Rip Rice was born in New York City, New York in April 1924. His family was in the restaurant business in lower Manhattan [Annotator's Note: one of the five boroughs of New York City]. They were expanding the business when 1929 hit [Annotator's Note: Great Depression; a global economic depression that lasted through the 1930s]. They lost both restaurants. His father then became an insurance salesman. He grew up in the middle of Manhattan. He did not fit in with the other kids. He had a nanny to take care of him. They were rich until 1929, and then they were poor. He had a sister. Rice was attending North Texas Agricultural College in Arlington, Texas when he heard about Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Great Depression; a global economic depression that lasted through the 1930s]. They had an ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps]. Rice was in the band. On Sunday 7 December 1941 they were having a parade when they got the news about Pearl Harbor. They were worried about getting into a war with the Germans and here came the Japanese. The next day, they were sitting around the radio listening to FDR’s address [Annotator's Note: Day of Infamy Speech; President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Joint Session of the United States Congress, 8 December 1941]. Rice enlisted to avoid the draft. He was going to a two-year college. After Pearl Harbor, recruiters from the Army and Navy came by. He wanted to enlist in the Navy to be a pilot, but he wore glasses so was not eligible. He joined the Army to stay in college. In June 1943, the Army wanted to send him to 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]. Six months later, they canceled the program and he was put into the infantry. He did basic training in Tyler, Texas. The ASTP training was for engineering. Rice wanted to be a chemist. He was sent to Colorado where the 104th Infantry [Annotator’s Note: 104th Infantry Division] was. There was six feet of snow. Rice was made a combat engineer with the 104th. They trained on explosives and building bridges. He was put into a job as a chemist. He had the safest job in a combat unit as a water purifier.

Rip Rice was assigned to the 104th Infantry Division and went overseas in August 1944. They landed in Cherbourg [Annotator’s Note: Cherbourg, France] on 7 September 1944, having sailed from New York Harbor. They were on a liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] that had previously been a battleship. The ship had bunks five people high. Rice was second from the floor. A lot of people got seasick. People above Rice’s bunk were throwing up, so he went up on deck with his sleeping bag. The food was great. They knew there were submarines out there. They did a lot of exercises. It was a nervous cruise all the way over. They were in a big convoy. When they arrived, it looked like there had been a war in the harbor. Ships were turned over. Others in the convoy had to land at Omaha Beach [Annotator’s Note: Normandy, France]. There were still Germans on the peninsula who had not given up. He was part of the combat engineers who probed for mines in the sand. They did this for a few days. Rice was probing for mines when a bouncing Betty [Annotator's Note: German S-mine, Schrapnellmine, Springmine, or Splittermine] popped, but it was a dud. Rice was lucky.

Rip Rice went into combat in late October in northern Belgium and southern Holland. There is a book called Timberwolf Tracks [Annotator’s Note: Timberwolf Tracks: The History Of The 104th Infantry Division, 1942-1945 by Leo Arthur Hoegh (Editor), Howard J. Doyle (Editor), Robert P. Patterson (Contributor)]. Rice was at the water points behind the front line. He saw his first dead German in Germany. They were by a train station near the autobahn [Annotator’s Note: German highway]. Inside, there was a dead German sitting on a bench. Rice had to see if the man was booby-trapped. They were used to sleeping in pup tents [Annotator's Note: small sleep tents often shared by two soldiers]. The body was not booby-trapped. The 104th Infantry Division got to Holland in April 1945. In Headquarters Company, there were four water points. Rice was told they would be moving up and taking a town on 18 April the night before his 21st birthday. It would be a bloody battle. They were trying to get the Germans to give up.

Rip Rice remembers they were trying to get the Germans to give up. They were going to take a town on the night of 18 April [Annotator’s Note: of 1945]. They went to sleep that night and did not hear a war. The next morning, they had to set up the water point. A guy in the German underground claimed to be a salesman of pots and pans. He drew the commanders a map of where the SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization; abbreviated SS] were holed up. The commanders leveled those buildings and the war was over in the town. Years later, Rice met the man who did this in the United States. [Annotator’s Note: Rice discusses the German underground.] The SS were under orders to fight to the last man or their families would be hit. The town was the nicest they had been in since the war started.

Rip Rice did not have many interactions with civilians. [Annotator’s Note: Rice had just entered Holland.] They were trying to figure out who their enemies were. Rice and his unit [Annotator’s Note: 104th Infantry Division] were making water. He remembers hearing about VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945]. They met some Russians before they heard the war was over. There was a chocolate factory near them. They were pulling water out of a fire hydrant instead of the river. The war was still happening in the Pacific. They were sent home. They heard about the concentration camps. Rice saw a slave labor camp in Nordhausen [Annotator’s Note: Elements of the 104th liberated Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen, Germany, a subcamp of Buchenwald, on 11 April 1945]. He saw people who were starved and sickly and the smell was awful. Rice and others threw up at the sight and smell. The smell covered a 30-mile span. The stench was the bodies and the crematoriums. It smelled like burning flesh, hair, and bones. Rice had a month's leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] and then went to the west coast to prepare to fight the Japanese. In August, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] and the war was over. There were thousands of kamikazes [Annotator's Note: Japanese suicide bombers] waiting for the invasion. Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] made the decision to drop the bombs.

Rip Rice made a trip to Tokyo, Japan. He loves the Japanese people and the German people. Rice wrote a story about the atomic bombs [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] being dropped and Harry Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] being bashed over it. It was the firebombing that stopped the war, not the second atomic bomb. Rice thinks the war changed everyone’s lives. He had nightmares for a while. Losing friends was hard. Rice is a peacemaker after the war.