Edmund J. Williams

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
Edmund J. Williams – Life during
WWII and Vietnam
By Edmund J. Williams
February 24, 2004
Box 4 Folder 38
Oral Interview conducted by Karen Dee Goodson
Transcript copied by Alina Mower June 2005
Brigham Young University – Idaho
KG: What did you understand what the war was about?
EW: Which one are we talking about?
KG: The Vietnam or Korean.
EW: Korean war, I understood of course I was at the age that my number came up and I
went to Boise and took a physical to be drafted, and they found that I had allergies and
that I was studying science at school. And at the point, it was just after Sputnik and
everybody [ was] in Science and they want everybody in science they could, and I was
training to be a science teacher. And they just said hey since you have allergies, and are
going to be a science teacher we want you to go to school, so I kept in touch with my
draft board, every, about twice a year. And they just kept saying hey we can do without
you as long as you are doing well in school and such because we need science teachers
and so I never did go to battle, but I would have done. I would have been willing to do so
if they needed me, or if circumstances were a little different, but my allergies kind of
stopped some of that, especially being a foot soldier. But the war of course was to keep
the communism, back in those days the communism was really spreading and everybody
was afraid of it, and we would lose our freedoms here and so on. So we were defending
our freedom and in the Korean War by helping the Koreans, the South Koreans keep
North Korea and the Chinese from coming in there. I did have some friends that went and
they came back just sick because they had had to kill so many people. I mean the Chinese
just kept coming. They just kept coming by the thousands and they would die by the
thousands and it just was a unfortunate that that sort of thing had to happen, but that’s
what communism was all about and they didn’t care about peoples’ lives, and they just
kept bringing them on. One guy said that he just was so sick, but he know that if he didn’t
keep shooting with the machine gun that they’d over run him and he’d be killed. And so
he say’s I killed thousands everyday and he says he felt terrible, I’m sure that will affect
him for the rest of his life. But I had an experience a few years ago, we adopted twin girls
from Korea, and while we were over there doing the adoption and getting the adoption
decree started and so on. We were in Seoul Korea and I would walk down the street, and
everybody would bow to me. And of course, they would bow to each other sometimes,
but every person almost every person, especially the older ones would bow to me. And I
couldn’t figure out quite why, and one day a guy stopped me on the street and he says are
you American. I didn’t quite know how to answer that because some people had, but he
just bowed to me so I thought he must have some respect for me. And I says “ Yes I’m an
American.” He says, “ oh”, he says “ we love Americans.” Your young people came over
and died so we could be free. And, you know that’s the sort of benefits, the sort of
rewards that we get for… for doing that war. And we, you know, lost a lot of Americans
in that war, but I think that it was worth it, it stopped [ the] spreading of communism at
least in that part of the world. So I don’t know, are there any other questions about the,
the Korean War that you would like to know about?
KG: I had a question actually; you said you were on campus or at college, which college
were you at?
EW: Utah State University.
KG: Utah State. Were there a lot of guys that were gone?
EW: No, there were quite a few there. I know during World War II here on Ricks College
campus, my sister was going here at the time, and there were maybe three or four guys
and hundreds of girls. You know because there were a lot in the war efforts.
KG: Cuz I’m writing my paper on, like, Ricks College at that time and I was just
wondering what social changes there would be, or whatever, and even where you were
was there a lot of social change or, was there...
EW: Not, not a lot, it wasn’t as noticeable as during World War II. I grew up as a young
fellow in World War II and remember some of the experiences there. But, no I didn’t, I
didn’t notice a lot of social changes. We were all interested in what was going on in the
war, and I had a number of friends that went, but it wasn’t the type of thing that I saw
during World War II. Everybody was just…
KG: So what did you see during World War II?
EW: Well, in World War II everybody came up and everybody was joining the army.
And because you know we had the Japanese picking on us and Germans picking on our
friends and they vowed to come over here as soon as they got Europe occupied and so we
says hey we gotta stop this. And so everything went in the war… into the war effort in
World War II it was, I don’t know how much you want me to talk about World War II.
KG: Yeah, I like World War II that’s what my paper's actually on.
