How Sergeant Warren Lost His Stripes

Hank Lochowicz and Jabos

   Two years ago, Don Knapp sent me some photos from the war, but they were in pdf form rather than jpg. As I was looking through them, now that I have the ability to convert them, I discovered this picture of Hank Lochowicz, of Milwaukee, with a dog. This was the caption on the back of the picture:

   This story, however, is not about Hank Lochowicz, and it's not about Don Knapp, who I assume took the picture. Incidentally, you might have seen Knapp interviewed in "The Color of War," a documentary that aired on the History Channel a few years back. But this story is about the dog Jabos and Sergeant Jim Warren, and illustrates the kind of discrepancies that arise when stories are told secondhand. In this case, there are two strikingly different versions of how Sergeant Warren lost his stripes, but they both lead to the same conclusion: that Jim Warren was busted from a sergeant and tank commander to a buck private.
   The two different accounts were from Bob Rossi, a Pfc. in the third platoon, and Lieutenant Jim Gifford, who was Rossi's tank commander and platoon leader until Gifford was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge.
   Rossi joined the battalion as a 19-year-old replacement in November of 1944, shortly before the battalion's first crossing of the Moselle River. Sergeant Warren was one of the many characters he told me about.
   "I started to tell you one of the many Warren stories," Rossi said, "why he hated General MacArthur. The way he told us, Warren was in the Marines in Hawaii first, but he was getting discharged and his records were being sent to San Diego. In the meantime, he told us, he got into some trouble, and the sheriff of the island,. Duke Kahanamoku, he was a famous athlete, he was gonna come to grab Warren. Now Warren technically was a civilian, so the only way he could beat the rap was if he joined the Army. So he stayed in the islands with a searchlight outfit. And as fate would have it, MacArthur was the general in charge of the islands at that particular time, and they're going to have a big inspection. So he said they spent weeks polishing up the equipment, painting this and painting that. He was like a battery sergeant. And he says here comes MacArthur, and he says 'Ten-hut!' And he said he gave MacArthur the biggest highball [salute] you could ever give an officer. MacArthur says, 'Sergeant, how do you cut your toenails?' Warren says he was mystified. MacArthur says, 'Show me how you cut your toenails.' He made Warren sit down on the parade ground, take his shoes and socks off, and as he's sitting there, he made the whole battery crowd around Warren, and he says, 'Now this man is going to suffer from ingrown toenails, because he doesn't cut his toenails properly.' And Warren's sitting on the ground, everybody's razzing him, he took some razzing for weeks. That's why he hated MacArthur, for making a fool out of him."
   Sergeant Warren's name came up in several stories told to me by veterans of C Company. The consensus was that he looked after his men, he drank heavily, and was the kind of reliable tank commander you would want backing you up in a tense situation.

From left: Ed Spahr, Jim Gifford, Tony D'Arpino, Bob Rossi

     At the 1992 reunion of the 712th in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I sat at a table with four veterans --  Rossi, Gifford, Tony D'Arpino and Ed Spahr -- who were in the five-man crew of a tank that was knocked out on January 10, 1945, in the vicinity of Wiltz, Luxembourg, during the Battle of the Bulge. Sergeant Warren's tank was behind their tank. When the crew abandoned it, Lieutenant Gifford, who was wounded, told Sergeant Warren to fire into his tank and set it on fire, so that it wouldn't fall into the hands of the Germans.
   "Sergeant Warren was the type of guy, he was really military," D'Arpino said. "I mean, his tank crew wouldn't eat unless he said so. He was that kind of guy."
   "When I joined the third platoon," Rossi said, "I arrived with Koon Leong Moy, who we called Chop Chop because of his Oriental heritage. [Moy was a second generation Chinese American from New York City, and political correctness had not yet been invented]. "Right away, when Lieutenant Lombardi was assigning the crews, Warren says, 'I want him.' He thought Chop Chop was gonna cook for him. "Chop says, 'The hell with you, you cook for yourself.'"
   "But I'll tell you one thing about Sergeant Warren," D'Arpino said, "Sergeant Warren, and we weren't used to it, Lieutenant Lombardi even told me this himself, he wasn't used to having a guy like Warren in the Number 2 tank because if Lieutenant Lombardi had something hot in front of him, Sergeant Warren rode up on his backside. You could count on him. Very dependable. He wasn't one of these guys who would sit back 400, 500 yards."
   "He was a good tank commander," Rossi said.
   "The only trouble Sergeant Warren had was he liked his 'tea' a little much." D'Arpino looked at Gifford and said, "I think, from the time you were with us you could probably say the same thing, Sergeant Warren was one of the best Number 2 tank, when you were in trouble, he was right there."
   "He was dependable," Gifford said.
   "If you had a fast tank like I had in reverse, you'd always bump into him," D'Arpino said.
   "There are more Warren stories than you can shake a stick at," Rossi said. "He had pots and pans galore on the back of his tank. I used to say his pots and pans make more noise than the tank itself coming down the road."
 
   "Now this is toward the end of the war with Warren, one of the other  stories," Rossi said during my 1992 interview with him at his home in Brick Township, New Jersey. "They were giving us a pep talk on how we're going to go into Czechoslovakia, and how to conduct yourselves, these people are our friends, not our enemies. And to make it impressive, they gave us all new helmets. The war was gonna be over.
   "And as we're all sitting around laying on the grass, Colonel Kedrovsky is giving a talk, there's Warren on the ground, playing with the dog, Jabos. He was playing with the dog's penis, and he's laughing.
   "Colonel Kedrovsky sees this, and he's pissed off.
   "So they let it go. And no sooner had this happened, than the war ended.
   "Now we go into occupation. We went to Mincen, Malybor, then we went for miles, we traveled to Amberg. That was a mess. It took forever to clean those barracks up, because everybody looted it before we got there.
   "I can remember that night. We had a choice. I don't know how many miles we traveled, with the dust and everything, a column of tanks. We had a choice, either wash or make coffee. We had half a jerry can of water. So right after that, they broke Warren. It didn't go unnoticed. They let him continue as a tank commander. As soon as the war ended, they broke him from a buck sergeant to a private."

