Oral history interview of William M. Alexander, Jr.

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of William M. Alexander, Jr.
Creator:: Eberhard, Sarah
Alexander, William Murray, Jr., 1924-2009
Date of Original:: 2003-12-03
Subject:: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Ardennes, Battle of the, 1944-1945
V-J Day, 1945--Georgia--Atlanta
World War, 1939-1945--Medical care--Europe, Western
Alexander, Sarah Anna Huffaker, 1925-2002
Patton, George S. (George Smith), 1885-1945
United States. Army. Infantry Division, 87th
United States. Army. Infantry Regiment, 347th. Company L
Queen Elizabeth (ship)
United States. Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944
Location:: Belgium, Wallonia, Liège Province, Arrondissement de Verviers, Saint-Vith, Saint-Vith, 50.28407, 6.12728
Belgium, Wallonia, Luxembourg Province, Arrondissement de Bastogne, Bastogne, 50.00347, 5.71844
France, Maginot Line, 49.4112748, 6.0834938
France, Metz, 49.1196964, 6.1763552
Germany, Saarbrücken, 49.234362, 6.996379
Germany, Saarland, 49.4173988, 6.9805789
Moselle River, 49.0207259, 6.53803517035795
Netherlands, Rhine River, 51.97198, 5.91545
United Kingdom, England, 52.355518, -1.17432
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Chattahoochee County, Fort Benning, 32.35237, -84.96882
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Fort McPherson, 33.70733, -84.43354
United States, Kentucky, Hardin County, Fort Knox, 37.89113, -85.96363
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: MovingImage
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, William Alexander describes his experiences in a U.S. Army infantry unit in Europe during World War II. He relates his experiences in training, and discusses the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). He participated in the Battle of the Bulge, was wounded and evacuated to England. He relates conditions in the encampment, travel on the Autobahn and the progress of the battle. He recounts communications with his family and his post-war life.
William Alexander was an infantryman in Europe during World War II.
BILL ALEXANDER VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW Atlanta History Center December 3, 2003 Interviewer: Sara Everhart Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell Sara Everhart: My name is Sara Everhart, interviewing Bill Alexander on December 3, 2003, regarding his experiences in World War II. What we would like to start off with is just prior to going into the service, were you in school, were you working, you know, at what point in your life were you when things got started. Bill Alexander: I was a freshman at the University of Georgia. I spent one year there before I was drafted. My intention was to get into the armored specialized training program, which a college program for people going in the army, but to start with, you had to go through the basic training. So I was drafted and went through the basic training, which is the training that all ground forces have to go through where you learn to crawl under machine and shoot rifles and big guns and that sort. I was actually assigned to a armored basic training, I learned tank driving, tank tactics, and that sort of thing. The most significant part of my experience was later on in combat in Europe I was in the .Bbattle of the Bulge, and of course that was a real fantastic battle and quite a few hardships and that sort of thing, but I'll lead up to that, to how I got to that particular point. Since I had applied for this armored specialized which they called ASTP, there were a lot of them in my basic training unit that had applied for it and also some had applied for OCS. In our files, we were segregated; our IQ was a little bit higher than the average in order to qualify for those particular programs. So in the files, we were sort of segregated a little bit different, so when we finished basic training… SE: Where was your basic training? BA: Fort Knox, Kentucky. When we finished basic training, everyone was to be sent out as replacement as other tank outfits, but those of us who had been set up for ASTP and OCS were not sent out, but at that point, they had abolished those programs. They anticipated so many casualties in Europe that they wanted all men they could get over there, so they aborted college and that sort of thing. So everybody else in the company was sent out as replacements in nine units but they decided to create a separate tank company for us. This was, they were experimenting with a big heavy tank that the armored school had already turned down and I guess somebody with influence had an interest in it and they wanted to try again to determine that this tank was useful. So they created this separate tank company and those of us that had been designated for college training and OCS were put in that company along with some ________ from the armored school who had been training tank soldiers for years. They were a real specialist. Lot of them had been mechanics in civilian life and were very well trained. So we experimented with that tank for about six months I guess, and we came to the same conclusion that the armored school did, that it wasn't practical in combat, just too big and heavy. So they broke up this company, and by that time, course the ______ who had come