Coming Soon: Tanks for the Memories 2, The Hospitality Room

"This is the only loving I get out here" -- Art Horn in a letter to his girlfriend.

  It's been a long time between posts. I've been working on a new book, "Tanks for the Memories 2: The Hospitality Room." This is a collection of stories, interview and conversation excerpts from the many reunions of the 712th Tank Battalion that I went to in the 1990s, until they stopped having them because the last few veterans were too frail to make the trip. It didn't help that two of the four who were at the final reunion were treated so badly in the airport where they had to make a change on a flight from Boston to Florida that they decided it would be their last reunion. I forget what year it was, but in the early 2000s, I think.

   Please keep an eye on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, my email newsletter, which gets posted on Facebook anyway) for further progress on the book. In the meantime, since I had such a wealth of material from which to draw, I'll be posting some "outtakes" from the many transcripts which have been hiding on my computer's hard drive for nearly two decades.

   The photo above is of Art Horn, who became a mechanic in D Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. Art sent the picture to his girlfriend Margaret, whom he would later marry, in Chicago, and it wound up in a newspaper, I'm not sure which one.

   While he was training in the horse cavalry, Art had a bit of a mishap on a horse. It was not the horse pictured above. During an exercise in which the trooper had to ride in a figure 8, shooting at targets at various points, Horn fell off the horse, struck his elbow on the ground, the pistol fired and the bullet struck the horse in the chin. The horse survived. I had heard about this from a couple of other former cavalrymen in the 712th, so I asked Art about it. This is what he said:

   "That was after six to eight months of training, the company commander gave an order to the stable sergeant to take certain horses away, we were gonna be firing on the range, and he says to put those in the corral and don’t let them on the line so that anybody could take one. But I think I got one. And I waited my turn. The biggest problem was that the rest of the horses were in the distance, they would stay there and each one of us would make these figure eights, run the figure eight, and this horse that I had, as long as I fired away from him, when I went around the other way to fire crossover is when it got too close to his ear and he bucked and he threw me on the ground. And when I landed on my back, my elbow hit the ground and I still had my hand on the pistol. The bullet went straight up. Because they always said when you’re on the firing range, when you’re not firing, always hold it straight up, because if I’d have held it off to the side I might have hit one of the men that were standing around.
   "So I did that. The horse stopped, and I got up and I looked and I noticed that there was a little blood coming down from his throat. And I looked at it, and I said, oh, the bullet hit the horse. But I also noticed on the halter on the horse there was a double leather thong that was underneath there. The bullet went through that, and then I found out later that the bullet only entered into the horse’s mouth, and when they got to the vet they were able to take it out and it healed up, and he was back in the saddle again."

Art Horn

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Return to Normandy

Dave and Boots Tolan in 1996

   I received a phone call recently from a member of the Daughters of WW2, a Dallas-based organization that had sponsored a trip to Normandy for several World War II veterans, one of whom, David Tolan, was a member of the 712th Tank Battalion.

   Upon their return, the Dallas affiliate of CBS recorded interviews with some of the veterans. Dave's interview can be seen by clicking the following link.

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/video/9049073-profiles-of-courage-david-tolan/

   After the interview, the woman from the group told me, David came by and wanted to talk. The trip had revived many memories of events that happened almost 70 years before.
   At first I didn't recall David, as I heard his last name as Collins (must have been that Texas accent), but then when I realized it was Tolan, which I had misspelled as Toland, I remembered I'd met him at one reunion and possibly another. He attended the 1996 "mini-reunion" of the battalion in Bradenton, Fla., and I think he came back the following year.
   In 1996, when I learned he was a veteran of C Company, from whose members I'd heard many stories, I wanted to get his point of view on some of the incidents, so I conducted an all too brief interview with him.
   Following is an edited transcript of that interview, with some parenthetical names and remarks.

   Dave Tolan: I went to Paris in November [of 1944], I remember that. The reason I remember is because it was the first bath I’d had, I mean, Up Front with Mauldin, so if you can imagine, the Grand Hotel in Paris, and here come these guys that are covered with mud, and these old dirty bedrolls, and they put them down in front of the desk, and all these people were standing around, and very formal. The contrast must have really been something.

   So I go to my room, and my French wasn’t very good. Then I heard they had trouble getting coal. Well, I’m going to take a bath, that was the first thing, I’ve got my own bathtub. So I turn the water on, and I don’t know which is hot and which is cold, and the one I thought was hot was coming out cold, they don’t have any coal, I’ll take a cold bath. So I take the cold bath, and when I’m all through doing as my mother taught me, I’m cleaning out the tub, and I’m rinsing it with this cold water that all of a sudden turned hot. I fill up the tub again, and I take another bath.

   Aaron Elson: Who did you go into Paris with?

   Dave Tolan: There were only three of us from the 712th, and I didn’t know the others, they were from different companies. Then we joined some guys from the 90th Division. But Paris had only been liberated like three weeks. Does that tie in with November?

   Aaron Elson: What did you do to earn a trip to Paris?

   Dave Tolan: We drew straws. We were up all night putting connectors on the tank, Patton wanted those duck things on there, so that you would get better float, and we were up all night. When they finished, I guess C Company got an opportunity, and they said, we’ll draw straws to see who goes to Paris. And I won.

   Aaron Elson: Oh, the other guys must have been pissed.

   Dave Tolan: No they weren’t. You know, get me this and get me that. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I went to Paris, I never even saw the Eiffel Tower. I never got out of the first three blocks.

   Aaron Elson: One of them wasn’t George Bussell [from A Company], was he?

   Dave Tolan: Oh, I don’t know.

   Aaron Elson: He said he went into Paris with $500 on a three-day pass and came back with 50 cents.

