Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with George Charles Bodine, Jr. was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Spelling errors are indicated with [sic]; however, recurring errors in spelling within a single document have been marked the first time and not subsequently.
Today is Friday, February 28, 2003, and this is the beginning of an interview with George Charles Bodine, Jr., at the Erlanger HealthLink Plus Office, 975 East Third Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Mr. Bodine was born on August 10, 1918, and is now 84 years old. My name is Michael Willie and I will conduct the interview. Mr. Bodine, could you state for the recording your name and its spelling, please.
Yes. George Charles Bodine, Jr. The last name is spelled B-o-d-i-n-e.
Okay. And during which war did you serve?
World War II.
And which branch of the service?
Army.
And what was your highest rank obtained, sir?
First lieutenant.
Okay. Where were you born, Mr. Bodine?
Chicago, Illinois.
Okay. And tell me about your family. Do you have any brothers or sisters?
I have one brother.
Okay. Now, coming up, you -- you were born in Chicago; were you raised there? Did you stay --
Yes.
-- stay there for your formative years?
Yes. I was born in Chicago and raised in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
Okay. Now, you -- that's where you graduated from high school?
I graduated from Evanston High School.
Okay. Where do you go after high school?
I went one year at Northwestern University, one year at DePaul University, one and a half years Colorado School of Mines, and then I decided to go mining.
Okay. Now what -- what is the School of Mines, exactly? Is this like a ge -- a --
They call it the MIT of the mineral industry.
Okay. And so did you have a distinct interest in -- in minerals and -- and that kind of thing, or how did you end up there?
That's a story in itself, but let me put it this way: I spent three years just not knowing what I wanted to do in university, and it was a disaster. So I just decided to go to Alaska to go mining. And I started out for Alaska with 25 bucks in my pocket and a sleeping bag. And in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a man picked me up, and he had a pet coyote in the front door -- seat and a bunch of rocks in the back, and he said I didn't have to go to Alaska; he'd teach me to mine. And he had a mining operation going out of Rifle, Colorado, and it was for uranium and vanadium, and I worked with him for a while. And then i worked for the big -- went to work for the big parent company in Yervan (phonetic), Colorado. And so I was -- got into mining that way, and I was just sort of floundering then.
Uh-huh. Well, explain how you end up going into the service. Tell me that story.
Well, from the mine one day, we -- every two weeks we'd get a weekend off, and I went into Durango, Colorado, one night and was having a few drinks at the American Bar. And a man came up to me, and I had my football numeral sweater on from Colorado Mines, and he said to me, he says, Did you go to Colorado Mines? I says, Yes. He says, Can you survey? I says yes. He said -- well, he identified himself as the commanding officer of Headquarters Battery, 168th Field Artillery, Colorado National Guard. So he said, Would you be interested in being a survey sergeant for me? Well, as the night went on, 6 o'clock in the morning I wound up in his office. He swore me into the National Guard. And in January -- this was in November -- and in January it was federalized, and I started out as a survey sergeant, 168th field Artillery.
Okay, so that was November 1940?
'40. And they were federalized in January of 1941.
Okay. All right. So let's -- let's go from that point then in January.
Okay. We -- that had been a horse-drawn artillery outfit. And they just switched them over to -- got rid of their horses, had to be French 75 guns, pulled by trucks. They still wore their britches and boots, just like the cavalry, and the Smokey Bear hats. And we went from Durango, Colorado, to Tullahoma, Tennessee, to Camp Forrest. A part of us went by truck and the other part went by train. We start -- opened up Camp Forrest in just about the -- February of 41. The Tennessee National Guard outfit, 181st Field Artillery, 196th Field Artillery, were just adjacent to us as we came in. The 33rd Division from the north came in a little later, and they used our Colorado unit as a buffer zone between the Tennessee unit and the so-called Yankees from the north. So, we were -- have a history there of being the first into Camp Forrest. I stayed with the outfit through 1941. The high point of being with it would be some of the parties that they had for us down in Hunstville, Alabama. I'll never forget the kindness of the people down there. They'd have dances for just the Colorado outfit. It intrigued them. That's up on Monte Sano State Park, and I -- and then later on, I'd say about September of 1941, just after we came back from the maneuvers in -- in Louisiana, where the Army had for the first time in their life 200,000 men in one place, and --
Can we talk about that just a second?
Sure.
Just talk about what it was like, the maneuvers down there.
Okay. When we got down there, we had the -- only the second heavy field artillery pieces in the United States Army. They were -- what they called later the Long Tom 155 rifles. These where the original World War I French guns. They were pulled on four-wheel carriages by Allis Chalmers tractor. They weighed about 1,500 -- 15 and a half tons altogether. Our top speed was 10 miles an hour. So we were down in the swamps of Louisiana, maneuvering with them, and we found out our best use for them was to use them as roadblocks. There were -- it was a mess. They had many casualties from snake bite. They had the red bugs and all of that, just took their toll. Then we got sort of some fungus diseases down there, and it affected people's legs. Much like the troops later on in the war got out in New Guinea. There were hospital planes -- trains going through Louisiana, reminiscent to what I saw in World War II later on. So they finally got us out there -- out of there, and got us back up to Tennessee, and I think the Army learned a few things by that one.
At this point, is there -- within you, I know there's kind of a -- a buzz, but is there a sense of impending war at this time?
Yes. Yes. The sense of it was brought to me by -- the Royal Canadian Air Force came down to interview some of us as volunteers for the Royal Canadian Air Force in September when we got back from maneuvers. I went over and I was accepted to go to -- as a navig -- to go to navigation school. So I was all set to go with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and they gave me a few days' leave, and I went home to Evanston, and my mother just raised all kinds of the devil about it. She came from an old German family, and she said, If you're going to fight for anybody, you fight for your own country, not somebody else. Well, she did a -- quite a good job, because she discouraged me, and I turned down the acceptance. Next thing, I wanted to get out then, so I heard that if you joined the regular Army you'd be sent down to Trinidad. That sounded good. So I went over and joined the regular Army. Gave up my sergeancy, became a private again, and instead of going down to Trinidad, I wind up -- wound up with the 50th Field Artillery, Camp Custer, Michigan, in the middle of winter. Just on my way up, war was declared, December 7th, so instead of going to Trinidad we wound up in Iceland.
