INTERVIEWER:   Mr. Watters, when did you go into the military, where did you go into the military and why did you go into the military?

WATTERS:   Well in 1937, I joined the National Guard and stayed in a year and then was discharged.  In 1942, I was inducted into the Army as an inductee.

INTERVIEWER:   Now how old were you when you went into the National Guard?

WATTERS:   I was 15 years old.

INTERVIEWER:   And you were discharged what, when you were 16?

WATTERS:   I was discharged when I was 16 because when the National Guard mobilized in 1938 and 1939, they started checking all the people’s records and found out that I was underage so that’s the reason I was released from the National Guard honorably.

INTERVIEWER:   But you did get credit for that service, is that right?

WATTERS:   I did get credit for that service. 

INTERVIEWER:   You weren’t even out of high school, were you?

WATTERS:   No, I was still in high school (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   Let’s go ahead then.  You were drafted?

WATTERS:   I was drafted, inducted into the Army.

INTERVIEWER:   And what year was that?

WATTERS:   Let’s see, I reported in 1943, January 20, 1943.

INTERVIEWER:   Now you’re an old man of what?

INTERVIEWER:  With military experience (laughter).

WATTERS:   Yeah, with previous infantry training (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   Tell me about those early days when you first when into the Army?  Here you are, a young man, but you do have military experience.  Where did you do your basic?

WATTERS:   Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Arkansas.  It was an infantry basic.  Let’s see, I left Fort Bragg, that’s where I reported the first time, I left there and went into Little Rock, Arkansas to the infantry company there and trained until May, all basic training, drill, weapons, all the obstacle courses and all those things.  I was a little man, a small person, but I did alright.  Being that I had former military training, they made me platoon guide.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what does a platoon guide do?

WATTERS:   He guides the platoon on road marches.  In other words, he has the ability to line up a position in front of him and keep the platoon in line as they’re marching.  So that was my responsibility.  Along with that, I didn't have to pull any old-fashioned KP while I was taking basic training.  I was treated as an NCO or non-commissioned officer all through training.

I’ll go back to when I took my physical when being inducted.  It was in 1943.  They stripped us all naked and put a big red number on our chest.  I think I was 190 something.

INTERVIEWER:   Just painted it on you?

WATTERS:   Yeah, just wrote it with, it looked like methyiolate.  So as I walked down the line, one doctor looked over at me and he said, “My God, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel” (laughter).  So when I went on through the line and came back out, passed the physical and everything.  When I came back the same doctor was sitting there.  He looked at me and said, “Hey”.  I said, “Yes sir”, he said he owed me an apology.  I said, “What did I do?”  He said, “No, it’s what I said.  I said they were scraping the bottom of the barrel when I saw you.  You’re the healthiest one in here”.  (laughter).  But then I went on through the basic training part of it and took all the physical training.

INTERVIEWER:   Where were you living when you were drafted?

WATTERS:   Kure Beach.  I was raised in Kure Beach.  My grandpa was Mr. W. L. Kure.

INTERVIEWER:   After whom the beach was named?

WATTERS:   Yes sir.  My great-grandmother was lady-in-waiting for the Queen of Denmark and my great-grandfather was a sea captain that came over and made investments and through her influence, he was a rich man seeing as he was a sea captain.  My grandpa was also a sea captain, W.L. Kure was a sea captain of a square rig sailing ship type.

INTERVIEWER:   Well when you were a boy at Kure Beach, it was not the Kure Beach of the year 2002.

WATTERS:   No, I think there were 32 permanent residents on the beach in the wintertime.  So we had the run of the beach.

INTERVIEWER:   Where did you go to school?

WATTERS:   Well I took grammar school on Myrtle Road, but the school is no longer there.  It was a three-room schoolhouse.  I was so smart that I skipped the 8th grade.  They didn't have the 8th grade, that’s the reason why I skipped it (laughter).  But anyhow then I went to New Hanover High School. 

INTERVIEWER:   How did you get to high school?

WATTERS:   By school bus.  We’d leave about I reckon 6:30 in the morning, get home some time around 5:30 in the afternoon. 

INTERVIEWER:   Well I carried you back a little further.  You just finished basic training, but you’re a buck private.

