I got that little letter says you report that to Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis.

Yes, everybody in Indiana did and went up there and went through all the indoctrination, the shots and the routine.

And then they sent me to Fort Lee, Virginia, and really tore up a knee badly.

And they classified me and what they called back then limited service.

After less than a year in the Army, they called me in one day for inspection and five doctors looked at me and said, you know, I think we're going to send you home.

And someone that returned to Evansville in 1943, even if that only left a year before they would have found a city that was completely transformed.

The population had grown enormously.

Industry was firing on all cylinders and the city even had a thriving nightlife.

Evansville had become a boomtown.

Evansville was going in the maximum amount of capacity.

They were building houses.

We had the Breckenridge soldiers coming in the town hall, which can be a big crowd of them.

Everybody was employed.

There were good jobs available in the shipyards in Republic Aviation, everything.

It could do anything of value manufacturing.

They were making bullets or planes or something.

I think Evansville is a really good example of what's happening all over America.

Before the war, during the war and after the war, World War II really gave it an economic shot in the arm like it did the rest of America.

People were coming from all over the United States to work in Evansville.

Most of them were coming in for jobs at shipyards, Chrysler, Servelle, Republic, Aviation.

After all, these war workers team town, when weekends hit, you couldn't move downtown.

You could hardly get across the street lines into all the restaurants and movie theaters, into the bars.

Friday night was really crowded because that's when nearly everybody got paid was Friday and you know how women like to shop... movies... Oh, we went to movies.

The movies.

We're doing a land office business every Saturday.

I think the theater opened at 1230 or 1:00 and we stayed to 6:00, regardless of what we saw it once, twice or three times on Sunday, you'd have big dance bands coming into town and all.

They had a grand theater.

It was just down from where the bus station is now and they had a lot of real well-known people come in there.

You probably never heard of Lionel Hampton, but he was there and we saw the Andrews Sisters at the Coliseum.

Dad was at the Coliseum.

They had something going on all the time there.

They'd have wrestling matches.

They had ice shows.

The flying circuses.

And the funny part was, you know, when a band was coming into town because we had so many artists that got sick or so many fathers died.

And you go back the next week, they're dying to hear and, you know, oh, it's part of them that went out and checked on them if you caught them lying, they were fired.

They were looking for that kind of entertainment.

They had a lotta nightclubs and like dance halls and beer joints.

Okay.

There was the Chalk Belles, Green River Tavern Captains Quarters, The New Yorker downtown, the Vendome, the blue bar down on Main and Fifth Street under the Hotel Lincoln was one of the hot spots.

One of the more famous spots was the Club Trocadero.

The Trocadero was a place you could go to gamble illegally, but it was kind of down in no man's land there, out basically at Waterworks Road and Highway 41 of today.

It was in Kentucky.

But on the Indiana side of the river whereby Indiana legally didn't have authority there, but Kentucky didn't come over to patrol.

The Trocadero was a really hot spot of gambling and dancing and entertainment.

That used to be a pretty good stretch out south 41 on the road in Henderson, they had nightclubs, theTrocadero, Granville Gardens, The Dells.

I can remember my there talk about the Dells are really a rough place.

Well I don't think it had a concrete floor I think was just a dirt floor and it was just a place where if you've looked for a fight, you could find one there.

There was what was known as the Ellis T. Tavern on West Franklin Street.

My dad started the Tavenr Last Stop Tonight, so the name of it was the last stop tonight that also conferred with the LST bolts.

That was a tavern that people went to from the shipyard.

And then other people also come there all the way from Morganfield, Kentucky, where they trained the soldiers camp.

Breckenridge opened up and the troops would come in here, particularly over the weekend.

Camp Breckenridge had had a regular everyday population of 45,000 soldiers and 5000 trainers.

When they had leave, we were probably one of the closest places they could go from Breckenridge.

I don't really know, but they were around all the time.

Loved to go downtown because Main Street on Friday and Saturday.

Well, you had all those good looking service men in their uniforms.

