Interview (Part One of Two) with Roger A. Howard, WWII veteran. CCSU Veterans History Project

world war 2 and which branch of the service the army what was your highest rank corporal well you drafted or did you enlist I enlisted can you tell me how that came about I was in college at the time for semester freshmen at Bates College and we had choice of the Army Navy a Marine Corps that we could enlist in the Reserve Corps that they had on the colleges at that time and knowing that I my stomache wouldn't take the C I knew the Navy was out also that battleships were bigoted agates and foxholes I decided that I would go into the army I'd enlisted in the enlisted Reserve Corps on December 8 1942 with a they told us at the time you could continue your education as long as you were in the Reserve Corps there at that time they were drafting men but the draft age at that time was 20 minimum age and I was 19 so I wasn't going to be drafted anyway for a couple of months but I did get into the reserves and within three weeks they called up the reserves even though you thought that might be in the reserves you were gonna finish college well I kind of thought that but a lot of us wanted to go into the service anyway but being under 21 you needed parental consent and I knew my mother would never sign it so so when yes March 3rd 1943 1138 reported 11:30 p.m. I reported to Devon's Fort Devens last train out of Boston where were you living at the time I know you were going to be yeah I was Melrose Massachusetts now when you report it to Fort Devens where did you go from there they sent us to Fort Bragg North Carolina and they field artillery training and replacement Center basic training yes three months it was a 90 day can you tell me a little bit about basic training and what it was like oh yeah this was actually being 19 or a group of us all those broken down into a couple of sections really the old men which were 24 25 26 that had been out of school for a while and I've been working and so forth and then they had the young kids a lot of us were College enlisted Reserve people and I know that several of them were from Bowdoin Hannibal Hamlin's great-grandson was from the University of Maine he was in the outfit with us the group from Bowdoin a group from a collage group from Yale and we were young kids at that time really 18 19 20 and while we were in college the phys ed departments were giving us a lot of physical work so we're in a pretty good shape to start with and they as far as a basic training was concerned after the few close auto drills and manual of arms and that type of thing and work on the howitzers for the most part it was more oil more or less just physical conditioning getting us into shape and for the college kids it wasn't too bad we were in pretty good shape to start with but the the old men were having it had drop a lot of trouble with with a commando courses and that type of thing but basically they gave you getting you ready for military duty we had to go through well some of the things I was saying about the rifle range and learning out a fire weapon how to throw a hand grenade and that that type of thing and they one thing with the chemical warfare they did put us through a building that was filled with tear gas just to prove to us that the gas masks were effective and then they make you take the gas mask off and walk the length of the the building not run you had to walk and of course the it showed you that the gas masks well your rifle was supposed to be a best friend but the gas masks was second best friend I guess had me do you recall any of your instructors yes the captain battery commander was a captain Sexton and we had two officers that were assigned to us first lieutenant who was battery executive officer was I say young kid I don't think he had shaved at that time lieutenant Menke and he was he was good he was a first-class officer and then they had lieutenant a second lieutenant Kara heylia's came from I think came from Providence but he was more a regular person you could talk to him and the two sergeants work that we had well Wilson I know that was getting Stackhouse and Williams were the two sergeants and they were they were good they they were understanding and they as long as you didn't follow up too badly they didn't bother you too much and you had the usual thing that yeah KP and guard duty and all that kind of good stuff you did have to I do remember that on KP they'd get you up at 4 o'clock in the morning did get the breakfast ready and so forth and then you the one thing that was you wanted to dodge was outside men because that if you're outside man you're out of the kitchen which wasn't bad during the day but you had to stay around at night and clean the stalls and voila grease that accumulated and so forth I might say that as far as KP was considered my second night at Fort Devens I drew Knight KP which went from 6:00 in the evening until 6:00 in the morning and I sat there for those 12 hours breaking eggs in with GI container now how many shells get into the the scrambled eggs this morning I don't know but and then we were supposed to have the next day off but those people up there didn't realize that so at 11 o'clock in the morning they got us out of bed and nobody was able to sleep after 6 o'clock and that type of thing and the next night I pull guard duty and what we were doing was walking around the stockade to make sure they had prisoners of war up there German and Italian prisoners and we were supposed to make sure that none of them got out and they gave us empty rifles because we didn't have we weren't checked out on the firing range so they didn't give us any ammunition but if anybody got out we were supposed to have to serve their turn which might not have been a bad idea because you'd have a roof over yeah and three square meals a day but that was about the extent of what happened at Fort Devens I was only there for about ten days because we did have one of the advantages in the enlisted Reserve Corps was that you could have a choice of your branch of service I mean as far as infantry artillery and that type I think I didn't know nobody know what that I knew I didn't want the Air Corps because my my eyes weren't that good and I know I couldn't fly which meant they would fight the wall with a monkey wrench so I ended up I knew I didn't want the infantry because that was a lot of walking and so they we figured if you had the artillery you always had something to move their guns so you had a truck and so I chose the field artillery and they wanted to know which branch feel the coast well I was at Fort Devens in March and the wind blew down from Mount Washington and it was cold I wanted to get out of New England and I figured that they had coast artillery battalions out on the Boston Harbor so it would be called out there I wanted to get south and I knew that the rumor had it that the two places to feel that Jill retrained was Fort Bragg North Carolina and Fort Sill Oklahoma and they were in the south so I figured it'd be warmer so I took the field artillery and I got my choice you had two or three choices one of them had to be a combat type of thing and so I did choose the field artillery which was a wise choice I think in my that's what's where we went the Fort Bragg Fort Devens you said that there were groups there from Bowdoin College and Harvard did your group go from Bates or did you go you know there was a group oh maybe maybe 15 or 20 of us went up but Oh more no I was the only one from Bates that went to Fort Bragg a lot of them went