We Who Are Alive and Remain (28 page)

While we were in Zell am See, I and Tom Gray ran a riding stable. Lieutenant Speirs gave me a permit to do that to keep the troops busy. Zell am See was a resort town. It was a beautiful place to hunt and fish.

One day when I was running the riding stable, an old lady came up, pointed, and said, “That horse is mine.”

“Okay,” I said, and handed her the reins. The next day word was out, and more old ladies came to claim their horses. Before you know it I was out of horses and had to close the stable.

We received our mail in Austria. Mail call was still something everybody always waited for. Word from home was so welcome. I had one sister, Lois, who wrote to me and sent boxes of homemade cookies and fruitcake from the time I was in basic training until I was ready to ship home. I never told her until years later that only crumbs were inside her boxes by the time they arrived. I didn’t want her not to send them because even the crumbs were good to eat compared to the other food we had.

At the end of July, we were moved by train to France. Our company went into barracks in Joigny. We were starting to break up. Some of us were going home on points. Since the 101st Division was inactivated in November of 1945, I was transferred into the 82nd Airborne before I shipped out for home from Le Havre, France, to New York.

During my time in Joigny, to avoid having to stay busy by being involved in training exercises, I joined the regimental boxing team. I was in the light-heavyweight division. I ended up in the ring with another soldier from another team. He was a Native American and he could really dance in the ring. I sized him up and hit him with everything I had. He just stood there and grinned. That’s when I knew I was in big trouble. The next thing I knew I woke up with my head bouncing on the steps as they poured water on me while dragging me out of the ring. That was the end of my boxing career. He came up to me in the dressing room after the boxing match and said, “It wasn’t fair for you to box me. I was formerly a Golden Gloves champion in our weight division.”

So I tried out for the company choir. I was in the back row singing my heart out when the choir director pointed at me and yelled, “Hey, you with the foghorn voice, out!” That was the end of my singing career.

Next, I joined the honor guard. I got my white helmet, white scarf with the screaming eagle on it, white boot lacings, and white leather belt, and we practiced marching in close order drill. I liked the precision and snappiness of it. Finally I had found a home. I was promoted to a staff sergeant and added a rocker under my stripes and had eleven men assigned to me in an honor guard unit. We served in that capacity until it was time to be shipped home.

Coming Home

I came back on the
Queen Elizabeth
. I had traveled overseas on the
Queen Mary
, so I joke that I traveled first class both ways. Coming home I was on the promenade deck flat on my back with both legs in a plaster cast from my ribs down. Only my toes were sticking out. I thought, They ain’t going to get me in a lifeboat if we get torpedoed. But by then you figure you’ve made it out alive, so you aren’t worried about much of anything.

I landed in America on April 13, 1945, the day after President Roosevelt died. The war was still at its height in Germany and Japan. U-boats were still sinking ships. The
Queen Elizabeth
always traveled alone. It made twenty to twenty-two knots or more, and destroyers couldn’t keep up with it.

When I had been stationed in New York, back before I had been sent overseas, we stayed at the Broadway Central, an old rattletrap hotel at the foot of Fifth Avenue near New York University. Nearby was a neat little canteen called the Music Box. I met a beautiful brunette there, Pearl Dufour was her name, a New York model, taller than I was, and we dated all three months I was in New York.

Well, this gal had connections. She had been on the front of
Yank
magazine and a couple others. After I was wounded, I wrote her to say I’d probably be coming home soon but had no idea where or when. Unknown to me, she had someone watch the manifests and found out I was coming home on the
Queen E
.

So we landed at the main dock in New York. All the Red Cross gals came to greet us, and who comes walking in but Pearl Dufour, dressed to the nines. She was the first woman I saw coming home to the States. All around me GIs hooted and hollered. Pearl came right up to me, put her arms around me, and gave me a hug and a kiss. She asked me if I needed anything, something to eat or drink. I said I’d love a chocolate soda. It had been quite a while since I had one. Twenty minutes later here comes a chocolate soda on board the
Queen E
.

