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Transcriber: Erika Gunther, RPR - 2/15/11 EILEEN HURST: Today is September 4, 2004.
I'm
interviewing Francis James Vail. He goes by Jim,
though. We're at Francis James' house in Stafford
Springs, Connecticut.
Interviewer is Eileen Hurst Downey from
Central Connecticut State University.
Jim, will you state your full name, your
birth date and your current address.
FRANCIS JAMES VAIL: My name is Francis James
Vail. I was born July 25, 1921, and that's it.
HURST: And your current address?
VAIL: My current address is 212 Upper Road,
Stafford Springs, Connecticut.
HURST: Which war did you serve in and what
branch of the service?
VAIL: I was in World War II, and I was in the
Army Air Corps, which was the -- the Air Corps was part
of the army at that time.
HURST: What was your rank?
VAIL: When I -- when I got discharged, it was
Buck Sergeant, or -- I guess they call them Buck
Sergeant.
HURST: Jim, were you drafted or did you enlist?
VAIL: I enlisted.
HURST: Where were you living at the time?
VAIL: Stafford, Connecticut.
HURST: Why did you enlist?
VAIL: Well, I wanted to get in as a pilot, and
I flunked my eye test, so I was getting drafted anyway,
so I applied for the Air Force.
HURST: Why did you pick the Air Force?
VAIL: Well, it seemed more exciting, I guess,
than being in the infantry.
HURST: Do you recall your first days in service?
VAIL: Somewhat, yeah.
HURST: What did it feel like, and where did you
go?
VAIL: Well, I went to Hartford to get started.
From Hartford, Connecticut, we -- they --
I went there early in the morning and stayed there until
afternoon before we left for Fort Devens, and I think
there was about a hundred of us, most of them draftees,
and we went to Fort Devens, and we got our uniforms or
our clothing, and we got our VD lectures and movies and
all our shots, and it was about 3:00 in the morning
before we got to bed, and the next day they woke us up,
fed us, and it was Sunday, and then we didn't do
anything that day to speak of, a few drills, and at
night they said -- they -- they asked me to -- I'd have
to be ready at 7:00 in the morning to ship out the next
day, and we didn't know where we were going, except we
were on a train, I don't know, two or three hours or
something like that, and we wound up in Atlantic City,
and that's where I took my basic training.
HURST: Do you remember the date when you
VAIL: Yeah, well, it's -- it was
September 17th.
Is that on there?
HURST: We can check your records.
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: What was the year? September of...
VAIL: '42.
HURST: 1942.
Then you ended up in Atlantic City, New
Jersey?
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: How long did you stay there for basic
training?
VAIL: I don't quite remember. We stayed longer
than most people. I think it was 16 weeks -- well,
maybe it was only eight weeks. It seemed like 16 weeks.
HURST: What was basic training like?
VAIL: Long. We -- we got up -- they woke us up
in the middle of the night for fire drills usually, and
we stayed in -- I stayed in the Dennis Hotel, which I've
been to Atlantic City lately, and I tried to find out
something about it, and I finally found out that it was
torn down, and I think that's where Bally's Casino is
now, because it was right next to the Steel Pier, and
they had -- while we there, they had -- 1942, where all
the girls parade, you know.
HURST: Boardwalk?
VAIL: Yeah, it was down the boardwalk. It was
right down the boardwalk, and the Steel Pier. It was
where the movie -- I mean beauty pageant was held in
'42.
HURST: Oh, Miss America?
VAIL: Miss America Pageant was held.
HURST: While you were there?
VAIL: Yeah, we went there. It was right within
a hundred yards of where we were stationed, and we saw
it from the boardwalk when they came out, and they don't
look then like they look today, because they wore
one-piece bathing suits, so that's what started.
HURST: Do you remember any of your instructors
from basic training?
VAIL: No. They were all infantrymen from
Jefferson Barracks, Missouri that trained.
HURST: Where did you go after basic training?
VAIL: Well, because they -- they told us we
were leaving, and I had called my mother up and told her
we -- and scuttlebutt -- we were going to Jefferson
Barracks, Missouri, and I couldn't figure out why we
were going to an infantry camp, and I called my mother
up and said I was going someplace and didn't tell her
where. I didn't know where.
We were on the train about an hour, and
we pulled into Grand Central Station, and we -- we met
some people there, and what -- it was -- it was on a
Thursday, I think, and they had this apartment --
brand-new apartment house we were going to stay in, but
there was 16 -- there was 15 classes in there, and we
were the 16th one, so they had no place to put us, so
they sent us home, so instead of going out west, I went
home.
HURST: To Connecticut?
VAIL: To Connecticut.
HURST: And you never went to Jefferson Barracks?
VAIL: No, and -- because they told us when we
were there we were going to -- what the heck was it?
The Long Island Institute of Technology was a -- was a
mechanic school for -- airplane mechanic school.
HURST: At that point, did they assign you to be
a mechanic? Is that when you knew you were going to
specialize?
VAIL: Yeah, that's when I knew what we were
going to do, except we had to go home, because they had
no room to put us up until Monday.
HURST: What was it, the Long Island school?
VAIL: Institute of Technology.
It was in Flushing, Long Island.
HURST: How long did you stay home?
VAIL: Until that Monday. I went back Sunday
night and got there Monday and then we started school.
We -- we stayed in the new apartment
house. The other class had graduated, so we got in in
turn, and we were there, I think, 16 weeks.
HURST: You went to the institute for
16 weeks --
VAIL: Yeah --
HURST: -- to learn mechanic skills?
VAIL: -- mechanic school. That's what we
studied, mechanics.
HURST: And what --
VAIL: And I don't know how many were in the
class. I think there was about 30 in the class.
HURST: Did they teach you the mechanics on all
the different aircraft that were being used at that
time --
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: -- or just general?
VAIL: Yeah, it was more or less general. They
even taught us about Piper Cubs and how to do stuff on
it, and it was just general information that they
usually did, I guess.
HURST: Did you have prior experience as a
mechanic?
VAIL: No, I was a draftsman. I -- I drew up
plans for houses and stuff, so...
HURST: Where did you go after your 16 weeks at
the Long Island Institute?
VAIL: Well, we graduated there, and while we
were there, we stayed in this hotel, and I think they
just went up to 50 dollars a month for pay, you know,
and -- because there we stayed in this -- this brand-new
apartment house, I guess you'd call it, because it was
more than one floor, and there was a lot of guys --
well, there was 16 classes there, or 15, and we went to
school on the subway. We ate in the restaurant
downtown, a big restaurant that was near the school.
HURST: You didn't have regular mess halls?
