More pictures from the archives

A Company, 712th Tank Battalion, officers at Amberg, Germany. Back row,
from left: Morse Johnson, Sam MacFarland; front row, from left, Bob
Hagerty, Ellsworth Howard, Howard Olsen, Jule Braatz
 

   I used this picture on the cover of the first edition of Tanks for the Memories. In the back row are Morse Johnson and Sam MacFarland, whom I mentioned in my previous post.
   Bob Hagerty, on the left in the front, and Morse Johnson were both from Cincinnati, Hagerty from the Norwood section and Johnson from, I think it was called Far Hills. Both were sergeants in the horse cavalry, both received battlefield commissions, and both distinguished themselves in the battle for Oberwampach, as did Howard Olsen, third from the left in the front. When the 712th Tank Battalion was stationed as occupation troops in Amberg, Germany, after VE Day, Hagerty and Johnson often faced each other as opponents on a court-martial board; Johnson, a lawyer in civilian life, as the judge, and Hagerty as defense counsel.
   Hagerty recalled one particular case involving an enlisted man named Everett Bays, who was court-martialed on three occasions. The first two were for minor offenses, stealing a jeep, things like that. But the third offense occurred while the battalion, already in Marseilles, was waiting to be shipped out for home. Bays got drunk and got into a fight with an officer from a different outfit and beat the officer pretty seriously.
   Don Knapp, whom you may have seen interviewed on "Patton 360," remembered the fight for which Bays was court-martialed. At the battalion's 1993 reunion, Knapp recalled a conversation he had with Tony D'Arpino, who also was interviewed in Patton 360.
   "D'Arpino said, 'You remember that night when we were going home, we were in this area," and he says, 'it was all muddy.'
   "And I says, 'Yeah, and they had strips of wood to walk on.'
   "He said, 'And Bays got drunk and he was an ex-prizefighter and he was slapping people around.'
   "I said, 'You don't remember, Tony, but I was charge of quarters that night.' By that time I was a staff sergeant.
   "And he said, 'No I don't.'
   I said, 'Well, I picked up a log out of that walkway,' because he had hit one guy real hard and I walked in he was slapping somebody. And I said, 'Cut it out, Bays.' You know, appealing to his better nature.
   "And he said, 'You shut your mouth or you're gonna get it, too.'
   "And I've got a .45, but he had one too.
   "I said, "You put that gun down.'
   "And he said, 'What the hell are you gonna do about it?'
   "I said, 'Why don't you put the gun down?' And I says, 'We'll settle it.' And I'm holding the thing in back of me, and I thought to myself, if he comes up close I'm gonna nail him, because I couldn't take him. That guy was a prizefighter. I was not about to go up against him without something. I wouldn't shoot him, but I had this big birch log in my hand in back of me and he didn't see it because he was half-bombed and I thought, I've been around drunks before and if he's up close he's gonna get you but he was kind of staggering, I thought, 'I'm gonna stay back and I'm gonna let him have it alongside the head.' I think somebody, they all jumped on him when I was talking to him. Bays. He was something else."
   Luckily for Bays, the officer he injured shipped out for home the next morning, and all the court-martial board could do was take his deposition. Bays still was court-martialed, but got off with a slap on the wrist. As Hagerty recalled, the battalion commander, Col. Vladimir Kedrovsky, was so incensed over the outcome that he fired the whole court-martial board. The battalion, Bays included, shipped out the next day.
  

