So you essentially went AWOL.

Yeah, the whole company.  The company commander didn’t mind because he knew what was going on.  He didn’t say anything anyways.  We went to, we found a pub and all the restaurants over there are pubs.  So we get to this restaurant and were sitting at this round table, an 8 man table and we asked the girl what she had and all she had was fish and chips, which was a standard diet over there for those people.  And I said, “Well I’d like to have an order of fish and chips,” and we went around the table and said, “just double my order,” because we hadn’t anything to eat for a couple of days.  And I said, before she got done, I said, “I’ll just take 3 of them, all on one plate.”  And when it came back, David, it was so much that I couldn’t, like this.

Big as a basket.

No way I could ever eat it.  And it cost me a shilling and a sixpence.  But anyway we said, while we’re in town we might find out where all the action is going on.  So we found a place called the Orange Hall, and all towns in Northern Ireland have Orange Halls, just kind of an assembly area.  And we get there and there’s a dance going on…Around a week, I guess, and they decided they’re going to ship us, they got the transportation I guess, they decided to ship us to Kilmer Camp, which was where Wake was at, right by the Northern Coast.  And they shipped us in these Irish trains which were almost like miniatures.  They were very small, you know.

Small coaches?

Small coaches, small engines.  But you just fit the countryside, it looked like a toy running down the highway, down the tracks.  So we finally joined the 508, spent the next, I guess 6 weeks there. 

Now was the 508 just forming up at this point?

Oh no, the 508 was organized October 2^nd, 1942, so they went through jump school, they were in the landing force a long time.  They went through jump school before I did.  They finished and went on to McCall, Camp McCall and they went on maneuvers and we came in right in behind them, then they broke up the 541.  Then the 541 we joined the 508.

They haven’t been in North Africa, or Sicily.

No, no.  508 was attached to the 82^nd.  The 504, the 502 and the, 504, 505, and the 325 glider outfit joined the 82^nd in England.  But the 82^nd had went through Sicily, Anzio and so on.  But when they came to England they finally joined them.  Or were attached to the unit, we were kind of a bastard unit.  We were one of the best of them. 

You were on the train.

Yeah we’re on the train, to Camp Cromer which is near, north of Corene.  And it’s set right on the coast, it was an old estate that belonged to some Irish lord of some kind.  We had a base camp there, the winds were cold, you know the winter times, boy was it cold.  We trained there for several weeks, we left there and got into, we left there March 1^st of 1943 and got on that George Washington to cross the channel, landed at Glasgow, went from Glasgow by train down to Nottingham, England, and set up a base camp at a place called Wollaton Park.  That’s W-o-l-l-a-t-o-n, ok.  This was an old estate too, it was owned by a lord 300 years before that.  Its like a mile square around and we’re right in the middle of this camp.  And we spent, we trained from then until D-Day there, before the D-Day jump.

You talked about jump training you had at Benning, what was jump training like, what type of things did you have to go through to be qualified as a paratrooper?

Well, we only took a trip to physical.  In fact, as I understand it, and I wasn’t there at the original time, but when they first originated the 508, they went through 4,500 men to get to around 2,000 as acceptable people you understand.  Not much of it had to do with how smart you were, but how good a physical shape you were in.  Check your eyesight and your heartbeat and whatever, before they finally agreed that they had the right amount of people.  Then they, basically most of the training, almost all the training at that point was physical training.  You get up in the morning, to give you an example, we had a camp, there was a bridge 2 and a half miles down the line out of Camp McCall, we fall out for roll call in the morning, the captain would give roll and we’d have the roll call called.  Then he would say, he would run through the roll call and he would give, “Left, right, left face, double time, march!”  And we would double time all the way down to the bridge, all the way back.  By this time we had a lot of training, we’d been in really physical training.  And we could back and we would double time right into the mess hall.  And just eat everything in sight, just cleaned the place out.  And here’s a bunch of snot nosed kids, you know 18, 19, 20 years old.  And our average age of our regiment was 22 years.  22 years old, counting the old man too. 

