John Campbell was born Clinton Township, Ohio in 1926. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks about life during the Great Depression.] His father died in 1930. They were farm people. His brother was 12 years older, but not old enough to run a farm. His mother had too many things on her plate, so they had a big sale. They lost a lot of money but the neighbors who bought the things they sold, made sure they never ran out of eggs or butter. The family was invited to help butcher and would go home with some meat. They moved into town, Tiffin, Ohio. There were four kids and his older brother went to work for a farmer on the condition that he finish high school. He got room and board and about a dollar a month. Campbell remembers his first business endeavor at eight years old. He started selling newspapers. He had hand-me-down clothes on and sold a lot of papers to people who felt sorry for him. He received one cent for each paper sold. As a family they never were on relief. His mother would not even take the government coal. The only thing he knows she ever took were his eye glasses when he was in the third grade. His sisters worked. They cleaned houses, baby sat and pet sat. When the war came along, they were still thinking about jobs. They thought it was great that the war industries were coming along making good times for them. World War 2 was what got the country out of the Great Depression. Mr. Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] knew that when he was elected. If you look at the history of the US Merchant Marine in that time, the 1936 bill [Annotator's Note: Merchant Marine Act of 1936] was to build a merchant fleet to get ready for the coming war.

John Campbell was mostly selling newspapers while in high school. He was making as much as a lot of men who were working part time. A friend of his was an honors student and he was going to sea as a radio operator. He got Campbell interested. His mother was working as a seamstress. Her work was falling away. Campbell needed to make more money and he was bored in school. By his sophomore year, he was so bored he would do anything to get away. He was ahead of the teacher in United States history because it was his passion. He went up to Cleveland [Annotator's Note: Cleveland, Ohio] and got his papers which allowed him to ship. He took a job as a wiper [Annotator's Note: apprentice to an oiler; cleans engine spaces and machinery] because he did not like the cold and would be down where it was warm. He started his career as a wiper and a coal passer [Annotator's Note: person who shovels coal on steam ships]. He did not like firing coal. He did his training aboard ship. He went to Sheepshead Bay [Annotator's Note: Sheepshead Bay Maritime Service Training Station, Brooklyn, New York, 1942 to 1954] in the fall of 1944 to get his lifeboat ticket. He wanted an engineer's license. Everywhere they went was in a 60-man group. There were unusual people involved and he was glad to get out of there. He could not pass the Navy Reserve physical because he had only one good eye.

The first saltwater trip John Campbell made as a US Merchant Marine [Annotator's Note: Campbell regularly does not finish his thoughts]. Campbell discovered his papers limited him to freshwater lines. He got on a coastwise trip. A lot of ships were being lost off the East Coast and they needed bodies. He took a ship up to New York carrying some kind of grain. The ship was not seaworthy and was shut down by the Coast Guard. Campbell was told he needed to be a year older. He went to the Coast Guard and got his papers stamped for going to sea. His first trip was to England. They carried SPAM [Annotator's Note: canned cooked pork made by Hormel Foods Corporation], powdered milk, and powdered eggs. That was a 60 to 70 day round trip. He was a fireman and watertender [Annotator's Note: also called a stoker or water tender; tends the fire for running a boiler]. On the merchant ships they did both jobs. The Army and Navy had three or four guys doing the same job. He made three trips as a fireman. The convoy sizes varied. Early on, it was 12 to 15 and then towards the end of the Atlantic war it was 50 or 60. The one time he was afraid was going into Gibraltar [Annotator's Note: United Kingdom territory] with a convoy of about 150 ships and escorts. The rumor was that there three to four wolfpacks [Annotator's Note: convoy hunting tactic used by submarines during which a number of submarines carry out coordinated attacks against enemy shipping] of German subs [Annotator's Note: submarines] in the area. The convoy had to go down to three or four ships to get through the pass at Gibraltar [Annotator's Note: Strait of Gibraltar]. Campbell was afraid to go on watch because they were sitting ducks. Every so often they would hear torpedoes going off in the distance. It is a sound you never forget. Off the record, he felt that the Spanish fishing boats were directing the German submarines. He felt the fleets of fishing boats hid submarines underneath them. Radar and sonar were terrible at that time. Several ships were lost in that operation. There are times when he was scared for one thing or another, but that time he was truly afraid to go down into the engine room.

