World War II Interview
11 October 2000
By: Kimsey M. “Mac” Fowler
Typed By: Jimmie B. Fowler
Sarah Austin Frost
228 Brookwwod Drive
Dublin, GA 31021
On December 7, 1941, I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio in the bus
station at Winston Salem, North Carolina. I had been to my home in Monroe, North
Carolina for the weekend and was returning to Pine Hall, (a small community north of
Winston Salem) where I taught school. On the speaker system, I heard “All service
personnel report to their bases immediately, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”
That was quite a shock.
Of course, I had to change buses to go thirty miles up the road to the community where I
taught. From there on, the next thing I remember about it, the teachers had to register all
the men for selective service. I don’t remember whether we did it on Saturday or if we
closed school for a day, but I remember that all the men of the community had to come and
register for the draft.
I don’t remember when rationing started, I wish I did.
The Marine Corps Women Reserves was formed February 13th of 1943. The Army had
WACS, the Navy had WAVES. In September, I went to Boot Camp at Camp Lejeune in New
River, North Carolina which was a boot camp for men and women. There were two on the
East Coast but that was the one for women. New River is at Jacksonville, North Carolina.
The men could be trained there or at Parris Island, South Carolina.
Camp Lejeune looked like a University Campus, the buildings were beautiful, similar to our
V. A. buildings here. I was there for six weeks.
We had people from all over; some were college graduates, some not. They tested us, we
marched. We marched to our meals, to our classes. We’d practice marching; we’d go to
classes and we always had lessons to study at night. We took History of the Marine Corps,
traditions, how to behave, how to dress, how to tell rank and everything that had to do with
service.
At the end of six weeks, we finished there; we didn’t know where we were going. We knew
where we had asked to go. I had asked to go into Aviation. Cherry Point was right across the
river but fifty miles by bus (you couldn’t go across the river there). If you were sent to
Cherry Point, you knew you were going to be on an Air Station somewhere. The first thing
I got was mess duty. I had two full weeks of mess duty there, then I did get assigned to
Cherry Point.
As soon as I got there, guess what I got….mess duty! Working in the kitchen. We had to do
turkeys for Thanksgiving and turkeys for Christmas and whatever we had for New Years.
There was lots of cooking going on during that time. I have recorded in my book that I got
off mess duty after supper on December 31st.
On the fourth of January, we left on a slow troop train to go to Oxford, Ohio. Oxford is the
home of Miami University. I had never heard of it, but now they have their football scores
in the paper every week. It was a small University but the Navy had a training school there
for both men and women. The Marines were trained there along with the WAVES. We were
in dormitories and learned how to be radio operators. We studied Morse code and typing.
We marched to class every day just as we had done in boot camp. We had the weekends
free. Every Saturday we had to get out on what was probably their athletic field before the
military moved in, for a parade. There would be this great big platoon of women Marines,
along with the WAVES, and the men and we marched for the parade. That was a weekly
thing that we did. I don’t recall our marching much after we left Ohio.
On weekends we could go into Dayton, Cincinnati, and Chicago. I met one of my old
students in Chicago for a weekend once.
We all had to march in a parade on “I Am an American Day” in our wool winter uniforms.
It was a hot day! I will never forget that parade.
We graduated from the Radio School at Miami University on the 27th of May. I was
promoted to Corporal when we finished in Ohio and reported to Omaha, Nebraska on the
7th day of June for Radio Materiel School. That’s where we learned to build radios and repair
them.
There were three of us who went to both of those schools together, we were not in the same
platoon at boot camp together but we went on mess duty together, we went to Ohio
together, Omaha together and Santa Barbara together. It was so nice to have someone who
was your friend with you. One was from Columbus, Nebraska, an English teacher, one from
Boston who had never been to college and me, a math teacher. In Omaha we stayed at the
Fontenelle Hotel. We had an entire floor; in our room we had eight women. The WAVES
were there too on a different floor. We had bunk beds.
We did not have a chapel there so we could go to a church of our choice. I went to the First
Baptist Church of Omaha, had a good time and met some people there with whom I stayed
in touch for a long time. I finished in October of 1944.
The three of us went to Santa Barbara, California. None of us had ever been that far away.
The train ride was boring, packed; we were lucky to get a seat. We got there the 24th day
of October and were there until we were discharged on December 12, 1945.
I was promoted to Sgt. in August about the time the War was over. I wouldn’t take anything
in the world for the time I had in the Marines.
When we were in Santa Barbara, we would hitchhike to Los Angeles, or to San Francisco for
a weekend. We could go to the USO. Hitchhiking then was not dangerous. There would
always be at least two of us. I was not afraid. The Base was right on the highway. You could
go right out the gate and hitchhike. Trains and buses were always too packed to ride.
I worked in the Radio shop with three men. We had to take turns being on duty all night.
We had a bunk back in the corner. I never worried about being by myself out there.
Sometimes someone would come in and most of the time we didn’t have anything to do, so
we would play bridge. We just had to be there in case. We were responsible for the radios
in a couple of boats. We had a little target boat and planes would practice bombing. The Air
Base was in Goleta, about six miles north of Santa Barbara.
The coast guard was right in town in Santa Barbara. We would love to go down and work
on their radios in their boats because they always had the best meals you ever saw. They ate
“high on the hog”!
One day I was so sick down there working in the hold of the target boat. I had to come up.
You talk about seasick! The three men I worked with were very nice. I remember one of
them was a great big, muscular man, he got a lot of sun, he exercised and had his muscles
in good shape, and he wanted to be “Mr. America”. In fact, he entered the competition and
came in third, I think. So you can imagine what kind of looking man he was. But I
remember when we needed something moved or lifted, we would ask him to help and he
was afraid of straining his muscles. So we had to get somebody else.
We drove from Santa Barbara after getting our discharge. Avis (one of the three) had been
home that summer and drove her car back. She had a nephew about nine or ten years old
who wanted to go back to his grandmother’s house. His mother lived in San Francisco. He
also wanted to bring his dog. Well, Avis went up there on the weekend before we got
discharged and picked them up. They lived in the car and the barracks until we got our
discharge. Avis, Ann and I got our discharge together about noon on the December 12, 1945.
We changed into civilian clothes, Santa Barbara was always warm in the daytime and cool
and damp at night. So we got in her car. Avis, Ann, the boy, the dog and I all got in the car.
I think it was a ’39 Plymouth. We started on Route 66 (the song was popular back then). We
went to LA and then across the mountains to Arizona. It got cold, all three of us could drive
and we were going to take turns that first night. The heater was not working because it had
not been used in a long time. We ran into snow in Arizona and it got so cold that it iced
inside the car. We put on our trench coats. We absolutely froze. We didn’t have slacks;
women weren’t wearing slacks then like they do today. We were fortunate to get the heater
repaired. The next night we stopped in New Mexico. The third night we were in Enid,
Oklahoma. We didn’t realize that all the motels would be full there because of its being a
military town. The motels were so different then; they had individual cabins. We stopped
and paid the man at the motel $3.00 for the night, we didn’t look at the cabin first, but
when we got inside there were no shades or blinds on the windows, the bed had bare springs
and the sheets looked dirty.
I said, “I’m going to sleep in the car.” Ann and Avis said, “I am, too”. We got in the car and
left and drove all night and got to Ann’s house in Columbus, Nebraska the next day and
stayed there a day and night. Avis was taking everybody home. So we headed toward St.
Louis and North Carolina. We didn’t expect snow. Snow had been in front of us all the way.
Of course, I told them we would not have snow in North Carolina. But would you believe
there was snow on the ground in Asheville. We got to Monroe where it had never snowed
in December, but it was snowing in Monroe. Avis had to stay two days because of snow in
the roads. At least we were in my parent’s home and we were comfortable. Avis left there
and went through Washington to pick up her sister and go on to Boston. We all three made
it home for Christmas!
I taught Math in Dublin twenty-one years and Winston Salem about seventeen years.
When you are in service you have the GI Bill. I did go to Columbia University in New York
City one year. By that time I was not afraid to travel by myself. It was a real good year.
My parents were John and Winnie Porter Austin, both from North Carolina. Daddy was
born in Monroe and mother in Lilesville about thirty miles from Monroe. I had one sister,
Elizabeth, a nurse in the Nurse Cadet Corps, a brother, Richard in the Air Force, killed in
a plane crash in 1977 (a private plane after he was out of the service), and William, drafted
in the Army and served over a year in Korea.
My husband was William Perry “Bill” Frost, Jr. from Jefferson, Georgia. His parents were
William Perry, Sr. and Alice Guest Frost.
Our children are Betsy in Roanoke, Virginia. She has three children, Tori, Abby and
Michael. She graduated from the University of Georgia and the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and is the Baptist Campus Minister at
Roanoke College. Our son, Billy graduated from Georgia College in Milledgeville and is
employed with Bell South Yellow Pages. He has one son, Austin.
Note: Among memorabilia, Mrs. Frost has pictures of her discharge certificate, pictures of
her various platoons and various other pictures of interest.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
MALCOM DUNN
Tales of a G.I.
Malcom Dunn was just your regular G.I. He got his daddy to go down and sign for him to enlist in the National Guard in 1940. Malcom trained in camps across the country and boarded a troop ship for Europe. Fighting from hedge row to hedge row and from river to river, Dunn's division traversed the span of western Europe in less than nine months. There were good times and bad times. With the war in Europe over, Malcom had enough of death and dying. He came home and began a new life, a life of building and not destroying.
Dunn got his first taste of military service at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The taste was good old fashioned dirt. "When we drilled in the dust bowl, you could stand on the edge and not see the soldiers," Dunn said. Malcom tried to re-enlist in the Guard, but was forced to join the regular army instead. At Fort Custer, Michigan, Dunn was assigned to M Company, 3rd Battalion, 376th Regiment, 94th Infantry Division. The young man from the coastal plains of Georgia found out what a real plain looked like. At Camp Phillips, Kansas, the land was so flat that he could see 20 miles in every direction. It was cold too. The 18 to 20 degrees below zero winds whipped unimpeded through the barrack's fabric walls. "After a while, you would have icicles on your moustache and eyebrows ... when the snow was on the ground, you had to guide yourself by the telephone lines," Malcom reflected.
The following spring Malcom was sent to McCain, Mississippi, which was located on the edge of a swamp. When it rained, water would rise into the camp. As the water rose, so did the ground worms. Malcom picked them up, put them in a can, and waited for the water to rise to the edge of the barracks, from where he would fish out the back door for a good mess of catfish. "The mosquitos were real bad. We had to rub mud on our faces to keep them off. When the water got high, we would get on a knoll and wrap ourselves in our rain coats to fend of the mosquitos," said Malcom, who was sure with conditions like that, he was going to be sent to the Pacific.
Malcolm's division was crammed like sardines inside the hull of the Queen Elizabeth bound for Europe. Under the watchful eyes of their B-26 and blimp escorts, the ship managed to evade the German Wolfpack submarines and made it to Southampton, England. His regiment was commanded by Col. Thurston, a cross-country walking champion, who wanted to arm himself with a rifle instead of the standard issue .45 caliber pistol. "I came here to kill Germans, not to scare them," declared the Colonel.
Malcom was a tech sergeant in one of Col. Thurston's mortar platoons. When the requests for laying down fire came in, Thurston's men went into action. The men called them "Thurston Shoots." The Germans were enfiladed with synchronized fire of 81mm mortars and artillery. Dunn quickly learned to let the big guns go first so as to disguise his mortar battery's location from the German 88 mm gunners. In their zeal to protect their friends in the regular infantry, Dunn's men often "double-loaded" their mortars for maximum efficiency. When some division officers complained that fighting in the hedgerows was "penny-anny," Malcolm retorted, " Go out there and try it yourself."
From Paris the 94th was sent to the point where France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium come together at the Saar River. The fighting was bitter. The weather, even more bitter. The division was promised support from the armor divisions. It was slow in coming. Meanwhile, General Patton kept ordering, "attack, attack, attack!" "I would lie awake at night listening for the clinging of their tracks. I listened so hard that I imagined I heard them when I really didn't," Malcom remembered. Finally the armor units arrived. One of them was Sgt. Lester Porter's outfit. Porter and Dunn found out while talking at the VA Hospital one day that they were in the war together, really together.
The 94th broke through and raced to the Siegfried Line. A regiment of black engineers superbly repaired a downed bridge. Just as the division approached the river, German artillery units pounded the engineers and the front elements of the division. A combat patrol neutralized the enemy guns, and the division poured across the bridge. Then, it was a race to the Rhine River. The Germans continued to fight back and hard.
One night a group of truckers came into a town where Dunn and his men were. "We were completely exhausted, lying on the porches of the houses and buildings. We were so tired we couldn't hardly talk to each other. One of the truckers lit a match to take a smoke. His sergeant came up to him and cussed him out for endangering the men around him. He told him he was at the front lines. He really wasn't. At the time, it was funny. We all laughed. I must have laughed for at least 30 minutes. I laughed so hard that my belly hurt. It was good to laugh. I hadn't laughed in a long time," Malcom fondly remembered.
Another night, while standing in the chow line, Malcom noticed German soldiers were standing in the line waiting for something to eat. "They were chilled to the bone and were hungry too," Malcom said. When the light came, the Germans returned to their guns and fired on their hosts once again. Eventually the firing stopped and the Germans stacked their arms and offered their support to fight against their most feared enemy, the Russians.
As Dunn's regiment approached the street fighting going on in and around the outskirts of Ludwigshafen, the report of a 9mm "burp gun" resounded throughout the town. Malcom and his squad discovered the shots were coming from the top of a house. They eased up a narrow staircase. The first man kicked the door in. Malcom saw an old man shooting from the window. His wife was handing clips to him. "We had to kill them," Malcolm said.
The division was moved to Czechoslovakia. "It was kind of like Kansas, but with rolling hills," Malcom remembered. German soldiers came through the lines at night to surrender and were sent back behind the lines only to be returned to the Russians. Eventually, they quit surrendering. It was in Czechoslovakia where Sgt. Dunn was offered a battlefield commission as a 2nd lieutenant. Fearing that he would be sent to the Pacific, where the outcome of the war was still strongly in doubt, Malcom declined the honor, saying that "I am sick of war and I just want to go home, and I have a daughter that I have never seen."
Sixteen days after he left, Malcom was back home, laying brick for the expansion of the U.S. Naval Hospital in Dublin. He took a security job there, but eventually made his living in the masonry business, while dabbling a little in raising hogs and livestock.
Tech Sergeant Malcom Dunn was one of the millions of our veterans who left their homes and families to accomplish a single mission. The mission was freedom, freedom for you and me. On this Veteran's Day, let us pause to thank them for their sacrifices and service to preserve the freedoms we have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy for the rest of time.
Interview with Tech. Sgt. Malcom Dunn,
HQ Co. 121st Infantry Regiment;
Co. M, 3rd Battalion, 376th Inf. Reg.,
94 Infantry Division.
I joined the National Guard in 1940. I wasn't quite 20 years old so my daddy signed for me to enlist. I enlisted for a year and we went to Camp Jackson, South Carolina. When we got there, there were only a few buildings. We built many more. It was the first permanent barracks I stayed in. We built a drill field we called the "dust bowl". If you stood on the edge you couldn't see the soldiers, but you could see the dust we raised. The country started a draft and we trained the new drafted. After a year I was discharged and sent home. I came back home but it was a dead time for me. All of my friends were up there. I decided to register for the regular draft. Nineteen days later I turned 21. They told me I couldn't re-enlist in the National Guard and that I had to join the regular army.
