A new sampler from Oral History Audiobooks

   Most of the Oral History Audiobooks in this collection are available in my eBay store. Here is a new audio sampler with a bit of a description for each track.

Track 1: Jerry Rutigliano

   In 1994 when I interviewed a series of D-Day veterans in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of D-Day, I wanted to find a veteran who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. So I called a psychologist at the VA Hospital in Orange, N.J., and asked if he could suggest a patient to interview. He set up a meeting with Jerry Rutigliano, a former prisoner of war. This particular story, in which Jerry showed me a photo of him sitting with Jimmy Doolittle, always gets me a little choked up. A waist gunner on a B-17, Jerry was shot down on his sixth mission to Berlin. It was his 27th mission overall, and General Doolittle had recently raised the number of missions for crew members from 25 to 30. Jerry met General Doolittle at a reunion in the 1970s. Excerpts from my interview with Jerry are available on my double CD World War II Bailout Package, available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com

Track 2: Karnig Thomasian

   Karnig Thomasian was a gunner in a B-29 that was destroyed when two bombs of unequal weight collided in midair. For the next several months he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Rangoon, during which time he was regularly beaten and starved. In this excerpt, he describes the emotional rollercoaster of coming home as the plane dipped down and flew past the Statue of Liberty. Karnig's full two-hour interview is included in the collection "POW: Right in the Keister," available in my eBay store.

Track 3: Erlyn Jensen

   Erlyn Jensen is the sister of Major Don McCoy, the B-24 command pilot who was killed leading the ill-fated Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. In this brief excerpt, Erlyn tells how her mother blamed her son's death on President Roosevelt. Erlyn's interview is included in "The Kassel Mission: An Oral History Epic," available in my eBay store.

Track 4: Don Knapp

  
   Don Knapp was a tank commander in the 712th Tank Battalion, my father's outfit, which is what got me started doing this whole oral history thing. In this excerpt, Don talks about his role in the fight that broke out in the middle of the night of Sept. 8, 1944, between the 712th Tank Battalion and the 108th Panzer Brigade. Don's full two-hour interview is included in both The Tanker Tapes, available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com, and "The Middle of Hell: An Oral History Epic," about the role of the battalion's First Platoon, Company C in the battle for Hill 122 in Normandy. "The Middle of Hell" is available in my eBay store.

Track 5: George Bussell

   George Bussell was a tank driver in Company A of the 712th Tank Battalion, and one of the most colorful characters you're ever going to meet through an oral history audiobook. In this excerpt he also talks about the battle with the 108th Panzer Brigade. George's full-length interview is included in "The Tanker Tapes," available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

Track 6: Erlyn Jensen

   In this excerpt, Erlyn Jensen described the day in 1943 that her brother came home on leave before going overseas. A transcript of my interview with Erlyn and a great deal more about this epic battle between 35 B-24 Liberators and 150 Fokke-Wulf 190s and Messerschmitt 109s can be found at www.kasselmission.com, and while you're at it, why not think about joining the Kassel Mission Historical Society.

Track 7: Ed Boccafogli

   Ed Boccafogli was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division and fought in Normandy, Holland and the Battle of the Bulge. After you listen to this (not before), read this story about Johnny Daum as told by his nephew. My full two-hour interview with Ed Boccafogli is included in "The D-Day Tapes," available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

 Track 8: Henry Dobek

   Henry Dobek was a navigator on a B-24 on the Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. His plane, piloted by Paul Swofford, was one of only four of the 35 planes in the 445th Bomb Group to make it back to their base at Tibenham, England, that day. Of the others, 25 were shot down, three crash-landed in Allied territory, two reached an emergency landing field in England, and one overshot the runway at Tibenham and crash-landed five miles away. For the full story, visit www.kasselmission.com. "The Kassel Mission: An Oral History Epic," is available in my eBay store.

Track 9: Bill Scheiterle

   Bill Scheiterle was a lieutenant, and later a captain, in the Marines. In this excerpt, he describes an incident on the island of Peleliu. My full interview with Bill is included in "Four Marines," available in my eBay store, and the printed transcript is included in my book "Semper Four," along with transcripts of my interviews with three other Marines, available in my eBay store.

Track 10: Stanley Klapkowski

   Stanley Klapkowski was a gunner in C Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. My full-length interview with "Klap" is included in the audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge," which is available in my eBay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

Track 11: Tim Dyas

   Tim Dyas was a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division who was captured during the invasion of Sicily. In this excerpt he describes the emotionally wrenching decision to surrender his men, despite being faced with the certain death of all of them. My full-length interview with Tim is included in the autiobook "POW: Right in the Keister," available in my eBay store.

