If you are curious to know how members of the Signal Corps live in New Zealand, catch T/Sgt. Richard E. Thornton of the Zero Beaters when he isn't busy. He was there a few months ago. He's the man who can tell you plenty about the daily routine of radio operators in jungle stations.
For all his eighteen months of foreign service, the sergeant has been in the Army only a little over two years. Pretty quick time to P. O. E. as you can figure. He enlisted in January of 1942, and in June of that year was getting deep breaths of that old sea air. Within six months of the date of his enlistment, Richard E. Thornton, then corporal, was headed for Australia and, as it turned out, a year and a half of pretty rugged work. From June, 1942 until July, 1943 the sergeant's company ranged up and down the east coast of Australia. They were as far south as Melbourne at one time for a short period, but mostly, they worked in General McArthur's Headquarters, handling the communications. This work meant long hours and little rest, for the volume of communications in and out of such a headquarters was tremendous. But Sgt. Thornton is a man who does his work and keeps his opinions to himself. He felt that the work of his company was important, and plugged away at it. He doesn't build his job up. He just says it was a man-sized job and lets it go at that. In July, 1943, he was transferred to another company and flown over the Coral Sea to Fort Moresby. After six weeks there another plane journey took them over the Owen Stanley Range in New Guinea to a hillside near Buna. On this hillside the company saw the spot marked X on a military map to designate their camp site. On the actual hillside, there were real trees which had to be cut down, and thickets of dense kunai grass nine feet high and tough as nails to be cleared away. It was not just a question of arriving and finding suitable quarters all ready. It was a question of starting from scratch. Shelters had to be built, stores set up, equipment put into immediate operation, sanitary measures taken, and all this not just any time but right away. Sgt. Thornton says they worked like the very devil long hours every day, and in three months had a pretty decent camp, with even a few little extra conveniences. But with two days required to cut fourteen feet into the surrounding forest, you can see that there wasn't too much time to devote to "frivolities". Many important lessons were learned the hard way. At first ignorance of fundamental sanitary precautions caused much trouble - some illness among the men. After all, says Sgt. Thornton, you can't build latrines any old place you wish. You have to build them with rules of sanitation. If not - dysentery. Failure to follow correct procedure right at the beginning sent two truckloads of men to sick call each day for quite a while. As the errors were corrected, of course, these conditions cleared up and the sick rate fell off. Another difficult problem was that of keeping the men from going stale. The climate and the distance from home conspired to take the steam out of the men, and counteracting this natural slackening was not easy. It takes good men to stand up to the jungle, make no mistake. In order to eke out their own supplies and equipment, his company kept a jeep always standing by, ready to tear off whenever an Allied plane crashed or was forced down in the nearby jungle. Every company in the area did the same, and it became a race to see which company would get to the damaged plane first for salvage. The first to arrive would take away whatever instruments or machinery or armament could be salvaged. In this way, Thornton's company came by several very handsome .50 cal. machine guns, which were added to the company's defensive weapons against possible attack. This is typical American resourcefulness - a quality of prime value in the Pacific war. Units in jungle stations have to improvise freely, for the nature of the country makes supply difficult. It is best to develop the ingenuity of the unit's members and supplement outside assistance with plenty of homemade tackle. Thornton thanks his lucky stars that he was placed in radio work, because this is the work he had done for several years in civilian life, and this is the work he was aiming at in the Army when he enlisted. Sgt. Thornton is 25 years old, a native of Houston, Tex., and is a special code instructor here at Pinedale. He has just been joined here by his wife to whom he has been married little over a month. A recent bout with malaria, his very first, incidentally (it hit him during his train ride home on furlough last month - about 6,000 miles from the malarie belt and after living in the tropics for 18 months!) tags him for a rest in this country.
One of the favorite diversions of Thornton's company was watching the aerial dogfights which often raged over their area. It is comforting to hear the sergeant's eyewitness testimony to the superiority of our pilots and planes over those of the Japs. He has seen the Nips take some terrific beatings, sometimes losing every ship to the fancy flying and excellent marksmanship of Yank flyers. He says the men in his company followed these fights intently and cheered enthusiastically whenever a Jap folded up. These mixups in the sky took the place of baseball games for them.
Regarding the communications of the Japs, Sgt. Thornton has this to say, "The Japs have an effecient system, and are well-trained operators. They have been at war in the East for many years now and can handle almost twice as much traffic as we can. This is due to the remarkable brevity of their messages."
*The above article was taken from a 1944 issue of THE INTERCEPTOR, the official weekly Camp Pinedale newspaper.