WATTERS:   Right, a buck private.  So from there I was assigned to New Orleans to Camp Harahan in a railroad shop battalion.  It hadn’t been organized yet, but it was mobilized on my birthday, 6 April 1943.  So I was in there with the mobilization of the forming of the unit.  From there we went to what they called basic training.  It was nothing but just long marches along the levies there along the Mississippi River.

They didn't give us any basic training or anything, which I’d already had.  I had had more training than the average one in there.  The officers were not trained.  They were strictly railroad people.  They were just along for the ride.

INTERVIEWER:   How did you get into a railroad battalion?

WATTERS:   I don’t know.  I was a licensed welder, maritime licensed welder, both oxyacetylene and electric car, so evidently that’s the reason I went in.  They needed welders in the railroad battalion. I was looking to go to a shipyard or something in construction, engineering or something, but I went to a railroad shop.

Anyhow we took what they classified basic and then we went out to the rifle range.  We rode boxcars across Lake Ponchartrain to Slidell and over to the rifle range. 

INTERVIEWER:   What were you firing, an M1?

WATTERS:   No, I was firing carbine.  They had assigned me a carbine.  Anyhow they lined everybody up and everybody started firing.  I don’t know what happened, anyhow most of the range stopped firing and started watching me shoot cause I was making all 10’s.  In other words, I was hitting bullseyes on every shot.  So as it turned out, I was the highest shooter in the company.

INTERVIEWER:   And the others are firing carbines as well?

WATTERS:   Yes, the other ones are firing carbines also.  So I don’t know, I have a copy of the order somewhere, showing that I was lead man in the outfit for rifle fire.  From there, that was about the end of our training.  From there we went to Bucyrus, Ohio, to Camp Millard to finish the railroad training.

The Army couldn't tell me anything because I knew how to weld.  I knew what they wanted to do on that part of it.  So the only thing I needed to do was to find out what to do on the railcars when they needed repair.

INTERVIEWER:   Now what year is this and what month?  Do you remember?

WATTERS:   1943, I can give you the exact month, I thought I could, but I can’t.  Anyhow I believe it was in June, we went to Ohio.

INTERVIEWER:   So it wasn’t snowing and wind?

WATTERS:   No, no, it was nice.  We worked in the shops and learned some of the procedures on what to do, especially with the new American cars that they were building and sending over to the overseas countries.  They had different trucks and wheels and everything than they had on the American cars.  The camp was real nice.  We lived in tents.  They were talking about you people shouldn’t be out in the hot sun, this, that and other, because it was so hot in Ohio and we had just come from Louisiana, and man, we were cool.  We were ready to go.

I had a good time in Ohio.  We were there during the harvest season.  People used to call the camp for volunteers to come out and shuck corn and one thing or the other.  I have never eaten such food in all my life.  I volunteered and went out, they told me never volunteer for nothing, so I did this one particular time.  When I shucked corn and man I was ready to go another time, but they didn't ever call us back.

INTERVIEWER:   This was just a farm family that needed harvest help.

WATTERS:   It was harvest time.  I think it was three or four families that got together and set it up for the GI’s.  I think it was mostly a GI type of thing. 

INTERVIEWER:   But you only did this one day?

WATTERS:   I only did it one time, one day and man I was ready to go anytime they wanted.  It wasn’t long after that, we were restricted to the camp because we were getting ready to go overseas.  We left the camp before Thanksgiving.  If we’d had stayed around, we’d have had all types of Thanksgiving festivities going on, but they needed us somewhere else. 

They loaded us on troop trains, always at night, and we left for California.  So we went from Ohio down through Tennessee and picked up the southern route and went to Riverside, California.  I think the camp was named Camp Anza, California.

INTERVIEWER:   You’re still a private?

WATTERS:   No, I was a technical sergeant.  They had made me technical sergeant due to my skills in welding.

INTERVIEWER:   Weren’t they called T-3?

INTERVIEWER:   That was a buck sergeant with a T underneath.

WATTERS:   That’s right.  So I wore that the whole time I was in the CBI theater.  Stayed there in the barracks.  I nearly froze to death in that place and about melted at the same time.  From 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, you couldn't take off enough clothes, but from 3:00 in the afternoon until 9:00 at night, you would freeze to death.  You couldn't put on enough.  I reckon the sun would get behind those mountains and it would get cold in that desert area.