to the Air Corps which wasn't a bad deal because they they had their basic training in Miami that was it well that was a story in itself we could we all took the test for officers Candidate School and you had to have an IQ of I think 110 are better to be qualified and most of the college kids would would have that and that IQ I don't know that came in the a meet IQ test that they I forgot now what the name of it was but it wasn't too difficult and we all figured we had the interview at Fort Bragg and it was a simple interview you just sold what you'd been doing and how you trained and that type of thing a little bit of first aid well we all figured were going to OCS Officer Candidate School well first sergeant came in and handed us a one call us a group of us in and he ended us fell I don't know four or five sheets of paper and said sign it and we what is it nice there's OCS so we signed it and about a week later with names are on the bulletin board to report that we were all going to be assigned of ASTP now they said what's a STP an army specialized training program now what that was was that if you'd finished basic training and had less than two years of college that send you back to college and for more training well that's the last thing some of us want it because for the first time since we were in the sixth grade we didn't have homework now they're gonna send you back to college and nobody knew just what it was well anyway we went from Fort Bragg to the North Carolina State in Raleigh and that's what they call the sty unit and that's what a classification and we'd ask the officers and the non comes yeah there are a few of them what you know a STP was well it was supposed to be divided into two groups foreign language and engineering well I was never strong in the math and sciences so I knew that I'd be a square peg in a round hole with the engineers and so I said I'd take called the foreign language which way I found out later was to be the espionage and dropped behind lines and so forth you were supposed to be able to speak a second language well I'd had three years of French in high school and a semester at college and I figure well you can bluff your way through it it's going to be a written test or so I thought I'll take the the foreign language now they took us in for an interview and I thought the interview would be a reading test or a writing test they didn't in those days they didn't teach you to speak the language you're right could read it or write it and so forth so I figured well I can bluff my way through this and I went into rapport and individually in either the German the French of the Italian and so forth well I went in and sitting behind the desk was a major in the French army and he and I I froze he anything I could think of let's say come on to allez-vous he said send him to the damage and is so I ended up in the engineers well what happened that from there was that they would assign you to different colleges across the country and when we figured you know the swamps of Louisiana the wilds of Washington State Oregon and so forth the army never send you within a thousand miles of your home so they called are they finally after about a week of doing nothing can really it was nice duty because you just sat in the dorm and played cards read and wrote letters and so forth well anyway we they were going to assign us and they had a self abetik Lee they called off the names alphabetically a to G and where were that group they were going to the University of Connecticut which would have been you know within a hundred miles of home which was something that you you dreamed about but then they stood and then I thought well we've we missed that the next shipments gonna be to Louisiana or someplace down the swamps and they read the names from a Down the rest of the names through the alphabet from G down and then they there was a hesitation and where are they sending you Boston University and you couldn't believe it the army couldn't goof up that badly here I was within eight miles a home when I was several of us that were two of us three of us from Melrose and one from Wakefield and so forth so we were we went to be you they draw they took us up because it takes three and those days troop trains to go from Raleigh North Carolina to Boston would take about three days because they go I had five miles and back ten miles and so forth and and the cast we will Rin were dirty dusty and that took care of our class a uniform so we will rent for a while but anyway we ended up in Boston and what was then the old Mechanics Hall down on Huntington Avenue and it ended up with about eight hundred men in two rooms which meant that they couldn't keep track of you two to carefully and we went there and it was supposed to be for nine months three sections of three months each nine months and then if you passed that high enough that send you for three more section another nine months to advanced engineering well that's looking in the future for you know for nine months although the reason they had the ASTP as I understand it was that they had no place for us he had all these soldiers coming out of basic training England with saturate with troops at that time they had just started the North African campaign and they did need some troops but not that many and the campaign was going pretty well so when they ended up we just didn't they figured the easiest thing out was the colleges were short of men send him to cut back to college for a while well everything went fine at BU the first group the first section went from and it's July 1st until September 43 for the first three months and that was a snap because most of the courses they they had were well a college math was what we'd had a freshman year at at college ah some of it was more or less high school math and the chemistry and physics were high school stuff English all you did there was learn how to write ami letters and I I was always strong in history so I had no problem with history and geography and so we went there for three months and we had pretty much didn't have to do too much studying because and we had the run of Boston pretty much you you were supposed to be studying but you could just walk out of the dorm and there was nobody I wasn't a dome it was Mechanics Hall that's where the government center is now so we had the run of the city really and then the second group started in September October and that went through till Christmas now things were getting a little more difficult here getting into some of the advanced math and so forth and advanced math chemistry and physics but we could we survived and then the third group section came until sometime in the end much from Christmas to match and that many of us were a lost cause than that they were into advanced calculus and all that kind of area but slowly but surely they were doing linked and then we were trying to figure out who was going to advance we're supposed to send you to MIT nobody went they finally decided they needed men now this was in the fall of a spring of 44 and d-day was in June so they figured they were going to need men so they one thing I might say when I was at BU they we got a new lieutenant colonel came in sometime during this summer and he was a an Old World War one veteran and tough but I found out that he was a graduate of I don't know in those days where the restores Agricultural College of Connecticut Aggies and my father had been down in Connecticut Aggies had graduated from there and they were classmates but I didn't want the colonel to find this