Oh, man.
We were the first Army troops there in Iceland. We were replacing the 6th Marine up there.
Okay. Okay. So you're sent -- is it Reykjavík where you're stationed?
We were stationed about 25 miles northwest of Reykjavik on the fiord leading into the naval base.
Okay.
And we -- it was sort of a ridiculous, but the only artillery you had up there were little mountain Howitzers, and we had them in place to defend the fiord and expecting the German battleship Turpitz to show up any time out of the fog. One humorous thing about that -- and it was humorous in a way and it wound up quite sad. The orders were if German planes ever flew over not to fire on them because we didn't give up our vulnerability.
Uh-huh.
Well, a Folk Wolf German four-engine bomber start making scouting runs over us, and it was every day they came over, maybe flying about 400 feet up, and it got so that we got to know each other. And they'd waggle their wings at us, and we'd wave at them. And then they were building an air base over in Keflavik and Reykjavik, and one day they got a bunch of P-40s in there. And this German bomber came over our position again, waggling his wings. And I looked out of the corner of my eye, and the P-40s were taking off like hornets. That's the last we saw of them, and I found out later they got them on the way back to Norway. What he had been doing all the time was scouting the -- the convoys and everything else for this -- for information for the submarines.
Right.
And so in retribution, on Easter, the Germans sent over a couple of J -- 28 JU-22 bombers, and unfortunately shot some German soldiers crossing a bridge. But after that, why, things settled down.
All right. So how long were you actually in Iceland?
I was in Iceland from February until the end of May, and I had -- in May I had been made a acting officer in artillery to teach American officers how to fire English 25-pounders.
Okay.
And I was interviewed for engineers officer's school and accepted, and I left Iceland on -- I believe it was May 20 -- 29th, headed back for the United States to go to OCS.
Okay. All right. And is this -- what ship -- what ship did you board?
We boarded a ship that had come back from Murmansk. It was called the SS Cherokee, and it was a little coastal steamer that they used to use for the New York to Cuban run. It wasn't made for really deep sea sail -- sailing. But anyway, all ships in the Murmansk runs were anything -- they even had ships from steamers from the Great Lakes then in there. They wrote them off as expendable. But we didn't know that. We boarded the Cherokee and we started out with a escort of one destroyer, and we had six ships in the convoy. The first ship was an English ship, the Commodore ship, a freighter, then ours. Behind us was a Norwegian tanker and then three miscellaneous freighters behind us. We were out at sea a pretty long time. And about the most eventful time out at sea was we ran into the tail end of a -- I guess you'd call it a perfect storm or something, and we started running into 25- to 35-foot waves, and this little ship that we were on wasn't made for it. And I remember one of the crew members saying to me, he says, I don't know; this is a flat-bottom ship. We are going to be lucky to make it. Well, we did make it. So when things settled down, we were off the coast of Nova Scotia -- or Newfoundland, rather, Newfoundland. And then we finally put in at Halifax, and we anchored in the harbor. And we were allowed to go into town for one afternoon. And my bunkmate in the stateroom with me was a former football player from Texas A&M, and he and I had a big party with some Canadian Air Force girls and fellows there in Halifax. Then we -- next day, we took off then with an escort of two Canadian Corvettes and still had the six ships in the convoy. We got down to probably off of the coast of Maine, and I remember I -- it was late afternoon, or almost -- well, about sunset. And I remember I said to the fellow I was standing there with -- I says, you know, I've got a gemstone I found prospecting in Iceland down in my stateroom. I'm going down and get that thing and put it in my pocket for good luck. And I says, If anything happens I'm not going to lose it. Well, I must have had a premonition, because at 10:30 that night my bunkmate and I got up and went to have a cup of coffee in the galley. And he -- he -- we -- I take it back -- he and I were to go on watch on the flying bridge at midnight. It's a lucky thing we did what we did. Because as we were standing in the galley, I looked at -- I was looking at the chronometer, and everybody was saying, Well, we'll be in port in the morning. And the Puerto Rican crew they had on there were having a big time down there in the engine room, singing Latin songs and calypso and pounding on the metal things and, like, the metal drums, and everything was a happy time. And all of a sudden, right at 11 o'clock, we had a big explosion. It wasn't on our ship, but we had another one, and I remember saying, My gosh, are they setting off death charges? I no sooner said that and I heard a big click and then a big explosion on our ship, and I remember one -- one guy saying, That's no death charge; that's a torpedo. And apparent it had hit on the -- yeah, just outside the bulkhead we were in. The ship start listing right away. I started up with the fellows in the galley to go up to the deck. I got about halfway up and I realized that I had left my life belt on the deck down in the galley. I turned and I went down, and I says, I'm going to get my life belt because nobody's going to get a boat off of this ship. By the time I got down to the galley the second torpedo hit, the lights went out, the china in the shelves all came crashing down on me. It cut up my hands pretty bad. I finally found out -- my way out of the galley in the dark by going for fresh air, because the -- the cordite smoke or whatever you want to call it from the torpedos was so bad in there, that from my mining experience, I knew if I didn't get out of there, I -- I'd it would kill me. So I found some fresh air, found my way out, in the dark, got up to the gangway. And the only trouble was the ship was listing so bad that the gangway now was vertical. I tried to get out of that gangway, up that gangway, twice, and I just fell right back. And I collected myself for a minute, said a little prayer and I says, God, help me. And the third time, I made it, and I got out on deck. And by that time the ship was clear over on her side. And so I literally walked along the cabin back to the aft position of the ship. When I got there, there was a Russian captain from the Merchant Marine that was coming back from Murmansk standing there; there was a sailor from the gun crew; there was a American soldier who was horribly burned, and he was just sitting there moaning; and myself. The others that were in the galley, I never knew what happened to them but me. And my bunkmate never made it. So maybe it was fortunate I went back to get my life belt. So we're standing there and the ship start going down. The Russian naval officer, merchant Marine officer, took out a knife, cut in -- cut off a small flotation device on the rail that had a line on it, and he threw it down and handed me the line and he says, Go. He motioned to go. The sailor from the gun crew and I went down the -- walked -- literally walked into water, and every time we get in the water, it -- the waves would wash us back up on the side. And it was trying -- like trying to get off a beach in a heavy surf. We finally got away and we went to the -- the ship went down, sucked us down with it, and I don't know. The next thing I know I was floating in my life belt out there in the middle of the Atlantic, at night, and everything was quiet. The English ship ahead of us had -- it had broken in half, and half of it was ablaze just like a big torch. There was oil all over the water. There was a lot of water on fire from the oil. So we floated out there, floated out there, and I -- I thought, Well, it's not going to be long before I'm going to be dead from exposure, because the water was very cold.