John Campbell was on nine different Liberty ships [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] over 13 voyages. When he sailed on the O’Brien [Annotator's Note: SS Jeremiah O’Brien] on his 14th voyage, she was his tenth Liberty ship. He was just a passenger on that ship. He had gone through Gibraltar [Annotator's Note: Strait of Gibraltar] in late 1944. They went from there to Oran [Annotator's Note: Oran, Algeria] with wheat. They then went to Arzu [Annotator's Note: likely Orzu, Iran] and got British vehicles and light howitzers to take to India. In India, they loaded different kinds of British trucks and brought them to Italy. By late 1944, he was mostly oiling. Kids were coming out of schools who then had to be taught their jobs. They knew the basics like knots and maritime terms. They were eager to be seamen but took one trip and then went and joined the Army. In Tom Brokaw's [Annotator's Note: Thomas John Brokaw, American television journalist and author] book [Annotator's Note: The Greatest Generation, 1998], there is one little paragraph about a Merchant Marine cadet who took a pleasure cruise to North Africa. He was so bored he joined the Army Airborne afterwards. It was safer. At that time, the Mediterranean did not belong to us and neither did the Atlantic. The kid probably heard some stories and got scared. A cadet would have been quartered below the bridge or behind it and would be in the chart room and studying navigation. That is all Tom Brokaw had in his book about the Merchant Marine and it was not really accurate.

According to Winchell [Annotator's Note: Walter Winchell, syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist], Hearst [Annotator's Note: William Randolph Hearst, Sr., American businessman, newspaper publisher, politician], and those people, John Campbell was making 20,000 dollars per year which was wealth in those times. On an average trip, he made around 18 to 20 dollars per day as a senior petty officer. They paid all of their own transportation and doctor bills. This made him angry. Several thousand men whose ships were sunk, and they came out of the water with oil of some kind in every orifice of their bodies. They were not sent to military hospitals and cleaned up. They were sent to charity or public health hospitals that were not equipped to deal with them. Most of them died young, and many died a horrible death. What they gave was never recognized until 1988 [Annotator's Note: Veterans Programs Enhancement Act, 19 January 1988] and then it was a cursory recognition. Campbell did not go to sea to get rich or avoid the draft or to get out of prison. There was a war on, and this country needed them. Most of them could not get into the military for various reasons. Some who were too old and could not pass the physicals were sailing the merchant ships. No one was ever conscripted or drafted for the Merchant Marine, but they had the highest casualty rate in World War 2. They lost one man for every 26 to enemy military action. He went to sea because he was bored with high school, he wanted to make money, and he wanted to contribute to the war effort.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks John Campbell about pay. He explains the lengthy process for getting paid.] They would eventually get into a warzone on the ship. By 1943, the warzone was just outside of Long Island [Annotator's Note: Long Island, New York]. There was a bonus, the Russians started it. They would pay 100 percent of wages for a run into Murmansk [Annotator's Note: Murmansk, Russia]. They did not know where they were going when they took the trip though. The combat bonus was five dollars per day. If the ship was lost, the pay stopped completely. A ship was sunk in the Barents Sea [Annotator's Note: Arctic Ocean, north of Norway and Russia]. About seven days later, a sailor was picked up and went to Murmansk. 87 days later he got back to New York. His pay for that length of time was four dollars and 50 cents per day when averaged out. The Navy and the USSR [Annotator's Note: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] would issue a temporary pass to survivors. Upon reaching the United States, the Coast Guard would detain such a person until they were investigated. Then you could get new papers and go get paid whatever you had coming. In Glasgow [Annotator's Note: Glasgow, Scotland], there was an old hotel and it was a favorable place to be stranded. The Scottish were thankful for food and were good to the sailors. The acting chief engineer on the SS Jeremiah O'Brien grew up in Glasgow. Campbell was in the hotel there. They got breakfast and tea. They would report to the dispatcher for work if it was available. Campbell took any kind of job to get home. The United States built Liberty ships [Annotator's Note: a class of rapidly built cargo ship] for the British which were coal-fired, and all had the word Ocean as part of their name.

