Foxfire – World War ll

An Interview with Mack Suttles

Adapted from The Foxfire Magazine Fall/Winter 1994 - Original article by Cary

Suttles and Johnny Pearce

Iwas seventeen years old when I volunteered for the war. Maybe I felt like it was my patriotic duty and, like a lot of the other boys that were my friends and things, they had gone. So I went along with it.

I wasn’t married at the time. I guess my family was upset in a way when I left, but that was one thing I had to do and so I went and did it. Boot camp was rough. Most of us were just young boys. They really put us through the mill, too. We learned to march, drill, hand-to-hand combat, and how to handle the weapons. How to handle grenades, how to throw a grenade – we learned everything we could about warfare. It was tough, but we made it through. I took my regular basic training, and then I took six weeks of hand-to-hand combat training, which was ranger’s training. I started in the Rangers with one hundred sixty-nine guys, and all you had to do was drop out just one time and you were automatically out of the outfit. In six weeks when we finished our basic training, there were sixty-nine of us left. Then I also had two weeks of survival course. I took my physical at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. We had malaria shots, typhoid, and yellow fever shots. We also had plague shots, and just about any kind of shot you could name, we had it. I went from there to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for my induction. And from there I went to Camp Croft, South Carolina, in Spartanburg, where I took my basic training. From there I went to Fort Ord, California for two weeks and was sent from there back to Camp Picket in Virginia, where I joined the 65th and the 218th. And that is where I left to go to France.

My older brother spent four years in the Reserves for the Navy. Then I had one brother that was in the Air Force during the Korean War. He was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War when he retired. I also had another brother that was in the service during the Vietnam War. He spent his time in Germany.

We really did not have a special time to get up during the war. Whenever they kicked you out of a hole, somewhere or another, either you were on the move, in a skirmish, or else you were in a foxhole on guard. When a commanding officer came in there and said to get up, that’s when we got up, but our regular time was usually at about five o’ clock in the morning if we were in basic training.

It was very cold most of the time. Whenever you got a break, you were sent back to where you could take a bath and get clean clothes. Other than that, you washed in a steel pot. The only hot water you had you heated in your helmet. If you were out there, you could take your old helmet and put water in, and if you were where you could build a little fire or something under it, why you could heat it that way. If you didn’t do that, why you had cold water.

They would have chow lines. In the army, we called our food ‘chow’. If you were up on the front lines they would usually eat air rations or sea rations. In each sea ration there were four cigarettes. There was a can of some kind of meat or lima beans, a raisin bar, and also two heart attack crackers which were crackers that tasted so bad that they would give you a heart attack.

I was assigned detail at Dachau prison camp. As a matter of fact, I was there when it was took over, and then I went back to Dachau prison camp and I was stationed there for a while. We had nineteen thousand S.S. troopers there.

We wrote home every week, most of us did. Most of the guys, the ones that were married wrote home to their wives, and the ones that were not, wrote home to their families, their mothers, fathers, and their girlfriends, stuff like that. There was not too much data to speak of. You didn’t talk about the war because your mail was censored then, and if there was anything in there about what they didn’t want you to know, they blacked it out. Other than that, about the only thing you could tell them was if you were well and okay.

In a fight, well, we slept in a foxhole, in what we called a slit trench. You carried an old blanket with you. The foxhole was dug deep and a slit trench was about two foot deep most of the time, where you could stretch out in it.

You did not build fires during combat. You would get your head blown off. You could hear gunfire almost at all times. Sometimes the Germans would catch you in chow lines, or they would catch you by creeping up and they would throw an eighty-eight barrage on you. For entertainment, why, we would go to the U.S.O. or to a dance somewhere or another if we had liberty to go. I made a lot of new friends while I was over there. The majority of the time the morale of the G.I.’s was good. Sometimes it would get pretty low, but if a guy depended on the next guy that was beside why most of the time the morale was pretty good.

Foxfire is a not-for-profit, educational and literary organization based in Rabun County, Georgia. Founded in 1966, Foxfire’s learnercentered, community-based educational approach is advocated through both a regional demonstration site (The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center) grounded in the Southern Appalachian culture that gave rise to Foxfire, and a national program of teacher training and support (The Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning) that promotes a sense of place and appreciation of local people, community, and culture as essential educational tools. For information about Foxfire, foxfire.org, or call 706-746-5828.