A Medic's Story



 

   Following is an excerpt from "A Medic's Story," by Edward Madden, as told to me during a 2000 interview at the 90th Infantry Division reunion in Charlotte, North Carolina. "A Medic's Story" is available for Kindle for $1.99 at amazon.com. 

 

   After the Normandy peninsula was cut off, they put us into a holding position and we were put onto this farm. We were there for almost two weeks, in a holding position. And one day, July the 1^st, the Germans decided they were going to put some artillery into the place.

   There were two girls who lived on the farm. One was 14 or 15, and her sister was 16 or 17. They were out in the field, milking the cows at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, when the Germans put the shells in there. The shells landed real close to them, and a couple of the cows were killed, and some of the shrapnel went through the older sister’s heart and killed her. And the younger girl had both of her legs taken off below the knee, both of them, and one of her arms was pretty badly shattered. And I went out and picked her up and brought her into their house. I treated her, then I called and had her evacuated back.

   The very next day we moved out, and I never heard anything about her until later on in the year, in December or so, the Stars & Stripes came out and there was an article in it showing her with Air Corps people. And what they did was they came in, and they built a landing strip right near the farm. They found out about her, so they went back to the Army hospital that they had her in, and the Air Force took her out of there – with permission – and they brought her back to the farm and they built a tent for her. They had their doctors take care of her, and eventually they ended up buying her prostheses for her legs.

   When the Air Corps – these were fighter planes, P-47s – moved forward to keep up with the infantry, they were able to carry her in their planes because they got written permission from General Eisenhower to take her with them. And she met Eisenhower, he came over and talked to her.

   I sent the article home, and I didn’t think anything about it.

  Then in 1985, when I was going to go to Europe, I wrote to Henri Levaufre [a Normandy historian who has assisted many 90^th Division veterans] and I told him about her and asked him to find out if the woman is still alive. He wrote back to me and he said, yes, he found her, that she lives only a few miles from where Henri lived. So he said when you get to the hotel – we told him what hotel in Paris we were going to be at – he said he would leave a message for me so I’d know where she lives. So when we got into Paris we got a message stating that her daughter – without the legs but with the artificial limbs; she married a lawyer, and she had one daughter, and the daughter was going to come by in the morning and pick us up and take us to the big hospital in Paris where they take care of the people. So they took us over and we met for the first time. And she didn’t know that it was the infantry that was stationed at her farm – she didn’t remember that it was infantry, she thought there were artillery people, and she didn’t know who I was or that I had taken care of her until I explained to her; I told her that one day one of our officers was going through their barn, and he moved some hay aside and he found a German motorcycle that her brother had hidden, that he’d stolen from the Germans. I told her about that and she said, “Oh, my God, you were there, on the farm.”

   And I said, “Yes, I was the one that took care of you.”

   Well, with all of this the Air Force had adopted her and they’ve had her come over to some of their reunions. And if you ever go to the Airborne Museum in Ste. Mere Eglise, they have a whole display about her there.

   I met her in 1985, and then when I went over in 1994 we stayed with her at her home for a few days and she took us around and she introduced us to the curator of the museum at Ste. Mere Eglise.

   Her name is Yvette Hamel. Incidentally, there’s a book, one of the fliers, he’s a doctor now, his wife met her and his wife wrote a book about her called “Sunward I’ve Climbed,” and it’s been translated into French, too. It’s an interesting book. I’ve got it. She sent me a copy, signed and all.

 

