Lawrence
Martin
WWII
Veteran Engineer
When I first telephoned Lawrence Martin, I was delighted to discover a welcoming voice on the other end of the line. I made an appointment with him, and met with him the day before Thanksgiving. Lawrence and I sat down at the table while his wife bustled around making Thanksgiving dinner. I discovered that Lawrence was a family man with high standards, but he was also a humble man. Lawrence has been married to his wife for sixty-one years and has two children, eight grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren, with the fourteenth on the way. Lawrence recounted memories he has of being an aviation engineer during WW11.
I was born near Scammon in 1918 and I grew
up north of West Mineral about a mile and a half. I grew up on a farm. One thing about growing up on the farm in that
Depression. A lot of people didn’t
have enough to eat, but we did ‘cause we lived on that farm. We grew most
of what we’d eat. We had fruit, our own meat, our own eggs, our own milk. So, we fared pretty good for going into a depression.
Even the flour, my dad took wheat over to Waco and over by Asbury on the river
and ground flour and ground corn for cornmeal; and of course, we raised our
own vegetables. We lived on an eighty-acre farm, but dad rented land besides
that. When I was real young, everything
was done with horses. There wasn’t
even a tractor anywhere; it was all horses. Dad did everything with horses; so, finally dad got one of the Ford
tractors. Of course, we was poor and
didn’t have any money, and when we’d go to town we’d try to get mom to get
us an ice cream cone. If it was getting
cool she’d say, “ I can’t get you an ice cream cone. They don’t make ice cream when it's cold.” We didn’t know any better.
One of my most favorable childhood memories is going swimming in the strip pit. There was another family, the Stevens family, and one of the boys was my age and one was younger; and I used to go down to their house and then we would go to the strip pit skinnydippin’ and swimmin’. And then I used to go up to their house, and they had a pair of boxing gloves and we tried to box one another--you know --we wasn’t very good at it; but then we’d beat one another around a little bit with them.
We kept busy, whenever we had any Sundays or Saturdays off, we were working somewhere. I helped with the old thrashing machines, and me and my brother used to do a lot of wheat shucking and corn shucking in the fall. Then in the wintertime, we killed a lot of rabbits. We could go out and kill forty or fifty rabbits in one day, on a Saturday, and go back on Sunday in the same place and kill that many more. I don’t know where they came from, but there was just oodles and gobs of cottontail rabbits around at that time. We got eight cents for the rabbits; and if we had a small one, they would only give you a nickel for it
Me and [my wife’s] father was both working for the Frisco railroad. Went to Ft. Scott to a meeting, and when we got home we found out that World War II had been declared. And then I got that letter that said, “Greetings, you have been selected by your friends and neighbors to serve your country.” It was signed by President Roosevelt. It said in there that I was to go to Columbus on the next Saturday, and there would be some more guys, and they would take us up to Leavenworth, Kansas to get our physical. But it didn’t say that they would induct us while we were there.
I was working at the Parsons Plant at the time, and so I went up there and they gave us all our physical, and took a whole bunch of us and inducted us into the army. It was the seventh of January in 1943. So I went over to the plant on Monday and told them I had to get released and they said, “No, we can’t release you. You’re one of our top men, breakdown men.”
I was breaking down shells. They told [me], if I would have brought that letter over there when I got it, that they would have got me reclassified and I wouldn’t have went to the army. They said that, “You’re just as important here as you are in the army. You’re one of our top men.” Well, I didn’t know I was one of their top men. I broke down those shells, and I tried to do what they wanted. I guess I was doing a pretty good job at it because, boy, they hated to see me go. But I had been inducted in the army, and they couldn’t get me out of that.
So I went. I spent twenty-six months overseas in the islands. When I went in, they asked us if we cared if we took our training with the Air Force. Of course we all said, “No.” So, they made Special Forces out of us.
But my brother was in before I went in. He came home on furlough; and of course, we hunted a lot when we was younger and we was pretty good shots. Not bragging, but we were! We was pretty good shots. And he told me, he said, “Lawrence, when you go to the rifle range, don’t shoot too good.” He said, “They take all them real good sharp shooters and make sharp shooters out of ‘em and put ‘em on up front of the infantry. To get the snipers that the enemy’s got out.” He said, “Just don’t shoot too good when you get up there [laughs].”
One day they had us out in the street and they said, “We need so many truck drivers. Does anyone here know how to drive a truck?” And a bunch of guys threw their hand up you know, “You, you, you and you.” Pretty soon we seen them and they was wheeling ashes with a wheelbarrow. My brother told me, “Don’t ever volunteer for nothing!”
