Q:
When did you go into the armed forces?
A: I was 18 years old when I went into the
service. We had 16 in our family and my
father had passed away when I was 16 years old. I did not enlist because there were five of my brothers who were
already in the service. I was home
supporting my mother and the rest of our family and finally the draft board
said I had to go, and so I went. That
was the end of 1943. And I went to North
Carolina for basic training.
Q:
Which branch of the service were you in?
A: In the army I trained on 155 howitzers. It is quite a large gun and it has a shell
that weighs 95 pounds and can shoot 9 miles accurate. In those days you were out in the field and you had to dig a hole
by hand about as big as this kitchen, three feet deep. The camouflage nets would go over top of it
so you couldn’t see it from the air.
The Sergeant was in charge and there were ten of us. My job was to fire the howitzer and to put
the powder in. There were seven or
eight bags of powder, all attached together.
To fire the gun a shorter distance, you just cut off some of the bags. The most we ever fired at one time was about
five bags of powder. That would go four
or five miles. The shell had a fuse on
the front that you screwed on. You can set the fuse to explode when it hits the
ground or hits what ever you are firing at.
You can set it to explode in the air, especially when you are firing at
troops. Then you get pieces of shrapnel
and it all breaks up. You would have to
open and clean what they called the breech.
It’s kind of like a little pan, which had oil in it, and you had an oil
rag that you would wet and use to wipe off the breech. It would get black, very black. The reason I can hear today is because every
time you fired you were supposed to open your mouth. If you kept your mouth closed the noise of the gun recoiled back
and it is so large that if you stand in the way, well that would be the end of
you. Having your mouth open does
protect your ears.
Q:
Did you fire any guns besides howitzers?
A: I used to fire a bazooka too. There is no recoil at all from
bazookas. You put it on your shoulder
and the shell goes in the tube and one fellow is in back of you and he wraps
the wire around that little coil, where you make electrical contact, and then
he hits you on the shoulder. That meant
he was out of the way and that you could fire.
When you do fire, there is no recoil, but what comes out the back is
just a mass of flame. In fact we put up
sheets, regular bed sheets on 2 x 4s and put them in back of us and it burned
them to a crisp. There were fellows who
did get hurt when they were practicing.
They burned their hands severely.
It is a very simple thing to fire.
There is a trigger on it and you actually just squeeze it. I don’t know exactly how accurate it is, but
when we fired at the German tanks, the shells just bounced off. They had such good tanks. To knock the tanks out you had to hit the
tracks and then they couldn’t move.
That’s what we aimed at most of the time.
Q:
Had you ever handled a gun before going into the military?
A: Not until I got in the army. I had what they call a carbine. That has a clip of 15 rounds, but when we got
overseas, we welded two clips together so that we would have 30 rounds. It was illegal to do, but it was nice to do
because you just hold your finger on the trigger and it would go pow pow pow
pow pow…. And it was a nice gun, I mean
if you want to call guns nice. It was a
light gun. It wasn’t like a rifle,
which is a lot heavier. At the rifle
range we shot 200 yards. After that, I
went to Fort Bragg, Kentucky. There I
met a nice family from Evansville, Indiana that took me in on furlough weekends
and so forth.
Q:
What happened after you were in Kentucky?
A: The Battle of
the Bulge started as the German Army broke through the American lines and began
an offensive in Belgium. Our group left
Kentucky seven months early because we were needed to help push the Germans
back into Germany. We got on a British
ship, to go over, that held 10,000 soldiers.
All of our equipment was in the bottom of the ship. There were 600,000 soldiers that fought in
that battle.
Q:
Were you worried that the ship would be attacked on the way over to
Europe?
A: You’re scared. Anybody who says they aren’t scared, they are lying. We were concerned about German submarines so
we went over in convoys and we had ships protecting us. At night we slept in canvas cots, eight or
ten deep, and not very comfortable.
They were chained to the wall.
