Bartholomew, R.D.

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
R. D. Bartholomew – Life during
WWII
By R. D. Bartholomew
March 10, 2003
Box 2 Folder 2
Oral Interview conducted by Kristina Waite
Transcript copied by Maren Miyasaki August 2005
Brigham Young University – Idaho
KW: Alright, first off, when were you born?
RB: I was born 4th of July, 1934.
KW: And where were you born?
RB: I was born in the infamous location of Salt Lake City, Utah.
KW: And how many brothers and sisters do you have?
RB: I have five sisters and each one of them has five brothers.
KW: And could you tell me a little bit about your parents?
RB: Okay. My father was an electrical engineer working in various engineering and
technical and education areas. My mother passed away in 1940 when I was six years old.
I had one sister at that time. And for the bulk of the Second World War period it was just
my sister and I in the family. My father remarried after a couple of years and proceeded
to have eight more children.
KW: And what kind of games did you play as a child?
RB: ( Laughing) That’s a good question. We lived on a small truck farm in Bountiful,
Utah. We didn’t have a lot of toys. We pretty well made our own games. One of the
things I used to do was I always had a pocketknife, which seems like today is a forbidden
commodity, but I whittled a lot. I carved a lot of things. And I had an affinity to
airplanes. I would whittle out airplanes. And we played with a lot of toys that we made
ourselves.
KW: And did you have your own bedroom and bathroom?
RB: Matter a fact, the house had one bed and bath for everyone. And my sister and I
slept in the same bedroom meaning we slept in bunk beds.
KW: And did you have any jobs to do around the house to help out?
RB: Unfortunately, I did. My sister’s jobs primarily consisted of in- house work with her
mother. And we had a truck farm, which we grew mostly onions, sometimes a few
carrots and few other garden things for our personal use. It was my job all summer long
to weed the onions. I spent a full day, every six days a week, working in the farm when I
was like seven to eight years of age.
KW: Did you have any family traditions?
RB: ( Laughing) I find it hard to think of any family traditions. I don’t think of any.
KW: Well, did you eat certain foods for Thanksgiving and Christmas?
RB: Well, we celebrated them pretty much like everybody else. I guess the closest thing
to something that was peculiar to our family was that at Christmas time we opened up the
parlor, which was the best room in the house. It was closed virtually all the time, but
we’d opened it up in Christmas time, set the Christmas tree in the parlor. You had a very
fine morning, which appointed our place. We’d fire up the fireplace and at Christmas
time we’d have our special events in the parlor.
KW: And how did you like school?
RB: Oh, I tolerated school ( laughing), a necessary evil.
KW: Did you like any or dislike any specific classes?
RB: Well, as a matter of fact, the class that I really liked always was art class. It seemed
as though that I had a pretty good eye and a good hand. I pretty well excelled in art. I
picked up a lot of good pointers from a couple of elementary school teachers who had
some art understanding. I always liked art and I always did well in it.
KW: And did you go on vacations?
RB: My earliest recollection of traveling was between Minneapolis, Minnesota and
Bountiful, Utah. My father was attending, had a fellowship at the University of
Minnesota. And so during the winter times we lived there. And during the summer times
we traveled back to Bountiful and run the farm. And that was basically our travels, but
the only time… the first vacation that I can think of at all was shortly after my dad
remarried. And six or eight months into the marriage we took a trip to Bear Lake and
actually spent a major part of the week there. But that was the only vacation I can think
of.
KW: Now turning our interview more towards the World War II period, where were you
on the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked?
RB: Well, confidentially that’s my earliest recollection of World War II. It was on a
Sunday. And believe it or not, that we went to our Sunday activities, but the family was
extremely somber. It wasn’t too joyful. And I didn’t entirely understand why until late
that night, my father in the company of my sister and I, explained to us what had
happened that day. He explained that the Japanese had attacked the United States. And
he was very somber about the event. He said that things were going to get pretty tough.
He said that even there could be the possibility that we would be invaded and that we
might even have to leave our homes to go and hide in the mountains. And that’s a pretty
ominous explanation isn’t it?
KW: Yeah. Did you have any relatives or close friends in the armed forces during that
war?
