Conducted by Thomas Saylor, October 28, 2002, St. Paul, Minnesota
TS = Thomas Saylor
WB = Wilbert Bartlett
TS: Today is the 28th of October 2002 and this is the beginning of the interview with Wilbert Bartlett. First, on the record Mr. Bartlett, thanks very much for taking time to speak with me today.
WB: You’re very welcome.
TS: We’ve been talking a little bit and I’m going to go over some of what I’ve learned from you already. You were born in Moberly, Missouri on the 12th of December 1921. You were one of four children, but apparently only two survived childhood, is that right?
WB: That’s right.
TS: You and your brother?
WB: Yes.
TS: Was he older or younger?
WB: He was older, about a year older.
TS: You went to school in Moberly and graduated from high school there in 1939. Went on to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, and attended there from 1939 to 1943. You were scheduled to graduate in June of 1943 when the U.S. Army stepped in and inducted you in March.
WB: Right.
TS: You did get your diploma though, didn’t you?
WB: Yes, it was mailed to me. Mailed to my home.
TS: But you missed the last¾?
WB: Missed the graduation march and all of that.
TS: But apparently you weren’t the only person being taken in from Lincoln at that time.
WB: Oh, no.
TS: In the service you had basic training at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. You then were transferred to Greensboro, North Carolina, to an Overseas Replacement Depot [ORD], the 1167th Training Group, Headquarters Company [information from Mr. Bartlett’s discharge papers]. Primarily your job was as an instructor for basic training recruits.
WB: That’s right.
TS: When the war began to wind down in 1945 you were sent to McDill Field, Florida where you were trained as a construction foreman.
WB: Right.
TS: And according to your discharge papers, you were shipped over to France in November of 1945. You remained in France until April of 1946 when you were returned to the U.S. and discharged. You came to Minnesota in 1946, but returned to Greensboro in 1947 to get married. Your wife’s name was Anne L. Carter. After three years working for Whirlpool Corporation in St. Paul, in 1949 you took a job with the Post Office and you stayed at the Post Office until you retired in 1980.
WB: That’s correct.
TS: And you’ve been living in St. Paul ever since?
WB: That’s correct.
TS: Well, the first question I wanted to ask you, in 1941 when the U.S. got involved in the war, you were well into your second year of college.
WB: Yes.
TS: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941: I’m wondering if you remember what you were doing when you first heard that news?
WB: Yes. When I first heard it I was coming out of a theater in Jefferson City. Yes. And of course, it was blasting all over that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.” The main thing that was talked about was most of the guys would probably be drafted and go into the service. It was pretty well discussed. It was discussed in school, in the classrooms and what not. Everybody thought it was a pretty terrible thing, especially with the people who were killed.
TS: So it was a topic of conversation at your college? At Lincoln University?
WB: Not everywhere, but at certain times. Especially in the beginning it was. In the first week, I would say it was a topic of conversation. Almost every time you’d go—we had little restaurants and places we were going to, and have snacks near the college and we were talking about Pearl Harbor.
TS: At the time, December 1941 or even early 1942, were you someone who considered quitting college and enlisting in the service?
WB: Not really, because we were under the impression (most of us there) that we were going to be able to stay and finish college completely. I hadn’t felt too much against it because early on—I had neglected to tell you that I was a member of the CMTC for a couple years.
TS: What’s that, what’s CMTC?
WB: That’s the Citizen Military Training Camp [at Ft Riley, Kansas] that you went to when you¾the war wasn’t even thought about then. This was before, when I was in high school. 1938 and 1939. It was at Fort Riley, Kansas. It was a training base that they sent guys who were interested in military to give them a little taste of the military. [Not exactly a school, but permanent military cavalry base that the Army made use of. At that time the soldiers trained on horseback as well as being motorized.]
TS: So you volunteered for this?
WB: Yes. I volunteered. I forgot all about that, really. My brother went and that kind of got me interested in it.
TS: He was a year older than you?
WB: He was a year older. He had gone there, too. Fort Riley, Kansas. He went and couple of kids from the hometown went. So I didn’t really worry too much about what kind of life it was. You got a pretty good taste at military training school.
TS: So you weren’t intimidated by the thought of joining the military?
WB: Not intimidated. No. I wasn’t intimidated. I hated to see it, the way it was carried out. You know, the war going on. But both sides were ready for it. The sneak attack . . . at that point anybody . . . I didn’t really care for it, but I really didn’t . . . it didn’t worry me. I didn’t know if I had to go in the service. As a matter of fact, I was almost positive that I would have to be sworn in after I finished school. So it didn’t affect me that way that I didn’t know what’s going to happen now. I just took it in stride.
TS: How about your brother? He was a year older. When did he go in the service?
WB: He went in. He graduated the year before I did. He went into service . . . I went in 1943. He probably went in 1942.
TS: Did he go to Lincoln University, too?
WB: He went to Lincoln. Yes. He finished. He graduated.
TS: What branch of the service did he go into?
WB: He went to . . . I don’t know where he had his basic training, but he went into the engineers.
TS: Also Army.
WB: Yes. Army engineers. He was in the Army. Yes. Army engineers. He actually, finally after he was in the war, he went to Officers Training School.
TS: Did he really?
WB: Yes. He went to Officers Training School and he got his commission.
TS: While the war was still on?
WB: While the war was still on. He was a lieutenant. From what he talked about, he was in the battle area.
TS: In the Pacific or Europe?
WB: No. He was in Europe. He was in Europe. He didn’t get to the Pacific. He was in France, too. He never did talk too much about what he actually or how close he was to the actual firing, but he was in the combat zone. I think it did affect him later on in life. He didn’t have any particular job that he came out with either, but he got honorably discharged. He was discharged before I was. I remember that.
TS: And you were discharged in April of 1946.
WB: Yes. He was probably discharged in 1945.
TS: When you were at school now, did you live on campus at Lincoln University?
WB: Yes. I was in the dorm. I lived on the campus my first year. The freshmen, they want you to be there on campus. But the second year I lived off campus.
TS: In Jefferson City?
WB: In Jefferson City. A lady doctor was taking male students in to help out around the house and drive her. We did that for her and she would give room and board. I actually lived there, had a room downstairs and then I had my meals there, too. They were real nice people. I did that more or less to help out with expenses. I did that my first and second year. I lived off campus. The third and fourth year however, I planned to come back to the dormitory and that’s what I did. I was in the dormitory when I was drafted.
TS: In 1943. How did your folks react? Your mom and dad were still in Moberly, right?
WB: Yes.
TS: Do you know how they reacted to the news of Pearl Harbor? Did you talk about it with them?
WB: Not too much because I wasn’t with them, but they talked about it. I talked about it when I went home. My dad was pretty [unclear] about it. He was in the service, too. He was World War I. He was a supply sergeant in World War I so he had quite a bit of military service. He wasn’t—I don’t know exactly how many years he was in, but he was in for a few years. So he talked about it. He talked about it some but he didn’t seem too . . . he was sort of a quiet guy anyway. He didn’t seem to be outraged or anything. I think he was probably sure that the United States would be able to take care of this.
TS: Did he encourage or discourage you and your brother from joining the service?
WB: He definitely didn’t discourage it. He said if you didn’t do anything else, if you didn’t have a good job or anything, the military would be a good thing for you for a while.
TS: How about your mom?
WB: She wasn’t too hot about going into the service. Even though she knew him while he was in service, my dad. When they were married, I think, it was someplace in Texas. They got married. He was in the service then. She knew about the military life. She didn't try to encourage the kids to go into it. She more or less went along with what he would say.
TS: Do you remember getting the letter in the mail that said you had to report for military service?
WB: No. Not a personal letter to me. It was sort of a memorandum to the school.
TS: No kidding!
WB: Yes. That these people . . . they had been there. They had put us in more or less an induction type . . . saying you will be inducted when you finished school.
TS: So you knew that this was coming when you finished school.
