WILLIAM E. BUDDY CARTER

World War II Interview


By: Kimsey M. "Mac" Fowler

Typed By: Jimmie B. Fowler

17 October 2000



William E. "Buddy" Carter

106 Poplar Street

East Dublin, GA 31021



On December 7, 1941, I was only sixteen years old and my friends and I was out playing football in the field nearby. We went inside to get a drink of water and heard the news about the attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio. We continued to play football and then we stopped and started talking about it and we were too young to go into service. I waited on the draft.



They drafted me when I was eighteen. I was working in Florida building air bases for the allied pilots of Europe to learn to fly those P51 Mustangs. I lived in Bartow, Florida at this time. I came back home to tell my family and went to the courthouse in Camilla and they shipped us to Atlanta.



I was inducted November 11, 1943 and went to Fort Belvoir, Virginia for about five months of training in Combat Engineering. This was the first war that had combat engineers in it. We were well trained to do our job on bridges, mine fields, booby traps, you name it, we could fix it. Every soldier was trained to fight so they could protect themselves and then we had engineer training after the basic training.



We would go out in boats in the Chesapeake Bay and practiced landings. We had a week furlough and then we were shipped out to Camp Penn, Pennsylvania for three or four days and then they sent me to Embarkation Center in Fort Reynolds, New York. We left New York on the Susan B. Anthony Boat. It was a big boat about the size of the Queen Mary. It took two or three weeks to cross the ocean because we had to zigzag because of the submarines.



We landed at London and took a train and went all the way across to a little town, Codford, England. We stayed way back out in the cow pastures for several days and got a little extra training on the side.



They put us in a replacement outfit that was called Repel Depel and I was put in the 294th Engineering Combat Battalion. The 294th trained in mine fields while in England just like we would in Combat. They were getting ready for the invasion and someone put a mine that we had used in training on one of the trucks with a pressure type fuse in it. It blew up and killed forty of our men.



We were about five miles off the coast of France and we hit an underwater mine. It knocked the bottom out of the boat. We had to leave the ship without any gear or weapons. The only thing I kept was a trench knife. We had our float belts on; I wore mine all the time.



As I was going over to the invasion, we were talking and some of the guys didn't want to shoot anybody, but I had made up my mind that if someone pointed a gun at me, I was going to shoot back.



The British and American s Destroyers came by and picked us up.

We got to the beach and the first and second waves had already hit. The Higgins boats came back to the destroyers and picked up the people on it because we were scattered so bad.



When the Higgins Boat took us in, they dropped us off in about four-foot of water and we had to wade in. We picked up the dead men's guns, ammunition, knives, ammunition belts and bayonets. We got into some fighting on the beach over there but then they came by around before too long and put us with the 4th Infantry and 3rd Armored Division. We came in on Omaha Beach and after we got a Beachhead established we went to whoever needed us for engineers. We fought down to the Cotentin Peninsula to Cherbourg. That was a seaport, we had to have a seaport to bring supplies in on. And we went down with the tanks and took down the booby trap and the concrete roadblocks they had laid out.



We used TNT, dynamite and nitro-glycerin to make a super charge and blew the barriers out of the roads.



When we got into Cherbourg, they were pretty well armed down there and it got a little hotter. The orders they gave us that morning was to move any dead Americans that we found laying in the road so the tanks wouldn't run over them and mash them.



We took bobby traps out of buildings. One building we went into had a cash register that had a what looked like a $100.00 bill sticking out of the drawer. I told the men not to touch it. After careful examination, I found that the bill was only printed on one side and a trip wire attached to the cash register. I told the rest of them to go outside. I followed that trip wire and there were about two cases of dynamite under the cabinet. It would explode if you pulled on the cash register drawer to open it.



I ran into a flame-thrower down the street and it was even booby-trapped. I removed the fuse from it.



There was a big concrete bunker roadblock down the street that was ten to fifteen feet high; it was as wide as the street. We found weep holes in it for the water to run through. We packed all the weep holes full of TNT and the last one we put in; we put a fuse in it. We blew that thing "slap up in the air".



We noticed something coming out of the windows from a four-story building that we had to take. When we got close enough it was women in the top floor jumping out of the windows. They had been told the American soldiers would kill you. There was a lot of fire coming from the Fort. A Commanding Officer called and said we have something coming up there to stop that fire. He ordered us to get behind the biggest thing we could and sit on the ground. They turned two of the battleships out in the English Channel broadside and they had a great big German Swastika flag on top of that fort. After about three or four broadsides, they turned that flag into a bed sheet. They had as much as they could stand.



We turned around and started back up the other side of the Pensiula. We were up near St. Mere Eglise and they stopped us again. We all got up on high grounds and got situated. We were there about a week because it started raining.



