[Begin Tape 1, Side 1]
[Interview begins mid-sentence]
Payne: -- “that the -- I guess it’s called the Department of War -- here, I’ve got an ID card; I’ll show you that -- put out that said they were sure there was going to be a war and we were going to get into it; and that they didn’t have enough college graduates at West Point so they wanted a program, and they proposed this Thomason Act program and they passed the act.
“And for four years, they picked -- from 100 land-grant colleges, they picked an honor graduate who was in the upper-division ROTC. And so I was a cum laude honor graduate in chemistry with a physics minor at Berkeley. And Colonel O’Brien and Colonel Browing came to me -- I was a reader, by the way, for the ROTC. Do you know what a reader is?”
Chin: “You’re reading the papers that” --
Payne: “When I went into upper division -- because I was straight A -- and money was just very important in those days because it was during the Depression. And I got $25 a month to read the freshman and sophomore examinations.
“And they -- all of a sudden, about four or five months before graduation, they asked me into Colonel O’Brien’s office and said that with your grade point, we’re recommending you for the Thomason Act commission from UC Berkeley.
“I had not intended to be a career military. I had a job as a chemist and physicist at Shell development in Emeryville. And my wife and I had been going two years to high school, four-and-a-half years to college. And this law also said you couldn’t get married the first year. So -- but my dad was a brilliant graduate engineer and he says, look, there’s a war here. You might as well get in and get -- get going; get in early. So I accepted it and I -- oh, and you had to be in a combat branch, also, and you could be quartermaster or ordinance or anything like that.
“So I was assigned to the 65th Artillery at Fort Scott, which was an anti-aircraft, the mobile anti-aircraft -- you know that, huh?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Okay.”
Chin: “I know very -- I knew they were there and then they moved them down to L.A.” --
Payne: “March.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “They moved them to March Air Force base. General Stockton was the general at the time. Colonel LaFrenz was the executive officer. He and I turned out finally to be very good friends. And, later, Colonel George D. Burr was the artillery engineer, a very outstanding, brilliant man. He was licensed in the State of California as like number three civil and number ten structural engineer. He designed all the tunnels for the Hetch Hetchy dam project from --you know, it’s up by Yosemite”--
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “down through -- well, you passed it on 280, those lakes” --
Chin: “Oh, yeah, Crystal Springs?”
Payne: Crystal Springs. The end of Hetch Hetchy comes in there at the” --
“He was also an assistant to Strauss, who designed the Golden Gate Bridge. And he never agreed with Strauss. He said Strauss was too skinny, did a skinny job. But I didn’t know all that.
“And so I went -- I had a telegram that said I had to have so many uniforms and shoes and boots; and I was to report to Letterman for a physical about the 15th of June. And if I passed that, I would” --
Chin: “15th of June of what year?”
Payne: “1940.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “I graduated May the 12th from Berkeley. And so I passed the physical and reported to -- I was -- for some reason or other, I was assigned as a reservist to the 65th. But at the last minute, the orders came out that it was B Battery of the 6th Artillery. And the 6th B Battery had the 12-inch mortars, the four mortars, at Fort Funston and the three-inch permanent-mounted anti-aircraft to protect Battery Davis, which is the 16th. They were there before -- they and Townsley were there before I got there. And there was a set of three-inch over at Cronkite, also, that protected Cronkite -- Townsley” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “Townsley, yeah.
“I reported in, and my battery commander -- do you know Fort Scott very well?”
Chin: “Oh, I know all the forts” --
Payne: “I see.”
Chin: -- “quite well.”
Payne: “Where did you come from?”
Chin: “San Francisco. I’m working in Los Angeles. I’ve been there for 10 years, but San Francisco is where I was born and raised.”
Payne: “Oh, me, too. “
Chin: “So I” --
Payne: “In fact, I am five generations -- or four generations San Francisco. My mother’s name was Lydia Hunter, and she was the great-granddaughter of Judge Hunter, who Hunter’s Point was named after.”
Chin: “Oh, I see. Yes.”
Payne: “And my dad migrated -- after he graduated from college, his folks were multi-millionaires and farmers in Kentucky, but he didn’t want to be a farmer. So he graduated from the University of Kentucky as a mechanical engineer and took his first job with Baldwin Locomotive” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “who had made steam tractors.
“And he went to South America and sold steam -- now, they didn’t pull anything. They were stand- -- they stood in one place. But in the old days, they used to have mules or horses go around in circles. It was -- Colonel LaFrenz was the executive officer, big stomach.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Long story about him, why Chiang Kai-shek chose him to come over after the war.”
Chin: “Oh, I’d like to hear that.”
Payne: “Well, the reason was Chiang Kai-shek, when the war was over, said that he wanted some full colonels -- they had to be full colonels, because that’s what the Chinese respected -- and they had to be fat and white haired; and Colonel LaFrenz fit.”
Chin: “Yes. I’ve seen the pictures, yeah.”
Payne: “Oh, you have seen them.”
Chin: “Oh, yes.”
Payne: “Oh, okay.”
Chin: “Is he still alive?”
Payne: “Oh, no. Oh, no.”
Chin: “Oh. Because I was going through the San Francisco phone book, looking through for names of some people.”
Payne: “Mm-hm. Oh, no, he’s been dead a long time.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “Yeah.
“But he’s a Cal graduate and I’m a Cal graduate. Bob Ball was a Cal graduate, and I’ll tell you about him. He was in the engineering department.”
Chin: “Now, you” --
Payne: “Fred Ryan” --
Chin: “Yes, I -- yeah, I know” --
Payne: -- “Fred Ryan pasted my majority leaves on me.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And he was the adjutant there. I always remember going -- LaFrenz and everybody else was gone. And he called up and says, ‘I’ve got some major’s leaves to put on you.’ I’d only been a captain for 14 months.
“And so I went up there and I said to Fred -- I said, ‘Holy mackerel, Fred, I’ve only been a captain for 14 or 15 months.’
“He says, ‘So should I throw these away or should I put them on you?’
“I says, ‘Well, okay.’
“So -- so that was -- it was called -- there was quite a few others.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “But most -- the Thomason Act officers were not.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “There were 10 of us. Of a hundred, 10 of them showed up at the Presidio -- at Fort Scott.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “I keep track of two of them still: Kenneth Cooper lives in Bay Minette, Alabama; and he was the district attorney of the county there and married Ann, a red-haired lady. And we still Christmas-card each other. He’s retired now.
“And Danny Cook, he lives over in Tiberon. And he also joined the (inaudible) system. Never went very far with it, but he runs some kind of museum in Belvedere, a military museum or something over there.”
Chin: “Oh, really?”
Payne: “But except for me, I was the only Cal -- well, of course, you could only have one Thomason Act from Cal anyway for each year.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “So there was, in effect, only 400 Thomason Acts.”
Chin: “And you said all the ones that you mentioned ended up at the Harbor Defense” --
Payne: “Only 10 -- no, no. No. Of my class, 10 showed up.”
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “The class before me, one showed up; and that was Chuck Ottinger. And he showed up later and kind of took my place when I was sent to Command and General Staff College. And he took my place for those six months.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Now, in your class, were these all ROTC in the coast artillery training?”
Payne: “No, no. It just happened” --
Chin: “Oh.”
Payne: -- “that they picked the 10 coast artillerymen and sent them to San Francisco.”
Chin: “Oh.”
Payne: “And John Dodson came from Alabama; Ken Cooper came from Alabama; Beatty came from Georgia. I don’t know why all the southerners. All nine of them” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “-- all showed up at Fort Scott.”
Chin: “So they weren’t part of the California -- I mean, the -- what did you call it, the what Mafia? Berkeley Mafia or the Cal Mafia?”
Payne: “Well, no, they were part of the Berkeley Mafia. “
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “The Berkeley Mafia was Colonel LaFrenz, Fred Weyand, Ottinger, Bob Ball, me -- I can’t remember them all” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “but they had picked a lot of” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “Cal graduates were there at Berkeley.
“Now, George Burr was not. He was a Phi Beta Kappa civil engineer at the University of Washington. He was not a Cal graduate.
“Anyway, I reported to duty. And the captain -- by the way, do you know where the jail is?”
Chin: “Not at Fort Scott. I -- I don’t think I” --
Payne: “All right. You know the loop.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “All right. At the head of the loop was the headquarters building.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And as you go down to the right was headquarters and headquarters battery, then A Battery, which was the mine battery. Then B Battery is where I was.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Then there was kind of an office building, a two- or three-story office building, then the jail.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “Then you went around the other side, was N Battery, the anti-aircraft -- I mean -- yeah, the anti-aircraft, the 65th, went down the other side.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And then the PX was right down by the jail and the post office. And then I lived in the big officers’ quarters. You know where the big general’s house is just down from the headquarters building? You know, the horseshoe.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Okay. The headquarters building with the flagpole.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “You go a little south, a block or so” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “and that big general’s building.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And just a little bit further was about a 20-apartment bachelors’ quarters. They built another wooden one right behind the general’s, which I lived in later. And then my wife and I had quarters -- 34 or 36A -- there for four years.
“You know where the officers’ club is (inaudible)?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Well, there’s the steps that come from the street down to the officers’ quarters. I’d walk out of my front door, down those stairs, past the entrance to the officers’ quarters over to the headquarters. That’s how I -- that’s where I was.
“Anyway, I reported in. And all the battery commanders were West Pointers. And I reported --Captain Moorman was the battery commander of B Battery; and he was about six-foot-two, stuffy as a son-of-a-bitch. As I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, you’re the genius they sent me.’ And he says, ‘I’m going to make you the technical engineering’ -- et cetera -- ‘and fire-control officer, plus the supply officer.’
“And then every morning, what we did was we would have breakfast and then truck up and go to Fort Funston and work on either the 12-inch mortars or practice with a tugboat plotting and practice fire control. We had an old -- not IBM” --
Chin: “Sperry?”
Payne: -- “Sperry computer for the anti-aircraft, plus an optical range finder for slant range.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And the 6th was -- I mean-- and then C Battery was there. That had the 16s. And Ken Cooper, from Alabama, he was a lieutenant in there.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “In my battery, there was First Lieutenant Larson, who was a reservist called back to active duty. And he was an accountant, I remember. And there was a young second lieutenant from West Point who I never got along with.
“Oh, by the way, they made all Thomason Act exactly six weeks date of rank after the same class at West Point.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “So his name -- I forget. It starts with a P-. I can look it up someplace. He ranked me by six weeks.
“And then we had John Dodson from Alabama, me and one more.
“Anyway, we’d truck up every morning and go out to the little Fort Funston. And we’d leave Fort Funston about 3:00 in the afternoon, because we had to get back and get in class and uniform and troop the colors. And the bandmaster’s name was Hershenow.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “You knew that?”
Chin: “Yes, I -- I” --
Payne: “Oh, you got that already?”
Chin: -- “I’ve seen that name; I did” --
Payne: “Where were you in the Army?”
Chin: “I was not.”
Payne: “Oh, you weren’t.”
Chin: “I wasn’t -- I wasn’t around in those days.”
Payne: “Oh, I see. Yeah.
“But why did you get interested in this?”
Chin: “Well, because my father was and -- he wasn’t in the coast artillery. But after the -- after the war and after the Korean war, he was in the reserves. And they used to do maneuvers and such up at Townsley.”
Payne: “Oh.”
Chin: “So one time he took me up there. And when I saw that, I said, well, this looks very interesting; and I got interested in it.”
Payne: “Oh. Well, I’ll just -- I’m sorry, I’ll just tell you how I became an engineer.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “About the end of 1940, they built some barracks at Funston. And I don’t know -- I don’t think it was an officers’ quarters, but I had -- right inside the gate was the guard. And I was not married, and all the other guys that were (inaudible) married. And I had like a sergeants’ room on the second floor, little two rooms. And I could look down -- and I would take OD all the time, ‘cause I wasn’t married; and all the other guys wanted to go home. And they had a woodshop -- Sergeant Sylvester had a woodshop there. I even have the sign on my garage. It’s out in the garage.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “It says Lieutenant Payne. ‘Cause the salt water got -- ruined cars there. So because I stayed all the time, they -- and then I had the name on it. And I still have it nailed up outside there. And so they built barracks there and we finally moved out there.
“And I don’t know where the alerts came from, but Captain Moorman decided that we needed fortifications underground that we could get into in case there was an attack. And he called me in and he says, ‘Well, you’re the engineering officer.’ He says, ‘Here’s an FM on’ -- a field manual -- ‘on fortifications.’
“And I looked at it, and they had some references there to technical -- TMs, technical manuals, on structural engineering -- oh -- oh, yeah, engineering, et cetera. So he said, ‘I want underground quarters that we can live in and’ -- et cetera.
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And he says, ‘You design them and take the platoon and build them.’
“I said, ‘Where am I going to get the wood?’
“He says, ‘Well, go to the engineers in the Presidio and get some wood.’
“And they argued with me. And fortunately -- or unfortunately -- ever heard of Roberts at the Beach?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Okay. It burned down. Too bad it burned down, but there was a lot of lumber there and timbers. So I went over to the owner, and they decided they couldn’t rebuild it. And so I asked them and I got lots of 12-by-12 beams and all kinds of stuff out of Roberts at the Beach and hauled them up to Fort Funston and made the drawings and designed the underground bunkers and tunnels and all kinds of things.
“And we got a whole bunch of recruits in -- this happened to be -- I’m giving you this background on how I became an engineer, ‘cause I’m a physicist, really. And, you know, physics is the basic of all engineering. Did you know that?”
Chin: “I can see how it applies, yes.”
Payne: “Well, sure. Physics is the basic -- all engineering is -- is nitty-gritty physics.”
Chin: “Mm-hm; okay.”
Payne: “You take Physics 1A at UC Berkeley and you learn mechanics and strength of materials. You take Physics 1B and it’s thermodynamics. You take 1C and it’s electrical; and 1D is light and sound and stuff like that. Well, that’s all engineering is, is just applying those same formulas in detail on and on and on. And I was straight A in physics and chemistry, too.
“Anyway, I designed all these things and started building them. And then Captain Moorman says -- one day he says, ‘We need water out there, too.’ He says, ‘I know where the water hydrant is.’ He says, ‘Go put water in the place.’
“In the meantime, I didn’t know he was bragging to the battalion commander about the beautiful forts and things we were building out there and how they were nicely done. And the battalion commander got scared whether they’d fall in or something, and he sent them down to the Corps of Engineers to see if they were structurally” --
Chin: “He sent the plans down?”
Payne: “He sent my plans down” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “to the Corps of Engineers; not the artillery engineers.
“A coincidence: The Corps of Engineers, which I worked with for 10 years after that, was at the corner of 180 New Montgomery, which is next door to the big telephone building at Howard and -- well, I used to go down there once every other week for either finances or something. After the war, they sold the building to Pacific Bell. And the last six years of my -- of my career at Pacific Bell was at 180 New Montgomery, except they put ceilings in and everything at that time.
“And then we got a whole bunch -- the railroad train used to be able to come right down on Crissy Field. The track’s still there, yeah. And they brought all these recruits in from Kentucky and Tennessee and Oklahoma. And they didn’t know nothin’. Didn’t know how to use a screwdriver or anything.
“And so Captain Moorman says, ‘Well, Lieutenant, we need water.’
“And I said, well, where am I going to get the pipe? Well, I went to Roberts and stole a lot of pipe from Roberts at the Beach and then I got some from the Presidio. And we didn’t have any wrenches, and so my dad went and scrounged me -- in fact, I’ve still got those out there, great big Stillson wrenches. And these young men -- we’d dig the ditches; and they had never learned, in their youth, that you screw on a pipe clockwise and you screw it off. And Moorman kept saying, ‘I want that done by next’ -- what, Saturday or something like that.
“Well, I was down in the ditch in my coveralls, but I had my silver bars on. And -- because these guys, they were -- they just couldn’t understand how to make a Stillson wrench work and which way you screwed on and which way you screwed off. So I knew how, so I was down in the ditch. And all of a sudden, Sergeant (inaudible) hollers out ‘Attention.’ And here’s all these wheels, and one of them was General Stockton.
