Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  When he finished, the clerk stamped an official paper and handed it to Werner. He was now a naturalized citizen of the United States of America. Werner’s first thought was of how pleased his parents would be—but then, of course, he remembered. He had no way of telling them: not his mother or brothers, with whom he had lost contact, or his father, imprisoned in Berlin.

  Still, Werner felt a huge sense of relief, as did the other new Americans on the ride back to camp. For weeks, there had been much speculation as to what might happen if those graduates who were born in Germany were rushed overseas after graduation before their U.S. citizenship went through. If they were captured, would they still have protection as POWs under the Geneva Conventions? Or would they be executed by the Nazis as traitors or because they were German Jews in the U.S. Army?

  It was early afternoon when they arrived back at camp. The ten men he was to lead on the exercise had waited for him, and they were impatient to get started. The other teams had left long ago. Werner and his men were loaded into the back of a truck, with a canvas cover dropped over the back so they couldn’t see where they were being taken. The truck left them at the edge of a forest with a map, a compass, and nothing else. Werner didn’t recognize any of the names on the map, because they were all located in France—the idea being that it would be more difficult to ask locals for directions. Only by following the map’s topographical contour lines would they get to their destinations.

  Their assignment was to hit all the checkpoints, solve intelligence problems at each one, and get back to camp in no more than forty-eight hours. Anyone showing up after that would have to repeat the exercise. As they were starting off six hours behind everyone else, Werner drove the men hard. At each checkpoint, an examiner handed them an envelope with tasks to complete. Some involved a test; others required interrogating mock prisoners in German uniforms, who might be carrying documents that had to be interpreted.

  On the second night, they stumbled across the countryside in the pitch dark. The only way Werner could check the map was to kneel on the ground, cover himself with a ground cloth so no light would leak out, spread out the map, and turn on the flashlight. Support troops were out in the woods, too, and if they spotted lights or heard noises, they “shot” the offenders with blanks that were as loud as live ammunition. The exercise was meant to mimic a combat patrol whose only geographical markers were terrain features. As they progressed, Werner discovered that the best method was to seek out distinctive markers—railroad tracks, a river, or a lake. Using such points of reference, he got his team to all their checkpoints without getting lost for long.

  At one point, they found themselves facing a barbed-wire fence. Behind it, a nasty-looking bull stood, eyeing them warily. They had been instructed not to stop for fences, but as exhausted as the men were, they decided to take the long way around. They had also been warned that they might be mistaken for prowlers, and farmers with real bullets in their guns might shoot at them. In such cases, they were to shout: “U.S. soldiers on patrol!”

  In the early days of Camp Ritchie, locals had called the police in alarming numbers to report a “German invasion” after farmers plowing their fields had looked up to see heavy trucks marked with swastikas barreling past, filled with German infantry and field artillery guns. But by now the rural residents of western Maryland had largely gotten used to the men with heavy German accents running around, some of them in German uniforms and steel helmets and others in U.S. Army uniforms. Eventually, locals began to offer a standard refrain to one another about these curious activities: “It’s just the Ritchie boys.”

  Werner’s group finished the field exercise slightly past the deadline, but because they had made up most of the six hours they’d lost, they passed the test and were even commended by their instructors.

  For the final exam in the interrogations course, a student had to show he knew how to extract tactical information from someone acting as a German prisoner. Instructors as well as other students (past and present) played the role of prisoners, and were briefed as to how to respond to various methods, from subtle questioning to brow-beating, and when to reveal (or not reveal) the desired information.* If the interrogator proved inept, the prisoner was told to clam up. The interrogation was observed and graded by an examiner based on how well the student extracted the “essential elements of information,” or the most critical information regarding the enemy—strength, location, etc.—that could assist a U.S. commander in “reaching a logical decision.” Tactical intelligence was described as the current location of mortars and machine guns, whereas the location of the factory that manufactured them was considered strategic intelligence. Given that tactical information could be old and of little use after days or even hours in a fast-moving battle, interrogations were to take place as soon as possible after an enemy soldier became a prisoner; not only would the information be more current, but this was the time when a new prisoner was most frightened and felt most vulnerable. It was also for this reason that IPW teams were assigned to frontline combat units.

  Local residents were at first alarmed by the “German invasion” in the countryside around Camp Ritchie. (U.S. Army Signal Corps and NARA, top to bottom)

  When it was time for his test, Werner got unlucky: he drew an examiner he had hoped to avoid. The man was a second lieutenant who had interrogated Germans in North Africa, but suffered shell shock during that campaign. After recuperating in the States, he had been assigned to Camp Ritchie. The day before the testing started, the lieutenant had given the entire class an overview of what the examiners would be expecting. The students were to find out which military unit the prisoner belonged to, its strength, where it was located, and other tactical information. The lieutenant had definite ideas as to how a prisoner should be treated. He must be forced to stand at attention in front of the seated interrogator, heels together and hands along the trouser seams. Under no circumstances could he sit down or be offered water or a cigarette. As prisoners stood at attention, they were to be yelled at nonstop.

