CPL. John Hodges
U.S. Army – Ammunition Specialist
950th Antiaircraft Artillery
Automatic Weapons Battalion - Battery D
New Guinea, Luzon, Philippines
March 20, 1943 – January 11, 1946
U.S. Army – Ammunition Specialist
950th Antiaircraft Artillery
Automatic Weapons Battalion - Battery D
New Guinea, Luzon, Philippines
March 20, 1943 – January 11, 1946
John Hodges was born on August 25th, 1923, in rural Sydnorsville, Virginia. John said Sydnorsville was really only a post office and today the post office no longer exists. Mapcarta describes it as a hamlet in Franklin County with the closest town being Rocky Mount, VA. His parents, George and Annie Hodges, had a family tobacco farm. They also had a big family, typical of a farm family at that time. John was the seventh of nine children: five boys and four girls. The Hodges family lived on a 60-acre family farm that was handed down through the generations. It was originally over 300 acres, but the land had been sold off to relatives or to repay debts. John remembers his grandfather who fought in the Civil War. “He didn’t talk about it with me”. John was only six or seven years old at the time
The Hodges grew wheat, corn, vegetables and tobacco. The money crop was tobacco. “Others had grain farms and others had liquor stills. Revenuers (government agents) were out looking for them all the time”. They were distilling whiskey.
The vegetables fed the family. “Most all of our food came out of the garden, and we killed the hogs every year. The corn and the wheat were ground and sold and if there was any extra the family would use it in their meals. John recalled always having enough to eat. ”It might not always be what you wanted”. He recalled burying potatoes and turnips and “they would keep all winter like that”. “A lot of things you would freeze. The weather was colder then than it is now, and the streams would freeze over. You put stuff down in there and it would freeze and keep for you. They didn’t have much, but they had a lot of common sense. It passed from one generation to another…it was bad, but it could be a whole lot worse”.
His house had no electricity, a state-of-the-art outhouse and a bubbling spring that was “just through the cornfield” and served as the only source of water for the house. John recalled carrying a bucket through the corn field down to the spring to fetch water for his mother. That job was like being a postal worker. He caried that bucket through the cornfield come rain, snow, sleet or hail or frigid temperatures.
John attended a one room schoolhouse, and the kids walked to and from school over the mile and a half country road. John recalled he couldn’t start school until he was seven years old. “I was small for my age, so I didn’t get to go…until I was big enough to walk that distance. Even then, on deep snows my brothers and sisters would have to carry me through the snow drifts. It was kind of rough. We survived.” The Schoolhouse had two to four students in each grade. The school was heated with a wood stove in the middle of the room and the desks formed a circle around the stove. There was an outhouse in the woods. One for the girls and one for the boys. If they needed water, they went to the neighbors well. John only went to school through the seventh grade because he was needed on the farm.
John was six years old when The Great Depression rolled through rural America like a steamroller. There was barely enough money for the family to eke out an existence. No car. No radio. John spent much of his younger years without shoes. Despite being a religious family, they didn’t attend church. It was only a half a mile walk but they didn’t have suitable clothes to attend church services.
“In 1931 at the depth of the Great Depression, we had a beautiful farm full of corn and tobacco. My dad took 1,100 pounds to market which normally would have brought several hundred dollars, a hundred dollars then was a lot of money, and he got exactly $3.75. We had nothing left”. The family survived on what they harvested from their garden. “We survived because we were prepared for things”. John went on to say, “we didn’t have the things we wanted but we had enough to live on and grow”.
Was life tough during the depression? “It certainly was. It was very, very tough but it had one beautiful thing about it. People helped people. Nobody had much but everybody had a little somethin’. You don’t see that today”. “I learned to live that way, sharing with people”.
Children on the farm weren’t very concerned with fun. There wasn’t much time. After working on the farm all day, the kids were pretty tired at night. On Sundays John would go down to a local country store where they had a radio. They would have fun listening to the various programs. He was at the store when he learned Pearl Harbor was bombed.
