The Fifth Generation of Watlingtons in West Tennessee were at the age for full participation in the mobilization for World War II, 1939-1945. As early as 1938, Wm. Eugene Watlington joined the U.S. Navy, and John William and Herman Watlington left Jackson, Tenn., with the Tennessee National Guard 117th Inf. Regt. for training at Fort Jackson, S.C. in Sept. 1940. Herman had enlisted for only one year, but John and other regular Guardsmen were there for the duration of the War.
After Pearl Harbor and the Military Service Draft, World War II drew in nearly every grandson of Mack Rob and Eula Daniel Watlington. Albert's three sons saw service: Wm. Eugene in the Navy, James Leonard in the Army Air Corps, and some years later Bobby Mack was for a short while in Navy service. John L. Watlington's son Leonard Needham served with the Army Air Corps, Velma's husband Karubah Carnahan also served with the Army Air Corps piloting fighter-bombers, and Albert Edwin served a short time with the Army and was released because of an injury in training. He worked in the welding trade during the rest of the war years.
Ulrich and Jennie Watlington's eight sons all served some time with the armed services, and one son-in-law, Clarence Lloyd King, Clara Mai's husband served with an Army Field Artillery Battalion. Betty, their youngest daughter later married Hubert H. Williams, who was wounded twice in U.S. Infantry service in France and Belgium. The oldest grandchild, Willie Lee Davis was married to Otis Simms who worked with the critical automobile industry during the war years in Detroit, Michigan with the Ford Motor Co.
Service in the war effort was also rendered by Margaret Watlington as a nurse assigned to various military posts, including the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, and Camp Blanding, Fla. Her brother, Wm F., served with the U.S. Army Air Corps. Service in war related industries was the common lot of many, including farming, Army Ordinance Plant at Milan, Tenn., cloth production at Bemis, telegraph operators and city water works. Mack, Sam and Paul worked building U.S. Service facilities at Paris, Tenn., and on base and airfield facilities at Dothan, Ala., in north Florida, at Homestead Army Air Corps Base in southern Florida, and on several other facilities in Central Florida. One by one they were called for military duty until there were only Elton and Joseph C. at home on the farm. The draft board offered to defer them for family farming duties but after a one year deferment, Elton relinquished this privilege and was inducted in April 1945. Two months later Joe Conrad finished high school and volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps before he was 18 years of age. Where were they? A brief resume will indicate how scattered they were around the nation and the world.
Ulrich Mack Watlington trained in Virginia; Paris, Tenn.; and Battle Creek, Michigan. He served fourteen months in a barrage balloon unit at Santa Monica, Ca., then retrained with a Military Police Battalion at Battle Creek, Michigan. He went to England with this battalion and was assigned to traffic movement duties with General Patton's fast moving motorized Divisions in France, and Germany. As soon as the victory in Germany was secured May 9, 1945 his battalion went by train to Marseilles, France and shipped July 7,through the Panama Canal, by Eniwetok and Hazel Island in the Caroline Islands and then to the recently captured island of Okinawa, September 1, 1945. Sporadic fighting by Japanese soldiers was still going on, even though the war had ended. Some weeks later his brother Sam's troopship landed at Okinawa and they were able to spend a short time together in the fall of 1945.
Inducted July 29, 1942, Orson Kenneth Watlington trained in New Jersey and Florida then went by troop train through his home town of Jackson, Tenn. at midnight on to Denver, Colorado where his Science and Mathematic education was put to work studying bombsight maintenance and other navigational aids of Army Air Corps planes. While in Denver his wife was able to join him for some weeks, but he had no home furlough before sailing to Casablanca, Morroco. There he joined the U.S. Forces in North Africa which later invaded Sicily and Italy. For much of the later months of the War he was assigned to a Repair Depot at Bari, Italy on the Adriatic Sea.
Sam S. Watlington probably performed his best service in the war effort as a foreman in civilian construction work at major new airfields in the South. Large roofs for aircraft hangars were being assembled of wood only as steel was in scarce supply. His job was calculating the fastest and safest way of assembling and raising into place these huge wide spans of wooden trusses. Some of this work was represented in the Homestead Army Air Base in south Florida. After several delays the draft board called him to service in February, 1945 and he took basic Infantry Replacement Training at Camp Wheeler, Macon, Georgia. From there he was shipped to Okinawa, at the time invasion plans were being set up to enter Japan. The war ended and he was assigned to an engineer battalion more in line with his experience, and sent to Seoul, Korea. His battalion built and supervised the building of quarters for the Army of Occupation in Korea. Beginning as a private he was assigned a supervisory capacity immediately and given monthly promotions to a Master Sergeant rank. He was offered a commissioned officer's rank for re-enlisting but wanted to return home to his wife and sons in West Tenn.
