Transcript: Carl Platou Oral History Interview

Conducted by Douglas Bekke, July 13, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota

DB = Douglas Bekke
CP = Carl Platou

DB: I am interviewing Carl Platou on July 13, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr. Platou, please give me your full name.

CP: My name is Carl Nicolai Platou.

DB: And your birth date?

CP: November 10, 1923.

DB: And your birthplace?

CP: Bayridge, Brooklyn, New York. Mother and Dad had just arrived from Norway and my brother and I were both born in the Norwegian Lutheran Hospital in Bayridge. I was born in 1923 and he in 1922.

DB: And can you tell us a little more about your parents? I think you said that they met and married in Norway, and came over here together.

CP: That’s correct. They met and married in Norway and came over as first generation immigrants. Dad spent his time mostly on the ocean as a seaman. That’s why we lived in Bayridge. Then we moved to Philadelphia where Harald and I actually grew up through junior high school and high school.

DB: I have a little bit of a question for you. Your name isn’t typically Norwegian.

CP: No.

DB: Now we think that someone coming from Norway (or any other place) has always been there, and that’s where they come from. But people actually moved around all the time. Does your family have a different ethnic background?

CP: Yes. As a matter of fact, you raise an interesting point. My family traces back to 1528 in Norway. At that time the French came up from Normandy into Norway and that’s really where the name derives. There was actually a minister by the name of Platou, and we have a family history at home that goes way back to 1528. They’ve been there ever since. It’s a large family back in Norway. As a matter of fact, it’s a family of considerable accomplishment. A wonderful family. My wife and I and my kids have had the joy of visiting Norway. It’s a beautiful country, with wonderful people.

DB: You said your father was a seaman.

CP: Yes. He was. And then he came ashore when his father had a terrible accident and my dad had to take over the family business. Then, of course, the Depression came along, and that was a very, very strenuous and terrible time.

DB: We’ll get back to the Depression in a little while. When your father came to this country, how was he employed? Was he again employed as a seaman?

CP: Yes. He was.

DB: Was that something related to his father’s company?

CP: Yes. It was. He did not go to what they call high school. He went to what they call Norwegian Nautical School. That’s where young boys from the age of sixteen to about twenty would go to sea and learn all about seamanship, leadership, and do their homework for the classes on board ship. It was the Norwegian Nautical School for teaching young people about the ocean.

DB: And your mother was from the same town in Norway?

CP: Yes. Mother was from a town called Hamar, and we’ve been back there and visited the family home a number of times. It’s just north of Oslo, about a hundred miles. It is a beautiful little town.

DB: And what was your mother’s name?

CP: Anna Sophia Arveschoug. A dear, dear lady. Marvelous lady. She tragically died at the age of forty-four of cancer.

DB: And what was her educational background?

CP: High school. Neither of them had a college background.

DB: Do you know how your parents met?

CP: I do not really know how they met. But I know it was a short romance. They fell in love and decided to come to the United States. They came on two separate ships about a year apart from one another. They settled in Brooklyn.

DB: What was the connection with your grandfather’s business and your father’s career as a seaman?

CP: My grandfather owned a number of ships and he was at one time very prominent. In those days owning a ship was a very wonderful experience. A wonderful thing, because of the shipping trade. He had a big business based in Brooklyn. Bayridge is a subsection of Brooklyn where many Norwegians live. It’s a little ghetto of Norwegians.

DB: As you were growing up, did your parents talk about their experiences in Norway a lot? You obviously know a lot about it.

CP: It’s interesting. I remember being about six years of age, and my mother and Harald and I went to Norway for a year to visit with grandparents. My father did not go. When we came back I said, “Why don’t we speak Norwegian at home?” Because my mother and dad never would. They would only speak English because they said we are Americans now. So I really cannot speak Norwegian. I did that year when I was six years of age in Norway, of course. But we never kept it up at home because all of the immigrants felt that as Americans they should not use their native language.

DB: So they came here with the intention of staying.

CP: Oh, indeed. Indeed. Yes.

DB: But your family took a great deal of pride in their Norwegian heritage?

CP: Oh, indeed. Very, very much.

DB: And that was an important part of your upbringing?

CP: Yes. And there’s a Norwegian flag right over there, here in my office.

DB: You had one brother.

CP: One brother, Harald.

DB: And no sisters.

CP: No sisters.

DB: How would you describe your economic situation when you were growing up? Now we’re not into the Depression yet. We’ll get into that. We’ll let it evolve into that. But during your early years, growing up. I realize you were pretty young then.

CP: We rented. We did not own a home. We lived mostly in Philadelphia. It was a nice, suburban neighborhood. We went to a very good school called Haverford. Both Harald and I were very much involved in athletics and leadership in high school and junior high school. I was president of my class during my freshman, sophomore and junior years in high school. We moved during my senior year, so I wasn’t president. We really had a very fine upbringing.

DB: And there were lots of kids in your neighborhood when you were growing up?

CP: Lots of kids, and we used to play kick the can in the street.

DB: Can you describe the game?

CP: Kick the can was . . . out in the middle of the street you’d have a circle and have a little can in there and everybody would go and hide except the person who was supposed to find the hidden ones. Then whoever got to kick the can over first, the second had to go seek the others. We used to play every night after dinner out in the street. It wasn’t a very costly game. Then my brother was very good at track so we used to have track meets in our backyard.

DB: Just informally organized?

CP: Informally organized. Yes. Everybody did everything by themselves.

DB: And of course not much traffic in the street so you could play in the street.

CP: No. There wasn’t much traffic. As a matter of fact, any family that had two cars was considered ultra-wealthy. Nobody had two cars. There would be a single-car garage somewhere out in the back.

DB: Your family had one car?

CP: We had one car.

DB: And did you do things with the car? Take little side trips on the weekends or was it strictly for going to work?

CP: Every Sunday after dinner we would take a trip. We would drive through the countryside and buy chicken because chicken was so cheap. And corn. That was the family outing.

DB: You’d buy it directly from farmers?

CP: Yes. We never went on vacations. There wasn’t anything like that in those days. We did have a radio. Of course, there was no television.

DB: And your mother was a housewife?

CP: Yes. Mother was a housewife.
DB: How did she keep busy? You didn’t have a refrigerator. I assume you had an icebox.

CP: Yes. We had an icebox. The iceman would come every other day. He would come in through the back door and put in a block of ice.

DB: He just had access to the house?

CP: He just had access to the house.

DB: So no key or anything?

CP: No. He just walked in.

DB: You didn’t have to worry about that.

CP: And social life in those days was very, very modest. Mother and Dad would have some friends. They’d come over sometimes on Friday evening for dinner. But they weren’t much into games or going to parties. I can’t remember them going to parties at all, as a matter of fact. There was church on Sunday. We went to a Lutheran church. Being Norwegian, that was part of it. We didn’t go to games as such. It would be very infrequent that we’d go see a professional baseball game. Very infrequent. Hardly ever. We went to just a few professional football games in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Eagles. My brother was very good in track, and so we used to go to a thing called the Penn Relays every year. We enjoyed that tremendously.

DB: We’ll get back to the sports again later, but I want to go back to your mother’s experience being a housewife in the 1920s and 1930s and how she occupied herself. Did she spend most of her time cooking and cleaning and washing and was she pretty busy most of the time?

CP: Yes. She was busy. Mother didn’t have much opportunity to do anything else. She didn’t belong to any societies or volunteer groups. There was a paucity of volunteer groups. I can’t think of any, as a matter of fact. Today there are so many volunteer groups. Medical groups and auxiliaries. There was none of that at that time that I can recall.

DB: But she was probably the type of woman who nowadays would have been very involved in a lot of those things?

CP: I would think so. I would think so. She was devoted to her boys and her husband and was a magnificent lady. Just a great lady.

DB: And at the time cooking was something . . . you bought your meals a day or two ahead of time.

CP: That’s correct.
DB: No freezer.

CP: No. No freezer. The grocery store was about four blocks away. We walked over to the grocery store and we carried the bags home every day. It was sort of a daily event. When you think if it today, it was a very modest way of living.

DB: Were you expected to help out in the home?

CP: Yes.

DB: What kind of chores did you have to do?

CP: We had to take care of our room, help clean up a little bit. Do the yard. We had a nice house. It was three bedrooms with a single-car garage and one bathroom upstairs. I think it was quite typical of the time.

DB: When you say do the yard, did you have a push lawn mower?

CP: Yes, a push lawn mower. Twenty-eight inches wide. It was not automatic. Not power-driven.

DB: You mentioned some of your school activities earlier. You were involved with sports.

CP: Yes. I was on the wrestling team and did quite well. I was on the varsity team from my freshman year on, and I was president of my class. I had a wonderful set of experiences and wonderful friends.

DB: Talk about that experience a little bit. You said you just happened to be elected. Was there a certain amount of politicking involved or was it just that you were popular? What was the experience of that? I imagine this was about 1938?

CP: Yes. It was. I don’t know what to ascribe it to except that I just seemed to be asked to do things and things worked out well. I was an average student. I was not a great student. But I enjoyed it very much and I had a good relationship with all my teachers. I was never in any kind of problem with the principal. [Chuckles]

DB: How big was your class?

CP: It wasn’t too big. It was about a hundred and fifty kids. It was a small school. It was just one of those things that you are asked to do.

DB: Did you take pride in that? Did you see it as an accomplishment?

CP: Oh, yes. I enjoyed it very much. But I can’t remember that we really ever campaigned or anything of that sort. I was in the National Honor Society as was my brother Harald. He was a better student than I was. We had many friends. Boy friends and girl friends. We didn’t pair off so much, a boy and a girl. We’d be in a group. There would be . . . every Friday and Saturday night we’d be in somebody’s home down in the amusement room, if they had one. Dancing and having root beer and ice cream floats. Nobody drank beer or anything like that. Didn’t even know what drugs were. It was a very, very healthy set of relationships and friendships.

DB: A more innocent time, maybe.

CP: A very innocent time. It really was. It was when Frank Sinatra started. “I’ll Never Smile Again” was his first song.

DB: Were there organized dances at the school?

CP: Yes. There were a lot of organized dances at school. As a matter of fact, there were dances even at lunchtime at school. There were parties at school and then at private homes on occasion. And then we’d all go to football games, the high school games. We also went to baseball games and high school track. But it was not like today where there are so many professional and collegiate games.

DB: What about income? Did you work?

CP: Yes, I did. I worked every Saturday. I made a dollar a day delivering groceries for the local grocery store.

DB: Starting at about what age?

CP: I did that from thirteen on. I had a wagon and I’d load up that wagon with bags of groceries and deliver them. Of course, the sphere was only maybe ten blocks. Maybe less than that. About six or eight blocks. Women would call in the morning for an order. Then I’d put the order together and put it in a paper bag. It was a red wagon. Then as I’d begin to deliver things, I could get my right knee in the wagon and then sort of scoot along fast. I would always buy a twenty-cent bag of chocolate wafers that Harald and I would eat that Saturday night by ourselves. We’d eat about twenty wafers. It was delicious.

DB: That’s a big part of your income.

CP: That was our expenditure.

DB: When you delivered groceries did the people ever tip you?

CP: Yes. A little bit. A nickel or a dime. Very small.

DB: Maybe enough to buy your bag of wafers?

CP: Yes. That was about it.
DB: But the dollar that you received from the store was enough money to do things with?

CP: Yes, it was. Buy ice cream cones and some Pepsi Cola and things like that. But it was nothing much.

DB: And that continued through high school?

CP: Through high school. And then in my sophomore and junior year in high school I worked in a hotel in Wildwood, New Jersey, called the Seaside Hotel. It was about fifty rooms. Owned by an old Swedish couple. Magnificent people. I was a night clerk and I registered people at night. I was there for twelve hours. I’ll never forget it. The hotel cook was a black lady. She was about five feet two and she probably weighed two hundred pounds. Her name was Corinne and she thought I was nice, so she gave me the key to the locker every night, which was where the ice cream and cakes were. [Chuckles] So I had a feast every night. A big dish. I would sit in the hotel lobby because there would be very few people coming in and going out. I’d do some correspondence on the typewriter and that was about it.

DB: And this is while you were in high school?

CP: I was in high school, during my sophomore and junior years. Then Harald would come down and spend some weeks with me in the hotel. As would Mother. That was extravagant living. That was lovely. I think I made fifty dollars a month. Yes. I think it was fifty dollars a month.

DB: And that was pretty good money?

CP: Oh, yes.

DB: Did they give you room and board in the hotel then?

CP: They gave me room and board in the hotel. And the second year I was a day clerk, which was a big step up. I made seventy-five dollars a month.

DB: How did you get that job? How did you find out about it?

CP: I don’t recall. It must have been some friend who told me, but I really do not recall.

DB: Probably word of mouth rather than answering an ad or something like that.

CP: Yes. It was about eighty miles from Philadelphia.

DB: And was there a point when your income was expected to supplement the family’s income?

CP: Oh, yes. Whenever I made any money I’d send some home. Because those days were the Depression days.

DB: You mentioned church, that you were involved with a Lutheran church. Did that provide a source of social activities for you as well as spiritual?

CP: A little bit. And also some Boy Scout contact. But I wasn’t involved that much. Our minister was Reverend Nye. I remember one Sunday Harald and I decided to go to church. Mother and Dad didn’t go to church very much. So after Sunday School we went to church and they brought a plate around for offerings. I had a dollar bill and I had to put something in and I took out change. [Chuckles] I think I took out a dollar and twenty-five cents. Reverend Nye always told that story—he thought that was pretty good.

DB: You mentioned you weren’t too involved in Scouts. A lot of the men that I’ve talked to in your generation were very involved in Scouts.

CP: Very involved. Yes.

DB: So within your community was that an important social outlet for a lot of the boys?

CP: Yes. A lot of the boys did get involved with Scouts, but for some reason or other we did not. I don’t know exactly why we didn’t.

DB: Did the church organize events for young people?

CP: Yes. A lot of events. The church was very active. Those were hard days financially, and so the church took a key part in getting the youth involved. It was wonderful.

DB: And were there a lot of adults who volunteered at the church and helped out, helped with the programs?

CP: Yes. There were. But my mother and father were not involved in that. I never understood exactly why, but I think they were just too depressed in their finances to be able to do other things.

DB: Had they been more involved with those sorts of things before the Depression?

CP: Not too much. It just wasn’t the sort of style for us.

DB: In 1929, the Great Depression hit, and that affected your family severely.

CP: Yes. Horribly.

DB: How conscious of this were you as a young man? Now you were only about six or seven years old when the Depression hit, but you grew up with it. I know you were very young at the time, but do you remember how things changed in your family and your home?

CP: I can remember distinctly in Philadelphia seeing a green panel truck park in front of our house. The man got out with a long, long pole. He opened a cap by the sidewalk, which controlled the water coming into the house. He put that long pole down there and turned it and shut off the water.

