Bill Neal Cook

Bill Neal Cook, of Bellingham, WA, passed away Tuesday, March 13, 2018. Bill was 93, born in Fairview, KS to Forest and Gladys (Guider) Cook. He was preceded in death by his parents, five brothers, Forest, Norm, John, Gene, and Jack Cook; three sisters, Norma Thorneycroft, Betty Cook and Sandra Cook. Bill is survived by his wife Elcey; son Nathan Cook; four brothers, Dick (Nancy) Cook, Don (Diane) Cook, Tom (Jackie) Cook, and Terry (Marie) Cook; two sisters, JoAnn Loomis and Shirley Arndell; three step-sons, Irwin Wright, Butch Wright, and Mike Wright and their families; and numerous nieces and nephews.

The following story is written
by Bill N. Cook, his life and
adventures and is like he tells it:
Upon graduating from Circleville High School at Circleville,Kansas,
my family and I moved to Bellingham, WA. Thinking there was a
choice which branch of the service I might enter, I soon found out
that Kansas had the upper hand in choice and I was inducted into
the United States Army in 1943.
Leaving bellingham for Ft. Lewis, it was only one week later that
we were transfered to Ft. Claybourne Louisiana close to Alexandria
LA. Before basic training was over, I broke my leg in a training
jump with a pack, jumping into a twelve foot sand pit, twisted my
ankle and before I could roll out of the way, another trainee
jumped on top of me breaking my leg.
it was a two week leave to Bellingham to recuperate
and back to finish basic training. Next it was Camp White in Oregon
on a troop train. We were there about a month, then on to another
training camp at Camp Kilmer New Jersey, which led to a troop ship
bound for who knew where.
Judging by the direction and scuttlebutt...it must be England.
The nightmare that followed was nearly as bad as the war itself.
There were three thousand soldiers aboard the troopship at what I
recall to be smmetime in May 1944....and we hit rough weather.
Everyone had dysentery. When they passed out the fire buckets in
the holds and on the deck...we were all sick and if the enemy would
have been looking for us, they could have found us by our smell.
Bunks were stacked five high and the convoy zigg-zagged its way back
and forth to England for a week. I had bunked in with the ships
carpenter and refused to answer roll call for three days.
Lying in my bunk on that troop ship, I had lots of reminiscense
about the past. The depression was in full swing when I was nine
years old and any income you could get was helpful. I sold the
Saturday Evening Post and newspapers to folks who could afford them
and one day the county sherrif asked if I would be willing to work
on a farm with a a couple who needed help. It sounded good to me
and confering with my family, I was on my way to Maye and Scott
Nuzman i s farm with all my worldly posessions in a paper bag.
The years ahead were some of the best and most memorable of my
life. I had a pony to ride to school, chores to do, milking cows,
cleaning barns, feeding, haying and living with two really nice
people. Maye bought me some new-fangled underwear and they were
about half silky. I wouldn't wear them...I just balked! Maye took
them back and exchanged them for regular shorts...cotton I guess.
r We had fresh milk, homemade bread, butter and jam, ice cream from
a cranker, butter from the churn and how could life be any better?
There was a cistern to collect rain water and on bath nights..a long
tub filled with warm water to soak in was great! Surely the work
was never-ending, but we had plenty to eat and warmth from the winter
blasts. I had a pig that I was so proud of and one hot summer I felt
sorry for him panting in the heat. I took a bucket of spring water
and poured over his body and he fell dead! Little did I know, but I
learned fast that you don't do that.
My ptty was helpful in letting me find out some things about myself.
While riding him, if he would see something - out of the corner of hiseye...
he would jump sideways about five febt, -pitching me to the ground
and away he'd go!! I would get s0000 mad at him but I loved him and
he'd stil leave me when he wanted to. I would visit my family from
time to time and it isn't much of a distance now..but in those days
in reality...it was a long way away.
There was a cream separator at Nuzman's that was unlike any I'd ever
seen. It was a long slender verticle tank with a spigot below a
small glass window. You would pour the milk in and it separated and
you would have milk on the bottom, thick cream on top.
Large vegetable gardens that Maye and Scott created every spring did
provide good eating, fruit trees abounded and there were fish in the
lakes and streams. I learned to hunt and trap and sell hides and it
has been a standing thing with me ever since. We attended church every
Sunday and upon occasion, we would visit different places sometimes
with Maye's sister Ethel.