   Dave Tolan: He had a better time than I did. Oh, I was just enjoying the relaxing.

   Aaron Elson: You went from July to November without a bath?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah. When we first started, when clothes got dirtied you threw them away, and you got new. Boy, you know I used to think about all those coveralls I threw away, afterwards, “Boy, I wish I’d kept those.” There were times you’d wash just out of the helmet. We did everything in that helmet. We also made good coffee.

   Aaron Elson: How would you make coffee?

   Dave Tolan: Pour in the grounds, pour in the water, and you just put it over the fire. And just hang the helmet over the fire. It was when I came back from that that I was in [Sgt. Jack] Green’s tank. I wasn’t when I left, but when I came back. They were looters. Boy, you’d pull into a town and they were off looting.

   Aaron Elson: Was one of them named Aaron Brown?

   Dave Tolan: Yes, Aaron Brown, I remember him.

   Aaron Elson: Souvenir Brown was his nickname.

   Dave Tolan: Souvenir Brown, yeah, I can remember him. But they were bringing this stuff back, and I’d throw it off the other side, and nobody asked about where is this or that, they didn’t know what they were doing. It was ridiculous.

   Aaron Elson: What kind of stuff would they bring back?

   Dave Tolan: Oh, junk. I don’t know. Satchels of stuff. The town wasn’t even taken, these guys were out running around, looting.

   Aaron Elson: So that was in November that you came back from Paris?

   Dave Tolan: See, it all kind of comes together. I can’t even remember when, after Green we brought in this Lieutenant Monroe. They pulled us back for a couple of days, and he joined us. I was to be his gunner, and he comes up to me, he says, “Before we leave, you better check the gyro stabilizer.” And I said, “If you want to do that, you’d better go back to the beach at Normandy because that’s where we left it.”

   “Oh,” he said.

   Aaron Elson: Monroe didn’t last long, did he?

   Dave Tolan: No. I was with them for a little while. I can’t remember why I left them, and that’s when I went to [Sgt. Max] Gibson’s platoon, with Young. Ewell Young. I know they tried to get him to come to a couple of reunions, and he wanted no part of it. The reunion was right in his hometown. Some guys, Thompson was the same way. He wanted no part of it.

   Aaron Elson: Gibson at that point was still a sergeant or he was a lieutenant?

   Dave Tolan: He was acting as a lieutenant, and somewhere in there they gave him a commission. He he was acting quite a while. But it was right after that that this Monroe, there was something wrong with the gun on one of the tanks or something, as I understand it, and he got out of the tank and went over to see what was the matter, and that’s when he got killed. And I thought, geez, I hope I didn’t do anything to that gun. Because I used to clean it out, every time we pulled back I would re-sight, re-clean, I’d find myself a twig about a thousand feet away and see if I could hit it with a three-inch shell. You know, you put the crosshairs on there, you set it right up with that thing. Then of course you fire and everybody would come running out, what was that? But then, I’m trying to think, the last part with Young. But those other battles, those are the ones that I get all mixed up.

   Aaron Elson: You were with them when they crossed the Saar River into Dillingen?

   Dave Tolan: Oh, yes. The tank in front of us was going across on a ferry, they wouldn’t build a bridge, so we had this ferry. And the water is racing down there and this tank in front of us gets on the ferry and he gets halfway across, and the darn boat conks out. And down the river goes the tank. Oh gosh. And they managed to get the boat started. We had ammunition all over the back deck of the tank, and so we’re next. I said, uh-oh. I’m coming up to that turret if we start going down the river. Well, anyway, we got across all right. That was part of the Siegfried Line there, and we backed up the tanks against this bank, and the guy says, “They can see you from over there,” because it’s night, now. “You’d better stay in the tank.” So we spent the whole night in the tank, and this shell came in and hit, it didn’t miss that ammunition by two feet. It went right into the bank, right behind the tank. Of course we’re all beat up, tired. “What was that?” But when you got up in the morning, there’s the hole, right there in the wall. We were just lucky they didn’t keep on that azimuth.

   And we went down there, and [Sgt. Burl] Rudd had to go up into the line, he and another tank were up there. I don’t want any part of that.

   Aaron Elson: So at this point you’re in Rudd’s platoon?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah.

   Aaron Elson: Now was Jack Green in that platoon also?

   Dave Tolan: Jack, yeah, he had the No. 5.

   Aaron Elson: He had to destroy a tank there, didn’t he? Somebody said he accidentally put a can of water instead of a can of gas in the gas tank. But your platoon had to leave one tank behind when you went back across the river?

   Dave Tolan: They may have, I don’t remember.

   Aaron Elson: I think Jack Green stayed behind and destroyed it because they couldn’t get it to start.

   Dave Tolan: When we crossed the Rhine we only had eight tanks.

   Aaron Elson: That probably was when the two platoons combined [after a battle in Pfaffenheck, Germany, when two tanks were lost, with the end of the war in sight, the second and third platoons were merged into one. Each platoon would have had five tanks at full strength]?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah.

   Aaron Elson: That was yours and Snuffy’s [Lt. Francis “Snuffy” Fuller, who got his nickname, according to veteran Otha Martin, when a member of his platoon “done imbibed him some” and told Lt. Fuller, who was a bit older than most of the men in the platoon, that he “looked like Snuffy Smith in the comics”.]

   Dave Tolan: Yeah. Gibson and Snuffy, that was the night that they went down to the CP. He said the Germans came in and they hid upstairs, and he says, they’re lying in the room, and he said there’s a German over there in the doorway talking to another one, and they’re lying here on the floor, and then he says, and Snuffy started to fart. [A day after crossing the Rhine River, Lts. Fuller and Gibson found themselves in a building taken over by Germans, who took the 90th Division officers there prisoner. Fuller and Gibson hid out overnight in an attic room.]

