The following is taken from tapes of Veterans Oral History Project in conjunction with the Library of Congress at the Oldham County History Center.  The interview was conducted on Ruth Lowry Lewis Murray, a Red Cross employee during WWII by Earl Orr on April 20, 2002 and transcribed by Jan Jasper.

Ruth was born on June 12, 1920 in Crestwood, KY , graduated from Crestwood High School and Transylvania University.  After graduation from Transylvania she did graduate study at Syracuse University in New York.  She joined the Red Cross overseas service in 1944 through January of 1946.  Ruth was sent to Calcutta at the Red Cross headquarters and then given her longterm assignment.

 “I was assigned to an Air Force Base known as the 305^th Air Service Command at a place called Ondal, India, where there were nearby bomber bases and First Air Commando Base which both of them had active duty in Burma and China and Southeast Asia. There were two American Red Cross Clubs already established on this Air Force Base.  I served in one of them along with four other women, Club Director and three staff assistants.  There were times when the Clubs had five women working in them.  We had in the Club - it was a large kind of stucco, thatched roof building, low flat one story building - known as Club 690, which was our APO number. That was the Post Office for over seas people, military as well, for our base. We had music, we had record players, and we had a game room, and we had a great big center lounge.  We scheduled ping pong tournaments.  There would be people who came through who were national ping pong champions and we’d schedule those.  We had contests between officers and enlisted men.  We had a canteen where we served hamburgers and doughnuts – famous dough nuts that the Red Cross is known for - probably some other food. …… Those kinds of activities, you know, as best we could.  We were often short. That whole Theater, China-Burma-India was the last on what we called ‘the pipeline’….  Most of the war material and supplies from this country to the service people went to the South Pacific and Europe, because those were the big military pushes.  So we were the last to get supplies, although we did get some, not just Red Cross, but military, too.”

On the base where Ruth worked they “repaired Air Force planes, the parachutes, and all kinds of equipment.  We had planes of all types: fighter planes, bomber planes, cargo planes that were brought to our base for repair, and we were in a large area that, as I said, had a bomb group, the Seventh Bomb Group.  They essentially had B-24 bombers that flew all over Southeast Asia and China Coast bombing.  Then we had the First Air Commandos that were the glider pilots that went in Burma behind enemy lines.  General Stilwell trained Chinese troops a bit north of our base. There were a lot of Chinese troops trained by the American military to fight in Burma.  You may have heard, or seen on TV, Merrill’s Marauders.  They did very rough fighting in Burma.  It was horrible, you know, their worst enemy was the snakes, bugs, ants, disease - malaria, dysentery, and Dengue fever – all the tropical diseases.  That killed a lot of Merrill’s Marauders that fought in the jungles in Burma.  They had just finished.  They were under a General named Merrill.  That’s why they were called Merrill’s Marauders.  They were asked to do - they were volunteers that were asked to do - some special fighting.  I think when they signed up; they didn’t think it would be that rough.  And they had just finished their campaign, essentially, when I got to India.  The nurses that took care of many of them said they were just almost like animals, our servicemen, because they had had it so rough.”

            Ruth left Calcutta on a troop ship in December, 1945 through the Suez Canal to the Atlantic Ocean to New York City on a ship with 3,300 on a very rough trip through the winter Atlantic Ocean storms.  There were nurses, enlisted men, officers and ex-prisoners of war on the ship.  “I’ll never forget, one woman with a little girl coming into New York harbor, and she was kind of bleary-eyed, but she said, “Isn’t this beautiful?”  She had been interned as a prisoner of war in Java, I believe, for years.  She looked at the Statue of Liberty and she said, “Isn’t it beautiful. I’ve come into this harbor many times too hung over to appreciate it, but I certainly do now. The Japanese were merciless, really, really cruel to their prisoners of war.  You’ve heard of the Bataan Death March, I’m sure?”

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