out or you know if you stay in the back ranks you're sometimes better off but everything went along fine until I was home one weekend on pass and I came down with some kind of a viral infection and I was probably some of the food they fed us and I was sick I just couldn't leave there's no way I'm going back so my father at that time thought that maybe they were still shooting soldiers for being AWOL so he he called the colonel and identified himself and the colonel automatically immediately gave me a five-day pass which was great because I got better the next day it was cleared up and he said the infirmary was full because there were a lot of them came down with the same malady that I had and we ended up in after three or four days and then my mother got concerned that I was better I should be back on do and so forth so instead of lollygagging around home I went back and reported well from then on the colonel knew who I was and I ended up as cadet battery a connect company commander for a week and then battalion commander supposed to be an honor but that meant you had to go to wall formations and you had to take attendance and classes and that type of thing and you just sit down if somebody was not there you signed their name and the thing in and a couple of his professors would be you said would you please learn how to spell their names when your sign that was at the end of March everybody shipped out and we all went down to the 78th division which was down in Fort I can't pick it Virginia and we had had no idea what it was and I went down and the 78 had been 60-day maneuvers in Tennessee that winter and they said that they're out in the field for 60 days in a train 63 days so they were they were a sight to behold when they came back coming well two or three days in the back of a truck driving down from Tennessee and they they came in with the eye and what had happened was that they were the 78 at that time was a training division and they were sending out all the privates and PF C's to frontline outfits because they were building up for d-day and so forth and we were replacing the privates and pfcs so we were about as popular as skunks in church at that time well they didn't know what to do was it's his 1,500 men are so end of this one outfit one division we ended up well I said you had a chill retraining we we'll put you in a heavy weapons company that was a closest thing they had an infantry heavy weapons company and we were there for about a week and then they decided that put us in a war an anti-tank outfit which was 37 millimeter rifles that would useless against tanks anyway I guess we were in that and then north of an in a week we ended up in the in a cannon company which was getting closer to the artillery that was a 105 Kennan rather than a howitzer and and within another week they shipped us to a field at to Rio v that's and that's what I ended up the 307 field field artillery battery a and a story that went along with that was that we are a group of us reported to the 307 thin some new second lieutenant medicine yeardley room and put us in an empty barracks and said stay here until somebody comes for you yes that was down a picket and it's all there were about 15 of us in this barracks and nothing else and nobody came for us so you know this is pretty good duty you just sit around the barracks all day keep out of sight keep out of trouble and you could go into any of the mess halls with several mess halls around there and because of so many new men coming in they nobody knew you so you could eat and at five or six o'clock at night after the evening meal you get into a class a uniform and go to a movie or a service club or a px and just keep out of sight it was about either a week to ten days and we just sit there and play cards and write letters and finally some you know it had to come to an end but we had been in the Army really about a year so we at that time most of us knew that you didn't go looking for trouble and as long as you did what you were told and that's what we were told to stay there till somebody came from finally somebody came for us and then they sent us back well as on a Saturday morning and they ended up with sending us so were to happen to be a battery and they needed men because a lot of the privates and PF sees that were going to be shipped out were on furlough they gave him ten days and we we ended up going in and they were having a firing exercise as they had a group of dignitaries coming down from Washington now Pickett was kind of close to Washington wasn't too far so you always had somebody from the War Department hanging around and they were gonna fire these live ammunition over infantry and fairly close well they put all these new men that we were into a gun batteries and most of them hadn't fired a howitzer or not over a year but they worked out all right they all were assigned one of the former gun sections except me and I was gonna be the first sergeants orderly for the day and the first sergeant was he was the most miserable face of the youth and I didn't realize it but I was going to be stuck with him for about seven or eight months and at the end of the conclusion of a firing exercise everybody that was on a gun crew was given a pass and but I was stuck around with sergeant Henshaw for the rest of the weekend I was his gofer and so that that was my introduction of a battery 307 feel that - I stayed there until I was discharged that was well that was May of 44 and or April of 40 or to January of 46 well never about so was it right up until the time we were to ship out of Europe after the war I was with the 307 how long did you stay as an orderly for the sergeant oh just for the one weekend Oh then I try to keep away from him that that was now did you do further artillery training while you yes then we what was your specific job okay what we did they broke us up into for firing sections for guns and there's seven of those Agana and seven cannoneers on that each gun supposedly according to the book you need at all eight men to fire a gun plus a chief of section who was a sergeant well but what they broke us down into we had to learn actually learn each position from gonna do number seven men and there was no the only way you get could get into trouble was the gonna and he was he had to know how to add and subtract and if you got the wrong number on the gunmen that's for you but the rest of it was just rote carrying ammunition Porter Evans 105 millimeter howitzers can you tell me something about those yeah the howitzer was had a high trajectory low muscle vola no low muzzle velocity which meant you could get behind a hill and lob the shells over the hill and I forgot now the specifics of the thing but basically they were active accurate all from five to seven miles but the German guns of reeve there was offsetting a hundred and five mils a 88 which had a range of maybe 12 miles and they were good they were accurate and they were particularly effective in the desert in North Africa because of the level terrain they couldn't lob shells they over the ovum hills they had to go more or less straight and the howitzer as though as I say the 105 and the 155 could get behind hills and so forth and lob shells over more or less like a mortar but we the different position she I kind of forgotten that now but the 7th and 8th men would get the shell that they wanted whether it be a chemical shell or a white phosphorus or high explosive and then you'd fix a charge you'd have five powder bags in each shell in each case and they'd call charge five so