March 2006

Frank Eastman –

How WW II changed my life.

I wanted to add my comments to your collection because WW II completely changed my life. I can remember that when the news of Pearl Harbor came over the radio, I was walking to my friend’s house in the little town in Iowa where I grew up. I was a sophomore in high school at the time. We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing how the beginning of the war would affect us. Soon many of the young men in town were eager to serve in the military long before the U. S. officially declared war on Germany and Japan. Even before Pearl Harbor some local young men had gone to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to help defend England against the German air raids. As the war effort built momentum the draft was initiated and it became obvious that many young people would eventually be inducted into the military. My friend was two years older than I and he graduated from high school the following June. He joined a program called the Army Specialized Training Program. He was sent to college to learn physics so that he could become a specialist in radar. I continued in high school, participated in paper drives, scrap drives, air raid training, etc. just like the others have described. In the middle of my senior year in high school it became evident that I would be drafted soon after I graduated from school. I wanted very much to get into some kind of interesting technology in the military. Since I was very interested in radio, I enlisted in the U. S. Army Reserves before I graduated from high school with the understanding that I would enter the Signal Corps as soon as I graduated.

One month after I graduated from high school I was inducted into the Signal Corps at Camp Dodge, Iowa. After about three or four days at Camp Dodge, where I was given a physical exam, given several immunizations, issued uniforms, etc. I was given a railroad ticket to Camp Crowder, Missouri and dumped off at the railroad station. It was late in the afternoon and my train didn’t leave until 3 AM. By about 11 PM I was very tired but a nice man offered to let me sleep in his room at the local YMCA. I was so naive that it was several years until I learned enough to know that I had been raped that night. Even years later I remained naive and so it did not traumatize me. The remaining trip to Joplin, Missouri introduced me to Jim Crow for the first time in my life.

I went through basic training at Camp Crowder for about 6 weeks. We learned how to salute, march, recognize different ranks, obey orders, and remember all the regulations that we were required to know. We also saw many military training films, some of which featured Ronald Reagan. Basic training was very dull and Southern Missouri is a lousy place to be stationed. When basic training was complete, I was loaded onto a troop train with many other soldiers and sent to Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. I was one of the soldiers assigned to KP duty on the train. I had to rise at 4 AM and report to the kitchen car on the train. My first duty was to empty the trash. At that time emptying the trash meant taking the trash to the door of the car and throwing in out onto the tracks. Just as I opened the door to dump the trash, we were passing through the gap in the mountains between Eastern Ohio and Pennsylvania. I had never seen mountains before and the sunrise silhouetted the mountains of Pennsylvania. I stood there for many minutes drinking in the astonishing sight.

When we arrived at Fort Monmouth we were formed into training companies and began the task of becoming radio operators. We learned Morse code and gradually improved the speed with which we could send and receive the code. I progressed rapidly and soon became trained in copying Morse code on the typewriter. I eventually achieved a speed between 25 and 30 words per minute when qualified me as Radio Operator, High Speed Automatic. We were then formed into teams, which were capable of operating a radio station on our own. We had radio operators, transmitter technicians, and riggers. We trained to become independent and self-sufficient in the field at various locations in New Jersey including a 100-year-old house in a small town and an old CCC camp. We also received weapons training to be able the use the M30 carbine, Thompson submachine gun, 50-caliber machine gun and rifle and grenade training.

New Jersey was a great place to train because it was so near New York City. It was easy to hitchhike to almost anyplace in the state and the train and ferry service to NYC was not very expensive. The city was very hospitable to servicemen, many churches and synagogues offered places to sleep for the night and free meals were available almost everywhere. The telephone company maintained a call center in New York where servicemen could book calls to their hometowns. I remember booking a call to Iowa from there and the technology was such that it took 2 hours for the call to go through and it cost me $7.50 for a three-minute call. There were places to go to get free tickets to movies, Broadway shows, parties, etc. I once accepted an offer to attend a Thanksgiving dinner. I followed the directions to a loft in the garment district and went upstairs to find that the employees had cleaned all the equipment and materials out of a large room and replaced it with several large tables. The tables were loaded with turkeys, hams, casseroles, desserts and many other foods that were hard to get in wartime. One table was filled with liquor, which was almost impossible to get at the time. After many drinks and a lot of food several of the girls at the party asked us GIs if we would like to go out for pizza. They took us to a restaurant in Greenwich Village and ordered pizza. I didn’t know what pizza was and didn’t know how to eat it. They showed me how to pick it up, fold it in the center and eat it from your hand. Growing up in a small town had deprived me of many experiences.

Toward the end of 1944 our team was informed that we would soon be shipped overseas. We were given all of the equipment necessary to operate in the field and packed it up for shipment. Several of the men on the team packed up some of their personal items along with the equipment with the assumption that we would be reunited with the equipment when we arrived at our destination. We never saw that equipment again. A few weeks later, we were sent to New York City and housed in a hotel on Sutton Place. We stayed there for two or three days until we were sent to Fort Totten on Long Island to board a plane to fly overseas. We had no idea what our ultimate destination would be.

