Steven Karras

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

  They split 3 Troop up into teams about six weeks before D-Day. I was sent to the bicycle troop of 6 Commando, which had been to the desert in North Africa, so some of the guys were decorated. D-Day was my first action. In the initial briefing, we were all told we were going to do the initial assault and come home, to which one of the old hands in Troop 6 Commando (he’d been in North Africa) said, “Don’t fuckin’ believe it. Which colonel is going to let you go when he was an elite unit under his command?”

  Of everybody in the bicycle troop, I was the only 3 Trooper. There were four others who were in other troops of 6 Commando, but we were all rather isolated and did not operate as a unit. We embarked in about four o’clock in the afternoon before all the craft were gathered together. It was getting dark, and we sailed with everybody singing and cheering each other from one craft to the next. We sailed from Southampton and went across the channel. It took all night and we were to land at six o’clock in the morning.

  My wave was to land at 7:15 and 7:45. Two infantry regiments were to land first, the East Yorks and the South Lancasters, and they were to take the beach, then the commandos were to push inland. We were to be proceeded by gliders to take the vital bridges, and then we would cross over the bridges and take the high ground from which the Nazis would be shelling the beach.

  During the crossing, I decided I should get all the rest I could because I would need all my energy the next day, so I lay in one of the hammocks in the hold. I was trying to read a book called Cold Comfort Farm and gave up. I said to myself, “This could very likely be the last thing I do.” And then I said, “Well, I can’t complain because I’ve had a rich full life.” I was twenty-two years old, and it seemed to me I’d done almost everything. Sure I was afraid—there was plenty of reason to be afraid—but I said to myself, “I’m here because I wanted to be here.” The point was to do what I had to do and, in a reasonably businesslike attitude, do what I had been programmed to do.

  The sea was extremely rough and we were on the rough channel all night long. So almost everybody was seasick, which meant that the hold, in parts, was ankle deep in vomit. We all had seasickness pills, which I refused to take because I thought it was a numbing pill and I didn’t want to be numbed. I wanted to be alert and with it. Going to the head, to the toilet, literally meant having to wade through pink vomit, which was a great encouragement to be even more seasick. What everyone really wanted to was get it over with, or at least be on deck where people could be sick over the side, but the captain of that craft said, “I want my decks clear for action. Get the hell out of here and keep below until I tell you.”

  Finally, he let us up; we picked up our bikes that had been piled up on deck. The bikes folded in half, but we had them assembled because we didn’t even have the time to tighten the wing nuts. I was carrying a full-size pickaxe, a two-hundred-foot rope, a rucksack with a change of clothing and a blanket, a water bottle, eight hand grenades, and about five hundred rounds of ammunition We didn’t carry a gas mask, as we appreciated they would not use gas, or a steel helmet. I also carried a Tommy gun. We didn’t run up the beach, we staggered.

  I had a couple of sayings; one of them was that in Austria, or in Europe in general, when there’s a traffic accident involving a cyclist, it’s always his fault—he always gets the blame. Another was in the British army, if somebody is in trouble it’s usually the lance corporal, the lowest on commission track. I don’t need to say that the world over, it is said if there’s some problem, it’s because of the Jews. On D-Day, I said the Nazis didn’t have a chance because I, being one person, was a Jewish lance corporal cyclist, so the odds were stacked against them.

  Sword Beach was the leftmost beach, which was subdivided into alphabetic subdivisions. I landed on Queen Beach, and Queen was subdivided into Queen Red on the left and Queen Green on the right; I landed on Queen Red.

  The ship practically landed aground at Sword Beach, and I was the second person off the landing craft. On the beach, I saw the Skipper who had landed in the craft next to mine, and I didn’t know what to do so I saluted. It was probably the only salute on the beach on D-Day.

  The Germans were shelling and things were exploding around us. Oil bombs sailed through the sky like balls of fire, shot in rapid succession from six-barreled launchers called Moaning Minnies or sobbing sisters. Wherever they hit these incendiary rockets ignited large fires.