you take this six and seventh bag of powder out of it and just have the five so it would have less range a shorter range if you had that and then the fuse which was be a delayed fuse or a fuse or with the shell would explode on detta and what would detonate on contact and then the number two men would load the gun and all you had to do was Mitton but not miss the breech block when you put it in I mean you might have and the number one man set the elevation up and down and I gonna set that back and forth but it wasn't it wasn't too difficult at the hood and you we got it so you could do it in the dark really yeah when when did you actually leave and head overseas we went over in I think it was I know it was a middle of October and 44 yes yeah yep we all stayed together we went over in October well in the middle of October sometime I think it was a ten to fifteen days crossing we were in a cook we were in a convoy and I outfit and I forgot no it's I guess it was a three eleventh combat team which was three seventh field artillery in the three 11th infantry was on the one ship which was the lead ship and the convoy and I believe the name of it was the Ericsson it was a sister ship to the hospital ship that they had the console which was I have originally a Swedish ship and it took us as I say about ten days or two weeks we landed in Southampton and they took us from Southampton England to Bournemouth which was on the coast and there we would we were there probably about oh let's see we left the middle the middle of November so we were over there from well maybe three weeks or four weeks in Bournemouth which was a resort town in England before the war but there we had the first taste of that we were in an actual combat song because you had some of the coastal defences that was still when they weren't expecting England to be invaded and so forth and occasionally you'd you'd see not too many at that time with these buzz bombs flying over they were headed for for London so yeah it was a rocket really they were firing them it looked like a telephone pole with wings and you could see the flame coming out of the back of it because of the rocket and they had those that they were aiming it at London for the most part and they were coming out of Germany or the occupied Europe and they were not accurate I mean they could hit the City of London but what they would hit in London and there was about I don't know a thousand pounds of TNT and the thing so it would and it was the way they would come along that fly you could hear them and it sounded like a Model T Ford going on two cylinders and when it stopped then the thing would come to cut down and you're wrong right as long as you could hear the engine go I hear the thing going but won't let's stop then everything stopped and you were held your breath until you heard the explosion and hoped it wasn't but we saw a lot of those later on in the war then they had the V twos that you didn't see here those were the original those were the beginning of the rocketry and they'd go up how high I don't know you wouldn't see them they'd just come down and they were in as large but they were more destructive her when you left in mid-november where did you go then we got on an LST and I believe we went out of Weymouth and there was a bad bad weather so they held us up for a while you know aboard the LST which you were cramped you had a lot of a lot of men on one of those small ships and was supposed to be maybe eight at ten hours to cross the channel but we were there for a couple of days until the weather cleared and as I recall we didn't have any bunks to sleep in but we had the trucks in the howitzers aboard with us so you could sleep in the back of the truck ain't been in the back of one of those trucks you kind of with all your equipment as you kind of crowded but it was all right and the weather was was terrible those rainy and wet and so forth well anyway they went across and it was kind of a rough crossing although it didn't take too long a lot of the that the infantry got off and Lahav and the artillery went up the say of the Seine River to Rouen and I know we were talking and I was sort of know some history anyway at that time and I said that was where they doing Jonah back at the stake and one of them nobody seemed to be impressed uh-huh every one of them wanted to know who Joe Novak was but we got off at Rouen and got on the trucks we were attached to the howitzers and other howitzers were attached to the trucks and we headed north west I guess and we kept seeing the signs and it was Paris so many kilometers and kept getting close from close when she maybe were going to get into Paris and Paris I guess had been liberated August of 44 sometime in there but it we figured this would be great duty to be stationed somewhere close to Paris well then the science started going the other way and we're getting further and further well anyway we ended up in Belgium and on the way up we had Thanksgiving dinner which was we did have turkey but it was can turkey or something and rainy I remember it was down for and Thanksgiving in those days during the war I think was not the last Thursday I think it was President Roosevelt decided that they'd have a longer time between Thanksgiving and Christmas for shopping or something so he moved it up a week so it was the third third Thursday so that that could give you something time date but I ate that I ate my turkey under the truck because it was floating in water from the rain and then we ended up in Belgium about that time and it was on and uh they called it a chateau it was a a quadrangle effect with a lot of outbuildings and so forth and we were stationed in the main house and the inhabitants were down in the basement we were in the upper floors which they they wanted they preferred it that way because that was when we started seeing the buzz bombs and great number and some of them would fall short so they wanted to be in the cellar in the basement we were in the upper storey and as I recall we were on the third or fourth floor of the building which meant that you had a lot of flights of stairs to climb and so forth but also way it was kind of we never realized it at the time it were pretty close to the front lines at that it was just before the Battle of the Bulge and so they had the privates and PFCs were pulling guide duty every other night so you one night you're on and one night you're up but they also had a local pub was kind of close so the off nights was not not that bad the we did have a run-in with a battalion OD one a night on the guide duty because he didn't think we were where we should be and so forth and he came running in and waving a 45 and he didn't count the guide we had four of them and where the two posts came together because you'd double up two men on a post and there were three of us around a fire that we had supposedly not supposed to have a fire but we had a fire to keep warm but the fourth one was in a truck sleeping and when he saw the captain II fortunately he recognized him waving a gun he was sitting in the truck and the captain said I got the drop on you and the guy that was in the truck says and I get the drop on you so but that was just before we went into combat and it was miserable in there because I was muddy and I don't know it was almost ankle deep and mud but there was nothing yep we knew we were going into combat but we figured that at that time the troops were moving pretty fast there was no they're just about gone through the Siegfried line that was a the dragon's teeth and