Harry D. Layfield
[b. 11/ 02 / 1925]
[Today is Tuesday, September 16. I am Rebecca Chen and I am interviewing Harry Layfield at 8551 Olde Mill Circle. Mr. Layfield is eighty-two years old and was born on 2 November 1925. Mr. Layfield served in World War II. Mr. Layfield was in the Second Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, Seventy-first Infantry Division, and held the rank of staff sergeant.]
[0:00:00]
Harry Layfield: You got something to write on and that might be easier for you. Rebecca, for some background information on me, I graduated from high school here in Indianapolis in January of 1944 and went into the service immediately. Kind of the next day kind of thing. And I went to basic training in—first to a camp called McClellan Camp, Fort McClellan, I guess it was, in Alabama, and then through after basic training I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and there we joined the Seventy-first Infantry division in the—now I’m going to give you some stuff here, let’s see . . . . The seventy-first infantry Division was training in Fort Benning, Georgia, and they went on to—following all of their training went to Camp Dix in New Jersey which is just across the river from New York City.
[0:01:57]
HL: We got on a boat and went overseas to the European Theatre. We landed in a place called Le Havre, France. And I am going to give you this, too. This is Le Havre. We now followed this little route here as you can see down through Paris and on across here, over into Alsace round Strasberg, and then went on up here into Germany. We crossed the Rhine River in here and on down this way and ended up in the little town of Steyr, Austria. Now this took place all then from the—I did not come in on D-Day, what they call D-Day, the Normandy invasion—I did not come in and it was some more time after that, and it was across the mouth of the Seine River from the beaches of Normandy. The beaches of Normandy were down here, I came in up here, at Le Havre, and they—this all took place until we crossed the Rhine River. This was all through France and when we crossed the Rhine River, we went up and joined General Patton’s Third Army and started down through Germany then all this way and then entered into Austria, right about here. I think this is, yeah, this is the Danube River. And we crossed the Danube and then that got us into Austria and we continued on down to this little town of Steyr, Austria. That was the end of the war. Let’s see, we arrived here on the sixth of May of 1945. The war was officially over on the eighth of May, two days later.
[0:04:30]
HL: And on the sixth of May, when we arrived in this little town, I was driving a jeep, I was a radio operator, and I drove a jeep, and I…[it’s] here somewhere—This was what the jeep looked like and this is—that’s me on the far side. Here are some other radio operators that were a part of that. It was the Headquarters Company of the Fifth Infantry—the Fifth Infantry Regiment of the Seventy-first Infantry Division. What I was in: Headquarters Company, Second Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment, Seventy-first Infantry Division. When we got to this small town, everything was fine until a German gun emplacement back up somewhere started shooting at us, and this was the jeep I was driving and an explosion I remember was off along the left-hand side of the road up to three hundred yards, down off to the right-hand side, and to three hundred meters or so, and the next one lit right in the middle of that jeep. Now, by that time I had gotten out of the jeep and I was right down by the right front tire in a little ditch. It blew the jeep all to pieces. I was wounded and this is me getting some first aid on the [?little?] chin, I had a piece of shrapnel through here, I got some shrapnel through my right shoulder.
[0:06:51]
HL: Now, let’s see. What else can I tell you? This is what we did that day, we went out to meet the Russian soldiers and as you will read up here, we—this Fifth Infantry Division ended up the war as the further east (this way) of all of the infantry regiments in the entire US army at that time. And the war was over. So the last day of fighting was the sixth of May and the war was over on the eighth of May officially. For doing this I got a big medal. It’s called the Bronze Star medal. That’s this medal, and here’s the citation that goes with it. And I’ll give you that copy of that, I have another copy. And then this is the Purple Heart medal. They come in boxes like this, and that’s what it looks like. This is the purple . . . That’s a pretty medal. And I want to give these photographs that you can take with you.
[0:08:35]
HL: Let’s see, this was a little piece that was in one of the papers here in Indianapolis when this all happened and they heard back from it. And then you can have that also, I got another one. And—what else?
[0:09:00]
Rebecca Chen: You said that basic training—
HL: Basic training was in Fort Benning, Georgia.
RC: Could you describe what that was like?
