Phil Wood's Letters
Letter #14
All As Green As Grass
To Margretta & Gretchen
16 December 1942
Wednesday night
(December 16, 1942)[1]
Dear Girls,
Well, I really do feel like a Lieutenant at last – believe it or not, but I’ve been commanding my men (“my men”!) for three days now and what a bunch! Most of them are young kids, under twenty and some seventeen, and they are all as green as grass.[2] Just got out of boot camp, and not a one of them is even a PFC. I don’t have any sergeants or corporals, tho I should get 3 sarges and 4 corporals. If I don’t get any, which I probably won’t, I’ll have to make and train them. I got my weapons platoon and it is, understandably, known as one of the toughest jobs going – though it will be a long time before I can get around to giving them all the special training they need.[3] I’ve been giving them a lot of close order drill, checking equipment and issuing it, give my first lecture tomorrow. There is really a hell of a lot of work to this. I’m dog tired at the end of a day – it is really wearing to be on your toes every minute, as you must be with 40 men watching you all the time, making a hundred decisions a day.
But so far I am really enjoying it; much more than I have anything else in the Marine Corps. Because it requires so much, it just makes it that much more interesting.
Here it is all of nine o’clock and I am so sleepy I can hardly stay awake – guess I won’t fight it, but toddle off. And at last the stove is fixed and the hut is nice and warm.[4]
No pay yet, but the food is very good.
Love
Phil
No letters yet of course.
Footnotes
[1] Original undated; presumed to be three days after the previous letter.
[2] Compounding the difficulty was the fact that many of the enlisted men had their boot training cut short. Most of Phil’s platoon had only been in the service for about two months, and the basic knowledge they should have gained at Parris Island was incomplete – to say nothing of the more complicated jobs of gunners.
[3] The weapons platoon manned .30 caliber M1919 Browning machine guns, and 60mm M2 light mortars. The officer in charge had to be proficient with deploying, spotting, and controlling the fire of these complex weapons and their crews, which was no easy task. Phil’s job was made more difficult due to his lack of experienced NCOs.
[4] Oil-burning stoves heated the pasteboard huts; they were a fire hazard, but much appreciated in the bitter cold. Enlisted men occasionally had trouble getting enough oil to heat their huts; Phil would later turn a blind eye to his men “borrowing” oil from his stove.
Seventeen-year-old George Apple Smith, a sharp kid from Philadephia’s Fishtown neighborhood, entered the Marine Corps in August 1942 armed with a quick wit and firm belief in his own invincibility. He was almost through Parris Island when his training was cut short and Recruit Platoon 832 “with very few exceptions” was packed off to New River. This, they were told, was lucky: they would be the nucleus of a new “special super-unit,” the like of which had never been seen. Smith and his buddies in Hut #10 were still learning the ups and downs of Marine life, but they knew how to turn out for a “field day” – a meticulous cleaning of quarters, gear, and person – especially when told that they would be inspected by their new “battle-hardened” officers the next morning.