Herman Lee Watlington served a year with the 30th Infantry Division at Fort Jackson, Columbia, S.C. from Sept. 1940-Sept. 1941. After returning to West Tennessee he worked with his brother-in-law, C. Lloyd King, in maintenance work with the Madison County Board of Education. Recognizing his need for further education in order to become a pilot with the Army Air Corps, he studied on his own while in service and during his year between service terms. Before being drafted for service again as the war progressed, he volunteered and was accepted as an Army Air Corps Cadet in training to become a pilot. Less than half of the cadets became pilots, but Herman hung in there tough and passed training at different levels at Union City, Tenn., Malden, Mo., and Blytheville, Ark., to graduate as a Flight Officer for multiengined planes. Further training in four-motored planes came in Louisiana, and his was one of the crews who flew a four-motored bomber from the U.S.A., Florida, to Trinidad, then on to Belem, Brazil and across the Atlantic to Africa, delivering the plane to North Africa.
Then his assignment was to the 15th Air Corps in Italy; more specifically to fly Boeing B-17 bombers on long ten to twelve hour raids into Romania, Hungary and Germany. He completed fifty missions and got home in time to marry in Dec. 1944. After this he worked with the Army Air Corps Transport Command until the War ended. His account of these years is included elsewhere.
John William Watlington joined the Tenn. National Guard in Jackson, Tenn. as a high school student along with friends from Bemis and Malesus. It offered a modest supplementary income, some adventure, and new friendships and experiences. In September 1940 the Guard was called into active service as a part of the 30th Infantry Division, 117th Infantry Regiment, and sent to Fort Jackson, Columbia, S.C for further training. In 1940 and 1941 shortages of all kinds of military equipment was notable, partly because as much as possible was already being shipped to England to aid that country resist the Axis powers in the Battle of Britain. Herman and John recalled that there was not even the necessary trucks to transport troops from one training area to another. Housing was often in squad tents heated by small coal or kerosene heaters in winter.
Many of the troops involved in the 117th were from Tennessee and thus many accounts of their training experiences have been shared by friends. Special parts of John's training were carried out at Camp Blanding, Florida, with summer strategic sessions being held near Shelbyville, Tenn. with large numbers of troops. Many of the original men were given options of transferring to other service units where their abilities were in demand. George Morris, Dewuild Rushing and John Wm. Watlington chose to stay with the Company L, a Rifle Company of the 117th and earned promotions as squad and platoon leaders. To the surprise of many the Division was not rushed overseas, but rather used as a training division where raw recruits received basic training and then transferred to other units. Later in the war special Infantry Replacement Training Corps were established to ``rush up'' the training done at first in such training Divisons. But this type of training in Regiments and Divisions was a training program for officers as well as enlisted recruits in field strategy and operations.
In the winter of 1943-44 the Division moved to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, for specialized training related to the June 1944 invasion of France. They shipped out of Boston for England where they continued their disciplined training and were prepared for the Invasion of France in June 1944. After the beach heads had been secured by special forces, the 30th Division landed in Normandy on D-Day plus 6 (six days after the invasion began) and moved into the hedgerow country around St. Lo where the fighting was intense and the advance slow. After near disastrous ``friendly fire bombing raids'' by American planes, the 30th helped lead the breakthrough at St. Lo and moved toward Avranches, a small sea port town to the southwest. The 30th Division was engaged near Mortain by four armored Divisions in a major counterattack by German forces. It was near Mortain that John earned his Bronze Star in the rescue of a wounded soldier when his unit was forced to retreat. As the Germans failed in this counter attack at Mortain they recognized that France was lost and began a tactical withdrawal toward Belgium and Germany with the loss of many men and war material. The Allies pursued and Paris fell on Aug. 23-25, and the 30th Division of the First Army advanced 180 miles in 72 hours across Northern France and liberated Tournai, Belgium on Sept. 1-2. They proceeded across Belgium and by December were in the fringe of Germany surrounding the city of Aachen.
John and George Morris were both Platoon Sergeants at the time of the invasion. They often shared sleeping quarters when possible and some dangerous escapades. John was slightly wounded but preferred to stay with the unit, and earned a Bronze Star and Commendation for gallantry in action. In December 1944 George and John were both recommended for a ``battlefield furlough home'' and the lot fell to John to get it. He went to England, then to the U.S.A. and arrived home in January 1945, where arrangements were quickly made for a long postponed marriage to Shirley Johnson of Bemis.
John thus missed out on the action called ``the Battle of the Bulge'' in Dec. 1944. His unit did enter into Germany before he came home.
John and Mack Watlington, Lloyd King and his brother Paul King were all within a few miles of one another in Nov.-Dec. of 1944. Leonard Needham Watlington was flying over them with the Ninth Air Corps. But John left Dec. 15th for home and Herman was already home after fifty missions out of Italy. Kenneth and his wife's brother Arthur Nanney were still in Italy; Samuel S. Watlington was awaiting induction into the Army; and Paul Watlington was with a Signal Battalion on Green Island in the far away South Pacific. Elton was awaiting a draft call from the Draft Board, and Joe was in his senior year at J. B. Young High School.
