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This is the oral history of World War II veteran Robert E. Anderson. Mr. Anderson served in the U.S. Army with the 30th Infantry Division, 119th Regiment, Third Battalion. He served in the European Theater and he was a prisoner of war. His highest rank was PFC. I'm Tom Swope and this interview was recorded at Mr. Anderson's home in Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio, on April 30, 2004. Bob was 81 at the time of this recording. Where were you living in 1941?
In 1941 I was living in, on the east side of Cleveland. It was on 102nd Street for a while, then I moved to Tanner Avenue, which is right off of 102nd Street. It was in the St. Thomas Aquinas Church parish, and so I lived there until Pearl Harbor.
And I think you told me you're 82 now?
I will be 82 in September.
You will be 82. So you were probably about 18, 19 when Pearl Harbor?
Something like that, yes.
Were you out of school at that point?
I had quit school. I quit in 11th grade. And I have -- remember exactly where I was at when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I was actually in a kosher delicatessen on 105th Street. And just, my buddy and I just completed eating a corned beef sandwich and had the radio on. And it was interrupted, it was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, interrupted that Pearl Harbor was attacked. Pearl Harbor, for us, you know, Vincent Sturber and myself, didn't know where it was at at all, you know. They said the Japanese struck suddenly and several ships were, in our fleet, were bombed and so on. And so we left right away, we didn't wait for any more detail.
That night when we went walking down Superior Avenue, why St. Thomas Aquinas Church started ringing their bells. You know, it was rather gloomy, ominous. It just fitted with the gloomy Pearl Harbor Day, let us say, you know, what happened at Pearl Harbor. But I had no inclination, you know, that it was that serious, really, you know, until the next day, of course, when President Roosevelt declared war on the Empire of Japan and so on, the "day of infamy."
And see, we had a lot of young fellows in that neighborhood. It was during the Depression, too. The Depression was not over. It never ended until, really, World War II began. And a lot of men who, a lot of the young fellows, I should say, who joined the Ohio National Guard, that's the 37th Division, and just for the money. They went down to Gray's Armory downtown and they would train, or have exercises, let us say. They didn't do much at all really. It was more of a joke.
They did it for the money for the most part. I think they paid a dollar a day to join the National Guard. And they got their checks at the end of the month and they were able to buy a few clothes and maybe go to see more movies, something like that, buy a bicycle or something. And they never had any idea, of course, that, you know, within a short, relatively short period of time they were going to be fighting in the Pacific in a major battle.
In fact, they thought -- they went to Hattiesburg, of all places, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, at Camp Shelby, a camp that was very, very known for its tough, harsh conditions. It wasn't really built up. It had not been finished at all. And they maneuvered in Louisiana shortly after taking some basic training at Camp Shelby. And they came home on furlough and Pearl Harbor struck. This was before Pearl Harbor. They were still wearing those tin hats and wrap leggings and so on. And they were -- had no equipment at all. They were actually simulating rocket shells and mortar shells. And very few with rifles actually, really, some of them were actually carrying branches.
It was that -- that was so ridiculous and it was so, it showed how short-handed, how ill-prepared we were to counter the Japanese. So they maneuvered with exercises designed to fight the Japanese. And they went to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, which is a POE, a point of embarkation, from going to Europe, going east. But they wound up in the Pacific and fought on, at Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, Bougainville, New Georgia, places like that. And they wound up, they wound up fighting in the Philippines, in Manila. The great battle that they did have, it was in Manila.
Now, the 37th Division had a politician as its commanding general. His name was Robert Beightler. A lot of people called him "beet-ler" but he pronounced his name "bite-ler." And he was in the reserves a long time, so, of course, he became the commanding officer of the reserve, of the 37th Division. And they had a red patch for them. And the funny part about it was everyone referred to that division as the flaming assholes, really, because all it was was a simple red patch, you know.
But they fought very well. They have a very distinguished record during World War II fighting the Japanese. They went up against an Imperial Japanese navy, a well-trained navy outfit, in Bouga- -- at Bougainville. And they were over, some of them were over six feet tall, unbelievably, with the Japanese you think of smaller men, but these were crack troops, and they had a hard time with them. So they fought very well --
When did you --
-- under MacArthur.
When did you join? Were you drafted or did you enlist?
No, I was drafted, yeah. I was drafted in 1942, early in 1942, went to Camp Hayes, Fort Hayes, Columbus. And then from Fort Hayes -- well, we didn't know where we were going to be sent. We -- since I was not a high school graduate, why -- I always wanted to be an infantryman, a regular soldier in the trenches. How stupid that might sound now, but that's exactly where I wound up. We took a train from Columbus and we wound up at Camp Blanding, Florida, land that was owned by J.C. Penney, sandy, hot, palmettoes and lot of mosquitoes and it was very hot.
But luckily why, fortunately why, we got down there in the wintertime and, really, when we went to the rifle range for the first time, why we were freezing. We had to wear gloves and everything else, really, firing on the range, you know. And the nights were very cold. And we stayed at Blanding for, oh, I don't know, three, four, five months, something like that, and we made our way up to Tenn- -- first we stopped at Knox, at Fort Knox, and stayed overnight there. Then we took, we trucked to Camp Forrest, Tennessee, to prepare for maneuvers, in Tennessee. And we just roamed, we climbed every hill in Tennessee during those maneuvers. And from there -- see, this outfit I belonged to was the 30th Infantry Division.
It was an old National Guard outfit, too, and most of the men, especially the cadre, were made up of southerners -- Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. So we northerners, who went down there to fill in a regiment, the 119th Infantry Regiment, we were mostly all northerners and, of course, we got the royal treatment, you know. We were chicken-something buckeyes, you know, they hated us. They had the rank and everything else. And we just had to do pretty much of what they said because they were already established and so on. So we maneuvered, like I say, in Tennessee.
Then we finally went to a very nice camp, Camp Atterbury, in Indiana, a newly constructed camp with some fairly decent facilities. And we only stayed there a short period of time. And we took a train, we entrained and wound up at Camp Myles Standish, right outside of Boston, right on the coast, and we took the troop ship, the SS Brazil of all things. They had three ships -- the Argentina, the Brazil, and I think it was the Bolivia -- three ships that took our division to Europe.
When was that crossing?
This was in late '43, I think. And we -- in one of the largest convoys that the Americans put together at that time. We stayed out in the Boston harbor and even close to New York for a number of days before all the ships were able to maneuver and present some kind of an organized convoy. So we made it over there with all kind of scares about U-boats and so on like that, but we saw nary a U-boat.
The biggest attract -- the biggest events mostly were getting seasick and gambling. Huge gambling pots on the floors of the ship, of the decks of the ship, and so on. A lot of money turned hands there. And we finally pulled into Liverpool, the Port of Liverpool. I always wanted to go to Liverpool, it was always an exciting place for me. The movies I saw, you know, dark and gloomy, rain, foggy, murders and all this business. And I'm kind of a movie bug, too, so it sort of captured my imagination.
