Interview of Dan Cameron
Transcript Number 099

FEBRUARY 8, 2001

INTERVIEWER: Okay, we're back with Dan Cameron and we're on a new tape. This time we're going to cover preparation for and involvement in World War II. So last we left you, you're at VMI and was there kind of a sense that last year that you were going to go on active duty. I mean was this known?

CAMERON: Oh there was no question about it after Pearl Harbor.

INTERVIEWER: But how about before Pearl Harbor, at the start of the semester in September.

CAMERON: There was a lot of anxiety because of the way the war was going. I think all of my class felt that they had a destiny with the Army, no question about it. But of course, Pearl Harbor.

INTERVIEWER: Were you at home or you were still at school?

CAMERON: I was at school and I had a girlfriend from Wilmington that was at Holland's College and so Sunday, we didn't have automobiles, cadets couldn't have cars. We had hired a taxi and it's about 50 miles over to Roanoke where Holland's College is and I had a date with a girl and about six of us got in the taxi, went to Holland and got there just after lunch. My girlfriend came out, "Have you heard about Pearl Harbor, the Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor". And of course, I didn't know where Pearl Harbor was. But we knew that war had started. So from that time on, we would have graduated about the middle of June and they pushed us up. We got out, I think the 9th of May we graduated.

INTERVIEWER: Well they actually sped it up.

CAMERON: They were desperate for officers. When we got out, I reported for duty on the 19th of May.

INTERVIEWER: So you had a 10 day...

CAMERON: 10 day stay.

INTERVIEWER: Did you come to Wilmington in that 10 days?

CAMERON: Yep, sure did, came home.

INTERVIEWER: And then you reported at...

CAMERON: At Camp Davis.

INTERVIEWER: Was that a kind of a very temporary camp that they'd just thrown up?

CAMERON: They were just building it. They had a lot of permanent buildings, and I reported for duty to a battalion that had already been formed, but it didn't have any men in it. My first assignment was to go to the 430th antiaircraft battalion, which would be the communications office which was a first lieutenant's job and it got our men in and we went through that whole summer training and most of them were off the street, had no previous military...

INTERVIEWER: Were they from everywhere or were they mainly Southerners?

CAMERON: Lots of them from Detroit, everywhere so we got them all trained up in the summer, September of '42. We had started the north African invasion and so my battalion packed up and were ready to go to the port and an order came down to dismantle that battalion. Took the men out as replacement people and left just a small group for a ______ for another group coming in off the street. So by that time, I was doing the captain's job and so I stayed with the battalion at Camp Davis. We got another group of men who came in by Christmas. We went through exactly the same routine of training and we shipped out of Davis in 1943.

INTERVIEWER: So they saw you as an experienced training group to do another one. Did you have a sense that you were going to just keep doing this?

CAMERON: No, not at all. We were in the same outfit, I went overseas with the outfit that I signed in with the day I joined the Army.

INTERVIEWER: What was happening in this Wilmington region? You were able to get to come visit on any break or something?

CAMERON: Yes, I'd come home at night and stay with my mother and father.

INTERVIEWER: So what was happening with the town of Wilmington?

CAMERON: Well the town of Wilmington was going through a metamorphose. All these soldiers were at Camp Davis and this was the only place they could go find any recreation or any restaurant or anything to eat and then Camp LeJeune was even a larger base and Jacksonville, North Carolina at that time was just a little hamlet sort of a town and so all those Marines would come to Wilmington. And then they had the shipyard operation underway and at one time they were over 25,000 people.

INTERVIEWER: Now had that started when you were just starting. Did you see that build up yet or was that a little later?

CAMERON: That started I think in 41, early '41. People flocked into Wilmington by the thousands.

ADINA: Sounds like it was very lively.

CAMERON: It was lively and crowded.

INTERVIEWER: Were the streets just filled with soldiers?

CAMERON: Yes, they had two USO huts built here. One of them is still standing there, but this was a military town. And they also had an Air Force base at our airport. You just couldn't understand how all these people could possibly fit it.

INTERVIEWER: Did your folks put any other people up besides you. There were lots of families that even took in soldiers, didn't they?

CAMERON: Well my father rented the beach house to officers from Camp Davis. They didn't take anybody into their house, but they did rent the house at the beach.

INTERVIEWER: So now you're shipping out. Tell us about, I mean that sounds like a novelty, but it must have been an interesting experience. What did that mean to ship out?

