Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  For now, the 2nd Armored was conducting nearly nonstop preinvasion maneuvers that included long marches, special drills, and war games on the grassy, rolling hills of Salisbury Plain, good ground for practicing tank tactics. During this period, Victor taught himself how to drive using one of the team’s jeeps. And although none of the Ritchie Boys were expected to handle a tank, Victor was given a demonstration ride in one. For the entire time, he was gripped by intense claustrophobia as he imagined being trapped inside a burning tank during battle.

  In early May 1944, Victor was tapped to speak to a group of more than one hundred 2nd Armored officers about what they might find in France as they moved inland after the invasion. He decided to draw them a verbal picture of a typical French town, centering around vivid descriptions of characters they might meet—the town mayor, pharmacist, doctor, priest, banker, schoolmaster—as well as familiar places like the church, boulangerie, town square, and town hall.

  Victor spoke at a dais with a pointing stick before a large map of the French coastal region. He was not familiar with the area around Calais, where the distance across the English Channel was the narrowest, and which many—including Hitler and his army generals—thought was the most likely place for the Allied landings. So Victor chose a region he knew well for the location of his mythical town: Normandy. He gave colorful descriptions of the place where he had spent a summer falling in love with a girl named Dany, which seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Weeks later, when they learned where the men and tanks of Hell on Wheels would be landing on the coast of France on D-Day, some of the officers present that day—as well as his own team—refused to believe Victor had not been secretly briefed by someone on high at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in London. But he hadn’t been. It was just chance that Victor had pointed on the map that day to the spot that would soon be known as Omaha Beach.

  Guy Stern ended up a Ritchie Boy only because the U.S. Navy rejected him.

  A couple of months after America entered the war, Guy, in his second year at Saint Louis University, took seriously the military posters that went up in the school hallways, especially one that said to all with special skills like a foreign language: NAVAL INTELLIGENCE WANTS YOU! He went to the navy recruiting office in downtown St. Louis. When he reached the front of the line of young men eager to enlist, he told the recruiter he had seen the Naval Intelligence poster and wanted to sign up.

  “I speak German,” Guy said.

  “I hear an accent. Were you born in this country?”

  “No, I was born in Germany.”

  “Can’t use you. Naval Intel is only taking native-born Americans.”

  Guy was crestfallen, and he worried that he would be unable to do his part in the war. But four months later, he received his draft notice.

  Guy wanted to get into the war because he had become convinced that defeating the Nazis was the only way he would ever reunite with his family. In just a short time, he had made America—the country that had taken him in and given him a new life—his home, and he had developed his own patriotism for the U.S. But he also retained strong feelings for the land of his birth, and felt a strong sense of duty to go back and help rid his homeland of Hitler and the Nazis.

  Along with a dozen other recruits from St. Louis, he was sent to the U.S. Army Induction Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After two weeks of mostly sitting around until the army decided what to do with them, they were sent to Camp Barkeley, the basic training center for medical administration outside of Abilene, Texas. There, the recruits endured long hikes under the broiling sun carrying a full field pack, then took classroom instruction from local high school teachers who taught the fundamentals of the paperwork involved with medical treatment and hospitalization.

  On the first day of May 1943, while still in training, Guy and a group of other foreign-born recruits took a bus into Abilene, where they went before a federal magistrate for a mass citizenship ceremony. They were told that the court could change their Germanic or Jewish-sounding names if they wished. A number of soldiers, not wanting to go overseas with their birth names on their dog tags in case of capture, opted to do so. That day, Günther Stern of Hildesheim legally became Guy Stern of St. Louis.

  Guy expected that once his basic training was complete, he would be assigned to a military hospital or medical support unit. But before he finished at Camp Barkeley, he was called into headquarters, where a sergeant informed him he was being transferred that day to another camp.

  “Where to, Sergeant?”

  “Can’t tell you. Your orders are sealed.”

  He was ordered to board a train heading eastward with two other German Jewish soldiers. Three hours into what seemed like an endless trip across the grasslands of east Texas, they opened their orders as instructed. They were to change trains in Baltimore for a local to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where a jeep would await them. The mystery continued until a day later when they arrived at the front gate of a Maryland army camp surrounded by lush greenery with a lake in the center. The MP carefully checked their orders, then greeted them in German.

  “Willkommen im Camp Ritchie.”

  Guy found the training at Camp Ritchie much different than in Texas but equally demanding. He was soon joining other students on nighttime exercises that consisted of being dropped off deep in the woods with only a map in some unfamiliar language and a small compass. An assembly point was marked on the map, but if they weren’t there by 11 P.M., they would miss their ride and have to hike twenty-five miles back to camp. For Guy’s first exercise, his group had with them a colonel, who handled the map and compass. After hours of groping around, he admitted he had been looking at the map upside down. Exhausted, they worked their way back in the dark, arriving in camp just in time for the first class the next morning.

  On Guy’s next nighttime exercise, the map made no sense to him or his companions; one of them guessed it was in Icelandic. They made a beeline for the first farmhouse, where they received a hearty hello from its owner. Clearly, they were not his first wayward foreign travelers from Camp Ritchie.

