Five D-Day Veterans Talkin' "Saving Private Ryan"



  

   Sometimes in an interview or conversation I'll get what might be called a little bit of ancillary history, one historical episode, that is, connecting with another.
   For instance, when I was transcribing my interview with James Finn, a veteran of the 294th Combat Engineer Battalion, I was somewhat agitated by the fact that Jim's wife was in the next room talking on the phone. And talking on the phone. And talking on the phone. And the tape recorder was picking it up as background noise, causing too great a distraction for me to use the interview in one of my original oral history audiobooks. To further exacerbate the situation, Jim's wife was not only talking on the phone through much of the interview, she had either a television or radio turned on.
   And then, during a lull in the interview, I could hear more clearly the sounds coming from the next room, and I realized that the TV or radio was broadcasting a basketball game. Not only that, but it was a New York Knicks playoff game. One minute while transcribing the tape I was frustrated as heck, and the next I was thinking, a Knicks playoff game, how cool is that!
   Or the time I was visiting Forrest Dixon at his home in Munith, Mich., around the time of his 80th birthday, and all over the television was the scene of a fallen Ranger being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, which upset Forrest terribly. And just by happenstance it was around the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that I interviewed Nick Paciullo, a 4th Marine Division veteran of Iwo Jima, and he spoke at length about the episode of post traumatic stress that anniversary brought about.
   When I interviewed a group of veterans of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1998, "Saving Private Ryan" had recently been released. Sure enough, the subject came up in conversation.
   

Jim Burke: The actual D-Day scene was noisy, that’s all I can remember. I don’t remember anybody saying anything I could hear.

   Chuck Hurlbut: He tried to make it (“Saving Private Ryan”) that way because that’s the way it was.

   Jim Burke: That’s what I’m saying, it’s pretty typical. That’s what was so authentic about it, that’s all.

   Chuck Hurlbut: The first half hour. If anybody asks me I say the first half hour was true ...

   Tony DeTomaso: But the rest was all Hollywood after that.
  
   Chuck Hurlbut: I was so sad he got killed. I thought he’s a good egg. If it was a Hollywood film, he would have come home a hero.
  
   Jim Burke: Yeah, but did you notice, he had to put his captain’s bars on his helmet. That’s Hollywood too. Most guys took those emblems off real quick.

   Chuck Hurlbut: I remember seeing a lot of them.

   Jim Burke: Before the invasion or after? During the invasion you didn’t. They took them off.

   Bill Secaur: You know that Ryan, you remember, he’s from Syracuse, his cousin.

   Jim Burke: Tommy Niland. We had him at our 50th anniversary.

   Bill Secaur: That’s right. From Syracuse.

   Jim Burke: He was in the 101st Airborne and was a cousin of the real life Ryan.

   Jim DePalma: The real family was from Buffalo, right?

   Jim Burke: Tonawanda. And this guy was too. Tommy Niland was basketball coach at LeMoyne College for 25 years, maybe.

   Chuck Hurlbut: I thought it was so impressive, what really got me, it opens up in the cemetery with the old guy, then at the end, he becomes ...

   Jim Burke: That was pretty clever.

   Chuck Hurlbut: This is Private Ryan as an old man. Then at the end you saw the young guy. Now tell me, any of you guys ever hear Fubar?

   Jim Burke: No.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Fouled up beyond all recognition. They used it in the movie.

   Jim Burke: Maybe the Rangers had it.

   Chuck Hurlbut: I can’t find a guy that ever heard it. I never heard it. We had snafu. You heard that every ten minutes.

   Tony DeTomaso: What was the name, fubar?

   Jim Burke: F-U-B-A-R

   Tony DeTomaso: Yeah, but that’s just the initials. Well, you know what they were saying, don’t you? He just told you.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Fouled up beyond all recognition. Like a snafu. Situation normal all fouled up.

   Jim Burke: That’s why they had that little clerk guy running around trying to find, he’s an interpreter for Germany, he says “I never heard a German word like fubar.”

   Chuck Hurlbut: I never heard it.

   Jim Burke: Nobody did. It might have been a Ranger thing.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Now another thing about it. One of the guys gets hit. He’s laying out there and they’re all putting sulfa on him. Then they take the canteens and they wash it all off.

   Jim Burke: Getting the blood off.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Why wouldn’t that wash the sulfa off? I couldn’t understand that.

   Jim Burke: It probably did.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Every five minutes, washing him off and putting sulfa. I can’t understand that.

   Jim Burke: It was dramatic, wasn’t it? That’s the idea.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Yeah, but it seems so foolish, put the sulfa then wash it.

   Jim Burke: Yeah, but when you’re trying to simulate combat it’s all screwed up.

   Chuck Hurlbut: I guess.

   Jim Burke: Everybody’s excited.

   Bill Secaur: Actually, what we took off the boat, it never showed them taking little boats off the landing barges either in that movie.

   Chuck Hurlbut: Well, they couldn’t do everything.

   Jim Burke: You didn’t see any engineers, though, either. Did you notice, those obstacles were up in the water pretty good. This is after the tide’s come in. Quite a bit later. this is the third or fourth wave.