WB: They had the names of all the guys that were eligible and had the age and everything. So we were told. They probably just sent a letter to the administration saying that we were going to be inducted at a certain date.
TS: Which they moved up, apparently.
WB: They moved it up. They moved it up a week from the graduation date and said, “You are going to be inducted.” And gave us the date that we had to report.
TS: So in March of 1943?
WB: Yes.
TS: Let me ask you, the student body at Lincoln University, was that men and women?
WB: Yes. It was co-ed.
TS: And what percentage of the students were African-American?
WB: Almost total. It was a black . . . What did they call those schools, those early black schools? They had a name for them . . . land grant colleges.
TS: Like Grambling and Southern?
WB: Yes, they had some kind of name attached to them. Those all black schools, they were land grant colleges, I think. There weren’t many whites. If they were white there were just very few in Lincoln in some capacity. The students were almost totally black.
TS: Wilbert, when you went to service, where did you do basic training?
WB: I did my basic training in Jefferson Barracks, Missouri.
TS: That’s near St. Louis, isn’t it?
WB: Jefferson Barracks? Yes, it’s just a little bit out of St. Louis, a few miles from St Louis.
TS: You weren’t going very far, then, were you?
WB: No. My brother, he took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
TS: So both of you were in Missouri.
WB: Jefferson Barracks was a big training camp.
TS: At Jefferson Barracks was your basic training. Was that segregated when you went through basic training?
WB: More or less. We had segregated companies we stayed in. The barracks were segregated. The training officers were white. The noncoms, quite a bit of blacks were noncom officers. They inspected the barracks and things. It was segregated, yes. Most of the mess hall, the cooks and that, they had blacks in the mess halls. The medical companies were all white doctors. I didn’t see any blacks. Until I went to New Jersey, to Camp Kilmer.
TS: Was that right before you went overseas?
WB: Yes. In the basic training area it was pretty much segregated.
TS: How much contact did you have with whites then?
WB: You had contacts. We weren’t the only ones there. Jefferson Barracks was a large area, and they had several companies. I think my company . . . I think it was the 1167th. I’m getting ahead of myself. Jefferson Barracks had companies that were white. And the same kind of company we were in, only all were segregated and they were white.
TS: They were training by themselves and you were training by yourselves.
WB: Yes. We stayed in segregated barracks. The barracks had about forty to fifty soldiers to each barracks. All the barracks were segregated.
TS: And the mess hall, too, was then segregated?
WB: Yes. All was segregated as far as the eating. I imagine they had mess officers, I suppose. They were white. The cooks were black. They were all black. The only time I remember seeing a lot of whites is when they were marching on the day you were going to take your shots. Sick leave. Then you went to the sick bay. You saw the whites.
TS: Among the people in your basic training company were there people from all over the country?
WB: Yes. They weren’t just from Missouri. Oh, my gosh. They were . . . they didn’t have big training areas like that in every state. They just had them in areas like this. We had people from New York, Chicago, and all over the country.
TS: From the South as well?
WB: Yes, from the South. We had some people from the South. Missouri. We were there. They had camps, too, that were black in the South. A lot of them were in the South.
TS: What differences did you notice between people from the North, people from the Midwest, people from the South?
WB: Besides the language, you had the accent and you could pretty well pick it out. Particularly if they were from the Deep South. You would notice that right away. They had a lot of people that were college trained, too, just like we were. People were from different cities, from Lincoln and other places. We had a lot, quite a few from here, so there was a difference in mixture. They had their own customs that they used back at their home states. They brought it right into the camps with them. You had the trouble-makers. The ones would try to not [unclear]. They seemed to get along pretty good because they got to that point where when you are in the service, one of the big things that you had to adapt to was your discipline. That kind of makes everybody the same. You’re going to get punished if you do something out of line.
TS: How would you say, from your observation, how well did people from the North and the South get along?
WB: Get along with each other?
TS: Yes.
WB: As far as blacks, fine, but it was the same old thing when they mixed up with the whites. The only time you mixed up with the whites if there was a mixture that didn’t really come to too much contact, that’s when you had Marines and that was something special. You still had your white troops in their companies and the platoons and all that and the blacks would be the same thing. But they got along. They got along I think as well as they did because of the separation. They didn’t get too much chance to mix up. The only time they got a chance to mix it up was if they were on leave in the city. In town or something.
TS: Let me ask you about that. When you went to town, because Jefferson Barracks is a few miles from St. Louis, right?
WB: Yes.
TS: When you went to town, did you go in uniform?
WB: Oh, yes. You had to wear your uniform when you were still training. When you got to be—I think when you got to be a noncommissioned officer, I don’t think you had to wear your uniform when you went in. But usually for the soldiers, the privates, the PFCs [rank: private first class], they had to wear the official uniform all the time. So they wore a uniform when they went to town.
TS: How much interaction was there between whites and blacks when you went to town, for example?
WB: In town? It’s the same old story. It seemed to be just the following that you just knew where the black area was. Because a lot of kids that were there were actually from St. Louis, too. A lot of them in training.
TS: So they knew their way around?
WB: They knew their way around in the city; you just followed the soldiers who knew where the black areas were. In fact, I had a kid that I stayed with all the way up to Greensboro that lived in St. Louis. They lived in St. Louis, a lot of these guys. You’d go to town, the buses weren’t segregated. The city buses and the cabs, they weren’t segregated. At that time, anyway. So you would just go and if you knew where you were going, fine. If you didn’t, you just probably have one of the black soldiers that lived there in the city tell you what [bus] to transfer on. You’d usually follow that route and go in where they were and find out about it. Sometimes they went on their own, but you’d never see them going into a white nightclubs or anything like that. I never did anyway.
TS: What about whites coming into the black area of town?
WB: You’d see them, but the same thing. It wasn’t a close mixture of black and white. You never went to a club where you’d see black and whites together there, dancing or drinking or whatever.
TS: That just didn’t happen?
WB: Not in St. Louis, no. Not in Missouri. It didn’t happen there.
TS: When you were in basic training, what’s perhaps your best memory of basic training? If there is one.
WB: The worst was the twenty-mile hikes. That was a pretty grueling thing. You had to hike with all your equipment on, your backpacks and nine pound rifles. We had to hike. Of course, you got rest when you went on the hikes. But after you get to where you’re going, then rather than lay down on your bed and resting you pitched that tent. Then you laid down on the ground and rested. That was the worst thing I think I had.
But the best thing I had was, the best part of it was, when you were training and doing something you didn’t have to worry about how far you were going to be marching after we’d do it. Like rifle training and first aid training. Training how to pitch your tent in the beginning. You had to learn all that stuff the first time around. The hike was the final thing that you went through to learn all the stuff, to put into practice all the stuff that you were going through. It wasn’t really that bad because we were keeping in pretty good shape. Did a lot of walking, did a lot of maneuvering. The obstacle courses, you had those all the time. Go through that. You were in pretty good shape to take those hikes; they were far out. They always had a medical team following.
TS: Did they?
WB: Oh, yes.
TS: Were there guys who washed out of basic training?
WB: Washed out? Yes. Some of them did. They sent them to . . . well, if they wash out of basic training because of, not because of their health reason, they’d just send them to another camp.
TS: Really? And start them all over again?
WB: You had to start all over again. There was quite a few sometimes for medical reasons. Even flat feet—they’d kick you out of the Army. You had to do a lot of walking. If you had things wrong with you that weren’t discovered when you finished with your physical, they would give you a medical discharge. There were quite a few medical discharges. That didn’t go bad on your record.
TS: So it wasn’t a dishonorable discharge.
WB: No it wasn’t dishonorable. They gave you a certificate. It was common. It was common. They would let you go if you had something that was going to hurt you in the long run. Some kids had heart problems they didn’t know about. They didn’t know it until they started doing some activity. Then they found out.
TS: How would you describe the morale among the people in your basic training company?
WB: It was very different. I can’t think of too many people. And it was easy for us to kind of see it because we had already gone through the basic training.
