The Lost Ranger: A Soldier's Story

by Mehlo, Noel

  One week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the regimental headquarters issued the movement order, HQ 134th Infantry Regiment, Field Order No. 1, on December 14, 1941. An excerpt of this order is below: HEADQUARTERS 134TH INFANTRY REGIMENT Camp Joseph T. Robinson

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  14 December, 1941 Field Order

  No. 1

  Maps: None available

  1. a. War has been declared on this country by the AXIS POWERS.

  b. The 35th Infantry Division stationed at Camp Joseph T. Arkansas, will move by rail, destination unknown. 2. This regimental combat team will move at once by rail with all personnel, equipment, and transportation, except as indicated below, destination unknown, and duration of movement unknown…

  j. …Ammunition: The ammunition officer will immediately draw one day's mobilization supply of ammunition and same will be issued as follows: 10 rds. to each rifleman, and one clip of .45 Am. for each pistolman. Balance to be equally distributed within the Regiment according to the firepower of the weapons.

  3. a. All leaves, furloughs, and passes are canceled and officers and men are directed to report to their units… On December 14, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, orders were received moving the Regiment, as a part of the 35th Division, to the west coast as part of the Southern California Sector as part of the Western Defense Command. The Division moved on a high priority by rail over several routes. The unit was consolidated at Fort Ord, California. Subsequently, the 134th Infantry Regiment spent a year in 1942 on coastal defense duty along a 185 mile stretch of coastline. The Regiment spent a short stay at Camp San Luis Obispo in January, San Francisco as a part of the Internal Security Command in March, and Los Angeles in April, finally settling in Ojai near Ventura. The Army's fastchanging new methods of waging all-out global war were introduced quickly to the Infantry Divisions in March 1942. Amid all of this action and duty on 1 March 1942, came reorganization as the U.S. Army issued orders of triangularization of infantry divisions across the entire Army.

  The Californian’s came to respect the Regiment and came to call it their “adopted Army.” In August, 1942, the Second Battalion was selected to form the basis of a Task Force sent to Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska on a secret mission to secure Adak and construct an airfield. The Second Battalion was permanently transferred to the 197th Infantry Regiment. For its performance in the Aleutians, the battalion received a commendation from the War Department. The rest of the Regiment remained on the west coast and received 900 men and 40 officers to replace the Second Battalion on Christmas Day. This required the Regimental leadership to make adjustments in personnel from the remaining two old battalions in order to balance out experience within the unit.

  In January, 1943, the 35th Division reverted to the direct control of the Army Ground Forces and left the Southern California Sector to re-concentrate at Camp San Luis Obispo. Major General Eugene Murray remained in control of the Southern California Sector, and Brigadier General Paul Baade, Assistant Division Commander, succeeded him to the command of the Division. The 35th Infantry Division had retained its fourth regiment, the 140th Infantry Regiment, until moving to Camp San Luis Obispo in January, 1943. The 138th Infantry Regiment also left the Division. The primary mission of the unit became training again rather than security, with emphasis on discipline with a training focus marches and range-firing of all weapons and field exercises for squads and platoons even amidst the heavy rains.

  In order to equalize the state of training of the three regiments of the Division, Major General Paul Baade, now the Commanding General, ordered a sweeping exchange of personnel between the old regiments and the newlyactivated 320th Infantry Regiment. The 137th Infantry Regiment was moved to Camp San Luis Obispo. As a result of this latest reorganization, one third of the men in the 134th Infantry Regiment and one third of the men in the 137th Infantry Regiment were sent to be a part of the new 320th Infantry Regiment that had been filled from newly arrived conscripted soldiers from Fort Dix, New Jersey, Georgia and other locales to a lesser extent. In return one third of the new recruits from the 320th Infantry Regiment became part of the 134th Infantry Regiment and one-third went to the 137th Infantry Regiment. PVT Hull was one of the soldiers from the 320th Infantry Regiment to be integrated into the 134th Infantry Regiment. This move gave each regiment one-third of the new recruits and two thirds of trained men and national guardsmen to ensure combat effectiveness throughout the Division.

  All of this reorganization was necessary to make the Division a well-balanced fighting unit. It hit the 134th Infantry Regiment especially hard due to the loss of its Second Battalion to Alaska not a half a year before. Several accounts of members of the 134th Infantry Regiment offer resentment of the newly absorbed troops from the 320th, but this doesn’t seem to have affected the unit in the long term. The Regimental Commander took action to save the original Nebraskan National Guard members who had been with the 134th when it was called into Federal Service.7 Those original 2072 men were the men who had volunteered for this Regiment, and were the needed core with which to build an esprit de corps for the Regiment. This would prove critical in the months and years to come.

  A result of this meant that the three infantry regiments all had to redo what seemed like basic training to familiarize themselves with each other. This included close order drill, map reading, trips to the rifle range, and everything else involved in basic training. The infantry companies would take long hikes into the rugged terrain to places such as Morro Bay.4 In a wartime memoir, Mr. Ferry Schoonover of the 137th Infantry Regiment recounted;

  “Three things that I remember most about the training at Camp San Luis Obispo: 1) Practicing guard mount in the sticky, gummy, soil in the rain, and how hard it was to march with that goo on our feet!! 2) Going out in the surrounding hills on compass problems and trying to find our way in those dark eerie-rainy nights!! 3) Getting poison oak all over my body and going to the medics and getting calamine lotion to put on the rash.”