from armored school already had high ratings, they were sergeants, master sergeants, that sort of thing, but those of us that had come in had gotten some promotions, too. I was a corporal at that time. And they sent us to the infantry. Now, the ones that was in our basic training unit, they sent them to a tank outfit, but they sent us to the infantry because when they see a bunch of soldiers who had ratings like we did to another outfit, that kind of fills up the rating so this new outfit could not promote some of their people. There was a lot of resentment about us coming in there. They also had people that had washed out in the air force, had been training for air force. They gave them a buck sergeant rating and sent them in there, so they were trying _____ to break us back to private so they would be able to advance these. And a lot of real experienced, high-ranking NCOs were busted to private. My first sergeant showed me an order that he was sending down to have me busted. But before that went through the inspector general got a hold of it and stopped all that. So I wound up going overseas with this infantry unit as a corporal. I hadn't had a lot of infantry training in a learned company; I had infantry training in basic training, but it's not the same thing. They tried, since I had a corporal rating, they had me work as a squad leader at times and so it was an area that I hadn't had a lot of experience so it was a sort of a stressful situation. SE: At what point did you go over, what year was that? BA: It was 1944, October '44. So we got into combat, and it's right ironic, but most of those experienced soldiers from this division that we were in were some of the early casualties, so a lot of those of us who had come into the outfit moved up in rank pretty fast because of the casualties. I became a staff sergeant very quickly and was a squad leader for a long time. Because of more casualties, I wound up being a platoon sergeant. So I had a lot of responsibility without having a lot of the training that most of these people had had. We first went into battle down into southern France around Metz and _____. In fact, we pushed into Germany for a short time there. While we were down there was when the Belgian Bulge broke out. ‘Course we didn't know what it was, we just knew that they were pulling us out of the line and sending us somewhere else. They loaded us in trucks and sent us north and we found out later, of course, that we were going up there to push the Bulge back. We were assigned to Patton's third army. We were near the end, you might say the tail end of the Bulge because we were the unit to push it back. The Bulge had broken out, and most of the damage had been done so we were in the position of pushing it back. The bad thing about that whole thing was the poor intelligence on the part of the U.S. Army. The top generals felt that the Germans didn't have the capacity to do any real damage up there so they had the lines pretty loose up there, didn't have too many troops, and the ones that they had were very green. For example, one of the divisions that was on the line was a brand new division that had just come over from the states. A lot of those were people that had been in this ASTP program and assigned into this division, and they had been, a few weeks earlier, they had been sitting in college classes, and also with new draftees. So you had soldiers that had never been in combat, of course, had had basic training and learned to use the gun but had never been really tested as far as combat even in training. They were spread out very thin along this line. Of course, the Germans were aware of that and they would just push right on through that. So when we came up to push them back, we ran into a lot of those guys that had been, had come in there and gotten in the beginning of the Bulge, and I had talked to a lot of them. Some of them said they were in the classroom just a few weeks before that happened and they got up there and just really didn't know what to do. When the worst thing about that, as far as personnel problems is concerned was the weather. They said it was the coldest winter in many years there, it was down to zero with snow on the ground. This is another problem of the army, they didn't have winter equipment for us, we just had normal shoes and uniforms that we normally wore. We were having to sleep on the ground in that heavy snow. In fact, my feet got frozen, and they weren't bad enough to be evacuated, but whenever I got them warm, for example, if we were on the march and we stopped and went into some houses, when heat hit them, they started aching so bad I had to go back outside. At night I usually had to sleep with my feet out from under the covers because as soon as they would get warm they would ache. The bad part about it was the conditions, the weather and that sort of thing. But then we continued to work and push the Germans on back. I'll give you another example. I was, by that time, I was a squad leader, and we were in a holding position at Luxembourg, and there was a lot of snow on the ground and all. We were in a situation where we were under fire from the Germans during the daytime from artillery on the side of a mountain and we had to stay down in the foxholes. At night we would get up and go over the hill to