War Stories III by Oliver L. North Page A

than eight decades before just reinforced the idea.
    During the Depression a military career was a pretty good deal. Back then there were relatively few jobs available and duty in the peacetime Army wasn’t bad at all—or so I thought. I had a chance to go on active duty under the Thomason Act. That law allowed the Army to take a thousand college graduates from ROTC, and select a hundred for a regular Army commissions.
    After receiving my new gold bars as a 2nd lieutenant, I was sent to the first communication officers’ class at Fort Benning, Georgia. From there I was assigned to the 16th Infantry, then stationed at Fort Jay, on Governor’s Island in New York City.

    By the time I got to Fort Jay in early 1941, the war in Europe was on in earnest. But we were doing very little to prepare for the kind of mechanized warfare the Germans were fighting. For several weeks we went to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland for amphibious training along the Gunpowder River. Since we had no landing craft, we used rowboats . Unfortunately, most of the soldiers were from New York City and I don’t think they had ever seen a rowboat—much less knew how to row one through the water.
    By the summer of ’41 it was apparent that people in Washington were getting serious. We moved to Fort Devons, Massachusetts, and started building barracks and training ranges, then went on maneuvers in North Carolina and finally to Puerto Rico for real amphibious training—this time with Higgins boats— real landing craft. I was in Puerto Rico when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
    We returned to Fort Devons for a few months—and the 1st Division was fully “fleshed out” with thousands of new recruits and all kinds of new equipment. That summer the officers were told that we would be deploying overseas and I was sent over with the advance party to Tidworth Barracks in England, to get the place ready for the division. The rest of the division sailed from New York aboard the Queen Mary on 2 August 1942.
    Training at Tidworth and later in Scotland was very realistic. We had some very good, experienced British instructors. All of them had seen action and many of them had been wounded. We did a lot of long hikes, conditioning exercises, marksmanship training, practice with artillery and air—and the senior officers were almost always there. Our division commander, Major General Terry Allen, and the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., were both well-loved by the men. By the time we sailed for North Africa and Operation Torch in November of ’42, I was in the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry and the 1st Division was ready to take on the Germans
    During peacetime, the U.S. military had been all male. The onset of war brought hundreds of thousands of American women into the Armed
Forces. No woman could be subject to conscription, but they didn’t have to be: they volunteered so fast that many had to be told to return weeks or months later, after uniforms were made and facilities to house and train them were built. One of those young American women who volunteered early was nineteen-year-old Pearlie McKeogh from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After Pearl Harbor, she and her boyfriend decided to enlist together.
    PEARL MCKEOGH, WAAC
    St. Paul, Minnesota
13 November 1942

    When Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, I was in business college but planned to join the Navy. Then I found the Navy wouldn’t let women serve overseas, so I switched to the Army. I wanted to do something different—get away—I had never been out of Minnesota. My boyfriend at the time said, “Let’s both sign up.” So we did. But he was rejected—I was accepted.
    My oldest brother went into the Coast Guard. One brother was a farmer in North Dakota and didn’t enlist. Another brother worked for a manufacturing plant in Milwaukee and my fourth brother was a minister. Both my sisters were