They told us when we started there would be four thousand bombers that are coming over. At the break of daylight, right behind us (we were in the foxholes), they fired those snub noses 105's. They fired those into the enemy lines. After that they put the Long Tom's 105's up there for about thirty minutes. When they finished, they turned the 8" howitsers on them. They fired about thirty minutes followed by P-51's and P47's came in right over our heads strafing into the enemy lines. They strafed in and out but stopped before they got where we were. One of the P47's had a bomb lodged under its wing and the pilot was rocking the plane trying to shake it loose and he did. It fell right on top of us, a 2-« ton truckload of TNT. We lived through that and about this time, the B17's came through. They told us they were going to drop five hundred-pound bombs every five square yards and they did. Anyway, we had a jumping off point.



We were the leaders. We had to go up on those supply roads and get all the mines out of the road so the 3rd and 5th Armored could come through. We went up there and got to working getting the mines out of the roads and hedge rows and got pinned down with machine gun fire. We stayed there for a while and finally decided the best thing to do while they were reloading the machine gun to jump up on the high side of the road. We got up on the high side and we got pretty active, too. We would take on those snipers up in the treetops. We had a little shoot out with some American Infantry, they thought we were German soldiers and we thought they were Germans (it was so dusty). We could tell by the BAR and the Tommy guns, that they all sounded alike and that each of us was Americans. We found out that we had jumped off about thirty minutes too quick.



Some of the things we saw next were people burning and I saw one man off a German tank that looked like he had been turned inside out.



We went into Normandy then in some flat country, we followed the tanks. Anything that stopped the tanks, we had to go take care of it. Our job was to keep them moving.



When we arrived at the Martain Gap, on up in France a little piece, the Germans counter attacked. We had to furnish two companies to the 3rd Armored Division and the 30th Infantry Division another company to support them. They were getting beat up pretty bad.



The other two companies, we were doing engineer work plus fighting at the same time, too. We finally broke up the counter attack. Ernie Pyle was there. I was in the 7th Corps. He stayed there with us. He wrote for the newspaper about the Martain Gap where we had three hundred fifty thousand of Hitler's elite troops cut off. He quoted, "blood ran in the ditches like rainwater".



After that we went on to Malone, France, south of Paris. We were going to ride on tanks into Paris, but the Germans had blown out four bridges in Malone, France across the Seine River. Each bridge weighed two hundred thirty tons and we built them in two and half or three days.



We had to keep the main supply roads open. Those Bailey bridges are made out of steel and we put it together with pins. We had planes strafing and when we'd get started with a bridge, they'd blow it out and tear it up again.



If the German's counter attacked again we'd have to go back and blow up the bridges again after we had gotten across. We'd build one, one day and blow them up the next day sometimes.



The man who invented the Bailey Bridge was from England. The point on it sticks up and when you built a twenty-foot section behind it, you push the pointed part out further and do the same after each twenty-foot section. That's the way we built bridges across the river.

When you got the bridge across the river we put in a small boat and put the rollers down there that it drops down on.



It took six men to take one six-foot section of it. While you are building one of the bridges and fire got pretty hot and some of the men got hit, other men would step up and take their place. We also had to build footbridges. The Bailey bridges were for heavy equipment. Then we had pontoon bridges, also.







We went all the way across France and into Germany we went through where the World War I was fought. We got into the Hurtgen Forest, and then the 9th Division was trying to knock a hole in the German lines. Every time they'd try to break through that line, they'd get knocked back themselves. One morning, they jumped up and run through that line again and attacked and the German's were not there. They were captured. We were right behind them and filled the hole for them. There were 1,000 of us and each of us had five yards each to take care of. We did a good job on them. I don't like fighting in the woods, I'll tell you that! It gets pretty nasty. But it had to be done by somebody.



When we'd come to a barbed wire fence or something like that, we'd take a big stick of bangalore torpedo and put them together and put a fuse in the last piece and it would open up barbed wire so we could pass. Just like a cattle gap, it opened it up.



We were considered for taking the Rhine River Bridge that would have been a pretty long bridge. When we built bridges, we'd call back and tell them how long the bridge we were going to build and the Quartermaster would bring the material they'd back up and dump it on the ground. We'd take it from there and build it across the rivers.



We got up around the Battle of the Bulge area. We stopped around Aachen, Stolberg and Cologne.



When the German's broke through the lines and started the Battle of the Bulge they took our mailbox. Some of the men said they had put letters in it that day and they got delivered. So evidently someone down the line saw that it got delivered.



The weather got pretty ugly and dirty. It was raining, snowing, cold and sleet. It was below freezing all the time for about a month.



The "C" Company had to build one bridge back down through the Battle of the Bulge. The rest of us were active in the infantry. I think that's what won the Battle of the Bulge, the enemy had to go across the rivers and we'd blow the bridge up before the tanks got there to cross it. We'd go from one river to another and wore them out and they couldn't get to us. They'd run out of gas and the gas was on the other side of the river. Everytime they'd come to the river, we'd blow the bridge out. When they got to the last river, the fuel tank was on the other side. After that we got caught building a bridge across the Rhine River, there was a railroad bridge, which fell in after all the Infantry got across and killed lots of engineers who were trying to keep it up. We tried to capture it intact so we could use it to get supplies across. But when we got to the bridge itself somebody had already gotten ahead of us. The old bridge looked kind of shaky anyway. We got down there on the left side of that bridge and we built a pontoon bridge. The 291st built one on the right side and got shot up pretty bad with V2 bombs, planes and artillery.



