WILLIE "BILL" L. PADGETT

WORLD WAR II - INTERVIEW AUGUST 28, 2000


BY: Kimsey M. "Mac" Fowler



Willie "Bill" L. Padgett

835 Highway 80 East

Dublin, GA 31021







I was on guard duty up at Fort Benning, Georgia on December 7, 1941. I enlisted into the Army, January 1940 down at Ft. Screven, on Tybee Island, Georgia. The Fort is not there anymore because it has been turned over to civilians. The lighthouse is the only thing left. We were shipped from Fort Screven over to Ft. Benning, GA. We would go down to Alexandria, Louisiana to Camp Beauregard for maneuvers staying a couple months at the time. We would always come back to our home base, which was Ft. Benning. Immediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked, we moved to Ft. Gordon, GA. It was not quite complete but we helped to move stumps and trees to build roads to complete the Fort. They treated us like we were engineers but we were just Infantryman. I was in the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Gordon. I trained in compass and map reading at Fort Gordon plus we trained recruits until about 1942. The engineers would go out and put up stakes and put the location on top of the stake and cover that up with a sea ration can. Then we would follow the degrees given on the stake to another stake and find another reading on it. We might run into a lake, we had to follow the proper degrees to get around the lake to the other side and pick up the degrees given on the last stake. This training was done mostly at night. If you read your compass correctly, you would end up at the right place and there would be a truck waiting to carry you back to camp. If you missed your course, you could be ten miles from camp and have to walk in (and you were sent back at night continually until you got it right). By this time, it could be morning and you'd have to continue the daily schedule without any sleep. This extensive training was extremely helpful later on in combat especially in directing the artillery.



I lacked one year on my three-year tour before I would have discharged when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and all discharges were frozen.



After about a year at Fort Gordon, we went to Fort Dix, New Jersey with all our tanks, half-tracks, and other heavy equipment belonging to our division. We had chemical warfare training at Ft. Dix learning about all types of chemicals that we might possibly encounter during the war. There was a chemical used with some of the shells that had phosphorous in them, if you got some of it on you, the only way you could put it out was with wet mud or clay to seal it off.



We went by train from Ft. Dix to Carribell, near Tallahassee, Florida. We did all types of amphibious training there. Then we loaded on the trains again and went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey where we loaded on ships and sailed for Europe. There was a lot of confusion. Before loading on the Franconia Ship, a French Ship captured by the Germans, then the English captured it from the Germans and loaned it to the U.S, they issued us weapons that was stored in cosmoline, a heavy grease. The U. S. took the swimming pools off the ship and used that area for ammunition storage. At this point it did not look like a luxury liner, it looked like a battleship. There were about forty ships in our convoy going over. Most of these were troop carriers; some were destroyers and escorts. We cleaned the whole division's weapons but they gave them to another division and they went on to Europe ahead of us. We then had to clean weapons again for us to use. We had a lot of preparation before going overseas. This was about the end of 1943. We sailed to Liverpool, England. It took twelve days to go across because we zigzagged to confuse wolf packs (submarines).



It seems like we were about one hundred miles from London. They sent us to a little small town, about like Soperton, GA, called Huntingdon, England. It had one little theater and the soldiers would always crowd it.



We knew when we got to England that this was a staging area. We didn't know where or when but we knew there was something big in the making. We continued to train doing more obstacle courses and getting use to the climate. It was cold when we arrived there.



We went down on Slapping Sands, England (in the Moor Region near Scotland) for more amphibious training. Our training came intense in that we began to use ammunition-containing tracers. We slept in Quonset huts. The Germans were still doing some bombing and if you didn't have air raid shelters, you'd have to get in a trench.



I was in a machine gun outfit, the 1st Battalion, 8th Inf. Reg., and 4th Division, Company D. There was three rifle and one machine gun companies in each Battalion plus other attachments. We would go out in the landing craft about fifteen miles, the ones that would be used in the D-Day Invasion. The British was supposed to control that sector of the seas. The pump had knocked off in my boat and it started filling up with water about waist deep. We were just before sinking with all our equipment in there. We were bailing the water out with our helmets. One guy that was a radio operator knew the signal so he tied his T-shirt onto a rifle to signal to the British Destroyer. That's the guy that is supposed to be supervising the maneuvers. He let a wolf pack come through there and got a couple of our LST's and we lost I've forgotten how many men. They kinda swept this incident under the rug because you aren't supposed to let information like this out. It seemed like we were already in combat.



