A funny thing happened on my way to the bestseller list

This blog post is brought to you by Oral History Audiobooks

 



   I've had some interesting experiences promoting my books and audiobooks. A couple of years ago, at the Greenwood Lake air show, where I was displaying my audiobooks, to the right of my table was Dutch Van Kirk, the navigator on the Enola Gay; and to my left were two Tuskegee Airmen. I felt like a history sandwich.
   Then today, as my Amazon Kindle e-book edition of "A Mile in Their Shoes," which I made available for a two-day free download promotion (today, Feb. 25 and tomorrow, Feb. 26), was climbing the ranks of free Kindle books in the History category, I found my book at Number 38, just below, at No. 37, the Gettysburg Address. Pretty cool company, if you ask me.
   Then something caught my eye. It was the stars signifying the reviews of the free edition of the Gettysburg Address; there was only an average of four and a half stars for 53 reviews. So I looked a little closer and discovered there were three one-star reviews. How could anybody trash the Gettysburg Address? Fortunately, only one of the one-star reviews was from some reprobate who probably has a Confederate flag hanging in his trailer. A more reasonable one follows, although still nobody should give the Gettysburg Address a rotten review, I mean, now I don't feel so bad about the handful of trashy reviews my own books have gotten, I'm in some pretty good company. Anyway, here's the review of the free edition of the address that I just mentioned:

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful

A review of Format, Not This Amazing Speech, January 19, 2012

By

Pam T "mom,wife,fur-mom"

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Gettysburg Address (Kindle Edition)

There are surely many who would like to own a copy of the Gettysburg Address. Read with an understanding of the times, one can't help but be moved by the eloquence of Lincoln's words, and the careful crafting that made this one short speech, so memorable.
What I am reviewing here is the Free "Vanilla Electronic Text" version of the speech which is available for Kindle. Though serviceable, I can't recommend it. For whatever reason, the publishers have chosen to replace commas with elipses. So that you get:
Quote:
Now we are engaged in a great civil war ... testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated ... can long endure.
REALLY?!?
Available elsewhere, for free.
Pam T~
mom/history lover

 

This blog post is brought to you by Oral History Audiobooks

Southbound Winnie and Southbound Peggy



The B-26 on which tail gunner John Sweren flew 58 missions.

   When Stephen Ambrose wrote that he felt like he developed post traumatic stress syndrome just by interviewing all the World War II veterans that he did, I thought, "What a crock." But I can understand where he was coming from, and I'm sure he was exaggerating a bit. And while I would never claim to have anything close to PTSD, some of the interviews I've done are veritable emotional roller coasters, going from laughing out loud to getting all choked up and vice versa.
   One such interview is the subject of my new Kindle publication, "Merry Christmas in July," an edited transcript of my conversation over two days in Mesa, Arizona, in 2009 with John Sweren.
   John's B-26 took a direct hit on July 28, 1944, and the tail section broke off with him in it. He managed to bail out, was captured and became a prisoner of war. One of the stories he told was how in Stalag Luft IV, he read a book called "Ordeal by Hunger," about the Donner party. Most of the other people in his room in the prison compound read it as well. When he was on the long POW march across Germany in February and March of 1945, he was so hungry one night that before going to sleep he told his buddy Lloyd Alexander that if Lloyd should wake up in the morning missing an arm or a leg, he'd know where it went. He meant it as a joke, but when he woke up his buddy was nowhere to be found, and he never saw him again. That should be humorous, but it always haunted John that his friend must have taken him seriously.
   John tells the story better than I do, which is why, when possible, I prefer to present the stories I record in the veterans' own voices or in their own words.
   The audio of John's interview is available from audible.com in a three-interview set titled "March Madness," and now the transcript is available from Amazon for its Kindle e-book reader.
   Here's an excerpt:

Aaron Elson: What about the first time you shot down a German fighter?

John Sweren: First time? I think it was an ME-109. They circled, and I opened fire before he did, and whether he fired or not I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you, there was so much debris in the air there when I hit it, and I didn’t know whether I hit it but they claimed I did, because in a box, you have six planes, three up here and three a little bit lower. So I’m not the only one that’s got a gun. Other people see the plane also. But that’s why I got a couple planes shot down and one probable. But when the plane was hit that I thought I hit, they claimed I hit it, and it just flipped over and down it went.

But, this is not my idea, on a .50-caliber machine gun there’s a buffer plate on the back with a cylinder on the buffer plate, probably two inches long or two and a half inches long, a Micarta disk, plastic kind of, so when the bolt would come back for the recoil – this was none of my idea but somebody said well, they put nickels in there. So I got some nickels from home, I sent for them. I put them in there, and every fifth bullet is a tracer, okay, when you shot, it looked like all tracers. The recoil was three times as fast with the nickels in there, because we’d come back sometimes, my boxes were almost empty.

