Audio
Colonel John Schonher Part 2
Transcript
Haller: “Could you tell us a little, Colonel Schonher, about the relationship of your Battery E and Battery Townsley, which it manned, to the higher echelons, the group --- groupment and the structure of the harbor defenses in San Francisco?”
Schonher: “The --- as far as the organization, there’s the battalion organization and then there’s the group --- the group was major caliber and the lighter caliber and the mines. There was really three units.”
Haller: “Three groups of the harbor defenses of San Francisco.”
Schonher: “Yes. The major caliber included Davis and Townsley and Wallace. And I never kept up too much on the six-inch gun batteries.
“To go back for the regional --- year before Pearl Harbor, we had the 6th Coast Artillery; we had the 2nd Battalion, 18th Coast Artillery; and we had the 56th, which was tractor-drawn. Of course, these were gradually withdrawn as time went on. The 18th was deactivated. And the officers, I think, went to either antiaircraft or Field Artillery; and I guess the enlisted personnel went into the Infantry. And this was what happened to the --- we also had an antiaircraft battalion. When it was activated was when I became a lieutenant colonel. Captain Mormon was also a lieutenant colonel, and he had --- he had command of the antiaircraft battalion. But that was finally deactivated.”
Haller: “Antiaircraft battalion of the 6th Coast Artillery?”
Schonher: “No. It was the 65th Coast Artillery. It was a separate battalion.
“They divorced antiaircraft from Coast Artillery. They were trying to integrate it --- at least, I thought they were in the beginning --- but they --- you could see there were distinct differences. ‘Cause most of the antiaircraft was mobile. Of course, there were fixed installations, too.
“But all these units were gradually cut down as time went on. And, again, at different periods of time after I’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel, they took out a cadre of one lieutenant colonel and one major to activate antiaircraft battalions. And this is where a good deal of the officer personnel left. And then Colonel Mormon was assigned to a Field Artillery.
“Very interesting about his unit --”
Haller: “Colonel Norman’s unit?”
Schonher: “Mormon.”
Haller: “Mormon’s unit, uh-huh.”
Schonher: “His picture’s in here. He was a captain when this was done. I’ll just save that.
“At any rate, one of the courses that I went to in 1943, I guess, they decided that field officers, who would make inspections of motor vehicles, would know what to look for. So they had a school down at the ordnance, people that had Santa --- had occupied Santa Anita racetrack. So Colonel Mormon, whatever, went down on one week’s tour of duty there to learn all the intricacies of what makes a --- what maintenance is required for motor vehicles. Before that, most any --- well, I can remember the regimental commander, all he did is look to see that everything was clean and take a look at the dipstick. That’s all they’d ever do. And (inaudible) was just coming in, was this modern detergent-type of oil; and it doesn’t look like the other. (inaudible), and he didn’t believe me. He got the motor-pool sergeant, said, ‘Oh, that’s new.’ So he finally gave in. That’s how much he knew about inspecting a motor.
“But, at any rate, while we were there, we saw a very interesting gun parked over there. It was an eight-inch field artillery gun. They didn’t know that it existed. It was just something new. It took a huge vehicle to move it. The strange thing about it is when I got a letter from Colonel Mormon and he said, ‘You’re’ --- and he had a battalion of those eight-inch guns.”
Haller: “Did he?”
Schonher: “He said all they’d do was set up and move, set up and move. He says, ‘I haven’t fired any shots yet.’ He didn’t know what to do with it, so they --- they phased that gun out anyway.”
Haller: “I wanted to ask you, because you were talking, very interestingly, about the overall scope of the duties of the company commander and how you were responsible for the perimeter defenses and laying barbed wire and the like.
“How about camouflage? What did you do to camouflage --- what could you do?”
Schonher: “Well, yeah. We couldn’t --- this was already being planned before I took over command of the battery. And they had strung out these cables from the top of the parapet to anchor bolts in the ground, and they put a great net that we could collapse very quickly and tow these cables out of the way to get the gun in a position to fire. And, of course, they had something different for the three-inch guns. There were flat things with cables running out of them. I don’t --- I’m not too familiar with them.
“I had an opportunity --- the Harbor Defense commander said they had arranged with the Navy to take a ride in one of the blimps, just to look at the camouflage. They had a blimp out all the time for patrol in the daytime for the antisubmarine alerts. So we --- I went down --- I guess I was the only one; yeah, I guess I was the only one --- they let me sit in the bottom of the air seat, which was fine; because it was right in the center of gravity, and I never got air sick.”
Haller: “I hear it was quite a ride.”
Schonher: “And here’s this plastic dome, you could look right down. And I remember coming up from off the field and we got over San Francisco and I said, ‘My God, these houses do have back yards in them.’”
Haller: “You’d never know from looking at the front.”
Schonher: “At any rate, we went over to the --- and the camouflage looked pretty good. Of course, I knew what I was looking for, so I could --- but it blended in very nicely. They put the right number of streamers, the right colors, in there. It looked very good.”
