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

  

  

Christmas in Kirschnaumen and other holiday stories

A card from Lt. Fred Lemm, 712th Tank Bn., to his wife.

   Ira Weinstein of the 445th Bomb Group volunteered to fly a mission on Yom Kippur in 1944. It would have been his final mission, and he would be home in time for his wife's birthday on Christmas Day. Instead his B-24 was shot down over Kassel, Germany, and he became a prisoner of war. He did make it home for Christmas ... in 1945.
   Tank driver Tony D'Arpino celebrated Christmas during the Battle of the Bulge by stringing machine gun bullets around a scrawny tree.
   Bob Rossi, the loader in Tony's tank, recalled eating Thanksgiving dinner in the rain.
   Far from home, holidays were especially poignant for the men and women fighting World War II. These are some holiday-themed audio clips from my World War II oral history interviews.

track 1 Major Forrest Dixon, 712th Tank Battalion, recalls Christmas shopping in Luxembourg.

track 2  Pfc. Bob Rossi recalls Thanksgiving of 1944.
 
track 3 Sarah and Jim Schaen get married on Christmas Day.

track 4 Bob Rossi and Lt. Jim Gifford recall Christmas in Kirschnaumen (France).

track 5 Ex-POW Jim Koerner recalls a Christmas Eve service in 1944.

track 6 B-24 bombardier Ira Weinstein is shot down on Yom Kippur in 1944.

track 7 Karnig Thomasian grows an Easter lily in a Japanese prison camp.

track 8 Corporal Jim Rothschadl, 712th Tank Battalion, recalls his father's love for the 4th of July.

track 9 Forrest Dixon's Christmas dinner is interrupted by an order from General Patton.

track10 T-4 Tony D'Arpino decorates a tree for Christmas.

track 11 Orlando Brigano and Paul Wannemacher recalls a Christmas Eve tragedy

track 12 More on the Christmas Eve tragedy.

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My Monuments Men, Part 2

The 712th Tank Bn. entering Malybor, Czechoslovakia

 (My Monuments Men, Part 1)

   Harlo J. "Jack" Sheppard was the company commander of C Company, 712th Tank Battalion, from Normandy until the end of the war in Europe. Following is an excerpt from my 1993 interview with Sheppard in which he talks about the Merkers salt mine, among other things. The battalion was assigned to guard the salt mine, which is depicted in the movie "Monuments Men," following its discovery on April 4, 1945.
   The guarding of the mine, incidentally, was sandwiched between two other major events in the battalion's history: the explosion that demolished the A Company headquarters on April 3rd, killing five members of the battalion, including Lt. Edward L. Forrest; and the liberation of the Flossenburg concentration camp by the 90th Infantry Division, to which the 712th was attached, on April 23rd.
   Part of my interview with Sheppard consisted of me reading from a narrative he wrote for his children and grandchildren, with occasional comments he made elaborating on what he wrote.
   I have not yet finished transcribing the interview, having stopped about halfway through to move on to complete writing a book in which I used a narrative drawn from that first half of the interview. I recently made an audiobook of the full interview, "Reflections of a Tank Company Commander." Following is a transcription of Track 39 from that audiobook:

   Aaron Elson (reading from Jack Sheppard's book: "On 4 April near Ettenhausen, first platoon lost one tank to a panzerfaust ..."

   Jack Sheppard: Do you know what a panzerfaust is?

   Aaron Elson: Yes.

   Jack Sheppard: Okay, it's not a bazooka.

   Aaron Elson: It's a self-propelled ...

   Jack Sheppard: It has a charge in it, and it goes about 100 feet at the most. You stand up and you push the trigger and it goes. It's like a football coming at you. It's about the size of a football, with a stick out the back of it, and the stick is a tube that has the propellant in it. They come out of cellar windows, second story windows, haystacks, foxholes. If they hit the side of a tank it penetrates. If you're lucky it would hit down around the track. In Berlin they had Hitler jugend, Hitler youths, and that's all they had, every one of them, to give their life for one tank, that's what was expected of them, when the Russians came in. Fourteen years old, ten years old.

