INTERVIEW OF MR. FRANCIS (FRANK) MARKS
Transcript Number 007

INTRODUCTION:

I'm Thor Roneghan and this is Mr. Frank Marks. We're both with World War II Remembered in Wilmington, North Carolina.

INTERVIEWER: Frank, how did you get in the Army?

MARKS: Well, I got in the Army when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent me one of those infamous letters that began, "Greetings! We welcome you to be drafted and in thirty days, you'll report to Plattsmouth Nebraska. You'll meet a troop train and from there, we'll take you to an Army camp."

INTERVIEWER: When was that?

MARKS: That was about June 15th, 1944.

INTERVIEWER: What happened after you got on the train?

MARKS: Well, let's say what happened before I got on the train.

INTERVIEWER: Ok.

MARKS: My uncle, Fredlin Sand, transported me up to Plattsmouth, Nebraska, about 20 miles away where the troop train picked us up. He related to me for the first time in my life, the story of the birds and the bees. If I hadn't seen things about the birds and the bees and observed things on the farm the past 3 2 years, I would not have known too much about the facts of life. His words were these, "Stay away from women that hang around Army camps." So, I got on the troop train and the next morning, I woke up almost straight south of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. From there, I went to Salinas and Manhattan, Kansas, at Fort Reilly, Kansas, where I was inducted in the Army as a Private in the cavalry. We took training on horseback. It was the same as the infantry, except you had to take care of the horse first, because he was going to be your mode of transportation. So, you had to curry him, feed him, saddle-soap all of the tack and gear, and everything else. 

INTERVIEWER: That was where your basic training started?

MARKS: Yes, that's where my basic training started. It was seventeen weeks basic training. About six weeks into the basic training, I had a horse rear up and stomp down hard with his front feet on my toe, broke it, and smashed it flat. So, I was put in the infirmary for about five weeks and I started basic training over again.

INTERVIEWER: Then, where did you go from there and when?

MARKS: Well, one of the interesting things about basic training was as I indicated, the same as the horse cavalry. We had a bivouac that we had to go on in the final weeks of basic training and that was a twenty-mile ride. It happened to be along the Republican River down in Kansas and we rode down in an ice storm in December. About eighteen miles out on the ride, they brought Mickey Rooney, Dan Dailey, and Don Cherry the singer along. They put them out to walk the last mile and a half to two miles with us. So, that was my first meeting of Mickey Rooney. He was in special services to entertain the troops and so was Don Cherry. Dan Dailey was a spit and polish type of an officer. He, of course, had his officer riding saddle and he was one heck of a good information officer for the troops.

The bivouac lasted twelve days and they hauled 40% of the troops back with frostbite. Having undergone that type of training, it prepared you for going overseas.

INTERVIEWER: Right. Did you go overseas?

MARKS: Yes. After graduating from the seventeen weeks basic training, I got to go home back to Nebraska for a week. Then I got on a train and went to Fort Ord, California. From there, I shipped out to New Guinea and that was quite a journey. If you haven't ever experienced sea sickness before, I'll tell you that first twenty four hours out of Fort Ord was the longest day I'd ever spent in my life. You carry around your steel helmet and you try to stay out of the bunk to keep from heaving up. You want to eat, but you don't want to eat. You try to run to the nearest railing so you can heave up overboard. It seems like it's an eternity. We ended up in New Guinea and we arrived there the day before or the day after President Roosevelt died. Then, we picked up a convoy from New Guinea of several ships and went up to the Philippines. We arrived in the Island of Luzon and then, we were ultimately transported to the island of Leyte, where we did reconnaissance work in the jungles of the Philippines. When we arrived in Leyte, I'll never forget the words of the General who sat us on the side of this hill. He made a provocative statement that I'll never forget and it was this, "Gun powder maketh all men virtually alike, so don't worry whether you're small, you make a bigger target if you are a big person." I was small and I might have weighed 130 pounds.
So, I had learned how to use the Garrett rifle of mine and anything within 500 yards was gone when I bore down on it. We went off into the jungles of Leyte and I was assigned to the headquarters troop of the 1st Cavalry Division, 7th Regiment. We did mop up action in the jungles of the Philippines and we were then taken out to the beach and we were given amphibious training to invade. We would be in the foxholes at night half full of water and I alternated taking over watch with two other buddies. You'd be on two hours and then off four.
The Japanese were desperately hungry and they had no food at all that was on the island. They had some ammunition and hand grenades and they would attack our camps at nighttime searching for food. They were existing on bugs. They had a little box and when you shot them, you'd open the box and it would be full of bugs.