Ellsworth Howard

   Ellsworth Howard, second from the left in the group picture, was the A Company executive officer until Clifford Merrill was wounded on July 13, and then he took over as company commander until August 18, 1944, when he was wounded at the Falaise Gap. He returned later in the war.
   I never did a formal interview with Ellsworth, but did do a couple of brief interviews during battalion reunions. Following is an excerpt from the first edition of "Tanks for the Memories":
   Ellsworth Howard:  "You could only get a replacement tank if you lost one in battle, and the replacements were slow in coming through. We had a void of tanks for a long time.
So I started battle losing them on paper. And then the durn war ended before my tanks balanced out. I had four or five too many, and we had to turn them in at Nuremburg.
   "We went to an ordnance place down there and turned the tanks in, and they wouldn’t take but just the number listed in the table of operations.
   "I said, 'What am I gonna do with the rest of them?'
   "'That’s not our problem.'
   "So I found a field down there right close by, and parked those tanks, got out and left. A week or so later a guy named Marshall House called, and he said, 'Are you by any chance from Louisville?'
   "I said, 'Why, I sure am.'
   "And he said, 'Well, this is Marshall House.'
   "I said, 'Why, I remember you, Marshall.' And we talked about old times.
   "And then he said, 'What about these tanks down here?'
   "I said, 'I can’t hear you. It must be a bad connection.'"

 

Howard Olsen



  

Jule Braatz

  
Here are some more photos:

Jim Cary, left, and Joe Fetsch. Cary was the original
C Company commander, was wounded on July 3, 1944,
took command of B Company when he returned,
and was wounded on Jan. 9, 1945 in the Battle of the
Bulge. Fetsch drove a gasoline truck and was wounded
on April 3, 1945, in the explosion at Heimboldshausen.
 



 

Colonel George B. Randolph

Colonel Randolph's body when he was killed during
the Battle of the Bulge. This picture appeared
in the Saturday Evening post, although he was
identified only as a colonel.
 



A platoon of A Company tanks in Bavigne, Luxembourg during the Battle of the
Bulge. The driver of the lead tank is Dess Tibbitts; the tank commander, on the left
side in the lead tank, is Lt. Wallace Lippincott, Jr., who would be killed a few days later.
 The commander of the second tank is Sam MacFarland. The commander of the fourth tank is
Hank Schneider, who would be killed by a sniper in March of 1945 on the day he received
 his battlefield commission.
 

Dess Tibbitts in 1988



The Rev. Edmund Randolph Laine and Ed Forrest



 

The entry in Rev. Laine's diary for the day Ed was killed. The death is noted
as a footnote, because it would be 13 days before the telegram arrived.



(More pictures to come)

 

Please visit the Oral History Audiobooks campaign site

Some pictures from the archives

Lisa Keithley and Dale Albee

   In 1999, Lisa Keithley of Vancouver, Washington, contacted me via email after finding a story by her great-grandfather, Walter Galbraith, on my web site, tankbooks.com. She said that after her great-grandmother passed away, she inherited Walter's memorabilia from World War II, including his uniform, and she was doing a school project on his service.

   I immediately remembered Walter Galbraith. He was one of the most upbeat, humorous veterans I'd interviewed, even though he was in remission from cancer and would pass away only a year or two after the interview. I used a couple of his stories in my first book, "Tanks for the Memories." Like the story about the time he went to check on "Little Joe." Little Joe was the generator in the tank, which was parked near the side of a building during what likely was the Battle of the Bulge. It was early in the morning and the rest of his crew was inside the building.

   A 75-millimeter round was in the chamber of the tank's cannon, and as Walter climbed into the tank, his foot accidentally hit the solenoid that fired the gun. There was an explosion in the ground in front of the tank, and Walter immediately feared that he might have killed somebody. As he climbed out of the tank prepared to "face the music," as he said, the sergeant came running out of the building, nobody had been injured, and the sergeant muttered an expletive and said something like "I drove over that spot three times last night and didn't go over that mine!"

   Relieved, Walter then heard Andy Schiffler, the driver of another tank in his platoon, begin to say "That was no mine ..." so Walter grabbed Andy and told him to shut up.

   I also remembered Dale Albee, who was Galbreath's tank commander, telling me how he teared up when he heard that Walter had died. Galbreath was Albee's gunner during a particularly harrowing incident during the Battle of the Bulge when the platoon stopped a counterattack in the middle of the night, as well as through many other incidents.

   Lisa mentioned in her email that she lived in Vancouver, Washington. I had traveled to Prospect, Oregon, to interview Albee, and I thought, heck, northern Washington, southern Oregon, heck, they're practically neighbors, how far could that be? (279 miles, thank you, Mapquest). So I asked Lisa if she'd like to meet her great-grandfather's lieutenant.

