Oral history interview of Louis J. Bury

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Louis J. Bury
Creator:: Palmer, Janet
Bury, Louis J., 1920-2004
Date of Original:: 2003-07-23
Subject:: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
World War, 1939-1945--Medical care--India
Liberty ships
World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Burma
Tomokowski, Frank J., 1920-2011
United States. Air Force. Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, 821st
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
United States. Army Nurse Corps
Location:: Australia, Western Australia, Fremantle, -32.05632, 115.74557
India, Assam, 26.4073841, 93.2551303
India, Chabua Air Force Station, 27.4630047, 95.1143134
India, Digboi, 27.3956145, 95.614868
India, Hugli River, 22.91089175, 88.0106338789909
India, Kolkata, 22.5677459, 88.3476023
India, Ledo, 27.2911024, 95.7385827
United States, Florida, Hillsborough County, MacDill Air Force Base, 27.8472, -82.50338
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Kentucky, Jefferson County, Bowman Field, 38.22813, -85.66302
United States, Pennsylvania, Johnstown, 40.3267407, -78.9219698
United States, Texas, Camp Barkeley, 32.3510804, -99.8514412934425
United States, Virginia, Nottoway County, Fort Pickett, 37.0497, -77.94626
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Louis Bury describes his experience in an Army Air Forces Medical Air Evacuation Squadron. After his training in Virginia, Texas, Florida and Kentucky, he was sent to India, where he was an administrative officer with the 821st MAES. He talks about his Pacific crossing in a Liberty ship and having leave in Australia. He describes in detail what camp life was like, including sleeping in beshas. He details his dealings with the Army Nurse Corps, the natives, and the British. He also tells of his trip home, transiting the Suez Canal and seeing New York Harbor. He also discusses his post-war life, employment and education.
Louis Bury was in the Army Air Forces in Burma during World War II.
JANICE PALMER: Today is July 23rd, 2003. My name is Janice PALMER and I'm conducting an interview with Louis Bury at the Atlanta History Center for the Veterans History Project. Mr. Bury, could you please state and spell your full name? LOUIS BURY: Louis J. Bury, L-O-U-I-S J. B-U-R-Y. JANICE PALMER: What is your date of birth? LOUIS BURY: Date of birth is 10-15-20. JANICE PALMER: And what is your current address? LOUIS BURY: 3406 Stillbrook Way, Marietta, Georgia, 30062. JANICE PALMER: Also attending this interview is Mr. Bury's daughter, Claudia Klee. What war were you in? LOUIS BURY: I was in World War II. JANICE PALMER: And what branch of service were you in? LOUIS BURY: In the U.S. Army and the Air Force. JANICE PALMER: And what was your rank? LOUIS BURY: I finally came out as a Captain. JANICE PALMER: And where did you serve? LOUIS BURY: I served after the OCS; I served in China-Burma-India, known as CBI for eighteen months. Prior to that I started off with Camp Pickett as a medical replacement training center, and then to OCS at Camp Barkley, Texas, and then finally assigned to the Air Force to the Bowen Field School of Air Evacuation. And that was in those days, air ambulance. They didn't like to be called air ambulance but air ambulance is assigned to A Point [?] First Medical Air Evacuation Center as an administrator officer, and went overseas with one enlisted man. We listened with the equipment to the rest of the outfit went first class by troop ship through the Panama Canal to India. JANICE PALMER: Okay. Well, let's start out with getting a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up? LOUIS BURY: I grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. JANICE PALMER: And did you enlist or were you drafted? LOUIS BURY: Oh, I was drafted. JANICE PALMER: You were drafted. Do you remember knowing how you felt when you found out you were drafted? LOUIS BURY: Oh, it was to be expected when December 7th came around, the very next day three or four of my buddies enlisted. We were told by a neighbor who was a World War I veteran, don't enlist, you won't get any more benefits than if you're drafted. That happened exactly that way. So, we waited, my brother was first in February and I went the following August. JANICE PALMER: And where did you go for boot camp? LOUIS BURY: For training first with Camp Pickett, Virginia. It's called an MRTC, Medical Replacement Training Center. And there eight weeks of basics, and then I stayed on what is called cadre, which is staff. And trained the next two more groups and from there I went to OCS. JANICE PALMER: Do you remember any experiences while you were in basic training, any experiences that really stand out in your mind? LOUIS BURY: Oh, basic training was running the obstacle courses, the exercise, and the calisthenics and so forth. And I was gung-ho in those days, and I relished being what was a so-called drill instructor afterwards for two more, meaning, you're teaching the guys drills and pitching tents, and you name it, hollering and calisthenics, and so forth. I relished that part really, great fun, same way when they went on forced marches and so forth, no problems. I didn't get sore feet like my trainees did. JANICE PALMER: Are there any people in particular that you remember from that time? LOUIS BURY: Oh, yes, one of my, two of my buddies, three of them. Frank Dukaski was from my home town. There was about four of us from my home town were in my company. Then we had two more came, the rest of my outfit were from Pittsburgh, sixty miles away, sixty-five. And one was Danny Annemitis [?], and he was my cadre buddy and roommate when we were basic training, and afterwards as we were cadre, he stayed on as a cadre. Paul, he went on to become, he went to OSS, Office Strategic Services, and he got in the AGC test, highest I ever saw, 145, mine was 137, Danny's was 139, and Paul's was 145. It took 110 to get to OCS, 110 to go to an AGC unit, Army General Classification Test. You're talking to an administrative officer; I had to know all that stuff. JANICE PALMER: So, when you finished basic training, you went up to OCS? LOUIS BURY: No, I stayed on as cadre for two whole periods. I think the next period was about ten weeks long, and then there was a twelve weeks long period. And then about midway through the third period, I never did take it, I went to OCS. JANICE PALMER: And where did you go? LOUIS BURY: I went to Camp Barkley which is in Abilene, Texas, not Abilene, Kansas, but Abilene, Texas, west of Fort Worth-Dallas. JANICE PALMER: And how was that? LOUIS BURY: That was quite an experience. Very glad to have been cadre for two periods, in other words this is the stuff that they threw at us at OCS, and it was duck soup for me, nothing to it, because I was used to it all. I had no trouble going through OCS outside of the heat. You had to keep your uniform spotless and everything, and it is very hard to do in the heat. JANICE PALMER: And any experiences in there, particularly in there that you remember, that stand out in your mind? LOUIS BURY: Not too much, other than I had no trouble. I got to drill the troops and so forth, and always did well because one of the things they graded you on was command appearance and things. In other words you had to look like a soldier, and of course I said I was gung-ho and young, athletic in those days and no problem. But outside of that, forcef marches in the heat were rough. JANICE PALMER: And when you finished there, where did you go? LOUIS BURY: Well, they assigned me; I was one of the lucky ones that was assigned to the Air Force. A lot of them stayed in the Army, and went to Army medical places, but I went to the Air Force and Deal Field, Tampa Bay, Florida, Tampa, Florida. And there had to wait for assignment. First they assigned me to one, believe it or not, a medical outfit, a dental outfit in Clearwater. And I went to Clearwater, Florida, across the bay. I wasn't there more than two weeks and they changed the assignment to Bowman Field, Kentucky, School of Air Evacuation. So, I didn't have to go overseas right then and there with a dental outfit. I went to School of Air Evacuation on the same way, I was an instructor there. One of the things that I taught of all things is map reading, some GI's and the enlisted men that were there, and the nurses too. And there were a bunch of nurses; they were all training to be air evacuation. So, I was cadre for a while there, and then finally a month or so they assigned me to an overseas outfit So, I got an 821, in other words when I first went there my buddies were assigned to 810, 11, and 12, I think 810, 11, 12, and I didn't get assigned to one until 821. JANICE PALMER: When you finished there where did you go? LOUIS BURY: Oh, now they sent us overseas, and we went—as an administrative officer one of my jobs is also to be a supply officer, where they sent me to California, to Wilmington. To a port of embarkation with an enlisted man, we would take the equipment overseas. And he was to be on one ship and I was to be on another ship. But the outfit went the other way, they went by, to Norfolk, Virginia and boarded the big troop ship and went through the Panama Canal, went to India that way. And we went overseas. I went in the Liberty Ship at top speed with eleven knots and just crawled along, took me seventy days to get to India. JANICE PALMER: What was the name of the ship? LOUIS BURY: The ship was Segundo Ruiz-Belais, Segundo means gentleman in Spanish I think, and Ruiz-Belais was his name, RUIZ- BELAIS. And later on I found out, years later I found out that it sank on the coast of Africa after the war. But anyway we went to Calcutta, I went to Calcutta, the outfit went to Bombay, India, and then went across India by train to Calcutta. Our two ships went up to Okleah River [PHONETIC], not the Ganges, but Okleah, to port in Calcutta. Then we were sent to up to Providence of the Esam, being way up into Northeast India. Northeast India was the actual place, was called Chabua. And there was a big air field there. It was the going-jumping off place where they drove the supplies over the hump into China, to help out the 14th Chiang Kai-shek, in the 14th Air Force. But, so we were sent to Chabua out that there, and from Chabua we were ordered with the first outfit that was there, believe it or not, 803rd Medical Air Evacuation Squadron that had been evacuating agents from India from the start of the war almost. They thought we were going to relieve them, they found out no. We weren't there to relieve them, our job was to go up further north up to Leoesam and evacuate the casualties out in Burma, call back casualties, 803rd was different, evacuate the non-combatants across the rest of India to Kalache [PHONETIC], by Calcutta. So we were assigned to Leo. We moved out after Leo, we got our own base set up in Leo, set up, and incidentally we sent, right off the bat, we sent off one flight of nurses, six nurses and eight enlisted men, and a medical officer to China to work with the 14th Air Force. The rest of us stayed in India to work with the 10th Air Force. We were stationed there until the end of the war to evacuate. JANICE PALMER: And when did you arrive, about when did you arrive there? LOUIS BURY: Oh, I arrived at the first part of August, 1943, '44 that's right. I always say I celebrated D-Day on June the 6th. I was two days past across the equator, the Pacific. We crossed the equator on June the 4th first time, and then we went down along there, we got about eighteen hour shore leave, in Freeman, Australia, which is the west side, the big city Freeman was on the ocean, and from there up to Bay of Bengal to Calcutta. JANICE PALMER: What was your daily life like? LOUIS BURY: Daily life was—uniform was shorts and shoes, tennis shoes if you had them. But certainly not anything heavy, shorts and shoes and it was hot. And we lived in what we called bashas. And the 803rd had tents, they had like ten man tents. And the reason it was called a ten man tent, it didn't hold ten men, it only held four men. It took ten men to pitch it. I had to learn all over again how to pitch a British tent from a desert tent. But anyway we lived in bashas, except for the officers. They lived in these ten men tents, and they were always pitched on what was known as a plint. A plint like this table, set up off the ground about eighteen inches. The reason for that is water, monsoons. Round here you worry about ground clot [?], but when you're camping above water in India, get up to eighteen inches. But anyhow the quarters for the 803rd had a mess hall, and the mess hall is what the engineers would construct a building out of bamboo. It was flattened bamboo; you took the bamboo and flattened it, and beat it with a hammer and flattened it. You can almost make it like a board, and then they would weave that into a big sheet and nail