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

　

Preface to Conversations With D-Day Veterans

A so-called "short snorter" signed by members of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion. Many of the signers would be killed or wounded on D-Day. Photo credit: 299thCombatEngineers.com

Following is the tentative preface to my forthcoming book "Conversations With D-Day Veterans (not to mention the Huertgen Forest and Battle of the Bulge)":

Landsberg Prison has a Facebook page. As of July 1, 2012, seven people “liked” it. Who knew. According to Wikipedia, Adolf Hitler was incarcerated there in 1924 following the “Beer Hall Putsch,” and while inside, he wrote “Mein Kampf.” And after the war, Landsberg Prison was used to hold high-ranking war criminals.

Len Goodgal had a story about Landsberg Prison during World War II.

His unit, the 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101^st Airborne Division, captured the town of Landsberg, in Bavaria, in April of 1945, near the end of the war in the European Theater. What Goodgal refers to as Landsberg Prison may actually have been a labor camp or concentration camp, as the subject came up when I asked him if he took part in the liberation of any concentration camps.

The story Len told was about the English language. About a soldier who gives his coat to a shivering inmate and says “Who needs it more, him or me?” when “he or I” would be grammatically correct. I won’t give away the ending of the story, which is only a few pages into this book, but it might be advisable to keep a handkerchief nearby.

Speaking of which, in 1994, when the media was focused on the 50^th anniversary of D-Day – that, in fact, is the period during which many of these conversations were recorded – I watched a documentary on CBS about the invasion of Normandy. It was called “Normandy: The Great Crusade,” and in one segment Dan Rather interviews a D-Day veteran of Omaha Beach who tells a story that had me crying like a baby. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried, just as Sammy Trinca wasn’t ashamed to tell a newspaper reporter that he wet his pants on Omaha Beach, after which people in his hometown of Auburn, N.Y., would say, “You’re that guy who wet his pants.”

In 1997, to promote a book I wrote three years earlier full of stories about my father’s tank battalion, I launched the “World War II Oral History” web site @ tankbooks.com. Needless to say I spent a lot of time on the Internet. One day I was browsing through a forum in which someone asked a question about the Battle of the Bulge that involved the 299^th Combat Engineer Battalion. There was a web site which no longer exists that had contact names for just about every organized veterans association, so I contacted the name on the list for the 299^th Combat Engineers. It had a phone number, so I called Chuck Hurlbut, whose name was listed. Chuck came to the phone and all of a sudden I found myself talking to an Omaha Beach veteran of D-Day. I was like Wow! So I composed myself and asked if he knew anything about the question in the Internet forum. Chuck said I should talk to James Burke, who was the battalion’s historian and might know more about the Battle of the Bulge. Then Chuck invited me to come to Ithaca, N.Y., to interview him.

I can’t say for sure – it’s funny how I don’t trust my own memory, and I didn’t record my thoughts – but I think I may remember the original question on the forum. It involved some soldiers entering a house and discovering a group of German officers seated around a table as if they were having a meal, only all of them were dead, as if they were posed that way. Sounds like an episode made for CSI. But this questioner was looking for corroboration as to whether this scene were true. Oddly enough, many years later, when I interviewed a Marine Corps veteran who spent a year on the island of Tinian, he described how he and his buddies would take some of the corpses of Japanese soldiers that lay strewn about the island and set them up in various poses, so I can speculate that such events occurred elsewhere, but that hardly counts as corroboration. Nor could Burke, who was captured in the first few days of the Battle of the Bulge and went on to write a book about his experiences as a prisoner of war, “Funf Mann,” say he’d ever heard that story.

I can no longer find the original forum posting, if indeed I'm correct in remembering that there was one, but I did find a firsthand account that describes the incident for which the questioner was seeking corroboration. This might be the account he was trying to corroborate, or it might be the corroboration. Either way, it’s posted at the website of the 299thCombat Engineer Battalion which, if it existed at all, was only in its infancy back in 1998, and has grown exponentially thanks to the great work of Jeannie Tucker, the daughter of one of the battalion’s officers. Here is the account of Mike Accordino posted at the site:

After we regrouped at Malonne we moved on to Spa, Belgium where we guarded some bridges. It was very cold. I remember one bridge we were guarding, where we could hear the ice forming on the river. At nighttime it was so cold you could hear it cracking out there.

While we were there we met a family named Tedesco. The man of the house used to go out and measure the snowfall. He would come out in the morning and then later in the afternoon. He would take a couple of measurements a day. While we were in Spa a Buzz Bomb landed, a V-1, Vengeance Weapon and some of our men were injured when that bomb hit. From Spa we then went to Saint-Vith where we swept for mines. The roads were covered with snow and we had to make sure there were no mines so the roads could be plowed. While we were there we took some prisoners, some of them were just kids; they were 14 and 15 years old, German soldiers.