DB: Into your home.

CP: Mother and Dad didn’t have the money to pay for the water bill. And we had to go to the Shell Gas Station a block away to go to the bathroom. I never heard Mother and Dad ever talk about how terrible it was. The absence of money. They never complained. We always had a little bit to eat, but not much. An awful lot of Jell-O and chicken and things like that. But Mother had to hock her wedding ring in the pawnshop. It is hard to believe. The car was confiscated. Dad had to take the bus. It got so bad. I remember coming home from school when I was then in ninth grade. I came home from school one afternoon, and there was a red sign nailed up on the front door. It was a cardboard sign, signed by the sheriff. It said, “All belongings of this property are those of the county and the county sheriff,” whose name I forgot, of course. No one had any admittance. So Harald and I went down the street to a friend’s home, a family by the name of Jewett, and my mother and dad were there. They lived there with the Jewetts for a year in an extra bedroom. Harald and I lived next door with a family by the name of Kluge. Lovely people. We lived in the attic of their home. Every morning we would go to school and have something to eat. We would have lunch there.

DB: At school?

CP: Yes. We’d have breakfast and lunch at school.

DB: Was that part of a program?

CP: Yes. They had school breakfast and school lunches. We paid very little. They had breakfast and lunches there, but not dinners. So we’d have dinner with the Jewetts. Then Harald and I would go back to our attic in the Kluge’s house. And that was how it was during those years. But on the other hand, it didn’t seem to . . . I can’t recall that we ever felt terribly depressed. We were so involved in school and doing things. Harald was great in track, and I in wrestling and cross-country, and there were all the functions we had going on. I cannot recall that we sat and cried about it. But for mother to sit alone in somebody else’s house in a little bedroom all day long, that must have been hard.

DB: There was nothing really for her to do. Just sit and think about all these issues.

CP: Nothing for her to do. She just had to evaporate. Get out of Mrs. Jewett’s way. That was terrible. I admire my parents so much. Their fortitude and strength of character. In those days, of course, some people were jumping out of windows and killing themselves because of financial distress. So I guess we just sort of felt that that’s the way it was.

DB: Your father was involved in the shipping business of your grandfather.

CP: Yes.

DB: What exactly happened with that business to cause your economic distress?

CP: That was when we were in Bayridge. Then we moved to Philadelphia, though we first went to Baltimore when I was in the first grade. We were in Baltimore about a year and a half. He was selling cleaning compounds, and he did that in Philadelphia, too. He was selling for a company called Noxon.

DB: Commercial cleaning products?

CP: Commercial cleaning products. Yes.

DB: So he wasn’t involved in shipping?

CP: No. Shipping was down to nothing. And trade was down to nothing. There were no jobs. No ships. My grandfather had three ships. He lost them all. It was very, very hard. Very hard times. But I especially admire the fortitude of my parents and how they never placed upon us deep worries and frustration and anxiety and anger. They never expressed that. I admire them tremendously. I don’t know how I would have gone through that.

DB: How was the situation in your neighborhood? Were other people in a similar economic situation?

CP: Yes. Everybody understood. People were losing jobs and doing the best they could. I never felt any sense of lesser citizenship than anybody else. For our parents, either.

DB: Just to make a comparative note between the eras here, I assume you have grandchildren . . .

CP: Yes.

DB: And you go in their closets and there are racks and racks of clothing. What was in your closet in those days?

CP: I had one fancy jacket that I bought from some money that I made at the Seaside Hotel. I tended to wear that all the time.

DB: Like a sport coat jacket?

CP: Yes. A sport coat. Other than that everything was very meager. We never thought of luxuries.

DB: Two pair of pants, two shirts. A good shirt, a work shirt.

CP: Yes. That’s about it. A pair of shoes you’d wear out, practically.

DB: And when something wore out you wouldn’t always throw it away. Would you get it repaired?

CP: My mother would do a lot of stitching and hemming and knitting stockings. We never threw stockings away. She’d always darn stockings. You put this darning thing on the inside.

DB: Like a ball.

CP: Like a wood ball. Then she’d sew up the holes. And underpants that were wearing out, she would stitch those up. Everything was used; nothing was really discarded. And driving. You wouldn’t drive far on Sundays. You would try and find someplace to get out of the city into the countryside. But not too far, because everything was expensive.

DB: How much was gas in those days? Do you remember?

CP: I don’t recall, but I think a new car was something like $700.

DB: When you’re making a dollar a day, $700 takes a long time to earn.

CP: Oh, yes. Yes. And yet, you know, we led a very full life, my brother and I. We really had good friends and were active. There was no sense of defeatism.

DB: And the activities were essentially free.

CP: Things that you did yourself.

DB: And through school there were free activities.

CP: Yes.

DB: And so there wasn’t, because of your economic distress, there wasn’t a loss of those activities.

CP: No. No.

DB: It wasn’t a situation where you couldn’t participate because you couldn’t afford it.

CP: No. So school was a great leveler and everybody was very . . . everybody was understanding.

DB: Everybody was kind of in the same boat.

CP: Yes.

DB: One thing I hear from people over and over again is the comment that, well, I guess we were really poor but nobody knew it.

CP: Exactly. Exactly. We didn’t know it. We really didn’t know it.

DB: So it was just the situation you were dealing with, and that’s what it was.

CP: Yes. Yes. You know, human nature has fantastic capacity to adjust, and the Depression showed that.

DB: Life around your town. You used public transportation a lot? Was there a good system? Streetcars, buses?

CP: Yes. Streetcars and buses. You didn’t use a car very much. That was mostly for Dad to go to work. And, of course, that was confiscated. He couldn’t pay for the car anymore. That was very difficult.

DB: How did he do his salesman work when he lost the car?

CP: He had to borrow somebody else’s car, or he had to make calls by streetcar and bus.

DB: Were there appliances around your home? I assume when you lost your home you lost all of that. But just in general, when you think about all the gadgets that people have nowadays, did your mother have a wood-burning stove or did she have a gas stove?

CP: She had a gas stove and an electric refrigerator. We had a radio, a vacuum cleaner, and I guess that was about it.

DB: Did people entertain themselves a lot?

CP: Yes. They would sit and talk. There was a lot of conversation in the living room.

DB: Was anyone in your family musical? Did you have any instruments?

CP: No. We didn’t. We did have a piano. We did have a piano, and mother loved to play the piano. She was very good. That was her solace. That piano.

DB: Was that a source of entertainment too, that you’d listen to her or sing along?

CP: Yes. We used to sit and listen to her all the time. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. She played it over and over again. I can remember when that sheriff’s sale took place. Harald and I that night sneaked into the house through a living room window that we knew was unlocked. We each took a table cover which was knitted and mother had brought from Norway. She had two of them. We each have that. That’s the only remnant we have from those days. I have it at home in our family room. I also saved a crystal decanter from Norway.

DB: It must be pretty devastating. You think about people who have a fire in their house and they lose everything, and it was a similar situation for you.

CP: Yes. You lose everything. Including your clothes. We couldn’t get back in the house. Everything went. Everything.

DB: Was it the landlord who had filed a claim?

CP: Yes.

DB: That was his way of recovering . . .

CP: We couldn’t pay the rent. So the whole thing was locked up. When they say sheriff’s sale, they mean sheriff’s sale. Everything was sold.

DB: Did you go back when they had the sale or how did that . . . it must have been pretty painful.

CP: No. It was too painful to go to the house. They didn’t get much for the things.

DB: Were there other forms of entertainment? Movies were available but were they out of reach? Were you able to go to those?

CP: Saturday afternoon movies were very popular and very inexpensive. There was one movie theater in Brookline, which is where we lived outside of Philadelphia. It was about ten blocks away. You always walked. Everywhere you went you walked. Or you could ride your bicycle, of course. There was a lot of bicycle riding. Other entertainment I can’t remember. I do remember going to Bookbinder’s Restaurant in Philadelphia once when we had an uncle, who was a doctor, who came and visited us. He was quite well-to-do. He had a big Lincoln with a trailer behind it. My brother and I were just fond of that. We’d sleep in that trailer. He parked it in front of our house. That was high living. Then he’d take us down to Bookbinder’s, and it was the first time I ever had steak, as I remember.

DB: So it was a kind of a camping trailer that he had behind?

CP: Yes. A big camping trailer. It was quite large. About thirty-two feet. Hooked onto this big Lincoln. That was back in the middle 1930s. He lived in North Dakota. He drove that thing all the way back. He went down to the ocean, down to Ocean City and Wildwood, too. He would park that near the boardwalk. That’s where we all lived. It was sort of crowded but it was very, very enjoyable.

DB: A big adventure.

CP: Big adventure.

DB: Now you said your parents were immigrants. They came here. You had, I think, two uncles who lived in the States.

CP: Yes. I had an uncle who is my dad’s brother. He was a doctor in Valley City, North Dakota. A general practitioner. Then we had some uncles and aunts in Brooklyn. Another uncle there was also a doctor, and was a very prominent surgeon at NYU, New York University Medical Center. We would drive up to Brooklyn on occasion and spend a weekend with them. Then I had an aunt who also lived in Bayridge. She and her husband did very well. So we’d go sometimes spend a weekend with them. I remember that their boys were about our ages. They had a train set down in the basement. A big train set. It was just fascinating. We used to watch that all the time. But we didn’t have that. And importantly, there was also my uncle, Erling Platou, a prominent pediatrician in Minneapolis.

DB: Was it difficult for you or for your parents to have . . .? Your parents had siblings, you had cousins who were doing well, had things and . . .

CP: No. I wasn’t lonesome.

DB: You just kind of accepted that’s just the way it was?

CP: Just accepted the way it was.

DB: For holidays and events you had some relatives around, but they were in other cities and so your family days at Christmas or something were probably very quiet.

CP: Just private family. Yes.

DB: What could you expect to receive on a birthday? What was the celebration for a birthday? For you or your parents. How was the event commemorated?

CP: We’d always have a dinner party. A birthday party and birthday cake. As to gifts, they were very minimal. I remember one year at Christmas Harald and I each got a BB gun. That was absolutely unbelievable. We just couldn’t believe that mom and dad could afford such luxury.

DB: About how old were you at that point?

CP: We were about fourteen, fifteen.

DB: Those were the really tough years of the Depression.

CP: Terrible. Terrible years.

DB: Your parents sacrificed for you then.

CP: Yes, they did. They did. And we also had a stopwatch. That was really elegant as a gift. So when we had our races in the backyard and around the block we’d actually have a stopwatch to do the time. We’d also race around the block on our bicycles to see who could do it the fastest.

DB: Were they used bicycles or new bicycles?

CP: My bicycle was called a Cadillac. Painted blue. It was probably fourth hand from somebody else. But dad painted it a sparkling blue. I remember that little sign on the front, Cadillac. I thought it was the greatest bicycle in the world. It had small wheels. It wasn’t a big one. But it sure was fun.

DB: It got you where you wanted to go.

CP: Yes.

DB: How about Christmas? How was Christmas celebrated in your home?

CP: Christmas at home. We’d go to church every Christmas Eve, of course. And we had Christmas at home with very minimal gifts. A few shirts and a necktie. Some trousers. Minimal things. A book. We didn’t have much.

DB: Did you make gifts?

CP: No, we didn’t. Mother used to make Christmas cards. Sort of block cards. They would say “God Jul,” which is “Merry Christmas” in Norwegian. We’d send out a few Christmas cards to people. But it was limited indeed.

DB: How about national holidays? How were they celebrated when you were growing up? The Fourth of July. Was that a big event?

CP: Oh, yes. The Fourth of July was very important. We’d go out and see the fireworks down at Fairmont Park, Philadelphia. But again, that was a public thing to see. As I think about it in talking with you now, my parents really didn’t have much to do with, and didn’t therefore do much. They couldn’t have a big party, a dinner party for say six or eight couples like we do today. Or a cocktail party. We hadn’t even heard about the term cocktail party. In those days there was no hard liquor in the house. An occasional bottle of port wine, an occasional glass of port wine. Mother and Dad would have it very, very infrequently.

DB: And did you have a lot of freedom as a young man growing up?

CP: Yes.

DB: Kids would just roam around on their own?

CP: Yes.

DB: Nowadays you think about how closely parents watch their children all the time and drive them everywhere.

CP: We didn’t have any of that problem at all. Our parents had great trust in us and vice versa. We’d just tell them where we were going to go.

DB: And you mentioned earlier that the back door was open and the iceman could come in and put a block of ice . . .

CP: Put a block of ice in.

DB: Did you lock your doors in the home then? You were pretty much left open?

CP: At night you would lock the doors. There used to be an ice wagon that came by. A horse-drawn ice wagon. In the summertime we used to love to get to the back of that wagon and pull out chunks of ice. That was a big treat. Then the big change came. The ice wagon had rubber wheels. Instead of clankety clankety clank down the street with those metal rims it had rubber tires and that was really quite something.

DB: And of course it was pulled by horses.

CP: Pulled by horses. Yes.

DB: And that was just the accepted thing. No one thought anything about it.

CP: No. Pulled by horses. Think about how slow that was. How ineffectual. And not too long ago. I remember dad had to fly to Brooklyn for something one day, to New York. He went in a Ford Trimotor airplane in about 1934, and that was the talk of the neighborhood. That he actually flew.

DB: And what talk was there in the family? How did he describe that to you, the experience?

CP: Oh! He thought it was unbelievable. It was a Ford Trimotor, with three big propeller engines. It probably seated fifty people or forty people, something like that. That was quite an event.

DB: Armistice Day. Was that commemorated? Veterans’ Day. November 11th.

CP: Yes. It was.

DB: A parade?

CP: Parades. Veterans recognition. Veterans of World War I, which didn’t seem to have been so far away at that time.

DB: It wasn’t.

CP: No, it wasn’t. And then they had this gigantic veterans’ encampment in Washington to lobby for veterans’ bonuses. Then General MacArthur destroyed those camps and scattered all the veterans back home.

DB: The Bonus Army.

CP: Yes. That was a very unhappy event. People were destitute.

DB: We think now that everybody has a car and they drive. I know with my kids their range of friends is a fifty-mile radius. What was your radius when you were growing up?

CP: As close as you could walk.

DB: Or ride your bike.

CP: Or ride your bike. That’s actually the way it was.

DB: You walked to school.

CP: And then, very importantly, Franklin Roosevelt came in and he gave hope.

DB: Do you remember the fireside chats?

CP: I do. I do indeed. I remember that everybody would listen. And he had a melodious voice and he spoke slowly. He didn’t speak like some people in politics today. Rapidly and harshly and loud. He spoke slowly, in a very measured tone. He made sense, and he started to change things, and people began to think there was a way out of all this. People had lost their savings. There was a rush on the banks and your savings were gone. Your money was gone. Whatever you had.