“And so I jumped up and said, ‘Yes, sir.’
“The (inaudible) says -- he had a stick, one of those riding sticks -- and he says, ‘Lieutenant’ --and he pokes me on the shoulder here where my -- he says, ‘Lieutenants supervise’ -- ‘Officers supervise; they don’t do the work.’
“I says, ‘Sir, these men are farmers and they don’t know pipe work.’
“He says, ‘You should teach them.’
“I says, ‘Sir, Captain Loomis says this has got to be done by next Wednesday and I haven’t got time.’
“’Well,’ he says, ‘you’d better take time.’
“Well, it turned out that Colonel LaFrenz was there with him and Colonel Burr and -- I don’t know -- about a half-a-dozen others. And so they all walked on and Colonel Burr says, ‘You’re the man that designed those fortifications?’
“And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’
“He says, ‘Where’d you learn that?’
“’Well,’ I says, ‘I’m a physicist’; and, I says, ‘I got out the TMs and made the calculations.’
“He says, ‘You’re a very conservative engineer.’ He says, ‘They’re never going to fall down.’ He says, ‘When did you’ -- ‘you learned this just out of TMs?’ You know, training -- technical manuals.
“I says, ‘Yep.’ I says, ‘I just read ‘em and did the calculations, the beams and stress and strain.’
“About a week later, Captain Wilman (phonetic) came to me and he says, ‘The battalion commander wants to see you down at Fort Stockton.’ We were living at Funston.
“So I says, ‘Okay.’
“He says, ‘But I’m going with you.’
“So we drove in the -- it wasn’t a Jeep. It was a bigger thing, a command car.”
Chin: “A recon car or something?”
Payne: “Recon car or something.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And we went down there. And the battalion commander says, ‘The chief engineer, artillery engineer, wants to interview you.’ He says, ‘He wants you to be an engineer. Would you want to be an engineer?’
“And I says -- oh, and my 14 months was up, also. You had to be a year, plus two months, that you had to stay in a combat unit. You couldn’t be an engineer under the Thomason Act without that.
“And he says -- and I said, ‘Well, I guess so.’ I said, ‘I never thought of it.’ I says, ‘I wasn’t going to’ -- ‘I didn’t know what I was going to do.’ I says, ‘I was thinking about making a career out of the Army now.’
“So I went down to Colonel Burr’s office, which was in the old headquarters building, in the --you know the horseshoe” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “it was upstairs.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “We moved down next to the jail later as we grew.
“And there I met Bob Ball, who was a first lieutenant, a Cal graduate. And I still keep contact with Bob Ball and his wife, Kathleen, and their six children. And he interviewed me and he says, ‘I’m surprised.’ He says, ‘I got your records out.’ He says, ‘You’re a cum laude graduate at Berkeley’; and he says, ‘You know engineering.’ He says, ‘I’d like you to be on my staff.’
“So I said -- Moorman was there in the back (inaudible). And he’s a big guy, too. So I says, ‘Okay.’
“So about two weeks later, I moved from Funston into the wooden bachelor quarters right behind the general’s house. And I worked as an artillery engineer. And Colonel Burr, the first thing he said to me, he says, ‘Well, you’re going to start next Monday.’
“And I says, ‘Yes, sir.’
“And he says, ‘Do you know what a slump cone is?’ He says, ‘I know,’ he says, ‘from your calculations, you know what water-cement ratio of concrete is.’ He says, ‘You know what a slump cone is?’
“I say, ‘No, sir.’
“’Well,’ he says, ‘you’re going to find out.’ He says, ‘Come in your boots and old clothes’ -- or ‘old uniform Monday morning.’ And he says -- and they were building 129. And 129 had 10 10-yard concrete mixers in what’s called tandem, and they pumped 24 hours a day. And a slump cone is a piece of sheet metal 18 inches high, a foot in diameter. And a slump cone is that you can tell if the con- -- the contractors like to put a lot of water in the concrete. You know that?”
Chin: “Yeah, I” --
Payne: “It makes it easier to put in” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “and a smoother job.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “But the higher the water content, the less the strength per sack of” --
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: “So you can tell this on the job easy by -- you put a piece of plywood down and you’ve got two things you put your foot on. And you tell the contractor out of that mixer, bring me a wheelbarrow. And you make -- you put it half -- a third full and you hit it 20 times with a rod; and then you fill it up another third. And then you have handles on it, and you take your foot off and go (noise), pull it up quick; and the slump -- then you measure how far it went down. And the wetter it is, the further it goes down.
“Well, good concrete, like we wanted up there, three inches is all we wanted it to fall. So he spent a couple days, showed me how to measure reinforcing steel and putting the chairs and all that kind of stuff. And then for about four months, I was up there all day long. Then he finally started me in other projects and then into finances. Then he sent me back to MIT for four months to take a crash course in civil engineering.
“And then, all of a sudden -- Bob Ball was a first lieutenant there. All of a sudden, all the West Pointers of my class got to be first lieutenants. Six weeks later, I got to be a first lieutenant. But guess what happened six weeks after that? I became a captain. I was only a first lieutenant six weeks. I don’t know how that happened, ‘cause I remember the -- the West Pointers used to --he told my wife at parties -- he’d say, ‘Oh, you know, Harry’s a bright guy, but he’ll never make it up in the Army ‘cause he’s not a West Pointer.’ And all of a sudden, I’m a captain and he’s a first lieutenant.
“And 18 months later, I was a major; and 18 months later than that, I was a lieutenant colonel. I don’t know. George Burr liked me, although I hated him. For the first year and a half, I just hated that man. But he liked me and he got me promoted; and Colonel LaFrenz did, too.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “And, finally, it turned out George and I became very good friends. And he was not a graduate of Command and General Staff College and I was. And then when I was an instructor, he was one of my students, Colonel Burr was.”
Chin: “Oh, at Fort Leavenworth?”
Payne: “Well, no. Then -- by that time, I had resigned my regular Army commission and I was the assistant commandant of the USAR school in San Francisco” --
Chin: “Oh, I see.”
Payne: -- “and was -- and taught the Command and General Staff School.”
Chin: “I see. Oh, I see; I see.”
Payne: “And -- so that’s how I became an engineer.
“And so we -- then we” --
Chin: “Now, these events you’re talking about, that took place in 1941, when you had your interview and” --
Payne: “Yeah; mm-hm, yeah.”
Chin: “Before the war, obviously.”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“About when; the spring, summer?”
Payne: “Spring, in there, yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah, uh-huh.”
Payne: “And then they converted -- and I can’t remember which -- the Miles or the Niles” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “to a cable ship, rather than a mine packet.
“And then they got the Niles and the Sturgeon, I think, or something -- Spurgeon --
Chin: “Yeah, it’s called the Bills; the Bills came first in ’42, and then the Spurgeon came in 1943.”
Payne: “Then we had the Niles, then.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “I guess the Niles was the” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “one that they converted.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And it was a triple-expansion, steam-driven ship, and we used it for laying cable out to sea; because they decided that it was -- there would be less sabotage if we went to sea and brought the cables in. And then, because it was the only cable-laying ship, we actually laid cables up in -- up in Grey’s Harbor in Portland and then off of -- Fort Warden, is that” --
Chin: “Yeah, up in Washington.”
Payne: -- “Washington.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Then we went out in the Aleutians and laid some cables.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “We had a destroyer escort when we did that.
“And -- oh, I know. How I -- how I finally ended up at the telephone company was -- not only was Colonel LaFrenz’s brother an executive at Pacific Bell, but I was on the Niles -- oh, we were out to sea.
“There was a Western Union -- I think we only had one wire. It went to ground -- went from the Great Highway to Hawaii. You knew that?”
Chin: “No, but how else would it go? If you’re in Hawaii, you had to go through the” --
Payne: “But -- and I remember the thing, when they tapped it, it moved a thing with a mirror on the wall so they could do telegraph; you know, dots and dashes?
Chin: “Uh-huh.”
Payne: “And -- because such a long distance and the attenuation of the copper, and it broke. And so we took the Niles down about 600 miles. We had a destroyer escort. And a couple of Jap subs came along, but they got scared of the destroyer. And it was about two months, we went back and forth and back and forth with a drag hook” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “to pick it up in two places, then buoy it and then splice it together again.
“And then when I was up off of Fort -- Fort Warden, I got a message on the radio or something that said some ship had cut the Army cable from Crissy Field to Yellow Point, Fort Baker, and get the ship back in a hurry.
“Well, heck, we were tied to a big cable up there. And so I says -- and, you know, buoying a cable out at sea, you could lose it. So the Navy brought me back in a PBY. It was a -- it was a seaplane with two engines. And one of my wire chiefs -- oh, I was also, finally, signal officer under George Burr and engineering supply and all construction. That’s why I knew where every site from Pillar Point -- you know where Pillar Point is -- to Point Reyes, there wasn’t a site that I didn’t walk on, that we didn’t do some construction on.
“What’s the 12-inch battery at Barry? Walden” --
Chin: “Wallace.”
Payne: -- “Wallace.
“That was an open battery when I first started; and that was one of my projects, was to put the concrete around it. Yeah, Wallace; right.
“So, anyway, I came back. And Bill Cook was the wire chief at Fort Scott. He was an ex-Bell System man. And he says, ‘Major,’ he says, ‘you know, the Bell System has a cable barge that fixes cables.’ He says -- ‘cause I was all worried about leaving the big cable up there off of Fort Warden buoy. And he says, ‘Why don’t we see if we can’t rent that.’
“So I went down to Pacific Bell, and they agreed to -- with their tug and their barge, to fix the Army cable.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “We paid ‘em, $400,000.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “We made a contract. And from then on, I talked Burr and Colonel LaFrenz into not bringing the Niles back, except in an emergency, because the barge Pacific would do all the – we even took it out to sea. When Zimmerman brought those big things the Bell Labs invented that had the electric motor in ‘em that had an antenna underwater that they could turn and control so they could hear submarines and ships coming in, propellers, we even used them; because we laid them out at Horseshoe Shoals.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And then -- what are all the things that you’ve been asking; I’m just seeing -- then, all of a sudden -- oh, they put up a net” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “from Crissy Field to Tiberon; and they had a big tug just off of Crissy Field that had all the wires and ropes to open the gate and et cetera.
“And then just outside of that was -- they put a giant buoy -- as big around as this room -- that they had a destroyer they tied to it, that they called the ready-duty destroyer. And, all of a sudden, Burr gets a hold of me and he says, ‘The Navy doesn’t want to rely on radio; they want cable.’ He says, ‘Do you think you can invent some way to get a flexible cable out to the buoy?’
“So -- who did I know? I knew somebody in the signal corps -- Ray Waltz. I says, ‘Is there some kind of telephone cable that’s got rubber around it instead of lead?’
“’Oh,’ he says, ‘yeah, Roebling makes that.’
“And so I called the Roebling engineer up and had him bring some samples out. And they brought out a sample of a 10-pair, 19-gauge copper cable that was plastic insulated. Then it had a plastic cover on it, then some steel mesh and then another plastic around it. And then we bought some Navy waterproof boxes for the telephone. And we got the barge Pacific from Pacific Telephone to lay this cable from Crissy Field out to the ready-duty. And we had a fast disconnect so when they -- when the alert came, they could -- they didn’t have to get aboard. They could just (noise) to go” --
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: -- “except they broke it all the time.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And then, all of a sudden, the Navy says, well, we want the same thing on the tug that opens the gate. So we put two cables out there.
“And other than that, well, I built barracks over at Fort Barry, down in the dell, the low place down there.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Built more barracks at Fort Funston. Built three telephone -- underground telephone switchboards: Barry, Funston and one over here in Cronkite someplace. And then they decided to build a major mine casemate at Baker’s Beach. And that’s down toward 25th Street there.”
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: “Because they came up with this new -- new mine.
“Now, the mines that I first worked with were floating mines. They had a cable tied to them, and the mine planter would drop them off. Then the wooden L boat would grab them, hook the cable onto them. And the cable had to be measured exactly so that they would -- and a concrete on the bottom -- so that they would just be so many feet below the surface.
“You knew all this?”
Chin: “Yes, but everybody that explains it does it a little differently; and then I can piece it all together. So go ahead from your” --
Payne: “I did it.”
Chin: -- “your angle.
“You’re more precise because you’re an engineer” --
Payne: “Yeah. I see.”
Chin: -- “and a scientist, all that rolled into one, so” --
Payne: “Then, all of a sudden, they came up with the bottom mine, the big cone top that went on the bottom.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And it had -- it was a magnetic mine, and it had sensors in it. And then in the casemates -- and they put them in patterns out there, and then -- and Army mines all had electrical cables going to them, where Navy mines don’t. Navy mines are by themselves. The Navy was always scared of the Army mines, because a mine’s a terrible thing for a ship.”
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: “And then they had this thing with a lot of little orange lights” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “a panel about this big (indicating).”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And each orange light was a mine. And a ship would come through, and you could watch its progress by these lights coming on in this big square pattern.
“And we laid the cables -- well, the Spurgeon -- the mine planters laid the cables for the mines, but my ship laid the -- I call it the Zimmerman. Major Zimmerman from the signal corps and the Bell Labs, that big -- four or five big fancy things that had motors in ‘em that actually were like a radar that rotated. And so -- and they were right outside the gate. And they’d just go up like this (indicating) and they could tell if submarines or something” --
Chin: “I see. So this was underwater.”
Payne: “Underwater, yeah. It was sound.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Then, finally, we started putting in radar; and that was my job, also. And the first ones were 268s, which were anti-aircraft, great big – like bedsprings. And then we got 582s.”
Chin: “Well, I think the 296 was the seacoast radar; 268 was probably anti-aircraft.”
Payne: “268 was -- yeah, right.”
Chin: “592, I think, was a general surveillance type” --
Payne: “Yeah; okay.”
Chin: -- “like they have at airports.”
Payne: “Yeah; right.”
Chin: “Using everything all at once.”
Payne: “But we started putting those in at -- up and down the coast.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And then, of course, I went -- we built the end stations from Pillar Point” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “to Point Reyes.
“I can always remember the one at Point Reyes was really out from Olema -- it’s a little town up there -- and we had to go out to the forest and pioneer a road. And there was a bog, and I lost a V8 tractor for about four months that got stuck in the mud. We couldn’t get it out.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “But we built the end stations, and they all had cables that went to sea and came in at each end station. And the reason they went to sea was to make sure that the Japanese couldn’t come in and cut them.”
Chin: “And this is the type of thing that the Niles or your Pacific Telephone barge would lay those?”
Payne: “The barge didn’t lay any of those cables out at sea, but the Niles did, yeah. We laid ‘em with -- except that -- oh, because the Niles -- we had it up off the Aleutians. And there was a funny old ship that -- I remember going to college -- it was black with a white -- old-fashioned ship that was moored over at Goat Island or Yorba Linda Island, belonged to the Coast Guard. And we had to get this cable in to either Pillar Point or Devil’s Slide -- oh, I know. The cable at Devil’s Slide broke at sea. I mean, the rocks got it. And so we couldn’t get our cable ship back, and so we got the Coast Guard to loan us the Sequoia.”
Chin: “Yeah; okay.”
Payne: “And then we laid the cable to Devil’s Slide with the Sequoia.”
Chin: “You can keep talking. I’m just checking my tape. I can’t let any of this valuable testimonial information go to waste.”
Payne: “And so we used the Sequoia two or three times to get the -- to put in cables or repair them. Because -- we finally got some cables that we had rubber -- the cables we laid were regular telephone cables, were called armored telephone cables. They had the copper wires insulated, then a lead sheet. Then about quarter-inch rod, completely encased around them” --
Chin: “Uh-huh.”
Payne: -- “very stiff cable.”
“And we used to put them in what’s called Flemish 8s in the bottom of the ship. And they came up off of the cable and came twisting off of the Flemish 8s that were in the hold. But the rocks off the coast would finally wear through the steel and et cetera.
