Chapter 1

I first met Frank Blixter on Okinawa, back in the spring of 1945 while the battle was still going on.

Back in those days the government would draft you right out of high school if the local draft board had a quota to meet. I guess that in the spring of 1944 the Fremont County draft board must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel because my name popped out of it. I was a senior in high school then, and to tell the truth I was looking forward to graduating and then getting in the service – it seemed to me that the adventure of a lifetime was out there and it was passing me by. In many ways I was right – for many of us, maybe even most of us, World War II was the adventure of a lifetime. As far as we could tell the war wasn't going to last a whole lot longer – maybe a year or two, if that, and a lot of us wanted to be a part of it. We didn't really hear all that much about the war, just a little bit on the radio, which my folks and I listened to most nights, from Life magazine, which we didn't get at home but I read at school sometimes, and the newsreel when we went to town for a movie maybe once a month.

When my draft notice came, I knew from the local paper that I could get a deferment that would last me until I graduated, but I didn't want to wait. Since I knew that the school would go ahead and graduate me with the class anyway, I went ahead and reported. Neither Mom or Dad were too crazy about the idea, but with that draft notice in my hand there wasn't much they could say about it. For me, getting out of Fremont County, Nebraska was about as big a deal as going to war. Like a lot of kids in small towns, I wanted out. I wanted the music, the fun, the money, the adventure of living in a city, and I don't mean Omaha, either.

Now, my dad had been through World War I, and he told me one thing: try to stay out of the infantry; they live like dogs and die like them, too. I figured that was pretty good advice, as if I'd have much to say about it. As it turned out the Army decided to make a Jeep mechanic out of me, and then sent me to the Army Air Corps, which sent me to a base in western Kansas, which was a lot like home although even flatter and with fewer trees.

I mostly worked on Jeeps throughout the winter of '44 and '45. It gets cold out there on the high plains, and there were times I sure wished that I was warmer, and I felt I'd like to be a little closer to the war.

Along in the early spring of '45 a levy came down, gathering troops to go on to another place, they didn't say where. By that time I figured that just about anything was better than Kansas, and the war looked to be getting over with, so when my name came down I was just as glad.

They put us on a troop train up at North Platte heading for the west coast. By this time in the war they didn't have enough regular passenger cars to go around, so they put us on what they called a troop sleeper, which was just an old boxcar with some hard bunks built roughly into it. I felt just a little like a hobo as I rode that old boxcar westward, up through the Rockies and across the Great Basin desert, then over Donner Pass and down the Sierras to San Francisco.

We were taken right to a troop ship and marched on board. That wasn't a lot of fun; we were crammed in there six high and about all we could do was stay in our bunks or wait in the chow lines which wound all around the ship and took hours to work your way through. We were about a week getting to Hawaii, where they landed us. I didn't see any hula girls or anything else but another ugly Army camp for the few days I was there, and before long I was on another troop ship, part of a replacement detachment heading on west.

Of course we all knew that the battle on Okinawa was going on by now and that there had been lots of casualties, so I figured the Army was about to forget that I was a Jeep mechanic and give me a rifle. Most of us in the detachment figured that, some people looked forward to it and some didn't.

We had to anchor offshore for two or three days before they finally sent us ashore and stuck us in another thrown-together tent city. You could hear the big guns shooting in the distance but that was about all. I wasn't there for more than a day or so when they called my name at a formation, and I had to grab my stuff and get on a deuce and a half to ride to yet another place.

It turned out I'd been half right – I was back in the Army, in an infantry division, but I was assigned to the division motor pool as a Jeep mechanic. It seemed like for once the Army had managed to put a square peg in a square hole.

Of the group I had been with I was the only one assigned to the motor pool. The headquarters first sergeant had a runner take me over there, and that was where I met Master Sergeant Frank Blixter.

"Son, with them corporal's stripes you don't look like you come in the Army last week," he snorted. "You know anything about fixing Jeeps?"

"That's mostly what I've been doing for the past year," I told him.

He asked me a couple simple questions about how you work on Jeeps, and I guess I answered them all right when he said, "You'll do, son. You ever done any car racing?"

I told him the truth, that I'd never even seen a car race; they weren't very common in Fremont County, Nebraska.

"Never?" he asked. "They didn't have racing where you were?"

"I guess there's a track down in Omaha," I told him truthfully, "But I've only been to Omaha twice and once was on a troop train."

"Oh, well, can't have everything, I guess. Look son, you do good work and I'll overlook the fact that you don't know nothing about race cars."

I should probably explain that I didn't much mind him calling me "son" since that was what he called just about everybody any younger than he was, at least back in those days. He was in his early thirties then, and he was just darn near old enough to be my dad, anyway.