INTERVIEWER:   Near what big city was this?

WATTERS:   Los Angeles, Riverside.  We went from Riverside, I think we stayed in that camp about maybe 5-10 days, I don’t remember exactly.  Then we got on another train and went to Wilmington, California and there we loaded on a ship, always at night, the USS Mariposa.  It was a luxury liner prior to the war and they had converted it to a troop transport.

There were 4500 railroad troops that was on board of it.  When we left Wilmington, California, we sailed unescorted; there were no ships with us.  We went across the Pacific.  We went the low route.  Crossed the international dateline, the Equator and about an hour before sundown, the captain would speed the ship up.  We ran a zigzag course all the way over.  He’d speed it up before sundown and then before sunrise in the morning, he’d speed it up.

Word got around that he was doing that to get off of any submarines, to change the speed of the ship therefore the torpedo wouldn’t hit because they had marked it at a certain speed back before sundown and they’d wait until dark to shoot it.  We were on the ship 32 days at sea.

INTERVIEWER:   Tell me a little bit about that experience.

WATTERS:   When we were going over, a lot of the people got seasick.  I didn't have any seasickness at all.  We had staterooms.  Normally there would be two people to the stateroom if it was occupied by passengers.  But they had from 6-12 people in those staterooms in bunk beds, stack bunks. 

We got over there, after we were in the ship aways, the food started getting bad.  The troops on board mutinied.  They would go through the chow line and take their chow and throw it in the trashcan, wouldn’t eat it.

INTERVIEWER:   What was wrong with the food?

WATTERS:   Come to find out, the transportation officer or the troop officer in charge of the ship had been making a pocket by buying outdated food.  Some of the sausage that they were serving for breakfast was packaged in 1929.  The troops had the packages and everything that had worked in the mess section.  While everybody else and the ship personnel were eating trash.  

From that time on, they picked up all our weapons and the officers would wear side arms all the time.  At certain times, if we had anything, we were to go to our stateroom, close the door.  They had certain people that would watch the halls.  This was all over the whole ship.  It wasn’t just one unit.  The whole ship, all the troops mutinied.

INTERVIEWER:   Did the food improve?

WATTERS:   Oh yeah, the food improved.  This was about maybe three or four days before Christmas in 1943.  As we went on, we had Christmas dinner.  They served us turkey and they showed, they brought the carcass out and carved it while we were there so we knew it wasn’t packaged or something.  What really got everybody was on Boxing Day the day after Christmas, we pulled into Hobart, Tasmania and docked.  We made a 10 hour layover there.

The ship’s captain told the transportation officer to get food on board or he was putting him off.  So from that time on, we had good food.  In other words, we normally would expect military rations, but not junk.  So the food improved and everything. 

INTERVIEWER:   Was it two meals a day?

WATTERS:   Two meals a day.  I saw a local bread on board bring $10.  One of the mess people, I say mess people, individuals that were working in the kitchen, KP and everything, stole a loaf of bread and brought it out and sold it for $10.  One loaf of bread and it was cut up into pieces and distributed out amongst the troops.  That’s how hungry we were prior to the Christmas meal.  We gained the respect of the officers.  They respected all the troops.  We didn't do anything from then on that was out of line, just that one incident.

We were respected as men, not as a bunch of coolies so to speak or hired hands.  Then when we left Tasmania, we still zigzagged and went into Bombay, India, and we docked, offloaded.  We stayed on ship for about two days I think until they got everything organized and then they loaded us on trains, well not all of us, but just certain groups.  We cut out for Calcutta.

When we reached Calcutta, the unit was broken in half.  Half of us went north and half of us went south.  So I was in the northern group.  From there we took our meter gauge railroads, 39 inch track and went up to a place called Kandu.  Then we got on a river boat with a paddle wheel for a day and a half up the river.  Got back off of that.

INTERVIEWER:   How many men?

WATTERS:   About 150, maybe a little bit less.

INTERVIEWER:   Officers and enlisted men?