In 1941 John turned 18 years old and went to work for the Basset Furniture Company. “I went to work on December the 3rd, 1941, four days before Pearl Harbor. I worked at the furniture factory Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Sunday Pearl Harbor was bombed. After a few months there they were short on hardware, not getting enough bolts and screws to build all the furniture they would like to. They had to reduce the workforce. Me being the newest member, I was the first one out the door and several followed me”.
John found a job at the Newport News Dry Dock Company in Newport News, VA. The company was busy filling orders from the U.S Navy for a battleship, aircraft carriers and cruisers. After four months John headed north to Baltimore “to a shipbuilding place up there”. This was likely the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard. John decided he wanted to be in the action and just before he left to go home for Christmas he resigned. “In January I went to the recruiting office to sign up for service”.
John wanted to join the Marines, but those quotas were filled. “So, I went into the Army”. In March of 1943 John reported to Fort Story located in Virginia Beach, VA for eight weeks of basic training. When it came time for Advanced Individual Training (AIT) most of the men were selected for communications fields, but John didn’t have the background necessary for those jobs, so he chose “Big guns. 90mm anti-aircraft guns.”
John spent the next ten months at Fort Stewart in Georgia. When training was complete John and the rest of the GI’s were loaded onto a train for the two-day trip to San Francisco, CA. In San Francisco the men boarded a troop ship headed to Australia for additional training. From there they went on to New Guinea. John recalled his ship was traveling without an escort. One night John woke up when he felt the ship shaking. The next morning, he learned there was a Japanese submarine that had surfaced and then submerged when it saw his ship. His ship dropped depth charges, and the sub did not pursue them.
To pass the time John recalled the troops would tell jokes and play cards. “Just a bunch of boys trying to have fun”. John supervised a crew of three other men that were responsible for manning a fire hose in case of a fire emergency. John also supervised a crew responsible for cleaning the bathrooms. He had a fellow on his crew from Georgia who knew how to get things clean using what John believed was pine tar. They would spread the pine tar and light it on fire. “It burned off everything”. “
We had times when we laughed and had good times. At the same time, we did face reality. I remember when we sailed into Subic Bay and one of the fellas asked me how did I feel. I said, ‘well, if I make it, I’ll be pleased. If I don’t, I hope I take at least 10 with me before I go’. It was just a feeling I had”. John recalled being scared “but just to a point. Not scared enough that you couldn’t do your job right. You were more worried of your surroundings. Things you don’t see or hear but the possibilities you know. That is something you have to deal with too. A submarine could pop up anywhere. It’s a constant fear but you have to deal with it”.
When they arrived in Subic Bay, their ship, an LST, dropped its ramp into the water and the men unloaded their equipment. John recalled the bulldozers came off right behind him, headed straight to the beach and began working. “They started running up and down the beach and in about 45 to 50 minutes planes started coming in. They landed right on the beach”. John learned the night before the U.S. had bombed and strafed the Japanese airfields in Manilla and destroyed all of their aviation fuel and all of the Japanese aircraft.
“It was scary, but I never felt completely alone”. John recalled The Gideons gave him a bible with the New Testament and Psalms. He kept it with him day and night and only took it off while showering. “Believe it or not, it gave me a lot of courage”.
The battalion was sizeable. There were four guns in an artillery battery, four batteries in a battalion and 13 men manned each gun. “You could put a whole lot of danger up there. As high as the highest plane could go, we could reach it”. John recalled five different types of shells they could shoot. John was smaller in stature, and he was assigned as the gunner. The others would carry the shell to the gun and John would load it and pull the charge.
By the time John’s unit reached the Philippines the intensity had leveled off. In Manilla the Japanese retreated into the mountains and were hiding in caves along the “Zigzag Pass”. The Infantry had to use flame throwers to get the Japanese out of the caves. When that didn’t work, they would tell the Japanese to surrender and leave their guns behind. If they didn’t leave the caves John’s battalion would lower their guns and fire rounds with a six second time fuse. “It took maybe one second to get there and they come running out”. “Once they came running out…they were taken as prisoners. They never treated us that way. They just shoot anybody any way they could. We gave everybody a chance”.
