Intergenerational Oral History Interview

ME: My name is - and I am interviewing my neighbor, Richard Whaley. We spoke once about the big moments in history that he lived through, and we are going to start with his memories of life at the end of World War Two. Mr. Whaley, please tell me about how life was like.

RW: Ok, in World War Two, our food was rationed, and gasoline was rationed, you couldn't drive about. I was born and raised in San Francisco. San Francisco of course was on the West Coast next to the Pacific, and we were mostly concerned of an invasion from the country of the Japanese. We were really concerned in 1942, but as the war grew on, it wasn't as much of a concern. Economy in San Francisco revolved around shipyards, and building things for the war effort and sending many of the young men into the military to go overseas.

I saw a lot of the younger kids in my neighborhood disappear from the neighborhood, those which never returned home. And, at the time the war ended I was 12 years old and I was in San Francisco Boy's club camp in Mendocino County and many of the counselors in our camp were disabled ex-military people, people who had been disabled by being wounded in the Second World War, and were counselors at the camp. And, when the war ended, specifically VJ day, we had a big watermelon feed at about 3:30 in the afternoon and a speech by a navy captain who had been discharged by the navy because of his wounds. And so it was a very emotionally stirring time, there were a lot of people involved.

ME: Ok, and during World War Two, what did you think about what the people were fighting.

RW: Well when the war started I was 8 years old, and to understand why we had to go to war and so forth didn't really impress an 8 year old that much. There had been a war going in Europe many years before that. At 8 years old at the time, when I was being raised you didn't spend much time reading the newspaper and the only news you got out of that was on the radio they had nightly news on the radio that my father listened to at 9 o'clock but that was 15 minutes so as I got older, when I got to be 10 years old which was a couple years before the war ended, I started carrying (delivering) newspapers to peoples home and the news of the war was of course on the front page of the newspaper so you were more exposed to what was going on and the battles that were occurring in Europe and the battles that were occurring in the Pacific.

The main thing that happened to me in my personal life was that certain things that you used like sugar and butter, and things like that you couldn't get or they were rationed and even if you had the ration stamps, the stores still didn't have the supplies because they were being used for the war effort and people such as my mother was pressed into working because the local laundry that was in our neighborhood, the man who owned it was a good friend of ours, his people had left to go to the war so he came over and got my mother to come to work with him at his French laundry, which he would have never done had it not been for the war.

ME: Ok, so do you want to talk about the Great Depression now?

RW: Yea the Great Depression was the thing that was going on when I was born. I was born in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, and the Great Depression of course affected a lot of people in my neighborhood, and when I was a kid growing up were unemployed.

There were people who were trying to find jobs but there were very few jobs, there was a program ran by the Federal Government, called the Work Projects Administration, or the WPA that did employ some people but a lot of the people who had jobs in the offices and things of that nature weren't physically able to do the work in the WPA which was basically construction type work, but the WPA did build a lot of parks, and places for people that could enjoy and recreate in and so forth, but there were a lot of people helping other people, giving them food and so forth during the Depression.

Things were difficult, what we ate were very simple foods, and maybe once a week we would have one chicken on Saturday night for 5 people, and that probably lasted for two dinner meals but there was very little money and very few things that we did. We never ventured out of town, and my father worked six days a week, he was a lucky one he had a job.

ME: So, where did you live during this Great Depression?

RW: I lived in San Francisco during all of this.

ME: So, was the street life and cars affected?

RW: In San Francisco, during the Great Depression, very few people even owned cars, most everybody, my father didn't own a car, and my father never did own a car his entire life. I finally bought a car for my mother when I was about 16, and she had operated a car since she was a kid because she was raised in a farm in Burlingame, and they had cars at that time in there, but there were cars that they were using mainly for farming, so she knew how to drive, and I taught her how to drive a modern car, and so she had a car, but my father never had a car, and in San Francisco, because of the density of the city and so forth, there were street cars, electric street cars, within 3 or 4 blocks of one another, the electric street cars ran all over the city you could get on a street car, get a transfer, and catch another street car going in another direction.

So, people walked, or rode bicycles, or rode public transportation. If you wanted to go to a place like Oakland, or Marin County, you got on a ferry boat across the bay on a ferry boat. The two bridges weren't actually dedicated until the mid-30s, mid to late 30s.

ME: Ok and how was education?

