Interview with Mr. Doug Horth
[b. 5/9/23]
Recorded from 11/24/06-11/27/06
[Interview starts at 002 on counter]
Emily Cooney: Today is the twenty first of October. I am Emily Cooney and I am interviewing Doug Horth at 3605 East 75th Place Indianapolis, Indiana. Mr. Horth is eighty-two years old and was born on May 9th 1923. Mr. Horth served in World War Two and was in the Tenth Mountain Division.
[010]
EC: Where you drafted or did you enlist?
Doug Horth: No I volunteered, enlisted.
[013]
EC: Where were you living at the time?
DH: I was living in Indianapolis. My exact address was on Washington Boulevard just north of 38th street 3906.
[019]
EC: Why did you join?
DH: Well I had to go to service. Everyone had to go to service at that time we knew it we were that age level and I wanted to go. I wanted to pick the kind of a unit that I would prefer. At that time I was at Purdue University I had one semester at Purdue before I actually went to service. When it came time to go I volunteered for the tenth mountain division. Which was a mountain troop and they skied and they climbed rocks and they did all those wonderful things that I thought was something I wanted to do. So I had to get three letters of recommendation in order to do this. I got one from my scoutmaster, one from my minister, one from a doctor. They were all sent in with the appropriate paper work. Then I actually was inductive into the army at fort Benjamin Harrison, I think it was April of the year, and immediately was sent for about a week of going through their basic docternation. I was sent to fort brag North Carolina that was because I came from Purdue and Purdue had some ROTC units there that dealt with artillery. So they sent me to Fort Brag North Carolina to be in the artillery. That did not suit me very well and I was not happy but I was in the army and I had to do what they told me to do. Fortunately in about three weeks after being down there my transfer came through and I was transferred out to Colorado, to Camp Hale, Colorado, which is way up, two miles above sea level, 10,000 feet. Our base camp was right at 10,000 feet and the air was very thin. I arrived there in May of ’43 and then started my experience from there.
[069]
EC: Do you remember your first days in the service?
DH: Oh yes. Pando, Colorado was a little rail stop and that’s where the trains pulled in to go to our camp, which was right next-door. I got off that train and I had a great big heavy rucksack, duffle bag like thing full of clothing and whatever else and pushed it and threw it up over my shoulder and I thought I was just going to go over backwards because the air was so thin and the atmosphere there was so different than sea level. That was my first experience. Then they took me to the company area, assigned me to Company K of the 86th regiment and after signing papers and doing whatever they had me do they took me to a barracks and gave me a bed, which was on the first floor, and I soon learned to know the fellow in the next bed and got acquainted with him pretty well. He had a brother in the unit that he would visit him once in a while These fellows turned out to be the Von Tropp, the Tropp brothers of the Von Tropp family, the singers. I knew nothing about all that, but they were very nice young men and I did enjoy meeting them. That was my first memorable experience in the service.
[099]
EC: Can you tell me about your training experience?
DH: Oh yeah. We stayed at the camp one full year. I did. The camp had been there one year prior to that, I was there the second year it was open. When I got there, there were about 10,000 men. We were called the Light Division; the regular Army division had about 15,000 people and heavy armor. We had less people at 10,000 and lighter armaments and mules for transportation. You know heavy transportation. We trained very much like any Army outfit, we had a basic training time had lasted probably six weeks or eight weeks where we learned how to march and turn right and turn left and shoulder our arms and do all the basic things you learn to do. Mostly take orders and do what you’re supposed to do, when you’re supposed to do it and you started to get acquainted with your friends there are new people who you’ve never seen before and that was interesting. We were fortunate there at Hale that the average age when I got there was about twenty-one years old and the average, they had an Army Intelligence test you had to pass to get into service, and that the average was about 116, which was a high average. But most of these fellows were coming out of colleges and we were a sort of a college grade outfit, which was, not to sound snobbish, but it was a nice place to be. So we blended well together. We made many really strong friendships that have lasted all through, even continue, today. And so that was some memories from my early experience.
[135]
EC: Where did you go when you served in World War II?