Haller: “Were there any other camouflage measures that you took?”
Schonher: “That’s all. That’s all. The --- the base-end stations had a certain amount --- they had the steel visors, they painted them with camouflage. And you look at them from a distance, you couldn’t distinguish them very well.”
Haller: “Speaking of paint, do you recall what color the battery was painted?”
Schonher: “They were sort of browns and greens, dull greens, you know.”
Haller: “On the base-end stations.”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “How about Battery Townsley?”
Schonher: “I don’t remember. I don’t remember.
“At any rate, talking about --- then we had to --- we had one --- one or two incidents where our authority checked our alertness by making dummy attacks, you know. But they never --- never affected me. Most of it was done on the San Francisco side because it was a lot easier, I guess.
“But it was interesting, because the people making reports of what they saw were pretty bad. Creating intelligence is really an exact science. You have to be exact in what you’re saying. Somebody says there’s a million of ‘em over there, you know, that’s stupid. Have to get about 17 or 20 of them, people in summer camouflage uniform. But these are things that were very interesting.
“Then the --- there were --- the regular Army officers were just being drawn off constantly, being that they had better background than the Reserve personnel and certainly were more qualified for what they were doing. Of course, they were --- as far as I could tell, they were equal --- equal. I felt that I did just as well as the battalion commander. We’d have been in bad shape without Reserve officers, so --- something a little under 300,000. You can understand how pitifully small the regular Army personnel was, very small. And even now, the ROTC provides more officer candidates than the academies do now, although they are expanded. Army, all through the Cold War.
“At any rate, I gradually moved up --- Captain Kramer got promoted to major. I was still a captain, finally got --- my first promotion was delayed because of this hang-up between our organization. I finally got to be a lieutenant colonel in January ’43, I think it was.”
Haller: “So what assignment were you --”
Schonher: “Oh, I had the --- well, I was a senior officer in the north post, so I had command of all the forts. I had general responsibility for them. Of course, you have quartermaster, all the other people that do all the housekeeping anyway.”
Martini: “You said --- you used the term “north post.” Were all of Baker, Barry and Cronkhite considered part of the same post?”
Schonher: “Well, no. They were all --- remained --- kept separately, as far as names are concerned. They were not important so much as --- as the armaments was concerned. I had the --- of course, I had Battery Wallace and Townsley and I had Battery Davis to the south. There was quite a bit of distance between them. And I had, also, command of the searchlight battery. And that was in the battalion, too; because it provided the illumination for the major caliber and for the others, too.”
Haller: “So as major caliber commander here on the north side, was your station --- action station then referred to as the Group Barry command post on Wolf Ridge?”
Schonher: “Well, there was a command post there, which I didn’t spend much time in. I hardly even remember --- I remember when we had target practice with … when I was battalion commander … with Battery Townsley. Captain Garth, I think, was in charge then. So I just stood outside of his command station and gave him his orders for his target --- because I wanted a place right there where I could see what’s going on and could see the guns fired that I’d never fired in a target practice.”
Haller: “I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I was just asking, was that --”
Schonher: “As far as administrative post, I --- I had that Fort Baker headquarters building, that little building up at the end of the parade ground. And when alert status got down much lower, why, I spent time there for administrative problems. And then the rest of the time, it was just a matter of inspections and constant supervision on what’s going on, which wasn’t --- it wasn’t a big chore, really.”
Haller: “But clarify for me, on high alert status, where were you supposed to be?”
Schonher: “Well --- I’m trying to remember. By the time I was battalion commander, I don’t think we ever had any Class A alerts. In June of 1942, of course, we had broken the Japanese code and we knew about the attacks on Alaska and Midway. They gave us that same information, because we wouldn’t know. Might have to do some kind of diversion even on the coast. So we knew about it in advance. But I don’t think that we had any real immediate alert. Maybe we were Class B, ready to go in 15 minutes. I just don’t remember. It was such a long period that we were there; and, yet, we spent so much of it in a rather relaxed state of readiness. Nothing was a threat.
“When I became battalion commander, Colonel Eustis was regimental commander at the time. He was a very competent officer. I admired him. He was a West Point graduate, and he went back in Reserve. He was Ford motor company executive in Richmond, and he came back as a lieutenant colonel. He was first the mine commander and he was promoted to colonel. And then he got a little itchy for something more. He wanted to get something in Europe or something. And, finally, he ended up --- he was provost marshal in North Africa.”
Haller: “Really.
“Do you mind --”
Schonher: “He came back for a visit afterwards, and he didn’t think much. He says, ‘You can’t believe what our troops can do.’”
Haller: “Did you ever feel itchy for another assignment?”
Schonher: “Yes, oh, yes. They were --- as I say, in --- when Colonel Eustis was the regimental commander --- and that’s 1943, at least, if I can remember --- they were taking out lieutenant colonels and majors for activating antiaircraft battalions almost every month or two. And Colonel Eustis said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to go.’ He just wouldn’t let me go. So that’s what happened there.