   Aaron Elson: (reading) "After the one tank was lost to a panzerfaust, second platoon lost two tanks to panzerfausts. No wounded. Seventeen prisoners were taken. Merkers. C Company and 357 were busy guarding a salt mine found by a German-speaking MP who overheard some women talking about a salt mine loaded with money. Gold, silver, priceless paintings, etc. Every brass officer from Eisenhower on down came to look. The GIs were used to bring the stuff to the surface and truck it away. Officers were used as guards ..."

   Jack Sheppard: To keep the enlisted men from stealing it.

   Aaron Elson: What do you remember about that?

   Jack Sheppard: Well, there was one battalion of infantry and my tank company left there to guard that. I don't remember a whole lot about it because they didn't bother the company commanders, but everybody and their brother went down in that mine to look at the stuff. I don't know of anybody that got away with anything, although one tank crewman, I can't remember who it was, later said some infantryman said to him, "Hey, Mac, can you give me a ride with this bag of gold? It's getting awful heavy." But the paintings, oh my goodness, all kinds of famous paintings. And money. They had everything there, from counterfeit English pounds and counterfeit American money, real American money, real English money, German money, silver coins. That was their main stockpile. That took several days, and it was kind of a vacation because nobody was shooting at you."

   Aaron Elson: (reading) "On 16 April we arrived at Grafenthal and a distance of 100 miles. Next day 20 miles. Next 12 miles, next 25 miles ..." You were moving.

   Jack Sheppard: Yes.

   Aaron Elson: Where was it that C Company liberated the prisoners from the 106th Infantry Division from the Bulge? Do you remember that?

   Jack Sheppard: No. The 90th ran into one of the extermination camps. I never saw it. All I saw was two men on the side of the road, and they looked like they couldn't hardly make it. So we stopped and we heard about this stuff when we stopped, and gave them some food and told them not to eat it too fast or it would make them sick. And they told a little story of two Germans they saw beaten to death. One of them was a sergeant in charge of the dogs and the other one was the first sergeant of the camp, and the prisoners beat them to death. And they said that they hated to admit it, but those two guys stood there at attention until they were knocked to the ground. Didn't cower and didn't ask for mercy, nothing. They knew they were gonna die, evidently.

   Aaron Elson: (reading) "4 May. C Company together with 357 in Corps reserve. 5 May crossed border into Czechoslovakia." When was VE Day?

   Jack Sheppard: A little later on.

   Aaron Elson: (reading): "Forty miles. Next day 20 miles, next 25 miles. 8 May holding in place at Malybor where C Company released from 357 as the war was over. At Malybor you never saw such happy people. They gave us a flag which is now in storage at the Patton Museum at Fort Knox. The flag said in Czech "Thank you for our liberation, Malybor." The volunteer fire department helped wash our tanks with hoses. A dance with music was held that night. The town was small, one or two hundred people. In a few days the order was given for us to move to Amberg, Germany." At Malybor I think Rossi said they put up a Maypole?

   Jack Sheppard: I've got a picture of it. At the entrance to the town they had an archway with flowers and leaves, and there was one girl in that town the men couldn't keep their eye off, she was always coming down to the river to wash clothes. She was a gorgeous blonde. The men hadn't seen a gorgeous blonde in a long time. She attracted attention. But those people were most happy. As soon as we got there they started digging up arms and ammunition that they had buried in case they ever needed them, and they were overjoyed. They couldn't do enough for us. They baked a cake for us, and they didn't have anything to bake cakes with. They said they were glad the Americans were there. They said the Germans, when they ride down the street they kill chickens, and ducks, and pigs, but the Americans, they look out for the animals, they wouldn't run over them. When they found out the Russians were coming in, they hated Russians worse than the Germans I think. They didn't want the Russians. No way. They were pleading.

   Aaron Elson: (reading) "In a few days the order was given for us to move to Amberg, Germany as the Russians were to take over Czechoslovakia. People were most unhappy. 15 May, moved to Amberg in two battalion columns, distance 130 miles." In one day you covered 130 miles?

   Jack Sheppard: Yes.

   Aaron Elson: (reading) "C Company arrived with all vehicles. Some were on their last legs..."0

   Jack Sheppard: I'm talking about blowing tread off the bogeys.

  Aaron Elson: (reading) "...and some were limping along, but C Company pulled into the tank park parking area complete. On long marches the rubber or steel tracks, we had both, generated so much heat the rubber tread of the road wheels would explode and come off of the steel wheels. Now to sweat out Japan for division. POWs evacuated, 81,088; tanks destroyed, 501; self-propelled guns destroyed, 195."

