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Jack Burrus

The Source

July 3, 1999

(the interview started before I could get the tapes turned on – Jack was telling how when he was in Iowa City he looked up the girl who was engaged to Robert Clark, another Arenzville serviceman)

JB: Had they been engaged? I don’t think your dad was married yet, but they gave me “Roberta Wheelan” as the name. So I made it a point to – I didn’t speak to her, but I found out who she was. Apparently, easy to do because she was popular on campus. Wasn’t she head of the paper? So I found out who she was. I don’t know if I ever told her that or not.

I spent nine months there [Iowa City] and three months in chem lab school out at Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver. Why, the worst was over by the time we got to Europe. I don’t begrudge that at all. I mean, with Chas already gone and Bud wounded in the Bulge, why, by gosh, I found out later I could even gotten out of a combat outfit.

MJD: Well, that’s one thing I wondered was it how you, and Charles and Bud all went?

JB: Well, you know, the Sullivan brothers – five of them, wasn’t it?

MJD: So, you went before that actually happened and before they knew not to do that kind of thing?

JB: Yes, that came along way late. Dick Bell, who wrote the other side of that book, was in the same position. I think he had two brothers killed. One of them was a pilot. We saw him fly. Pretty sure we saw him taking paratroopers over us one day, but I don’t think it was the mission they say he got killed on.

CB: There were things over at Fran’s house. There was a page in a photograph book of our wedding pictures, and on the back of it was something about when Charles got killed and when Bud was wounded in action.

MJD: She kept that?

CD: Yes. We’ve got it now.

JB: Yes, Bud had a pretty a pretty rough go of it. I didn’t. I think – well, now here again, you’re talking about [the relative tragedy of] “fifteen killed.” See, a division is fifteen thousand men, and I think we had about ten percent casualties, so you would say “only fifteen hundred” casualties. Compared to the First Division, Second Division, Third Division.

Another one from Arenzville that had a real rough go of it was Wally Kleinschmidt. Do you know Wally?

MJD: I know the name.

JB: He would be like Lorenz’s (Skeezix’s) brother. I think he’s literally been almost paralyzed ever since the war. He was in a couple of operations out in the Philippines or out in the Pacific, and I think he was wounded in the neck. He’s in a wheelchair and everything ever since. He got home, married an Engelbrech girl. He always …

– but he had a rough go.

Ed Fanning had a rough go. Dick Staake had a rough go. Aw, there’s many of them that had it much worse than I did. I can’t think of many that … you know, about one out of ten or one out of thirteen, and maybe as high as one out of fifteen, in the Army were actually combat troops. A very small percentage. The rest of them – you had support troops -- quartermaster, ordnance, engineers – sometimes the engineers got caught – medics, back behind the lines, probably never even heard a shot fired. So you’ve got a very small percentage. I was just trying to think in the Legion, who else might have been in infantry combat. I don’t know. Gib Harbin might have been, in Korea. A lot of them were in the Navy. Of course, we’ve lost Dick …

MJD: Marley [Winkelman] would have been in combat.

JB: Yes, well, Marley was in the 3rd Armored Division, and he had a job that I would have cared for less than the infantry. He was on a half-track, hauling ammunition.

MJD: Oooh.

JB: Wow, one, one shot, and he’s out of here. And the 3rd Armored really took a beating. They were in on about D-plus three, four, five, six. They were one of the first armored divisions to go in.

MJD: And you went all the way almost to Berlin or to Berlin actually?

JB: No, none of us got to Berlin. The highlight of my career was we were the first outfit to meet the Russians. The 69th Division was the first one to link up with them. At the Elbe River is where we all had to stop. We didn’t get further than that. The 3rd Armored didn’t come up there very quick because they were engaged around the Ruhr. They had circled a whole bunch of Germans behind us at the Ruhr. They got stuck there. That’s where … their commanding general made it all the way to there, and then he got killed. Right around the Ruhr there. But then they came on up later.

Bud was with the 7th Armored. They went in – D-Day was June the 6th, [and] Bud went in – I want to say July sometime. He lasted till the Battle of the Bulge. He lost one tank at Metz. Lost his best friend, the tank commander. He got a shot through the turret and it killed him. Bud got out through the escape hatch, and then he was commander at the Bulge and lost his tank up there. And then he came home. They shipped him home.

MJD: He was wounded?

JB: Yes. Actually he got out with frozen feet, but that was certainly a wound.

MJD: Oh, yes. That was dangerous.

JB: Yes. Fact is… he was telling me that – Well, once they lost the tank, they didn’t have any overshoes. They fought on the ground, in the snow and in the mud. Finally, his feet got so bad, in fact, once the medics got ahold of him they got him out of there in a hurry. They shipped him back to England. He wasn’t in England very long, and they put him on either the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth hospital ship. One or the other. Maybe it was the Lizzie. They rush him off of the and took him out to Camp Carson. He said, when he came across the United States, his feet were just black and cracked wide open. They told him at Camp Carson that they would have to take them both off. But they didn’t. I think he still draws a 100% disability. Cold weather bothers him. They fought so hard. They thought he was going to lose both of them. They didn’t waste any time getting them treated. I’ll tell you that. They bothered him for quite a while. Oh, it still bothers him. But he’s still got them. He’s still mobile.

Yes, they took a pretty good beating up in the Battle of the Bulge.

CB: I was there the day that your mom and dad got the telegram that Bud was wounded. And Jack was gone, too, but I was staying there with them and worked at the glove factory. And I remember that police officer came to the door, and your dad just went to the door and said, “Well, which one of them is it now?”

MJD: Because you already had word that Charles was captured?

CB: Yes.

JB: Yes. Missing in action. For three some years. Actually died a year right after that. He survived the Bataan Death March. Did you ever read about that?

MJD: Yes. He survived that?

JB: And then he died shortly thereafter.

CB: People had to hold him up.

JB: His he two good friends who literally carried him. They would get water for him and everything, but …

MJD: He had dysentery?

JB: No, let’s see. The final telegram said dysentery, malaria, malnutrition. Those were the three things on the telegram. See we’ve been in touch you know… You get [me] started talking. You aren’t recording anything yet, are you?

MJD: Yes.

JB: Aw, you’ll run out of tape! Because I love to talk!

MJD: We’ll get more tape.

JB: Did you ever hear of how I met two of the fellows who were with Chas?

MJD: But tell me again. I only heard parts of this story.

JB: Well, see I went to visit him when he was down in El Paso at Fort Bliss. I visited Chas. And on Sunday. They had Sunday off. This was before the war started, see. We went over into Juarez, Mexico. Tom Welsh, Gunnar Sacson, Chas, and I and John Herbert and Boss Lovekamp. It was a separate trip that Boss and John and I took. We went over there to Juarez, Mexico, for Sunday. That was an experience, too.

But then, they went out to bases out in the Philippines, and, I had only met Tom and Gunnar, just once. They both survived the Death March. Just barely. Tom especially. He was in the hospital for a long, long time. But we could never hear anything for anybody. We didn’t know what happened. Sometimes Japs put out “died in prison camp,” but you never heard a thing. In fact he had died early in June.

Here we’re going to move fast-forward here. How many years ago would it have been up in Canada?

CB: Seven or eight?

JB: Oh, longer than that. It was before I retired.

CB: Yes.

JB: Maybe fifteen. Anyway, we’d go fishing in Canada every year, and I met a fellow named Bob Howard up there who was a detective on the Chicago police force. Any at rate, he would be there when we were there, with [name…] and I. Bob had been a pilot on B-24. And he’d been shot down and been a prisoner. So, every night after we had our supper, Wib [?], Bob and I would sit outside there and lie to each other about the war. About how each one of us won it individually – literally – by ourselves, and I thought we had heard all the stories in the world. One time, Bob said that “before I was in pilot training, I was in an anti-aircraft outfit.” I said that I had a brother who was in an anti-aircraft outfit. Unfortunately, they went to the Philippines and he survived the Death March but died in prison camp.

He said, “You know, my watch commander was in the Philippines and he survived the Death March. He came home, and his name is Tom Welsh.”

I dropped the knife that I was skinning fish with. And I said, “I don’t believe this!” And I told him, and he said, “Well, as soon as you get home Tom will be in touch with you.”

I wasn’t home at all till – I didn’t think Tom would remember.

He said to me, “You bet I remember our trip over into Juarez,” and he said, “I’m sure glad to get a hold of you.”

And the very next Memorial Day, why, him and Gunnar Sacson both came down. They came down every Memorial Day until Tom died. And Gunnar…we’ve seen Gunnar up at his place in Chicago. Gunnar has been here several times. I tell you, it was just unbelievable. Just a chance remark there – Tom was Bob Howard’s commander.

So that’s when we really got the details.

CB: And you should have heard those stories!

JB: Oh, boy, I’m telling you! They’ll curl your hair. In fact, Tom was telling one story about a snake crawled through the barracks, and a guy on crutches tried to get it and he couldn’t. But another guy did, and they killed the snake. Then they got into a fight over who was going to get to eat it. The guy on the crutches couldn’t move fast enough to get it, and the other guy did. I mean it was just unbelievable.

MJD: But they were able to tell you what happened to Charles?

JB: Yes. Yes. They were. Tom especially. I think Gunnar was in a different compound, a different barracks. But Tom said he would have to stand in line for eight to ten hours to get a canteen full of water. And he could only take back a canteen, and then he had to stand again to bring back a canteen full of water. He claims, in fact Tom claims that the government fought them … the day Chas died. … kept that record.

CB: He said he fed him his last meal.

JB: Yes. Fed him what little he could get him to eat, he said. Tom was a real nice guy.

CB: But, you know, Molly, both of those men had … and they still didn’t lose it. It come home with him.

JB: I think it’s just all that time on a starvation diet. I mean, I really do.

CB: If it had just been one, you know, you wouldn’t have thought, but then both …

JB: Gunnar had a son and a daughter, and the daughter is borderline mental, wouldn’t you say, Cele? And then the son apparently he was all right, but then he just died real sudden as a young man. Four or five years ago. Some kind of defect. And I forget that Tom – what they went through. I mean, here they are, weighing a two hundred pounds and maybe they’re down to 110 or less when they get home.

Gunnar admits that he had it easier than Tom. And the things they would do. Gunnar, let me see if I’ve got this right. It was against the Geneva Convention, but the Japanese put the prisoners to work for war industry. And Gunnar got put to work building a ship. He said he did two things: he said whenever they could, they would scoop up a little sand on their way to work and put it in their pocket. And then throw it into the bearings. That would do them in. And he said that the guys what were riveting sheets together always made sure that they didn’t rivet too tight. And he said, “The nicest thing that ever happened was when they finished that ship, they pushed it out into the bay, and this ship slowly sank in the water.” He said, “If they ever did figure out what happened, they didn’t punish us for it.”

MJD: It must have been satisfying for them.

JB: It was. He said that was a great day. When it slowly sank.

MJD: Let’s start back at the beginning and tell me before the war started what you were doing, and when you joined up.

JB: I was drafted. I wasn’t going to join up after Bud and Chas were already gone. The last member of the family. At that time I was working out at Burrus’s Seed Corn. Came out of high school at Beardstown, did a little work for my Grandpa Hierman in a hardware store for a while until they closed it. Then I did a little bit of everything – I drove a truck, scooped sand for Al Nickel one fall till it froze up.

CB: He was only sixteen when he graduated.

JB: I graduated from high school when I was sixteen.

And then I went out to Burrus’s. Worked out there for the seed company. They offered me – they could have gotten me a deferment. They offered me. But, hey, Mart’s gone, Bob’s gone, your sons are gone. No, I’m not going to take your deferment. No, I’d go ahead and go.

So I went in November of ’42. Took basic training for the medical corps at Camp Grant, and it was the coldest weather for I don’t know how long. I don’t know how frozen … how many years it had been. Then lucked out and got to go to chemical lab school out at Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver. Which was also good duty, and I enjoyed it. I really did. All kinds of microscope work and analysis of all kinds. Well, I just thought I would stay in the medical corps and be a chemical lab man back in some safe hospital.

Then the Army started up what they called the AST program – Army Specialized Training Program. Basically, I think it was a subsidy to keep the colleges open because they didn’t need that many potential engineers. Almost everybody, every big college had a bunch of us. But I had to make up my mind before I left. Or before -- I had to go – I had to go ASTP or I could wait two weeks, graduate from chem lab school and then go on to chem lab. I hated it, but, boy, I’m telling you, about nine months in a college dorm looked good to me. So I gave up on chem lab and went to the University of Iowa for nine months. We lived in fraternity houses. Ate at the Union. Real good duty. Then all of the sudden they just wiped out the whole program. There were a few of them. A few real brains that got to go onto engineering. Mart Burrus got to on to the medical field. He was in ASTP, too. And he did get some advanced medical training out of it then. But basically they just wiped it out. They found out that they needed infantry men a lot worse than they needed any more engineers.

So I went from a college fraternity house to a tarpaper shack in the Mississippi swamp.

MJD: Where in Mississippi?

JB: Hattiesburg. Camp Shelby. It was right on the edge of a swamp. I’m telling you. That was quite an adjustment! But the good thing about it – like I said, they cancelled that. Also, they were canceling a lot of the air cadet programs at that time. They still found out they needed more infantry men than they did fliers. Our division, that division filled up.

MJD: It would have been 1943 by then, or what?

JB: No, it would be … let’s see. Just a minute here, let me stop and think. I went in ’42… ’44 was when I went to Mississippi. In the early spring of ’44 was when I went to Mississippi. Like I said, they were canceling all these programs, so practically – oh, I don’t know what percentage of our people were washed out air cadets, washed out ASTP people. All our …It mean it was a splendid outfit. But as far as education, training…

CB: At the reunion, you know, it’s just unbelievable. What a great bunch of people they are.

JB: So that beat being with an old regular Army division, with some of these guys that all they ever knew was the regular Army, you know. We had some real good non-coms, a real good commanding officer. So, if I was going into to an infantry outfit, this was the one I would want to go in. Because they … we were all quite similar. Seventy-five to 80 percent of us were quite similar. It would have been a great outfit to join, but I could have been sent to the swamps.

MJD: So the one you were with – the group you were with, you with the rest of the time?

JB: Right. 69th Infantry Division. Company B, 272nd Infantry Regiment. I was a medic attached to the Company B. Technically a medic because I had done only an aid station. I was attached to Company B, which was a heavy weapons company, mortar and machine guns. We stayed together from then on.

MJD: How was that you ended up being a medic?

JB: Because I took basic training for the medics at Camp …, Illinois.

MJD: And that was enough qualification?

JB: Yes. When I got down to Camp Shelby, they looked it over and said, “you’re going in the medics again.” [I said] “Well, okay. Okay.” And I got out there, for a while I did work in the aid station. You know, basically, that’s the first treatment center behind you. Sometime they get pretty snug. I mean, I have seen them up within a few hundred yards of the front. They just do what has to be done to get them transported and get them in ambulances and get them back.

CB: Tell her about the guy on the …

MJD: Tell me how you actually got overseas.

JB: Okay. Well, we trained in Camp Shelby. Finally it was just more and more. They were on maneuvers the day the news of D-Day came through. They finally said we were ready to go, so we shipped out to Camp Kilmer, in New Jersey. This was a POE, point of embarkation. I’m going to tell you one sidelight, too -- Molly, I could talk all afternoon!

I just picked up this story. You know that magazine I gave you. It reminded me of it. We were getting ready to leave. We were locked down in Shelby. No more furloughs. By the way, I did the smartest thing I’ve ever done. On my last furlough, and I gave Cele her diamond. Then never saw her for sixteen to eighteen months!

But we were locked down, down there in Camp Shelby, nobody could get in or out. We were restricted to quarters. So about all we would do every night, was go down to the PX and drink 3.2 beer. One night we were sitting down there and one of the medics by the name of Shannon said, “I guess you guys know I’m not going overseas with you.”

[We said,] “What are you talking about? You’re no better than anybody else. If we’re going, you go, man!”

He said, “No, I’m not.” He said, “I know too much.”