DH: Well we trained in Colorado for that full year and went through all the seasons out there. They our training started at 10,000 feet, we worked up to as high as 12,500 and 13,000 feet. And that’s a rare atmosphere to train in hard. We didn’t have any transportation except our feet and our skis in the winter and we did an awful lot of that. We weren’t fancy downhill skiers they taught us how to do that but we were supposed to be able to carry heavy packs and armament and uphill mostly, it seemed like we always went uphill. We lived right out in the cold, because it did get quite cold, even down to 40 below, that was rare but that happened. And we had have special equipment, to with stand that, and they did a pretty good job of clothing us and outfitting us. We had, of course, long underwear, and kind of a ski pant which was different than most regular Army people. It had big side pockets where you could put ammunition or food or rations in and we had a special jacket what they called a ski jacket heavy sweaters and all the appropriate clothing. Shoes were a big thing there they had to have to so much variation in the temperatures that dealt with that well anyway my shoes covered from one end of my bed to the other end of my bed, underneath. We changed them on a regular basis. But our service time and physical time out there was harder than what we got into in combat as far as physical activity. But there’s no comparing combat time with training time, emotionally. It’s vastly different. But we were pretty well trained people. And we had that full year there at Hale and with all of its various experiences and we learned some good trades and the skiing was to become a very popular national sport. We were sort of in on the ground floor of that. So after that they sent us to Camp Swift Texas and that was a great change for us because of the difference in the climate and terrain and the general atmosphere. We were there almost six months before we went overseas. And our overseas journey was to Italy where we joined the 5th Army and helped finish the war in northern Italy. That was quite an experience.
[191]
EC: Do you remember arriving in Italy?
DH: Oh yes. We arrived at Naples the day before Christmas of ’44. Pulled up to a dock this great big ship came into the dock and that was the first time I had ever seen the real effects of war with my own two eyes. Bombed out buildings and just terrible distressful scenes you know. And then the thing that really afflicted me quickly was all of the people on the dock were down there and our GIS and our soldiers went to the rail of the ship, down there and saw these kids, many of them were young children and they started to throw them candy bars, small things like that and they would fight for them, they just were hungry and anything was very valuable if you could eat it. That was the first time I ever saw real poverty. It was painful and we saw many, many things over there that were painful also.
[210]
EC: What was your job assignment?
DH: Well I was in the infantry. We carried rifles. I was a rifleman. In combat I carried what they call a BAR Browning Automatic Rifle, which was a machine gun really. And it fired very rapidly. It fired 16 shots in just a very few seconds. And of course you reloaded but that didn’t happen until later. We arrived at Naples and then we spent two days in Naples at the point of disembarkation there. Then we got on a freighter, a small Italian freighter, and sailed up the west side of Italy to Lake Horn, which was much farther north near the city of Pisa where they have the leaning tower. And we encamped there for a while and then they moved us up into the mountains about fifty to sixty miles north sort of in a holding capacity. They put us in little farmhouses, chicken coops, wherever they could find to put somebody in sort of to keep us hidden from the Germans who were just across the way waiting. And they didn’t want them to know we were there yet, but I’m sure they did. So we spent probably a month there that was through the winter. We were waiting for a break of weather and snow conditions and so forth to take the next range of mountains. Now there wasn’t enough snow to use skis there. We made maybe a few runs on patrols with skis. But we were in the Army, we were infantry, we had to do what we were told to do and at that time skiing wasn’t part of it. But rock climbing was. That was very important because one of the primary objectives we had to take if we were to be successful involved a lot of high rock climbing we accomplished that.
[246]
EC: Did you see a lot of combat?
DH: Well I had all I wanted. It was from February, the first major battle I was in started in February the 19th, and the war ended then in May. We were in all of that, now I was in half of it, because I had an appendicitis about half way through and I had to go back or they made me go back and have my appendix out so I missed some of it but I had about half of it.
[255]
EC: Were there a lot of casualties in your unit?
