Veterans Voices Special Section

Former U.S. President Harry S. Truman wrote, “America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.” He was describing Fayette County’s World War II veterans.

As we mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, we remember the hundreds and hundreds of locals who defended our country on the battlefront or behind the lines. Each did his or her part in helping to win the war and preserve the freedom we take for granted today.

This publication features 40 firsthand accounts of men with Fayette County ties whose experiences are representative of the much larger group of veterans from this area. It is an honor to have been entrusted to retell their stories of faith, courage, endurance and resilience.

The wives of the

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veterans whom I met offered wonderful encouragement and assistance. In addition, the following family members and friends couldn’t have been more helpful: Bob Roberts, Joe Gajdos, Daniel Vyvjala, Otto and Helen Steinhauser, Judy Pate, Robert Heinrich, Florence Farek, Darlene Quiring, Ralph Hackemack, Linda Ephraim Dalchau, Gregg Pennington, Linda Giese Oltmann, Vi and Dan Mueller, Rox Ann Johnson, Liz Treybig, Lestell Villanueva, Viola Weiss, Dick and Jerri Frenzel, Judge Ed Janecka, Carolyn Lehmann, Kathy Kitchen, Kathy and Charles Weishuhn, Marcy Heller Huntsinger, Joe and Joyce Hanzelka, Marie Watts, Carolyn Heinsohn, Bobbie Nash, Theresa Mazoch Phinney, Darlene Bramblett, Daniel Muras, Susan and George Frondorf, Polly Cisneros, Starr Shillington, Connie Reiss Petty, Joseph Muras Jr., Charlene Meinen, Lee and Phyllis Fritsch, Mike Maxwell, Rick

Veterans’ Voices

Knape, Chuck Mazoch and Betty Sacks.

Thank you. If I have left anyone out, I apologize for the oversight.

My sincere appreciation to the entire staff of The Fayette County Record, especially Publisher Regina Keilers, Editor Jeff Wick and Advertising Coordinator Bobby Bedient, as well as the paper’s advertisers. Also, thank you to two terrific listeners: my husband, Emil, who worked wonders on old photos, and my sister, Shirley, who proofread every story.

The Fayette County World War II veterans to whom I have spoken are very modest. Looking back on their service, they shrug their shoulders, smile and say they only did what they were expected to do. I consider them my personal heroes.

Please join me in telling all our veterans, “Thank you for your service.”

-Elaine Thomas

The Fayette County Record

* Veterans Listed in Alphabetical Order Joe Bargas, Holman.................................66 Bennie Beale, Flatonia............................67 Frank Brauner, La Grange......................70 Bob Clements, Warda.............................16 Lonnie Daniels, La Grange.....................52 James Ephraim, Winchester....................4 Dr. E.L. Fitzpatrick, La Grange..............48 Cleve Friddell, Fayetteville.....................18 Otto Fuchs, Carmine...............................68 Richard Gabler, High Hill.......................34 Pete Glaiser, La Grange.........................30 Joe Hild, La Grange.................................20 Joe Hlavinka, La Grange.........................26 Eugene Hollas, Schulenburg...................42 Eddie Hulsey, Flatonia............................13 Elton Jochen, La Grange.........................14 Edward Jurek, Flatonia.............................9 John Kobersky, Holman..........................56 Milton Koenning, Winchester................24 Arnold Kramr, Fayetteville.....................58

Alvin Langhamer, Schulenburg............40 Charlie Mazoch, Ammannsville............59 Tom McLean, O’Quinn...........................28 Leland Miller, Fayetteville......................25 Gene Muzny, Plum.................................62 Walter Noll, Fayetteville..........................32 Warren Pennington, La Grange..............8 Leon Reeder, La Grange........................10 Henry Reiss, West Point..........................67 Charlie Ripper, La Grange......................6 Laddie Ripple, Fayetteville......................54 Elvas Roensch, La Grange.....................60 Dennis Rudloff, Fayetteville....................46 Frank Stastny, Fayetteville......................44 Victor Sternadel, Round Top..................50 Edgar Tiedt, Swiss Alp...........................12 Clarence Weishuhn, La Grange............64 Roy Wilks, Flatonia.................................22 Ted Wolfram, La Grange........................36 Alford Zoch, Winchester.........................38

On the cover: Center, Roy Wilks’ Army buddies; Clockwise from top right: Victor Sternadel, Otto Fuchs driving tank, Edgar Tiedt and buddy, John and Hazel Kobersky, Alford Zoch in back of trio.

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Veterans’ Voices

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I’m looking at the winch I made to load 300 and 500-pound bombs four at a time and 1,000- pound bombs two at a time. The 2,000-pound bombs had to be unloaded one at a time.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I was going on a hunting trip to South Texas with my uncle, Monroe Harris, and some other men, when we heard the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. After President Roosevelt declared war, I knew I would eventually be called up, so I didn’t tell anyone at home, but went to La Grange and volunteered. I figured that way I would have a better chance of picking where I would serve. I didn’t want to be “cannon fodder” on the front lines. I’ve heard it said that it took 10 men behind the lines to put one man on the front line.

I was inducted at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on January 12, 1942, and trained at Salt Lake City, Utah; Seattle, Washington; Alamogordo, New Mexico; and Richmond, Virginia. After basic training, I was assigned to the 283rd Army Air Corps and we shipped out of New York on an American vessel. I was 20 years old.

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I was assigned to the ordnance department at a 100-acre bomb dump in Shipdham, Norfolk, England, where I was responsible for bombs and ammunition used

by American heavy bombers such as the B17s and B24 Liberators stationed nearby.

A B17 had a capacity of 5,000 pounds of bombs and the B24 could carry up to 8,000 pounds. That’s a lot of bombs when missions were being flown constantly. There were 65 planes to four squadrons. I remember once counting more than 800 B17s and B24s flying over our barracks returning from a single mission.

Our work involved lots of lifting. The bombs and ammunition would arrive on convoys of 125 to 150 trucks that needed to be unloaded right away. We would stack the bombs and then other ordnance crews would load the bombers. Each man in our 36-member crew could stack 300-pound See Ephraim, next page

I was born in 1921 and attended Winchester Public School until the 10th grade when the principal and coach from Smithville recruited me to play football there. I’d never played football in my life, but I was a husky farm boy, which is what they must have been looking for.

Veterans’ Voices

“Over there, over there… we won’t come home until it’s over - over there.” Those words from a World War I song also were true for World War II. We figured we’d be in it until all the fighting was over and the Allies had won the war.

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Continued from previous page bombs by hand, although it took two of us to move a 500-pound bomb, which was the same weight as a bale of cotton on our farm at home. We also handled 100-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs. The 16-inch guns off damaged Navy ships were made into 1,600-pound bombs. Early on in the war, we had to hand-link 50-calibre shells for the Air Force’s machine guns, but later the ammunition arrived ready to use. I invented a mechanical winch that we took off an old disabled truck to move the bombs around more easily and stack them. That helped.

The bombs had to be handled carefully.

At another nearby base, an impatient driver got careless with a load of composition bombs that had a low ignition rate. When he slammed his truck in reverse and jolted the load, the bombs ignited. Seventy-two hours later, bombs were still exploding at that base. It sounds gruesome, but they never even found the driver’s dog tags. That’s how

bad the damage was.

We also filled practice bombs with sand for new aircrews, so they could learn how to accurately drop their loads.

American bombers were stationed at bases about six miles apart in rural Norfolk, England, in a checkerboard pattern. Just as our planes were bombing German targets such as aircraft factories at Weiner Neustadt and oil supplies at Ploesti, German planes were bombing England. Although our bomb dump was only a very, very minor target, we had nowhere to hide if a bomb had been dropped on or near us. Our area had revetment walls made of sandbags to contain the bomb dump, but it did not provide any real protection.

I had a phone in the Quonset hut where we lived beside my bed. If I got a call at night announcing a red or black alert, I’d run out and throw covers over the windshields of any trucks to ensure the glare of the glass didn’t show up in a German bomber’s searchlight. Of course, windows

had to be covered at night so no lights were visible.

We dreaded the thought of buzz bombs, those small pilotless aircraft powered by a jet engine carrying explosives that the Germans used to pound London repeatedly. We also were wary of the Germans’ butterfly bombs, which were containers filled with multiple incendiary devices. When those containers were dropped from an aircraft, the fuses opened them with such force that the bombs scattered far and wide. Some of them didn’t go off for hours afterward, another hazard.

The coldest I’ve ever been was the day an American bomber ran out of fuel and crashed nose down in a pond covered in ice about two miles from our bomb dump. We rushed over to get the pilot and co-pilot out of the icy water to save their lives, but we were all frozen stiff by the time we got them on stretchers. I had been up to my waist in that cold water.

I served 24 and one half months over-

seas and got out of the service on October 15, 1945. My family told me that after I left for the service in 1942 my dog walked the rock fence and went to live nearby with my great-aunts, twin sisters Eda and Augusta Haschke, whose nicknames were Edie and Dido. Through some strange intuition, that dog knew when there would be a letter from me in the mailbox and he would be there waiting. The week before I returned to Winchester, my dog, Texas, appeared back at my mother’s house. When I arrived home, he was waiting for me, wagging his tail. He never went back to live with my great-aunts after that. Before we shipped out for England in 1942, I got a day pass in Richmond, Virginia, and went to a jewelry store and bought a very nice ring that I mailed home to my girlfriend, Lera Evelyn Karisch. She told me again recently how surprised she was to get it and wondered what it meant.

I hadn’t wanted to propose before I left for the service, but after I got home, we got married on June 9, 1946.

Our ordnance crew is pictured with several different sizes of bombs that we routinely handled at our base in England.

The Fayette County Record

Veterans’ Voices

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I was drafted on July 27, 1943, when know they had lost their lives.

We sailors would sit around and have I was 18 years old. My oldest brother, Alfred was already serving in the U.S. Air our little bull sessions. There was a good Force and my older brother, Bennie, had deal of comradery, although there was aljoined the Navy. I wanted to be a Marine, ways work, something for us to do. We but the recruiter said I wasn’t big enough, didn’t have much time to sit and talk.

It really bothered me when women so I joined the Navy. My dad wanted to try to get a deferment for me so I could stay would send “Dear John” letters saying, “I home and help him with the farm work, but don’t want anything more to do with you.”

I wanted to go to war. Believe it or not, I How could they do that when these boys had always worn hand-me-downs, so I was were out in the middle of nowhere in an excited at the prospect of getting my first ocean fighting for their country? So many boys got that kind of letter from their girlset of new clothes.

After being seasick all the way from friends and even wives. It almost made you San Francisco to Pearl Harbor, I asked to want to hate women.

One sailor’s wife sent a letter demandbe assigned to the biggest ship in the Navy.

The officer obliged and I joined the crew of ing a divorce and enclosed her wedding rings. We had to watch him the USS Colorado. after he got that news beIt didn’t take me long cause he was so distraught to get my feet wet in the we thought he might jump South Pacific. Less than overboard. four months later, NoAt first, he was going vember 1943, our ship to throw the rings away, but saw action at Tarawa. We we told him, “No, no, you also sortied at Kwajalein, paid $250 for them. Don’t Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, do that.” So he held a rafTinian, Leyte, Mendon, fle, selling tickets for 25¢ Luzon, Okinawa and Jaapiece. I bought one ticket, pan. I was assigned to 1st but I didn’t win the rings, Division, Deck Division in which was fine with me. turret #1, operating big 16We did a lot of letter inch guns.

I was born on a farm in I was onboard the USS the Holman area and had writing on Sundays. You’d Colorado for 27 months. 10 brothers and sisters. write a letter and mail it onMost of my days were There was a lot of disci- board, but you didn’t know routine, filled with main- pline in our home, so be- when our ship would meet ing told what to do and livtenance duties and training. ing with many rules wasn’t a mail ship that would pick When they occurred, the a hardship to me. Some it up. Although the mail battles were unbelievably of the sailors had a tough we sent home was heavily horrific. At the harbor at Ti- time with that. I felt sorry censored, I wrote our ship’s location in the upper right nian, an island purportedly for those boys. hand corner of each enveunder U.S. control, shells started whistling overhead when we were lope and covered it with a stamp. When my waiting to drop the anchor. My friend, Ben- family got my letters, the first thing my sisjamin Matthews from Odessa, Texas, and ters did was steam off the stamp to find out I raced to turbine #1 to get away from the our location.

My mother sent me some cookies for barrage. I made it, but Benjamin was killed.

Christmas, but it was about March before I’ll always wonder why.

When we were onboard the ship, it was I got them. By then, they were just a bag an entirely different world for farm boys like of weevils. For something to do, I went onme. The saddest things I ever saw were the board one of those mail barges when they burials at sea. It would get me to thinking needed help. We sorted the bags by the that the parents of these boys whose bodies names of the ships. From there, they’d be were being dropped overboard didn’t even put on small boats to take them out to the

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When I was home on leave in 1944, my picture was taken with my brother, Erwin, on the banks of the Colorado River near Bastrop.

ships. The mail was stacked up and weevils were flying around. The smell was so bad that when we got back aboard the Colorado, we had to shower. It reminded me of the corncrib at home.

From a vantage point as a lookout on the USS Colorado, I had the opportunity to witness history when the Japanese signed the Instruments of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. That ceremony marked the official end of World War II. I didn’t realize the significance of the ceremony at the time.

After the war was over, our ship landed in Yokohama, Japan, which had been badly fire bombed. There were hardly any buildings standing. I went ashore in the third wave of sailors because my name started with “R.” I was standing on a street corner with two other sailors when a young Japanese soldier, who was probably in his early 20s, walked up to us and started talking in English. At the same time, young Japanese people began gathering nearby at a little hut made out of old rusted tin. There must have been about 50 to 60 of them. They would not make eye contact with us. If you looked at them, they looked the other way.

Then an elderly man rode up on a rickety bicycle that looked like it was going to fall apart at any minute. On each side of the rear wheel, he had a little cage-type of attachment that carried a five-gallon tin can.

He stopped and talked to the soldier who was visiting with us before opening the building. He then took those cans inside and banged the lids off. That’s when the smell of sardines hit me. There was rice in one can and sardines in the other. Out of nowhere it seemed, they all had little tin plates in their hands. Even the young Japanese soldier boy had one. The old man put a spoonful of rice on each plate and then added three or four sardines. Everyone would squash the mixture together. This appeared to be the equivalent of a Japanese

Veterans’ Voices

On the island of Ie, a soldier said, “If you want to see where the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in combat, walk down that trail.” When we did, we saw a barbed wire fence very much like those we have in Fayette County with some steps over it. There was no marker yet.

soup kitchen.

Suddenly, the Japanese soldier boy grabbed me, jerking me away from where I was standing. It startled me, but then I felt something roar past. It was a streetcar. He had pulled me out of the path of the streetcar.

The sailors with me said, “You were lucky. That streetcar was really going fast.”

When we got back onboard the ship, I told my two friends, “Don’t tell anybody that a Japanese soldier saved me from being hit by that Japanese streetcar. They’ll make a fool out of me.”

I never heard about the incident again, but it has always stuck in my memory because a month earlier, that young Japanese and I had been trying to kill one another.

Since we were no longer at war, his first instinct was to try to save my life when I faced possible death.

After I got out of the service, I met a girl named Irene Fisher at a dance at Ammannsville, Texas, in 1947. We were married on Flag Day, June 14, 1948. Our daughter, Carol Ann, married Richard Peters and they have one son, Ryan. They live in Austin, Texas.

The USS Colorado was scrapped more than 50 years ago, but we members of its alumni association, which was comprised of sailors and marines, continued to meet until April 2014. Only 15 of us attended the final reunion at Bremerton, Washington. I was glad to go and say goodbye.

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

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My “military” experience started when I was 15 years old. I joined the Texas Home Guard in my hometown of Woodville, Texas.

It was comprised of some young boys like me and old men who wouldn’t be going off to war because of their ages. We were each issued a 12-gauge shotgun. We went on maneuvers and marched, so if the enemy had attacked our East Texas town, we were prepared to protect its inhabitants. At the age of 16, I went off to Texas A&M University, but I didn’t do well because I was immature and had poor study skills. When I was 17½, I volunteered for the Navy before I flunked out of college.

I had hoped to become a pilot, but World War II was almost over and the Navy had all the pilots it needed. I was offered two options: go to officers’ school to become a deck officer or enter the fleet as a seaman. I later learned that at Guadalcanal, three sailors died in combat for every marine who died on the ground. Fortunately, I had chosen to enter officers’ school. I was sent to Midshipman School at Northwestern University in downtown Chicago. My marching experience with the Texas Home Guard, combined with what seemed like a miracle, enabled me to be commissioned as an ensign at the age of 18.

The captain of the Midshipman’s School wanted to graduate more reserve ensigns as had ever graduated as regular ensigns at Annapolis. To accomplish this goal, he could only flunk 12 men in our class of 300. Usually, at least a third of a class washed out. Ours was the last, his 25th class.

We were informed that class number 24, which had graduated immediately before us, suffered nearly 50 percent casualties serving as small boat officers at Salerno, Italy. Most of the members of my class became officers of small boats or ships that transported soldiers or marines onto the beaches in the South Pacific. I was saved from this duty because the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

I served as a line officer, possibly the youngest and the lowest ranking, on the USS Shoshone (AKA 65). It was an armed cargo carrier and troop transport which had a crew of 40 officers and 200 sailors.

I vividly recall one incident. After the USS Shoshone had unloaded cargo in the Bay of Armory, a port on the northern tip of

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Honshu on the island of Japan, a huge storm hit from the northwest. The force of the gale was so intense that the anchor began to slip and our ship was in imminent danger of going aground on the beach. When the skipper ordered the ship underway, the anchor chain was released with a buoy to mark it so it could be retrieved later. (Anchors and chains were costly items.)

For 10 days, the storm literally pushed our ship toward Seattle, Washington, which was our destination.

Two of the landing craft chained to the deck were lost over the side when their tiedown lines snapped from the constant abuse.

Another landing craft was left dangling over the starboard side of the ship. This extra weight caused the ship to be off balance.

When the winds hit the ship from the port side, it would shake and tremble as it rolled to the starboard side before beginning to right itself by rolling back to the port side. When our ship came back and reached center, it would list only a few degrees to port before beginning to again roll to starboard and go to shaking. With the “help” of the storm, we made our trip back to the U.S. in record time for a ship of our class. It was a very stressful trip.

When I was honorably discharged in the summer of 1946 after more than two years of active duty, I decided I had better go back to college under the GI Bill. This was a federal law passed in 1944 that provided veterans with cash payments for tuition and living expenses to attend university, high school or vocational education. This dyed-in-thewool Aggie entered the University of Texas to study business and law. By that time I was mature enough to make the most of the opportunity. My dad could not have afforded to educate all of us boys, so the GI Bill was a tremendous benefit.

Housing in Austin was scarce because of the number of veterans getting educated under the GI Bill. My dad bought a little house for about $4,700 where my two brothers and their wives and I all lived there until I got tired of sleeping on the couch and found other accommodation.

Looking back, I realize that God followed me around the world and blessed me time and time again. He has worked miracles in my life and I have been richly blessed.

Looking back, I am amazed that World War II was fought by a bunch of ordinary kids whose courage and patriotism were truly extraordinary.

I’ve witnessed God’s grace throughout my life. I was born September 1, 1926, the third of five boys. We were raised in Woodville, Texas. My brothers and I all served our country in World War II.

Veterans’ Voices

The Fayette County Record

I went to Houston in 1941 and worked in a shipyard for a little while until I joined the Army Air Corps on October 14, 1942, when I was 20 years old. I applied for gunnery school, but because I had worn glasses since I was a kid, they wouldn’t even talk to me.

I was assigned to the 68th Two-Engine Flying Training Group at Ellington Field near Houston, a training base for pilots. A lot of cadets went through there. Sometimes the field was full of airplanes.

I didn’t work on airplanes. I was in Supply. The mechanics who worked on the line would bring us the parts they needed replaced in order to fix the airplanes. We’d make out the paperwork and take the requisitions over to the big Supply group. That’s where my future wife worked and that’s how we met. Some of the parts were rebuilt and some of them were new. We’d bring back the parts to our station and notify the mechanics they could pick them up. We kept records on every piece. The mechanics were in a hurry a lot of the time.

Three of us worked in Supply – a Staff Sergeant, a Corporal and I - a Private. On the weekends, I worked in Clothing Supply.

We issued and exchanged clothing – new shoes, whatever they needed.

I got three-day passes pretty regularly while I was in the service. I hitchhiked

home because I didn’t have the money to ride a train. You would be surprised, but in those days, people picked you up right away. You’d barely walk out to the highway in the direction you were going and you’d be picked up right away.

At the end of the war, I was transferred to Fort Worth. I worked with a lieutenant taking in all the clothing that guys returning from overseas turned in. We issued completely new uniforms, etc. Most of what they brought back to us was worn out and they were happy with their new clothes.

Sometimes we’d have a pile of discarded clothes six feet tall. At the end of the week, we’d take it down to the big Supply group and turn it in. I stayed there until December 1945 when I was discharged from Randolph Field in San Antonio.

I went back to school at Fort Sam Houston at night under the GI Bill of Rights. I worked at several jobs, spending 22 years with McGuffie Co., of Cleveland, Ohio, which manufactured products such as putty and calking compounds, and 14 years with the U.S. Post Office. We lived in the Spring Branch area on the west side of Houston until 2003 and then retired in Flatonia.

My parents had a farm near Praha, so we’d come down to the farm with the kids, Carol (Barta) and Stephen and knew this is where we wanted to live.

I was just a country boy, so going into the service was a valuable experience. I learned a lot of lessons about discipline, fairness and honesty that have stayed with me throughout my life. I was proud to serve my country and in the process, I learned to be a better person.

I was born in September 1922 and raised in Lavaca County between Flatonia and Moulton. I had one older brother, Fred, and one sister, Mary. We attended a one-room school about two miles from home called Cedar Spring through the seventh grade.

I didn’t finish high school until after I got out of the service.

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I met my future wife, Merlene Guidry, from Tucson, Arizona, when she worked at Air Corps Supply at Ellington Field near Houston where I was stationed. We were married at the base on June 17, 1944 – another of those wartime weddings. My mother was able to come to the service. We celebrated our 70th anniversary last year.

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I remember too well the long trip my ing instrument training just for the experifamily made to Halsted in Fayette County in ence. We had to check out a parachute eve1933 during the Depression. I was 13 years ry time we went up. I would put it on but I old when we piled everything we owned on didn’t know how to use it! Thank goodness, a wagon pulled by a team of mules. Anoth- I didn’t need to.

On one flight, the instructor told a er team of mules was tied to the back of the wagon. We spent the night camping on a lot young pilot to slow the engines, but when at a dipping vat near Ledbetter. The second he did, the aircraft started falling. It scared day, we made it to the farm my parents had the daylights out of me! When he put the aircraft back on the normal speed, though, rented at Halsted.

I went to work for August Gau right it just took off again. Once you got used across the road. He had a lot of cows and to it, it was normal. It was really exciting the cotton gin. I milked 12 cows in the when we flew over Alabama and Georgia at morning and 12 cows at night, seven days a 13,000 to 20,000 feet.

The pilots who were training had to week. It amazed me that the cows knew in be careful not to get lost. I which stall they were supremember once the young posed to stand. I made $20 pilot looked at his instrua month. ments and said, “Well, it’s I married Bessie Baca about lunchtime. I wonder in 1941. I was drafted in where we are?” He checked July 1943 when I was 23 his radio compass and right years old and inducted at away got a signal. It didn’t Fort Sam Houston in San take 20 minutes before we Antonio before taking bawere coming into the landsic training in Salt Lake ing strip at Gulfport.

City, Utah. I took techniBessie came to Gulfcal training at Amarillo in port and got a place off airplane maintenance. I base. I got permission to was stationed at Gulfport, live off base with her. It was Miss., at Gulfport Army all right for them and me, Air Field where I worked I was born in Coupland, on B-17 bombers for the Williamson County, Texas, too. I got to come home to Air Corps Flying Training in 1920. I couldn’t speak Texas on leave a couple of Command. Our job was to any English until I was five times. We had ration stamps keep 72 bombers ready and years old. German is what for tires and gasoline. We available for flight 24 hours we spoke at home. I went had a 1934 Chevrolet and a day, seven days a week for to the school at Coupland coming home once we had the last phase of training until I finished the sev- a flat out in the swamp. The for pilots who were being enth grade. I liked going highway patrol came by to school and was always and helped us jack up the shipped overseas for their ready to study. car in the dark and change tours of duty. We were told the tire with the light from our work was just as important as those pilots who would be on the a flashlight.

On another trip, I had a pass that didn’t front lines.

The B-17 was a very good aircraft, allow me to go beyond Houston. My wife among the best, in fact. It was well designed took the MKT train to La Grange, but I and very efficient at dropping bombs on the had to be careful that the Military Police enemy. I crawled all over it from the tail to didn’t pick me up, so I got out on the highthe nose just to see how it was put together. way and thumbed my way to La Grange. I It fascinated me when I crawled up in the caught a ride with a fellow I knew by the nose and laid there on my belly just taking name of Havemann from West Point. Besin the sights. I’ve always liked things like sie couldn’t believe her eyes when she got off the train at the station in La Grange and that.

I went up several times with pilots tak- I was there to meet her.

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Throughout my life, when I was determined to do something, I did it! I made up my mind early on to find ways to better myself. Don’t let life get the better of you.

After the war ended, I was transferred to Portland, Oregon, and Bessie came home to La Grange to wait for me. To go up there, I boarded an old, slow moving train in Houston that was so cold the pipes froze up on it. It was warmer in Portland than it was on that train in the South.

We were just laying around in Portland waiting to get out of the service, so they gave us permission to start up the AT-7s on the strip for something to do. They were small, two-seaters. We had to be careful, though, when we put the chocks under the wheels and made sure the tail section was in order. The discharge from the engine would force so much air that it would raise the tail up and make the front go down and there

Veterans’ Voices

you’d go - chopping a hole in the runway.

I was discharged at Tyler, Texas, in February 1946. I thumbed my way to Waco and then caught the train home to La Grange.

By that time, my parents were living in Houston. I have enjoyed spending the rest of my life in La Grange. I had the thrill of starting my own business, Reeders Air Conditioning, after working for Adamcik’s for 22 years. I wouldn’t have had it any better. The two great losses in my life have been the death of my wife, Bessie, and our only child, Kenneth Wayne, who died on May 25, 2014. Cancer took his life at only 67 years of age.

