TRANSCRIBER: Heather Tijerina - January 27,
2011 INGRAHAM: 4/29/2007. It's approximately 1:40.
I'm here at the home of Mr. Franklin Johnson. My name is Shawn Ingraham. I'll be conducting
the interview. Introduce yourself. JOHNSON: Well, I'm Frank Johnson. I'm a World
War II Veteran. My outfit was in all five major campaigns in Europe, and I myself think
I have quite a story to tell. But let me just go back a little bit and tell you that I was
also a teacher, a coach, guidance counselor, and administrator for 38 years in Naugatuck
High School. This the second or third time that I've done something like this. So I feel
quite comfortable doing it, and I also feel it's very important that things like this
should be done because I honestly believe what World War II Veterans did you know,
back in 1941 to '45 that, you know, we probably saved the world from a horrible experience
under the Nazis and the Japanese. They had some strange designs on the world on the world
and young people would find it hard to believe what might have happened to them, but later
on in my story I can tell you some of the things that make me feel the way I do. Right
after I graduated from Naugatuck High School in 1942, I went into the service. Many of
my classmates went in prior to that because Pearl Harbor was bombed my senior year. And
a lot of them left almost immediately. The whole country was angry at the treachery of
the Japanese. Patriotism was at an all time high, but my mother made me wait longer than
I wanted to. In those days if you went in under 18, you needed your parent's signature
and my mother wouldn't give it. Probably because there were four from her family already in
the service, including her husband, and my sister, and brother. So she had even tried
to get a deferment for me. But shortly after I turned 18 in October, I went into the service.
And I was sent up to Camp Edwards, Massachusetts in an antiaircraft artillery unit. When people
say, "is that what you asked?" And I tell them that during wartime, what you asked for
was not listened to very often. You were put in a unit that needed people. So you went
in probably in blocks. I would say the group of us maybe six or seven hundred of us went
together. We were in Devens at the place that we were inducted and we went as a group to
Camp Edwards and formed the 110th. So even though I had asked for a different assignment,
that didn't make any difference. Well, the first thing the military does when they get
you in the service I don't know if it's like that now, but I imagine that it is
is that they have to get the civilian out of you and they have to get you used to obeying
orders, knowing what the ranks are, who was superior to whom. For an inductee like myself,
it doesn't make any difference because anybody from one stripe to a star, you obeyed, you
know, without question. And that was one of the first things that they try to do is get
you used to taking orders. The thing then was that if somebody of rank told you to do
something and you didn't like it or you couldn't understand why, you were told to do it and
complain later. Now, I wonder how many young people, you know, could adhere to that. Do
it first and then complain. Most of the people today complain complain and try to get out
of it, but that doesn't go in the military because some day an officer is going to tell
you to do something extremely dangerous or do something you don't want to do and without
hesitation you're going to do it. So that was the first thing we learned military discipline.
The next think, of course, was to get your strength up and they did that by multiple
exercises every day, marches, runs, all types of physical activity. And then, of course,
was to understand the makings of the gun that you were going to be on. And that was training
on a (coughs). Excuse me a 90 millimeter gun. A very versatile weapon. Had a range of about
five or six miles and basically used for high flying airplanes. It's very intricate piece
of equipment. Sixteen men on a gun crew and we all had to learn our jobs so that we could
do them in pitch dark or pouring rain or any type of weather. We learned each other's jobs
in case, you know, someone was taken out of action and that was the extent of basic training.
First of all, to learn military discipline. Secondly, to get yourself into physical shape
and to learn the intricacies of your weapon. Now, after that was accomplished, we were
ready to, you know, get into action. And about November, we left Camp Edwards and went down
to Skillman, New Jersey and, you know, there we started to get ready for deployment. We
learned all kinds of things to do on the high seas, how to store our equipment properly.
And then a couple of days before Christmas in 1943 Yeah, 1943, we were taken by truck
and when we got off the truck, we saw this huge ship. We hadn't seen the likes of anything
like that in our lives. It was The Queen Mary, the largest ship in the world at that time,
and we were told later that there were about 18,000 troops on board and a couple of thousand
of English personal because Mary was a British ship and run by the British. So we sailed
out of New York Harbor passed the Statue of Liberty, and the first strange voice we heard
was from the captain. And the captain came over very loud and clear and introduced himself
to us and told us, in no uncertain terms, my job is to get this ship safely to port.
I'm not interested in your comfort or safety, but you better take care of it yourself. Should
you fall over board, forget about it. We don't stop. It wouldn't do us any good to stop anyway
because to stop a ship that size would take a couple of miles and you'd be shark bait
by then. So if you are sick or had other problems, your company officers will take care of it.
I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in my ship. So that was a rather rude awakening.
