Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Louis Bednar was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Spelling errors are indicated with [sic]; however, recurring errors in spelling within a single document have been marked the first time and not subsequently.
17th, 2002. I'm here with Louis Bednar. He was a veteran of World War II.
Mr. Bednar, would you briefly state your full name, your date of birth, the -- your current address, and your branch in the military.
Can't remember all of that.
Okay. That's okay.
Let --
Just one at -- just one at a time.
My name is Louis Bednar, L-O-U-I-S, Bednar. Date of birth was December 24th, 1921. Born in Newark, New Jersey. My current address is 2721 Redway Road in Boise, Idaho.
Thank you. And your branch in the military?
I was in the Army.
And which war?
U.S. Army.
In the U.S. Army. Which war?
World War II.
World War II. Thank you. My name is Jason Andres. I live at 12366 West LaGrange in Boise, Idaho. I'll be interviewing. And the others who are present during this interview are Suzanne Andres and Sienna Andres at the same address. Okay. I'll just ask you a few basic questions here to -- to get things started. You mentioned that you enlisted. Why did -- why did you enlist?
Well, most of my -- some of my close friends that were older than I were already in the service because pri- -- just prior to our entry in the war the people who were in the National Guard had been federalized, so a couple of my friends already were in -- on active duty, you might say, and my older brother was registered for the draft. I wasn't at that point registered; however, it was about to happen that I would have to sign up, and I decide -- I knew it was going to happen, so I decided I'd join and pick the service or the branch that I wanted to get into.
So why did you choose the Army?
Well, I -- I don't know why. I just thought the parachute troops might be something interesting because it was something new.
And what -- what were your responsibilities?
Well --
What did you -- what did you do in the Army?
Well, after basic training, we -- were we at -- it was basic infantry training that we were taking, beside the parachute training, because I was assigned to a machine gun platoon, and we had to do everything with those light machine guns: take them apart, put them together, fire them, carry them, everything with those, the light -- it's a 30-caliber machine gun --
Okay.
-- air-cooled. And we even had to jump out of the plane with the silly things.
What was that like?
Well, they were kind of heavy if you were carrying them, the gun itself.
Right.
The tripod was light, but then the ammo boxes, the ammunition boxes, were heavy, so was the gun itself.
Did you have to carry those when you jumped?
I did one time, I jumped with it on a training jump.
So what were your first few days in the military like; what were you thinking, what -- what was happening?
Well, I -- I didn't know. I had been away to camp as a young boy, so it wasn't the first time I was away from home, but I remember knowing that this -- I wasn't going back in a week or two --
Sure.
-- from this engagement. And what the future held was a little bit more -- you know, well, was a little scary, so I was a little apprehensive about the future, I guess.
I could imagine. So what was -- what was boot camp like?
Boot camp?
Yeah.
Well, it was basic training, and I went to basic training at Spartanburg, South Carolina, at a place called Camp Croft, which no longer exists. It was a temporary camp that they had for World War II, and then they abandoned it. But that was just strictly a basic infantry training camp. And then at that time we spent three months there. After that, we went to the parachute school at Fort Benning where we learned how to do everything a parachutist had to do, including pack your own chute and jump out of the planes and so on.
So did you -- did you enjoy your training experience; did you entroy -- did you enjoy the basic training?
Well, some parts of it, I did.
Some parts of it.
When I see films of the Marines and soldiers, the -- that the drills' instructors, how they harass troops that are just starting out, I see nothing has changed too much. They all do the same --
It's pretty tough, huh?
-- thing. To be a drill instructor, you have to be a certain breed, I guess.
Yeah, you got to get in people's faces, right? So what parts of the -- what parts of basic training did you enjoy?
Oh, I don't know. I enjoyed the hikes, I suppose. We did some long hikes where you hiked all day for carrying your weapon and full field pack. I think we went -- I don't remember how far we went in miles, actually, but we marched for, say, eight hours pretty steady, so it would be, oh, probably over miles, 24 miles that we --
Right.
-- hiked and we'd camp and then the next day hike back.
Pretty intense, huh?
Well, it was part of the toughening-up process --
Sure.
-- I guess.
So now you're in World War II. Where -- where exactly did you go?
Well, after I was -- we were -- I was assigned to the -- after parachute school, they were forming the 82nd Airborne Division, and after we were formed into our, you know, groups or companies, battalions, and so on, we then were sent up to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, which was -- and it remains today the home of the 82nd, I guess, the training area for them; and after training there for quite a while, we made a number of training jumps, well, we had made some in -- at Fort Benning and then we made more training jumps, actual combat-type jumps at Fort Bragg.
After our training was over and we were ready, we were deployed overseas. We went to North Africa. And more training there. But the fighting just had ended in North Africa when we got there, so my group did not actually see combat in North Africa, but we crossed Morocco and Algeria and wound up in Tunisia, and from there we got ready for the invasion of Sicily. That was quite a fiasco in the sense that sometimes I read about these people that are killed by friendly fire.
We've had them -- you know, these things occurred in the Arabian conflicts, and I wonder if world wars aren't the same, because my first taste of combat was on the invasion of Sicily when we were flying from Tunisia and we were making a night jump, we flew over Malta and headed north towards Sicily, as we came close to Sicily, we passed over, our fleet was -- our invasion fleet was down in the harbor near the shore, and we could see the dark hulls, of course, it was a nighttime jump, the moon was shining, but there were no lights down below, nor were we allowed to have any lights in the plane. And somehow they -- somebody goofed, and our Navy mistook us for German bombers, and they shot the dickens out of us, knocked some of our planes down.
Wow.
Some of the planes were -- went into the water. Before they -- they were shot down, and the men never got out of them. I don't know how many, but I've seen this recorded, and this is not something I'm making up.
