On
December 7, 1941, halfway through my
senior year in
high
school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
. There had
been
fighting in Europe for some time prior to this
date,
but I and,
I believe, other high school students had not
been
seriously affected by the conflict. Our
everyday lives
had not
changed--we continued to be concerned with the usual
teen-age
life and only vaguely did we realize the impact the
Japanese
attack would have on that life.
As a
matter of fact, on that Sunday afternoon in
December, I
was at home listening to the symphony concert
broadcasted on radio each week.
The announcement of the
bombings
in Hawaii
interrupted the program and I immediately
felt shock
by the news. There were not many details
known
at the
time and the radio continued the concert from New
York. But the same interruption continued many
times during
the
remainder of the afternoon and I remember being annoyed
by the
breaks in the music. After all, enough
was enough!
Let's get
on with the business at hand--music.
The
realization of what the war was to mean to me and
my friends
developed only slowly. After some flirtation with
the notion
of declaring myself a conscientious objector, I
registered
with the Selective Service System and went off to
college to
wait the call to the service. As a
scholarship
student I spent the first year at Boston University
living
in a house
on Beacon street
occupied by graduate philosophy
students
--my girl friend spent that same time at a liberal
college in
the midwest. Our awareness of the war
was only
superficial. The first impact during the following summer--
my girl
friend met a soldier and announced that they were to
marry! Well, my pride suffered
some--maybe for about two
days.
Somewhere near the beginning of my sophomore year, I
received a
notice to appear for a physical examination to be
held in
what was an automobile garage on the Boston
end of
the BU
bridge. I reported, was directed to
undress, walked
naked
through the cold ramps of this concrete structure from
one
examination station to the next. At each stop, some area
of my body
was examined with varying degrees of
thoroughness. They looked at the broken toe on my left
foot--"Does it bother you?" "No", I answered. "Well, it
will", he said while making a note on the papers I carried.
(It hasn't
bothered me during the 52 years which followed).
Much ado
was made over the lack of mobility in my shoulders.
My myopia
made my examiners shake their head. A
psychiatrist asked if I went out with girls--"Yes", I said.
"Sex?", he asked.
"No", I replied. With a
look of
astonishment distorting his face, he managed to stammer out,
"We...we...we...well,
Wha..wha..wha...what the
He...he...hell do you do with your excess energy?" I do not
remember how that interview
ended.
It
came as no surprise that at the last examination
station,
the papers and notes were examined, and were
stamped
"REJECTED"! When I asked why the reply was something
like,
"Hell, boy, didn't anyone tell you?
You've got German
measles, You'll hear from us
again in a month or so."
I was
able then to finish my sophomore year.
When I
was called
for an examination again, no one paid any
attention
to my broken toe, to my lack of shoulder mobility,
nor to my
eyes. No one asked me whether or not I went out
with or
had sex with girls. No one made notes on my clip
board and
no one stamped "Rejected" on my papers. On May
13, 1943,
I was inducted into the army at Fort
Devens,
Massachusetts, and
finally realized that there was a war on
--and I
was to be in it.
After
a few days at Fort
Devens (about which I
remember
nothing),
I was shipped to a small Signal Corps camp in or
near Red
Bank, New Jersey,
to begin learning Morse code. We
spend
hours at a table, earphones on, trying to translate
sound into
letters. Since messages were encoded,
"words"
consisted
of exactly five letters (a fact which later caused
me
difficulty in receiving plain English messages). There
was some,
not unreasonable, daily pressure to increase the
speed at
which we could receive "messages" and transcribe
them onto
paper. One effective device used to urge
us on,
was to
call our attention to a collection of telephone poles
just
outside the window and to those training to string
telephone
wires--"If you can't learn code, you'll have to
learn
that. Those guys make pretty good
targets, don't
they?" There was some
physical exercise at this camp, but
as I
remember it, nothing equivalent to "basic training".
We did
have to take daily hikes, often through mud which
stained
our clothes and gave meaning to the name Red Bank.
There was
some free time on weekends during which we went to
a local
USO club, etc. After a time, we were
transferred to
Fort Monmouth
which was apparently a major training
installation for the Signal Corps.
Our training in code
continued
but the physical basic training received more
emphasis.