   When I interviewed Jim Gifford at his used car dealership in Yonkers, New York, in November of 1992 -- only a couple of weeks after the group interview -- he brought up the incident, which he didn't witness personally, as we were talking about Stanley Klapkowski, the gunner on the crew, who was not at the reunion.
   "Klapkowski was a nice looking kid, he almost looked German," Gifford said. "He had that wavy blond hair, and he was a handsome kid. But he had a Polish background, and he didn't like the Germans for some reason. The boys could probably tell you more stories than I could about him, because I didn't see him raising hell, just like I didn't see Warren when he threw a bottle at some general. Got himself demoted from sergeant to nothing. And that made me feel bad. He was drunk, and when he was drunk, he was another person, forget about it. Some general was up there, some minor general, not a big general, and he was in the area, and Warren threw a bottle at him, and the general had him demoted. But they didn't throw him out of the Army or put him in the stockade. I guess [Jack] Shepherd, who was the captain at the time, probably said, 'Look, the man was drinking, he's been through a lot, give him a break.' But there were a lot of things, so many guys could tell you stories that you probably wouldn't want to see printed."

   I never met Sergeant Warren, who passed away before I began interviewing veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion. But there's one more notable story Rossi shared.
   "This is at Christmastime," he said. "We're at Kirschnaumen [France]. Up on the hill the bulldozer tank dug out all the ground, and our turrets were just sticking above the dirt. We're in a holding position. This is just prior to the Bulge. It was miserable cold out there, and we were doing guard duty, four hours on, eight off.
   "So this one day, we're standing around, the house we were in had a blanket covering a hole up on the second floor where a shell had hit previously. We had to sleep up there. And the mother, father and daughter slept in the one room downstairs.
   "So we're in the other room, like the gathering place, it had a stove in it. We used to gather around the stove, oh, it was so cold. This one day Sergeant Warren, we had a kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling, this was in the evening and Warren was drunk, and he's sparring at the lantern. We're all laughing, because he was really a card. He throws a haymaker at the lantern. He misses the lantern and hits me on the other side, and I went flying across the room. And I come up with the biggest fat lip you ever saw. And when that was over, we went to bed.
   "The next morning, I'm in one of the other rooms, and I hear somebody, they were talking, and I hear, 'Ahh,' he says, 'I never touched the kid.' So I went in and showed him my lip, and he believed it."

   "Several years ago," Rossi said a little later in the interview, "I got one of the newsletters. Milford Anderson and Warren had died about the same time. I just filled up. These are the guys I was in combat with, they're both dead. I wrote to Anderson's wife, I think I sent her a picture. And I wrote to Warren's wife and I told her what a great guy he was. In combat he was the type of man that you wanted behind you, because he was right there. He drank a lot, but he was a good soldier. I wrote to his wife and I told her about the incident where he gave me a shot in the mouth."

- - -

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Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge

   I started going to reunions of my father's tank battalion in 1987. I always had a small tape recorder with me, and I would sometimes plunk it down in the middle of one of those round tables where maybe two or three veterans and a wife or companion would be sitting, and I'd record a sometimes casual, sometimes animated conversation. I would also conduct brief interviews with individual veterans, or be lucky enough to get two or three together to talk about the same event.
   The 712th Tank Battalion spent 311 days in combat, and its veterans had stories that ran the width and breadth of the human condition.
   Because the conversations were spread out over more than a decade, it sometimes was years before, in reviewing the transcript of an interview from one reunion, I would discover a detail that contradicted or corroborated a story from another.
   One of the first veterans I interviewed, in 1991, was Ed Spahr, at the battalion's Detroit reunion in September of 1991. Ed was of medium height, thin, wore glasses and spoke with something akin to a Philadelphia accent, although he was from Carlisle, Pa.

Ed Spahr

    In later years I would ask questions with a laserlike focus, like "Do you remember a tank that had to be destroyed when the battalion retreated across the Saar River from Dillingen?" However, with Ed, my questions were more generic: Were you scared? How was the food? Were you wounded?
   "These scars on my hand I got one time, they had anti-aircraft guns," Ed said, "I think they were 20 millimeters, and they hit our tank. They didn't penetrate, but on the inside of the tank a little round spot would get cherry red, and the paint would sometimes catch on fire. That's what made these little white spots on my hand.
   "I was wounded on the inside of my left arm. Lieutenant Gifford, he was our tank commander. Our tank got knocked out and luckily we all got out of the tank. After we got hit, Lieutenant Gifford stuck his head out, and a machine gun bullet struck him around one eye. He had blood all over. When he got out of the tank, I don't think he thought he was hurt as bad as he was, and he stepped behind the tank, away from the incoming. They were firing machine guns on us, but we were behind the tank. Lieutenant Gifford tossed me his camera, and said, 'Take a picture of me.'
   "So I'm standing there with my hands up taking the picture, that's the only way I could have gotten hit in a spot like that, I had to have my arms up. It just felt like a bee sting. It was no big deal to me. I didn't think I was hit until the medic asked to see my hand because when I dropped my arm the blood would drop off my fingers. And then he said, 'It's coming down your arm. Take off your shirt. And there this was, I was bleeding like a stuck pig.
   "I haven't seen Lieutenant Gifford since. He was all right, but he never came back to the company after that."
    That was in 1991. The following October, the reunion was held in Harrisburg, Pa. Spahr was there again. And who should walk into the hospitality room, but Lieutenant Jim Gifford!
   Not only were Spahr and Gifford there, but Tony D'Arpino, who drove the tank on Jan. 10, 1945, the day it was knocked out just outside of Wiltz, Luxembourg; and Bob Rossi, the loader, were there as well. And I was able to get the four of them around one of those round tables, with the tape recorder in the middle.


