#165: One Soldier's Story - Bob Dole, Part II

Bob Dole finishes the 1942-1943 school year at Kansas University and is almost immediately called up for active duty. His training timeline is changed multiple times - as does the military job he is training for - but once the Allies successfully land at Normandy on D-Day, he know that his time is coming. After being afraid that the war would end before he got into it, he is now sure he will be heading to the European Theater of Operation. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

While Bob Dole finished up his sophomore year at the University of Kansas, he met Grace McCandless, whom he described in a letter to his parents as tall, dark haired, and the most charming young woman he had ever met. They both knew that Dole was headed for the army after the school year, so the two were just friendly at first, but before long they started dating and things got serious. He met her family, she met his, and in an act that Dole describes as one step farther than going steady but not quite a full blown engagement, he gave her his fraternity pen to wear. Dole wrapped up the school year and almost immediately received his notice to report to active duty. On june first, nineteen forty three, he reported to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and got his first real dose of Army life of hurry up and wait. He and a large number of volunteers from the region all reported and were in process and expected to be shipped out to any number of possible basic training destinations, but was still waiting around when he wrote his first letter home on june ninth. In that letter he said he expected to finally ship out in the next day or two, but was still stuck at Leavenworth several weeks later running little errands for a corporal in charge and being assigned the occasional KP shift, in other words, kitchen duty, which he describes as much lighter work than most of those stuck awaiting follow on orders were given. On july eighth, Dole's younger brother Kinney and a few other boys from Russell also reported and ended up in Dole's company because he was still there. After more than a month of waiting, which was probably the most realistic introduction to the realities of the Army's hurry up and wait lifestyle, Dole finally got his orders to move out. He boarded a train and when he woke up the next morning, he was at Camp Barclay just outside of Abilene, Texas for basic training. The first thing he noticed when he got off the train was the oppressive heat. When he got to his fourteen man barracks room, he also noted that there was no air conditioning. Welcome back to Ghosts of Arlington. I am your host Jackson Irish, tracing the shadows of Arlington National Cemetery through the lives buried there. Today, Bob Dole begins his military training and as so many raw recruits before him, worries that the war will be over before he gets there. Thank you for joining me for episode one hundred and sixty five One Soldier's Story Bob Dole Part two. Dole was told that he would indeed be joining the Army Medical Corps, which, as you may recall from two episodes ago, was exactly what he was hoping for, but before he received any medical training, he went through the same basic combat training that all new recruits go through. It was only now that he got his first army crew cut. He described it by saying They cut everything off but my ears, and was horrified as to what Grace might think of his new look. Dole took to the rigors of Army training quite well. In Letters Home, he admitted that it was tough, but he likened it to a lot of the athletic training he had spent so much time doing in high school and college, so he was used to it. He also enjoyed the camaraderie that quickly formed among the three hundred or so other basic trainees in his class. This reminded him of being with his fraternity brothers back at KU, but despite these associations with simpler times, Dole also said his drill sergeants constantly reminded the recruits that what they were learning could be the difference between life and death. They were in the army of a nation at war. On july twenty second, nineteen forty three, just a few days into his basic training, Dole turned twenty years old. His letter home that day called it a quote quiet, but not too happy birthday. He lamented his lack of banana cake and ice cream, but was cheered up a little by the news that his brother would also be coming to Camp Barclay for his basic training and should arrive before too long. When Kinney did arrive, the brothers found themselves in barracks just a few hundred yards apart and spent nearly all their free time together. That same week, Dole got his first Army paycheck. It covered the first two months and was a whopping seventy four dollars twenty five cents. Thanks to the training he was finally undergoing, he called it the hardest money he had ever earned and sent nearly all of it home to his parents. It was also around this time that Dole was informed that his eleven week basic training course had been extended to twenty one weeks. This of course incited numerous comments of the war will be over before we get there, as if that would be a bad thing. But it also threw a wrench in Dole's personal plans. Aside from the mental anguish of having to spend nearly twice as long at basic training as he thought he would, he was supposed to get a furlough after basic, before he moved on to whatever his next thing would be, and he had decided that he was going to buy a ring and propose to Grace on that furlough. While he was bummed that he would have to wait longer to see her, he did put a positive spin on things and realized this would give him more time to save, which meant that he would be able to buy her a bigger ring. The craziest story to come out of the Dole Brothers' basic training experience actually centers around their mom, Vina. I have no idea if this was a common thing during the war years, but it seems absolutely wild and something that would not happen today. As any good mother would be, she was concerned for her boys' well being while they were at training, so she decided that she would go and check on them. Of her own accord, she took the train from Russell, Kansas to Camp Barclay, Texas, talked her way past the sentry, and began wandering the streets looking for her boys. Forget the fact that this camp was bigger than the town she lived in, she figured she would bump into Bob and Kenny eventually. Before she had been there too long, the MPs rounded her up, but she refused to leave, so they turned her over to a first sergeant. His pleadings fell on deaf ears and she flat out told him that she wasn't going anywhere until she could check on her sons and see that they were alright. Exasperated, the first sergeant tracked down the Dole Boys and let them visit with their mother for a short time, as long as they promised to convince her to get back on the train and go home at the end of the visit. For years afterwards it was not uncommon for the Doles to bring up the time mom chewed out the first sergeant around the dinner table. Although he doesn't say one way or another in his book, I have to assume that the Doles had to pay for that visit with extra KP duty, or at the very least a lot of extra pushups. Regardless, Dole