Interview with Don Carter, World War II Army Infantry
44th Field Artillery Battalion, 4th Division
Cook Memorial Public Library District
August 17 th, 2005

Interviewer: Ellen Bassett
Transcribed by: Stephen Woldridge
Proofread by: Ellen Bassett

ELLEN: This interview is taking place on August 17 th, 2005 at Cook Memorial Public Library, in Libertyville, Illinois. My name is Ellen Bassett and I am pleased to have the opportunity to interview Don Carter. Don is a veteran of World War II and was a Private 1 st Class in the 4 th Infantry Division. Don also was part of the second wave of soldiers to attack at the invasions of Normandy or D-Day. The following is Don Carter’s story.

ELLEN: Don, were you drafted or did you enlist?

DON: I was drafted. As a matter of fact, I turned 18 years old on January 1943 and they gave me a 6 month deferment before I went into the Army, to finish high school. So I got my high school graduation plus sixteen days. I don’t know where the sixteen days came from but that’s what I had.

ELLEN: So sixteen days after graduation you’re going into the Army. And where were you drafted, where were you living?

DON: I was living in the town of Hornell, New York. It’s 52 miles south of Rochester and I had to get on a train and go to Camp Upton, Long Island. And the induction center was in Camp Upton, Long Island. But if it seems unusual, I finished high school, got on the train and went; it’s not unusual at all because our entire graduation class, all the men from the graduation class in high school all went into the service, except one. One had one guy in their class that didn’t have to go into the service…he had some health problem. So he wasn’t draftable. But everybody else was in.

ELLEN: At the same time? More or less?

DON: Well, some of them didn’t go into the Army; some of them beat it by joining the Navy or the Air Force. They beat the thing by joining the Air Force and the Navy. But the rest of us, we just all went on the train and went to Camp Upton. It was a whole, whole group of us.

ELLEN: Okay so you were inducted on Long Island, and where did you go for basic?

DON: Okay then they gave us some shots there and shaved our heads and all that stuff, the short haircut. Then we went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And I spent the next 17 weeks in Fort Bragg, North Carolina for basic training. That was our introduction into Army life which was pretty rough.

ELLEN: What? The physical training or…?

DON: Oh yeah.

ELLEN: What types of things did they make you do?

DON: Oh we had to…they would round us out; I remember one day, they rounded us out of bed at about 5 o’clock in the morning and gave us about…the thing in the Army, and it didn’t make any sense then, but after I finished and I got out everything they did made perfect sense, but they’d round us out at 5 o’clock in the morning and they gave us like 15 minutes for everybody to line up out front and they took us on a 34 mile speed march and we went hiking down the road and we didn’t get back, we got some breakfast on down the road, and then at about lunchtime, we got a break, we got a little more to eat. But we went 34 miles and that sounds bad but when you are eighteen it’s not that bad.

ELLEN: Yeah, I guess you’re right. What kind of weapons did you train with there?

DON: Well we learned to shoot carbines. That’s a .30 caliber rifle. It’s kind of an automatic rifle, small. And we learned to use pistols, the regular Army .45 caliber pistol. But the main basic training was on the 105mm cannon. I was in the field artillery and ours was the 105 and that’s what we spent the whole time learning to shoot them and when you’re in the artillery and you finally get into the war, I’ve had a lot of people say, “well what did you do?” And I say “you do everything,” you have to learn to do everything you have to learn to sight it, you have to learn to use the instruments, you have to learn to load it, you have to learn to fire it, and you have to learn to unload it and all that stuff. So depending on where you’re standing, you’d do anything, anything involved with firing a gun.

ELLEN: So you were able to do anything besides just…well you didn’t drive a tank, you were operating it.

DON: No I did not drive the tank. And I should explain when we say tank…I was in the artillery but it was a different kind of artillery, because the invasion, everything had to be mechanized, everything had to be on wheels or tracks or something. So we had a 105mm cannon mounted on a special Sherman tank where they cut the turret off the top and they mounted the cannon on it instead. We had a tank driver, but that’s all he did. And he knew how to drive the tank and nobody else knew how to drive the tank. It was pretty specialized, so he drove the tank and we did everything else.

ELLEN: Okay, you operated the cannon.

DON: Yeah we had to unload the, we had to load the ammunition on the tank, the 105 shells and load them, unload them, set the fuses and put the charges in them and all that stuff and load them in the gun and fire them.

ELLEN: Oh my gosh.

DON: It could be done alone if you had to and a lot of times we did, but we fired the gun at night. What we called harassing fire. In other words, you would get your orders and they’d tell you to fire three rounds an hour all night long, at your discretion. In other words, you could fire and then fire another shell one minute later or you could fire 20 minutes later or you could fire them every 20 minutes.

ELLEN: So they never knew…and you weren’t aiming at anything.

DON: The enemy never knew when the shell was coming. We’d usually fire at a cross roads or a bridge or something like that where you thought the enemy might be coming across the road during the night. So you would just lob a shell in there every so many minutes and they never knew when it was coming. We didn’t like to do that, but we did it.

ELLEN: Like you say, you’ve got your orders.

DON: The reason we didn’t like to do it was one that if you’ve never been in the service you would never think of it. And that is, when you’re sitting someplace firing a gun; and we did the same thing, don’t get me wrong…the Americans did the same thing, but the Germans did it too. When you fire that gun and the Germans are on their side of the line they can see the flash.

ELLEN: So they know where it’s coming from.

DON: Yeah, and what they do, and they got these instruments, and they’ll line the instrument up on the flash, and then when the shell is coming to them, they time the amount of time it takes to get from the gun to where it explodes. Then they know how far away you are. So they can sit there and they can line up the number of degrees where the flash is coming from and then they can take the length of time it takes the shell to get there and they can calculate that all out and they’ve got charts and graphs and all these little things that they look up and they just run their finger over and they say that guys is three miles back there at this angle and everything and when you sit there and fire these shells all night, you are going to get them back. That gets to be not funny. But it’s called sound and flash, and a lot of people don’t know that went on but it did.

ELLEN: What was that called again?

DON: Sound and flash.

ELLEN: Oh sound and flash.

DON: The sound and the flash…

ElLEN: I never heard of that.

DON: They time it; we had two guys in our outfit that did the same thing. So we would be there at night and we’d see the German guns firing at us and we would see the flash way over there and then we would time it coming in. And you could tell, the timing was a little bit more sophisticated, you had to have experienced guys doing it because it depended on what gun you were firing…it would take…to time the… like the time it took the shell to get there. If we were firing a 105, that has a certain muzzle velocity, and an 88 has a different one, and a 90 has a different one and a 155 has a different one, so you have to know what kind of a gun is shooting at you. And you can tell that by experience, that’s the only way I can tell you. You can tell by the sound. If a German 88 went off we knew it went off because you could tell by the sound.

ELLEN: You were at basic for 17 weeks and then once you finished basic…

DON: After basic training we got a seven day delay in route and what that means is that you have to have to report to your next place but you have seven days to get there which means you can go home. And depending on how far away you live, depends on how long you are going to be home. And I went from Fort Bragg, North Carolina and I wanted to go up to New York so it took me a day to get there and a day to get back to my next assignment was in Fort Meade, Maryland, so I had five days at home and then I had to be at Fort Meade, Maryland. And Fort Meade, Maryland during World War II was a staging area so we just went down there and continued our training but I was only there a few weeks. I really don’t remember how many, three or four. And then what they did was they assembled us and we did our equipment and made sure we had all the stuff we needed and then we shipped out of there and shipped to Boston, to Pier 5. Boston was our next place we went. And there were a whole bunch of us, a lot of us there. We went to Pier 5, Boston and we get on our ships and shipped us to England. I went to England and that’s interesting too. Most people went to England on a troop ship. We didn’t. I don’t know why, just lucky I guess, or unlucky. They had a, I don’t remember the number, it was 52 or 58 or something like that, LSTs. The big landing ships that were going to be used in the invasion, they were taking them from Boston over to England and the convoy was going to assemble in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so we’d all ship out of Boston and go up to Halifax and the convoy would assemble in Halifax and then go across to England. And it took a zigzag course across there. And instead of going on a troop ship, they assigned 25 Army guys to each one of the landing ships. So I actually went across the ocean on an LST. And it’s 315 feet long, it’s flat bottom and it doesn’t ride very well on the open ocean. And so we were sick most of the time.

