Talking With George, Part 2

BEFORE
"Believe it or not, this is when I enlisted at the courthouse when we went away, they had a guy there taking pictures. This is [Edward] Lykins, he went all the way through with me, and this is John - I can't think of his last name, John Something, he also enlisted with me, and this is Tommy, Tommy was a friend of mine, he came down to bid me farewell. This was taken in October '42, when I left the custom house."

PARRIS ISLAND
"Platoon 849, 13th Recruit Battalion. George A. Smith, John J. Franey, Mess Duty, Nov. 1942."


"Smitty, Spohn, Jowers, Shaw. Sitting: Hurley."
"They were teaching us knife fighting, and [the walls] were like cardboard, it was great for throwing knives. The whole goddamn back of the hut was full of holes."

George Smith and Jeff Jowers outside Hut 10.


Walking the beat.



Howie Haff and George Smith climbing down the mock-up rigging.

Howie Haff, George Smith, Bartholomew Wanagaitis, David Spohn, Howard Kerr, JJ Franey.

"January 1943. Boot Leave."

CAMP PENDLETON
"What this is is Tiny Jowers... when we got to Pendleton, we pulled in there on the train late Saturday night and they told us on Sunday morning just to get the lay of the land. The Third Division had been at Pendleton, but they had been out of there several months, so as a result all this animal life regenerated itself, and there must have been literally a thousand snakes, and that morning when we're walking around, this guy, this is one of the thousands! And I'm petrified of snakes, still am, but at any rate I took that picture and that's as close as I ever got to one. Them suckers, every time we were playing around in the bush I was petrified because I just don't like 'em."

Mess duty at Pendleton. "I dunno where the hell they got the hats."
JJ Franey, McCay, Donald Hart, Robert Williams, Bill Imm

"Imm, Hart, Williams, McCay & Franey vs. Colburn."

"Chow line - note watermelon - Pendleton '43"

"Getting ready for the smoker. Colburn, William, Yonkers?"

"Bob Williams walloping pots."
"We were eating out of mess kits, you'd have 2 or 3 cans, GI cans, one of soapy water and one or two of plain water and you would, after you ate you'd dunk 'em down and that'd be that."

"Fred Davis (Ohio) Pendleton, '43"

George scrubbing his clothing - finished results hanging on a line behind him.

"Lt. Endicott Osgood giving First Platoon 'the Word'."

"Gunnery Sgt Russell, McCay, Izzo, Haff. Tent Camp #2, Camp Pendleton."

Platoon Sergeant Parker McBride and Gunnery Sergeant Walter Russell.

Desperate men of the Weapons Platoon defend their whitewashed stones. From left: Howie Haff, Tom Hurley, Luther Diehl, Amedeo Izzo, JJ Franey, David Spohn, George Hall.

"That's Hopkins, that was a publicity picture put out by the Marine Corps. He was a great kid.... His father had a taint of Communism in his philosophy and I could see it in Steve - and I don't mean to be derogatory here but he just had those ways. You know you say things sometimes you're gonna regret the rest of your life... we were sitting on some railroad ties on the dock in San Diego when we were getting ready to go out, and somebody said about going out and he said "Yeah," he said, "I know I'm not coming back," and big mouth me, I said "Yeah, if I lived the life you did I wouldn't expect to come back either" and of course I have to live with that."

"Show you how nerves get you, when Hoppy got hit a corpsman came up right away and he had indicated that we were out well beyond where we should be, and we, I, expected a litter up there in a hurry - nothing came, nothing came, I really don't know about time but it seemed an awful long while, and I finally got enough nerve, I knew that whoever got up stood a chance of getting zapped, but at any rate, I got up... I knew Knight by name simply like I knew 100 or some others in the platoon, no special contact, but you know when I started back all's I wanted to do was talk to him. Why the hell, I don't know, but you know the ironic part? I kept asking "where's Knight, I wanna talk to Knight," and finally someone said "he's over by the tree, he got shot in the mouth and he can't talk!" To this day I still can't figure out why I wanted to talk to him! I knew I had a head of steam, nerves, and unfortunately he came back later on and got killed...."

"Doxtator, Kincaid, 'Field Music' Fritz, Palmer."

"Hall, Doxtator, Svoboda, Palmer & Davis."

"Spohn, Fritz, Palmer, Davis, Hall, Hart."



Executive Officer "Big Harry" Reynolds and Field Music 1st Class Fritz.

George and Dalton Young wring out the laundry. "Notice we didn't have any washers at the time, everybody's got their laundry hanging out."

ALISO BEACH: RUBBER BOAT TRAINING
Members of A Company on Aliso Beach, November 1943.


In the surf. This photograph appears in the Red Book.