Aaron Elson: So it would speed up the rate of fire?

John Sweren: Yes.

Aaron Elson: So the tracer was almost constant.

John Sweren: Yes. And I was, I don’t know who told me this, nobody followed up on it but I did, and my crew chief says, every time we came back he’d change the barrels, he says, it looks like a shotgun, no land and no grooves in there.

Aaron Elson: Because the heat was melting the ...

John Sweren: I didn’t know what it looked like too much in the daylight time, but one evening we had a late mission, and boy, I’ll tell you, in the dark, it looked like every bullet was a tracer. But that was my experience. Everybody didn’t do it but I did it, because somebody told me to put nickels in there, so I sent home to the United States and they sent me three rolls of nickels. I think I gave some to somebody else.

Aaron Elson: Would you have to replace the nickels?

John Sweren: They stayed in there all the time. The Micarta disk looked like kind of a rust color, about the same size as a nickel, but evidently there was some sponge there, give there, nickels, snap, snap, snap, so I know every mission the crew chief would check the barrels, wanted to know if I used it.

Aaron Elson: Now you had two kills and three probables, no?

John Sweren: No, I think two kills and one probable.

Aaron Elson: What was the second one like?

John Sweren: The second one was, we were, we always flew different boxes, had three boxes, you’d have a high box, a middle box and a lower box. The lower box was kind of a Purple Heart box. And I think the second one we were in the low box, and the plane kind of circled. I lost track of it, and it came up from kind of underneath and made a 90-degree turn and started firing. Of course my rapid fire I think got him, but he just, just a flash of light, that’s all, I couldn’t tell, I blew it up. But, uhh, but after that happened, I said a little prayer, God bless the guy, he was in the war just like I was, fighting for his country, and I felt sorry for what happened. It was either him or me. Or us.

Aaron Elson: Even though he was trying to kill you, you didn’t feel anger?

John Sweren: Well, I guess I felt anger at the time, but after it exploded, the anger went away and I felt sorry for him and his family, or loved ones. That was me mostly, I don’t know what the group that I was in, my acquaintances, my crew, and even other people that were on different aircraft, after the briefing, the woman pours drinks for you and then, at first I thought boy that’s got to be cocktail hour. They had a purpose for it, to loosen you up and you’d talk. But get to the barracks, and communications was very, we hardly ever talked about what happened. The people in my barracks, everybody kind of talked about something else. We played a little cards, we’d play on this guy’s bed, and we had some plastic cups there and we’d have a drink. Not everybody drank, but I did, quite a bit. Well, I came from a family that, we always had booze on the table and milk, nothing else, and my father said “Take your choice,” but I never drank anything until after the war. I didn’t know what liquor did to you but it does relax you. It put me to sleep a lot of times, because I’d have two or three drinks, and you could feel it, so I’d sleep pretty good. If I didn’t have anything to drink I’d toss all night, and dream about this and that.

Aaron Elson: You’d dream about the missions, in England?

John Sweren: Yes.

Aaron Elson: Now tell me about the time, Brett was telling me outside, that you had a couple of drinks and you fell asleep in a shelter and you woke up and the roof had collapsed on top of you, in London.

John Sweren: Well, it was not in a shelter, it was a house. This was in Rumford, England, probably around 75 kilometers from the base. I rode my bicycle that far. Seventy five kilometers is a guess on my part. So you’d see a sign in this yard, “room for rent.” I saw two of them and I saw this bigger house. I rang the doorbell or knocked, and they said yes, come on in. I introduced myself. Then I went kind of into Rumford, and I think into London maybe, London I think it was, and they had dog races. And all these guys up there, well, you’ve got to bet on so and so and so and so. I had a little paper there, a program, of the horses, I mean the dogs that were running, so I went up there. I already picked them out, Southbound Winnie and Southbound Peggy. I chose Southbound Winnie to come in first and Southbound Peggy to come in second, and it was just the opposite. They both came in. And, I don’t know, at that time the British pound was $4.05 US, so I had a whole sack full of money. They had a bar there, and of course I was drinking, and there was a flower shop. Before I got there I bought some flowers to take to the place where I was staying. There were two ladies there, a grandma and her daughter. So I bought flowers for them. Oh, they’ve got a tub there, I put the flowers in this tub. So after the race, I went to the counter and got my money, I don’t know how many pounds I had but quite a bit, maybe about four hundred dollars worth, so I got on this bus, and from the bus I got a cab, and I was pretty loaded.