get our supper, the cooks would bring it up to us and that sort of thing, and we would get a hot meal then and they would give us a ration. We would get a hot breakfast the next morning. We had to do all of this in the dark because as soon as it got light the Germans would be ready to open up on us. So we would, they would give us a, at breakfast time they would give us a K ration to eat for lunch. Then we'd have to go back over the hill and stay in the foxhole all that day until the next night. I had a replacement assigned to my squad and he came up to me and said he'd been in that foxhole one day. He told me, he said sergeant, I'm suffering from asthma and I'm just about to die up in that foxhole. If I'm up there another day I won't be able to survive. He said, can you do anything about it. So I talked to the first sergeant about it and they were able to move him out. Later on, he was sent back behind the lines, and later on he was coming up. No, as he was going back, he ran into some guys from my outfit and he was telling them if it hadn't been for Sgt Alexander I'd be dead now. So you have a lot of situations like that. And again, some of these guys that were sent up there, replacements, had been in this ASTP program and I had one of them tell me that he was given a three-day pass to go home and then shipped overseas from this college classroom. So this was a situation that was going on more. Then there, we finally pushed the Bulge back and the, Patton's army was doing a tremendous job on that and they didn't get much credit for it. The press was talking about General Montgomery from England, giving him credit for most of this, and a lot of that is in this book I have here. So that was generally the situation, mostly the hardship, cold weather, and of course there were casualties. I remember one case, one of the toughest battles we had, we were trying to push the Germans out of a town. They were pushing us back. We were going back and forth. A couple of companies from my battalion had moved out beyond us, and they had the snow for the first time, and they had gotten hold of some sheets and improvised a white uniform. They came back in where we were and we started shooting at them because we had never seen anybody with white uniforms. They were yelling that they were Americans, and Germans were shooting at them from the rear and we were shooting at them from the front. So we had to quiz them and ask them questions about the United States to make sure they were legitimate and got them in. We had, that was about the time the Germans had sent a lot of English speaking Germans with American uniforms over. They disrupted the traffic. They would change signs, _____ signs of that nature. So we heard that there were Germans in American uniforms, so we didn't trust anybody. We had to be very careful. I remember going back and seeing where some of our people had captured some of those Germans that had American uniforms on and they had them sitting up on the hood of a Jeep, and they took the shoes from them in all this cold weather and that sort of thing, they took a lot of the uniform stuff off. That was a thing you just couldn't trust anybody, you just didn't know what the situation was. We had gone into this place that I was just talking about, where we found these people. Before, we had gone in to try to take this town, my company did, and the Germans overwhelmed us, and we lost a lot of people. We went in with a full company of about 140 people and we came out with about 28 people. The rest of them were either wounded or captured, that sort of thing. Then we tried to get orders to retreat to ______ because the Germans were still in there. But the orders came back with anybody that retreated from that would be court-martialed so we had to go back in and fight again. But they did give us a platoon of tanks to go in, and we, although those tanks were knocked out very rapidly, we finally came in and got control of the town. We stayed in that town for a while, then knocked out, knocked the Germans back and forth. SE: Do you remember the name of the town? BA: I want to say it started with an “A” but there was another town close to it, was ______. I've got it in this book. Let's see if I can find it. I can't read it, it's small print. Can you read that? I meant to bring a magnifying glass. That was one of our toughest ones. It was in this thing somewhere, I'm trying to see if I see it. SE: Is this a book that your group printed that or? BA: This is a book about the 87th Infantry Division. It was compiled professionally. SE: It looks like it's beautiful. BA: And it's divided into regiments. So there's a section on my regiment which was the 347th. See this is pictures of captured German prisoners in the snow, and you can see, you get an idea of the weather conditions from this. There's some charts of some of the battle operations. SE: What we may do towards the end is actually have you hold up, hold up some of those to the camera, because… Another person: Was that compiled by the army, the army compiled that book, didn't they? BA: Not the army officially but some group did and of course they sold it to us and we had to pay for it. On the front of it, they've got the route that we took. We landed at La Havre France and then these arrows show where we were