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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Horn

Read the Original Tanks for the Memories  (free online at tankbooks.com)

 

Order the expanded 2nd Edition (almost twice as full of great stories)

The Hospitality Room, Part 1

Arlene and Grayson La Mar, circa 1993

Did you ever wish you were a fly on the wall at a reunion of World War II veterans? You probably wouldn't wish that if the reunion were of the 712th Tank Battalion, where a veteran might say "Look, there's a fly on the wall," and the next thing you know there's a 75-millimeter high-explosive shell coming in your direction. No more fly. No more wall. No more room next door either.

But that's what I was at reunions of the 712th, with which my father served as a replacement lieutenant. Not a fly on the wall but a son of a veteran with a little Sony recording Walkman and a keen interest in hearing the stories they shared among themselves.

My New Year's resolution -- the only one I made this year and the first I have yet to break in all my 66 years -- was to go back through my early recordings and transcribe the interviews I never got around to, and review the transcripts of interviews and conversations I hadn't looked at in more than a decade. So while I cobble together a unique collection of conversations and interviews, I'll be posting some of them here, starting with a brief interview with Grayson La Mar at the 1993 reunion in Orlando, Florida. I was especially struck by one line, a description Grayson made of the battle for Maizieres les Metz, France, in November of 1944.

Grayson was a driver in C Company of the 712th. He said his platoon spent two weeks (three, according to some other accounts) in a house in Maizieres prior to the first crossing of the Moselle River.

"They had this thing zeroed in," he said of the house where his crew was staying,  "and you couldn't stick your nose out the side of the building, they'd trim it off."

I thought that was such a neat description so I posted it on my Facebook page. Among the comments was one from Cindy Sink, Grayson's daughter, who I met at many reunions which she attended with her father, mother and sister Judy, who was born while Grayson was overseas. "I would love to have that," she wrote. "Miss him. Would love to tell my children." And one of Grayson's grandchildren commented "My Pops!!!"

So, without further ado, here's the first excerpt from "The Hospitality Room"

 

Orlando reunion

Grayson C. La Mar

9-12-93

You were in Lieutenant Lombardi's platoon?

   Yes, I drove for Lombardi for a while. They shifted. When I first got over there, we lost a lot of boys and we had a lot of replacements coming in, killed or hurt. They might take you out of one platoon and put you in another, if there was a new arrival, so you knew what you were doing, and the other guys, because a lot of them hadn't had the training that we had.

   I drove for a fellow called Sagabiel for a while, and he got killed. Then I drove for Sergeant Holmes, then I was Holmes' gunner for a while.

Were you in the tank when Holmes was wounded?

   I was in the platoon. Holmes was the platoon leader. We were on top of this hill, we were taking orders from a 90th Infantry Division lieutenant, and we didn't run into anything. So we were supposed to take up positions the next morning, and since we didn't run into anything he wanted to go on down to the bottom of the hill, in the valley, and stay down there. So by daybreak, it just, all of a sudden all hell broke loose. We had four tanks and a tank destroyer. They threw a shell in the tank destroyer, killed all of them. And one boy, we could see, they broke his leg or something, he just tried to climb out, then they threw another round in there and finished him off.

   Then they got the second tank I believe it was. So when they got that, that left three tanks. Sergeant Gibson, he didn't know what the rest were gonna do but he's gonna get the hell out of there and he's the only one that got out.

   When he left, Holmes followed him, I automatically backed up, and followed Holmes. When I got to the top of the hill, his tank was sitting in the middle of the road burning. I couldn't get around, so I had to go off into a field, and when I did my back end blew up. The shell came in there and that set me on fire.

   It took three tries to get the hatch open. See, the hatch would hit the gun barrel. The gunner was killed, and nobody could operate the gun to get the barrel out of the way, so finally, on the third try, I slipped by. If the gun was over a quarter-inch more I'd never have got out.

   The concussion from the shell blew my helmet off.

   When I got out, there were blazes all around and I had to keep my eyes shut, so naturally I was in the dark.

   The tank commander, he was hanging over the side, he said "Help me." He got his heel blown off.

