Norm Smith Interview - Boot Camp

You ready?

Okay.

Are you going to do the intro again?

I'll do the intro again.

Oh I see okay, alright.

Come on back Donna.

I want you to know what the intro was.

Okay. I can't shut it off because I've got to get a call.

That's fine.

Okay. I'll just stop real quick.

Okay. Today is Thursday, October 7th, 2010. We are guests in the kitchen of Norm and Donna Smith, in Albion. And we're here today to learn more about Norm's experiences in World War II, especially regarding the liberation of a concentration camp. We'd like to thank the Smiths for welcoming us into their home. And, Norm, if you could tell us a little bit about becoming a soldier?

I would consider myself a typical citizen soldier. That's the way I would put it. I had an opportunity to do other things but I decided to allow the draft to take me and I had no preconceived ideas about it. All of my friends were being taken into the armed services, and so I waited until I received this little friendly note from my friends and neighbors saying, We have selected you. And that was typical. For 1943, it was very typical. In the class of 1943, in Seattle, Washington, I'm talking about 750 people. And out of that 750 people, I know there's been 168 that never came back from the war. So it gives you an idea with regard to how I got into the service. It was called various things, it was the Selective Service Act, and it was a matter of waiting until you got the letter. First of all, you went to the post office, and you registered. Everybody had to register. The second part of the process was to go to a couple of draft board meetings in which you met people who were responsible for you being selected. Basically, I'd say it's not too different than a cattle sale, because they're parading by you, and looking even over, "he looks like he's all in one piece" and so forth. And then you're the rest. . .

It was a matter of just conversation. And it was not a case of, why do you want to go in the Army? It was a case of, you're here because of this Selective Service law. Whereby, one of the first meetings I can recall was held in the office of a lumberyard on Westlake Avenue in Seattle in the evening after the operation of the lumberyard had closed. And this was a case, again, of interrogation going through. The second one was held very similarly, only at this time they had a doctor there. And the doctor looked you over on a preliminary basis, asked you about your aches and pains and so forth, and your history. Just a brief interview, that's really what it was.

So then, the next time I was called to go to the board, I had to go to downtown Seattle. Now Seattle at that time was a city of about 350,000. Today it's three and a half million, so you get an idea of the change. So the second one was held down in a building downtown called the Northern Life Tower. There the draft board had the use of almost a total floor. This was considered, in my day, you would call it a skyscraper. Today it would be, look at that little building over there, it's just a contrast. Whereby we went through a rather extensive physical examination, but mainly no x-rays, nothing like that, but this was just more or less, yes, he is alive and so forth. There the word selected came through because there were representatives from the Coast Guard, from the Marine Corps, from the Navy, from the U.S. Military Institute back in Connecticut. The Naval, it wouldn't be called the Naval, but it was selecting people to go to the, to the Merchant Marine Academy. And finally, it was the Army, and they were all sitting shoulder to shoulder. So you had your papers, and you went to the one you thought you would like to go to, and they looked at you, and the Army was always last. And so anyway, I wanted to go to the Navy, so I put my papers in front of the Navy guy, and he took a look at me and said, pass it over to the Marines, and we passed it from the Marines. Finally got down to the Army and I thought, well surely that guy will throw that away and I'll be out of here, but that didn't happen. So that was the selective part of the service. Whereby then you were, in that particular meeting, they called you ahead of time and told you, when you come down, be prepared to leave your clothes here because they are going to take all my clothes at that point, and put them in a box and ship them home. So that's the process.

They gave us a, they said, you are leaving on the train at such and such a time, a couple of hours, intervals there, down to downtown Seattle to the King Street Station, which is one of the big stations at that time. And thereby, you get aboard the train, well I was surprised because, and I don't know why, but all of a sudden this official hands me a whole stack of papers and he said, you are responsible for the guys on this train and you be sure you take this with you until you get to Fort Lewis. And I thought, gee whiz fellas, if I threw them out the window, but anyway, that's the way it went. And we went from there to Fort Lewis, Washington.That was the induction point.

And Fort Lewis was, it was a matter of going through the process of being issued Army clothing and it was, so I think the most memorable thing I can remember about that day was, they had to give you something to occupy your time. So they gave me a stick about this long and they had a point on the end, they gave me a number 10 can and they taught me how to field strip a cigarette. You punched it on the ground, you picked it up, you took it, you divided it to be sure that you got all the tobacco in one part, and then you took the paper, you waded it up a little well to actually see how well you could use your finger to wad it up, put it in there. And you did that for eight hours. And when I got tired of it, my God, I went back into that office and I said, haven't you got anything else I could do? How long have you been in the Army solider? Well, boy, oh boy, I found out I better not complain, just play their little game. So I field stripped cigarettes from my first. I learned to hate everybody that smoked on me. Cigarette butts all over the ground.