You know, we had the USO Center, which is no longer there now, is there about Main and Eighth Street used to have dances there all the time down at eighth and Main was a CDR railroad.

But when World War II happened, they turned it into a USO center.

I had a friend that lived not too far from where our place was, and we’d get on the bus and go downtown and walk to the USO, and all you did was just sit and talk to those guys.

They'd ask you questions and they’d talk about their girlfriend at home and you could have Cokes and stuff like that, or you could order a sandwich, but no liquor.

Everything was supervised.

Everything was heavily super- because this was war.

My dad was custodian at the Coliseum at that time.

And I remember they would always come there on Saturday night.

They'd have a nice dance and I wasn't old enough to get in with them or anything.

So my mom and my sister, my brother and I would sit up on the balcony and watch the soldiers dance.

I didn't go to that cause I was too young for that.

That's how my aunt met her husband and the girl that she went to high school with.

That's how she met her husband.

And then once a month they got a bus and we got on that bus and went to Camp Breckenridge.

Different churches and all would get together with young ladies and they would go down there.

There was three groups of dancing girls that I know of in Evansville, Dancing Girls Incorporated.

And I can't tell you what the other ones were, but they would go typically to Camp Breckenridge on Saturday afternoons and Sunday afternoons to dance with the boys.

I think the USO helped to boost the morale of the soldiers.

I think they enjoyed that.

And I really think if when we went to Breckenridge with those guys, enjoyed that, plus the troops were coming up or staying with families.

When the fellas came in from Breckenridge, the homes were open to them.

We'd have the fellas for dinner.

The USO started that.

They advertised that, you know, make a soldier feel at home.

And of course, mom had sons in the service and that she did want people to take care of them.

They would come to church, farm boy from Iowa.

We'd pile them in the car, II or three of them bring them home from home cooked meal that included pie or cake.

Thelma, who was the next oldest to I mean, we would go down to the USO each Sunday and bring II or three servicemen home for chicken dumplings, home cooked meal.

The kids slept on the floor so that the troops could have our beds.

They were always polite.

They were wonderful.

Most of them were very civil.

And they took in the Mesker Zoo And the different attraction we had here.

But then a lot of them came in and they were looking for women due to the war.

They was a lot of daughters and daughter in laws around there and I remember they were quick to give them a dollar, to go to movie theater, but we had to leave at once.

They don't come back after 6:00.

One Sunday um there were no GIs in church and dad was going somewhere and he saw some GIs walking about three or four of them.

And Dad stopped and asked them if they wanted to come for a meal and first thing out of their mouth are there any broads there?

And dad said, No, thank you.

And he went on.

There were a lot of young, single men.

Some not single coming through Evansville.

And you know, with that there were problems.

Of course, they liked to drink.

And there was, of course, the red light district.

Oh, yeah, Yeah, it was There were all the prostitutes.

Everybody knew which part of town it was and where it was and what was going on.

Not that we used it.

We were too young, but we knew it was down there first, second and high.

I was thinking there was an automotive name for it for first, second and high.

We called it Gear Town.

Gear town.

There you go.

That's it.

I didn't know what it was.

I asked my mother one time.

I was reading the paper and it was something about the red light district.

And I said, Well, what is that?

That's just a bad place.

We don't talk about that.

I lived a pretty sheltered life.

I think when it came to things like that, everybody knew, and especially later on in high school, high school guys knew where High Street was.

When we were in high school, we used to drive down there and the girls would hide down, the guys would pass, you know, just sit up here and we read the girls all day and make em so mad.

I was with some guys, one night.

They wanted to go up, knock on the door, which they did.

They talked to them and they discussed price and they didn't intend to go in anyway, you know, turn around, run off.

I guess it was a young man's fantasy to just go up, talk to somebody like that.

I can honestly say I never got involved, but there was a lot of activity there.

And course these soldiers, some of them, you know, been away from home for for months and they were looking for a little companionship.

World War II didn't create the red light district in Evansville, but it probably gave it a lot more business.

Those houses of ill repute had run for many years down in that area.

The police knew about them, but they rather regulated them, took care.

