SURROUNDED BY THE ENEMY: WWII Veteran Describes Fighting for Survival!

well i thought many times about how it is to kill somebody and the more you think about it it's worse it gets and um like a saying i have you have to have something happen to you before you can kill anybody it's not a good thing to do but i was helped out in this case because i had seen crews being killed and i knew right away that i could easily be next so you might say that was a help otherwise we'd all be dead whoever was up there so it wasn't any choice at that time but it's not a good feeling not a good feeling [Music] after we were on the front uh that front the first front we were on for about five days we were told to um they said realign the lines which what they were doing we called it a retreat we really didn't like that idea of retreating because you don't we didn't go over there and retreat but we did and it was miserable we retreated in the snow maybe six inches of snow the gun was frozen in we had to dig the gun out in order to get it out and i had a terrible time with my truck to get it get it hooked up again online and we went back to a town called swaghasan and there's where in the next day we had a terrible fight we entered swag house and it seemed like a peaceful town hadn't been beat up too much um had been um either bombed or shelled or mortared uh many of the roofs were gone which was normal for that area for any area all the towns were wrecked to some degree poor french took it on really really tough anyway the next morning well as we approached we didn't go to our we we um we placed our guns which we always did then i had the job or truck drivers had the job every time we did this was hiding in the truck because of that's the biggest target on the front and you're right on the front with the germans maybe just a couple hundred yards between you and they can easily see a truck big enough to pull a 57-millimeter gun so anyway before we did that we stayed on the outside of the town and every town village in that area has a brewery and the brewery has a tower don't ask me what the tower is for but every every brewery has a tower and we had been sleeping anywhere we could any kind of shelter for several i guess a couple weeks and here this town wasn't that badly beat up so um another truck driver and i bob gardner uh would generally stick together and we we said well how's that tower so we went to the tower and the tower was nice and dry had a wooden floor and it had about was about three stories high and so we said well this looks pretty good and we stayed in that tower that night and the next morning we moved our guns in position and found a couple houses in the village well one the morning the next morning after a couple of hours actually i suppose it was around noon time i looked up on the hill where this brewery was and there was no tower there was a tower was gone completely it had been shelled away because that's an observation point for either side so that was the first thing that either side takes away the high points where somebody can look out and see where you are and what you're doing so it was an odd feeling to realize you were slept in that tower and the next day it's gone it was on the ground so anyway we found places to stay and the next morning i was supposed to go in for a hot chow for hot meal every once in a while but every three or four days we'd get a hot meal and uh in a vacuum looked like a big vacuum bottle very good but that was supposed to but we didn't that didn't happen very often but we got there we finally got there and um uh the next morning i'm i was i wanted to leave earlier because there was i had to go over a hill to get to where our kitchen worked and it was maybe about three miles back to the next town so one of the other drivers was to go with me and we were going with my idea to leave about but before dawn so i could get over that hill before they'd see me and they'd they'd fire or tour at me so um lo and behold the next morning i'm up and around i go out to get my truck and a shell had hit near the truck and had flattened three of the tires so i figured i couldn't use it so i walked down about a block to where my buddy was with another truck to get him awake and to use that truck and make a longer story sort and finally got him up and got him out into this truck and we're there ready to start out he's ready to turn the key and start the truck and i look out in front of me along the woods line and there's about 200 guys coming out from this woods dressed in white sheets or white uniforms of some type so we hadn't thought haven't thought too much about german soldiers we hadn't thought anything about that we were still pretty green so um he was ready to start the truck up and i said just just a minute just wait here just look what's going on here i don't like this i think it's gis airman but i'm not sure and just about that time one of the germans had yelled out something in german to another so we both got out of there fast ran to the house his billet where he was staying with his group his squad and the lord was good to us he gave us a two-story house only two-story house in the area the rest were one-story it so we ran upstairs and sure enough they were right at us i don't know why they didn't fire at us as we were running from the truck to the house they could have knocked us off easy but i don't know why he didn't do that but we got into the house we tried to wake his his um squad up they wouldn't wake up so finally they start shooting into the house the germans start shooting into the house and they got up in a hurry and by that time gardner and i and and cruz was upstairs cruises and just as i got up the stairs he had been firing out the window and he just said to me i got another one and bang right in the middle of his forehead he he fell over and it was a