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All right, this evening we're very pleased to have with us two guests, two guests who are going to reminisce with us about their experiences during World War II. It's a husband and wife team. As you can see, the gentleman is Dr. Kenji Ogata, who is a virtually a lifelong resident of Sterling, and his wife, Mrs. Wilma Ogata, also a lifelong resident. Dr. Ogata is one of two East American, Japanese

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Americans, AJA, who served in combat, who flew in combat in Europe in the Second World War. Now, he was a belly gunner on a B-24, a consolidated liberator. He flew with the 15th Air Force out of Italy, across the Adriatic, and then missions primarily in Southeastern Europe and probably up into Germany. But he's going to tell about his induction into the armed forces, some of the prejudices that he saw

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and felt due to the fact that he was an AJA, an American Japanese ancestry, because you know how the country felt about the Japanese during the Second World War. But he was an American citizen. He was born and raised here. He was loyal to our country and served in our armed forces, but he had to go through a great deal of turmoil in the process. He'll tell what it was like getting into a combat

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outfit, about what it's like to fly on missions, and more specifically what it's like to be shot down of enemy territory and survive. He was shot down over Romania, was picked up there by friendly partisans and harbored from the Nazis, taken across hostile Hungary, turned over to the Tito partisans in Yugoslavia, taken all the way across Yugoslavia back to the Adriatic, and then back to

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his home base. So he has a story which is incredible. And how many years ago that you went back to Romania? Was it three? About nine years ago, he and his wife decided to go back to Romania to see if they could find that family that harbored them from the Nazis. They found them and they had a wonderful reunion. So it's a tremendous story. Now Mrs. Zogana is going to tell us about what life

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was like back here in mid-America during World War II. Now when I was growing up and she was growing up, there was such a thing as a mixed marriage. And to me growing up, a mixed marriage is when a Catholic girl married a Protestant boy. In other words, you married someone out of your religion. That was considered almost to be a moral sin in the Catholic Church it was. And I'm sure

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probably Baptists and Lutherans didn't look a very favor upon it either. But that was what a mixed marriage was. We didn't even think about mixed racial marriages in those days. That's only been in recent times with, you know, guess who's coming to dinner, that type of an aspect. But no, no racial. But in her case, 1943, they were married and this was again, she married someone not of

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her race. And she's going to talk about some of the trials and tribulations of that during the war and some of the pressures placed upon her. So Dr. Zogana, if you'd like to come forward and tell us your story. And we're going to, again, students will probably interrupt you as you go on. If there's something to understand or if he uses a nomenclature or terminology that you're unfamiliar

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with, raise your hand and he'll respond. And by the way, you still are practicing dentistry in Sterling? Look at that. Boy. Oh, well, he's just a youngster. That's very good. [Audience member] I've got a map back there too, just in case you want to refer to your area. [Zogana] I'm really not sure where to begin because I don't see anybody my age here. So if I lie a lot,

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some of us remember. I'd like to sort of set the stage, Sterling, Illinois, prior to World War II. If you, are you all from Sterling? Are you from Dixon? It wasn't any different in the other towns either. Basic little differences. But in Sterling, if you were Catholic, you live west of Locust Street. And if you're a Protestant, you live east of Locust Street. There were some exceptions to

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that. Basically, that was the way it was. And as you said, mixed marriages, religion-wise, were really bad, you know. They were done, but there were people who were having a lot of difficulty. [Audience member] It was the exception, just like divorce was the exception. [Zogana] That's right. If you were Italian, you lived in Rock Falls. If you were of Mexican descent,

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we didn't have a whole lot prior to World War II, but you lived on Wallace Street, down by the mill, because that's where you worked. If you were black, we only had one or two families, and they lived about where the high school stadium is now, over the houses. The reason I knew that, because a beautiful lady was my babysitter, and so I spent a lot of time with her. And her husband was a

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maintenance man at the YMCA in those days. I was just talking with someone the other day, and they said there was a little Swedish congregation on Locust Street, about between 9th and 11th Streets. I wasn't aware of that, but I guess there were half a dozen families who were of Swedish descent, somewhere along the line. Let me see. Prior to World War II, we lived out by the hospital, and my

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parents came here in 1919. They came from Gary, Indiana. The YMCA wanted to start a cafeteria, and this was apparently a trend in the state of Illinois, because after my past, my mother passed away, I found various correspondences from half a dozen YMCA's in the state, all wanting my father to come there and start a cafeteria. Because he was an assistant manager of the cafeteria in the

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Gary YMCA. So I don't know why the trend. But anyhow, he came to Sterling and started YMCA cafeteria, and that's how I came to be here. As I said, we lived out by the hospital, and in those days, there was nothing west of the hospital. There was nothing north of the hospital, nothing east of the hospital. And so we could see the airport. And being a little boy, I was nuts about airplanes,

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and so I'd run out to the airport in my bicycle all the time. So naturally, when I grew up, got out of high school, the government started a civilian pilot training program, and it was a competitive sort of thing. Took the exams, and so I got to learn to fly prior to World War II, and I got my pilot's license, and so. When Pearl Harbor happened, I went down, that was on a Sunday, December 7th,

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and on Monday went down and enlisted in the Army, hoping, assuming that I would, of course, fly. It was a, seemed like a sensible follow-up. When I got to Chicago, Chicago was ahead of the Sixth Corps Army area. This encompassed about six states in the Middle West. And so everyone who enlisted or was drafted in the Sixth Corps area came to Chicago from those various six states. We, I remember

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that day well, because I went in with, there must have been about 30 of us all told, we happened to be enlistees, and we met in Chicago. There must have been four or five hundred people there who were enlistees or draftees, and we were awaiting a call to be shipped to wherever. And so as we're there, my name was called, and I went forward, and there was a major there, and he started to just