General Dwight Eisenhower came out to each unit, no matter how large or small. I was in charge of quarters the day he came to speak to our unit. The OD told me to go ahead to the meeting. General Eisenhower told us at the meeting we were the best-dressed, best fed and best equipped and highest paid soldiers in the world, barring none. He built up our moral so high that no one could stop us when we hit the beaches. He had us to take our headdress off, I never understood why he wanted us to do this, but I found out later he wanted to see if anyone was a bald as he was.





We were on our ships waiting to invade three or four days due mainly to weather conditions. We were waiting for the boats to get ready for the invasion, too. A storm moved in on June 2 and 3rd (1944) and the meteorologist thought there would be an opening on the 5th and 6th. We were riding those white caps, it was very choppy.



We were on a troop ship, which took us across the channel. We had to climb down a net ladder (like six stories long) to the landing barges. The rough waters caused the ship to rock and the net ladder would swing away from the ship and then come back and slam you against the ship. With our heavy backpack and other equipment, it was difficult to hold on to the ladder. My 1st Sgt. was getting a little age on him and really shouldn't have been on the operation. He was going down the ladder, his helmet came off and the chinstrap was choking him causing him to fall into the boat. It hurt his back so they had to hoist him back on the ship. We didn't see him for about two months up on the front.



On June 6th at 6:o'clock in the morning, we hit Utah Beach. Our Assistant Division Commander, General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. the former President's son got permission to go ashore with the first wave of men with his walking cane and a revolver. (See picture attached) He looked like he was surveying a parcel of land to buy. He wouldn't take cover, but a German Artillery shell knocked him down and covered him up with sand. He would crawl out and brush himself off and lost his walking cane one time. Someone had to find it for him. He would walk back and forth from the sea walls to the beaches like he was directing traffic. He had severe arthritis. He only lived about ninety days after the invasion due to exposure related to his arthritis.



Just beyond that sea wall, there was barbed wire obstruction put there by the Germans that looked like it was about fifty feet wide. I had this bangalo torpedo which was about six feet pipe about three inches in diameter. This torpedo was loaded with TNT and Nitro-starch.



I was the point man to these other six guys, which had six feet of pipe each. These pipes were designed to lock together end to end. We were receiving fire from the Germans and we were afraid to stick our heads up. When you lit those waterproof fuses, you only had a few seconds to find a shell hole to get in for protection, you had to be on your all fours and open your mouth it would be so loud. I had a headache for three weeks, especially when I would eat, you would taste that powder.



General Roosevelt had flesh wounds all up and down his arms. It was unusual to see the high brass on the point like he was. They are usually in the back with the maps and telephones where it is safer. The flame-throwers went ahead of us and did a great job in clearing things out. The guys with satchel chargers would run up there and throw them in the bunkers to clean out the bunkers. The 82nd Airborne was suppose to drop ten miles ahead of us. But they got scattered. Some were ten, some fifteen miles. We cleared out everything out on the beach there. Two P51's came in from the sun, I thought they were German planes because they had planes that looked a lot like them. Everyone hit the dirt, we thought we were being bombed. But what they dropped was five hundred pounds tanks of flame-thrower fuel that went skidding across the Bermuda grass there. For a big invasion like this, everything went about as good as you could ask for.



We came to a lake and was somewhat trapped. If the Germans had been there, they could have wiped us out. We carried some small pump-up boats but luckily we didn't have to use them because the planes had pushed the Germans back further and we were able to go across the causeway. We advanced through those hedgerows about seven and half miles that first day. We found out after the war that two of our four battlewagons should have been at Omaha Beach, which means that the men at Omaha Beach had no battlewagons. That's why we were so fortunate. It was the difference of losing three hundred men against five thousand.





We met up with the paratroopers about six o'clock that afternoon, some of those 82nd Airborne. Kelso Horne was part of the 82nd and it was some of those boys that we met up with. They had one prisoner for interrogation.