“What in the world do you mean by that?” We kept buying him beer, kept trying to find out.

He said, “Well, I did some work” – he wasn’t an engineer, I guess he must have been a janitor. He said, “I was doing some work underneath the football stadium at the University of Chicago. And if that weapon is ever perfected, the war will be over in days!”

And we just kept trying to pump him, and I think we must have had him floating because we kept buying him beer. But he just clammed up, like that.

About two days before we left, here comes Shannon waving orders for Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They pulled him out. And it didn’t even completely – we all kind of filed it and forgot it. You know, one day, when the atomic bomb was dropped, they said some of the early development was done at the University at Chicago under the football stadium.

That was weird.

But then we went out of the POE in a huge convoy. Headed for Europe. In November. Had Thanksgiving dinner on the boat. By that time, the submarine menace was past. We had a huge convoy. We had a Canadian flattop riding beside us. The weather was so rough they never got a plane off I don’t think all the way over. But we were just about over there, and then one afternoon, we were sitting down below deck, and we were below the water line, and I heard a something that hit the side of the boat – sounded like a sledge hammer. I said, “I think I know what that is!” and whoosh, I was on the top deck in nothing flat. It was a destroyer escort, running around in circles, dropping depth charges. I don’t know they might have found a big fish or something, but I wasn’t going to be below deck. When the depth charges went off that’s what sounded like the hammer hitting the side of the ship.

But, other than that, it was a really uneventful voyage. Had Thanksgiving dinner on the boat, and was in England a short time, south of London around Salisbury. Got to do a little visiting in London, Salisbury. And in England is where it really got a little heavy for me. Of course, Chas was missing in action now. It had been three years, almost three years.

The mail, everything, was… I hadn’t heard from Bud in I don’t know how long. And the last letter I had from home was when, you know, they thought Dad had his heart attack, it turned out to be bursitis, but the pain was identical. So the last letter I had from home there was that Dad was in the hospital for a heart attack, Chas was missing. And while we were there in England, we had radios, and we could pick up the German propaganda broadcasts. And then when the Bulge broke out. They had -- they had one called Axis Sally – I think she was German but was very fluent in English. And then they had one called Lord Haw Haw, who was a British citizen but he had turned to the Nazis and he was broadcasting all the propaganda. They executed him after the war. I don’t know what happened to Axis Sally.

But I had these two things on my mind, and then that night we were listening to “Today we…” I’m not sure if it was Lord Haw Haw that came on … and this was the Bulge. The German had broke through, punched a forty, fifty-mile hole in our line, and just went wild… “Today the glorious troops of the Third Reich totally destroyed the 7th Armored Division.”

That was Bud’s outfit.

And …. It was rough.

But then we all crossed into France right quick, and I hadn’t heard from Bud for I don’t know how many weeks. And one day I was walking down the street. I don’t know if it was France or Belgium. At that time the Bulge was pretty well sealed off. The worst was over. I saw a guy with a 7th Armored Division patch, and I said, “Where in the heck are you guys anyway?”

He told me exactly where they were.

“What about the 40th Tank Battalion? What about the town they’re in?” And he told me. And I had visited Bud down in [place] some of his fellows Stevens, Harry Freeman, I forgot who all… We were in reserves at the time. I don’t think we had even been up yet. But I went to Capt. Jackson, and I said, “I like to find out where Bud is.”

He said, “Take my jeep. Take off. Take my jeep and my driver.”

So I did. I got up there. I went and I found the town, and I found the, well, I asked where the Company C was. [And someone said] “That building over there.” I walked in, and the first person I saw was Harry Freeman. I said, “Harry! Where in the world is Bud?”

He said, “Now, don’t get excited, but he went back to the hospital, but he’s going to be all right. He’s going to be all right.”

So I found out about it before I ever got official notification. Even before you found at home. I don’t know.

MJD: He was on his way home then?

JB: Yes. They had already shipped him out. But then he told all about what had happened.

CB: Bud’s …

JB: Yes. But, Steve, the other friend I met down there was his closest friend that got killed when Bud lost his first tank at Metz.

Bud hates to this day Patton with a passion. He said, first of all, in England, when he came out to address his division, they were green. Had never been in. Why he just cussed them out and called them all kinds of names. They hadn’t even been in action yet.

And over in Metz, there was a huge fort, thick concrete… shells bounce off of it. They had big guns dug in behind the it, but Patton decided he wanted to capture it. And he lined up I don’t know how many tanks Bud said across a field. Sent them right at the fort, out in the wide open. Here their 75’s they were shooting were just bouncing off like peas. Bud said, he looked to the left, and there went tank number one. Number two. Number three. Number four. And they were number five. They caught one right through the turret. Killed Stevens. Dumbest thing he ever saw. But, he bailed out of that.

And then he, after that they went on a rampage. They moved pretty fast, got clear up to the Bulge anyway. He was enjoying it. He was attached to the British Army for a while. They were a lot different from Patton. He wouldn’t put his tanks in until the level was down. Patton would always send them to the front, but the British didn’t do that.

But when the Bulge happened, when the Germans broke through the Bulge. Well, they pulled stuff back out of a village and shoved them right out in front. They were literally encircled, but they did get out. At St. Vith was the town where they got… .they did lose all their tanks. He said on the 16th of December I think the company had 24 tanks. And on the 24th of December, they didn’t have a tank left. And then of course they had to fight on the ground.

But we moved on out, and luckily, the worst of the Bulge was over. We helped seal it off. But it was… it wasn’t tough at all. We moved up … have you heard of the Siegfried Line?

MJD: Yes.

JB: Yes. We moved in … we were setting here, and the Siegfried Line was there. We were in Belgium, and they were in Germany. But it was kind of an unusual situation. The pill box was over there. I’m not even sure they were fully manned. We went up to relieve the 99th Division. Almost as soon as we got there, some guys said, “Hey, there goes a German running from that pill box to that one! Let me get ‘em! Let me get ‘em!”

The old guys in the 99th said, “Sit down. We got an unofficial truce. They don’t shoot at us when we’re going this way, and we don’t shoot at them when they’re running between pillboxes.” It was true! If you ran, between the buildings or wherever it was I don’t think they ever fired a shot at us that I know of. And we didn’t fire at them. It was kind of a phony situation. But that’s just the way it was. “We got an unofficial truce here.” If it’s just one man, you don’t shoot at him.

MJD: It was only when the organized action starts?

JB: Yes. Right. Basically that. Yes.

We lucked out there again. We were the luckiest division I think. Some of them had punched through a couple of those pillboxes. Through our …. Metz, I guess.

It could be done. Once you … had to fire everything they had a pillbox, but they a sense of … pillboxes could cover. You just covered them will all kinds of fire and then sent some poor sucker across with a satchel charge to go in the back door. That’s what you did.

And they’d captured some of them just up to our left. But ours were still fully manned. We were about due to try to punch through, just in front of us, and then the 3rd Army, we heard, broke through just to the south one night, one afternoon. Punched through the line and then rolled up behind ours. Well, the Army in all its brilliance, didn’t tell us what had happened. All we knew was that all of the sudden one morning about dawn, they said, “Hit the road! Get on the road.”

So here we are, walking down this road, pillboxes up here. Yesterday they were fully manned. We could see them. They had their machine guns and everything else. And here we are, walking right in front of them!

But they knew that they had abandoned them. But we didn’t know it.

And a – kind of a funny story here, too. First time I ever saw this. We hadn’t gone very far, and have you ever heard the expression “scared stiff?” I only did once. We had a big red-headed sergeant named Flaherty out of Boston. And we were creeping along there. The jeeps were up there. The jeep stopped, and I came up there.

Flaherty was there, and he said, “Doc, what can you do for me? I’m scared. I’m scared.”

He was just rigid.

I said, “Hey, they never told me anything about this in training.” We literally lifted him up like a board, laid him in the back of that jeep and sent him back to the aid station.

MJD: He couldn’t move?

JB: He just couldn’t move! He froze up completely. I don’t know if he ever came back again from the aid station. He was just rigid. ….

MJD: …

JB: ‘Cause he was over there yesterday. They had the ability to wipe out the whole there on the road if they were still there, but they weren’t. The powers that be didn’t bother to pass the word down.

So then we walked oh, though the … and up on the Rhine. You mentioned the bridge at Remagen? Well, that was just a little bit north of us, so we sat on the banks of the Rhine, went fishing for carp and hand grenades for just a few days. And then our only job was to set up machine guns and – anything that floated down toward the Remagen bridge, we shot at because the Germans were floating mines down the river trying to blow up the rest of the bridge or the pontoon bridge. So we just fired at anything that floated. I think they had target practice more than anything else. And then one morning we crossed the Rhine on an LCI… at Koblenz. Again, this was a piece of cake. Kind of scary. We crossed the darned river at 4 o’clock in the morning, can’t see anything. I heard up at the head of the column some scattered fire shooting, but they never … for all I know.

MJD: Did you see any German people as you went in the towns?

JB: Oh, yes.

MJD: How did they react to you?

JB: We didn’t see much of them. That’s for one thing. They stayed out of our road. That suited us. If we had time, we’d try to make a search for guns or something like that.

CB: Did you tell how you got a family out of their house and slept in their bed one night?

JB: Oh, yes. We did that. We ran them out. That’s another story that’s in there, too. After we got across the Rhine a little ways, we moved on up. We were with the 3rd for a while, then we relieved the 2nd. At Kassel. Kassel’s a pretty big, a good-sized town. You might know that. You probably know Kassel.

MJD: Yes. I watched their hockey team once.

JB: That right? The story was that one night the British bombed Kassel and the air raid sirens didn’t work.

[pause to change the tape]

JB: I could sit and talk all --

MJD: No, we’ll just pause for a second.

CB: Tell her about that bridge…

JB: Oh, now. That was probably, might be one of the scariest things, too.

CB: Well, have you come to that yet?

JB: No, I haven’t got to that yet. We’re in Kassel.

And the pitiful… you ready?

MJD: Yes.

JB: The pitiful thing there was just piles of rubble just every place because the air raid sirens hadn’t gone off. The civilians hadn’t gone to the air raid shelters or basements. And just literally on top of every pile of rubble would be three or four crosses, maybe some poor excuses for flowers or something. And as you walked through the streets … you’ve heard of the smell of death? It really isn’t that bad. It’s kind of a sickening sweet. But we walked through that for blocks. Miles. I don’t know. They really took a pounding. And least in part of that town they did, I know.

And then we kept on moving actually east from Kassel. Maybe I can just go ahead and jump up… there’s a bit more in that book, Molly. But …

MJD: Go ahead and tell the stories you want to tell.

JB: Probably the one incident, too, that does stand out was at a little town of Witzenhausen. It was on the Were River. We were sweeping across country. Oh, and that’s uh … oh, there’s two stories here or maybe three…. Remember moving across country, and opposition was very light. Usually, the farm houses there were clustered in a village. There wasn’t many out in the field by themselves, but this one particular house was out in the … kind of by itself when we just had a skirmish line going, and [we thought] “Well, we’d better check out the house.” And there was an old German couple in there. But we had to check it out. Went down in the basement, and they had that thing just full of canned fruits and vegetables. And we took one look around and helped ourselves to the canned fruit. And I can still see them standing there --- “Alles kaput! Alles kaput!” And – but we had one guy who could speak German like a native. He had been raised in Germany. He said, “Hey, we left you your vegetables!” We just took the fruit because didn’t hardly ever see any fruit.

Then we swung on in towards Witzenhausen, and on the way up there, one of the guys from C Company – C Company was working on our right. He was hit. Fletcher was a medic over there. I was kind of working up on a ridge, and he motioned for me to come over and help him. He got kind hit high on the chest, and he was bleeding quite a bit and Fletcher couldn’t get it stopped. He asked me if I could help him because, well, there wasn’t hardly any opposition. [I decided] “Yeah, I’ll stop here.”

So we got kind of tight bandage on him or were getting it tight, then I was ready to move. And I had my back to the village we were going into, and we had the guy between us, and Fletcher was on the other side, and he said, “Hey! They’re shooting at us!” He said, “about ten feet down there.”

I said, “Well, we ain’t got any cover, and we can’t move this guy yet.”

But then he said, “about six feet, that shot.” And I think the next come within about three feet of us. We both said, “well, let’s just lay real flat, and maybe the next one will go over us.”

Well, there wasn’t a next one because there was a tanker up on the road above us, and he’d saw what was going on. And he apparently saw where the guy was because he fired his 75, and we were never shot at again.

And actually – and this seems odd, but actually we were mad. Supposedly they weren’t supposed to shoot at medics. This is something I forgot to tell you, too. Because we had red crosses on four sides of our helmets, and we had white armbands with a red cross on them.

But I helped evacuate a hospital train in England with the wounded. And I was helping one medic, and I said, “What happened to you? They’re not supposed to shoot at you!”

And he said, “Are you kiddin’?!” He said, “The old German Army probably won’t shoot at you very much, but this SS people will shoot at anybody and anything. Now, I’m going to give you a hint. You don’t know who’s up against, so when you get ready to go in, when you go up, black out – put mud on the cross on the front of your helmet, but leave the ones on the sides so your own people can see you. And that damned white band,” he said, “pin it on, just so it’s showing the sides, not to the front,” he said. “I just gave you a clue.”

So that’s basically what I did. Because technically they weren’t supposed to shoot at us, but they did once in a while. We had several of our medics who got it.

MJD: Then they were targeting you actually?

JB: Yes. They were targeting the three of us laying there. We were a big target. One wounded guy and two medics, you know. Frankly, he was a lousy shot. And we found out why when we got up there. By that time, Hitler was just scraping the bottom of his manpower barrel. That’s all there was to it. I think these kids might have been thirteen or fourteen years old. They had old World War rifles, old World War uniforms on. By the time I got up there, most were sitting there, crying their eyes out.

And I actually felt a little twinge of sympathy for them in spite of the fact that they had been shooting at us. And I heard later that they took their uniforms and their rifles and told them to go home. They didn’t put them in prison camp.

MJD: They didn’t even capture them?

JB: That’s what I heard anyway.

But then we went on into Witzenhausen, and this is probably the one incident that I think about the most probably. Because we came just on top of the ridge, and were coming down into town [and saw] we’re going get a bridge! We won’t have to wade or get boats or nothing. We can go across with dry feet. And about that time. Kablam! They blew the bridge right in front of us, you know.

MJD: Ooh, they were that close to you?

JB: Well, we were several hundred yards away when they blew the bridge, but we thought we had a bridge anyway. But they blew it. We got down into town, got scattered along – they had a little sea wall there. About that high. Along the Were River. And we were stalled there a while, and pretty soon I saw Ed Sell. He was with Medical C Company down on the sea wall, and he motioned for me to come down. So I crawled down to the sea wall, and he came up to meet me.

He said, “I just heard the orders. They’re going to split my company and your company. Part of you are going to crawl over that blown bridge, and the rest of us are going to be taken across in the salt boats.” He said, “Which way do you want to go?”

I don’t know yet who said what. I think it might be just because I had my back to the bridge, and he had his back to the boats. I don’t know. I don’t know. I couldn’t even remember that night who said what. But it turned out that I was going to crawl the bridge, and he was going to ride the boats.

So we went back, and we started over the bridge. It wasn’t bad. We had pretty good protection, a lot of concrete in front of us. And of the course the idea of the boats was that they would get over there much faster than we would. We just had to crawl one at a time. They would … I guess the Navy took them across, the engineers, I don’t know. But they could get across pretty quick.

Well, on the way over, one of my guys, by the name of Paul Tanno, got hit in the hip. And they got to the other side, and they laid Paul Tanno on the bank, and then Ed Sell, the medic, came along on about the next boat. He stopped, patched Paul Tanno up and gave him a shot of morphine, and left on the bank for the litter bearers to come and get him when they cleared the shore. And then Ed stood up and looked around to see where his company was, and a sniper nailed him.

A little bit. Carry on a little more detail – when they got him back to the aid station, Capt. Dahlberg told him, he said, “Ed, you’re the luckiest man I ever saw.” He said, “that bullet went right through you and it missed every vital organ. You’re going to be okay. You’ll be back in Illinois before you know it.” He was from La Salle-Peru.

