Norman C. Stieg
[b. 5/6/27]
[0:00:03.6]
[Today is October 23, 2007. I am Kirstin Brueckmann and I am interviewing Norman C. Stieg at Park Tudor School. Mr. Stieg is a contact through my teacher, Mrs. Lerch. Mr. Stieg is eighty years old and was born on May 6, 1927. Mr. Stieg served in World War II. Mr. Stieg was in the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 82nd Airborne. Mr. Stieg held the following rank: Private First Class.]
KB: Were you drafted, or did you enlist?
NS: Yes, I was drafted. Actually, I enlisted. I took the physical for the navy. When I was seventeen I quit high school and I went to enlist in the navy. I took the physical and they said that I passed the physical and go home and they’ll call me to be in touch. I went home and I found a draft notice so I went back down and took the physical the following week and then I chose the army. That how it all happened; how I got in the army.
KB: Where were you living at the time that you were drafted?
NS: I was in the western suburbs of Chicago in a town called Lyons.
[0:01:05.7]
KB: Now why did you pick to be in the service branch of the army?
NS: I wanted to go in the navy, but when I got the draft notice and I went back downtown to take the physical again because I was drafted. We then had the choice of either army or navy or marines or coast guard and I drove down to the draft board and the physical with three of my other friends and they all took the army, so I took the army. It was just a matter of following the leader.
[0:01:52.1]
KB: Do you recall what your first days in the service were like?
NS: Oh, very well. I went to Fort Sheridan and the first three days the four of us all went there together and we didn’t get any sleep for three nights, for some reason. And we didn’t know absolutely anything about service life so the first day we were there they said we had to do a fire guard in the barracks, which meant you had to stay up all night in case of a fire. They were wooden barracks, two story wooden barracks, so they needed fire guards. We stayed up all night and the next day we had to go through all this induction, get shots and uniforms and everything. At the end of the day they called out a list of names to go on kitchen police (“KP”), and we got called into that. That was two nights, two days, that we hadn’t slept. The third day they called us out for our detail. I don’t remember what we were supposed to do, it was some kind of a clerical detail or something. Anyhow we were all so tired that they kept picking us four included with a group of about ten or twelve. At the third we were all so tired I think we slept. Half of the time we slept and half of the time we were doing what we were supposed to do, but I was kind of “woozy” by that time. That was my introduction to army life. I think somehow they got the names screwed up or something.
KB: Can you tell me anything about what your training experience was like?
NS: Well, I went through basic training, seventeen weeks of basic training and it was Camp Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was basic, just infantry training. [We] learned how to handle all the weapons. In the infantry there’s the rifle platoons and heavy weapons are the machine guns and mortars. So I was in the machine guns, not the mortars. Then I went through what the call “jump school,” parachute school, to learn how to jump out of an airplane basically. That’s just what that was. That was probably a little more rigorous than basic training. It was a lot more physical.
[0:05:16.5]
KB: Was it hard to get through those first couple weeks of training?
NS: That was when I got homesick. It wasn’t hard. After awhile you understood what the procedure was. They would start you out the first week with minimum equipment, field equipment. You just had an ammo belt and carried a rifle and that was about the first thing they issued you. As they went on, the next week they added an empty field pack and the third week they put something in the field pack while you were [carrying] all your others. Gradually you went up to a full field pack. You carried more and more weight. It was a gradual process which was kind of interesting after a while when you caught on to what they were doing. When I look back on what they were doing, we though it was kind of stupid at the time. Basically, that was it.
[0:06:40.0]
KB: When you were serving in World War II, where exactly did you go in Germany?