Of
course, we had to become acquainted with the rifle--
in
retrospect, it seems as if we spent hours on the firing
range,
either shooting at targets or sitting behind a hill
to the top
of which the targets were hoisted. In
this
second
job, we had to bring the used targets down and
replace
them with a new ones; occasionally, a bullet
penetrated
the top of the hill in such a way that its
velocity
would decrease nearly to zero and the hot lead
would fall
into the pit where we sat.
I was
not really a good shot with any firearm.
I
couldn't
hit a barn door with a 45 pistol. A rifle
was
better
until we were required to use the arm sling.
Then
the lack
of mobility in my shoulders made it almost
impossible
to get into the correct prone position.
It was
necessary
to hit the target a certain number of times in
order to
obtain the marksmanship medal which the sergeant in
charge
insisted upon. He was not going to allow
any of his
men too
fail, so as I lay on my stomach, left arm almost out
of joint, he kept feeding bullets into my
rifle until I had
scored the
require number of hits--even though I probably
used as
much as triple the number of rounds allowed.
My
marksman
medal is still pinned on my dress jacket!
At
any rate, I graduated from basic training and almost
immediately all of our summer clothes were taken away from
some of us
and we were left only with the heavier woolen
trousers, jackets,
etc. We concluded that the next day we
would be
shipped to some cold part of the world--maybe
Alaska. However, instead we ended up at Miami beach and
housed in
what was once a very fancy hotel!
For a few days we had a fair
amount of free time. We
did have
to wash the glass walls of the large dining room
daily, and
had to pick up coconuts that had fallen in the
driveways
overnight. But we also were able to walk
around
town some
and attracted considerable attention.
After all,
here we
were at Miami beach
dressed in warm brown,
insignialess uniforms while the rest of the world wore
lighter
khaki decorated with emblems of rank, medals and
branch of
service. People, of course, were curious
and
asked,
"Where are you from...To what outfit do you
belong?...Where are you going?...How come you you have no
insignia?" We were able to
give them cleverly constructed,
if not
consistent, answers which really answered nothing.
After all
how could we do otherwise? We didn't
know the
answers to
any of these questions. Apparently a
consensus
developed
among the questioners to the effect that we must
be
intelligence agents on a secret mission....Well, the
mission
was secret alright--even to us!
Soon
(on October 9. 1943) we found ourselves
passengers, along with a few officers and miscellaneous
airplane
equipment, on a two engine plane heading south.
(It was
immediately clear that the heavy clothing we were
wearing
was to be our salvation flying in an unheated plane
at fairly
high altitudes.) Our first stop was Puerto Rico
as I
remember, and then Belem, Brazil. The intention was to
stay there
over night and to proceed to the Ascension
Islands in
the morning. But as we were about to
take off
the next
day, the right engine of the plane failed and the
trip was
postponed twenty four hours. On the next
morning
the flight
was aborted due to a fire in the same right
engine.
Uneasily, we took off the following day for the tiny
islands in
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. An over night
stay there
was followed by a series of day trips across
Africa.
Only
one of this sequence of stopovers made any real
impression
and I do not remember the name of country where
it
occurred. It was dark as we walked from the plane to the
reception
building but we were aware that we were walking on
something
which was being crunched by our boots. When we
arrived at
the lighted building it was clear that the entire
tarmac was
covered with large insects (locusts ?)! We slept
that night
in a room filled with these beasts and was
entertained by a kind of lizard attacking and devouring
them.
In this way we traversed Africa arriving at our final
landing in
Karachi, India
(now Pakistan). We were housed in
barracks
in the desert outside the city where working camels
were a
common sight and where we were at last given lighter
khaki
cloths. Apparently, however, our arrival
was not
expected
by the army headquarters there who seemed not to
have any
orders concerning our group. We were
there for a
considerable
length of time (my unreliable memory says six
weeks)
during which there was talk of making our unit a
temporary
MP company. I don't think that was ever
formalized, but I do remember wandering through the streets
of Karachi and getting my
first glimpse of the poverty and
disease so
common in sections of the cities of India--
hundreds
of people sleeping in railroad stations, on the
side
walks; thousands of beggers every where.
Eventually, we were given orders to travel to Calcuta
by train.
The time given us to make this trip seemed
unreasonably lengthy but we didn't complain since we were
also give
a per diem which seemed generous. At any
rate we
traveled
first class, stopping at Lahore
(where we spent an
evening in
a night club), New Dehli (with a visit
to the
old city of
Dehli and from which some of the group traveled
to Agra for a glimpse of the
Taj Mahal). Eventually we
arrived at
Calcutta.
