David Byrne
Excerpts from an interview with Robert Byrne
“Yes, I served [in World War II]. My oldest brother William [Byrne] served, he ended up as a captain in the Fifth Ranger Battalion, until he was killed on March 3, 1944. My brother Joseph [Byrne] served in the Air Force, and he was on his last training mission at Westover field in Hartford when his plane crashed; he was the only one injured. He [Joseph] eventually avoided overseas duty and was discharged from the Air Force. I served five years in the service, eighteen months of which were spent in the South Pacific.”
“We were [our unit] en route overseas and we would talk about where going and what we were going to do. We thought that we would beat the Japanese in two weeks. That is the opinion that we had I guess of them at the time. And we were badly mistaken; sadly mistaken.”
“I imagine the war had changed [Waterbury Connecticut] for the better; everyone was working, everyone had work I guess. But they did have rationing; you could only get so much butter, so much eggs, you could only get so much sugar; everything was rationed. I guess they has kind of a hard time in the home front; they were trying to, probably, consume less so that we [soldiers] could have more in the service, or wherever we were. The people responded tremendously; there was great output of manufacturing, it was tremendous. They had a higher level of minorities in industry; the Jamaican’s had to come in to the factories to keep things going. So we had a lot of the come over here. Everybody backed the Second World War. Even when we returned, people were gracious to us. If they saw you in Mass, like in St. Louis Missouri, go to mass on a Sunday and they would come out to the sidewalk and invite you into their homes for dinner; they’d just pick you right out and invite you into their homes, it was great. They were nice; they were very good to us.”
“At Camp Landing, [training] was quite intense; especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became more intense. We would be training in the swamps and underbrush outside of Landing; the heat would be so bad down there. Then you would come home, say you started at 7:00 am, you’d come back at about four in the afternoon, half dead. They would have a band at the end of the camp when we came back, and they would play “When the Monkey Wrapped his Tail Around a Tadpole”, and it would straighten you up like you were drugged or something; you would strut in as if you were fresh as a daisy. I don’t know what music does, but it did that to us I know. It did that to me anyway. The Monkey Wrapped his Tail Around a Tadpole.”
“I was in a special training unit in Fort Devins Massachusetts, the reason we were there was because the manpower was so low at the end they were inducting illiterates in the service. We would teach them basic training in the morning, and from noon on they would go to regular teachers to learn the ABC’s. That is what out manpower was down to at the end of the war. Fortunately it ended before any of those had to be invested into the war effort, but that’s what they had to do. That’s how much the manpower had been used up on this country.”
“I think it’s atrocious [the way World War II is portrayed today in movies]. There is no need for the ghastly scenes that they show. I remember when I was a youngster they used to have cowboys, like Boot Gibson and Tom Hicks. They used to shoot each other. Do you know where they would shoot each other? They used to shoot each other in the hands; today you need to see the bullet going in, see the flesh being torn apart, you got to see the blood squirting out. We were brought up in more serene generation I guess. Not with all that violence. You would never see a cowboy picture with the guys shooting each other and killing each other; they would shoot the guns out of each other’s hands, that’s all. Boom, you would hear the gun go off and the other’s gun hit the ground, and that was the end of that guy. Gibson had a good shot; he could hit you right in the wrist!”