Then, of course, the foxholes were full of sand and you had sand crabs eating on you all night long. Then, we were taking amphibious training storming the beach. Luckily, it was in July that they dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The second one followed up in August on Nagasaki. If it hadn't been for those atomic bombs, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd have gotten wiped out in the first wave because the 1st Cavalry Division was always the first to go in as an infantry group to invade an island. I think it's been documented, that they figured we would have lost five-hundred-thousand allied lives and the Japanese would have lost one million lives if we had had to invade the Japanese islands.
We were then put on troop ships and went through typhoons where it was far worse than ever shipping out of Fort Ord. Those ships laid over 35' off the horizontal from one side to the other, but I didn't get sea sick again. Sea sickness is a big psychological thing and if you forget it, you're better off. So, we arrived in Tokyo harbor when they signed the pace treaty on the battleship Missouri. I had originally thought it was Emperor Hirohito that signed it, but I read in the paper recently that it was one of the Premiers of Japan that signed the peace treaty with McArthur. We went into Yokohama that very day and then the next day we were moved 20 miles up into Tokyo where we set up camps. In about a week, we took over a Japanese marine school, which looked a lot like a regular high school building with three floors. I was there nine months in the occupation forces of Japan.
It's a funny and ironic situation there. When I was orphaned at sixteen and moved to the farm in Nebraska, I came along in time to drive a tractor 15 hours a day, but my uncle would never let me drive the Model A Ford. He didn't want me to go in town on Friday nights with the other country boys chasing girls. So, here I was and didn't know how to drive a jeep. A job came up as a jeep driver for a Catholic Chaplain, and I told one of my buddies that I'd like to get that job and he said, "Well, I'll tell ya what, let's just check a jeep out of the motor pool." So, we went out for two hours and we came back, and I applied for the job and got it. It was kind of a weird feeling in Tokyo. Everything was bombed flat except the Daichi building where McArthur had his headquarters. All of Tokyo was burned out and the only thing you ever saw where the tile bathrooms and things that withstood the firebombs. When Emperor Hirohito said that's it, we never had one incident of the Japanese trying to get even with American soldiers.
The city of Tokyo was an interesting thing because it was built like a wheel. You had the hub where the city originally originated, and then the spokes would be the streets going out in all directions. If you went in the right direction, you either went way out of town or you got to the heart of the town. It was built in a circular fashion and grew way out. We had a very interesting time in Tokyo. I could buy a carton of cigarettes for five cents a pack or fifty cents a carton and I could sell them for twenty dollars. So, I saved all my money and sold all my beer and cigarettes. I guess that's why I'm pretty healthy today at 73 years old. I'm a milk-aholic right now. I go through a gallon of milk about every day and a half. My cholesterol is 175 , so the doctor says just keep eating all the cottage cheese, cheese, and drinking all the milk that you want.

INTERVIEWER: When did you come back to the states?


MARKS: After nine months in Tokyo in the occupation forces, I had garnered enough points to go home and be repatriated. I was discharged at Camp Hill out of Salt Lake City. I then came back to Lincoln, Nebraska and the farm. That September, I enrolled in the University of Nebraska in mechanical engineering and spent four years at the University and graduated in mechanical engineering in 1950.