going. The first time, our first infantry attack was in this Sarb___ area of southern France, in Metz right here. This was the first time the division was entered in combat, and here's where we crossed the German border. And then arrows turn around, that's when we were going back up to help on the Bulge, and it shows us going up to Bastoigne. You may have heard this, Bastoigne was the town where the 101st Airborne Division was surrounded and almost wiped out there. So this shows our route. After most of the fighting is over, the division, I was wounded by this time and was back in England. The division was sent right on over to Czechoslovakia. So this gives us a little bit of a history of how we were. SE: At what point were you wounded? BA: I was right on the Rhine River. After the worst of the fighting was over. In fact I would get letters from some of my buddies while I was in the hospital and they was telling about how much fun they were having on the autobahns and driving through there and all that stuff. But I was sleeping on clean sheets and so I didn't have any complaints. The first time I had been able to sleep on a nice bed and all that. SE: You want to give a little bit of information about how you were wounded, what led up to it, where you were when you were wounded and… BA: We were on the, we had pushed into the Rhine River one night, and the Germans were trying to get a lot of equipment across the line, so there was a lot of real heavy fighting going on there. But by daytime they had gotten across and there was no more fighting. So we went down to the river there where they had left a lot of their equipment and all that sort of stuff, and we were going through the trucks and all that. Some of the guys were riding motorcycles up and down the road over there, and I was gathering souvenirs when I was wounded, so after all that fighting, I was wounded by collecting souvenirs (COUNTER 289) but a sniper had gotten me from I guess across the river. I was shot in the knee. We called a leg wound a million dollar wound because that meant you'd be evacuated and you wouldn't be sent back because you couldn't fight with a bullet in your leg, so we always looked forward to a wound like that because you'd get to go into a hospital and sleep on clean sheets. I remember one time I had a guy in my squad who was a very malcontent person, just always complaining, and I went to relieve him from outpost duty one time, and he was laying on his back with his leg up in the air like this. I said what are you trying to do, he says I'm sticking my leg up so maybe a German would shoot it and I'd be evacuated. That's the kind of extreme that they would go to. SE: When you were injured, where were you taken? BA: I was taken up to a field hospital there, and they did the preliminary operation I guess. Then I was flown back to England and I was in a general hospital in England until I was able to get out. Then I was in a recuperation center for a while in England. SE: What part of England? BA: You know I don't even know where I was. We got some weekend passes and I went to some of the towns, but I can't… I remember one time I went to Stratford-on-Avon, I was close to that but I'm not familiar really with where I was. I was shot full of luck in my army service. Number one, I was forced to get out of the tank outfit because one thing I saw when I got in combat is those tanks went up in flames and a lot of people were burned and all. You could take care of yourself out on the ground a lot better than you could all cooped up in a tank. So although there was a lot of bad conditions, I'd much prefer to be on the ground in the infantry than being cooped up in that tank. So I felt I was lucky in that standpoint. Then when the, after I was wounded, and that's another thing, getting wounded in the leg which sent me back to the hospital was another stroke of luck. Then with the, when the war was over, the chances are that it would be a quite a while before I got back to the states, but I was assigned to a general hospital unit. I was in limited service. So instead of going back to infantry, I was assigned to this general hospital unit. It was scheduled to ship to the pacific. See the Pacific war was still going on. So I came, ______ the same ship I went over on, which was the Queen Elizabeth. When we docked in New York, they had announced that the Japanese were surrendering. See we were on our way to the Pacific, we was going to ____. They sent us, they sent everybody closest to home for a 30 day furlough before they were shipped to the Pacific. So I was sent to Ft. McPherson, here in Atlanta. The day that I got to Ft. Mac was the day that they celebrated the Japanese surrender. So I was able to walk up and down Peachtree Street with my girlfriend who I later married, and so we enjoyed the celebration with all of that. So that's another lucky streak. If it hadn't been for that, I would have been over in Europe for a long time before I would have gotten discharged. And of course, if it had been a little bit earlier, if the war was still going on, I'd be over fighting in the Pacific, being over there. SE: How was the communication back home? Did you have much opportunity for communication with your family? BA: Yes, that was an interesting thing. I had written a letter to both my mother