WATTERS:   Yeah, we got back on the train.  We had all our gear to handle and everything.  It was miserable, but no problem.  Everybody did it.  We had received our weapons back so we were armed.  Anyhow we got back on the train and rode into a place called _________ Dibregard.  That was our base.

They had a railroad shop there.  We offloaded all the troops and all the equipment we brought.  We marched about a half a mile where they had a tent city set up for us.  We went over and that’s where our base camp was.  That’s where I remained for the two years I was in India.

INTERVIEWER:   What was the weather like?

WATTERS:   In the summertime, it would get to about maybe 115-120 degrees and in the wintertime, it would get down to 60.  You’d freeze in the wintertime.  We were at the base of tall mountains there.  I could lay on my bunk, I had the last tent at the end of the row, and I could lay on my bunk and look up in the mountains and see snow on the hill and sweat just pouring off of you. 

We slept in British tents.  They were double tents.  In other words, they had one tent pitched and another tent pitched on top of it about 18-20 inches away from the first one.  That created an air space and all the heat would be blowing out of that hot air space and the tent stayed fairly cool.  We didn't have too bad of conditions in the tent.

INTERVIEWER:   I was going to ask you if it was 120 degrees during the day, was it 120 degrees at night too?

WATTERS:   Well no, it would cut down to maybe 90 or something like that.  It was still warm.

INTERVIEWER:   90 is comfortable if it’s 120 in the day.

WATTERS:   You just learned to cope with it.  You drank a lot of water and salt tablets.  Salt was the key to the whole thing.  Then we had to take a Atabran tablet which was daily.  In other words, most of the people wouldn’t take them, but I took mine every day because some of them were coming down with malaria.  Me, I never had any malaria.  I didn't get any sores or anything that wouldn’t heal. 

One reason for that, I had a buddy that had been around a little bit.  He said, “Peewee, let me tell you something.  Go to mess hall and get a piece of GI soap.  Bath with the GI soap and you’ll never have athlete’s foot or any skin problems.”  I said, “You’re kidding”.  He said, “No, you know Mac.”  He was one of the fellas that lived in the tent and his chest was broken out with boils and all under his arm and it was from a skin rash.  He said, “That’s what you don’t want”.  I said, “You better believe it”.  So I never had any skin rash or anything the whole time I was there.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you do for recreation?

WATTERS:   Well we played volleyball.  It’s strange that you brought that up.  We played horseshoes and things like that.  Most of the time, we were working and didn't have too much time for recreation.  Anyhow I had a friend that was kind of a mountaineer boy.  Most of us were from the south.  I had the nickname of Peewee because I was about the smallest man in the unit.

He said, “Peewee, do you know anything about a still?”  I said what kind.  He said a whiskey still.  He asked if I knew the formula and I said I could get it.  He said, “Where are you going to get it”.  I told him I’d write home and get it.  He said, “You can!” and I said sure.  “I can get my daddy to write it out for me”.  He asked if I made whiskey and I told him I didn't, but my dad did.  I used to go to the still with him.  So I wrote home.

INTERVIEWER:   Your daddy was making whiskey on Kure Beach?

WATTERS:   Yeah, he and another fella.  Anyhow wrote home and asked him for the drawings and the recipe and how to cook it and everything.  He sent it back to me.  I still have the drawings.  In our tents we had brick floors that were filled in with sand and they were about maybe two feet above the surface of the ground to keep the monsoon rains from going into the tents.

What we did, on Sunday, it was the only day we had to do it, we removed the bricks, dug the sand out and I had made steel waterproof boxes, filled with steel from the shop and put those boxes in the floor and put the bricks on top of it.  So we cured the mash in the containers and one tent had the cooker.

INTERVIEWER:   Where did you get the mash?

WATTERS:   We made it.  We stole the cornmeal from the mess hall.  They didn't know anything about making cornbread.  So they had cornmeal just going to waste there.  So we asked them for the cornmeal.  “What are you doing with it”.  “We’re feeding the birds”.  “Oh good, help yourself”.  The sugar, we’d take…they had containers on the table and the ones that were making the mash, in the mornings would unscrew the cap, pull the sugar out in a bag, put the cap back on and carry it to the tent after breakfast.

That night at supper, empty the same containers and carry it to the…so we had enough sugar to ferment the cornmeal.