  There were guys from the infantry sweeping mines with a mine detector and we were right in front of them. One of them said, “Wait! I haven’t swept there yet.”

  We said, “Too bad, we can’t wait. We have to get on,” and went around him. Then we took a short rest in the dunes before it was time to get on our bikes and cycle. When we were on bicycles riding inland, we passed the parachutists and the gliders wearing the maroon beret of airborne units. They cheered when they saw us come up, because we were their first assurance that troops were coming by sea to reinforce them. Until that time, they were the only ones there. They had landed before H-Hour on D-Day: H-Hour was six o’clock in the morning, and they had landed the night before at H-minus.

  When we passed, they would say, “Give them hell!” I remember to this day reflecting that it was a strange way of putting it, because it wasn’t like we were literally going to give them hell. We were going to Varaville, six miles inland, to hold it until further notice. If German troops tried to stop us from getting there, we would stop them from stopping us, so it seemed incongruous to say “give them hell.” In retrospect, I think they were quite right, for it was the spirit of the thing, but I was too focused on doing what I had been programmed to do to consider this at the time.

  As we continued inland, we were under sporadic fire from German riflemen sniping at us from the woods. When we came to the forming up point, our brigadier, Lord Lovat, was walking around urging people on, and he seemed to be a man perfectly at ease. The shots and the noise didn’t seem to bother him at all. “Good show,” he said as Piper Bill Millen, the bagpiper who had piped us ashore, came dashing up. Millen was panting and catching his breath while carrying the bagpipes as well as his other equipment. “Come, get a move on. This is no different than any exercise,” said Lord Lovat. He was very calm and carried no other weapon but a .45 Colt in his holster and a Scottish wading stick, normally used to keep one’s balance when fishing.

  There were a couple of prisoners at the assembly point. Lovat commented to me, “Oh, you’re the chap with the languages. Ask them where their howitzers are.” So I started to interrogate one of the prisoners. He was a great big guy who didn’t respond. There was mumbling in the crowd: “Look at that Nazi bastard, he doesn’t even answer our guy when he’s talking to him.” Meanwhile I was looking at his paperwork and saw that he was a Pole. He didn’t understand a word I said in German. So I tried French, because many Poles learned French in school, and his face lit up in recognition, but he said he didn’t know anything. Lord Lovat, who was standing next to me and spoke much better French, started to take over the interrogation. I felt very disappointed because I’d been upstaged by a better linguist.

  Behind the woods of the forming up area, we encountered our first road, which was a pleasant change from what we’d been riding through so far, and prepared to start riding our bicycles. We were to cycle to the village of Varaville to relieve the Canadian parachutists, who were supposed to have taken the bridges.

  There was death all around us. Dead cattle lay belly up along the roads, their bodies bloated. Dead parachutists were hanging from the trees. For most of us, it was the first action we’d seen, and it was shocking. The mortar and artillery shells exploding all around would have been even more frightening if we had really understood the situation. I kept telling myself that they were our shells, that it was all supporting fire. Of course, when the shells hit nearby and bullets whizzed past my ears, I had to admit we were under enemy fire, an enemy that was trying their hardest to kill us.

  We had been instructed by the Skipper to make
sure that we were used properly by the officers commanding the troops to which we were attached. He had said, “They’ll be very busy and preoccupied with their own things, but don’t you come back afterwards and tell me that they were too busy to use you. Pester them. Ask whether you may go when they’re sending out reconnaissance patrols. Make sure that all your training didn’t go to waste.” So I contentiously did precisely that.

  My captain, however, was indeed preoccupied and considered me a nuisance. Whenever I asked to go on a patrol, Captain Robinson simply said no and sent one of the people with whom he had been training for the last several years and had greater confidence than this kid with a funny accent who had joined his troop at the last minute.

