Jack Barnes was born in Cisco, Texas in 1922. Shortly after his birth, his family moved from Cisco because his father was a cable tool driller. He worked in multiple sites in Texas as a result. His father pumped water at Odessa, Pecos, Humble Town and Penwell. Penwell is about 18 miles west of Odessa. They caught a large rattlesnake while there. Barnes and his brother saw him on the way to school. The two boys and their father captured the snake together. It was on display for years in a gas station. Barnes found a container of snuff and tried it. He was sent home from school after a fit of vomiting. It was a hard lesson but worth learning. Barnes graduated from a high school in Fort Worth in June 1941. He went to work afterward. The family had problems with their radio so news was difficult to get. They did hear about the attack on Pearl Harbor. That event caused a lot of things to start happening. Barnes' brother was 18 months older than he. The brother was drafted and gone before Barnes was drafted. Barnes received his draft notice and left his work for the service. He was sent to Mineral Wells, Texas for induction.

After induction, Jack Barnes went to Camp Howze in Gainesville, Texas for nine months of training. He trained in everything including building bridges and running a maintainer [Annotator's Note: a maintainer is a heavy duty work vehicle]. He carried a rifle and his unit [Annotator's Note: 311th Engineer Combat Battalion, 86th Infantry Division] had a bazooka and other weapons. His outfit mainly had trucks, graders, tractors and other equipment for construction. They also had boats. A year or two after training, they continued to be utilized as trainers for new inductees. They trained in Louisiana for amphibious assaults in the Pacific then were sent to California to train others. They then went by train cross country to Camp Miles Standish in Massachusetts to board a ship for Europe. The voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was rough. They were in a large convoy which had to maintain its speed for the slowest ships to keep up. There were 7,000 troops on his ship plus a contingent of 500 Marine guards in addition to the merchant seamen operating the vessel. The ship had troop bunks 12 high. It was a converted German luxury liner. It was very uncomfortable. The ship was named the USS General Hizemon [Annotator's Note: ship name not be confirmed]. The officers' quarters were very nice on the ship but Barnes did not spend much time in that area. The chow lines were endless and constant. The disgusted cooks would slap the food in the troops' mess kits. With the roll of the ship, the mess kit would slide and sometimes food would be dumped on another man. There was no sitting unless they were out on the deck. The ship landed in Le Harve, France. There was nothing but a burned out German pillbox that had been destroyed by a flamethrower. There were no docks so the men went over the side of the ship on rope ladders. They were fully loaded with their gear and had to be very careful not to fall the 20 feet or so into the LST or LSM below. [Annotator's Note: Landing Ship, Tank and Landing Ship, Medium]. The landing craft would drop its anchor off the beach for the troops to wade ashore.