horrible scene fell back threw his hands up on the floor and knew he was going right away so by that time the rest had come up with me and we fought the whole day from that from up there and they um and about oh it was about 20 minutes half an hour i guess a couple of them got this idea to come up as you as you went into the house you went in across the back and up the stairs so they had to make a turn to get up there and i'm thinking to myself they're going to be right behind us so i just stopped at the stat top of the stairs and i had a what we call a grease gun which is a a marvelous thing it cost 17 to make what was a great machine gun 45 and i just picked them off as they came in the back they were or came in and tried to get up there so we stopped that and then we had to the fight from the windows from then on and it got hot and handy from that point on and they they got in the bottom the bottom uh level and shot up to the floor and here you're standing right here and these this these bullets are coming up right to you you know it's not a good feeling [Music] and they gardner my my buddy he was a great guy he was another driver and he threw a grenade out the window but we had accident the first grenade he ever flew he ever threw other than in training and i think it's seven seconds or a count of seven seconds that's way too long and they threw it back in at him and fortunately it landed on a bed and he had dropped right on the ground right away that's that's one that saved his life too he dropped right on the floor and the grave the grenade went off and uh the mattress took all the beating it was all feathers all over the place but he didn't get hurt so but we did learn that before you throw a grenade you count up to about three and they won't throw it back again so the little things like that and the other other things we learned uh we had heard about this so we tried it out when you're firing you're firing a an m1 a grand rifle as the last cartridge goes out the clip that holds them together comes out too and it makes a little zing a little noise not very loud but you can hear it and and that's when they know you have to take a sec couple seconds and put another clip in so they got a couple seconds there so what what we did was what we had heard work you fire for three or four shots and then you drop one of these clips on the ground on the floor and it sounds like it ejected it and then exposed themselves and then then then you get them from that point on so we should have been taught that in training but we weren't [Laughter] and that came in handy i don't know what other tricks there were that that we i can tell you about but they were they worked and they tried firing those big panzerfaust at us and uh they wouldn't go through the wall they missed the windows because they aren't very accurate and they exploded but they would blow a hole in a wall it's a good thing it didn't come through so we we've we've had that fight all day that was from like eight o'clock in the morning until four anyway and uh we were pretty lucky only got one of us there crews now up at the other side which my um squad was i was away from my squad i don't know if this makes a whole lot of difference but they had a tougher fight than we did and because they were caught in a house um one of this gentleman hickey who was 34 years old was when i i i was supposed to take the last the last watch i was with them my squad which is like a half a block away and hickey was with me we were all in one room i remember and i had gone i had just left and about five minutes after ten minutes after i left there were two german soldiers that came into the kitchen and they stopped for a few seconds to warm themselves up because we had a stove in there that somebody had made a fire and for a while and hickey heard them the rest of my squad had jumped out the window and tried to get to another house which was safer where our platoon leader was he they we were under orders to try to make that um anyway hickey uh opened the door with and his rifle he had his rifle but these two germans were a little ahead of him and they they had their rifle race on him so he had to throw his hands up he had a let's call him a good german and a bad german and the good the bad german wanted to shoot him shoot him right away get rid of him he said we don't have any way of getting him back or anything so they took hickey between them across the field which led to this woods that i talked about earlier and they and a shell hit and killed the bad german part a piece of shrapnel or something just either killed him or knocked him out some he was out of the picture and the other german said the hickey he gave him his uh i think it was his pistol and he said we don't know who's in that woods now whether it's americans or germans if they're germans i have my rifle i'm going to take you prisoner if they're americans you take me right prisoner with the pistol a good idea so they got to the woods and unfortunately the good german got killed right away there were tanks in there and they shot at hickey but he was able to get away from him until they had gone by then he jumped up on the back and and he became a hero that day because they had captured about 20 or 25 prisoners and they didn't have they didn't want to spare any mendes to take them back so they told hickey yes you grab a rifle rifles all over the place because there were plenty of dead german soldiers there by that time he said you grab a rifle and take him back so he he marched these 25 prisoners back of course they're ready to give up anyhow because they had enough of war so he marched him back to our headquarters and became a hero they saw him coming over the hill and they made a whole lot of it but it's just too bad he's not here to tell this story because he had a way of telling stories that was great so