Occasionally, I publish some of Mr. Montgomery’s musings edited only for grammatical errors. Since it was Mr. Montgomery’s birthday this week, here is another of his reflections of earlier times. Mr. Montgomery wrote about much of his time enlisted in the U.S. Army, and this is ACT ONE of SIX.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY – Wartime ACT ONE – University of Idaho
How to get involved in a WAR and stay SANE (or thereabouts)
Way back in the dark ages, before the USA and Hitler’s Germany started shooting at each other, I lived in Seattle, Washington. I graduated from Broadway High School June 1941. But that is another story.
By 1942, I was doing odd jobs as an employee of my father working at fixing typewriters, and other exotic office machines at the Adding Machine and Typewriter Exchange, at 821 Third Ave, in Seattle. The company was a purveyor of misc office equipment like typewriters (used mostly), Adding Machines (Wales Adding Machine Corp), and doing a lot of office machine repairs.
Early in 1942, the US Navy sent out a call for typewriter mechanics to handle maintenance service on a large number of typewriters that were to be located at the newly established Naval Radio Operators Training School to be established on the campus of the University of Idaho at Moscow, Idaho. I sent in an application, and got the job.
Actually, the job was with the Woodstock Typewriter Company who would be furnishing some 600 of their typewriters for this navy operation. I had to be ready for business by April 1942 in Idaho, when the first navy students arrived. That is also another story
I arrived at the U of I and got started as the typewriter “man” with this navy school—which was starting from scratch at the time. Sometime toward the end of the year, I received a letter: “Greetings from the President of the United States”, requesting my services with the US Army in our recent altercation with Germany and Japan. Naturally I answered the summons, and became a very lowly private in the US Army. It was November 21, 1942.
It was fortunate that I had covered some of this back in ROTC at the University of Idaho, including experience dismantling and cleaning various models of US army rifles, etc.
I was sent to Ft. Douglas, Utah, an Army reception center, just outside Salt Lake City. There I spent about 2 weeks taking various tests, acquiring uniforms and other “things”. Apparently, they determined with their intelligence and aptitude tests that I was not an idiot, and then sent me on to Camp Beale, California near Marysville. Somehow they decided that I was just right for doing repair and maintenance work on the typewriters at Camp Beale, with plenty of broken and bent typewriters. This was a training camp for the 13th Armored Division, and a Philippine Brigade getting ready to go back to the Islands and have it out with the detested Japanese Army. Life at Camp Beale was the usual army camp routine with time in setting up a repair shop for typewriters, mimeograph machines, and any other small mechanisms that looked sick. Sometime later on, the army management discovered that I had never gone through army Basic Training, and a special unit was put together to cover the training required for turning civilians into wartime soldiers.
Our basic training unit at Camp Beale consisted of a number of us “soldiers” who had missed out on this requirement for getting anywhere in the army; tromping about learning the requirements of soldiering. It was a motley collection of about 18 of us, and ran from almost recruit privates to a Staff Sergeant who had missed out on this necessity of military life. We spent every day for about 5 weeks under the supervision of an old timer Tech Sergeant from the old army. T/Sgt Whoever, had stripes and hash marks that ran all the way up his sleeve from top to bottom. I think he was a returned 30 year man and from old Brooklyn, New York. His orders ran something like: “Aw right youse guys, this here is the toid time I’m gonna tell youse about dis here…” Very colorful.
I can remember that there was reveille call every morning, when the barracks would fall out and line-up for the First Sergeant. It was a pretty straggling looking bunch. Some of them got in lineup late, or not making the call. Being a camp service group the officers were not as particular about Army regulations and official rules of drill. Remember this was a camp headquarters company of mostly clerks, truck drivers, cooks, and other people primarily doing housekeeping jobs that did not require shooting at the enemy. We were a pretty lackadaisical lot of soldiers. One morning though (the bugler was in our barracks building) the bugler stepped out on the stair landing at the back of the building and bugled reveille, except in mid call he suddenly switched to a hot jazz rendition of “Bugle Call Rag” (he was a very good trumpet player). It woke up the whole camp in a hurry, we had guys falling out of bed who rarely had eyes open for another half-hour. Our bugler had been a trumpet player in a dance band. It certainly gave some variety to the monotony of the system.
Along in the summer, as typewriter repairs just got interesting, I was picked to leave Camp Beale and to join a new organization called an “Army Specialist Training Unit” at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. By this time, the Allies had made the landings in North Africa, and the war was on for earnest. Later the rumor about this organization was that the army found itself loaded up with lots of military training recruits but they were not ready to receive us in Europe, and even adequate transportation over the ocean was not yet ready. What to do with this bunch of soldiers running round the various camps all over the country? The Colleges had been decimated of this age group by the draft, so the great minds in Washington decided to establish training units on college campuses all over the country, and sent us soldiers back to college.
To be continued in ACT TWO