There were a lot of other rude awakenings that were to follow. It was not at all comfortable
on board that ship, as you can imagine. A ship with 18,000 __ 20,000 plus people. In
peacetime that ship accommodated probably less than 2,000 people comfortably. We had
we were billeted in a room that we were told was a former library and there were probably
30 of us in there. Crowded into bunks made from pipe and canvas and rope, six or seven
high. You rolled into your bunk. The guy above you, his rear end was about two inches away
from your nose. So you couldn't move around too much. And then there were two men assigned
to each bunk. Not at the same time of course, but you were to be in your bunk area 12 hours
a day and then you were to be out on the deck or having your meals for the other 12 hours
and that was strictly enforced. Now, it took you most of 12 hours to get fed twice because
the lines were long. You had your mess kit, you walked to the cafeteria line and there
the guys with these big spoons would just slop something on your mess kit. If they were
serving desert, don't be surprised if that was served first and your mash potatoes went
on top of it. They said you didn't get on board to eat. You got on board to get to your
destination. The cafeteria was just a series of long troughs. You didn't sit down, you
stood up in front of one of these troughs and put your mess kit down and started to
eat. Now, when the ship would roll, sometimes your mess kit would slide two or three men
in either direction and you'd have to wait for the ship to right itself to get your mess
kit back. And more than occasionally down the line somebody would upchuck. So you can
imagine what that did to your appetite. Again, fortunately, it was only four days. Probably
five five and a half if you count the time that it took to get off, but the trip itself,
I think, was about four days. It went without escort because we were told the ship was faster
than any German submarine and it would take several torpedos to sink it. Well, we arrived
in Glasgow, Scotland, the only place that The Queen Mary could dock and we were greeted
by a bunch of American and English Red Cross workers who did the best to greet us and make
us comfortable with coffee and donuts and these little bags of goodies: Cigarettes,
toothbrushes, stuff like that, candy bars. And then we were put on board these trains.
The blinds were drawn tight so you couldn't see anything, and I don't know how much days
or how long we were on this train, but it seemed endless. We finally reached our destination
and, again, we disembarked. We had to wait hours for our bags, you know, to catch up
with us because we had nothing but the clothes on our back during all that trip, but finally
things came together and we found ourselves billeted in this old English home. So many
of the English people gave up their homes for the American troops and it was quite a
gesture on their part. The home we were in was a real fancy estate and there must have
been, I don't know, 15 or 20 of us there. And the gardener of that estate was the only
person left. The people who owned it and their family had moved into the country side someplace.
And there we made ourselves comfortable and got down into the routine business of being
retrained again on the weapons that had been provided for us. And that went on, again,
for several months. When we arrived in England it was I'd say early January and, if you recall,
the invasion was in June. So during that six month period of time, we trained, learned
about the English customs, later on about the French customs when we found out that
was our probable destination. But there was much more intense training. Everybody was
much more serious and before too long we disembarked again and went down to this loading station
in Exeter, England were there were thousands and thousands of American troops and vehicles
of all types, sizes, and shapes and there we practiced amphibious loading and landing.
Our guns were big and pulled by a tank. So since we were going to be deployed in three
or four feet of water and make our way toward shore, everything had to be waterproofed,
but in such a way that it could be stripped very quickly. So, again, it was a tedious
task and we became more efficient on it each time we tried it. We were put on board ship
twice, maybe three times, each time thinks maybe this was it but then after a day or
two out a few miles out in the ocean, they just returned us for more training at our
campsite. Everything was very hush hush there. Security was unbelievable. You couldn't talk
to anybody outside of your outfit. Of course, there were no passes. Finally, we got on board
our LST, that's a landing ship, tank. That's the type of vehicle that we were going to
go across the channel on. It's a large ship and ironically, the LST 510 the ship we went
on is now a ferry boat out of New London. So if any of you people want to see what my
ship looked like that took me to battle, it's still there in New London and it's about a
two hour ride over to Long Island. My wife and I have taken the trip a couple times.
You know, just for nostalgia. And one time several of my buddies that are in the area
together we went together and were treated loyally by the crew. If you go, you'll see
a plaque up in the captain's quarters with the name of the 110th, all of us, and you
look for Frank Johnson, you'll see him, he's there. A very proud momentum . But anyway,
it was pitch dark when we rolled out and our officers were being briefed by the higher
commands away from us and early in the morning they got us all together and gave us whatever
information we needed to get ready to do our job. Now, when people ask me about the war
in general, I tell them you'll know more about it if you read books because World War II
was only like a couple of football fields in front of me. I was never asked for any
advice or anything else. So whatever my task was, that's what I did for the whole war and
I never really knew the overall picture, but that's all I had to do. To do what I was told
and to take care of business in front of my field of vision. I'd say about halfway across
the channel we knew something big was going on because there were thousands of ships.