VAIL: No, we ate in a regular restaurant, big
restaurant, and that was one of them kind of buffet type
stuff.
And when we got paid, our first -- my
first pay in the service was -- they had about ten
tables, and the first one, you had to pay for cleaning
your clothes. They came and they cleaned our clothes,
and you had to pay, and we got more money than 50
dollars, but -- I thought I was rich at the first table,
but they kept taking it away. There was a PX thing, if
you used it, and clothes and all, yeah.
Then they talked me into buying a bond,
which was 18.50, I think, at the time, for a 25 dollar
bond, and then when I got to the last table, they --
they -- the guy mentioned that I could get money for --
to send home to my mother, but it cost me 22 dollars. I
said, Well, I'm not going have enough money left after
buying that bond and all this other stuff, so I went --
he said, Well, go back and cancel the bond, and I went
back and cancelled it, but then when I got my second
month's pay, they never cancelled the bond, and for two
months they didn't cancel it, so I really didn't have
any money and -- leftover, you know, or -- I even owed a
little bit, and I never did get the bond. They never
sent them to me. I never found out what happened to
them, so anyway, that was the end.
And we went to the school on the subway,
and the only time we saw any army personnel while I was
in school was from, I think, 8:00 until 9:00 in the
morning. They had a big group in the area, and we had
cali -- an army guy, a lieutenant used to come around
and give us calisthenics for an hour.
HURST: All the instructors at the institute were
VAIL: Yeah, everything was civilian.
We didn't see Army, only that hour a
day, and we were off every night. We went to New York
City every night, but we -- it was -- it was the
eight-hour -- eight-hour school day, you know, and I
think I finished third in the class of about 30, maybe.
HURST: Where did you go after that?
VAIL: We went on a train, didn't know where we
were going again. We went to Albuquerque, New Mexico,
and I stayed there, eventually, about nine months.
HURST: What did you do there?
VAIL: Worked -- at the beginning, because the
air -- it was Kirtland Air Base, and it was just
starting up, and as I said, they were making a movie
there at the time. Bombardier was the name of the
movie, with Pat O'Brien and, I guess, Anne Sheridan and
a few others, so we used to see them come on the air
base every morning, and they came by bus most of the
time, and they -- you'd wave at them. That's the only
time we saw them.
HURST: Did you get to see the movie when it was
finished?
VAIL: Well, they had the premier down there in
Albuquerque, and we got to get in to see it, and I don't
know if I should say this, Pat O'Brien didn't make the
premier. He was there, but he didn't make the stage.
He wasn't feeling good, I guess, but anyway, it was an
experience.
No, we worked on planes. We worked in
the hangar, and after we were there about two months, I
guess, I applied for -- for gunner on a plane again or
it was -- it was something else. It was -- it was waist
gunner or something on the airplane, something to do
with flying, and the guy looked at my test and -- when
we were in Atlantic City, we took tests to see where --
what you could do, and I had, I guess, a pretty high
mark on my exam, because my CO asked me if I wanted to
go to this training program, and I think the name of it
was ASTTM, or something like that, and it was an
engineering program where you went to a university.
From there, anyway, you went to the University of
Oklahoma for two years, and they got a whole bunch of
colonels together, and they give me an interview, and I
passed everything, but just when I was waiting to go up
there, we got alerted to go overseas, and they cancelled
everything. Everything -- anything anybody was doing,
they cancelled it, so then we started overseas training,
and we'd work eight hours a day, and then from 6:00 till
9:00 we'd have overseas training, six -- six days a
week, and they cancelled everything after that.
HURST: Then you went -- after your overseas
training, you shipped right out to go overseas?
VAIL: Well, it took a long time. It was four
or five months anyway. I think I was in Albuquerque
about -- and we went on detached service. We went to
different airfields in Texas at the time, Rhome (ph),
Magado (ph), and we didn't do -- you were only there for
a week or something, so you didn't do much work, but
they'd travel around in convoys, so we went to about
three or four different -- but then we got alerted.
And we used to pack all our supplies.
You know, every night we did a little packing and -- to
send overseas, kitchen equipment and all that kind of
stuff, which, come to find out later, never got there.
HURST: When did you actually ship out? Did you
ship out or fly out?
VAIL: No, we took a train to Camp Kilmer in New
Jersey and of course it took quite awhile, because the
trains in them days -- in fact, we woke up in the middle
of the night, and we were in Canada, so, I mean, you
knew it took a long time to get there. They used to
zigzag or take different routes or something because it
was loaded with soldiers or, you know, servicemen, and
we got there, and we went up the plank, and we were
assigned a bed in the hull of a ship, and because there
was people -- it was a big ship, and I -- I don't
remember the -- it was an English ship, because it was
English Navy that was running it, and it was supposedly
the biggest convoy that ever went over at the time. You
know, there was a lot of ships in this convoy.
HURST: Do you remember how many?
VAIL: I don't know how many ships, but they
were talking something like a hundred thousand soldiers.
HURST: Wow.
VAIL: And I don't know if that's, you know --
that was just scuttlebutt, so I don't know if it was
true, but it was big, because it was a lot of ships
and -- and because down in the hull there, everybody --
not everybody, but most people got sick down there, and
they were sick, some of them, for the whole trip, which
was 28 days.
HURST: 28 days?
VAIL: Yeah, it took about --
HURST: Did you get sick?
VAIL: No, because I went down there and you --
you were -- they had them beds, cots with the -- string
cots, you know, and because if there was a tall -- a
heavy guy above you, you couldn't turn around because he
was in your way, so I never went back down there. We
stayed up on deck the whole trip, some of us, very few
of us, because it was sickening down below.
HURST: What was the date, at least month and
year?
VAIL: I don't know. I'd have to check --
HURST: You'd check.
VAIL: -- somehow.
HURST: It was probably, if you enlisted in
September of '42 --
VAIL: It was --
HURST: -- '43?
VAIL: It was almost a year I was in the States,
I think, almost. It's one of them papers. I think it
might be --
HURST: All right.
VAIL: -- on my discharge paper.
HURST: I'll check it.
Where did you land when you finally got
overseas?
VAIL: Well, we circled, because you don't know
what's cooking when you're -- you know, we got to the
island of Gibraltar, but for some reason we didn't go in
the Strait of Gibraltar. We circled for days and days.
Anyway, it took us 28 days, and the
boat -- the ship with our equipment on it, that had all
our cooking stuff and stuff like that, went to
Casablanca, and we went -- there was only, I think, one
troop ship that kept going and a few destroyers that
went to Tunis or Bizerte -- Bizerte, Africa, and all our
equipment went to --
HURST: So you went to Bizerte, Africa?
