WILLIAM MCLAIN
Age: 88
Born: Sept. 30, 1921
Hometown: Boston
Residence: Palm Springs
Military branch: U.S. Army; 54th Replacement Battalion; 211th Replacement Company
Years served: Oct. 17, 1942- Jan. 4, 1946
Rank: First lieutenant
Family: Three children, David Taylor of Murrells Inlet, S.C., Virginia LeLesch of Fountain Valley and Susanne Mumby of Dallas; two grandchildren; two great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
Army Air Corps veteran Leo Habel of Indio
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii
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William McLain's scruffy appearance drew the ire of one of the U.S Army's top commanders during World War II.
McLain, an officer with the 54th Replacement Battalion — stationed in Glastonbury, England — was in charge of a unit that provided food, clothing and shelter for Gen. George Patton's tank crews.
The men had to set up temporary housing for the crews — 12-foot square “pyramidal” tents with wood floors — because there wasn't enough housing in town, he said.
“One time, 15 or 20 troops came in and I wound up working all night setting them up,” McLain said. “The next morning, who should come for an inspection? Gen. Patton, and he raised hell with me because I didn't shave.”
McLain said he tried to explain, but Patton didn't want to hear any excuses.
“He said, ‘Go home and shave now,'” McLain said. “He was so spit-and-polished it pissed me off a little bit. He had an orderly to polish his boots and buttons and he gave me hell because I wasn't up to his standards.”
McLain dropped out of high school after his sophomore year and after working for two years, he returned to complete his junior year. Uncle Sam came calling one month into his senior year.
“In October, at age 21, I was drafted out of high school,” he said.
The city of Boston decided to give diplomas to those drafted in their senior year. After McLain's Army physical, the examining physician handed him a slip that read “Pes planus Limited Service.”
Pes planus, Latin for flat feet — meant combat duty was out of the question for McLain.
After basic training, McLain was assigned to the 48th Military Police Escort Guard Company stationed at Fort Wadsworth in New York.
His future duty would be to “escort” prisoners of war arriving in “otherwise empty ships from foreign shores to camps,” in the United States, he said.
Before completing this training, he responded to a call for officer candidates, was accepted, and was sent to Grinnell College in Iowa.
Ninety days later, when McLain received his commission as a second lieutenant, his mother, who was in the Women's Army Corps, attended the ceremonies.
“It was customary at that time to give a dollar to the first enlisted person who saluted you, so she got the dollar,” McLain said.
When McLain received his overseas assignment, he and thousands of men loaded onto ships in New York Harbor.
“When the convoy left in the morning, our ship wouldn't go,” he said.
The next day, the men hopped aboard another ship — the RMS Mauretania — a former luxury passenger liner converted to a troop ship — and set sail, alone, across the Atlantic Ocean
When the Mauretania sailed out to the open ocean, another ship was making its way into the harbor. McLain said he was curious, as the two ships approached each other, to see how they would pass. As they closed in, they seemed to be playing a game of “chicken,” he said.
“Finally, the damn thing ran into the Mauretania in the port side near the bow,” McLain said.
The Mauretania returned to port for inspection — she was found to be dented but seaworthy — and was off, again, on her eight-day voyage to Liverpool, England.
“We arrived at night,” everything was blacked out, he said. “They put us on a train and we rattled down to the southwest of England,” to the town of Glastonbury.
McLain spent about seven months in Glastonbury before being shipped to France in August 1944, where his company supplied housing for replacement tank crews waiting to be called up to the front lines to replace the dead or wounded.
“We chased behind Patton's Third Army,” he said. “We got requests on a daily basis.”
McLain was tempted to jump into the action when a call came out for volunteers.
Any and all available men were allowed to volunteer — even those with flat feet — during the Battle of the Bulge.
“That's the closest I came to (the) war,” he said. “(When) they came back with a plea for more men, I thought about it, and I thought, ‘Uh uh.'
“I would hear the sounds of battle, but I wasn't close enough to get shot,” he said.
“As the war was winding down and there was less need for our service, we were disbanded and sent back to a POW camp” that held 50,000 prisoners, he said. Most of the POWs were German, but there were some Russian soldiers captured wearing German uniforms.
“We didn't know what the hell to do with them,” he said.
But dictator Joseph Stalin finally requested that the soldiers be returned to the Soviet Union.
“Before sending them back there, we destroyed their records (to protect them) and sent them back, and God only knows what happened to them,” McLain said.