There was hardly a space in the water without some type of craft, and when you looked up
at the sky, you couldn't really see too much sky because of the planes, thousands of them
flying back and forth. We said, boy, somebody's taking an awful pounding over there and we
began to hear it the sites and sounds of war as we approached the coast of France. Again,
the time was June 6, 1944. We were told that we were supposed to land early afternoon that
day. The infantry and __ units started to land around 6 o'clock that morning and they
were supposed to secure the beaches and secure a path to the designated area where we were
supposed to set up our guns, but on Omaha Beach, where we landed, that wasn't done until
the next day. So we spent the first night probably about a half a mile into the I
can't call it a harbor because there really was no harbor, but just about a half an hour
away from land and that was a eerie shaky feeling because all night long small enemy
fire could be heard not just in the distance, but you could hear it bouncing off the side
of your ship. You looked around and saw ships exploding all about you and you were wondering
when that was going to happen to your boat. You looked out in the water and there were
just filled with debris, blown up ships. And then you saw all kinds of bodies, floating
bodies already starting to be bloated. One of the thoughts I had is every one of those
American soldiers trained just like I did for months and months and maybe years and
went through all that training and hard times and here they were dead in the water without
even a chance to fire their weapon. But as you'll see in my story later on, that's what
makes war such a terrible thing. Well, in the morning, our ship was supposed to get
in close to the shore, drop us to the front, and we're supposed to ride off in a couple
of feet of water, but they couldn't do that. There was so much debris in front of it that
they couldn't get any closer than they were the night before. So they had a floater they
called a "rhino" which is a large platform. It looked like a board strapped to 50 gallon
oil drums with an out back motor on the back of it and they loaded one tank and gun and
one truck and our crew. Probably, you know, 20 25 men took the that's all the rhino
could take care of and we put putted to shore. Again, we could hardly wait to get to shore
which was strange because that's where the enemy was, but we felt so vulnerable right
out there in the open and we couldn't do anything to fire back. When we get to shore as we
were going to shore, we were taking the cosmo in the grease and covers off our weapons
because it looked rather obvious that it wasn't going to get too wet. The rhino took us right
up into the sand. Then when we hit the beach, we were directed by beach masters and by flagged
coded flags. Some of them had our outfit name on it. So you could see the name that had
to be done by combat engineers during the night. And we were hustled up this very small
path. I think is was a makeshift path. Certainly didn't look like any road that had been established.
We were right at the top of the hill was the replacement where we were to setup our guns.
Now, normally, a battery excuse me. The battalion consist of four gun batteries and
a headquarters battery. So we usually fire, you know, in cooperation of the other three
gun batteries. I was in Battery D and Battery C was in seeing distance, but the other two
batteries, for one reason or another, either hadn't made it or were sent some place else.
It wasn't to many many days later that we became a complete unit again. But, anyway,
I would say within an hour after we landed and setup, we were firing at the enemy and
doing an awful lot of damage and they in turn were doing some damage to us. One of the first
things I remember is my gun officer saying to us, "remember, if you can see the enemy,
they can see you." So, you know, watch your butt. So, again, it wasn't too long before,
you know, we were missing people and we were beginning to realize what war is really about.
Now, the effectiveness of our gun, the 9 millimeter, usually takes place out of your site your
vision. We were firing at targets that we most of the time couldn't see. We were being
directed by spotters or by the radar and the hot fly finders for planes. But in the early
part of the war, we did fire at tanks. We could see them. And boy, you better get to
them because if you don't, they were going to get to you. So beach fighting went on for,
I don't know, a couple of weeks, I guess. And then we moved, not very far. The whole
battalion regrouped. So we were one body again, four gun crews. That's 16 guns because each
battery had four 90 millimeters. So that's a very potent force and we were called upon
by everybody and his brother for support. You know, an infantry rifleman shoots one
bullet, but that 90 millimeter could take out a building or a tank and when you have
16 of them, you can imagine that our infantry and supporting groups were happy to see us.
And conversely, the enemy was very anxious to get rid of us. As I say, it was quite an
eventful process. After a couple of weeks, the Germans withdrew. When they knew they
lost the beach, they withdrew to a large town called St. Lull, and St. Lull was the second
major battle of the war. It was a town probably the size of Waterbury, I imagine. And we were
there four or five days just firing shell after shell after shell into the city. Airplanes
were coming over around the clock dropping all kinds of ordinance. As I look back now
in hine site, I think of the civilian population that was in that city. A few days later we
rode through St. Lull. I was sitting on the top of my tank and one of the highest structures
I saw was a chimney of the house. The whole town was just leveled. It was a very very
scary site for us. Then after St. Lull we moved from site to site, a lot of open space.
As we started clearing the western front of France, small airfields were being built so
the planes wouldn't have to fly the English channel. They could land and reload and refuel
and take off for their targets much more conveniently, but we were given the job of guarding those
airfields. So that was our assignment for I'd say probably 50 percent of the war. We
were guarding something, ammunition dumps, railroad crossings, airfields, headquarters.
Things like that that were vulnerable targets and I'm very happy to say we did our job.
One night in particular there was a flight of German bombers. The Germans only flew at
night when they felt a little safer, but there was a flight of German bombers that came over.