  “Hi, fellows. What kind of map do you Ritchie Boys have tonight? Let me have a look.” The farmer studied the familiar geographical features on the map. “Okay, that building in the center, that’s a school about two miles north of here. Then comes a crossroad that’s really no more than a path. You take the fork to the left, follow it for five miles and you’ll be where the truck is waiting for you. Hurry along, you’ll make it.”

  Although they were not supposed to ask locals for directions, lots of students did so when they became lost. Guy guessed that their instructors knew this and secretly wanted the future Military Intelligence graduates to develop their wiles and find ways to solve such problems in the field.

  Guy found that the fieldwork at Camp Ritchie was rivaled by the intellectual demands of the classwork. There were few aspects of the most current intelligence about the enemy that were not covered. From memorizing whole passages from German Order of Battle to analyzing aerial maps to identifying the piping on a Wehrmacht cap and medals on an SS uniform, it all went toward the goal of preparing them to quickly extract vital information from prisoners.

  In learning how to conduct interrogations, Guy was taught four basic techniques. The first, “superior knowledge,” called for over-whelming the prisoner with details about enemy units that the interrogator already knew. “Form of bribery” entailed eating a chocolate bar or lighting up a cigarette in front of the prisoner, and when they asked for something to eat or a smoke they were told they could have it only if they cooperated. “Find common interests” played on a prisoner’s likes and inclinations. If he was a soccer fan, the interrogator would talk soccer until the prisoner forgot that the interrogator wore a different uniform. Last was “use of fear,” in which the interrogator learned a prisoner’s anxieties and fears, and made him think they would become a reality if he failed to cooperate.

  In case any of
the students got the idea there were no legal or moral boundaries when it came to prisoner interrogations, a lawyerly major from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps went over the rules and regulations. “First and foremost, and remember this if you recall nothing else I tell you: Never touch a prisoner. That is a clear violation of the General Convention on Warfare.”

  Guy was among 130 graduates of the IPW-Ge course in Camp Ritchie’s Eighth Class. He received his highest grades in Signal Communications (96), Staff Duties (89), and Counter Intelligence (90). His evaluation by instructors: “Quiet, unassuming, theatrical, quite intelligent. Good German. Good documents man. Good stenographer and typist.” Upon graduation, he was promoted to staff sergeant.

  After two months of still more training and maneuvers at Fort Polk, Louisiana, among copious snakes, alligators, and feral pigs in the swamps, Guy was thrilled to at last be going back to Europe when he joined two hundred other Ritchie Boys—including Werner Angress and Victor Brombert—in January 1944 aboard the Rangitata, headed for England.

  Private Guy Stern, 1943. (Family photograph)

  Upon their arrival they took the train to the headquarters for Military Intelligence teams in England, which were located in the small, quaint town of Broadway in the heart of the Cotswolds, northwest of Oxford. Largely unchanged since Shakespeare’s time, the town’s name was derived from the wide, grass-fringed main street lined with red chestnut trees and honey-colored limestone buildings, many dating back to the sixteenth century. Most of the Ritchie Boys were billeted with local families, who invited their guests to join them for meals, outings, and other social occasions. In turn, the GIs shared their special rations, such as hard-to-get chocolates and cigarettes.

  Here the Ritchie Boys’ training continued, occasionally enlivened by guest lectures from seasoned British intelligence officers. Many hours of practice interrogations took place at a holding camp north of town, where two hundred German POWs from North Africa were being held. Referred to as “the cage,” it was a place to practice interrogation methods on actual Third Reich soldiers, although after being questioned many times and knowing the war was over for them, the POWs had become immune to most interrogation techniques.

  At war with a powerful enemy entrenched just across the Channel, all of England had become an armed camp, which made the Ritchie Boys nervous whenever they had to don German uniforms and visit camps bristling with U.S. troops to teach them a thing or two about the enemy. They were most concerned about the British Home Guard, many of them older men armed with ancient rifles and pistols, taking potshots at “invading Krauts.” Guy always ended his presentations with what he thought would be a very practical German phrase for the GIs to know. He would soon have an entire barracks of beaming soldiers yelling resoundingly, choral-style: “Hände hoch oder ich schieße!” (Hands up or I will shoot!)

  Guy was a member of a six-man IPW team attached to the headquarters of the massive U.S. First Army, then made up of six infantry and airborne divisions totaling some one hundred thousand men. The First Army had recently been activated under the command of Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, who had been designated by his former West Point classmate General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, to serve as commander of all U.S. ground forces in Operation Overlord, the invasion of Nazi-occupied France.*

  A demonstration of German uniforms and equipment to GIs in England shortly before D-Day. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

  Guy soon discovered that the vast majority of the twenty-four officers and enlisted men in the four IPW teams assigned to First Army headquarters (other IPW teams were attached to its divisions and their various regiments) were German Jewish refugees who, like him, had been deprived of their homeland and cut off from loved ones. To a man, these Jewish exiles were willing to leave their American asylum and return to Europe to fight the Nazis. Sharing a missionary zeal, they all considered themselves crusaders against evil.

