How Sergeant Warren Lost His Stripes

Hank Lochowicz and Jabos

   Two years ago, Don Knapp sent me some photos from the war, but they were in pdf form rather than jpg. As I was looking through them, now that I have the ability to convert them, I discovered this picture of Hank Lochowicz, of Milwaukee, with a dog. This was the caption on the back of the picture:

   This story, however, is not about Hank Lochowicz, and it's not about Don Knapp, who I assume took the picture. Incidentally, you might have seen Knapp interviewed in "The Color of War," a documentary that aired on the History Channel a few years back. But this story is about the dog Jabos and Sergeant Jim Warren, and illustrates the kind of discrepancies that arise when stories are told secondhand. In this case, there are two strikingly different versions of how Sergeant Warren lost his stripes, but they both lead to the same conclusion: that Jim Warren was busted from a sergeant and tank commander to a buck private.
   The two different accounts were from Bob Rossi, a Pfc. in the third platoon, and Lieutenant Jim Gifford, who was Rossi's tank commander and platoon leader until Gifford was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge.
   Rossi joined the battalion as a 19-year-old replacement in November of 1944, shortly before the battalion's first crossing of the Moselle River. Sergeant Warren was one of the many characters he told me about.
   "I started to tell you one of the many Warren stories," Rossi said, "why he hated General MacArthur. The way he told us, Warren was in the Marines in Hawaii first, but he was getting discharged and his records were being sent to San Diego. In the meantime, he told us, he got into some trouble, and the sheriff of the island,. Duke Kahanamoku, he was a famous athlete, he was gonna come to grab Warren. Now Warren technically was a civilian, so the only way he could beat the rap was if he joined the Army. So he stayed in the islands with a searchlight outfit. And as fate would have it, MacArthur was the general in charge of the islands at that particular time, and they're going to have a big inspection. So he said they spent weeks polishing up the equipment, painting this and painting that. He was like a battery sergeant. And he says here comes MacArthur, and he says 'Ten-hut!' And he said he gave MacArthur the biggest highball [salute] you could ever give an officer. MacArthur says, 'Sergeant, how do you cut your toenails?' Warren says he was mystified. MacArthur says, 'Show me how you cut your toenails.' He made Warren sit down on the parade ground, take his shoes and socks off, and as he's sitting there, he made the whole battery crowd around Warren, and he says, 'Now this man is going to suffer from ingrown toenails, because he doesn't cut his toenails properly.' And Warren's sitting on the ground, everybody's razzing him, he took some razzing for weeks. That's why he hated MacArthur, for making a fool out of him."
   Sergeant Warren's name came up in several stories told to me by veterans of C Company. The consensus was that he looked after his men, he drank heavily, and was the kind of reliable tank commander you would want backing you up in a tense situation.

From left: Ed Spahr, Jim Gifford, Tony D'Arpino, Bob Rossi

     At the 1992 reunion of the 712th in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I sat at a table with four veterans --  Rossi, Gifford, Tony D'Arpino and Ed Spahr -- who were in the five-man crew of a tank that was knocked out on January 10, 1945, in the vicinity of Wiltz, Luxembourg, during the Battle of the Bulge. Sergeant Warren's tank was behind their tank. When the crew abandoned it, Lieutenant Gifford, who was wounded, told Sergeant Warren to fire into his tank and set it on fire, so that it wouldn't fall into the hands of the Germans.
   "Sergeant Warren was the type of guy, he was really military," D'Arpino said. "I mean, his tank crew wouldn't eat unless he said so. He was that kind of guy."
   "When I joined the third platoon," Rossi said, "I arrived with Koon Leong Moy, who we called Chop Chop because of his Oriental heritage. [Moy was a second generation Chinese American from New York City, and political correctness had not yet been invented]. "Right away, when Lieutenant Lombardi was assigning the crews, Warren says, 'I want him.' He thought Chop Chop was gonna cook for him. "Chop says, 'The hell with you, you cook for yourself.'"
   "But I'll tell you one thing about Sergeant Warren," D'Arpino said, "Sergeant Warren, and we weren't used to it, Lieutenant Lombardi even told me this himself, he wasn't used to having a guy like Warren in the Number 2 tank because if Lieutenant Lombardi had something hot in front of him, Sergeant Warren rode up on his backside. You could count on him. Very dependable. He wasn't one of these guys who would sit back 400, 500 yards."
   "He was a good tank commander," Rossi said.
   "The only trouble Sergeant Warren had was he liked his 'tea' a little much." D'Arpino looked at Gifford and said, "I think, from the time you were with us you could probably say the same thing, Sergeant Warren was one of the best Number 2 tank, when you were in trouble, he was right there."
   "He was dependable," Gifford said.
   "If you had a fast tank like I had in reverse, you'd always bump into him," D'Arpino said.
   "There are more Warren stories than you can shake a stick at," Rossi said. "He had pots and pans galore on the back of his tank. I used to say his pots and pans make more noise than the tank itself coming down the road."
 