   

Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge

   Following is a partial transcript of that conversation:


   Jim Gifford: I was a lieutenant at the time, a first lieutenant.

   Bob Rossi:  I was a loader in Lieutenant Gifford's tank. I was a private first class.

   Ed Spahr: I think I'd better be classed as a utility man with all of C Company because I served in every platoon.

   Tony D'Arpino: I was a driver, first tank, third platoon, and towards the end I was a tank commander for a very short period.

   Aaron Elson: Where did you come together as a unit?

   Bob Rossi: Just prior to the Battle of the Bulge, Jim was brought in as our new tank commander.

   D'Arpino: He was our platoon leader.

   Rossi: We were in the Number 1 tank. We wound up in the town of Kirschnaumen in Belgium [France, actually]. I can recall so vividly how we wondered where Lieutenant Gifford was all day. We were in a hayloft, and he came up the ladder, it was a footladder, he said, "Come here. I want to show you something." He had draped the tank in white sheets. There was snow all over the ground, so he scrounged these white sheets from all over and he draped our tank so we'd have camouflage. That same night, he had gotten a package from home, and he had some canned chicken. He shared his package with all of us. We were talking about home, and he said to us, 'You know, I'd rather lose an arm or a leg than lose my eyesight. There's too much to see in this world." And the next day, he got hit in the eye. It was a hairy situation because we had gone into a pocket to flush out the Germans, and as fate had it, our left track was knocked off.

D'Arpino: Wasn't that the time that we just took one section of the tanks, just us and the second tank? We were almost ready to eat supper when we had to go out.

Rossi: We only had two tanks, us and [Sergeant Jim] Warren's. There was concentrated machine gun fire. Lieutenant Gifford got hit in the right eye, the bullet lodged in his cheek. I thought he might jump out of the tank, and I yelled to him to keep down or they would blow his head off. He said, "I don't want to jump out. I want Warren to come forward to help us." Then he said, "Rossi, how bad am I hit?" And I lied. I said, "You don't look bad, Lieutenant." But he looked like somebody hit him in the face with a sledgehammer.

D'Arpino: I remember something else about that. He was great for having a camera around your neck, right?

Rossi: I'm gonna get to that. So he says to me, "Fire the smoke mortar." And this is the joke. In my excitement, I forgot to knock the cap out of the top, and when I fired the first mortar it went like this [motioning straight up and down]. And then I fired some subsequent mortars to give a smokescreen. As we were abandoning tank, Lieutenant Gifford was firing his .45 and pulling Spahr out by one of his arms. Spahr's leg was locked."

Spahr: I had a little blood coming out, something had hit me. I went along with him back to the aid station.

Rossi: Ed was the assistant driver. His machine gun was firing by itself it was so hot. And I said, "Twist the belt! Twist the belt," so he could stop the bullets from feeding into the machine gun. And Klapkowski, who was our gunner, he and I were running in a zigzag, we could see the snow being kicked up around us. As we were running, a recon truck came toward us, and Lieutenant Gifford said, "Fire that .50 and protect these boys!" And the guy yelled out, "It's our last box!" He says, "Fire it anyway, you sonofabitch!" And that's when they started firing the .50 to give us cover. As we got out of the line of fire, he handed his .45 to me, he says, "Hold this for me till I get back." And with that, he says, "Take my picture." I says, "Lieutenant, I can't take your picture."

Spahr: I took it. That's the only way I could gave got hit, right here, when I was holding the camera up. It felt like a bee sting.

Rossi: And there he was, having his picture taken. He had gotten a Bronze Star that morning, he had the ribbon, his face was all puffed up, blood all over his combat jacket, he says, "Take my picture."

Gifford: I couldn't see out of my right eye, but I didn't know how bad it was. It's a funny thing, I didn't feel any pain when the bullet went in.

D'Arpino: I can remember plain as day one thing about that night, that evening. We were about ready to eat our meal, and they said that there was a small pocket, it was holding the infantry down, they wanted the tanks to clean it out. You took two tanks. It was just supposed to be a small pocket, and it turned out to be a little more than that, I guess.

Gifford: It was bad news.

Rossi: After we were knocked out, Sergeant Warren's tank came forward, and under  Lieutenant Gifford's orders, he set our tank on fire.

D'Arpino: We had ruined the radio. We put a grenade in the gun barrel. We did everything we were supposed to do.

Rossi: So the Germans couldn't turn the gun around and fire on the town.

Gifford: I had Warren shoot into the back of our tank, because the Germans were stealing the tanks. They'd use them against us. The track was blown off, so it was useless anyway.

D'Arpino: But the gun was still good.

Gifford: So we immobilized it by hitting it in the back.

D'Arpino: We had the best working escape hatch of anybody in the platoon. I used to oil that thing up good, so that when you touched the lever it would really fall out. Sometimes that was the only way of escape. If you're inside the tank and the hatches are down and the gun is traversed over your hatch, you can't open it to get out, you have to go out the other way. I can remember always telling Klapkowski, he was the gunner in the tanks that I was in most of the time, I always told him, "You sonofabitch, if we ever get knocked out, make sure that gun is in the center because if I can't get out because you've got the gun traversed over my hatch," I says, "I'll haunt you. I'll come and pull the sheets off of your bed."

