Interview with Donald Wilkening, World War II POW
Private, 45 th Infantry Division
Corporal, Army Signal Corps
Cook Memorial Public Library District
June 28th, 2006

Interviewer: Ellen Bassett
Transcribed by: Connie J. Pfeifer
Proofread by: Joel Boon

ELLEN: This interview is taking place on June 28, 2006 at the Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville, Illinois. My name is Ellen Bassett, and I am interviewing Don Wilkening, a World War II Army Veteran. Don was born on March 24, 1925 and currently resides in Vernon Hills, Illinois. This is Don’s story.

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

DON: No, I was drafted. I graduated on June…in the middle of June or something and in the middle of July I was in the Army.

ELLEN: What year was that? Do you remember?

DON: ’43. 1943.

ELLEN: You graduated high school, and then a month later you were in the Army?

DON: Right. I was in the army.

ELLEN: That was July.

DON: Of ‘43, yes.

ELLEN: You were sent off.

DON: I went to Camp Grant in Rockford. That’s where they sent most of the draftees for their…what do you want to call it…interrogation, or whatever they did. From there, I wound up in Camp Wolters, Texas.

ELLEN: Camp Grant was not for basic training?

DON: No, no. Just like I said, for your interviews and…I was only there maybe a day or so.

ELLEN: Oh, I see.

DON: Then I was then shipped out…I would imagine most of us went to an infantry basic camp. That’s what Camp Wolters was.

ELLEN: Where was Camp Wolters?

DON: Well, Mineral Wells, Texas was the closest town, the biggest town. I know we were, I’m guessing, 40, 50 miles from Fort Worth. On our first passes, you were not allowed to be out of camp during basic training. Once you were through, then they gave you a three day pass, and we went to Fort Worth for a couple of nights.

ELLEN: Had a little fun?

DON: Yes. And as I say, from there…all of the guys, they were from all over…the East, the Midwest, New Jersey, New York. All of those guys went right overseas. As I said, I was lucky and passed the Air Corps. I went to Sheppard Field, Texas. They didn’t need anybody. The war was….that was probably the end of ‘43 or so, and the war was pretty well along by then. So, then I was sent back to Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

ELLEN: How is it that you wound up in the Army Air Corps?

DON: I took an exam. If you passed the exam, you were in the Air Corps. And I passed the exam. I couldn’t take it until after I finished my basic training. Then anybody that wanted to take it could take it. So, I raised my hand and took it, and I passed. As I say, that was nothing. All we did was sit around for a couple months, because they didn’t need any Air Corps people.

ELLEN: You would have been flying then?

DON: Well, I don’t know what I would have been, you know. The fact that I was with…no, I wasn’t with the phone company then. No, I wasn’t with anybody. Where ever they needed somebody in the Air Corps that I would have gone to, who knows what it would have been, because as I said, they didn’t need anybody.

ELLEN: Once you passed the exam and you were officially in the Air Corps, you were no longer at Camp Wolters. Where did you go?

DON: No, no. I went to Sheppard Field, Texas. That was an Air Corps Base.

ELLEN: Okay. What did you do there?

DON: Nothing (laughs). Go to town all day. You know, they didn’t know who was who. They posted the duty roster, but if your name wasn’t on it, you just took off and went to town. They didn’t know who you were. They would call out my name and I’d say, “He just went to town.” I got up and went to town. They didn’t know who you were. It was a mess, really (laughs).

ELLEN: So it sounds like you were just there waiting.

DON: Yes. There you were waiting for an assignment to do something else. It wasn’t going to be Air Corps, because they didn’t need them. From there, I mean, I was just a replacement. As I say, at that time the 65 th Division was in Camp Shelby, Mississippi taking their basic. Of course, I had already had my basic, so they put me on…they’d go out and go through different tactics. You have machine gun fire and you’d crawl under…because I had had heavy weapons training, I was picked to run the machine gun. We would sit there with a machine gun and cut trees down (laughs). Is this all going in?

ELLEN: Yes. This is great.

DON: We really shouldn’t have done it, because there were a lot of guys out there crawling on the ground. You were shooting over their head and of course those bullets would ricochet off those trees. We’d keep shooting at the base of the tree until it would fall down.

ELLEN: That’s amazing.

DON: From there, I just got put on a boat and went overseas.

ELLEN: Do you remember the name of the ship?

DON: No, I don’t.

ELLEN: Do you remember what time of year that was?

DON: No, I don’t know that either. No, I don’t know. I went in, ‘43 July, and basic was 12, 14, 16 weeks, something like that. So, that would have put us in August or September. Then I went to Camp Shelby and I might have been there for a month or so. That would make it October. Then I went to Mississippi. It was probably December when I went overseas. I would guess so. That’s strictly a guess. Then we went…we landed in Rome, Italy.