Mr. Reeder died on March 1, 2015.

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

11

There were 11 kids in my family. I was the second youngest.

When I was 16 years old, I had to get out and make my own living, so I went to work on a dairy at Addicks, Texas, near Houston, for two years.

Then I got work at another dairy near Cypress for two years. It wasn’t easy. We got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and worked about 14 hours seven day a week for $4 a week. I got room and board, though.

I came back to La Grange because I knew it was only a matter of time until I was drafted.

I went to work for the Austin Bridge Co., which was rebuilding the bridge over the Colorado River that goes from downtown to the Riverside Addition. There’s an interesting story that goes with that.

I was in the last car that went over the bridge before it collapsed in a flood. I also worked as a carpenter for Otto Pohl Construction.

I was 21 years old when I got my draft orders in 1941 before war was declared. I was supposed to serve for one year. The Army sent me to Wyoming where it was 30 degrees below zero in the winter. I got the mumps there.

When the war broke out, a sergeant came in and asked me if I was well enough to go to California.

I knew it was about 70 degrees in California, so I was happy. I got on the train, but the deal turned sour because I came down with rheumatic fever. I didn’t know anybody for something like 42 days.

The Army contacted my sister to make arrangements for my funeral, that’s how bad off I was. But I made it.

I worked as a quartermaster providing clothing and supplies for the troops going overseas.

We had big warehouses that were full.

The Army didn’t send me overseas because I’d had rheumatic fever, but my three brothers, Loydie, Callie and Buck, all served in Europe.

The Army decided it needed a quartermaster in Tooele, Utah, at a German prisoner of war camp. For

12 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

some reason, they thought I spoke German.

My parents came from Germany, but they tried to speak English as much as possible at home.

That’s why I only knew a few words of German. So when that didn’t work out, they sent my butt back to California. That didn’t hurt my feelings.

While I was in Utah, I bought a 1929 Chevrolet from a lieutenant. He put some new tires on it, so I drove it back to California. That was about 1,000 miles, a lot of it through the mountains. Sometimes I had to back up those roads – no, really. I swear that’s true.

I was stationed at an Army base called Camp Stoneman at Pittsburg, Calif., as an Assistant Supply Sergeant T4 when President Roosevelt died.

That was bad news.

When I came home on leave, I took my niece, Mable (Tiedt) Nichols, to a dance at Swiss Alp. There, I met a girl named Lillian Janak from Holman.

She was working at Reiker’s Café in La Grange.

She was such a nice girl that I fell in love with her and we decided to get married. She was Catholic and I was Lutheran, but her parents didn’t say too much.

We got off the train in Temple, Texas, and found a judge who married us.

The next day, we got back on the train and went back to Pittsburg, Calif. She got a job at a 5¢ and 10¢ store and I moved off base to be with her.

There was big excitement when the war ended. I was happy, but I had it so good there in California.

My wife was with me and then Edgar Jr. was born. My sergeant wanted me to stay in the Army. He offered me a big promotion, but I decided not to.

I bought a 1936 Chevrolet from a farmer out in the country and fixed it up until it ran real good.

When I was discharged, we put our son, Edgar Jr., in the back seat on a blanket and took off for Texas – a 2,000-mile drive. We made it home to La Grange on December 24, 1945.

I served in the U.S. Army for a total of four years and two months.

While I was stationed in Utah, I bought a 1929 Chevrolet with a rumble seat in the back for $100 that I fixed up. The building in the background is the barracks where we lived. The huts were built fast and each housed eight men. Do you notice I don’t have any stripes on my coat in this picture? I was a private first class at the time.

They sometimes call us boys who served in World War II “The Greatest Generation.”

We appreciated everything that America stood for. I do know that.

I was born April 17, 1919, on a farm in Rutersville. I was baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran Church there and went through the fifth grade at Rutersville School. Then our family moved to a farm at Halsted for two years. I’m pictured with my new wife, Lillian, whom I married while I was in the service.

Veterans’ Voices

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I graduated from Jefferson Davis High School in Houston when I was barely 16 years old. Since I was too young to do anything else, I went to Southwestern Bible School Institute in Waxahachie, Texas.

When I came home to Houston, I went to work for Hughes Tool Company. All my friends had already left to go in the service so in June 1945, another kid and I went down and joined the Navy. I was 17 years old, but all I needed to get in was my birth certificate.

Ten of us left Houston going to San Diego, California. They put me in charge of a bunch of guys a whole lot older than me, so I handled all their papers and meal tickets.

After we got through boot camp, we were sitting outside the barracks when a lieutenant walked out and said, “When I call your name, fall out over here.” There were 12 of us. “You boys have been transferred to the Navy Seabees. You are no longer Navy.”

They sent us to Camp Parks near Oakland, California, where we went through

three months of commando training. It seemed as if the Marines were trying to kill us because we were sailors, but we survived.

After we got out of school there, they put us on a train to eventually ship out to the Aleutian Islands.

About an hour or an hour and a half out of Oakland, the train pulled off on a side track where we sat for three days.

Finally, a lieutenant told us, “Your orders have been changed. You are going to Fort Hueneme, California, to take over a Marine base and make a Seabee training school out of it.”

We had to completely rebuild the base.

They had a little canister and when you walked by, you picked out a number. Whatever number you picked was the piece of heavy equipment you were assigned to operate. I picked “dump truck.”

When I went over to where 13 dump trucks were lined up, each one of them was numbered.

The lieutenant said, “All you boys go

On account of my last name, my nickname in the service was “Little Admiral.”

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pick a dump truck.”

I just stood there because I knew no one was going to pick number 13.

The lieutenant said, “It looks like you’re going to have to drive that number 13.”

I told him, “It’s just another number.”

He said, “I don’t suppose you’re afraid of black cats walking under your ladder either.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I am not superstitious.”

“I think I’ll put you in charge of all the dump trucks,” he replied.

I drove a dump truck for two weeks until at muster one morning, the lieutenant said, “Can anyone here type?”

I had taken typing in high school and could type about 60 words a minute, which was pretty fast. Another kid also knew how to type, so we were both sent for a test, which I won. I was transferred to the port director’s office and that’s where I spent the rest of the war.

We were stationed right out of San Diego, California, and when the announcement was made that the war had ended, all the

servicemen were turned loose for the day. It was pandemonium: people running and hollering and celebrating.

When we enlisted, we signed up for two years or the duration of the war. They said they would discharge us early if we signed up for four years in the Naval Reserves, so that’s what I did.

After I was placed on inactive duty, I came back to my hometown of Houston in August 1946. Korea came along and they froze my time, so I ended up spending five years in the Reserves.

I worked for Hughes Tool Company for 41 years before I retired.

In 1969, I went to work part time for the Harris County Sheriff’s Department and later full time after I retired from Hughes Tool.

Then I went to the Precinct 4 Constable’s Office in North Harris County, before coming to Flatonia as police chief in 1987. I retired in 1994 and since have served several terms on city council, including one term as mayor.

I’m a native Houstonian, raised in North Harris County. Back then, you could start school if you lacked just a few days of the cut-off date. Since my birthday was in November, they let me start school two months before I was six years old. We moved around a lot and I ended up being two years younger than everybody in my graduating class.

Veterans’ Voices

FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

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We dug in on the top of the hill when On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, I was gassing up my 1936 Chevro- the rains started. It poured day and night. let at George Adamcik’s Service Station on Our foxhole was like a funnel. Every eventhe Bluff, getting ready to go back to Hou- ing before we could get a little rest, we’d ston where I was attending a sheet metal take our steel helmets off and use them to school. The news came over the radio that dump out the water and mud so we could Pearl Harbor had been bombed and war squat down to lean against the bank. There were three soldiers in our foxhole and we was declared.

When I finished that school, I went out took turns keeping watch.

Every day, we had to go out on patrol. to San Diego to work at a factory called Consolidated Aircraft for two and a half About a squad of soldiers would go back years. Every time I would get a draft notice, behind the line, a good mile or so, to get the company would get me a deferment be- rations and ammunition. A jeep or a halftrack couldn’t get through the mud. cause I was doing necessary war work.

Partway up the hill was the shell of a By the summer of 1944, the war was getting more and more iffy. They needed truck that had taken a direct hit. All that was men badly, so I told my bosses to turn me left was some sheet metal scattered around. loose. I reported to the draft board in La The Japanese were probably about 100 Grange in July 1944. I was inducted on yards ahead of us. There were some dead September 20, 1944, at Fort Sam Houston bodies filled with maggots that smelled. It in San Antonio. From there, we were sent to was awful.

Sometimes when we looked off in the Camp Hood at Killeen, Texas, for 17 weeks of infantry training. We got a 30-day leave distance, we could see what the Japanese before we shipped out to Fort Ord in Cali- were doing, but we were told, “Hold your fornia and later Fort Lewis, Washington. In fire, hold your fire.” Even though the JapaFebruary 1945, we had 30 days of jungle nese knew we were up there, we didn’t want survival training at Oahu, Hawaii because to give away our position.

Our Navy did a good job of keeping we were going to the South Pacific. They sent us to Saipan before we left for Ok- flares above us all night long. The flares would float down very slowly on a parainawa in mid-April 1945.

On May 7th or 8th, our regiment moved up on the frontline to fill a gap on a designated hill that was occupied by the Japanese. I think it was number 86; they didn’t have names at that time.

The 27th Army Division was on our left and the 1st Marine Division was on our right. When Alfred Harbers John Muras we got within about 100 yards, we started to Two Friends Didn’t Make it Home get Japanese sniper and When I was stationed in Camp Hood at Killeen, Texas, for machine gun fire. They infantry training in the fall of 1944, I’d give five boys from called in our artillery and Fayette County rides home on the weekend in my 1937 the first rounds fell short, Chevrolet. They were: Clarence Stanzel of Schulenburg; landing among us. EarOtto Steinhauser of Flatonia; John Muras of Mullins Prailier shelling had knocked rie; Edward Kallus of Swiss Alp; and Alfred Harbers of Plum. At about the same time I was wounded John Muout craters about two feet ras and Alfred Harbers both were killed in action in the deep, so we curled up in Asia/Pacific war. They were so young; those boys had a those shell holes until lot of living to do. I still think about them and wonder why our artillery got word to I came home and they didn’t. correct its range.

14 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

During the Depression, I worked for a year and a half for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), at Humble, Texas. The last eight or 10 months, when I was an assistant cook, they brought out a chef from the Rice Hotel in Houston to teach us. I remember him telling us, “We’re going to get in a war.”

I was born in November 1922 and raised on a farm in the Cedar community, eight miles west of La Grange. We lived with my grandparents, Julius and Mary Nollkamper. I attended Cedar School for all seven grades. My grandfather raised a lot of sheep and we milked cows to sell milk and cream. When I was old enough, I helped him run the farm.

chute. It wasn’t daylight, but it was the next best thing. If they were close enough, we could see the Japanese lying on their bellies, waiting until it was dark enough to sneak up to us with hand grenades, but we could always hear them. Their grenades were not like ours where you pulled a pin.

Ours were spring loaded like the hammer on a rifle. The hammer would fly up and hit the detonating pin. Then you had about five seconds to get rid of it. A Japanese grenade, which had an exposed detonating cap right on top, would usually go off in three seconds. The Japanese would hit the grenades on their helmets and when you’d hear that clink, clink, sound you knew what was coming.

On the night of May 26, 1945, the Japanese were really shelling us. I was on watch and my squad leader and another boy were taking a nap in our foxhole. At 2 o’clock in the morning when it was time for me to get some rest, I woke up our squad leader. We held a poncho over our heads to shield us from the rain and smoked a cigarette before he took over the watch. I was dead tired, so I scooped some water and mud out of our foxhole, crouched down, leaned back and just passed out.

The next thing I knew, I was lying face down in the mud among old pieces of sheet metal from the skeleton of the burned out Japanese truck about 25 or 30 feet from my foxhole. A piece of the metal was hurting my eye. My leg was broken and my back hurt. It was 5 o’clock in the morning on May 27, 1945.

The Japanese had dropped an artillery shell in our foxhole, blowing us clear out of

it. I started calling for help. The aids found me and gave me a shot of morphine. They got some guys to carry me out, very nearly a mile, before they could come with a jeep.

I was treated at an aid station on Okinawa behind the front lines for three days and four nights before I was flown to a field hospital in Guam. I didn’t get to see the plane because it was dark. I think it was a C-48.

They patched us up there and did some surgery on me. I was there almost four months with my left leg broken between the knee and the ankle, as well as a back injury. My leg bone was shattered. They took all the loose bone out and put traction on it, trying to get the parts of my leg to knit back together. They also drilled a hole through my heel to pull my leg straight. My eye wasn’t damaged.

My squad leader was as lucky as I had been. He also had a broken left leg. We never found out what happened to the other boy that was in our foxhole. It was just as if he vaporized. He might have gotten scared and run, or he may have taken a direct hit from the shell.

I was in that Guam field hospital when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the war ended. There was a lot of shouting going on even though we were all bedridden.

Over the years, I had many grafting operations and have had to deal with the effects of my injury every day since May 27, 1945. I received a Purple Heart, which reflects that I was injured while serving my country. I married Ruby Byler of Muldoon on September 12, 1949. We’ll celebrate our 66th wedding anniversary this fall.

Veterans’ Voices

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

15

We young men were all very patriotic and wanted to get into the service.

I was scared to death the war would be over before I had a chance to put in my two cents worth. I was 17 years and one month old and had just graduated from high school when I enlisted in the Navy in May 1943. My dad signed for me because I was underage.

After I was inducted in Abilene, the Navy sent me to San Francisco. I was placed in a receiving pool and sent to the Coast Guard, where I served during the war.

From San Francisco, I went to radar school.

In fact, I like to say that I saw the war from a radar screen.

Because we were assigned to a ship that was not yet commissioned, we had to wait a couple of months before we went to sea on a troop transport in the Pacific that had 4,000 beds. (Later, I also was on a gunboat the size of a destroyer, for a very short while.)

Onboard ship, the group of men in my division included radarmen, radiomen, signalmen and quartermasters. I was a radarman, which might sound like a complicated job, but it wasn’t. Back then, relatively little was known about radar and the Navy tried to keep it secret but couldn’t.

We took turns operating an air search radar machine and a surface search radar machine looking for airplanes in the sky and ships on the water. Four men were on duty at a time. We would switch off from the radar machine to the plot table and back again. On the surface search, we could see

out to about 12 miles. At that point, the curvature of the earth put ships out of sight.

We had a system called IFF – Identification Friend or Foe. By turning a switch on your radar machine, you could pick up a signal from another ship. It would put a little break in the time baseline showing it was a friend.

If you didn’t get that little break in the time baseline, then you knew it was enemy.

At times, we would have a goodly number of ships around us, some were friends and some were foes. We kept track and reported range, bearing and speed of the airplanes and ships to the bridge.

However, most enemy operations were in the air. If a Japanese observation plane came into our space it was usually just plotting information about who we were.

Our ship seldom fired its guns because we weren’t there to fight. We were there to move troops, although we didn’t actually have much contact with them.

When the war was over in Europe in May 1945, we were sent over to bring troops back to the Pacific. On one trip, we went through the Pacific and the Atlantic to England where we picked up 8,000 engineers and carried them to the Pacific. The troops slept in shifts, so half of them were below deck at all times.

They had breakfast about 9 or 9:30 and then they’d line up for supper. The line would go around the ship several times. We got two meals a day, but that was not a problem. If I recall correctly, it took about 90 days from the port of Bristol-Avonmouth, England, to reach Manila in the Philippines.

I’m at the far left on the back row in this group of the sailors in my group onboard ship.

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I was born in Abilene, Texas, in April 1926, and went to school there. I was just a 15-year-old kid when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. Being from West Texas, I’d never seen a bay or an ocean before I joined the Navy.

When I hear that we’re celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, I say to myself, “I hate to think I’m that old.” Other times, I’ll hear a discussion about World War II and it will hit me, “I was part of that.”

We got into a really big typhoon in the North Pacific right at the end of the war.

It was a harrowing experience because the waves were huge. It hit Okinawa head-on, carrying huge ships up on the beach. I’ve always said that the wind speed was 225 mph.

That seems awfully strong compared to the hurricanes we have in the Atlantic, but in the Pacific, a longer stretch of open warm water allows a storm to pick up air speed. We were out of the high wind in less than two days, but the clouds and rain lasted for 17 days in the storm area where we were.

I had one leave in early 1945. When I returned home to Abilene, my father, James Clements, took me to join VFW Post #2012 in Abilene. We were the first father-son members. My dad had been a member of that post since returning from serving in the Infantry in France and Germany during World War I.

Although we didn’t see it, the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, took off from a little island called Tinian not far from our ship. We got the news about the bomb and the Japanese surrender in little bits and pieces from our guys in the radio shack. There was no big announcement that I remember.

After the war ended, almost immediately we started bringing troops back from the Philippine Islands to the U.S., a 17-day trip to San Francisco.

Although I had enough points to get out of the service when the armistice was declared, they kept me on because troop transports still had a lot of work to do. Finally, I was mustered out in 1945 at the old naval destroyer base at Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans.

After the war, I went to college under the GI Bill and graduated from HardinSimmons University in Abilene with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology.

I spent most of my time in the service on a troop transport ship, the USS General A. W. Brewster (AP-155).

Veterans’ Voices

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

17

In October 1942, I volunteered for the U.S. Navy Air Corps and spent the next two years overhauling Pratt & Whitney airplane engines at Alameda Naval Air Station across the bay from San Francisco, California. I’d spent the previous two years working on the same 1,250-horsepower engines at Precision Aeromotive in Houston, after I graduated from Milby High School. In 1944, I transferred to Fleet Air. I was sent to gunnery schools in California before deployment to the South Pacific where I was assigned to the VPB-23 Patrol Squadron, nicknamed the Black Cat Squadron. The nickname was chosen because many missions were flown at night, so our planes were painted a flat black color. We flew the Consolidated PBY Catalina. These amphibious aircraft could set down on land or water.

There were 15 planes and 12 crews in the Black Cat Squadron. Each flight had a nine-man crew: patrol plane commander pilot and first pilot, navigator, two radiomen, two ordnancemen and two machinist’s mates. As plane captain, I was responsible for the physical airplane and its enlisted men.

The PBY wasn’t sleek, shiny or fast, but it saved the lives of many airmen in Navy air/sea rescues nicknamed “Dumbo” missions. A PBY pilot would bring his seaplane in low and slow to land on the water. He then would taxi alongside a downed airman, pull him aboard and fly him out of harm’s way. We participated in this operation on Midway, Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, Ulithi and Palau. It was always gratifying to save a man’s life.

Several times on these missions we hit large ocean swells that caused rivets to pop out of the aircraft’s hull. We carried a supply of regular yellow pencils which were a perfect fit to plug the holes.

The Navy ordered us to stop landing in the open sea in the last quarter of 1944 because there had been too many serious accidents. From then on we were instructed to radio in the coordinates of the sighting of a downed airman so a ship could make the rescue. The PBY was more than a rescue aircraft though. With a 104-foot wingspan, it could carry one 1,000 lb. torpedo or a special torpedo called “fido” under the port wing, which could home in on noise made by submarines. Under the starboard wing, the PBY could carry four bombs, each weighing 500 pounds

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In 1944, when we were stationed on Eniwetok, a World War II pin-up girl, Carole Landis, performed in a USO Show for us.

It’s something I’ll never forget. We sat on “sea bags,” burlap sacks filled with sand, to watch the performance. I must have been impressed with Carol because I have no idea who else was with her!

I was born and raised in Houston. After I got out of the service, I went to the University of Houston on the GI Bill and earned a degree in Engineering. My business career was largely in managing large office buildings. I’ve lived in Fayetteville since 1999.

Dan Armstrong (left) and I had been best friends since we started school together at Broadway Elementary in Houston. When we met up in the South Pacific in 1944, it was great to see his familiar face again.

or other combinations of that weight, including a 650-lb. depth charge. Each PBY was equipped with two 30-caliber machine guns in the nose, two 50-caliber in the side blisters, plus one 30-caliber in the tail, as well as four single bunks, a stove, food, first aid kit, drinking water, cabinets and a head (bathroom). If a PBY was not loaded, she could stay in the air for 26 hours.

Using the PBY’s radar at night, our crew hunted Japanese submarines that had surfaced to charge their batteries. We also watched for Japanese subs coming in under the curtain of darkness to supply islands still controlled by the enemy, which our Navy had bypassed. We also gathered intelligence, such as the condition of runways and buildings on those bypassed islands. If we detected repairs, the pilot would radio

base and bombers were sent out to destroy the work that had been done. If necessary, we would drop bombs on small islands like Sorol. We also escorted carriers or landbased fighter aircraft on bombing and strafing raids against islands still under Japanese control. When the U.S. was assembling ships and support vessels in the Eniwetok Atoll for the invasion of Saipan, I wrote in my logbook that it looked like the whole fleet was there. I never knew there were so many ships in the world! While I was stationed on the island of Eniwetok, I wrote my mother that I was on a hot, dry island in the South Pacific. The Navy censors didn’t black out that description because I wasn’t being specific. My mother shared that news with the mother of my best friend, Dan Armstrong, whom I’d known all my life.

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He was in the Army Air Corps and I was in the Navy Air Corps. Dan’s mother passed along that information when he was sitting in a harbor on a ship with a B-29 squadron that was forming for the invasion of Saipan and the bombing of Japan.

Dan looked over at the island of Eniwetok and said to himself, “If there’s a hotter or drier island in the South Pacific, I don’t know where it would be.”

He got hold of the Red Cross, was able to confirm that I was on Eniwetok and received permission from his captain to come over and spend three days with me. Later, when we went to Saipan, I stayed with Dan for two days. That was where we got our first Japanese bombing. It was a small world even in the South Pacific.

Saipan was quite a sight. When it was occupied by the Japanese, they had only narrow, muddy roads. Our Seabees worked round the clock to build runways and large two-lane highways out of crushed coral through the mountains to accommodate hundreds of trucks, etc.

At Tarawa, I saw the aftermath of the battle in which 978 Americans were killed and another 2,188 wounded. It seemed hard to understand that so many men were killed or wounded to take such a small island.

Of all my experiences in the Pacific, memories of little gooney birds – albatrosses – on the Midway Islands still make me smile. The young birds had only a few feathers, but an abundance of grey hair.

They were so ugly they were cute. The adult birds were white with a wingspan of five to six feet. Mom and dad gooney birds would show their offspring how to flap their wings. After that, the youngsters seemed to have only one ambition in life and that was to fly. When we would start up our plane’s engines, the little gooneys, along with mom and dad, would come running to get behind us using the strong wind the propellers produced. They would flap their wings and pound the earth with their little feet straining and jumping up and down. We would rev the engines to check things out before we took off on a mission, which got the little ones so excited. Their little feet would be going so fast that many times both would come off the ground at the same time. Then they would tumble back and fall flat on their backs. In a few seconds, though, they would be at it again. Every time we went to our plane, here the gooney birds would come, waddling up to meet us. I guess they eventually mastered the art of flying.

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

19

I am pictured standing at left with the members of our crew in front of our B-17 bomber. Although we flew the day before and the day after D-Day, we were not part of the actual invasion.

All the guys at school were talking about joining the Army Air Corps except me in December 1942. My buddy talked me into going with him to Roanoke where he planned to enlist. Almost before I knew it, I went through all the screenings. Then I was told to raise my right hand and I was duly sworn into the Army Air Corps.

What’s ironic is my buddy, who was so gung ho, was turned down because he was

20 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

colorblind.

After intense training at a number of U.S. air bases, I was transferred to England where I flew 35 bombing missions on a B-17 Flying Fortress from Knettishall, a village near Cambridge.

Excerpts from letters I wrote to my parents provide some insight into my service.

August 9, 1944 – I have not shot down any Nazi planes. In fact, I have never fired

a shot at one. There seems to be a great scarcity of Nazi planes as they very seldom make an appearance in the sky. Whenever they do appear, our fighter plane escort shoots them down before they can get close to the bombers. Anywhere from 12 to 25 planes fly in a group. When we go on a big raid such as Berlin, Munich or Leipzig, we usually fly in a wing formation, consisting of three or more groups. The whole time

Veterans’ Voices

we are flying to the target, I can see all the planes in the three groups. We see many groups either going to or coming from various targets. In other words, the deeper you go into Germany, the more planes you see. I would say that I see on an average of 300 to 400 planes on every raid. I don’t know how many combat hours I have so far, but I think it is about 100.

See Hild, next page

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Continued from previous page August 20, 1944 – A practice mission is run exactly like a regular mission, only on a smaller scale and at a lower altitude, usually 8,000 to 10,000 feet. A certain target – usually a city – is designated. We form in a regular group formation and fly to the target, but instead of dropping bombs, they take a picture of the place the bombs would have hit had they been dropped. Most of our bombing is done around 25,000 feet. As soon as the bombs hit the ground, a camera takes a picture. That is how we know what we hit. If clouds completely cover the ground, the bombing remains unobserved until a fighter plane flies over and takes pictures. We made a few missions over to France to try to help the Infantry out a little.

August 29, 1944 – We finally got around to flying missions again and they really picked a long one for us. We were in the air for more than eight hours. What do you think about the fall of Paris?

August 30, 1944 – Certainly sorry to hear that Grandpa died. My commission finally came through. I was a Second Lt. last Monday.

September 1, 1944 – Our crew is now stationed at a secret field doing secret work.

We will only be here a couple of weeks, so if I don’t mention in my letters that I am flying missions, you will know that I’m not just loafing around.

September 5, 1944 – We haven’t been doing anything that I can tell you about, so there is very little for me to write. Am enclosing a snapshot of me on my bicycle.

October 3, 1944 – I didn’t fly today because the pilot is having a little trouble with his sinuses. Our crew will be grounded until his sinuses are OK again. I hope this won’t take too long because I am anxious to get my missions completed.

October 9, 1944 – I received the package containing the hat, washcloths, soap, shaving lotion and powder. Everything was in fine shape and the hat was just what I wanted.

October 16, 1944 – I went on a mission yesterday morning, the first in a few weeks. The weather was bad over Germany, so we flew a practice mission. A mission is scheduled for tomorrow. We have to supply our own sheets and pillowcases, but so far, I have been sleeping between blankets. I decided that in case I am here at Christmas, I would like to sleep between sheets that night. Do you think I’m nuts?