HL: Well, we—you learned to shoot a gun, you learned commands and such from the unit that you were in. I was a radio operator so I went to radio school. I had to learn Morse code: dit-dah-dit-dah-dit-dah-dah-dah-dah. That sort of thing. So I had to know that, as many messages were sent in Morse code. Then there were some little voice messages also, and we had walkie-talkies and we were assigned to—had to take in—the major communication was in a jeep with the battalion commander of the Second Battalion of the Fifth Infantry Regiment of the Seventy-first Infantry Division. And that took about six weeks maybe, something like that, six weeks or so. And then we went to Fort Dix, then went over seas.
[0:10:41]
RC: As a radio operator, what specifically did you do?
HL: Well, primarily it was at the command of the officer in charge of the second battalion and whenever he went anywhere he wanted a radio and an operator to go along with him so that he could keep in communication with their headquarters company and with other troops that were part of that battalion. I don’t know how many—there were four or five companies and each company had—I don’t remember now—sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred people in it maybe, for a company, and four or five companies to a battalion, and then a regiment had three, four, or five battalions in it, and the division then would have four or five, I guess, battalions that were part of it. So there’s a lot of people involved, more than a thousand people in it probably. But I was primarily involved with keeping the communications between all the people out in the field of the commander of my second battalion. He frequently used the radio himself as a voice thing, he didn’t know Morse code, but he had a secret message or something of that kind that they didn’t want just broadcast out everywhere. You did that, and then he could give you what he wanted to say and you…that business send it out and bring it back to him and he’d call in and give it to him.
[0:12:51]
RC: Is there anything you did that really stands out?
HL: Well, radio school was something that I thought I would never learn the Morse code. That was just foreign—but after a while when you listen to it for a while it’s like learning another language. You soon get to a point where you understand it, once you know it. But it just takes a lot of training, but we had several weeks of training in radio school.
RC: And were you drafted or did you enlist?
HL: I enlisted, but I was actually drafted. I started school late, my birthday was in November, so school started—you had to be six, I guess, when school started in your first grade of school. Before, school started in September and my birthday was in November, so I missed almost a full year of school, so I started that late, so I graduated late, and the draft was in midterm, in January of ’44, so I was eighteen—no, nineteen at that time, I guess. I was born in ’25, I think I was eighteen in November of 1944—no, in ’43, and then I graduated, and I was deferred until I graduated from high school. I was deferred until the following January. I went in the next day.
RC: Now, did any of your friends or classmates go with you?
HL: No, I knew several of them that went, and they were in different areas and many of them went into the navy, and some of the others went into the army and they joined infantry divisions and other divisions of the army that were close by. I could see them from time to time. They were part of the same base and out of Fort Benning and they had a bunch of paratroopers that were training there and they had a couple of infantry divisions training there, so I could sometimes just cross the base and find somebody from high school.
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RC: How did you keep in touch with your family?
HL: Letters. They had things called V-mail and these were just ordinary letters that were sent from overseas. They went through censor. That was part of the company that they read the letter. If you said you were in such-and-such a town at such-and-such a date and all this they might cross off that, the town name of the town and the date so they couldn’t pin you down in case the letter got sidetracked somewhere along the way. And then there was some kind of mail that—it was on very lightweight paper and again it was a letter—it was something that you wrote—you physically wrote it and sent it off. You might hear back from somebody here in the United States a month later or something like that. It took a while to get across the ocean and they didn’t have air mail back in those days. They had something. For more important they have gasoline going across the…second into the…
RC: How often did you get mail?
HL: Get mail? Well, frequently every day, and occasionally some may get delayed for a while and you’d get a bunch of letters once every three days or so, but most on even you got mail pretty often.
RC: So, yourself, how often did you get letters?
HL: Well, probably, weekly. So I heard from family.
[0:18:58]
RC: How did you entertain yourself?