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call me every kind of SOB and you name it. I never heard of it before, but I was hit, and he was blaming the war on me, and he was really getting his kicks. I don't know, there are people like that, you know. And while he was delivering his tirade, he didn't realize, but in back of him, a colonel came out, who happened to be head of the Sixth Corps area, Army Sixth Corps area, and he

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listened just briefly and realized what was going on. And he walked up to this guy and tapped him on the shoulder, and this major swung around, and I thought he was gonna hit him. And he realized who it was he came to, and the colonel said, "That'll be all of that." And so he said, "Young man, you come with me." And I was glad to get out of there, because, you know, when this noisy

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room, and suddenly I'm the star of the show, you could hear a pinder hop, you know. So we went to his office, and he said, "If you want to, you can go home." He says, "I have the power to send you home." And I said, "I don't want to go home. I'm here for a reason." And he said, "Well," he said, "you saw what happened out there." And he says, "It won't happen under my command if I know about

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it." But he said, "You don't know what happens." And so I said, "Well, I'm here. I enlisted, and I'm here for a reason." And so with that, he seemed a little pleased. He said, "Well, good luck." And he says, "I'll see that you're on your way." So I was sent to Camp Grant, which was the reception center for the Sixth Corps area. All enlistees or draftees were sent there, and then they were

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sent to various, like the artillery or the tank corps, whatever, those that were kept in Camp Grant, because it was also a medical training center. So they had basic training for the medical corps there. Now, I was kept there and went through training, basic training as a medical corpsman. And it became a little obvious that I was not going to go to the Air Corps. And as time

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went on, I think there were probably six or eight other Japanese Americans in the training outfit that I was in. And then when the training was over, the whole company was present when they started reading out names, and you were sent to the various different camps in the various parts of the country to be assigned to the basic infantry, whatever. And so everybody -- there were

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about 200 in each company, and everybody was called off. And it became very obvious there were six or eight of us, of Americans of Japanese descent, standing there. And we were the last ones. And so it turns out that we were the only ones that were sent to the hospital in Camp Grant. Camp Grant was an Army general hospital. And it was a training hospital for general hospitals

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going overseas or wherever. So the whole units, like Cook County, would send us physicians, nurses, orderlies, surgeons, dermatologists, every specialty, which made up a general hospital unit. MR. DRAPER Did you go to the Corpsman at that point? It looked like you were going to the Army Corpsman. LTG SEMO: No, I worked in an office doing a typewriter.

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MR. DRAPER But now I was going to ask you, too, was the 442 organized yet? LTG SEMO No. MR. DRAPER Did you know about the 442? LTG SEMO No. Yes, I did.

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MR. DRAPER Okay. But that hadn't been -- LTG SEMO It hadn't even been thought of yet, I don't think. So anyhow, those units would come through and as a total unit, they'd train as a general hospital and they'd leave. But as time went on, because I became part of the permanent cadre, and so I didn't move, but as time went on,

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we became more and more Japanese American soldiers from all over the country. So it was obvious that we were being held there for whatever reason. And so I would -- I was trying to get out of there. I really wanted to fly. You know, I thought, this is dumb. So I went through the channels a couple -- first thing I did when the air cadets had their exam, I went over to -- I got permission and I

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went over to headquarters and took the exam. And it turned out I did very well. And -- but when it came time, some of the other guys that took it, the Caucasians, they went and I stayed. So I went over to see -- I happened to know -- had met General Aide, who was a good friend of a gentleman who started our airport here, Gene Jacoby. And so I went over and talked to him

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about it. And he said, well, he said, you had the highest grade, but he said, I can't send you, he says, and I can't tell you why, he says, those are orders. And he said, you can assume why, but he said, nothing is written. So every time something would come up, they had a glider training program. So I volunteered for that. And nothing. It got to be a point where I

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-- I wouldn't go to the company commander anymore because he wouldn't let me go. And so I went anyhow. And that's why I did so much KP and did a lot of weekend duty. And they were nice to me. But I enlisted for all of those things. And of course, I was turned down. One time I found out that they were sending second generation Japanese to Minnesota. The Army has a language school there.

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And I thought, well, that'd be a good -- that'd be one way to get out of here. So I went over to G2, which is Army Intelligence. And by this time, I guess everybody knew a little something about me. And when I went there, the tech sergeant says, what do you want? And I told him what I wanted. And he says, did you come through company headquarters? And I says, no. And he says,

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well, I figured that. He says, well, just a minute. He says, I'll see if the colonel will talk to you. So in a few minutes, the colonel comes out, and the guy's about six foot four, handsome, blonde guy, probably Swedish. And he says, what can I do for you? And I said, well, I want to enlist for the language school of Minnesota. And he said, you speak Japanese?

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And I says, oh yeah. Of course I did. [Laughter] With that, he started just spouting Japanese at me, you know. And I said, holy Christ. [Laughter] And, you know, he could tell from the expression on my face that I did. And he says, well, I kind

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of figured that. He said, and he says, go on back to the company. He says, you know, he says, we really can't use you. He says, I need some guys that can really speak Japanese, who can read it, who can write it. And what we're going to do is train them in the vernacular of the Japanese Army, so we can interpret what they're going to do, because the language is different, you know.

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They've broken the codes, and so they had to teach them these words. So that was another bust. It was almost two years before I got out and I was sent to Fort Sheridan. Now, in the meantime, they were organizing, I think, both the 100th Infantry and the 442nd. One of them, I don't remember which was which. 100th Infantry, I guess, was Hawaii, right, honey? No, the other way around.