October 27, 1944 - Flew another mission yesterday and was all set to fly another one this morning, but it was called off just

The Fayette County Record

In 1969, I was hired to design and engineer the Fritsch Auf subdivision and built a weekend home there because we liked the people and the area so much. We eventually retired near La Grange in 1988.

I was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1923, grew up in Newport News, Virginia, and graduated from high school in Norfolk.

When I entered the service, I had one year of college at Virginia Tech. After I got out, I went back to college on the GI Bill to earn a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Civil Engineering.

In August 1944, Major Glenn Miller (center) and his orchestra came to entertain us at our field. Afterward, he christened our plane Moonlight Serenade after a song he had written.

Then we took turns having our pictures taken with him.

before take-off time because of the weather.

I must close now and get some sleep because we will probably fly in the morning.

October 30, 1944 - We didn’t have any celebration in honor of Columbus Day, unless you would call dropping a few more bombs on Germany a celebration. I think I mentioned in a previous letter that I heard a direct broadcast of the World Series.

November 3, 1944 – The cold weather doesn’t bother me when flying. We have heated suits that really keep us warm, even when the temperature is 40 or 50 below! We are never bothered with ice on the plane.

The wings and tail surfaces have deicers.

Went on another mission yesterday and was all set to go on one this morning, but the weather suddenly turned bad and the mis-

sion was called off.

November 10, 1944 – Flew most of yesterday although it wasn’t a mission, but today I got in another mission to Germany. Am slowly approaching my 35th mission, so it won’t be too long before I am home. Have received five letters from you since last Saturday, but I hope you will excuse me if I don’t answer them tonight. It is pretty late and I must wash before going to bed. We will probably fly in the morning, so I have to get in as much sleep as I possibly can. Three o’clock comes around in a very big hurry.

November 11, 1944 – We have our own chapel on the field, our own chaplain and two Masses every day: one at 9 in the morning, the other at 5:15 in the afternoon. We are permitted to go to Communion at either

Veterans’ Voices

of these Masses, and Father is in the briefing room so the Catholics can receive Communion before every mission.

November 12, 1944 - I expected to go on a mission this morning and they did wake me up, but immediately after the briefing, the mission was called off because of the weather. We had a good supper today – chicken, mashed potatoes, green peas, gravy and chocolate cake for dessert.

November 18, 1944 – Sorry I haven’t written the past few days, but I have been away from this base. We went on a mission last Thursday and when we returned, the weather was so bad that they wouldn’t let us land here. Instead, they sent us to … (censors removed the next page).

December 8, 1944 – Received a promotion today. I am now a First Lt. We may fly in the morning, so I will close now and get some sleep.

December 12, 1944 – Two years ago yesterday I enlisted in the Air Corps. I didn’t think I would be in the Army this long, but I can’t complain. I don’t mind it at all.

Western Union Telegram, January 5, 1945 - Completed tour. Be home soon.

Love, Joe A January 1946 Newport News newspaper clipping provides more details about my service: “For ‘extraordinary achievement’ during bombing attacks on Nazi war plants and military targets in support of Allied Ground Forces, First Lt. Joseph C. Hild, 21, of Newport News, has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFS). Lt. Hild is navigator on an 8th Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress. In addition to his DFS, he holds the Air Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters for his part in the battles with Nazi flak and fighters in the war’s toughest air theater. He is a member of the 388th bomb group, a unit of the 3rd Air Division. Lt. Hild took part in two attacks on military installations in Berlin. He flew seven times in attacks on oil refineries at Merseburg and took part in blows at other oil refiners at Magdeburg, Zeitz, Politz, Brux and Ludwigshafen, an ordnance plant at Stuttgart, an aircraft plant at Hanover and at Munich, railroad yards at Kiesel, Cologne and Frankfurt, and Nazi flying bomb sites in the Pas de Calais area of France.”

After I completed my 35 missions, I returned home from overseas. I was stationed at Ellington Field when I met my future wife, Doris Copeland, who lived in the Heights. We met at a Sunday afternoon tea dance in downtown Houston and were married in 1945, a wartime marriage that wasn’t supposed to last.

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I was drafted the day I turned 18. I was prepared for that because Hitler was trying to take over the world and had to be stopped.

Several of my relatives were already in the service, including my brother, T.J., who was a year and a half older than I. He was drafted a year and a half before me and joined the Army Air Corps. I was drafted into the Army, but then they gave me a choice and I decided on the Army Air Corps, too. I had helped build an Army Air Corps base in San Antonio. I didn’t want to fight in the Infantry. I wanted to see Hitler finished off. He had to be stopped.

I was sent to Miami Beach, Florida, for my basic training. The military had taken over the hotels because other training facilities in the state were overcrowded, so we were living there among big shade trees in a very comfortable climate. It was a pretty nice place!

I was eventually assigned to the 394th Bomb Group, 586th Squadron where I served throughout the war. At the time, our whole group - the 586th - was being formed.

Since I had driven vehicles and equipment on the farm, they gave me two choices: drive a jeep or tractor in the motor pool.

There was some question about whether I might do street work in the service since I had worked in construction before I was drafted. I chose driving a jeep. That’s what I did through all my time in the service. We left Miami Beach at a crucial point in the war when things were moving very fast. We were sent to an airfield in the northern U.S., but they didn’t have any place to put us, so they sent us to Ardmore, Oklahoma. Finally, we went to Battle Creek, Michigan for more basic training. We didn’t stay there too long.

By that time, I had been in the service a little less than a year. I was terribly seasick on the trip over to England. In fact, I was so weak I could hardly get off the ship, but I was very ready to get my feet on dry land.

At first, we were stationed in southcentral England at a nice new airbase. In fact, everywhere we went in England the bases were new. In the bomb group, transportation was a small unit. Most of the men in my outfit were servicing aircraft and we helped by providing them with transportation.

Starting in France, we pushed Hitler’s army back. That’s when we started moving into old bases previously occupied by the Germans. Most of these facilities were really messed up. We had to go in and rebuild the

22 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

I felt fortunate to be sent to basic training in Miami Beach, Florida, where we were housed in ocean front hotels because the Air Corp’s bases were full. A typical beach scene was lots of airmen in uniform and a few girls enjoying the sun, sand and palm trees.

runways and landing strips with big tractors and equipment. The men in our squadron sometimes lived in tents in apple orchards, but I never did. Since I was in transportation, I towed an 8-foot long trailer that had sides and a canvas roof behind my jeep. That’s where I slept.

You never knew how long you would be in one place. For several weeks, we stayed in underground compartments that the Germans had built. Up until that time, we hated the Germans and everything about them, but then we grudgingly admitted we had respect for those comfortable underground bunkers that were dry and secure. We even had battery lights at night; we were lucky.

By that time, Hitler was occupying almost all of Europe. He had gotten so strong, but when he began fighting Russia in the northern winter, they stopped him. There was a tremendous sense of urgency, but we didn’t know at the time that Russia was going to make such a strong stand. We were back behind Hitler’s forces in Europe making progress. As long as we were moving, there was a positive feeling among the men because we knew we were advancing.

My oldest brother, Elmer, was drafted and stationed in Europe with the Army, while I was serving in the Air Force. I got a chance to meet up with him there. Elmer served in the Occupation Force post-war.

It wasn’t long before we were able to come home after the war ended,. The bad part was the trip entailed getting on another

I was born on a farm near Devine, Texas, in 1923. There were 12 children in my family.

I was working in construction and living at home when I was drafted. When I returned from the service, my family had moved to Bishop, Texas. My dad was in the construction business full time by then.

After serving almost three years, I was discharged before I was 21 years of age. I stayed in contact with my buddies and regularly attended reunions in Corpus Christi, Texas. About 10 years ago, we took a trip as a group to Normandy, France, and visited some of our old stomping grounds.

ship and being deathly seasick for the duration of the trip. The ocean was rougher coming home than it had been going over. One storm was so rough that garbage cans were being tossed around.

We landed at Camp Miles Standish in Massachusetts. From there, we went by train and I was discharged at San Antonio. We all

were grateful to come back to the States. Although I enjoyed my time in the service, it was great to come home; it really was. I had dropped out of school before I went in the service, so when I came home, I went back to school. I earned both Bachelors and Masters degrees in Education. I spent about 40 years teaching and I loved it.

Veterans’ Voices

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

23

Our high school at Winchester had three grades in one classroom. One of our teachers, Mr. McLaughlin, told all seven or eight of us boys sitting in that room that before World War II was over, we would be called to serve in some branch of the service. He was right; each of us served our country.

I was drafted into the Army at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on July 17, 1945, when I was 18 years and three months old. From there, we were shipped to Fort Bliss at El Paso, Texas, for a 17week infantry and 90 mm anti-aircraft training as squadron replacements for the war in the South Pacific.

Our group was made up of boys just graduating from high school and men, some of them my dad’s age, who did not have a job that was deemed “contributing to the war effort.”

The older men found the physical training difficult. Our cadre (trainers) was made up of soldiers with battle experience in the South Pacific.

We were midway through basic training when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. When it was announced that peace had been declared one evening at chow time, we were one jubilant group of men, although we felt badly for the people of Japan.

It’s hard to explain the feeling I think everyone felt in his heart and mind. My prayers changed from hoping the war would end to giving thanks that the war was over. However, our training program continued and, upon completion, we received a 10-day delay en route leave, so I was able to come home.

We were all shipped to different Army bases in the U.S. One of my buddies and I were assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas.

When we arrived at the train station in Kansas City, the area was covered with snow, more snow than I had ever seen in my life.

As we got on a bus to go out to the post, my buddy from Beaumont arrived.

We stayed there for two weeks before being shipped to Camp Picket, Va., arriving on Christmas Eve. In January 1946, when a number of men in our group, including me, enlisted in the regular Army, we were offered a promotion and a 30-day furlough. Af-

24 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

I was born in 1927 on a farm near the community of Sand in Bastrop County, Texas.

In 1932, our family moved to a farm in the Winchester community of Fayette County.

I was 14 years old and attending confirmation class at Winchester Lutheran Church at the time Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

Because of my age, the war ended before I ever saw combat. I thank God that I and the other youth in the same age bracket were spared. I also thank God for the many brave men and women who were not spared and especially those who made the supreme sacrifice.

During a furlough between Fort Bliss, at El Paso, Texas, and Fort Riley, Kansas, I had a chance to come home to see my family at Winchester. It was an honor to serve in the military to defend our country. I grew up quickly in the Army because I’d never been away from home before.

terward, we reported back to Fort Sam Houston where we again were shipped to Camp Pickett. In fact, Camp Pickett is where I spent my 19th birthday. In the

meantime, our medical records were lost and we had to have all our shots again.

There were a lot of them.

In April 1946, we were sent to Jackson

Veterans’ Voices

Barracks in New Orleans before boarding a troop ship bound for the Panama Canal Zone. I was miserably seasick for most of the four-day trip.

When we disembarked on Easter Sunday, the Red Cross served us coffee and donuts. Then we boarded a train and were sent to Fort Sherman. Before we could be assigned to another unit, we had to spend two weeks in quarantine.

The word was out that the best assignment was the Mine Plant Weaver, a small ship that had placed mines in the Pacific and Atlantic on either side of the Panama Canal to protect it during the war. Since the war was over, the same ship was being used to retrieve the mines.

The last thing I really wanted to do was get back on another ship, but I decided to stay with my close friends, so I signed up.

On my first trip out on the mine planter, I got a little seasick, but after that, I was fine - no more seasickness.

We would go out about once a week to pick up 12 to 14 mines that were each filled with roughly 3,000 pounds of TNT. After we retrieved the mines, the infantry cleaned and repainted them. Then they were stored in case they should ever be needed again.

By this time, the Army was operating in peacetime mode. Career soldiers could bring their families to live on the base or nearby in a city.

On weekends, the crew of the Mine Plant Weaver would take the families of servicemen on sightseeing tours along the coast of Central America and the nearby islands.

My tour of duty was to end on February 23, 1947, but in the middle of December 1946, I received my discharge orders.

I was ready to go home by that time. First, we were shipped to New Orleans and then were sent by train to Fort Sheridan, Illinois.

That’s where I received my honorable discharge and a furlough on Christmas Eve. What a nice Christmas gift! I boarded a train on Christmas Eve at 11 o’clock, which arrived in Houston on the morning of December 26.

I took a bus to La Grange and then hitched a ride home to Winchester.

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I was inducted into the U.S. Naval Reserve in Houston and left Columbus on February 12, 1943, for boot camp in San Diego, California. I celebrated my 19th birthday on the train. After boot camp, I was transferred to the Fleet School of Music in San Diego. On May 3, 1943, I was assigned to the crew of the new Essex Class Aircraft Carrier named the USS Intrepid CV-11 in Newport News, Virginia, as part of the new ship’s damage control crew and a band member.

My main duties were to help keep our ship afloat by containing damage inflicted by the enemy. The ship’s band played for noon concerts, church services, burials, etc., when the Intrepid was out of harm’s way.

Entries from the last of three diaries I kept while on the Intrepid describe certain events during the final months of the war.

Dec. 20, 1944 – The (Golden) Gate Bridge came into view through the cold fog at midday or a little after. What a wonderful sight after a little cruise in the West Pacific.

Most of the guys had their gear packed a couple of days prior to getting in. Yep, we’re out for a couple of months, but the main thing is that we are going home for a while.

In a short time, I’ll be with the ones who care for me most.

Feb. 20, 1945 – Well, today farewell to the States again. Sure was good being back.

As Bill says, “We lived the whole year in those two months.”

March 20, 1945 – The Japanese know the (USS) Franklin is in serious condition and are determined to sink her. Last night, the group was under attack again with the Enterprise getting a suicide plane. The Franklin, being towed at 6 knots, is making very little time getting out of their tough spot. We are withdrawing slowly, at the same time protecting them from further assault.

March 22, 1945 – Today, we’re taking on ammunition and bombs from an ammunition ship and later will refuel from a tanker. Much to everybody’s disappointment, there was no mail. Tomorrow, we hit Nansei-Shoto – Okinawa. These are softening operations for the invasion, which is to take place April 1 – Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day! Last Easter, I was home on leave.

March 26, 1945 – Again the Japanese

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After I was discharged from the U.S. Navy, I entered the University of Texas and played in the Longhorn Band from 1946 to 1948. I earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Petroleum Engineering and spent my career in that industry. For many, many years, I also had the pleasure of participating in a number of German and Czech brass bands, most extensively in Kovanda’s Czech Band.

on Okinawa are getting it: bombs, rockets, bullets – even 16-inch shells thrown by battlewagons only 9 miles offshore. With all the bombs and rockets that are being dumped, it is hard to see where much could be left to oppose landing operations. Defense sounded off and on during the day, but GQ (an announcement signaling the crew to prepare for battle or imminent damage) ‘waited’ until 8:30 and again at 10 to ruin my 4 hours of sleep before my 12-toreveille watch down in the hole.

April 1, 1945 – Here it is Easter and a great day all the way around. It is 8:30 and the troops are beginning to pour ashore on the west side of Okinawa: first, three waves of assault troops and then equipment, tanks and other vehicles. This is supposed to be a bigger operation than the Normandy beachhead. At 10 a.m., special Easter services were held in the wardroom. I enjoyed it greatly, remaining for communion at the end of the service. The most notable addition to the service was a pair of vases with roses – artificial, of course - on each side of the altar.

Look closely at the band of the USS Intrepid CV-11. I am the sailor in the back row holding a trumpet in the back row with an identification arrow pointed at my head.

April 13, 1945 – Just learned of President Roosevelt’s death last night. What an inappropriate time for such a tragic event.

April 16, 1945 – This finds us off Kyushu again. About 1:30 p.m., the bosun’s whistle blared (GQ) - a noise weird enough to disturb the dead. I jumped up and before I got 10 feet, all the guns on my side (starboard) were roaring like mad. I knew a (enemy) plane was coming in close; I just can’t explain how scared I was fighting my way aft. Before I was out of the compartment, there was a sharp bang behind me, which may have been a shell from the strafing (gunfire from low flying enemy aircraft).

The suspense was terrible until our guns silenced with a dull thud of near miss. What a relief!

Got all squared away at Rep. III and all was more or less quiet for an hour or better. Then bogeys (unidentified aircraft, presumed hostile) began to move in again.

What time it was I can’t remember. I was so tired and scared all I had on my mind was my duty and carrying it out. Shortly after, the guns opened up again and I think that See Miller, Page 27

Veterans’ Voices

While I was growing up on a farm in the Buescher community just north of Columbus, Texas, music was a special part of my life. I was a member of the Columbus High School band in 1940 and 1941. In 1942, I played regularly with the Ellinger Chamber of Commerce Band and the Arnold Ilse Orchestra at area dances.

FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

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For some reason, I had always wanted to be in the Navy. I tried to join when I was underage, but my mother wouldn’t sign the papers. I was working in Houston for Brown Shipbuilding Company when my folks called to say I’d been drafted after I turned 18. My two buddies and I got a notice saying we had been transferred to the Army, but I said, “No, I’m going in the Navy.”

My buddies ended up in the Air Force, but they never did go overseas. I weighed 129 pounds when I had my physical. The doctor told me to go away and come back after I had eaten some bananas. I don’t know how many I ate, but I weighed in at 130 pounds when I went back, the minimum weight requirement.

I was inducted at the old post office building in downtown Houston in November 1942. The next day, the Navy shipped us to San Diego. The train was a coal burner and we rode with the windows open for much of the trip. When we got there, we were dirty and we smelled from the soot and the smoke. We went into training for six weeks in San Diego. They sent me to welding school on Treasure Island. The Navy had taken over Treasure Island and had a lot of different schools there. When we got finished, we got another rating and got leave to come home. Then we picked up a ship at another base and were supposed to go to Baltimore, but I ended up being transferred to a riot squad in Philadelphia because our ship wasn’t ready yet.

There’s a U.S. mint in Philadelphia and one night there was a train wreck. That train carried a lot of money, so we were called out to guard that train.

After that, our ship was ready in Baltimore. The USS Mindanao was a brand new auxiliary repair ship. It was commissioned on November 6, 1943, by a lady officer, who broke a bottle of champagne – probably cheap champagne – to christen it.

We sailed for the South Pacific. The crew on the Mindanao made engine and other repairs to damaged vessels. On November 7, 1944, our ship was anchored in Seeadler Harbor at Manus, 350 yards from a brand new ammunition ship, called the USS Mount Hood that was making its

26 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

When the USS Mount Hood exploded on November 10, 1944, at Manus in the Admiralty Islands of the South Pacific, every sailor onboard was killed. On our ship, anchored next to the Hood, 189 men were killed or injured. It was a terrifying experience.

I served in the South Pacific on a repair ship, the Mindanao, during World War II. It was decommissioned in 1947 and in 1980, it was scuttled to form an artificial reef in 85 feet of water off Daytona Beach, Florida.

first voyage. This was a staging area for the Philippines campaign in the Admiralty Islands. I went onboard the Hood one day to do some welding.

Three days later, November 10, 1944, we had finished our 8 o’clock muster and reported to our workstations when the Mount Hood exploded at 8:50 a.m. I was below deck. I remember striking a welding arc and we started rolling one way and then the other from the force of the blast. I wondered what the heck had happened.

The Mount Hood had three separate ammunition compartments. First one blew, then the second, then the third. Boom, boom, boom. Only 18 sailors out of a crew of 350 survived the explosion of the ship.

They had gone ashore earlier that morning to pick up orders, mail and stuff like that.

The Mount Hood blew up while they were on the beach. The Navy never really said what caused it.

The Mindanao listed 39 degrees and might have turned over if we had not had six wooden minesweepers anchored on our port side. The two inboard ones were crushed. A few days later, they stripped and beached them. They were finished. We were very lucky. Those minesweepers kept our ship from capsizing.

Of the 407 men in our crew on the Mindanao, 23 were killed and 166 injured.

What happened is that after the first blast, some sailors on our ship rushed out on deck. They were hit by flying ammunition.

Of course, there was so much damage on our ship that others were hurt that way.

After the explosion, the lieutenant who was in charge of all the repair crews handed me a tray of morphine shots and told me to administer them to the most badly wounded sailors. I remember coming upon the guy in charge of our repair crew. He had two arms and a leg shot off. I gave him three shots.

Then I was handed a carton of one-ounce liquor bottles to hand out to those in shock.

I didn’t even save one for myself.

For three or four days afterward, we were picking up bodies and pieces of bodies from the harbor, which was covered in oil. I tell you, when that ship blew, those

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people were flying all over the place. It was terrible.

The Mount Hood was sunk, of course.

They sent divers down in the harbor to check the wreckage. The force of the explosion had driven the ship down 50 feet. The only thing intact was a part of the keel, the bottom of the ship.

It took our crew a whole week to clean up the Mindanao. You could drive a pick-up truck through the holes caused by the explosion. A 10-inch shell went through the wall just above my bunk. If I had been in it, I wouldn’t be here now. They brought in a sea-going tug, listed the Mindanao over and the Seabees welded the holes in the bottom. We were under repair for about three months.

When we got going again, we went to a rest and recreation island for a week or two.

Then we went to Ulithi, where they were assembling ships for the Philippines campaign. We always followed 1,000 to 1,500 miles behind the main fleet for safety. When minesweepers or landing craft got hit, they would bring them back and tie them up next to us. Our whole crew would go onboard and find out what we needed to do.

See Hlavinka, next page

The Fayette County Record

Continued from Page 25

You could drive a pick-up truck through the holes on our ship, the USS Mindanao, after the ammunition ship, the USS Mount Hood, blew up. I was lucky to be below deck when the explosion took place.

Continued from previous page Our ship was anchored in the harbor protected by steel gates in the water so a sub couldn’t get in, but it could get close by. One of our crews had gone out to repair the USS Franklin, which was anchored outside the harbor. The very next day after they announced it would leave the next day for the States, a small Japanese plane dropped a bomb on it. The repair crew had to start all over. Two days later, when the ship was repaired for the second time, it was bombed again. We suspected a Japanese sub had been monitoring the Franklin’s communication and reporting news about the ship.

We were in Okinawa when the war ended. We were all so excited. You should have heard the whooping and hollering. All work stopped and we had a party. The galley put out a special souvenir menu I still have entitled, “Victory Day – Celebrating Victory Over Japan.” The commanding officer’s message on the inside front cover read, “It is indeed with a deep sense of gratitude that we celebrate the cessation of hostilities. In that same spirit, I extend to each member of my crew my thanks for your part in the Victory and hope that we may all soon again be reunited with our loved ones at home.”

The menu was chicken noodle soup, southern fried chicken, giblet gravy, butter whipped potatoes, creamed peas and carrots, buttered corn, carrot-raisin-apple salad, pickles, olives, hot rolls, butter, ice cream, apple pie, iced orange juice, candy, cigars and cigarettes. We had good food on the Mindanao. In fact, the soldiers and

The Fayette County Record

I was born in Scappoose, Oregon, in July 1923, but three years later, the lumber mill where my dad worked closed down. We moved back to East Bernard, Texas, where my mother grew up, and I grew up, too.

marines used to come to our ship to eat.

Finally, they had to limit it to your friend, your cousin, your brother-in-law, etc. A good friend of mine, Jerome Viaclovsky from Wallis/East Bernard, who was in the Marines, sent me a message asking if he could come over. He ended up being my brother-in-law after the war. I left the USS Mindanao in Shanghai, China. After the war, I served in the Reserves, and when the Korean War started, I was called back up.

I was finally discharged from the Navy in 1947, the same year I married Hattie Masek of Praha. God willing, we will celebrate our 68th wedding anniversary later this year.

was the most intense firing this ship has put out.

As firing reached its utmost intensity, there was a heavy explosion and I knew we were hit. Things began to move fast as we were required to take over repairs. The suicide plane and its 1,000-lb. bomb hit a little aft of the two last time. There was a 12x12-foot hole in the flight deck with manifold shrapnel holes scattered near it. The bomb exploded on the hangar deck or rather it went through the 3-inch armor in exploding – the steel armor was ground and crushed like wood. The fire resulting was bad until the sprinkler system was turned on. Everything is black from the fire and shrapnel riddles the hangar decks like paper. Only eight planes burned up, but more were damaged by the shrapnel flying freely all down the hangar deck.

Number III elevator is completely wrecked and the pit is full of water and other trash. I noticed a large piece of shrapnel had torn a 3x8-inch hole in the elevator shaft, which is about 10 inches in diameter and the thickness of the sides is about 2½-inches.

The elevator beams are all bent and warped – a real mess.

A crew began repairing the hole in the flight deck, as we had to land a returning strike (our planes). Before this got finished, another bogey was closing at about 18 miles. By this time, my nerves were pretty well on edge and, I might add, I wasn’t by myself in the least. All at once, the guns opened up again and this time, I was really scared. I could just feel the plane coming in and the suspense was unbearable. Simultaneously, there was another explosion, not quite as sharp as the last one. This plane came in from aft and port. Reaching Number II elevator or rather just off same, it exploded – another near miss that sprayed more shrapnel on the ship.

Casualties were being brought down aft so we headed to our compartment, which was dark as the power was off. All hangar hatches were down because of water, so we went forward, mustering at the office. The hangar deck was quite a mess, but the damage this time was more centralized than before. Casualties were 7 to 9 dead and 40 or so wounded, some seriously.

It was just beginning to get dark when the bogeys were moving in again. The Intrepid shot down three of the five planes. We received a couple of compliments from the Admiral to the effect that we can take it, as well as dish it out. One run was made on us; the torpedo whizzing by just 15 feet off the fantail and the plane coming so close the gun crew was ready to hop over.

April 17, 1945 – Today, everything is calm again and it is a great relief. This task group is refueling and now we’re on our way to Ulithi, escorted by some destroyers. At 3:30, the band played for burial services. The burial started with the band playing Lead Kindly Light, followed by scripture readings and prayers by the chaplains. After the committal, a volley and tapes, the service concluded with the beautiful hymn God Be With You Till We Meet Again. There were about 10 burials, I think.

May 1, 1945 – It is quite evident that we’ll wind up in Frisco as our orders carry us to Pearl Harbor and the Number III elevator can’t be fixed there. The Ajax (repair ship) is to finish the work it has started first.