Ed says, “I’m going to die.”

Dahlberg said, “No, you’re not, Ed.” He said, “that thing was just a clean hole. Missed everything.”

Ed just said, “I’m going to die.”

They loaded him in an ambulance, and he was dead before he got back to the next hospital. It must have hit a major blood vessel or something.

That’s probably the one incident that I think about the most maybe. Because I really don’t know how we decided who went where. But Ed was a nice guy.

From then on, it was pretty much – we got pretty much of a cake walk. Oh, Leipzig was interesting, too.

MJD: Now, you’re in 1945, right?

JB: Yes. The war is about over.

When we were lined up to go into Leipzig, about 4 o’clock in the morning. I think we had the 2nd Division with us. And we were lined up. Pitch dark. About 4 o’clock in the morning. And we were lining up on the outskirts of the town, getting ready to go in, and word came down the line: “President Roosevelt’s died.”

I remember that.

So you can see how late in the war it was then.

But that wasn’t a bad deal. In fact, it was that night. The wheel – you’ve been to Leipzig?

MJD: No, I’ve only been through it on the train.

JB: The streets kind of run like a wheel, like spokes on a wheel. I guess we were the slowest regiment around because the 2nd Division swung in over here and two of our regiments come here, and next thing we knew, we didn’t have any place to go. Our own troops had us blocked out. It was just about night time. That’s okay with us [we thought]. There’s a hotel over here. Let’s bed down for the night.

Man, we went in there. I swear the carpets were that thick, it had running water, it had electricity. And the basement was full of looted French champagne.

We had a good night.

CB: You wrote home about that.

JB: Yes. We had a good night that night. We really did.

MJD: You liberated some champagne, did you?

JB: We liberated some champagne! I think they might have taken some of the ammunition out in order to put it in the trailers to carry it.

MJD: At that point, we were you encountering any Germans at all?

JB: Oh, yes. In Leipzig they had a tank battle inside the railroad station. I think at that time it was the largest railroad station in Europe. And there were some German tanks in there, and ours went in after them.

And they had a Napoleon monument battle?.. what was that?

MJD: Yes, there is something there.

JB: Some of them holed up in there. Some SS troops. We bypassed it for a while. I think our artillery would just bounce off of it. Of course they had places to fire, and they just covered that thing with artillery fire, and they finally surrendered, I think. But we bypassed them anyway. And went on through, and outside of that….

Well, Eilenberg might be an interesting story…

Again, we were sweeping. There wasn’t hardly any opposition. We come to a fair-sized town of Eilenberg. White flags all through the town. So we just thought it was a walk-through and started in, and found out later that there had been a platoon of SS troops that had just moved in. We didn’t know it. And they opened fire.

I was way back. It didn’t bother me any. And, but, boy we stopped, and I know they said the old colonel or maybe the general, said, “Hey, this war’s about over. We’re not going to lose any more infantry if we can help it. Just back out.”

So we all – we backed up a couple miles, I guess, from the town. And that night, I never heard so much artillery fire in my life. 105’s, 155’s, even some 240’s. They just leveled that town. It was a pretty nice town up until then. I was reading, I think, that they fired 10,000 rounds. I’m not sure.

MJD: Wow.

JB: I remember walking through it the next day, and one those big shells had scored a direct hit on the bank vault, and I was kicking 1000-Mark notes out of my road as I walked through. Just curb to curb. I saved some of them, but I lost them before I got home some way or other. But those poor people. I felt sorry for them. Just one little platoon can cause that much trouble. But, yep, they decided they wanted to still fight. It was crazy of them!

MJD: Yes, because then you’re talking late April, early May?

JB: Yes, yes. I think it…

MJD: Just a couple of weeks before the war ended?

JB: That was it. That was it. I think we linked up with the Russians, and that would have been shortly after that, on Mom’s birthday, which was April 26th.

And then living in Torgau with the Russians for a week was a separate story. Whew! They carried vodka in their canteens!

But with us, they were generous to a fault. I got involved in one deal. You’ve seen the famous Russian dance. They were good at it, some of them. The officers would be playing the accordion and the enlisted men would be dancing, and we were up there watching them one time. It was about lunch time, and [they said] “Ah!” and grabbed about three of us. We knew they wanted us to come eat with them.

Gosh, what they had, we weren’t much in favor of it. But they had some old dried might have been horse meat, I don’t know. I think they got a few greens. It was early enough in the year I guess they had some greens. Some kind of dried bread.

Well, we thought maybe for the good of international relations we’d better go. I think about three of us went. Don’t remember who they were. We ate with them, and when we got through, this big ol’ … I don’t know if he was an officer or a non-com, you couldn’t understand ‘em. But they poured everybody a water glass full of vodka. Straight vodka.

And he leaped up. Obviously he was proposing a toast. But the only things that I could understand were “Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.” And they all jumped up, you know, and glug, glug, glug! Well, we weren’t going to stop ‘em but, [we tried it], “Glug …. Glug ….. pstoooh!” They laughed at us. I thought they were going to go nuts. Oh, that was the most potent stuff I ever drank.

From then on, we sipped it. Very, very gently.

But, boy, they treated them Germans like cattle. But of course, they had suffered so much at their hands. They were trying to build a pontoon bridge across, and they had some old guys – Germans civilians working. Oh, they must have been in their 60’s or their 70’s, and there was one little ol’ short Kossack, boots on, and he would just walk down the line where they were working and just automatically kick every one so hard he’d lift him off the ground. And move on to the next one and do the same thing.

Yes, they were …

Well, we knew when we got there, we thought we were through because … I’ll always remember coming over that hill into Torgau and looking down the hill at the bridge and seeing the American flag and the Russian flag. And I said, “Well, we’ve had it, fellas, I think. We’re done.”

MJD: About when was that? April 26th?

JB: Yes. April 26th was when we linked up with the Russians. I’m sure that’s right.

MJD: So were you there when V-E Day occurred.

JB: Yes. We were still in Torgau on V-E Day. Then of course right away the Russians wanted their territory. They kept moving us back all the time.

Boy, I saw a lot of terrified German civilians who didn’t want us to leave. But…

I know there was one girl. She must have been a teenager. I don’t know. We took over a house. We were living good. We got to know her, visiting with her. Oh, I got one more story I’ll tell you during our occupation duties, too, but we would give her chocolate, give her some bread. Whatever we could spare. She was nicely treated. The guys treated her nice. But then when our orders came to leave, she just really cried her eyes out. “Take us with you!” [she said].

Well, we were tempted to smuggle her out. But we just, we said, “we just can’t.”

She said, “If you don’t, I’ll kill myself.”

I do believe she probably would have. I don’t know. That would have been….

CB: How old was she?

JB: I would say she was late teens or early 20’s. Nice looking gal. Very quiet. Very nice acting. I don’t …I think she might have been alone. I’m not sure if her parents were there or not. But I don’t know that much about it.

I’ll tell you one funny story. We had a fellow with us. After we had pulled back even further, we had to keep retreating because the Germans [sic] wanted to get there territory real quick. We had backed way up. We had a fellow in the company by the name of Horst Kehrel – this was the guy that – K-e-h-r-e-l. German. He was born and raised up to a certain age in Germany, but he was an American citizen. Of course, he could speak German very fluently, and one day – Capt. Jackson told me this story after the war was over – he said it was the dangest thing.

There was supposed to be absolutely no fraternization. Germans weren’t supposed to speak to us, and we weren’t supposed to speak to the German civilians. Strictly keep your distance. Just ignore them.

Capt. Jackson said, “One night I picked up about four or five German girls in our compound.” He said, “Heck, I had to speak to them, you know.” So he said, “I’d better get Horst Kehrel in here to interpret for me.”

So he said, “I had the five gals sitting there in my office and sent word down for Horst to come up and interpret for me.”

He said, “Horst had no more got in the door, when all five of them jumped up and said, ‘mein Horst! Mein Horst!’”

MJD: They knew him?

JB: Oh, he’d been out and around! I think a few nights!

MJD: Oh, they weren’t related!

JB: I think he hadn’t been wasting time.

CB: Related!

MJD: He’d already interpreted.

JB: He’d already interpreted quite a bit, I think. We’d been there for two or three weeks I think, and Horst had really been around. He was embarrassed. Capt. Jackson said, “I couldn’t get mad at him. I just had to laugh at him.” He said, “That was really funny. Old Horst, it was like he was just sinking right through the floor.”

CB: You need ice cubes [in our glasses of lemonade]?

JB: Mine’s still cool.

MJD: Mine’s cool.

JB: Now, you take over. That’s a quick synopsis there, Molly.

MJD: Well, that is an overview.

JB: Yes, it is an overview.

CB: Then coming home, the State of Liberty…

MJD: Tell me when you got word you would about coming home, how you got back, who you saw first…

JB: Well, after the division of the – we were training to go to Asia after …because we were one of the newer divisions. We hadn’t had many casualties, we were in real good shape. So we went into training for going to the Pacific. We didn’t know when. But, of course, Hiroshima ended all of that then.

So then they just started breaking up the guys. We had some guys who had a lot of points. They got to ship out almost immediately and come home. I accumulated a few. I think our division had two battle stars. I had some overseas time, so I wasn’t really too far. But nothing like the high point men were. So I got sent to an ordnance company. And I had good duty, too. I had several good duties. Little town of Esslingen. Down real close to Stuttgart. You ever been to Esslingen? 55 MJD: I think I’ve been through it.

JB: Yes. At that time, they had a beautiful town hall where I think every hour or every half hour a man would come out of the steeple and bang on a gong. To tell the time. Beautiful work of art. And the town is literally untouched. So that was good duty.

But I had to go down and help close out an ordnance company. They had sent all the high-point men home. I think there was five of us that went down there to turn in all their equipment to all the depots and everything. And we were setting down there in the beautiful house on the hill, overlooking the town. Beautiful scenery. We had to drive back through the mountains, I don’t know, X number of miles to pick up the mail. Then we had to forward all the mail from the ordnance company. We had to forward all their mail to their forwarding addresses. Then we had to run all over Germany turning in their equipment. It was a light ordnance company. It wasn’t any heavy stuff. Compasses, watches, chronometers. I don’t know what all we had. But we had pretty good duty.

Oh, yes, then five of us – we were drawing ration from the Air Force for ten. With that, we went out and hired us a Polish houseboy. A D.P. – displaced person. So we didn’t have to do any scrubbing or sweeping. Didn’t have to make the bed. And we went out an hired an elderly German lady as our cook. Boy, could she make soup!

MJD: From your rations or from what else you could scrape together?

JB: Our rations. We were drawing ten rations for five men. And we let her take home what was left. We’d feed the Pollack out of it, too. But then everything that was left I think that we gave to her. That was her pay. But she was glad to get it. And she was good.

CB: That little boy was pleased too, with that … you gave him.

JB: No, that was in Weisenfels, I think that was.

That was good then there in Esslingen. Didn’t find out till I got home that Bill Taylor was there the same time I was. Bill Taylor from Concord. We kind of compared notes when we were having coffee at the restaurant here. But that was good duty, and we were supposed to be done by Thanksgiving, and by goofing off, we made it last until after New Year’s when finally the orders come down: “You guys are through whether you’re ready or not.” And from then on it was just killing time. Killing time.

Finally wound up at Le Havre, and I was lucky. I went over on one the ships called The Ericson, which was a Swedish ship, a pretty good-sized ship. I think … a couple had gone over. We came home on The George Washington – a big ship. We ran into some rough weather, but I never did get sick then. And they had ice cream. First ice cream we’d seen in I don’t know how long. I really don’t.

We shipped out of Le Havre and came straight across on George Washington. They met us in New York harbor with the band, and I was sure glad to see the Lady with the Lamp out there in the harbor, I know that. If I remember right, the dad-gummed tug boat crews had gone on strike and they thought we weren’t going to get to dock. And the old captain said, “I’ll take her in by myself.”

And he did.

MJD: Without a tugboat? Took it right up?

JB: Yes. Yes.

MJD: Was there a crowd there?

JB: Not really. It had become old hat by then. Let’s see that was … uh February of ’45.

MJD: ’46.

JB: ’46. Because that was …

CB: You remember the date?

JB: Oh, yeah, the date was in February. February 26th. And see that’s one good thing, Molly. I can always remember. That date is branded on my forehead. February 26th. And I can always remember our wedding anniversary because we got married a month less two days later.

February 26th. I’ve never forgotten our anniversary.

CB: No.

MJD: So you came home in February and got married in March?

CB: Yes.

JB: She got her ring sixteen, eighteen months before.

CB: You didn’t tell her about the trip you got to go on when you met Roy Roberts, and …

JB: Oh, yes! I forgot when – the war was over, I guess.

I was someplace. We were getting all kinds of furloughs. And I signed up for one to Switzerland. And one morning, why, they called out all the people going to Switzerland. My name wasn’t on it. So I went screaming back to the company clerk, and I said, “What in the world did you do? You told me you’d put me on that list!”

He looked down at his list and, “Oh, my God, I did. But I forgot to put you on there.”

I said, “I’ll kill you.”

“Where do you want to go?” [he asked]. “Next one we’ve got is going to the French Riviera.”

“Okay! I’ll take the French Riviera, then.”

And got on an old C-47 that had been shot up half a dozen times I think. Flew down to the French Riviera, and got to see a little bit of Switzerland from the air. Of course they had to skirt it because it was neutral. But he took as close it as close as he could and pointed out that that was Switzerland down there. We went down to Nice.

It’s kind of strange….. but we were assigned a hotel, and I went in there to sign up for my room. I signed my name and looked up. The guy that signed just ahead of me was Roy Roberts, an old classmate from the class of ’39 in Beardstown.

CB: Those guys were always saying that they take a trip back…

JB: Never did get back there. But that was a nice time.

MJD: How many other people from home did you see?

JB: Boy, darned few! Let’s see, Ben Peck got a furlough, and he looked up everybody he could possibly find I think in the E.T.O. after he got it. The war was over. And I think he might have been the only one. I that was it. Cele?

CB: Till you saw Roy.

JB: Then I saw Roy, and that was after the war was over. And he had to leave fairly quick. His furlough wasn’t as long as mine. But I can’t think who …. Do you remember anybody else from Beardstown that I saw?

CB: No.

JB: It does remind me of one little funny one. When I was in training down at Camp Shelby, Skeez Hus, who I went to school with in Beardstown, too. He got washed out of the AST, too, and he was at … invasion, too. I met him one day, and he was just laughing at me.

He said, “Aw, you poor sucker. You got assigned to infantry.” He said, “I got assigned to the artillery. I’m always going to be nice and warm and comfortable way back there behind you.” He said, “You just didn’t luck out, did you?”

And I said, “I guess not, Skeez.”

I always remember one day in Belgium. We were moving up, and it was raining, and it was muddy, and it was miserable. And I looked up, and there’s ol’ Skeez standing there the intersection. I walked over to him and said, “What in the world are you doing? I thought you was in the artillery and you was going to be back there and high and dry, comfortable quarters and everything.”

And he said, “Our forward observer got killed, and they sent me up to take his place.” He was about ready to cry. I needled him about it. I didn’t see him very often, but I’ve needled him about it ever since.

But other than that, boy, I just didn’t see many people from home.

MJD: What kind of news did you get from home, and how did you get it?

JB: Have you seen V-mail?

MJD: Yes.

JB: That was the fastest way. They microfilmed it.

MJD: Oh, yes.

JB: And you could it in what – seven, eight, to ten days? Something like that?

CB: Yes.

JB: A regular letter might take a month.

MJD: A month!

JB: Yes. Because most of it’s by boat. I think V-mail back in those days went by phone. I’m not sure.

CB: It was all censored, you know.

JB: Yes, you could hardly say anything. I didn’t get anything cut out of mine, did I?

CB: No. Just every once in a while the name of a place.

JB: The name of the place would be cut out. I guess that’s probably right, too. But you just couldn’t write much.