DH: Yes there were. We had 998 men dead and right at 4,000 wounded and that happened in about 12 weeks, something like that. We had a high casualty rate. My experience of combat, advancing into fire as they say, that means you take a gun and run up the hill and hope they don’t shoot you it’s scary stuff but you do it out of training because you’re conditioned to do it. One of my first experiences in combat was at Mount Delaterrcia, which doesn’t appear on too many maps, but it sure is on my mind, it will never go away. But we started out to attack that particular hill, our particular platoon was assigned a segment, and when we were told to move we had to run down through a little valley, and then get up on the backside of a hill, the little hill which gave us protection, before we started up the big one. On the way down that hill I fell down just didn’t get shot but I just fell and I broke the butt off of my gun, my BAR, and that gave me a lot of concern for a few minutes but when we got to the backside of this hill, I tried to fix the gun and I couldn’t so I just had to take the butt and throw it away and use the weapon sort of as a side arm and shoot it. I couldn’t put it into my shoulder lie a normal gun and shoot it. But it worked I mean I could fire the weapon. So after a short time it was time to move around that little hill and try to take the ridge. First I’ll tell you that in training, they had a lot of films about combat and what combat was like, which had you have to think. And one of the films, I recall vividly, it said that when you are moving you don’t stop, if you see someone that hurt or down a friend, it’s makes no difference who it is you keep going, that’s what you have to do. And I thought at that time, while I had been trained, I couldn’t do that I just, you know, if a friend is down, you’d have to help him. But as I moved around that hill I came upon my lieutenant, LT Howell, at that time he was about 25 years old, had just been married before we came overseas, had a couple weeks of time with his new wife, and there he was on the ground, and I did think he was dead, but I couldn’t stop and see because I had to go. And I did that. So I broke my own rule. I told myself I could never stop and take time, but I did because that’s what you were supposed to do. So we just moved up through the day, it took us the whole day to get to the top. An awful lot of activity and ugly sites on the way, and then that night we were far enough advanced, we had pushed them up the hill, and, I’m saying hill it was more than a hill, so we started to dig in. You have to dig your own foxhole, you didn't have any machines to do that such thing, and we had small tools to work with, they call them entrenching tools, a shovel on one side and pick on the other. You really work hard! When you are doing that you are very earnest about your activity. I was with Bill Holbrook, that’s Bill up on the wall there, that’s his picture. We’ll talk more about him later. But anyway, we dug in up there and then the artillery, of course there is artillery all the time. We had a lot of it. But the first, second and third nights up there were just hell. They just pounded and pounded and pounded because they wanted that ground back. It was vicious. We lost people but we hung on and achieved our first objective. We did withstand a counter attack, and by the third night Gerry’s always counter attacked and that was a viscous time too. We held on to the property and moved on later.
[325]
EC: Can you tell me a couple of your most memorable experiences?
DH: Well I had a very memorable one up there; why I’m here I don’t know I mean I’m pleased but it could have gone the other way so very easily. About the third day or fourth day up on Terasia I had climbed out of my foxhole, for I don’t know why but I was out
and near a tree that was probably a foot in diameter and within 30 seconds three mortar shells were dropped right around it. The Gerry’s were very good at mortars. And very accurate. Those shells landed within 30 or 40 feet of me and I was dead in my mind that was it and I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, it was just, this is it, I had kind of a warm feeling. And why, I can’t explain that to you. As to why that happened that way. But then, as soon as that third one landed and I was still breathing why I ran for that hole and you know fifteen feet maybe and I got back in it and then I got scared. I wasn’t frightened out there doing that activity but I do remember that. Also on that hill we had when we went up we just carried everything we needed. We were given some rations for about three or four days, something like that and ammunition of course, and that’s all. No bedding, no anything, just us and what we were wearing. We had stacked our packs down at the bottom of the hill, appropriate place and then during the combat time they would send two or three down to get their pack and bring it back up so we would be a little more comfortable and have some things with you and I went down the hill and there was artillery all the way but then I started to see things that I hadn’t seen on the way up, because some of it hadn’t happened yet and then on the way back up you see more and it’s hard to describe and may be harsh to talk about but when you see shoes with feet in them, helmets with heads in them, bodies just stripping from the branches of the trees, it was painful. And it’s still painful. And that’s what war was like. It’s not too much fun.
[363]
EC: We you awarded any medals or citations?
DH: I got a bronze star. And I conducted myself well. I was a good GI, but there were a lot of other good GIs and didn’t do it all by myself. I didn’t know any friend that turned sour in combat. I do know that one, because I was there, I heard him, he was crying for his mother before we first jumped off to start up Della Teresia. Just before I saw the lieutenant that was killed and was a young kid, he was younger than the rest of us a little bit, he died in that fight.
[373]
EC: How did you get the bronze star?
DH: Well, I did what I was supposed to do. I can’t say there was any one special reason I got the bronze star but I was in combat, I had a weapon, I used my weapon, I did what you do with weapons, so for that they gave me a bronze star I would assume.
[379]
EC: How did you stay in touch with your family?
DH: Well, by writing some letters. In those days we had V-mail, and victory mail. You had a sheet of paper, which folded it up right into a letter and then folded up into an envelope and send that. Sent several of those. And we had just normal mail. Mail call was always such an important thing. When you got a letter that was happiness, and if you didn’t get a letter, then that was something else too. After a long time. So, sometimes it would be a long time before you’d hear. The guys are over there now doing what we did then have computers and emails and that sort of thing. Life is just different now. Vacations are different now. Back then it was just letters, no phone calls, that I was ever aware of, from overseas. We were sort of more by ourselves I think.
[393]
EC: What was the food like?