And again we were told there were about 17 German planes in this flight and we accounted
for 11 or 12 of them. So our gun was really something. That's the way it was all during
the war. People used to brag about the German 88 how accurate and destructful it was and
we later on found out that it wasn't the gun was better it just that their orientations
were better. We captured a German pillbox one time and inside the fortifications was
the __ and elevations of all the sites around: Trees, bridges, houses. So all they had to
do was read the projectory already established, put that on a gun, and they could knock off
a tank coming up off a bridge with one shot. Whereas, we often had to fire two or three
to get a way in. But, anyway, that went on for quite a few weeks. The next major battle
was the Liberation of Paris. That's major battle number three. We were told, again,
afterwards that we were one of the first American units that came in on the north side of Paris.
And we came in with the French Second Armor Division. And we as we moved into the city
of course the major the bulk of the German army had left, but there were snipers, there
were all kinds of even French civilians that had learned to side with the Germans. Remember,
the Germans had occupied France for seven years. So sniping had become the thing we
had to worry about. INGRAHAM: Were there any French snipers?
JOHNSON: Huh? INGRAHAM: Were there any French snipers that
would JOHNSON: Yeah. Well some of them were Frenchman,
yes, but had kind of became quasi Germans during that seven year period. But also the
French __, the French underground, they did a lot of clean up. They knew the area. They
knew where these Germans were and we had to be careful because, you know, they didn't
have uniforms. The French army did, but these were civilians who had been harassing the
Germans all during the occupation. They just had regular clothes and when they confiscated
weapons, they just went wacky. You know, they were so happy they'd shoot up in the air and
once or twice they had confiscated German trucks and everything, even a German tank,
a small tank. And they'd be riding down the street with it and celebrating it and we would
see it and, again, that's an enemy piece of equipment. So we had to be doubly careful
and make sure that it wasn't just some French __ celebrating. One of these strange sites
that we saw was one day there was a street demonstration. I didn't see it but some of
my buddies did and there were a half a dozen German women who had been stripped naked and
their head shaven and we were told that these were women who fell in love with German soldiers
in order to lead a better life. Because the Germans had everything they, you know, became
part of the German effort. And when the Germans left and everything, the citizen, the French
citizens were so angry at them that that's how they treated them. That was one thing.
Others we were told some of the men were hung. Again, we didn't have any part of the policing
of Paris. Our job I don't think I told you. Our job when we moved in, the Germans had
set up this anti aircraft unit in the park and our job, we had to pull their guns out
and put our guns in. So we became the established protection for Paris from the air and from
afar. The American MP's and everything were the ones who were trying to bring some type
of peace and order to the city. We were there seven days and it was quite an experience.
We had to put up a barbed wire fence around our unit to keep the French civilians out
they were so happy to see us. Especially the young girls. They wanted to meet some of these
young American guys. I tell you, it was quite a site. I was 19 years old and people used
to ask me what country had the best looking women and I would tell them the country I
was in at the time. It was a very happy time, but all good things have to come to an end
and after seven days, we thought we were going to stay because we had heard General Eisenhower
and his staff were going to move into Paris and that was going to become their headquarters
rather than London. But one day we heard the rumble of trucks and all these 2 and a half
ton trucks came rolling into our outfit with loaded with fresh American soldiers, nice
new uniforms, they jumped off the truck and we were told to move out. That these guys
were going to take over our positions, and we were moved to Marseille where we had to
learn some new equipment. They had made some modifications in the old 90 millimeter, and
we spent a couple of weeks familiarizing ourselves with this new equipment and then off again
we went again into battle and those guys that just got off the boat, we were told, spent
the rest of the war in Paris. But that's the kind of luck I've always had. Anyway, that
was battle number three. Now, battle number four, people all know about it. It's called
the Battle of the Bulge and one of the most horrifying things about that battle is it
was in the dead of winter. You know, war is bad enough in good weather, but if you could
imagine trying to fight it in below zero temperatures where you couldn't change your underwear or
socks. You get up in the morning and brush the snow off your blankets. Sometimes your
equipment would freeze, and you'd have to spend time, you know, getting the frost off
it and so forth, especially the vehicles. Very little very little anything hot. Hot
water to bathe, hot water to have a cup of coffee with. It was the most uncomfortable
and unbelievable. Many of the troops had frostbite, their toes froze. They had to be evacuated.
Invariably, their toes would be cut off and they'd be no good for the military, they were
sent home. I could go on and on and talk about, you know, the seriousness of it. I avoided
several weeks of it because I came down with pneumonia and that developed into what they
called yellow jaundice which is an infectious disease. I was evacuated all the way back
to London for a couple of weeks. I was very fortunate of getting back to my own unit because
after you left the hospital over there, they put you in what they call a replacement depo.
