Eric Walz History 300 Collection

Grant Jensen – Life During WWII

By Grant L. Jensen

October 23, 2004

Box 6 Folder 15

Oral Interview conducted by Anthony Ragone

Transcript copied by Devon Robb March 2006

Brigham Young University – Idaho

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Anthony Ragone: When were you born?

Grant Jensen: Okay I was born the 30 th day of December 1919. So I’m a teenager… two more days and I would have been in my twenties. I always laugh when I tell people how old I am, “Well, I’m a teenager.”

AR: How old were you?

GJ: [Inaudible]

AR: How old were you on December 7 th 1941?

GJ: [Inaudible] just about 31.

AR: 31?

GJ: About that [inaudible] began.

AR: Okay. What do you remember about that day?

GJ: About December the 7 th ? Oh it was tragic, tragic. We went to church, went to, up with my wife lived up close to church, and uh, we went up to their place for dinner. And while we were there the radio came on with the announcement that the Japanese had attacked us in Pearl Harbor. Raised Cain you know and it was… it was a mix-up. You see we had carriers and that… and that was their disappointment was that the carriers were out at sea on maneuvers.

AR: But all the others ships were.

GJ: Yeah, the uh, battleships and cruisers and all these others in Pearl Harbor. And, uh, you’ve seen film I suppose on that. [Inaudible] turned some of them over and sank the Arizona within minutes. They got, uh, historical [inaudible] the, uh, ship is still on the underneath the, uh, memorial. It’s still underneath… they just built it up across it.

AR: Okay.

GJ: That was, uh, that was a shock to everybody. We always thought, “Well the Japanese would be a pushover,” you know. Yes, we did. We didn’t realize that they had been building up, uh, a real force. It was dive bombers and it was Zeros, fighters. My, they were way ahead of us.

AR: Okay.

GJ: But I was teaching school at the time and, uh, I felt like I should enlist, but I had two little girls by then. And I felt my loyalty to my wife and my little kids, but still I felt guilty because they had a lot of other guys in the community that were in the service. I 3 had cousins that were in. And, uh, so I uh… it was a constant churning within me on that. But I felt guilty not, uh, enlisting. But I finally decided “Well I’ll wait for the draft. I’ll let the board decide if they… if they decide if I should go, I’ll comply.” Which… which I did, I taught school three years in that school and I started teaching in Archer. That was a nice big school house. Now they say it’s no good, you know, should be razed. And it only had three grades over there and boy that it just like working in a rocking chair compared to before. But, uh… gee that brought, uh, rationing you know. Shoes and butter [inaudible] all these people that didn’t live on a farm, they had quite a hard time gaining access to necessities.

AR: I’m gonna… I’m gonna ask you about rationing later on in the interview because there is a question about that specifically.

GJ: Oh.

AR: Um… what um… did you serve in the Armed Forces during the war?

GJ: Yes.

AR: What branch?

GJ: The navy.

AR: And were you ever in combat?

GJ: No.

AR: Um, where exactly did you serve?

GJ: Okay, I was inducted and sworn in the Navy in Salt Lake, Fort Douglas and then they hustled us. When we went down there was a whole busload of guys and the navy just opened their window and took seven and eight guys and we happened to be right there. Fellows right from this county. Quite a few of us were [inaudible] and we got some of the fellows as we were leaving they marched us out [inaudible] and were marching us out. I remember one fellow, he name was Leo Smith. He’s been an active church member, a member of the Stake Presidency. He had looked so sad when he saw us walking out, “Oh I’d wish I were going with you guys!” And, uh, but then they took us right downtown to a big hotel, put us to our room. And then fed us our meals, got us to the bus to the train depot the next morning to Pullman, can you imagine it? We traveled in style to Pullman. And the Army guys, they were in what they called “cattle cars” [inaudible] guys in, uh stacked up [inaudible] floor deep on the [inaudible] we took off for San Diego. First time I had ever been in a bus or a train.

AR: Really?