May 8, 1945 – Today in itself warrants an entry even in our ship’s log: The war in Germany is over!!! The news reached the ship and was logged at 2:41. Now, the only thing left is the Japanese and I’m wondering what their reaction will be and how long it will take us to beat them? *** I was aboard the Intrepid for two years, the ship’s entire World War II service with the exception of one carrier strike just before the war ended. After leaving the Intrepid, I was transferred to the U.S. Navy School of Music in Washington, D.C. From there, I was sent to the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi where I received an honorable discharge in January 1946, after three years in the service.

Veterans’ Voices

FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

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In the summer of 1941, the United States had not yet entered World War II. I had finished two years of college, but I was restless. I knew I wanted to fly, so my dad took me to Dallas to enlist. Since the Army was wishy-washy, in October 1941, I joined the Navy as a Seaman 2nd Class.

While I was in basic training in Dallas, the U.S. entered the war. I remember watching the great migration of all our planes to the West Coast as they landed to refuel. Up until that time, the only planes we had seen were those being delivered to Britain under the “lend-lease plan.”

I was transferred to Corpus Christi, Texas, as an Aviation Cadet, wearing the same uniform as Midshipmen. There, I took different levels of training at three different fields: Cabaniss, Cuddihy and nearby Kingsville Naval Air Station. I hadn’t failed any of my flight school tags and a guy who went up with me asked if I’d like to join the Marine Corps. I said something nonchalant like, “That sounds good to me.”

I didn’t realize I was making a commitment, but it turned out I had.

When I graduated on July 31, 1942, I was 20 years old and a 2nd Lieutenant. I was sent to Santa Barbara, California, where I joined squadron VMF 222, called “The Flying Deuces,” and flew the new American fighter called the Corsair.

Through the rest of the war, the Corsair proved itself by escorting bombers on their missions in the Pacific War. Corsairs flew in groups of four on every mission. Each pilot had a wingman and when we were in enemy air space, we weaved back and forth to protect each other from the Japanese. We were flying what amounted to figure eights. While it burned a lot of fuel, it was the only protection fighters had at the time.

We flew so close together that we were able to use hand signals to communicate.

We couldn’t trust the AM radios because the Japanese could monitor the frequency.

Had we broken radio silence, we would have been hung and quartered when we returned to our base.

My first combat experience is still very vivid.

We sailed to the South Pacific and landed on Espiritu Santo Island, the rear base for America at the time. We picked up some new airplanes there and flew on to

28 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

We were on Okinawa when the war ended.

Guys got so excited they began shooting every weapon they could get their hands on. For at least an hour, the sky was alight with more bullets than I had seen fired all through the war. That was a stupid and dangerous stunt.

Guadalcanal, about 200 miles south. From there, we flew to Russell Island in the Solomon Islands where we had a few flights, but no combat. Next, we went to Munda, in the Solomon Islands, the closest U.S. airfield to the Japanese. Our troops had taken Munda a few months before and rebuilt the runway. Although it was still a small airstrip, it was usable. Later on in the war, it became a huge field. We were all excited to get to Munda because that’s where we were to start flying our combat missions.

We were living in tents off the runway.

If you wandered just a little bit away from the flight line there were many foxholes and bunkers, you would see the bones and skulls of Japanese soldiers. Munda was a smelly, horrible place. We had trouble keeping healthy. Most of us had dysentery from the food, which was pretty bad.

Our squadron, the 222, was assigned its first mission. Our skipper let it be known that all the experienced pilots in the squadron would go on the first flight and the rest of us would have to wait for another day.

I was born in Oklahoma City in 1921. When I enrolled at the University of Oklahoma after high school, I joined the ROTC and took a flight class. That course was a turning point in my life. I’ve never grown tired of seeing the world from the vantage point of the cockpit of an airplane.

Their mission turned out to be a disaster.

While weaving was a fighter plane’s only protection, it burned a lot of gas. Two of the four pilots ran out of gas flying back to Munda and crash-landed their Corsairs in the ocean.

Two or three days later, I had my first flight covering B-24s on a bombing mission to Kahili on Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea, which was a strong Japanese airfield. Our intelligence photographs showed there were about 100 planes there, mostly Zeros.

I hadn’t established myself on any of the flights yet and the executive officer of our squadron, who was a recent graduate of Annapolis, had just finished flight school himself. He had no combat experience, but, because of his rank, he was given the flight and I was assigned as his wingman.

We stayed in our proper, assigned positions, but the other pilots in our flight

Veterans’ Voices

had engine trouble or something and went back, so it was just the major and me. We were scissoring, our method of protecting each other. At that time, we were in the neighborhood of 30 or 40 miles south of Kahili traveling with the bombers.

Zeros were all over the sky. We could see about 60 or 70 of them just over our flight, but they weren’t aggressive. They wouldn’t attack until you made a mistake.

Then it was easy for them to pick you off.

I could see three Zeros right behind the major and another three zeros right behind me, but they were keeping their distance. They were not within gun range.

This wasn’t anything urgent until, all of a sudden, the major decided to leave. He did what we called a “straight S.” He dove straight down and left me.

I made a head-on run with a Zero and had him dead to rights, but my four guns See McLean, Page 31

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Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

29

After I graduated from Eagle Lake High School in 1939, I went to work as a carpenter’s helper. At the time, a friend of mine was driving a truck for a Houston wholesale grocer that supplied the little towns and country stores in this area. When they had an opening for a driver, I got the job. The company decided to close its Eagle I spent two years on small Lake warehouse and ex- I was born on October 13, jungle-covered South Papand its La Grange loca- 1920, on a farm near Eagle cific islands. There was tion, so I was transferred Lake in Colorado County.

When my dad won a conno entertainment, so we here in February 1941. tract to build a school bus, made our own and we I met my future wife, he constructed the body made ourselves happy Lila Schultz, in March from wood and used a by deciding to be happy.

1941. We planned to get 1927 Model T chassis and I was never in a fight, nor married the weekend after motor. When the Model A did I ever see other men fight. We had an allotment my 21st birthday, but the came out, he upgraded of two bottles of beer a boss said a load of weevil- because it had an autoweek. One time, we had filled flour needed to be matic starter. That’s how two guys from Tennessee returned to the mill right my sister, brother, other local kids and I got to who could make their own away, so I couldn’t get off school in Eagle Lake. whisky. work that weekend. I had to get my mother’s permission to get married the weekend before, October a shotgun when I was six years old. After he 11, 1941, because I hadn’t turned 21. My told me to grip his hand he said, “You can wife was 18. Eleven months later, we had a pull a hell of a lot of triggers,” so that was that. He sent me through the Navy door. baby, Billy, in September 1942.

A bunch of us boys were put on a pasAfter Pearl Harbor was bombed, everybody was ready to go into the service. Of senger train and sent straight to San Pedro, course, I had a wife and baby, so they didn’t California, for six weeks of boot camp. In draft me right away. I knew that I would be high school, I had my own band and played called and on July 27, 1943, I was drafted. I a guitar and sang all over Texas, so when was working for United Gas Pipeline at the I took a sound test, I could tell the differtime. After I took my oath under the Muster ence between tones. Since I made one of Oak in downtown La Grange, I was induct- the higher grades, I was sent to a submarine detection school. Then I got on a ship goed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

When we were examined to see if we ing to New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean. were physically fit, all of us boys who had There, I waited two weeks before I was sent come in that day stood buck naked in long to Guadalcanal, which had been secured by lines. Another La Grange boy was ahead the time I arrived.

Then I went to Munda, the main base of me. When he got up to Captain Jolly, who decided whether you got in or weren’t on the island of Ondanka in the Solomon physically able to serve, the boy said he Islands, to provide protection for a big rewas a conscientious objector. Captain Jolly pair ship anchored there. It was capable raised cain, but the boy had to be sent home of repairing any kind of marine vessel. A because that was the rule. When I got up hospital ship with lots of nurses onboard to Captain Jolly’s desk, he looked up at arrived and stayed almost a month to treat me and said, “What the hell is wrong with American servicemen.

At Munda, 20 of us had responsibility you?” I showed him I had only three fingers on my left hand. I had lost one playing with for operating three listening posts called

30 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

On the island of Ondanka, I found a bicycle frame the Japanese had left in a trash pile.

After I made tires from two-inch rope, I rode it all the time I was there. In the background is one of the huts where we lived.

hydrophones each powered by a 550-lb. battery, plus a spare that sent us radio signals. The hydrophones were installed half a mile out beyond the entrance to the harbor. Eight of us were sonar men. The others were signalmen.

We could hear every ship within a 15mile radius and tell what kind it was and which direction it was going. Ships could still be over the horizon, but we could hear them. Every ship had a different sound. We knew when a ship was coming our way because the sound kept getting louder and louder. When we would see its conning tower, our signalman would flash a light by using levers asking them to identify themselves. If they didn’t do so, we assumed it was an enemy vessel. When we detected submarines, we couldn’t tell whether they were ours or not.

After we reported activity to the officerof-the-day, information went up the chain of command. If the decision was made to check on a ship, a destroyer escort in the harbor was on the ready day and night. A little fighting devil, it was a smaller ship with 3-inch guns, 30 and 50-caliber machine-

Veterans’ Voices

guns, plus torpedoes and depth charges.

Even though from time to time we saw the destroyer go out, we operators didn’t know what transpired.

We did all our own repair work. Sometimes big birds would land on a hydrophone’s wire antennae and bend it over or short it out, so we’d have to go out and straighten it. We had a 38-foot buoy boat equipped with a winch with a separate motor.

The Seabees built us tents for shelter and a tower over 40 feet tall in two days, so we could see the ocean above the trees.

Seabees had their own big float with tractors. There were big trees on the island and the Seabees made their own lumber from it.

They knew how to work. They were great!

We had Japanese camps with just six or eight men as close as half a mile from us.

They never bothered us. They were there as eyes, reporting what came in and what went out to their chain of command.

The natives on Munda would approach us in long wooden canoes that held about 15 to 20 men. If they had something to See Glaiser, next page

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Continued from previous page trade, sometimes the women would come along. I traded a pack of cigarettes, a $5 bill and something else as inconsequential for a rifle. What I had to offer amounted to practically nothing to me, but the woman was happy with the pack of cigarettes; even though she didn’t smoke and couldn’t spend a $5 bill, she had something American. I was stationed on Munda from March to October 1944.

Up the line, as the U.S. continued to capture islands, some of us were sent to install sonar equipment in new harbors. On December 4, 1944, I left Munda and went back to Guadalcanal to catch transportation to Manus Island in the Admiralty Islands.

For five months, I was an operator on Ndrilo, a 13-acre island at the entrance to Manus Harbor, where we operated four hydrophones. However, I missed one whole month because of an ear fungus. Every day, I took a 10-mile trip across the harbor to the main base to see the doctor, who told me not to put on earphones because that would only make the problem worse.

Finally, the doctor admitted he didn’t have the medicine to cure the infection, but knew of a home remedy. “Let me have it,” I said. “Get yourself an extension cord where you can screw a lightbulb into one end. Plug it in and hold it up so the light can penetrate the ear canal. Do that for 15 minutes three times a day for three days.”

Do you know that home remedy cured my infection? I tried it 10 years later after I was home and it worked again.

Even though I had enough points, I knew I wasn’t coming home until the war was over because sonarmen still were needed in the Pacific. I was put on a Swedish ship that listed, operated by an Indian crew.

The ship only had one screw that worked, but it floated, and it got me to the Samar in the Philippine Islands. We slept on the deck.

When we woke up one morning, about 200 yards away was the Battleship Texas. That was the greatest feeling. Seeing the Battleship Texas brought tears to my eyes. Thinking back, it still does.

The Battleship Texas went on and a little boat came to get those of us getting off that old ship. As soon as I stepped on Samar Island, a familiar voice yelled, “Hi Glaiser!”

Grinning at me was a guy from Eagle Lake named Morris whose father was the barber.

From there, we went on to Kavuete at Manila to load supplies on a barge. Our Marines and soldiers had taken back Corregidor, an island the Japanese had taken from us, displacing General Douglas MacArthur.

When we arrived, dead Japanese soldiers were lying everywhere and we couldn’t get in to unload. The next day, a barge brought Japanese prisoners-of-war who piled a lot of bodies on a truck and took them away.

Finally, the war was over and I came home. When I left, my son, Billy, was nine months old. When I returned, he was three years and three months of age. I was so happy to be reunited with my wonderful wife and child. After the war, we had two more fine boys: Bob and Dan. Mr. Glaiser died July 9, 2015.

President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, while I was stationed on Ndrilo. We assembled to pay our respects to our late commander-in-chief.

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I’m third from right on the second row in this photo of our squadron in the Pacific. The Corsair fighters we flew were not designed to land on carriers, so we were stationed on different islands in the Pacific.

Continued from Page 28 wouldn’t fire. Normally, the flight leader gives the signal to turn on your guns, but he was gone. Since I, too, was inexperienced, I hadn’t thought to turn on my guns.

I wasn’t ready to go into combat. As soon as I passed the Zero, I turned on my guns, but by then it was way too late.

Getting out of there was a problem.

I had six Zeros right behind me and no other Corsair for protection. Meanwhile, the bombers had completed their mission and were turning around to go back home.

I turned 180 degrees and headed for home going full throttle, giving it everything I had. I started at about 30,000 feet and all the time I was reversing direction, I was building up as much speed as I could.

The Corsair had a two-stage blower, which was a super charger system to fly at high altitudes. When the pre-detonation red light came on, you had to shift your blower to a different setting or cut back on the throttle. When my red light came on, I cut back a little on the throttle.

Then I started to see Japanese tracers coming by me. I dove down to pick up speed and went back to full throttle, leaving the red light on.

I was trying to head for a cloud layer at about 10,000 feet where the Zeros wouldn’t be able to see me as easily. But every time I slowed down enough to get the red light

Veterans’ Voices

off, they would catch up and start firing at me. The Zero was a slower, but much more maneuverable aircraft than the Corsair.

The Japanese shot cannons and we shot regular solid bullets. My Corsair had been hit six or eight times, but the Japanese hadn’t gotten a good, solid hit to make the cannons explode. They all glanced off.

I then got close enough to our bombers that the Zeros would have to fight them, too, but that was problematic in itself. The bomber crews could be so trigger-happy that they might shoot at you instead of the Japanese.

When I got back on the ground, my first question to the major was, “Why in the world did you leave?” He said he thought a Zero was making a run at him.

You can’t blame anyone for taking action in his own defense, but we were both lucky to make it back to Munda that day.

I went on to fly lots of missions and had my fair shares of kills – destroying Japanese planes - and lots of experiences that you could call adventures. I always considered myself fortunate to fly a Corsair in World War II. After the war ended, I returned to San Diego where I was released from active duty. When I married Mary Ann Taylor a month after we met in 1946, I decided to return to the Marines. I eventually retired in 1964 with 22 years of service.

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The details of the D-Day invasion still were secret when we boarded a ship called the Susan B. Anthony on June 5, 1944. We were in Wales on the west side of Great Britain. Our second day on the ship, DDay-plus 1, they called us for breakfast at 0400 hours. We were instructed to put on our uniforms, strap on our 125 pound-packs and be ready to board the landing crafts at 0800 hours. Just before 8 o’clock, there was a huge explosion. The ship quivered, shook and all the lights went out below deck.

I thought, “This is it. I’m not going to make it to the beach at Normandy. It’s all over for me now.”

When we ran up on deck, the superstructure was in flames and the stern was under water. A German submerged mine had blown up our ship. We peeled off our heavy packs by undoing one hook and over we went, abandoning ship. There was no loss of life because part of our regular gear was a floating waist belt that kept us bobbing up and down.

The boat that picked us out of the sea was an American destroyer loaned to Great Britain to sink submarines. While sitting on the ship’s deck for hours off Normandy, we saw an overwhelming number and variety of ships of all sizes and shapes. Six American and British battleships fired salvo after salvo at targets that seemed to be well beyond the arena. One of those ships was the Texas, the World War I battleship now retired near Galveston.

The ship held the men of the Fourth Infantry Division and the 294th Engineer Combat Battalion to which I belonged.

(The anchor of the Susan B. Anthony is now honored in the Normandy Museum while the ship and our equipment rest very nearby in 350 feet of water.)

Once we got onshore at Normandy, our chant became, “You saw us first on Normandy shores; you will see us last at Hitler’s doors.” This was a prophecy that applied to our unit and all other units, as well.

It is estimated that in the 30 days or so of conflict starting with D-Day in Normandy that one million people: Americans, British, Canadian, German and French were killed, injured or missing in action.

The first bridge we built at Beuzevillela-Bastille did its job by allowing reinforcements to land at the Cherbourg Peninsula to aid the Fourth Infantry in moving up to

32 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

Although we spent most of our time in Europe in combat, we also built many bridges such as this one called the Last Bay across the Rhine River.

I was born in South Orange near Newark, New Jersey. My father was a high school science teacher. After high school, I enrolled at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and took as many courses as I could before I was drafted. The Army caught up with me on my 20th birthday, October 19, 1942.

capture Cherbourg.

With this done, it was time for the break out from Normandy. As the sweep started, the 294th Combat troops created another bridge across the Varenne River at Ambrieres. Next, we moved swiftly to Melun, which was on the Seine River, 30 miles above Paris. Melon had good roads and an island in the river. On September 2, 1944, this allowed us to build four bridges, two going each direction. Two were built very strong to support tanks and loaded trucks and two were lighter for trucks returning empty.

We were in Belgium and the Black For-

Some years ago, my wife Jean and I went back to France and Germany. In the Allied graveyards, each cross (marker) listed a person’s name, his unit and the date he died. It was eerie because I remember where most of the divisions had been when these young men were killed.

est in Germany by September 13, 1944. We stayed in the Black Forest for three months.

During that time there was much change in activity, but little or no progress by the Germans or the Americans. Each appeared to be keeping tabs on the other. Every evening, a German fighter plane flew over at treetop level. After seeing it often enough, we gave it the nickname of “Bed Check Charlie.”

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With the Americans in the Black Forest of Germany and Belgium, as well, Hitler apparently felt he must take an aggressive position. In mid-September, he launched an unexpected and very strongly reinforced attack against three unfortunate American divisions. Two of these were relatively inexperienced and one was on a much deserved rest. An “all hands” counterattack by the Americans was badly needed. The Battle of the Bulge was on!

The Germans had clearly surprised us and had taken every opportunity to use this advantage. The word “bulge” was properly descriptive as our lines had been deeply penetrated. It took time for the Allies to organize and respond. This effort took even more time because of turbulent weather that kept our planes out of the air.

But things changed. Our planes were able to get in the air. Our soldiers overcame the most serious and difficult situations, as well as the most physically demanding conditions one can think of. To our advantage, the Germans began to have their own problems. The Battle of the Bulge was over on January 25, 1945. Hitler had gambled and lost!

After the Bulge ended, there was much to be done. A major job was getting the Ruhr River crossed on February 2, 1945, so that the Allies had full access to the Cologne Plain and the Rhine River. After that, the Germans closed their seven Rhine River bridges, one of which had a problem. We Combat Engineers built a bridge across the Rhine on March 18-19 and other groups were crossing, as well. There was still work to be done, but for all purposes, the war was over! I have mentioned a few bridges built by the Engineer Combat Battalion, but that was only the beginning of our work. We built 38 bridges for vehicular use that measured a total of 5,380 feet. We also swept 6,000 miles of roads for mines and drove another 6,000 miles correcting maintenance problems.

When we were mine sweeping, we’d put up a sign saying, “Travel this road and have no fear. The mines have been swept by an Engineer.”

This was not our business, but we also took 890 prisoners of war.

None of this work could have been done without the full and very much needed strong support on the home front. Bless you all and many, many thanks.

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Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

33

I was ready to get married before I went into the service, but when I asked my girlfriend, Georgia Barta of Ammannsville, she said, “No.” She came from a Czech family and I came from a German family. She was afraid that if I got killed over there in Europe, she wouldn’t fit into my family. Not many Germans married Czechs back then.

It wasn’t like it is now. I had to agree with her on that, so we waited.

I was inducted into the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on February 16, 1943, and arrived at Fort Lewis, Washington, for basic training on my 20th birthday. I was assigned to the 739th Medium Tank Battalion, 3rd Platoon of C Company. The training was brutal in order to prepare us for what we could expect to face when we eventually landed in France. After I came home from the war, I couldn’t We underwent intensive tank instruction, in help but think of all the boys who would addition to other maneuvers. I remember never see their homes again. They wanted crawling through a live minefield at night to come back as much as I did. They gave with real 30-caliber machine gun fire rak- their lives so we could live in freedom. ing the area only 30 inches where we were sent, above the ground. Next, my it was raining and the platoon was sent to the demud was almost kneesert heat of Oregon for madeep. When our battalneuvers. Each of us soldiers ion was under heavy was issued one canteen of German artillery fire, water that had to last us 24 big limbs would fall hours. While stationed there, and trees would be cut six of my buddies were run in half as if they were over by another tank battaltoothpicks. We spent ion-in-training in a horrific 27 consecutive days accident. fighting in our tank, After tank firing traineating C-rations withing in Yakama, Washington, out a bath or change some of the tank units went to France and participated I was born on my grandparents’ of clothes.

The tank I was in the D-Day invasion of farm at Freyburg, the youngest Normandy, on June 6, 1944. of six children. My family lived assigned to and two However, my battalion was on a tenant farm behind Frey- others went on a missent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, burg Methodist Church. We sion to push over 40 where we were equipped had very little money, but a lot or more of the Gerand trained on the use of top- of hard work. I attended Frey- man concrete pillbox burg School. fortifications. Due to secret night fighting equipthe heavy snow that ment. It was very hush-hush.

Three more months of intensive training had fallen by that time, we whitewashed was followed by another three months in our tanks and traveled under the cover of the desert near Phoenix. Then my battalion darkness, but still came under fire. I wonboarded a troop ship bound for England. Fi- dered if I would ever see Fayette County nally, on November 12, 1944, we landed at again, but we made it. As the Allies approached the Rhine River in Germany, we La Havre, France.

The following weeks were the longest found knocked out vehicles and other deof my life because we were constantly in bris had been strewn around to slow down danger. There were still active land mines our approach. The mission of our tank was

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We participated in so many terrible battles that I sometimes wondered if I would ever see Fayette County again, but God protected me and I came home.

to clear the road leading to the river. This worked fine until we came to a disabled German Tiger Royal tank that our American-made tank couldn’t budge. When we got out to hook a cable on it to drag it away, shrapnel from German airbursts was hitting the ground all around us. When we finally pushed the German tank aside, we used our dozer blade to slope the riverbank so the Allies’ amphibious vehicles could cross.

Our tank couldn’t cross, of course, because there was no bridge. At Neuenhagen, Germany, I made the mistake of speaking German when my loader and I were halted by a Dutch guard one night. He stuck his rifle in my stomach and, even though I hastily reassured him I was an American soldier, he wouldn’t take my word for it. He marched us to his command post, then to ours. We were not released until our commanding officer assured him we were Americans.

The special night fighting equipment on our tanks never really worked out like they hoped it would. In the later days of the conflict, I suffered such a high fever that I was taken to a hospital in Holland for treatment because I had hurt my fingers badly earlier during the war.

When V-E Day – Victory in Europe – was announced on Tuesday, May 8, 1945, we had been pulled back from the front, so I really don’t know if the fighting stopped all at once. I recall we were allowed to take the day off and we were very happy the war was over. After surviving that hellish war from the beaches of France through Belgium, Holland and Germany, they told us a big, fat lie. We were close to Wuerzburg, Germany, where we had nice living quarters. Our company commander told us that

Veterans’ Voices

anybody from a buck sergeant on up could transfer to the 70th Tank Battalion at Bamberg because the 70th was getting ready to turn in their tanks and go home to the States.

Of course, we should have known better. I think every sergeant in the company, including me, transferred to the 70th. When we got to Bamberg, they put us in pup tents and it rained day and night. On top of that, about two weeks later, our original outfit went home. They were halfway across the Atlantic when Japan surrendered. Those guys got 30-day furloughs, plus 15 days delay en route, and then they got their discharge in November and December.

I was caught in Germany until December 16 of 1945. It wasn’t until January 5, 1946, that I sailed by the Statue of Liberty at New York and was finally back home in the States. I had been in the Army 37½ months when I was discharged on March 30, 1946. Georgia and I were married on June 4, 1946, and at first settled on a farm behind the KJT Hall at Ammannsville where we started to raise our family of four children. I took advantage of the agricultural program available under the GI Bill that paid me $90 a month. In those days, $90 meant a whole lot. Later, I worked at various jobs, including many years with the U.S. Post Office. We eventually settled in the High Hill area. Georgia died from cancer seven years ago. I miss her immensely because we were always very close.

I have always been very proud of my country and proud that I could serve it. I thank God for sparing my life during the war and I feel fortunate that He has blessed me with such a long, rich life.

Mr. Gabler died on March 12, 2015.

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Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

35

As a five-year-old kid, I loved to watch barnstormers, old World War I flyers, who came through town selling rides on veteran training airplanes called the Jenny. I saw birds flying and I grasped the concept, but what caused airplanes to fly? That fascinated me so much that I wanted to be a pilot.

After I graduated from Ventura High School in May 1939, I thought there was a chance I could receive pilot training through the Army. I contacted the recruiting office in Des Moines, but at that time the basic requirement for aviating cadets was at least two years of college, which I didn’t have.

The letter I received from the Fourth Recruiting District advised me that since I had a high school diploma, there were vacancies for the Air Corps and Signal Corps, as well as the Quartermaster and Medical Department. I would have to pay my own way to the applicable station. Keep in mind that the pay for an Army recruit then was $21 per month. I decided not to enlist at that time. I worked for my dad during the winter and as a lifeguard at Lake Okoboji in the summer.

I still remember where I was when I heard Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. We were practicing a Christmas program at St. John Lutheran Church near Ventura. My immediate reaction was, “What they have done to Pearl Harbor is horrible. How could they?”

By about 10 a.m. the next day, December 8, I was 17th in line at the recruiting office in Mason City, Iowa, eager to enlist.

The longer I stood there, the longer the line behind me grew. Obviously, a lot of guys felt the same way I did. I took my oath in the U.S. Army on December 31, 1941. I didn’t know it at the time, but a friend of mine, Erwin Jante, died when the USS Arizona was sunk during the Pearl Harbor attack.

I also had no way of knowing that my decision to join the service would change the course of my whole life.

In 1942, after I had been in the Army nine months, I read the Air Corps had started to accept pilot training recruits with one year of college if they were able to pass a test. I had a year of college and I still really wanted to fly, so I applied and passed the test. First, I was sent to Santa Ana Army Air Base in California as a cadet for two months of preflight training and then on

36 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

I was born in Ricketts, Iowa, in June 1921.

