Bill Mullins
U. S. Army

Interviewed by: Alex Greene
Adult Secretary: Ellen Folke

I was a student at Southwest Missouri State College in Springfield.  I had attended there for three years.  When the war came along in 1941 after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I finished that school year and then volunteered in June of 1942.  The draft was just getting started then.  I lived about 60 miles east of Springfield in Cabool, so I got on the bus and headed for Springfield.  They checked my vision there, and made sure I had all my teeth, and made sure I could walk.  There were about seven of us who volunteered that day, and bright and early the next morning we boarded a bus for Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, which was the main recruiting station for that area. 

We spent the first day filling out forms, but we had not taken any oath of allegiance yet.  Our night was spent in two-man tents with no floor in them.  No sheets, just Army cots and wool blankets, in June! They didn’t want to put us in with the soldiers until we had had health checks and so forth.  Our second day there we had a thorough physical exam, took the oath of allegiance, and were issued our uniforms and duffel bags full of equipment.  When we got to the barracks we were assigned cots and sheets.  There were about 30 men on each floor. 

Next we became acquainted with military eating.  There were four food lines.  We held out our plates and someone put a spoonful of mashed potatoes or whatever they had on the plate, and then we moved down and got a piece of meat, and so on.  When we were finished, we got in another line and scraped off our plates and put them into a big continuously running dishwasher. Evidently they must have thought I was an eager guy, because before long I was wearing a white paper cap and running the four lines for a day or so. 

Then I was assigned to the supply room, helping the sergeant by handing out uniforms and so on.  They gave us tickets to all the theaters and shows in St. Louis.  You could catch the trolley and be there in ten minutes, so we went out every night.  It was a delightful life, other than the fact that we had to get up pretty early and had long days, but they turned us loose fairly early too.

The supply sergeant offered me the chance to work there permanently, but I didn’t want to be connected with supply, I wanted to get into the combat area, so I thanked him but went on.  This was June 1942.  In mid-August, they put four of us on a train to Camp Swift in Austin, Texas.  The 95^th Infantry Division was being organized.  There were about 15,000 men in the Division, including three Infantry Regiments of about 4,000 men each plus some artillery units and others.  I was placed in an anti-tank company, and we went through all sorts of training. 

Our company was armed with 37mm guns.  Those were large guns for that time, but they were not large enough to be knocking out enemy tanks, and they were later replaced with 57mm.  It took a squad of four to operate those 37mm guns.  After about a month, I made corporal and was named squad leader.  I was so proud of those stripes.  After I had completed my basic training, I trained some new people.  We didn’t apply the Marine system of running people to death and yelling at them and everything else.  We treated those people with tender loving care.  I remember that first night I checked to be sure they knew where they were supposed to be and that they had their beds properly made and so forth.  I encouraged them to write a letter home, and then told them they would be getting up at 5:30 to start their training. That lasted until about November of 1942 when I left the 95^th Division and entered Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. 

That training occurred in December, January, and February.  It was a cold winter and we spent the night sleeping in slit trenches, getting up at 4:30 in the morning to eat a cold breakfast.  The tactical officers checked us all the time to make sure we didn’t do anything wrong.  I graduated in March 1943 as a brand new second lieutenant, assigned to an Infantry, the 66^th "Panther" Division where I stayed until June 1944. 

My wife is from a little town called Scott City, Missouri.  When we decided to get married, her father put her on the train to meet me.  She had to go alone because you couldn’t get the gasoline or tires for a group to go.  When her father put her on the Pullman, it was full of soldiers, and he almost didn’t let her go.  But he did, and she could really take care of herself.  She took the train to Jacksonville, Florida, and I took a bus in to Jacksonville from Camp Blandy, Florida after drill.  We looked up a Presbyterian minister and got married on June 11, 1943, and we’ve been married for 57 years.

I was part of the 66^th Division for a year and a half there in Florida training a platoon in anti-tank weapons, and then we got the 57mm guns.  In June 1944 the call went out for people needed in Europe.  D Day was on June 6^th, and on June 14^th I got my walking papers.  I really hated to leave the unit because we had spent a full year training, and they were well trained and ready to go to war.  Anyway, my wife and I rode the Pullman to Fort George Meade in Washington DC, which is where they processed me.  She came back home to finish school, and I left for Europe.  About 3,000 of us boarded the USS Wakefield for the five-day trip to England.  The Wakefield was an Army transport ship.  The Navy operated it, but it was an Army ship built just for transporting troops, and it was really nice.

I spent an unusually long time in England.  I don’t know why that was, they may have temporarily lost my records, but I think it saved my life.  In the fall of 1944, I was sent to the 80^th Division.  I thought I would be in an anti-tank platoon because that is what my training was in, but those leaders were not getting injured or killed.  What they needed was rifle platoon leaders.  I was with them for about two months when I started having all sorts of problems with my Achilles tendons, and I couldn’t walk.  I spent 117 days in combat, but 108 of those days were spent in the hospital.  After I got out of the hospital I joined the Second Platoon of Company K of the 318^th Infantry.  Within two weeks, four men had been killed, and about five wounded.  Only 10% of the Army servicemen were in the Infantry, but 75% of those killed or wounded were in the Infantry.  So you can see who bore the biggest burden of danger during the war.  We didn’t get credit for it, but I think our platoon went further east than any other American unit.  We were in battles at Kassel and Urfurt. 

During what we called the "rat race" portion of the war, we got on trucks at night and rode in them all night long and then got out to fight, then loaded up the trucks at night again.  As a platoon leader I usually got a seat up in the cab of the truck.  We couldn’t have lights on because we didn’t want to be seen.  We could only have black out lights, which were like a couple of little lightning bugs.  One particular night I was a little worried about whether our driver was completely awake.  I looked out and I couldn’t see the lightning bug lights of the truck ahead of us.  I told the driver to slow down because we couldn’t see a single thing.  Right then we hit part of a bridge and got hung up about 12 feet up.  It was so dark that we couldn’t see to do anything.  The driver got out on his side without any problems.  I opened my door and put my foot down, but I couldn’t feel anything.  I kept lowering my foot expecting to touch the ground, but I didn’t, so I just got out the driver’s side.  The next day I came back to look, and there was a 20-foot drop to the river on my side of the truck.

I was with Company K for all of March and all of April.  About the middle of April, I became the executive officer of the Company.  On May 8, 1945 the war ended.   I went from the rank of Private all the way to the rank of Captain.  I had men shot and killed in front of me and behind me, to my right and to my left, but I never was touched.  The luck of the Irish, I guess.

I was discharged in St. Louis, and my wife met me there.  We went down to Hot Springs, Arkansas and went to the races, and had all kinds of good food, went to the hot baths.  When we got back home, I went back to school on the GI Bill.  I had all my books paid for, and I received $150 a month.  This was the best investment the government ever made.  I have never seen so many people who were able to go to school that would not have been able to otherwise; architects, lawyers, and schoolteachers.

Permission Granted for Use by Bill Mullins   © 2001
Transcribed by Ellen Folke