  (Ferry G. Schoonover8) The current Camp San Luis Obispo Museum Curator commented that the “goo” is the clay that the Spanish had built all of the local missions from. The clay still takes on the messy consistency during wet periods. Poison oak is still very prevalent in the region.

  The entire Division moved to Camp Rucker, Alabama, on 1 April 1943 for advanced divisional training. The 35th Infantry Division now firmly consisted of the 134th Infantry Regiment, the 137th Infantry Regiment and the 320th Infantry Regiment. This divisional training is important later because the fact that Hull participated in this training in the summer of 1943 helped to make him eligible for the Rangers. One of the requirements for the Rangers was that soldiers had participated in a divisional training exercise. By spring 1943, the components of the Division were substantially established and would remain the same later as the unit proceeded into combat with one final shakeup of personnel occurring at the time of the transcontinental movement of the Division in the spring of 1943. This reorganization within the 35th Infantry Division was likely a large part of the reason for his assignment to the Regiment.

  The importance of all of this unit history is that it helps to define the heart of a unit. The heart of a unit is comprised in part by the heritage of it. The idea of living up to heroic or honorable deeds of those men who have served before is something that gets inside a motivated soldier in a good unit. A unit like the 134th Infantry Regiment had this at its heart. It had seen and felt the touch of history. This unit was ideal to forge the beginnings of many future United States Army Rangers. A thorough review of records from multiple sources indicates Herbert Hull entrained on March 22, 1943 and traveled with the 320th Infantry Regiment to Camp Rucker Alabama and joined his new unit on April 5, 1943.

  Troop trains were first used by the American military in the Mexican War in 1846 to move troops across the continent to engage in battle. The Civil War saw large scale movements of entire armies to the various engagements that most Americ
ans are familiar with. World War I resulted in extensive use of the rail system to move men and equipment. The use of the word referring to troop trains as “mains” evolved as jargon by railroad personnel as a result of the two World Wars.9 Troop movements were always classified, identified only by a Military Authorization Identification Number, or (MAIN), for secrecy. A military troop train could be made up entirely of troop cars, or it might be mixed with civilian passenger cars, or with military or civilian freight cars. That secrecy extended to the train crew as well, who were told only their segment of the soldier's final destination.10 To move a World War II triangularized division of around 14,000 men and their equipment required the use of as many as 21 trains with over 200 coaches, 40 baggage cars, 30 kitchen cars, and as many flat and box cars as were necessary to move vehicles and other equipment. It is possible that for security and timing, all the trains moving a division-sized unit might not all take the same route on the network. An interesting note is that almost all U.S. servicemen rode a troop train at some point while Stateside between 1941 and 1945, which equates to over 40 million military personnel. Much of the troop train traffic rode on what were normally the freight only lines of the major rail companies. In 1943, the U.S. Office of War Information produced a film called Troop Train to educate servicemen and women. Several screenshots from this film are in Figure 36.

  If troop movements were scheduled to last over 12 hours in length, Pullman coach space was assigned to the train if available. A Pullman could sleep around 30 personnel at a time. The Pullman Company went into the war with a surplus of some 2,000 cars and was thus well equipped to handle their requested mission. For the movement, two men were assigned to both the lower and the upper berths to sleep. The space was converted into seating for four men during the day. The troop trains of the 35th Infantry Division travelled on the Southern Pacific rail line on the east-west traffic artery from California through southern Arizona including Tucson, through El Paso, Texas, on to San Antonio, past Camp Wolters, Texas, Houston and into New Orleans as part of this movement. The trains then continued along the gulf coast through Mississippi, near an Army Air Corps base near Biloxi, and on to Camp Rucker. There might have been slight deviations in route per train, with the Southern Pacific east-west traffic artery being the common denominator.9

  Figure 36: Troop Train (1943) Images U.S. Office of War Information Camp Rucker, now known as Fort Rucker, Alabama is located in the extreme southeast corner of Alabama mostly in Dale County. Portions of the base also lie in Coffee, Geneva and Houston counties. It lies approximately 75 miles southeast of Montgomery, Alabama. Its geographic location is at 31°20'37" North, 85°42'29" West (31.343654, 85.707995). It is located on the Ozark, Alabama USGS map quadrangle shown below as Figure 37. Modern Fort Rucker serves as the home of Army Aviation. The region is a physiographical part of what is known as the East Gulf Coastal Plain, which implies that the region is relatively flat with rounded and eroded hills, cuestas and flatwoods. As a subpart to the above classification, the region is dominated by what is referred to as the Southern Red Hills which are formed on sand, limestone marls, clay and silt with elevations in the hills reaching more from 200 feet to 400 feet above mean sea level. The area is typically considered forested with Loblolly shortleaf pine.11 This information is important as to the selection of the place as an Army training camp, as well as to the training conducted.