They knew where they were and they could rather control were all that was before the war.

The health department would go down there and check things, make sure that everybody was healthy.

When the ship yard was being built, the government insisted that the city clear that out.

Prostitution was taken so seriously by the federal government that there was actually a division of the federal government, the Office of Social Protection, whose sole job was taking care of it.

The division was headed in Washington, D.C., by Eliot Ness, the former untouchable from Chicago, and an agent in Evansville.

Janet Bergen sent regular reports back to Eliot Ness, telling often despairingly, of how the battle against prostitution was going here in Evansville.

In the newspaper, on the front page, there are debates going on.

Is it good to have all of the prostitutes in one area or should we close down this district?

One of the things that Don Zirkelbach, who was a police officer at the time and worked the vice squad, he said he was he didn't want to see it happen because the girls are just scattered and they couldn't keep track of them.

And indeed they did.

They started working at some of the hotel lobbies at the Vendome, and the McCurdy Venereal Disease started popping up to the point that the naval crews were kept at Crane.

The LST crews started to be housed up at Crane Naval Base until they were ready to go on the ships rather than being housed here in the days leading up to going on the ships.

Jim Madison talks about how we remember World War II is the Good War.

And I think it was the good war.

I mean, history is rarely black and white, but World War II's there's a lot of black and white in World War II.

Having said that, prostitution and crime and rowdiness is one of those things that a city like Evansville, with a lot of newcomers and a lot of soldiers moving through would have had to deal with.

It was something that people weren't accustomed to, but they were fully aware of.

If if we didn't win, there'd be a different America.

I think the general feeling among the population is we are really into this conflict.

World War II was all encompassing in Evansville.

You know, if you lived here during the war, you you could not escape it.

I lived about II blocks from Serville.

We'd watch the big semis carrying the wings.

We'd be walking to school or coming home or something.

Here comes the big semis or whatever, you know, they go to the highway and head out to Republic and they made the planes out on 41 where they would assemble all of them.

They would always flying over testing them and everything.

On Sunday, Dad would put us in our 1936 Dodge and we'd drive out to the airport and watch those thunderbolts practice.

There were thousands of people out there on Sunday afternoon.

They would bring the thunderbolts out to go through maneuvers, fly formations, go over the runway at 50 feet, and everybody got excited.

Oh, one guy is going to be different.

Arrest him.

And he flew underneath the Henderson Bridge.

They didn't think much of that.

Believe me, when we'd hear airplanes, it scared me to death.

And of course, we made them here.

And I didn't have enough presence of mind to think, Well, are those ones we made and they’re just taking them out or over or whatever or someplace?

We would run and get under the beds.

And especially at night, the air raid drills.

That was scary.

The entire city of Evansville had a couple of blackout drills.

We'd have these blackouts in the neighborhoods that year, lights had to be off at a certain time.

And they had wardens that come around the neighborhood to make sure.

They had, I guess, certain areas that they had to patrol.

They'd come by, make sure nobody was smoking, even a cigarette would show up.

They said if any neighbor lit up a cigarette during one of those, you know, runs where we we practiced, we'd go over and talk to him.

I didn't.

But you know, adults did.

They'd go over and say, look, this is serious business.

We're in this thing, you know, and, and they'd put the cigarette out.

The thinking was so the Japanese and the Germans bombers could not see the city.

Now, that sounds pretty corny, but I think it was more a motivational thing than really an actual fear that the leadership had.

And Evansville was into the war as the rest of the nation was.

You couldn't really not know the war was going on.

The United States fought war since then, that unless you had a son or daughter involved, you could probably not think about that for days or weeks on end.

But during World War II, that was not the case.

There were many ways that you would be impacted by it on a regular basis.

You had all kind of propaganda film.

We need you and we need the war effort, Rosie the Riveter.

And it had a very good effect on people because many of them, especially women, their husbands, may have been in the service.

The city, Evansville did everything they could do to contribute to helping those that needed help during the war.

I think one of the things that really illustrates what your Evansville’s attitude was is the amount of war bonds sold here, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. And also the big issue of defense by his first customer is President Roosevelt.