INTERVIEWER:   Now how many of you bootleggers were in on this?

WATTERS:   Let’s see, me, Tom, Mac, there was about eight of us in on it.

INTERVIEWER:   How did you keep it away from the other guys in the outfit?

WATTERS:   They didn't know anything about it.  Each tent had five people in a tent, so these five people would band together.  You usually picked a buddy and your buddies were in the tent with you.  This was the way it was kept quiet.  The only trouble was when we started cooking it, the nights would get real still.  The humidity was heavy.  Man, you could walk through the tent area and take a deep breath and get drunk (laughter) from the odor of the whiskey being made. 

Somebody made the statement about somebody around here is making whiskey.  Old Tom spoke up and said, “Yeah, I think it’s those Hindus over there.  They got a thing going”.  Anyhow you had little combat ration stoves that would run on gasoline.  So that’s what we used.  We’d take three or four of them and put it under the cooker and make…to steam the mash and go through the thump keg and into the worm and into the bottle.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you make the worm?

WATTERS:   Yeah, I made the worm.  I made all the copper…

INTERVIEWER:   I’m sorry, for the purpose of this recording, tell us what a worm is.

WATTERS:   A worm is a coil of copper that looks like a big spring that goes into cold water, which causes the steam to condense in a liquid.  The still was made with all copper, no solder, it was all welded.  So there was no chance of anybody getting sick.  It was good corn whiskey.  When you’d take it and shake it, it would bead.  It had a perfect fine bead. 

If you take corn whiskey and want to find out if it’s good or not, you take it and give it a good shake and if the beads are real fine, the bubbles on the inside are real small and tiny, then you’ve got good corn whiskey.  If they’re big, then look out.  It’s not cooked right.  We made good whiskey (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   If the bead, as I remember, if the bead floats on top or if the bead is halfway down, what does that mean?

WATTERS:   That something is not cooked properly.  In other words, your mash, your liquid is not thoroughly done.  The bubbles should, when you shake it to form the bubbles, they should all gently rise to the surface.  If they do, then you’ve got good whiskey.  It would be perfectly clear and look just like water.  You couldn't tell it from water except when you took a sip of it (laughter).

Afterwards, see all this went on after March of 1943.  When we first got there, we were all infantry.  We were supporting the British 14th Army as infantry because the Japanese had invaded India.  Once the invasion had been upheld and everything had become stabilized, then we went back to our normal work routines which was build a railroad and that’s what we did.

We built the railroad, the B&A, Bengal and Asam Railroad and hauled tons and tons of supplies to the airfields just a little bit to the north of us. 

INTERVIEWER:   You built the railroad?

WATTERS:   We built the cars, rebuilt the cars.  They had been destroyed.  I welded bullet holes in them where the Japanese had messed them up prior to us getting there.  This was in the early 40’s.

INTERVIEWER:   But tracks were down and ties were down?

WATTERS:   Yeah, we had to get the signals all squared away.  There were all types of wrecks and everything.  The engines, they could care less.  They didn't worry about it one way or the other.  When the GI’s got over there, they set it up to where it was a functioning railroad.  I mean first class railroad.

INTERVIEWER:   Who didn't care about the engines?

WATTERS:   The Hindus.  They didn't have any incentive to do anything.  When they’d get ready to load a coal car, they’d take it and each man had a basket that would carry maybe a peck inside, put it on his head.  He’d walk up and gently drop it into the coal car and that’s the way they loaded the coal car.  They didn't have any ramps to load it on.  So when the GI’s got over there, they built ramps where they could run the car, put the engine underneath it, pull a lever and they’d dump the coal right down in it.

The next train could push a coal car up on top of the ramp and dump it right into that hopper so the engine could fill it, the engine could be filled.  These are the things they didn't care about.  From talking to a lot of the people, they were ready for the Japanese to take over India.  They wanted the Japanese to invade India and take over because they were tired of the British rule.

The British did more harm than those people realize believe it or not.  But they resented being on their own.  So India is free now, but you look at the United States or South Africa and look how many Indians or Hindus have moved out to leave their own country.  You go to the hospital out here and look at the medical people that are on staff that came from Indian background, east Indian background.  It was a shame at that time.