  Figure 37: U.S. Department of the Interior Geologic Survey, Ozark, Alabama, Scale: 1:62500, Edition of 1948 To gain a better understanding of the importance of Camp Rucker to the Army and the training of military personnel, something of its history must be understood. From what is known from the time of European settlement, southeastern Alabama was controlled by the Muskoegans which is synonymous with the Creek Nation. These Native Americans were formed by a loose confederacy of about 17 tribes. This culture is classified as Late Mississippian. The archaeological and historic record indicates that permanent settlement in the immediate area around Camp Rucker was unlikely, and Indian trails have not been detected in the area. Indian wars waged around the area of Fort Rucker into the 1830s.

  Areas surrounding southeastern Alabama did attract early European settlers as early as the sixteenth century when the Spanish attempted to settle what are now Mobile and later the development of the French Fort at Biloxi in 1699. The French maintained control over the Gulf Coast until ceding it east of the Mississippi River in defeat to the British at the Treaty of Paris in 1763, upon conclusion of the French and Indian (Seven Years) War. The British colony of Georgia containing the acquired territory of what would later become Alabama began to prosper under British rule and the population grew with improvements in agriculture.

  Development continued under British, Spanish and American control through the end of the 1700s. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 from France by the United States doubled the geographic size of the new nation. This lead to a steady stream of settlement into the Mississippi River Valley and eventually what would become Alabama. The conclusion of the Creek War of 1813-1814 further resulted in European settlement of what became the territory of Alabama as the result of the forced cession of 9,321,000 ha (23,000,000 acres) of Creek lands. The Alabama territory boomed, and by 1830, it had 309,527 residents. The area around Camp Rucker had its first public land transaction in January 1824. The Federal Government continued to sell off tracts of land in the region into the early 1900s.

  Unlike the southeast Alabama of today transected by all means of transportation, the region in the first half of the 1800s had very poor transportation routes. Rivers such as the Pea River provided some of the first access to settlers. Other reasons for poor growth of the region included poor soil conditions and a lingering Native American presence. Into the Civil War, much of the settlement in the area of Camp Rucker consisted largely of small farmers. The eastern portions of Alabama contain large areas covered in "wiregrass" and "piney woods" and were not known for fertile agricultural soils. Cotton became an important crop in the region and livestock became somewhat important. The Camp Rucker area did not see direct Civil War fighting, although many men fought for the Confederacy from the region. After the Civil War, the region focused on cotton through the end of the early 1900s. By 1917, planters rapidly changed to peanut, corn and potatoes after a devastating boll weevil invasion.

  Not until well after the Civil War did the first railroad arrive in the area. The Central Railroad reached the town of Ozark in late September 1888. Future rail linkages included the Alabama Midland Railroad from Troy to Ozark, and Dothan, and ultimately through Georgia to the Atlantic Coast, and lastly the Atlantic Coast Railroad. During the late 19th Century, the timber industry, driven by large stands of pine trees resulted in several offshoot industries such as lumber and turpentine production.

  Alabama and more specifically, southeastern Alabama suffered greatly through the depression. Dale County’s two banks failed in 1929 and the Federal Land Bank began to foreclose on area farms. The New Deal intended to make substantial investment into revitalization of agriculture. Prior farming practices had taken the poor soil conditions of the region and reeked havoc on the landscape through poor conservation. Practices that are taken for granted today such as crop rotation were non-existent in the previous hundred years and resulted in extreme soil depletion. In 1934, the U.S. Department of Agriculture purchased tracts of sub-marginal land and converted them to natural and wildlife refuges. A good portion of this land would later become Camp Rucker and at the time would be known as the Pea River Land Use Project. The federal government constructed Lake Tholocco by damming Claybank Creek. In 1940, the federal government turned the entire land holding over to the State of Alabama for a recreation facility.

  After the hostilities erupted in Europe, the locals petitioned to return the land to the War Department with the purpose of creating a military base. The Army announced plans to establish a training facility at the site. The Camp was originally named the Ozark Triangular Division Camp in 1941. The War
Department decided to rename it Camp Rucker in January 1942. Camp Rucker was named in honor of Confederate Colonel Edmund Winchester Rucker, who was later given the honorary title of General as he had become an industrial leader in Birmingham after the war.12

  The J.A. Jones Construction Company was awarded contract of the project for the construction of 1,500 buildings in 106 days. The grounds, encompassing 58,000 acres (235 km2), were to include 11 churches, 15 post exchanges, five theatres, and a hospital. Camp Rucker was designed as an infantry training base. Like many other military facilities in the interior, it also served as a prisoner of war (POW) camp for 1,718 prisoners. This practice began in 1942 and continued through the end of the war and slightly beyond. The POW laborers constructed an altar and fittings in the Headquarters Place Chapel.13 Camp Rucker would provide quarters for 3,280 Officers and 39,461 Enlisted Personnel. Considering the conservation movement begun in the early 1900s, it is interesting in today’s thinking that the government converted a wildlife refuge to a military base. In September, 1942, the Army purchased acreage that would become Ozark Army Airfield, and later be named Cairns Army Airfield. Camp Rucker would later be designated as Fort Rucker in 1955.11