The army created a new division, the 77th. I was taken and became part of the cadre in the new outfit. At first there was a captain, and first lieutenant who was the executive officer, a mess sergeant, a company clerk, and four or five platoon sergeants. Then they started bringing in officer from O.C.S. at Fort Benning. The draftees came in until we filled the division at Fort Jackson, S.C. and went into advanced training. Then they left half the cadre and took the other half to Ft. Custer, Michigan. That's were they sent me.
We formed the 94th division. After three months, we found out that the area was too small. There was not enough space and the runs in and out were too small. We were sent to Camp Phillips, Kansas. It was flat and you could see for twenty miles in each direction. It was about 20 miles from Smokey Hill Air Base, but I never went to see the planes. We had plenty of space there. They sent draftees to form the 94th division. Most of the boys were from up north. I don't know why they sent boys from the north down south and boys from the south up north. I guess it was to keep them away from home. It was cold. Sometimes 18 to 20 degrees below zero. The barracks didn't have wooden walls. They were some kind of fabric dipped in tar. There were no ceilings. We had three pot-bellied stoves for heat. It was a dry cold, not like here. After three breaths it would take your breath away. After a while you would have icicles on your moustache and eventually on your eyebrows. When the snow was on the ground, you had to guide in the middle of the telephone poles unless there a rut for you to follow. We stayed there that winter.
Then we were moved to Camp McCain, Mississippi. It was on the edge of a swamp. When it rained the water started to back up to the barracks. The worms would start crawling out of the wet ground and I would pick me up some and when the water got underneath the edge of the barracks, I fished for catfish off the back of the barracks. The mosquitos were real bad. The men had to smear mud on their faces to keep them off. When the water was high we would get on a knoll and wrap ourselves in our raincoats to keep them off. We just knew that they must be sending us to the Pacific. The sweat was also real bad.
I went to POE at Camp Shank, New York. They let part of the division go to New York City at a time for one last fling. A lot of the boys got sick from over-drinking. We went down to the Hudson River docks and got onboard the Queen Elizabeth. Once we got out into the open sea, we had a B-26 or a B-26 to shadow us. There were U-Boats off the coast. We called them "wolfpacks." The following day we had a blimp. After the third day, we were on our own - no nothing, no convoy. We were right by ourselves. The ship was unfinished. All the fixtures weren't there. Some jokers wrote "Kilroy was here" all over. Others carved their initials into the wooden panels. We were on E-Deck. I know how a sardine feels in there. The bunks were stacked on top of each other. You had to be laced up. If the canvas was loose, you were laying on the belly of the man below. They had to pump air down to us. On the upper deck there were Russians, Red Cross people, French officers, nurses. E-Deck was half under water and half above water, but I never saw a "Joe" sick. One time I got woozy when a wave came over the bow. They said it would take twelve torpedoes to sink that ship. Each compartment had airtight doors.
Early one morning the call for battle stations came over the loud speaker. My first thought was that it was a drill. The captain kept yelling for us to go below deck, but we stayed. We had been trained to survive, but not in the water with life jackets. There was a Marine detachment on board and a pop gun on the deck. The spotted a periscope on the starboard side. I didn't know what side the starboard was . We saw a periscope. I learned the difference between starboard and port. When they called out what side it was on. The Captain ordered "full speed ahead." I felt the back end of the ship go down. We were zig-zagging, changing courses to throw them off. We kept looking for a wolfpack. It seemed like thirty minutes, but it wasn't that long. When the submarine came to the surface, I was shocked. I had seen one in movies. It made a loud sound and about the front third of it went up into the air and then came down. I was shocked at the height of the periscope. I could see the sailors on the deck. Our ship flashed signals to them. We were relieved to find out it was an American sub. We kept looking around for others. We really thought we were in trouble, because we were right by ourselves with no escort. We were afraid of the U-Boats because it would be a real feather in their caps to sink a ship with a whole division plus everyone else on board.
After seven days or so we arrived in Southampton, England. They opened the steel net across the harbor and let us in. You could see in the water. Then they closed it up. They towed us with tug boats. We debarked and they took us to a big park. They had dummy planes there with different insignia. They created another squadron to fool the Luftwaffe. We got re-supplied and new equipment in England. We got in landing craft that had been used before - in the invasion. We crossed the English Channel where there were U-Boats trying cut our supply lines. It was one sick bunch of Joes. The water was very rough. The waves made the boat go up and down. There was vomit all over the deck, then the water would come in and wash it away. There was a steel cable around the boat, but the waves washed a few of the men off, but there were men on the side that grabbed them and pulled them back in. We had Poles, Swedes, and Italians. They made good soldiers, once you understood them.
We went inland to St. Lazaire, Lorient, and Brest. Brest was the big sub bull pen. We relieved another outfit on the main drive up the peninsula. There were about thirty five thousand Germans cut off on the peninsula. They raised a racket until they couldn't break out and then they began to settle down. We had a Col. Thurston, who had been a cross-country walking champion. When we began to settle down in our military duties he got upset. When we landed in France he had a .45 pistol. His assistant had a rifle. Col. Thurston asked the man to trade weapons. The puzzled man asked the colonel was he sure he wanted his rifle. The colonel said "Hell man, I came here to kill Germans, not to scare them." Before long you could find any kind of gun. The Germans had captured some American troops and we had some German prisoners. They had a son of an English general or diplomat. We traded prisoners and got him back.
Col. Thurston saw what was happening. He thought we were getting dull. He took us on what we called "Thurston Shoots." I had an 81 mm mortar . They would send an overlay of the target in the German area. The artillery took the back half and I took the front half. In the first "Thurston Shoot" we moved in between the lines to reach the Germans. I moved out to where we could reach them. We synchronized our watches so that we could open and close fire at the same time. I opened first a split second or two before the artillery. The Germans heard my mortar "coughing." I learned something because they zeroed in on top of us. We pulled back to our lines. On the next "Thurston Shoot," I waited until the artillery began firing and then I started. I closed a second before the artillery closed. I never had any trouble after that.
Sometimes we "double-loaded" our mortars. It was dangerous, but we only had one accident. We would get one man on each side of the mortar. We pulled the pin on the rounds and stacked them like firewood. You had to get a rhythm. One man put one in and then the other man. You had to be quick and careful. We had interrogation officers. One was an s.o.b. and the other was kind. They would throw off the German prisoners. One would holler and scream at them and the other was kind to them. He pretended to be his friend. He asked if there was anything he could do for them. They wanted American cigarettes and coffee. He gave it to them and asked them if there was anything else he could do for them. One of them said to the kind one that our new kind of artillery weapons would end the war. He was referring to our double loading. It sounded like an automatic mortar. That gun would get awful hot. The interrogator told him that it was a highly secret weapon and that we didn't advertise too much. We were straightening out our lines in the hedge rows. A big field was five acres. Along the hedge rows the dirt was three feet higher than the rest of the ground. The Germans would dig under the rows and leave holes for their guns. If you got caught in a field you had it. Col. Thurston wanted a flame thrower. I suggested we use phosphorous on the opposite side of the hedge row. It worked, but not one hundred percent. It allowed us to get right on top of them. One time "double-loading" the mortars hurt us. They had an 88 on top of a hill which denied us the use of the road. We moved to no-mans land in the hedge rows. We couldn't see where the 88 was. We put out a decoy on a hill where they could see it. They fired on it and we saw it. We moved over with a mortar and shot up there. One man accidentally had his fingers cut off when he didn't pull them out quick enough. We got the 88.
The division officers and generals around were not satisfied with the fighting in the hedgerows. They thought it was "penny-anny." I finally told one of the officers to get out there and try it himself. We were relieved by another outfit and we were sent to Paris. It was very cold. It was during the time of the Battle of the Bulge. We were transferred to the Third Army and sent to where France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium come together at the Saar River. We relieved another outfit. I think it was a cavalry outpost. It was the only river I ever saw without a bank. When the water rose it spread out. There was a railroad. It was the only railroad I ever saw without a bed. The farm houses were made of stone or brick, or some kind of dried mud. The Nenning school had three to five foot thick walls. We began the attack on the area called Nenning-Berg-Wies where the Germans had dragon teeth - concrete structures to stop our tanks. They called it the Siegfried Switch. It was there outer defensive line. Our 3rd Battalion went to the river at night and began the attack at the railroad. Past the railroad was a bid open space. They had tank mines, anti-personnel mines, trip wire mines and others. You could see them through the ice. It had rained and the water had frozen around them. They didn't work anymore. Our division artillery opened with a thirty minute barrage. The artillery had spade to take up the shock and so the guns wouldn't rock back. The shells were hitting on the other side of us, but every time they hit you would almost bounce of the ground. We knew if the spades didn't work and the guns rocked back, that they would fire on us. Some of them did. There were some casualties. All of the houses seemed to have pillboxes with holes in them. One German soldier was smoking and a piece of shrapnel hit him. He fell out and his clothes were set on fire. The houses had basements and the Germans were hiding in them. The stones were crumbling into them. Some of the Germans dug out to surrender. We kept easing around to see if they would come out. We would asked them in German to come out with there hands out. If they didn't respond, we would throw a hand grenade in the hole. If there was still no answer or if we didn't here anything moving, we would fill up the holes with stones and hope they couldn't get out. The dragon teeth kept the tanks out. We went back and forth. They chewed us up and then we chewed them up. We gained some ground and then lost it. They had Panzer tanks and the dug in Tiger tanks. We could only see the turrets and that's where the armor was the thickest. The most vulnerable part of the tank was along the boogie wheels and the tracks. If you get a shot and mess up the wheels and throw the tracks off, you could stop them. We were promised armor from the 3rd Army, but Gen. Patton kept saying "attack! attack!" It was flesh against steel.
They had something called a shoe box mine. It had a lid on. When you stepped off the pressure would set it off. It wasn't like the mines in the ice which didn't work. They replaced them every day. At Nenning they had a group of N.C.O.s from Berlin who were sent to retake Nenning. They would come out at night and holler "Come you American's give up!" There were about forty or fifty of them. There was a B.A.R. (Browning Automatic Rifle) man on guard. He heard them coming. They would get as close as they could before they started hollering. Once you started firing a B.A.R. it would go up. The man turned it side ways and held it with a strip and began firing. The next morning they could nineteen of them dead or wounded. The colonel said it was the finest shooting he had seen in his twenty nine years in the Army.
We jumped off early in the morning and late in the afternoon. We finally got armor. I would lay awake a night listening for the clinking of the tracks. I listened so hard that I imagined I heard them when I really didn't. There were two armored units. One of them was Lester Porter's outfit. We got to talking about it one day at the VA hospital in Dublin. His unit lost thirteen tanks one day. The Germans caught them going around a hill. They shot the first one and the last one. Then it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I told him the story about the armored unit. He said, "I know, that was my unit."
We broke through and raced to the Saar River and the main Siegfried line. They had blown the bridge there. There were pill boxes on the other side. There were even pill boxes at the edge of the water. A black engineers regiment was sent in to build another bridge below the blown one. You had to have a gentle slope on both sides of a bridge to get the men across. They did a superb job. The Germans were in the hills looking down on us. They waited until the engineers were almost through and then began shelling. They shot rounds up river from the bridge and broke the ice into floes. The floes struck the bridge and knocked some of the engineers into the war. Someone hollered for another company. They started again and the same thing happened again. We tried smoke bombs, but they didn't work when the wind shifted. We knew that we had to have the bridge and we knew we had to knock out that artillery. They sent out a combat patrol up there at night. We were promised boats, but they were late. They combat patrol got up there and knocked out the artillery. They put the bridge and the men and armor poured across. I had been to the river bank and them went to a village where there was a bunch of officers. Rex Brantley, a friend of mine from back home, had been given a battlefield commission. He was stranded on a knoll. Lt. Daley was with him. The Germans surrounded them and wanted to wipe them out. We couldn't get them ammunition or food. They took the packages and padded them and dropped them from a liaison plane. About two-thirds of them fell on German positions. They had snow to eat for the water. They would throw the grenades down the hill and they would roll on the Germans.
The 11th Panzer division is what they called Hitler's Ghost Division. They were sent into trouble spots to break the stalemates. They would pull back and hit another spot. They would zig and zag. Our artillery began taking a toll on them. We got in bad shape with the tanks and the grenadiers. I was said that the two sides then became ineffective. Col. Thurston wrote a book about it. I haven't seen it. We got a citation from Gen. Patton.
We broke through the main Siegfried Line and raced toward the Rhine River. We went day and night. They were flying us maps. By the time we got them, they were obsolete. The Germans were doing anything they could to slow us down. They shelled us and attack our flanks. In the 376th Regiment, we used the leap frog method. The attacking battalion would meet its objective and pull back, while the supporting battalion moved forward through their lines without stopping.
One night a group of black truckers came into the town where we were. We were completely exhausted, lying on the porches of the houses and buildings. We were so tired we couldn't hardly talk to each other. One of the black truckers lit a match for a smoke. He shielded it pretty good. His sergeant came up to him and cussed him out. He told him that he was endangering the men by lighting the match. He told him that he was on the front lines. He really wasn't. At the time it was funny. We all laughed. I must have laughed for thirty minutes. I laughed so hard my belly hurt. It was good to laugh. We hadn't laughed in a long time. It relieved the tension.
One morning the chow truck finally caught up with us. We were standing in line in the dark waiting for the food and we noticed German soldiers in line with us. They were chilled to the bone. They were hungry, too. When it got light they had gone back to their lines and were shooting at us. We captured some prisoners. There was one whole battalion in uniform with their weapons stacked. The German officers told the men that they were to join us and fight the Russians. We circled them around and sent them to the back of the lines. Some of them spoke pretty good English. When we reach a super Audubon highway we crossed and set up a position. I had a German Jew in my outfit, whose family had left in 1935. His name was Swab. He was smart. I told him to make an overlay and he did a good job.
While on a drive, we hit a village. We were checking out all the houses. They had manure piles near the front door. The rooms had hard packed dirt floors and the animal rooms were next to the other rooms. In one of the houses the animal urine would run down through a hole into a well. One our man was walking by the house when he completely disappeared. He fell into that well. He was one stinking soldier. It was not funny them, but later we dubbed him "Old Stinky."
The division commander had a 300 radio like ours. He tried to get in contact with the 3rd Battalion, but the Colonel wouldn't answer. He finally got the Colonel to answer. He told him if moved another inch that he would relieve him of his command. We were running wild. Our maps were obsolete. Our Colonel wanted to be the first to get to the Rhine.
We hit the Rhine at Ludwigshafen. There was street fighting on the outskirts of town, which was on the banks of the Rhine. The Germans had managed to destroy some of our supply warehouses. We caught four Germans who had been using some of our uniforms to fool us. We sent them back to the rear to a tank crew. They said they didn't want them and tried to give them back. We were told that the tank crews later shot them. We ran into the armored guys and jawed at each other on who got there first. We had orders not to shoot any bullets into the buildings. I found out later why. There were some kind of war gases in them. They began shelling us. They came in kind of slow and you could see them. I have never seen anything like them before or since. They hid the ground and bounced toward us. They were luminous. We didn't lose a man. They kept bouncing.
