I was assigned to the 33^rd Division and sent to the Philippines. I was a platoon leader of 36 enlisted men. We hit the beach in landing craft and were exposed to shooting as soon as we hit the shore. I was there until the war was over, but there was really no combat by that time. It was a damp and hot island. We were camped right by the ocean. Even though we did lots of training, when we were off-duty we were allowed to go swimming in the ocean. The tropical island conditions were so humid that some of my men and I noticed a green powder forming on our boots and billfolds. It was mold! I was awarded an expert rifleman badge and a Pacific campaign medal.

What would I have changed about the way the war was fought? Most of the American ships and supplies were sent to fight the Nazis in Europe. If the Pacific had gotten more ships and supplies then the war would have ended sooner there.

I was then sent to Japan, which has very rugged coastlines that reminded me of the California Coast. While there, I had a closer feeling to how the war was affecting the Japanese civilians. One of my jobs there as a company commander was to keep the children away from the garbage cans. The Japanese children were always hungry and dirty and theirs was a sad plight. The Army gave civilians DDT powder to fight the lice in their hair and in their homes. In wartime Japan the civilians suffered terribly during the war. There was such a shortage of everything; gasoline being one of them, so the Japanese had devised a charcoal burner to put in cars’ engines to run them. Cars modified in this way had to stop every once and a while and put on more coal.

The Japanese people wanted the war to end after the first atomic bomb had been dropped. But the generals kept the Emperor under house arrest so those who were profiting by the war could keep the fighting going. While I was in Japan I became interested in the country. I visited the Buddhist temple at Nara, where deer roamed in the park area. For one yen you could ring the large bell in the temple and this was something that the GIs in Japan liked to do. I took a Japanese class when I got back home and our teacher was from Kobe, which was one of the places that the U.S. had bombed.

General MacArthur was very firm about the policy of not hurting any of the civilian population after we’d occupied Japan. There were signs all around that said "NO Kilroys in Japan". I found the people had good family values. The young people didn’t disgrace their families. They produced high-quality goods and were hard workers. But they were very slow in completing their work at times, which kept us from finishing our projects. We weren’t given leave during the holidays, but I had a chance to see my mother and grandparents.