In my last year of high school I stayed with the principal and family
because the former student who resided with them had quit his job and
they needed someone to help with the chores. In the middle of the
night I was awakened by this shouting and carrying on when it finally
dawned on me that the husband and wife were having a fight. It lasted
way on into the night and I couldn't sleep.. He was calling her every
dame in the book and more and I felt queasy. At about.five fifteenAM
he came downstairs and asked why I hadn't done the chores yet. I told
him it wasn't five thirty yet. I packed my things..went to school
and at the day's end I told him I wouldn't be staying there anymore.
The strange part of all of this was that when I would tell someone
what happened, no one•believed me. The educator was held in such
high regard by everyone in the community that no matter how true the
story was...no one would believe it.
Across the Atlantic I thought many times of life in Kansas and it all did
really seem like a dream aboard this troop ship. We laid over in England
and went to France. It was D-Day and seven. Cold and wet with mud up to
your knees in the Brittany area in France. The first thing we did was to
destroy an enemy amunition dump with everything from grenades to shells.
In two or three weeks we were on the march again...toward Paris.
We were treated wonderfully by the French people. We dug out booze(buried
underground so the enemy couldn't find it) which had been there for years
of occupation. The French people were really glad to see us.
We built roads and secondary bridges because the Germans had blown them
up in many places. We continued on toward Paris and the continuing rain
and cold made it difficult to be without shelter a lot of the time. Sea
rations and K-Rations were little better than nothing and made us really
appreciative of a good meal when we got it.
We went on through Paris to a small town called Senlice, thirty five
miles East of Paris where we took over a compound previously occupied by
the enemy. We were straifed a lot and sniped at a lot and had land
mines to dig up and destroy. Our main job was to repair the roads for
other troops bringing up supplies and reinforcements through rapidly.
The infantry was in front of us with artillery most of the time and
we built and cleared for them.
I was elected to stay behind with the equipment by myself with rations
enough for only one week. I guarded a half dozen trucks, some caterpillars,
low-boys and a portable sawmill. That week turned into three weeks and
I had to go and scrounge up some food. I walked from Senlice seven or
eight miles to another supply outfit where I obtained some food and supplies.
They took me back to my post.
Oh yes, I should tell you this...one night while we were still back in the
Brittany area..it was my turn to stand guard. It was about eleven thirty
and darker than black...no sound whatsoever and someone touched me on the
shoulder.I was scared because I thought I was alone. It turned out to be
a Free-French sniper who wore a bright crimson fez. All he wanted was a
light for his cigarrette. A second later, he was gone! I called the
sargent of the guard and told him what had happened and he couldn't believe
it. We never saw any more of them after that .
Well, finally the group returned for me and we were on our way toward
Belgium. There were some barracks which the enemy had used and a chateau
where the officers stayed. The chateau owner kept mouthing off and chattering
that we had not kept h is place as well as the Germans did and I
ran him off. The townspeople said it was a good thing.
On toward Cineay...about this time the Jerrys started their push on
the roads. They would devastate the roads...blow up bridges, drop
trees across the roads using prima-cord. Fields were too wet to get
tanks through...they'd mire down, so we had to secure the roads. The
Germans made their big push and broke through east of Cineay and
thus..The Battle of The Bulge. I had to take a big truck to the
coast of Holland. The people were running everywhere and the orders
were not to give anyone a ride. There was-no way I could prevent
it. The roads were filled with people evacuating because the Jerrys
were coming back and they knew war was inevitable again.
Bicycles, wheelbarrows, carts with worldly possessions on them were
being pushed by young and old persons filled with panic. Heading
toward Holland I let people off from time to time. I loaded the
sawmill with the help of a guy with me and headed back to Cineay.
The weather got bad and it rained and was cloudy for a week. Then
the sun came out and the Airforce came and bombed the Jerrys and
that was the turnaround point of the Battle of The Bulge. On to
Luxembourg...still building emergency bridges and roads and nobody
liked to drive the fuel supply trucks. I drove them from time to
time. I drove back to Leige, Belgium for a load of gas. I had a
truck and trailer and had to disconnect the truck from the trailer
and in putting it back on...the fifth-wheel controller collapsed
smashing my left hand badly.
