Here is one of Dad’s stories about being mobilized for World War II. It tells about his leaving Iowa and heading south to Louisiana for training that was pretty basic. The story ends with an anecdote about a motorcycle. Dad had ridden Harley Davidsons for years:
I was in the National Guard, and we were mobilized February 10, 1941. I left Iowa for Camp Claiborne, LA, on a train left over from WWI that had signs at the windows saying, “Don’t shoot buffalo from the window.” When we got to Camp Claiborne, our barracks were square shaped tents with four bunks in each.
We had training every day. They woke us every morning to 40 minutes of exercises, then breakfast, then regular army training. We hiked nearly every day, sometimes with full packs on our backs, and we took our rifles everywhere. We had Springfield bolt action rifles, left over from WWI. Later overseas, we got new M1 Garand rifles.
Sometimes at Camp Claiborne, we had practice air raids. Planes flew over and dropped bags of flour for bombs, and afterwards officers would check what places had flour on them and know they had a hit where the flour was. We didn’t have real tanks for those maneuvers: we just had trucks with the sign “tank” on each one. So if one was hit by flour, we knew it was bombed.
We did have motorcycles, though, in the message center. I delivered messages by motorcycle there and all through the war. Once I was supposed to give a colonel a ride in a sidecar. I’d never had a sidecar attached and I drove the car up a guide wire, spilling the car and the colonel. He got up, helped me right the bike and sidecar, jumped back in and said, “Let’s go, and stay away from guide wires.”
I was in the National Guard, and we were mobilized February 10, 1941. I left Iowa for Camp Claiborne, LA, on a train left over from WWI that had signs at the windows saying, “Don’t shoot buffalo from the window.” When we got to Camp Claiborne, our barracks were square shaped tents with four bunks in each.
We had training every day. They woke us every morning to 40 minutes of exercises, then breakfast, then regular army training. We hiked nearly every day, sometimes with full packs on our backs, and we took our rifles everywhere. We had Springfield bolt action rifles, left over from WWI. Later overseas, we got new M1 Garand rifles.
Sometimes at Camp Claiborne, we had practice air raids. Planes flew over and dropped bags of flour for bombs, and afterwards officers would check what places had flour on them and know they had a hit where the flour was. We didn’t have real tanks for those maneuvers: we just had trucks with the sign “tank” on each one. So if one was hit by flour, we knew it was bombed.
We did have motorcycles, though, in the message center. I delivered messages by motorcycle there and all through the war. Once I was supposed to give a colonel a ride in a sidecar. I’d never had a sidecar attached and I drove the car up a guide wire, spilling the car and the colonel. He got up, helped me right the bike and sidecar, jumped back in and said, “Let’s go, and stay away from guide wires.”