Okay. Talk about your parents as you were --
Well, at that time I thought, well, you know, my parents back in Evanston, Illinois, are sitting down and having tea, as used to be their custom before going to bed, about right now. And here I am out in this darn ocean, probably be dead by morning, I can't say a thing to anybody. I said, You know, it's -- I thought to myself, This is a frustrating situation. And I no sooner got to thinking that over and somebody snapped me out of it because he tried to grab me out of the dark and tried to take my life belt. And I managed to survive that. And I -- and pretty soon we saw a light out in the dark. And we decided to swim over that way. I don't know how long we swam. But we finally got over there, and it was a life raft that had been -- it was so many fellows in it, it was half submerged. And they pulled us aboard, but half of them in the life raft were almost deathly sick from swallowing oil, and some of them just -- when they went to throw up and lean over, they just fell into the sea and were washed away. So I'd say a third of us in the raft just got too sick, fell in the sea, and disappeared. There was wreckage all over the place. And the fellows that had kapok life jackets on, a lot of them went down in the water because the wreckage had punched in the kapok. I had the old cork jacket and I was fortunate. So it seemed like eternity when all of a sudden we saw a -- sort of a -- an apparition showing up. It was a -- it looked like a large black object, and it turned out to be a freighter. And I remember its name was the Ohio. The captain put on the full search lights, and -- in spite of submarines still being around -- and was trying to pick up survivors. The reason that ship came through, it had been with an outgoing convoy and couldn't keep up with them and it was ordered to turn back. And it's just a miracle he came through where we were. So we had a harrowing time trying to get on board that ship because he tried many times to get a line to us and couldn't do it, and we finally were floated aft of the ship, and I was holding onto the rudder of the ship. And the propeller was, oh, enough out of the water, I'd say about eight inches out of the water, the blades, turning slowly, and no -- no further than maybe a yard from me. And I thought, Boy, if he puts this ship in reverse I'm a goner. Well, fortunately he didn't, and they did manage to get us -- a line to us and get us on board. As I was going up the -- being pulled up the Jacob's ladder, the fellow behind me they said later had a broken back. He was screaming all the way up as they were pulling. There were several injured people. So the -- when I got on board, the captain took me to his quarters, and he had one of our soldiers in there, and he was literally scalped. He had been on the flying bridge when it happened, and apparently shrapnel from the explosion had parted his head in two, his scalp in two, and one half was hanging down on his shoulder.
Explain who that guy was to me.
What?
Explain who he was.
Oh, yes, he -- he was an interesting fellow. He had been a cartoonist for the Detroit Free Press before coming in the Army, and he used to entertain us on board the ship drawing all these cartoons. And he had a real liking, and when I saw him there I thought, Oh, my gosh. So I decided to help out, and I took some makeerucum (phonetic) that the captain had in a first aid kit and did the best I could to clean the scalp. And I took the skin and everything and put it back on his head and took some bandages and did the best I could to bandage him up. Then the captain said, I don't have any medicine on board this ship, but he says, I do have a bottle of whiskey. And he passed it around and we all took a big sip. And then I -- I was pretty -- I was shivering like the dickens because I had been pulled out of the water with no shoes on, just a pair of pants and a thin shirt. And the captain gave me a blanket, and I decided to go back out on deck because one thing that happened during the ship sinking that traumatized me was one of the fellows, as the ship was sinking, stuck his head out of the porthole right next to me and he couldn't get out. And we looked at each other and just, like, well, tough luck, fellow. God be with you. And I thought, I'm not going to get trapped down if this ship goes down. So I went out on deck and was joined by another fellow, and we sat out there huddled together on deck. And on our way back, the captain said they were heading for the nearest land. So on the way, we were fired upon by a submarine again -- a torpedo -- fortunately missed us. We had no escort. And as dawn broke, we could see in the distance land, and I'd say about 8 o'clock in the morning or so we were within sight of Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod. The Coast Guard came out and escorted us into the harbor. The ship anchored and the word went out. Those that were injured the Coast Guard would take out. Well, I -- all through this time I had never realized how badly my leg had been injured. It was absolutely black and blue from the knee all the way up to the hip. There was a groove across the middle of my thigh that you could have put a two-inch Hawser across, but the skin wasn't broken. I don't know how it happened. By -- but by that time it had stiffened up so that I could hardly walk. So they took me off with the rest of the injured. And the Coast Guard surf boat that took us -- took us to the dock there at Provincetown, and here were all these former artists and actors and actresses, as members of the Civil Defense Corps, waiting for their first customers. And, boy, did we get treated. I got put on a stretcher and -- and a gal put a cigarette in my mouth and I said, Oh, I don't -- I think I can hobble up, you know. No, you got to be in the stretcher. They had converted their townhouse into a hospital, and...
Hold on. Okay. Now talk about your -- you're coming in now and she -- the lady takes you?