I was sent to spend five months in the hospital in England with
skin grafts on my hand. The first one didn't take and they had to
re-do it with skin sprips taken off both my legs. They sewed my
left hand to my right thigh and I slept on my back and side. This
was a scary time for me, not being sure if I would keep my hand or
not and the way the hand appeared it wasn't too reassuring.
Finally it began to heal and after four pennicillin shots per day...
round the clock for the entire time...it was okay.
It was at this time that a soldier with a very small injury was
admitted to the hospital and seemed to me to be in perfect health
otherwise. He was bragging how a mason's ring was going to be
his ticket out of there and he was going home. It really irked
me because there were seriously injured men all around that hospital
who were in pain and misery and they didn't have a mason's ring to
get them home.
In returning to Belgium, I found that my outfit had enough time in
to be able to go home and I was put in a replacement situation,
moving around all the time. I was finally assigned to a service
group which had only been there three months. When I was sent to
the hospital in England, I never caught up with my outfit again.
All my personal belongings, several brand new handguns, mementos,
souveniers and clothes were all lost It was stated by the Articles
of War that we weren't supposed to muse prisoners of war. In our
outfit, one cocky little German POW made himself a pair of shorts out
of an American Flag. He wore his pants low, so all of us could see.
One night some of our guys got ahold of him, ruffed him up a lot and
took the shorts away. No one was chastized for it.
After I got out of the hospital I remember some incidents in France
in a railroad yard where there were some tank cars of wine going to
the cellars to be aged. All railroad yards had police guarding for
theft etc. More times than one the group of us worked it so that
we had ready-made plugs for the tank cars. We'd send out a decoy...
that is...someone going one direction to shoot...and the guards
would run to the noise. Someone else would shoot a hole in the
tank, causing the wine to spill into a helmet. If it was good wine..
we'd fill a bunch of helmets. Then, we'd drive a plug into the
hole to cover out sins and not let it leak all over if it was good.
Wine and I didn't mix having had too much of it early on and I was
sick for three months, but I did help those guys in the railroad
yard. We were in these railroad yards two or three days at a time.
They shipped us back and forth to and from Belgium a couple of times
to France and now that I look at a map, I see that we weren't over
ten miles from Monte Carlo and the Riviera. The water was so full
of jellyfish and Man-O-War that you couldn't swim. NowI wish there
had been a way to have kept a journal.Marseilles was a really filthy
place and every place was off limits. Everywhere we were, the staff
would brief us that it was the very worst place on the continent for
venereal disease. No matter where you were...it was told to you that
this was the"WORST" place!
We all had plaques, medals and papers whenever you did something for
the French....we were all heroes! Some guys had medals pinned on
their chests, weighing them down and got recognition for it...oak
leaf clusters to tell how long you've been there...some were sharpshooters
with something silver hanging beneath the medal. Everyone
had to go to the firing range,for practice to see if you could
qualify with Browning Automatic Rifles and M-16s 30 caliber and
50 caliber.
If we had to haul supplies somewhere, we always had a relief driver
and had a 50 caliber machine gun overhead mounted on the passenger side.
We stood up, unzipped the canvas and fired from the seat. It was a
big thing for the Germans to shoot up supply lines and you never
knew when you were going to get straifed. All trucks were equipped
with black-out lights with slits in them in case we had to move at
night.
They put us on a ship in Antwerp Belgium and I might tell you here
that I did get three rest leaves while I was in Belgium and visited
the Riveria and Edinborough Scotland. We had no dairy products for
a long, long time and we stopped in Panama. We all missed fresh
milk like crazy and we gulped down milkshakes like mad. We had a
hotel and fresh sheets on the beds and after sleeping in bags, blankets
and cots...this was heaven.
The entertainment committee was always looking for someone to do some
boxing and not by choice...it was me. I got my nose pushed out of
place a few times and it didn't last long...guess I didn't have the
heart of a fighter. I did hold my own a few times.
Out of Panama it was hot across the ocean. We were allowed to drag our
clothes in the ocean to wash them because we didn't have fresh water
except to drink. There were a lot of flying fishes which came flying up
on the deck. We threw them back in the ocean. Porpoise would follow
us for days ahead of and alongside the bow of the ship. We were
allowed to wear shorts and go without shirts. It was a huge cargo ship
and we had about four dozen big Sherman tanks on board. It was kind of
unique as we had lots of room aboard...not at all like the troopship.