   Aaron Elson: Gibson said that?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah. Then he said, when they left the door, why then, they went up in the attic, they got up top of this water cooler and spent the night up on top of that water cooler, and in the morning, he said, the Germans were gone. That was kind of a wild night.

   Aaron Elson: Now, tell me about Putnam.

   Dave Tolan: Yeah, [Fred] Putnam. He’s the one that killed [Edwin Jarusz].

   Aaron Elson: Were you with them when that happened?

  Dave Tolan: Yeah, we had just joined them, and he was cleaning the gun ...

   Aaron Elson: It was a grease gun?

   Dave Tolan: Grease gun, and it, the end, all you had to do was just hit that thing into something, that bolt would come back and it would start firing. That killed more Americans than I think Germans, that grease gun.

   Paul Wanamacher [the Battalion Association president]: It was a very simplified weapon.

   Dave Tolan: Yes, it was.

   Aaron Elson: How would it misfire?

   Paul Wanamacher: All you’d do is have the door out. The door was the safety. You know what they look like? They’re about this long and have a tube. And on the top of it was a latch that was probably about that wide, and you just lifted it up. And when you lifted it up, it then allowed the bolt to go back and fire. When you closed it, there was a little protrusion on the inside of the latch which locked the bolt, and it couldn’t go back and forth, so it couldn’t fire. But if that latch was open and somebody hit the trigger, oh, that was it.

   Dave Tolan: That thing zzzips right out.

   Paul Wanamacher: And they were .45 slugs.

A World War 2 "grease gun"

   Dave Tolan: It wasn’t as fast as a burp gun. I never heard of a burp gun hitting a guy once. If it hit you once it hit you 15 times.

   Paul Wanamacher: Yeah, that’s the Schmeisser.

   Aaron Elson: So you had just joined them in Normandy, and that’s when that happened?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah. I didn’t even know the fellow that...

   Aaron Elson: His name was Jarusz. [Lt. James] Gifford said that he tried to calm the crew down, that they were very...

   Dave Tolan: Oh, they were very upset, everybody was, the whole outfit, the company was upset. But he’s the guy that when they moved [Sgt. William] Montoya from No. 2 behind [Lt. Leo] Hellman back to No. 5, because Hellman kept sending Rudd out and Rudd wanted a better tank to go with him, he didn’t want the weakest crew. So they moved us back there and they moved 5 up, and Putnam was sitting where I would have been sitting, and that shell went right through him. That’s when Tambaro got out, and he was just covered [with blood and flesh], I saw Tambaro running across that field and I said, “Tambaro’s been hit.” But it wasn’t him at all, it was Putnam [T-4 Ralph Tambaro was the driver, who would have been sitting next to Putnam in the tank].

   Aaron Elson: Who did you say that to?

   Dave Tolan: The guys, we were in our tank. Everybody, we were lined up, 1,2,3,4,5, right across the ridge there. That’s when Hellman jumped out and says “Fire at any range” and took off. And the next one was the one that got hit. We were up there, and we’re firing 400 yards straight down and we’re hitting that tank right where the turret meets the hull and that shell’s bouncing up in the air, that’s awful discouraging. I mean, you hit that thing square, and the shell just bounces up in the air. It’s time to take another tack on this. Go somewhere else.

   Aaron Elson: Was that the tank that hit...

   Dave Tolan: Oh, there were tanks all over. And then we got around, and I remember, we pulled around and started up this road, and I’m down inside, because I’m throwing these shells up, so I’m not seeing everything other than what I could see through the periscope...

   Aaron Elson: You were the loader at the time?

   Dave Tolan: No, I was the assistant driver at the time. I think McDonough was the loader, and Raymond Vuksich, he was the gunner, and Montoya was the tank commander. But I remember looking out, and they hit this one tank in the back, and it blew up. And I remember seeing this guy way, I mean up over the trees flying through the air, and landed way down there somewhere. Because I guess the suction right at the hatch when that thing blew, just like a rifle, shot him right out of there.

   Aaron Elson: This was an American tank?

   Dave Tolan: No, this was a German tank. We got one in the rear. We got another one down in the sponson where the tracks were. Then we got four halftracks full of infantry came over, and we got those. That’s just from our tank, I don’t know what the other guys got...

   Aaron Elson: When you say you got those, did the infantry get out, or were they still inside them when you...

   Dave Tolan: Oh, I don’t know. The 90^th was all around, and they took care of all the...We just kill them, we don’t handle them. We knock ’em out, they handle them. I mean, what do we got ’em there for?

   Aaron Elson: Now, how did that night start? You were under the tank?

   Dave Tolan: I was under the tank, having my nice full night’s sleep that I earned.

   Aaron Elson: How did that work, with the guard duty?

   Dave Tolan: It depended where we stayed. Every night we thought it was pretty easy, why, one guy got to sleep all night, and the others were on four, off four. This was my night to sleep and we’re backing in this pine woods, with those nice pine branches down there, I’m gonna sleep like a baby. And that’s when these guys come through in the middle of the night.

   Paul Wanamacher: Where was this?

  Dave Tolan: This was that battle that he’s got outlined there.

   Paul Wanamacher: What, Mairy?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah. He didn’t know that there was an airplane in there too, one of those observation airplanes came down and landed and they backed that thing in. Those two guys, they got in a jeep and took off. They left the airplane there.

   Aaron Elson: What was it that woke you up?

   Dave Tolan: I heard ’em, talk, they were spread out across the field.