In there, any organization that needed men, they just sent you to, but luckily my outfit
was not too far from where the "repo depo" was in and when I found out where it was,
I had the chaplain, you know, contact them and tell them where I was and they sent a
jeep for me. So the Battle of the Bulge was long and hard and horrible and few people
have read the story of Bastone and General McAuliffe telling the German General when
they were asked to surrender, he said "nuts." General Patton marched his troops through
stormy weather a hundred miles or so and saved the day. The weather was in favor of the Germans
for the first week. Cloudy overcast, the planes couldn't fly, and that's what gave the Germans
the break they needed, but once the weather cleared, they were sitting ducks. Our air
superiority just flew over in droves and picked them off. It was a slaughter. So that was
the forth battle. The last battle was The Remagen Bridge which was the last bridge across
the Rhine River, the main entrance into the heart of Germany. And the Germans tried to
protect that bridge and try to keep the Americans from it. We were sent right up on the highest
point overlooking that bridge to protect it from bombers and, you know, situations like
that. Can you turn that off for a minute? (Audio Interruption). So our last major assignment
was the fifth battle of the European war, the Battle of the Remagen Bridge. And Germans
were trying to destroy the bridge, slow our progress. We were there defending it it. Down
below us were infantry and tanks and the Germans were shelling it and they were sending planes
over trying to bomb it and that was our major objective. For about three days we had heavy
fighting and the Americans crossed the bridge, were able to protect it, we kept the Germans
away. The planes the Germans had developed a jet planes by then. The first time we ever
saw one and it was unbelievable the difference in speed, but the thing was the Germans had
developed the plane but they didn't have time to develop the pilots and the pilots were
not that good at flying that plane. There was something that was just too good for them.
So right after we crossed the Remagen Bridge, we went into a German town __, and there was
a big German hospital there. And our first assignment was to guard this hospital because
the Americans became very interested in finding German officers and German civilian people
who were directly responsible for all the atrocities that happened during the war. And
they were sure that there were some of them in that hospital. So we had to guard everybody
going in or out and making sure nobody escaped. But the thing that I remember about that particular
duty is when we moved into that town, we were standing outside the building and the captain
came by and said to each gun crew again, a gun crew is 16 to 18 guys. You take that
house there, you take this house there, and you give the people two hours to get out and
so we did. Captain's orders. So we went over and knocked on the door and told them in broken
German, you know, out, raus whatever the words were we're taking over your house as long
as we're here. I want you people to think about that because I think about it quite
often. As I'm sitting here with Shawn and we're looking at all my souvenirs supposing
that it happened here, how many of these souvenirs would be left when I came back? They'd all
be on their way home to become somebody else's souvenir. And the house itself, we didn't
make beds or we weren't careful about, you know, cleaning the floors. It was really horrible.
That's a nonmilitary thing, but war is just as bad for the civilians as it is for the
military. I used to watch lines of civilians going through our garbage cans after the war
trying to salvage food. All the infrastructure of those cities were destroyed. No sanitation,
no transportation, no way to get food accept what was brought in to them by trucks from
the USO's and so forth. It it was horrible. But, anyway, that was our first assignment
and after that we moved out. And the second assignment was watching roads. The Germans
during the war if they would capture a country or a town, would take most of the able bodied
men and women and bring them into the heart of Germany to work for them either in the
fields or the factories, any type of work that would free a German to fight and they
were called DP's or "displaced persons" and after the war they wanted to get home. And
they were supposed to wait until they were interrogated and checked for health problems
and then they would be offered transportation to get back home if there was a home. Invariably,
many of those homes or cities were destroyed too, but a lot of them were impatient and
they were going to walk, hundreds of miles maybe. So we would be stationed at major intersections
and we would have to stop these groups. They always traveled in groups. Maybe, you know,
a group of three or four, maybe fifteen, and we would have to stop and interrogate them
and see if they had the proper papers and whatever was necessary. So we would stop them
and one of the things we did was we would delouse them. We had these spray cans full
of filled with DDT because they had been living in deplorable conditions for years and we
would spray them to try to kill any lice or bugs they might have. And there are two funny
stories I remember there. One about a group of them down in a pond that were trying to
fish with whatever they could muster to fish and my buddy and I went down and we took a
German hand grenade that we had and we moved them back and we threw it in and every fish
that was in the pond came floating to the top and these people were jumping in with
their clothes and grabbing them and smiling. So that was one of my heroic efforts for the
DP's. The other one, of course as you can imagine, is interesting to us and kind of
devious but whenever there would be a young young lady, a young girl going through the
line, we'd make sure we'd give them an extra spray of DDT. You know, tell them to open
up their clothes. We used to get a big kick out of that. We were waiting to be amused.
The war weighed heavily on our hands. As I say, when the war was over, we kept busy.