   Dale said he had a daughter he was going to visit in Vancouver over the holidays that year, so he visited with Lisa, resulting in the above meeting, which was covered by the Vancouver Sun.

 

A Company officers, 712th Tank Battalion, Amberg, Germany, 1945



   I used this picture on the cover of the first edition of "Tanks for the Memories." It shows six officers from A Company -- five lieutenants and a captain -- in Amberg, Germany, where the 712th Tank Battalion was stationed after the war in Europe was over.
   Because my father was in A Company, I took a special interest in the veterans of A Company, and although none of the men in the photo are alive today, I was able to meet all six of them, interview four of them at length, and one of them briefly a couple of times during reunions.
   The two men standing are Morse Johnson, on the left, and Sam MacFarland. I wrote an earlier blog entry about Johnson, although I failed to mention that there are only two statues that I know of dedicated to veterans of the 712th. One is of Tullio Micaloni, a sergeant who was killed at Seves Island in Normandy and who is one of four soldiers on the 90th Infantry Division monument in Perier, France. The other is Morse Johnson, and it stands near the Playhouse in the Park in Cincinnati's Mount Adams district. Unlike most statues dedicated to heroes, Johnson isn't riding a horse or sticking his head out of a tank, in fact you likely wouldn't know it was him unless you read the plaque, as the statue is an abstract figure of a human form. After the war, Johnson was a patron of the arts, and was a founder of the Playhouse in the Park, which even today has a Morse Johnson Society for donors.

The Morse Johnson Memorial

 

   Johnson entered the horse cavalry and became a sergeant, later receiving a battlefield commission with the 712th. His platoon withstood nine counterattacks at Oberwampach during the Battle of the Bulge. When I interviewed Morse in 1992 during a trip to Cincinnati, he apparently was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which would claim his life a few years later.

   Standing to Morse's right is Sam MacFarland, who introduced me to the 712th Tank Battalion Association, and helped me find three veterans who remembered my dad (who was wounded twice but survived the war, and passed away in 1980). I would love to have interviewed Sam, but he died of cancer before I attended another reunion. Shortly before passing away, Sam wrote in a letter to Ray Griffin, then the battalion association president, that "Time is succeeding where Adolf Hitler failed."

   I heard many stories about Sam, including one where he learned while in combat that his wife, Harriet, had given birth to a daughter. He was a sergeant at the time, and conferred with the members of his crew as to what she should be named. They came up with Lucky. Sam was one of 14 members of the battalion to receive battlefield commissions.

   If a picture is worth a thousand words, I'd better post this before the rest of the day flies by, and I'll get to the four men sitting in the front row, from left, Bob Hagerty, Ellsworth Howard, Howard Olsen and Jule Braatz, in my next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



A word about cenXXXXhip in World War II

While going through some old interviews with the veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion and researching a chapter on the Falaise Gap for a book I'm writing, I came upon a passage from a somewhat impromptu interview I conducted in the hospitality room of a 1994 reunion with Ellsworth Howard. Howard was the executive officer of A Company but became the company commander when Clifford Merrill was wounded on July 13, 1944, in Normandy. Howard was wounded on August 18 in the Falaise Gap, and while in the hospital, being an officer, he was assigned the duty of censoring letters.

Here is an excerpt from the transcript of my interview with Howard in which he discusses censorship:

Interview with Ellsworth Howard
    Bradenton, Fla.
    January 1994

Ellsworth Howard: All the mail that was coming back to the States had to be censored, not for what personal things people had on their mind but what conceivably could be military things, so that the way it was done, it was taken to wards in the hospital that had wounded officers in them. So as we were in bed,  we'd have a stack of mail dumped on us, and you had to read through all of it. You had to look over it for, a lot of times people tried to code things, had a little secret message of some kind. So you scan those things. And then you're looking for anything that has to do with military action or people being killed or wounded or anything; nothing personal could be said.
   In order to find it you had to read the whole letter, and I'll tell you, the things people put in some of those letters. it's just repulsive. You couldn't censor that because it was personal, I mean it had nothing to do with the military whatsoever, but, intimate things. And in the most unbelievable ways that they'd express it.