EW: Let me just tell you a few memories that I have. We used to have black outs, and
there were two reasons why they had them that I understood as a young fellow. One was,
to save energy so that that electricity could be used someplace else. And then another one
was to kind of practice, especially in the cities too so that if there were bombers [ that]
came over or something they couldn’t see where to bomb. They couldn’t see the cities
and so, so we would have black outs. We were able to use electricity to milk our cows out
on the farm because food was needed, but we put shades over all of the barn windows so
that we could see to milk the cows and also to… electricity to run the milkers. And there
was a real effort from that point of view from the agriculture store point of view. They
rationed gasoline for example there was only so much gasoline per month, but farmers
could get what they needed to run the tractors to produce the food; because, we had to
have the food to feed the soldiers. And to feed the people that we were liberating, and
because everything had been destroyed in their country, and so we took a lot of…
KG: So you were rationed for them too?
EW: Right, I can remember there were a lot of things we went without. For example
pepper, came from over near the side, you know from Africa and, and some of the spice
growing companies, and the commercial ships were being used for other things. And also
the commercial ships were being sunk by the Japanese submarines, by the hundreds and
even thousands and so we, we ran out of pepper, you know. And that was you know, they
developed some artificial pepper, but it wasn’t quite the same. And there were a lot of
things that— for example rubber tires, you know tires on a car. You’d see people run
them until just where the tread was showing, and they get a flat tire. And they’d park it on
the side of the road until they were able to get, sometimes a month or two, till they could
get tires because the tires were needed in the military, and the military vehicles and
airplanes and so on. But, I know my mother took all of her pots and pans… aluminum
pots and pans and cashed them in because they needed the aluminum to build airplanes.
KG: Wow.
EW: And so we, ate out of some caste iron stuff we had there and, so it was an all out
effort, everybody was involved in helping the war effort. I remember my brother, Scott
Williams, he’d just… he turn about nineteen and he got his eagle, a year or so before, and
an eagle rank in scouting and so he joined the army, and they, “ so, oh, your an eagle
scout, you’re a pilot.” And so he… they trained him to fly a B17 bombers, and he flew
36 missions over Germany in a B17, and he’d go out with a squadron of 150 planes and
maybe half of them would come back because they would be shot up, and shot down.
But, he always came back, he flew back nine B17s that never flew again they were shot
up so bad. And… he had…
KG: How did he get them back?
EW: They’re just shot full of holes, and when they get back and then land, why they just
strip off the good parts, put them on another plane and away they go. And, one
experience that he had was, he flew out with a whole bunch of planes I think about 100
150 and, the Germans would shoot these shells up that would explode and produce flak
just fragments of steel flying everywhere, up there. They try to shoot down these planes.
A lot of them went down. But his belly gunner one time hollered, hey there’s a shell
coming right straight up. And he was down on his belly and these shells were so big that
he could see them coming. And he jumped up out of that belly gun and it hit right beside
him, and blew a hole in the side of the plane and he fell out through it, except for he
caught himself on his elbows. And the navigator ran back and grabbed him by the jacket
and pulled him back in. And, then about that time, they were, they were on the bomb run
and , the bomb bay guy was the navigator, was saying alright hold it still, hold it steady,
you know. And then he says about that time then they’d armed their bombs, about that
time the, a shell came up and blew up in the wing tank, in one of the wings and it blew
this plane right sideways, so the wings were vertical. Right straight up and down. And
they would just drop like a rock, and in the process of doing that it dumped all the bombs
out of the Bombay rack and they were rolling around in the floor of the bomb bay, and
they finally, and they couldn’t bail out. They says we’ll bail out, nope we can’t bail out
with the wings vertical, he says I’ll get it level, and then we’ll bail out. Well, when he
leveled out, he was only, his altimeter read 300 feet. Well that’s too close to the ground to
bail out you hit the ground before the chute opened. So he says well, we’ll fly this thing
home, you know, and, and they had to siphon the gasoline across by hand across the
engines and in the one side that didn’t have a hole in the gas tank. And, and here’s this
hole in the big belly enough to jump through without touching it, and a hole in the wing
that you could jump through without— as big as a bathtub you know. And they couldn’t
get any altitude so they flew clear across Germany at 300 feet, and everybody’s shooting
at them with pistols and machine guns and everything and umm. When they got almost to
the English Channel, which was kind of the safe place, they, they couldn’t get all of their
hydraulics to work so their guns were useless. And five messermits, German messermits
came after them, and they were going to blow them out of the sky, and he says just as
they started their dive two of them blew up and they were, “ what in the world was that”
you know. And these P51 mustangs had come over and were escorting, you know these
wounded B17’ s back…
KG: Wow.
