Oral history interview of Robert W. Battle

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Robert W. Battle
Creator:: Palmer, Janet
Battle, Robert W., 1922-2011
Date of Original:: 2004-01-07
Subject:: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Motion sickness
Saipan, Battle of, Northern Mariana Islands, 1944
Leyte Gulf, Battle of, Philippines, 1944
Paravanes
World War, 1939-1945--Cryptography
Navajo code talkers
V-J Day, 1945
Typhoons
Halsey, William F. (William Frederick), 1882-1959
Spruance, Raymond Ames, 1886-1969
United States. Naval Reserve
Navy V-12 Program (U.S.)
Emory University
Columbia University
Riverside Church (New York, N.Y.)
Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York, N.Y.)
United States. Marine Corps
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Firm)
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
Knox (Attack transport : APA 46)
Kamikaze
Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952
Location:: Columbia River, 47.443875, -120.845216
Guam, 13.47861, 144.81834
Indonesia, Jayapura, -2.5387539, 140.7037389
Japan, Nagoya-shi, 35.1851045, 136.8998438
Japan, Volcano Islands, Iwo Jima
Japan, Wakayama-ken, 33.8070292, 135.5930743
Micronesia, Ulithi, 9.9613889, 139.6036111
New Caledonia, Noume´a, -22.2745264, 166.442419
Northern Mariana Islands, Saipan, 15.21233, 145.7545
Northern Mariana Islands, Tinian, 15.0116123, 145.629297331134
Panama, Panama Canal, 8.99797, -79.59269
Papua New Guinea, Manus Island, -5.558333, 154.619444
Philippines, Leyte Gulf, 14.6835822, 121.0701444
Philippines, Lingayen Gulf, 16.206166, 120.2323788
Philippines, Luzon, 18.5530638, 121.1246109
Philippines, Manila Bay, 14.5906216, 120.9799696
Philippines, Surigao Strait, 9.8153114, 125.4545447
United States, Alabama, Mobile County, Mobile, 30.69436, -88.04305
United States, California, City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco, 37.77493, -122.41942
United States, California, Los Angeles County, San Pedro, 33.73585, -118.29229
United States, Chesapeake Bay, 37.96186, -76.17834
United States, Florida, Saint Lucie County, Fort Pierce, 27.44671, -80.32561
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Floyd County, Rome, 34.25704, -85.16467
United States, Hawaii, Honolulu County, Pearl Harbor, 21.34475, -157.97739
United States, Hawaii, Maui, 20.8029568, -156.310683316022
United States, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, New Orleans, 29.95465, -90.07507
United States, New York, Kings County, Brooklyn, 40.6501, -73.94958
United States, New York, New York County, New York, 40.7142691, -74.0059729
United States, Oregon, Portland, 45.5202471, -122.6741949
United States, Virginia, City of Norfolk, 36.89126, -76.26188
United States, Virginia, Virginia Beach, Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, 36.91847, -76.16469
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Robert Battle relates his career as a Naval officer in World War II. He was pursuing a degree in journalism at the time the war broke out. He entered the Reserves until he graduated. He describes in detail his train trip to New York, life in training, including working on the yearbook and singing in the choir. After finishing his officer training, he became a communications officer aboard a troop transport, sailed on its shakedown cruise, and participated in several of the major battles of the Pacific Islands. He recounts life aboard ship including crossing the equator ceremonies, zig-zagging, and the fear of attack by kamikaze planes and two-man submarines. His ship was decommissioned at the end of the war. He describes V-J day and discusses the impact of his war experiences on his life and describes his post-war education and career.
Bob Battle was a Naval officer in the Pacific during World War II.
