My Grandpa Mac, Part 2

My Grandpa Mac, was interviewed for the Marshall paper. It's a great article outlining his service in the military. So proud of him!

http://www.marshallindependent.com/page/content.detail/id/517703.html

Green Valley's Clarence McLaughlin grew up in North Dakota.

"I was born in Baker, Montana which was the closest hospital to our farm in southwestern North Dakota," he said. "There were seven boys in my family and five girls - I was number seven."

Clarence grew up during the Great Depression.

"Those were very bad years," he said. "We had dust storms and grasshoppers . . . you could hear the noise of the grasshoppers hitting the windmill. I don't think I really realized how bad it was -the neighbors lived the same way and we didn't stop to think about it."

Public education in western North Dakota was a challenge. Clarence attended the local country school, which was only a mile and a half walk away, through the eighth grade. But high school, located 40 miles away, was another matter.

"We stayed at a dormitory in Marmot, North Dakota," he said. "The boys lived in the basement and the girls lived upstairs . . . I finished one year of high school."

"I worked on this farm until I was 16 years old when my brother and other kids joined the CCs (Civilian Conservation Corps)," he added. "We joined the CCs because the times were tough."

Clarence, his brother, and their friends boarded a train in early December 1941, Clarence's first train trip, for their CCC assignment in Miles City, Montana. The world changed unexpectedly during that train ride when the boys heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

"When we heard about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, why, there were rumors they were going to put all the CC boys in the military right away," Clarence recalled. "I was kinda worried because I was only16."

The rumors proved untrue and the train delivered the boys to their CCC camp near Miles City. The new CCC boys went to work.

"Every day they'd load us up on trucks and we'd go out and grub sagebrush," Clarence said. "We'd chop the sagebrush and put it in piles and burn it - they'd replant the area in grass."
Clarence said the CCC camp was a good experience for him. The boys were well-fed; they earned money; and he was with his brother and several friends.

But the war triggered cuts in the CCC program and the Miles City camp closed.
Clarence returned home where he worked again on farms.

The draft took several of his friends over the next couple years, so in late 1944 he decided to volunteer. He called his local draft board and was on a train to Fort Snelling, Minnesota within days. He was the sixth member of his family to put on a uniform during the war.
Another train took Clarence to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. "That's where I got my GI haircut and all my new uniforms that didn't fit too good," he said with a chuckle, "I was sworn in the first of March of 1945."

The Army sent Clarence to Camp Robinson, Arkansas for 16 weeks of Basic Training.
Clarence mastered Basic Training with few problems and returned home on leave before reporting to Camp Rucker, Ala. for advanced training. But the new soldiers did not train. They passed a couple weeks pulling KP and guard duty before boarding a train across country to Camp Adair, Oregon. Once again they did not do any training. The young soldiers learned why their training was being curtailed when they heard of the Japanese government's surrender.

The young soldiers took yet another train to southern California where they boarded the USS General Randall, an enormous troop ship.
"It seems to me there were five or six thousand of us on that huge troop ship," Clarence recalled. "They didn't tell us where we were going."

Being at sea was, of course, a new experience for Clarence, but one he enjoyed despite being stacked with the other troops in the berthing areas like sardines.

Two weeks later the ship docked in Yokohama, Japan. Clarence ended up in Tokyo where he was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, one of the units charged with occupation duties in Japan after the war.

Clarence worked on a number of occupation missions, the first of which involved guarding government buildings in Yokohama. The city was severely bombed out and the Japanese people were in bad shape.

"They were begging for food, so things weren't very good," he said.

The Division reassigned Clarence later to a port at the mouth of Tokyo Bay.

"We were assigned to this program where these repatriates (Japanese soldiers) were coming back from different islands," he said. "Some of these soldiers were sick or in bad shape . . . mainly I was a driver for doctors and interpreters."

Clarence final assignment was to a camp where his new unit did a lot of training patrols in jeeps.

"One time we went real close to Mount Fuji, so we stopped there and we all tried to climb Mount Fuji," he said with a laugh. "We went part-way up, but it was real hard climbing because it was all ash."

Clarence accumulated enough points to return to the States in October of 1946. His troopship passed under the Golden Gate bridge into San Francisco harbor where a train took him north to Fort Lewis, Washington and his discharge from the Army.

About his service, Clarence commented, "I learned a lot from being around other people." He concluded, "I was proud I was in the service."

Thank you for your service, Clarence.

Copyright 2010. William D. Palmer.