was grateful for the visit. It would be a long time before the three of them would be together again, and by then, the war will have changed all their lives. Aside from the standard complete basic training and then get sent to a unit, probably one already overseas as a replacement, there were two other follow on assignments new recruits could get. One was the Army Specialized Training Program. This program's goal was to rapidly educate and train young, academically gifted soldiers at universities nationwide to meet critical wartime demands for engineers, doctors, linguists, and junior officers. Dole was interested in this program if it got him more medical training and furthered his ambitions to become a doctor after the war, but it also came with a five year service requirement. After the war, which no one thought would last five additional years, most of the people involved would be discharged and the Army would shrink back to its pre war size, roughly one hundred seventy five thousand active duty personnel, augmented by an additional two hundred thousand reservists. In contrast, at its World War II peak, the Army had more than eight million active duty soldiers and more than four million reservists. But anyone who was still repaying the Army for specialized training would have to complete their five years before they would be discharged. The Army has a similar three for one system today. For every day of specialized training on the Army's dime, you owe them three days of service once it is over. When the Army sent me to a one year master's program at the Naval Postgraduate School, I owed them three years of service to pay them back. And let me just say that being paid as a captain to go to school to include a housing allowance for the Monterey, California area, on top of having my schooling paid for so I came out of it with zero student loans, and then repaying two thirds of the time back while being stationed in Bangkok, Thailand was a pretty sweet deal. The second alternate option was OCS or Officer Candidate School. There are three main ways the Army makes officers. One, a cadet attends four years of school at the US Military Academy at West Point, but that takes a while and only produces about one thousand officers a year. Two is Army Reserve Officer Training Corps, or ROTC. This is where students in public and private universities, i. e. not West Point, attend military specific courses in addition to their regular academic classes, attend some summer training events, and after graduation, get commissioned in the Army, either active duty, the reserves, or the National Guard. This is how the Army gets most of its new officers. In two thousand six, when I commissioned through ROTC, I believe there were somewhere between four and five thousand new officers created via that pipeline. The third way was through OCS, and this is how most junior officers in World War II received their commission. It's a lot quicker than waiting for someone to complete a four year program and allows the Army to accept as many qualified personnel into the program as needed. In Dole's basic training cohort, twenty seven soldiers applied for OCS, Dole included. To get accepted, one had to drill, test and interview for two majors, two first lieutenants, and one's company commander, typically a captain. It was a rigorous application process that took place all throughout basic training. When all was said and done, Dole's commander caught him right before he went to the field for a seventeen day exercise and told him As far as I know, you are the only one of the twenty seven applicants who made OCS. Congratulations, Private Dole. But the Army being the Army, after the two and a half weeks in the field, there was a letter waiting for Dole, telling him that while he had made the cut for OCS, all the quotas for entering that training had already been filled. He could either wait five or six months for another opening, or he could apply for the specialized training program, which is what he did. Though disappointed, he didn't want to wait around for an OCS slot that might never open up. On the bright side there was also a package from Grace waiting for him. He hurried back to his bunk to open it in private. He quickly peeled the brown shipping paper off the small box, lifted the lid, and was brought up short. There, tucked into a small tuft of cotton was his fraternity pen. Grace was breaking up with him. He had to fight to hold back tears as he read the accompanying letter. She had met a fine young cadet stationed at the Naval Air Base in her hometown. Basic training ended less than a week later. Once that training wrapped up, everyone was furloughed, except Dole and the others going on to the specialized training program. That, on top of being dumped, did not help his mood and he moped around the camp. Before long, he was sent to Paris, Texas to take a battery of tests. This was to determine if and what he was to go to school to study, and his nerves began to get to him. Rumor had it that fifty percent of the test takers failed. He needn't have worried he passed with flying colors and soon found himself with orders to Brooklyn College in New York to study engineering. Wait, engineering? Badole wanted to be a doctor. Well, while he had already become quite familiar with the term hurry up and wait, he was learning another of the service's favorite maxims needs of the Army. At that moment the Army needed more engineers than it did medical personnel. He had kind of hoped he would be sent to KU for his studies, but he had always wanted to visit New York and was soon looking forward to the training. He also heard that the coeds outnumbered the male students six to one there. The newly single soldier liked those odds. The two and a half day train trip to New York was enlightening. Dole got to see half the country and even coming from the wide open plains of Kansas, he had never imagined the US was so big. Brooklyn College was barely a twenty minute trolley ride from Times Square, and he was excited to explore every inch of it. But the academic program was brutal. In one term he had classes in physics, English, algebra, trigonometry, speech, chemistry, history, and the US Constitution. Every week he spent twenty four hours in class, at least twenty four hours studying, five hours of physical conditioning, and five hours of drill. Any sleeper exploring he wanted to do had to fit somewhere in between all of that. In his own words he said, The Army planned on getting its money's worth out of my education. Dole was blown away by the diversity, culture, and variety of foods he found in New York City, but found his new studies much more difficult than the classes he had taken at KU. The program crammed an algebra class designed for eighteen weeks into just five, and after the first month or so, about twenty percent of the guys who had come with Dole were failing. He hadn't failed a test yet, but was spending far more than twenty four hours a week studying to try to keep up. He found chemistry and physics to be his two most difficult classes. On top of all his schoolwork, he had also been made cadet first sergeant of B Company. He was responsible for two hundred other soldiers, and had additional duties that included filling out