SUMMARY: Nick served in the Army and reached North Africa shortly after the end of the North African campaign. He was an excellent observer and produced a great transcript.
This is a transcript of a taped conversation in 1990 with Nick Parsons of Redford, Michigan about his military service at the end of World War II. As we talked, we looked over Nick’s collection of photographs and keepsakes.
Additions made to the narrative for the sake of clarification are in [brackets]……….. Margaret G. Lubahn (March, 1997)
What can I tell you, Peggy?
Well, you said you went over to Egypt after the end of the campaign in North Africa, which would be…
Right, 1945. I was en route on the General C.C. Ballou, a Victory Ship, during Thanksgiving of 1945, so that’s the time I was going over. I was over[seas] a little over a year. I went to Port Said and Camp Russell V. Huckstet, an Army base outside Heliopolis. Of course, that’s a suburb of Cairo. Paine Field was just down the road, the Air Force base.
I was there, [with] the group that was there at that time, primarily winding things up and getting the formalities [of occupation] taken care of. My job was with the MP’s in the Provost Marshal’s office, so I, as a pretty raw recruit, wound up early on commanding traffic control and town control for the Army base. It was a small group.
I learned a little bit about the area. Leave was easily gotten. It was routine to go downtown, except it was a good idea not to go wandering around because someone would slit your throat if you did that unwarily! Pickpockets were legendary, and anything that was pickable was picked. It was a good idea to watch your step, and I think it holds true today in that part of the world. Thievery is an art [there], that’s the bottom line. It was a real eye-opener for someone like me, who grew up down on the farm, and we’d go into a big metropolis and see the squalor, smell the squalor; and it was exciting too.
At that time, I thought I would never travel like this and see this part of the world if it weren’t for the Army. And I was very happy that I was not expecting to enter any combat.
So things were pretty quiet in North Africa by that time?
Outside of students tossing hand grenades at bus stops and into the seats in theaters, and so forth! Minor details like that. This was the time that the internal unrest was beginning to foam up pretty well. King Farouk was the titular head [of the country] but the British were there and the people wanted the British out.
What about Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat? Did you hear a lot about them?
Not really. Not at the time. Some people may have, but I was not aware of it.
Late in the campaign, Nasser and Sadat had a scheme to organize an uprising just before Field Marshal Montgomery arrived to take command, when morale was pretty low, and the British had been beaten back. And they wanted to kick out the British and welcome the Germans. I don’t know off the top of my head why that didn’t happen, but they were working on it at the time. I think Nasser and Sadat were both arrested and jailed by the British.
That’s quite possible. And it may be that I heard more about them than I realize now, but if I did it has faded.
Did the average people on the street give you trouble? Were they friendly, or didn’t care much whether American soldiers were there?
They pretty much didn’t care. Anyone who walked down the street, if you wandered off into the native section, it would be a good idea to have a couple-three people together, because as I say, thievery was an art. People got robbed regularly, their pockets picked. No one thought much of it. And yet, on the military reservations, it was a good idea for them [native thieves] to leave it alone, that was out of bounds. And I know we had a little bit of thievery.
There was a Camel Corps policeman stationed at Fort Huckstet in the Provost Marshal’s office, and there was a camera stolen from a foot locker in one of the tents. Some of the quarters were tent tops, and some were regular hard-sided buildings, and so on. Anyway, someone went into a barracks and stole a camera. Which doesn’t seem like a very big deal today, but at that time, it was a big deal. Someone had come in and stolen a camera. The camera was back in 48 hours. The thief was in custody, he was brought in and turned over to the Camel Corps. Not by military police, but there was a network and he tried to sell the camera. It was reported, he was picked up by the Egyptian police, and turned over to the Camel Corps. And he claimed that he was a Sudanese, which was a big mistake because the Sudanese detachment stationed there did not go [in] for stealing.
With them, honesty and respect for other people’s property [was extremely important]. They were part of the British Commonwealth, and they were assigned as part of the detachment. They did guard duty and dealt with the local people for the US Army. Mohammad Osman Al-nur was the Sudanese gentleman who, with a staff sergeant and his detachment, looked after all duties associated with the Provost Marshal’s office, including guards at the guardhouse and so forth. The Camel Corps was separate. They were perhaps equal. At any rate, the word came out to Mohammad that this fellow said he was a Sudanese, and Mohammad was too dark to turn red, but his veins pulsed and he stalked in to “have a discussion.” When he came back, he was all smiles; he [the thief] confessed that he was not Sudanese.
Lucky for him!
Yes, it was lucky for him because of the strict codes and penalties that were prescribed. This was also kind of an eye-opener for me, to see how proud this people was of those particular values. Now, Sudanese were conquering people by taking the cross with the British. When they won, they were probably quite ruthless, but that set of values was very precious to them. It’s a good thing that fellow said he wasn’t Sudanese, because otherwise Mohammad probably would have beaten him to within an inch of his life.
Did you run into a lot of other Commonwealth forces while you were there, or just the Sudanese?