Once
again however there was a delay. The
captain to
whom we reported
had never heard of us, didn't know what we
were doing
there nor where we were supposed to go.
We spent
a few days
exploring the city but, since I had leave later
on in
Calcuta, what I did during the wait is confused with
this later
rest and recreation visit.
One
of my roommates during my freshman year at Boston
University
was a philosophy student who was brought up in
Calcuta
and whose father was headmaster of a missionary
school for
boys there. I called this man and was
invited to
tea one afternoon. It turned out that the school was in an
out-of-bounds region of the city, but I paid no attention to
that and arrived on a bicycle a little late
while a group of
people,
including my former roommate's parents, were
enjoying
their very formal tea. Nevertheless, I
was greeted
warmly and
was quizzed by questions about my old roommate--
questions
I could not answer because it had been well over a
year
since I had had any contact with
him. The warmth with
which I
was greeted seemed to cool considerably and I began
to wonder
how I could reasonably leave the group.
Fortunately, there was a knock on the door which was opened
to reveal
a boy in his early teens. He saluted the
headmaster
in the stiff, almost robot-like manner, of the
English
military. It turned out that the boy was
the
captain of
the football [soccer] team which was to play a
game with
a neighboring school. The head master
returned
the salute
and dismissed the lad with. "Good luck, old
chap." It became clear that
the whole group was about to
leave to
watch the game. Thankfully, I was not
invited and
after
handshakes all around, rode my bike back to the city
proper.
We
were able to see a lot of the richer parts of the
city--the
government buildings, the homes of the English
residents
(into one of which three or four of us were
invited by
an elderly Scotch couple), horse races (from
outside
the fence enclosing the track), a lengthy and
unintelligible classic Indian play including strange sounds
of the
music and of a language we didn't
understand, a
rather
posh restaurant serving food which none of us had
ever
tasted and were not anxious to taste again. But these
exposures
to a rather affluent part of the city in which we
were
barracked, did not prepare us for the sights we were to
see in
other parts of the city and in the regions outside
its
boundaries.
Not
too long after our arrival in Calcutta,
we were
finally
ordered to join the unit to which we were assigned,
the 993
Signal Service Company (later to be enlarged to a
battalion). We were to travel by
train to Ledo in the
province of Assam
(now Bangladesh??)
in the northeast
section of
India near the border with Burma. Our ride
through
the city to the railroad station gave us the first
look at
another aspect of the city--streets crowded with
trucks,
rickshaws, cows, people carrying tremendous loads
balanced
on their head (I remember seeing four men walking
with a
grand piano carried on padded heads.), many beggers,
barbers
cutting the hair of men squatting on sidewalks,
people sleeping huddled in any
indentation which would
prevent
their being walked on. The odors, both
unpleasant
and
exotically delightful, were strange to us Americans. The
noisy
congestion made movement almost impossible, but we
finally
arrived at the station and picked our way through
sleeping
figures and necessarily avoiding hundreds of
obviously
near starved beggers.
We
were loaded on a troop train (with none of the first
class
features we had on our trip from Karachi!)
with its
cars
already filled with Indian and African troops.
I do
not
remember whether there were English nor Americans other
than our
small contingent of maybe 30 men. As the
train
slowly
left Calcutta
and the surrounding area, we looked out
on the
most disturbing scene I have ever witnessed--beside
the
railroad tracks were hundreds of living skeletons
begging
for food, some already dead, and a baby sucking at
the breast
of its dead mother. It was an experience
that
haunted my
dreams for many years during and after the war.
Although the trip north to Assam did not have the
luxurious
features of that from Karachi,
it was leisurely
and more
or less uneventful. Only a few incidents
are still
vivid in
my memory. At one point the train
stopped for an
entire
night in the middle of large clearing on the far edge
of which
was a weak light shining from some sort of
dwelling.
The engineer disappeared from his post; in reply
to our
questions about this we were told that the house
belonged
to the engineer's girl friend and he was visiting
her.
On
another occasion the train stopped to replenish its
water
supply and a good number of us decided it was a good
time for a
shower. We lined up and one by one
subjected
ourselves
to brief (and not altogether painless) drenchings
from the
torrent issuing from the tower which supplied water
to the engine. When I had had all that I could stand, I
turned to
the man next in line and found my self face to
face with
a group of what seemed to be very large, very
black
Africans whose naked bodies were covered with tribal
scares and
whose mouths were parted in wide grins.