CAMERON: Pack up all your guns and get them loaded.

INTERVIEWER: You actually took your cannons with you?

CAMERON: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What was the artillery size?

CAMERON: It was a 40 mm, well we had three different kinds of arms. We had 40 mm, was the main gun, but see those pictures over on the wall over there. They are half tracks with 50 caliber machine guns and each battery had four of those.

INTERVIEWER: And what was the target that you were going to be eventually aiming for.

CAMERON: Well when we left Camp Davis, we knew we were heading for England, but we went to Boston, a little town outside of Boston. Called it a staging area. My guess it took us a month to 6 weeks before we...after we got on the ship and started...

INTERVIEWER: What time of the year was that?

CAMERON: That was in the fall.

INTERVIEWER: So your weather was okay in Boston cause that can be...

CAMERON: We crossed in convoy to England and landed in Liverpool, England, no in a dreary, dreary place in Wales, Cardiff. And immediately went to Liverpool and set up the same outside of Liverpool. That would have been in November of '43.

INTERVIEWER: Really cold.

CAMERON: And nasty, just getting that way.

INTERVIEWER: And Liverpool must have had, was it continuing to have attacks from the air at that point.

CAMERON: At that time, they were not. The big attack on Britain had kind of petered out by that time and we didn't stay in Liverpool long. We went up the coast of England to Blackpool. Blackpool is kind of like the Atlantic City in New Jersey. It was a recreational place, lots of piers out in the water.

INTERVIEWER: Before the war it was like this you mean.

CAMERON: Yes, it was that type of place and we trained in that area for a while. Spent Christmas there. Had a great Christmas in Blackpool, England.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us again how big of a unit...

CAMERON: It was a battalion, what they called a separate battalion. It had about 700 men.

INTERVIEWER: And your duties at this point were...

CAMERON: I was battery commander which had a... a battalion had four batteries and I was captain in charge of battery B. 

INTERVIEWER: So you're about...

CAMERON: 175 people. 

INTERVIEWER: Was there besides each battalion, was there a superstructure of managers above that too?

CAMERON: Yeah, every battalion was attached to a group and then the group, when the invasion came along, every Army Corps had a group. For instance, when we went to Normandy, we went with the 5th Corps which was the invasion force.

INTERVIEWER: You must have had a sense of what you were about, but they didn't ever tell you what you were going to do, did they? I mean they couldn't...

CAMERON: Well we knew we were going to have an amphibious landing cause we trained for that. That whole spring of '43, we were on maneuvers one place or another in England. We'd go to the White Cliffs of Dover. That was a place we would go and set up antiaircraft defense there, just practicing. Then we'd go to these little southern English towns and load up on LSTs, go out and come back in.

INTERVIEWER: Did you actually go out in the ocean and come back in then?

CAMERON: Yeah, wouldn't go too far out, just go out where we'd have the feeling of landing on a beach.

INTERVIEWER: Now antiaircraft you know is aiming for aircraft. Were you also ground support or was it just aircraft that you were...

CAMERON: Well we were always prepared to be ground support. Several times after we got into France, we were ground support. But primarily we'd set up around bridges, airports, field artillery units and that sort of thing. Never looked forward to being ground support.

INTERVIEWER: Too close (laughter) because the other people might be there too, right?

CAMERON: Our unit was almost constantly in enemy artillery range so you can see from those pictures the way we'd dig everything in and that was because of the enemy artillery, not the airplanes.

INTERVIEWER: So lots of training. Did the citizens welcome you? What was the mood there?

CAMERON: Yeah, I made some great friends in England. There wasn't much to do over there. You could drink warm beer sometimes at a pub. You could buy fish and chips.

INTERVIEWER: And the beer was a little different, wasn't it? (Laughter) 

ADINA: Had you been abroad before the Army?

CAMERON: No. No I had not. I stayed in England about 8 months. Of course they corralled us up before D-Day started and we were confined to an area there for about two weeks.

INTERVIEWER: They didn't want any leaks, right?

CAMERON: We knew what was coming, but we didn't know when and then we got the orders, we headed down to the port. In fact, we left our base camp on D-Day in England, headed to the port, it was D + 3 before we actually got to Omaha Beach.

INTERVIEWER: And what was it like at that point? I mean that was a brutal battle, but when you got there, had it started to at least...

CAMERON: Oh when we got there, the carnage was pretty much over with. The troops had gotten off of the beach and they were 4 or 5 miles inland.

