just the engines on one side operating the plane, running through the air like this. And you have to cut the engines and make a dead stick landing and let the plane straighten out. We went over the top of that Panagra plane sitting there at the, I guess it was twenty, thirty feet at the most. And just set it down, just straightened it up like this. But we lost all the hydraulics and everything and everybody was up there operating the manual pumps to get the wheels down and do everything else like that, that was necessary for our landing. You're too busy to be… we dropped the bombs at sea. We didn't arm them, we let them go when the bombing device sent them. And we threw all the 50 caliber machine guns out. We were about ready to ditch a few other things but didn't dare. And we did land with no engines and coasted to a stop and everybody got out and kissed the ground. That was the, those two experiences with getting the bombs out of the barracks and this coming in on a wing and a prayer was the only other experience that I had that was not good time Charlie. ML: Right at the beginning, you mentioned _. Was there much enemy activity _, did you see it? FH: No, we never knew about the submarine. We had a squadron at Riohato that was sent down to _ in Aruba because that's where all of our gasoline was coming from, Aruba. And Aruba had a harbor and so forth and they had submarine gates, you know, wires, what do you call them, traps, that they'd put down, every time a ship would come in they'd do that. Well, a submarine sneaked in there and blew up many tankers. One of the war activities you've probably never ever heard of, they did, one German submarine got in there and he got away. That was early in the war. We were trying to protect against anything, the Japanese, you never, the Pacific is so vast and you never know, like how they got to Pearl Harbor without being noticed is still a mystery to me. And when we, when you look at the Canal, if we, if the Canal had been closed, the war with Japan would have gone, we'd probably had to use the atomics a lot sooner than we did if… ML: We didn't have it any sooner. FH: No, you're right. But anyway, I'm proud of my service and I decided when the war was over that I would stay in the reserves, ‘cause after four and a half years, if you make twenty, but I stayed in the reserves and taught the command general staff college for ten or twelve years, both at Fort Leavenworth on active duty for some, two weeks here and two weeks there. And Sundays down at the USO in the old Ford plant on Ponce de Leon. ML: __ discharge date, and you said you went into career after that. I guess was it later. Was that what you were doing in the ROTC, or did you have a different career type? FH: No, my, that was, when you're in the reserves, you're two weeks a year. No, my career as an engineer was sales and services of engineered products to industry, and I ended up, well, this is not war experience, it's something else, but I ended up at four companies here in Atlanta. When I retired I turned them over to the guys _ and said, I walked out in 1987 and turned it over to them. ML: _ when you were in the service, friendships that kept while _ were you able to, was it possible to keep up with those associations? FH: A very few. Mainly because they're scattered, other parts of the country. Some _ knew I was closer to so many other people. And in my business I was traveling a lot, covering Georgia, Alabama, and Florida for many months and then finally reduced it down to just Georgia. But my association and friends that kept on were those that stayed in the reserves. My social life in the post-war years was divided up between company and career, church activities, the hobby genealogy, and my buddies that I was with in the army reserves. And interestingly enough, very few of those fields ever co-mingled. ML: _ medals or citations? FH: I had the army commodation ribbon, I had the American defense service medal, and then all those things that they gave us at the end of the war, the ruptured duck, the flying, everybody who got out TAPE 1 SIDE B …with honorable discharge got a pin. I've still got it, never ever wore it, it's called the ruptured duck. That and I think, World War II victory medal, and the lapel victory pin, and the army commendation ribbon. That's the highest award I had. ML: What's the army commendation medal? FH: Exemplary service, you could never have fired a gun or anything, if you really performed your job and helped others, then you were awarded this. And there weren't too many of them given away. I got mine for what I did at Aberdeen, the administration of all of those students going through all the time. How are we doing on time? ML: _ see what you wanted to say on the _, that was one of my questions which I really want you to have to say first, when all this action started, did you have any idea how it long it would go on? FH: Far as I was concerned, it was going to go on one year. In July of 1942, I would be home, that's what my orders read. Yes, and I finally was free of all obligations under the war time in January of 1946. Summer of '41. ML: __? FH: No, I was always busy, never, I never had few occasions of shooting the bull or any of those other things. When I was, while we were in the service. ML: In those years, did you even get on leave? FH: Well, so much of your leave was stored up, saved, there was no opportunity to take it. But my leave when I was discharged in, I think I was discharged in September or maybe October, but I had to be at home. I had to be released _. They did put me, I had four or five months of pay… ML: _ school. FH: Yes, it really was. ML: Did the military experience that you had influence your thinking about war or about the military in general? FH: I don't know. It did not influence my future life because I had goals other than the military, and I served my time as most every other one did. I didn't join the American Legion, I didn't join the Veterans of Foreign Wars. They're good time Charlie affairs mainly, and I, there's camaraderie there, and I attended a couple of meetings as guests of people trying to get me to join, but I never did join. ML: I think you've answered the next possibility too, how did your service experience affect your life? FH: Well, it, maturity, responsibilities, learning how to deal with people. But knowing one thing, having been in the army, I knew I never wanted to go with a big company, never. ML: Is that why you started your own? FH: I went in partnership with one man and stayed and I was always the boss. Yes. ML: Are you sure we covered everything, is there anything else? FH: Well, I, without getting into real personal things, but I'll share one thing I just thought of. The, at Georgia Tech in the