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A child in London - 1940

Margie Hoffman    This is a guest post. On Friday, I've been invited to speak to the fifth-grade class at Hunter College Elementary School, my alma mater. I thought it might be a good idea to read the pupils a story from my original web site, tankbooks.com. I launched the site in 1997, and the following year I received an email from Margie Hoffman, asking if I would like to post a story she wrote on my site. She also sent a follow-up story which is on the site. I've lost touch with Margie, so, while the essence of the story may be old hat to my handful of British Twitter followers (okay, maybe it's two handfuls), if anyone knows of Margie's whereabouts could they please get in touch with me? A Child in London -- 1940 Margaret Hoffman  ©1998, 2009 Margaret Hoffman This was written by Margie Hoffman, who was a toddler in London during the Blitz.    My war started when I was about three months old. My Dad had been called up into the army and my mother had been living in a small apartment in East London. The German planes had already been flying over London and dropping bombs, mainly at night. After one raid, my mother took me in the pram, to post a letter to my Dad to tell him that we were all right. While she was away, an undetected land mine exploded and the apartment was just brick dust so she returned to her father’s house in the dock area of London.    This was an unfortunate move because the next thing the Germans bombed was the dock. They bombed it by day and night until even the water burned with the contents of the warehouses tumbling into the water. My grandfather had forbidden all his "children" -- all of whom were grown up with families – to go into the large warehouse down the road because he said it was a death trap. It’s funny what you do, though, to escape from noise and to get away from the scream of bombs. People crammed into the large warehouse, someone brought in a piano and local teachers and others organized singing to take people’s minds off the bombs. The warehouse received a direct hit and over 200 people were killed by blast. Others died not directly as a result of the bomb hitting them but they were crushed to death by the huge, heavy walls of the warehouse.     Apparently we were three days and three nights in an underground shelter in Granddad’s garden. Crowded together, the family were not too pleased when the local police knocked on the door and made them take in two more people who had been a mile away from their home when the air raid began, especially as they were none too clean. After the dawn broke and everyone crawled out of the shelter, we were not only covered in dust but covered in fleas from our two uninvited guests!     Granddad said if we stayed where we were we would not survive another round of bombing like that. He had already bought a small plot of land in Essex and built what he called a wooden holiday home there – it was not so much a holiday home as it was a two-roomed shed! But the garden was pleasant to look at, which was a good thing as we ended up with eight of us living in the wooden house and the men camped in a tent in the garden.    Eventually we sorted ourselves out. Poor Mum had to live with her mother-in-law, who was hardly a sweet-tempered person, Dad’s mother, although born in England, had Irish parents and she was prone to be bad-tempered and a bit of a drama queen. She made matters worse by telling Mum all the bad news of the war, and her prediction of what was going to happen.    Mum moved out and rented a small bungalow, which got us away from Nan but made it more difficult for Mum when the air raids started. By this time she had had another baby and when the siren went, my Granddad Hickman (who was kind, sweet and gentle – how on earth did he choose my grandmother for a wife?) would come round and carry me to the big underground shelter in his house, while Mum would carry the baby.    The shelter was called an Anderson Shelter and was built half in the ground and half on top. The top half had curved, corrugated iron sheets, and you piled lots of earth on it and hoped for the best. It tended to be damp, and if it rained you all had to lift your feet up because the water seeped in from underneath. Grandmother Hickman had chosen the house just after the war started because of the large garden and peaceful neighborhood; unfortunately she failed to notice it was quite near the railway lines and in a direct line with the Shell Oil Refinery five miles away. Consequently, Germans coming in to bomb the oil refinery would miss and others would continue to have a go at the railway. I don’t know how old I was when we sat there listening to German planes coming over the shelter on their way to London and we then had to stay there until they came back. Of course if they missed their target they would jettison their bombs before they were over the Thames Estuary.     