ELLEN: That was a question I had for you, you were probably pretty sick then?

DON: I was sick 19 days…took 31 days to get there because it only goes 6 miles an hour or 6 knots an hour or something like that. So we went all the way across the ocean but we were…when we started out in Halifax we saw small icebergs when we got out in the ocean. Then we zigzagged all the way down and at one point we’re off the Azores in Spain. So we went out and then we went way down. I guess they were trying to decoy, it looked like we were going to Africa or something. And then we turned around and went back up. Around Ireland, the top of Ireland, around to the Irish Sea, and then back down in the English Channel, and landed in Falmouth, England. Some of the others landed in Plymouth, they landed in all different places because there was 50, like I say 50 some LSTs in the convoy and we were well protected because they couldn’t lose any of those LSTs. They needed every one of them for the invasion. So we had an aircraft carrier in the convoy and all these 50 some LSTs, and we had a…I think a cruiser and a couple, 4 or 5 destroyers, and we had 6 or 8 Canadian Corvettes which are like destroyers and they escorted the whole convoy across. And when we got over there we went to each of the ports and we didn’t have any excitement where we were in the convoy but there were some submarine sightings on the outside of the convoy, but this convoy was so big, with 58 ships in it and 15 miles across you know, it was big. On the outsides of it why we heard some shooting over there and depth charges and stuff like that but it didn’t affect us, it was miles away. So nobody bothered us. We weren’t too worried in the LSTs about submarines because they are flat bottomed and they don’t go into the water that deep. So if they fired torpedoes they would probably go under and so we were pretty safe there but we saw the planes, the planes from the aircraft carrier were out circling the convoy all day, every day.

ELLEN: Wow you really were well protected.

DON: Well we had to get those boats over there.

ELLEN: Well once you landed, where did you go from there?

DON: After we landed in Falmouth, we got on the little British trains, a whole flock of us. And we went to Barry, Wales. And there was a camp all set up in Barry, Wales and we went there and we just continued our training in Barry, Wales. And we were there for I think a couple of months. We went overseas in January ’44 and it was winter and the ocean was pretty rough. But then we landed in January in Barry, Wales and then we trained for a couple of months and then they moved us out of Barry, Wales over on the other side of the Bristol Channel over to a town of Barnstable. I remember it very well, very British. We got some passes and we got to meet the British people and everything, very nice. Then we left there and went to (?); it was closing in on May, so we left there and we went to Winchester, England, which is just south side of London. And we got there and we thought oh boy, we’re going to get the kind of pass to go into London. And when we got there, we found out that we were restricted to base, we couldn’t get any passes, we couldn’t go anywhere. It was interesting, it was extremely interesting, it’s one of the things that I remember a lot, didn’t have anything to do with the war but the camp in Winchester, England, was run by the Scottish Regiment, the Black Watch. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. Toughest guys you’ve ever saw in your life, tough guys, big, big. They were all about 6’ 1”, ’2, ’3, ’4. And they are mean, they are tough guys, but they’re very nice when you are stationed with them, but they ran the camp. And we got up in the morning to bagpipes, we went to lunch with bagpipes, we went to dinner with bagpipes, and we went to bed with bagpipes. It was very interesting, it was a neat outfit. That was a good experience. Then we went right from there to down the coast, down into South Hampton and we loaded on our ships and went out into the English Channel, this is around the 4 th of June…I don’t remember exactly but the division started on June 6 th. So we get on the boats and we’re headed out in the Channel, but we were kind of decoyed, we went up the coast up by the White Cliffs of Dover up there and then we turned around and came back down and we went across the Channel. And I want to make it very clear up front I did not land on D-day, per se.

ELLEN: But that was the first combat you saw?

DON: Oh yeah. But we went down, I was on the boat, the LST, off the coast of Normandy on D-day, and we were sitting out there in the water, right next to the USS Nevada, which is a battleship, and we’d sit there all day watching those 16 inch guns going off, just shelling the heck out of the beach. And the guys were all landing and at this point, although during the introduction at the top it says he was in the 4 th division, at this point, I am not in the 4 th division yet. At this point I am what they called a replacement. And the whole camp of Barry, Wales, were replacements and it’s not nice to think about it, but what you were, was when the guys landed on D-day, and the 4 th division landed on Utah beach, and I will tell you right up front that Utah beach was not as difficult as Omaha beach. Omaha beach was the tough beach. And that’s the one, I was lucky, Omaha beach is the one that you see in the movie Private Ryan and all that.

ELLEN: But why was that more difficult?

DON: There were more Germans there, they were more fortified. And at Utah beach we also got lucky. It was dumb luck but we got lucky. The water, as you’ve probably read, on D-day, you remember Eisenhower at one point was tempted to postpone the invasion because the weather was so bad but he decided to go ahead with it because the meteorologists told him it was going to clear. Well when we get over there off the shore, it still wasn’t very…it wasn’t a nice placid sea. It was pretty rough. And as a result, when the 4 th Division landed they landed a half-mile off from where they were supposed to land. They were supposed to land at this one stretch but the weather was so rough it blew us…it blew the whole convoy down and we landed about a half a mile away which as it ended up was really good because it wasn’t very fortified down there. So we got into an easier spot than the Omaha beach people did. And true story, we got down there, but anyway I laid offshore in this LST until the infantry got the beach secured and as soon as they got the beach secured then the replacements came in the next morning and what we were to do…each outfit that lands an invasion, they planned on losing a certain number of men. I think they lost 5,800 that day…in one day. And I think that was the casualties on D-Day was 5,800. But so anyway you can’t operate after you land an invasion…you can’t operate unless you’re full strength so you had to have these guys ready to come on in and replace. What I did was I went in the next day, the next morning after D-day, and when I went to the 4 th division, that was my assignment, I went to the 44 th field artillery battalion and I reported in to the 1 st Sergeant and they put me on gun number 2 and I was on gun number 2 and I said “Where’s the guy that I’m replacing?” “Well he got it yesterday.” So…he wasn’t killed, he was wounded. So anyway me and another guy went over here and another guy went there and we were replacing but we went onshore with a lot of infantry guys too and they replaced all the infantry guys that had gotten it the day before. So we were replacements that we were replacing to bring the units up to full strength the next day. Otherwise you can’t operate if you’re short.

ELLEN: How long were you there then?

DON: Until the end of the war.

ELLEN: On the beach.