DH: Well we had, pretty good food really, for the circumstances. It depended where you were and what you were doing. When we were up in combat it was harsh and heavy we were on rations. We had to carry our own. Usually they’d give you enough rations to last about three days. C rations and K rations. And some of them were in cans and the other came in a box. But I had kind of a funny experience. Once we were making an attack and going up a hill and had a lot of heavy fire and in this area that we took had attempted to be taken prior to our activity and so there were some, what we called slip trenches already dug by other people, at an earlier time. And I was lucky enough to find one of those and on this particular occasion I was laying on my back because you have to have your vision up so you can see something, you can’t just put your head down, and just waiting for something to happen and we were there about two hours. And pretty soon there was something poking me in the back and I couldn’t move too much but I was hungry, we were being held down by machine gun fire, and finally mortar fire from our side took those guys out, and when we moved I looked to see what was poking me in the back and it was a can of C rations. From an earlier time. Somebody has left it there. So I missed that.
[415]
EC: Did you have plenty of supplies?
DH: Yeah I told you about breaking my rifle, it took me about three days to get that up to me so I could fire. But normally yeah, they were pretty good at keeping us supplied with ammunition and food. But foxhole life it not fun life. I’ve spent as long as ten days in one hole at one time. And you get pretty, well, not discouraged, but just enclosed. You just feel trapped when you’re down and have to stay in a given place because of enemy fire, you’re not going to get out in the open any more than you have to.
[426]
EC: How did people entertain you?
DH: That’s funny that you ask that because one of the things, I had cleated boots. We did. Well like football cleats almost and one of the biggest things I did was to use a knife and dig the mud out of those cleats and I thought I was having a nice time, so there wasn’t too much entertainment. I guess you read your letters if you had any to reread and things of that nature, if it was fairly calm I guess we had as much entertainment as anybody else. We played cards and I we didn’t have any shows. I saw some shows when I got on a little leave time later, but saw Frank Sinatra the very first time he ever appeared overseas and I didn’t think he was so red hot. So, entertainment was just made up as you went along is all I can say.
[442]
EC: What did you do when you where on leave?
DH: Well I did have a nice leave to Rome. I had four or five days down there and we just were tourists. You know? And went around and saw many of the wonderful sights, the Coliseum and different things that I wish I had known more about, I guess my background in history wasn���t all that good and I didn’t have the appreciation of what I was looking at all that time. I saw the catacombs and I knew what the catacombs were but I didn’t have a significant amount of history to really appreciate it. But I did stumble into an audience with the pope, there were an awful lot of other people there, I wasn’t by myself and I’m not Catholic but I did appreciate the fact the I knew that he was a significant person and I also realized that he’s always guarded all the time by the Swiss Guard and I presume still is, I don’t know if it continues or not but they meant business,there’s no question, when he appeared before us they were all out in front of him with, they had spears and there wasn’t going to be anybody that would get close to the Pope. But it did, I had that experience and that was nice.
[459]
EC: Do you remember any humorous and unusual events?
DH: We had a lot of good times, the men you were with just made their own, good time, in fact I cannot bring up any one particular thing but we did, we laughed, we did a lot of things together which were enjoyable. I didn’t drink. I didn’t have that kind of a desire, but that sort of thing was always available.
[468]
EC: Where did you travel in Italy? What city?
DH: We landed at Naples, then we went up to Lake Horn and north Pisa, you can look on a map and see where they are in relationship and then we, on trucks, went up into the mountains, the Pyanees, and we were west of Bologna, you can find that on a map, almost across the country, West. In our travels, so to speak, we crossed the Po River and then we got up into the Alps. There was a lot of communities, small little communities up there and really don’t remember all their names but that was our area.
[478]
EC: What did you think of fellow soldiers?
DH: I thought they were pretty fine men. And they are. I’ve shown you some pictures of different friends I had, still have. Bill Holbrook, was just a marvelous man, I lost track of him after a few years after the war and finally found him again just a recently short time ago. Then he died right there after. I did get to talk with him on the telephone. My wife and I took a trip last April out to Williamsburg and his, Bill’s wife, Mrs. Holbrook, lives close by and we spent a day with her and that was very meaningful to me to be able to do that. So he had become a teacher, he taught high school for thirty years and more. He was very highly thought of, taught English and History I believe. There were just many other men who had done well. In our unit, we had the man who started Vail Ski resort and other people helped develop at least 60 of the major ski areas around the country. We have the man who started the Nike shoe company, was in our outfit. So we had a very great number of our people became very successful. Bob Dole was in our outfit; he served in part of the combat I was in. He was desperately hurt. Spent two years in the hospital and became out vice president. And, I didn’t know him, but the people I did know were mighty fine guys.
