Jill Marshall and F. Ray Marshall

[00:00] JILL MARSHALL: I'm Jill Marshall. I'm 62. It's Wednesday, August 11, 2021. I'm here in Austin, Texas. My partner is my father, Ray Marshall.

[00:13] F. RAY MARSHALL: And I'm almost. I'm almost 93 years old. My birthday is the 22nd of this month. And that's about it. It's.

[00:29] JILL MARSHALL: It's Wednesday, August 11.

[00:31] F. RAY MARSHALL: Wednesday, August 11, 2021, and we're in Austin, Texas. We're in Austin, Texas. Yeah. I thought you told them all.

[00:47] JILL MARSHALL: Okay, so, daddy, you were 13 and living in the baptist children's home with your brother and sisters when the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor on December 7, 1941. You had told me you had just come back from church when you got the news. What was that like, and what did you think?

[01:09] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, I was kind of shocked, because I guess it had been in the news that there we would like to have some problem, and I was in some shock, so I decided to go look up Japan on the globe and went and looked it up and was kind of mad because they had attacked us, but looked at how large it was on the globe and said, this ought not to take long.

[01:42] JILL MARSHALL: Because it was a little bitty place.

[01:44] F. RAY MARSHALL: So I figured, well, we'll get this one over in a hurry. Turned out to be a whole lot more difficult than I thought it was.

[01:52] JILL MARSHALL: So you had left the orphanage and gone to work at the dental lab before you actually decided to go enlist. What made you decide to sign up?

[02:04] F. RAY MARSHALL: I decided to sign up because I thought I could help with the war, and it had recruiting signs all around. One was navy that I passed every day on my way to work. So I finally decided, well, I ought to do that. There's no point in not getting involved in it when I can, even though I'm not old enough, but I think I'm old enough.

[02:32] JILL MARSHALL: Okay, so first one is, what made you decide to go Navy rather than army?

[02:37] F. RAY MARSHALL: I wanted to get into a branch of the service that was more technical, and I thought that Navy would be more technical. You can't operate a ship with a lot of technical work, and in the job I was in, that was absolutely the case, because you had to learn a lot in order to do that, and I was interested in doing that.

[03:02] JILL MARSHALL: So you were still just 15 when you did manage to enlist. How did you do that?

[03:09] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, it took a while, and the first thing I had to do was to prove that. I asked them how old you have to be, and they said, 17. And I said, what do I need to prove that? And they said, a birth certificate. And I told them that I was born in Mississippi, and I wasn't. I knew they'd check for the Bureau of Vital Statistics and find out that I wasn't born in Jackson, Mississippi. So they then said an alternative was to go to the last school you attended and get the principal to certify how old you were. So I went out to the orphanage school principal's house at night. I did that because I didn't want to be able to get to his records and find out how old I really was. And one of the things that made that feasible was that he had no idea how old I was because many kids started the school when they got to the orphanage. So I had, you know, older people in class with me when I was at the orphanage. And just as I figured, the principal, who was retired judge, got his pen paper out and put his green eye shade on, says, well, Ray, how old are you? And I told him then when I got back, took that, he certified it, and I took it back to the recruiting station. They said, all right, now, since you're only 17, you'll have to get a parent to certify. And I thought to myself, if he had told me that before, I'd been 18 down here. But. So I had to go out and get somebody, and I paid somebody to say they were my father. I tried to get friends first and all friends that I worked with, and they were skeptical about doing it because they didn't want to send me off to war anyway. So I finally found a vendor, newspaper vendor on the street, and paid him to go in, say he was my father. And they accepted that. And then shortly thereafter, I took a physical, and they sent us all to. They formed a boot company. Over the time that I first signed up time they sent us to Great Lakes.

[05:55] JILL MARSHALL: So when you left Jackson to go to the Great Lakes boot camp, did you just walk to the station? Walk to the train station? Did anybody see you off?

[06:07] F. RAY MARSHALL: We didn't walk. I think what we did was to assemble at the recruiting station, which was in the post office building in Jackson. And I think it put us all on a bus, as I recall. And we went down to the railroad station, and to my surprise, my father was there. I didn't know he knew anything about what I was up to, but he had come down to see me off and dead, but he was the only one that was there. As we marched from the bus to the train station, what did you all.