and my girlfriend to tell them about how I had been wounded. My mother got the letter from me, and I was telling them how fortunate I was and how nice it was to have a nice bed to sleep in, how I was really happy about it. My letter to my mother got to her before she was notified by the war department that I had been wounded. Back then they sent telegrams, Western Union, and the only people they had to deliver telegrams were old men, and she said this old man came up to the door with a telegram and says, Lady I'm sure sorry to bring you this telegram, and she said oh that's alright, I already heard, so I was glad to get it. And he was afraid he was going to get her upset because I had been wounded which she had already heard. The communication was very good. I meant to bring a sample of it. We had what we called V-mail, which we would write the letter and they would microfilm it and reduce it and put in on film and they could ship you know thousands of letters over on one reel of film. Then they would reproduce it when it got over here. So what they would get would be a little bit, a small thing, but at least it was fast communication. I got packages, cakes and cookies, and… My mother knew that my favorite dish was, what did we have to eat today?, Brunswick stew. My memory's getting bad. She canned Brunswick stew and had it shipped to me over there. We were real fortunate for that. I remember that time when we were moving out to go up to push the Bulge back. We got our first mail from home, and I got a fruit cake from my aunt. The officers got a, two bottles of whiskey a month. They had a fifth of gin and a fifth of bourbon, and our lieutenant was a teetotaler. So he had gotten his liquor ration and he had given it to us. We were in this truck. So I passed my fruit cake around and they passed the bourbon around, so we enjoyed that going up to the Bulge. Of course TAPE 1SIDE B COUNTER 000 That was a real experience up there. One of the towns that my, well the only real sizeable town that my company got into was St. Hubert Belgium. And it was, we took this town with my, we had to struggle through snow and all that, it was really a rough situation but the Germans moved out the next day and we didn't have any problems. And so we were resting and glad to be out of combat, having a nice town to relax in, and somebody from the signal corps came in and said they wanted us to put our equipment back on. They wanted to take pictures of us taking the town. And we told them nothing doing, we weren't about to do that. But they went and talked to our company commander and so we got orders to do it, so we had to retake that town for the benefit of the cameras. We stayed in that town for about a week and it was real nice, it was the first time we had had a good place like that to stay. All of Belgium was very friendly, and we enjoyed that quite a bit. Then we had to move out and continue the war. That was, in that area, that's around St. Vith. St. Vith was completely wiped out with artillery fires back and forth from the Americans to the Germans. Then we began to move on back towards Germany and it seemed like we marched from Belgium to Luxembourg all the way to German. Then we, my unit crossed the Mozelle river which is at a point where it almost runs into the Rhine river, and that was a very sticky situation. There's pictures of that in here. There's a steep bank on both sides of that river, so we were, my unit was taking ____ to go on in, and we went, we didn't carry a lot of heavy arms because we anticipated the Germans would open up on us and we'd but out there in the water with a lot of heavy equipment so we went over very lightly in light boats. We got on the other side and without incidence the German's didn't fire on us. Then a group was coming behind us with the heavy equipment and they came in bigger boats and all that, and the Germans were waiting for them and they opened up on them, and they went down, a lot of them drowned because they were carrying heavy equipment and they couldn't maneuver. But my unit held that beach head for a while, a while until they could get more equipment across there. And then we had to fight up that hill. When we got up to the top of that hill, that was about night time, and the fighting had slowed down. We were told we would be taking it easy for a while so we took over a house, our unit did, and so we were enjoying it, they said we wouldn't pull out until the next morning. This was in Germany, and of course, we had been through France and the Germans had just looted France, and we go into a France house and everything was just looted, nothing was there. But in this German house we were staying in, we found a wine cellar down there so we were enjoying t his booze and living it up and then all of the sudden the orders came in that things had changed that we were moving out. So we moved out and fortunate that my unit, my company was in reserve, and two companies went down the hill in the middle of the fighting and we were up on top of the hill. I remember it was drizzling rain and I was under a raincoat with a buddy of mine, and you could hear the shells popping over your head as it went by. He says look up and see where they're firing from and I said I looked up and I said they're firing from everywhere, and he said well