<Begin Segment 13>

SF: So when you got drafted, did, did you feel that you were really going to make a contribution by potentially being able to help stop Hitler? How did you see that, your role when got drafted into the, into the army?

JF: I don't really know, (Steve). I think that I... my first inclination would be to say that I thought well, now maybe something was going to happen. But I'm not sure that I felt that way. Certainly it made, it made me aware of how, what a long way we had to go to get prepared. I mean, I was drafted, we had absolutely nothing to train with. Not only did we have nothing to train with, but nobody had any training plan. We, a lot of us from Baltimore/Pennsylvania area went to Fort Knox and trained with the 1st Armored Division. We were there for housing and, quartering is what I think they -- food and quartering or something like that. I'm not quite sure what the phrase was.

But there were no weapons, and there was, there was no -- the army was put in a position of having to take in thousands and thousands of men and literally not knowing what the hell to do with them. I mean, what we did was walk. I mean, we walked for miles and miles and miles over, over the Kentucky countryside. And that was the only, that was the only thing that we did as a group because there was, there was nothing to do and there was nothing to do it with. We finally got on the rifle range, and we had World War I British Enfield rifles on the firing range. And we had no, there were no tanks. We had no tanks. We had no anti-tank weapons. So we learned in a tremendous hurry how far behind we were as far as, you've got twenty thousand people here, which is virtually division size, but fire power, training, and so forth, you've got zero. You couldn't stand up against a good German platoon, for God's sake, with twenty thousand men there's just nobody who's, to speak of, has fired a weapon.

SF: How did they, how did that happen where you've got the masses of the American public knowing that you've got this horrendous force that they're probably going to have to contend with, and yet the military and the politicians are kind of standing on their hands or sitting on their hands, and you've got nothing happening here, and people are anticipating this great problem that they're going to have to deal with?

JF: I don't know. I, I, they say that one of the reasons for the famous "death march" on Bataan was because all of a sudden the Japanese captured, I don't know how many thousands and thousands of American prisoners, and they didn't know what to do with them. They had no food, they had no, not enough guards, they had no water, they had no sanitation, they had no place to put these people. All of a sudden they've got 'em. And chaos is what resulted. And I think that the military was in the same boat. They knew they were, they knew that all these people were going to descend upon them, but knowing and being, having the time and the ability and the money to do something with them was an entirely different thing. If you, there just wasn't, just wasn't the time from, from the first volunteer group joining the army, until the first draft, drafted people joined the army. There simply wasn't time to do, to get this set up.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.