   I dragged him off into the snow and I just fell into about ten inches of snow. I drove my head in the snow. And Holmes, he was laying out there in the field. A jeep came up there and got him and got me, and that other guy. Carried us back there in some kind of cave or something, a tent, or some kind of cave. They put some kind of powder on us. Then Holmes got in an ambulance and went back, to a field hospital or something, and they put stuff on us, it smelled like axle grease, they put that all over our head, where we were burnt. And they put him in one ambulance and me in another. I remember them giving me a carton of cigarettes. He says, "Take these. It might be a long time before you get one."

   So they got me to the hospital, they put me in a chair, kind of like a barber chair, I remember that, and put some more of that stuff, and done me up like a mummy, just wrapped gauze all over my head and I wore them for 18 days, they just cut holes for my nose and mouth and my eyes. Got a shot every four hours, man, I never had saw so many needles in my life. Stayed in bed, and stayed there 18 days. When they took it off, it was just like you stuck your head in some ice water. A lot of my skin came off. I didn't have no beard or eyelashes or nothing. In fact, I can wash my face now with a rough washrag and roll the skin up on my face, it's just been that way ever since. When I wash I don't bear down, I just rub lightly. It makes my face raw to rub it hard.

   But I had orders there to go by some bivouac area and pick up another tank, and they showed me where to go to find my platoon, I didn't even go back to the company, I went on back out on line. Right from the hospital.

Who was the gunner who was killed that day?

   I'm trying to think. My assistant driver was a fellow named Whiteheart, he lived at Winston-Salem. Well, I thought he had got killed. But see, under where he was sitting he had a trap door, all he had to do was throw a switch and the thing would fall out. About fifteen years after the war I reckon it was, or maybe longer, not much longer, he came walking around my house one day after we got home, and that really give me a shock because I thought he got killed. He got burned, but nothing seriously. We visited a couple of times, he lived in the next town, about twenty miles away. He worked for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. And his wife left him while he was gone, but he got married again after that.

His wife left him during the war?

   Yeah, and run off with somebody else.

Were you in the tank that ran over a mine in Normandy, with Cardis Sawyer?

   No, I never did hit no mines. I just lost one tank is all I ever lost.

Was Klapkowski ever your gunner?

   He was the gunner for Lombardi when I was the driver. See, I was the first platoon then, and Klapkowski was the gunner, Lombardi was the tank commander, Whiteheart was the assistant driver, and I don't remember who the, I'd know the boy if I could see him but I can't recall his name. As far as I know, let's see, Lockhart, he drove the fourth tank, he got killed, that was the one that Hardee was in and Lupe, Guadalupe. Guadalupe lives in Topeka, Kansas, he was a little Mexican, and Hardee, he lives up close to me, when we're by there we'll go down to see him.

Was Lockhart killed the same time that Hardee was wounded?

   Yes, Lockhart was his tank commander. And later on, after the shelling and all, you know, the fighting eased down, we had gone as far as we could go up that street, where there was a river on one side of us, and a kind of a wedge type thing, and Lombardi had told me go down there and bring his tank up there. See, the Germans had gone, got killed or captured or whatever. I went down there to get his tank, and Lockhart was laying on the side of the road aside of his tank, and a big old hog had walked up there and started to chewing on him. Another boy shot the hog. I guess the animals eat everything they can get ahold of. That's ridiculous. I didn't have a gun on me myself, I never did carry one. I did have a .32, a little bitty one, I got it off a German officer, but you could look at that thing and it'd go off. And I had it in my belt, and I come out of my tank one day and that thing went off, I threw that thing as far as I could throw it, down across the wood. Man, that thing'd ruin me. And I had the purtiest dagger you ever laid eyes on, you could shave with that thing, it was about two feet long.

    It was a short sword, and it had the handpieces on, it looked like gold, and a handle that looked like blue marble, it was a beautiful thing, and I carried that all the way through the war, and when we came to catch the boat back home, we stayed in tents, and they said, "Lay everything out on your bunk," and somebody stole it. There wasn't supposed to be nobody in there, but somebody knew I had that thing. That's the only thing I wanted to bring home. I loved that little sword so.

What was Klapkowski like?

   He was Polish. He'd run his mouth, you've heard of a motormouth. That's about the way he was all the time. And he'd stay high on something all the time. Drink everything he could get his hands on. And it made no difference who it was, if they got in front of him, he shot them. I was telling you about him shooting that woman with a .50 caliber machine gun, he shot her in the legs.

What were the circumstances of that?

