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As a young boy growing up in Smithfield, Ruffin Johnson witnessed impact of WWII |
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Gary Ridout recently recorded an
interview with long-time Smithfield resident Ruffin
Johnson, who has vivid memories of what life was like
on the "home front" during the Second World War. Here
are excerpts, providing an appropriate look-back as we
come upon another observance of Memorial Day:
At the 11:00 church service, the
minister talked about Pearl Harbor and how bad it was.
He asked that we all pray for our nation. At least
two-thirds of the women in the congregation cried during
the entire service. My family and many people around the
United States thought we had had it. They thought it was
the end of the world. Within two weeks, the draft started.
We had so many people volunteering that the draft did
not really take effect for about six months. Boys that
were 15, 16, and 17 were volunteering. No one questioned
them because they needed everyone they could get. The
draft originally was for men aged 18-45. That policy
lasted less than a year because they found that men over
40 could not get through the first 16 weeks of basic
training. The new policy included men aged 18-40. When
the
first policy was in place, my daddy volunteered for the
army. He was 43 years old. Two buses would come to
Smithfield every day to pick up men for the Army. The
buses would arrive before daylight, load up with men,
take them to Fort Bragg to be processed, and then return
after dark. After dinner that night, the front door
opened and my mom asked “Did they take you?” He saluted
her and both of them cried together for over an hour.
This was about two weeks before Easter in 1942. When I was a child my family had a
flower shop on Second Street. We were the only florist
in Johnston County. We made money three times a year:
Easter, Mother’s Day, and Christmas. The rest of the
time, we kind of floated. If someone died, we
made a little money. If
someone got married, we made a little bit. Mr. Willie Gaskins was the head of
the draft board in Smithfield. My daddy appeared before
the draft board and asked if he could begin serving on
the Tuesday after Easter since that holiday was a big
money-maker. They granted his request, but then the
national draft board met on Easter Monday (the day
before he was supposed to report) and changed the top
age to be drafted from 45 to 40. My daddy never had to
serve. In my opinion, our country was really
great at that time. Before Pearl Harbor, the United
States was basically a nation with no military. In less
than 18 months there were hundreds of thousands of
soldiers being trained all over the nation. In our area,
there were military convoys carrying troops going north
and south on Highway 301. These soldiers were going to
maneuvers in northeastern North Carolina. Fort Bragg was
not as large as it is now and there was not enough room
there for the troops to train so they were taken to
different areas for training exercises. Many people don’t know this but in
the area east of Raleigh there were over a hundred camps
or forts for training and housing soldiers during World
War II. One of the places I remember they went to was
Nags Head. In the
1940s there were very few people living at Nags Head on
a permanent basis, so space was available.
The soldiers knew they were going
overseas. When they were riding through town in their
“deuce and a half” military trucks they would write
their addresses in M-1 casings and throw them to the
people standing by the side of the road. Doris Parrish
and I were kin. I gave several of the M-1 casings with
addresses to her. We would write to the boys and
sometimes they would write letters back to us. The government was extremely careful
about information being leaked to the enemy. My father had
a cousin who served in Italy. He sometimes wrote my dad
letters because they were very close. A letter was
routed through Washington, D.C. where it was read and
screened. Sometimes words or sentences would be marked
out by the screeners. This man was killed during his
time there. It was three weeks before his family was
notified that he had died. Soon after the war began, we realized
that unless we grew our own food or our neighbors grew
it, we would not have enough to eat. The grocery stores
were not going to have enough because so much was going
to the war effort. There wasn’t even canned food in the
stores. All the ladies in our neighborhood got together
and had “canning” parties. They swapped foods that they
had canned. My daddy planted apple trees, pear
trees, and peach trees. We shared apples, pears, and
peaches with the neighbors. The man who lived across the
street had milk cows. I
helped him milk the cows and he gave us some of the milk
as payment for my help. I milked seven days a week and
for that our family got a quart of milk a week. Soon after that, Mr. Ira Medlin and
my father bought a milk cow. This helped bring more milk
into the house. After the milk cow, they bought a beef
cow that they fed for a while and then slaughtered it.
They were not experts at cutting the meat so we could
not recognize any of the cuts of beef. We preserved the
meat by taking it to a freezer locker located on Highway
301. We took the meat and wrapped it in “oil” paper. We
rented a space in the freezer locker and kept it there
until we needed it. Some of the men who were too old to
be soldiers got jobs at Fort Bragg. A bus left
Smithfield at 6 a.m. and arrived back after dark,
transporting the men to work at Fort Bragg. The pay was
very good. They
worked at the post six days a week. This effort gave the
men a job so they were able to feed their families and
provide a service to the military. Once the troops went into Europe, the
war effort geared up considerably. It seemed like the
convoys were going through Smithfield all the time.
