[Granville-Hough] 14 Jan 2010 - Army Time I

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:13:06 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Army Time I- 14 Jan 2010

Today was cloudy and cool. Winter is on the way. I got a Christmas call
from my West Point roommate which reminded me of our third roommate, who
passed away several years ago. I endeavored to help the widow of our
deceased roommate with suitable records of his service, but I was not
able to locate anyone who could recall different periods of his life. He
had transferred from Army Artillery to the Air Force, and we only knew
bits and pieces of his work there. I knew the first four years of his
work in Artillery, but the 26 years in the Air Force were blank. I
resolved that I would record what I wanted said or written about my
service time so no one would be at a loss for words. I did this in an
oral history program for old veterans here in Leisure World, and the
local commander of the American Legion happened to be present. He asked
me to present my story to the American Legion chapter, which I did. Here
is what I told them.

COLD WAR ARMY

Thank you for this opportunity to speak about my experiences in and with
the Army from Sep 1941 until Jan 1969, in the ROTC, the Enlisted
Reserve, in Infantry Heavy Weapons, as a Cadet at West Point, and as a
Regular Army officer, and as a Retired Officer subject to recall until I
was 60. My experience began in Sep 1941 at Mississippi State University
in ROTC. I was in a two-year program in Pre-Forestry, but the war had
already started but was not going well in Europe. We knew we would be in
the war eventually. Then, in December, the Japanese attacked at Pearl
Harbor. That changed all our lives.

When I had graduated from high school, I had three uncles who thought I
should get an appointment to West Point. When I contacted my Senator, I
found I had to have trigonometry, which I did in my first semester at
Mississippi State. Then I applied for an appointment, but found I had no
birth certificate. I had to file my own birth certificate.

Meanwhile, I joined the Enlisted Reserve in November 1942, which would
allow me to stay in school until there were spaces for basic training.
In December I received a notice that I had received a Second Alternate
Appointment for West Point and that I should report to New Orleans for a
physical exam. When I did the exam in January, 1943, the Army doctors
found I had hardened arteries and would not be a suitable Cadet. Now,
that was my first experience with Army doctors, who are always right.
They knew that I would not last long as an Army officer and would die of
heart disease. Of course, it may happen any day now.

So I went back to my studies in pre-Forestry, and actually completed
them before I was called to Active Duty for my basic training in
Infantry Heavy Weapons at Fort McClellan, AL. Near the end of that
training, I had another uncle call me from my home in MS with the news
that the Army was trying to find me so I could retake the West Point
exam. I went to the Army Hospital in Fort McClellan and retook the exam
and passed it. Then I was discharged from the Army and told to report to
West Point, which I did. Then I was sworn back into the Army as a Cadet.

I graduated from West Point in 1946 and went through another year of
training as an Artillery Officer, then was sent to Korea. At that time
the Army was still demobilizing . For most of you, World War II ended
when you were demobilized. You dropped whatever you were doing and went
home and started a new life in a new world. About 15 million people in
service did that. We who were sent to the Army units in places like
Korea had to pick up what you left behind. That was trouble enough, but
the Army was slow to recognize that it was a new world. Higher
commanders werenÆt much help, as they were mentally refighting WW II.

The priority places were Germany and Japan. Everywhere else was way down
on the list, out of sight, out of mind. We even had a Secretary of
Defense under President Truman whose idea of economy was to reduce all
organizations with three units to two units. Divisions in the states
with three regiments were reduced to two regiments. This reduced
Division Artillery battalions from three to two. This had unfortunate
repercussions when the Korean War began.

But back in 1947 I arrived in Korea. There was a Captain in the battery
and over 100 men. A few weeks later, I was the only officer, and I had 5
men. We eventually had another officer but never again did we have 50
men. Still, our training schedule read as if we had the authorized
strength of 136 men. I never heard General MacArthur mentioned as
overall commander. It was as if the 24th Corps was in another Army.