“Then the other time I ever had was in August of ’45, I was picked on what they call ‘Shipment X-ray” about 2,000 officers, to set up for the invasion of Honshu.”
Haller: “You were?”
Schonher: “Yeah. Yeah. There was about 2,000 officers there. They had to --- had to come up with a different type of organization, a much more massive type of situation, I guess, Japan. So I --- at headquarters on the post, I had to do something for the family and start to scurry around to find a place for them to rent, which was difficult. About the second day, Colonel Lefrenz(?) called me and says, ‘Ah, forget it.’ He says, ‘Somebody down at Presidio has bumped you off.’
“So the irony of it was they went out on the ship. I knew when they were going out. They went out of the Golden Gate Bridge on VJ Day. They kept going.”
Haller: “With this --- with this group of X-ray officers.”
Schonher: “Yeah, about 2,000 --- about 2,000 officers.”
Haller: “It was pretty ironic, indeed.”
Schonher: “Well, I thought that was so ironic.”
Haller: “What was VJ Day like for you?”
Schonher: “What?”
Haller: “Do you remember vividly events of VJ Day? Was that special?”
Schonher: “Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yes, yes. I --- I went down --- I went, actually, down to San Francisco that day, that afternoon; and the activities were really starting. There was --- everybody was out on the street. More sailors around than servicemen, really, and doing a lot of crazy things. I remember one was --- a couple of ‘em --- one sailor was doing a handstand on the Emporium building. I saw that, figured he was probably drunk anyway. But, at any rate, that was the big celebration.
“And then --- then we had the 6th Coast Artillery stage a large parade, VJ Day parade, about --- I don’t remember --- a day or so later.”
Martini: “After Market Street calmed down.”
Haller: “Was that in San Francisco or that was --”
Schonher: “Yeah, I was in command of the regiment, whatever, what was left of it, for the parade. It was interesting.”
Haller: “Where --- where did you parade?”
Schonher: “We started down on one of the side streets on Market --- down at the foot of Market Street. I don’t know how far we went up Market Street. I think up to Civic Center, at least. The Army outranks the Navy, so we led the parade.”
Martini: “You touched on something back there a little bit, when Steve was asking about units --- or the outlying posts from the actual battery itself, of Battery Townsley. What was your relationship to those cluster of three-inch guns on the hill above the battery? Were those directly under you or did they have their own command structure?”
Schonher: “They had their own command structure. They were a separate battalion. They weren’t part of the 6th Coast Artillery Regiment I think at that time. At one time, I remember going on active duty in 1939, that there was some unit --- I don’t know what it was … the 6th Coast Artillery manned those antiaircraft guns.”
Haller: “But only at the beginning of the war.”
Schonher: “Only at the very beginning.”
Martini: “My understanding is that they were there to protect you --”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Martini: “-- from air attacks.
“Did you coordinate with them?”
Schonher: “No. That --- they --- no, there was no --- they were under the command of the battalion commander. It was a Colonel Mormon at the time, and they were in touch with the radar setup that they had.”
Martini: “There were both --- as I understand it, both antiaircraft radar and surface-craft-detecting radar out in that area. Did you get input from the radar stations or did you rely on the base-end stations?”
Schonher: “Well, the radar for gun control didn’t come into being until way late, somewhere in ’44, --- ’45, I guess. Needless to say, we relied on the plotting board and a visual tracking of the target.”
Martini: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “And, generally, that was thought quite acceptable because the navy couldn’t do any better with the fog than we could. But they did develop the radar to the point where they could track a target. And we actually had a firing of it.
“By that time, they had --- before the plotting board, you either had a deflection angle on a sight that --- which would come far enough ahead of the target to reach it when the target gets there; or you could use the azimuth circle underneath the decepticon and then --- then you’d range drop for the range. Then they developed these synchronous motors to set a moving dial for elevation and a moving dial for the azimuth in connection with radar tracking of the target.
“And we actually conducted one with Battery Davis. As a safety officer for it, I don’t remember that I was too well prepared for it, because nobody gave me much information. But, at any rate, we’d picked a foggy day, we couldn’t see the mine planter towing the target target. They had a special reflector on the target that gave a good signal for the radar. And they started firing, and nobody could see anything. And the target, of course, was out where they could see the --- they were under the overcast. They could see the target being towed. So they could just plot the positions of the shots.
“But I never did remember --- or hear what the final results were. They weren’t --- they weren’t as accurate as they were with the other method. But this was --- needed more fine tuning, I would imagine.”
Martini: “So who was --- the crew on the gun was actually getting a readout to follow as they set the --”
Schonher: “Yes. They just --- at the elevation, there was a moveable pointer. All they had to do is keep --- keep the gun pointed to match the pointer. And on azimuth, all they had to do --- there’s a control that controls the motor turning that big turntable. All they had to do was match the pointer, and that’s all --- and they don’t have to wait for the bell to fire. They could fire any time. That data’s good continuously. At other times, you had to fire on the bell; because that’s --- that was your predictive point.”