Right.
I've seen it recorded in the 82nd Division books, the second battalion was really massacred by our own Navy.
Wow.
And my plane was hit, but no one in my plane was hurt because the pilot apparently banked -- got out of the antiaircraft fire, and as soon as we got over land, we jumped. They put on the green light, and out we went. We were only about 35 or 40 miles from where we were supposed to be.
Oh, no.
And I found out that that was very common with the airdrops then. The peo- -- the men were scattered all over the island. Now that had the effect of, you know, kind of unnerving the -- the enemy people because they heard paratroopers were here, paratroopers were there, miles away paratroopers were there. Now this wasn't by design.
So it was a happy accident?
It was a happy event for us that it frightened them. So it took the nerve out of the Italians especially, so it wasn't too much of a combat there, combat situation, after the initial landings in Sicily. Then, of course, the Italians gave up there in Sicily, and the Germans took over. And the Germans were a different story. They were a little more resistant, very much more resistant.
Right.
Then after the -- well, in Sicily, that was the campaign when Patton, General Patton was our commander of the -- it was the Seventh Army, I guess, and he had that slapping incident where he was supposed to have slapped a soldier that was in the hospital and it actually happened. If you saw that movie on Patton, they kind of dramatized it --
Sure.
-- quite a bit. But General Patton had to apologize to all of the troops under his command in Sicily. Now, we were off in the boondocks somewhere up on a mountaintop somewhere, I've forgotten just where we were, but we were kind of isolated, but the message came to our platoon leader, Lieutenant -- I've forgotten his name now, but our lieutenant came and read us this letter from General Patton apologizing to the troops for slapping the soldiers, and he said he -- in the letter he did state, I believe, if I recall, that he was -- he felt the soldier was in shock and that by slapping him in the face he would get him to snap out of it.
Of course, some reporters happened to see it happening, and it was, you know, changed completely. So Patton was disgraced there for a while. And then right when Sicily campaign ended, he was kind of relieved of command. And when we went -- when we jumped at Salerno, which followed shortly after, we -- the commanding general was Mark Clark, so Patton was sent to England where he was kind of in limbo for a while. But then Clark was our commander. Most of the way up Sicily -- I mean, I'm sorry, from Salerno, we went to Naples up to the central mountains of Italy, and we were used as combat infantry there rather than paratroopers after the initial jump.
And we wound up very close to that, what's the name of that -- Monte Casino, which was way up, well, almost, not quite to Rome, but it was around the Lira River, and it was an abbey where the Germans had a strong line. We got up to it, not into it, but we could see it off in the distance across the valley, and that was in January of '44. Well, they took our group, our bunch back, we were prepared for a jump in -- at Anzio, and we were given new equipment, new replacements, and then when -- just before we made the jump at the end of January, why, they called off the jump.
They found out a German armored unit had moved into the drop zone, not -- they didn't feel that they knew we were coming, it's just that they moved in there by accident or coincidence, you might say, but we couldn't jump on top of them, so they called the jump off and they put us on LCI, that's those landing craft infantry boats, and we got on the boat -- on the boats there in the vicinity of Naples and headed around and hit the beaches near -- near Anzio -- well, at Anzio and Nettuno, which is south of Rome.
Well, I lasted on that beach-head about five days until the Germans hit us with some armor and we didn't have any armor there where we were. We -- a bunch of us paratroopers and rangers were left out, kind of isolated out, and it was either surrender or get shot, so I -- I decided I was allergic to bullets and decided I would not get shot for nothing. But, anyway, I became a guest of the Germans then around -- around, I think it was around the 26th of January of '45 -- '44.
And they took you to a POW camp?
Yes, well, they took -- they took us up from there. They put us in those box -- those famous boxcars they have. You always see -- that was the main way of transporting prisoners; they put you in those boxcars and then shipped you north up into Germany. So they took us up near Munich for a few days, and then from there, they took my group up to what was -- what is now Poland, so that's where I spent the rest of the -- my war experience. And at that time it was the old Polish corridor and not too far from Danzig, in that area.
Pomerania was the provenance. And the Germans considered it Germany then. Now it's Poland because they moved the borders over, of course. But I was there until almost Christmas of that year, and when the Russians started coming in closer, why, then we had to withdraw -- the Germans were withdrawing and they -- and we went with them headed toward the American lines. So we, around Christmas there, we waded through deep snow and headed toward the west and crossed the Oder River somewhere near New Brandenburg, and we stopped there for a while.
And then, the Russians kept coming, of course, the Americans were coming from the other side, and toward -- toward the end there, our German guards had -- they had to surrender their weapons to the Volkstorm, so the feldwebel or -- he was like a high-ranking noncom, I guess, that took care of us, he was in charge of our -- our detachment of prisoners, said he couldn't guard us anymore. He said, you can stay here, the Russians will be here in a few days, or you can go with us, we're going to surrender to the Americans.
So we weren't going to sit there, wait for the Russians for some unknown quantity, so we took off with them and marched quite a ways. We got -- marched almost all the way across northern Germany till we got to American lines, and that was it. We walked to American lines, and we were free.
When was that?
That was in -- just before VE Day. We got out a couple days before they declared VE Day.
So what was the camp like; how many people -- the POW camp, what was it like; how many people were there?
Oh, well, we had -- we had prisoners there, the Amer- -- we had, as far as Americans were concerned, we had Americans that were taken prisoner in Africa in the invasion of -- near Casablanca of Morocco, and somehow the Germans got ahold of them from the French, because it was the Vichy French, and then prisoners would be -- would accumulate. Every so often, they would get some prisoners and ship them up. So the oldest American prisoners had been there since November of '40 -- what was it? -- November of '43, I guess. Because it was in '44 that we went into Sicily and Italy and then June 6 when they hit the beaches there at Normandy. What else?