MJD: Did you try to write code so that Cele would know where you were?

JB: No much. We hadn’t established any before I left.

CB: No.

JB: No.

CB: We weren’t that smart.

MJD: How did you know about where he was? Did you figure this out? Did you have any idea?

CB: No. We never…well, no, we didn’t.

JB: Well, you knew when we had met the Russians because that was in the paper that the 69th Division…

MJD: That’s the first you knew that he was in Germany?

CB: Yes. That’s [the first I knew] where he was.

JB: I could write “somewhere in England,” “somewhere in France,” “somewhere in Belgium,” “somewhere in Germany.” The only designation I could give. But no references other than that.

CB: They weren’t always scratched out. They were cut out.

JB: Yes. They cut them out with scissors.

MJD: So it was both sides of the paper that got it.

JB: Yes. V-Mail was nice, but you couldn’t get much on one.

CB: No. Just one little page. That’s all.

JB: And then they would …

CB: Wasn’t fair. That’s what I got from him, and he got a letter from me every day.

JB: Well, I didn’t have time to write every day! Did you ever – oh, my, let me see if I can find one – did you ever see a V-Mail? How it arrived? Do you know what it looks like?

MJD: I’m not sure I have.

CB: I’ll go see if I can find it.

JB: Where do you think it might be?

CB: In your desk?

JB: Look in my Army file. You know, where this book came out of.

MJD: This blue notebook.

JB: That blue book. Look in that file. I got a bunch of junk in there.

CB: I’ll find one.

JB: Well, what they did was you got a sheet of paper about like that, and you’d write the letter. And then they would take it back, they would photograph – they’d reduce it to about like this. And then it would get – I think it was phone.

MJD: Then they blew that up again on the other side?

JB: No, they – it arrived. In fact, they probably … when they reduced it, they reduced it to about like that, and then when they got it over here, then they printed it out on a small kind of thing. So that was a fastest way.

I don’t think they … they couldn’t send V-mail to us. We could send V-mail home but didn’t have that privilege of sending it back.

MJD: …?

JB: No. They got them, but we didn’t.

I know I got some of them suckers. I got some that Bud sent home…

MJD: Did you ever get anything besides letters from home?

JB: Packages once in a while. They tried to send cookies and things like that. Willie Peck, bless him. At that time, he was driving a Curtis candy truck. And of course sugar was rationed. But just periodically, Bud or I would get a box of Butterfingers.

MJD:

JB: Yes, he… mailed. Boy, it made you popular then.

MJD: I was going to say! I’ll bet you had friends then.

JB: Yes. Yes. I was just trying to remember whether we got them overseas or not.

MJD: Did you get copies of the Arenzville Tattler?

JB: Yes. Cele would send them, I think.

I just can’t think of anybody else I saw, really, outside of Ben Peck and Roy Roberts. Were the only ones from home.

MJD: Tell me about your job. What your actually duty was and what kind of things you did.

JB: You mean…

MJD: Yes.

JB: Basically I was the first medic who saw any wounded. And my job was just very basic, Molly. I stopped the bleeding. Tried to stop the bleeding. I didn’t have time to work on fractures as a rule. Because usually we would try to get litter bearers to come up on the other side as soon as possible. For a wound, you needed sulfa powder. It was the first line of defense …

[To Cele] It might not be in that file.

And then probably the greatest lifesaver was morphine. I carried morphine all the time to prevent shock. I don’t carry how bad a guy was hurt, he’d end up after a shot or two of morphine, and he’d be feeling pretty rosy.

Basically, my first aid was just very basic. Your basics would be pressure bandages, sulfa powder to prevent infection, and morphine to prevent shock. That’s about all I had. Back at the aid station, they would try to set the fractures. Every aid station had a least one surgeon. I think we had two. And they would try to make any preliminary life-threatening changes that they could.

MJD: So once you got to somebody, did you radio? How did you…?

JB: Radio? We didn’t have any radios.

MJD: How did you get…?

JB: They just automatically came up behind us.

MJD: They were right there.

JB: Sometimes you would stick the rife in the ground and wrap something around it so they’d spot it maybe, but there were always litter bearers coming up following each action. There was always litter bearers just a little ways behind us anyway. No, we didn’t have radios. Our company commander had a radio maybe, but … They tried to cover behind us. We tried to mark where we left anybody because we couldn’t get …

MJD: Did you have to… were the times that you would have to wait until you could get to somebody?

JB: No. We never. I can’t think we were. We had it pretty easy from … standpoint. We were then in … what I was in doesn’t hold a candle to what the guys on Omaha Beach ran into or Battle of the Bulge or the Hürtgen Forest or so many place. I mean, there, sometimes, they …. You had to wait. Fighting was so intense. We never ran into that. I’m very, very fortunate on that. You could get to them and generally get them out of there reasonably soon anyway.

MJD: Do you ever see any of those guys now?

JB: Well, my company. That’s what I missed. My reunion. But, boy, there was only ten there this year. I think we had 28 then [pointing to photo]. My closest one, Jimmy Headland, died just about two weeks before the reunion. Because I was planning on flying to Pittsburgh, renting a car and going by and seeing Jimmy … I knew he wasn’t well. I had heard from him at Christmas. When I called out there one afternoon, and the grandson answered. And I said, “Well, is Jim or Mildred there?”

“No,” [he said]. “Grandpa’s in the hospital, and Grandma’s with him.” He sounded pretty blue.

And the next – about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the phone rang, and [she said], “This is Mildred. I just lost Jim.”

Jim was a real classy individual.

Tell you a funny story there, too. I’m rambling, aren’t I?

MJD: No, you’re not. You’re telling good stories.

JB: But this is up on the Siegfried Line and, just off to our right there was a valley. And our last outpost was over here, and the … division was clear across on the other side of the valley. And apparently what the Germans and Americans used this valley once in a while to run patrols through it. So we put an outpost out there. I was… we were bedded down in an old farmhouse that had been pretty well damaged, but the roof was rather tight, and I had good warm – well, not warm, there wasn’t any fire, but it was out of the rain, out of the wind, and out of the mud.

And one night, why, they had to take turns manning this outpost. And one night Jimmy came by and said, “Hey, I gotta take my squad out to that outpost. Why don’t you come on with me?”

“Jim,” [I said]. “I got a perfectly warm, dry place here to stay. Why would I want to go out to that lousy outpost with you?”

“Aw,” he said. “I think you ought to come along.”

Well, he conned me into it. So we got out there. Jimmy’s squad set the machine gun out about I’d guess a hundred yards from an old barn. Jimmy and I said now we’re gonna. I think the squad worked shifts. There would be four of them out, probably eight of them back here. The rest of us can bed down in the barn, and we’ll trade shifts. So, we went in there, and Jimmy and I looked around. Huh! There was a dead horse right there.

Jimmy said, “I’m not sleeping next to any dead horse.”

I said, “I’m not either!”

So the rest of them bedded down in the barn, and Jim and I bedded down right outside the barn. Woke up, I don’t know one or two o’clock in the morning I’d guess. It had been snowing. I swear my bedroll had that much snow on it. And still it was kind of a glow, like the moon was just above the clouds. You could see. It wasn’t pitch dark at all.

And we both looked up, and here was two great big ol’ horses about ready to step on us. I don’t know if they had escaped from the Germans or not – the Germans used a lot of horse for transport. They might have been some Belgian farm horses. I don’t know. They were just about ready to step on us.

Jim and I kind of shook the snow off and [asked ourselves], “well, what are we going to do?”

“Well, I don’t know. I think the best choice is to go to the barn!” And the only two places left were right next to the old dead horse.

Jim and I talked about about ever dog-gone reunion.

MJD: You let two horses sneak up on you.

JB: Yes!

MJD: You were darned lucky they weren’t Germans.

JB: Well, they might have been. I don’t know. We don’t know what they were. But we ran them off.

It got a little scary there for a moment, though, too, I know. When we first woke up, why both of them – the horses were standing looking down into this valley. And all of the sudden, one of them jumped sideways like something hit him, like a rock. We laid out there, and we studied that pretty carefully. Then we slipped into the barn.

MJD: Might have been somebody had tossed a rock at them.

JB: Might have been. It might have been one of our own patrols, too.

[Looking through items Cele brings]. We got one around here somewhere. I know I took it to school one time.

This is the old division patch.

MJD: I’ll get a photograph of that.

JB: You’ve got to hold it right. So it’s a red six and a blue nine.

There’s my dog tag.

MJD: So what’s your serial number?

JB: 36433340

MJD: What’s the “T 43” stand for?

JB: Tetanus shot. My last tetanus shot. I don’t know if I had … you could just get them so often. They just gave tetanus shots periodically.

CB: This is what he got me when he was in Nice. [holds up a small blue bottle]

JB: Yes. I went to a perfume factory. They had a whole valley full of flowers. And they’d harvest them, and, oh, I think there’s other stuff besides that.

MJD: It was probably lavender, wasn’t it?

JB: It was, oh, solid, wasn’t it? Stick perfume.

CB: It was…

MJD: You still have something in this, Cele. You haven’t used it all.

Now this is your European theater medal?

JB: Victory medal. Somewhere around here I got a bronze star. I got it in a box someplace.

CB: I got it.

MJD: And the bronze star was for -- ?

JB: Oh, supposed to be for bravery.

MJD: Supposed to be? Well, tell me about that.

JB: Yes. At the end of the war, they were handing them to anybody that got across the Rhine, I think.

MJD: Well, was there a specific incidence that you earned this for?

JB: Not that I know of.

CB: These are Charles’s medals.

MJD: This is a microfilm of your honorable discharge?

JB: Yes. Yes.

MJD: [Reading from discharge document] Two bronze battle stars.

JB: Yes. Rhineland Campaign and Central Europe. Some of them got five of them.

MJD: And the Purple Heart?

JB: That’s Chas’s.

MJD: It’s Charles’s.

JB: Bud and Chas both got one. I didn’t, thankfully.

CB: [Reading from a medal] Says Army of Occupation on this side.

JB: Is that what that is? We were there long enough to earn that.

CB: Oh, I see. This is to your mom.

JB: It’s from Bud, isn’t it?

CB: Hmm?

JB: Is it from me, or is it from Bud?

CB: It’s from you. I thought this was the one where he said he was going to give me ring when he got home.

JB: I’d already given you your ring!

CB: I mean when you were coming back home from …

JB: Oh. Oh. Here’s a couple more.

MJD: Oh, these are V-mail.

JB: Yes. That’s how they got them. [To Cele] You couldn’t send V-mail, could you?

CB: No.

JB: You had to take the long route.

[Reading from another V-mail] This is when Bud told them about his feet. He wrote Mom and Dad. “Still here in the hospital… don’t know what they’re going to do with me. Feet aren’t in such good shape. A case a frostbite.” And then he talks about something else.

MJD: And what is this medal, Jack?

JB: I think it’s a Bataan medal. Chas’s.

MJD: Yes. That’s what it says.

JB: Here’s a regimental insignia.

CB: You know about that [hands over a coin].

MJD: Coins? Occupation money?

Yes. They don’t put quite the same word on it anymore.

JB: I don’t imagine.

MJD: It doesn’t say “Reichspfennig.” It’s a 50 pfennig.

JB: That was the headline on the Stars and Stripes.

MJD: Oh, hold that up. Let me see if I can get that.

And there they’re talking about the 69th?

JB: Right.

MJD: And what’s the date on that?

JB: I think it’s April 28th, if I remember right. Because we got there on the 26th.

MJD: And what’s the group that has some other claim?

JB: What?

MJD: Isn’t there another group that says they were the official one?

JB: We are the official one. Marley and I used to argue about it all the time.

You know, [he’d say] “We got to the Elbe before you did!”

[And I would answer] “Yeah, but you just stayed behind the river. You didn’t cross on over. Our guys jumped in a boat and went across.”

MJD: And got the vodka scars to prove it.

JB: Yes. “We were up there before you were.” Marley and I used to argue all the time.

MJD: Now, your pin here that has two little stars on it?

JB: That’s the battle stars.

MJD: These are battle stars.

JB: Yes. That’s E.T.O. European Theater of Operations.

MJD: And the battle stars, what are they for again?

JB: Rhineland and Central Europe. Because I think there was some for… I think there was five or six all together issued for Europe. I can’t tell you what they were – one for France, I don’t know.

MJD: What’s this one? American Campaign.

JB: I think we ….last one from Chas.

MJD: Before he was captured, or how…?

JB: Yes. Before. We never heard from him after the war started.

CB: We got one to Fran.

MJD: So you said you never heard from Charles after the war started.

JB: Nope. They couldn’t get any mail out.

CB: That was one of the last letters… [hold envelope addressed to Fran Hierman]

MJD: But somebody did get a letter before he was actually…

JB: No, after Pearl Harbor, we never heard a word.

[showing photo] Recognize anybody on there?

MJD: Yes! The tall guy.

JB: Yes, I was the tallest one.

MJD: The one on the left is Jack. Who are the other two?

JB: Woody… that was the three medics for Company B. The other guy was named Middaugh.

MJD: Middaugh?

JB: Never heard from either one of them again.

MJD: What was his first name?

JB: Who?

MJD: Middaugh.

JB: Uh… is it on the back?

MJD: Bill.

JB: Okay.

MJD: Steve’s advisor at South Dakota State was Paul Middaugh.

JB: Is that right?

MJD: He had a little bit to do with biological warfare.

CB: [showing newspaper clipping] Here’s “Sergeant Burrus Listed as Dead.” Here’s where he’d be brought home.

MJD: And this is when you finally got word but still didn’t know quite what had happened?

JB: Right. We still didn’t know any details until fifteen years ago.

CB: They had a funeral, though, for him.

JB: Yes.

MJD: Had you heard about Bataan? Did you know?

JB: Yes. Because, you know, some of them got out on a submarine. Some of the officers and a few men. They didn’t have any of the real details of the Death March until they recaptured the Philippines. But there was some… some of them got out and hid in the jungle instead of going on the Death March. And survived. Not many.

MJD: And were able to tell….

JB: And when Corregidor…. Some of them got back on Corregidor, the island off of Bataan. And they lasted about another month. And a few of them got away on a submarine with MacArthur. MacArthur came out in a PT boat. So a few sketchy details.

MJD: So people knew something had happened that had killed a lot of men.

JB: Yes. Right. They didn’t know all the details until later.

Now here’s a picture that was after the war was over. This was when Ben Peck came up to see me.

CB: There. Did you see that? “U.S. and Russian veterans are reunited at the site of the Elbe River.”

JB: Oh, yes. Several of them have gone back and had reunions with the Russians.

MJD: Now what’s this item here that I’m reading about? “Jack Burrus got in touch with a mother of a buddy of Charles. Jack knew the buddy’s name and knew also that his home was Chicago. Jack found a Chicago telephone directory, found a family member whose last name was spelled the same as that of Charles Fowle. He wrote to the address, received a letter shortly afterward, informing him he had written the right people and that they had heard from their son, who also mentioned that Charles was safe.”

JB: That was Gunnar Sacson. The other fellow with Tom Welsh was Gunnar Sacson. Mom had heard from them. I hadn’t. I was gone.

MJD: They knew that they were with Charles?

JB: They knew, well, the only thing that they knew was that he made it to the prison camp. Yes.

I forgot about that. But Mom found that out.

MJD: So by then, there was some word of the Bataan Death March?

JB: Yes. Right.

Because I think, actually… you know, periodically the Japanese would…I would always read …I would get The Chicago Tribune at the University of Iowa. Periodically, there would be a little article: “the Japanese have released the names of the following prisoners…” And I think I caught one of the two – either Sacson or Welsh. They were announced that they were prisoners.

MJD: They would announce it, but there wasn’t a real regularity to it?

JB: That’s all. Just names. No, no, they didn’t begin to announce all of them.

MJD: You didn’t even know why the announced the ones they did?

JB: I don’t either.

CB: [holding up photo] Here’s your…

JB: My old company picture!

MJD: About how big a company are we talking here?

JB: About 250, I think. Two hundred to 250.