Martini: “The time-interval bell?”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Martini: “Yeah. Now, your plotting room behind Battery Townsley --”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “-- and even inside the battery itself, certain areas were gas-proofed; and there was air locks and everything else.
“Was that a big fear?”
Schonher: “The plotting room did have that, that they could seal it and they could keep pressure inside, yeah. We didn’t use it, but it was there to use. I don’t remember much about it now.”
Martini: “So that wasn’t something that was preying on your mind, poison-gas attacks?”
Schonher: “No, we didn’t take that as a --- with the way the wind blows there all the time, we didn’t think that we had much problem with the gas.”
Martini: “There’s a --- there was an article written in National Geographic magazine in 1943. A woman writer wrote a big story about San Francisco, and it was titled something dramatic like “The Gibraltar of the Pacific.” And she writes about a visit to Battery Townsley, although she never uses its name. Do you remember that --- the visit or the --”
Schonher: “No, I don’t remember that visit. Now, that might have been --- well, I would have --- even as a battalion commander, I imagine I would have been apprised of it to be there. As I say, we had very few visitors. As I say, [Assistant –JM] Secretary of War McCloy.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “And then we had a Mexican general come by. I guess he was interested in seacoast.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “And photographers --- we had several air patrol officers there for a while that watched one firing. I don’t know why they were there, but they were invited to watch.”
Martini: “The fellows who were living up at the battery itself when you first moved in cots and all, it almost seems like the engineers or the planners who designed the batteries, the old type, like Battery Mendell and Chester and even the new ones, like Townsley, they never built in permanent living quarters. It seems like everybody had to kind of invent it after the war started.
“Wasn’t there any anticipation that in a modern war, there might be 24-hour crews out there?”
Schonher: “That, I don’t know. This is --- I don’t know. They didn’t --- I guess they thought maybe they could just live in shelter halves just like the Infantry. I don’t know.”
Martini: “It’s cold up there.”
Schonher: “Yeah. Well, the Infantry’s faced the same problem.”
Martini: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “The Infantry’s faced the same problem. But they --- I think they always felt that this was just going to be a one-time thing. You know, they can attack; you either repel them, they’re going to go away, or the Navy catches up with them and finally finishes them off. Anyway, they didn’t think there was going to be any long-term situation like this was. I think that’s --- that’s the thought there.
“You know, Fort Sumter, of course, they put their barracks inside and they caught on fire. And that ruined their --- actually, it was to the powder magazines and they couldn’t even fire; and they didn’t have the guns set up anyway.”
Martini: “Did the --- the other fellows from your battery, when they lived up there, they remember definitely living in those bunks suspended from the walls and all?”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “Remember when you and I and the other group visited last year, we went in that big access gate.”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “None of the other veterans I’ve ever taken up there remember going in that way. They all remember entering through the generator room.
“Do you remember any standard procedures for entering or leaving the battery?”
Schonher: “Well, we had gates --- there was a big kind of gate with a smaller gate back of each gun, get in that way. That, I know we had access to that; and that’s where the troops went out mostly, that I can remember; because it was right at the end of the corridors for both ways to go out. I think this is the way they went in and out.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Schonher: “We had --- we kept on with our retreat ceremony every day. That’s just part of living in the military.”
Martini: “You held retreats?”
Schonher: “Yeah. That’s --- well, yeah.”
Martini: “Did you have a flag staff?”
Schonher: “You go out. It’s a chance to inspect everybody, inspect their weapons; see if they’re tidy, their hygiene’s okay, uniform’s okay. It’s part of military life.”
Martini: “But where’d you have formation?”
Schonher: “Right out there in the road right in back on the battery.”
Martini: “Again, did you have a flag staff or did you --”
Schonher: “No, not that. No. They --- they had a --- they had --- later on, I think they did hold --- you could hear it from down at the battery --- at the barracks area. I’m not sure.
Martini: “Sounds like you had your [battery] parade out there.”
Schonher: “I just don’t remember. You always have --- you could play a retreat, you know, and play --- that’s what we did at Miley. We had a bugler do the ceremonies for us, and we had the two men take the flag down and go through the whole ceremony.”
Martini: “That was a question, too, about --- back when you were with Battery D, before you got up there, at Battery Chester, you made passing mention that you had two 12-inch disappearing guns.”
Schonher: “Yeah.”
Martini: “You had that one old barbette gun. Was the --- was the barbette gun --- were you actively using that one, also?”
Schonher: “Oh, well, we just trained on it. We --- we only did it for fun, really --”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “-- because we didn’t have enough personnel, I don’t think, that we could have used it.