NS: Okay. Well, we landed in France and took a train to Germany. They called them “forty-and-eights,” they were freight trains box cars. So the first week was nothing but traveling into Germany and we ended up in Marburg, Germany which was a university, like a college, town. I think that’s what was there, a university in Marburg. We were billeted in school buildings that had been. The population of Germany was in flux by that time. People were moving out and everything. It was the end of the war and people had been bombed and everything else. Schools were not functioning as troops moved in. They took over all these buildings that were still standing [and] used them as billets. So we were billeted in a school building in Marburg, Germany. From there I went to a truck to Frankfurt, Germany and joined up in the Marburg Eighth Parachute Regiment as part of the 82nd Airborne. That was basically at that time Supreme Headquarters. Eisenhower was stationed in Frankfurt complex. We were basically doing guard duty. That’s what we were always doing.
[0:08:41.4]
KB: What exactly was your job assignment when you were there?
NS: Well, the 508th was still combat ready so we were doing a lot of combat training but in addition we were doing a lot of guard duty. Supreme Headquarters was the compound built around the building called the I.G. Farben Building with a chemical plant. It wasn’t a plant but the general office buildings for the I.G. Farben industries in Germany that did all the war contracts and everything. Eisenhower was stationed in the Farben Building and then we did the guard duty around their complex. They had a wire fence all the way around and we did some guard duty around the complex but we also did guard duty on their prisoners, POWs that were still part of the prisoners that were being rehabilitated.
[0:10:13.1]
The war had ended and these POWs were being returned and we did a lot of guard duty on guarding the POWs and lot of assisting what they called “DPs,” displaced persons. Mostly civilians had just been uprooted from their homes and were just migrating all over Europe actually. As everything calmed down these displaced persons would come into, or be directed to the offices of the Farben building for assistance in locating relatives and getting back, trying to get back, to civilian life so we had to escort those. They had to be under guard inside of the Farben building because a lot, not a lot, but many of the higher eschelon Nazi regime, as the Russians overran them, became displaced persons and they would take their uniform off and put civilian clothes on and would be filtrating through with the other people that were being displaced and escaping from the Russians. So they had to be under guard when they went inside. All the displaced persons had [to be], so we had to escort them into the offices and then we guarded railheads. They were when the supply trains would come in and there was a growing black market in Germany at the time of stealing military goods and bringing them in boxcars and taking military equipment out and supplies and food and whatever was in there. They put it on the black market. They were criminals by no choice; they had nothing else to do. There were no jobs for them so we had to still maintain guard at that time and there were other things we guarded. We guarded our own people, the people that were doing bad things in the army, our own G.I.’s and the stockade. We had to guard those people. We had various types of duties like that.
KB: Did you see any combat yourself?
NS: No, I didn’t. No.
KB: Were there many casualties in your unit?
NS: No, when we got to our unit they had already been [in combat] -the war had already ended and the unit that I joined was with the 82nd and they had gone through the last big engagement, battle of the Bulge where they had a lot of casualties. So they were depleted in that power, so they were sent to Frankfurt. They were asking for volunteers. The parachute regiment were volunteers because you didn’t get assigned, you had to volunteer. When we got to Marburg that’s when the 82nd came around and asked for volunteers to go through parachute school so I went through parachute school in Germany and then went to join the 508th Regiment and the 82nd Airborne division. They needed so many replacement men because of the casualties. They had a point system for the veterans -the combat veterans. You got so many points for service and combat. The ones with the highest points immediately after the surrender got points -send you home. You could get home if you had a high enough points so they lost a lot of men just going back home. The outfit itself had casualties like everybody else. What the ratio was I don’t know but they were short-handed after that because they were recruiting.
KB: Can you tell me what some of your most memorable experiences were when you were stationed in Germany?
NS: I really don’t think it was when I think back upon it. It was kind of a bored thing that we kept doing guard duty. I guess the worst thing that happened was when we had a big training jump, a parachute jump, for my company that was traumatic to us. The combat veterans were used to losing people but it was a little depressing. That only lasted a day or two. They take you out and they jump. You forget about it. When I think back about it, that was kind of sad. The kids just came over from the states. We had guard duty one night and we caught a teenager. Germany had taken teenagers and put them in what would be the equivalent of our Boy Scout troops, training them to be Nazi soldiers. We caught this one and he had some propaganda and things for Hitler and his cult, things like that. He was pretty belligerent. He didn’t want to believe that they had lost the war. There was nothing really extremely exciting over there. It was a routine, a daily routine that we were going through.