No, just the Sudanese. When I was in Casablanca we were in contact with some of the Italian POW’s, who were on the staff in some of the installations there. There I was in charge of a couple of villas and a small hotel when we transferred. We were closing up Huckstet, and my commander went to _________ Air Force Base to take over a lot of the ground materiel and close out there. He took me along as a Provost Sergeant, and the ADC already had MP’s set up, so there really wasn’t any job for me. And he gave me a job as Barracks Sergeant, which was nothing. He wound up with these two villas and a hotel, and… “Nick, have you ever run a hotel?”
So here I am, nineteen years old, have I ever run a hotel? No, I’d never run a hotel, but I did then. I can’t remember the second villa’s name… Villa Miramar, the Anfa Hotel, and another villa. The Anfa Hotel was the site of the Casablanca Conference when the three major Allied powers met there. It was a kind of interesting experience to be playing ping-pong where the Big Three had sat and decided the fate of the world!
What else?
You started out in Egypt in late 1945. At what point did you move over to Casablanca?
Oh, mid-1946. I was in Egypt about six months, I suspect.
And then how long were you over in Morocco?
Another six months.
So you ran a hotel. What kind of clientele did you have?
Officers.
American officers?
American officers. No British in the hotel. Occasionally there’d be some British coming in for the villas, because they were for VIP’s.
Did you find American personnel having difficulties dealing with British personnel? I’ve seen a lot of references to that, with people thinking, “We speak the same language, we should be able to get along real well, but boy are those guys different!”
No, actually they both looked down on one another and it was kind of a challenge to kind of waylay one another. If half a dozen Britishers met three US personnel downtown, they would probably drink together and have an argument and have a little fight, and everybody would go home and tell about how tough they were and how they’d beaten up the other group… Nothing fatal, but it was that sort of arrangement.
I commanded a group of motorcycle cops, who didn’t much like being commanded by anyone as young and raw as I was, but that’s all right, they took orders okay. But they had a couple of people who got beaten up nicely by a batch of the Limey’s, the British. And so they went roaring off on their motorcycles and took on a [British] barracks!
A whole barracks?
A whole barracks.
Who won?
Everybody! It just depends on who you talked to.
Right. Everyone beat the crap out of everybody else, and a good time was had by all.
A good time was had by all, and it made for good stories.
Did you guys get in trouble for doing this stuff? I mean, that’s not part of the regular military routine!
No, but this wasn’t really as regular as it might have been.
It was pretty loose?
Yes, it was pretty loose, but so long as it didn’t get really out of hand, nobody really worried about it. It was a “boys will be boys” sort of thing. One incident that I knew of, I was there when it rained, which doesn’t happen just every day. It rained, and it rained, and it blew, and so forth. The next morning, I went on a patrol, it was routine. I would trade off and take a vehicle and go down into Cairo, down into the Nile, and swing around. Just as kind of a watchdog to see that our drivers were, well, moderately legal with their driving!
And Jim Campbell was the fellow I had replaced; he was a Staff Sergeant and I was a PFC. I replaced him and another fella. But at this stage of the game, they were sending people with experience home and replacing them with whoever they could get, and I was what they could get at the time. And he was destined to ship out that week. He wanted me to go down on patrol that morning, because after all it had rained and he just wanted to see what was down there with all that rain. The streets and drains weren’t set up for all that rain, so it was a mess. There was big puddles standing all over the place. Jim was driving, and he was having fun, driving a three-quarter ton weapons carrier. And you could drive that through and over and under almost anything.
So we went racing along and if there happened to be a bus stop somewhere, and he could spot a puddle within striking distance of the bus stop, he hit it. There was a place near downtown Cairo that had lots of British personnel coming out of [their] quarters there, going to work. We got ’em at the bus stop! They were watching for the bus and standing there, and I’m sure they saw the vehicle coming. And he just came barreling along and hit this big, muddy waterhole, and sent this sheet of water over this queue of people waiting at the bus stop. You’ve seen the maps of Cairo, how you have a traffic circle sometimes, and there are streets radiating off; and he disappeared, out of sight. And they were still watching where he had gone, and shaking their fists, when he came around the second time and got them again!
Then on our way back to camp, we saw this beautiful white military staff car, and it really was a nice looking car, it was all polished and everything. He followed it for a short distance and then spotted a long, thin water hole. And the staff car started through it and he speeded up and got beside it so that this sheet of muddy water came up over this white British staff car. Well, he got busted for that, from Staff Sergeant to… I really don’t know, because I had shipped out by the time he got busted. But it was an Air Marshal who outranked our commanding general, and he was not happy about being doused!
So it was a rotten thing to do, but he was having fun. Frankly, I wouldn’t have done it. I was a bit too… well, bound by rules at the time. On the other hand, I did find it pretty funny!
Were you driving along with him?
No, I was riding with him. We only had one vehicle out every morning, and he was the ranking person in the vehicle even though it was my patrol. But by the time the fan got dirty, I had been transferred out, so it never caught up with me.
When you went from Egypt to Morocco, did you fly there or drive?
Flew.
How long does that take?
Oh, it took a while. It was a C-47. We stayed over at Tunis. I think we had two stops. What are the major cities?
Well, Tripoli is right in the middle of Libya. That would have been a good stop.
Yeah, Tripoli, and then one other.