For the benefit of the younger folks reading this, I probably also ought to explain that the draft in World War II was a whole lot different than people remember from Vietnam. The big difference was that they didn't just draft eighteen year olds, they drafted everybody from eighteen to thirty-five, so a unit wasn't just kids, it had a range of ages and some more mature people to help keep things in line, and for the most part it worked pretty well.

There was an officer in charge of the section, a Lieutenant Frawley. I never really got to know him because we hardly ever saw him; it may have been just as well because what he knew about Army motor pools could have been written on a bottle cap. I don't want to say he was a pain in the ass or anything like that, it was just that he'd been wounded in combat and was trying to hang on and be useful, which I thought was a good thing. He spent an awful lot of time in the hospital and more around the division headquarters doing this or that, I guess. It actually worked out pretty well because that left Frank in charge of the section most of the time, and Frank did know what he was doing.

Since this was an infantry division, we didn't have a whole lot of vehicles. Some were in pretty good shape, but some had had the crap beaten out of them on half a dozen islands in the Pacific, most that you never heard of before or since. In the first part of my time there I was pretty busy; the battle was still going on, and there was always something that had to get done yesterday. We were supposed to work twelve hours a day, but we mostly worked when there was light enough to see – they wouldn't let us work under lights for fear of snipers shooting at us, and we didn't have any way we could black out a work area. Cleaning up, getting some chow and getting some sleep took up most of the rest of the time.

It seemed to me that the section was understaffed, and it turned out that it was. I soon found out that in the early days of the battle a couple artillery rounds landed right in the middle of the vehicle park where there weren't any slit trenches nearby. Five or six guys had been killed and a number shipped home with wounds. Most of the section had been together since they left the states back in '42. I heard stories about a lot of places like Guadalcanal and New Guinea, and I never quite got straight where and when most of them were. I was the new guy, not part of the crowd that had gone through all that stuff, and there were times that it was no fun to be an outsider.

On the other hand, these guys weren't quite as close as a combat unit and there had been transfers in and out, so the old-timers were actually in a minority by then – and Frank set the tone for the section, anyway. He was a good guy; he liked his fun, but his attitude was that he wanted to kick the crap out of the Japs so he could get back to the states and fire up the race cars he had stuck in a barn someplace.

After the battle was over there was kind of a letdown. One rumor going around was that we were going to get shipped back to Hawaii for a rest period, but another rumor was that the division was going to be the first wave of a beachhead against Japan. That seemed pretty likely to us at the time, and I've since learned that it was dead true, but it never happened that way, thank God. I really hadn't been directly affected, but everybody knew that taking Okinawa had been a damn mess and no one figured that landing in Japan was going to be any easier.

In any case, we weren't quite as busy as we had been, not that it made things any easier, because for a while there wasn't much to do on duty and a damn sight less to do off duty. About once a week there'd be a movie up at the division headquarters and just about everyone went to see it. There was never any beer, even any Cokes, just water and occasionally a little powdered lemonade. There wasn't much to do but to write letters home and wait for the occasional letter back, and after a while it got pretty damn boring.

I heard it said later that a busy soldier is a happy soldier, while a bored soldier is one looking for trouble and will manage to find it. One of the old-timers in the motor pool, a private by the name of Antonelli, was from Chicago. He'd grown up in a family that had run an alky cooker back in the Capone days, and Antonelli knew a thing or two about making hooch. I have no idea how he did it or what he used to make it with, but he threw together a potent brew. He kept it for him and his buddies, which was just as well, because he had a batch go bad on him one time. Nobody died but a couple guys came close. Antonelli wound up getting sent to the stockade and a couple guys got sent to the states; the rest of the crowd was scattered to line companies.

Now we were really shorthanded, and we were back to being fairly busy. Along about that time, Lieutenant Frawley got hold of me one day and said, "Austin, Sergeant Blixter tells me that you're a pretty good mechanic."

"I like to think so, sir," I replied respectfully.

"Do you drink, Austin?"

"No, sir." That didn't mean that I wouldn't, given the chance. We'd never had anything to drink at home – my folks were that kind of people – and I was still under twenty-one so couldn't drink much in the states. And other than something like Antonelli's hooch or the occasional bottle of 3.2 beer that made it to the troops, there was nothing to drink.

"Good. We're going to be getting some new people in here, and it's likely that none of them are trained mechanics. You're a sergeant now; you'll have to help keep things going."

Sure enough, in the next day or two we got some people in, mostly guys from line companies. Some of them were real duds, but others had been hurt enough to keep them out of the lines but not bad enough to be sent home, and a couple of them had some idea of what they were doing, so we got along. One of the latter was a corporal by the name of Spud McElroy. I found out later that his name was really Sylvester, but you didn't dare call him that or he might hurt you. It didn't take long for me to find out that he was a real mechanic and knew what he was doing, and it didn't take Frank long to find out that Spud was a racer who had run sprint cars and midgets along the east coast for several years.