Early the next morning I saw a man dragging a Joe had been shot. I heard that "burp gun." It was a 9 mm gun. It was the fastest thing. I'll never forget that sound. You heard the first and last of it. I saw a fellow sergeant in a whole near a house. He was in the back yard. We believed that shots were coming from the top of the house. We started up the stairs which were wide enough for one person. We eased up the stairs. We heard the gun tear loose again. We kicked the door open and saw an old man shooting out the window. There was an old lady handing the clips to him. They were quite aged. We killed them. I looked out the window and saw German civilians just standing there in the street. They seemed to think they were impervious. We were relieved by another outfit and pulled back to reduce the strong points we had by-passed along our way. We got them reduced.
They shot us to Czechoslovakia. It was more like Kansas, but more rolling. There were a few trees. We were ordered to dig in. We wanted to know why. We wanted to know what was going on. We were told that the Russians were coming. Our division command post was in Prague about 30 kilometers away. The Russian lines and the American lines were a mile and one half to two miles apart when we stopped. The German soldiers would come over from the lines at night to surrender to us. We put them in trucks and sent them back through the lines. We later heard that they were given back to the Germans. I don't know, but the Germans quit surrendering to us.
I wasn't but a couple of days, two or three, before Russians troops came into our lines. They would use hand signals to tell us they wanted a cigarette. When we handed it to them, they would take the whole pack. They began to ask us for gas. We would give them five gallons or so. They seemed to get upset with us when we started handing them only one cigarette. When they got too mad, we pointed our guns at them. Later I was told that they didn't have any quartermasters, that the lived off fat of the land.
I saw a funeral in Czechoslovakia. It was the first one ever done that way. I was sitting in a barber chair. I always kept my weapon with me, no matter what. I had a .45 under the hair net. I heard a bugle in the distance. I said what is that? I snatched off the hair net and went toward the window. You just didn't run out the door and look to see what was happening. I saw a crowd of people. There were two horses pulling a wagon. I heard a brass band. I thought what was going on - a funeral with a brass band? I kept watching. They (the Germans) would pull anything. You couldn't trust nobody. As it got closer I notice the pretty black horses. The were plumes on the bridle. They had a completely black harness except for the shiny brass on the end of the hames. There were coachman driving the wagon. I kept observing. Behind the band was the family of the corpse, singing, hollering and drinking vodka and schnaps. It was a celebration. The hearse was drawn by two horses with glass on each side. I could see a make-shift coffin. I questioned the Chec barber. He told me that we rejoice at death and mourn at birth. He told me that the dead man did not want for anything, but a child who is born wants for all of his life.
I wasn't there a few days when I got word that I was going to be rotated back to the states for discharge. Back then I was offered a battlefield commission by the 3rd Army Headquarters. A lot of the troops that had much time in the ETO were being sent to units in the Pacific which had little time there. I told them that the only way I would accept was if I could stay there. The captain told me that it was better for me and the men to leave. I told him that I had trained many of them since they were recruits and that I would have no trouble from them. The Captain asked the Colonel and the Colonel asked the Regimental Commander. The officers were furnished liquor and the enlisted men had to scrounge for it. The Captain offered me a drink. The company clerk came in and told me that in a few weeks that I would be a "shaved-tail" lieutenant. I was going to be sent back to the states and then if I didn't have the points, I would go to the Pacific. The Captain pulled out the order and laid them on the table and told me to sign them. I told the Captain to tear them up. He said, "What do you mean, tear them up?" I told him that I was sick of war and that I just wanted to go home. I had a daughter at home who I had never seen. I also had a son, but I had seen him. It took three months for the telegram to get to me that I had a daughter. He said, "that's just scuttlebutt." I took a drink of the cognac and then I tore them up. He said, "What would the Colonel say." I said that I would talk to the Colonel. He then told me, " I don't blame you. I wouldn't take it if they made me a General. I am sick of war too and I want to go home."
In one or two weeks they sent me home. I went to Paris and flew back home. I was discharged at Fort McPherson. I was the second man in my company to be rotated back home. Sixteen days after I left Czechoslovakia I was home, laying brick for the expansion of the Navy hospital in Dublin. The men kidded me that I didn't even get a vacation. I was just glad to be back home. They offered me a big construction job up North, but I said no. I had drug my wife and son from camp to camp and I wasn't going to move again. I took a job in the security section at the Navy Hospital. After the war I got into the masonry business and also raised a few hogs and livestock.
Interviewed by Scott B. Thompson, Sr., November 26, 1999
Malcom Dunn was just your regular G.I. He got his daddy to go down and sign for him to enlist in the National Guard in 1940. Malcom trained in camps across the country and boarded a troop ship for Europe. Fighting from hedge row to hedge row and from river to river, Dunn's division traversed the span of western Europe in less than nine months. There were good times and bad times. With the war in Europe over, Malcom had enough of death and dying. He came home and began a new life, a life of building and not destroying.
Dunn got his first taste of military service at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The taste was good old fashioned dirt. "When we drilled in the dust bowl, you could stand on the edge and not see the soldiers," Dunn said. Malcom tried to re-enlist in the Guard, but was forced to join the regular army instead. At Fort Custer, Michigan, Dunn was assigned to M Company, 3rd Battalion, 376th Regiment, 94th Infantry Division. The young man from the coastal plains of Georgia found out what a real plain looked like. At Camp Phillips, Kansas, the land was so flat that he could see 20 miles in every direction. It was cold too. The 18 to 20 degrees below zero winds whipped unimpeded through the barrack's fabric walls. "After a while, you would have icicles on your moustache and eyebrows ... when the snow was on the ground, you had to guide yourself by the telephone lines," Malcom reflected.
The following spring Malcom was sent to McCain, Mississippi, which was located on the edge of a swamp. When it rained, water would rise into the camp. As the water rose, so did the ground worms. Malcom picked them up, put them in a can, and waited for the water to rise to the edge of the barracks, from where he would fish out the back door for a good mess of catfish. "The mosquitos were real bad. We had to rub mud on our faces to keep them off. When the water got high, we would get on a knoll and wrap ourselves in our rain coats to fend of the mosquitos," said Malcom, who was sure with conditions like that, he was going to be sent to the Pacific.
Malcolm's division was crammed like sardines inside the hull of the Queen Elizabeth bound for Europe. Under the watchful eyes of their B-26 and blimp escorts, the ship managed to evade the German Wolfpack submarines and made it to Southampton, England. His regiment was commanded by Col. Thurston, a cross-country walking champion, who wanted to arm himself with a rifle instead of the standard issue .45 caliber pistol. "I came here to kill Germans, not to scare them," declared the Colonel.
Malcom was a tech sergeant in one of Col. Thurston's mortar platoons. When the requests for laying down fire came in, Thurston's men went into action. The men called them "Thurston Shoots." The Germans were enfiladed with synchronized fire of 81mm mortars and artillery. Dunn quickly learned to let the big guns go first so as to disguise his mortar battery's location from the German 88 mm gunners. In their zeal to protect their friends in the regular infantry, Dunn's men often "double-loaded" their mortars for maximum efficiency. When some division officers complained that fighting in the hedgerows was "penny-anny," Malcolm retorted, " Go out there and try it yourself."
From Paris the 94th was sent to the point where France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium come together at the Saar River. The fighting was bitter. The weather, even more bitter. The division was promised support from the armor divisions. It was slow in coming. Meanwhile, General Patton kept ordering, "attack, attack, attack!" "I would lie awake at night listening for the clinging of their tracks. I listened so hard that I imagined I heard them when I really didn't," Malcom remembered. Finally the armor units arrived. One of them was Sgt. Lester Porter's outfit. Porter and Dunn found out while talking at the VA Hospital one day that they were in the war together, really together.
The 94th broke through and raced to the Siegfried Line. A regiment of black engineers superbly repaired a downed bridge. Just as the division approached the river, German artillery units pounded the engineers and the front elements of the division. A combat patrol neutralized the enemy guns, and the division poured across the bridge. Then, it was a race to the Rhine River. The Germans continued to fight back and hard.
One night a group of truckers came into a town where Dunn and his men were. "We were completely exhausted, lying on the porches of the houses and buildings. We were so tired we couldn't hardly talk to each other. One of the truckers lit a match to take a smoke. His sergeant came up to him and cussed him out for endangering the men around him. He told him he was at the front lines. He really wasn't. At the time, it was funny. We all laughed. I must have laughed for at least 30 minutes. I laughed so hard that my belly hurt. It was good to laugh. I hadn't laughed in a long time," Malcom fondly remembered.
Another night, while standing in the chow line, Malcom noticed German soldiers were standing in the line waiting for something to eat. "They were chilled to the bone and were hungry too," Malcom said. When the light came, the Germans returned to their guns and fired on their hosts once again. Eventually the firing stopped and the Germans stacked their arms and offered their support to fight against their most feared enemy, the Russians.
As Dunn's regiment approached the street fighting going on in and around the outskirts of Ludwigshafen, the report of a 9mm "burp gun" resounded throughout the town. Malcom and his squad discovered the shots were coming from the top of a house. They eased up a narrow staircase. The first man kicked the door in. Malcom saw an old man shooting from the window. His wife was handing clips to him. "We had to kill them," Malcolm said.
The division was moved to Czechoslovakia. "It was kind of like Kansas, but with rolling hills," Malcom remembered. German soldiers came through the lines at night to surrender and were sent back behind the lines only to be returned to the Russians. Eventually, they quit surrendering. It was in Czechoslovakia where Sgt. Dunn was offered a battlefield commission as a 2nd lieutenant. Fearing that he would be sent to the Pacific, where the outcome of the war was still strongly in doubt, Malcom declined the honor, saying that "I am sick of war and I just want to go home, and I have a daughter that I have never seen."
Sixteen days after he left, Malcom was back home, laying brick for the expansion of the U.S. Naval Hospital in Dublin. He took a security job there, but eventually made his living in the masonry business, while dabbling a little in raising hogs and livestock.
Tech Sergeant Malcom Dunn was one of the millions of our veterans who left their homes and families to accomplish a single mission. The mission was freedom, freedom for you and me. On this Veteran's Day, let us pause to thank them for their sacrifices and service to preserve the freedoms we have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy for the rest of time.
Interview with Tech. Sgt. Malcom Dunn,
HQ Co. 121st Infantry Regiment;
Co. M, 3rd Battalion, 376th Inf. Reg.,
94 Infantry Division.
I joined the National Guard in 1940. I wasn't quite 20 years old so my daddy signed for me to enlist. I enlisted for a year and we went to Camp Jackson, South Carolina. When we got there, there were only a few buildings. We built many more. It was the first permanent barracks I stayed in. We built a drill field we called the "dust bowl". If you stood on the edge you couldn't see the soldiers, but you could see the dust we raised. The country started a draft and we trained the new drafted. After a year I was discharged and sent home. I came back home but it was a dead time for me. All of my friends were up there. I decided to register for the regular draft. Nineteen days later I turned 21. They told me I couldn't re-enlist in the National Guard and that I had to join the regular army.
The army created a new division, the 77th. I was taken and became part of the cadre in the new outfit. At first there was a captain, and first lieutenant who was the executive officer, a mess sergeant, a company clerk, and four or five platoon sergeants. Then they started bringing in officer from O.C.S. at Fort Benning. The draftees came in until we filled the division at Fort Jackson, S.C. and went into advanced training. Then they left half the cadre and took the other half to Ft. Custer, Michigan. That's were they sent me.
We formed the 94th division. After three months, we found out that the area was too small. There was not enough space and the runs in and out were too small. We were sent to Camp Phillips, Kansas. It was flat and you could see for twenty miles in each direction. It was about 20 miles from Smokey Hill Air Base, but I never went to see the planes. We had plenty of space there. They sent draftees to form the 94th division. Most of the boys were from up north. I don't know why they sent boys from the north down south and boys from the south up north. I guess it was to keep them away from home. It was cold. Sometimes 18 to 20 degrees below zero. The barracks didn't have wooden walls. They were some kind of fabric dipped in tar. There were no ceilings. We had three pot-bellied stoves for heat. It was a dry cold, not like here. After three breaths it would take your breath away. After a while you would have icicles on your moustache and eventually on your eyebrows. When the snow was on the ground, you had to guide in the middle of the telephone poles unless there a rut for you to follow. We stayed there that winter.
Then we were moved to Camp McCain, Mississippi. It was on the edge of a swamp. When it rained the water started to back up to the barracks. The worms would start crawling out of the wet ground and I would pick me up some and when the water got underneath the edge of the barracks, I fished for catfish off the back of the barracks. The mosquitos were real bad. The men had to smear mud on their faces to keep them off. When the water was high we would get on a knoll and wrap ourselves in our raincoats to keep them off. We just knew that they must be sending us to the Pacific. The sweat was also real bad.
I went to POE at Camp Shank, New York. They let part of the division go to New York City at a time for one last fling. A lot of the boys got sick from over-drinking. We went down to the Hudson River docks and got onboard the Queen Elizabeth. Once we got out into the open sea, we had a B-26 or a B-26 to shadow us. There were U-Boats off the coast. We called them "wolfpacks." The following day we had a blimp. After the third day, we were on our own - no nothing, no convoy. We were right by ourselves. The ship was unfinished. All the fixtures weren't there. Some jokers wrote "Kilroy was here" all over. Others carved their initials into the wooden panels. We were on E-Deck. I know how a sardine feels in there. The bunks were stacked on top of each other. You had to be laced up. If the canvas was loose, you were laying on the belly of the man below. They had to pump air down to us. On the upper deck there were Russians, Red Cross people, French officers, nurses. E-Deck was half under water and half above water, but I never saw a "Joe" sick. One time I got woozy when a wave came over the bow. They said it would take twelve torpedoes to sink that ship. Each compartment had airtight doors.
Early one morning the call for battle stations came over the loud speaker. My first thought was that it was a drill. The captain kept yelling for us to go below deck, but we stayed. We had been trained to survive, but not in the water with life jackets. There was a Marine detachment on board and a pop gun on the deck. The spotted a periscope on the starboard side. I didn't know what side the starboard was . We saw a periscope. I learned the difference between starboard and port. When they called out what side it was on. The Captain ordered "full speed ahead." I felt the back end of the ship go down. We were zig-zagging, changing courses to throw them off. We kept looking for a wolfpack. It seemed like thirty minutes, but it wasn't that long. When the submarine came to the surface, I was shocked. I had seen one in movies. It made a loud sound and about the front third of it went up into the air and then came down. I was shocked at the height of the periscope. I could see the sailors on the deck. Our ship flashed signals to them. We were relieved to find out it was an American sub. We kept looking around for others. We really thought we were in trouble, because we were right by ourselves with no escort. We were afraid of the U-Boats because it would be a real feather in their caps to sink a ship with a whole division plus everyone else on board.
After seven days or so we arrived in Southampton, England. They opened the steel net across the harbor and let us in. You could see in the water. Then they closed it up. They towed us with tug boats. We debarked and they took us to a big park. They had dummy planes there with different insignia. They created another squadron to fool the Luftwaffe. We got re-supplied and new equipment in England. We got in landing craft that had been used before - in the invasion. We crossed the English Channel where there were U-Boats trying cut our supply lines. It was one sick bunch of Joes. The water was very rough. The waves made the boat go up and down. There was vomit all over the deck, then the water would come in and wash it away. There was a steel cable around the boat, but the waves washed a few of the men off, but there were men on the side that grabbed them and pulled them back in. We had Poles, Swedes, and Italians. They made good soldiers, once you understood them.