Okay. As soon as we hit the dock, they loaded us on stretchers, and a young lady that was beside me put a cigarette in my mouth, and said, Anything she could do? And I about -- and I said, Take this life jacket off of me and send it to my home, because otherwise the Navy will take that thing and I'll never see it again. So she did that and she sent it back to my home. So that -- that's --
Why don't you take that out?
(Took out life jacket to display.) That's why I still have it. It's got the name of the ship on it, the SS Cherokee.
And that's the life vest that saved you, right?
This is the life vest that saved me. And it was an old cork vest, and as I said before these didn't puncture from wreckage. The kapok jackets did. And people with kapok jackets that got their jackets punctured went down.
Okay.
They had converted the townhouse there to a hospital. I was brought up to a room in a hospital. A doctor started examine me -- examining me, and in the midst of the examination I passed out. And I don't know another thing until I woke up late in the afternoon, and the doctors and people were still around me. And he said that I had suffered from hypothermia and severe exposure, and I was lucky to be alive. And later, then, in the day the Navy came and had an inquiry with us. There was some politicking going on there. They tried to make us say that we hit mines. Apparently they didn't want to -- the story about being torpedoed.
Because you were so close to the shore?
I beg pardon?
So close to the shore, or, I mean, why --
Well, they -- they just didn't like the idea that they had let the submarines do this. And another thing interesting was the -- that was June 15th that we were torpedoed, and that's the same day that Hitler had given the instructions to his submarine fleet to take no survivors. Fortunately, it -- it had been -- we -- had we been seen, we might have been machine-gunned. We don't know. But anyway, that was a sort of a coincidental thing. Another thing, on it -- I think we were the first American soldiers that had casualties from torpedoing in World War II. I can't verify that, but that's what I was told. And I think the -- that's why the Navy wanted to sort of keep this thing under wraps. But anyway, later an ambulance came and took -- took me in real style. It was a Cadillac am -- Air Force Cad -- ambulance, and took me to the hospital at Camp Edwards on Cape Cod. And I was in the hospital for several days getting physical therapy for my leg. And surprisingly, the physical therapist was a girl that I'd gone to high school with at Evanston, and only had lived a block away from me in Evanston, and it was like old times. (Laughter). And -- small world. And then I was given my orders, and they didn't have military clothes to give me, so they put me in civilian clothes, Red Cross clothes, gave me a pass to go to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to report to OCS. And they gave me a piece of paper saying "survivor's pass" and indicating that I was okay to be in the clothes I was in, which the metal -- the first thing when we reached New York, the MPs jumped on me right away and couldn't understand this, being in the clothes I was in, well, they finally accepted our story. We reported to Fort Belvoir. I was walking with a very bad limp, and as we were walking to post, there were a bunch of the guys from OCS sitting up there hazing us. And one of them, I said -- I remember saying to me, Well he's limping already. And I sort of resented that, but there wasn't much I could do about it. And we no sooner got on the post and the next day or two, I believe it was, the chaplain at Fort Belvoir came over and said, You can't start these fellows in the condition they are right away. So they gave us two weeks' sick leave. So I went home on that, and then I came back in two weeks. Entered the OCS program.
And by this time is your leg getting better, or is it --
Well, yes, it was. It was better and nothing had been broken, fortunately. It just -- severe contusions and banged up. So I was there about three or four days in the program, and one morning, at reveille, the captain -- I was in K Company of the OCS group -- and the captain came out and said, Anybody that's had experience in mining, explosives, mountain climbing, skiing, this sort of thing, take one step forward. Well, I thought, I'll probably flunk out of here. I wasn't a very good bed-maker, so why not? So I took my step forward. The next day two people from general staff in Washington came to interview me. One was a man by the name -- he was Major Wickham at that time; he later became adjutant general of the U.S. Army. The other one was captain Ellis from parachute group. They interviewed me and they asked me all sorts of questions and asked me if I'd be willing to make parachute jumps and things like this. And they said, If you don't hear from us, well, forget we ever talked to you. Well, I believe it was two days later, they told me to stay in the barracks in the morning, and I thought, Well, I'm being kicked out. And about noon an officer came in and said to me, Get over to the post hospital; you're getting your -- get your physical. You're getting your commission at 2 o'clock this afternoon. So here I was, no training again, getting a commission. At 2 o'clock -- I could pass my physical -- at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I and about six other fellows from the OCS were given our direct commissions by the general there and told -- and given our orders. And it said, Report to Fort Henry Harrison, Montana, for the Plow Project. That's all it said: 10 days, a delay en route. Well, fortunately, one of the fellows had a car, and he got me into the -- after I learned how to -- went down to the PX and got my lieutenant's -- second lieutenant's bars -- and had to have the girl at the PX pin them on so I -- I didn't even know how it put them on right. She got me all straightened out. He got me into Washington Union Station. I caught the -- the train for Chicago, just made it, and got home the next morning. And had a wonderful 10-day -- well, no, it was a few days, because I had 10 days' delay to get out to Montana. Then I got on the train and went out to Montana.
Have you met your wife at this point?
No. No.
Okay. Okay.
So I had -- during that 10 days' delay, since you asked the question -- I had some dates with former girlfriends up in Evanston. Okay. So we arrived at Fort -- it was William Henry Harrison, and Montana, in Helena --
Uh-huh.
