Steven Karras

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

  As for me, I was soon far more interested in concentrating on our new weapons collection than teaching classes. To that end, I started to pick up whatever training manuals were available on German handguns, rifles, submachine guns, and light machine guns. Although I certainly had no notion of planning it that way, this activity started me on the long road of mastering all manner of detail about European weapons. Almost imperceptibly, I slid into a pursuit that occupied much of my waking hours for the next two years and more.

  We packed our duffel bags, left Bristol behind on May 1, 1944, and took a train to Warminster. Our destination was a former British horse-artillery camp located outside of the town of Tidworth. The camp was part of the Salisbury Plain, which was—and still is—basically a very large British Army reservation. It had been used as a training area, where artillery, tanks, and other weaponry had been exercised indoors and outdoors since long before World War II.

  The U.S. Army had taken over most of the Salisbury Plain by 1942 and used it as a staging area. The army stationed and trained large numbers of our troops there in preparation for the invasion of the European mainland. There would soon be several hundred thousand U.S. servicemen in the general area. Our common home for an undetermined time would be Tidworth.

  We went through our now standard speech of how our group of MIs would serve as instructors for intelligence subjects.

  I sat on my bunk in our barrack and updated the lecture notes that I had first generated for the Bristol MI school. They covered the same material of message-handling and recognition of German uniforms, insignia, and weapons, but also some new instructions on the training and psychology of German soldiers, whom the troops would soon encounter.

  In short order, we rounded up additional German weapons. In this, we were aided by a ground forces training inspector who saw what we were planning and procured some German small arms for us. The idea was to introduce our troops to the handling of these weapons when needed in a pinch.

  I have no idea how all these weapons got to the British Isles. Most likely, they were captured during the North African campaigns and brought back for training purposes. In the weeks that followed, we took advantage of that situation and started hunting for additional German light and heavy weapons, uniforms, rifles, handguns, machine guns, mortars, mines, and booby traps. Lucky for us, that stuff seemed to be everywhere in the Salisbury Plain and places beyond.

  After we had acquired a collection of German arms suitable for a teaching display, Mauksch persuaded the camp administration to give us sole access to a huge, empty brick building. It had an arched, corrugated sheetmetal roof, perhaps forty feet high along the crown. Before we Yanks moved in, this building had been used by British horse-artillery troops for indoor exercises, thus it was big enough to allow drilling horses pulling howitzers inside the hall across a dusty dirt floor. Anything would do to keep out of the British weather and the all-pervading muck outside, particularly heavy artillery weapons!

  One of the major pieces of heavy German weaponry was the 88mm antiaircraft and antitank gun. We acquired an early “88” that had been used in the Spanish Civil War and did not yet sport the recoil-reducing muzzle-break of the later models.

  We focused our collection on German weapons, of course, since the job of our Military Intelligence training centered on the immediate enemy. Specimens from other European countries would come into our collection over the course of the next year, before we established a second Military Intelligence school and museum in Normandy.

  Somewhere in Tidworth, we also found a working model of a German Army Volkswagen. It was open on top, its canvas roof was missing, and it had a two-cylinder, air-cooled rear engine. That early version of the civilian VW was a real piece of junk and no competition for our jeeps by any stretch of the imagination. Our specimen was working and we tooled around in it for a bit. Someone was brave enough to try and give me driving lessons in that crate. After I nearly drove it off a small, wooden, banister-less bridge over a shallow gully, my instructor decided to cut my lesson short.

  On several occasions I taught visiting British artillery troops how to disassemble and reassemble the German quad antiaircraft gun and the 47mm antiaircraft gun. The antiaircraft gun barrel was about six feet long, so the gunner sat on a perforated metal seat and traversed and elevated the gun with two rotary hand cranks.

  It was recoil-operated like an ordinary machine gun and could be disassembled without the need for tools—exactly like the German MG38 and MG42 light machine guns, except that every part was oversized by comparison. As precision machinery goes, it was a good-looking piece of hardware. I got really fast at taking it apart and reassembling it.

  In exchange for taking the time to instruct them in the details of these guns, the British invited me to their artillery range in another part of the Salisbury Plain. They offered to let me fire a German 105mm field gun, lobbing shells from one hillside into another across one of those British villages that had been abandoned ages ago when the plain first became a military installation. Of course, I didn’t know that little detail. I saw them shooting across a village in the valley below and thought “What a callous bunch!” Nobody set me straight at the time.

  A big, burly noncom with a Scottish brogue called out to me and said something I couldn’t understand. I thought he’d said, “Fire!” so I pulled the lanyard of the 105 that was assigned to me and off went the shell. It impacted a couple of seconds later on the opposite ridge of the valley and exploded. Echoes of the sounds rang through the valley for several more seconds, whereupon the noncom sauntered over and asked me whether I was in the habit of ignoring commands. Embarrassing moment! Good thing those guns were laid in properly, so no harm done.

  I also gave speeches on German arms and psychology to very large groups of soldiers from the 3rd Armored Division, including their general staff. That was something of an anomaly, for I was still only a lowly private. The armored troops were on their way through Tidworth to other staging areas.