EW: … and shot down two of them and the other three took off. And, two of the P51’ s
got right down on their wing tips and just escorted them like…
KG: Wow.
EW: … escorted them back over the English Channel, and then they peeled off and went
back after some others to escort them back. So they radioed the commanding officer and
said, hey we’re going to ditch this thing in the English channel come out and, you know.
We can’t get any altitude to bail out we’re just going to ditch it in the channel, come out
and send a boat out for us. And the commanding officer says “ are all four engines
running?” He says “ yeah, we’ve got them all going full blast. This things has so many
holes in it, it takes all the engine power to keep it just, just barley above the ground.” And
he says “ can you bring that back and land it. He says yeah, he says those are brand new
engines, we need those engines for another plane” so he, they flew it back and landed it.
And one of the problems is that it has a tail, tail wheel so when they landed and the tail
went down it dumped some gas out of that gas tank. And the belly gunners gun was
sticking straight down so here is this gun running on the runway making sparks and they
dumped this gas out. They were probably doing a 150- 200 mph when they landed
because they had to land it full speed otherwise they’d drop like a rock. But, he says, and
there was this ball of fire just following them down the runway. So, he says well he says
they were doing 30 mph and they were still out jumping off the wings, they were out
running… out jumping off the wing tips on this thing… to get off the plane. The ball of
fire went out [ because] they ran out of gas before it caught up with them. And, then there
was some other events that took place that day. They had to take the bombs out. The
Bombay door was sprung and they couldn’t open it to drop those bombs out. And so they
landed with this full load of bombs. They were afraid it would jiggle. The Bombay door
opened when they landed. It was kind of a rough landing because they didn’t have much
control of the plane it was shot up so bad. Anyway it held, and, and they took the bombs
out and dumped them in the English Channel. But uh, boy if that had gone off when they
landed, you know it would have blown a hole in the runway and everything survived. But
he was the, they called him the preacher. Everybody that ever flew with him he, well he
always came back. He flew 36 missions many of them would never, you know, half the
planes ¾ , ¼ of them at least would be shot down, but he always came back. He always
had prayer with his crew before he left. So they called him the preacher. But, in tense,
tension and so on during these flights and some of them last eight to ten hours round trip
and being harassed by messersmits fighters and flak and everything else, really affected
his heart. And it actually killed him but it wasn’t until about 20 years after the war that he
died of a heart attack because his heart had something what they called coronary
thrombosis and it swelled up so much from all the tension and so on. But, there were a
number of things that happened during World War II that, there was a lot of food
rationing. Flour was hard to come by really hard, but since we were out on the farm we
raised our own wheat and, we ground it. A little hand grounder we ground flour so we
always had bread and, we always had milk and eggs and so on, but you couldn’t buy
much from the store… you’d walk in the grocery store and the shelves would be empty.
But one of the things that impressed me about World War II was after we beat Germany
and after we beat Japan we went back in and rebuilt the countries.
KG: That’s cool.