One day my uncle was home on leave. He was only 19, an aircraft engineer, and he was stationed in some quiet backwater. He was fascinated by the planes and my grandmother was having hysterics. "Come inside the shelter! They will see you." Uncle was a fidget and wanted to see the planes coming back so he made us all a cup of tea and we sat there until the familiar drone came nearer and nearer. Suddenly I realized, he didn’t know about the railway lines! I didn’t say anything; everybody else was getting ready with their hands over their ears when suddenly four bombs cascaded on to the railway lines now gleaming in the moonlight. It was so near the whole shelter lifted up and then went down. My uncle dived in head-first in a state of shock and our tea went everywhere.     At one stage we used to go to sleep with our clothes on. We wore what was called a siren suit, which was kind of like a child’s stretch pyjamas so that we could get into the air raid shelter quickly and not get cold.     One night we went to bed at about 8 p.m. – we were cold and coal was rationed and bed was the warmest place. I slept with my mother and she would read in bed. It must have been winter because it was dark – we had thick lined curtains so that the light would not show through and in a raid you just kept the lights off anyway. Suddenly the air raid siren went; I was half asleep but my mother was up and into the back room for my baby sister (I say to her now, "I don’t know why she chose you first to get into the shelter.").     By the time it was my turn large lumps of jagged shrapnel were clattering on the top of the shelter and the ground, my sister was crying, and my mother was frantic to get me, but I didn’t care: I was warm and probably tired anyway. Suddenly the railway lines got hit again, the house shook , two windows broke, then my mother came rushing in. In the explosion the vibration had shaken open the wardrobe door, my mother walked straight into it and walked around holding her head. I laughed and laughed! It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film. She was so mad, she clouted me round the head and said, "See if you think that’s funny."    We rushed into the shelter, she a nervous wreck and nursing her head and my sister screaming. Suddenly I looked up and saw in the sky a long object with fire coming out of the back of it, but really quite close. "Isn’t that wonderful?" I said.     "Yes, so wonderful, that is what is going to kill us all if you don’t get inside." The V1 was certainly a marvel of German technology but we all knew that as long as you heard the engine you were safe; once it cut out, its descent was rapid and it could take out six houses. -----     My children asked me what our food was like – pathetic is the answer. We grew potatoes and tomatoes, picked berries and swapped things with neighbours. We were rationed so severely that even now I don’t eat meat as my ration had to go to my sister who used to be ill with asthma.    After the war when we came off ration, I had gotten used to not eating meat so I never bothered. For a family of three we would have four ounces of meat a week – two if it had been a difficult time for the supply boats coming in. England as an island depended on overseas help for food. If the U boats were active we all went without as most of the food went to our army. Two eggs a week or else that dreadful egg powder.     I always thought our food rationing was pretty dreadful until I met my husband who was a child in Holland during the war and who really knew what starvation meant.    As for our little family, Dad survived D-Day and went on with the Middlesex Regiment through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and through great good fortune came back to us. How did the war affect him? Well, he couldn’t stand noise, we never had the radio on very loud, he would never listen to a memorial service. He would never go swimming. Years later I learned on D-Day he was dropped too far out and the vehicle he was driving was nearly submerged; he negotiated debris, burning vehicles and bodies to get his crew onto Sword Beach and then off into Normandy.     While his officers were having a meeting near him, mortar fire sped over the trees killing them all in front of his eyes. His confidence never returned; he could never make a decision and was left with stomach ailments that plagued his life. He looked after us both when my mother was ill immediately after the war and our bedtime stories were Operation Overlord and the time he just avoided a mine in France. We knew all the generals and battle plans. We often spoke of old battles but he would never return to France with me. He died of a heart attack at age 69 but his wartime stories are etched in my mind forever. Margaret Hoffman  Priceless. (Well, actually it's $19.95 at amazon) Please subscribe to the Oral History Audiobooks email newsletter to keep up with the latest developments and specials. Web Form Generator