pull that raincoat back down, thinking that would protect him. So we spent the night on that hill, fortunately we didn't get hurt up there. And then the next day is when we went down the hill and that was the Rhine river and that's where I got wounded. SE: Did you have, were there friends and family members that were also in the war at that time? BA: Not any immediate family members. I had an older brother who had two children and then he didn't go in. I had a younger brother who went in the Navy, and the war was over by the time he finished boot camp. In fact, he enlisted in the Navy, he dropped out of high school to get in the Navy, because he was afraid the war was going to be over before he got in there, and it was over by the time he finished his boot camp training, and he was assigned to an aircraft carrier, and all they did was to haul troops. They had to go over and pick up the troops and bring them back. He didn't get in any fighting. I had some cousins that were in the Navy in the Pacific, I didn't know much about what they were going and all that, but I didn't have any real close family members there. SE: We talked about the communication, it sounds like the army's communication was a little bit slower than your own mail getting over there. Once you came back here and you were back in Atlanta in your way out, when were you officially discharged? Did you stay in the reserves? BA: Alright, lets see. I got back, Japanese surrender was in August and that's when we landed. When I had a 30 day furlough from that. After that furlough I was, they had to do something with us, so I was assigned to a unit in Fort Oglethorpe which is up near Chattanooga. They just had to find something for us to do until the time to be discharged. You had to accumulate points. When I first went in, was first drafted, they asked if anybody if you could type, and I could, and I passed a typing test. I had given, I was given a rating as a clerk/typist but I never used it until I was getting ready to get out. So when they assigned me to this hospital unit they saw where I had been a, I could be a clerk/typist, so I spent the time typing medical discharges until I accumulated enough points to get out. That was in November I think is when I was actually discharged. So I just killed time you might say up there until that period. SE: Then you went back to Atlanta? BA: Yeah and went back to college. SE: At Georgia? BA: Well I went to the, it was a separate school then, what's now Georgia State, its. No I mean it was not a separate school, it was part of the University of Georgia, it was called Atlanta division of University of Georgia. So I went there for a quarter and then I went over to Athens and got back into it. Course I got in with returning veterans, we were all in the same boat. We were in our army uniforms dyed and that sort of thing and we were all struggling to get along, and everybody was just, anxious to get out of school. It wasn't like your normal college group because everybody was serious and wanted to finish up and get on with their lives because they had matured, I had matured a lot then in that length of time. I probably wouldn't have finished school, college, if I hadn't finished that. Because see it was right at the end of the depression and I was having to work my way through college. Going back it was with the GI bill and the combination of the GI bill and a part time job, I was able to make it alright. SE: When you first went in, you were pursuing the military ___ programs. Did you completely change paths when you went back, in terms of your studies or what you wanted to do? BA: Oh no, I went back and continued what I had planned to do which was to get a degree in accounting. This specialized training thing I was telling you about, that was a way of getting college time while you were in service, and it just didn't work out for me, the timing was wrong on that. A lot of people got a lot of college credit while they were in service. SE: What about, are you involved with going to reunions or staying in touch with any of the people? BA: No. Our division really wasn't anybody that pulled together. That division had been a training division, they brought an old line unit like the 2nd Cavalry and something like that. So people had come and gone through that unit, even before they went overseas, it was a training unit. So you really didn't have anybody that had been in the division for a long time, so nothing was really built up on it. SE: Would you ever go back at any point, or have you ever been back since? BA: No, I would always like to have seen some of its, area that I had been to but I never got over there? SE: Hold up those pictures and try to focus in here. BA: I was reading, oh I've got a lot of clippings I've gotten over the years. This was a series that was in the Atlanta paper, its about World War II fifty years later. And I was reading something about the Bulge and they were saying that we had over 80,000 casualties there in that Bulge. It was the biggest battle that the Americans had been in since Gettysburg I think. Now these are some of the pictures, showing ____ can you focus on that? This is a picture of a couple of soldiers stopping to eat, they're on their way to St. Hugert, that was the town I was telling you about and you see how heavy