We landed at Liverpool. Then from Liverpool we took a train to Bognor Regis, right on Sussex, right on the coast, the English coast. Beautiful. It was a resort town and we actually lived in houses, like Yellow Sands, named Yellow Sands and Bellwood. And it was good duty really. We didn't do much except just march around and so on. There wasn't any real tactical training at all. And we stayed there for about, oh, three months maybe.
And from there we went to a town called Luton, and then we started our training for the invasion of Normandy. Of course, we didn't know anything about the invasion. We didn't know which divisions were going to go in on D-Day or -- we didn't know that at all. And while we were in Luton, why we saw General George Patton. He went around visiting all the troops that were in England at the time. There were a lot of women and children in the crowd that gathered, and he was about as obscene as any general could be and get away with it. Yeah, really, tremendous, you know. Even hard, some of these hard-boiled GIs were astounded by it, was shocked by it, too, especially a lot of the women standing next to you and the kids, why they were shocked the way he was hurling off these obscenities.
And then sometime later General Montgomery, Bernard Montgomery, came. And, of course, a dapper little guy, you know, very British, very precise and a crisp voice and everything and he was all seriousness, you know, we have to do this, we have to show -- you Americans have to show us what you have. We've been holding out for years now in the Battle of Britain and so on. And we welcome you over here and we know that you men will do an outstanding job and all this kind of business.
You know, it was completely contrary, completely opposite to the type of speech that General Patton made. So from there then, why D-Day occurred. Our division was lucky and we hit D-Day -- we hit the Normandy, Omaha Beach, we landed Omaha Beach on D-plus-six. So that's when our combat of our division started on D-plus-six. We headed towards Saint-Lo, the 29th Division -- in fact, there's a big article about the 29th Division there. We were just on the right of the 29th Division. They took Saint-Lo on the 25th of July, and I was captured right after that. And then from July until, until I think it was May the 1st, or April the 31st, I was liberated.
Do you remember your first day in combat, before you were captured, your first day in combat?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the first two days why we dug in in the hedgerows. And we were so amazed by the hedgerow country in Normandy. No one told us anything about hedgerows. We thought it was flat country that the armored divisions could operate quite effectively there. That's how bad the briefing was really. We had no idea that these hedgerows were about anywhere from 4 feet to sometimes 10 feet high, and you had to climb over them. And the Germans would set up their machine guns, and it was a quite treacherous place, really. Some very imaginative, inventive man in, I think, in one of the armored divisions, devised a -- I don't know what they call them, what do they call them -- it was some kind of a heavy metal shield that could go right through and pound right through those hedgerows.
Like a plow or something?
It was like a plow, yeah, that's the word, yeah. Yeah, it was a plow. And that helped them get through, the armored divisions get through, but still they were bogged down. The German Luftwaffe was completely absent, which helped us a great deal. American fighter planes, especially P-47s, were over all the time doing ground, the Ninth Air Force's tactical air force under Pete Quesada. He did a wonderful job. Completely underrated, I would say, this man. All you heard was the Eighth Air Force with Curtis LeMay and Spaatz and Jimmy Doolittle and people like that, but the tactical work that was done I think was -- had just as much effect, really, on winning the war than the strategic heavy bombardment by the four-engine planes like the B-17 Flying Fortress and the 24s and so on, _____ bombers.
Would that have been the Fifth Air Force that was doing that?
That was the Eighth Air Force.
Oh, that was also the Eighth tactical, okay.
Yeah. And while we were in England we visited several RAF bases and that was always an interesting experience for me. In fact, I talked with a Chinese member of the RAF and he says everyone gives the Spitfire all the credit for winning the Battle of Britain, but he said it was the bullfighter. Yeah, a bullfighter was a two-engine, rather heavy, rather clumsy plane that did a lot of the coastal work. They prevented a lot of -- they did a lot of mine work, they blew up a lot of mines in the harbor that could have -- that did serious damage to ships that were going in and out of all those ports, like Portsmouth and Southampton, Weymouth, places like that. They did wonderful work. And they also worked against the U-boats also. So this, I never heard it before, because everything was Spitfire, you know, fighter pilots and dashing, as they were in the RAF. They had a few Americans. They had the American fighter pilot group over there, too, and they did pretty good. They called them The Eagle, The Eagles.
When you were still in England, did you have much contact with either British soldiers or British people?
The only contact we had, in pubs, in London, in crowded small towns, and bed and breakfasts where we would stay when we maybe would get a two-day pass or something like that, you know. I mean, I could say that I had, you know, a lot of contact, physical contact, with the British people, talked with them. We drank up all their beer. By 9 o'clock their beer was exhausted. And the poor British soldier being so, really, and he was completely overshadowed by this flood of Americans that came over there. The island was just about ready to sink, really, with so much equipment, heavy tanks and trucks, so many trucks and heavy -- everything, Caterpillars, and material that made up the Mulberry project. I don't know if you heard of the Mulberry. It was actually a dock, you know, really, an artificial dock, really. And the saying that, at that time, that was quite humorous, was that the Americans were oversexed, overfed, overpaid, and over here. That's what the British had to say about it. And some wag sooner or later in the American forces said, well, the British solider is undersexed, underfed, underpaid, and under Eisenhower. I don't know if you heard that story or not.
Was that the British soldiers that were mainly resentful? How were the people toward the Americans?
I would say for the most part I think the treatment, they treated us very well. They were happy we were over there. Because they were in bad shape after the blitz. And of course, this old cliche about being reserved, refined, not being open-minded, not being maybe as generous and as liberal as the American GI, there's some truth to that, too. You would have to more or less draw them out in conversation. And especially about the war, why they wouldn't talk about it at all.
And the American GIs, especially the young Air Force officers, imagine, majors at 22 years old. And at that time they were making pretty good money, really, compared to, say, a private, you know. Colonels, lieutenant colonels, 26, 28 years old. So they would go in these towns, especially London, and stay at good hotels and everything. Of course, they got all the women, they got all the perks that you could possibly be. And these were just young, youngest officers I've ever seen, really.
All the German officers that I saw were usually a little bit older, I would say. But the Air Force, they were all young pilots, hotshot pilots. The fighter pilots were anyway. And boy, they really took over, London and other places where they were stationed. Now, American air bases were quite numerous. I think they had something like 17 to 20 bombing air bases. And they had a lot of fighter bases over there, too. So they were the king pins, they were the elite, I would say, as far as American forces in England at that time, better pay, better conditions, everything.