that to a frame. And that was the outside of the house, the inside of the house was lined with burlap. The reason for burlap was to keep the bugs out and snakes. They wouldn't keep mosquitoes out, it wouldn't keep mosquitoes out, but anyhow, and the roof always a sheet metal roof, a corrugated sheet metal like an iron roof, but it was packed with leaves that were bamboo leaves and whatever else leaves they could get on top, about eighteen inches thick for insulation to cool it off inside. In Leo, we were fortunate to have the engineers build for the nurses two barracks, but I guess it was two nurses to a room and we had nineteen of them, almost twenty. So, there must have been ten rooms, two five-room barracks in a long line with again, with the bamboo sides and the brush roof, and so forth. They also had a water tower, oh they had a—their shower was believe it or not heated with a Coleman stove. Of course, they had a brush roof and so forth and they burned it down one time, they got it too hot. I remember one of the exciting, two things for the nurses, one time they called for us to come over because there was a snake in their shower, and up in the roof. And we knocked it down and killed it with a shovel. But it was, what's a snake in India with a puffed up head and so forth? I forgot, cobra, puffed up in the head, and they hit him with a shovel, surprised he didn't cut his head off, but anyway I hit. Anyway, the thing burnt down., They also had a water tower there. We had the water pumped from the air strip. The nurses' quarters were like on the hill, above a rice paddy, former rice paddy, and the rice paddy had been built up and it was an air strip out there. But we flew out of that air strip, flew on one end of it and then we had a well down in there, and it pumped the water up to the water tower. And we could tell when it was full, we had a bucket on the inside with a weight on the outside. And when it would get empty why the weight would be up near the top, and then when it was time to start to pump, you'd pump it back up. And we'd go back down and watch the thing and turn the pump off. And the nurses had a special generator of their own for their own electricity. And we had a Jeep generator on our side, a Jeep motor. And it put out, of all things believe it or not, was enough electricity, 3KW, three thousand watts and you can't buy generators today that have three thousand watts in it. We had a special guy that his job was to run that generator, keep it running with gasoline and also to run the pump on the other side, and the nurses' generator. That is all he had to do, all day long, was keep them both running. And of course we had the enlisted men; we built a special area for them. We put all their tents and laid it out, being a former layout in a steel mill in drafting, but anyway we laid it out in a quadrangle, put all the tents around the side except the one side that was opened toward our mess hall. The engineers built us a mess hall, and a supply house, a four-room house for the officers which were, oh, and they built us a dayroom, a dayroom, and squadron headquarters. And they were all built with the bamboo things with the brush top and so forth. We had roads coming into the place. We had to get into the place; we had to go through the medical supply warehouse. And they had these big long warehouses built out of bamboo and brush top, long rectangular warehouses which all the medical supplies for the whole, that end of the theatre was stored there. I don't know what all was in it. We'd get in there, you get anything medical. I don't care whether it was generators or whether X-ray generators machines or what, but they were stored in there. Because of the place where I had, they had two general hospitals in that area too, 69th Gneral, and 20th General. Two general hospitals, a number general is as high as you go in the Army, general hospital, because otherwise in the stateside they become, they are named by Walter Reed and so forth, Massachusetts General, and things like that. And overseas they have their own nurses and so forth. JANICE PALMER: Are there any experiences? Tell us any more experiences you had during that time? LOUIS BURY: Well, we had different ones. We went with the nurses, whenever we were at Chabua with the 803rd, they had been there quite a while. And when you have nurses why you can get anything and the officers fought over themselves making sure them nurses get taken care of. But anyhow they had a swimming pool; it was built out of, just of boulders, rocks, and cement and so forth. And the wall was cement block and the sides were just boulders cemented together. But they had a swimming pool and they had tennis courts, one tennis court. So, when we got to Leo why the nurses right away, we didn't have any room for a swimming pool, but we did build a tennis court. We built a tennis court out and we built a tennis court again with GI improvisation, you know and so forth. Anyway we built a tennis court, the backsplash were camouflage nets, kick the ball, they were held up with bamboo poles, single coil wire holding them so far, telephone wire holding it. But anyway that's the way, and we rolled the court with—we had just plain lime for the lines. We rolled the court with it with a front end roller from the road roller. We got a front end road roller from the ordnance people, that front end of a big road roller, hitched the board on it and then we toted around with a recon car around because the Jeep wouldn't tow it. The Jeep, it was too heavy for a Jeep, the Jeep would overheat, and we had a heavier car, we would tow that thing around and roll it. That was our way we played tennis. We managed to get some blankets from and so forth and some of the guys went, later on somebody went down to Calcutta and got some good rackets from a sporting goods store in Calcutta, and tennis balls were supplied by special service. I can remember two instances with fire. One, me and one of my buddies, we had a pit off to the side road. We threw brush in it, and we wanted to clean it up because it attracted mosquitoes, and so I told one of the youngest kids in the outfit, named Blacky, to go burn it. So he went over to burn it, and he poured some oil on it and so forth, and it wasn't burning fast enough so he decided to put some gasoline on it. He put a bucket, got himself a bucket of gasoline at the motor pool and stood up there inside the pit and threw and the bucket of