anyway um we fought that battle until about four o'clock and then we were rescued by i don't know somebody else no this part of the 79th division came by so um if it's okay i want to ask you some questions about the story yeah can you tell us about the first germans who you had to fire at you know you must have been 20 years old what was that like for you well i thought many times about how it is to kill somebody and the more you think about it it's worse it gets and like saying i have you have to have something happen to you before you can kill anybody it's not a good thing to do but i was helped out in this case because i had seen crews being killed and i knew right away that i could easily be next so you might say that was a help otherwise we'd all be dead whoever was up there so it wasn't a choice at that time but it's not a good feeling it's not a good feeling but i'm sure you realize that every german that you know you knocked out that many more americans or other allies got to come home and have families yeah yeah not at that time but you do later on when you're thinking this thing through but it's it's a miserable thought then you know it doesn't make you feel good i'm sorry that you had to go through that uh but i i can't tell you how grateful i am that you did thank you because yeah people like me would not be here without people like you yeah and you know unfortunately it takes someone to actually pull the trigger and yeah you know you were the unlucky one but that's that's what it amounts to i can't tell you how yeah how much that means though it's a burden it's a burden so can you describe how they actually attacked inside the house for some reason or another the first guy came in went straight across to the door if you can picture that instead of going even looking up the stairs he went straight to the door and tried again and that door was locked so it gave me a little more time so i just opened up on him because i knew he'd be coming up why he didn't come up right away i don't know and the second guy came in i think he was trying to pull the first one out but if if i had time to think of that i wouldn't have shot him because he was only trying to pull the first one out but what i was by that time my nerves were pretty edgy and i i looked actually i was looking for an arm to come up with a potato masher on a grenade and going to throw it up and i was going to try to hit the potato masher and explode down there not on me so i didn't even have time as soon as i saw action i i fired and got him too so but so that was two of the enemy soldiers do you remember any others trying to make their way there were there were one or two or three maybe at the door but they didn't i don't know what they they didn't try to pull the second guy back or anything you would have thought they would have done that but they you know they could have maybe saved him now the first guy um at the end of that day when we were rescued we went down and and and looked at him um he had gi sweater on gi of shoes shoe packs he had a gi shirt wool shirt he had a 45 one of our 45s anyway he had enough things on him that made me feel as if he was he was really an experienced soldier soldier had done a lot where did he get all that american stuff so i felt just a little better and um it meant that he had been plenty experience i think yeah matt he took that off dead americans yeah and i think you could always take comfort in the fact yeah some justification there and and the fact that there's no way he would have given you a second chance he wouldn't think twice ah no no but that that helps a little bit uh is there anything else you remember after the battle when you guys came to the first story of the house did you see any other things that stood out there were a number of dead germans around we all got the firing at them and sometimes you didn't know if you hit them or not or you didn't didn't want to stay on the target you move as soon as you fire it move that was one of the basics if they can if you can see them they can see you so you be extra careful and and just so we're on the same page after you and gardner made it inside the house and the germans you know shards of fire and you got the rest of the squad up and you guys make it upstairs do you immediately start uh to guard the stairs knowing that the germans might come yeah because i thought boy they'll be right behind us and nobody's here i i that came to me was as they're walking up the stairs or running up the stairs they i got we got to stop them before they hit the stairs well so you you hole up at the top of the stairs the rest of the squad fans out yeah yeah um and what it was as you were making your way up the stairs that crews got killed uh no it was after i had been to the top of the stairs he actually talked to me before he he got killed he said something he said i got another one and he was too near the window because he was firing out the side of the house to the front so they were in the front on the front road so he was firing out there and as they would come and view he would farm and a sniper probably they he probably got two or three i don't know how many he got at least of them before they realize they have to have a sniper on this thing and so they put a sniper on and then just as he took i i told him i said i said cruz you got to get back from that window they're going to pick you up and as soon as i said that bang and he was going so he didn't even have time to move from the window can you tell us about cruz what kind of man was he i didn't know him too well he was a likeable person a big guy he it wasn't gushy but he wasn't he was he was just an ordinary quiet person a big guy and he and i always got to go on together we weren't in the same squad but he he and i got along whenever we had anything to do together and um just like most guys