That first month, with war on the distant horizon, Americans invested almost $350 million to safeguard their future.

War bonds was was one thing I could do.

The kids bought into it.

The adults bought into it of buying war bonds.

You'll loan your government money through purchasing war bonds to help them fund this very expensive effort, with the hope that in X number of years you would get a good return on your little investment.

Oh, they pushed them in.

Everybody was willing.

Everybody was willing.

I had several war bonds - $25 war bonds.

And I think they cost $18.75.

Dad was buying II war bond books per week at Republic Aviation.

They wanted everybody who worked to buy one war bond per week, and Dad bought II.

I think you could have money taken out of your paycheck and you could buy them.

They always want to take at least 10% out in bonds, which we did a whole family, every one of us at work always contributed to bonds.

They had big selling events for the bonds.

Famous people came into town to promote war bonds sales.

I remember Bob Hope came into town and drew a huge crowd out at Bosse Field.

Abbott and Costello came to town and did a bit and they raised $650,000.

That's a lot of money when you think that was in the forties, that'd be a lot of money today.

The schools had had contests and you know, the school that sold the most war bonds got to fly the pennant on their flagpole for that week.

And I know from reading the right mirrors, it was a competition that was taken seriously.

I remember in grade school we got a little booklet and had $0.10 stamps in it.

We were offered and indeed did save our pennies to buy $0.10 saving stamps that we put in booklets.

And as soon as you got $18.75, you figured you could get a $25 war bond.

And of course we had races to see who was going to fill theirs first.

You see on Friday we would collect all of these booklets and we'd take from Hebrew school 50, 75 of those booklets down there during the noon hour, and they had a presentation that we would make and give you another book.

They wanted you to keep buying books.

Central High School, Class of 44, we raised $70,000 selling war bonds and war stamps in 13 and a half weeks, and we bought a P 47.

It was a school effort at first.

They wanted all the city schools to do that and they said, Oh, it can't be done.

So we said, Give us a shot.

I don't know how many bonds I bought.

I know I bought a bicycle and ten years later with my war bonds and I don't know if I had one book, II books, five books, everybody wanted to buy them.

They helped out the economy and everybody was really patriotic.

You could see Uncle Sam's picture everywhere.

You know, there was always something in the newspaper on the front page about some opportunity, some way that you could do your part.

Scrap metal drive, rationing of tires, helping register people for sugar, rationing.

I know when they registered everybody for sugar rationing, they closed schools so the teachers could help with the registration effort.

The sugar was rationed.

I remember my next door neighbor at the time, she came up with the idea of making chocolate cake with mayonnaise.

I don't know how that happened.

Gas was rationed.

Meat was rationed.

Sugar was rationed.

Women's couldn't get their nylons as being used for parachutes.

And such as that, the stories of the ladies that painted the stocking mark on the back of their legs and put like makeup on, they didn't have nylons and they wanted to look in style.

And so that's what they did and they painted their legs.

It was really difficult to paint that seam up the back.

We all wanted scenes in our nylon hose coffee One can and my dad was a real coffee drinker.

I don't care if you had $100 in your hand, you couldn't go in the store and buy a pound of coffee without a stamp.

You couldn't buy a pair of shoes without a stamp.

They gave you coupons and you had to go to the store and give them a coupon for so much sugar, so much meat.

Big families, even though they had a ration book for each one, they never seemed to have enough of some things.

We had a neighborhood full of big families, and I heard stories of women who would get their sugar ration and their relatives who maybe didn't need as much sugar.

So give them their they would give them their sugar.

I think they did.

They bartered around in like car tires.

You were only allowed to get so many, but they could recap tires, which they did.

The gas station in Waynesville, you could buy tires and you could buy gas there even if you didn't have the stamp.

But everybody knew that if you were going to cheat, you could go there and cheat the system and go to the black market.

So that went on to there was a shortage of nearly everything.

They couldn't make cars cause all the steel went for tanks, gasoline was rationed, sugar was unheard of, and part of it certainly was out of necessity.