We took off in the early evening in C-54, one of the half dozen that had been in airline service at the beginning of the war and was commandeered by the Air Corps. It was a different version because it had plush seats rather than military bucket seat version. We flew from Long Island to Saint Johns, Newfoundland in the night. It was my first-ever flight in an airplane and I was enthralled. We arrived in Saint Johns early in the morning and were sent to the mess hall for breakfast while they refueled the plane and briefed a new flight crew. We left Saint Johns in the morning and flew to the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic. We arrived that night and found that the islands were fogged in. We circled the islands for about two hours trying to find a way to land. The airport pointed their searchlights straight up into the clouds so that we could find them. After making several passes over the airport we finally descended through the fog and landed on the PSP runway. We went through the mess hall for a meal and waited for takeoff the next morning. In the morning we took off and flew to Casablanca in Morocco. We stayed in Casablanca just long enough to rest up for the remainder of our journey.

We flew across North Africa in C-47s and C-46s. Needless to say, North Africa was totally new and foreign to me. The vast expanses of desert pockmarked with bomb craters were far from the things I saw as a child in Iowa. We stopped at a place called Castel Benito in Tripoli. The hangar at the edge of the airfield was riddled with bullet holes from the strafings that it had received. It was disconcerting despite the fact that the military action had long since ceased in North Africa. We proceeded on to Alexandria in Egypt where I got my first and only introduction to British food. We ate in a British mess hall at Alexandria and the meal consisted of tinned corned beef and hardtack biscuits. The corned beef was served cold and it was very fatty. When we finished we took our mess kits out in back to wash them. We were provided with garbage cans filled with cold water for washing the mess kits. There was a 2” layer of fat floating on top of the water. We took our mess kits out into the desert, filled them with sand, scoured them out with the sand and then dumped it. After that experience I knew that it was a lot better to be in the U. S. Army than the British army.

From Alexandria we flew to Oman on the Persian Gulf. The one thing that impressed me about Oman was the heat. As we descended towards landing it became hotter and hotter as our altitude decreased. When we landed it was unbearably hot and there was no shade. We stayed there only for a few hours then took off for Karachi, India (in those days it was a part of India but it is now part of Pakistan.) The sight of the base as we were approaching a landing was astounding. The base was part of a camp that the British had established to train the troops that made up the British Eighth Army, which fought in North Africa. The camp extended for miles in all directions. It was huge. We stayed in Karachi for about a month. Again the heat was a real problem. Our barracks had no doors and the roof was made of tile. There was a one-foot gap between the walls and the roof so that any breeze could enter the rooms and cool it a little. It was so hot that we didn’t go out during the day. We waited for the sun to go down then went out in the relative cool of the night. While we slept at night the jackals would come into the barracks and steal our shoes. I was here that I first noticed and interesting custom in India. As we went through the villages we noticed that most of the houses had disks of (what appeared to be mud) plastered on the outer walls and each had a handprint in the center. We later found that the disks were cow dung placed there to dry. When dry they were used as fuel in the kitchen stove.

After Karachi, we flew to Calcutta, India. Since we were only troops in transit, we had no particular duties and spent our time reading, playing poker, etc. We ate in a mess hall that had been built for British troops. It had a thatched roof. One of the army nurses had a British pilot as a boyfriend. He would show off to her by buzzing the mess hall at lunchtime. When he did, the wingtip vortices from his Spitfire shook the thatch and bits and pieces rained down on the tables. We also had an interesting experience with the kites. I first noticed this the first day we ate at the mess hall. As we stood outside waiting to wash our mess kits, I was standing with the mess kit held out at my side. All of a sudden I heard a crash and the scraps of food from my kit were scattered around me. I looked up and the kites were circling around the line of soldiers and, when you were not alert, the birds would dive on your mess kit and grab scraps of food from your kit. After that we brought extra food with us and tossed it up for the kites to dive at. Some would throw the food into the telephone wires hoping to get the kites to collide with the wires. We stayed in Calcutta for about a month. One experience there really stuck in my mind. We were taken into Calcutta on an army bus and wandered around the city for a day. We saw the sights around Calcutta and returned to base late at night. We had to leave through Victoria Station in Calcutta. It was a large railroad terminal, almost as large as Grand Central Station. During the day it was busy with people coming and going to all sort of destinations. At night the poor people of the town gathered in the terminal, unwrapped the loincloths that they wore during the day, used the cloths as blankets and slept on the floor of the terminal. The floor was covered with sleeping people with only two narrow lanes for others to come and go. They looked like corpses awaiting burial after some kind of natural disaster.