They didn’t have any casualties. They had one death after the war had ended. John recalled the GI who died “was always taking chances. He was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing”.
John became good buddies with Jack Thorn, a GI in his battalion. After one mail delivery John noticed Jack had a letter from his sister, Kathryn, and he had a picture of her. John said, “you give me her address and I’ll write her if anything happens to you”. John wrote that night. John and Kathryn corresponded and exchanged photos while he was overseas. As incredible as it sounds, they decided to get married when John got home. More on that later.
As the fighting wound down and the Japanese surrendered in the Philippines, John and his Battalion were preparing for their next mission. “At the time were taking advance training for the invasion of China. We knew it was going to take a few years and a lot of lives. I smiled from ear to ear when I heard an atomic bomb was dropped. It’s a hard thing to talk about. They had 60,000 people injured in some manner, BUT it would be 200,000 at least of our own men killed if we had to go fight in China”.
After the fighting stopped, John was assigned to care for the civilian prisoners that the Japanese that had interned. The Japanese had reduced the prisoners rations to almost nothing. John remembered “they were just skin and bones. I think it was 17 died the day before we got there”. John thought some of the women weighed as little as 80 pounds and some of the men weighed only 110 pounds. John made the observation that there was a very big difference between how the Japanese and the Allies treated their prisoners. He also recalled the civilian prisoners put weight back on because the Americans gave them “all the beer and all the chocolate they wanted”.
John remembers one afternoon when he went into Manila to watch a baseball game. When the game was over, he tried to hitch hike a ride back to the base, but no one would stop to give him a ride. “Finally, this nurse, she was a Captain came by, and I saluted her. Then I said, ‘lady would you do me a favor’? to which she replied, “what’s that soldier’? John said, ‘I been out here all this time and I can’t get any of these trucks to stop for me and give me a ride back into camp. Would you stand over here and hold that skirt up just about an inch’? Believe it or not she did, and the trucks were slamming the breaks on…I just got in and everybody was fussing at me”.
John and his battalion boarded a ship back to the states on December 9th, 1945. They hit U.S. soil on Christmas day 1945. From there John went across the country and arrived at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in January of 1946 and was discharged. He caught a bus to Greensboro where he changed for the last leg of his journey back to Sydnorsville. There was no bus station, so the bus dropped John in front of the country store. He arrived home approximately 5am on January 12th which was his mother’s birthday. There was no phone on the farm so John’s family had no details of his return. “Was she surprised? Yes”!
John spent 10 days at home talking and visiting with family and friends, but he wanted to meet Kathryn Thorn who he had corresponded with and made plans to marry. Kathryn lived in West Virginia. John made the trip to visit her and asked a man driving a truck if he knew where Kathryn Thorn lived. The man, who happened to be dating Kathryn at the time, gave him directions to her home. John would see Kathryn a total of 6 times. The sixth was their wedding day in November of 1946. John and Kathryn had a big family including six children, two died at birth, 11 grandchildren, 12 great grandchildren and 3 great great grandchildren. John and Kathryn were married for 68 years before she passed away in 2014.
John got a job working for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia as a mechanic. He worked there for a little less than a year. Kathryn was expecting a child and in 1947 the couple moved to Staunton, Virginia to be closer to family to help with the new baby. John found a job at Reid’s, a local Grocery Store. After three years John tried his hand at insurance and then selling cars. Eventually he found his way back into the insurance business, where he made a career for the next 37 years. John sold life insurance policies door-to-door. This included selling and collecting the monthly premiums. “I would quit around 4 o’clock. I’d go home and the children would come in from school”. When Kathryn arrived home from working at the American Safety Razor Company around 5pm, John would say, “wash your hands, dinner is ready”. John cooked dinner for 20 years until his daughters could help with the cooking.
John retired at 64 years of age and Kathryn retired at the age of 58. John has been very civically oriented as many people of his era were. He raised money for the March of Dimes, he belonged to the Fraternal Order of the Moose that raised money for deserving causes and he was also active in the VFW.