I could pillboxes and so forth and the middle of December I don't know the exact date but we went up moved up into Germany we went through act and which wasn't there was not much left of Ike and that was pretty much they put up a lot of resistance there because of the first major city in Germany that was captured so the Germans did try to defend it and the buildings were pretty well knocked down and so forth and we went to little to a lot of little towns but then we pulled into the dis open field and it was as I recalled snowing and they pulled the guns into the this open field and they said making it this is where you're going to be for a while and cold miserable and we set up the guns and they the advance party that was there to show us where we were going to put the guns up said that they'd been shelling the field all afternoon which made you feel good but actually they hadn't that the shells have been landing a quarter of a mile in front of us someplace and they were zeroing in on a crossroad up ahead of us well anyway they we get the guns set up and I don't think I ever spent a more miserable night because it was because of the snow and I was half rainy and you were digging guns in weird sellzen and the captain we had a new captain who was a captain Jones who was very good with with Figgis but he wasn't that great with handling men and he was young and he wasn't the captain then he was a lieutenant he thought he saw Germans out in front and told us that get ready for an attack so we were lying down in the the gun pit that we had half dug and the executive officer came along lieutenant pacing her and said why aren't you taking the gun in and you know what are you doing goofing off and we said the captain had just told us it was he says I he sees a swastika on every file every Bush out there well anyway we got the guns partially dug in and try to get into the hole ourselves and half of us went in and half of a state on the gun and tried to stay at least halfway drive we did have sleeping bags but they got wet and we got up the next morning and finished in a and actually we were in that one position the ones outside of lamis North Germany from the middle of December until the end of January because that we were in there about two days and that's when the Battle of the Bulge started and it went just south of us and I was on as a number one man on the gun and that way you could look at the site that they had and you could get the range of how far the shells were falling and we were firing and you could hear the tanks coming through and they kept dropping the elevation and dropping the elevation now look now there are about a quarter of a mile away at least that's where the shells were landing and I figured they weren't firing on our own troops so hopefully we ended up the night and they'd gone south of us and that's where we stayed with the whole division held that elbow of the northern elbow of the Bulge for the until the thing was straightened out at the end of January and yeah but it wasn't it wasn't constant firing but what they would do would be if they had something to shoot at you know they did they'd call back an enemy machine-gun nest or a cow a counter-attack was one of the things that there would be counter attacking and you you might have four or five rounds that you'd fire well sometimes at one time they had sustained firing but not more than maybe 10 of 15 minutes did you realize at the time what a big battle you were involved no no we knew that the Germans had broken through and they were dropping they were dropping paratroopers and we could hear the planes going over and also they had with it an observation plane would go over every night at dusk we used to call him bed-check Charlie would come over was a like one of our Piper Cubs and so forth and they just go you'd hear him come over whether they were taking pictures and and one of the things that we did was when we were there we were there for five or six weeks in one position you had a chance to make the thing halfway livable and the that we had a dugout that was in good shape and that we could stay in next to the gun and you'd have four men and four men off every six hours should change well the place became quite livable the only problem that we were having at that time was that trench foot and I think we lost four men to trench foot in our section of 12 of 15 and it seemed to be that the the young of the younger ones were getting the trench foot because I guess they just walked through a puddle rather than around it and the feet were wet and they kept saying you had to change socks when they get wet well we had two pairs of socks so here you didn't have they were usually wet I did get a touch of trench foot a couple of the tolls began to get black spots on them and so forth so they did have me sit down and they had captured a German pill box which was livable but not with damp and cold and so forth but they have like Bunsen burners that you could stick your feet up close and get him warm and dry your socks and put them back on again so there was only about a day that I was off-duty and I was the owner with because of the evacuation we had three of them three of our members have been evacuated and there was a gonna cooperate jump go and myself were the only two that could knew how to really handle a gun sight so if I wasn't there Mike had to do all the gunning he had to be on 24 hours so that's not Ferren even though I wasn't supposed to be on duty I'd go up and work as a as the Ghana Forum chunko chom piqué oh I believe came from Scranton Pennsylvania when when you lost those guys to trench foot did you get replacements yep no we got a young girl well it was one we got Eddie Sanaa he came in and he had been in he came from Chicago little kid but he had been in the invasion and was would call it shell-shocked every time the gun went off you'd run and so you had to handle him with kid gloves and gradually we worked him in Mike was Junko was good with him we lost a chief of section worried right to trench foot so chunko moved up and became the chief of section he got an extra stripe and then lamort was an older man from he got trench foot he was a gun out and was transferred out Sylvester Kerrigan got trench foot and he was moved out so we were heading for and we had well as I say Eddie son rocky came in as a replacement Johnny Daisha came in he was a wasn't supposed to be over there he's only 18 years old and then the old man came in Pop Kirkland he was probably about 30 31 and we got him because he was big and we figured there's a somebody that could carry the ammunition and I took questioning him a little bit when he came up on where he'd been trained he was trained at Fort Bragg so he had some artillery training and I would battalion and he says the 19th well the 19th battalion at Fort Bragg anybody that went through there at that time knew it was where they took the troops in that couldn't read or write and they tried to teach him to read or write but pop could they know where it's so successful with pop he we still had the writers letters home and read his letters that his wife would send a woman so forth but he stayed with us all during the during the war right up till we shipped out and they had a yeah a couple more that came in that one of them we got rid of in a hurry but he pulled a knife on the captain so they get he got him out he was crazy and the but from then on we were pretty stable the outfit was pretty stable they brought in a corporal to reap to become a gun off they brought him in from another