William "Bill" Watkins

I only met Bill Watkins once. I had put a request in the Yorktown Crier/Poquoson Post for World War II veterans to interview for a project that I was working on. He called and told me that he would like to get together with me and tell me of his experiences in the war. One afternoon a couple of months ago, I did get the privilege of spending two hours with him.
William Watkins was born and raised in Poquoson. He was twelve years old when the August 23, 1933 hurricane decimated the area. He lived in the Messick area and remembered having seventeen windows knocked out of his second story of his home by floating fence posts.
His best friend was John Forrest. John joined the Marine Corps and was later killed at Iwo Jima.
He graduated from Poquoson High School in 1940. He went to work in the shipyard and was married his wife Dot the week before Pearl Harbor.
On December 7, 1941 William Watkins was working and it was there that he received word of the Japanese attack. He remembered someone selling newspapers at the intersection of 38^th Street and Washington Ave. with the headlines of the attack.
He talked about the fear that the local people had after Pearl Harbor. There was a real fear of Germans landing in submarines. He watched for airplanes at the old Claytor Rollins funeral home.
He was joined the Army on June 17^th 1943. He met Major Krause at the post office at West Avenue in Newport News. He wanted to be an aviation cadet and passed the test for that position.
He reported to Camp Lee for induction and stayed there for about ten days. He then reported to Miami as an aviation cadet. He wanted the fly the P-52s "so bad, I could taste it" He was in a group of about 500 other cadets. Most could not swim, but Bill passed the test and was made a swimming instructor. He stayed in the water too long and got an ear infection. He woke one morning and noticed a discharge on his pillow and showed to the doctor and was "kicked out" of the aviation cadets.
Bill was then sent to a school in Illinois and then to school in Tampa Florida. He soon received word that he was placed on the replacement lists to go overseas. He then reported to the a replacement camp in North Carolina. From there he went of a troop train to Camp Miles Standish in Thornton Massachusetts.
Soon he was on a troop ship sailing for England. They landed at Liverpool. It was there that he got his first view of the war as he saw the damage from German bombs to the city.
He then to took a train to High Green in the southern part of England. It was there that he was assigned to the 834^th Engineers.
He boarded an LST in Southampton Harbor as part of the Normandy invasion fleet. He noted that many of those ships were built at Newport News shipyard.
He went ashore at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. It was D-Day. He that the scene was like the movie "Saving Private Ryan" but worse. He remembered seeing someone drag another person by the hand from the line of fire only to have the rest of his body stay behind.
William Watkins’ unit later became attached to General Patton’s 3^rd Army.
They went constantly moving forward in France. He was strafed by the German air force. He was at the famous bridge at Remagan.
He participated in the Battle of the Bulge. He remembers this time as being "cold, cold. cold." He saw people literally freezing to death.
William Watkins was there when Dachau was liberated and described the disturbing scenes of the death camps. " If someone says that the Holocaust did not happen, they don’t what there are talking about. I saw it"
He was in Czechoslovakia when the war ended. He remembered a sergeant coming by and announcing that the war was over.
He then returned to France and lived in a tent city with thousands of other soldiers. While they were still elated over the victory over the Germans, they knew that being transferred to the Pacific loomed in the future. Harry Truman dropped the atomic bomb, ending the war and saving thousands of American lives.
Bill Watkins did not have to go to the Pacific. Like millions of other American servicemen, who were lucky enough to survive the war, he came home and resumed his life and raised a family. He came back from overseas in 1945. He returned to the shipyard, but after a year of so, he became a bricklayer.