You Could Die Laughing

   Lately I've been putting together themed compilations of stories taken from my personal archive of some 600 hours of interviews with World War II veterans.

   One recurring theme in the interviews is the importance of a sense of humor to the combat soldier. Some things might not seem funny in retrospect, and others withstand the test of time, like the new lieutenant who instructs his company, "Hands on Place, Hips!"

   Bill Scheiterle was a young lieutenant in the assault wave on the island of Peleliu. "I don't ever have to worry about going to Hell because I've been there," he said when I interviewed him at the Eldred World War II Museum one Memorial Day. Then he told me an amusing story about one of the most horrific battles of World War II. He told his company that he had a bottle of brandy in his pack and when they got ashore he would break it open and they would all have a drink. However, a shell exploded nearby and as he lay face down on the beach, he heard one of his men shout "The lieutenant's been hit." Then he heard another voice shout "The heck with the lieutenant, get the bottle!"

   (Tragically, the bottle of brandy, along with Scheiterle's pack, was demolished, but the lieutenant was patched up on a ship and returned to action the next day.)

   Frank Bertram was a 19-year-old navigator when his B-24 was shot down during the ill-fated Kassel Mission bombing raid of Sept. 27, 1944. The Kassel Mission generated one of the great stories of closure to come out of World War II: In 1986 a monument was dedicated in Friedlos, Germany, with the names of all of the American and all of the German fliers (and a handful of civilians) who died in one of the most spectacular aerial battles of World War II. Some 600 people, including American and German survivors of the battle, attended the dedication. Afterward, Bertram was invited to a reunion of veterans of one of the German fighter squadrons that attacked the 445th Bomb Group that fateful day.
   The German veterans were boisterous, drank a lot of beer and smoked liked chimneys, and for a gavel, their president used the joystick of a Fokke-Wulf 190. Toward the end of the evening, Bertram asked to see the joystick that was used as a gavel. He turned it over, looked at its underside, and said "Hah, it says "Made in Japan."
   After a moment of stunned silence came the remark "Nein! Nein! Deutschland!" before his hosts realized he was making a joke, and burst out in laughter.
   These and many other stories, all of which are historical and some of which are hysterical, are included on the new audio double-CD, which is available in my eBay store, along with the many other audiobooks drawn from my oral history interviews.
   Mention the blog when you order a copy, and I'll include my other new individual themed CD, "Uphill Both Ways," with stories about the Great Depression. I'll have more about that in my next entry.
   Here are some excerpts from "You Could Die Laughing."

mp3 John Zimmer, a veteran of the 712th Tank Battalion, describes a visit to an elementary school.

mp3 Reuben Goldstein, a tank commander in the 712th, has a book autographed by a general. (From "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge")

mp3 Bob Hamant, a Marine who spent a year on the island of Tinian, describes an incident while unloading 90-millimeter shells from an ammunition ship. (From "Four Marines").

mp3 Frank Bertram, a navigator on a B-24 and former prisoner of war, tells of an invitation to a reunion of German fighter pilots. (From "The Kassel Cassettes," which is currently out of circulation while it undergoes some changes).

mp3 Bob Hamant recalls some playful goats on the island of Tinian that liked to pee on sleeping Marines.

NOTE: I produce these audio CDs from my personal oral history archives in small batches with paper labels. Because of this, it's important to keep them from excessive cold or heat, which could cause buckling of the label. It's recommended, if possible, to make a backup copy of each CD. Occasionally the CDs will skip in a car CD player while they play well in computers and regular CD players. I'm working on the problem, but if it should arise will make a full refund or send replacement CDs. Thank you, Aaron Elson

New in my eBay store:

You Could Die Laughing

Uphill Both Ways

New Improved "Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and Winning World War II"

 



 

Please visit the Oral History Audiobooks campaign

 



New and Improved: "Tales of Love, Food, Booze..."

Question: What's new and improved beside Palmolive dishwashing liquid, Dove bath bars, Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream and Chock Full o'Nuts coffee?
Answer: The new and improved, expanded audio edition of "Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and Winning World War II."

"Tales of Love, Food, Booze ..." was conceived in 2008, when Bear Stearns went under and the financial markets collapsed. Then-President George W. Bush issued the first $600 billion bailout of the financial industry. At the time, I was in the early stages of two years and five months of unemployment and figured I could use a bit of a bailout myself. Then it occurred to me that over the years I had interviewed numerous ex-prisoners of war, B-17 and B-24 crew members whose bombers were shot down over Germany; and paratroopers who were captured in combat. All of these men had, in effect, bailed out of airplanes. And so I decided to create my own bailout package.