Aaron Elson: Almost like pornography?

Ellsworth Howard: Oh, golly. Pornography's mild compared to this sort of thing. And, yes, they were just unbelievable, you just don't realize that there's as many people whose minds think like that, I guess. But it was an experience for me. Of course, people would think that they have no business reading that, but it goes in one ear and out the other, you don't retain any of that, you don't even know who the people are. If on the rare occasion you'd get a letter from who you might identify a name, you'd give to somebody else, so that you're dealing with unknown, at least that was our experience. I don't know how other people did it, but if I would ever run across a piece of mail from somebody that I knew I would let somebody else handle it, I wouldn't look at it.
   But then we would just have to X out or blot out those things that had to do with what division or unit or anything that had to do with the military.

Aaron Elson: Did you see examples of disillusionment? I know Jim Rothschadl said he wrote a letter home from the hospital to his brother and his brother wanted to sign up, his kid brother, and he said in his letter that he tried to tell him what hell it was and that half the letter was blotted out. But the message got through. Did you see examples of...

Ellsworth Howard: Oh yeah, you could expect anything in there. There's, people would try to disguise their locations, and they would make some kind of a reference point, or something, and a lot of times you let it go on through, it didn't have any particular meaning. But if it got down to where it was a pretty specific thing or explicit, why, we'd cut that out.

Aaron Elson: Can you remember finding any things that looked like code?

Ellsworth Howard: No, it wouldn't be code regarding military action or anything like that.

Aaron Elson: Like a secret code.

Ellsworth Howard: Yes, somebody trying to tell their wife something, or this, that and the other. Those kind of things. Judging by the contents of the letter, you'd decide whether to X it out or what to do with it, but no, it was rare that we had to do any real censoring, because most of the letters that we saw didn't go into anything specific that would be of any value to anybody if they intercepted a letter.

Aaron Elson: What did they talk about in the letters?

Ellsworth Howard: Oh, everything. They'd talk about everything from their food and how it's fixed and how they prepare it, and what their 10-in-1 rations are like, or they might have had a letter from somebody else and they talk about family affairs and like that, even to the point of one guy telling his wife that I've found somebody over here that I'm having sex with so I hope you've found somebody. Stuff like this.

Aaron Elson: That's oddly honest.

Ellsworth Howard: Sure. Of course that didn't have any concern to us.

Aaron Elson: You didn't censor that?

Ellsworth Howard: No.

Memorial Day 2011: Tarr's Platoon

Lieutenant George B. Tarr of Newtown, Pa., was the first officer in A Company of the 712th Tank Battalion to be killed, on July 3, 1944. He was also the officer my father replaced, until he himself was wounded but a few days after joining the battalion.

Clifford Merrill was the A Company commander, although he, too, was wounded and evacuated before my father arrived on or around July 27th. Ellsworth Howard was the company executive officer and eventually took over as company commander until he was wounded in the Falaise Gap. Charlie Vinson was the company's first sergeant and, to the best of my knowledge, he didn't get wounded and even recalled my father reporting back to the battalion in early December after recovering from the wounds he sustained in Normandy.

In the second, expanded edition of my first book, "Tanks for the Memories," which I'm currently formatting for Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, I have a story about George Tarr. It was told by Cliff Merrill, and was about a train ride from Fort Gordon, S.C., to Camp Myles Standish outside of Boston, which was the battalion's port of embarcation for England and eventually France.

