[Milsurplus] war stories

[Kees & Sandy]

I talked to an 87 year old gentleman today and tried to get him to document his wartime experiences. He's thinking about it. 
His name is Howell Byrne and he enlisted in the army for communications training (Milsurplus connection) after being trained as an operator on teletypes and other basic communications gear he was shipped out to be part of the MacArthur invasion of the Philipines. Although the route they took via Australia was to avoid sub encounters, the ship ahead of them was hit. They made the journey OK but were held up for 4 days on aux power (~4 knots) because the ship lost a screw (talking about "sitting duck"). Anyway their army unit was redirected to CBI (China Burma India) support and he spent the rest of the war at an airfield in the jungles of India providing support for those flying "the hump". He said the jungles out there were filled with aircraft that didn't make it. He volunteered to be part of teams to recover bodies/identification from the aircraft after "Ol' Truman stopped the war" but with the war over, he was sent home. He has many stories including the tigers you could hear in the jungle at night. He said the tigers never bothered the troops in the tents that he knew of but the cooks were surprised one morning at 4AM after nearly walking into 3 tigers drinking out of a drainage ditch near the latrines.
73 Kees K5BCQ     
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