So, you were running a hotel in Morocco. Did you find that to be difficult? Did you find it challenging, or boring?
It was pretty boring, really, because it was an easy life. For one thing, I was in contact with people that I really couldn’t fraternize with, so it kind of isolated me. We had POW’s doing a good bit of the work.
Italians?
Yes. And they spoke the language, so if I wanted to go buy something or do some shopping for the job I would take one of the POW’s along and they would take care of all the conversation and bargaining. There really was not much of a challenge. There was novelty, but that was about the size of that.
Had the Italian prisoners previously lived in North Africa? Were they of the colonial population or were they from the mainland?
No, they were from the mainland. The one I’m thinking about, Rudy (and I don’t know his last name), had been a professional soccer player before the war and he was drafted into the Italian army. He was well-educated and had traveled, so it wasn’t by chance that he wound up with that sort of an assignment. Other than that, the experience in Morocco was, you know, go visit on tours, this and that. The local hostility was there, it was not an area in which we were encouraged to take off and live it up.
Do you think the people in Morocco would have preferred the Germans also, or was it that they just didn’t want you Americans there?
I don’t think they wanted anybody there. I don’t they disliked us because we were Americans versus Germans, in fact I think they did kind of like us. They seemed to prefer that we were there rather than the Germans, but as far as liking us on our own… Now there were some people who were really happy that we were there, the Jewish population, who were very happy to see the Americans there.
I’ve only talked to one person who could remember hearing about anything unusual being done to Jews in North Africa, as was so common in Europe. Do you remember hearing anything like that?
No, but I dated a Jewish girl a few times, and Roosevelt’s picture was hung in a place of prominence in her home. The family was very happy that the Americans were there. It just wasn’t a general thing, for the general population. The Arabic population, I don’t think was enamored of any of the white races.
What eventually happened to your Italian POW’s?
They were repatriated. As to how they went about their repatriation, I don’t know. It was one of those little mysteries in my life that I wasn’t wondering about at the time. Here’s a picture of the guardhouse and what our lawn looked like.
It looks like a pretty substantial lawn for Morocco. Not much mowing!
Right. Solid rock and steps and so forth. Here’s a couple of prisoners… This actually was the prison compound and we were out passing a football around. There’s that weapons carrier. I don’t think I have a picture [of Jim Campbell]. I didn’t particularly like him.
This unit patch on your shoulder; what unit were you in?
That’s Eisenhower’s “flaming sword.” I can’t offhand remember the name of it. [The emblem of SHAEF: Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.]
And those people standing in the background looking disgusted are local people?
That’s right.
“The stupid foreigners are taking more pictures of the pyramids…” That color film held up real well, didn’t it?
Well, that one was tinted. It was black and white film, and then it was tinted with oils.
The weapons carrier was basically sort of a big jeep?
That’s right. Four-wheel drive, but heftier than a jeep, because it’s three-quarter ton.
Here’s Henry Piostrowski. I was in basic training with him, and we wound up going to Africa at the same time.
Did they give you a copy of the Africa booklet that was issued to troops?
This is the one we were given.
I haven’t seen this one before. I have a copy of a restricted issue Africa booklet: it tells you what the people are like, what the weather is like, this is a picture of a sandstorm, stuff like that… Ah yes, the obligatory picture on a camel!
I never got an obligatory picture [of myself] on a camel. I was too cheap to give money just to get on an animal and have my picture taken. I’ve been around animals all my life.
And this is one of the temples beside the Sphinx. Those columns were standing in a straight line. You just couldn’t see any deviation from line of sight at all. Another camel picture… These are friends of mine.
Those camels probably get tired of getting up and sitting down and getting up and sitting down…
They probably do! The Egyptian beer. It was potent, came in large bottles, and I had a few. You only needed a few.
It was that potent, huh?
Yes. And you really didn’t want to be passed out drunk in Cairo. It wasn’t a good idea.
Did you enjoy getting a chance to visit all these spots, or were you not particularly interested at that time?
Oh, absolutely! I was interested, but certainly wasn’t as interested [as I would need to be] to make the most of it. I really regret that.
You stopped in Brazil on the way home [to the US]?
Yes, we flew the southern route across the Ascension Islands and to Brazil. This is a C-54, four engines; big stuff in those days.
You had to carry this honorable discharge around with you, didn’t you?
Yep, for a while. Here’s a picture from basic training.
Did you take basic in Ohio?
No, Fort McClelland, Alabama. We wound up with ten dogs that came wandering in. Mascots. That’s the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt [a ship].
You don’t happen to know what kind of planes it was carrying?
No. I’m sure I knew at the time. That was in 1946. Here’s Casablanca. We got to go out and visit, and I was thoroughly impressed. Here’s the Camp Huckstet Fire Department.
Oh, Clarissa Wright, she was a clerk or secretary. She handled the Provost Marshal’s clerical work, and lived in town in Heliopolis. Her husband was a British officer, I’m not sure where he was. He wasn’t home right at that time. She was kind of a mother or big sister to all the guys in the detachment.
Was she American?
No, British.
She was probably just the kind of calming influence you guys needed!
Probably. Here’s one of my bunk, and that’s in the guardhouse.