MJD: The Hattiesburg group?

JB: Yes, let’s see. I don’t know where we took that. Let’s see it just a second. I’m not sure. Of course we stayed together all …I think it was probably taken at Hattiesburg.

And I don’t think I’m even on the picture. Because I was the medic, and I think I was back someplace else then. I wasn’t with the company when they had it taken.

MJD: Important guy! And they leave you out of the photo.

CB: [with clipping] Here’s a … Tom Welsh, when he died.

JB: Yes.

[Looking at company photo.] Yes. That ain’t that good a picture. I’m sure I’m not even on there, because I …

MJD: So these are the 69th men?

JB: Yes. The Company D of 272nd Infantry Regiment.

MJD: Big group of guys then.

JB: Yes.

CB: Now down to ten.

JB: Well, there’s more than that around. We didn’t have all the addresses. Most of them.

MJD: The ones who could get there.

CB: I tell you, we’ve got a lot of these 69th [Division patches], and the kids even got some.

MJD: Now, how did you get so many patches? Did you bring all of those back?

JB: Yes.

MJD: Or, did you buy them since then?

CB: No.

JB: Brought them all back.

MJD: Can you recall what you thought when you heard the war was over?

JB: Yes. I say it was a rather wild celebration when we heard about Hiroshima. And I remember trying to explain it to some German. Of course, that’s a little difficult when you can’t speak German, and he couldn’t speak English. But, I don’t know, they came out with the story that the atomic bomb had the power of – one bomb had the power of maybe all that were dropped on Berlin during the war, or something, some kind of comparison like that. And I remember talking to this one German and trying to explain it to him, but I don’t think that I ever go through to him.

As soon as the atomic bomb was dropped, the war was over in Europe.

MJD: And you were at Torgau then?

JB: No. No. See, the Russians didn’t let us stay at Torgau very long. We met them in April, and we were way up in their area of occupation. And, boy, just as fast as they could get their troops us there, they pushed us back. We had to come back. Oh, golly, I don’t know how much ground we gave up. A hundred miles, maybe more than that. Where did we finally settle down at? But, boy, the Germans wanted their, I mean the Russians wanted their area of occupation. They wanted us out of there.

Here’s a picture of a female Russian soldier.

MJD: A female Russian soldier?

JB: Yes.

MJD: Is that you with her, or is that….

JB: No, that’s ... Don’t confuse me with Stotler!

CB: [laughs]

JB: That guy! I tell you a story he pulled, too.

MJD: [reading from the back of the photo] “One of the better members of the Russian Army.”

CB: Here’s your dog tag.

JB: Yes. I showed her that. [Hands over another photo] Here’s another one.

MJD: [reading back of photo] “Same guy, same girl, but they dug up another Ruskie to sit in”

JB: Yes. They carried rifles and … [looking at another photo] same guy again. A couple more. Ol’ Stotler.

CB: This must be some notes from when you were going to school [to talk to students]. “World War II killed more people, cost more money, damaged more property, affected more people and caused more far-reaching change than any war in history.” The total the military casualties and then you told some of the things that were rationed back here.

JB: I mean, the kids don’t really have any idea when you’re talking to them about what life was on the civilian side. They can’t imagine getting by on three gallons of gas a week.

Yes!

CB: And they asked some weird questions.

JB: Yes.

MJD: What kind of questions did they ask?

JB: Oh, gosh, I don’t know…

CB: “How many did you kill?”

JB: Yes. That would be one of them. Well, I’m a medic. I didn’t kill anybody.

Oh … I don’t remember.

CB: “Did you see my grandpa?” one of them asked.

JB: Yes, something like that. That was Jim Taylor’s grandson.

Here’s a picture, Molly. This was when the war was over, and you can’t hardly tell, but this is Ben Peck. He come up to see me, I told you? And then there I am, and there’s Jimmy Headland, the fellow I just told you about.

MJD: That’s a nice looking group.

JB: Yes. We had a bunch of good guys. And … he’s a picture of our platoon leader. And, boy, we were lucky there, too. He came out of Texas A&M.

MJD: Is that a cigar in his mouth?

JB: Yes. We called him General – you wouldn’t be familiar with this either, but an old Li’l Abner character was “General Jubilation P. Cornpone.” And so we called old Dusty there “General Jubilation P. Cornpone.” But he was a heck of a nice officer, I’ll tell you.

MJD: He looks like a kid.

JB: He was young. I think he might have been a little bit younger than I was.

MJD: How old were you then?

JB: You know, Texas A&M turned out more officers than West Point in World War II.

Well, I was drafted when I was twenty. Came out, I guess, when I was twenty-three and a half, or something like that.

MJD: He looks like he’s about 19.

JB: But he was a real good company commander and a real good platoon leader. I was really real fortunate.

CB: You can’t come to our house without seeing Hannah.

MJD: This is the most important member of the family now.

CB: Our first great grandchild.

JB: Yes.

I was going to tell you about Stotler, who was on those pictures with the Russians soldiers…

MJD: Yes?

JB: I think he made PFC – that’s one stripe, you know – three times and wound up the war as a private. I was there when he got busted the last time. I don’t know, we’d been, we’d captured some little town and Stotler had ran across German signal flares. He thought it would be great fun to shoot them off! So he gets off, off to the edge and just starts shooting them off.

I guess back about a half a mile, the colonel and the major saw them, [and thought] “My God! They’re going to counterattack!”

And I can still see Capt. Jackson come running up there and, “Where is that! Who is that?”

“That’s Stotler!”

Rip! Rip! Both stripes.

And he never got …. He made PFC three times and finished the war as a buck private.

And then it even got funnier. He only made one reunion of all them we’ve had, and that was the one that was here. And we got to quizzing him, [asking] “Well, what did you do, John, after the war?”

“Well,” he said, “I re-enlisted.”

We said, “You WHAT?!”

He said, “Yeah, I re-enlisted.”

I said, “Well, what did you do?”

He said, “They made me an MP.”

And the whole company just went up. “YOU? A military policeman?!” Boy, talk about the fox watching the hen house. He was a character!

MJD: Stotler. And he’s the one that’s in the picture with …?

JB: He’s in the picture with all the Russians. Oh, golly! He was something else.

But, basically, we had one heck of a good group.

MJD: So what you thought when the war was over?

JB: How quick we’d get home.

MJD: Yes? You had plans already?

JB: Not really, no. Didn’t have any for a year after I got home. I knocked around from one job to another for a year.

MJD: So you hadn’t really … ?

JB: Couldn’t get settled down, but, no, didn’t have any… Thought about going to school, but thought, nah, I was ready to settle down, get married and start in. So, for about a year, I just kind of kicked around. Went to work for Burruses for a while, and I don’t know, kind of got into with Rob there a time or two, and [thought] “Aw, it ain’t worth it!” Worked for Bob Beard for a little while, putting together farm machinery. They were finally beginning to get some after the war, you know. Then one day, Louie Witte I remember came up and wanted to know if I wanted to go to work at the elevator as a bookkeeper. Because they were just working poor ol’ Heine Meyer to death, and the auditors for the Illinois Grain Association had said, “You will get a bookkeeper.”

That turned out to be real fortunate.

MJD: So you learned bookkeeping on the job?

JB: I had been to Chillicothe Business College before the war. And I had good commercial teachers in Beardstown. So I had a pretty good background on commercial, on bookkeeping and typing. I could type fairly well.

I was down there about five years at the elevator. And that’s when Bud Morrison was at the bank. And I guess he went to selling securities on the side, and I guess Mr. Hart didn’t like it, so they parted company. And I remember that I was working there at the elevator, and June Houston came by and said, “Hey, I think we’re going to have an opening at the bank. Why don’t you go up and talk to Mr. Hart?”

I looked at those banker’s hours, and I said, “I think that’s a good idea.”

CB: You thought banker’s hours were good.

JB: Well, they were there!

So I went up and talked to him, and by gosh, spent five years at the elevator, and then five years at the bank here in Arenzville.

MJD: So when did you start at the bank in Arenzville?

JB: Well, let’s see. Got home in – what’d I tell you? In ’46? Yes. I knocked around for about a year and didn’t do much of anything. So probably in ’47 I went to the elevator, and I’d say about ’52 I went to the bank in Arenzville, ’57 in Beardstown. That sounds about right.

MJD: And worked there until when?

JB: Worked there for 25 years and retired…. When did I retire?

CB: When you were 60.

JB: Got to retire when I was 60. I told them I wanted to retire at 62 ahead of time, and they had a couple of young men there that they wanted to move up, so we just kind of made a deal. I said, “I’ll take early retirement, if you make it worthwhile.” And they did, so I got out. I was there 25 years.

MJD: Did you ever use your medic skills after the war?

JB: All I had was basics. I mean in civilian life, you really don’t need pressure bandages or morphine very often.

MJD: Not for taking splinters out of kids’ feet or…

JB: Oh, yes. Opening blisters, things like that.

MJD: Did you occasionally tell Roger and Cheryl, “Now I’m a medic. I know what I’m doing!”

JB: No. Don’t think they’d believe me.

Nope. Because my skills were very basic. At times, I wished I had stayed in chemical lab because I did like that. That was all kinds of analysis and blood typing. And I enjoyed the work, and I had a real good instructor. But, boy, when they said “nine months in a fraternity house,” because you could have wound up in a field hospital out in the jungles of the South Pacific, too, so I …

MJD: I was reading Bill Mauldin’s Up Front…

JB: Oh, yes.

MJD: And he said a lot of the guys, well, first of all, the medics were the heroes.

JB: Yes.

MJD: But they were also often asked for medical advice.

JB: Oh, yes.

MJD: Did you get that, too?

JB: You mean from the guys?

MJD: Yes.

JB: Oh, yes.

MJD: And they called you “Doc?”

JB: Yes.

CB: And they do now.

JB: That was every medic’s nickname – Doc. When I go to a reunion, I’m still “Doc.”

Yes. There’s one little story in that book, too, we ran into a mortar barrage. Mortars are wicked because you can’t hear them coming. You don’t know it till the exploding obliterates your feet. Wasn’t very many mortars, and I don’t know if anybody got wounded in that one or not, but right after it was over, we bedded down. It was late in the afternoon. A kid by the name of Barbie came up to me, and he was just quivering. Like that, you know.

He said, “Doc, you gotta give me something. I gotta get some sleep.” He said, “I’m just completely shook up.”

And he was just quivering like this, and I said, “Well, okay, Barbie, if you want to. I’m carrying some sodium amitol with me. I guarantee you, you’ll get some sleep.”

He said, “Well, give it to me.”

Well, the thing he forgot to tell me was that he was supposed to go on guard duty four hours later. And here I’m sleeping right next to him, and I hear somebody come up [and say] “Barbie, get up!” Kicking him, “Barbie! It’s your turn to go on guard duty. Barbie, get up!”

And I looked up, and I just said, “Don’t even bother to try to wake him up because he’s going to be out for a long time.” And that guy cussed me out for giving it to him. He had to go back and stand four more hours of guard duty.

MJD: But he got his sleep.

JB: Yes. He got his sleep. Barbie was all right the next morning then.

I forgot, I did carry sodium amitol in my kit.

MJD: Sort of exhaustion, then or something like that? Nervous exhaustion?

JB: More nerves than exhaustion, I think really. Because he’d got caught in the middle of that mortar barrage. Pretty wicked.

MJD: And then after that, did something like that usually happen?

JB: Different people reacted differently. Like Flaherty. I was telling you – he was the guy that got froze up like a board. When we were training, he was going to whip the whole German army by himself. Nothing feared. And he was the first one that – I don’t think you’ say he wimped out – but the first one that kind of cracked anyway.

It was different, that’s all. But I sure had a great bunch to be with.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

Video camera turned off at this point

MJD: [Handling small bottle] Now, what does this say on it? “Evening in Paris Cologne.”

JB: Hey, that might not have came from Nice. I don’t think it did.

Up from Nice is a town called Grasse. And that was just a valley of flowers, and they were making this perfume. It was good perfume and lasted forever. It was just kind of like a bar of anti-perspirant, wasn’t it?

MJD: Kind of a lavender, was it?

JB: No, I think it had about six different odor in there, didn’t it? It come in little bitty jars like that. And this was right close to Monte Carlo. We rode right by Monte Carlo. But we weren’t allowed to go to Monte Carlo.

MJD: Now, why would that be?!

JB: [laughing] I don’t know. That was off limits.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

MJD: [photographing] Now this is V-mail here.

JB: It got here fairly quick. I don’t know if it was a week, ten days or what it was. But that was our quickest way of getting word home.

MJD: That’s still quite a long time to wait.

JB: Now, I know Bud was wanting to get his V-mail back when they evacuated him before they got the telegram. But I guess it didn’t get here.

MJD: So they got the telegram before…?

JB: Before they got the V-mail. He was trying to play down his frozen feet.

MJD: Now, when he came home, he didn’t get to come right to Illinois?

JB: No, he was out at Camp Carson hospital for a long time.

MJD: So, did your folks go there, or was that in war-time too hard to get there?

JB: I think it probably was. But he did get home in August, I think. Wait a minute. Because he was here for Grandpa Hierman’s funeral, I know. But see I guess he got shipped out….see, even after the Bulge, they were fighting on the ground without their tanks and without any boots till, oh, what did he tell me – March?

MJD: Without their boots?

JB: Yes. There was one pair of overshoes in the whole company. I think the captain had them, and he offered them to Bud. And Bud said, “I’m too far gone,” I guess. The medic said he was too far gone.

MJD: Did he wrap his feet in blankets or what?

JB: Yes, or something. He had his combat boots all right, but he didn’t have any overshoes to keep the water.

MJD: Oh, my. In winter.

JB: Yes. He lost his tank, I think, on Christmas Eve.

That Battle of the Bulge was murder. I mean it was… we went up there, and we found a little cleaning up up there. There were some people … I think they had their hands tied and were shot, I know.

Did you ever hear about the Malmedy Massacre?

MJD: No.

JB: The Germans…in that book, in that Bulge, they broke through … they broke through our lines forty, fifty miles. And they broke through in this point, and I think it was the rear end. I don’t think it was Bud’s outfit, but it was the rear end of their convoy that they broke through, and they captured a whole bunch of them. A hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty. And put them out in the field. They thought they were going to a prison camp, and the next thing they … they just mowed them all down.

Boy, uh, that was the SS that did it. And after that, there was very few SS ever captured.

MJD: I’ll bet not.

JB: No. Fact is, there’s a story in my book there about – I don’t know if it was our aid station or the other battalion aid station. We were moving fast, and the orders came up to move. Leave what you got. Well, they and an SS man for a prisoner. And they said they’d be danged if they were going to turn him loose!

So, well, I may be a little vague, too, but it seems to me like three-quarters of a gram of morphine was supposed to be fatal dose. So I think they mixed up a full gram, in four different syringes, and they made four syringes with water, and they took turns giving him shots. And nobody knew who gave him the fatal shot.

Medics did that.

MJD: But that was humane. Against all the rules, but…

JB: Yes. Against all the rules, but they weren’t going to turn an SS … because right after the Bulge there just wasn’t an SS man hardly ever taken prisoner. They had just done too much. Especially …

MJD: It’s also something that the Germans probably wouldn’t have returned the favor.

JB: No. The Germans … now I get this from what little I saw and from Bud … the professional German Army pretty much went by the rules. I mean, but the SS … They’re …

MJD: …Different critter.

JB: Totally different… Critter. Yes. Just too much.

Like that guy told me, that poor old medic that was in Plaster of Paris from his shoulders to his knees told me. Oh, man, I don’t know how many machine gun holes he had in him, but … he said it was an SS outfit. So there wasn’t much love lost there at all. No.

But the professional German Army was a little different. Of course that little bunch of youngsters we ran into, that was totally different, too. They hadn’t been indoctrinated.

MJD: They probably went right from school to that.

JB: Yes. Had them a rifle. Yes, that was kind of sad, that bunch.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

CB: I found this [Valentine banner].

MJD: Now, where did this come from?

JB: What is it?

MJD: [reading] “Sweetheart.”