We ate beans for breakfast and I know there were hot dogs there. The British cut up hot dogs in
something. It wasn’t too good taste
wise. We landed in Glasgow, Scotland,
and our ship was too big to go into port so we had to be transported onto
tugboats and then we got into Glasgow, they put us on freight cars, I mean
really freight cars, not like American ones. They’re boxes.
Q:
What was it like riding in the freight cars in Scotland?
A: We were headed to Wales, to where our guns
were. When we were on these freight
cars, we were cooking our sea rations on one of these little Bunsen burners and
all of the sudden, the train jerked.
The trains were always jerking. My
hand went on this can, and I have this scar, see that. And it was funny, ‘cause they wanted to give
me a purple heart ‘cause I was wounded in action. It was bleeding so badly, you know, we threw the powder in there,
put special powder on there and put gauze on it. It wasn’t that bad. When
it cut, I didn’t even know it was cut until it started bleeding, because the
edge of the can was so sharp. So we got
word to three cars ahead of us, where all the medics and the doctors were. They had me get off the train and run along
the tracks while the train was going.
The funny part, although I didn’t think it was funny at the time, was
that they couldn’t stop the train. If
they stopped the train, they felt you were a target, because you could be
bombed. But anyway, I’m running along
the tracks and finally I catch up to the car and they had the door open and
they pulled me inside, and finally the guy sat me down on the floor and he’s
taking his needle and he says he was going to do the best he could. Every time he would go to put the needle in
the train would jerk, and they didn’t give me anything for pain. I’d say that the train was going maybe
fifteen or twenty miles an hour.
Q:
What happened after you got to Wales?
A: So then after we got into Wales, we got our
guns ready and they called our division to get into Germany and eventually we
got up to the Rhine River and it was cold.
The hardest part for the American soldier was the cold - the snow, the
cold, the sleet, frozen feet, frozen fingers, stuff like that. There were a lot of cases of frostbite
there. And then when we decided to
cross the Rhine River and they were building pontoon bridges and we had…I’m
trying to think of the name of it…it is not a tank, it’s a tractor, and like a
tractor it had regular tractor steel, with seats up top which pulled our gun.
The back part of the gun opens up like a Y.
The back part has like a spade that digs into the ground, which you push
into the ground so that it wouldn’t coil back.
Well, some of it is welded parts; they have to weld the things
together. Anyway, when we started across
the Rhine River, it was kind of scary because soon as the engineers got the bridge
built, the Germans would bomb it. And
in certain parts of that river, especially where we were at, it’s very swift
and if you got caught in it you’re almost a goner…
And another sidelight, that’s where I met
my brother, he was in another outfit. I
saw some soldiers with his patch, from the group that he was with and I said,
you know Paul Werrell and finally we got together. Before we crossed the Rhine, he came and ate lunch at our place
and I went to eat lunch at his place.
They were stationed at this big zoo, and in the zoo they had this big
cafeteria, and these guys are eating with table clothes on and we’re sitting on
the ground eating with mess kits! I
couldn’t believe it. And the food they
fed me in that place was unbelievable, because he was with the headquarters
division. A lot better treatment,
yeah.
Q:
How did the German citizens treat you?
A: You didn’t see too much of them. When we were going through Belgium, I met
some Belgian people who were very nice. We liberated Belgium. War is cruel and it’s sad and a lot of
people suffered in that war. At the
time, I think that most civilians over in Germany weren’t thinking about taking
anything. They were just trying to protect themselves. There were towns where
there were no houses left. They were
just wiped out, bombed out. People were
killed and children…we saw it in Germany and in Belgium. Some places were bombed by us, because there
was military going through those places.