Not to say that they didn't perform hazardous duties, they certainly did. Those missions that they were on were really terrible. In many respects, maybe psychologically, emotionally were more disturbing than maybe men fighting in foxholes, because they had to think -- they didn't go on missions every day -- and they had to think, and they formed, and especially the bomber groups, and they developed a very close camaraderie with their crew members and they had to think about this all the time, the next big raid might be Berlin.
And everyone, all the Air Force men were, you know, hoping that they wouldn't bomb Berlin right away until they had gained more experience. So it must have been quite a thing. Even though when they came back after their missions, whiskey was available, good food was available, they would have parties and so on, and they could forget about it. But once the liquor wore off, undoubtedly they spent many sleepless nights waiting for the orderly to come in and wake them up at 4 o'clock and say, "You're on a mission today."
And they'd get up in a hurry, dress, eat breakfast and go to the briefing room; and it must have been pretty hard for them, too. In fact, all of -- a lot of people, they underplay the combat marine -- combat engineers, for instance, or the artillery observers who had to -- they were actually embedded with the infantry. And in many respects they went through the same things and it was very dangerous. And not only that but they did very important work. They told the fighter planes where the German forces were, which meant that they were very, very close. They were at observation posts as close to the enemy as they possibly could. And they did an outstanding job. And another unsung, just like the medics were unsung. The grunts got -- the regular GIs got most of the publicity.
That was your job, you were rifleman with the outfit?
Yeah, right, yeah.
What else do you remember about your experiences in Normandy before you were captured?
Well, I mean, I would say I was in four pretty, pretty tough firefights, you know, and I was lucky to escape any injury. And the day I was captured, I was in a hole with my buddy Cardar- -- his name was Cardarelli, Carmen Cardarelli, he was from Boston, Mass., and two other guys. We built a big slit trench and we were in there. And all of a sudden we heard a, in the middle of the night, we heard a tremendous explosion. So we all got up. And our ammunition dump had blown up. The Germans landed a shell on it.
And just shortly after that, why my best buddy, Sergeant Buckle, came and said, "Andy," he says, "I want you on the patrol." I said, "What are you talking about, a patrol?" He said, "You'll find out." And shortly after, Captain King, our company commander, Richard King from Georgia, Macon, Georgia, he came around, and he was shaking, actually, he was shaking. He had an M-1 rifle, but he was really shaking. And he told Buckle, he said, "Gather about six or seven men, the Germans have broken through our lines, there's tanks and infantry, knock them out." Imagine that?
It was still dark and all that debris and everything flying around from our ammunition dump. So we set out, Buckle led us, and we charged out of there towards the German lines. We didn't know where we were going. We had no bazookas. We had no -- all we had actually to defend ourselves against tanks, to perhaps knock tanks out, was the 03 Springfield rifle that Sergeant Buckle, my best friend, carried with him. He had the grenade launchers and we had a few shells. That's the only thing that we could use against them.
So we must have went, I don't know how far we went, through the darkness, not knowing where, not knowing exactly, anything about where we were going. There was hardly any trails, we had to beat the way through. Finally, we found, just before daylight, we found an area that wasn't too forested, so we waited there for a while and until it got lighter. So Buckle says, well, we heard all kinds of noises, German tanks in the area, so we got a -- Captain King told us to go ahead, knock out German tanks and infantry, so we started going. And we saw a hill maybe about 200 feet high, after walking, almost trotting, I would say, maybe for 15 minutes, we saw this hill.
And we made for this hill, the top. And when we reached the top, there happened to be three foxholes already dug, probably German foxholes. So we got up there and we sank in those foxholes and we looked down, we had a vantage, like I say, about 200 feet, there were German tanks all lined up down there on the thin bits -- in Normandy none of the roads were very narrow -- they were all narrow, they weren't wide at all. And these tanks actually were in a straight line. And Buckle started firing his Springfield, his grenade launcher, didn't hit a thing.
We started actually firing our rifles at those tanks. And the only, well, I only saw two men, two officers, in the tanks. And of course, they pulled the lid down, so to speak, and they stayed there. We kept firing and firing maybe for 10, 15 minutes, and we started smoking cigarettes, too. And before we knew it, we stood up and we saw, I would say, maybe 20, 25 German infantrymen coming up the hill in back of us. And then immediately some mortar shells started firing. I got hit in the leg and I got hit in the hand. And two of our men got killed. And there was six of us in all, so four of us survived.
Well, I had, I was carrying at the time a carbine. Why I picked up the carbine, I had my M1 in the hole, but why I picked up a carbine, I don't know. But anyway, I had, I was carrying a carbine. And we, all four of us, looked out seemingly at one time and saw these German troops coming towards us. And I was, I had a bead on either a lieutenant or a sergeant who was leading this group. And I was just about ready to pull the trigger when my buddy by the name of Burkhardt, Bob Burkhardt, he just died about a month ago, anyway, he said, "For chrissake, Andy, drop that thing." I was actually going to shoot at these 20 or some infantrymen that were coming at me. We would have been just completely annihilated right there. So I -- but -- and trying to drop -- I froze. I froze. I clung to that carbine. I finally dropped it after Burkhardt yelled at me, you know. And these Germans came up to us, called us all kinds of names, scheissdreck and everything.
They started with their knives, cutting our packs off, and whatever we had, searching for cigarettes. They took my wristwatch. Called us all kinds of names and everything. To this day I'm trying to find out just what -- I think it was the 352nd Infantry Division, German Infantry Division. It wasn't the SS, thank God it wasn't the SS, or they probably would have shot, would have killed us. Because they did a lot of damage, you know, they did a lot of atrocities.
But anyway, they marched us back to a blockhouse, it's like a cement building. And since I was wounded and two of the other men were wounded, the German medics treated us. They gave us hot tea and they wrapped us up in bandages, gave us some kind of -- and they were all the time, at the same time we were facing the wall, I thought maybe they would shoot us, but they didn't. They were treating us and at the same time behind us they were treating German soldiers who were being wounded. And they were carrying them in on stretchers and everything else, all these guys were in bad shape, they were moaning and complaining, you know, really, they were in bad shape.
I didn't dare to look around at all. I thought sure that they were going to shoot us. But, they didn't. In about five minutes time we heard airplanes coming. We didn't know what kind of planes at all. They happened to be P-47s, Thunderbolts, one of the terrible, vicious fighter planes, because they were very good at dive bombing, not really dive bombing, but at low range tactical strafing and knocking out ground -- good ground support. They found that the 47 was the most durable and the hardest ship to knock out of the skies.
And they made a couple passes over our blockhouse. Well, their commanding officer was sitting at a desk, he had a steel helmet on, he had a long leather jacket, a handsome man, because he took his helmet off and he had gray hair -- he had blond hair, wore glasses, very studious looking man. Finally he put on his helmet and the Germans started yelling and, not screaming, but the ones that were wounded were screaming.
