<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So, so we're back at Fort Lewis now...

BB: Fort Lewis, uh-huh.

TI: And now you are federalized. So now you're having equipment to actually train on, at this point you're a sergeant, and this is about February, 1941. I'm curious, so they federalized you. Is it because they thought, the government thought that we were going to go to war, or was there a sense of going to war?

BB: I think it was the beginning of an emergency situation. I wasn't in politics so I don't really know, but what I've learned is that President Roosevelt and the Department of Defense decided that they better have larger army. Because Germany was at war with the United States, they weren't at war with us, but they were invading the coastline and shipping wasn't very safe. So you recall the Roosevelt administration gave fifty destroyers to the, to Great Britain at that time? And so we were one small unit that became a, a battalion, and then we were, in July, I think, we were scheduled to go to the Philippines. We were supposed to protect the airfields there against paratroopers.

TI: And so was there a sense that the war was possibly going to be against Japan at that point?

BB: We knew at any time that we would be in combat, because we were escorted under lights-out, no smoking, and we had a cruiser escort and a, we knew of one submarine. We could see the cruiser and once in a while we'd see the submarine.

TI: So this was July 1941, so this is months...

BB: July and August.

TI: Months before, still, the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And yet these precautions were being taken because, as if you were, you were at war.

BB: We went over on the Coolidge, which was a luxury ship. And what they did, they emptied all the inside of the Coolidge, all the decks, and they put, oh... hampers, like, like the navy has, and I guess everybody, you could, you could look down from the top to the bottom of the, to the bottom of the ship. And actually, I was one of the sergeants and there were ten of us, and we found ourselves a room on the deck, on the main deck, and we occupied the room. So we sailed over to the Philippines in a room, ten of us in the same room.

TI: How many men were on the ship?

BB: The whole battalion and, let's see, there were about a hundred, 120 or so in each company, so that'd be about, oh, 350 in our group, then we had the 200th Coast Artillery with us, from New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. And they were about the same size.

TI: So about 700...

BB: So it was about 700, 750, somewhere along in there.

TI: And so you're going to the Philippines.

BB: Going to the Philippines.

TI: And so when you arrived in the Philippines, what was that like?

BB: A lot of work. [Laughs] The Filipinos had never seen a tank, and we inherited onboard, when we boarded the Coolidge, we inherited all the tanks from the 3rd, 3rd, I guess, Tank Brigade in Fort Knox. We had all their tanks. That's all the tanks the United States had at that time. And so we ended up having, each battalion having fifty-six or fifty-seven tanks. And there was another battalion that came over in November.

TI: So when you say "all the tanks," so the tanks in the, on the continental U.S.A., this is all new, and I don't really understand this, they were sent to the Philippines rather than, perhaps to Europe where the war was going on with Germany? Is that, so they were actually making a strategic decision...

BB: Remember this is before the war started.

TI: Yeah, before the war started, but someone was making the strategic decision that resources should be devoted to the Philippines versus the --

BB: I think we were starting to build them then, and I think General Motors and Chrysler and whatnot were developing and rebuilding, modernizing tanks. Now, the old tank that we had was a Stuart Tank, single turret, a .37 mm. The inside of it was, had asbestos for soundproofing, and the asbestos was stapled, riveted, to the armor through an aluminum sheet. We had aluminum sheet on the inside, it was about, I don't know, sixty-fourth or a thirty-second of an inch think, just, just aluminum covering, to keep the asbestos intact, I suppose. And when the shell, first Japanese shells hit the tank, it caused the rivets to break, and so you had this explosion of rivets all inside the tanks. So the rivets did more damage than the shell did. We had one fellow that, Debennedetti got one right in the throat here, and eventually it killed him. But he lived through it for a while, he lived through it, I guess, about six months or a little more than that, a couple years.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.