“We finally -- oh, after we did the ready-duty buoy, we realized that that Neoprene or rubber, or whatever it was, was better with rocks than the steel. So we had some special cables made to have the rubber; and they lasted longer.
“And each of those end stations had little switchboards in ‘em and a place for guys to sleep. And the one at Devil’s Slide, it gets in the newspaper all the time.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “If you drive down there, you can still see the stairs that we -- we put in there. And I haven’t been there for 30 years.
“And you know where Pillar Point is, down by Half-Moon Bay?”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “We had one there.
“The only cable that was land cable was from Funston along Highway 1 to the first end station, and it was some kind of name -- some kind of a beach.”
Chin: “It must have been the end station right on Ocean Beach.”
Payne: “No. It was south of Funston.”
Chin: “Oh, Shark Park?”
Payne: “Thornton Beach.”
Chin: “Yeah, Thornton.”
Payne: “Thornton Beach, yeah.
“Well, I’m a hands-on type operator. And so I had a Jeep, and I spent most of my time in the field. I liked it best. In fact, when I was an executive at Pacific Bell, I found I was the same way. I had my own personal company car, and I always picked a good exec or a” --
[End Side 1, Tape 1]
[Begin Side 2, Tape 1]
Payne: “In ’42, there wasn’t any site that I didn’t visit at least once a month. Or sometimes, if it was a big construction, like Wallace or -- or the switchboard or the casemate, those I would visit once a week, something like that.
“Used to -- oh, and I was also in charge of camouflage engineering. And I made a contact with the Navy. And you couldn’t tell camouflage from an airplane. You went too fast. So they used to let me borrow a blimp from Moffat, and we’d fly along the coast and take pictures and things.
“And talking about camouflage -- why the threat came, I don’t know. But all of a sudden, they felt that there were going to be motor torpedo boats coming in and trying to crash through the net. And so Colonel Burr says -- they recommended Fort Point. So we -- one of my jobs was to clean it out. And there was some old, I guess, Civil War muzzle-loaders there that we took off from the top parapet. And then as you go in that sortie gate, to your right is a cast-iron stair going up. To the left is that spiral one. You can tell I know every inch of these places. And at the top of that -- and I noticed that -- my wife got pneumonia two years ago, it was so cold. They took it down. But we built a barracks at the top of those stairs just to the right so that the crews with the” --
Chin: “The barracks at the spiral or the cast-iron?”
Payne: “No, the cast-iron.”
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “The top -- as you come in the sortie gate, to your right is the cast-iron stairs that go up. And right at the top of there, you can still see some of -- we built showers and latrines and quarters and places for cooking and everything there so that the crews that ran the 40s could live right there. And we put in some searchlights, big -- those great big” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “so they could see with those.
“Let’s see, what else did I build? Oh, the two mine docks were all mine. I engineered those, with the Corps of Engineers.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And, finally, it turned out that I -- this happens to be with Pacific Bell, in a way, again --we would have to go -- by the way, the long-range projects were also under Colonel LaFrenz, under Major Waters and Jack Irwin. And they looked out five years and made a project book of what the construction was going to be. George Burr and my job was to put it into effect and budget it.
“And so once a quarter, we’d have to go down to that great big headquarters building at 6th Army and get the capital, the money. Because the Corps of Engineers hired outside contractors to do a lot of the heavy -- like Turner and Thomas and all those people -- the heavy construction. And the head of the finance down there was a full colonel named Ward Schweizer. And for some reason or other -- I’ll get off the subject slightly; it has to do with George Burr -- at the first 18 months, I was just so frustrated. He would make me write a project letter, and it had to be quadruple spaced. He would write in three lines in the quadruple space, give it back; and this time it was triple spaced. Then it would be double spaced. And it was a joke.
“I used to be in his office, and I was always (inaudible) going back there. My hand -- I would get so tired -- he never invited me to sit down. And he smoked a pipe, and there was always smoke coming up. You never could see his face. And I would get tired standing -- he never invited me -- and my hand used to go like this (indicating) on the wall. And I remember we used to laugh. My hand grease was on his wall there where I stood.
“But I finally got mad at him and he says, ‘I know you don’t like me, Captain’ -- and then major ‑- and he says, ‘What’s the matter?’
“I says, ‘Colonel,’ I says, ‘I can build ‘em, kick ‘em down and build ‘em again by the time you get them off your desk.’ I says, ‘I’m tired of’ -- I’m the same way in the Bell system. I was a builder. I don’t -- I don’t like messing around.
“Anyway, George Burr and I never got along for the first 18 or 20 months. And he finally asked me and I told him that. I says, ‘Colonel,’ I says, ‘you’re so damn slow getting things out,’ I says, ‘those projects out there’ -- as I’ve said, I’ll repeat myself -- I says, ‘I can build ‘em.’ I said, ‘I’ll kick ‘em down and build ‘em again before you get the damn project letter out.’
“He says, ‘You’re too impatient.’ And I says -- and he says, ‘You’re going to have trouble in your later life,’ he says, ‘because,’ he says, ‘you’re too quick.’ He says, ‘You always want to go’; and he says, ‘I’ve never had a project that failed.’
“However, he’d get in the way. We would go down to Colonel Schweizer’s office once a quarter with all the funding we needed, and George and Colonel LaFrenz just didn’t get along with Colonel Schweizer. And when they would leave -- Colonel Schweizer (inaudible) -- he’d say, ‘Major, let’s go in the club and have a drink.’ And he would tell me -- he’d say, ‘You know,’ he says, ‘they’re always so holy and et cetera.’ He says, ‘When I talk to you,’ he says, ‘you’re down to earth.’
“I don’t know how the word got out, but after six or eight months, Colonel LaFrenz and George Burr would say, ‘Okay, let’s get it ready for Colonel Schweizer for funding. You go down by yourself.’
“Well, as it turned out -- and I didn’t realize this at that time -- Colonel Schweizer was a senior vice president of Pacific Bell. And later in life, when I would have big arguments with the vice president and et cetera, I can remember in front of the president he says, ‘You know, I’ve never won an argument with Colonel Payne since 1943. He always comes in prepared and gets the money out of me.’ But he never really helped me. He says, ‘I don’t’ -- ‘I’m not a person like that.’ He says, ‘You have to do your own work.’
“So we built the mine docks. We built the switchboards at Baker and Barry. What else? I guess” --
Chin: “All right.”
Payne: “I don’t know what else -- there is not a place that I didn’t know.
“And then, finally, Burr -- when the war was over, Burr got sent to Korea to fix the infrastructure that the Japanese had ruined. So I became artillery engineer.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And then my wife and I wanted out. She wanted out. We’d had two children by then. So I got this telephone call from Ward Schweizer and the executive vice president of Pacific Bell asked for an interview. And I finally went with them and took a reserve commission and resigned my regular.
“And I never really -- well, I was very active in the -- from ’47 till ’65, I averaged a third of the year per year.”
Chin: “In reserve” --
Payne: “In reserve active duty.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “I went back to Leavenworth two or three times and taught as a guest; taught at Fort Bliss, and I did -- oh, if you’re interested -- ever heard of the ROPA Act?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Well, the ROPA Act, about 1955, said that any regular or reservist that had 20 years’ service and was 55 years or older had to retire, because they’d earned their pension. And that was to get more young people up. And we had 11 USAR schools in the United States at that time, and they rated us 1 to 11 on academic standards and et cetera. And, in fact, they were so strict that the teachers, the instructors, the professors, never got to see the examinations. So you couldn’t teach towards the examinations. They sent an IG out to monitor and proctor the examinations.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Then, all of a sudden, the -- that’s the air conditioning -- I mean the heater just went on -- the ROPA Act said -- so USAR 6228 -- and that’s where I -- where Enzio and Mario came in.
“Actually, when -- in 1947, after I -- or ’46, I guess it was -- when I left the Army and went to reserve, I became the battalion commander of the 844th Anti-Aircraft, active -- we had our own guns and we went active duty at Bliss or at Camp Irwin. And Enzio was my exec. I picked him up. I don’t know where I got him, but I picked -- but he had never served at the Presidio, really. And Mario, we picked him up as a battery commander in the 844th. So that’s where -- and they are my lawyer, also. They -- they’re both lawyers, so they became our lawyers and good friends, but they never really served.
“But Mario got interested in writing -- I thought he was going to write a book about the Harbor Defense” --
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: -- “because he kept telling me he wanted data from me all the time.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “And then, all of a sudden, they decided that the -- they did the Allentown experiment and said that a school system was better than the battalion system for training. So they chose Colonel McFarland to be the commandant of the first -- after they opened the two-year trial at Allentown, of the 11. And San Francisco was chosen as one of the 11. And they rated us every year, 1 to 11, on our academic standards. And they came out and -- and watched us -- our instructors and et cetera.
“And Colonel McFarland asked me to be the director of artillery. So I brought Enzio with me. What happened to Mario at that time, I don’t remember now. But Enzio was my exec in the school system, and so he and I ran the artillery department. And then McFarland left and Hughes came in, and he chose me as his assistant commandant.
“I happened to be a gifted teacher. I teach for Junior Achievement, and I’ve got awards all over the place in the office. Anyway, so I did all the evaluations of all the branches, including CMGS. Went back to CMGS for six months to learn some things about nuclear. I taught most of the nuclear on the west coast, ‘cause I’m a -- did the physics on that. And, all of a sudden, the ROPA Act comes.
“Now, Colonel Hughes had a Doctor in education and a Doctor in English; was a professor at San Francisco City College or UC -- someplace (inaudible). And, all of a sudden -- we were number one or number two in the nation as academic standards. All of a sudden, we lost, oh, about two-thirds of our staff because of the ROPA Act.
“So he and I did the dumbest thing in the world. We -- we went back and got all of the -- I’m going to call them A students; you don’t call them that in the Army -- the ex-graduates who were top of the class and recruited them to be instructors. Our academic rating plunged. They were good students, but they didn’t know how to teach.
“So Hughes is a big politician, so -- oh, Enzio took over artillery when I went into commandant, and then he brought Mario in -- Mario in as his assistant then. So Hughes came up with an idea, and he got the 6th Army G1 to fund a special study on how to choose graduate-level instructors on an objective basis. And we hired -- he happened to be a lieutenant colonel in the reserves --Dr. Edmund from Mills College, at the psychology department there -- we hired somebody else, too, a statistician; I can’t remember who -- and I ran the project. And we ran a three-year test of different methods of choosing graduate-level instructors on an objective basis, not by observation. But then we matched it with watching them in the classroom against these 72 questions, down to what you call a sit-in strike” --
Chin: “Uh-huh, yes.”
Payne: -- “at Moore dry dock over in Alameda; and they worked putting the guns on the ship.
“So about four months before July the 1st, Roosevelt gave them an ultimatum: You either settle that strike and get away from the gates or I’m going to put soldiers in there. So they picked the 6th Artillery, where I was in B Battery, to -- well, we trained on strike break. And what we did was we’d have Battery B would be the -- maybe the strikers. We’d sit in the playground, where the flagpole is there. We would all sit there.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And then Battery A would be the strike breakers” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “with the wedge formations and how to club and all that stuff.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And we had competitions, platoon competitions, on who was the most efficient at cleaning out -- we learned how to -- to -- like a truck was blocking the gate, you just hook the big six-by-six to it with a winch and just dragged it sideways; and all -- and how to put out fires, and we learned all the strike-breaking techniques. And we had prizes. Platoons -- and every platoon -- and I was a platoon commander.
“And I applied for a leave of -- I mean a week’s leave to get married on the first week of July, which is the legal week that I finished my contract for the first year. All the announcements were made. And, all of a sudden, Roosevelt says they will be out of there on the 4th of July. If they’re not, 6th Artillery will go out there and get ‘em out.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “So by this time, Colonel Haynes was the -- Stockton had left. He went to March Air Force base with the 65th, I think.”
Chin: “Well, actually, I think Stockton was still there.”
Payne: “Was he maybe?”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “I didn’t think so. Maybe he was” --
Chin: “Maybe -- maybe you’re talking about General Bergen.”
Payne: “Maybe so, yeah.”
Chin: “Maybe General Bergen was the one that tapped you on your” --
Payne: “Maybe so. He was a fat guy, this guy, this general.”
Chin: “Well, I don’t know. I thought he was sort of portly.”
Payne: “I thought it was Stockton. Anyway, I can’t remember. That was 50 years ago.”
Chin: “Okay. Yeah.”
Payne: “Anyway, Captain Moorman comes to me, he says, ‘Okay, Lieutenant Payne.’ He says, ‘Get the trucks loaded up. You won the competition as the outstanding platoon. You’re going to go over on July 4th and clean those people.’
“I says, ‘I’ve got a 10-day leave of absence to get married on July the 2nd, and I’ve got reservations up in the Sierras for a honeymoon.’
“He says, ‘Don’t tell me about it.’ He says, ‘ Colonel LaFrenz says he wants the platoon’ -- well, it was two platoons. Mine was one of the two. He says, ‘And he picked the best two who won all of the prizes.’
“I said, ‘Well, can I talk to Colonel LaFrenz?’
“Now, Moorman was a giant. And I’m there walking up to headquarters, I could take three steps -- I had to skip all the time -- went up there and I told Colonel LaFrenz -- I says, ‘Gee, Colonel LaFrenz,” I says -- he’s a Cal graduate -- I says, ‘I’m going to get married. I’ve been waiting a year and I’ve got all the announcements and everything out.’
“’Well,’ he says, ‘you were number one; you’re going to go to Alameda.’
“I says, ‘Oh, no.’
“So we had to send out telegrams to cancel almost everything. Then, all of a sudden, they got (interruption in tape) patriotic. And about the 29th of June, they decided to close it off. Well, then we had to get the marriage going again. So we didn’t get married until July the 5th, and all the announcements said July the 2nd.”
Chin: “Yes, yes. That’s great.”
Payne: “Okay. Ask me some questions.”
Chin: “All right. When you were at Fort Funston and you designed the underground quarters and everything, could you give me a general idea of what they -- you know, what they -- how they looked like and, you know, where they might have been located sort of” --
Payne: “Okay. They were all north of Battery Davis. They were close to where the three anti-aircraft guns -- are those guns still there, the anti-aircraft guns? I guess” --
Chin: “Well, the pads are still there.”
Payne: “The pads are still there; okay.
“They were all near those anti-aircraft guns, between the anti-aircraft guns and the 12-inch mortar battery. Because that -- Battery B had the dual mission of the 12-inch mortars -- they had about eight-foot head room in ‘em, dirt floor or sand floors. They were all made out of heavy timbers. They were about -- about three foot of dirt on top of them. And you got to them through a tunnel. And they were all wood, except the verticals were -- were -- we dug holes with drivers and put concrete to hold the verticals.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “But they were all -- and most of them, you could get up in one end and you could peek out and look to sea.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “You could look to sea.”
Chin: “I see.
“But that was basically the only window you would have, would be the” --
Payne: “That’s right.
Chin: “Yeah.”
“So it was entirely underground, no windows or anything” --
Payne: “No, no; completely underground.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “Were those used by whoever was stationed at Funston throughout the war or would you know?”
Payne: “Well, after Pearl Harbor and they realized that the Japs really weren’t going to -- had not planned that well, we went back to barracks.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “Well, by that time when we went back to barracks, I was in engineering; but they went back to the barracks. They built the barracks out there at Funston.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Oh, for the record, within Harbor Defenses of San Francisco, there was the office of the artillery engineer; is that what the official title was?”
Payne: “Absolutely. Artillery engineer, that was his title.”
Chin: “Uh-huh.
“And that was Colonel Burr, and you were one of his assistants or did you remain” --
Payne: “That’s right. I was one of his assistants.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “Now, it’s funny, Bob Ball was a first lieutenant; and I went in as a second lieutenant. And he kind of ran -- let’s see -- we had about 10 or 12 engineering and architectural draftsmen. And they made the drawings and the specs and worked with the Corps of Engineers down at 180 New Montgomery.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And Bob Ball ran that office with the architectural draftsmen and things like that.”
