LIVING HISTORY:
WORLD WAR II 

Garn was still in high school when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Although he knew that the United States would eventually enter the war, he was shocked that it came this way. As he learned details of the attack he began to feel bitter about the affair. Like most Americans, Garn supported U.S. entry into the war. When Garn came home after the quarter he contacted the Selective Service to see when his number to be drafted would come up. They said he probably wouldn't be able to get another quarter of school in so he came home from Cedar City, Utah. In March he was called to report to Fort Douglas. He made the comment that if you could see lightning, hear thunder and felt warm they took you into the service. He was inducted and told to go back home and report back to Fort Douglas on May 1st. When he got up there he had to take some tests. One of the questions asked where he wanted to serve. He felt like he would like to be an airplane mechanic but didn’t qualify. When they called the names to ship out, they said, "Report out in front of the building barracks with all your belongings, we’ll load you in trucks and take you to the base where you are going." Garn thought, "Oh boy I’ll get to make Kearns where they have an air force." But he was shipped down to Camp Williams, Utah, located at the point of the mountain by Lehi, across from the Jordan River.

When he got to Camp Williams the 752nd MP battalion was there and he found he was going to be a Military Policeman. He did enjoy the MP’s and it wasn’t too bad. He was lucky enough to have quite a few people from Utah there. There were some from down home, Blaine Felstead and Max Allred from Centerfield and Ron Grange (Harold) from Mt. Pleasant. Kennard Chappell from Wayne County was there (he and Garn are still friends and see each other quite a bit.) Camp Williams was close enough, if you were a good soldier and received a Class A pass, you could hitchhike home over the weekend. Garn thought to himself, "Brother Bastian you better shape up." So he shined his shoes, and combed his hair, and made sure his bed was sharp, rifle was clean, and his clothes were hung in a line right, and every thing was spic-and-span. When they had their fallout for drill and inspections he always passed with an A+. Pretty soon he could get a weekend pass to go to town or whatever. If you had an overnight pass before that, and then had the weekend pass follow it, you could walk the flume across the river and stop the banburger (bus) as it came along. Then ride to the end of the line down just about to Payson, hitchhike and you’d be home before dark. He would spend Friday night, Saturday, and then Sunday his dad and mother would take him back up. He said he got home enough times it didn’t seem like he was in the service. He never once had to pull KP or Latrine orderly all the time he was in basic training.

They had quite stiff training, a lot of combat training, and then a lot of military police training. This was one-on-one about how to take care of problems when they were out on town duty. After boot camp was over they shipped the MPs to Tulle Lake California. It was just underneath the Oregon state line, close to Klamath Falls. They had built a relocation camp to intern more Japanese Americans, when he first got there wasn't a camp for them built. They lived in squad tents. The tents had wood floors and measured 16x16. Garn was a guard at the Japanese relocation camp that held 50,000 people. The conditions of the camp were good but as the Japanese were shipped in they had to go through an inspection line with the stuff they were bringing. One of Garn’s duties was to help with the inspection. They had to go through their (Japanese) baggage looking for any weapons or contraband of any kind. There was one suitcase he was going through and there was a fancy looking vase affair in it. He kind of shook it to see if it made a noise and the owner got awful excited. He later found out if was one of their dead ancestors ashes they were bringing with them. They were nice people and he felt sorry for them to have all there stuff taken away from them and then have to live in that confinement area.