INTERVIEWER: Not very far though.

CAMERON: Not very far, but bodies piled up on the sand, machinery, tanks and boats just everywhere you looked.

INTERVIEWER: And was the Luftwaffe at that point fairly...

CAMERON: It was not. They made a presence on D-Day, but when we got there, the activities on the beach had diminished considerably. Did have attacks, but not big attacks, not constant air attacks, but we were always, they were always shooting at us with those 88's.

INTERVIEWER: Their field artillery.

ADINA: I was there recently and I went to the town where they manufactured the...but anyway, it was a little bit away from the beaches, but that's where they initially, that's where they surprised...

CAMERON: That's where the British went in.

ADINA: The British, that's right, yeah.

CAMERON: We went into Omaha and Utah Beaches.

INTERVIEWER: And at that point without the enemy, how did you land then, still in that same kind of boat or were you coming in at a different kind...

CAMERON: Well that's an interesting question. We had trained all spring loading our guns and trucks, had a lot of trucks in our unit. We loaded them into the LST's which were going right to the beach. When we went down to ship out in Southport, they loaded us into a liberty ship so instead of being in an LST, they put all our guns and trucks and everything down in the hole of a liberty ship and we were tremendously surprised because we hadn't trained on it or anything like that. We went over across the channel, got off at Omaha Beach and then the trick was, they had a barge arrangement called, a great big flat barge, rhino ferry and so you'd have to get a rhino ferry to come along side the ship and then you had to lift all of our guns and trucks and put them down on the ferry and the ferry went to shore.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. And how did you get ashore as an individual?

CAMERON: That way.

INTERVIEWER: You went over on that ferry too.

CAMERON: And one of the little interesting highlights is the people on that ship, they were Merchant Marines, they weren't Navy and when we got off the shore of Normandy, they were not in any hurry to get us unloaded because they were getting triple time pay being in the combat zone.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my God.

CAMERON: And so they would not let their crew unload our equipment and so we actually lost about a day and a half and finally I was the ranking officer on the ship and we got the men out of our unit, found one that you always had someone that could do everything and so we found our men that could operate their rigs and we loaded our own stuff. And you might say that I threatened to shoot the captain of the boat I was so upset. (Laughter) In retrospect, it might have been the best thing that ever happened because I was a day and a half late getting to shore.

INTERVIEWER: That's right, it saved you (laughter). 

CAMERON: But I was really upset.

INTERVIEWER: And somebody up the line was probably upset too.

CAMERON: Yes, they were looking for us. Other units had about the same experience.

INTERVIEWER: Is that right? Now is this British or American Merchant Marine?

CAMERON: They were Americans.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my goodness, interesting. So did they hustle you right off the beach because it was pretty loaded. I mean did you move in very quickly.

CAMERON: All the guns and trucks were covered with grease because we could literally run our trucks in order to get down under the water and we had a stack up and you had what they called cosmoline, all the spark plugs and all the motors and everything. So when we got to shore, it took a certain amount of time just to clean that mess off before you could move. You've seen pictures of all these on D-Day, well that's exactly where we were, right under those cliffs. 

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Now what was your first forward position then, where were they taking you to? 

CAMERON: Well the first forward position, a field artillery unit had come ashore and they were setting up and our job was to put antiaircraft protection around that field artillery battalion and it was about 3 or 4 miles in shore and I guess the most scared I ever was was at night, we had to go out on reconnaissance of where to put our guns and going down to German, those Normandy ________, they were big tall things, little narrow and you could see a German jumping out at you at every spot. None did, but you had that feeling. So you sat up there and every time our line would move forward, we would move.

INTERVIEWER: Now you talked about being, you were a captain at this point or you were doing the captain's job?

CAMERON: I was the captain in less than a year. 

INTERVIEWER: And yet this was really a hands-on activity. I mean sometimes when we think of a captain, we think of someone whose removed, but you were right there with the troops.

CAMERON: Oh yeah.

ADINA: A captain in the Army?

CAMERON: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: But I'm saying it wasn't a remote position.

CAMERON: Oh no.

INTERVIEWER: You were digging and ...

CAMERON: Of course, I did have like 8 or 9 captains, but I was in charge of a particular battery with 170 men and they were my charge.

INTERVIEWER: And how many guns were usually in the battery then.