Gifford: I'm sure there's a few guys that aren't here today because of that gun being over their hatch.

D'Arpino: That used to be my biggest worry.

- - -

   This conversation went on for two hours, and included many harrowing incidents both before, during and after the Bulge. I had interviewed Ed Spahr in 1991 and Bob Rossi earlier in 1992. I subsequently interviewed Tony D'Arpino and Jim Gifford individually, and I visited Stanley Klapkowski at his home in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. All five interviews as well as much of the group recording are included in the audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge" in my eBay store, where I hope you'll check out that and the many other oral history audiobooks, all in the veterans' own voices.

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Christmas in Kirschnaumen and other holiday stories

A card from Lt. Fred Lemm, 712th Tank Bn., to his wife.

   Ira Weinstein of the 445th Bomb Group volunteered to fly a mission on Yom Kippur in 1944. It would have been his final mission, and he would be home in time for his wife's birthday on Christmas Day. Instead his B-24 was shot down over Kassel, Germany, and he became a prisoner of war. He did make it home for Christmas ... in 1945.
   Tank driver Tony D'Arpino celebrated Christmas during the Battle of the Bulge by stringing machine gun bullets around a scrawny tree.
   Bob Rossi, the loader in Tony's tank, recalled eating Thanksgiving dinner in the rain.
   Far from home, holidays were especially poignant for the men and women fighting World War II. These are some holiday-themed audio clips from my World War II oral history interviews.

track 1 Major Forrest Dixon, 712th Tank Battalion, recalls Christmas shopping in Luxembourg.

track 2  Pfc. Bob Rossi recalls Thanksgiving of 1944.
 
track 3 Sarah and Jim Schaen get married on Christmas Day.

track 4 Bob Rossi and Lt. Jim Gifford recall Christmas in Kirschnaumen (France).

track 5 Ex-POW Jim Koerner recalls a Christmas Eve service in 1944.

track 6 B-24 bombardier Ira Weinstein is shot down on Yom Kippur in 1944.

track 7 Karnig Thomasian grows an Easter lily in a Japanese prison camp.

track 8 Corporal Jim Rothschadl, 712th Tank Battalion, recalls his father's love for the 4th of July.

track 9 Forrest Dixon's Christmas dinner is interrupted by an order from General Patton.

track10 T-4 Tony D'Arpino decorates a tree for Christmas.

track 11 Orlando Brigano and Paul Wannemacher recalls a Christmas Eve tragedy

track 12 More on the Christmas Eve tragedy.

   Like audio such as this? Sign up for my email newsletter by sending me an email, and putting "email newsletter" in the subject line to get special offers and updates as well as the latest audiobooks in my ebay store and at oralhistorystore.com.

  

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From left, Ed Spahr, Jim Gifford, Tony D'Arpino, Bob Rossi

 



   In 1991, at the annual reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, I conducted an impromptu interview with Ed Spahr of Carlisle, Pa. I wasn't as familiar with the history of World War II as I am today, and the interview comprised mostly generic questions: Were you scared? How was the food? Were you wounded?
   That last question brought an interesting answer. It was during the Battle of the Bulge, his tank was knocked out, and his lieutenant was wounded. In fact, the bullet, most likely from a machine gun, was still sticking out of his head near one of his eyes. The lieutenant didn't know how badly he was injured/ When the crew abandoned tank and reached the relative safety of the other side of the tank, the lieutenant, Jim Gifford, handed Spahr a camera and said "Take my picture."
   It was while he was holding the camera up to take the picture that he felt something like a bee sting on the fleshy inside part of his arm.
   "I didn't even miss a day," he said.
   A year later, at the 1992 reunion in Harrisburg, Pa., I got quite a surprise. I was in the hospitality room when Lieutenant James Gifford entered. Wide-eyed, I blurted, "You're Lieutenant Gifford!"
   Spahr was at that same reunion, as was Tony D'Arpino, the tank driver that day, and Bob Rossi, the loader. The only missing member of the crew was Stanley Klapkowski, the gunner.
   At that reunion, I sat down with the four crew members and they reconstructed the events of that day, and spoke of some of their experiences before and after the tank was knocked out. I had already interviewed Spahr and Rossi, and in the ensuing months I visited Gifford in the used-car lot he owned in Yonkers, N.Y., and D'Arpino at his home in Milton, Mass. Some time later I even visited Klapkowski in McKees Rocks, Pa., to get his version of the events.
   All of those interviews make up my audiobook "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge," and a narrative version of the events comprise a chapter in my new book, "The Armored Fist," due out in April from the prestigious British publishing house Fonthill Media.
   Here is an excerpt from that 1992 group conversation:

October, 1992, Harrisburg, Pa.:

James Gifford: I was a lieutenant at the time, a first lieutenant. When I left the service I was a captain in the Ninth Armored Group.

Bob Rossi: I was a loader in Lieutenant Gifford’s tank. I was a private first class. I got out of the service in January 1946.

Ed Spahr:  I think I’d better be classed as a utility man with all of C Company because I served in every platoon. I think I spent more time in the front than a lot of other ones did, because if that platoon wasn’t there, I was with another one.

Tony Darpino: I was a driver, first tank, third platoon, and towards the end I was a tank commander for a very short period when the end was in sight. I was discharged in ’45.

Aaron Elson: Where did you come together as a unit?

Bob Rossi: Just prior to the Battle of the Bulge, Jim was brought in as our new tank commander.

Tony D’Arpino: He was our platoon leader.

