I went to officer candidate school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in June 1942. I graduated from Fort Sill in ninety days—what they called the “ninety-day wonders”—became a second lieutenant, and they assigned me to a tank destroyer battalion. I asked them why I wasn't assigned to a field artillery unit, and they said, “You're too old for field artillery, so we had to put you with the tank destroyers.” Actually, the tank destroyer command had just started the school. It was a new concept. They needed officers. So I went through most of the war with the tank destroyer battalion in Europe.
When we went across, it was a very memorable journey. We went across on one of the so-called liberty ships. I was quite impressed by the amount of armament, and there was a navy officer on board, and I said, “What is this? What's going on? This seems peculiar.” He told me he was there on a guard ship for a troop convoy. I worked out a deal with him, since he had limited personnel, that we would take some of the personnel from the tank destroyer battalion and put them on watch at night for submarines. We had our submarine alert practices at dusk because that's the time when submarines generally surface.
We started out from New York Harbor with a convoy, and we had a right lead ship. Three days out, another convoy came out of the dusk from Boston and joined us to form a large convoy, which I understand was the largest convoy that ever went to Europe [for the Normandy invasion]. Our ship was still the right lead ship of the convoy. Along the line, we started dropping depth charges when we suspected submarines below. We didn't see any evidence of any, but I understood later on that somewhere a submarine had penetrated the heart of the convoy and sunk at least one or two ships.
When we got to the British Isles, the convoy peeled off to different ports. Our ship went directly to Cherbourg, France, and that was our first sight of what the war was about, all the wreckage that we saw. We debarked on a smaller landing ship and went to the coast of Normandy, and that's where we started our campaign.
I was finance officer for the trip, which is a menial job. I got rid of a safe that had been entrusted to me, which I never even looked at. I got rid of that at Cherbourg, and, of course, the unit was put on sort of guard duty against German attacks from the neighboring Jersey and Guernsey Islands until they decided to deploy us. Then we were moved north to the town of Geilenkirchen in northern Germany, near the border with Holland.
We were attached to the British Second Army at the time because they were right on the border of the American Ninth Army. And, of course, the activity, when we got up there, was very heavy. It was just a strange sight to see German planes flying over, strafing, dropping bombs. I saw American planes flying over, and for some reason you never saw the two get together. One came, one went, and you don't know why the two didn't meet each other in midair somewhere.
I recall as we were being led into Germany to the beginning of the Siegfried Line, the motorcyclist that came to us just got lost. He was leading a whole group. So I stopped the motorcycle and said, “Do you know where you're going?” He said, “No.” I said, “Then get behind me and I'll try to figure out where we're going.”
I was riding in a jeep. Behind me were a whole bunch of tank-destroyer vehicles mounted with seventy-five-millimeter guns or ninety-millimeter guns. It was Thanksgiving Day 1944 and we were on the Siegfried Line, and I had my first hot meal standing up inside of a German pillbox. The word “pillbox” is what they described as a very strong concrete fortification built by the Germans, which was certainly capable of thwarting any direct tank shells, it was that strong. But we fought our way slowly, bit by bit, and we penetrated the Siegfried Line.
I remember I had gone to take a shower at a coal mine, and as I came back, I checked into my radio, just to check in. My commanding officer barked, “Silence your radio and return immediately.” I wondered what happened. As I was heading back to the battalion area, I found out the Germans had invaded Belgium, and our mission was to reinforce First Army and contain the attack.
We got into the town of Marche, Belgium, in the Ardennes Forest. It was very cold. There was plenty of snow on the ground. This was the first time I saw the American army on the defensive. Division headquarters pulled back. We stayed forward, and the Germans had been in that town the night before. All civilians were sleeping in the cellars because of shelling, and, in fact, I took an upstairs place. You can't very well pitch tents in congested areas, but there was plenty of shelling, and it got so heavy that the glass in the room just shattered right in front of me. So I went down to the cellar for the rest of the night, more like on a stairway, because it was too crowded down below.
Slowly we repelled the German attack and straightened out the front line. It was very hectic. Everything was moving very fast. Tank destroyers got hit, were immediately replaced. It was so cold that the water in my canteen froze. The temperature was about twenty degrees below zero in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. We straightened out the line, and when we did that I went back to Ninth Army, 13th Corps, and I was transferred to the Sixth Tank Destroyer Group. This was a break for me because I had always wanted to get out of the battalion. You couldn't get a promotion there. You just had to do what you could.
The corps commander decided that he would try to do what had been done in Third Army successfully, so I was chosen, as one of the liaison officers, to be attached to the Fifth Armored Division in a final push to the Elbe River in eastern Germany. I asked for Combat Command A, because I figured that would be the one which got the most action, and I was correct. It was commanded by a brigadier general, while the others were full colonels.
We moved along across the rivers Ruhr and Rhine. There were no bridges, so we built pontoon bridges. The bridges were manned by combat engineers. They were told to shoot any floating mines that may be in the river, or any other suspicious object. This was a one-way bridge, twenty-four hours a day, crossing the pontoon bridge into the main area of Germany, from which we would launch the final and main attack for the end of it.