In 1944, John Campbell came back from Karachi Annotator's Note: Karachi, Pakistan] with a load of British trucks to Italy. They shuttled back and forth between Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy], Oran [Annotator's Note: Oran, Algeria], and Livorno in Northern Italy. They called Livorno, Leghorn. One shuttle went to Arzu [Annotator's Note: likely Orzu, Iran] to a big military depot. A squad of chemical warfare guys came aboard and started securing their peak tanks. They put sensing stuff in the tank and loaded cylinders of gas. The crew was given a three-hour course if the alarm goes off. They had to carry a pack with a poncho-like tent to wear. They were to do that immediately as they would not know the gas was there. They took it up to Italy, just north of Naples, that they called Magnolia. There was an old mine there where the gas was stored and sealed up. The crew did not feel easy about it until it was off-loaded. The Army was segregated at that time and the chemical warfare men were all black. Two of the guys in the squad were working on their master's degrees. They were nice people. The Merchant Marine was integrated. In 1937, the NMU-CIO [Annotator's Note: National Maritime Union - Congress of Industrial Organizations] and SIU [Annotator's Note: Seafarers International Union] integrated. One of the best gun crews he worked on, three inch 50 [Annotator's Note: three inch, 50 caliber gun] crew, had a black World War 1 Navy veteran as the fuse setter. You did not want to get to know people too well in case they were lost with a ship. The two black men on the crew were Smiley and Smitty. He does not know their real names. There was a white kid, Rex and another, Shorty. There was a Russian who was from Connecticut. Smiley and Smitty were on the gun crew. Two Navy kids did the sighting and aiming. Campbell was a loader. They had a huge crewman from Trinidad who was blacker than patent leather shoes. He asked why so many black men went into the stewards department. He was told that most are raised as house people or field people. House people cook and clean and end up in steward departments. Campbell knew they were excellent seamen and decent navigators. If he was going to be in lifeboat, he wanted one of them with him.

John Campbell returned to the United States from Europe in April 1945. Everything on the East Coast was shut down because everything was moving to the Pacific. He went to the War Shipping Administration Office to look for work. He was told there was shipping of Higgins boats [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel or LCVP] to the Pacific from New Orleans [Annotator’s Note: New Orleans, Louisiana]. He went there but there was not a ship moving and there were men waiting for a ship. He was told he could go to Cleveland [Annotator's Note: Cleveland, Ohio] and get a ticket to go to San Francisco or Los Angeles [Annotator's Note: San Francisco or Los Angeles, California]. He went to Ohio and got a first class train ticket to the West Coast. The railroad did not honor it because he was a civilian. He made it onto a train called the Challenger but there were no seats or food on the train. They got to Cheyenne [Annotator's Note: Cheyenne, Wyoming] and got off the train. They caught another train the next day. It ran out of drinking water. There were trains going East with German prisoners going home. They made it to Oakland [Annotator's Note: Oakland, California]. A colonel had been sitting with them and had been taking notes. There were reporters and photographers in the station. He took a ship out of San Francisco to Long Beach [Annotator's Note: Long Beach, California] and San Pedro [Annotator's Note: San Pedro, California] and loaded for the invasion of Japan. They then went to the Philippines.

John Campbell stopped in Okinawa [Annotator's Note: Okinawa, Japan] for orders. From there they went to a holding area around Darwin [Annotator's Note: Darwin, Australia] and then to Truk [Annotator's Note: now Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia]. After that they went to Batangas on Luzon [Annotator's Note: Luzon, Philippines] to an open roadstead [Annotator's Note: sheltered body of water]. The war ended there. They had been scheduled for the Yokohama [Annotator's Note: Yokohama, Japan] second-wave in October [Annotator's Note: 1945]. Nobody knew what was really going on. Campbell marvels that we won the war, that we have won any war we have been in. They were anchored offshore with about 100 ships on the south side of Luzon. They could hitch a ride on the Red Ball to Manila [Annotator's Note: Manila, Philippines] for recreation. He got to see how Manila had been treated. Batangas was a cesspool. It rained many days in September and October. The locals used the bathroom outside and wherever they were. The houses were stilt huts. There were some bars downtown, but they were off limits. The Black Market flourished. The Philippines, much like India today, needs a bath. He was there for nearly two months. They were still loaded with small arms ammunition, mortar rounds, and field hospital. There were 38 Seabees [Annotator's Note: members of a Naval Construction Battalion] that needed to go home. They had been there shortly after Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack, Hawaii, 7 December 1941]. They had not been paid in months. Their currency was matchsticks. They came aboard and built some wooden sheds for them on the deck. On the return to the United States, they stopped south of Johnson Island as one man had jungle rot [Annotator's Note: also called Tropical ulcer; chronic ulcerative skin lesion common in tropical climates] so bad that he needed a hospital. They landed in Long Beach [Annotator's Note: Long Beach, California]. They unloaded almost everything there. They left enough on the ship to get it to the Mississippi Delta where it was going to be scrapped. They picked up some men in the Panama Canal Zone to take back with them. About two days out, they had engine trouble and had to stop for four days of repairs in the Gulf of Mexico. They then were to take the ship to Galveston [Annotator's Note: Galveston, Texas]. The ship was sold there and taken to Houston [Annotator's Note: Houston, Texas]. Campbell left the ship and went to a hotel. That was his second to last trip. His last trip was to bring more troops home. He had marriage on this mind though. Newport News [Annotator's Note: Newport News, Virginia] had ships that needed crews. He signed onto a Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship]. They went to Recife and Santos in Brazil. There was a longshoreman strike and Carnival [Annotator's Note: Carnival of Brazil; annual festival] at the same time. They loaded the ship with coffee, and they went to a slaughterhouse port near Buenos Aires [Annotator's Note: Buenos Aires, Argentina] to get bones and hide. They brought troops home too.