DON: Oh just that day and then we pushed in. But as you pushed in the fighting got harder and the first thing we had to do was to take the town of St.-Mère-Èglese. And we had to tie up with the 101 st Airborne, which were dropped during the night. If you’ve seen these movies you know all that stuff that they were depicted like The Longest Day or Private Ryan. They dropped those Airborne guys during the night, the night before D-day. And they were down on the ground and then we had to link up with them. So we went into St.-Mère-Èglese and we linked up with them, we had already done that, and then we kept pushing in and it was pretty slow but we had to secure the whole beach and they called it securing the beachhead and we had to push in so many miles. I think we had to get in 15-20 miles. And you get enough troops in there so that the Germans couldn’t push a counterattack and push us right back into the sea and we didn’t want that to happen. So, and it didn’t. But that as you well know, and as everybody knows… that was just a fluke. It was an error on the German’s part, particularly Hitler’s because Hitler did not think that this was the real invasion. He thought the real invasion was going to occur up at Calais because it’s only 18 miles across the channel up there and it’s 80 miles across where we were. And he said this was just a decoy…the real invasion is coming up there so he held back his good troops. So on the beach we were, in reality, we were fighting their lesser troops and their SS, their crack divisions, the SS Divisions were held in reserve and he wasn’t committing it until the real invasion occurred. But he finally woke up to the fact that this was the real invasion. So anyway we made it, as I wanted to bring up…our first objective after we secured the beach was to get up to Cherbourg, which is a big port up at the end of the Normandy Peninsula. And there’s loading docks up there with cranes and all that stuff and it’s a great big French Port, in Cherbourg. And we were supposed to…our first assignment for the 4 th division was to get up there and take that port intact before the Germans had an opportunity to blow it up. So we did and we went up to Cherbourg and took the whole port and it’s very difficult in an invasion to land. You can get the troops onshore and tanks and all the equipment but then you got to land the food and the gasoline and got to land all of those supplies and it’s impossible off those landing ships so you’ve got to get up to where there’s a dock and a port and you can bring in the big freighter boats and unload the bulldozers and the cranes and all that stuff. Thousands and thousands of gallons of gas in the Jerry Cans and the food and everything for the thousands of people you got there, to land the rations and all that stuff. The Quartermaster Corps keeps track of all that. I don’t know how they did it but we took the port and the supplies started coming in then we came back down and then we, I’m going through the war, do you want me to keep going? We came back down after that and we got a couple of days rest and by this time…by the time we had taken Cherbourg we had been on the beach for going on a month probably, it was close to a month, 3 ½ weeks…something like that since we landed. And we hadn’t had a shower yet and we hadn’t had a bath yet or a shower…about the only thing we had is when we take some water out of the canteen and pour it in your hand and rub it all over your face every morning to wake you up. That’s about all we had. Our hair was filthy and everyone was filthy dirty. But we didn’t think much about it but they finally brought us back down and we went in and they had a shower unit set up and we all took a shower and we got clean uniforms and everything. Because we hadn’t had our pants or underwear or anything off in three and a half weeks or so. But I thought that was going to be unusual…it wasn’t… it was pretty normal. So we all got a shower then we all assembled again and we were going to have to break out of the…we called it the invasion and you’ve secured the beach…the beach head and everything and now we got to fight the Germans and get across Europe to Paris and eventually Berlin or wherever we’re going. You had to break through…you had to break out of this beachhead. And what the Germans do, they put their crack troops all around it. You know they got us all around there so we can’t get out we can’t move over into France. So what you’ve got to do is you bust through that, and when we landed in invasion we were in the 1 st Division, excuse me, 1 st Army. We were in the 1 st Army…General Hodges ran the 1 st Army and he reported to Omar Bradley and then you remember from the movies and everything they had General Patton in reserve and he was over in England and he was kind of an imaginary General…they had him on the radio and they were doing all kinds of stuff. We didn’t know that at the time but we found out later and he was supposed to be the decoy over there. But anyway when we…when they got to the point where we were going to bust through the breakthrough to get out of the beachhead, Patton came over to France and he took over. And so our division automatically transferred over to General Patton and so did several other divisions. And plus he brought his own armored divisions in. And we broke through and that was called the St.-Lo Breakthrough. You’ve probably heard of that.

ELLEN: Yeah, yeah. And you said that was even…

DON: That was tougher than the invasion because they had had time to regroup and they knew what we were up to and they knew this was the real invasion and they committed their SS troops. So when we broke through at St.-Lo that was tough, that was way worse than the invasion.
ELLEN: I bet you witnessed casualties there?

DON: Oh yeah, lots. It’s kind of a shock to see your first dead guy. But I saw that the first day so I got used to that. But then when you see your first American guy, that’s a little…

ELLEN: That would be, yeah, that would be hard. Hopefully it wasn’t anybody you knew well or anything.

DON: No, no. Not the first one, but they’re laying along the road and they told them to cover them up and they got guys that…there were a lot of them in the St.-Lô Breakthrough, but there’s a lot of airplanes involved with that. There was stuff going on overhead as much as there was on the ground and it was exciting.

ELLEN: And what did you do at St.-Lô? What were you operating there?

DON: The tanks came in and they busted through the German lines and then the infantry followed through and then the artillery was right with them and we just broke a great big hole in the German lines about a mile wide and we just went through it, and we just poured through this hole and went to the other side and then the Germans were fighting like crazy. They didn’t want us to break through because the theory was that if they could contain us then they could possibly drive us back into the…stop the invasion and drive us back. The minute we broke through everything was downhill from then on for the Germans. And so but we did break through.

ELLEN: And were you in a tank then or what?

DON: Yeah, well I was in the artillery, they were mounted on the tanks. I was riding on this tank.

ELLEN: I imagine you were in a tank that broke through. What was that like? You had to have been scared.

DON: Well we were firing the gun.

ELLEN: Did you have a target or did you just…

DON: We were just…yeah, we were firing into towns and the next town. Well we were firing at the Germans. When we came through, we were going forwards and they were going backwards. So we were just firing into them. And we had radios and we were listening to earphones and we were getting our instructions…telling us where to fire and everything. It was pretty confusing for about a day and a half. It was all jumbled up and everything was very confusing. We got dive-bombed by our own Air Force at one point. Yeah, P-47 dive bombers dive bombed us and fortunately they weren’t very accurate so they didn’t hit us but we had a couple of 500 pounders that went off just a matter of 70-80 feet away and we couldn’t hear very good and we were having a lot of problems there because it was affecting our hearing. The concussion and everything was…we had points where you just couldn’t hear. I mean your ears would quit on you and they would…it was called noise induced hearing loss. I still have 40% hearing loss right now. It’s from then. I get in a restaurant or something like that and I lose all my hearing with the background noise and everything like that. I wear hearing aids, I don’t have them on now but that the VA gave me. But anyway we got through the St.-Lo thing and then we proceeded all the way across France. One interesting comment I might make, if we’ve got a moment, is that the 8 th Air Force, in the St.-Lo Breakthrough was supposed to come over and bomb the Germans who were in the Panzer divisions that were behind the lines. And they were supposed to make their bomb run down this particular road. And they came down and they came down the wrong road. And the 8 th Air Force actually bombed their own commanding General and his entire staff and killed them all. General McNair…yeah. We had heard about it a few days later. It’s in the history books. They came down the wrong road and hit their own commanding General and staff and killed them all. It was just an error.

ELLEN: You’d think they’d be able to tell. I don’t know.

DON: Well it’s pretty confusing when you’re…when everything’s going on. It’s just a lot of stuff going on and…anyway we went all the way across France. And we went, there was a lot of fighting in each of the towns and then the Germans would stop every now and then and we’d have to fight them again. Then we’d come down the road and they’d back up a little more. But we had an outfit with the 4 th Division…we had a reconnaissance outfit that’s part of the 4 th Division. What they do is they go ahead, they go way ahead of everybody, they’re ahead of the infantry, the artillery, everybody. They call them the recon, they’d go out there to find the Germans and the way they find them is you keep going and you get shot at.

ELLEN: Nobody wants that job.

DON: Not a nice outfit to be in. You’d say, well, how do you find the Germans? Well you just keep going until they shoot at you then you know where they are. Then everybody moves up again. And the infantry all comes up and the artillery comes up and the tanks come up and we fight them again. And they’ll regroup and you’ll fight them there and there’s always casualties and everything but there’s, you have a medical unit right there and there’s a doctor and a whole staff and if you’ve seen M*A*S*H. on TV they’d move the tents up and set up a hospital with a big red cross on the top.