and uh i'd say he was just a likable person during the whole battle you mentioned it went from about eight in the morning to four yeah you know that's eight hours yeah did you stay by the stairs the whole time yeah yeah um there was i felt like i was how to stay there i mean they were all around the house i didn't know what was outside the house and very careful to look out the window to find out because they'll see you were there any other attempts by the germans to go to the door or near the stairs no no once they saw those two to soldiers at the bottom of the stairs and that that was a long wait because i thought there would be i thought there would be piling in after them but they didn't choose that course could you hear movement i mean could you could you tell that they were still downstairs but in different parts of the house or do you think yeah i could i could oh yes um they they had been at the at the end of that hallway at the door they were there uh for a while they were talking together and i don't of course couldn't understand what they were saying but there may they may have been medics that were talking about draw drawing i don't know what they said i could hear them and they stayed there for oh not that long maybe 15 20 minutes at the most so um but they after an hour or a couple of hours um they got into the into the bottom into the lower floor that's when they shot up through the floor and i got to thinking boy they can easily set this place on fire and our goose is cooked and so actually we cut down on our firing because we want them to think they were getting us and there was only one or two left i mean that's what i'm thinking in my head i don't know what they thought but uh they kept firing in the house for quite a while and eventually just stopped but the guy who was in and there was a couple guys in the lower floor because we could hear them talk down there and i thought all they have to do is set set something on fire and yes we're going actually i thought there's not much of a chance of us getting out of here alive for some reason other so but that didn't bother us gardner and i said that together that some way they're going to get us here and but it didn't bother us didn't bother me why not that's that's the chance you take when you're you're a soldier in combat you you kind of have to forget you know otherwise you i would guess you'd be pretty well paralyzed you wouldn't be able to think at all i hope i could be half the man or even a quarter of the man that you are one day oh you you you you would be you do the same thing as we all we were ordinary guys you know i think i think you were anything but to be honest can you describe the layout of the outside of the house and where the germans were that you saw well the road across of course was was in the front the house was longer than it was wide and three stories really couldn't see too much and you know that kept you guessing but it wasn't worth going to a window for but i guess what i'm trying to get at is where were the germans they must have been hiding behind something on the outside oh here's a little story that might be interesting they were running up and down that road and hollering at each other and in in bare sight of us and they were yelling and and crazy like and i said to gardner they must be on something we didn't have drugs like they do now but i was thinking to myself they've got to be on something and we find out later on years later that they had some kind of concoction that had something in it that would make them care less and be like that almost like um i don't know maybe even alcohol so we found out that was standard i don't know if you've ever thought of that and never run across that i've just heard about some of them being on meth really yeah which is obviously a drug but um so you're saying these germans were out in the open just running yes yes anybody in the right mind wouldn't be doing that i mean that must have been some pretty prime targets for you guys yeah i went over we went over in 82 and uh 1982 and um uh i didn't have any interpreter or anything but i could get along a little bit with them with german and i i met some people in the street and they said well there's a there's a guy living in that house but he probably won't let you come in so i went over and knocked on the on the gate he had a wood fence around it wasn't a wood fence around during the war but he had a wood fence a high wood fence all around and then one of the other women said uh we think he was a nazi he doesn't you know really communicate with them and i wrapped on the door and he came he was a grumpy kind of a guy of our age or maybe a little older and i said in in my best german i said well we were here during world war ii and we had a battle in this house we were wondering i was wondering if i you would let me come in and look at it again no no nine nine all right wouldn't wouldn't budge on that couldn't get get past the wood gate so where's the grease gun when you need it yeah yeah i didn't want any nazis telling me that stuff i think we should all be mindful of what wars entail before they're started and the terrible things that happen in wars and we must remember that god's in control and as long as he's control and control he'll take care of things so we nee we needn't we don't need wars thank you thank you so much for your service sir god bless you yeah thank you [Music] so [Music] so you

Channel: Legends of WWII

Views: 288,599

Rating: 4.9413123 out of 5

Keywords: world war II, veterans, world war II veterans, world war 2, combat veterans, heroes of world war, heroes of war, soldiers, marines, navy, airforce, combat, army, interviews, WWII, fighting the germans, fighting the japanese, Allied forces, Allies

Id: PTck52FZj9Q

Length: 37min 1sec (2221 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021