"That was one of our infamous rubber boat brigade things, holy jesus.... I liked it to a certain extent but the water was so damn cold and particularly at night, when we went out at night, ah damn.... Because we were the rubber boat platoon for the battalion, we'd spend a week on the beach doing this while everybody else was playing around someplace else. You know how they lure you into this? Pendleton had a lake alongside of the dispensary, and when they first told us we were gonna be rubber boats they took us down there on a Sunday, put us in this lake, it's great! Sun's shining, it's nice and warm, we thought oh hell this is great! Then they put us down on that beach, they like to killed us. These boats came in, there were two basic sizes, the seven man boat you'd have three men on each side with a coxswain in the back, and the thirteen man boat you had that number twelve, six on each side with a man on the back, and they were brutal those 13 man boats, just picking the suckers up when they were wet, you know.... anyway, the one night the sergeant refused to get in the boat - what we would do, we'd come off the beach, go out past the breakers, play around a little bit then come back through the breakers - but at any rate, we tried to get out three or four times and just get beat to death, and whatever time it was, the fourth or fifth time, I was what they called the bow man, the number one on the port side, and we had the machine gun stashed in these, these thwarts came on an angle up the front and we had the machine gun tied/lashed in there, and we were paddling, and it's dark I mean there's no moon no stars no nothing, and all of a sudden it got blacker if you can picture this and I don't know what made me look up but maybe fifteen, twenty feet above me is this little white line where the breaker starts, and it picked that boat up and it threw us, god knows where the hell it threw us but it threw us all over and as the boat's going up the lashing broke on the MG and now the receiver (which is the big end) is hanging down, and I thought, "if I go off the thing is gonna come on top of me," so I just close my legs on the thwart and I just rowed the boat until it settled upside down and I got off. But at any rate, Gann was in charge of the boat and Gann says "Take a head count," so we're counting, and I realize the gun's missing, I think "I'm gonna have to pay for it," so I go down. First of all, when the wave goes out we're only up to here in water [indicating waist high] but when the waves come in you were like 15 feet. So anyway I go down to check the gun, he counts and of course there's one missing. I come up and I don't know whether it was Spohn, I think, says "I'll go down and try to get it," so Gann counts again, and says "We're missing somebody, who the hell's missing?" You know, so anyway there was a big mixup. In the meantime, Hoppy's hanging on to the back of the boat not saying anything, so we start, when Gann figures out that everybody's there and the hell with the gun we start pushing the boat, and I said something to Hoppy, I don't know what it was, and alls I hear is blublublublublub. And here, he was out on his feet and he's holding onto the boat and as we're pushing his head's going down in the water and I hear this bubbling, that's him breathing, and Christ we woulda lost it. And of course we won't let him forget that, but you know, anyway. [laughing] And I said that's all we need, lose the damn gun and lose somebody who lived in the White House on the same night! But at any rate, we had some good times out there but as it was we were chilled to the bone."

OFF BASE

[From left: George, unknown, unknown, unknown, Tom Hurley, Robert Larson]

"This was our liberty when we first come back in LA. These three were cooks. I don't know whether you know the rank structure - back then the Marine Corps was divided into line and staff. Believe it or not, it was like the Army and Navy fighting, we viewed staff people like they were inferior. I know I'm exaggerating but really there was a lot of animosity, because there were, we have rockers now [on shoulder insignia, curved vs straight], and the line people always had rockers underneath, they had straight bars. When I made staff sergeant, which is what it was called at the time, I told everybody "don't call me staff sergeant, call me platoon sergeant," that's how bad it carried over. Larson, great guy, tough kid. And Hurley, him and I stayed close until he died. The Haywood Hotel in LA, I'll never forget that, they threw us out of there a couple times."

"This is Haff and me down in Tijuana! We enjoyed ourselves... we had a good time. Haff, to look at him there you would think he was somewhat somber, but he was a great guy."

The 24th Marines Band on the set of "Song of Bernadette."


JJ Franey, Anne Hurley, George Smith.

"Hurley was married. That's Anne, that's his wife. When we were down in North Carolina, there was nothing down there, we lived in the tents and all this, right? But at any rate, Anne would not let him be in the States without being with him. Now there's no allotment at the time, we're making $50 a month, right? Anyway, Hurley one day says to me, we have to go in town, he said Anne insists on coming. She came in by train, there's no place for her to go, they did have a place on the base, the Hostess [?] House, they called it. Anyway, she comes down, that's how much she, you know, she loved the guy, she wasn't gonna let him sleep on his own. Finally she the next day goes out on her own and hustles and gets an apartment with another Marine couple so they shared this two room apartment or something. When we go to California, it was a Sunday morning. She said she was coming out, Hurley said we gotta find a place for her. Well him and I went out, started Friday night and we went all over Oceanside trying, you know as much as we could, we didn't have a car, trying to find a place, and we couldn't find a place, so Saturday night we came back to the barracks. Didn't get back til late. Sunday morning he wakes me up and says Anne's in town. She came cross country by bus, went to LA, got the train from LA down to Oceanside. We hustle up, go in, I say where the hell are we gonna stay? Again she does the same thing, she goes around, she finally found a motel for a couple days, and then - you can't see it here but what this is, this was a main house with cabins like a two room cabin, had a little kitchen, it was a tourist thing where people would pull in for the night - at any rate she made friends with the people that ran the place, they had a trailer there that had a Marine and his wife but it had two bedrooms so the people that owned the place convinced the people that were in there to let Anne and Tom share the trailer and eventually they got one of these little cabins that you can't really see, but it was a little cabin. And this is where these picture were taken. What would happen was we would go on liberty Friday night, and Franey and I - mostly Franey and I - would stop at the grocery store to buy what we could, including meat. We would drop it off at Hurley's, we would go up to LA and come back Sunday afternoon, Sunday night she would have a dinner for us, that's what kept us civil down there!"
"This is the guy and his wife that had the trailer that they first moved into, he had been in the Corps for a while, you know, before the war."