ELLEN: Were you ever wounded in any way.

DON: No, I was real lucky, I never got wounded. And never got any Purple Heart, thank you.

ELLEN: Yeah thank you very much.

DON: I didn’t want one. But I remember back and I guess maybe the only thing I can recall but there was a good number of us in our outfit, we were pretty chicken if you want to put it that way. We didn’t go wandering off I mean we stayed back with the guns. We had guys that would go into a town and they’d go running into the houses you know, looking for souvenirs and everything but they booby trapped those places and we had a number of guys who got wounded.

ELLEN: Booby trapped you mean with bombs?

DON: Well what they do, it’s real quick, they just put a hand grenade on one side of the door and run a wire over on the other side of the door, put that in with a thumbtack and you’d go running in, hit the wire and the hand grenade goes off.

ELLEN: So you were obviously witness to that.

DON: Yeah we saw quite a few of those, the dummies that did that. But I wasn’t one of those. I don’t know maybe I was just scared or chicken or something. We were all scared and there was a good bunch of us that didn’t do that and I just clung close to my vehicle, close to my tank, didn’t go roaming in any houses or any of that stuff. I wasn’t going to be a hero. We did, we had to get out of there every now and then and we had some things that happened that involved all that. We took prisoners sometimes. We’d move into a town and a whole bunch of Germans would come out of the town waving their white flag and we’d take twenty prisoners or thirty prisoners or something like that and we’d actually take them and put a guard on them and take their weapons away from them. And that’s where I got my sword.

ELLEN: You got your….yeah.

DON: I had a gun too. I got a P-38 pistol off of a German officer but I don’t have it anymore. I got it confiscated. When I got out of the Army I was going through our home town…a couple of us veterans were going up on the hill shooting targets and so forth and I was walking through town with this P-38 pistol and the police department confiscated it. So I don’t have that souvenir anymore.

ELLEN: But you could still tell about it. Well, when we left off, you were pushing through France.

DON: Yeah we went all the way to Paris and that’s another interesting story. It was pretty heavy fighting all the time. And we went all the way to Paris and this is the first part of the war and our outfit was actually the first troops into Paris. And we were actually right in the center of town, right in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral. And we were taking a lot of sniper fire and there’s a lot of big buildings around there. We got a lot of sniper fire around there and we were firing back and everything. We were only there a few hours and one of the Lieutenants came up in a jeep and told us that we had to get out of town. This is one of those stories that not many people really know about I don’t think. They said we had to get out of town so we packed up our stuff and moved out of town and we went back over into this town kind of…eastern part of Paris. It’s called Bondy. B-O-N-D-Y Bondy on the Seine, Seine River. And we went over there and we sat in the sugar beet field for about three or four days while the Free French went in and took Paris with Charles de Gaulle. He had to march down the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees. And they had the Free French march down that but we had already been there two days before but the French had to take Paris.

ELLEN: Oh is that why they told you that you had to get out of there?

DON: Yeah we had to get out of there for political reasons so Charles de Gaulle could take Paris. We’d been there two days before but we had to move out into the sugar beet field to get out of the way. It is funny. We moved down out of there and across France into Belgium. All this time we were in Patton’s Army and he really pushed you. If you’ve seen the movie Patton, you don’t have to have it explained to you. He’s a dilly.

ELLEN: It was all true.

DON: Oh yeah.

ELLEN: Did you ever see him or meet him?

DON: I saw him twice. Yep, just exactly like it was in the movie. He was…there was a four corners of roads came together and he was standing right in the middle of the roads with his fighter stick directing traffic. You guys get over there and you guys get over there and he was directing the whole thing. With his britches on you know he wore those riding britches with the long leather riding things and he had his white pistols with his white pearl handles on and everything. He was something else, Patton. We liked him.

ELLEN: So the men respected him.

DON: Oh yeah, he was good. He pushed you. It was no booking around. He didn’t care whether you got any sleep or anything. He just gave you your objectives and well they came down from his headquarters but I don’t know if everybody listening knows how the Army works but you have your objective that day. You know where you are now, and it comes down from headquarters. Some Colonel tells the Major who tells the Captain who tells the Lieutenant who tells us that we have to be at that town by tonight and you’re supposed to get there. Sometimes you don’t make it if the fighting gets a little rough you don’t get there. But with Patton you were expected to be there. You’d better be there.

ELLEN: And you didn’t let him down it sounds like.

DON: Not if you could help it. A couple times we ran out of gasoline and we got down the road and we didn’t have any gas and we just flat out ran into it, ran out. And there’s nothing worse than a tank with no gasoline.

ELLEN: Yeah, you’re a sitting duck.

DON: Yeah, they’re sitting ducks. So we didn’t run into any catastrophe but nobody came back and attacked us or anything so we got away with it but we did run out of gas a couple times. And what they did, we’d just put the camouflage over the tank and sit there and the next morning they came up with the C-47 airplane which dropped gas from all the planes to us. And then we ran out into the field and picked up the jerry cans and filled up.

ELLEN: Okay, I was going to say how can you drop gas out of a plane?

DON: They put it in jerry cans and they’d put a whole bunch of them and they’d drop them down. Then you’d go get the cans and dump it all into the tanks.

ELLEN: So you were able to alert somebody that you needed help or needed gas.

DON: Oh yeah we had a radio; they knew everything that was going on all the time. The Captain is on the radio or the Colonel and everybody knows everything that’s going on. I hope. We thought they did. It seemed to work.

ELLEN: Well at one point, you talked about the Battle of the Bulge…you were there. You showed me some pictures.

DON: That’s on into the war, that’s…

ELLEN: Am I getting ahead of myself?

DON: No, no, no, we went across Belgium and then we went across Luxembourg. And we got into Luxembourg and in this town of Echternach. We had kind of worn out the barrels…I had mentioned that…the barrels in our guns, they had lans and grooves in them that spin the shell. When the shell goes out of the gun it twirls for accuracy. It goes like that. And so it’s got grooves in the barrel and we wore them all out and your gun gets less than accurate if you don’t…so the quartermaster… we were at this town and the quartermaster put all new barrels in our guns which is a big job. You’ve got to take the cannon all apart and everything. So they put new barrels in the guns and they had guys that just do that, that’s all they do. Then the quartermaster called and so we were getting new guns and in this town and we got those all fixed and everything. Then a couple of days later we were getting all organized, we were right on the Mosel River, and the Germans attacked in the Battle of the Bulge and they came running across the river. In the thing I gave you with the newspaper, the gentleman who interviewed me, he wrote five down but it was really three. But we were actually surrounded for three days and he took it for five but that would be a long time but we were surrounded for three days. The Germans came across the Mosel River and they hit the unit that I was in, the 4 th Division. It was the 22 nd Infantry Division and then we supported the 22 nd Infantry Division. The 22 nd Infantry Regiment, we supported the 22 nd Infantry Regiment and when they came across, apparently we were…the Germans had objectives too. They were trying to get to Antwerp, Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge and we were in their way. So instead of stopping to fight us they went on the left and on the right and bypassed us and went right on. So we had Germans in front of us behind us, on the left and the right and we were surrounded for three days.

ELLEN: I’ll bet you were feeling a little helpless?

DON: We were a little nervous. We thought that we were going to become POWs and we didn’t think that that was too funny. But we actually fought our way out of it and we got out of the whole deal and the Battle of the Bulge continued. And we were not in that Bastogne thing where General McAuliffe said “Nuts!” and all that. The Battle of the Bulge was big and that was just that one… Bastogne was that one thing where they came through and took over the town. But we were not far away but we were not at Bastogne. No. But we got surrounded we were in that whole deal. It was winter, it was around Christmas time. I don’t remember the exact dates but it was right around Christmas time. There was snow all over the ground, it was cold and it was not pleasant.