After they got the Japanese in the camp, their duty as the Military Police battalion was to pull guard on them. The camp had 14 towers, and the MPs would be up in the tower, with a searchlight to keep track of them. They went through the winter pulling 24(hours) on and then 24(hours) off. When you were on guard you pulled four-hour shifts for that 24 hours, four on, four off, four on, it was quite monotonous. During off-hours, Garn worked for Morrison-Knudsen Construction building the camp. Although they had just built a new camp and had brand new barracks, Garn and the others didn't care for being in control over those people, as far as they knew had done nothing to harm the United States. Some of them had probably been in the country longer than he had (older). The morning of May 15^th when they fell out for reveille, the first sergeant called them to attention and said, "I want to read you a new order that has come down. Anybody that wants to volunteer for the infantry be in front of the orderly room right after breakfast." Garn went to breakfast, when he came back better than 2/3 of the company was lined up in front of the orderly room door. He volunteered for the infantry, and within less than a week they were shipped out to Fort Custer, Michigan. When they got there they would get orders as to where they would go. He was assigned to the 70th division, which was in Fort Bend, Oregon, doing training. The army shipped them to Custer and then the ones, about 14, that were going to be in the 70th were loaded on a train and shipped clear back to the West Coast. When they reported to the camp, they were told that the 70th had been shipped to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, so the put them on another train and back across the country they went to Ft. Leonard Wood. There they were finally assigned to their outfit. It was 70^th Infantry division, Trailblazer division. In a division there are three regimens. The regiments were 274, 275, 276. Garn was in the H Company (276), which was the heavy weapons company. He started his training for overseas in the machine gun section.

That morning when they fell out for reveille, the first sergeant was making the roll call and while Garn was standing there he looked over at this fellow. He thought he knew him, it had been along time since he had seen him, but he knew him. The fellow was older than Garn was. As they called their names Garn was watching, low and behold, he was an Anderson, and he knew he knew him. When they called Garn’s name and he answered and they went on through with roll call. When they dismissed them over he come. He was a very good friend of Garn’s Uncle Ernest when he was a boy. Garn had helped Uncle Ernest put up hay over on the Anderson Farm. This Anderson fellow was part of the cadre/staff that was doing the training. As Garn went through his training, he would always come around and see how he (Garn) was doing.

On December 1st they received orders to go to Germany. They loaded on the SS America, a luxury liner that had been commissioned the USS West Point, to go to Germany. Garn’s company was assigned guard duty for the trip across and this liner was fast enough that they went without an escort. They just changed directions every little bit so the submarines couldn’t get in line on it. The rest of the companies had to sleep down in the holds, and the cargo bays, but where they were on guard duty they got to sleep in staterooms. They had their own bunk, own showers, and there were six to a stateroom. He could go down on the main deck, where the breeze could blow in your face more or less like a tourist. He didn’t get seasick but a lot of poor boys did. One day they had an air raid drill. After that stale air down there, when the guys started coming up out of the hold and up the steps they were seasick. Garn said up where he was it got so slick you could hardly stand around.

They went over without any trouble, went up through the Mediterranean Sea. Porpoises were swimming along side of the boat and kept cutting across in front of the boat. Garn and some others got down in the very front of the bow just above the water line and screwed open one of the doors. The porpoises were close enough you could just about reach out and touch one of them. The Mediterranean was smooth and beautiful with not a ripple on it. Bed Check Charlie, an enemy fighter pilot, came around and some of them were scared and didn’t have any place to go. One guy ran and jumped in the split latrine. Charlie didn’t spray the area or anything; he was just around to harass the soldiers.

Garn’s company landed at Marseilles, France, on December 6, 1944. They were taken to a staging relocation area, and that's where they were assigned where to go. After four days they were taken as close to the front lines as possible in eight train cattle cars. There were about 40 men, their luggage, side arms, rifles and stuff (not heavy weapons) and duffel bags in a car. They sat with their backs to the wall and their feet out in the center. Because it was wintertime, the body heat and moisture from that many men breathing, the frost was a couple of inches thick on the bolts. When your feet got aching so badly from being on bottom, you would pull them out and lay them on top of the pile, pretty soon they would work to the bottom again. When the troops got up close to the Maginot line, they were unloaded and walked to their position in the fringes of the forest where the Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes campaign) was taking place. They reached the front lines at Alsace-Lorraine on Christmas Day. Because of the cold and snow sound carried well and Garn could hear one of the Germans singing a Christmas carol during the night. One Jewish man ran out of German ranks and the squad sergeant understood him to be saying they were there because of their duty to protect the Fatherland.

