Q: You went from Omaha to Fort Leavenworth?

A: Well, yes. Colonel Pick said I had a choice. Did I want to stay in the district or did I want to go out with the troops? He said General Robbins who was construction deputy in the chief's office at the time had told Pick that I could stay there if Pick wanted me to stay there otherwise they had me on the list to go to a troop unit and I said to Pick let me go to a troop unit. So, I was transferred out in March of '43.

The chief's office was quite smart. They figured that I didn't know a damn thing about what had been going on in the war, military engineering aspects of the war and so they sent me down to Fort Leonard Wood for about two weeks to just observe training of engineer troops there and what they were being trained in like mines and booby traps was something that maybe I'd never seen about in the paper but I didn't have an idea what a mine or a booby trap looked like So it was a good idea and I spent about two weeks trying to learn what I could on my own without being assigned there of engineer troop training.

Then I went to Fort Leavenworth and joined the 70th infantry division cadre. The commanding general John E. Dahlquist had is staff there and we were taking what was called the New Division Course which had been established at Leavenworth for all divisions which were being activated to put their staff through. It was a good course, a good thing. among other things it let the staff start to get knowing each other.

Q: How long was that course?

A: I think it was four weeks. It was a pretty good -

Q: Was that the one designed by Army Ground Forces?

I'm sure it must have been yeah. I can't recall knowing that but it was just the sort of thing that Army Ground Forces would have been doing at that time and it was a new course established because of a need that had been discovered after they had activated a number of divisions.

Q. Did you see General McNair during this time?

A. No, I never saw him. I don't even recall who was the head of the commanding general's staff for Fort Leavenworth at the time. Our division of the staff was kept separate. We had all our classes separate, not with anyone else. So, we were not a part of the regular school which was operating here. It was just something special set up which they ran us through.

After leaving there, we all moved out to Camp Adair, Oregon near Corvallis, Oregon and a division was activated. My job was division engineer and of course it included command of the engineer battalion which was the 270th engineer combat battalion.

There we received our cadre, came from Medford, Oregon.- I think it was the 76th division. I'm not sure of that but the process in those days was a division which had been in existence for awhile would pick a cadre and when a new division came along why that cadre would go over and take over the new division's recruits as they were brought in. So, we formed, had the new men come in, took them through individual training and then unit training and then combined training and the 70th division was one of the last two divisions to be activated.

The 63rd I think was activated at the same time back in Mississippi or back in that part of the country anyway and so this was getting along in the war, '43. So, we were training up until '44 when we finished our combined arms training and the division never did get called overseas while I was there.

We'd finished the training and had actually started to lose people by having trained individuals taken from us and sent as replacements overseas. In which case we would have to receive new draftees and train them and the result was that the division or at least the battalion, well the division, would ,have been the same in the division, was sort of in a mess. We had some men that had already been trained and other men that hadn't been trained and we had to train them. Of course, the morale was affected by seeing people taken out and sent overseas without the unit itself being kept together in it which had been trained together and sent overseas as a battalion and as a division.

I had, I guess it was June of '44, been ordered out and ordered to Camp Gruber, Oklahoma near Muskogee to activate the 1157th engineer combat group which again I guess must have been one of the last, if not the last, combat groups to be activated. Is there anything more about the 70th division or Camp Adair that you want me to --?

Q: Let me just ask, what were the conditions at Camp Adair?

A: The physical conditions? Oh, it was a good camp. It was a two division camp. Of course, all the construction was frame construction but completely adequate.

The training area itself was barely big enough for a regimental combat size field training. It was a pretty big camp. I think some 60,000 acres. But you couldn't maneuver one division against another. It wasn't big enough for that purpose. For that purpose, divisions would have to be moved elsewhere over to the Bend, Oregon training area where they could have division maneuvers but the physical facilities were good there. The Willamette River was there which allowed us and the engineers to have all the training we needed and wanted on floating bridge equipment.

The camp was a little unusual in that there was a tremendous amount of poison oak existing there. At one time, the hospital was just full of soldiers suffering with poison oak in it. Some of them reacted real badly of course, would have to be to be put in the hospital. I think it was the engineer district that got a contract to go through the worst of the poison oak area and cleared it all out so that the troops could maneuver through it without being afflicted with this problem and it was real bad.

It rained a lot there. I always thought that the two 70th engineers was probably the best combat battalion in the Army when it came to getting out of the mud because we were sure in the mud and out of it enough. Any time we went in the field it seems like we got stuck but we got pretty good at it...