  Suddenly there was a burst of machine gun fire close by, and as I rode up I saw one of our people, a red-haired commando, lying dead by the road next to his bicycle. Robinson had us dismount and deployed us behind a little block overlooking the downhill road and grassy slopes on either side. On the left, there was a solid hedgerow and down below there was a village called Laporte, adjacent to Benouville, where there were two bridges that constituted our first objective. They were to have been taken by the British 6th Airborne Division gliders. I carried two hemp ropes in case the bridges were destroyed by the Germans or under heavy fire, in which case the ropes were to be used to ferry troops across the river in rubber dinghies, which some other people carried.

  Finally, Captain Robinson said, “Now there’s something you can do, Corporal Masters. Go down to this village where the bridges are and see what’s going on.” It wasn’t difficult to tell what was going on. All hell seemed to have broken loose, with odd bursts of fire in every which direction, but it was hard to tell where the fire was coming from. I thought a reconnaissance patrol would be accompanying me, and I asked, “How many people should I take?”

  He said, “No, I just want you to go by yourself,” which didn’t bother me.

  I looked around at the scenery and said, “Yes sir. I will go in the left and come back in a sweep around the right hand side.”

  “You still don’t understand what I want you to do,” replied Captain Robinson. “I want you to walk down the road and see what is going on.”

  Now it was quite clear what he wanted to do—I was to be the target. He wanted to draw fire to see where the machine gun that had killed the cyclist was firing from. Rather than send some of his own men, he preferred to send this recently attached stranger. It felt rather like mounting the scaffold of the guillotine. I had been trained to figure out angles and to be more useful than that, so I frantically looked for some angle or option of improving the situation for which there was none. There were no ditches of any kind or cover, and it was broad daylight.

  Then I remembered the movie Gunga Din, where Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Cary Grant get overwhelmed by Indians on the Khyber Pass and inadvertently find themselves in a hopeless situation. Just before they get overwhelmed by two thousand rebels, Cary Grant delivered a line I always thought was funny: “You’re all under arrest.” And then an angle came to me at this precise moment.

  As I walked down the road with my finger on the trigger of my Tommy gun, I yelled at the top of my voice, “Ergebt Euch alle! Alle raus! Ihr seid volkommen unsingelt-Ihr habt keine Chance. Werft Eure Waffen fort und kommt mit den Handen hoch raus wenn Ihr weiter leben wolt. Der Krieg ist aus fur Euch!” (Surrender all of you! Come out! You are completely surrounded and you don’t have a chance. Throw away your weapons and come out with your hands up if you want to go on living. The war is over for you!) I tried to sound as Prussian as possible.

  Nobody came out, but they held their fire, probably because they wondered what lunacy was going on. They’d seen the armada landing, they’d been bombed and shelled, they saw a bunch of soldiers on bicycles, which was a surprise, so they shot the first cyclist. And now a pedestrian soldier was walking toward them in broad daylight on D-Day morning. They must have figured, “Maybe he has an armor division right behind him. Maybe we are smarter to wait. We can always shoot him, but let’s not betray our position.” So they held fire for a while. Finally, a guy got up and fired at me. I fired at him but my gun jammed.

  Now Captain Robinson had seen what he wanted to see, so he had the riflemen fix bayonets and charge. In the lead was Cpl. George Thompson, a former grenadier guardsman, firing his Bren machine gun from the shoulder, which was the usual method of shooting when charging. As I marveled at the charge, I saw Thompson suddenly move ninety degrees to his left and fire his entire magazine at a low target I could not see, practically at his feet. I got up to join the charge, and when I got there I saw his target. There were two Austrian machine gunners who had been shot. One of them was pretty much out of it. The other one was wounded but conscious. When I began to question them, they told me they were fifteen and seventeen years old.

  Corporal Thompson came over to me. “You speak their language, don’t you?” he said. “How do you say ‘I’m sorry’ in German? I’ve never shot anybody before.” He added, “I took their life. I’m sorry, forgive me.” The next day Thompson led another bayonet charge and was killed. I still get emotional when I think of him.