John Hodges lived in a world very different from today. His first-hand account of not only serving in the Army in the Pacific and beating the Japanese into an unconditional surrender but his recollection of The Great Depression and a slice of by-gone Americana are valuable insights into who we Americans were and how we have been influenced by those times. It is also worth noting four of Annie Hodges’ sons served in WWII.
John, thank you for traveling halfway around the world to fight a brutal enemy and save the world from true evil. It seems like that was just another day for a depression era farm boy.
The Hodges grew wheat, corn, vegetables and tobacco. The money crop was tobacco. “Others had grain farms and others had liquor stills. Revenuers (government agents) were out looking for them all the time”. They were distilling whiskey.
The vegetables fed the family. “Most all of our food came out of the garden, and we killed the hogs every year. The corn and the wheat were ground and sold and if there was any extra the family would use it in their meals. John recalled always having enough to eat. ”It might not always be what you wanted”. He recalled burying potatoes and turnips and “they would keep all winter like that”. “A lot of things you would freeze. The weather was colder then than it is now, and the streams would freeze over. You put stuff down in there and it would freeze and keep for you. They didn’t have much, but they had a lot of common sense. It passed from one generation to another…it was bad, but it could be a whole lot worse”.
His house had no electricity, a state-of-the-art outhouse and a bubbling spring that was “just through the cornfield” and served as the only source of water for the house. John recalled carrying a bucket through the corn field down to the spring to fetch water for his mother. That job was like being a postal worker. He caried that bucket through the cornfield come rain, snow, sleet or hail or frigid temperatures.
John attended a one room schoolhouse, and the kids walked to and from school over the mile and a half country road. John recalled he couldn’t start school until he was seven years old. “I was small for my age, so I didn’t get to go…until I was big enough to walk that distance. Even then, on deep snows my brothers and sisters would have to carry me through the snow drifts. It was kind of rough. We survived.” The Schoolhouse had two to four students in each grade. The school was heated with a wood stove in the middle of the room and the desks formed a circle around the stove. There was an outhouse in the woods. One for the girls and one for the boys. If they needed water, they went to the neighbors well. John only went to school through the seventh grade because he was needed on the farm.
John was six years old when The Great Depression rolled through rural America like a steamroller. There was barely enough money for the family to eke out an existence. No car. No radio. John spent much of his younger years without shoes. Despite being a religious family, they didn’t attend church. It was only a half a mile walk but they didn’t have suitable clothes to attend church services.
“In 1931 at the depth of the Great Depression, we had a beautiful farm full of corn and tobacco. My dad took 1,100 pounds to market which normally would have brought several hundred dollars, a hundred dollars then was a lot of money, and he got exactly $3.75. We had nothing left”. The family survived on what they harvested from their garden. “We survived because we were prepared for things”. John went on to say, “we didn’t have the things we wanted but we had enough to live on and grow”.
Was life tough during the depression? “It certainly was. It was very, very tough but it had one beautiful thing about it. People helped people. Nobody had much but everybody had a little somethin’. You don’t see that today”. “I learned to live that way, sharing with people”.
Children on the farm weren’t very concerned with fun. There wasn’t much time. After working on the farm all day, the kids were pretty tired at night. On Sundays John would go down to a local country store where they had a radio. They would have fun listening to the various programs. He was at the store when he learned Pearl Harbor was bombed.
In 1941 John turned 18 years old and went to work for the Basset Furniture Company. “I went to work on December the 3rd, 1941, four days before Pearl Harbor. I worked at the furniture factory Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Sunday Pearl Harbor was bombed. After a few months there they were short on hardware, not getting enough bolts and screws to build all the furniture they would like to. They had to reduce the workforce. Me being the newest member, I was the first one out the door and several followed me”.
John found a job at the Newport News Dry Dock Company in Newport News, VA. The company was busy filling orders from the U.S Navy for a battleship, aircraft carriers and cruisers. After four months John headed north to Baltimore “to a shipbuilding place up there”. This was likely the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard. John decided he wanted to be in the action and just before he left to go home for Christmas he resigned. “In January I went to the recruiting office to sign up for service”.