So how many people were in the POW camp?
Oh, how may?
Yeah.
I don't know the exact figures. I know that we had many of the -- there were many Americans there. Actually, the Germans had a caste system. They kept all enlisted men, all of us enlisted people, in one camp, officers were kept in separate camps, for whatever reason, maybe they figured that with the leaders in the camp they could -- we wouldn't -- we men wouldn't be apt to do anything rash with no -- none of our leaders there. The numbers, I don't know how many. There were, oh, I would say hundreds, possibly thousands.
Because I -- I don't -- I didn't see or I had no way of knowing how many were there. Now, the main thing that we found, the difficult part of being a POW in Germany was, of course, the diet you were on because they had no food of their own, very little of it, so what they gave the prisoners was nothing. And we got Red Cross parcels that were shipped over by our government through Switzerland or Sweden, and those parcels were what kept us alive. Basically they were, oh, about 10 pounds, nine or 10 pounds of food in a little cardboard carton, and that was supposed to be for one man, the rations for one man for a week.
Sometimes you didn't get them. Sometimes we did. But they had representatives from those neutral countries that were there to see that we got them and the Germans didn't eat them, you know, instead. Now, when we had those Red Cross rations, we were actually eating better than our guards were. I don't know if you would believe that, but I remember at one -- we were out in one little forest camp where we had a couple of guards and just about a dozen of us men, and what we did, we had -- they had a little compound where we slept, and we had one fellow, one prisoner was allowed to stay in to be the cook.
So we pooled our -- our meats from our Red Cross parcels, because you had a can of Spam, for example, and a can of this corn beef, but if one person, if one person ate -- opened the can of Spam, you had no way to refrigerate it, it would probably spoil, so what we did was shared. Several of us would, say, would share a can of Spam, each one would get a fourth, and then you'd do the same thing with the -- with the other meat. That way, the meat wouldn't spoil, since you couldn't refrigerate it. Now, the Germans were smart enough too to know that if men were going to escape, they would try to take rations with them.
So when they -- they supervised the rations, they usually opened -- made you open the can, if you took a can of meat, for example, out, you had to open it up right there or they would punch a hole in the can of Spam so that you couldn't put it in your pack pocket and save it for a week's journey. Now, there were other things like margarine, sugar, and, of course, there were some crackers, cheese, and a lot of rich food in those rations. And I was telling you about being out at this forest camp where we had one person stay -- stayed in, and he did the cooking, like he'd cook up a bunch of Spam for us, and fried Spam tastes good, I still like it, believe it or not.
But I remember we sat down at a little table and we were going to eat, and then one -- one of the fellows asked me to sit, to go back into the kitchen, we had two rooms, he asked me to go back in the kitchen and get some salt because we did have some rock salt that we broke -- ground up for, you know, seasoning our food. So all the fellows were sitting in here at the table, and I went back into the kitchen to get the salt, and here was a German guard, he'd picked the empty cans of Spam out of the trash can and he was rubbing his finger around in the can and licking it off, and I thought to myself, if I were the guard, I wonder -- and my prisoners were eating something, I wonder if I would have the, you know, patience or whatever to let them eat it without --
Yeah.
-- you know --
-- I imagine that was tough for them.
But, anyway, it was something to see, that here the German guard was actually envying the prisoners, and I think it was the same fellow, we were talking to him about the lack of food, and he said, well, he had a letter or one of his relatives had a letter from the United States, and he said they didn't get enough potatoes to eat. He says you -- you people talk about having a lot of food, he says here my -- this cousin of his or something from the United States didn't get enough potatoes. But he didn't say that they got a lot of meat and other things which Americans don't eat as much potatoes. [Oh, here's our Gordo. Hi, Gordo.]
Anyway, I have some fond memories of the camp. They put us out on these work commandos were we were chopping down trees and so on, and they had the old two-man saws and we'd saw the -- we'd saw the trees down and clear the branches off. They were kind of telephone-pole-size trees, like pine trees, and we had to clear the branches off. And we cleared many of those trees, but they stayed there. The Germans never got out of them out because they were there when the Russians came in, so I imagine the Russians put them to use.
And when we were in the big camp, you asked me about the number of people in there, there were a lot of people in there, and the Red Cross managed to send the -- to send over some sport equipment, like softball gloves and bats, and also musical instruments. And one time when I was in the -- in the main, in the Stalag, in the big camp, they decided they were going to -- I don't remember if this was at Mun- -- I think it was at Munich or up in northern Germany, but, anyway, they told us they were going to have a musical show for the prisoners and we were all invited.
It was in kind of like a big, one building, and we went in there, and they had some seats up in the front which were reserved for the German officers who were the commandant of the camp and his aides were coming in to see -- be entertained by the American prisoners. So they were going to put on a -- they put on a variety show, you know, different skits with the guys dressed up as women, you know, dancers and so on, just mostly like slapstick stuff. And I had to laugh at the -- the orchestra, they struck up like an overture to start, and it was something called the "Fuhrer's Face." I don't suppose you ever heard of it.
No.
But before the war, before I ever got into the Army, they had, I don't know if it was Spike Jones and his musical combo came up with this crazy song and it was about -- the "Fuhrer's Face" was the name of it, and they even made a Donald Duck movie with it, and Donald Duck was singing it. And it went something like: Not to love the Fuhrer is a big disgrace, so we heiled-heiled right in the Fuhrer's Face, and -- and that was the song, da-ta-da-ta, da-ta-da-ta-da-ta, and here we were in the POW camp and this orchestra beats -- they play that overture, that song. And the Germ- -- it's a lively song, and the German officers were turning around looking at all the prisoners grinning, you know, and we were all laughing and, of course, they didn't know the words.