(Later
on, while
briefly attached to an English force, I met more
of these
serving as guards of the compound and who snapped
to
attention and saluted even the lowly technician grade
whites
temporarily serving in the same unit.)
The
food we ate on this trip north was not memorable; I
suspect
that it was mostly C or K rations.
Except for what
past as a
feast on one never-to-be-forgotten night. One
other
night, we stopped in large railroad yard and were free
to roam
around while freight cars were added to our train.
An Indian
soldier a couple of us had befriended obtained one
or two
chickens (he said he had bought them), cooked them
between
the tracks of an unused spur and provided us with a
magnificent
meal.
Finally we arrived at the headquarters of 993 Signal
Service
Company in Ledo, Assam and were greeted by a Captain
with the
words, "Where the hell have you guys been?". I
suppose we
received some sort of orientation but I remember
only
hiking in the hills and having to cross deep chasms on
bridges
which swung precariously with each step on the two
board wide
walkways. On one occasion, an old man
stepped
out of the
bush with a big smile on his face carrying a blow
gun. He admired our carbines and asked if he could
fire one
promising
us that he would let us try his blow gun.
After
some
negotiation and careful precaution, we allowed him to
fire a
rifle once. He then tried to teach us
how to shoot a
dart with
his weapon (which none of us succeeded in doing).
Only later
did we learn that the natives of this part of
Assam had been,
until recently, head hunters.
.........................................................
It
surprises me as I write that I recall only few of
what must have been many events. How was our 993rd
Signal
Service
Company divided into radio teams? How
often and how
did we
prepare for the job to which we were assigned?
What
did we do
during the short time we spent in our headquarters
camp not
far from town? I do remember riding in
the back of
trucks
over a dirt road dug into the side of mountains and
looking
nervously down into chasms the edges of which seemed
to be only a few inches from the rear
wheels. At any rate,
some how
the several teams were distributed among various
units of
the Chinese infantry. In charge of these
teams
were what,
in retrospect, seems to have been relatively
young
infantry officers--none of which, probably much older
that 30.
We were told that our job was to communicate with
Americans
in Assam
who were to supply the Chinese with food,
ammunition, and with whatever
else was needed to enable
these
troops to drive the remaining Japanese out of northern
Burma.
From
then on we would walk through the jungles always
close to
the headquarters of the particular Chinese company,
battalion
or division we happened to be attached at the
moment. Apparently there were not
many Japanese in the most
northern
portion of Burma
for we climbed hills and forded
streams for weeks before we met the
enemy. There were
everywhere
signs that he had been there, and as we hiked
further
south we began to become involved with fairly small
artillery
barrages and occasional skirmishes with infantry.
Our radio
team was however always within the perimeter of
the
Chinese headquarters and I never heard of
any of our
radio
teams that found it necessary to fire a single bullet
from our
carbines. But these attacks increased in
intensity
as we
moved further south.
The
radio equipment we used was housed in a large metal
box
weighing perhaps about sixty pounds.
There was also a
generator
mounted on kind of tripod with a seat upon which a
member of
the team would sit, turn bicycle-pedal-like cranks
by hand in
order to produce the electricity necessary to
power the
radio. Luckily (although our personal
gear was
always
carried on our own backs) we did not have to carry
this heavy
and bulky equipment ourselves. Rather it
was
usually
transported (along with the unit's kitchen
equipment)
by Chinese soldiers acting as coolies. There were
times when
there were small horses or mules which did this
job.
[There were at least two occasions on which this method
was not
followed. (1) There was the time I was transported
across a
swiftly flowing river in a narrow dugout canoe
poled by a
naked, scar-decorated aborigine with the radio on
my lap and
holding my breath for the entire trip. (2) In
another
adventure, I sat in the seat of a Piper Cub--usually
used as an
ambulance to transport wounded--with out doors,
without
seat belts, with the radio again on my lap and again
holding my
breath. The crazy American pilot of this
vehicle
felt that
he should take an active part in the war and flew
low over a
small Japanese camp firing down at it until the
clip in is
pistol was empty!]
Once
our radio malfunctioned and some how (probably by
means of
the reliable telephone wires which the Chinese laid
in the
jungle as we moved from place to place) news of this
disaster
got back to Assam. At the time we were camped in
an
abandoned village situated on the edge of a large rice
paddy.