Bob Rossi: We were in the No. 1 tank. We wound up in the town of Kirschnaumen in Belgium. I can recall so vividly how we wondered where Lieutenant Gifford was all day. We were in a hayloft, and he came up the ladder, it was a footladder, he said, “Come here, I want to show you something.” He had draped the tank in white sheets. They weren’t whitewashing the tanks at that time. There was snow all over the ground. So he scrounged these white sheets from all over and he draped our tank so we’d have camouflage.
   That same night, he had gotten a package from home, and he had some canned chicken. He shared his package with all of us.
   We were talking about home, and he said to us, “You know, I’d rather lose an arm or a leg than lose my eyesight.” He said, “There’s too much to see in this world.” And the next day when he got hit, he got hit in the eye.
   It was a hairy situation because we had gone into a pocket to flush out the Germans, and as fate had it, our left track was knocked off.

Tony D’Arpino: Wasn’t that the time that we just took one section of the tanks, just us and the second tank? We were almost ready to eat supper when we had to go out.

Bob Rossi: We only had two tanks, us and [Sgt. Jim] Warren’s. There was concentrated machine gun fire. Lieutenant Gifford got hit in the right eye, the bullet lodged in his cheek. I thought he might jump out of the tank, and I yelled to him to keep down or they would blow his head off. He said, “I don’t want to jump out, I want Warren to come forward to help us.”
   Then he said to me, “Rossi, how bad am I hit?”
   And I lied, I said, “You don’t look bad, Lieutenant.” But he looked like somebody hit him in the face with a sledgehammer.

Tony D’Arpino: I remember something else about that, too. He was great for having a camera around your neck, right?

Bob Rossi: I’m gonna get to that. So he says to me, “Fire the smoke mortar.” And this is the joke. In my excitement, I forgot to knock the cap out of the top, and when I fired the first mortar it went like this [motioning straight up and down]. And then I fired some subsequent mortars to give a smokescreen.
   As we were abandoning tank, Lieutenant Gifford was firing his .45 and pulling Spahr out by one of his arms. Spahr’s leg was locked.

Ed Spahr: I had a little blood coming out, something had hit me, I went along with him back to the aid station.

Bob Rossi: Ed was the assistant driver. His machine gun was firing by itself it was so hot. And I said, “Twist the belt, twist the belt,” so he could stop the bullets from feeding into the machine gun. And Klapkowski, who was our gunner, he and I were running in a zigzag, we could see the snow being kicked up around us. As we were running, a recon truck came toward us, and Lieutenant Gifford said, “Fire that .50 and protect these boys!”
   And the guy yelled out, “It’s our last box!”
   He says, “Fire it anyway, you sonofabitch!” And that’s when they started firing the .50 to give us cover.
   As we got out of the line of fire, he handed his .45 to me, he says, “Hold this for me till I get back.”
   And with that, he says, “Take my picture.”
   I says, “Lieutenant, I can’t take your picture.”

Ed Spahr: I took it. That’s the only way I could have got hit, right here [on the inside part of the arm], when I was holding the camera up to take his picture. It felt like a bee sting.

Bob Rossi: And there he was, having his picture taken. He had gotten a Bronze Star that morning, he had the ribbon, his face was all puffed up, blood all over his combat jacket, he says, “Take my picture.”

Jim Gifford: I couldn’t see out of my right eye, but I didn’t know how bad it was. It’s a funny thing, I didn’t feel any pain when the bullet went in.

Tony D’Arpino: I can remember plain as day one thing about that night, that evening. We were about ready to eat our meal, whatever it was, and they said that there was a small pocket, it was holding the infantry down, they wanted the tanks to clean it out. You took two tanks. It was just supposed to be a small pocket. And it turned out to be a little more than that, I guess.

Jim Gifford: It was bad news.

Bob Rossi: After we were knocked out, Sergeant Warren’s tank came forward, and under Lieutenant Gifford’s orders, he set our tank on fire.

Tony D’Arpino: We had ruined the radio. We put a grenade in the gun barrel. We did everything we were supposed to do.

Bob Rossi: So the Germans couldn’t turn the gun around and fire on the town.

Jim Gifford: I had Warren shoot into the back of our tank because the Germans were stealing the tanks. They’d use them against us. The track was blown off so it was useless anyway.

Tony D’Arpino: But the gun was still good.

Jim Gifford: So we immobilized it by hitting it in the back.

Tony D’Arpino: We had the best working escape hatch of anybody in the platoon. I used to oil that thing up good, so that when you touched the lever it would really fall out. Sometimes that was the only way of escape. If you’re inside the tank and the hatches are down and the gun is traversed over your hatch, you can’t open it to get out, you have to go out the other way.
   I can remember always telling Klapkowski, he was the gunner in the tanks that I was in most of the time, and I always told him, “You sonofabitch, if we ever get knocked out, make sure that gun’s in the center, because if I can’t get out because you’ve got the gun traversed over my hatch,” I says, “I’ll haunt you. I’ll come and pull the sheets off of your bed.”

Jim Gifford: I’m sure there’s a few guys that aren’t here today because of that gun being over their hatch.

Tony D’Arpino: That used to be my biggest worry.

Bob Rossi: We subsequently got a new tank after that. Sergeant Holmes became our acting platoon leader. When Lieutenant Gifford was wounded and we were knocked out, that was January 10, 1945, Berle, Belgium — Luxembourg.

Jim Gifford: Outside of Bastogne. Bastogne was right over there, we were heading for it. We had to go down a defile with a lot of woods and they were dug in there, but we didn’t know that.

Bob Rossi: We were committed to the Bulge already. When Lieutenant Gifford was evacuated, we waited maybe several weeks for a replacement tank, and that’s when we got this new tank, and Sergeant Holmes became our acting platoon leader. He was the platoon sergeant. And on February 8, 1945, we were knocked out again, at Habscheid, Germany. We were in a wooded area. They called us during the night.