I stumbled into the house there, and I brought the flowers in. On the way up the stairs, they had a beautiful vase, I knocked it down and broke it. And I said, “Ohhhh, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. That’s okay.”

So they took me into bed, brought me some tea and some little cookies, and I passed out. Boy, I’d drank quite a bit, or it hit me a lot. So morning came, and I felt like there was lead on top of me. I opened my eyes, and I see daylight through the roof. It was all plaster on me. A buzz bomb had exploded nearby. How I made it I’ll never know, but after it was all over, the two ladies, I think one was 72 and the daughter was fifty something, she’d lost her husband in the war, so they thought I was gone because when they escaped out of the house, well, after it was all over there’s a little blank there in my mind, but when they came back, she said, “Johnny, the vase would have been broken anyhow.” She said “I’d sooner have you break it than doggone it, the Krauts.”

   (With special thanks to Christian Levaufre and Brett Schomacher, both of whom made my interview with John Sweren possible)

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"Merry Christmas in July" is available in the Amazon Kindle store. If you order it, please think about leaving a review.

John Sweren, center, at the dedication of a monument in 2005 where his plane crashed in Fierville-Bray, France.



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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

Please help Oral History Audiobooks grow





Darrell Petty Part 1: Machine Gun Hill

Darrell Petty

   I met Darrell Petty, of New Castle, Wyoming, at the 1997 reunion of the 90th Infantry Division in Omaha, Nebraska. My tape recorder must have missed the beginning of our conversation, but at the start we were talking about the division's crossing of the Moselle River in November of 1944. The river was at flood stage, and the infantry got across two or three days before the first tanks were able to cross on a bridge. The fighting was intense, and the infantry was at risk of being pushed back into the river when the tanks finally did get across.

   From there the conversation turned to the division's second crossing of the Moselle, in March of 1945, under greatly different circumstances.

 

 

Darrell Petty, G Company, 358th Regiment, 90th Infantry Division
 
Omaha, Neb., Sept. 1997

　 Darrell Petty: ...Anyway, it didn’t sound like a German tank. But imagine that sucker coming around that corner into view, the first thing I saw was the end of the barrel on that muzzle break, I thought, oh, man, they got tanks behind us. Boy, I was sure glad to see that old white star shining on that sucker, I’ll tell you. It made a whole bit of difference, I’ll tell you.
Aaron Elson: They got one platoon of tanks across the Moselle, just in time from what I understand.

Darrell Petty: Well, I’ll tell you. It was a lot different the second time I crossed it. I crossed on a bridge. But then we ran into quite a firefight on Hill 451.

Aaron Elson: Where was that?

Darrell Petty: We were supposed to be in reserve. F Company had pulled up on the line and we were in reserve, and we left, I can’t think of the name of that town, just right on the banks of the Moselle on the other side. We billeted in houses. We took over houses, we felt pretty secure by that time in the war. So we started marching up in reserve, and we could hear digging. We knew somebody was digging in, but we didn’t know who. And we went up a hill, a pretty damn steep hill, and a guy by the name of Gene Miller and I, we helped another guy up. His name was Prey. He was a private first class, and if I knew then what I know now he was having a heart attack. But we didn’t know it. He carried a little 536 radio. I was packing that, and they’re pretty heavy those little devils. And Miller was packing his M-1 rifle. We were lightening the load up for him as much as we could. And just the day before that we’d chopped his hair off, it had gotten long, it looked like the devil.
   But anyhow, we got to the top of the hill, then we sat down for a break. We could still hear these guys digging in, whoever it was, and it turned out it was F Company. And we were just setting there, and about that time here comes a machine gun burst.
   The Germans shoot white tracers, ours were orange, so we knew that it was definitely German. By the sound and by the tracers, they shot just about twice as fast as our Brownings did. And man, we whirled around and headed for cover. And this kid, this Pfc. Prey, he let out a groan and collapsed. We figured he was hit. We got over the hill and then hollered "Medic!" And a guy by the name of Doc Roberts, Thomas Roberts, a field medic but everybody called him Doc, he came up, and he and I crawled out there to Prey. We got ahold of him and dragged him back behind cover. And he was gone. And he had a classic look of a person with a heart attack, in his face, the coloration of his face. We tried to find where he was hit. We couldn’t find any blood. He didn’t have a bullet mark on him. He died of a heart attack. And we lost him. He was the only dead one. We had some wounded. And Lieutenant Colonel Cleveland A. Lyttle was leading us, he was the battalion commander, and he went right up that hill with us.
   All we know is they said there were machine guns on the hill, well, that was standard. If we’d have known what was on it we probably wouldn’t have tried it. They pinned F Company down and they had killed 25 men in F Company and wounded some others. There were five companies of German SS, they were dug in, and they had 40 ground type machine guns on that hill. And F Company had just buggered into them. They weren’t supposed to be there, by all the reports there was nothing there. And Lyttle came up and he said, "We’ve got this hill to take, it’s got some machine guns on it, we’re gonna take it."
   Okay. F Company’s pinned down. So, we called in artillery, everything they had, and boy, they were tossing them in there close to us. So we had to go down the hill, under trees. And we had to cross the valley, that’s where they pinned F Company down.
   We went through F Company, and we headed up that hill. But when we got underneath that canopy where we could look up under there, man, it looked like an anthill. There were Germans running all over that hill. Well, hey, you couldn’t do anything but go forward. If we turned around and retreated, we’d have been just like F Company. So we just kept going, and they’d taught us use that march and fire, every time your right foot hit the ground, if you had a carbine you fired it, and we got good shooting from the hip. Heck, I could throw a small bucket out and fire when I throw it and hit it five, six times out of eight out of that M-1 Garrand. And that’s the way we went up that hill. And that colonel, he went up the hill with us. Our watches were all synchronized when the artillery was gonna stop, so we knew what time to hit the hill. And when we got to the top, we only took one German prisoner.

