NORTH CAROLINA’S WWII EXPERIENCE

INTERVIEW PARTICIPANTS

Week One

William Friday -- Chapel Hill, NC
Navy Ammunition/Weapons Center, Norfolk, VA

A North Carolina native from Dallas in Gaston County, Friday -- a wonderful storyteller -- gave us a vivid picture of North Carolina and its people in the 1930s and during and after the war. Even though he never left the United States during the war, Friday's job was both important and dangerous – enabling the military to track how the war was going through analysis of captured enemy weapons. Great insight into the war’s impact on the state and its future leaders as well as lessons learned. We could have listened all day.

Dr. John Hope Franklin -- Durham, NC
Civil rights activist

A fascinating storyteller -- particularly from the African American perspective -- Franklin recalled Raleigh in 1939 where he lived while researching his dissertation, and what North Carolina was like prior to World War II. With the outbreak of war and his subsequent attempt to enlist in the Navy, he was shocked at being told he was simply the wrong color to work in administration but rather, could expect to be assigned as a steward or cook. From that point on, an indignant, determined Franklin not only vowed to fight the draft but also the double standard that permeated life in the South. Great insight into the "Double V" campaign which advocated for African American rights here at home while African Americans fought for America's freedom overseas.

Hubert Poole -- Raleigh, NC
Ammunition Company, Montford Point Marines

82-year-old Poole grew up in Raleigh’s Oberlin neighborhood, 1 of 7 boys who experienced and negotiated segregation, including during his military service. Drafted on October 23, 1943 Poole trained at the all-black Montford Point Marine Base near Camp LeJeune, then shipped off to Guadalcanal, which was secured by that time, and Guam, which was not. In both places, he served strictly in a support role but admits that while it represented inequality, it also probably saved his life. Poole went on to teach and coach in Wake County and says his Marine training was behind everything he did in life.

Don Bolden -- Burlington, N. C.
8 – 12 years old during World War II

Bolden, who grew up to become the editor of the Burlington local newspaper, experienced World War II as a child -- playing war games with his friends, seeing soldiers in uniform in Alamance County, participating in scrap and stamp drives, watching plywood airplanes fly out of Fairchild Aviation, and feeling the impact of rationing. With still-vivid memories of a father who was the air raid warden and a grandfather who maintained a victory garden, Bolden provided a window to the homefront during a world event that to this day, permeates his daily life.

Chuck Paty -- Charlotte, NC
Radioman, USS North Carolina -- January 10, 1942 through duration of the war

Paty, a Charlotte native, had a keen interest in Hitler’s European invasions prior to US involvement in World War II and enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor -- though he had to get his parents' permission because he was underage, and then after eating several bananas to gain enough weight to be accepted. Paty said he was thrilled to be a Tar Heel onboard a ship named after his native state. He described the battleship's dramatic arrival at Pearl Harbor and subsequent Pacific engagements, including kamikaze pilots and surviving being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.

Jim Hunter -- Charlotte, NC
1st Marines, Pacific Campaign

Hunter, 86 years old and a Charlotte native, began his Marine career with chemical warfare training and officer candidate school. He joined the 1st Marines as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Russell Islands in the Spring of 1944; then 5 months later, was in the first wave to attack Pelilu, east of the Philippines. He still recalls how shocked and unprepared the military was at combatng Japan’s new strategy of fighting from honeycombed caves embedded on rough coral ridges. There, after losing many men, he was wounded on the second day and evacuated under heavy mortar fire.

Jesse Oxendine -- Charlotte, NC
82nd Airborne, post-Battle of the Bulge

Oxendine, a Lumbee Indian from Pembroke, was a replacement soldier -- one of four brothers who served in the war. In an emotional interview, he revealed for the first time what it was like to liberate the Wobbelen Concentration Camp in Germany and how war changed theis former Eagle Scout. How stunned he was to find himself stealing from a dead German soldier; how surprised he was to see that the blond and powerful German soldiers portrayed in American propaganda films didn't look anything like the scared dark haired young men he was actually fighting against.

Tom Alley -- Charlotte, NC
102nd Airborne, D-Day through Germany’s surrender

A Charlotte native, Alley was among the first paratroopers in the Army to yell “Bill Lee” during training jumps in honor of Dunn native, William Lee, father of the Airborne. He was also among the first to arrive at Camp Mackall, which was under construction. Then, from the foggy, early morning hours of D-Day, when he and fellow paratroopers flew through anti-aircraft fire and missed their landing zones, through the Battle of the Bulge and the surrender of thousands of of enemy troops in Germany, Tom Alley saw it all.

Bill Ferebee -- Mocksville, NC
Naval Plane Captain and Turret Gunner -- Pacific

Ferebee, who grew up on a Mocksville farm in a family of 11 children, enlisted in the Navy prior to Pearl Harbor, first training as an aviation mechanic and then working his way up to B-26 crew chief in charge of keeping the middle-range bomber flight worthy. He served in Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal and the Philippines, where he was stationed when he learned that his older brother, Thomas Ferebee, was the bombardier who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Ferebee also told of getting married to his high school sweetheart while on leave – a love story that endures to this day.