   And here are some excerpts from my interviews with other veterans of the 712th:

   Big Andy (Bob Anderson, tank driver, A Company): The most important thing that I remember after the Battle of the Bulge was when we took this Merkers mine. I was the first tank in there; I won't say the infantry wasn't, but I was the first tank in there, driving the first tank. And as we pulled in there there was a train leaving. And my gunner, Ted Duskin, of course the train was going fast, so we started running alongside and trying to catch it, and Duskin put a shell right in the engine and blew it up. Well, we pulled back to the mine and we sat there until I don't know how long or what. Not knowing what was in it. We didn't know for two or three days after how wealthy some of us could have been.

   Bob Rossi (loader, C Company): When we captured the salt mine at Merkers, I was on guard duty there, just before dusk, and these German planes were coming in to strafe. And I'm up on the turret there and I'm on the .50, and I'm firing, in fact they taught us in basic training you took a five to seven-plane lead ahead, so the plane's here, you're firing there, so that by the time the bullet gets there the plane would be there. And I'm firing away and I knew damn well I was gonna hit him, the damn round jumped out of the webbed belt. And by the time I could recover to reload, he was gone. I used to complain to the guys that brought our ammo, "I don't want the webbed belts, I want the metallic link," the metallic link held the round in there, but that webbed belt, the constant vibration of the tanks moving would loosen the ammo.

   Reuben "Ruby" Goldstein (tank commander, A Company):  Now, when we were at the mine, remember the Merkers salt mine? And we surrounded, all the tanks were around, there was an open field in the back, and McCarthy, from Connecticut, he worked in the kitchen crew, and he was put on guard duty. Now Alfonse Switer, he was the company cook, and he had to go to the bathroom. So he went. McCarthy thought the Germans were coming across the field. It's dark. I was upstairs in the mine building, on the third floor. I had my shoes off, I had my clothes on, I had my .45 and my submachine gun with me. And I hear shots. I come running, everybody, running like crazy, you know, you think something's happening. I come running down, and Al is hollering "Goldie, Goldie, help me, help me." And everything else is quiet. There's no more shots.

   McCarthy thought it was the Germans coming and he shot his carbine. In the leg. But he did not know that it was one of our own men. It was what you call friendly fire. Accidental. All right. So they took Al away, and nobody ever saw him again. And the reason they never saw him, because nobody knows what ever happened to him after that. Till the beginning of January of 1946. My brother and I, we bought a second-hand car, and my mother and I, and my brother Mel, he got out of the service after I did. My other brother came out after that. We picked up my aunt in New York and went to Florida.

   On the way back from Florida we stopped in Pennsylvania. We stopped at a gas station to gas up, and I said, "Why don't I call Al's house." He lived in Manionk. I was there in his house once, on my way back from a furlough I left a day earlier and went to the train station in Philly and Al's sister picked me up at the station. Al was supposed to meet me, but he wasn't there.

   I got to the train station, I'm looking around, I don't see anybody. A beautiful looking girl comes over to me, and she says, "Are you Goldie?"
   I said yes. I said "You must be Al's sister."
   She said, "Yes I am. I'm looking for you. He told me to bring you down."
   I said, "Bring me where?"
   She said, "He's waiting." And where was it? He was in a barroom, sitting at the bar, drinking. And another fellow, a friend of his, an insurance broker, with no legs. He had a little cart on the floor with wheels, just like with roller skates. And he was drinking. She left. And we had a few drinks. These guys were loaded.

   Now we're gonna go back to Al's house, he and I. This guy's gonna drive. This insurance fellow without the legs. But he had all the attachments. I says, "No way. I'll drive."
   "'You don't know...'"
   "I'm driving." I get them in the car and we drove to Al's house. He conked out in the car, the fellow without the legs, fell asleep, and I went up in Al's house, and we stayed there. The next day we had a ball, Al and I. We had a good time over in Conshohocken, at a Polish dance.