RB: Well, as a matter of fact, I did. My father was 36 years of age in 1941. And he had
recently resigned a commission in the army reserve. He had gone to ROTC in college
and was assigned to an armor, correction, an artillery army reserve unit. And a year or so
earlier, he had resigned that commission. Otherwise, he would probably been
immediately snatched away and joined the armed services. At that age, I think he was
still eligible for the draft by a year or two. And I know as a family we were a little
concerned about him having to be drafted. But here he was, a widower at that time and
with two children. And almost immediately, well, at the time of Pearl Harbor he was
teaching school at the University of Utah. And overnight, all of his student body was
drafted, and they didn’t have anybody to teach so he lost his job. And he got a job in a
small arms plant in Salt Lake City. And so he, as an engineer worked in the arms plant
making ammunition for the war effort. He made .30 out of .60 caliber and .50 caliber
machine gun bullets. And he worked there for a number of years. And as I look back on
it, having two children without a mother and working in a critical industry, I guess the
chances of being drafted was pretty small. But on the other hand, I had a couple of
uncles on my mother’s side, my mother’s uncles that were younger than my dad and were
prime candidates for the military. One of them, an Uncle Emery, was a medical doctor
and he immediately got drafted and went into the services as a doctor. His younger
brother Joe was with a reserve unit if I remember, and so he got picked up pretty quick.
And I can remember in the house of my grandfather’s with his family around him, and
these two sons of his, uncles of mine, were on their way out. And again this was a very
somber period. I remember one comment made by my grandfather. He said that as I
remember, in spite of him being an old man, he might have been in his 50s ( laughing); he
said that he would have rather go into the military than have both of his sons go into the
military. But of course, his sons did go into the military, and we had to monitor their
activities throughout the war.
KW: In what ways did you personally keep in touch with them?
RB: Oh basically it was indirectly through letters to my grandparents, and my
grandparents would tell me what they were doing. The younger uncle, Uncle Joe, he was
a late teenager, maybe 20 years old, 19 years old at the time and I was seven going on
eight. I idealized him and he gave me time and he and I did things together. And he
came home from Pearlo, why we spent time with him and basically that’s how we kept in
touch with Uncle Joe. Emery went on his way, had his medical assignment.
KW: And what did they think about the war?
RB: Now, Joe in particular was shipped to the Pacific. He had a number of close scrapes.
He didn’t ever talk too much in detail to me about the war. We did keep in touch and in
addition as the war progressed as far as individuals we knew in the war my aunts often
dated military men. Some of them, they got pretty close to. I remember one Aunt Ellen,
who dated a fellow named Bob. And Bob was a tank driver. He drove a Sherman tank in
the Second World War. And Bob sent me a picture of him and his tank once. And I
liked that very much. As the war waxed on, and came to a close, Bob was seriously
wounded in Italy. And he came home and took a long time to rehabilitate. When he
came home, why he rekindled his relationship with my Aunt Ellen, and they were
married. And so, Uncle Bob, an injured, Purple Heart recipient of World War I, was one
of my favorite uncles throughout the years. Did I say World War I?
KW: Yes, you did.
RB: Well, make it two.
KW: And why did the United States get involved in the war?
RB: I really didn’t get too involved with the politics as a seven and eight year old
( laughing). Well, I guess a conspicuous answer is a worse tact.
KW: And did you feel that the war was a good cause?
RB: Oh, we were fighting for quote “ freedom.” And of course at that age it wasn’t, I was
very susceptible for the party line. And yes, as a small boy I felt it was a righteous war.
In fact, we worked a lot in various drives. And we’d collect old pots and pans and
aluminum metal from this place and that. And we’d collected it and it was collected and
sent off to be refurbished and used in the war. We’d even collect things such as old tires.
Rubber was a very critical item in the Second World War. Prior to the Second World
War, rubber was basically natural from rubber trees, grown in the tropics and a lot of the
tropical sources that they had had been shut off because of the occupation of the Japanese
to these sources. So rubber was critical. We of course as history indicates, we
discovered synthetic rubber which turns out would time to be much much better than
natural rubber. But we used to collect tires. And then another thing we used to do was
they used to have drives to sell what if I remember them were freedom bonds, that might
be a simple misnomer, but they later became war bonds. That’s when people would loan
money to the government to finance the cost of war. And to slice it down into small
increments; you could buy stamps for a few cents a piece. They were saving stamps.