Combat Command B and Combat Command C moved forward. My Combat Command A was in reserve, and I was rather unhappy because it was just too far behind. Then Combat Command B and Combat Command C stopped, and Combat Command A, we just roared up our tanks and off we went, passing through B and C, and took the lead to the Elbe River. We were the armored spearhead for the corps unit, followed by two infantry divisions, anywhere from twenty to forty miles behind us.
We were very successful in moving fast. We never stopped. We just kept on going, and German soldiers were passing alongside of us with their hands over their heads. They had gotten rid of their helmets and their guns, but we couldn't take them because we were not equipped to take prisoners any more than those in Desert Storm. Our tactics were to get to the objective as quickly as possible, and prisoners were out of the question. We just couldn't do that. That was not part of our mission.
I recall when we got to an airfield, there were six German planes during a two-hour period that were trying to land, never dreaming that the American forces had moved so fast to that area. We shot down every one of them. It was a huge brand of fire. One plane caught fire, careened out of sight, and crashed into one of our armored vehicles, killing all of the crew.
We reached the Elbe River and waited for the Russians to meet us. The Germans were on the other side. Day after day I would stroll up to the river, look at it. I still saw no sign of activity, no sign of the Russians. There was a bridge. I remember my commanding officer said, “You can be sure they [the Germans] won't let us take that bridge. They'll blow it up.” And sure enough, as I was turning my radio on, there was a loud explosion. The general's aide came rushing up to me. They had blown the bridge right in our face.
Later on, the able-bodied Germans, rather than surrender to the Russians, swam across this wide river, about as wide as the Hudson River, to surrender to the Americans. But in about a week or ten days, the Russians finally caught up and stayed put. We could easily have gone on to Berlin in this situation. Winston Churchill said, �
�Let's shake hands with the Russians as far east as possible.” But [General] Eisenhower held up the entire front, knowing that we would give up this sector of Germany to the Russians, according to the agreement of Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam.
So we sat there, a large area that later became East Germany. It could have been a lot shorter if we decided to hold the ground that we had taken. But political agreements take precedence over any military tactics. Eventually we gave this area over to the Russians. We moved further west, further back, and then we occupied our sector in Bavaria, which was the mission of the American forces.
At that time, of course, all units were disbanded, and I was given an assignment with the provost marshal officer, Third Army, which was commanded by General George Patton.
The job I took over was as a security officer for the Third Army at the prisoner of war hospital. It was an area of German military hospitals ranging from Munich south to Salzburg, Austria. The headquarters was in Bad Tölz, and General Patton took over the headquarters that had been held by the German Wehrmacht. He made that his headquarters in the town of Bad Tölz.
My mission was security control, to supervise these prisoners of war who were in the hospitals and disabled—typical enough. During that time, I went over to Dachau, that infamous camp where they had a lot of American DPs, or displaced persons. As I went through that camp, I went into one of the furnace areas where they burned bodies; you could see footprints on the wall. I repeat, on the wall, not on the ground, where they had stacked bodies high. I had the mistaken impression that one of the reasons why the Nazis had starved Jewish people was so they could get them so skinny they could fit into those very narrow furnaces. It just happened that those were the narrow furnaces that I saw, but there were others that were much larger. But, of course, starving them to death meant that they could cremate them easier after they gassed them.
We cleaned out Dachau and got all the displaced persons out of there, and we filled it up with German SS troops. I had gotten to the commander of the hospital, who was a full colonel in the German army, and he spoke very good English, so we were able to talk.
As we got friendly, he told me a story that I have never yet seen in any of the history books: how Germany started World War II. It was not started by Adolf Hitler. World War II was started by some elite Germans who were never satisfied in the Athletic Club in Berlin. They were plotting to revive Germany as a military power. This full colonel, a medical doctor, was offered the job of being chief of all the German medical forces. He refused. Instead of being a full colonel, he could easily have been a major general, but he turned it down.
When they chose Hitler, that was their mistake. He was supposed to be a front man. But he so fired up the German people that he pushed everybody else to the background, and of course the rest is history when you have a madman who thinks he can conquer the world and was not able to do so.
I retired as a reserve officer, which was compulsory at the age of fifty-three. I was a lieutenant colonel. I was forced to retire. That was the law. I have stayed in it as a retired officer subject to recall in case of any national emergency, and it still continues to this day.
Immigration patterns in this decade were greatly affected by the 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression. In addition, quota-law restrictions, first enacted in 1921, finally took full effect. For immigrants in foreign countries seeking visas, this meant that immigration processing was now slowly shifted to US consulates abroad, thus turning them into mini–Ellis Islands. While the US population reached 125 million in 1930, for the remainder of the decade it would only see seven hundred thousand new immigrants arrive, the lowest number since the 1830s. Many of the immigrants who came were Jews fleeing the persecution of Nazi Germany and Hitler's mounting war machine. At home, Americans were hurting economically, as one in four workers were unemployed and many families went hungry. Deporting illegals now became a viable solution as a nation built on growth turned to subtraction to help solve its problems.