[06:44] JILL MARSHALL: Say to each other?

[06:45] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, he said that. I can't really remember. I told him I was glad he came, and he said that he hoped everything would work out all right. I know he would have prohibited me from going if he had known in advance, which is the reason I didn't tell him in advance, and I didn't live with him. There had been a boarding house near where I worked, and that was about it as much as I remember of it.

[07:17] JILL MARSHALL: So when you got to the boot camp, was that the furthest north you've ever been? Was it coldest you've ever been?

[07:27] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah. And it turned out also it'd be the hottest I'd ever been. When all that concrete heated up in the summer, it was pretty hot, and we marched on concrete drill fields, and that was really hot. But in the winter, the wind whipping off of Great Lakes was really cold.

[07:52] JILL MARSHALL: In fact, you said one of your colleagues there wondered if people.

[07:57] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah. My company commander was Eric Parsigian. He played football for the Great Lakes team. We beat Notre Dame that year, winter, 43 44. And he was very good boot company commander. And he would give tour guides as we march over on the banks of Great Lakes. And he pointed out something had happened over there before the war started. And this boy marching behind me from El Paso, Texas, I think, said before the war, says, you mean, tell me folks live here. Wasn't no war.

[08:39] JILL MARSHALL: And you also said you got some advice from a returning boot camp.

[08:44] F. RAY MARSHALL: Generally, I want to know. When I got into the boot company barracks, there was a guy sitting there, and I asked him, why are you here? He says, well, I didn't make it through. I got sick before I finished, so they making me start overdevelop. I said, well, how was it? And he says, I tell you what. Say it ain't nothing you're gonna like, but ain't nothing you can't stand.

[09:12] JILL MARSHALL: So that was probably. Probably good advice.

[09:16] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yes.

[09:17] JILL MARSHALL: So then you joined the company at Camp Bradford, and then you all sailed on an LST landing ship, Tenta.

[09:30] F. RAY MARSHALL: The drill when I went in was, for most people, four weeks boot camp, 42 hours leave, 72 hours leave, and then to the Pacific, which is where most of us were going, and unless you were going to school. And I went to a class a, which is the highest school for enlisted people that you do at the radio school. And I think that was 16 weeks. So I stayed there in Great Lakes for 16 weeks, and then I went into amphibious training at Camp Bradford, near Norfolk, Virginia. And it was terrible place. I think their theory was to make it glad to get out of there and into the war.

[10:22] JILL MARSHALL: So from there you left, heading south. Have to go to the Panama Canal?

[10:27] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah. Well, actually, then we went up. My ship was built in Massachusetts, the Bethlehem Hingham shipyard. So we went up to the Fargo building in Boston and got, got the ship ready to go to sea. And then we went down to Bayonne, New Jersey, for degaussing, and then through the Panama Canal and out into the Pacific.

[10:51] JILL MARSHALL: So when you were in the Pacific, what's the most scared you ever were?

[10:56] F. RAY MARSHALL: Oddly enough, didn't have anything to do with combat conditions, because my theory was always, I'll get ready, and whatever comes, we'll be able to handle it. So I felt in control of my work as a radioman and. But the scariest I ever got, Washington. For some reason, I had to go over shore, one of the islands, and the Pacific radiomen frequently had to go and pick up stuff from the other radio stations. And we were some distance from the shore, and when we started back, a storm came up before we could see our ship and could get to the ship. And we were in an LCVP, which is a flat bottom boat, and it's taking huge waves, and we couldn't see the ship, didn't know exactly where it was. And that was really scary, because reflecting on that question, I think the scariest I was in conditions I had no control over, not much I could do. The coxswain, I think Coxon and I, maybe one or two other people, were the only people on that LCVP. He was very good, you know, his name was Dick Feudy, you know, and it was one that took me around places that I had to go. And I had confidence in him, but I could tell he was scared, too, so that was scary. And then, of course, we didn't know what we would do when we got to the ship, there was no way we could come alongside and go up the road. Bladder, which is what we ordinarily did. But finally we worked it out. We got to lower the boat of it and take us back up without having to go. But that lasted about 3 hours, is our call. And we had life vests on all the rest. You weren't going to make it too well out in this storm, even with a life vest.

