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SF: Okay. I'd sort of like to, kind of go over your military career kind of systemically. So, you started out at Fort Meade. You were inducted, right? You took your initial physical and filled out some papers probably. And then you went to Fort Knox, I guess, to take your basic, right? And that was kind of like a standard, basic training. And then what did you do after Knox?

JF: After we took our basic training, we had a series of tests to determine maybe what army career we would have, what kind of slots we could fill. And I along with a whole group of other people was sent to signal school to learn to be a radio operator, and that was, I think, a three-month course at Fort Knox. And we did, we did move out of tents in the barracks for that. And that was pretty intense training, and very successful. It was surprising to, to both the general soldier population as well as to the cadre of the school that, how well some people did and how poorly some other people did. I mean, education seemed to have nothing much to do with the ability to hear a sound and write it down. And I had a, I had a good friend from school, his name was Fidorowitz, Frank Fidorowitz, and he was, I don't think he had graduated from high school. He was kind of a sharpie from Philadelphia, but he had a knack for this. And he was one of the, in fact, he was the first one in the class to ever reach, receiving 25 words a minute, which is pretty fast. They teach you by sound, but you don't say "dot-dash," you say "dit-dah," "dit-dah," "dit-dah," "dit-dah" because that's the way it sounds on your headset. And Frank, Frank was just superb at that. But where some of the other fellows seemed to have much more going for them intellectually, had trouble passing twenty, twenty words. I mean, twenty -- they're not words, they're code groups of five. But you gradually, you gradually pick up speed in receiving, and you gradually pick up speed in sending, over, over a period of time.

So after that, when I graduated from, as radio operator, I was sent to Pine Camp, New York, which was a brand-new camp. We were talking about training and things the other day. Everything was new. They didn't have the, they didn't have the housing facilities. That's why the tents. All of this had to be built, and somebody had to plan it all, and somebody had to select the sites. So I mean, for a nation to get ready for war, there's a million little details to take care of. So we went, at two different times we went into brand-new, just-built barracks. That was Pine Camp in New York, and then I went there and I was a radio operator, oh, for just a couple months. And then into the winter, into the fall, went back to Fort Knox, and we formed another armored division, and that was the 5th Armored Division.

And after that winter at Fort Knox of training and getting in more people, not too many more, but more of a cadre, then we went to another brand-new camp at Camp Cook, California. And then we just were inundated with people who've been called into the service. By this time I was a platoon sergeant, and then I was, I was a staff sergeant, and then I was -- our operations sergeant went to, applied for and was accepted to go to OCS, Officer Candidate School. Unfortunately, he didn't, he didn't complete the course. He was washed out. But any rate, I took his job as an operations sergeant for the 85th Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. And that was mostly training, mostly, setting up convoys of, and camps where we could go and do overnight bivouacs and just to get an idea of a whole company being able to roll out at the same time. In our battalion we had four, four armored car companies and one tank company, one light tank company. So the idea was primarily to get all these people on the road and get to the same destination roughly at the same, same time, and to find a place that would take us in.

And I remember one time this lieutenant, who was, first lieutenant was in charge of this training branch. He was my immediate boss. And his name was Severe Roang. I'll never forget that name. He was from the Midwest, of course, and a very, very nice fellow, really a hard-working guy. And he was, he was under a lot of pressure because of the four companies that we had in our battalion, three of them were, were commanded by West Point graduates and one by a Virginia Military Institute graduate. So the officer caliber was pretty high. The colonel was a West Point man, the battalion commander was a West Point man. The assistant, his assistant was a Major, Wayne J. Dunn was a West Point graduate. So we had, we had a pretty high level of officer leadership there. And I think it was a pretty damned good outfit. But any rate, we, soon after I became operations sergeant, why, we went out on the Mojave Desert for desert maneuvers, the desert training center that General Patton set up. And that, that, was tough.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.