-- the morning of the -- well, I think I've got it, but anyway, in the morning, on a Monday, and we got out to the post, and it wasn't much of a post; it looked like a big ranch. It was an old Montana National Guard place. They were just paranimal (phonetic) tents to live in and a few asphalt-siding buildings, and that was about all. And we reported to a table set out there in the open. And there was a Colonel Fredrick sitting at the table and Major Wickham, and we -- I reported, and he gave me my orders and welcomed me in the outfit. I was assigned a tent to live in, sleeping bag. And we started parachute training right away. There was an old veteran from the parachute corps going back to World War I, a parachutist named Wilson, and he was our instructor. Well, they instructed us for about three or four days, and I made my first jump. It wasn't like Benning, where they had an intensive training. And they just showed us what to do, and I made my first jump early on a Sunday jump. And when I jumped there was somebody to go out with me. We were supposed to jump in groups of two. When my chute opened I looked around and there was nobody there and I thought, Well, something's wrong. So I thought, Well, maybe the wind's come up or something. But anyway, I -- I landed and did a perfect landing, and another colonel in the outfit came up and congratulated me. So I'd made my first jump. And about two or three days later I made my second jump, but I think that jump was a little overconfidence, because as I was coming down I was enjoying the Montana landscape more, and playing around what I could do with my chute. And they had warned us not to land on the landing strip, the takeout strip. Well, I didn't pay attention. I came down on the landing strip. It was asphalt and I hadn't turned my parachute so that my back would be to the wind, so I came down, hit that landing strip, and flopped right back. And we didn't have any equipment on. I -- just bare-headed, hit my head, and I saw every star there was in the planets, in the universe. And they came -- medics came running over to me and saying, Get him in an ambulance. And I said, No, I'm okay. Because that day we would get our wings. And so I finally got up on my feet, and they got me over to the formation where Colonel Fredricks was going to pin our parachute wings on. After I got my wings on, I said to the medic, I says, I'm tingling all over like there's 20,000 volts in me. So they got me over and decided I'd had a con -- bad concussion. But that outfit, the way they treated things like that, they told me to go back in my tent and rest the rest of the day. I went in town that night, had a -- had some drinks and everything else, and was back at duty the next day. Well, that was my introduce -- duction to the First Special Service Force.
Okay. Now at this point, are you -- do you understand what the job of the First Special Force is?
I'll go -- I'll tell you that right now.
Please do that.
We found out that our mission -- first of all, we found out to be half Canadian and half American, that we -- our force was the result of a man by the name of Pike, in the British OR office that came up with this idea of having guerilla units in Romania, Hungary, and Norway to arrest the Germans. Well, general staff and Washington and General -- and Winston Churchill and everybody got into the thing. And the end results, well, they decided not to have the Romanian group and the Hungarian group but keep the Norwegian group. This colonel Fredricks was against it originally, and then he finally got orders from Eisenhower and -- to go ahead with it, and so they were going to train us to be -- be dropped in Norway and arrest the Germans. And another thing: In Norway, the Germans had a heavy water plant for their nuclear operation. They at that time were really ahead of the United States on the nuclear bomb. Part of our mission probably would have been to go in and try and get that heavy water plant. Well, so all our training involved learning to blow up everything with special explosives that they had gotten for us. We must have blown up the whole state of -- of Montana. We blew up bridges. We blew old mining mills. We blew up everything. In the course of that, I was walking down the main street of Montana one night, and I went into the Cheerio Bar, which was a unofficial officer's club. And in there I met a very charming lady which later became my wife. And the reason I bring her up on this, she had volunteered just like I had, only for the corps of engineers, on getting the post ready for us. And so -- after about two months there, we were married. And just to keep on the subject further and bringing her in, she was involved on the intelligence work that was being done on our post commander. He was not attached to our outfit, but he ran the post and the engineer corps that was maintaining the post. It turned out that Army intelligence told my wife, who was close to him, to keep an eye on him and go along with whatever he did, which was -- he made some passes at her, and he would drive her to work in the morning and take her back at night. It almost wrecked our marriage. But all of a sudden he disappeared. And a friend of ours who was in the intelligence, she asked him, What happened to him? And he says, He's probably in Leavenworth right now. Why? He was feeding information to the Germans. And this was quite a surprise, and Dorlis, my wife, said to him, What will happen to him? He says, I guarantee you'll never see him again. So that takes care of that episode. So we went on and trained. We had Norway -- three Norwegian instructors on our ski training. On the New Years's Eve, we were put up on top of the Continental Divide with some special winter equipment that the Army had made for us. The temperature in the daytime never got above zero. At nighttimes up there -- we were up there about a week and a half doing ski maneuvering and everything -- the temperature at night sometimes, most of the time, it would go to minus-25. It went sometimes to minus-40, and one night it went to minus-60. We survived. We were skiing up there in the daytime. The Norwegians were bound to make us as good as any of the elite German ski outfits. So we got so we could do 50 miles, 60 miles full pack, in a day. So as it turned out, we were a pretty rugged special outfit. We did more training, and then even on our training where we weren't on skis, they'd give us ski poles to march with all the time. We were trained in mountaineering, rappelling, and climbing mountains and all of this sort of thing. After that, why, in our training, we found out we were the -- called the First Special Service Force. I might mention that we were unique in the way they made us a special outfit in the Army. In other words, like artillery or infantry, they made us special service force. They gave us new insignia, which were the crossed arrows of the old Indian scouts. The special forces today wear those -- our insignia.
Okay. So were the precursor to the special forces?
We were the granddaddies to the special forces. They carry our colors nowadays, and we're their patron saints. But they sent us -- all of us green berets after the war. So in April, we had a big parade there in Helena.
April of --
'42.
'42.
And -- no, that would be April of '43. I take that back. April of '43. We left Helena, Montana, and we wound up at Camp Bradford in Virginia for special amphibious training. Apparently the Norwegian mission had been canceled. I was told by one intelligence officer that our mission, if it had gone through, we would probably have been dropped in outside of Trondheim, Norway, in groups of six and that we were to operate in these groups, and after we did our missions we had two ways to escape: Either go to the Swedish border or meet a British destroyer up in Arvik. How much truth to that, I don't know, but that's what I was told. But anyway, we wound up for a different mission and were assigned to the fleet for a special mission, Pacific Fleet. So we were trained in amphibious training at Camp Bradford or Little Creek. We impressed the Navy quite a bit because in all our training there we beat every record they had. On getting off of a ship and into a landing craft, the Marines held the record for that: 55 seconds. We made it in 33. So the -- then we were assigned from -- after our training there at Camp Bradford -- I might mention another instant -- incidence with my wife, because one night at the officer's club at Camp Bradford, about 11 o'clock at night, a Navy courier came up to me and said, Your wife is in Virginia Beach. She has no quarters and the USO, because she's an officer's wife, won't put her up. But she's at the USO, and you better get in there and do something. Well, I got permission to leave. I got a Navy bus, got over to the USO, and there she was sitting, I says, What are you doing here? She says, I missed you. (Laughter).