   Well, we were making an attack on a town, you see, in formation, and I guess she, see, the Germans was in the town, and she was coming out of it and hiding in here. We come across this field, you know, attacking the town, and she got in the crossfire, and she jumped up and started running back towards the town, I guess to get behind a building or something.

   Lombardi chewed him out.

   Klapkowski's been to one reunion that I know of, and he got so drunk then they had to carry him out.

                                                                 Arlene La Mar

   I let him know that she was here (Grayson's daughter). We had to stay in the hospital two whole weeks, the doctor sent me and her home around the block, that's how far it was from the hospital but he wouldn't let me go, you know, with anybody driving the car.

   So, I tried to show her his picture at least once a day every day, and told her who he was, and where he was. And that one day he'd be home, and then we'd all get to have a lot of fun together. That was one of the main things I kept up was letting her see her daddy's picture, so when he did come home she went straight to him like he'd been there every day. She didn't even whimper, she just went with her little arms out just as hard as she could go. So she's been Daddy's baby ever since.

   One time she waved at a soldier downtown. He had on this uniform, and the windows on the car were down, and she stuck her head out and hollered, "Daddy!" loud enough for him to hear it. And so he turned around and waved at her, and then I had to try to explain to her that that wasn't him, but he'd be home before long. So this was a while before he came home, but she recognized the uniform, whatever, that he would be dressed that way.

How long before the war were you married?

   We got married on October 31st and you were inducted, what, about three, four weeks later?

                                                                Grayson La Mar

   I went to Benning, Fort Benning, Georgia, for training, and she come down there and stayed several weeks, in town, and I'd go back and forth, a lot of us guys did.

   One morning I come in and the company was out, and the first sergeant said one of the guys had the chicken pox, he said if we went in we wouldn't be allowed to go back to town. So we had the guy who had chicken pox throw us some more clothes out the window and we went on back to town.

   The same thing happened coming from maneuvers in Tennessee, we went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and she come down, well, she was living in Chester, South Carolina, with her daddy and mother, and I'd go up there on the weekends, the bus wasn't fifty miles. So I'd leave on Friday and come back Sunday night. The first sergeant put me on KP every weekend, so he caught me one morning, told me to check the bulletin board, I might be for something. So he put me down again for the weekend. So I went and told Captain Cary, he was our company commander then, I went in there and told him about my wife being in town, so he told the sergeant not to put me on KP no more, because my wife was there, and we were going overseas, and if I had a chance to be with her, to let me alone. Which I appreciated. And I never did pull KP no more after that. And the sergeant, he got shot in the knees the first day in action, he was standing up in a halftrack and a shell hit it.

Which sergeant was that?

   Spearman was the first sergeant.

   I know we had a lieutenant that busted me for not zeroing my gun in on something or other. I was a gunner at that time. There was shelling all the way around, and you've got to make a cross line in front of your barrel to zero the big gun in through the firing plug, and I wasn't going out there, with shells falling all around. You had to make a cross thing, it had a little notch there. So he busted me for that. So I was in Lombardi's tank. So Lombardi asked me what happened to my stripes, and I told him, and he said, "Well, he can't do that, you're working for me. Sew them back on." So I sewed them back on the next day.

You were a sergeant?

   No, I was a T-5. It's the same rank as a corporal.

When did you switch from being a gunner to a driver?

   When he busted me.

Did you ever sleep inside the tank?

   No, I fell asleep in front of one one time. When we was on a march, and we hadn't run into nothing, I forget now where we were going, but we were in a column. We stopped about two o'clock in the morning. Everybody got out, stretching around. Transmission area, you know, because it was warm, and I lay up against that thing, the next thing I know somebody was shaking me, "Get up, it's time to move out." I don't even remember falling asleep. See, you didn't have no lights. All you could see was the exhaust in front of you.

Do you remember the Saar crossing, into Dillingen?

   Yeah, we crossed the Saar and the Rhine. We'd build a bridge and the Germans would knock it out. Finally we got across. The Germans had the river, and the big towns, the railroad, zeroed in. You couldn't cross in the daytime. In fact, we was in one town, I don't remember the name of it, and there was a big railroad yard there, we got across that, and the Germans had an 88 zeroed in on the railroad, and we stayed there 14 days.

Was that the town where the slag heap was, Maizieres?