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: How do you spell that?
VAIL: B-I -- I don't know if it's Z-R-T-A or
something like that. I can find out.
HURST: I will look it up later. Bizerte,
Africa.
You didn't know where you were going
until you got there?
VAIL: No, we had no idea where we were going
and nobody else did. Our officers didn't know where we
were going, and we stayed on the ship, and we got there
in the a.m., and you look at the city of Bizerte, which
supposedly was the most heavily fortified city in the
world at the time, because the harbor was -- they were
fighting in Sicily at the time, I think, or just got to
Italy, and everything came into Bizerte, all the ships,
so -- and they bombed Bizerte quite a bit. You couldn't
see that from the ship. We were a little ways out. You
couldn't see it. It looked like a beautiful city,
except we stayed there all day and nobody knew when we
were going to get off.
We finally get off and we had to -- we
walked and we were carrying all our equipment with us,
bags, you know, and we walked -- we must have walked
four or five miles, I guess, up in the thing, and there
were -- it got dark by the time we got up there, so
nobody knew where we were. There were no lights, and we
finally -- they said come to the side of the road,
because the roads were just dirt roads, and we went on
the side, and we -- when we woke up the next morning,
they had all these -- and because Rommel and the Germans
had just got out of there a little while before that,
and they left everything on the ground, you know, when
they left. They left all this ammunition, and there was
ammunition all over the place, and they had these red
devil hand grenades. They used to call them red devils,
and they had -- somebody had put tripod sticks over them
so you weren't, you know, getting into them, but we were
in the middle of that. We stayed there -- nobody knew
where we were supposed to -- the officers didn't know,
and there must have been, just guessing, hundred
thousand soldiers there, and they weren't assigned to
anything. We used to -- well, the next day we went
swimming, and we were right in the Mediterranean there,
right on the shore, and we went swimming and -- and
nobody knew what to do. We were there about a week or
maybe two weeks even before anybody -- we finally went
to an air -- airport in Tunis.
HURST: Actually, you didn't do any training in
Africa, you just went --
VAIL: Well, not there.
HURST: Then you went to Tunis?
VAIL: We went to Tunis, and we -- we didn't
have our tents with us, and we didn't -- I got deathly
sick, along with a lot of other people, from the
C-Rations which -- all we had were C-Rations, a little
can of hash and three cans a day, I guess, and everybody
got sick so -- everybody got dysentery, and I had it
real bad, and after a week they sent me to some
hospital, and I don't know where it was, but it was a
field hospital.
HURST: In Africa?
VAIL: In Africa.
It probably -- it seemed like 300 miles.
It probably was 50 miles at the most, and -- and I -- I
was sick, and I couldn't even -- you couldn't -- there
was nothing else to eat except these C-Rations, because
all our equipment was in Bizerte -- in Casablanca, and
they wouldn't give you B-Rations unless you had stoves
and stuff to cook them, and so anyway, I went to this --
and I got better there and because that's where all
the -- all the wounded were coming in, to this hospital,
and because they really didn't care about me too much,
because I got better on the way, because I threw up, in
other words, and I felt better, and because I looked
healthy enough and there was nothing physically wrong
with me from the outside, so I didn't get -- and people
were coming in that were really wounded, you know.
There were a lot of people coming in, so -- and then
when I went back, my outfit had moved, and I couldn't
find -- I couldn't find them for a whole day. I said,
Geez, they must have shipped out without me, you know,
but they had just moved but nobody knew. Very few
people knew what they were doing at the time. There was
so many people there and -- coming in all at once and --
so anyway.
There was airplanes at this field, and
because they used -- they used to bomb it. Not
necessarily bomb. They weren't dropping bombs. They
were dropping, supposedly, paratroopers, and they would
be dressed as Arabs, these Germans, and they'd mill
around, because the Arabs were walking -- all night long
they'd be walking around, you know, and you didn't know
who the heck -- who anything was.
Then I got a job with the English. I got
a job. They put me down on the airfield. What the
heck? Oh, I was parking planes down there when they
came in. There was an airfield there, the strip, but I
was working for the English. I had an English guy, and
when a plane would come in, I would go out with a jeep
and tell them where to park, and that's all I did for, I
don't know, another week or two I worked for him, and
then one day they called us in, and until this day I
don't understand it, and they said we were going to
Italy.
They picked four of us. I was the
mechanic, and I don't know why they picked me as a
mechanic, because I really did all right in school, but
I didn't have a background of being a mechanic or
anything, which a lot of guys did before they went in.
Anyway, they picked me and they picked one guy that was
just -- did odd jobs and stuff around the orderly room,
and they picked this Captain Schmidt, who was in charge
of us, and -- and a control guy, you know, to work the
control towers, so they loaded up a C -- we were -- the
C-47 they called them, a cargo plane, and we put
?pyramidal? tents in there, which were heavy things, and
they loaded this plane up, and there was only four of us
plus --
HURST: Out of all those thousands of guys, they
only took you four?
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: How did you get so lucky?
VAIL: I don't know. Well, I don't know if it
was lucky or not. Well, I guess it was, because, until
this day, I don't -- and the thing that happened after
that, after reading this book was kind of strange, but
we -- we flew over there, and because the plane was
loaded with this stuff and one engine -- it's a
two-engine plane, C-17 -- no, C-47, I guess, and it was
a cargo plane. Anyway, we were going over the -- over
the Mediterranean and one engine conks out, so, of
course, they could go on one engine. These were more --
the most reliable plane they had, because they didn't
even give you a parachute in this plane. That's how
safe it was supposed to be. In all the others, you had
to wear them, so we threw out the -- the pilot said, You
got to throw out the equipment in the back, so we threw
out all the tents and stuff in the ocean, and he said,
We won't have any problem.
And he knew where he was going, but we
didn't know, so we went to Bari, Italy, which was the
other side from Africa. You had to go over land to get
there, to the -- it was on the Adriatic side, and we
landed at this airport there, and there is nobody there,
and, of course, the Germans had just moved out, I guess,
because I think the English went up that side. I guess
that's the east coast, I don't know, on the Adriatic,
and they went up there because the Germans and Mussolini
had surrendered or something.
And there was nobody there that we knew.
There was no GIs around. They were on the other coast.
There was no GIs around there, so, evidently, we were
sent over there to start this airfield up and -- and
why? Because we weren't that smart, and in the -- the
officer in charge, Captain Schmidt, who really was my
officer the rest of the trips, he could talk German, so
anyway, we went up to where the control tower was in the
building, and there is nobody in the building, so we
stayed there, I don't know, a week or so, and once in
awhile there was a plane that would come in. It wasn't
that big a field. You couldn't -- I don't think you
could land 24s there. They used to land P-38s and
others.