   "Now this is toward the end of the war with Warren, one of the other  stories," Rossi said during my 1992 interview with him at his home in Brick Township, New Jersey. "They were giving us a pep talk on how we're going to go into Czechoslovakia, and how to conduct yourselves, these people are our friends, not our enemies. And to make it impressive, they gave us all new helmets. The war was gonna be over.
   "And as we're all sitting around laying on the grass, Colonel Kedrovsky is giving a talk, there's Warren on the ground, playing with the dog, Jabos. He was playing with the dog's penis, and he's laughing.
   "Colonel Kedrovsky sees this, and he's pissed off.
   "So they let it go. And no sooner had this happened, than the war ended.
   "Now we go into occupation. We went to Mincen, Malybor, then we went for miles, we traveled to Amberg. That was a mess. It took forever to clean those barracks up, because everybody looted it before we got there.
   "I can remember that night. We had a choice. I don't know how many miles we traveled, with the dust and everything, a column of tanks. We had a choice, either wash or make coffee. We had half a jerry can of water. So right after that, they broke Warren. It didn't go unnoticed. They let him continue as a tank commander. As soon as the war ended, they broke him from a buck sergeant to a private."

   When I interviewed Jim Gifford at his used car dealership in Yonkers, New York, in November of 1992 -- only a couple of weeks after the group interview -- he brought up the incident, which he didn't witness personally, as we were talking about Stanley Klapkowski, the gunner on the crew, who was not at the reunion.
   "Klapkowski was a nice looking kid, he almost looked German," Gifford said. "He had that wavy blond hair, and he was a handsome kid. But he had a Polish background, and he didn't like the Germans for some reason. The boys could probably tell you more stories than I could about him, because I didn't see him raising hell, just like I didn't see Warren when he threw a bottle at some general. Got himself demoted from sergeant to nothing. And that made me feel bad. He was drunk, and when he was drunk, he was another person, forget about it. Some general was up there, some minor general, not a big general, and he was in the area, and Warren threw a bottle at him, and the general had him demoted. But they didn't throw him out of the Army or put him in the stockade. I guess [Jack] Shepherd, who was the captain at the time, probably said, 'Look, the man was drinking, he's been through a lot, give him a break.' But there were a lot of things, so many guys could tell you stories that you probably wouldn't want to see printed."

   I never met Sergeant Warren, who passed away before I began interviewing veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion. But there's one more notable story Rossi shared.
   "This is at Christmastime," he said. "We're at Kirschnaumen [France]. Up on the hill the bulldozer tank dug out all the ground, and our turrets were just sticking above the dirt. We're in a holding position. This is just prior to the Bulge. It was miserable cold out there, and we were doing guard duty, four hours on, eight off.
   "So this one day, we're standing around, the house we were in had a blanket covering a hole up on the second floor where a shell had hit previously. We had to sleep up there. And the mother, father and daughter slept in the one room downstairs.
   "So we're in the other room, like the gathering place, it had a stove in it. We used to gather around the stove, oh, it was so cold. This one day Sergeant Warren, we had a kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling, this was in the evening and Warren was drunk, and he's sparring at the lantern. We're all laughing, because he was really a card. He throws a haymaker at the lantern. He misses the lantern and hits me on the other side, and I went flying across the room. And I come up with the biggest fat lip you ever saw. And when that was over, we went to bed.
   "The next morning, I'm in one of the other rooms, and I hear somebody, they were talking, and I hear, 'Ahh,' he says, 'I never touched the kid.' So I went in and showed him my lip, and he believed it."

   "Several years ago," Rossi said a little later in the interview, "I got one of the newsletters. Milford Anderson and Warren had died about the same time. I just filled up. These are the guys I was in combat with, they're both dead. I wrote to Anderson's wife, I think I sent her a picture. And I wrote to Warren's wife and I told her what a great guy he was. In combat he was the type of man that you wanted behind you, because he was right there. He drank a lot, but he was a good soldier. I wrote to his wife and I told her about the incident where he gave me a shot in the mouth."

- - -

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Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge

   I started going to reunions of my father's tank battalion in 1987. I always had a small tape recorder with me, and I would sometimes plunk it down in the middle of one of those round tables where maybe two or three veterans and a wife or companion would be sitting, and I'd record a sometimes casual, sometimes animated conversation. I would also conduct brief interviews with individual veterans, or be lucky enough to get two or three together to talk about the same event.
   The 712th Tank Battalion spent 311 days in combat, and its veterans had stories that ran the width and breadth of the human condition.
   Because the conversations were spread out over more than a decade, it sometimes was years before, in reviewing the transcript of an interview from one reunion, I would discover a detail that contradicted or corroborated a story from another.
   One of the first veterans I interviewed, in 1991, was Ed Spahr, at the battalion's Detroit reunion in September of 1991. Ed was of medium height, thin, wore glasses and spoke with something akin to a Philadelphia accent, although he was from Carlisle, Pa.

Ed Spahr

    In later years I would ask questions with a laserlike focus, like "Do you remember a tank that had to be destroyed when the battalion retreated across the Saar River from Dillingen?" However, with Ed, my questions were more generic: Were you scared? How was the food? Were you wounded?
   "These scars on my hand I got one time, they had anti-aircraft guns," Ed said, "I think they were 20 millimeters, and they hit our tank. They didn't penetrate, but on the inside of the tank a little round spot would get cherry red, and the paint would sometimes catch on fire. That's what made these little white spots on my hand.
   "I was wounded on the inside of my left arm. Lieutenant Gifford, he was our tank commander. Our tank got knocked out and luckily we all got out of the tank. After we got hit, Lieutenant Gifford stuck his head out, and a machine gun bullet struck him around one eye. He had blood all over. When he got out of the tank, I don't think he thought he was hurt as bad as he was, and he stepped behind the tank, away from the incoming. They were firing machine guns on us, but we were behind the tank. Lieutenant Gifford tossed me his camera, and said, 'Take a picture of me.'
   "So I'm standing there with my hands up taking the picture, that's the only way I could have gotten hit in a spot like that, I had to have my arms up. It just felt like a bee sting. It was no big deal to me. I didn't think I was hit until the medic asked to see my hand because when I dropped my arm the blood would drop off my fingers. And then he said, 'It's coming down your arm. Take off your shirt. And there this was, I was bleeding like a stuck pig.
   "I haven't seen Lieutenant Gifford since. He was all right, but he never came back to the company after that."
    That was in 1991. The following October, the reunion was held in Harrisburg, Pa. Spahr was there again. And who should walk into the hospitality room, but Lieutenant Jim Gifford!
   Not only were Spahr and Gifford there, but Tony D'Arpino, who drove the tank on Jan. 10, 1945, the day it was knocked out just outside of Wiltz, Luxembourg; and Bob Rossi, the loader, were there as well. And I was able to get the four of them around one of those round tables, with the tape recorder in the middle.