John was on his way to rejoin his unit in Europe when the war ended in Europe. He was one of the first to be discharged from service on the ``point system'' with 107 points on September 2. He was discharged November 18, 1945. He returned home and ventured into farm life for a few months, but discovered that Army life had left a strong call for him. Later, he said that after five years of learning to be a soldier, he knew more about soldiering than anything else. Therefore he chose the Army as a career. After some months in various camps in the U.S.A. he was assigned to Army of Occupation duty in Hokkaido, Japan, with the ill-fated Seventh Infantry Division, which pitched him into the front lines of the Korean Conflict in 1950 where he made the supreme sacrifice as the Chinese entered the war.
In the meantime James L. Watlington found himself in the U.S. Army Air Corps near Lucknow, India, flying war material ``over the hump'' into the besieged Republic of China. While there he met Rev. Wood K. Whetstone, a missionary to India, who performed Chaplaincy service to his unit. In later years James served as an officer in the Tenn. National Guard, Jackson, Tenn.
William Eugene Watlington served with the U.S. Navy from April 1940 until April 1946. He married his childhood sweetheart, Emily Ruth Forbis, in 1941 while stationed stateside. After his years of active service he served in the U.S. Navy Reserve until 1957.
Leonard Needham Watlington served a period of three years with the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1933-1936. After returning to military service in 1942 he studied to be a glider pilot, then went to gunnery school and later to airplane engineering school. Before going to England he had qualified as a gunner-engineer for the flight crews of the B-26 Martin bombers.
Assigned to the Ninth Air Corps, his 391st bomber group flew missions from England preparatory to the Invasion of June 1944, and later from France and Belgium in close support of ground troops on the front lines. His 574th Squadron earned a Presidential Citation for their participation in turning back the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, Dec. 23-26, 1944. Thus he, too, was near other relatives involved in the Invasion of Europe June-Dec. 1944. He recorded fifty-three combat flights before being recalled to the U.S.A. to attend an Air Corps Officers Gunnery School on May 3, 1945. As the war in Europe ended he chose to return to civilian life and his work at the Ethyl Corporation in Baton Rouge.
Velma Louise Watlington Velma had married Karubah Carnahan of Shreveport, La. while they both attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, La. He was enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program in college and went directly from college to U.S. Army Air Corps Flight School. After he went overseas Velma Louise lived with her parents in Shreveport.
Karubah (Karo) Carnahan's overseas service was in the Mediterranean Theatre with flights out of Sicily and Italy on A-20 Fighter-Bombers with strikes in Italy and Germany. Many of his later missions were on night raids from Italy into Germany.
Karo Carnahan chose to stay with the U.S. Army Air Corps and because of his excellent record was chosen to be one of the early pilots on experimental jet fighter planes. It was an exciting venture but as dangerous as missions in combat. For some years he was based in Panama where he flew jet planes for the Air Force. He served a total of twenty-three years with the Air Force and continued in work related to training pilots for Northrup Aircraft in southern California. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a full Colonel.
Carnahan's service in Italy overlapped the time Herman and Kenneth Watlington were with the Army Air Corps in Italy. Herman was flying out of Foggio Airfield and Kenneth was at Bari, Italy, both bordering the Adriatric Sea.
Paul Hammond Watlington was inducted in January, 1943 and after basic training was assigned to the Signal Corps Training School for the use of early radar equipment. Most of his training was in Florida and radar was still secretive in those years. Their first sets were made in Great Britain though the discovery and design had been made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., where an old temporary building of 1940 vintage is kept as a memorial to its discovery. After his training Paul had no home furlough, but was sent in December 1943 to California and on to Guadacanal where thousands of Japanese troops were still offering resistance near Henderson Air Field.
Paul took part in the resistance to a massive but futile attack of the isolated Japanese army on the airfield. His platoon was soon assigned to another observation post on Bougainville to detect any Japanese air or sea activity in the area. Thus his service in the South Pacific War was as ``eyes and ears'' of the Armed Forces on strategic advanced observation posts which included the Solomons, Bougainville, Green Island, and then Zapoanga, Mindanao, Island of the Phillipines before V-J Day in August 1945. He claims that he never saw anyone he had known before the war, in the South Pacific or in the Western U.S.A., because of the isolated nature of his work. Getting back to North Little Rock, Ark., (Camp Chaffee) a telephone operator friend of Rachel Weir was able to locate him for greetings from home. In Memphis he recognized a neighbor of Madison Co., Tenn., Bill Robley, who was selling tickets at the bus station as he was on his way to Jackson, Tenn., in the first days of 1946.