JB: I think I have sent that to you from Shelby, didn’t I?

CB: Maybe. Where did this come from then [hold up blue silk handkerchief]?

JB: That was from France. Maybe from Nice. I really do. I think that came from … MJD: That looks pretty fragile.

JB: At this was overseas, I know. I think that might have came out of Shelby….

MJD: Is there something printed on it?

JB: “To my darling.”

MJD: Silk. A little bluebird on it.

JB: I think that might have came from the Riviera, I don’t know.

MJD: It doesn’t look like it ever was used…no, wait a minute, there’s something else here. [Reading] “Souvenir de Nice,” it says.

CB: You ought to keep that stuff together.

MJD: It was pretty much together.

JB: My gosh, I’ve bored her to death.

MJD: Not at all!

JB: I was trying to think of something else that was funny. Because there were a lot of things that happened that were unusual.

MJD: And you trained with a lot of people.

JB: [laughing] I remember one…one of the guys, name was Shannon. This was after the war was over, and we were with an entirely different outfit. And a kid from Boston by the name of Shannon got a fruitcake for Christmas.

“Ah,” he said, “we’ll eat it. And we’ll have it right after we eat chow. I’ll share the fruitcake with you.”

Of course, I think he was a little bit looped anyway, and we came back to the place where we living, and he said, “Well, in Boston, I’m used to having a flaming fruitcake.”

And what did he have? Some schnapps? He had something. And he absolutely completely ruined that. Poured it over, it wouldn’t light. He’d get mad, he’d pour some more…

We could have killed him. We couldn’t stop him. But he sure did ruin a perfectly good fruitcake. Oh, golly.

MJD: It was inedible by the time he…

JB: Right. It was inedible. I guarantee you it was inedible. And it looked good.

Another funny one, too, when we were on maneuvers. One time, down in the swamps. It was miserable. I mean, it was rainy, and it was cold, and it was early spring, I guess. Supposedly, everything was tactical. That meant no fires, nothing like that. We were going to just play it like it was. Finally, I think even the officers got tired of that, and they said, “Well, we called off the tactical part. You can pitch your pup tents and build a fire if you want to and try to get dried out.”

Jimmy Connor was a medic, too, and we put our shelter halves together and pitched our pup tent.

I said, “Hey, here’s a good spot.” There was an old stump there. I said, “If we get some dry wood and get this stump to burning, it will keep us warm all night.”

He said, “That’s a good idea!”

So we scrounged around among the pine there and found some old dead limbs and got it going pretty good and got that stump started on fire. And we was laying there, and there were a whole bunch of coach whip snakes that had dammed under there.

MJD: Oh, no!

JB: About as big around as your little finger. They come pouring out of there by the dozens!

Jimmy said, “We’re not staying here!”

I said, “No, we’re not!”

Hated to leave a perfectly good fire, but….

CB: They told one another that story… ”Remember that night?” … every reunion.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

JB: Now here’s a combat medical badge, Molly.

The combat infantry man had a badge of their own, which was kind of a blue enamel background with crossed rifles on it. The medics got that [indicating medal in his hand] instead. And I think that might have been worth ten bucks a month to me. I think that was all combat pay was.

MJD: You would wear this while you were in service?

JB: No, well, it was for your dress uniform … you would.

I think it was worth… I think it was ten bucks. I forget. Overseas pay was so much, and then combat pay was so much.

MJD: So what does your dress uniform look like? Is it a brown khaki dress uniform?

JB: I still got mine.

MJD: You still got it?

JB: Yes.

CB: Want to see it?

MJD: Yes! When’s the last time you had it on?

JB: I couldn’t get it on.

MJD: No?

JB: No.

MJD: Has the Legion every done something like that where they guys that can wear their uniforms will wear them?

JB: They … when was it? One of the Burgoos, shortly after we got home. Maybe it was about the Centennial, would it have been? Some of them did.

MJD: Oh, there was an old photo that Mom has, where there are a bunch of guys on the stage in their uniforms.

JB: Yes. Uh huh.

MJD: And there was a picture, I thought it was Dad at the microphone, but it might have been someone else.

JB: Could have been, though, too.

MJD: That was about the time that the Legion formed, wasn’t it?

JB: About a year after the war was over, yeah.

Sometimes I envied those fliers, and sometimes I didn’t. And especially, I don’t think I would have envied them that fly in the Navy, over the ocean.

One time, oh it was when I was going up to try to find Bud. I hadn’t heard from him. And there was another fellow who went up with me, one of our bakers. That’s one of the few times that the Army made a mistake. Generally, always they specialized in putting a round peg in a square hole or the other way around. But they assigned a guy to us as a baker. He had been a chemist. And, man, he was a baker! I’ll tell you.

He had a brother who was up close to where Bud was…

CB: [Brining out jacket of dress uniform] He had a short one.

MJD: Let me get a picture of that.

JB: Gee, I ought to have my … I don’t have my ribbons on there. And this [combat medical badge] would be on there, too.

MJD: Where would that be pinned on?

JB: Right above the breast pocket there.

CB: [Handing him the ribbons] Put them on.

JB: Oh, good gosh!

MJD: Well, of course.

JB: This is ridiculous.

MJD: You’re the one who knows where they go.

CB: Heck, yes.

JB: I had them all at one time in a bar.

MJD: They’re right here, aren’t they? Isn’t that what there are?

JB: Yes. Most of them – North American defense, good conduct, oh, heck, I’ll just put this on there. ETO, I mean, European …

MJD: This is a dress uniform?

JB: This is a dress uniform. You didn’t see it hardly while you were in combat at all.

MJD: How did you even keep it with you?

JB: We put it in a duffel bag, and they would eventually catch up with us with it.

CB: And you, Molly, he wore his pants out after they got home. They were nice and warm, and he wore them out.

JB: Yes.

MJD: He kept wearing them, then?

JB: Yes. At the elevator they were nice.

CB: And when Terry came home, we had a gal down at Beardstown that made… what was it that she made out of uniforms? Oh, bears. She made bears out of the old wool.

But I took his down. I didn’t really want to get rid of it anyway. But I took them down, and there wasn’t enough material in them.

MJD: To make a bear?

CB: No. [Holding up dress jacket] You ought to see his big one. See, it’s short.

JB: Ike jackets. They used to be long.

CB: Why don’t you put it on?

JB: [laughs]

CB: He couldn’t get that on!

MJD: Well, your shoulders are a little broader.

CB: I guess. I think he weighed 160 when we got married.

[Molly takes photo of Jack holding up the dress jacket.]

JB: Then all your ribbons went right above here.

CB: You didn’t get them all on.

JB: Well, I used to have…

MJD: They went right here?

JB: Yes. You’ve seen the generals with all that stuff. Fruit salad on here. I mean of them don’t’ mean anything – North American defense.

MJD: You’ve never removed those [patches] since they were put on there?

JB: No.

CB: No.

JB: Good conduct medal. This is the 7th Army patch and [the reason] why [is] that’s the last army I wound up in, but basically I was with the 1st Army all the time. So that really doesn’t mean that much to me. That was the 7th Army.

[changed tapes]

Something else that made me stop and think. Everybody went to ASTP as a private. They lost whatever rank they had. So … it was cushy duty, you know, so everybody in there was a private. Everybody that went to ASTP was a private. So I gave up sixteen dollars a month, too, by golly. I got sixteen as a Tech 5 and just fifty as a buck private. It took me a long time to get them two stripes back. I got the PFC before I went overseas, and I got my Tech 5 back when we were in combat. I remember that.

I was starting to tell you about this trip up to see his brother, and we stopped at this anti-aircraft outfit where his brother was. You knew that Germany had perfected the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs? And they were giving England a rough time.

Apparently there was a … this was on the Ruhr River. And apparently, just across from where this anti-aircraft outfit, on the other side of the Ruhr River, was one of the launching sites for… the I don’t know whether it was the V-1 or the V-2’s. I don’t remember. But while we were there, then the Air Force came after them. And it was the two-motor bombers. I don’t remember if it was … let’s see Martin Marauder and the Billy Mitchell. One was a B-26 … and the other was a B-25 or 26? I don’t remember. But they were low-level bombers. Two motor. And they came across just where we were aheading. And I’m telling you. Them Germans must have had that launching site surrounded with 88’s. They were knocking them out of the sky!

I forget how many parachutes we counted in the air at one time. Twenty some I think. And they carried a relatively small crew. I don’t know if they carried four or five, but, I mean … and sometimes, if they scored a direct hit, you wouldn’t see any parachutes coming down. And them boys really took a pounding that day. I guess some of them got through and dropped their bomb, but, boy, they took an awful beating in the process.

CB: Will you drink a glass of wine with us before you leave?

MJD: A glass of what?

CB: Wine.

MJD: Sure. Sure.

JB: I got some chillable red.

CB: It’s almost our wine time. At four o’clock every day.

JB: Our wine time.

They were just knocking them out of there like clay pigeons. They were coming in low.

MJD: They knew that it was a V-1 target?

JB: Yes. Yes. And, boy, them 88’s them Germans had, they were rough on that aircraft and tanks.

MJD: Wouldn’t it have been fortified? How could they have gotten a bomb through it all? JB: Huh?

MJD: It would have been so fortified, wouldn’t it? All that concrete?

JB: I don’t know. I don’t know. They … I think they had to launch them rockets pretty much from a pad.

MJD: Oh, out in the open, sort of a catapult?

JB: Yes. I think they had to launch them pretty much from just a pad, I believe. Now what … I know the V-1 was that way. The V-2, I don’t know.

MJD: I guess I was envisioning like the big guns off of Normandy.

JB: Yes. No, that would be entirely different from that because they had these rocket launchers. I was in one. They were dropping a few in there.

We were at a funeral one time, and we heard one explode.

MJD: Really?

JB: Uh huh.

MJD: Did you go to the bomb shelters then?

JB: No. But they came so seldom and so sporadic that …

MJD: And there wasn’t much warning?

JB: No. The V-1, which was the first rocket bomber, it was a fairly slow moving [indicating with hand motion]… chug, chug, chug … only it would move pretty fast. But fighter planes could actually catch up with them, shoot them down. And they said some of them RAF boys got so good – and they [the rockets] had wings on them – that they would fly alongside and tip them! Tip them over so they’d crash!

But that was the first one the Germans used was the V-1.

MJD: And the V-2 was faster?

JB: V-2 was faster and bigger, and it came like this [illustrating an arching movement].

MJD: From a greater range.

JB: Yes. I’ll never forget the … it wasn’t a truly jet plane that I saw. You know, the Germans had some jet planes in air before the war was over, and they played heck for just a few weeks there.

But it was this same little town of Witzenhausen, where Ed Sell got killed. We got across the river, and the engineers were building a bridge. Pontoon bridge. And here comes a German fighter plane down the river. Obviously, he was going to try to knock the bridge out. We had a lot of anti-aircraft fire there. But apparently he had jet assistors on his wing tips. He wasn’t a true jet plane. But he just … he had … he could kick them in when he wanted to. And he chickened out a little early when the anti-aircraft started zeroing in on him. He was coming low, and they were really letting him have it. He kicked them jet assistors in. He was just going like this [illustrating a slow, level action] and then vrrraa! Like that, you know. We just stood there with our mouths open. We had never seen anything like it.

He throwed his bomb about… oh, he missed the bridge by a good five hundred yards, if not more I think. We didn’t know what was going on! Never had heard of a jet plane before.

So we were lucky, really. They were developing like your V-2 and your jet plane…

MJD: Can I make a toast to your 69th?

JB: Thank you.

CB: And a nice afternoon.

JB: One thing that did surprise me a little bit maybe was that the Germans never did use their poisonous gas arsenal.

MJD: They had it though?

JB: They had it. We captured a lot of them. It wasn’t Torgau… where? I don’t remember. I remember a couple of them leaking.

MJD: Oh, really?

JB: But we captured a bunch of cylinders of poison gas.

They had it, but they never used it. Boy, you know, that was what was vicious in World War I. Both sides, I guess used it, but the Germans perfected it in World War I.

MJD: You get caught in the trenches with that…

JB: Yes… but nobody …

MJD: How long were you in England that ….

JB: Oh, let’s see. We got there after Thanksgiving. I was still there for Christmas. We left in January. I might have been there six weeks. I’m not sure.

I did get to London once. Got to Salisbury Cathedral. Got to Winchester Cathedral. We were in the very southeast corner around Southampton. But we did get one pass to London.

MJD: Was that all… let’s see, that was after Normandy, right?

JB: Yes.

MJD: So it wasn’t all hush-hush, cover-up that you were there? And there wasn’t such a concentration of U.S. troops in England then?

JB: No. They were already over in France. Fact is, that … well, London was still observing their blackout. But the night we was there, they said that it was the thickest fog of 1944 descended on London. And it was so thick that they didn’t worry about blackout. They had barrels of fuel on the corners burning to try to show you where you were.

We managed to get to tickets to a theater. And, boy, London had a beautiful subway. It’s far better than New York’s, I’ll tell you. What do they call it? Is it the Underground?

MJD: It’s the Underground, isn’t it?

JB: I guess. And so we had tickets to this theater, and somebody told us how to get there. We got on the Underground and rode out to there and come up, and you couldn’t see … nothing! Where in the world is the theater?

But there was an English bobby standing there, and English policeman. [He asked], “Where do you want to go?” And we told him the name of the theater, and he kind of took me by the shoulders and squared me away, and [said] “Now, just follow your nose about a hundred or a hundred and fifty steps. You’ll find it.”

And, boy, that’s about the way it was, too. I’ll tell you. We found it. He got us there all right.

I’m trying to think … what was the name of that … can I remember that?

MJD: The play that you saw?

JB: Yes. Is there such a thing as “The Golden Cadillac” or …? It was a comedy, and it was good.

But I got to see a little bit of London.

CB: You know, all these guys are closer than any four years of high school or any four years in college.

MJD: Well, they’ve been through more together.

CB: You just ought to see them when they get together.

MJD: They had to depend on each other…

JB: Yes. It’s just different.

CB: When you depend on your life, why, it makes an impression…

JB: Yes.

MJD: You need to know how that other guy’s thinking?

CB: And there’s one guy, did you tell her, that slept with a gun under his bed for…

JB: Smallsley. He was captured.

CB: I mean, he still does.

JB: Heck, he come home, slept with a gun under his … I don’t know, I haven’t heard from him … well, we heard from him at Christmas.

MJD: He was captured?

JB: Yes.

MJD: But made it home.

JB: Yes. He was captured by the Germans.

CB: But he’s nervous. And she told us, she sleeps with a gun under his bed every night.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

JB: Did you every spend much time in England, Molly?

MJD: Oh, four or five days.

JB: I liked them. Some of them don’t like the British. But I came away with a lot of … they took a tremendous beating. They were all alone there for awhile. I came away with a lot of respect for them. Boy, they took a pounding. Boy!

I remember, we were there in London, and they took down along the docks, where they built a lot of ships and serviced a lot of ships. I guess one night the Luftwaffe came over and delivered … they weren’t going after the docks. They made a fire-bomb attack on all the residences of the workers around there. And I don’t know what percentage of houses were burned, but they said 90 percent of the workers showed up at work the next morning. It was just devastated around there. They took us down there.

MJD: Well, they were within reach of Germany. That damage took place right in their houses.

JB: Yes. They took a…

CB: But the Russians were something else.

JB: Yes. They were a … oh, they were the ones that lost the most people, though.

MJD: They lost several million, didn’t they?

JB: Yes. Millions there.

Well, the British were at the bottom of their manpower barrel, I’ll tell you.

MJD: And material.

JB: Yes.

MJD: They had nothing.

JB: Right.

MJD: What they had had been leased from the U.S.? JB: Lend-lease. Yes. Smartest move we ever made, I guess.

I wasn’t around them a whole lot. But what I did, I have respect for them, and the guts that they had. I tell you. A lot more than I … I came away with no use for the French.

MJD: Really?

JB: They would try to steal us blind of everything that we had. Yes. They’d try to steal gasoline off of our trucks, and … just anything! I don’t know.

