Richard Scholl was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1920. His father worked for Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company and his mother was a homemaker. Nearing the end of the Great Depression his dad had a good job. Scholl does not recall any real problems during that time. He went to school and graduated and then attended Marquette University. He decided he wanted to go to work. He started at Wisconsin Motor Company [Annotator's Note: Wisconsin Motor Manufacturing Company] making gasoline engines. His father told him to get a better job at a bank. He went to work as a messenger. He then stayed with the bank for 42 years. He was exactly 21 when he enlisted on 7 October 1941. Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese while he was in basic training in Texas. He was in a movie theater on leave when the news came across along with an order for the military to report back to base immediately. This was the only period of leave he would get for the next four years. Scholl enlisted because the girl he was dating had heard that there were good government jobs in the Panama Canal Zone. She wanted him to go along but he could not afford it. He read a news article about two boys who enlisted and were stationed in Panama so he went and enlisted. His parents were not happy. He did go down to Panama and joined the 158th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division. [Annotator's Note: In February 1942, the 158th Infantry Regiment was detached from the 45th Infantry Division and became a separate organization, the 158th Regimental Combat Team, also known as the "Bushmasters".] He went through basic training at Camp Wolters [Annotator's Note: in Mineral Wells, Texas]. It was really cold. They had fire barrels to keep them warm on the rifle range. They would warm the guns and then run up to the line and fire. The guns would freeze, and they would bring them back to the fires.

Richard Scholl was in basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas. Training was not bad. It was bad doing jungle training in Panama where he joined the 158th Infantry Regiment, 45th Division. [Annotator's Note: In February 1942, the 158th Infantry Regiment was detached from the 45th Infantry Division and became a separate organization, the 158th Regimental Combat Team, also known as the "Bushmasters".] It was around 1942. [Annotator's Note: Scholl says his memory is not good.] He went from Texas to Jackson Barracks [Annotator's Note: Jackson Barracks, New Orleans, Louisiana] for two months waiting on a ship. The ship was on its maiden voyage as a troop carrier. The captain said that the first people on board got their choice of room. Scholl and a buddy got a state room and they were just Privates. Two days later, two Air Force officers came aboard and got bunks. They complained but the captain let them stay. Submarines were still working in the Gulf of Mexico then. Their equipment was basic, a duffle bag and a backpack. A girl he had been dating was already in Panama. He was in quarantine at Camp Davis [Annotator's Note: Fort William D. Davis, Gatun, Panama] and she came to visit. They talked through the fence. He found out she was married then. He later met her and her husband and had dinner. They had very little liberty in Panama. They went into the interior for jungle training which was very rough. They built the camps. He was chosen to head the post exchange since he had been a banker. He was assigned to Company M as the company clerk. They were taught to cross rivers and what to eat from the native plants. They also tested canvas boots and hammocks enclosed in mosquito netting. They learned camouflage and how to treat jungle rot. They took quinine every day for malaria prevention. They decided the barrels of the rifles were too long for jungle patrols. They cut the ends off, which made a bad backlash. Later they got smaller carbines. They built two different camps in the jungle. They received orders to go into combat and loaded on a boat to New Guinea. They stopped in Australia first.

Richard Scholl was sent from Panama to New Guinea on an Italian ocean liner that the United States Government had seized in a port. It was made into a troop carrier. This was its first troop as a carrier. They did the Pollywog ceremony [Annotator's Note: Line-crossing ceremony; initiation rite that commemorates a person's first crossing of the Equator] crossing the Equator. Scholl received a membership card with his typewritten name on it. They ended up in Brisbane, Australia and set up camp late in the afternoon. [Annotator's Note: This was in January 1943.] They had pitched their tents on a flat area. Around sunset, the Air Force did a low flyover that sucked a lot of the tents off the ground. The next morning an Air Force general came over and apologized. They loaded onto an old Dutch freighter and steamed to Port Moresby, New Guinea. The ship had no armament or escort. The company [Annotator's Note: Scholl was a member of Company M, 3rd Battalion, 158th Regimental Combat Team] set up their machine guns with sandbags in case of attack. From there they went out to Milne Bay and built a camp. After that they did one landing after another up the coast. They remained on Kiriwina Island for about four months. They cleaned up the remaining Japanese troops and found radio equipment they removed. They made five landings, the last of which was Noemfoor Island where they captured an airbase. Later, fighter planes would land and refuel there. The pilots would get out to stretch their legs as they filled it with gas. One asked Scholl if they ever got any air raids there. When he told him they did, the pilot said to hurry and fill the plane so he could get out of there.