Our bridge we built across the Rhine River was 1145 feet long in sixteen hours.



We went into some open country and they fired at us. Anytime we got into open country; they would tear us up. We called for some help from the Air Force and they dropped bombs on them but it didn't do any harm to it.



Some P47's came up and the Commander could talk with them on the radio and explain the situation. The Germans were shooting at us from a tunnel. The P47came over and dropped his 500 lb. bomb in the tunnel and the plane went straight up and it blew the tunnel apart.



Cologne was a nice, pretty town. It had lots of cathedrals in it and we didn't want to destroy them. But it was our job to clean it out. We went in there and got started on it. The German officers that were in charge of the town surrendered the town to us.



We heard later that they took him out and shot him. He said that he didn't want to see the Cathedrals destroyed. They were so pretty.



When we got up to Norohausen, Germany and it was our job to help capture it. Our Company Commander told us we were going to see something we had never seen before. He said whatever you do, you've got to live with it. We didn't know what he was talking about. We arrived and there was a concentration camp up there. There were thousands, thousands, thousands and thousands of people from all over Europe. If we could have looked hard enough there might have been some Americans in there, anyone that looked like a Jew. They had the biggest stack of people in the crematory that they were going to burn them. They had the live ones on the top of the dead ones just trying to find a place to lay down. They were nothing but skin and bones. That would make you so mad, you would want to just kill anybody. We kind of held ourselves. We let the captive people have two of the SS Guards and they beat them with sticks and limbs and anything they could get their hands on. We couldn't stop them.



We were in the Hurtz Mountain at that time and went into a cave where the Germans had prisoners, it was a labor camp. Some of them said they had not seen the sun in over a year. They worked people until they couldn't do anything. This is where they were manufacturing the B1 and B2 Buzz Bomber.



We didn't know who was who; there were men, women and children lying there dead. We went up on the side of a hill out there close to the concentration camp and took a bulldozer and put the children in the first line, the women in the second and the men in the third and buried them.



We had the SS men to bathe the bodies and wrap them in sheets and lay them in a grave and sent men in to town to pick up anything that looked like a flower and take it out to the cemetery. After we got that situated, the War was coming to a close at that time.



We then tried to get the displaced people back to the country in which they came from. We had trouble with the Russians, they didn't want to fool with those people and they didn't want anybody fooling with them.



I worked with the Military Government from there on after May when the war ended. I had enough points then to come home. I had 68 points. They started at 85 and worked down. It took several months to work down to me. I was sent to the Bremen Haven German Seaport and were there for about three weeks waiting for a boat. The first one took the war brides home to England, and another carried someone else home. We turned the drawbridge across the river and wouldn't let anyone come or go and stayed there until we got a boat.



We left out Christmas Day 1945 to come home. We came into New Jersey. They gave us all a steak supper that night at Camp Kilmer. The people that were serving us were German prisoners. We didn't eat much steak we'd had enough of the Germans. We got on the train and a lady came by with a bucket full of milk. I didn't have a glass but I took the liner out of my helmet and filled it full of milk and drank it. I had not had any milk since I left the USA. I was discharged on January 10, 1946 from Fort Gordon, GA.



I'm glad that I came along at the time that I did so that I could help put a man like Adolph Hitler away.



My parents were Lawrence Ezquel and Atha Lesley Carter from Pelham, Georgia.

My brothers and sisters are Eddie, Alton, Otis, Bill, Mary, Lillian and me (the youngest).





My wife of 52 yrs. is Evelyn Annette Kerns from Camilla, GA. We have two sons, Ronnie and Michael.



Ronnie is married to Lavona Powell Carter and they have three children Thomas Russell, Ryan, and Niki.



Michael is married to Wanda Moore Carter; they have four children Jeremy, Jamie, Jennifer Moore Davidson and Julie Moore.



We have five great-grandchildren, Sara Hynote, Harley Humphries, Shelby Carter, A. J. Davidson, and Jarred Davidson



We moved to Dublin in September 1957 when I was transferred from Albany with Carlton Caterpillar Company where I retired in 1988 after thirty years.



Note: Mr. Carter has an American flag that flew over the cemetery at Omaha Beach. Honorable J. Roy Rowland made arrangements for him to have this. He states that many of the men from his unit are buried there and he flies it every June 6 on D-Day in memory of them.



He has a shadow box with pictures of him at the age of 19 (in service) and another at the age of 65. He has his Campaign Ribbons displayed neatly, including an Arrowhead from the Invasion of Normandy, Five Bronze Stars for 5 Campaigns between Normandy and Berlin.



He shared that the closest he got to a Silver Star Medal was the officer that was going to turn in some of his men for a Silver Star the next morning, got killed that night.