They would be next to us and crying. We tried to be consoling and to reassure them that nothing was going to happen and that everything would be alright. While we were sweeping for mines someone came along and said, "Go and look at this house down the road. You will see something very curious." So we went down to this house and looked in. You could see through the windows. I don't think we ever went in. But there were six to eight German officers sitting around a table. A big dining room table with high back chairs. It looked like a real nice home because it had such nice furniture in there. The table was set for dinner. Food was on the table. But the odd thing about it was these guys were all dead. They were sitting down having a meal, I don't know what happened to them but they all wound up dead. I didn't see any wounds on them. Perhaps their food or drinks were poisoned. The odd part about it was their pants were wide open with their privates showing. Every single one of them. That to me was the oddest day. Maybe someone may have heard of this. Maybe they know something about it.

Getting back to Chuck Hurlbut, we were about halfway into the interview when he began telling a story. As tends to happen in conversations, he digressed a bit, and the beginning of the story just became one memorable detail among many other memorable details. It was a story about a buddy’s tie, which was as loud as D-Day itself. And then when he came to the end of the story, instead of getting all choked up, I exclaimed “That was YOU?!!!” And I told him how seeing him tell the same story to Dan Rather left me crying like a baby. Only now when I was hearing the story from its original source, perhaps a burst of adrenalin overcame the tinge of sadness I feel almost every time I read Chuck’s words. The story is embedded in Chuck’s interview, so I won’t give away the ending. Since the book is not yet published, you can read the story at tankbooks.com.

At the end of the interview, Chuck said he had arranged for some of his buddies to meet us at a nearby mall. I followed him over, and waiting for us there were five other members of the 299^th Combat Engineer Battalion. The interview took place at a table in the mall atrium, with a noisy waterfall in the background. And then we went to a Holiday Inn for lunch, and the tape recorder came with us (I’m glad it did, as it recorded one of the best food stories I’ve been fortunate to preserve), and after lunch we went into the lounge.

I always found other things to do rather than tackle a transcription of the group interview. I wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the individual voices to assure myself that I would even know who was saying what. But when the author Joe Balkoski contacted me and asked if I had any information on the 299^th Combat Engineers because he was writing a book about D-Day, I put the audio from the interview on a pair of CDs and sent them to him. I later sent copies of the CDs to a documentarian in England who was working on a film for the 60^th anniversary of D-Day. Now, because it’s vital to this book, I’ve transcribed it as best I could. I apologize in advance if I matched any of the speakers to something another of them said, but I believe I got most of it right. The important thing is that of the five, Jim Burke and Tony DeTomaso landed on Utah Beach; Chuck Hurlbut, Sam Trinca and Bill Secaur landed on Omaha Beach, and Jim DePalma came ashore a week or two later.

 This is not a comprehensive book about D-Day. It is simply a collection of 11 interviews and conversations I’ve had with men who took part in one of the greatest invasions in history. When I was looking for a publisher for my first book, “Tanks for the Memories,” I sent a copy of the manuscript to a well-known author and asked him for advice. He wrote back and said this was the kind of material that authors like him “stole from.” What he meant was that those stories – like the interviews in this book – were source material. And he was right. The stories I've recorded have found their way into more than two dozen books and several documentaries, some of which have been shown on the History Channel, including “The Color of War” and “Patton 360.”

I’m just a photo section short of publishing a Kindle edition of “Conversations With D-Day Veterans,” with a print version to follow. In the meantime, part of Chuck Hurlbut’s story can be found at tankbooks.com, while Sammy Trinca’s food story that I mentioned earlier is posted on this blog. Here are the links (I’ll post Len Goodgal’s story about Landsberg Prison in my next entry):

Omaha Beach Armageddon 

Gold Out of a Dollar

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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

　

"That guy who wet his pants..." (on Omaha Beach)

Me (second from right) with five veterans of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion, from left, Sam Trinca, Tony DeTomaso, Bill Secaur, Jim Burke and Chuck Hurlbut.

In September of 1998, at the invitation of Chuck Hurlbut, I interviewed a group of veterans from his World War II outfit, the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion. The movie "Saving Private Ryan" was released earlier that year. Naturally it came up in conversation. Here is an excerpt from that interview with some comments from Sam Trinca, on the far left in the photo above.

Aaron Elson: Were you scared?

