Wesley Holm (WH): Before World War II broke out, my mother did an awful lot of baking. She used to be a lot. Every week. When I went to school on Friday, she used to bake on Thursday night. When I went to school, I can remember going to Providence for Junior high school. She used to bake, she used to put it on the radiators at night so it would rise, and then she'd get up at like 5 o'clock, 4:30 in the morning and she'd put it in the oven, you know. So she used an awful lot of sugar. Then the war broke out, and rationing came into existence. And she became very very nervous about the sugar that she had up in the attic that she used to store up there, you know. And she figured, at that time she had about forty pounds of sugar up there, you know, four bags of it. They were ten pound bags. But she always kept a lot of sugar up there you know, but now rationing comes in and she's becoming nervous ok, because all the sugar is up there. And she wondered if they were going to find out about, but they never did.

Inez Russo (IR): Now what happened when she ran out of that sugar? Then did she have to just, you know, lessen how much she was baking?

WH: Sure, sure, yes. She did a lot of backing, so that's what she used it for.

IR: And also, you were talking to me about how when you would come home, your dad saved the gas.

WH: Oh yeah, when I'd come home periodically-because we ran convoy duty between the States and Europe. And I'd come home and get a couple days off before another convoy would start to go to Europe, and so I'd come, and my father used to save up ration, gasoline stamps, so maybe if I had a date I could get 5 gallons of gas or three gallons of gas or whatever, for the car.

IR: That was nice.

WH: Yes it was!

IR: How often did you come home?

WH: Well it used to take us about a month to take a convoy from New York to England or to France after they invaded France, it would take about twenty-eight days. Ten days over, ten days back, and it would probably be seven days there, seven or eight days there, so.

IR: And what kinds of things would you do when you were home?

WH: There wasn't much to do because there wasn't many people around, many of my friends around. We grew up in a neighborhood where it was all boys about the same age, so they were all in the service, you know. So there weren't many guys around. Girls they were always looking for dates, so it was easy for a guy to get dates because there were no boys around, so you could get a date with just about anybody.

IR: What kinds of things did you do on your dates? Did you go into White City, I know people would go dancing…

WH: We'd go to movies, go out to eat maybe.

(Mr. Holm's wife came into the room and brought out ration books)

IR: So this is from a newspaper, and it explained how the ration stamps worked?

[We looked through the ration books, at all the different stamps, and I turned off the recorder].

WH: Another thing, I used to come home, when we came back to the States, we always came back to New York, and I'd get on a train to come home. And one of the neighbors smoked cigarettes. Cigarettes were also not easy to get. I don't know if they were rationed, but they weren't easy to get. Well, we used to buy cigarettes on the ship. We paid fifty cents a carton for them, or five cents a pack. And so you weren't supposed to take them off, but I used to put them under my pea coat, and boy did he appreciate when I brought him a whole carton of cigarettes, you know!

IR: Weren't there those special markets tat you could buy things discounted if you were in the service? Like you could get cigarettes and other food?

WH: Oh, on the ship you see, the reason it was so cheap you see, there was absolutely no tax. On those cigarettes there was no tax on them, so the cost was a nickel a pack. He really appreciated that you know.

IR: Do you remember what they did in the States to try and get people to be, not excited about the rationing, but to support the rationing, and they kinds of propaganda.

WH: There was a lot of black market. All of kinds of ways to get what they were looking for.

IR: So people tried to bend the rules?

WH: Sure, oh absolutely. That was the problem, they couldn't get the kinds of food they wanted, and they used to say, 'well they're getting it in the service.' Well, one reason I went into the Coastguard, I figured I wanted to eat well, which I did.

IR: What was the reason, was that was one of the factors that made you decide to go into the Coastguard?

WH: Well because it was small.

IR: Smaller?

WH: It was probably the smallest. I mean you've got the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and so forth, and the Air Force. The Coastguard was the smallest, so I went down to Boston and enlisted that way.

IR: So you weren't drafted? You signed up?

WH: No I enlisted, I enlisted, yes.