  “This is the way to do it,” said the lieutenant. “It is the way I did it, and why I had such great success in North Africa. It’s how you will do it.”

  Although he had yet to conduct a single wartime interrogation, Werner considered the lieutenant’s methods pigheaded. Despite the officer’s claims, Werner had a hard time imagining this boastful banty rooster having had much success yelling at the tough vets of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. In any case, Werner had no intention of becoming a screaming interrogator. He believed, from the outset, that there were better and more humane ways to extract information from another human being, even if he was the enemy. Although he was stuck with the lieutenant for the final exam, Werner, given his time in the army and his sergeant rank, was not cowed by the brash junior officer. That, added to his innate stubborn streak, made Werner try an approach he thought would be more effective when the day came for him to interrogate actual German prisoners on the battlefield.

  German-language prisoner interrogation practice at Camp Ritchie. (NARA)

  When Werner walked into the examining room, he saw the lieutenant already sitting in a chair in the far corner. Making every effort to ignore him, Werner turned his own chair around so his back was to the officer.

  Werner had brought a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes, which he placed on the table. When the mock prisoner entered the room, Werner addressed him in German, telling him to grab a chair and join him. He then offered him water and a cigarette, which he took. Werner asked in a normal tone of voice a series of harmless questions, such as his name, rank, and serial number, all of which prisoners could answer under the Geneva Conventions.

  After about ten minutes of smoking and responding to numerous harmless questions from Werner, the pretend prisoner seemed to tire of the charade and started volunteering information, as if to get it over with. He freely detailed his unit, its location and strength, and similar pieces of information. With that, the interrogation was
over; the lieutenant and Werner were left alone in the room. Werner turned around and looked at the lieutenant, who was staring at him in shocked disbelief.

  Though Werner had extracted the information he was supposed to get, that didn’t stop the lieutenant from giving him the sort of dressing-down he hadn’t experienced since childhood. The lieutenant said Werner was “incapable of interrogating” and lacked the “necessary military bearing” to be taken seriously by captured Germans. He said he would not be giving Werner a passing grade in interrogations.

  When Werner graduated with 184 IPW-Ge classmates on October 23, 1943, his lowest grade was in interrogations, although it was still a solid 85. Combined with his other grades, all in the mid to high 90s, he earned a final course grade of 91. His language skills were rated E for excellent. The combined evaluations by his instructors did show the one blemish on his record:

  An extremely conscientious worker, intelligent and eager, who makes a favorable and soldierly impression. Possesses fine control of both languages and handles them most efficiently, however, because of somewhat slow psychological reactions, not quite an interrogator.

  Werner’s Eleventh Class, which graduated 427 students, also trained 74 Italian-language interrogators, who would soon participate in the Allied campaign in Italy, 136 photo interpreters, and 33 terrain intelligence specialists. In the interests of security, all were warned not to tell anyone—even family members—that they would be working in Military Intelligence.

  After graduation, the members of Werner’s class heard that they would be sent away to another base for additional maneuvers. The thought of more training exasperated Werner. That was all he had done in the army—train, train, and train some more! Sick and tired of drills, he was ready for action. He was more than ready to get into the war and do his part. He found the colonel in command of Camp Ritchie, who was willing to hear him out.

  “Sir,” Werner said, after finishing a sharp salute and remaining at attention, “I would like to volunteer for the next transport overseas.”

  It must have been an unusual request. The colonel looked at Werner with raised eyebrows. “You really want to go, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fine, you’ll be on the next one.”

  The colonel kept his word, and a few weeks later, Werner joined a contingent of other Camp Ritchie graduates boarding a ship in New York headed for England, where Allied forces were massing in preparation for the invasion of occupied France.

  Four years had passed since Werner Angress crossed the same ocean as a German Jewish immigrant fleeing Hitler and the Nazis. Now he was going back as a Ritchie Boy to fight against them.

  5

  GOING BACK

  Victor Brombert and Werner Angress did not know each other, but after graduating from Camp Ritchie they sailed with a contingent of nearly two hundred other Ritchie Boys across a storm-tossed Atlantic aboard the RMS Rangitata, a New Zealand–built passenger liner–cum–troopship. They left on January 28, 1944, from a Brooklyn pier that was near the spot where Victor and his parents had arrived on the freighter Navemar overloaded with Jewish refugees three years earlier. As Victor stood at the rail of the Rangitata and watched the Statue of Liberty fade in the distance, he was struck by a kind of symmetry between his arrival as an immigrant and now this departure as an American soldier.

