Oscar Anderson. Veteran's Day 1990.

Oscar Anderson

Veterans Day 1990

I went in the service in Chicago and from there down to Camp Perrin, Texas for training. We got into the special area where they had radio and message center climbing poles. Well, I never could learn the area where it was dot-ta-dot-ta-dot. I wasn’t good at Morse Code or the switch board but I could climb poles pretty good. We used to go out and practice going up and down those stupid things. One time we were out there climbing poles and we were gonna have a race and it just so happened that I was the first guy done. You had to pretend you were running a wire up to a pole and tie it off at 14 feet, come down and go up the other pole, tie it up there, come back down and make it like you were going across the road. Well, the first guy done happened to be me. As I was taking off my climbers I looked up and there happened to be a guy with 3 stars on each shoulder standing in front of me. He had come over to congratulate me. I didn’t know what to do so I stood real stiff at attention. As I stood there he said, “Where you from soldier?” I said, “Kent City, Michigan, sir.” He said, “Where?” I said, “Kent City, Michigan, sir.” He said, “Did you say Kalamazoo?” I screamed, “KENT CITY, MICHIGAN!” He never heard of such a place. He happened to be from Indiana.

Anyway, I didn’t think much about being a message center guy because what they want you to do is string the wire way out to some outpost somewhere and have some guy out there look it over all the time. At that time, any guy or some Jap could come along and snip them wires and then there’s no messages. Then they would send a guy like me out to find it and splice. Well, the guy knows where the cut is at then here I come along to fix it and here I am. I’m a dead duck. Well, I really didn’t want to do that. They said there was a place in the motor pool so I headed for the motor pool.

We went to the Philippians. Now I had a mustache all the time I was in the service overseas. When we get in the Philippians and I was in the motor pool some guys got envious of my mustache. I had sandy colored hair and one time they called me to the paint shack. As I walked into the paint shack two big guys grabbed me, plunked me down and painted my mustache red. The paint dries real fast. It was a bright red vermillion paint. I had a brilliant red mustache until it grew out.

Anyway, we came to the Philippians to replace some guys. Well, I’ve never seen a place like this. Jack and I was talking about the mud. Mud in the Philippians is absolutely out of sight. It’s the slimiest thing I’ve ever seen. You can take a shovel and you can’t get even that far in it (holding up his fingers to show about two inches). You can’t even walk in the stuff. It’s just awful.

One night we were supposed to go get some black sand or river bottom stuff to put around the camp so we could walk. Well the Japs could hear us and they were shooting at us from the bamboo. We didn’t like that. We had to shovel sand in the dark because if we turned the lights on the Japs could get us.

We got shipped up north near Clark Field when they brought back the 161^st Infantry guys. They had been up in combat about 107 days. When we got up there we were the guys that filled in the blanks and boy there were a lot of blanks. These guys. We thought they were in their 40’s and 50’s when we looked at them. The aging and the beards that they had made them look that old. But come to find out they were 19 and early 20’s years old. They had had banzai attacks. (A Banzai charge is the term used by the Allied forces to refer to Japanese human wave attacks mounted by infantry units. This term came from the Japanese cry "Tenno Heika Banzai" , shortened to banzai, specifically referring to a tactic used by Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War) They were hardened veterans but they were battle weary if you’d ever seen them and they had seen a lot of blood. These guys were so glad to see us. I’ll never forget that they would ask, “Is the west coast really bombed out?” They had heard ‘Tokyo Rose’ and all that stuff. We’d say “No.” They would say, “Are you sure or are you just crappin’ me? This happened about two months ago.” We would have to keep reassuring them that there were no deaths or bombing anywhere on the U.S. coast. Then they would ask, “Have you got any pictures of anything back home?” We’d show them pictures of our sisters or anything we had from back home.

I gotta say, my dear mother wrote me a letter every day that I was in the service. Everyday. I was in only a couple of years but every day I got mail. Every time they had a roll call old Oscar Anderson got mail. These guys would read my mother’s letters and you knew a certain calf got out of the stall and knocked a box over. You knew everything that happened. We would read all about it. I remember the Clark School news how she wrote everything. She would write everything to me and I would pass it around for all the guys to read. They were so glad to read that mail.