And then we were sent to Marseille. The war was over in April. I think in July we were
sent to Marseille which is on the Riviera which is on the Mediterranean Sea. And we
were told we were going to be you know, get ready to go back home to be discharged,
but all of a sudden they started retraining us: Exercising, going through manuals, and
all kinds of stuff that didn't sit very well by us. And rumor told us that we were now
getting ready to be shipped to Japan. Germany was gone and now Japan had to be taken and
Japan was hundreds of islands. Each island had to be taken separately and as each island
was taken, they needed air protection anti aircraft protection. And so we were told we
were a need, a great need. And, again, you can imagine that didn't set very well with
us. You know, how lucky can you be? But they say that was in July and August. The middle
of August my good friend Harry Truman gave permission to drop the atomic bomb and after
two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered. Of course, we weren't deployed
to Japan. We probably had another month of training before we would have been. You can
imagine what I tell people when they tell me should we have dropped the bomb. I tell
them I don't think I'd be here if they didn't. But, anyway, my military experiences started
to close about then. I think in September it was September before we were given a ship.
We were discharged by a number system. You get so many points Actually, the point system
they call it. You get so many points for each battle you were in. So many points for each
metal you win, so many points for this is that. And the people with the highest points
were discharged first. Our unit was high up there. We had accumulated quite a few points.
We were, you know, pretty much from that high group from Marseille, but one of the things
they did before we got on board ship, they gave us back pay. In the military, you're
always being paid behind. Not that you can do anything with the money anyway and we hadn't
been paid for a couple of months. And so before we got on board ship I think they gave us
about two months pay that they owed us and what a stupid thing that was because what
do you do on board a ship for six, seven, eight days? I don't have to tell you but it's
gamble. So some of those guys walked off that ship multimillionaires and guys like myself
walked off broke. When we talk about it with my buddies, well, why in the world did they
have to pay us then? Why couldn't they have paid us when we hit the States so we'd have
a couple hundred bucks? But, anyway, we landed at Camp Kilmer. The same place we embarked
from. There were these enormous mess halls and on the wall were all the menus you could
choose from. You could get anything you wanted, and I mean anything. And you know what the
most requested thing was fresh milk because we hadn't had fresh milk. We weren't allowed
to drink any of the milk over there. We had powdered milk. So fresh milk or steak, anything
you wanted and the thing they told us to be careful of was the waiters were German prisoners.
They had been working things like that for maybe a year or two. They were the happiest
bunch of guys I'd ever seen in my life. Nobody was shooting at them. They all looked well
fed and many of them had picked up rudiments of the English language, but we were told
not to speak with them about anything. We were given a piece of the paper to check off
what we wanted. And we weren't even supposed to say hello or anything else because they
were just worried that perhaps, you know, some American who had seen a buddy killed
would grab one of these guys or stab them with a steak knife or something. But, anyway,
that was a wonderful experience. Within a couple of days we were sent back to Fort Devens
where I was inducted and divided into groups to get discharged. So sometime in November
of '45, I was a civilian. I don't like to use the word civilian. I like to use the word
veteran because I'm very proud to be a veteran. I'm very active in veteran's affairs. I received
a lot of high honors for my work with veterans. I like to use the word patriot. When you people
study U.S. history, you read a lot about patriots: Patrick Henry, George Washington. You know,
all the first Presidents, the signers of The Declaration. You remember each man that signed
The Declaration of Independence became a trader to the English king. Their houses were confiscated,
their families, if possible, were imprisoned. If they were caught, they would have been
hung. So they did a very very noble and dangerous thing. In the last sentence in The Declaration
of the Independence, "we pledge our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor." How many
people would do that today? So that's what our country was built on. And our country
is built on the sacrifices and deeds of the United States veterans. We like to think of
ourselves as a peace loving country, but no generation since the Revolutionary War has
not seen some war going on some place in their lives. To you young people, I hope you appreciate
the military, I hope you have love and respect for the flag. That flag is almost human to
me. When I see it wave on certain days, I can see Washington, I can see Eisenhower,
I can see all these former figures in our past. People think I'm nuts, but I have no
trouble standing when I'm watching a parade when I'm watching the flag go by. Saluting
it in uniform. I enjoy standing and singing the national anthem at ball game or pledging
allegiance in classes. Whenever I give a lecture in a class, I always ask if they will stand
with me and join with me in a pledge. It's very very important to me. Respect I learned
in the service respect for my government. I firmly believe that our democracy is the
best form of government ever devised in the history of the world. Our problems are not
with the form of government. They're with some of the people that we have elected to
run it. All the more reason to be careful in whom you elect. So I could talk another
half an hour about flag waving. I'm the world's greatest flag waver, but I'm going to stop
there and let Shawn ask me if there's anything that I haven't talked about that he'd like
to know. INGRAHAM: Could you tell me about growing
up before you joined the military? JOHNSON: Hmm?
