by Studs Terkel
Our impression of France, those of us who grew up in the thirties, was French maids, French poodles, a frivolous type of people. So it was striking to see these stolid peasants walking behind horse-drawn plows. The area we were in had not yet been hit by the war. I was struck by the sheer beauty of the countryside, the little villages, the churches. This sort of thing the impressionists did.
Going to the front, I can remember the cities in Belgium: Liège, Namur. We were going through towns and villages. We were hanging out of the cars of the trains and on the roofs. We had all this extra candy from our K rations and would just throw them out to the kids. There was a sense of victory in the air. They had already been liberated. They were elated.
All of a sudden, the tone changes. You get off the train on the border in that little corner of Holland and Germany. We’re near Aachen, which had been absolutely leveled by Allied bombings. Rubble, nothing but rubble. Here was the ancient city of Aix-la-Chapelle, just a sea of rubble. We’ve had forty-eight hours enjoying being part of the victorious army. Now the party’s over. You’re within a few miles of the front. You’re off the train into trucks. You hear gunfire in the distance.
Everybody sobered up very rapidly. We drove on for a few miles and there was a second city, Düren, totally wiped out. It was one of the most bombed-out cities in Germany. Now we’re moving forward on foot.
They moved us into what they called a quiet front. Our division occupied a frontage on the Rhine, south of Cologne. We simply relieved another division that had been there, the Eighth. We moved into the same foxholes. You know it’s getting close. It’s still sort of exciting. Nobody’s gotten killed yet. To me, it was interesting because of the architecture. From the distance I could see the Cologne cathedral, with the twin towers.
We stayed in bombed-out buildings. It was almost surreal. Here’s a cross-section of a four-story, where every room is open to the atmosphere on one side and there’s another room that is still intact. This was true all the way through Europe.
The very first night, our squad was in comfortable quarters. Our one side was completely open, but on the other side were beds and kitchens and what-not. It was almost theatrical. Since the Germans were the enemy and evil, we never had any sense of guilt that we were in somebody’s apartment. Any abuse of the apartment, like throwing dishes out the window, was what they deserved. Whatever was there in the way of food and drink, we would make use of.
One of the things we had was this old music box. It could play whole melodies. We had two disks. One was “Silent Night” and the other was “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” I had a typical Lutheran churchgoing background. Here am I hearing a Christmas carol and a hymn that I’d sung many times in church.
I was sort of schizophrenic all through this period. I was a participant, scared out of my wits. But I was also acutely aware of how really theatrical and surreal it was.
Three days later we pulled out, crossed the Rhine, and cut off a German pocket. As we were moving out of this area of sheared-off buildings, there were courtyards with fruit trees in blossom. And there were our heavy mortars blasting away across the river. I had been seeing shadowy figures moving around. Were they infiltrators or just a bush that I was imagining? And there in sight was the Cologne cathedral amidst all this wreckage.
We’ve seen a little of the war now. We’ve seen planes dropping bombs over on the other side. We’ve sent out patrols, have captured prisoners. But we really hadn’t been in it ourselves. It was still fun and dramatics. When the truck took us from Cologne south through Bonn, for me it was, Hey, Beethoven’s birthplace! But when we crossed a pontoon bridge and I saw a balloon of fire, I knew the real combat was going to begin. I had the feeling now that we were gonna be under direct fire, some of us were gonna be killed. But I was also enormously affected by the beauty of the countryside. We were in rolling hills and great forests. It stretched out for mile after mile. I could almost hear this Wagnerian music. I was pulled in two directions: Gee, I don’t wanna get killed. And, Boy, this is gorgeous country.
Our uniforms were still clean. We were still young kids who hadn’t seen anything. You could see these veteran troops. Their uniforms were dirty, they were bearded, there was a look in their eyes that said they’d been through a lot. A sort of expression on their faces—You’re gonna find out now. A mixture of pity and contempt for the greenhorns.