Chin: “Right, right.”
Payne: “Then I had an office, and I had about -- oh, I had about 10 or 15 sergeants or master sergeants working for me. Some of them were inspectors that stayed on the concrete pours and jobs. They were the wire -- I had all the wire chiefs -- like at Funston, Fort Scott, Fort Barry, Baker -- oh, and then I had the engineer depot, warehouse; and it had a big, tall master sergeant in it, and it had a signal supply room. That was all under the artillery engineer.”
Chin: “I see; I see.”
Payne: “And I had all those. For some reason, Burr just gave me the works, plus the field inspection” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “and then, finally, the budgeting.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Do you remember constructing any other underground type of quarters, say, behind the batteries up at Barry, say like behind Battery Smith-Guthry, those six-inch guns?”
Payne: “No, no. I was never -- all -- anything I did – the only ones that I built myself were at Funston” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “because I was in an active artillery battery then, see.
“When I got to engineering, everything I did was reinforced concrete” --
Chin: “Oh” --
Payne: -- “et cetera.”
Chin: -- “okay.”
Payne: “So I’ve seen them over there.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “But my job was to -- was to build the casemates and the steel and supervise the construction.”
Chin: “So those were probably built by the -- by the local commanders.”
Payne: “The local commanders, yes; right, mm-hm.”
Chin: “So the construction of 129 was well on its way before Pearl Harbor, then?”
Payne: “They started the road or something, yeah.”
Chin: “Uh-huh; uh-huh.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “But it took until 1943 to have the entire structure” --
Payne: “That’s right, mm-hm, mm-hm.
“Now, we brought the guns in -- I guess the railroad tracks are still there in Sausalito -- came in on the -- on fancy, big, long, specially built flatcars that had lots of trucks, wheels, on it. And we got G.W. Thomas -- we rented -- hired them to put ‘em on their dollies, their house-moving dollies, and towed ‘em up Waldo grade, then up that dirt road that goes up the side of the mountain where the north tower is and in through the tunnel.”
Chin: “Yes.
“They got the barrels up there, but they never mounted them.”
Payne: “Never mounted them, no; never fired them.
“Now, one thing we did do an experiment out at -- haven’t been there for a long time; maybe you’ve been there” -- at Townsley “ --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “to the north, are there still some great, big concrete blocks?”
Chin: “Yeah, I -- yeah, I was told about them by Lieutenant Colonel Schoener.”
Payne: “Oh, sure, sure, I know -- yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah. Yeah, he was a battalion commander.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah.
“Yeah. Well, what we did was -- the ordinance wanted to really know how effective the penetration of the 16-inch projectiles were. So they looked at the maximum right traverse of the 16s there, and then they built these specially built targets and fired point blank into them. That was one of my projects, was to build those -- those” --
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “I built -- two or three of them.”
Chin: “I don’t know how many. I guess so.”
Payne: “Yeah, it was two or three. Not too far away, really.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And we just fired 16-inch shells into them, without explosives, I guess -- or did we? I forget. They were looking for penetration.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Colonel Schoener, he said he was amazed because the windshields on the projectiles just fell off with no harm to them whatsoever. He couldn’t figure out -- he thought they’d be obliterated or” --
Payne: “Yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: -- “you know, but he said these just fell” --
Payne: “Yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: -- “with no scratches.
“So 129, they got the barrels up there. They didn’t mount it because they figured the expense wasn’t worth it considering the lack of a threat by that time?”
Payne: “By that time, the Battle of Midway was over. And so the four Japanese carriers were down in the bottom of the ocean, and they realized that they did not have the capability.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And by that time, we were reinforcing Australia and working on cutting off their oil and stuff. So they realized that they had missed their chance. So they wasn’t going to spend any more money on that kind of stuff.”
Chin: “Construction of 129 is rather unusual from the standard 16-inch guns that -- batteries that were being built at the time, in the fact that there seemed to be some tunnels leading to the battery itself without actually being part of the battery.”
Payne: “Yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: “I mean, in other words, it was very different from Townsley; it was very different from Battery Davis.”
Payne: “Well, yes, because those were built on the top of a hill on -- well, Townsley had enough rock. So they could have done Townsley with a tunnel, but Davis you couldn’t have; because it was built on the sand dunes out there.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “But they never thought about that. And -- but up there, it made good sense to have that hill and top for any bombing or things.
“And then the casemate out front, as I remember, over -- you know, it hung over the barrels? That’s about 35 feet of solid concrete” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “that we -- we poured that -- we never stopped pouring 24 hours a day for about three months, just kept pour, pour, pour.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And I was up there with my slump cone all the time.”
Chin: “Impressive.
“Now, when they built these massive constructions, was there any effort to camouflage it or make it look like -- I mean, to do something so that nobody could actually see something was being built there?”
Payne: “No, not when we -- under construction, no; but we did build camouflage about all the batteries and even the end stations. And that’s when I used to rent the -- or borrow the blimps and fly along and photograph to see if we were effective or not.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And -- and then we -- oh, we used Fort Point not only for the (inaudible) torpedo boat, but we finally made it the engineer dump. And so all the engineering sandbags and camouflage nets and everything were stored at Fort Point.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Can you give me some examples of some of the more ingenious types of camouflage that might have been effectuated on certain” --
Payne: “No. You know, really, all it was was like fishnets. And I think it was fishnets. And then we just had -- enlisted men had strips of different colored cloth that we tied knots around the openings in the fishnet to cover it.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And sometimes there’d be three depth. Because if there was a hole below, you could see through. So like there’d be three layers of these nets” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “over the openings.”
Chin: “I see.
“Now, the -- I’ve noticed a lot of the placements still have traces of a sort of a very raw green type of a paint on them. Do you remember the types of colors that might have been painted on the emplacements themselves? I think I’ve seen, you know, some mottled” --
Payne: “Oh, yeah, we had -- we had tans and greens and browns” --
Chin: “Yeah, yes.”
Payne: -- “that we painted them and just kind of -- well, made ‘em like” --
Chin: “Yeah, it was patches; right?”
Payne: -- “patches, yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: “Was that developed specifically for the general area here?”
Payne: “No, no. That came out of an Army field manual.”
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “That came out of an Army field manual.”
Chin: “So the color, shades and everything came out of a field manual?”
Payne: “They came out of a field manual.”
Chin: “I see.
“So the three-inch emplacements for the fixed AA guns, they were -- the quarters underground and everything were already built by the time that you were involved in” --
Payne: “There was no underground for those three-inches.”
Chin: “Oh, there weren’t?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “I thought up at Wolf Ridge, there’s quite a massive amount of -- of tourmaline under there.”
Payne: “Well, all right.
“But that -- I forget now, what battery had Wolf Ridge?”
Chin: “Well, Townsley was below, and then you had your three-inch guns up there.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “There was a whole bunch of base end stations up on that” --
Payne: “Yeah. Well -- but the -- the first battery made underground were the ones I designed.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And then other places -- the battalion commanders, like Schoener, they came and looked at ‘em; and they got final approval from George Burr and the Corps of Engineers at 180 that my design was all right.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “But, actually, I wasn’t -- I don’t think I was that good, really. I just read the field manual, and then the field manual would refer you to a technical manual. And all that had in it was the beam and truss formulas, which is -- I was an honor graduate in math, too. So it was a simple thing to just apply the dumb formulas.
“And, as Colonel Burr said, I was very conservative ‘cause I -- whatever it would say, I would always add a little to make sure.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “I didn’t want anybody killed or hurt or anything like that.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Somebody had told me that Batteries Chamberlain and Crosby had some amount of defects in them. Like Crosby, which is a six-inch disappearing gun, he said that they couldn’t -- it wouldn’t raise up in the battery for some reason.”
Payne: “And Mendel.”
Chin: “Oh, that, too.”
Payne: “Mm-hm.”
Chin: “What do you” --
Payne: “All right. Mendel was in the cove -- all right. Fort Baker, okay” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “in there, the mine dock, then the -- up here is the Golden Gate bridge (indicating); then there’s a beautiful little cove in there that’s all wooded and everything.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “That’s Battery Mendel.”
Chin: “Oh, is Kirby maybe? Mendel is -- there’s one out in Barry.”
Payne: “Yeah, it’s in Barry.”
Chin: “Oh, it is?”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “It’s a 12-inch disappearing gun?”
Payne: “12-inch disappearing; right.
Chin: “Yeah, uh-huh.”
Payne: “I’ve got a piece of it here.”
Chin: “A piece of the gun?
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “The turntable? I don’t know what. “
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “The carriage?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “You’ve got a piece of” --
Payne: “Lead.”
Chin: “Oh, yeah.”
Payne: “Because they had these big lead weights” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “that were all in pieces on that -- when the battery was let go, it had parallelograms, you know.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “And they would go up and fire at the top, and the recoil would put it back; but in order to get it back up again, you had to lift these weights. And the weights were big pieces of lead.
“Well, I happened to be a model boat -- racing model boat -- a real working model boat fiend.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And while -- in fact, I built two boats while I was in the Army. I built a model. And at Fort Funston, we had a beautifully equipped woodshop. Sergeant Sylvester was the battery mechanic for B Battery. And being I was the unmarried one, I'd stay there. And they had buzz saws and tables and everything.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “And so I built my first racing -- working, I mean, big sailboat, 21-foot -- at Fort Funston, and -- but I also built a racing model -- like at Spreckles Lake, you ever seen them out there?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “I built those. I’ll show you when we go out here.
“And I needed some lead. And we were tearing Kirby and Mendel apart, and this lead was -- they were melting it and it was laying around; and I needed 40 pounds of lead. So I took 40 pounds of lead and I molded them into keels for my models.”
Chin: “Yes.
“But you’re saying that those guns would not raise up in the batteries?”
Payne: “They would -- they were -- they had not been used or something for a long time -- oh, and they’re restricted use; ‘cause they pointed right across the Gate, almost. So they weren’t really effective. You weren’t going to get some big battleship in there.
“And, in the meantime, they built Davis and Townsley. And then they had the 12-inch -- was it Wallace?”
Chin: “Yeah, Wallace” --
Payne: -- “Wallace that” --
Chin: -- “that you later casemated.”
Payne: -- “that we casemated.
“And they aimed out where the Japs would be, and those other ones were really only -- could shoot across the Golden Gate” --
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: -- “if they got in that close.”
Chin: “Yeah. You were in trouble.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “I see.
“The base end stations you were talking about sound like they were mainly for the newer batteries, like Townsley.”
Payne: “Oh, yes, absolutely.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Now, those look like they might have been constructed and the concrete poured in some factory somewhere, and then they would truck them out to the spot and then dig them in. They weren’t?
Payne: “No, sir.”
Chin: “Describe how they were done.”
Payne: “Well, we -- we actually dug the holes, had -- sometimes the Corps of Engineers did ‘em; sometimes the Corps of Engineers would contract with a general contractor. Now, the one that -- I’ll tell you the one I can remember -- the two that I can remember most. The one is out of Olema and Devil’s Slide -- I can always remember the one at Pillar Point for years after.
“You ever been to Pillar Point?”
Chin: “That’s restricted. I couldn’t get there. I’ve -- you know, I’ve seen the one at Devil’s Slide and some of the other ones.”
Payne: “Oh.”
Chin: “You know, that steel-covered type.”
Payne: “Yeah, okay.
“Well, I know you know this. But at Devil’s Point, the only way to get there -- the road was blocked or something -- and we had all six-by-sixes. And we went up the side of this hill to get the concrete up there. And there was so much mud, for years, you could see these big, deep scratches that we made in the dirt getting --
“No, what we did was we dug regular -- the (inaudible) we bought from a foundry. I don’t know where. The Corps of Engineers arranged for that for us.”
Chin: “But they were done to your specifications.”
Payne: “Oh, they were part of the drawing that Bob Ball and his engineers or the Corps of Engineers at 180. It was according to how fast or big -- we cooperated. We had our own architectural engineers and draftsmen, and we also would get the Corps of Engineers at 180 New Montgomery.
“And then they were -- now, I’ll tell you, Devil’s Slide was the most complex. You’ve driven by Devil’s Slide?”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “You know that the stairs are still there?”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “Alongside those stairs was a -- we built a -- it wasn’t an endless -- it was like a chairlift on an endless cable with a gasoline engine on wheels. And then we brought the concrete out in regular ready-mix from a ready-mix place in San Francisco, dumped it into this little wagon and towed it up a long -- to the left -- to the south of those stairs was a -- I don’t know if it was concrete or not; I think it was a concrete ramp that was all done by hand, chiseled out by jackhammer and by hand.
“And we would put the concrete in -- well, we were building the forms. We put the lumber in and the nails and the tools. And the little gasoline engine would draw this little cart up to the top, and then the carpenters would make -- would -- well, the contractors would dig the holes with jackhammers and et cetera. And then the concrete truck would come and then -- and then dump the concrete into this little mechanical bucket and it would bring it up there. And then at the top, they would dump it into the forms and stamp it. And then it would come down and get another load.
“I’ll never forget that -- the superintendent was an Irishman. And some crazy nut came along in an automobile -- and we were pouring concrete -- and sideswiped him and tore his arm off, one of the general contractors there. He was a nice -- tough old Irishman, but I’ll always remember Devil’s Slide.
“But, no, we did those all by” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “just regular construction.”
Chin: “Yes.
“They also -- I notice they sometimes would glue rock on them to give it that sort of a rough” --
Payne: “Oh, sure, we would -- we tried to make them look as natural as possible.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And a lot of ice plant.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “The one at Olema, there was a sergeant from Battery Townsley who had the responsibility of getting those manned after December 7th. He said that the battery was never told where some of the far-flung ones were, and he had to go and find them.
“Do you think that is possible?”
Payne: “I do not think that’s true.
“In the first place, if you know anything about artillery, they had to be surveyed in very accurate -- I mean, down to a yard. We had to know their elevation and their coordinates down to a yard. So they were done by transit, by licensed Corps of Engineers surveyors. Because those have telephone lines back to the -- have you seen a plotting board?”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Okay. Now, the plotting board arms, where the pins are, is where the battery is; and where the other pins are is -- down to the 10th of an inch is where the end station is. So that the arm represents the map exactly.
“So if he said that -- I will tell you, though, Olema was hard to find. I mean, you might have known the coordinates; but getting out there was hard” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “because -- you know, that’s where I lost a tractor.
“We had to build a -- there was no road out to that end station. And so we pioneered a road. And it turned out that -- it was during the winter or something -- and there was a bog in there; and our big V8 got down to the top of the wheels and it wouldn’t move. And we didn’t want to put another one in there. So we had to wait a couple months until the water drained out of the place.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “But you had to go through a forest, kind of, to get to the one at Olema.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “So I can see where some sergeant at Battery Townsley says go to the end station at Olema and he’d be hard to” --
Chin: “Yes. All right. We’ll just say it was very difficult.
“The harbor entrance control posts, you built the one that exists today. Now, there was a structure at that spot that was there at the beginning of the war. Could you describe that?”
Payne: “Yeah. That was -- it was like an end station, really. I mean, it was not as -- it wasn’t jointly manned with the Navy at that time. It was about as big as three rooms like this. And --oh, okay. All right. I don’t know whether the one at the toll plaza is still there or not, but we had a -- it was connected to -- right at the south toll plaza, to the left as you’re facing the north, we had a two-story end station there” --
Chin: “Was that a signal station?”
Payne: -- “signal station” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “and that was connected to the old 8 station that was in the top of the Dynamite -- they called it the Dynamite battery.
“And the room was about three times this size, ‘cause all it was -- and it was very old.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And we sent signals from there -- we had a flashing-light thing, and we would look at the flags on the ships and identify the ships.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And then we would signal there at the signal station there at the toll plaza whether to let them come through or not.”
Chin: “So there was the signal station at the toll plaza, which was connected to -- it was a --another -- a station on top of Battery Dynamite? I mean, they could see out from there?”
Payne: “They could see out from there, and it was -- but it was -- it was just like a little end station.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “Just a little slit with a round top on it.”