   But anyway, to get back to the story about when he got shot, and when I'm coming back from Florida, I get in the phone booth, and my mother and my aunt and my brother are sitting in the car. And I called up information, I get the number, and I don't know how to say it, to ask for him, I don't know if he's dead or alive. So I got the number, and I asked if this is the Switer residence, and this girl answered, and it was the same girl, his sister. So I told her, "Oh, my god," she says, "how nice to hear from you." You know, she sounded so happy. And all of a sudden, she said "Would you like to talk to Al?" Well, I nearly flipped. I never. He was there. I got on the phone, he says, "You S.B.," he says, "I thought you were dead." I says "I got news for you, I thought you were dead."

   I says "Nobody's ever heard from you." He was in so many hospitals, he had 26 operations, and his leg was gone all the way. Gangrene had set in. They made him artificial legs, and at first he was walking with the artificial legs with crutches, and then with a cane, and then he could walk on his own. I found that out, we went to a Polish dance one night, and he was dancing with an artificial leg as good as anybody.

   After I talked to him, that was the last I heard of him is when I talked to him on the phone. But he married this girl he was going with for fifteen years before he went in the service, and he finally married her when he came home. They had a home in Plymouth Meeting, in Pennsylvania, not far from Manionk.

   So I got married in 1949, and we went on our honeymoon to Atlantic City. We stayed eleven days, at the Senator Hotel at the time, it was the next street over from where the Resorts International is now. And I says to my wife, "Gee, let's go see if we can find Al." So what we do, and sure enough, I find out where he lives, I called the house where his folks live, and they told me where, and I went down to his house, and there was an open porch like a deck in front of the house. The two of us sat, it was hot as a sonofagun, it was toward the end of June. And they weren't home. They were both working. She worked in the offices of a coal company. And he worked for a clothing company, a very well-known name. He worked for them in the factory.

   Anyway, they came home, and the two of us were still waiting, I wasn't going to leave. They were so happy to see us. I'd met Mary before that, my wife hadn't met either of them. And we stayed, and he gave me his room.

   Anyway, he was a hot ticket. But always, anything, that's the way he was. Even in civilian life as well as in the service.

   (That last part doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with the Merkers salt mine other than that poor Alfonse Switer lost his leg after being wounded by friendly fire. I kept it in because Ruby Goldstein, who passed away a few years ago, was such a wonderful storyteller.)

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Jack Sheppard

Reuben Goldstein

Big Andy

(My Monuments Men, Part 1)

An Okie from Muskogie

Doc Reiff

    I would often see Jack Reiff, one of two medical officers in the 712th Tank Battalion, at reunions. I recorded this impromptu interview in the hospitality room at the 1993 reunion in Orlando, Fla.

   Jack Reiff: I was born July 24, 1918, in Muskogie, Oklahoma. A genuine Okie from Muskogie. And when I was about 11 or 12 years old I moved to Oklahoma City. My father was superintendent of schools in Muskogie, and then he was superintendent of schools in Oklahoma City, from about 1929 to 1940. I went to Oklahoma City High School Central, graduated first in my class of about 500, and then I went to the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and got a B.S. degree. I was first in my class when I got my B.S. degree. I graduated first in my class when I went to medical school, also, at the University of Oklahoma.

   I was in the ROTC when I was in college and med school, in horse-drawn artillery. My first contact with the Army was in horse-drawn artillery in 1934 and '35, and I could have been a second lieutenant in artillery with the ROTC.

   In medical school, our dean was Robert U. Patterson, who had been surgeon general in the United States Army for many years back before that, and he encouraged everybody to join the Reserves, so we did. Then just about that time, the war came along. But I did finish my internship at the University of Michigan, and then went back and did it at the medical field service school in Carlisle Barracks, Pa., where they had basic training in company administration, like OCS, for the medics. There were 1,300 in my class, so they started fanning them out to combat units, and I was sent to the 11th Armored Regiment in Fort Benning. The 10th Armored Division, the 11th Armored Regiment. The 11th Armored Regiment had been the 11th Cavalry, but they only had about 24 cavalry men as I can remember. A couple of them were medics. And one medical sergeant, one medical technician, and three or four officers, and then about twenty other enlisted men were spread out through the whole regiment.