“It was just something else that could be used. And we --- for that reason, we did train on how to --- how to load it and so on. I remember when --- of course, necessary training periods, there’s --- inspections are going on all the time. Everybody’s --- that’s where I started for --- based my rapport with the battalion commander that checked my training. He was a --- he was a real beater himself. I mean, you know, first lieutenant colonel. And he apprised what I was doing correctly, and that’s why I was sent to take care of Battery E.
“But, at any rate, I remember this one group --- I don’t know who they were --- inspectors, maybe from Fourth Army. And we’re talking about --- oh, one of the officers --- I think he was a major in one of the juniors of the group --- he said, ‘Did you ever fire these guns?’ I said, ‘Look at that --- Sutro Baths down there, they’re all glass roofs.’ I said, ‘You know what would happen if we fire the gun?’ He said, ‘Well, we could pay for it.’
“As far as I know --- I don’t know if those guns --- they were fired. I --- not when Sutro Baths were there.”
[End of Tape 2, Side 1.]
Schonher: “-- Fort Baker, and he came up with some interesting papers there about some of the things that went on on the post in the late 1800s.
“Like some sergeant had gotten a letter reminding him to keep his cows off the parapets because they were eroding the earthwork parapets, the vibration of the cows.
“And they had one coal scuttle for the whole Officers’ Row, and the big fight was always who --- what senior would get the brass coal (inaudible.)
“And another one, some officer was reprimanded because he was late getting on the bus in Sausalito. The bus was an escort wagon, horse-drawn, but they had regular service for the personnel to go to Sausalito.”
Haller: “Now, up until its last years, the Presidio was, you know --- for Sixth Army, that was considered to be a really good post. Was Fort Scott considered a good Coast Artillery post?”
Schonher: “Yes, yes. They --- I look back on it. I don’t know if I agree with it. All those peacetime years, there was so little money for training, that the troops --- they had skeletonized troops, maybe 90 men in a battery. A lot of their time was spent just on housekeeping duties; mowing the grass or policing, guard duty.
“And the officers concerned had no ability to train. They’d go down to the --- the captain would go down and sign the morning report in the morning and then go out do something and he’d go back to his quarters, if he wanted to, I guess. You know, this is --- this is boredom. And I think this --- we got a real bad situation, as far as serving that theater.
“And this is why some younger people, like Eisenhower, moved upward. Too many of the older people were too set in their ways and had very little imagination and very little knowledge of what to do, even. And so that’s the way I see it.”
Haller: “How do you see --”
Schonher: “And then we --- you brought up a group of Reserve officers were highly motivated to get going and they all --- well, they’re college graduates, mostly. I think they did yeoman’s duty as far as the Harbor Defense. And I’m sure 35th Infantry was the same way. I know that one of my classmates in high school was captain of the 35th Infantry and very competent; graduate of Oregon State.”
Haller: “How do you see the contribution that you made to the defenses of San Francisco and how do you feel about that, in the context of World War II, as you look back upon it after the passage of some 50 years?”
Schonher: “Well, I --- I’m confident that I certainly had been able to perform my duty very capably. I don’t see any problem with what I had to do. It’s just a matter of training and responsibility that --- I think the CCC training I had helped me a lot with dealing with people as a captain.
“Incidentally, I always look back on it as sort of a rewarding time. Because you were responsible for 200 men, and there are a lot of things you can do for them.
“I remember one of the --- our best trainee, as far as knowledge of what he was doing, was a man that had badly crossed eyes; very conscious of it himself. You’d go talk to him, his eyes would start dancing and he’d look very nervous. But found out the inspectors that come by, they’d picked him out right away; and the hands are just like that (indicating). So I put him in the front rank every time, and every time they’d hit him. And he had every --- never asked anybody else.
“At any rate, he had some problem with his eye and started going to the post infirmary. He went to Letterman, which was handy, and sent a number of people over there simply because they had more specialists, more doctors --- a lot of --- lot of Reserve medical doctors on active duty. They were very competent people. And the man that saw him was an eye surgeon. And whatever it was, he finally up --- he said, ‘You know, I can correct your eyes.’ And he’d like to do it to keep his hand in, you know, instead of just taking sick call.
“So when he came --- the man came back, he came and asked me what to do about it. I said, ‘Sure, go right ahead.’ I said --- ‘It costs money.’ ‘I mean, I’ll send you’ --- ‘How can anybody afford it?’ I said, ‘It’s a very simple operation.’
“And they did correct it. It’s hardly noticeable, and it changed his whole character. He became --- lost his nervousness. His eyes didn’t dance. He was very confident. He was one of our first sergeants --- the first man I promoted to sergeant.
“See, as a battery commander, you --- you have pretty much a freelance of who you promote. You just send in your recommendation to headquarters, and they issue an order and that’s it. The battalion commander generally has some say about the first sergeant --- the top very first sergeants, but I had no trouble with mine.
