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To understand the background for this post, it will be helpful if you first read (if you haven’t already), Part I and Part II.
The following is a continuation of Mr. Spaulding’s and my conversation this month about his military service. 
* * * * *
L.: Before you went into the military, were you well disciplined?
Mr. S.: Not very much. No.
L.: Because you expected your students to be disciplined, which, I wish more people did, do you think you got a lot of that from the military?
Mr. S.: I believe so. Yes. You had to, or else.
L.: You went from boot camp back to Great Lakes.
Mr. S.: Sometime in between there they had you taking aptitude tests to show what you might be good at. I don’t know how they decided, but from Great Lakes they sent me to St. Louis to electrical school. I must have had some sort of test that showed I was capable of that.
L.: Do you remember when you went to electrical school?
David Spaulding, circa May, 1945, at the finish of electrical school. (Click photo to enlarge.)
Mr. S.: It was from about January of ’45 ‘til about the end of May of ’45. It was four months of electrical school. After electrical school I was out in California at a camp waiting to be sent someplace. I stuck around there for, I don’t know, three or four months. Then they finally decided they had a spot for me so they sent me to Hawaii. Oahu.
L.: So, you were shipped to Hawaii in about October of ’45?
Mr. S.: I’d say about then. I’d have to look someplace in my old Navy stuff. I had a little book of where I was and what ship and so forth. When I was in Hawaii the Army Signal Corps was teaching us to climb telephone poles. Spikes, leather belts and all that stuff. We would walk up the side of a pole, digging the spikes in. That had nothing to do with what I learned in electrical school. That was just a waste of time for the service.
L.: Were you in Hawaii waiting for what was next, and the next thing was Guam?
Mr. S.: Yes, I know I was in Hawaii through Christmas and then I took a destroyer ride to Guam. That was interesting, too. Rough ride. It was something like 3,500 miles from Hawaii to Guam on a rock-and-rolling destroyer. It was almost enough to make you seasick.
L.: I have in my notes that in Guam, you guarded the Japanese prisoners.
Mr. S.: Right.
L.: Were you ever afraid there?
Mr. S.: Oh, apprehensive, maybe. We had them working for us as prisoners. There was one time I and another guy were working from a camp and they went down through the jungle. They were cutting a trail through there to put in a series of poles for telephone lines. Two of us were in charge of fifteen prisoners. At about chow time at noon, we’d flip a coin to see who’d go back for a hot meal at the base. The rest of us would eat K-rations. That would leave one person there with a carbine and fifteen Japanese prisoners, machetes and axes and all sorts of things for clearing the jungle. If they decided they wanted to do away with you, they’d have a pretty good chance because the .30 caliber carbine, that was a short rifle, only had fifteen rounds in a magazine. You’d have to be a deadeye.
(Part IV will be posted Tuesday, August 18th, which is also Mr. Spaulding’s birthday, or Wednesday. I’ll post more about Oregon later this week.)
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Tags: Dave Spaulding
Marion Gunderson Art (and the Farmer's Daughter) 
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