Right.
And we did. So it was kind of a funny thing, funny situation. And we weren't about to sing the words either if we knew what was good for us. But that's one of the fond memories of the -- one of the few fond memories I had of the prison camp.
It sounds like, for the most part, you were actually treated fairly well at the camp.
Well, in the sense of being mistreated, we were treated well by the Germans and not -- well, we were not manhandled or beaten or anything of that nature. I saw pic- -- END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE; BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE.
-- read stories about the Japanese, how they treated some of the prisoners from Carigador (ph) and Baton, the Baton death march, there was nothing like that in Germany. And one of the French prisoners, who had been prison -- a prisoner for years, he was a prisoner -- he was taken prisoner in 1940, I believe, and we could speak to him just a little bit in Germ- -- using some German words because he couldn't speak English and we couldn't speak French, but he used to -- he would tell us that the Germans were pretty rough when they were winning the war at the beginning, when they overran France and Holland and -- they were quite arrogant at that particular time. But then, about the time we were -- I became a prisoner, we were on -- we were very close to Rome, and I think any German with any sense knew that it wasn't going to be too long before they were -- would be in the same position, that they would be prisoners. So they -- they treated us decently in that respect, not -- not like the Japanese treated some of our fellows in the South Pacific.
So how long -- you mentioned that a few times you had to go without food. How long -- what was the longest you had to go without food?
I think about five days.
With nothing to eat?
With nothing to eat. And I know I didn't go to -- have to go to the bathroom for about five days in -- in all that time.
So how often were these -- how often were these Red Cross drops made?
Well, after we got up to Germany, the Red Cross parcels came in -- first they came in piecemeal, but then -- then for a while they came in so we had one parcel per week per man. That was the optimum. That was how it was supposed to work. And in that carton, I mentioned the foods that they had in them, was those -- there was also powdered milk, a can this big of powdered milk, and I'm not sure if it was one pound or what. And we had all the powdered milk we could use. When they were -- decided to have a softball game, some of the fellows even used powdered milk for the white lines, the foul lines. Would you believe that? It was food, and they were wasting it on something like that. But they had -- we had so much of the powdered milk, I don't know why they gave us so much, but margarine and food -- the meats, they didn't waste those.
Right.
And there were also cigarettes in those. Of course, most of us smoked at that time, and if you didn't smoke, you could always barter, use cigarettes for -- to --
For food, yeah.
-- barter for bread or something like that.
Sure. Wow. So if the Red Cross didn't make their drop, did you -- did the Germans give you any food or --
Well, they gave us some -- what the Germans gave us was typically in the morning, they said coffee, only it wasn't coffee, it was this ersatz coffee which they make from taking barley, toasting it till it's black, and then use that as coffee, coffee grounds.
Okay.
And it doesn't taste anything like coffee, and there's no caffeine in it at all. It's ersatz coffee.
Right.
And that's what they called coffee. Then they usually gave us one or two slices of bread, and that was all. Then, that was for lunch, and then you'd have soup, and the soup was watery porridge with -- it was very watery and nothing else in it. You were lucky if you ever found any meat in it. But very few vegetables. It was usually a watery soup, and you'd eat it and it would go right through you, you know. But it was not too nutritious and I can see why some of the people, like those concentration camp people who did not get Red Cross parcels, why they withered into skeletons. Well, most of us lost weight. We didn't have much fat on us, I'll tell you, but we still -- we had it better than those political prisoners.
So were there any points where you didn't think you were going to make it?
That I didn't think I was going to make it?
Um-hmm.
Well, at first be- -- while I was still in Italy, I -- I was so -- when I was first taken prisoner, I had no idea what would happen. I didn't know and I was so, well, unnerved by being taken prisoner that I didn't really -- really care whether I -- it didn't matter to me, for some reason. I had seen too much of this, too many of my friends get killed and shot to pieces, and I think I was kind of a basket case almost myself when I was taken prisoner. But it wasn't -- it doesn't bother me anymore except I hate the smell of anything dead, like, you know, you might see some roadkill around, an animal, it just reminds me of Salerno because there were so many dead people around, soldiers of -- Americans, Germans; and when I got a whiff of that I -- it smelled the same way, and that's kind of a sad -- sad commentary probably.
But right now I kind of worry about some of our military leaders and our president making all this noise about going into Iraq as if they were going to play a game of baseball or a game of chess because people are going to die, and whether it's our people or their people, it doesn't -- you know, it doesn't make sense to me. It seems like there should be a way that they could do it without killing so many people.
I agree. So that -- that battle, how long -- how long was the battle in Salerno; how --
I'm sorry?
How long did the battle in Salerno go?
How long?
Yeah.
Oh, well, I'm not sure of the exact -- where they -- they had started because, actually, when we jumped at Salerno, it was not -- it was different from Sicily. In Sicily, it was a foul-up. We were scattered all over the island. When we went to Salerno, it was a different story. They had already -- our 34th, I think, Division had already hit the beaches, they were on the beaches, and they prepared a jump zone or a drop zone for us on the beach itself. So we flew over at night, and what they did was get some cans, like coffee cans or something, with dirt in them, poured some gasoline in them, and they set them at each end of the drop zone. And, as we were coming in, they had some soldiers light those things so that they were immediately -- it was dark, but they were immediately, these torches, you might say, the gasoline cans burning at each end of the drop zone so the pilots had a perfect place to come over, and then we jumped and we landed in the right place at Salerno.