IR. What was your initial reaction when you first found out about Pearl Harbor being attacked?

WH: When I am I going in.

IR: You knew immediately you wanted to go?

WH: I was going to school at the time. I was going to Worcester Academy at the time. I was going to be there for two years, so I didn't go. Pearl Harbor was in '41, and in '42 we finished school in June, and I didn't quite know what I was going to do. Two of the guys I always used to hang around with they always wanted me to go into the Air Force, "learn to fly, learn to fly." You know you can get killed, but you can also get killed flying by mechanical problems with your plane, and the two guys I hung around with, they both died, they never came back. They became pilots, and I said, "I want to come back." Many times I didn't think I was going to, but I did so, you know. I had one fellow that was, we used to come, and I was going to school on Ellis Island. I'd become a Quarter Master, that's part of that job as Quarter Master, that's what they do. And we finished up in January of '44 we'd been there for twelve weeks, or three months we were at Ellis Island. And then they were [ ] for ships you know, and this fellow and I- we used to go home because we used to get weekends off too, and we'd get a day, and we'd run up and get on a train and go home and then come back, for Sunday night, we'd come back, you know. And he lived on Millbury Street. I don't know if you're familiar with Millbury Street, but he lived on Millbury Street. And so, they called, we were going on a ship, so we went up the two of us, but the fellow said to us, "We can't take you both on this ship, we can only take one, they'll be others though." So he said, "Well flip a coin," so we flipped- they had half-dollars then- he flipped the coin, and I said, "heads." So he said, "Ok, pack your sea bag, get on the ferry and get back to New York, and they'll be a truck there to take you." Which I did. So, I went on one ship. There were six ships in our escort, Coastguard ship escorting, maybe forty ships across. And he went oh the USS Leopold, and I went on the USS Poole. The first trip he went, the Leopold went down, two-hundred guys went down, he was one of them- I can't even talk about it…I'll never forget that. First trip, I knew he'd gone on it. I saw the German submarine out there right out in front of us too, you know.

IR: So you actually saw the German submarine?

WH: Yeah, it was more than one submarine. See when you did convoy duty, you did this. So if there were submarines around you maybe could avoid them.

IR: I see.

WH: But then he radioed to us that he went tot ram that submarine that was right out in front of us, and he did. He headed for it, but there was another submarine over here that fired a torpedo and cut it right in half. And this was off the coast of Iceland, and it was about March 1st. So most of the guys that went in the water, they couldn't stand it.

IR: It was freezing.

WH: They died in the water it was so cold. We picked up about 25 men out of 230 or something. That was the first trip. I had just gone aboard ship, it was seven from New York, when we left there you know. I saw others after that, but that was my first experience.

IR: And so all were 23 or 24 at that point?

WH: At that point I was 22. I went in when I was 20. I went in in 1942. I think I enlisted in the summer, or it was September I enlisted I guess, and I then I got called. So I went in there in November and went to school.

IR: Was there a big push for everyone, for all boys of your age to enlist?

WH: No problem. They flocked in their. I remember I used to wait for my orders to go through, and I'd come home and I'd say to my mother, "Did we get any mail?" "No" I said, "This war is going to be over before I get in there!" Little did I know [gets muffled]
But no, people were very very patriotic then. Absolutely. You couldn't believe how patriotic they were. They couldn't wait to get in there.

IR: What kinds of other things did people do to show their patriotism?

WH: What did they do to?

IR: Besides enlisting, you know. Men, women, children, do you remember anything people did?

WH: No, I just remember the guys, how fast they all went it. We all went it-we lived in a neighborhood made up of nothing but boys around the same age, so we all went in together. Then when I would come home, there were no boys around.

IR: I was just wondering what is your ethnic heritage?

WH: Mine?

IR: Are you Swedish?

WH: Yes, how do you know that? By the name?

IR: No, because Quinsigamond Village is famous for its Swedish population.

WH: Oh absolutely. I mean the stores. You know, like my grandparents came over, they couldn't, none of them could speak English, let's face it. Not like today, every Swede speaks Swedish today. You know, you go over there and it's no problem, everyone speaks English.