   Bill Secaur: You know what I can’t understand? Why they give the combat infantry badge just to the infantry. You know, we did a lot of infantry work.

   Chuck Hurlbut: We should have that. Or its equivalent. The medics got it.

   Aaron Elson: I can’t imagine the combat engineers not getting combat infantry badges.

   Jim Burke: I don’t think we should, though.

   Tony DeTomaso: Why?

   Jim Burke: You can’t compare your little infantry stint with a guy who’s been there for 30 days in a ...

   Tony DeTomaso: We didn’t get the credit we should be getting.

   Jim Burke: You don’t deserve a combat infantry badge either. That’s their thing.

   Chuck Hurlbut: When the infantry guy in the rear echelon back in Paris gets it ...

   Jim Burke: That’s their problem.

   Chuck Hurlbut: I want it.

   Tony DeTomaso: Look at the glider pilots. They didn’t get no jump ...

   Jim Burke: No, but they got a pin. There’s a combat engineer’s badge, probably. I don’t know.

   Chuck Hurlbut: There should be. There is none to my knowledge, but there should be.

   Tony DeTomaso: We did a lot of infantry work.

   Jim Burke: What, a day, two days?

   Bill Secaur: Regardless, you’ve got to build bridges and be the last one out and blow them up, too.

   Chuck Hurlbut: How about the Prum River? We’re down putting the damn footbridge, the infantry’s lolling up on the bank waiting for us. They’re all getting the combat infantry badge. I’m not.

   Jim Burke: No they’re not, not for that. Thirty days on the line. You talk to the guys up there at Aachen, when they can’t talk straight, their eyes are bugging out of their head, they’re so damn tired and disgusted, they’re the guys that deserve the combat infantry badge.

    Tony DeTomaso: They deserve it, no question about it, but so do we.

   Jim Burke: You know what happened to us up at Aachen? They were posting signs, one mile, two miles, six miles. All of a sudden these guys stopped us. They were the 1st Division. That’s their blockade. Their roadblock. They said “You can’t go in there.”

   I said “Why?”

   They said “We haven’t taken it yet.” And we’ve got signs, we’re supposed to go down in the middle of town and then start out.

   Bill Secaur: That movie with Telly Savalas where he was a tank guy, the guy was dressed like an American soldier and he was German, and all of a sudden they asked him a question, and right away Telly Savalas, he knew darn well the guy was lying. And he changed the signs around.
   Jim Burke: They said “You can go in there if you want to, but until they come back, we don’t know what’s down there. And those guys were excited, those infantry men are terribly distraught. I couldn’t get any sense of them.

   Tony DeTomaso: Most of them are replacements.

   Jim Burke: And they’re just like the cartoons, grizzly and dirty and they haven’t been anyplace except in that friggin line, and they’re sick. They’re really sick. It’s a wonder they don’t shoot each other.

   The full conversation, and several others is available in my new book, "Conversations With Veterans of D-Day," which is currently available in a Kindle edition only. I hope to have a print edition soon.



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Check out some of the audio from the Oral History Store:

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

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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

　

A Letter From a German Wife to Her Soldier Husband



The destroyer USS Butler (DD-636)

   The American War Orphans Network is a wonderful group, and has helped many Americans deal with the loss of a parent in World War II. I often wondered if there were a similar organization in Germany. Quite a few years ago I asked a German veteran if such a group existed, and the answer was no.
   I recently called Felix Podolak, a "Tin Can Sailor" who served on the USS Butler, to ask his permission to use his 1994 interview in my forthcoming book "Conversations With D-Day Veterans." In the interview, Felix mentioned that he had a buddy on the ship, Gus Siebert, who made two copies of a history of the Butler, one for Gus, the other for Felix.
   The book contained a translation of a letter from a German wife to her husband. There is no indication whether the husband lived or died, or even who he was, as the letter was found in a gun emplacement on one of the invasion beaches, and the soldier's name, as well as the last few lines of the letter, were too smudged by water damage to be legible.
   Here's an excerpt from that conversation:


   Felix Podolak: I had a chance to meet my captain through the Tin Can Sailors. I met him over a drink, and he was gonna be the guest speaker. So I said, “Do you remember that time we had to go chase that British cruiser that was off the Azores?” And there was another incident when we were in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I came off leave from Garfield to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and when I got there, the fellow came down from the yard gang, he wanted to know if he could pump out the No. 2 magazine, in the forward part of the ship. They felt somebody sabotaged the ship, flooded the forward part of the magazine because we were supposed to leave the next day.

When we got to Algiers the captain called me into his quarters, and he had a tape recorder. He recorded everything. He got down to maybe there was some sabotage. After the questioning, he said, “Podolak, maybe the FBI will pick you up to question you, but as far as I know now, you didn’t have nothing to do with it, you came off liberty.” So during the speech he said, “Podolak can sleep a lot better now, he won’t have to worry about the FBI picking him up.” That was about 30 or 40 years later, but he made a joke out of it. He was a terrific captain.

