Carver McGriff
[b. 9/ 05 / 1924]
PFC U.S. Army
[000]
AH: [introduction not on tape] My name is Adam Holt and I am at the house of Dr. Carver McGriff in Zionsville, Indiana. Dr. McGriff is a veteran of World War II and will be sharing with me the events and feelings that he experienced during his time serving in WWII. Today's date is October 7, 2003.
[010] [Tape recording starts]
AH: What war did you serve in?
CM: World War II.
[011]
AH: Were you drafted or did you enlist?
CM: I was drafted.
[012]
AH: What were the feelings of your family and friends about the war and about you serving in it?
CM: They were all proud that I was serving in it and they were all enthusiastic about - my father had been a captain in the army in World War I and I wanted to get into the army, but they had passed - recently passed legislation that you could no longer enlist, you had to wait to be drafted. So, by the time I was old enough to enter the army, I had to wait to be drafted.
[016]
AH: Where were you living at the time?
CM: I lived here at Indianapolis at 42nd and Carrolton.
[018]
AH: Do you remember your first days in the service?
CM: Very well, yes.
[018]
AH: What was that like?
CM: Oh it was -I was excited about it. I was a teenager and I was taken out to Fort Harrison here at Indianapolis and given a uniform that really didn't fit and I felt kind of silly about that, but I was glad to be in the army. I could hardly wait.
[022]
AH: What was the training like?
CM: Well, I was in infantry training down in Camp Blanding, Florida 1. It was seventeen weeks and it was exceedingly strenuous. And the training was designed, first of all, to kind of drum into you the fact you've got to take orders, no matter what they are, because the day can come, as it did, when somebody will tell you to run into the face of enemy fire and you have to, by that time, have learned to do exactly what you're told. In fact, the day came- one memory I have is I was in an infantry company in Normandy during the fighting and we had just captured a position. And about a hundred yards from us was a hedgerow and behind that hedgerow' were some German soldiers and they were firing at us with machine guns and we were ordered to attack the hedgerow and we didn't do it. We just layed there so we wouldn't get shot. And a major walked up, standing full height, pulled out a .45 pistol.' and said, "I'm gonna shoot anybody who's still lying on the ground. Now get up there and move." And we moved, but that was the whole training was designed to -- to get us to understand, that when we're given an order we have to obey it. So that - and then the training was to learn proficiency with various infantry weapons, basically the M -1 rifle 4 and then we had to learn how to use mortars and bazookas and machine guns so that when we - whatever kind of a unit we would eventually be assigned to, we would know how to use whatever weapons they used.
[041]
AH: Was there anything you did to pass the time during the training?
Clvl: Pass the time? You didn't have any time. No, they got you up at 5:00 or 5:30. I can't remember. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other. You had to stand outside instantly for roll call. Then you went back and had a few minutes to change clothes, get dressed. Then you
went to breakfast. Then you went back and fell out again. They call it 'falling out', it means come out and stand up in line and at that point, you were told what you would be doing for the day. It might be infantry training. It might be a road march we would do. For instance, one
time we did a twenty-five mile march carrying everything we owned. Another time we did what was called a forced march which was ten miles jogging, carrying everything we owned. So, other than the occasional time off we were given, we didn't have to worry about spare time.
[051]
AH: So, I understand you were in the Battle of Normandy?
eM: Yes.
[052]
AH: How far in advance were you notified that you were going to be in this battle?
CM: [part missing] ... training here in this country and then we were sent over to England and I was at that point what's called a 'replacement', which was what most of us were. And we did advanced combat training in England for two months. And, of course, we didn't know there was
going to be a battle of Normandy because it hadn't happened yet and it was very secret. But one day we were marching - actually we were riding in trucks and we saw hundreds of planes going overhead pulling gliders. And we didn't know that we were at that point seeing the glider troops going in to land in Normandy. And so that night, really the night of the 5th of June, the 102nd [101 st] and the 82nd Airborne Divisions dropped their paratroops into Normandy, and also the gliders landed. And so we suspected, of course, that's where we were going.
[065]
AH: Did you know before that the casualty rate would be so high, that it was going to be so dangerous?
eM: We didn't worry about that. We were naive. You're what, fifteen now?