Tony D’Arpino: In high ground, no?

Bob Rossi: In high ground. And it seemed like the Germans were just waiting there for us.

Tony D’Arpino: They had it all zeroed in. They had three lines of machine gun fire. Some just grazed the ground, some came waist-high.

Bob Rossi: When light came, it seemed like everything opened up at one time. They knew we were there, in the woods, and they had mortars, artillery, machine gun fire, and all of a sudden Sergeant Holmes collapsed in the turret, and I was yelling, “Holmes! Holmes! are you hit?” And Spahr says to me, “Sure he’s hit.” And with that we picked him up, and put him behind the gun. Shrapnel had gone through his steel helmet. He was hit in several places. The towel that was around his neck, a bath towel, was sopping wet with blood.
   Later, after this happened, I noticed I had blood all over my left sleeve. And with that, I asked  D’Arpino, “Give me the first aid kit.” And with that, he can’t open it. The darn thing was rusted shut. So with a chisel he opened up the first aid kit, and I bandaged Sergeant Holmes as best as I could, and as he’s laying on the floor he called up Sergeant Gibson, he says, “Gib, I’m hit, I’m getting out of here.” And Gibson called back, he says, “We’re all getting out of here.” And with that, Gibson started up the hill, and this is when we found out that the Germans had the hill zeroed in. As Gibson stopped, they fired two rounds in front of him and missed him. He took off. We came up the hill, and Bang, we got hit. The 88 went through our engine compartment and landed between [Jim] Sessions’ —  he was the assistant driver — it landed between his legs.

Tony D’Arpino: He was a recruit.

Ed Spahr: First time up.

Bob Rossi: I think it was a day before or a day after his 18th or 19th birthday.

Tony D’Arpino: I was driving, and I knew there was another tank behind me to get out, so I tried pulling over to the right to give him room to get around me, and of course nothing was working. Sessions, the assistant driver, he was new, he grabbed the fire extinguisher, and I says, “Jump, you crazy bastard, jump!” Matter of fact, I didn’t even unplug the radio or nothing, I just got out.

Ed Spahr: He never did attempt to get out till I got ahold of him. I jumped back up on the tank and I grabbed him.

Bob Rossi: I neglected to say, one tank was already knocked out in the woods, their bogey wheels were knocked off, and we had taken two guys from that crew into our tank, so there were five of us in the turret when there should have been three. When we got hit, I was the last guy to get out. I was on my hands and knees waiting for the others to get out, and I no sooner got out of the turret than the ammo started to go.

Tony D’Arpino: It’s taking a while to tell this story, but it all happened within seconds, and when that thing hit and I saw that red projectile land beside Sessions’ foot —  it came right alongside by the transmission, the transmission was between the driver and the assistant driver — it was laying right down by his left foot.

Jim Gifford: The projectile, gets red hot.

Ed Spahr: Cherry red.

Tony D’Arpino: I didn’t even bother unplugging my helmet radio. I just put my hand outside, tried to pry myself up, and that tank was just as hot as a stove.

Ed Spahr: When they hit us, it just felt like it drove the tank ten feet forward.

Bob Rossi: I automatically turned around when we were hit. I turned around to pull the extinguisher. We had an inside extinguisher. It didn’t do any good. The fire was so tremendous with all that gasoline.
   And right after we got hit, just before I got out of the tank, that’s when the other tank, which was just about on our left rear, they got hit. But they weren’t as fortunate as us in the sense that [Grayson] LaMar, who was the driver, he was burned pretty bad, I can remember when he took that stocking mask off his face he took the skin right off his face. And Whiteheart, who is now dead, the type of tank they had, they had ammo stacked in back of the assistant driver, it shifted, hit him right in the back.
   Van Landingham was the tank commander, part of his heel was torn off from the shrapnel.
Tony D’Arpino: I remember we got all the way down, we crawled all the way down that hill, got down to the bottom, and Van Landingham was missing, right? He’s still back up there. So I don’t know who the other guy was and myself, we grabbed a stretcher, we went back up — we crawled back up. They were shooting right over our heads. I thought that was my last day, out of all the —  I had three tanks knocked out from under me, and out of all of them, I thought that was it. I had it.
So we crawled up there with a stretcher to get Van Landingham, right? We finally get to him and he’s moaning and groaning, I’m looking for blood, you know, I don’t see nothing. He’s got them combat boots on. I look, and he goes, “Ohhh, ohhh,” real sharp, right, now he must have been hit someplace, I don’t know where. I couldn’t see any blood. We’re trying to get him on that stretcher, and we’re trying to crawl on our hands and knees with the stretcher, get him down over the crest where they couldn’t see us. They had that place zeroed in. And we’d go a few feet, and then, “Shooom!” We’d drop the stretcher. The third time the stretcher hit the solid ground, Van Landingham, “Oooooh,” he would groan, anyway, God willing, we got him down to the bottom, and I don’t know who that man is today, I’ve thought about this a million times, but somebody saw me and whoever else had that stretcher, and it was an officer, not in our company, it was an officer that was down there, and he took our names, he thought we should get the Silver Star for what we had done. And then I was told later on that this man was called back to England, he had to be a witness in a court martial. I don’t know who the officer was. He wasn’t in our outfit.
  
Ed Spahr: He was a captain in the infantry up there. You remember, we all got up in that bunker?

Bob Rossi: We were going from pillbox to pillbox.

Ed Spahr: I’ll never forget that day. The snipers were, you raised up a little up a bit and Ping!

Tony D’Arpino: Every time we’d hear “ping” we’d drop the stretcher and Van Landingham would hit and he’d groan.