You Could Die Laughing

   Lately I've been putting together themed compilations of stories taken from my personal archive of some 600 hours of interviews with World War II veterans.

   One recurring theme in the interviews is the importance of a sense of humor to the combat soldier. Some things might not seem funny in retrospect, and others withstand the test of time, like the new lieutenant who instructs his company, "Hands on Place, Hips!"

   Bill Scheiterle was a young lieutenant in the assault wave on the island of Peleliu. "I don't ever have to worry about going to Hell because I've been there," he said when I interviewed him at the Eldred World War II Museum one Memorial Day. Then he told me an amusing story about one of the most horrific battles of World War II. He told his company that he had a bottle of brandy in his pack and when they got ashore he would break it open and they would all have a drink. However, a shell exploded nearby and as he lay face down on the beach, he heard one of his men shout "The lieutenant's been hit." Then he heard another voice shout "The heck with the lieutenant, get the bottle!"

   (Tragically, the bottle of brandy, along with Scheiterle's pack, was demolished, but the lieutenant was patched up on a ship and returned to action the next day.)

   Frank Bertram was a 19-year-old navigator when his B-24 was shot down during the ill-fated Kassel Mission bombing raid of Sept. 27, 1944. The Kassel Mission generated one of the great stories of closure to come out of World War II: In 1986 a monument was dedicated in Friedlos, Germany, with the names of all of the American and all of the German fliers (and a handful of civilians) who died in one of the most spectacular aerial battles of World War II. Some 600 people, including American and German survivors of the battle, attended the dedication. Afterward, Bertram was invited to a reunion of veterans of one of the German fighter squadrons that attacked the 445th Bomb Group that fateful day.
   The German veterans were boisterous, drank a lot of beer and smoked liked chimneys, and for a gavel, their president used the joystick of a Fokke-Wulf 190. Toward the end of the evening, Bertram asked to see the joystick that was used as a gavel. He turned it over, looked at its underside, and said "Hah, it says "Made in Japan."
   After a moment of stunned silence came the remark "Nein! Nein! Deutschland!" before his hosts realized he was making a joke, and burst out in laughter.
   These and many other stories, all of which are historical and some of which are hysterical, are included on the new audio double-CD, which is available in my eBay store, along with the many other audiobooks drawn from my oral history interviews.
   Mention the blog when you order a copy, and I'll include my other new individual themed CD, "Uphill Both Ways," with stories about the Great Depression. I'll have more about that in my next entry.
   Here are some excerpts from "You Could Die Laughing."

mp3 John Zimmer, a veteran of the 712th Tank Battalion, describes a visit to an elementary school.

mp3 Reuben Goldstein, a tank commander in the 712th, has a book autographed by a general. (From "Once Upon a Tank in the Battle of the Bulge")

mp3 Bob Hamant, a Marine who spent a year on the island of Tinian, describes an incident while unloading 90-millimeter shells from an ammunition ship. (From "Four Marines").

mp3 Frank Bertram, a navigator on a B-24 and former prisoner of war, tells of an invitation to a reunion of German fighter pilots. (From "The Kassel Cassettes," which is currently out of circulation while it undergoes some changes).

mp3 Bob Hamant recalls some playful goats on the island of Tinian that liked to pee on sleeping Marines.

NOTE: I produce these audio CDs from my personal oral history archives in small batches with paper labels. Because of this, it's important to keep them from excessive cold or heat, which could cause buckling of the label. It's recommended, if possible, to make a backup copy of each CD. Occasionally the CDs will skip in a car CD player while they play well in computers and regular CD players. I'm working on the problem, but if it should arise will make a full refund or send replacement CDs. Thank you, Aaron Elson

New in my eBay store:

You Could Die Laughing

Uphill Both Ways

New Improved "Tales of Love, Food, Booze, Jumping Out of Airplanes, Meeting General Patton and Winning World War II"

 



 

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Darrell Petty Part 1: Machine Gun Hill

Darrell Petty

   I met Darrell Petty, of New Castle, Wyoming, at the 1997 reunion of the 90th Infantry Division in Omaha, Nebraska. My tape recorder must have missed the beginning of our conversation, but at the start we were talking about the division's crossing of the Moselle River in November of 1944. The river was at flood stage, and the infantry got across two or three days before the first tanks were able to 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.

   From there the conversation turned to the division's second crossing of the Moselle, in March of 1945, under greatly different circumstances.

 

 

Darrell Petty, G Company, 358th Regiment, 90th Infantry Division
 
Omaha, Neb., Sept. 1997

　 Darrell Petty: ...Anyway, it didn’t sound like a German tank. But imagine that sucker coming around that corner into view, the first thing I saw was the end of the barrel on that muzzle break, I thought, oh, man, they got tanks behind us. Boy, I was sure glad to see that old white star shining on that sucker, I’ll tell you. It made a whole bit of difference, I’ll tell you.
Aaron Elson: They got one platoon of tanks across the Moselle, just in time from what I understand.

Darrell Petty: Well, I’ll tell you. It was a lot different the second time I crossed it. I crossed on a bridge. But then we ran into quite a firefight on Hill 451.

Aaron Elson: Where was that?