  At one of these lectures I read from those notes that I had already made in Bristol. I faced about three hundred GIs assembled in a huge barn of a building, one similar in size to our “museum.” Halfway into my talk, my microphone went dead; I also dropped my prepared notes. Since they weren’t stapled together, they flew all over the stage and were instantly useless. I had to extemporize from there on, but I got a standing ovation by finishing up my talk by yelling something like “Let’s go get the bastards!” Throughout it all, my knees were fairly knocking.

  Our weapons exhibit kept growing and its reputation began to spread. Eventually, we wouldn’t allow anybody into the building after hours to see the weapons collection if they were below the rank of major. We couldn’t be bothered to unlock the front door unless they were serious brass—office hours are office hours. Hubris had already set in.

  Those weapons soon became entirely my responsibility. Before long I was caught up in the details of their fascinating history and of the technology of European small arms in particular. I started studying whatever descriptive material I could lay my hands on, which were mostly German and British military manuals. It had taken us several weeks of hard work to get the museum in shape for classes and casual visitors. After we opened the doors, over four thousand GIs wandered through our place on their own time.

  Our training course was so successful that word got around. The press showed up one day and interviewed us. A story, almost exclusively about Mauksch, eventually appeared in the November 3, 1944, issue of Yank magazine, the Sunday edition of the army newspaper. Mauksch was shown demonstrating a heavy machine gun to Colonel Moore, the station commandant. Next to that photo was a great view of the museum as it was late that year. A very complimentary story appeared inside.

  After that article appeared, MI headquarters in London—located at Eisenhower’s European Theater HQ on Grosvenor Square—duly noted what we were doing.

  All had gone well except for a detour late in May 1944, when I was ac
cidentally separated from my MI group. Some orders got screwed up and even Hans Mauksch couldn’t get them countermanded in time to keep me from being shipped off. Suddenly I found myself among a bunch of other GIs on the way to another replacement depot somewhere else in the south of England. It was not a great place to be. I was unassigned, had no recent combat training of any kind—including no U.S. weapons firing—and I seemed destined to become a prime candidate for combat of some sort in the near future. The invasion of Normandy was just a month off, though of course no one in the ranks knew that.

  The weather was abominable. It rained constantly. There was foot-deep mud all over the place. Duckboards were laid out in the company streets so people wouldn’t sink in past their ankles. Everyone was cold, damp, and mostly miserable all the time.

  We were housed in old, single-story British Army barracks that had a dirt floor and a single, little potbelly coal-fired stove at its center. In the morning we would wake up covered with soot. Our GI blankets were black with coal dust and so were our nostrils, mouths, faces, and hands.

  I wasn’t happy. I had left a secure and interesting job behind in exchange for waiting to be shipped to the Continent along with other, basically undertrained replacement troops. Meanwhile, here I was, pulling night KP, or guard duty. Once, I “walked a post” around a water tower on top of some godforsaken hill in the middle of the night, with my M1 at right-shoulder arms, in pitch darkness! Around midnight, the officer of the guard appeared from nowhere and made me jump.

  Like everyone else around me, I looked ahead to an uncertain future amongst troops I did not know. Rumors about the impending invasion of France set the scene.

  Probably the worst duty I had during those weeks at the replacement depot was night KP, during which I scoured the inside and the carbon-black outside of GI garbage cans from the canteen, working outdoors in nearly total darkness in the dead of night. I came back to my barracks looking like a chimney sweep.

  When I wasn’t sleeping off guard duty or night KP, or wasn’t washing my clothes, underwear, socks, or my heavy GI overcoat in cold water, I sat outdoors during every available daylight hour studying my algebra correspondence course. My feet were constantly caked with mud, and my leggings and socks were soaking wet, like everybody else’s. We still had canvass leggings at that time. Paratrooper boots with leather bindings a third of the way up the calf from the ankles hadn’t been issued yet—at least not to the regular ground troops; that came later. Naturally, and as if I had planned it so I could leave that miserable place, I caught pneumonia.

  The next thing I knew, it was morning, I was on a stretcher, blood was trickling from my nose once again. I was feverish and I was being carried—along with my duffel bag—into an ambulance. I was taken to a field hospital occupied by the U.S. Army, somewhere to the north. During my hospital stay, I sat in bed between clean, dry, white sheets. Meanwhile, the replacement troops I had left behind were on alert. Shortly after I had left them, they were shipped off to the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

  A couple of weeks later, now Lt. Hans Mauksch managed to get me reassigned to Tidworth and I was reunited with my MI group. Who knows how he pulled off that one. Fortunately, Mauksch appreciated my contribution to the group and wanted me back there—needed me, in fact. By now, I was the only member of the group who intimately knew every aspect of each of the many weapons that we toted around with us. They were our most prominent calling card. That suited me fine.

  While the battles in France raged on, we remained in Tidworth, training troops on their way over to the mainland. The war was next door, but it seemed far away. How fortunate we were! We had no idea, of course, how long our present situation would go on.