ROBERT W. BATTLE VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW Atlanta History Center Interviewer: Janet Palmer Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell Janet Palmer: Today is January 7, 2004. My name is Janet Palmer, and I'll be interviewing Mr. Bob Battle for the Veteran's History Project at the Atlanta History Center. Mr. Battle, will you please state your full name and spell it for me? Bob Battle: Robert W. Battle. JP: And what is your date of birth and place of birth? BB: July 25, 1922 in Rome, Georgia. JP: What branch of the service were you? BB: US Navy. JP: And what was your rank, highest rank that you.. BB: Lieutenant. JP: Lieutenant. And what ship were you on? BB: I was on the USS Knox, APA 46. JP: Can you tell me a little bit about before going into the service, a little bit about your background and what you were doing at that time? BB: I was in school at Emory University and scheduled to graduate in June of 1943. Right after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, a program was offered to go into the navy in the reserve and be allowed to finish your college education. I did this in January or February of 1942, I've forgotten, it was a V program and I can't remember the number, V5 or something like that. And I was left alone completely as far as the service was concerned until I graduated from Emory in June of 1943, and two weeks later I reported to the midshipman's school in Columbia University at New York City. JP: What kind of degree did you get from Emory? BB: I got a BA in Journalism. JP: So now when did you go to Columbia? BB: June of 1943. JP: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience there, do you remember arriving there… BB: I left Atlanta on a train, the first time I'd been off by myself, ever. And arrived in New York alone and first time I'd been to New York. I remember distinctly looking up through the roof of a cab to see the tall buildings and I spent the night in a hotel and reported to Columbia the next morning, I think it was 6:00, and a long line of people who were going in, entering that class of midshipman's school. JP: How did you feel? BB: Scared. It was the fourteenth class at Columbia, the midshipman's school. We were quartered in John Jay Hall, which is right across the street from the well known Columbia library. My roommate was from Indianapolis. We started out as apprentice seamen for the first thirty days, dressed in nothing but khakis. Drills, classes, athletic training, a lot of studying. At the end of thirty days we were promoted to midshipman and could get into our blue regular midshipman uniforms. I worked on the, we had a yearbook, I worked on the yearbook, I sang in the choir, which was a magnificent experience. The service for the midshipmen was at 5:00 on Sunday afternoons, and it was at Riverside church up on Riverside Drive, the old Harry Emerson _____ church. And we marched, the choir marched separately, and the corps of midshipmen marched in and the choir always used the navy hymn as the benediction, and that was very very moving. But the choir would go to choir practice sometime during the week, and we'd always sing going up and down the street going from Columbia up to Riverside church. JP: How far is that? BB: Oh, its about ten blocks I guess. But we always had a crowd hanging out the windows listening to us sing as we went back and forth. We were graduated from St. John the Divine, the cathedral of St. John the Divine the Episcopal cathedral. … largest church in the world, I think its one foot longer than St. Peter's. And one of my classmates recalls his impression was that heard this music way off in the background when we marched in and it was our band but you could hardly hear them, they were way down the nave. So we were graduated from there and given I guess maybe a week's leave or two weeks leave and reported to wherever we had been assigned. And I was assigned to the amphibious training base at Little Creek, Virginia, arriving there in November I guess of 1943. And we trained in the landing craft, the small landing craft that would take troops ashore in an invasion. It was very cold, we wore sometimes as much as four or five layers of clothing and scrambling around the decks of those little boats out in the Chesapeake Bay, if we'd fallen in, we'd have sunk like a stone, but it was very, very cold, scraping the ice off of the foul weather gear. We were there from November until January, early January and then were sent advanced amphibious training to Fort Pierce, Florida, which was a contrast in weather, and we were in shorts. But we trained, we practiced landings constantly and how to take the landing craft would breech, turn sideways on a current, and how to get them off. The crew would come in and drag those boats off. We had to, the engine was cooled with a water trap and it would get sand in it and overheat and the engine would shut off, so you were constantly cleaning the sand traps on the LCVP's and LCM's. We graduated from that class and went on a troop train from Fort Pierce, FL to Brooklyn, NY. JP: How did you from… BB: Train. JP: How did you get from Fort Pierce to the… BB: Train. JP: Oh the train. BB: It was a regular cattle car. What they called I think in World War I a 40 & 8, forty men and eight horses. But there were bunks about I guess four or five high in these cars. And… JP: How long did it take you to get there? BB: A little over a day. JP: Did you eat on there and everything or did they stop? BB: No they had a mess car. And