Darrell Petty: We were supposed to be in reserve. F Company had pulled up on the line and we were in reserve, and we left, I can’t think of the name of that town, just right on the banks of the Moselle on the other side. We billeted in houses. We took over houses, we felt pretty secure by that time in the war. So we started marching up in reserve, and we could hear digging. We knew somebody was digging in, but we didn’t know who. And we went up a hill, a pretty damn steep hill, and a guy by the name of Gene Miller and I, we helped another guy up. His name was Prey. He was a private first class, and if I knew then what I know now he was having a heart attack. But we didn’t know it. He carried a little 536 radio. I was packing that, and they’re pretty heavy those little devils. And Miller was packing his M-1 rifle. We were lightening the load up for him as much as we could. And just the day before that we’d chopped his hair off, it had gotten long, it looked like the devil.
   But anyhow, we got to the top of the hill, then we sat down for a break. We could still hear these guys digging in, whoever it was, and it turned out it was F Company. And we were just setting there, and about that time here comes a machine gun burst.
   The Germans shoot white tracers, ours were orange, so we knew that it was definitely German. By the sound and by the tracers, they shot just about twice as fast as our Brownings did. And man, we whirled around and headed for cover. And this kid, this Pfc. Prey, he let out a groan and collapsed. We figured he was hit. We got over the hill and then hollered "Medic!" And a guy by the name of Doc Roberts, Thomas Roberts, a field medic but everybody called him Doc, he came up, and he and I crawled out there to Prey. We got ahold of him and dragged him back behind cover. And he was gone. And he had a classic look of a person with a heart attack, in his face, the coloration of his face. We tried to find where he was hit. We couldn’t find any blood. He didn’t have a bullet mark on him. He died of a heart attack. And we lost him. He was the only dead one. We had some wounded. And Lieutenant Colonel Cleveland A. Lyttle was leading us, he was the battalion commander, and he went right up that hill with us.
   All we know is they said there were machine guns on the hill, well, that was standard. If we’d have known what was on it we probably wouldn’t have tried it. They pinned F Company down and they had killed 25 men in F Company and wounded some others. There were five companies of German SS, they were dug in, and they had 40 ground type machine guns on that hill. And F Company had just buggered into them. They weren’t supposed to be there, by all the reports there was nothing there. And Lyttle came up and he said, "We’ve got this hill to take, it’s got some machine guns on it, we’re gonna take it."
   Okay. F Company’s pinned down. So, we called in artillery, everything they had, and boy, they were tossing them in there close to us. So we had to go down the hill, under trees. And we had to cross the valley, that’s where they pinned F Company down.
   We went through F Company, and we headed up that hill. But when we got underneath that canopy where we could look up under there, man, it looked like an anthill. There were Germans running all over that hill. Well, hey, you couldn’t do anything but go forward. If we turned around and retreated, we’d have been just like F Company. So we just kept going, and they’d taught us use that march and fire, every time your right foot hit the ground, if you had a carbine you fired it, and we got good shooting from the hip. Heck, I could throw a small bucket out and fire when I throw it and hit it five, six times out of eight out of that M-1 Garrand. And that’s the way we went up that hill. And that colonel, he went up the hill with us. Our watches were all synchronized when the artillery was gonna stop, so we knew what time to hit the hill. And when we got to the top, we only took one German prisoner.

Aaron Elson: Just one?

Darrell Petty: One. He was a sergeant, spoke English, and he said, "You damned Americans are crazy. You don’t know how to fight a war." He said, "When you’re fired on with full automatic weapons you’re supposed to hit the ground and take cover. That other unit did and you guys didn’t. You just kept coming at us. We couldn’t get our heads up to shoot back straight." And it made "Army Hour," and was broadcast all over the free world.

Aaron Elson: You know, that’s what they told me. I’ve met some of the Germans who fought there, in one of the villages, and one who spoke English said the Americans didn’t know how to fight.

Darrell Petty: Oh yeah. He said we took war for sport, because we laughed at things. Sometimes it was either laugh or cry, so we laughed. And by golly, it’s an awful thing to say, but we shouldn’t take prisoners, because if you stand there guarding that prisoner you’re gonna get shot. And some, most of them tried to fight, but a few tried to surrender. You couldn’t stand there and guard him because you’re going to get shot. Plus we needed everybody up the hill. So you just had to do what you did.