  Meanwhile, we were definitely earning our keep. During our stay in Tidworth, over 120,000 American and 5,000 British soldiers received training in important subjects from us. We worked all kinds of hours, and all that before we were even “officially recognized” and attached to Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in London. It was all highly irregular, but it worked.

  TWICE DURING MY PROLONGED STAY at Tidworth, I got an opportunity to go on leave and visit my uncle, Heinz (now Henry) Kirschbaum, my mother’s youngest brother. Even before I had met Heinz and his brother Fritz in Berlin in May 1938 during my brief vacation there and in Guben, Heinz had already briefly wound up in a concentration camp, ostensibly for “fooling around” with an “Aryan” girl. By the time I met him in Berlin, he was starting to keep company with Lea Goldhammer. I met Lea several times in Berlin during my last late spring vacation in Germany and liked her instantly.

  Both Heinz and Lea were fortunate to get to England in 1939. Heinz managed to join a rescue program for German Jews run by a Jewish aid organization in Berlin. That got him out of Germany and into England, where he first spent some time interned at a Kitchener Camp for displaced persons. Lea had also been lucky. She had a cousin in Wales who provided an affidavit for her so that she could immigrate to the United Kingdom. Later that year, this same cousin got Heinz out of the Kitchener Camp. Heinz married Lea and went to work in her cousin’s factory. They moved into a small house in Tufts Wells, a town near Cardiff in southeast Wales.

  Winter had finally ended, and with it went the miserable English weather. In the spring of 1945, everybody else had been sent off to France. We stayed behind and waited for orders or a new assignment. Finally, a decision was made at MIS and we were told to report to MI HQ in London.

  We took a train to London. Once there, we moved into the Red Cross building at Charing Cross, not too far from Eisenhower’s headquarters on Grosvenor Square. A few buzz-bombs were still coming into London at night. I heard one of them hit one morning while I was standing in front of a mirror and shaving at our Red Cross quarters. The mirror blurred my image for a second, but that was all. The worst of the Blitz had passed by then. British and American air forces had taken over the skies, and German bombers now rarely ventured into English airspace. Normandy was also a much safer place now than it had been nine months earlier, particularly on D-Day.

  Our new assignment from MIS was to move our training activities to a new camp in Normandy, near the small town of Dreux, sixty miles southwest of Paris. The army engineers had built barracks for a Military Intelligence School there.

  To get over to France, we boarded an Army Air Force “Gooney Bird,” Douglas C-47, the military equivalent of a commercial DC-3.

  We had an uneventful flight that November 30, 1944—just a short hop—to an airfield near Paris. Once there, we boarded a decrepit French passenger train. We rode along for about an hour and finally passed through Dreux and the small French village of Saint George-Motel that bordered our new camp. It was a warm and sunny that early spring day; I saw daisies everywhere as we passed through the village with its ancient stucco houses and cobblestone streets.

  Much to our amazement, our “camp” turned out to be located on what we were told had been a former Vanderbilt Estate. Driving through the gates of the estate, we entered what once must have been very beautiful, sculptured gardens. A few hundred feet farther, a French château came into view, complete with steeply gabled twin wings. All that was missing was the drawbridge over the moat. The grounds were in bad shape, but the castle seemed untouched by the ravages of the war and the occupation. A Luftwaffe contingent had cleared out of there months earlier, we were told upon our arrival.

  Soon our small group got ready to teach again. We were scheduled to conduct our standard curriculum of training courses—basically the program that we had offered the troops in England, but adapted to a new contingent of GIs, mostly officers and noncoms. Everybody quickly settled into a routine. Their work was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of free time for most of our crew. It was also definitely safe.

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER OUR ARRIVAL in Normandy, we finally succeeded in having all of our small arms shipped over from England; they were our teaching tools and we needed them urgently. The heavy weapons had to stay behind,
much to my regret. In no way were we going to be able to cart the 88, the mountain howitzer, those antiaircraft guns, and other heavy equipment across the English Channel. We had enough for a new small-arms display; now we needed a proper venue in which to display our goodies.

  I had small group of guys assigned to me for a few days. Together, we planned how to build a really good-looking and functional weapons exhibit. We settled on having one display case for each major machine gun family in our collection. Handguns would be displayed on tables throughout the large open floor area.

  We kept an eye out for additional small arms, and over the course of several months, we assembled and displayed quite an impressive collection of European small arms, as well as a few Japanese guns. Those display cases around the three walls were very professional looking. The Smithsonian would have been proud to have them, we thought. Tables located on the floor throughout the large arboretum displayed additional small arms, mostly our large collection of automatic pistols and revolvers, all appropriately labeled. We also acquired a sizable number of German uniforms, several German mines and booby traps, and a motley collection of other gear including some mortars and light antitank guns. These were displayed on the floor against one of the two short end walls.

  I was beginning to think of myself as a small arms expert and was busy writing my manual whenever there was a free moment to communicate my insights to the rest of the world. I also studied my collection of small German antipersonnel mines and booby traps, some of which were of doubtful safety. On one occasion, I tried to determine whether they were really disarmed. I tied them in place behind a large rock near my museum and pulled their releases via a hundred-foot-long string. Nothing happened; that I didn’t blow myself up goes without saying.