Track 12: Erlyn Jensen

   In this excerpt, Erlyn describes her mother's participation in Gold Star Mothers, and her mother's trip to St. Avold, to see her son's grave. Although this is the third excerpt from one interview, it's intended to give you an idea of the depth of the full-length interviews. A full-length interview with Ed Boccafogli, for example, is available on the home page of tankbooks.com. My full interview with Erlyn is included in "The Kassel Mission: An Oral History Epic," available in my eBay store.

Track 13: Jerome Auman

   In this excerpt from my audiobook "Four Marines," Jerome Auman talks about a reunion of his unit in which he encouraged his fellow veterans to write their stories. Spoiler alert: Keep a handkerchief nearby. Jerome's full-length interview is included in "Four Marines" and is available in my eBay store.

Track 14: Vern Schmidt

   Vern Schmidt was a replacement private first class in the 90th Infantry Division. He and two other young men were assigned to the division in the Siegfried line, and in ten days, the two men he joined with were dead. My full-length interview with Vern and his wife Dona is available as a double CD, "Kill or Be Killed," available in my eBay store.

   Thanks for listening. Your purchases help fund the substantial project of digitizing and making available my archive of more than 600 hours of audio interviews with the men and women of the Greatest Generation. If you'd like to sign up for my email newsletter, please send me an email at: aelson.chichipress@att.net.

A Thimbleful of Moldy Sugar

Lou Putnoky

   Lou Putnoky called me on Saturday afternoon. Since his wife passed away a few years ago Lou tends to call every three weeks or so, usually on a Sunday or on Memorial or Veterans Day. He always asks me if it's a bad time to call, and I always tell him it's never a bad time to call. Those of you who've read my book "A Mile in Their Shoes" should be familiar with Lou, a World War II veteran of the Coast Guard who was a radio operator on the USS Bayfield, the flagship of the Utah Beach invasion fleet.

   It was rare for him to call on a Saturday, but Lou suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and perhaps depression as well. He wanted to tell me his birthday is going to be in a few days, I forget how many days he said, but he's going to be 90. I told him to hold on while I placed an order for several shares of stock in a candle company. Then he asked me if he'd ever told me the story about Andy Baumgartner.

   I told him he hadn't.

   Before he enlisted in the Coast Guard, Lou said, he took part in some kind of a four-year program in which he trained during the summer, and if you succeeded in the program, at the end you would receive a commission. The program was cancelled in 1940 after Lou had spent two summers in it.

   He said there were two units that took part in the training, one was the 18th Infantry and I forget what the other one was. And he said Andy Baumgartner, who ran a hardware store in Carteret, where Lou grew up, was in the 18th Infantry on Corregidor when it fell and that Andy took part in the Bataan death march

   He said Andy lived across the street from a very good friend of his, so he would see Andy from time to time, although Andy was a little bit older and they were never that close. But one day Lou called Eli Holtzman, a writer for a local paper with whom he was friendly, and asked if Eli would be interested in doing a story about Andy.

   Andy had suffered a stroke, and was not in good condition. He sat hunched over in his chair and could barely make himself understood when he spoke, and his daughter Nancy helped out and filled in a lot of his story.

   Andy was a cook while he was a prisoner, preparing what little food there was for his fellow prisoners. When they captured Corregidor, the Japanese confiscated a supply of Carnation evaporated milk. Andy would carefully remove the paper labels from the cans, and he used the blank inside part of the labels as a diary.

   Lou noticed that there were several names in the diary with diagonal lines drawn through them. He asked what they meant.

   I don't know if Andy told the story or his daughter told it for him, but Andy had discovered a bag of moldy sugar, and he hid it from the Japanese. He also had a thimble from a sewing kit. He would fill the thimble with moldy sugar, and one at a time he would take it to his fellow prisoners. He would tell them to hold out their hand, and he would empty the thimble full of moldy sugar into it. They would ask him what it was, and when he told them, they would hurriedly raise their opened hand to their mouth and gulp down the thimbleful of sugar. Then Andy would put a little chit by their name.

   What was the chit for, Lou asked.

   He said Andy struggled to get the words out, but he said that he told the prisoners that if they ever got out alive, they would owe him a dollar for each thimble full of moldy sugar.

   Lou said he could see a tear rolling down Andy's cheek. And then he kind of smiled, and said that after the war, at a reunion of the survivors of the Bataan death march, one of the other former prisoners came up to him and gave him two dollars.

   Happy birthday, Lou Putnoky!

