Steven Karras

by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

  My dilemma was resolved in March 1943 when I finally got that long-expected official notice. By this time the United States was building up troop concentrations in Great Britain. Anybody and everybody who was male, breathing, and unattached was being called up.

  I was proud to be finally part of the action. Despite having lived in the United States for barely more than four and one-half years, I was well on my way to feeling at home here. Furthermore, if there was one war that seemed to have the support of most of the American public, it was World War II. It was hard not to be swept along with the spirit of the times. Having had my life turned upside down by Hitler was another piece of the picture. Time to get even …

  A WEEK AFTER MY INDUCTION, I said goodbye to my folks, packed a small bag of things, and reported back to the induction center in the cavernous Grand Central Terminal building. I was assigned to a group of several hundred new draftees and promptly shipped off to Fort Dix in New Jersey.

  After a four-hour ride in the back of an army truck, we arrived in Fort Dix in the midst of an early-March downpour. Once there, we ate our first army meal in the mess hall; then we lined up in the stockroom, where we were outfitted with GI clothing from top to bottom. “Civvies” (our civilian clothes) were shipped home. Underwear, socks, shoes and boots, overcoats, fatigues, and dress uniforms loaded us down as we dragged them to our assigned bunks in a large barrack.

  Daily close-order drill in the company street started the next morning. It took a while before it sank in: we were going to be bullied and yelled at and generally treated like some subspecies barely worthy of the drill sergeant’s attention. As we got better at close-order drill, we no longer stumbled around like drunken sailors.

  Little by little we began to feel and act like soldiers in “this man’s army,” as the phrase goes then. The weather was frigid and wet. I caught a bad cold the first day I was there and so did everybody else. We slept in barracks that were about as cold as the outdoors.

  Finally, three weeks later, orders arrived and a number of us were shipped off to a place I had never heard of before—Fort Belvoir in Virginia. I wasn’t too sure exactly where Virginia was, never mind Fort Belvoir. Based on what little I knew about the job of the combat engineers, it sounded to me like I was going to be trained to become prime cannon fodder, preparing roads and bridges for infantry grunts and armored troops. I had been dreaming of becoming an engineer, but this was not exactly what I had in mind.

  It was early April 1943 when I started my combat engineers training, along with all those other raw recruits from the Big City and a fair number of six-foot-plus Texans, Georgians, and Tennessee hillbillies. This was also my first encounter with southern drawls and anti-Semitism in the ranks.

  True to my nature, I kept much to myself, did what I was told to do, and took the training seriously. If anything, I took it too seriously. I was certainly uptight about my performance. My German upbringing and the martial discipline of that school system were part of it.

  Even in April, it was hot and humid in Virginia; we drilled and worked hard, building roads, assembling sectional Bailey bridges and erecting pre-cut wooden barracks; we also laid and removed lots of mines and booby traps, both our own and several German models.

  There was, of course, the usual contingent of twenty-mile hikes. We would lug full field packs, wear our heavy helmets, and carry the even heavier M1 rifles slung over our shoulders. I held my own; even my feet didn’t bother me. Hiking, walking, and all other forms of physical exercise had not exactly been my thing, but I was surprised to note how many of the young, athletic-looking guys in my platoon had difficulty during the forced marches, while I just plowed on.

  Several men in the platoon were well over thirty years old; they had a hard time coping with the strenuous regimen, what with their bum knees and bad backs. I wondered why they would draft some of these guys and felt sorry for them. There was definitely a war on!

  We were taught how to fire both the army’s standard M1 rifle and the much smaller carbine. Out on the firing range, I turned into a good marksman with the M1 rifle. Actually, I enjoyed firing weapons, a sign of things to come.

  During one of our firing exercises, it was my bad luck to wind up next to the platoon fuck-up. Every small organization seems to have one of them. He would do stupid things while laying prone on the firing line. One time, he pretended to have a misfire, whereupon he would turn the rifle around and look down the barrel. I didn’t particularly care whether he might blow himself away, but naturally I didn’t like having a loaded rifle swing by me in the process. When I complained to our noncom about this, I got my just desserts and wound up getting assigned to cleaning that man’s rifle.

  I MISSED MY RADIO WORK most of all during those first weeks in basic training and took every opportunity to fix odd radios that were kicking around and needing attention. I tinkered with radios even if they didn’t need attention. In my spare time I wrote my first technical paper: “Converting Radios from AC to AC/DC Operation.” It described the theory and practice of the art form that I had practiced so often in my Lexington Avenue repair shop.

  After four weeks of basic combat engineers’ training in the 2nd Platoon, we got a week’s leave of absence. My folks were glad to see me. I was in great physical shape and was tanned a deep brown from the exposure to the strong Virginia sun. While I was home, I moved into my new bedroom-cum-lab. I hurriedly installed all my test equipment and wired up the heavy desk that served as my bench, ready for work. In the short time before my pass expired, I designed and built a tiny battery-operated covert listening device. It consisted of a small microphone, a battery-operated amplifier, and earphones for listening in on conversations through walls and the like.