gasoline on it. And the gasoline hit the flames that were down there, and just came right back up, all the way to the bucket and him. And he's bare-chested and so forth, it hit him right in the chest. So, he was burnt for quite a while. We didn't send him to the hospital, we took care of him ourselves since we were medics. Same thing happened to me. When we had for our mess hall, you had to heat your utensils when you come out, your mess kit and your cup and so forth. You had to dip in one to wash the slop off and then you had to dip them into two more that were hot, boiling hot to scalding. And the first one was just slop bucket for your GI can, garbage can. The second one were to, had to be heated. And we'd build a fire under it, and the fire took too long to get it heated up to the big garbage can. So, in the theatre were the Air Force people and someone advised how to make a blow torch underneath it. You make a blow torch, and so I had the thing made. And we had the thing made, we'd put it, it was raining at some point and we had to keep it inside. And we started, we had a big can of gasoline coming down feeding this thing, and it made it with about ten feet long, not quite ten feet long but enough so you could put two GI cans on it, and it would heat both cans, and with jets coming up from the bottom. So the gasoline would come down hit those jets, burned so forth. Well, gasoline come down, it was working fine. The thing was crossed thread, the thread to connect the gasoline to it was crossed thread, the pressure from the stuff coming down from the heat goes back up and hit the gasoline and the gasoline went like a snake. And I'm standing there watching it like all them, hits me right in the legs, right on the shoes. I have GI shoes on, heavy Brogans, but nothing above, I had long pants on, it was winter time then. And the gasoline went up the fire and so forth, and went up my legs, burned me on both legs. We dashed out of the tent and so forth and lay on the ground. I grabbed one leg, pinched it shut, shut the air off. And one of the guys came running out of the mess hall which was next door and he dives on the other leg, dives on the other leg and smothers it and so forth. So he smothered, so I'm laid up for a couple weeks at home with bandaged legs. I have pictures of myself always from the top up and so forth. When I sent them home, I didn't want my wife to know that I had been burned, pretty painful, very painful. JANICE PALMER: Did you go on any evacuation flights? LOUIS BURY: I went on one evacuation flight, down in when one of the officers heard about it and said nothing doing. He said, you're married and have a baby at home, and so forth, and on top of that you're not on flying status, we are. We get paid for flying down there into combat, you don't. That's the only flight I made one down aircraft, you had to go down. That part was very interesting the way we actually did it. They had combat cargo ships with the doors off. They took the doors off the ship to see in with the car going with a parachute-attached to a parachute, and then we would fly over the troops and kick out then. Anyway their jobs were called “kickers”. Their job was to lie in, and they could hold on to the bar, and when somebody pushed a thing in front of them to kick it out the door as they flew over. But anyway, they would fly that and then they would fly back empty. Well, our troops, our medical personnel would go down in the morning and unload Air Evac and they would land in all these fields, first they would land in one place and drop off a nurse, and then go to the next field, fly to the next field further down into Burma closer to the combat zone. And when they got to the front lines, the medical officer was along and his technician was the last one, they were the ones that got the closest. The nurses weren't allowed to get close to the front lines. But anyway when they got there, they would—the plane would land and taxi over to the side of the strip in the jungle, and they would have, the patients would be laying there in the shade trying to shade as much as possible. And they would check with the medics that were on the ground and say, “What have you got? Do I have any litter patients, or do you have any walking wounded” and so forth. And then they would take the records, when they got the data, then they would field telephone, they would crank it up across the tower they had, the bamboo tower. And the tower's job was to call one of these ships flying back empty, cargo come on down and land we got patients to collect. They had theater orders when they were told to go down, a court martial offense if they passed it up because you have to take patients back, and they didn't like to take patients back. The reason for it was when they took patients back they didn't want to try to bail out and crash anything, if something went wrong they had to land it themselves, because if you've got patients on there, you got to land it. They didn't want to land it. They would sooner bail out, that's the reason for this map here. This is the map that they had in their parachute. These maps show all of Burma, and told so forth how to. Yeah this map is the kind of map they had in their chute pack. And when they would bail out, this map was in there along with all the necessary supplies to bail out. And so they were told to find water, and find a stream and then follow the stream to get out, because you don't want to go through the jungle. There would be a machete in the seat pack. The chute was known as a seat pack. You sat on that parachute and right on top of it was a flat pack, it wasn't any bigger than that frame there. And inside that can was K-rations, fish hooks, glass little cup, pills for water, stuff you might need to supply. And one of the things in there was a forty-five caliber shot gun shell, bird shot was in them, because when you bailed out you had a forty-five caliber revolver on your leg, strapped to your leg. And that was your only weapon for survival, that forty-five, and it had bullets, you couldn't kill, but you had bird shot and you could kill birds, rabbits, or anything like that with a bird shot shotgun shell. And they made a pistol into a shotgun. So, that was the way they survived to bail out. All of our guys survived that bailed out because these ships were just wired together. Every landing they would cross their fingers and every take off you didn't know whether the ship would hold