The first major task the Army had in Korea in 1945 through 1947 was to
send back to Japan the 5 million Japanese and their Korean associates
who had run the country. With these people gone, the Koreans were
obsessed with surviving and grabbing Japanese property or any other
property they found unguarded. Blueprints and technical information were
in Japanese, which few Koreans admitted to reading. For example, we
never were sure which underground pipelines were fresh water and which
were for sewage.

One example of Korean free enterprise came to our attention when we
tried to run a diesel pipeline from the port at Inchon to Soeul to
reduce our transportation costs of moving our heating fuel by truck or
tanker. We got the pipe finished and pumped in diesel at Inchon but very
little ever came out in Soeul. As we checked along the pipeline to find
the leaks, we found that enterprising Koreans had drilled holes in the
pipe, and were selling diesel fuel to long lines of Koreans. So we
helped the cause of Free Enterprise, defined as ôhelping yourself if
nobody is looking.ö

An amusing use was made of the glass Silex coffee pots which were so
popular after WW II. The Koreans did not drink coffee, so we wondered
why thousands were being sold or stolen from the PXÆs. We eventually
learned that little Koreans were being pottie-trained with Silex coffee
pots. Wonderful use. Little Koreans could see what they were doing in
pottie training, and were quite gleeful about it. So other cultures have
unusual uses for things we use.

These are trivial examples, but I tell them to illustrate what is
happening now, each day, to our soldiers in Afganistan and Iraq at a far
more sophisticated level. If our soldiers have it, peoples of other
cultures will see a use for it. What we see as fertilizer for crops may
be used as raw material for massive explosives. Damaged or discarded
computers may have memories with military secrets which can be
exploited. Ordinary alarm clocks can be used to set off detonations. On
and on, a thousand times.

Not much is said nowadays about the Korean War. However, in the Chinese
War Colleges, I am sure they have real discussions on how Chairman Mao
Se Tung out-generaled Douglas MacArthur. It cost us a 54,229 lives and
8142 missing in action, to gain a cease-fire to a war which is still not
over, with no peace treaty signed, and the North Koreans and Chinese
waiting for another Douglas MacArthur to bamboozle. One tragic story of
the Korean war reflects our lack of training. 20,600 of the dead, more
than one third, were accidental deaths.

After my time in South Korea I came back to Fort Sill to a School Troop
Unit, the 969th Field Artillery, a black unit, except it was not doing
field artillery work. The Army was having maneuvers in Louisiana and
because of the troop reductions under Truman, the Fort Sill
Transportation unit, also a black unit, had to go serve as
transportation for the maneuvers. So while the assigned black
transportation unit was in Louisiana, we of the 969th could become the
temporary transportation unit. To the credit of those black soldiers,
most of whom had never owned a car, everybody learned to drive or do
some other related task and we served all spring and summer as the Fort
Sill transportation unit. We never reported an accident. Not one. Then
we had to convert back to field artillery, which we did. At the end of
the year, the battalion was deactivated, and the black soldiers were
integrated into white units. Some were successful as individuals, but
they lost the pride of success as a black unit.

I went back overseas in in 1949 to Puerto Rico, to the 504th Field
Artillery, which was also a segregated unit, all white Puerto Ricans.
(There were also black Puerto Rican units).

In Puerto Rico we were in Fort Bundy, an old Seacoast Artillery position
which protected Roosevelt Roads, which had been designed early in WW II
to receive the British fleet when and if Britain fell to the Germans.
The nearest town was Fajardo. From where we lived, we could see the tip
of the Virgin Islands to the east. The nearest islands offshore were
Vieques and Culebra. Both were mostly owned by the U. S. Navy. Culebra
was the impact area for the Atlantic Fleet firing range. Vieques had a
fishing village and a maneuver area.

In the fall and winter of 1950, we prepared Vieques Island for Operation
Portrex, which was the largest maneuver exercise held to that time after
WW II. The Puerto Rican troops were defending against the invading
Continental troops. We wore Russian style uniforms and prepared defenses
so well that they had to be removed before the Continental troops could
come ashore. During the actual landing and invasion, I was artillery
liason officer with the Aggressor unit formed by the 65th Infantry, an
independent Puerto Rican white unit. We did our job well, and these
maneuvers showed Continental units had real problems of the most basic
kind.