Sam Trinca: Scared? Oh, you didn’t read the article, I had an article in the paper, one of the guys, he was asking about, oh, they saw the movie, what was that movie ...

Aaron Elson: “Saving Private Ryan”?

Sam Trinca: And they called me up because they knew I was one of them. They said "Mr. Trinca, you’re one of the boys who was at Omaha Beach. Could we have a little information about it? What we want to know is, does the producer hit the spot?” They wanted to know if it’s exact, as close as possible, if they made that movie as close as they said, they claimed that that movie was very close to the real invasion.

 Aaron Elson: Was it?

Sam Trinca: I don’t know. So they asked me that question. “Did you see the movie by any chance?”

     I said “No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, well,” he says.

I said, “Give me a ticket, I’ll go and see it.” How could I prove what the movie looks like if I haven’t seen it? I said “I can tell you my version of the story.” So I told him my story, like I’m telling you now.

He said, “Well, that sounds pretty close to it.”

“Well,” I says, “I can’t tell you what the movie is.”

He says, “Are you going to go see it?”

I says, “I don’t know, maybe yes and maybe no.” But I didn’t see it. See, they were trying to compare how close they came to making it real. Because they said a lot of it was a lot of bull. But some people thought it was real. So they’re taking the people’s word.

Aaron Elson: Going back to scared.

     Sam Trinca: Oh, scared. I was afraid to even mention it in the newspaper. I told him, I said, “You know, I was so damn scared I wet my pants so many times it wasn’t even funny.” I mean a lot of my friends downtown, they said, “You’re that guy who wet his pants, ain’t you?”

I says, “I’ll tell you. I’m not ashamed to say it. Yes, I did wet my pants.” I tell my friends. In fact, I was over here at a store here, that my wife goes to, and I saw a lady, a friend of ours. She started, she said, “Hey Sammy. I read the story in the paper. So you wet your pants, huh?”

I said “Yes I did.” I said “I’m not ashamed to tell you.”

She says, “I don’t blame you. I’ll bet you some guys did more than that.”

I says, “They probably did.” Then I says, “Thank god I was in the water anyway, I was soaking wet, so who could tell the difference?” She started laughing. What the hell, I was soaking wet anyway. How many times did I have to wet my pants? I don’t know, from there to there? Hell, yeah, you bet your life I was scared. Scared? Like I said, when you jump off that boat, you don’t know what you’ll do. You know you’ve got to get the mines, your job is to do what you’re supposed to do and keep on going. You’re here. You watch yourself, you try and help your buddy if you can."

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A full transcript will be available in my next book, tentatively titled "Conversations With D-Day Veterans." An audio version will not be available as the interview was recorded in a mall with a noisy waterfall in the background, and later in the restaurant of a Holiday Inn in Ithaca, N.Y., with a great deal of background noise. I have made copies of the audio and supplied them to the author of a book on D-Day who could find few sources on the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion, and also to a documentary producer in England who was making a film about D-Day. I may recreate the conversation using actors to produce an audio version in the future. For more information about the battalion, visit their web site,  299th Combat Engineer Battalion, with thanks to Jeannie Tucker, the daughter of one of the battalion's veterans.

- - -

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

 

Visit the Oral History Audiobooks Indiegogo campaign and check out the great perks

　

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.

You can't make stuff like this up

Me, with five veterans of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion, from left: Sam Trinca, Chet DePalma, Tony DeTomaso, Jim Burke, and Chuck Hurlbut.

During the past few weeks I've been transcribing a conversation I had in 1998 with five veterans of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion. The battalion was split up on D-Day, with some members landing on Omaha Beach and others landing on Utah Beach. A narrative drawn from my individual interview with Chuck Hurlbut is included in my book "Nine Lives," but I always kind of dreaded transcribing the group interview because a) I wasn't sure I would recognize the individual voices, and b) the conversation began in a mall in Ithaca, N.Y., with an artificial waterfall in the background, then moved to lunch at a nearby Holiday Inn, and concluded in the lounge.

I'm almost finished with the transcription, which I plan to include in my book "Conversations With D-Day Veterans." Today I came upon two passages in one of the files I've converted for use in the transcription program ExpressScribe. The first is one of those scenes that is both sad and humorous at the same time. The second is a wonderful description of the effect of American tank ammunition early in the war when confronted with a German tank.

1) Jim DePalma: Do you remember when the German paratroopers came down during the Battle of the Bulge? We captured what, four? We had about four we captured, I don't know what town it was. Anyway, I had the duty of guarding these four, taking them to the POW camp. Who the hell was it, Mitchell, said to me, he says, "Have them dig a latrine." So I give them a shovel apiece and they started to dig, and one guy started to cry. This sergeant started to cry. So I said to someone who could speak German, "Ask the guy what's wrong with him." Well, he thought he was digging his grave.