You don’t know how many civilians were killed because they would set up
in an area. The Americans were more or
less after the factories, where they made their ammunition and trying to bomb
them out and of course by doing that you are bombing civilians and so…After the
war was over the transport planes crashed not too far from us where Germans
were trying to escape and so we had to go through this town to try to find
these soldiers who were in the transport plane so we went from house to house
to house and we got into this barn and I saw the hay moving and they gave us
orders to shoot and don’t ask questions. So by the grace of God, that the only
thing I can say, I just hollered, “Get out!” and a little boy and a little
girl, 7 or 8 years old, walked out and I said, “Oh thank you Jesus, for not
letting me shoot those kids.” And another time, during the war actually, we
were in this apple orchard, and the farmhouse was quite a way up on the hill
and we were sitting on this wall, there’s a lot of rock walls over there and a
little boy and a girl came down, they were 7 or 8 years old, and my buddy and I
were eating and we just had left in our mess kit was a half a peach, a canned
peach, and they came and sat down beside us and the little girl looks up in my
eyes and I look at Ed and I said “Ed, I can’t eat this peach, can you?” He says
“No” and we gave it to the kids to eat and actually we could’ve been court
marshaled for it because the reason is, they would tell their friends that
they’re giving food down near the guns, and at the time, I was sitting on this
wall, and across the street the shells were coming in. You could see the
artillery shells coming in. It breaks your heart, you know, children are
children.
Q:
Did you have any problems with mines?
A: Oh yes
and then there were mines on the ground where we were. We had after we got
across the Rhine, after the tenth time the bridge was blown up the following
day we got on that, cause we fired all night long before we went across. There were ten of us to actually run the
gun, but we worked with five men and five guys slept and believe me, you could
sleep with all of that noise you were so tired and they had a rack which you
put the shell on. It was a rack about 2 foot or 2 ½ foot and you lay it on that
rack and two guys carry it up to the gun and they had a ramrod and they would
ram the shell in. Well, we bypassed
that. We just took it in our arms like
this here and threw it in and the guy in the back would catch it. We never missed. If we did miss, I don’t
think the impact would be… they tell you not to do it that way, you know, you
improvise, just to let somebody get some rest.
There are times when you go and you don’t sleep for days. It is just unreal. So anytime you would see a place that is cold, you lay it on a
log or a bunch of snow and you just lay down and went to sleep like that. Snow
was up to your hips. Then as you were moving there were mine fields. I felt sorry for those guys. They both just
got married before they went over and two sergeants. They were trying to clear a mine field so we could go over this
field and they weren’t supposed to do it.
They were supposed to call the engineers in to do that, they had the
metal detectors. The best way to
describe the mine is, you have a cheese box, not the 3lb cheese box but about a
5lb cheese box like the stores used to get, like at the deli, but they don’t
put them in boxes anymore it is all in plastic now. It is a metal box, that big, and it has a cover on it. And it has two handles. The cover, if you step on it with enough
weight, if I step on it it wouldn’t explode, or if you took the cover off to
try to disarm it, it would explode and these guys were not trained to disarm
it. What the engineers do, after these
four fellows were killed, it is just a sad sight…it is sad to say, we just had
to go and collect parts.
Q:
What was inside the boxes?
A: I don’t know what it was made of. And the, some of them are round, metal. So what the engineers do is they go in and
take a little garden tool and scrape around it and take a rope and put a rope
on the handle and if the mine is where I’m sitting, they would go up to where
the RR track is and they would pull them all into a big pile, like where the
this table is, and they would set it off themselves. Just to blow them up so they couldn’t be used again. It is sad.
I think the hardest thing was the cold weather. I think I dug so many holes in Europe that
is why I don’t like to garden, maybe?
Just to keep warm and shovel snow, just to keep warm. Because if we
weren’t firing at night we would have to be on guard duty.
Q:
Did you have tents?
A: No, we didn’t have any tents. Well we would dig a whole and after a while
we would have tents and it was almost a waste of time putting them up. The thing that was funny was you dug a hole
and it is almost like digging your own grave.
You lay down in there. Today you would think that it was very
uncomfortable. You throw leaves and
twigs that were there just laying around and then you’d put over the top, logs,
pieces of wood and stuff. Then it would
snow that night. Then the next morning
the sun would come up and you are down there with all that water dripping on
you from the snow melting. That is the
most uncomfortable feeling of all.