HL: While you were here in this country, in the United States, you had a place to go to; you had dances to go to; you had taverns and you went to town. At Fort Benning, for instance, they had the town of—I forget the name of the town—in Georgia, but it was just outside of a town and you had a bus to take you to town or drove [?get your agent?]. Somebody would always pick you up and take you to town. Columbus is the name of the town. Columbus, Georgia. So you had all these things that you could do. Overseas there weren’t that many things to do. Frequently they had patrols that went out at night and we were pretty busy during the day. You weren’t fighting every second of each day. There were some times that, when we were all here in this Alsace region, we were two, three weeks in this one spot. Now this is just before we were going into Germany so on about a building up through some supplies and all of that, so when we crossed the Rhine River down into Germany to get some extra troops and such . . . . There wasn’t much of anything to do.
RC: Well, what did you do staying in one spot?
HL: Well, we just sat there and looked at each other. They sent out a patrol every night and occasionally the Germans did the same thing. Occasionally they’d shoot at each other. They didn’t anybody hurt anybody at that time, so it really was just a lull in all of the fighting.
RC: So you guys just sort of sat there.
HL: Uh-huh. We waited there and when they had built up supplies for all of this—they—this thing moved very fast through here from the beaches of Normandy over here to Paris—this was the—what was D-Day, the sixth of June—and this [background noise]—we moved very fast and over here we were in—well, it was cool, so it was the fall, late fall, maybe a year or something that that happened, then they went on across and in May, the war was over. They moved very fast. Most of the time they could have moved faster except the big tanks that they had. They’d start out in the morning with you and they’d run until they ran out of gasoline or diesel fuel that they had and then they abandoned them—it would be about two or three o’clock—and they just quit. They couldn’t do anything, just sat at the side the road until the truck caught with them with more diesel fuel that they could put in. We would either go on past if we could or just stop with them at the same place. But it really moved fast; the entire war, it moved fast.
[0:23:18]
[RC checks the time]
[0:23:40]
HL: Well, what else can I tell you?
RC: Could you tell me what the food was like?
HL: What was the food like? Food was good, except when you were very busy in a battle somewhere along the way; they obviously didn’t have time to set up a tent where they had big kettles and cooked food for you. You got rations, two, three different kinds of rations, K-rations and C-rations, and some other kind of rations that I can’t remember, but each one of these things just came in a little box. You opened it up and it had meat of some kind—Spam they called it—and crackers and bread of some kind. Some kind of little dessert—chocolate bar usually. Some kind of powder that you could make orange juice out of, or powdered milk that you could do something with. They had rations, but anywhere you got and there was a lull in the fighting, they would set up a tent and they would actually cook meals so we had hot meals a good many days.
RC: So how were the hot meals when you had them?
HL: It was fine. It was alright. It was good, a whole lot better than a lot of the other people had, some of the other soldiers and such; we would compare notes, and they didn’t have as nearly as good a menu.
RC: You mentioned K-rations and C-rations. What was the difference?
HL: Well, each one of these things was a little box that was so long, maybe so wide, I don’t know, a little larger than this thing, a little wider than that, a little deeper than that. They had different kinds of rations that went all the way from powdered eggs that you could just pour some water in them and stir them up, and they were—I guess they were eggs! They weren’t very good but they were alright. And powdered milk, as I said, and chocolate bars; each one had a little pack of cigarettes in it, five or six cigarettes in it. Everybody smoked back in those days. What else? You had enough to eat, though. We never had real problems, and sometimes you would find along the way eggs and farmland and chickens that would lay eggs. You would get some eggs, and have them served—over the campfire kind of thing. It worked out alright.
RC: You said there were farms, did you ever meet any people?
HL: Sure, there were people.
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RC: You mentioned that you’d compare notes with people. Did you see other groups a lot?
HL: Well, no, you were pretty much with your own group. Occasionally you would see some others. Like the people that drove the tanks, for instance, were from a different unit than we were in, and we would see them almost daily. We’d trade some rations with them. If you liked a K-ration better than you liked a C-ration, you could trade some with some of the other people. That sort of thing.
[0:28:30]
RC: What was your most memorable experience?
HL: I think that the one I told you about the jeep blowing up, probably the most memorable. There was a ton of the fighting that we had, and I went along most of it. We were kind of long range with it. You shot at people and they shot at you, but you were pretty far away from each other. But this thing was just right beside you, so that was probably the most memorable experience I had.
RC: Was there anything that happened that was, like, funny? Happy moments?