You could paste them in books and when you get a full book, why you’d have
approximately 17 dollars and enough to turn them in for a 25- dollar victory bond. That’s
what it was; they called it a victory bond. They called it victory bonds, not freedom
bonds, victory bonds. And as providence would have it, my father bought my sister and I
several 25- dollar bonds during the Second World War. I kept those bonds for many
years. Much later, in the 1960s, I cashed in these 25- dollar victory bonds that my dad
bought us. And they had appreciated to the point that each one was worth more than a
hundred dollars. That’s a demonstration of what the time value money isn’t it?
KW: Then, what was your opinion of the president’s leadership during the war?
RB: Interesting that you should ask that. Of course, the president during the war was
Delano Roosevelt. He was the president before the war. As a matter of fact, he was
president all of my lifetime. And so there was only one president and that president was
Roosevelt. And for a young person like myself, I just took his leadership for granted. He
talked on the radio. As I understand, one of the first presidents to take advantage of that
medium like he did. And he was the president and that’s all there was to it. Now, later in
1944, I believe, if I’m correct on this, I remember coming home from school one day and
my mother informed me that President Roosevelt had died. I remember thinking and
asking the question, how are we going to get another president because President
Roosevelt had been president all of my lifetime. And I didn’t understand the process of
where you get another president from. That was a little striking moment in my life that
President Roosevelt had passed away, and I didn’t know how he would be replaced.
KW: What was your opinion regarding the relocation of the Japanese- Americans?
RB: I had absolutely no knowledge of that.
KW: And what was your opinion of Hitler or Mussolini or other leader of the Axis?
RB: They were frequently personified as being the bad people, the Axis leaders as they
were called. In cartoons and in the newspapers they were villainized and we viewed
them as bad people.
KW: What is your opinion of Japanese and Germans now?
RB: Today?
KW: Yeah.
RB: During the war, I guess there was a bad feeling toward, the Japanese were called
Japs and Germans were called Nazis. And I guess nationwide we felt very bad toward
them. But I didn’t have any events or associations that I associated with these bad
people. And I guess because of that today I have the same feelings toward them today as
I did then as individuals. And individual is good or bad depending on the characteristic
of the individual. There isn’t classes of bad people, collectively bad people.
KW: When did you first hear about the German Concentration Camps?
RB: I must have heard about them during the wartime, but I didn’t have any strong
emotions or feelings about the concentration camps at that time. I was too young and too
involved with other things.
KW: Did it seem that more men from the community fought in Europe or in the Pacific?
RB: Well, I knew people in both areas. I guess I knew about the same amount of people
in either place.
KW: And what are some of your best and worst memories of the war?
RB: Oh ( laughing), well, I will have to say that the war did effect every family and every
individual in the United States. One of the things that came into effect was rationing. As
you know, rationing is where critical items used in the families and in industries was
rationed and allocated out to wherever most needed. Now, one of the things that were
rationed was sugar. And there was other foodstuff that was rationed and I don’t
remember what they were, but I remember sugar was. And each family was issued a
book of stamps. And you had to buy these rationed items; you had to surrender a certain
number of your stamps. And when you had run out of these stamps, you couldn’t buy
any more of that commodity. One of the strangest things, well gasoline was a very
critical one, and another thing was shoes. We were rationed to one pair of shoes each six
months. I guess the shoe industries was busy make shoes for the military people. And
my younger sister was really tough on shoes. She couldn’t get a pair of shoes to last six
months. She was barefoot. I remember my folks having to go to the ration board in
Bountiful, Utah. To go to the board office you had to go up a long outside staircase to
get to the second floor. Then, you went into this office, which was the ration office.
They did battle with the people in the ration office to get extra stamps to get shoes for my
sister.
Other ration experiences are that, my father had to travel so many miles to work.