It was seven or eight days out that we learned the big bomb had been
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and we knew there wouldn't be any
action on that side of the globe. Upon arriving in Manila they trucked
us on to Luzon. There were rumors that nobody wanted the Sherman tanks
and it was believed that the ship took them out and dumped them in the
ocean.
We were camped in a clearning where we had our tents and such and at
night we would hear something hit the tent that sounded like a rock.
When we went to investigate, there were huge beetles the size of your
fist ; lying on their backs kicking their feet. There were also huge
lizzards four or five feet long that could run like race horses. Sometimes
a mother monkey would bring her small baby out to lie in the
sun while she went to feed. We were told to leave the baby alone
because she could bite you forty times before you could get away.
There was a church nearby and there were a lot of bats that lived in
the steeple. When they came out at night, they were the size of small
banty hens and you'd better keep clear of them too.
It must have been the former lack of dairy products that made my teeth
deteriorate. The dental facilities in camp were at their worst. When
you had to have a tooth drilled, the electricity was made by a soldier
pumping a bicycle to power the drill. The pain and agony was unimaginable.
We all were taking a medication called atabrine to prevent
malaria. We were getting ready to leave for Japan as occupation
troops and we were paking up and the meds were on the table where we
had chow. I had taken them faithfully every day, but the last day we
were there they'd packed them up before I got mine and I had none on
the way to Japan. I spent most of the time in sick bay and was semiconcious
when we arrived in Kuri Japan.
In Kuri there was a huge Japanese naval training area about the size
of Glenview Illinois perhaps and it had an enormous building that you
could drive a truck from floor to floor with ramps. There was also a
huge battleship anchored in the bay that had 16" guns on it. It had
been bombed by the U.S. forces. When we went on board I had never seen
those kind of guns before. They really had a look of might to them.
There were also some huge warehouses containing everything from ethyl
alcohol fuel to clothing,:aerial cameras. I found two big spotting
scopes, but later found that they wouldn't let us ship them home. At
night when we went to the warehouse there was a Japanese soldier guard
outside refusing to let us in. One of our fellows named McKnight hit
the guard with the butt of his gun and that pretty well ended that
discussion. There were some of the fellows that took an armful of
Japanese swords and somehow must have gotten them home.
There was an old wreck of a ship quite a ways out from the shore and we talked
about swimming our there. One day we really did it and when we climbed up
on the wreck, we looked down into the water and there were sharks darting back
and forth beneath us. We stayed out there for what must have been two or
three hours...the sharks were gone and we must have swam back in nothing flat!
The people of Kuri weren't "prisoners" so to speak. They carried on
quietly with their usual work and gardening. Some of them worked in
our laundry. We had our own cooks but the Japanese did the cleaning
up. We avoided getting in too personal a basis with them. In the
old Japanese barracks they had a community bathtub which was about
25 to 30 feet square and made of smooth concrete. We would fill it
with cold, clear water and heat it with steam pipes which were from
the nearby laundry. Now that we occupied the area,it was ours.We all
took baths in there and it was a different experience. At that time,
community baths were not yet an American style.
One of my jobs was to help with the building of the Officers Club.
We took a boiler off of an old locomotive to use for a heating system
for the club. We divised a unit to make gas out of carbide for our
cutting torches. We cut the boiler off and it worked a lot better
than we thought. We were in Kuri about two months. Then the orders'
came to go home and when we shipped out it was cold and there was
snow on the ground.
A couple of weeks later we landed in Seattle and I mustered out of
the U.S. Army. I had received $37.00 per month until I made Corporal
T-5 (technician, grade five) and then received $52.00 per month. I
sent $20.00 home each month even at that. Doesn't seem like a whole
lot. The day we reached Seattle was January 16, 1946.
In my thoughts the summation of the whole thing is this: Wars are for
three reasons; 1. For aggression to gain land or power. 2. For the
allready rich to get richer. 3. For good military men and women to
suffer the pain and agony of frozen feet or sweltering deserts in place
of politicians who sit in offices of comfort. I may sound synical, but
add it all up and its true.
I love my country and the life I have led since my military days have
been good and I have appreciated the freedoms I once fought for. This
is also to say that I hope my descendants don't ever have to go to war.
I love you all very much.
Bill Neal Cook
September 17, 1995