Yeah, you were wet all the time.
I never got a cold. Never got a
cold. It is funny. When you talk about it now, you say, how did
you ever do it. You were just there and
you had to do it. I think god had made our bodies so strong and so intricate
that we could put up with these things. You think you can’t but you just had to
keep going.
Q: Now you would shoot it but you couldn’t see
where it was going to land? You could
hit a house, you could hit anything.
A: No, they have the little cub airplanes flying
around out there, I think that was one of the most dangerous jobs in the
war. They were telling you where to
fire. And usually in artillery, the
first round you fire it’s over. The
second round is short and sometimes you even hit your own men. There is a percentage of your own men that
get hit. And then they take the
coordinates between the two shots and usually the middle coordinate is where
you have got your target. When we
crossed the Rhine, we fired all night long to try to push them back more so
that we could get across.
Q: After the Battle of the Bulge what did you
do the rest of the war time?
A: Well, after that Germany surrendered, they
broke our division up and then they were sending people home who had enough
points to go home, that meant how many
battle stars you have. I fought in
three major battles. One is the
Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, I can’t remember the other one. It might be in my book here. They broke us up and I didn’t have enough
points to go home and they put us in what you call these tent cities. You had
these big tents where maybe 24 guys would sleep in with a stove in the middle
and whoever slept closest to the stove was the warmest. As young guys they did crazy things and you
had to watch out. You were inside your
bedroll most of the time and you zip that up when you sleep, you had to sleep
holding your top zipper, because you always had comedians amongst you and they
would come and unzip the bedroll while the guy is sleeping and put a mouse
inside just to see him jump all over the place, just for the fun of it. The
mouse was more scared than you and even when we were in the field, we used to
see, we’d be laying down and the mice and rats would run over you.
Q:
What did you do after Germany surrendered?
A: After the war was over I got sent to what
was Metz, Germany, but it is Metz, France now.
I got hooked up with a military police outfit. I had a horrible job the first night and I got off of it and I
praise the Lord for that. There were
Americans who were stationed in Metz and there was a beautiful park and at
midnight my job was to go out to the park and chase all the soldiers out, with
their girlfriends, from the park. I met
this Captain Otto, who was a friend of mine, and I said boy you have to get me
a different job. I can’t handle this.
He says, “Can you type?” I said hunt
and peck and he said you got another job.
So I worked in the MP station and the sergeant would write up everything
that happened during the day and then they would give me the book and then I
would type it on this form, put it in a big brown envelope and jump in the jeep
and take it to the general, everyday. That was nice. That was kind of a soft job I had for two months or so. I used to work 24 hours and have 72 hours
off and we didn’t have to sleep in the barracks. We were in an apartment over the MP station and the fellows were
all together. Right next door was the
Red Cross with coffee and doughnuts there for the soldiers. And then while we
were there, my buddy Ed, who is a Jewish fella’, The thing of it is there were
two Catholic orphanages in this town. I
said, you know, we ought to give these kids a party or something because right
next to the Red Cross place there was a big hall where the soldiers danced at night
and we would play pool and ping pong, so anyway, I had to get permission. They wouldn’t let me have the girls and boys
together. I had to have two parties. The boys had to be separate from the
girls. Of course we took the girls
first. All of their parents were killed in the war. And they were from two years old to about nine or ten so we had
about 30 to 40 children there. We had
German prisoners there, making the coffee and serving us and all that
stuff. We had them make a birthday cake and also we made 5
gallons of homemade ice cream and I collected a lot of candy bars from all the
other soldiers to give to the kids when they left and we had a party for
them. We played games. It’s interesting, the best game they liked,
boys and girls alike at that age was when you were in a big circle and you
would take a handkerchief and you would stand and they would drop the
handkerchief in the back of you and then you would chase them and get back in that spot that was open
and they would always put them in back of Ed and I and ‘course we’d go real
fast but we’d never catch them, ya’ know, we could never catch them. It was a
fun time and then when we got the boys, ‘ course the boys were a little more
excited because they could ride in the army truck. They thought that was really
neat. We took the sisters [nuns] in the
jeep and one of the nuns spoke English but my Jewish buddy, he could speak
French. He could talk to the kids and
it was kinda neat, too. And then I was carrying this two year old after the party
was all over. We gave them all a bunch
of goodies to take back. And I was
carrying this two year old little girl and she said something in French that I
didn’t understand and the sister said she wanted to go home with me. I started crying. After that, there used to be a lot of stuff sold on the black
market and the military police would go and confiscate a lot of stuff and this
one night they brought in, I think it was 48 or 50 boxes of Hershey Bars and
each box contained 48 bars of candy. They were big boxes. And so I said to
Captain Otto, “Oh, I know where thats
gonna go and he said, “Oh, I can’t give ‘em to you because if I gave them to
you they’d think you were going to sell them but, he says if you get Nancy, who
was the Red Cross lady next door to take her jeep and to put them in her jeep
you can take them to the orphanage. I said, “Okay, that’s no problem.” The
soldiers would sell them to the people for an extraordinary amount of money.