Anyway, we stayed there, and we didn't
have -- the control guy didn't have a -- we didn't have
no radios or anything. He had three flare guns -- I
mean he had one flare gun, and he had green flares,
yellow flares and red flares, and the green flare was
okay to land, and, evidently, the pilots knew that, and
yellow was that you were supposed to circle and then
land, and the red was you're not supposed to land at
all, so that's how we operated for, I don't know, a week
or two, and then finally the rest of our outfit came
over by boat. They came by boat and -- and jeep across
the thing, and we went to this depot that -- where all
the supplies came in for -- I think for the Eighth Army,
which was English, and the Fifth Army, which was ours,
and the 15th Air Force, which I just read in that book,
they just started up that month we there were.
HURST: You were in the 15th Air Force?
VAIL: Yeah, but they -- when it was in Africa,
it was the 12th Air Force --
HURST: Oh.
VAIL: -- and then they made -- they just
started the 15th somewhere around that time we got over
there.
And some of the bigwigs used to fly in to
there. They said that Churchill flied in there, but I
never saw him, but they used to have meetings up in
olive orchards up there, so anyway...
HURST: So how long did you stay at Bari? Was
that your job then, to work on --
VAIL: Well, we went to the depot --
HURST: Uh-huh.
VAIL: -- and then we had nothing more to do
with the airport, because a lot of people started coming
in and -- and we never -- I never even went back out
there, and that was, I don't know, seven or eight miles
from the center of Bari, I think, and then we went to
this depot, which was almost in town, and I started
working as a mechanic, and what we were doing, like,
when -- when they had something wrong with an airplane,
like with a 24, most of them were 24s. When something
went wrong, they'd just change them. They didn't fix
any -- you didn't work on any engines. You took them
off and you put a new one on, so we had new ones coming
in at this thing they got back there, and we used to
pickle - they call it pickle - the old engines. You had
to know how they rotated so you could -- when the piston
went down, you squirted oil in there, so they wouldn't
rust on the way back, and you put them in these crates.
They were all Pratt Whitney engines. You put them in
these crates, and -- the new ones you'd take out, and
you'd put the old ones in there, and they'd send them
back on the ships back to the States to look them over,
so we pickled engines for, I don't know, geez, about two
months I worked on that, and that's when we got this
raid, when they blew up -- I don't know if it's in here
(indicating). There was --
HURST: We have pictures of --
VAIL: I had -- that picture is of one of the
burning ships.
HURST: Well, so Jim, while you were at Bari,
there was a raid by the Germans?
VAIL: Yeah, and according to this book, and I
never heard about it until last week.
HURST: What was the name of the book? The book
just came out that Jim's reading that's about the --
VAIL: 15th Air Force, and most of it is about
Governor -- Senator McGovern. He goes through this book
a lot, because he got over there, I think, in '44, and
he flew missions over there, and I -- I guess he
completed his missions.
HURST: The book is called...
VAIL: The Wild Blue.
HURST: The Wild Blue.
It's about the --
VAIL: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over
Germany.
HURST: By Stephen Ambrose.
VAIL: Yeah, and it tells a lot of -- well, they
had this raid on this thing and they sunk -- I have it
here someplace. It said they destroyed -- I have it
here someplace.
Is this hesitation? Can you shut it off?
HURST: So how many --
VAIL: It was December 2, 1943 in Bari, Italy.
There was 30 ships being unloaded at the docks downtown,
and at 7:30 the Germans, in 20 minutes they left 19
transports destroyed and seven severely damaged and two
ammunition ships received direct hits --
HURST: Wow.
VAIL: -- and blew up. When they blew up, the
explosion, I can't even explain it.
HURST: The picture you have of the ship that's
burning, is it one of those ammunition ships that blew
up?
VAIL: No, I think it was -- there was one tank.
That was probably the tanker. It was -- it said a
tanker carrying oil causing an immense fire over -- over
the thing.
HURST: Jim took a picture, because he was there,
of the oil tanker burning. That will be submitted with
this interview.
Jim, you were actually stationed there at
the time.
Did you witness the attack by the
Germans?
VAIL: Well, yeah -- well, we couldn't see the
actual thing. We were about a mile away, probably.
HURST: I'm sure you heard it and felt it.
VAIL: They felt -- they felt the concussion --
well, it took the -- it knocked down a lot of buildings
that weren't built so good, including our barracks,
which was -- the roof caved in. We didn't have -- well,
we slept there that night, but there was rubble all
around, and the next morning is when we went down and
took pictures, and that's when that picture was taken,
the next morning after the raid, and they -- they
were -- the ammunition ships they towed out to sea, the
Adriatic, and sunk them. They sunk the ships.
HURST: Why?
VAIL: Because that was -- well, they were full
of mustard gas and all that stuff, and, oh, the next
morning, the road -- you know, there were narrow roads
there. All the roads were narrow, and from Bari up to
Foggia, which was one of our bigger air bases over
there. It was the one most north, I guess, and there
must have been, and I'm just guessing, but line for line
it was two-wheel carts, and everybody owned a donkey
over there. That was their pride and joy, their donkeys
or whatever you want to call them, and they had big
two-wheel wagons, and there was thousands and thousands
of people on the road getting out of town, because they
didn't know what happened either, and we didn't know
what -- what it was, and there was just scuttlebutt, and
that's when they took pictures down there that they
confiscated on us, so somebody must have them someplace,
if they ever got them developed, plus they took the
camera.
HURST: Do you want to tell me for the interview
what happened? I know you told me before we started
taping.
VAIL: Well, it was, I suppose, a security
thing. We took the pictures, you know, not knowing any
better probably.
HURST: You and your friend?
VAIL: Me and my friend who was -- that was his
job, taking pictures with the -- with good cameras, like
they showed in newsreels, you know, and the Provost
Marshal put us in this basement, and we stayed there
for, you know, almost one night, probably two days
anyway, and they just left us there, so we didn't know
what was cooking.
HURST: And they confiscated your camera and the
pictures and you never got them back?
VAIL: No, no, we never heard from them, so...
HURST: Where did you go after Bari, Italy?
VAIL: We went to Gioia del Colle.
HURST: What did you do there?