They used to have an A ration coupon, and then had B ration coupons, and C ration
coupons for gasoline. Everybody got an A allotment, which was a very small allotment
which was to take care of your business. Depending on what kind of work you did and
how much you had to travel for work, you got some addition B or C coupons. Well, he
needed extra fuel to go to his work. As I recall, he needed to have 17 miles per gallon
performance on his automobile otherwise he wouldn’t have enough gasoline to go to
work. He had bought one of the very last built Buick automobiles in 1942 before the
automobile production was shut down. So he had this straight 8 ( laughing) Buick 1942
model that he had to keep running at 17 miles per gallon or he would run out of gas. And
I remember he spent more than normal time having that automobile tuned up so it’d run
at its very best so that he’d have enough gasoline to get to work and back over the
month’s times. So rationing affected everybody’s life.
KW: And what did you do to entertain yourselves during the war?
RB: Well, I think we did as much as anybody does in the farm environment. Our closest
neighbors were like a quarter or a half a mile away. And we played with them very
rarely. We mostly played by ourselves. We would periodically see movies, church
activity involved as to some degree of course, and we just pretty well made our own
entertainment when we weren’t busy working in the field.
KW: How did your religious beliefs help you to cope with the war?
RB: Well, pretty much even today, I take my religious convictions for granted. They’ve
always seemingly been there, we always prayed for the military people and our uncles
who were in the war. We just took the religious influence for granted.
KW: How did the war affect your community?
RB: Well, a lot of community growth and perhaps even public instruction and even road
maintenance was curtailed. Things kind of came to a status quo. Everything kind of
limped along until after the war. That’s I guess my impression at such a young age.
KW: Did you know any young men who did not return from the war?
RB: Fortunately, not. I can’t think of anyone that I knew personally. But of course, the
tradition that was established during the war was that when people had military members
in the war, they would display a blue star in their windows. We could see it from the
street. If you had two or three family members, you had two or three blue stars. If one of
those members met their demise, the blue star was replaced with a gold star. And so I
knew a family that had gold stars in their windows, but I didn’t know the individuals.
KW: Where were you on Victory in Europe Day?
RB: You know, I tried to remember that, and I don’t recollect that day. Well, I do
remember VJ- Day ( Victory in Japan Day). In fact, leading up to VJ- Day I was about 11
years old, so I was getting older and being able to understand a little more of what was
going on. And surprisingly, incidentally if you can believe it I can to get opinionated
nicely quite a bit. One Saturday, I was driving with my father in his automobile. And the
radio in his car was on. He had a radio in his car, which wasn’t all that common in those
days. And there was a national commentator, Gabriel Beeter or somebody who was
commentating this bomb and he was saying that they now had a bomb large enough to
destroy a whole city. The bomb had been detonated in Japan. And his comment was that
now that we had city bombs, what will comes next. And island bomb? Of course, he
was talking about the first atomic bomb in Japan. And I remember at the time thinking,
in all my wisdom, that that is totally ridiculous. He just is talking about something
hypothetical because it was humanly impossible to have a city bomb. There’s a little
personal experience to live up to the day, VJ- Day. On VJ- Day, in the middle of the day,
my sister and I were playing in our front yard. And while we were playing out there, my
mother came to the door. And she came out and said that the war was over. This was
just a few days after this atomic bomb blast. And I remember that we were very elated to
think that this many years bloomed that had been about us, in our family and in our
school, church, and all the publicity that went along with it was now over. And we were
really jubilant. We jumped around and acted pretty happy about VJ- Day.
KW: After VJ- Day, what was your reaction to the knowledge that the bombs were being
used?
RB: I can’t say I had any particular reaction. I just assumed that bombs were part of
warfare. There were several interesting things that happened after VJ- Day. As I
mentioned earlier, in order to conserve on gasoline, would you believe that the public
sector had reduced the speed limits on the roadways. A maximum speed as I can
remember was something like 35 miles an hour even on highways. So the cars didn’t
normally drive very fast during this war because they wanted to save on their gasoline.
And after the war was over, with low and behold, they upped the speed limits on these
highways. And I remember being very astonished the automobiles could go 60 and 70
miles an hour because I hadn’t seen them do that in years. So I was impressed with the
fact that cars could go more than 35 miles an hour. I have over the years had several
experiences that would draw me back to the Second World War and the fact that I was
there when it happened. If you’re interested I can tell you a couple of those.