ELLEN: How long was the trip?

DON: Going over?

ELLEN: Yes.

DON: About four or five days, because they zig-zagged a lot. We went…we missed the Rock of Gibraltar, because we went through at night. But I did manage to see the North Coast of Africa before we came into Rome, before we landed. Then we went out to a campground out there where it was just guys sitting around waiting for replacements.

ELLEN: Is that what you were coming in as, a replacement?

DON: Yes.

ELLEN: So, you knew you were in the infantry at that point?

DON: Oh, yes. You just sat there until somebody…I got called up and wound up with the 45 th Infantry Division. I was just another guy, a soldier. I joined them. I was in Italy, outside of Rome, for quite a while. They came through one day and loaded a bunch of us on a truck and drove us up to Rome. When we got up there, they told us we were going to be in the Glider Troops. A miracle, one of the officers….I had had him in the United States, and he knew me. He said, “Don, this is 99% casualty.” This was strictly volunteer. I said, “No way!” So, I sat outside of Rome for over a week and was afraid to go in for fear I’d miss the truck going back to where I came from ‘cause when he told me 99% casualty, I said, “I don’t want no part of that.”

ELLEN: Wow. Had you been trained as a pilot?

DON: No, no, no. You would have. They were looking for Glider Troops. I don’t know how many truck loads of guys came up from where we were, hoping to get volunteers. But I don’t think they got too many because I think most of us went back. The camp I was in in Italy was called Purple Heart Valley, because there were so many GI’s killed there, you know, when the United States Army was going through Italy. These guys that I have pictures of there went through all that, all of those battles.

ELLEN: Were those pictures taken at Purple Heart Valley?

DON: No, no. I didn’t have a camera.

ELLEN: Oh, okay.

DON: You didn’t do anything there except wait. It was the same thing. They’d try to get you to go out for a drill, but nobody would go. They’d just goof off. They used to have guys coming from the front up there battling, you know. They’d hand them new rifles and that, and throw them in a ditch. They’d been up there dodging bullets and shells, and they come back and they expect them to take a basic training? No way! From there on in, like I said, we went by boat to the North Sea, or whatever it was, up to Le Havre, France. That’s where I joined the 45 th Division. I wasn’t with them very long before we were captured.

ELLEN: Had you seen any combat before you were captured?

DON: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

ELLEN: Can you tell me anything about that, what you had seen?

DON: Well, it’s not nice to talk about watching guys getting blown up and shot up. They used to…I don’t know whether it was GI’s or Germans…you’re familiar with stacking sand bags to stop water, but that’s how they stacked the bodies, this high, just piled on top of one another. That hurt me. The night we got captured, we were where we weren’t supposed to be. We were way up on a hill. We watched the Germans walk around us all day. I went out with a Major and a Colonel, and we laid out an artillery barrage that night hoping to catch them. When we got captured, guess where they put us? Right in the middle of that artillery barrage. I don’t know how I ever got out alive.

ELLEN: Wow. At what point did you know that you were likely to be captured?

DON: Well, you didn’t know you were going to be captured, but they always came in at dawn or dusk. Just as soon as it started to get dark, they were there.

ELLEN: Did they know you guys were up there?

DON: Oh sure. They had to. They had to. You know, I don’t know. I have no proof. They got two companies, a heavy weapons company and an infantry company, what was left of them.

ELLEN: How many of you were captured?

DON: I don’t…number-wise, I don’t know how many our company consisted of, how many men. I don’t know, but there were two companies.

ELLEN: In other words, that was quite a few.

DON: There were probably, I’m guessing, 30, 40 men or better. But they weren’t all alive. Some of them….that was the part I didn’t like. I saw my own fellow guys so badly shot up. It was pitiful.

ELLEN: So the Germans were not…when you were captured…they did not…I don’t want to say, “treat you well?”

DON: No, no, no. They didn’t harm us.

ELLEN: Oh they didn’t.

DON: In fact, once our artillery barrage was over, we got up and ran and ran the wrong direction. I didn’t know where I was. I ran right into the Germans, as most of us did, because there were a lot of us. When we got…they sat us down. He came up to me. First, he asked me how old I was. I didn’t know….you know, he was talking…he could talk English, though. He said something like, “[German words]” I was 19. He said to me, “I don’t hate you. You don’t hate me. It’s that damn Hitler and Roosevelt.” That’s exactly what he said to me.

ELLEN: No kidding?

DON: Yes. I’ll never forget that.

ELLEN: What was the feeling you had when he said that?

DON: Well, I don’t know, the same as him. Why were we fighting each other? Of course, and what can you do? You’ve got to follow your leader. Then they loaded us on top of a tank and took us to an area where we were all questioned. They took all of our clothes away from us and gave us whatever they had. Most of it didn’t fit, you know.

