Secretary's Comments:
I consider the following article to be MUST READING. The Author, Will Brown, is a member of the Association.We exchange email on a fairly regular basis.
In my opinion it took a special kind of courage for him to write the following article. He tells it like it really was!
Hopefully he will provide us with an additional follow-up article regarding duty and training in Japan.
Those of us who joined the Division after the last California National Guardsman had departed had no idea what kind of an outfit the original 40th was. We could only guess. Now we have a good idea of what kind of training, if you can call it training, they received.
The majority of National Guardsmen ( Enlisted Men ) were, after all, pretty much the same as we were. Youths who became men, often in less time than it takes to read this sentence.
" AS I Recall .........."
THE 160TH BEFORE KOREA
1948 to September 1950.
(A very personal perspective)
Will Brown, Author.
The first contact I ever had with the 4Oth Infantry Division was when two recruiting officers visited our ROTC class at Belmont High School in Los Angeles. They persuaded two or three of us to go down to the Armory in Exposition Park and see what the National Guard was all about.
One night we rode the old street car (that had probably carried 160th Infantry volunteers during the Spanish American War) down Vermont Avenue to the Armory, and were shown an impressive display of weapons. We were also shown the many advantages of enlisting in the National Guard (recently changed from the California State Militia). Easy Money and Adventure beckoned, and we followed.
The 60mm mortars appealed to us, and that is what we chose, based on I) its being an interesting, "neat" looking weapon; and 2) the idea that being in a mortar section would be safer and a lot more relaxed life-style than being a regular line-company rifleman.
Once a week we went down and did close order drill, listened to PRI lectures (mainly on how to avoid "M1 Thumb"), and sometimes even examined a mortar, studied some charts casuallv, and turned the little cranks, etc. We did learn how to field-strip and clean our rifles, which is apparently more than MacArthur's garrison troops in Japan were learning. There were also some lessons on Military Courtesy and other such basic matters.
On one occasion we gathered in a room with the medics to watch a very realistic film on wounds. It was a very graphic depiction of what to expect; and we were somewhat uneasy at the number of would-be medics who fainted right out of their chairs or had to leave the room.
One of our group had been in the previous Thompson-toting California State Militia, and he demonstrated to the rest of us that a lot of pleasant hours could be spent wandering around the hallways carrying a clipboard and looking like we knew what we were doing.
The real fun, and experience, was during the summers when we went for a week on "maneuvers." At places like Camp San Luis Obispo and Camp Pendelton we did a lot of route-matching in the hot California sun, and cold nights; camped in pup-tents, ate in field-kitchens, and actually got to fire a few rounds from our M1s on the rifle-range. I don't remember the mortars even being brought along.
Somewhere along the line some of us in Charlie Co. became corporals, and had to come to meetings twice a week. NCO Night was mainly spent on Clipboard Patrol.
I remember one night we whiled away the happy hours in cleaning cosmoline from bayonets, and one night Lt. Duncan talked to a few of us in his office about his combat experiences, and how it was something he would not have wanted to miss, and would never want to repeat. (It might have been on this occasion that he informed us that he was aware of the excessive amount of time some of us spent wandering around with clipboards, and suggested that we put our time to better use.)
Most of the "basic training" we were receiving, or supposed to be receiving, had already occurred for some of us in high-school ROTC. There we had also seen many U.S. Army WWII training films, and a few of the much more realistic British ones. In our National Guard unit, we saw almost no training films.
Many officers and senior NCOs were combat veterans, and we kids could have benefited from what they could have told us and shown us, but things were not structured that way, and at the maturity level of most of us, we certainly were not going to initiate training and indoctrination on our own.
Somewhere about 1949, there was a sudden influx of volunteers into the regiment. Many of them were somewhat older than us, and they approached their enlistment with a much more sober, if not soldierly, attitude. Most of them worked themselves immediately into clerical and supply positions, or motor-pool; and there was a lot of talk about having joined up to avoid the draft.
When the Korean War (or Police Action) broke out in 1950, nothing changed noticeably in the 160th, at least not in my part of it. There was no attempt made to use the military disasters we were suffering in Korea during those first months as lessons for us, or to inspire us with a sense of seriousness and urgency. In the same old lackadaisical way, we drifted on towards the 40th Division's next rendezvous with history: 1 September 1950.
Go to next page of " As I Recall............"