  My naive assumption was that the U.S. Army would really appreciate my compact design. At Fort Belvoir I had seen and operated the crude, oversized, vintage gear that the service was using at the time. My experience with battery-operated portable radios had taught me how to build amplifiers using the latest tubes. The army’s covert listening gear was a generation behind those radios, a situation typical of operational equipment in the military back then.

  I took my little battery-operated amplifier by train to Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Monmouth was the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ headquarters during Word War II. I hoped to get transferred there and get an assignment as a radio operator. After all, I was a radioman with almost five years of technical experience.

  At Monmouth, I demonstrated my amplifier to an officer, but nothing came of it. It was naive of me to think that an unauthorized private currently undergoing basic training in the combat engineers could simply walk into Fort Monmouth and get himself transferred on the basis of some prior professional ability. The army didn’t do business that way. In the first place, nothing short of a pile of documents obtained through the “right” connections could affect such a transfer.

  During service, my major connection with my previous electronics experience was converting German mine detectors into radios that would tune in the American Forces Network in Europe so we could listen to Glenn Miller. What else is an electronics education good for in the army? Cooks and bakers’ school?

  When my leave was up, I left New York and took the train back to Fort Belvoir for the last four of our eight weeks of basic training. By now it was early summer. As usual, the Virginia weather was extremely hot and sticky, yet the daily grind of marching went on. We went back to building bridges, erecting barracks or shooting our M1s or carbines on the firing range.

  On several other occasions, we were ordered to shed our green fatigues, dress up in formal khaki uniforms, and march in formation around the camp’s parade ground. There, we stood at attention in the hot sun for review by some higher brass. It wasn’t long before we would hear a rifle hit the dirt, followed by the thump of its owner dropping to the ground seconds later. Pretty soon, two or three other guys would pass out with a similar bang and whoosh.

  The moral of the story is this: When
you’re in the army going through training exercises, you follow orders, oftentimes suspending your belief and common sense—until you get into combat, where you may have to do exactly the opposite.

  One day in July we were up to our necks in the Patuxent River working on a Bailey bridge. It was a relief considering the heat. Soon after I got to work in the water, fatigues and all, I was called out again to report to the orderly room. I got into the back of a jeep, still sopping wet and dripping all over the place. The driver drove me back to camp and told me to report to the first sergeant’s office. That was more than a little peculiar—what had I done this time? Nothing, it turned out; they had received orders to ship me off to Camp Ritchie, then a Military Intelligence (MI) training camp near Hagerstown in Maryland, wherever that was!

  Camp Ritchie was a unique place among U.S. Army training facilities. There were perhaps two to three thousand GIs stationed there at any one time, and not one of these guys was a U.S. national—Ritchie comprised a bunch of foreigners! What we all had in common was the ability to speak a foreign language fluently. In particular, men whose native tongues were German, Italian, or French might wind up in Camp Ritchie. Most of us were there to become interrogators of prisoners of war.

  We spent the next six months studying intelligence subjects such as the order of battle for every European army then in existence. The order of battle is the organizational structure of an army starting with the smallest unit, the squad, and moving up through the platoon and company level to the battalion, regiment, division, corps, and finally the army—as in Eighth Army. Of course, there are dozens of variations on that theme in various regular foreign armies and also their specialized organizations, such as their armored groups, mechanized groups, or paratroops.

  Now, one cannot properly interrogate an uncooperative prisoner unless one can immediately determine such basic things as his rank and organization by looking at his uniform or by observing other telltale signs. An interrogator would have a hard time getting useful information out of his prisoner unless he had the experience to figure out these basics, even in the absence of any insignia, which many prisoners remove and toss away during capture if given a chance. Those were the tricks of the trade, we learned at Ritchie.

  Three months into our training, we graduated from classroom instructions and started doing special intelligence field exercises. We often used maps of the area printed in German or in French, or worse yet, in Russian—as if it wasn’t hard enough to get oriented using only a map and compass in some godforsaken part of the Maryland woods. Some GI truck drivers would drop us off there, often after nightfall on some moonless night, and tell us to find the trucks by a specific deadline. The trucks would then be waiting for us at a destination marked on our doctored maps.

  BEFORE THEY COULD SEND the non-U.S. citizens overseas, we had to be sworn in. That was the law, or least, it was back then. So, they had piled groups of us into trucks and took us to a courthouse in Hagerstown on October 5, 1943. Once we were inside, we lined up in front of the Maryland judge, raised our right hands, and pledged allegiance to the flag. The ceremony was short and sweet. We were sworn in within five minutes. Then they handed us our citizenship papers. This qualified us to become legal cannon fodder.

  When finally our training was complete, I found myself standing outside on a sunny day, one man in a long line of GIs, duffel bag at hand, waiting forever to get onto the trucks that would take us who knew where on our way overseas to the war.

  We shipped out in early February on the Mataroa, a British freighter no bigger than about twelve thousand tons. Altogether, there were about sixty MIs onboard, including me, plus a much larger number of GIs from various other organizations. At night the MIs slept together in a hold below deck, using hammocks slung over the wooden tables and benches where we ate and sat during the day. Antiaircraft guns went off frequently above us on deck, but nobody told us what was going on. We never knew whether the gunfire was for real or simply a training exercise. We also did not know initially where we were headed. It turned out we were part of a large convoy of ships that zigzagged across the Atlantic toward England, in the hopes of avoiding German submarines.