When we got back to Fort Bundy, we were ordered to go to Panama as the
direct support battalion for the 33rd Infantry. The WW II defenses of
Panama had been dismantled, and people in Washington had suddenly
realized the Canal Zone had no protection. So during Easter Week of
1950, we moved our battalion, with all its equipment, and all our
families from Puerto Rico to the Pacific side of the Canal Zone to what
had been the seacoast artillery Fort Kobbe and Howard Air Force Base.
The Korean War began soon after.

In our own role in Panama, we took turns guarding the locks and the dam,
then doing artillery training near Galliard Cut in the Canal Zone. The
Puerto Rican troops were the best I ever served with. They were
educated, highly-motivated, and eager to learn. Some volunteered to go
to Korea and served there and later in Viet-Nam with distinction. I
became a Captain and a battery commander, and completed my tour in 1952.

As soon as the Korean War began, the U. S. Army began frantically
searching for soldiers it could recall. The 65th Infantry I had known in
Puerto Rico was sent to Korea as a replacement for one of the divisional
regiments which had been deactivated. It fought valiantly for over a
year until it was sent over and over against a strongly fortified
position held by North Koreans. Finally, Puerto Rican officers refused
to lead another charge. They were court-martialed and the 65th Infantry
was soon deactivated and Puerto Rican soldiers were assigned to other
units. This really signalled the end of segregation in the U. S. Army,
but the story of the 65th Infantry is only known in Puerto Rico.

I went back to Fort Sill to the Advanced Artillery Course for one year.
Then I considered my options and requested to go to graduate school. I
asked for Journalism at the University of Missouri, English being my
best subject at West Point. One option which interested my wife was
studying in California. The only course was Mechanical Engineering at
USC, and engineering was not my strong area at West Point. I put that
down as last choice, and that is what I got.

With a MasterÆs degree in Mechanical Engineering, we next went to the
Air Defense School at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas. There I did research
on problems of the Nike Ajax Air Defense Guided Missile system and
taught system maintenance and repair for three years. While mentioning
the Nike systems, we had the Nike Ajax system which was non-nuclear, the
Nike Hercules system, which had nuclear warheads, and we worked on the
Nike Zeus system, a nuclear defense against ballistic missiles. By 1965,
we had Nike systems protecting nearly all the cities of the U. S.

 From Fort Bliss, we went in 1958 to the Command and General Staff
School at Fort Leavenworth, KS, where I took a special course which gave
me the title of ôNuclear Effects Officer.ö I learned how to select
nuclear weapons for particular effects on targets. Later, in 1986, I was
very much interested in the Soviet accidental disaster at Chernobyl,
where the eventual casualty list is expected to reach 100,000. I can say
that the Army tables of nuclear effects, developed from Nevada and
Kwajalin testing, were certainly in error by an order of magnitude. A
nuclear exchange would solve the worldÆs population problems for a long
time.

 From Fort Leavenworth, I was able to see the Pentagon for the first
time in my 13 years of service. I became the Army Intelligence Analyst
for Soviet Air Defense missiles, studying photographic and electronic
intelligence on those systems. I was able to help identify Soviet
defenses being installed at various cities of the Soviet Union and to
locate other air defense developments. I was particularly interested in
places they might be developing defenses against ballistic missiles and
I had identified a curious unit at a remote place called Sary Shagan.
One day, John Hughes, a young civilian, asked me a simple question.
Where did I think the Soviets would be developing defenses against
ballistic missiles? I got a map of the Soviet Union and gave him the
coordinates of the most logical area. I did not know at the time that he
was helping plan the next U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union. Later,
when the results were analyzed, we had hit the jackpot and had
photographed a heretofore unknown development center, with space
tracking phased array radars, radars with large parabolic reflectors,
and defenses against ballistic missiles. I received my highest award,
the Legion of Merit, for that particular insight.