VAIL: I was a mechanic, and we used to go on
detached service to different place -- we went down --
the ship went down or a B-24 got shot up, and it was --
needed a new engine, needed a new wing, and we were down
there, I think four of us in a tent for about four
weeks, and we fixed it all. We worked on it. We put a
new engine on it, and we had to bring a new wing down
and we worked on it. Either three or four weeks we were
down there and we flew it back there. We had a test
pilot in our outfit. We flew it back, but he never
gained any altitude. It'd go up so high and for some
reason, I don't know what happened anyway, and then the
front, the nose -- the nose turret had gotten shot up,
so we put a piece of metal on there and wrapped it
around and riveted it on, but it came loose while we
were flying and was flapping around, but we got it back
to Gioia del Colle, which was our main base where a lot
more stuff was up there, supplies and tools you could
work with, and it never did fly anyway. They never got
it off the ground, but we had, I'd say, 500 new planes
at our field. All the new planes for the 15th came into
Gioia del Colle. Well, I'm sure all of them or most all
of them, because we had loads of them and because they
were all silver colored now because they used to be
painted green and they used to be painted tan when they
were in Africa to match the desert, I guess, but that
slowed the plane -- they claim that slowed the plane,
up. The paint on the plane slowed it up about 18 miles
an hour or something like that.
HURST: Really?
VAIL: Yeah, the drag on the plane from the
paint.
HURST: Wow.
VAIL: Because we tried to take the paint off of
one of them, and it was impossible to take it off.
HURST: Did you see combat?
VAIL: Not really. Bombs, you know, but not any
combat. Got shot at --
HURST: The results of combat.
VAIL: No.
Got shot at a couple times by mistake
but --
HURST: By mistake? How did you get shot at by
mistake?
VAIL: Well, we were in tight -- there was a
6:00 -- because we were in Gioia del Colle for almost a
year, so we knew the town better than I knew my
hometown, and we had softball games. We had a good
softball team. We used to play softball with the --
they had what they call in the States, donkey softball,
where you jumped on a donkey, and because they were all
trained to do that, and the ones we got from the farmers
over there, some were big, some were small, and they
weren't trained to do anything, so you had to hit and
then jump on the donkey and go to first base and then do
other stuff, you know, go around, but some of them would
run off with you, so it was more -- and the people -- we
used to pay the people to use their donkeys, and they
were satisfied, you know, and -- but they -- it didn't
work out that good anyway, but we had a lot of fun doing
it, so...
HURST: Where did you go after Gioia del Colle?
You were there for a year.
VAIL: I was there -- we got alerted to come
home, our outfit, the 41st, and that was in the
spring -- well, we got alerted around March, I guess, to
come home, and I don't know why they picked our outfit
out to come home.
HURST: The war was not over yet?
VAIL: No, but when we got on the boat -- we got
on the boat in April, after we -- this was maybe two
months preparing to come home and -- with all the
things, and the ones that were to come in and there were
different people that had to stay. They got in trouble
or something, but anyway, we got on the boat in Naples,
and we were out -- and we started out with
escorts and -- destroyer escorts and stuff, and we were
only one boat. It was a big boat, and I think the name
of it in the civilian thing was the Wakefield, and it
had burned -- it burned up, and it was a troop
transport, and there was a lot of people on there, and
we didn't know why we were going home until after, and
we got out there about an hour, I think, something. It
was in the morning anyway, and about 10:00 in the
morning, all the sirens go off, and it was V-E Day, and
it was just by coincidence.
HURST: You were actually onboard the Wakefield
when you heard about V-E Day?
VAIL: Yeah. We were out to sea about maybe an
hour, two hours, whatever, and all these sirens went
off, and the people -- it finally came over a
loudspeaker what it was after awhile, because they
didn't know, and they had surrendered, and so it must
have been, when was that, 6th of June, something like
that, I don't know, but anyway, we -- when we left the
Mediterranean, our escorts left us and we came home
alone.
HURST: Just your one ship all by itself?
VAIL: Yeah, and -- because we zigzagged all the
way home, seriously, because they figured, you know,
there might be somebody, and it was stormy all the way
home. I think they had a new driver on that boat.
HURST: It took you 28 days to get across.
How long did it take you to come home?
VAIL: It took us exactly eight days to get
home.
HURST: Really?
VAIL: Yeah, and we got into Boston Harbor, and
they're coming around with planes around the ship. We
were the first ones back, because we had left, just
coincidentally, because we had been planning this for
two or three months, and they wanted us to wave, but I
guess nobody was in -- wanted to wave, so they kept at
it, egging us on to wave because we were the first ones
home or we -- I think we were the first ones home,
because we left after the -- well, anyway, we went to --
got off, went to Fort Devens again, went in the mess
hall because they had German prisoners waiting on mess.
They had as much freedom as we did, I think. They
could -- they were going to go to Boston sometimes, you
know, on the train. They wore our uniforms, but they
had PW on the back, but, I don't know, they used to get
out, and there was no security anymore, as far as
getting out and in, and I guess they were pretty well
satisfied at what they were doing, you know. They
were -- they were -- all worked in the mess hall, I
think, and we stayed there -- I stayed there about two
days, I guess, and then I came home for 30 days, and
then I shipped out to Spokane, Washington, and then I
found out why we came home. They were going to invade
Japan, and because they were talking about losing
500,000 people if they invaded and, of course Japan was
going to lose more, and because the atomic bomb, I don't
know when the first one went off, but it went off, so
that -- anyway, when we went out to Spokane, the 41st
Air Depot Group had 152 men in it, and I knew them all.
We were together, most of us, for three years --
HURST: What it was called, the 41st what?
VAIL: Air Depot Group, and it was a
headquarters outfit, so it had a lot of rank, and it had
a lot of --
HURST: That's the group you got in when you were
at the depot in Italy?
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: You just stayed with them?
VAIL: Just stayed with that group.
When we got to Spokane, I met a lot of
guys, and the younger guys, you know, and I didn't know
them, and they said they were in the 41st Depot Group,
and I said, Can't be.
Anyway, they had replaced us, and I don't
know if we ever would have went to Japan, us, or what,
but we never did, so anyway, they didn't know -- nobody
told us what to do down there, so I got a -- I went
downtown, you know, and I slept a couple nights, you
know, and nobody knew you were there or what. Nobody
seemed to know anything, so I -- I slept in the
Davenport Hotel in the lobby for a couple nights, and I
worked -- you could get a job unloading apples. It was
at -- at the train station, and they'd pay. If you work
two hours, they'd pay you for the two hours, whatever it
was, so we stayed on, and I went back to camp a little
leery about what was happening, and they asked where I
wanted to get stationed in the States, so I told them
West Dover Field, you know. Well, they couldn't get
there, but they sent us to Wright Field, a bunch of us.
HURST: Where is Wright Field?