Who did you have for your pinup girls?
Probably centerfolds from… hmm, there wasn’t any Playboy. They were leggy… By today’s standards, they would have been considered prudent. That’s looking from the Tunis plateau. They put buildings out there, trees too.
Johnny Labusty from Shoboken, Pennsylvania. And this is looking back down from that plateau, also. The big building, or series of buildings, is the Mena House Hotel.
Was Mena Camp near where you were? Montgomery mentions it in his memoirs.
No, I’m not sure where it was. This is a street scene on the way back from Cairo to Camp Huckstet.
Oh, military money. I’ve wondered what that looked like. Did you ever get a short snorter, or was that pretty much over by the time you were there?
What’s a short snorter?
Well, the first guys that went over got in the habit of getting other guys on the ship or plane to autograph dollar bills because it was their first time overseas. They would also use large-denomination bills and have everyone in their group sign. Then they started stapling bills together so they had a long string of bills that people had signed. It developed into quite a fad, but I think it probably was old hat by the time you got there. I’ve only talked to one person who knew about short snorters, and he had a beautiful one. He gave me a photocopy of it.
Here’s a bill for five cents. What could you get at the PX for five cents back then?
Oh, a candy bar.
E.A. Wright Banknote Company, Philadelphia? Morocco had their money printed in Philadelphia? That’s interesting!
One peseta. That was a Spanish peseta. That was from Tangier, where I went on leave.
Did you have a lot of people trying to sell you antiquities while you were in Egypt?
Yeah. And of course they were all genuine! But this is a genuine antiquity [looking at a dagger].
I wonder if that handle is made of rhinoceros horn. Do you know?
No.
That’s the major problem for rhinos today, Yemeni daggers with rhino horn handles.
It had a wood-lined scabbard. I bought it at a stand. You can see the perspective [in the ornamentation]. That’s a person on the right. It was a great stand in front of the pyramids.
There’s Mohammad Osman al-Nur.
A very serious-looking gentleman.
He was. And when he drilled his troops, he looked serious, too. He did drill them regularly. And there’s another camel.
Did you actually get to ride around on those things, or did you just get on and get your picture taken?
I didn’t get on. I wasn’t kidding, I wouldn’t give money for something like that. Mostly they just stood up and took their pictures and got off.
When were you in Algiers?
We just stopped there for refueling on the way. Christmas, 1945… That’s Tangier.
What part of the city is this, do you know?
It says on the back “Angleterre.” It’s an international city.
Different quarters for different nationalities?
It could be. I was there on a three-day pass, and never really found out much about it. Here’s the Grand Market of Tangier. This is pretty typical garb for the natives, the ghalabiyah, [with] some sort of coat most of the time. There’s Mohammad’s troops again… The Grand Market in Tangier. I must have bought these Algerian post cards from a shop or something, because we just set down and refueled. I didn’t get a chance to really look at Algiers other than coming down and going back up.
Can you see the sand dunes here? Those looked like they were just across the street, and when we arrived there on the port side, we got up the next morning and went out. And several guys said, “Hey, let’s walk over to the sand dunes.” Well, they’re a good five miles out. We later went out and took pictures from the weapons carriers. Some years earlier, they had built a platform out there, for bands, and we would have dances out there. We’d choose partners, and so forth, right out in the desert. When we had dust storms or sandstorms, I was amazed to see that a sand dune I knew was there, the next day wasn’t there! It was mind-boggling, the amount of sand that was moved. As I say, that was five miles away. When you get out there at the base of a sand dune, it’s huge! Sleeping Bear dune is a nice dune, but it’s nothing next to these.
SIDE THREE
(Some text was lost when the tape was turned over.)
I had a short pass, then I transferred out. And they shipped me to Casablanca, so I never got to the Holy Land. I never got to Luxor either. At that time, I really didn’t know what I was missing, so I wasn’t as disappointed as I might have been.
Somehow, you never think of those places as being big, modern cities. You expect them to be quaint little villages or something. When I see pictures like this it reminds me that they’ve been there a long time, and they’re not little villages any more. Some of these places are very modern looking.
I saw some pictures within the last couple of years, people who had gone on detail to Egypt, and so I have some friends who went to Egypt. Some of it hasn’t changed too much.
[Looking at uniform patches.] These were all fancied up, with metallic thread on the edges. There’s Mohammad again.
These look real. I’ve seen a lot of patches that are so perfect you have to wonder if they’re authentic or cheap reproductions.
They are real. I culled out a few pictures that had nothing to do with this. Oh, yes, gold panning in California.
How much did you find?
Not enough to speak of. Black sand… I didn’t have any mercury to use to float that out. Somewhere I have some coins as well. It’s always interesting to look at coins, their different sizes. Of course, we’re familiar with different sizes for coins, but we’re not that familiar [with] or used to different sizes for the currency. Oh, here we are. Current events.
I really don’t know any French to speak of… Oh, good. This is in English.
“A Monday morning report stated that the Palestine Arabs would accept the invitation to the London talks.”
The Tangier Gazette. “First newspaper to be published in the Moorish empire.” That’s cool. “Who Invented Papier Mache?” Good stuff!