ELLEN: Did you know where you had been taken when they questioned you?

DON: No.

ELLEN: You had no idea where you were?

DON: It was in France some place.

ELLEN: How did you get there?

DON: What do you mean?

ELLEN: Once you were captured and they brought you to where you were interrogated, how did you get there?

DON: We rode on tanks.

ELLEN: Oh!

DON: On German tanks to this place. No food. We never got food. I had a beautiful class ring. To get food, I traded that for food. From there, we were put on box cars or something and taken to our camp, which was Stalag 7A.

ELLEN: And Stalag 7A is located where?

DON: That’s about 30 miles…I don’t know which direction…out of Munich. A little town of Freising was the nearest one. And as I say, Dachau was right near there. We could see the Bavarian Alps very clear from our camp. As I said out there, you could always tell. We got packages of food from the American Red Cross and the British, but there was an American Sergeant Major and a British one that would go between the prisoners and the Germans. They would…the English, they were the senior ones and would take our packages because they were good, and we’d get theirs. They weren’t good. If a guy was going to run away you could tell. He started stocking up on food and you knew he was going to run away.

ELLEN: Oh.

DON: We would use it…as I say, we went in town everyday. Weekends we didn’t go. Everyday we were loaded on box cars going to Munich and work on something, mostly the railroad stations if it had been bombed the night before. They used our camp. They’d come up from Italy, use our camp as a turning point and head for Munich.

ELLEN: You mentioned those care packages that were sent. The U.S. ones were good and the British ones were bad.

DON: Well, they were nowhere as good as ours.

ELLEN: What were the types of things that were in those packages?

DON: Ours had candies and cigarettes and stuff like that in there. Theirs didn’t have it. They had the English cigarettes, if you smoked, weren’t as good or anything. Because as I say, we would save up what we could because you got nothing but a bowl of soup and horse meat and that to eat.

ELLEN: Horse meat?

DON: Oh sure.

ELLEN: Oh.

DON: We didn’t have anything. And we would go in town…the guards were mostly old guys and they were pretty good. They would let us sneak off and trade for a loaf of bread because they didn’t have…they liked American cigarettes and chocolate. You could get anything for a chocolate bar and cigarettes. You could get anything. We’d get loaves of bread and take them back to the camp.

ELLEN: While you were in town you would sneak off and shop?

DON: Yeah. You could barter with the Germans and the guards would let you do it, some of them. That’s when the guys would try to run away.

ELLEN: Oh. Were there any escapes? Anybody you knew?

DON: I didn’t…because I was a replacement, I didn’t know anybody. Most of them were from around New York or the Northeast. You can tell that I just loved to sit there and listen to those guys talk with their brogue, but most of them were from there. I didn’t know a soul. That’s why, even now, the 45 th Division has, oh what doyou want to call it, get togethers. I went to one, but I didn’t know a soul because I was a replacement. So I never went again.

ELLEN: I’m curious about when you mentioned that guys tried to escape.

DON: You usually had maybe one guard for maybe a dozen guys or more. He couldn’t watch them all you know. I don’t know whatever happened to the guard if some of us people ran away, if he was reprimanded or not. I don’t know.

ELLEN: Were there any successful escapes?

DON: Not in the barracks I was in. Like I say, you could tell if a guy was going to run away, because he had food stocked up. But not that I know. Most of them were brought back.

ELLEN: What happened if someone was brought back? What happened to them?

DON: I never saw anybody in my compound or barracks get mistreated. The only time….in the morning when you were supposed to fall-out, you know, go to work, if you didn’t get out of bed and go, they’d send the dogs in. They had German Shepherds. They’d send them in. You got out then.

ELLEN: What would the dogs do?

DON: They’d come after you. Oh, yeah.

ELLEN: Wow.

DON: I never saw anybody mistreated. I don’t know. We had a group of Russians right next to us, and also from India. I can’t verify anything, but the rumor was that they used to stand dead guys in line to get their food. I couldn’t verify that. I don’t know if they did. That was a rumor.

ELLEN: Yeah.

DON: But those people never went out to work. We were, but they weren’t allowed out of camp. The Russians or the…

ELLEN: They weren’t?Do you know why?

DON: Probably because they were afraid of them. I don’t know why otherwise why they weren’t. And, a lot of the English, they had the run of things. They were in town. They had their apartments. They had their…what we called water bags, they had them full of wine (laughs).

ELLEN: These were POW’s?

DON: Yes, and Russians too. They lived like kings in town, in Munich.

ELLEN: It’s hard to understand.

DON: Yes it is, but they did. They had their own run of things.

ELLEN: It sounds like your camp, Stalag 7A, was full of prisoners from all over the world.

DON: Oh yeah.

ELLEN: Did you ever fraternize with any of the other prisoners?