   It could have been, I don't recall. Anyway, we had to sleep in that basement for 14 days and pull guard at the tank. I'd been setting up there with the 50-caliber machine gun, and I couldn't see my hand that close in front of me. When it's dark in Germany, it's dark. It's not like it is here. I guess it would be if there wasn't no lights. And the infantry would be coming by, they'd say "Don't fire on us, we're going to get our C rations."

   I know one of the infantry guys was out, it was in the daytime, he started running across the tracks with a box of C-rations, and a big shell hit him, and he just, like you spilled a cup of coffee out.

   They had this thing zeroed in, and you couldn't stick your nose out the side of the building, they'd trim it off. If they had any smart officers, with any sense, they'd have whipped us, two or three times. They just didn't have the maneuvers, and the fact they didn't know enough about German warfare to really get in a fight. See, we trained all the way through. In Germany, I don't think they trained like the Americans did. They drove us in the ground with that stuff. They knew what we had to do, you know. And we had some smart officers. And old Patton, he was one of them. We need a whole lot like him today.

What was he like. Did you ever see him in person?

   One time, close. We was overlooking this valley, and this column of Germans coming up the valley pulling artillery, all that stuff, you know. And you know, you've been on a high mountain, you know, and looking way down you see in the valley, and everybody's that deep in mud, it's been snow melting, and it's been raining and all that stuff. And he pulled up there and looked out down through there with his glasses, right beside of me, said "Let's back 'em up and move 'em out." And that's the first time I ever saw him and the last time. There's a lot of the other guys who got to see him.

Were you with the platoon when it liberated some prisoners from the 106th Infantry Division, who were captured at the Battle of the Bulge?

   We drove to, we got orders to go to the Battle of the Bulge. We left one evening about 2 or 3 o'clock. We drove all night long, got there the next morning about daybreak. And it was slick, ice, sleeting. You just touch your hand and that tank slid. You couldn't see, all you'd see when somebody'd let up on the gas, the backfire you'd see, that's the only light you had. And all the men in my tank I think were drunk, or asleep or something, I drove the whole way by myself, all night. And it'd sleet awhile, beating you in the face. You couldn't half see, you'd just have to feel your way around. And a lot of the roads over there was made out of brick, slate rock, and all that stuff, and with ice on them, we had plates and steel tracks, or rubber, either one, didn't have no effect. Of course, the thing weighed 44 tons, but it'd still slide.

You had the 44-ton tank?

   Yes, the last tank I picked up, it had a 76 gun, where the other was a 75.

Did you see much action in the Bulge?

   Not too much. They had done took it by the time we got there. See, all of us got there about the same time, but I think we drove the furthest anybody had to to get there. We were about 200 miles, I reckon, maybe when we got orders to go there.

                                                                     end of side

 

What was the most scared you were?

   After I got hit. All the boys carried tommy guns. I left my tank, I never did carry a gun. Of course, I may not go nowheres, just a couple of blocks, a little ways, but after I got hit -- before I got hit, mortar shell bursts, getting sprayed with machine guns, you know, I didn't pay no attention, no more than to popcorn popping. But after I got hit, I would flinch, which is natural. I'd always jump after that.

Do you remember the cold going up to the Bulge?

   You mean the weather. We pulled guard, your breath, you had your long johns on, I wore my o.d.'s, plus a combat suit and over that, and your breath would freeze, and your cap. Whatever you had put up over your face. That's cold weather. Of course, a lot of boys got their feet frostbite and all like that.

   Your bedroll and all that was tied on the side of the tank, which you never did get to use. I remember one time we had one guy, he got scared, that's when we was in the hedgerows, the hedgerows were about the worst thing we had going through. You'd be on one side and the Germans would be on the other side, and just a hedgerow between you.

   And those tanks, you hit a tree, a pretty good size tree, any type at all, it was like a matchstick. But you take a bunch of hedges and just locked, it's hard to knock something like that down. You could throw a track if you don't watch yourself, very easy. And some of the boys sleeping, or resting at the side of the tank, and this one guy, he got scared, he heard 'em, and throwed a hand grenade, hurt some of our own boys. Because he couldn't see. I guess he got scared. We hurt a lot of our own boys, got hurt by one another. Which was unnecessary. Of course, when we were going in formation, you've just got a 45-degree angle you could see through a little slit, and you'd run over people dead or wounded in the field, you couldn't tell if they was your men or who they was, you had to stay in formation, or then the other guy in the other tank would run into you. That was sad.