That was in September of 2008. A few months later, I was digitizing my interview with Charles Feiler, who had been a dentist in the 101st Airborne Division. "Doc" Feiler, who served as a medic during the siege of Bastogne, had recently returned from the hospital and was medicated, which put him in a very good mood. His wife, Lillian, sat in on the interview, as did my neighbor Maurice Tydor, a 101st Airborne veteran who introduced me to the Feilers. Lillian Feiler was British, and had met her "Yank" in London between D-Day and Operation Market Garden. As I was listening to the story of how they met -- she described herself as a "kissless bride" because a day after they were married, Doc Feiler was restricted to base and then sent to Holland during Operation Market Garden, and Lillian didn't hear from her new husband for almost two weeks -- I realized it was Valentine's Day, and I thought I might make a themed audio CD with similar stories. Thus was born the CD "Tales of Love and War."

Next I thought of all the colorful dining and drinking stories I'd recorded over the years. Before you know it I had a CD for each, although the drinking CD has been expanded to two CDs, both of them 100 proof.

All that remained was a collection of stories about General Patton. Some of the veterans were yelled by Patton or witnessed someone else being chewed out by him. Others heard him give a speech or a pep talk and quoted it word for word nearly fifty years later.



And there you have it: Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and winning World War II, eight hours on eight themed CDs excerpted from my hundreds of hours of interviews with people of the World War II era.

Here are some audio excerpts, in mp3 form:

From "Love and War," Art and Ella Hary. Art was a veteran of the 712th Tank Battalion. He and his wife grew up in Hartford, Conn.

Art and Ella Hary

From "Food and War," Bob Hamant. Bob was a Marine on the island of Tinian. His interview is included in "Four Marines."

Bob Hamant

From "Booze and War," Joe Fetsch. Joe was a gasoline truck driver in Service Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. This story was recorded in the Hospitality Suite at a reunion of the battalion.

Joe Fetsch





From "Jumping Out of Airplanes," Hal Mapes. Hal was a waist gunner on a B-17 that was involved in a midair collision near Chartres, France. He was one of only two survivors of the crash.

Hal Mapes

From "Encounters With General Patton," Russell Loop. Loop was a gunner in the 712th Tank Battalion.

Russell Loop

 

Thanks for listening! The new and expanded "Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and Winning World War II" is available in my eBay store.

Coming soon: "Stories of the unusual and bizarre, faith in a foxhole, and humor in uniform"

And be sure to watch for the April release of my new book "The Armoured Fist," published by the new and exciting British imprint Fonthill Media. Email me at aelson.chichipress@att.net if you'd like information about ordering advance copies. Thanks, Aaron Elson.

P.S.: Here are some more clips from "Food and War."

Here are some clips from the audio CD "Food and War," which is included in the audiobook "Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and Winning World War II."

Track 1 (Water) Reuben Goldstein

Track 2 (Menus) Corman Bean

 Track 3 (The March) Hal Mapes

 Track 4 (Rattlesnake) George Bussell

 Track 5 (Rations) Tony D'Arpino)

 Track 6 (Stealing beer) Bob Hamant

 Track 7 (Ham) Valentine Miele

 Track 8 (Potatoes) Tony D'Arpino, Reuben Goldstein

 Track 9 (Avez vous des 'erfs') George Bussell





Shipmates Lou Putnoky and Yogi Berra

Lou Putnoky and Yogi Berra at the Berra museum

   Every now and then I get a call from Lou Putnoky of Carteret, N.J. He gets nostalgic, usually on a Sunday, especially since his wife, Olga, passed away two years ago. We chat for a while and he tells me what a wonderful thing it is that I'm preserving all these veterans' memories, and I try to tell him without the veterans themselves and their courage and experiences, there would be nothing to preserve, all I do is poke a little tape recorder microphone in their face and ask a couple of questions. I try to tell him that, but he wants no part of it.
   Lou is a World War II Coast Guard veteran, and was a radio operator on the USS Bayfield, the flagship of the Utah Beach invasion fleet. The Bayfield also took part in the invasion of Southern France, as well as the battles in the Pacific for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and he is one of the many veterans who witnessed, albeit from a distance, the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
  One of the highlights of Lou's time in the service was having served on the same ship as Yogi Berra, which leads me to a story that is kind of sad in a way. Lou lives in New Jersey and expressed a desire to meet Berra again, so about a decade ago, when I was still working for a newspaper in New Jersey and there was some kind of publicity event at the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, I invited Lou to come with me, and he got to chat with and have his picture taken with Berra. That isn't the kind of sad story, and I can't find the story in the transcript of my conversation with Lou that I used in my book "A Mile in Their Shoes: Conversations With Veterans of World War II," which means I must have edited it out because it was kind of sad, although in retrospect I should have left it in, which is why I'm relating it now, secondhand.
   After the war was over, Lou was a big fan of Yogi Berra, and regaled his son with tales of their shenanigans on the stern of the Bayfield, the stern being, in Lou's words, "where all the action was." One day, when his son was perhaps seven, Lou decided to take him to Yankee Stadium to see if he could introduce him to Berra. They arrived early and were watching batting practice. Lou took his son down to the railing and told an usher he'd been a shipmate of Yogi Berra's, and asked if he could give Yogi a note. Lou said the usher must have been a veteran, because he nodded understandingly.
   He saw the usher walk over to Berra and hand him the note, and he thought he saw Yogi nod. Then Yogi began walking in his direction, and Lou was going to get the chance to introduce him to his son.
   Just then Lou saw Casey Stengel come out of the dugout and walk over to Berra, and the two of them turned and went into the dugout.
   End of story. Now tell me that isn't a little bit sad. But Lou's face lit up when I brought him to see Berra at the museum.
   Here's an excerpt from my interview with Lou, in which he talks about Berra on the ship, and rationalizes the fact that Berra never attended a reunion of the Bayfield crew:

Aaron Elson: What can you recall about Yogi Berra?

Lou Putnoky: Yogi Berra is a very, very bighearted, very nice, quiet individual. I reluctantly use the term simple, good. If he wasn't that way, he would be the first one to be at the reunion, I'm a hundred percent certain he would go. Because he would feel uncomfortable being there, especially being a celebrity.  He was a coxswain on one of the rocket boats. He was attached to the admiral's staff, so we had, maybe the staff brought, let's figure they brought maybe a hundred men to supplement the crew of our 500 crew with them, and Yogi Berra was attached to Admiral Moon's staff. And Yogi latched onto our particular group because that's where the action was, on the stern of our ship. There was always something going on, and he said to us that the admiral was such a nice man. He said that when he was in England, he would be able to recognize, with thousands of sailors, he was able to recognize men and he would stop his car, his jeep with the two stars, because he knew that they were going back to the ship, and he would pick up seamen that were part of his ship. He didn't know them by name but he knew them by looks, and he would pick them up in the staff car, which was very unusual. But this was the kind of man he was, very well-liked. It upset everyone of course when they found out he committed suicide, it really shook us to the core, at the time.

But Yogi was very personable. And of course it always comes up in conversation when you had new people, "What did you do? What are you gonna do after the war? What did you do before the war, whatnot," and he said "Oh, I played ball, at Norfolk, in the minors." And we looked at him, with his bandy legs, and of course that shit-eating grin that he had, what the hell kind of ballplayer, are you pulling our leg? Were you a batboy or something, just like we're talking now. And of course we never paid much attention. He skipped over it, he didn't elaborate on it too much. It would come up every now and then, and we would kid him about it. Nothing serious. And then after the war I'm looking through Life magazine and I see his picture. I recognize his picture. I knew him as Larry Berra, not as Yogi Berra, and I said, "Larry, good God, he did play ball," and he was a fantastic, phenomenal ballplayer. He could hit any kind of wild, crazy wild pitch, you never knew what the hell he was gonna hit.

Other than that, during Normandy I remember him pulling alongside our ship with his rocket boat, and I know, like everyone else, he was deathly scared. Once they let go all their rockets, and they come back and any other assignment that they might have for his craft.

- - -



   Got Kindle? Or the free downloadable Kindle reading app for PC, Tablet or Smartphone from Amazon? "A Mile in Their Shoes" is available today and tomorrow, Oct. 15 and 16, for a free download of its Kindle edition, and it's only $2.99 after that. Or read my full interview with Lou Putnoky here.

- - -

From Oral History Audiobooks:

The Tanker Tapes

From D-Day to the Bulge

The D-Day Tapes

From Chi Chi Press:

Tanks for the Memories

A Mile in Their Shoes

Got Kindle?

Conversations With Veterans of D-Day

Nine Lives: An Oral History

They Were All Young Kids

 

　



Gold Out of a Dollar

Recently a researcher from England contacted me. He's working on a documentary about Omaha Beach for the Discovery Channel. He said the author Joe Balkoski ("Omaha Beach: D-Day, June 6, 1944") told him I might be able to give him some information about the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion.


Chuck Hurlbut, one of the veterans in my book "9 Lives," was an engineer with the 299th, whose job was to blow up the obstacles on Omaha Beach. Balkoski found Hurlbut's story on my original web site, tankbooks.com, and wanted to know if I had more information on the battalion. I made a copy of a tape I recorded in 1998 and sent it to him.

It's not a tape I was especially proud of, as it was recorded in a mall atrium with a noisy waterfall in the background.

Chuck invited me to Ithaca, N.Y., to interview him in 1998. While I was there, he organized a group interview with four of his fellow veterans from the 299th. The original members of the battalion were all from upstate New York, towns like Auburn and Ithaca and Syracuse, Skaneateles and Buffalo. Yes, Virginia, there is a Skaneateles. These men grew up together, went to school together, were in the same outfit, and many still lived in the region.