Week Two

Roger Casey -- Goldsboro, NC
Company D, 119th Regiment, 30th Infantry Division

Casey, who was assigned to a division initially made up of North and South Carolina guardsmen, landed on Omaha Beach sixt to eight weeks after D-Day. At first, he carried ammunition in a machine gun squad, but later was assigned to be a gunner -- a job he wanted to do. Still emotional about his experiences in World War II, Roger spoke frankly about killing German soldiers, his fear of their artillery, the brutality of the fighting and the harsh weather conditions they often endured.

Orion Blizzard -- Kenansville, NC
Carpenter at Camp Davis; 11th Air Force, 39th Air Depot Group; Repair Squdron; Quartermaster Supply

Blizzard spent his war years in two roles. First, as a farmer turned construction worker at Camp Davis in Holly Ridge, one of several military bases that sprang up “overnight” in North Carolina during the war. Orion drove a carpool of men on a 120 mile round trip commute to a job where the pay was good and checks were cashed on the side of the road. In February, 1942, Orion was drafted into the Air Force and served in Alaska where he helped care for fighter pilots based there due to the threat of attack from Japan. He later returned to Camp Davis in time to see it being dismantled and sold -- a sight that he simply could not understand.

Lionel Gilgo -- Beaufort, NC
Portsmouth Island Resident

As a young child, Gilgo lived on Portsmouth Island, a remote barrier island off the North Carolina coast with a population of just 36 people, where horse and cart was the means of transportation and people lived off the sea. In early 1942, the island's peaceful existence was shattered by explosions offshore that rocked homes, set the horizon aglow and swept supplies and bodies ashore. German U-boats were wrecking havoc in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic. While Lionel was excited by this and the large, silvery blimps that patrolled offshore, the adults would talk themselves into frenzies over the prospect that Germans might invade. Lionel Gilgo is one of the few remaining survivors of Portsmouth Island and often speaks about its history.

Virginia RusseLl Davis -- Hubert, NC
Flight Nurse in Europe

This sweet, soft spoken grandmother had quite the adventure during World War II as a flight nurse in the 810th Squadron, whisking the wounded from the battlefields to hospitals in Britain. During her two years of service in England and Europe, she had incredible experiences -- meeting planes that dropped flares upon landing to indicate that wounded were aboard, surviving a plane that crashed on takeoff, and treating numerous battlefield injuries -- even German POWs. She recalls that GIs were always happy to see an American girl. After the War, Davis married a C-47 pilot she met in England just after D-Day.

Billy Sutton -- Wilmington, NC
Mounted Coast Guard Patrol

Few of us will forget Billy’s incredible descriptions of the home front in his native Wilmington as well as his service patrolling the beaches nearby. There, fearful of what each day and night might bring, he and others rode up and down long, isolated stretches of beach – keenly aware of Wilmington’s vulnerability with its shipyard, Ethyl Dow plant and Bluethenthal Field -- looking for German submarines and saboteurs. Meanwhile, supplies and wreckage washed ashore, fishermen picked up survivors and Billy and others saw the glow from burning ships offshore.

Phillip Dresser -- Wilmington, NC
Worker at the Wilmington Shipyard

This Leland native went to work building Liberty Ships at the Wilmington Shipyard in 1942 at age 17. There he worked on anchors, rudders, big booms -- anything and everything outside of the machinery room. He saw launches, including the Zebulon Vance, the very first ship to roll off the fast-paced assembly lines. Later Dresser worked on faster and improved Victory Ships.

Margaret Rogers -- Wilmington, NC
A child who saw German POWs housed in a Wilmington Camp

In 1944, Margaret Sampson Rogers was a first grader at Wilmington’s Williston Primary School where she had several unusual experiences, including trying to communicate with the men who lived in a fenced-in building just across the street from the school; seeing them march down the street; and learning games on how to react if they escaped. These were German POWs and they were confined in a facility located across the street from Williston School. Rogers -- a most curious child -- was totally fascinated by them and their language. She also has vivid memories of blackouts and rationing. Rogers is a local historian who has written a play about her experiences in the war.

Marlene Blake -- Burgaw, NC
Member of an evicted family

Blake talked to us in memory of her brother who recently died, still bitter over their family’s eviction from land used to build Camp Lejeune Marine Base. She described how proud her father was after buying a total of 55 acres of land and a house from money he earned sharecropping with a mule and plow. How devastated he was when the family received an eviction notice giving them one year to leave. How they didn’t have the money to buy another home and lived in a dairy barn with another family when they first left, and how her father returned two days after they moved out only to find their home already bulldozed over. Blake’s family was one of many evicted in Onslow County and her home front story is one that few know about.

*Bob Forsyth -- Long Island, NY
First Marine War Dog Platoon, Second Raider Battalion

Another unusual World War II story is the Marine war dog program at Camp Lejeune -- the only branch of the service to use dogs in actual combat. Bob Forsyth was a member of the original war dog unit that was shipped to the Pacific. He and his dog, Liney, saw service in three combat landings there, Bougainville, Guam and Okinawa. Bob says Liney and the other canines who led patrols and served as messengers between the two trainers assigned to them, were most effective in jungle warfare and saved countless lives with their unique skills and courage. Forsyth now lives in Pinhurst, NC.