Tarr's wife, Dorothy, had recently given birth to a son, and Merrill wanted to keep Tarr's mind occupied on the train ride so he wouldn't worry about his wife and baby. I don't know if he was any more or less nervous than any other soldier who had just become a father -- several members of the battalion became fathers shortly before or after going overseas, including Sam MacFarland, a sergeant and later lieutenant in A Company who learned he had a daughter while his tank was in an apple orchard in Normandy, and who named his daughter Lucky. Grayson LaMar, a tank driver in C Company, married his wife, Arlene, while stationed at Fort Gordon but had a sergeant who kept putting him on KP instead of allowing him to take the bus to a nearby town where his wife was staying. Mrs. LaMar wrote a letter to Grayson's lieutenant, Jim Cary, explaining the situation and Cary made the sergeant stop putting Grayson on KP. The LaMars' eldest daughter, Judy, who was born while her father was overseas, once thanked Cary at a reunion and said that without his intervention, she wouldn't be here.

In order to keep Tarr busy on the train, Merrill asked him to count the soldiers on the train. "Go count noses," is the way he recalled the request. Tarr protested that he took a head count just a short while before, and Merrill reminded him that the battalion was about to go into combat and you never knew but one or more of the soldiers just might get a notion to jump off the train. Merrill couldn't recall whether he gave Tarr the assignment himself or had Ellsworth Howard tell Tarr to count noses, but the two of them shared a laugh while reminiscing at one of the battalion's reunions several decades later.

Clifford Merrill was wounded on July 13, 1944, spent almost a year in the hospital and wouldn't return until the war in Europe was over. As he was a career soldier, he was assigned to be part of a tribunal at the Dachau war crimes trials, and later served as a provost marshal, the equivalent of a chief of military police, at the compound where the prisoners were kept.

While he was in the hospital, his first sergeant, Vinson, would write to him to keep him abreast of developments in the platoon. The way he got around the censors, Merrill said, was that if a battalion member was killed, Vinson would write that he joined Tarr's platoon.

One day, Merrill's wife, Jan, gave me a copy of one of the letters he had saved in which Vinson made mention of Tarr's platoon.

"27 January 1945, Somewhere in Luxembourg


"Dear Captain,

"One of the members of the Battalion staff tells me that you say I owe you a letter with a little poop on our past actions. Well I might owe you a letter, but as yet I have had no reply from the last one I wrote you. It could be that the APO is screwing up, as our mail has come through very slowly.

"There is a lot that I would like to tell you about, but it would never get by the censors. We are still with the same division. And the outfit is really getting to be appreciated by the Infantry. Especially since our last big operation. The tankers really did themselves proud. The second and third platoons raised hell with the enemy armor. Sgt. Hagerty did all right with three Mark V’s and crippled a Mark VI. The second platoon accounted for six Mark V’s, a self-propelled gun and a prime mover. Then Lt. Forrest got himself a Mark V to finish things off. After that the enemy sort of got a little discouraged. The co-axials did a great amount of damage too. It is still a very wicked weapon.

"The company isn’t exactly the same as when you left, but there are still plenty of the original members left. Greener, Pacione, Koschen, Coburn, Hagerty and Lieutenant Forrest are all operating again. Schneider, MacFarland and Hagerty are in for commissions, and Braatz is in for first. Lt. Cozzens, the CO, is a new officer, but all the men think he is okay. He is doing a good job. Lt. Forrest is getting a much deserved rest now. He will be the exec and maintenance officer. He is one of the best all around officers going in my estimation.

"The men in the company are getting quite a few decorations. E.E. Crawford is back in the States on a furlough as is Sgt. Colton. Both men have been decorated twice. Each has the Silver and Bronze Stars. Bahrke has the Silver and Bronze Stars too. Pacione has the Silver Star and the Purple Heart with Cluster. Lt. Braatz, Tibbitts, MacFarland, Johnson, Ringwelski, Craven, Pellettiere, Hagerty, Bob Anderson, Bussell, Justice, and Borsenik have the Bronze Star Medals. Cameron has the Silver Star, and three new men whom you don’t know have the Bronze Star also. Shockley, who transferred to us from Headquarters Company, has the Bronze Star also. There are from 15 to 20 new awards pending for the men in the company. Pilz and Bynum, who are with Lt. Tarr, have been awarded the Bronze star too."