Chin: “I see.
“But there were -- but it had -- sounds like there were a lot of rooms for being a sort of a headquarters or a command post.”
Payne: “Well, it was not anywhere near as the big HECP that’s in there now.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And it wasn’t joint.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “The one we built -- have you been in it?”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “It’s got a hallway down the middle.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “To the right was Navy; to the left was Army, and then a joint room at the end. And we had a gas chamber at the beginning, didn’t we, yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah, a gas lock.”
Payne: “A gas lock, yeah.”
Chin: “So those signal stations had been there before the war, then“ --
Payne: “Yes.”
Chin: -- “they were built.”
Payne: “Oh, yeah.”
Chin: “Somebody told me later on that those were Navy stations for their own purposes. They weren’t?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “Okay. Those were Army.
“So they used those throughout the war as part of the” --
Payne: “No. Once we got the new end stations -- well, we used the lookout, the old lookout. But the HECP was all underground, but you could get from there to the lookout” --
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: -- “to the old lookout.”
Chin: “I see.
“So -- so the old lookout is still there, then?”
Payne: “I would think so.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “I don’t know what they destroyed up there.”
Chin: “Uh-huh.
“I had read that the original HECP there was some sort of a -- more of a tower-like affair that rose up on a concrete bench or something like that.”
Payne: “I don’t think so.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “I don’t think so.”
Chin: “Okay. Those signal stations, like the one off the toll plaza, what did they do with those after the new Harbor Defenses command post was built?”
Payne: “Didn’t use them anymore. For some reason, we abandoned them. I can’t remember whether it was -- whether radar got rid of them or what. ‘Cause by the -- by ’43 or ’44, we had the 582s surveying out there.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.
“So those signal stations was a point where they could signal ships?”
Payne: “That’s right.”
Chin: “And they had flags” --
Payne: “They had a big -- they had flags that they could raise up on a flagpole and” --
Chin: “Yeah. Yes. Yes.”
Payne: -- “and tell the ship yes or no or different words, yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“So they weren’t using radio or communication with the ships at that point?”
Payne: “I don’t think so.”
Chin: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.
“Anything interesting to say about the construction of the mine dock facilities? You -- you must have worked on the casemated ones on the side of the hill at Fort Baker” --
Payne: “Sure.”
Chin: -- “by the water, huh?”
Payne: “Yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “They were all done by the artillery engineers. They were all part of the projects. They decided to -- when the war looked like it was coming, boy, we got busy building things.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And so we had a mine dock at Baker and a mine dock there by Fort Point by the Coast Guard station there, and we docked our cable ship there most of the time, also; and that’s where we loaded cable, also.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.
“Somebody told me an anecdote about them putting a big box to dump crabs that they would pick up from off of a mine or whatever activity they were doing further out. And they’d put ‘em in this box at the pier, and anybody that wanted could fish out some of the crabs and” --
Payne: “I remember that, but I also remember” --
Chin: “Do you remember which dock that might have been on?”
Payne: “That was the Presidio dock.”
Chin: “Oh, Presidio; okay.”
Payne: “Presidio dock, yeah.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “But Colonel LaFrenz -- as I said, a big, fat guy -- his folks” Um owned a very famous restaurant in San Francisco. So he was…..
[End of Side 2, Tape 1]
[Beginning of Side 1, Tape 2]
Payne: “I have a feeling that it was he and Burr that conspired to get me all the promotions.”
Chin: “I see; I see.”
Payne: “Because -- well, I know on two or three times, I got notice that I was to be shipped out. And, you know, the quarters we had -- talk about food; I’ll come back to that -- the quarters we had, that my wife and -- and she had two children down at Letterman -- had a full basement with a concrete building -- a duplex -- a concrete wall between us and the other -- next door. Had a main floor. Had a spiral staircase to the second floor, and then had a straight staircase to the third floor. And the third floor was, in effect, designed for servants. It had its own bath and toilet, bathroom and sitting room.
“And I would get -- I always had my overseas gear ready, my footlocker and my big duffel bag and the field stuff. And then we kept it for a while downstairs, and I would get -- Colonel Burr or Colonel LaFrenz would call me up and say, ‘Well, we got orders; you just can’t stay here anymore. Better get your legal affairs,’ et cetera, ‘and check your duffel bag and things.’
“So I’d check it and nothing would happen. And in a couple months, I’d ask either Colonel Burr or Colonel LaFrenz, ‘Hey, what happened?’
“Well, they, I think, invented an MOS that was hard to replace. And I’ve seen the letters later. And the letters would say Major Payne is available -- he’s a Command and General Staff graduate, et cetera -- good stuff -- however, before we will release him, we want him to train an equivalent MOS.”
Chin: “Okay. What is an MOS?”
Payne: “Military occupational specialty.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “And I must have had a unique one or something, because the Army never could find somebody that knew about mines and underwater and construction. I’m guessing. I don’t know.
“So Colonel Burr would call me and he’d say, ‘It’s all off.’
“I’d say, ‘Well, what happened?’ I was kind of anxious to get going, you know?
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And he says, ‘Well, they couldn’t find an equivalent MOS anyplace in the Army, so,’ he says, ‘they had to cancel the orders.’
“So this happened three or four times. So, finally, I moved all that gear up to the third floor to get it out of the way; because it was in the wrong place.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “So I had orders four or five times that said you’ve got two months to get your affairs in effect and go.
“And, anyway, Colonel LaFrenz would -- have you been to Olema and Drakes Bay and” --
Chin: “I’ve been up to Drakes Bay, but (inaudible)” --
Payne: “You know there’s an oyster factory or -- what do you call it -- okay, up there.”
Chin: “Yes, yes; right.”
Payne: “Well, about every week or so, there’d be a message from my clerk that would say Colonel LaFrenz says if you’re going up to inspect anything at Drakes Bay, bring him back a couple-dozen oysters.
“So in my Jeep, I had -- my wife would sterilize some -- what do you call it -- bottles, mayonnaise or, you know” --
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “And I would have them in a box in the back of my Jeep, and I’d stop in on my way out and tell them to fill them up two or three dozen of oysters. Then I’d bring them back” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “and give them to Colonel LaFrenz.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And then pretty soon, it got to be -- sometimes I would bring back 10 or 12 Mason jars. Everybody would say, oh, Payne’s going up to Olema and up there. And Colonel LaFrenz gets them, so everybody was getting oysters. And sometimes I’d bring crabs back and other things.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.
“Well, I mean, with the mine fleet they had, they should have had their fill of all sorts of stuff from the ocean.”
Payne: “Yeah, right.”
Chin: “Yeah, I would think so.
“What – can you tell me about, you know, December 7th and the like emergency construction or things that might have been put off, but now you just -- let’s just build it and get going type of situation?”
Payne: “Well, yes. I was living at my mother-in-law’s place most of the time until Pearl Harbor came along. However, we started wearing sidearms about six months before. And then Pearl Harbor came along and I never went back out. I got in the barracks there right behind the generals’ building there. And we worked seven days a week expediting every job. And many of the jobs that the major and the Lieutenant-Colonel Waters and the project team were doing, we brought into current projects as fast as possible. And the most important things were those end stations, the mine batteries, the mine docks; getting the 12-inch battery at Barry encased. Oh, we worked seven days a week, 10, 12 hours.”
Chin: “So a lot of the end stations had not been installed as of December 7th?”
Payne: “Oh, no. No, no. I was building those” --
Chin: “Oh.”
Payne: “And we put new ones in. The project -- they wanted interspaced ones and different things like that.”
Chin: “I had heard that the planting of the mine field was not really completed as of December 7th. They were still going hot and heavy afterwards.”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Absolutely. Absolutely. The -- they worked night and day laying the mines. And then they had to convert all the mines to the new kind. The big heavy ones on the ground -- on the base, on the bottom.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Do you remember the loss of an L boat to” --
Payne: “Absolutely. I went up there, yes. That’s one of the reasons I probably got -- was a first lieutenant only six weeks.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “I went up there in a hurry to get some radio gear, yeah.
“It -- the mine planters at sea were run by ward officers. And, in fact, my cable ship, when -- I was, in effect, the commanding officer when we’re docked. But at sea, he could tell me to shove it.
“It happened on kind of a foggy night. Now, the L boat was a wooden -- a wooden -- a wooden tug kind of deal; and there were two of them for the mine planter. I can’t remember exactly. They’d drop the mine off, and the L boat would have to cut in front and go around and pick up the cable, cut it to the right length and hook it up and drop it. Either the Spurgeon or the Miles sliced one, and it went ashore at Drakes Bay, I guess, yeah -- up from Stinson Beach, yeah, absolutely.”
Chin: “Oh, so -- so how did it go adrift and get up on the shore?”
Payne: “The waves carried it” --
Chin: “Just the rough seas?”
Payne: “Just the rough sea.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “It was foggy and there was a rough sea.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “Yeah, it was foggy and a rough sea.
“And I was up there -- when we heard it went down or when we heard, it was ashore by the time I got there.”
Chin: “So it was up that far? I didn’t think the mine field went up that far -- or it just got washed?”
Payne: “Oh, the mine -- no, it just got washed up that way.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “It got washed up there.”
Chin: “Yeah, that’s the one story that Colonel Eustis remembers to this day and he can tell it in great detail. So I just” --
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “Now, you -- you remember Colonel Eustis?”
Payne: “Yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“So what did -- what type of things did you have to do for him or” --
Payne: “I didn’t do anything for him.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “No. He was not in the engineering, and he was in a line outfit.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.
“Oh, so there was no (inaudible).”
Payne: “No.
“How about Fonville, have you ever heard about him?”
Chin: “I know the name. I don’t know anything about him. If you have something” --
Payne: “He was a stuffed shirt. He was a West Pointer, Colonel Fonville, but he was ramrod” --
Chin: “What was his position?”
Payne: “He was in headquarters or someplace.”
Chin: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Payne: “And he was the one that was kind of in charge of evaluating the 10 Thomason Act officers.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “I think he was in personnel.”
Chin: “Uh-huh; I see.”
Payne: “But nobody liked him ‘cause he was -- he was one of those old-fashioned stuffed shirts, where Bill LaFrenze was down to earth. I didn’t like, though, some of his politics. Every Monday night, he and his buddies had poker games.”
Chin: “Was that ‘cause they were part of the Cal Mafia?”
Payne: “Yeah.
“And the rumors got around that if you want to get promoted good -- but it didn’t really work out. Because I never played the poker, and I went up awful fast.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Do you know any of those -- well, this is not going to be in the book. I mean, there’s certain --not the type of thing I’d write. But what was the basis for those people calling Colonel Eustis ‘Colonel Useless’? That was his nickname.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “Do you remember” --
Payne: “He wasn’t well liked, really, and he never seemed to have -- I was kind of outside of this, ‘cause I was in construction. He was in the line organization. But people didn’t really like him. He was -- he really didn’t seem to have a job. And I was from the outside” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “so I don’t remember him too much.”
Chin: “Yeah; okay.”
Payne: “But I knew they called him ‘Useless,’ yeah.”
Chin: “Oh, let’s see.
“I had heard from Colonel Childer that there was -- the Assistant Secretary of War, John McCoy, who visited sometime early in the war, and he said that we ought to put up barbed wire all over. And so -- which instigated a gigantic effort to have barbed wire everywhere.”
Payne: “Oh, man, did we put barbed wire in. And that’s where we started, was at Fort Point. Yes, we put serpentine wire clear up to Point Reyes. In fact -- I don’t know where that battalion came from. It was the 155 battalion.”
Chin: “Yeah, that’s the 56th Coast Artillery.”
Payne: “Right.”
Chin: “Yeah, I’ve talked to some of those.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “They left soon after” --
Payne: Yeah, right.”
Chin: -- “they went to Chili and all.”
Payne: “Yeah, right.”
Chin: “Oh, so you went and put up barbed wire for them?”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “They thought -- see, with the original plans, they thought that with the nice beach up there, that they could -- the Japs could make a landing up there. So the 56th was sent up there, and we had engineers and people coiling barbed wire 24 hours a day.”
Chin: “Yes.
“At all the parts of the Harbor Defenses or just mainly up at Drakes Bay?”
Payne: “No. And Fort Funston.”
Chin: “And -- oh, wherever there were beaches.”
Payne: “Yes, wherever there were beaches, yeah. And at Tennessee Cove we had it.”
Chin: “Was -- was there related like machine-gun positions to insulate everything?”
Payne: “Absolutely; absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“And those were all planned out at that time?”
Payne: “At that time, right.”
Chin: “Were those positions manned throughout the war or just during that emergency period after Pearl Harbor?”
Payne: “Oh, for about -- I’ll tell you, until after the battle of Midway” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “everything was 24 hours a day full-blown; lights out, every house had to have its windows blocked and everything.
“But after, oh, four months or so after the battle of Midway, when our Navy knew that they had the -- the Jap navy did not have the capability anymore. ‘Cause, see, they lost all four carriers at Midway; and that was half their carrier fleet.”
Chin: “Did you see many other types of units, such as, you know, infantry and maybe some field artillery coming in to support the” --
Payne: “Hm-mm.”
Chin: “Not during that period?”
Payne: “No, not during that period, no.”
Chin: “’Cause I’ve seen pictures of these old World-War-I-style 75-millimeter guns with the wooden wheels lined up, you know, in place on the beaches. I was just wondering if that” --
Payne: “No, I don’t think so.”
Chin: “Okay. I had heard that there was a shortage of Army mine planters in this early period, where they had to requisition maybe a little freighter or a big fishing boat or something and turn one of those” --
Payne: “Not big ones; little ones.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “They went to the Fisherman’s Wharf and then -- I don’t know whether they bought them or requisitioned them or rented them or not, but they got some of the larger seagoing fishing boats out of Fisherman’s Wharf to help out at sea.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Would those be big enough to handle a couple of mines? I mean, they’re tall enough” --
Payne: “I think they used them more for like L boats and things like that, yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: “So that was done through some purchasing or -- I don’t know” --
Payne: “Battery A -- Captain Liskey” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: -- “he did most of that.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah. He was a great guy.”
Chin: “I had heard that he was the mine expert on the west coast.”
Payne: “Oh, he is or was, absolutely. He’s the -- but he wasn’t stuffy, like Fonville and those other guys. He was a down-to-earth, nice guy.”
Chin: “I see; I see.
“Was Battery Howe that you were at at Funston, was that being used any time during the war?”
Payne: “We’d fire for target practice.”
Chin: “Uh-huh. But was it manned by a battery” --
Payne: “Battery B.”
Chin: “Yeah, but I’m talking about after December 7th, was it still being used at that point or” --
Payne: “It was -- it was on the -- on Battery B’s assignments, if I -- I don’t know what Battery B would have done if they had to protect -- I can’t remember now -- protect Davis with the anti-aircraft guns or Battery Howe, I don’t know. But, see, I’d left by that time.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “But Battery B had the dual responsibility of the 12-inch mortars and the -- are the -- is the casemate still there? That’s a park now, isn’t it?”
Chin: “Yeah. All of that is a park. All of your batteries are parks.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “Well, Davis is still there. Howe, I think, has been broken -- maybe the casemate has been buried.”
Payne: “Oh.”
Chin: “And your underground shelters, I don’t know where they are.”
Payne: “They’re probably all bulldozed, too” --
Chin: “Yeah, I guess” --
Payne: -- “because they wouldn’t want kids in those things.”
Chin: “Yeah, exactly.
“So -- so like the batteries down at Kirby Beach and Mendel, those were still in operation during the” --
Payne: “First part.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“Now, what I wanted to know was -- I understand that that those were deactivated and then scrapped in about 1943.”
Payne: “Absolutely.”
Chin: “Now, do you know how the process of -- what do they do, just dismantle it and chop it up for” --
Payne: “We sold them to a scrap-metal outfit.”
Chin: “I see.
“So they just” --
Payne: “And I got a piece of lead.”
Chin: “That’s right, you got a piece of lead.