[0:15:20.3]
KB: Did you stay in touch with your family, and if so, how did you do that?
NS: Oh yeah, we sent mail back and forth. It was basically air mail. But the letters came pretty fast. It would only take a week or so to two weeks. We had free mail service. We’d just write free on it instead of putting a stamp on it so we probably wrote more than if we would have had to buy stamps. We did a lot of letter writing. Mail caught up with us all the time. That was easy to keep in touch.
KB: Do you have any family that had served earlier in the war or that were serving at the same time you were?
NS: My immediate family, no but I had a cousin that was basically a career soldier. He started out in National Guard when he was a teenager and when World War II started they activated him right away. He was in the service for the entire length of the war. We were very close to him. My brother went in about a year after I went in. He got drafted. That’s about all of my family members.
KB: Can you tell me what the food was like where you were stationed?
NS: Surprisingly enough, I don’t know if it was Hollywood movies or the comedians that were always joking about the food, but overall the food was not bad. It would depend on the cook. From good cooks, you got good meals. If you didn’t have good cooks, [you didn’t]. From the time you got inducted until the time you got discharged, until you got stationed in a permanent station like we did in Frankfurt assigned to the 508th. Before that you did a lot of moving around. You ate in different mess halls at different camps. The first camp we went to was Camp Kilboo and then they sent us down to Fort Bragg. It was close to Thanksgiving. It was actually Thanksgiving night when we arrived and they gave us a big Thanksgiving dinner. It was really great. They sent us down to Fort Bragg and the first week at Fort Bragg we were in a temporary unit and that was the worst food, the worst chow. That one week I’ll never forget. Overall, I’d say 80%-90% of the time the food was good, as far as I was concerned.
KB: Were you ever lacking in supplies that you needed or did you always have plenty of supplies?
NS: No. We were still using World War I equipment. We had field equipment and field clothes, the canvas and the backpacks and ammo belts and things like that. They were still from World War I. We had long canvas leggings that came all the way up to our knees. Once we got out of basic training they gave us more modern uniforms. But we were never lacking that I can remember.
[0:23:39.0]
KB: Was there something special that you or someone you knew did for good luck? Or something from home that you held onto for luck?
NS: Just the letters from my girlfriend. I kept all those. I started a photo album. I was never a good photographer but I had a camera. I was very lax in taking [pictures]. Now I look back and I could have taken so many pictures. So I had this good sized photo album that I started here and there with the pictures from basic training, all the way through. Maybe twenty or thirty photographs. I turned it into a scrap book after I got older and I started collecting things. Stamp collector and stuff like that. I turned it into kind of a scrapbook of the forties. Not only World War II but from ’40 to ’49. I would see pictures of remember them or something: ticket stubs, baseball cards. That was started basically from when I was in the service otherwise I would have never done something like that. Those are about the two things. I brought back a couple souvenirs. I have the backpack that comes out of the parachute. When you jump out of an airplane you’re hooked up to what they call a static line from your bag, from your parachute, to a wire that runs through the airplane and when you jump out the static line goes about to about twenty feet and it pulls your parachute open, it’s an automatic thing. The backpack stays with the static line and when you go through the airplane, these were C-47’s, and we had to jump out the side doors. They were two engine airplanes. So you already jumped out of one side. You were numbered with what they called a stick. There were twenty men in the stick and you were numbered one, two, three, four and five and so on. I was number one my first jump and so they needed the static line and your backpack. I think later I got it on the black market. I got some paddle from an emergency shoot which I still owe the government for that probably, but those were the only souvenirs I brought back. Nothing exciting or spectacular.
KB: What did the people and yourself do to entertain yourselves while you were in Germany?