Now, what censor would question a letter like that? Edmund Pilz, a tank driver who spoke German, was killed in the Falaise Gap. The German 7th Army, trapped in the Gap, was trying to escape and A Company was in its way. Pilz's platoon, along with a company from the 90th Infantry Division, was in a field, and they could hear the Germans in the woods nearby. Pilz, according to Joe Bernardino, the loader in his tank, was calling in German for them to surrender. Some did, but many remained behind. Bernardino told Pilz to stop biting his fingernails because it was making him nervous, and they had an argument. Bernardino figured he would apologize in the morning, but shortly after daybreak the Germans began an artillery barrage. The first shell struck the tank, wounding Bernardino and killing Pilz.

Quentin "Pine Valley" Bynum, the other tanker who joined "Tarr's platoon," also was a driver. He was killed during the Battle of the Bulge. There was some question about how he got the nickname Pine Valley, but five decades after his death his buddies speculated it was from his hometown in the Ozarks. Only he was from Stonefort, Illinois, and there is no Pine Valley in the area.

There is, however, a Pine Valley in the mountains near Camp Lockett, where Bynum trained with the horse cavalry in 1942.
Of the others mentioned in the letter, Pete Borsenik, a mechanic, got the Bronze Star for repairing a tank under fire. Hank Schneider was killed by a sniper the day he received his battlefield commission, and Ed Forrest was killed in a freak explosion on April 3, 1945, barely five weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Chris Bynum, Quentin's nephew, inherited his uncle's dogtags and is one of my Facebook friends. I'm sure he's thinking about his uncle this Memorial Day.

Clip of the (almost every) Day: Ellsworth Howard

Ellsworth Howard

For my next oral history audiobook, I'm considering a collection of vignettes recorded in the hospitality room over the years at reunions of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served.

Yes, there's background noise, and I'd like some feedback from listeners as to whether the background noise is too much of a distraction to make for a quality audiobook.

Today's audio clip is from the 1993 reunion. Ellsworth Howard was the executive officer of A Company, and became the company commander on July 13, 1944, when the original company commander, Clifford Merrill, was wounded. Howard himself was wounded a little more than a month later, on August 18 or 19, at Le Bourg St. Leonard, during the closing of the Falaise Gap.

Here is an audio clip of the conversation, along with a transcript to make listening a little easier:

Ellsworth Howard

Aaron Elson: Where were you wounded?


Ellsworth Howard: On my body, or ...

Aaron Elson: Both.

Ellsworth Howard: I got shot in the belly, a shell fragment in the belly, in the Falaise Gap. We were there when it first started, walked right into it. Courtesy of Jack Galvin.

Aaron Elson: What did Jack Galvin do?

Forrest Dixon: You got this on, or don't you?

Aaron Elson: It's on.

Ellsworth Howard: We were in relief, A Company was. Colonel Randolph had given us instructions, you're gonna be here for several days, so clean up your tanks and your guns and write letters. Before the day was out, why, he came over and said "I need you to send five tanks up there to Le Bourg," and I said, "I don't think I've got five tanks. We've got the engines out of the darn tanks and their guns are out and everything else."
He said, "Well, you're gonna have to do it."
I went back and told Szirony [maintenance sergeant Steve Szirony] "We've got to have five tanks right away." So they, after a round of obscenity, put together five tanks.
He [Colonel Randolph] said there's nothing going on up there, that B Company's been up there on guard duty for a while and there's nothing going on, they're just tired and need to be relieved. So they pulled out and we went there with five tanks and had to fight our way in there. And before the day was out, we had everything we had in there. Then I found out that Galvin and Dougherty were drunk up there, and Randolph pulled them out because they couldn't handle it. We just about lost our whole company in that deal. When I got shot we were down to six tanks. What was the number of that tank destroyer outfit [the 773rd]? Their medic picked me up and hauled me back, and there weren't any hospitals around there, because of the way the front was moving, the hospitals didn't know where to set up, and they took me over someplace, and the best I can remember there wasn't a darn thing there, but they let me lay on that ground there on a cot until they put up a tent, they called a hospital unit in there and I stayed there for a while, and I stayed there for a while, and then they took me into Chartres and flew me back to England.