Our first objective was to go to Cherbourg Peninsula, south of Normandy Beach. We thought we would take it faster than we did. They were well fortified down there. As we took Cherbourg, we had some help from another outfit. I've forgotten who it was. We came back to Cartan and St. Lo, France where we were stalled. The Germans had a semi-circle of heavy tanks and we were dug-in elbow to elbow with plenty of everything. General Patton gave a speech that we were going to go through the Germans like "crap through a goose". He talked kinda rough! I thought he was going to spear head with tanks, but he spearheaded with fifteen hundred bombers plus a pursuit job. We were on the point up there. The artillery marked a smoke bomb on the Germans MLR (main lane of resistance). We had a down wind coming down toward us. Some of those bombers were flying at different altitudes to confuse the German ack ack. That vapor blowing down on us, we had to jerk up our machine guns and run back three hundred yards. All we could see was roots and rocks. However, the visibility that morning was such that you thought you could see for ten miles. But in three hours time all that chemical and dust made it seem cloudy for two weeks. We knocked out a hole there about ten miles wide and forty miles deep and before we jumped off some of our own men got killed. The bombs were so close that even some of the tankers were killed. St. Lo was a hot spot; they call it the "break-out" at that time of the war. We went straight toward Paris and the Germans threw a couple of armored divisions in front there. General Patton was going straight toward Paris; he did a column right and cut off the Brest Peninsula, about a third of France. He run off the map and they had to fly him out with C47's. You couldn't write home and tell anyone where you were, so General Patton called back and said he was "somewhere in France".





Gasoline and maps, etc. had to be delivered by plane. We went on the left bank of Paris and stayed on one of the bridges crossing the Seine River for two days guarding the bridge. The German night fighters would come out and try to blast us. The American Air Force had a field day when that German outfit tried to block us. Those fighter planes were knocking the Germans out right and left.



We left Paris and headed toward Belgium on foot and sometimes we would be lucky enough to get a ride. The German rear guard started to get us.



We would go into these small towns and there would always be one or two snipers left. We had a guy ("Tubby") that was called a point man, he was armed with a Browning automatic weapon and he threw that tripod away that fits on the barrel and sits on the ground to give you a better shot. He did it Texas style; he liked to hear that glass rattle. He was very arrogant sometime. It was his natural way he was gung-ho. One time I remember, Tubby said "I know where he is, y'all give me some cover." We gave him some cover. The sniper could not fire all the way around to his right; he was using an air-cooled machine gun. Tubby crawled up that ditch, pulled the pin on a hand grenade and threw it on the Germans dug out in the hedgerow. Tubby forgot how hot the barrel would be on the machine gun that the Germans were using; he grabbed it with his bare hand, snatched it away from the Germans and pulled all the skin off his hand. He wouldn't go back to the field hospital. We bandaged up his hand with sulfaminide powder. If you could stop the bleeding, it kept you from going back to the field hospital and you could stay with your own troops. If you ever went back to the field hospital, you would be sent to another outfit that you were not familiar with. You knew these men you had lived with for five years.



The 4th Infantry stayed on the front line for one hundred ninety-six days without a relief. Our uniforms were water repellent; they smelled, and all you could see was the white of our eyes and our teeth. When a relief would come up there, they would look at us like a monster man.



Tubby Oliver from Laurens County was a real soldier. He saved our necks many times! He should have gotten seven Congressional Medals, but he didn't get a one. The reason he didn't get a Congressional Medal was his own fault, he was so arrogant even to the General. Just like he would curse you and me out he would curse the General out. He was like an animal out in the field.



When we left France, we went to Belgium first and then up to a little corner of Luxembourg. We weren't too far from Bastone one time. A guy came by with a copy of The Stars and Stripes, you very seldom got to see a newspaper over there to see what the situation was. I said, "Let me see that paper, Joe". He said, "Oh, no I got this for the Captain." I asked, "What's the headlines?" He told me "The Oarkin was taken by the 1st Division." Oarkin was a town not too far from Bastone. At this time it was the fall of 1944.



We proceeded on up into Belgium, we ran into some hot spots and then hit the Zig Free line. That was a line of Germans across the border there. Sorta like the margarinary line in France. They had the concrete houses some built in oval shape. We went there, we took it twice and held on to it on the third time. Sometimes we would do some night mortar attacks and I never did like that. There were lots of unknowns out there in the nighttime.



