Engineer Memoirs
A:
We did. We left Germany in the middle of June, and we were in Marseilles for a month.
We turned in all our equipment. The third week in July we got on the Luraline. There
have been many Luralines, but this was the latest one at that time--a Matson liner.
There were 5,000 troops on board. We went across the Atlantic, through the Panama
Canal, to Hawaii, to Ulithi, and then to the Philippines.
The war ended in the middle of August. We reached the Philippines the end of August.
The war was over. They didn't seem to know what to do with us. They sent us up to
Angeles, to a camp just outside Clark Field. After we had been there about a week, they
sent us up to San Jose, which was up in the middle of Luzon, opposite the Lingayen
Gulf. They sent us up there, I think, just because they had a vacant camp there. We
were supposed to do training.
Q:
So you were chasing the war, still.
A:
I was chasing the war, but at that time, with the war over, the main interest of
everybody was getting home. At the end of World War II, they had a point system,
which was used to decide who would go home. A lot of this battalion had not been
overseas that long. Many didn't have many points because they had only been overseas
less than a year. A lot of them weren't due to go home, although some were. I
concluded that I wasn't going to go anywhere in that battalion, so I went to try to call
on [Major] General [Leif J.] Sverdrup, who commanded the Engineer Construction
Command--called ENCOM.
Q:
Where was he at that time?
A:
Their headquarters was in Manila, at the Wakwak Country Club. The officer I saw there
was [Brigadier General Edward A.] Eddie Brown, who was a colonel. Later he became
a general. He had been in charge of personnel in the Office of the Chief of Engineers.
I had met him when we were at Fort Belvoir. I had been the ranking officer of our
group, since the number one man in my class went into the Signal Corps, and I was the
number two man. I became the senior lieutenant in the basic course attended by the
members of my West Point class commissioned in the Corps of Engineers.
Q:
And the youngest.
A:
And the youngest, too.
While at Fort Belvoir, I went to see Brown, partly to talk over with him my own
assignment, but also to talk over the proposition that quite a few out of our class in the
engineers, rather than being assigned to units, wanted to go overseas as individual
replacements. That led to some of us going to Europe as individual replacements. Some
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