Aaron Elson: The Germans on top of the hill, were they killed by the infantry or by the artillery?

Darrell Petty: Infantry. We took a kid by the name of Speaks, he had a B.A.R., and I had an M-1, and old Thomas [Doc Roberts] was like a squad leader. He was right up there on the front end of that thing with us, that medic, and by golly, we overran the CP, the command post up there, and a full German colonel came out of there and his cadre, and they were running and we opened up on them with a B.A.R. and that M-1 and it just folded them up. There was one still alive, and Roberts went down and was gonna try to help him, and I heard a Schmeisser bolt click and I hollered "Doc! Look out!" I looked up the hill and he was taking aim on old Doc, and Doc just fell down among the bodies and he sprayed him and he finished killing the German, but he didn’t get Doc. And about that time Speaks and I opened up on him, with the B.A.R. and the M-1.
   He was gonna kill Doc, and Doc was trying to help a German, wounded. He killed the German, and Doc fell in behind the bodies and he didn’t get him. Then we nailed that guy. And my M-1 was so hot it wouldn’t quit firing, it was setting itself off. And on the way up, a kid by the name of Phyllis, in F Company...

Aaron Elson: Phillips?

Darrell Petty: Phyllis, just like a girl’s name, his last name was Phyllis. He was mad, and he jumped up, and he said, "I’m going with you!" He went through basic with us, this other kid and me.

Aaron Elson: He was from F Company?

Darrell Petty: Yes. And he shouldn’t have even went with us, but he did. And halfway up the hill I got a bunch of machine gun bullets through the pant leg, and they cut him down. And I thought my leg was gone, it felt like somebody knocked it off. I looked down, it was still working, it was okay. But if he hadn’t went with us, a kid out of Prescott, Arizona, by the name of Billy Bacon and I, we would have run out of ammunition halfway up the hill. We went back and got his ammunition and finished it up, and when it was done I had 18 rounds left. We split it, and I had 18 rounds left, and we were expecting a counterattack. We were setting there with dang little ammunition, but as it turned out, this German sergeant, he'd seen what was going on and he played dead, he smeared blood on his face and lay there. When we discovered he was alive, Lieutenant Kelso said "I want to talk to him," because old Sergeant Will was about to kill him. Lieutenant Kelso said, "I want to find out what they’re doing here." As it turned out, they were supposed to let us bypass them, and then they were going to hit us from the rear that night, and the 11^th Panzer was going to hit us from the front. And when we found out, we called artillery in on where the 11^th Panzer was gonna come in and we foiled the whole thing.
   We were put in for a presidential unit citation for that. And it was on Army Hour, broadcast all over the free world. And I have the little article, I’ve got it at home, where it says Colonel Lyttle and G Company of 358 outmaneuvered and destroyed five companies of German SS, and I’ve had people look at me about those holes. I had seven holes in the pant legs. And my officers tried to figure out how they could miss my leg and make those holes. And I got a letter from a buddy that was there, he got married after we came home, and he said, "I sure would like to have you meet my wife. I’ve been telling her all about you and what we did over there." Then he said, "Well, not quite everything." But he said, "I even told her about the seven holes in your pant leg."

Aaron Elson: Now, the German sergeant that was captured, he had smeared blood on his face?

Darrell Petty: He'd seen what was happening. He saw we weren’t taking any prisoners, his comrade was dead, and he just got some blood and smeared it on his face.

Aaron Elson: Was he wounded at all?

Darrell Petty: Not touched. He just lay down and played dead.

Aaron Elson: And somebody was going to shoot him, and then who said that they wanted to talk to him?

Darrell Petty: Sergeant Will was gonna kill him, and Lieutenant Kelso, he was our executive officer, he hollered at him, "Will, don’t you kill him, I want to talk to him."

Aaron Elson: And after they talked to him, then what happened?

Darrell Petty: Then he went back to a prisoner of war compound. But, oh yeah, we called it Machine Gun Hill. We figured we were kind of justified in doing that. The official number is Hill 451.

(Coming soon: Darrell Petty, Part 2)

Read more interviews like this in "A Mile in Their Shoes," by Aaron Elson, available in our eBay store as well as at amazon.com (where you can order a "used" copy directly from the author at a discounted price). It is also available as an e-Book for Amazon's Kindle.