We got a little further into Germany around the Hurricane Forest. It started snowing. We were still in the attack mode. After dark, we dug our foxholes (we dug in every night) in an open field near a tree line of forest. Most people would dig in on the tree line, but we chose the open field to stay away from the tree bursts, which was worse than the artillery.



Artillery shells would hit the trees causing them to burst and if you dug in under the tree line, you would be killed with the fallen limbs. So the German's thought no one was around because they didn't think anyone would dig-in in an open field. That's what the big surprise was. A German scouting patrol came along the tree line about two o'clock in the morning.

They were about thirty yards from us, digging in under the trees. We could hear the Germans talking and every other man in my outfit was up on the gun. Sometimes we would put out trip lines and boogey traps, but this night we were so tired we just dug-in. One of the Germans had stopped and was looking at a map with his flashlight. I woke up the Platoon Leader and told him to wake up every body down the line. The Platoon leader always carried a grenade on the end of his M1 rifle so I went over there and got on one of the guns. I knew exactly where the guy was that was using the flashlight. The Platoon was going to fire the grenade. That was the signal for everybody to start firing. He had the radioman to call back for some mortar fire. We got the whole batch of them except for just a few. We could hear them hollering and screaming from pain.



I don't know how they did it, but they managed to drag their wounded off. There were clothes and parts of bodies hanging up in the trees. They awarded us for stopping them from coming on through.



We went on into the Hurricane Forest, a part of the Ardennes Forest, which was a large forest. It started snowing and we were in the attack phase. Once it got so cold, my machine gun headspace froze which made it shoot like a semi-automatic. The boys with the rifles could shoot more bullets than I. Normally, we would drain the water out of the barrel and put anti-freeze to keep this from happening. The 1st Bn. was suppose to lead the attack, the 2nd Bn. was suppose to jump off an hour later on our left. The 3rd Bn. was in reserve. We captured two or three hundred German prisoners and sent them back to the rear by a rifle company.



The next morning, the Germans were using our frequencies on our walkie-talkies. The telephone operator reeled a little green wire all the way up on the front line that way they couldn't tap our frequency. The next day, I got hit in the hand, bleeding. I got a tree burst. I started to go back to the aid station and it started snowing pretty heavy and covered the little green telephone wire that I was planning to follow.



I must have beared to the right or left plus the Germans had cut us off. They took me as a prisoner on December 1 or 2, I'm not sure. They took me to a small village about the size of Dexter, GA. I spent part of the night in some kind little old store, there were some wounded Germans there. About midnight, a truck pulled up to take away the wounded Germans and took me with them. I couldn't speak any German. The next day, they took me by truck to Bonn, Germany and from there to Zeegburg near Bonn. Then they carried me to another town by train where I met an American Air Force Pilot that had been shot down. They interrogated us and then the next day they took us to Dresden, Germany. This was just after they had bombed Dresden off the map. The prisoners had repaired the railroad so that you could go through there slowly. They put us in these cattle cars, about seventy guys to a car. There were lots of Air Force men who had been shot down on some mission. They had barbed wire over the windows in the cattle cars. We got thirsty, one guy had a piece of cord and tied it to his helmet and let it drag to pick up some snow that we used for water. We went two or three days without anything to eat or water. They took us to Muhlburg, Germany, about ten miles from the Ebb River.



I stayed there as a prisoner until the end of the war. The Ebb River was where we met up with the Russians. Eisenhower and the other warlords had agreed to let Russia come into Berlin. They had twenty-three Russian armies to come into Berlin. A lot of the Russian soldiers were men from the little countries adjoining Russia.



The Russians would have a tank, horses and artillery and they freed me from prison. Some of those British prisoners had been there for two or three years. I was only there for six months, I didn't weigh but about one hundred pounds. Most of them kinda leveled off at one hundred pounds.



They had the walking wounded working and only fed us two boiled Irish potatoes and a slice of black German bread every day at 11:o'clock and that was all we had. We were forced to push coal wagons carrying coal to a German hospital.



