THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE PACIFIC WAR Center for Pacific War Studies Fredericksburg, Texas An Interview with Maurice E. Stamps Seymour, Iowa March 18, 2009 Ft. Shafter, Hawaii Classification and Assignment Section Transferred to Message Center Delivered messages to Admiral Nimitz My name is Richard Misenhimer, today is March 18, 2009. I am interviewing Mr. Maurice E. Stamps by telephone. His phone number is 641-898-7541. His address is 215 Wall Street, Seymour, Iowa 52590. This interview is in support of the National Museum of the Pacific War, Center for Pacific War Studies, for the preservation of historical information related to World War II. Mr. Misenhimer “Agreement Read.” Mr. Stamps Yes, the agreement that my material can be used for anybody to send off as research is fine with me. Mr. Misenhimer What is your birth date? Mr. Stamps October 29, 1915 Mr. Misenhimer Where were you born? Mr. Stamps I was born on a farm in Appanoose County, Iowa Mr. Misenhimer Where did you go to high school? Mr. Stamps I went to high school in the town of Seymour, Iowa which is across the county line in Wayne County, Iowa, about 5 miles from my home farm. 1 Mr. Misenhimer When did you graduate from high school? Mr. Stamps 1934 Mr. Misenhimer What did you do after you graduated? Mr. Stamps I spent one year on the farm and then in the Fall of 1935 I entered Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Mr. Misenhimer How long did you go there? Mr. Stamps I graduated from Knox in the Spring of 1939. Mr. Misenhimer What was your major? Mr. Stamps I had a major in English and a major in History. I had a double major. Mr. Misenhimer What did you do after you graduated from college? Mr. Stamps I returned Iowa to to the farm and I was absolutely positive that we were going to be in the war. Hitler was running rampant in Europe, and I was sure that eventually we would be in war. So I went to work on our family farm on the farm that my relatives engaged in farming for a while, but I didn’t intend to make that a lifelong career. I liked farming and 2 all that pertaining to it. So I thought I would spend time there and see how the international situation developed. Mr. Misenhimer When did you go into the service? Mr. Stamps I entered the service on September 23. I reported to the service to go to camp on September 23, 1942. Mr. Misenhimer Which branch did you go into. Mr. Stamps The Army — I entered the draft and reported for duty at Camp Dodge, Iowa, as an inductee into the Army Armed Forces. Mr. Misenhimer You were drafted, is that right? Mr. Stamps Well, yes, I volunteered for the draft. When I was in college, a lot of my friends and team mates on the football team and associates were taking ROTC, but I had a busy schedule and I was on the football team and on the track team and I did not take ROTC. They were given commissions, of course. I thought about trying to get into one of the programs and volunteer for the service, but because of the draft situation and my older brother was on the farm, I talked to the Draft Board about me volunteering to be in on the next draft quota. My brother was given an Agricultural Deferment to stay home and run our family farm. 3 Mr. Misenhimer Did you have a choice of which branch? Mr. Stamps go the Army. I had it No, I just went in, but I did have it in my mind that I wanted to into to in my mind, since I had a college degree and a thorough education, that I was going try to qualify to go to Officer’s Candidate Schools, OCS, they called it. Mr. Misenhimer Tell me about your boot camp. Mr. Stamps Dodge. I That’s quite a story. I reported to Camp Dodge, we were inducted at Camp thought we would be sent some place for basic training. When we took the Induction Test, we were waiting there a few days and the Master Sergeant in the Administration Office at Camp Dodge contacted me and another fellow that had gone in with me. He was a college graduate, too, and we had both made exceptionally high scores on the Induction Test. So he said, “While we’re waiting for you guys to be shipped out, I’m going to put you to work grading tests of recruits that have been coming in after you.” So for about 4 days, I worked grading tests and working in the Administration Office there at the Induction Center. Then, at the end of the first week on a Friday, the Master Sergeant said to me and this other boy, “I don’t think you guys will be shipped out till pass if you want it.” The other fellow didn’t care next week. I can give you a weekend for a pass to go down to the city of Des Moines. I said I had a bad cold and didn’t want to go down either. A little bit later, I got a call. A soldier came in and called out my name in the Administration Building and I went out and there was this girl, Enid Stark. come We were friends but she had a boyfriend and I had a girl in Chicago, but she had 4 out to see me. She was a Secretary in Des Moines and I talked to her and I told her, “I can get a weekend pass and I’ll come down to your apartment and take you out to dinner.” She went back out to the Coca Cola Bottling Plant in Des Moines where she was a Secretary and she said, “No, I’ll cook dinner in the apartment, we won’t go out to dinner.” That sounded good to me. She talked one of the Coca Cola drivers to bring her out to see me. Thirty minutes later, I called her from a telephone booth and said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but seven of us were just called out and the First Lieutenant said, ‘We have a requisition for you college men,” he called us kind of sarcastically, “and you have thirty minutes to put all your gear in your bags and climb on that troop train that is sitting over there on that siding.” I told Enid, “I don’t know where we’re going or what’s going on but I’ll write you as soon as I can.” As night fell over the camp, we climbed on that train and left Camp Dodge, traveled all night down to Kansas City. That train hooked up with a troop train headed west and we were on that troop train until we got to the dock at Oakland, California, without one bit of basic training. There were probably, by the time we got there, probably 200 inductees that hadn’t had basic training but we were sent directly to Oakland and got on ferry boats and went out Fort McDowell which was in the middle of San Francisco Harbor. We were processed there for a day and a half and at night we marched down and climbed on a troop ship. The ship pulled out of the harbor and during the night there came a tremendous storm and everybody got tremendously seasick and I didn’t go up and eat for two days. Then my seasickness was over and when I felt like going up deck, the sun was shining and the sky was blue, and there we were in a convoy of six transports and there were two destroyers on each side of the convoy and they were racing back and forth like greyhounds and I guess they were escorting us and looking out for Japanese 5 submarines. This was right after the battle of Midway but the Japanese submarine threat was still very real. After only being in the Army 10 days, we were at sea in a convoy with the possibility of having a submarine attack. That seemed pretty unusual to me. Do you follow me so far? Mr. Misenhimer Yes, sir. You’re doing well. Keep going. Mr. Stamps The convoy was traveling pretty slowly because it was following a zig-zag course. After or 10 11 days, I forgot which, there was some scuttlebutt around ship that we were headed for Australia, but after about 10 days, what we thought was a cloud in the west turned out to be land and we could see the outline of Diamond Head and we were coming into Hawaii. Our ship went to the Honolulu Harbor not the Pearl Harbor. As we slid into the harbor by the dock we were looking down at the dock and there were some soldiers and some Gi’s down there looking up at us and yelling something and then when the ship had docked and we could hear them. We heard them yelling, “You’ll be sorry”. We marched off the troop ship and there with a siding there with a little train, some cars. They looked pretty small to me, being used to the big Rock Island trains that went through Seymour. It was a narrow-gauge railroad, and the boxcars were cars they used to haul pineapples and sugarcane. We got in those cars, it was hot and miserable and we thought we were going to suffocate, but the train took us up about 30 miles to Schofield barracks, a big Army camp.