“Did you have to place any searchlight sections anywhere or was that just sort of a thing that a battalion commander would” --
Payne: “The battalion commander had that. We had -- they had -- see, all I had to do was -- like at Fort Point -- was to get rid of the junk and clean it out and build the barracks so they could mount the 40s there and the searchlights.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “But then they had a battalion commander that they -- a new battalion commander, I forget his name; he was no good either -- who had that. And they also put some” --
Chin: “They had some three-inch guns up there that they had taken from one of the old batteries and mounted them up there, 40s and three-inch guns.”
Payne: “40s, as what I remember, yeah. But they also put some over at -- where Mendel was or Yellow Point” --
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: -- “someplace over there so they could crossfire” --
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: -- “any torpedo boats that would come in.”
Chin: “40s all over.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “Did those require any special preparations as far as your office was concerned or was that all handled” --
Payne: “No, no. They were -- they didn’t have base stations or anything.”
Chin: “Yeah, right.”
Payne: “They were firing -- they didn’t have radar either. They were just tracer fire.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“So you didn’t have to -- well, you didn’t have to prepare a sort of a raised step for them to reach over the top of the parapet at Fort Point for those particular weapons, did you?”
Payne: “No. And some of them were -- some of them were on the -- on the -- where the walkway is there” --
Chin: “Oh, I see.”
Payne: -- “where the road is there.”
Chin: “Were those camo- -- did they attempt to camouflage those?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “Okay. I had seen pictures of old searchlight stations here at the Harbor Defenses that were built so that, you know, the searchlight may come out of the ground and things like that.”
Payne: “Don’t remember those, no.”
Chin: “Okay. Radar. For seacoast radar, Townsley had one of the first. But do you remember who had the first installed for use in their battery? Was it” --
Payne: “It was Townsley, yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“Was that -- so the radars were built at various points all along the” --
Payne: “We only put three or four in.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “Didn’t put in many.”
Chin: “Were those -- they were disguised as water towers or did they attempt to do anything” ‑-
Payne: “No, there was no camouflage on those, no. They were disc type, round.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “They were not like the 268 that looked like a bedspring.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“I understand those things were so secret that even the commanders, if they didn’t have clearance, they couldn’t even look at them.”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely.
“I remember I was cleared, and they came in on cars down at Crissy Field. And I had to go down there and check everybody out that -- and they had soldiers with guards on them. And I was sent down there by Colonel LaFrenz and Colonel Burr, because we were going to install them on the pedestals.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And, yeah, you couldn’t even get -- in fact, I wasn’t even allowed inside of the vans and things. But they had, generally, sergeants or warrant officers that stayed with them all the time.”
Chin: “Yes. Yeah, they had to be trained with them.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “How did the casemating of Battery Wallace go and when, approximately, did that start? That was something that they wanted to do before even the war started?”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely. That was in one of the projects that Waters and Irwin -- one of the future projects.”
Chin: “Uh-huh.”
Payne: “And then when Pearl Harbor came along, it was expedited, just get going. So I’m guessing mid-’42.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“During the time it was being casemated, the gun -- that battery’s not in operation?”
Payne: “Oh, yes, it was.”
Chin: “Oh, it was?”
Payne: “Oh, yeah, we never took it out of operation, no.”
Chin: “I had heard that the men who manned that lived below, in some barracks just below the guns. And every time they’d have some -- well, they’d have to put away the dishes and” --
Payne: “Yeah, that’s right.
“Down in the dell down there, it shot right over there, out through the cove, yeah.”
Chin: “Was that a battery that was active throughout the war?”
Payne: “Oh, yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“Do you remember a unit called the 130th Coast Artillery Battalion that took over the manning of the fixed AA guns?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “Okay. Well, that’s neither here nor there.
“How about Battery Lobos, this mounted Navy gun down at” --
Payne: “Miley?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “What was that like?”
Payne: “They were two six-inches, weren’t they?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah, mm-hm.
“Yeah, we -- my office or our office, Colonel Burr’s office, built the pedestals and the -- and we built end stations for them, too. And I think the plotting room, we got a room from the Veterans Administration” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “out there at -- that was the Veterans Hospital out there at Fort Miley.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “And the quarters, were those built behind the guns, probably, for the” --
Payne: “The quarters were built behind the guns, yeah.”
Chin: “Uh-huh.
“I don’t see how people could get down there. Those roads I don’t think exist anymore, do they, to get down there?”
Payne: “I haven’t been there in a long time; because, you know, the old Sutro Baths and everything burned and everything’s eroded there so much in the last 40 years.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“These anti-motor-torpedo-boat weapons, how did -- what was the thinking of how the Japanese were going to send motored torpedo boats clear over here from Japan” --
Payne: “They thought they” --
Chin: -- “what scenario had they” --
Payne: “The scenario was, in fact, they did have the capability. We know this. They made a mistake when they went to Pearl Harbor. They should have kept going.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Oh, tell you about balloons. I’ll tell you about that, too” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “Japs.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “But at the beginning there, we didn’t know that they didn’t have a task force that was going to come all the way. Because they could have walked right through California. We were not prepared, we -- our little defenses that we had there at Fort Scott and Barry, for a big navy force. Why they turned around and went back -- either they didn’t have good long-range planning or something.
“But the -- the 6th Army or the intelligence people felt that just out of retaliation, they would like to come in and wreck the harbor of San Francisco so we couldn’t ship out of it. And so they -- that’s why the net was there. They figured they were going to ram the net and then have some landing craft out by the Farallons or beyond and then run the torpedo boats in and just tear up all the loading docks. Not only Navy. They were thinking about the ships that were going to carry troops and – like at Fort Mason and the facilities all along San Francisco harbor and Oakland harbor, just wreck ‘em so we couldn’t get supplies out. That was their scenario.”
Chin: “So they were going to get some naval task force far enough in where they could launch these.”
Payne: “Launch these torpedo boats and just crash ‘em in and wreck everything they could to slow our resupply.
“Did you ever hear about the fire balloons?”
Chin: “I’ve heard about them. What do you know?”
Payne: “I might have a piece of one here.”
Chin: “Oh, no.”
Payne: “Well, I chased those -- boy, did I chase those. The prevailing winds were onshore. Now, they made these balloons out of paper mache’, thick.”
Chin: “Oh, so they were noncollapsible. They were like a hollow shell, then.”
Payne: “Yeah, yeah. They were stiff.
“And they launched them a couple-hundred miles off the coast from -- I don’t know, ships or submarines -- how they got them out, I don’t know; ‘cause they were big as this room. And they had a magnesium incendiary device on them that, when they got down to a certain elevation, it would go off and the balloon would go on fire. And they were going to set forest fires and anything to distract us.
“And we’d get these reports of sightings. And because I was always out in the field and knew every road clear up to the Oregon border, they would ask me get going. And I’d take a couple sergeants with me and -- took Colonel LaFrenz in a command car one time -- and we found one; but the incendiary device didn’t go off.”
Chin: “Is this up in northern California -- way clear up” --
Payne: “Almost up to Fort Bragg.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “They were trying to get the forests on fire (inaudible). And I brought back a couple of them. And I think if I -- my problem right now is I’m -- I’m throwing things away. I’m sorting boxes. I’ve got hundreds of boxes of lesson plans -- not only for the Army, but the telephone company and Junior Achievement and the Catholic church -- and I’m trying to sort them out. And within the last six months, I’ve seen a piece of one of those balloons” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “in one of my boxes.
“But they were kind of creamish color” --
Chin: “Cream; okay.”
Payne: -- “cream-colored paper.
“And it was -- I’m going to say like paper mache’. And it had like strings hanging from it, but they were glued some way with paper mache’. And then they had this magnesium thing with an altimeter on it.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “When it got down to 50 feet or something, it would blow the whole thing and burn the balloon and all.”
Chin: “Huh.”
Payne: “But they never really started any forest fires.”
Chin: “No.”
Payne: “They either didn’t work -- and I don’t know how many they set off, but I actually found two of them.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “But they all were north of Point Reyes. For some reason -- either they miscalculated the wind or the wind was -- they didn’t know. Because I’m sure that they were trying to get somewhere closer to the San Francisco Bay area.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“They” --
Payne: “You didn’t know that one, huh?”
Chin: “Well, I knew that the -- you know, the launching of the balloons, but I didn’t know what they were made out of and” --
Payne: “Oh.”
Chin: -- “you know, the fact that somebody from HDSF might have been involved in trying to hunt down a few.”
Payne: “Yeah, we -- I found two of them.”
Chin: “The construction of this mine casemate down at Baker Beach, there -- there was one that was existing there already prior to this time. Why did they want to put another one in?”
Payne: “Bigger and the new mines and then this -- they needed -- this electronic stuff started coming in with this panel -- it was about -- oh, bigger than that TV and just had -- I don’t know --maybe a hundred across of these little orange lights; and each light was a mine.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And when you’d watch it, a ship would come through and it would light up the lights right under the ship, I guess, and you could tell where the ship was.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And you could actually -- they actually had a button that if it looked like it was going to hit Mine 22, they could light that one off.”
Chin: “Yes.
“You said you also were involved in reinforcing the old mine casemate made out on Fort Barry.”
Payne: “That’s right, mm-hm.”
Chin: “Was that sort of an open structure before you had” --
Payne: “No, nothing was open.”
Chin: “Oh, it was covered and everything.”
Payne: “It was -- it was covered, yeah, yeah.”
Chin: “So what type of reinforcing did” --
Payne: “We made it bigger.”
Chin: “Bigger.”
Payne: “Yeah; added something to it.”
Chin: “Uh-huh.
“Oh, the new style of six-inch batteries that they did -- I guess developed in World War II and then really didn’t try to mount anything until after the war in San Francisco. The ones -- there was one at Fort Miley and there was one at Milagro Ridge.”
Payne: “Yeah, Milagro Ridge, I built Milagro Ridge.”
Chin: “Yes.
“They finally put guns in, but in 1948. What was the story with the” --
Payne: “Don’t remember.
“See, a lot of things -- I always tie it to the battle of Midway.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “Within four or five months after the analysis was in of what the real -- that was a turning point -- things slowed down. It was hard to get money out of Colonel Ward Schweitzer for anything, you know, for the coast defenses anymore.”
Chin: “Oh, here’s something. Colonel Schweitzer, he was in the 6th Army, in the finance department?”
Payne: “Yeah -- well, not the finance. He was in planning” --
Chin: “Oh, oh.”
Payne: -- “but he was the one that could say yes, you could fund that project and here’s the 12,000,000.”
Chin: “I see
“So 6th Army was where all Harbor Defense construction” --
Payne: “They were our boss.”
Chin: “Oh, okay. It wasn’t 4th Army, Western Defense Command? It was something else?”
Payne: “I’m sorry, I guess it was” --
Chin: “It was 4th?”
Payne: -- “4th, yeah, yeah.”
Chin: “All right. I guess 6th didn’t come until” --
Payne: “Well, I’m just thinking now. It was in the same building that the 6th Army’s in now.”
Chin: “Okay. Very good.”
Payne: “Yeah, yeah.”
Chin: “Well, let’s see. From what I understand, the shields were there on those six-inch guns, but the barrels didn’t really get there” --
Payne: “Didn’t get there, no.
“But everything slowed down. Funding got terribly hard by the time we were in the Solomons.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.
“Here I have something that says ‘Number 34: Notable base end stations.’ Of course, you’ve already talked about Devil’s Slide. And then there’s the ones that all the tourists seem to see nowadays, the ones on Sutro Heights.”
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “They put two up there on Sutro Heights” --
Payne: “Two up there, yeah.”
Chin: -- “very nice-looking things.
“Now, that’s right on the property of -- the Sutro property. Did they” --
Payne: “Absolutely. We went to Mr. Sutro, and he okayed it.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “In fact, he -- my wife and I used to go ice skating and he used to give me passes to go ice skating; ‘cause I met him and we negotiated the” --
Chin: “Oh, was that -- could you expound on -- that’s the type of story I like to have, you know, something connected with notable San Franciscans and then with the Harbor Defenses now. Could you expand that one” --
Payne: “Well, Sutro Baths -- you know where the Cliff House is?”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Now, Sutro Baths used to be way down -- now, that used to be a museum.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “And he had -- when I was a boy, they used to have mummies and gorillas, stuffed gorillas, and kind of corny stuff.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Not very fancy, really.
“And then they built an ice rink down there. And my dad came from Kentucky and he says we ought to ice skate. And so we bought -- Geraldine and I bought ice skates, and my dad took us down there ice skating. And I met Mr. Sutro, a big, fat guy. And then when we decided we were going to build the -- the stations up there on Sutro Heights, I met him and asked him and we -- it was all legal, a contract and everything.
“But I’ll always remember, he says, ‘I’ve seen you down at the ice-skating rink.’
“And I says, ‘Oh, yeah.’ I says, ‘Mom and I and my father go down there once in a while.’
“So he handed me a couple of passes, only for just one time, yeah.”
Chin: “Great, great.
“Now, was the mansion that he had up there still existing at that time or was it just the esplanade that’s there now?”
Payne: “I think just the esplanade, yeah.”
Chin: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.
“Was the statuary there?”
Payne: “Statuary was there, absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah. But that was” --
Payne: “The house was gone, I guess.”
Chin: “Yeah. I mean, he did -- I mean, you didn’t build it right on his esplanade. So I guess you didn’t really tear down something” --
Payne: “No, we never tore down anything that was historic, no.”
Chin: “Yes.
“That must have been a good spot for men who had duty in those two base end stations. They could go down to the Cliff House any time that they needed to.”
Payne: “Yeah, right, mm-hm.”
Chin: “Oh, let’s see. Oh, there’s a story I want to hear about. You told me on the phone, but this is going to be good if you tell it again.
“The story about the harbor entrance control posts and the fact that the Navy has it really rigged up for a nice living in their coffee room and the Army didn’t. So” --
Payne: “Right. Okay.
“Well, I was on the staff and built the station and had to work with the Navy, obviously. I remember we had -- not serious, but arguments whether we were going to call the toilets latrines or heads; and I think we decided to put both signs on them. And we had men and women, because we had ladies in there, too -- or women in there, too.”
Chin: “Both Army and Navy?”
Payne: “Army and Navy, yeah.
“And the hallway was split. The right-hand side was all Navy. Now, the Navy had the smoking and coffee room, and they equipped it first class. And ours was like an electric burner with a glass pot and no refrigerators or nothing. It was very primitive. So all our enlisted men would make friends with the Navy and they’d all end up over in the Navy’s nice coffee shop.
“And it was -- really, he wasn’t mean about it, but the -- and, oh, well, my boss, Colonel Burr --oh, I was on the staff; was not on the tactical anymore. I was on the engineering staff and was working all day long building things. He insisted that two graveyard shifts a month, I would do duty. And he says it’s good for me to be in with the tactical guys and keep the hand in and all that kind of stuff.
“And so twice -- and he wouldn’t let me take off the next day either. That’s the kind of a guy Burr was -- although after a while, he was like my father. I loved him. But, oh, those first (inaudible), I couldn’t stand him.
“But, anyway, he insisted that two or three times a month, I would take a graveyard shift at the headquarters station. And the lieutenant commander that was there used to always kid me -- I was up there almost every day anyway. When I was in the office, I’d always go up there because it was new. And I told you on the phone, I guess, that when I build things, I consider that they’re mine. I told you about the Sacramento headquarters building? I still rub my finger along some – hey, Colonel, it ain’t yours anymore.
“But I was at the H station two or three times a week, just going up to see how things were. And, anyway, he said to me, ‘You know,’ he says, ‘why doesn’t the Army build a nice coffee shop like we got.’ He says, ‘Your guys are over here drinking our coffee and eating our donuts and filling up the room all the time.’
“And I says, ‘Well, I’ve tried two or three times.’
“And he says, ‘Try again.’
“So he made me do it officially. I wrote a letter that the Navy’s coffee room was being overcrowded by our soldiers because all we had was a two-burner electric hotplate and nothing else, really, for our soldiers. And there was -- oh, they had decorated. They had curtains and everything -- not curtains, but, you know, wall hangings.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “And so they’d do everything first -- everything was stainless steel.