Our clothes were water repellent and after six months they were full of head lice, body lice, and crabs. After the Russians liberated us (about May 1, 1945) they carried us to a German hospital. They had an audicade and a shower. You would hang those same old clothes and they would go through that 500 degree audicade and it kiln dried those lice and crabs. We could shake our clothes and lice would fall out Rice Krispies. You could see them on the floor. The interpretator told us to stay there for three days and they would locate a place for us. They got us a place just across the Ebb River, forgot the name of the town. It was not quite as big as Dublin. The Russians were in control of it. They liked the Americans but didn't care for the British and French. The Americans had a large land lease deal going to Russia. I saw one Russian that must have a dozen cans of American Spam. He probably thought that Americans didn't live on anything but Spam. We stayed under the Russian control twenty-one days after we were liberated. I thought somebody was using us for a bargaining chip.



(The videotape ran out at this point. Full interview covered with attached cassette tape)



The Russians and Americans had a prisoner exchange. They put us on a C47 (cargo plane) and flew us down to France, not too far from La Harve to a field hospital called Lucky Strike. They fed us and gave us new clothes. They told us not to eat too much because your stomach had shrunk and if you eat too much it would rupture. The Germans had left this little town so fast; they left food on the shelves and money in the cash register. They had canned beef and gooseberries and stuff like that. The Russians ate so much; it killed them like pigs with the colic.



It only took us only six days to get home from La Harve to Boston; I don't remember the date. We came home on the General Black ship. I had gained a little weight back by this time, but I just felt drowsy.



I forgot how long I stayed in Boston, they put us on a troop train to Atlanta, Georgia and then I caught a bus in Atlanta and rode to Dublin.



I have a facial scar, shrapnel in my shoulder, bullet wound in the leg, which did not fracture a bone; it worked its way out and fell down my britches leg. I was lucky it didn't hit an artery. I wasn't that lucky with my finger. On the day I was captured, but see my outfit didn't have any record of my wound. So as soon as I got back to the States, I got a ninety-day furlough. I stayed at home trying to gain some weight. Then I reported down to Coral Gables, Florida. I stayed at the Biltmore Hotel where they had made a recuperation hospital. The walking wounded didn't have to do anything. Early in the morning the nurse would give you your daily medicines and then you could leave and go fishing, play pool, go to a movie, play tennis or whatever you wanted to do. They gave you a beer card so you could drink all the beer you wanted to gain weight. I never cultivated a taste for beer so I gave my card to my buddy. But he was not suppose to drink beer because he was on antibiotics. He gained more than anyone did; he had a big potbelly with little arms and legs! He over did it, he would stay down there drinking beer from ten in the morning until ten at night, eating boiled eggs and pretzels and drink that beer.



They wouldn't discharge us until we gained some weight. I weighed about one hundred twenty-five when I was discharged. While I was at Coral Gables, I was attached to the Air Force. They didn't know me and I didn't know them, they didn't know my combat record. They did a revision on my finger.

See the reason I got captured, I had taken shrapnel in my hand and was trying find my way back to headquarters. The Germans took my finger off; it turned black and red streaks running up my arm. They didn't have tetanus shots like we did. This British Major noticed the red streaks going up my arm and told the German guard that I needed surgery. The Germans cut through my knuckle to remove my finger. The Air Force did a revision surgery while I was in Florida because those nerves were exposed on that first amputation.



The Air Force never did acknowledge doing the surgery. None of my war records were down there with the Air Force, so I was like a man without a country.



My date of discharge was about the later part of November.



I was written up in the Dublin Courier Herald on May 25, 1998.



I received a Purple Heart and an Oak Cluster and other combat medals.



My father was Joseph L. Padgett, my mother was Ola Howell.

My parents had ten children (4 boys and 6 girls). We lived down at Vidalia, Georgia on a farm.



My wife, Joyce Kight, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thelman Kight and have three sons, Russell Lamar (killed in automobile wreck), Jimmy B., and Joseph Craig





Note: Willie Padgett and a brother went to Vidalia on Saturday to see a double feature Cowboy movie. In town that Saturday was an Army parade, Willie looked at his brother and said, "Let's join the Army." His brother said, "You join the Army, I'm going to the movie." Willie signed up and the recruiters had to take him to his home for his parents permission (because he was under age). The soldiers in the parade were dressed up and looked neat getting Willie's attention. He quit school to join but there were no jobs available anywhere.