DON: No. We weren’t allowed in their camps, and they weren’t allowed in ours.

ELLEN: When you weren’t working…it sounds like they took you into Munich and you worked…what did you do?DON: You just stayed in your barracks. Each barracks was all fenced in. You couldn’t go outside of it. All there was was a make-shift latrine. Not even a place to wash and clean up. Dysentery was VERY bad.

ELLEN: Really?

DON: I never was very heavy when I was young, but I was way down under 100 pounds when I finally got back into American custody again.

ELLEN: So, the sanitary conditions in this place…

DON: There were none.

ELLEN: Oh. You never had the opportunity to shower or wash?

DON: No.

ELLEN: Did you ever lose anybody there?

DON: Not that I know of. Because of the conditions?

ELLEN: Yes.

DON: No. Most of them were…like I said, I was only 19. Most of them were, I would say, in their 20’s or 30’s or so on. There weren’t very many young ones. There was one old guy. I say old, because he had grey hair. I don’t know how old he was, but I met a lot of old guys in there.

ELLEN: Did you get to know any of your captors, any of these Germans?

DON: No.

ELLEN: You never knew them by name?

DON: No. Like I said, they only guy I spoke to personally was the guy that I told you about on the night we were caught. That’s the only guy.

ELLEN: Right.

DON: You never spoke to the guards there. Of course, I couldn’t talk German. After a few months there you’d pick up a few words. Not that much.

ELLEN: Were you able to keep track of how the war was going? Did you have any information?

DON: Not too much, no. We were allowed once a month to write a postcard to our folks back home and that was it. That’s all.

ELLEN: You didn’t have access to any kind of papers or anything?

DON: No.

ELLEN: You really had no idea how things were going?

DON: No, no.

ELLEN: Were you able to receive any mail from home or any packages?

DON: No, we never got anything.

ELLEN: You never got anything.

DON: If they wrote, I didn’t get it. I would assume they did, but…. of course the government notified my parents that, you know, I was a prisoner. I don’t recall them saying that they got our postcards or not. I don’t know whether they ever did.

ELLEN: Wow. How long were you at Stalag 7A?

DON: About six months.

ELLEN: Were you there for any holidays, Christmas or…?

DON: Yes. Well, let’s see. I don’t remember. It was cold. It was wintertime when we were captured, so it had to be December or January or something. I think it was April or something when we were relieved, I think. By the time I finally got back in the United States…I got into Fort Sheridan, and my brother was graduating either that night or the next day from high school, so they let me go home, you know, to be at his...that was in June. But it was mostly the wintertime, because we froze all of the time. You didn’t have any coat…the bare necessities. No underclothing whatsoever.

ELLEN: Did they issue you just…what kind of uniforms were they?

DON: No uniforms. It was just clothes that they…thought they might have picked up from, like we had the Salvation Army or something. Old pants. My shoes didn’t fit. They were too small, and they hurt my feet. You didn’t have anything.

ELLEN: Since it was cold out, did they issue you a coat?

DON: No.

ELLEN: You had nothing? Wow! Were you working outdoors when they made you work?

DON: Sure. Oh, yeah. I never had the luck of working inside. I guess the wealthy Germans were able to bring prisoners in to do work. But I was never that fortunate.

ELLEN: It sounds like you were cold the whole time.

DON: Yes, I was, until we were relieved and then they took over a whole block of apartments. They kicked all the Germans out and let us have the apartments to ourselves.

ELLEN: You got an apartment at some point?

DON: Yeah…there was an Armored Division that came into Munich and freed….because we were setting right in the middle of the railroad yards in box cars near the end.

ELLEN: Oh, I see.

DON: When the Armored Division came in, the Americans chased all of the Germans out. All of the prisoners were given rooms in the apartments.

ELLEN: How long was a typical work day?

DON: You went very early in the morning and it was dark when you came home. But it was a 30 mile ride, about, into Munich in old box cars.

ELLEN: During the day, did they ever feed you?

DON: You got what they called “soup” in town. That’s about all. It was a little like weeds or something in the soup. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t good food. Like I said, dysentery was very bad. Of course, no showers. Body lice. We used to sit under the lights at night and squish the lice. The seams of your clothes were loaded with them. You slept on straw mattresses and you’d sit under the light if you had one or two, and squish them to get them out of you, because there was no laundry to clean your clothes.

ELLEN: I take it there was no type of heat where your barracks were?

DON: No.

ELLEN: Wow. Did they make you work seven days a week?

DON: No. I don’t recall working on Sundays, but all of the rest of the time, every morning.

ELLEN: How about medical care?

DON: There was none that I know of. I never needed anything. Whether they had a…I would assume they did. But I never knew anybody that went. Except for going out to work, I never got out of my little compound. You weren’t allowed out.