- - -

A Crock of Hooey

Ed Stuever

   More from the hospitality room at the 1993 Orlando, Fla., reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion:

                      Ed Stuever

   At Fort Jackson, South Carolina, when we became the 712th Tank Battalion, we had to go for a physical before we went up north. And we stripped naked, walked up to the desk of this doctor, and as I approached him, he says, "How in the world did you ever get here?"

   And I says, "I walked here, Sir."

   And he says, "Don't get cute with me. You're not fit for this man's army. You've got the flattest feet I ever saw. Did you ever make a five-mile hike? Did you ever make a mile hike?"

   I says, "I made 'em all, even the 30-mile hikes, and I carried my buddy in the last couple of miles so that we could all get a pass to go to town."

   And he says, "Aww, you're not fit for this man's Army. We can use you in a hospital carrying bedpans."

   And I says, "Why, I'd be on my feet more than ever."

   He says, "Don't get so cute with me. I'm going to send you back with this report."

   And when I took it back to the office, I didn't even knock, I just walked in there and threw it on Sergeant Bennett's desk, and he says, "Get out of here and come back in here like you're supposed to."

   I says, "I don't give a damn what you do to me."

   And then the captain says to me, "What's this all about?"

   And I says, "Here's my medical report. The man there says I'm not fit for this man's army."

   So the captain says, "Why, you're one of our best soldiers."

   And I says, "This report is a crock of hooey," I says, "There's nothing here I can't do."

   He says, "You're up for sergeant. Didn't you put it up on the bulletin board, yet, Sergeant Bennett?"

   And he says, "I was just about to."

   And he says, "Steuver, what do you want to do? Do you want to carry bedpans or do you want to stay with us?"

   And I says, "I sure as hell don't want to carry bedpans."

   So he tore up that medical report, and he says, "Congratulations. You're gonna stay with us." And then he dropped it in the wastebasket. And then when I was ready to leave, I apologized for the way I came in and I saluted him. Then I reached down and I picked up that report out of the wastebasket, and Bennett says, "What do you want to do with that?"

   And I says, "I want to remember that S.O.B.'s name so if I ever see him again, I'm gonna avoid him, or I'll run over him with my tank."

   That's the end of it.

   Oh, when we got to England, I didn't care to make some of them overnight affairs that we had, so I'd say to Sergeant Bennett, "Boy, my feet are killing me."

   And he says, "You son of a gun, you still got that report? I'm gonna shake you down till I find that thing." So he says, "You stay in the office here and run the office overnight." So I had to stay on duty all night. I didn't get away with it.

- - -

    Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook (click on the cover):

 

More from the Hospitality Room

Bill Doyle

   In 1993 I returned from the Orlando reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion with a dozen tapes of interviews. Some of the material was used in my first book, "Tanks for the Memories," which I self-published in 1994.
   Most of the interviews were recorded in the hospitality room.
   Bill Doyle was a member of D Company, which had 17 1/2 ton light tanks.

Bill Doyle

   I'm 75. My fiftieth anniversary is coming up in February.

   Our job in D Company was to just go out there and find out where in the hell they were, to sneak up, then get the hell out and let the big guys go after them, because our little tanks, they only had little 37-millimeters, and they bounced off of them Tigers like it was kids shooting marbles, you know, you'd hit one marble and the other one would bounce, it's gone. You'd do no damage.

   Paul Wanamacher over there, he was in an area that was overrun with Germans [Mairy ... see "Destruction of the 106th Panzer Brigade]. We were all around the same neighborhood. They could see us shooting at the Germans. I guess we were where we weren't supposed to be. Some broke through the lines, and you could see our 37-millimeters didn't mean nothin', it was just like swatting a fly.

   None of them (the light tanks) got lost. It was just, there was an observation point up there and he called for artillery in the same place, so that helped us out a hell of a lot.

   That gentleman coming around the corner there [one of Col. Vladimir Kedrovsky's sons ... Kedrovsky was the battalion's third and final commanding officer], his father, you couldn't meet a finer man. He never asked you to do anything that he wouldn't do himself, that's the kind of guy he was. I don't know if I can put it in much better words. He was never too busy that you couldn't talk to him.

Carl and Tim Kay, sons of Col. Vlad Kay (formerly Vladimir Kedrovsky) at the 1993 reunion.