So but we -- we landed there. And then that beach was covered with dead British, Americans, Germans, and then we moved inland, and I don't know that you -- you could say that there was a certain date that it ended or started, but I know we were there probably about ten days, my group was there that long, before we were able to move out. And that was the first time I had -- I experienced some German shelling because their shelling was terrific and it got worse up further north. But most of our casualties came from the artillery, the incoming artillery, and it was kind of a -- well, our own artillery was doing the same to the German soldiers because, wherever we went, we found soldiers who had been torn apart, Germans and our Americans as well, so ... Anyway, that lasted, I'm not sure how long. Then they took us down to the beach, put us on LCIs, and we hit the beach around Amalfi, which was near the aisle of Capri, near -- south of Naples.
And I remember we went -- we had to go up over -- climb up, hike over this rise and then down into the plain of Naples, and we could see Vesuvius off in the dark, and I saw it glowing at night and I remember sleeping in the foxhole or in the slit-trenches at night and would see this glow in the sky and I was wondering what it was until I found out it was Vesuvius, the volcano, and it would have a glowing thing all night; and then in the daytime you'd see a wisp of smoke going up. Well, then from there, we went into Naples in October. I think we spent about a month. We were -- our whole division was doing MP duty in Naples. And then, while there, we found the Germans had left some mines in some of the buildings that would be suitable for quarters.
One building blew up and a bunch of our engineers were in it, and they were sleeping in it. We were sleeping in the school, my bunch were sleeping in an old schoolhouse. And when -- when that engineers' building blew up, a lot of the fellows, it was just like that catastrophe in New York, buildings caved in and a lot of fellows were killed. And we went over there and they were pulling them out and it looked like sacks of burlap when they were taking the bodies out. Well, then we went back to our place, to our building, and we went through that building from the roof down to the catacomb, down to the bottom. We were looking for mines. But while we were there, the Germans came over and bombed us, I think on two occasions, but they didn't do any damage close to us.
They were more interested in hitting the ships down in the harbor. After Naples, we went up into the hills again and we were chasing the Germans. The Germans would spot us coming and fire at us, pin us down. And then we'd have to send out scouts. And by the time we got up there, they were gone; they'd move out again. It was just, they were fighting a rear guard action most of the way up. And there were different towns, Isernia, Ven- -- Venafro -- Venafro. Venafro was up almost to Casino, across the valley, the Lira Valley from Casino. And we got up into that town, and I know that's -- that was just before Christmas, and we lost our company commander and some other -- others to German shelling. They shelled us quite heavily there, and Captain Johnson was hit by a -- we were in kind of like slit-trenches we fashioned out of rocks, you couldn't dig into the thing, it was too rocky, so we just piled some rocks up and made a little, like a shelter, and you laid down alongside of it. It didn't work for the captain; he got killed there.
So how many from your -- how many from your battalion were lost in that battle?
Well, again, how many were just wounded and how many were killed, I have no idea, because we didn't -- they never told us anything except we'd go down and we'd get a whole bunch of new replacements again, and -- you know, to make up for the people who were -- we lost. So there were not many of us. When we came down from the mountain at -- near Venafro, I think there were about a dozen of us out of the company that were still left that hadn't been wounded. The wounded had, of course, gone -- been taken down, evacuated, and the dead were also evacuated, we hope. But then, when we got down, we found some of the fellows who had been wounded were returned -- you know, if their wounds were not bad, they returned and then we got new replacements to fill in the ranks again.
Did you lose anybody close to you, any of your friends?
Lose what?
Did you lose any of your friends or anybody close to you?
Yes, several of them.
Several of them. Was it in that battle, or was it at another time?
Well, I lost some on the original jump in Sicily because there were fellows from our company that got killed, one plane load, our communications bunch, the whole section was wiped out. They never got -- they never got to see a German or Italian.
So what did that -- what did that do to the morale of your --
Well, I don't know.
-- company?
As far as morale goes, I don't know that -- we got to -- you have to get to accept the -- the facts, accept what happens, and you just go from day to day, you know, and you make your plans and just hope that you don't buy it one day. But I don't think our morale went too -- dropped down too bad until we got left out there sometimes, like at Anzio, where we made a big-scale attack. They told us we would have our tanks supporting us. They never got across the canal. We got across the canal because we could wade across on these little concrete things, but the tanks couldn't get over there. So here we were left over there, rangers and paratroopers were left over there.
We made a big-scale attack and our tanks were back on the other side of the canal. That was kind of depressing, and I think that's why a lot of us wound up as prisoners there at Anzio because they, for some reason, they didn't get the Bailey bridge across to get the tanks over on the other side. Some parts were missing or something like an erector set back there by the -- on the beach, never got to us, and our -- the tanks were sitting over on the other side of the canal; but the German tanks just came and run -- ran right over us. And it's kind of scary when the -- when the -- a tank, you see it off about a hundred yards away and you see the gun pointing at you. They used to tell us in basic training that, well, don't ever fire a tank at one soldier because the tank shells cost too much money. I mean, that's a lot of hot air.
If they saw one soldier, they figured there were other soldiers nearby, and they saw one head or one movement, they'd fire that tank shell. What's the difference? They weren't paying for them themselves. And the Germans had that 88 mounted on their Panzer tanks, and I remember seeing this one just before I was taken prisoner, and it -- I could see that it fired, but the shell got to me before I heard the sound from the gun. I could see a puff of dirt where the -- around the tank and I heard a boom right behind me where the building got hit, and then one of the fellows out from D Company got hit in the neck and it just about tore his head off. And it was -- wasn't anything I could do for him.