NS: We had movies, depending on where they could set up the screen, outside or inside. Later on we found out the German engineers were continually working on the infrastructure of their country. Everything had been destroyed and when they got power back of electricity, of course it wasn’t 220 pulses but the states. Once we had power and electricity you could sit home and get your radio and you could rig it up. You had to put a 100 watt light bulb between the radio and the outlet or whatever you could find to plug into. If you got billeted in a building that had the outlets, they would get power into their buildings so you could plug into an outlet. From the outlet you had to put an outlet screw into your 100 watt bulb to reverse the power, to take some of the power, for your radio. If you did do that, your radio would work. We did a lot of makeshift stuff like that. We listened to a lot of radio. They had what the called Armed Forces Network Radio. Once they started broadcasting, there were basically disc jockeys that played music, but there were different cities. Frankfurt had a station, Munich had a station, Stoutenburg had a station, and we could get those different stations in our area. We did a lot of sports. We played baseball and football and things like that. If you had time, most of the time you didn’t have too much. It was mostly at night. If you were just on normal duty or you just had training you would be done by five o’clock or six o’clock so you had the evening, unless you were on guard duty, you had the evening for yourself. It seemed like the army time was on daylight savings time because evenings lasted from six to nine o’clock, so there was a lot of daylight to play sports: a lot of baseball and football, basketball was thing. I guess maybe if we could stick up a goal and put a net we could. Baseball and football all you needed was ball and plenty of space. You didn’t have to build anything special.
KB: Were you ever on leave from the army? Were you given leave to go somewhere?
NS: Well, when I got out of basic training they gave us what they called a “delay in route” and when I got out of Camp Robinson, I was going to Camp Pickett in Virginia. Before, I had thirty days to get there so I had a delay in route from Camp Robinson to Camp Pickett. You got to go home for twenty-nine days and get to Pickett by thirty days.
KB: So you did go home to visit your family?
NS: I was home for the delay in route. The other leave, I [got] a leave in Germany, in Europe, so I had what the called a terminal leave. I got my discharge at Fort Bragg but I was still in the service, I still got paid for another thirty days. I could go home because it was terminal leave. My discharge I got at the end of the month and then it wasn’t dated till thirty days after I was home. Basically for thirty days I was getting paid by the government, by the army, so that was the other leave.
KB: Did you ever witness any particularly unusual events that just seemed out of place to you? Maybe something funny within your division?
NS: No, I can’t say that I saw any unusual events. Not that there was anything spectacular. The unit I was in was basically combat ready as opposed to most of the service units around -engineers and things that weren’t combat ready. I forget what they call it, but [we] had to pack up everything, full field pack and all your belongings that you could carry. They were going to ship us to Trieste. There was something going on there. I don’t remember exactly what, but you were under twenty-four hour notice to ship out to Trieste. We had to pack up full field pack, like I said, and steel helmets and weapons and everything. We sat out in the yard for twenty-four hours waiting to go. I didn’t know if we were supposed to go by truck or if they were going to air lift us. I didn’t know. Nobody knew anything. There were all these rumors flying around. So we sat on our duffel bags. We didn’t have big duffel bags because we just had our full field packs. We just sat on top of our full field packs for twenty four hours outside just waiting. I’m glad it didn’t rain or anything. We just sat there waiting to ship out but we never did. Whatever was happening got resolved so we had to go back in and put everything back. We were stationed in an apartment building, actually a four story apartment building. Half of it had been bombed but the other half was standing. We were fortunate to have a pretty good building. The only thing we didn’t have was the elevators. Once you got up to the fourth floor you had to walk up and down the steps. I remember that incident. We had a bomb go off. There were a lot of shells and things that didn’t go off during the war. There were still mines here and there and things like that, that people didn’t know about. There was some kind of a building down the street, blocks down from us that had been demolished and the farmer there had a herd of cows. One of these cows went into the building, or what was left of the building, and set off, evidently, some kid of munitions. It killed [the farmer’s] cow, he was pretty upset.
[0:37:29.0]
KB: Do you recall the day that your service ended and what it was like?