2) Bill Secaur: I got chased down a road by a German Panzer 200 yards behind me with a jeep. I was driving a jeep with a machine gun mounted with a messenger. We ran into our outfit in a schoolhouse and they said you better get some sleep. We woke up an hour later and everybody's gone, kitchen equipment's all there, and everything else is gone. We went out the back door of the schoolhouse and here comes a Panzer tank. We took off with a jeep, that's when we went into the woods. We went into the woods, and here's a tank destroyer outfit  from the U.S. and they were waiting for the tanks to destroy 'em. When we first went in with American tanks we couldn't touch a Panzer tank. The shells would bounce right off like a ping pong ball.

D-Day 2012

A photograph by Robert Capa of the D-day landings in 1944. Photograph: International Center of Photography/Cornell Capa/Magnum 

   The following is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, tentatively titled "Conversations With Veterans of D-Day." I interviewed Valentine Miele, of Palisades Park, N.J., in 1994, shortly before the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. "Conversations With Veterans of D-Day" is a sequel to "A Mile in Their Shoes: Conversations With Veterans of World War II," whose e-book edition for Amazon's Kindle has ranked consistently on Amazon's bestseller list in its category (History...military...U.S....veterans) for the past three months.

   Valentine Miele was a machine gunner in the 1st Infantry Division, the fabled Big Red One.

Aaron Elson: Which regiment were you with?

Valentine Miele: I was with the 16^th.

I’m going to England in two weeks. I’m leaving the 26^th, back to where we were. I’m not going to France. I could go. I’d have to get a special pass to get onto the beach. I was there on D-Day, now I’ve got to get a special pass, so I said to hell with it.

Aaron Elson: You’re the first person I’ve talked to who was on Omaha Beach. What was it like?

Valentine Miele: It was rough when we got there. I was sick as a dog going in. Puking up.

Aaron Elson: What kind of a ship did you go in on?

Valentine Miele: An LCVP.

Aaron Elson: You crossed the channel on what?

Valentine Miele: On the Chase, an invasion ship. Then we had to climb down a cargo net. I was a machine gunner then. I lost the front side of my machine gun on D-Day, somebody chopped it off. It had to be another machine gun. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an air-cooled machine gun, there’s a jacket around the barrel, and it has holes, so the air gets in there. And they hit that. It knocked the front side off my machine gun. I lost two fronts on my machine gun. And I lost a box of ammunition too, that day. You see, the gunner only carried the tripod. The assistant gunner carried the gun. The tripod I had tied to my wrist, with a rubber life preserver. When I got off the landing craft, when they dropped that gate, my company commander went off before me, but he was 6-6, he was a giant. When I went off the water was only up to my chest. I took two or three steps, and my feet didn’t touch the ground anymore. So I let go of the box of ammunition, because I had that in my left hand. In my right hand I had the tripod, that was tied, and I started to swim. When I started to swim, I thought I was swimming, the water was deep. I looked over to the side, there was my first sergeant, he was walking, and the water was only up to here. That’s when I got my foot down on the sand, and I took off for what we called the rock pile. Right at the edge of the water they had all crushed stone, so the water wouldn’t go in. Then behind that, they had a big hole they had dug, so if any water went over that it went in there, and the water coming off the hill went in there. That was a slop.

Aaron Elson: Was it high tide or low?

Valentine Miele: Low tide. They hit at low tide. Good thing. They had it planned right. At high tide we would have lost more. I don’t think we would have made, it because we wouldn’t have no beach to stand on. High tide it would have gone right up to the crushed stone, and they wouldn’t have seen those, have you ever seen the pictures with the railroad tracks up like that? They would have ripped the hell out of the boats. And then you see those big poles in the water? They had mines on top of those. So at high tide we would have hit them. I think they had it figured the high tide came up about a foot every ten minutes or so. And that water, it was rough. They were gonna call it off but it was rough. I’m glad they didn’t call it off. The day before we got in there, they moved a whole division in there for maneuvers, the 4^th or 5^th of June they moved a whole infantry division in, and we ran right smack into them. We lost a couple of men there. I think I got a couple. When we got on the beach we met a lieutenant that used to be with us in Sicily. We met him. “Hey, Lieutenant, how ya doing?” Some guy came running up and said, “Lieutenant! Lieutenant! The machine gun up there is cutting the hell out of G Company, cutting C Company apart.” So my sergeant says, “Miele, get on the gun.” I got on the gun. I set the gun up, and we’re looking, we’re looking. He says, “See if you can spot him.” All of a sudden I spotted him, about 200 yards away, and I’d say maybe about thirty or forty feet higher than me. He wasn’t firing at me. He was firing down across. So when he opened up again, the Germans, when they fire, they fire fast, they don’t fire like we did, because they change the barrels of their machine guns in seconds, ours were a pain. We had to take the whole gun apart and screw the barrel off, and then put another barrel on.