Aaron Elson: Just one?

Darrell Petty: One. He was a sergeant, spoke English, and he said, "You damned Americans are crazy. You don’t know how to fight a war." He said, "When you’re fired on with full automatic weapons you’re supposed to hit the ground and take cover. That other unit did and you guys didn’t. You just kept coming at us. We couldn’t get our heads up to shoot back straight." And it made "Army Hour," and was broadcast all over the free world.

Aaron Elson: You know, that’s what they told me. I’ve met some of the Germans who fought there, in one of the villages, and one who spoke English said the Americans didn’t know how to fight.

Darrell Petty: Oh yeah. He said we took war for sport, because we laughed at things. Sometimes it was either laugh or cry, so we laughed. And by golly, it’s an awful thing to say, but we shouldn’t take prisoners, because if you stand there guarding that prisoner you’re gonna get shot. And some, most of them tried to fight, but a few tried to surrender. You couldn’t stand there and guard him because you’re going to get shot. Plus we needed everybody up the hill. So you just had to do what you did.

Aaron Elson: The Germans on top of the hill, were they killed by the infantry or by the artillery?

Darrell Petty: Infantry. We took a kid by the name of Speaks, he had a B.A.R., and I had an M-1, and old Thomas [Doc Roberts] was like a squad leader. He was right up there on the front end of that thing with us, that medic, and by golly, we overran the CP, the command post up there, and a full German colonel came out of there and his cadre, and they were running and we opened up on them with a B.A.R. and that M-1 and it just folded them up. There was one still alive, and Roberts went down and was gonna try to help him, and I heard a Schmeisser bolt click and I hollered "Doc! Look out!" I looked up the hill and he was taking aim on old Doc, and Doc just fell down among the bodies and he sprayed him and he finished killing the German, but he didn’t get Doc. And about that time Speaks and I opened up on him, with the B.A.R. and the M-1.
   He was gonna kill Doc, and Doc was trying to help a German, wounded. He killed the German, and Doc fell in behind the bodies and he didn’t get him. Then we nailed that guy. And my M-1 was so hot it wouldn’t quit firing, it was setting itself off. And on the way up, a kid by the name of Phyllis, in F Company...

Aaron Elson: Phillips?

Darrell Petty: Phyllis, just like a girl’s name, his last name was Phyllis. He was mad, and he jumped up, and he said, "I’m going with you!" He went through basic with us, this other kid and me.

Aaron Elson: He was from F Company?

Darrell Petty: Yes. And he shouldn’t have even went with us, but he did. And halfway up the hill I got a bunch of machine gun bullets through the pant leg, and they cut him down. And I thought my leg was gone, it felt like somebody knocked it off. I looked down, it was still working, it was okay. But if he hadn’t went with us, a kid out of Prescott, Arizona, by the name of Billy Bacon and I, we would have run out of ammunition halfway up the hill. We went back and got his ammunition and finished it up, and when it was done I had 18 rounds left. We split it, and I had 18 rounds left, and we were expecting a counterattack. We were setting there with dang little ammunition, but as it turned out, this German sergeant, he'd seen what was going on and he played dead, he smeared blood on his face and lay there. When we discovered he was alive, Lieutenant Kelso said "I want to talk to him," because old Sergeant Will was about to kill him. Lieutenant Kelso said, "I want to find out what they’re doing here." As it turned out, they were supposed to let us bypass them, and then they were going to hit us from the rear that night, and the 11^th Panzer was going to hit us from the front. And when we found out, we called artillery in on where the 11^th Panzer was gonna come in and we foiled the whole thing.
   We were put in for a presidential unit citation for that. And it was on Army Hour, broadcast all over the free world. And I have the little article, I’ve got it at home, where it says Colonel Lyttle and G Company of 358 outmaneuvered and destroyed five companies of German SS, and I’ve had people look at me about those holes. I had seven holes in the pant legs. And my officers tried to figure out how they could miss my leg and make those holes. And I got a letter from a buddy that was there, he got married after we came home, and he said, "I sure would like to have you meet my wife. I’ve been telling her all about you and what we did over there." Then he said, "Well, not quite everything." But he said, "I even told her about the seven holes in your pant leg."