My dad worked for a bank and my mother worked in the telephone exchange across the street. We later moved to Ventura, Iowa, where my dad was in the grocery business.

I’m fourth from the left in the suit in this newspaper picture showing the swearingin ceremony at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, on December 31, 1941. Some of the men enlisted to beat the draft. Others, like me, who were not old enough to register for the draft, joined for other reasons.

to Mira Loma Flight Academy at Oxnard Air Corps Base, which was also in California, for primary flight training in the PT-13 aircraft. From there, I had two months of training on the BT-13 aircraft at Lemoore Army Airfield at San Joaquin Valley, California, before transferring to Luke Field near Phoenix, Arizona, for advanced flight training in the AT-6 aircraft. On July 28, 1943, I got my wings and commission as a second lieutenant. Getting a commission was wonderful, but what I was after was my wings, so I was very happy.

Although I’d been trained as a fighter pilot and that’s what I wanted to be, I was transferred to the Pecos Army Air Field at

For my 90th birthday, my family arranged for me to fly a T-6, one of the planes the Army Air Corps used for advanced pilot training, at Ellington Field near Houston. I said I wasn’t going up if I couldn’t do a roll and a loop. Fortunately, the pilot who took me up obliged.

Pecos, Texas, as a flight instructor for nine months. During that time, I taught about 20 American cadets how to fly. Next, I was transferred to Reno Army Airfield near Reno, Nevada, to train in the C-46 Transport, the biggest two-engine aircraft of its kind at the time. That was quite a thrill.

I put that training into practice when I was sent to India for one year. I flew 93 missions transporting military supplies for the Chinese and American war effort on a route that was nicknamed The Hump because we flew over the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains. We carried everything from clothing and food to jeeps, spare parts, engines, gasoline, tents, garbage cans, even bombs - many bombs.

We had no weather radar, so we could not fly over the thunderstorms. Instead, we flew through them where the most turbulence, including up and down drafts, occurred. This could make a regular mission very risky. In a single day, we lost 19 aircraft due to bad weather conditions. Some airmen whose planes went down walked out, but that was difficult because they not only had to face the Himalayas, but also the jungle before they reached civilization. Before I got there, CBS News correspondent Eric Sevareid was with a crew that was forced to parachute over The Hump in 1943. Those men all made it to safety.

Our route to China was often referred

Veterans’ Voices

to as the Aluminum Trail because of the great number of aluminum aircraft that had crashed on it. We flew at a high altitude, so we could not see the crashed aircrafts but we knew they were there.

Because we were young, fear didn’t mean much, but we were concerned, not reckless. When we went through a thunderstorm, we would experience strong up and down drafts, so we didn’t have complete control of that aircraft. When we got an updraft, we were trained to cut back the engines to idle, put down the flaps and lower the landing gear to create as much drag as we could to keep the aircraft from being pulled higher, but we gained altitude anyway. Then when we hit a downdraft, it was the other way around – full power, flaps up, landing gear up. We tried to climb as fast as we could, but we would still lose altitude.

The C-46s were not pressurized aircraft, so we wore oxygen masks. There was a lot that could have gone wrong, so I guess I was very fortunate.

For something to do between flights, I planted a bunch of pineapple plants outside the tent where I lived and they grew. I had a pet monkey at the time named Rastos.

When I returned from one flight, that monkey had eaten a ripe pineapple that I had been admiring for days.

So that was it. I put Rastos on my arm and took him back in the jungle, way back in the jungle, and let him go. Guess who was waiting for me when I got back to my tent? You guessed it - Rastos, my pet monkey.

After President Roosevelt died and President Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, the war was finally over. I was sent to Camp Grant in Illinois, where I was placed on inactive status.

They didn’t need all of us pilots any more.

However, I was recalled during the Korean conflict and later served in Vietnam.

I retired in 1968 with more than 26 years of service with the Army Air Corps and Air Force, 20 years on active duty.

After the end of World War II, we Hump pilots formed an organization called CBI, which stands for China, Burma and India. The logo for our organization was an illustration of The Hump. For many years, we enjoyed seeing one another at our Hump pilot reunions.

To this day, I am fascinated with flying.

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The Fayette County Record

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Tuesday, August 14, 2015

37

In addition to B-24 bombers, we worked on Stinson L-5 Sentinels, small, light planes that were used by different branches of the service because they could land on short, unimproved airstrips. I’m pictured beside one at Gowen Field where I was stationed.

I remember when we heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

It was Sunday, December 7, 1941, an overcast day. I was working on the farm for my dad and living at home.

I was drafted in February 1943 but never left the States.

I had worked on my dad’s equipment, so I was familiar with mechanics. After basic training in New Jersey and New York, they sent me to Boise, Idaho, to train as an airplane mechanic.

I changed many an engine on B-24 bombers – the big boys. The schedule called for us to rotate the engines every 600 hours. We lived in barracks and they would put up tents for us to work on the B-24s. I enjoyed the work.

When we worked at night, they sometimes would put out flare pots, which put

off a lot of light and heat.

Would you believe I got sunburned working at night? Yes, I did. We wore sunglasses or our eyes would also have gotten sunburned. That’s how bright the light from the flare pots was.

I liked Boise. The Lutheran Church there invited us to come to services and we participated in church activities. At Christmas, we helped the church elders fill bags with apples, oranges and candy for the children.

Some of the families took the soldiers home after church every week for dinner.

The meals were good and we got to know the people. I went to visit the same family every week.

They’d take me back to the base later in the afternoon. They were farm people who had once had a cherry orchard but

I was just about always the tallest, so in all my old photos with my buddies at Gowen Field near Boise, Idaho, I’m always in the back.

38 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

I was born on a farm near Winchester in October 1922. I attended St. Michael’s Lutheran School and Church at Winchester.

At the time I was drafted, I was farming.

lived in town by the time I met them. I liked them and they liked me.

When the war ended, one of my buddies was going to Hawaii and he wanted me to go with him. I thought about it.

I also thought about staying in Boise.

My Master Sergeant was going to reenlist and he wanted me to sign up for another hitch, too. My aunt, Bertha Tschatschula, wrote me a stern letter telling me to come home.

She didn’t want me to marry a girl from up there and stay. I enjoyed Boise, but it wasn’t home. Texas was home.

I came back to Winchester and started raising cotton and corn, as well as some peanuts. One year, we ginned 45

Veterans’ Voices

I am proud to have served my country by helping to keep some of the B-24 bombers in the air, as well as some of the smaller planes used by different branches of the service.

bales from one field, a very good crop.

I married Harriet Hielscher in 1950. We weren’t going together when I was in the service.

I’ve never been back to Idaho, but, over the years, I’ve thought about the time I spent there.

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The Fayette County Record

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Tuesday, August 14, 2015

39

I didn’t think about the fact that I could speak German when I went in the service till I got to the barracks in Arkansas and told them I was German. The other soldiers called me a “Damn Nazi.” That taught me right quick that from then on I was going to say I was Polish all the time I was in the service. After that, they called me Tex. After we docked in England on November 26, 1944, I was transferred to the 83rd Infantry Division, part of the First Army, as a replacement to go to France during the massive German air attacks they called the Blitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg means “as if struck by lightning.” That’s what it was like, too.

A couple of other soldiers in my platoon said to me, “Tex, you know how to pray. Will you teach us?” I taught them the words to the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven…”

I told them, “That’s all I know. Just ask Him to help us.”

We were all scared. There was nobody that tough. There were a few of them that were kind of smart-alecky, but when it came down to it, they weren’t all that tough.

During the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest of the battles that the U.S. experienced in World War II, about 19,000 Americans were killed. I thought to myself, “Maybe I will get out of this mess or maybe I won’t.”

I became a scout, along with a soldier named Iacco. He and I probably captured about 100 to 150 Germans total. I would strip the Germans of weapons as Iacco stood guard. Most of the Krauts that I captured were Polish. They gave up. They were about 45 years old, average. I found out they were family men just like us. They told me in German that they didn’t want the war any more than I did. They were so glad they got captured. The young ones were Nazis, though. They were out there to kill, one way or another.

We took the Germans we captured back to the rest of the GIs in our unit. At times, we heard shooting afterward. I know they just shot them. They told me, “What can we do with them? We have no place to go.”

We had about eight or nine men left in our group when we got cut off from other American troops in the Ardennes Forest.

We were completely surrounded by Ger-

40 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

My twin sister, Evelyn, and I were born on October 7, 1925, at our parents’ farm in the Middle Creek section north of Schulenburg. We went to school at Middle Creek. I was drafted when I turned 18.

mans. There was deep snow and it was very cold. They couldn’t get any supplies to us and there was no way out. We were on our own. It was bad.

During this time, we never got a hot meal. All we had were K-rations. These were 3,000-calorie meals carried in our pack that were to be consumed only under emergency conditions. Those were emergency conditions, let me tell you.

When we ran out of K-rations, we turned our pockets inside out and ate the crumbs. Then we ate snow. Can you believe it? It’s true. We ate crumbs and then we ate snow. There was nothing, nothing at all to eat for days on end.

Our guns froze one night when we went to shoot some Germans at a roadblock and they captured us.

I told them in German that we were Germans and had taken the uniforms off dead American soldiers. The Germans didn’t know whether to believe me or not because my German was pretty good. The

know which, and taken to a makeshift tent where they bound me up and sent me on to a hospital in France. When they cut off my combat boots, my feet were black and cracked so they started treating me for frozen feet.

After three days or so, I got really sick.

I asked the male nurse, “Why are you not changing my bandages?”

“You are here for frozen feet,” he said, “No,” I said, “I got hurt by a hand grenade.”

I had developed a terrible infection. The nurses started giving me penicillin every two to three hours for three days and nights.

Then they sent me back to England and later to Scotland for two or three months to recuperate.

Looking back, I find it hard to believe that while I was on the front lines, I never saw a medic.

If you got hurt, you got hurt. From the time we started out in France at the end of I was stationed in Belgium from Novem- November or early December 1944 until I ber/December 1944 to January 1945. To got wounded on January 16, 1945, I never this day, when I get cold at night, I still took my clothes or my boots off. When I dream I am lying in the snow there. I can got to the hospital, I did not remember what never forget that nightmare. month or day of the month it was. I missed Christmas 1944.

My family told me later that when the other guys with me kept their mouths shut.

Finally, the Germans threw two hand gre- man from Schulenburg who delivered telenades at us and left us for dead in the snow. grams came driving up our road at the farm, Mama crawled under the house where we I heard someone calling me, “Tex?” stored the potatoes and onions.

“Yes,” I said.

She knew he had bad news. He could “I am Iacco. Are you hurt?” be bringing the family a telegram that said, “No,” I said.

“Your son is injured,” “I have only got one “Your son is missing in foot left,” he said. action,” or “Your son is I got up, dazed. dead.” Mama didn’t want “Where is Fortini?” to hear that kind of news (He was the other friend about me, but it wasn’t who was with us.) that bad.

“Here,” Iacco said.

The telegram read, “He is dead.”

“Regret to inform you I walked off in the your son Private Alvin J. snow. I don’t know what Langhamer was slightly direction. I didn’t know wounded in action sixthat my rifle was gone. teenth January in BelI didn’t know where I gium. Mail address folwas going, but I ran into lows direct from hospital four or five GIs. I told with details.” them that one GI was When I finally came back there with one foot home, I was still too young blown off. to buy a beer at the Swiss They asked me if I Alp Dance Hall, but not was hurt. I told them no, too young to almost die for but when they shone a On the Lone Star Honor Flight flashlight on me, blood to our nation’s capital in June my country.

For a long, long time, I was running down my 2010, my picture was taken in was mad at the world, but front of the World War II Memoleg, but I couldn’t feel rial.

They treated us like heroes after the Lone Star Honor any pain. in Washington, D.C., but I don’t After a few hours, feel like a hero. I was just for- Flight to Washington a few years ago, I’m not I was put on a jeep or tunate to get back home alive. mad any more. weapons carrier, I don’t

Veterans’ Voices

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

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Tuesday, August 14, 2015

41

My unit arrived at the port of Cherbourg, France, awhile after D-Day in 1944.

I served in the Third Army under General Patton. We didn’t like him, but the Germans didn’t like him either. He was mean, mean, mean. I heard him over a loudspeaker once giving the troops a pep talk before one of the offenses. He told us not to die for our country, but to make the enemy (those SOBs, his words, not mine) die for theirs.

Once we got our tanks and half-tracks, the Third Army moved forward quickly. We met our first opposition in Metz, France, a heavily fortified city. That was baptism by fire, the real thing. It was very creepy there in the woods in dugouts with the artillery shelling us. That winter was the coldest weather they had ever had. You could spit and your spit would turn to ice.

We met our first serious trouble in the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg, France.

The Germans were shooting machine guns and we were shooting rifles all at the same time. It’s unimaginable how loud it was.

We had a lot of casualties among our 100 men.

When it quieted down, we were laying behind logs and fallen trees. I was platoon sergeant. We heard a noise and saw four German soldiers coming down a path talking loudly. They must have drunk too much potato whiskey. They got ripped apart at about 20 yards. When we went through their pockets to get IDs, we found pictures of their wives and children. It made you feel pretty bad, but we moved forward.

We were getting ready to take a hill that looked just like Monument Hill State Park in La Grange. The hillside was so steep and rocky that we climbed it by grabbing onto grapevines, weeds and small trees.

We caught the Germans on the top of the hill asleep, but when they awoke and began firing on us, they killed a colonel, one of the 60 to 75 men in our detachment. Then they fled. We found they had dug a hole in the ground that was a perfect room with a chimney in the middle for a fire and a flat roof. We didn’t stay there long.

We were moving across a flat, open area, which was very unusual in Germany because there were so many farms and towns. When we came around a bend, we saw what appeared to be an abandoned shack made of unpainted, rough wood with no glass in the windows or a door. Suddenly, four Germans started firing on us from

42 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

I am not a hero. A lot of combat soldiers had it worse than me. But a question has always stuck with me: Was I just lucky or did a guardian angel or the Lord take care of me?

We were transported from battle to battle in half-tracks: vehicles with wheels on the front and tank tracks on the back, armored walls and no tops. Time after time, we moved forward, got out and went into combat.

there killing four or five of our soldiers.

Then they came out without their guns, holding their arms in the air and saying in German, “We surrender.” They wanted to give themselves up. The boys who had been killed had been part of a close-knit bunch from Pennsylvania. Cussing the Germans out, the boys’ sergeant completely blew his cool. He told the Germans, two of them regular army and two SS (Nazis), to go behind the house. He shot them. If they hadn’t killed those boys, the sergeant would have taken them prisoner, but he was too angry to let them live. We moved on and we never saw that sergeant again.

When we engaged a few Germans in the woods one day, I was laying behind a tree, my legs spread out behind me for better balance with my gun. The Germans would fire mortar shells at us that would burst and spread shrapnel. I felt something like a powerful puff of wind. When I glanced behind me, I saw a hole in the ground between my legs eight inches wide and four or five inches deep. If my legs had been together, I would have lost one or both of them. I decided I should look on

the other side of the tree and when I moved, a bullet whizzed by my right ear. If I hadn’t moved, it would have hit my head. The Germans doing the firing were wearing Red Cross helmets, but they weren’t medics at all or they wouldn’t have had rifles.

I have two bronze stars and a Purple Heart with two Oak Leaf Clusters signifying I had three battlefield injuries. The first time, a bullet tore the skin off my upper right arm. Two or three days later, at sunset on Christmas Eve, 1944, we moved forward to take a hill. The Germans fired “screaming meemies,” mortars so loud they almost broke our eardrums. One of them landed about 10 feet away and blew up, spraying shrapnel that hit my leg.

I give credit to the medics. They were there pretty fast to load me in an army ambulance and haul me to a field hospital in a tent. When I was fixed up, they sent me back to a hospital behind the lines. I wrote home to say my injury wasn’t bad and in a joking way told my family it was the nicest Christmas gift I’d ever had - getting hit and spending 30 days in a warm place.

We had been living outside with no shelter

Veterans’ Voices

even when we slept. Then I went back and joined my unit again. The second time I got hit, I was treated by the same doctor and the same nurse who had worked on me the first time. The nurse said, “I think we’ve seen you before.”

Weeks later, we got to the woods on the outskirts of a railroad complex near Trier, Germany, that we were supposed to take.

A mortar shell exploded close by and, that time, the shrapnel hit me in the butt. After they got through with me at the field hospital, they loaded a bunch of us who had been wounded on a cargo plane that rattled and shook so bad I didn’t think we would make it over the tops of the trees, but we did. It wasn’t bad being in an upscale hospital in Paris for another 30 days. Then I went back to my unit until the war in Europe ended.

By that time, the German civilians were hungry and the country devastated. It was bad. When we were stationed in Mittenwald, Bavaria, near the Austrian border, I saw an old man digging through a garbage can, looking for food. My grandfather in Schulenburg was from Austria and this old See Hollas, Page 45

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The Fayette County Record

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Tuesday, August 14, 2015

43

I came home from Europe onboard the Queen Mary, a former luxury liner that had been refitted as a troopship. It was so crowded that we would sleep on deck one night and the next night sleep below deck. There were so many soldiers that we only got two meals a day. The cooks couldn’t feed that many men three times a day.

I was inducted on January 9, 1942, at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, and trained at Fort D.A. Russell in Cheyenne, Wyo., Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Wash., and A.P. Hill in Virginia. I was assigned to the 339th Ordnance Depot Company. I had worked for Vavra’s Garage in Fayetteville as a mechanic for a while before the war so I knew about carburetors, engines, parts supply, things like that. Most of the boys in my company were from the northern states so they called me Tex. We departed Camp Kilmer, N.J., on No-

44 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

vember 2, 1942, aboard the SS Monterey as part of a big convoy of vessels. We were packed on the ship like sardines. The convoy zigzagged across the Atlantic Ocean to avoid German submarines, so it took us two weeks to reach Casablanca, French Morocco, North Africa, on November 18, 1942.

I saw my first German air raid on the night of December 31, 1942, when Casablanca was bombed. It is something I will never forget. I was on guard duty at the warehouses, so I stayed at my post where replacement parts such as tires were stored.

I didn’t go to an air raid shelter because I had to stand my post. Soldiers were running everywhere. Our men were shooting guns that couldn’t reach as high as an airplane, but the big anti-aircraft guns did.

They made a thump, thump, thump noise when they fired. I saw fire and smoke coming from the tail of a German plane that went down in the Atlantic. There was so much gunfire you could see your shadow. although it was night.

That wasn’t my only experience with See Stastny, next page

Veterans’ Voices

You followed orders. They told you where to go and what to do. Each of us did our part.

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Continued from previous page air raids. In Bizerte, North Africa, German planes we called Midnight Charlie flew over at night looking for targets.

We went by ship to Malta and then to Sicily. We could see the live mines bobbing up and down in the water at Malta. It was dangerous. We were divided into two groups. One went by ship and the other by land to Palermo. I was on the ship.

After the invasion of Sicily was over, we saw the Germans try to bomb the destroyer that President Roosevelt’s son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., served on. That was in the Palermo harbor. The bombs missed the ship, falling in the harbor close to where our company was stationed on land, so we got peppered with dirt. That ship pulled out for open waters right quick.

From Sicily, we went to southern Italy loaded on the back of trucks. When we were in Italy, I got a pass and went to Rome, but I didn’t get to see the Pope.

We got on an LST (boat) and went to Southern France, arriving on August 15, 1944. There were burned out tanks and trucks on the side of the roads and big holes from strafing on the roads. From there we traveled to Worms, Germany, and departed for Wurzburg, Germany, on April 12, 1945. We had a hard time keeping up with the front lines because they were moving so fast. Our supplies were on a whole bunch of semi-trailer trucks. We had repairs for trucks and jeeps and even tank tracks - rubber ones for the highways and metal ones for the country. We were in the Seventh Army under General Patton, but not for long. I remember seeing General Patton when I stood honor guard at sunset as we were lowering the flag for retreat.

Our company was not on the front line so we didn’t have the best guns. We were issued 1903 bolt action rifles used in World War I. Some of them were badly pitted from wear on the inside and didn’t fire properly. Others were in pretty good condition. I never had to fire my weapon, although I pulled a lot of guard duty. I served in five different campaigns: Sicily, Rome-Arno, Southern France, Rhineland and Central Europe.

My younger brother, Edwin, got called up before I did. He served as a cook for the Armored Division in Germany. The Red Cross set it up so I could visit him in France. My youngest brother, Johnnie,

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I was born at Rek Hill in 1917 and attended school at St. John’s Catholic Church in Fayetteville. Before I was drafted, I raised and sold special laying chickens and eggs to Dixie Poultry Farm & Hatchery in Brenham.

enlisted and served with the medics in the Pacific. That left my folks by themselves.

I was discharged in 1945 from Company B 254th Infantry after three years, eight months and 28 days. I spent a total of 35 months of that time overseas. I was awarded a European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with five Bronze Stars, World War II Victory Medal and Good Conduct Medal. My mother, Annie, prayed every day to the Blessed Virgin Mary to watch over us. All three of us boys came home, although Edwin married a girl he had met in Kentucky and settled there.

After I was back home, I received a citation that says: “Award of the Meritorious Service Unit Plaque: The 339th Ordnance Depot Company for superior performance of duty in the accomplishment of exceptionally difficult missions from 15 February to 30 April 1945, in France and Germany. Despite the fact that this company was organized for the servicing of 30,000 troops, the actual work encompassed five times that number.

“The ability of its personnel to perform varied tasks in a superior manner and to handle vastly greater quantity of supplies than ever contemplated, reflected great credit upon the unit and its members.”

Continued from page 42 man looked just like him. I still wonder, could they have been related?

After about two months in Mittenwald, we got on a slow moving train that was transporting us to a ship that would take us to the war in the Pacific. About halfway to the port, the train stopped and an officer came by. He told us, “The war is over; Japan has surrendered.”

We were very happy and relieved.

We were sent back to Mittenwald on the same train to wait until we could go home. On the way, we passed alongside two elderly ladies wearing bonnets working in a small patch of garden next to the track. One of them shouted in German, “Are any of you from Texas?”

“Yeah,” I shouted back. Then she yelled in German, “Do you know Winklers?

“Yeah,” I yelled back before the train chugged past them and out of earshot.

There were Winklers in Schulenburg.

Although it is unlikely it was the same family, just the same, I still wonder.

We sailed back to the U.S. on a terribly crowded old ship. Coming home, we ran into a storm. The waves were higher than the ship at times.

There’s not a prettier sight than the red roofs of Norfolk, Virginia, in the distance.

How good it was to see America again! When we got off the ship we could clean up and get clean clothes.

There must have been 100 telephones for us to use to call home. My parents didn’t have a telephone at Ammannsville, but I knew the telephone number of my girlfriend, Dorothy Vacek - 1618F53 - five long rings and three short rings on a country party line. Mr. and Mrs. Vacek relayed the message to my parents.

My family knew what bus I was supposed to be on from San Antonio. The closer we got to Schulenburg, the more excited I got. When the bus turned onto Main Street where the bus station was then, I could see my dad standing on the sidewalk wearing a big hat. I pointed out my parents and my girlfriend to the lady sitting next to me. I made a point of being the last person off the bus. It was so good to be home!

Veterans’ Voices

When I had my picture taken while training in Georgia, I had no way of knowing how terrible the war would be: the fighting, the noise, the destruction and the stench of dead bodies, dead horses, dead cows, all lying there decomposing. It was unimaginable. One thing I learned is how much abuse a human body can take when it has to.

I was born on my Grandma Adamek’s farm two miles north of Schulenburg in 1922 and raised on the main street of Ammannsville where I attended both the parochial and public schools. I graduated from high school in Schulenburg.

FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

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I had just bought my books for my sophomore year at Texas A&M College when I got my draft orders. I hitchhiked as far as Industry and walked the last eight miles home, arriving in the middle of the night. So as not to worry my parents and two younger brothers, Rueben and Percy, I slept on the front porch until morning.

When my dad got up and found me, he wanted to know why I had left College Station, so I told him.

I took my physical exam in Houston. I was inducted at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio before going to Biloxi, Miss., for basic training and Airplane Mechanic School. I had Gunnery School at Harlingen, Texas, and then I was accepted for flight training, I went to Amarillo, Texas, for pilot training. This was a short stay, probably because of the heavy losses of bombers in Europe. I was transferred to Muroc Army Field (now Edwards Force Base) in California before being stationed in Norwich, England, a few days after D-Day, June 6, 1944.

I was part of a 10-man flight crew on B-24 heavy bombers.

I received a slip of paper each morning telling me what time to get the crew up, which was not an easy job, the time we would be briefed and when we were to take off. We flew 52 practice missions. Part of my job was starting the engines for every mission and making sure there were no mechanical problems. We didn’t get the same aircraft every day. Before every mission, we would gather together and recite the Lord’s Prayer.

I wrote in my personal logbook on August 6, 1944, “This is the big day. My first bombing mission over Germany.”

We got up at 4 a.m., ate breakfast, were briefed and took off at 7:45 with 6,000 pounds of demolition-type bombs. Hundreds of planes roared over the North Sea and finally Denmark to hit oil refineries and an oil installation at Hamburg. We had a fighter escort of P-47s, P-38s and P-51s, but no enemy fighters rose to meet us. We came into the target from the northeast and when we got over the target, we met intense flak. Shells were bursting all around us.

That was plenty scary. When we dropped our bombs, they hit the oil installations right on the nose. Smoke rose up in the air

46 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

One of the boys in our crew, who was an American Indian from the Dakotas, wore a silver cross around his neck. When I asked him about it, he said his grandmother told him as long as he wore it, he would return home safely. When he asked me if I would like one, I told him I wouldn’t mind and she sent one for me. It is framed with my medals: the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign with five bronze stars, Air Medal with four oak clusters; American Campaign Medal, Victory Medal and Good Conduct Medal. In this crew photo, I am on the front row at left in front of a B24 bomber.

about 10,000 feet. We lost one aircraft in our squadron.

One of our 500-pound bombs got hung up on a torn up shackle in the bomb bay so its nose was hanging out of the ship.