- - -

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

　　

Preface to Conversations With D-Day Veterans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omaha Beach Armageddon 

Gold Out of a Dollar

- - -

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

　

A Letter From a German Wife to Her Soldier Husband



The destroyer USS Butler (DD-636)

   The American War Orphans Network is a wonderful group, and has helped many Americans deal with the loss of a parent in World War II. I often wondered if there were a similar organization in Germany. Quite a few years ago I asked a German veteran if such a group existed, and the answer was no.
   I recently called Felix Podolak, a "Tin Can Sailor" who served on the USS Butler, to ask his permission to use his 1994 interview in my forthcoming book "Conversations With D-Day Veterans." In the interview, Felix mentioned that he had a buddy on the ship, Gus Siebert, who made two copies of a history of the Butler, one for Gus, the other for Felix.
   The book contained a translation of a letter from a German wife to her husband. There is no indication whether the husband lived or died, or even who he was, as the letter was found in a gun emplacement on one of the invasion beaches, and the soldier's name, as well as the last few lines of the letter, were too smudged by water damage to be legible.
   Here's an excerpt from that conversation:


   Felix Podolak: I had a chance to meet my captain through the Tin Can Sailors. I met him over a drink, and he was gonna be the guest speaker. So I said, “Do you remember that time we had to go chase that British cruiser that was off the Azores?” And there was another incident when we were in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I came off leave from Garfield to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and when I got there, the fellow came down from the yard gang, he wanted to know if he could pump out the No. 2 magazine, in the forward part of the ship. They felt somebody sabotaged the ship, flooded the forward part of the magazine because we were supposed to leave the next day.

When we got to Algiers the captain called me into his quarters, and he had a tape recorder. He recorded everything. He got down to maybe there was some sabotage. After the questioning, he said, “Podolak, maybe the FBI will pick you up to question you, but as far as I know now, you didn’t have nothing to do with it, you came off liberty.” So during the speech he said, “Podolak can sleep a lot better now, he won’t have to worry about the FBI picking him up.” That was about 30 or 40 years later, but he made a joke out of it. He was a terrific captain.

Gus made this book for him and me, there’s only two like it, it’s a history of the ship. Gus was on the forward repair party with me.

The captain went ashore. In one of the pillboxes he found a letter, this fellow out of the pillbox was supposed to write to his wife but it was wet and dirty, and Gus speaks German. He interpreted everything, and this is what the guy was writing to his wife in Germany. This is what we picked up, it’s in here somewhere, this is the communique. Gus being of German descent, he spoke very fluent. In Palermo they were bombing us, and Gus had a chance to be the interpreter for a German pilot that we picked out of the water, in Sicily.

 Aaron Elson: Is this the letter here? (Reading): “When Captain Matthews came back from his trip to Cherbourg, he called me to his cabin and showed me a letter he’d found in one of the German gun emplacements there. He asked what it was. It was a letter from a German wife to her soldier husband. He asked if I could translate it for him. The envelope had a return address but water had blurred the ink, making it impossible to read, and the letter had the last few lines and the signature also blurred. ‘My dear Ewald and my dear father. ...

"‘My dear good Ewald, it is Friday morning, half past eight. Want to hurry and write you a nice letter. I received your dear letter yesterday and was very happy to hear from you my love, and to have heard what you did Easter Day. But now I know that you have seen the great lovers on the screen and yet you didn’t mention a bit about love in your letter. What do you do in your visits to the movies? Do you sleep while the picture is on? With whom do you usually go out, or do you go out alone.

'Dear Ewald, when you write, please don’t complain about your food openly. Just because your officers receive better food than you do, remember, you’re the dumb one when you start to get hotheaded. Therefore, my sweetheart, don’t write about these matters openly.