  During the Normandy campaign, I was constantly out in no man’s land as a sort of early warning system to see if the Germans were doing anything that would signal they were about to mount an attack. I went out every morning to creep up to where the Germans were and watch them. I knew individual Germans by sight.

  We would interrogate prisoners or deserters as soon as we caught them. Being taken prisoner is a risky business for that person. If they are deserters, it’s a doubly risky, because they might get shot from either side; The troops from which they are deserting are likely to shoot them in the back if they see them, so they would just barely escaped with their lives. What’s more, they’ve been programmed to think that they will be executed and tortured and are afraid of what will happen to them. The usual question they’d ask was, “Are you going to kill me?” I would respond, “Not for the time being.”

  At times, I feel dissatisfied that I didn’t do enough. I started out as a pacifist when I was a kid. Essentially, I yearned for peace, but I found the old saying, “If you want peace you must prepare for war” was extremely valid then, and is still valid to this day. I feel that people who haven’t experienced persecution and war tend to come up with a pacifist notion that is completely misplaced.

  Some of my friends said the important thing was to eliminate as many of the enemy as possible, as quickly as possible. At times, there was another question that came up in discussions among us commandos many years after the war, when the Palestinians assassinated the Israeli team in Munich in 1972. We thought they did that to make an impact, and I understand that. If we were asked, “Would you have done that?” The answer would be, “No way!”

  If we heard that a plane was taking off from Germany to Spain with the soccer team from Frankfurt, and we had the opportunity to shoot that plane down, would we have done it? No, we would not have done it, because what do we have against the soccer team? These are sports people. However, if we had heard that on the plane was the Gestapo leadership, or even one or two SS types, would we have shot the plane? You bet we would have shot the plane down.

  Peter Masters left England to go to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship to study design. He eventually became a prominent television art director in Washington, D.C. In 1997, Presidio Press published Peter’s autobiography entitled Striking Back: A Jewish Commando’s War against the Nazis.

  Chapter 23

  JOHN BRUNSWICK

  BOCHOLT, GERMANY

  XV Corps, Third Army

  John Brunswick was born Hans Braunschweig in Bocholt, Germany. Having arrived in the United States in 1937, he was inducted into the army in 1943 and was trained as an interrogator of prisoners of war (IPW) at Camp Ritchie. He served much of the war in an IPW team attached to the Free French 2nd Armored Division. In the photograph above, Brunsw
ick (center), serving as translator, sits between Lt. Gen. Von Foertsch (left), Commanding General, German First Army, and Gen. Jacob L. Devers, Commanding General, American Sixth Army Group, as Von Foertsch signs the unconditional surrender of German Army Group “G.”

  When I received my draft notice, I had very mixed feelings. On one hand, I felt that I should have volunteered to fight Hitler and his Stormtroopers who had caused such unbelievable suffering to so many people and had ruined their lives. If not stopped soon, they would probably be unstoppable and cause more trouble throughout the world. On the other hand, I hated to leave my wife. At the age of thirty-two, having already been in the United States for six years, I was making a little more money and I was able to support my parents.

  While I had no choice, deep down I knew that by serving my new adopted country, like everybody else, I was doing the right thing and would have felt guilty if I had not done so. I was inducted in March 1943 and, after about a week, landed in Camp Croft, an infantry training camp near Spartanburg, South Carolina. I slept in the barracks with about fifty other inductees, nearly all of them eighteen to twenty-one years old—I was the “old man.” We came from all over the country; I had trouble understanding some of the farm boys from Mississippi and Louisiana with their thick southern drawl.

  The first part of basic training consisted of six weeks of physical hardening, drilling lessons in discipline and commands and, above all, instructions in shooting the M1 rifle. The sergeants instructing and commanding us apparently did not expect the old man, who had an accent and was a New York Jew, would make a very good soldier. However, I surprised them all by qualifying as an “expert rifleman,” which was the highest grade a marksman could achieve. After six weeks of basic training came another seven weeks of advanced infantry training. We had to hike up and down the South Carolina red clay hills with full, 50-pound packs on 20-mile marches in the 90-degree heat.