Sgt. Leonard Israel Neff . United States Army 1255th Engineer Regiment from Chicago, Illinois When was picture taken? It was taken after I’d been in army for 8 months or so. That was at Fort Jackson, So Carolina where I was undergoing my 3rd basic training.
I was drafted and was inducted at Fort Sheridan Ill, just north of Chicago. For 3 days I did Kitchen Police (KP) and caught what later turned out to be viral pneumonia. From there I was sent to Fort Benning GA where I was to be in the Army Special Training Program (ASTP) where upon completion of basic training I would be sent to college either for engineering or medical training. It turned out that just before we completed basic training at Fort Benning the ASTP was disbanded so I was shipped to Fort Jackson to be in the 87th Infantry. There I underwent basic training again and at the end of it there were 50 young draftees who were transferred out to different companies. I was transferred to an engineering construction battalion. I underwent my 3rd basic training in the 1255th Engineering Battalion. Apparently, I antagonized the executive officer and so I was sent off to water purification training school just south of Washington DC (don’t remember name of camp [US Army Coastal Water Purification Training Center at Fort Belvoir, VA?]. While in this 12 week training course we heard that both the 87th infantry and 1255th were sent to the Battle of the Bulge and suffered 50% casualties. I was very grateful for having antagonized the top brass.
At that time I had become a PFC and a group of 8 of us were shipped to a topographic (mapmaking) company at Camp Gruber Oklahoma which was military training camp about 50 miles southeast of Tulsa. We went across the middle of the country on a train and I was the ranking PFC in charge. It took us 10 days to cover those 1500 miles because we were often put on side tracks while military and freight trains came through, which always had priority. We had to change trains in St. Louis Missouri. There was some problem in making connections, but we made it. We got to Camp Gruber and the orders I had that I carried with me were to a particular map making company, but when we got there the barracks were empty. We hung around for ½ hour and finally a lieutenant came in and said “Who the hell are you guys. What are you doing here?” I could not rise to my moment of truth, and showed him the orders. He had no idea who we were, why we were, because he hadn’t gotten a copy of the orders. I could have said “Oops I guess we made a mistake” and walked out and disappeared and never be heard from again, and they would never know the difference.
I stayed with this group for 1.5 years during which time it was converted from a mapmaking company to a construction company. Did we learn cartography? No the mapmaking company only lasted 3 weeks after we got there. But they did make a construction worker out of me, sending me to heavy equipment school at Fort Leonardwood Missouri where I had a 10 week course learning how to drive a truck, operate an air compressor with jackhammers, and learned how to operate a road grader. The one I trained on however had hydraulic steering controls for both the front and rear end, and my ambidexterity didn’t do very well. We were training on rather high dune type bunkers, and I at one point I was going about 25 MPH and set the steering controls in such a way that the grader ran over the side of the bunker and down into a flat land. I got thrown off, and I had fantasies of having to pay for the grader, having wrecked it, so I jumped back on it and stopped it and didn’t have to pay anything. I returned to our construction company at Camp Gruber after the training.
One night while on guard duty, it had been a custom for the sentries for the sentries to periodically going into the company headquarters and rest for a while. I happened to get snagged by one of the officers while doing that, and I was busted down from PFC down to private, losing my one stripe and got a scolding as well. At that point, there were 10 of us who were veterans of the aborted ASTP program, young college kids, all very bright and articulate, and we hung together for the rest of the time in camp.
From Camp Gruber we were sent up to Seattle, and were to go out to fight in the Pacific, part of the planned invasion of Japan. We had in the meantime, before leaving, gotten a number of heavy equipment operators who had been in the Aleutians and Attu, and were really hard-core heavy equipment operators, hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-living and we were terribly intimidated by them, and they were somewhat intimidating towards us. We laid over in Seattle for 3-4 days before finally taking off on August 4, 1945. Four days out, the armistice was signed with Japan. Some of the hard line construction guys were sorely tempted to jump overboard and swim back to Seattle, because they had accumulated enough credits that they could be discharged and they wanted out very badly.