   

Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge

   Following is a partial transcript of that conversation:


   Jim Gifford: I was a lieutenant at the time, a first lieutenant.

   Bob Rossi:  I was a loader in Lieutenant Gifford's tank. I was a private first class.

   Ed Spahr: I think I'd better be classed as a utility man with all of C Company because I served in every platoon.

   Tony D'Arpino: I was a driver, first tank, third platoon, and towards the end I was a tank commander for a very short period.

   Aaron Elson: Where did you come together as a unit?

   Bob Rossi: Just prior to the Battle of the Bulge, Jim was brought in as our new tank commander.

   D'Arpino: He was our platoon leader.

   Rossi: We were in the Number 1 tank. We wound up in the town of Kirschnaumen in Belgium [France, actually]. I can recall so vividly how we wondered where Lieutenant Gifford was all day. We were in a hayloft, and he came up the ladder, it was a footladder, he said, "Come here. I want to show you something." He had draped the tank in white sheets. There was snow all over the ground, so he scrounged these white sheets from all over and he draped our tank so we'd have camouflage. That same night, he had gotten a package from home, and he had some canned chicken. He shared his package with all of us. We were talking about home, and he said to us, 'You know, I'd rather lose an arm or a leg than lose my eyesight. There's too much to see in this world." And the next day, he got hit in the eye. It was a hairy situation because we had gone into a pocket to flush out the Germans, and as fate had it, our left track was knocked off.

D'Arpino: Wasn't that the time that we just took one section of the tanks, just us and the second tank? We were almost ready to eat supper when we had to go out.

Rossi: We only had two tanks, us and [Sergeant Jim] Warren's. There was concentrated machine gun fire. Lieutenant Gifford got hit in the right eye, the bullet lodged in his cheek. I thought he might jump out of the tank, and I yelled to him to keep down or they would blow his head off. He said, "I don't want to jump out. I want Warren to come forward to help us." Then he said, "Rossi, how bad am I hit?" And I lied. I said, "You don't look bad, Lieutenant." But he looked like somebody hit him in the face with a sledgehammer.

D'Arpino: I remember something else about that. He was great for having a camera around your neck, right?

Rossi: I'm gonna get to that. So he says to me, "Fire the smoke mortar." And this is the joke. In my excitement, I forgot to knock the cap out of the top, and when I fired the first mortar it went like this [motioning straight up and down]. And then I fired some subsequent mortars to give a smokescreen. As we were abandoning tank, Lieutenant Gifford was firing his .45 and pulling Spahr out by one of his arms. Spahr's leg was locked."

Spahr: I had a little blood coming out, something had hit me. I went along with him back to the aid station.

Rossi: Ed was the assistant driver. His machine gun was firing by itself it was so hot. And I said, "Twist the belt! Twist the belt," so he could stop the bullets from feeding into the machine gun. And Klapkowski, who was our gunner, he and I were running in a zigzag, we could see the snow being kicked up around us. As we were running, a recon truck came toward us, and Lieutenant Gifford said, "Fire that .50 and protect these boys!" And the guy yelled out, "It's our last box!" He says, "Fire it anyway, you sonofabitch!" And that's when they started firing the .50 to give us cover. As we got out of the line of fire, he handed his .45 to me, he says, "Hold this for me till I get back." And with that, he says, "Take my picture." I says, "Lieutenant, I can't take your picture."

Spahr: I took it. That's the only way I could gave got hit, right here, when I was holding the camera up. It felt like a bee sting.

Rossi: And there he was, having his picture taken. He had gotten a Bronze Star that morning, he had the ribbon, his face was all puffed up, blood all over his combat jacket, he says, "Take my picture."

Gifford: I couldn't see out of my right eye, but I didn't know how bad it was. It's a funny thing, I didn't feel any pain when the bullet went in.

D'Arpino: I can remember plain as day one thing about that night, that evening. We were about ready to eat our meal, and they said that there was a small pocket, it was holding the infantry down, they wanted the tanks to clean it out. You took two tanks. It was just supposed to be a small pocket, and it turned out to be a little more than that, I guess.

Gifford: It was bad news.

Rossi: After we were knocked out, Sergeant Warren's tank came forward, and under  Lieutenant Gifford's orders, he set our tank on fire.

D'Arpino: We had ruined the radio. We put a grenade in the gun barrel. We did everything we were supposed to do.

Rossi: So the Germans couldn't turn the gun around and fire on the town.

Gifford: I had Warren shoot into the back of our tank, because the Germans were stealing the tanks. They'd use them against us. The track was blown off, so it was useless anyway.

D'Arpino: But the gun was still good.

Gifford: So we immobilized it by hitting it in the back.

