Richard Willett was born in San Antonio, Texas in January 1925. He lived in San Antonio until 1938 when his family moved to Houston. His father was in politics in San Antonio. He decided the United States Post Office would be a little more secure. He carried a gun at all times. His family was going to visit his grandparents one weekend. The road was dirt. About halfway there, a car was parked across the road. His father was not a big man but was a little bulldog. There were three men standing there with guns. His father stopped. The men said they wanted their money and rings. His father told them what they were going to get was killed and pulled his gun out. He said to them, "There are three of you and only one of me, but one of you is going to die. You better kill me with your first shot because I don't miss." They let them pass. His mother and aunt were crying. His father felt pretty proud for bluffing them. His dad wanted to move to Houston [Annotator's Note: Houston, Texas] because there was always work. He stayed with the Post Office until the end. They were above blue-collar for the period and had two cars during the Depression [Annotator's Note: Great Depression; a global economic depression that lasted through the 1930s]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks if he remembers where he was when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941.] Willett heard about it on the radio while riding his bicycle. He rode over and told all his buddies. They just asked him what football team he wanted to be on. They could not comprehend what it meant to their futures. His parents were terribly upset. It actually helped a lot of people because of the shipyards. Willett went to work at 17 in the summers in a steel mill. He had started working at eight years old selling magazines. Willett played football, track, and basketball. He did well at football. He was All-City Tackle. He was a lousy student. He graduated in January 1943. He had tried to get in the Army at 17, but his parents made him finish high school. He went into the service right after high school because he had to leave town. There was a concert and he wanted to hear the band badly. Between the theaters there was an ice cream parlor where the high school guys hung out. He had a dollar and he was proud. His friends said they could slip into the theater and then use the dollar to buy some wine. Five of them went to the building and lifted two of them through the window. The last guy was about halfway through and a guard caught them. The police came and handcuffed them. Willett had to go trial because he was 18 now. His father had to bail him out. There was a tax on the movie tickets and that made it a Federal offense. At his trial, a friend's father defended him. The judge told him he had 30 days to get out of town or get 90 days in jail.

[Annotator's Note: In 1943, Richard Willett went to trial for trying to sneak into a movie theater and the judge ordered him to get out of Houston, Texas or go to jail.] Willett told everybody he was going to be a Marine. He went to the Marine Corps and they said they were full. They told him about the Navy, but he went to the Army. He went to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas where he was from. He was given a choice for the Air Force. He could not be a fighter pilot due to his size, so he chose infantry. His father was in the infantry and the air force [Annotator's Note: in World War 1]. A neighbor kid would come and talk to Willett's father about World War 1. The kid's father had been killed in that war in a plane crash and had the propellor from the plane. His name was Randolph. Randolph Field was named after his father [Annotator's Note: US Army Captain William M. Randolph]. Willett had two years of ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] in high school. He was sent to Camp Wheeler, Georgia. It was hot. A couple of guys got heatstroke and died. A soldier kept talking about sex things that offended Willett. During judo practice, Willett hit him on the jaw. The guy just looked at Willett and then hit him hard. The others said they did not know if Willett was ever going to get up again. He just ignored the man's sex habits after that. After Camp Wheeler, Willett was nominated for OCS [Annotator's Note: officer candidate school]. They wanted him to go into ASTP [Annotator's Note: generally referred to just by the initials ASTP; a program designed to educate massive numbers of soldiers in technical fields such as engineering and foreign languages and to commission those individuals at a fairly rapid pace in order to fill the need for skilled junior officers]. They told him it would take two years and he would be a Lieutenant. They sent him to Clemson College [Annotator's Note: now Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina] and then to Alfred College in upper New York [Annotator's Note: now Alfred University in Alfred, New York]. The people up there had never seen any soldiers. They had been training in the South. The South is patriotic but was fed up with soldiers. The people in New York were really fine people. They met the train with ice cream and cakes. It did not take long for the soldiers to mess that up. Willett had a good looking Hispanic roommate. The people there had never seen a Hispanic and the women were crazy about him. He would help Willett with his physics problems. After lights out, he would go out the window to town. He never got caught. One morning Willett walked outside, and it was snowing. He was told how cold it would get there. He went in and asked to be transferred back to the infantry. They sent him to Fort Bragg [Annotator's Note: Fort Bragg, North Carolina] for reassignment.