Pearl and I corresponded for some time but drifted apart over the years. It was never a marrying thing, we were always just good friends. When we first met, she was a good dancer, and I loved to dance. She knew New York and could get us into any club we wanted to get into.

I was discharged from the hospital May 16, 1946. Altogether I was in the service three years and three months. I saw thirty days of combat before being wounded.

I don’t remember where I was on V-E Day, but I remember V-J Day well. We had left Austria by then and gone to Joigny, France. I had come down with tonsillitis and was restricted to quarters. There was a radio there with the BBC on it. The announcer talked about this bomb that had been dropped on Japan that leveled nearly the whole city. I was alone when I heard the report. When the guys came back to the barracks I told them about the size of this bomb. They all thought I was nuts. But they turned on the radio and heard the reports for themselves. I don’t remember any big celebration on V-J Day, but we had all figured we’d have to go to Japan next, particularly guys like me who came in late, so news that the war was over was a relief.

The unit was deactivated in November 1945. They sent the guys who hadn’t been sent yet over to the 82nd, but they were all being sent home as a unit. I didn’t have enough points to be sent home with the 82nd, so after three or four days I was transferred to the 508th and sent to Frankfurt. I was in Frankfurt for Christmas. In January I got a furlough to England. Then I came back to Frankfurt for a few more months. Mostly it was just training and guard duty there. You were on duty four hours on, four hours off. Every other twenty-four hours you got eight hours off in a row. I was a corporal by that time.

One of my jobs was guarding the main doorway to the USAID’s [U.S. Agency for International Development] headquarters. Boy, I saw some main brass walk in and out of there. In one shift I counted thirty-two stars come through the door. We didn’t stop generals, but we stopped everybody else. A lot of big-name civilians came in and out, too. Once I opened the door for Eleanor Roosevelt.

From Austria we headed back to France, where we were garrisoned in an old stable area. The high-points men were shipped home. The rest of us stayed.

In November 1945, the unit disbanded. They held a ceremony, and the flags came down. I felt a real sense of loss. E Company was our home. Most of our remaining fellows, including me, went with the 508th where we went to Frankfurt, Germany, for occupation duty. I was in Frankfurt about six months, from November 1945 through May 1946.

It felt a bit sad to join 508th, yes, but it turned out that the 508th was good to us, too. In Frankfurt we had a chance to live in a nicer area. I had some relatives over in Germany and was able to meet some of them.

The first meeting happened almost by chance. One cold day I was on a roving jeep patrol with some guys. We came to a town called Königstein. There was a photo shop there and I took some film in to be developed. I gave the proprietor my last name, and his eyes lit up. He called his seventeen-year-old daughter downstairs, who spoke English. It turned out that the man’s wife was a cousin to my dad’s cousin, who lived in Chicago. I became friends with the man and his family. The daughter took me to Frankfurt to meet other relatives. They were all very cordial to me.

It was interesting to meet the other side. Two of my relatives had been in the German Army as infantrymen. They lived in an apartment building in downtown Frankfurt. Fortunately, their building had not been damaged very badly. They were very hospitable and gave me pea soup and crackers. I visited several times and gave them cigarettes, butter, and coffee.

I never felt strange as a German American fighting against Germany. My dad had fought against the Germans in World War I. Ironically, his father, my grandfather, had been in the German Army in the 1870s. But my father felt that you fought for the country you lived in. My family believed that we owed America something. It was our country, and we had been very fortunate during the Depression with my dad in the fire department. We always got a paycheck. Plus, there was a sense of moral obligation. What Hitler and the Nazis were doing was wrong—the aggression, the human rights violations—all that. We wanted to do what was right.

I stayed in Frankfurt until May 1946.

This was something few others have seen: before we left Europe, a buddy of mine, Peter Rosenfeller, and I were heading home and ended up in Bremerhaven, a German port city on the Weser River. We had a lay-over of a few days, so we walked around the harbor. A German patrol boat was there. We talked to the captain, he was very talkative, and he took us around the harbor in his boat. We ended up next to the U-boat pen area with all the German sailors still down there. I’m sure it was off-limits to us but nobody stopped us, so we were able to get off the boat and walk around the pen area, looking at all the German U-boats. I know the United States had tried to bomb those pens several times, but I couldn’t see any damage. The sailors were all very aloof toward us.