[13:08] JILL MARSHALL: So you were the radioman. So you got the messages for the ship. One that you told me about is when you got the message that the president had died.

[13:19] F. RAY MARSHALL: President Roosevelt, yeah. And that was depressing. You know, I'll never forget that I went up in a gun tub, and I don't know if I cried, but I felt like it. Partly because he was the only president I'd ever known. I. And he was kind of revered in the south, you know, for all of the WPA. In fact, first paying job I think my daddy ever got was on the WPA. He'd been a farmer up until then, and they built schools and railroads and, I mean, roads and other facilities. Rea was a huge thing for the rural south, especially. And I had great confidence in him as a leader, because I thought he had done well getting us to where we were in the war. And he was being succeeded by a person who had. By Harry Truman, who was part of the Pendergast machine out of Kansas City. So I thought, you know, here this crooks gonna take over, and I don't know what he's gonna do for. He's going to help us. And it turned out, of course, I was dead wrong. Of course, Truman turned out to be a great president. I thought, and I think his decision to drop the bomb probably saved a lot of our lives, including mine.

[14:50] JILL MARSHALL: So the other message I wanted to ask you about is the message you got saying that the war was over. What was it like to get that?

[14:57] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, I was copying it, and it started coming over plain language, which, in time of war was unusual. There were only two kinds of languages that came over during plain language as those that didn't mean anything informational. But anything else that came over was coded. This one wasn't coded, and it was from the chief of naval operations, which is, you know, that was Admiral Nimitz's boss. I thought, this is really something. The other time it came over, if they didn't have time to encode it, they were so serious that they didn't have. They couldn't do that. And I thought, this is one of those. And then I got about halfway through it, and I recognized what it was saying. You don't pay as a radiometer. You don't pay attention to. You just copy it tendons to the machine. And when I realized what it was saying, you know, I kind of got over with it. I kind of went limp. I said, this. The war is ending.

[16:07] JILL MARSHALL: Made it so, after the war, when you were going into Japan, tell me about meeting the engineer at Sasebo.

[16:20] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, we went to Sasebo. It's a big naval base in Japan. We had things to do there. And the interpreter was this engineer. And he said. He asked me where I was from. He spoke English very well. I was surprised at that, because I had been indoctrinated to believe the Japanese were kind of subhuman, and then weren't very cultured or educated. And when I found out I got there, you know what he was like, and he said, oh, you're from Mississippi. He said, has Warren county acquired the Vicksburg Bridge? I said, well, I didn't know they wanted it. So now I was at bridge. I'd been over the bridge a lot, but I was amazed that he knew that that wasn't all he knew. And it turned out that he was a Stanford university graduate and a very good person. You know, maybe we spent a week there, so. And I got to know him reasonably well.

[17:29] JILL MARSHALL: Do you remember the engineer's name?

[17:31] F. RAY MARSHALL: I don't. I don't remember it at all. But the impression. But what it did for me, that and other experiences in Japan, was to indoctrinate me against prejudices based on ignorance. You know, I was ignorant of the Japanese and had strong prejudice against them, but when I got there, I overcame that in a hurry.

[18:01] JILL MARSHALL: So you realized you'd been lied to.

[18:04] F. RAY MARSHALL: Or that it was based on maybe their ignorance and mine, you know, and maybe that's intentional. Maybe you have to do that, build up enthusiasm for the war. But I don't really think so. You know, I think there are ways to do it without that.

[18:21] JILL MARSHALL: So what was it like when your ship made it back to San Francisco?

[18:25] F. RAY MARSHALL: It was glorious. I don't ever forget that. When we came under the Golden Gate bridge, the banks were lined with people welcoming us home, and we went docked at Treasure island, and they said we had 72 hours leave, and then we were. We would be headed home. Those of us who were leaving the ship. I was leaving the ship because I was eligible then to retire from active duty. I stayed in the reserve. So I wasn't retiring from the navy, but retiring for active duty. So we spent two or three days in San Francisco, and people were just great to us. And then we got on a troop train from San Francisco to New Orleans, which is where I got discharged.