But that’s some of the problems that were in the railroad.  The people would, in the shops, they’d get a break in the morning.  Tea time the British called it which is break time.  On their break, they would all get up and sit down on their honches, put their hands on their knees and just sit there and the one down on the end would load a little pipe with hemp or marijuana.  Puff, puff, and pass it over to the next one.

They smoked their dope and then they’d gradually get up after it was over with and go back to work.  The people that I liked the best over there were the _____ that lived there.  They were the most industrious.  The people around Nepal, they really wanted to better themselves. 

Life was really a work camp.  Seven days a week, well I say seven days a week, not all the time…depending on the situation.  If it was critical, it would be seven.  If not, we were six. 

INTERVIEWER:   Tell me about the average day.  What time was reveille in the morning?  Did you fall out and have a formation?

WATTERS:   Yeah, we had a formation first thing in the morning about 6:00.  We went back to tents.  From 6 to 7 to about 7:30, it was chow time. We had breakfast.  Then we left for the shops about 8, walk a half a mile to the shops. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did you have GI cooks?

WATTERS:   GI cooks, yep.

INTERVIEWER:   But you didn't have to pull KP, did you?

WATTERS:   No, we didn't have to pull KP.  KP was assigned to the mess section.  Some did have to pull KP as a help.  I’ll give you an example of that.  If we had chicken for example, they usually brought the chicken in live so you had to kill the chicken, pick him and then you turned him over to washing and everything and then you turned him over to the butcher to take care of preparation.

So I got into one of those details and everybody…the first time we had chicken, they didn't know what to do with one.  I said that’s no problem.  So I showed them how to kill it and then started to pick him.  As I started picking, the skin on that chicken was full of sores.  So I broke the skin and pulled the skin off of the meat, but the sores were only on the skin.  They didn't go into the meat.  So I picked the chicken, went into the mess hall and showed the mess steward what was going on.

He said, “My God, what can we do”.  I said the only thing I knew to do was to skin all the chicken, don’t even pick them, just skin them.  If he found one with a sore on it, I told him to throw it away.  Then I said I would pot boil it before I cooked it any other way.  He said, “How do you know so much about that?”  I said I didn't know, that I was raised around things like that and knew what was going on.  He said, “You don’t want to be assigned to the mess hall, do you?”  I said “No, not really” (laughter). 

INTERVIEWER:   Did you hire local folks to do the pots and pans?

WATTERS:   No, most of it was done by the GI’s.  The kept the Indian personnel out of the area.  We had an old major there that had been in World War I.  I reckon you’d say he commandeered a locomotive boiler and hauled it up to the camp.  We had a young man there who had worked on a ranch.  So he set it up, built a water tower and run pipelines from that boiler to the mess hall, to the latrines where we had hot showers with running water due to that one major that set it up. 

I forgot how he got it, they were having lend lease problems, oh you can’t do that and you can’t do this.  So he told one of them, “The hell I can’t”.  He said that his people were going to have hot water.  He told them his kitchens were going to have hot water.  So he moved that thing and we set it up.  The young man that set it up, his name was Doug Gates.  His brother is Ken Curtis.  Do you know Ken Curtis?

INTERVIEWER:   No I don’t.

WATTERS:   He’s from Gunsmoke.

INTERVIEWER:   Is that right?  I’ll be darned.

WATTERS:   Both of those people are dead now.  I got to see Doug at a reunion we had in New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He was all crippled up.  Most of the people in the unit were old people.  When I say old, they were in their thirties and forties when we were in India and me, I was just a youngster.  I reckon I was one of the youngest in the outfit.  There were a couple more that were about my age.  Most of them have died off.

INTERVIEWER:   You got paid once a month.  What did you do with your money?

WATTERS:   Well I sent home and I kept just enough to survive on.

INTERVIEWER:   What could you buy?

WATTERS:   Couldn't buy nothing that amounted to anything.  Well you could go into the stores, but they didn't have anything that was for sale.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you have a PX?

WATTERS:   After things got settled down after all the fighting had moved away from us, we started getting PX supplies such as…you could buy trinkets and things.  In fact, I bought a hand-carved jewelry box made out of sandalwood and Ann still has it.  It has an odor to it.  You can still smell the sandalwood.