RW: I started off going to a public school, and, San Francisco of course being the largest city on the coast, had public schools from kindergarten to twelve grade, and they plenty of space as they were kids in San Francisco. My mother decided that when I was in 4^th grade that I would get a better education in a Catholic school. So, in the 4^th grade I was transferred from a public school to a Catholic school. And I went to a grammar Catholic school, than a Catholic high school. So, education in San Francisco was quite good. Out in other outlining areas in California, you had one room schoolhouses and one teacher to maybe 50 or 60 kids. In the "Big City" as they called it, education was quite good.

ME: Ok, do you have anything else to talk about this? Or do you want to talk about the Korean War.

RW: Well, I don't know if you want to talk more about the beginning of the Second World War. The beginning of the Second World War was different from the beginning of the wars today. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor it was a Sunday. I was at home because I had a heavy cold, my family went up to church, and they came back from church around 11:30 to 12:00, the newspapers put out an extra paper, and the newsboys came into the neighborhood calling out, they put out a four page newspaper and they were selling them for two cents. That was how people found out in my neighborhood that there was a war, because people normally didn't listen to the radio during the day. People would listen to the radio like family would listen to the radio after dinner, to listen to news programs, mystery programs, comedy programs, and what not on the radio, starting at around 7 at night to 10. But people, my family at least, didn't listen to the radio during the day. And, nobody called us to tell us the war was on, I doubt that any of our relatives knew of it any sooner than we did, and so that was the beginning of the war.

The next day I was still home sick and my mother and I woke up at 11 in the morning, listening to the declaration of war by President Roosevelt which was a very moving moment for me and for people in my generation. Of course after that the draft got started. They had a draft before that, but they really starting taking people in earnest and with the war started, everybody who was 17 years old wanted to get in the military. My brother signed up for the Navy, enlisted in the navy, and I believe he was 43 or so but he didn't graduate from boot camp so he got dispatched.

ME: He wasn't young enough?

RW: No he wasn't physically capable to do the navy thing. So he was let out of the military. The military puts you in boot camp; they put you through some rigorous training where you are deprived of sleep and whatnot, and their really physically challenged. There are people who don't make it; can't do that.

Nowadays, maybe they keep those people for other kinds of jobs because there are a lot of jobs in the military that don't require anymore physical effort that you and I are putting on right now. But, the standard in the old days; the standard when I was drafted was that you had to be able to carry that heavy pack and the helmet and the rifle and so forth, and go on a 12 mile march at any time.

ME: So, for the Korean War, you were drafted, how did you feel about that?

RW: Well the Korean War came along, and like everyone else I was going to college; starting college. The Korean War actually started when I was still in high school. Again, when you're going to high school, you're working. I had to work to help my family for the expenses and so forth. I stopped carrying newspapers, and I started going to what we called a service stations where you go in and tell the attendant to fill your automobile up with gasoline, and check your oil, and wipe your windows and so forth. Drivers didn't get out of the car; they just rolled their windows down. So I worked in a gas station through high school and going into college.

I went to college and things didn't go too well, between working and getting involved in the beer parlors, I had to leave college for a period of time until I could go back in. Well, in the time I was not there, I got drafted because in the Korean War, if you were in college you could get defirmative, or an exemption from the draft. If you weren't going to college, that ended just like that. The draft board grabbed me so I got taken into the military. Then of course you become very interested in the war, because when I actually got my draft notice, the war was actually still going on. Then you get the interest of "What is this that is going on?" So I got drafted and went into boot camp in Fort Org, and than I was sent to Camp Pendleton down in the San Diego County for training in tanks, I became a tank mechanic. I came back to Fort Org, got married, than I got went overseas, got shipped overseas down from San Francisco. The first call was at Yokohama, Japan. Then we went down to the bottom of Japan.

ME: Than down to the bottom of Korea?

RW: Well we went to the bottom of Japan and stopped at a city called Sasebo and I stayed there for a while because I had the chicken pox. I stayed there for a couple of weeks and than when we sailed from Sasebo up into Japan which is not very far away actually and only takes a few hours actually, and then we went to Pusan and the bottom of Korea. And then we stayed there for a day and then we went on a train and we went north as far as the train would go. We got off the train, and than called the artillery company that was supposed to be with the artillery battery. About seven or eight hours later, they send a Jeep Ford to pick me up. And so that was one of the days in the military where you leave where your staying and eat breakfast, and you don't see any food again for twenty-four hours, because there was no food on the train, and where the train ended, where they let us off the station at the end of the train ride, they wouldn't give anybody any food. They had probably seventy or eighty people got off the train at that point. The U.S. military was all soldiers. But in Korea, because of the United Nations action, the soldiers were from all different countries. Turkey soldiers, French soldiers, Puerto Rican soldiers, and did cause some friction amongst the people when they were thrown together like that. It was a very difficult situation.