You’ve got to remember that in those days there was no Social Security. There was no unemployment insurance. If you were fired it was on Friday morning, and you didn’t come in on Monday. Very few people owned their homes and had equity. Most people rented. Therefore when you were fired, you were financially bare. Savings were minimal. Savings were wiped out by the bank crash, by the rush on the banks. So the economic viability of the nation was at zero and families had nothing. You see pictures of the Depression—men standing in line and women in soup lines with a nice hat and a nice overcoat. They had been instantly thrown out into the bread and soup lines because they had no money. It was very uncomplicated. You were just financially bare.

DB: Do you remember the soup lines, bread lines? Did you see those?

CP: No. I do not remember that. I saw pictures and all the rest, but that was mostly in the big cities and we lived out in a suburb of Philadelphia. We did not see that. But I know that the school breakfast and the school lunch is what saved us. And then Mr. Jewett always had a job. So they had some source of income. Oh, yes. He sold a Heat-O-lator. It was a thing that you put in a house, the fireplace, that would bring in the cold air in the bottom and put the warm air out up top and therefore people could heat their living rooms with Heat-O-lators, which were very popular in those days.

DB: It was gas-operated or how did it . . .?

CP: No. It was a fireplace. You’d throw in wood.

DB: You’d throw in wood.

CP: Or chunks of coal. We heated our house with coal. That meant that you would have to go down and shovel coal for heating.

DB: So shoveling the coal was one of your jobs then?

CP: Yes. Shovel the coal. It was always sooty and dirty and gave minimal heat. I can remember seeing mother stand against a heat radiator in the foyer of the house by the front door with her shawl on, standing up against that radiator. Just to stay a little warm— to put a little warmth on her back.

DB: You mentioned the soot. When everyone is heating with coal there’s a lot of soot in the air.

CP: Yes.

DB: I know the climate was a lot milder there than it was here. But my father used to tell me stories about you’d have snow and it would be white for a day or two and then everything would turn gray or brown from the soot.

CP: Yes, it was gray.
DB: You had that experience up there, too?

CP: Oh, indeed. Yes. We had snow back in Philadelphia. Not like out in Minnesota, of course. But I can remember that.

DB: Enough to see the coal soot change it to a gray or a brown color.

CP: Yes. Yes.

DB: And you talked about horses, and there’s a lot of pollution from the horses. People don’t realize what the horses left deposited in the streets.

CP: Oh, they sure did.

DB: And that got ground up and changed into dust and blew around.

CP: Yes. It used to bother us when we played kick the can. [Chuckles]

DB: When you were in high school, you mentioned that you were popular and you had various . . . you were involved in athletics and you had a role in student government. Did you have plans or ambitions for yourself? What did you see in your future as a fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old? Were you thinking about any of that?

CP: I remember with great joy one day when the wrestling team was practicing. A Dr. Fink, who was the musical director of the high school choir, came down and said that he needed two tenors and two basses. [Chuckles] I tried out and I got to be a second tenor. I was in an a cappella choir for four years in high school, and that was a great experience as it was with the athletic events. I always thought I’d want to be a doctor because I had four uncles who were doctors. Then, as we met them, I saw what wonderful personalities they were and the beauty of the profession. So I always wanted to be a doctor. Harald didn’t have an ambition to do that. But we also knew that we couldn’t go to college. So we didn’t think much about it.

DB: Financially you couldn’t go.

CP: Financially we couldn’t. So we didn’t think much about the future. We didn’t talk much about the future. Because the future was sort of an anonymous thing. How can you talk about the future when you can’t even afford to rent a house? You’ve got to live with neighbors. It would be sort of like talking about wanting to be the king of England when you don’t even live in England, let alone the fact that you’re not nobility. I mean it was so unreachable that you didn’t spend much time thinking about it.

DB: Just wasn’t part of your worldview?

CP: No. But then along came World War II.

DB: You graduated in 1939?

CP: I graduated from high school in 1942.

DB: And your mother passed away that year, too.

CP: Mother passed away in that spring of 1942. That was the change. Dad had gone to Trinidad for the Navy as a consultant. They were building harbors. And my brother and I came out to my uncle in Valley City, and ended up here in Minneapolis.

DB: I want to go back to a couple of other things first and then we’ll come back to this because I had miscalculated. I thought you graduated earlier. When you were in high school looking at the world . . . now you talked about your personal world and possibilities that the world might have held for you and the economic situation you were in, but what was your worldview? Were you paying attention to world events? In 1939, World War II started in Europe.

CP: There was a tremendous amount of discussion about the Nazis and the Japanese, and we all had a deep repugnance about the dictatorships. I’ll never forget the night that Roosevelt came on the radio and talked about the Lend-Lease Program for sending destroyers to England. He said, “What if I was sitting in my living room tonight and I looked out the window, saw my neighbor’s house on fire, and he knocked on the door and asked if he could borrow my hose to put out the fire? I would say, ‘Yes. You can borrow my hose.’ Don’t you think we should lend a hose to the British so they can put out their fire?” He turned the nation around, because that was the beginning of our involvement. He was so clever and so adroit and so convincing. He just had everybody pulling in the same direction. We in school, of course, were active intellectually in history and geography. We knew about what was going on in Norway. Mother would get letters from relatives about what was taking place during the German occupation.

DB: Even after the occupation she was still in contact?

CP: Yes. It wasn’t much, but there would be a few letters and you knew it was just murderous, what the Germans did. They were horrible. Simply horrible. Beastly. So you developed this sense that we ought to do something ourselves. Then that just came out of it all. Then there was the Fox News every Saturday. Fox Movietone News. The first thing in the movie would be Fox Movietone News. The newsreels—that was the big thing. You’d see German paratroopers jumping into Denmark or wherever, and how they were sweeping over France and Poland and so forth. So you really felt as though you knew what was going on.

DB: And you paid attention. You had a political consciousness.

CP: You paid attention.

DB: And your family talked about these things.
CP: Yes.

DB: They had a very close tie with the Norwegian relatives.

CP: Indeed they did. Indeed they did. And then there was a senator from North Dakota, Gerald Nye, and Colonel Charles Lindbergh, whose America First campaign said we should not be involved with someone else’s war, and held big rallies in Madison Square Garden. Those were all covered. Even now I can remember thinking that Lindbergh was wrong. I wondered, how he could be so wrong? There was a group they called the Isolationists, here in the United States. As a matter of fact, when Roosevelt . . . the problem he had was that the nation was basically isolationist. He had to use consummate skill; get us involved. Which, of course, saved our Western society. It is admirable what he did. Unbelievable.

DB: In 1941, Roosevelt re-instituted the draft and he called up a lot of National Guard people. Did you have people in your neighborhood, friends from school or anything, that were in the National Guard who had been mobilized?

CP: No. We all volunteered instantly.

DB: That was later?

CP: Yes.

DB: That was later. What I’m saying in 1941 . . .

CP: I didn’t know many that were in the National Guard. We were too young to know much about that.

DB: December 7th, everything changed.

CP: Everything changed. Everything changed.

DB: And the isolationists just went away.

CP: They went away. So Harald and I . . . we were then eighteen, nineteen years old, and we volunteered right away.

DB: You were still in high school in 1941.

CP: Yes. But we went over and volunteered.

DB: Oh, you did?

CP: Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They wouldn’t take us because we were still in high school. But it was at that juncture in May when I finished high school. Harald had finished the year before. It was at that juncture that Mother had just died and Dad was in Trinidad.

DB: That was in the spring of 1942?

CP: Spring of 1942.

DB: And your dad was gone at that time?

CP: He was gone.

DB: And you were living in a rented apartment.

CP: We were living in a rented apartment. A small, rented, two-bedroom apartment. Mother died. We couldn’t even afford to send her to the hospital.

DB: You guys were all alone.

CP: Yes.

DB: Your father is gone. Your mother is dead.

CP: Yes.

DB: What did you do? Did your father come home?

CP: No. He couldn’t. He couldn’t afford it. And we lived with the family whose daughter became Harald’s first wife. The O’Dells. They had us live with them. The apartment . . . we couldn’t afford to keep the apartment. So that was in March, April, May and June of 1942 that we lived with the O’Dells. Harald went out to Valley City to my Uncle Carl, who had a splendid large practice as a family physician. He was my father’s brother.

I came out to Valley City that July, and then that fall, in September, we came to Minneapolis to be with my Uncle Erling and his wife, Helen. He was a pediatrician, a famous man. A remarkable man. His picture is over there. He was the founder of the Minnesota Medical Foundation. He was captain of the Minnesota basketball team that won every game in 1919. He was All-American. The nation’s best basketball team. He was a marvelous pediatrician and he took us in and he paid for us to go to the University that fall quarter. I took organic chemistry, math, physics, zoology and German. That fall quarter I had three Ds, one F and an incomplete.

DB: Think about the trauma that you’d just gone through. Now you and your brother were alone with your mother, and your mother died. Did you boys have to take care of all the funeral arrangements and everything?

CP: No. Dad did come home. Dad did come home for about four days. He did come home for the funeral. Yes. I shouldn’t have forgotten that. Dad did come home.

DB: But beyond that, it still must have been a pretty overwhelming and devastating experience for you, the things you had to take care of at that age.

CP: Yes. Then he left and we cleaned up . . . got rid of the apartment. I mean we were just renting. There was very little furniture. Then we moved in with the O’Dells.

DB: But you’re still in high school, and you have to keep that going.

CP: Yes. Still in high school. Harald had finished high school. But that was my senior year.

DB: And then your uncle contacted you, or did your father set that up?

CP: Dad called him. My father called my Uncle Carl in Valley City, who was a very prominent physician and a huge practice. Carl said, “Send them out here.” And then we wanted to go to the University, so my Uncle Erling said that we could stay with him. Then my Uncle Carl paid for us to go to college. In those days if you were a resident of Minnesota—and we were living with my Uncle Erling who was here—I think it was seventy-five dollars a quarter. And then I worked, and so did Harald. When we were in college we worked full time.

DB: Where did you work?

CP: At the E. L. Murphy Trucking Company in St. Paul. Washing trucks. Murphy Trucking. Washing trucks every Saturday and delivering refrigerator units Monday through Friday on the back of a truck. And going to class in the morning. That’s how we got our way through. And then, of course, we went into the service in January of 1943.

DB: But you lived with your uncle?

CP: Uncle Erling. From September on.

DB: This was your father’s brother?

CP: Actually, my father’s brother was in Valley City, North Dakota. Uncle Carl.

DB: Who was the one who was here, then?

CP: That’s my Uncle Erling. He was my dad’s cousin.

DB: Same last name?

CP: Same last name. My dad’s father had come from Norway, and my dad’s father’s brother had come from Norway, and he went to Valley City. Erling was his son, so he was actually a cousin. So then all of a sudden we were going to college, and then we went in the service.

DB: Let’s talk about coming back here, because that was quite a change. You’ve come from this fairly desperate situation on the East Coast and you’re coming out here with your father’s cousin who is a man of great prominence and some wealth.

CP: He had a big Lincoln, and a beautiful home.

DB: It must have been a huge change in your lifestyle situation.

CP: Gigantic.

DB: But he still had expectations that you were going to work and not get a free ride.

CP: Yes. As a matter of fact, Uncle Carl owned a number of farms. The first day we were out in Valley City, he asked if we would mind working on the farm during the week. He said, “We’re short of hands.” We said that we wouldn’t mind at all. So we went to work on the farm outside of Valley City. And the farmers all had white foreheads because they had these big hats on. We didn’t want to look like farmers, so we didn’t do that. The first day we were out in the wheat fields . . . you’re supposed to shock five acres in the morning and five in the afternoon. In the morning we did five and in the afternoon we did one and a half. [Chuckles] They thought we were city slickers, and they had more fun at our expense. Then one day this sleet storm came. It used to be that in the evenings, after dinner, the pharmacist and the banker and accountants, everybody would come out of Valley City and work on the farm and make the shocks because they were short of hands. A big storm came and the next morning our shocks were standing and the others were blown down.

DB: So the summer of 1942 you spent showing the farm boys how a city slicker could work on a farm.

CP: It was really hilarious. That sleet storm came and the next morning we all looked out the windows. The Bruns family, Harald and Mrs. Bruns, were wonderful, wonderful people. They said, “Oh, my goodness. Just look at that. All the shocks are flat except where Carl and Harald were.” [Chuckles] That really . . . that was an indescribable joy for us.

DB: So Saturday night at the farm dance did you get more dances with the girls?

CP: Yes. They thought we were okay then. It really was quite something.

DB: In the fall of 1942, you came back to the Twin Cities.

CP: Yes. My Uncle Carl and my aunt Trix . . . we were with them through that summer.

DB: And can you talk about them some more before you get into your school experiences? Because they were important mentors to you.

CP: Yes. They were indeed. Uncle Carl had practiced there for forty years. In general practice. He had a great, great practice and was beloved in the community. He took us in and then he put us to work on his farm that summer. We were with him every weekend. He was a splendid gentleman. My aunt was a wonderful lady. They just treated us like their sons. I remember every Saturday night we would drive in to Fargo to a restaurant that had the biggest steaks and the best steaks in the Midwest. All of a sudden here Harald and I were. From living in that little apartment in Upper Darby in Philadelphia, to driving in a beautiful new Lincoln into town for a big steak dinner. To go ninety miles each way just for a steak dinner. The transformation was stunning. We just sort of absorbed it, I guess, and didn’t say much about it. Then we came to Minneapolis . . .

DB: Would you say you just kind of took it in stride?

CP: Took it in stride. Yes. He had no concern about driving . . . it was eighty miles on US Highway 1 from Valley City to Fargo. Going about ninety miles an hour in that big Lincoln.

DB: And he was the man who had come out and visited you on the East Coast with the camping trailer?

CP: That’s correct. Yes indeed. So we really knew him and my aunt. So here we were driving in this big Lincoln, going just for steak. Going eighty, ninety miles and then going back home. I mean, it was like being Alice in Wonderland all of a sudden. And we just loved it.

DB: Did you have any contact with him as far as his practice or any reinforcement of your earlier desire to get into the medical profession?

CP: Yes. I used to go to the hospital with him every Saturday morning and watch him during surgery. Because I wanted to be a doctor. He thought it was just great. Then I’d go into the laboratory with him in the afternoon. I’d spend all Saturday with him. He was a remarkable man. After World War I, he moved out to Valley City to be a doctor. He bought a U.S. Army airplane and took the wings off. He put on skis and made rounds in the airplane in the old days. That was back in the 1920s and 1930s, before there were fences put up. He would make house calls in the snow, out in the farmland. He was respected.