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Whichever. Anyhow, there was a big group from Hawaii, and they're really tough, those guys. And then the other group was Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. So there were two groups that were training all in the infantry. As it turned out, they were then combined, I think. And when they went overseas, as it turned out, there was the most decorated

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unit in the history of the United States. And because they felt they had something to prove, like I did. And thank God I didn't go with them. But-- You went to Italy, but you didn't go with them. No, I didn't go with them. I was sent to Fort Sheridan, and from Fort Sheridan,

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it was--again, it was a holding center. And so I was a company clerk for this thing for a little while. And again, I'm sending letters and stuff. And finally, just before New Year's, I was sent to Las Vegas to do the Army Air Force Gunnery School. And they told me in Fort Sheridan that General Hap Arnold was the guy that made the decision. I don't know why. I don't know. Apparently,

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he got enough of my letters. So anyhow, the day I was transferred was the last day that anyone in the Army could transfer into. So on the way out to Las Vegas, I met up with a group of Seabees who had just come back from the South Pacific. Seabees were civilians who had volunteered. And these guys were all expert technicians. These were the guys that could build bridges and

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build anything they could do. But they were civilians. And they were on some kind of a leave, and they were going back out to the California, I think it was. I got to talking to these guys exchanging information with them and being fascinated by their stories. On the train, there was a conductor. Again, he was one of these brave people who didn't like

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me and was enjoying every moment. He couldn't restrain himself to be in the smoking car and talking about the goddamn Japs and son of a bitches. I'd like to be there so I could do whatever he thought he could do. And of course, this was all for my benefit. Finally, the guy that had the Seabees got sick and tired of it. He told them in uncertain terms to

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knock it off. He didn't want to hear it anymore. And he was a very impressive person. The conductor didn't bother me anymore. Well, anyhow, I went to Las Vegas. And when you do training for gunnery school, you shoot shotguns and you get in turrets and you shoot rifles and you shoot a lot of everything. So when I was going through the shotgun phase, one of my instructors, the guy

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that was head of that portion of it, he was a champion skeet shooter in the United States for, I don't know, in the early 40s and late 30s. He obviously didn't like Japanese. He was going to flunk me out. Fortunately, there was a guy, a friend of mine, Russ Anderson, who was from Sterling, Illinois, was also an instructor in that phase of the training. And he talked him out of

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got me into his group and got me out of that deal. We finished that. After you finish training in your various specialties as a gunner, an engineer, a radio operator, then there are six enlisted men in a bomber. And we were all either gunners or engineers, system engineer, radio operator.

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Then we all went to Lincoln, Nebraska. In Lincoln, Nebraska, you, six men were put together as a crew of enlisted men. Four men as the officers would be the pilot, the co-pilot, the navigator, and the bombardier. So they would put together six and four. And then after the six and four, we'd put together, then they'd put the ten together. And so that's, we met in Lincoln, Nebraska,

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at six and four, we became a crew of ten. From then, you would go to bomber training as a crew. I remember the, when the six of us enlisted men found each other and, you know, got acquainted, then I think it was the following day when the six and the fours all got together. So we found our officers and as we presented ourselves to the officers, I can remember my pilot, who

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today is one of my best friends, but at that point in time, I'll never forget, the first thing I heard him say was, he was from Alabama. He said, "I hope there's no nigger lovers here among you." And I thought, oh Jesus, I gotta go through this again. But that was his only racial hang-up and had no problems after that, racially. We went to Tucson, Arizona and trained

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as a crew. And you did a lot of bombing of targets in the desert. And after we completed training, then we were assigned a meeting place in Topeka, Kansas. Went to Topeka, Kansas, we picked up a new B-24 bomber and we were on our way. So we flew to New Hampshire, spent the night, flew to Gander, Newfoundland. And we had to spend four or five days there because of the weather.

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We didn't know at this point where we were going. We knew we were going to Europe somewhere. So when we finally took off, you had sealed orders which you opened about two or three hours mid-ocean to see where you were going. Turned out we were being assigned to go to Italy, not England. We thought we were going to go to England. So we flew from Newfoundland to the Azores,

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spent the night in the Azores. Next morning we flew from the Azores to Marrakech in Africa. And then we spent one night in Marrakech, went to Tunis one night. In Tunis we went to Italy. We left our airplane in Italy and was sent to our group. And we got a ride with a bomber pilot who had finished his missions and he was really happy. And we had a stripped down B-24 that they

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were using as a shuttle. And so he flew us from southern Italy up to near Foggia. And I don't think we got over 50 feet off the ground. Just got pretty scared to hell out of everybody. But he was feeling good because he was all done. We got to the 15th Air Force in the 451st Bomb Group, assigned to the 726th Bomb Squadron. We were supposed to do some training for about 30 days

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before we would be sent on a mission. We'd do some practice flying and shooting targets in the Adriatic Ocean and things like that. So we were only there a few days. And at 3.30 in the morning they came and woke me up and said, "Are you Ogata?" And I said, "Yeah." He says, "Well, go down to briefing." He says, "You're flying today." I said, "Oh, I think you made a mistake.

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We just got here and, you know, we don't have to fly for 30 days." He says, "Ogata," he says, "get up. You're going to fly today." And because they were losing a lot of Baltard gunners at that point, because there were a lot of low level, low SV grades too at that time. Baltard gunners were a little more vulnerable. So I had my rude awakening. Anyhow, I went to briefing, came back,

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and was assigned a crew. You'd get all your gear and your parachute, and a truck would pick you up, and then they'd drop you off at a bomber. They took us out, and I got off at the bomber that I was assigned, and the crew was there before me. And the officers were inside the enlistment and were still outside.

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And I said, "I'm your Baltard gunner." And they just looked at me. Nobody would talk to me, you know. And I thought, you know, this is a hell of a way to have to fight a war. I'm scared to death. But I'm trying to rationalize with myself. Well, maybe they did lose their Baltard gunner than

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they before. I thought, well, maybe they feel really bad about that. But I thought it was a strange way to -- anyhow, I flew that mission, didn't get killed, came back, and I told our assistant engineer, we're describing the bombing raid and how they were shooting at us and everything. And this guy never did fly. At that time, he could go to the flight surgeon and

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I don't know what that term was, but you could ground yourself. Later in the war, they didn't allow that. I don't know if -- in World War II, when you flew in a bomber, you, of course, had a parachute, which they hoped you never would have to use. They did not teach you. There was no practice because there was no time for that kind of stuff.