Finally, he says, he got us to our feet and he said, "Marsch." So they marched us out of the blockhouse. Thank God, because they started, the 47s had started dropping bombs close by, one came very close just before we left. Now, they marched us way back to a farmhouse, it must have been two or three miles away. And they kept us in that farmhouse for a while. And some time during the night two German soldiers came in, and they picked on Buckle, the sergeant, and myself. And we were very close to Saint-Lo at the time, that was before it was captured.
And they took us by command car, and we still had our helmets -- usually when you're captured they remove your helmet -- but we still had our helmets and we sat in the command car, and they had one, they had the driver and they had one guard with a submachine gun, a Schmeisser, standing up and half pointing at us in the back. And we went through there, and it was quite dark, but there was still people around, and they looked at us, they probably thought we were maybe German officers or something like that.
So what they did was they took us to an ammunition dump that was in the forest right outside of Saint-Lo and they wanted us to load, help them load, ammunition, mortar shells and everything like that. And we protested. Buckle and I said, "No, we're not supposed to do that," we told them, "We're not supposed to do that at all." So this guy with the Schmeisser says, "Well, you better do it" -- and I'm paraphrasing now, of course -- he said, "You better do it or you're not going to be alive much longer." So we started to work there maybe for 10, 15 minutes. We actually loaded some of the shells onto the German trucks. And finally, they told us that's all we had to do. They took us back to the farmhouse. And they had two beds in the farmhouse in the upstairs in the second floor and we slept -- we were so tired and beat and so on, and I was still bleeding, and they let us sleep probably until about 10 in the morning.
Finally, a woman, an old woman, came up with what looked like a jug of milk. We couldn't tell, it was a milk can. And it was milk and bread that she brought up for us. And we ate and we drank, I don't know, three or four cups of that milk and five or six slices of bread because we were famished. And then from there, why they took us to a place called Star- -- we called it Starvation Hill. It was called Notre Dame. It was actually a little church, I think near Alencon, France.
And by that time we were so beat up and so on, we had marched -- and we gathered other American prisoners of war, some British prisoners of war, some tankers who had been burned and had been almost brewed in their tanks, you know, they were in pretty bad shape. And they took us to this church called Notre Dame and they put us in the flat part of the roof. We were up there about three or four stories high. And we sat down and we couldn't stand up, because every time we stood up we'd black out, because we didn't have any food at all. But they led us down to their gardens and they had an apple grove down there. And the apples at that time were about this big, they were very sour. And the German guards kept insisting: Do not eat those apples, don't pick any of those apples, they'll kill you.
Yeah, they actually protected us in that way, too. Because some of those guys started eating those apples, they got tremendous stomachaches and so on, you know, they'd keel over, vomit and everything else. And I didn't touch it. As much as I wanted to eat one of those apples, take at least one bite out of it, I didn't do it. So we were at Starvation Hill for about two or three days until finally we got some gruel. We got some soup, rutabaga soup mostly, turnip soup, couple pieces of bread, no meat of any kind at all, and that sustained us for a while.
Finally, they pulled up a lot of trucks, there must have been about a hundred of us then. And even then I saw part of the air war. It seemed that British planes were flying over, this one afternoon, while we were groggy and weak and everything, they were flying over, and they were attacked by Luftwaffe planes, fighters, I think they were Me109s. And these were Spitfires, definitely, I could tell by the wings and everything, they were Spitfires.
Well, the German planes chased them away. I think there were three Spitfires, three or four, I can't quite recall. I think there were at least three. And they all took off, and the Messerschmitts came around and circled around and so on. And finally, one Spitfire pilot came over again, by himself, alone, and he swooped way down on the artillery unit that was back of the woods there. Imagine, how brave this guy was. He swooped way down, strafed, and moved up and moved around again. He made three or four passes. On the fourth time, when he did it, we could see smoke coming out of the rear end. And he wasn't quite as high as he was either when he made his climb, and he just went up there.
Whether he ever got back to his base or not, God only knows, we don't know what happened. But that was another experience. I had so many experiences, too, even before we got to the regular camp, to the stalags and so on. They had us working, see, enlisted men had to work. I was an enlisted man, of course, and I had to work. And it was better -- a lot of officers, not officers, but noncommissioned officers, sergeants and so on, even top sergeants, wanted to work on these commandoes, as they were called, because you got better food. Some of them worked on farms, you had more food to eat and so on like that. And you were away usually from the big cities where the bombing took place and so on.
Well, anyway, they took us to this farm area and they had us picking potatoes for a while with Russian women and Russian young men that they picked up. The Germans picked up so many Russians on the way. And most of them were Ukrainian. A good many of them were White Russians. They hated the Communists and they liked the Germans. In fact, an entire unit was established by a Russian general, Kurov, who, he just simply left the Russian army and he joined the German forces. And they had special uniforms. We would see these men, we'd go like this, because we thought they were traiters, because, you know, they were Russians, but they had better uniforms, I think, than the Wehrmacht had, really, much better uniforms.
So from the -- there's so many incidents here. We were, about six or seven of us were in one little house and they had us go to an officers' warehouse and transport officers' food, cigarettes, tobacco, things like that. And so we did that. They sent us by truck. And the second time I went into the warehouse, Buckle and I happened to spot tobacco. These were in pouches about this size. And oh, my God, I was dying for a cigarette, he was dying for a cigarette. And I think the third time I went in there, there were two guards there, but for some reason I got up enough nerve, or the pangs of hunger for a cigarette, for nicotine, was so great, that I said the hell with it, I'm going to. So I punched a hole in there and I took two of those packets and I put them in here under my belt. And I told Buckle what I had. So when we went back, knowing full well we were going to be searched going back through the door and, sure enough, when we got back there, they had a sentry at the door and he looked at everyone. And I was afraid to go in there. But for some good reason, for me anyway, he didn't notice that I had anything here at all. So Buckle and I had it -- we smoked most of those cigarette -- tobacco.
We got newspaper, made cigarettes from that. We would meet in the latrine and smoke so the other guys in -- really, we wanted to protect that tobacco. Because the other guys would have probably stole it from us. Even when we got Red Cross parcels of food, which was very infrequent, you had to wrap with your belt the parcel around your neck or somebody would steal it. Yeah. The British were notorious for that, incidentally.
And one Britisher stole a -- he actually took this thing around this guy, he had a GI belt, he had it fastened to his neck, his parcel was gone. This British soldier who took it ate just about the entire contents of that parcel. And you got everything in there. You got coffee, you got Cremora, kind of a powdery, we called it KLIM, and you got jelly, currant jelly, rich jellies from Britain -- this was a British parcel, incidentally, from the British Red Cross -- and this British, this one British soldier ate the entire contents, chocolate bars and everything, and he died. Too much food at one time, yeah. So even the German guards told us, don't, don't eat very much at all, go easy on it, you know. So I only received maybe four or five packets during that entire year.