ELLEN: Wow. At some point, you must have known the war was coming to an end. Tell me what happened.

DON: Like I said, there was no way to tell…they would come over and drop leaflets, you know, and we did hear that there was a tank outfit just outside of Munich. We almost knew when they were coming in. There was nobody left to fight them. There was no German army left by then, not around Munich.

ELLEN: So it was an Armored Unit?

DON: I don’t remember who it was, whether it was Patton or who. That I don’t remember. It seems like they were part of the 45 th Division, which I was with when I was captured. I wasn’t one for writing things down. You didn’t have nothing to write on (laughs).

ELLEN: Do you recall where you were?

DON: Yeah. They had started a night-run on bombing. Of course, we’re right in the middle. The guards threw up their arms and ran. We ran over…it could have been the same apartment complex that we took over. We went into an air raid shelter.

ELLEN: So you were out working?

DON: No, no. Well, as I said, they took a whole bunch of us and put us in…that’s where we lived in the box cars right in the center of the Munich Rail Station. They put us in there. As somebody said, they could have been a deterrent for their bombing runs.

ELLEN: I guess I’m confused. You were living in the box cars.

DON: Right at the end, for the last couple of weeks or so.

ELLEN: So you had been moved out of the camp?

DON: Out of the camp. Oh, yeah.

ELLEN: Okay. I got it.

DON: We never went back.

ELLEN: Because the Germans knew…

DON: We didn’t do anything there. We never went out to work from the box cars.

ELLEN: So you were living in the box cars.

DON: Right. Then one night you could hear them coming and their bombs going. Like I said, the guards just threw things up and ran. We just ran across the way into the apartment complex with bomb shelters. We went in those. After it was over, we were on our own. Nobody bothered us or anything. Shortly, within a day or so, the tanks came in and freed us, you know. Then we went and stayed in the apartments. They brought us clothes and stuff, American stuff. We weren’t allowed out of the apartments.

ELLEN: Oh.

DON: Oh, no! They put guards on all the doors.

ELLEN: Americans Guards?

DON: Oh, yeah.

ELLEN: What was the reasoning?

DON: Well, we’d been captured a long time and they didn’t want us running wild around town. We did manage to get out. They were very well stocked with food, the German people were.

ELLEN: Oh!

DON: In fact, a couple of us got into one of their apartments and talked with the Germans, you know, a mother and father and children. You never know. Some of the guys got uptight and started picking….the guards were, as I said, mostly old guys, and started picking on them. Most of the other guys would tell them, “Leave them alone. It’s not their fault.” So I never saw anybody get hurt. There again, the Russians and the British, they’d take these people’s cars and drive them. They all had guns. I don’t know where they got them, but they did. I don’t know how long we were there. I would say maybe a week or two before they trucked us down to Dachau, and then we flew on C-47’s, I think into Le Havre, France. I don’t remember exactly. Of course, it was going through all the things like getting cleaned up, getting decent clothes and food. We were rationed on food because they didn’t want us to go overboard on eating. We hadn’t had anything for so long.

ELLEN: Do you remember what they started you with for food?

DON: No, I don’t.

ELLEN: Just a small portion.

DON: Yeah, I was on some form of a diet to bring you back up. From there, we went to London. Well, I’m not sure if it was London, but we came home on a German luxury liner. We were very well treated there.

ELLEN: Do you remember the name?

DON: Of the luxury liner?

ELLEN: Yeah.

DON: No, but it was a German luxury liner. I remember that.

ELLEN: I have to ask you about your homecoming. That had to be…

DON: Of course, there again, they wouldn’t let us out. We weren’t allowed off of the boat when we got to England. They didn’t want us to get in any problems. When we got in…we came into New Jersey. I can’t think of the name of the camp. And you were, there again, processed. I was sent to Fort Sheridan, and from there I was sent home for…I don’t know how long I was home. Then I went…they gave us all a couple of weeks down on Miami Beach at a luxury hotel for a couple of weeks there. Then I went up to Camp Blanding, Florida until I was discharged.

ELLEN: When you saw your family, that’s the first time you had seen them in how long?

DON: Since July of 1943.

ELLEN: This was now...

DON: ’44 or ’45, yeah. It was June, because it was graduation at Waukegan High School.

ELLEN: That must have been an incredible homecoming.

DON: Yes it was. Like I say, they knew I was a prisoner. But I don’t ever recall ever saying whether they got those cards that we were allowed to send one a month or something like that.

ELLEN: Did your family get any kind of updates from the Army about you?

DON: Not that I know of.

ELLEN: Okay. So they didn’t know.

DON: No. They didn’t. They knew I was a prisoner and that’s all they knew.

ELLEN: They knew you were alive.

DON: As far as I know, yes.

ELLEN: Wow. That’s incredible. You were discharged from…

DON: From Fort Sheridan.