Then we came to Minneapolis. We met my Uncle Erling, who was a man of great prominence. He was All-American in basketball, captain of the number one team. He was the founder of the Minnesota Medical Foundation. He lived in a beautiful home in Edina, and drove a Lincoln Zephyr—a beautiful black car. He had three cars, as a matter of fact. I never imagined that.

DB: And they were big cars? They weren’t Model Ts?

CP: No. They were big cars. The Lincoln Zephyr was a very, very fashionable automobile. That’s like the fanciest Mercedes today. He had gray velveteen gloves and a black Chesterfield coat with satin lapels. A very stylish man. Marvelous physician and a huge practice. And all of a sudden there we were in the midst of that environment. So we went to the University and I had my first quarter with organic chemistry, math and physics, zoology and German . . .

DB: Was it any difficulty in enrolling in the U?

CP: No. No. Erling got us in. [Chuckles] My uncle just got us in. He was very prominent over here at the Medical School and at the University. He just took us in to the registrar that first morning. He drove over and parked . . . where nobody is supposed to park.

DB: And said, “Sign them up.”

CP: Sign them up. Here they are. And they did. So I got a job at a fraternity house doing dishes and waiting on the tables and so forth. But we lived with my Uncle Erling and my aunt out in Edina. He was an inspiration to me. He was a man of great stature and achievement and kindness. Pediatricians are always great people. And he was one. He was very inspiring to me and encouraged me.
 
DB: What happened that fall? It was just too much going to school? A little overwhelming?

CP: It was overwhelming. It was entirely different. We volunteered. We wanted to get into service. We were not really dedicated to study.

DB: Your heart was in the war, not in the university?

CP: Yes. You wanted to get there. Wanted to get in. The only ones who were unhappy about the volunteer army were the young fellows who became 4-F and were not accepted. They’re the ones who were heartbroken. All the rest of us, everybody else wanted to get in.

DB: I’ve heard some stories about that. Sometimes the young men would be drafted and there would be a going away party and everyone would send them off and then they’d slink back a few days later after they’d realized they hadn’t passed their physical or something.

CP: Yes.

DB: Did you have friends who had that experience?

CP: Oh, yes. I had friends who were not accepted, and they felt like second-rate citizens. They were ashamed of themselves. I shouldn’t say ashamed, but they were embarrassed. They wanted to be in the service. We all wanted to know, when can I get overseas?

DB: How did your uncle respond when you didn’t do well in school and wanted to go in the service?

CP: He sort of understood. He then laughingly said, “Maybe you should be a hospital administrator.” Whenever I speak with doctors, they think that’s pretty good, because they think hospital administrators are not too bright.

DB: Let’s come back to this when we talk about what happened after you came home from the war. School got out in December, and you went down and tried to enlist again.

CP: I went to Fort Snelling and enlisted at the beginning of January 1943.

DB: And your first choice was . . .?

CP: Navy, then the Air Force. But I was colorblind, so they said, “You’re in the Army.” I said, “That’s not going to be good enough. Any alternatives?” “Well, you don’t want to do this, but you can get in the paratroops. That’s for the crazies.”

DB: Was it pretty disappointing for you to not get in the Air Force or the Navy? Was the colorblind situation something that you weren’t aware of?

CP: Yes. I was not aware of it. No. No, I really wasn’t. I truly was not.

DB: So all of a sudden did you see the world collapsing again? Did you think, oh, my God, I won’t get what I want to go in the service?

CP: Exactly. Harald was going in the Navy.

DB: He’d been accepted. He didn’t have your problems.

CP: He’d been accepted. Yes. And I just thought being an infantryman didn’t sound very exciting or alluring. So then I heard about the paratroops, and volunteered for the paratroops.

DB: Was someone at Fort Snelling doing recruiting for that, or did you just hear about it on your own?

CP: No. I heard about it on my own. Then I went to somebody there at Fort Snelling and said, “I’d like to enlist with the paratroops.” “Oh,” he said, “Those are the crazies. They jump out of airplanes.” I said, “I know. I know.” He said, “You don’t want to do that.” [Chuckles] I said, “I sure do.” And we were paid an additional fifty dollars a month with GI pay. Also, the paratroops were the elite fighting force—the best!

DB: And you’re nineteen or twenty years old now.

CP: Yes. And if you were in the paratroops you got an additional fifty dollars. You made twice as much. Which was quite enticing. But the real thing about the paratroops was that they were going to be involved in disciplined, hard-hitting, exciting activity. I mean it’s obviously going to be very, very demanding and very alluring. I’m going to be challenged. Something that would really stretch you completely. And so I went down to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and that first day it was pouring rain when the train pulled in. We were taken by truck to Camp Toccoa.

DB: And you had your uniforms and that stuff now. You had a big duffel bag. You would have gotten all this at Fort Snelling.

CP: Yes. Your duffel bag and your M-1 rifle and your helmet and your mess kit. But no jump boots or anything like that. And a big trench coat, and everything was oversized. Didn’t fit too well. And then you get off the train down in Camp Toccoa, and here are these tough guys. The first day at lunch, we were standing in the mess line, in drizzling rain. We’re standing on planks between the mess hall and the dormitories where we stayed, and the plank was about twelve inches wide and on either side was mud. I was standing there in line with my mess kit, waiting to get into the dining room. The fellow in front of me, whose name was Lyle Henderson, was pushed by another fellow who happened to be Mike Stafford, and they got in a pushing contest and then they started a fistfight right there. They dropped their mess kits and started swinging and all of a sudden they were wrestling in the mud. I thought they were animals. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. And they became intimate friends. I mean we went through three years of sheer murder together. Sheer hell, really. And that was the very beginning.

There were two fellows who didn’t know how to read or write. From Hamtramck, near Detroit. Tough, hard, Polish guys. Jay Gabowski and Dennitch. Oh, God, they were tough. And they were hard. All muscle. Take nothing from anybody. I thought, boy, this is going to be great. [Chuckles] The first day we were there, before we went in for breakfast that first morning, Sergeant Atkinson, a magnificent sergeant it turns out, said, “If any of you guys are going to college, take two steps forward in front of our whole company.” And it was just John Comer and I, who became very good friends. He had gone to Macalester for three months and I had gone to the University of Minnesota for three months, so we both proudly stepped forward. The sergeant said, “Okay, you smart bastards, you police the area. That means pick up all the cigarette butts. And the rest of you dummies can see how these smart asses do it.” I thought, oh, boy, this is going to be great.

DB: Don’t volunteer anymore.

CP: [Laughing] That was it. We were the only two who had gone to college for three months, and were we razzed. Obviously. But it was the beginning of a great set of intimate friendships.

DB: What kind of training did you go through at Camp Toccoa? Was it mostly physical training? Weeding out training?

CP: Mostly physical training, yes.

DB: Did many people get weeded out there?

CP: Yes. It was basic training, and quite a few were weeded out. And then, of course, when we went to jump school a lot of them were weeded out. But that was down at Fort Benning.

DB: When you finally got to Fort Benning . . . Let me go back to one thing. You were in the 511. A Company.

CP: The 511 Parachute Regiment.

DB: H or A?

CP: H.

DB: Were you formed into that unit while you were at Toccoa?

CP: Yes, we were.

DB: And so you stayed together with the unit. You went through training together as a unit.

CP: We had basic training all together. Which is a great advantage.

DB: By the time you got to Fort Benning, you’d had about a month of training at Camp Toccoa?

CP: Yes. Thirteen weeks of basic training. That was three months. Then we went to Fort Benning.

DB: You started to develop a pretty strong sense of unit cohesiveness.

CP: Oh, yes. We sure did.

DB: And you get to Fort Benning, and again, it’s more physical training.

CP: Yes.
DB: And you went through five weeks of jump training?

CP: Four weeks. A, B, C and D stage.

DB: The first week is ground week?

CP: Ground week.

DB: Physical conditioning.

CP: Physical conditioning and climbing ropes hand over hand. Don’t use your feet. Every afternoon packing your chute. If it doesn’t work you can always bring it back and get another one. They told you that. But what it did was to teach you confidence in that parachute because you have packed your own. If it didn’t open, it was your fault. So you paid strict attention to what you were supposed to do. And then that first week there was physical training. Very demanding. Then how to jump out of the fuselage. How to land with your ankles and knees together and how to tumble forward.

DB: Tower week.

CP: Then climb up that tower about sixty feet and jump down with this harness on your back. Some guys didn’t want to do that and got scratched right there. Then you ride down on that big cable. They had these great big tall towers with arms up about a hundred and fifty feet in the air. They pull you up . . .

DB: Two hundred and fifty foot towers they were. They came from an amusement park in New Jersey, actually.

CP: That’s right. That’s right.

DB: It is still there.

CP: Yes. Still there. Then you drop a piece of paper and if your paper blew into the structure they’d drop you and they would bring you down a little way. Then they’d push a button and all of a sudden you’d free fall. Come down. Which is very, very gracious. That was great fun. A lot of guys couldn’t stand heights. Then, of course, D stage. Monday through Thursday there was a jump in the morning, and on Friday it’s jump at nighttime.

DB: From Lawson Field.

CP: Yes. That’s right.

DB: And do you remember your first jump?

CP: Very well. I remember it like it was yesterday. You’d get up in the morning in your barracks and you’d hear these engines, plane engines, revving up down at the field. You get into your outfit and pick up your chute and your spare chute. Go down to . . . we called it the Sweat Room, and sit on long benches. All buckled up with your parachute on your back and the other small parachute on your chest. In case of emergency you pulled that open. Then walking out, you could hardly walk because the straps were so tight around your thighs and your stomach. Getting into a C-47 Douglas. There were twelve guys on one metal bench on one side and twelve guys on the other side.

DB: Of course, all the time you’re sitting there and waiting to go, you’re thinking.

CP: Thinking. Now I’m going to go out. Going to go out. Going to go out. It was exciting. There was a cable down the roof, the ceiling of the plane. Then when the plane takes off the door is off and of course you hear this mighty roar and you see the tar going underneath you and then it lifts up in the air and everybody cheers.

DB: Was this your first plane ride?

CP: First plane ride.

DB: So that’s another experience in addition. Not only are you going up in a plane for the first time but you get to jump out of it for the first time. You didn’t get to land.

CP: You didn’t get to land. And the first time up they would stand up and hook up. You stand up and you hook your static line and check. You turn and you check one another back and forth. Then stand in the door. Then when they yell go . . . I think we got to the fact that we could get twelve guys out . . . a stick—we used to call it a stick. We could get twelve guys out the door in about three and a half seconds. You just rushed out. And you go out there and holy smokes! You’re upside down, inside out, everything. Then smash! You feel the shock and you count one thousand, two thousand, three thousand. Then float down in. It was great. The second and third jumps were not so lovely. They were frightening. You were scared, and you thought, what am I doing this for? Because the first week we were there we saw one fellow as he jumped out and his chute did not open up. It looked like a cigar. And he did not get his chest chute open and he plummeted and went smack into the ground. You could have heard it. I mean everybody saw it. My God!

DB: It could have been you.

CP: Could have been me. And some guys quit right there. I’ve got to tell you that on the third jump . . . it was a hard one for me to jump. The third one. I don’t know why.

DB: Psychologically hard?

CP: Psychologically hard. Yes. I jumped a total of seventeen times and the third one was really hard. We had one person, Dennitch, the Polish guy from Detroit, he was so frightened of jumping that he would jump out and he’d try to hold onto the tail of the plane. He’d reach for the tail as if he was going to hang on. He didn’t want to let go. Think about it.

DB: He never connected with the tail though. It would have killed him.

CP: Oh, no. Yes. It would have. So on the third jump we were coming in. On landing there was a slight breeze, about five miles an hour. I came in with my ankles and knees tight together on the left side and landed going sideways. Slipstream. Slipping in. And you know, you drop pretty fast. Like a sack of potatoes being dropped out of a four-story building. [Chuckles]

All of a sudden, in my left leg, right below the knee, I felt something sharp. And oh, my gosh, I thought I had a charley horse or I bruised it. When I got up I rolled up my chute and carried it to the truck, which was a quarter mile away off the drop zone. My left leg hurt terribly, but I kept walking. That day I kept doing everything all day. At the end of the day there was a big structure of bars at Fort Benning. Monkey bars, where you had to do all kinds of exercises. One of them was to sit on a bar and then hook your feet underneath it and stretch out with your hands behind your head. Stretch out flat. I ended up about eight feet in the air on the bar and I was sitting there and I couldn’t have any pressure on my left leg. So I didn’t dare flatten out because I only had my right foot up because my left leg hurt so much. The sergeant said, “What the hell? Flatten out.” I said, “I can’t.” He told me to come down. “You get a demerit.” So I got a demerit. I thought, oh, my God, I’ll be scrubbed out of here and I’ll have to go into gliders. We thought gliders were a bunch of fairies and sissies. I didn’t want to be a glider.

So I went to dinner in the mess hall. Sergeant Atkinson came along. He was a tall powerful guy. Fearless. Fearless. A great leader. He said, “Platou, what’s wrong?” I told him that my left leg hurt. “Where?” “Right below the knee.” He put his big thumb on there and it felt like an electric shock. He said, “Come with me.” So we got in the Jeep and we went to the Fort Benning station hospital. Went into the emergency room and he said, “This trooper has got a sore leg. He’s got to get it wrapped up.” “Well, come in here and we’ll take a picture.” Atkinson said, “No. You’ve just got to wrap it up.” The corpsman said, “Goddamn it, Sergeant, you’re not running this place.” He took a picture and it showed that I had a broken leg. They told me that you’ve got two bones underneath your knee. One is the fibula, and one is the tibia, and one is a smaller bone. It doesn’t really have the weight but that’s the way it is. I had a fracture. But it wasn’t a displaced fracture. It was what they call a green stick fracture. It was like a pencil being bent. Fractured.

Before you knew it I had a cast from my toes halfway up to my thigh and was taken into the hospital. So I had walked all day on a broken leg. Two days later a major came to my bed in the hospital at Fort Benning, accompanied by a sergeant with a folder. He got the folder from the sergeant and said, “Platou, what happened?” I said, “I landed sideways and I felt something.” He said, “Did it hurt?” I said, “Yes, it did.” He said, “Well, why didn’t you say something?” I didn’t want to be scrubbed out of the paratroops. I didn’t want to be a glider. I didn’t want to be in the gliders, and I figured if I only had two more jumps to make on Thursday and Friday I’d get my wings and I’m safe. And I just thought I had a charley horse. He asked, “Did you realize you had a broken leg?” I said, “I didn’t realize it at the time, no.” “Do you mean to tell me you walked all day on a broken leg?” I said, “Yes, sir.” “Well,” he said, “When you get out of here in thirty days, you come see me. We’re going to make you a jump instructor.” A jump instructor is the highest honor any paratrooper can ever have. Because they were the guys that really ran it. And every morning, when the division would be over there in Fort Benning, the jump instructors would take charge. They wore their jump pants and tight t-shirts that said Fort Benning, Georgia, Parachute School Instructor. They were like gods.