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GJ: Yeah. It was kind of… it was all new. So, we went through, uh, past the salt flats and off to the south-west and finally came out of Las Vegas. The train stopped there for a few minutes and we got out and ran up, up through the strip you know the big, long strip wasn’t there it was just about a block long.

AR: Right.

GJ: Right, but the train depot… but we had a quick look at the different [inaudible] U-bar and things like that then. Well, [inaudible] went back in, spent the night on the train and went through some mountains and snowstorms and all that. And then we woke up the next morning we thought we arrived in heaven. Palm trees…

AR: Wow!

GJ: It was just California, it was just different! I’ll tell you we were impressed. Well then they transferred us to a streamliner to go from Los Angles to San Diego and that was another eye opener. See we went through big orchards of oranges, you know, just for miles. Well, we arrived at the gates and we got in there we just, we stepped in the training center. They started to bark at us. They issued us clothes and cut our hair off and it was a big change for us. And you could pick us out of the whole station as greenhorns and they mustered us out back to our barracks and had us take all our clothes off, all our civilian clothing and put on Navy stuff. And I remember I had an [inaudible] hat, just a hat. And I… I remembered that and I looked around [inaudible] “what in the world do I do with that?” And my suitcase fell on the floor… ground in front of me and I just took it, crammed it in and slammed the lid down and, uh, shipped it home. [Inaudible] she wondered what I’ve been going through.

AR: What was the highest rank during the war that you obtained?

GJ: A Seaman 1 st Class because I was only in just a little less then a year; the war ended.

AR: Okay.

GJ: But I… we took our examinations, physical and mental; very, very detailed. They knew your education and… this and that. And then they called us in for a personal interview with the man [inaudible] it was supposed to draw out of us what we wanted to do in the navy, what we’d done previously, and, uh, well I finally told them I had been a school teacher. “What school?” “Well, Ricks College.” And he had a big, thick reference book and I think he was thinking I was trying to pull his leg cause he searched in that book to see if he could find Ricks College. Finally, he did and he believed me. And, uh, he said, “Well, what do you want to do in the Navy?” “Well, I had a lot of experience driving trucks.” And I was thinking with my stomach, having a square meal everyday at least. So I said, “Well, either a truck driver or the cooks in baker school.” Oh my! As much as to say how well educated as you are and the experience you had he said, “I’ll see if I can find an assignment that will fit your qualifications.” He said, “I think I know of one [inaudible] Link Trainer… Link Instrument Flight Instructor School. And would you 5 like that?” Well, I had already told him my prime desire all of my teenage years was to be a pilot, commercial pilot. I was just nuts over flying. I had every literature from every flying school in the United States. And I’d compare the price… all this and that. And I settled on one in, uh, Nebraska. And they wanted eleven hundred and some dollars. It was like asking dad for the whole farm! He had [inaudible] eight other boys. And so I… I gave up on that.

AR: Did you make any new friends during the war?

GJ: Yes I did.

AR: Did you meet any old friends from home?

GJ: Yes I was with a few for awhile. But anyway, I was the only one… I was the [inaudible] or the company clerk. I had passed a typing test and got that job. I had an office so I had some privileges. All I did was to be sure to get up to make my bunk… make my bunk up and I was in the office. Now that… scurry around, scrubbing floors and [inaudible].

AR: Did you, um, did you receive any combat training?

GJ: Yes. Got it all… got it all.

AR: All kinds?