We went inland to St. Lazaire, Lorient, and Brest. Brest was the big sub bull pen. We relieved another outfit on the main drive up the peninsula. There were about thirty five thousand Germans cut off on the peninsula. They raised a racket until they couldn't break out and then they began to settle down. We had a Col. Thurston, who had been a cross-country walking champion. When we began to settle down in our military duties he got upset. When we landed in France he had a .45 pistol. His assistant had a rifle. Col. Thurston asked the man to trade weapons. The puzzled man asked the colonel was he sure he wanted his rifle. The colonel said "Hell man, I came here to kill Germans, not to scare them." Before long you could find any kind of gun. The Germans had captured some American troops and we had some German prisoners. They had a son of an English general or diplomat. We traded prisoners and got him back.
Col. Thurston saw what was happening. He thought we were getting dull. He took us on what we called "Thurston Shoots." I had an 81 mm mortar . They would send an overlay of the target in the German area. The artillery took the back half and I took the front half. In the first "Thurston Shoot" we moved in between the lines to reach the Germans. I moved out to where we could reach them. We synchronized our watches so that we could open and close fire at the same time. I opened first a split second or two before the artillery. The Germans heard my mortar "coughing." I learned something because they zeroed in on top of us. We pulled back to our lines. On the next "Thurston Shoot," I waited until the artillery began firing and then I started. I closed a second before the artillery closed. I never had any trouble after that.
Sometimes we "double-loaded" our mortars. It was dangerous, but we only had one accident. We would get one man on each side of the mortar. We pulled the pin on the rounds and stacked them like firewood. You had to get a rhythm. One man put one in and then the other man. You had to be quick and careful. We had interrogation officers. One was an s.o.b. and the other was kind. They would throw off the German prisoners. One would holler and scream at them and the other was kind to them. He pretended to be his friend. He asked if there was anything he could do for them. They wanted American cigarettes and coffee. He gave it to them and asked them if there was anything else he could do for them. One of them said to the kind one that our new kind of artillery weapons would end the war. He was referring to our double loading. It sounded like an automatic mortar. That gun would get awful hot. The interrogator told him that it was a highly secret weapon and that we didn't advertise too much. We were straightening out our lines in the hedge rows. A big field was five acres. Along the hedge rows the dirt was three feet higher than the rest of the ground. The Germans would dig under the rows and leave holes for their guns. If you got caught in a field you had it. Col. Thurston wanted a flame thrower. I suggested we use phosphorous on the opposite side of the hedge row. It worked, but not one hundred percent. It allowed us to get right on top of them. One time "double-loading" the mortars hurt us. They had an 88 on top of a hill which denied us the use of the road. We moved to no-mans land in the hedge rows. We couldn't see where the 88 was. We put out a decoy on a hill where they could see it. They fired on it and we saw it. We moved over with a mortar and shot up there. One man accidentally had his fingers cut off when he didn't pull them out quick enough. We got the 88.
The division officers and generals around were not satisfied with the fighting in the hedgerows. They thought it was "penny-anny." I finally told one of the officers to get out there and try it himself. We were relieved by another outfit and we were sent to Paris. It was very cold. It was during the time of the Battle of the Bulge. We were transferred to the Third Army and sent to where France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium come together at the Saar River. We relieved another outfit. I think it was a cavalry outpost. It was the only river I ever saw without a bank. When the water rose it spread out. There was a railroad. It was the only railroad I ever saw without a bed. The farm houses were made of stone or brick, or some kind of dried mud. The Nenning school had three to five foot thick walls. We began the attack on the area called Nenning-Berg-Wies where the Germans had dragon teeth - concrete structures to stop our tanks. They called it the Siegfried Switch. It was there outer defensive line. Our 3rd Battalion went to the river at night and began the attack at the railroad. Past the railroad was a bid open space. They had tank mines, anti-personnel mines, trip wire mines and others. You could see them through the ice. It had rained and the water had frozen around them. They didn't work anymore. Our division artillery opened with a thirty minute barrage. The artillery had spade to take up the shock and so the guns wouldn't rock back. The shells were hitting on the other side of us, but every time they hit you would almost bounce of the ground. We knew if the spades didn't work and the guns rocked back, that they would fire on us. Some of them did. There were some casualties. All of the houses seemed to have pillboxes with holes in them. One German soldier was smoking and a piece of shrapnel hit him. He fell out and his clothes were set on fire. The houses had basements and the Germans were hiding in them. The stones were crumbling into them. Some of the Germans dug out to surrender. We kept easing around to see if they would come out. We would asked them in German to come out with there hands out. If they didn't respond, we would throw a hand grenade in the hole. If there was still no answer or if we didn't here anything moving, we would fill up the holes with stones and hope they couldn't get out. The dragon teeth kept the tanks out. We went back and forth. They chewed us up and then we chewed them up. We gained some ground and then lost it. They had Panzer tanks and the dug in Tiger tanks. We could only see the turrets and that's where the armor was the thickest. The most vulnerable part of the tank was along the boogie wheels and the tracks. If you get a shot and mess up the wheels and throw the tracks off, you could stop them. We were promised armor from the 3rd Army, but Gen. Patton kept saying "attack! attack!" It was flesh against steel.
They had something called a shoe box mine. It had a lid on. When you stepped off the pressure would set it off. It wasn't like the mines in the ice which didn't work. They replaced them every day. At Nenning they had a group of N.C.O.s from Berlin who were sent to retake Nenning. They would come out at night and holler "Come you American's give up!" There were about forty or fifty of them. There was a B.A.R. (Browning Automatic Rifle) man on guard. He heard them coming. They would get as close as they could before they started hollering. Once you started firing a B.A.R. it would go up. The man turned it side ways and held it with a strip and began firing. The next morning they could nineteen of them dead or wounded. The colonel said it was the finest shooting he had seen in his twenty nine years in the Army.
We jumped off early in the morning and late in the afternoon. We finally got armor. I would lay awake a night listening for the clinking of the tracks. I listened so hard that I imagined I heard them when I really didn't. There were two armored units. One of them was Lester Porter's outfit. We got to talking about it one day at the VA hospital in Dublin. His unit lost thirteen tanks one day. The Germans caught them going around a hill. They shot the first one and the last one. Then it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I told him the story about the armored unit. He said, "I know, that was my unit."
We broke through and raced to the Saar River and the main Siegfried line. They had blown the bridge there. There were pill boxes on the other side. There were even pill boxes at the edge of the water. A black engineers regiment was sent in to build another bridge below the blown one. You had to have a gentle slope on both sides of a bridge to get the men across. They did a superb job. The Germans were in the hills looking down on us. They waited until the engineers were almost through and then began shelling. They shot rounds up river from the bridge and broke the ice into floes. The floes struck the bridge and knocked some of the engineers into the war. Someone hollered for another company. They started again and the same thing happened again. We tried smoke bombs, but they didn't work when the wind shifted. We knew that we had to have the bridge and we knew we had to knock out that artillery. They sent out a combat patrol up there at night. We were promised boats, but they were late. They combat patrol got up there and knocked out the artillery. They put the bridge and the men and armor poured across. I had been to the river bank and them went to a village where there was a bunch of officers. Rex Brantley, a friend of mine from back home, had been given a battlefield commission. He was stranded on a knoll. Lt. Daley was with him. The Germans surrounded them and wanted to wipe them out. We couldn't get them ammunition or food. They took the packages and padded them and dropped them from a liaison plane. About two-thirds of them fell on German positions. They had snow to eat for the water. They would throw the grenades down the hill and they would roll on the Germans.
The 11th Panzer division is what they called Hitler's Ghost Division. They were sent into trouble spots to break the stalemates. They would pull back and hit another spot. They would zig and zag. Our artillery began taking a toll on them. We got in bad shape with the tanks and the grenadiers. I was said that the two sides then became ineffective. Col. Thurston wrote a book about it. I haven't seen it. We got a citation from Gen. Patton.
We broke through the main Siegfried Line and raced toward the Rhine River. We went day and night. They were flying us maps. By the time we got them, they were obsolete. The Germans were doing anything they could to slow us down. They shelled us and attack our flanks. In the 376th Regiment, we used the leap frog method. The attacking battalion would meet its objective and pull back, while the supporting battalion moved forward through their lines without stopping.
One night a group of black truckers came into the town where we were. We were completely exhausted, lying on the porches of the houses and buildings. We were so tired we couldn't hardly talk to each other. One of the black truckers lit a match for a smoke. He shielded it pretty good. His sergeant came up to him and cussed him out. He told him that he was endangering the men by lighting the match. He told him that he was on the front lines. He really wasn't. At the time it was funny. We all laughed. I must have laughed for thirty minutes. I laughed so hard my belly hurt. It was good to laugh. We hadn't laughed in a long time. It relieved the tension.
One morning the chow truck finally caught up with us. We were standing in line in the dark waiting for the food and we noticed German soldiers in line with us. They were chilled to the bone. They were hungry, too. When it got light they had gone back to their lines and were shooting at us. We captured some prisoners. There was one whole battalion in uniform with their weapons stacked. The German officers told the men that they were to join us and fight the Russians. We circled them around and sent them to the back of the lines. Some of them spoke pretty good English. When we reach a super Audubon highway we crossed and set up a position. I had a German Jew in my outfit, whose family had left in 1935. His name was Swab. He was smart. I told him to make an overlay and he did a good job.
While on a drive, we hit a village. We were checking out all the houses. They had manure piles near the front door. The rooms had hard packed dirt floors and the animal rooms were next to the other rooms. In one of the houses the animal urine would run down through a hole into a well. One our man was walking by the house when he completely disappeared. He fell into that well. He was one stinking soldier. It was not funny them, but later we dubbed him "Old Stinky."
The division commander had a 300 radio like ours. He tried to get in contact with the 3rd Battalion, but the Colonel wouldn't answer. He finally got the Colonel to answer. He told him if moved another inch that he would relieve him of his command. We were running wild. Our maps were obsolete. Our Colonel wanted to be the first to get to the Rhine.
We hit the Rhine at Ludwigshafen. There was street fighting on the outskirts of town, which was on the banks of the Rhine. The Germans had managed to destroy some of our supply warehouses. We caught four Germans who had been using some of our uniforms to fool us. We sent them back to the rear to a tank crew. They said they didn't want them and tried to give them back. We were told that the tank crews later shot them. We ran into the armored guys and jawed at each other on who got there first. We had orders not to shoot any bullets into the buildings. I found out later why. There were some kind of war gases in them. They began shelling us. They came in kind of slow and you could see them. I have never seen anything like them before or since. They hid the ground and bounced toward us. They were luminous. We didn't lose a man. They kept bouncing.
Early the next morning I saw a man dragging a Joe had been shot. I heard that "burp gun." It was a 9 mm gun. It was the fastest thing. I'll never forget that sound. You heard the first and last of it. I saw a fellow sergeant in a whole near a house. He was in the back yard. We believed that shots were coming from the top of the house. We started up the stairs which were wide enough for one person. We eased up the stairs. We heard the gun tear loose again. We kicked the door open and saw an old man shooting out the window. There was an old lady handing the clips to him. They were quite aged. We killed them. I looked out the window and saw German civilians just standing there in the street. They seemed to think they were impervious. We were relieved by another outfit and pulled back to reduce the strong points we had by-passed along our way. We got them reduced.
They shot us to Czechoslovakia. It was more like Kansas, but more rolling. There were a few trees. We were ordered to dig in. We wanted to know why. We wanted to know what was going on. We were told that the Russians were coming. Our division command post was in Prague about 30 kilometers away. The Russian lines and the American lines were a mile and one half to two miles apart when we stopped. The German soldiers would come over from the lines at night to surrender to us. We put them in trucks and sent them back through the lines. We later heard that they were given back to the Germans. I don't know, but the Germans quit surrendering to us.
I wasn't but a couple of days, two or three, before Russians troops came into our lines. They would use hand signals to tell us they wanted a cigarette. When we handed it to them, they would take the whole pack. They began to ask us for gas. We would give them five gallons or so. They seemed to get upset with us when we started handing them only one cigarette. When they got too mad, we pointed our guns at them. Later I was told that they didn't have any quartermasters, that the lived off fat of the land.
I saw a funeral in Czechoslovakia. It was the first one ever done that way. I was sitting in a barber chair. I always kept my weapon with me, no matter what. I had a .45 under the hair net. I heard a bugle in the distance. I said what is that? I snatched off the hair net and went toward the window. You just didn't run out the door and look to see what was happening. I saw a crowd of people. There were two horses pulling a wagon. I heard a brass band. I thought what was going on - a funeral with a brass band? I kept watching. They (the Germans) would pull anything. You couldn't trust nobody. As it got closer I notice the pretty black horses. The were plumes on the bridle. They had a completely black harness except for the shiny brass on the end of the hames. There were coachman driving the wagon. I kept observing. Behind the band was the family of the corpse, singing, hollering and drinking vodka and schnaps. It was a celebration. The hearse was drawn by two horses with glass on each side. I could see a make-shift coffin. I questioned the Chec barber. He told me that we rejoice at death and mourn at birth. He told me that the dead man did not want for anything, but a child who is born wants for all of his life.
I wasn't there a few days when I got word that I was going to be rotated back to the states for discharge. Back then I was offered a battlefield commission by the 3rd Army Headquarters. A lot of the troops that had much time in the ETO were being sent to units in the Pacific which had little time there. I told them that the only way I would accept was if I could stay there. The captain told me that it was better for me and the men to leave. I told him that I had trained many of them since they were recruits and that I would have no trouble from them. The Captain asked the Colonel and the Colonel asked the Regimental Commander. The officers were furnished liquor and the enlisted men had to scrounge for it. The Captain offered me a drink. The company clerk came in and told me that in a few weeks that I would be a "shaved-tail" lieutenant. I was going to be sent back to the states and then if I didn't have the points, I would go to the Pacific. The Captain pulled out the order and laid them on the table and told me to sign them. I told the Captain to tear them up. He said, "What do you mean, tear them up?" I told him that I was sick of war and that I just wanted to go home. I had a daughter at home who I had never seen. I also had a son, but I had seen him. It took three months for the telegram to get to me that I had a daughter. He said, "that's just scuttlebutt." I took a drink of the cognac and then I tore them up. He said, "What would the Colonel say." I said that I would talk to the Colonel. He then told me, " I don't blame you. I wouldn't take it if they made me a General. I am sick of war too and I want to go home."
In one or two weeks they sent me home. I went to Paris and flew back home. I was discharged at Fort McPherson. I was the second man in my company to be rotated back home. Sixteen days after I left Czechoslovakia I was home, laying brick for the expansion of the Navy hospital in Dublin. The men kidded me that I didn't even get a vacation. I was just glad to be back home. They offered me a big construction job up North, but I said no. I had drug my wife and son from camp to camp and I wasn't going to move again. I took a job in the security section at the Navy Hospital. After the war I got into the masonry business and also raised a few hogs and livestock.
Interviewed by Scott B. Thompson, Sr., November 26, 1999
Saturday, April 17, 2010
FOREST IN HELL
The 121st Infantry in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest
As the weather began to turn cold in Autumn of 1944, the divisions of the First Army were slowly, but steadily, moving toward their goal to capture the German capital of Berlin. German forces were not going to give up that easily. An area of some of the most unyielding enemy resistance was centered around the area where the countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany join. The 121st Infantry Regiment, Georgia National Guard, which was mobilized in September of 1940 at the beginning of World War II, was assigned to the 8th Infantry Division of the First U.S. Army, under the command of General Courtney Hodges, a native of Houston County, Georgia. The regiment, originally made up of Georgians, was enlarged to include men from all over the country. Co. K of the 121st and HQ Co., 3rd Battalion were headquartered in Dublin. Some Laurens county guardsmen served in other companies of the regiment. By 1944, most of the original members were serving in other army units.