Richard Scholl arrived in New Guinea to constant rain. They were experimenting with canvas boots. They would wear them at night and go days with wet socks and boots. The men had terrible foot problems. Even after Scholl left the service, he had problems. On shore, New Guinea was nice, sandy beaches and palm trees. Inside was different. One day, a patrol came back with a wild boar they had killed. The 158th Infantry Regiment was from the Arizona National Guard. There a lot of Indians [Annotator's Note: Native Americans] and Mexicans and they knew how to build a tripod to dress the boar and cook it. The native people started talking to them and told them that the boar belonged to them and they wanted cigarettes. The sergeant went and got a carton. The Australian boy that was translating said to only give them one pack. He did and the chief went away happy. They had wild boar for dinner. That was his first encounter with native peoples. The women wore nothing from the waist up. This was before ballpoint pens had been invented and the soldiers only had fountain pens. Some of the soldiers would write their names on the girls breasts. They liked it because they liked body adornment. They would also wash the soldiers clothes for them. The Army switched from white to olive drab underwear. They gave their white t-shirts to the native girls. They also loved white things. The native women would cut holes for their breasts in the t-shirts. The jungle training Scholl received in Panama really helped in New Guinea. The weather did not really affect combat operations. The Americans were on the shoreline and the Japanese were up in the higher ground, making it hard to remove them. The 32nd Infantry Division had been there before and had come over the Owen Stanley Mountains but had a hard time getting their equipment over. The Japanese were very well placed. Scholl had no idea what the Japanese would be like. They were scared, the artillery shells come screaming in and it is scary. Artillery was effective.

Richard Scholl does not recall the Battle of Lone Tree Hill by name specifically [Annotator's Note: also known as Battle of Wakde-Sarmi 1944; major battle in Papua, New Guinea]. He was in the landing at Sarmi though. His worst landing was Noemfoor Island. The Navy Seals had gone in prior to them. They went ashore on LSIs [Annotator's Note: most likely LCI, or Landing Craft, infantry]. There was a miscalculation. They landed around six o'clock in the morning [Annotator’s Note: eight o'clock on 2 July 1944]. The ships hit ground and dropped their ramps, but the troops went off into water eight feet deep. A lot of the soldiers had to drop their packs in order to survive and be able to swim. Scholl was carrying a radio pack and his other pack was in a jeep. He lost his rifle, but was able to get the radio ashore. They were under fire the entire time and many men did not make it. An error had been made about the tides. They had to cover a lot of wide open ground under enemy fire. The Japanese were not as tough as he expected during the landings due to having been bombed pretty hard by both the Navy and Air Force. It was when they went inland after them that it got pretty tough. Fortunately, the Japanese supply lines had been cut pretty well and their soldiers were malnourished. Some Japanese were taking American uniforms off of dead soldiers and would actually get in line for food in the American camps. Since there were Japanese interpreters with the American forces it was hard to tell who was who. Another trick was that the Japanese would climb a coconut tree at night, tie themselves in, and then shoot at the Americans from those positions. The Americans would check the trees every morning and would shoot up into them. If they killed a Japanese soldier, they would just leave him tied in the tree. Scholl went through an area once and noticed movement. After throwing a smoke grenade into the area, a Japanese Imperial Marine charged straight at Scholl. Scholl's buddy shot the Japanese soldier and killed him. In the Philippines later, the Japanese actually charged the unit's half-tracks. Scholl was in a half-track and recalls very vividly seeing Japanese soldiers attack the tracks on the vehicles with their bayonets.