    We were reconaissance. We'd just go out, get a mission, if it was too rough, we'd just back up, get out of the way and let the big guys take care of them.

   He either shoots at you or you see them first and you run. But before you run, before you do anything else, you're always on the radio talking to whoever's behind you.

   After that deal there (at Dillingen), a bunch of us got the Bronze Star. Every time the kids would say something to me about it, "Oh, I hit a lieutenant." I said, "I punched a lieutenant in the mouth and got away with it." I never spoke to them about it or told them what happened, until they cornered me. Then I had to tell them about the river crossing, going up and getting the guys [wounded] and bringing them back. But to name names, the names are forgotten.

"Russky gonna cut you throat"

Ed Stuever

 
    More from the Hospitality Room. I first recorded Ed Stuever, a sergeant in Service Company of the 712th Tank Battalion, at the battalion's "mini-reunion" in Bradenton, Florida, in January of 1993. Dick Greca, also a member of Service Company, was seated at a table, as were a couple of other veterans.

Ed "Smoky" Stuever

     In Normandy, they liberated a young Russian. He was about 21 years old, and the Germans had him digging foxholes. So when he heard the Americans were coming he hid out, and he waited till we came along. Then they told me to take him with me, he's a good worker.

     I had him with me doing hard work, moving the tracks around. We had him from Normandy until August, when we were in Briey, France. He was walking down the main street over that little bridge, and he saluted a colonel of the MPs in a jeep with a cigarette in his hand, and they hauled him away. We never saw him again.

   In all this period, he would always approach me and he'd say "Sergeant, what you do when Russia and America come together?"

     I said, "I go home. I can go home tomorrow, I have enough points."

    "'No, no. You no go home. Russky gonna cut you throat." Time and time again he would approach me with this, "Smoky, what you do when America and Russia come together?"

    I couldn't sleep with that guy around. I had a real sharp dagger, and I had an extra pair of boots on the truck. They were all worn and I wanted to exchange them whenever I got a chance. And he said, "No, I want them."

    I said, "No, you can't have them."

   He said, "Let me have your knife." This was still in Normandy. And next day he comes back with a shiny pair of Nazi boots on, and he gave me my bloody knife back. So I could never sleep with him around.

Dick Greca

    In Service Company, we'd go fishing with hand grenades. Throw 'em in the river, fish would come up, and we'd pick 'em up. Big German trout, brown trout. Hey, you know, I was on a little rowboat and I dropped one off the side of it. That's the last time I did that, because that water wasn't too deep, and you could feel the concussion.

     One night we went up to check the tanks, and the crew heard us talking. They got scared and thought it was the Germans out there, and they threw a hand grenade out. Two of us got hit, but not serious. We all walked away.

   I jumped under the tank, so I wouldn't get the shrapnel, and the doggone tank started to move. I said, "Now what?" I got out of there real quick.

    Jim Cary [Capt. Jim Cary was the C Company commander] remembered me going up on the first day of combat. His tank was acting up, and I came up and took care of it. I can remember that real well. I can remember after he got hit, what do you call them things, booby trap, his raincoat was all shredded. And he was always one to preach, "Watch out for booby traps." The guys got a kind of a kick out of it, not that they laughed at him, because he was so strict.

     I seen a guy come out of a barn, and he had one of these things in his hand, one of those potato mashers, but he was all slaughtered up. But he was still walking, and the handle was still in his hand. He came out and I'll never forget. He wasn't with our outfit. We just passed him. He probably went to look for a dozen eggs someplace.

Jim Flowers

    If I had it all to do over again, I'd probably do it the same way. Even knowing what I know right now.

Dick Greca

 Like I always say, I wouldn't do it for a million, what I done before, I wouldn't do it again for a million either. We done our goofing off. We always had some cognac or Calvados, or something around. I think that probably got us through better. You know what I mean.

- - -

Mother Knows Best: A story from The Hospitality Room

Walter "Red" Rose

     The hospitality room at a reunion of my father's tank battalion from World War II  turned me into an oral historian. I entered in the middle of a story Wayne Hissong was telling about the hardest thing he had to do in the whole war: after returning home to the small town of Argos, Indiana, he had to face the mother of a buddy who entered the service with him and was killed. Wayne may not have known it but he struck upon one of the great issues of World War II or any other war: dealing with emotions. Was facing his friend's mother more difficult than driving an ammunition truck for 11 months in combat, or being ambushed, wounded and captured near the end of the war by starving German soldiers looking for food and cigarettes? I never asked him. Years later, though, I would learn that his buddy, a tank driver, was decapitated by an armor piercing shell on the battalion's first day in combat. How do you face a friend's mother knowing you know what happened but there's no way in hell you're going to tell her those details?