ELLEN: How did you stay warm or you didn’t? Where did you sleep? Right there next to your tank?

DON: We liked to…you couldn’t get everybody under there. Some of the guys slept in the tank and you just went there and leaned against the side of it. (End Side A)

ELLEN: (Beginning of Side B) Okay we were just talking about sleeping in the tank.

DON: Yeah sleeping in a tank. In the wintertime, the tanks are awful cold, you know that metal just gets awful cold. As a matter of fact, we even had a couple guys, this is so dumb it sounds like little children but, we had a couple of guys put their tongue on the side of the tank and we couldn’t get it off. We had to sit there and pour water on it to get their tongues loose because it just froze right to the tank. But that’s dumb. But anyway the…

ELLEN: Well that answers the question about what you did for fun anyway.

DON: Yeah. A lot of times, most of the time, as I mentioned in the article that was in the paper and also at the Library of Congress. We slept under the tank quite a bit. And what we would do is we would just shinny; we had sleeping bags and we’d put the sleeping bag on and then we’d lay down on the ground and shinny under the tank and we’d sleep under because it’s very safe under there. Safer than just being out in the open.

ELLEN: How much room was there between the tank and the ground.

DON: There isn’t very much, you can’t turn over.

ELLEN: Oh so a foot maybe?

DON: Yeah something like that. So if you shinny in on your back that’s where you stay. And if you want to turn over on your stomach you’ve got to get all the way out to turn over. It’s not high enough to turn over.

ELLEN: And how wide was that? I mean could you fit…how many guys under there?

DON: Oh we could get about three or four. Well it wasn’t the width, it would be the length.

ELLEN: The length this way then? Yeah.

DON: You’d get a couple of guys coming in the front and a couple guys going through the back but there were only four of us anyways.

ELLEN: Was it any warmer, I know you said you never got warm, but was it any warmer under there than…or just safer.

DON: Just safer, but when it wasn’t winter and when there wasn’t snow and all that we slept under there and we didn’t think anything about it. Sometimes, we didn’t dig many foxholes or anything like that. The infantry guys did that. But we didn’t do that. Sometimes there were foxholes already there. But we were really reluctant to get into somebody else’s foxhole too because they sometimes booby trapped those too. And you didn’t want to jump into a foxhole and have a hand grenade go off or anything like that. But some of the guys slept in foxholes and what they’d do they’d get a great big pole or something, a tree branch and you get way away and hold your hand over the foxhole and pound the tree branch on the bottom down there to be sure that there wasn’t anything that would go off and then if it was okay then you’d get in it. Yeah we had people sleeping in that way.

ELLEN: So it was the Germans who had booby trapped that.

DON: Yeah, we did the same thing. The Germans loved to booby trap woods. Because at night if you came up to a woods alongside of the road then it would be nice to run into the woods and lay in the ground at night in the trees there and nobody could see you or anything. But what they would do is they would put hand grenades on one tree and on the wire to the next tree. So if you ran into the woods you were going to hit the wire and the hand grenades would go off. We had that happen a number of times. That’s not nice either but again I was not one of those guys that ran into the woods. No, I didn’t do that.

ELLEN: Then the guys that you were with in your tank were you ever with anybody that did something like that?

DON: Not in my tank. We all talked about it and we were pretty careful. The other tanks, there was four tanks in our outfit. Yeah we had one where they pulled up to the woods and ran into the woods and one guy was killed and the other two were wounded and you had a tank that was supposed to have four people in it and there was only one left. So that’s when you go back and get more replacements. Yeah, they had the wires.

ELLEN: Well obviously there was a great amount of stress and you saw that much combat and was there ever any downtime, were you ever able to relax? What did you do?

DON: Not very often. We had, not until the war was over really. But the only time that we got off was…that was because you had done so much. This sounds funny, but like when we wore the barrels of the gun out and so we were off for two days while we were waiting for them to fix the gun. Then we got to sit around one whole day while we didn’t have any gasoline and then a couple of times we were running out of shells and we had to wait until they brought some more shells up from the rear and they bring those up in trucks and then you unload them and everything. And we had to sit and wait for those a couple of times well several times we had to do that when the ammunition couldn’t keep up with you. But other than just flat out having free days off, no. Things were going on all the time.

ELLEN: So you never got to see any USO shows or…

DON: No, well the, no, no USO shows, I did not get a weekend pass to Paris. Some of our guys did. I don’t know how they dished those out. All the officers did. I don’t say that begrudgingly. The officers worked harder than we did, they really did. They had a lot more responsibility type thing. The one thing looking back and it’s of interest I think, is the one…when I was in basic training they give you an IQ test when you go in the Army and when I was in basic training at Fort Bragg there were six of us in our outfit…I’m backing up to basic training, there were six of us in the outfit that scored high enough on the IQ test that we were to go to officer’s training school….Officers Candidate School. And I was going to go to the Citadel in South Carolina for Officers Candidate School. And we were coming into the war in ’43 and the war started in ’41 so we were coming in late, well before the invasion, but late in the war. But by the time we got through with basic training they had all the officers they wanted so they cancelled our OCS stuff at the Citadel. There were six of us and we had meetings and everything and we were supposed to go there as soon as basic training was over. It was a disappointment that we couldn’t go to Officers Candidate School. So we said where are we going instead? And they said overseas. So we just went with the guys overseas. But as I look back on it I am kind of glad I maybe was…there was somebody looking out for me. I’m glad I didn’t go to Officers Candidate School. Sounds like sour grapes but the rank we went through in our outfit the most was 2 nd Lieutenant. That’s what I would have been if I went to Officers Candidate School. I would have gotten out as 2 nd Lieutenant. We went through more 2 nd Lieutenants than any other rank. They’re the ones that have to go out and find out where the enemy is. They’re the ones that are the forward observers. The 2 nd Lieutenants they have to do all of that scouting stuff. The Captain doesn’t do any of it and the 1 st Lieutenant stays right with the tanks and he’s the one that tells you everything to do. He’s the one that’s on the radio commanding everything that you do. But we had a whole bunch of 2 nd Lieutenants… and you go here and you go here, and they’d do the running and all that kind of stuff.

ELLEN: And many times they didn’t come back obviously.

DON: Yeah, a lot of times. Well we had 2 nd Lieutenants that we never even got to know.

ELLEN: They weren’t even there long enough?

DON: No, we’d meet them… we’d see them at the chow line and then they’d go up front and we’d never see them again. The 4 th Division, in our outfit we were pretty lucky, we had casualties and all that but the 4 th Division, I’ve got the book on the history of the Army now at home and the 4 th Division, which I was in, in World War II, took 258% casualties. That is they lost 2.5 guys for every one they started out with. If you got through the whole thing and didn’t get wounded you were pretty lucky. But that was mostly infantry and 2 nd Lieutenants. But anyway that was it.

ELLEN: Well, I just want to ask you a question…your overall impression with the military food and just daily life and things you did on a daily basis, what was that like or did you just accept it?

DON: You accepted it. It wasn’t that you didn’t know any different. But in basic training they tell you what it’s going to be like.

ELLEN: And they were pretty on target?

DON: They were pretty accurate. We had guys there that knew. Your Drill Sergeant in basic training has been there. So there are people there with experience that came back and they’d been. They’d tell you what it’s going to be like. We got rations. After the invasion we were eating…you had different kinds of rations in the Army. We had C rations and you had D rations and you had 10 in 1’s and the 10 in 1’s were pretty good and the C rations were okay. The D rations were not good. The D rations is a chocolate bar. And it’s kind of big and it’s…I’m showing you with my hands here…it’s probably 4 inches wide and 6 inches long.

ELLEN: Like a big, big old Hershey bar then.