we then joined the USS Knox which had been commissioned about ten days before. She was an attack transport, had been, the hull had been built in Pascaguoula, Mississippi by Ingalls shipyard, and she was converted, she would have just been a freighter, she was converted to an attack transport in Brooklyn. And we went aboard as the landing ship crew, with ____ ships, that group was kept separate from the ship's crew. But our captain was smart enough to realize that that would just create a schism within the crew, so we were immediately integrated into the ship's crew. I went in the communications department, some of my classmates went into as deck officers, some as radio officers, some as engineer officers, but I was assigned to the communications department. And we did our shake down crews but I still stood deck watches on the bridge. We did our shake down crews, we took the knocks from Brooklyn down to Chesapeake to Norfolk and it was just as light as a toothpick on the water and I was sick for the first eight hours, deathly sick. But we were in, reported back to Norfolk and then did training up and down the Chesapeake for about a month and then in April or May of 1944 we sailed from Norfolk and went down and went through the Panama Canal and out to Pearl Harbor. And then from Pearl Harbor we went over to Maui and took aboard a marine division. An attack transport carries troops and all their equipment, trucks, tanks, everything. And we did practice landings at Maui and then on June 15, 1944, we invaded Saipan. That was the first of the invasions after _____ and _____. JP: Do you remember that: BB: Oh yes, I remember that very, very well. My assignment was to lead a wave of boat into the beach. The boats, we'd off load the boats and then they would circle up off the ship and be called in one by one and then loaded with troops who would come down the side of the ship on rope ladders. And then when all the boats were loaded for that wave, then we would advance towards the beach and be signaled when to come in and come in in a straight line across, parallel to the beach. And we'd land under fire and the troops would jump off and then we'd get out as fast as we could and regroup to go back to the ship. I think I was in the fourth or fifth wave, the fire was still pretty heavy. We got back to the ship in the late afternoon in time to see the ship sailing away. We had been left. The ship had had to get out to sea, all of the ships moved out to sea because of the threat of Japanese air attacks and Japanese two man submarine attacks. So they left us, told us to just gather together and we'll pick you up in the morning. COUNTER 128 JP: Are you walking around in the water or… BB: Yes, no. We were out, just out at sea. JP: How big were these _____? BB: They're 36 foot boats. JP: How many people were _____? BB: Well it would just be the crew by that time because the troops were all gone and they were ashore. I would rather have been where I was than where they were. But we tied up about, I guess 10 or 12, maybe 15 boats together and stood watches because we were afraid that we might be sunk by the Japanese subs, and we spent the night there and the ship came back and got us in the morning. So we joined back up with the Knox immediately. JP: So you didn't have any problems with the Japanese at that time? BB: No, not at that time. But we stayed, we still had a lot of equipment to unload and we stayed around off the landing area at Saipan for I supposed, let me see, a week, about a week and then we came back to, it was July, late July of 1944. We left Saipan and went back to Maui in the Hawaiian islands and loaded another load of troops and then came back to Honolulu and then sailed from there to Tinnean, which is next door to Saipan. And we were part of that invasion but it was, we were very minor part of that invasion. And we sailed from there, we crossed the equator for the first time and had initiation of all the people who had never crossed the equator before. JP: What does that involve? BB: Oh that involves a great pageant, a lot of initiation, a lot of hounding of the pollywogs as they call it, before they become shellbacks before the cross the equator. At that time, I remember I had one lock of hair left and it was gone with the initiation ceremony. That was the last of my hair. It involved being servants to the people who had already been across the equator, very costumed. But surprised certificate that you get and a card that I've kept in my memoirs. We sailed from there and went to Manus which is in the ______, and we stayed there from the first part of October to the end of October and sailed for, no to the middle of October. And we sailed for Leyte in the Philippines and we participated in the battle of Leyte Gulf. We were, we came in in the afternoon of D-day but when we got into Leyte harbor, we had to string paravanes because there were mines. Paravanes are floats that stick out from the ship and have wires on them and they cut the mine cables. So you can shoot the mines then with a rifle and blow them up. And we had to spend the night there in the harbor with smoke screen all around because of the Japanese airplanes and potential of Japanese attacks. We landed troops at Leyte and were there until the 21st of October. The battle of Leyte Gulf was the 20th. And we stayed there until the 21st and then we got out just as the 7th fleet was in their big battle of Leyte Gulf with the Japanese fleet. And we sailed down to Hollandia, New Guinea, and we were getting, we