<Begin Segment 25>

SF: So after you got to India, where did you report to?

JF: Well, I joined a, I'd been assigned to a, a big, actually it was a battalion, but it was called the signal company, and gradually they did refer to it as a, as a battalion. But it was providing communications up and down the Ledo Road, and Ledo is in Assam, India. And the road goes down and turns, it goes way down into central Burma, then turns back and goes back up into China.

They were building this road in order to not to have to fly over the hump, which is a... isn't it amazing, I can't remember the name of the mountains. It's Himalayas. Because they were losing so many people. I mean, they were flying these C-47s or C-46s, and flying gasoline over to support the Americans and the Chinese troops in China, and it was very, very costly in manpower. And so they were trying to build this road. And, and we were supplying communications for the, for combat and for the engineers who were building the roads and for anybody else who needed it along this strip. And I was assigned to a place called Tingkawk Sakan, and the only reason that place was there, carved out of jungle was because at that time our main communication was a cable about, about a half inch through, maybe 5/8 of an inch. And it was just like putting down a phone line, except it was a heavy cable, and every once in a while at a given distance this, the messages on this cable had to be, not re-emphasized, but made louder. I can't...

SF: Amplified.

JF: Amplified, exactly. And this equipment was call repeater equipment. And we, they had to be at a certain distance apart. And we set up this repeater station for the cable and also cable repair and things like that, plus the fact that we had radio communication and some, well at that time we didn't have teletype, but we had radio communication. So there was just a small group of us there representing our, our company, in the, in the jungle. We ate with the -- we had our own tents, but we were rationed by our engineer outfit for a while. The food was mostly air-dropped. There was a field along the combat trail, the clear area, and they would drop, drop canned food into there, canned food and bags of rice and so forth. And details of cooking people would go out there and bring that in and fix meals. So the food was not cuisine by very, very much of a jump. But any rate, it was livable, and gradually more and more people came in including supply people because they got enough down that far where they could set up a supply depot. And so we had these big, what we called bashas, big structures made out of bamboo to store this food for the administration of the storage and putting it out to the Chinese troops who were doing the fighting, and anybody else who needed the food. So we had supplies, we had engineers, we had our little signal outfit. And that was about it for quite some time. Then as the Japanese were pushed down the road, more headquarter type people came in including the Red Cross had built a big, big basha there, but not in, just about everybody was gone by the time they were finished -- excuse me -- finished this big -- pardon me -- big building. But, at any rate, why, civilization kind of took over, and we even had the Red Cross girls giving out doughnuts and things like that.

SF: Did you see much action against the Japanese in...

JF: No. Knock on wood, I didn't see any. We, we had some cables cut. The only military action, and it wasn't that, really. But we had some cables cut, and we found that, we got a whole bunch of the guys together and armed everybody as well as we could. And we went, following the cable along, we found a pile of cable that somebody had cut apart and dumped here. And we figured it was the Japanese. So we, we kind of scoured the jungle for a good bit of the day, and I saw something up a tree which I thought was maybe a man, and I fired once. That was my only fire -- only shot. But it wasn't. And we never did find out who was doing that.

And the cable was kind of a standby at that time anyway. We mostly had, were using typewriters, teletypewriters. So it didn't amount to very much. But that was, that was the only time. We could hear, we were close enough that we could hear the sounds of battle, but we had no part in it, which was fine with me. That's not a place, not a place to live, much less to fight. Often we would see the bodies of Chinese and bodies of Japanese, 30, 40 feet apart. It was just bloody fighting.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.