Bob Rossi: You know what was ironic? We were running from pillbox to pillbox to get out of the line of fire after this all happened. And the infantry was dug in in foxholes, they said, “Don’t run on the road, it’s mined. Don’t run in the gully, it’s mined.” And we finally got to this one pillbox, and I think it was a major or a lieutenant colonel, he wanted American wounded put outside because he complained that they were in the way of him conducting business. And we were PO’d at him. I was so mad at the time, I was only a kid, but I was so mad I felt like shooting the German prisoners who were there because they did this to us.

Ed Spahr: I remember that one infantry boy, this captain said to this guy, he pointed to him, he said, “Get up there and get that sonofabitch!” And that infantry boy was sitting there, he handed him his M-1, he said, “Here, you get him.”

Tony D’Arpino: If you remember, that night, it was dark when the infantry moved us up there.
Bob Rossi: It was raining.

Tony D’Arpino: We argued about it. You move the tanks at night, Jesus, they make too much noise. But the infantry officer said, “I’m giving you an order.”

Bob Rossi: So Holmes says to me, “Rossi, get out.” He handed me his tank commander’s watch with the luminous hands, he said, “Lead the tank.” Now I’m running in front of the tank in the rain, holding it up as I’m running so D’Arpino can see the watch in the dark. And when we got knocked out the next morning, I said to myself, “Thank God my clothes were soaking wet. I think that’s what saved me from getting burned to death in the tank.” All my clothes were soaking wet.

Ed Spahr: We lost four tanks that day.

Bob Rossi: Three. Three out of the four.

Ed Spahr: That’s right. Gibson’s was the only tank that got out.

Bob Rossi: Two tank destroyers were lost. And we lost about a company of infantry. I mean, we took a beating.

Tony D’Arpino: When daybreak came and I looked around, I said, “Hooooly shit.” You could see for miles. I mean, we were really exposed. They had three lanes of machine gun fire.

Bob Rossi: You remember later on we were kidding, it was bad, but later on we kidded, “That German gun crew must have all got the Iron Cross and a three-day pass.”

- - -

 

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Breakfast at Denny's

Reuben "Ruby" Goldstein

The following is from the preface to my book "A Mile in Their Shoes":

 "

Have you had breakfast? Perhaps you’ll join me at Denny’s. I’d offer to pay, but Cliff Merrill insists on picking up the check. Cliff is a retired colonel. Who are we to argue?

Cliff’s wife Jan will join us, along with Reuben and Sue Goldstein. Ruby is fond of reminiscing about the Great Depression and is a big fan of the $1.99 Grand Slam breakfast – these are 1994 prices, mind you!

Let’s take this table in the corner. It’s Sunday morning, and the restaurant in Bradenton, Fla. – where the veterans of the 712^th Tank Battalion from World War II are having their annual Florida “mini-reunion” – is crowded. Soon the waitress brings our plates, with their neatly arranged sausage patties, their bacon, pancakes and sunnyside up eggs. She disappears momentarily and returns with two thermal decanters of coffee.

Before long, as it always does at these reunions, the conversation shifts from restaurants in the Boston area – another favorite topic of Ruby’s – and salmon fishing in Alaska, an annual pastime of Cliff and Jan – to Normandy and 1944.

Cliff is solidly built, even as he pushes 80, with pale, chiseled cheeks and a splash of red beneath his eyes. He could still fit into a uniform, while Ruby, with the exception of his facial features, bears little resemblance to the rail-thin cavalry sergeant in 50-year-old snapshots.

When the battalion experienced its first combat on July 3, 1944, in the Haye du Puits sector of the Normandy battlefield, Cliff was a company commander in the 712^th. Ruby was a tank commander in his company.

“Do you remember,” Ruby says, “we had these flare guns in the tank?”

“Smoke,” Cliff says.

“Yeah, smoke mortars,” Ruby says, although the next few times I hear him tell the story it will still be a flare gun. Memory is funny that way.

“I had mine wired to the inside of the basket of the turret,” he says with his Boston accent, “and I took it with me after the tank was hit.” This was on either July 4^th or 5^th, 1944. A few days later Cliff would be wounded and would miss the rest of the combat in Europe, although he would return to the European theater as a member of the tribunal at the Dachau war crimes trials, and later as a provost marshal. Ruby would be wounded too, but not until the Falaise Gap in August, and he would later return to the outfit.

“There was a machine gun nest in the field,” he says. “He was waiting for somebody to cross the opening to the field, then he’d let go. So I started to fire it [the smoke mortar] and lobbed it over the hedgerow. It couldn’t do any damage, but it must have scared the hell out of them, because I fired quite a few shots. But he caught one paratrooper that was trying to go through the opening. He caught him and killed him.”

“It was a captain of the paratroopers,” Cliff says. “I tried to stop him.”

Cliff pauses amid the clinking of coffee cups and animated conversations at nearby tables. He glances down, as if he is deep in thought.

“Before your tank was hit, you ran over,” he says, staring now at his plate, his voice barely audible, “there was a wounded German. You ran over him with your tank. Did you know that?”

“No, I just kept going.”

Jan Merrill, who is Cliff’s second wife, glances knowingly at Sue Goldstein, who married Ruby shortly after the war, as if to say you’d think our husbands wouldn’t talk about these things over breakfast. But the women know it’s better to talk about it over breakfast than to not talk about it at all.

“Jesus,” Cliff says, “you flattened him right out.”

“We kept going,” Ruby says. “Didn’t stop for anything.”

“He wasn’t wounded any longer,” Cliff says. “The tracks ran the whole length of him.”