loaded troops there but we were there for probably two weeks in which time I had the opportunity to take one of the boats and we got a local Dutch warden, it's a Dutch island, and were taken down and got a chance to go ashore to a native village and got to see the natives on New Guinea. Then we sailed from Hollandia, New Guinea back to Leyte and then went through the _____ Straight, west and around the southern end of _____ and up to Linguian Gulf, past Manilla and up to Linguian Gulf, and that was when we were in the heaviest of the kamikaze attacks. And we were on 24 hour alert, we were fired on, never were singled out by a kamikaze but saw many of them and we were of course in a fleet. We were a division, we had a division commander on our ship so we were first in the line of three lines of ships. And the, one of the baby carriers just off our port quarter took a kamikaze and caught fire and had to drop out. We went into Linguian Gulf once we got there, relatively unscathed, and unloaded troops in Linguian and then went to Ulythe in the Carolines and stayed there for a rest and in February, at this point, we're now February of 1945, we entered the harbor at Guam and loaded troops for Iwo Jima. JP: While you were having the rest break, what did you do while you were there? BB: Just a lot of maintenance and in the case of communications, we monitored all of the radio circuits and we drilled. My general quarters post was very much exposed, right up on the signal bridge, and we did a lot of work with lights, flashing lights in code, and with signal flags up on the yard arms. And I was in charge of that crew there. The chief of that, chief petty officer of that crew knew more in five seconds than I would ever learn about it and so I kept my mouth shut and let him run it. JP: So you felt fairly _______ safe ______? BB: Yeah, except that it was pretty exposed, the top bridge. But we sailed from Guam to Iwo Jima, and we did not arrive until D-day plus I guess, it was D-day plus one. From where we were anchored, we unloaded troops. JP: Similar to what you did? BB: Similar to what we did in the earlier invasions. By that time I was not on the boats, I was in the communications office and radio and doing a lot of decoding. Everything came in in code and we had these code machines that we would load and change every eight hours and decode it. Our captain had us decode everything that came over the wire instead of stuff that was just addressed to us, we decoded everything, which made for reams and reams of paper and hours and hours of sitting in front of a typewriter keyboard and this decoding machine. JP: Did you get anything that was..? BB: Well we got the, I remember the communication when the fleet had to scramble and get out of Leyte Gulf when Halsey took the 7th fleet up north and left Admiral Spru___ I guess it was, stranded, and had to be called back in, not in code but in plain language over radio, said get back, and that's just before the battle of Sergile Strait. If you've ever seen the movies of the battle of Leyte Gulf, that's very descriptive, we were right in the middle of that. But then I got the communication when the war was over. It came over the radio. JP: ____ Iwo Jima? BB: No, we were back from, we got back from Iwo Jima. We set off the shore at Iwo Jima and were able to observe and listen on the radio to all of the air strikes that were going on the island, which were terrible air strikes. And I remember walking along the deck one day and seeing this marine sitting cross legged on the deck with a radio and as I went by I heard him say something I couldn't make out what it was. I found out later he was one of the Navajo talkers that they were talking back and forth from the island to the ship and directing the air strikes, but it was all in Navajo and nobody could understand any of it. We stayed there for about four or five days. We had a fairly large sick bay on the ship, and we took wounded in and took them back I think to Saipan. Yeah, took them back to Guam and took them off there. And then we sailed from there down to, all the way down to past the Solomons and had a two month maintenance period in Newmea, down in New Caledonia, which is almost down to Australia. JP: Did you cross the…? BB: Crossed the equator again. But from a different perspective, we were initiating instead of being initiat-ees. It was an interesting time to be in Newmea. Its, at that time was just literally a large village. Its French, there was a volcano up on the mountain. We were able to take one of the JEEPs and go up and look and comb the volcano. And we were there for I guess a month or more, lets see, we got to Newmea on the 23rd of March, no, no, yeah, on the 23rd of March and left of the 3rd of May, so we were there about six weeks. And came up to Leyte Gulf and then were told that we were going to get two months in the states. And that was in May I guess of 1945. And we sailed from I'm trying to remember whether we took anybody home with us as far as troops are concerned or not, but we sailed from there to Portland, Oregon, went in through the mouth of the Columbia river. And we had sixty days in Portland. Half the ship got the first thirty days off leave and the other half got the second thirty days off. And I was able to fly back to Atlanta then and come back. And we stayed in Portland until, lets see, we got there in June so we stayed there until August. And V-J day we were in Portland. We sailed the next day, so we missed all of the celebration of V-J day, but