John Campbell spent most of his years [Annotator's Note: in the US Merchant Marine] as an oiler and a fireman. Part of that job is to feel the engine first. [Annotator's Note: He describes how the engine works in detail.] He would feel the bearing to be sure it was oiled and cool. He would do that to the whole engine and then accept it from the previous watch. Every half hour, he would make a complete round again to make sure everything was running cool. They were four hours on and eight hours off. The ship has to keep up and hold position when in a convoy. The older sailors from before the war, had a hard time maintaining position. A friend of his was in a convoy off Nova Scotia [Annotator's Note: Nova Scotia, Canada]. The friend was on the steering wheel and it was a foggy night. He heard somebody say hard right and turned. They missed the ship ahead of them by about three feet. It had slowed and they would have collided if he had not turned. Nobody had told him to turn though. For the fireman duties, they had a system of blocks that they used to let each shift know what to do. They had to maintain a clean fire. You can see black smoke 15 to 18 miles on a normal day and maybe 30 on a clear day. White smoke is only visible 12 to 15 miles on the best day. In a convoy, you dare not make smoke.

The first couple of ships John Campbell was on had no Armed Guard [Annotator's Note: Navy sailors serving aboard merchant ships as gunners, signalmen and radio operators]. In 1943, they got their first Armed Guard aboard. The first gun crew had never seen a 20mm machine gun [Annotator's Note: Oerlikon 20mm automatic cannon]. The crew told the new guys that a telephone pole that looked like a five inch gun was a secret weapon. It was actually a decoy to try and fool German submarines. Their last gun crew was on a trip in the Pacific. There were 30-plus men in the gun crew on this trip. They spent most of their time playing poker and scraping and painting the ship. The first convoy Campbell was in had British four-stacker [Annotator's Note: four smokestacks] escorts. They could not tell what the Commodore ship was. His last trip in the Atlantic had one escort for every five or six ships. The highly explosive ships were in the center. The convoy would only slow down so much. If your ship had engine trouble, you only had so long to fix it. Everything was easier late in the war.

John Campbell was on ships that sunk twice. The first one [Annotator's Note: the SS Andrew G. Curtin, sunk 1944], he had just come off watch and it was still daylight. They were in the Barents Sea [Annotator's Note: Arctic Ocean, north of Norway and Russia] when a torpedo caught them in the number three hold. They were going down slowly at the bow. Two lifeboats were blown off the ship. Campbell was trying to break a lifeboat loose. The rescue boats would not come in against the ship in case the ship broke. The men had to jump off the ship and get picked up from the water. Campbell was never so cold in his life. He ended up in Scotland after that one. He returned to New York. It took them a week to get into Murmansk [Annotator's Note: Murmansk, Russia] and then get on a ship to Scotland. The British were sweeping for mines. The ship he was on hit one that blew a spinner off the propeller. They had to run the ship aground. It was a coal-fired Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship]. Their convoy had not stopped for them. The second time was south of Iceland in a shipping lane. The routes had been extended to allow for air cover. Campbell was in the water for eight to ten minutes and was falling asleep. He was pulled out with a pike and he remembers hearing someone say he was gone. A British Navy wool blanket against his face felt like steel wool. For the next three or four days, he did not know a lot. If you are going to die, that's an easy way to go. At first you are really cold, but that leaves, and you do not feel it anymore.