KW: Go right ahead.
RB: Okay. Well, in 1956 I was in Hobart, Tasmania. And of course, you know that is
the very most southern part of Australia close to Antarctica. And all there, the local
people reported to me that during the Second World War there was both the Queen
Elisabeth and the Queen Mary, who were the largest ocean liners of the Second World
War, who were primarily used for Atlantic travel between Europe and the United States,
were both way out of course down in Hobart, Tasmania. They had gone the devious
route to avoid submarines and what all. And they had come down there with troops.
And these ships that were say good for about 2,000 passengers each had approximately
50,000 military men, shoehorned into these very large ships so that these ships brought
100,000 soldiers into Hobart, way south of Japan. And there were Yankee soldiers
mostly. They then during the Second World War infiltrated Australia and helped defend
Australia from the Japanese. But I was impressed with that because I later had the
opportunity of traveling on the Queen Mary from South Hampton, England to New York
harbor. And to think that the ship had 50,000 men on, it certainly shows what some of
the war effort was like. I got another experience if you are interested.
KW: Sure.
RB: In 1958, I was traveling by ship from Bridgeton, Australia to Naples, Italy. And we
had a stop in Dicarta, Indonesia. And in that harbor, in 1958, which was several years
after the war there was still protrusions from the harbor of sunken ships. There was
multiple sunken ships in that harbor. And it looked kind of like some of those newsreels
that I had seen during the war. And so there was a real time experience on my part of
some of the consequences of the Pacific war activity.
KW: And did you ever doubt that the Allies would succeed in winning the war?
RB: ( Laughing) That is a good question. I guess I didn’t. I was young and youthful and I
didn’t doubt that they would sooner or later win, which of course they did.
KW: When were you scared the most during the war?
RB: Well, I guess the most negative experiences that I had was that very first day, that
Pearl Harbor day when my father was painting a very bleak picture of what the
possibilities were. That was a little startling, but I was pretty young and I still didn’t
entirely appreciate what he was saying. Another of the negative feelings was having of
course my own uncles participating in the war. We were always fearful for their lives.
KW: What was your happiest moment or memory of the war?
RB: ( Laughing) Well, I have already described VJ- Day. And that is the ultimate
ultimate, you know. The Victory in Europe Day was celebrated by the United States and
probably almost more than VJ- Day, even though I don’t have any personal recollections
of what I did that day. But VJ- Day was a relief day, and also I guess the few days and
months after VJ- Day I was happy to see my relatives come home, my uncle Joe in
particular because I knew him more and better than the others. And my new made
acquaintance Bob, who was there to become, to become my uncle and marry my Aunt
Ellen. We were glad to have these people home and they told us their war stories. And I
guess it was a bit of a removing of an ominous cloud. It was kind of a relief following
the end of the war.
KW: What kind of things did your uncles tell you about the war when they came home?
RB: Well, I guess I heard more war stories from my Uncle Bob. Now, he was a tank
driver like I said earlier; he drove a Sherman tank, which was one of the main tanks, the
Yankee tanks during the Second World War. And he told us a few stories about going
through Italy, but not a whole lot because it was a bad experience for him, definitely
when his tank was hit. I think it was his left leg was filled with shrapnel. And in fact,
throughout the rest of his life, he had no feeling in his left leg and over the years there
was a large sore which would fester up in his leg and out would come a small piece of
iron shrapnel that had been in his leg for years would come out. And he, I guess was my
closest exposure to an individual that had experienced these bad experiences.
KW: Did you feel that your uncles had changed at all because of the experiences being in
the war?
RB: Well, in real time I didn’t particularly pay attention to that, but of course as I
matured and as I look back on it today, I am sure that it effected them a lot. It affected
their attitudes, I think that they were and I might be wrong in this, but I guess my
impressions are that they were more jovial and more taking advantage of life after the
war. They were pleased that they could do what they were doing and they were pleased
to be amongst their friends and after having experienced these very bad times in their life.
They were more jovial compared to others.
KW: I don’t think so. What were holidays like in 1945?