[19:24] JILL MARSHALL: So you were sort of in charge of the.

[19:27] F. RAY MARSHALL: I was in charge of people in my sleeping car. These were troop trains, and they had about eight or ten people in each car. And I was this. I must have been the senior petty officer in that car, which was not unusual at the time, because when the war ended, many of the senior people who were going to be discharged got discharged, whereas I stayed on from August, when the war ended, until June of 1946.

[20:10] JILL MARSHALL: So how long were you on active duty?

[20:14] F. RAY MARSHALL: I was just about two years and ten months or something like that.

[20:19] JILL MARSHALL: So on the troop train, on the way back, you were the petty officer.

[20:22] F. RAY MARSHALL: In charge of your car? Yeah.

[20:24] JILL MARSHALL: So tell me what happened when you stopped in March. Marshall, Texas.

[20:28] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, when we stopped and when a fast train came by, they made us get off the track, you know, and move side. So we. We spent some time in Dallas, which was the longest way, and we got to Marshall, we were only going to have meals there, and we were going to be served meals that were called box lunches. At a Yde cafe near the railroad station. I think I had the vouchers for people for my eight or ten people. And one of those people was black. And I had bonded with him pretty well. His name was James. And the person in charge of that cafe said, we can't feed him. He has to go to the colored cafe, which was nearby. And that kind of made me mad. I said, well, they serve us all in the colored cafe. And the guy said, yeah, but says, we'll serve him when you threaten to.

[21:39] JILL MARSHALL: Take your chits and go elsewhere.

[21:40] F. RAY MARSHALL: And I knew from my Mississippi experience, you know, white people go to colored cafes. Colored people couldn't come to then. The colored cafes were used a whole lot better than the white cafes anyway. So in Jackson, you know, I had gone to colored cafes, so I thought, that's a whole lot better deal. But I also felt there's no point in insulting him like that. You know, that soldiering unit. Yeah. Therefore, let's all go where he's going. And everybody in my group agreed with that, you know, that's what we'd do. So when the person at the cafe saw that, he said he gave us all a box lunch, you know, which was the other irony of it. All he's going to do is give us a box lunch. Why couldn't this black sailor get a black. Get a box lunch with all the rest of us? Which was what we had done up until then, even in Dallas, is our call. We didn't have any trouble with there.

[22:43] JILL MARSHALL: So do you remember James's last name?

[22:46] F. RAY MARSHALL: No, I don't. I don't. I don't remember any of. He's actually about the only one in that group that I remember.

[22:54] JILL MARSHALL: So when you got back to Jackson, what was the first thing you did?

[22:58] F. RAY MARSHALL: Well, one of the earliest things I did since I hadn't been there in over two years. You know, I walked it off, went up, and I can't remember exactly. I think I stayed with my. With my aunt there at Lou, and then I made contact with my girlfriend and we got together, and then I had. There was there were other people from the orphanage who were getting discharged if he had been in service. And one of my friends was Ed Cole, and he had been in the navy, been up in Alaska, and he's the one told me about Hinds you.

[23:45] JILL MARSHALL: Know, that you'd have a chance to go to.

[23:51] F. RAY MARSHALL: I hadn't been. Since I hadn't been to high school, part of my wreck, my plan was trying to figure out what to do next. One of my options would be get the equivalent of a high school diploma and then go to Annapolis, you know, get a fleet appointment to Annapolis. And I thought I might do that. And I had to first, though, get the equivalent of a high school education. My captain had told me about the GED general education development test, which was initially, I think, only for veterans. And I figured I'd go down to Hinds take a couple of high school courses, take the test, and see if I could get a GED, and then back to the fleet. And I took the GED, passed it, but they wouldn't count it because I only had. And I had two high school courses, and they said you had to have four. So when I told a registrar at the community college that which called junior college. Right? So this is Hinds Community College and high school, but it was called in.

[25:11] JILL MARSHALL: Those days in Raymond, Mississippi.

[25:13] F. RAY MARSHALL: Raymond, Mississippi, junior college and high school. And that got me. By that time, I'd met your mother, and by November, we were married.