We started seeing our first dead, Germans. You drew the obvious inference: if Germans were dead, the Americans were getting killed farther up the line. Night fell, we were up within a couple of miles of where the action would begin. We were passing through our artillery emplacements. Incessant firing. It was reassuring to see how much artillery we had, but disturbing to see all these German dead. I had never seen a dead body before, except in a funeral home.
We were told that the next morning we would be on the attack. I remember the miserable cold. By this time, I had taken up cigarette smoking, wondering what my mother would think when I came back. [Laughs.] I felt sickish, I was cold, I was scared. And I couldn’t even get one last cigarette.
We were awakened before dawn. I honestly don’t know whether I dreamed it or whether it really happened. I’ve asked buddies I’ve seen since the war: Can you remember these ambulances and army surgeons getting their gear out? I have such an absolute recollection of it, but nobody else remembers it. It had a dreamlike quality: just seeing surgeons ready to work. Here we were still healthy, still an hour or two away from actual combat. It added to the inevitability that really bad, bad things were going to happen.
Our platoon of thirty men was to take a small town. At the time, I was a bazooka man. I’ll never forget that sense of unreality as we were moving through the woods to this village, which we could just see a few hundred yards away. There were sheep grazing in the fields. By now there’s gunfire: machine guns, rifle fire, mortar shells.
You’d lost your sense of direction. This was not a continuous front. These were piercing, probing actions. You’d take a town, then to the next river, then across the river and then the next one. This was the first. Now I can see actual mortar shells landing in this meadow. German 88s. They were hitting the tile roofs of these houses and barns. My initial reaction: they’re not hurting anything. Oh, a few tiles being knocked loose, but it’s still a beautiful sunny day. The meadow is lovely. Here we are in a medieval village. This reaction lasted three seconds. These sheep started getting hit. You were seeing blood. Immediately you say, Soon it’s gonna be us torn up like these animals. You sense all these stages you’ve gone through. And now (laughs), the curtain has gone up and you’re really in it.
We captured that town without any casualties. I think the German troops had moved out. My confidence is coming back a little. Gee, we captured a town and didn’t even see a German. Later that afternoon, we were moving up to take another town. We have a sense that things aren’t going too well. We seem out of radio contact with the other rifle companies. I sense an apprehension by our officers.
All of a sudden, we spotted a group of German soldiers down by the slope of this hill, perhaps fifty. We were strung out, a couple of platoons. We would be on the ground, get up on command, and start firing right into this group of Germans. We did catch them by surprise. They responded quickly, firing back, machine guns and rifles. We had them well outnumbered, our company, about 240. We did the march-and-fire. It was a new maneuver we’d never done in training. We learned. I noticed that some of our guys were getting hit. It was all in a few minutes. We killed most of the Germans. A few might have gotten away, but we wiped them out. Our guys were getting killed, too. Irony again, the first one killed was our platoon sergeant.
You have to understand the culture of our company. Most of our privates were college types. They had been dumped en masse into these infantry divisions. The cadre of noncommissioned officers were old-timers. They were mostly uneducated country types, many of them from the South. There was a rather healthy mutual contem
pt between the noncoms and the privates. This sergeant was the most hated man. One of the nineteen-year-olds, during maneuvers, was at the point of tears in his hatred of this man who was so unreasonable and so miserable. He’d say, “If we ever get into combat, I’m gonna kill ’im. First thing I’ll do.” Who’s the first one killed? This sergeant. I’m sure it was enemy fire. I would bet my life on it. I’m sure the guys who said they would kill him were horrified that their wish came true.
“I’m gonna kill ’im” is said a million times.
I’m sure our company was typical. We had x percent of self-inflicted wounds. There’s no question that a guy would blow his toe off to get out of combat. People would get lost. These combat situations are so confused that it’s very easy to go in the other direction. Say you get lost, get sick, get hurt. By the time you get back to your outfit, a couple of days have gone by.