DON: Big, big bar and it’s about maybe ¾ of an inch thick. And it’s chocolate but it’s all mixed, it’s not like a Hershey bar, a chocolate bar, I don’t know who makes them, maybe Hershey made it for all I know. It’s a chocolate bar, but the chocolate is only to hold the whole thing together. It’s got wheat meal in it and barley and grain and you got all the vitamins you need for a day in a meal.

ELLEN: Oh I can see why you were saying it wasn’t very good.

DON: What you do is you open it up and if you are going down the road and you had no…you’re not stopping and there’s nothing to stop for and you’re fighting and you get hungry and it’s four of five hours since you’ve eaten you just grab one of those chocolate bars and eat it. And you take bites out of it and it’s kind of hard and you just chew it up and it’s got all the grains and the minerals and everything, it’s all built into this chocolate bar. That’s a D ration. Then we had C rations and that’s a little different. That’s got crackers in it, it’s got a little can in it.You open the can and it’s got Spam, that meat stuff that kind of tastes like Vienna Sausages, you know? You dip the crackers in it and eat it.

ELLEN: So that kind of food, that’s when you were on the road I guess.

DON: Yeah. Then we had 10 in 1’s…those were good. And what 10 in 1 means, it comes in a box and you’ve got enough food for one meal for ten guys or ten meals for one person. And there’s all different cans in there and there’s beef stew and there’s tuna fish and it’s got all these cans of stuff. And it’s almost like if you were getting a can of soup only you don’t get to heat it up or anything. You just sit there and eat it. They’re pretty good. Then you got biscuits and crackers. But the one they did in the Army which they don’t do anymore and I wish they’d never done it there is that every time you open a ration, there was a pack of cigarettes in it. And it was a little miniature pack with four cigarettes in it. And it’s kind of a flat pack. It was only like a ¼ of an inch thick and as long as a cigarette and as wide as four cigarettes. And so every time you opened a ration there were cigarettes in them so we smoked them. And we figured that’s what you were supposed to do I guess. So the Army taught me to smoke. And I never forgave them for that. But fortunately when I got out of the Army, my wife was a nurse and she quit that in a big hurry. So I never did smoke after I got out of the Army. It is kind of funny that the Army, a lot of these people learned to smoke, they taught us to.

ELLEN: Well I suppose that was before they campaigned against smoking, but even still.

DON: Yeah they didn’t know about it. There were cigarettes in every ration. Then there was candy and small Hershey bars and stuff like that.

ELLEN: That does sound good, well not bad.

DON: Yeah it was good. And we had little packages of juice but it wasn’t the juice, it was the dry mix. And you’d take the water out of your canteen and pour it in your cup and pour this juice in and stir it all up and you’ve got your citric acid and your vitamin C and all of that stuff. We did a lot of other things. Do we got time?

ELLEN: Yeah.

DON: We did a lot of other things. A lot of people were interested in food. We had to take care of ourselves and it’s called…there was a term in the Army called field expedience. And this is where you learned to take care of yourself because it isn’t going to happen unless you do it. And we had fish fry’s a couple times and we did it on our own. We would move into this town and it would be on a river. And so we’d go to the edge of the river, and if you don’t have anything, and there’s no rules, why if you did it in Libertyville, you’d get arrested. But there’s no rules, it’s war why you do just about what you want to do. So we’d go to the river and we’d throw a couple of hand grenades in the river. And they’d float down to the bottom and they explode and a couple of fish would float up to the top and so we’d wade in and get the fish and one of the guys on our tank was from Brooklyn and in his real life he was a butcher. So he would butcher the fish and make fillets out of it and we’d build a fire that night and we’d all sit there and have a fish fry. It was good. And we’d dig up potatoes along the way and we had a couple of extra helmets, our steel helmet that we wore, we always had a couple of extras. And we put grease in it and put a little fire and have French fries and they were good, a little greasy, but we didn’t care. Then we shot chickens and we had chicken sometimes. One time we were kind of aching for a…we hadn’t had any real good meal. We had a kitchen though. We had a kitchen truck with our outfit and they would come up every now and then with a nice warm meal. And we’d have dried beef gravy on toast or something like that. And corn or beans, all that kind of stuff, mostly canned stuff. And they’d come up and cook…we had turkey for Thanksgiving, we had turkey for Christmas and the kitchen truck came up and cooked all this stuff. And so maybe, two or three/four times a week we had a regular meal. The kitchen truck would come up and we had our mess kit and we’d go through the line. We had a rule, take all you want but eat all you take. And they were bringing all this stuff over from the United States so a lot of people didn’t like that but after you got done eating you went over and they had a big pail of hot water over there and you’d put your mess kit in the hot water and you’d shake it all around in there and then take it out, dry it off, and fold it back up. That was a sanitation issue. But they had no pail over there to dump your garbage in. If you took it, you ate it. If you got the dish yourself and in other words if you had the meat or potatoes or the vegetable or whatever you dished your own and they just had the pan sitting there and you went up and you helped yourself. But when you got over there, there wasn’t anywhere to throw any garbage away because you ate it. And if you didn’t want to eat it there was a Lieutenant standing right there that would help you. Go finish your meal soldier. And that was it. But we shot a cow one day. We were over I think Germany, we shot this cow, and the guy that was the butcher chopped it all up. We cut it all up and then we hung it from the sides of the tank. You know the hind leg and this and that, and we went down the road with that hanging on the tank…we had to age it. So we aged it about a day. And then he cut it all up into steaks and everything and we had steaks the next night. That was pretty good. It wasn’t very aged beef but it was better than what we had. And it was kind of funny because there was a Major that came down the road in his jeep and he saw us apparently shooting the cow and butchering it up. And then we went down the road and we were miles from where it happened. And we couldn’t have fires over there because they would see them. So we went over behind this barn and we had a fire over there. And we had a lot of stuff up so they couldn’t see it or anything and we were cooking our steaks. And all of a sudden we looked up and this Major is standing there and he said, “I knew there were going to be steaks down here somewhere, I didn’t know where it was.” So he said, “I want a medium.” So we cooked him one.

ELLEN: That’s all it took. I’m sure there was enough meat.

DON: Yeah and the funny part, somebody said after it was all over, never did prove it was right, was that he was Patton’s aide. You know each General has an aide who’s a Major, and they said it was Patton’s aide, I don’t know if it was or not but it could have been. We got into Germany and the fighting got pretty rough in Germany because then they were defending their homeland. That’s a little tough. And when the war ended, that was in May, we were down near Nürnberg, Germany. Well into Germany, we crossed the Rhine River on a pontoon bridge and then we got way down into Germany when the war ended. It ended kind of abruptly.

ELLEN: Did you know it was coming?

DON: No, we didn’t even know it ended. Some guy came down in a jeep, a Colonel as I remember. And we were down in this town and we were down there shooting our guns and everything else and he came down and he said the war has ended and they’re meeting tomorrow to sign a surrender and all that kind of stuff. And we said, it’s over? He said yes. Somebody better tell them…they don’t know it. It was a little hairy for a couple three days until everybody got straightened out because we were informed but the Germans didn’t seem to get informed. And so it took a while before they got informed. And then there was a little shooting going on there for...

ELLEN: Yeah, that would be hard to believe.

DON: Yeah, it was a day and a half or so before everybody got quieted down.

ELLEN: What was the reaction? Was there a big party?

DON: Yeah, we had a big baseball game. We went out into a field and had a baseball game.

ELLEN: Well deserved I’m sure.