(Laughter).
So before the night was over I got her in an apartment and everything else, but we set up housekeeping once again. But she was a real tiger.
Yeah.
Anyway, we were assigned then to leave Camp Bradford, and I bid my wife good-bye again, and we went up to Fort Ethan Allen in Burlington, Vermont. And there we trained with explosives again, climbing mountains, doing all sorts of things. And again, my wife showed up in Burlington. Okay? Then in the end of -- I think it was -- it was in June -- we were put on a train again, and we wound up, I believe July 2nd, in an island in the San Francisco Bay. I'll look at my note again here. It was a remote place, so I guess they didn't want us to be recognized. It was Angel Island out in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And we stayed out there for a while. And on --
Now what are you doing out there?
Well, they just had us encamped there out of sight.
Okay.
And on the 9th of July we were taken into the harbor, the port, and we boarded the SS John B. Floyd. And this was a liberty ship.
Okay.
Our regiment and the other two regiments were put on another ship. And we set out, not knowing where we were going, and we finally found out we were to go up the Aleutians to chase the Japanese out of Kiska. The Japanese at that time had 10,000 troops up there. They were all imperial troops. And it was quite a -- a -- I'd say scary thing, in a way, because their service troops over in Atu had held off the 7th Division for a long time before they finally took Atu. So these guys were real fighters, and -- and the fact that the ones on Kiska were imperial troops, and in imperial troops they all had to be 6 feet or over. So that was our mission.
Okay. Now, leaving, do you know this is your mission? How long out -- or, how far out are you before you find out what you're going to be doing?
It was -- I'd say at least a week at sea.
Okay.
That's just a guess. But anyway, we knew we were going into something special.
Right. Okay. So you find out what your mission's going to be, and you're going to Kiska?
Yes. And we first put into Adak in the Aleutians with a ship. And early we were supposed to be disembarked at Adak, but our Colonel Fredrick didn't like the setup there. So they arranged for us to go to Amchitka, which was just the island across from Kiska. We arrived at Amchitka on the 24th of July. We trained in there. When we first got up there we just slept in foxholes in the tundra, and later we got some tents. Then as our training went on we found out that we were to be the lead force into Kiska.
Okay.
Two of our regiments were to go in by rubber boat 24 hours before the main force --
Okay.
-- to take the higher elevations and do what they could do to destroy Japanese artillery and so forth. My regiment was supposed to jump in reserve behind the Japanese lines. They had picked our jump area from a Navy photograph that looked like something was smooth there among the mountains.
Okay.
Okay? Came the second of August, the invasion was scheduled. The night -- let's say -- I believe the night before, the whole -- looked like the whole Pacific fleet had bombarded Kiska. It just looked like thunder and lightning all night. We could watch it from Amchit-- our two regiments had already taken off, and I'll tell you a little story about it. One of the destroyers that was taking them, during our training at Amchitka, I got on board, and I saw this guy, he looked familiar. And all of a sudden I yelled out, Hey, Mowry (phonetic), and he looked at me and he says, Hey, Bodine. He was a buddy of mine during my mining days around Colorado.
(Laughter).
And we used to go to dances and little schoolhouses together and things. And there he was. He was a boat commander, of the landing boats.
That's amazing.
Well, anyway, we'll get back to the invasion. The two regiments, the 1st and 3rd Regiment, were taken by ship, and went in by rubber boats. We -- at 4 o'clock in the morning I was out at the landing strip in Amchitka being weighed in for our -- our boarding the plane, C-47s, to go to fly and then jump. When I was weighed, I weighed 300 and, I believe, 40 pounds, because each of us had a week's ammunition. We had concussion grenades, fragmentation grenades, our rifles. I even carried a hatchet. That was my favorite weapon. By the way, the Brit -- they had made special knives for our outfit, stilettoes with a sharp point on the top, which would go through a helmet. Yeah. That was used very effectively later on by the outfit. Because most of our work was, when we had to go in early or doing sneaking around, we dispatched -- were training to dispatch the people with the knives. Rather than making a -- yeah, we were trained in all the vulnerable places to use the knives, and that's another story. But anyway, so the 1st and 3rd Regiment went in at Kiska. They got up there and they found they were stabbing dummies in gun emplacements. The Japs had left dummies to fool you. One of the fellows found hot coffee. So there's quite a story between what the Navy tells and what our people tell, and they're not exactly coincidental. But someway the Japs have managed to get out of the island between the Navy surrounding and the -- the real story, I'd like to hear someday, but the best I know, the Japanese got a cruiser in there and got some what they called supply submarines in there, and they got them out. But anyway, they didn't really know that, and as our regiment -- the 1st and 3rd Regiments took their assignments -- the 10th Mountain Division got into a firefight between two ridges. The fog was just -- from what I was told was -- you just couldn't see anything. Radio communications, due to magnetic and atmospheric conditions up there, was just nothing. So they fought most of the day back and forth among themselves. And I -- we had several units pinned down between them. There were some casualties on this. The Canadians came in there, not of our outfit but of the Canadian Army, and they had a lot of casualties. They would find these, what they'd call spider trap foxholes that the Japanese had, and they'd sneak up and drop a grenade in there. And then another guy would get in and another guy would go in and drop another grenade on his own person. Well, it was sort of a mess. Well, we out there at the landing strip out at Japan -- Amchitka -- boarded the planes. Then we sat and sat. And the fog came in and everything else, and finally our mission was scrubbed, and the word got out from Amchitka that they were -- they wouldn't need us for reserve. Fortunately for that, they later found out our drop zone was nothing but huge rounded boulders. And it just showed up as a black area on the -- on the photograph. If we had jumped in there, we'd probably all been broken up. But anyway, another lucky thing in my life. So after the Kiska campaign, apparently they didn't know what to do with this outfit, and then the word came that they'd probably could use them in Europe. We went back to San Francisco. We got back to Camp Stoneman in California, San Francisco, and were -- on the second of September. We were given 10 days' leave. And we reported back to Camp Fort Ethan -- I mean, Fort Ethan Allen again, and were put through intensive training, night training. We were -- Mount Mansfield is one of the highest mountains in Vermont. We were already to go at night with full packs and see how fast we could get to the top of Mount Mansfield and come back again. It was rather interesting work. I think we astounded the -- the people that were giving us these tests. Then the next thing I know, I'm called in to the medical detail. They examined me, they sent me over, found out I was half blind in my left eye. And I -- in a few days I was given orders to report to the -- an engineer, combat engineer outfit in Fort Evans, Massachusetts. (Coughs.) Excuse me a minute. I'll get a drink here.
