Reminiscence of WWII. Mary Savage Contributed by Mary Savage. ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** When I married Levi Batte Aug 2, 1941, I didn't know what was ahead. The draft was mandatory for every male 18 and over but we were not at war, the war was over in Europe! Batte worked at Cities Service in Sulphur, Louisiana for $90 per month. I could no longer teach because married women were not allowed to teach in Louisiana at that time. Then, on December 7, 1941 the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Batte applied for border patrol. Then in April, his draft notice came...to report in 7 days and we cried all night in each other's arms. The next day he decided to join the Coast Guard. We thought the coast meant Gulf Coast! We had to be in Port Arthur for 9AM. He signed papers and they told him to be back by 1PM to ship out for training in New Orleans. We drove back to Sulphur, notified Cities Service, packed his clothes and told his folks goodbye. The Coast Guard sent back with me everything including his wallet. The clothes he had on would be mailed back after he was issued his uniform and dog tags. He was in Algiers (New Orleans) April 22, 1942 for boot camp. After 3 weeks he was allowed an overnight pass. I met him on the ferry ramp and didn't recognize him in his sailor suit and shaved head. During the 4th week in New Orleans, he was notified to report for Border Patrol. Too Late! At the end of New Orleans boot camp, 30 men were sent to San Diego to go through the Marine boot camp combat training where the men felt the Marines would kill them! After boot camp, the 30 men were put on a northbound train with an officer and secret orders. 10 men (one third of them) got off in San Francisco. The officer couldn't tell them where they were going but he told Batte that he was not going to Seattle. (That group was slated to go over seas.) When Batte and 9 others got off in Portland, it was night and no one met them. The Navy office was closed so the men went to the most expensive hotel, ate a big meal and charged it to Uncle Sam and went to sleep. When they called the Navy recruiting office the next morning they found they had to help build the Coast Guard Barracks and would stay on the top floor of the Hoyt Hotel in the meantime. Because of maneuvers in Louisiana in Fall of '41, schools started in the southwest Louisiana area in November, so there would be no danger to children. A teacher in Sulphur married so she could follow her soldier. I finished out the year as a substitute for her until July 20. Cars were scarce and I sold our car for $300, and took the train for the 5 day trip to Portland. All trains had to side track for troop trains. In my suitcase I took 3 thin dresses. It's hot here in July and I didn't think about cold trains at night. There were no sleeping cars on the train so I slept on the seat. I met a nice girl and we met two boys and played cards and I read my book. One of the boys loaned me his coat and it really helped. I bought sandwiches, fruit and candy from the boy who came through the train cars. I arrived in Portland at night on July 31. There were no screens on the hotel windows and diesel truck went on the street by our hotel. I lived with Batte on the top floor of the Hoyt Hotel. There was one other wife and we all ate next door at a restaurant where we two women paid for our meals. The boys' meals were paid by the Coast Guard. The morning after I arrived, I walked down main street and saw an Eastman Kodak store. I went in and saw the manager. He knew the manager in New Orleans whom I knew and was a friend of my Dad, who was also a photographer. The Portland manager hired me and said to come to work the next morning. I asked him to wait one day because my first wedding anniversary was the next day. I took a raincoat to work every morning but the clerks laughed and said it was just a high fog and would not rain. Sure enough, the sun would come out by 10 o'clock. I worked there 2 months while I kept trying to find a better paying job. I read in the paper about a job at a lumber mill. It involved a one hour trip each way on the lumber train leaving before daylight. When I got to the mill, the boss showed me this big time-keeping and check writing machine that I would operate for 8 hours a day and would be responsible for all mistakes. In my early 20's, I was scared I'd hit the wrong key so I didn't take that job. When the barracks were completed, the boys moved in and their numbers were increased. Mable, the other wife that was there, and I rented an apartment on the top floor of an apartment building. Both husbands were on the same schedule and came home every third night. When the husbands were on duty, Mable and I would ice skate, go down town on the street car at night and get apple pie a la mode'. When the husbands were off, the four of us would take the street car and go to the Portland Zoo, Council Crest, and the Rose Gardens where the roses were as big as tea cups. Once a friend was able to get enough gas to take us to see all the falls on the Columbia River drive. Portland was growing and I started teaching first grade in November with a temporary certificate requiring me to take Oregon History and Oregon School Law by correspondence. I rode the street car to the middle of town then caught a bus out to my school, a one hour trip each way. I changed to the bus in the center of Portland where everyone wore a had and gloves down town, so I did too. By December I had developed a painful water pocket at the base of my big toe. I went to Seattle to the big Marine Hospital on Christmas Eve for the operation scheduled for the day after Christmas. I was there for one month and returned to Portland on crutches. On the return trip, shoe rationing was announced and the only shoes I had were the ones I had to cut the top out of because my foot was still bandaged. When I returned from the hospital (still on crutches) it snowed and I fell from the bus into the snow cause I didn't know how to go down steps on crutches. My school by then