On December 29, 1944, Garn’s birthday, he was in Germany and had just arrived where their company kitchen was expecting to have Christmas dinner and all the trimmings. However, Sgt. Skidmore determined that the turkey and trimmings had been kept too long and they threw it out, handed out K-rations and moved them up to the front lines at that time. They were within a thousand yards of the Rhine River. All were green horn troops without a seasoned veteran among them. It was dark and they were told to scatter out on a MLR and dig their positions in and every third fox hole would stand guard for two hours and then rotate so that they had some sentries out all the time.

He was a first machine gunner, so he was always on the move - often in knee deep snow. Under regular circumstances he carried the barrel, the second gunner carried the tripod, and three other men carried four boxes of ammunition each; every box contained five hundred rounds. [At the beginning of the war they were using the heavier, water-cooled thirty caliber guns. During one skirmish two of the gunners were killed or wounded; when they moved on Garn carried the barrel and the tripod, the other two carried as much ammunition as they could. Toward the end of the war they received air-cooled guns, because the new guns were lighter, the first gunner carried the barrel and the tripod, and the other four men carried ammunition.]

Garn was sure the Germans knew that they had moved up because part way through the night they started dropping mortar shells on them. They were in a forest that had tall trees and that way the Germans could get tree bursts and the shrapnel would rain down on them. In the process of the mortar barrage one of ammunitions bearers was wounded. They tried to console him and put a bandage on his leg where the shrapnel had entered his leg. None including the medic thought it was that severe, but he died that night. They said it was from shock, his baptism to the front lines. It was the starting of 35 days up in the mountain snow up to their knees. It was in part of the lower end of the Bulge. He didn’t see all of the fighting of the Bulge but they were down there to take seven different hills to chase the German’s back or to capture them. So they would hike from one hill to the next during the daytime. He figures the Germans were just as scared as they were. One day they were strung out along a ridge and when they stopped Garn set the machine gun up and could see down a draw. He could see some white bobbin’ along and it was a German patrol that was out finding out where the enemy was. They had been given orders not to fire if they saw the enemy strung out like, unless they got an okay from the commissioned officer. He wouldn’t give it, so Garn just cranked the bullet out of the gun and the enemy went down the draw and dropped in the trees and were gone. There were about seven or eight and were on snowshoes and had white sheets over them and were hard to distinguish, but you could see them moving against the backdrop of the trees.

They went on for the rest of the day and camped that night on a hilltop. They dug in; the hills were easy digging. They were dug down so that when you stood up they were just between your waist and your armpits. They would get some pine boughs and put in the bottom and get three or four to put over the top of them. When they weren’t on duty two of them in there would make it toasty warm. That is when you became grateful for your companions. That time of night they were in support of a rifle company. They had sent two heavy weapon machine guns and mortars, the rifle company dug around so they are supporting the heavy weapons outfit. Just a little bit before dark somebody started hollering "Halt." The German soldier didn’t halt and so they opened fire and got him. Garn said the German was there for a purpose to find out where they had dug in for the night and just shortly after they got a big mortar barrage. They went in as a machine section and mortar section and a rifle platoon. When they went out in the morning there weren’t many that went out. They’d had to be packed out during the night.