Aaron Elson: Now, the German sergeant that was captured, he had smeared blood on his face?

Darrell Petty: He'd seen what was happening. He saw we weren’t taking any prisoners, his comrade was dead, and he just got some blood and smeared it on his face.

Aaron Elson: Was he wounded at all?

Darrell Petty: Not touched. He just lay down and played dead.

Aaron Elson: And somebody was going to shoot him, and then who said that they wanted to talk to him?

Darrell Petty: Sergeant Will was gonna kill him, and Lieutenant Kelso, he was our executive officer, he hollered at him, "Will, don’t you kill him, I want to talk to him."

Aaron Elson: And after they talked to him, then what happened?

Darrell Petty: Then he went back to a prisoner of war compound. But, oh yeah, we called it Machine Gun Hill. We figured we were kind of justified in doing that. The official number is Hill 451.

(Coming soon: Darrell Petty, Part 2)

Read more interviews like this in "A Mile in Their Shoes," by Aaron Elson, available in our eBay store as well as at amazon.com (where you can order a "used" copy directly from the author at a discounted price). It is also available as an e-Book for Amazon's Kindle.

- - -

From Oral History Audiobooks:

Encounters With General Patton

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

　　

General Patton at the Crossroads

Suella and Russell Loop

   In my Oral History Audio CD "Encounters With General Patton," I included an anecdote related by Russell Loop when I interviewed him at his home in Indianola, Illinois, on Oct. 24, 1993.
   I might note that I almost didn't get to interview Loop, who, in his mid 70s at the time, was a farmer. I have somehow managed to get lost in almost every state in the nation. I even got lost in a parking lot, but if you've ever been to the Drawbridge Estate in Fort Mitchell, Ky., you might not be judgmental. And once in my travels when I was visiting my brother in Minneapolis and proceeded to visit a cousin in Madison, Wisconsin, I got off the highway to get a cup of coffee and managed to get back on headed west. The first few times I saw signs telling me how many miles it was to St. Paul, I thought, gee, I didn't know there was a St. Paul in Wisconsin.
   I can't think of a time, however, when I've been more lost than when I was on my way to visit Russell Loop and hs wife, Suella.
   He told me to get off the highway, look for a certain convenience store, take a road all the way to the end, make a right, and take that road to the end.
   This was farm country, and somehow the first road I took didn't end until I was probably in the next county, but what did I know, there was the end of the road and I made my right and drove for several miles until I finally came to a house with the number of Russell's house, and it's not like there were any streets signs along the way. I rang the buzzer, and a young couple with a baby came to the door. This must be Russell's son or daughter and grandchild, I thought. Except they had no idea who I was talking about. But they explained that Indianola was back the way I came, so I doubled back to the convenience store and called Russell, and this time I got it right.
   All that, of course, is not on the CD. What is on the CD is the part that follows my asking Russell "Did you ever see Patton, up close?"
   "Yes," he said. "Real close. We had just pulled up on a four-way crossroad, which was a hard road, and pretty nice roads for back that time. And we had not met any resistance there. But we had just pulled off and was waiting for further orders, and here comes Patton and his jeep, and his driver, and he just more or less walked by the officers and went around and shook hands and talked with nearly every one of the enlisted men. And while he was there, there was a German plane that strafed that crossroads both ways, twice. And he just looked up and said 'They must know I'm here.'
   "That's all he said, about that. But what he wanted to know was, 'Are you getting plenty to eat? Are you getting enough ammunition and gasoline? And is there anything that I can do to make it better?'
   "And of course we all said 'Yes, send us home.'" -- Russell kind of laughed when he said that -- "But I did, I got to shake hands with him on the front line.
   "He was I suppose by far the best officer we had. He got the job done. He didn't give them time to get set up and ready for us. He kept them out of bounds. And I think that was the whole deal, really, myself. I think that's the reason we got as far as we did as quick as we did. Of course, we were clear across Germany and Czechoslovakia when the war was over."