CAMERON: Well we had 8 40-mm guns, we had 4 of these half-track with the quadruple 50 caliber machine guns. Then we had 8 50-caliber machine guns that were ______ mounted. And it's an interesting operation because you had to try to find a place to put our guns that had what you called a firing field, and you couldn't put them into wood, you had to set them out in the middle of a field so that if planes came in, you'd have a chance to zero in on it and shoot at him.

INTERVIEWER: And did you shoot at lots of planes?

CAMERON: Yeah. Our outfit kept exact numbers, but we shot about 60 German planes in the course of the war.

INTERVIEWER: Wow. And the main thing was to keep them from coming in on your artillery that was firing....

CAMERON: Yeah, all the bridges or the airport. For instance, when we went through Paris, my battery was assigned to the LaBourget Airport and that's where Lindbergh landed and that was the main airport in Paris at that time. 

INTERVIEWER: And did you get any chance to see Paris?

CAMERON: Yeah, we were there about a week.

INTERVIEWER: I was going to say the citizens were pleased to see you.

CAMERON: They really were.

INTERVIEWER: Now you had talked about the artist friend who ran into you and that's kind of a funny story. You might...

CAMERON: Well when Normandy beach got secured, the big battle then was a place called St. Lowe? And it was very heavily defended and so when our troops attacked St. Lowe, that's when I ran into my friend Henry McMillan. He was sitting there on the field. And I said it looks like there's a guy out there painting. He had an easel in front of him.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my God.

CAMERON: And I didn't think anymore of it. I just thought it was very peculiar, but then Henry saw my numbers on the vehicle and he knew what outfit I was in and he immediately looked me up and so we got together and stayed and visited each other all the way through...

ADINA: Wasn't that nice to see someone from home?

CAMERON: Oh it was wonderful. He was like family. It was great.

INTERVIEWER: And were there others from Wilmington that you ran into?

CAMERON: I ran into, we were on the Rhine River, I ran into an old friend of mine, Bill Meyers, whose still here, still living and we had a nice visit. A roommate from VMI, I ran into him. I knew what outfit he was in so we were able to visit twice and another man that worked for my father named Alan Lewis, we bumped into Alan at ______ as a matter of fact. Let's see.

INTERVIEWER: That's just fascinating isn't it, with all those people, you still...

CAMERON: Another man Diehl from Wilmington.

INTERVIEWER: I think a lot of people don't realize that during the war, they tried to maintain as much normalcy. Were you able to write home? Did you get letters?

CAMERON: Oh yes, we could write.

INTERVIEWER: So your family was able to have a sense of where...

CAMERON: Yeah, but you couldn't tell them anything. 

INTERVIEWER: You'd say, "I'm okay Mom".

CAMERON: Yeah, "Every thing's great. We're getting great food" (laughter), looking forward to seeing you.

ADINA: And they could write you?

CAMERON: Yeah, I got letters from home all the time. Daddy would write me, I think I mentioned to you, he died while I was in Normandy and he had been dead and buried before I even got the notice that he'd been sick.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my goodness, that must have been a shock.

CAMERON: In fact, that was right talking about the Battle of St. Lo, that's where we were. I was sitting on the side of a hill watching this huge bombardment of our planes on the German, big effort to break through and I got a telegram from the Red Cross right there so that was kind of tough.

INTERVIEWER: And you didn't even know he had been sick. Something just came up?

CAMERON: No, he died of a stroke suddenly.

INTERVIEWER: Very suddenly. And how old was he at that time?

CAMERON: 53.

INTERVIEWER: 53, that was very shocking. And then did you get a letter later from your mom?

CAMERON: Oh yeah, I got a letter from a lot of people, mail would find me. Sometimes it would be 2 or 3 weeks. Especially when you were moving. When we moved across France and into Germany, we were moving every day.

INTERVIEWER: I wondered about that, so it was a very mobile. A lot of your management was trying to keep things moving. 

CAMERON: Right, that was the main part of it.

INTERVIEWER: And what were you sleeping in, such a temporary position.

CAMERON: Well you slept in foxholes or you'd try to find an old house that was bombed out, get in the basement, sleep there with sleeping bags. Sometimes we'd luck out with a nice little house somewhere. You never stayed more than a couple of days.

INTERVIEWER: Now did you get in a part of the back sweep from the Battle of the Bulge? Cause you were moving fast, but then they came the other way, right?