  One of the team’s preinvasion assignments was to select future sites for large POW cages in France beyond the initial beachheads; close, but not too close, to First Army headquarters. The sites had to be accessible to highways for quick evacuation of prisoners, close to where the interrogators would bivouac so they would have easy access to the prisoners, and have ample space for what was hoped would be a large number of Germans, who would have to be fed and guarded by ancillary units. They put together the list of future POW cages, and then, like the hundreds of thousands of other Allied troops who had massed in England for the invasion, they waited for D-Day.

  Guy’s team had been briefed: when the alert came, they would convoy from First Army headquarters in Bristol, a city of nearly a half million people in southwestern England, some one hundred miles on roads cleared of other traffic to Southampton, a seaport on England’s southeastern tip that had been selected as a major embarkation point for hundreds of ships and landing craft carrying invasion forces.

  With stormy weather over the Channel, the wait continued.

  To kill the boredom one afternoon, Guy wandered into the large, darkened tent where movies were shown in the evening. Usually there were no matinees, but today a new Hollywood film was playing to help relieve tensions. The movie was Shine on Harvest Moon, starring Ann Sheridan, a popular wartime “pin-up girl” who reportedly received 250 marriage proposals a week, many from soldiers. About twenty minutes into the film and shortly after Sheridan belted out the hit tune “Time Waits for No One,” the lights in the tent went on. A voice came over the loudspeaker: “All personnel report to quarters! Be ready to move out in convoy in half an hour!” Guy and the other GIs rushed out of the theater.

  The invasion was on, and Guy Stern’s fervent wish to go back and fight the Nazis who had taken his family away was about to come true.

  Werner Angress had never planned to jump out of an airplane.

  Before he went to Camp Ritchie, he had turned down the chance to take parachute training. Being an infantryman in the war, he thought, would be risky enough. Upon arriving in England, he had again been asked if he would like to volunteer for the paratroopers, and he had again said firmly, “No, thank you.” Yet, to his great surprise, after a few weeks at Broadway, he was assigned to an IPW team attached to the 82nd Airborne Division, which had fought in North Africa, Sicily, and mainland Italy. It had recently arrived in England and had been strengthened with replacements and new equipment in anticipation of D-Day. Now at full strength (approximately eighty-five hundred men), the 82nd comprised three parachute infantry regiments (PIR): the 505th, 507th, and 508th. One IPW team was assigned to each regiment and one to division headquarters.

  Werner’s team was assigned to the 508th. When he was interviewed by a regimental officer, who asked under what circumstances he had left Germany, Werner gave him a short version of his family’s flight.

  “So you’re Jewish? You don’t look it. Are you jump qualified?”

  Werner stared blankly. After a hesitation, he said, “Not yet.”

  His response hadn’t been for effect, although he had been wondering what it would mean to be in an airborne unit and not be a parachutist. After two years in the army, serving in the infantry, reaching the rank of staff sergeant and graduating from Camp Ritchie, Werner was determined to be a good soldier and not shirk his duties.

  The officer seemed pleased with Werner’s answer. He explained that most of the men in the airborne unit had gone to jump school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but some late arrivals had been trained in England. He promised that Werner and the other newbies would get parachute training prior to the invasion. The officer admitted their training would not equal six weeks of jump school instruction, but it would at least include the five practice jumps required to qualify as a paratrooper.

  Werner’s IPW team included three other German Jews who had immigrated to the United States after the Nazis came to power. They had all received infantry training before arriving at Camp Ritchie. They knew that D-Day—which they anticipated with a mixture of excitement
and resolve—was fast approaching, and they discussed how they should conduct themselves with actual prisoners of war. They rejected any kind of force during interrogations and felt strongly that as American soldiers, they had a responsibility to act in a civilized manner, in a way that they felt would distinguish them from the Nazis. They all knew, of course, that not every German soldier was a Nazi, and expressed empathy for “those poor bastards” who had been cajoled by Hitler and his party but would be needed when the war was over to help create a new Germany.

  Werner Angress in England after joining the 82nd Airborne Division. (Family photograph)

  Captain John Breen, head of the regiment’s intelligence section (known as S-2), kept trying to arrange the practice jumps for Werner. Breen, in civilian life an investigator for the U.S. Treasury, was pleasant and likable; he was the only officer in the regiment who would join the men at a nearby pub, in violation of the rules against officers fraternizing with the enlisted ranks. But weeks passed when the weather was too bad to fly or there were no planes or pilots available.

  In late May, the 82nd was placed on alert. Everyone was ordered to pack their clothing and equipment and wait to be transported to an airfield. They all knew this meant that the invasion was close at hand.

  As he was packing, Werner was approached by a regimental officer who told him that he would be staying behind with the other “nonjumpers,” who were to be delivered by landing craft to the coast of France several days after D-Day, once the invasion beaches were secured.

  Werner was furious. After all his army training before and after war began—and his fruitless wait for parachute practice that never happened—he was going to be left behind when his airborne division parachuted into Nazi-occupied France on D-Day? He was going to be delivered later on a boat like a sack of potatoes? He voiced his vehement objections to the officer to no avail. But Werner, as usual, was not one to be cowed by the army’s chain of command; he decided to go straight to the top.