Richard Scholl was in some of the dirtiest fighting in the Philippines [Annotator's Note: Invasion of Lingayen Gulf, Luzon, Philippines, 11 January 1945]. They captured a huge cannon that had been covered by a shack. It was a coastal cannon. They had no breaks or rest between campaigns. Scholl had only one overnight pass in four years of service and that was on 6 December 1941. The only thing they got was rest between combat operations. Malaria took a heavy toll on them. They started out taking quinine [Annotator's Note: medication used to treat malaria and babesiosis], and then Atabrine [Annotator's Note: trade name for mepacrine, or quinacrine; an anti-malarial medication], which Scholl took daily. Each soldier was given a one month supply of it after discharge. He used his up and on the day he was supposed to be married, he was in the hospital with malaria. The hospital did not know what he had other than a high fever. His future wife called in her doctor, who was a former Navy doctor. He had them inject something into his blood stream to cause a high fever so they could test him for malaria. His wedding was postponed for a week. Scholl and his unit [Annotator's Note: Company M, 3rd Battalion, 158th Regimental Combat Team] went into Luzon, Philippines on 11 January 1945. It was the most amazing landing he ever saw. The weather was terrible. They had to hang onto ropes because the ship tossed so much. He had never seen so many Navy vessels together at one time. They went ashore but did not receive any fire. Once they went inland though, it got very rough. Scholl got acquainted with an American resident of the Philippines and had dinner with his family. The Filipinos would bury eggs in the sand for some days and considered it a treat [Annotator's Note: Balut, also spelled balot; fertilized, developing egg embryo; traditionally buried in sand and stored in baskets; now boiled and eaten from the shell]. Scholl really liked the people who were glad to see Americans. He also saw a lot of destruction. He bivouacked in a church one evening that had no roof left. The Philippines suffered a lot. Scholl drove through Manila around midnight once and the city had been burned by the Japanese and it was just horrible. The Japanese were definitely fighting harder now. They had more firepower and the terrain made it easier to fight. When they landed at Legazpi on Easter Sunday, and he wondered why the sand was black. It was volcanic sand. The Japanese there were hungry. Scholl says there was positive proof there that the Japanese were so hungry that they were eating human flesh. There was also a large leper colony there. The people there were starving to death as well.

Each campaign that Richard Scholl took part in in the Philippines took about two weeks to clear out completely. The Japanese resisted that hard. The closest fight that Scholl was in was with an Imperial Japanese Marine. The firefights with Japanese tanks were bad too. The most effective weapon the Americans used were the 81mm mortars, backed by artillery. Scholl considers his rifle his most effective weapon. An Indian [Annotator's Note: Native American] with his unit [Annotator's Note: Company M, 3rd Battalion, 158th Regimental Combat Team] used the Browning Automatic Rifle [Annotator's Note: BAR; M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle]. The shooter had to wear a fireproof glove due to the heat of the barrel. This soldier lost his hand due to the heat he endured because he had to use the gun for so long. He was decorated for his actions. Scholl and the men did not know that they had liberated the Philippines. There was no celebration at all. He was sent home while in the Southern Philippines due to the point system. Much later after the war, they discovered what their actions had resulted in. The 158th Regiment had been committed to take an island off of Japan [Annotator's Note: Tanegashima, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan] three days prior to D-Day [Annotator's Note: Operation Downfall; proposed Allied plan for the invasion of Japan]. D-Day would have been awful, but fortunately we dropped the bomb [Annotator's Note: atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan] and Japan surrendered. Scholl did not see Japanese air power in the Philippines, but he did see it in New Guinea. Mostly air-to-air but they did suffer bombing raids too. In New Guinea, Scholl's unit took a water-cooled machine gun, mounted it on a canoe, and patrolled the beaches. They actually shot down a Japanese observation plane that strafed it. They received an award for that. [Annotator's Note: The entire unit received the Philippine Presidential Unit Citation; decoration of the Republic of the Philippines for its fighting in the Philippines.]

Richard Scholl was sent back to the United States while his unit [Annotator's Note: Company M, 3rd Battalion, 158th Regimental Combat Team] was in Legaspi, Philippines. The war ended while he was coming back to the United States on a rusty, old Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of rapidly produced cargo ship]. It took 38 days to get from Manila to San Francisco. They had no laundry service, so they would use lifelines to drag their uniforms through the ocean to freshen up their clothes. The Captain told them to stop though. The ship lost its refrigeration during the trip. For the last three days on the ship all they got to eat were hard-boiled eggs and smoked fish. Scholl was discharged in September 1946 as a Master Sergeant. The war was terrible, but it was good for Scholl. It taught him that he could endure a lot of hardship. When he entered the service, base pay was 21 dollars per month, and they deducted for laundry. That was okay during basic training, but after that there was no laundry service anywhere, yet it was still deducted from his pay. The lack of clean uniforms was a particular hardship for them in the tropics. The best they could do was when they could hire local natives to clean their clothes somewhat. His company had a soldier who would cut hair at no charge. Money meant nothing to them. What little cash they had, they used to play poker. Scholl went back into banking after the service. Scholl thinks The National WWII Museum is absolutely important. He has three children who have no experience of war other than what he tells them. He appreciates being able to tell his story. World War 2 was to end all wars and it did not do that. We have a good one going now in Iraq and Afghanistan. It won't end.