John Campbell was on the SS Thomas Pollock, the SS O. Henry, and the SS Jubal A. Early. One they called the bushel basket. Jubal Early was one of his favorite Confederate generals. The Early was in the Pacific. The Pollock was in the Mediterranean. The O. Henry was in South America. The one he was on that went down in the Barents Sea [Annotator's Note: Arctic Ocean, north of Norway and Russia] was the Curlin or Curtain [Annotator's Note: SS Andrew G. Curtin, sunk 1944]. After the war, Campbell decided to forget the Merchant Marine. When he would go for a job, the first question was "are you a veteran?". He would say no. Companies were only hiring people with degrees or veterans. Campbell would have been 4F [Annotator's Note: Selective Service classification that indicates that an individual is unfit for military service] and just started using it as his excuse. He did not have to explain what the Merchant Marine was. Navy veterans would say negative things about them. They did not have a good reputation due the press. A lot of servicemen did not realize that for every soldier or Marine that went ashore on a beach, the Merchant Marine put a ton of stuff on that beach for him. The Merchant Marine participated in every Allied invasion. A Marine friend of his told him he remembered pulling kids out of the water that had been killed on their merchant ships by kamikazes. A lot of guys appreciate what they did. But there are lot of guys like Bob Dole [Annotator's Note: Robert Joseph Dole, American veteran and politician], who never thought about the Merchant Marine at all. Even though he went overseas on a Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quicly produced cargo ship] and landed around Salerno [Annotator's Note: Salerno, Italy]. The Germans destroyed everything they could in Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy]. Four days later, the Merchant Marine was offloading there.

For about 60 years, John Campbell never said or did anything Merchant Marine. He just put it aside. He thinks it is why he has forgotten a lot. The first time he walked on the SS Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California], he went down into the engine room and was amazed at what came back to him. He was explaining it to tourists. He would sometimes say things to his wife and kids. Around 2005, he got mad. He is a history nut and he was researching Johnson's Island in Sandusky Bay, Ohio which was a Confederate [Annotator's Note: Confederate States of America, 1861 to 1865] officer's prison camp [Annotator's Note: American Civil War, 1861 to 1865]. He was told there was a museum nearby [Annotator's Note: Sandusky Maritime Museum]. The curator there was an exceptional history person. He looked at World War 2 stuff and did not see Merchant Marine stuff. She had very little. Sandusky, Ohio has been a coal port for 150 years. She told him she would relish anything she could get. He sent her some things that are still there today from him and others. The beginnings of The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] did not welcome them at all. There is a Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] in San Francisco [Annotator's Note: SS Jeremiah O’Brien] that is the only ship to have participated in the invasion of Normandy [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, Fracne on 6 June 1944; D-Day] that went back for the 50th anniversary celebration. Liberty ships were built for one voyage and were expendable. He does history-you-can-live-with classes for continuing education. He teaches a History of the United States Merchant Marine. A lot of people raise an eyebrow when he tells them the privateers, the merchant ships, won the Revolutionary War [Annotator's Note: American Revolutionary War, or, American War of Independence, 19 April 1775 to 3 September 1783].