GJ: Oh my golly! Yes. We had bayonet training and hand-to-hand combat. We just learned how to kill a man in the easiest ways and the quickest ways. Boy, did it sure make me feel blue at the end of the day like that. To think here I was learning how to… So sometimes at night after everybody had gone to bed the lights were dimmed down, I would take my writing material and go in the head, the bathroom. And I’d sit on the floor and write a letter to my wife, and pour out my…my feelings. I did that quite often. She wrote to me everyday, I think, so I usually got a…got a letter in the mail when they had mail call. But then I was the only one in our company that got that assignment, about that Link Instrument…simulated flight. And I feel like I deserved it because I never been a pilot, that I was keenly interested in that. So the day came when the fellow from regimental headquarters came out to tell us…to answer questions to the whole bunch of us about our assignments. About 85 percent of our company was assigned to go right to Shoemaker, California which was the shipping-off point for the Southwest Pacific. And then there were a few other, engineers got sent…a few got in the [inaudible]. A few, uh, radio…oh I can’t remember what it was but it was a…but I was the only one that had that and my friends, close friends, they said, “Ask him. Ask him what that is.” And when I did he just turned and pointed right at me, he was up above us you know, he said, “I heard you’re the only one in here that I can tell you exactly where you’re going. You’re going to the Link Instrument Flight Instructor School in Atlanta, Georgia; the Country Club Navy.” And boy, I was just raided! [Inaudible] they had come and wanted to know how I get that. I never answered very many questions. I just thought I would let it [inaudible]. 6

So, it took about…well we got our recruit leave then…we got home for, well, ten days. But, we spent five of those days on buses; stopping at every little dirt water town. Going [inaudible] going back. So we only got about five days…I had to wait after I went back to the training center for about six weeks until we gathered up enough men, with my classification, to send us to Atlanta. And I got acquainted with one fellow. He come look me up… someway he found out that my assignment was the same as his. He checked up with me and we started to be friendly. But we got on the train the day we shipped out. We got down on the, uh, Mexican border, Tijuana. We crossed…they sent us through a piece of Mexico. And oh that was a mountainous, wild ride through there. And the Mexican guards came through the car and told us that President Roosevelt had died. And boy, a hush came over our whole car and I don’t think anybody said a word for thirty minutes.

AR: Wow.

GJ: We just felt like, “Where are we going now?” We didn’t have much confidence in Truman. And, uh, he proved to be [inaudible] President.

AR: Speaking of world leaders, what was your image of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito during the war?

GJ: Oh, terrible people. Yes, we hated them. Yes, especially Hitler. And, of course, we got in it with Japan who were just as bad. But it was, uh, it was a time when people really lined up and supported the, uh, war. And the women went to work in the factories, you know; plane factories, riveters, and ship yards, yeah.

AR: Well, 63 years later today what is your opinion of the Japanese and Germans now?

GJ: Well, I think they’re very able and smart people. I respect them. When I was in high school my best friends were Japanese. I won’t say my best, but among my classmates there was about five or six fellows my age and I thought the world of them; they were just couldn’t be nicer before the war started. And so it put a strain on our relationships a little bit, you know, that way. But the Germans, oh they were, almost a master race at the art of making war. They had… he had built up even though they were assigned with the League of Nations at the end of World War I. They weren’t supposed to be able to have a navy or an air force to amount to much. All those things and yet they, on the sly, they built all that stuff up, very super stuff.

AR: How did, um, when did you first hear about the German concentrations camps in Europe?

GJ: Well, when the war was about over was when we heard about it. I had a cousin that went in on the invasion on D-Day. He lives he’s still alive too. Lives right up here a mile and a quarter from me. He went on Utah…Utah beach…

AR: Wow.

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GJ: What he tells is quite a story. And, uh, and he dug in a slip trench and then he got him a bite of breakfast. He said, “I was hungry. They got sunk in the channel. They had struck a mine and the boat they were on went down so they clung on to another one, just as many as could hang on and they dragged them into the store. But then he got in and dug in a slip trench. And he sat, eating a bit of breakfast. And he scrounged around found a little of this and that. Oh he said it was pandemonium! It was just…he said, “I was all alone. I got separated from all of my company Charlie.” And he said, “All of the sudden a German fighter came across.” He was, whatcha call it, shooting… [inaudible] he went to dive into his slip trench and there was already a guy in it.

AR: Wow.

GJ: He said, “I jumped right in on top of him.” And come to find out after the smoke settled a little bit he was a General.

AR: From the, on the other side?

GJ: No, he was an American general.

AR: Oh!

GJ: And he stayed and ate a little food with the, uh, my cousin and then he was gone. Never saw him again. He says it was pandemonium.