INGRAHAM: Growing up. JOHNSON: Oh, Okay. Well, growing up, of course,
was much different. There was no television. Very few people had telephones. My whole neighborhood,
I don't think there were five automobiles. Your whole world was your neighborhood and
you got to know everybody. The kids, you know, your peers, and also their parents. And most
of your amusement took place in the neighborhood. Occasionally you'd go downtown to meet people
or go to the theater. There was one theater in town which, you know, which changed maybe
once or twice a week. So it was a very slow pace thing. I don't think I ever left Naugatuck
until maybe I was in high school. Maybe went to Waterbury. I might have been out of Connecticut
once or twice before I went in the service but that's the way it was. It wasn't just
me, it was everybody else. And it's hard for people, you know, in your vantage to understand
that and that's why it's hard to understand what our early up bringing was. School was
a great social center as well as a learning center. Discipline, I think, was much easier
to maintain because parents exercise a great deal more control over their kids. It was
an embarrassment for parents if their kids misbehaved. You know, such thing as promiscuity,
teenage pregnancy. A family would be likely to move out of town if their daughter were
to become pregnant. Today, it's more commonplace. You know, I'm not going to dwell on that.
I can't make statements about it because my up bringing is much different, but if somebody
was ever arrested in the neighborhood, it was a whole cast of negative spell over the
whole neighborhood. And if Mrs. Jones down the street saw you smoking a cigarette, she
wouldn't hesitate coming down and telling my mother. She probably would have to come
down to tell her that because for a while we didn't have a telephone. The first telephone
we had was a party line. Two or three people would be on the same line and if you picked
it up and someone else was on the line talking, you could listen to their conversation. And
if it was sort of an emergency, you could say, you know, Mrs. Brown, could you get off?
I need to call my doctor. The best way to community with somebody across town was with
a letter or a postcard. You brought it to the corner postbox and the mailman would pick
it up, bring it downtown, sort it, and it would be delivered to __ the next day. And
they'd answer you, write a postcard, and same thing because you couldn't talk on the telephone.
Where would people be today without a cell phone? So when you study history, you have
to study history in the same context. When you see the Civil War where men marching shoulder
to shoulder into enemy fire, you say, wow, that's suicidal or it would be today, with
machine guns, but remember if you could get off two shots in three minutes, that was rapid
fire. You had seven or eight different things you had to do. And the enemy would get very
close to you by the time you got two rounds off. So you lined up four or five or six deep.
In the European battles, if you were fighting your first battle, you were in the first wave.
If you lived through it, you would be in the second wave. If you lived through five or
six battles, you had good chances of surviving. But, again, the context. The early Indian
War, the Indians would get off six or seven arrows before you could get your second shot
off. But, anyway, in my young life, everything was very simple. Movies were probably 5 or
10 cents, ice cream, same thing. Most parents made their own. My father made root beer.
My older sister could make good ice cream. Everybody had something growing in the backyard.
Very little refrigeration. So my parents almost had to shop every day. A lot of backyard baseball,
and football, basketball, swimming in the old pond. You know, which now would be ruled
out of order for being polluted. Walking up in the mountains to pick berries. You know,
a two or three mile walk was nothing. INGRAHAM: What did your father do as a job?
JOHNSON: Well, my father really had two jobs. He was a Reserves Officer which meant me was
gone for at least two months every year in training. He was in World War I and World
War II. And then he worked in the chemical which was part of the __ complex then. He
worked in an office. He was a purchasing agent. A little bit high, probably in the middle
strata of jobs. So probably by the time I was 10, 11 years old, we had a car and we
had to take trips here and there. To do that, gasoline was 12 cents a gallon. So he You
know, he tried to provide, but The Depression came along. Everybody lost their jobs. Even
people like my father who had a fairly responsible job probably was told to work one or two days
a week. Eventually, just about everybody lost their homes. Homes were foreclosed, they couldn't
pay mortgages. But the good thing about it was the bank couldn't sell the homes because
nobody had any money. So the bank was sitting on hundreds of foreclosed homes and it limited
the amount of business that they could do because they didn't have any money either.
No money was coming in, but we were never forced out of our homes. I guess some people
were. Some unscrupulous people that had money of some source. They were able to buy up beautiful
homes and estates for less than nothing. Boy, they could hire men who had been unemployed
for less than nothing an hour to build stone walls and all kinds of structures. So these
people had You know, had an advantage. But growing up was altogether different.
INGRAHAM: Now, you said your sister was involved with the war effort. What did she do?
JOHNSON: My sister was a nurse. After high school she went to a three year nursing program
in Waterbury Hospital and as soon as she got her RN papers she joined the military. My
father was already gone. Our family had a very heavy military orientation. So she joined
the Army Nurse Corps and became a Second Lieutenant. Before too long I think even before I was
out of high school, she was overseas and working in some hospital. She stayed quite a while,
10 or 12 years. As a matter of fact, she met her husband. A wounded 82nd Airborne Officer
and she met him in the hospital. So I never really remember too much about her. Accept
she graduated from high school and went to Waterbury Hospital. At that time, they stayed
at Waterbury Hospital and didn't come home at nights because after a couple of months
they worked the hospital. The hospital was getting free training nurses but they were
fed and housed at the hospital. So I didn't see too much of her and once she graduated
she was gone. My older brother, I don't even think he graduated. I think he left. My father
was very very strict. My mother had the toughest job. You know, helping us grow up and then
during the war, can you imagine can you picture yourself as a mother having five of
your family during the war living in harms way? All of us were not too far from danger.