D'Arpino: We had the best working escape hatch of anybody in the platoon. I used to oil that thing up good, so that when you touched the lever it would really fall out. Sometimes that was the only way of escape. If you're inside the tank and the hatches are down and the gun is traversed over your hatch, you can't open it to get out, you have to go out the other way. I can remember always telling Klapkowski, he was the gunner in the tanks that I was in most of the time, I always told him, "You sonofabitch, if we ever get knocked out, make sure that gun is in the center because if I can't get out because you've got the gun traversed over my hatch," I says, "I'll haunt you. I'll come and pull the sheets off of your bed."

Gifford: I'm sure there's a few guys that aren't here today because of that gun being over their hatch.

D'Arpino: That used to be my biggest worry.

- - -

   This conversation went on for two hours, and included many harrowing incidents both before, during and after the Bulge. I had interviewed Ed Spahr in 1991 and Bob Rossi earlier in 1992. I subsequently interviewed Tony D'Arpino and Jim Gifford individually, and I visited Stanley Klapkowski at his home in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. All five interviews as well as much of the group recording are included in the audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge" in my eBay store, where I hope you'll check out that and the many other oral history audiobooks, all in the veterans' own voices.

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S***hole Story No. 2 (no pun intended)

Bob Rossi, 712th Tank Battalion veteran

   Another story with a very contemporary theme from my World War II Oral History archive. Bob Rossi was one of my earlier interviews, back in 1992. He was a source of many stories in my book "Tanks for the Memories," and his full-length interview is included in the audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge." He joined the 712th Tank Battalion as a replacement in September of 1944. In this excerpt he recalls an incident shortly before he joined the battalion.

   Bob Rossi: "We wound up, this is a funny story, we wound up in this replacement depot. Now this is my life, living in barns, stables. We were all replacements, and the way they fed you, a section at a time, they would throw all these C rations together, they made like a stew out of it, and you were allowed one scoop of this meal, a canteen cup of coffee, a slice of bread, and a pack of cigarettes. And a tropical hershey bar, or we had some other bar that they gave us which was like a fruit bar. And this one time I wound up with a pack of Lucky Strike green cigarettes. The phrase was 'Lucky Strike has gone to war.' I wound up with Lucky Strike green cigarettes. I was a celebrity. 'Let me see that, let me see that.'

   "They had a mound of cigarettes on a table. As you went by they gave you the cigarettes. You could get Chesterfields one day and Camels the next. The first pack they grabbed they gave you.

   "We had to clean out these stables first to make them habitable for us to live in, and we got our bedrolls on the ground, and finally they assigned us jobs while we were waiting to be shipped out. And they assigned me to be in charge of this latrine. Now it's a little distance from where we're staying in the stable. And what it is, I have to keep this 55-gallon drum full of water, make sure there's toilet paper, they had toilet stalls, no seats on them. And as the guy came in, there was an old slate urinal with the disinfectant powder. And I have to keep this place clean. Hose it down and what have you.

   "Now I'm doing this for two days. And as the guys would come in, they would take their steel helmet off, grab a helmet full of water, use one of the stalls, then flush it down.

   "Now the third day I'm on the job, I've got everything cleaned up, a detail is coming toward me. They're walking toward me, they've got buckets. So I'm standing in the doorway, and one of them, I don't know if it was a sergeant or an officer, says to me, 'Okay, soldier, you want to get out of the way?'

   "Underneath me, I was standing on a trap door, is all the crap in God's world. That they're flushing down. These guys had to scoop it out into the buckets. I said that was a real s*** detail they were on.

   "That's the type of latrine I was in. Further away, they had what looked like sentry boxes, but they were on a platform. And the guys would take a crap, and it would go into cans, and they'd just keep changing them.

   "We were all ready to leave, we've got the full field pack on, we're not allowed to take our stuff off, because we don't know when the trucks are coming. And who pulls up in a staff car, Marlene Dietrich. And she looked like hell. She had the helmet on, olive drabs. So maybe ten, fifteen minutes later, she comes out on stage. She had a beautiful red gown, a shimmering gown, she sits down, pulls up the gown, she shows off those famous Dietrich legs. Then she sang. Then we got on the truck, we had to leave."

 - - -

 

   Bob Rossi's full two-hour interview is included in the World War II Oral History audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge," along with a group interview with four of the five crew members of a tank that was knocked out on Jan. 10, 1945, and individual interviews with the other four crew members.

  

Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge

 In case you missed it: S***hole Story No. 1

  

  

A new sampler from Oral History Audiobooks

   Most of the Oral History Audiobooks in this collection are available in my eBay store. Here is a new audio sampler with a bit of a description for each track.

Track 1: Jerry Rutigliano

   In 1994 when I interviewed a series of D-Day veterans in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of D-Day, I wanted to find a veteran who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. So I called a psychologist at the VA Hospital in Orange, N.J., and asked if he could suggest a patient to interview. He set up a meeting with Jerry Rutigliano, a former prisoner of war. This particular story, in which Jerry showed me a photo of him sitting with Jimmy Doolittle, always gets me a little choked up. A waist gunner on a B-17, Jerry was shot down on his sixth mission to Berlin. It was his 27th mission overall, and General Doolittle had recently raised the number of missions for crew members from 25 to 30. Jerry met General Doolittle at a reunion in the 1970s. Excerpts from my interview with Jerry are available on my double CD World War II Bailout Package, available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com

Track 2: Karnig Thomasian

   Karnig Thomasian was a gunner in a B-29 that was destroyed when two bombs of unequal weight collided in midair. For the next several months he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Rangoon, during which time he was regularly beaten and starved. In this excerpt, he describes the emotional rollercoaster of coming home as the plane dipped down and flew past the Statue of Liberty. Karnig's full two-hour interview is included in the collection "POW: Right in the Keister," available in my eBay store.