DB: Did they have a black hat in those days?

CP: A little black hat. Yes. They were unparalleled. To be a jump instructor you had to be super-special. He said, “We’ll make you a jump instructor.” I said, “I don’t want to. I want to go back to my outfit.” He said, “You’re going to be the jump instructor.” I asked why. He said, “Because we can make a hell of a story out of you. You walked all day on a broken leg. That’s the guts we’re looking for. We’ll make a big story out of it.”

After thirty days I did go back, and I did see him, and I said, “No. I want to join my outfit. They’re about to go overseas.” He said, “You have to have a specialty ranking.” I said, “Well, what’s available?” “Well, there’s wireless and there’s something else and then there’s demolition. You don’t want to do that. Those are the crazies. Those are the crazy guys.” I said, “I’ll go to demolition school.” Which I did, for six weeks. I remember that first day at demolition school, in a little Quonset hut in Fort Benning. There were ten of us in there. Our instructor was Harald Russell, a sergeant who later became an Academy Award winner for the movie The Best Years of our Lives. He blew his hands off with a makeshift bomb, a grenade, which we all learned how to do . . . and blew up his hands.That movie came out about 1947, I believe.

Anyway, on the first day in class he said, “Okay, you stupid bastards, you’re going to remember everything I tell you. You’ve all gone to high school and you’ve had some studies, and some of you are good and some of you aren’t. Let me show you why you’re going to remember everything.” And he got up in front of the class, and he pulled on a cord, and the drape opened. It was a big picture about eight feet long and about six feet high of a German bomb that had not exploded. It was stuck in a London park a third of the way into the dirt. Sticking out the back were the fins, and sitting on this was a British demolition specialist. He opened the lever in the front, towards the front of this bomb with a screwdriver. He had a pliers and he was about to turn an ignition switch. Just when he’s about to turn he looked up over his left shoulder. A photographer happened to be there and took a picture of this physical look. The caption was, “Do I turn it to the right or do I turn it to the left?” Well, if you turn it the wrong way, of course, everything goes up in mid-air, including you. So you did learn and remember. That was a tremendous experience.

We learned how to blow up bridges, communication centers, dams, how to dislocate turbines, how to bust a dam, how to crawl out underneath a bridge with full regalia on, where to place the charges, how to run the wires back, what part of the bridge is the weakest point, how to escape, and how to get in there in the first place. It was very, very intense. You learned how to kill. How to kill a guard with your hands or a knife. It was intense, intense, intense. And we just loved it. The instructors were fierce, powerful, strong, intelligent men, and they developed a sense of confidence in each of us. You can do anything that you’re assigned to do. So I went through that. These were amongst the finest men trained in the U.S. Army—taught to kill, destroy and escape.

DB: This is the summer of 1943 now?

CP: The summer of 1943. I went back with my outfit, and was with them when we went overseas. I went back as a demolition specialist, of which I am very proud.

DB: The unit went to Camp Polk, Louisiana on January 5, 1944.

CP: Yes.

DB: And that was for a training exercise?

CP: It was for training exercises.

DB: Maneuvers? Big maneuvers?

CP: Big maneuvers, and we knew we were going to go to the Pacific, so they tried to get us in places where it was muddy and wet and sticky. [Chuckles] And miserable. Which turned out well for us. Because the Japanese were good at jungle fighting.

DB: At Camp Polk, Louisiana, you were preparing for jungle fighting with the Japanese.

CP: Prepared for jungle fighting. And what they did is to show us movies of the Japanese, how they worked through the jungles, how they tied themselves in trees as snipers and how you had to look up and try to decipher where they were, find out where they were. Then you would get a machete. You were taught how to use machetes and cut through the underbrush. It was entirely different than the European Theatre. It was jungle fighting. It was going to be hand-to-hand combat. We saw movies about this. If you were in the jungles and your company, your outfit, is together, you’re all in foxholes, two guys in a hole. You dig your own hole in the mud, and then put up branches. You cut through the roots. You dig a hole so that the only thing that’s sticking up above it is your eyes. The top of your head.

Then the Japanese would surround you at night. Just like the Indians in the old days on the prairies. All the covered wagons would get in a circle and the Indians would run around and shoot. Well, the Japanese would do that. You would be sitting in a hole at night and you would hear, “Hoi,” and on the other side, “Hoi,” and on the other side and on the other side. And then silence. A few hours later you’d hear the same calling back and forth. And it was done to unnerve you. So you had to learn what to expect. Then when we were actually in battle, which I’ll talk about later, that’s what would happen. They would surround you, and sometimes they would just come out and rush at you, screaming, “Banzai!” Screaming . . . just rushing like mad. Just like they were infuriated. But at other times they’d just creep . . . creep, creep.

DB: Infiltrate.

CP: Infiltrate at night. I have a rifle at home—a Japanese carbine. A twenty-eight caliber that I took from a Jap who came into my hole. Tried to kill me. I killed him. My partner, Aubry Miller, who was asleep, heard all the scuffling. He said, “What’s that all about?” I said, “I’ll show you in the morning.” I rolled this guy’s body out.

DB: Let’s go back to Camp Polk. How did you regard the Japanese? With respect, with fear, were they looked down upon? How were the Japanese regarded?

CP: They were regarded with fear. We saw pictures of them in Manchuria, taking their bayonets and sticking them through childrens’ stomachs. We saw them slashing people’s heads off with their big swords. Having somebody kneel, and slicing their head off. We realized their cruelty was unbridled, unrestrained, animalistic. So you knew that the enemy was never to be underestimated. They never surrendered, and you would never surrender to them for fear of the constant torture that would happen. Did happen.

We were taught that they were very well trained, and they had tremendous experience, and that they were jungle fighters. They fought through Manchuria, China, the Philippines, and into New Guinea. They believed in the emperor, who was god-like and everything was in his honor. They hated us, and there was not sense of civility or civilian rights. To them the Geneva Conference Rules and Regulations didn’t amount to a thing. It was different than fighting with the Germans. The Japanese almost bordered on religious fanaticism, and therefore were very feared. They were stealthy and very well trained and very, very experienced. We weren’t experienced.

DB: When you got to Fort Benning, did you go back to H Company?

CP: Yes.

DB: So you’re back with the guys that you’d been with since Camp Toccoa.

CP: Yes.

DB: And was the attitude in the unit one of eagerness to get into the fight?

CP: We could hardly wait to get there. Could hardly wait to get there.

DB: How did the maneuvers in Louisiana seem? Was it pretty good training? Did it seem to be very effective?

CP: It was very good training, and you learned how to find your way in the dark. Night maneuvers were especially important. How to find your way. What not to do. If you ever lit a cigarette you could be seen a half a mile away. A little cigarette. It’s amazing how far you can see that cigarette. And you learned to respect especially the noncommissioned officers. Our officers were a great, great group. But some of our sergeants were of the highest caliber, the highest order. The officers were great also. But for some reason or other our noncommissioned officers . . . you could reach and understand better. The officers had a sense of some distance between the enlisted men and the officers. The noncoms understood very well what was going on. I’ll never forget Sergeant Atkinson’s words down in Louisiana. He’d gone out for a weekend and he came back roaring drunk that Monday morning. He stood up in front of us and called the platoon to order. He was still staggering but he was there straight as an arrow. He turned around to us and said, “Don’t do what I do, do what I tell you to do.” [Chuckles] He was killed. Tragic. That was tragic.

DB: Did you get any leave before you went overseas?

CP: Yes, I did. I got leave after I broke my leg. When I got out of the cast I had two weeks off, and I went up to Farragut Field, Idaho, to be with my brother Harald just before he went overseas in the Pacific. He went on a minesweeper, YMS97. He was the fellow who did the navigating of the minesweeper. The minesweeper was about a hundred and eighty feet long. They’d go in before an invasion and clear out the mines. Pretty dangerous. We met overseas, and I’ll come to that later.

DB: When you went out to Idaho, was that when you wore your paratrooper uniform to the dance?

CP: Yes, that’s right.

DB: How was that regarded?

CP: Oh, God, that was really funny. In the paratroops you’re allowed to buy . . . when you went off duty you were allowed to buy what they call pinks. It was gabardine trousers and a shirt. They’re sort of a . . . not a pink color . . . not a feminine color, but sort of a pale pink. The gabardine had a beautiful press to it and was very, very ornate. And then you put your jump wings on that and you really looked better than you did in the army’s normal uniform. And I wore the pinks when I was out there with Harald. We went to a dance that Saturday night. They’d never seen anybody like that. A paratrooper dressed up like that. And a lot of the guys in the Navy didn’t appreciate it and tried to get me out of there.

DB: They tried to get you out of there away from the girls?

CP: [Chuckles] Yes, they did. Three guys came over and I said, “I’ll take all three of you outside right now. Get out of my way.” And they didn’t. You learned how to immobilize somebody. You actually could take out three guys. Or more, if you had to. It was all in the strength that you developed. First of all, you had to be physically strong in the paratroopers. Then there was the rigorous training. They’d say, “Give me fifty pushups,” just at the drop of a hat. And you’d give them fifty pushups. And so you developed an attitude of, “I’m indestructible.”

DB: Self-confidence.

CP: Self-confidence and, most importantly, how to immobilize or kill an opponent.

DB: Cockiness.

CP: Completely. And, “Don’t push me.” If you didn’t have that total confidence you couldn’t have endured in the jungles. You would crack up. You’d have stood up and run out of the foxhole. You’d have done all sorts of crazy things. Or you would have quit. But I never saw any of that. Because the guys were all so well prepared. And then in front of your buddies you could never give in. But they did tell you what to do. The other thing about it was that you didn’t think. You just acted. You didn’t react. You didn’t wonder, what do I do now? No. You just were so disciplined. You instantaneously performed.

DB: So the training had prepared you.

CP: The training prepared you for that. And it’s magnificent. I remember once, coming out of a little clearing in the jungles, and right across from me about thirty feet away came a Japanese. A big fellow. I shot first. I saw his face. It was the instantaneous reaction that saved you. If you don’t have that, you’re dead. Dead.

DB: After Camp Polk, you went to Camp Stoneman in California, and that was April 29, 1944. You departed from there.

CP: Yes.

DB: How long were you at Stoneman? Just a brief interim period?

CP: Yes. We were there just to get on a Liberty ship, a troop ship. It was a Liberty ship. To go to New Guinea.

DB: They checked all your shots there and made sure all your records were ready. And you made a will, probably?

CP: Yes. A will. You weren’t allowed to leave. You couldn’t go into San Francisco or anything like that. We were just about to go overseas. But we didn’t know where. We knew it was in the Pacific, somewhere.

DB: Was there a great sense of anticipation?

CP: Yes. A lot of anticipation. Lots of joy.
DB: This is just before D-Day happened in Europe, and of course there have been all kinds of stories about the 82nd’s involvement in Sicily and Italy, and you know that the units are getting ready to go into Europe. You’re going to the Pacific with the 11th Airborne. Was there any sense that you were missing the big show, or were you so trained and prepared for the Pacific that you didn’t feel any sense of . . . what should I say? Missing the big war in Europe? How did you feel about that? What was the attitude in the unit?

CP: We felt those guys had it easy because they were going to deal with the Germans and the Germans were Western Europeans. They would live by the Geneva Conference and they’d take prisoners and treat them decently. Our guys went over there believing that if you want to really fight somebody, go fight the fucking Japanese.

DB: So you felt . . . you were getting the chance to really prove your manhood, even more so than in Europe?

CP: Oh, yes. And you used that adjective before Japanese. There was always a four-letter word before it.

DB: That word comes with the uniform. It has something to do with putting on a uniform.

CP: I used to wonder if we could ever speak in civilian terms again?

DB: Yes. It hasn’t changed. It never will.

CP: Never will.

DB: Your ride on the ship over to . . . you went directly to New Guinea, or did you stop in Hawaii?

CP: We went to New Guinea.

DB: As part of a convoy?

CP: No. We were single. A single ship.

DB: On a Liberty ship?

CP: We zigzagged. It was hot. There were meals in the morning at ten o’clock, and at four in the afternoon. And we used to have a saying. On Saturday nights there were always these boxing matches. During basic training and jump school. And if one of our guys got a bad decision we’d go and yell out, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty—the whole place, everybody, screaming. On the first day out, as soon we began to feel the ship lifting and settling and lifting, guys were getting seasick. Being in the hole where we were, you marched down a wooden stairs when you got on the ship with your duffel bag and your rifle and all the rest. Every guy would have to throw his duffel bag into a berth, of which there were ten in a row.

DB: Vertical.

CP: Vertical. And the distance between my bunk and the bunk above me was the distance between my elbow and my knuckles. And in that area was a canvas tied onto the metal frame. You had your duffel bag there and your rifle and that’s it. You had no footlocker or anything. So you would be cramped. Then to go to the bathroom was a long, long way. It was a mess. When the ship began to heave and people were getting sick, things got sort of nasty. Then you’d only eat in the morning and the afternoon. Some sort of soup and porridge. And then every now and then you’d hear a click, and the communications system would turn on. Somebody would say, now hear this. There will be no this or none of that.

Then a couple of hours later you’d hear the click go on again. Now hear this. So finally the guys, the whole division, the regiment, started yelling forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. The whole ship would vibrate, practically. I mean it was just a roar. About the fourth day the click came on. “This is the captain speaking. Now listen, there shall be no more, I repeat, no more of this forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty business. Is that clear? Understood? Over and out.” Stillness. About five seconds later [Chuckles] the yell came back—forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. We never heard from him again. Thirty-three days later the captain came on and he said, “Okay, you guys, it has been a pleasure bringing you over here. We’re landing in a place called Oro Bay in New Guinea. There’s nothing there but jungles and Japs. Just what you want. You’ll disembark in the morning.” At about midnight you could hear the ship coming to a halt and the anchor going down. We all got up early in the morning to look over the side. There was this beautiful, beautiful island of New Guinea. Huge. New Guinea is a huge, huge landmass. It looked just like Hollywood. Palm trees. Beautiful sandy beaches. Lovely rolling surf. Just gorgeous.

DB: Hills in the background.

CP: Hills in the background. The Owen Stanley mountains. That was the last place the Japanese got to before we stopped them from going into Australia. It was called Lae and Oro Bay. So we disembarked. But before we disembarked, about ten in the morning, a mail boat came up alongside the ship. We all leaned over the side. There were two Australian sailors with their fancy hats, shorts, sneakers but no shirts, no trousers. Just shorts. We said, “What’s it like here?” One fellow made believe he was holding onto his penis and said with a swipe as if he had a knife in his hand, “You might as well slice her off. Nothing here.” Well, that was the beginning. Then we all disembarked and set up tents. We set up our camp and then went out and started.