Richard Willett went to Fort Bragg [Annotator's Note: Fort Bragg, North Carolina]. He had a girlfriend in Washington, D.C. and said he wanted to go see her. He was told that if he chased [Annotator's Note: guarded] prisoners for a week, he could get a three day pass. He did that. A short captain came out there and he was mean. He told the guards they had to keep the prisoners from escaping or they would do the prisoner's time. These were American prisoners. He thought then that his girl could do without him. Life is very strange. He could not stand not giving the men a cigarette every now and then. One guy asked him to bring him a carton or he would tell the captain he had given them cigarettes. Another prisoner was there whose mother was dying. He had gone AWOL [Annotator's Note: absent from duty without leave] to see her. He came back, but he got hard time for it. That prisoner told Willett not worry about the other man. That night the prisoners held a kangaroo court [Annotator's Note: unofficial court] and the man was carried out the next day. He was not dead, but Willett thinks he wished he was. The day Willett got his pass he was transferred to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. He went to the 65th Infantry Division which was new. It was a fortunate break for him, and he was put into a battalion. The first day of training, the sergeant in charge made him the squad leader on wireless communications. He was transferred and a beautiful relationship began between Joe Soleto [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify] and Willett. They trained and were together all the way through combat. When the war ended, Soleto got to go home early and Willett was transferred to the 9th Division.

When Richard Willett was at Camp Shelby [Annotator's Note: Camp Shelby, near Hattiesburg, Mississippi], he would go to New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] almost every weekend. He found a way to pay his expenses. A lot of the husbands were very loyal to their wives and sent them their pay. Mississippi is dry [Annotator's Note: slang for a place where the sale of alcohol is illegal]. In New Orleans when he went to see his girlfriend, he would buy a case of cheap, bourbon whiskey. The men would be waiting for him. They had no entertainment and did not want to go town. He would give the sergeant and the cooks a bottle and then sell the rest. He enjoyed and profited from it. They were supposed to go to France and be in the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945], but they were delayed by three months. They did go over to Le Havre, France. It was freezing and muddy. They lost men due to their frozen feet being amputated. They did not have winter clothing. The trip over was another adventure with Joe Soleto [Annotator's Note: unable to identify]. He organized a gambling deal on the ship. Willett's job was to see all bets were covered. They crossed [Annotator's Note: the Atlantic Ocean] on a German banana boat that had been captured. They had some rip-roaring games and Willett landed with about 1,000 dollars from it. The worst thing was they were stacked in five bunks and about three out of five guys were throwing up. You felt bad for the guy in the bottom bunk. Willett would go up on deck to get fresh air because the hold smelled so bad. They were happy to get to Camp Lucky Strike [Annotator's Note: one of the transit and rehabilitation camps in France named after popular cigarette brands; Lucky Strike was near Le Havre, France]. They just did not get much food, just breakfast and dinner. The camp was on the side of a landing strip. They asked for volunteers to scrape ice off the strip to get lunch. Willett did and got sauerkraut and wieners for lunch. He wanted to cry. They finally went into town and bought horse meat. It was hard to cook it on a cold stove. They literally were starving. A Major had a chocolate bar stolen and it caused him to have a nervous breakdown. They never saw him again. One night, Sergeant Soleto told some men to dress for guard duty. He came and got them in the middle of the night in snowing, horrible weather. He said they were going to relieve the 260th Regiment [Annotator's Note: 260th Infantry Regiment, 65th Infantry Division] of their guard duty. They were in the 261st [Annotator's Note: 261st Infantry Regiment, 65th Infantry Division]. They went over and relieved the guards who said they were early. The men went in [Annotator's Note: to the mess hall] and picked up every case [Annotator's Note: of food] they could carry back to their camp. He told them to bury it and cover it with snow. Another guy in the platoon thought he would pull a deal by himself. He crawled over to another mess tent and grabbed a case and brought it back. It was a case of lard.

[Annotator's Note: Richard Willett was in Camp Lucky Strike near Le Havre, France.] They finally left Lucky Strike and moved down by the river and relieved the 26th Division [Annotator's Note: 26th Infantry Division]. Willett went around a building when a German soldier came around. They scared each other and ran in opposite directions. The first night he had to lay wire down to the river. He went with his men. A flare went up and they just froze in place. They could get about five steps at a time and got down there after about an hour. The next morning, they started crossing the river. There were about eight to ten GI's [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] laying there. Willett's father had been gassed in World War 1, and he worried about it. He got down to the river and saw worse than gas, Schu-mines [Annotator’s Note: Schü-mine 42, Schützenmine 42]. These men had all lost a foot. They were casually smoking cigarettes. That so impressed him that they were not hollering or screaming. Most of Willett's men were screw-ups. One had been in the Aleutians [Annotator's Note: Aleutian Islands, Alaska], Red Smith, he wore a field jacket that had a fur collar. He had a BAR [Annotator's Note: M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle] that he would not part with. He had a baby buggy and would carry his wire drum with it. He would walk through the fields shooting the Schu-mines and pushing that buggy. Whenever they hit a town, he would leave them with the wire, run there with his BAR, and shoot and kill whatever he could. One day he just disappeared. They never found his body. Another man from the Aleutians had been regular Army. One day when Willett tried to wake him up by the shoulder, the man came up with a knife. He told Willett never to do that again; just wake him up by shaking his foot. The man had a grandmother still living in Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany]. He was a ruthless killer. He told Willett that after the war, they should rob banks. He was a hard worker though and was with them all the way.

