1943

Bob's Adventures, 1944
1945

Judith, Bob's mom kept some of the letters and envelopes he sent her in a scrap book. Here are some of the envelopes:






Bob's commanding officer, Lt. Francis Marion Davis, requested Bob make a few pieces of art, such as:



Fuel rationing stamps of the time


Marian & Bob - Marian is, at this point, a mother with a job as a riveter with North American Aviation


Ft. Pierce


Graduating Class


Legend of Graduating Class

Bob worked on the plans for a large scale simulation on the D-Day invasion. Among the demonstrations was a radio controlled boat with 50 tons of explosives that took out the steel reinforced breakwater the SeaBees erected (6' high and deep, 200' long). One piece of that boat landed in an evacuated school 3 miles away!

Bob recalls:

JANET BOARD

"While stationed at the Navy's Amphibious Training Base in Fort Pierce, Florida in 1944 as a Carpenter's Mate (Surveyor) 3rd Class in Sea Bee Maintenance Unit No. 570, our CO, LT.F.M. Davis, recognizing my incipient talent as the unit's bulletin board cartoonist, assigned me to do illustrating work for FDR's Joint-Army-Navy-Engineering-Testing Board, of which he was a member, representing the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps.

"The JANET Board, I understood, was established for the purpose of encouraging and using the wartime nation's civilian population's resource of inventiveness to help win the war, wherein a request was published for members of the public to submit ideas. My part in this effort came after many of these ideas had been developed and were ready to be demonstrated before a select group of Allied Military Commanders before a grandstand erected on the beach at Fort Pierce Inlet.

"Our Unit had the responsibility for setting the scene for staging this event, and I illustrated the Program Brochure and also participated in the labors of constructing some of the objects which were targets of some of the following described inventions:

  1. A General Sherman Tank, fitted with a long set of booms on its front supporting a sprocket and chain driven drum rotating many heavy chains that flailed the earth in front of the tank to explode the minefields before passing through.
  2. Another tank, with a large egg crate full of rockets used to blast way through a heavily reinforced concrete wall 9 feet tall, 6 feet thick.
  3. A landing craft, fitted to launch toward submerged underwater obstacles submarine torpedoes that had the normally 2-foot long warheads replaced with 50-foot long ones.
  4. Floating docks composed of steel boxes capable of being bolted together to any configuration and pushed to shore. ... and ending the show....
  5. A landing craft, crammed to the gunwales with explosive cratering compound,which when set off in the surf, flung a piece of the boat 3-miles across the Indian River into the City of Fort Pierce.
"There were many other parts to this demonstration which others can better describe, particularly those members of our unit whose expertise was used a short time later, to continue this work on the beaches of Normandy. My last job, before being deployed to the Pacific Theater, was to swim into the crater in the surf to measure the hole's dimensions with a long stick."

Bob recalled in 2015:

About 11/1/44, railroaded to Treasure Island and Livermore CA for training as an infantry Mortar Platoon member. About I/I/45 based at Port Hueneme Ca with weekend liberty to LA until boarding Gilliam. My work then was assignment to a Land Surveying Party.

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