TS: That CMTC you spoke about earlier?
WB: That and when we went to the service we had already, coming from the university, they had already decided they were going to make instructors out of us if they could.
TS: College educated?
WB: So we had to go through the basic training just like the recruits did. We had to go through all that ourselves at Jefferson Barracks. You could spot the ones that were really uptight about not wanting to do it. You had trouble with them. You had trouble with them falling out in the morning, you had trouble trying to teach them how to do things, like how to drill. You could tell. And some of them liked it. Some of them liked the idea.
TS: I guess it’s like everybody. You’re going to find some folks that adjust and some that don’t.
WB: Yes. You’ve got to try and get all you can out of it and some of them do everything they can to disrupt it. When they did that they got punished. They didn’t get a weekend pass or if it was real serious they got moved to the stockade.
TS: When you finished basic training, did you think you might be headed overseas or did you kind of know you were going to be staying stateside?
WB: We knew we were going to stay at ORD Camp, Overseas Replacement Depot Camp, because we were instructors. As long as they had to keep having people to go overseas in groups we had to keep training them.
TS: In other words, your job was safe as long as there was need.
WB: Yes. The only reason our job got to the point where we were pretty close to closing up and going overseas was the war was winding down. Then we knew we weren’t going to be getting too many more new recruits in. So all these people, all these training people there, well, there wasn’t training. They were re-assigning you.
TS: You ended up in Greensboro, North Carolina, at an Overseas Replacement Depot. Can you say briefly what your job entailed there?
WB: Briefly, the bottom line is we were there to train raw recruits, basic things of the Army, so they would be more prepared to take care of themselves when they went into combat zones or wherever they were.
TS: So you were a drill instructor?
WB: We were drill instructors. Basically, that’s what we were. Instructors. The drill instructor entails all the instruction, the drill, the rifle, the range, the rifle range, the watching, tent pitching. Everything. Basic training was the primary thing.
TS: You did that for well over a year. How satisfying that work was for you?
WB: In the beginning it wasn’t too satisfying, because you kept feeling like those youngsters you were getting were never going to learn anything. But then when you learned that you must have done a pretty good job when their final days came up of training and they had the big parade and they’re all marching in unison, in step with each other. Everything seems to be going right, and they were holding their rifles right. It makes a pretty nice picture. They did well. They gave them tests on the rifle range and things like that and they did well on that. They knew how to break their rifles down and take of themselves. When they start doing things that you knew they were supposed to do and they were doing it right. Really taking pride in themselves that they were doing pretty well. Then you were kind of proud of yourself, too.
TS: How long did you have them for?
WB: About three to six months. To go through the whole basic training. It was a continuing thing.
TS: Did you see the same group for a long period or did you see just continually different groups?
WB: You saw the same group until your group graduated to the point where they were eligible to be shipped out.
TS: To be trained somewhere else?
WB: And there was always an influx of new recruits coming in. You still had some of the old ones. But your barracks was divided into kind of groups. Here’s the beginners, here’s the second phase of it, third and fourth [motions with hands, left to right, to indicate stages]. The fourth phase was ready to be shipped out when number one and two were coming down to you. You just keep going. You just keep going with different guys all the time.
TS: Which phase did you do typically?
WB: Mostly . . . I was a sergeant then. Most of the time, actually training and the marching, we’d do that when you were doing a parade or something. The training part of it, most of the problem we had, then you had PFCs and corporals, too. They took care of the primary work of getting activities set up. Then the sergeant would check the trainees out and see how they were doing. We were in charge of the people who were doing the work with them. They came, and they had to go through the sergeants to make sure that they got ready for you to interview and check out.
TS: The people that you were training, were they also all African-Americans?
WB: Yes. I don’t know for some of them if you would call them African-Americans. They had this African-American group. Some Mexicans, Indians, some of the darker races.
TS: So it was more than just blacks. The military made a visual distinction. If a guy was darker he went in the African-American group?
WB: If he was dark. If he was a Mexican. They have many black-skinned Mexicans. If they were dark they ended up in that group.
TS: That’s very interesting. That suggests discrimination which is very visual.
[Tape interruption]
WB: And they didn’t hesitate to put them there, either. That caused some friction sometimes, too, because a lot of times these people knew what they were. Sometimes they wondered why they had to be in a so-called—it was Negro then—why they had to be in a Negro outfit when they were Mexican. It was because they didn’t have an all-Mexican outfit. They didn’t feel that they were any kind of color at all. They should be in a white outfit. The discrimination from color and race.
TS: Very interesting. Did you have friction among your recruits, between Mexicans and blacks for example?
WB: Not too much. Once they got in there and knew what they were going to be doing and they were going to be assigned, most of the kids like that, they’re not troublesome. They really know what they’re supposed to be doing. Some of them were just ornery kids. They would pick a fight with somebody.
TS: Regardless of who they are?
WB: You could have these so-called Mexicans fighting blacks, Indians fighting blacks. Except when they [unclear]. We had a lot of boxing that was official. It wasn’t too much. They had a kid challenging the first sergeant. [Unclear] You have to do it [unclear]. It wasn’t too nice, either, but he was tough enough to take care of the kind of recruits they were getting in. He made a first sergeant.
TS: They had to stand up to them physically sometimes?
WB: Physically sometimes, yes. And they had a lieutenant in charge. They never did find out about it. But the kids around that barracks, they knew about it.
TS: Sure. Scuttlebutt gets around.
WB: Oh, yes. And strange as it seems, once that happened that [unclear]. It happened. They’d do something wrong, and then they’d go outside and go around the back of the barracks.
TS: No kidding?
WB: No kidding. You had to be tough on them when they’re like that. They challenge you. But some people adjusted. They usually straightened up after a while. The sergeant doesn’t want to them to go to the stockade or jail and that. They seemed to have been straightened out. Each guy was different.
TS: Greensboro, North Carolina, Jefferson City, Missouri, and St. Louis. What differences did you notice as an African-American between these locations?
WB: You noticed a difference. When I went to Jefferson City, Missouri, in Missouri I knew what things were going to be like, but when I went to North Carolina, then you saw just a little bit more of the Jim Crow [system of segregation]. It was really . . . there was no doubt in your mind what things were. When you got into town, into Greensboro, in the town itself, you knew right away that you were going to the black restaurants; you’re going to the black entrance to the theaters and things like that.
TS: White entrance, black entrance?
WB: Right. It started getting better at the end of our time in Greensboro. Things were breaking down a little bit.
TS: Is that right? You noticed a change. You were there over a year.
WB: Yes. You noticed a little change. It wasn’t something that you could get up and holler about, but you noticed a little change. We had MPs [Military Police] that were black in Greensboro, black MPs, and they drove their own cars. The MPs drove their cars around, military cars. They went into places where sometimes they had to go for a mix-up of whites and blacks. They didn’t just have the car, they had the twenty-five [caliber] pistols and hats and everything. Regular outfit just like the white MPs. They worked together sometimes, the MPs.
TS: The whites and blacks?
WB: Yes. Because sometimes it wouldn’t be prudent for the black MP to go into a white area by himself to try to break up something, so they had the radios in the cars. Especially when there were blacks and whites involved. Black wouldn’t go into a place probably anyway, if there were just whites involved. It just wouldn’t be done like that. But if there were both races involved in something, they would even call on each other. They seemed to work pretty good like that. It was more prevalent in Greensboro than in St. Louis. They even had to bus us to visit the colleges, for dances and things. Black colleges. That was where I met my wife. I went to a big dance. Civilian men were kind of scarce.
TS: So they bused you guys in for it?
WB: Bused us soldiers in for it. We went to Greensboro to Bennett College. There weren’t many colleges in Greensboro. There weren’t too many blacks around. A lot of whites around but they weren’t mixing like that.
TS: How comfortable did you feel in Greensboro as a black man in uniform?