You're fine.
And found out I was assigned to the 204th Combat Engineer in Fort Devens. My wife accompanied me from Burlington down at the train. She found quarters in Aire (phonetic), Massachusetts. So here I was, the platoon officer for an engineering company without any engineering training. Again, I did it by guess or by God. The Boy Scout training I had, I think, was wonderful. But anyway, I was a platoon officer with them. We trained at Fort Devens, and then we were -- went to Elkins, West Virginia, for more rigorous training and lived in tents in the mud in Elkins.
And explain what the training is like for --
It was road work and doing -- building bridges and things like -- like that. And so my platoon became known as Bo's Commandos because the only thing I knew how to train them was what I learned in the special forces. And these fellows were a bunch of Italian guys from New York and the Bronx. And they -- and I got these guys, trained them in everything I knew about commando work, and they lorded it over the other outfits and called themselves Bo's Commandos. (Coughs). Okay? Then we went from there to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, and this was in December of '43. And from Camp Kilmer to Fort Dix, and then eventually, we boarded the -- a ship in New York, and the ship broke down. So we were taken off the ship and sent into an encampment up the Hudson river temporarily, and then we were finally brought back down to New York and boarded the Queen Elizabeth. We -- we left in -- January 2nd, I think it was -- on the Queen Elizabeth, not knowing where we were going, but found out later it was England.
Uh-huh.
And we ran and the Queen Elizabeth traveled by herself. She was so fast. She could usually outrun most of the destroyers in calm water. We ran in a heavy sea somewhere above Iceland and between Iceland and Greenland.
Now I -- at this time -- do you -- are you more anxious about being on a ship, you think, because of what happened before?
No. I -- to tell you what, I forgot to tell you. I had sunk -- my platoon had sunk in the landing craft in the Bering Sea in our training. And I managed to get my whole platoon out of that without one weapon being lost or anybody. So I was getting confidence back again. Okay. But anyway, everybody was seasick on the Queen Elizabeth. I never got seasick. So some nights there I was with the English mess officer with great big coal shovels shoveling vomit from the deck into garbage cans. And so I guess I became sort of a -- a guy with the British Navy, because I probably was the only fellow that wasn't seasick. Well, we finally turned into Greenwich, England -- or Scotland -- and we were boarded on a train and taken down to England. We were in England in various encampments through the southern part, ranging from the Bristol area all the way over to the London area. And I was promoted then to company commander of the B Company 204th Engineers. So in our training -- one time we were training in -- near a large English estate not far from London called Stoner. I got my fellows out to have a volleyball game. And our net was stretched from a huge tree to another tree, and in the course of that game that evening, I fell and hit my head against the tree and partially knocked myself out. Later in the evening as I was going to my bivouac, I fell down and my ears start ringing, and I think I had a mild panic attack of, what, was I going to die, or what? But the medics came out and took a look at me. They checked me out. They sent me into the hospital the next day, and the doctor checked my heart, and he says, You got a heart like a lion. Are you afraid of being overseas? Well, fortunately I didn't hit him. But I said to him, I says, You know, this is my third trip overseas. And if I wanted to go back, I -- I am savvy enough to do it different ways than this. So I says, I don't need your medicine. So I went back to duty. And they kept trying to send me back to the hospital again, and I wouldn't go. I says, I'm not going to be insulted like that again. So finally, I think it was -- we were busy building roads for the invasion. And we knew something was going up because we were ordered to repair bridges and get them down -- the troops down -- regardless of anything. We even went so far as to steal a five-ton truck and a big trailer and a bulldozer from the Air Force and use it. But anyway, we got that mission done, and the next thing I know our battalion surgeon said to me, he says, George, I've got a friend in the Air Force Hospital in Oxford, and he used to be chief of staff of neurosurgery at Presbyterian Hospital in New Jersey -- I mean, in New York. He said, I'd like him to take a look at you. I says, huh-uh. He says, Just go in for the weekend. Well, I went in; I never got out. They examined me and everything, and the next thing I know they sent me before a board, and they said, We're sending you back to the United States. And I says, Why? There's something wrong with you; we do -- you don't want to fall down leading your troops, and gave me all this story. I was almost -- I was really too scared to ask then. They scared the wits out of me.
Right.