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I remember -- I don't remember what mission it was, but I said, the -- see, the Christmas Day of 1944, we were awakened at 3.30 and we were told we're going to fly, go to briefing. I had a premonition that I never had before then or since that I was going to die that day. And I wasn't real excited about that. But the mission was uneventful.

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We did have some problems. We were the last plane in our group to come back. I don't remember why that was. But we got back and because we were much later than everybody else, the mess hall had closed. We didn't live in luxury in Italy. We did eat inside, but we slept in tents. Unlike the Eighth Air Force, they lived in luxury. They lived in barracks. They had bicycles. They could

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go to town. We had no towns near us or anything. But in retrospect, I think it would be very difficult for those gentlemen who flew out of England because if you live in relative comfort and then you have to go out and risk your life and maybe get killed or come back, and then now you got to leave this again. And that has to be mentally traumatic, I think.

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We didn't have all those kind of fixings, you know, so we weren't leaving so much. Anyhow, when we came back, we were late. They had to open up the mess hall again, and they were a little upset about that. I can remember we were a little upset too because we weren't really on a picnic that day and we didn't think it was asking too much to be fed.

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But like I say, war does funny things to people. It doesn't really change people an awful lot. You rally together for a cause, you know, but still those little human frailties come out. We -- because I came back on Christmas Day and my premonition didn't work out, I was really happy. And I was -- in fact, I was so happy I really got stinking drunk that night.

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And needless to say, I didn't think we were going to fly the next day, but come 3.30 in the morning, they woke us up again. And so I had a -- a real excellent headache, and I said to the other guy, the enlisted guys in our tent, I said, "I'm not going to go to briefing. I'll wait. You come back and you can tell me about it." And they

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said, "Okay." And when they came back, I don't know, one thing led to another, and we just didn't have time enough to talk about it. So I didn't really know where we were going even that day. So as it turned out, it was the longest mission that the 15th Air Force had ever flown. We flew from Italy all the way across Europe, and they had permission to fly into Russia, and we were

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flying back out of Russia and bombing Poland, Auschwitz and Poland. And because they figured if they did that -- and we had the permission of the Russians to fly in and come out -- that they wouldn't be expecting heavy bombers from that direction. So maybe we could eliminate fighters from coming after us. As it turned out, it wasn't until a few years ago that I

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found out what Auschwitz and Poland was. Auschwitz and Poland is what you know better as Auschwitz. Auschwitz was not our primary target that day. It was a railroad marshalling yards. It was just a few miles from there. Anyhow, we lost -- there was very heavy anti-aircraft fire. And I don't know how to describe any aircraft fire to you except that they're at least 90

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millimeter cannon shells, and they had such awesome clusters of those in Europe like in Vienna or Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Lenz, Austria. Many of those places could -- they had so many guns that they could throw up a mile square area of these shells going off. What they would do is try to anticipate because, you know, when you have 1,500, 2,000 bombers coming from one direction,

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it's pretty hard to hide that fact. And so what they would try to do is time the direction and the time that you would go over a given place perhaps, and then they would send up this stuff. Well, when you have that many airplanes involved, they -- we did what you call saturation bombing. And saturation bombing is, let's say, a cluster of 150 bombers, each cluster. They all would watch

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the lead plane, and when the lead plane dropped its bombs, everybody dropped their bombs. All those bombardiers weren't looking in their sight, just the lead bombardier. And that's called saturation bombing. When one went, they all went. So it was kind of a different situation. Anyhow, we had to go to Auschwitz in Poland. We lost,

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I thought, one engine, and my intercommunication was shot out also, so I didn't -- I couldn't talk to anybody in the airplane. And as it turned out, we lost two engines. I didn't know that, too. We had got back to -- and again, I didn't know what country I was in. And we got back as far as Hungary, and the decision was made to abandon ship. So I didn't know what was going on until

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somebody beat on the turret with a hammer. That was a signal for me to come out of there. So I came out of there. It was obvious everybody had their chest packs on and everything, that they were going to out. And so, in all the excitement, again, I never had a chance to talk about it. Incidentally, in the real thing, it isn't like in the movies, you know,

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where you see these guys, bombers, carrying on conversations with each other. It's so damn noisy in there, you can't do that, you know. So I never had a chance to discuss where we were. Through a fluke, I was the last one out of the airplane. Usually the pilot was the last one. But he didn't see me, and he thought I was gone. So as it turned out, I realized that there was

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nobody else in there, so I went. I have to tell you that, oh gosh, it was just a few days before that we'd had a lecture by a major and a pair of troopers. This was December 1944. By this time, the Allies were doing very, very well, and Hitler wasn't doing all that well. And as it turned out, a lot of our airmen, especially the enlisted men in the back end of

00:40:01.200 - 00:40:35.200

B-24s, were dying. The reason they were dying is, in the back end of the B-24, if you had to jump out, they had a door that opened up this way. And you had to face forward and sit on the edge and roll out. It wasn't a big enough door that you could jump out or you might hit something. So it seems that when you rolled out of your airplane, and the airplane's going 160 to 200 miles an hour,

00:40:35.200 - 00:41:08.720

as soon as you hit the airstream, they'd roll out like that. And in their excitement, when they would pull their chute, they'd just wrap up in that thing. And there's no way to disentangle yourself if that happens, you know. So a lot of them--and I saw it happen. I saw that happen many times. Those guys died, you know. Besides that, there were pitchforking parachuting

00:41:09.600 - 00:41:40.800

airmen, and they were shooting them. And so this paratrooper was lecturing us and telling us that the foibles of the guys in the back end and the mistakes they were making and what not to do. And so I can remember him saying that you do not try to open your chute while you're tumbling like that. The first thing you do is throw out your arms and stiffen your body,

00:41:40.800 - 00:42:13.040

and you'll come down at a 45-degree angle. And then he said, "You've all flown enough to know and have some idea as to your altitude." So he said, "When you get--try not to open your chute until you get about a thousand feet above the ground. Make it less time that you're vulnerable." And he said, "You've all flown enough. If you see a house or a vehicle--you probably won't see any