[502]
EC: Do you remember the day when your service ended?
DH: We came home from Italy. They brought us home early after the victory over there. We were going to go to China. We didn’t know this at the time, but we were on the boat when the first atomic bomb was dropped. And then we got to the States and they sent us, home, they gave us 30 days off, and the second bomb was then dropped and the war ended in Japan. The overall plan was to take us to China to train up and help invade Japan, it saved our lives. We wouldn’t be here today had that happened. The Japanese were going to fight to the very bitter end and they were ready to do that. Dropping that bomb was a hideous, hideous thing to do but it was, it ended that war. It saved an awful lot of lives. American and Japanese.
[514]
EC: What did you do afterward?
DH: Well I went back to school, Purdue, and I graduated. I became, our family was in the business. It took about two years but I joined the family business a couple years after that, and I went to Oregon and spent a year in Oregon and worked with the Quaker oats company for awhile and then came back and got into our family business and my major effort there was in the building of industrial railroad siding. We spent almost, well, 50 years, easy in that kind of work. And we worked all over the Midwest and built railroads, you can see the picture here. See that helicopter picking up that tractor over there? Well, that was the first time in the world that that was ever done. That was a job that we couldn’t get to the grade as quickly as we wanted so we built our track up and had a little yard area that had stacks and stacks of those rail sidings and then we brought this helicopter in and laid a whole lot of it in a hurry once the ground got dry and ready to work on. But that’s unusual most of the work was just typical railroad work, which I enjoyed very much. I traveled an awful lot around our area here and I had to be away from home a lot but that was my work life.
[532]
EC: Was your educated supported by the GI bill?
DH: Yes it was that was a wonderful thing.
[534]
EC: So you made a lot of close friendships while in the service?
DH: I feel that I really did. I still communicate with some of the fellows that are alive. We have reunions, have had over the years, and the last of them was down in Texas and Lois and I went to that. We’re going to have another one out in Denver this next year. We’ll be going to that. But there getting thinner and thinner all the time you know, but we have the descendants of the members of the unit are becoming active in the association, we call it, so they’ll keep it going. And of course the 10th Mountain Division was reactivated after WWII, for a while it was sort of dropped, but they reactivated it and now it’s located at Ft. Brown. And those young men are all over the world now. They are in Afghanistan, Iraq wherever, wherever we’re having problems. The 10th Mountain Division are there. They function differently that we did. They use a lot of helicopters and so forth. Speaking of helicopters, I’d like to let you know that in my early combat days I could see critically wounded young guys, put on a stretcher and strapped across the front end of a Jeep, You know what a Jeep is, it sort of has that flat front, and they go bobbing down through these mountain roads, in the mountains over there in Italy to some kind of a hospital. Early on I saw that and I thought to myself, ���Why don’t we use helicopters to do this? Why don’t we have a place where we can pick these fellows up, two at a time anyway and get them out of here and get them to help faster?” And I would talk about that to friends and officers and people around me and they just thought I was nuts, just really crazy. That would never work. But that’s the only way to go to do that and they started to do that in Korea. So we saw that coming. I’m proud of that.
[558]
EC: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or the military in general?
DH: Well it makes me know that it’s unfortunate and very, very necessary. We have to stay strong and we have to stay very determined. People who want to stop the war we’re now in, in my mind are ridiculous. They aren’t seeing things that they should see it, and young people I’m talking to now if they are listening are going to be watching this thing and may be involved themselves and that’s my great concern. It isn’t for me or my generation that I’m worried it’s for my grandchildren and your age level.
[568]
EC: So do you attend a lot of the reunions?
DH: Yeah, whatever I can I do.
[569]
EC: What are they like seeing people?
DH: Well it’s just always a joy. They make a nice pleasant time. We always have nice entertainment you know. Just seeing the friends that are left is always good. The last reunion I attended I was the only person of our company there. Now that doesn’t mean that everybody’s gone, but they just weren’t there either from lack of interest or lack of ability physically to get there. So my hope is to try to stay physically healthy as I can and go out with a big boom.
[576]
EC: How did your service experience affect your life?
DH: In a positive way I think it let me know that as problems occur there’s, if you’re determined, you’re going to get through them. You just have to apply yourself.
[579]
EC: Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t covered?
DH: Well I’m just delighted that young people are showing the interest in knowing something of some of these experiences and thoughts and feelings of those who have experiences. Now there are many young people, younger than me who have been through similar experiences and are going to continue to have these experiences because of the world condition that we live in. And we just have to look for the sunny side of things and be as content as we can be but know that we are going to have some disturbances along the way.
[586 End of Interview]