“I can remember a first sergeant, who was a man who was ready for retirement, he’d been a caretaker at Fort Miley for years and years, where it was just a caretaker place because they kept the armament there. And he also had an interesting story about --- it’s right next to the golf course there, and these golf balls keep coming over; and he had a hard time keeping the kids out. And he told me about one time he locked one of them up in of the data booths there at the mortar battery. You wouldn’t dare do a thing like that now, but that scared him silly. But he said he got enough golf balls to buy a used car. Just go down to the pro shop.
“But, anyway, the --- I remember on my inspection --- on the morning inspection of the barracks, that the sergeant, staff sergeant, had his own little room at the end of the barracks. Up on his shelf, he had about eight --- eight or nine books on English history, mathematics. And I tried to ask him about it, and he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘everybody’s right from high school, but,’ he says, ‘I’ve studied all these books.’ And he was later my first sergeant. And he was topnotch. He was --- he could be an officer any day.”
Martini: “Do you remember his name?”
Schonher: “Matthews.
“And, of course, we were sending a lot of people out --- you know, even the Reserve personnel wasn’t enough, their officer personnel. We sent a lot of men to Officers Candidate School. It’s still in operation. And I kept nagging him for that, and he kept saying about another sergeant. He said, ‘How about’ --- he says, ‘How about Hatten, he got washed out.’ And I said, ‘Well, I know why he got washed out; because he’s got a short fuse, and you can’t be that way and be an officer.’ I said, ‘He blew up one day and they just washed him out.’ Well, he wouldn’t take it and wouldn’t take it.
“Then he went out later with, I guess --- I don’t know --- Infantry, I guess, in the South Pacific. Anyway, he got a battlefield promotion, second lieutenant. You couldn’t miss that man, that’s what I ---
“So I thought this was --- Battery E had quite a few people that went to Officers Candidate School. In fact, the --- my battalion executive officer was a first sergeant before the war; and I think he may have been a warrant officer. I’m not sure. But he went to Officers Candidate School, and he was never --- never even graduated high school. But he was a real leader and very competent. And he finally end up at SHAEF, where they’ve got that --- in New York, the --- the construction --- with the construction Quartermaster. He was a --- he had a real knack at getting things done. This was a doer. And the last thing I heard, he had retired. Well, when he went back, the Sixth Army asked for him by name to come there. And so he came there and retired, Sixth Army. Well, he was one of the people that are very interesting.
“And the other incident that happened --- you know, about the captain’s responsibility --- was Monday morning, I got a call that three of my men were in the --- were arrested by the police. So I --- I guess the MPs told me about it. I said, ‘When are they going to be in court?’ And they said in the morning. I said, ‘Okay. I’ll be down there.’
“So I went down to the court and Hall of Justice. In those days, I could park the car near it. At any rate, Theresa Michael is the judge, I guess, the municipal. She had a very nice reputation. So before anybody --- the court started, I went up to her and said who I was and what I was there for. And she says, ‘Well, just wait here by the --- by the bench and we’ll see what’s going on.’
“They finally brought in the three boys, and the patrolman got up to testify. And he was rambling on about the boisterous comments. The judge told me, she says, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ She said, ‘Case dismissed.’ So I picked ‘em up and took ‘em back.
“All they were doing was --- they hadn’t even been drinking. They was just feeling good and they were happy-go-lucky on one of the avenues out there in the Richmond district. They were on foot because they could walk to Fort Miley. They were arrested for --- I don’t know --- no reason at all.
“This is the public’s visualization of military people before the war. I know we had problems in Sausalito, and they wanted --- the military police took over most of the problems in San Francisco that --- the police didn’t do anything. They got out of the picture. The Marin County, they didn’t like military personnel in public, I guess. And they were trying to angle, I think, for MPs to take over duty in Marin County; and they didn’t want it. They were stretched too much.
“I know one of my sergeants, he was driving in Sausalito and he was trying to find an address. The car --- I guess he might have weaved a little there, but the patrolman arrested him, yeah. They --- I remember that call. They finally let him go. They didn’t charge him with anything. But there was that sentiment that --- I remember I talked with someone. I said, ‘These are your sons that are here.’ I said, ‘What did they do that for?’
“But particularly Mill Valley was kind of a --- what you call an upscale English background? I don’t know. They had their own feelings about that, and it wasn’t too good. But it changed. It changed as war progressed. As people were making sacrifices, they --- they changed. Everybody changed.”
Martini: “Everybody knew someone who was in the military.”
Schonher: “Well, they know --- they can understand the pain of anybody losing their husbands and their sons.”
Haller: “Well, now that you visit the park 50 --- 50 years later, you still see the gun batteries out there; and the public still comes to visit the park. And some of them know a lot about gun batteries and --- not very many of them, though probably most of them know very little.
“So the point I’m getting at is, is what --- what would you have us tell the public, in just the few words that we may have, that would really capture the essence of what you were trying to do out there in those days?”