IR: Exactly.

WH: But then you know, the community was Swedish. The grocery stores were Swedish, the other stores were Swedish.

IR: Did you speak Swedish?

WH: No. My sister did. My mother came from Sweden, but my father didn't. She came over in 1901 I think it was. She was nine years old. She came with two brothers and two sisters, when she came, and her mother. Her grandfather had come here before to get some property and build a house. He was a carpenter. So he built like Chicken coup, and they lived in it while he was building the house.

IR: And is that the house that you lived in?

WH: No.

IR: Did you belong to one of the parishes in the Village?

WH: Well yeah. The first one I went to was the Methodist Church, because all the kids went to the Methodist Church. It's funny you know, there were Methodists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, and Baptists. And my grandparents founded a Baptist Church, so consequently, just like anything else, you became a member of this Church. I mean, if you were Jewish, and your parents are Jewish, what do you do? Become Jewish. If you're Catholic, what do you grow up? Catholic. But living in Quinsig Vil- I didn't know what a Catholic was. It's true

IR: Really?

WH: Really.

IR: I've heard there was tension with the Swedish and the Catholics, and they didn't want the Catholics moving into the Village.

WH: Well, that could have been, but it must have been before me because I never knew it. That could have been way back probably. That I didn't know. One thing that they didn't want was bar rooms in the Village. And they never got one.

IR: To this day they don't have any?

WH: There aren't any now either. There's a package store. It's the street, we used to call Middle River Road. It come from Cambridge Street.

IR: Oh, I know exactly.

WH: There's a package store there now.

IR: It's a new one.

WH: Well that came from Millbury Street, when they were going to build 146. All those stores, and two bar rooms there were on Millbury Street, but that's the closest they ever got to a bar room.

IR: I see. Back then. You know how even now a lot of the stores are gone that used to be there.

WH: Oh sure, oh yes.

IR: What kinds of stores used to be there? Do you remember?

WH: Grocery stores, and they were Swedish, and you could get all Swedish food. And they could go down there, and if they couldn't speak the language it didn't make any difference, because all the clerks in the store spoke Swedish. I'm sure if you went to an Italian neighborhood it was the same way.

IR: So it was very close knit?

WH: yes, absolutely. You know most of the people. You were either going to Church or going to school.

IR: We had a question about the fact that Sweden was neutral during the war. Do you know that affected the Swedish population in Quinsigamond Village.

WH: Well there was no one coming in '39 to the States from Sweden.

IR: Did they feel that as though now that they were Americans, did they resent thef act that the Swedish weren't on the side of the Americans?

WH: I don't know. I don't think so. I never heard it. When we first started running convoys we used to run to Northern Ireland. That was before they invaded France. Then, after that we used to go into Northern Ireland we go down through the Irish Sea and go into Liverpool and places like that.

[Turned off recorder when Mrs. Holm came in]

WH: the Air Force, and then he went into the Navy and he became a marine pilot, and the other one flew bombers, and he was flying out of Italy, and they were bombing the Rumanian air fields. Well, he was first listed as Missing in Action, and his mother used to come out every day and look down the street, and walk, and wait for him to come home. Everyday. She was a nice lady. Because in the Fall after playing gold we'd go walking or go up to the golf course, and we'd come home and she'd have made apple pie.

IR: Did he ever come back?

WH: No. They surmised that. Somebody else was in that raid, and they say his plane get hit, and they saw the parachutes come out of the plane. But what happened is, when they landed the people on the ground would kill them. Farmers would come with pitchforks, you know, and they would kill them. So they assumed probably what happened. They were so mad at the Americans for bombing.

IR: What was your impression as a soldier of the enemy? I mean, what did you think about the Italians and the Germans?