We were on board a small steamer, a commercial cargo boat and there were 5000 of us stacked up in bunks 5 high. So we spent most of our time on the deck. I remember one night going up on deck and seeing that the boat was completely blacked out, there weren’t even running lights to see the full moon reflecting on the ocean, and the plankton flickering in the ocean. It was the most beautiful moving sight that I could ever imagine. I remember it to this day.
Then, after about 3 weeks we stopped at Tinean A Marshall Island, about where the 8th Air Force had its headquarters. We were waylaid by the commanding general, Curtis LeMay and apparently, the captain or officer in charge of the whole contingent was told that LeMay was having his men return to the States, and he was commandeering an equal number from the men who were supposedly going into potential battle. I had a chance at that time to see a B-29 that had the name Enola Gay on it, little realizing the significance of it at that time. We shoved off from Tinean after 3 days and in the next few days we landed at another Marshall Island, called Saipan. Both Tinean and Saipan were islands that no one had ever heard of before, but apparently on Saipan there was a major army contingent that had been a jumping off point for potential invasions of the Philippines and/or Japan. We got off there. Again the officer in command of the island came to our commanding officer and said “Who the hell are you guys. What are you doing here?”
(All 5000 of you?) No the construction company contingent.
Somehow our commanding officer found us some quarters to live in and miraculously got us our paychecks, not that we could spend any money on the island. We were there for 6 weeks, spending an hour a day degreasing heavy equipment, like road graders, tractors, earth movers, etc. that they would load onto LSTs and take them about 10-15 miles offshore and dump them. As we realized later, if we took them back to the States, they would flood the market for heavy equipment, and the manufacturers of the equipment wouldn’t have any more business.
While there we spent an awful lot of time at the USO eating donuts and drinking coffee. We’d heard a story that a lieutenant from another outfit had gone up in the hills with a nurse and they were both killed by Japanese snipers who were still up in the hills and hadn’t heard that the war was over. We loaded up on our boats 6 weeks after landing and then 4-5 days later we landed in Manila, Philippines where we remained for about 7 days without disembarking.
Then a day or 2 after we got underway again, we found out that our orders read that we were to go to Lorea, which was a place no one had every heard of, not knowing that a typo had substituted “L” for “K” and we ended up in Korea. Before that we stopped in Yokohama for 3 days and were able to get off the boat for about 4 hours and got to see the devastation that our bombing had resulted in. Then we went through the Straits of Japan and came the closest we ever did to any kind of combat. About a hundred yards away off the bow we saw a mine and managed to evade it without any problem.
After another few days it was the 3rd Thursday in November, which had been declared as the new Thanksgiving Day. We had a thanksgiving feast, if military rations could be called as such on board ship, and we landed in Inchon Korea on a Tuesday and the following Thursday we had a second Thanksgiving. We had been aboard ship for a total of 60 days from the time we left Seattle and had more time at sea than many of the sailors on the ships we were traveling had had. Landing at Inchon we were taken to an abandoned Japanese industrial park, ASCOM city (I don’t know what the letters stood for [Army Service Command, per Internet]) and were encamped in an abandoned wire rope factory that had never been completed. Most of the floors were dirt, it was several hundred thousand cubic feet of space, and we had 4 little space heaters for between 75-80 men. Many of the windows were broken. We were there for a week and I don’t recall ever being so cold before or since that time. It really reached the marrow of my bones. It didn’t snow, but there was a fair amount of rain and it was raw.
By now we dwindled to the 8 or 10 ASTP refugees and we were transferred to an all-black construction battalion. We were in the headquarters company. We were the first integrated troops in military service – this was, after all, 1945. I’ve had a lot of dental work in my lifetime, but the best dental work I had was from a black dentist whose hands were as big as hams, and was built like a football player, but his hands were as gentle and as sure and as competent as anyone. He used a drill that was operated with a foot pedal like the old-fashioned Singer sewing machines.
