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On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, we were eating Sunday dinner at my Uncle Lawrence’s farm near ours in northern Missouri. We heard the announcement on the radio, followed by Roosevelt’s famous speech. I was a sophomore in high school at that time, and I really hoped that the war would be over before I graduated from high school so I wouldn’t get drafted. About four months after I graduated from high school in 1943, I was drafted. My father died when I was 3 years old, so my mother raised me. She didn’t really want me to go into the service, but she knew that I hated working on the farm. She knew that I was not going to get a deferral, which would allow me to stay and work on the farm, and she also knew that the Army would give me a chance to get further education. I took an exam and passed, which allowed me to enter the Army Specialized Training Program. (This was abbreviated as the ASTP, which we jokingly referred to as “All Safe ‘Til Peace”). You were a member of the Army, but they sent you on for further education, specifically engineering. I was on my way to Georgia Tech.
The day before I was due to leave for Georgia Tech, the program was dissolved, and they sent all of us to the Infantry to the 100th Division. Here is the story of how I got into the Army Corps of Engineers, and it was pure luck. There were so many people all swarming together that I just could not stand to sleep on the bottom bunk. They gathered together all of us who were on the upper bunks. They told us if your last name started with A through M, and mine started with an E, you went into the Engineers. All of the other top bunks, from N through Z, went into the Field Artillery. So that is how I ended up with the Engineers, and I stayed with them almost my entire time in the service. I was assigned to the 1162nd Engineer Combat Group. About half of the members of the 100th Division were killed in battle, so I am very glad that I slept on the top bunk.
I mentioned the 18,000 troops that supported us. We were segregated from those troops because they were black, and I never thought this was right. We got to know each other pretty well over time, and to us they were regular guys just like we were. It simply wasn’t fair that they were treated like second-class citizens. America has changed for the better there. There was no doubt in my mind that
the Allies would win the war. Through
propaganda on the radio and in the news, we were constantly told that we would win, and we
believed it. Doubt was never projected down
to the troops. I suppose that happens in all
wars, but now that they are practically shown play-by-play on television, things have
changed. When we returned to the United States, one of the things that seemed really different was the music. The music we had heard while overseas was canned, so if we would go into the Post Exchange the songs were always familiar. When we got back home, the music was different! What I was concentrating on when we got back was going back to school. I went to the University of Missouri at Kansas City on the GI bill. I was able to graduate with a 4-year degree in 27 months if I went to school around the clock. My happiest memory of the war was when we were in France. We were 35 kilometers east of Riems, where Eisenhower’s headquarters was. We were billeted in a small town in what was formerly a girls’ school. I had a girlfriend there named Susie. We corresponded for a long time, but eventually we lost track of each other. Our Colonel was Colonel Walter Krueger, Jr., son of the General. He very much wanted combat because of his father. With his pull, our mess sergeant was a former chef from the Waldorf Astoria. He could make C-rations into delightful things. There were about 67 of us in our group, and we got to be family. We knew all about each other’s families, and it was a very pleasant association. What I’m about to tell you won’t appear in the history books. When the war was over in Europe, I was lucky enough to win a Rest & Relaxation thing on the Riviera. The scenery was there, but you needed to eat in the Army barracks. We also got to go to Paris and to Brussels, and we had some good times there also. My biggest accomplishment was being able to help other people in the service with my cartography and the maps that we provided. Another funny thing that happened was when we returned to the United States on the USNS John Ericsson. You can imagine all those people together on the ship for 15 days, and our sleeping bags were just yucky. It was so hot and cramped, that I slept out on the deck with the merchant marine dogs that lived on the ship. I didn’t ever want to have to worry about that sleeping bag again. The morning that we pulled into harbor and I knew I wouldn’t need it again, I threw that thing overboard into the water. When I got out of the service, we went through all this counseling. I had intended on becoming an engineer, and my counselor said engineers were going to be a dime a dozen. He suggested I major in math and minor in economics. So that is what I did, and I became an actuary. It was very good advice. He did make me promise not to go into anything that had to do with music because I had absolutely no talent for it. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, we were in Marseilles, France getting ready to be sent to Japan when we heard the announcement on the PA. We were probably in the most danger of the entire war on that day because of the guns fired in celebration. We were so happy to hear that announcement because we were tired of war. We were sort of programmed to believe that the Germans were really bad people. At the end of the war there were many of them in prisoner of war camps. We walked past them, and it was surprising to see that they are just people like you and me. And they saw my nametag, with my first name Karl. They wanted to make friends with me. They weren’t so bad after all. When I was discharged, I concentrated on finishing my schooling, and I wanted to get ahead. We were quite a bit older than the other college students at that time, and we knew what we wanted to do. What I would like people to know about this time in history is that in addition to all the battles you read about in the history books, it was a time when everybody was proud to pitch in and do the job, get it done, get it over with, and go on with their lives. I was very lucky because in my job I got to use my brain, and I was not involved in any combat. I’m really glad you are doing this project. You are going to have a completely different slant that you can tell people about the war. Permission Granted by Karl Eaton ©
2001 Thanks for visiting! Do you have
any questions? Comments? |
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Karl F. Eaton, 78, of Leawood, Kansas, passed away on April 1, 2004. We are thankful that we got to meet Karl and hear his stories. |
Karl Eaton
The reason for the program was that there were very few
people who had gone to college during the 1930’s because the Depression didn’t
leave much money for education.
When I got into
the Engineers, I did something that they said you’re never supposed to do, and that
is to volunteer for something.
A typical day was
harder in the United States than it was later when we were in Europe.