EW: And what was it, I thought, that was so impressive, and we still do that. You know,
we go into the wars that we fought lately, we go in and bomb, and tear up everything and
then go in and rebuild them when we win. And uh, we didn’t do that in Vietnam because
we didn’t win the war, and we lost a lot of troops in the Vietnam War. Let me just talk
about some of the experiences I felt during that. I was… most of the time I was a student
at Utah State also teaching here at BYU- Idaho, Ricks College then. And you know,
generally people were sympathetic of what we were doing over there. Once again we
were trying to stop the spread of communism and to help the people of Vietnam. And, we
were sympathetic to the program but boy, we lost a lot of people, a lot of a young men
over there and women in the war effort. It was really kind of sad, because the thing that
was frustrating about it is that they didn’t want us to go to the sources of the enemy
supplies and bomb them, because that was China we didn’t want to make China mad at
us. All we would do is, you know, we’d watch them load their ships with guns and
ammunition and so on. And we could do that from spy satellites or from spy planes but
we couldn’t touch them until they came and then we had to destroy with the convoys and
of course so much of the supplies got through and it was a war we couldn’t win. And I
noticed when we did the… a Dessert Storm in the early 90s and also the war in
Afghanistan and so on the, leaders of our military said we won’t fight unless you let us
fight it the way we want to fight it. That is go into the supply lines and manufacturing and
all of that stuff. We’re not going to fight another war like Vietnam. Because we just…
there is no way we can win it. When you don’t fight it, just by shooting soldiers and so
on. Go right back to the supply lines where they produce it. So, I… you know, that was
the frustrating part of the Vietnam War. And of course, my number came up again in the
Vietnam War and they wrote a letter to me and I… they says what are you doing. And I
says teaching Geology and Earth Science at Ricks college and they says OK just keep
right on doing it. And so I didn’t go to Vietnam either. And I certainly could have done, I
mean, I, and once again I would have done.
KG: Did you notice a lot of the “ anti” like feelings?
EW: Oh, you see that on TV but you don’t see it around this country. You know, the
people here were saying hey, we’re looking for freedom, you know we’re defending our
freedom. I thought that… I don’t know, last night I saw President Bush on C- span giving
a talk [ that] was given yesterday that would be the 23rd, you might want to look that up
someplace. But he gave a talk that was so fabulous and he read a letter from a soldier that
was fighting in Iraq, and it was so fabulous he says we’ll do whatever it takes because I
have a wife and children back home. We’re defending freedom and we’re going to have
to handle it, to take care of the problem and we’re here to do it, and we’ll do our best.
And I, you know, it was really impressive, a lot more impressive than what I can tell, but
that’s what the attitude has been all during World War II that I can remember and Korea
and Vietnam and so on. We’re defending our freedoms. And President Bush said
something else. It was on September 14, 2001 just after 9- 11 and when the President
went to ground zero. And visited, and workers were up there and they were trying to
rescue people and, see if there were any survivors and so on. One of the firemen that was
working there he says, he was just covered in grime and so on, but he looked at him and
says, don’t let us down, you know.
KG: Ohhhh.
EW: Don’t let us down because, we’re giving our all to try to save people, but let’s take
care of the problem. Of course, as I see it from my point of view that’s what he’s doing
now. He’s… we’re over there; we did Afghanistan and Iraq and whatever else we have
to, to get rid of these terrors, these terrorists. I don’t feel that bad about what we’re doing.
We’ve got to protect ourselves, and that’s the purpose of the United States Government
one of its obligations is to defend America. And that’s what World War II was about,
that’s what Korean war was about and Vietnam war, Desert Storm, and this Iraq war, and
Afghanistan, sure, it’s on foreign soil, but I’d rather do it over there than here.
KG: This is true. How old were you on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor?
EW: Well, Pearl Harbor, I was just a little kid and I was, I was about five years old, and
people said the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. And I says I could remember thinking, man,
what’s that all about, what’s going on. You, know it just threw the fear in me. But, it
was… we soon found out. We didn’t have television in those days, we had radio and we
would huddle around the radio and listen to the reports, and so on. And that was a costly
war in, in lives and so on. I saw a thing on Discovery Channel in which the Kamikazes in
Japan killed over five thousands of our students, or of our, our soldiers. Because they just
come in Kamikazes ships and whatever else you know they could find. They just, they
raised a whole group of Kamikazes over there. They’d take these older planes that were
kind of worn out and send them out with a bomb in them and crash into a ship or
something, you know, trying to, trying to stop us. And the biggest effort was a bunch of
kamikaze submarines. I didn’t even know about that until the other night on discover,
but, no it was a history channel, it was a history channel. And also, they’d just build these
small submarines, put a guy in them and say take them out and run them into a ship. And
so they’d guide them as best they could, they only sank a couple of ships, but, jeez. Those
guys, they really brain washed those young people that they would. The same thing has
happened as I see it with the Arabs, they’ve taught these people that the Americans are
infidels and, we’ve got to destroy them. And they’re willing to go out and do suicide
bombing and all sorts of things.