WH: Well, it's a funny thing. I don't think that badly. I never think of the Italians because that wasn't- Mussolini wasn't much anyway. He followed Hitler. We never heard of any of the atrocities. The whole time I was in the war, I had never ever heard of an atrocity that they had these death camps, and the Germans held. Never heard it. Another thing. I was going to tell you, when we went to Northern Ireland, we went there a couple times, we used to go ashore and play softball and things like that. I never heard that there were problems in Northern Ireland. Never saw anything. You know the problems like they were having over here between the Catholics and the Protestants. I never knew it existed.

IR: Wow. That's surprising. I'm surprised that the government wouldn't have told you what was going on Germany. Even if not to motivate you to inspire you, yes, we have to defeat the enemy here with what they're doing.

WH: I didn't have the hatred of the Germans I did have for the Japanese. I positively hated the Japanese 'cause they attacked us.

IR: Exactly.

WH: Ok. So, I still carry it. I will never, ever buy a Japanese car. If it was the last car, I would never ever buy a Japanese car. I don't care how good they are, I don't care, but I would never buy one. I know a lot of us guys that wouldn't do that. And I didn't fight over there. I was over there, I ended up in Japan, but I still had that hatred. I don't know how many of my kids in the [inaudible ] got killed because of those Japs. And they were mean. They were a mean people. When they took prisoners, they used to slaughter them. But so I still don't have any love for the Japanese. And I know that generations and generations have gone by, you know.

IR: But it's hard to let go after something like that. It's sort of the same way for us after September 11th. What about Japanese Americans? Did that resentment carry over to the Japanese Americans?

WH: Well you know, they interned all the Japanese people on the West Coast, and now they say they're sorry for what they did, but they didn't know. They weren't taking any chances, anymore than we want to take any chances now.

IR: Exactly.

WH: At least we knew who they were. We don't know who are enemy is now. They're walking among us in the streets, you know, it could be.

IR: So at that time it made sense to do that?

WH: Yeah, that's right. It made sense at the time. They were fed, they were taken care of. They were behind barbed wire, whatever it was. But I'm sure they didn't like it, they were U.S. citizens.

IR: What did you think of the President during that time?

WH: President Roosevelt?

IR: Yes.

WH: Oh. I think President Roosevelt did the right thing. Oh everybody. Whether you were a Republican or Democrat or what you were, you were behind him, the President, because he was the Commander in Chief, and he was leading, you know.

IR: Exactly. I was curious to know whether partisan alliances stayed together.

WH: No way. It all ended then, and he used to get elected. He was elected three times-by a landslide. They weren't going to change leadership. No way. Just the same way with Bush today. That's why they say they have-

IR: High approval ratings.

WH: Very high approval ratings. And it's two years that have gone by now, and he still has it you know. And a lot of people don't like what he's doing, but hey, I feel like he has to do what he has to do. Do it. And in Iraq, it's the same way, and people say, "Why are you going in there?" We don't know what they're doing. We don't know what they're doing.

IR: So do you think your experience during World War II has influenced the way you think about the situation in Iraq right now?

WH: Probably, probably. He can't be another Hitler. But he can cause a lot of trouble. Kill a lot of people.

IR: Going back to your family life. You said you have a sister? Did you have any other siblings?

WH: Nope, just my sister and I. She's older than I am.

IR: Ok. And you said she was working while you were in the war?

WH: I'm not sure. I think she worked a long time at City Hall.

IR: Did she start working-You hear about Rosie the Riveter-Did she start working once the war began? Or had she always been working?

WH: No she had been working before. She was working a lot before. She started in Norton Company I think. You're familiar with Norton Company right, you've heard of it? It's not Norton Company anymore, it's a French name now. She started there, and I don't know- then she went from there. The reason she didn't like it up there-coming up from Quinsig you have to come up through town, change buses, and then go out to Greendale to Norton Company. So she was looking for a job all the time where she didn't have to do that-just get on a bus and go to City Hall in the center of Worcester and that was it. She wasn't Rosie the Riveter.

IR: And what about your parents? What were they doing?

WH: My dad, he got involved in it. Not in the war. But he worked at the time at Wyman-Gordon Company. I don't know if you've ever heard of Wyman-Gordon Company?