the sick book, taking charge of evening study hall that ran from eight to ten PM Monday to Friday and sometimes Sunday, passing on announcements, and anything else those in charge needed him to do. It wasn't difficult work, just time consuming, and he was finding time to be a precious commodity. About two weeks into the program, february nineteen forty four, Dole had been promoted to Cadet Company Commander, as senior as he could get at Brooklyn College, and felt he would ship out any day. His original academic cohort of four hundred was now down to about three hundred twenty, with more and more soldiers shipping out to new assignments all the time. Dole wrapped up the first part of his academic program and surprised himself by passing every class, and most with A's and B's too. But the Army had a bigger surprise for him. It now needed something more than engineers. It needed infantrymen. Dole and a number of his academic cohort soon found themselves on a train from Brooklyn to a place where over the next seventeen weeks they would become infantrymen. Camp Polk, Louisiana. I just heard everyone in the know let out a collective groan. I went to Polk, no longer a camp, but now a full blown fort, just once. If I remember correctly, it was mid October twenty ten. It was the third brigade tenth Mountain Division's last major training event before our deployment to Afghanistan in early twenty eleven. Even in October it was still hot and humid. I ran to the local home depot to pick up some items the unit needed and was shocked to see that even in the middle of town, my cell phone had no service. I had no service on post, which didn't really surprise me we were in the training area in the middle of nowhere, but part of the reason I volunteered to go on this supply run was to get cell service so I could call misses Ghosts of Arlington and see how she and the boys were doing. She was about seven and a half months pregnant at the time with two boys under the age of five, so I wanted to make sure she was doing alright. Long story short, about a week into this four or five week training event, I got a phone call that she had broken her toe on her right foot, and her doctor said she could no longer drive or go down the narrow, somewhat rickety stairs to our basement where the washer and dryer were. I had finished the one event I really needed to do at Polk, so I was allowed to return home and take care of my family. I left Fort Polk after being there for maybe one week and never looked back. In a letter home after his transfer, Dole wrote Dear folks, from the sidewalks of New York to the swamps of Louisiana, oh how this army changes. They say we will be here another month, but I hope not. There are about three thousand Army Special Training Program men here, and the drill sergeants are really taking it out on us. They believe that we have had a soft life for the last three months, so they are either going to make us or break us. I'm in the infantry attached to an anti tank outfit, but until I learn more about that, I can't explain what it is. This outfit is a little tougher than the medics, but at least we have something to fight back with. This is one boy they're not going to break, so don't worry about me. I even sort of like the place. Good night. Love Bob. I have to assume his comment about liking Polk was a bit of Stockholm syndrome setting in. Several rainy weeks in the field where they fought mud as much as a simulated enemy gave way to training on larger anti tank guns in Kentucky, but before the transfer, Dole was granted just enough leave to swing through Russell and spend a few days with his family, sleeping in his own bed and eating his mom's home cooked meals. It rained the entire time he was home, but he was out of the swamp and could not have cared less. None of his friends were there, they were all off somewhere with the military, but the leave was just what he needed to refocus and get ready for the next phase of his training. Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, everyone was speaking in quiet whispers about a possible Allied invasion of Europe. They didn't know how right they were. It was now May 1944, and D-Day was less than a month away. In preparation, these new infantrymen spent most of their time at the gun range training on rifles, pistols, the 50 caliber machine gun, and bazookas. Dole was the only one in the unit who had managed to not fire a gun on a military range up to this point, but he was pleased to learn that he was a pretty good shot. On June 1st, they started training on big guns, the 57 calibers. Loud, powerful, cannon-like artillery that could blow out the side of a building with one shot, stop an enemy tank dead in its tracks, or provide cover for a platoon approaching a hostile area. It hardly seemed possible, but during this training, Dole realized it had already been one year since he reported to Fort Leavenworth. In some ways it seemed like the time had passed quickly. In others, it seemed like he had lived multiple lifetimes in those twelve months. He found it even stranger that Kenny had been in the army for two months less and was already in combat. One year from today, he told his parents in a letter, I'll be home for good. I hope. On June 4th, Dole listened to the radio as President Roosevelt held a fireside chat and announced the fall of Rome to Allied forces. Then, two days after that, D-Day, he listened as FDR prayed publicly over the airwaves for those taking part in the invasion and bloody battles to come. It's a little long, but I'm going to play some or most or all of that particular message.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer. Almighty God, our sons, the pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and cruel. Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong, he may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again, and we know that by thy grace and by the righteousness of our cause our sons will triumph. They will be sore tried by night and by day, without rest, until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest, they fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, thy heroic servants, into thy kingdom, and for us at home, fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them. Help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in thee in this hour of great sacrifice. Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer as we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking thy help to our efforts. Give us strength too, strengthen our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces, and let our hearts be stout to wait out the long travel, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons, wheresoever they may be. And O Lord, give us faith, give us faith in thee, faith in our sons, faith in each other, faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dull. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment, let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose. With thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances, lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace, a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men, and a peace that will let all men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