Somewhere I have my old pass…
And you got this in Egypt?
Right. Bought it from a shop for a little bit of nothing. And of course, no one bought anything for what it was quoted at. It was just scandalous if someone paid what they were asked for something without putting up any fight. It just didn’t work that way. It was hard to get used to at the beginning, but it really didn’t take all that long to realize that it was just another game. I never really enjoyed it. Somehow I seemed never to pick up the idea that this was what I wanted to do with my time, stand around and argue with someone over the price of some insignificant item. So I can do it. Leslie says she feels ashamed that she even knows me when we go out to buy a car!
Were the Italian POW’s good at that?
Yeah. They knew the going price pretty well on the things that we were after. So they did not spend a lot of time at it, and of course it wasn’t their money, [so] they’d go ahead and bargain. It really didn’t take them long to do it, and I think in part that if they had to give a little more than the going price, who cares, it wasn’t their money anyway. That may not have been why they were so efficient at it.
Did you ever happen to go by the Cairo Dump?
I never saw the Cairo Dump.
You look as if you’ve heard of it, though.
I’ve heard of it, but that’s it. I think if I went back now with the same amount of time, I would come away with a pretty well documented picture story. I do enjoy photography of a variety of things, and I could kind of lose myself with some of that…
There was a large field of disabled GI vehicles that had been bashed up in the war… It was also kind of entertaining to see cars, or trucks, with exposed chain drives.
Chain drive? What’s that?
Well, instead of having a drive shaft running from the transmission back to the differential, they had a chain running back there, and the power was transferred from the engine to the rear wheels with a chain.
That doesn’t sound very efficient.
Well, they did get away from that some time before that in this part of the world, but a lot of those trucks were still in service in Africa at the time. There were a lot of solid rubber tires running around on some of the local rolling stock. And of course, you’d see wagons with families, whole wagon-loads of people, not efficiently loaded or anything, but a good-sized family. And the patriarch (usually the one with the whip) and a team of, usually, horses. Could be mules, or burros. Could be cattle. Camels walking along the streets.
At that time, was anybody interested in collecting some of the Afrikakorps stuff that was probably sitting around all over the place?
I think probably they were, but I wasn’t aware of it. There were a lot of things to be collected. There was a lot of ivory. Some of it was probably fake, but I’m sure that a good bit of it was genuine ivory. If you wanted an ivory letter opener, ivory this, or ivory that… small items carved from ivory.
A lot of the shops were about the size of two of those doors on the cabinet over there. And they had a big variety of things. And one of them would have the same thing priced for five pounds [and it would be] five piasters over there. But there again, the pricing system was something you had to get used to.
I’ve often wondered whether people, at that time, thought that there might be a tremendous demand for Afrikakorps items in the future. There were tons of it laying around. Let’s fill up a warehouse with it and wait…
Well, someone may have, but they probably long since thought that interest had peaked out and they got rid of it. That happens over and over. Far-sighted people who really don’t look far enough.
Did you have any experience with German POW’s? You’ve only mentioned Italians.
None. Didn’t run into any German POW’s.
I know some of them were interned in Michigan.
Some of them came to Ohio. They were probably scattered around a good bit.
Did you ever run into any French Foreign Legion soldiers?
Never did. They were probably genuine tough folks, and wouldn’t mess around where young amateurs were wandering about!
What else? I ate at the mess hall most of the time. Stainless steel trays. We’d go through a line. They had a lot of meat, and it really wasn’t my favorite. It became less and less my favorite as time went on. It was mutton, and it tasted like mutton. I never did gain a real taste for wool, to eat it! It wasn’t the finest cuisine.
But once you were finished in the mess hall, it was customary to go out and scrape your tray into the garbage can, dip it in a GI can of suds, then put it on the stack to be taken care of by whoever was on KP. Every mealtime, there was a large flock of vultures that would circle overhead. And this gave some people the willies. They would come out and look up at the tent. It was a mess tent, it had hard side at the bottom, canvas up at the top, and a fly they’d come out under. They’d be looking up and holding their tray, and rush out, dip it, and run away from the tent, because if you just sauntered out and you had a chunk or two of food left, if you wanted preliminary cleanup of the tray, you’d hold it out and one of the vultures would come down and nip it off of the tray. You had to have not much of a crowd and so on, because some of the people got kind of hysterical and it scared them away! But you could hold a tray up and if it was something that looked delectable to a vulture he’d come by and snatch it off the tray.
I’ve never heard of vultures doing anything like that!
We would go out, sometimes, out on the desert and take firearms out and practice with them. And I mentioned the platform out by the sand dunes. They had a firing range out there, too. [There were] small cast iron targets set up. They had pits, so they had at one time run targets out, fired for effect, and pulled them down to check them. What was there when we were there, was just those cast iron, maybe chest-high targets set up by the pit.
And I wound up with a firearm because someone insisted I carry one. I didn’t really care to go running around, swaggering around with a pistol; it wasn’t my style then and it never has been. Some of the drivers that I had to face down a time or two really respected the gun, the firearm. And they kept insisting “You’ve got to carry a firearm; you’ve got [to wear] that MP arm bracelet, not just that written authority that you’re boss out on the road.” So I put on an MP band and carried [a gun]. So then, I liked firearms, so I had to go get some cartridges and go out on the desert and play along. And I took some friends along.
