My name is Harold Dinzes. I was born December 24, 1916 in the back of the old Opera House on East 36th Street in New York City. I was raised in Brooklyn. We lived on New Jersey Avenue, in East New York. My father built office partitions, then the Depression hit. I was fifteen. My father went to work for my uncle, for practically nothing, so he could keep food on the table. One Sunday, I was over at a friend's house in Clifton, NJ and we had the radio on and we heard the announcement that the attack on Pearl Harbour had happened. Both of us got into the car and ran it to New York. I don't know why, but we went there. Everybody was up in a dither.
In June 1942, my number got drafted. I was sent to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to the engineering school. For some particular reason or another, I was interested in explosives. I took a liking to the instructor and paid attention to what was going on, eventually got the chance to go to officer candidate school and took it. Before I knew it, I was a second lieutenant.
When I first got into the service, I was in the 169th Combat Battalion and all of a sudden they changed everything around and created the Air Force. My outfit became the 164th Aviation Battalion. I started teaching about demolitions and booby traps. I went all over the country to different forts, camps, teaching and learning. Because I was good at what I was doing with explosives, I gave lectures to all the officers that were way up in the line, including, once, a general. I taught everything I knew. I like to believe that because of the lectures, I saved an awful lot of lives on our side.
I was stationed at an airfield in Tallahassee and was going with a girl from the Tallahassee State College for Women. One night, we were out on a date and she started crying. I said, "What's up?" She said, "You're going overseas." I said, "What are you talking about? I didn't hear a damned thing. How did you find out?" And she said, "You know, what's-his-name's girlfriend, she works in the offices at the base." Sure enough, we shipped out within a couple of months. They boxed up our equipment and sent us to the West Coast. This was 1943. It took over a week to get across the country, on a tube train that had been in use since 1918, from the days when they had "40&80." Forty horses and eighty men. In a goddamn boxcar.
We boarded the ship at San Francisco, if I'm not mistaken, and sailed across the Pacific in about three weeks, unescorted. Japanese subs were all over the place, but we didn't use evasive tactics, we just went as fast as we could. On the way there, they told us we were going to New Guinea. There must have been, I'm guessing, eight thousand troops aboard that ship and I bet maybe ten people on the whole ship knew where New Guinea was, or what it was. I happened to know because I had always been interested in faraway places and read about them all the time. I lectured on where we were going, but it was impossible to tell these guys we were going to the jungle because all they could think about was exotic girls, all the rest of the stuff, you know, the hula girls. They were sadly disillusioned when we got to Milne Bay.
The jungle came right out to the waterline. I got off the ship and stepped on land and there was a native there, standing with his bow and arrow, his spear. He looked at me, I looked at him and it was like we were from different worlds. I had studied the books they gave us on the language, Pidgin English. I still have the books. He was shaking like a leaf. I asked him, "Where is your house, where do you live?" And he looked at me like where the hell did I come from? From Mars. They have no concept of time. He tells me his house could be ten days or ten years. You never could tell where they live or where they are. After a while, I got to be pretty fluent.
We got put to work helping with the airfields that were in the process of being finished. At the time, I had about 166 men underneath me and I had to keep them fed with the rations we were getting from the service, as well as stuff we were getting from Australia. We never starved to death, but it wasn't the kind of food you'd like to eat. To enhance the meals, we would do some fishing. With hand grenades. The fish would float up and the natives would tell you which ones you could eat. Soon, the fighting was going our way.
The Japanese had some very high class marines who had seen previous combat, but they had to pull them out because we had the Australians there, who were also very good fighters. From that point on, it was the Japanese backing off from island to island, and you know what happened then, the history of the war. I can't praise the Australians enough for the fighting that they did. Once, when the Japanese marines were coming through the jungle, every one of our available men, whether sick or wounded, dying, it didn't make any difference, went up on the line. They came across one of the airfields and we had all our guns lined up, shooting with no obstruction whatsoever. And they kept charging across. The massacre was so great, we buried six hundred men in a common grave, with a bulldozer. We couldn't take the time and give them a courtesy of a proper burial, because after one day in the jungle, everything started to rot and pop apart. Six hundred in one common grave.
Even after that, there were still Japanese in the jungle. There would be enemy fire and we'd get there and wouldn't know where they were. I got sick and tired of it, so one day I requisitioned two .50 caliber anti-aircraft guns on mounts. Bullets that would take your arm off if they hit you. And we put them in the jungle and opened up, sprayed the place to hell. I didn't care who we killed. I never knew whether the Japanese were in there or not, but we didn't get bothered too much after that, after we sprayed the place. We also sometimes sent the natives out as scouts, to find someone to interrogate, and they would bring back heads. I told them I couldn't talk to a head, I had to get some information. When the first Japanese POWs came in, we put them to work. There were so few that gave themselves up. It was so uncommon, people actually showed up from hundreds of miles away to see one. They just never gave up. There would still be soldiers out there, refusing to stop, decades after the war, some of them.