KG: Have you seen, like, you’ve noticed several similarities in the wars, different wars,
like…
EW: Well the technology is certainly greater now. Look at the loss that we’ve had in Iraq.
You know 550 or something like that, which is really not many. We’ve probably killed
tens of thousands of Iraq resistance people. We have better equipment, all of the soldiers
wear bulletproof vests, and the equipment they give to them to use is the best. And so if
we’re going to fight war, you know you’re going to want to run out there… with each
one, with a sword, you’ve got to give them your biggest longest one you see. And put on
your armor, and that’s essentially what they are doing and I think that’s great. It’s too bad
we’ve lost 500 and something. In World War II we lost tens of thousands, Vietnam war
was tens of hundreds of thousands and I guess in World War II I don’t remember the
exact figure but we lost half a million or so troops.
KG: So do you say, how these wars affect our lives, is there any effect at all or?
EW: Oh, I’m sure they do, you know. I told you about my experiences in, you couldn’t,
there’s certain things that you couldn’t buy, in fact you couldn’t… there wasn’t anything
on the shelves because it was all going into the war effort. But…
KG: How about any long- term effect?
EW: I’m sure psychologically, especially those in the war. I have an uncle, a couple of
uncles that were in the Pacific Theatre in World War II, and they don’t even want to talk
about it, because of the grim. Buddies falling all around them and they had to kill so
many and they just… it’s one of the… it has a heck of effect on everybody. But, I don’t
know, I think the long term effect is that hey, we’ve got to… we’ve got to do this sort of
thing in order to protect our freedom. That’s why we are free today. And I think one of
the things that keep us a free people is that that there’s, even though the world is so
wicked, there’s enough of us. Maybe I should consider myself, but enough people that
are good, that the Lord says alright we’ll help you win this one again, you know. And
then the fact that we go in and rebuild a country and rebuild the buildings and the
schools, and get them back on their feet. We taught Japan how to do assembly line, you
know. Now they’re just out producing us, and the same with Germany and you know the
American way, the industrial way, the American Industrial way of doing things. So,
yeah… so I think that we try to leave a country that we conquer better than when we
came. And I think that, with that attitude the Lord will keep on our side, as long as we’re
not doing things that are wrong in the war. There are a lot of horrible things happened in
the war.
KG: So is there anyone you know that served that didn’t come back, or?
EW: Yeah, there were some kids, from my hometown in World War II that didn’t come
back. There were a number of people from Rexburg here that were in the Vietnam War. I
don’t remember their names right now but, some of them got killed, so most… they’re
the ones the guard called up. And they went over, and some of them just didn’t come
back, left widows and little kids, orphans and that sort of thing, which is sad, but gee
what’s it take. One thing that I— that is frustrating to me is how do you win a war like
we’re fighting in Iraq today with all the terrorists and the people that are willing to give
up their life in suicide bombings. That’s awful hard to stop. We had that sort of thing
after World War II, with the Germans. They were doing suicide bombing and all sorts of
things. But soon it straightened up. It only took a few months, but this is just going on
and on and these people are so ingrained thinking that we’re infidels and we got to blow
them up but, I just don’t understand that kind of thinking. It’s hard for me to comprehend
that.
KG: How do you think religion effects, like, their thinking and our thinking?
EW: Well, as we look at the Russians for example, they shot down a couple of our
airlines during the cold war, that’s all right, you know, they didn’t take life, they didn’t
think it was all that important. And, they would… the Germans would send in, and the
Japanese, both would send in kamikazes type raids because human life was not
important, course we valued human life much more than that. I don’t know if that
answered your question or not.
KG: Yeah it did. Ok thanks.