DB: What were the Japanese doing? They’d been pretty much abandoned by their high command in New Guinea. They couldn’t supply them.

CP: Oh, yes. They were just shut off.
DB: It was a pretty desperate situation.

CP: Very desperate for them. That’s when we first met them. That part was not complicated at all, because they just had some outposts. We just mopped them up.

DB: They tried to infiltrate just to steal food more than anything else, sometimes.

CP: Yes. Yes. So that didn’t amount to much. But there were a couple of Japanese planes down, and I have some pictures of Steward Bose and myself holding up a Japanese flag that we got from one of them. Pulled it out of his knapsack. That one we killed, obviously.

DB: The plane was shot down by you, or was it abandoned on an airfield or something?

CP: No. It was shot down. The Air Force must have shot him down. But he was nearby.

DB: It came down while you were there though?

CP: Yes.

DB: But anyway, you spent time in the jungle. It was more . . . almost . . .

CP: Mopping up.

DB: Mopping up, but it was also a kind of a training situation, too.

CP: Oh, yes.

DB: Orientation to the jungle, orientation to the Japanese.

CP: Yes. And then how to get through that foliage with your machete. Then to make sure that the snipers don’t get you. We drove them out. The few that could make it went way back in the hills. We couldn’t find them. They might still be there.

DB: This was the end of May when you arrived in New Guinea?

CP: Yes.

DB: Had you ever experienced heat like that before?

CP: No.

DB: Heat and humidity.

CP: Heat and humidity and bugs. Then one day a first sergeant called me in and said, “They have something new going on. They’re going to try and get men out of combat to go to West Point, and you and one other guy from the division are going to be interviewed.” I evidently had a high IQ. They would give you a test when you entered. “And so you’re going to be interviewed by three generals and two colonels next Saturday. It will be a two-hour interview.” So I got as cleaned up as I could, and I went for the interview and I was offered an opportunity to go to West Point. Then I asked, “What does that mean?” They said, “It means eight years in the service.” “I’m not going to do that.” But I almost went to West Point. I remember that interview very clearly. The officers were all such intelligent and outstanding men. They were all West Point graduates, of course.

DB: The ones who were on the interview panel?

CP: Yes. And I thought it was a real honor to be interviewed, and I was very appreciative and respectful of it. I did decline. I asked them at the end, what did this imply to me. “Well, it implies you go to West Point. You have a magnificent education and then you serve in the service for the next eight years.” I said, “No. I’m not going to do that.”

DB: Was there also a side of you that just didn’t want to leave your buddies and your unit?

CP: Yes. You didn’t really want to. I mean, it’s almost like a marriage. Being in the service. Especially when you get into combat. It is almost like a marriage. Total interdependence and trust and respect. I felt as though I would forsake them, and you don’t want to do that. In combat . . . we’ll talk about that later . . . but after being wounded and hospitalized, the first thing you want to do is to get back to the outfit. You never think about going back home, being discharged.

DB: Only the unit.

CP: Only the unit. Yes. So that’s what you do.

DB: You spent five months in New Guinea.

CP: Yes. And that was training for the jungles, mopping up around Lae, which was tough. Going after these guys was tough. Terrible. They’re fierce fighters. They never surrendered.

DB: Did you have any encounters with the Japanese in New Guinea?

CP: Oh, yes. In Lae. They had to be killed. They would never surrender.

DB: Did they conduct foraging raids or something against your positions, or were they probing you to . . . what were they trying to do?

CP: They were trying to cause mischief and upset and kill. You’d go out on combat squads. First, second, third scout.
DB: Patrols. You’re on patrols.

CP: Go out and try and find them and take care of them. Kill them. And it worked. We didn’t have many casualties there.

DB: And you were in a demolition squad?

CP: I was in a demolition squad. There was nothing to blow up except on Sunday, when you would take a couple of your buddies . . .

DB: Don’t tell me you went fishing!

CP: Yes, we did. We went fishing. We did. We’d go to these beautiful little ponds and throw a stick of dynamite in there and up come these fish upside down and you just grill them there. It was really terrific.

DB: How were your rations in New Guinea in general?

CP: Really pretty good. Actually pretty good. They really were. Everything was dried, of course.

DB: You were living in pup tents when you weren’t in your foxholes?

CP: Pup tents. Yes. We were in pup tents. Actually, it was not a pup tent. It was four-sided . . . there would be two guys on a side. The tents were really pretty good. Quite high. You could walk around in them. It was not difficult at all. I remember the tent right next to us. Sitting on his bed was Dennitch and Hogan. Hogan could read and he was teaching Dennitch. He had a book. C-A-T cat. H-O-R-S-E horse and a picture. Here’s this big Dennitch, shoulders like a football player, learning to read.

DB: And did he?

CP: Yes. He was killed later. Tragically. But yes, he learned. They were the machine gun team. It was a fifty-caliber machine gun. It was a heavy thing to carry, and that was Hogan’s job, and Dennitch was the ammunition bearer. They were tough horses. Powerful men. Powerful men. And wonderful. Hogan was a crazy Irishman and Dennitch was a tough Pole. We always said that Hogan was also Polish. He couldn’t be that dumb being an Irishman.

DB: He probably loved the insult.

CP: Oh, yes. There’s a camaraderie amongst all of us that was just . . . it was just simply beautiful. We were totally interdependent on one another. One guy by the name of Denapole was killed on one of our last days. We’ll come to that later. He was probably the epitome of a paratrooper of the highest order. Most fearless. Most vigorous. Killed on our last day.
DB: On the 18th of November, you landed in Leyte. 1944. And you came by boat.

CP: Yes. Came in by landing craft. The Japanese planes were strafing. We heard machine gun bursts. And said, “Oh, my God.”

DB: Did you come in a Higgins boat or an LCI?

CP: It was a Higgins where the front drops down. We got ashore. Leyte was a huge battle. The Leyte Gulf Battle was one of the biggest single battles of World War II. It was a transition of the power for the U.S. Navy against the Japanese, and the Japanese did not want to give up Leyte. They had fifty thousand Japanese killed in Ormoc, which was on the west side of Leyte. It was all mountains. Twenty-seven miles across, and our company was the lead company to go across through these caribou trails in the mountains and jungles. That’s where it was brutal, brutal, brutal. Every day was brutal. I came out at the end of the thirty-one days on December 24th, and I weighed a hundred and twenty-four pounds. I’d lost forty pounds. Isolated. No food for five days. They couldn’t get to us. We were surrounded. Up in the mountains.

DB: Surrounded on a company level, or battalion level, regimental . . .?

CP: Company. We were the lead company.

DB: And you had advanced too far and had been cut off?

CP: Yes. There were no helicopters. They were Taylor Cubs. So the guys would fly over with the door open and spot you and throw out these boxes of food and ammunition. About five days. I remember chewing a piece of gum for two days and then gnawing on some bark the rest of the time. You just . . . every night there was infiltration or an attack. Every night. Every night. Every single night. We landed and the first day out, about four in the afternoon, a single shot rang out. I looked next to me and there was Siebert face down. I rolled him over and there was blood dripping out of the corner of his mouth. He had a forty-five caliber pistol, a Colt, in his hand. It was his pride and joy. All through jump school he’d sit there in the corner, write a letter once a day to his fiancée, and she’d write to him every day. Then he would polish and re-polish and re-polish that weapon.

Every day he’d write a letter to his fiancée and every day he’d get a letter. He was a very quiet man. Very, very strong. Huge biceps, huge chest. Short-cropped hair. Immaculate attire. He was German. Very tough, but a pleasant man. After writing his letter he would sit and he would clean and re-clean and polish and re-polish that .45 Colt. He loved that Colt. It was in a leather holster. We used to kid him that he shouldn’t take that out because the Japanese would think he was an officer, and they loved to shoot officers. Which is exactly what happened. He was the first one killed. And that Colt was in his hand. We left him there.

DB: Did somebody take the pistol?

CP: No.

DB: Left it with him?

CP: We left it in his hand. Left it in his hand. His eyes were still open. Terrible. That was the first one.

DB: Was that right on the beach?

CP: No. It was inland about a hundred yards. It’s on a little hill.

DB: Essentially on the beach though?

CP: Yes. Yes.

DB: At the point of landing.

CP: Yes. And he was the first one to go down. In New Guinea we didn’t lose any guys. There we were charging and they were running away from us. But this was a pitched battle for the next thirty-one days.

DB: You’re sitting in your foxhole at night, and the Japanese were infiltrating your position. Now there are two of you in the foxhole?

CP: Yes.

DB: One’s awake and one’s asleep, or you’re both awake depending on the situation?

CP: No. You’d be on two hours and off for two hours. Awake for two hours. What you would do is . . . at night, when it started getting dusk, getting darker, all of a sudden it would start. Like fireflies. You’d see on the base of a tree. Little white specks. Little white specks. Little white fluorescence in the foliage and you’d memorize that. You’d remember that. Because if anything ever blocked those little lights you knew there was somebody crawling up, coming in.

DB: This was the natural phosphorescence from decaying wood or something?

CP: Yes. Correct. And I’m surprised I’ve never read anything about it by anybody. But it sure was prevalent with us. And of course in the jungle it was constantly raining, constantly wet. You were sitting in water all the time and when you go to the bathroom you couldn’t get up and go out. You did it right there. So you became a stinking mess. Everybody. There was no sense of cleanliness or . . . I mean you’re just immersed in mud all the time. It was just . . . constant. There’s no way you could get away from it, because you had to be in the hole every night. Then when you move on to the next hill you keep moving up through these jungles. You had to keep digging a new location. I remember the second day we were out Dave Reynaud was our lead scout. Dave was from the state of Washington and he wanted to be a ranger for the state of Washington. He was half Indian. Half French, half Indian. He had an uncanny hunter’s capacity to tell whether there was something out there.

DB: The sixth sense.

CP: Sixth sense. Yes. He had it and he was a deadeye shot. He was the first scout, and Dick Ostrum was the second, and I was third and then the company was behind us. There was about ten feet between the first and second scout. We were going up this trail and all of a sudden I saw Dave crouch down and Dick crouched down so I did. We all crouched down. Then Dave flattened out and Dick did and I did, of course. And all of a sudden I heard him take a shot and then I heard an, “Ouh!” Then you hear that somebody was hit. Then another shot. Then another shot. Then another shot. Then shots started coming back at him. Then five, six. He got seven guys in one sitting. And when the seventh one, the seventh shot went by, he suddenly . . . this is funny . . . he moved his right hand to Dick like move over. So Dick moved over a little bit to his right. On his stomach, moving out to the right. A Japanese shot came out and then Dave got him. He could see where the flash came from that rifle. Then he went the other way, and Ostrum moved to the left, and another Japanese shot came out and then Dave got that one, too.

DB: So he was having your buddy be a decoy.

CP: He was having his buddy’s rear end be a decoy. So later that day Ostrum said, “What’s this all about? Why were you wagging me to move to the right?” He said, “I had to see where they were shooting from.” Ostrum said, “You mean you were sacrificing my ass?” He said, “Yes. It’s so big, who cares?” So there was humor in all of it. And that’s the way we fought our way across. Then, of course, at night there would be these Banzai attacks, and they were fierce. One guy on a water patrol was caught by the Japanese, and we heard him screaming all night long, being tortured.

DB: Did you ever find his body?

CP: Yes. They had taken him off and taken him apart and used him for food. Cannibalism. And that’s what they did.

DB: It wasn’t uncommon. The Japanese were essentially abandoned by their high command. They had no food. They had nothing. Many of their units resorted to cannibalism.

CP: Yes, they did. They resorted to it. And they didn’t kill you first. Think about it.

DB: Keep the meat fresh.

CP: Yes. Think about it.

DB: That’s what it was.
CP: Think about it. It was an inconceivable set of standards and actions like I can’t believe. I used to sit in the foxhole after two weeks went by, or three weeks, and think about that first quarter at the University. Every Friday there would be a convocation at Northrop Auditorium.

DB: This is after the war when you came back?

CP: No. Before. They would have some speaker. I remember going to Northrop Auditorium. You’d have a box lunch or bag lunch and there would be somebody speaking. The President of the University, Dr. Morrill, used to speak. There was an open dialogue with the students. It was really wonderful. And I remember thinking . . . I mean, I thought that was so wonderful. A huge auditorium, and there the president would talk openly with all the students. We all wanted to be there. I remember sitting in the foxhole wondering, I wonder if Northrop Auditorium is still standing? You get so detached in your own mind about your loved ones, your parents, your brother, your girlfriend, all the rest. But I got to wondering if Northrop Auditorium was still standing, and I’ve often wondered about that since. What a psychiatrist would say about how you could be so active and alive and performing in life and death situations every day, and yet so detached that you actually wondered if an auditorium on a college campus was still standing. It goes to show how psychologically and mentally you can be so detached. You begin to wonder . . . maybe Yamamoto is in Washington.

DB: Mind games.

CP: Mind games. And I remember wondering if Northrup Auditorium, with all those Grecian columns out front, is still standing. But I never saw anybody in our outfit lose their courage or run.

DB: Crack.

CP: Crack. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. I saw one guy, after Leyte, who didn’t want to go further, take his rifle and stick it between his toes and blow his toes off so he’d go back to the States.

DB: Did he get court-martialed or what happened to him?

CP: He did get court-martialed. Got a dishonorable discharge. And the guys could have killed him.

DB: Because he betrayed them.

CP: He betrayed them. It was terrible.

DB: What was the experience of being the recipient of a Banzai attack at night? It’s pitch-black. You can’t really see your hand in front of your face and there are these people running towards you as fast as they can, screaming, shooting, trying to kill you. Did you have support? Did you get flares?

CP: You had a number of things. First of all, you had a number of hand grenades. Right there by your nose. You had a trench knife made with a long, twelve-inch blade. You didn’t want to shoot your own rifle because then they would know where you were shooting from. Because of the fire flash of your rifle. So you’d throw grenades at them. You had your bayonet on your rifle so you were ready to stick them. This one guy that almost got me . . . this is the result. He was trying to infiltrate in the dark.

DB: You point to a scar on your wrist.

CP: Yes. A scar on my wrist.

DB: About a five-inch scar.

CP: Yes. Six inches. He tried to get in . . . you could smell them. First of all, you could smell them. Secondly, you could sort of sense him.

DB: This is in Luzon now, or Leyte?

CP: This is Leyte. And Aubry Miller was sound asleep. It must have been about four in the morning. Three in the morning. Something like that. You also sense them. Then I saw this one little light blocked out and thought, here it comes. So he rushed and I had my left hand up. I grabbed him by the shoulder, and I had my knife and killed him and then rolled him out. There’s little Aubry Miller. Suddenly he woke up and said, “What’s going on?” I said, “I’ll show you in the morning.”