But I think another part of it is it's part of the psychological bind to the war.

I mean, we did need rationing and we did need to conserve these materials that are needed for the war effort.

But it also does psychologically draw people in to this war is going on.

And this is how contributing by going along, this rationing in a peaceful and cooperative fashion.

People didn't complain.

Everybody was willing you know, we accepted it.

We knew we had to do it.

I don't think there was any problem with it because it all went to the war effort.

This was a real contribution, a physical contribution to the war effort.

You knew that what you did without if they were using it actually for the war, you wanted it to, you wanted to do everything you could to help them.

One of the advertisements I've got that hangs in my class has the slogan on it.

Use it up, wear it out, make it, do or do without.

And then, of course, by war bonds, kids were running scrap drives and Boy Scouts were like captains and, you know, running these scrap drives, you know, we'd go to somebody's house and say, any scrap metal?

we take our wagon.

I remember the old pushcart pushing that pushcart up and down the alleys with the boys and picking up stuff to take to Trotman’s to sell.

So we saved our tin cans.

Always had a container in the kitchen.

Take the labels off, open them top and bottom, smash them down.

You could get into the movie theater at the Alhambra if you brought an old piece of aluminum.

Get in free.

Probably my mother missed a lot of pans.

They would put up caricatures of Hitler, and I think Tojo on the courtyard lawn invite people to try to hit the caricatures with their scraps at home.

We saved grease and took it to the grocery stores.

I hated it most of all, meat grease because when Mom fried the hamburgers, she'd save the meat grease, and I'd take cans out to Stringtown School for meat grease Day.

That stuff was nasty.

It would get every - I’d ride the school bus and I felt like I needed a bath when I got home from school on Meat Grease Day.

Glycerin was in that meatgrease.

You had to have glycerin to make your gunpowder.

Dynamite, gunpowder, nitroglycerin.

I don't know how well that worked, but I felt like I was doing something to help those boys who came home wounded and were sick and needed help.

So people certainly were into the war in many ways where there's rationing or buying war bonds or having a soldier into their home on a Sunday afternoon.

It was something that was all encompassing, even down to little kids who were involved in the scrap metal drives and the scrap or of rubber drives, gym classes in the schools were were oriented towards having the boys especially ready to go and serve in the military.

On Reitz's practice field, they built an obstacle course in the gym.

Classes would do the military style obstacle course to be ready for the war effort.

I think Evansville was very conscious of the war.

It was constant, constant, constant, just as tight as it could be.

All the factories went 24 hours a day, and so there was always a lot of action, a lot of commotion and a lot of people coming and going at all times of day and night.

Sometimes I go to work and I wouldn't know when I'd get off and come home.

One time I worked three shifts.

I came home, was undressing.

I got a call, plant protection on the way to pick you up.

You got to get back to work.

And of course, the west side was broad daylight, 24 hours a day because of the shipyards.

The lights were on over there around the clock because they worked around the clock.

They had three shifts.

When the shipyards were there, the West Side was booming.

Reitz High school sits right atop the hill.

And as a teacher writes, I always think how hard it would have been to have class that day in May or in September.

When it's hot, you've got to have the windows open and you can hear the banging and the whistles and the welders going right at the bottom of the hill or one of those days when they would launch an LST and the band would be playing and people would be cheering and and some poor math teachers up on the third floor try to teach calculus and compete with that kind of excitement right outside the window.

It was amazing to go see this as a kid, watch a launch that was great fun.

When they built ships at the shipyards, they built ten ships at a time and they were parallel to the river.

And when they got the keel laid and everything where the thing would float and it had the engines in and had power, why they would launch it, they always had some dignitary there, the mayor or somebody.

The mayor was there and all kinds of dignitaries and they had a woman there, attractive woman, they christened it, with a wine bottle.

And then they slid around down to the river.

And when they launched them, they launched them sideways.

They didn't launch them by the bow or the stern.

They launched the ship sideways and they were slow down the ramp and settled into the water.

Yeah.

So maybe you go, Oh, the big splash.