John wanted to join the Marines, but those quotas were filled. “So, I went into the Army”. In March of 1943 John reported to Fort Story located in Virginia Beach, VA for eight weeks of basic training. When it came time for Advanced Individual Training (AIT) most of the men were selected for communications fields, but John didn’t have the background necessary for those jobs, so he chose “Big guns. 90mm anti-aircraft guns.”
John spent the next ten months at Fort Stewart in Georgia. When training was complete John and the rest of the GI’s were loaded onto a train for the two-day trip to San Francisco, CA. In San Francisco the men boarded a troop ship headed to Australia for additional training. From there they went on to New Guinea. John recalled his ship was traveling without an escort. One night John woke up when he felt the ship shaking. The next morning, he learned there was a Japanese submarine that had surfaced and then submerged when it saw his ship. His ship dropped depth charges, and the sub did not pursue them.
To pass the time John recalled the troops would tell jokes and play cards. “Just a bunch of boys trying to have fun”. John supervised a crew of three other men that were responsible for manning a fire hose in case of a fire emergency. John also supervised a crew responsible for cleaning the bathrooms. He had a fellow on his crew from Georgia who knew how to get things clean using what John believed was pine tar. They would spread the pine tar and light it on fire. “It burned off everything”. “
We had times when we laughed and had good times. At the same time, we did face reality. I remember when we sailed into Subic Bay and one of the fellas asked me how did I feel. I said, ‘well, if I make it, I’ll be pleased. If I don’t, I hope I take at least 10 with me before I go’. It was just a feeling I had”. John recalled being scared “but just to a point. Not scared enough that you couldn’t do your job right. You were more worried of your surroundings. Things you don’t see or hear but the possibilities you know. That is something you have to deal with too. A submarine could pop up anywhere. It’s a constant fear but you have to deal with it”.
When they arrived in Subic Bay, their ship, an LST, dropped its ramp into the water and the men unloaded their equipment. John recalled the bulldozers came off right behind him, headed straight to the beach and began working. “They started running up and down the beach and in about 45 to 50 minutes planes started coming in. They landed right on the beach”. John learned the night before the U.S. had bombed and strafed the Japanese airfields in Manilla and destroyed all of their aviation fuel and all of the Japanese aircraft.
“It was scary, but I never felt completely alone”. John recalled The Gideons gave him a bible with the New Testament and Psalms. He kept it with him day and night and only took it off while showering. “Believe it or not, it gave me a lot of courage”.
The battalion was sizeable. There were four guns in an artillery battery, four batteries in a battalion and 13 men manned each gun. “You could put a whole lot of danger up there. As high as the highest plane could go, we could reach it”. John recalled five different types of shells they could shoot. John was smaller in stature, and he was assigned as the gunner. The others would carry the shell to the gun and John would load it and pull the charge.
By the time John’s unit reached the Philippines the intensity had leveled off. In Manilla the Japanese retreated into the mountains and were hiding in caves along the “Zigzag Pass”. The Infantry had to use flame throwers to get the Japanese out of the caves. When that didn’t work, they would tell the Japanese to surrender and leave their guns behind. If they didn’t leave the caves John’s battalion would lower their guns and fire rounds with a six second time fuse. “It took maybe one second to get there and they come running out”. “Once they came running out…they were taken as prisoners. They never treated us that way. They just shoot anybody any way they could. We gave everybody a chance”.
They didn’t have any casualties. They had one death after the war had ended. John recalled the GI who died “was always taking chances. He was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing”.
John became good buddies with Jack Thorn, a GI in his battalion. After one mail delivery John noticed Jack had a letter from his sister, Kathryn, and he had a picture of her. John said, “you give me her address and I’ll write her if anything happens to you”. John wrote that night. John and Kathryn corresponded and exchanged photos while he was overseas. As incredible as it sounds, they decided to get married when John got home. More on that later.