00:42:13.040 - 00:42:46.080

animals, but any kind of a motor vehicle, you have some idea, you know, how high you are." And thirdly, he said, "Don't--under any circumstances, don't open your chute while you're in clouds." So when I jumped out, I--sure enough, boy, you start tumbling like this, and I thought, "That guy sure was right." And so I did this, like he said, and sure enough, you

00:42:46.640 - 00:43:18.480

stop rotating, and you come down at a 45-degree angle like that. And that's a--it's a euphoric feeling in that for the first time in my life, there wasn't a reference to something that you're close enough to touch or throw a ball to or something like that. And--but you don't really have a sensation of falling. Your clothes are fluttering like this, because I don't know what

00:43:18.480 - 00:43:43.680

terminal velocity is. I always get them mixed up. It's either 126 or 162 miles an hour. It's fast anyhow. So you reach terminal velocity. But your clothes, of course, at that speed, they're really fluttering, but you don't feel like you're falling. It's, you know--and it's really kind of fun. Everything looks nice. - Was it daylight? - Yes, it was daylight. It's two o'clock in the afternoon.

00:43:43.680 - 00:44:12.720

So the whole--as far as you can see, it's all cloud cover. So I didn't know at the time until much later that we jumped out at 5,000 feet. When I--when I went into the clouds, I can remember what they were saying, you know, about all the other stuff and don't open your chute. When I entered the clouds,

00:44:12.720 - 00:44:38.640

I could swear I heard a beautiful voice choir singing. What? I don't know. And--and I can hear that guy saying, "Now, don't open your chute in the clouds. Wait till you get through. You can see the ground." And with that, it was like somebody took my hand and did this. And I'm thinking, "No, no, no, no. Don't do that. Don't do that." And I did that.

00:44:38.640 - 00:45:06.160

When you go from 126 or 162 miles an hour to--you look up and the canopy was open, you know, that's a sudden stop. I--it was open. I looked down and my feet hit the ground. I did two fast somersaults. If I'd have waited a tenth of a second longer, I wouldn't be telling you this story. You can take it for what it's worth.

00:45:06.160 - 00:45:32.000

But I guess my time hadn't come yet. Anyhow-- >> You heard an angel was writing with you, right? >> I think so. So I gathered up my chute. There was--it was a dense ground fog. It was so--I couldn't see you from here. And it stayed like that for 24

00:45:32.000 - 00:46:01.120

hours at least. I didn't know what to do with my parachute. There was only about an inch of snow on the ground. And I could hear artillery firing there. And needless to say, that gets your attention. But I couldn't see anything. Now, airmen in World War II, no matter where they were, had little escape kits. They're about this big, about that big. And they had concentrated food tablets

00:46:01.840 - 00:46:36.400

and $51 bills with gold seals. They had maps of the areas that you were in. They had an arm band that you could attach with an American flag here. And on it it said, in various languages, "Take me to your underground." Because-- in--oh, and they had a compass. Compass is very valuable because wherever you're shot down in

00:46:36.400 - 00:47:08.720

Europe, you would head south, at least the 15th Air Force. If you were north in Italy, why, hopefully, you'd get south and run into some partisans. So in Yugoslavia, they had very active partisans. Tito was with the Communists. And Mikhailovich was a royalist. He was for the king. They hated each other. Even when the war was going on, they were killing each other. And so we were not

00:47:08.720 - 00:47:33.040

supposed to discuss politics. We were picked up by either one of those groups. The-- [Audience member] When you landed, did you know what country you were in at all? [Burr] No, I did not. I had no idea. So, anyhow, like I say, it was two o'clock in the afternoon, and I could hear that artillery

00:47:33.040 - 00:48:01.440

firing, and I was scared to death. And I gathered up my parachute, because I knew I should hide that somewhere. I didn't know how long the fog would last. I had to hide that somewhere. And I carried it for several miles until I finally, inadvertently, ran into a haystack. That's how dense it was. So I hid it in that haystack. And I just-- I would cross roads, and that was what's really scary,

00:48:01.440 - 00:48:29.360

because you didn't know if anybody was coming one way or another. And if they were, you hardly had time to get out of the way, you know. But these are country roads I'm talking about. So I went-- if I'd come to a stream, why, I'd walk in the stream, because I heard dogs barking at various times, and I was sure they were looking for me. They probably weren't, but

00:48:29.360 - 00:48:54.880

that's what I thought. And so I would walk and rest and walk and rest, and my feet were practically frozen, because going in the water, you know, like that. But when you're scared-- -Were there any other crew members, or were you all alone? -All by myself. -Okay. -As it turned out later, the reason I was all by myself was because

00:48:54.880 - 00:49:21.920

I talked to my bombardier, or my navigator, years later. This was a young man who was on his first mission. Scared to death, 18 years old, or 19, I think. And he admitted to me when they were doing some circling, we were losing altitude, and the pilot told him that we were going to bail out. And so he said, "Give me a heading." And he says, "I think I gave him a heading in

00:49:21.920 - 00:49:50.960

the wrong direction. Therefore, we're heading back into enemy territory. You were the last guy out. You were the one to end up in enemy territory, and everybody else did not." That was the reason for that. Anyhow, I managed to survive for the first 24 hours, and I came and ran right into a guy. He was coming out of the fog, and we met each other, and we were about from here to here.