Gus made this book for him and me, there’s only two like it, it’s a history of the ship. Gus was on the forward repair party with me.

The captain went ashore. In one of the pillboxes he found a letter, this fellow out of the pillbox was supposed to write to his wife but it was wet and dirty, and Gus speaks German. He interpreted everything, and this is what the guy was writing to his wife in Germany. This is what we picked up, it’s in here somewhere, this is the communique. Gus being of German descent, he spoke very fluent. In Palermo they were bombing us, and Gus had a chance to be the interpreter for a German pilot that we picked out of the water, in Sicily.

 Aaron Elson: Is this the letter here? (Reading): “When Captain Matthews came back from his trip to Cherbourg, he called me to his cabin and showed me a letter he’d found in one of the German gun emplacements there. He asked what it was. It was a letter from a German wife to her soldier husband. He asked if I could translate it for him. The envelope had a return address but water had blurred the ink, making it impossible to read, and the letter had the last few lines and the signature also blurred. ‘My dear Ewald and my dear father. ...

"‘My dear good Ewald, it is Friday morning, half past eight. Want to hurry and write you a nice letter. I received your dear letter yesterday and was very happy to hear from you my love, and to have heard what you did Easter Day. But now I know that you have seen the great lovers on the screen and yet you didn’t mention a bit about love in your letter. What do you do in your visits to the movies? Do you sleep while the picture is on? With whom do you usually go out, or do you go out alone.

'Dear Ewald, when you write, please don’t complain about your food openly. Just because your officers receive better food than you do, remember, you’re the dumb one when you start to get hotheaded. Therefore, my sweetheart, don’t write about these matters openly.

'Yesterday afternoon I went to the health clinic. A fitter from Ludenscheid was there, and he took my measurements for a health belt. I had to go to the welfare office and get a certificate for it. Then I went back to the clinic and had it stamped, and yesterday afternoon went to the clinic to try it on. The fitter was yet a young man about 30 years old, and I sure felt embarrassed and ashamed to be in my undergarments while he took the measurements. There were 12 other expectant mothers there. The clinic is going to pay 70 percent of the cost of it, and I will have to pay only the 30 percent. I don’t know how I’m going to get something to hold my stockings up with, because you have to have a good reason whenever you want to buy things like that.

'I came home on the train at 3:30. Then I drank some coffee and rode out to the farm. It was almost 8 o’clock and I was just getting ready to plant some vegetables when all of a sudden it began to rain. We had to run, but we got wet just the same. Our daughter came at 5 o’clock and asked for a piece of butter bread and some coffee. She always wants to be where I am. She was out to the farm with me and picked flowers in Forsters’ meadow. Then she sat down by the side of the road and tied the flowers into small bundles. Then she noticed the Russians, which the people are hiring to dig their gardens, and she got frightened and started to cry and came running to me, and then said “Momma, on account of the Russians, I lost all my pretty flowers.” I had to laugh and told her “You little goat, don’t be so scared.” When it stopped raining I wanted to send her home, but she wouldn’t go alone.

'This evening I have cramps in my hands. That’s why I can’t write so plain. My fingers hurt a lot and have blisters on them. In the morning I have to take our daughter to the dentist because I made an appointment for the 14th of April. Yesterday I met Mrs. Sonnerkin, who is a midwife, and think I will have her when our baby arrives. She suggested I have the baby at home instead of in a hospital, because she could be closer that way, and also the hospital would cost 150 marks, while at home the clinic would pay for everything, even 35 marks for a nurse. Lena is going to nurse me, and in case an operation is necessary, Dr. Dimkle will see that I get to a hospital. Then I wouldn’t have to pay anything. I’ll have it home, I think. What is your opinion?

'Dear Ewald, I have to close now because it is 10:30 and we have to leave. Our daughter has to be back at school at 2:30. Last night the Tommies were overhead again, and they didn’t leave until after 12. Until then, we couldn’t go to bed. It was very bad. Now my super sweetheart, a thousand kisses from your faithful wife and daughter.'”

"As I mentioned in the beginning, this letter contained a few more lines and also was signed. As a thought, as of this writing, if their baby was born in 1944, he or she would be now 45 years old. Twice as old as many of us were at that time.”

 Felix Podolak: You notice, she wrote something in there, that she was tired and that her hands were, she must have had to work or something, but she wouldn’t say that she was working hard if you notice. Even on our ship, our mail was censored by the officers.

There’s an article in there about us chasing around, and we finally found that cruiser that was torpedoed by the Germans. It was torpedoed in the bow. Every time it would go down you’d see a big gust of water like a whale. It was only making a couple of knots, and we were sent out to pick it up. While we were sent out to pick it up we didn’t know where, because you’re riding what we call radio silence. We got as far as the Azores, and the next morning we woke up, the fog lifted, and the cruiser was right in front of us. He said it had to be divine intervention, because we traveled more than a thousand miles in three days, and there it was right in front of us. And we brought it back to Bermuda."

As of this writing, Felix Podolak is 91 years old and still living in Garfield. God bless him.