As the fighting wound down and the Japanese surrendered in the Philippines, John and his Battalion were preparing for their next mission. “At the time were taking advance training for the invasion of China. We knew it was going to take a few years and a lot of lives. I smiled from ear to ear when I heard an atomic bomb was dropped. It’s a hard thing to talk about. They had 60,000 people injured in some manner, BUT it would be 200,000 at least of our own men killed if we had to go fight in China”.
After the fighting stopped, John was assigned to care for the civilian prisoners that the Japanese that had interned. The Japanese had reduced the prisoners rations to almost nothing. John remembered “they were just skin and bones. I think it was 17 died the day before we got there”. John thought some of the women weighed as little as 80 pounds and some of the men weighed only 110 pounds. John made the observation that there was a very big difference between how the Japanese and the Allies treated their prisoners. He also recalled the civilian prisoners put weight back on because the Americans gave them “all the beer and all the chocolate they wanted”.
John remembers one afternoon when he went into Manila to watch a baseball game. When the game was over, he tried to hitch hike a ride back to the base, but no one would stop to give him a ride. “Finally, this nurse, she was a Captain came by, and I saluted her. Then I said, ‘lady would you do me a favor’? to which she replied, “what’s that soldier’? John said, ‘I been out here all this time and I can’t get any of these trucks to stop for me and give me a ride back into camp. Would you stand over here and hold that skirt up just about an inch’? Believe it or not she did, and the trucks were slamming the breaks on…I just got in and everybody was fussing at me”.
John and his battalion boarded a ship back to the states on December 9th, 1945. They hit U.S. soil on Christmas day 1945. From there John went across the country and arrived at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in January of 1946 and was discharged. He caught a bus to Greensboro where he changed for the last leg of his journey back to Sydnorsville. There was no bus station, so the bus dropped John in front of the country store. He arrived home approximately 5am on January 12th which was his mother’s birthday. There was no phone on the farm so John’s family had no details of his return. “Was she surprised? Yes”!
John spent 10 days at home talking and visiting with family and friends, but he wanted to meet Kathryn Thorn who he had corresponded with and made plans to marry. Kathryn lived in West Virginia. John made the trip to visit her and asked a man driving a truck if he knew where Kathryn Thorn lived. The man, who happened to be dating Kathryn at the time, gave him directions to her home. John would see Kathryn a total of 6 times. The sixth was their wedding day in November of 1946. John and Kathryn had a big family including six children, two died at birth, 11 grandchildren, 12 great grandchildren and 3 great great grandchildren. John and Kathryn were married for 68 years before she passed away in 2014.
John got a job working for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia as a mechanic. He worked there for a little less than a year. Kathryn was expecting a child and in 1947 the couple moved to Staunton, Virginia to be closer to family to help with the new baby. John found a job at Reid’s, a local Grocery Store. After three years John tried his hand at insurance and then selling cars. Eventually he found his way back into the insurance business, where he made a career for the next 37 years. John sold life insurance policies door-to-door. This included selling and collecting the monthly premiums. “I would quit around 4 o’clock. I’d go home and the children would come in from school”. When Kathryn arrived home from working at the American Safety Razor Company around 5pm, John would say, “wash your hands, dinner is ready”. John cooked dinner for 20 years until his daughters could help with the cooking.
John retired at 64 years of age and Kathryn retired at the age of 58. John has been very civically oriented as many people of his era were. He raised money for the March of Dimes, he belonged to the Fraternal Order of the Moose that raised money for deserving causes and he was also active in the VFW.
John Hodges lived in a world very different from today. His first-hand account of not only serving in the Army in the Pacific and beating the Japanese into an unconditional surrender but his recollection of The Great Depression and a slice of by-gone Americana are valuable insights into who we Americans were and how we have been influenced by those times. It is also worth noting four of Annie Hodges’ sons served in WWII.
John, thank you for traveling halfway around the world to fight a brutal enemy and save the world from true evil. It seems like that was just another day for a depression era farm boy.