NS: It was just routine. I knew I was going to get paid for another thirty days yet so it actually ended when I was home but the last day in the service it was just like normal. There were rations because rationing was still going on in the civilian population so we had to get a ration book to get meat and stuff like that. All the clerical stuff. It was just basically clerical work that you had to go through. You had to go through a physical. You go to the dentist to get your teeth fixed if you wanted to.
KB: Now you said you were home when your service actually ended, but you last day overseas, where you still in Germany?
NS: We went through Bremerhaven. I went over and back in what they called victory ships. I wasn’t lucky, but the Queen Mary was turned into a ship for troops. The person I worked for after I got a job, he was my boss, and he had gone over on the Queen Mary. He was in the air force. These victory ships were little tugs compared to the Queen Mary. We had to go up to Bremerhaven, which is a port on the North Sea. The last day there I guess we just went up the gang plank and got on the ship. There was a little incident there that I still remember. The North Sea typically is very rough compared to the Atlantic Ocean, it is actually rougher. The waves aren’t big but it’s choppy. We were in Bremerhaven but we weren’t scheduled to leave for about a week, four or five days to a week, whatever it was. The ship that left before us, the victory ship, had gone on the North Sea and had actually broken in half from the storm. A lot of men were lost in that and where we boarded we got one day out and we had to rescue a British fishing vessel. It was big enough to go in the ocean, but a lot smaller than out ship. They put a line on that and we had to tow that back behind us and that slowed us down, towing this fishing boat. The rudder had broken off and they couldn’t steer so they put a line to us and we spent three days in the North Sea going up and down. Everybody was sea sick; I remember that, except me. I was feeling bad but I never really got sick. The third morning we got up and thought we’re never going to get out to the Atlantic and we saw we were heading right for Dover, the famous white cliffs. They took our ship as fast as they could go and then they made a real sharp turn so they ship we were turning, the fishing boat we were towing, kept going straight. They threw the line off and they just shot right up to the shore. They didn’t have any choice where they landed. I don’t know where they landed but we didn’t care. We were gone by that time.
[0:42:54.4]
KB: What did you do in the days and the weeks after you were finished with your service, at home?
NS: I did a couple jobs right away. I worked at a soda delivery truck. I had dropped out of high school so I was able to go back, I got the GED they were offering. I don’t know what they called it at that time, but it was equivalent to the GED. I had to take these tests and everything. I got my high school diploma and worked at the soda company and then I got a job at an office. My cousin worked at an office for clerical work. She was a secretary at a small plant that did pipe manufacturing, steel pipes and stuff like that. They needed somebody in the mail room so I started in the mail room. I stayed there for six years and then I went to a larger corporation that had benefits, health benefits. It worked out very well so I stayed there. I didn’t do too much jumping around. Eventually I got married and that was it. I stayed in the area. I moved to neighboring towns, two or three neighboring towns.
[Tape switch]
KB: Did you make any close friendships while you were serving that you maintained afterwards?
NS: No, I did not. I had close friends and I had Bob, who was from Milwaukee. He and I stayed together all the time we were in Europe. In fact we met in basic training. Surprisingly enough we did stay together. He was in a different platoon and it ended up when we went to the 508th we were in the same platoon. We were roommates. In the field service, or in the field equipment, you had what you called a shelter half with half of a tent. To make the whole tent, your buddy had the other half. You put that together and two guys could sleep in there in sleeping bags or blankets or whatever you had. He and I would team up in that. Then when we got done with it we got roomed together. My last name was “S” and his was “T” so I think alphabetically we got closer together. In the beginning we weren’t right next to each other but we did end up together. When we came back we got separated. He was in a different company than I was. We were just waiting for discharge. I just saw him maybe half a dozen times in a month or so. Then I never kept in touch with anybody.
KB: Did you join a veteran’s organization after?