They would get hot if you fired like the Germans. We only fired bursts of three or four at a time. The Germans put their finger down, they’d run a hundred off. Because they just push a button, the barrel falls out, and they put another one on. We couldn’t do that. We had to take the whole gun down, screw the barrel off, put a new barrel on, then loosen it three clicks. It was a pain. So he fired, I picked him up, I got about ten rounds in there, that sonofagun never fired any more. He didn’t fire no more. Some of the infantry got up, the riflemen got up and they walked over, and they looked in the hole. They didn’t signal that there was anybody in there. They just looked in the hole and walked away.

And after I started firing some other guy picked me up, and that’s when they knocked the front side right off my machine gun. I lost two.

Aaron Elson: Were you still on the beach?

Valentine Miele: Right on the rockpile. Then they told us to get the hell off the beach. I was ready to go.

Aaron Elson: About what time was this?

Valentine Miele: Oh, about 7 in the morning. Then after we got up there, we only made 1,500 yards on the first day. We were supposed to go 6,000 and set up a roadblock. Never made it. Then we hit the hedgerows. That was a pain.

Aaron Elson: Did you have tanks with you?

Valentine Miele: There was one tank by us on the beach, and he wasn’t firing. All he was doing, there’s when our colonel came up, he’s banging on the end of the damn tank with his tommy gun, “Fire! Fire!” Then all of a sudden the hatch would open up, and they were throwing out, not the shells, you can’t call it a box because it’s the shape of a round, what they had them packed in, because you had to make them waterproof, the tanks. They had a big scoop on the back, it came up like this and out like that so they could go on the water. So once they got on the beach they had to take the shells out of the packing case. They were throwing these out, and the colonel was hollering “Fire!” And he was hitting the tank. They had shells but they were in them damn things. Then we got out and we went up the hill. When we got up to the top of the hill we lost a couple of guys. Urban got hit there. I think it was Hoffman got hit. Cheseldine got killed. Alabama Sam Cipolla got blown up altogether, I think he stepped on a mine and it blew him, he was gone. Cheseldine, he shouldn’t have been there. I found out later on what happened to him. He got hit in Africa in the head. See, when you go into the hospital, you’re still in the same outfit, you don’t get reclassified. But with him, he gets hit in the head, but when he found out that the outfit went back to England, he came back to the company, but he should never have been there. They should have sent his rear end home. So he got killed on D-Day.

Aaron Elson: Where was he from?

Valentine Miele: I think he was from New York.

Aaron Elson: What was his first name?

Valentine Miele: Oh, I don’t know his name. You don’t know anybody by their first name. We found out later on. One day we were in the hedgerows and the old man, the company commander, came over. We’ve got the little stove we used to carry, and we made coffee, and he starts talking. He says, “Cheseldine got killed on the beach.” They found out, I don’t know if a grenade or a shell went off close to him. And that’s when they found out he had a silver plate in his head. They shouldn’t have sent him back over there, bastards.

Another guy got it in the eye, up by the eye. He got it on D-Day. We got him back, they sent him back in October. We got him back in October. The company commander took one look at him and said, “Get the hell out of here.”

He said, “Where am I gonna go?”

He said, “I don’t care, get out.” His eye was pulled over on the side like that, they sent him back up on the line. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t want to get out of the outfit. I didn’t want to get out either when I got hit. When I went to the hospital and I came out, next thing you know I got a reclassification, they put me in some ordnance outfit in the Air Force. And that’s where I got discharged from, the Air Force.

Aaron Elson: Was that the first time you got wounded?

Valentine Miele: Yeah, only once I got hit. That other guy, Urban from New York, he got hit on D-Day, he got hit in Sicily, right through the shoulder. He got hit when he came back again, the third time he got hit, I think he got it in the leg. Then they reclassified him. They put him in some other outfit. They didn’t send him back on the line no more.

         - - - 

Thanks for reading. Watch for more information on this upcoming book.

- - -

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

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Conversations With Veterans of D-Day

Nine Lives: An Oral History

They Were All Young Kids
 

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Gold Out of a Dollar

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, that's your room."

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

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

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

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

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