INTERVIEWER:   Let me take you back to the point where the Japanese were really aggressively trying to capture India.  Were you in any direct fighting yourself?

WATTERS:   No, thank goodness, I was not.  I was only in position to fight if the situation had come about.  We were five miles from the fighting.  In other words, they had a line drawn and the Japanese were trying to cut the railroad.  If they took the railroad, they had command of the river, the railroad that would separate the northern part of our troops from the southern part. 

The northern part, let’s see, there were two airfields just a little bit to the north of us that Mumbery and Fimjam____ I think it was called.  The Japanese wanted those airfields because they could bomb or do whatever they wanted to do from those fields.  With the railroad cut, that would stop the supplies going into China because the road was under construction and was in the process of being completed.  If they had taken that, then that eliminated the road and that would have been the supply line going into Burma and right into China.

INTERVIEWER:   Let me take you back.  There you are…by the way, did your camp have a name?

WATTERS:   No, it didn't have a name.  At one time it was in Frank Buck’s old animal camp.  That’s some of the history I have, that he had set up his wild animal farm there and that’s where the camp was situated.  But there were no buildings or anything.  I don’t think we had a name.

INTERVIEWER:   Well it sounds like your life was get up in the morning, work all day, lay down at night, get up the next day, work all day, lay down at night.

WATTERS:   That’s it.  That’s what we did.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you ever get a pass to go into…

WATTERS:   Only after the war was over.  When Japan surrendered, I had an opportunity to go on a tiger hunt and I went on a tiger hunt.  We didn't kill any tigers, but we got two big elk, a big wild boar and a porcupine and squirrels that were almost four feet in length.  We didn't see any tigers anywhere.

INTERVIEWER:   How did you get the news that Japan had surrendered?

WATTERS:   Came on the radio.

INTERVIEWER:   Yeah, Air Force Radio Service.

WATTERS:   When Japan surrendered, we had what’s known as signal torpedoes.  They’re just about maybe that size and you take it and strap it on railroad tracks.  The number of ____ that you attach gives the engineer the signal that the bridge is out or the tracks are down or something like that.

So we lined up, I reckon, maybe a quarter a mile of those railroad torpedoes and I had a buddy that could run an engine.  So he got on the locomotive and run down through those things, boom, boom, boom, boom.  That’s the way we celebrated the war with Japan being over.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you open the still?

WATTERS:   Oh yeah, we had the still wide open (laughter).  Let’s see, I can’t remember the old sergeant’s name right now.  He said, “You crummy rotten so and so.  Been making whiskey all this time and wouldn’t pass it out to nobody”.  I said, “yeah, that’s true, we had it.”  He said, “Man, I don’t know who you got the information from, but it’s first class”.  (Laughter)

INTERVIEWER:   How did the camp get deactivated?  The war is over, the fighting is over.

WATTERS:   Well the war was over and this was in August 1945.  The railroad unit or the units picked up all of the wrecked cars and loaded them on flat cars and sent them into the shop.  We had to repair all of those cars before we could leave the area.  So we had more work after the war than we did prior to the war.  So it got to the point that some of the stuff was a joke to try to repair.  We had a couple of good sergeants that had been old time railroad people.  He said, “Cut it up in little pieces”.  So that’s what we did, just cut it up in little pieces and threw it aside.

That’s the way we got rid of a lot of it.  Then the equipment and everything was sold to the English people there in the camp or in the shops at scrap prices.  We had wheel lays that would turn a six foot wheel, welding machines, drill press, all types of rivet guns and all this stuff, generators.

INTERVIEWER:   Hand tools of all sorts.

WATTERS:   Hand tools of all sorts, forges, the handles.

INTERVIEWER:   Went for a penny on a dollar.

WATTERS:   Penny on a dollar.

INTERVIEWER:   Well we got to get you out of that camp. 

WATTERS:   Well when the time came for us to leave, they just packed us up, told us we were going to leave in the morning, be prepared to go.  So we loaded all of our bags and the next morning put them on our shoulders, walked down to the shops, climbed on a troop train and headed for Calcutta.  I don’t know who closed it or anything.  They just loaded the troops on the train and moved us out.  I don’t know whether it was political or they wanted us out of there or what the score was.