AH: Yeah
CM: Well, in four years you'll be the age I was then. And at that age you don't think anything bad can happen to you. So we were anxious to go over. And really not ever having been in a battle, therefore, not knowing what we were getting into, we didn't worry about it. We were just
anxious to get there.
[070]
AH: So Normandy was your first ... combat?
CM: Yes.
[070]
AH: Combat?
CM: Yes, and you didn't just go into combat. We had to go to a - well, what did they call it back then? A point of departure anyway, and we had to board ships that took us across the English Channel. And then when we arrived there, we were formed up and told that we would
be assigned to an infantry division. And the first night that we started marching and we had hardly gone any distance at all (I guess this the kind of details they want.), I saw a dead man lying in a ditch, and he was wearing the insignia of a sergeant in the 101 st Airborne Division. So
when I saw him I knew this is the real thing. We marched quite a distance and passed several gliders that had been crashed in the open fields. So, we knew that's where the airborne had landed. Finally that night, we were exhausted tired. (Let me pause and ask what kind of specific
things they want to hear?) We were dead tired and we stopped in a field and they said that we would sleep there that night. Now, sleep meant you were going to get maybe three or four hours - I think it was about three. And to do that, you were to dig a hole and sleep in that hole and the ground was as hard as this floor. It was really terribly hard to dig so called foxholes'. In fact in World War II, they had what they called fox holes, which was originally a deep hole that you could stand up in and still be fairly safe, but the ground was so hard that nobody could dig a real fox hole - what we dug was what we called a slit trench9 -- and it might be a foot deep if you were lucky. Anyway, we were so tired that - and we found some trenches that had been dug by somebody else that we slept in those. And when dawn broke we got up and found that they had been used by another unit that day which had shelled by enemy mortars and had suffered terrible casualties. And I remember one of the men had found an unused field jacket and had put it on and the next morning when he looked at it, it had a big hole right over the heart. So that he knew then that the man who owned it had been killed. So the next day then we were each one assigned to the unit that we would serve in for the rest of our time.
[100]
AH: Was there anything you did to prepare yourself for a battle before you went into it?
CM: You mean other than the training?
[101]
AH: Yeah, just mentally.
CM: Well, the camaraderie that we felt with the other men we were with was - it was kind of - I don't know, are you in sports of any kind?
AH: Yes, football.
CM: Football, alright, its like a football team. You go out there and you kind of get each other ready. You know, you bang heads or slap each other prior to the game in order to get ready and this is kind of a way of getting yourself mentally prepared. We did not precisely that but each
one of us knew that the last thing that we wanted to do was to fail the other guys. And the worst thing that could happen to you, worse than anything else, would be for the other men to think you were afraid. So, this kind of made each one of us get the other ready for the battle. That's about all I can say about how we prepared ourselves, because really, you know, for several months we had known where we were going to end up.
[113]
AH: I'm sure you witnessed deaths of your fellow soldiers. How did you cope with those after?
CM: ... Cope with the death of other men? Well, it depended on the person. I'll give you one example of something that happened to me. It's a vivid memory. We were - this was late during my experience, but we were moving up to begin an attack that was to open up the whole front lines of the war. In fact, it was around the town of St. La and the American forces had been stymied. We had taken weeks to accomplish what the original planners thought we could do in a day or two. And so after this vicious fighting through the hedgerows - see, Normandy, France,
is composed of thousands upon thousands of fields of varying sizes, each one surrounded by a hedgerow and each hedgerow is probably anywhere from five feet to eight feet high so that you could capture a field, maybe a hundred yards across then you had to do another one and another one. So, it had taken us weeks to move across. Then finally we reached a point where we were to engage - we being the entire army really - to engage in this big, ferocious battle. Well, we were on the verge of that and on the edge of a field and we were taken by a mortar barrage and the Germans had a field piece or a cannon they called an eighty-eight, this 88 mm cannon'" and it was usually on tanks or on a movable base so that they could fire them and then by the time we could pinpoint them, they'd moved. Well, they opened up on us and we had to hit the ground and when the barrage ended, I got up and look and the man to my left - well, first I should tell you while we were waiting there a little, white puppy came walking over and I like dogs, so puppy walked up to where I was sitting and I began to pet him. He was a cute little puppy. I picked him up, cuddled him and everything. And when the explosions started we immediately hit the dirt. When it was over I looked over and the man next to me was dead and the puppy was dead, and for some strange reason, the death of the man didn't bother me, but the death of the puppy did. And the only thing I can explain from that was that somehow I had become used to death. I had seen so much of it, but some how a puppy - the innocence of a puppy - that didn't seem right. [interruption]... a combat soldier would be dead. It didn't fit that a tiny little puppy, who knew nothing about what was going on should die. And that kind of it was I guess the numbness that beset men in combat. And you reached a point where you just tried to ignore it. Now, now, let me say this one thing. If it was a close friend, which this was not, then that was a different matter. But ...