NS: Yeah, I joined the American Legion. Not right away, I joined the American Legion about ten years ago when I moved out to Carmel. I met a new friend and he was in the Legion so I joined the Legion. But I’m very inactive. Basically I was working nights at a part time job doing cleaning work at night, office cleaning, and all their meetings were at night so I was kind of inactive. I paid my dues and belong to the 82nd Airborne Association, which is the same thing. I pay my dues just so they hopefully will keep the organization going. I’m not really active in either one. The 82nd Division Association is on the south side and their meeting place is way on the south side of Indianapolis and I’m in Carmel on the north side.
[0:49:00.7]
KB: Did your military experience influence how you think about war or about the military in general?
NS: Yeah, of course it did. The comparable experience of World War II is to me war. I mean the country was at war. Then we had the Korean War, shortly after and right away there was a difference in the attitude. It wasn’t as strong as the Vietnam, where people were divided; our country was divided by anti-war and pro-war. Should we stay in Vietnam or get out of Vietnam? The ones that had strong feelings about it were pretty active doing demonstrations. It was a big device in the country. It just split the country in half with that war. They refer to it now as the Korean War, but President Truman called it a “police action” because we did not declare war. We were in Korea to keep the spread of communism from going into South Korea. At the time, shortly after World War II, there was a phrase that was popular at the time that we were the
“arsenal of the world,” because our production in the United States was unbelievable. We sustained Great Britain and Russia. We were furnishing war materials to all of our allies, all the things that were being manufactured in the United States. For one thing, we weren’t under siege. There were thing along the coast but there weren’t bombs being dropped over the United States. Our production could be continuous. That was all-out war and the whole population was involved and had to support. 99% had supported the war and the other 1% were what they called conscientious objectors, which their religion said they could not kill anybody. They would still serve but they would not go into combat, they would not kill anybody. I’d say 99% where in one way or another behind the war. In the beginning we thought it was a matter of survival. We were attacked and lost so many men in one day at Pearl Harbor so our navy was half gone. The first year of the war was not good at all. We were losing people and bases that we had on islands, Wake Island, and so on. We were losing battles all over the place. It wasn’t till the second year where we started making a come back. The war effort kind of changed. I remember we got back to, “I can win it.” After that, the Korean War and Vietnam and the Desert Storm, to me personally, we’re not at war, we’re policing this.
[0:53:59.1]
I mean as bad as it is, right now the population doesn’t understand that theoretically we are not at war. Nobody, none of us civilians are suffering for this conflict that we’re going through like the civilian population did. We had rationing and shortages and twenty-four hour work shifts. People were working twenty-four hours a day in eight hour shifts off and on. It was full blast for war. The war was the main thing. Now, I would say you could probably find people that go through their daily work day and won’t even thing about what’s going on in Iraq. They don’t even think about it till they hear the news or something and think, “Oh yeah, we’ve got a war.” In that respect, I look at, to me the phrase “The Big War,” and what Truman called a police action, and to me that’s still what it is. They’re just a police action. There’s no draft, nobody’s getting drafted into the service. If you’re in the National Guard you joined. You’re like a volunteer, you joined with the understanding that you could get activated. And so now you get activated so theoretically you’re not drafted, and in the other sense you are drafted because you’re in the select group that said, ���I will be drafted.” My son, right now, will never be drafted to go and fight in Iraq. But in World War II, everybody got drafted. Everybody in my class got drafted. In my class, everybody, all the boys got drafted or enlisted, one or the other. There were only seven or eight boys but 100% of your class got drafted. As you went through town when you had someone in the service, you used to hang a little blue flag with a white star on it to say somebody in this family had somebody in the service. Just about every house had one of these little blue flags. Then it got a little worse at the end when we started having casualties from the town. They would put a gold star. A gold star mother was an organization of mothers who lost their sons. They would put a gold star up instead of the white star and you’d start seeing three or four of those in the small town. Now, you don’t even know who’s in. For all I know my neighbor three doors down could have a son in Iraq and I would never know it. People are not that close anymore. There’s a big difference in my outlook or whatever you want to call it about war.
KB: Is there anything else that you would like to add as we close that I haven’t asked or we haven’t covered? Is there anything you would like the say?
NS: No, not that I can think of.
[0:58:30.9]