section and he created a lot of problems in the outfit but we got along pretty well and we went from there until January the end of January and they had straightened the the balls out and the 78th attack it was supposed to capture the dams along the raw river which you had to capture the dams because they could open them up and flood the land down below so the troops couldn't go in in that area and that was around Schmitt and struck and they did get them I think around the 1st of February they captured the dams and then they crossed the rural river and from then on to the the Rhine it was pretty open open field and they moved fast and we were moving sometimes move two or three times a day and you'd pull a gun into position and fire a few rounds and then half the light put the thing back together again and pull it on the next position so that went along for about though but I was going to say two to three weeks in the meantime I had a pass to a three-day pass to Paris and a six-hour pass to Liege which was was great you had concrete under your feet and civilization and so forth free and we were going when I was going back to Paris on it and I guess we went back in trucks I met a fellow fred pope who had been in high school with me and so we were able to have somebody you knew to travel around a paracin and so forth and that the good food I hate potatoes but I even liked them there the way they they cook them but other than that we had a chance to see the Eiffel Tower on this shop sale is a everything else was pretty much closed up in Paris at that time but we had a roof over your head so now we're moving two or three times a day at some times and going forward towards the Rhine where was the next combat area that you follow next the one that everybody hears about was Remagen was at the bridge at Remagen we went into they captured the the bridge which we didn't know about of course we've heard about it a week later not a week later better we didn't realize the importance of it that they had the bridge and we went along we will run the west bank of the Rhine and the infantry had crossed the bridge we were the first I think the first infantry battalion of a first Infantry Division to cross the Rhine but the infantry went across and the artillery stayed on the west bank and fired across and we were in a town just outside of Remagen and this just really not doing much other than when occasionally fire a shell a trooper more or less in rest area the plains were coming on the Germans of course we're trying to knock the bridge out and they were throwing everything they had at it and the planes would come in and of course the anti-aircraft would be firing and we'd be he had about 50 caliber machine guns and every time they saw a plane they'd fire at it now we put the people on the 50 caliber machine guns we had a couple of them on either side of the way but you couldn't trust on the howitzer you put them on a 50 caliber machine gun and I did say don't one of them how do you recognize these planes we had plane recognition that was part about training I know and I said well how do you know what if they shoot at us we shoot back at them and how we won the war I sometimes wonder but that that was what they would do now what a lot of them didn't realize was that while at ordnance going up has to come down and we'd be out there and pieces of shrapnel would be dropping down around you and Dow Onix well we did have a couple of unexploded shells 37 millimeters come down in the area one of them went down and was on the roof of the house we were staying and but they as I say they were throwing a lot of stuff in and one of them we we always thought they were 240 millimeter mortars but I don't know now whether that's what they were of some of these v2 bombs that they were shooting they were falling so one came kind of close to where we were and actually the concussion knocked me over the trail of the gun and then we went back to see though all that it made not realizing that another one could be coming in you know but I mean if you didn't think to well anyway yeah we were had nothing to do for a while as off-duty in the truck driver Charlie Morgan and I decided we'll go down and take a look at the bridge well we went down and saw the bridge walked up on the bridge you know well let's cross it so we cross it never realized me is still shooting at it and then we got across nobody had a railroad tunnel across the on the east bank of the Rhine and no he decided that was the safest place to be and we get in the tunnel and then we had to get back to our outfit so we ran back across pretty much back across the bridge and I mean you as twenty-year-olds you don't think too much about some of these consequences and then we eventually crossed the line and it was more or less a mop-up operation after that the Germans were knew that the war was pretty much over and instead of one or two prisoners coming and you'd have 50 of them surrendering at a at a time and yeah we were up around the town of whippet all that the vision went up to and we were outside of Wuppertal when the war ended and but then you pulled more or less occupation duties had set up checkpoints and you would check all these displaced persons now a lot of the civilians moved ahead of the troops now they were trying to come back home and we were trying to catch junior soldiers well what a lot of the soldiers did were take off the uniforms put on civilian clothes and anybody would stop them and they're coming in and of course we spoke very little German you'd stop any groups coming by and yet question them and if you'd see men between 18 and and 40 or so are older and younger and civilian clothes you figured that they were at one time in the service so you kind of question them a little more carefully and the other thing that were the dead giveaway was that there was a shortage of shoes in Germany so the soldiers wouldn't wouldn't discard their boots they always had their so if they had boots on you knew they were in the a me someplace and of course they they did pick up some of the high brass and I know at one place I I was on one of the outposts and stopping them and I figure I had a really must have been at an admiral or something and a blue jacket with all kinds of gold brain on them and so forth and I figured gee I got a real live one here come to find out he was a railroad conductor but you what do you do with them you put them in a pen and hold them there for awhile but then you had to feed them and they did get a few we never did that I know of get any high-ranking officers we got a few soldiers and so forth but for the most part they they didn't want the war was over and they survived and that was yeah that was when we went in first went in the combat we were on the edge of the forest the three 11th infantry was in the hood gun forest and we were when the edge of it actually not too much in combat but they were we had nobody in front of us because the 311th was supposed to be in front of us they were often that flank some plays my few miles away and that's why if the if they had decided to come through our section at the Battle of the Bulge that have been nobody to stop them that hit the artillery in the artillery couldn't handle an infantry attack so we were fortunate but that was at that time and I couldn't tell you the divisions now but there was the 78 and a couple of others they were green divisions had not been in combat and they just threw them in to fill in the line and that's why they broke through so easily it was a green division