They made four different outfits: 874th, 875th--which I was in--876th, and 877th. I was what they called a T-4 corporal; it was like a regular corporal. What that T-4 was, was you were an equipment operator. That’s what I came out as. We was really in the Army, because the Air Force was part of the Army at that time. We built five or six different runways over there. And what they were, they were small engineer outfits. Instead of having big tractors, they had farm-type tractors and small farm-type graters and that. They were going to put these in gliders; and fly them in, and fly us in, in gliders down in the middle of these islands. When we flew in, there was another outfit already there and they had a dirt strip made so we didn’t have to go in them gliders. They took us in, in planes and from there we went to place called Atapie. We were the 875th Airborne Aviation Engineer Battalion, and we were never attached to any outfit. We weren’t part of any outfit; we had been with the Far Eastern Air Force, the 5th Air Force, the 7th Air Force, the 2nd Army and the 6th Army. We were just attached to different outfits. Whenever we’d move, we’d get attached to a different outfit it would seem like. We didn’t have no nickname; but when we was here in the states, we got the name of being a mean outfit. What happened [was] some of the guys from the 874th went to town one night in Hartford. We were stationed in Connecticut at Radley Field. One of their guys, I don’t know what he said, but they had two big old bouncers in there and [they] threw him out. They actually just threw him out and they broke either his arm or his leg, I don’t remember which. The next night, the captain took a whole truckload of men in there and they tore the bar all to pieces. They broke every table, every chair, they broke the back bar mirror, turned the bar over, [and] beat the heck out of the bartender and them two bouncers. I think about every one of them took about a fifth of whiskey with them. Threw some of those chairs and tables through the windows, and then they left. Well in the meantime, they called the MP’s; but time they got there, they was halfway home and they didn’t know who done it. So, they finally found out who done it, and the government paid that old boy for his bar.
Then after that, I got sick one time and they sent me to the hospital. Took me there in an old ambulance. They never told my company commander or anybody where I was at; they never told anybody that they took me to the hospital. I was in the hospital for seven days, and when I came back, they had me listed as AWOL. They thought I had left. I told them to just call the hospital they’ll tell you. So, I gave them that doctor’s name, she was a woman doctor. They called and talked her and she says, “Yeah, I just released him.” So, I got out of that [he chuckles]. When I was in the hospital, we played poker. A bunch of guys had some chips and we wasn’t supposed to play for money, but we was playing for money. Well, we were talking one day and one of the guys said, “What outfit are you from?” And I told him and he said, “Oh my God! That’s that mean outfit, ain’t it?” He said, “I don’t want to go to that outfit.”
And I said, “They ain’t bad!”
“Oh,” he said, “Don’t tell me, I heard what they done to that bar [laughing].”
We went to New Guinea; and according to the maps, there were places you’d think there was towns, but there isn’t nothing there. There wasn’t any towns over there at all, just mostly natives over there. We was there for a while and then finally, before the war ended, we went to the Philippines. We was at Manila, and that’s where I came home from. I went to Australia when I first went over, they took us to Australia and then they took us up to New Guinea. They never would tell you where you was going or when you was going to move. You’d know you was going to move because you was getting your stuff already to move, but they wouldn’t tell you. But we could go to town, and the people in town would know where we was going. I don’t know how, but they did. And they took us over in the islands where it was hot, and we had all those winter clothes. After we got to Australia, they threw all those winter clothes away. They had big piles of army overcoats, army shirts, army pants. They were wool, you know, and they just give the light outfits to wear.
I drove a cat overseas; I was a truck driver ‘til we got over there. One night they, [our senior officers], came and got me and some other guys and took us out. They put me on a Cat with a scraper. They put me on there and let me run the cat and everything. He [my senior officer] went around with me for three times, crawled off and said, “There, it’s yours.”
No experience, no nothing; but you had to just go from there. Things happen that way, you know, you never know what’s going to happen. One time they started to send me and another guy with a truck crane--you know a crane on a truck--and we was going to go do some work for another outfit. I had never worked with this guy before or anything. And I was supposed to be the hooker and give him signals and everything. We got out to the highway, and there was so much traffic you couldn’t get out. We sit there for ten or fifteen minutes and I asked that driver, “You got a red flag?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “Give it to me.”
I jumped out and went to flagging them cars, and I stopped them, both ways. We drove out in there turned to the left, and I went up and jumped in the truck and we took off [laughing].
Then, one time, we was working in the Philippines somewhere, and we had a D-8 Cat. It had power, but the governors just wouldn’t kick open on it. They’d always send a crew out there to gas everything up and grease them where we were working. I asked a guy, “Do you got any wrenches?”