[Annotator's Note: Richard Willett asks the interviewer to cut the tape for a minute to catch his breath. The video restarts with him already talking.] They [Annotator's Note: the 261st Infantry Regiment, 65th Infantry Division] liberated a concentration camp [Annotator's Note: a subcamp of the Flossenburg Concentration Camp, Flossenburg, Germany]. It was one of the sickest things you could ever see. They liberated two camps, but his regiment did not take part in one of them. The bodies were stacked. The poor things would come up to the fence when they saw them coming. The Germans had taken off. They took the offices there and were sleeping on the floor. A British Intelligence person came in and started ripping the walls out. Willett was laying on the floor listening to the BBC [Annotator's Note: British Broadcasting Company] and heard it announced that President Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] was dead. They moved on and helped clean up Regensburg [Annotator's Note: Regensburg, Germany]. [Annotator's Note: Willett says there are some things there that he does not care to talk about.] They were glad to get Regensburg because they were wearing their same clothes for two and a half months and had not bathed. There was a big tent there. They would go in, dispose of their clothes, take a hot shower, and get new clothes. Earlier, General Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] called a meeting and asked how many men liked to sleep in a bed at night. Patton told them that if they took a town a day, they could sleep in the beds. That is what they did. They were called the Spearhead Division. They moved fast, too fast for artillery to keep up with them. They went to Mainz [Annotator's Note: Mainz, Germany] and the Rhine River and were in a big house. A foxhole was not for them. The Germans almost all had cellars. This house had walls of preserved cherries and wine. There were some sick soldiers after that. Willett had a bad hangover that day. They had never ridden on tanks until then. Willett had a jeep, a driver, and a trailer with his wire equipment. Willett was in the jeep feeling really bad and heard the Colonel calling his name. He ran over to see him. The Colonel told him that his men had taken their equipment out of the trailer and filled it with wine. He gave him 15 minutes to fix it. They got strafed twice going across there, but they made it out.

Richard Willett got into a mountainous area. His jeep driver was from North Carolina. A Lieutenant decided to ride in his jeep. They were in a convoy going up a mountain and had been on the move for several days. The driver said he was too tired to drive anymore. The Lieutenant said to stop the jeep and have Willett drive. The convoy got far ahead of them. Willett was going fast to catch them and realized he had no brakes. The jeep was swaying. The Lieutenant knocked his helmet off and dropped his rifle. Willett sideswiped a telephone pole and they straightened out. The Lieutenant made the other man drive after that. A couple of days later, the Lieutenant told him to go to a town and bring the line back. They pulled into the town and it was full of Germans. They were surprised but started shooting at them. They got out of there. Willett was outraged because the Lieutenant did it on purpose. He got back and knocked the Lieutenant down, pulled his pistol on him, and was going to kill him. His men got him off. They then told the Lieutenant that if anything ever came of the incident, he would never see his family again. He walked out but never messed with Willett until his last day. [Annotator's Note: Willett says he will not go into that.] They left there for Regensburg [Annotator's Note: Regensburg, Germany] and then Passau [Annotator's Note: Passau, Germany] where they saw the most combat. Willett made his first kill there. It was an exciting day. One Lieutenant went out with their guys the night before, slipped into Passau and reconned it [Annotator's Note: performed a reconnaissance mission]. On the way back, he got his password wrong and the guard killed him. They left Passau and went to Linz [Annotator's Note: Linz, Austria] where they met the Russians [Annotator's Note: Soviet Army] at the gate. They occupied a town there and the Division was deactivated [Annotator's Note: 31 August 1945]. He was transferred to the 9th Division [Annotator's Note: 9th Infantry Division]. He played football for them. He had lost 40 pounds. They had some boxing matches. He signed in as a heavyweight and got knocked out three times. That was the end of his Army career. He got scarlet fever and was hospitalized. After a week, he said he needed to go back to play one more game. He played the first half. The second half he threw a tackle and went unconscious. He spent five and a half months in the hospital. He had bad relapses of scarlet fever. He came back and spent a week in New Jersey and then a month in San Antonio [Annotator's Note: San Antonio, Texas] in the hospital.

