A Journey to the Far East:
Lawrence Carlton’s Experiences in World War II
Dr.
Carlton shares his World War II experiences with children in Simsbury as well
as men and women in local retirement homes. On the 23rd of May, 2002, I
interviewed Dr. Lawrence Carlton. I arrived at the Canton Historical Museum at
approximately 6:30 PM, with tape recorder, notebook, cassette tapes jumbled in
my hands. I couldn’t help but feel nervous. As I walked up the stairs of
the museum, I realized that I was just feeling nervous anticipation. I finally
got to hear stories of World War II experiences. I never had the chance to talk
to either of my grandfathers about their experiences in World War II. Dr.
Carlton was a member of the Army Air Corps from 1942-1945.
Q: Let’s start off
by giving a little introduction of who you are.
LC: I’m Dr. Lawrence
Carlton; I now live in Simsbury. I grew up in Windsor, Connecticut. I went to
the public schools there, Loomis School, now Loomis Chaffee. From there I went
to Harvard College. I was drafted before I got very far in my freshman year.
Three years in the Army Air Corps, back to Harvard College, graduated there in
1948, class of 1946. Then went to Harvard Medical school, graduated in 1952.
Q: When you went to
Harvard, you didn’t get a student deferment?
LC: No.
Q: I remember hearing
about that taking place in Vietnam, the same didn’t hold true in World
War II?
LC: In World War II, unless
you were in a particular government training program, students weren’t
like that in Vietnam. They needed us too badly. They passed a law in December
of 1942 drafting teenagers. Up until then, you weren’t eligible for the
draft. You could volunteer if you were over 17, but they couldn’t draft
you until you were 21. They changed that age to 18 in December.
Q: It must have been a
disappointment to start college, right, and then be taken away. Were you
expecting to be drafted?
LC: After one semester I was
drafted.
Q: Did you take getting
drafted as inevitable?
LC: I figured eventually, I
would be drafted.
Q: Were a lot of your
friends drafted?
LC: Oh yes.
Q: So it was pretty much
the whole class of ‘46 that was taken out of school?
LC: Eventually almost all of
them served time.
Q: Were you in like the
beginning of the whole group of drafted young men?
LC: Uhh...early, Yes.
Q: At least it
wasn’t during the first semester, at least you got some time to get some
credits.
LC: Well, when I came back to
college after the war, there was no room for me to live in a dorm. This was
because my parents had moved within 25 miles of Boston, so that made me
automatically a commuter. So I had to commute for the rest of my time in
college.
Q: So it was kind of a
bummer coming back. Going back to when you said that you served at the air
force...
LC: Army air force, it
wasn’t just the army, it was just part of the army. They didn’t
even call it the army air force. It was called the army air corps. They had
under the corps, different air forces within the corps.
Q: Where did you live? Did
you do training in the United States?
LC: Yes. I was in the United
States. We went to Miami Beach for basic training. In the middle of the winter,
it was the place to be, but it was very tough just the same. After basic
training, they sent me to Illinois for radio operator school. After training in
that, I went to advanced radio operating school in Wisconsin.
Q: Basically all over the
country, then, right?
LC: Absolutely. After that I
was sent to an army air base in Tennessee for overseas training. Then they
decided that some of us probably might be called upon to act as infantry men or
behind the enemy lines, so they took us and sent us to Jefferson Barracks in
Missouri for infantry training, bayonet practice, and marksmanship and all that
kind of stuff. And then we were sent off the United States at Long Beach, on
ship.
Q: Had you ever been to
these places before, or had you been sheltered in New England growing up?
LC: Mostly New England, yeah.
Q: Going back to college,
you must have wished you could have gotten college credit for all of this
training. Did you get any college credit?
LC: As a matter of fact, I
did get some college credits for my 3 year of service. They gave us war service
credits. That was their policy. As to where I went after setting off from Long
Beach, I went out across the South Pacific, unescorted, zig-zagging all the way
to Australia (by boat). In Australia we docked the supplies. I wanted to say
that I had set foot on Australian soil, so I volunteered to unload the supplies.
You never volunteer in the Army, but I did that so I could set foot on
Australian soil. Then we went back on the ship, continuing around the world to
Bombay, India — across the Bay of Bengal, which is where the Japanese
were. We landed in Bombay.
Q: So did you stay there
for a long time, or no? More of jumping from place to place?
LC: We stayed in Bombay for a
couple of weeks because of a disastrous fire around the docks.
Q: Were you in Bombay when
the fire began?
LC: We were there. A ship
loaded with cotton caught on fire and the Bombay Fire Department wanted to let
it dissipate. I guess they forgot that the cotton ship also contained
munitions. So that ship exploded, catching fire to surrounding munition ships.
Because of that fire, we lost 19 ships and about 4000 people were killed.
Q: Were the destroyed
ships all American?
LC: No they were not. They
were Norwegian. There were no warships involved. We had to spend 2 weeks
cleaning up the mess, moving the bodies around.
Q: Where were you specifically
when the fire started?
LC: When it actually happened
I was in the barracks in a base just outside the city of Bombay. And we heard a
series of explosions. Within half an hour we got a call to load up the trucks
and they drove us down. All the townspeople were streaming away from the fire,
but we were going toward it, into the heat of things. There was a constant flow
of people away from the site.
Q: Did you know what was
going on, did they let you know or were you kind of wondering? Were you kind of
prepared for battle?
LC: We were prepared for
anything, but we didn’t know. It could have been anything, sabotage, who
knew?
Q: On the way there, were
you and other members of the army like: oh my gosh, here’s real war?
LC: Well, we were young guys,
and we were kind of excited about the whole thing. We wondered what we were
going to do there. When we got there, it turned out, for the whole night we
were moving munitions — piling them up on the streets of Bombay. Winston
Churchill called it the “best kept secret of World War II.”
Q: So news of the event
did not circulate to the United States?
LC: Actually, LIFE magazine
put it on a two page spread.
Q: Right after the event,
it didn’t even hit US newspapers? It was covered up?
LC: Right. In letters home, I
wrote that there had been “minor excitement” around the base.
Q: Or how about minor
altercations? (laugh)
LC: I couldn’t write
about the event at the time. I wrote about it later.
Q: After the two week
period when you were in India, where did you go?
LC: They put us on a troop
train, a very slow moving Indian train. We had to stay on it for five days and
five nights. Um, wooden benches to sleep on. Whenever it was time for meals,
they would stop the train and set up a soup kitchen. We’d get out, and
have our meal, very leisurely. The train would go so slow sometimes we would
get out and walk.
Q: And almost go faster?
(laugh)
LC: What an experience! Then,
we went to Calcutta. I was stationed in an RAF base outside of Calcutta.
Q: An RAF (hesitantly)
base?
LC: Royal Air Force base.
Q: I should know that...
LC: The base is now located
in “Dumb-Dumb-field.” There, instead of being a radio operator,
suddenly I found myself a cryptographer. Decoding messages. They were very short
of cryptographers. So with no training, but with good intelligence reports, I
was made a cryptographer. An instant cryptographer!
Q: So after all of that
training in radio, you were put in a completely different field.
LC: Some of my buddies were
on the radio side of things. They were on the receiving side messages. I was
decoding messages from 14 generals in Calcutta. This was at the height of the
Burma campaign. General Stillwell, he was a famous general from that era. The
Japanese had taken all of Burma and were
invading India.