It was ready to go off at any second. The bombardier and I rushed through the open bomb doors to fix the problem. We had to stand on a six-inch wide catwalk, 22,000 feet above the ground. We couldn’t wear a parachute because of a lack of room on the

catwalk, although we had to wear our oxygen bottles, which made it even worse. The weather was plenty cold too, 20 degrees below zero. The radio operator said ice was forming on my eyebrows and chin, but I was still sweating to beat heck.

After dropping my screwdriver somewhere over Germany, I finally took a gun barrel off a 50-caliber machine gun and started pounding the heck out of the bomb shackle. Finally, the bomb came loose and

Veterans’ Voices

dropped into the Channel only a few miles off the coast of England. Had we not been able to get rid of the bomb, we could not have landed and would have had to bail out and ditch the aircraft. We watched the bomb fall and saw it explode when it hit the water. After we landed, they gave us a shot of whisky and we each were debriefed about what we’d seen. That shot sure was good and so were the sandwiches and See Rudloff, page 49

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Tuesday, August 14, 2015

47

I was an Electrician’s Mate Second Class when the LSM 40 pulled into San Diego on New Year’s Eve in 1945. I’m pictured at far right welcoming 1946 with my buddies. In the Navy, I learned to smoke and drink, but I don’t do either of those things any more.

When the U.S. declared war after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, I was living in Dallas, Texas. I was too young to enlist, so I went back to Flint, Michigan, to plead with my parents to let me join the Navy. They weren’t about to do that, so I had to wait until December 1942 before I could enlist. I was accepted in August 1943.

The adventure appealed to me. I wanted to get in on the action and do what I could for the war effort. In boot camp, I was an apprentice seaman. From there, recruits like me were either trained as seamen working as deck hands, signalmen, radiomen, storekeepers, etc., or as electricians and firemen working below deck. We were called the Black Gang because we were below deck.

The Navy sent me to the Electrical Training School in St. Louis to study to be an electrician’s mate. While I was there, I taught mathematics for three months. Then

48 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

I was transferred to Little Creek, Virginia, outside of Norfolk, for amphibious training and then to Houston. Brown Shipyard on the Houston Ship Channel was manufacturing ships like the LSM 40, which stood for Landing Ship Medium. I spent several years on that ship, which was fitted out at Todd Shipyard near Galveston. I was in charge of the port section of the Black Gang in the engine room.

The LSM 40 was about 200 feet long with a flat bottom. It only drew about two or three feet of water in the bow and about six or seven in the stern. Called “sand scrapers,” ships like this were used to take Army troops into the beaches, as well as deliver supplies and support equipment.

After it left the assembly plant line at the shipbuilders, we sailed the LSM 40 through the Gulf of Mexico. Near Cuba, we went through what they called a “shakedown” to See Fitzpatrick, next page

I was born in East Jordan, Michigan, in November 1925. My family moved to Flint, Michigan, when I was 10 years old. I quit school and ran away from home when I was 16.

Veterans’ Voices

After I was discharged in May 1946, I returned to Flint Northern High School in Michigan and applied for a high school diploma. They took into account all the Navy Service Schools I had attended so I graduated with the class of 1946 and got on with my life.

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Continued from previous page see if the ship had any mechanical problems.

A crew from the shipyard was onboard to train us and see how the ship performed. Then they left.

The LSM 40 carried a crew of four officers and 48 seamen. On the ship’s well deck, we could carry two or three tanks, as well as “ducks” and “alligators,” mechanized equipment that could be driven off the ship’s decks onto the beaches.

At the time, we were traveling in a convoy of ships. When we got near the Panama Canal, we discovered diesel fuel had begun leaking into the fresh water supply. We stayed in Colón while our ship underwent repairs.

Then we sailed alone from the Panama Canal to Bora Bora in the Society Islands. There, we picked up some quonset hut materials that we took to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.

Next, we went to the Admiralty Islands transporting supplies. From there, we sailed to Hollandia, New Guinea.

For our first two invasions, we took the Army into the islands of Morotai and Halmahera. The next invasion was Tacloban in the Philippines. At Ormac on the island of Leyte, we’d take the Army into the beach in the morning to clean it off and then we’d pick them up late in the day. During the night, the Japanese would move back in and the Army would repeat the process. We made six or sev-

Continued from Page 46 coffee served by the Red Cross girls.

On another mission, I bent down at exactly the right time because a piece of shrapnel from a German gun slammed into the window beside me. Had I been sitting up, it would have hit me and probably killed me.

My family complained that the censors cut up my letters because we were not allowed to say exactly where we were stationed or what we were doing. I devised a system to tell them how many missions I’d flown. My dad didn’t have sheep, so when I asked how my 18 sheep were doing, they knew I had flown 18 missions.

By April 1945, we had flown 30 missions and I had 230 hours of operational combat flying time. The Air Force asked me to rejoin, but I told them no. I wanted to come home. I was discharged at Fort Sam

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en milk runs, first taking in the Army and later transporting supplies and support equipment after areas were secured.

I think we participated in 10 invasions, but I didn’t see much because I was below deck.

In addition to the ones I mentioned, we went to Mindoro, Mindanao, Bataan, Subic Bay and Zamboanga in the Sulu Archipelago.

We also took the Australians into Borneo, but I think that was after the war had ended.

Most of those islands in the South Pacific were surrounded by coral reefs that were just below the waterline. They made reaching the beaches very difficult. Sometimes we tried to jump over those coral reefs or break them up as we went in, but coral is so hard it can damage a ship.

Other times, we would go in to make a landing and, before we got to the beach, we’d drop the stern anchor. That way, when we unloaded, we could put the engines in reverse and use our own anchor to pull the ship back off the beach.

Occasionally, we’d run so far up on the beach that we couldn’t get off. Once we were forced to stay in one place for two days. If we couldn’t get out with a high tide, sometimes another ship would pull us off. Had there been anyone shooting at us, we would have been sitting ducks. Fortunately, when that happened, there was no action. There were times when we’d let the ramp down and the troops would have to get out in six or eight feet of

Houston, the same post where I had been inducted. I got as far as Schulenburg that night where I was standing on a street corner when up drove Fayette County Deputy Sheriff Charlie Prilop. After he rounded up a couple of drunks, he dropped me at a dance at the fairgrounds in La Grange. The only person I knew there from Fayetteville was Red Schidel, who ran a café. He took me the rest of the way home. Once again, I arrived in the middle of the night, so I slept on the porch using my pack as a pillow. That’s where my dad found me the next morning.

It was July 4 and I wanted to go to the Round Top feast that day, but I didn’t want to wear my uniform. When I put on my civilian clothes, my pants were three inches too short and my jacket was too tight across the shoulders. I had grown up while I was stationed in England.

water.

When we were on our way to Japan for the first time, we were part of a convoy of 10 or 12 ships that got caught in a big typhoon in the China Sea. With 50 to 60-foot waves, our ship was like a cork in a bathtub because it didn’t draw much water. The bow would go completely under water and the fantail would come completely out of the water.

When the propellers had no water, they’d make such a racket – RRRR, RRRR, RRRR. Then the big waves would hit us again. We finally had to turn and go into the waves. Otherwise, the ship would have tipped over. I was in the engine room with one motor mechanic and in contact on a sound-powered telephone with the sailors in the conning tower and those in the wheelhouse. We were mighty glad to get out of that storm.

After our second trip to Japan from the Philippines, we stayed a few days in Tokyo before we got orders to come home. A lot of our crew had already been sent home on points, but not me. We spent Thanksgiving 1945 in the Guam-Saipan area. At Christmas, we were in Honolulu. When the LSM 40 developed some generator problems, we headed to San Diego, California, arriving on NewYear’s Eve. After the repairs were made over several weeks, we took the LSM 40 down through the Panama Canal again, this time to Charleston, South Carolina. We had a 30-day leave to go home and it was on that trip that I met my fu-

ture wife, Joan Ruth Elliott, on a blind date.

Then I went back to Charleston where our flatbottomed sand scraper was decommissioned.

I got orders to report to Great Lakes, Illinois, for discharge on May 9, 1946, thus completing the circle.

I really enjoyed my Navy career. I must have done pretty good because I made six different pay grades before I was honorably discharged: Apprentice Seaman, Fireman 3rd Class, Fireman 2nd Class, Fireman 1st Class; Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class and Electrician’s Mate 2nd Class.

We did some crazy things aboard ship such as cleaning the gyrocompass with carbon tetrachloride that is often used in fire extinguishers instead of medical alcohol, which we were supposed to use. Instead, we mixed the medical alcohol with grapefruit juice and drank it.

We also set up a still in the steering compartment one time.

An interesting anecdote about the diving I did for our flotilla. I would go over the side and check out the propellers, hulls, etc., for damage after we hit a coral reef. Years later, when I was visiting Washington, D.C., I went to the Naval Archives and pulled up the records for the LSM 40.

They showed our day-to-day activities right down to the dates and times I dived.

That’s how detailed the Navy’s record keeping was even before computers.

I was born at my grandmother’s house near Shelby in 1924 and attended school at Skull Creek, Shelby, Rock House and Industry, before graduating from Fayetteville High School in 1942.

Those of us who served in the Air Corps knew we had a 50/50 chance of coming home. If a member of a World War II flight crew tells you he was never scared, I don’t think he’s telling the truth.

Veterans’ Voices

FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

49

I was drafted into the Army in June 1943, two months after I turned 18. The first day I was at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, they told us to look on the bulletin board for our assignments. I was a country boy. I didn’t know what a bulletin board was until the next day when the lights came on at 4 a.m. and a captain came looking for Sternadel who hadn’t reported for KP duty.

At first, I didn’t know he meant me because he was pronouncing my name wrong.

From Fort Sam Houston, we were sent to Fort Sill, Okla., then to California and West Virginia, for maneuvers. It took us 21 days to go overseas in a convoy. We spent a couple of days in London before we crossed the English Channel. There were about 11,000 in our division, so landing crafts were lined up one behind the other for about a mile. It was quite a sight. They dropped us at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on August 13, 1944, with General Patton’s Third Army. We landed waist-deep in water and waded ashore. It was a mess chaotic. Nobody knew where anybody else was. There were no Germans there, just some bunkers. The Allies had pushed the Germans back toward Paris. They sorted it out and set up a headquarters and from there, we went on.

Metz, France, was a big deal, pretty fierce fighting. The Germans were so well prepared with bunkers. We cut off Metz, but never captured it. When we got into Germany, I became a jeep driver for the officers. Later, they made me a messenger carrier. There were nothing like cell phones then. The Germans were smart. They tapped into the Allies’ telephone lines, so that didn’t work. My job was to deliver information to the frontline in a jeep. It was always at night, sometimes three nights in a row, all night long. I had no lights.

When I first started, I asked, “How do I find the front?” The captain said, “Follow the American bullets.” That’s all I had to go by. The Germans didn’t have many bullets by that time in the war.

One night, I was running on a road through the woods when a voice shouted, “Stop,” in German. “Ya vol!” I replied. I was close enough to see the German soldier hadn’t pulled his gun, so I put the pedal to the metal and got out of there. He shot at

50 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

If I had to go in the U.S. Army again, I would want a last name that started with “A” or “B” because everything was done alphabetically. You spent a lot of time waiting when your name started with “S.”

I was born on a farm near St. John in Lavaca County, Texas, and went to school at St. John. We spoke German at home. A nickel was a lot of money in those days because no one had any money. As children, we didn’t get around easily like you do now.

That’s one reason the service was quite an experience for me.

me, but it was dark and he missed. Speaking German probably saved my life that night. I carried the messages in envelopes strapped to my chest. If you got captured, you were supposed to pull a little string that hung down so the ink would be erased.

Sometimes, I’d bring messages back. That’s the only way they could keep things secret.

You didn’t have time to get scared.

I packed sandbags on the floorboards and in the back of my jeep in case I hit a landmine. I thought maybe that would help, but I was very lucky; I never got into a mine.

The Germans knew we had no windshields on our jeeps, so whenever they could they strung a fine wire tightly between trees on either sides of the road. Fortunately, my jeep had a funny-looking contraption on the front that acted as a wire cutter. When you hit one of those wires, you’d hear a “ping” as the wire cutter broke the wire before it sliced off your head. I still remember that sound and what it meant.

When we were pulled back from the front for 10 days rest, I found out I had a cousin, Clarence Sternadel, about 50 miles away. He said, “Come to see me.” I was good friends with the captain, who was from Yoakum, so I asked him and he said I could go. When I got to my cousin’s

camp, he was in town drinking beer, so I went to find the place. He was with the Ninth Armored Division and they had all these winch trunks. Since there weren’t any other parking places, I had to squeeze in next to one of them. It hit me that they might try to steal my jeep when I went inside. I opened the hood and took the rotary cap off so they couldn’t start it, but by time we came out, the jeep was gone. They must have winched it up and hauled it away.

My cousin arranged to take me back. The next day I met with the captain and since I was good friends with the sergeant over the motor pool, he said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you a jeep.” They went out the next night and I think they stole about three of them, so they gave me another jeep, but I had to pay $490 for the one I lost.

They told me, “Don’t worry about your money. When the war is over that serial number is going to come up.” I thought to myself, those people aren’t that dumb.

They’ll remove that serial number and that jeep will never be found. I’m still waiting for my refund.

At Christmas in 1944, they pulled me out of my outfit and sent me up to the headquarters as an interpreter. Even though I spoke German, their language is somewhat different from ours, so it wasn’t easy.

During the Battle of the Bulge, I was with General Patton, “Old Blood and Guts.” I stood beside him just like I’m standing beside you. He was a pretty goodsize man, just a common man, but everybody respected him for one reason or another. Once he asked me if I’d like to put on his pearl-handled guns and have my picture taken. I wish I’d taken him up on that offer.

When the Allies pushed back after the Battle of the Bulge, a lot of the guys com-

Veterans’ Voices

plained they didn’t have shovels to dig foxholes. Patton told them they didn’t need any shovels because they weren’t going to have time to dig any foxholes. He was right, too.

They moved day and night. It was cold.

As we moved from one town to the other in Germany, I would often talk to the mayor - the bürgermeister - about housing for our troops and other local matters in German. One of the first things we would do is confiscate all the beer and wine for our troops.

The guys would tell me, “Don’t forget to bring back a barrel of wine.”

The 86th and the 95th Divisions were the first ones to come home. I left Germany on June 29, 1945, and it took us nine days to get to Boston instead of 21 going over.

From there, I took a train to San Antonio and got back to St. John on July 4 on a 10day leave. My future wife, Mildred Michalke, had waited two and a half years for me.

When I went into the service, I weighed 118 pounds and when I came home, I weighed 198 pounds. Even though I looked different, she was very glad to see me come back in one piece. We got married six days later on July 10, 1945.

I was then sent to Mississippi for training to go to the war in the Pacific. The 86th Division was ahead, already on the way to the Pacific, but I heard they tore up their ship and had to turn around and come back to California. By that time, the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and the war had ended. Then they moved us from Mississippi to Camp Hood at Killeen, Texas.

That’s where I got my discharge.

My wife and I lived in Hallettsville for more than 60 years and I retired from the Texas highway department with 30 years of service. A year ago, we moved to Round Top to be close to our daughter, Betty Sacks, and her family. We also have a son, Elroy, who served in Vietnam, and his family.

After I returned from Europe, I came home to St. John on July 4, 1945, for a 10-day leave. My girlfriend, Mildred Michalke, and I got married on July 10, 1945, before I had to report back. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, we were being trained to fight in the war in the Pacific.

Thankfully, Japan surrendered before I was shipped over there or I might not be here today.

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

51

I had a teacher by the name of Lyndon B. Johnson for my speech class at the old Sam Houston High School in downtown Houston. One day, when he passed a group of us boys in the hall, he said, “Hello, Men.” No one had ever called us men before. We had no idea our teacher would someday be president of the United States.

When I graduated from high school during the Depression, there were no jobs, so I joined President Roosevelt’s “Tree Army.”

This was one of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) “make work” programs. We did maintenance and tree trimming to earn a little income. I was still living at home at the time.

In 1934, I got on with Hughes Tool as a machinist, working for Howard Hughes’s uncle. I learned to operate all the different machines. Most of them only did one thing, but then they brought in a new model that could do seven different things. I had no trouble mastering it. When the boss announced that Howard Hughes was coming from California for a visit, we spent a week cleaning up the shop. Howard Hughes got

My oldest daughter, Lonnita, was born in 1941, when we lived in Davenport, Iowa.

I got a taste of many different military installations in the U.S. through my work with the Civil Service. After I finally enlisted in the U.S. Army, I would run into men I played cards with years before. They had received quite a few service promotions and didn’t necessarily want to acknowledge this lowly private.

52 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

as far as the doorway near the machine where I was standing when he became distracted. He turned around and left. He didn’t even walk through the shop.

I got a break when the Civil Service hired me as an airplane mechanic in San Antonio to help revamp 50 old aircraft to be used as aerial targets for troop training.

When that job was done in 1939, I went to California to work for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. That’s where I was when I got a call from an armament machinist at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois. We were revamping Civil War field artillery.

That’s hard to believe, but it’s true.

Next, I was sent to Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Brookline, New York, as an armament inspector. Still with the Civil Service, I went on to develop armaments for the Air Force in Brookline, New York. Then it was back to Texas to work as a machinist on building Naval vessels at Orange.

Next stop was Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where I taught armament inspectors the use of field artillery. I was assigned to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, as an armament inspector. While there, I experienced hearing damage in an accident. Then I was called to Fort Lewis, Washington, where I worked on World War II rangefinders, a tool that measured the distance between the user and a point in a visual field.

I drove all over the country to all these different places where I was sent. At night on the Pacific coast, we could not turn on our headlights because of the blackout rules. We drove in total darkness.

A lot of my buddies came through the post where I was assigned who had either volunteered or been drafted. I wanted to enlist, but the Civil Service said they needed my machinist skills and didn’t want to let me go. I enlisted anyway and went to work for Reed Roller Bit Company, building gauge checks for Sherman tanks until I was called up on April 26, 1944.

I was inducted at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and suffered a leg injury in a forced march during boot camp. From there, I went to Rossford Ordnance School in Ohio. Then I was sent back to Aberdeen Proving Ground to make coastal defense guns by rebuilding old World War I railway guns that France had given the U.S. as part of its financial settlement. These guns were sent to Corregidor in the Philippines, but

As a machinist, I’ve always been interested in what it takes to make things work. I’ve even filed patents for some of my inventions. When I was 90, I received an award from a prominent national insulation company because I was its oldest commercial business operator.

the Japanese sank the ship that was transporting them, so they never made it.

I was relieved of duty and discharged with a 60 percent disability due to my leg injury on November 13, 1948. When I refused surgery, the disability was cut to 10 percent, but recently was increased to 30 percent.

I was born in Garwood, Texas, in 1916, but spent most of my childhood at 4920 Polk Avenue in Houston. My dad was a machinist with the railway and later worked for an ice plant. I don’t have a picture of myself in uniform, but this is how I looked in 1941 about the time World War II was declared.

Veterans’ Voices

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

53

radios and transmitters.

I was driving pilings Our unit was assigned for a new bridge at Freeto the Marines, Army, port, Texas, when I got a Cavalry; it depended on letter that read, “Greetings which branch needed us from the President of the most.

U.S.A. You have been inI was awarded one ducted into the U.S. Army.” bronze star for each of I was 20 years old. Afthe six major battles ter I entered the service or campaigns, as they on January 4, 1943, I had were called: Hollandia six months basic trainand Lae, New Guinea; ing at Camp Davis, North Cape Gloucester, New Carolina. I attended a radio communications school I was born in Shiner, Texas, in Britain; and Leyte/ and became a radio opera- 1922 and raised on my parents’ Tacloban, Luzon and farm near Moulton. I attended Lingayan in the Philtor.

We were loaded on a grade school in Moulton and ippines. Two bronze high school in Shiner. After the Liberty ship, which had war, I went to the University of arrowheads displayed with my bronze stars been hastily built to haul Texas. signify that twice I was cargo. It still reeked of dieamong the first Amerisel and with such rough cans on the beach when seas, it wasn’t long till it we went in to take those also reeked of vomit. It islands with firepower, took us 32 days to get to one by one.

Brisbane, Australia, as part At our first invaof a convoy dodging ension, Port Moresby, we emy submarines. were met by strafing Many times in the dark fighter planes and guns. of night, all the engines At Cape Gloucester, the would stop.

Japanese shelled us day There were no lights and night, causing the and no talking because sandbags we were usJapanese submarines were ing for protection to catching up with us. We leak. stood by the rails, ready There was nowhere to jump into the water if I was on the battlefront in the Pacific for two-and-a-half a torpedo hit us. After the years. After awhile, none of to run. The bay was submarines passed by, we us expected to come home. I behind us and the enwould make a 45 degree never touch an American flag emy was in front of us. turn and go on. We zig- that I don’t remember the boys I prayed God would zagged our way across the who died under it. No one really help us. I don’t know whether I passed out or deepest waters of the Pa- wins a war. went to sleep, but when cific Ocean.

Before we came into port, rations were I awoke, the Marines were marching Japaso short the cooks were feeding us a cup nese prisoners past our dugout. I thanked of navy beans at 9 a.m. and another cup at God for the reprieve.

At Leyte/Tacloban, the Japanese had 4 p.m.

When we got to Brisbane, we anchored 80-millimeter cannons hidden behind conear a boat loaded with cabbage. We conut logs on the beach waiting for us. We begged the shore men for some of those thought the beach was clear, but before the cabbage heads. They threw some to us and bridge on the front of our landing craft went down, they started shelling us. that cabbage tasted so good.

Six shells hit us. It was like lightWhen I was promoted to sergeant, I had responsibility for all of our unit’s com- ning striking each time. The explosions munication, which included short wave knocked the bridge off the landing craft

54 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

After I was discharged on December 30, 1945, at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, I rode a bus to Shiner. There was a big dance that night at Bluecher Park, so I thought that maybe somebody there could give me a ride home. It came as a shock to come back from hell and walk into a place where people were dancing and having a good time. It was a far cry from the primitive conditions like those on islands such as New Guinea where I’m pictured on the left.

and the hull was just above the waterline.

It’s a wonder it didn’t sink. We were sitting on gasoline drums. We retreated and hit the beach again two miles further down. There were Japanese guns buried on the beach, but we finally got over there and cleaned the Japanese out, chasing some back into the fields.

Conditions were no better at Luzon.

At Leyte, we had orders to hit the beach at 0500 hours. We got word there were 50,000 Japanese soldiers waiting there. One of my buddies said, “I wonder what MacArthur is smoking?” referring to the general’s famous words, “I shall return.” He might return all right, but a lot of American boys were going to die first.

One of our guys would start crying uncontrollably before every battle. After what we’d been through, he always said his luck had run out and he was going to die that day.

He made it through the battles safely,

Veterans’ Voices

but died in an explosion later when he was washing a weapons carrier.

After a few battles, our hearing was shot because we never had any ear protection. The noise from the big guns was beyond deafening. It made the blood pour out of our ears and noses. The medic told us to stuff cotton in our ears, but it didn’t help much. My hearing has been impaired ever since. I also had a bout with malaria.

I still don’t know how long radio waves could travel that far, but I managed to pick up KVOO, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and WOAI, San Antonio on our unit radio. That’s how I heard the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Years later, I met General Tibbets, the pilot of that aircraft, I shook his hand and thanked him for saving my life.

I am convinced I could not have hung on much longer because we were getting ready to go to another horrible battleground.

There were so many terrible sights: dead and maimed soldiers from both sides, as well as women, children, even babies.

When we arrived in California on our way home, we didn’t see anybody serving coffee and donuts like they did when we were leaving to go to war.

Three buddies of mine from Shiner, who also had served in the Pacific, died soon after they returned home.

The noise of the big guns wouldn’t leave me alone. The left side of my body was so numb I couldn’t press the clutch in on my old Buick.

It felt like ants were crawling on me. I was in pretty bad shape. They sent me to a VA hospital in McKinney, Texas.

The staff asked me how I got there and I told them I had ridden the bus. They were surprised that I could function well enough to do that. I underwent a series of sub-insulin treatments.

They helped me and, at the end of six months, I felt like a new man. The doctors turned me loose to see how I’d react to the crowd noise at a Southern Methodist University bowl game in Dallas. I was fine and able to get on with my life.

I worked construction, including a high school in Colorado Springs, and painted at the air force academy. Construction work even took me to Tullahoma, Tenn., where I built the foundation for a wind tunnel to test airplane engines.

I married Doris Quick from Tullahoma in 1952 and we raised a family.

I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in Denver, but retired early because my war injuries were worse and came back to Texas. We live in Fayette County on the farm of my grandparents, Joseph and Mary (Novastad) Ripple.

The Fayette County Record

The Fayette County Record

Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

55

I put in a request for a deferment from the local draft board three times in 1942 because I was running the farm for my widowed adopted mother who was an invalid. Three times, I was turned down. They really wanted soldiers in my age bracket. At the time, it seemed like they weren’t drafting many men much older than 25.

The afternoon I got my letter from Uncle Sam, I got on my horse and rode 13 miles cross country to tell my girlfriend, Hazel Lee Doerrich. She lived on a farm in the Svetlo community on the far south side of Fayette County near Middle Creek. Hazel said maybe we ought to get married, which was fine with me. Our wedding was at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Schulenburg on November 9, 1942. I was 21 and Hazel had just turned 18.

On November 14, three busloads of us boys left La Grange for the induction center in Houston. The draft board’s office was upstairs in the building where Dr. Hatfield’s dental clinic is now located. Who should I meet at the induction center in Houston, but my full brother, Emil Kazmir? I was very surprised to see him and very glad. Neither of us knew the other had been drafted.

While we were in Houston, the Army told us to go home and settle our affairs, get things straight before reporting back to La Grange in 11 days. I had to get rid of my mules, cows, chickens and hogs – everything – because there would be no one to look after them when I left. Some of the local boys from the Tofel, Muras and Hajovsky families had already gone into the service and the others knew it was just a matter of time until they were called up. Our neighbor, Laddie Osina, was the only one who didn’t come home. He was killed in action in Belgium in 1945.

I couldn’t get anyone to stay with Grandma Kobersky, who wasn’t well enough to be here alone for long, so she ended up living with Grandma Hollas in Ammannsville. Jerome Kossa from Ammannsville said he’d work the cropland on our 75-acre farm while I was gone.

I was inducted into the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio before I was sent to Camp Howze near Gainesville, Texas.