DON: We went down to…oh, a lot of interesting things that happened. We moved into a town in Germany…there’s a town of Krum after you cross the Rhine River…and the Siegfried Line which the Germans had set up so you couldn’t invade their country. We moved into this town of Krum. Nothing town…but we went in the main part of town and we drove a tank through the front of the bank. If you wanted to knock a building down you just drive a tank right into it and it just knocks it down. So we drove it into the front of the bank and we went into the bank and we filled a whole bag full of money, German money, we had a couple of million dollars of German money stuffed into this bag. Then we took it and (?) it into the tank, for no good reason other than it was just there so we did it. And when the war ended we were over near Nürnberg and I don’t remember the town we were in but there was a brewery there. And so the war is all over so we wanted to go down and get some beer down at the brewery, some good German beer. So we did. We get down there and we bought it with their money which we got out of the bank which wasn’t worth anything but they didn’t know it. But money was worth nothing, zero.

ELLEN: No kidding.

DON: No because when the Americans came in they changed the German money, first thing they said German money is not worth anything, we’re going to issue all new money, all new currency and everything like that.

ELLEN: Wasn’t it some sort of currency that the Nazis had….?

DON: Yeah, well we printed up our own...all that kind of stuff, so when we got paid we got German money. It was kind of funny but…anyway all this pretty money of theirs was not worth anything but we were using it. Then the non fraternization order came down so then we had to be careful there because after the war you couldn’t fraternize with the Germans at all. We were talking to them and everything but, if they could speak English, we couldn’t speak German. But then we couldn’t associate with them. We couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t look at them.

ELLEN: Well how long then, after the war ended, were you in Germany?

DON: I was there a couple of months.

ELLEN: Probably just keep the peace of type mission.

DON: Yeah, I was in an Army of occupation and we occupied this area down in New Mont, Germany. One thing you might be interested in, before the war ended it was real late in the war, a couple of weeks before the war ended, we were going into this town, not very far from Nürnberg. And we got into the town and we got into a problem over our head. We’re in this town and there’s this slave labor camp down there where all these prisoners were in there with the black and white striped suits and everything, there was thousands of them in this camp. And came to found out there was a big chemical works in the town, that there were German chemical works there and these were slave laborers that they had captured in Poland and Hungary and Romania and all those other countries and they brought them down and they were…

ELLEN: So this was a Concentration camp then?

DON: Yeah, and they lived in these camps and they worked in the…and we went into the town and there’s all these (?) in this camp, and it’s got barbed wire around it and a wall around it and a big gate on it and they apparently go over and work in the chemical works all day and then they come back. And they’re in there…men and women were all mixed up and everything, they had pond water in there and they had to do their laundry in the pond and it was a mess. (?) in my article (?). And one of our 2 nd Lieutenants, one of our new young guys come in and he was down there and he told us to…we were all sitting outside this thing looking in and we didn’t know what the heck to do. So if you don’t know what to do you don’t do anything. If you’re a Private of a Corporal or a Sergeant or something like that, if you don’t know what to do, you don’t do anything because you wait until an officer tells you what to do. The Army, if you’ve never been in it, and I’m sure you haven’t it’s…the Army is…you’re ordered to do what you do, you’re ordered all day, you are told what to do. You follow orders and if you’re ordered to do it you do it. If you’re not ordered to do it you don’t do it. And it’s just orders and it’s discipline and I feel sorry for the kids nowadays, they don’t even know what discipline is but when you’re in the service, the people that are running along the streets right now, you know, with the guys in Iraq, they don’t understand it. I listen to some of these people on the TV at night and they don’t get it. It’s discipline! And when you’re told to do something in the Army, you do it. It’s not, “Well gee, I don’t think I ought to do that” or “Could we talk that over” or anything like that. They tell you to squat and grunt that’s what you do. You just do it…you can’t even do it fast enough. You know, you’re ordered. That’s the way it has to be in combat. If the Lieutenant says get over there and do that, you do it. You don’t say, “That’s not safe over there.” You just go do it, that’s all. So we didn’t do anything and the Lieutenant came up and he said, “Break the gate down so we can get into that camp.” So how are we going to break it down? Drive the tank through it. So one of the guys, it’s an order from an officer, so he starts the tank up and ran it right through the front gate of the camp and these people came pouring out of there, I’ll tell you, we had a mess on our hands like you wouldn’t believe. And the Lieutenant got in a lot of trouble.

ELLEN: Oh, he did.

DON: Yeah. The next thing we knew…they didn’t all get out, but a bunch of them came out. And there were hundreds of them out and they were running into the town. They hadn’t had a square meal in years. They’re afraid of everything else and then we had to round them all back up and get them back in. And some Colonel came up with a big eagle on his shoulder. In the Army a guy with an eagle on a shoulder is real high and he said, “How did they get out of there, who did that?” You know I’m only a corporal and if something goes sailing over there, I’m not getting involved with this but I could hear it. And Lieutenant, he really got it. And it took us about a day to get them all back in there. And he said you can’t do that. Well the thing came out, which I didn’t think of it, what am I 19 years old? It came out that these people had been in there for years and they had been in a concentration camp. They’re German prisoners. They’re in there washing their clothes and do their sanitation in that pond of water in there, and going over working in that chemical plant. There’s gonorrhea in there, syphilis and typhoid fever, and there’s pneumonia and everything in the book in that camp and you can’t let them out. What you’ve got to do, what you should’ve known, I didn’t know it, but you’ve got to radio back and call it up and get some medical people. Nobody gets out of there until every single person in there has a physical and they figure out what they’re dealing with. So anyways we got involved with that. Just a little aside from some of the things that happened.

ELLEN: Those are some great stories.

DON: Yeah, and also there’s the story that I was not supposed to tell in Washington, which I did, is that during the Battle of the Bulge, going back to that, and I was on guard duty one night. And picture yourself, and we were on guard duty down by the Mosel River the night of the Battle of the Bulge started. And I was on guard duty with this other soldier that night. And I won’t mention his name for obvious reasons but he’s probably, maybe he’s still alive or dead, I don’t know where he is anymore. But anyway he was on guard duty and he kept drinking out of his canteen and I’m on guard duty because you’re always on guard duty with two people. He keeps drinking out of his canteen and he keeps getting sillier. And I figured he hasn’t got water in his canteen. And he had his canteen, I found out later, all filled with Schnapps. And he’s drinking this stuff and he’s getting worse and worse and finally when you’re on guard duty you have to be on guard duty. It’s very serious…guard duty. Well, and the Army’s serious. I don’t know if you knew it or not, but when you’re in the Army, there’s a thing in the Army called the Articles of War. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it or anything. These Articles of War, it’s like the Ten Commandments of the Army. When you’re in the Army, they call you all together, they read them to you in basic training and then they call you all together about every four months or something like that, four or five months and an officer up there reads them to you again. You get them read to you every period of time, so that never you can say, “I didn’t know that.” Or if something happens you can’t say, “Nobody told me, I didn’t know that.” You know it, you know what they are. And they are the rules for combat. And that’s the rules. And so anyway, we’re there, and he left his guard post, the guy I was on guard duty with and there’s a lot of fighting going on and everything. I didn’t know what to do, you’re not supposed to be on guard duty alone but yet he’s gone. So I looked at my watch and I said well the Sergeant of the Guard is going to be here in about a half an hour so I’m just going to stay here on guard by myself and when he comes he’ll find out I don’t have anybody with me. So that’s what happened. He came a half hour late and he said, “Where’s your buddy?” You know he said his name. And I said, “He kind of left.” And he said, “What do you mean he left?” And I said, “He left.” He says, “You can’t leave your guard post” I said, “Well he did.” And I don’t remember the exact wording anymore, this is sixty years ago, but anyway, he’s gone, and he said “Why would he go?” And I said, “Well he kind of had some sarsaparilla in his canteen, I think he was….he went.” So anyway he says, “Well, stay here and we’ll get a …bring a relief down.” So he brought two more guards down, and I left with him and we went back up and we got the officer of the day who was 1 st Lieutenant and told him that this guy had left his guard post at three o’clock in the morning or whatever it was. So then we went out hunting him up and we found him about an hour later. And he’s down, I don’t know if you know it or not but over in these towns, these little towns in Luxemburg and France and over there they play duckpins. It’s like bowling only they have these little duckpins, they shoot these little balls down, they’re called duck pins…in the bowling alley. This guy was down and he was really drunk. He’s down in the bowling alley shooting duck pins and he’s got some young Luxemburg girl down there sticking pins for him, setting them back up while he’s bowling. So we went in and we found him and the Lieutenant went in and told him he was under arrest for leaving his guard post and hit him! He hit the Lieutenant. And I thought, “Oh, my God!” So anyway they…we figured we had a problem here that we couldn’t control so we called the MPs and there was an MP group just down the road someplace. So two MPs came up and they went in and arrested him and they were big…he wasn’t going to hit any of those guys so they took him under control and they took him down to the guard house and they charged him with five Articles of War. I think I can give them to you: drunk on duty, leaving your guard post, the assault of an officer, desertion of duty and aid to the enemy.