You would go slow down there.

For a kid in high school, there was something to see, you know, I was privileged also to see the inside of some of the plants for public aviation I to open houses.

I got to tour of the plant.

I easily give $1,000 right now to go back and do that, just walk through that plant again.

I mean, here's this huge plant.

You know, you walk in and there's all this activity, you know, and the assembly line and all.

I never seen anything like that.

The plant was made north to south.

The plane started out.

They had four production lines going and the plane would start out at the south end.

And they had a jig that they set the fuselage and other parts on.

And as it went down the line, these parts were added.

And when it went out, it was a full completed aircraft, had the engine in it and everything else.

That little plane won the war, didn't it, P-47s.

That's pretty much the pay.

47 was huge.

I mean, it was a big fighter.

Weighed seven tons without anything on.

It was not as fast as the P-51 Mustang in level flight, but it could out dive anything.

It’s very dependable, tough airplane.

It would take a beating and still fly when it shouldn't be flying.

At Republic.

They just didn't want anything to be wrong with those planes.

I went to work at Republic Aviation.

I worked in the West hangar and the west hangar is where we, the planes had been pretty well critiqued out and then we would go over them again for any what they called crab They would make a crab shape.

This needs to be looked after.

That needs to be looked after.

So we would open up access panels and we'd look for stray rivets and things like that.

We'd wipe the plane down and do things like that.

When we finished a job, they came around with their little flashlights and, you know, checked all the rivets because if there was a split in there, then, you know, I don't know.

I don't remember how it was fixed.

Obviously, it was vitally important that the P-47s were perfect and the care and attention to detail was a central focus of the Evansville plant.

And they did it so well that eventually the high quality of their workmanship came to the attention of the White House.

At some point, like about 1943, Roosevelt was scheduled to come in the Republic Aviation to thank them for their craftsmanship and building good aircraft.

The train was secret, but somehow people lined the track through the town.

They knew when about when they knew the route it was taking.

He came in from Fort Chaffee, Missouri, to Evansville, and people knew enough.

Now, if they lined the tracks, they were lined up all along the railroad all the way downtown.

And we stood there for 3 hours.

And when the train went by, all the curtains were pulled.

And there was some speculation that he wasn't even on the train.

But it was an exciting day.

He came in off the train, loaded into his limousine convertible and drove through that plant and drove all the way around through it.

Outside of it, a lot of the employees, most of the employers could see the president's car.

I'm sure some bombs were sold, too.

Dad was a Republican.

FDR was a Democrat.

But on the day Franklin Roosevelt died and my father cried, that's how strongly people felt about Franklin Roosevelt.

He, my dad, think save the nation.

I'm sure some didn't feel that way, but I know that Franklin Roosevelt was an utter, absolute, complete hero to people who were involved in World War II.

And that's that's all Americans.

I enlisted when I was 17.

My older brother, he was in the Army.

He said, You don't want to go in the Army.

That's no good.

The other brother was in the armored division.

They said, Well, you don't want that.

My other brother was in the Navy.

He said, You can't swim.

So that didn't leave much.

So I enlisted in the Air Force.

I was 17 years old when I graduated here I am 18 when I was drafted and the war ended prior to me going overseas.

V-E Day was was the day that Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended.

I remember in Europe, V-E Day with my dad he got his little V-E Day pin out of Republic.

Course everybody's excited that the war was ending in Europe, but celebrations were discouraged because we still had soldiers being killed in battles still being won in the Pacific.

Our family all felt the war was not ruined when the European war was because we were still involved in the Japanese and celebrations were very, very muted and people continued working.

V-J day was a little different story.

If you could have such a thing as a national sigh of relief and and celebration, that was it.

The day the Japanese surrendered, we went down to our friends on Lombard.

Everybody was out, yelling and carrying on.

The sirens and horns all went off the airport.

Fire trucks had their sirens running.

As such, people got out on their porches and shot their shotguns up in the air.

We sat on our porch.

We got every pot and pan and lid and spoon, and we sat on that porch and we banged and went on like crazy, screaming and yelling, this celebration.