“So I brought the letter back and it says no
(missing audio).
“-- on it or a color or what, but you could tell what kind of a ship it was, a military or a transport or a -- whatever it was by looking at the code on there.
“And the Navy manned that all the time. That was the Navy’s job.”
Chin: “I see.
“The information on the shipping, would any ships approaching that sea area have to have -- I mean, it would be down in some log book ahead of time in some schedule or” --
Payne: “Oh, absolutely. The lieutenant commander in charge of the -- this side knew every ship, when it was coming, its name, its tonnage, what it was. And one of his enlisted men would put this magnetic thing and would follow it. It would -- you could see it coming out 50 miles, and it would come through the gate.”
Chin: “I see.
“What would be the Army’s main job in that joint operation center?”
Payne: “Well, the Army’s main job was if the Navy said it was a hostile ship, then we would warn the batteries to get full alert and we’d inform the mine batteries to make sure everything was turned on. And we had a phone to every one of them right there, a little switchboard.
“And then the Navy had the phone right down to the ready-duty buoy. So if there was any question, the ready-duty destroyer would -- would pull the plug and head to sea.”
Chin: “I see; I see.”
Payne: “All run by HECP.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“As far as the Naval craft that they were using, there were -- didn’t they have something like an in-shore patrol or something that was already out beyond the Gate” --
Payne: “Oh, sure; yeah, yeah.”
Chin: -- “out there?”
Payne: “They had some picket boats out there.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.
“But the ready-duty destroyer was their first line of a real ship that could” --
Payne: “A real combat ship.”
Chin: “Combat ship.”
Payne: “Yeah. The other ones were not big. They weren’t -- you couldn’t fight with them. They were just observation things.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “But the ready-duty destroyer had its steam up all the time.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And sometimes -- I must have repaired that telephone on that thing like 50 times. ‘Cause all of a sudden, they’d get an alert; and they didn’t take any care of pulling the plug. They just pulled the steam and pulled the box off the buoy and everything.”
Chin: “How close to the shore was the gate? It was close to the San Francisco side?”
Payne: “Close to the San Francisco side -- oh, I’d say out about a half a -- quarter of a mile, half to a quarter mile.”
Chin: “I see.
“And how wide do you -- well, again, it had to be as wide as the widest ship that ever wanted to get through the” --
Payne: “I would say it was a hundred yards across.”
Chin: “And there would be this one tug that would just pull” --
Payne: “The tug was on the -- was anchored -- the big anchors on the outside -- or the inside of the net.”
Chin: “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Payne: “The net was -- had buoys and anchors, and then they had this gate that was kind of like this (indicating) that had pulleys that they pulled underground to pull it open. And the tug had a winch on it that would -- would -- when they wanted to open it, would -- and tug was really anchored. I mean, it had big concrete anchors down.”
Chin: “Why was that?”
Payne: “So it wouldn’t move.”
Chin: “Oh.”
Payne: “’Cause when you put the pressure on the -- on the -- opening the gate, the boat would want to move. So we had anchors in sideways and rear and every way.”
Chin: “Oh, so this tug was the stationary end of the gate.”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely. It was just -- oh, it was” --
Chin: “It was just -- it was sitting there as a machine to”-
Payne: “That’s all it was. It was -- it was a big tug that had living quarters on it. And all it was was a big winch.”
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “And it was permanently anchored. It never moved.”
Chin: “I see.
“So the gate would open by being drawn from one side” --
Payne: “To the other, yes.”
Chin: “Oh, okay. Somehow, I envisioned it was a gate where the tug just sailed across from one side to the other pulling this thing behind it.”
Payne: “No, no. No. The tug was permanently -- with giant pieces of concrete.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And it just had a winch and it had pulleys on the water that, some way or another, pulled the two pieces apart. And it had great big buoys that -- that moved as the gate moved.”
Chin: “I see. I see.
“Would it be closed at night or what was the” --
Payne: “It was closed a hundred percent of the time, unless there was a ship going in or out.”
Chin: “Oh, I see.”
Payne: “It was never open.”
Chin: “So the operation made -- they would have to do it maybe a hundred times a day if there was” --
Payne: “Not a hundred, but they would do it 10 or 12 times a day, at least -- well, maybe four or five ships would come at once, yeah.”
Chin: “Oh, okay. They would stack them up.”
Payne: “But they -- no, no. That gate was completely closed all the time, and that tug was anchored there. I had a telephone cable to it.”
Chin: “Okay. And the ready-duty destroyer was nearby somewhere?”
Payne: “It was out to sea about a quarter of a mile.”
Chin: “Oh, that would -- that means it would pass the Golden Gate and on the other” --
Payne: “It was -- it was” --
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “It didn’t have to go through the gate -- through the net. It was outside the net.”
Chin: “Okay. But, still, inside the Golden Gate.”
Payne: “It was inside the Golden Gate, yes. It was right off of Crissy Field.”
[End of Tape 2, Side 1]
[Beginning of Tape 2, Side 2]
Payne: -- “torpedo-boat batteries until, gee” --
Chin: “’43, I think, that’s” --
Payne: -- “’-3, ’43, yeah.
“Because they felt that there might be a -- well, kind of what Doolittle did: Maybe the Japs were going to come and just be messer-uppers of San Francisco harbor.”
Chin: “Yes, yes; right.
“In fact, they added -- I think they had 90-millimeter guns later on that they had placed for the same purpose.”
Payne: “Anti-aircraft guns, yeah.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “Yeah, yeah, mm-hm.”
Chin: “Would the -- would your department have to be involved in setting the” --
Payne: “No, no. They put those on the -- on the street or -- what do you call it -- the roadway there.”
Chin: “Yes.
“What was I going to say -- oh, the sub net, why was it positioned where it was? Couldn’t they find a place that was narrower?”
Payne: “Ah-ha, good reason. I got to be very -- in fact, I stayed out there two or three nights and knew the commander of it.
“The Golden Gate -- the Navy knows about all harbors in the world, ‘cause they travel ‘em. And the Golden Gate and the entrance to the Yellow River in China have the highest and fastest water flow of any defilade like that in the world. And so they had to get it further back; because the closer you got to the narrowness of the two towers, the volume and everything speeded -- you know Bernoulli’s principle of water, how if you squeeze a hose, how it squirts harder? Well, the Golden Gate gets narrow and squeezed harder. So they had to get it back so that the water pressure was acceptable.
“And the commander told me -- I asked him the same question, and he says, ‘Well’ -- I says, ‘Gee, you could have cut the thing in half in distance.’
“’But,’ he says, ‘we couldn’t have held it.’
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And then he explained to me -- he says that the Navy studied and knew that the Yellow River in China and the San Francisco Bay had the highest velocity, highest volume per minute of water. So you had to put it back there.”
Chin: “Good.”
Payne: “Did you want that data, huh?”
Chin: “That is perfect, because I wondered why it was there. I, basically, didn’t know too much about the net until what you’re telling me about it now.”
Payne: “Mm-hm, yeah.”
Chin: “Are you familiar with those devices called hydrangea devices? You mentioned them” --
Payne: “That’s -- that’s Major Zimmerman.”
Chin: “That’s right.“
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: “That’s what I know it as.”
Payne: “Yeah, hydrangeas, yeah.”
Chin: “Yes.
“If you could give me a fuller explanation -- that was a Navy thing?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “It wasn’t. It was an Army” --
Payne: “Army. Major Zimmerman” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “from the signal corps.
Chin: “Okay.
“Now, he was -- was he” --
Payne: “He was project manager.”
Chin: “Okay. In the region or he was in the signal corps back in Washington?”
Payne: “No, no; back -- wherever -- wherever it was.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “And what they decided -- when they decided they were going to build them and they made them, they told us -- told headquarters, Colonel LaFrenz, and then he told Colonel Burr and me -- that they had come up with this hydrangea – I’d forgot the name until now, yeah --and it was a box not as big as this room -- almost, though -- big, heavy box. And it had this kind of an antenna -- or sat- -- with the arms on it that rotated. And there was electricity out to it, and we installed it from the cable ship. And then we put two or three of them just outside the gate and brought them back to the mine casemates” --
Chin: “Meaning bringing the cable back to the mine” --
Payne: -- “bringing the cable back to the mine casemates.
“And he brought them out from the Bell Labs and installed them, and then he stayed on the staff there. My impression was they weren’t as effective as that thing that the Army had with all those little red lights.
“He just -- he was a scientist, and he was experimenting. And a couple times, we had to go pick ‘em up because the electrical failed. And they were heavier than the devil and hard to get a hold of.”
Chin: “What type of a reading -- how would they be read and interpreted? What would the” --
Payne: “It was sound.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And you could tell by triangulation. The two of them -- or three of them, you could triangulate and you could hear this sound, and the guy would -- it was like sonar. And the operator could tell that that was the propeller sound from this one; and if he put it up to his ears, it was the same propeller sound. And then he would work the things so it would track it.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “And then we could just plot it on a plotting -- on an artillery plotting board where this ship was or submarine was underwater.”
Chin: “That was used throughout the war as another device” --
Payne: “You know, I’m kind of -- Brian, I’m a little bit fuzzy on this. I don’t think we ever tapped it. I think it was mostly experimental. Zimmerman was an awful nice guy, but he was a -- well, I’m a scientist, but I’m not” --
Chin: “But he was theoretical” --
Payne: -- “stuffy -- yeah, he was theoretical; and he was always messing with the thing and” --
Chin: “I see. I see.”
Payne: -- “and wanting it brought up to adjust it; and I’d have to get the ship.
“And one time, my ship was up at the Aleutians or up at – that was the only real cable ship we had. And we talked -- I talked to Bell Systems. They didn’t want to have their barge out to sea, and for good reason. It’s a -- it’s a big barge with a big crane on it; and it has living quarters in it and cooking and everything in it. But it has no keel and it’s got a big -- what do you call it --freeboard -- you know what a freeboard on a ship is? You know, a height that wind can get a hold of or a wave.”
Chin: “Oh; oh, okay.”
Payne: “And it was towed by a tug. And our ship was up off the coast. And I’d fly up once or twice a week to see how things were going. Because we had a lieutenant -- no, we had a civilian that was a cable guy. It was an Irish name.
“Well, Ray Walls was the signal corps guy that did a lot of the engineering for the telephone cables that we installed from the ship. Oh, I forget his name. Anyway, he -- he was always -- and he was a diver, ‘cause you had to put a diver down to get a hook on this thing.
“But Zimmerman was always just messing around. So I don’t think we ever -- well, I’ve seen the plots and everything, but it was always, well -- oh, I was telling you about the barge.
“The ship was up there. And he had a lot of power. He could call -- I don’t know -- the chief signal officer or somebody, and they would call down through 4th Army and say do what Zimmerman says.
“Well, I talked with them. They were about half a mile out beyond Bonita Point, Point Bonita. And the -- Pacific Bell didn’t really want us to take that barge out there because its freeboard was so high and the wind was always coming in. And if you sail -- I’m a sailor, also -- coming in that Golden Gate on a chop and the wind, boy, it’s tough with a sailboat.
“But we -- we got an insurance company to write an insurance policy, and we talked the -- and it turned out it was cheaper than bringing the ship back from Alaska. So we got a big red-stack tug, and we went out and picked up Zimmerman’s hydrangea. Because this barge had this gigantic crane; much bigger than the Miles or the Niles did on it.
“And a storm came up while we were out there and a chop came in -- the chop was about eight foot, choppy water -- and the wind was blowing. And the captain of the tug couldn’t get going. The barge was beating us in through the Golden Gate sideways. We all grabbed our life jackets. And here we’ve got Zimmerman’s damn thing on deck. But we got in safe, but the barge almost hit the net before the tug could -- could turn it and stop it. And it wasn’t headin’ toward the open gate. It was headin’ toward the -- yeah, we used to -- that’s twice I had the barge out beyond the -- the Pacific Bell barge out beyond the gate. But the first time was okay. But the darn barge was beating the tug in.
“Because the freeboard was so high, the wind has a lot of sail area and was pushing it, see.”
Chin: “Zimmerman, was he -- you -- he was in industry or he was in the lab” --
Payne: “He was a major.”
Chin: “Well, I mean outside of his military career.”
Payne: “I don’t know.”
Chin: “Oh” --
Payne: “I don’t remember.”
Chin: -- “I thought you said he was some lab worker.
“What was his full name or his first name?”
Payne: “I don’t remember his first name, but I remember Zimmerman.”
Chin: “Oh, I see.”
Payne: “But -- and I don’t know whether he worked for the Bell Labs and had a major or what, but the Bell Labs apparently did the research in getting it built through Western Electric or something.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And he was assigned to bring it out on flatcars, and he came out on the train and -- but he had power, I’ll tell you. He was nice. He was not mean, but you could tell if -- yeah, if you says -- if Major Zimmerman says he wanted that thing picked up, if you had any excuses, in a day or so, Colonel LaFrenz or Colonel Burr would call up and say, ‘You better get that thing up for Major Zimmerman; the War Department or somebody wants -- says to do it.’ So” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “But, as I say, he wasn’t mean. He was a nice guy to talk to and he was smart as the dickens.”
Chin: “Oh, I see.
“During the very last days of the war, maybe even after the Japanese surrendered and all that, they had to go through the steps of making the decision, well, when are we going to just deactivate everything. I mean, shut down the HECP” --
Payne: “Yeah.”
Chin: -- “you know, take the troops out; deactivate the guns.
“Was there any procedure for that or did it just happen gradually or” --
Payne: “It just happened gradually, yeah. They hired -- I can remember; it broke my heart -- the first guns they broke up were the ones at 129, too; because they weren’t mounted. They hired Lavin Scrap Iron -- they’re still in business – to come up and they cut those -- with torches, they cut those big 16s into pieces about that long (indicating), like donuts, so they could handle them and (inaudible).
“And I don’t know what they did with Battery Howe. I know that they -- they came out with torches and were cutting them, but I don’t if they did them the same way; because they were shorter barrels, the mortars were.”
Chin: “So they cut everything up, then.”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely. They just cut it up and went to scrap -- well, see, by that time, rockets were (inaudible). And when you start thinking about rockets -- by the way, I had quite an experience with V-2s -- 10 to 4:00. Gee, time goes fast, doesn’t it?”
Chin: “Yes, I know.”
Payne: “Well, we’ll talk again.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “When the war was over, we captured 81 V-2s at Peenemunde. Guess where we brought ‘em?”
Chin: “Where?”
Payne: “Fort Bliss, White Sands.”
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: “And we built a big concrete blockhouse there, and we brought von Braun and all his engineers and scientists and technicians; and we put ‘em in a compound at Fort Bliss, barbed wire and everything around. And I had a battalion there for a while and -- a field battalion. And every morning, we’d put them in buses and drove them out to White Sands. And they were teaching us how to fire rockets. And they -- and I’ve got a picture of one. It landed in Mexico. But I’m about a mile away, looking down at the blockhouse. I’m in my Jeep. And I knew it was going off, that the schedule -- V-2, that was the big one, you know.
“And about halfway between me and the blockhouse were some soldiers with a command car, three or four of them; and they were watching this thing go off, too. And I watched it go up. And it went up about three lengths and, all of a sudden, it started tipping over. I had my camera ready. And these fellows down in front of me there, you could see them hitting the ground; and then I hit the ground. And then the next thing we knew -- I went down to the headquarters building -- it had headed toward Mexico and we didn’t know where, to Juarez. It landed in Juarez, in the cemetery, thank goodness. Gosh, if it had landed -- we’d have had an international incident.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “But, anyway, rockets -- you can’t imagine how simple that V-2 really was. The Germans, in the first place -- you know, we bombed Swinefurt and ruined all their ball-bearing factories. Now, this was permanganate and liquid oxygen fuel. But gravity was not enough -- no, not permanganate -- amylin and oxygen. It’s hypergolic, means it gets together and it sets itself off; okay? I mean, you don’t need a match, but you -- but they use a match, in a way. But they needed the fuel to the engine so fast that gravity wouldn’t do it. There was tons of amylin and oxygen. So they had a steam plant.