***

GOLDSTEIN, Reuben "Bob" Of Hull (Mass.) Entered into rest June 22, 2012, at the age of 94. Bob was a proud U.S. Army Veteran of WWII and a Purple Heart Recipient. Beloved husband of the late Sylvia (Raskind) Goldstein. Devoted father of Martin Goldstein and his wife Pamela of Randolph, Stuart Goldstein and his wife Donna Marie of Hanover, Barry Goldstein of NJ and Donna Goldstein of Hull. Loving brother of the late Melvin Goldstein, Nathan Goldstein, David Goldstein and Jack Goldstein. Cherished grandfather of Alyssa, Ashley and Philip. Services will be held at the Stanetsky Memorial Chapel, 475 Washington St, CANTON, MA on Monday June 25, 2012 at 10:00 AM. Interment Lindwood Memorial Park, (Moses Mendelsohn Section), Randolph. Memorial observance will be held at the home of Martin & Pamela, on Monday beginning at 6:00 PM and on Tuesday and Wednesday beginning at 2:00 PM. In lieu of flowers expressions of sympathy in his memory may be made to a charity of your choice. Stanetsky Memorial Chapel 781-821-4600 www.stanetsky.com

Ever since I began attending reunions of the 712th Tank Battalion, I can't recall Ruby Goldstein ever missing one, either the annual reunion or the Florida minis. I heard two stories at the first reunion I went to, in 1987, which were instrumental in turning me into an oral historian. Neither story was the kind of story you'd expect to hear, about courage under fire, about bravery. One of the stories, told by Wayne Hissong, was about all the things he did upon returning home to avoid facing the mother of a buddy with whom he'd entered the service, and who wanted to know how her son was killed. The other story was told by Ruby, and was about a rabbit. Those of you who knew Ruby have probably heard this story more than once, but here it is nonetheless:

Reuben Goldstein

I was in the replacement depot waiting to rejoin the battalion, and we were getting hungry. It was after breakfast, and it’s getting close to noontime, and who know when the heck you’re gonna get chow, or what you’re gonna get.

So this fellow and I, we take a walk, and we get to a farmhouse, where we get some eggs. But we bought them. The Germans wouldn’t buy them, they’d take what they want. I had some francs in my pocket. I said, “Give me six eggs.”

I put them in my field jacket, three in one pocket, three in another. We go along, go into another farmhouse, and I want some more eggs.

The woman in the house could understand what I wanted. She goes out to get the eggs, and I go to sit down – forget it! I made a mistake. I crushed the six eggs in my pockets. What a mess I had!

I got the other six eggs. I cleaned up as best I could. I cleaned out my pockets. Then I said if she had a rabbit we could buy a rabbit. So it cost me, I think it was ten francs, it’s two cents a franc, twenty cents, and I got a rabbit. It was a nice, big, fat one.

We get back to camp, we said, “How the hell are we gonna kill this and cook it?” So this one kid from down South, I don’t remember his name, he says, “I’ll show you how we do it.”

He takes the rabbit by the hind legs, on the tree, Bam! Hits the head right on the tree, holds the hind legs, puts the rabbit on the ground, puts his foot under the neck, and pulls his head right off. Then he takes a knife and guts it.

We got a couple of branches from a tree, and two forks, cleaned them off, dug a little pit, and started a fire. I got some salt from a guy, and we poured it all inside of the rabbit to clean it out, we didn’t have any water. We poured all the salt, and we’re scraping it with knives to clean it out, and everybody, their mouths were getting full of saliva, you know, we’re gonna have something to eat.

We turned that thing, and we’re turning it and turning it, it should be done by now. We break a piece off and go to eat it.

Did you ever eat shoe leather? You started chewing, you figured look, it’s better than nothing. You spit it out, you couldn’t eat it.

***

 One day I was driving my goddaughter Avery somewhere, she was in her early twenties at the time, and I had a recording of Ruby telling that story. I said "Listen to this," and I played it on the CD player. Two thirds of the way into the story, she made me turn the CD player off. "Ewww," she said, or a word to that effect. Maybe it was "Yuck." Only then did I realize how graphic a story it was.

One day Tony D'Arpino, who lived in Milton, Mass. -- Ruby lived in Hull -- came into Ruby's dry cleaning establishment. The two of them got to talking, and they discovered that the both were veterans of the 712th. Ruby was in A Company and Tony in C Company, so they didn't know each other during the war, but from that point on they were good friends. The last few years they were both widowers, and they would travel to reunions together; sometimes Tony's daughter Ann would drive them, other times they'd struggle in wheelchairs through airports.

When I went to Milton in 1992 to interview Tony, Ruby came over and I interviewed them together. Ruby brought some pictures and memorabilia, including a training manual. I opened it up, and immediately my respect for Ruby rose several notches.

"Wow," I said. "This was autographed by a general?"

Ruby didn't know quite what I was talking about.

"Right here," I said. "The general signed your book."

Ruby looked quizzically at the page, and then laughed. It was the page with his address.

"General Delivery," he announced. "It was signed by a general!"

"Uncle Ruby, you're my hero," George Goldstein wrote on the obituary guestbook.

Reuben Goldstein was one of my heroes as well.

- - -

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

　

Clip of the day: Plaster Fried Chicken

Tony D'Arpino

You may have seen Tony D'Arpino, of Milton, Mass., on "Patton 360" on the History Channel. Tony was a tank driver in C Company of the 712th Tank Battalion.

Tony often spoke of his gunner, Stanley Klapkowski. In this excerpt, he describes a meal cooked by Klapkowski while his platoon occupied a house in Maizieres les Metz, where they spent three weeks. I guess the title gives it away a little bit, but it's one of my favorite stories anyway.

Plaster fried chicken