And, anyway, when that tank fired that shell, it exploded here and then I heard the poom back there. In other words, that shell came faster than the sound. The sound goes about, what, 760 feet per second. The shell goes faster than that. The shell got there before the sound. And that was kind of scary. And then when I looked at that fellow and he was looking at me and his blood -- I could see there was nothing I could do because his head was just almost severed, and, I don't know, it took something out of me there. What could you do? We had nothing to fight a tank with. Our carbines would -- were popguns to fight those. But, anyway, I've relived some of the deals. Well, then some -- a few of us had to get down in the ditches there because the Germans would spray the machine guns, and we had nothing to fight them with in a tank.
If you're infantry, you don't -- you have nothing to fight a tank with unless you have a bazooka. We didn't have a bazooka there. A machine gun or rifle isn't going to do you any good because that tank is buttoned up and they just mow you down. So they came rolling through the town there, Borgo Piave, I guess it was, and there wasn't too much we could do except get down in the ditches, in the water, and kind of hope they wouldn't see us. Well, they weren't about to come out and see us because they knew we were there too.
I mean, their infantry were a little cautious about come -- sticking their heads up too. So it was just us against the tanks, and I tell you, it's kind of an uneven match anytime. Then, we lasted that night, that night we tried to get back. We got together with a few of the fellows in the ditch and we tried to get back and we got separated, and that's when I got caught trying to get over an embankment, and the German hollered at me, Halta, and I couldn't see him, but I figured halta meant halt, so I stopped, and that was it. That was a guess --
Well, what -- what were you thinking at that moment?
I didn't give a damn really. I was so depleted, disgusted, it didn't matter to me what happened really. I was, you know -- I didn't know what would happen, whether he would -- he halted me and he could have shot me as well as not shot me, but that was it.
Well, let's switch gear -- let's switch gears here a little bit.
Yeah, good.
How about home life, did you keep in touch with your family?
Well, you mean after I was a POW?
Well, during the war.
Well, I used to send letters, I used to send letters to my mother; of course, I wasn't married then, to my mother usually. And she would send me packages of cookies or things like that. That was kind of a treat when we got something like that. Then after -- she knew that I smoked, the brand of cigarettes that I smoked because I took up smoking as a nervous habit, and so she would send me, through the Red Cross, they would send me cigarettes. Again, this was a good trading medium there. We had nothing else to trade but cigarettes, and it was good to trade, used to trade with other prisoners or in a couple of cases to get bread from the Germans.
So did you -- how long -- did you get letters up until you were captured?
Did I what?
Did you get letters up until the time you were captured?
Oh, well, yes. Well, after I was a POW, they -- I have one letter that I sent home to my mother from the prison camp and it's got Adolph Hitler's picture on the stamp. That's the only one that survived. But they gave -- they allowed us to write once a, I've forgotten, once a month or once every couple weeks, something like that, and then she could -- they could write to us or send us parcels. I guess the Germans didn't care if they sent us some food through the Red Cross because that meant less that they would have to give us, you know. [Ooh, be careful.]
So did you have a girlfriend?
No. Well, I -- I had a sort of a girlfriend, it was a kind of platonic girlfriend that I had before the war, but I had no intention of getting married because I didn't know what was going to happen.
Did you write to her while you were in the service?
No, I didn't. I wrote home to my mother generally. Well, that girl, apparently she joined the service too, she joined the WACs, and she -- she went away too. And I didn't see her till after the war. But we -- we didn't take up anything.
Well, we're getting low on time here, but I've got a few more questions for you. What did you do after the service?
Well, after the service, I went back and got -- I was given my old job back at Du- -- at DuPont's. They had a requirement that they would -- you know, if you left for the service from a job they would give you the job back, and I went back to a chemical laboratory in -- for DuPont. They had a plastics firm up in Arlington, New Jersey. I didn't really care for it, and I decided I would go to college under the GI Bill which was pretty much of a godsend, and under the GI Bill, we were able to go to college. And they would give us, I think they started out $50 a month, which wouldn't go very far now, but at that time it was quite a bit, $50 toward your subsistence. So I started in college, and I decided I didn't want to be -- to pursue that chemistry because, well, different reasons. You had to work shifts at night, and that got on to me. I figured, why can't I go for something like teaching school where you teach in the daytime, you go home and you sleep at night, which is what I did. I went to teacher's college and became a teacher.
So where did you go to school?
I went to Panzik (ph) College, which was a physical education school at first. After I got my bachelor's degree, I continued on. I went to New York University. That was right down near Washington Square in New York. And I got my master's in second and -- health education, health and physical education.
Okay. How long -- how long did you teach for?
How long?
Yeah.
Not very long, because when I got out, P.E. teachers were a dime a dozen. I found out the hard lesson that most educators wanted a coach or a physical education teacher who was a big, brawny football player or a big, tall basketball player, not a short fellow who had majored in gymnastics, which I did. And I was short and too small for football, too small for basketball, but so I was in gymnastics. And there were very few openings for gymnastics people. So then I came out West to visit some relatives and I got a job at a military academy where I found out in the military academy they were desperate for a coach or teacher, you know. But I didn't really like that too much because the reform -- the military's academy was very similar to a reform school in the sense that there were some kids there that were one step ahead of the law, and the only reason they were there were their parents could afford to send them to a military academy rather than send them to the reform school, which was not a good way to do. Now, there were some kids at the military academy who wanted the military background in order to prepare for West Point or the Naval Academy, and I had to hand it to them, they were good students, good athletes and everything else; but then there were the others, they were kind of the borderline kids that gave you problems.
Right. So how many years did you teach?
Altogether, about 32, 31, 32.
Now, do you have any close friends in the service that you've kept in touch with over the years?
From the -- my active duty days? No. They were all back -- the ones I knew were back East in Newark, around New Jersey, and most of them have, well, they'd have to be my age now, I guess, up in their 80's, so I've kind of lost touch with most of them. There are one or two that I'd keep -- we keep in touch with now and then. They weren't necessarily in my unit, but they were in the service at that time.