Oh, my goodness.

I know the people downtown collected wherever they could to party on Main Street.

Every tavern in town, I'm sure, was filled until small hours of the morning.

We all went down on Main Street.

Everybody is on Main Street, whooping and hollering and having a ball.

You couldn't see nothing.

But people, they were screaming and hugging and kissing main and Sycamore.

You couldn't get through if your life depended on it.

The war was over.

I was there back home and some.

I had Marseilles, France and go to the Pacific.

We were supposed ban on the invasion of Japan.

The war had ended and we were headed over there anyhow.

We landed at Nagasaki, where they dropped the atomic bomb, Nagasaki.

And like a lot of the cities in Japan, one side was water.

Three sides mountain.

Now, because the country is very mountainous and the trees on three sides.

I always use the analogy of a giant took a sickle, cut all the trees down, laid them back and then took a giant blow torch and just scorched them.

In the city there was rubble.

But when we got there and when we got on the train, who were in the crew kids younger than we were running the train.

That's how down manpower they were.

We went past an area like London and Whirlpool, and there was an industrial plant and the steel was leaning away from the blast.

The blast was an aerial blast.

So you had 360 degree coverage.

The steel was leaning or flat.

But then I looked and here were II I-beams and steel.

You connected at 90 degrees when they were at obtuse angles, one beam melted down into the other one.

Like you took II sticks of butter and let them gently melt.

And I thought to myself, Steel at 1800 degrees begins to get a little flimsy, but to melt one beam into the other.

The intense heat that that must have been.

The people boom, they were evaporated, many of them.

It was an awesome sight.

And I'm thankful that Truman did drop the bomb because if we would have landed, I probably would not be here today for the invasion of Japan.

They were buying everything that was bought at Normandy times ten times ten was how big the invasion of Japan would have been.

Tells you what was going to happen if atomic bombs were not dropped.

A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy that bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.

It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July the 26th was issued at Potsdam.

Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum.

If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

I know my dad and my grandfather made a remark about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My dad was pretty upset about that, but my grandfather said it had to be done.

I will tell you what I said.

I said, I hope we burn those yellow bastards in hell.

That's what I said myself.

I firmly believe to this day that Truman was right and it saved lives.

And a lot of the younger generation feels that it was genocide.

But I don't feel that at all.

I think it was a good decision that Harry Truman made in that war and get it done.

Well, there was no controversy at all.

And I think he had a burden to bear and he took care of the job.

I mean, I don't feel good when I see pictures of some of the things that happened to the people.

But I think at the time, the feeling was they deserved it.

The president had no other alternative because that was going to be bloody wow in my life.

He dropped that bomb and everything stopped right there.

The war was over.

And those people would that would who are still alive, would be coming home.

I just thought my brother still alive and he's coming home.

I was playing jacks on my cousin's porch and I looked up and I see my brother Bob coming home with his duffel bag over his shoulder.

And I start screaming out, Bobby, Bobby, I guess I'm really loud because they come out their doors.

My neighbors, they thought I was hurt and they see my brother and I still see him walking home.

He was in one of them that was in the Navy with his duffel bag over his shoulder walking through that path.

I had an older brother.

He was in the Navy.

He came home on the train.

I'll never forget when he stepped off the train.

Well, of course, Mom was the first one to hug him, and I couldn't wait to run up to him and grab him.

I said, Oh, Larry I love you.

I love you.

I hugged and kissed him.

Oh, and he picked me up.

He swung me around.

Oh, gosh.

Oh, you know, I guess there was some adjustment for them coming home.

That has to be a big letdown.

I mean, excitement.

You had a letdown to them, wondering what's going to happen to the rest of their lives.

But, you know, they never talked a whole lot about the war, never talked too much about what went on.

I don't think very many people in World War II discussed anything after I came back.

To tell you the truth, the way I looked at it, we had a job to do.

We did it.

We came home.

We were proud and we were ready to go back to normal life.

And we just never discussed it, never talked about it.

