socialstudies

This is the oral history of my father, Ernest Hinton, who was drafted into World War II. He left the small, farming community of Meador in Allen County on January 8, 1943, to begin life as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division, Headquarter & Headquarter Company, 188th Glider Infantry. He and I want to share his story with all.

    It all began with a notification through the mail. �First, I went to be examined (physical) February 16, 1943 at Louisville. I came back home and waited to leave. Then, I was inducted into the military on February 23, 1943 and went to Camp Atterbury,
Indiana,� recalled Ernest. He stayed there for 3 or 4 days and then everyone in his group was shipped to different places. He went to camp McCall, North Carolina, which had just been started. The barracks were built in the woods and �we had to clear
the woods to build the barracks.� Basic Training was done there. After Basic Training, he went to Camp Polk, Louisiana on maneuvers.
     Jump school began in Louisiana; however, he went overseas before completing training. Their tents were set up on steel runways. The runways had holes in them so tents could be attached. The entire division was in tents on this runway. My dad had completed half of his training when the First Sergeant came down to see the men. The First Sergeant said for everyone that had finished Jump School to fall out, line up behind him, and go jump.
     �I thought, �They don�t know whether I finished up or not,�� said Ernest, �So, I just fell out and got in line, too.� My dad described a great, long shed with shelves on each side that had parachutes sticking in them. He said, �I would pull one out,
and I would think maybe it might not open or something, so I would push it back in. Before I went out, I just got one. Then we got out to the air field. I thought I�d straggle back behind, let the others go in, and then I�ll jump last. Learn a little from them.� He realized he had �messed up� as soon as they all started into the plane. The other men went to the front of the plane. Ernest, the last person to board the plane, sat directly beside the door. The Company General came in and sat in the seat across from him. There was nothing left to do except jump first. �I only had 2 or 3 weeks of training, but I done just as good as the rest of them,� he reminisced.
     Next, he went to Camp Stowman in California and stayed for 3 weeks. He road on a ferry boat down the San Francisco Bay, traveled beneath the San Francisco Bridge, and unloaded all of the equipment onto an old Coast Guard ship. He started across [the
ocean] on this ship, but he didn�t know where he was going. The trip aboard the ship lasted 29 days before arriving in New Guinea. Jungle training took place there, but there was still no combat.
    �From there we went to Leyete Island. It had already been invaded, so we relieved the 7th Infantry Division. That�s where we saw our first combat. We lost a lot of men there,� said Ernest. After clearing that area, he went to Southern Luzon. Part of
the outfit [paratroopers] jumped onto Tagaytay Ridge and the remaining paratroopers, called the Amphibious Force, entered by land. �We went up Highway 17 to Manila. There were really a lot of Japanese through there. We called it Wall City. Then, there
was Nichols Field with those big Naval guns where the Americans had bombed Manila Bay. They were on concrete pods; they would shoot point blank; they had those twin barrel 50 caliber machine guns. They had everything,� remembered Ernest.
     He was at Nichols Field, an air field. �I wasn�t in one the Line Companies. I was in a Demolition Platoon; an anti-tank platoon. I used a bazooka, but the Line Companies were in the worst of it [fighting]. The most of the soldiers that were killed was in my regiment, in the 87th Regiment. Six hundred ten were killed and two hundred ninety were injured. �That was a high cost to take an airfield, but they had to have it,� said Ernest.
     �I was in Headquarters/Headquarters Company. We would go on patrols and try to flush out the enemy. The first one we went on in the Philippines, I thought I liked to have got killed all day. We walked into an ambush, got pinned down, and stayed until
dark. We had it bad there in the rain. There was the jungle, mountains, and canyons. Vehicles couldn�t go where we went. We used Water Buffalo to haul our equipment and we walked. We left a small air field there just big enough for small planes, but
one of those big planes like we used force landed there and took off,� Ernest explained.
     Soon after he left that place, airforce people and an engineer outfit came to the same location. �A bunch of Japanese paratroopers jumped right on them and burnt all of the planes and killed several of them. General Swing led our attack himself. They called us to come back across the island, but we got word that they had already burned them out,� he recollected.
     When asked if he was almost shot, my dad replied, �I was almost shot a lot of times. I almost got shot once....and I don�t why I did this. It was the first break we took after we left the beach going to Manila. There were guard rails along a real deep ravine to our right. The land was mountainous over there. The guard rails along there were just like our guard rails here. So, we took a break and everybody laid down to rest or sat down. I sat down on that guard rail, sticking up like a sore thumb. I heard a gun shot go off and the bullet was so close to my ear I could almost feel the wind from it. I almost got killed by a sniper. So, I just eased off the guard rail real slowly onto the ground and never said a thing about it. There wasn�t anymore gunshots after that one. After we rested, we went on.�
     �The first patrol we went on in Leyete Island, a Mexican boy was the ammunition bearer, and I had a bazooka. We had a carbine rifle, too. Machine gun fire opened up on us....we were laying just as flat as we could on the ground. He had that pack full of rockets on his back and he got afraid the bullets would hit one of them. So, we threw the ammunition and the bazooka down the hillside to get rid of them. I was almost getting hit. They just kept opening up fire and I was rolling. I jammed my rifle barrel in the ground. I had it jammed; I couldn�t even use it. So I rolled and I rolled, I was laying flat of my belly just as low as I could get. They opened up fire with that machine gun again and blowed a hole out in the ground under my face. Dirt blew up onto my face. If the bullet would have hit me, it would have splattered my head,� said Ernest. He said that in Luzon there were several times he was almost hit by gunfire.