the snow and all was there. We had to battle through all that to take the town of St. Hugert. Then this just shows some scenes of all the snow and all out there. That's just GI's lounging around. These are some of the battle plans that shows some of the activities of where we were fighting. SE: You actually followed that one there on the left. Was that the one you followed? BA: No, that happens to be another unit, its not mine. Let me see. That's, its another battalion, its not my battalion. These are just some pictures of GI's out there. It doesn't show much snow there but it was awful cold at that point. ?? … foxhole with the snow over the top of it. BA: Yeah I'll do that. This is where we went through the Sigfried line. That was dragon teeth. Here's another picture of the Sigfried line, that's where we first went into Germany. That's where we crossed the Mozelle river, that I was telling you about before and the tanks finally got across. Now here's some of the boats I was telling you about that we went across on. See guys had all this heavy equipment and boats were sunk and a lot of them were drowned, course they couldn't swim with all that equipment. Then after we got across, we began pulling a bridge together and you could bring the heavy equipment across on this bridge. Engineers would come up and put that bridge together? ?? Pontoon bridge? BA: Yeah. Another place where we had to battle up a hill. That's what most of this is, various pictures like this. SE: On the right there… BA: Oh that's some, that's _______ Germany and that shows what happens in a lot of those towns. The artillery had been blasting through there both with Germans shooting towards us and us shooting towards the German just about like that town there. I thought maybe that was St. Vivre. They have a picture here of St. Vivre which was just completely obliterated, let me see if I can find it. Here's a picture of eating out on the field. St. Vivre is back the other way. Yeah, here's the ruins of St. Vivre. That was a pretty good sized town. But as you can see, there's not a house standing. I remember one of the ____ I talked to had told me about going through St. Vivre, she said there's not one brick standing on top of the other, they're all completely liberated. I can't stand up too long, I got a pain in the back. SE: Were there others, I know you said these clippings were from the Atlanta Journal Constitution and that was on, when was that, did that series run? BA: That was in 1995. See that was 50 years after the war. This particular one here is about Patton and it tells a lot about the Bulge. “Patton said that since January, the 3rd Army has ____ 6,484 square miles from the enemy captured 140,000 or wounded an additional 99,000. History records no greater achievement in so limited a time. The defending Germans flee and panic in front of the armored forces of Patton and the 1st Armored commanded by Lt. Gen. Hodges. GI's were the first Americans to cross the Rhine. The two US armies streaked across the open plains of middle Germany, gobbling up massive industrial centers as they go. The retreat becomes a rout as Nazi troops cannot turn tail and run fast enough. German roads leading to Munich and Nurenberg are carved with fleeing civilians. Thousands of Nazi troops rush to the American lines to be captured.” In other words, they were wanting to be captured by Americans. “A jubilant General Eisenhower, supreme commander, said that the main German defense line has been broken and that as a military force on the rest of the front, they are a whipped army. There will be no negotiated unconditional surrender but an imposed unconditional surrender.” I was trying to pick out something there. “In the American press, General Marshall complained there was overdose of Montgomery [talking about British General Montgomery, they gave him a lot more credit than they did the Americans]. So on March 23, Ike telephoned and directed that I owed a press conference to emphasize American achievement. Both General Hodges and General Patton had crossed the Rhine before Montgomery's grandiose operation plan to go as scheduled the following day. Montgomery's massive assault across the Rhine is launched at 1:00 AM March the 24th among the more than 250,000 troops at his command are the British and Canadians.” The press had given Montgomery a lot more credit for crossing the line, and he wasn't the first one to cross. The Americans were already across. “Patton's ___ seized the German city of Frankfurt on March 26th, and cut the Stuttgart-Hanover highway. The 1st armored drives into Lindberg and clears it quickly.” That's what that's generally about. Then there's a story here about a bridge leading across the Rhine that the German's were desperately trying to blow up and it wouldn't blow up. They set a lot of charges on it, and it never did fall. And so the American's were able to use that bridge to cross, that's the way they were able to get across. That's real interesting to go back and read this but it… SE: Those were some very good stories. Did you have any other ___ or things… BA: I don't think so. These is divided by regiment. I'm going to show you a picture of my company if I can find it. A right interesting thing, I was home on that 30 day furlough I was telling you about, and I wasn't in my original