   We spent our whole time training the medics and giving physical exams, physical inspections, and immunizations, which was a horrendous thing. We had 3,000 recruits, and I was in charge of the thing. Every one had to have three typhoid shots, three tetanus shots, and they had to be at specified intervals. If you didn't make it between the five and seven days, they had to start over. And the tetanus was three weeks, so there wasn't any way to coordinate it. And the smallpox had to be read in ten days. So seven days, ten days and two weeks, and then, of course, you've got all kind of things, you just had to go individually, this guy needs so-and-so, so then you get a big long list and send it to the first sergeant of the company, and he would be on KP or on guard or on furlough. It was just real hard to get them all there. I mean, it was a nightmare.

   And then I was with the 712th from the very time it started, when they decreased the size of the armored division. They didn't have armored regiments anymore, just separate battalions, so I went with the 712th when it split off. They split off another battalion at the same time, and that battalion went to school troops at Fort Knox.

    We were in a very small ship in a big convoy, the USS Exchequer, just our battalion plus just a few other people. I don't think it carried a thousand people. It was a banana boat that had been used just in South America up here into Florida or someplace, and had never been out on the ocean. Then we were crowded. Most of the men were down in the hold. The officers had nine guys in a room that was just the size of, one cot, and one cot, and one cot, three high, no place to put your stuff but in bed with you. And, oh, sick, sick, sick. I'm scared. I did a lot of physical inspections then, too, to be sure they didn't have the measles. That was another thing, when we first had all of those recruits, they had a lot of epidemics, because throwing all these guys together, they had measles, chicken pox and all that kind of stuff, especially measles was very bad. That's about the only time I ever worked in the Army hospital at Fort Benning was during a measles epidemic.

   I was what they later called a combat medic. They didn't call them medics at that time, it was a medical detachment. And we just went with the tanks.

    We crossed the English Channel in LSTs. Getting on them was a funny thing. These two tank battalions, we got the message to go to Southampton on the 6th of June. We had practiced, we had dry runs, but this was sort of a surprise, and when we got down there they held us several days. And that was a scary time. We didn't know what was going on. So then we went on LSTs, and we were on the ship several days.

   And then, very tough slogging, hard going, heavy casualties and everything until about the 24th of July, that was when they had that 1,000-bomber raid.

You said there were a lot of people scared. How did that manifest itself?

   Oh, I don't know. I think that anybody that said they weren't scared were the ones that got combat fatigue. We just didn't know what was going on at all.

 When you got inland a little bit, what did you do?

    Usually, well, you've talked to [Forrest] Dixon a lot. The funny thing is the Army had us medics set up, we had 20-year-old halftracks, like a mortar halftrack, pulling great big trailers like the tankers use for ammunition. That was really unhandy for us. I mean, those doors on a halftrack aren't very wide, and if you tried to put somebody in a litter, you'd bust your knuckles, and you had to push them up above your head to one side. It was very difficult to use it.

   And I actually lost a jeep in the drink coming in on the beach, so we got a three-quarter ton jeep, a weapons carrier, it looked like a jeep but it was a weapons carrier. So we used that for our supplies, and it had seats along the side. We put the litters and long stuff along the side, supplies and blankets and all that in there. And the medical sergeant, Sergeant Lingeman, built a cabinet that had space for everything.

   We didn't go in buildings, we were living in foxholes.

What do you remember about the first day, the first casualties that came in?

   Actually, the first casualties that I saw were Germans. They kept bringing them in. That was a little scary, too. There was one German lieutenant that we talked to, they carried their service records with them, where we had our service records in the company, so he had the picture, and the ID, and this guy's got a monocle, and he just looked like a typical version of a German lieutenant.

   He had the monocle in his picture in his service book, of course he didn't have it on him.

   Our tank battalion was fragmented a lot. This company went out with this unit, and this company went with that unit. So our battalion headquarters, our battalion command and so forth and service company, we really had a problem going out and finding out and giving immunizations and so forth. We took care of the casualties that were close, whatever medics were close to our people.

   I took care of a lot of paratroopers and British soldiers and infantrymen, and people from other units, because our battalion really didn't function like a battalion, like they did in Africa, where the whole battalion was fighting as a battalion. We had this company out with this regiment, and this platoon with this company, and they kept switching around, and our headquarters company didn't really command the whole battalion, they were more or less under the command of the infantry people that they were supporting. So it was kind of a situation, but then we always had people sick with colds...