I talked more about it in the last three years than I have ever talked about it.

When I got out, it was over with.

I was safe.

I was fortunate I didn't see combat, and that's an altogether different scenario.

There are fellows that I know who were in combat, like my brother, and he didn't talk a lot about it.

He talked about the fun side of it, but the serious side, he kept it in to himself.

And that's why many of the combat veterans are even today, most of them when they came back, if they had seen a bunch of that, they didn't want to talk about it because they just didn't want to for what they had seen over there.

They just wanted to erace that from our memory.

They didn't want to because they'd have nightmares and stuff all over it and they just didn't want think about it anymore.

Most people are raised to be civil, like I was raised as a Christian.

And would I have been able to kill somebody, I don't know.

I don't know.

I guess circumstances would dictate that, but I'm sure that went through the mind of many a soldier.

I didn't get back til ‘46.

I drew unemployment for about eight months.

There are a lot of veterans.

A lot of them were going back to school.

My brothers both went to college on the G.I.

Bill.

That was wonderful.

Went to the Evansville College.

At that time, jobs are hard to find.

Dad was terminated the day after Japan surrendered.

They were promised that Republic Aviation was going to close or lower the New York plant and bring their aircraft construction to Evansville.

But they didn’t.

They closed that plant, the Evansville shipyards.

There's the great shipyard fire that consumes much of the shipyards not long after the war ends, the fire did considerable damage, but all of the remaining buildings and all of the remaining materials were sold off by the Navy.

And eventually there was nothing left.

And that kind of closes the chapter on the shipyards.

After the war, there was no need for the numbers and the volume of defense products that we had been building.

All those factories that are making war goods quit making war goods.

Literally overnight they stopped the orders and they quit making airplanes and ships and bullets.

I think the main reaction was people begin to wonder where they were goona find a job.

I thought we would just, you know, within a year we could crank up Chrysler automobiles and Whirlpool would get back in refrigerators.

But that didn't happen.

People grew up beginning to get out of work.

And there was a period there where there was a lot of idleness.

It took a lot of effort to bring the civilian effort back into Evansville.

There was about a II year recovery period.

So the first automobile came out, Evansville, in 1947.

It was a Ford, and it was a big deal when it came to Evansville, the first new car since 1941 or 42, because there was a pent up demand for domestic products.

There had been rationing and all the automobiles went to the military during the war.

And because all of those workers were making more money than they'd ever made and not being able to spend it because there weren't consumer goods to buy, everybody had a down payment for a new house and everybody had a down payment for a new car.

Really, the war made us rich, so we thought that was a blessing.

Of course it wasn't.

It wasn't a good blessing because of the fact that it was a war.

But in the long run it paid for our house.

And it got us out of debt.

There that a lot of people made a lot of money as a do off the war.

But still we were just totally focused.

Everything was had to do with doing our part.

It was just part for the war effort.

Evansville was a hero city, so I don't know what Evansville did as far as production compared with, say, New York City and Detroit and Kansas City.

But per capita, I think Evansville was the largest producer of World War II goods during the war.

Sort of incredible when you think about it.

But I think when the people were living that, I don't wonder, do they think this is incredible or, you know, this is just our everyday life?

I think back in those days we just did what needed to be done.

No, Why put up a fuss about it?

Everybody just grit their teeth and did the job.

And when you think back on it in your later years, think about that was really something in looking back now I can see where it was a very important cog in the war effort.

We made 96% of the 45 caliber ammunition that was used in the war.

There were a lot of 45s produced.

There were a lot of 45 caliber bullets shot during the war.

The LSTs, The over 6000 P-47s.

You know, when you look at the stats, we produced a lot of stuff.

I think here in Evansville, people certainly can look back at what was done in our city and without hesitation say that the construction that went on here, the industrial output that went on here, really contributed to the victory of the allies during the war.

I wish the kids today would, if they would just go down to the LST, down to the museum and read some of the contributions that the city of Evansville had made toward that war effort.

It would just blow your mind.

World War II made Evansville what it is.

And I think that will always be a big part of the legacy of our town.