AR: How did your life change as a result of World War II?

GJ: Well, I came home and didn’t have a job. There was a lady teaching in the school that I had left that was expecting a baby and so the board came to see if I would finish the year for her, which I did. I finished that year. But then that was the last I taught, ’46. I never taught school anymore. I followed into farming with my brothers and my dad. And, uh, it was a test. We bought an old piece of ground over here in Burton. It was nothing but sagebrush on that and it was un-irrigated ground. We had to pump the water out of a canal to get the water on it. So that was a real struggle, but uh then we bought a dry farm on the bench. And that was a good move, but we had a struggle to make payments on that. In fact, the Federal Line Bank…they come to see us each year. We just held our breath while [inaudible] went to talk to him. He was a man how only had one hand, a nice fellow. He said, “Well, Mr. Jensen if you can pay the interest we’ll cancel the payment.” And that amounted to about $250 dollars a year in interest. And that was… well that was a big amount. But we got to stay on the land for three more years and by then we caught up to ourselves a little bit, was able to make a go of it.

AR: Now during the war, while you were stationed what kind of entertainment did you have?

GJ: Entertainment? We had good entertainment. I mean the, uh, USO would come through with an entertaining group. 8

AR: Bob Hope?

GJ: Huh?

AR: Bob Hope?

GJ: We didn’t see Bob Hope, but we saw… what was his name? He became a dancer, famous movies after that… oh I can’t think of his name. But he put on shows there, they had, what they called, a smoker. Every Sunday they had it out in the middle of the big square, they had entertainment. Oh that name slips me!

AR: Okay. Um, what kind of food did you have, uh, while you were stationed?

GJ: Well, we had, uh, good nourishing type of food and sometimes we weren’t too impressed with the way it was done. They had to do such…such an amount that sometimes it almost spoiled good food by the time we got it on our trays. But I could eat it, there was a lot of guys who would just…they’d go and dump it in the…dump it in the trash can and head for the ship service where they could buy milkshakes, candy and all that kind of stuff. But I didn’t do that, I stayed with the food they served. Milk, they had plenty of milk. They had big trays, you know, compartmented [inaudible]. Each one of the guys would slam a glob of stuff on. Breakfast wasn’t what I ever been used to. It was navy beans.

AR: Navy beans?

GJ: White, white beans, a glob of those. But of course, that regulated our bowels. Kept us [inaudible]… funny thing too after breakfast everybody needed to go to the head. And there was a whole line of toilets, one big room with a whole line of toilets. And they line up by everyone and wait, no doors.

AR: Really?

GJ: No, you’d just sit down and did your business and got out of there so the next guy could get in. So I had to learn…I’d been…we’d been, uh, very private about those things you know. You wouldn’t think so with nine brothers but we were.

AR: Um…

GJ: [Inaudible]…of course they made hotcakes.

AR: You mentioned earlier about rationing. How did that, um – what do you remember about rationing?

GJ: Well, I was teaching school when that came in and I, uh, the teachers issued the ration books. So the people from the other districts [inaudible]. And, uh, so I had some 9 experience there. And it was pretty tight – tires you couldn’t buy tires. Rubber was, rubber was at a…it was almost – well, the only ones that could get tires were usually trucks at that time. My dad was able to get [inaudible] tires for his trucks – they weren’t really good but they started out with imitation rubber, kind of mixed with something else. So the Japanese got right down in there, swooped up the rubber country, down in Vietnam.

AR: So that’s how they got the rubber?

GJ: Yes.

AR: How did the war affect the community where you were?

GJ: Unified us.

AR: Unified you?

GJ: Yes. Because it was fellows from almost every family had someone leave to go in the Army. That made you pretty patriotic. I got to be a little ashamed to go to church because I’d slip by the draft for awhile. But when, like I told you before, I didn’t feel like I should enlist because I had a wife and two little kids. So I waited for the draft and it caught me. But people were good too, if someone had a boy in the service [inaudible] neighbors bring things in for them, you know.