   Aaron Elson: You heard them talking German?

   Dave Tolan: They weren’t talking English. That was my first clue, that there’s something wrong. They’re not coming to wake me up for guard.

  

  Aaron Elson: So there you are sleeping under the tank, you heard them talking German. What did you do?

   Dave Tolan: When they backed the tank in, they bent these trees down, and I couldn’t get out the back. I had to go out the front. So these Germans were out in the front and I didn’t want to go out the front. I waited until they got by and then I slipped out the front. But my biggest worry was they were going to start this thing up, whether I was in it or not, they were gonna take off, and I’m underneath it. So I got out, I got in, the rest is history, I guess.

   Aaron Elson: So you got in the tank, and then did they start it up, or when did the firing break out?

   Dave Tolan: When they went through, that’s when we pulled out on this road and we ran into all the, we pulled up on this hill, that’s when all the other jazz went ...

   Aaron Elson: Now Putnam, was he a bow gunner?

   Dave Tolan: He was an assistant driver.

   Aaron Elson: Oh, he was an assistant driver [actually, the assistant driver was also called the bow gunner]. So he was in the same seat you would have been.

   Dave Tolan: We just happened to move the tanks a couple of days before. It wasn’t very long.

   Aaron Elson: And what were the circumstances of the switching of the tanks?

   Dave Tolan: That was, well, Hellman, every time they had a duty to run, they sent Rudd out. He wouldn’t take his part of the platoon, he’d send Rudd and some other tank. And Rudd says, “If I’m gonna do all the work, then I want a better tank to go with.” Montoya had a better tank, so they pulled him out. I don’t even remember, Tambaro would, because he was in that tank.

  Aaron Elson: What happened in the Falaise Gap? Was it in the Falaise Gap that Hellman left the tank?

   Dave Tolan: Well, everybody left that tank. That was when he left [Rex] Smallwood laying there in the ditch, he said he was dead, when he wasn’t dead. But we were in a tank right behind him, and  that tank got hit five times. Five times they hit that thing, and they split the barrel of that 75 right down. You couldn’t see that till the next morning when you came back, that tank was orange when we came back the next morning, it was that hot. That’s when we came back the next morning, and Smallwood was still alive in the ditch.

   Aaron Elson: [Don] Knapp said that he found Smallwood and he was still...

   Dave Tolan: Yeah, when he was still alive, he’d been there all night. If they had brought him back he would have lived.

   Aaron Elson: Smallwood was the driver? No, [T-4 Sidney] Henderson was the driver.

   Dave Tolan: Henderson was the driver. He’s the one we never found.

   Aaron Elson: And he was the driver of that tank, of Hellman’s tank?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah.

   Aaron Elson: And Smallwood was what?

   Dave Tolan: Smallwood was either a loader or assistant driver. He was not the gunner. But those guys all, boy, you just watched and the fire was up higher than the tree, and you see these guys jumping out of this tank...

   Aaron Elson: Did they jump out after the first hit?

   Dave Tolan: Oh, during. They just kept hitting that.

   Aaron Elson: What kind of gun was it that hit them, was it a tank?

   Dave Tolan: Couldn’t see. They were very clever, they put that little fire on one side of the woods and let the smoke blow across the road, and you went through that real carefully, and it cleared up. Then they had another one. They were behind the second one. On both sides of the road, I assume, from what we saw being hauled up down through the valley there that it was some sort of antitank, drawn gun, horses or jeeps or whatever. They sure had a lot of horses down in there. And they just pulled up in the front, you’d fire into that woods and it would blow up. And then the second day, it looked like the Oklahoma rush. I mean, they all started at once, right across the field, they took off. And we’re sitting there, we can’t fire fast enough. And the British of course on the other side. After we went through all that, I remember we finally went down in there and got over to the British, they said, “Where ya been, Yank?” I told them we’d been sitting on the beach for two months. “Where ya been, Yank?” I was at sea.

   Aaron Elson: This happened before or after the thing with Smallwood?

   Dave Tolan: After. That was the whole deal, we were coming up to the valley, and it was just getting dark about that time. The next morning we came and we saw the vehicles taking off. As we were coming down the road. And of course we came out in the valley and there they were. We sat out there in the open for two days firing, and then finally somebody comes from the rear and says, “You shouldn’t have any tanks out here. Put them back in the woods.” As soon as we put them back in the woods they started shooting at us. And we were sitting out there for two days. That’s when they brought the mess sergeant, that the cooks hated, everybody hated him, and he came up to see, because they told him that nobody was firing; well, when he came up they started firing at him, and he got wounded. And then they go back to the cooks and they told them he was wounded, and they said, “Serious?”

   “No, but enough to send him to England.”
   “Hooray!” Everybody was cheering. I can’t remember his name. One of those cooks, I took a plaque back for one of those cooks. They had a plaque to present to the next of kin. The guy I guess was never married or whatever, so I took it to his sister down in Texas. He was one of them, and I’m trying to remember his name. I can’t do like [Ray] Griffin did, Griffin knew names, places, dates. He spent a lot of effort in that.

   Aaron Elson: When they combined the two platoons, Snuffy’s and Gibson’s, you were in Gibson’s platoon at the time?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah, I think so. No, I was in Snuffy’s platoon.

   Aaron Elson: The one with the Chinese guy, Koon Moy, he was in that?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah, he was in there. In fact, he was in our room in Amberg after...

   Aaron Elson: Was he? He was burned, I thought. He was badly burned.

   Dave Tolan: This Chinese guy was, a short guy. He was telling us how to swear in Chinese. And I don’t know whose tank he was in, he wasn’t in our deal, but when the war ended and the company moved into the barracks, he was one of the guys, that’s my first recollection of him. And he was there for that summer.