'Yesterday afternoon I went to the health clinic. A fitter from Ludenscheid was there, and he took my measurements for a health belt. I had to go to the welfare office and get a certificate for it. Then I went back to the clinic and had it stamped, and yesterday afternoon went to the clinic to try it on. The fitter was yet a young man about 30 years old, and I sure felt embarrassed and ashamed to be in my undergarments while he took the measurements. There were 12 other expectant mothers there. The clinic is going to pay 70 percent of the cost of it, and I will have to pay only the 30 percent. I don’t know how I’m going to get something to hold my stockings up with, because you have to have a good reason whenever you want to buy things like that.

'I came home on the train at 3:30. Then I drank some coffee and rode out to the farm. It was almost 8 o’clock and I was just getting ready to plant some vegetables when all of a sudden it began to rain. We had to run, but we got wet just the same. Our daughter came at 5 o’clock and asked for a piece of butter bread and some coffee. She always wants to be where I am. She was out to the farm with me and picked flowers in Forsters’ meadow. Then she sat down by the side of the road and tied the flowers into small bundles. Then she noticed the Russians, which the people are hiring to dig their gardens, and she got frightened and started to cry and came running to me, and then said “Momma, on account of the Russians, I lost all my pretty flowers.” I had to laugh and told her “You little goat, don’t be so scared.” When it stopped raining I wanted to send her home, but she wouldn’t go alone.

'This evening I have cramps in my hands. That’s why I can’t write so plain. My fingers hurt a lot and have blisters on them. In the morning I have to take our daughter to the dentist because I made an appointment for the 14th of April. Yesterday I met Mrs. Sonnerkin, who is a midwife, and think I will have her when our baby arrives. She suggested I have the baby at home instead of in a hospital, because she could be closer that way, and also the hospital would cost 150 marks, while at home the clinic would pay for everything, even 35 marks for a nurse. Lena is going to nurse me, and in case an operation is necessary, Dr. Dimkle will see that I get to a hospital. Then I wouldn’t have to pay anything. I’ll have it home, I think. What is your opinion?

'Dear Ewald, I have to close now because it is 10:30 and we have to leave. Our daughter has to be back at school at 2:30. Last night the Tommies were overhead again, and they didn’t leave until after 12. Until then, we couldn’t go to bed. It was very bad. Now my super sweetheart, a thousand kisses from your faithful wife and daughter.'”

"As I mentioned in the beginning, this letter contained a few more lines and also was signed. As a thought, as of this writing, if their baby was born in 1944, he or she would be now 45 years old. Twice as old as many of us were at that time.”

 Felix Podolak: You notice, she wrote something in there, that she was tired and that her hands were, she must have had to work or something, but she wouldn’t say that she was working hard if you notice. Even on our ship, our mail was censored by the officers.

There’s an article in there about us chasing around, and we finally found that cruiser that was torpedoed by the Germans. It was torpedoed in the bow. Every time it would go down you’d see a big gust of water like a whale. It was only making a couple of knots, and we were sent out to pick it up. While we were sent out to pick it up we didn’t know where, because you’re riding what we call radio silence. We got as far as the Azores, and the next morning we woke up, the fog lifted, and the cruiser was right in front of us. He said it had to be divine intervention, because we traveled more than a thousand miles in three days, and there it was right in front of us. And we brought it back to Bermuda."

As of this writing, Felix Podolak is 91 years old and still living in Garfield. God bless him.

D-Day 2012

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

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

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

Aaron Elson: Which regiment were you with?

Valentine Miele: I was with the 16^th.

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

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

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

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

Valentine Miele: An LCVP.

Aaron Elson: You crossed the channel on what?

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

Aaron Elson: Was it high tide or low?

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

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

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

Aaron Elson: Were you still on the beach?

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

Aaron Elson: About what time was this?

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

Aaron Elson: Did you have tanks with you?

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

Aaron Elson: Where was he from?

Valentine Miele: I think he was from New York.

Aaron Elson: What was his first name?

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

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

He said, “Where am I gonna go?”

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

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

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

         - - - 

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

- - -

From Oral History Audiobooks:

Encounters With General Patton

The Tanker Tapes

From D-Day to the Bulge

The D-Day Tapes

From Chi Chi Press:

Tanks for the Memories

A Mile in Their Shoes

Got Kindle?

Conversations With Veterans of D-Day

Nine Lives: An Oral History

They Were All Young Kids
 

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