WB: Not too comfortable in the beginning, even though I knew about it and it was going on. Even in St. Louis a lot of times it was going on, too, in Missouri. There was nothing new. The idea that you knew. Sometimes you wanted to rebel just for the heck of doing it, and see what would happen. Your better impulse was not to do it, not to try it. They wouldn’t put up with too much of that kind of stuff if they thought you were doing it intentionally.
TS: Is that right?
WB: Yes. They wouldn’t try to encourage you to go and do anything like that. It was not too bad in the final analysis, because we had so many black areas and black things you could go to. We had A & T College there in Greensboro. That was a big college, North Carolina A & T. That was in Greensboro. I went there many times for dances. You got to know some of the students. They would give you invitations to come. Sometimes they’d give you a blank invitation to come to these things.
TS: So you could really live almost within a black subculture.
WB: Right. Black culture, and that was good, because it took you back to your own school days. You could go to a college campus and go to the frat dances and things like that. It wasn’t too bad that way. You didn’t worry about anything. And you could go to stores and things, department stores, drug stores. You didn’t have any trouble going there. I went to several drug stores, white drug stores. They didn’t try to keep you from coming in. It was just the idea that it was segregated when you come to social activities. White and black just weren’t mixing like now. But the fact that it was a big city and that you did have some museums and anything, the colleges and the games. It was a segregated city. It was something you could put up with if you had to. I guess it’s bad to say it sometimes, but I guess, really, you get used to it. You know when you go somewhere like that, it’s not going to be mixed up.
TS: It’s just the way it is?
WB: Just the way it is. Right. You don’t try. In the first place, you figure you’re not going to change anything. You’re in the Army. Try to change the social culture of the South? You weren’t going to do it.
TS: Did you observe people who were less easygoing than yourself on that question?
WB: Oh, yes. A lot of them more . . . wanting to do something. Kind of give you hints of, “Let’s go do this. Let’s go here and see if we can sit down here or something.” A lot of these drug stores still had the old counters where you sit down and eat. Now that wasn’t . . . you couldn’t do that. But some of them tried to do it. We got politely asked to leave. It wasn’t done, to sit down at lunch counters and eat at that time.
TS: In uniform or not in uniform.
WB: Didn’t make a difference. It was terrible, too. Being in the service and you’d get the same old answer: Go to the black drugstores. And they had black ones. They had black everything in those cities like that.
TS: Greensboro is pretty big, right?
WB: Greensboro’s a big place. They had morticians and business people and stores and everything else. Owned by blacks and run by blacks. It wasn’t that you didn’t have places to go to, it was just the idea that you should be able to go anywhere you wanted to go to. That was the drawback. You either make up your mind if you want to try, you make up your mind that you’re maybe going to run into trouble, or you just kind of say what the heck and forget about it.
TS: And that’s where you came down, wasn’t it?
WB: Right. It wasn’t . . . Maybe if I had been from a big city, it might have been different. A city from the West Coast or North or somewhere else in the beginning, and weren’t too used to doing those things. Just read about them. I would have had a different attitude.
TS: So you think that really having some experience being from Missouri—?
WB: Absolutely.
TS: So maybe the fellows from the Deep South didn’t find Greensboro a problem?
WB: They didn’t find a problem, no. In fact, they used to say, “Come on, we can’t do that, we can’t go there.” They had a . . . I don’t know, an intuition about those things, I guess. They had an instinctive way of finding where the blacks were going to have these things. They know they’re going to be welcome there.
TS: That might have been a rude surprise for someone who grew up in Minnesota or the Northeast.
WB: That’s what I’m talking about. Those from Minnesota that would go over there and find out they can’t go to a drugstore and sit down and get sandwich or something, they got to rebel. First thing you know, somebody’s going to get loud, start talking, cursing. This and that. It’s going to bring problems. And that’s when they call in the police, and the police are likely going to call the MPs and let them take care of it.
TS: That’s very interesting.
WB: We didn’t have too much trouble with city police.
TS: As long as you were in uniform?
WB: Unless you were in uniform or unless you were way out or they couldn’t get a hold of the black MPs. They would do their best to bring an MP in there if something was happening when you were in uniform. If you weren’t in uniform they were really going to take you then. They patrolled the whole area, the black MPs.
TS: Now when you left Greensboro, Wilbert, you went to McDill Field, in Florida. Is that by Tampa?
WB: That’s in Tampa almost. It’s hot. 1945 I was there. It wasn’t too long because we went overseas. I’d say about three months. It was a crash course, really. For heavy equipment.
TS: You knew nothing about heavy equipment?
WB: I knew what it was, and that was it. [Laughs]
TS: And as a college man, how in the world did you end up in a construction battalion?
WB: Because that’s where they sent us, and because that’s where they figured we . . . they said they were going to make us foremen. Being college and being a sergeant, too.
TS: And you were a foreman, right?
WB: I was a foreman but, like anything, you had to kind of know what you were going to be a foreman of. You had to be able to operate a lot of that stuff. So you had to learn how to—the beginning operation, basic operation anyway. But the kids who were doing it, they learned. They took them out in the field. Learned how to operate those big tractors and graders. This is real heavy equipment. Those backhoes and that kind of stuff.
I didn’t know what a backhoe was. They used heavy equipment, especially the tractors and the graders. They cleared off the land and smoothed it out. They had to do that. It was a crash course. They did it in about three or four months. We were going to be construction foremen and we just watched to make sure it was done. They had a special kind of runway that they could lay down on a place like that. It wasn’t just a lot of concrete, it’s called PSB or something. It’s a [metal] mesh of some kind.
TS: You laid that in pieces?
WB: Yes. It was strips, rolls that we laid down. It was real strong. It was not real concrete but the planes would actually land on it. When you put it down, they had a way of putting it down where it stays pretty steady. The planes landed. That’s what the POWs were doing.
TS: When you got over to France?
WB: When we got over there. Yes. They were doing that. Our troops were actually operating the equipment. The heavy equipment. That’s where they came in, the heavy equipment school.
TS: This construction battalion was also segregated?
WB: Well, it was segregated in the fact that we had POWs.
TS: But as far as the enlisted personnel?
WB: The unit was a segregated unit. The unit that they had sent to McDill Field, that was segregated.
TS: Did folks who ended up at McDill come from Greensboro and other places?
WB: They came from other places, but our groups from Greensboro was sent as a unit. Just from the ORD unit in Greensboro, because they had as many as they needed. You could put hundreds of them if they wanted to, but there were other groups training who went to other places in France. When our Liberty ship [American cargo ship, mass produced during World War II] went over we were loaded. It wasn’t just our company, we had all kinds of people and they went to different places.
TS: The fellows from Greensboro, when you went to McDill you had a lot of folks who you knew from Greensboro?
WB: Yes. I still do.
TS: What kind of place was that? Did you get into town in Tampa at all?
WB: Yes. I’m pretty sure I did. I was trying to remember that the other night. What did I do in Tampa? It was summer; it was so hot. It would be 120 [degrees] in the shade.
TS: That sounds pretty miserable.
WB: We started out in the morning. We went to town. But it wasn’t . . . you just had a certain area they would take you to. The buses would just go so far. They’d come back to McDill Field. That’s the only thing. We relied on the buses, no private cars. Some camps, they had private cars.
TS: You couldn’t at McDill?
WB: Not at that time. It was bad there. I killed mosquitoes falling out one morning. I killed a mosquito and put it in a tissue paper and sent it home to my mom because I knew she wouldn’t believe how big it was if I just told her. Anyway, we went to town, but it wasn’t in the town as a whole, just a certain area. They had restaurants and stores and that, but that was where that bus would take you. You had to get on that bus to get you back to the camp, so we weren’t really going too much into the city itself. Tampa is a pretty big place.
TS: So you would say—it sounds like you knew Greensboro much better than you knew Tampa.