Richard Willett does not recall exactly where they crossed the border into Germany. They had not been told they were going into Germany. They did not have maps and half the time they did not know the towns names because the signs were blown away. He does not recall much about passing through the Siegfried Line [Annotator's Note: a series of defensive fortifications roughly paralleling the Franco-German border built by Germany in the 1930s]. They moved so fast it was like a blink. It had been battered down by the time they got there. The Germans were excellent soldiers. They had a discipline the Americans did not have. The same goes for the Japanese. Most of the Americans were from the draft. He remembers seeing men coming into basic who were in their 30s. He does not know how they survived it. It was hard on the older, married men. Nobody was in shape those days. We live longer now because in the service we learned to take care of ourselves better. Willett looked forward to taking a human life. He had been a hunter all of his life and it was just another kill. It was exciting. He was hyper after his first one. He was in a building. The window was broken out. A sergeant was laying there dead and it fired them up. Across the street was a school loaded with German soldiers. There was a railroad track that ran beside the building. Willett had a Thompson submachine gun [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun], an M1 [Annotator's Note: .30 caliber M1 semi-automatic rifle, also known as the M1 Garand], his .38 [Annotator’s Note: Smith & Wesson Model 10, also called Smith & Wesson Victory Model; six-shot, .38 Special, double-action revolver] and two grenades. If he had ever been hit, he would have exploded. They tried to run a wire [Annotator's Note: communications wire] and a guy said he could not make it. Willett said he would do it. He ran in front of the school and realized he was not going to make it. He came back. A German ran out and Willett shot him with his Thompson. He was not dead and sat up. Willett then shot him with his M1. People who hunt like to go see what they hit. Willett wishes he had not done that as he had hit him right in the temple and his brains were laying in his helmet. He was elated though. That was what he was paid to do, and it did not bother him. The soldiers today are all volunteers and they like excitement. There is no greater excitement than man hunting man. That is why people are policemen. It is excitement you do not get anywhere else. The Army would not take him back and he thought about being a mercenary and his sister told him she would not go through it again. People do not like to think it is like that, but it is. You do not think you killed a man with a wife and kids, you killed the enemy. Most men do not talk about it.

Different people handle combat in different ways. Richard Willett had a cousin who was a deeply religious family man and who went through North Africa and made D-Day [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. He came home and had PTSD [Annotator's Note: post traumatic stress disorder]. He finally told his wife to find someone else. He went to his mother’s house and hung himself from the telephone pole. Some people have nightmares. Willett had a boy in his unit [Annotator's Note: Headquarters Company, 261st Infantry Regiment, 65th Infantry Division] who was a flamethrower. That is a horrible job. They had been in combat about two months and he shot himself on his bunk. That shook up Willett. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks if he had interactions with the civilian populations in Germany.] They ended up in Austria and the people were lovely. He had a girlfriend there. He enjoyed the occupation. He came back to the United States about 1 April 1946. He was discharged from the hospital as a Private. He had been busted down from Sergeant. [Annotator's Note: Willett tells the interviewer to shut the camera off so he can tell him why.]

World War 2 changed Richard Willett's life by making it possible for him to go to college. He learned how to discipline himself. He had a couple of businesses and had to handle people. The Army is good for you and he thinks there should be a mandatory draft for men and women. He goes to reunions at Camp Shelby [Annotator's Note: Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Mississippi] and sees the young men and women serving today with the pride they have. Service instills pride. He remembers when a guy came in who had been a convict from a poor background. Everybody ignored his prison time and he completely changed his personality. No one had ever been nice to him in his life. Everybody is treated equally in the Army. It is good for us. We should also be putting all the Latinos who come here to work in the service. They are great soldiers. War is in their heritage. They are going to be here, so why not bring them in and use them to defend the country. Willett thinks it is important for there to be a museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana]. He has been to many museums and each one helps his patriotism. He went through the museum with a friend and they walked into a room with a picture of the Marines in the South Pacific pulling a Marine out of the water. They knew him, they had gone to school with him. He is very proud to have been able to do this [Annotator's Note: the interview]. He is a great admirer of Mr. Ambrose [Annotator's Note: Stephen E. Ambrose; American historian and author; founder of National D-Day Museum, now The National WWII Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana]. He tells everybody he knows about the museum.