  For the duration of the ocean crossing, about ten days, I lived on imitation Coca-Cola and boiled potatoes. I couldn’t stomach the limey mutton that they served us down below. It was forever stinking up the mess room and our hold. I haven’t eaten lamb since, except when it’s been prepared as shish kebab and that basic lamb taste is conspicuous by its absence.

  While onboard the Mataroa, a pecking order among the MIs began to develop. Hans Otto Mauksch became our virtual leader by dint of his strong personality. Hans—who was a private first class in this man’s army, but had been an officer candidate in the Austrian Army in the 1930s—gradually became our recognized leader. Hans was about twenty-six—old compared to most of us—fairly tall and imposing, and light-years ahead of most of us in maturity, with guts and leadership qualities. He was abundantly equipped with the chutzpah needed for coping with unusual situations.

  He was a guy with a mission and he had a vision of what we could do for the troops with our MI training once we got to England. Wisely, he kept the details to himself.

  Heavy betting on assorted card games went on amongst the other troops all the way across the ocean, but not by the MIs; somewhere along the line the first mate was reputed to have been heaved overboard during a game—tough crowd!

  WE ARRIVED AT THE PORT OF Liverpool on the east coast of England on a sunny afternoon. Leaning over the railing topside, I watched our deckhands and the British dock workers secure the vessel while we looked out at our first sight of old Britannia. She was already well past the major portion of the clobbering by the Luftwaffe, but the scene looked serene and completely normal that day. Liverpool was too far north to be accessible to German bombers or V-2 rockets.

  We spent our first cold February night at Miller’s Orphanage in Liverpool, sleeping in a cavernous place that had once been a gym where we were quartered alongside troops who had arrived before us. Late at night, we promptly got called out of that huge barn to hit the trenches outdoors because of an air raid alert. The tail end of the Blitz—what was left of the intensive bombing of English cities by the Germans by aircraft and V-2 rockets—almost reached us.

  After morning of marching and doing close-order drill as a unit, our group of about sixty MIs got orders to report to the 19th Replacement Depot. On our way there by train, we stopped over in Manchester. While hanging around the station’s elevated platform for a couple of hours, waiting for the train that was to take us to Chester, we got a glimpse of Manchester. I remember looking out onto the street from the open platform that was one level above and seeing that old, grimy textile mill town full of ancient brick factory buildings.

  After we arrived in Swindon, we were quartered with other troops in a large barracks. We were assigned a new course of basic MI training, the so-called combat intelligence refresher course given at the American School Center, located in Bristol. It was déjà vu all over again!

  In Bristol, we were quartered in a large barracks and would soon become an active MI training cadre group for the first time. We would be charged with running classes and lectures for GIs on such esoteric subjects as recognizing German uniforms, ranks, organizational affiliation, and the handling of German weapons and prisoners. Before this, however, most of the group did several weeks of the usual infantry drill stuff, to say nothing of day and night KP.

  The major subject headings of various syllabus summaries were:

  • German infantry weapons—a detailed discussion and a demonstration of German small arms that we had collected for this purpose

  • Identification of aircraft—a two-hour lecture on recognition of U.S. and foreign aircraft in daylight or at night

  • Reading foreign maps—a four-hour lecture series covering the reading of German maps and an hour each on French and British map reading in comparison with our own

&n
bsp; • Military sketching—a quickie course in the art of making stride scales and planometric sketches for practical field use

  • Reconnaissance—a two-hour lecture on day and night reconnaissance methods and procedures

  • Aerial photography—a one-hour lecture on definitions and uses of aerial photos, making photo maps, obtaining stereoscopic images from photo pairs, and so on

  • Staff duty procedures—a lecture explaining the procedure used by intelligence personnel in handling information from collection to evaluation to interpretation and, finally, dissemination

  Additional MI training subjects included a series of lectures on German Army identification, for which I drew several sketches showing the many insignia, patches, head dress, boots, and uniform styles worn by the German Army ground forces and those used by the tank, air force, and paratroop units.

  I also reworked a lot of Camp Ritchie material into a series of lectures on German history, with details about the most prominent military and political leadership persons. Abstracts from that lesson material came in handy during our next assignment, when I had to lecture on this subject to large numbers of troops then being staged for the imminent invasion of the mainland. Part of that lecture was an overview of what the German male can expect from life. I made a sketch showing the conscription duties of every German boy and man.

  In a matter of a couple of weeks, I was done with the syllabus. Our highest-ranking noncom, Corporal Massimi, became our clerk-typist and helped crank out the lecture notes. Mauksch assigned various members of our group to study my notes and begin teaching classes. The group, now down to fifty-five MIs, was organized into an orientation section, a terrain intelligence section, a German Army section, an aircraft team, an armored vehicle team, a security team, and a training aids department. Our courses covered map reading, identification of enemy personnel, safeguarding military information, German Army, handling prisoners of war, identification of armored vehicles, identification of French, German, and English aircraft, and French and German phrases. “Zip your Lip” also stayed on the program.