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks John Campbell about the journalists Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler]. They wrote untrue stories. The union finally sued them and won. Winchell wrote that there was an American cargo ship at Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands] that refused to unload gasoline because of the air raids and shelling, and left the port. The truth was that the Beachmaster [Annotator's Note: military officer in charge of the disembarkation phase of amphibious warfare] told them to leave because the airstrip was not ready. The ship pulled out and went down the coast to wait. Another story was that during the Invasion of Anzio [Annotator's Note: Battle of Anzio; part of Italian Campaign, 22 January 1944 to 5 June 1944], cargo ships were unloading and at quitting time, they shut down and pulled out. The truth is that the Beachmaster did not want anybody working at night because the Germans were in the hills. The Germans would have had easy targets with any lights on. The merchant ships were not unloading cargo, it was black quartermasters unloading onto ducks [Annotator's Note: DUKW, six-wheel-drive amphibious truck] and barges. What got reported and lies sold better than truth. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer adds that Pegler wrote that by not unloading the gasoline, sick Marine Corp troops had to do the unloading.] Campbell says it was out of proportion and untrue. Guadalcanal was a mess. He was not there, and he does not know, but he has heard about it.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks John Campbell about the relationship between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Merchant Marine.] In 1936, Roosevelt managed to get the Merchant Marine law [Annotator's Note: Merchant Marine Act of 1936] through. At the time, America had less than 50,000 sailors and few, working American ships. He [Annotator's Note: FDR] knew when the war came, we would need a bridge to Europe. At that time, he [Annotator’s Note: Roosevelt] was not thinking much about what Billy Mitchell [Annotator's Note: US Army Brigadier General William Lendrum Mitchell] was saying about Japan. He [Annotator's Note: Roosevelt] called Liberty ships [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] "Ugly Ducklings". They were not pretty, but they were designed over an old tramp steamer design of the British with 1870's technology. They could be built quickly and cheaply. They were easy to sail. Two are still working and running cruises. The ships are still there, and they are still working. The Germans called them Creeping Coffins because they were so slow. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks about the relationship the Merchant Marine had with President Harry S. Truman]. "Good old Harry" was the only President that made an effort to recognize their wartime service. He [Annotator's Note: Truman] sent a letter that Campbell has given to the museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana] that lets them know that they would have Public Law 87 that meant they could have their old jobs back. Harry had inherited a lot, but he and Joe Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premiere Joseph Stalin] agreed that the American Merchant Marine saved Russia. We shipped tons of SPAM [Annotator's Note: canned cooked pork made by Hormel Foods Corporation] to Russia and there are tons of it at the bottom of the Barents Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean. Harry [Annotator's Note: President Truman] concurred with Roosevelt that someday America will know what the Merchant Marine did.

John Campbell says that President Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] had Admiral King [Annotator's Note: US Navy Fleet Admiral Ernest Joseph King] to contend with. The early United States Congress passed a law that made the merchant ships auxiliary to the Navy during wartime. King said he did not want them as Navy seamen. They were rust buckets and a bunch of old drunks. Prior to the Union's 1937 to 1938 strikes, the ships were vermin-ridden, two-pot kitchens. Not pleasant. At a strike in Houston [Annotator's Note: Houston, Texas], there were riots where goon squads [Annotator's Note: group of criminals commonly associated with union strike violence] came in and murdered seamen [Annotator's Note: three black longshoremen, July 1934] who were on strike for better living conditions. Campbell has seen weevils in hardtack [Annotator's Note: simple biscuit or cracker], and they do not taste all that bad, but you do not want them as part of your diet. Under Roosevelt's [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] last years the cruise ships, the SS Brazil and three or four more, were built in the late 1930s. Other than that, American passenger ships were in deplorable condition. When those were converted to troop transports, some of the workers were appalled at the conditions. Admiral King did not want to spend the money to change that condition. The Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of of quickly produced cargo ship] got the trash steel and Henry Kaiser raised a stink about the materials being allocated. King was also against arming the ships. We had fully armed escort ships that did not go to sea due to lack of training for the crews. The first ship to get them, had World War 1, French-designed, machine guns that would often jam. The military command did not recognize that there were those problems. The Army Air Corps said they could patrol and bomb submarines. The bombs they used had no effect on the submarines. It took seven or eight months to get depth charge bombs. The main thing they did was report the sub's location. The Coast Guard would send a private yacht with some depth charges. That is what we had for protection in this country. Roosevelt did try to build a fleet of merchant ships.

John Campbell was trained as a gun loader on merchant ships. In Great Britain, in 1943, air raids were still pretty common. In Italy they were very common. In port, they fired when told to by the Navy or Army. He does not know that they ever hit anything. Once he was on a 20mm [Annotator's Note: Oerlikon 20mm automatic cannon]. He was told a German dive bomber almost stops when it pulls out of the dive and if you can get him at that point you might get him. He thinks he got one, but he does not know. The average soldier fired 144 rounds a month in the direction of the enemy. The American kids were never trained to kill. Sure, they hunted but they were not man killers. Most World War 2 and Korean War soldiers will tell you that they never really aimed at a being and shot it. They aimed at the enemy and emptied the clip. If you get an American mad, you better look out.