   Aaron Elson: Had he been injured in a tank, had he been burned?

   Dave Tolan: I had no idea. If he did, it didn’t show.

   Aaron Elson: So were you with Gibson when the column of tanks got hit by a lot of panzerfausts going through a town, and I think Streeter, Dale Streeter, was he a driver?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah, Streeter was a driver. That was right near the end of the war, because I remember Lombardi had just come back from this rotation deal, and they told us what we were gonna, which I thought was too smart, anyway, but we started right down going about ten, fifteen miles an hour, they were apparently trying to get someplace by a certain time or whatever. So they had one tank going this way and the next one going this way, and they just fired all the way down, out through the woods, and then the lead tank got hit with that panzerfaust, 40 tons going down, they stopped it cold. All the ten-in-one rations and all this crap goes up in the air. Stopped it cold. And then they started firing into the woods and then some guy comes out and surrenders, I remember Lombardi taking him up through the middle, and I was just about to say they ought to shoot that a---, before I got the words out he shot him, right there.

   Aaron Elson: Who did?

   Dave Tolan: Lombardi.

   Aaron Elson: Really?

   Dave Tolan: Yeah. Right there. Well, he killed one of our, well, he killed his loader. That was that kid that was in, he’d only been in the Army six weeks. How the hell’d they get him over that fast? Well, he’d worked at the arsenal in Maryland, what is that big arsenal there? And he had worked on machine guns and he knew weapons, so they probably just skipped right over basic training and sent him out, and he came in as a replacement. And he was only with us about a week when this happened. And he was the only one in the tank that was hurt, and it killed him.

   Aaron Elson: Lombardi had just come back?

   Dave Tolan: Well, Lombardi had the third platoon, but he didn’t have it because Gibson had it then. But apparently, he was with the entourage in the front, it could have been Sheppard [Capt. Jack Shepard, the company commander] and Lombardi. And then, I never saw Lombardi again after that.

   Aaron Elson: And when was it, you said, they were firing panzerfausts from the trees?

   Dave Tolan: Oh, that was going towards Koblenz, when we did that deal up there. Those guys were all doped up. Any turkey gonna climb up a tree and start shooting with a bazooka, he doesn’t have too much going for him. Oh yeah, they were down, and they had these antiaircraft guns, and you’d hear them howling, yelling, they’d fire this thing up in the air and you’d see all these tracers going all over, well, they must be hitting it pretty hard. Then they’d come down and fire at you, it was kind of wild. And that was where we came up, and Gibson saw the first one, because I remember that he was up ahead of us, and he stopped, and he backed the tank up and he took a grenade and threw it in this hole, which had a guy in it. So then we started looking around, and that’s when we went over and we sprayed this hole, and this German was coming up, I mean this tank, he’s only ten feet away, and he’s coming up out of that hole with this panzerfaust, and I could see him as clear today as I did then, and I had no choice, I just moved my foot over and I fired a three-inch gun right down in that hole. Because it was seconds, I couldn’t take a chance on that coaxial.

   Then we went to the next hole and sprayed it, and a guy came up like that, he came up immediately. But those guys were nuts. Really.

- - -

Visit the Daughters of World War 2.

The Mark of a True Soldier (Pfaffenheck, Part 3)

 

(Pfaffenheck, Part 1)

 

(Pfaffenheck, Part 2)

 

   I've only watched the first two episodes of "Band of Brothers," and that was several years ago, but when I did, one scene jumped out at me. And wouldn't you know, the scene is on YouTube, so that I was able to refresh my memory this morning. It's the scene in which the paratroopers find a dead German soldier wearing an edelweiss, the "mountain flower," which one of them remarks is the mark of a true soldier.

   The first time I saw the scene, I was like, "What's an edelweiss doing here?" When I traveled to the village of Pfaffenheck in 1995, I learned that the edelweiss was the symbol of the 6th SS Mountain Division North, whose soldiers were ski troops and spent a good part of the war in Finland. The "mountain flower" only grows above 10,000 feet, and I think one of the soldiers in "Band of Brothers" remarks that it was the mark of a true soldier because that soldier had to climb a mountain to pick one.

   The last few months my book "A Mile in Their Shoes" has been above the tree line in the Amazon Kindle rankings in three different categories -- Armored Vehicles, Naval, and Veterans -- and one of the books that has been up there for eons is titled "The Lions of Carentan." It's about the 6th SS Falschirmjager Division, which was in Normandy. The dead German soldier in the "Band of Brothers scene" was from the 6th Falschirmjagers. I don't know if they had an edelweiss for their symbol or if that was a Spielbergian touch, but for me it was an aha! moment, as is just about any moment when I recognize a personal connection to a scene in a documentary, movie or book.

   I'm not much of a photographer, but I've always been captivated by the photo I took at the beginning of this entry of an edelweiss -- not a real one -- on the inside window of the BMW of the German veteran who acted as one of my two interpreters. I can't name him because he wrote a book in English titled "Black Edelweiss" under the pseudonym Jochen Voss.

   Voss did not take part in the battle at Pfaffenheck. After the fidgety-nerved tank gunner fired those five shots into his machine gun position, he was taken prisoner a week before Pfaffenheck at Wingen as the 6th SS Gebirgsjagers -- a gebirg is a mountain, whereas a fallschirm falls out of the sky, or something like that -- worked their way north from the Vosges. Nor was the other interpreter, Wolf Zoepf, who also wrote a book, titled "Seven Days in January," as he was captured during Operation Northwind. Zoepf passed away the week his book came out.

   A number of interesting things occurred when I went to Pfaffenheck the following year for the Germans' reunion and ceremony.