We were out there, and started firing at a couple of cast iron targets and occasionally would hit it, although with our GI 45 automatic pistols the accuracy is not all that great after a reasonable distance, maybe 50 yards. We hit that target [and it sounded like a gong]. Well, one of the local people had been sleeping in the pits [behind the targets], and he came boiling out of there. And we, a bunch of dumb kids, we were firing the 45’s. And sand was hopping around… I’ve never seen anyone move so fast across sand in my life, before or since! Poor guy! No one came close to hitting him, but really that was by accident because we weren’t that accurate. It was a dumb thing to do.
Did you ever get into a bad sandstorm? Everyone always talks about the sandstorms, and how terrible the sand is, and how it gets into everything.
Yeah, but I wasn’t out in the sandstorm. We had a bad sandstorm, and it blew for 24 hours.
What time of year was that, do you recall?
I can’t say… It had to be fall or spring, because it was late fall when we got there, and by summer of the next year I was gone. So, probably spring. That’s when I was talking about how the sand dune had moved. You just couldn’t go out and go anywhere. We were in the guardhouse, and had everything all battened down against [the wind]. So we didn’t have camels huddling down and snuggled up against us or anything like that. Sand got into everything: sand in your clothes, teeth gritty, eyes gritty, the whole bit. I can’t imagine if someone were out and in something like that. It would be really terrible. Even [for a storm] only one day long. If you were in the right place you could get covered up, and really buried.
So it was not something to be taken lightly, then.
No, definitely not. I’d love to go back over some time and roam around the desert. Leslie does not like deserts at all. We went to Craters of the Moon. We stopped there and were going to camp. In early evening we heard some coyotes howling. It was hot and dry and all that, but I thought it would be a neat place to stay. No one else seemed to be that much at ease, so we moved our camp and stayed elsewhere.
There was a lot more life there [in the Sahara] than you think. People running around… There were gazelles off somewhere. I never saw any there, but they were there. It was a little bit like the pronghorn antelope of the US. They live on areas that all the rest of the large animals avoid, but they seem to be perfectly comfortable there. Perhaps it’s the lack of competition, maybe the vegetation there is just what they like. So that was another incident. We had dinner at one of the fancy hotels in Cairo… Shepherd’s.
You went to Shepherd’s? What did you think of it?
Expensive! So I didn’t go back.
Did you think it was worth it?
Yes, at the time it was worth it.
I wonder if Shepherd’s is still there? It’s quite famous.
I don’t know. Probably. That was one of the things that impressed us about England. The value placed on the British establishments. Here, if something gets shoddy, the first thought is to tear it down, clear it away, and start over with something that is contemporary. I think it’s pretty general in much of the rest of the world (and I can’t speak authoritatively because I haven’t been around much), but preserving things seems to have a higher priority in lots of places.
Did you and your buddies go to see belly dancers while you were in Egypt?
Yeah, but more in Casablanca than in Egypt. Absolutely! It would have been a completely deficient education in the world if you didn’t go to see belly dancers!
What did you think of them at the time?
Probably not much, because I don’t have a very vivid memory [of it]. For one thing, most places that were accessible to GI’s weren’t very clean.
SIDE FOUR
(Some text was lost when the tape was turned over.)
Frankly, no one wanted to get into the cab of a truck and roll the windows up, if one of them was an Arab, riding along. Smells like there was some truth in that story!
No one’s ever mentioned that to me before. Maybe they were trying to be delicate.
The BO was very pronounced and of course their religious rituals, with religious washing, had nothing to do with overall body cleanliness. It’s symbolic, and at least the working class people, with whom we came in regular contact, probably didn’t take any baths, at least for long periods of time. Now, I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.
What about shopkeepers and people who worked in offices?
Well, we didn’t get into offices. Shops were mostly out in the open, so who knows? Definitely the public health aspects of the way food was handled, displayed and so forth… We were warned, don’t eat fresh vegetables, don’t eat salads, uncooked things. Don’t drink the water.
What did you drink instead?
Beer!
Of course! That Egyptian beer.
Beer, tea, coffee. Things that were simple.
Did it take a while for your system to get used to the new food?
I had no adjustment. No problems at all.
Was that pretty common, or did you find a lot of people had difficulty?
I think some people had difficulty, but I wasn’t in the dispensary or anything, so I really didn’t know about it. And I was more fortunate than most, because sometimes we’d eat with the prisoners, and the prisoners ate well. Some of the prisoners were in there [the guardhouse] on general court-martial, they were bad hombres. One of the people was a drug smuggler, and I don’t recall particulars on anyone else. But he had money, lots of money, and he spread some of it around where the people who were supplying the guardhouse food supplied really good [food] down there. We ate with them! He had some power, but he had also a permanent home. My part was seeing that he didn’t wander away from his permanent home, not directly but as a part of the unit.