“Now, the steam plant was run by permanganate and what -- anoxide that made steam, that ran a little steam engine. Now, the bearing in that steam engine – because we had ruined all their ball bearings, they built a brass Babbett bearing for that steam engine, a high-speed steam engine. When we took ‘em apart and tested ‘em, the maximum fuel in that V-2 was something like 72 seconds; a little over a minute, it would burn out.
“Now, they measured range by cutting the fuel off. If they wanted it to go shorter, they would cut it off at 50 seconds or something. We tested those bearings. And those Germans were so conservative, those bearings would only last 90 seconds. They didn’t build a bearing that had any more in it than was required, plus a little.
“Now, how do you think they set the fuel off in that -- it was set on its end; okay? How do you think they set it off, the fuel, get it starting on fire?”
Chin: “I don’t have” --
Payne: “As a Chinese person, you ought to know.”
Chin: “They turned it upside down?”
Payne: “No.”
Chin: “They throw a firecracker under” --
Payne: “They used a firecracker, a -- you’ve seen ‘em down in -- in -- by the way, did I tell you, my daughter-in-law is Chinese.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “She speaks two dialects of -- one in China and speaks five other languages fluently. But -- so we go to the Chinese New Year, Bok Choi or whatever they call it up there.
“Anyway, you know those things that look like a swastika, that they’re on a pin and they go around like this (indicating)” --
Chin: “Oh, yeah, yeah.”
Payne: -- “with four firecrackers on them?”
Chin: “Oh, that’s” –
Payne: “That’s how they -- huh? They put that on a stick up in the air” --
Chin: “Oh, really? Oh.”
Payne: -- “and lift them up with a little electrical gadget; and that thing span around, the fuel would come down and would go on fire, that simple.”
Chin: “Oh.”
Payne: “And this is that fancy V-2. And the bearing would only last 90 seconds, because they -- they didn’t put any more effort or material in because they were short. Isn’t that interesting?
“Anyway, I got on rockets, once rockets were -- you know, we’ve known about rockets for 60 years. But once the Germans and -- who started -- they had jet engines during World War II. And then right at the end of the war, we had the Nike Ajax, the Nike Atlas. And then starting the technology of the Sidewinders and all those, they realized that artillery was just -- a long-range artillery for the Navy, for fighting a navy, was just worthless. Because you could get an airplane and stand off 20 miles and do it. And you didn’t have all that base end and all that fortification and things.
“So they made the evaluations right there that with the rocket technology coming of age, you didn’t need coast artillery anymore. And so we changed our -- our things.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Remember, we used to have the lipstick in the middle of the crossed cannons?”
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: “Then we had the -- now we have the guided missile, AA and guided missile insignia.”
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: “So that’s why they made the decision. They just realized that big 16s were kind of like -- they could put a helicopter up there with an air-to-surface missile guided, go right down the chimney of a battleship. So that’s the reason why they” --
Chin: “With a service span of five years (inaudible) the end of the war and when they just crossed that -- the coast artillery out of the” --
Payne: “Oh, yes, it took time; took time.
“And, by the way” --
Chin: “I -- I mentioned there were proponents of – you know, we should keep the concrete artillery for X purposes. Do you remember what argument” --
Payne: “No, no. I -- I got into guided missiles very quick, because I -- see, what people -- a lot of people didn’t realize that of the combat branches, the coast artillery was the most technical of all.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Because they had the anti-aircraft, and then they had the plotting, where all the other -- I mean, regular artillery, what do you do? You shoot it up and you put a spotter and say over, under and adjust.”
Chin: “Right, right.”
Payne: “And the artillery had to shoot at moving targ- -- I mean coast artillery had moving targets, both air and sea. So of the combat branches, except for the Corps of Engineers, they were the most technical branch in the Army.”
Chin: “Yeah, yeah.”
Payne: “So a lot of the West Pointers wanted a technical branch in the early times.”
Chin: “Well, it’s about 4:00, so” --
Payne: “I’m going to have to get dressed.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “I want to show you the ID card.”
[End of Tape 2, Side B]
[Beginning of Tape 3, Side A, by telephone]
Payne: -- “from Funston and one Fort Bowie.”
Chin: “So they’d be big enough for several men to be on duty inside.”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah.”
Payne: “In fact, Bill Cook, one of my -- the chief -- the master sergeant chief convinced me to go to the Bell System after I retired.”
Chin: “Okay. So these were things that were covered over after they were casemated and all?”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely.”
Chin: “And they were built only after the war started or” --
Payne: “Oh, absolutely, yes. I was the construction superintendent and engineer on them.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Now, you said that the Navy feared the Army mine fields. Do you have any particular anecdote or some way that they would express that type of hesitation about going through them?”
Payne: “Well, yes.
“See, in the first place, the Navy didn’t really understand that the mines -- see, the Navy hates mines. I mean, just fundamentally, a mine is one of the worst things a Navy ship could hit.”
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: “And they laid them in places where they never wanted to go.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “They didn’t really conceptually understand that our Army mines in the Harbor Defenses were controlled and had a wire to them -- a pair of wires.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “And so it made them nervous all the time with our mine fields out off of San Francisco and -- and off of San Pedro. They just were nervous. And that’s one reason why they were so cooperative in the ACCP.”
Chin: “I see. To make sure” --
Payne: “Because it -- it was just an innate, natural thing for a Navy man to hate a mine. And they had a hard time understanding that our Army mines were controlled.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.
“I mean, so there” --
Payne: “Does that help you?”
Chin: “Yeah.
“So there was no, you know, like some little joke or a little thing that they would say sometimes that would really get that fear across? I mean, nothing in particular, some” --
Payne: “No, not really. They just had an innate feeling, a worry” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “about any mine.
“And you had -- you had to keep explaining to them that you couldn’t make our Army mines go off unless the power was on.”
Chin: “Okay. Okay.
“In casemating Battery Wallace, you say the battery was not deactivated while the construction was going on?”
Payne: “I do not believe so, no.”
Chin: “So that means that you had to design the construction process so that it wouldn’t interfere with the workings of the guns?”
Payne: “Absolutely.”
Chin: “Yeah. All right. I guess there’s nothing to ask more about that.
“Now, you say that planes were too fast to use for doing reconnaissance on your camouflage. I could understand why you say that, but what is the principle behind that, as opposed to a blimp going over slowly?”
Payne: “Well, I could take time -- I did the work. And when you went at 120 or 200 miles an hour, you couldn’t analyze a little shadow that happened or something like that.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “Where with a blimp, I could tell the Navy pilot, hey, stop” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “and I could take a photograph.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “And then I could figure out what was wrong or what was good or what was not good.
“But when I first started using spotter planes out of Crissy Field, they went so darn fast, I had to go back and forth three or four times.”
Chin: “Yes. All right.
“Now, in the platoon that you had that was getting prepared for possible strike duty, you said prizes were given for the performance of the men and all. Now, what type of prizes would those have been?”
Payne: “They were little cups that they bought downtown someplace, like little -- little cups that said winner of 9th” --
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: -- “things like that, that they bought at a -- like a” --
Chin: “Okay. No, I understand.”
Payne: -- “you know, a sports place.”
Chin: “Right. Okay.
“Now, wire chiefs, what is the definition -- is that somebody that’s assigned to the signal corps or is that an engineer or” --
Payne: “No.
“It turned out that, as I told you the other day, the coast artillery was the most technical combat unit in the Army really. Because we had anti-aircraft. We had all the communications and radio and radar.
“And a wire chief -- we had the switchboard that -- mostly at Funstun and Barry -- that had all the communication cables from all the way from Point Reyes down to Pillar Point coming into it. And a wire chief made -- and we had switching systems, a tactical -- well, there was actually a civilian-type telephone system in down Presidio by Letterman Hospital now, a telephone --you know, a dial system.”
Chin: “Mm-hm, yes.”
Payne: “But ours was a tactical system, completely separate.”
Chin: “Okay. So it was your own private telephone company, in other words.”
Payne: “It was our own private telephone company.
“And we got everything from the signal corps; but the coast artillery, artillery engineers, was a combined engineer and signal. In fact, I had both the signal supply room and the engineering supply room.”
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: “And then I had electronic wire chiefs at each of the tactical switchboards.”
Chin: “Mm-hm. Okay. Very good.
“This L-74 craft that got washed up on the beach, in listening to the tape, I didn’t quite get the idea of what made it start drifting off and running up – did it have engine trouble or” --
Payne: “No, no.
“What happened was that L boat -- that’s L, like an L” --
Chin: “Right.”
Payne: -- “A, B, C, D -- you know, L” --
Chin: “Yeah, mm-hm.”
Payne: -- “it made a 90-degree turn after the mine ship.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “It was foggy and it was stormy and rainy. And the L boat picked up the cable and cut it to length and dropped it.”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “Somebody made a mistake and the mine planter hit the L boat” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “and broke it up.
“And so it -- the wind was ashore at Stinson Beach, so that drove it ashore there.”
Chin: “I see. Okay. That explains that.
“This term -- the Cal Mafia or was it Berkeley Mafia? Which -- which one was it called?”
Payne: “It was kind of undercover, but everybody said” --
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: -- “everybody -- everybody who’s from Berkeley gets ahead around here.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “So it was just kind of an underground thing with LaFrenz and all the other fell- -- Weyand and myself, et cetera, were all -- and Bob Ball” --
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: -- “were all from Cal and -- there was -- there was more than that; I can’t think of them all.”
Chin: “Yeah.
“So it was called the Berkeley Mafia, except you wanted to whisper.”
Payne: “Yeah, right; yeah.”
Chin: “This Construction 129, I have read in some official reports that it wasn’t started until September ’42.”
Payne: “That’s right, about.”
Chin: “But in our recording, you said that this was one -- this was your first project upon reporting to the artillery engineer. But that should have been before Pearl Harbor.”
Payne: “Oh, boy, that’s a long time ago, but I” --
Chin: “Yeah. No, I realize that. I -- I thought, well, maybe” --
Payne: “See, I went in the Army on July the 1st, ’40. Because of the Thomason Act law, I could not get out of a combat unit for, I think, 14 months. So that meant ’41 sometime. And I didn’t go in right away.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “Sometime late in ’41, I went into the artillery engineers.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “And the first job I had was up there.”
Chin: “I see.
“Well, then -- then I guess I could say that they started 129 even before the September ’42, which” --
Payne: “I would say so, yes.”
Chin: -- “has been officially reported.
“Okay. No. That’s what I need to know about that.
“And the -- at the sub net, you said that there was only one tender that controlled the gate or were there two on either side of the gate?”
Payne: “No, no, just one.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “There was one -- it was like a big tug. There was a Navy tug -- I don’t know, it was about a hundred foot long; and it had all kind of winches and all kind of things on it.”
Chin: “Right.
“So the gate was pulled across rather than swung.”
Payne: “That’s right.”
Chin: “Okay. All right.
“And the last question, the one that’s maybe the most interesting, you say Colonel LaFrenz was -- went -- was sent to help Chiang Kai-shek after the war. Could you give me that story of what happened?”
Payne: “Well, after the war, Chiang Kai-shek wanted some advisors to go over from America to train and lead the Chinese army. And he specified that the men should be heavy weight or white haired or bald, because the Chinese respected older, stout men as leaders, I guess.”
Chin: “Yes. Okay.”
Payne: “And Colonel LaFrenz fit that perfectly.”
Chin: “I see.
“Now, how did they pick him? I mean, I’m sure there must have been at least a thousand in the Army that” --
Payne: “Oh, there were lots that went over. He was not the only one.”
Chin: “Oh, oh.”
Payne: “But, see, he had engineering and planning background” --
Chin: “I see.”
Payne: -- “that gave him the capability.”
Chin: “I see.
“So how long do you figure that he was over there.”
Payne: “I think two -- two years.”
Chin: “Uh-huh.
“But you didn’t hear about what he might have done” --
Payne: “No, I don’t know after that, no.”
Chin: “Okay. Okay.
“You said that he -- his family owned a very famous San Francisco seafood restaurant or something?”
Payne: “Yes. And I’m trying to think of the name, but it was a very famous restaurant, high-class restaurant in San Francisco.”
Chin: “I see. I see.
“Well, I -- I couldn’t imagine what that is, but I guess I” --
Payne: “If I think of it, I’ll let you know.”
Chin: “Yes, please do.
“One other thought occurred to me. That fellow that was -- that came in under the Thomason Act with you, I think you said his name was Ken Cooper or something like that?”
Payne: “Ken Cooper, yes.”
Chin: “Yes.
“Is he -- do you think he’s available to talk to?”
Payne: “Oh, absolutely. I know his address. We send Christmas cards to him. He’s in Bay Minette, Alabama.”
Chin: “Do you have his address?”
Payne: “I don’t have it here, but” --
Chin: “Oh, okay.”
Payne: -- “I’ll be home Sunday evening.
“If you call me Sunday evening, I’ll give it to you.”
Chin: “All right. I will do that.
“Okay. Well, I wish you a safe journey back up there when you go, so” --
Payne: “You know what I’m going to do, Brian?”
Chin: “Yeah. What’s that?”
Payne: “I’ve got those two boxes I showed you outside?”
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “They’re -- I don’t really need -- I saved them in case anybody questioned that I was in the Army.”
Chin: “Well, I don’t think anybody’s going to bother to question you now about it.”
Payne: “No, I don’t think so either, since I have been getting a check for 15 or 20 years.”
Chin: “Yes, yes.”
Payne: “I’m just going to look through them quickly, and I’m going to put them in a box and mail them to you.”
Chin: “Okay.”
Payne: “They’re just orders that affected me from the Harbor Defenses generally.”
Chin: “Yes. Oh, that would be perfect. I mean, if there’s enough stuff in there, the whole book may be just about you, for all I know at this point. But I would appreciate getting them.”
Payne: “I will mail you the whole box.”
Chin: “Oh, I’d appreciate that very much. If you want, I could send you, you know, some money for the postage. I -- it probably doesn’t matter to you; but as a courtesy, I would. But okay.”
Payne: “Yeah.
“I’ve decided that I just don’t feel like going through every page in there, and there’s two boxes of them. And they’re called personal files and” --
Chin: “Yes.”
Payne: “But they’re orders and everything else I can think of for 10 years.”
Chin: “Well, good. I will go through them with a fine-toothed comb.
“Do you have my address?”
Payne: “Yes, I have it.”
Chin: “Oh, okay. I guess Mario gave it to you.”
Payne: “No, no.”
Chin: “Oh, he didn’t?”
Payne: “In the first place, you sent me a letter down here” --
Chin: “That’s right; that’s right.”
Payne: -- “and then you sent me a thank-you card in a little blue envelope.”
Chin: “That’s right; that’s right -- which I couldn’t find your ZIP code at the time, but I guess it got to you.”
Payne: “I got it.”
Chin: “All right. Well, I appreciated you talking to me. I mean, it was a wealth of information.”
Payne: “Okay. Thank you.”
Chin: “All right. I’ll give you a call Sunday eve and you can give me that address.
“What time do you figure you’ll be in?”
Payne: “Well, I hope -- well, I hope to be back Saturday night.”
Chin: “Uh-huh. Okay. Well, I’ll get a hold of you.”
Payne: “But I -- I have to be in -- I have to be at Letterman the first thing Monday morning, so I” --
Chin: “Oh, I see. Oh, I thought you had already had that done.”
Payne: “No, no. Monday morning, I’ve got to be at Letterman Hospital.”
Chin: “I see. Okay.
“I was born there, too, you know.”
Payne: “Oh, you were?”
Chin: “Yeah, back -- well, not that hospital they have now, but back in the old” --
Payne: “Oh, the old place.”
Chin: -- “yeah, the old place.
“So, anyway -- all right. I’ll call you Sunday.”
Payne: “All right.”
Chin: “Okay. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”
Payne: “Good-bye.”
[End of Taped Interview]