And a Hershey Bar wasn’t what you get today. I mean, they were Hershey bars. I
mean big! We got Nancy to drive us over and we divided between both
orphanages. I said to the sister that
these are for the children. I said that
you sisters can have some, too. But I
want you to take the same amount as you give to the children. She said to me,
“Well, I’ll break a piece off each bar and then give some after lunch and after
dinner. Give them a piece about this big.” So it would last. And I said, “Yeah,
okay, that sounds good.” She said yes, she would promise me that they would do
that. Any time I could get any food or anything, I would bring it over to the
orphanage. And it was very interesting,
she would say to me, “I don’t understand you two guys. You’re protestant, your
buddy is a Jew, and we are Catholic.
Why are you helping the Catholics?” I said, “I’m not helping the
Catholics, I’m helping the children.
What difference does it make it we are Catholic, Jew or Protestant and
these kids have gone without [basic necessities]. They had a little to eat and the big thing is they lost their mom
and dads and even their grandmothers and grandfathers.” So, she said, “Well, I never looked at it in
that light” and I said, “Well, that’s what God put us here for, to help each
other.” That was a fun time for me
during the war.
So we stayed
there a couple of months and then after that I got another soft job which was
nice. The weather got nice and they had
what they call a battalion baseball team so I tried out for that and I made
that so in the mornings, for two months in the mornings we would practice and
no duties and in the afternoon we would hop in the truck and go from one camp
to another camp to play the other soldiers so God was very good to me after all
that hard time. So that was a fun time and I felt so proud of myself because
there was a pitcher from the Philadelphia Phillies that was pitching against us
and he was terrific. I missed the first
two pitches and then all of the sudden I hit the ball right over the third
baseman’s head for a triple. Oh boy, I
hit it off a professional. That was an
exciting time for me and we had a fun time doing that after the war. Then I finally got enough points. You see if I took the purple heart in the
beginning I would have had five more points and I could have gone home earlier
and then after they got me ready to go home they said that if I would stay, I
was a corporal then, they said they would promote me.
Q: You knew Mary the whole time you were over
there. Did she keep writing to you?
A: Oh yes, she still got my letters. In fact,
the sergeant used to get mad at me because I used to write her every time that
I could and it was funny, there was a like even during the war they had a p.x.
where you could go in and buy stuff like watches and stuff like that but during
the war they didn’t have the px here so for a hundred soldiers they would have
like two watches and two pens and so you had to take a lottery ticket for who
gets it. It was kind of funny, I won
the pen and my sergeant says oh no. I only wrote a little bit on those v mails
but they had to cut out stuff during the war which was where you were
located. Sometimes I would put the name
of a town and there would be a hole in the paper when she got it. Everything was read. They even cut out some of the parts that said
it was bitter cold and snow and ice.