   On the second day, Voss said to me that after a discussion among the association's leadership, they decided it would be okay to ask me about something. One of the villagers in Pfaffenheck some time ago had told the German veterans about an incident in which the tankers in Pfaffenheck made a badly wounded German march in front of a tank as they approached the village. Voss wanted to know if I had ever heard of such an incident. I told him I would look into it.

   I only had to look as far as my 1992 interview with Bob Rossi, the loader in Otha Martin's tank, commanded by Jack Green, in which he described the battle without knowing the name of the town.

   "About that time, we're coming down the road, and there's a German soldier laying on the side of the road, he's about cut in half on a stretcher. And I remember, Loop's tank was in front of us, we were coming behind him, and the German was like waving from the stretcher for us not to run over him. I don't think we would have anyway, I don't think I would, I know we wouldn't. So we went into the town, and there was a house, and they made a red cross on a sheet with blood, the Germans, in blood they made a red cross hanging out there, and there were German wounded and German prisoners lined up along a little brick wall there in front of the house.
   "So with that, Loop went back to bring this guy in, the wounded German, and he makes the guy walk in all the way. The guy is just walking hunched over, just holding his gut, he's in bad shape. And he gets to that wall, and he's leaning on the wall. In the meantime, one of our medics motions to two German soldier prisoners to help with the wounded. [Jack] Green thinks that these two guys are trying to take off, and he grabs the one Kraut and he hit him on the head, he kept banging him on the head with a tommy gun clip, he split his head open, and I'm going "Hey Green, for Chrissakes, stop, Green!" He was a mean sonofabitch."

      There are enough elements in this description to indicate it took place after but not in Pfaffenheck. Lieutenant Fuller's platoon approached the village through an orchard and didn't take the road. (It may have been the day before, as they approached Udenhausen.) All of the participants are deceased, so I can no longer investigate further. But considering the character of some members of the platoon, such as Jack Green, and even the feelings at the time of soldiers I only encountered as gentle elderly men, I would say it was possible such an incident occurred. I never did tell Voss of my suspicions.

   A somewhat more humorous event occurred during the German veterans' banquet on the last night of the reunion. The first year I went, the banquet was a luncheon in the early afternoon and was in some kind of municipal hall. The second year it was in the evening, it was 1996, the beer was flowing pretty freely, and following the dinner the room burst into several marching songs. It was quite entertaining. And then one veteran came to the table where I was sitting with Voss and a couple of other veterans, and he was very animated, he wanted to tell me something, only he didn't speak English, so he just poured it out in German, and I could tell Voss was just the least little bit uncomfortable at what he was hearing. He did, however, give me a synopsis of what was said.

   This veteran had just joined the division as a replacement, I guess he was about 18 years old, and Pfaffenheck was his first battle. He was in a house at the end of the village, one of three I think that were occupied by the Germans, and when he saw the tanks approaching and firing their big guns, he crapped in his pants.

   Even after all these years, there was something unspoken in Voss' reaction to this story that seemed to project disdain.

   I haven't spoken with Jochen since, but my two German Facebook friends -- Holger and Thorsten -- who I supplied with copies of my German interviews, told me he's still living and they've now been in touch with him. So bear with me, I'm sure you haven't heard the last of Pfaffenheck, which also is described in my new book, "The Armored Fist," due to be released on April 16.

 

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Darrell Petty Part 2: The Death Camp Doctor

Klaus Schilling



    At the 1997 reunion of the 90th Infantry Division, I met Darrell Petty of New Castle, Wyoming. My tape recorder missed the beginning of our conversation, but at the start we were talking about the crossing of the Moselle River in November of 1944. The river was at flood stage, and the infantry crossed before the heavy equipment, including the tanks of the 712th Tank Battalion, could cross on a bridge. The fighting was intense, and the infantry was at risk of being pushed back into the river when the tanks finally did get across and helped to turn the tide of the battle.

From there the conversation turned to the division's second crossing of the Moselle River, in March of 1945. Initially I made two separate stories in Darrell's words out of this interview, but here I'll post the interview itself, with a brief postscript. (See Darrell Petty Part 1: Machine Gun Hill)

Darrell Petty

Omaha, Neb., Sept. 1997

　Aaron Elson: Were you wounded?
Darrell Petty: I was wounded twice, actually three times. Once I didn’t even, the line medic patched me up and that was it.

Aaron Elson: Where were you wounded?

Darrell Petty: Just outside of Chambois, when we closed the Falaise Gap, the first time. The second time I got it was in the Siegfried Line. And the third time that I got a minor wound was about two weeks before the end of the war.

Aaron Elson: And where was that?

Darrell Petty: Getting pretty close up to Czechoslovakia. I don’t remember just where, what town.

Aaron Elson: Before the liberation of the concentration camp?

Darrell Petty: After we went to Flossenburg.

Aaron Elson: Were you with them at Flossenburg?

Darrell Petty: Yeah. Flossenburg was the last one that we took. You won’t find it in the books or nothing, but the 4^th Armored and part of our unit went to Buchenwald, too. But you won’t find it in any history book, because we were stopped at Merkers, where the gold reserves were. And Patton said it doesn't take us all to watch Merkers, and there was a little place called Ohrdruf or something like that. It was supposed to be a work camp. But we got there and there were bodies stacked up. A lot of them had come from Buchenwald. They were stacked up. First encounter. And we went to Buchenwald. The Germans were gone, the prisoners had apparently taken Buchenwald over by that time, but we saw what was there. And of course, that old camp commandant’s wife, she was called the Bitch of Buchenwald, because she liked tattoos, she made lampshades.

Aaron Elson: Ilse Koch?