We came back across the Atlantic on the
Wilson Victory
, a ten-day, rough ride. We got back on Memorial Day. All kinds of flags waved. We came up the Hudson River and pulled into a dock in New Jersey. A number of us went to New York early that evening. It was so great to be back in America. I took a lot of pictures of the Statue of Liberty. I had looked forward to coming home all the time I had been overseas. I had been away from home for a little over two years. When we had left New York to go to Europe it had been a cold, windy day in January. Now, when we came back the skies were clear, it was a warm day in May, and people were very happy. It was a real contrast.

The following day we took a train to Fort Sheridan, Illinois. A day or two later we were discharged. I got my pay, got my records, grabbed my two barracks bags, then took the train to Milwaukee. I hopped in a cab with some other guys and got to my house. My folks were in the backyard when I pulled up. They were very happy to see me. I was happy to see them, too.

We stayed in Austria until August, then were sent back to Mourmelon Le Grande, France, where we got new clothes and had a chance to shop. I went to Paris and went gallivanting around. I bought thirty bottles of perfume that I sent home to my sister. She was supposed to distribute the perfume to a bunch of girls that she worked with. But she didn’t do it. She gave it to girls she wanted to.

In Mourmelon, they checked how many points you had. I had eighty-five points, so I was qualified to go home right away. I was sent to Antwerp, all by myself. I got on a Liberty Ship. There were nineteen other guys on the ship, all colored guys, all from somewhere else. I was the only white guy. The colored guys were the nicest bunch of guys I ever met. They liked to shoot dice. They asked me if I wanted to join in, so I gave it a try, and we shot dice for five days, just pennies and nickels, stuff like that. On the sixth day a guy says, “Let’s shoot dice and see who can win it all, then enjoy the voyage.” Believe it or not, I cleaned them out for $298.

On the way across the Atlantic going home we ran into a late fall hurricane in November. We got hit with the tail end of it. That was rough. It tossed our boat around pretty good. The pounding broke one of the ships’ plates, and the boat took on water. But we made it back to Boston.

From Boston we were sent to Fort Indiantown Gap, a National Guard training base, where we were discharged. I was there for a week where they check you out for everything. A captain saw my records, saw that I was with the OSS in London, and asked if I wanted to get back in the service and continue on with the OSS. I said, “No, I got other ideas.” I wanted to get out and get a fishing camp in Canada. It took ten years before I got the camp, but I got it.

When I was discharged, the captain told the MP to take me to the road outside the base. I thought they were going to take me to a bus terminal or train station, but the MP just took me to the road, stopped, looked at me, and said, “Oh, this is your destination, we don’t have any train stations or bus lines around here close.”

So I had to hitchhike home—it was about an eight-hour drive. Right around there (Indiantown Gap) was Route 322. I got on the road and started hitchhiking. About half an hour later a guy picked me up and asked where I was going. I got in. We started traveling. For a while we just shot the bull, then I fell asleep. It was about 7:30 P.M.

We got to the intersection of two highways where he was going to let me out. It was about three in the morning then. The guy stopped the car. I took my duffel bags out and got on my way. The guy also got out and went to relieve himself. I put my bags by the side of road and bent down to get something out. Suddenly the guy has got a gun to the back of my neck. He says, “I want that duffel bag and all the money you have.”

I had $18 for soldier traveling, $100 in soldier savings, and the $298 I won shooting dice. The guy took it all. He took the duffel bag with all my souvenirs. So that was the end of my military career. Getting robbed at gunpoint.

These days I lecture a lot—I’ve given about three hundred lectures, schools, organizations, military groups, all over the country. Veterans will tell me similar things happened to them—they were discharged and had to hitchhike home and someone picked them up and robbed them. Some guys must have figured out where the GIs were hitchhiking and knew how to work the system.