Joan Falconer Byrd interviews Harvey Littleton in 2001:
"MR. LITTLETON: We spent most of our time digging holes for these 100-foot poles. And if you had to dig a hole for a 100-foot pole by hand – and they were quite big around, because a tree that long – it was something. So we spent most of our time digging holes or ditches and not very much time going to school. We once passed the word down the ditch we were digging. And, we found there was 1,200 years of college education and teaching experience in that ditch. It was quite a place.
Well, finally, after six months of that nonsense, I was shipped overseas to the 849th Signal Intelligence Unit in North Africa. So we landed in Oran in March or April 1943. And we were shipped then by train in the, literally, the "40 and 8 cars." That is, they're freight cars, which would handle either 40 men or 8 horses. And they didn't clean them out in between. It took us two days to go from Oran to Algiers, only a couple hundred miles. It was amazing.
Well, the war was still on in North Africa, so I got a battle star from that, I think. At the headquarters we did some more training. And I remember I sort of misbehaved a bit. I got sick and when I came back from the hospital to the outfit, I told the duty sergeant that I had gone back to work. And, I told the sergeant at work that I was on duty. So I got – finally, they caught up with me after a couple of weeks, and I got my strength back digging a garbage pit. Four feet by four feet.
So, you see, I wasn't really a good soldier. However, I had a nickname in that outfit [Smorgasbord]."
Oral history interview with Harvey K. Littleton, 2001 Mar. 15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed April 5, 2009. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/little01.htm
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