[151]
AH: Was it a longer lasting feeling?
CM: I would guess that most veterans of heavy combat came home and forgot the whole thing and now are remembering it.
[154]
AH: What happened to you directly after the Battle of Normandy?
CM: After it?
AH: Yeah.
CM: Well, we leave out a lot if we go past it.
[155]
AH: Is there anything you'd like to add before we move on?
CM: I ended up as a prisoner of war. That's what happened for me after the battle. Of course there are many stories - I'm trying to think - one story I wanted to tell, you - in fact, I'll show you this little silver box which a listener or reader of whatever is recorded here would have to imagine, and I believe you are Catholic, are you not?
AH: No, I'm not.
CM: Oh, I thought from what your mom said. She said she knew Bob Kessing, who's an old friend, and mentioned the church. Well, I was in this infantry squad and we had just taken a little town and all the structures were destroyed except one. And the sergeant came along (he was a friend of mine) and gave us orders not to do any looting. But then we decided (he and I decided), this house seemed to be deserted, so we would go and see what we could find. And we broke into the house, and it wasn't like breaking into a house here, of course. The place seemed deserted and so we took many things that we found in there. And one of the thinks that I took was this little silver box. It says Lourdes on it ... For Catholic people to make a pilgrimage to the city of Lourdes is an important - can be an important part of their religious experience. Well, we had found some food in there, not much, but we were all hungry because we had very little food. And we went down to the barn that adjoined this house and were fixing beans and one of the men had taken a helmet (and a helmet is in two parts in the United States army at the time - you had what they called the helmet liner, which had an interior part that you'd buckle on, a little like a football helmet and then there was a metal shell that went over it.) Well, we used one of those and we were making soup, and we needed more water so I said well I'll go back up. I saw a pump outside the house. And when I went up to the house I saw a shadow move inside the house. And so I had brought several canteens to fill and I set the canteens down and took my rifle and I put a shell in the chamber and I walked over to the door and I thought it could be a German because the Germans were right down the road from us. And I shoved open the door and when I did, a man walked out and he was a Catholic priest wearing a black robe. And there I stood, holding a loaded rifle pointed at a Catholic priest and I spoke no French and he spoke no English. So, I didn't know what to do so I just took of and ran back down to the barn. And I said 'For gosh sakes guys, we just robbed a Catholic priest!' So, we were debating what we should do and a moment later in walked the priest bringing the rest of his food. We had not only taken his food, but he was giving us what little he had left and I felt terribly embarrassed so I went to the men
while he was there visiting - there were probably eight or nine of us there - I said, "come on guys, give me everything you took and give me some money." So I collected all the money I could get from the guys and everything that all of us had stolen. And while they talked to the
priest, I sneak back up to his house, to the window we had broken and I put everything back. And I put all the money that we had collected in there too, but the one thing that I forgot to return was this little silver box. And when we had gone on and marched down the road quite some
distance, I reached in my pocket and there it was. So, it - and it had some coins in it, which are still there also that had belonged to the priest. And I felt bad about it, but I couldn't return it so this is one of my souvenirs. Okay, what was your question about. .. what happened after?
[203]
AH: Yeah. What happened to you after the Battle of Normandy? Was Normandy the last battle you fought in prior to becoming a prisoner of war?