  Victor had spoken often to his friends and family about how much he wanted to be involved in the fight to free France from the Nazis’ tyranny. But he also knew that this worried his parents, who had already lost one child—his sister, Nora, at age five. They would be devastated if they lost him, too. After his speech at Harrisburg Academy in which he spoke to the urgency of defeating Hitler, he had enrolled in dental school, but in winter 1942, a summons from the draft board arrived, and the decision was no longer his to make. Victor was soon on his way to basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

  His fellow recruits called him “Frenchy,” and he made it through close-order drill even though he had some difficulty understanding the Alabama drill sergeant. He enjoyed learning how to disassemble, clean, oil, reassemble, and shoot all the weapons. Field training was less agreeable: running the obstacle course; climbing, jumping, and crawling under simulated or live fire; endless push-ups and sit-ups; thrusting bayonets into sagging dummies; and instruction in hand-to-hand combat. But by the time he finished the training, Victor felt like a real soldier. So he was terribly disappointed when he was transferred to the medical corps because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. While his parents were happy when they heard he would be serving as a noncombatant and not an infantryman, Victor was delighted when his training as a litter bearer was interrupted by orders to report to Camp Ritchie.

  After he completed the IPW course, Victor, who like many other foreign-born students at Camp Ritchie became a naturalized U.S. citizen in Hagerstown, was kept an extra three weeks at Camp Ritchie. Given his fluency in French, he was among twenty-two students selected for a special graduate course to learn how to interrogate French civilians. They were taught the nature and locations of the various French Resistance groups, the typical structures of their local cells and how to best contact and work with them, what they should try to achieve during these interrogations of civilians, as well as an understanding of how French cities and rural towns were run. After taking the IPW course in German, for which he received a final grade of 89 (his highest grades were in Organization and Tactics), Victor was delighted to be speaking and reading French again. He put his best efforts into the course, hoping to secure his participation in the upcoming Allied landings that everyone knew were being planned for the coast of France.

  Enlisted men who graduated from an IPW course were usually promoted to one of four sergeant ranks. But at the completion of his two courses, Victor went from private, the army’s lowest rank, to its highest noncommissioned rank: master sergeant, a promotion usually attained by career soldiers after years in the army. It had to do with the “needs of the service” rather than his soldiering, as sergeants and junior officers were needed to lead small teams of interrogators, and many such rapid promotions took place for this reason after graduation at Camp Ritchie. After five short months in the army, Victor went from having no stripes to wearing a stack of six chevrons on his sleeves. Not yet twenty years old, he was surely one of the youngest master sergeants in the U.S. Army.

  The Rangitata took more than two weeks to cross the Atlantic in a convoy that could only move as fast as its slowest ship. They were tightly grouped together and protected by warships due to the threat from German U-boats. The destroyers and torpedo boats guarding the convoy detected submerged enemy submarines on several occasions and detonated rounds of depth charges.

  Victor had a completely different journey across the Atlantic than his first. This time, he slept on a clean bunk in a well-aired space that was neat and orderly, and he and his fellow soldiers played poker to pass the time. He befriended a fellow master sergeant, an Alsatian who had also been through the training at Camp Ritchie. The two of them spoke to each other in their native French. The other soldier was a few years older than Victor, and he had left a wife behind in the U.S.

  One bitterly cold day, as the two of them stood on deck watching the undulating seas, Victor was talking excitedly and at some length about the nobility of fighting and liberating Europe and taking heroic action. The older man listened, then finally shook his head. “Tu as le virus,” he said, his sarcasm evident as he described Victor as having the “bug” for war. He prophesied that Victor would lose it soon enough.

  They arrived in Liverpool in mild weather to a dockside crowd holding WELCOME YANKS signs. Victor’s first meal at an army mess in England caused a stir. As he walked past a table of older U.S. Army sergeants, they stopped eating with forks in midair to stare at him. Victor, who was years younger than any of them but outranked them all, offered a greeting. When they heard his French accent, they looked even more astonished. How could a Frenchman be a master sergea
nt in the U.S. Army?

  Victor would experience many such double takes, as would other Ritchie Boys, due to their foreign accents and senior rankings. However, within Military Intelligence, they were not outcasts. Once the Camp Ritchie graduates were assigned to small teams attached to a division or regiment, they largely operated independently of regular army units and commanders, and were free to move about on their own.

  Victor was assigned to a six-man team—officially designated Military Intelligence Interpreters–French—whose main mission was to interrogate French civilians and acquire information from members of the French Resistance, which would entail reconnaissance work behind enemy lines. The team’s two officers were both lieutenants; as the only master sergeant, Victor was the ranking enlisted man. Officially, the officers and Victor were the chief interrogators, with a staff sergeant serving as a documents examiner and two technical sergeants to handle translations and the typing of reports as well as drive the two jeeps the team had at its disposal. But this table of organization—the same for every IPW team—turned out to be theoretical, as everyone shared the various tasks. All were Camp Ritchie graduates who spoke French, although Victor alone spoke it like a true Frenchman. He and another team member, Staff Sergeant Willi Joseph—at thirty-five the team’s old man—were the only ones fluent in German as well.

  In February 1944, the team was sent to southern England, not far from prehistoric Stonehenge, to join the 2nd Armored Division. Known as “Hell on Wheels,” this was a battle-tested outfit, formerly commanded by George S. Patton Jr., which had seen action in North Africa and Sicily. Rumor had it that this seasoned division, with two regiments that each had more than one hundred tanks, along with a regiment of infantry and support battalions of armored engineers, signal corps, and reconnaissance, would be one of the first U.S. armored divisions to land in France.