we sailed from there down to San Francisco and we were in San Francisco from the 16th of August until the 22nd, and we went to, back to Pearl Harbor and then back down to Anowetok and Guam and back to Leyte and then we anchored, we came up into Manilla bay, the war being over. We loaded troops to go back to the states. It was called, the operation was called Magic Carpet. As they were qualified under the point system, they were getting out of the service. We took them from, we sailed nonstop from Manilla to San Pedro or Long Beach, California. COUNTER 308 JP: How long was it? BB: That was about a three week… JP: Each way? BB: Oh yes. Lets see, no I missed something completely. From, we sailed from Manilla, I said we sailed back to the states. From Manilla, that was the second time. From Manilla we sailed back over to _____ gulf and picked up troops to take in for the occupation of Japan, and that was in September of 1945. We sailed up, we loaded the troops and then we were going into Magoya, Japan. But we had to anchor while they cleaned the mines out of Magoya Harbor. So we were in a very large anchored area called _______ Bay, and the little town, the Japanese village was called Wakyama. We had to stay there for three weeks, almost three weeks while they cleaned it out, cleaned out Magoya, and during that time, we had a typhoon. And we're unable to move the ship at all, we put both anchors out and acted as though we were sailing. In other words, the ship was steaming ahead very, very slowly to take the strain off of the anchor chains. But we did have an opportunity to go ashore in this little Japanese village and wander up and down and _____ souvenirs. Then we sailed into Magoya and unloaded troops in a day and a half there and then sailed from there to, back to Luzon. JP: So, when you were there in Japan, this was before the ____? BB: No, no, no, this was after. See the surrender was signed I think it was the 2nd or 3rd of September and we're now into October. Because we took, we loaded troops to go to Japan on the 21st of September, so we were in Wakyama anchored from the first week in September, uh the first week of October to the end of October, almost the end. JP: During this typhoon were most of the people sick? BB: No, no. We just, it was almost landlocked so we didn't, but the winds were just howling and of course rain and some, it was a chop in the bay. But we were afraid that the wind was going to break an anchor chain so that's why we stayed as though we were steaming at sea with two anchors out instead of one and steaming ahead very, very slowly would take the strain off of the anchor chains. From Magoya, we went down to Luzon,, and that's where we picked up the troops to go to the states. And I've already covered that. We got back to Portland in June and then we sailed from Portland to San Francisco in August. JP: When you got back to the States the first time, how did you feel? BB: I couldn't believe that I was seeing the States, and that became a rather important part of my life, which I'll get to later. JP: I know that was a beautiful sight. BB: It was a beautiful sight. But when we left San Francisco and sailed back to Manilla and picked up another load that were to go, went into San Pedro, Long Beach. And from there, we got orders to proceed to New Orleans to decommission the ship. So we sailed from San Pedro around, came back through the Canal up to New Orleans and had about almost a month in New Orleans at Mardi Gras time. JP: Were you able to get off the ship? BB: Oh yes. We were, what they were going was they were taking off all the guns and all of the heavy stuff because we were going to Mobile to be decommissioned. And we sailed from New Orleans on Mardi Gras, we didn't get to see the final celebration. We sailed down the river and out and then back up into Mobile Bay and the ship was decommissioned in May of 1946 in Mobile. During the time we were in Long Beach, CA, I, on a blind date, met someone. It didn't last just 55 years. We had maybe three dates before we were married. And she was from Portland, OR, had no connection with my having been in Portland, but I've been back to Portland countless times since then and I always think of when I get there, I always think of coming in the first time to, see we arrived about midnight and we could hardly see any of Portland. But that's the combat. Then from there I was sent to New Orleans to the navy, the 6th, I've forgotten the number of that naval district and was transferred to Charleston to the 6th naval district for decommissioning. And I got out of the navy in March of 1946. JP: Before we talk about getting out of the navy, are there any particular stories or people or events that really stand out in your mind, during all these places that you went? BB: Maui was always a pleasant experience, and I've been back there later as a civilian after the war, and went up to Mount Holy________, which was a volcano. JP: Were you always feeling scared? BB: Not particularly. JP: Do you get finally to where it just becomes a daily routine? BB: It becomes a daily routine. And we weren't under fire constantly. There were just times, in case of the invasions where it was very intense but not if you were steaming from Guam to New Guinea, it was just, you were at sea. You did a lot of drilling and we, a lot of zig-zagging convoys and signaling convoys with flags, so I was busy on the signal bridge during all those times because they'd order a zig-zag pattern and the ships would acknowledge by flag that