"See that belt... the belt buckles on the side. These trousers had no back pockets in them, and if you put the belt on front when you put your blouse on it would bulge it out so the buckle was right in the back, so you carried your cigarettes and money in your sock."

MAUI
"This was on Maui, that's the only picture i have of Maui. When we went out they told us no cameras, and most guys adhered to it, but a couple of them, they put 'em in the gas mask case because we had one guy, always carried his gas mask and everybody'd say "What the hell's he doing, why's he carrying that?" and here the sucker had his camera in it."

"This is one of those, without the hula girl! Colombo [top right] was from NY, this was Ski [bottom left], he was the corpsman, Doc, and we had this fellow Horan [bottom right]. Horan... when we landed in the Marshalls and that explosion went off, that blockhouse blew, we had concrete reinforcing bars coming down in the boat, and Horan's the first one in the middle - we had three lines, one against each side and one in the middle, and Horan gets hit with a rock, and it was so bad that it pierced, not the rock, but dented his helmet and opened his head, and I don't know if I have a picture but he's practically baldheaded, he had white hair but mostly bald, anyway, he takes his helmet off and the blood starts running down his face. Now we're landing on this hostile thing and there's gunfire, and Ski turns around and says to Horan, "You can't go in," like it's in the middle of Broadway at noon! Horan says, "Why not? "Well, you're bleeding." "Well I ain't bleeding that bad!" And it's a whole conversation, and everybody's standing in the boat waiting to get the hell out, and these two are... I've never forgot that, it was really funny."

OAHU

George in 1945, after experiencing combat in the Marshall Islands and Saipan.
"The first time I got out of the hospital, I was a little wifty and they sent me to a rest camp."


"This was around Kanaeoe, and it had been a YWCA camp. This is the main road that ran down, and they had this walkover so you could get from one side to the other."

"These were these little shelters, some had 2 some had 4 some had 6 beds in 'em and it was really, what a place to unwind, and the Marine Corps took it over and you'd stay there for a week."
"10 Nov. 1944. This is my area, my hut is on the left. What a place."
"They had a large building that would be like a rec center, and this pier ran off of it, that pier ran out a couple hundred yards into Kanaeoe Bay, they had tennis courts there, you could really unwind.... one of these was a dining hall, it was big, boy you could go in there and eat family style, they had china. What a way to unwind! I was glad they kept me for two weeks."





"That's a picture of... Bess? What the hell was that horses' name? I thought I'd never forget that sucker. It was funny, you know, they had this stable but they only had I guess about six stalls in there, so with all the horses they just had this corral. When we were going on at 4 o'clock in the morning, you had to go out there, you had to chase your horse down, get that sucker! And they were rolling, this was sand, then you had to clean 'em off... four o'clock in the morning and you're out there playing with those suckers. But anyway, it was fun."


George on his big white horse.
"These pictures were taken for the Pacific issue of Leatherneck, and that's me. And the horse's name... what the hell was her name, it was a female, a mare.... and the rough ride you got with her you had to kick her all around the thing. But anyway, the ammunition depot had been a large ranch and when the Navy took it over they made it an ammunition depot, and it was just this big vast area, the only thing that... you wouldn't really see them because they were covered with dirt and brush, were what they called igloos where they stored the ammunition. They were concrete bunkers and they put dirt and everything over them, and it was a hard way to patrol so the horses came into play, that's why we had horses there."

AFTERWARDS

Memorial ceremony for President Roosevelt.




"'Waianae Gate' Lualualei. September 1945. 'Cobbler Inn,' our shack."

"This was Stafford, "Cease" we called him, he was my assistant gunner most of the time. When I got hit, he got hit also, he got hit between the elbow and the shoulder with an explosive bullet, and it literally took bone. The only thing was holding his arm on was some skin on the inner side. They sent him to Philadelphia where, now this is in like '44 or '45, they inserted bone and saved his arm. While he was in the hospital he stopped - that's Doris, before we were married - but he stopped to see her while she was still in the hospital. But what I'm saying, this was back in '44, nobody ever heard about putting artificial bone in, you know, repairing an arm."


Members of A Company on Namur, after the battle. Izzo on far right with captured flag.