They had lots of fun among them. No matter how serious it was you could always find something to laugh and be happy about and kid. When they dug in for where they were going to be staying they really but up some fortifications. Timber on top and a back door so they could get out in case they were attacked from the front. As they were building they said if they all spent this much time on it at home they could build them a house. They cut a lot of the trees down, put logs up and put dirt around them. Garn says they were there for a cause and they were going to do it. They went that way for 35 days, eating K-rations, washing your socks in your helmet, and cooking your soup in your helmet. They survived out there. It was surprising when they got to go in for their first R & R, you went through and they gave you clean clothes, they had never had a bath for 35 days. They did wash their feet and socks and kept them clean and dry. ("Take a pair of extra socks with and put them around your waist and they’ll dry out and when the others get wet just change your socks and it’ll keep your feet sound, to keep from getting trench foot.") He went through and told them what size clothes he thought he’d wear. When he put them on they hung on him like a scarecrow. He had to go back three times in order to get clothes that would fit. He said he’d never been so happy in his life, but it didn’t last very long. They had a good outfit. In February they were stationed in Glavivian, France and had their machine gun out in an apple orchard about 3/4 of a mile from town. They would take turns staying there at night and then every other night they got to sleep in a house they had commandeered. Half of the squad would be out there holding the line of resistance. They probably stayed there about 6 days and got the order to jump off on an attack about 11 at night. So they took up over the hill and ran into barb wire entanglement, (that’s where they take barb wire and run it in loops and its about 3 feet high and it’s hard to get over or through). They were pinned down and they laid there in the water and the mud while they got the engineers up and cut through the entanglement. As they got through and started up they were right on top of the enemies trenches. They hadn’t had any resistance at that time but as they stepped over the trenches, Garn was sure there was a German down there and the Lieutenant said, "Everybody in the trenches." Garn told him, more or less, to go to &*@&. He wasn’t getting down in the trenches, and said, "There are Germans down in there." They went on and took the top of the hill. The next morning, as it became daylight they spread out and they captured some prisoners. They were camped up on top of that hill just like sitting ducks. Garn had been over to the lieutenant’s foxhole and was just going over to his foxhole when a mortar barrage came in, that is when he received his wound. The shrapnel is still in his collar bone area. He said it didn’t bleed badly and it didn’t hurt. Garn was still conscious and began inspecting his wound. He found that he had two holes in his field coat, two holes in his fatigues, and two holes in his shirt; but he only had one hole in his undershirt. He walked back to the first aid station at the nearest village where he was treated and released the next morning. He later received a Purple Heart. The good thing about it is that it gave him ten more points so he would get home a little earlier. They dropped off the hill that night down into Forbach, France and that night they had a line of resistance up on the outskirts. They were stationed in an old barn there looking out between the cracks; they hadn’t got to the point to find out what they were looking out until just about dark. Garn was sitting there with a gun stuck out of the barn. The moon came up and he could see heads out there moving. People moving. He called the lieutenant of the rifle company and said we have people out in front of us. So he sent a company out and when they came back they said all it was, was a bunch of cabbage heads that hadn’t been picked. Made him feel kind of silly, but he could have sworn they were changing positions. They all kidded Garn about that.

Heavy weapons always had jeeps so they could ride and the others had to walk. Once they were all set up in combat, they moved up along the Rhine River to Kaub on the Rhine. That’s where they were when the war ended. Where they had jeeps they were assigned to go out and patrol all the roads and surrounding mountains and locate equipment that had been abandoned so it could be picked up and confiscated and moved so they (the enemy) couldn’t get a hold of it. Garn said that that wasn’t a bad assignment. They came to a stream that had fish in it, so Garn wrote home and told them to send some fishing line and hooks, but before the fishing line and hooks got there they had gotten them all with their rifles and there weren’t any fish left. Their outfit was assigned to leave there and come home to the U.S on the way to Japan. After seven months on the front lines he was taken to a jumping off point for the South Pacific. It took quite a while to get the paper work done, by the time they got on the train and it was moving that route the war had ended in Japan. They were just outside of Paris, France at Maisons Le Fed, an armed forces reinforcement command; they stopped them there and reassigned them. Some they moved to other outfits, but he got to stay there. They stayed in a hotel that had been commandeered. The owner and her maid did the cleaning and laundry (in Ann’s account it says the men did their own laundry and ironing—not sure which is correct). The owner once killed an eel with an ice pick for dinner. There were three platoons with fourteen jeeps per company. Every squad had a jeep to locate and pick-up war equipment, such as abandoned vehicles and ammunition dumps. Garn was in Europe for a year after the war ended. They were established with a pretty good outfit, they could get passes and if they had somebody to take charge they could take outfits into Paris and go to the big gymnasiums and play ball. You wouldn’t have thought it was a regular army.