After crossing the Atlantic, Jack Barnes arrived in Le Harve, France. He then motored into Belgium. From Belgium, Barnes and his outfit [Annotator's Note: 311th Engineer Combat Battalion, 86th Infantry Division] went to Aachen, Germany. Aachen had been largely blown away with only a random column standing here and there. It was absolutely devastated. Barnes and his outfit were moving all the time to follow the Germans who were rapidly falling back. One enemy prisoner told Barnes that he had never fired at the Americans. He only fired in the air. The surrendering German prisoners were plentiful. Barnes' officers told the troops to leave the prisoners where they found them. Barnes thought this was a bad idea because the enemy could reform and attack the Americans again. It was difficult keeping up with the volume of those surrendering. Some of the enemy were even were allowed to go home. Barnes was in Germany for four months. During that time he crossed the Danube River at night in assault boats. The small boat carried 12 infantrymen with paddles plus their gear. To man the boat, there were two engineers in the front and one in the rear of the boat who steered it. The current in the river was so strong that the boat had to be headed upriver in order to get to the right landing location. Bright shell bursts lit up the night. Men were lost in the river. Barnes was not hit but he saw casualties on both sides of him. The following day, Barnes was with a chaplain. He saw an officer and his radioman, both of whom had been killed by a tree burst. The two men were frozen in their death position. This occurred near Nuremburg, Germany. Barnes also laid infantry foot bridges over the Rhine River. It started with cables and then the walkway was spread across. The infantry had to keep moving across the bridge in order not to get wet. If they stopped, they would get immersed in the water. There was enemy shelling going on while the bridges were being built. The German 88mm gun was particularly accurate. The shells would skip across the ground if nothing was hit. Barnes and his outfit went into a dairy. It was full of captured Germans, including women. One American disappointed Barnes when he stripped a ring off a woman's finger. Most Americans did not act that way. Barnes also remembered hearing a wounded German asking for aid before a spray of machine gun fire silenced him. Barnes never shot his rifle, although he spotted a running man that he figured was hiding. He could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Barnes and his unit would clear roads that had been blocked by large downed trees used as obstructions. He would lie on one side of the road and observe enemy shells ricocheting across the other side of the road. There were approximately 900 men in Barnes' battalion. He was in Company C. There were Companies A, B, and C plus the Headquarters unit in the rear. The outfit had a bulldozer and other heavy equipment. They had weapons such as bazookas. An item called an idiot stick was also used. It would be pushed in the ground and was part of the operation of building bridges. Thick slabs would be installed to increase foundation weight on footbridges. When the war ended, Barnes was near Munich in a town called Ingolstadt. The unit was headed to Austria but orders had changed. Barnes made it to the edge of Austria where he observed a cheese manufacturing operation. He found the operation interesting but not appetizing. The unit had a few days in Nancy and Lyon, France in a large hotel. Barnes liked to look out for the local young people in the population. He was on the third floor when he saw a crippled youngster. He admonished the others to move back so the cripple could get the candy. He finally got the candy to the youngster. The children would fight over sweets because they had very little food, let alone candies. This was because of Hitler. If he had listened to his generals, the war would have gone differently. Rommel [Annotator's Note: German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel] could have given particularly good advice if Hitler would have listened. The war in the east between Russia and Germany was particularly vicious. If a person wanted to strike terror in a German, all that was necessary was to tell them that the Russians were coming.

Jack Barnes returned to the United States for 30 days after he left Europe following Germany's surrender. Following his leave, Barnes got onboard a ship in Camp Stoneman in California. He was headed to the war in the Pacific. The attack on Japan would have been as difficult as that experienced in attacking the bluffs in Normandy. When his ship reached the International Dateline, word was received that Japan had surrendered. The ship was diverted to the Philippines. The voyage took 19 days. Barnes felt that Mr. Truman [Annotator's Note: President Harry S. Truman] dropping the second bomb caused the war to end and, although many lives were lost, many more lives were saved. Casualties for the attack on Japan had been projected to be far higher than those lives lost due to the atomic bombs. Barnes was happy the war had ended. During his four months in the Philippines, Barnes helped build a 20 lane bowling alley in a location in the mountains near Manila and Clark Field. Barnes took care of the construction truck with the air tools and air compressors. When the Americans left, they left behind their equipment. They boarded a ship in Manila. They observed a young lady running up to the ship who told them "Go home, victors." The Japanese had been brutal to the Filipinos. Some of the Japanese soldiers hid in the juggles for 30 years and never surrendered. Barnes had a brother-in-law who was on Iwo Jima. He carried a flame thrower and was with the 2nd or 3rd Marines. Barnes' relative said he would be talking to a friend and the next minute the friend would be dead. Barnes' brother-in-law saw the original flag that was raised on Mount Suribachi. Shortly afterward, two of the men who raised that flag were dead. War is hell. Barnes felt he was in a lucky outfit because it went to Europe instead of the Pacific. Although he was in a unit that was in a running gun battle with the enemy, he never had much danger except when he had to do the river crossing where the boys in his boat were going directly into the fight. After the Philippines, Barnes returned to the United States and was discharged at Fort Sam Houston as a T-5 [Annotator’s Note: Technician 5th Grade]. Veterans returned to the states and were maintained in cadres. At Camp Howze in Gainesville, Texas most of the men were kept together. On arrival in San Antonio, Barnes was brought into a cubicle and a man attempted to convince him to stay in the service. Barnes refused because he was ready to go home. The war made him appreciate his country even more than he did before. He had little use for the French people because they seemed to take advantage of all that they could. Germans seemed to be industrious people. For Barnes, learning French was difficult. German was easier to learn because of common sounds with English words. He was glad he served though he was frightened much of the time. It was hard to leave his family. Barnes wished that Hitler had been killed far earlier so that the pain of the German people would have been lessened.