Lou Putnoky aboard the USS Bayfield

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July 4: What Happens to Combat Veterans

Clarence Rosen, C Company, 712th Tank Battalion

   Today being July 4th, I thought it would be appropriate to post this written account by Clarence Rosen of Ogilvie, Minnesota. I never met Clarence, but Otha Martin, a tank commander from Macalester, Oklahoma, said he was one of the top gunners in the battalion. Rosen wrote this before he passed away in 1960. His sister, Viola Oelrich, sent this to me.

   If you find that this and other entries in my blog, web site (tankbooks.com) and books help you understand World War II a little better, I hope you'll help support my work by making a small donation to my "Last Hurrah" crowd funding campaign. Most of the donations offer up a reward which makes the experience similar to buying an audiobook or book of mine on eBay or amazon, and even the smallest donation, comment, share or tweet from the campaign site helps to boost its visibility and thus introduce my work to a whole new audience.

 

What Happens to Combat Veterans

 

By Clarence Rosen

 

   Let’s say you were there! You are moving along cautiously, your eyes straining to detect movement that may indicate an enemy ambush.

   You are the tank commander standing in the turret of an M4A4 American tank. The supporting infantry are walking close behind in cover of the tanks. You come to a curve or bend in the road, you caution your driver to slow, you direct your gunner to traverse the gun turret to cover the bend in the road, and there is your objective. A river, a bridge, not a shot fired and you are only two yards from completing your mission. You were briefed by your platoon commander, before starting, that reports from intelligence had it that over 100 Heinie fanatics were to fight to the finish to hold a village, named Susisce, in Czechoslovakia. You again order your driver to move but to   approach the bridge cautiously. You spot movement through your binoculars, and as you brace and prepare yourself for battle, to your surprise you discover that they are not Germans, but your allies, the Russians. After handshakes and comments and trying the hand sign language, you radio your commander that the mission is complete, and you learn that this is the last combat mission (in the ETO) you have to accomplish. The War is over. The hasty, bloody, smeary messy war is over after almost a year in combat.
   So you come home, the old familiar faces are there, but they are empty. There is no expression in them. They don’t know – they haven’t been there. They can never know nor can you ever tell them, because they can never understand.
   So you’re home – you try to pick up the threads but your hands are palsied, and your brain is numb. Somehow in spite of all your trying, the only real thing is noise and thunder and death and hell.
   It is quiet now – but soon your numbed mind has you outside into flame and crashing death, you drift back to the time on the Normandy beach, the day you were committed to battle, the terrible roar of enemy artillery shells exploding, the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire, the cries of dying soldiers, laying there with guts some with lungs blown out. The smell of dead Germans and Americans and cattle that were grazing about in line of the battle now dead and bloated. And the days you were spearheading when enemy antitank guns sent armor piercing steel through your armored tanks killing the crewmen, wounding the others and in an instant the whole machine burst into flames and you drag yourself out half dazed, then they open up on you at close range with machine guns and rifle fire. You dive head first into a ditch where they pin you down where you have to lay and hear the blood-chilling cries of your wounded buddy burning to death, whose cries are stopped when the ammunition magazine inside the tank blows and now mortar shells are bursting close, and the heat drives you back, in spite of the danger, but somehow you manage to get back to your own lines, to again in a few hours replace and reorganize another tank crew and back to resuming battle. There is no stopping. Numbed and dazed like walking in your sleep, you must keep going.
   Now you can thrust an arm into a flame and it comes back seared and blackened. Later come the scars. Contact with boiling water leaves tortured reddened flesh, blisters, and again scars.
   These things you can see and comprehend. You understand them because you have had some experiences with burns; therefore to you a burned person is an object of understanding and compassion.
   But have you ever been shot at even once in your life? Have you been shot at day after day, week after week, month after month for up to a year?
   Have you ever in your life, when driving past a cornfield such as in Iowa or throughout the corn belt, stopped and gazed in wonderment at long wide endless rows of corn? Or have you ever walked out on a high mountain bluff and stared down at the breathtaking depth below?
   While on a tour of duty in France, I learned from a source, the sepulcher of one of my buddies killed at my side in action, and as I was passing close by, I stopped to pay my last respects. As I entered and walked through the gate, there were large letterheads stating that no photography was to be permitted inside. This was a temporary military cemetery, and there, larger than any cornfield that I have ever seen, were row upon row, acre after acre, of white crosses, all in neat, well-kept mounds. As I searched for a certain section, I could not help in my bewilderment to snap photos nor had I up to this time fully realized all the supreme sacrifices that had been made in such a short time and that the cost of liberty and freedom can never be totaled in dollars and cents.

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