WB: I did, yes, because I was there longer and I went more into Greensboro. I knew the bus routes more in Greensboro. Like I say, when I met Anne she was going to school in Winston-Salem, but her home was in Greensboro. I knew how to get to her house on the bus ride and back to camp. And the college—I knew how to get to A & T. So I knew Greensboro much better because I was there longer. Most of the guys, noncommissioned officers, they went to town after duty hours. It was right there. You’d get on the bus and the bus came all the time. Just get on the bus and go into town, then come back.
TS: Let me ask you about the time in Greensboro. Were you in Greensboro when President Roosevelt died in April 1945?
WB: Yes, because I remember when he died. His train came through somewhere. We were all marched to see it.
TS: After he had died?
WB: Yes. After he died.
TS: He died April 12, 1945, and you were in Greensboro then.
WB: I’m trying to remember, why did we see . . . did he come through Greensboro?
TS: He was down in Georgia when he died.
WB: He died in Georgia, I remember that. He died in Georgia. And he was going back to Washington, through North Carolina. He had to come through there.
TS: Sure. Through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina.
WB: Right, because he was probably routed through military spots. There was clearance and everything. So he probably came, that’s why it was. We marched over as a group. Several guys were at the ORD when his train went through real slow. I remember that.
TS: How did you react when you heard the news that President Roosevelt had died?
WB: The first thing I thought about was how the war was going to go at that time, and the end of the war, too. We still had V-E Day [Victory in Europe Day a month later on May 8, 1945]. I think that was the end of the war. That was the main thing. I guess most African-Americans thought he was a pretty good president. He did a lot for the common man, working people and all that.
It was a sad day. People seemed to be thinking about, “What’s going to happen now?” We didn’t have any idea of how things were going to go. Kind of skeptical about things, about the future. How is the war going to end up? Because they knew who was going to come in and replace him. I don’t think they had too much confidence in the beginning in [President Harry S] Truman. As a whole, I thought it was pretty scary sometimes. You expected Roosevelt to just be there from now on, at least to the end of the war.
TS: Perhaps because he had been President since 1932?
WB: Yes. He had been there so long. We expected him to always be here. [Pauses] Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was pretty low for a while but things starting getting . . . well, life goes on. You talk about it. Nothing is going to change. You go back to the barracks, we still had our training. Doing the same thing you did every day.
TS: And your job didn’t change at all?
WB: Didn’t change one bit. No.
TS: Less than a month later, in May 1945, the war in Europe ended. Were you still at Greensboro when the war against Germany ended?
WB: What was the month, May? That’s the month I went to Tampa. I was still there in Greensboro. At that time the war wasn’t really in an explosive time. It was kind of folding up anyway. I think it was about the time he died, and they were in the process of almost dissolving the ORD as a big permanent base. Even at that time. It was such a big place, so they had a lot to do to get rid of that place. When I talked to some of the people that were there, when I went back to Greensboro, they said, “That place is still there. They’re breaking it up but you’d know it now.” It’s much like it was when the camp was there but they still had used it twenty years ago. They still haven’t taken it down yet.
TS: So it was a pretty big place?
WB: Pretty big place? Yes. It was tremendous. Like I say, even though it was segregated it was still a monstrous place. It must have been a city. When you go to the PX [Post Exchange, army shopping area] there it was just like walking into the mall almost. It was a mall. It was a big place.
TS: On the subject of the end of the war against Germany, how did you react to the end of the war?
WB: I don’t think I did anything. In fact, I think it was more or less expected that it was going to be pretty quick because of the way it was going. I was glad it was over because it meant things could be concentrated over in the Pacific area now. We wouldn’t be training anybody who would be going to Europe any more. I kind of liked that. Then, too, I kind of thought that it was going to be something, that Greensboro would shut down. Word starts getting around you’re going to be moving out pretty soon. You don’t know where, but they’re going to send you somewhere.
TS: You’re job is almost superfluous?
WB: Yes. It was almost a going thing that it was going to be dissolved in not too long. Officers were moving out, and you knew we were going to start moving out. I was relieved. I was glad to be moving. I didn’t want the war to keep going forever and ever and ever. At the same time I was thinking, “What are we going to do? Are we going to have to go to the Pacific?”
TS: Was there a concern in your mind that you would end up in the Pacific?
WB: At the beginning, yes. I figured if they did close up, that’s what they’re going to do. Training us now. We’d go to the islands in the South Pacific. That’s how most of them felt. At the end of the war against Germany a lot of people were looking forward to going to Europe because they were thinking of Paris and Germany. They figured that wouldn’t be too bad.
TS: But not thinking about the Pacific.
WB: Not thinking about having to go to the Pacific. But then they started, I don’t know if somebody started the rumors or what, but they thought we were going to be trained and maybe end up in the Pacific. Maybe some of them did. I’m sure some of them did go to the Pacific.
TS: So you went to McDill. Were you at McDill in Tampa when the war against Japan ended?
WB: V-J Day in August 1945?
TS: You went overseas in November 1945.
WB: I went over to France in November. I must have been . . . well, I remember it was cold when we left McDill.
TS: [According to your discharge papers] you left McDill in November to go overseas.
WB: Yes. It was cold. I had on a heavy coat. I think V-J Day had happened when I was still there.
TS: That was in August, so it was probably Greensboro or Tampa.
WB: We went from Tampa to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.
TS: I’m wondering, when you heard the news about the end of the war against Japan—and this is whether you’re in Greensboro or Tampa, it doesn’t really matter—how did you react to the news that the war, the whole war, was now over?
WB: V-J Day. I figured that was it. I figured the war was over. Period. I didn’t have any thoughts. I thought it was just going to be a matter of a little while and moving around until they ship us to relocation centers and get us out of here. I didn’t have any idea, any thoughts at all, about whether I would be going overseas or anything.
TS: So you figured you’d be discharged?
WB: I didn’t even think I would be going to France at that time. I expected to be discharged at that time. When I think about it now, it comes back to me. We didn’t even finish the airfields.
TS: The airfields in France?
WB: In France. I didn’t think we needed to be doing that. The rumor keeps going around when you hear these things but they said, “No, you’re going to go. Something is going on. You’ll be leaving, you’re going to Kilmer pretty quick, and from Kilmer you’re going overseas.”
TS: When did you first find out that you were indeed going to be shipped overseas?
WB: When I went to Camp Kilmer. We thought we were going to be discharged from McDill Field and stay with the Army maybe, and go on back to St. Louis and be discharged out at Jefferson Barracks.
TS: How did you react to the news that you were actually going to France?
WB: I didn’t react too much, too badly, because I guess I didn’t really know where I was going to be landing when I went to France. When you think of France, all you think about is Marseilles and the big cities. We were in Marseilles. I went there. I didn’t think we were going to be going there. I just assumed that the war was over with V-J Day. I had no idea we were going to Kilmer and then overseas.
TS: What kind of emotional response did you have? Were you happy to be going overseas?
WB: No, I wouldn’t say that. I wasn’t happy, I just figured it would be another chapter. I would see something I hadn’t seen. The worst feeling I got was when I found out we were going over in Liberty ships. That didn’t strike home at all. You hear about those. I’d seen them, too, pictures of them, but I had no idea that I was going to go on the big boat. When I found out that I was going to be on a Liberty ship I didn’t think too much of that. It was bad.
TS: Do you remember the trip across the Atlantic?
WB: Oh, yes. [Chuckles]
[Tape interruption]
TS: What can you say about that trip across the Atlantic?
WB: In the first place, it was rough.
TS: This is the Atlantic in November.
WB: It was rough. There were several of them in the convoy. That was one thing, you didn’t have to worry about too much anyway was being attacked.
TS: At this point the war was over.
WB: Right. There wasn’t anybody to attack you. Steady. It was really rough and the food . . . you could eat it, but you had to stand up. Every meal you would stand up.
TS: You stood up to eat?
WB: Can’t sit down and eat. Because it would go right to your stomach and you could possibly get sick.
TS: That’s why they did it?
WB: They said your food would digest better.
TS: If you stand up?