ELLEN: From Fort Sheridan?

DON: Yes. Then like a dummy….oh, no, no I apologize. I was discharged from Camp Blanding, Florida. Fort Sheridan was just an overnight deal before they let me go home, processing it. No, I was discharged Camp Blanding Florida. But like a dummy, I let them talk me into signing up for the Reserves. And wouldn’t you know I wound back up in Korea.

ELLEN: You served in the Korean War?

DON: Yeah, but I didn’t go overseas. According to the Geneva Convention, I could never go back to Europe, because of being a prisoner over there. I could go that way, but you wouldn’t know, because you’re too young. At that time, there was a lady in Evanston…Mrs. Church. She was our State Representative in Washington. I was out in the state of Washington. This was during the Korean deal and I was married. My wife called this Mrs. Church and she called the Commanding General…that’s the 5 th Army out there…and told them about me. I was all ready to get on the boat. Some guy come over and said, “I don’t know who you know, but get out of here! You ain’t going.” It was because of this Mrs. Church.

ELLEN: You were ready to go over?

DON: Oh yeah. All the guys I was with. We had our orders to go to Korea. I was ready to ship out from Washington. This Mrs. Church said, “This is it.” She called the Commanding General of the 5 th Army and he called up where I was and they come down and said, “You aren’t going no place. I don’t know who you know, but get out of here.”

ELLEN: Where did you go from there?

DON: I went down to California to Camp Roberts, California. Because I had been in the infantry, they wanted me to be an instructor in heavy weapons. I said, “No way.” In the meantime, I had been with the telephone company for quite a few years. So I went to this Post Signal Officer and he took me in the Signal Corps. It was a waste of the taxpayers’ money.

ELLEN: Why do you say that?

DON: Well, the TO….it called for two people to be in a section. We had nineteen guys. Now most people stayed in the Reserves because of rank. I didn’t have any. Most of them were Master Sergeants. Some of them were Majors, but they were like a Master Sergeant permanent grade. That’s all we had. We didn’t do nothing.

ELLEN: What was your rank?

DON: There I had a Colonel who was in charge of the Signal Corps. He was a wonderful guy. He got me the Corporal stripes. I never had any. I was a nineteen-year-old kid listening to some officer, and I signed up. If I would have been active reserve, okay, I would have got a pension. But I was inactive. I didn’t do anything. It was a blessing in a way because the company paid me the difference between my Army pay and my company pay. All the whole time I was out there, they paid me. When I got stationed out in California, one of the guys I was with…he lived in St. Louis. He went home. My brother drove my wife…we had just bought a brand new car…down there, and his family and my wife drove out to California. We rented a house together and lived like kings… nothing to do. She took a part-time job in Sears. That way we got to know people. We were going to parties and dances. I had nothing to do at camp. I don’t know if you have ever heard of the Randolph Hearst Estate?

ELLEN: Uh, huh.

DON: Well during the war, the Army took over part of the Randolph Hearst Estate for training grounds. So another guy and I…we had a small contingent…would check out a brand new truck every morning…about 20, 30 miles up there… and call them up, tell them we’re coming. The Colonel would tell us to go up there. We’d get up there and have steak dinners, and we’d ride all through the Hearst Estate and then head back to camp when it was time (laughs).

ELLEN: It sounds like you were deserving.

DON: When we were up in…same thing. Most of your Reserves were older guys. They stayed for the rank they had. They’d send us…you know Washington State. That’s liquid sunshine. It rains all the time. Well, they’d send us out on…expect us to do field projects. You could hear the guys at night tearing down board fences and that, to make fires to keep warm. You know, and things like that. As I said, for me…when I… END OF SIDE A

 ELLEN: BEGINNING OF SIDE B We were just saying how you were accumulating points while you were there.

DON: You had to have x number of points to be eligible for discharge. It took me…I was out there almost a year. That much time. I didn’t live at camp. I lived off base. As I say, we rented a house from a couple. When I had accumulated enough points, I could either go home and get discharged or get discharged out there. If I got discharged out there, they’d pay me so much a mile to go back home. The company gave me….I’m paid by the company all this time. They gave me a month to get back to work. So we took off. I had cousins up in Oregon and my wife had friends. We went up there and stayed with them. We went deer hunting and everything. I had another cousin who was a salesman and we were going to Mexico. We were going to leave Oregon. He wanted me to buy a lot of stuff for his wife. So we drove down to Mexico. If you stayed overnight, you could bring more stuff out. So we stayed overnight. But at that time, that was in….we were married in 1949 and we had only been married a couple of years. There were no pure food laws in Mexico. So we went to eat and ordered a salad, and it was full of worms. So we didn’t eat. Then they told me I had to park my car…it was a brand new car, I had just bought it…out in the back. I parked right out in the middle of the street and I sat in the window and watched it all night. We got up in the morning and went shopping and bought all of the leather goods and that we wanted, and then we drove home from there.