So I says, Well, I really don't want to go. I says, I've trained these guys. And he says, Well, you're not -- you don't have any choice. They put me in the hospital again there at Oxford. The next thing you know they put me in a train, in a hospital train headed for Scotland, and on the stretcher next to me was some charming USO gal that had gotten sick, so we chatted all the way up to Scotland. We got up to Scotland and D-Day occurred. And here I was, all this training and everything else, laying in a hospital bed, and a -- in Scotland. It was just outside of Glasgow. Next think I know I'm put on a hospital plane to be flown back to the United States. This time I had my orders with me. And it was a C-54, and we took off and we flew to Iceland, Reykjavik. We flew to Reykjavik and took off from Reykjavik, and halfway out from Reykjavik our hydraulic system on our flaps went crazy. And the flaps start dropping and the pilot start cranking them out, and we did that and limped all the way into Stevensville, Newfoundland, and landed there. And they apparently repaired that there and had breakfast. I had opened my orders and found the medical thing. It said "suspect brain tumor." So that was the first hint of anything on me. So then they flew us to New York, put us in the Air Force hospital at Mitchell Field. From there I went to the -- the hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, was put in there. They put me through every neurological test you could. They couldn't find anything. They finally doped me up, and -- and I was literally semiconscious for about two weeks. They decided to try the postconcussion trauma business. Then they transferred me to Wakeman General Hospital in Camp Atterbury, Indiana, which was a neurosurgical plastic hospital.
Now, is your wife following you at this time?
No. No. She -- and in the meantime, she had our first son. And she was down on her farm in southwest Missouri. They wouldn't give me a leave out of the hospital to see her. She couldn't get up there to see me. So I was in the hospital bounced between surgical ward and medical ward, and finally became a basket case. They sent me to do rehabilitation and assigned me to command a bunch of German Africa-corps prisoners. I -- I finally told the doctor, I says, Now, look, I says. I'm going crazy, now. You got to do something. So the next thing I know they called me back in the hospital, they sent me up to the retirement board. And they had a diagnosis of postconcussion syndrome. I think that's what they called "shell shock" in World War I. The board turned that down because they're -- they're -- it didn't qualify for whatever they had. So they brought me back to the hospital for -- in my ward for another week and then they took me up again. But they didn't tell me a thing. So they made me get in a wheelchair, wheeled me -- I could walk, but they made me get in the wheelchair -- wheeled me in before this retirement board of colonels and all and presented my case. And the next think I know the guy says, Anxiety neurosis. And I said, My God, they're gonna Section 8 me. So they presented the case, and finally the chief of the board, he said to me, he said, Do you have anything to say? I says, I'm so confused right now, I don't know whether I'm coming or going. He says, Remove the patient. And they had their, apparently, decision made. They wheeled me back in and they said, You are hereby retired from the United States Army, physical disability. I said to the doctor, I said, Where did you pick up this anxiety neurosis? I says, I put in all this service, and, you know, wind up a Section 8. He says, George, he says, That was the only diagnosis we could give you. It covers anything. It will even cover appendicitis. He says, We had to get you out. And apparently at that time the casualties were so bad, they had to make beds ready, and they -- they just more or less were shuffling guys out as soon as they could. So I went down to Muheto (phonetic) and he told he, he says, There's something wrong with you; we don't know what it is. Go down to your wife's farm and take it easy. Well, I went down there. I'll wind this up real quick. I stayed at my wife's farm for six months, and I finally said to her, If I'm going to die, I'm going to die with my boots on. I went back to the Colorado School of Mines, finished school. Some 10 years later, in Gary, Indiana, when I was working in the steel mills, the doctor says, Something's wrong with you. He says, I'm going to send you to an eminent neurosurgeon in Chicago. He made his claim to fame as separating the Brodie Siamese twins. He examined me. He says, When did you have -- when were you treated for your broken neck? I says, I was never treated. He says, I can't believe you're alive. So the end diagnosis was I had whiplash injuries in three cervical vertebrae. He says, I wouldn't operate on you with a 10-foot pole. Now he says, I'll teach you how to live with it. So I'm here today at 84.
Right.
So that's just about it. My tale.
Okay. Okay. I want you real quick to just mention that -- the names of your children.
Yes. The names of my children are -- my son is the eldest. His name is Michael Craig Bodine. I have two daughters: The eldest one is Doree Ann Graham. She lives out in Ute-wa (phonetic). My son is a social worker at Macchus and Ben (phonetic). He came out a basket case out of Vietnam. Okay? My youngest daughter is a -- in the media, and she lives in -- and her -- her name is Lynn Marie Iez (phonetic), and she lives in Springfield, Illinois, and she's a national sales manager for three TV stations.
Okay. And did you have any grandchildren?
I have one granddaughter, and she's an unfortunate case. And I have two great-grandchildren -- this is a disaster. One of them was born by some guy that was shot and killed, the father. And the other by some guy -- I guess the state of Florida's still looking for him. But anyway, they're sweet kids. They're -- one's 11, and I think the other's going on 12 right now. We're doing the best we can with them. The granddaughter is impossible right now.
Is she in town, or is she --
She's in town. She's -- I love her, she's a sweet kid. But there's my son, who works at Macchus and Ben, said she's a sociopath. She can't rel -- there's something deep back up there. She can't rationalize. So we're making the best of it.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Before we get to the pictures, is there anything you'd like to add that we didn't cover in the interview? Any final thoughts about how the war has affected you or how your time in the service affected your life?
Yes. I guess I was a very lucky person. I seem to -- I'll put it this way: All my friends in that special service force on December 3rd were all wiped out. It seemed that I just -- before a disaster would happen they'd move me someplace else. I -- I -- it's made me think about it a lot. Not of my own doing, but they -- they -- I'd get my orders. Okay. I just thank God I'm alive. As far as war and everything, I'm not a big champion of war. I -- I really appreciate what our armed forces are doing. I think they're great. I'm a champion of them. But I don't want them to be used -- misused. I respect all these fellows. And I don't want them to send in or be sent into a war just for some political thing. I don't like war. And I -- I some of these friends of mine in the force who I got together -- I belong to the Force Association -- told me all their things in Italy. And there's got to be a good reason for war, as far as I'm concerned. So let's say -- I admire our military. But politically, I hope they're never misused. (A slide show of photographs was shown.)
And that's a picture of your wife, right?
Right.
That's the commando group?
Yeah, that was my platoon.
Where are you?
We are at the Mike Horse Mine up in -- near Lincoln, Montana.
At Fort Henry -- William Henry Harris?
Yeah. I might say we were the only outfit that was ever allowed to wear shorts as our uniform. (At this point, the recording ended.)