00:49:52.320 - 00:50:31.840

And I think he was as afraid as I was. He looked, he looked very dark and complected, or complexioned, I should say. And he was wearing a heavy coat, and he was, he started to signal to me to come. And I didn't know whether to come or not. You know, I didn't know what to do. I also had forgotten my .45 in the airplane, so I had no

00:50:34.160 - 00:51:09.600

idea. So then he started making noises like a zrrrrr. Boom. There you go. What's this guy saying? And I did that a few times, and I thought, and I thought, "He's telling me that our bomber crashed." I agree with that. Then he was doing this. He said, "Well, he's telling me that everybody's dead." And I thought, "I know better than that. Maybe some of them were dead, but they went out ahead

00:51:09.600 - 00:51:35.360

of me, and, you know, they got out, and their chutes opened, and all that stuff. But he wanted me to follow him. So I followed him, and we walked for several miles, and we came to a little town called Nagyarkasi. And five of the crew members were there. We were eleven that day, because we had one extra man who was a photographer. Photographers never flew the same crew. They

00:51:35.360 - 00:52:06.720

put them in different airplanes, because it was sort of potluck. They wanted to, they survived longer, I think, if they did that. So anyhow, it turns out that five of my crew members had slept in this little town, in beds. The other five were in another town a few miles away. It turned out they slept in beds. Only Dum Dum here was outside all night.

00:52:06.720 - 00:52:37.200

Anyhow, what this gentleman was trying to tell me was that our bomber had crashed in their cemetery. This was, which we went and tried to gather. The main thing we were interested in, especially the pilot, was to get the orders and that kind of thing, and the codes, all that. We burned those. We found those, and burned those.

00:52:37.200 - 00:53:08.640

We stayed for a couple of days with a Hungarian man, his family, and daughter. Turned out that Mr. George Marcus had worked in Akron, Ohio, as a young man. Akron, Ohio, he said. And it was a Goodyear rubber plant. And he saved his money as a young man, came home, married his sweetheart, learned to have this daughter, and had a little bit of store in their home. So after two or

00:53:08.640 - 00:53:41.520

three days, he, all of the English he knew came back. So it was a very interesting little visit. Now our idea was how to get home. So there were Russian, a couple of Russian soldiers there, and on patrol. And we finally garnered enough information to see where the first garrison of Russian soldiers would be. I don't remember what town it was, but we started heading east, because we knew

00:53:41.520 - 00:54:17.360

that they flew one airplane a week, a C-47, or DC-3, whatever we please, into Bucharest, Romania, once a week, in case there were stragglers that would manage to get over there. So we kind of held a pseudo vote on it. The other option was to go into Yugoslavia and risk getting shot at quite a lot. And we decided maybe that was the, we were safer here, where the Russians had taken over Hungary

00:54:17.360 - 00:54:42.400

and Romania. So they weren't too interested in us, because we wanted to go that way, and they were going this way. But we were, we found out that the Russian officers ate much better than the Russian soldiers, and so we tried to find them. And the pilot was nice enough to introduce all of us as officers, which they couldn't tell the difference. We didn't have uniforms on, just flight suits,

00:54:42.400 - 00:55:21.440

and without insignias. So it took us roughly 30 days to traverse most of Hungary, because we landed below Lake Balaton, which is, if you know anything about Europe, that's quite a pleasure place for all of Europe to go and spend the summer. But we rode in various devices. We walked, we rode in ox carts, of which there were many. We rode on trains, which didn't do too well, because the

00:55:21.440 - 00:55:53.840

Russians were, the Army was always borrowing the engines to do whatever they wanted to do with it, and they'd leave the cars sit. One night we crossed the Danube under fire. That was exciting. They put us on a barge, and we were in a huge woods on the Danube River, and there were thousands of Russian soldiers in there, trucks and whatnot. And there was artillery fire

00:55:55.280 - 00:56:20.960

all over the joint. I don't know who was doing what to who, but they were trying to transport a lot of guys across the river. And so they were going one direction, we were going the other direction. But they put us on this barge, and we couldn't figure out. It was pitch black, you know, and only occasionally you could see a little something because of the artillery.

00:56:21.760 - 00:56:50.240

But as it turned out, they had the cables strung across the river, and the barge, you know, was probably twice as big as this roof. And they had these Hungarian men with sticks, you know, poles with notches in them, and they were walking this thing. That's cheap labor, I tell you. I don't know, 40 or 50 guys, you know, pushing that, against that cable. So eventually we got

00:56:51.120 - 00:57:32.160

to Romania, and it took about a month. We had a lot of exciting instances. We were in the town of Craiova, Romania, and we went. There were some, we heard that there were stores that still had some goods left in them. So we all wanted to buy socks. You know, when you wear socks for almost a month, they get a little gamey. And so we were hoping we could buy socks. And when we went

00:57:32.160 - 00:58:01.760

in, we were in that store quite a while, and we realized there's a lot of commotion outside. And pretty soon a guy come in, he was, he spoke some English. He was trying to interview us. He was a newspaper reporter. And he said the news was that we were the advance guard, and we were going to replace the Russian army, which they were tickled to death because the Romanians were scared to

00:58:01.760 - 00:58:33.520

death of the Russians. And they were praying that this was true. When we, of course, we had to tell them what the story was. And when we went outside, this is Boulevard there, there must have been 40, 50,000 people out there that, you know, the news got around, and they all wanted to see the American soldiers. So that was a kind of a disappointment, I guess, for those people.

00:58:33.520 - 00:59:09.600

Anyhow, we eventually we got to Bucharest, Romania. In Bucharest, Romania, there was a colonel, I think a captain, and a lieutenant, and a master sergeant. And they represented the United States. The, of course, like we are prone to do here, we don't think we ought to speak anybody else's language. None of them spoke Romanian.

00:59:09.600 - 00:59:42.960

The gentleman that was their interpreter had lived in the United States, and I only had to talk to him for about two minutes to realize this guy's a real con artist. And he was the janitor in the schoolhouse that they billed us in, and it was their headquarters. And I, it's almost ludicrous to realize it was this janitor who was literally representing the

00:59:42.960 - 01:00:08.080

United States of America in Romanian, because he's the only guy who could speak the language. Our officers couldn't. That's something to think about, you know. I mean, if you think, know anything about the State Department, people who work for the State Department are civil service employees, nothing the matter of that, but their jobs are secure.