We did a lot of counting screws and nails but gradually we were assigned to real jobs. I finally was assigned as a truck driver and made the PX non-com officer my job was to distribute and keep track of the cards that enabled our men to utilize the Post Exchange to buy things. I didn’t realize the potential of my position and therefore didn’t capitalize on it as a number of PX non-coms had. I only sold 2 cartons of cigarettes on the black market and didn’t sell any PX cards to anybody.
I had a number of quite remarkable experiences while there and of course never saw any combat. A young fellow I knew a medic with the military government spoke about how hard it was initially to get the Korean people to come in and get vaccinated for smallpox, cholera, etc. Previously, when the Japanese had occupied Korea, they would vaccinate by slashing X-marks with a knife on their arms and just pour serum into the open wounds. When one or 2 of the braver souls took the American injections, they came back for seconds and thirds because it was so silly and painless.
We were part of a larger construction regiment at headquarters and they had Korean draftsmen, young college kids, who were doing the work. One of our little group befriended a Korean. The fellow from our group his father had been a correspondent for the Jewish Forward in New York. They were posted in Russia for about 10 years, so my comrade was very fluent in Russian. This young fellow and one of the lieutenants decided to take a trip above the 38th parallel. They disappeared for 4 days. We had no idea what happened to them but had fantasies of their being flogged, drawn and quartered by the Russians who were also occupying Korea at the time close to the 38th parallel. Finally they came back and described royal treatment once they were passed hand-to-hand to the Central Headquarters of the Russian Army in Korea where they were feted with vodka and caviar and goodies for a couple of days and then given a pass to get back signed by the Russian commander in chief. They had some pretty rousing stories to tell.
Getting back to befriending the Korean boy. At one point he took 4 of us home with him one Sunday. We piled into the jeep and he was giving directions north of Seoul we went into the mountains and crossed a very narrow wooden bridge that we practically had to carry the jeep across. When we got into the valley where his family’s farm was, right at the entrance there was a Buddhist monastery. The monks greeted us, we were the first Caucasians they had ever seen, and put on a special religious ceremonial for us. We then went on to his family’s home and farm, which was very rustic, and they too put on a celebration for us, cooking a chicken that was to serve the 5 of us and his entire family of 9 or 10 people. The house was on stilts so that it could be heated from underneath with fires. The chicken was half cooked and had to be served about 15 people and the women, of course, were the last to get anything, and they got practically nothing of this almost raw chicken. It was a fascinating area. Their farmland contained a Buddhist shrine to an Emporer of the 7th century who fell in love with a commoner. They were both beheaded because that was a no-no at that time. There was a little prayer area and a commemorative stone where these people were described.
We came back to our barracks and then went about our humdrum military lives. I became a truck driver and somehow I got promoted to staff sergeant. That was the rank that I had when I was discharged in March 1946. Our trip back from Korea to Seattle took 7 days. There was a floating casino run by 2 obviously professional gamblers. There was a 24 hour crap game and 24-hour poker and 21 hands. I managed to win at the craps game and lose in the poker game, but I still managed to come out $300 ahead. In those days $300 was quite a lot of money. I went to someplace a military post in Wisconsin and was discharged from there.
The other thing is that while we were sailing from Seattle to Saipan to Korea, this fellow who had spent time in Russia, a brilliant engineer, “Kitty” Katz was a chess whiz. He waqs playing 12 or 13 games by mail all that time. He and another kid in the group. Kitty was a math major, Sorenson or Swenson was an engineering student. They got bored with standard chess, and developed a cylindrical chess game, all strictly visual. Soon that lost their interest and they tried spherical chess, but couldn’t make that work. Kitty, Sorenson and one other person taught me how to play bridge on the way out to Saipan. We played bridge 10 hours a day because that was the only thing to do except jump off the boat and play with the whales, or whatever, and we had no inclination for that.
So that was my military story or stories.
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