However, the overflight was the last successful one over the Soviet
Union. For the next flight, I was asked to help plan the overflight, and
the Air Force representative insisted on going over Sverdlovsk. I told
him we had known for six months that it was building air defenses with
the SA û 2 system; and that the missiles would now be operational. He
insisted on coverage, as Strategic Air Command had the city targeted and
wanted to know the EXACT status of the defenses. I agreed reluctantly,
as we thought the SA-2 would not be limited by altitude. Of course, when
Gary Powers got over Sverdlovsk in his U-2, he provided SAC with the
EXACT status of the defenses. He was shot down. Gary Powers escaped with
his life, and finally was exchanged. When he was later a helicopter
pilot for the Los Angeles Times, I wanted to talk to him, but concluded
he should not know that I had helped plot his flight over Sverdlovsk. I
felt very sorry when he died in a helicopter crash when he ran out of fuel.

At this time, I still thought of myself as a field artilleryman, but
Army requirements had made me a specialist in Air and Missile Defense.
My next assignment was to Thule, Greenland, where we had Nike Hercules
missiles with nuclear warheads protecting the Air base and the BMEWS
(Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) which detected missiles and
space objects and sent the information to Colorado Springs. This BMEWS
was a huge structure facing the Soviet Union. If I recall the signpost
correctly, it was 6000 miles to Moscow, and Washington, DC was a few
hundred miles farther.

As Logistics Officer, I did whatever I came across which needed to be
done. I found I had the Army accounts for Iceland and Newfoundland from
WW II, so I closed out 17 years after the war had ended. I found we were
heating three warehouses filled with Nike Ajax equipment which had been
shipped to Thule but never installed, after the Nike Hercules equipment
became available. Through channels, I asked Army Headquarters in the
Pentagon what to do with the Nike Ajax equipment. The answer came back
to destroy it. We waited until the ocean froze over, then loaded trucks
with the equipment and took it out about a mile where we dumped it. When
the ocean thawed, down went the obsolete equipment.

My next assignment was as battalion commander of the Nike Hercules
battlion of the Boston/Providence Air Defense Command. Of course, we had
nuclear warheads and we trained constantly. We went to Fort Bliss for
Annual Service Practice, where we actually fired missiles at target
drones, but without the nuclear warheads. I often wondered if the people
of New England knew that if we fired at an incoming plane all the people
who in New England who happened to be looking that way would be blinded.
All exposed would eventually have some radiation sickness. We might save
the cities, but at a terrible expense.

My most harrowing experience in my Army career occurred when I was
visiting the missile batteries in a helicopter. We went down in Natick,
MA, in a retired Lebanese immigrantÆs vegetable garden. We hit pretty
hard but were not injured. I had tea with his family and went on to the
next battery by car. When Gary Powers had a similar accident, it was fatal.

After this year, I went to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces,
where I had a chance to think about the larger interacting processes of
war, politics, economics, and population dynamics. I think my
conclusions are valid that wars have been fights for resources to
support expanding populations. The Germans called it ôLebensraumö or
Living Space. To avoid war, we must reduce populations to what each
country can support within its own borders. The way we practice war is
the most inefficient way one can imagine to reduce population. I can
talk on these concepts all night.

My final work for the Army was in the Defense Intelligence Agency. I was
Project Manager for Air Defense work on Soviet systems and chaired
committees, and helped prepare National Intelligence Estimates. We were
mired down in Viet Nam, searching for a way to get out, just as we had
been in Korea, and as we are now in Afganistan and Iraq. For every Army
position I could see open for me, I could also see ten people smarter
than I was waiting to get it. I decided I could do more for the country
by teaching, so I retired and came to California, where I taught at Cal
State Fullerton for 23 years, almost as long as I was in the Army.

I moved to Leisure World in 1975, and attended my first American
Legion meeting, but I did not fit in with the WW I veterans. I waited 20
years to join in my own generation. Thank you for this opportunity to
share some of my experiences with you.