Track 3: Erlyn Jensen

   Erlyn Jensen is the sister of Major Don McCoy, the B-24 command pilot who was killed leading the ill-fated Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. In this brief excerpt, Erlyn tells how her mother blamed her son's death on President Roosevelt. Erlyn's interview is included in "The Kassel Mission: An Oral History Epic," available in my eBay store.

Track 4: Don Knapp

  
   Don Knapp was a tank commander in the 712th Tank Battalion, my father's outfit, which is what got me started doing this whole oral history thing. In this excerpt, Don talks about his role in the fight that broke out in the middle of the night of Sept. 8, 1944, between the 712th Tank Battalion and the 108th Panzer Brigade. Don's full two-hour interview is included in both The Tanker Tapes, available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com, and "The Middle of Hell: An Oral History Epic," about the role of the battalion's First Platoon, Company C in the battle for Hill 122 in Normandy. "The Middle of Hell" is available in my eBay store.

Track 5: George Bussell

   George Bussell was a tank driver in Company A of the 712th Tank Battalion, and one of the most colorful characters you're ever going to meet through an oral history audiobook. In this excerpt he also talks about the battle with the 108th Panzer Brigade. George's full-length interview is included in "The Tanker Tapes," available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

Track 6: Erlyn Jensen

   In this excerpt, Erlyn Jensen described the day in 1943 that her brother came home on leave before going overseas. A transcript of my interview with Erlyn and a great deal more about this epic battle between 35 B-24 Liberators and 150 Fokke-Wulf 190s and Messerschmitt 109s can be found at www.kasselmission.com, and while you're at it, why not think about joining the Kassel Mission Historical Society.

Track 7: Ed Boccafogli

   Ed Boccafogli was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division and fought in Normandy, Holland and the Battle of the Bulge. After you listen to this (not before), read this story about Johnny Daum as told by his nephew. My full two-hour interview with Ed Boccafogli is included in "The D-Day Tapes," available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

 Track 8: Henry Dobek

   Henry Dobek was a navigator on a B-24 on the Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. His plane, piloted by Paul Swofford, was one of only four of the 35 planes in the 445th Bomb Group to make it back to their base at Tibenham, England, that day. Of the others, 25 were shot down, three crash-landed in Allied territory, two reached an emergency landing field in England, and one overshot the runway at Tibenham and crash-landed five miles away. For the full story, visit www.kasselmission.com. "The Kassel Mission: An Oral History Epic," is available in my eBay store.

Track 9: Bill Scheiterle

   Bill Scheiterle was a lieutenant, and later a captain, in the Marines. In this excerpt, he describes an incident on the island of Peleliu. My full interview with Bill is included in "Four Marines," available in my eBay store, and the printed transcript is included in my book "Semper Four," along with transcripts of my interviews with three other Marines, available in my eBay store.

Track 10: Stanley Klapkowski

   Stanley Klapkowski was a gunner in C Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. My full-length interview with "Klap" is included in the audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge," which is available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

Track 11: Tim Dyas

   Tim Dyas was a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division who was captured during the invasion of Sicily. In this excerpt he describes the emotionally wrenching decision to surrender his men, despite being faced with the certain death of all of them. My full-length interview with Tim is included in the autiobook "POW: Right in the Keister," available in my eBay store.

Track 12: Erlyn Jensen

   In this excerpt, Erlyn describes her mother's participation in Gold Star Mothers, and her mother's trip to St. Avold, to see her son's grave. Although this is the third excerpt from one interview, it's intended to give you an idea of the depth of the full-length interviews. A full-length interview with Ed Boccafogli, for example, is available on the home page of tankbooks.com. My full interview with Erlyn is included in "The Kassel Mission: An Oral History Epic," available in my eBay store.

Track 13: Jerome Auman

   In this excerpt from my audiobook "Four Marines," Jerome Auman talks about a reunion of his unit in which he encouraged his fellow veterans to write their stories. Spoiler alert: Keep a handkerchief nearby. Jerome's full-length interview is included in "Four Marines" and is available in my eBay store.

Track 14: Vern Schmidt

   Vern Schmidt was a replacement private first class in the 90th Infantry Division. He and two other young men were assigned to the division in the Siegfried line, and in ten days, the two men he joined with were dead. My full-length interview with Vern and his wife Dona is available as a double CD, "Kill or Be Killed," available in my eBay store.

   Thanks for listening. Your purchases help fund the substantial project of digitizing and making available my archive of more than 600 hours of audio interviews with the men and women of the Greatest Generation. If you'd like to sign up for my email newsletter, please send me an email at: aelson.chichipress@att.net.

The Hospitality Room, Part 1

Arlene and Grayson La Mar, circa 1993

Did you ever wish you were a fly on the wall at a reunion of World War II veterans? You probably wouldn't wish that if the reunion were of the 712th Tank Battalion, where a veteran might say "Look, there's a fly on the wall," and the next thing you know there's a 75-millimeter high-explosive shell coming in your direction. No more fly. No more wall. No more room next door either.

But that's what I was at reunions of the 712th, with which my father served as a replacement lieutenant. Not a fly on the wall but a son of a veteran with a little Sony recording Walkman and a keen interest in hearing the stories they shared among themselves.