After working in the heavy equipment company he spent five months in the ground reinforcement command as manager of the billeting office where he made the arrangements for visiting officers. They’d go to Garn’s office and he would assign them places to stay for the night or the period of time that they’d be there. He saw people from home; Wayland Sorenson came through one day. Garn was surprised to see him. Wayland was driving as a chauffeur for some high brass. He came through and they got to see each other quite often. Then there was another fellow from Sigurd with a headquarters outfit and they were moving from there to Brussels and he stopped to ask the way. Garn told him he didn’t know the way to Brussels and said, "Iral? You don’t know me do ya’?" The guy told Garn he just wanted to know the way to Brussels. Garn said, "Well Iral? Don’t you know me?" And he said, "No, I don’t believe I do." The fellow was Iral Colby that Garn had grown up with in Sigurd. He was moving equipment to Brussels. They were close to a race track, in fact next to that little village was a stable that held about 90 race horses, and they went to the races nearly every afternoon. It was a beautiful racetrack and Garn made horse lovers out of all his good friends. They didn’t know whether they wanted to go to the races or not. Out in the middle of the streets there was a wide lawn and trees with streets on both sides. There was grass there and that’s where they played ball. They would be out there and the horses would go down to the track in the morning to train and go back, and after he talked them in to going to the races they went quite often. At the races they started them with a car that had a big wide gate across. As they got to the starting line the gates would fold up and the car would leave. They ran steeplechase races, it wasn’t an oval, and it was on turf. They had big crowds. It helped make stuff more bearable. One time they came home to their apartment and saw some kids leaving. The door was open, they walked in and Garn said they had been cleaned out. So out they went and chased them down the street and finally caught them and got their stuff back. Garn’s dress shoes (which he wasn’t supposed to have) were shined so well they could see the moonlight reflecting off them as the kids ran away. They were some of the kids that they had been befriending. That was the sad part of the wars, the suffering of the small children. They found their stuff, they had dumped their sack out and Garn could see his shoes shining and claimed them.

Garn was also able to tour parts of Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Germany while he was on a seven-day furlough. Breakfast while on furlough consisted of a sweet roll and hot chocolate or coffee. At one time he went from eighteen inches of snow in Strasbourg, France, down through a tunnel in the mountain, and came out in his shirt sleeves in Switzerland. The scenery was beautiful, and he even got to swim in the Rhine River, where fishing with hand grenades was profitable. There were a lot of small towns along the river with cobblestone roads. The hills were terraced for vineyards and farmers packed hay on their backs after cutting down the grass along the forest with a scythe. Another interesting feature was the cattle barns being adjoined to the house. Although the civilians were friendly, they did not show a lot of emotion.

Garn left Europe in mid-March of 1946. About February they got word that they were leaving to go home. They moved them up into Brussels and they found out there was a place that they could go get fresh meat, watercress salad, and french fries. So instead of eating army food they’d go into these cafes for supper. It turned out the fresh meat was horsemeat, but it was still good. They had a pretty good time there for the 10 days they were there before they got on a "Victory" ship to head home. The water was very rough coming home. They had Garn right next to the kitchen. When the ship would rise up on the nose of it the pans would slide to one end of the galley and when the ship would go down in the trench of the water then the pans would slide to the other end. It made it very hard to sleep. They made it home without any problems, other than Garn getting seasick (something he never experienced going over) just crossing the English Channel. They weren’t crowded going home and it was a good trip. He arrived in New York on the fifteenth of March and went into Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. From there he got his shipping orders to head back to Ft. Douglas. After examinations he was released from the Army on March 23, 1946. Garn joined the reserves then returned to Vermillion, Utah. The economy had improved as a result of the war, and life slowly returned to normal. Two days after his return, he took Shirley Cowley (a girl he had known prior to the war) out on a date; they were married September 26, 1946

Despite the sacrifices he and others made to win the war, Garn does not blame the German people. He believed that the leaders and SS troopers were the ones who should be punished. Fortunately he has been able to keep in touch with some of the people he served with including one of his lieutenants and a full-blood Cherokee platoon sergeant.

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