John Campbell wrote about what would have happened if he had had the G.I. Bill. His life would have been different because he would have had the education to be a history teacher. He would have had a nice retirement. He would have missed a lot of life he thinks if that had been the case. His kids would have been better off, and his wife would have had it a lot easier. She could double his money. She saved their retirement money and invested it. His sons got through college and one is a tenured professor in Japan. They both finished their education with no debt. The other son is a retired criminal investigator and is a Park Ranger. More than anything else it would have been a lot easier for his wife and they would have eaten more T-bone and sirloin than ground chuck [Annotator's Note: beef], but they got by. He thinks that the G.I. Bill was more of a hindrance to this country than a help. He competed for jobs with G.I. college graduates and most of them did not have more than a tenth grade education. They went four years to college, and it was paid for. They started a family and that was paid for. They went to jobs with on-the-job-training-pay. And yet, they are not any better off than he is. Most of them are dead and gone because they lived too easy. Campbell has often thought it [Annotator's Note: World War 2] did not really change him that much. It made him more cognizant of who and what he is and more appreciative of things this country has given him. He did not ask for them, but they are there. He likes that he can talk in this interview and does not have to be afraid of insulting Franklin Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States]. He can say what he wants to. Walter Winchell did this country a great disservice. The Heart Press Organization [Annotator's Note: now Hearst Communications] frequently would tell a lie rather than the truth. It sold newspapers. The American people are dumber than a post. No conception of their history, what this nation is. [Annotator's Note: He starts to talk about a comic strip but does not finish his thought.] Campbell says that when the invasion of Georgia happened [Annotator's Note: Russo-Georgian War, August 2008], all the rednecks [Annotator's Note: slang for working-class white person; especially a politically reactionary one from a rural area] in Alabama and Mississippi bought ammunition to stop the Russians.

John Campbell says that America won the war and lost the peace. We were out-negotiated by Churchill [Annotator's Note: British Prime Minister Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill], De Gaulle [Annotator's Note: French General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, President of France, 1958t to 1969], and Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premiere Joseph Stalin]. We did not want to offend them because they were our allies. We had the Marshall Plan [Annotator's Note: European Recovery Program] to rebuild Germany. It was handled in a very poor way. He does not understand how we won the war. There was some guy sitting in Washington making a policy that trickles down to the guy in the foxhole and he has to live with it. Campbell took a career route that he would not have taken if the war had not happened. In spite of his laziness, he was able to provide for his family well and his wife was able to save for their golden years. He figured that work hours were from can until cannot. He worked for commissions and he had to work. His mother raised her children with an absolute work ethic. If you do not work for it, you do not deserve it. He felt that if you cannot pay cash for something, you do not need it. The war undoubtedly changed world. It bolstered Harvard Business School [Annotator's Note: Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts] to the point where they think they can run everything efficiently and they do not know how to run a bathroom. They have completely ruined American business. They did away with mom and pop hardware stores, neighborhood grocery stores. All of the business schools in the country adopted Harvard's principle of "you can have it made cheaper in China". When Sam Walton [Annotator's Note: Samuel Moore Walton, American businessman] died, his kids hired Harvard business school people to run Walmart. If Walmart were a nation, it would be China's sixth largest trading partner. That is scary. That country is going to Africa for cheap labor. We are building Africa up so it will be in good shape when they get there. Mr. Clinton [Annotator's Note: William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States] and Mr. Bush [Annotator's Note: George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States] spent a lot of money improving the conditions in Africa for the Chinese. We gave away the whole world simply because some people wanted to make a buck. [Annotator's Note: He continues to talk about politics and business not related to World War 2.] He does not know how to explain to his granddaughter what his generation did to this country. We have an Imperial Presidency and an incumbent Congress, and he would not want to be 20 today. The story that the museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana] can and will tell is that this nation went out to do the world's business and did it. We did not expect much in return. We do not have that country any more. The working man used to read Shakespeare [Annotator's Note: William Shakespeare, English poet, playwright, and actor]. He is mesmerized by the "boob tube" [Annotator's Note: television]. The Museum has an opportunity to tell the story of the United States of America. Whether the story can get into the schools to teach the children [Annotator's Note: he does not finish his thought]. Old war stories, old soldier stories, old sailor stories. Our kids need to know what this nation was made of. Museums are the only place that story can be told.