[25:23] JILL MARSHALL: So I decided who was not the girlfriend, by the way, that you had before.

[25:30] F. RAY MARSHALL: It had the same first name, though, Sarah. Patricia, who was the name of the other girlfriend, and I had one at Hinds and she graduated. Your mother's boyfriend graduated. So that helped us out.

[25:45] JILL MARSHALL: So my last question, what did you learn from the war?

[25:52] F. RAY MARSHALL: It was really important lesson. I think one of the first things that I would say about it is I learned that war is a necessary evil. It's evil, and it's not hard to see that. You couldn't see what we saw without knowing that it was evil. Because I went up to Hiroshima, Hiroshima, where they dropped the bomb and very soon concluded that a nuclear age war is to be avoided at all costs. But then other things, like sinking of ships and sailors getting it eaten by sharks, and the pain and suffering from the Japanese, you know, as a result of all that was pretty horrible, you know, pain, suffering, and destruction. And therefore, war is evil. The second thing I concluded from that, though, was that war, preparation for war is necessary because that's the way you keep the peace, is being strong enough to do that to avoid war, if you can. I also learned in the war and in the navy a lot of things that were very useful for us military service. And, in fact, I think service to the country generally is personally satisfying and beneficial. It's satisfying in the sense that you feel you're doing something important. And if you're a teenager, like most of us in the Pacific war, most of the enlisted people were teenagers. It was very satisfying to be jointly involved in what we consider to be an important endeavor, that is, to help win the war. So we felt important, you know, and that was, I think, an important part of it. The second thing was that you learn a lot about yourself, you learn a lot about other people, what you can do and what. What you can't do. You learn organizational skills, leadership skills. You also, as I mentioned earlier, get inoculated against prejudices based on ignorance, because you all working together towards a common cause, regardless of your religion, regardless of your national origin. And so you quickly overcame those kinds of prejudices that you had. And that's one of the reasons I believe in national youth service, is I think that having young people involved in those kind of endeavors is very important. It was also beneficial to me. First place, I learned skills that I'd learned to type. I learned something about electronics, and, as I mentioned, leadership skills and how to get along with people, how to get people to do things. And all that was very important. In addition to that, I got great personal satisfaction from the oath of office and precarious defending our country, which I agree with Abraham Langston, last great hope of mankind and a constitutional democracy. You take an oath, I've taken it three different times, and you always take the oath to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that's important, you know, a benefit to realize what that means and what you need to do to carry it out. And then in addition to that, of course, I got the GI bill, which made it possible for me to go to school. And I learned from that experience how important it is to give low income people opportunities to go to college. And it was a great investment for the country. So not only did we gain a lot personally, the country gained a lot personally because of the GI bill. And that was an important lesson to me, to see that this was an investment, not just a cost to the government. We figured that the federal government got back maybe five to seven times as much it would have paid on the GI bill.

[30:44] JILL MARSHALL: Of course, the most important thing of all is, because of the GI bill, you were able to beat Mama Sarah. Patricia Williams, then is now Sarah Patricia Marshall.

[30:54] F. RAY MARSHALL: And then for 75 years, very soon.

[30:58] JILL MARSHALL: Will be for 75 years. And so, and then I came along and all of your siblings, my brothers and sisters. So I'm very glad that all happened.

[31:17] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah, I am, too.

[31:19] JILL MARSHALL: I don't know if I have ever told you how proud I am to be your daughter and how great. So thank you.

[31:31] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah. And I've always been proud of you, too. And as with my service to the country, you know, I got a whole lot more out of it than I put into it. You know, they, they repaid me many times, and you have to.

[31:48] JILL MARSHALL: So thank you. We're grateful to have this opportunity to share time. At the end of the war, when you were going in for the occupation of Japan and the harbor pilot, the japanese harbor pilot came out to your boat.

[32:04] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yes. The main reason he did that was because we had to go through minefield and they knew where the mines were and we didn't. So we actually went through with skeleton ships with trying to go through. And, but that was the first japanese official that we had seen, military officer. And we always worried about him coming aboard because some of the, one of my shipmates, especially Don Duce Lear brother, had just been killed at Okinawa, and I was afraid that he might try to do something because he was distraught as a result of that. And so we kept, kept him away. But the pilot turned out to be very useful because he gave us a map of the vines, you know, where they were, and he guided us through it.