unit, I was in this, I had been assigned this general hospital unit. But my unit had been sent back to the states, and they were stationed down at Ft. Benning. I happened to run into some of them down at a nightclub in Atlanta and take some of them right from my company. So they was telling me about being down at Ft. Benning and invited me to come down there. So I went down there the next day and I just happened to be there when they took a picture of the company, and I was no longer a member of that company, I got my picture taken with them, that's me right there. SE: [Inaudible] BA: That's what the whole company looks like. SE: I'd like to reference the book itself on this tape, I know. I don't know if there's a…. It's called the, what's the title? [COUNTER 298] BA: See it says here this book is respectfully dedicated to the officers and men of the 87th Infantry Division who gave their lives so that we may live. I thought maybe it would say who produced it, but it doesn't. SE: What about the ____. Just going to see if you have anything else in particular you'd like to add? Go ahead and just wrap things up. Have you thought about that you forgot to say earlier? Another person: I remember a story that he used to tell about at the Bulge where he used to have to sleep in the foxhole with the shelter half over the top and a snow on top. The snow actually insulated the… BA: When we moved up to the Bulge, we got into the first snow, me and a buddy built a real good foxhole, and we had built a fire, it was real cold, during the daytime, and we'd built a fire down in there. As it came on close to night, course we had to put the fire out, and it was warm ashes there. And we'd put a shelter half over those ashes and we'd lace the top of the foxhole with logs. Generally we did that in case an artillery shell came in and exploded in the air, it wouldn't rain shrapnel down on us. So, that made a top for this and I put a shelter half down on that to kind of seal it in. So we were down in that hole with the warm ashes and it snowed and completely covered all of that over with snow. I was called out about 2 o'clock in the morning to go on guard duty and I had to come out of that nice warm hole in that cold. I always said that was the nicest foxhole I ever built. I couldn't stay there very long. And then the next day we had to move out, had to keep pushing that Bulge back. Oh we saw lots and lots of German equipment as we pushed them back, trucks and tanks that had been bombed and all that. And horses. See the German's didn't have much gasoline so they used horses to pull a lot of their guns and all that sort of stuff. And we'd see dead horses laying around and all that. And we would occasionally see dead Germans. The Americans always tried to keep the dead Americans cleaned up because they didn't want us to see dead Americans. And they have a unit called graves registration group that go around and pick up the dead American soldiers as fast as they come. I remember one time, I had to run into a place where they were accumulating the dead American soldiers, and there must have been fifty of them that were just stacked up there. And the usually keep that hidden from the soldiers but I had to run in there. That's a sickening feeling to see your own men lined up like that. We got used to seeing dead Germans and didn't think much about it. If you've got a couple of minutes I can give you… SE: Yeah, actually we do. BA: I had one time, when I had been evacuated for a short time because I had a cold and my temperature was over 100. I came back up to the lines and I was snuggling down and we were in the Magino Line and there were places to sleep and all that. I had bedded down there and somebody came in looking for me. And they said somebody said Sgt. Alexander's back and they said yeah, he's around here somewhere. And I just snuggled down, I didn't want them to pull me out because I'd been out of combat for about a week and I wasn't ready to go back. He said the lieutenant wants him to take a patrol out. So he found me and they dug me out and I had to take a patrol out that night and drive us to go up in the German lines and contact a unit on our right which was not part of our division, it was another division, so we made the contact. They had had breakfast in the dark and they had pancakes. We always tried to get our cooks to cook pancakes and they said they couldn't keep them. So we had these what they call marmite cans, big thing about that big, and they were laying around. And it had gotten daylight and they didn't tell us that the German mortars were up on the hill up there. So we got out there and were helping ourselves to pancakes when all of the sudden the mortars broke out. I remember one looked like a mortar went right into those pans and scattered pancakes everywhere. And we had to run and get out of there. In fact, I saw one guy was running right beside him [tape inaudible]. I could tell he was dead before he hit the ground, but we enjoyed those pancakes. SE: Well anything else you want to add? [inaudible] COUNTER 414
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Extent:: 1:01:10
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Contributing Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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