We found a table in the mall and I planted my tape recorder in the middle.

After about an hour, the group headed to a nearby Holiday Inn for lunch, and I continued to record the conversation. One moment they would be talking about Omaha Beach, another about fallen comrades, another they would be gossiping about veterans who weren't there, then they would shift to the Battle of the Bulge. It was your typical conversation when a group of veterans get together.

Due to the excessive background noise and the fact that even though they introduced themselves, it would have required major concentration to identify who was speaking, I never transcribed the tape.

Now, 12 years later, Balkoski recommended to another researcher that he contact me about the tape. I told him I'd transfer it to CD and send it to him. While doing so, I listened to it, and discovered a gem of a story.

The story is kind of gross, so if you've a sensitive streak in you, you may want to skip the rest of this item. There was way too much background noise -- at least two conversations going on at once and some kind of singing group rehearsing loudly in the next room -- so I've chosen not to create an audio file, although the speaker, Sam Trinca, was very animated and I doubt that the written word can recapture that animation. And while some might doubt the veracity of the story, thinking perhaps Sam was slightly embellishing it, which he may have been, I've heard similar stories from combat veterans told in more somber and reflective settings.

At one point, the conversation turned to brothers. One of the 299th veterans had two brothers in the service during World War II, and one of them was killed. He remarked that he didn't learn of his brother's death until two months after the war in Europe was over.

At which point Chuck remarked, "Sammy, you met your brother over there, didn't you?"

"Speaking of brothers," Sam Trinca said, "now that you mention it, my brother was, oh, he had a job! He was in the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force) headquarters. He was doing the payrolls of all us guys. That's how he found out where I was. By looking at the records, he found out that I was in Nuremburg.

"I was pulling guard duty at the house we were staying at. All of a sudden a jeep pulls up and my brother gets out. He's all dressed up, and here I am all dirty, like a bum. I look at him, he looks at me, I said, "What the hell, I must be dreaming." So we took pictures that day. And he asked the sergeant, "Could you let Sam go for a couple or three days?"

"Ahhhh," the sergeant says, "I don't know."

"Jeez," my brother says, "we haven't seen each other for three years."

"Wellll, go ahead, you can go," he says. "So I didn't even bother changing. I had the clothes I had on. I jumped in the jeep and we took off, and their headquarters is Salzburg, Austria. He took me down there. A guy comes out, opens the jeep, my brother walks right in the hotel, service with smiles. Now the guy looks at me as if to say, "What the hell's this guy doing?" He says, "Jesus, you need a bath."

"Thank you very much. What is a bath?"

So he took me up, I don't know if it was the second or third floor, the guy says, "Here's where you sleep."

I look at the place. It's a hotel. Sheets. Beautiful bed, clean bed.

"What?" I says. "Do I sleep here?"

"Yeah, that's your room."

At this point, Chuck interjected: "You died and went to heaven."

"I took a shower," Sam said. "Nice. They gave me some clean clothes. Then it was time for mess. So we all went downstairs. We went down to big tables, all sitting down, they're all eating, and the guys I was sitting down with, my brother's next to me, and all the rest of the guys were shooting the bull, this and that, and I took it all in. And all of a sudden they put the food on the table.

"'Jesus! Is that all we get? They give us the same old food all the time, god damn!' They're all bitching. "'What? Again we gotta eat this good food?' I mean, Food! FOOD! We ate our K rations and C rations, that was food! This was like giving you gold out of a dollar. I looked at that food, Wow! And these guys were all bitching. I says, "Why you..." I spoke up. "Why you rotten sonofabitches," just like that I told them, "You guys don't even know what the hell you're talking about." I says, "You're bitching about that food?" I says, "How would you like to eat on top of a dead body with maggots coming out of the body?" I says, "and eating C rations if you're lucky you got it." I just sat down, I says, "Thanks, fellas." I ate like a pig. "Thank you very much fellas, now get the hell outta here. I don't give a damn what you think." To me, that was food! For the first time in two years, man, chicken ... vegetables ... hot stuff. I'll tell you, I was in heaven."

When the researcher called me, I told him I'd try and locate a couple of veterans of the 299th for him. I found a listing for a Santa Trinca in Auburn, N.Y., and left a message on the answering machine. I thought Santa might be an old-world name shortened to Sam. A short while later Santa Trinca called me back; it was Sam's widow. She told me Sam had died in 2007. She told me they were married after the war, but that they were married for, it might have been 59 years. She remarked on how close the veterans of the 299th were, they got together all the time, and how there were so few of them left. She provided me with the names and phone numbers of two who were still living, and I passed them on to the researcher.

The documentary will be on the Discovery Channel, I presume sometime around June 6th of this year. I'll be at the Reading (Pa.) World War II weekend that weekend. Hopefully, somebody will tape it for me.