VAIL: In Ohio, and we were on orders from -- we
had bulk orders, but there is about 30 of us. We all
had the same orders, and one guy was carrying the
orders. Well, we had a layover in Chicago, and they
took off without us. Anyway, but -- so we didn't have
any orders that we could show to anybody, you know, so
we had to bum from Chicago to Wright Field, which is
quite a ways.
HURST: You mean hitchhike?
VAIL: Yeah, because they had our orders.
Well, we get to Wright Field, and we
can't find any of these guys, and we know they're
supposed to be there. One of the guys lived close by,
and there was no time on these orders. There was no
time exactly, so they went to his house, and they were
there, I don't know, two or three days, so we couldn't
find them. We couldn't find them, so we were getting
lost. You know, we didn't know what to do. We didn't
want to tell anybody. We weren't exactly AWOL, I don't
think, but we weren't doing anything, so anyway, I
got -- I stayed there a few days, and I got assigned to
go to New -- Newark Airport.
HURST: So you went to Newark?
VAIL: Yeah, and they -- they had me making
charts and graphs again about how many planes they were
sending, and they still were doing this, sending them
over or coming back, and they had all kinds of stuff,
and I used to go in the office there and make out charts
on the wall, you know, just extend them another day and
stuff, but then -- then everybody in this office, there
was only two of us that was in the service. The others
were all civil service, mostly women, you know, so I
used to go home on weekends to Stafford, but I used to
bum, and then my boss, who was a woman -- woman, she was
the same age as me, I guess. She was my boss in this
job I was doing there, and nobody ever knew I was
overseas, because I -- I had got issued new clothes when
I got back, and they had nothing on them, you know, no
stripes. They didn't have no braid or what, so they
thought -- and all these people hadn't been overseas
that were in my barracks. They were all working in New
York doing something. They hadn't been overseas, so
anyway I -- I saw a couple guys that was overseas, and
this was after the second atomic bomb, so the war was
winding down, and I -- it was after -- must have been
after Japan surrendered, and I see a couple guys I was
overseas with, and they got discharge things on their
sleeve, and I said, Geez, how did you get out, you know,
because I knew I was in longer then them and at --
overseas at least as long. Well, they said, I got four
more battle stars. Well, that's the battle stars. I
went to see the guy, what do you call him, officer. He
asked me where I was at a certain time, and if you were
in a battle zone at the time of whatever it was, you get
them four battle stars, and I had enough points to get
out, so then they lose my discharge papers. They lose
my paperwork, so I was down there doing nothing for
about a week, and they didn't find it, so he finally
says, Well, you might as well go home. I will give you
a call. I get home on Saturday. They call me Sunday
afternoon, they find my papers, so they wanted me back
Monday. Well, I started back Monday, and there was no
bus to Hartford at the time, so I used to go to
Rockville and take the bus. I'd get a ride to
Rockville, and the bus used to go to Rockville, and make
a swing through Hartford, Manchester and come back.
Well, because I was tired, so I fell asleep on the bus,
and because they didn't really stop when they get to
Hartford, they used to go down where Front Street was
and just make the loop and stop and let passengers on
and off, but they never woke me up, so I wake up and I
look at this mill, and it's in Vernon where I started
from.
HURST: Oh, no.
VAIL: I'm back in Vernon, so I got back late
for my discharge, so I had to wait another couple of
days, so I finally got discharged anyway.
HURST: Oh, my God.
Were you awarded any medals or
citations? I know you were. Can you tell me what they
VAIL: Just the ones I wrote down there.
HURST: Well, tell me on tape.
Do you remember what you wrote down? I
know you got a good conduct.
VAIL: Well, I can't remember unless I read them
off.
HURST: You don't remember your medals?
VAIL: No.
HURST: And you got battle stars.
VAIL: Battle stars for -- I can't remember them
names.
HURST: Naples-Foggia?
VAIL: Yeah, Foggia.
HURST: Rome-Arno.
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: Appennines and Po Valley.
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: Are those all in Italy?
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: And four bronze EAME.
VAIL: That was the --
HURST: Four --
VAIL: That was the East American Mediterranean
something. EAME stands for something about the
Mediterranean area or something. I don't know.
HURST: With four bronze stars.
VAIL: Yeah, yeah.
HURST: Tell me about living conditions while you
were overseas. How did you stay in touch with your
family?
VAIL: Via letters.
HURST: What was the food like?
VAIL: Well, it was terrible the first couple
months. I got sick and never got over it for awhile,
but where we got -- when we got to Italy, the food was
good. We had B-Rations, and then because we got to know
some of the town people, so they used to -- we got what
they call cold storage eggs. I guess we used to have --
this woman used to cook -- cook our breakfasts once in
awhile when we had a day off, which wasn't very often,
but, no, we ate good after -- after I got to Italy, we
ate good. Africa was terrible.
HURST: Where did you live, in tents or barracks?
VAIL: When we first lived in Africa, when we
moved to the airfield, we lived in pup tents, which are,
you know, and my -- my companion in the pup tent was
about six foot, two, and he couldn't even fit in there,
because they're not even -- I couldn't even fit in
there, and I'm not that tall, and because it was on the
ground and it was sort of up a knoll or a hill, and they
had big, big tents for eating, for mess hall at the time
where they set up, but the ground -- it didn't rain
there all summer, and the ground was black, the soil.
There was no trees or nothing on it, but it was sort of
black, and it was cracked from the constant heat, I
guess, but then they had the rainy season when we had
the pup tents because it just rained and it rained right
through there. You had to just put your bags and your
stuff up in the thing, and you couldn't really sleep on
the ground, and it rained every -- every day at the same
time for, whatever, the rainy season in the fall
sometime, and so we didn't -- then we got ?pyramidal?
tents, which are the ones we loaded up on that plane,
and they were, what, eight sided, something like that.
You could sleep six in there anyway, and we made
platforms so the rain went underneath, and that's where
we lived when we were in Africa, and then we slept
outside the first few nights.
HURST: Where did you sleep in Italy?
VAIL: Well, we got an old -- well, when we
first went there, we were at the airport, this building,
until some people arrived, and then we -- we made a
barracks at the supply depot we were stationed at, and
because that was a bomb target, the supply depot, so
they used to -- they didn't bomb that much, but they --
you thought they were, because they always set the bomb
alarm off every night, so a lot of people used to walk
and -- walk or ride with a jeep up to the olive orchard,
which was maybe seven or eight miles, and sleep in the
foxhole up there and then come back in the morning, but
I never -- I was young and, you know, but anyway.
I forgot to tell you about that stint I
played in -- that was in Gioia del Colle, when they put
me in the infantry for...
HURST: What happened? How did you end up in the
infantry?