During the 1990s, as I sat around those circular tables in the hospitality room often with two or three of the veterans and some of their wives, companions or friends, munching on Chex Mix and premium peanut free mixed nuts from Sam's club or homemade zucchini bread from one of the veterans' wives, sipping on soda or beer or nursing something stronger, I would plunk my little Sony Recording Walkman or Radio Shack knockoff in the middle of the table. The result was a unique bit of history, casual conversations that ranged from who was in the hospital and who had a new grandchild to intense accounts of combat in the European Theater of Operations.

In junior high school – what would now be called middle school – my class took typing. I got pretty good at it, and as the cassettes piled up I tried my best to transcribe them. Those thousands of pages of transcripts have provided material for my books and blogs, but much of it has never escaped the confines of my hard drive.

The 712^th had some great storytellers – Wayne, Ed Stuever, Jim Flowers, Forrest Dixon, Dan Diel, Joe Fetsch, Clifford Merrill, Walter Galbraith, Dale Albee, Ellsworth Howard, not to mention some of the wives, like Helen Grottola, Evelyn Knapp, Jeannie Roland – and when they entered the hospitality room it seemed as if the men checked their post traumatic stress at the door and relived the war in the company of those who lived it with them.

These are some of the stories from The Hospitality Room.

Mother Knows Best

When the battalion veterans began retiring and either spending the winter in Florida or moving there permanently, the idea of having a casual get-together, in addition to the regular reunion, was tossed around. Sam Adair, a veteran of the Headquarters Company assault gun platoon, organized the first one in the 1980s. Then Jack Roland, also of Headquarters Company, moved to Bradenton after his health forced him to retire from the photography studio he ran in upstate New York. He was elected mayor of Bradenton, and was able to secure a good deal for the battalion at a Days Inn on Route 41. The battalion could supply their own hospitality room, and could take over the kitchen for the Saturday dinner so that Major Clegg "Doc" Caffery, who owned a plantation and a shrimp boat in Louisiana, could cook up a batch of crawfish etouffe.

The 1993 mini-reunion, late in January, was the first mini-reunion I attended. This is one of the many stories I recorded, as Walter “Red” Rose of Ahoskie, North Carolina, a corporal in Headquarters Company; Doc Caffery -- who was not a doctor but had been the battalion G3, or operations officer -- and I sat at one of those circular tables.

"It was right at the very beginning of the war [the battalion's first day of combat was July 3, 1944]," Rose said. "Not all the outfits had been committed, but we sent some tanks out to support the 82nd [Airborne Division]. We lost a couple of tanks. And Dickie [Forrest Dixon] was attached to Service Company.

"He came in one evening and he says, 'Captain Laing, we've lost two tanks. We've lost contact with them, and if they're knocked out, I've got to requisition two more from ordnance in the morning.'

"This is only the beginning. You're learning. He said, 'I've got to get to 'em and see that they're knocked out.'

"Laing said, 'Get the jeep, Rose.'

"I said, 'Captain Laing, this is not our duty. We're going someplace we don't have no business.'

"It was in the evening, and we were going down this old dirt road. I could see the terrain begin to rise. I remember this just like it was yesterday. We come to an area, and there wasn't nobody, no vehicles, no nothing. Everything just as quiet as it is right here. We come to a little crossroad, and there laid some infantry, down in a ditch, with their guns stuck across.

"Dixon starts to say something to them.

"'Get the hell out of here, you sonofabitch!' one of them says. 'You're gonna draw fire. Get that damn jeep out of here!' And they began to holler all the way down that line.

"Dixon said, 'Straight on.' I just went straight on, got about a hundred and fifty feet, and by god looked out, and if you've ever seen rain on a mill pond, that's what it reminded me of. Before I could get out of my jeep, those mortars were falling, bup-bup-bup-bup, and I hit the ditch. The jeep had no emergency brake, and I was out of that thing, it was still going. I hit the ditch and I lay there, and I could feel the shrapnel. Now there was some infantry on ahead of us, because the line, the wires, were laying in the ditch, and I could feel them  jerk when the shrapnel was coming down the banks.