Les O'Riley was saying that you and Doc Wojtowich had a wounded German, and Wojtowich accidentally snipped off a piece of his liver. Do you remember that?

Yes, that was at the Falaise Gap. We had encircled the Germans, and had them in a pocket, and just mass destruction, so many casualties. So we had gone out picking everybody up, and the Germans had used paper bandages. We used gauze. I don't know if it was a medical thing, or just financial necessity. Anyway, this guy had a big wound, and of course, a wound of entrance is always smaller than a wound of exit, so the wound was in the front and he had a big bandage on. Yet the German medics had put a big bandage on the wound of entrance, but the wound of exit was much bigger, and the tails of the bandage and everything were back, sticking out the back, and messed up a little trying to cut off the bandages.

   He [O'Riley] called us the liver-snipper. Hepatectomy.

  Oh, what a deal. After that, see, there was so much death and destruction, dead horses and everything, we decided we were gonna have to have immunizations again. So all of our guys had to have tetanus and typhoid and all that. So there was always something going on.

Do any cases, individuals stand out?

   Oh, yes. I remember very vividly, the hardest thing to take care of medically, the mortar, shell fragment wounds. Those mortar, shrapnel, just jagged, razor-sharp, all different shapes. And whether to take it out and run the chance of cutting someone on the way out. I don't know whether you've ever seen a piece of shrapnel, some of them just twisted, split, sharp knife edges.

   Well, anyway, I eased ... it was an American. ... Well, of course, Jim Flowers was our prize patient. I didn't work on him. I did go back to see him when he was in a field hospital.

   That was something else, keeping records was real tough. We started keeping a record of who was wounded and all that, it was quite a chore. Of course, the Army is so gung-ho on reports, that's how I got some of those notes.

   We always had sick, quite a few people that really were so sick they had to be evacuated, I mean like bleeding ulcer and all that kind of stuff that you had in civilian life. Stress.

What about frostbite?

   Yes, a lot of that. Trenchfoot and frostbite. And a lot of what we called combat fatigue, psychiatric casualties.

How did some of these manifest themselves?

   I don't know, it was just one of these, you know that you know. Gestalt. You know what gestalt means?

  There's several different things, but more than anything they were very agitated, so what they needed was just a little sleep, for a couple of weeks.

 

Somebody said there was something called a Green 88?

   Sodium amitol. It was a barbiturate. We didn't have a tranquilizer. It was sleeping pills, it would just put them to sleep, just get 'em out of their misery for a while. In fact, I went to a school of military psychiatry, and that's what they recommended.

   We had quite a few cases of frostbite, but not as many as the infantry. But as I say, I did take care of a lot of infantry people.

   The system of a battalion aid station is to send people to the rear, the impetus, to evacuation. I'd go to my tanks and bring them back to me, then somebody comes to me and brings them back. The people that are supposed to come up, pick up from the battalion aid stations, are collecting companies. Medical collecting companies are primarily ambulance drivers, but they had the same problem with me that I had with my tank platoons. We were so far out in front of things, there wasn't a static line, we were moving, they didn't know where we were. So we got in the habit of taking the cases back to the rear echelons.

What were some of the other shrapnel cases?

   Oh, gosh, everywhere. Legs mostly, abdomen, you couldn't do much with that, we just evacuated those guys. As a matter of fact, do you know what definitive treatment means, in other words we didn't do any amputations or abdominal surgery or anything like that. We gave them plasma and put on bandages and stopped their bleeding, and stopped their pain, and get them back to the hospital.

Did you have many who died while you were treating them?

   Oh gosh, yes. A couple of the officers, one that I'd played cards with. Remember Cliff Merrill? He didn't die, did he? The way he tells it, it was hysterical, it was a big joke. Have you talked to him? He was so tough

It wasn't like that?

   I think that was combat fatigue in both of us!

You said that toward the end of the war, you thought you had combat fatigue?

   I don't know, I just got so shook up.

What was the name of the lieutenant who you played cards with?

   I can't remember, but boy, he had severe, very early, down in Normandy. He just, "You've got to give me a drink of water," or something. That's really hard on the medics, of course.

What were the signs that you can think of that would indicate you had combat fatigue?