Okay. Have you ever gone to any reunions?
No.
Okay.
I am in the 82nd Airborne Association here, but I've never gone to any reunions.
Okay.
Just as a point, ooh, I showed you my --
Actually, can we put -- let me see that. I'd like to put that on the tape here.
If you want. That was when I had -- oops.
Yeah, you're okay. That's great. When was this when was that taken?
That was in -- when I first became a parachutist in 1942.
Okay. And where was that?
That was in Newark, New Jersey. This was a park near where I lived, I lived a couple blocks away from. That was Riverbank Park.
Okay.
And -- oops -- I could show you a picture of myself. [Pause.]
Okay. I had the tape paused there for just a second while you went to get this. What is this a picture of?
Well, we were, at Panzik College, we were on the gymnastics team, and we were just fooling around. The photographer wanted some pictures, so we got -- did handstands for him on the parallel bars.
And you're the one on the right?
On the -- I'm the one on the right.
That's really great. All right. Just a couple other quick questions for you here. So you mentioned you had just been released, right, before VE Day, right?
Yes.
And what were your thoughts when you heard that the war was over?
Well, we knew -- we pretty much followed what was happening, because actually where we were, Christmas of '40 -- what was it? -- Christmas of '44, yeah, the Russians were coming closer there, they were coming into Poland, eastern Poland which they considered their own territory, and we could actually hear the bombardments from the Russians off in the distance. And when we -- we left there at Christmas, they were getting pretty close. END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE; BEGIN SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO.
They were most of the way across Poland, what was the old pre-war Poland. And then we withdrew from there and marched for about 10 days, walked for about 10, 12 days, a couple weeks, I'm not sure. But we started out in snow and wound up crossing the Oder River, and it was a big caravan sort of thing where the German people, civilians, soldiers, and we prisoners were all going down the road and heading toward the American lines, and the Germans had a deathly fear of the Russians; and they had good reason for it, I suppose.
I've heard, yeah.
They had good reason for it, because of what they had done to the Russian people. So the people were terrified of the -- actually terrified of the Russians, and they were going to surrender to the Americans and -- or British coming up from the west. And they pulled no bones about it, they were going to surrender to the Americans or British.
Okay. So then what were you thinking when you heard the war was over; what -- what was going through your head?
Well, we knew it was coming. We had -- we were able -- now, there were some Polish prisoners that would sneak in maps to us, newspaper maps, showing us where the Russians were and what happened when they hit the beaches in Normandy, and we knew it was a matter of time till we would be liberated because we knew the Germans couldn't -- there was no way they could hold off the Russians and the other allies from the other side, and most sensible Germans knew that too. Now, we talked to some of our German guards.
They weren't supposed to talk to us in English, but we could talk to them in a little pigeon German, you know, the few German words we had learned, and right after the invasion of -- invasion of -- in Normandy, I remember one friendly -- he was a friendly German guard, he was friendly with us and he told us, well, he says, they're letting the Americans in. We kind of ribbed him a little bit about it, about the invasion. He was a German that -- he was kind of friendly, as I said, to us and we felt we could kid him a little bit about it.
And he said, Hey, how come, the Americans are there, you didn't -- was pushing back in the sea, he said, well, we're waiting till they get enough of their Army in and then we're going to push them back and they'll lose all their equipment and they won't be able to do it again, which was something that the German government fed them, I guess.
Right.
And then, another time, we were, I forgot, we were -- where we were, but here came a bunch of American (Fords), the whole sky was full of Fords, they were going to bomb Romania or someplace, Clu- -- (Chloeste). That was early in -- in my imprisonment, you might say. And I remember this guard was up there, and we said: Look at those American planes. You could see they were Fords, you know, a whole -- the sky was full of them. He said they're German planes. I said the Germans don't have that, bombers like that; those are bombers. Anyway, they were fed a line, but I think the sensible ones could see that their number was going to come up, and I'm thankful for that in the sense that they treated us decently as -- as we would treat prisoners, you know, not as cattle or something like that.
Now, the Russians, that was something else. I remember seeing a German guard taking a -- walking, marching with a German prisoner, and he'd be whacking him in the back with his rifle, with the butt of his rifle, and they never did anything like that to us, but here was the Russia prisoner walking along and the German guard, whack, whack. And he just kept whacking him in the back with that rifle butt, and I thought to myself, you know, how unnecessary. But, anyway, I was thankful I was an American, not a Russian.
Yeah, and me. So what about when you came home, what was that like?
Well, it was quite a relief, of course. Well, when we were -- we first got to American lines, they flew us out of Germany to Le Havre, I guess that -- Le Havre is the way they pronounce it, L-e H-a-v-r-e, it's a port in France, and they had a big hospital there. They put us in the hospital so they could give us some physical checkups and start feeding us food. They wanted to put some meat on us. I guess we were a little skinny. Would you believe I couldn't eat two meals in a day?
I've heard --
Not that they -- the American meals. I couldn't eat it. We just couldn't eat it. We got so we didn't even want to go to the mess tent because we couldn't stomach -- our stomachs had shrunk so much. But, anyway, they had us on food that was like bone chicken or turkey or something like that, very, hospital kind of -- types of food, and they wanted to put some fat -- meat on us before they sent us home. So we were there about five days, and they checked us over and -- for different things, health, and -- healthwise, and then they put us on the boat back to New York. And we got to New York, and I forgot, where did they take us, they sent -- took us to Camp Dix, I think, and they turned us loose to go home.