Elton Andrew Watlington turned eighteen in 1943, was offered the option of deferrment from military duty to help on the farm, which was accepted for a year. But having six brothers already in the Armed Services and not having much land, machinery or future in farming, I elected to take a turn at military service in 1945.
Inducted at Fort Oglethorpe, outfitted at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, and sent to Infantry Replacement Training Corps at Fort McClellan, Anniston, Alabama, the Army was a whole new world for me. We were seventeen weeks in training and by the time it was over we were not facing a shooting war but an overseas tour of duty in the Army of Occupation. Going to Yokohama in October 1945 our troopship wallowed for two or three days in the remains of the typhoon that damaged so many ships at Okinawa a week earlier. In Japan I was assigned to the 27th Division, 106th Regiment, Company M stationed in Niigata for six weeks, then reassigned to the 7th Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division in the heart of Tokyo for the next twelve months. It was a great adventure and I found Christian friends among the Japanese and the troops. The years went by quickly and I came home in January 1946 with a new resolve to become a Methodist Minister and, God willing, a missionary. My brother Joe had come home from China in September 1946, and Sam a bit earlier, so I was the last ``draftee'' to return from service. Like so many, I was ready for college with the help of the G. I. Bill of Rights -- twenty-two months of service time gave me thirty-four months of help with studies, enough for four years of studies at Lambuth College in Jackson, Tenn.
Joseph C. Watlington served August 1945-September 1946. Joe had gone to J. B. Young High School for his junior and senior years in order to ``take shop'' under Mr. Kirby McKnight. His sister Clara Mai, who was living at home while Lloyd was in service and driving daily to teach at Bemis, provided transportation for him and two Threadgill students. Athletic in build and abilities, he played a good game of basketball and enjoyed other sports also. Venturesome by nature he even took a few flying lessons, enough to solo in a light plane during his senior year in high school. He was quick to think, act and choose, even to a fault at times.
Joe had milked enough cows and had no inclination to stay on the small farm when the whole world was out there beckoning to him. He was eighteen on the 7th of July and chose the Marine Corps for his branch of service. He trained at Parris Island, Camp LeJeune Marine Base, Jacksonville, N.C. and in January 1946 was on a ship to Tsientsin, China, for eight months of overseas service on mainland China at the same time that Sam was still in Seoul, Korea with the Engineers, and Elton was in Tokyo with the 7th Cavalry Regt. Joe returned stateside in September, 1946 and was discharged in San Diego.
Hubert Howard Williams of Boone Lane, Madison Co., Tenn., who married Betty Juanita Watlington, July 20, 1950 is also a veteran of World War II, seeing action with the First Army Group, First Infantry Division for a short period in October-November 1944 in Belgium and Germany. Hubert was inducted July 1, 1943 at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., took training at Ft. McClellan, Ala. and then was transferred as an Army Air Corps trainee to Miami Beach, Fla. He then went through some air crew training with the U.S. Army Air Corps at Duquesne University, Pittsburg, Pa. from Dec. 21 to April 17, 1944. From there he was transferred to Advanced Infantry Training, 78th Division, Camp Pickett, Va.
From Camp Pickett he went to a Port of Replacement at Ft. Meade, Maryland, on August 11, 1944, and shipped out of New York on the U.S.S. Ile D France troop transport directly to Scotland. From Scotland he went by railroad to Southampton, England on Sept. 22, 1944 and landed at LeHavre, France September 23, that harbor being open three and a half months after D-Day at Normandy.
Hubert was still unassigned in transport into France, Luxembourg, and Germany. At Luxembourg the Replacement Center was close enough to the front lines to hear the big guns, Oct. 6-13, 1944. On Friday, October 13, he entered Germany by truck to join the First Inf. Div., First Army as they encircled the city of Aachen. Within five weeks he had been twice wounded and was taken to field hospitals in Germany and Belgium. Because of the severity of his back and chest wounds he was shifted to Paris for surgery and to England for recuperation before being sent Stateside on a hospital ship in June 1945.
Hubert was left with severe, slow healing wounds and was hospitalized until given a disability discharge March 8, 1946.
C. Lloyd King married Clara Mai Watlington in Feb. 1940 and he continued his maintenance work with the Madison Co. Board of Education. He had started to work for them principally as a truck driver but became involved in many kinds of tasks across the years. When inducted into military service, at the same time as Paul Watlington, he was assigned to a basic training unit designed for the Field Artillery where his experience as a truck driver and maintenance man could be best used. His training was mostly at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and he was sent to various auto mechanic schools there. His unit was shipped over to England in time for the June 1944 invasion of France and he entered France a few weeks after ports were secured. His field artillery battalion later offered fire power for the crossing of the Rhine River and the drive into Germany in 1945. His brother, Paul W. King, was with a Field Hospital unit in France and Germany and as hostilities ceased they were able to visit one another.