It was a lot colder there than it was at Holman during the winter. I was assigned to the 84th Infantry, an artillery division. From Camp

56 FRIDAY, August 14, 2015

This was the last picture taken of my oldest brother, Emil Kazmir, (right) and me. Emil was serving in the 335th Infantry 84th Division when he was killed on the frontline in Holland in 1945. He was awarded a Purple Heart posthumously.

I was born in Lovelady, Texas, in May 1921, and adopted by Edward and Anna Kobersky of Holman when I was 10 years old. Except for the three years I served in the Army, I’ve been here ever since. When I got here, I didn’t speak a word of Czech and they didn’t speak a word of English, but we got along. I went to Pecan School at Holman. When my adopted father got sick and died, I had to quit school and run the farm.

While I was in the service, the Army sent my sweet little wife $50 and Grandma Kobersky got $25 a month, which left me with $6. Hazel saved all that money and when I got home, we had enough to buy a brand new 1946 Ford tractor. It’s still down in our barn and I guess it would run if we tuned it up and aired the tires. I took real good care of it.

Howze, I was sent to Camp Polk, Louisiana, where we did war maneuvers in the swamps and brush. It was really rough terrain and the temperatures were cold. When I got to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, they worked us even harder.

After we got our orders in September, we went by train to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, and loaded up on a ship called the Thomas S. Barry. We were part of an 11-ship convoy that took 11 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean to our destination, Southampton, England.

We stayed there about 30 days.

The first week of November, we went by truck to the harbor, crossed the English Channel in ships and transferred to landing crafts to land on Omaha Beach. There was a big, old hill about 50 feet tall where the Germans had dug in, but we finally made our way up that hill. Then we moved by truck into Holland.

The first night we were in Holland, we were standing up eating our chow upstairs in a building. A guy named Joe Weselhoff had his back to the window when a German bul-

let blew his helmet off with his head in it. I’d never seen a man die before, but I had already seen a lot lying there that were already dead.

From my basic training here in the States to the Weser River in Germany, I was assigned to a howitzer gun. Its shells were about five-inches in diameter and several inches long. Whenever the forward observer (a soldier) identified a target, he would call that number to our battery commander, who would give it to us. The howitzer had panoramic sights with numbers on the aiming stick, so we could line up the gun to fire in the direction of that number. It was very accurate.

Was the howitzer loud? Tell me about it! I often sat underneath that barrel wiping it down with an oiled cloth. We had to keep those guns clean: the axles, the wheels, everything. There were eight men to a howitzer, each howitzer weighed 4,000 pounds and there were four howitzers to a battery.

The Germans had thousands of “pillboxes,” small, fortified structures, made of eight feet concrete and steel up and down the Siegfried Line. We had to help knock them out and take prisoners, so we could break through. We were in the “rat race,” fighting in one town and moving on quickly to the next in Holland. Then we fought from the Ruhr River all the way to Vienna, Austria. We slept in outdoor foxholes most of the time. It often rained like the dickens and it was so cold. For two weeks, we never got a change of socks or boots. Some of the boys got trench foot and had to go to the hospital, but not me.

I wasn’t afraid except when a shell exploded close to me. Then I would get a little jittery. One night when we pulled into our bivouac when we were getting ready to cross

Veterans’ Voices

the Weser River in Germany, close to Hitler’s headquarters, the Germans attacked. They hit one of the four trucks in our battery, knocking it out. That truck driver just went berserk.

I was upstairs getting ready to go to bed when he came running up with his carbine rifle yelling, “I’m going to kill everybody here.”

We had to subdue him.

When the war was over, the howitzers were sold for scrap. I was transferred from one place to the other until I ended up in Berlin. I was assigned to process other GIs who were getting ready to come home. I made my corporal stripes at that point. I had been a private first class for a long time. I had 63 points and my name was finally put on the list to sail home. We were scheduled to go to fight in the South Pacific, but thankfully, we didn’t have to do that. I was discharged on New Year’s Day 1946 in San Antonio. I have never had any interest in returning to Europe.

Hazel Doerrich and I were married five days before I was to report for service in World War II. She lived with her parents while I was away three years, one month and six days.

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Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

57

When war was declared in December 1941, my friend and I both were too young to go, but we wanted to. We talked about lying about our ages and volunteering, but I got the mumps, so I couldn’t. After I turned 18 in 1943, I was drafted. My friend went into the service, too, but he didn’t come back. I never heard what happened to him.

I served as a gunner for three years on three different merchant tanker ships: the SS Meacham, SS Quebec and SS Byron Nelson. We picked up high-test gasoline in the Caribbean Sea and took it to the Pacific Ocean for use by Admiral Halsey’s 3rd Fleet. We went through the Panama Canal 25 different times. We also carried fighter plane replacements on some of the trips.

Other ships sailed with us for protection because German submarines and Japanese aircrafts were looking for targets like us.

For more protection, we zigzagged when we were at sea instead of traveling in a straight line. Some of the trips were longer than others depending where in the Pacific we were sent.

On all three ships, I was assigned to a 20-mm anti-aircraft gun. Noisy? Yes, the gun was very loud. We didn’t wear earplugs because we didn’t have any. If you didn’t have all the buttons done up on your shirt, the concussion from firing a shell would take your shirt off. The empty casings came out so hot they would burn your hands if you didn’t have on gloves. We practiced regularly, so we were always ready if a threat was spotted. We were always on alert.

I don’t remember being scared, but we were aware that if a torpedo, a bomb or a shell hit our ship when it was loaded with that high-test gas, it probably would all be over before we knew it.

We almost sank one of our own ships once. The captain was told there was a German sub on our port side. He ordered one of the big guns to turn toward it. Before the gun could fire, the unidentified ship started blinking lights frantically at us to identify itself as an American vessel and the captain changed his order. We came very, very close to sinking that ship.

About the same time the Allies invaded France, our ship was ordered to go from the Pacific Ocean to Newport News, Virginia, in the Atlantic Ocean, for repairs. When we got there, a big band was playing at the dry docks for us.

Our captain said, “What’s going on?”

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I served at the same station with a 20-mm gun on all three of the tanker ships.

I’ve always been patriotic. To this day, the American flag means a lot to me.

He was congratulated on sinking a German submarine. That’s what all the fuss was about.

“No, we didn’t do that,” he told them.

Here’s what happened. Earlier on in the voyage, we thought we had seen the periscope of a German submarine following us.

Our big guns were fired, but there was no submarine periscope out there. It was actually a wave and lighting conditions.

When we were at sea, we would crowd into the kitchen to listen to Tokyo Rose on the radio at night. She broadcast antiAmerican propaganda in English to troops and sailors like us serving in the South Pacific. To us single men, she was entertaining, but the married guys got real upset with her. They couldn’t stand her. She would say things like, “You guys that are married, you know that while you’re out here, your wife has got a boyfriend back home.”

From our tanker, we watched several

meant, but my mother could look at the list I’d left her. She knew about where I was. I wrote to my parents and my mother wrote to me regularly, but sometimes it took a long time for the letters to reach me because we were out at sea so much.

When the war was over, our captain wanted me to sign up for another four years. I told him, “No, I’m going home.”

He said, “I’ll get you out of here.”

The captain signed my discharge papers at Pelican Island at Galveston, Texas.

I hitchhiked from Houston to Columbus.

A lot of people would pick up servicemen then, but you wouldn’t do that now. Then I got another ride from Columbus to Ellinger.

When I walked into the café in Ellinger, sitting there were my uncle, Joe Zapalac, and my friend, Johnny Becka, who had been discharged from the service earlier. My parents had a big German Shepherd. When I got home, that dog came running to meet me. He knew me. I still remember that. One of the things I missed most about being in the service was going hunting for dove and deer. I was happy to get back home. I went back to working for my dad doing fence work on the ranch. When he got sick later on, I took over the ranch.

Mr. Kramr died on February 17, 2015.

I was born south of Fayetteville in 1924. I attended Osveta School, which had only about 10 students, and then St. John’s Catholic School in Fayetteville. This photo of me was taken at Krchnak Studio in Fayetteville when I was in boot camp.

U.S. invasions in the Marshall Island of the South Pacific War – the battles of Eniwetok and Kwajalein. I remember seeing a solid mass of palm trees in the distance on those islands. We were standing by to refuel the battleships and fighters. I also remember seeing one of the big battleships that had guns everywhere. The names of the ships names were not painted on the sides, so it wasn’t easy to identify them.

During the three years I was in the Navy, I came home once on a 23-day leave.

I wrote out on a piece of paper all the different islands in the South Pacific and numbered them. When my leave was over and I went back, I would write home and put a number on the letter. The censors didn’t cut it out because they didn’t know what it

Veterans’ Voices

I still have my Navy uniform in our cedar chest. It is 72 years old and in as good of condition as it was when this picture of me was taken in 1943 in California. We plan to donate my uniform to the museum in Fayetteville.

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today. We had never heard I was drafted in Auof earplugs. gust 1942 and inducted at We landed at Taipei in Fort Sam Houston in San April 1943. The fighting Antonio. I celebrated my was beyond description.

21st birthday at Camp Either you killed them or Wolters at Mineral Wells, they killed you. To secure Texas, during 13 weeks a Japanese airstrip, the inof basic infantry training. fantry moved in behind When we got to Michithe fighter planes to cut gan, we never saw the trails through the jungles sun, but big snowflakes before even a jeep could fell every day. I’d never seen anything like it be- I was born in Ammannsville, get through. One day fore. The barracks were Texas, on October 21, 1921. when they told us to take a heated with coal and eve- My parents, Charles and Mary break, everybody dropped Mazoch were farmwhat they had on that trail. rything you touched was (Hajovsky) ers. I attended St. John the black with soot. We boys Baptist Catholic Church Pa- Then low and behold, the from Texas gave those rochial School and later the word came from the back, guys from the northern public school in Ammannsville. “Clear the trail! Clear the states hell about that I had nine brothers and sis- trail!” I thought maybe because they had com- ters. When I finished school, I ambulances needed to get through, but that wasn’t the plained about the Texas worked for my dad. reason. Along came Genheat. I had a month of eral Douglas MacArthur military police training riding in a jeep. He told us before being shipped to we were doing a great job.

Fort Meade, Maryland, He saluted us; we weren’t for a couple of months of saluting him. The engiranger training. neers did a remarkable job From there, we were there. They filled the bomb put on a train in a Pullman craters and repaired the aircoach (exceptionally nice strip and then our fighters accommodation) to San started coming in.

Francisco. After a few Then we went to Holweeks, they loaded us landia, New Guinea, for a on a freighter converted few weeks doing stevedore to a troop transport ship.

Nobody knew where we I went into the service in 1942 work. There wasn’t a sinand was in continuous combat were going, but after 21 in the South Pacific from April gle building and no roads. days in January/February 1943 to August 1945. I was 24 The jungle was so thick 1943, we reached Syd- by the time I got back to Fay- that to travel around the ney, Australia. Then they ette County. My baby sister, island, you had to go down sent us to Brisbane to join Irene, who is 14 years younger the beach. We sometimes an outfit, the 32nd Divi- than I am, didn’t really remem- stayed in tents, but most of sion, “Les Terribles.” We ber me. In fact, she was a little the time we slept outdoors.

For two months, we were replacement troops afraid of me. stayed on Leyte, an island for battle casualties in the about 20 miles wide and 50 miles long. JaNew Guinea Buna Campaign.

They asked me whether I wanted to be pan sent its soldiers from Formosa, who were a machine gunner or a mortar man. I didn’t supposed to be the toughest they had, to fight like machine guns, so I said mortar. We were us on Leyte. I never took my shoes off, never always situated behind a bank or a hole in the took a bath, never changed clothes. It rained ground for protection when we fired. A mor- every day – monsoon season. No vehicle tar had a barrel, base and two levels that had could travel because of the mud. I prayed my to be set. It fired an 85-mm shell. Noisy? Oh rosary every night and we were in combat lord, yes. No wonder my hearing is impaired every day.

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Canned lima beans and cheese – that’s what we had to eat. We got so tired of lima beans and cheese that we couldn’t face it.

One day, I found a pail with a bail over the top. I scrubbed it out, filled it with lima beans and cheese and put it over a fire to warm up.

I got called away to set my mortar to fire before the cheese had melted and when I got back, it was all gone. My buddies had eaten it. We tried feeding our rations to a skinny stray dog. It smelled our food and walked off.

It wasn’t that hungry. Eventually, C-24s flew over us treetop high to drop boxes of food in a fairly open place. They had to kick it out because there was nowhere for the planes to land. Four of our guys on a machine gun were hit by the heavy boxes and killed. Now that was sad.

Finally, we got two weeks rest and then they said, “We are going to Luzon.” Every day, the Japanese shot at us and we shot back.

It took 119 consecutive days of uphill fighting to do that job. In mid-August 1945, they said they were going to give us a rest. That’s where we were when they told us the war was over. They warned us not to fire any guns in celebration because the Japanese might think we were attacking and start fighting again.

We were at an abandoned Philippine sawmill building where there was lumber still lying around. I slept on some 1x12-inch boards. It was a hard bed, but a lot better than sleeping on that wet ground like we’d been doing for so long. While we were at that location, a Roman Catholic chaplain came to hold Mass. He told us, “Boys, all I have with me are the sacraments, no altar.”

We thought of making an altar out of some lumber, but instead came up with the idea of using big sawblades. It was nice altar.

Then the chaplain asked us, “How many of you guys would like to go to confession?”

We all raised our hands because we hadn’t been to confession for months; for some of the boys, it might have been years. “I don’t have time to hear you individually,” he said, “so I’ll just give you all general absolution.”

The natives, who were dark skinned people, were friendly. The men helped us, but the captain told the boys, “Don’t mess with those women or your head will end up in a pot over a fire.” He got his point across.

The Army put out a press release saying that up to July 27, 1945, our division had seen 607 days of combat, the highest total time amassed by any American division in any U.S. war. By July 20, 1945, we had 14,494 hours of Pacific combat on MacArthur’s “road back” from Australia to the Philippines. Under the headline “Our Boys” in the La Grange Journal on November 1, 1945, a news item read, “Charlie L. Mazoch is returning home under the Army redeployment plan. A former squad leader in Company M of the crack 127th Infantry Regi-

Veterans Voices

ment, Sgt. Mazoch served overseas with the veteran 52nd, Red Arrow Infantry Division.

In the service since 1942, he fought the New Guinea, Leyte and Luzon campaigns and holds the combat infantryman badge, Good Conduct medal, Asiatic-Pacific ribbon and the Philippine Liberation medal. His brother, Sgt. Ladis J. Mazoch, is serving overseas in the Field Artillery.”

I was discharged on November 7, 1945, at Fort Sam Houston. The Greyhound buses were on strike at the time, so when a soldier came in and said, “Anybody going to Houston can ride with me,” I paid him to take me all the way, but when we got to Schulenburg, I told him to stop and let me out.

Ironically, that morning my dad had backed over an oil pail with his tractor and punched a hole in one of the tires. He was at the Helmcamp Station at Hwy. 77 and Hwy. 90 having it fixed when I got to Schulenburg.

He didn’t know I was coming home that day, so I surprised him. Before we went home, I asked him to take me to Kasper’s Store so I could buy a new pair of shoes because I was still wearing my combat boots. As soon as I got home, my sisters said there was a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) dance at the Ammannsville Hall and they wanted me to go. Low and behold, I was surprised. All the neighborhood kids had grown up. I had to keep saying, “Who are you? Who are you?”

Then I thought to myself, “This is a crazy world. I have come out of those jungles where I have been fighting for my life and these people have been living more or less normally.”

On April 25, 2015, I had the opportunity to go on the first Honor Flight from Houston to Washington, D.C. with my son, Chuck. It was a whirlwind two-day trip. I got to see so much including the National World War II Memorial. It was too much to comprehend!

Everybody thanked us for our service everywhere we went. I was so surprised when two ladies who stopped to talk to me said they were from Brisbane, Australia. That was about 35 miles from where I had been stationed at Camp Cable. They were surprised, too.

I brought home a bracelet made of clamshells called cat’s eyes. These shells were found off the coast of an island in the Pacific where I was stationed. One of the other GIs made them into bracelets.

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After I got out of school, I took any kind of a job I could get. Work was hard to come by. I worked at a couple of sawmills and a cotton gin earning 60¢ a day. I lived at home and worked for my dad and for the neighbors in the cotton and cornfields.

After I turned 18, I was drafted on July 3, 1943. We mustered under the old oak on the Courthouse Square in La Grange.

Growing up, I was always a good shot with a rifle and a shotgun, so that was a help when the Army sent me for 17 weeks of basic training at Camp Wallace at Hitchcock on the Texas coast near Galveston. It was summer and so hot and humid, much worse than La Grange. I’d never been away from home before. As a part of our training, we ran obstacle courses on the sand with a full pack on our backs. Everything was filled with sand – our fatigues, our guns, our food, everything.

From there we were sent to Fort George E. Meade, Maryland, for 90-mm anti-aircraft gun training. At Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts, we trained on 40-mm guns and hiked in deep snow over frozen ground. I was sent overseas on a ship with thousands of other boys that took 21 days to reach Liverpool, England. Then we trained for three more months in Wales.

By that time, the Army had made men out of us.

On a Sunday afternoon, they took us to the coast, but we didn’t know where we were exactly. There, they fed us a real good steak with homemade bread before loading us up to sail across the English Channel. The next day we transferred to landing crafts, which took us into Omaha Beach where Allied forces had invaded Normandy on D-Day in 1944, a few weeks before. We were replacements troops that were attached to different outfits to knock out German airplanes and we knew we would be targets. The beaches were a terrible sight.

The first night after we landed in France, we took cover under some apple trees. We soon learned the Germans would drop flares and once they’d identified our location, they would come back and drop bombs. The Germans could shoot over top of us with long barrel 88-mm guns that were accurate for as far as eight miles. If you heard a whistling noise that sounded like “swish,” a shell had just missed you, but, when the shell exploded, “BAM!” You

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I didn’t know how long it would take, but I always thought we would win. You can live through a whole lot when you have to. God was with me all the time I was in the service. I can’t thank Him enough.

I was born on a farm at Rabb’s Prairie in January 1925. I went to the seventh grade at a one-room school called Indian Creek.

No transportation was available to go to bigger schools to attend higher grades.

I came home on a seven-day delay before we were shipped overseas in 1944. I am pictured with my sister, Evelyn (Roensch) Gersch and our parents, Ewald and Anita (Schellberg) Roensch. My brother, Dean Ray, had not yet been born. When the war started, my dad would have gone willingly, but at 38, he was too old. He always said I took his place.

might still get hit by the shrapnel. They say the soldiers who took hits didn’t hear anything. One of the best assignments I had was protecting Radio Luxembourg, an Englishspeaking radio station. When Allied forces had taken over Luxembourg in September 1944, the radio station was transferred to U.S. Army control. They broadcast on that powerful station for the remainder of the war.

While we were on that detail, we slept in a big barn on hay. That was a lot better than sleeping outdoors. One of my buddies got hold of some Schnapps – white lightening.

It was clear as water and very potent. After drinking a cup, he tried to shoot a chicken with a Thompson sub-machine gun and couldn’t hit it.

One time, we were advised to come to our artillery truck for a good hot meal, which was a real treat, but just then, the Germans started a barrage. One shell hit about 10 feet from where I stood. It must have been a dud or an armor-piercing shell because it didn’t explode. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be telling you about it. We ran and got under our halftrack, a vehicle that was half tank and half jeep with guns mounted on the turrets. Shrapnel pinged against the sides of our halftrack for five or six hours from two German tanks until our artillery knocked them out.

Conditions were tough. Other soldiers would say to me, “Will you pray for me?”

And I would pray for them. I think those who say they weren’t scared weren’t there.

Veterans’ Voices

One time, at 3 in the morning, I was on guard duty when I saw two figures silhouetted in the moonlight not far from my foxhole. It was a German officer and a German non-com sneaking up on us. I yelled out to them in German and when they responded in German, my buddy and I took them prisoner.

We turned them over the next morning We would see the English and American bombers fly overhead. On cold days, they would leave a vapor trail of 50 to 100 miles long. We could hear their engines and when they dropped their bombs in the distance, we could hear them whistle before they exploded. When we got to the Hürtgen Forest near the Belgium-German border, the snow was knee deep and we had no tents. We were still sleeping in foxholes. We always had something to eat, although sometimes it wasn’t too good. K-rations were better than C-rations.

We could fire 120 rounds of ammunition a minute with our 37-mm guns. We had 50-caliber machine guns that shot 500 rounds a minute, as well as anti-aircraft guns and automatic rifles.

When we got to Aachen, Germany, the first town in Germany we captured, our battalion was guarding an American fuel gasoline dump.

The German planes fired at a truck on the site and the dump exploded. There was nothing we could do. Two of us jumped out of our half-track, rolled over a high hedgerow and ran for cover in an old house that had been pretty much demolished. A shell hit the ground and rolled under the halftrack, damaging it beyond repair. Even the driveshaft was full of holes. The next day, we were sent back behind the lines for a replacement halftrack. It was nice to be going backwards out of the war zone instead of going forward into it.

We ended up in Chemnitz, Czechoslovakia, when the war ended. I received five bronze stars representing five major battles in which I participated. I was glad to get home after I was discharged on December 6, 1945.

I’ll never forget my parents meeting me on the front porch the night I got back to Fayette County. They didn’t know I was coming, so I really surprised them.

I met my future wife, Lorine Walther, at the Warda Store after church about three weeks later. We dated for 14 months. Lorine and I were blessed with three sons: Harvey, Donald and Gary and were married for 66 years before she passed away in 2013.

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Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

61

I was 18 years old when I got on a bus at Plum that took me to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for my physical in November 1943. When I was called up on April 27, 1944, I went back to Fort Sam before being sent to Camp Robinson near North Little Rock, Arkansas.

After training, I got on an Italian ship that took 14 days to reach Southampton, England. I had a porthole above the waterline beside my bunk, so it wasn’t too bad.

On the trip, I was glad to see some familiar faces from Fayette County: Adolph Chovanec, Henry Bertsch, Erwin Freudenberg, Ludwig Sulak, James Janak, Warren Havemann and Vaclav Stryk, although they were in different companies. After we docked, we were transferred to a smaller, much dirtier ship that had hammocks instead of bunks for the trip across the English Channel to France. We arrived right in time for the rainy season. We boys from Fayette County were split up with the exception of James Janak, whom I camped with for one week as we marched through the mud.

We were told that two companies would go in to attack the Germans while one other company would stay in the rear for support.

The day I first saw combat, I remember digging seven foxholes because every time we stopped marching, we didn’t know how long we’d be in that one place so we’d dig in. A day or two later, I went with another soldier to scout about 100 yards ahead of the company. The Germans opened fire and pinned our company down. The artillery came in and fought until the Germans surrendered.

After more marching and a few skirmishes, we came to part of the Maginot Line. This was a series of fortified pillboxes built by the French for protection from German invasion. They had been built facing east to counter invasions from that direction. Early in World War II, the Germans took control of France, including the pillboxes. We would sneak up and knock the Germans out of these two-room pillboxes by pulling the pins out of hand grenades and dropping them through the ventilators.

The Germans would rush out with concussions from the explosions and surrender. It

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only took one hand grenade to blow up one pillbox.

We got in on the Battle of the Bulge when General Patton moved our division and two others 150 miles toward Luxembourg. I was on patrol with seven or eight other men one night when it was very cold and snowing so hard it looked like a white sheet was draped in front of us. At a railroad dump, the Germans started firing on us, so we lay down in a ditch full of snow and began to crawl back to our outfit, except our outfit had moved out. We caught up to it the next day.

On December 24, 1944, we were in our foxhole when what looked like some American soldiers dressed all in white came walking down the road from the forest. When the leader motioned to his men to attack, we realized they weren’t Americans, but we stopped these Germans with our rifles. Later, we had to take a village at the base of a cliff. From a distance, we could see the Germans enjoying themselves as they butchered a big cow. We went to work quickly and slid quietly down the hill, catching the Germans by surprise. We captured three Germans and decided to hold these prisoners of war in the nearby church.

The Germans resisted going into the church something terrible. No wonder. We discovered they had booby-trapped it.

After clearing out that village, our company moved on to take another small town.

During the fighting, shrapnel from a German 88-mm gun hit me in the head and knocked me out cold. I woke up in a field hospital and had no idea how I got there.

I was transported to France where they operated on me. During the six weeks I spent in recuperation at the hospital, General Patton came to visit the wounded. He was dressed in clean, pressed khakis and wore a shiny pistol on each hip and a shiny helmet. When he walked by my bed, I tried to sit up, but he motioned for me not to bother. I was able to shake Patton’s hand.

He was a very impressive man.

From there, I was sent to a convalescent home in France for two weeks where I met Jerome Stryk from Flatonia. I dreaded going back to my outfit because I knew what

Between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s Day 1945, our platoon dug in on a hilltop near Heidersheid where we stayed for 19 days. At night, the Germans constantly crossed the nearby Sure River dressed in snowsuits. We held them back by firing our M-1 rifles, while American tanks fired their 30 and 50-caliber machine guns and 90-mm guns. After 19 days, we turned around and marched back to Heidersheid. I’m third from the left on the front row of the picture of our Company C platoon.

I was born in Ellinger, Texas, in August 1925. My parents, Theodore and Mary (Kovar) Muzny, moved to the Morgan farm near Plum in 1932, so that’s where I grew up. I attended Plum Public School and Sts. Peter & Paul Catholic Church School. I didn’t have transportation, so my schooling was over after the eighth grade.

After World War II ended, I didn’t have enough points to come home with the 80th Division. Instead, I was reassigned to the 103rd Infantry Division and spent a year in Czechoslovakia keeping an eye on the Russians. Although I would rather have been home, it wasn’t bad because it was peacetime and I spoke Czech.

to expect. I’d already seen a lot of war.

Not long after I returned to the front, we had to cross the Siegfried Line, which was fortified with solid iron posts and plenty of barbed wire. We fought hard and finally broke through. Next, we crossed the Rhine River on a damaged bridge. There were swastikas everywhere.

We helped take Frankfurt and then went into Kassel where the fighting was tough, hand-to-hand and house-to-house.

When our squad leader stepped through a

doorway, he was killed. The assistant squad leader was killed as well as a private right behind him. They were picked off by a German shooting from a window in a building across the street. This German later came out of his hiding place with his rifle in the air to surrender. We were angry and shot around him until he dropped his rifle. He was lucky we didn’t shoot him.

From there we turned east toward Czechoslovakia. That’s where we were when the war ended.