   Another time I got lost was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking for the home of Lex Obrient. Come to think of it, this one may even beat my search for Russell Loop, because I never did find Obrient's home; he lived in a cul de sac in one of the communities that seem to ring Albuquerque, and I drove around for a couple of hours before finally abandoning my quest. This, too, was in 1992 or 1993. I did keep in touch with Obrient's son, however, and in 1999 when I went out to Albuquerque to interview Vincent "Mike" McKinney, whose interview is included in my audiobook "The D-Day Tapes" and my Kindle book "Conversations With D-Day Veterans," I finally found Obrient's house.
   It wasn't until today, however, 13 years after that interview, while reviewing material for my forthcoming book "The Armoured Fist," which will be published by Fonthill Media, that I realized that Lieutenant Obrient (he later was a colonel with an engineering unit in Korea) was Loop's platoon leader for a while. Obrient was in D Company, the 712th Tank Battalion's so-called "light tank" company, while Loop was in C Company and my principal reason for interviewing him was because he was one of the tankers involved in the battle at Pfaffenheck, Germany, on March 16, 1945. But Loop started out as a gunner in D Company and later transferred to C Company's second platoon.
   As in many of my interviews, the subject of General Patton came up, and Obrient related one of the many colorful anecdotes I've been fortunate about front line encounters with Patton.
   "At Mortain," Obrient said, "my platoon was right there at the crossroads at Mortain. Lieutenant Godfrey's platoon went around where the cross-section was and he went down that way, and then Harry Coe (Eugene Godfrey and Coe were the other D Company platoon leaders at the time) went down even further. So we're sitting there, and just playing a flank guard for anything that was coming because they were getting ready to move the 2nd Armored, I was told, the 2nd Armored Division was getting ready to come through. But before that, here comes Patton down the road with his whole staff of officers, and three or four jeeps behind him. So he’s coming my way, and when I got up there and I reported to him, he returned it and said hi, and shook hands real quick, but he didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted to talk to my sergeants with the other tanks. And what he wanted to know was if they really understood what was going on. And he was very satisfied with what he heard. I mean, they told him, we’re here, and this is what we’re here for, and this is what we’re doing. He immediately left and I called on the radio and I told Gene about this. I said, 'Gene, you’re about to have some very special company. It won’t be more than two or three minutes.'
   And he said 'Thanks.'
   Sure enough, Patton went on down there, he talked to Gene, and he went down and talked to Coe, as I remember. But then we saw him come back. And then a funny thing happened. We got strafed. I don’t know how the Germans would have found this out, but I kind of feel like somebody had tipped them off that hey, I guess you couldn’t miss it, I mean gee, Patton with his brilliant, shiny helmet and dressed to perfection. Okay, that’s the second time I met Patton. I’m glad you brought that up. That’s what happened. Did Andy (Schiffler) tell you anything about that?"
   "No," I said. "You know who told me about that? Russell Loop. Do you remember him? He transferred to C Company, but he said that once Patton came up and spoke to the enlisted men. He was a sergeant, and you know, he bypassed the officers. So that would have to be the same, because he started out in D Company."
   "Russell Loop?" Obrient said.
   "Loop," I said, "From Indianola, Illinois."
   "Ah, yes, I remember him," Obrient said. "But you know something else that I don't know if Andy told you about, there was a woman there with her children in a house close by. And of course, this is one thing Patton insisted on, "Don’t you take any food from any of these people. You have what you need. Leave it alone." So I felt real sorry for this woman and her children. And we had fruit, we had some apples and we had oranges, and those children, they hadn’t seen any candy at all. Well of course all the candy we had was that D-bar, that highly concentrated chocolate, so I tried to tell her, listen, these are for your children, because I knew they hadn’t had any food there, I was told that they hadn’t had any oranges or apples, they didn’t know anything about any of that. And above all, they hadn’t had any chocolate. So I think Andy was one of them that gave her the chocolate.
   "So you know what she did? She was so grateful, she went and killed a couple of chickens, and boy, I thought, no ma’am, don’t do that, uh-uh. But she did anyway, and they came out there, and this is just before Patton showed up. So what we did, they had it on one of these oblong plates and cut up, I said 'Jesus Christ, we’re all gonna be in trouble.' So we took it, and thank God he didn’t get close enough to notice it, but we pushed it in under the bogey wheels and the track and covered it with jackets and so forth. Of course he wasn’t there long. Thank God he wasn’t. He just was in and out. So when he got out of there, I took that chicken and said, "Ma’am, please, for God sake, take that back, don’t do that." So we made her take it back. But if he’d have found out, I hate to think what would have happened. But he was real fast. He came up, and I bet he was gone in less than a minute and a half. But that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to talk to the sergeants and the other enlisted men that he could talk to.
   "So that’s the second time I saw General Patton, right there. The first time was on the hills in England, and then the second time I saw him was there. And then we saw him again up in the Battle of the Bulge, but I didn’t really get to say anything to him. I just saw him, and he went right on. It was fast. And then the last time I saw him, the war was over and we were in the theater at Amberg, and he came around and he talked oh, maybe ten, fifteen minutes, with as many troopers as could get in that theater. That was the last time I saw him, of course you know what happened to him after that at Mainz. No. Yeah, Mainz, that’s where it was [actually near Mannheim]. He was in his staff car and he was waiting for a train to go by, and these guys had been drinking, and they drove a two and a half ton truck into the back of him and broke his neck. You know that part, I’m sure."