     Not only did the Americans have to fear the enemy, but often their peers. �One night the machine gun squad got nervous. Other boys came to relieve them, but they turned the gun and shot their own men....people we trained with. They thought they were
Japanese. That happened a lot. Our own navy and coastal outfits shot down plane loads and plane loads of American paratroopers, because they thought it was enemy planes. I mean just shot them out of the sky.
     He went on to Luzon from Leyete by boat. �On the way there we ran into bad storms. We had small boats and big boats. Of course, there were battle ships and [aircraft] carriers with us. I think there were 300 boats in all. We went a round-about way to trick the Japanese. We stayed in combat in Luzon until the war was over,� said Ernest.
     �I had a bad case of Malaria while I was at Luzon in the Philippines. Seven of us was on a 37mm gun. It was about 100 degrees and I laid down between the tripods on the gun, they put several yarn blankets on me. I was still about to freeze, my fever
was so high. A whole bunch of us got sick, but they sent me back to the field hospital. It was in a big tent and was full of sick and injured people. They gave me medicine and shots. You just kind of have to wear it [Malaria] out. Other people there had Malaria, too. I was yellow as a pumpkin. We were taking tablets to prevent diseases like that. The pills were yellow, and they turned you yellow, too,� he remembered.
     The Los Banos Raid, the freeing of a prison camp, was one of the most successful Airborne operations of World War II. My dad explains, �One company jumped close to it. My company went in amphibious, in trucks and 2-3 tanks that had been assigned to us. We freed that camp of 2200 prisoners of different nationalities. We freed all of them. There were 400 Japanese guards killed. There were a few Americans killed from my outfit. We freed that camp. There was a Japanese division near us; they could have wiped us out there was so many of them. We went 28 miles behind enemy lines.�
     My dad describes the last jump he made... �There were 21 of us that jumped together from the C47 planes. After jumping, I got out of the parachute. We had so much weight, and the parachute was made to come down fast. You didn�t want to stay up there
long. The last jump I made, I had 8 blocks of TNT in my side pockets, 8 or 16 dynamite caps taped to the inside of my boot on my left ankle, my full field pack, my ammunition, a carbine rifle, and a bazooka. You looked like a walking box car. That�s what some people called it. You had to take everything you had with you.�
     Often, the Japanese would kill themselves, my dad explained, �Just after daylight, one morning. We went down to a hot water spring to make coffee. I looked up and there came a Japanese patrol to make coffee, too, I guess. I never fired any shot at them. These other boys (Americans) opened fire on them and killed them all except one. He took a hand grenade and released it. He held it to his stomach, fell on it, and just blew himself up. We kind of buried them and got them out of the way.�
     �The Japanese used so many suicide planes, they almost ruined our navy. They would have a suicide plane filled full of explosives and with one pilot. They would have a funeral at the airport for the pilot before he left. Then, they would dive, plane
and all into a ship. That way, if the Navy didn�t hit them with a gun, the Japanese would hit their target. They were sure of that. When B-29�s would be bombing, Japanese pilots would just fly right into the back of the B-29, and both planes would crash," he described.
     �They [America] got ready to invade Japan. They brought in all of the planes they could. They didn�t have enough transport planes, so they brought in some B-24 Bombers. The runway was too short for them. The first plane that took off went about
300 feet, then crashed and burned. Then there were 2 or 3 planes of our men that crashed into a mountain. They had a blackout at Okinawa just as they were supposed to land, so they crashed into the mountain,� he remembered.
     �Our division spearheaded the invasion of Okinawa, Japan. Well, they dropped an atomic bomb and in a few days they dropped another one. Then, the Japanese began considering surrender. They [Americans] were pretty sure they were going to surrender, so
our outfit flew into Japan at Yokohama with General Douglas MacArthur about 3 or 4 days before they signed the peace agreement. A lot of people wouldn�t think we were there when it was signed, but we were...the 1st Calvary, too,� said Ernest.
     He stayed over there on Occupation Duty for about 6 months, blowing up huge, coastal guns. �When I say big guns, I mean BIG guns. Monster guns. Bigger than a car. All of the guns had wrenches and tools with them. We would take all of the wrenches
and put them down in the barrel. Then, we would tamp down in the end to stop up the barrel. Next, we would put explosive charges in the breech block, (where you would put the shell), then we would raise the block and set the fuse. This would crack a place inside the barrel and would put the gun out of commission. We done that for a long time....until we got rid of all of the guns. Finally, we were allowed to come home on a point system based on the length of time in the service,� remembered Ernest.
�Before I came home, I almost drowned,� said my dad, �There was a ship at the dock and it was dark. I was as sleepy as I could be, and I thought it looked like a wall or something there. I almost stepped off between the dock and the ship. I would have
drowned, because there wouldn�t have been anyway I could have got out. That happened to one of our officers when we got to New Guinea...not off of the dock...but he fell in....the water was rough. But it just came pretty near to everything ending for me right then.... after the war was over.�
              �In Manila they�ve got a big memorial about our outfit kind of like at Fort Campbell. It�s all over... I wouldn�t want to go through anything like it again,� recalled Ernest.