CM: Yes. The battle lasted - I was there for about a month in combat and toward the end, our unit was under heavy artillery fire. We were running out of ammunition and the Germans had gotten in behind us and we were fighting a German parachute battalion. And so they had gotten in behind us and our own people were unable to get more ammunition up to us. So, for about twenty-four hours we were engaged in a battle that finally had eXBended most of our ammunition and once we realized [it], - then they came in with a tiger tank I (and that was the largest tank ever made at that point.) I think it was as big as a house and it had one of these big .88 artillery pieces and we were looking right down the muzzle .... The Germans were moving in on us. Finally, we were in a ditch that was maybe fifty yards long and firing at them. And finally we agreed to surrender and one German jumped in to the end of the ditch, raised a machine gun, and we thought he was going to execute us and one our the men (a friend if mine named Castille shot the German and killed him) - didn't kill him, he shot the German. Then the rest of them took us prisoner. We put our hands up and we were made to walk into the little town we had just come through and they lined us up in the middle of the street. Well, our platoon leader, Lt. Harvey, had already called in an artillery barrage on that town because we knew the Germans occupied that town and the town was a small village, (I can't think of a town around here that is - [about] a tenth the size of Zionsville, [Indiana]). And when the artillery barrage landed, it hit both Germans and Americans and so I was knocked unconscious. I got hit by an artillery shell, I was knocked unconscious as I would say most of us were and many of the Germans as well. And a little story that will explain a lesson that I learned: there was a Mexican soldier in our unit and I didn't like him. I didn't like the Mexicans. They talked - most of them spoke Spanish when they were together. They had some English but not much, but they were still - I was a PFC, Private First Class - that's one step above a private. But they hung out together and most of us didn't like them. They had a silly game they played that caused them to yell in Spanish at night. So I had taken a dislike towards this man and I didn't have anything to do with him. And he was a guy - he would playa - he had a little guitar he would play and sing sad songs and we knew he was homesick for his home in New Mexico. After the barrage that hit us and I regained consciousness (I had been wounded on both legs, so I couldn't walk) and I felt somebody picking me up and carrying me, and I looked up into the face of this Mexican. The shells were still exploding around us. He had risked his life to come out and carry me to safety - the guy I didn't like because he was different from me. So I learned a lesson from that. I learned not to judge people just because they're different. Well, he dragged me over up against a wall where I would be safe and the next man they dragged up was my squad leader, a sergeant who had become a good friend (Brewer) and he looked up at me and I looked down at him and he died. And then they brought the other sergeant from (I was in a machine gun section, which had two squads) and they brought the other squad leader, Jackson, up and he looked up at me and then he died. So I had lost - my platoon leader was dead, my squad or my platoon sergeant had
disappeared (we never knew what happened to him), our section sergeant was wounded and both of our platoon - or squad leaders were killed. And most of the other men in the squad were either wounded or killed. So, I was carried then into a small bar - tavern that was along the street there. We stayed there through the night while the shelling continued and then the next day the Germans came. And a German sergeant walked into the room where we lay and everybody in the room - imagine a room about this size and there were probably thirty or forty of us wounded in various degrees - he walked up to me and offered me a drink (and when you are injured you become very thirsty). So he offered me his canteen and I drank everything I could drink. It turned out to be hard cider and I got roaring drunk. I'd never had an alcoholic beverage before, but it would impress me that this German sergeant whom we'd been trying to kill and he'd been trying to kill us, now came in and showed us mercy - took care of us. I was taken then to a hospital in France with the other men. I was there for a month. At
the end of the month, that battle I mentioned where we were trying to break out and tear into France, had finally taken place. We had captured the city of St. La and American troops were racing now and so I was in a little hospital, and having been there a month, we could hear machine gun firing in the distance. We could look out the window and there was an anti-aircraft battery and the Germans - or rather the Americans were flying the fighter plane sorties into the town and they didn't know that there were Americans there. They had warned the French to vacate the town and so we could see the - it would be like looking across the street and watching an anti-aircraft battery shooting at you (it was German) shooting at our planes. When we heard the machineguns, we knew they were coming and so there was a pitched battle around our little hospital and it was hit seven times by our own artillery. And one of our men had risked his life escaped from the hospital and broke through the German lines and into our lines and told them that we were there, and so they quit firing at our hospital. As a matter of fact, one of the men who had been in the hospital wrote a book about it later and that's how I got that story. And so then we were released and taken back to hospitals in England.
[296]
AH: So, did you continue to fight after?
CM: No.
[297]
AH: Why was that?