Did you get a full parcel for yourself?
Never. Never.
You had to split it with other guys?
Yeah. First it was three to, three on one part, three to one. Then it was four to one. Then during the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans got cocky, especially when they started and they were pushing the Americans back, they got cocky and they changed it to seven, eight to one, nine to one, and -- the whole thing. And they had warehouse after warehouse, Tom, of parcels, you know. And I know they were dipping into American Camels, Lucky Strikes, all the good food and so on that they didn't get themselves, really. Actually they had more American -- not only American parcels, but Argentina, parcels of their beef that they sent over, British parcels, Canadian parcels, South African parcels. I smoked a lot of weird cigarettes from the South Africans, not a lot of them but a few anyway.
[END OF CD ONE, BEGIN CD TWO]
And so the ration deal was really terrible. So finally, I wound up at Stalag VII-A, which is in Moosburg -- we called it "moose-burg," because it's M-o-o-s, we called it "moose-burg" -- Wilma, being from Austria, she said it's Moosburg, you know. It's about 20 miles from Dachau and about 30 miles from Munich. Well, they had us working on the railroad then. Yeah.
Moosburg?
We left Moosburg in the cars, in the railroad cars, and we would go in maybe once every two or three days and work on the railroad in Munich after it was bombed. We worked tremendous. The whole bomb -- almost the whole station was bombed all the time. But miraculously, when we'd go back there after two or three days, they had rebuilt, sections of tracks were -- mostly slave labor, I would say, was used and, of course, under the direction of German engineers. It was a tremendous project how they were able to restore those railroads, troop trains were coming through and everything else, you know. So we were glad to get out of Munich.
But one day, the Americans came over about 11 o'clock from Foggia, Italy, the 15th Air Force, mostly B-24 bombers, they'd come over 11 o'clock, 11:30, something like that, depending on the weather, of course. And the guards would always have us in the shelters before the German civilians. Yeah, that was unbelievable, too, I thought, you know, we just left there, not even reach us, the shelter, but they had us in the shelter right off the bat, then the German civilians came in.
One special day, a very important day, because it was probably the heaviest raid by the Americans that I experienced on Munich, we were -- we went in the shelters right away, we could hear the loud speakers, the German announcers telling the civilians just how close the German -- the American bombers were and so on. Wilma experienced the same thing in Vienna. Vienna was bombed by Americans, too, from Italy, and she went through the same experience.
Well, anyway, this bombing went on for 15, 20 minutes anyway, then stopped, and another wave came over. And by this time all the dust and dirt, the bombs were falling closer to us and everything, and all the time these German civilians were looking at us, Americans, there must have been 25, 30 of us that were working on the railroad at that particular shelter, near that particular shelter. And oh, they were, really, I thought they were going to just tear us to ribbons. They swore at us and everything else and all this stuff.
I had an old beat-up handkerchief, I had to put that over my nose and throat because the dust was so tremendous. And I was never so glad in all my life when that bombing ceased and these people did not do anything to us. They could have -- they could have just destroyed us, you know. Here, we are Americans in their shelter and American planes are bombing. So you can imagine how they felt, you know. Why they didn't, like, again I say, why they didn't shoot us, I don't know, or beat us up. I can't understand that either.
There's so many instances like that where I was tremendously lucky and so many people and so many Germans helped us, you know. Helped me especially, too. And this gets -- then we went to a couple other places, and we finally wound up in southern Germany. No better place to be at war, at the end, towards the end of the war, than southern Germany and Bavaria, right close to the Alps, the Austrian Alps. We were in a town called Oberau. It's very close to Oberammergau, the famous place where they have the Christ festival every so often and so on. It's a world-famous place only about 10 miles from where we were at.
And we were working at a lumber mill and cutting up logs, making cardboard at this company. And we would load this cardboard onto freight cars. They would send them to the big cities that the windows had been blown out and they used this cardboard as a replacement. So I worked with two Russians, two Russian Ukraines, a man about 45, 48, and a young fellow maybe 21, 22. And they were sitting in the cab of this bulldog, which was a tractor, we called it a bulldog, and it was wood-fueled, really. Yeah, we never saw that before. So many of those vehicles were, actually used Holz wood as fuel. We had never seen that before and that was news to us.
Well, anyway, they would load that up and start the fire, we'd wait 10-20 minutes. And I had to sit on a real wide bumper, and this was in the middle of the winter, with wooden shoes on. I didn't have socks or regular leather shoes. I had wooden Dutch-type shoes that I wore. And my feet got frozen. I sat out there and these two Russians, who were pro German, of course, they were inside the cab. And this lasted for about 10, 12 days, maybe three weeks.
And I was getting worse and worse, my legs were hurting me, turning almost black really. And we had this guard -- now we get to the point where Handlebar comes into the picture -- and he was this Volkssturmer guard who lived about two miles away. Like I said, I assumed that he might have been too young for the First World War, too old for combat duty, anyway, in the Second War, although they used men 60, 65 at the end of the war in the Volkssturm, and young kids 13, 14 in the Hitler-Jugend. But anyway, he took a liking to us.
He could speak very little English, but just enough that our interpreter, a man from Cincinnati by the name of Reiger, I forget what outfit he was from, but he did all of the translating for us, he kept us abreast of everything that not only Handlebar had to say but also the other guards. Now, Handlebar was about six feet tall, seemed to me he had steely gray eyes. He had this handlebar, wonderful handlebar mustache, and it didn't take any imagination or creativity on our part to call him Handlebar. It was so self-obvious, so obvious, it was ridiculous. And so he would be there every day along with the other guards.
Now, we got some guards from the Eastern Front that came in, they were really rough. They would go out chamois hunting and then they would come back and they would start drinking at night and they would call us all kinds of names and things like that. A lot of them had -- were frozen, had frozen feet or frozen arms. One man had only one arm, he had just lost it on the Eastern Front. And they hated us. They hated us. And I can see why, because they had such a terrible time on the Eastern Front.
I don't think you could compare, really, the Western Front from the Eastern Front. War is war and all that, but there was just not much action on the Western Front. But fighting on that Eastern Front and that cold and against the Russians must have been really. It was hellish on the Western Front, but it was more hellish, I would say, on the Eastern Front. But anyway, these guys, like I said, these young troopers, why, these young guards, were very mean. Finally, they got orders to go back to the front. And we really snickered and laughed and chuckled to ourselves when we found out that two or three of them were being sent to the, back to the Russian front. We were glad of that.
But so many of those guards wanted to be captured by the Americans and the British. They were going to give themselves up, but they never did. I don't know of anyone that ever got -- they just took off. And like I say, when we found out that we were, the day of liberation that the Americans and the French were moving towards us down the hill, towards our log or our small wooden building, we were on the second floor, we hoped that they were not the Free French, because we had rumors, we heard rumors that the Free French were shooting up everything.