   Watch for more information about and excerpts from my forthcoming book, "The Armoured Fist," from Fonthill Media. That's Armour with a "u" because Fonthill is a British publisher, besides, I do seem to have a small following in England and Australia, although I have no idea how Australians spell armor.
   My original Oral History Audiobook "The D-Day Tapes" is available from Amazon.com for download or on CD from eBay, and "Conversations With Veterans of D-Day" is available for Amazon Kindle.

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From Oral History Audiobooks:

Encounters With General Patton

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

　

'Who Needs It More, Him or Me?"

The Landsberg concentration camp memorial

Here is the story from my new book, "Conversations With Veterans of D-day," to which I referred in my previous post. Len Goodgal is a 101st Airborne Division veteran of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, whose I Company often fought near or alongside the fabled Easy Company of "Band of Brothers" fame. There but for a couple of letters you might have seen this story on HBO or read it in a bestseller.

I've included a little more of the interview. As I mentioned in the previous post, on D-Day Len landed in the water near the base of Pointe du Hoc and scaled the cliffs with the Rangers. This story occurs much later in the war.

  

Aaron Elson: You mentioned Landsberg Prison.

Len Goodgal: Yes, they liberated Landsberg Prison. I didn’t see the prison. I saw the prisoners. I’ve got an interesting story about that, because when we liberated Landsberg I was right outside the town. We were in a machine gun position with Eddie Austin, and we had three of these refugees with the stripes, you know what they looked like. They were Russian I think. I don’t know whether they were Jews or not, but they looked horrible. I mean, they looked nightmarish. And us guys, we were trying to feed them something. We had D-ration bars we were putting into our canteens and heating them with water, and we had some pickled eggs we used to find in the basement, and some bread that we grabbed from someplace, and a couple of things, I don’t know what the hell we had there, we’d find stuff in cellars.

These guys wanted something to eat, which we were trying to feed them, some of the cocoa. And this guy was shaking. Eddie Austin took his coat off and gave it to one of these guys. And Jesus, I almost flipped. I said, “Are you out of your mind? What are you doing? Giving away your overcoat?”

He said, “I can’t not give it to him.”

I said, “What do you mean you can’t? They’ll bust your balls for that.”

He said, “Who needs it more, him or me?” He or I. Him or me. “Who needs it more, he or I?” is correct. He said, “Who needs it more, him or me?” Eddie Austin was a superintendent of schools in California later on, but that’s besides the point. He knew what he was saying, “Who needs it more, him or me?”

“I don’t know, Eddie,” I said. “They’re gonna bust your balls.” Until my dying day I’ll never forgive myself for not giving the other guy my coat, but they weren’t shivering. This guy was really shivering. I didn’t feel bad. I said, “I think you’re out of your mind.” I said, “Eddie, what’s it gonna do for him? Put him in a house someplace and build a fire.” We had a fire going there. We fed them. They couldn’t eat the stuff, it was too rich for them. The Red Cross got ahold of these guys and took care of them. In fact, the Red Cross MPs came in to most of these camps. At Dachau they got in right away. They didn’t let us in. We went right past Dachau. I didn’t see them. I mean, they didn’t let them out of there. You would see guys roaming around if they did. We picked up a guy going through Germany, and he went all the way to Berchtesgaden with us, and the cook took care of him. Maurice. I don’t know what his last name is. He spoke about five languages. He’d been in a concentration camp for years. He was a skinny guy like that. And he had a horse and wagon, and anything he could steal he put in there. He and the cook were, I don’t know if they were chopping people’s rings, I don’t know what the hell they were doing, but they were getting enough loot to live for the rest of their lives. I mean, Maurice was helping him. And the cook used to carry a .45 pistol on him, I remember, all the time. And he was a pretty good guy, just gung-ho. Till he became the cook. How he got to be our cook, we had a guy named Feoli who was a cook and he shot his dick off in Holland because he fired his pistol while he was cleaning it. Feoli. He lives in New York State someplace. His .45 went off and it shot his dick off. I remember that, and oh, we laughed about that. Well, you know. What is it, pathos or something, I don’t know what the hell you call it. It’s funny as hell but when you think about it, in other words it’s not funny. Oh, it was brutal. We’d look at each other and laugh. “Don’t give me no pistol.” We used to pick up pistols, P-38s and Lugers and all different kind of weapons, Schmeissers and stuff. Most of them disappeared or we traded them along the way.