DB: Was it his bayonet that got you on the wrist?

CP: No. It was his hand. They wouldn’t come in with a bayonet. They would come in . . . and I’ve got his rifle at home, by the way . . . in a glass case. They wouldn’t come in with a bayonet. They would have a rifle tied onto their back. Strapped on the back. But they’d have a hand knife. They wanted to stab you. You had to keep your composure as it is getting closer and closer. There is a book that deals with this sort of experience.

DB: Is that The Rising Sun,I think?

CP: The Rising Sun, in which there were interviews of officers of the 511 Parachute Regiment who talk about the Banzai attacks. And in the morning you find bodies four or five deep, stacked up. Because, when they really start getting very close together, then you do shoot back. But you don’t shoot from a distance. You wait until they’re right on top of you. Then of course in the morning, when you look out there from where you are, there would be four or five bodies like from here to there.

Let me quote one of our officers, who was interviewed by the author Patrick K. O’Donnell in the book, Into the Rising Sun. “…so we had to sleep in our holes on the hill that night. There were hundreds of dead Japanese bodies there. Bodies were stacked five high. It was absolutely horrible.”

DB: Five or six feet away.

CP: Five, six feet away. And screaming and hollering.

DB: Because they’re wounded. They’re not . . . death isn’t always clean.

CP: No. And they’re wounded.

DB: Sometimes it’s slow and painful.

CP: Yes. And also we think that some of them were drunk with sake before they’d make the charge. The movie Iwo Jima shows that very thing. They just come like madmen. Just like madmen. Without any sense of rationality. I mean just . . . mad. Infuriatingly mad. We had our weapons, and the M-1 was an automatic rifle. You just kill them. They had single bullets. Their equipment was not at all like ours. So then out of their fury they’d rush. It’s written about and documented in those books. Our officers were telling those same stories. It’s powerful.

DB: The Japanese soldier that got in and cut your arm, he was an individual infiltrator.

CP: Yes.

DB: What was worse, sitting there waiting for them to sneak in, or the massed attacks? I suppose it didn’t matter. It was all pretty terrifying.

CP: It was all so terrible. All so terrible. It’s just . . . the worst part was . . . it started getting dark at night and you hear this “Hoi” and “Hoi” and “Hoi,” all around. So you’d know you’re surrounded. First of all, you know you’re surrounded. Then you wonder, my God, here we are now. Like, for instance, after five days, you’ve not eaten anything and you know you’re not as strong as you were in day one, and you wonder, are we going to make it tonight or are we all going to be killed? Is this the night we’re all going to be killed? And so you . . . it was terrible.

DB: Was there ever a situation where you took a Japanese prisoner? Would that ever . . .?

CP: No. Never took a prisoner once. We wouldn’t have taken them either. I mean . . .

DB: What are you going to do with them if you get them?

CP: Yes.

DB: You can’t. You’re sitting there and you can’t put them in your foxhole with you.

CP: No. You can’t take prisoners.

DB: You can’t take them.

CP: I really think the attribute . . . the greatest characteristic or force for our success was the training of the paratroops. The discipline, your confidence, your ability to act. Not react but to act. First, fast. It just made it possible for you to live. And yet they were seasoned troops. They knew what they were doing. They’d done it before. They had prevailed. Here now we came and stuff is starting to change.

DB: After Leyte you went to Luzon.

CP: Yes. I should tell you before you leave this . . . it was December 23rd. There was no artillery to support us because they couldn’t spot us and the artillery couldn’t reach us. Finally on the 23rd . . .

DB: Is this the period when you were surrounded? When you were out there by yourself for five days?

CP: Yes.

DB: Your company was surrounded.

CP: The company. Yes. Yes. Finally we got a message that the last hill, the last hill in front of us, about a quarter of a mile away, was going to be bombarded in the morning at five o’clock. A five-minute bombardment. We hadn’t had any artillery support at all in the prior thirty days. None. So McGinnis, Captain McGinnis, called us all together that afternoon about five or six, and he got the word. I don’t know how he got the word. There was going to be an artillery barrage on the last hill, which had eight machine gun nests on it. They were looking down this valley, the caribou trail. Everything was on a caribou trail. An oxen trail. And up there, about eight logs high, was where the big machine gun nests were. About a hundred yards wide.

DB: They were dug in. They were in bunkers.

CP: Yes. They were dug in, in bunkers. And they dug in deep. So there was going to be a barrage. The next morning we heard these screaming shells coming right over the top of our heads. You could hear it coming . . . boom! And then the screams of the Japanese. And then the cheers from us. Because we were to move out as soon as the barrage was over. It was to go on for five minutes. And then another shell hit. They sounded like the size of a locomotive.

DB: It sounds like a freight train going through the sky.

CP: It would go right over your head, and it sounded just like a freight train. You could hear that huge thing soaring and the scream to it and then, varoom!! And then the screams of the Japanese. Finally silence from the Japanese. They were all killed. So we moved out and I was the lead scout going down the center. Hogan and Dennitch were off to the left with the machine gun. Another guy by the name of Bose was on a machine gun to go over to the right. They were going to do a flank, and we were going to go down the center. So we started going down, and no shots came out. You don’t go right in the middle of the caribou trail. You go off on the side, and you sort of half hunch and crawl. Bent over. I got up against the palm tree barricade and started climbing up to look over, and there everything was a shambles. They were all gone. Parts were in the trees. Arms and legs here and there. Moaning. But nobody moving. So we all came over. It was then about seven o’clock. We sat down and said, “My God, down there, there’s the ocean.” The other side, at Ormoc. There were 50,000 Japanese killed at Ormoc. So this was our last battle and our last day. I sat down against a palm tree and Denapole sat next to me, and he tips his helmet back, just like that.

DB: Who is this?

CP: Denapole. Elmer Denapole. Great, great . . . great man. A great man. And he said, “Jesus, we made it.” All of a sudden a single shot rang out. I looked over and there was a hole right there. About two or three drops of red blood.

DB: Just above his nose.

CP: Just above his nose. He was gone. He was gone. We left him sitting there. We were all so exhausted. We were . . . if only somebody had taken a picture. Here I was, a hundred and twenty-six pounds in this mud and filth and dirt. I mean we stunk. We all stunk. We started walking down about eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock. Up came a Jeep. Some U. S. soldiers saw us. They got out of the Jeep and ran up to us, and here we’re coming out in all this mud and filth. We hadn’t shaved. Limping. We were all walking wounded. They stood and as we got closer they stepped back and parted and started to cry. You poor guys. They could tell in an instant what we’d gone through. So they loaded us into the Jeep and drove us down into Ormoc. There was a Catholic church. The only thing I’ve ever wanted to go back and see was that Catholic church. Because they’d taken the pews out, and that was the first aid station. They carried me in there and cut my boots off and my legs began to swell from the knees down. Just like balloons. We called it “jungle rot.” Like an elephant’s foot. You can hardly see your toes. The digits. You can hardly see them. It just swelled up. I couldn’t walk anymore. And when we were up in the jungles you never took your boots off because you couldn’t get them back on again. And we all knew that. So about five o’clock this doctor came by and put a big cardboard “E”, a piece of cardboard with a big letter E on it, around my neck.

DB: What’s that for?

CP: Evacuation. You will be evacuated tomorrow. This was Christmas Eve day. So I had something to eat. They were caring for us beautifully, and I said, “Where are the sentries?” It was getting dark. “We don’t have any sentries. We don’t need any sentries.” They said, “All the goddamn Japs are gone.” So I crawled off my stretcher. Crawled over to the confessional. Opened the door. Reached up and crawled in the confession booth. I slept in there because I figured if they came and threw some grenades or something, I’d be safe. When I crawled out in the morning, one guy said to me, “What did you do that for?” So I told him. He laughed. Then in the morning they picked me up on a stretcher and took me out to the hospital ship, Mercy. The ocean was beautiful. Beautiful. We pulled up next to this great big white gleaming white ship. Air-conditioned. Here I was looking like . . . terrible. Smelling. And people cried. We went into a wardroom on the main deck. It had huge windows on both sides.

DB: Are you here by yourself now? Is anybody else from your unit with you?

CP: Twelve other guys. We were the worst wounded. My arm looked like . . . it was all infected.

DB: Where you had been cut.

CP: Terrible. Yes. It looked awful. So all of a sudden two orderlies came and took my outfit off. My legs were then just . . . I couldn’t walk. They made a little chair with their hands. I sat there and they carried me into the shower room down the end of the ward and a little metal stool. They said, “Just sit here. Just soak.” So I sat and soaked. I remember I began to sob. I couldn’t stop. I sobbed and sobbed for . . . maybe a half hour. Then they carried me back. My God, I’m free. It’s around noon and Denapole is probably still sitting against that goddamn tree. Only one day ago. That was brutal. That was terrible. That was terrible.

DB: Terrible thinking about your friend up against the tree.

CP: Yes. There he was.

DB: There you were. Safe.

CP: And here I was. Safe. Warm. Food. All cleaned up. Then a Catholic priest came. I always remember what a lovely man he was. He sent a telegram to my dad that I was okay.

DB: Your father had been notified that you were missing?

CP: I was missing in action. Yes. We were cut off.

DB: And the company was surrounded.

CP: We were surrounded and we were out of touch. So dad got a telegram on Christmas Day that I was safe.

DB: So that was probably the best Christmas present he ever got.

CP: Yes. It sure was. It sure was. And we went down to New Guinea, to Hollandia, and that was about a week’s trip, two weeks. I forget how long. My legs were up in stirrups and they were draining all the pus out of them and I was feeling wonderful. I got out and went to the station hospital in Hollandia, where they operated on my arm and took care of that. Then I wrote to my brother, who was on the minesweeper. I said, “I can’t tell you where I am, but it’s APO 968 as you can see. But I can’t tell you where.” He wrote back and said, “We’re in the South Pacific. I can’t tell you where, but we’re going to be moving north.” Then all of a sudden one day the YMS97 pulled into Hollandia harbor, and Harald was at the side of the ship when the mail boat came up. He said, “What’s the APO number here?” “Army Post Office 968.” He said, “That’s where Carl is.” So he got off the next day. They were stocking up with food and gas. He got a ride up to the station hospital. Just like M*A*S*H. People coming and going. He said, “I want to find my brother.” But they told him, “We don’t have any records.”

DB: It was a tent hospital?

CP: Yes. Tent hospitals. They didn’t have any records, and they told Harald they didn’t know how he could find me. So he went out, and he was walking down a big company street, which was all mud, of course, and in the middle were the holes of gas tanks with the top and bottom cut off, and you’d squat over it. That was the latrine. All the way around were posts about six feet high, five feet, of canvas with an entry over here. So he was walking along and all of a sudden he saw me from here up, going into the latrine. And I was sitting there squatting and Harald came and stood in front of me. He said, “So this is the way you spend your time in the paratroops.” [Chuckles] I put on some clothes, and we went down the beach and got a ride out to his YMS97. The captain and all the guys came and talked to me. What is combat like? How is it? Here we are. And we had fried eggs and steak. My God!! And carbonated Coca Cola.

DB: And they weren’t dried eggs either, were they?

CP: No. [Whistles] Boy, was that ever thrilling. So that was great.

DB: How long were you in the hospital?

CP: I was there about . . . I don’t quite remember how long. I really did most of the healing on the hospital ship. They did the surgery on my hand and all that pus was taken out. So I went back to my outfit. I got a ride back up to my outfit. I could have gone home, but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do that. So I went into Luzon.

DB: Was your unit already in Luzon when you got there?

CP: Yes. They were there. As a matter of fact, they jumped at the big airfield outside of Luzon.

DB: Tagaytay Ridge?

CP: Yes. That’s right.

DB: So you missed the jump there.

CP: I missed that jump. Then we jumped up in northern Luzon. What was the name of that place?

DB: Apollo, Apello, something like that?

CP: Yes. Something like that. Aperri. Something like that.

DB: Right on the northern tip?

CP: Right on the northern tip.

DB: That was a very small jump though.

CP: Small jump. Yes. It was a resort town. It had been a mountain resort place. And so things were back to normal.

DB: And so things were back to normal. When you rejoined your unit, was it like homecoming?

CP: Oh, it was thrilling. It was thrilling. Oh, yes. Thrilling. Because they didn’t know where I was or what had happened. And of course the greatest salvation in World War II was penicillin and streptomycin. Before that most people died of infections—in World War I and all the rest. But with my arm, when it was cut, I just poured the powder in there and wrapped it up. With that, you knew you’d be okay. I mean, you just didn’t worry about it. But nevertheless, people died. So nobody knew until we got together, and everybody felt the same thing about Denapole. He was sort of a spiritual leader of the outfit. That was terrible. Then Atkinson was killed. Half of his head was blown off by a mortar shell. He was our first sergeant. That was a terrible loss. And we kept on fighting up there in Luzon, and made a couple more jumps, and everybody felt good about it. Then we were told we were going into Okinawa. Now Okinawa is not jungle land. Okinawa is a mountainous, rocky place in which the Japanese were into caves.

DB: But you were going in there to fight. You weren’t going in there in preparation for the occupation of Japan. You got in there in August of 1945.

CP: We went in to fight. I have three invasion arrows, three battle stars, the Bronze Star and Presidential Citation and, of course, the Purple Heart.

DB: They were still cleaning up the Japanese in the southern part of the island.

CP: Yes. That’s where the demolition came in. With the flame thrower. One of the things the demolition guys used was a flame thrower. And the flame thrower was the only way to burn them out. You could throw a satchel of dynamite in there or you could throw grenades. But the best way was to burn them out. Because you’d go about a hundred and fifty feet with that fireball and you’d hear them scream and they’d come running out and the guys would shoot them. Pick them off one by one. And they were fierce. They’d never give up. So that’s another place where it got very, very frightening, because as a flame thrower you were a target for the Japanese. They could see you; they could see the cylinders on your back. They weighed seventy-eight pounds when they were loaded. And you would just pull that trigger and give it a blast for two seconds. So I don’t know how many . . . I was asked once how many Japanese I killed. I said, “I have no idea.” But it was many.

DB: Did you yourself carry a flamethrower?

CP: I was a flame thrower. As a matter of fact, on my discharge it says “demolition specialist.” I wish it had said, “flame thrower,” too. [Chuckles] A flame thrower was a fierce weapon. I mean that was a fierce weapon. Fabulous power. And of course they would try and shoot you. So you were constantly under lots of stress. But it was also fantastically powerful.

DB: It is just part of the job.

CP: Yes. And you’d share. You’d share. So Okinawa was tough. That went on for about a couple weeks. Then came the big day when Truman made the decision to drop the bombs. If he hadn’t, we would have lost maybe a million men.