VAIL: Well, I had made crew chief and actually
I was -- I was assigned to go to Russia, which, they
were our allies, and what was happening, I think, the
Eighth Air Force out of England used to bomb Germany and
then land in Russia, and they had facilities there at
this airfield for them, you know, and they loaded up
with bombs there and bombed on the way back or they'd
bomb Germany and came to Italy, so it was sort of a
(indicating), so they needed some mechanics over there
at the time. Well, that's when I -- they saw I was a
draftsman in civilian life, and I did -- I had charts
and graphs I used to do, and I used to draw plans for
houses and stuff, and they made me -- this guy put out a
report, this Captain Schmidt. Every month he had to put
out a report on how many planes got shot down, how many
new ones they came down and got, how many old ones and
all that kind of stuff, so they came around, then, from
someplace, I don't know, these officers around to the
army room, and the first sergeant called me in and went
for an interview, and I wasn't working as a mechanic,
because he wanted me to keep doing this stuff, and all
he did was sign his name on it, and we had one guy that
did all the typing, and we -- I did all the drawing and
stuff and charts and stuff, so he didn't want to let me
go, because he had it made, and I was assigned a jeep,
so I had a jeep all the time, so I wasn't complaining,
but then they said if you weren't working at what you
were trained to do in the army, they're going to put you
in the infantry, and they did. They swapped -- they put
people down. The Japanese-Americans came down, two of
them, and one of them was a typist, and he had paralyzed
fingers on both hands from getting shot up or something,
but he still could type good. Well, he was going to
take my place, you know, or come in our office. Anyway,
my -- I was in the infantry about three or four weeks,
and I never went anyplace, but they would assign me --
and it was during the Battle of the Bulge. I guess you
went to France after three or four weeks training, and
anyway, I got out of there. I got out of there.
HURST: Did you actually go to France?
VAIL: No.
HURST: Oh.
VAIL: No, we never went or I never went because
he got me out of it, and I stayed with -- doing
drafting. After that, I never was a mechanic, and I was
the crew chief, I think, for two months, and then when
they started --
HURST: Where were you stationed when you were
doing the drafting, the Gioia del --
VAIL: Gioia del Colle, yeah, and then back in
the States I did it before I got out.
HURST: While you were in Italy, did you ___?
VAIL: Yeah, that was rest -- I don't know,
quite awhile and then that was the rest camp for --
because the battle was up above Rome, you know, that
line. I guess, the Po River was the line, and that was
up there, so everybody used to go or everybody from
our --
HURST: How long did you get to stay in Rome.
VAIL: I think ten days.
HURST: So that was just for R and R?
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: What did you do while you were there?
VAIL: Well, I saw a lot of the sites, went to
St. Peters, went up in that ball up there. It looks
small, but there was 14 of us up there, and we walked up
on that roof somehow. I don't know. It looks too steep
in that picture, but on the backside -- and because you
can look over into the Vatican from up there, which was
a neutral. If you went in there, you stayed there for
the rest of the war. It was like Switzerland, you know.
In fact, that was the quiz on the bus
tour I took in Hawaii, what's the smallest country in
the world, and it's the Vatican. It's actually a
country, I guess, or something. I mean, they might
be -- but anyway, if you went in there, you could stay
there, but nobody went in there.
HURST: While you were stationed in Africa and
Italy, did you have plenty of supplies, the things you
needed?
VAIL: Not in Africa, no. We -- we used to --
well, I lived on C-Rations for a long time, and that's,
to me, isn't nothing, because everybody got sick on
them. We probably lived on them for a month, over a
month, and you didn't get anything with it. You were --
you know, you didn't go -- I never saw a glass of milk
until I got back.
I lived in Italy for over a year. I
never saw a cow or a chicken, because the Germans were
there just before us, and they -- I'm not sure they
killed the cows, but they all had donkeys, but they
didn't have nothing else, and they were poor. When I --
when we got -- when we flew over to Italy, they paid us
in new -- new money, a hundred lira, which was, to us, a
hundred -- it was a dollar. That was our, you know --
how -- and it was just the size of a dollar. Well, when
we first got over there, the first week, I went to
church, and because they were -- nobody worked over
there. I mean, you saw no teenagers, none, male
teenagers. There was none around in southern Italy. I
don't ever remember seeing a teenager, you know, say an
18-year-old or something.
HURST: Where were they?
VAIL: They were all off to war, and they were
above the Po River up in the German territory.
But anyway, I never saw a chicken or a
cow, never had a glass of milk while I was over there,
so it was -- you did what -- but we ate good in Germany.
I mean, decent we ate. And they had restaurants, but,
you know, they were -- they weren't open. They had
cognac shops that we used to visit. We called them
cognac shops. They were little -- and they were open
from 4:00 to 6:00 in the morning and 4:00 to 6:00 in the
afternoon, and they were closed the rest of the day.
It's only four hours they were opened, some of them.
HURST: Yeah?
VAIL: Anyway, when I went to church that time,
the first time we moved there -- because they had coins
that were -- were they sentismos or something like that
they called them, and they were worth -- I don't know if
they were worth a penny, but anyway, their month's pay
wasn't that much at the time. It was less than a
dollar, or some crazy thing, so anyway, when I went to
church, they didn't have pews. It was a Catholic
church. They didn't have pews, you know, stationary
pews. When you went in, they had kids that brought you
chairs, and they set them up for you, so, of course, the
first time we went in, they didn't know who we were.
They didn't know we were American soldiers, because
there was no American soldiers around there at the time,
or there wasn't any soldiers when we first got there,
and so we gave them a dollar apiece, me and this guy,
you know, which was probably three months pay or
something like that, so, of course, they -- I mean,
every time we went in there after that, they used to sit
us in back of the altar, as a matter of fact, because
they knew they were going to get a good --
HURST: Preferred seating --
VAIL: Yeah.
HURST: -- because you were big tippers?
VAIL: Yeah, and because we thought it was a
dollar, you know, which was -- but they -- and anyway,
we were there -- when we first got there, you know --
and because you couldn't buy nothing because there was
nothing open to buy and because they rather -- when we
went to Rome Rest Camp, we were going to give them
money. We were going to stay in a hotel up there, you
know, buy a room. You couldn't buy a room no how,
unless you had -- say if you had a few cakes of soap or
cigarettes, you could get a room for that instead of
money, because they -- they had nothing to buy, but then
we were there four or five months, and when all the
people came in, all the soldiers from all over, and, of
course, the prices changed. They had a price for -- if
you went into a store that sold, I don't know, anything,
they had a price for civilians, their own civilians;
they had a price for soldiers; and then they had a price
for American soldiers, because we got paid more than
anybody else. You know, they didn't -- the other
services didn't get as much, so they had three prices in
most all them stores.
