The 325th Combat Engineers
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The 325th Combat Engineers
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My grandmother saved this clipping of her son getting drafted. I suspect from the wording and the expressions on all the faces that the newly instated pre-war draft was a hard sell. They were promoting the joys of service as hard as they could. The opening reads "The draft brought financial rewards to the two men who were among 181 Albany District selective service enrollees leaving for Camp Upton, L.I. A $5 a month rise in pay is only one of several advantages of military training seen by Harold Reed, 22, Ravena farmhand. A volunteer, Reed summed up his story thus: "I'd have to go eventually and it just happens the $22 a month is more pay than I'm getting. More important than the money, though, is the training I'll get." (10 April 1941, Albany, N.Y., Knickerbocker News) |
The last thing Gordon Morse wanted to see was the draft notice arrive. He was waiting for an engineering job interview to come through from an aircraft company, which he was sure would mean that he'd spend the war that had not yet been declared designing aircraft. But the day before the letter with the job interview arrived, the Selective Service got him first. He'd been assured by his doctor that his rotten eyesight would keep him out, but rather mysteriously he passed the eye exam. |
The face of disgust |
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| "I was making $75 to $100 a week building an airfield. I was so angry making $15 in the Army. The draft board voted 8 to 0 to send me on my appeal. My dad was killed in 1941. I was already a straw boss, working on an airfield. I was so peed off. I said something worse. I was supporting my mother and brothers, but I had just been in this town for two or three years so they were going to send me as soon as they could. It was funny to them. I asked them to let me get in and send some money before they got the next brother. But they drafted him the next month." (T.C. Moore, 2001) |
| "I weighed 145 pounds when I went in the Army. I had been working on the farm. Everybody thought the Army was hard, but it was easy on me." (Carl Blanton, "The Shelby. S.C. Star," August 15, 1985) |
| J.P Wallis had just bought a little farm in Georgia before going in and went back to it after the war. (J. P. Wallis, 2003 Florida reunion) |
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Morse stayed at Camp Upton just long enough to start getting stuck with needles, to do KP on Easter Sunday, and to get issued winter uniforms, before being shipped out to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where it was 90 degrees. (Gordon Morse immunization cards and a souvenir of Camp Upton) |
| Dad used to tell a story about doing KP at Camp Upton. A guy he'd gone to high school with, who lived way up in an isolated farm in the hills of the Helderbergs, had gotten drafted at the same time. Dad was peeling potatoes when along came this guy, who was also on KP, and he was in a sweat. He said, "Gordon, can you help me? I don't know what to do. The sergeant sent me to find an oven stretcher and I've been looking and looking but I can't find one anywhere." Dad winked at him and said, "If I were you, I'd just keep looking for that oven stretcher." |
Doing It the Army Way
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Gordon Morse is marked with the white box. They stood the men (the 28th Infantry) in order of height.There was one of these mass parades that Dad used to remember. I don't know if this is the occasion, but I bet it looked like this. My father would tell a story about how he and his buddies went out on the town the day before a big deal drill and parade for some VIP. One guy was a tall Texan who didn't drink. The next morning everyone but the Texan was in misery but they had to march and stand at parade rest with the hangovers and the hot hot South Carolina sun on their heads. The guys with the hangovers were gritting it out, when the next thing they knew the clean-living Texan keeled over. The ranks were thinning as men keeled over waiting on the VIP. But the guys with the hangovers all made it through. |
The first step was to separate the civilian draftee from a sense of his old life or of being an individual with individual rights or of any sense of control over his destiny. There were endless regulations and officers and mind-numbing routine interspersed with "battle innoculation." Everyone treated you with contempt. My father wrote constantly to my mother (then his girlfriend), chronicling his experience in the 28th Infantry.
Gordon Morse wrote back to his fiancee from Fort Jackson, 16 April 1941, seven days after getting drafted: "Had a lower berth last nite and laid by the open window watching the country going by and I was pretty blue as I kept getting farther away from you all the time. What a camp, there are miles of barracks, automobiles, trucks, tanks, and everything that goes with military life. There are around 40,000 men here now and the personnel is ever increasing." By 19 April, it was getting worse--"Another shot in the arm to-day and it is stiffening up--so had better write before it gets too bad.... Did I tell you all the boys are quarantined for two weeks? They are afraid of diseases so guards walk around all the time to keep everyone out and us in.... The boys from Upton are pretty sore--everyone was put in the 28th infantry regardless of previous work or military training....We have quite a start on drilling already and my face is like a beet. How the sweat runs down my face. 95 degrees. The sand blows all over the place. It is rough stuff to march in. We are going to be issued summer uniforms next week. Colonel lectured us this week on the glory of the regiment. L Companty is going to be issued guns this coming week--more cleaning and polishing." |
| The Army stuck him with lots of needles and tested lots of things and never told them what they were doing. There was some kind of substance they injected into Dad's arm that gave him a terrible rash. He had that rash for years after the war, but it finally wore off twelve or fifteen years later. He never did know what it was they'd given him. |
"I'd be like the soldier in the movie. They'd say face right and I'd go left. Fort Jackson, when I first went in the service. They didn't have rifles for all of us. We were doing drilling with wooden guns. Of course I never took to that drilling business too much. I don't think Captain Morse took to it too much either. When we were going through basic training at Fort Jackson, we were buildng a pontoon bridge or something out in the big lake in Jackson. And that darn colonel came up there to look at what us workers were doing, out there in the water, and he comes up there and he said, put this guy on KP for not shaving this morning. And I thought that was a pretty mean thing to do, a man out there wrestling with those pieces of pontoon. I wasn't too happy with that Colonel." (T. C. Moore, 2001) |
| "It was an accident that I ended up in the 100th division. When I went in I was smoking or chewing 15 to 20 cigars a day or more and we were marching in columns of three, running us around all day. I hadn't had a cigar and I thought at the end, we were off, so I lit up. 'That old fat boy, you on KP in the morning.' I was on KP from two or three in the morning to 9:30 at night, feeding that whole bum fort in Atlanta and washing pans. Got back to the barracks and they'd all gone. PFC said, 'you were supposed to go to Texas with the 36th Division.' They got the hell shot out of them so I was glad I didn't go." (T. C. Moore, 2001) |
And then it got more serious--
| "When the Normandy invasion happened , we were at Wilmington, practicing landings. I went to the latrine to shave and heard on the radio about the landing. I came out and said, "'boys, this is straight from the latrine." (Carl Blanton, Shelby S.C. Star, August 15, 1985) |
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