ROTC program, you had drills and then you had classes, and one of the things that you had in your senior year was the army court martial manual, the whole procedure of court martial and all that goes on with regard to duties and everything concerning it. And I didn't know I'd ever have much use of that, but when I got in, attached to the air corps, the air corps boys, the flyboys, they didn't have any experience with, no instruction or anything, the officers didn't even know what to do with a court martial. And when there was reasons to have court martials, everywhere I went, I was the trial judge advocate, I did all the prosecuting. And I fought _ in the guard house, AWOL, oh, you know, everything that goes on with a group of men. I got the duty. And it never, I never thought I would have that experience, but I did, and I'm not a lawyer by any means, but I know what the manual says. ML: I bet you do. FH: I know what the manual says. ML: _ that you had to handle _. FH: And morale. My company, my two companies were not up to strength. One was aviation ordnance pursuit and the other one was aviation ordnance bombardment. And neither one of them were up to strength, but when we started doing those bombs and all those other regular soldiers were sitting around doing nothing, we were swamped for requests for transfers. Everybody wanted to get in my unit, one of them. And a lot of them would be released and allowed to transfer, a lot of them weren't. But the unit morale, it was one of the things that I always made a point of. And this court martial was never for my troops, it was always some other troops. Like in Salinas, Ecuador. They had a, they sent down a West Virginia National Guard unit, they had National Guard officers and all the guys the same home town. And they sent them down there with a 155 mm field artillery pieces and set them up there, and they were going to protect our airbase from any attack that came in from the water. And those guys, the officers, the company commander was the, I forget what his commission was, but one of them was, they were all National Guard now and they had not been regular army. And they, they were goof-offs, the whole crowd was, and they caused more problems just because they didn't have anything to do. It really was make-work, it wasn't what we were doing, and we had a lot of, and such things as you'd declare an area of a little town with nothing but straw shacks or mud shacks or whatever they were building, and their whore houses and trying to, you'd declare them off limits. Then they got arrested by the MPs and put in the jail. ML: Going back to the _ morale thing, what were some of the ways that worked and _ at that time? FH: Same thing that works today, treat everybody as an individual and treat them with respect regardless of what their position is and thank them publicly for jobs well done and condemn then in private for goof-offs. That works for me. ML: How were you able to keep in touch with your family? FH: By letter. Well, I had girlfriends and my one month leave when I came, got off the ship in Los Angeles harbor and when I came back from Panama, yeah, from central America was to go home _ two girlfriends in Macon that I had been writing to. One of whom was up at Vanderbilt, and the other one was in Macon. I had a girlfriend at St. Louis at George Washington University, and I made good time straightening out things and wishing them luck, and they all got married shortly. ML: Not to you. FH: Not to me. Well, I wasn't ready to get married. But it was only when they told me I could not go back overseas up at Aberdeen that I was, really got interested, and I met this wonderful person, and we were married for fifty-eight years. She died December 23, 2001, fifty-eight years. Wonderful woman. ML: Had some good years? FH: Yes, thank you, I did. ML: Thank you for talking about the most memorable experiences _. FH: No, I think we've bragged enough. I might get telling lies. It's hard to, I do have memory problems today, particularly quick connection. You know, go out of this room to do three things and forget what I went out for. After I walk out of here, I'll probably think of a thing or two that I should have said. They're going to accumulate enough information up there. ML: Do you have books _, manuals? FH: No, not, I started doing family history research, and from that I found out that in Georgia, you couldn't go back up the country, reverse migration because you got bogged down in Wilkes County. And forty-five percent of all the free people lived in Wilkes County when they took the 1790 census, in one county. Well, very few people know it. We have the statistics but we don't have the schedules, census schedules are lost. British burned them when they sacked Washington. But it took the tax records, bits and pieces for Wilkes County from 1785 to 1805 and you'll find two big volumes that weigh twelve pounds down in your library on the tax records of Wilkes County, Georgia, by Frank Parker Hudson. ML: That's you. FH: And all the money, giving all the money that's been made, and it's sizeable, more than I thought it would ever, is going to three organization that are saving the loose records in our courthouses. ML: Which three organizations? FH: Georgia Genealogical Society, Augusta Genealogical Society, and the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board. That's a state organization, official organization for the state. And it's well over thirty thousand dollars that they've taken in. Until I got hurt lifting my wife, I did all the packing and shipping too, in my basement, and I finally had to just give them the rest of the books. ML: So you've been a genealogy expert and authority also. FH: Well, if you talk about an old Georgia family that was in north or northeast Georgia, I can pretty well tell you where they came from. ML: There is one date and one question, do you recall what you did on the day your service ended? FH: It was just like any other day. In January when I got my last paycheck. ML: Did you know what you were going to do then? FH: I was already doing it. ML: I want to thank you so much. FH: Well, I've enjoyed it. ML: Now it gets to be _. FH: Well, it's, I'm just one little plug. ML: _ hero service _. FH: In the dike, just one little plug, but I really enjoyed it. Thank you, thank you for putting up with me. - Metadata URL:
- http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/cdm/ref/collection/VHPohr/id/216
- Additional Rights Information:
- 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.
- Extent:
- 1:03:57
- Original Collection:
- Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center - Contributing Institution:
- Atlanta History Center
- Rights:
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