HL: We had a lot of funny things happen. For instance, one time I recall we were off in a field somewhere and the Germans were firing at us over with big guns exploding on us and everything. One guy was lying over ten, fifteen feet away from me. He started yelling and I crawled over to him. He said, “I’ve been hit,” he said, “I’m afraid to look.” I looked around and he had a canteen of water on his hip back here, and a bullet or shrapnel or something punctured that thing and the water had run out. It was during the summertime so it was warm water, and it kinda soaked the back part of his leg, and he was afraid to look. He really thought it was blood. He hadn’t been hit at all, it hadn’t hurt or anything. So you had some funny experiences. Another one I remember, a man had a steel helmet, and there was a thing they called a liner inside the steel helmet, it was a plastic thing. You wore that all the time and you put the steel helmet on when you went into battle and such. And the—
[0:31:05] END OF SIDE ONE
SIDE TWO
[0:31:45]
HL: Back recording. Um, I don’t know, where were we when we got cut off?
RC: The steel helmet.
HL: Oh, the steel helmet. This bullet went kind of an angle to the side and it went around the steel helmet, went in sort of the back but around it, in between the liner and the steel helmet and came out the front. And when it did that, there was a little buckle on the inside of this liner that gets it up tight around your head and such so it takes up all the slack in the thing. That had a little metal buckle on it. It broke that metal buckle and it flew around and hit this guy and almost went in and it cut his nose. So all of this is happening and lots of noise up there and all of a sudden he reaches up and there’s blood all over his hand and he thought he was going to die. But nothing happened, so—again, these are amusing things that happened, so it’s not all bad. Bad enough, but it’s not all bad. Okay.
[0:33:05]
RC: You said that it was May 8 when the war ended.
HL: When the war ended, yeah.
RC: So, what did you do afterwards?
HL: Well, we went back from Steyr, Austria. We went back to Munich and our division headquarters was in Augsburg, a little town very close to Munich. The army headquarters was in Munich and Augsburg was our regimental thing. We were just in occupation duty here and there really wasn’t much of anything to do. We were just there waiting to come home, really, and the people that were in the army the longest came home first. That’s okay. It should be. I hadn’t been in the army for a long time, I had just got started, so I was there for several months, and there weren’t any deaths, the 8th of May and I was there all that summer, and up until about holiday time. We started getting ready to come home, and I think I got home in January, maybe. Or February, and then I started in Purdue. I went to summer school that summer in Purdue and graduated as an electrical engineer, three and a half years or so, I entered out in 1950.
RC: People you knew in the army, did you ever see them again afterwards?
HL: I have seen one or two them, and I heard from a number of them afterwards in the form of letters and such, but in the last ten or fifteen years, it’s been, I don’t know, I have not heard from anybody. They had some reunions for this army division. I thought about going to them but I haven’t been to one of them.
[0:36:03]
HL: I went to work for Eli Lilly and Company and I think that’s where your dad is, maybe.
RC: It’s my mom.
HL: Your mom is! Oh, okay. You’re at Lilly. And you’re in research labs?
Mom: Yeah.
HL: Okay, very good. At McCarty Street. I spent thirty-five years there Lilly. I was in the engineering group. We designed, built, operated, and maintained all the plants. We built the labs, we built the labs over at Clay, hauled all the stuff out of the old stockyards . . . until the end of the last day of 1984, I’ve been retired a long time. Yeah, good place to work. Uh, let’s see, what else can I tell you?
RC: How has the war affected your view of life and the world?
HL: I don’t know that it affected it very much, Rebecca. War is not fun. It’s a horrible sense of using things, great experiences that you have, but war is not a good thing—you ought to—think very hard before you start going to war with anybody. But I don’t know, I don’t think it affected my life any at all. There was something called a GI Bill. GI, you know what GI stands for in the army? ‘Government Issue.’ I was a GI. All the other soldiers were GI’s. Your mess kit was GI, your shoes were GI, your everything was GI—Government Issue, they called it—soldiers called it. They had a lot of cartoons and such that went through the war years that made fun—not made fun of, but—you had great experiences are part of some of these little things that I told you about that happened to other people in the war.
RC: You were talking about the GI Bill.