Darrell Petty: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know, I don’t remember her name, I just called her what they called her. But anyway, the one unit...

Aaron Elson: Were you with that unit?

Darrell Petty: Yeah. And we went to Buchenwald, but you don’t find it.

Aaron Elson: Had Buchenwald already been liberated?

Darrell Petty: No. But the Germans knew we were going to overrun it and most of them had fled, and they took quite a lot of the prisoners from Buchenwald to Flossenburg. Then they tried to take them from Flossenburg to Dachau. So, like I said, most of the Germans were gone and the prisoners were actually about in charge of Buchenwald when we got there. But it was still in enemy territory at the time.

Aaron Elson: So you actually went to Buchenwald before it was liberated?

Darrell Petty: As it was liberated. The 4^th Armored and a unit from our outfit and another outfit.

Aaron Elson: Did you go into it?

Darrell Petty: Oh yeah, we went in there.

Aaron Elson: And what did you see?

Darrell Petty: Bodies. Everything you can imagine. It horrified us, and we’d seen those bodies at that other one, I couldn’t say its name, and most of them had come from Buchenwald, so we were kind of prepared for it, but still it was...

Aaron Elson: Were any of the German guards captured at the time?

Darrell Petty: The prisoners had got some of them. The prisoners had killed some of them, they caught them, they killed quite a few, the ones that hadn’t got out of there. Once they got control, they went hunting. A revenge thing, and I couldn’t blame them. But where they were shipped to, down there at this other place, they had heavy equipment there and they were supposed to have dug trenches and got them buried before we got there, and they didn’t get it done.

Aaron Elson: And it was just the emaciated bodies?

Darrell Petty: Yeah, I’ve got a few pictures at home. So many times you’d take pictures. I got ahold of a camera, and you always got a moment to stop and snap a picture. We’d have to cross a river or something, you’d get the film wet, it was the old roll type, 120s and that. I’d have had more than I got. I’ve got some from Flossenburg, and Dachau.

Aaron Elson: Did you take any at Buchenwald?

Darrell Petty: I took some, but I lost them, before I got it. And then, after the war was over, I was still enlisted for a while. I enlisted, and instead of coming home with the division, I stayed over there in the army of occupation and they transferred me back to Munich, and I was attached to the 508^th MP battalion in Munich. And when we weren’t doing the other stuff we just pulled regular MP duty. But we were at Dachau, at the war crime trials, and at Nuremberg, we were part of them.

Aaron Elson: Were you at Dachau for the war crimes trials? You never ran into a fellow named Clifford Merrill, did you? He retired as a colonel, but he had been a captain, but he was in charge of MPs at the Dachau...

Darrell Petty: I probably saw him, but you know, so many times, like I said, we didn’t know names. Didn’t bother with names. And if you didn’t know the guy, why, he was just another GI. I most likely saw him, I probably saw him there.

Aaron Elson: He was an officer of the MPs. He had contact with that Ilse Koch, and also there was one famous prisoner there, Otto Skorzeny, he was the commando who tried to capture Eisenhower, and who had freed Mussolini the first time, he was one of the prisoners there.

Darrell Petty: I don’t remember the name, but, you know, one that stands out in my mind was old Dr. Schilling.

Aaron Elson: Why does that stand out?

Darrell Petty: Because he did so much experimenting on the people and that, you know, he was the camp doctor...

Aaron Elson: At which camp?

Darrell Petty: Dachau. And he experimented on those people. Even when we took those places it was horrible to see what was there, but we still didn’t know about all the experimentation until the trials. And, uh, I come within an inch of shooting him.

Aaron Elson: Really?

Darrell Petty: That’s one of the reasons he stands out, I guess. Because we’d just been on his case, and I wasn’t at all the trials of Dachau, because they switched us back and forth. But we had some guys that had never seen an ounce of combat, who came over there later. And we had one new guy in there, and I won’t mention no names, I don’t want to implicate anybody, but anyway, he’d never seen combat. And he had a little .30 carbine, that was just semiautomatics at that time, and 15-round clips. But there would be a clip in the gun, and two clips on the butt of it. That’s 45 rounds. Okay. He’s standing there gawking around and he wouldn’t be protecting that gun. I got on him several times. I told him, "You protect that firearm." I said, "These guys don’t have anything to lose." Well, these guys that lived such a high muckety-muck life, it was kind of satisfying to see them sniping cigarettes off the floor, and they were eating some pretty thin soup that we brought for lunch, and they were in a soup line. That day it was some pretty thin soup. And this kid was standing there gawking around and he’s got the butt of the rifle grounded on the floor, and gawking around and not looking at them at all, he was looking around. And I just about went over and said something to him and I didn’t. And by golly, old Schilling was in line, and I, I just loathed him for what he’d done to people. And all at once he made a dive toward this kid, and the first thing flashed in my mind was he’s going for that carbine. I had a .45, and I always had it full loaded, the hammer on half-cock and the safety on. And he dove like he was reaching for that rifle. Well, as it turned out there was a cigarette butt about that long, boy, that was a prize, between that kid’s foot and the butt of the rifle. That’s what he was going for. But I didn’t know that. And I grabbed the old ‘45 and I dropped the safety, and cracked the hammer full, and when he came up with that cigarette, I was about from here to there ...

Aaron Elson: About six inches?

Darrell Petty: That half-hole looks awful big.

Aaron Elson: From his face?