Schonher: “Well, we were responsible for the defense of San Francisco Bay area from an enemy attack, and this was a possibility in view of the fact that we had no Navy to protect us, which would be our first line of defense. And there was always a chance --- what happens in the future, you don’t know. And we have to take conscious of the fact that --- could make a serious threat to us, and we were prepared. We were prepared.”
Martini: “Especially those first days after --”
Schonher: “Right.”
“But even --- even --- even in June, they attacked Midway and Pearl --- they had the capability of going anywhere they wanted. And the fact that we had cracked the code, there could have been a disaster there, both Midway and in Alaska. And they had --- the Japanese had very realistic thoughts of dictating a peace in Washington. That’s what they said.
“Another interesting thing, I think --- I don’t know if I mentioned this --- we had a lot of submarine alerts. I remember the first --- first night or so, we got notice that they had --- the Navy and shore patrol had detected a submarine coming in the Golden Gate. And I think this is before the net was down. They had a submarine net down. Well, that was a little bit of excitement, but that finally filtered out that it wasn’t --- they had a lot of, I’m sure, false alerts.
“But I remember after the war was over --- and I stayed on until 1946, in June, was still there. And one of the officers that had been on duty there was in Japan, and he was present at some of the debriefing of some of the Japanese officers. And one Japanese sub commander mentioned that he had approached the Golden Gate, gave the date and time. And so we rushed down to the harbor defense patrol post and looked up in the log and, sure enough, it checked with one of the alerts. So that’s the only thing we ever confirmed.
“We had a tragic accident when one of the PBYs --- PBYs from Treasure Island went out on a submarine alert, crashing on Wolf Ridge. As I remember, I got word of somebody --- two survivors who had been ejected from the bubbles on the side. They were kind of skinned up, lacerated, but they made it down the hill to the road; and they were taken to the station hospital, and they --- and that was the first word we had of it. We didn’t know about it. And I picked up one of the medical officers and we drove --- I drove the --- we were able to drive the staff car right up to it. And I picked up the guard at the post there. Really didn’t need it (inaudible) get there anyway. But, at any rate, the plane was burned out by then. The motors and the depth charges had ended up down in the brush. It just missed the --- the ridge was rather shallow, and you could see the mark where the float of the plane scars it.
“The survivor said, ‘The only thing I remember was the intercom and somebody said, ‘Commander, watch your air speed.’ So he must have been dropping a little bit. And the plane didn’t go very far after it hit. It just --- the pilot was dead. He was --- the grass burned around about a hundred feet around out there. He was halfway in and halfway out. He had a compound fracture of one leg, but he might have survived if that fire hadn’t caught up with him. The rest of them were all burned in the middle of the plane --- you know, the whole central part just burns up.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “So that was the --- one of the only real accidents, I guess, with the submarine alerts.”
Martini: “Did you handle that or did the Navy come in --”
Schonher: “No. I just waited there until the --- it happened to be payday and bills scattered all over. I gathered it in stocking caps and gathered up everything I could and waited there until the Navy personnel from Treasure Island got there on the bus that came in from the other way.
“And you could just see the sentiment, you know, the feeling on their faces, you know; because they’d just seen these people, a few hours before, take off. Very tragic.
“Now, another interesting thing, we --- the United Nations Committee For International Organization took place in San Francisco at the opera house in, I think, about May, June --- it was before --- it was after VE Day, I guess, or VJ Day. Anyway, President Truman came out --”
Haller: “Yeah. They came out in May, June --- May and June, I think, in ’45.”
Schonher: “It was after VE Day, I think.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “Anyway, I was able to see him one night. Went down to --- we got a --- they gave us a free pass to go to one session of the --- at the opera house and saw Statineus (phonetic) make up the --- whatever the business of the day. But we also held a reception at the Presidio Officers Club for the military personnel of the --- of the participants. And that was very interesting, to meet all these officers from all these countries.
“There was one lieutenant general --- British lieutenant general from India; an Air Force man from Egypt; very tall, very dark-skinned man, very precise, British --- English-speaking --- of course, educated --- Turkish officer. And had one captain, an officer from Soviet Union, a captain with these baggy pants, you know. He had picked up some sergeant at Sixth Army that knew Russian as an interpreter. So everybody’s formed around to talk to him; because they were --- actually, they were supposedly our ally during the war. And they didn’t get too much out of him.
“Later on, I was talking to this British lieutenant general and I said, ‘You know, it’s hard talking to a person with an interpreter.’ He says, “Ah, hell, that son-of-a-bitch knows how to speak and understand English. He’s just using that as a cover.’ I just about exploded.”
Haller: “In --- I guess in our last 10 minutes or so, what --- what was your career like after VJ Day?”
Schonher: “VJ Day? Well, I could leave, but I still --- I was debating whether to stay in the service at the time. I didn’t know what the future would be. My children were in school at the time; and I thought, well, at least I’ll wait until June. I said, ‘I will sign up for another six months if you’ll let me stay here.’ Well, they agreed.
