The Greatest Generation.
Christmas 1943 marked the end of training for Ted Garnett and the beginning of a bloody campaign to take back Pacific islands from the Japanese.
Mutton and a Dutch freighter were pressed into service.
“We knew it was Christmas,” he said. “But not turkey, no tinsel.”
Of course, growing up during the Great Depression meant he had low expectations for the holiday.
A year later, Christmas for Jim Geiger was spent in a B-17 bomber high above the Battle of the Bulge.
“We flew a mission on Christmas,” he said. “It wasn’t like Christmas.”
During the Battle of the Bulge, he flew five missions in six days and didn’t make it back to home base. During the flights they had hard candy to suck on and peanut butter sandwiches that froze solid.
“We threw them out and hoped they would hit a German on the head and shorten the war up a little bit,” he said.
“I flew five missions in six days in nasty weather,” he said. “We hardly ever saw the ground. I flew all my missions in the winter, and we bombed through the clouds.”
Geiger remembers black smoke.[…]
A boy growing up poor in Willow Creek in a country just coming out of the Great Depression, Garnett joined the National Guard to help pay for college in Billings. He got a dollar for every week’s guard training session.
“We were dumb not to realize with war in Europe, we would eventually be going to war,” the 94-year-old said.
This year is the 75th anniversary of the mobilization of Montana’s 163rd Infantry Regiment, which drew from across the state. In 1940, the 163rd left for Camp “Swamp” Murray in Washington. Pay went up to $30 a month, or a dollar a day but only paid out once a month. That was about the wages a farm hand made, too.
He was issued a wooden gun. The country was far from ready for a world war.
“We were going to get out in a year, but then Pearl Harbor ended that,” Garnett said.
He remembers fear after the Japanese attack. The 163rd patrolled the Washington coast, on alert should the Japanese strike the mainland. On March 17, 1942, they left Washington for San Francisco and boarded the Queen Elizabeth, a converted luxury liner that didn’t feel too luxurious with six bunks stuffed in every suite. Many had tears in their eyes as they left their country, maybe forever.
In 21 days, the 1,500 men of the 163rd had reached Sydney, Australia, then Melbourne. They crossed the equator on Garnett’s 21st birthday.
Aussies turned out in force to wave them off as they left by train for the north of the continent for rugged jungle training. The men could read on the faces of the Australians — the worry about a Japanese invasion. The Japanese then were in Papua New Guinea, an island just 93 miles across the sea from Australia’s north coast.
“The Australians were glad to see us. The Japanese were so close, and the Australian army was in North Africa,” Garnett said. “Welcoming, that’s the word.”
He ate a lot of mutton, not his favorite dish.
“You had to eat it fast or greasy scum hardened on it,” he said.