At midnight on the morning of November 20, 1944, the order came for an attack on the towns of Hurtgen, Kleinau, and the Brandenberg-Bergstein Ridge. The 8th division was assigned to relieve the 28th division, which had been engaged in bitter fighting for two months. American generals believed that one more sustained push would break the German lines. When the attack began on the morning of the 21st, the 121st, with Col. John R. Jeter in command, was moving northward from Luxembourg. The 1st battalion was assigned to take the woods south and west of Hurtgen. The 2nd battalion would be on the left flank in the Hurtgen Forest west of the town. The 3rd battalion, including Companies I, K, L, and M, was sent to the toward the woods south of town in open trucks in a cold rain. Maj. Wesley Hogan’s troops halted their ride near the Weisser Weh Valley southwest of Germeter and began a long and arduous march. When the Germans saw movement, they directed mortar fire in its direction. By now the rain had turned to sleet. The sleet would soon turn to snow. The 2nd battalion was in a “pickle.” Fortunately, Co. K had a little time to rest.
The 3rd battalion moved into a position on level ground near the Wilde Saw minefield. Anti personnel and anti-tank mines posed extreme hazards for the infantry, as well as the American tanks and vehicles. Co. I was able to move the closest to the German lines before Thanksgiving day on the 23rd of November. At the end of the day, the 3rd Battalion had made the most progress of any of the units.
Photo: Thomas Kilgore, Company A, 121st Infantry, Macon, Georgia.
In a move that dumbfounded some, the soldiers of the 121st were pulled back from their positions for Thanksgiving dinner. They got in lines for a cold and soggy turkey dinner. By this time, General Hodges had become furious with Major General Donald Stroh for the 8th Division’s lack of progress.
On Friday, the 3rd Battalion made a push up the Germeter to Hurtgen Road and the adjoining woods. The tanks of the 70th Tank Battalion suffered heavy losses and were forced into a withdrawal. Major Hogan ordered Co. K to attack without armor protection. The mines were becoming deadlier. Twelve engineers were killed or wounded along with thirty riflemen. When a second attack failed to succeed, Hogan removed the company commander at 1820 hours. During that night, the engineers set out to remove mines from the road and is shoulders.
Nearly as fast as they could remove the mines, German soldiers placed new ones to thwart the American advance. By the end of the 4th day of the battle, casualties in the 121st stood at 50 killed and 600 wounded. They were still three miles from
the Roer River, while Hurtgen remained under German control.
In a move of desperation, an attack on Hurtgen was ordered on the 25th. The CCR, 5th Armored Division moved through the positions of the 3rd Battalion. Their were serious concerns that the 3rd Battalion couldn’t keep up with the tanks due to mines and wet ground conditions. German forces began firing on the tanks as soon as they got on the road. When the attack stalled, Col. Jeter was relieved by Col. Thomas Cross. On the morning of the 26th, the 1st and 2nd Battalions moved toward Hurtgen. General Stroh was also relieved of his command. Stroh, who had lost his son in battle several weeks before, was the highest ranking American officer to lose his job in the Hurtgen Forest campaign. Brigadier General Walter Weaver took over command of the Division.
Sgt. Ira T. Garnto was head of intelligence in HQ Co. 2nd Battalion. Garnto remembered: “The trees, mostly pine trees, were in bad shape, all split and splintered. I remember sleeping sitting up some nights. I served in the headquarters 2nd battalion under the command of Lt. Col. Henry B. Kunzig. I was in the forward Command Post with Col. Kunzig. He wanted a messenger from each company and wanted someone in charge of the messengers. I took four messengers from each of the four companies in our battalion and went back to Col. Kunzig’s bunker and remained there with him. I was walking into the Town of Hurtgen after it was captured. I had just come into the edge of town and was standing by a German tank in front of the first building on the left. I was waiting on my next orders when I heard an artillery round coming in. It hit the tank with a strange thud, but it didn’t explode. I was lucky. It started snowing after a few days, but the snow was much better than the sloppy mud. The slop was worse than the snow. It slowed us down. Many of our casualties came from frostbite. The tanks had no way to go in the mud in the forest. I guess we just outlasted them.”
On the 27th, the final attack on the town of Hurtgen began. The 1st and 2nd Battalions led the assault. Co. K followed Co. I toward Hill 54. From that vantage point, mortar men pummeled the town of Hurtgen, which eventually fell. One passing soldier was stunned at what he saw. There were men loading frozen, dead bodies into a two and one-half ton truck. One man would grab one end and another the other end and place them in the truck like firewood. After nearly three months of the fighting, the attempt to take the Hurtgen Forest ended. It is criticized by some to have been one of the biggest waste of men during the European Campaign. The V Corps casualties were twenty five percent, 4,000 out of 16,000 were killed, wounded, or missing in action.
Despite the questions raised about the military advisability of the attack, the men of the 121st and the Laurens County guardsmen kept on fighting until the could not fight any more. In the early days of December the 8th Division supported the taking of Kleinhau and the Brandenburg-Bergstein Ridge. One officer of the 121st remarked, “ The men are physically exhausted. The spirit and will to fight are there, the ability to continue is gone. These men have been fighting without rest or sleep for four days and last night were forced to lie unprotected from the weather in an open field. In some instances men were forced to discard their overcoats because they lacked the strength to wear them. These men are shivering with cold, and their hands are so numb that they have to help one another on with their equipment.”
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, on behalf of Pres. Harry S. Truman, recognized the men of the 121st Infantry with a residential Unit Citation, which read in part: “The 121st Infantry and attached units are cited for extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance of duty in action from 21 to 28 November 1944. During this period they made a relentless and determined drive to overcome bitter opposition in the Hurtgen Forest and the capture of the town of Hurtgen. The bloody and bitterly contested advance, which taxed individual fortitude and stamina to the limit, represented the major offensive effort of the 8th Infantry Division and V Corps in effecting a breakthrough in this heavily defended sector.
Despite its high casualty rate, the 121st displayed extremely courageous fighting qualities in attack a strongly fortified enemy.”
The men of the 121st gave up their Thanksgiving fifty five years ago. They dreamed of being at home - eating mamma’s turkey and dressing and taking in the traditional Dublin High School football game that morning. But, there was a job to do. Most of them had made it from Utah Beach, where they arrived on Independence Day, all the way into Germany - an accomplishment that they all were thankful for. They just wanted to do their job and come home - back to mamma’s house for next Thanksgiving. David Gladstone Daniel was killed in the Hurtgen Forest - he never had another Thanksgiving.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
THE U.S.S. LAURENS
The Story of the Life of a World War II Transport Ship in the Pacific
In the final push to bring World War II to an end in the Pacific Theatre, the United States Navy began a massive program to build one hundred and nineteen AP - 5 Attack Transport Ships - fearing the worst case scenario of a possible invasion of the island of Japan. The third ship built by Portland’s Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation was the “U.S.S. Laurens. “ This ship, named for Laurens County, Georgia, undoubtedly by Congressman Carl Vinson of Milledgeville - who was a long time friend to his Laurens County constituents and the powerful chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Fifty five years ago this week, the “Laurens” began her made voyage from Astoria, Oregon, headed for action in the Pacific Ocean.
The keel of the “U.S.S. Laurens,” which was officially designated as APA 153, was laid on May 23, 1944. Seven weeks later, the “Laurens” was launched at Portland. After another seven weeks of completing her final fitting out, the ship arrived in Astoria, Oregon, where her crew, who had been training separately and together in various schools along the west coast and onboard the “U.S.S. Arlington,” was waiting to get onboard their new ship.
Captain A.R. Ponto, acting on behalf of the Maritime Commission, ordered the commissioning of the “Laurens” on September 7th, 1944. Captain Donald McGregor, U.S.N. took command of the ship with its compliment of thirty-two officers, including Executive Officer, Lt. Commander Raymond J. Solesie, U.S.N.R. and two hundred and seventy eight enlisted men. Nearly two weeks later on September 18th, the “Laurens” put out to sea on its maiden voyage with a crew, eighty percent of whom had never been to sea before. The ship traveled to San Francisco before taking a course to San Pedro, California, where Lt. John H. Livingston, would relieve Lt. Commander Solesie as Executive Officer. On the 20th of October, the ship returned to her base in San Francisco until the morning of the 26th.
In a dense fog, the “Laurens” passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean, this time bound for Lea, New Guniea. As the ship approached the Equator, the “pollywogs” - a nickname given to the novice sailors who have never been that far south before, were initiated into the “Realm of Neptunus Rex.” The “Laurens” arrived on the 12th of November, just in time to deliver a batch of Christmas mail.
The “Laurens” made several trips around New Guinea before making a fifteen hundred and fifty five mile round trip to New Caledonia just before Thanksgiving. On the 17th of December, the ship set out from Noumea, New Caledonia for another fifteen hundred mile trip - this time to Guadalcanal with fourteen hundred soldiers from the 35th U.S. Infantry, who were sent there to participate in landing exercises on Christmas Eve. Guadalcanal had been the scene in August of 1942 of the first American offensive of the war and one of the bloodiest battles in American history. The landings went well, although there were a few close calls. Japanese suicide bombers began to crash into the area, with one coming within one thousand yards of the “Laurens.”
On Christmas Eve, the ship set out for a short trip to Point Purvis. After a brief Christmas celebration, the ship’s crew took the ship on a thousand mile journey to Manus on Admiralty Island. On the day after New Year’s Day, again there wasn’t much time to celebrate, the “Laurens” set out on its third fifteen hundred mile journey, this time to Leyte in the Philippine Islands. For nearly three months, the ship traveled back and forth between the Philippine Islands and New Guinea.
On the 27th of March, the “Laurens” began its part in the invasion of Okinawa. With nearly one thousand men of the 24th Army Corps on board, the “Laurens” arrived in the transport area, west of Okinawa on April 1st, Easter Sunday. Once again, the ship avoided any direct hits by enemy aircraft. After two nights of night retirement, the ship was sent to Saipan in the Marianas Islands and then on a thirty five hundred mile trip to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After three weeks in Hawaii, the crew was ordered back to San Francisco. On the 1st of June, the “Laurens” once again set out for the main scene of the war in the Pacific. After stops in the Marshall and Caroline Islands, the “Laurens” returned to Okinawa on July 24th with a load of troops and material.
On the 14th day of August, while the ship was undergoing repairs at Mare Island Naval Yard, near San Francisco, the announcement was made that the was over, finally! The next day, Capt. James Francis Byrne, arrived to take over command of the ship. The “Laurens,” with one hundred and naval officers aboard, set out for Hawaii, where the war had begun nearly four years earlier. At Honolulu, the “Laurens” picked up six hundred tons of equipment and supplies of the 3rd Battalion, 391st Regiment, 98th Infantry Division. On the 6th of September, forty eight officers and one thousand seventy two men came onboard bound for
occupation duty in Japan. One year after she was commissioned, the “Laurens” was headed toward the western Pacific for the last time.
The ship arrived on September 27th and the 98th Division went ashore. The “Laurens” took over fifteen hundred men from Japan to Okinawa, before making a return trip to Japan with a hundred passengers onboard. The “Laurens” remained anchored in Tokyo Bay until the 10th of November, 1945, when she began her journey home.
During her fourteen months of duty in the Pacific the workhorse transport ship had transported thousands of tons of equipment, ferried several thousands soldiers, and traveled nearly sixty thousand miles - a distance equal to two and one-half circumnavigations of the globe along the equator, before arriving at home in Seattle, Washington. What happened to her after the war isn’t known. The ship may have been used for a short time after the war, possibly by private companies or perhaps she was sold to the navy of another government, or she, like many other ships, wound up in the scrap yard.
The history of the “U.S.S. Laurens” was written by an anonymous crew member in the months following the war. The illustrated booklet, entitled “Life of the Laurens,” can be found in the Dublin-Laurens Museum and the Laurens County Library, making its way here through the magic of Internet auctions. The “Laurens” played a small part in the largest naval operation in the history of the world, an event that we hope will never have to take place again.
In the final push to bring World War II to an end in the Pacific Theatre, the United States Navy began a massive program to build one hundred and nineteen AP - 5 Attack Transport Ships - fearing the worst case scenario of a possible invasion of the island of Japan. The third ship built by Portland’s Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation was the “U.S.S. Laurens. “ This ship, named for Laurens County, Georgia, undoubtedly by Congressman Carl Vinson of Milledgeville - who was a long time friend to his Laurens County constituents and the powerful chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Fifty five years ago this week, the “Laurens” began her made voyage from Astoria, Oregon, headed for action in the Pacific Ocean.
The keel of the “U.S.S. Laurens,” which was officially designated as APA 153, was laid on May 23, 1944. Seven weeks later, the “Laurens” was launched at Portland. After another seven weeks of completing her final fitting out, the ship arrived in Astoria, Oregon, where her crew, who had been training separately and together in various schools along the west coast and onboard the “U.S.S. Arlington,” was waiting to get onboard their new ship.
Captain A.R. Ponto, acting on behalf of the Maritime Commission, ordered the commissioning of the “Laurens” on September 7th, 1944. Captain Donald McGregor, U.S.N. took command of the ship with its compliment of thirty-two officers, including Executive Officer, Lt. Commander Raymond J. Solesie, U.S.N.R. and two hundred and seventy eight enlisted men. Nearly two weeks later on September 18th, the “Laurens” put out to sea on its maiden voyage with a crew, eighty percent of whom had never been to sea before. The ship traveled to San Francisco before taking a course to San Pedro, California, where Lt. John H. Livingston, would relieve Lt. Commander Solesie as Executive Officer. On the 20th of October, the ship returned to her base in San Francisco until the morning of the 26th.
In a dense fog, the “Laurens” passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean, this time bound for Lea, New Guniea. As the ship approached the Equator, the “pollywogs” - a nickname given to the novice sailors who have never been that far south before, were initiated into the “Realm of Neptunus Rex.” The “Laurens” arrived on the 12th of November, just in time to deliver a batch of Christmas mail.
The “Laurens” made several trips around New Guinea before making a fifteen hundred and fifty five mile round trip to New Caledonia just before Thanksgiving. On the 17th of December, the ship set out from Noumea, New Caledonia for another fifteen hundred mile trip - this time to Guadalcanal with fourteen hundred soldiers from the 35th U.S. Infantry, who were sent there to participate in landing exercises on Christmas Eve. Guadalcanal had been the scene in August of 1942 of the first American offensive of the war and one of the bloodiest battles in American history. The landings went well, although there were a few close calls. Japanese suicide bombers began to crash into the area, with one coming within one thousand yards of the “Laurens.”
On Christmas Eve, the ship set out for a short trip to Point Purvis. After a brief Christmas celebration, the ship’s crew took the ship on a thousand mile journey to Manus on Admiralty Island. On the day after New Year’s Day, again there wasn’t much time to celebrate, the “Laurens” set out on its third fifteen hundred mile journey, this time to Leyte in the Philippine Islands. For nearly three months, the ship traveled back and forth between the Philippine Islands and New Guinea.