they had gotten the signal and then when the flags were dropped, that's when you made your turn in zig-zagging. JP: We're resuming the interview with Mr. Robert Battle for the Veteran's History Project. So when you got back and you got out of the service, what did you do at that point? BB: Well, when I got out of the service in, I was actually out and on terminal leave in March of 1946. And I went back to Emory and I wanted to get a graduate degree, and the dean of men had been very active in a lot of things at Emory, and the dean of men asked me to come in as his assistant while I went to graduate school. But in the meantime, I went out to Portland and got my bride and brought her back to Atlanta. And I spent the next year working in the dean's office and getting a master's degree at Emory. And then I went to the Atlanta Journal in the advertising department and was there from 1947 to 1949, in which time I went to work for a then unknown little company called Vacuum Foods, which had a brand of orange juice called Minute Maid which later became Minute Maid corporation and then became the Minute Maid division of Coca Cola. And I was a salesman and the district manager and then finally the regional manager for Minute Maid with about six states. Then in 1958, the company changed its sales method from a direct sales force to a network of food brokers and they gave some of us the opportunity to go into business for ourselves, one in New York, one in Chicago, one in Denver, one in Dallas. I took Atlanta and went in the food brokerage business and remained there until I retired in 1987. JP: When you came back and went back to school were you able to use VA benefits? BB: Oh yes. I had my, I guess my VA benefits. JP: The GI Bill. BB: GI Bill, I couldn't think of the term we used. And at that time, during that first year, we were working with, I was working mostly with veterans who had come back and gone back to school. And a lot of them were married and living in trailers and there was a lot of having to get used to going back to college or going to college for the first time, but we started things like the newspaper and the annual and the interfraternity council and the student government and I worked on all of those things during that year while I was getting a masters. JP: Were you involved in any veteran's groups? BB: No, not in any veteran's groups, and we did not, I stayed in touch, an interesting thing, there were about five of us who reported to midshipman's school at Columbia university in June of 1943 who decommissioned the ship, we were together the entire time. That was a very happy, it was called a happy ship, there was not a lot of conflict on it and very few transfers off and on. There were a number of people who were on the ship for the entire time she was commissioned from the time she was commissioned in Brooklyn until she was decommissioned in Mobile. JP: Was she called a happy ship after the fact or even while you…? BB: No, even then. People would say oh, you're on a happy ship. But what your question? JP: I was asking about… BB: I stayed in touch with all of those people that I had gone to midshipman's school with. And they have dropped out one by one through death. I still have one contact, the fellow that I told you heard that midshipman's band from back in the cathedral. I was reading Smithsonian magazine about five or six years ago and there was a letter to the editor. And there had been an article in Smithsonian about St. John the Divine, the cathedral, and this fellow had written a letter and I didn't know who he was. So I immediately wrote him and he have stayed in touch ever since. We email back and forth all the time. My wife and I spent a weekend in California with them, but the rest of the crowd have died. The ship had a reunion in, let me see, I can't remember when the first reunions were, it was in Indianapolis, oh 1993, and they had probably 40 or 50 there. They've had, there's a group that gets together that I haven't been able to be at, they get together about every year or two, but they want to go to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee or Branson, Missouri for the entertainment and for their wives to be at the discount malls. So I stay in touch. The small group, a small group of signalmen that I was on the bridge with, we have stayed in close touch. We, us Christmas cards every year, and we have gotten together three or four times, but that's dwindled down now to about, oh, if we get everybody there, there may be ten. JP: Are there any experiences or anything we didn't talk about that you'd like to. BB: I can't think of anything exciting or interesting. I probably will think of something later, but... JP: Overall, how did the whole experience affect you? BB: Well it changed my life totally, as I'm sure it did almost anyone who went through that experience. I don't know what I would have done in retrospect had I not had that experience. I would have probably finished up college and I don't know what I would have done then. But it changed my life, I met my wife, my whole family life changed. It made a much more mature person out of me. It was a life changing experience. I can't think of any other description that fits it better than that. JP: If there's nothing else… BB: No, just thank you for the opportunity. JP: Thank you very much. COUNTER 568
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Extent:: 44:05
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
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