and but they could have come through us just as well no that was just going across the cologne plane and I'm gonna change gears a little bit and ask you about daily life while you were in the service how did you stay in touch with your family when you were overseas you can write letters they had the v-mail which they had take pictures of you letter you know he didn't have one sheet of paper and that was that but we were at right I tried to write every two or three days that and they would take as I recall took about a week to get the mail over and back and in order to get packages you had to say send me cookies and cake and so forth and all your relatives would send you and the thing that we they could send over at that time that would travel well was fruitcake we had more fruitcake coming into the division or into a section that you would just you'd give it away really yeah I used to live I I love a kiss sardines and they'd send me Kansas sightings which were traveled well I know that we had this one member of our was he and I were pretty close to that while we were over there Abe Eisenberg and his folks annum gavel to fish and I who have fish but it's Ryback the veldt official it no way but then nobody could eat it so a Eisenberg was so close to Eisenhower we used to call him Ike he wrote home sent me all the Cavell deficient again I don't have to share it so we he he eventually left out a gun section and went up with a wire section of radio up forward he he was quite knowledgeable with in those days electronics and they they used them up there anyway plus the fact that he could speak German our Yiddish which was close enough to German so that they could get by and he was our interpreter and I said something about if he if he got a phrase or a word of something he didn't understand we do he says just yell louder and they were all afraid of him but he had lost a brother had on d-day so he had no no love the enemy he's always moving oh yeah we would get that we the mail was pretty good coming through and another thing that for the most part if you weren't moving if you're stationary for a day or so you had hot meals what did you eat I mean powdered eggs for breakfast well it was Chuck and water I called it but they said it was milk you could usually make pancakes spam they cook that up in many different ways and the cooks could manufacture they make muffins and as I say pancakes but nothing fancy but you wait well then you had if you were moving you had sea rations and K rations and I imagine you've heard about those before but the K rations were came in like a crackerjack box and they had three three meal breakfast lunch and dinner and I forgot now what each one of them was but you'd have a little round tins of well the dinner was cheese for the most part and you'd have breakfast I think they had sort of an egg combination with some kind of meat and at him with something and the same thing with a dinner combination now one of them I couldn't handle it would make me sick so I'd trade that off for the cheese or something else so you did all right then and you'd get three or four crackers to go along with it and some kind of a drink it would be well they had Nescafe powdered coffee of something in the beginning and it was tolerable then they had a lemonade thing for a lunch which carbolic acid but the and fourth cigarettes and a roll of toilet paper package of it and a candy bar of something well it was they had and then they had a d-bob which was chocolate and you couldn't bite in would you break your teeth on the thing but if you cut it up and put it in a cup of water and boil that you could have cocoa but the mistake you made and some of it that there was enough nourishment and that candy bar for a whole meal and if you ate it fast it would upset your stomach you had to eat it over maybe 15 or 20 minutes and as I say it was had you had to bite how to cut it off and eat it and he's small pieces the c-ration was well liked I store a hash akin that you if you could you could eat it cold or you if you was stopped long enough you could warm it up and it would be tolerable the civilians liked it they liked all that stuff and you could trade that off with well we used to get can't fruit how preserve fruit which was good that your trades off you weren't supposed to talk to the Germans but that was what would you treat what would you get you return for it we trade the kenneth's or whatever maybe ki boxer K ration for sort of a salami that they'd have our beef jerky the civilians themselves didn't have much they they'd have preserved fruit peaches and if you were fortunate you could kind of skate it a live chicken once in a while and do that but eggs eggs were real yeah real eggs what were your sleeping conditions like were you ever stationed at any place where you had actual barracks with no no not until after the war where would you sleep when you're out in the field on the ground usually one of the things that you learned very early in combat was it you dig and get underground even though it might be only six inches to a foot deep you would have a they call foxholes but those would get down deeper but all you had to do was a place where you could have some did in front of you and you could throw your bedroll down and sleep really did you pitch a pup tent that was statewide one of the things that I might mention that when we were in lammers Dorf and that first month according to the book the minute you put a gun placement in a howitzer you put a camouflage net up now the camouflage nets were made a lot of cloth wood in the mingle with a green and grey and so forth so that he had hide what you had well we got kind of smart one time it said you know we got a cover of snow when you put this green that you spotted from the air I mean it was very visible so we thought using Yankee ingenuity that we went up into the town of lamonsoff and confiscated a lot of sheets bed sheets and strung those over the howitzer so it blend in with the snow Colonel came by and took one look at it and put up the camouflage nets so again how did we win the war but that was one of the things so we had to have a camouflage net and at the ad ever imagined just at the Remagen when we were going up on the west bank of the Rhine we had the camouflage nets we had a gun position that was supposed to be we were supposed to be more or less in a rest area and we get strafed by a me-109 came down now our machine gun is on either side of the gun positions opened fire on the plane when it came down well they were firing low and a couple of the traces hit a net and set it on fire now you got a lot of loose ammunition there and this net collapsed and we did have bags of powder that were sitting around and that which ignited now they they didn't explode they just burned and it was it was a good thing it ended up as a good thing because anytime you came up short of any equipment we had we lost it in the fire and the and I will say that we when we were crossing the channel we had to dummy rounds of ammunition in the truck and we kept banging our shins on it and so we're figuring going into combat you don't need dummy ammunition so we toss those overboard and come to find out that somebody was going to have to pay I know 40 dollars a piece of something for them and in those days you got $50 a month for pay yeah we were never short of at one time during the Bulge we were a little short of ammunition but nothing serious was getting down low far as clothing was concerned we never had a problem with that as a matter of fact they used to