together or not for another landing. JANICE PALMER: [Unintelligible] LOUIS BURY: Oh, yeah, we delivered them all. Afterward, for quite a while there we would correspond with a special letter and so forth telling where everybody was, and the next thing you know why it started getting smaller and smaller, deceased, and deceased. Never did find the certain ones, never did contact them until all of the outfit. But we had two reunions, one in Bowen Field and then later we had one of our, this was our nurses and so forth. Because they were at Bowen Field they were put in a special plaque in there for the field, the fact that this is where school was during World War II. We got with one place that we went too, and I've got quite a few of pictures, group pictures of people that were there, half of them are deceased since then, you know that wasn't too long ago. And this one to San Diego, this time one of our, we had of our surgical technicians, they were the enlisted men that were accompanying the nurses down, all of thirty technician, about three or four of them doctors afterwards, they went to med school. And one of them is an optometrist and the one that started in San Diego. And another one is a cardiologist, and another one went in gynecologist, baby doctor, high pockets. And he's the biggest one in the outfit and he's known as “high pockets.” And, of course, the medical officers correspond with him, Doctor Patton, Pat was my buddy, he was captain. I think later on he became RCO, promoted to major so I've got a picture of him. Me pinning his Oakleaf on when he got promoted, I'll have to send it to him one of these days if he's still living. JANICE PALMER: Did you have any interactions with the local people there? LOUIS BURY: No, we were told, believe it or not, the local people, we had to more or less stay away from because they were working their independence at that time. The Indians were working for their independence and our British allies said don't help them out. So incidentally everything that we did over there was lend-lease, lend-lose you might say. We had laborers who were, two set of laborers working, one crew was just malaria control, just did nothing but keep the vegetation down and scalped right down to bare ground, and the other group worked in the mess hall, and they did all the work. Our GI's didn't, our GI's who would normally be taken scrubbing pots and so forth and scrubbing the mess hall, didn't do that. They were now almost second cooks or third cooks. The Indian laborers did all the work for us. And real funny particular incidence, when there over there they're barefooted and they use their feet as well as they use their hands. And one day, they caught one of the Indians working in the mess hall cutting a loaf of bread by putting it on the bench and holding it with his foot, and didn't let him touch the food after that. Yeah, we didn't let him touch the food after that. JANICE PALMER: So how was the food? LOUIS BURY: Food was good, excellent. Food was good; we had our Spam, our S.O.S., and it's crap on a shingle. Spam cream on toast, S.O.S, but you ate it and it was good, it was food. What else? I can remember once, Thanksgiving we had, normally you would get canned turkey, GI canned turkey for Thanksgiving. Not us, our CEO said “no way”, he sent all the way down to Calcutta and got us back fresh turkey. And we had fresh turkey, and Calcutta was about as far away as here to New York City. And anyhow he sent down there, we had fresh turkey. We also, all chipped in, all the officers chipped in for a buck to buy condiments, because the GI's didn't have the, all they had one brand of ketchup and one brand of mustard, and that was it. And we made sure they went down there and they bought the relish and different brands of ketchup, you know, and stuff like, all the stuff to cook with. But they brought it all back and our cooks had everything at the office to make sure everything was seasoned properly. And as they say, the mess hall was divided, the officers ate at one end of the mess hall and the enlisted men ate in the other. One thing about the mess hall is as you went in at the noon meal, noon lunch; you had to take an adamin [?] tablet for malaria control. And that was a substitute for quinine. And you'd take the adamin [?] tablet and to make sure you took the adamin [?] tablet, we had an officer stationed at the door who would give you the pill and you had to take water from your canteen and pour it in your cup and take the pill right there, and make sure you took the pill almost like when you're in the hospital, make sure you took the pill. But the adamin itself turned your skin yellow. So, all of us had yellow behind the ears and yellow eyelids, and yellow between the fingers. That's the only place you could tell because the rest of it was tan, you couldn't tell underneath the tan that his skin was yellow. Oh, well, I want to tell you one thing real interesting. We were stationed near the town Digboi, Digboi was the oil fields, I didn't know that on that outlet, the oil fields for Asam for India. And that's what the Japs were trying to get, they were trying to come through Burma to get to those oil fields. And they were run by British interests. British colonial, and being British colonials they made doggone sure they were going to live as good as they did at home. And they had a country club after they got done working in the, whatever, they had the offices for the wells and so forth, and they retired for their tea and so forth in the afternoon at the country club. However, the country club, in addition to having a country club was a true country club. So, they both had lawn tennis courts, Wilmington style. One of the nurses heard about it and wanted to go down. Well, they weren't allowed to go anywhere unless they had an enlisted man or officer to drive them. So, right away I took the assignment. So the two nurses went down and two of us, I took one of the enlisted men along. And we went down there the four of us, and down there to see the place and we walked out on the tennis court to play, we had been playing tennis on a clay court, a homemade one that we built. There we were, we went from the Honda Civic to the Cadillac. But anyway we went in there, we walked out on the court to play, we started to get our rackets ready and we looked up, sure enough Indian ball chasers came along with a purple screen that they put up for a back drop.You hit across the net