Bourbonnais, Jonathan

US History-per. 5

Corona

3 June 2002

On December 6, 1941, a senior in high school named Calvin Bishop was sitting in his room listening to the radio. His quiet home in Yucaipa, California was resting in tranquility while the United States Naval Base in Pearl Harbor erupted in Japanese plane fire. The next day Calvin Bishop was listening to his friend who was going to join the marines. He declined the offer to join also only to be drafted later. As his buddies were being transported to the base he was held back because he did not have two GI pairs of glasses. These were Federal regulated glasses required with poor eye sight. He then was moved to the Advanced Field Artillery Training with the 9^th Calvary under General Bradley. This was fortunate because that same platoon that was shipped out with out him had later been destroyed by enemy machine gun fire.

Three days after the invasion of France, Calvin Bishop was on his first day of combat. He almost died twice that day. He was as the role of a jeep driver in a city. He was driving towards the German Front. He did not know where it was or how far to go. Suddenly, a man jumped in the road and said, "Stop! I am the last American." Calvin would have driven right into the enemy’s front lines.

The same day he was ordered to find a high point to view the German lines. One thing Mr. Bishop learned that day is that bad things happen if the Germans can see you. And if you can see Germans, Germans can see you. He said that it was weird knowing that the Germans were pointing the big guns right at him. A huge shell landed right next to him. "Six feet away and I can still see the dust rise from the shell," he said. Luckily the shell was a dud and did not explode.

The bravest thing Mr. Bishop mentioned that he saw was people that knew they were going to die and still did what they were told to do. He saw a whole platoon ordered to march across an open field that they knew were heavily guarded by machine guns. He said that to make it even worse, they needed to march fifteen feet apart without the comfort of companionship. This according to Calvin took an enormous amount of courage.

Cowards however, were no strangers to dangers. "One guy," he said, "was tripping out over dying, he said,’ I won’t go, I will shoot myself in the foot.’" Also, some guy freaked out on a jeep ride out to a point. He just jumped out and ran away in the middle of the night. No one ever saw him again.

Companionship was Calvin Bishop’s means for distraction from the destruction. He said, "A common bond between soldiers was made by the fact they could all die at any time."

The time he was most afraid was when he walked into a bar and saw four German soldiers looking at him. He did not know what to do and then realized that they were dead.

In his opinion, the military has good sides and bad sides. He says there is too much cussing in the army, which is no good. However, the army teaches good discipline which is necessary to an orderly life.