<Begin Segment 24>

JB: So, what thoughts were going through your, through your head when you were leaving the Continental U.S. and heading overseas to enter World War II?

JF: Well, of course, mostly hoping we'd get back, and second, hoping that no submarine commander would torpedo the damn ship we were on. And that was, that was a fear that everybody had that you -- you know, it wasn't so much as you were going to be sunk as the fact that all of that training you had was just not going to ever going to be brought to fruition. Boy, I didn't go through desert maneuvers to die here in this goddamned ship sinking, that kind of thought. Most people, a lot of them didn't have the time that I did, but still, that was pretty much a thought that was on everybody's mind.

But we went overseas on a huge ship called the Andes, which was going into the Pacific and Orient, steamship line, as a passenger ship, when it was caught, caught in the waves by the war. And they never really finished it. But it was just a huge ship that held, I don't know how many thousands of people were on that thing. Then we went into Casablanca, then separated there.

But when we were going overseas, we were formed into a company, a battalion of casual officers and men, which means they weren't assigned anyplace. So we were going into a casual pool in North Africa. And from the casual pool, there's other organizations, other military organizations would draw six radio operators or four infantrymen or whatever, so it was just... and I was, I was one of the company commanders. Imagine, we had a battalion of men, and all the officers were second lieutenants. Battalion commander was named Page, he was a second lieutenant. I was company commander as a second lieutenant. All this, all my platoon lieutenants were second lieutenants. So we got to North Africa, and we tried to give the fellows some kind of training, although again, we had nothing to train with. It was just a matter of walking every day. So we'd walk out to the ocean on, on the outskirts of Casablanca, and stop at a wine shop and get a couple of glasses of wine. They had a lot of wine, but they didn't have very many glasses. So we had to very careful not to break the glasses. But at any rate, we had a couple glasses of wine, and we'd walk all the way back again, maybe four or five miles one way. And that was, that was the extent of our so-called training.

SF: Where did you go after Casablanca?

JF: Well, I got separated from my company. I still swear to this day that somebody was poisoning our water, but I had no proof other than the fact that a lot of the, lot of the fellows including me got this intense diarrhea. And I got really sick this one night, and this friend of mine said, "I'm going to call, tell them you're having an appendicitis attack or something. See if we can get you in the hospital. So sure enough, he did and the, they came out, put me in the ambulance and took me to the hospital, Casablanca. I was there celebrating my 25th birthday, by the way. And after three or four days of just not eating anything and drinking milk, why they managed to cure this, well, by that time, my outfit had moved over to north, to, they had started on their way to India. And I caught up with them again in India.

But we went from -- now, here I am, I'm already a casual officer without an outfit, and now I'm a casual officer all by myself without even a company to command. [Laughs] So, so we went around North Africa by train, which was a fascinating trip, to Oran. And we were in Oran for probably two, three weeks while they were forming a convoy. And then we went through the Mediterranean to Calcutta -- not Calcutta, but Bombay, through the Mediterranean, through the Suez. We sat for three days off of (Aden), A-(d)-e-n, at the tip of, I can't remember which peninsula it is. But three days, and it was just boiling hot, waiting for the convoy to be able to move again across the ocean, Indian Ocean, I suppose and get us into Bombay, which we finally did. And then I caught up with the outfit. They were in, I think I caught up with them outside of Calcutta. We flew across to Calcutta. And that's where I caught up with the outfit again.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.