Across the field ran a narrow road, fairly straight
except for
a curve of about 45 degrees in the middle. [ An
English
biplane with open cockpits and looking like a world
war 1
relic once landed (and took off!)
on this
bent road]. Although we were still without radio
communications, we somehow learned that we would receive
replacement for our broken one. Sure enough a C47 cargo
plane flew
over dropped, by parachute, two new radios and
several
cases of beer! Both of the radios worked
well but
we were
only able to take one of them, and when we asked
what to do
with the extra one, we received our orders, "BLOW
IT UP".
As
the fighting heated up a little, these radios became
useless
since every time we operated them there would be a
few rounds
artillery landing in our vicinity. (Once we
received a
voice message from the Japanese telling us our
precise
position and promising all sorts of nice things!)
Because of
this, our value to the Chinese diminished greatly
and we
were directed not to operate for a while.
Anyway,
they had
much better communications via telephone!
For some
time after
we simply went along performing no useful
service.
Compared to other places in the world, where we were
the
fighting was sporadic and on a relatively small scale.
I was
always thankful that I had not ended up in the battle
of the
bulge, in the Pacific islands, in Africa or Italy as
so many of
my age had. Nevertheless, for us there
were
times when
we would have rather been elsewhere. A
few
memories
are sufficient to document the justification for
that
desire. Being strafed by an American
plane while we
took cover
in a small, abandoned concrete jail house;
sitting in
a fox hole all night during the most intense of
the
battles with the Japanese and trying (unsuccessfully) to
follow the
frequent admonishment to "keep a tight a-hole"
and
finding the next morning that my backpack had several
holes and
tears which had not been there previously; seeing
Chinese
soldiers being marched across an open field and shot
in the
back of their head by their own countrymen while they
walked;
listening to the screams of a Japanese prisoner
being
tortured during the night; watching wounded Chinese
soldiers
being operated on by American doctors while lying
on bamboo
tables roofed only by canvas tarps; the maggot
ridden
corpses of Japanese on the side of jungle trails;
even after
the surrender of Japan,
on one occasion using the
bed of a
creek as a fox hole while two rival Chinese units
fought a
battle over a gambling game and on another, being
between
the troops of a local war lord and those of the
nationalist Chinese army fight it out;---these are some of
the more
vivid memories. But as bad as these
seemed they
were
nothing compared to the Anzio
beach landing, the
landing in
France,
the battle of the bulge , the German
invasion
of Russia,
and the many, many battles in the South
Pacific
and in Europe.
Eventually, we left Burma
and traveled by truck over
the famous
Burma Road into China
and were told that we were
headed to Hanoi. We had motor vehicles for this trek and
our team
had access to a jeep. We traveled over
the
mountains
by truck, over the hills of China
by jeep. Passing
through
small settlements for the first time we were able to
come into
direct contact with Chinese civilians.
Our trip
took us
through rural areas and over mountainous terrain,
but almost
always we were surrounded by curious people.
They
gathered around our vehicles, silently observing our
every
motion, staring at our equipment and only now and then
making
comments among themselves about the behavior of these
strangers. If we were in a
building, the windows would be
filled
with faces watching us--they seemed not to be
unfriendly, but unabashedly curious.
[This curiosity had also been evident among the
Chinese
soldiers while we were in Burma. There we
frequently
slept in jungle hammocks--hammocks with a plastic
roof and
mosquito netting which provided dry and bug free
sleeping
quarters--and it was not unusual to wake in the
morning
with two or three faces peering at me through the
netting. Sometimes curiosity gave
way to attempts to steal
cigarettes
which we tried to thwart by tying our backpacks
to the hammock with our metal mess kits
hanging so that any
motion
would set the pieces knocking against one another and
waking us
up. One night such a device did wake
me. I
unzipped
my netting and reached for my carbine hanging under
the
hammock only to have my hand seized and a voice
whispered,
"Cigaleet, cigaleet....". My
expletives were not
deleted
but uttered in a voice loud enough to send the
perpetrator scurrying away.]
The
journey continued toward Hanoi
until we came to a
large
river and were prevented from crossing for some time.
(It was
here that we found ourselves caught in the cross
fire of
the angry gamblers from two different armies which
has
already been mentioned.) There was a fairly large barge
available
to transport the large number of troops camped
there
across this river. But one of the army
units had
brought
with them an elephant to help carry equipment and it
was this
beast which was to be one of the first passengers.