This was something, when some hood like this has the best quality beer and so forth and steaks are brought in, and the rest of us get an occasional steak, but not very often. And I don’t mean that the officials were corrupt, but some of the workers didn’t mind making a little extra money by seeing that things ran smoothly for this fellow. I don’t think that’s too much different from what goes on in some of the prisons today, here. But anyway, it was any eye-opener for a young kid.
Did you know Leslie [Nick’s wife] before you went overseas, or did you meet her later?
No, I met her while I was in college after I got back. She was a student at Ohio University, and when she graduated she moved to Columbus for a job as Assistant Advertising Manager at Montgomery Ward. I was still in school at Ohio State in Columbus, and she was dating a friend of mine, and we met. We took a shine to one another, dated a while, and three months after we met we were married. We were both fairly decisive people. You’d get a kick out of some of the people, and some of the procrastinating they do. Probably with good reason: they haven’t made up their minds what to do. We had our first date on September 28, 1951.
You have quite a memory!
And we were married December 28, 1951.
Anything else you can think of that we should talk about?
I went over with a miscellaneous group, some of whom were with me at basic training at Fort McClelland. I almost told you what unit it was… 27th [Infantry] Battalion. We were training as infantry replacements, to be shipped off to the South Pacific. Everyone expected to go to the Pacific. And right in the final stages of our training, they changed it. I came home for ten days leave en route to Shipshank, New York, got on a boat, went down to Brooklyn, alighted, walked across the pier and up the gangplank, and off to Africa. Which was a big surprise.
At what point did they tell you where you were going? I suppose it wasn’t so important to keep your destination secret at that point.
Oh yes, it was. Had APO’s and everything. Well, we didn’t know where we were going, really, until we got there.
Didn’t they call Africa “Area J”?
I don’t know. They may have, and I may have known it at the time.
So you actually arrived but didn’t know where you were?
Yeah, we didn’t know really where we were going until we got there. Got on these trucks in the middle of the night. As we steamed in to Port Said, a British ship (probably from India) was coming through going the other way. They were headed home. And we were very much impressed. We were leaning on the rail and waving and so forth. They all came up, in formation, stood at attention and saluted us as they went through on their way home.
We embarked at a pontoon walkway from our gangplank over to the pier. They drove us well into the night, unloaded in the dark, and [we] stumbled into the barracks. Everyone got a bunk and flaked out. The next morning we got up and went outside and looked, and here’s this great expanse, sand dunes way over there, the sky with no clouds anywhere, really kind of an impressive thing.
And the assignments then came through piecemeal: you go here, you go there. I went to the Provost Marshal’s office, and didn’t even know what a Provost Marshal was. They told me I was a clerk, and I had no clerical skills at all. I learned and pecked. I adapted rather well, did a decent job. They put me in command of some people, all of whom outranked me, all of whom had more experience and were older. But I had the position, and knew what to do with designated authority. Interesting period.
I got to roam around downtown because of my patrol, but I really didn’t get to mingle and know people, [native] people, the way I would like to. Learned a few words here and there. I did not get to do the other roaming around, like the Holy Land, and up the Nile. Saw the Nile regularly. Used to ride the tram, and take it through Cairo, three or four or half a dozen of us, then we would wander around. Not going too far, because we didn’t want to get lost. Cairo is an easy city to get lost in, and we didn’t know the language. We had known that practically everyone hated England. Being young and insecure, we weren’t all that confident when everybody around on Maimonides Street was going you know not where, talking some other language. And of course, we had heard all the exaggerated stories about slit throats and whatever. It was prudent to use a little care, even though it was greatly exaggerated, some people didn’t come back.
You just never found them?
Once in a while. [Going through more photos.] Johnny Labusty, from Oakland, Pennsylvania, came back and reenlisted, and the last time I heard he was a recruiter for the Army. Hank Piostrowski came home and lives over in Cleveland or east of Cleveland, and I really don’t know what he did. Some sort of plant. Jimmy Allman, from Churubusko, Indiana, opened a body shop, auto paint shop. One of the other fellows is in one of the Chicago suburbs, and never did hear from him. And one of the guys lives in Wisconsin. Never heard from him, either. I thought it was kind of a shame, because we went to Fort McClelland, wound up at Huckstet. When they closed that we didn’t move together but we all wound up at a Kansas air base, and all of us came back about the same time. I was scheduled to go out on a ship, and then somehow it got shifted so I wound up flying. Ascension… that got me a weekend in Macau, Brazil.
That was probably quite a bit faster than going by ship, wasn’t it?
Much faster. And that way I got to see that column of chocolate colored water that comes out of the Amazon and runs out into the Atlantic. It was a big thrill. And we stopped at British Guyana (there was one then), just for overnight. Puerto Rico, and home. Well, West Palm Beach, Florida. I was there for a couple of weeks with a hand infection. Then on home. I didn’t want to go on sick call, but there were ugly red marks running up my arm. They put me on antibiotics for a couple of days and they were ready to ship [me] out. The day before they did, they cut the core out of it. The core looked kind of like an oat grain. That seemed to help a good bit.
You must have been pretty uncomfortable, if the infection was that far advanced.
Extremely. I was kind of a sick fella. I caught the train with the rest of the outfit. I got a Parker P-51 pen in Puerto Rico, and someone stole it in Florida and I never got it home. And I got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, got discharged with the rest of them, and got home for Christmas.