after the war sell boots for some of them would sell boots for $75 appear and then claim it was lost and did you do anything special for good luck no not particularly it's that that I can think of at this time you know it's 60 years how did you handle the stress of the job the the main thing was the monotony you know the same thing you always as I often think back on it what you remember are the good times you block out some of the the other now I know you said you had a three-day pass to Paris and a six day pass to Liege six hour pass what did you do on your six hours drink to be honest with you my wife hasn't arrived she can you'd walk around sometimes you try to buy souvenirs to send home but in really didn't have much that was Paris they did but me age they didn't have much weird buy a bottle of cognac to take back and or whatever you could could buy in there and sit in a bar and drink beer or something like that but six hours you couldn't Paris was a little better you could do some sightseeing there and go yeah ah I got to Brussels then this was after the war that's because I went back with it as an assistant truck driver and got assigned at taking leave troops back to Brussels so you've got to go in and I like Brussels as a city a leaf city better than Paris really and so we could stay with the troops or any one of the things that made you think of a frontier town you're going to Brussels and you checked in the big sign check all shootin ions so everybody had Lugar's or captured pistols and so forth that they carried with them and you had to check that they caught you in town with them or in the city that kind of escaped them so you check them and you get picked them up on the way way back or way out of town we had 3 days and Brussels actually at end of the four days and that again was a lot of sightseeing and eating good meals you know there you could sit down on a restaurant nor Dora and I did have sort of a speaking knowledge of French so I could get by with with that and then just before I get this judged I had a 7 day pass to London and London was a good place because I had a choice of Switzerland nice of the Riviera while London well London was good because you had to cross a channel and they kind of lost track of you're going across the channel so you could stretch a 7 day pass into maybe 14 days because you had to get a ship coming back across a channel and even though your pass was up you could hang around Southampton and the we came back and eventually they caught up you have to you had to come back so there was another one another phone I forgotten his name now and I were in London for the 7 days and then we hang around since Southampton for a while came back and ended up in Paris and I figured they still didn't know where we were oh yeah until I money ran out we could maybe have three or four more days in Paris and I saw somebody and we're in the railroad station in Paris and I asked him so no one of the troops that were coming down with a division patch if they how the point system was working now that's you were being discharged you had X number of points and I said that they shipped out the 60 pointers yet he says all yeah he says and there's shipping out the 56 pointers now I had 56 points and so I said there's no way I'm going in the next truck back to the outfit and I got there just in time as I was shipping them out and I think I stayed with the with the outfit maybe two or three days and then we shipped out and they went down we went and I forgot and I was down some place in Germany southern Germany the to the 83rd division which was being deactivated they were sending them back to the states deactivating them and we went in or three of us from our outfit that were in the 83rd and that was you're just killing time but then now by that time I had with the two stripes so I didn't have to hawk God dude he hadn't been able to walk God dude he hadn't been there signed it but now you're down in the 83rd Division and everybody had stripes so we were pulling well you didn't pull KP because they did have German prisoners doing that but we did pull God duty and I remember Hank mance and I were they were going to give us typhus shots we never had typhus shots before and we were figuring we're get down here within a month or so we're gonna be out of the army why do we have to have shots so we tried to dodge it and they caught up with us we had that they first shot and then they sent us down to the coast of France and down around Lahav and we were in one of these camps they call them all after cigarettes I think we were in Pall Mall they had camp Lucky Strike and so they're all ports of embarkation not close and during that time I ended up with a toothache and that that's one of the vivid remember and everyday it's down at the camp they call off the shipments the ones that were going to ship out depending on whether there was a boat in or not but they didn't have any dentists in the camp and you had to go in Tula half now if you were in the have and they called your name for shipment you went back down on the bottom of the list and it might be another two weeks or a month before you chip out so I said I didn't do it a tooth so I think it was New Year's of Christmas that I had the tooth it was really bothering me and I eat on one side of my mouth and so forth well anyway we finally got shipping orders and I figured gee if I get aboard the ship maybe they got a dentist aboard well we're in the back of a truck with a canvass off and it was cold was in January and suddenly at that cold Mia was hitting the my face and I got a shot pain and then that went away what it was was the new have died in the tooth so I had no problem with it from then on then we got aboard a a Liberty Ship or one of those things they put together and for a shipment home and it was miserable coming across I pulled Duty and the guide duty on the ship of MP duty and because you had work to do there was no problem but I had nothing we had nothing to do going back and the minute we hit the English Channel and then the open sea the ship rocked and while I was sick for about five days I said if I realized this out of reenlist they had and I knew you had to get food in you but every time I got out of the bunk now we're gonna stack five high and the ship minute I got my legs over the bunk and down on the deck the deck would start to spin and I get sick again so the only thing that we had was I had a box of butterfingers candy bars and that was what I was trying to get done to this day I can't eat at Butterfinger but after about four or five days I was able to get down and get to the galley and I've the the first day I got halfway down going into the galley and you got that greasy old or that do that did it and I was the second day I got down there and they I went through the line and they wouldn't let you leave the mess hall with any food so you have to eat it they're all I couldn't I knew I couldn't get it down but I did get two or three had boiled eggs and stuck them in my pocket and went up on deck and ate them in the fresh year and from then on I was alright but it's it was a long trip of course you knew you were going home I know it's a long trip okay

Channel: ccsuvhp

Views: 10,518

Rating: 4.7241378 out of 5

Keywords: Veteran (Profession), World War II (Event), Interview, Central Connecticut State University (Organization), Veterans History Project Of The Library Of Congress American Folklife Center

Id: tfMZkHiEzZ0

Length: 86min 37sec (5197 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2012