ELLEN: When you say “home,” you came back to where?

DON: We were living in where the restaurant is up town. There was an apartment up there.

ELLEN: In downtown Libertyville?

DON: We were there before I went in. We had sub-leased it to a couple of friends of ours that had gotten married while I was in California. Within a couple of years after that, we built our home.

ELLEN: What did you end up doing as a career?

DON: Phone company.

ELLEN: The phone company. Was that influenced in any way by your military experience?

DON: No. When I got out, I was at one job or the other. We went to one place…there was another guy and I that worked many jobs. He says, “You guys jump around like a flea on a hot griddle.” I worked with Cyclone Fence. I worked all over. I had a cousin who was in the office at that time. Evanston was the District. He said, “Why don’t you come work for the phone company?” “Well, oh sure!” But it took me over a year to get a job because they had a weight requirement at that time. You had to weigh 150 pounds, and I didn’t.

ELLEN: Oh!

DON: So, almost a year. Finally my cousin…you had to keep going downtown Chicago for interviews. He called downtown one time. Like I say, he was a secretary to the District boss or something. He called downtown to the Medic Department and said, “Jump his weight the next time he comes down.” So he jumped my weight and I got the job.

ELLEN: Oh, yah!

DON: It’s not any good now, but those years it was a good place to work. They are very good now. They paid every item. I don’t have any insurance. The company pays everything. I’ve never paid for medical coverage or anything in my life. Of course in those years, they didn’t have it. Right now, I get everything from the VA. That’s another thing. I don’t know if I should be telling all of this. I have a disability because I had frozen feet. That happened in camp, because we had no clothes, no socks or nothing. We had to go off to work everyday. I was diagnosed with that, and I was given a 10% disability which entitled me to a small pension. So those pictures I showed you last year for that memorial, two of those fellows are very high up in the prisoner deal. The one guy said, “Yeah, we got frostbite.” I said, “I’ve got 10% disability.” “10%?” he said. “I’ve got guys that were in prison for one day, and they’re getting 100% disability.” He said, “You go back!” I went back and they tripled my pension and they gave me 50% disability. I have a very good friend downtown who is very, very high in the State for POW’s. When I filed, because the VA everything takes forever and a day, they said it could take a couple of months. I called this guy and I had the stuff the next day. Well, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

ELLEN: That’s the truth.

DON: He’s a very wonderful guy. I’ll never forget him. He’s a very good guy. He wants to retire, but these people don’t want him to retire because he’s so good. He’s as high as you can get. I’ve met him once and I’ve never forgotten him. He’s a really nice guy. But the rest of it is history. I spent thirty-five years with the company. Just like everybody else, they wanted to get rid of people. In 1982, we were down in Florida, and my daughter….somehow one of the bosses found my daughter’s telephone number, and he said, “Next time you talk to your dad, tell him he’s eligible for retirement.” Boy, I was right on the phone. Then I had a friend who had to do with the retirement that was downtown. So I called him to see what was going on. And he said, “Yeah, you’re eligible.” So I said, “Put me on it.” I was only 57 and my wife had a fit. She said, “We’ll have to sell the cars and we’ll have to sell the house.” But they paid me until I reached eligibility for Social Security. They paid my salary. That was one of the conditions if you took early retirement. Ever since then….one of the bad things is I lost my wife, but I never dreamed I’d have a place in Florida. Buy a new car whenever I wanted it…come and go as I please. I’ve been very lucky that way. Just losing my wife, fifty-four years we were married.

ELLEN: Oh, sorry about that.

DON: In one minute she was gone. I still go see her everyday. She’s right over here. I’ll never get over it. Of course my son and daughter…she and my daughter, one never went any place without the other. She has one grandson. It’s a wonderful family, both of them. She’s been a teacher for twenty-six years at Hawthorn and her husband works for the County Forest Preserve. They’re both getting near retirement age. In fact she just went down last Friday…the state runs teacher’s pensions, I guess. My grandson, it was very unfortunate…his femur bone, that’s the biggest bone. He broke that four times, twice in each leg. He has some kind of weakness or something. Anyhow, she had to take off for a year to help him, you know. She can buy that back if she wants and retire a little earlier. He’s a senior. He’ll graduate next year and then he’s going on to college. So I would think they would probably work until he gets out of college, I don’t know. They just called me. I talk to my daughter. My son lives with me. He has his own business. My daughter just lives right down in Vernon Hills. We talk all the time. I was talking to her last night or the night before. She said, “We were sitting at the table the other night and my son said, ‘We should go on a vacation together.’” My son-in-law said, “You mean to tell me you want to go out with your parents?” They’re all going to Hawaii right after Christmas.