into a ball with a purple background. And they always were coming; you had to put a purple screen up for it, both sides. And of course I spent the rest of the afternoon, I remember this one woman there, I guess his little wife and she had a little boy, and me being a water safety instructor, I took her little boy under my wing and I spent part of the afternoon teaching him to swim and jump off the diving board into deep water, and swim away. And he didn't know how to do that, and the mother thanked me for it in her British accent, and said, “Oh my, he could never do any of that stuff before.” It just took somebody to tell him, you know. The next thing you know the kid was jumping off the diving board and coming up and paddling away to the side of the ladder. And he had no fear of the water. It was a memorable experience, I even wrote a paper on that. Of course, later on I went to school on the GI bill, where you had to write English themes and so forth. So, I wrote one on past experiences in India, how we built our own tennis court and playing on the clay, and then playing on a real tennis court. JANICE PALMER: Did you get any medals or citations? LOUIS BURY: Oh, they gave me a Bronze Star medal, this one right here. This one would be for, the Bronze Star medal, it's for meritorious service in a combat area. They just gave one to Jessica Lynch [Iraq conflict] Jessica got one. This one is the Asiatic Pacific Ribbon with three Bronze Stars. We got one for the India Campaign, the Burma Campaign, and the China Campaign, all one for three, five points a piece coming home. Incidentally, the 803 only got two, they never got the China one, they didn't have anyone in China, and we did. And they were mad as hornets when they found out you could have got a fifth star. This is just the American Theatre, where everybody did that, good conduct medal for not going AWOL or being put in brig or anything like that, for heroes, enlisted men. And this one is a discharge, World War II discharge medal. This is a Cudious, medical Cudious with an “A” on it, which means administrative. Doctors wore a plain one, nurses had an “N”, dentists had a “D”, and veterinarians had a “V”, and “A” is administrative. This other stuff here, the very first picture taken in the PX, as a Private, this is a patch that you wore, CBI, China Burma India, very hard to get now days, very hard to get because it was a patch. Dog tags, this one is 02047583, that's my officer's, it starts with an “O”, but the enlisted men had 33250294, that was my enlisted serial number. Presidential Union Citation, our outfit got a presidential unit citation for evacuating my ring that found it out, going up overseas, for one, two, three, nearly six months, you get an overseas bar. Now there's two Meritorious, and the reason they're both on here is later on they became red, when I was in the service it was blue, they became red. So, I guess if you were like Vietnam, you might have one of these; you'll never get a blue one. OCS Patch, when you went to OCS you wore a patch on your shoulder so when you went up to town they why they knew you were an officer candidate. You had to keep your nose clean. “Ruptured duck”, ruptured duck means discharge. Ruptured duck is a discharged veteran that they gave everybody when you discharged. This is called an AGO pass for officers, had your picture on and so forth. You had to show that all the time. I managed to get one, I don't know, you were supposed to have it turned in. How I got two was kind of a long story, but I did manage—I lost one and they replaced it, but in the meantime they mailed me another one. So I got two, and I turned one in and I kept the other. Two dog tags and I don't have a 332. Incidentally being an administrative officer you read the records, and you can tell a person by his serial number, an enlisted man, pretty much his service. First number was one that you're, if you had a “1” in front meant you were regular Army, you enlisted. “2” meant you were a National Guard, “3” meant you were drafted, so mine started with a three. And the next number “3”, “33”, three meant I was in the Third Service Command. There were about six, not eight or nine service commands. Pennsylvania happened to be in the Third Service Command. So, you can tell right away if the GI was from your end of the country or not, or even if he was in California, by knowing which service command he came from. JANICE PALMER: You mentioned about the ring that you have, could you tell us a little bit more about that ring? LOUIS BURY: The ring was, we were going overseas, we were stationed, we stopped for eighteen hours, that's the only time we got eighteen hours shore leave, in Freeman, Australia. And their coin, one of the coins is an Australian florin, F-L-O-R-I-N, about the size of a quarter, could be a little bit bigger. But the sailors on our ship told us that you could make a ring out of it. They said, the way you make the ring, you take the coin and turn it on its side and with a hammer keep tapping it on something solid, keep tapping it on something solid and keep turning it around. Eventually it will flatten and roll out and when it flattens and rolls out, when you get it to the size you want, then you bore a hole out in the center, and then you polish it. You polish it by rubbing it on your pants and so forth, and keep rubbing it and rubbing it until you get the shine right and so forth. So, that's it. I hammered the ring out going overseas sitting up front on the bow of the ship. It took us seventy days to get, took us a little longer but between Freeman and going up through Calcutta and into the Bay of Bengal and so forth, I hammered that thing out and went down into the engine room and borrowed a file to bore the hole out with and so forth. And filed it down to get the inside the right dimension, and the rest of it polishing and so forth. And I wore that ring for quite a while, 1972 I guess. JANICE PALMER: And when was this that you made this? LOUIS BURY: The ring was made in going overseas in the summer of 1944. JANICE PALMER: And that was your wedding ring? LOUIS BURY: That was my wedding ring, yeah. Yeah, that replaced the cheap wedding ring that I bought at the time, when Sophia and I got married, but yeah that replaced it. JANICE PALMER: Do you remember when you got discharged? LOUIS BURY: Oh, yeah, discharging was—believe it or not, I had enough points but I had to wait for a replacement because I was an officer