Anyway, there was a demand for aviation engineers to different places because we needed airfields badly. I got alerted. We didn't know where we were going to go. You got an alert, you have so much time to load up, get your equipment ready. They sent us off in convoy, on a ten thousand ton steamer. We went up the coast to Manila and I'l never forget when we got to the harbour, which was a deep sea harbour where ships could come right up to the land. The whole bay was scattered with blown up ships, all you could see was the mast sticking up, a funnel here and there because it was a big ship. The captain of our ship was an old Dutchman who had been a Navy man, he'd been called back to service, he threaded that ship through there like he was driving an automobile. I stood on the bridge and watched him maneuver the ship into the bay, and I thought he was going to blow us the hell up. He got us in safely.
There, the Japanese had taken bodies, dead animals, refuse and thrown it all in the reservoir. They knew what they were doing. It would occupy nine or ten people to take care of a single person in a hospital. Not just wounded, but sick. The diseases that were going around, people were dropping like flies. Everybody in my outfit had malaria, myself included. The pill for it tasted horrible. An order had come down to stand there while my men swallowed it. I'd line the guys up and give them the pill and make sure they took it. But a guy would swallow it and the moment you'd turn around and go on to the next person, they'd spit the damned thing out.
We had filtration systems set up. But it was so hot. They'd tell you not to drink the water. When you're dying of thirst and there's so much of it...
Eventually, I got injured and got an infection in my ankle. I couldn't get it fixed where I was, so I found an outfit nearby that had an army doctor. An overweight man in his forties. I asked what he was doing there. He had volunteered. The bone was beginning to stick out of my foot. He gave me a concoction he himself had created, and it worked. He put a bandage over it and told me to keep my foot dry. But the minute I stepped out of the tent, there was water waist deep. You couldn't keep dry. It was impossible to do.
When the war was ending, I was at a field hospital. I had my bed on the veranda outside, because there was no room inside. There was a medical captain to my right and an eighteen year old from a Filipino combat outfit that had been fighting against the Japanese. The kid came running up to where we were one day, saying, "Captain, they just said on the radio they dropped a bomb equal to 15,000 tons of TNT." I said, "Get the hell out of here. Go back to whatever you were doing and don't come bothering me like that." When I used TNT in the service, the most I ever used was ten or twenty pounds at a time. To blow up a bridge. To mine something. Set traps. This was an unheard of sum. He ran away, then he came back and said, "Sir, they're saying it all over again on the radio." So I went there. I didn't know what the hell an atom bomb was. I couldn't conceive of anything that powerful. Nothing like that existed. It couldn't be. But it was, of course.
The day, that night, when we thought that was going to be the end of it, one of our ships full of ammo blew up in the harbour. Everybody started firing their guns. The guys were going crazy, thinking we were being attacked. Bullets bouncing off the embankment. We got under our beds. I was praying, thinking "it's a hell of a time to get killed," you know. Fighting's going to be over and one of our guys is going to kill us. Finally, the MPs got control of what was going on. They took the weapons and got everything calmed down.
About six months later, everybody started going home. They prioritized people by how much combat they'd seen. How far you'd been overseas and where. I was in the Philippines for almost two years. I remained there for several months after. This was 1944. McArthur's Manila.
One day, I got a call from the officer in charge and he told me to get dressed because I was being considered for promotion. I had no nice clothes, I'd been out in the field. I dug into my duffel bag and found an old uniform, put it on and went there. I rode in a coupe with some others who were up for promotion. Everybody was dressed clean as a whistle. I was sweating like a pig, I was nervous as hell. I hadn't seen that much brass since I got out of the States. All the sudden, we're at attention and a two-star general walks into the room. He tells us to be seated. "Don't worry, the guy you're going to see is not that bad, he's a nice fellow." He put us at ease. Because my name started with a D, I was one of my first guys called to be interrogated by this group of army officers that was there. The general was sitting in the middle of them. He asked me questions pertaining to mathematics with the engineering we were doing, which was so basic that a kid in high school could have passed. He was smart as a whip. He knew I was jumping. And he says, "That'll do, Captain." He was telling me I got promoted. Right there.
I was also put in for an award by a commanding officer. He put me in for the Bronze Star, without my knowing it. Eventually, without my knowing it, I got it. The army works in mysterious ways. I am now 95 years of age. I still have trouble with my injury. I'm a disabled vet. The army has taken care of me with the problems I've had since. I've got stories. I could tell stories till I'm blue in the face.