01:00:09.920 - 01:00:37.440

Most of them don't even know how to speak the language of the country they're in, and they could care less. They can get interpreters. You get a guy like this janitor. He speaks good English. That's scary, isn't it? Well, it's true. I hope it's changing, but that is really frightening. I was shot down. We did get out of there. They did

01:00:37.440 - 01:01:07.040

send an airplane in there. We got out of that place. They flew us back to Italy and de-loused us. Then, a short time later, shot down again. This time we crash landed in Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, they had two different places. One was the island of Vis, and that, as the war went on, they moved that up to the northern part of Yugoslavia,

01:01:07.040 - 01:01:43.040

and there was another area that was held by American Rangers, British commandos, Italian partisans, Yugoslav partisans, French troops. They just held this one five square mile area open because when you send two, three thousand bombers up into Europe every few days or many days, many times consecutive days, there are dozens and dozens of casualties of one kind or

01:01:43.040 - 01:02:10.240

another. Some of them can manage to get back to a little place like this where they can at least salvage part of it or whatever. We had an engine shot out, and the gas was streaming out of this thing, and we were afraid it was going to blow up. We managed to crash land it. The thing I remember about that is we jumped out while it was still rolling and caught on fire,

01:02:10.240 - 01:02:36.560

and I think the British commandos that came out, and by this time the ammunition was on fire, and it was 50 caliber bullets in about this big around, about that long. And these things were going every which way, but every fifth or tenth one was a tracer so that you could see where they were going. And these guys didn't pay any attention. They just went in there with a foam, and

01:02:36.560 - 01:02:59.920

they had more guts. But they had the reason it was imminent that they get that airplane off of there because they only had one strip, and all these airplanes are circling waiting to get in there, you know, so they had to get a—they blew some of them up, I guess, to get them off clear of the thing. So that was interesting. I don't know what else to tell you.

01:02:59.920 - 01:03:18.000

I flew 35 missions, and that was enough. Anybody have any questions? I don't really know what you don't know or don't care. You finally got back to your base, and you finally made it back to the States. Now, when did you come back, and what month?

01:03:18.000 - 01:03:32.720

April 1945. I had enough points because I flew so many missions, and yeah, that was a point— I thought 25 missions was max, but you flew 30. Well, in England, they had 25 missions, and we had—then they changed it to

01:03:32.720 - 01:03:59.200

35 missions and 50 sorties. But as the war got better, a sortie was a double mission. Some missions counted for two sorties, so you get a total of 35 or 50. They changed that, and then I ended up—I had about 57, so I got cheated a little bit. But you came back in April.

01:03:59.200 - 01:04:04.240

Yes, I did. Now, did you stay in uniform until the war was over? You did. Oh, yeah.

01:04:04.240 - 01:04:15.280

And then when did you finally get out of the uniform? April? What? May? I kind of forget. May of '45. July.

01:04:15.280 - 01:04:28.160

Was it July? Okay. I came home on a boat, and I was in a repple depo in Naples when Roosevelt was— He died. Went and died.

01:04:28.160 - 01:04:48.320

Yeah, he probably went and died. But then I came home on a boat, and we had a submarine attack one day out in New York, and oh, Jesus. But it wasn't successful. Now, when you got back to the States, where did they assign you? Did you go back to

01:04:48.320 - 01:05:06.880

maybe as an instructor in a gunnery school? No. They offered to send me to Air Cadets, and I said, "No, you had your chance. No, thank you." So they sent us on an R&R to Miami, and we bought an old car and drove it out.

01:05:06.880 - 01:05:13.680

Were you married at that time? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, did she come to New York to greet you, or did she know you were coming? She didn't know I was coming.

01:05:13.680 - 01:05:25.860

She didn't know. No. Okay, any other questions or comments before we get the rest of the story? I'm going to fall early.

01:05:25.860 - 01:05:46.020

Well, thank you. Thank you very, very much. Now we're going to have Mrs. Wilmore got to talk about some of the things that she remembers from the World War II time frame when she and Dr. Gatta were married.

01:05:46.020 - 01:06:11.380

Some of the pros and some of the cons. Thank you. First of all, I should tell you that when Kenji told you he was nuts about airplanes, he courted me in a Piper Cub. He took his weekly allowance, and that's what it was spent

01:06:11.380 - 01:06:46.420

for, and if I wanted to go, that's fine. Otherwise, no. On Pearl Harbor Day, my landlord in Sterling suggested that I find another boyfriend. During this time, I wrote to a nursing school for information, and they rewarded me with a list of two schools that might accept one of my nationality because my name was Ogata, they

01:06:46.420 - 01:07:24.500

assumed. When Kenji was sent from Chicago to Camp Grant, his spirits were at a low ebb, to say the least. He called his brother here in Sterling, and his brother and fiance and I went to Rockford to cheer him up. So he had the night off. He didn't have to be back to, I don't know, 10 or 11 at Camp Grant.

01:07:24.500 - 01:07:52.580

So we picked him up, and we drove around Rockford, and we joked and did our best, and we were doing a pretty good job, we thought, getting his spirits back where they belong. We were going east on State Street. A car drove up beside us with a First Louis in it, and a girl who looked terrified, and he said, "Pull over." So we did, and he said,

01:07:52.580 - 01:08:25.540

"What are you doing? Who are you? What is your name?" Got all this information. Camp said, "Well, we just came up. My brother's in the service, went through this information." So the officer drove away. We turned around and started back to camp to take Kenji back. We were going south on Kishwaukee when five squad cars convened on us. You couldn't have done it

01:08:25.540 - 01:08:52.100

better if you'd tried in the movies. They got us out of the car. They put each one of us in separate cars. This young man had called and said there were spies in this car. So we were taken to the police station, and the chief of police was called out of bed, which didn't put him in a very good mood, but it turned out he was a good friend of Kurt Booker,