HURST: Did you stay in touch with any of your
fellow soldiers after the war?
VAIL: No, just one. His name was -- geez, what
was his name? I can't think of it. He's in that
picture there. He was the radio operator.
HURST: Where did he live?
VAIL: He lived in Newton, Mass. He came down
to see me, and I went up there one weekend, but I
haven't seen him since.
HURST: What did you do right after you got out
of the service, when you finally were able to get
discharged?
VAIL: Yeah, I collected, 20 -- what do they
call it, 20 -- is it 20-a-week club or 20-a-month club?
I was a draftsman, and I studied drafting, and I had --
idea is I wanted to be a draftsman, and they offered you
jobs. Every week you went down to sign up, and they
offered you jobs, different jobs, and they offered me a
job as an airplane mechanic at Bradley Field, and I
didn't want to take it, and I kind of been sorry ever
since that I didn't take it, because, you know, you
never know what would have happened, but anyway, I
didn't take it, so I didn't work for quite awhile.
Then I went to work as a draftsman for an
architect, and I worked for him about a year, and then
he got slow, and I went to work for another architect,
and I went to drawing schools. We did all schools. I
think we did -- I was there 11 years, and then we did 23
of them, I think, and then I went to work in Manchester
for another couple young architects, and we did country
clubs mostly, and then I went to work for -- in Hartford
for another architect and worked there until we got
slow, and we did all Pratt Whitney's work. I was
outside for four years there from the architect's
office, inspecting and stuff, and I worked there. I got
laid off because they went out in the early '70s. They
didn't have -- and then I -- then I did -- I went to
work for the State for about -- I worked for the State
Military, drawing plans and sending out jobs.
HURST: You're covering the mic.
VAIL: Oh, and I quit -- like a dummy, I quit
the State, and then I worked as a building inspector. I
just quit last year in Tolland. I worked in Tolland,
Connecticut. I worked there -- well, I was clerk of the
works at the high school originally, you know,
inspecting the high school in addition, and then I went
to work as an assistant. They had a full-timer there,
but I worked pretty much three or four days a week, not
full days, though. I worked about 20 hours a week, and
I worked there for 17 years after I retired, so...
HURST: When did you get married?
VAIL: 1946.
HURST: You had how many children?
VAIL: Six. Two of them have passed away.
HURST: One of your sons served in Vietnam or did
you say two of your sons?
VAIL: No, two served in Vietnam, and the other
one was -- well, one was -- the younger one enlisted,
and my oldest one had just gone to Vietnam, so
because -- they can't send two over to Vietnam at the
same time, so then the middle one got drafted. He quit
college, and about a week later he got drafted, and he
went to Germany, Brian. My oldest one went to Vietnam.
My youngest one went to Korea. I think he was there
15 months.
HURST: You had three sons that were in the
military?
VAIL: All at the same time. He went to Korea,
and he came home, I think 15 months, and when he got
home on furlough, my oldest son got out, because his
year was up over in Vietnam, and they sent my youngest
one to Vietnam, and he was over there I don't know how
long, so...
HURST: Your family certainly has contributed to
our country.
VAIL: Um-hmm.
HURST: Did you join any veteran's organizations?
VAIL: American Legion is the only one I belong
to. I joined that before I even got out of the service.
HURST: You're still a member? Do you do
anything with that group now?
VAIL: Yeah, I'm not that active, but I belong.
HURST: Did your military experience influence
your thinking about war or about the military in
general?
VAIL: I don't know. I don't think anything
influenced me when I was that age.
HURST: Do you attend any reunions or have you
attended any reunions?
VAIL: No. When we were over, because we were
together for three years, most of us, the older guys
said we have to have a reunion every five years, but I
never heard anything from anybody, and I never got into
it, and I -- probably most of them are dead now, because
a lot of them were older than I was, you know, and there
was a few that were younger, but only a year or two
younger, and I -- I haven't heard from any of them in --
Oh, George Norcross was that guy's name
from Newton, and I never got in touch with him again.
HURST: How did your service effect your life?
VAIL: You know, just took three years, three
years plus out of it, I guess. I had -- because I was
single and not attached to anybody, so I mean, it
wasn't -- it wasn't all bad, you know, it was -- I had
good times, and I got lucky on a few occasions, you
know, so it wasn't -- it was -- they used to claim that,
you know, you had it easy in the Air Force, but it
wasn't that easy overseas anyway. You know, the bombing
and that stuff didn't bother me at the time. Like
today, a lot of guys went on CO went berserk just on
account of the pressures and stuff, but as far as seeing
any action, no.
HURST: Is there anything else that you would
like to add that we haven't covered in the interview.
VAIL: No. I think that ___ anyway, you know,
as I say, I was young, and I didn't have a girlfriend or
nothing, so I had no -- so I could have a good -- when I
was going to school in New York, I went to town every
day, every night, because nobody checked on us and --
and because we were treated like royalty in them days.
We used to take the subway to Grand Central, and they
had a USO, I guess they'd call it. The people there,
they would give you tickets to go out and eat and go see
Frank Sinatra, who was just starting out then as a
singer, single, and the Andrews Sisters. Because we got
to know the woman who worked there because we was there
a lot, 16 weeks, and so they used to save us the best
tickets, you know, for the eating places, and then on
Wednesday nights we used to -- Guy Lombardo used to play
up on the roof. What is that, The Astor Hotel or
something, and so we used to go down in the bar, and you
couldn't buy a drink in them days because some civilian
was always buying you something, and we would go up
there and dance all night, and it probably didn't cost
us anything.
You know, of course things weren't the
same in later wars as that, you know. We were taking a
train ride out through North Dakota, oh, when I went out
to Spokane, and the people out there, when you stopped
on a train -- we were on a train. The whole train was
one thing going to Spokane, and they had a layover that
night. It was going to layover there all night, and it
wasn't bad. We had sleeping booths -- sleeping berths
on the train, and anyway, this farmer came down, you
know. They used to feed you, bring you sandwiches,
pheasant sandwiches out there and all that stuff.
Anyway, they brought us out to the farm and kept us out
there until the following day, and they had a pool out
there. You could swim. You could -- they treat you
like royalty, you know. Well, when my kids were in, you
know, a lot of people didn't care for it. I don't know
why it was such a bad thing, but, you know, I had some
good times, I would say. I don't think it affected me
one way or the other.
HURST: Jim, I'd like to thank you for the
interview. Thank you for sharing your story with us.
VAIL: Well, I enjoyed it. I don't know if
it -- but anyway, it's different.