The Belgians were different again, too. We liked the Belgians. But the French, we didn’t. I just didn’t care for them. They were just …

CB: And then the Jews.

JB: More of them got out of combat than any race I know of.

MJD: Were you near any death camps?

JB: No. The only thing that I saw was one small work camp. Where obviously it was going to be overrun. I don’t how many were stuck in it. Maybe twenty? But they had put these people out to work on the farm basically. And I guess what they did when they knew we were coming, they nailed the doors and windows shut and set it on fire. You could see where a couple of them had tried to break out through the bottom of the floor.

Now, Skeezix Kleinschmidt got very close. I think he might have been in one even. I’m not sure. I missed that.

MJD: Did you know of them? Did you hear about them?

JB: We’d heard about them, but I’m not sure when exactly.

MJD: But you weren’t really sure if it was just one of those stories?

JB: No. I think when we heard it, it came pretty straight, you know. We had guys who would have been there or went by there or something. They were all pretty much over in eastern Germany. There wasn’t any in western Germany. Pretty much over in Poland and in eastern Germany.

MJD: Yes, but you were close near there.

JB: Oh, yes, we were there. Like I said, Skeez’s 12th Armored Division, they got into one.

See, we didn’t hit them until about the end of the war. I don’t know of any of them that were in western Germany.

MJD: No, I don’t think they were.

JB: Poland and eastern Germany is where they were. They weren’t liberated until right at the end.

CB: Wasn’t it a Jew who wrote you, though, wanting you to do something about his feet after he got home?

JB: Well, now you’re talking about a race that didn’t like combat. Couple of them. That was [name omitted]. He had the best job in the company anyway. I don’t think it was his feet though, it was “how he was always sick” or something. He wanted me to help him get a pension of some kind.

CB: But … “don’t you remember how many….”

JB: Yeah, “how many times I was sick” or something. I wrote back and said, “I don’t remember that much about you being any sicker than the rest of us, I don’t think.” So that didn’t do him any good.

The one that made mad was [name omitted]. He was a machine gunner. And how he ever got in that, I don’t know. But we were… we hadn’t even gone up front yet. We were living a pretty dry dugout. In reserve. Back two or three, four miles. Probably shelling once in a while, but basically, we had good, dry quarters. And there was something called trench foot. Where you really your feet ….

CB: Oh, yes. That’s the one I’m thinking about.

JB: You’re thinking about [name omitted]. Nobody knows to this day, when we had perfectly dry quarters how he come up with trench foot. The only way he could have done it was to deliberately sleep and eat and walk with his socks soaked in water. There was no need for it.

CB: He did it himself.

JB: But before we ever went on combat, why he went back with trench foot and never rejoined us again.

MJD: Some guys were desperate to get out of it.

JB: Yes. On the other hand, we had a sergeant, Dave Silverman, who was one of the best non-coms I ever saw. A Jewish boy. He was a buck sergeant. He didn’t have to carry the machine gun. But he usually wound up carrying it. Dave was as nice as they came.

Never was… race, now here, too, I was never around any blacks. Heck, when I was growing up, there weren’t any blacks in Cass or … well, Morgan, yes… but Cass, Schuyler, Brown county. I knew nothing about them. And then one night in England, a couple of our captains were out bicycling. And they were jumped by some blacks.

And a jeep came roaring up, [and someone yelled] “Doc! Where are you? I need you!”

“What do you need?”

“Well, we got some people who have been stabbed.”

[I thought] “Oh, my God.” So I grabbed my first aid kit and jumped in the jeep. Thankfully, by the time I got there, they’d had some other medics and some ambulances there.

But they were just out bicycling, and they got jumped by … a bunch of blacks. How many, I don’t know. But then I had to go on road … they went looking for them, naturally, who did it. And I was on road patrol that night with … the driver was from North Carolina, lieutenant was from Mississippi, and the gunner was from Louisiana.

Whee! If we had found anybody who had even a dark sunburn, he was dead! Oh, them people were just completely irrational. Lt. Roberts. And he’s a nice guy. But if we had found anybody who was black, they would have killed him first and asked questions afterward.

MJD: Oh, dear. It was good you didn’t find anybody.

JB: They were just raving like maniacs, and I was sitting back there in my jeep [saying to myself] “Hope they don’t find anybody. Hope they don’t find anybody.”

We didn’t, thankfully.

Honeycutt was from North Carolina, Shirley was from Louisiana, and Roberts was from Mississippi. Boy, they were just absolutely ….

CB: We met him in Springfield when he came home, and I was … Bud went. Your mom?

JB: No. Just you and Bud, I think.

CB: Yes.

MJD: At the rail station?

CB: Yes. [Laughs] And the train was late …

JB: Was it?

CB: And, oh, my gosh, we were just all upset.

MJD: You about went to pieces, waiting for him to get there?

CB: Yes.

MJD: [To Jack] And you had taken the train from …?

JB: Chicago. I had taken a train from… we landed at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. And came across, and I got my discharge out of Chicago. And caught the… Green Diamond, wasn’t it? Or was it the Abraham Lincoln? One of the streamliners.

CB: I think it was the Green Diamond.

MJD: Was the train moving fast enough for you then?

JB: No. No.

MJD: Full of servicemen, I suppose?

JB: Yes.

CB: Yes, and he was one of the last ones off. [I kept asking] “Where are you? Where are you?” And finally he came.

MJD: So Bud was there to drive you home because you two were probably impossible to distract.

CB: Yes.

JB: Yes. When did Bud get his discharge? He got it….

CB: A couple months before you did.

JB: Is that all?

CB: Well, he, let’s see… he got it earlier because of his frozen feet.

JB: Yes. He was home for Grandpa Hierman’s funeral, but did he have to go back after that?

CB: Well, yes, because there was – when I was staying with your mom and dad, there wasn’t anybody there. Bud wasn’t …

MJD: He went back to the service even with his frozen feet?

JB: No. Well, I mean ...

MJD: He was still in service but not…

JB: Yes, I think he was on furlough and hadn’t been discharged yet.

When was Grandpa Hierman’s funeral?

CB: I got to think about it … I know Bud was home then.

MJD: So when were you formally discharged?

JB: Two days, let’s see, how’s that now?

MJD: Oh, a month before you were married…

JB: [Laughs] February 26th.

MJD: For Dad, it was several years. I think he was even called up for Korea.

JB: Was he? Yes? He had to stay in the reserves.

CB: He had to, or he did?

MJD: Well, I think he had to.

JB: We had a choice. They gave us a choice if we wanted to really sign up for the reserves, they were saying how much money you could make by training once a month and all this, and I said, “Forget it. Just give me my discharge. Forget it. Forget it. Forget it.”

CB: You didn’t have a job then.

JB: But they said that even though you were in the inactive reserve, I know it came out once, when Korea started, that they might have to dip into the pool. You were still eligible.

I wasn’t on active reserve at all.

MJD: That wouldn’t have happened for too many guys, I wouldn’t think.

JB: I would have thought so. There were some. Bob Sample got called up again. Of course, I think he stayed in the National Guard or something. Them’s the guys they … the guys signed up for reserve and were drawing money, them’s the ones they got. But I think we were in the inactive reserves for X number of years, but no training, no money, no nothing.

CB: But he was telling you about being in college, you know. He gets some credits for being in the army.

JB: Oh, yes. I think I got about three semesters of credits in nine months.

CB: So, I really wanted him to go to college, but I tell you there was no way. Because we wanted to get married, and …

MJD: Even with the GI Bill?

JB: Yes.

CB: Even with the GI Bill.

JB: Could have, I guess. Some of them did.

MJD: The GI Bill would be valid even if you got married or not?

JB: Yes. A lot of them did. I didn’t want to.

CB: You should have, but…

JB: Aunt Lillian, wanted me to come – she offered to let us come to Los Angeles and go out there, too.

MJD: Would you change it now, knowing the way life worked?

JB: No, I can’t complain about life. I would have been better off with a college education.

CB: You couldn’t get to be a bank president now without a college education.

JB: No.

MJD: And in those times, I’m not sure you could have gotten there without some of the experiences you had. Living in the community, working at Burruses, having some training in bookkeeping. And I’m sure the service was a big part of it.

The town was supportive when you came back, weren’t they?

JB: Yes. Yes. Yes.

CB: Oh, yes.

JB: But we used to laugh. You know, after the war was over, why, they started counseling as to what your military service prepared you for in civilian life. And the infantryman, they came back laughing, and they said, “the only thing they could offer us was big game hunter.”

That’s about true! They had survival skills. They were just laughing about that.

CB: Since we have missed this year’s reunion, four guys of the ten have called. And of course we’ve gotten cards. They are so close. And the wives are, too. We’ve gotten close because of that.

MJD: Well, it’s a fraternity you hope you never really have.

JB: You’re right. Yes! Jimmy Headland found my first gray hair.

That was after the war was over. Just about the time of Hiroshima maybe, why, one day he said, “What’ve you got here?” He pulled it out and showed it to me.

Of course, I can always remember my dad being gray. He turned gray real young. I can’t remember him any other way.

MJD: Well, isn’t there an old theory that if you pull them out you get ten more where that one was?

JB: I don’t know! But he didn’t think about that. He was just having fun needling me.

CB: And he remembered it till dying day.

JB: Yes. Yes. Jimmy …

CB: Jack wrote his wife reminiscences of their army life.

JB: Yes. After she called me and told me that he had died. Kind a repeat of this …

CB: And his grandson read that letter, and he is so thankful to Jack for writing that because his grandpa never talked it.

MJD: Well, Dad would talked when I asked him.

JB: Yes.

MJD: But he didn’t bring it up.

JB: It’s easier to talk to somebody else that’s been there.

MJD: Yes.

JB: That’s been through it. It’s easier. When we get together. When we have a reunion, we sit around and lie to each other like mad. But if you haven’t been there, you really can’t appreciate it.

Now, another…. I’ll even go further than that. An infantryman cannot really open up to somebody that was in ordnance, quartermaster, even the medics behind the lines back in the hospitals. Combat engineers, yes. But the regular engineers, no. I mean. It’s just different.

MJD: I read a generalization in … I forget whose book it was. Maybe it was Tom Brokaw’s… the infantryman’s view of the war was this area around him.

JB: Right.

MJD: This is the war.

JB: That’s it.

MJD: An airman’s view of the war was a big picture. It was a more remote… maybe he could be more philosophical. But the infantrymen were close…

JB: Content on day-to-day survival. Where his buddy was on the right, and where his buddy was on the left.

MJD: And it’s a different war that you had …

JB: It is!

MJD: Than the pilot had.

JB: Right. But still, there would be more similarities there, with a pilot. See, there’s fifteen thousand men in an infantry division. Of them, oh, I guess 9,000 would be considered combat troops. The other six are all support troops. And I would say that there’s more a feeling of kinship with an infantryman with a combat pilot than there is with an infantry with his own ordnance or quartermaster sitting back here some miles.

MJD: Because you’re the ones being shot at.

JB: Right. Yeah, right. They’re the ones, too. The air crews have taken their beating. We used to see them go over and be darned glad to see them. We hated when we would see one of them get knocked down. I mean, we could… even though we were jealous of them, “think of those lucky S.O.B.’s going back to England tonight to a warm bed and hot food.” But still, we were glad to see them up there.

MJD: They kept a cover over you.

JB: Right. That’s right.

MJD: And you didn’t see many German aircraft, did you?

JB: No.

MJD: At that time, there wasn’t much left of the Luftwaffe.

JB: England took most of the beating on that.

But there is a difference. If you haven’t been there, you really can’t experience it.

MJD: Well, how can you explain to Monica, Mike and Ben what it’s like …

JB: I don’t.

MJD: … to have somebody pointing a gun at you?

JB: You don’t. You don’t.

CB: And at the age they are. You can’t imagine.

JB: You just … it’s just something that until you experience it…

MJD: And you didn’t think about that when you were that age though, either, did you?

JB: No. Huh-uh. Huh-uh.

CB: You gotta to do what you gotta do.

JB: You were just glad to see the sun come up every morning.

MJD: Most guys were glad to enlist? Glad to go. “Glad” is not the right word.

JB: All kinds. Some of them I think were drug in, kicking and screaming. And others, like I said, Flaherty, he was gung-ho. He couldn’t wait to get over, and he’s the one that crashed.

CB: Yes, I can remember you didn’t object very much, and you had two brothers who were already…

JB: Well, Burruses offered me a deferment.

CB: And I just don’t why he didn’t take that.

JB: Well, Bud and Chas for one thing…

MJD: What did your mom think?

CB: Well, your mom didn’t even know you were offered one!

JB: I know it. I didn’t tell her.

But it’s just a different … cup of tea, that’s all.

That first night …

CB: Well, the marked the ones that didn’t go. Painted the mailbox…

JB: Painted their mailbox yellow, and their fence posts yellow.

But you’ll never forget that first night. When we moved up. The first time. We relieved the 99th Division. And that night – you’re here, and there’s nothing between you and this German over here, sitting over here in the Siegfried Line, looking at you. With a lot of guns at his disposal. I mean, it’s just…

MJD: Right then, your training didn’t seem like near enough.

JB: No. You dug your fox hole a little deeper. Or pulled your blackout curtains a little closer.

CB: Carried your Bible.

MJD: Did that sense of “I’m here now” ever go away?

JB: You got a little more used to it.

CB: I don’t know how you could.

JB: Not completely. But you would get a little more used to it.

CB: [Holding a book] Here’s the Bible he carried all through. It was used, wasn’t it. MJD: You did use it, didn’t you?

JB: It’s just a different cup of tea, it’s just …

CB: And Molly, he wasn’t baptized. I didn’t know it.

MJD: You wouldn’t have let him go like that, if you had known that, would you?

CB: No. His parents and Bud and Charles baptized but never did get around to baptizing Jack.

MJD: When did you correct that?

CB: Well, just as soon as he got home.

JB: When we got married.

CB: And he was … I had nothing to do with him wanting to join a church. He was ready.

JB: That’s for sure.

MJD: By then, I imagine you were convinced.

[Reading Jack’s notes in the front of the Bible] What’s so special about page 271?

JB: You have to follow it all the way through. There’s a … it’s kind of an evangelism story. It’s rather lengthy. A course I took one time.

CB: It’s got the real important passages.

JB: For basically for evangelism is what it is.

CB: The reasons you need Christ.

MJD: How often did you get to read this?

JB: I carried it with me pretty regular. I generally carried it. I had a medical… I don’t know what they called it … first aid kits. I had a regular vest-like, and it would fit in there real easy.

Along with the souvenir pistol I carried. If I had been captured with that, they probably would have shot me. I wasn’t supposed to do that. But, the first German pistol that my platoon captured off a German officer they gave to me.

MJD: Why?

CB: Because he couldn’t … they all had one.

JB: No! They didn’t have any German pistols!

CB: Oh, no, but you didn’t have …

JB: This was a souvenir. They would like to have kept it, but they said, “Doc, you can have it.”

MJD: Why did they want you to have it?

CB: Because he didn’t have any gun.

JB: I don’t know. Appreciation for treating their athlete’s foot and their blisters maybe. I don’t know.

Oh, a couple of them were arguing about it, and they just said, “Aw, Doc. You can have it. We’ll get some more later maybe.”

I put that on the bottom of my medical bag. Probably a stupid thing to do, but… I still got it.

MJD: You do still have it?

JB: Yes. It wasn’t a Luger. I wasn’t that lucky. They gave it to me, and I had it silver-plated.

MJD: Who was it captured from? An officer? Would they have had a pistol?

JB: Hmm… either an officer or a high-ranking non-com. One of the two. I don’t remember. I wasn’t there when they captured him. They brought it in that night.

MJD: Did you ever treat German prisoners?

JB: No, I never did. Well,… wait a minute, was that a German prisoner or a Polish DP…? No, I don’t believe I ever did. Some when back to the aid station.

MJD: But medics did do that?

JB: Yes.

MJD: Were you obligated to?

JB: Yes. Right. That was part of the deal.