We remember examples of Caspar Milquetoast: ordinary people showing incredible heroism. But you have to accept the fact that in a cross section of people—in civilian life, too—you’ve got cowards and quitters. Our radio man shot up his radio: he thought we were going to be captured. Panic. I became a bazooka man because our bazooka man threw his weapon away and I picked it up. He ran off.
Our captain said, “Pick up the bodies. We don’t leave our dead to the enemy.” We’re now cut off and have to join the rest of our battalion. We had to improvise stretchers. I took off my field jacket and turned the arms inside out. We poked rifles through the arms and fashioned a stretcher. We got the sergeant on ours and, jeez, half his head was blown off and the brains were coming out on my hands and on my uniform. Here’s the mama’s boy, Sunday school, and now I’m really in it.
I remember lying in that slit trench that night. It was a nightmare. I’d now seen what dead people look like, the color out of their face. I think each person in my squad went through this dream of mine. Daylight came and we moved out into another town. This is twenty-four hours of experience.
Those who really went through combat, the Normandy landings, the heavy stuff, might laugh at this little action we’d been in, but for me...We were passing people who were taking over from us, another company. We had one day of this. Our uniforms were now dirty and bloody and our faces looked like we’d been in there for weeks. Now we had the feeling: You poor innocents.
We weren’t able to bring those bodies back with us. The mortar fire became too much. The next morning, our squad was assigned to go back and recover the bodies. It was sunshine and quiet. We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. These were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us.
I remember one, particularly. A redhead. To this day, I see the image of this young German soldier sitting against a tree. This group was probably resting, trying to make their escape. The whole thing might have been avoided had we been more experienced and called down in German for them to surrender. They probably would have been only too glad. Instead, out of fear, there was this needless slaughter. It has the flavor of murder, doesn’t it?
What I remember of that day is not so much the sense of loss at our two dead but a realization of how you’ve been conditioned. At that stage, we didn’t hate the Germans just for evil the country represented, their militarism, but right down to each individual German. Once the helmet is off, you’re looking at a teen-ager, another kid. Obviously you have to go on. There are many, many more engagements.
A few days, later, we’re in Ludenscheid. It’s near the Ruhr pocket. Two Allied armies had crossed the Rhine fifteen miles apart. It’s a pincer movement, closing in a pocket of 350,000 Germans. Under Field Marshal Model, I believe. They just don’t surrender overnight. They’re gonna fight it out. Our job, all the way through Germany, was to move as fast as you could on trucks, on tanks, until you came up against resistance. Some towns fell without a battle. Others, quite a bit of resistance. You’d assume the worst.
You were constantly behind the lines and then moved up. You’d pass through your artillery and you knew you were getting closer. Pretty soon things would thin out. Just an hour earlier there were an awful lot of GIs around. As you got closer to action, it was only your platoon, and then it was your squad ahead of the other two. You were the point man for the squad.
I thought, This is incredible. We’ve got these great masses of troops, of quartermasters and truckers and tanks and support troops, and then all of a sudden it’s so lonely. [Laughs.] You’re out ahead of the whole thing.
In Lüdenscheid, we were in the hills looking down. It was dead silence in the town, except that you became aware of German ambulances with the big red crosses on the roofs. We didn’t know whether it was a trick. There was something mysterious about that sight. The bells started tolling in the city. You didn’t know what to make of it. Was this the opening of a major battle? Were they going away? There was very little resistance and we took the town.
Now I began to get an inkling of some other evil abroad. We were very much aware that the Germans had mobilized the Poles, the French, the captive countries, into workers on farms and in factories. As each town was captured, you were liberating Slavs, Poles, French, whatever. It was often highly emotional. The idea of those death camps still hadn’t reached us at all. I marvel as I think back on it. When we took Lüdenscheid, our platoon stayed overnight in what was a combination beer hall, theater, festival-type thing, with a stage and a big dance floor. There in the middle of the floor was this mountain of clothing. I realize now that was probably the clothing they’d taken from the people that went to Dachau or another camp. It really didn’t register with us what that might have been. You knew this wasn’t just a Salvation Army collecting clothes. I remember it because that was the day Roosevelt died.