had two sets of pupils using the same room. My shift required that I leave the apartment at 10, arriving at 11:30, eat lunch and then teach from 12 to 5 arriving back to the apartment at 6. In March, I discovered I was pregnant and Batte had already been transferred across the Columbia River to the beach patrol in Washington. He had leave once a week. I miscarried Easter weekend when I was alone one night. That spring, a dead 54 foot whale washed up on the beach and Batte and the preacher chopped out 3 of its ivory teeth before they broke the preacher's ax. Batte carved a heart out of one of the teeth, put a screw eye in it and I have it still today on a chain that I can wear around my neck. We also kept the tip of another tooth and I still have that too. When school was out, I joined Batte on the Long Beach Peninsula. I lived in a crude motel that summer on the beach in Ocean Park. One night we went out on the beach and took some pictures of each other against the sunset. I colored them with transparent oils, as that was the days before color photography. We took the pictures at 10 o'clock at night. We had more daylight than dark up there. We dug razor clams, raked with wooden teeth rakes in crab holes left when the tide went out and got only the male crabs to eat. Two crabs filled a quart jar with meat. The school at the north end of the peninsula needed a teacher so I moved to the east side of the peninsula so I could ride the high school bus to Oysterville when the bus went to pick up the students. I taught in the one room school that had only 10 pupils in 1st, 2nd, and 4th grades from five families. Batte would stop by the school and chop kindling. I had to build the fires and sweep the floor. Snow was so rare that I had to let the kids out to play the day it snowed. We entered the US paper drive and came in SECOND in the US....a school with only 6 pupils in North Dakota beat us with more pounds per student collected. The Coast Guard patrolled the beach 24 hours a day on horseback in pairs. No civilians were allowed on the beach before 7am so when glass fishing floats washed up, the patrol picked them up. It takes 3 years for them to float from Japan to that beach. One morning Batte and his partner picked up 10 big floats. He also got many smaller ones at other times. After the war was over, Batte told me that they had seen Japanese subs out in the ocean while on their patrols. I became pregnant the first part of May, 1944. The hospital and doctor were across the Columbia River and in those days there was no bridge, only a ferry that did not operate at night. In August, the Coast Guard base closed and all were scheduled to go overseas. I prayed Batte would not have to go and God told me not to worry. Preacher was worried that my faith would be shaken if Batte was sent over. Over 100 men and he was the only one not sent over. He was transferred to a life boat station on the Oregon side of the Columbia River but he only came to the apartment every ninth night. His mother and sister who was a nurse came up and found work. Sissie soon became superintendent of nurses and worked two shifts most of the time. The Warrenton preacher's wife had a baby in September and had to stay in bed so I stayed with her in the daytime and cooked for them and took care of the baby while the preacher was free to do church work. Batte developed bleeding stomach ulcers and went into the Seattle hospital right after Christmas 1944. In January when I needed to go to the hospital (one Sunday at 10 PM) the preacher took me to the local hospital. Sissie was on duty. She prepared me, then called the doctor. He wanted to know if I could be moved. They had just opened a big Navy hospital and had been waiting for 10 days for someone to have a baby. Jan was the first baby born in that big Navy hospital in Astoria, Oregon. Our picture was on the front page of the paper. All other patients were returning from war zones and many had not seen their own babies. Many bet on whether I would have a boy or a girl and the doctor told me she had more men come to see her that day than she ever would have again! The night Navy nurses walked the halls and played with the baby to stay awake. And when we got her home, she wanted to be walked at night. They kept me there in the hospital 14 days and the total cost for the baby was $10.50 and that was for my food. Service men wrote "free" where the stamp goes and I still have an envelope sent by Batte from the Marine Hospital in Seattle to me in the Astoria Navy Hospital. I took Jan's picture when she was a month old so I could send it to Batte, but didn't get it until she was two months old and was about to see him. While waiting in Warrenton for orders, the commanding officer came to check on us and he had to push his way thru frozen diapers on the line on the small porch to get to the door. Batte was sent to Port Townsend to await discharge orders but his orders were lost. He had to return to Seattle to get new orders and we started the trip home. We were five days on the train but had compartments, or bedrooms all five nights but one. Jan was allergic to the wool uniform so her daddy had to just hold her when he could remove the top of his uniform. The train went through snow and then further south it was so hot we had to hold her in just her diaper on the platform between the cars. We had a five hour layover in Denver on Sunday and we left the baby with the nuns in a big home next to the train station while we went to find more paper diapers which had just started becoming available. The family met us in Beaumont, Texas and Batte had to go on to New Orleans to pick up his medical discharge. Batte's total time in the service was 2 years, 11 months and 9 days on March 30, 1945. The atom bombs were dropped on Japan the following August 7, 1945. Both of my brothers were carrier Marines who came through the war OK, but we lost two close first cousins, one shot down over Germany and the other beheaded on the Bataan death march. There were many families who were not as fortunate as we were.