Hey, you missed one here, this kind of thing. So that led to one or two activities in the opening day of being a draftee. Immediately ran into the latest fad. The latest fad was to take your newly issued high-top shoes, which incidentally were very good shoes, the best shoes I've ever had in my life. And the guy says, are you going to scrub your shoes? I said, what do you mean? Well, I said, everybody going in there, they get some GI soap, some nice lye soap, scrub all the dye off that shoe. And then let them dry, and then we're going to all have red feet. So the object was to dye them ox blood, and that was the easy thing to do. Well, that was about a two-day process just to do your shoes. You weren't required to, you could leave them in the regular olive drab, or you could turn them into this lovely spit-shine. Oh my. So that was another foolish activity, but it occupied time and kept it there. So, in about the third day, why they loaded us on the train, we head for Camp Roberts, California. Camp Roberts, California is located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and it's near the coast. It's about 20 miles from San Simeon. William Randolph Hearst's famous whatever you call it palace, or however you want to call it.

So, then the training period at that time had just been changed from 13 weeks to 17 weeks. So we had 17 weeks of basic training, and I don't know what you want to know about basic training. The old song is, what do you do in the Army? You march, march, march around. That was exactly what we did. Learning close-order drill, a lot of time spent in an auditorium watching propaganda films. We're in a major war, and Hollywood produces is a film called, Why We Fight. Beautifully done. Baptism of Fire was another one where we were swigging ketchup all over everybody, you know, and that's a casualty. What I thought was so interesting was that they had a couple of defense films, and they were using, must have been filmed in Panama because they were all in Spanish. What in the world are we doing sitting here watching this?

So, with these types of things. All of our equipment was World War I. 1918 field packs, which are entirely different than what we ended up with at the end of World War II. I would say they were damnedable things. You were given two blankets and a shoulder half. Then your buddy has also two blankets and a shoulder half. You have to team up with him, or he teams up with you to button your two shoulder halves. You now have a full tenth. He's got half of the tent pegs. I've got half of the tent pegs. Then we had to practice putting these tents up there. There were no floors in them. It didn't bother me because I had been in the Boy Scouts and had been active in the Scouts since leaving outside. But some guys, it was a real trauma. My God, they had to sleep on the ground, you know. There are bugs on the ground. Yeah, that's right. Camp Roberts, California had tarantula spiders that were about this big.

You had to go up into the field. Everyone gets the same equipment. Again, all 1918, the packs, the rifles were 1903 Springfield rifles. They had a full capacity of eight shots. Then you had a bayonet that went on the end of it. We were ready to be tossed. The bayonet drill, we went through that. When I say that, it's a matter of doing everything by command. You had to hold the rifle a certain way, and it was a short thrust. Withdraw, long thrust. Withdraw, this is the kind of thing we went through. Learning your left from your right, we had no boots. We had leggings, as they used in World War I. In fact, we had two different kinds of coverings in World War I. But anyway, it was all World War I equipment. In some instances, we were given wooden rifles, just dummy stocks. We'd get the feel of it. Going through the bayonet course, you had to stick your bayonet into a target. You had to withdraw. Then you had to do what they called a vertical butt strap. You had to turn around and bring your rifle up to catch the enemy end of the chin, this kind of stuff. All of these things we had to learn and wrote. When they had to sit down on the parade field, it was all asphalt. You had your helmet. You took your helmet and turned it upside down and sat in it like a potty. Boy, I tell you, your posterior becomes formed after you've sat on one of those and listened to some lieutenant talking for 45 minutes.

First of all, this general orientation of what the weapons were like. Close-order drill, meaning the manual of ours and putting it up over your shoulder, and so forth. Then march, march, march, march. We were told at the beginning that when you finish this 17-week period, you will have marched a thousand miles. I believe then, I really do believe them. 15 weeks of basic training, then you had to do such things as go through a transition course. This time we go out to a course where they had machine guns set up firing live ammunition 30 inches off the ground over a field that had barbed wire entanglements and holes in it. You had to pretend that you were attacking that field. The first thing you had to do, you had to learn how to go over barbed wire. The first man to the wire dives in, face down like that, and the rest of the guys go over on his back, and you see hitting your back and going over it, the entanglement. You go under the wire, and then at a certain point they're firing live ammunition. They say, don't get up, because you'll never get on down again. They wanted you to have the feeling of what bullets sound like when they're going over your head. Then to make it realistic, some of the holes were also filled with wire. As you got near them, they blew them up, and then you go, boom, and there's a mud going all over the place. He says, Sarge, I got my rifle dirty. That's your problem, soldier, this kind of thing. Finally got to the end of the transition course, and you had live grenades. You were carrying two live grenades in your pocket. You were to get up, run toward the target, pull the pen, and throw the grenade. Well, some guys were just going like, so afraid of the grenade, you know, they didn't throw it far enough. Everybody's down, and we'd get down, and boom, you'd go all over. These are the realistic types of things. That was considered basic training.