INTERVIEWER: Have you done anything with the military since you got out? The Reserves?

MARKS: No, I have done nothing since I got out of the service.

INTERVIEWER: What was the most significant thing, the one thing that stands out in your mind about your service?

MARKS: The thing I think I always tell young boys thinking about going into the service is that the service will either make you or break you. I think for a lot of young kids, especially today, the service is a good opportunity for them to find out what life is all about. You have to be able to take orders and work together as a group. I think that's the big thing that's missing today. There's too many kids today that go home and make mom and dad account to them and the family values are missing. Mom and dad should say, "Account to me tonight for what you did in school today." The tables are kind to turning in the other direction.

INTERVIEWER: What is your overall opinion or view of World War II as a whole?

MARKS: Well, I'll tell you, I'm thankful for the atomic bombs that were dropped. I think it saved an awful lot of lives, both allied and Japanese. I think the Japanese sometimes have put too much emphasis on the Enola Gay situation where the B-29 dropped the atomic bombs. They've long forgotten what they did at Pearl Harbor. I fought for a just cause. 
I feel kind of sick about the Vietnam situation and felt that that was a situation where a lot of American politicians were making money off of ammunition production and arms testing. The government was testing arms over there continuously. I don't really care about that aspect of things of the Vietnam war. 

INTERVIEWER: Let's take a break if we can. Now, after you got out of the service, you went to engineering school. Did you wind up riding horses or what did you do?

MARKS: No, I didn't end up riding horses. It's a funny thing having come off the farm. We had work horses, but we didn't have riding horses. I had always wanted to be an engineer from the time I can remember as a kid. My mother's brother was a mechanical engineer and had graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1912. I went to the University of Nebraska in the fall of 1946 and pursued mechanical engineering. I worked part time for the U.S. Geological Survey doing stream gauging measurements and office checking of engineer's fieldwork.

After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1950, I moved from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Denver, Colorado, and went to work for Gates River Company for seven years. I probably did more basic engineering for Gates River Company, a privately owned corporation, that I ever did in the next thirty six years in the government. It's kind of interesting, but Gates River company wouldn't spend a dime unless I could prove there was a dollar that was going to come out of it in the end. We used to call it Gates Robber Company because every year before vacation, I'd ask for my $25.00 a month raise, or spend my vacation time vacationing or looking for a job.
I left Gates River Company when Martin Marietta came from Baltimore, Maryland, to build the Titan Intercontinental missiles in Denver in the foothills. I will never ever regret that because it certainly improved my salary situation because ultimately I had six children, three boys and three girls, and needed something more than Gates Robber Company's wages. At Martin Marietta, I worked on the Titan 1 and wrote a lot of the engineering procedures for testing and the original battleship test tied to the test stand. Ultimately, later on, I designed test stands for the California bases and for the Cape Canaveral where the exhaust products go out the launch ducts. Then, I worked on the Viking Program where we designed and tested geological hardware to dig soil samples on Mars and make comparative analysis with onboard soil samples on Mars and of elements from earth. I also worked on the space shuttle program. I retired early at age 58 in Los Angeles, California. I went to work with Hughes Aircraft and worked on FA18 fighter planes in designing and building radar. Then, I worked on the flying wing bomber and the stealth bomber.
Basically, that was my career after the service. I think again, after having lived on the farm and having been in the service, that I learned responsibility. I think that's the big thing. My military service and ultimately my career in engineering, was very fruitful. Today, I'm back to the soil. I could care less about technology and in that respect, I think there's a lot of money that's going up in space to do things that could be used here on earth to solve simple problems that I think are sociological. We can't even feed the people in the poor parts of this country and solve the problems that are purely psychological problems. Yet, we're spending a lot of money going to deep space, that I think could be better spent through out the world helping nations and helping our own people here in this country. I think that's about all I have to say.

INTERVIEWER: Ok.

MARKS: Thank you, Thor.