My New Year's resolution -- the only one I made this year and the first I have yet to break in all my 66 years -- was to go back through my early recordings and transcribe the interviews I never got around to, and review the transcripts of interviews and conversations I hadn't looked at in more than a decade. So while I cobble together a unique collection of conversations and interviews, I'll be posting some of them here, starting with a brief interview with Grayson La Mar at the 1993 reunion in Orlando, Florida. I was especially struck by one line, a description Grayson made of the battle for Maizieres les Metz, France, in November of 1944.

Grayson was a driver in C Company of the 712th. He said his platoon spent two weeks (three, according to some other accounts) in a house in Maizieres prior to the first crossing of the Moselle River.

"They had this thing zeroed in," he said of the house where his crew was staying,  "and you couldn't stick your nose out the side of the building, they'd trim it off."

I thought that was such a neat description so I posted it on my Facebook page. Among the comments was one from Cindy Sink, Grayson's daughter, who I met at many reunions which she attended with her father, mother and sister Judy, who was born while Grayson was overseas. "I would love to have that," she wrote. "Miss him. Would love to tell my children." And one of Grayson's grandchildren commented "My Pops!!!"

So, without further ado, here's the first excerpt from "The Hospitality Room"

 

Orlando reunion

Grayson C. La Mar

9-12-93

You were in Lieutenant Lombardi's platoon?

   Yes, I drove for Lombardi for a while. They shifted. When I first got over there, we lost a lot of boys and we had a lot of replacements coming in, killed or hurt. They might take you out of one platoon and put you in another, if there was a new arrival, so you knew what you were doing, and the other guys, because a lot of them hadn't had the training that we had.

   I drove for a fellow called Sagabiel for a while, and he got killed. Then I drove for Sergeant Holmes, then I was Holmes' gunner for a while.

Were you in the tank when Holmes was wounded?

   I was in the platoon. Holmes was the platoon leader. We were on top of this hill, we were taking orders from a 90th Infantry Division lieutenant, and we didn't run into anything. So we were supposed to take up positions the next morning, and since we didn't run into anything he wanted to go on down to the bottom of the hill, in the valley, and stay down there. So by daybreak, it just, all of a sudden all hell broke loose. We had four tanks and a tank destroyer. They threw a shell in the tank destroyer, killed all of them. And one boy, we could see, they broke his leg or something, he just tried to climb out, then they threw another round in there and finished him off.

   Then they got the second tank I believe it was. So when they got that, that left three tanks. Sergeant Gibson, he didn't know what the rest were gonna do but he's gonna get the hell out of there and he's the only one that got out.

   When he left, Holmes followed him, I automatically backed up, and followed Holmes. When I got to the top of the hill, his tank was sitting in the middle of the road burning. I couldn't get around, so I had to go off into a field, and when I did my back end blew up. The shell came in there and that set me on fire.

   It took three tries to get the hatch open. See, the hatch would hit the gun barrel. The gunner was killed, and nobody could operate the gun to get the barrel out of the way, so finally, on the third try, I slipped by. If the gun was over a quarter-inch more I'd never have got out.

   The concussion from the shell blew my helmet off.

   When I got out, there were blazes all around and I had to keep my eyes shut, so naturally I was in the dark.

   The tank commander, he was hanging over the side, he said "Help me." He got his heel blown off.

   I dragged him off into the snow and I just fell into about ten inches of snow. I drove my head in the snow. And Holmes, he was laying out there in the field. A jeep came up there and got him and got me, and that other guy. Carried us back there in some kind of cave or something, a tent, or some kind of cave. They put some kind of powder on us. Then Holmes got in an ambulance and went back, to a field hospital or something, and they put stuff on us, it smelled like axle grease, they put that all over our head, where we were burnt. And they put him in one ambulance and me in another. I remember them giving me a carton of cigarettes. He says, "Take these. It might be a long time before you get one."

   So they got me to the hospital, they put me in a chair, kind of like a barber chair, I remember that, and put some more of that stuff, and done me up like a mummy, just wrapped gauze all over my head and I wore them for 18 days, they just cut holes for my nose and mouth and my eyes. Got a shot every four hours, man, I never had saw so many needles in my life. Stayed in bed, and stayed there 18 days. When they took it off, it was just like you stuck your head in some ice water. A lot of my skin came off. I didn't have no beard or eyelashes or nothing. In fact, I can wash my face now with a rough washrag and roll the skin up on my face, it's just been that way ever since. When I wash I don't bear down, I just rub lightly. It makes my face raw to rub it hard.

   But I had orders there to go by some bivouac area and pick up another tank, and they showed me where to go to find my platoon, I didn't even go back to the company, I went on back out on line. Right from the hospital.

Who was the gunner who was killed that day?

   I'm trying to think. My assistant driver was a fellow named Whiteheart, he lived at Winston-Salem. Well, I thought he had got killed. But see, under where he was sitting he had a trap door, all he had to do was throw a switch and the thing would fall out. About fifteen years after the war I reckon it was, or maybe longer, not much longer, he came walking around my house one day after we got home, and that really give me a shock because I thought he got killed. He got burned, but nothing seriously. We visited a couple of times, he lived in the next town, about twenty miles away. He worked for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. And his wife left him while he was gone, but he got married again after that.

His wife left him during the war?

   Yeah, and run off with somebody else.

Were you in the tank that ran over a mine in Normandy, with Cardis Sawyer?

   No, I never did hit no mines. I just lost one tank is all I ever lost.