ELLEN: All because he had the…

DON: He left his post, aid to the enemy, desertion of duty, the assault of an officer, Six Articles of War.

ELLEN: Did they ship him out? Did you know what happened to him?

DON: Yeah, oh yeah, the Lieutenant, the officer of the day, and the Sergeant, the guard and I, were all the witnesses and a general court martial was held after the Battle of the Bulge was over. They took him away and took him in jail. And about three weeks later after the Battle of the Bulge is over and everything our Captain told us that the Lieutenant and the Sergeant and you all have to go back to the city of Luxemburg for a general court martial. And we said, “We do?” And he said yes, so we got in a jeep and went into Luxemburg which is only about twenty miles away. And we went into this general court martial and I’d never been to a general court martial before, I had been to a court martial before but this is formal and it was not funny. You walked into the room and you do your square turns and everything else when you walk up to the desk. and you salute and everything else and you’re sitting right at the desk with a General with stars...and you record in. The only difference between a court martial and a trial here is…and it’s not as nice…is that because we have a lot of rules in civilian life but in the court martial when you went and testified, you were the only one in there. When the Sergeant comes in after me and testifies I don’t hear him. And the Lieutenant comes in and testifies he doesn’t hear you or anybody. You each go in and you do your thing. You don’t hear anything else so that you can’t correct your story or kind of adjust it or anything. You’d better do it right and it’s pretty serious. So anyway we got all done, it didn’t take long, we weren’t there that long...four hours or so. Then a (?), a General up there, a couple of Colonels and a Major and so forth, and he’s sitting there, and he hears everything. He’s sitting right over there in the docket looking at you. Anyway we all said what we said and we all turned around and walked out. After it’s all over and they deliberate and everything then you all come back in. Then the General comes in and well Private…I don’t want to say his name, “Private so-and-so please stand.” So he stands up with his lawyer…he’s got a lawyer right there with him…an Army lawyer. And he has to come over to the front and face the court martial and salute and everything and they said, “You are hereby sentenced to fifty years in Leavenworth Army Prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. (gavel sound) Finished. Out he goes.

ELLEN: Wow.

DON: Yeah.

ELLEN: Well you don’t mess around I guess.

DON: No. I’ve told that story several times. That’s what he got…I don’t know what he served. I mean he got twenty years (?)…Six of the five Articles of War.

ELLEN: That’s an incredible story.

DON: But when he was led out of the room he told the Lieutenant and the Sergeant and me he was going to kill us when he got out.

ELLEN: Well that probably took care of that. He probably served his fifty years.

DON: I hope they got that on him. We never heard from him so we don’t know. It’s an interesting story. Those are the things that we did and after we got done, we were in the army of occupation for a while and then we finally left. We left all of our equipment there and we got in a train and we went to LeHavre. I said train, it might have been trucks but we went to LeHavre, France and we got on these big boats and I was on the Countess de Savoy. It was a big ocean liner, not like the Queen Mary that was a pretty big ocean liner.

ELLEN: Well it’s bigger than what you came over on.

DON: Yeah, we went back to New York Harbor. They came in with all of the cheering and yelling and all that stuff.

ELLEN: Was your family there?

DON: No. We got off the ship and everything. We didn’t go immediately. I mean we didn’t just get off the ship and go home. We got off the ship and then we got on trains, went to Camp Butler, North Carolina. And then from there we got a thirty day furlough and we all went home, everybody went home for thirty days. Then we came back to Camp Butler. Oh another interesting thing, if I’ve got a minute, I’m taking up much time, but when the war ended in Japan….see when we came back we were told that we were going to reassemble in Camp Butler, reequip, reequip the whole the division, the 4 th Division and we were going to proceed to San Francisco and ship out to Okinawa and we were going to be in the Invasion of Japan. We were told that, yeah, and they said, well you are going to be in the Invasion of Japan. He says you’ve got all this experience so you’re going to Japan. And they were estimating the casualties of the Invasion of Japan to would be a million people so that’s why Truman dropped the big bomb on them and so we avoided all that. But anyway I went home for thirty days to Hornell, New York. And I was on the train from Hornell, New York to Jersey City, New Jersey… Newark, New Jersey. I’d take the train to Newark then change trains and go down to Camp Butler, North Carolina. And when I was on the train going to Jersey City, the war ended in Japan about the time we were in Binghamton and everybody got on the train and they showed us the papers, the war has ended and everything. So we got to Newark, New Jersey and we’re in the station in Newark, New Jersey. True story… we were walking, there’s about six of seven of us all GI’s and at that point I was a Sergeant. We walked into this station and we had to go to this other train and go down to Camp Butler, North Carolina. So one of the guys said, “Boy, we’re in Newark, New Jersey, can you imagine being in Times Square on VJ night?” And we said, “Oh wow, the war just ended, tonight in Times Square.” So there was a Colonel walking across, not an eagle Colonel but a Lieutenant Colonel, walking across the station, and we went over and we saluted him, and we said, “Pardon us sir,” we said. “What do you think would happen…?” The war is over now so we’re feeling a little loose. “What do you think would happen if we arrived at Camp Butler a day late?” And he said, “I would imagine they might be lenient.” And he said, “Let me see your orders.” So you always had them in your pocket so we pulled the orders out and saw it...showed him and everything and he said, “Okay, you just came back from Europe and you went home for thirty days and you are due there tomorrow morning. I don’t think they’ll do anything to you. What do you want to do?” We said, “Well we want to go to Times Square for VJ Day, VJ night.” He said, “Sounds like a heck of an idea.” And he said, “Let me write you a note.” So he pulled his briefcase out and took a piece of paper out and he said, “Please be a little lenient on these six soldiers when they arrive at Camp Butler, North Carolina a day late,” signed Colonel so-and-so. And he handed it to us, he folded it all up and we went and had VJ Day at Times Square and we stayed in the USO that night for free. Got a bed in there and the next day we got up, came back to Newark, went down to Camp Butler, North Carolina.

ELLEN: …showed them your note.

DON: Arrived a day late and got the heck bawled out of us. And it was all just for show.

ELLEN: Oh they really didn’t care but…

DON: I don’t think they did but they brought in a Lieutenant and he just bawled the heck out of us and the Sergeant bawled us out and told us that we were going to get extra duty and all that kind of stuff. We said, “Ahhh, okay.”

ELLEN: Did that ever happen?

DON: No, it was just for show. So we all went to the barracks and we did our thing and we were there ‘til, this was in August so we were there ’til October and we were closing up the camp. We had to close the camp up and clean all the equipment. We worked like dogs and we had to clean up all the equipment and mop all the trucks and the tanks and everything and get everything all put away and then finally in October I got my discharge from Camp Butler, North Carolina and went home.

ELLEN: And that was that.

DON: Yeah.

ELLEN: Wow.