Didn’t I…? I know I did. Wrapped up someone’s head? Couple of Polish DP’s… one of them got burned…

MJD: DP’s? What does that stand for?

JB: Displaced persons.

Oh, they were thick. See, they brought everybody back to help with German industry. And they treated them like dirt, too. As long as they could work, they would feed them once in a while.

MJD: And when the war was over, everybody moved around again.

JB: Yes. We kept our Polish houseboy, though, for quite a while. He was glad to have it. We fed him well, and he’d make our beds and sweep the room.

MJD: In fact, that story I read that I was telling you about, on the anniversary of the end of the war. The German boy that was captured by the Americans, he was a kitchen boy for a while for some American soldiers.

JB: Overseas? They used a bunch of them in Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. They were still there when I came home I think.

CB: Wasn’t he the one who had never seen gum or fruit?

JB: That was in England is where we had … the English. That’s again a part about my respect for … Christmas dinner, we invited a bunch of the real young English kids. They had never seen … some of them had never seen an orange before.

We had oranges for them. And invited them in…

MJD: They’d never seen one?

JB: They’d been blockaded for, you know… they couldn’t bring in … what ships they had had to bring in armaments. And they hadn’t seen an orange before. One kid didn’t know what to do with it when we gave it to him.

I mean, then, boy, I tell you! We didn’t go because they were short of food, but you’d go into a English restaurant, and they would mix sawdust in with a lot of their food.

MJD: Just to make it go farther?

JB: Yes. Uh huh. Yes. Fish and chips. They did have some fish, I guess, that they managed to catch. We tried not to … we tried to give them something else in place of it, but …. No, those English kids that night, they’d never seen an orange. I’d say they were probably first graders, first and second graders.

But there’s a sad side to that story, too. Somebody in the kitchen had goofed off, and I don’t know what they got, if they got soap in the wrong place… but everybody got the GI’s that ate that meal that night. And I know those kids got it too, but all night long -- Bang! Somebody would be running out, and “Oops! I didn’t make it.”

MJD: Oh, no!

JB: It was pathetic.

CB: I’ll bet it was soap.

JB: It might have been something, but the cooks had goofed someplace. Man, that was a sick outfit that night. Something in the food that wasn’t right. Everybody was up running around in the middle of the night. At least I think I made it, though. But some didn’t, though. It was horrible.

And all those little English kids, gosh, they just…. They just hadn’t seen anything. They were kids. I felt sorry for them.

MJD: So you got treated well by the English, then?

JB: Yes. I had no complaints at all. French was the one I came out prejudiced against.

And probably, after that incident that I told you about, I probably came out prejudiced against blacks. We didn’t have any in our division. We were all white, naturally…

And I do re – You get me to talking, and I don’t know when to stop!

But we were … I guess… we were moving up for the very first time, maybe. And we were in open, semi … grain bed you know type of deal, crammed in there like sardines, and it was raining, cold. And we knew where we going because I think we had left our duffel bags behind. And we were going up this road. Pitch dark. And, oh, a good quarter of a mile in front of us, an artillery shell burst in the field. Our truck came to a screeching halt, this old black guy stepped out of the cab, stepped on the edge of that grain bed and said, “Fellows, this is as far as I’m going because I belong to quartermaster.”

Our old first sergeant was sitting there. He actually took his carbine. I think he put it in his mouth. He said, “I got news for you, you black so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so. We’re not walking from here. Get back in that cab!” Vroom!

Old Art Burkman. He and I were the only ones from Illinois. The old first sergeant.

CB: And he was such a good guy, but he drinks too much.

JB: Drinks like a fish. Ran a tavern for a long time.

CB: Ran a tavern when he got home.

MJD: Oh, that would been the wrong choice for a guy like that.

JB: He was a darned good first sergeant.

CB: He is such a guy. Such a nice guy.

JB: He is. Art’s all right.

CB: This was year was the first year that he…

JB: He missed. I think he said that Alice is quite sick. His wife.

MJD: Somebody does a newsletter for your group, do they?

JB: No, not really. We kind of pass around at Christmas. Write to each other things like that.

CB: We usually…we’ve gotten to write to them now at Thanksgiving time.

JB: Yes. And they write back at Christmas.

CB: And we get nice letters in answer. Otherwise, you know, they cross in the mail.

JB: We were lucky. Our old mailman kept a list of all the home addresses. So at one time, I think we had eighty or ninety that were valid. We lost track of a lot of people. Didn’t have them to start with. But he kept track of a lot of the home addresses. So, gosh, they started getting together not too long after that.

MJD: That’s great.

JB: Yes, it is.

MJD: When was your first reunion?

CB: You didn’t go.

JB: I didn’t get there for several years because I’d always go on vacation. I would go fishing. You know, I only had a week or two off. But the first one I knew about was down in Louisville. I called them. I remember I called them. Finnegan had it. Finnegan and Joe Cower. So I called down there and talked to a lot of them.

But then I think the first one I went to was in Peoria. The old company commander was working in Peoria at that time as an auditor for somebody.

And we drove … no, you weren’t with me. I went up there to a bank convention.

CB: Yes, that’s right.

JB: And then I went up to his office. We sat there and talked for about half the afternoon. I didn’t go to all the bank convention, but would have.

And after that, why, I started going fairly regularly.

CB: They were every other year for a long, long time.

JB: So many of our outfit was from out east. It would be two days’ travel time and … so we started going out…

CB: We’ve been to every one since you retired.

JB: Since I retired, I haven’t missed a one until year before last. And then this one. But we’ve been to Louisiana, Boston, several places in Pennsylvania.

MJD: And had one here.

JB: Yes. And had one here.

CB: Chicago.

JB: Chicago. Had a beauty in Chicago with the old first sergeant.

But, like I said, they’re down to ten.

CB: And next year…

JB: I don’t know. I think next year’s ought to be a bomb because the kid from Louisiana wanted to have it again. Why, the old Henry Shank. Henry’s in pretty good shape as far as I know, and he said, “Man, that’s three thousand miles for me.” I think he’s wrong on that. It can’t be that far. From Pennsylvania to Louisiana. About two thousand maybe. But that’s still…

CB: Well, we had the best time down there. When we went, they had crawdads that they dug.

JB: Not dug. Captured. Well, what do you want to say?

CB: Caught?

JB: Eat them just like shrimp.

CB: And those girls … they have one daughter that … she was telling how they do it, you know. They just throw those stakes out and…

JB: Then get the crawdads!

He raised rice. What else did ol’ J.P. raise? He had a farm down there. They’d flood the field, and then they get these crawdads. I don’t know how much work it had to be to get them suckers ready! They taste like shrimp, but they’re so little.

CB: This is a picture…this is that sweet little girl. She was coming around and showing everybody…

MJD: How to eat the crawdads.

CB: And she’s been bringing her folks to the reunion. And now next year, we’re supposed to go out there again.

JB: I think it’s about my turn. I thought about it.

CB: Yes. We were going to invite them and have it at Urbana.

JB: Make it closer for those out east, you know.

CB: They have so many things to do up there, and Roger and Sara were going to help us. But then, everything changed.

JB: We used to make a big deal about it, but anymore now, we just sit around and lie to each other all the time.

CB: They don’t want to do much…

MJD: Yes, but you know when you’re lying, too.

CB: They don’t want to do much except just sit and talk.

MJD: Well, they’ve earned the right to do that.

CB: That day [pointing to a photo], the senior citizens have a dance at four o’clock in the afternoon, not very far from where they were at that house. They invited us all to come over, and we didn’t have to pay to get in, but they had one restriction: we couldn’t be wearing shorts.

All of us had on shorts. It was about a hundred degrees. And they made an exception.

JB: And let us in. That was fun!

CB: That had a dance that was …

JB: Cajun, ol’ Cajun music. Man, they had a pretty good beat. Them old boys were out there kicking up a storm. I enjoyed that!

CB: They taught us how, and we were out there dancing, and that was so much fun.

JB: I enjoyed that down there. I really did.

He was as far south as you can go in Louisiana and stay on the road. South and west of New Orleans.

CB: And, Molly, we could not find a restaurant where they didn’t just load it down with Cajun seasoning.

JB: Oh! What are those peppers?

MJD: Jalape™o?

JB: Yes.

CB: Yes.

JB: They would put them in their hush puppies and everything else.

MJD: And that’s mild.

JB: Yes, compared to some, I guess.

CB: And then we went through some kind of a pepper factory.

JB: Yes, that’s where…

MJD: Where they make Tabasco?

JB: Yes. We’d been to that before we got there.

CB: Yes, we got a little bottle of Tabasco sauce.

JB: We had a few Cajuns in our outfit. I mean, the old French Bourgois, and this guy’s name is Joliboix. And another one, what’s this guy’s name?

CB: Geoffroy.

JB: We had a Joliboix and a Bourgois in the medics from out in that area.

CB: They came up with it. We didn’t have his address, but they caught with it when they were here. This was the first time…

JB: …reunion they came was the one here because I put it in the Legion magazine. I got tickled. Remember, we just came in the house from someplace, and he said, he wanted to know if this was Mr. Burrus, and I said, “Yes.”

And said – this was a lady talking, said, “Well …”

CB: You could hardly understand her.

JB: Boy, well, they have a brogue! I’m telling you. But she said, “Is this 69th reunion World War I or World War II?” And I started laughing.

She said, “Well, my husband was in that.”

Well, the name didn’t ring a bell at all to me because he was at the mortar platoon and generally they were … I was with a machine gun platoon, and while we intermixed, I didn’t know a lot of the mortar men, because when we got combat, they was behind us. And I don’t know when J.P. joined us. I said, “Are you sure he was in this company? Company D?”

She said, “Yes.”

I said, “Let me talk to him.” He come on the line, and [I asked him] “J.P., who do you remember in the company?”

He said, “Oh, Sgt. Gutshall…” and he started rattling them off. And I said, “You got the right outfit! Come ahead!”

MJD: And he was looking for directions out here or what?

JB: He was wanting to know if it was the same outfit. Whether it was World War I or World War II.

CB: So he came.

JB: He came. And he made quite a few, and then he got sick and missed a couple, but I believe he was back again this year.

CB: And he’s got a younger wife.

JB: Yes.

MJD: And he saw guys he remembered, then?

JB: When he started rattling off names and I knew -- old Barney Gutshall. He was … I always hear from Barney. He was from the state of Virginia. He’s a nice guy.

CB: They were from how many states?

JB: When they were here, quite a few. A lot of our guys were east – Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey.

CB: And we just didn’t know how we were … what we could show them in Illinois, but we had the biggest crowd that they’ve ever had. Here in Illinois.

And we did crazy things. We … Tim Huey came out with his big

JB: … Big ladder truck. Took us all on a ride through town. [Laughs]

CB: One guy drove it! Drove it! And we went through town, and they just couldn’t believe it. Everybody was running out on their front porch, waving to them, you know, in Arenzville. [Laughs] And when we got letters and thank-yous, I’ll bet everybody mentioned….

JB: … Mentioned the fire truck ride. They had old Whitey Pearson turned the steering wheel on the back end, you know.

CB: And they let them, you know, blow that old horn.

JB: And blow the siren.

CB: It was hilarious.

MJD: You probably couldn’t have done that in too many towns.

JB: No, we couldn’t have. No, that’s right.

CB: And, you know, Tim thought of that.

JB: Yes, he did that.

CB: He called and… he knew we were wondering what in the world two days … we hosted it at the Holiday Inn in Jacksonville, but they all came here on Sunday. We had a catered dinner…

JB: Catered by the Brass Door in Carrolton.

CB: …and we were wondering what we could do in the afternoon.

MJD: And he called up then.

CB: Yes! He called, wanting to know. He offered us to bring it out.

JB: And old Nick Etze, he’s a volunteer fireman in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania. He really got a buzz out of it.

CB: Everybody standing on it. Hooping and a hollering.

JB: We had a ball.

CB: Oh, gosh!

MJD: Did you get a picture of that?

CB: Oh, yes, that’s in that.

MJD: In your folder?

CB: Yes.

JB: Oh, I’ve got it.

CB: In that Arenzville write-up about it.

MJD: Oh, in this one maybe [picks up an issue of The Triopia Tribune.]

CB: Yes.

MJD: Let me take a look.

CB: We got two of them. If you want one, you can …

MJD: If I could photocopy one and get it back to you?

CB: Yes.

MJD: That would be great. I know I’ve read it before.

CB: Yes. Oh, here [it is].

MJD: [Laughs]

CB: [Laughs] And they mention that about every reunion.

JB: Yes, they do. They haven’t forgotten that.

MJD: Well, you look like a pretty civilized group here.

JB: Yes.

CB: I think they had – what? Twenty-eight couples?

JB: We had about 50-some altogether.

CB: Yes. It was a big bunch.

MJD: That’s probably the best use that ladder truck’s had.

JB: Yes, I think so, too.

We’ve been in Fort Wayne. We’ve been in… we got one ol’ boy that’s a judge now, out in Massachusetts. He hosted it a few years ago.

CB: And now he’s retired, but you wouldn’t believe some of the easy money he makes.

JB: Oh, gosh, just to stay …

CB: … on the weekends, to be on call.

JB: Just serving on weekends. Spot assignments. The money he makes for…

MJD: For filling in?

CB: Yes!

JB: Yes, filling in.

CB: This year and last year, too, and the year before, when we were there. Well, he got four hundred dollars for just for coming in just …

JB: … a matter of hours.

CB: …couple hours thing.

MJD: Kind of an overtime.

CB: So he paid for all of it.

JB: He paid for the whole dinner for everybody. Pat Syracus.

CB: They said he did it again this year.

JB: Yes. He’s a dandy.

CB: Not that many are wealthy, I don’t think.

JB: I think Cecile does pretty well, though. Because he has his private plane, you know. I think he had … he had his private plane didn’t he? Cecile?

CB: Yes. He had his private plane one year. We think he’s got money. Made his … well, he told us he made his money in shoes.

JB: Yes.

CB: Flor … let’s see… what is that real good kind of shoe?

MJD: Flor…?

CB: Florsheim.

JB: He was big in that. I don’t know if he was a distributor or what he was. But he had his own private plane for a while.

Burkman was a tavern owner.

What does Mason do?

CB: Oh, I don’t know.

JB: He changed his name. It was Masonovic or something while he was in the … we got several of them that changed their names.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

MJD: [Looking at photo] And there are several guys from Bardstown, Kentucky.

JB: Harry Hagan.

CB: Oh, man, we had a good time down there, too.

JB: Yes, but he died… he hosted the one after we did, and he died before he could host it.

CB: His wife went ahead and had it.

JB: His wife, and then Ed Heckel stepped in, his wife and family stepped in. Harry was a heck of a good Joe, too.

We just had so many of them that were just….

CB: And we got a tour of the old houses in Bardstown. We were invited in for tea in one that was the most elegant house I’ve ever been in.

JB: Harry was just a…

MJD: All that bourbon money.

JB: Yes.

CB: He had a priest that liked bourbon.

JB: Yes. His brother was a priest. He helped host it. He was from that monastery across the river in Indiana. Not too far from Bardstown …

[unrelated conversation omitted]

JB: Harry owned a dairy. He was quite a civic leader down there.

CB: And they had one of these old houses that had a porch all the way around it. That’s where we ate. They cooked their own food. Their family helped, too, and, oh, it was wonderful!

JB: It was just … the whole thing was just great.

MJD: It would be an honor to host a group like that.

JB: Ed Heckel stepped in. He lived there in Louisville, too. But then Ed died about a year or two later.

CB: Yes.

JB: He was complaining then about his arthritis. “Old arthur’s got ahold of me,” and it turned out to be cancer of the bone.

So Ed didn’t last much longer after that.

CB: No. He died within a year.

JB: Yes. I think so, too.

[unrelated conversation omitted] CB: Have you been to Bardstown?

MJD: Yes.

JB: Bardstown’s a nice town. York, Pennsylvania’s another nice town. We’ve been there, too.

MJD: Was that another reunion group?

JB: Yes.

[unrelated conversation omitted]

• END -

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