On the 27th of March, the “Laurens” began its part in the invasion of Okinawa. With nearly one thousand men of the 24th Army Corps on board, the “Laurens” arrived in the transport area, west of Okinawa on April 1st, Easter Sunday. Once again, the ship avoided any direct hits by enemy aircraft. After two nights of night retirement, the ship was sent to Saipan in the Marianas Islands and then on a thirty five hundred mile trip to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After three weeks in Hawaii, the crew was ordered back to San Francisco. On the 1st of June, the “Laurens” once again set out for the main scene of the war in the Pacific. After stops in the Marshall and Caroline Islands, the “Laurens” returned to Okinawa on July 24th with a load of troops and material.
On the 14th day of August, while the ship was undergoing repairs at Mare Island Naval Yard, near San Francisco, the announcement was made that the was over, finally! The next day, Capt. James Francis Byrne, arrived to take over command of the ship. The “Laurens,” with one hundred and naval officers aboard, set out for Hawaii, where the war had begun nearly four years earlier. At Honolulu, the “Laurens” picked up six hundred tons of equipment and supplies of the 3rd Battalion, 391st Regiment, 98th Infantry Division. On the 6th of September, forty eight officers and one thousand seventy two men came onboard bound for
occupation duty in Japan. One year after she was commissioned, the “Laurens” was headed toward the western Pacific for the last time.
The ship arrived on September 27th and the 98th Division went ashore. The “Laurens” took over fifteen hundred men from Japan to Okinawa, before making a return trip to Japan with a hundred passengers onboard. The “Laurens” remained anchored in Tokyo Bay until the 10th of November, 1945, when she began her journey home.
During her fourteen months of duty in the Pacific the workhorse transport ship had transported thousands of tons of equipment, ferried several thousands soldiers, and traveled nearly sixty thousand miles - a distance equal to two and one-half circumnavigations of the globe along the equator, before arriving at home in Seattle, Washington. What happened to her after the war isn’t known. The ship may have been used for a short time after the war, possibly by private companies or perhaps she was sold to the navy of another government, or she, like many other ships, wound up in the scrap yard.
The history of the “U.S.S. Laurens” was written by an anonymous crew member in the months following the war. The illustrated booklet, entitled “Life of the Laurens,” can be found in the Dublin-Laurens Museum and the Laurens County Library, making its way here through the magic of Internet auctions. The “Laurens” played a small part in the largest naval operation in the history of the world, an event that we hope will never have to take place again.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
THE VETERAN'S HOSPITAL, DUBLIN, GEORGIA
The primary need in order to establish a navy hospital in Dublin was the transportation of patients in and out of the city. The Laurens County Board of Commissioners purchased 640 acres of land three miles northwest of Dublin for the construction of an airport. The land was purchased at a cost of nearly double the amount originally budgeted. The commissioners resorted to issuing warrants to pay the cost after a bond issue and bank loans failed to materialize. The federal government took over the construction and completed the project in 1943. Among the first military uses of the airport was the delivery of mail to the few hundred soldiers who where stationed at the prisoner of war camp in Dublin.
The City of Dublin took immediate steps to aid in the construction of the hospital. The city attempted to issue bonds for the construction of water and sewer lines to the hospital. The Citizens and Southern Bank took over the financing after the failure of the bond issue. The federal government stepped in and provided the remaining funds to extend the lines to the hospital. A four lane road was built running from McCall's Point at the end of Bellevue Avenue to the hospital site. Real estate developer and theater owner R.E. Martin donated land for the road. Years later the city lined the road with oak trees. The road, originally known as the Old Macon Road, now bears the name of Veteran's Boulevard in honor of all the patients at the hospital.
Construction of the hospital began in July of 1943. Lt. Commander Louis S. Dozier came to Dublin to inspect the site and began the initial preparations. Before the construction could begin, a rail spur line was laid from the Macon, Dublin and Savannah Railroad to the site. An elevated steel water tank was the first structure to be completed. Even as the work was proceeding, the government was still in the process of acquiring the land.
The government chose a 231 acre farm site on the western edge of Dublin. The farm, known as the "Capt. Rice Place" or "Brookwood," was owned by W.P. Roche. E.T. Barnes asked the court to allow him to harvest the crops growing on the land. Judge A.B. Lovett agreed, but allowed the government to immediately go into possession of the land where the water tank was constructed. The government was allowed to take full possession of the property by September 13, 1943. Mr. Roche's home was spared, but part of his orchard was taken under a condemnation process through which Mr. Roche was paid the market value of $112.00 per acre.
In September, the engineers began laying out the streets on the hospital grounds. The streets were named for medical department personnel killed in action during the war. Gendreau Circle was named for Capt. Elphege A.M. Gendreau of San Francisco, who was killed in combat in the South Pacific. Blackwood Drive was named in memory of James D. Blackwood, of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, and senior medical officer of the "U.S.S. Vincennes." Johnson Drive and Alexander Drive were named in memory of Cmdr. Samuel E. Johnson, of Clinton, Alabama, and Lt. Cmdr. Hugh R. Alexander, of Belleville, Pennsylvania and the U.S.S. Arizona, who were killed at Pearl Harbor. Lt. Cmdr. Edward Crowley of San Francisco had Crowley Avenue named in his memory after he was killed in the Solomon Islands. Neff Place was named in honor of Lt. Cmdr. James Neff, Senior Medical Officer of the cruiser "U.S.S. Juneau." Trojakowski Avenue and Morrow Place were named in honor of W.C. Trojakowski, of Schenectady, N.Y., and Lt. Junior Grade Edna O. Morrow, of Pasadena, Calf., who were killed in airplane crashes. The last street, Evans Avenue, was named in honor of Lt. Cmdr. Edward E. Evans, of San Francisco, who was killed in the Solomon Islands in December of 1942.
R.A. Bowen & Co. of Macon began the grading and clearing of the land in mid September. One of the first obstacles to be cleared was the Capt. Rice home known as "Brookwood." It was built in 1903 by Joseph D. Smith. Smith sold the home to farmer, naval stores operator and businessman Capt. W.B. Rice. Rice developed the land into one of the finest farms in Laurens County. In a matter of hours, the site of many of the grandest and finest social gatherings in Dublin was gone forever.
The first bids let for buildings were for eight patient wards. The wards were built of masonry and two stories in height. The contract was awarded to Beers Construction Company of Atlanta for 1.16 million dollars. The initial plans called for a 500 bed, 5 million dollar hospital. After the end of the war, the hospital would be turned over to the Veteran's Administration which planned to add another thousand beds running the total cost to ten million dollars. After the wards were constructed, a central hospital and administration building would be constructed in the center of the complex. Nurse's quarters, bachelor officer's quarters, WAVES barracks, corpsmen's barracks, mess attendant's barracks, a gatehouse, greenhouses, a fire station and garage, an incinerator and storage buildings rounded out the remainder of the hospital area.
The buildings were designed in the colonial style to blend with the colonial homes along Bellevue Avenue. The wartime shortage of material necessitated the use of clay, wood, and cement products from the local area. A crew of five naval civil engineers, and twenty civil service engineers, inspectors, accountants and clerks began work under the supervision of Lt. Cmdr. Dozier. Dublin's civic and church organizations worked together to accommodate the hospital staff during the construction phase. A corps of 125 architects and engineers worked out of an Atlanta office building designing the project under the supervision of Lt. R.R. Grant. President Roosevelt gave final approval of a Federal Works Agency grant in December of 1943 to extend water and sewer lines and install the necessary equipment at the pumping station.
As the completion date neared, Dublin tried to cope with its growing pains. Ingram Construction Company moved its operations to Dublin and constructed twenty brick homes for hospital personnel. Captain A.L. Bryan estimated that as many as a thousand people would be attached to the hospital with as many as two hundred families would move into the Dublin area. Commander Ellington of Charleston estimated that one hundred forty new houses would be needed to house the new families. By May of 1944, the city of Dublin was forced to institute rent ceilings to prevent gouging by landlords.
Despite some instances of rent gouging, the construction personnel were well treated by the community. When the Dublin Theatre reopened in the summer of 1944, special Sunday movies were shown to the military personnel. During the late summer of 1944, the navy men played Army-Navy baseball games against the army guards from the local German prisoner of war camp. The sailors also played basketball games against alumni teams from local high schools.
Finally on January 22, 1945, the hospital was ready for full operation. Five hundred beds were in place with room for an additional three hundred and fifty more for emergency purposes. The original complex was built with four and one half million bricks which, if laid end to end, would extend all the way to Washington, D.C. There were sixty cubic yards of concrete, seventeen hundred tons of steel, eighty miles of interior piping, five elevators, five thousand windows, twenty one hundred doors, eleven acres of flooring, four acres of acoustical ceiling tiles, twenty miles of underground piping and six thousand cubic yards of earth work.
Commander Louis Dozier, a native of Macon, Georgia, was commended by the Bureau of Yards and Docks for his work in supervising the construction of the hospital. He was promoted and was assigned overseas. Commander Dozier was ably assisted by project managers Lt. Carl B. Babcock and Carleton B. Johnson. The project was supervised at the highest levels by Rear Admiral Jules James of the Sixth Naval District and was operated by the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.
The dedication of the hospital was scheduled for the early afternoon. A light and cold rain kept many away. Nearly every politician and business leader in Georgia was invited to attend. Military leaders in the hospital's chain of command were invited to speak. Gov. Ellis Arnall and Congressman Carl Vinson were slated to speak, but were detained and did not attend. Postmaster M.J. Guyton spoke on behalf of his brother-in-law, Congressman Vinson, before a somewhat disappointed crowd. The first patients were scheduled to be brought in during the ceremonies, but were delayed by a few hours by the bad weather. The hospital was not quite finished when it opened. The commander's office was temporarily located in the front guard house and later in the surgical wing of the hospital.
The initial cadre of officers at the hospital was headed by Capt. A.L. Bryan. Capt. Bryan was a veteran of naval operations in the Pacific serving with valor in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. Commander A.J. Delaney served as the first Executive Officer. Commander B.E. Goodrich, Chief of Medicine; Commander W.S. Littlejohn, Chief of Neuropsychiatry; Commander D.D. Martin, Clinical Director; Lt. Commander E.B. Brick, Chief of the Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat Section; Lt. Commander V.B. Buhler, Chief of Laboratory Services, and Lt. Commander P.V. Dilts rounded out the executive staff of the hospital. The Red Cross provided a staff of nearly two dozen women to serve the hospital. The early heads of the Red Cross workers were Helen Cassidy, Merle Foeckler, and Margaret Weatherall.
The hospital, then a part of the armed forces hospital system, took on the role of aiding the war on the home front. This mission included entertainment and education of the patients. On April 7, 1945, Eddie Rickenbacker visited the hospital. Rickenbacker was the top American ace of World War I. After the war, he got into the automobile business. Rickenbacker owned the Indianapolis Speedway for 12 years. In 1938, he was named President of Eastern Airlines and served in that position until he was named Chairman of the Board in 1959. Rickenbacker's mission was to cheer up those sailors who were facing long recuperation from their injuries.
On the last day of April 1945, Helen Keller made a visit to the hospital. Helen Keller had lost her senses of sight and hearing. She could not speak. Upon the recommendation of Alexander Graham Bell, she went to a special school for the blind. Anne Sullivan taught Miss Keller to listen to others talk by placing her hand on their faces. She eventually learned to read, write, talk and type and graduated with honors from Radcliff College. In her later years, Helen Keller authored many successful books. Her visit to the hospital was part of her tour of military hospitals across the country. It was hoped that those disabled veterans would be inspired by Miss Keller's overcoming of her disabilities. Over the years that followed, touring bands and companies performed at the hospital for the sailors in the afternoons and at public dances at night. Among those were forties band leaders Les Brown, Vaughn Monroe, The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, Skinny Ennis, Glen Gray, Tommy Tucker, Jan Garber and Ted Weems.
The hospital continued to expand. A research laboratory was built in late 1945 to study the effects of rheumatic fever. Captain J.B. Logue succeeded Capt. A.L. Bryan as commander of the hospital. The last naval commander was Capt. Lea B. Sartin. Capt. Sartin was taken as a prisoner of war while serving at a Manilla hospital and endured three years in the Japanese prison camps, first as the prison doctor at Bilbub prison in the Philippines. Capt. Sartin served as Executive Officer of the Naval Hospital in New Orleans before coming to Dublin. The peak of hospital patient load came in came in June 1946, when there were 1200 Navy and 100 VA patients served by 75 Staff Officers, 80 Nurses, 300 corpsmen, and 78 WAVES. Nearly three years after the end of the war the hospital was decommissioned as a naval hospital. The ceremonial transfer was broadcast from the studios of radio station WMLT on the evening of June 30, 1948. Dr. David Quinn was named as Administrator of the new Veteran's hospital. On September 15, 1948, the hospital was dedicated by Senator Walter F. George and Congressman Carl Vinson.
THE REST OF THE STORY
Doctors, Patients and Visitors at the V.A. Hospital
Over the last six decades, hundreds of thousands of our country's heroes have received medical care in the VA Hospital. More than ten thousand physicians, nurses, sailors, waves, technicians, secretaries, and health care workers have walked the long halls, worked tirelessly to serve those who had served them and frequently held back their tears when in the presence of those who suffer terribly from the wounds of war of the ravages of time. It is to these wonderful Americans and the unnumerable legion of volunteers who have given of themselves that I dedicate these columns.
Franklin Gowdy was born to Dr. F.M. Gowdy and Margaret K. Gowdy on June 2, 1903 in Union Pier, Michigan. He grew up in St. Joseph, Michigan. Gowdy attended St. Joseph's High School, where he was vice president of the Crescent society in his junior year. While at St. Joseph's, Franklin performed in school plays and choral programs.
Franklin played tackle for the University of Chicago Maroons in the early 1920s. In 1924, he was elected captain of the football team. Gowdy was generally regarded by national experts as one of the best tackles in the county and rated by his coach, the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg as "one of the best tackles ever developed at the University of Chicago," Gowdy was chosen to the all Big Ten team and the All American team and led his team to a 3-0-3 record and its last Big Ten Championship. He was honored by Coach Stagg in 1925, when he was asked to coach the Chicago line. His younger brother Vic followed in his footsteps, first at Chicago and then as captain of the Oberlin College team.
Dr. Franklin Gowdy graduated from Rush Medical School in Chicago. He began the practice of medicine in 1937 in Evanston, Illinois, where he met and married his wife, Dorothy Faye Brockway. Dr. Gowdy enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve shortly after Pearl Harbor. Gowdy, then nearly forty years of age, expected to serve in the Naval reserve at the Great Lakes Naval base. He was transferred to the Marines and sent to Guadalcanal attached to First Division United States Marine Corps. The First Marine Division participated in the invasion of the islands of New Britain and Pellilu. By then end of his tour in the South Pacific, Dr. Gowdy rose to the rank of Lt. Commander in the Navy. His brother Howard served as an officer in the Army Air Corps.
In his last year in the service in the Navy, Dr. Gowdy was assigned to the United States Naval Hospital in Dublin, Georgia. In January 1946, Dr. Gowdy resumed his practice of medicine in Winnetka, Illinois. He and his family resided in nearby Glencoe. Dr. Gowdy practiced medicine in the Chicago area and taught internal medicine at Northwestern University until his death on July 15, 1973.
