So I worked for the telephone company for five years from 1937 to 1942. By that time we were in WWII.

I wanted to make a personal contribution because I wanted to see us beat the Germans. Fortunately, Maryland was one of the colleges that had ROTC. Even though I didn’t get four years of ROTC that would guarantee a commission, I did get two years of basic training, finishing in my junior year.

That, plus five years in the telephone company plus being in Washington, DC, where there was a guy who helped get people in the right jobs… I told this fellow that I would like to get in the military if I could get overseas.

He told me about the company being formed that would take its basic training in England I got the commission as a first lieutenant in the signal service company.

The job of this company was to work in ports, check out the equipment, and provide communications around the port. After about a month in England, our company moved to the Bristol Channel on the West Coast. I was in a town called Swansea which used to be a resort town, and still is, I guess.

We were bringing in material that would be later used in the invasion of North Africa. I worked there until about October. Then the company moved up to a place called Cheltenham. But then someone didn’t like the commanding officer of this company, so we were broken up. Eventually, we sailed for North Africa. No one knew where we were going.

In those days everything was blacked out, but when we went by Gibraltar the port of Tangier was not blacked out. It was an international zone that could be entered by any country according to the agreements. It seemed like a jewel in the desert.

We got into Oran about two days after the invasion. There were three points of invasion. Casablanca was to the west Oran was in the center, and Algiers was further east.

Oran became the biggest depot of signal equipment in the world for a while. We were simultaneously staging for the invasion of Italy. We invaded North Africa to learn how to do it.

If you read the books about this operation, they will tell you that we almost didn’t make it. Most of the time we shook our heads in disbelief. We thought our operations were bad we can only surmise that the German operations were worse.

At that time Rommel was operating in the desert between Tunis and Egypt. Rommel almost won those battles, but they were a long way from Oran.

The worst thing we had were a few air raids. We were out of range of most German aircraft, but once in awhile the Germans would send one over. But we never got close to being afraid that we would be killed.

Backing up for a moment, when I arrived in Swansea, that town was nothing but a heap of rubble. The Bristol Channel has very high tides so the ports need locks. A ship goes in and high tide and they close the doors. The aim of the Germans was to bomb the locks and cause the ship’s to be unusable. But the only thing they ever hit was downtown Swansea. They never hit the locks.

In North Africa I was in a unit that was responsible for getting signal core and communications equipment. We also ran communications up and down North Africa and it was pretty crude in those days.

There were very few lines between Oran and Casablanca and Algiers, but whatever we had we tried to make the most of it.