What was it like the first time you jumped out of a plane?

Well, I must have been a little bit of a daredevil anyways, it didn’t really bother me that bad.  I kind of enjoyed it.  In later years…I put these, I worked on the antenna on top of the crew tower in 1949.  And also on top of the AIU building in Columbus, so height didn’t bother me any.  But, you see all kinds of crazy things happen with people.  Guys don’t want to jump, you just throw him out anyways.  We did that many times.  But the basic training from the time we got there, we go through weapons, reviews you know, and so on, keep yourself aggressive and everything.  But basically it was physical training, they want you to be in top physical shape under about every condition.  See at that time we were reorganized to be a unit as such, because I knew they, I knew they felt that somewhere down the line they were going to split it up, where we joined the 508 or joined the 507 or whatever it happened to be.  Then we got into some real field training.  Now where do you want to go from there?

What kind of training did you have just prior to D-Day?

Prior to D-Day?

When you were in England.

Well, we did everything, we had a couple practice jumps, about assembly problems, you understand, and as I told you, I worked with the pathfinders.  Most cases, there were about 12 people in a pathfinder group.  And this consisted of a commanding officer who was, in this particular case he was a second lieutenant and his name was Pollette.  That’s one hell of a man, I tell you.  You’d have a radioman, and we had a guy that carried a machine gun, and we had the same weapons the other guys had.  And we jumped in there and try to assemble, to place the unit, the RADAR unit for the planes to come in on.  At the same time we set up a beacon light for the guys that were on the ground to see that beacon, which was an amber light at that time.  And the troops never could get in the air.  True story.  We went in, like I told you, at 1:30, right around 1:30 and the rest of the group a little after 2:00, maybe 2:15. 

Do you remember that evening at all? The June 5^th, what were you were doing as far as assembling?  Can you describe that?

You mean assembling?

Just assembling at the airbase at what that was like.

Absolute rat race.  They had.

Oh those are the pathfinders, that’s a photograph of the pathfinders that Gene Wilger flew in.  They’re 82^nd.

You know what regiment they are?

No I don’t.

Ok, let me show you another group, you asked about the assembly at the airfield.  There’s another picture in here, and it just happens that I’m in this picture.

If you could describe some of the preparations that went on, just prior to D-Day, what it was like the night before you went in.

On the night before our colonel was a Colonel Thomas Shanley.  He was a West Point graduate.  We called him a bulldog.  And he was about 5’7”, might have weighed 160 pounds, middle weight class you know, but he was a middle weight fighter in the Army at West Point.  He was the type of guy, if he thought you were tougher than he was he’d take you into the ring and beat the shit out of you.  Many times this happened.  We had a little guy named King who was actually a professional fighter, middleweight.  And this one guy that Shanley couldn’t get the best of.  Good guy was just too sharp for him.  But King got killed in Normandy.  But he was one heck of a fighter.  But Shanley was a good man, he’s still alive, he’s 70, 75 years old, he’s 6 years older than I am.  He was like 25 or 26 years old, he was a lieutenant colonel.  He was a good person, a good commander. 

What was the attitude of most of the guys just prior to going into D-Day?  Did you know what was ahead of you?

Well, we knew that it was going to be the invasion, this had been suspected for a long time.  We knew what we were preparing for.  So we got the signal, we had a dry run, we had a dry run about a month before D-Day.  Get everything packed, get ready to go, and it was cancelled.  And after D-Day, after I came out of the hospital and I went back to Nottingham, I got back about 30 days, about 30 days after the guys got back.  I didn’t get back until the middle of July.  So sometime in August is when I got back.  They had on order, they were going to drop into Belgium, and we got out to the airport and it was cancelled again, turn around, so what happened that time, General Patton’s tanks had overrun the position we were going to go in at.  So we came from there, came back to Nottingham, reorganized, and it wasn’t too long after that, that we got prepared to go to the airbase we took off on, to make the Holland invasion.  That was on September 17^th.  But we got there somewhere in the neighborhood the 2^nd or 3^rd of September I believe.