We left Calcutta by train on a railroad operated by American GIs. We went from Calcutta to an air base in northern India called Chabua. The trip was a real adventure. The railroad had been purchased from several small railroad companies in India by the Army Transportation Command. Unfortunately the individual railroad companies had used different track gauges when the originally built the tracks. The net result required us to change trains whenever the track gauge changed. A trip that should have taken a day took several because we had to change trains three or four times and, on one occasion, get off the train and take a ferry across a river. The scenery along the way was beautiful and got more exotic as we got closer to the border with Burma. Because we were heading towards Japanese occupied territory in Burma, we were issued 45 rounds of ammunition for the trip. Some of the soldiers used it to shoot at insulators on the telegraph poles along the track. During the trip one of the soldiers got tired of the cockroaches in the railroad car so he got an DDT spray can, which was novel at the time, and sprayed DDT all over the inside of the car. Unbeknownst to him, there were thousands of cockroaches hidden in the cracks in the walls of the car. Before anyone knew what was happening, the car filled with cockroaches running in all directions. They eventually all died and left the floor of the car slippery with squashed cockroaches. The worst victim of the problem was a GI who had rounded up a large cube of ice at the last village and had it stowed in his steel helmet so he could have cold drinking water. After the DDT episode his ice cube and water had several hundred cockroaches floating in it.

We stayed in Chabua for a couple of days and then boarded a C-47 to fly over the Himalayas to China. The C-47 was not pressurized and we had to fly at altitudes over 14,000 feet so we were supplied with oxygen at each of the bucket seats. We were also supplied with blankets to deal with the cold at altitudes. The flight was uneventful but interesting because we flew through the valleys to reach our destination. We arrived at Kunming in western China, which was to be my home for the next several months.

At Kunming we operated the communications center for China Theater Headquarters. As such we had short-wave communication links with Calcutta, New Delhi, Manila, Honolulu, Chungking, Kweilin, Kweiyang and other military locations in China. I finally got to experience of being a real Radio Operator, High Speed, Automatic. Our links with Calcutta and Manila used high speed equipment that allowed us to send and receive Morse code at more than a hundred words per minute, an unusually high rate for the time. Users of high-speed internet connections cannot possibly appreciate how primitive communications were in the 1940s. Our communications with other bases within China was by means of manual Morse code. Kweilin was a B-29 base from which many bombing missions over Japan originated so we had a lot of radio traffic with them. To operate that channel we used manual duplex. We had an operator sending at our end and an operator receiving at our end. At Kweilin they had a sending operator and a receiver operating. At each end the sending operator would send messages continuously unless he was interrupted. The receiving operator would copy whatever was sent from the other end until he made a copy error. Upon making a copy error the receiving operator would interrupt the sending operator and send to the other end the word he had last copied correctly. The sending operator at the other end would resume transmission after the last correctly received word. Because these interruptions slowed down traffic speed and accuracy were at a premium. Operating for a full 8-hour shift in the duplex mode was exhausting.

One additional interesting feature of working in the communications center was that we hosted a French Lieutenant who was supporting several clandestine agents from Indo-China who were spying on the Japanese. He would come in daily and listen to their radio transmissions which had been pre-arranged, decode the messages and prepare responses. Each agent would include in their messages a coded time when they would send their next transmission. After making up the responses the Lieutenant would wait until the agents had enough time to move to a safe place after their transmissions and then send the responses to them. By constantly moving themselves and the times they transmitted the agents escaped detection by the Japanese.

I continued in that job until the end of WW II. We upgraded our high-speed links a new technology called radio-teletype. The speed was lower at 60 words per minute but it required fewer people for support. I vividly remember the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan because the messages came over the radio-teletype in plain text, un-enciphered. The soldiers were both astonished and enthusiastic. We knew that the war would be over in a few days. Within two or three days be began to receive messages containing page after page of lists of the prisoners of war who had been released from camps in Manchuria. Two weeks after the war ended I was sent with several other members of our battalion to Shanghai to set up a new communications center there. We flew by C-54 and landed at field that had been built for fighter aircraft. The runways were so short that we almost overran the end of the runway. As we rode into the city Japanese soldiers, who were still guarding the city, saluted us. In Shanghai we were billeted in the German District School. In pre-war times it was a high school for the German population of Shanghai. My bunk was in the chemistry laboratory. We set up our radio station in a commercial building called the Wheelock building previously owned by a British company. We set up radio teletype links with Tokyo, Honolulu, Manila, Calcutta , Beijing and other places. Our radio transmitters were housed in the buildings of the Shanghai racecourse. The giant rhombic antennas were erected in the infield of the racetrack. Life quickly settled down into a kind of nine-to-five operation. We worked eight-hour shifts but a different shift each day, the first day 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, the next day 4:00 PM until Midnight then the next day Midnight until 8:00 AM. By that time I had risen in rank and I was a shift chief on one of the shifts.

After several months of the nine-to-five job, I got notice that I was being sent to Chungking on a new assignment. Although I wasn’t told so at the time, I finally discovered that I had been sent to support the mission of General Marshall to negotiate a settlement between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung. They met in Chungking, which was the capital of China in those times, to settle their differences over who should be the rightful leader of China. Mao had his headquarters in Yenan and he consulted regularly by radio with his supporters there. Our job at the radio station was to eavesdrop on the conversations between Mao and Yenan, transmit the data to Washington for translation and then present the resulting translations to Marshall so that he would know what Mao was doing. I continued in that job until I was finally sent on a three-week boat trip to San Francisco. Then I was finally discharged and ended my association with WWII.