WB: Yes. And you had to stand up every meal. And I saw so many guys that didn’t do it getting seasick. When you lay in your cot at night to sleep you just continually continue to move. Then you had to have heavy clothes all the time. No showers unless you liked cold showers. You had to fall out just like you were in a barracks or something. There was as much military science on here as they could just to keep you not forgetting where you were, I guess. It was a rough trip.
TS: So rough seas, cold, cramped and not good food.
WB: Food was not very good.
TS: Sounds like a pretty miserable trip.
WB: Pretty miserable trip, yes. And the thing about it, you had to come back home.
TS: That’s right. In April 1946 you came back again.
WB: We came back the same way, but it wasn’t as rough coming back as it was going over. The seas weren’t as rough, and that made it better right away. Nobody was even complaining about where we were going to embark. They just wanted to get off of that ship.
TS: On the way over, you mean?
WB: On the way over, yes. They didn’t care where we were going.
TS: You docked at the city of Istres, France?
WB: [spelling] I-S-T-R-E-S.
TS: Is that on the Atlantic or the Mediterranean coast?
WB: It’s on the Mediterranean.
TS: Down near Marseilles?
WB: Yes. Near Marseilles, because I went to Marseilles. That was one of the cities we visited in. Istres was just a place [there was an Army Air Corps base at Istres; numerous planes were returned to the USA through this base, which was a sort of collection point]. There wasn’t anything really there. We got off and got on trucks, big trucks, the trucks they haul you in. To Marseilles. That’s where we went. And I went to Marseilles. When we finally reached the camp where we were going to be stationed, do the work on this airfield, when you did get to go anywhere, that’s where we went. To Marseilles.
TS: This airfield. Was this something that had already been started, or were you starting from scratch?
WB: No, it had been started. Somebody had been there working. The [German] POWs were already there when we got there.
TS: This is I think curious. The war had been over for close to six months and you still had these Germans there.
WB: Yes. They still had German POWs there. They were at this airfield area. They weren’t right on the airfield itself but on the base. You’d go up the street or something like that. They had a barracks like, an old building really. It was a really old building. They put cots and things in them. The POWs stayed by themselves. They didn’t stay where we stayed, but there was enough of them to do the work. I don’t know what the count was, but they did pretty much all the manual labor.
TS: They were fed in town?
WB: Oh, sure, they ate right there. A lot of them spoke a little English. They picked up a few words, so you could talk to them. They knew what you were talking about. But they were there, they were there when we got there, and they were there when we left.
TS: Is that right?
WB: Yes.
TS: So April 1946, these guys were still hanging around there?
WB: Still hanging around. I guess they were waiting for somebody to come and get them and take them wherever they were going to take them. I don’t know where they actually ended up. This was in France. I don’t know what they did with the POWs there.
TS: One thing, at least they got room and board out of the deal.
WB: They got room and board, just like we did. They had the cooks and everything. They had mess hall just like we did. Three meals a day, morning, noon and night.
TS: How many American troops were stationed at this facility where you were?
WB: At the airfield?
TS: Yes.
WB: Oh, my gosh. I can’t even begin . . . Like I say, they were other places, too. In my group working on this particular airfield it was just our company. It wasn’t everybody that went over there. They were other places, other airfields, I guess. Our company from McDill . . . I don’t know how to determine the number of people in the company . . . three or four squads in a platoon. I don’t know how many squads, I can’t say. It was quite a bit. Quite a few guys, because they were still operating all this equipment.
TS: Is that what you were doing? You were basically doing construction of this airfield?
WB: I was just still a foreman. That was the primary thing, to build this airfield. Complete it.
TS: Were planes landing on it anywhere?
WB: Not when we were working on it. This is one they had started. You could see where they started. You could see stuff laying down. You had a lot of ground work to do yet. The heavy equipment, tractors and graders and everything, but planes weren’t landing yet. We were just in the process of building it. The landing field had to be pretty long for the planes to even come in.
TS: You never saw any planes there?
WB: We never saw any coming in for a landing. They just abolished the project at that time when we came back. “We’re not going to finish it, just get back out of there and back overseas.”
TS: Did you work regular daytime hours? Is that what guys were doing?
WB: Yes, daytime. It wasn’t night or anything. There wasn’t any time limit or anything that they had to finish it by a certain time of the month or something. We just worked when we got through with breakfast. Went out to the airfield. Whoever was in charge of the POWs marched them out there. Our guys went out and got in the machines and started working. Break off at noon for lunch. After that work and stop for dinner. That was it.
TS: Was there a sense of military discipline still with the war being over?
WB: Yes, it was strictly military. Yes. That’s what I saw; they had white officers around the area. I don’t know where their quarters were. We had white officers. The white officers from McDill, they came right along with us. It was still strictly military. There wasn’t any civilian project at all; it was strictly military.
The POWs were assigned to this airfield, but I suppose somebody had to be there before we got there. I suppose the Army was just working with whoever was there before, so they just kept them there until we came in. They didn’t have the freedom of going into town or anything like that. They had to go back to their barracks when the day was over. They were still POWs.
TS: What did you make of these Germans? Because the war was over.
WB: I didn’t hate them. We talked to them, we listened to them. They seemed to be just as glad as we were that the war was over. They wanted to go to their homes too, I guess. I didn’t feel any ill toward the POWs because they seemed to be just doing their job, too. They had a job to do and did it and they didn’t . . . There wasn’t any friction between us and them. In fact, they seemed to be real friendly.
I had some contact with POWs in Greensboro, too. They were there doing menial work and construction work too, but they had the POWs doing it. But we weren’t as close to them as we were over there. Right with them you know, they were right there where we were. They were doing the same work we were doing. They weren’t operating equipment, but they were doing all the stuff that was necessary. Carrying fuel to them, doing stuff that you do by hand. Stuff like that. They worked right along with us. They quit when we quit.
TS: They had their own quarters, you said?
WB: Had their own quarters. In the morning they’d fall out on their own. I guess they had some of their own people over them. They still had the officers overseeing the whole thing. They didn’t seem to be . . . and there weren’t any problems that they had things happening to them that they didn’t get treated right. They seemed to accept the fact that they were POWs. They were just a group like we were. They talked about going back home. We had artists and musicians and everything.
TS: Being near Marseilles, Wilbert, how often did you get to Marseilles?
WB: Not too often, not too often. You had to walk quite a while. You had to walk quite a bit to get to where you were going. We might have been on a train coming out when we first got into France. I remember going past buildings but I don’t think [unclear], after Marseilles we got on the truck to the airfield. We were on a train to Marseilles, the main city. We were there a couple times. We didn’t go to anybody’s house. The city was pretty well . . . spots were pretty well bombed out. Not a whole lot of activity going on. A lot of bicycles.
TS: You spent almost six months in France. How much contact did you have with French civilians?
WB: Not too much. As I say, the only city we had was near Marseilles. I couldn’t go into Paris. I didn’t have too much contact with the civilians. They had civilians come out by the airfield selling stuff. They would sell bread and wine on their bicycles. They did that, but they were speaking French. They didn’t stay around. They didn’t hang around too long. If we were going to buy something, Marseilles was the only one and there wasn’t a whole lot of . . . There was one reason I didn’t know too much about it, because I couldn’t speak French that well anyway. They didn’t speak too much English in the cities like that unless they were located near your camp. Then they seemed to pick it up. But we didn’t have too much contact with the French.
TS: If you didn’t get to town, and I guess other guys didn’t get to town either, how did people spend their free time in the evenings and weekends?
WB: In the first place, we had pool tables, and they had ping-pong tables and some of them just took a walk. To the town.
TS: So almost in the middle of nowhere, it sounds like.
WB: It really was. It was because of the space. The airfield. You would have to get too close to it. This is why they put it there. There weren’t any homes or buildings or cities or anything, just space. We had a rec[reation] room with a few things in it, but it wasn’t really overcrowded with things to do. Play cards and something like that.
TS: How much drinking went on in a place like this?