01:08:52.100 - 01:09:30.500

who was chief of police in Sterling. Kenji and his brother both were good friends of Kurt Booker, and so all we had to do was identify, and they apologized to us, and that was all. But anyway, that was our experience as spies. We had a lot of trouble finding a place to live in Rockford, to find an apartment. Places were scarce in any event, but there was suddenly no vacancy if you

01:09:30.500 - 01:10:01.060

had a Japanese name. If I went to look at an apartment, it would be available until I told them my name, and then they'd say, "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot my cousin or so-and-so is already." So we did have trouble. We finally found an apartment, and it was elegant. It consisted of one room, and it was not a very large room. What had been, it was a second floor. It was a

01:10:01.060 - 01:10:33.700

bedroom, and what had been the closet, one end they had put an ice box in, there were open shelves, and a two-burner gas plate. We had a daybed, which folded out, but you had to fold that back up in order to put the card table up so you could eat, to have a place to eat. So it was my first experience at something like that. To heat the water,

01:10:33.700 - 01:11:06.420

you had to go downstairs, out around, and down to the basement, and fire up the gas heater. The only problem with that was that anybody in any of the other rooms heard somebody going downstairs, they'd immediately go to the bathroom and lock themselves in so they could have hot water for a bath, and you didn't get any of them. So while we were there, two, a couple moved in,

01:11:06.420 - 01:11:31.460

and they were from an internment camp. They were a Japanese couple and wonderful. The fellow has passed away, but his wife is still a good friend of ours, and they told us of the real hardships that they had. The things that happened to us were nothing by comparison. - Was it in Manzanar? I mean, what camp they were from? Manzanar or where?

01:11:31.460 - 01:12:01.700

- Utah. - Okay. - Yeah. Things happened all along the way. One time I remember we went downtown, and a policeman was so rude in what he had to say about us as a couple. They were very crude remarks. When you went to a hotel, you had to have your marriage certificate with you,

01:12:01.700 - 01:12:30.100

but I don't think that was limited to just the Japanese. I think almost all the other people, servicemen, had to have a marriage license with them. Nylon stockings were very hard to come by. They had only come on the market in 1939, and I, now they were stockings, not pantyhose. So you had the, those garters and all that,

01:12:30.100 - 01:13:09.460

and I had, very fortunate, I had been able to get a couple pairs, but they had rayon tops, one night I came home late and I rinsed them out. They were still damp at the top. I didn't know that rayon was weak when it was wet. There went my hose, but I learned. We had rationing, meat rationing, and I spent my precious meat points to buy cans of Spam to send to him overseas.

01:13:09.460 - 01:13:40.500

What I didn't know was that Spam was their mainstay in their diet, and they were sick of it. They still are. The rationing was meat and sugar and gasoline. Shortages, coffee, teepee, cloth, yard goods. They started making flour sacks that were printed in colors, and you try to get two or three of

01:13:40.500 - 01:14:09.700

those the same color, in the same pattern, then you can make yourself a dress or some curtains or something. Worked out. You had to save lard and fat for the war effort, and tin cans, you would take out both ends and flatten them. I still do that to this day, and turn those in. They encouraged people to have gardens, and in downtown Sterling, there was a place you could go to

01:14:09.700 - 01:14:45.380

process your produce, pressure with pressure cookers, and I didn't have a garden, but. And usually, I received a letter almost every day from Kanshee. Once in a while, they'd be bunched up. There'd be two days with no letter, and then there'd be two or three letters, and the postman for the area where I lived with his parents, and I would pass him every day

01:14:45.380 - 01:15:10.340

as I went downtown to work, and he'd tell me, his name was Walter Armasco, nice man, and he'd say, "Got a letter in there for you today," and it would be in the box that he had stored, that he would be delivering, and then I'd know if I went home, was to go home at noon, and I, there was a period of almost ten, it was ten days, and I hadn't heard from him,

01:15:10.340 - 01:15:41.700

and this particular day, Mr. Armasco said, "I'm sorry, there's nothing today," and I said, "You know, I just know something is wrong." "No," he said, "you don't want to think that way." That was the day I got the MIA telegram, and two days later, he got a telegram that his brother had been killed. So, it was, the first thing I did, it said that he was shot down in Hungary.

01:15:41.700 - 01:16:11.860

I went to the library to check the terrain and find out what they did in Hungary, and when I found out that their principal product was grain, I figured it's flat, he's got a chance. So, I felt much better after that. So, it was more than a month, Mr. Armasco called me at work. There was a coffee shop where SBM is now in Sterling.

01:16:11.860 - 01:16:43.140

He said, "I got something here you're going to want to see." He said, "Let me read it to you." Kenji had sent me a postcard. We still don't know how it got through, and he said something like, "A bad penny always comes back," and it was nearly two weeks before I got the telegram from the government saying that he was safe. So, that was a wonderful

01:16:43.140 - 01:17:22.340

thing. We returned to Sterling after the war, and a friend of ours took us to his sister's house, who had been a family friend, and that sister's husband, who was a draft dodger, incidentally ordered us out of his house, said he didn't want any GED, so forth, in there. But I have to also tell you that when we lived in Hawaii, I experienced reverse prejudice among Oriental

01:17:22.340 - 01:18:02.500

professionals, because I was the odd man out there. It wasn't too many years ago that we were refused a room at Holiday Inn in Chicago. So, it still exists sometimes. And in closing, I'd just like to say that Kenji's parents were refined, wonderful people. They were well respected in the community, and Kenji's dad didn't live long enough to become a citizen. That wasn't, that law wasn't passed

01:18:02.500 - 01:18:34.180

until after World War II, and he had Parkinson's disease and passed away. But his mother was the proudest person to be a citizen of this country that I have ever known. She voted, she read about the people that were running for office. She was a wonderful citizen. Thank you, Ms. Zagata. Thank you very much. [Applause]

01:18:34.180 - 01:18:50.660

How long have you been married? It'll be 52 years in March, if we live that long. [Applause]