How did that infection on your hand get started?
Probably an infected hair follicle.
I’ve never heard of such a thing before.
Well, you’ve seen pimples and boils start with an infected follicle, probably. I had gum problems in Casablanca, and they did a gingivectomy. They would burn some of the gum tissue and then they would let me go home in a day or two. And that would slough off and I would go back the next week and they would say Well, we need to take some more off here and here, and they’d burn some more off until they removed the excess gum tissue back where it stopped sloughing. I had another one when I was in Ohio State, and that one was done with trichloroacetic acid. Same process. Burn it, it would slough off, and burn some more.
Was this painful?
Yeah, you could say that! But I had boils in Casablanca. I haven’t thought of that in years… And I just had an infection going, apparently systemic, and it would localize. And you probably wouldn’t be able to see any of the scars, but on the soft part of my arm there would be two or three boils going at once. At one time I had a dozen of them going at one time. Wasn’t particularly painful. I’d go in to the dispensary and they would lance them and drain them, medicate them.
But if one developed where it was on a joint or over a bone where there was not room for the swelling to be accommodated, it got uncomfortable. And that’s why this one was probably more uncomfortable than anything else. It was right next to the joint and in an area that couldn’t really expand to accommodate that swelling without getting real tight.
I remember one night we went to the Zebra Club, which was the NCO club. We were getting ready to say farewell to someone, and we started stacking our empty beer cans across the table and pyramiding them, and we hit the ceiling and had to start throwing them on the floor. And I was really in a good mood to go by the dispensary and have all my boils lanced because I didn’t feel a thing that time!
Do you remember what the name of the Egyptian beer was?
No, I don’t recall now.
Shall we stop? The tape is about to run out.
Yeah.
END OF TRANSCRIPT
INDEX
Africa booklet (American)…………………………………… 8
Afrikakorps………………………………………………. 13
Al‑nur, Mohammad Osman………………………………….. 3, 10
Algiers (Algeria)…………………………………………. 10
Allman, Jimmy…………………………………………….. 18
American/British relationships…………………………….. 4‑6
Anfa Hotel (Casablanca, Morocco)…………………………….. 4
Ascension Islands………………………………………….. 8
Ballou, General C.C. (Victory Ship)………………………….. 2
Brazil………………………………………………… 8, 18
British Guyana……………………………………………. 18
British, Egyptian attitude toward……………………………. 2
Brooklyn (New York)……………………………………….. 17
Cairo (Egypt)…………………………………….. 2, 5, 8, 17
Campbell, Staff Sergeant Jim………………………………… 5
Casablanca (Morocco)…………………………………. 4, 9, 19
Casablanca Conference………………………………………. 4
Dodge weapons carrier………………………………………. 5
Douglas C‑47 Skytrain………………………………………. 6
Douglas C‑54 Skymaster……………………………………… 8
Egyptian Camel Corps……………………………………….. 3
England…. ……………………………………………… 15
Firing range……………………………………………… 14
Fort Bragg (North Carolina)………………………………… 18
Fort McClelland (Alabama)……………………………….. 8, 17
German POW’s……………………………………………… 13
Gold panning in California…………………………………. 11
Heliopolis (Egypt)………………………………………. 2, 9
Holy Land.. ………………………………………….. 11, 17
Huckstet, Camp Russell V. (Egypt)……………………… 2, 3, 18
Italian POW’s………………………………………… 4, 6, 7
Jews, in Morocco…………………………………………… 7
King Farouk of Egypt……………………………………….. 2
Labusty, Johnny………………………………………… 9, 18
Mena House Hotel (Cairo, Egypt)……………………………… 9
Moroccans, attitude toward Americans…………………………. 7
Morocco…. ……………………………………………. 4, 6
Nile River (Egypt)……………………………………… 5, 17
Paine Field (Egypt)………………………………………… 2
Parsons, Leslie……………………………………. 12, 14, 16
Pickpockets, Egyptian……………………………………. 2, 3
Piostrowski, Henry (Hank)……………………………….. 8, 18
Police, Egyptian…………………………………………… 3
Port Said (Egypt)………………………………………. 2, 17
Puerto Rico……………………………………………… 18
Roosevelt, USS Franklin D…………………………………… 8
Sandstorms. ……………………………………………… 11
Shepherd’s Hotel (Cairo, Egypt)…………………………….. 15
Shipshank (New York)………………………………………. 17
South Pacific…………………………………………….. 17
Sphinx….. ………………………………………………. 8
Student unrest, Egypt………………………………………. 2
Sudanese… ………………………………………………. 3
Tangier (Morocco)……………………………………… 10, 11
Tripoli (Libya)……………………………………………. 6
Tunis (Tunisia)……………………………………………. 6
Tunis plateau (Tunisia)…………………………………….. 9
Victory Ship………………………………………………. 2
Villa Miramar (Casablanca, Morocco)………………………….. 4
Vultures… ……………………………………………… 13
West Palm Beach (Florida)………………………………….. 18
Wright, Clarissa…………………………………………… 9
Zebra Club (Casablanca, Morocco)……………………………. 19
World War Two Remembered 