Every town had a certain number of slave laborers. It might range from handfuls to hundreds, depending on whether there was industry in that town. The final one we captured in the Ruhr was Letmathe. There was a large number of Italian laborers who worked in a factory. There were quite a few Russians. The military government hadn’t yet moved in. I remember the Russians taking the horses and running them up and down the street to get their circulation up and then kill them for food. A Russian was going to kill the horse with a hatchet. I wasn’t up to shooting the horse myself, but I let him use my pistol. We were aware of the starvation and the desperate measures they would take.
You had these spontaneous uprisings where the slave laborers and war prisoners the Germans had in these towns would just take over. It was very chaotic.
I remember where a Russian was in the process of strangling a German in the cellar of our building. This was a moment of truth for me. I was still nurturing the notion that every individual German was evil and the Russians were our allies. Somehow I got the picture that the Russian was carrying out vengeance. He claimed this German had killed his buddy. In that confused situation you couldn’t tell whether it was true or whether it was a grudge carried out or what. It didn’t take much deliberation to stop it. The Russian broke out in tears when I wouldn’t let him kill the German. He just sobbed. Reflecting on it later, I had reason to believe his story was true. But I wasn’t up to letting it happen.
We were aware that the Russians had taken enormous losses on the eastern front, that they really had broken the back of the German army. We would have been in for infinitely worse casualties and misery had it not been for them. We were well disposed toward them. I remember saying if we happen to link up with ‘em, I wouldn’t hesitate to kiss ’em.
I didn’t hear any anti-Russian talk. I think we were realistic enough to know that if we were going to fight them, we would come out second best. We hadn’t even heard of the atomic bomb yet. We’d just have to assume that it would be masses of armies, and their willingness to sacrifice millions of troops. We were aware that our leaders were sparing our lives. E
ven though somebody would have to do the dirty work in the infantry, our leaders would try to pummel the enemy with artillery and tanks and overpower them before sending the infantry in. If that was possible.
I’ve reflected on why people my age and with my experience don’t have that spontaneous willingness to be part of the nuclear freeze. It’s the sense that the Germans were willing to lose millions of men. And they did. Every German house we went to, there would be black-bordered pictures of sons and relatives. You could tell that most of them died on the eastern front. And the Russians lost twenty million.
Later, we were back in the States being retrained for the Japanese invasion. The first atom bomb was dropped. We ended halfway across the Pacific. How many of us would have been killed on the mainland if there were no bomb? Someone like me has this specter.
In the final campaign down through Bavaria, we were in Patton’s army. Patton said we ought to keep going. To me, that was an unthinkable idea. The Russians would have slaughtered us, because of their willingness to give up so many lives. I don’t think the rank of the GIs had any stomach for fighting the Russians. We were informed enough through press and newsreels to know about Stalingrad. I saw the actual evidence in those black-bordered pictures in every German household I visited. Black border, eastern front, nine out of ten.
I have more disapproval of communism today than ever. I think our government did try to stimulate a feeling about good Uncle Joe. The convoys to Murmansk. We had this mixed feeling: Gee, we’re glad they did the lion’s share, the overwhelming bulk of the dying, the breaking the back of the German armies. And individually, they can’t be all that bad. In any case, we don’t want to fight’em. [Laughs.]
The thing that turned me against the Vietnam War was an issue of Life magazine in ’68. It had a cover picture of the hundred men that died in Vietnam that week. I said, Enough. I don’t want to stand here as a veteran of World War Two saying that we somehow took a stand that was admirable. We are bad as the rest if we don’t think independently and make up our own minds. We were willing to go along as long as it seemed an easy victory. When it really got tough, we started re-examining.