“Well, the Infantry --- my children went to school up on Pacific Heights area. And during that United Nations conference, they could --- in the morning, when they’d go to class, they’d see Molotov and his staff going out for a walk right near the school. They had a --- rented a house up there by that place. Every once in a while, going downtown, I’d get on Van Ness Avenue, you could see the entourage with Molotov’s big sedan on his way to his quarters.
“But, at any rate, they did offer a chance to get a permanent commission in the Army. And --- but, in the meantime, I wanted to get out --- I had to go out in June. So I went to Camp Biel for separation.”
Martini: “Which one?”
Schonher: “Camp Biel.”
Martini: “Oh, Camp Biel, yeah.”
Haller: “Oh, yeah.”
Schonher: “At that time, I did --- I put in an application, but there weren’t very many openings in the regular service for lieutenant colonels from the Coast Artillery. So I didn’t --- I wasn’t accepted at that time. I think they did take a few officers that went into the --- what amounted to the --- what finally became the Air Force and these ballistic missiles, because they felt some relationship with artillery, but there were very few. I know one of the --- one of the (inaudible) I knew went down there to Texas.”
Martini: “Fort Bliss?”
Schonher: “Out of White Sands; White Sands.
“At any rate, I went back to my work with the Franchise Tax Board as a supervising auditor, and I finally retired in 1972 as a tax administrator. I did go --- I did continue, of course, activity in the Reserve because I wanted to stay available. And in the Reserve, your retirement age is 60. And I finally got my retirement there with --- I got almost 10 years of active duty, so I apparently got extra compensation on the retirement there.
“They did --- they did put out a letter, asking that any colonels that wanted to go on active duty for the Korean War as an inspector general. And I got one because I was working with taxes. But at that time, I thought, well, that’s only temporary and I’ve got a career here. So I didn’t --- I didn’t apply for it.”
Martini: “Do you keep in touch with any of the men that you knew back from the harbor defenses?”
Schonher: “No. I --- no. One of these men here, Bedford --”
Martini: “Bedford, yes.”
Schonher: “-- Bedford, he was a classmate of mine at Berkeley, I think.”
Martini: “Bedford Boyes?”
Schonher: “No. The last name is Bedford.
“And the other one --- and the only other one I knew was in the infantry, and I knew him (inaudible). He’s still alive. His wife died. I see him at the commissary occasionally. I can’t think of his name right off hand. Those are the only two.
“Let’s see. Now, in the Reserve organization here, I went on a command general staff, teaching. I went back to the school itself and completed the command general staff course. The last tour was at --- command staff --- general staff college. And the only reason I’m thinking about --- they have the federal prison there.”
Haller: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “We had --- we had one real problem with one enlisted man, an escape artist. That was when I was commander out there. And we had a guardhouse set at [Fort] Barry. And this man --- I don’t remember what he was first charged with, but he was working out there at the garbage dump. And he had --- he would influence other people. He got somebody to get the driver of the dump truck to stop and get some liquor in Sausalito, and then he finally took the truck himself and drove to San Francisco to pick up his wife; and I guess he had a child.
“We spread the alarm right away. I got a hold of our military police at Fort Scott, and they notified the Highway Patrol. They stopped this kid driving this dump truck --”
Haller: “Dump truck.”
Schonher: “-- down the peninsula.”
Martini: “That’s a give-away.”
Schonher: “Got him back, put him back in the guardhouse. And we told the sergeant of the guard that one man was (inaudible). And I got word, finally, that he was trying to file out the bar in the cell. I made an inspection of it and, sure enough, the bar had been cut in half. And then the guard was out with him, just a single man, picking up litter along the road there towards the tunnel. And I guess the fella decided the guard wasn’t too alert and he just took off. So he was gone again. So we alerted and, finally, they followed his wife to a motel in San Diego, searched it. They looked underneath the sink, and he was curled up underneath the sink. So this time they sent him to Levenworth. And then he tried to escape there and they killed him.”
Martini: “Oh, geez.”
Schonher: “Those guards --”
Martini: “Yeah --- well --”
Schonher: “But it’s unfortunate --- he was --- he was looking at that man in uniform, he was just the best, clean-cut fellow you ever imagined. He conned everybody. His father was in San Quentin (inaudible) to this fellow, his father was (inaudible). You know, he had the wrong slant on life completely.”
Haller: “I guess so.
“We’re about to run out of tape. So I was just wondering, are there any final words that you’d like to say to us at the end of this very interesting interview?”
Schonher: “Well, I’ll take a look here at my notes. I get rambling here and I don’t know what I’m saying sometimes.”
Martini: “Let me pause and put in the last bit.”
Haller: “Okay.”
[End of interview of Colonel John Schonher, Retired.]
Description
A discussion of San Francisco Harbor Defense between Colonel John Schoner and Golden Gate National Park Historians Stephen Haller and John Martini conducted in 1995.
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