In 1952, Dr. M. Fernand Nunez served as chief of laboratory services at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Dublin. Dr. Nunez was a direct descendant of Dr. Samuel Nunez. The original Dr. Nunez came to the infant colony of Georgia in July, 1733 as the physician and apothecary for the Colony. Dr. Nunez delivered Phillip Minas, the first male child to be born in the colony.
Officials at the Dublin VA Hospital were honored when the national commander of American Veterans agreed to pay a visit to the hospital on January 12, 1961. The commander, a Canadian born paratroop sergeant in World War II, was the guest of honor at a luncheon held in the dining room and the featured speaker in the auditorium which was filled with patients, staff, and personnel. The commander told the veterans "It's not what you have lost, but what you have left. Disability does not mean inability." He urged the veterans to pass on to the civilians what they had learned in the military. The Commander spoke from experience for he lost both arms during the war. He tried, without his hands, at making a movie. He played the role of Homer Parrish, one of several veterans returning home after the war. Evidently he did a pretty good job. He was awarded two awards for his performance in the film. His name was Harold Russell. The classic movie from 1946 was "The Best Years of Our Lives." The movie won the Oscar for best picture. Frederich March won the Oscar for best actor. The director and writer also won the Oscar that year. Russell, one of the most famous American heroes of World War II, won the Oscar for best supporting actor and another special Oscar "for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans." In his first and only movie, Sgt. Russell was the only actor ever to be awarded two Oscars for one role. Russell went into the public relations field after the war. He died in 1993.
In the days and months before Fidel Castro took control of the Cuban government, Cubans by the thousands fled to Florida and parts of the southeast. Several families came to Dublin and in particular to the Veteran's Hospital. Three of Cuba's top physicians wound up in Dublin. They were unanimous in their view that the Cuban refugees should leave Miami and come to small American towns like Dublin, which were a more true example of American life and the strength of our country. Dr. Rogello J. Barata was a former professor of surgery at the University of Havana Medical University until 1961. Dr. Barata served as general and thoracic surgeon at the V.A. hospital. His former student, Dr. Luis G. Valdes, was Chief of Surgery in one of Havana's largest hospitals after completing his post graduate work at Harvard University. The third and most prominent physician was Dr. Delio S. Garcia, former professor of Pathology at the University of Havana. Dr. Garcia had been the former director of the Cuban National Bureau of Identification. Between 1944 and 1948 Cuba was experiencing a wave of gang killings when nearly 150 prominent people were killed. Dr. Garcia was able to identify five of the killers through scientific tests. The first murderer he identified was a young Cuban rebel by the name of Fidel Castro. The Cuban families assimilated into the community, Dr. Valde's mother-in-law taught Spanish at Dublin High School.
At the Veteran's Hospital patients came and patients went. There was something unusual about this particular patient. He was a veteran of the United States Army having fought in Korea. After the war, he married Frances Googe of Hazelhurst where he made his home. He did nothing to create the excitement. The unusual amount of attention paid to this patient Vincent Cadette came not from his actions, but because of his ancestry. His ancestor was among the most famous men of the late 19th century. Vincent was an American Indian like his great grandfather, Sitting Bull.
One of Dublin's oldest residents in 1968 was Louis Greenhaus, who was 101 years old. Greenhaus, a Russian-born naturalized citizen, was a resident of the V.A. Hospital. Naturalized as a United States citizen in 1892, Greenhaus served as a sergeant in the Spanish-American War and World War I. Between the wars, Greenhaus was a member of John Phillip Sousa's band and played under the direction of America's foremost band leaders. Greenhaus credited his daily cigar as the most important factor in his longevity.
In the early decades of the V.A. Hospital, the wards were filled with veterans of the Spanish American War and World War I. William C. Owen was Georgia's oldest surviving veteran of the Spanish American War. He turned 100 years old on September 4, 1978. Lemuel J. Rogers, who died at the VA Hospital on June 25, 1963, served under Col. Teddy Roosevelt and retired as a master sergeant in 1926.
These are a few of the thousands of stories of the people of the VA Hospital. Their complete stories would fill volumes. I encourage you to record your stories of the hospital for posterity so that the generations to come will know just what a special place the V.A. Hospital is.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
IRA T. GARNTO
INTERVIEW WITH SGT. IRA T. GARNTO
2ND Bn. Hq. Co., 121st Inf., 8th Inf. Div. 1st Army
Sgt. Ira T. Garnto enlisted in Co. K, 121st Infantry on Aug. 1, 1940. After was transferred to Regimental HQ in the intelligence section. After 2 more years I was transferred to 2nd Battalion as Intelligence Chief. I enlisted originally for three years. Many of the men enlisted for only year. After Sept. 1941 and especially after Pearl Harbor, the original Co. K broke up. Only about 10% of the original members of the Company K saw combat in Europe in 1944-45.
I enlisted on August 1, 1940 and in a few days went on maneuvers in Mississippi for three weeks. After I graduated high school in 1940, I thought to myself that I should go ahead and join for a year. We knew Capt. Clifford Prince would let us out after a year if we had a hardship, besides I needed the work. My daddy died in 1928, when I was six years old. I had two older sisters and two younger brothers. My mother invested the insurance proceeds in the First National Bank in Dublin, which went bust that year. We lived on a farm just outside of Brewton. Mamma managed to hand on to the farm in 1942 when she moved to town across from Jefferson Street Baptist Church. My brother was shot down in China on the Yangee River. He was in a B-24 and they were skip bombing. I didn't know what that was, but it was where they would come in low and drop their bombs so that they would skip into the boats. They told us that we would be in the army in three more weeks.
We got to come home on just about every weekend from Fort Jackson, if you could afford it. Some times they charged five dollars to bring you home. We used to ride two in the front and three or four in the back. Some of the men bought cars. You could get one for 800 or 900 dollars. I remember E.L. Stephens bought a car. The 121st was at Fort Jackson when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Actually I was at home when they bombed Pearl Harbor. I had come home riding in a car with Capt. Prince.
While I was there, they tried to get me to go to Officer Candidate School. I wanted to serve my country, but I didn't think that being an officer was for me. They selected two of us to take a test to go to West Point. You had to have the affidavits of two officers, pass a physical, and provide a birth certificates. I had the two affidavits, which I still have, and the birth certificate. About that time we were transferred to Ft. Leonard Wood. It was cold there. In all of the confusion in moving to a new place, the chance passed me by. I remained a Sergeant because I had a lot of lateral transfers. I didn't want to go to O.C.S., but I would have gone to West Point if only for the education. It would have taken me out of the war because I would have finished after the war. I would have had to sign up for seven years which would have put me in Korea. I would not have been killed in World War II, but I could have been in Korea. That may have saved my life. They also tried to make me Battalion Sergeant Major.
We trained in old clothes. They must have been from World War II. We lived in tents in the first winter. We didn't have much equipment. We had to use old stove pipes as mortars.
After we left Fort Jackson, South Carolina, we went on maneuvers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The army began assigning Georgia draftees into our regiment, which was then part of the 30th Infantry. We went to Ft. Leonard Wood for about six months and then out west to the desert for another six months. After we returned to Camp Forest, Tenn., we went to New Jersey where we left for Ireland in the winter of 1943.
We went to Northern Ireland after leaving the states. I remember General George Patton talking with us. We were originally to be a part of his 3rd Army. Then we were assigned to the 1st Army. We went to Brest. They underestimated what it would take to clean up there. There were fifty thousand Germans there.
We arrived at Utah Beach, Normandy on the 4th of July. There was no fighting there, but we could still hear the guns, probably close to St. Lo. I rode in a jeep. When it left the landing craft it dipped into the war and wet us. That tickled Gen. Walker. He was killed in a few days. We lost a lot of officers in the first few weeks.
In Normandy, our first mission was to straighten out a bulge in our lines. It took us eight days. Then we sat there for eight days waiting on the tanks to show up. I dug a hole next to one of the hedgerows, which had a bush that looked like a redtip, but I don't think it was really a redtip. A mortar shell came in one night through the hedgerow and caved in my hole. It didn't go off. Another one came within ten feet of my position and tore up my raincoat and cut my telephone wire. It didn't go off. I don't think it would had killed me if it had, but the concussion would have jarred me real bad. Our liaison officer was shot. They asked me to take replacements up to the lines which I did two times. We had gotten down to about 50% strength in Normandy by August, 1944. When we got out of the hedgerows, we got into open fields which were bad. Sleeping was tough. In the day, you thought about and hoped the night would come so the Germans couldn't see you. At night, you thought about someone coming in and getting you.
Our unit never got the credit for the job we did in Normandy. In all of the pictures and films I have seen, I have never seen a soldier in them wearing our division's patch, the 8th Infantry. Sometimes we used to see the skies filled with bombers heading toward Germany. Sometimes they bombed the enemy right in front of us. They were so close they jarred us.
We got into some trouble at Brest. The bombers came over and bombed the Germans, but as soon as they left, the Germans came right back out and starting shooting again.
On the Battle of Hurtgen: The 28th Division had been kicked out of the forest. They had lost almost all of their men. We went in to relieve the 101st Airborne Division. We got there about Thanksgiving. The 28th went to Luxembourg where we came from. They really got kicked during the Battle of the Bulge. The trees in the Hurtgen Forest were in bad shape. Every battalion was quickly engaged. They were mostly pine trees, split and splintered. I remember sleeping sitting up some night. I served in the headquarters 2nd battalion under the command of Lt. Col. Henry B. Kunzig. I was in the forward Command Post with Col. Kunzig. He wanted a messenger from each company and wanted someone in charge of the messengers. I took four messengers from each of the four companies in our battalion back to Col. Kunzig's bunker and remained there with Col. Kunzig.
I was walking into the Town of Hurtgen following the capture of the town. I had just come into the edge of town and was standing by a German tank in front of the first building on the left (see p. 35, 121st Infantry History). I was waiting on my next orders when I heard an artillery round coming in. It hit the tank with a strange thud, but it didn't explode. I was lucky.
It started snowing after a few days, but the snow was much better than the sloppy mud. The slop was worse than the snow. It slowed us down. Many of our casualties came from frostbite. The tanks had no way to go in the mud in the forest. I guess we just outlasted them.
Gladstone Daniel (David G. Daniel, Jr.) is the only Laurens County man that I remember being killed in the battle.
On the Battle of Ruhr Pocket (see page 53, History of the 121st Inf. Regiment): That scene (the one depicted in the book) is very real to me. The Colonel asked me to get four German prisoners who spoke English to work KP duty in the kitchen.
Along the Roer we had a lot of night fighting. It was boogerish, but we had less casualties. At Cologne, Emory F. Scarborough was killed in an auto assembly plant. He had been promoted to Second Lieutenant on the Battlefield. He was in Headquarters 3rd Battalion and they were waiting for directions. I believe George Allen Tindol may have been there. They did manage to get a few trucks from there. We stayed in cellars, but when the warm weather came the snow began to melt and it began raining in on us down there.
The 1st and the 3rd Army after they crossed the Rhine came together in a pincer and cut the Germans off. It was one place where there was a right smart bit of trouble when a 74 ton tank with 120 mm guns came out toward us. The army had assigned a platoon of Black soldiers to F Company. There were not actually part of the company, just attached to it. They did pretty good. They fought together. One of them found a German bazooka and shot it at one of those tanks and stopped it. Another man picked up a Browning automatic rifle and shot the Germans as they came crawling out of the tank. The two men were rewarded with a pass to Paris and a promotion to sergeant. One of them was awarded a Silver Star. That was as close as we came to having an integrated unit. There were a lot of Blacks in the Quartermasters. From then on, we didn't get much fight, but there was some in some of the towns.
When the Germans got out from behind their tanks they surrendered. They just quit. They came out the cellars and surrendered. I stayed with Col. Kunzig everywhere he went after the Hurtgen Forest. On our last drive we went to Schwerin near the Baltic Sea. Col. Kunzig said very little. A German captain wanted the Colonel to go with him to the German Headquarters. I followed his jeep. The Germans were still armed. I stayed outside and didn't go in. A Lt. General surrendered an entire corps to us. They came marching in for three days. There were about 214 thousand of them. They didn't want to surrender to the Russians.
We lost about a thousand killed and four thousand total casualties. Our unit met up with the Russians, or that's what they say. I saw one Russian and he looked liked he was lost.
Interviewed by Scott B. Thompson, Sr., November 20, 1999.
2ND Bn. Hq. Co., 121st Inf., 8th Inf. Div. 1st Army
Sgt. Ira T. Garnto enlisted in Co. K, 121st Infantry on Aug. 1, 1940. After was transferred to Regimental HQ in the intelligence section. After 2 more years I was transferred to 2nd Battalion as Intelligence Chief. I enlisted originally for three years. Many of the men enlisted for only year. After Sept. 1941 and especially after Pearl Harbor, the original Co. K broke up. Only about 10% of the original members of the Company K saw combat in Europe in 1944-45.
I enlisted on August 1, 1940 and in a few days went on maneuvers in Mississippi for three weeks. After I graduated high school in 1940, I thought to myself that I should go ahead and join for a year. We knew Capt. Clifford Prince would let us out after a year if we had a hardship, besides I needed the work. My daddy died in 1928, when I was six years old. I had two older sisters and two younger brothers. My mother invested the insurance proceeds in the First National Bank in Dublin, which went bust that year. We lived on a farm just outside of Brewton. Mamma managed to hand on to the farm in 1942 when she moved to town across from Jefferson Street Baptist Church. My brother was shot down in China on the Yangee River. He was in a B-24 and they were skip bombing. I didn't know what that was, but it was where they would come in low and drop their bombs so that they would skip into the boats. They told us that we would be in the army in three more weeks.
We got to come home on just about every weekend from Fort Jackson, if you could afford it. Some times they charged five dollars to bring you home. We used to ride two in the front and three or four in the back. Some of the men bought cars. You could get one for 800 or 900 dollars. I remember E.L. Stephens bought a car. The 121st was at Fort Jackson when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Actually I was at home when they bombed Pearl Harbor. I had come home riding in a car with Capt. Prince.
While I was there, they tried to get me to go to Officer Candidate School. I wanted to serve my country, but I didn't think that being an officer was for me. They selected two of us to take a test to go to West Point. You had to have the affidavits of two officers, pass a physical, and provide a birth certificates. I had the two affidavits, which I still have, and the birth certificate. About that time we were transferred to Ft. Leonard Wood. It was cold there. In all of the confusion in moving to a new place, the chance passed me by. I remained a Sergeant because I had a lot of lateral transfers. I didn't want to go to O.C.S., but I would have gone to West Point if only for the education. It would have taken me out of the war because I would have finished after the war. I would have had to sign up for seven years which would have put me in Korea. I would not have been killed in World War II, but I could have been in Korea. That may have saved my life. They also tried to make me Battalion Sergeant Major.
We trained in old clothes. They must have been from World War II. We lived in tents in the first winter. We didn't have much equipment. We had to use old stove pipes as mortars.
After we left Fort Jackson, South Carolina, we went on maneuvers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The army began assigning Georgia draftees into our regiment, which was then part of the 30th Infantry. We went to Ft. Leonard Wood for about six months and then out west to the desert for another six months. After we returned to Camp Forest, Tenn., we went to New Jersey where we left for Ireland in the winter of 1943.
We went to Northern Ireland after leaving the states. I remember General George Patton talking with us. We were originally to be a part of his 3rd Army. Then we were assigned to the 1st Army. We went to Brest. They underestimated what it would take to clean up there. There were fifty thousand Germans there.