"Finally it lifted. And when it did, Laing said, 'Get the jeep, Rose'”

"I got in that jeep and I put it in gear and we took off. And them infantry was just a cussin' us.

"We got back and I said, 'Captain Laing, I'll take you anywhere you want to go. But where there's no business of mine, I'm gonna let you do the driving from now on.'

"My mother told me, 'Son, if you go looking for trouble, you'll always find trouble.'

"We came on back, and that night we're setting there, we couldn't have lights. 'Well,' Dickie says to Laing, 'I've got to go. I don't know whether I'll ever make it back or not, but I've got to find them tanks.' Now, you remember he had an old trenchcoat?

"Yes," Caffery said. I remember he had an old trenchcoat. He wore it all the time."

"The next morning," Rose said, "now he told this, and I don't think Dixon would lie, he said, 'I got in the ditch, crawling to them tanks,' and he said the Germans seen him, and he said that he had bullet holes across that trenchcoat, by god, I know I've seen it, and he told Captain Laing and us  – now this was in the very beginning of the war, so I can remember a lot of this – he said, 'I was crawling up this ditch, and I looked ahead and there lay a German ahead of me.' And he said, 'I stopped. I guess I laid about thirty minutes. He never moved and I didn't either.' He said, 'I pulled my pistol out and started crawling. Well, I had to go over the top of him. The ditch was shallow. if I stood up I'd get shot.' He said, 'I crawled on up and laid my hand on the top of his head, and it was cold, and I went right over the top, and I went on.'”

(Walter "Red" Rose passed away in 2009 at the age of 86)

Free Kindle download today (Oct. 1), a $5.99 value

Kindle edition only 99 cents

Clip of the (almost every) Day: Ellsworth Howard

Ellsworth Howard

For my next oral history audiobook, I'm considering a collection of vignettes recorded in the hospitality room over the years at reunions of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served.

Yes, there's background noise, and I'd like some feedback from listeners as to whether the background noise is too much of a distraction to make for a quality audiobook.

Today's audio clip is from the 1993 reunion. Ellsworth Howard was the executive officer of A Company, and became the company commander on July 13, 1944, when the original company commander, Clifford Merrill, was wounded. Howard himself was wounded a little more than a month later, on August 18 or 19, at Le Bourg St. Leonard, during the closing of the Falaise Gap.

Here is an audio clip of the conversation, along with a transcript to make listening a little easier:

Ellsworth Howard

Aaron Elson: Where were you wounded?


Ellsworth Howard: On my body, or ...

Aaron Elson: Both.

Ellsworth Howard: I got shot in the belly, a shell fragment in the belly, in the Falaise Gap. We were there when it first started, walked right into it. Courtesy of Jack Galvin.

Aaron Elson: What did Jack Galvin do?

Forrest Dixon: You got this on, or don't you?

Aaron Elson: It's on.

Ellsworth Howard: We were in relief, A Company was. Colonel Randolph had given us instructions, you're gonna be here for several days, so clean up your tanks and your guns and write letters. Before the day was out, why, he came over and said "I need you to send five tanks up there to Le Bourg," and I said, "I don't think I've got five tanks. We've got the engines out of the darn tanks and their guns are out and everything else."
He said, "Well, you're gonna have to do it."
I went back and told Szirony [maintenance sergeant Steve Szirony] "We've got to have five tanks right away." So they, after a round of obscenity, put together five tanks.
He [Colonel Randolph] said there's nothing going on up there, that B Company's been up there on guard duty for a while and there's nothing going on, they're just tired and need to be relieved. So they pulled out and we went there with five tanks and had to fight our way in there. And before the day was out, we had everything we had in there. Then I found out that Galvin and Dougherty were drunk up there, and Randolph pulled them out because they couldn't handle it. We just about lost our whole company in that deal. When I got shot we were down to six tanks. What was the number of that tank destroyer outfit [the 773rd]? Their medic picked me up and hauled me back, and there weren't any hospitals around there, because of the way the front was moving, the hospitals didn't know where to set up, and they took me over someplace, and the best I can remember there wasn't a darn thing there, but they let me lay on that ground there on a cot until they put up a tent, they called a hospital unit in there and I stayed there for a while, and I stayed there for a while, and then they took me into Chartres and flew me back to England.