CM: No, in my case, some of the men -no, actually there was a law, an international law that if you had been a prisoner of war and they had gotten your name and number, then you dare not fight again. Now, I don't know the details of that law and I - it was only explained to me to that extent, but I was several months recovering from the wounds that I had experienced. So, I never really got back into combat. I was in what was called limited service from that time on.
[305]
AH: Did you go back to America at that point, or did you stay in Europe?
CM: No. I stayed over there for another year. No, you didn't go home unless you were really unable to do anything. If you could, as in my case, I ended up working in a post office pitching mail, for goodness sakes. And that was pretty embarrassing, you know, for an infantry soldier who had been in combat to be pitching mail, but it released somebody else to go fight. So it was the right thing to do.
[313]
AH: When you returned back to America, what did you do?
CM: Went to college.
[314]
AH: Went to college?
CM: Yeah.
[316]
AH: After that, was there anything that the war - did the war do anything to you that caused you to do something?
CM: You mean like get religion or something like that? No, I got religion since I'm a Methodist minister but that was a little later. You know, it's hard to know the effect of crisis and terrible things on a person because you bury them. You don't go around saying 'oh, look at me, I had
this terrible experience.' You go on. And this is something that my generation - I personally think that I understand it, but most of my generation did not understand the men who came back from the Vietnam War and had a lot of emotional problems, because our generation didn't have any emotional problems and yet we - as you can imagine from what I just described, you could if you chose to, I guess. And I think my generation today looks at the men who are fighting in Iraq and we are proud of them and we celebrate their sacrifice, but they have served - perhaps lost less men killed in combat through the entire war than my battalion suffered in two days. So, you are probably going to find that World War II veterans who were in combat, like myself, do not consider our casualties to be very much at the moment even though to lose one person, of course, is a tragedy. But no, I think I, like anyone I knew from World War II, we quickly went back into normal life with very little - very little hanging on to what happened in the war and we didn't talk about it. One of the unwritten rules for anybody in World War II was you don't talk about it. If you talk a lot about it, then you probably didn't have much of an experience. But that changed and I think what changed it was the movie Saving Private Ryan.
[345]
AH: I was going to ask you about that. Does that depict the war how it was or do they dramatize it?
CM: Yes and yes. It does depict it, but it depicts it, - the battle - the final battle was a little bit overdrawn. There may have been men in the -let's see, they were a Ranger company - and the Rangers were the elite troops of World War II. And then some of them were the - I think were
the 10151 Airborne, but yes, essentially it did depict what it was like.
[355]
AH: So, it's a pretty authentic movie?
CM: I thought it was an authentic movie. I thought it was overdone. It - what it did was to leave out the hardest part of being in a combat outfit. And that was not the battles, but the endless running to the next field and digging a hole. The minute you stopped, you had to dig in.
In two days over there, I wore gloves and the fingers - an inch of my gloves were all gone. Then two more days later and your fingernails are all broken and the ends of you fingers are sore, and the ground is so hard and yet when you stopped, the minute you stopped, you had to start digging a hole. Then at night ... [tape erased?] four hours, that would be the maximum. But you'd be awakened in two hours and now it's one in the morning, cold, rainy and you have to stand guard for two hours. So that means you have to stand awake all by yourself and that was so difficult that you would chew your cheek, and you'd stomp up and down and you'd, you know, bend your fingers till they hurt, do anything you could to keep yourself awake. And you would do that night, after night, after night, after night. And once we had one man that we'd found would take the watch and turn it ahead - because you had one watch they would hand you and as soon as your watch was over, (I mean your time on watch), you would go back .... [tape interrupted- my sister taped over this part of this section.] ... It was a hot summer day, it was June, so I got rid of most things. Well, then I found out it gets cold and rainy at night, because it rained every night. So you'd sleep in the mud and pull your field jacket over you and put your helmet under your head as a pillow and you'd sleep. And that's what life was like. Well, those things are left out of the movies, but yes, I would say that Saving Private Ryan was probably overdone, but still authentic and it became so popular I think with men who had been actually combat veterans, that it kind of opened us all up and we said 'hey, you know, it's okay. We did this, why not talk about it?' And I think that's probably a factor in this survey that you're doing.
[393]
AH: When you returned back home, how did people see you as?