WB: Not a heck of a lot. Some. Only what they could get when they went to buy wine or something. There wasn’t a whole lot of it. It wasn’t that comfortable. We had cots to sleep on but you had to build your own fire. There was no furnace or anything supplying heat to the building. You had to build your own fire. And the showers were mostly cold.
TS: And you were there over the wintertime, too.
WB: Yes. And the showers had cold water. You tried to make the water warm making fires, and they had a homemade system where they siphoned water off and it came down, but you just stood under it and when it ran out that was it. You took your towel with you and you just dried off as quick as you could. You weren’t out in the open. But my gosh! Weren’t too many showers taken!
TS: When you were in the service, when you were in Greensboro or Tampa or overseas, how did you stay in touch with your family and loved ones back home?
WB: Letters, everything was letters. That’s why I called when I was in the States. From overseas it was letters. You could write letters. They had mail pickup and mail coming in, too, coming in once in a while. Had mail call. I wrote home to mom and dad.
TS: Were you a regular letter writer?
WB: No. I’d say I wrote pretty much. I wrote at least every two or three weeks. A lot of times I would choose just to call instead of writing a letter.
TS: Did you get more mail than you sent?
WB: Yes. I should have written more, really. But I didn’t.
TS: How important was it to you to get mail when you were in the service?
WB: Real important. That’s what stayed. You want to get it but you don’t feel like writing too much. It’s real important. There’s just something about reading a letter. You can visualize people, see what they’re doing, what they’re talking about. It was real important. I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends I used to write. A couple of them in Missouri and a couple of them I had when I was in school in Lincoln. But after a while you start to lose contact.
TS: When you’re far away?
WB: I wrote home a lot. Once in a while you’d get a letter from somebody that you didn’t expect. Get the address from mom or something and you’d answer. Say, “Hi, I got your letter,” or something. It was something. When you were in basic training and some of these places during the war in the service, in the camps, you’d be too tired to write. You didn’t get much sack time in the camps. And you had to get up early. Five, five-thirty. You’ve got to get up, can’t lay there and say, “I’ll wait a while.” You get up. You don’t fool around too much. Once you get through with supper you might go somewhere and do something, to the rec room or the PX or something like that. Eleven o’clock, you better be sleeping.
TS: When you were in Greensboro or Tampa or overseas, how closely did you follow the war, the progress of the war in Europe or the Pacific?
WB: Pretty well. There were always newspapers and radio. They had newspapers in the camp, on the base, and I remember especially at McDill a fellow that I knew from St. Louis he was a great fan of wanting to know what was going on in the war. He’d buy a newspaper almost every day. It was good reading about things. Sometimes you read what you don’t really know about but you read about it. We kept up with the war pretty good. I did at least. There was no lack of having the opportunity to do it because there were always newspapers. And radios, too.
TS: So you were someone—you’d say you followed things pretty closely?
WB: Yes. I tried to follow it. Especially the reading part of it. I didn’t have my own personal radio. I followed it pretty closely especially when . . . Usually you would hear over the radio about some campaign, big campaign just finished or going on. Then you’d get a chance to read about it in more detail and get a little bit more about it when you read about it.
TS: Your brother was in Europe, right?
WB: Yes, he was in Europe.
TS: When he was in the service, how closely did you two stay in contact with each other?
WB: Not too close. Not too much. I didn’t hear from him. Very seldom. He was the one who stayed in contact with home. We didn’t write too much because where he was, I don’t know. He didn’t have the opportunity. He was in the combat zone. He probably didn’t have a whole lot of time to write. I was moving around from place to place. I’d have his address a lot. He wrote sometimes but not too much. He sent stuff home and I’d get a letter from home with what he said.
TS: Through your folks?
WB: Yes.
TS: Wilbert, you got back to the States in April of 1946, and were discharged pretty much right away.
WB: Yes. I was just moving around. I think it was just a matter of doing the things that you hadn’t been used to doing for a while.
TS: I wanted to ask, what was your initial reaction to suddenly being a civilian again?
WB: I liked the idea of being a civilian again, it was good. The problem was: now you’re out of the service. What are you going to do? Which way are you going to go? I started to go back to Lincoln again, but I think I was [unclear]. I shouldn’t have had that attitude but I think I was a little teed off at not being able to graduate. And being that close to graduation. I just . . . it really was a major thing in my mind at that time. I didn’t have to go back and finish up.
TS: You got a diploma from there, right?
WB: They sent it home, to my folks. I got it. Even when I looked at it I got a funny feeling.
TS: Funny good or funny bad?
WB: It was disappointment, really. Disappointment. It was a good feeling that I had it, that I got it. It was real, all the seals and signatures on it. I just felt bad about the idea that I didn’t get to march along with the class to pick it up, and that was one of the big things when you’re going to school. You go through four years and you figure, “Now I can walk up here and get this diploma.”
TS: And then that was taken away from you.
WB: Have no chance to get that. That was kind of . . . But I got over it. I got over it. I knew it was something that . . . I realized it was no fault of my own. If I had done something that kept me from going to do it that that would be bad, but it was no fault of mine. I wasn’t the only one; they took all of the seniors. It wasn’t just me. I guess everyone had their own thoughts about it.
TS: When you got out of the service in Missouri you spent some time there, in Des Moines, and then you ended up here in St. Paul. How would you explain your moving around in 1946?
WB: Just the fact that I was restless, I guess. I guess I didn’t really have a plan where I was going to end up. I was going to go to California when I left Minnesota, but I just never got that far. For some reason I didn’t go to California. I never did do it. I think I didn’t do it because at that time I really didn’t have any close relationships in California.
TS: And you did here in St. Paul?
WB: In St. Paul, [in] Missouri, and [in] Des Moines. And it may have been the best thing that I didn’t, because I would have really been on my own then.
TS: When you were still in the service, how much time did you spend thinking about, “What am I going to do when this is over?”
WB: Not too much, because I had no idea at all what was going to happen, so I didn’t spend a whole lot of time wondering what I was going to do. I had resigned myself to the fact that I’m in the Army now. I’m going to try and do what I can here. One thing I did in the Army is I put in an application to be an Air Force pilot. But I didn’t make the physical. I had a hearing problem and something else. They sent me a letter back saying you could go in the Air Force, but you wouldn’t get into pilot training. That’s what I wanted to do. I guess I was kind of fascinated about the Tuskegee Air School. I was rather fascinated, so I put in for it. They said you could be in the Air Force.
TS: You’d be ground crew or something, wouldn’t you?
WB: I could go in the Air Force and do something else. Maybe get into administration or—I didn’t type that well, so I couldn’t do something like that. That didn’t work out so I didn’t get to go to my air dreams.
TS: When you were out of the service in April 1946, did you use any of the so-called 52-20 benefits, the unemployment benefits for discharged soldiers [which provided $20 per week for up to 52 weeks]?
WB: The only time I took the benefits, I took the—they had a program where you could draw so much money for a certain length of time [refers to the 52-20 benefits]. I got back and I didn’t do much of anything. I got back in the service as soon as I got out.
I joined the Reserves as soon as I got out, for three years. It was tight, but still not steady completely. So I got the idea—they told me when I got discharged, “If you are discharged and have to come back in the service,” they told me, “if you get drafted again you come back as a private.”
TS: So you stayed in the Reserves?
WB: Right.
TS: And you got some money per month for that then?
WB: No, not from that. Some other kind of thing that they had. If you were still . . . that was after I got out of the Reserves completely. There was some other kind of program. It didn’t last long but it was supposed to be to help you get started. It wasn’t a whole lot of money either.
TS: That was after the Reserves.
WB: After Reserves. The only reason I joined the Reserves was because they said, if they call you back and you [are] back you’ll still be a sergeant. I was keeping my rank.
TS: That would be good.
WB: Yes. To keep my rank if I got called back again. I said to myself, “I’ll do it for three years.”
TS: In 1949 you let your Reserves go?
WB: Yes. They sent me a discharge, regular discharge from the Reserves. That was three years.
TS: You did settle in St. Paul and stayed here. You got married in 1947. Did you get married here in St. Paul?