Was Klapkowski ever your gunner?

   He was the gunner for Lombardi when I was the driver. See, I was the first platoon then, and Klapkowski was the gunner, Lombardi was the tank commander, Whiteheart was the assistant driver, and I don't remember who the, I'd know the boy if I could see him but I can't recall his name. As far as I know, let's see, Lockhart, he drove the fourth tank, he got killed, that was the one that Hardee was in and Lupe, Guadalupe. Guadalupe lives in Topeka, Kansas, he was a little Mexican, and Hardee, he lives up close to me, when we're by there we'll go down to see him.

Was Lockhart killed the same time that Hardee was wounded?

   Yes, Lockhart was his tank commander. And later on, after the shelling and all, you know, the fighting eased down, we had gone as far as we could go up that street, where there was a river on one side of us, and a kind of a wedge type thing, and Lombardi had told me go down there and bring his tank up there. See, the Germans had gone, got killed or captured or whatever. I went down there to get his tank, and Lockhart was laying on the side of the road aside of his tank, and a big old hog had walked up there and started to chewing on him. Another boy shot the hog. I guess the animals eat everything they can get ahold of. That's ridiculous. I didn't have a gun on me myself, I never did carry one. I did have a .32, a little bitty one, I got it off a German officer, but you could look at that thing and it'd go off. And I had it in my belt, and I come out of my tank one day and that thing went off, I threw that thing as far as I could throw it, down across the wood. Man, that thing'd ruin me. And I had the purtiest dagger you ever laid eyes on, you could shave with that thing, it was about two feet long.

    It was a short sword, and it had the handpieces on, it looked like gold, and a handle that looked like blue marble, it was a beautiful thing, and I carried that all the way through the war, and when we came to catch the boat back home, we stayed in tents, and they said, "Lay everything out on your bunk," and somebody stole it. There wasn't supposed to be nobody in there, but somebody knew I had that thing. That's the only thing I wanted to bring home. I loved that little sword so.

What was Klapkowski like?

   He was Polish. He'd run his mouth, you've heard of a motormouth. That's about the way he was all the time. And he'd stay high on something all the time. Drink everything he could get his hands on. And it made no difference who it was, if they got in front of him, he shot them. I was telling you about him shooting that woman with a .50 caliber machine gun, he shot her in the legs.

What were the circumstances of that?

   Well, we were making an attack on a town, you see, in formation, and I guess she, see, the Germans was in the town, and she was coming out of it and hiding in here. We come across this field, you know, attacking the town, and she got in the crossfire, and she jumped up and started running back towards the town, I guess to get behind a building or something.

   Lombardi chewed him out.

   Klapkowski's been to one reunion that I know of, and he got so drunk then they had to carry him out.

                                                                 Arlene La Mar

   I let him know that she was here (Grayson's daughter). We had to stay in the hospital two whole weeks, the doctor sent me and her home around the block, that's how far it was from the hospital but he wouldn't let me go, you know, with anybody driving the car.

   So, I tried to show her his picture at least once a day every day, and told her who he was, and where he was. And that one day he'd be home, and then we'd all get to have a lot of fun together. That was one of the main things I kept up was letting her see her daddy's picture, so when he did come home she went straight to him like he'd been there every day. She didn't even whimper, she just went with her little arms out just as hard as she could go. So she's been Daddy's baby ever since.

   One time she waved at a soldier downtown. He had on this uniform, and the windows on the car were down, and she stuck her head out and hollered, "Daddy!" loud enough for him to hear it. And so he turned around and waved at her, and then I had to try to explain to her that that wasn't him, but he'd be home before long. So this was a while before he came home, but she recognized the uniform, whatever, that he would be dressed that way.

How long before the war were you married?

   We got married on October 31st and you were inducted, what, about three, four weeks later?

                                                                Grayson La Mar

   I went to Benning, Fort Benning, Georgia, for training, and she come down there and stayed several weeks, in town, and I'd go back and forth, a lot of us guys did.

   One morning I come in and the company was out, and the first sergeant said one of the guys had the chicken pox, he said if we went in we wouldn't be allowed to go back to town. So we had the guy who had chicken pox throw us some more clothes out the window and we went on back to town.

   The same thing happened coming from maneuvers in Tennessee, we went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and she come down, well, she was living in Chester, South Carolina, with her daddy and mother, and I'd go up there on the weekends, the bus wasn't fifty miles. So I'd leave on Friday and come back Sunday night. The first sergeant put me on KP every weekend, so he caught me one morning, told me to check the bulletin board, I might be for something. So he put me down again for the weekend. So I went and told Captain Cary, he was our company commander then, I went in there and told him about my wife being in town, so he told the sergeant not to put me on KP no more, because my wife was there, and we were going overseas, and if I had a chance to be with her, to let me alone. Which I appreciated. And I never did pull KP no more after that. And the sergeant, he got shot in the knees the first day in action, he was standing up in a halftrack and a shell hit it.

Which sergeant was that?

   Spearman was the first sergeant.

   I know we had a lieutenant that busted me for not zeroing my gun in on something or other. I was a gunner at that time. There was shelling all the way around, and you've got to make a cross line in front of your barrel to zero the big gun in through the firing plug, and I wasn't going out there, with shells falling all around. You had to make a cross thing, it had a little notch there. So he busted me for that. So I was in Lombardi's tank. So Lombardi asked me what happened to my stripes, and I told him, and he said, "Well, he can't do that, you're working for me. Sew them back on." So I sewed them back on the next day.

You were a sergeant?