We arrived at Utah Beach, Normandy on the 4th of July. There was no fighting there, but we could still hear the guns, probably close to St. Lo. I rode in a jeep. When it left the landing craft it dipped into the war and wet us. That tickled Gen. Walker. He was killed in a few days. We lost a lot of officers in the first few weeks.
In Normandy, our first mission was to straighten out a bulge in our lines. It took us eight days. Then we sat there for eight days waiting on the tanks to show up. I dug a hole next to one of the hedgerows, which had a bush that looked like a redtip, but I don't think it was really a redtip. A mortar shell came in one night through the hedgerow and caved in my hole. It didn't go off. Another one came within ten feet of my position and tore up my raincoat and cut my telephone wire. It didn't go off. I don't think it would had killed me if it had, but the concussion would have jarred me real bad. Our liaison officer was shot. They asked me to take replacements up to the lines which I did two times. We had gotten down to about 50% strength in Normandy by August, 1944. When we got out of the hedgerows, we got into open fields which were bad. Sleeping was tough. In the day, you thought about and hoped the night would come so the Germans couldn't see you. At night, you thought about someone coming in and getting you.
Our unit never got the credit for the job we did in Normandy. In all of the pictures and films I have seen, I have never seen a soldier in them wearing our division's patch, the 8th Infantry. Sometimes we used to see the skies filled with bombers heading toward Germany. Sometimes they bombed the enemy right in front of us. They were so close they jarred us.
We got into some trouble at Brest. The bombers came over and bombed the Germans, but as soon as they left, the Germans came right back out and starting shooting again.
On the Battle of Hurtgen: The 28th Division had been kicked out of the forest. They had lost almost all of their men. We went in to relieve the 101st Airborne Division. We got there about Thanksgiving. The 28th went to Luxembourg where we came from. They really got kicked during the Battle of the Bulge. The trees in the Hurtgen Forest were in bad shape. Every battalion was quickly engaged. They were mostly pine trees, split and splintered. I remember sleeping sitting up some night. I served in the headquarters 2nd battalion under the command of Lt. Col. Henry B. Kunzig. I was in the forward Command Post with Col. Kunzig. He wanted a messenger from each company and wanted someone in charge of the messengers. I took four messengers from each of the four companies in our battalion back to Col. Kunzig's bunker and remained there with Col. Kunzig.
I was walking into the Town of Hurtgen following the capture of the town. I had just come into the edge of town and was standing by a German tank in front of the first building on the left (see p. 35, 121st Infantry History). I was waiting on my next orders when I heard an artillery round coming in. It hit the tank with a strange thud, but it didn't explode. I was lucky.
It started snowing after a few days, but the snow was much better than the sloppy mud. The slop was worse than the snow. It slowed us down. Many of our casualties came from frostbite. The tanks had no way to go in the mud in the forest. I guess we just outlasted them.
Gladstone Daniel (David G. Daniel, Jr.) is the only Laurens County man that I remember being killed in the battle.
On the Battle of Ruhr Pocket (see page 53, History of the 121st Inf. Regiment): That scene (the one depicted in the book) is very real to me. The Colonel asked me to get four German prisoners who spoke English to work KP duty in the kitchen.
Along the Roer we had a lot of night fighting. It was boogerish, but we had less casualties. At Cologne, Emory F. Scarborough was killed in an auto assembly plant. He had been promoted to Second Lieutenant on the Battlefield. He was in Headquarters 3rd Battalion and they were waiting for directions. I believe George Allen Tindol may have been there. They did manage to get a few trucks from there. We stayed in cellars, but when the warm weather came the snow began to melt and it began raining in on us down there.
The 1st and the 3rd Army after they crossed the Rhine came together in a pincer and cut the Germans off. It was one place where there was a right smart bit of trouble when a 74 ton tank with 120 mm guns came out toward us. The army had assigned a platoon of Black soldiers to F Company. There were not actually part of the company, just attached to it. They did pretty good. They fought together. One of them found a German bazooka and shot it at one of those tanks and stopped it. Another man picked up a Browning automatic rifle and shot the Germans as they came crawling out of the tank. The two men were rewarded with a pass to Paris and a promotion to sergeant. One of them was awarded a Silver Star. That was as close as we came to having an integrated unit. There were a lot of Blacks in the Quartermasters. From then on, we didn't get much fight, but there was some in some of the towns.
When the Germans got out from behind their tanks they surrendered. They just quit. They came out the cellars and surrendered. I stayed with Col. Kunzig everywhere he went after the Hurtgen Forest. On our last drive we went to Schwerin near the Baltic Sea. Col. Kunzig said very little. A German captain wanted the Colonel to go with him to the German Headquarters. I followed his jeep. The Germans were still armed. I stayed outside and didn't go in. A Lt. General surrendered an entire corps to us. They came marching in for three days. There were about 214 thousand of them. They didn't want to surrender to the Russians.
We lost about a thousand killed and four thousand total casualties. Our unit met up with the Russians, or that's what they say. I saw one Russian and he looked liked he was lost.
Interviewed by Scott B. Thompson, Sr., November 20, 1999.
Friday, January 1, 2010
DUBLIN'S ADMIRAL
The Story of Admiral Robert Edgar Braddy, Jr.
Robert Edgar Braddy, Jr., moved to Dublin at the age of nine in 1913. Braddy was a son of Robert E. and Neva Eudora Braddy. The Braddys lived on Maiden Lane in Dublin on the site of the First Baptist Church Life Center. After attending Dublin schools, he attended Gordon Military College and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927.
In 1942 Lt. Commander Braddy commanded the U.S.S. Bernadou, an old four stacker tanker, which was built in 1918. “The Bernadou” was named for Commander John Baptiste Bernadou, a hero of the Spanish American War. The ship was originally designed to combat submarines in World War I. The ship was launched four days before the armistice. After it was commissioned in 1919, the “Bernadou” saw sporadic service in the Atlantic Ocean. In the fall of 1939, the “Bernadou” was re-commissioned and went assigned to the Atlantic Ocean on neutrality patrol. The ship had a maximum speed of 35 knots and was just a little longer than a football field. The usual complement of a crew was about one hundred fifty.
Before the United States declared war on Germany the “Bernadou” carried Marines to Iceland in July of 1941. For the next year the ship remained in the Newfoundland-Iceland convoy in the North Atlantic. The first missions of Braddy’s ship were anti-submarine patrols. On October 25, 1942 Braddy's ship, nicknamed the “Bouncing Bee”, was assigned to carry troops into French North Africa for an attack in November, 1942. Along with the “U.S.S. Cole,” the “Bernadou” was assigned to an attack group heading for the port of Safi, French Morroco. The mission of a destroyer was to provide close-in combat support for landing troops. It was a suicide mission. Braddy’s ship was designated as the lead ship to land the first wave of infantry troops on shore.
The “Bernadou” was a part of the Southern Attack Group of the Western Naval Task Force. On the night of November 7th and 8th the attack group moved away from the main convoy. The ships moved to a rendevous point to await the signal for an attack. Just before dawn the eagerly awaited attack signal came.
The “Bernadou” and the “Cole,” commanded by Lt. Cmdr. George G. Palmer of Charleston, South Carolina, steamed toward Safi.
At 3:30 a.m. the two ships moved out headed for the harbor. H-hour was set for 4 a.m. The ship was filled with troops. All of her smokestacks had been removed to disguise her identity. It rode low in the water and was difficult to identify with her mast down. Through unchartered waters, the two ships moved their shops toward the harbor entrance. Their passage went quietly at first with a scout boat in the lead. With companies of the 47th Infantry aboard, the “Bernadou” was challenged at 4:10 a.m.. A spot light from the hills above Safi spotted Braddy’s ship. A signal from shore was answered by the same signal. The light went out. The shore batteries opened fire with their French ‘75s. The two ships along with others to the rear opened fire on the batteries. The pre-dawn skies were lit up by brilliant streams of tracer bullets and the mouths of the big guns.
Braddy ordered the ship to proceed full steam ahead. At 4:28 a.m. the ship rounded the north end of the mole. Braddy took the “Bouncing Bee” through narrow and difficult approaches to the harbor mouth. The task became increasingly difficult when machine guns began firing from jetties. Lookouts on the bridge spotted a bell buoy at the mouth of the harbor. The ships continued under heavy cross fire. Braddy and Palmer guided their ships through a multitude of vessels anchored in the harbor. Braddy ran his ship at near full speed right into the shoreline, which was lined with rocks. This daring maneuver allowed all of the assault troops to land immediately and avoid small arms fire. Cmdr. Palmer guided his ship to a dock where he unloaded his men. The invaders swarmed the shore and reached their objectives. In the dash for the harbor, not a single life was lost. The resistance from the shore soon ceased to exist.
Braddy’s good fortune continued to hold. The beaching had been eased by an underwater sandbar. It was substantial enough to hold the ship in place while the assault forces unboarded, but was not enough to cause any fatal damage to the destroyer. The “Berndaou” and four other destroyers began providing escorts for tanks and troops for the assault on Casablanca on November 10th.
For his actions in guiding his ship safely into Safi under dangerous night conditions, Lt. Commander Braddy was given the Navy Cross and an award from the Belgian government. The Navy Cross is our nation’s second highest award for heroism in the United States Navy. Secretary of the Navy Knox cited the commanders for their actions “with gallant and resolute purpose, and at grave risk to his own life and the safety of his ship and men, they successfully countered all opposition in the accomplishment of a vital and strategic mission.” Vice Admiral Henry Hewitt, in command of the invasion, cited Braddy and Coles’ ships with a large measure of the success of the operation. Admiral Hewitt nominated the two ships to the Navy’s roll of distinguished ships. The entire crew was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for their actions in the successful operation.
After the landing at Safi, the “Bernadou” returned to Boston where she remained on convoy duty until February of 1943. She made a convoy run to Gibraltar in March and in May departed for Algeria. In July, 1943 the ship took part in the occupation of Sicily. Two months later the “Bernadou” aided in the landings at Salerno. After two convoy trips to North Africa in the first half of 1944, the ship retired to the easy runs from the east coast of the United States to the Caribbean. The Bernadou arrived in the Philadelphia Naval Yard for decommissioning on July 17, 1945. On the last day of November, 1945, the grand old lady, who had served her country so well in earning five battle stars, was sold.
Commander Braddy was also a close and personal friend of deaf and blind American author, Helen Keller. His sister, Nella, wrote a book for Reader's Digest on Helen Keller, and her mentor, Anne Sullivan. Nella Braddy also earned national acclaim for her biography of the author, Rudyard Kipling. Robert Braddy retired as a Rear Admiral on October 1, 1951. Admiral Braddy died on August 14, 1965 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Robert Edgar Braddy, Jr., moved to Dublin at the age of nine in 1913. Braddy was a son of Robert E. and Neva Eudora Braddy. The Braddys lived on Maiden Lane in Dublin on the site of the First Baptist Church Life Center. After attending Dublin schools, he attended Gordon Military College and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927.
In 1942 Lt. Commander Braddy commanded the U.S.S. Bernadou, an old four stacker tanker, which was built in 1918. “The Bernadou” was named for Commander John Baptiste Bernadou, a hero of the Spanish American War. The ship was originally designed to combat submarines in World War I. The ship was launched four days before the armistice. After it was commissioned in 1919, the “Bernadou” saw sporadic service in the Atlantic Ocean. In the fall of 1939, the “Bernadou” was re-commissioned and went assigned to the Atlantic Ocean on neutrality patrol. The ship had a maximum speed of 35 knots and was just a little longer than a football field. The usual complement of a crew was about one hundred fifty.
Before the United States declared war on Germany the “Bernadou” carried Marines to Iceland in July of 1941. For the next year the ship remained in the Newfoundland-Iceland convoy in the North Atlantic. The first missions of Braddy’s ship were anti-submarine patrols. On October 25, 1942 Braddy's ship, nicknamed the “Bouncing Bee”, was assigned to carry troops into French North Africa for an attack in November, 1942. Along with the “U.S.S. Cole,” the “Bernadou” was assigned to an attack group heading for the port of Safi, French Morroco. The mission of a destroyer was to provide close-in combat support for landing troops. It was a suicide mission. Braddy’s ship was designated as the lead ship to land the first wave of infantry troops on shore.
The “Bernadou” was a part of the Southern Attack Group of the Western Naval Task Force. On the night of November 7th and 8th the attack group moved away from the main convoy. The ships moved to a rendevous point to await the signal for an attack. Just before dawn the eagerly awaited attack signal came.
The “Bernadou” and the “Cole,” commanded by Lt. Cmdr. George G. Palmer of Charleston, South Carolina, steamed toward Safi.
At 3:30 a.m. the two ships moved out headed for the harbor. H-hour was set for 4 a.m. The ship was filled with troops. All of her smokestacks had been removed to disguise her identity. It rode low in the water and was difficult to identify with her mast down. Through unchartered waters, the two ships moved their shops toward the harbor entrance. Their passage went quietly at first with a scout boat in the lead. With companies of the 47th Infantry aboard, the “Bernadou” was challenged at 4:10 a.m.. A spot light from the hills above Safi spotted Braddy’s ship. A signal from shore was answered by the same signal. The light went out. The shore batteries opened fire with their French ‘75s. The two ships along with others to the rear opened fire on the batteries. The pre-dawn skies were lit up by brilliant streams of tracer bullets and the mouths of the big guns.
Braddy’s good fortune continued to hold. The beaching had been eased by an underwater sandbar. It was substantial enough to hold the ship in place while the assault forces unboarded, but was not enough to cause any fatal damage to the destroyer. The “Berndaou” and four other destroyers began providing escorts for tanks and troops for the assault on Casablanca on November 10th.
For his actions in guiding his ship safely into Safi under dangerous night conditions, Lt. Commander Braddy was given the Navy Cross and an award from the Belgian government. The Navy Cross is our nation’s second highest award for heroism in the United States Navy. Secretary of the Navy Knox cited the commanders for their actions “with gallant and resolute purpose, and at grave risk to his own life and the safety of his ship and men, they successfully countered all opposition in the accomplishment of a vital and strategic mission.” Vice Admiral Henry Hewitt, in command of the invasion, cited Braddy and Coles’ ships with a large measure of the success of the operation. Admiral Hewitt nominated the two ships to the Navy’s roll of distinguished ships. The entire crew was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for their actions in the successful operation.
After the landing at Safi, the “Bernadou” returned to Boston where she remained on convoy duty until February of 1943. She made a convoy run to Gibraltar in March and in May departed for Algeria. In July, 1943 the ship took part in the occupation of Sicily. Two months later the “Bernadou” aided in the landings at Salerno. After two convoy trips to North Africa in the first half of 1944, the ship retired to the easy runs from the east coast of the United States to the Caribbean. The Bernadou arrived in the Philadelphia Naval Yard for decommissioning on July 17, 1945. On the last day of November, 1945, the grand old lady, who had served her country so well in earning five battle stars, was sold.
Commander Braddy was also a close and personal friend of deaf and blind American author, Helen Keller. His sister, Nella, wrote a book for Reader's Digest on Helen Keller, and her mentor, Anne Sullivan. Nella Braddy also earned national acclaim for her biography of the author, Rudyard Kipling. Robert Braddy retired as a Rear Admiral on October 1, 1951. Admiral Braddy died on August 14, 1965 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
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