of medical and so forth. So I had to wait until they had an officer replace me, and then we had already sent half of my outfit home. They all had handfuls of medals. But anyhow they all went home, and I followed them. I went to Kiloshi, India, and from Kiloshi, India boarded the transport there, waited for a transport. And that took us home across the sea through the, around the Arabia up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar across the North Atlantic to good old New York. Coming up in New York, it was quite a sight to come up and see the bridge. You see the bridge long before you see the Statute of Liberty, you see the bridge first. JANICE PALMER: And when did you arrive? LOUIS BURY: We arrived around December 2nd or 3rd of '45 until it took us from port of debarkation in New York, we went across the way to New Jersey. And from New Jersey to Indiantown Gap, which was where I was inducted, Indiantown Gap is just south of Pittsburgh. And there I was supposed to be discharged on the seventh of December 1945, but that was Pearl Harbor day, it was a holiday. So, they discharged me the next day, the 8th. And I'm coming out of the office with my papers, come down the steps and walking up the walk, Dominick Canterna [?] ,one of my buddies from OCS. I said, Dominick, what happened to you? He never went overseas. The lucky dog was, he was a basketball player and he was stationed in a general hospital in Memphis, Tennessee before he went to OCS. And when he got of OCS they wanted him back, basketball player. The hospital had a good basketball team, and he was captain of the basketball team. He stayed there for the whole war, stateside. The funny thing is, I come home and then from there I went to Vintondale, now Vintondale is nineteen miles from Johnstown. Now that ended my around-the-world tour. I started off there by leaving Sophia and the baby off there in May or April 1944, went back to Bowen Field across the country to Wilmington, California, all the way to India, across India and back up through. And I got a round the world trip on Uncle Sam. I made a complete circle. JANICE PALMER: You said something about having enough points to get out, how did that work out? LOUIS BURY: Oh, points was eighty-five, you had to have enough points. And they labeled that on Army service. And you got an extra point for being overseas, and if it was overseas service. So, that's, see, I was in the Army roughly forty-two months I guess, three and half years. And three and half years, and eighteen of it were overseas, so right away that jumps it up. You got five points for every dependant. At that time when I took Sophia home with Pat the baby, she was pregnant with number two, Joellen. This one wasn't born yet, number two. But anyway I had three dependants, and I had five points for each dependant. And I got five points for every medal, four, this one didn't count. We got that afterwards. You got five points for every medal; you got an extra point for every battle star, one, two, and three. Well, anyway, that was more than eighty-five when you add them all up. When you have eighty-five you can get out. Now our enlisted men, the ones that were down and flying, they got the Air Medal for flying plus maybe the second time they won it. And they got it for just a number of hours that they flew, that's the way you won the medals. You took, flew so many combat missions. And they also, every time they repeated, the second time you went you got a star to add to it. Well, some of them even got the next medal higher up, the DFC, Distinguished Flying Cross. They had enough medals, if you're in the air enough times you can get the DFC, so some of them even had the DFC. Some of them would fly every day if we would let them. They didn't care, go down there and back, go down to Burma and back and bring all the patients back and that was it. JANICE PALMER: And what did you do once you came home? LOUIS BURY: Oh, once I come back, we were watching enough being the ex-GI; they bent over backwards in my home town to help you. Got an apartment, got furniture for it, a refrigerator, bedroom set things like that. Furniture was hard to get, refrigerator was exceptionally hard to get, but got it all being an ex-GI, why they bent over backwards to help you. And got my old job back as a layout, I started to work. Oh, I went under the GI bill, they had started a veterans high school. Now I wanted to go, my brother, we had enough credits, or we both did, to go to school together for business administration degrees. And I wanted to go to engineering school. I didn't have the right high school credits. I had a commercial [diploma], of course, I took typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, but anyhow I went to the veterans school, GI school, for high school for veterans for almost a whole year. I took algebra over, algebra never had it, and I had some algebra. Algebra one and two, trig, physics, chemistry, took them all and ended up with a college diploma. So, I had two high school diplomas, one college, and one commercial. And then I started with, we had a local center, the Johnstown Center, University of Pittsburgh, where you could go to school two, to two and half years. And I went there for like, almost I was a junior when I got there. But I went to University of Pittsburgh, the school there. I switched courses. I worked 3:30 to 12:00 so I could go to school in the days. And I worked 3:30 to 12:00 and a lot of times I did my studies at work instead of laying something out, I had a blue print laying there and so forth trying to figure out the dimensions on where to make the next mark on this sheet. It wasn't a blue print. It was my math. But anyhow that's the way I got through my math courses and so forth. I went through GI bill, and then Claudia came around, number three 1949, time to quit, no school, so forth. So then the Korean War broke out. Korean War broke out and they said, hey if you want to continue your education you got to get back in. So, the only way I could continue the final senior credits in that was University of Pittsburgh, in campus in Pittsburgh. So, we moved to Pittsburgh, took a big jump. I got a job working for, believe it or not since I had college training and so forth, I got a job as a tool designer in a machine shop. And there they were working on castings for tanks on the making a machine, casting of tanks which they sent to Detroit to be built into tanks. And from that job