IR: No.

WH: They were in the aircraft business at the time. And they made forgings for airplanes and they made forgings for propelers. He worked for in a heat treating department. I didn't know this until after the war, but during the war they used to call him with problems. He was a foremen of a department, of a big department. And they used to call him maybe three, four times a night. Finally it got to him. My mother thought he was going to have a break down or something, and they'd call him about all these problems they were having during the night. During the daytime he was there so he worked, but so, she went down there and talked to his boss and told him, and they weren't aware of it. He needed more help!

IR: That really would have taken a toll on him to work all day and then be woken up so many times.

WH: Yeah. That plant is not there anymore, it's gone. You're probably not familiar with Madison Street.

IR: Is that in Quinsigamond Village?

WH: No.

IR: In Worcester?

WH: Yes it's in Worcester. You know Southbridge? You should know where Southbridge is. As it goes into Worcester, I mean, the center of town, you hit Madison Street there, and Wyman-Gordon is near there right at that point. That's about how far it is. You've probably gone into town up Southbridge Street.

IR: Yes, yes, definitely.

[muffled]

IR: Now, when did you come home from the war?

WH: February of 1946. Everybody was coming home.

IR: Tell me about that.

WH: Ok. At that point people all belonged to the 52-20 Club.

IR: What does that mean?

WH: That means you get $20 a week for 52 weeks from the government.

IR: Oh I see.

WH: Well most of us after- well we never went 52 weeks because we went to work. But anyway, in the morning, we'd all go over to the corner of Whipple Street and our street, and hang around there for a while until everybody came. Probably 8 or 6 or 10 guys you know. And we see what are we going to do today? So should we go down to the Red Sox game. We had this twenty bucks we had to use, or should we go golfing? But what should we do today?

IR: Nice, nice- so great to be back.

WH: Yeah, yeah sure.

IR: And what was the last thing that you did in the war?

WH: We decommissioned the ship in December of '45 in Green Cove Springs, that's just south of Jacksonville, and there's a big river. And the ship was decommissioned there, and I went home from there. But before that, when the war was over in Europe, after the Germans surrendered, we immediately went down to Guatanamo Bay (that's in Cuba) and we went to the West Coast and we headed to Pearl Harbor. And we went to Pearl Harbor and we took a convoy because the war now was still going on in the Pacific. So we took a convoy down to Saipan, and in the meantime, and in the meantime then the war was over there- they'd dropped the bombs. But we continued on after Saipan, and we went into Japan, we were there in Japan for 35 days. We went in there like an invasion like we were supposed to go in there.

IR: After the bomb?

WH: Yeah, after the bomb. The bomb was dropped when we got there. That was the best thing that Truman ever did. They crucified him for it and everything else, but we couldn't have gone in there. There would have been so many Americans killed, and so many Japanese. Because sure those bombs killed a lot, but there would have been a lot more killed had we fought. Because when we came in there and I look I thought boy how could we come in this place. It had all those mountains and no place to land. We went into like a bay.

IR: The invasion you were scheduled to do was cancelled after the bomb?

WH: Oh yeah.

IR: I see. You must have been thrilled.

WH: Yes.

IR: How did you find out about it? That we'd dropped the bomb?

WH: Newspapers. We were in Pearl Harbor. Our ship was in Pearl Harbor at the time. That was- we would have been slaughtered had we gone in there, and we would have had to, they were never going to give up.

IR: Were Americans unanimously- exhibiting the feelings you just did- thrilled that the war was over.

WH: Oh yeah, yes. I mean after what they did to us, they didn't care. After how mean they were to us, they didn't care. They were getting a taste of their own medicine.

IR: What they deserved I guess. Also you said when you came back you were a part of the 52-20's, right? I've heard about he GI Bill sending kids to college, did you benefit from that?

WH: Yes, I did.

IR: Oh, ok.

WH: I did that.

IR: The government paid for you to go to college?

WH: Yes, it was not as expensive as it is today.

IR: Did you go around here?

WH: Yes I did. I became an accountant.