These convoys were so long that they lasted 45 minutes
to an hour as they passed through town. Many Smithfield residents wanted to
help with the war effort. During this time, my father
was an “air raid” warden. There was supposed to be no
light in Smithfield at night. Military people believed
that if the base at Goldsboro or Fort Bragg were
attacked, Smithfield would also be hit by the bombing.
As air-raid warden, my daddy wore a World War I helmet
and walked around town to make sure everyone had their
windows covered. There were no window blinds then, so
people would take blankets and put over their windows to
darken them. As World War II went on, ration cards
were issued by the government. There were ration cards
for flour, sugar, salt, gasoline, and many other things.
We did not have a car, but would borrow my grandfather’s
car if we had to deliver flowers to Four Oaks, Pine
Level, or Clayton. Because no one could buy tires, my
grandfather would put his car up on blocks to make the
tires last longer.
A bus would come to Smithfield on
Saturday morning around 10:00. The young men would be
served lunch and then all the girls in the county would
come to the Legion Hut. I lived on Second Street at that
time and played in the woods all the time. I began to
watch as the servicemen and the girls would leave the
Legion Hut and walk over to the graveyard. I followed
them and learned a lot. They all had another meal at night
and then Bill Joe Austin and his band would play as
everyone danced. The next morning after breakfast, a
preacher from one of the churches would come and conduct
a church service. Then they would load back into the
buses and go back to their bases. For three and a half
years, this went on for many weekends. After the war,
former soldiers and airmen would come to Smithfield with
their wives to show them the Legion Hut and talk about
the great hospitality of Mrs. Mattox and the people in
town.
When I was 14 in 1948, I worked
construction for Mr. J.P. Rogers, who was a member of
our church. I did carpentry work at first, but after
meeting Gordon Howell and some of his brick masons, I
decided to work with them. One time, we were building the
hospital in Dunn. I was making mud for 10 brick masons.
Eight of them were World War II veterans and one had
been a POW. They would start telling stories and would
tell the worst war stories I had ever heard. One of the
men told me about his plane being shot down twice in
enemy territory during the war. One time he escaped on
his own, the other time a farmer hid him in a hay stack
and helped him escape. He had to stay in the hay stack
for two days while the Germans looked for him. After
telling the stories, some of them would say: “Now son,
don’t tell nobody this; my wife don’t know this, so keep
it to yourself.” Gordon Howell was an LST captain and
made eight drops on D-Day. On the last few drops, there
was so much carnage that his ship was just running over
bodies in the water. I asked him how he felt about
making the drops and seeing all the death. He replied
that he was just doing his job and really did not have
any choice. When the soldiers came back after the
war, they came back with a very different life attitude
about education and work. Before the war, if there were
30 students in a class in the first grade, this would
have been reduced to 20 when they entered high school.
The graduating class would then be only four or five.
Farming was the life blood and people would drop out of
school because they were needed on the farm or at a
mill. I would estimate that only 35% of the
residents of Smithfield at that time could read and
write. I remember going into the bank and watching the
teller touch the top of the pen while an illiterate man
held the pen. She would help him sign his name on the
document because he could not do it. Most of my friends’ families were
tenant farmers or cotton-mill workers. A high-school
education was not seen as a necessity for success. The
soldiers were different because they made sure their
children attained a high-school education. Everyone I knew that had been in the
military, even if they had not been in combat, exhibited
a new appreciation for our country. They were very
patriotic and loved the United States. Even if they had
been wounded or captured, they still showed a great love
for this country. They were thankful to be alive. I feel
that I have been blessed to have witnessed many great
and important things about the people of Smithfield and
this nation. |
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At my
church the men always came outside between Sunday School
and the church service to either chew tobacco or smoke.
The Sunday after Pearl Harbor (December 14, 1941) was
very different. No one came outside. There was dead
silence.
In order
to move the troops to the different areas, “troop
trains” were formed. They were not really trains, but
military convoys (trucks). When the troop trains were
approaching Smithfield, you could hear them coming up
Highway 301 around Four Oaks.
Mrs.
Mattox was a resident of Smithfield who really wanted to
help the war effort. Her husband was Ben G. Mattox. She
invited servicemen from the Army, Navy, Marines, and
Coast Guard to come to Smithfield on Saturday mornings.
They would come to
the Legion Hut located next to the Neuse River. The basement of the
Legion Hut had bunk beds where they would sleep on
Saturday nights.
As children we wrote notes to the
soldiers to support them. This was started in our Sunday
School classes in church. People in Smithfield
encouraged each other during the war because almost
everybody had a relative in the service. It could have
been a father, a son, a brother, a cousin, or an uncle,
but we all felt that we were working together in the
effort. People put small flags in the window of their
house. It had a blue star on it if there was a member of
the household in the military. It had a gold star (with
a blue edge) if a family member was killed during the
war.