  Who, me? I never did get turned in, it was nothing official. I was numb after awhile. See, I was in the whole thing all the way. A lot of medics got rotated. I got rotated, but not very much. This really wasn't a good idea, but along just about the time they got through with the Battle of the Bulge, somebody in the hierarchy decided that the guys that had been combat medics in the medical detachments should be given a break, they're doctors, too, they ought to be put in the hospitals, and guys in the hospitals should be put up at the front. Well, that's ridiculous. We spent our time knowing where the tanks were and knowing how to find tanks, knowing how to take care of ourselves, knowing how to dig foxholes. I wouldn't have done any good in a hospital, and they wouldn't do any good down there because they would have got killed the first time because they wouldn't know how to take care of themselves. So that was a dumb idea. But I got rotated to one of these collecting companies, which was just an ambulance company, just behind us. And this Hamilton guy (Colonel Ed Hamilton), I was transferred to his outfit. He was wounded way ahead of when I got there.

In your notes, you said there was one time when you came close to getting the Purple Heart.

   Oh, yeah. Several. Joe Diorio, I had one medic killed and another one wounded and a couple of patients were killed just after I had left an aid station, and then I also got a mortar shell in the back of the jeep. I wasn't in the jeep, I'd just jumped out of the jeep. And then down at the Falaise Gap, I got covered up by the dirt from a shell. Not hurt. I got my hand mashed, but that was just with a stick that got lodged in between the handle of the jeep and the body of the jeep, ground that little finger. That was very early.

   The medical colonel gave me a shot of morphine, I couldn't even feel it. That was in Tennessee maneuvers. I'm just now thinking about it. When I said colonel, it was Colonel Hansen, it was the 10th Armored Division, that was before we even left the 10th Armored Division. Okay, that's what made me remember that.

   And then in the hedgerows, well, I lost a jeep just coming into the beachhead, it just sunk and we got a replacement. And then a mortar shell just dropped in, I had a big radio, I don't know why the medics, they thought the medics had to have one of these big tank radios, you're riding along behind this hedgerow and the Germans would see that aerial, uh-oh, boom. But we got out.

You had mentioned seeing a German lieutenant come out of a tank when they surrendered...

   Oh, that was funny. It's a long story. Okay. Big story. We're on our way out across France someplace, and the people back as far as division headquarters and corps headquarters seemed to think that there was the front line, and this is friendly, and this is enemy territory. Our battalion was out here like those arrows sticking around, and way out in front, this infantry comes charging through our place after we've been there for a day. I had to go and report or something, and I went back to division headquarters, which was quite a ways back, and the division surgeon said, "Oh, you're with a tank battalion, yes? Where's your battalion?" And I had my map, I showed him, he said, "Come and show me on the big map." Then he says, "You can't be there. That's all enemy territory."
  And I said, "Colonel, I've been in combat for X days, if I didn't know how to read a map I'd be dead."
  So I said, "Let's go in to G-3," the big operations map. And sure enough it's just red, red, red, enemy territory.
  So when I went back, I guess it was that night, during the night sometime, this tank comes just charging right down through battalion headquarters, medics and the maintenance. And Dixon got in that disabled tank and just fired point blank with a 105-millimeter or whatever it was, I think it was an assault gun, a 105-millimeter assault gun just point-blank into the tank, and just, of course, knocked it out.
   The lieutenant came out, you know, he's this kid, he was just wounded in the arm, I mean, it wasn't real bad. So I got to talking to him in German, and saying "Germany's kaput."
   "'No, nein, nein.'"
   I said, "Well, you're kaput."
   And he said, "What are you going to do with me?"
   We're still speaking in German. I said, "I'm gonna send you to Amerikanische hospital." Okay, so then we got to arguing. I said, "Well, you're kaput."
   And he says, "What's the matter?"
   And I says, "It's your arm. You've got a compound fracture there."
   He says, in perfect English, just like he was from Harvard or something, he says, "Which bone is it, Doctor, the radius or the ulna?"
     I didn't have too much trouble. Up in Falaise, this major, German medical officer, he was gonna help take care of the casualties. He was a PW, we put him to work. He didn't want his men to have morphine sulfate, he wanted them to have morphine hydrochloride, a different kind of preparation than we used, and kept arguing. So I called for the MPs to come and get him, I can't put up with it.