DB: And the 11th Airborne was going to be in on the initial invasion, too.

CP: Yes. Yes, we were.

DB: You were aware of that?

CP: We were aware of that. Yes.

DB: And how did people feel about the invasion?

CP: We could hardly wait to get there. And yet we knew that they were going to fight every inch of the way. Like they did in Leyte. Like they did at Okinawa. Like they did in Manila. They never surrendered. They fought fiercely. So we knew it was going to be horrendous. We had no idea about the atomic bomb. And then the first one dropped on Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, and then the word came out they had surrendered. We flew in on August 28th.

DB: Let’s go back to when you first heard about the bomb. What was the attitude in the unit?
CP: People thought, my God!! How did they do that?!

DB: Just shock and amazement?

CP: Oh, shock and awe. Yes. And relief. Yes. It took out a whole city. And then the second one. Then everybody cheered for Truman because maybe they’d have a third and a fourth.

DB: As many as it took to get the job done.

CP: Yes. Otherwise you’re going to be . . . you know. We all knew what was going to happen. A million guys killed. I mean, we didn’t know that, but we assumed that. Because we knew they would never surrender. Surrender, to them, was unacceptable. To go to heaven you had to fight. That was their calling. That was their religion. So we got the call that we were going to go in August 28th. Our division. Our regiment first. The first thousand guys were going to get a free Ford when we got home. That was the rumor. It never materialized. And we landed at Atsugi Airfield.

DB: On boats?

CP: No. By plane. With full combat regalia and live ammunition.

DB: But not a jump?

CP: No. Not a jump. With a loaded flame thrower, hand grenade, live ammunition. All of our rifles, machine guns, everything.

DB: Now you were the first Americans into this airfield that hadn’t been even partially secured?

CP: No. We landed about four in the afternoon.

DB: And you were prepared for a fight.

CP: Yes. And we thought with the people that were trying to take our regiment hostage. So we were prepared for full fight. At the far end of the airfield, where the plane stopped, were cars and trucks with keys in the ignition but nobody around. The instructions were to go in single file to Yokohama, to Tokyo to the Imperial Hotel, and bivouac there. And we all piled in. You had all of your stuff.

DB: In these Japanese trucks.

CP: And cars. And everything. And as we walked and we drove slowly out of the airfield all the way through Yokohama it looked like this. Flat. Then you’d see a smokestack. It had been firebombed three times. They never surrendered under firebombing, but it meant that the city was flat. More were killed by firebombing than by the atomic bomb!
DB: Yes. It was worse . . . as bad or worse than an atomic bomb.

CP: It was worse than Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And yet they wouldn’t surrender. Here the Japanese were about four deep on both sides of the highway as we came in, with their hands at their side and their heads bowed. I don’t have a picture of it. I don’t have any regrets in life, but I do regret that one, that there weren’t pictures of us getting out of the jungles at Leyte, and two, there weren’t pictures of us coming into Yokohama. This was before the Missouri came in on September 2nd. This was the 28th of August. So we drove into Tokyo and set up tents there. The next morning after breakfast we went to the Yokohama Naval Yard. The gates were open. There was not a single Japanese around, and there were two destroyers and a of couple light ships, all that was left of the Navy. Our charge was to see that the boilers were cold. We got in . . . the gangway is only about so wide. They are smaller men. We went down and all the boilers were cold. Total, total defeat. Total defeat.

DB: So they had done everything they were instructed to do.

CP: Everything. Then came the Missouri and the signing. Then we were sent up to northern Honshu, to a city called Sendai.

DB: Were you still there in Tokyo for the signing? Did you see the events going on out in the harbor?

CP: Yes.

DB: And you saw the huge air armada that flew over?

CP: Yes. Everything. And we yelled welcome! We’ve been here for a week, you guys! Where have you been?

DB: Now you had an encounter with the Japanese when you came in from the airfield, and they were lined up along the road. What was your first face-to-face encounter with the Japanese? Now if you think . . . you’d just had these horrific experiences, killing them and trying not to be killed by them, and the resentment and the hatred and the fear and everything that goes with all of that, and now all of a sudden you’re in their homeland as the victor, dealing with them one-on-one. When did you have a one-on-one experience with them or a real face-to-face encounter, and how was that experience for you? What was it like to deal with them? All of a sudden here’s a person. And a few days ago we would have been trying to kill each other.

CP: MacArthur was a magnificent general, and he sent the word out that we would be occupiers but they are vanquished. We want no negative encounters. We want nothing to go wrong. Not a single incident in that occupation that was negative to the U.S. or with the Japanese. Not one. The first time I saw a Japanese as such was when we were getting on the train to go to Honshu up to Sendai, and there were some Japanese on that car that we were going to get on, and they ran off. At the station. They just didn’t want to be near us.

DB: Were they afraid of you?

CP: They were afraid of us. They were told that paratroopers killed their mothers and raped their sisters. You could see the sense of utter fear in them. So we suddenly felt sorry for them. Going out of the train yard in Tokyo, where there were train tracks and there would be a little plot of ground, they had vegetables growing in there. It looked as though . . . when we saw their last destroyer or two . . . we wondered, how could they have done what they did with what they had? We had such might, as against what they had. Their carbines, like the one I have at home, is a single bolt. Suddenly it was a beautiful land. Suddenly you had this hatred, but you also felt . . . sorry. The first fellow I hired—I’m jumping way ahead to when I was at Fairview—was a Japanese-American. As our controller. His name was Harry Umeda. So I harbor no harsh feelings. You did while you were in uniform. You did when you were in Okinawa. But once you got into Tokyo, once we got into Japan, you sort of had a different feeling. They were fighting for what they thought was right, and we were fighting for what we thought was right.

DB: Maybe you saw them now as not as soldiers trying to kill you but as rather pathetic human beings.

CP: They were. They were pathetic. They were pathetic. And what they were put through. What they were put through. What they were forced to do. What they were forced to believe. I felt tragic for them.

DB: How did the occupation go for you then? When you went up to Honshu.

CP: Yes. We were in Sendai and there was not a single episode up there either. And we left there in November. We came back to the States in early December.

DB: The 11th stayed there for a while though?

CP: Yes. They did. But I had points.

DB: Established at jump school.

CP: Yes.

DB: Did you do any jumps in Japan?

CP: No. Not in Japan.

DB: I have to ask you. You broke your leg and you only had three jumps. Did they ever require you to go back and get the other two jumps?

CP: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I had to go back for the other two jumps. And then most of my jumps were in demolition school. Every Saturday we’d put on a display, which was really hilarious. They’d have this big jump field, a drop zone, and there would be a wooden building and over here would be stands, like you see in Little League baseball. You’d have visitors from Washington come down. Senators and so forth. Then three planes would fly over real low, about a hundred feet off the ground, and go down ten miles and come back and jump and then blow up the house. It was always . . . I did that six times. The guy who got the long straw got to stand in the door. So you were flying down about a hundred feet off the ground. You had your left hand up here, and you would wave. You lean all the way out and you wave. They look up and say, ah! It was great fun. There’s a picture of me standing in the door. And that was in demolition school.

DB: Did you like to stand in the door?

CP: Oh, yes.

DB: I did, too. You could see what was coming.

CP: Yes. It was wonderful.

DB: If you’re back farther down the stick, you are kind of wondering what’s happening? Where are we? What’s going on? You stand in the door you can see it all happening.

CP: Yes. Yes. And of course, with the demolition guys, there would only be . . . there were only ten of us in the class. So the ten of us would go out. Just like that.

DB: Like a freight train going out the door.

CP: Yes. It was. Yes. Geronimo! [Chuckles]

DB: Let me ask you a question. Kind of a personal question. You’re sharing my experience. It’s been almost forty years for me since I jumped. It’s been sixty-five for you since you jumped. When you watch a movie, when you see the guys going out the door, are you right there in the door with them again?

CP: Oh, yes.

DB: All the emotions come back?

CP: Oh, yes. I love to watch the History Channel because you see the guys. There they go! There they go!

DB: You’re ready to go again, aren’t you?

CP: Yes.

DB: It never leaves you.

CP: No. It’s thrilling. I mean it’s a unique thrill in life. There’s no doubt about it.

DB: Facing death and overcoming it in a way.

CP: You know, probably the lesson on that is human nature has a capacity . . . human beings have a capacity for distress, and they never realize what they have until they’re into it. And then once they’re out of it, they wonder how they had it. And the book, The Greatest Generation, it’s true. But it is a misnomer. My grandkids now are going to be equal to what I am or was. The greatest generation is always to come, not what was the past. I think Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, does a disservice to the youth of today and the years to come, because it says that generation was the greatest, and therefore you will not be, and that isn’t fair. And it’s not correct either. It’s not correct. It’s all wrong. Because there were heroes in the Revolutionary War, there were heroes in the Civil War, there are heroes in every war, and there will be heroes today. Just as many as there were in those days. And war is not a criteria for greatness. I see true greatness in my children and grandchildren, and I am deeply proud of them.

DB: You came home from Japan in November, I think you said. You came home on points.

CP: Yes.

DB: Ahead of the unit. So you came home pretty much alone.

CP: Yes.

DB: You weren’t with the unit. There might have been one or two other guys on the boat from your unit, but essentially you were alone and you came in on a boat. You came home on a boat, or did you fly home?

CP: I came home on a ship out of Japan. There were about five of us who were out of the same company. We landed in San Francisco, and we immediately went down to this little shop where we got our decorations, medals, and put them on. It was about six in the evening, and we went down to the famous hotel in San Francisco on the main drag. Not the St. Francis but something else, and the maître d' could tell we’d just gotten off the boat. He said, “Did you just arrive?” We said, “Yes, we just arrived.” He asked where we were from, and we said, “We’re in the paratroops.” He said, “Your dinners are on us.”

DB: So you got to come home a hero.

CP: We had champagne and a steak dinner. Then that was the end of the service. I was decommissioned.

DB: Out-processed for a couple days in San Francisco?
CP: Yes.

DB: Given a train ticket home?

CP: Yes.

DB: And where was home?

CP: My dad was remarried and lived in Oswego, Oregon. He married a wonderful, wonderful lady. I was there for Christmas. It was hard to believe.

DB: Where was your brother? Was he home yet?

CP: Harald was in Philadelphia. He’d come home. He was in Philadelphia, where his fiancée lived. He had come home about the same time. So then the next thing was getting on with life.

DB: Let me ask you one other question. Was occupation duty something of a good transition for you, between combat and the civilian world? Did it give you sort of an interim period to adjust a little bit?

CP: Yes. I think so. You sort of unwound. The fighting was over . . .

DB: You’re still with a familiar group.

CP: The fear and antipathy was gone, and the anger was gone. You’re just thinking about getting back home and picking up your life. What are you going to do? And you write happy letters back home. You get letters. It was a very, very lovely time, really.

DB: And you developed some relations with the Japanese in Sendai?

CP: Very, very little.

DB: Very little, but maybe it was a transition for that, too. Just to see them as human beings for the first time.

CP: Yes. You didn’t wave or say hello to anybody. There’s just really no contact. You didn’t want any contact.

DB: And so while you were there you were thinking about your future plans.

CP: Yes. Going to school. The GI Bill. A free education. Go to college! Wow!

DB: And you planned to come back to Minnesota?

CP: Yes. To my Uncle Erling and my Aunt Helen. At that time I was just about engaged to Ruthie. A wonderful lady.

DB: Where had you met her? Because you’d been gone in the service.

CP: I met her during the freshman year at the University, in the fall of 1942.

DB: So this is someone you’d known and had corresponded with.

CP: We corresponded all through the war. And she was a great correspondent. We had a great time together. Then we became engaged. Wonderful lady.

DB: So that was another reason to come back to Minnesota.

Let’s have a little reflection on your time in the military. You’ve been very successful in life. Very successful. And you’ve had lots of experiences with important people, and yet I can tell from talking to you that these experiences in the military were extremely important in your life, and maybe were building experiences for you, foundation experiences. How often do you think about your military experiences? How important has that been in your life? Where do you rank your military experiences?

CP: Very, very high. It gives you . . . about twenty years ago I went through a terrible experience. I was president of Fairview. I created the Fairview hospital system. We had an episode there in which I was attacked from some people behind the scenes. I was deeply disappointed.

DB: Political attacks, you mean? Not physical.

CP: Yes. Political. I was almost destroyed in that process. That episode. There was a critical dinner meeting held one night with our Board of Directors in which charges were leveled against me. I remember sitting there, quietly thinking to myself, I’ve gone through worse than this. And I actually felt that, you guys don’t know what you’re up against.

DB: You’ve seen worse.

CP: I’ve seen worse. I’ve lived through much worse than this. Much worse. That’s why it’s great for kids to be on a baseball team, or a swim team, or a hockey team, or a choir or a whatever, and learn. To begin to absorb experiences that broaden you and deepen you, so that you can do the next thing.

DB: Adversity builds character.

CP: It does. It does. The Depression, the war, both contributed mightily, I think, to my own life because they were so stark and so terrible. But it wasn’t anything to be celebrated. I wouldn’t want anybody to go through it . . . your own children. You wouldn’t want your children to go through that. But on the other hand, it is good for them to understand.

DB: Rudyard Kipling.

CP: Right. It helps you discern a little bit about the personality of people and . . .

DB: Not a little bit. I think a lot.

CP: Yes. Who can you depend on.

DB: You learn to pick them out right away.

CP: Yes. You do. You do. We had one officer in Leyte . . . well, he did lose his confidence and his courage. And he ran. We had one officer that ran. We had one officer who actually ran and left us on an outer flank. Oh, my God. I forgot about that. And we managed to get back to our lines. But we went up to him and said, “Get out of here.”

DB: He had no credibility left.

CP: He was a first lieutenant. We were only sergeants and corporals. We told him to get out of here and he left. He left that night. I don’t know where he ever went.

DB: Never saw him again?

CP: Never saw him.

DB: Did you ever get involved with the 11th Airborne Association after the war?

CP: No, I never did anything.

DB: Never got involved with any veterans’ organizations then?

CP: No, never have. I felt that was over with. I wish I had really, because . . .

DB: You got very busy with other things.

CP: Yes.

DB: Did you keep in touch with any of your veteran friends?

CP: We had a two-day retreat with five of us once. About fifteen years ago. Dick Ostrom, Dave Reynaud, Joe Yarchak, Hogan and myself. We met at the Northwest Airlines ticket counter, and we were driving down to Ostrom’s house in Faribault. One came in from Seattle and one from Detroit and one from Philadelphia. We all met. Except Hogan wasn’t there. He was the machine gunner. He was from Detroit. We turned around and looked for him, and there he was walking around out front where the cars park. We called him—“Hogan! You haven’t gotten any smarter,” we said. That was a lovely time. We were like brothers.

Read about Carl Platou's post-war experiences.