They wanted to make a big impression. Because the Americans had taken over the war really from them, liberated France, really, the Americans did and the British, of course. And the French, Free French, didn't do very much really as far as size. They didn't have the resource, they didn't have the manpower for one thing. Not that they weren't good fighters or anything like that. But luckily, it was the Americans that were coming down the hill.
Well, like I think I told you on the phone, that afternoon, early afternoon, there was a German outfit outside close to us and they were eating their lunch and all of a sudden, oh, they started yelling and everything, they were throwing food on the trucks and hauling boxes and everything, and within a half hour they'd moved out. Must have been 20 or 30 trucks. How big of an outfit it was, I don't know. Maybe it was just a platoon, but they had at least 20 trucks. And they pulled up, and on that other side they had small hills, they weren't mountains.
The mountains were on the other side where the Americans were coming down. So a short time passed, we heard artillery shells coming over, tank, American tanks, 75s and so on, coming over. And we just fell on the floor, on the second floor, and we waited for the firing. As it got closer and closer and closer, we were afraid they were going to hit our building because they didn't know we were in there as POWs, American POWs, you know. And this lasted maybe 10 minutes. Maybe it only lasted two, in reality, but it seemed a long time for us, because here we were on the verge of being liberated and here we were in this crossfire, so to speak.
And it was quite, quite, quite shocking really. I mean it was quite a blow. And we were very grateful when the shelling stopped. And we waited for a while and, sure enough, why we could see out the window some American Jeeps pulling up. And the first American Jeep, a sergeant was in it, it was driven by a corporal, and the sergeant came running up the steps -- by this time all the guards had fled and we had told Handlebar to go home, change his clothes, put on civilian -- change his uniform put on civilian clothes and come back.
He thought for a long time. And he finally did that, he went back. And before long he came back again with his uniform on. And Reiger, who could speak very good German, he really, he told him, he said, "Hey, why? Stay home, stay with your family." He had two sons, he had a nice wife. "Stay with your family." He said, "You're going to be captured, you don't know what's going to happen to you." But he just, no, he said, "I'm a soldier, I'm doing my duty. This is my duty." And like I say, he took a liking to us, this was like his own children, really, his own sons, the way he treated us. He got us showers once in a while. He had us deloused one time. We had not been deloused for a long time. It was just lousy. We had contests over who could pick the most louse or lice from one's body, yeah. No matter how you could wash your shirt or pants, trousers, anything, hot water, steaming water, within a day those lice would be back again, even in more abundance it seemed, yeah. It didn't have any effect at all. And the Germans, the guards, they were also lice-ridden and -- But anyway, Handlebar came back with his uniform on and the sergeant came up, first thing he said, he saw Handlebar standing at attention, about as rigid as a statue, and he said, "This guy, here, this guard, how did he treat you?" And we all, almost spontaneously said, "Oh, fine, wonderful. Well, Handlebar is great, don't do anything to him." "Okay," he said, "but tell me," he says, "if he did anything wrong, let me know and we'll take care of him."
Yeah, just like that. This guy was about six feet two, from Malden, Massachusetts, I think he was from. Anyway, they all went down stairs, down the steps, and in the courtyard there by the guards' room. By this time the Russians, the French, they had Italian prisoners also there, they all seemed to form almost like a semicircle there. And Handlebar was standing near this stump. Why this stump happened to be there, it's like somebody created this, you know, in his mind, the stump was about this high. And they went in the guards', three or four other GIs went in the guards' room and they brought out all the rifles, you know. They brought out Handlebar's rifle.
In fact, he showed them which rifle he had. So this big sergeant, strong sergeant, from Massachusetts, grabbed Handlebar's rifle and he saw that stump and he started smashing it. And after three or four real hard blows and it finally broke. And Handlebar was just standing there and tears were coming down his eyes like that. And we were just mesmerized. We were just fossilized. We were just frozen. But that, it was really dramatic, really. I'll never feel anything like that before.
And feeling so sorry for him, too, you know, because he had treated us so well, not knowing what happened to him, what was going to happen to him I should say. And they finally put him in the back seat of a Jeep and he took off. He waved back at us and we all waved at him and yelled and so on. He took off and the whole outfit, I think it was the 11th, an element of the 11th Armored Division, if I'm not mistaken, they came up from southern France, the invasion of southern France, they worked themselves up with the Seventh Army.
I think these are the men who liberated. I should have found out who our liberators were, too, besides just being Americans, you know. And so that's the last we saw of Handlebar. Now, I've gone to Germany, Vienna, Austria, I've gone to England, Italy, all these places, seven, eight times after World War II. Wilma and I used to go to Vienna all the time. And I always said that I should have went over there, just look him up, because I could have found out exactly where he was at.
He wasn't old enough at the time. I'm almost certain he wasn't harmed at all. They probably put him in a truck with all the other prisoners that they rounded up, searched, and kept him maybe two or three weeks and then released him. They had nothing against him, no atrocity, nothing like that. So undoubtedly he was released and he was back at his farm in three weeks time. So that was one mistake that I made.
In 1948 I wrote an article about slave labor conditions in World War II. It was in the Cleveland News at that time. And the Cleveland News was before they became defunct. I wish Cleveland had more -- well, none of these cities have many newspapers. Even New York City, they've cut down on their number of newspapers, too. So that was how I was liberated, then, as far as -- from there then they took us by truck to Reims, France -- no, they didn't, no, they flew us to Reims, France, on a C-47. We had to run for it, we just barely made it.
They interrogated us, American authorities interrogated us, gave us new clothes, and a shower, of course, and good food. And they asked us if we wanted to have a two-week vacation in the Riviera or to go back to the United Kingdom. And stupidly, stupidly, because I liked London and England so much, I chose to go back to England. So many of the men went to the Riviera and spent two weeks at a fashionable hotel down there, yeah. Well, anyway, I went by ship, steamship, from Camp Lucky Strike, that was a concentration -- a camp where all of the ex-POWs, expatriates, repatriates I should say, congregated.
In fact, General Eisenhower came there one rainy day and sat right down in the mud with his mess kit and ate chicken dinner with us. We were being fed by German POWs. And there was a lot of hassle going on. A GI would want seconds and the Germans, "No, no seconds. No seconds." Yeah, a lot of fights broke out because of that. "You mean to tell me you're not going to give me more of my own food, and you're a prisoner of war?" This broke out a lot.
And some of these rear echelon Americans, especially one sergeant, I think he was from Connecticut, another New Zealand -- New Englander, and he got so mad when he saw these German prisoners that he wanted to do something. So he caught one tanker, a German former tanker, who was a prisoner, and he had a black uniform on, and he had him digging slit trenches all day and all night long. And this sergeant was out there at night with a lantern and made sure that this guy kept -- I felt sorry for the guy, really, he was just almost completely exhausted.