HL: The GI Bill was the government would pay your tuition to college, would send you to school, essentially, and give you a little bit of money that would at least buy some food. We didn’t live very high on the [?hog?]. I got a little more because they said I was disabled with this thing with the shrapnel in my shoulder, so I got all my books paid for, and all the classes were paid for by the government, and they gave me seventy dollars a month to live on. At that time, you could go through school with that.
RC: You say you went into electrical engineering. Did that have anything to do with your being a radio operator during the war?
HL: I went into electrical engineering, and that probably did have something to do with the fact that I had become familiar with the radio, Morse code, all that sort of thing. Yeah, probably did.
RC: And then you retired.
HL: About thirty-five years ago. I retired in 1984.
[0:41:26]
RC: Is there anything else you want to mention that we didn’t cover?
HL: Coming back from overseas, let me show you some pictures here. There’s one in here particularly that I want to show you. We came on one thing called a liberty boat—liberty ship. This was a ship that didn’t go very fast and one that they used to haul cargo across the ocean to supply all the troops over there. I have the picture of the ship here somewhere, can’t seem to find it—there it is. That was the ship and that was coming back and out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean I was up on deck one time when a ship appeared way back just over the horizon back here, came up abreast of us and I took this picture and it went out of sight over the horizon the other way in one hour. It shows you how fast that ship was going versus how fast we were going. We were both going in the same direction. This was the Queen Mary, and the Queen Mary was much, much faster than any of these other things. Let’s see, when we got to New York City, we were met by a boat that had music coming out of it and lots of girls and such on the deck and welcoming everybody home. Here’s one. I’m on a train going back over to catch this boat and that was right there, and here’s Indianapolis, Indiana on the side.
[0:43:50]
HL: Here’s an interesting little thing. The Germans didn’t have any gasoline or diesel fuel, they just didn’t have any oil out there. The airplanes in the air force had bombed all of the refineries. Crude oil reservoirs they had . . . so they built on the back end of a car or a truck a little thing that they burned wood in it. I really don’t know what they think the car ran on but it generated some kind of a—besides smoke—it generated some kind of a gas that they were able to run through the engine to make the car run, and that’s what they were using. They’d chop up some wood and throw it in the back end of this thing, and the car would run for a little ways, and they’d have to chop up some more wood.
[0:44:53]
HL: Let’s see, this is—on the back: “German general surrendering army group ‘H’ to our general in Steyr, Austria.” That’s a German car, you can see it there. This was General Patton here and our general. When they came into town, General Patton visited us.
[0:45:28]
HL: These are some things—the beaches that we were taken to. Not on D-Day, but some little time afterwards, but these were some big gun emplacements up there that were bombed out.
[0:45:55]
HL: This was a German, no, probably a French man. He just wanted his picture taken. This was a room that we had in occupation duty. We were in the occupation duty every morning. There really wasn’t anything to do. You could go around to some different places; I went to Paris, for instance. We went to—we would get on a train and it was a freight train kind of thing. The army took over some hotels and so forth and places for the GI’s to stay when they came to these places. And we went to Paris on over to London and we came back and came to Paris again. You went back over to this occupation place over in Augsburg, in Germany. I went to Switzerland one time, went up a mountain, skiing, had a good time up there. So you could do these kinds of things. We drove a jeep around, were down in what’s called Bavaria—that section of Germany which is so—are—high mountains part of the German Alps. They had picturesque places up there. Berchtesgaden was in that part of the country then. This was a place where Hitler had a home above in the mountain, we went up to see that.
[0:48:13]
HL: Let’s see, what else we got?
RC: What’s that?
HL: I don’t know, it’s just a church they had, and we’d been to this part of the world, and it reminded me of a church that we saw on one of the trips into either France or Germany, I don’t remember which one. We were looking through some of the things we had, and trying to figure where it was. Both of us know we’ve seen that church several since then. Most of these churches over there look alike. Have you ever been to Europe at all?
RC: No.
HL: Well, sometime when you have a chance be sure and go—Europe is a fun place to go, lots of things to see and do. You want a discovery—well. Okay.
RC: Thank you.
[0:49:37]
[0:49:46] TAPE ENDS