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Veterans Voices

Tuesday, August 14, 2015

63

People today don’t know what hard times are like. In the 1930s during the Depression, a cow and calf would bring $7.25.

Eggs were 4¢ a dozen and cotton sold for $25 a bale. But we always had a garden and our own chickens, hogs and turkeys, so there was something to eat, although it wasn’t fancy. I was about 14 or so when I went to work for my brother who ran the store at the Winchester turnoff. I also did a little blacksmith and mechanic work and sold gasoline.

I was drafted on May 12, 1942. I knew I had it coming because of my age. They loaded us up and took us to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Then I went to Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, for six weeks of basic training, before going to Camp Cleburne in Louisiana for extended training. The mosquitoes there were so big they could almost haul you off. Our rations didn’t get there when we did. I was supposed to become a glider pilot. I was having some trouble with my ankle, so an officer sent me to a specialist and that ended my glider training. I was reclassified at Fort Hood, Texas, and assigned to the Military Police, working out of the same office as the civilian police in Temple.

Soldiers couldn’t bring liquor back on post. We’d pour it all in a washtub. It smelled like a distillery. The soldiers were supposed to have proof of insurance on their cars before they went off the post. One night a second lieutenant was checking off post and didn’t have it. He said he was going to go anyway. I told him, ‘Give me your name, rank and serial number.’ He got mad; ‘Just wait,’ he said, ‘I’m going to meet you downtown one of these nights.’ I had a partner from Arkansas who spoke real slow.

He would say to an unruly guy, ‘You think you’re going to hurt me, but I’m going to hurt your arm.’

Because the Army needed replacement infantry troops in Europe, I was reassigned again, this time to artillery and communications. After we were sent to Camp Wolters near Mineral Wells, Texas, for four weeks of field tank training, they shipped us out to Naples, Italy, in October 1942, ready to go into combat. I was almost seasick for the 12-day trip across the Atlantic because the ocean was plenty rough. Huge waves would hit the ship and the prop would come out of the water making a loud noise.

When we were getting ready to go into

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combat for the first time, I sent my parents a message, “Season open, no limit.” Being hunters, my family knew what I meant.

My mother would send cookies and it might take six months for them to reach me.

It didn’t matter because it was something from home. I missed home living a lot. We did have Sunday church services even in the field, when it was safe to do so.

I was trying to dig a foxhole in France with two of the guys I was shipped over with. One took a direct hit that laid out his whole insides. The other, who was in front of me, was hit in the back. He was killed, too. Their bodies were still there five days later when we moved out.

At Bonne, France, I got hit in the stomach with some shrapnel. The impact knocked the breath out of me, but the shrapnel didn’t penetrate all the layers of clothing I wore. Then I felt something trickling down my leg. It was blood. I’d been hit in the leg, too. I still carry a piece of shrapnel in my leg as a souvenir. Even now, when there’s a weather change, it bites.

I was taken to a field hospital for treatment and then shipped to England for convalescence. When I started to get better, I got to see some different sights in England and Scotland. I still remember the English accent. I’d ask for directions and every Englishman would end his directions the same way, ‘You KONT miss it.’ When I went to a movie in England, the cigarette smoke was so thick you could hardly see the screen.

I was on my way back to the front about the same time the Battle of the Bulge took place. I was still in Communications, but not in the same unit. Sometimes, we’d crawl back to see where a line had been cut. We didn’t know if the enemy had cut it, so we couldn’t be sure what we might be crawling into. Other times, we had to work at night without any light trying to tie two little black wires together. It was nerve wracking, but you had to do it.

I was injured a second time taking down some 2x10 boards over a window. I was standing on the windowsill and broke my fall with my hand. When I was supposed to come home, an Army doctor tried to hold me over because he said I didn’t have the strength to carry my own luggage. I told him I’d find somebody to help me out and I did. There were so many soldiers coming home at once that the Army pushed some big pieces of equipment off the ship in the

I was born in Lee County in January 1919, but my parents, Edward and Selma Weishuhn, moved to a 220-acre farm near Nechanitz when I was about a year old.

That’s where I grew up and attended the one-room school through seventh grade.

All the beautiful cathedrals we saw in France had been badly bombed. I’ve always thought that was a shame. I would have liked to see Europe before it was devastated in World War II.

harbor to make room for all of us. We were 12 days on the water coming back.

We had turkey dinner at the base at Palestine, Texas, before I was finally discharged on December 29, 1945, at Fort Sam Houston. For the last leg of the trip from San Antonio, I caught a ride with Egon Tietgen and his wife from Swiss Alp. It was good to see someone from home. Two of my brothers, Lawrence and Vermont, who had also served in World War II, got home ahead of me.

When I went in the service, I took my Model A car to Brasher Motor Co. in La Grange and asked them to store it for me.

They agreed and I put it up on blocks.

When I got back, it was there waiting for me. It sat in their lot for almost four years and Brasher didn’t charge me.

I was awarded a Purple Heart, although I had been wounded not once, but twice, Combat Infantry Badge, European Theater

Ribbon, Presidential Citation and French Citation, Good Conduct Medal, Victory and American Defense Ribbons, as well as two battle stars indicating that I fought in two major battles in northern France.

I earned $475 in overseas pay on top of my regular pay during the war that I used to buy the Conoco Service Station in Flatonia.

A few years later, I moved to La Grange to take over the Texaco Service Station. I brought Phillips 66 to La Grange and operated the bulk distributorship, too. In 1946, I married Agnes Baca from Rabbs Prairie and we had three children: Charles, James and Beatrice.

I was glad to serve my country, but, when I got home, I wanted to put the war behind me. I have always thought there were “cents” and “sense.” If you use them together, you might do something with your life.

Mr. Weishuhn died on April 4, 2015.

I’m fourth from the left seated on the front row of our infantry training battalion at Camp Wolters near Mineral Wells, Texas. I started out training to be a glider pilot, but due to a previous injury, I was reassigned to the Army’s military police. Later when I was trained in Communications, I was sent overseas and into combat with the Infantry.

Veterans’ Voices

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I was drafted into the Army when I turned 18 in 1945. Four buses left from in front of the Fayette County Courthouse in La Grange at 4 a.m. on April 10, 1945, for Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. I had never been out of the county before. I wasn’t sad, but a little afraid. By that time, they were drafting men with families and when we passed through Schulenburg, one of our fellow members broke down and cried because he was leaving his wife and two small children behind. That made everybody feel bad. I was inducted at Fort Sam Houston.

About three days after we arrived, they needed some truck drivers. I figured being a truck driver would be a good job, so I volunteered and the truck was a wheelbarrow.

We were then shipped to Fort Hood at Killeen, Texas, for basic training. When we got a weekend pass, I got a ride as far as La Grange with a guy from El Campo and his buddy, who were going home for the weekend. He drove a Model A Coupe with a rumble seat that folded out in the back where a trunk would be today. That’s where I rode because his friend from El Campo was in the passenger seat up front. My father was supposed to meet me in La Grange, but when I didn’t come in on time, he went home. On account of the war, no lights were supposed to be lit at night, so everyone wanted to be home by dark. There was no communication, so he had no way of knowing what had happened to me. The man dropped me off about where Kleiber Tractor is today and I started walking 12 miles down what is now FM 609. I walked all night on a gravel road.

Actually, I ran half of the way. I didn’t meet a single car – not one. Mother was preparing breakfast when I finally got home. They were shocked to see me! The next day, my father took me back to La Grange to get my ride back to Fort Hood. I rode all the way back in that rumble seat, which was like sitting in the back of a truck.

I was almost finished with my training at Fort Hood when the war in Japan ended.

We all were happy for that. There was a lot of celebrating. The school bands came out and played.

I came home on a two-week leave before I boarded a troop train in Schulenburg that had come out of Louisiana going to Fort Ord in California. Dad came to see me off.

Mother wouldn’t because it was too sad for her. She didn’t even like to see pictures of

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Being in the Army was a good experience because you learned to take care of yourself, but more importantly, you learned how to get along with people. That has helped me all my life, especially in community service such as the school board, Round Up Club, KCs, VFW, Independent Cattleman’s Association and Fayette County Courthouse bailiff.

me wearing my uniform.

At Fort Ord, we prepared for overseas duty. On October 1, 1945, we loaded on a troop ship called the Costa Rica in the San Francisco harbor at 4 o’clock in the afternoon to go somewhere; we didn’t know where. By the next morning, half of us were beginning to get seasick. It was a completely different life. For a whole week, I would say 75% of the soldiers got sick, including me.

You would go to the doctor and they knew what was wrong, but they couldn’t give you anything for it. The sea was so rough that it made the ship rock so much that salt and pepper shakers would slide up and down the table when you went to eat. The bunks were so close together that you almost touched the guys above and below you. We were at sea for 21 days.

When we finally saw land, the most intelligent guys said it was Japan because we could see Mount Fuji, but a lot of us didn’t know what Mount Fuji was. The ship could not dock because the docks had been totally destroyed, so they had to boat us in.

I was born in 1927 and grew up on our family’s farm north of Flatonia on FM 609 near Muldoon. I finished the fifth grade at Pin Oak School before going to work helping my father raise cotton, corn and cattle. I also worked part time for Ruhmann Manufacturing in Schulenburg, which was a blessing because jobs were hard to find.

At the Fourth Replacement Depot, they were sending some soldiers back home and bringing others in to replace them during the Occupation. They sent me to the First Cavalry Division at Camp Drake, about 20 miles west of Tokyo. On a weekend pass to Tokyo with some other soldiers, a man called my name. It was Cecil Castro from Moulton, a good friend and kin on my mother’s side. He was in the Air Force. It was a surprise because I never even saw anyone from Texas in Japan!

I worked in the First Cavalry Division’s Officers Mess Club as a cook. I didn’t know anything about cooking, so I prepared steak and beets. The general asked me where I learned to eat steak with beets. I was just a country boy, but I learned to cook. I still do all my own cooking.

After 18 months, I boarded another troop ship, the Alabama. The water wasn’t rough coming home, although it took us 16 days to reach San Francisco. From there, we went by train to Fort Sam Houston where I was honorably discharged. When I got off

Veterans’ Voices

the bus in Schulenburg, my father was waiting for me.

After I got out of the service, I took advantage of the GI Bill program that offered education to farmers. Arthur Strobel of Schulenburg, who was my shop instructor, taught me woodworking. My father and I cut down huge cedars in the pasture at our farm and took the logs to a sawmill in Muldoon.

Blaschke’s in Schulenburg planed the wood for me and with Mr. Strobel’s help, I built a whole bedroom suit of furniture. I learned many farming skills from Roy Bucek, who was our agriculture instructor.

When I went into the service, my future wife, Andrea Delgado, was only a girl, but when I returned, she was a beautiful young woman. We were married on August 26, 1950, at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Ammannsville and attended St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Weimar. We had five daughters and three sons and have a large extended family now. Sadly, Andrea died last year, days before our 64th wedding anniversary.

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Not too long before World War II ended in 1945, I was 17 years old. I had a tough time all through school. I lied about my age and joined the Merchant Marines, which was known as the Maritime Service. I was influenced by a good friend, Chester Cherry, from Muldoon.

Under the U.S. Coast Guard, the Maritime Service workers worked cargo ships that transported all types of supplies. The ships are owned by big companies, not the U.S. Government. Some of the ships were made in the Houston area.

I joined the Maritime service in Galveston, Texas. I was sent for Maritime Service training in Avalon, California, which was on Catalina Island. This was my first time out of the state of Texas. From Catalina Island, I was sent to San Francisco. There, I served on a Merchant Marine ship. We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge down the coast to Panama through the Panama Canal.

We picked up 20 Navy men that were going back to the U.S. to be discharged.

On our way to New Orleans, these sailors dumped live ammunition over the side of our ship into the Caribbean Sea for two

Even though the hostilities were over by the time I was drafted in 1946, there was still a lot of work involved in bringing many servicemen home and sending others back to Europe. I was proud to serve my country.

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days. In New Orleans, our ship was loaded with supplies going to the Army base near Catano, which is on the island of Puerto Rico across the bay from the city of San Juan. From there we sailed back to the U. S. We landed in New York harbor. From New York, I went home to West Point, Texas, for a visit. Then I signed onto a ship going to England. When we reached Liverpool, we sailed up the channel to Manchester. From there we sailed back to New York harbor. I went home to West Point, Texas. The war was over but I liked sailing, so I signed up again. By this time, the Maritime union was talking about striking. One of the union leaders approached me and started telling me what I would have to do if there was a union strike. I told him I was not in the Army and he could stick it up his (you know what) and I walked out the door. After this event, I retired my Maritime card and went back home.

In 1949, I married Eleanora Blaha. We raised two wonderful children. We have six grandchildren, six great grandchildren and one on the way. Who could ask for a better life?

I was born in December 1927 near West Point. I attended Rocky Ridge School and later Flatonia High School. My dad worked for the Texaco Clay Plant at West Point and I worked there one summer, as well. My wife, Eleanora, and I live on the road named after my parents in the West Point area.

I was born near Flatonia and attended grade school in String Prairie, which was a little country school that had seven grades all in one room with one teacher. It was located due north of Flatonia about six or seven miles. I have one sister, Emma, who is younger than I am. I was the only boy from our community who wasn’t in the Infantry during World War II.

Veterans’ Voices

Whenever the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is mentioned, I think to myself, “I went over it and I went under it.” Whenever the Panama Canal is mentioned, I think to myself, “I went through that fascinating feat of engineering in a big ship.”

I was drafted when I turned 18 in February 1946 and joined the Air Corps “for the duration, plus six months.” First, I was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and then to Lowry Field near Denver, Colo.

From there, I was sent to what they called the Little Pentagon in Maryland.

I liked Maryland, although I found the winters harsh compared to Central Texas.

I worked in an office for the Fourth Airborne Division keeping records on Air Force personnel, who was coming home from Europe and who was going back. On weekends, I volunteered to answer phones in another government office in the same building just for something to do.

After I had been in the service awhile, they offered me a 30-day leave if I would reenlist. I did and was able to come home. I was a short-term enlistee at that point. Another boy and I got a ride on an airplane to Austin. Then I bought a ticket on a bus going to Flatonia. We had on wool ODs (olive drab uniform) and it was about 100 degrees in Texas. We like to have cooked!

After 30 days, we flew back to Maryland and I went back to the same desk at the Little Pentagon. My reenlistment was for 13 months. I served from February 1946 to September 1947 before I was honorably discharged from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

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My father had been drafted during World War I and served in the U.S. Army Air Force.

When I turned 18, we knew that I would be drafted, too, because the Allies needed manpower due to the heavy losses. My father requested a deferment for me since I worked on the farm, but was not successful in getting it.

I reported to La Grange along with two other local boys, Warren Wubbenhorst and Melvin Wolff. Sadly, Melvin was killed in action in Germany less than a year later, only a few days before the end of combat.

I was inducted at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on May 18, 1944, where I was told I had three choices: infantry, infantry, infantry. My mother saved the first note I sent home in a scrapbook. I told my family I had been issued a uniform and I looked pretty good in it. I reassured them the food was fine and I was feeling good. I signed it, “Bubba,” which was my nickname. I took my basic training in Tyler at Camp Fannin and we shipped out from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

Fortunately, I was never seasick. I was assigned to the 42nd Rainbow Division, which also had seen action in World War I. General Douglas MacArthur founded the division.

The nickname of Rainbow Division stuck because it was made up of men from one end of America to the other. Our division’s patch is a multi-colored rainbow and we carried the flags of all 48 states. (That’s how many there were at the time.)

We saw our first action in France at Alsace-Lorraine in about the same sector where World War I Rainbow Division soldiers met the enemy.

During the war, I spent a lot of time in foxholes. One soldier would sleep while the other was awake. The trees were so thick in the Black Forest that you couldn’t stretch your arms out without touching them. We used guide wires at night so we didn’t get lost in the dense brush. We had a replacement lieutenant who decided to go out and check to make sure our guys were alert. He ended up being pinned down until daylight.

Although I did not fight on the frontline during the Battle of the Bulge, about one third of the troops in our division were pulled away to do so. The Germans took advantage of our weakened strength to attack us.

We suspected that civilians, whom we knew could not be trusted, had likely reported our

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My wife, Carolyn, and I, along with two other couples, retraced my footsteps during World War II on a trip in 1988. Having witnessed the devastation, I was amazed at how well France and West Germany had been rebuilt.

I was born on my parents’ farm at Carmine in October 1925. I attended a one-room school named La Bahia about a mile away from home. In junior high, I went to school in Carmine and graduated from La Grange High School.

position to the Germans.

This was called Operation North Wind.

We went into combat December 24, 1944, at Strasbourg, France, defending the west bank of the Rhine River. On January 3, 1945, we were moved to a defensive position at Duppigheim, France. Two days later, we moved to Birlenbach in heavy snow and bitter cold.

We remained there in defense and conducted patrol duties until moving to Ingolsheim on January 19, 1945. We were forced to withdraw from there on foot and underwent an all-night forced march in bitter cold and deep snow. Company I then dug in at Dauendorf, a village near Neubourg.

In 2001, 56 years after the battle, the U.S. Secretary of the Army issued a Presidential Unit Citation to members of the 222nd Infantry Regiment, 42nd Division that reads: ‘The 222nd Infantry Regiment is cited for extraordinary and outstanding performance of duty in action against the enemy on 24 and 25 January 1945, in the Bois D’Ohlungen, and the vicinity of Schweighausen and Neubourg, France. On the night of 24 January 1945, the 222nd Infantry Regiment, under strength by half a battalion of riflemen, yet necessarily extended over a 7,500-yard front, was attacked by five regiments supported by heavy artillery. Ordered to hold at all costs, the Regiment withstood the enemy’s desperate bid to break the 7th Army Moder River Line. From ice-filled foxholes, the outnumbered defend-

ers fought off wave after wave of enemy attacks all along the Regiment’s front and infiltrating into friendly positions, well behind the main line of resistance. On the night of the 25th, the frustrated enemy fell back to its original line, leaving the ground littered with enemy dead. Despite the loss of 237 officers and men, the 222nd Infantry Regiment held its position, enacting a heavy toll of men and equipment from the enemy. The courage and devotion to duty shown by the members of the 222nd Infantry Regiment in smashing one of the enemy’s principal strategic efforts to reconquer Alsace, are worthy of emulation and exemplify the highest traditions of the Army of the United States.’

In addition to the deaths and injuries reported in the citation, frostbite, as well as many cases of foot problems, affected members of our regiment during this combat.

As we neared Wurzburg, Germany, in early April 1945, we had to wait for the allied engineers to rebuild a bridge across the Main River. We could see the words HEIL HITLER painted in huge letters on a wall of the local landmark, the Marienberg Fortress.

Before the end of the next day, those words were painted over and a rainbow, the symbol of our division, replaced them. I recall one other incident from Wurzburg, which was a large medical center. I was on guard duty in a hospital, which had no lights, when I heard a strange sound, ‘Wee, wee, wee.’ I couldn’t place the noise, so I clicked the safety on my rifle, ready to fire if need be. It turned out that a German doctor, turning the crank on a small handheld flashlight to generate a small amount of light in the dark building, had been making that noise. Also at Wuerzburg, we freed a lot of local champagne stored there!

Veterans’ Voices

On April 29, 1945, the U.S. 7th Army’s 42th Infantry Division 222nd Infantry Regiment liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp established by Germany’s Nazi regime. We were close behind them. The furnaces were still smoking when we got there.

All American company commanders were told to take their men through to witness the atrocities. Conditions at Dachau were unbelievable. You cannot understand the full extent of the brutality and evil of the concentration camp until you have seen and smelled it.

After all this time, words still fail me.

There were times during combat when I wondered if I’d ever see Fayette County again, but at 18 or 19 years of age, the war was kind of a game. Although I lost two of my best friends in combat, you had to will yourself to relax, so you could face combat and think. One guy, who was too tense for too long, lost it. Then he was no good to himself or the Army.

Although there were non-fraternization rules, I acted as an interpreter to set up army housing in the homes of German civilians before the war in Europe ended. After the war ended, the Army changed my military occupation to interpreter. I was assigned to the Military Intelligence Service in Salzburg, Austria, where I interrogated German prisoners for our Company Commander, Battalion Commander and Regimental headquarters. We were intent on identifying Nazi SS and Gestapo (secret police), who may have been in charge of the concentration camps and where they, as well as other criminals, were hiding out. By the way, high-ranking SS officers had two little dots tattooed under their right arms, so if a German prisoner got antsy about removing his shirt, we knew he had something to hide.

During the Occupation after the nonfraternization rule was lifted, I had some fun with the German civilians. They would often come up to me in the street seeking cigarettes and ask if I spoke German. I would reply in German, “No, not a word,” and walk away.

When it dawned on them what I’d said, they’d run after me with big smiles and start chatting. One time, I overheard two German women loudly complaining that the GIs were spoiling their teenage daughters. As I walked by them, I said, “I’m happy you think that,” leaving them speechless.

During the Occupation, I was very grateful to serve in Vienna and visit Paris and London when I was on leave.

Leslie Rhode from Warrenton was in my unit and served close to me in combat, but we didn’t know that until we talked onboard ship coming home from Europe. Also onboard was Warren Wubbenhorst with whom I had been inducted into the Army. I was finally discharged and returned home in June 1946.

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I have heard it said that the captain We knew we were going to be drafted, so after one semester at Texas A&M, seven steers his ship, but he didn’t. Much of the of us boys went to Dallas and enlisted. We time, a seaman steered the ship with a big wanted to join the Navy, but since its quota manual wheel. A smaller pilot wheel could was full, we signed up for the Coast Guard. be set on automatic after it was calibrated using a compass, but manIt was 1945 and I was 17 ning the wheel was regular years old. They sent us to seamen’s duty. boot camp at Curtis Bay When I was assigned to at Baltimore, Maryland, watch duty, I didn’t care much for eight weeks. I looked for going up on crow’s-nest, pretty young and one day the highest point on the ship. a drill instructor, who was When I had forward watch, pretty tough, said to me, I’d be on the bow of the ship “Does your mama know using binoculars. There were you’re away from home?” other types of watches and I told him, “Hell, yes, the ship was equipped with I was born at Schulenburg in February Sir!” They kept on us and 1927, but spent much of my youth in La radar. tried to make us mad so Our main worry was hit- Grange. I attended Sacred Heart Cathowe’d try harder. lic School and graduated from La Grange Then I was sent to Ellis Serving in the Coast ting a mine, an explosive High School when I was 16 years old.

Island in New York Harbor Guard during World War II device that would detonate if for two months of guard was a good experience for jarred. Mines didn’t show up from the ports of New York, Boston, Newduty at a hospital where me, something that I never on radar, so we had to look port News and Norfolk on the east coast forgot. I learned a lot and for them when we were on and San Francisco on the west coast. In orshell-shocked soldiers grew up fast. watch. I recall once that what der to reach the Pacific, we went through were being treated. When I was reassigned to the U.S. Navy, I attended looked like a piece of debris was, in fact, a the Panama Canal and then past Midway. firefighting and gunnery schools in Rhode mine. Our ship circled it at a safe distance We were at sea when Japan surrenIsland. In June 1945, I joined the crew of and one of the sharpshooters onboard shot dered. We had a special meal to celebrate a super troopship called the USS General at it until it exploded. the end of the war. We were glad because While serving on the Breckenridge, we we thought it meant we would be going J.C. Breckenridge. The Breckenridge was the equivalent of two football fields long made five trips to France: three to Marseille home soon. and one football field wide. It carried 5,000 and two to La Havre, taking troops over and Some of the things I saw while with the soldiers and a crew of about 500, plus Army bringing personnel back. We also went to Navy were not good. For example, when personnel and Marines. The ship was so Manila in the Philippines twice. We sailed we got to the Philippines after the war, crowded that it took a long time to get the servicemen onboard and, when we docked, a long time to get them off. In the galley, the troops ate their meals in shifts because there were so many of them.

They slept in bunks stacked five high.

Those sleeping on the top were exposed to the asbestos-covered pipes above them. The sailors would dust the particles off their pillows and sheets before they went to sleep, never knowing it was dangerous.

The Breckenridge had no air conditioning, so it was hot when we were in the Pacific, but fairly comfortable when we were sailing the Atlantic. When we ran into storms, the sea was so rough that a lot of the troops got really sick.

Guarding, painting, keeping the ship clean, running messages – those were all seamen’s duties. I started as an apprentice seaman, was a seaman 2nd class before we boarded the ship and then was promoted to A favorite pastime for seamen on liberty was to have their picture taken with their budseaman 1st class. dies. I’m at far right behind the fake bars.

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Veterans’ Voices

starving children would come to our ship and beg for food. We had orders not to give them anything, not because we didn’t care, but we only had enough food for the men onboard. We could not feed the whole city.

Those people had a hard time. We were fortunate not to see that kind of starvation in the U.S. While we were at sea, an officer was crushed and killed by a gun. Another man was killed in an explosion and the sea was so rough that a plane couldn’t land so he was buried at sea. That was supposed to be his last trip. He expected to be going home. Before the accident occurred, the captain had told me to switch places with that seaman. Had I stayed where I was, I would have been killed.

We picked up Japanese prisoners at Corregidor Island, located at the entrance of Manila Bay, a few months after the Allies took it over. The island was full of caves and had been torn up pretty badly. It still wasn’t cleaned up yet. There were helmets, equipment, you name it.

We had liberty – shore leave – in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Norfolk, but we were usually in port for only three days. Once in France, I got so sick on the wine that I ended up in sickbay. We had been warned the wine might not be any good and they were right.

Also in France, several other Coast Guardsmen and I were onboard a landing craft returning to our ship after shore leave.

Some Marines and Army personnel were also on the vessel. One of the Marines got into an argument and hit a sailor, which started a big fight. Even though we were trying to stay out of it, we got pushed around a little bit. We were wearing our whites (uniforms) and got pretty dirty because there was water in the bottom of the landing craft.

When we got back onboard our ship, we were each assigned 10 hours of extra duty as punishment for misbehaving, although we weren’t all guilty. That meant we had additional cleanup duties on top of our regular work. We were at sea nine or 10 months.

I was discharged in 1946 and received four service awards: American Theater of Operations Medal; European-AfricanMiddle Eastern Campaign Medal; AsiaticPacific Campaign Medal and World War II Victory Medal.

Mr. Brauner was interviewed by his son, Mark, before his death on October 25, 2014.

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