AR: Would they send them care packages?

GJ: Well, I heard of care packages [inaudible].

AR: Um, I have – here’s a question, did you know any young men who did not return from the war?

GJ: Yes. I had a cousin. He was a brother to this fellow I was telling you about who hit the beach, Utah beach. He was in the Navy on a flattop. Right while I was in training the war was hot and heavy in the Pacific. There was Iwo Jima; there was terrible, life-taking battles. They thought [inaudible] landing on those beaches they thought, “Well this is a piece of cake.” And yet those guys had pulled in, dug in the [inaudible] and then they opened up on just… just [slew] them right and left. But, uh, this cousin of mine, he was several years younger than I; he had been in the Navy a while and, uh, he got out in one of those… I think it was a kamikaze, that blasted him.

AR: Wow.

GJ: Sank and boy that hurt my aunt and uncle and my [inaudible] and my brothers.

AR: How did it… how did the family cope with that?

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GJ: Huh?

AR: How did the family cope with that?

GJ: Well, it was a sad, sad thing. We had a memorial and we all supported that. Folks have a lot of sympathy for that. That’s how they did. And, uh, one young fellow was with him and saw him last was from out here in Kilgore, that’s way out north in Fremont county. And, uh, he’d seen Calvin. That was the name of my cousin, he saw him go down. So, he came and visited the folks and told them the details that he was aware of. And it helped them, it helped, uh, get some closure. But they mourned, they mourned over it.

AR: Now the friends that you made during World War II, did you keep in touch with them after the war?

GJ: Oh yes.

AR: How did you keep in touch with them?

GJ: Letters and telephone. I have, uh, one of my good friends that I made in school, in our training, was a guy by the name of McGregor. And he had been an airplane pilot and, man, he knew that stuff better then our instructors because he had a lot of experience in link trainers and guess who they assigned two…two students to an instructor. There was a whole row of those, uh, link trainers in a big, air-conditioned building. And guess who I was – then we were assigned two of us to an instructor. And guess who I was assigned with.

AR: Who?

GJ: McGregor. That pilot that knew his stuff and here I was [inaudible] around, I was just… I felt so inferior. But he, he was a nice guy. He helped me a lot. He’d give suggestions. So I still keep in touch with him. He’s lost his wife like I have so we’ve got some things in common.

AR: If there was one vivid memory that stands out of your World War II experience what would it be?

GJ: Well, one it’s kind…it’s kind of a… well, all the training. We’d hit the beach, crawled on our bellies, you know, and, uh, they gave us all kinds of trainings, every phase of it. And, uh, one thing that I kind of got a kick out of – the Navy, when they were out on their schedule, it started to rain. And, uh, so they the Navy they ran their… their men into shelter. If it was the Army, they’d run a mile in it I guess! But uh, we went into a big theatre there and there was a piano sitting up on the stage. I noticed that and the first thing I knew the Chief got up and asked if anybody that played the piano. Well, there was about six or seven fellows that were really accomplished, you know. They played some long haired type of music and I never been, uh, played that. I always played the dance 11 music, some jazz and things like that. So I just sat on my hand and he said, “Anybody else?” I wasn’t going to speak up at all and this fellow from Thornton, good friend, says, “Jensen plays the piano!” I’d played for lots of dances that he had danced to. So, he ordered me up, the Chief, asked me to come up and I went down that big, long isle to the front. And I wondered, “What in the world?” I couldn’t think of a tune, couldn’t think of a single tune to play until I went to sit down on the piano bench and one came through “There Will Be Some Changes Made.” That was the name of a popular, old dance tune. We played it many a times and, surely enough, there was some changes made in our lives! So I’d play that, it was kind of a snappy number. By golly! I got the applause and then the names of other numbers kept clicking in my head. I’d play another one and I really got a lot of applause and, uh, I played for the rest of the period.

AR: Well, thank you so much for this interview. I look forward to transcribing all the material and I will give you a copy as soon as I’m done with it.

GJ: That’s fine.