ME: Language barriers? Did you have language barriers between each other?

RW: Well I mean would you be able to talk to a Turkish soldier in Turkish? No, you wouldn't. I mean, this was one of the big problems that we had in Korea. You get involved in some group like that, and you have four or five people talking in say Turkish, and four or five people over here talking in English, and these people are talking in Turkish and looking at you and your looking at them, and all of a sudden they start to laugh. We had a lot of people in this group that spoke English, especially people from the east coast and the south, who always felt that these people were making fun of them. So at this point they wanted to go over there and wipe them out. Now, it may have been that they weren't even talking about this at all. I mean what they were saying and why they laughed was possible that it had no bearing on what the other group was doing. I mean different people; say a French soldier he dresses differently then an American soldier. Or a Turkish soldier, or an Italian soldier. One of the problems that you get in when you get sent to a place like Korea is that you speak English. Nobody except Americans speak English. Koreans don't speak English, they probably most likely speak English in South Korea now, but when I was in South Korea, Koreans spoke Korean and Japanese.

The Japanese had occupied that year for almost 50 years. So most of them had learned to speak Japanese, were taught Japanese in the schools and so they knew how to speak Japanese because they were the people running the country. When the Japanese ran the country like that, they were very ruthless. If you wanted to stay alive, you better learn to speak to them. One of our problems in Korea was that we didn't speak their language and they didn't spear ours. We couldn't communicate; a lot of Koreans were killed by Americans because of this. Another problem was that when someone starts climbing your fence and you tell them to stop but they don't stop, what do you do? Because you don't know if they were North Korean, or South Korean. They both looked the same, and for example the people from the north don't wear a shirt with a big N on it. And, most of the Korean soldiers didn't wear a uniform. We had Korean soldiers around our artillery, and they didn't wear uniforms. I had several guys in our company, in our battery; especially one from Texas who went down and befriended the Korean soldiers and actually took them stuff like candy bars and sweet stuff that they liked, and got to talk to them and whatnot. But, most of it was sign language.

ME: With gestures and signs?

RW: Yea, and you know but in Korea you expected at any time to start firing those big guns. We never did, and we were pulled off the lines after 8 months and were sent back to Japan in Camp Drake, because at that time the theory was that there was going to be an invasion of Taiwan. Kankishate loyalists were still there in Taiwan and the Communist Chinese thought they were going to wipe that country out, but the U.S. felt that Taiwan should continue as an independent country. So we were brought back to Japan, off the front lines of Korea to be ready to go to Taiwan in a moments notice. So we spent the first 2 or 3 months in Japan preparing our equipment because when military equipment gets transported like that people on the docks and so forth actually more or less destroy a lot of it. A lot of it gets beat up pretty bad in transit. They show you these pictures from these newsreels and the television about all this stuff when they invade you know all this stuff just goes up there and do everything one-hundred percent but that's not what actually happened.

Yea, you'd be surprised at how much we had that would have never withstood any kind of invasion. Our stuff, our artillery pieces were large enough that we could actually shoot straight between Formosa and China; we could also shoot many kind of navy ships that were out there, or invasion type vessels. That was why we were brought back. There were many of these going on in China between the U.S. navy and the Chinese navy, but the U.S. government would never admit to it. So I had dinner many times with people in the navy in Tokyo they were in with the ships, the ships came in for repair in Yokohama. Yokohama was a beautiful big seaport, with many kinds of facilities in it. So they would come off in the Yokohama. You could meet them in places in Tokyo and whatnot. If they came from off the ships and whatnot and we were stray stationed there, we'd all get too talking together. Then when my time came to leave Japan after 16 months of being overseas, I got on a big ship and we sailed away from Yokohama up to Seattle. I was very happy to sail away, from Japan.

ME: Ok . . .and. . .?

RW: Well I sailed away, came home; I was married at the time; I reintroduced myself to my wife. I worked that summer at the railroad, and I went back to college. We

graduated from college, and by the time we graduated from college we had our first child. So that's how I went on from there.

ME: So the U.S. returned back to normal?