CM: Oh, it was interesting because I was wearing the Purple Heart, which you get for being wounded. Things would happen like - once a friend of mine who also was back from combat and had been wounded and wore the Purple Heart - and we were going to a movie and there was a long line of people waiting to get into the movie. So we got in the line and somebody saw us and insisted we both came up and got our tickets first. Everybody wanted us to on ahead. Another time I got on a bus and a lady got up and offered me her seat. Of course, I didn't take it, but that's the way people looked at us when we came back.
[406]
AH: I think that pretty much covers everything. Is there anything else you'd like to add or share?
CM: No, Adam, I can't think of anything. I guess one observation I notice now the day has come when we are trying to capture the memories before it's to late because my generation is about gone - but, you know, maybe ten percent of the men who served were actually in combat
and there were many other forms of service, of course. Probably half of everybody who went in the army either stayed in this country or went over to, you know - cooks or drivers and people like that. So there's a class - back then there was a class system - even men who fought with
rifles on the front lines made fun of guys who were mortar men, and a guy with a mortar was probably back a hundred yards behind the very front lines. And the guy with the mortars made fun of the guys with the heavy artillery because they're back a quarter of a mile. And the
artillery guys made fun of the air force because they flew over and fought for a while then they went back to England. So you had a constant hierarchy of people who were in the war and at the top of that hierarchy were the - and I wouldn't say this to my friends - I am only saying it for the record; the top of the hierarchy were those who had fought in the front lines with rifles and machine guns. And after the war, the only thing that men would talk about was 'where did you serve?' and 'what were you in?'
[435]
AH: Thank you very much for doing this.
CM: Well, you're welcome. We did it in forty-five minutes.
I Camp Blanding was located in Starke, Florida. Early in the war the base was used a training facility for new recruits. As the war progressed, the base was used to house prisoners of war and captured U-boats. By the end of the war, Camp Blanding had the largest number of POWs out of all the camps in Florida. www.floridawwii.com FebA,2004
2 Hedgerows were mounds of earth to keep cattle in and to mark boundaries. Typically there was only one entry into the small field enclosed by the hedgerows, which were irregular in length as well as height and set at odd angles. On the sunken roads the brush often met overhead, giving the GIs a feeling of being trapped in a leafy tunnel. Wherever they looked, the view was blocked by walls of vegetation.
www.worldwar2history.info/Normandy/hedgerows Feb. 20, 2004
3 The A5 pistol was the standard side arm for the American soldiers of WWII. It was semi-automatic with a seven-round magazine and a range of about fifty yards. www.combatfan.com FebA,2004
4 The M-l rifle is a semi automatic, .30 caliber rifle. It was used as the basic infantry weapon by the United States Army in World War II and the Korean War. www.wordreferance.com Jan. 21, 2004
5 Glider troops were groups of people that flew into battle on flimsy gliders made of plywood and canvas. The gliders did not have motors and were towed by planes until they were released. The glider troops eventually became a part of the airborne division during WWII.
www.worldwar2history.info.com Feb. 4, 2004
6 The 10 I st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were paratroop platoons dropped into the Battle of Normandy during WWII.
7 The English Channel is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean between Southern England and northern France. It is linked with the North Sea by the Strait of Dover. www.wordreferance.com Jan. 21, 2004
8 Foxholes were holes that was dug during battle in order to provide individual protection from enemy fire. www.wordrferance.com Jan. 21, 2004
9 Slit trenches were much like foxholes in the way that they provided protection, but they were much narrower and longer and provided protection for two to three people instead of only one. www.wordreference.com Jan. 21,2004
!O The .88 mm cannon was an anti-aircraft battery used by the Germans in World War II. It was very powerful and was the only weapon able to destroy the heavier British and French tanks. The cannons were first towed by trucks, but as the war progressed they were mounted on tanks for better mobility. http://home.sandiego.edu/-cshimp/88.htm Feb. 4, 2004
II The tiger tank was a tank used by the Germans in WWII and is probably the most famous tank of the war. Despite its formidable gun and armor, it sustained heavy losses due to weak assembly and mechanics. http://users.swing.be/tanks.edito Feb. 4, 2004
12 The Purple Heart is a medal awarded to members of the U.S. Armed Forces for a wound incurred in battle. www.wordreferance.com Jan. 21, 2004