Unfortunately, he was not positioned in the center of the
barge
(which, if I remember correctly, was like a very large
swimming
raft powered with an outboard motor) and it tipped
up
plunging the elephant into the water and apparently
breaking
up enough to need extensive repair. We were forced
to camp at
that spot in tents in crowded but not
uncomfortable conditions.
We
never did cross that river! It was at
this camp
that we
heard by radio of the existence of an atomic bomb
and of the
bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki (According to the
encyclopedia, on Aug 6 and Aug 9, 1945 respectively). The
import of
this news was important we knew but we did not
know the
extent of the power of these bombs nor of the
damage
they had done. Early one morning I was
roused by the
radio
(usually muted by earphones) loudly transmitting code
to the
occupants of the tent: ditdadada ditda
ditdadadit
ditda
dadit ditditdit ditditda ditdadit
ditdadit dit dadit
daditdit
dit ditdadit ditditdit... JAPAN
SURRENDERS! (The
cease fire
was ordered on Aug. 15, 1945 ).
What
happened after that remains vague. We
ended up
some how
in Kunming at a
permanent radio installation just
outside
the city and took our turn at sending and receiving
Morse Code
message. But this was different than
what we
were
accustomed to--the code came at blazing speed and, to
make
matters worse, it was in English. From
the very
beginning
we had learned to send and receive in five letter
blocks and
I found it difficult to handle these blocks of
random
length. Further more, in the field the speed was much
slower and
we copied using pen or pencil. Operators
on the
other end
would occasionally swear at us or at least make
disparaging remarks about our lack of
competence--remarks
that,
given the circumstances, we had no difficulty in
ignoring. (It was at this station
that the battle between
government
troops on hills around the city and the local
"warlord's" troops fired at each other with their missals
passing
over the compound. The only casualty of
occupants
of the
compound was a stray dog......It was here too that we
received
messages from some Americans who were in near
Tibet. They had been sent there to buy horses, they
said,
and were
apparently forgotten. I assume that they
finally
received
orders to return!)
Again
I am not clear how it was that we were
transported from Kunming to Calcutta. I think I would
remember
more clearly if we had returned to India again
over the Burma Road...so I think we probably flew. At any
rate In Calcutta, we boarded a
troop ship and my discharge
paper said
we departed on 8 Dec, 1945 for home.
We sailed
around the
tip of India, across the Arabian Sea,
into the
Gulf of
Aden and the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal,
the
Mediterranean Sea, and the Strait
of Gibraltar. Up to this
point the
voyage had not been unpleasant. Our
outfit again
had been
designated as Military Police whose sole
job was
to keep people off the deck at
night....not exciting nor
demanding.
Neither exciting nor demanding was our trip until our
ship
entered the Atlantic Ocean in the winter of
'45 and
soon were
hit by one of the storms for which that sea is
noted. As an MP, I stood at my
post in the shelter of a
hatch way
while the ship was tossed about by the storm--
there was
no need to shoo any one off the decks....most were
below deck
lying in their tiered bunks, sea sick.
It was
said that
the anchor had broken loose and cut a 6 foot slice
into the
bow (fortunately, well above the water line).
From
the deck,
all that could be seen was a wall of sea towering
above the
ship. Since almost all of my time was
spent on
deck
during the storm, I somehow avoided seasickness. But on
one
occasion (I think, Christmas Day) I went below, ate a
good and
tasty dinner, and as I stood over the garbage
barrel
cleaning off my tray, deposited all that I had eaten
( and
perhaps a little more) into the barrel!
Well the
ship arrived in New York
on 3 Jan, 1946 and we all
went
separate ways--I to Fort Devens in Massachusetts--and
within a
few days were again civilians. My
discharge paper
has the
following data:
Serial
Number:31356475
Date of
Induction into the Army: 13 May 1943
Date of
entry into active service; 20 May 1943
Military
Occupational Specialty and No.
Radio Operator Intermediate Speed, 740
Battles
and Campaigns:
India Burma
China Offensive, Central Burma
Date of
Departure (from USA):
9 Oct 1943
Date of
Arrival: 27 Oct 1943
Date of
Departure (from overseas): 8 Dec 1945
Date of
Arrival (in USA):
3 Jun 1946 [sic-date is 3 Jan 46]
Continental Service: 0 yrs, 4 months, 25 days
Foreign
Service: 2 yrs, 2 months, 25 days
Highest
Grade Held: T/3
Donald Kearns
March 1995