CAMERON: Yeah, we were in position above the bulge preparing to cross the Rhine River when the Bulge broke out and we had to experience that night that you probably read about, the Germans dropped a lot of paratroopers behind the American lines and we were very vulnerable because we would like have a gun position here and half a mile away, another gun position, and so we lost several people, Germans dropping on them and firing into our gun pits. So we knew something was going on, but didn't know exactly what until later that morning and we put a great effort into trying to round up all the German paratroopers we could and we got quite a number of them.

INTERVIEWER: So you had to turn into kind of foot soldiers at that point.

CAMERON: See our boys were very much exposed because they were sitting out in the middle of the field.

INTERVIEWER: Wow, with no expectation...

CAMERON: No expectation. We were getting ready to cross the Rhine, we were geared up. So they moved our outfit down to the blunt end of the Battle of the Bulge and that's when we went into one of the ground support, you asked about that. We set our guns up as anti_____ guns and thank God the Bulge stopped before it got to us.

INTERVIEWER: So you could level your guns down at a certain angle?

CAMERON: Right, but they were not very good weapons against Germans _____. They wouldn't have made much difference.

INTERVIEWER: Now did you end up, you said you were always worried about the other artillery. Were there times when they did find your range and come in on you.

CAMERON: Oh yeah, they were shooting at us all the time.

INTERVIEWER: And how could you protect yourself? Dig, dig, dig?

CAMERON: Dig, you look at those pictures up there, you can see how everything is dug in. But we lost a lot, lots of casualties, many more wounded than killed for some reason. A boy would be walking around, a gun shell would come in before they could get back in the hole so to speak.

INTERVIEWER: And if you were controlling this many weapons, where were you like physically within the enclave of guns?

CAMERON: Right in the middle of them if I could be. You know, so-called battery headquarters. I had a lieutenant that was the second in command of the battery and I had a staff of a mess sergeant, supply sergeant and a gun sergeant. We had a troop of about 25 that stayed at battery headquarters in an administrative sort of way. Had to get the rations out every day to the troops.

INTERVIEWER: And what was your communication methods there?

CAMERON: Well surprisingly it was primarily the telephone because if we'd get these guns and put them out, then we had a communications system and we would run wires from gun to gun to gun.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. So you could at least very quickly react.

CAMERON: Yeah. Of course the wires would get cut a lot of times, but basically, yes. If they saw a plane coming, they could crank everything up and all the guns would be on the lookout.

INTERVIEWER: Now what about identification. I mean we have here a lot of stories of friendly fire versus enemy fire. Was that always a problem of identification of planes. You know was it ours, was it theirs.

CAMERON: Well I know the first plane that we shot at in Normandy was a British Spitfire. He was coming and weaving just about tree top level and I think every gun on the continent was shooting at him. The last time I saw them, he was still in there. Yeah, there was a lot of, airplane identification was a large part of our training, but it was still... what would happen is one gun would shoot and the shell would go up and it would explode whether we hit something or not, it would make a puff and so when one puff went up, everybody in the world would start shooting and it was hazardous duty. Our aircraft identification people were very good. That was constant training all the time.

INTERVIEWER: And so that was a separate job for somebody with binoculars and books, did they have books? 

CAMERON: Yes, each gun crew had a lookout on duty all the time.

INTERVIEWER: And were most of your attacks on the Germans daytime or evening?

CAMERON: You'd always have an evening attack at least one or two airplanes just to try to keep them ruffled up, but most of what we shot down, ours was all visual, so it was in the daytime. We fired at the first jets that came over.

INTERVIEWER: Really?

CAMERON: Yeah, our boys were out in the gun pits, phone started ringing, said Captain, the plane came by here so fast that we couldn't even see it. It wouldn't wait for us to shoot at him. That's when the news came out that Germans had jets. About the first of the year in 1945.

INTERVIEWER: Isn't that something? Wow. So you probably didn't hit too many of them.

CAMERON: Well our equipment was really not geared up for that. That was faster than we were. Fortunately didn't have that many of them. Had they had bunches of them, we would have been in bad trouble.

INTERVIEWER: Now you talk about casualties and fortunately we said you didn't have many deaths in your battalions, but you would have wounded. How did you get replacements? 

CAMERON: They had a system for that. You just put in an application for more soldiers and they had what they called a replacement depot. They would just come in and you'd break them in.

INTERVIEWER: Were they trained at all?

CAMERON: Yeah, those guys had had basic training.

INTERVIEWER: But how about all your gun training?