ELLEN: That’s great! Sounds like fun.

DON: I’m just so happy for them.

ELLEN: Yeah.

DON: All three of them are going to Hawaii.

ELLEN: I have one more thing to ask you before we finish up. Did you ever get any medals or citations or awards?

DON: They’re on my shirt. I have two Bronze Stars, and that’s for two battles. That’s all. I was only there a week or two before we were captured.

ELLEN: Oh, that’s it?

DON: Yeah.

ELLEN: Didn’t you get any kind of medal for being a POW?

DON: No. I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. Not that I know of.

ELLEN: Oh, I thought there was something for that.

DON: No.

ELLEN: Maybe not. Do you belong to any veteran’s organizations?

DON: No. I’m the type that if I’m not going to be active, I don’t want to be….what’s the sense of belonging just to say you belong? I would never go to a meeting. I’m too active on the outside world. I’m gone all the time. I’m lucky.

ELLEN: It sounds like you’re very busy.

DON: There’s a young lady that we’re going around together. My brother a few years ago got me in the Moose. But our Moose Lodge is bankrupt (laughs). But I’m still a member. There’s a group of us that meet tonight and Friday night. There are eight or ten of us. We’ll go to Bonnie Brook Golf Course tonight for dinner. They have a good dinner. Each one will pick a different place for Friday night, locally, to go out. We’ll go out and have a couple of drinks and a dinner. It keeps us active. We’re pretty active with our families, always doing something. We eat out a lot.

ELLEN: Do you keep in touch with anybody you knew from...

DON: The service?

 ELLEN: Yeah.

 DON: No. I tried. There was the one guy that’s in the picture lived in Russell, Illinois. It’s on the state line. Now he went through every battle, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio.

ELLEN: He was not in captivity with you?

DON: Oh, no, no, no. As I said, when I finished my infantry basic at Camp Wolters, I went to the Air Corps. Those guys went overseas, and he went through all of those battles in Italy… Sicily, Salerno, Anzio. Those were some of the worst battles in the war. I went to look him up. He wouldn’t even hardly talk to me. The two of us got so close in the service that we cried when we separated. He was nothing after all those battles.

ELLEN: He didn’t want to talk about it?

DON: No. I never saw him again. Of course, as I said, he was the only local guy in my first basic. All the rest of them were from out east. There was a guy from the Carolinas or something that I was pretty close to and another guy from the east. We were pretty close. I’ve never seen them or anything. There’s nobody in the service that I know. There was a guy from Grayslake, he was a prisoner, but he was with the Air Corps, and I didn’t know him very well. He passed away some time ago. So I don’t know anybody.

ELLEN: Being in captivity like that would make it hard.

DON: I don’t know.Name-wise, you went by first name only. As I say, I went to one 45 th reunion down in Chicago and I didn’t know a soul. This guy from Grayslake was there and that’s the only one I knew. Probably by now, there are probably very few around at all.

ELLEN: That could be.

DON: There’s one guy that I said has all those medals. Of course, he was a regular outfit. He still goes every year to the reunions. I think he’s a wonderful guy for all he went through.

ELLEN: That’s what you said.

DON: He has a license plate with a Purple Heart on it. He pays for it. I have a license plate for an ex-POW free.

ELLEN: Oh!

DON: I can’t get that. That guy got shot up, got everything, and he’s got to pay for it, and I get mine free. It took two years to find out that I was eligible for the free license plate. They wouldn’t tell you, the state. I saw it in the papers. I called them. I said, “How many POW’s in the state of Illinois?” “About 1500.” I said, “With all of the junk mail you send out, you couldn’t tell those 1500 people they were eligible for this?”

ELLEN: Yeah. I want to thank you for sharing your experiences with us.

DON: Well it was my pleasure. It’s been my pleasure.

ELLEN: Oh, I know this has been difficult to talk about, so I appreciate it.

DON: The most difficult is the night we were captured.

ELLEN: Yes, I know it’s hard to talk about.

DON: A 19 year old kid seeing all of that suffering and bloodshed, I didn’t like that. Seeing the first time I saw those bodies stacked like sandbags, it’s hard.

ELLEN: It’s probably an image that you’ll never lose.

DON: I’ll never forget that. I don’t know if I’ve ever told anybody that. I don’t know. Maybe.

ELLEN: Well, I thank you.

DON: If it has helped you in any way, I’m happy.

ELLEN: Well thank you. I appreciate it. I enjoyed talking to you. I want to thank you for your service to this country.

DON: Okay.

1. 2. 3. 4.

1. Don during basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas 2.Al Sodman, Don Wilkening, Al Young at Camp Wolters, Texas 3. Don at Fort Shelby, Mississippi 4.Don (in white) at dedication of World War II POW/MIA monument in Lake Zurich, Illinois