Well, finally we shifted over and we were near Clark Field except we were about twenty miles back from the main road. Some of these guys heard that there were a bunch of nurses over at Clark Field. Now remember these guys were in their teens or a little beyond in their early twenties. Well, you know how these guys think and uh what they think with and so they wanted to get with them nurses and have a party. Oscar got a ¾ ton truck and over we went. We got drunked up a little bit then headed home. We had to go that twenty-two miles back in the woods on this two track and twice I was sure I was getting shot at. Boy, if you ever seen a guy hunkered down in a ¾ ton jeep, I was just looking with two eyeballs over the windshield going down this road and two shots ring out and your headlights are on but I never got shot and we all made it home.

Anyway, while we were there the war finally ended. That was some great big day. What a relief! We were kind of in training to be a diversionary force and uh, none of us really wanted to but it was something we had to do I guess. People complain about gamma globulin shots in the bottom but I never complained about it. It was a good way to save my hide and I had no concerns about that.

The rest of our troops shipped into Do Wax Basin but our outfit stayed behind to clean things up. Now we were twenty-two miles back and we had these little ‘fuzzy wuzzies’. They were certainly not very civilized. I’ll never forget the first time I encountered them. The company commander said, “Okay you guys, as soon as you get your truck unloaded go back down to the river and clean it up.” The truck was covered with mud. So, I go back down to the river and I’m washing away at this thing. I had the hood up and I’m bent over washing the motor off. I had a sense somebody was standing around me. I stood up, turned around and looked and here stood five guys. They weren’t any taller than that (held his arm straight out from his body). There they stood with fuzzy wuzzy hair. Their teeth were filed and pointed. They had bows and arrows that were longer than they were tall. Their arrows were bamboo sticks and here I was with only a rag in my hand and they had bows and arrows. I knew they didn’t like the Japs and had killed a few of them. I had never seen a fuzzy wuzzy before and I was petrified. I just turned and looked at them and I said, “Hi” and turned around and went back to washing the motor. I thought if I’m going to get it, I’m going to get it. It’s too late to run. There’s nothing I could do. They grunted and groaned a little bit, walked around and looked at the truck and kind of wandered off. That was all there was to it. After that we saw quite a lot of them. Of course, the Japs, when they occupied it they tried to make them work and do something and they hated the Japs with a passion and so these negroes would kill the Japs and they had quite a few of their guns. They’d see a Jap out in the hills and they’d kill him and take his guns. But we never bothered them so they were kind of on our side.

Americans waste so much stuff it was pathetic. We would take a bull dozer and make big trenches to throw our trash and dump it and these negroes would live like kings with what we’d throw away. Loaves of bread and so forth, they’d even take the coffee grounds. I never could figure that out.

After the war, they said all you guys in the motor pool, you have a license. We gotta move these jeeps. So, they hauled us down to this big pool where they had four to five hundred jeeps. We had to drive them all up onto a big air craft carrier. They all had to have 5 good tires and they were rough. I asked, “What are you gonna do with them?” They said, “Take them out and dump them in the ocean.” The Filipinos wanted them. They would steal them. If we went to town we had to take the rotors out of them and take some wires off them and lock ‘em up. But instead of giving them to the Filipinos we’d dump them in the ocean. We found out the retired people and the people that made jeeps didn’t want a bunch of them over there.

The other thing in that same line, we were up in Kobe, Japan and they put big army blankets with a big U.S. on them and they were just wonderful, all wool and so forth. I bet I seen 300 bales of them that they’d put on a ship and drive off - oceans away and dump them off instead of giving them to somebody. You think now what people could do with them. The waste was just terrible.

You talk about these fly boys. We were cruising up there at Clark Field and messing around and you know how these young guys are. They’d take a chance to do pretty much anything. I was supposed to be back of course but there were these guys I got to know. I come real close to flying from Clark Field to Okinawa and around and I thought I’ll never get back. I’ll be court marshalled for the rest of my life. Ray Wilder spoke up, “You should of went.” A lady’s voice from the audience said, “Ray was gonna be your pilot.” Oscar and the audience all laughed. Oscar continued, “The things that guys do, it’s just crazy.”