That was finished. You went out, and you went 25 miles away from the post, clear out into the boonies. Just enough hills in that area, you couldn't tell where you were. When we went out, heavy rains set in, and I remember that we stayed in one place for about almost a week. In the middle of the night, they got us up and said, okay, we've got to move to a new objective. So you learned what it was to get up in the rain, to march in the rain, and California has the most beautiful, adobe mud you ever saw, and it cakes on the bottom of your shoes because it's that thick. Whereupon, I fell down seven times that night, going from point A to point B. We finally got to the objective we had, and I said, okay. First thing he said, stack arms. What? Well, stack arms means you put them together, and you've got to swivel, and you hook them like this, and you put three rifles together out in front of where your position is.

Then the arms are stacked, and then you put your tent up. If you don't think it isn't fun putting a tent up, the ground is muddy already, gooey, and you're trying to lay that thing out. My buddy and I, the guy had been a hobo before he was drafted, tough as nails. His name was Snyder. So Snyder and I, we put up our tent, and then I heard a gurgling [makes gurgling noises], just like a drain. Snuffy says, calm, Snuffy, Snuffy. He said, hey, Smithy, you know what? We've got us a drain in here. So he took his time. He just pulled the mud back like this, and pretty soon we had the water running down the center of our tent and right into the drain. And we thought that was pretty doggone good. Well, we got to laughing. He said, someday we're going to think about this. And we started laughing. Along came the sergeant. This is about three o'clock in the morning. What's wrong with you guys? You idiots? All we could do was laugh. We got a drain. I tell you, but they really made it realistic. I mean, if he caught in the mud, anybody that went to Italy would appreciate it.

So finally the finale of this whole thing is that we march back 25 miles, and we have to do it in eight hours with full-field equipment. And they fed us well out of the field. There was no complaints about that. They fired artillery over our head so we could get the feeling of what it was like to be shelled. And they had us get down in the foxhole and then ran the tank over us. So we had to get down there and you, I hope that driver knows where he's going. That was basic type of training. You had a good feeling for misery when you got through the 17 weeks of it.

So how did you get into the airborne then?

Ah, that's strictly voluntary. You got so sick and tired, and you knew when you got through the 17 weeks you were going to be shipped somewhere. But you didn't know whether you were going to go to the South Pacific or Europe, depending upon where the demand was. I was out in a field with other troops. I had completed my basic training, and then I was held up for a minor physical reason. And so I became a corporal. All you did then was repeat the basic training and help other poor devils go through it.

And we were out in the field one night, and we got the word that we had just invaded Normandy. They dropped 13,000 paratroops in there, and they lost 6,000 in the invasion of Normandy. So that meant that they had to replenish their airborne divisions. So the next thing I knew, they were coming around asking for volunteers. And if you volunteered, these guys were devils.They were all dressed up in their special uniforms and shiny boots, and oh boy did they look slick. And if you volunteered, they'd double your pay. So I'm getting $50 a month. All of a sudden if I volunteered for Airborne, I could get $100. So that's the basis of that.

So I volunteered, and there were about four or five other guys that I knew, and that was very common. And the guys would volunteer and you'd be your pal. And yeah, we probably got lose. So that took me from Camp Roberts, California to Fort Benning, Georgia. The airborne training was extremely rigorous. I'd say you gave up the idea of walking and you started running everywhere you went you ran. I went into the airborne weighing 165 pounds, and in a month's time I came out at 205 because I'd been eating enormous meals every day and so forth, but I had a 32-inch waist also. I mean, I was just hard as nails. Airborne training was a matter of not just the running, it was physical conditioning. It was learning how to pack a parachute because you were expected to learn how to pack a parachute, and then you had to jump the parachute that you packed. So if you ever thought about it, did I pay attention in school? I hope I did. If it fails, I will give you a new one, you know, this kind of thing. So that's basically what there was to airborne. It was one month of training.

It was supposed to be then an additional six weeks of advanced training, but by that time the Battle of the Bulge was taking place, and the Germans were breaking through, and they thought, we've got to get reinforcements over there. So I smashed my back on the third jump, and I'm still dealing with that today. I know everything from L3 clear on down. If you take a look at me, it's like going into a jump shop. But it was hauled off the field. And I went back the next day and they said we're going to call off the rest of the jumping for this week. And they put us into a big dispensary, and they looked us over, how do you feel? Well, I was sore. I couldn't run. But they didn't x-ray us or anything like that. It was just a physical thing. Okay. I spent an entire day under a heat lamp.