[33:04] JILL MARSHALL: Yeah. So you, and you've kept up or kept up with Don Dusalier for a long time. Does he ever talk about that, about Lucille?

[33:14] F. RAY MARSHALL: Not really. I think he got over his grief, losing his brother.

[33:21] JILL MARSHALL: So the other thing I wanted to ask you about, when you went in Japan for the occupation, you said some members of the signal corps were going to go down to look at Hiroshima, and they invited you to come with.

[33:37] F. RAY MARSHALL: We were loaded for the invasion of Japan when the war ended, Okinawa, we went back to Pearl harbor to get the troops to invade Japan. And among those troops, of course, were army signal corps. And I bonded with them as a radioman would. And when we got to Sasebo, which is first, not Sasebo, Wakayama, we went Sasebo. Later in Wakoyama, they said they were going up to see where they dropped the first bomb in Hiroshima. The Japanese say Hiroshima. And we went up and looked it over. And if you want to see the first lesson in war being hell, you look at that and you say, this is we can't ever have a war like this. And now we know, of course, that erosion was small relative to what we can do now. So it. If you needed a lesson in why we need to avoid war, Hiroshima was a good one. It turns out that we were closer to Nagasaki. And I don't know why they decided to go up to Hiroshima instead of going to Nagasaki. I guess because the destruction was much greater up Hiroshima. I don't know that.

[35:07] JILL MARSHALL: So you brought back some photographs they shared copies of with you. And I remember in one, in a picture, there's one building standing.

[35:15] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah. And it was. It was a stained glass window. And the only stained glass window I'd ever seen was a church. So I said, God spared that church. Let the heat wave jump over it. And I learned many years later, there was a chamber of commerce, not a.

[35:30] JILL MARSHALL: Church, that was spared.

[35:33] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah.

[35:34] JILL MARSHALL: So you had a couple of boys on your ship who were from Mississippi, and you said one was red Haines.

[35:41] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yes.

[35:42] JILL MARSHALL: And he was a really good sharpshooter.

[35:46] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yes, he really was. He was Gunner's mate. And once when we had a loose mine that we were around, they commodore would become a flagship then. So we had a commodore board. I ordered a de to go out and try to sink.

[36:08] JILL MARSHALL: So that's a demolition expert.

[36:09] F. RAY MARSHALL: No, it's destroyer escort. They're the ones who are supposed to keep us from safe, from submarines, mines and things. And the de tried to take the mine out and couldn't. So the commodore told me to rejoin them, the convoy, and we would take it out. So we went out and red hand shot it with one shot from a 20 millimeter gun, which was not easy, and blew it up. But Red was a real hero. He was quite unassuming. Which is another lesson you learn, is the bravado types are not necessarily the ones who are going turn out to be the heroes. Red saved the lives, most of the people in his gun tub once, because the shells locked into the gun tub, the gun didn't go off. And he made everybody leave the gun tub. He reached in, got it, threw the bomb over the side, and it blew up. And unfortunately, when I saw him 50 years later and reminded him of that, he didn't remember it, because he's beginning to get. He had begun to get Alzheimer's.

[37:21] JILL MARSHALL: That's too bad. So if we have time for one last one, maybe you can tell me about the storm that you ran into before you even got to the Panama Canal and where you woke up and thought you were.

[37:34] F. RAY MARSHALL: Yeah, it was off Cape Hatteras. And the only time that I remember in my two years at sea that I really got seasick. And I went up topside to try to overcome my seasickness. So I bound myself to some chains that we had holding trucks and tanks down. And we were taking a huge role. I could see the ocean on one side and on the other side as the ship rolled. And I finally went to sleep, which surprised me. When I woke up, we wouldn't want totem all bay Cuba and glassy water. And boat coming out to meet us was a white boat, and the sailors were all in their whites. And I thought to myself, they'll have drowned. And this must be what sailors heaven looks like.

[38:36] JILL MARSHALL: All right, well, thank you for sharing that.