We had Eisenhower come over there and it was just crazy. Everything had to be spic and span. We’d take these big chains that were on the truck tires and tie them on a rope to the back of the vehicle and drive up and down the roads just to shine up and clean up the chains so when we’d have inspection and we’d lay all these chains out they would be nice and clean. But, we never had an inspection, nobody ever came but just in case we were gonna have, it was just something to keep you busy.

Finally, we got on ship and headed for Japan but they had a typhoon so we turned around and headed back to the Philippines and stuck around there. The ship headed back but we stuck around and cleaned up the mess. We used a bull dozer to make a big trench. We put all the junk in there and used the bull dozer to cover it up. By the next morning these negroes would have it dug all back up. Heck we thought we had everything all cleaned up and it was just fine and by the next noon here it is all dug up again and it looked like we never done a thing. They’d pull everything all apart and get everything they could out of it.

Then, we got on a ship and we went up to Japan and it was very, very interesting. The Filipinos to me were dirty. They were lazy. To me, they were just dirty, lazy people. And they expect Uncle Sam to hand them off everything. Every nice building that you ever seen around there would have ‘designed by Goldsteen/built by Filipino’ and so forth and everything was built by the American dollar. We rebuilt everything that was there after the war and they hadn’t bothered to clean up anything. They just walked over the trash and the junk and so forth. You know you’d talk to them and they would say, “Well, you know, if America would only help and give us some money then we could do something about it. We could clean everything up.” Man, we did everything we could do for them and they still haven’t done nothing. They’re just dirty, lazy people.

Then we go up to Japan and it’s still smoking. Every brick was in place and every street was cleaned off. Where the bomb craters were, they’d fill it in the best they could and we’d drive over it. I mean the Japs were ambitious, clean and industrious people. We just bombed them pathetically and you talk about saturation bombing. It was just void. You could see the checkered rows where the buildings were. We did a good job, guys. We always wondered, I know I did. If at least one of those Japs might want to take one of us Americans with him.

I always figured MacArthur had it easier than Eisenhower. In Europe, everybody was still free with no government attached. But Japan, their government was still fully in force. So, when somebody said we’ll do this or that, whatever, well, they did. People did what they were told. They never jaywalked or nothing. You can imagine a bunch of G.I.’s, especially if they got ½ drunk or totally drunk. They’d be walking to the corner and cut across and so forth. The Japs would blow their whistle. Just a little snot like that (holding his arm straight out). So, the Japs saw us Americans do it and said I guess I will too. It was kind of chaos. But MacArthur grabbed the old emperor by the throat and said you will do this and that and he did. Old Mac had to run the show from the top and he got to be real big for his britches and they got rid of him. But the Japs were never vindictive. I never seen any of the that ever tried to do anything to us. We treated some of them kind of bad. Some of us Americans were a little bit nasty to some of their women and ladies. It doesn’t make me too proud when I think of some of the things that happened but you know they would just physically beat them up and cuff them up and treat them kind of bad and they never fought back and they never to my knowledge would reprisal that I know of. They were very industrious and courteous and they were completely in submission.

I remember one time I went to a Japanese barber shop and man, this guy sharpened that old razor on the razor strap and when he put it up to my neck I thought zoomp! He could go like that (taking his finger and mimicking slitting his throat). I thought it could be all over just that quick. I didn’t need to shave for two days. I mean he got clear down to the roots and all. They were something.

Then I went and had one of my teeth filled. I got to know these people and one of them went to be a dentist. So, I said, “Look at my mouth.” I opened my mouth and he said I had one that needed fixing. I said, “You want to fix it?” He said, “Yeah, I will.” Again, I opened my mouth and he got his drill out and I thought he could fix my wagon pretty good, but he didn’t. They were nice people. I never could learn to sit on the floor and eat. That was uncomfortable. We had what I would say a good time there. I was real surprised outside of Kobe. They had an international settlement. There was what they called White Russians and there was a group of people that didn’t have slanted eyes in a hill section in Kobe.