So I think she had a very tough time with it, but we all came back. I came back and
I took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights. The United States Government would give you
a year of higher education a month of higher education for every month in the service you
had. So if you had three years, that's equal to four years of college because a calendar
year is 12 months and a college year is 8 or 9. So I went to Spring Field College and
had my room, board, tuition, books paid for, plus, $75 a month __. So when I got my check,
I went over to the cafeteria and bought about 50 bucks worth of meal tickets so I wouldn't
starve. And then I blew the rest of the 15 bucks a month or whatever it was. But, again,
it was a wonderful opportunity for me. Plus, I think it was a good move for the government
because I'm sure they got all that money back through taxes and work I did for 38 years.
It's very hard for me to comprehend the world that I'm living in now. I have an 8 year old
grandson who I can call over to fix my VCR. ___ I got rid of the clock. You see that?
I don't like the flash so I just that's improvising; right, for an 83 year old old.
I sometimes wish I had learned the computer but it just happened at a very inconvenient
time. When it became almost mandatory, I was ready to retire and that's what I wanted to
do. I had two offers to teach in junior college and I told them, well, let me take a year
off. I'm a little tired and by the time the year ended, I wasn't ready to do anything.
I was still tired. I just pick up a few bucks here, I tutor. I used to, I don't anymore.
I do an awful lot of volunteer work. I've been chairman of the Honored Vet's Counsel
for 20 years, run the parades, and all the other stuff. So it's been a very eventful
life. I consider myself very lucky in many ways. I don't want to get too philosophical
on you, young guy. INGRAHAM: It's Okay. When you enlisted, were
you hoping to fight in the Pacific or fight in Europe?
JOHNSON: I don't know if that was anything I really, you know, felt was important. I
think I told you earlier on, what your wishes were didn't make any difference anyway. I
wanted to be an infantry man like my father. They must have thought I was nuts, but I wound
up in artillery. Why? I don't know. Except that it's a little bit more sophisticated
maybe or maybe that's what they needed at the time. So they got a six or seven hundred
guys that just came in. Camp Edwards needs six or seven hundred guys to fulfill their
batteries up there and so boom, that's where you went. And once you were in, you have no
control over your life. The good and the bad thing is you don't have to worry about what
time you go to bed, they told you. You told you what time you were getting up, what you
were going to wear, what you were going to eat. All that was taken care of for you. On
the other hand, you lose your choice. The undemocratic something about the United States
is the military and it has to be that way. You're not going to take a vote to see who's
going to charge their machine gun. So choices are not important, today it is. I used to
do some recruiting when I was a guidance counselor and kids today, if their grades are commencer
to what they want, they have a good chance to gain. You know, and if if an opening
for what you want isn't there, they tell you to wait. Wait a couple of months so something
opens up. Not during war time. They didn't call you a GI for nothing. You were government
issued and you were part of the equipment. When it rained the sergeant would say "don't
get your rifle wet." He didn't give a damn about you. That's the way it has to be. Again,
that's Again, why I say war is horrible. It should be avoided at all cost. Except for
surrender and capitulation. If we ever surrender, that's the end. You'll never get anything
like we had now back. There's so many people out to destroy us that if they ever get control
of this country, that's the end. To capitulate, I feel we have done that already. I don't
feel we ever should have compromise Vietnam or Korea. Right now what they're talking about
over there in Iraq is very hard to We should avoid war as I said, but if you're in to it,
you're into it to win at all cost, no matter how long it takes. And you should have the
country behind you. Unfortunately, today our country is getting more and more away from
that. And that's the fault of our leaders. And political parties, I think now are more
interested in themselves than they are their country. So, I think I don't ever see ourselves
being destroyed militarily, but I can see ourselves falling apart internally. So with
that I'll end my conversation because don't get me started on that. I'll get my banners
out and show you my battle scars. But, again, as I said before, I appreciate this opportunity.
I hope a lot of people have the opportunity to hear it. I hope it's been a learning experience.
And I hope many young people will give some thought of joining the military. Not everybody
can hide behind the military. Some people have to become military. Young college men
have a chance to become officers which what I wanted to do but never worked out. When
I graduated from Spring Field College I wanted to. I had a chance to go to Officer Candidate
School for seven weeks and come out a Second Lieutenant, but I also was engaged at the
time and my wife and I had made plans to get married in August and she said, "I'm not
marrying a military man." She probably saved my life. So it's interesting. I envy you young
people. You're at a very exciting age. Take your profession of your job seriously but
not yourself. INGRAHAM: Well, I thank you for this opportunity.
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