RW: Well, yea you do but it's like the fellows that were returning from Iraq. Whenever you return from a war zone, and you've done those things you'll never return to way you were before you went over. I learned a lot from it and I really found out how blessed I was with that I had been raised in the environment that I was in and the education that I did have even though I only had one year of college. Compared to what other people in other parts of the country had, and what their families had in the ways of livelihood and so forth and it was an experience that I have no difficulty in recalling all the parts of it in great detail. The fellows who come back from Iraq who have actually been in the zones with the shells going off and people shooting at them and so forth will never get over it. Once, I had a brother in law who tried to enlist in the navy and he was turned down because he had some serious injuries when he played baseball. Somebody had slid into him at a base and spiked him and he had a arm ripped open and he had a ugly scar on his arm and so the Navy wouldn't take him, but he wanted to do something for the war effort so he went into the merchant ranks and he sailed in the merchant rein from the beginning of the war, 1942 and along the way he went to officer school in Alameda and he became a seaman in a merchant ship. The merchant ships went behind the war vessels and as the invasion went on they went back behind the destroyers and cruisers and picked off the supplies and so forth; the food and all the stuff that they needed and brought it up to the beach and of course the merchant rein guys were carrying this stuff back and forth when the fighting got off the beach. He had nightmares the rest of his life from the things he saw on those beaches, which as probably four or five days after the initial invasion. Of course the beach hadn't been cleaned up and there were all kinds of stuff; he had nightmares until he died, he has passed away now.

So it changes you and I feel really sorry for all these people who are going to Iraq and people going to three or four tours in Iraq and I cant believe that they would do that, but their doing it. I don't know, I don't see the purpose in it. One of the things that I learned in my life about war is that war really gains about nothing. We lost the war in Korea in the standpoint. Korea was divided on 38^th parallel when the war first started; today it is still divided on the 38^th parallel. You have an unfriendly government in the North, and what we think a friendly government in the South and the government in the South is prospering and doing well with the assistance of the United States. The government in the North, according to intelligence people claim is doing bad as people are starving. While they put on particular shows of military might and this nuclear stuff and so forth most Koreans in the North apparently are starving. I of course spent years reading and studying Korea and its history and so forth.

See what the North is, the North is the resources for the country. That's where the rainfall and your timber, and your hydroelectric and type of stuff. Those resources are in the North, and the South is where the food is. In fact, right where we were on a DMZ, were rice paddies in all directions. Anywhere that they could retain water in, even on the hillsides was rice paddies. That made it of course very difficult to move our military equipment because it rained. It started in about May and lasted for about two months, raining all day long. It was about 90% temperature, 90% humidity. 90/90 it was, and as a result of that, the dirt roads became very soft. Now we had big heavy stuff and we had to be really careful or else it would just give way. If one piece of equipment went into the rice paddies, we wouldn't be able to get it out. Just think, it would take bulldozers just to get it out. The food was in the South and the resources in the North, and historically most of the people lived in the South because that's where all the food was, and all the resources in the North. And then so you split the country, and look, the country as a whole was sustainable without China, and it could sustain itself. When the Japanese took them over, they took over the whole area, and it sustained itself as one country, but not when it was split. Why our leaders such as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin would split Korea in half I'll never understand why.

The communists thought they should have half of it or something. I don't know, it didn't make any sense, doesn't any sense today and this group in the North who was supported in part by the Chinese, they won't make friends. They just won't, and its stupid, like the Vietnam War was stupid. All the people, United States youth went to Vietnam and died, and Vietnam went back the Vietnamese they were running the country and having a great time. Well, they were already a rich country as the Dutch went over there and colonized it and of course the Dutch were after the oil in Vietnam. There is a lot of oil in Vietnam; there are a lot of resources in Vietnam; that's what they were after. They had enough in Vietnam to have a very good life. The country is prospering today without the Americans and without the Dutch. Also, Iraq could prosper also without us, but they have to learn to live together and get along. Whether they will get along or not, I have no idea. Again, is it our job to stand between the Sunnis and the Shiites, who both belong to the same fundamental religion, but are different branches of it, who think the other is no good? They both worship at the same place at the same time, I don't know. You may be able to understand it someday but I'm not going to understand it anymore then this country, which is basically one of the strengths of this country. The Catholics and the Lutherans were able to get along; the Islamic people. We believe in different religions, maybe different Gods but we work together to make the country work. We can all learn to stop at the stop sign instead of just driving through. That's the basic problem in Iraq right now, this group says, "No we aren't going to stop at the stop sign, we're not going to do it!"

ME: Ok than, so, thank you for your time.

RW: You're welcome. I hope you got enough for your page