Some of the guys came back with them. Most of the guys didn’t even come back with a pistol, on account they were afraid they’d use them. Some of them just didn’t want to have them around. Weapons didn’t mean anything anymore. Glad it was over. But I remember us being in Solfelden, and they had horses there and we were horseback riding, German horses, and we used to go horseback riding in the afternoon or in the morning. They had guys that knew about horses taking care of them. To me it was a novelty. It was recreation. I was there from May, the war was over May 8^th, I was there from May till September, and hey, it was a walk in the sun being a soldier. Just imagine how we felt over there. Anything you wanted to do. If you wanted to fraternize, and you weren’t supposed to fraternize with the Germans – everybody had a girlfriend someplace. Everybody. I can tell you an interesting story. I read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, I don’t know if you’ve read it. You’ve got to read it. It’s brutal reading. You’ve got to read that book. And in it he talks about them returning slave laborers, women, back to Russia, and the Russians  sent them to Siberia. When I was in Berchtesgaden, we used to use them, they were working as cooks and stuff for us because, hey, the Germans don’t want them anymore, they got captured, were working in the fields at home, in the hotels, hey, so the government took care of them. Then one day they came along, they took them all, put them on trains and sent them back to Russia. Solzhenitsyn talked about them, taking those people and putting them in Siberia. And I didn’t know. I thought they were going home. And they didn’t really want to go home, a lot of them, because, hey, when you see Russia, what it was about, and you see what Germany was like in Bavaria, even with the work that went on. Hey, it was a better life in a lot of ways, and some of them lived with German guys.

We had thousands of troops surrender to us coming off the Russian front. They wanted us to turn around and fight the Russians. They came in with all their equipment, ready to fight. They would turn around and they were gonna fight with us. They put them in camps. We did not abuse them. They talk about starving them to death. Eisenhower did not do that. Whoever wrote that stuff is a brutal liar. We did not brutalize the Germans, although there was high unemployment among them, there was not work and all that. We did not starve them or brutalize them. We weren’t allowed to do that.

Aaron Elson: Back to Landsberg, was that a concentration camp?

Len Goodgal: Yes, it was a concentration camp there and a prison. Landsberg Prison is where Hitler got his start, I think, one of those places. They had the putsches there. Beautiful area. Berchtesgaden, and that area through there, is probably one of the most beautiful parts of the world. You have to go to see it to see, July and August, where’s it’s warm and sunny and the fields are growing, there’s snow on top of the mountains and it would melt and we’d come the next day and clouds would go over, there’d be snow on the mountains. A gorgeous, gorgeous countryside. And they kept it nice, too. The Germans are meticulous. Clean. You can’t believe that these people were Nazis, and how brutal they were. Committed all these brutal acts. When you know the people. Germany was a country of kinder, kirche, kuchen. Children, church and cooking, that’s what a woman’s job was. Children he made, women and children for the Reich, screw the church, and fuck the soldiers, you know. Hooray for Germany. Blond and blue-eyed, Hitler was a brown-eyed, black-haired sonofabitch, who the hell is he kidding? Blond hair and blue eyes? I mean, let’s face it, did he have blond hair? Did he have blue eyes? He had brown eyes and black hair. It was ridiculous. It was so ridiculous that you wonder how they put over what they did. And they put it over. They did it. They captivated the state, captured the times. They were in a Great Depression, saw no way out, were looking to blame somebody and anybody they could put their hands on, it was their fault. Never my fault whatever happens to me, it’s your fault. You’re to blame. Not me. If I want to believe it, I can believe it. People can always believe anything. That’s what happened in Germany. The Depression. They lost contact with the reality of what kind of people they were. They thought of themselves as Saxons, not Anglos. Their image was the Prussian. And that was sad because they’re not that way, they were churchgoing people. Martin Luther came out of Germany.

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The new book, "Conversations With Veterans of D-Day," is not yet available in print -- I still have to iron out some glitches in the header/footer/page numbering/table of contents departments, but it is available in Amazon's Kindle store. Don't have a Kindle? You can get a free Kindle app for your computer or smartphone.

Amazon's free Kindle app

Conversations With Veterans of World War II

- - -

From Oral History Audiobooks:

Encounters With General Patton

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