   No, I was a T-5. It's the same rank as a corporal.

When did you switch from being a gunner to a driver?

   When he busted me.

Did you ever sleep inside the tank?

   No, I fell asleep in front of one one time. When we was on a march, and we hadn't run into nothing, I forget now where we were going, but we were in a column. We stopped about two o'clock in the morning. Everybody got out, stretching around. Transmission area, you know, because it was warm, and I lay up against that thing, the next thing I know somebody was shaking me, "Get up, it's time to move out." I don't even remember falling asleep. See, you didn't have no lights. All you could see was the exhaust in front of you.

Do you remember the Saar crossing, into Dillingen?

   Yeah, we crossed the Saar and the Rhine. We'd build a bridge and the Germans would knock it out. Finally we got across. The Germans had the river, and the big towns, the railroad, zeroed in. You couldn't cross in the daytime. In fact, we was in one town, I don't remember the name of it, and there was a big railroad yard there, we got across that, and the Germans had an 88 zeroed in on the railroad, and we stayed there 14 days.

Was that the town where the slag heap was, Maizieres?

   It could have been, I don't recall. Anyway, we had to sleep in that basement for 14 days and pull guard at the tank. I'd been setting up there with the 50-caliber machine gun, and I couldn't see my hand that close in front of me. When it's dark in Germany, it's dark. It's not like it is here. I guess it would be if there wasn't no lights. And the infantry would be coming by, they'd say "Don't fire on us, we're going to get our C rations."

   I know one of the infantry guys was out, it was in the daytime, he started running across the tracks with a box of C-rations, and a big shell hit him, and he just, like you spilled a cup of coffee out.

   They had this thing zeroed in, and you couldn't stick your nose out the side of the building, they'd trim it off. If they had any smart officers, with any sense, they'd have whipped us, two or three times. They just didn't have the maneuvers, and the fact they didn't know enough about German warfare to really get in a fight. See, we trained all the way through. In Germany, I don't think they trained like the Americans did. They drove us in the ground with that stuff. They knew what we had to do, you know. And we had some smart officers. And old Patton, he was one of them. We need a whole lot like him today.

What was he like. Did you ever see him in person?

   One time, close. We was overlooking this valley, and this column of Germans coming up the valley pulling artillery, all that stuff, you know. And you know, you've been on a high mountain, you know, and looking way down you see in the valley, and everybody's that deep in mud, it's been snow melting, and it's been raining and all that stuff. And he pulled up there and looked out down through there with his glasses, right beside of me, said "Let's back 'em up and move 'em out." And that's the first time I ever saw him and the last time. There's a lot of the other guys who got to see him.

Were you with the platoon when it liberated some prisoners from the 106th Infantry Division, who were captured at the Battle of the Bulge?

   We drove to, we got orders to go to the Battle of the Bulge. We left one evening about 2 or 3 o'clock. We drove all night long, got there the next morning about daybreak. And it was slick, ice, sleeting. You just touch your hand and that tank slid. You couldn't see, all you'd see when somebody'd let up on the gas, the backfire you'd see, that's the only light you had. And all the men in my tank I think were drunk, or asleep or something, I drove the whole way by myself, all night. And it'd sleet awhile, beating you in the face. You couldn't half see, you'd just have to feel your way around. And a lot of the roads over there was made out of brick, slate rock, and all that stuff, and with ice on them, we had plates and steel tracks, or rubber, either one, didn't have no effect. Of course, the thing weighed 44 tons, but it'd still slide.

You had the 44-ton tank?

   Yes, the last tank I picked up, it had a 76 gun, where the other was a 75.

Did you see much action in the Bulge?

   Not too much. They had done took it by the time we got there. See, all of us got there about the same time, but I think we drove the furthest anybody had to to get there. We were about 200 miles, I reckon, maybe when we got orders to go there.

                                                                     end of side

 

What was the most scared you were?

   After I got hit. All the boys carried tommy guns. I left my tank, I never did carry a gun. Of course, I may not go nowheres, just a couple of blocks, a little ways, but after I got hit -- before I got hit, mortar shell bursts, getting sprayed with machine guns, you know, I didn't pay no attention, no more than to popcorn popping. But after I got hit, I would flinch, which is natural. I'd always jump after that.

Do you remember the cold going up to the Bulge?

   You mean the weather. We pulled guard, your breath, you had your long johns on, I wore my o.d.'s, plus a combat suit and over that, and your breath would freeze, and your cap. Whatever you had put up over your face. That's cold weather. Of course, a lot of boys got their feet frostbite and all like that.

   Your bedroll and all that was tied on the side of the tank, which you never did get to use. I remember one time we had one guy, he got scared, that's when we was in the hedgerows, the hedgerows were about the worst thing we had going through. You'd be on one side and the Germans would be on the other side, and just a hedgerow between you.

   And those tanks, you hit a tree, a pretty good size tree, any type at all, it was like a matchstick. But you take a bunch of hedges and just locked, it's hard to knock something like that down. You could throw a track if you don't watch yourself, very easy. And some of the boys sleeping, or resting at the side of the tank, and this one guy, he got scared, he heard 'em, and throwed a hand grenade, hurt some of our own boys. Because he couldn't see. I guess he got scared. We hurt a lot of our own boys, got hurt by one another. Which was unnecessary. Of course, when we were going in formation, you've just got a 45-degree angle you could see through a little slit, and you'd run over people dead or wounded in the field, you couldn't tell if they was your men or who they was, you had to stay in formation, or then the other guy in the other tank would run into you. That was sad.

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