WB: No. I went to Greensboro. She was still at Greensboro. Got married June 7, 1947.
TS: And then you moved up here, both of you?
WB: I was up here.
TS: You were already here, right, since 1946.
WB: I was already here and I had an apartment. I guess I had decided more or less to stay here. We got married in 1947. We went home to see mom and dad and came back here. That was in Greensboro. She had graduated.
TS: Now when you were living here in St. Paul, you said you had an apartment by that time?
WB: Yes. I had the apartment.
TS: How hard was it to find an apartment here in St Paul in 1946?
WB: It was real tough. You couldn’t find apartments available. I don’t know if it was segregation. [Unclear] up here at that time. Some of them [rents] were just so high . . . The first apartment I had wasn’t a real apartment building, it was a house. There were people making apartments out of their homes. Upstairs, put a kitchen up there and everything. That’s what I had.
TS: So the rent was pretty high, too.
WB: Yes, the rent was high. Because I think they realized there were a lot of people getting out of service, using their service money a lot to get apartments, and there weren’t a whole lot. There wasn’t such a thing as black apartments, not that I remember. I couldn’t find any. Just homes. People had homes. I had a house right next to where I had an apartment that went up for sale. When we came back up here we just stayed in this place for a few weeks and we decided to buy a house.
TS: And where was the house?
WB: Right next door to the place where I was staying. Carroll Avenue [in St Paul], 912 Carroll.
[Tape interruption]
WB: I bought the house. The first house I ever bought.
TS: Wilbert, how did your wife like St. Paul?
WB: She was kind of uneasy about it in the beginning because she was born and raised in Greensboro. She finally got so she liked it pretty well but she missed her family, especially the school kids that she knew. All of them were still around that area. Finally she got so she accepted it pretty well. I think she started liking work. Put in for a job at school, she passed the test and everything. They put her on as a sub teacher. She loved that.
TS: Here in St. Paul?
WB: Yes. She went to almost every elementary school in the city at one time or another.
TS: When you think back yourself to 1946, 1947, even 1948, what was the hardest thing for you readjusting to being a civilian?
WB: When I came back home?
TS: Yes. When you were back in the States and you got discharged. What was the hardest thing?
WB: The hardest thing to adjust to was the idea of being on your own. The first time I was actually on my own, except being around school like that. You were really on your own trying to adjust to where you were going to live. What you were going to do. I had an adjustment even when we got married. I don’t know if I was ready to get married or not. Adjustment to that. You have to take a lot of readjustment from what I had in the service. I was comfortable in the service, really, when I got stationed because I knew what was going on, what I had to do. I had a job to do and I did it. It wasn’t so bad.
TS: You liked the structure of the military?
WB: I liked the structure of the military except the segregation part of it. I liked the structure of being able to do something and being in charge of the recruits and people like that. I liked that part of it. Then I shouldn’t have been too surprised about the segregation because it had been with me all my life. But the idea of being pushed right in the middle of it and being a part of it makes a difference. Makes it different when you’re the subject yourself. You knew you were doing it. You just more or less followed the group. You knew where you could go and couldn’t go. But when you’re by yourself and then what you were in there for, and then you still can’t do things that you should be able to do, well . . .
TS: That’s very perceptive.
WB: That is.
TS: Yes. That’s interesting.
WB: It’s never easy but it’s not too bad when you’re with a lot of other people going through it in your city, in your hometown or something, because . . . you know. You know. It’s something that’s just part of your life. But after you get out and you get on your own, my gosh, am I still be able to . . . And then you think about going back into the Army. But I did think about which way I was going to go and how it was going to turn out. I really didn’t know a lot of people up here either. I knew my aunt and the friends she had. But I didn’t know a lot of kids up here. I finally did start knowing them. I found some of them. You’d be surprised. You always seem to find somebody from your home state living up here and you don’t even know it.
It was kind of tough but I was more or less an introvert anyway. I was never much of an extrovert. I didn’t do a whole lot of socializing. I’ve gone to some of the clubs here. I used to belong to the Enlisted Club. I could get along doing things just on my own. We went to dances, joined clubs and all that. As far as having to do something all the time, that didn’t affect me too much.
TS: You didn’t find the military all that difficult to adjust to then?
WB: Not to adjust to. The only thing that was difficult about it was when you got off of your base and started mixing into the community. It was difficult there a lot of times, but on the base it was . . . I think that’s why I really liked my CMTC school camp that I went to. I had two years of that, like I said, at Fort Riley, Kansas. That was a permanent base for years. So that was strictly military and discipline. I got along pretty well, I didn’t mind it. Then I was a Boy Scout and all that stuff. I like those kind of things. It wasn’t difficult for me. I didn’t hate the Army when I went into it. It wasn’t something I had chosen at that particular time, but I got along with it pretty well.
TS: When you think back to the war and you were in the Army for a number of years during the war, what did the war mean to you personally at the time? What was it all about?
WB: I think that’s one of the things that you think about more or less after, because the fact is that I didn’t see any kind of what you call war. It didn’t really affect me like it probably would have if I had been overseas in a combat zone or something. I just found the war, where I was, just another job to do while the war was going on.
TS: Almost somewhere else.
WB: Yes. The war was somewhere else and I was doing things because of the war but it wasn’t affecting me personally at all. So I didn’t really have any kind of feeling that I was really in the war even though I was in the service.
TS: That’s interesting.
WB: I didn’t think I was part of the war, because how many times did I have to dodge bullets and do those kind of things? But you were in the Army. You knew that it was happening. You knew that some of your friends were getting killed. You knew they were having a tough time after they get out. You seem to either think that you were spared, that kind of stuff, or it just wasn’t meant to be for you, or what. I’m sure I would have had a different outlook on things if I had gone overseas right away after my basic training, instead of going to a basic training camp like I did. If I had finished my basic like most of them did and be gone, if I went over to the shooting war, then it would have been a whole different story.
TS: Very different. Finally, Wilbert, what’s the most important way that the war changed your life?
WB: I guess the only real important thing, one of the important things that it changed, was the idea that there are a whole lot of different people in the world than you, than your type of people. You see people of different of races. More so now. You see different countries that you probably would never see again otherwise. Just the idea, I think it expanded my horizons, so to speak, a little bit more than I would have if there hadn’t been a war. I wouldn’t have gone to the places that I had.
TS: You wouldn’t have been in Greensboro or France for sure.
WB: I wouldn’t have been in either one of them. I would have been in areas around my state, wherever I was. I doubt if I would have gone overseas. It changed my philosophy of being sure that there were so many other places and people that you could . . . the world and that they aren’t like you. They’re going to be different from you, they’re going to think different than you. And I found out people even talk different from you. It was an education, no doubt about that. It was an education and I’m not sorry that I did it. I think about it sometimes. Just some of the places I’ve been to because I was in service. I went to a lot of places I wouldn’t have even thought about going to. I think it helped my outlook on life as a whole. I did think I was lucky. I knew that. I didn’t get hurt, I didn’t have any problems being in the Army, and I didn’t have any wounds or anything to worry about. All you have to do is go out to the Vets Hospital and see some of those people. You realize then how lucky you are.
TS: You had a very different experience.
WB: Right. That’s the reason I try to give to some of those organizations every once in a while because a lot of them, you know what they went through. And you get bombarded with pledges and stuff to give to them every year. I don’t know where they get your name but they get it.
TS: It’s amazing.
WB: It’s amazing. But I think I . . . I can’t say I enjoyed being there but I think I accepted it as being just another part of my life, one which was not bad. I don’t hate the fact that I went in. Maybe it’s because my dad was an old soldier himself too. He was a soldier. I never heard him talk ill about the Army. He was in for a long time. Maybe that kind of brought down for me that he didn’t have it too bad. He kind of liked it. The only thing I hate is that my brother got so messed up. He got lost and didn’t know where he was.
TS: Mr. Bartlett, let me thank you for this interview today.