CAMERON: Well they didn't have much of that.

INTERVIEWER: So you were kind of in a constant training mode.

CAMERON: All the time. 

INTERVIEWER: And were there again men from everywhere. Did you have issues of kind of different parts of the country?

CAMERON: A second group of men we got in when we were training were primarily from the Chicago and Detroit area, young kinds. Never had any kind of military training, young, 18, 19.

INTERVIEWER: How old were you? You were an old man by this time or what, 22?

CAMERON: Well I was captain when I was 21.

INTERVIEWER: So they were young. Did you even think in terms of you being older by...

CAMERON: No, I never thought in terms that I was younger, that was...most all of the officers were older, but there again, I'd go back to doing my training without being egotistical again. You never doubted your ability to do whatever it was that you were called on to do.

INTERVIEWER: From that VMI time.

CAMERON: Yeah, and that kind of stood my stead all the way through life. I don't hesitate about taking on a new challenge.

INTERVIEWER: Full speed ahead...interesting. And what was the sense of the other officers if they were considerably older? They didn't care if you could do the job.

CAMERON: If they cared, they didn't let me know it. Five of my officers in my battery were all older than I.

ADINA: Did you have any troops that were younger, or that were your age or older?

CAMERON: Yeah, quite a number.

ADINA: Some of them were maybe college graduates?

CAMERON: No, not any college graduates. Most had commission. Of course there were an interesting bag of people, all kinds of people.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any conflicts because of the different regions coming together or were you okay?

CAMERON: I think we always had a southerner there that people would joke about, but most of our people were Yankees and we got along fine.

INTERVIEWER: And they didn't kid you about your accent at that point.

CAMERON: No.

ADINA: They weren't allowed to (laughter).

INTERVIEWER: He was the captain.

CAMERON: I was a pretty strict disciplinarian. You saved lives by doing that. We had one interesting experience. One of my first lieutenants was a Jewish boy, Charlie Cohen. Charlie married a woman. When he was at Camp Davis, he started going with a Wilmington girl and after the war he came down here and married her, but when we were sitting up on the ____ River and the Russians were over here and we weren't doing anything. We weren't looking for airplanes, but Charlie and I think it was because of his Jewishness, just had to go to Berlin. We were 60 miles from Berlin. And he came in and said, "Captain, I want to go to Berlin". And we had strict orders, nobody goes across this river, the Russians are out there and you didn't know, it was a fluid situation. So I said, "Charlie, you just can't go. I don't want to hear anymore of it." And my jeep driver came up to me, he had driven me all through England and all through France and Germany and said, "Captain, I'd like to go to Berlin with Lieutenant Cohen". There ain't going to be any going to Berlin. Lieutenant Cohen is not going to Berlin. Well the next morning, I called for my jeep driver. Nobody could find him. So then I started getting suspicious, started calling Lieutenant Cohen, couldn't find him. Well it turned out that seven of them got in a pickup truck sort of thing and they took off for Berlin and I was mad. It was only 60 miles away. So about 4:00 in the afternoon I'd expect they'd be coming back. They didn't show up. 8:00 still weren't back. By that time, I was getting to be like a worried daddy. You know my children were out there in danger. To make a long story short, they showed up about 4:00 in the morning and I put them all under arrest because they had violated my orders. I take that back. I only put the ones under arrest that I had told specifically they could not go including my jeep driver. 

ADINA: When was this, was this after?

CAMERON: This was after, the war hadn't ended, but we had met the Russians. 

INTERVIEWER: Weren't they negotiating, that they got to go into Berlin.

CAMERON: They got all kinds of harrowing episodes on that trip. They all could have been killed and so I was right about worrying about them.

INTERVIEWER: How long did you leave them arrested though?

CAMERON: Not long. I went to the colonel and we made a deal that we'd reprimand them. Charlie died last year. We were great friends. We'd get together every Christmas, that's when the Battle of the Bulge was going on. We spent a lot of times remembering.

ADINA: So they settled in Wilmington?

INTERVIEWER: Did he actually settle in Wilmington?

CAMERON: Yeah, his wife's family were in the rug importing business and so Charlie took that business over and one of his children still lives in Wilmington.

INTERVIEWER: Now you know we're going through these highlights as if you're moving along, but what was a typical day like. I mean tell us a little so that the person gets a sense of what's it like...