KEY HISTORIC EVENTS
1931:
Anti-immigrant campaign begins as the US government sponsors a Mexican repatriation program intended to encourage people to voluntarily move to Mexico, but thousands are deported against their will; more than four hundred thousand Mexicans, both illegal aliens and legal Mexican Americans, are pressured through raids and job denial to leave the United States, many of them children who were US citizens—a similar situation faced today by DREAM Act students (see chapter 12, page 329).
1932: Hitler's antisemitic campaign begins, as Jewish refugees begin fleeing Nazi Germany to the United States and other nations.
1933:
Hitler becomes German chancellor; Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany come to the United States, though barriers imposed by the quota system are not lifted. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is formed by a merger of the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization.
1934:
The Tydings-McDuffie Act, also known as the Philippine Independence Act, is approved by Congress and strips Filipinos of their status as US nationals and restricts Filipino immigration to an annual quota of fifty.
MIGRATION FLOWS
Total legal US immigration in 1930s: 700,000
Top ten emigration countries in this decade: Canada and Newfoundland (162,703), Germany (119,107), Italy (85,053), United Kingdom (61,813), Mexico (32,709), Ireland (28,195), Poland (25,555), Czechoslovakia (17,757), France (13,761), Cuba (10,641)
(See appendix for the complete list of countries.)
FAMOUS IMMIGRANTS
Immigrants who came to America in this decade (not all through Ellis Island), and who would later become famous, include:
Sidor Belarsky, Russia, 1930, singer/composer
Primo “The Ambling Alp” Carnera, Italy, 1930, heavyweight boxer
Lin Yutang, China, 1931, writer
Albert Einstein, Germany, 1933, physicist
Billy Wilder, Austria, 1933, film director
Jack “The Gorgeous Gael” Doyle, Ireland, 1934, boxer/actor
Nigel Bruce, England, 1934, actor (“Dr. Watson”)
Ieoh Ming (I. M.) Pei, China, 1935, architect
Desi Arnaz, Cuba, 1935, bandleader
Hans Bethe, Germany, 1935, Nobel laureate in physics
Edward Teller, Hungary, 1935, nuclear physicist (“father of the hydrogen bomb”)
Wenceslao Moreno (“Senor Wences”), Spain, 1936, ventriloquist
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, India, 1937, astrophysicist
Dick Haymes, Argentina, 1937, singer
Pauline Trigére, France, 1937, fashion designer
Georg and Maria von Trapp and family, Austria, 1938, singers
Henry Kissinger, Germany, 1938, political scientist/diplomat
Enrico Fermi, Italy, 1938, nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate
Lucien Aigner, Hungary/France, 1939, photojournalist
Richard Krebs (“Jan Valtin”), Germany, 1939, spy
Elizabeth Taylor, England, 1939, actress
Mike Nichols, Germany, 1939, film director
Thomas Mann, Germany, 1939, writer
André Previn, Germany, 1939, pianist/conductor/composer
Anne Elisabeth Jane “Liz” Claiborne, Belgium, 1939, fashion designer
She came to America during the Depression from Renazzo, thirty miles north of Bologna. Her father was a stonemason who helped build the subways, highways, and bridges of New York City. Her family settled on Long Island. She had three children and five grandchildren and celebrated her fiftieth wedding anniversary with her husband, George, in Hawaii. “I'm very proud to be interviewed by you,” she said. “I would like to dedicate this in loving memory of my mother and father, Albano and Argia Ardizzoni Nieri, for the sacrifice they made to give us a better life in the United States.”
We lived in a courtyard on a farm. My father had come here in 1923. A friend of his had come to the United States and
kept after my father to come here. He became a foreman in a brick-making factory. I remember when he left. My mother was very sad; we were all crying. She was left there, twenty-six years old with three small children: one at ten months old, I was four, and my other brother was three.
I couldn't quite grasp the reason. I knew that he was going to America. And although my grandparents on both sides of the family didn't live very far, we were still isolated. My grandparents were tenant farmers, and they couldn't take off any time they wanted. They had a horse and buggy, and once in a blue moon they'd come to visit. Fortunately, the other tenant family that lived in the same courtyard with us was very friendly with Mom, and they kept her company and so on because we just couldn't do any traveling.
So we lived on this farm, and you can imagine my mother being very sad because we had no money. Pop had to borrow the money from my mother's father to come here. It was October, just the beginning of the winter setting in. Fortunately, all the supplies had been already bought and provisions made for the winter. We had to do that because we had no form of transportation whatsoever. Mom had my father's bicycle. We had a lot of snow. Renazzo is about the same latitude as New York and Long Island, so we had very severe winters.
We went to school from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon, and then from two to five we'd go to the nuns, the Catholic school, to learn religion, and to learn our prayers, which were taught to us all in Latin, and the masses. During summer vacations, my mother kept us in the Catholic school. We lived right near the church. And the nuns would teach the girls mending, crocheting, knitting, a little cooking.
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