RB: One of the holidays that I always enjoyed a lot was the 4th of July. Now I’m not sure
if that might have been biased a little bit, with the fact that that was my birthday, but we
always had family gatherings. The cousins and our uncles and aunts would get together
and we always had a lot of fireworks. And that seemed to be one of the most
rememberable holidays of the year for me.
KW: What were your hopes for the future after the war had ended?
RB: I was a magnanimous 11 years old. And I didn’t have any hope for the future
( laughing). I was living day by day. I didn’t have any exasperations because of or
otherwise the war. But I did have some interfaces in the following years when I became
college age and was striving to get an engineering degree at the University of Arizona. A
whole lot of my contemporaries were several years older than I, and they were GIs,
military men and going there on the GI Bill. And I had a lot of friends that were a few
years older than I that were veterans. I guess I vicariously picked up on some of their
experiences.
KW: Do you think that the war could have been prevented?
RB: I don’t know enough today to think it wasn’t prevented. I surely, Pearl Harbor was a
really bad thing, situation and all these 20/ 20 hindsight people who were also willing to
dig up spluts and advertise it are, there are certain elements that we’re willing to blame
the politician for not reacting differently. And in hindsight certain people, they have
seriously, it could have been a lot different. But I’ll give the politicians the benefit of the
doubt. They probably did the best things that they could and for the time.
KW: Did you think that the war was worth the price?
RB: Well, ( laughing) Germany and Japan really came out well, looks like they won the
war. They got a lot of Lend- Lease and the Marshall Plan helped from the United States.
Put them back on their feet. They were better off with a short period of time after the war
than they were before the war ( laughing). These villains came out pretty good if I say so
myself. I of course, another thing that is a truism and that is that there was giant
technological advancements during the Second World War. A lot of things, that came
out of the war technically, that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for pressure of trying
to defend ourselves. So humanity, in general had a higher standard of living because of
the technological advantages that came from wartime. In fact, waxing philosophical
here, I think it is a lot better to have a space race, to put a man on the moon which will
accelerate technology, which is acknowledged in well know spin- offs than to have to
fight a war and get the spin- offs from a war.
KW: True. Do you think fighting in the war was the moral thing to do?
RB: Good question. If we wish to take advantage of the advantages of this government
in the United States, for example the many municipal services that are offered, the
national government protection that we have through its military arms. And we’re going
to take advantage of all these benefits of government then I guess our moral obligation is
to support the government when we have to see warfare.
KW: What mistakes do you think the military made, if any, during the war?
RB: ( Laughing) Again, at the time of the war I was way too young to have an opinion on
those things. A lot of the 20/ 20 hindsighters of course documented and journalized the
events of the war. I can’t consciously think of anything that I thought was a glary
mistake.
KW: Did anything happen during the war that affected you for the rest of your life?
RB: Now, that’s a good question. Society in general, the humanity in general, the war
changed sombered a lot of things for humanity. I guess I am a recipient of the general
effects of the war on humanity. But I personally, individually can’t think of anything
savingly changed as a result of the war. I can only say that on a very superficial basis
that I was impressed with some of the things that changed after the war. I was impressed
of course you [ could] go 60 miles an hour. A very small thing was that when we moved
to Tucson, Arizona, we couldn’t get a telephone. The war effort had tied up all the, you
know they weren’t making telephones very fast in 1946, ‘ 47 timeframe. And we couldn’t
get a telephone, so that affected us a little bit. But not a lot because my father, a faculty
member at the University of Arizona had some ingenious veteran students who knew
how to commandeer the equipment from the techniques they used during the Second
World War. And they commandeered a telephone to come in and install the telephone in
our house for us one day. They climbed up the telephone pole and connected us onto the
system. So we had a telephone that we could call out on, but the telephone company
wouldn’t assign us a telephone number because they by policy didn’t have enough
telephones to get everybody, so we had to wait our turn. But that was a kind of funny,
superficial consequence of the war that I can think of. I don’t know why I even thought
of that.
KW: Well, I think that we’re about done, but I forgot to mention with our release form
that the transcripts will also be put into the library if that’s alright with you.
RB: Oh well, I’ll accept that on one condition.
KW: What’s that?
RB: That I get a copy.
KW: That’d be fine. Thanks.