We stayed in a place in Calcutta that was a racetrack known as Hialeah.  We stayed there for about three or four days.  Maybe it was longer than that, I don’t remember now exactly.  Then they loaded us on a troop ship and brought us home.  We went through Calcutta, stopped in Ceylon and went around the tip of India and came through the Suez Canal.  Stopped again and out into the Atlantic Ocean.

INTERVIEWER:   Two meals a day?

WATTERS:   Two meals a day.

INTERVIEWER:   Crowded quarters?

WATTERS:   Crowded quarters, but we didn't care.  This was in November.  So from August to November, around the first of November, we had prepared all that junk that had been hauled in which included the engine, the engine shop, the machine shop, B Company, C Company and A Company.  A Company was the machine shop.  B Company was the engine repair boiler repair and C Company was the car shop.

INTERVIEWER:   And that was you?

WATTERS:   That was me, I was in C Company.  Then we went through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean Sea and as soon as we came out to the Atlantic, we got into one of those rough ones.  Everybody was hollering, “Oh, I’m so sick”.  I said, “man, I gotta get out of here!”  So we went on deck and stayed up on deck.  Finally we were up there one day and one of the Navy personnel came by and said, “You all want to work?”

I said, “sure, what was there to do?”  He said that they needed some help in the storeroom.  I said, “Fine, I’ll go, where’s the storeroom?”  He said in the bottom.  Go down in the bottom, you don’t get all that rocking and rolling cause you’re on the low part.  I said, “Who do I report to?”  He said he would get me first in line for meals and all this stuff so I said okay.  So I reported to the storekeeper down there.  He said all the things were falling down and that we had to stack them and tie them.

I asked how he wanted them tied.  He showed us knots and everything that we used to tie the canned goods back into the rack.  I got to looking at them and there were peaches, pears, canned fruit.  I hadn’t had any of that in so long.  So I still have it, a little P38 can opener.  I think you know what I’m talking about.

INTERVIEWER:   Oh yes.

WATTERS:   So we’d catch the storekeeper when he was gone.  We’d take it and open a can of peaches, eat the peaches, drink the syrup.  There were always paper towels around or something that you could wipe the can out, put the lid back in very gently and put the can back on the shelf.  You always remember open the bottom, don’t open the top cause if you turned it over, see it would be upside down.  So you want it so that everything can be read.  Put it back on the shelf.  We ate like pigs down in that storeroom.

That’s some of the good points.  The bad thing that I can remember, I can’t remember.  They don’t come up for some reason.

INTERVIEWER:   Well you sure have had an interesting military career, really.

WATTERS:   I did, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the military.

INTERVIEWER:   When were you discharged?

WATTERS:   In January 1946.

INTERVIEWER:   What was your serial number?

INTERVIEWER:   We never forget, do we?

WATTERS:   No.  I had two of them, one was my enlisted one.  Then I had another one 04018693.

INTERVIEWER:   When you were commissioned?

WATTERS:   When I was commissioned.

INTERVIEWER:   When were you commissioned?

WATTERS:   April 1953.

INTERVIEWER:   How long have you been in the military service?  What was your length of service?

WATTERS:   About 22 years. 

INTERVIEWER:   Did it seem that long?

WATTERS:   No, went by like that.  I have a young grandson that’s in the Coast Guard and he has eight years in and he’s talking about getting out of it.  I said he shouldn’t even think about getting out.  The next 12 years will go by so fast, you won’t even know what’s going on.

INTERVIEWER:   How many grandchildren do you have?

WATTERS:   I have two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

INTERVIEWER:   Alright, I want you to look right in the camera.  I forgot to mention you’ll never be a day older than you are today.

WATTERS:   Thank you.

INTERVIEWER:   The camera will make sure that you’re always this age.  So tell your great-grandchildren and your grandchildren, does war ever cure anything?

WATTERS:   War never cures nothing.  It brings on more wars.  If you can settle it without fighting, by all means do so.  But if it comes to a fight, don’t back down.  Keep your guard up.  That’s the way I feel about it.

INTERVIEWER:   You’ve done a great job.  Thank you sir.

WATTERS:   You’re welcome.