Describe the POWs that the battalion liberated

   Oh, good gosh. I think mostly Jewish. They were American soldiers, but I think they were mostly Jewish. I think the Germans had segregated them out. Maybe that was just a suspicion, I don't know whether that's founded or not. Oh, they were just absolutely skin and bones. Somebody came down from Stars & Stripes and took my picture, I think somebody has a picture somewhere.

What was it like at Flossenburg?

   Oh, that was a very calm thing. They just rolled in the front door, the tank, and that was the end of that. They just gave up.

What was your reaction to the inmates?

   Again, as I say, we didn't get too involved with trying to treat them. First they had to identify them.

How big a staff did you have?

   I think I had 25 enlisted men, and I usually had one more officer, Wojtowich. And for a while, there were three of us. Medical supply drivers, surgical technician and aid men.

Do you remember anything about Colonel Miller?

   I know the whole story.

  He was a West Pointer. He was a captain, and when the war broke out, he was suddenly promoted to lieutenant colonel. I told you that the 11th Armored Regiment had about 24 cadre men. He was one of them. Beverley Simms, who was a lieutenant. Colonel Morrow, I think his name was, a full bird colonel. Old man. Of course, we were 25 years old, 23. But he was a full colonel, probably 60 years old. Miller, lieutenant colonel, and a lieutenant. And I think that was about it, I think there were three or four officers, and 24 enlisted men.

   Well, because he was a West Pointer, he was made a battalion commander. And he was an obsessive, compulsive, extreme nit-picker personality. He did some real horrible things. I mean, like, here we are, as I say, everybody's scared to death, everybody's trying to do the best they can. When we got to England, we all had  new equipment, all new uniforms, all new vehicles, and everybody in the battalion was a specialist. Medics, tanker, tank driver, gunner, radio operator, tank mechanic, whatever. And he decides we're gonna have a 25-mile hike. I mean, none of those guys should have to walk a step in combat unless they got captured or something. They're gonna have a 25-mile hike. And whoever drops out, why, his platoon sergeant has to carry his weapon and his platoon leader his pack or vice versa, and the medics have to carry him.

   And then they're gonna do it over again, some other time. Just unreasonable things like that. And having staff do something over on Sundays. Did you see "The Caine Mutiny"? Do you remember, Fred MacMurray was the bumbling exec officer? The captain, the skipper, was nutty with the balls, and then the second in command was just... well, we had one of those guys in our outfit, Major Davis. He was a very inept,  kind of reminds you of Jimmy Carter, you know, with the smile and all that but doesn't know how to do anything. He just didn't. Major Davis just didn't know the war was on, I mean, really. But Colonel Miller bawls him out in front of all the troops. You know, if I had some GI, if I had some private that didn't do something, I'd say, "Hey, come here, how do you think I ought to handle this?" He says, "Well, captain, what do you think about 30 days KP?" And I'd say "Okay." What I'm trying to say is if I had a disciplinary problem, I didn't swear at him, I didn't do anything, I talked to him like he was a man. But Whitside just bawled poor old Davis out in front of the whole battalion, the officers, the men and everybody, embarrassed everybody.

Was that when he made him doubletime?

   Oh, I don't know. The specific incidents, probably everybody can remember at least one. But I mean, it was just bad. Twenty-five mile hikes. Oh, he was going to reclassify, I don't know whether you know what that means, reclassify, somebody's a tank driver, he's got all this schooling and everything, we're gonna send him back to the States and make him a foot soldier, infantryman, reclassify him because he can't make a 25-mile hike. It was just one thing like that after another. He was just an obsessive, compulsive, neurotic, trying to do his best, and had that West Point background.

Did he actually reclassify anybody?

   I think by that time we got a little control of the situation and wouldn't let him do some of these dumb things. But he did make, on some of these hikes, if a guy couldn't make the march, the lieutenant had to carry his weapon and the sergeant's gonna carry his pack. And the medics are gonna carry him, and if you think that isn't fun to carry somebody for 25 miles. I mean...

   I stood up for him. I think I was the only one that did. I wrote a great long letter, and I told them that I thought it was unfortunate. [Col. Whitside Miller was relieved of his command before the 712th Tank Battalion left England, and was replaced by Lt. Col. George B. Randolph. Col. Randolph was killed during the Battle of the Bulge.]

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