He couldn't lift up that pick. And he'd, sometimes he'd lift it up and it would fall backwards, almost fall right on the ground, you know. And some of the GIs, too, you know, we were treated badly but also we were helped. We never received that kind of vindictiveness and really it was just sure hatred. This guy, rear echelon, probably -- a lot of the rear echelon people, whether they were jealous of the combat troops or not, I don't know, but a lot of them were more brutal.
They brutalized more people than a lot of the combat troops did. It was a psychological effect that produced this kind of, you know, unseeming behavior on the part of a lot of those men. A lot of them, of course, they worked the Red Ball Express and lot of them stole a lot of valuable things, medicines and foodstuffs and equipment, sold them for big money, especially in Paris. I think there was only one GI that was executed for desertion, that was this young kid, Slovik, from Hamtramck, New York -- Michigan. But there was a lot of black-marketeering going on. And Eisenhower had to -- he claims he had to make an example, so he put him to death.
He left his machine gun post and that post was overrun while he was gone. So the American reporters tried to butt in and do something, get legal defense for this young man, but finally he was executed. In fact, I had a friend at Addressograph, where I worked, who was on, who was chosen, he was a sergeant, he was chosen for that execution squad. He turned it down. Yeah, he didn't want any part of it. And of course, they had blanks in their rifles too. And you never knew whether you did the work yourself or not. And so that sums up most of the --
So when did you finally get home?
I got home -- oh, the way I got home too was something. I went to the UK. I was under no army orders or restrictions at all, I was on my own. I had received backpay from the Red Cross, they gave me some backpay, enough to sustain me for a month or so. And I went all over the old spots again, had a good time in London and so on, went down to Southampton. And finally, I wanted to get home. So I went to this one headquarters and they said, "What outfit were you in?" They didn't even know what outfit I was in, so I had to tell them. So they sent me to a big building that housed a lot of ex-POWs and most of them were Air Force men. So we stayed three or four days.
Finally, they sent us by train to Portsmouth, the Port of Portsmouth. And expecting to be sent back maybe on the Queen Mary or some big vessels, we went back on an LST. These things were notorious for cracking, for breaking up. I never thought an LST actually could cross the ocean, you know, really, I thought, you know, even if they used a lot of them in the Pacific for invasion and so on, on all those islands, I didn't think they could travel so far.
I thought they just island hopped. Well, anyway, we boarded that ship and the captain of that LST told us right away, he said, "You men have complete run of the ship. Any of the food you want, go to the galley, get it. We will deny you nothing. Nothing will be held back from you." He says, "You people have suffered enough" and so on. Well, most of the ex-POWs were Air Force men again. And all their conversation, mostly bomber crews, was the B-17 a better bomber than the B-24 and the 25s and the 26s and everything. The B-17 men seemed to win. Possibly because it seemed that they had more ex-B-17 Flying Fortress crew members there, you know. A lot of them were pilots.
One ace, I think Gabreski was on that ship. Well, we took the southern route. It took us about 20 days to go from Portsmouth, England, and finally to sneak into Norfolk harbor, which we did, we sneaked into Norfolk. We took the southern route. We went to the Azores, stopped off at the Azores. We went along the Spanish coast for a while, then headed for New York. And like I say, we just about practically sneaked into Norfolk harbor.
We were the only troop ship coming in and so on, you know, just ex-POWs, and there was none of this fanfare of, you know, tugboats or anything like that. And it was a most enjoyable trip really. Well, I had other steamship trips. That's why I'm glad that, and fortunately, I had a lot of steamship trips to Europe and elsewhere and also had a lot of flights by airplane, so I was able to travel to Europe and other places in more than just one mode of transportation.
And that was a wonderful, oh, gees, the food and everything, they treated us wonderfully well. The sailors were really -- they had boat drills every day because they were headed for the Pacific, they were told that they were going to wind up in the Pacific because the war in the Pacific was still going on. And it wasn't until July that I pulled into Norfolk, really. My folks didn't know it. I didn't send them any letters. I just called them up on the phone and told them I was in Norfolk and, oh, it was quite an experience. Finally, they sent me home on a furlough. From Fort -- oh, from Norfolk they sent me to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in Columbia, South Carolina. We stayed there, just fooled around there, didn't do any duty at all.
Went to the PX, service clubs, had a good time listening to the bands and so on. And in fact, I saw Jimmy Lunsford down there. He was still living at the time, his band was still going. And they finally shipped us to Camp Patrick Henry. And from Patrick Henry they shipped us home. I got a 60-day furlough. And while I was home, I received a notification, I think it came from Washington if I'm not mistaken: We are offering you the choice of going either to Lake Placid for two weeks for rehab and recreation or Miami Beach. Well, I had been to Florida before, I didn't particularly like it down there, because I did my basic training down there, and so I chose Lake Placid.
So sure enough, I went two weeks to Lake Placid, stayed at the very posh Lake Placid Club. At that time, during peacetime, I think the Lake Placid Club you had to spend $200 a night to have a room there, yeah. And we stayed right there. And the GIs could bring their families if they wanted. Of course, I was single at the time, so I just went by myself. I had a wonderful two days, or two weeks, at Lake Placid. It started to snow about October the 15th in Lake Placid, Wilma. That was the earliest snow I think I ever experienced, you know, yeah. But we were having such a good time. In fact, it was about at the end of the two-week vacation anyway. It was a vacation really. So I went back home again and stayed there for three or four weeks, had a good time at home. Finally, I got a notification to report to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for discharge. So I took a train to Columbia, stayed there four or five days. They finally discharged me, went back home, and that was it.
Did you have any trouble adjusting to civilian life after you got back?
I did pretty well, yes, because I had adjusted to civilian life by spending a lot of time in London after the war, spending a lot of time in Lake Placid after the war and everything, so it wasn't. And I had no trouble with my family or anything like that. But in the meantime, one thing I wanted to tell you about, my brother.
My brother tried to get in the Marine Corps when he was 17 years old. He went down to the recruiting office in Cleveland someplace and they found a hernia, so they rejected him. And so he wanted the Marine Corps so badly, he got, he had an operation performed successfully. He went back, they accepted him, they sent him to Parris Island for basic training, did his basic training. And after basic training, he was promoted to sergeant and he wound up in an office at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, working in the office, an office where Sterling Hayden, the movie star and author also, I read some of his books, he was stationed there in the Marine Corps before he joined the OSS.
And while Bill was down there in the office, Madeleine Carroll, his girlfriend at the time, she came, and Sterling Hayden applied for a week's furlough. And he got it and she and -- and he and Madeleine spent a whole week together someplace down there near Camp Lejeune. And so Bill stayed there. And his hardest job, Tom, his most difficult job, was taking the lieutenant colonel's wife, whom he was working with, working for, took shopping, on shopping tours.