CAMERON: Well we had a 160 men scattered round and you had to get food to them. You had to have a medical call to see if anybody needs anything, assistance. Like in the Battle of the Bulge, they had a lot of frozen feet and that sort of thing and you stayed busy all the time. As a commanding officer, I would try to go to every gun position every day and I said they weren't just lined up. They might be miles apart.

INTERVIEWER: And this is where the jeep driver came in, you traveled by jeep mainly?

CAMERON: Traveled by jeep, yep.

INTERVIEWER: And were you vulnerable then in that jeep?

CAMERON: Not really. You always had the possibility that a German shell would land somewhere and none of them ever did.

INTERVIEWER: And you couldn't do much about it if they did. So you were a problem solver really. Is that how you saw your role?

CAMERON: It was a little more than that. I was the director, to make sure we were in the right spots, that the boys were dug in properly and that they were secure and safe as possible and got food to them, got them medicine if they needed it, that sort of thing.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, and then you, who were you, going up the chain, who was...

CAMERON: The battalion commander.

INTERVIEWER: And that was the one telling you when to move or where to go. 

CAMERON: When we moved, they'd have a call and we'd go to the battalion command post and he'd give us a map that said you're going to set up around this area here. So then we would go out on reconnaissance and go up and find the area on the map. We'd find out where we could put the guns. Find out what it was we were supposed to protect. So it was constant movement all the time.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned bridges, field artillery, who you were protecting...

CAMERON: Airports.

INTERVIEWER: Airports. Now as you got closer and closer to Germany though, what were you, I mean there wasn't going to be as much ...

CAMERON: Our artillery was always there and there were always bridges that weren't protected or the engineers put temporary bridges and they were very important and had to be protected. 

INTERVIEWER: And did you really see a diminution of the aircraft as the war continued?

CAMERON: Yeah. At the Bulge, there was not a whole lot of German air activity except January 1, they showed up in a large way on that day, That's when the jets came, and that was the last big German air attack.

INTERVIEWER: Of course you still had single planes always.

CAMERON: Yeah we had single planes, but no real big time stuff.

INTERVIEWER: I wondered, I don't know if you know the Sinclair's here in town, Dr. Sinclair.

CAMERON: Oh sure.

INTERVIEWER: Cause he was in a field hospital and I wondered were you in a good distance of all that support or how far away were you from that whole...

CAMERON: Well that all depends on how far you had moved out, but those field hospitals, they moved frequently too. They stayed pretty close up behind and Dr. Sinclair and his wife both were in that unit. I guess that's where they met. We had an interesting experience with a field hospital that, when we were, after the Battle of St. Lowe, they came and took all of our trucks, about 20 trucks in our battery and they assigned them to Patton's army. We sent a truck and two drivers to deliver ammunition to the third army and so we were sitting there with no trucks, no action, because the war had moved away. And so they came up with this idea that in the British army, all of the officers got a whiskey allowance and so they decided that would be a good thing for the American army so they showed up. We had six officers including myself. And they gave us all a fifth of scotch, a fifth of gin and two bottles of wine and that was our allowance. And so here we were sitting and so we went to a field hospital and I don't know if it was the same one that Sinclairs were in, but we rounded up 7 nurses and brought a captain from the field hospital and we went down to this old bombed out chateau and cleaned it up good, got a generator, had power and they had a Victrola so we could play records and we had a hell of a party.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my God.

CAMERON: We drank that liquor, first time we had had anything since we left England.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my goodness.

CAMERON: So it was a big party and we got the girls back in the truck and sent them off and I never will forget that captain from the hospital, Captain Jackson, Frank Jackson. But anyhow he took them off and we never saw them again, but we had a good party that night.

INTERVIEWER: One party for the whole war though, that's not a lot (laughter). Now the war is winding down and what stopped it. In other words, what did you find to say we're done. What was that like?

CAMERON: Well, of course the Germans just gave up and surrendered. And there we were and from then on, it was a matter of doing different things. I was still running my little troop, but I got transferred to another outfit that was training to go to Japan.

INTERVIEWER: Oh my goodness.

CAMERON: And they assigned you by the amount of numbers you had. I had about 95 numbers which wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good and they started sending some people home based on numbers so I got transferred down to this outfit, antiaircraft outfit as a battery commander and we were trained to go to Japan and then when that war ended, thank goodness that Truman dropped a bomb on them, they assigned this whole battalion to a prison camp.

INTERVIEWER: You were still in Germany?