Darrell Petty: And he just drained, his color just drained. "Oh, nein! Nein! Bitte! Bitte! Zigaretten, Rauchen! Rauchen! Bitte, nicht schiessen!" Don’t shoot, you know. Please. Rauchen is smoke. I never had a feeling like that in my life, before or since. But I wanted to pull the trigger. And I couldn’t hardly keep from pulling the trigger. And I finally just pushed my finger off of it. And I dropped the safety on, and I grabbed him and boy I throwed him back in the line and I told him to stay there, and he’d complained to me before about having to go to the bathroom a lot of the time, he’d had surgery, I suppose, prostate, I don’t know. But anyway, I thought, "Yeah, you, I sure feel sorry for you, you ..." And when I got done, I was mad. I throwed him in that line, and I done a pirouette and I kicked that kid just as hard as I could kick him right in the hind ...

Aaron Elson: The kid, the other MP?

Darrell Petty: Yes. And he lost his grip on the rifle and I grabbed that before it hit the floor, and he went down. And I stood above him, I had that butt of that rifle right in his face. And man, I told him in no uncertain terms what I’d do to him if I ever saw him, and I said, "Much as I wanted to do it, you almost made me kill a man without a reason." And I was just hyper, I was just, you know...

Aaron Elson: About how old were you at the time?

Darrell Petty: Nineteen. I went in at 17. And I was overseas at 17.


Aaron Elson: How’d that happen?

Darrell Petty: Well, my folks signed for me to go in, and when my unit shipped overseas, they didn’t say I couldn’t go, and I didn’t tell them I wasn’t supposed to go, and I went. I left New York in January of 1944 and was in England seven days later, well in Scotland seven days later. And then I went down by Cardiff, and the 90th hadn’t got there yet. I was assigned to the 90th about the middle of April. But I’ll tell you what, from that time on that kid was like this, he was looking at everything, with that carbine. I never saw him even look like he was gonna put it down after that. I could have got courtmartialed, I suppose, but at the time it did not matter. I was mad. I said, "You didn’t only pretty near make me kill him," I said. "He had nothing to lose. He could have grabbed that little carbine and started spraying us." It’s a pretty deadly little weapon at close range, I’ll tell you.

Aaron Elson: How old was this Dr. Schilling?

Darrell Petty: Probably middle age. At the time he looked quite old to me, but you know, they do when you’re young like that.

Aaron Elson: Was he executed, or what happened to him?

Darrell Petty: I don’t know whether they executed him or not...

(Coming soon: Darrell Petty, Part 3)

Got Kindle? My book "Tanks for the Memories" is available for a free download today (Sept. 25) only, a savings of $3.99 over the Kindle price and $13.95 over the print price. And I sure could use a couple of reviews at amazon, where a disgruntled reader just gave it a measly one-star review, and another gave it two stars. Phooey. If you enjoy reading these blog entries, which are similar to the source material in my books, I hope you'll make your enthusiasm known via a review at amazon. Thank you, Aaron

Postscript: According to testimony at the Dachau War Crimes trials, Dr. Klaus Schilling conducted malaria experiments on 1,200 inmates at Dachau. He was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out in 1946.

- - -

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

　

Why I began recording veterans' stories

Alyce Freeberg

Often I'm asked  how I got started preserving the stories of America's World War 2 veterans.  Like some of the veterans I've interviewed, I have a standard response. However, while listening recently to a 1995 interview with Hilding and Alyce Freeberg, I discovered something a bit more candid and off the cuff.

Hilding and Alyce Freeberg

Alyce Freeberg: This is wonderful (my book "Tanks for the Memories"). I'm very moved by all of this.

Aaron Elson: I think that, I started this, actually I got this little tape recorder when my dad was in the hospital, this very one. I said "I'm gonna go sit down with him and make him tell me his war stories."

Alyce Freeberg: Good.

Aaron Elson: I didn't. I left it home. I went to visit him in the hospital, and then he got out of the hospital, he didn't follow his diet, and then two weeks later he had a heart attack and passed away. But the tape recorder was in a drawer, and I took it with me, I got the newsletter, it was sent to him like five years after he passed away he was still getting it, and I found one and I wrote to Ray Griffin, and he wrote back and said why don't you come to a reunion, so I did. That's when I started doing this, I had the tape recorder, I found three people who remembered my dad. But at the same time, I couldn't believe the stories that I was hearing. And like Andy Schifler said, and this is something I've heard so many times, that they never tell these things to their kids.

Alyce Freeberg: No. He (Hilding) doesn't, either.

Hilding Freeberg: And the only reason my daughter has the stuff is because she was here a month ago or so, and we got talking about the Army, oh I know, what I heard on the radio, on TV, they said that all the people, all the Army personnel that were involved in D-Day are heroes, so I told her, hey, I'm a hero. I think it's D-Day 10, or 6, I don't remember, but I'm a hero, being I was there.

Alyce Freeberg:  Yeah. And that's how she wanted them. She's one of those really interested people, you know.

Hilding Freeberg: So she took it all. Then I had a book of, one of the infantry...

Aaron Elson: The 90th Infantry?

Hilding Freeberg: Well, it wasn't the 90th, the book I had on, but it showed all around where we went also. So she took that. We were attached to the 90th, but I don't have nothing about the 90th, not a thing.

Aaron Elson: But that's one thing that a lot of fellows who were there just don't...

Hilding Freeberg: No, they don't say nothing at all.

Aaron Elson: Even Forrest Dixon said, he's got three grown children, and he's very active, goes to all the reunions, he said one day he was talking with somebody and the other person referred to him as Major, and he said his son said, "Gee, Dad, I never knew you were a major."

Alyce Freeberg: He never mentioned that he was a major.

Aaron Elson: So that's why I started doing this, taking the tape recorder and putting some of this stuff down. Because I think in 25 years it will be good to have as complete as possible a look at one unit. I don't think anybody is doing anything like that from this perspective.

Hilding Freeberg: No, they're not.