Oral History Interview with Bill O Neill, Taken at the 17Th Signal Battalion Association

Oral History Interview with Bill O’Neill, taken at the 17th Signal Battalion Association Reunion 2006

Bill was a 1LT with US Army Reserve when assigned to the 17th Signal Battalion, A&B Company, mostly B Company, as VHF Platoon Leader, as assistant platoon leader and later as the platoon leader. I was assigned to the 17th somewhere around the 10th of September 1961. I was shipped overseas because of the Berlin Crisis.

Karlsruhe was just a gorgeous place. When I was with the VHF platoon and therefore we were always looking for the highest ground possible and really didn’t seem, as I recall, to create problems with the farmers or civilians, because that was what we were looking for. The roads were pretty good except when you started to go up these hills, because they were really small mountains, I guess, and they would be somewhere around 1500-1600 feet up in the air and typically they had a Gasthaus up on top of them. But it could be very slick and cause problems either during the winter or when it was rainy, because they were not improved roads.

I lived in the BOQ for awhile and that was fine and then went out into the economy and lived in an apartment with another fellow officer. The buildings on the Kaserne and right up to the Kaserne were nice I thought. They were functional. The motor pools, the same thing, they were functional. Billets: again they were functional. They were typical Army billets. I can’t compare the officer’s billets with anything else—that was my only real experience with billets.It seemed to me that the clubs were pretty nice. The officers club that I frequented was very nice, Incomparison with the one in Ft. Monmouth, NJ it wasn’t as big or as extravagant, but it was still very nice and the food was pretty good.

We frequently visited the EM club as Officer of the Day. It seemed real neat, had a lot of good food (or at least that was what the troops would say), but I don’t ever recall being to the NCO Club.

The weather for me was typical upstate New York weather. In the summer it was nice and in the winter it was cold and it could snow and it could rain. It could really make your life miserable, or it could make your life very nice.

We had anywhere from privates, the next step up was specialist 4th class and then we had buck sergeants, staff sergeants, and then to help run the Platoon we had either an E-7 or maybe a E-6s (staff sergeant). As an assistant platoon leader, I was a 2LT and I reported to a 1LT who was in charge of the VHF platoon, which as I recall had a number of people. The Platoon probably had in excess of 140 people including the radio maintenance people and the motor pool people. The company commanders that I dealt with were all captains. There was a CPT Everheart, CPT Botts, and a CPT Joy. When I moved out of the VHF platoon, I became a platoon leader for the HF platoon, which was as I recall around 125 to 130 people including all the maintenance people.

As an officer I carried a .45 and most everybody else carried M-14’s because we had just replaced the M-1s with the M-14’s. The food at the mess hall – well I always ate everything. In my opinion, it was always pretty good. Maybe I just lucked out, but it seemed to be that way. Clothing and equipment were good. I had to buy my own clothing. The equipment was always operational—it did its job. I can’t recall any time when we had an assignment where the equipment could not perform to the expectation of its design. Since we had a lot of trucks, movement of equipment, we always carried a lot fuel. We had 5 gallon gas cans all around. The deuce and a half carried a little hut on it that contained all the radio equipment. We had two 5 kilowatt generators being trailered and they were full of 5-gallon gas cans, too.

How did our unit operate in the field or during an operation? Well, the VHF Platoon we were assigned at that time to supply the VHF lines of communication between command posts, and so we already had our relay stations set up before we ever went out into the field. What I mean by setup: they were packed whenever we were ready to go, and we knew how far we could transmit without any difficulty. With the HF platoon it was a little different. Sometimes we were mobile and sometimes we were stationery. In essence, when we were stationary, we would backup the area of communicating with the various other command posts if there were some problems even with the landlines, or with the VHF connections.

Who were your best buddies in the 17th? Bruce Harbo, Paul Taylor. Do you stay in contact with some of them? Oh yeah, I still keep in contact with them. I roomed next to Ron Strand for about 4-5 months. There were a group of us lieutenants who showed up within 2-3 months of one another that were then, since we all knew nothing, we figured there was safety in numbers.

I cannot answer the question about historical legacies for the group. The reason being that we still have stuff in storage from 30 years ago that we haven’t gone through. Having been a bachelor for a long time and traveling light, I do not know how much of that stuff I have kept.