CAMERON: Still in Germany, Stuttgart, Germany. Ludwig's _____. King Ludwig built the castle, but anyhow they set up a prison camp there with 10,000 German prisoners and my battery was assigned the guard duty of this prison and that was a very interesting undertaking because the prisoners were not primarily soldiers. They were Nazis and that sort of thing.

INTERVIEWER: Really?

CAMERON: Or political type people and the CIA was in there interrogating people, trying to get information from them. That was an interesting thing.

INTERVIEWER: But these were all new troops for you then, a new officer...?

CAMERON: Yeah. 

INTERVIEWER: But again your VMI stead you well in the sense of...

CAMERON: Yeah, we had an interesting bunch of officers. Three of them had been transferred in like I had. Three of them had been in that outfit, but we had one of our lieutenants was a substitute organist from Radio City Music Hall and so we got in this little house and found us a piano and he would entertain us and we all went to see the movie Laura and we came back and said, can you play that song. He said yeah he could play it and so that was our theme song. He'd play that all the time.

INTERVIEWER: So how long were you at this duty then? Several months?

CAMERON: Yeah, several months. I think like from September until I left to come home.

INTERVIEWER: Were they starting to release some of these prisoners?

CAMERON: They had not released many of them. We had 1000 women in this group of prisoners. It was built originally as a training camp for about 600-700 people so...that was another interesting story. When I went over and took over as the commander of this prison, those Germans in that prison were starving to death. They were just emancipated looking and started checking around, when they set that prison up, they set it up for a few hundred prisoners, up to 1000, and they had allocated a certain ration for those people and then as more prisoners kept coming in and coming in, they had not increased the rations so I was smart enough, again my VMI training, I was smart enough I wasn't going to take on that responsibility so I immediately that first day wrote a letter to the Surgeon General of the 7th Army, told him what the conditions were and I would not accept the responsibility. Well the next morning they were down, the General came, two to three colonels and it was a bad situation and so immediately they started sending in adequate rations. So I was a very popular fellow cause I had gotten them something to eat.

INTERVIEWER: Well you didn't want to become like them, right?

CAMERON: Yeah, we had a German colonel and I put him in charge of this camp because that's a big job and we actually just had the supplying of the food and he organized that thing just beautifully. He was running it. But that was an interesting assignment.

INTERVIEWER: And at that point they were not still fighting. They weren't trying to break out.

CAMERON: Oh no, they really had given up. The Germans gave up in May, this was fall.

INTERVIEWER: So you didn't have any incidents of people trying to break out.

CAMERON: No, no. I'm sure some people broke out and we probably wouldn't even have known it, there were so damn many of them.

INTERVIEWER: So were you surprised when the letter finally said you get to go home?

CAMERON: Well that was interesting. We had what they called an R/R and I had I think 95 points and all the officers above 95 points had been sent out of our battalion and they came by and said you could have a week in Switzerland and I got to thinking...I know if I take that trip to Switzerland, they'll call my number. I said, on the other hand, I probably will never get to see Switzerland again so I took it. Had a lovely 7 days trip down to Switzerland. When I got back, they had shipped out officers with everybody over 90 points had left and they said they would not call anymore for a good while, 6 weeks. I said, oh hell, you know I missed it. The next day special order came down and said any officers with more than 90 points, send them to this particular place and we've got some wounded soldiers and we're going to expedite their shipment back home so I left that same day and went to that place and that night we got on what they called a 40 and 8 train and we went straight to Marseilles and in two weeks I was on the ship coming home.

INTERVIEWER: WOW.

CAMERON: The guys that left while I was in Switzerland, they didn't get home until the end of February.

INTERVIEWER: So you were lucky!

CAMERON: I was really lucky.

INTERVIEWER: And you got Switzerland.

CAMERON: Yeah, I got Switzerland.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever been back to Switzerland?

CAMERON: No.

INTERVIEWER: So you were right. Well listen, thank you very much and as we continue on, if there are other stories that we're not going to say that you can't tell us about them, but that was a wonderful kind of summary of a very dedicated service to the country for a long time. You were in the service then for four years. 

CAMERON: I got promoted to Major when I got out of the army.

INTERVIEWER: Great.

CAMERON: 23 year old major.

INTERVIEWER: That's amazing and I would guess that VMI was very proud of that too in the sense...

CAMERON: Well they had a lot of people with that same experience.

INTERVIEWER: But they really did prepare you to do a great job. Okay, thank you very much.