And, of course, I lived not too far away, so it was kind of an interesting thing to come home and see -- of course, a lot of our -- my friends were still over there. Some of my friends were in -- still in Italy and others were in France or wherever, Germany. So I got home a little ahead of them in that respect. But it was -- of course, now the war in Japan was still going on. We hadn't -- they hadn't dropped the bombs yet. So we felt that those of us who had been repatriated would be going back to Fort Benning, and we did.
I went back to Fort Benning, and at the school there, they were getting people ready. They were -- said we were going to go to the Pacific, which was what we expected; the war was still going on. So it wasn't all this -- that the war was over. Our war in Germany was over but then the war in the Pacific was still going on. And up until August we had every -- we had no reason to realize that it would end so quickly because we didn't know about the A bomb. And, of course, we were resigned to the fact that there were going to be a lot more casualties going into the Japanese home islands because of what the Marines and Army had experienced in Guadalcanal and New Guinea and the Philippines, for example, and we knew that it wasn't going to be a picnic if we had to jump in Japan, but we were getting ready for that.
And then I happened to be home on leave again I went home on pass from Fort Benning when we heard about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Hiroshimo or Hiroshima, whatever, and, believe me, it was a relief to -- when, a couple days later, they dropped the one on Nagasaki and the Germ- -- and the Japanese decided to quit. We knew that we were -- we had survived the war; in other words, we wouldn't have to go to it again. [Interview interrupted by a telephone.]
Excuse me.
Yeah, sorry.
Is there anything else? Or --
Anything else you would like to add? One thing I was going to ask you about that, is it fair to say that when you came home it was somewhat bittersweet thinking that you might have to go out to Japan again?
Well, that, it wasn't -- I wasn't overly concerned about it because we had signed up for the duration, and, as far as we knew, it was still on. The Japanese would have to be subdued. And then when they dropped the atomic bomb, it was a big relief because we felt that there were a lot of our friends, more of our friends who would die there. Now, some of these people that say now that we were wrong in using the bomb, well, they should have been in our shoes then and getting ready to go over to Japan and -- if they want to talk about not dropping the bomb. But the Japanese were a fanatic type of people, their soldiers were more so than the Germans. The only Germans that were the fanatics were those SS people, and while we ran into some of them in combat, in combat, you know, when they're firing at you, you don't run into them, but they -- they did not control us in the camps.
In the camps, we were prisoners of the regular Army troops which -- for which I was thankful because the SS were the ones who ran those concentration camps. Incidentally, coming out of Germany, I did get a taste of what had happened there because, going by one of the camps, when we were moving back, they didn't know where to put us, they were just moving us out, and we came by one of those camps where those people with the striped coats, the striped pants -- striped uniforms were, men and women, there was one place there was -- alongside the road, there was a fence, and they had just killed them there; they were laid out like cord wood alongside the wood in a perfect row, dead men and women in those uniforms, and apparently they didn't have anyplace to put them, so somebody decided to wipe them out, and they did.
That's how -- how they treated, some of those SS people treated prisoners. And then I did see a picture where some of our Americans were so disgusted with it they lined up some of those SS fellows and they just opened up with a machine gun and mowed them down. That happened. But they were concerned, overly concerned about us doing -- that had been prisoners, about taking revenge on the Germans, which -- and I had no reason to personally because I wasn't -- I didn't feel I was mistreated. Some of them may have been, you know. But I know after the war when I got located here in Boise, I was teaching school, I joined the National Guard, so I spent about 26 years in the National Guard, so it wasn't that I hated the military or anything of that nature; as a matter of fact, I kind of enjoyed some parts of it. And we were alerted a couple of times, like during the Berlin crisis and then the Cuban crisis, but our company was never call -- actually called up. They called up a trucking unit, but I was in the maintenance or like ordinance unit here in Boise during the National Guard, that is.
And twice our unit, our company went to Germany for our two weeks' training, believe it or not, and here, years after the war had stopped, they had -- our officers had to fill out a paper that if there were any ex-POWs in the ranks, they had to know about it, they wanted to know about it, to make sure that we didn't go over there with a chip on our shoulder. And I was the only ex-POW in the company, so -- but it was kind of interesting that they were -- the American Army was concerned that we might go over there and take it out on some German civilians or something, which wasn't going to happen as far as I was concerned.
Right. They were very nice to you. Well, I think we're about out of time here.
Well, that's --
Anything else you'd like to add?
No. What else do you want to know?
Oh, I think I've -- I think you've answered all my questions. I appreciate your time. It's been nice talking to you.
Well, it's been interesting, and there was some -- some parts that I enjoy or rather I think are humorous, like I told you about that time in the -- in the camp, in the Stalag where the orchestra started playing that "Fuhrer's Face" song and the German officers were turning around beaming at us because they -- it was a catchy melody, but they did not know what the words meant, thank heavens, or they might have exterminated all of us.
Yeah, really.
I don't think they would have. But -- and then there was some parts that I, especially the carnage parts, that I don't like to think about. I don't -- I mean, they happened, but I'm not exactly a pacifist, but I would be very careful about going into another war. Okay. So we've gone into the -- in the war they had there in the Afghan, not the Afghan, it was Kuwait, it was interesting for me to read about the number of -- there were, say, 160, in that neighborhood, 160, 180 people, Americans killed, and half of those were supposed to be killed by friendly fire; and I thought, war hasn't changed much. You give people guns and they'll get trigger happy and they'll shoot the wrong people, shoot at the wrong people, which is what happened to us in Sicily, and we lost quite a few people there. But those are accidents that would happen. They could have -- if they were riding around in a car joyriding here they could have been killed on a highway, I guess. Accidents happen anyplace.
True.
But you don't have to ask for them.
Yeah, you don't have to go looking for them. Well, thank you.
Well, it's been nice talking with you.
Thank you.