Week Three

Robert Youngdeer -- Cherokee, NC
1st Marine Raider

Youngdeer, a former Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, was a 1st Marine Raider during World War II. Having joined at age 18 in Philadelphia after he was refused in Asheville due to an overbite, Youngdeer saw action on Tulagi and Guadalcanal where he was shot in the face by a sniper during what later became known as the Battle of Bloody Ridge. After months of recovery, he returned to the Marines on Okinawa and was there when the war ended.

Marie Colton -- Asheville, NC
Student, spy, wife

Colton, a former North Carolina State Legislator from Asheville, experienced the war from many perspectives -- as a student at UNC-CH when Hitler invaded Poland, as a secretary in the school’s German Department after the U.S. joined the fight, as a “spy” for the Signal Corps in Washington, D.C. where she decoded Axis messages sent from Madrid, and as the wife of a pilot who served in Europe. Colton’s memories were poignant as she recounted her life and what it was like to live in North Carolina before, during and after the war.

Charlie McAdams -- Asheville, NC
Red Ball Express Driver

McAdams, who landed on Normandy in the second wave of D-Day, began as a combat engineer but was soon a part of the legendary Red Ball Express -- mostly African American soldiers who drove in long convoys to get supplies to the front lines, often under German artillery fire and nightly bombing raids. McAdams, who was surrounded in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge and who met Patton before the war’s end, says the Army taught him to take orders and work as a team member -- lessons he still appreciates to this day.

Jesse Ledbetter -- Asheville, NC
B-24 Liberator Pilot, 485th Bomb Group

From May 13 to August 22, 1944, Ledbetter was the pilot of a B-24 Liberator bomber. Operating out of southern Italy Ledbetter led 50 bombing missions against heavily defended Nazi targets.Even though he and his crew of ten were never shot down, they had several close calls, surviving German anti-aircraft gunfire and flak-filled skies. His plane was hit several times, crew members were wounded and engines were lost. Ledbetter was back in the U.S. training on B-29s and anticipating an invasion of Japan when the war ended.

Alda Womack – Mooresboro, NC
Textile worker in plant that made Navy towels

Womack, who grew up in the Cleveland County countryside, charmed us all with her colorful descriptions of rural North Carolina during the war. Womack worked in a textile mill making towels for the Navy in one of many plants that switched to wartime production. Working in the Hanes Plant in Cliffside alongside a growing female workforce, Alda rationed, canned and bought war bonds, even as four of her brothers marched off to war.

Falls Price – Valdese, NC
Company C, 423rd Infantry, 106th Division U.S. Army

Price began his military service in 1937 with the 1st Coast Artillery. Drafted in 1940, he returned to Fort Bragg for boot camp and later worked at Camp Davis, the first man, he says, to be drafted from Cleveland County. On D-Day + 16, he landed at Normandy with the 56th General Hospital and cared for the wounded from the many battles that followed. When the Army -- desperate for front line soldiers -- gave him the opportunity to fight, he joined the 106th Infantry Division. His timing couldn’t have been worse: the 106th was demolished by Hitler’s army in the Ardennes Offensive. A wonderful storyteller, Falls tells about the war from several perspectives including the loss of one of his brothers.

Eleanor Dare Kennedy – Greensboro, NC
UNCG student, newspaper reporter

Kennedy gives us the Greensboro story, an unlikely war town filled with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, including Charlton Heston, who came there for basic training and later, assignment. Not only did Kennedy and her college friends volunteer in such efforts as “Bundles for Britain” prior to U.S. involvement, but she worked for the local newspaper as a feature reporter, often covering wartime events like Greensboro’s celebration when the war ended. While she met her future husband prior to his military service, she says she fell in love with him through the letters that he wrote to her. Their future was greatly impacted when his brother was killed and his mother went into a deep depression.

Bill Henderson – Raleigh, NC
28th Marines, 5th Division

One of those interviews you never forget, Henderson brought the crew to tears with his account of the battle at Iwo Jima. A proud Marine who was Operations Officer during that horrible fight, he describes in vivid detail the change in Japanese defensive tactics which caught U.S. forces off guard. As part of the fourth wave ashore, Henderson and his men came under massive, blistering attack from an enemy hunkered down in caves and pillboxes. Many men lost their lives. The subsequent capture of Mount Suribachi and the now-famous raising of the American flag on its peak, was just the beginning. Another amazing storyteller.

*Helen Wyatt Snapp -- Washington, DC
WASP stationed at Camp Davis

After joining the WASP (Women’s Air Force Service Pilots) in the spring of 1943, Helen Wyatt Snapp was sent to Camp Davis in Holly Ridge, NC. As a WASP pilot, her missions included target towing over anti-aircraft artillery guns that were firing live ammunition, search light training at night, and strafing training during the day.

*Not included in the film.