This is what Dole wrote in his autobiography in response to the president's prayer. Tears clouded the eyes of several of the soldiers sitting near me. A few sobbed openly. Historians would one day debate Roosevelt's policies, his strengths and weaknesses, but that night, in that moment, his voice transcended human expression. Somehow he tapped into the soul of America. He had expressed its cry without reservations or embarrassment to God. Every soldier in uniform who heard Roosevelt's words was moved by their meaning and had no doubt that we were going to win the war, no matter the cost. That's where we're going to pause Bob Dole's story today. Next time we'll finish up his training and follow him into the brutal combat on the Italian peninsula. And yes, you heard that right. I said next time and not next week again. Work is sending me back to the birthplace of the podcast, and I will be traveling to the National Capital Region, where yes, I will be working, but I will also be spending some time with a few of the friends that made it such a good place to live. So I will see you again in two or three weeks on the Ghosts of Arlington podcast.

SPEAKER_03 32:01

What are you doing the infantry? You much, you much, you much. What are you doing your back is gut, your back is dead for stuck?

SPEAKER_04 32:08

This is a mechanized war, they say, that saying is sure a bust.

SPEAKER_03 32:12

Cause all that you see in the infantry is one that loves dust. What do you do in the infantry? You hike, you hike, you hike. What do you do in the infantry? You left and ride the bike. Everyone else can ride a jeep or fly up in the sky. But there's nothing to ride in the infantry, you just to tie the guy. What do they say in the infantry? They squap, squawk, squawk.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

They have to flop. They march across the ocean, and that's what it's going to do. But don't forget the aircraft has the hardware.

SPEAKER_03 32:55

What do you do in the ground? Never a chance to sleep with free face. You're fighting a hole of the fuselage. What do you do in the ground? What do you do in the egg when the five biggest screen?

SPEAKER_02 33:14

How can you look for the five years to stay on the free? How can you take a fuck all the time behind the dream?