Yeah, he'd take her into town and she would do her shopping, not only food but clothes and everything else, you know, and just drive her back. And he did a little desk work, he did a little office work and so on. He could type and do these things. Okay. Had it going for him. Well, my folks received a message that I was missing in action and, of course, they told him about it right away. And they didn't know what happened to me at all, whether I was dead or alive, prisoner or what.
This went on for three or four months they didn't know anything. So when he found out I was missing in action, he stupidly -- and I use that word now, I tell him that, how stupid he was, here he had it made, he had it made down there, he had the perfect setup -- and he stupidly volunteered for combat. So they sent him immediately to Camp Pendleton. He took some training at Camp Pendleton on the west coast, California. He went to Pearl Harbor. He joined the Fifth Marine Division. Finally, he found himself on Iwo Jima.
He was wounded on Iwo Jima after about 12 days of very, very terrible combat. And he said he was lucky that they evacuated him, because there were other people, other marines, who were more seriously wounded than he was. He had a mortar shrapnel wound in his side and his back. And the men that were in much graver condition physically, wounded, were just left there. It was up to the medics to tag the people who they thought were the most seriously wounded and send them back to the hospital ships.
And for some reason, I guess he was bleeding so profusely, this helped them tag him as one to be evacuated as soon as possible. And fortunately, he was evacuated, went to a hospital ship, sailed back to Pearl Harbor, received the Purple Heart, stayed in the hospital for a couple weeks, came back to the States, and after that he was discharged. Because he was in the service long before I was, you know, really. So I mean, but we're still great sibling friends when you come to it.
We go over to his -- well, we haven't for several months, or I haven't because I have cancer for one thing, I'm incontinent and I can't go far distances. We used to go every Tuesday night to the Savannah Grill where Ernie Krivda -- I don't know if you ever heard of him.
I know of Ernie. I don't know that I've seen him though.
Ernie Krivda, the big band, 17-, 18-piece band.
Right.
We were going over there for three years straight, until just recently, driving 64 miles both ways. I would drive to Euclid where Bill lives and he would do the driving, he's 84 years old, and we would go over to Savannah, stay from 7:30 until 1 o'clock, and we'd drive back. I'd get home here about 1:00, 1:30, 2 o'clock. Had a wonderful time.
We had our table that we knew everyone. It was called the fun table because we had so much fun, you know. And the musicianship was good. Ernie had a -- has a wonderful Big Tuesday, they call it the Big Fat Tuesday Band. He's still playing, you know. He's still over there. We haven't been over, the Anderson brothers haven't been over there for a long time. And he used to always more or less cater to us. He said, "I'm going to play an old number now," he says, "I'm absolutely certain that the Anderson boys knew back in 1900, you know, they know this number." It was "After You're Gone" or some number like that, you know. And so we've had a wonderful relationship. He went back to Iwo Jima, incidentally, oh, about six or seven years ago. They had some Japanese veterans, too, there. And they stayed in Tokyo for a while, then they flew them to Iwo Jima, and they had a celebration there. So I wanted to tell you about my brother and that situation. How many brothers would do that, you know?
That's right. Before I forget, about when were you captured, sometime in July of '44?
Yeah, yeah.
Sometime before --
In July, yes.
-- Saint-Lo fell?
Just before Saint-Lo fell. Saint-Lo fell on the 25th, I think, yeah.
And you said you were liberated on May 1st, I believe?
Yeah, either the last, either April 30 -- how many days does April have?
Thirty. Today would be the anniversary.
It might have been, yeah.
Any other vivid memories that come to mind when you think about that, or do you think we covered it?
Oh, I think the most important ones, I would say. Of course, I mean the ones that were most devastating to me, painful, uncomfortable, frightful, were the boxcar trips that we took by train. Forced into these boxcars, lock the door, we couldn't -- had no place to defecate or urinate. I think they were forty to one or something.
Forty and eights?
Yeah, forty and eight, these boxcars were French and so on. They must have had 60 or 70 of them just piled on top of each other, really. In fact, one place we stopped, I don't know, I think we were just ready to cross into the German border when we pulled over to a siding and we were strafed by RAF planes. And we had a British major sitting at the other end of where I was at and he was killed, shot right through the stomach, really, yeah. And we really, because they wouldn't let us out at all, we couldn't get out at all. When we urinated, we had to go up to the vent, up there, and somebody would hoist us up there and, of course, you couldn't, those vents are so thin and that, everyone below just got it. It was terrible really. That place smelled so badly.
And not only that, but the food, we got hardly any food or water, no water at all. And I must have been on five or six trains, you know, they were supposed to be marked with Red Cross signs on top, but they never did. So the airmen, of course, didn't know that, you know, prisoners, American allied prisoners of war were in those boxcars. So those were terrible times. And also by truck, after I was captured, we went from one town to another. And we went to Chartres in France and we went in a convoy. And my God, 47s, again, were swooping down. We all dove for ditches and everything.
That whole convoy was just shot up to hell. How I ever escaped getting hurt I don't know. A lot of the GIs were wounded and killed. And those -- that was really terrible, you know. And I could see then just how, why the Germans couldn't push the Americans back in, back into the ocean, because those reinforcements never got to the front at all. I saw convoy after convoy just broken up by our Ninth Tactical Air Force for the most part.
And of course, we sent heavy bombers over there too. In fact, our division, the 30th Division, was attacked by General -- under General Bradley's orders, heavy bombardment. And I think our division lost about 240 men that were killed in that bombing raid. In fact, our commanding general, Leland Hobbs, he excoriated the RAF, and especially the American Air Force, he said, "Are you people the Luftwaffe?" Yeah, he says, "Your people are supposed to protect us." They were hit again several times, the 30th Division, by their own planes, you know, really, that was always a danger.
After a while you became almost as if you were, you know, the enemy, yeah, right. You were one of them. You could identify with them. There's such a thing as identifying with your captor, really. And it can become quite a powerful emotional force, too. Especially if they treat you all right, you know. They treat you like -- you become like them, too, you understand their situation. They don't have all this -- they didn't have all the cigarettes to smoke, they didn't have all the food. In fact, sometimes maybe they had worse food than we had. They were in bad shape, at least towards the end of the war anyway.
They were in bad shape as far as their rations and so on, the German soldiers. But you develop, just like some of these people in our penitentiaries, they develop a certain relationship with the guards, a certain mental and emotional connection. They probably try to understand their position, just like the guards, maybe some of them, try to understand the position of the prisoners that they have custody over. So it's quite a thing. But I got -- I don't think there's a day go by that I don't think of the war, especially now that the Iraq war is going on. [END OF CD TWO]