He said, “Yeah, I got a couple of crescent wrenches.”
And I said, “That’ll do it.”
I came out the next morning, and that old boy working on midnight shift said, “Who worked on this Cat?”
And I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Boy, it’ll get up and go now!”
He’d hit a hard spot and the smoke would just roll. She’d kick them governors open and you could hardly pull her down. I went out driving a truck over there and they had governors on all them trucks. Well, you get to just about the time you was getting ready to shift into third gear and the governor would cut your motor off. You could only run so fast and then that governor would cut the gas off on it. We went back to where we was stationed at and I got a hold of some wrenches and a screwdriver. I took those screws and that [governor] and give them a throw. Boy that truck would run after that.
We was in three different places in Manila. One place in Manila we built barracks for a bunch of nurses coming in. They had all the boards and everything, and most of it was bolted together. All the boards and everything were drilled. That was the worst bunch of stuff you ever seen, nothing matched. We had flooring, oak flooring. It was completely turned over; it had twisted that bad. We had to cut that stuff up into pieces, some of it we couldn’t even use. It was a mess, but that’s what you get into. We finally got them built, and then they moved us ‘cause we was right next door to where we were building them, and I guess they didn’t want us next to the nurses [while laughing].
I’ll tell you a funny incident that happened, and I often wondered about it. Me and two other guys were going to go drink a couple of beers one night. Well, me and these two other guys, both of them were about my size, we went down there. Four of the biggest guys in our outfit were sitting at a table. This one [guy with us], his last name was Wilkie, he was a cutup and anything you could say he could make something out of it; but we walked in there and there were these four big old boys sitting at this table. He walked up to that one old boy and he told him, “This here’s our table, you guys will have to move.”
Well, they went along with it! They never cracked a smile or nothing. He said, “Well fellows, if this here’s their table, I guess we’ll have to move.” And they just picked up their gear and left and went over to another table. We sit down there. We were drinking a beer and we looked over at those other guys at the other table, and they would just be staring at you, you know. [They must have thought] God those guys must be mean ‘cause we moved four big guys from their table. They never said nothing, and it wasn’t planned or nothing [laughing]. I often wondered what was on those guys' thoughts.
When they flew us from Lae, New Guinea to that Gooseapp Valley, they flew low enough to the ground that you could see the grass wave behind the plane. They was just almost on the ground, and there was them trees that they would have to lift up to go over them. We wondered why they done that, and they told us that they done that so the Japs couldn’t shoot them down. They said that those Japs in those fighter planes would be coming so fast that they would get so close to the ground, and they couldn’t pull out quick enough and they would hit the ground. You could see the grass wave behind there when they brought those planes in. Didn’t have the jets on, but they would wave that grass and you could feel them pick up over the trees.
Now, one time we come almost into getting into fighting. When we was in Gooseapp Valley one time, they come to tell us all, “In the morning when you get up, stack your tent; and pack your barracks bags.” That was all they would give you. They wouldn’t tell you where you were going or anything. So in the morning they called us all again and said, “Don’t strike your tent and if you’ve got your barracks packed, unpack them we’re not leaving.”
Found out later there were supposed to be combat engineers first. They had special caterpillars and bulldozers with them that have a steel cab on them with just a slit in the front for you to see through or shoot through, that’s all. We were supposed to go in with machine guns before the infantry come in. We would be the first one’s in. We found out later that there was an engineer outfit that just came over. They were still on the boat, and they took them. That was all that saved us from going into [fighting]. That’s how close we come to being in the fighting, but I never was in any of it. I never did know how that came out.
One time, when we was in New Guinea, we thought we was going to get into the fighting. We was the second line of defense. The Japs started coming up the coast--now they couldn’t get back too far up in there because there was swamps back in there and they almost had to come up the coast. We was second line of defense. What we were supposed to do was to try to hold them off until they got them hospitals out of there. They said that they killed so many of those Japs up there on that river that there was places you could walk across that river and not get your feet wet.
I felt proud to go help protect my country and all. I might have felt worse if I hadn’t got to go, you know, if they would have kept me over there at the plant ‘cause everybody would have thought I was a—[draft dodger]. It wouldn’t have been my fault. You feel proud to be able to help your country for one thing, you know. I don’t know whether I learned too much really; but I did learn how to run a cat and that, but I didn’t ever use it after I got home. I really missed my family ‘cause my son was nine months old when I left; and I was a month from being gone three years. I went into the service on the January the seventh, and came out of the service December the seventh of ’45. If I would have went another month to the seventh, it would have been three years.
This oral history was researched and prepared by Angela Harvey, spring 2002.