I parlayed that into an excellent job working for Chrysler in Detroit, who was actually building the tanks. Because they would come into our place and check our machines and so forth, so anyway we got to Detroit, and in Detroit I still didn't have my degree. I still didn't have my degree but the engineering that I already had was more than enough to handle my job with Chrysler with quality engineering. And I worked there for twenty-eight years on tanks. So, and then I, quality engineering, and then I had a heart attack in '83. They said that you're going to have to walk and so forth to get yourself back in shape. You can't walk too well in Detroit. I used to walk in the malls in the morning, but in the winter. One of the young fellows that was working for me, he left me and went to work for an outfit in California. And he was working, he was now a boss out there, and he called me up and said, come on out here, I can get you a job. He had heard about my heart attack, and so forth. So, I went out there and got an easier job, didn't have much stress, and I worked for him for about eight years out there in California. So, I worked until I was about seventy-one, seventy-two. The only thing that kept me from working even further was the walking and they decided they didn't need any work. But that outfit out there was building the Bradley, the Fighting Vehicle. So, I'm not only an expert in M1 Tanks, all the tanks all the way through the M1, but also on the Bradley Tanks. So, I worked on both of them. JANICE PALMER: Are there any other things, anything else that you want to let me know that we haven't already talked about that I haven't asked you about or that we haven't discussed? LOUIS BURY: No, other than something like that, they were talking about stress, but I had no stress. Although we sent one fellow, well, actually we had to transfer him out. We sent him out because he wasn't making it, too nervous and jumpy. Our CEO decided to transfer him out to another outfit, maybe he doesn't like this one or whatever. And we sent a couple nurses home, supposedly for stress. I don't know, I'm not supposed to know, but anyway a couple of nurses went home for stress. Yeah, a couple of nurses went home for stress. Correspondence was always so, everything was censored. I was one of the censors. I had to censor the enlisted men's mail. Some of them were sending home rubies that they bought in Burma, and so forth. One was particular, his nickname was Ruby. His name was Rubenstein. And he was one of our cooks and his uncle was a jeweler somewhere in Texas and he would send rubies home to him because you couldn't get jewels, you couldn't get jewels in the United States for repairs for watches and so forth. So, he would send the rubies home, and there would always be a couple in the envelope and so forth. JANICE PALMER: Did you ever finish your college, get your college degree? LOUIS BURY: Believe it or not, I finally finished college when I was working FMC in California, they paid for it and Oliver [?] came back with the job that I should have done with my brother, business administration. He got his degree in 1951, and I didn't get mine until '78 or '79. I don't know when it was. I was about sixty-eight, sixty-nine years old by the time I got that business administration degree. But I'm proud of it, it's around somewhere. It's around somewhere. I still consider myself a mechanical engineer. Yeah, I always parlayed the job into my work, whatever I could do. The very first day, this is a day to remember. The first three years of school are the hardest as they learn with everything, and the last year you just coast and they give you busy work and stuff like that. Well, that was the last work, the last thing they did was give you mechanical engineering. They made you draw up the plans for a hydraulic, for a mechanical press, which you couldn't run by steam power, and so forth, you could form it into a hydraulic press on the hydraulics, and what would you do to convert it and prove it and so forth? Well, the work wasn't that hard, the engineering part wasn't that hard, but you still had to turn around and make all the drawings showing what parts, you had to be a draftsman. Well, I said, that's not engineering work to be a draftsman. I mean this is what I said, that's not engineering work. JANICE PALMER: And then finally how do you feel that the service affected your regular life? LOUIS BURY: Oh, it gave me a lot of confidence in myself. I was just a kid from Pennsylvania, young guy who had a good job in a steel mill, so forth. But going out you met fellows from all over the country, you run into everybody from all sections of the country. And you have to learn their customs and their manner of speaking, their colloquial and so forth, different ways of speaking all over the country. You learned what a mid-westerner spoke like and what a Californian and what a southerner spoke like, and what a northerner spoke like. You could tell from their accent who they were, and where they—coming from Pennsylvania, ethnic background, I could tell by the names and so forth. I could pronounce names, I was a mail orderly for our platoon and I used to rattle off the names, and the guys would say, “How did you know how to pronounce that?” And I said I came from western Pennsylvania, I know how to spell at this stage. I know how to pronounce at this stage. But anyway it was a real experience going all the way around the world. I was coming up the Suez Canal looking over the side of the ship, seeing all these women out there, whistling at them because they were lying in their bathing suits. They were workers for the canals, so French workers who was running the canal, going through the locks coming out Alexandria, coming out into the Mediterranean, the rough Atlantic in November and so forth. But India itself was quite an experience. They still, my family gets mad at me because I'm out working in the rain, I say this is nothing, you haven't been in a monsoon, and this is nothing. They complain about the heat, this is nothing, you haven't been to India, you don't know what humidity is. JANICE PALMER: Well, thank you very much. LOUIS BURY: Well, all right, well I was quite windy. [END INTERVIEW]
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Extent:: 1:09:48
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Holding Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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