Interview with Mr. Frederic Byers
[b. 6/7/1923]
Recorded on 11/26/04
Transcribed by Olivia Byers on 01/23/05
Side A
[Interview starts at 006 on counter]
Olivia Byers: I am at the home of Frederic Byers and interviewing him about his experiences in World War II.
*(Robin Byers also takes part in a few questions)
[011]
Olivia Byers: Were you drafted or did you enlist?
Frederic Byers: Drafted.
[014]
OB: Why did you pick the service branch you joined?
FB: Well... I was just drafted into the army. There was no choice to it.
[019]
OB: Tell me about your boot camp training or experience.
FB: Well, I went to Camp McKall, North Carolina... to the 11th Airborne Division. I was a squad leader, a machine gun squad leader. We had all kinds of tactics, tactical training. I was supposed to, originally, to go to the Air Force and they–– checked my records–– and I got transferred to Cadets like I was supposed to have gone in the first place. So they sent me to Miami, Florida and I was there for thirty days, taking all the tests for Cadets. Then I came back to Cincinnati, Ohio to Xavier University and I was there from October until May and at that time they sent down orders that all Cadets that had previous infantry training had to go back to the infantry. So I went to Camp McKall–– 'er Breckinridge, Kentucky and there I was a squad leader for a short time, teaching classes on machine guns and mortars. The weird part about it, I was put on K.P. (Kitchen Police) one day, and I went down to the Mess Hall and served K.P. all day, come back to the barracks that night and I was on it again. So when I went down the next morning, to the kitchen, the Mess Sergeant wanted to know what I was doing down there and I told him (course the records were all messed up) and he said, "Well, we’ll stop that." He said, "If you're going to be down here you just as well be a cook." So that's when they changed my certification over to a cook’s certification and I was a cook from then on. When I went overseas, with this outfit, I served as a cook and a truck driver all in one. So I had two different classifications. That was about the beginning of my time in service.
We were–– Our first combat was the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, that’s where they broke through. We were up on the front; they sent us up to front, on just a skeleton crew. And about midnight, the sky looked like the Fourth of July... that’s when they broke through on the Bulge... and we had to pull what few men we had back out of there to Liége, Belgium and wait for the rest of the unit to come up and then we went back up and stayed on the point of the Bulge for eighteen days and from there we went to Colmar, France, that was in southern France, that was another one of the fronts down there and we stayed at Colmar for about five weeks, we went from there back to the Remagen Bridge, where we were cross. We tried to cross the river there and go into Germany. They were trying to blow the end out of the bridge--to keep us from coming across. We kept them back from blowing up the bridge, but we had to build a–– a pontoon bridge across, the engineers put that bridge in, then we went across the pontoon bridge, across the Rhine River, and from there we went on into Germany. And before we got to the main part of Germany, the war was over, they declared the truce and we ended up there, and we stayed in a camp in–– out in Gmunden, Germany for about four weeks before we could ever come back out of there and everybody being processed and getting ready to come home. After we left there we come back to Le Harve, France and we sailed home from Le Harve, France and we were eighteen days coming back home on account of stormy weather. When we left Le Harve, France there was eighteen-foot waves hitting the docks in London. When we came out of the harbor there, we were on a Liberty ship, it was not a very big one, I think three between three and four hundred feet long, and the waves were so high that that boat would climb up and then when it fell over the screw on the back would come out of the water, it was just a big teeter totter, [laughs] we rode like that for eighteen days to get back to New Jersey. We had one–– one day of smooth water, we were just–– we could see the lights of Boston Harbor as we come in and that was the only time in that eighteen days that we had any smooth water coming home. We landed in New Jersey–– from there we came back to Camp Atterbury, and that’s where I was discharged.
163]
OB: What was it like coming, like going over there, when you went over to Europe what did it feel like?
FB: Well, you didn’t hardly know what to think on the way over. We were nine days going over in a big convoy, had a hundred ships in that convoy we went over in, they move slow, but the boat we were on was a big British Luxury Liner and we had to–– to land at Liverpool, England. From Liverpool, England we went to–– South Wales, that’s where we–– we had Thanksgiving Day there and then two days later we got on the boat and went across into France. But you–– you just kind of wondered from day to day what was coming up next.
[185]
OB: Were there many casualties in your unit?
FB: Well, we had quite a few, I don’t know just exactly how many‚ there was, but we lost quite a few up on the Bulge and–– and we lost some down at Colmar but after that the Germans were drawn back, toward Berlin, and they were moving so fast it was hard to keep up with them. They weren’t, after we got across the Remagen Bridge and across the Rhine River, into Germany, they were trying to run from us and keep ahead of us. They were down enough that they had a lot of horse drawn equipment, and they were skinning out their horses and using them for food, on the way back to Berlin, and they didn’t even stop to do that, they never stopped because–– everything was just strewn out along the road.
[207]
OB: Tell me a couple of your most memorable experiences.
FB: Well, the first one that really made us stand up and take notice was the night after we got over into France, we were in a big open area, it was hilly country, like it is here, and we were down in a little valley under––into the woods, they got to shooting rockets and we could see all we could see a great big bright light on the east of us and it just kept getting brighter and brighter and just at the top of the hill that we were down under all at once there was a big explosion and it blew trees and everything. That thing was coming right at us, just as straight at us as it could come. That was the first thing that really woke us up to what was going on.
[228]
OB: Were you awarded any medals?
FB: Well, just a, I got a Rifleman's Medal, Sharpshooters Medal, European Theater, and I think there was about four of them–– but that was the main ones.
[235]
OB: Could you explain how you got them like, what they’re for?
FB: Well, with the European Theater, it was automatically given to you cause that was the area you were stationed in. The Sharpshooters Medal was a high score on the rifle range. The Rifleman's Medal was the type gun that you used on the gun course, now in the airborne we had to know every gun from a .45 caliber automatic to a .37 millimeter anti-tank gun, we had to be able to handle each one of those guns efficiently, so that whatever position we was in we could take over.
[254]
OB: How did you stay in touch with your family?
FB: By letter, we wrote letters back and forth all the time.
[258]
OB: What was the food like?
FB: Well, it was pretty good, after I ended up as a cook, we never did have any complaints about it from the company. Our Mess Sergeant was a baker by trade, so he knew what he was doing. After the war was over, we were stationed there in Germany, he put me in the kitchen at night, cause we had to have a guard, and I stayed in the kitchen at night and baked all the bread and the cakes and cookies and pies and things for the officers mess, twenty six––I had twenty- six officers, and I done all the baking for all of those––twenty- six people. They told us later, the Colonel, told us later that he picked the best cooks in the whole–– [laughs]. Charlie, being a baker, he knew all the recipes, in fact, I started home with a book that had–– about two hundred recipes that he had written out for me and somehow it come up missing, I don’t know what happened to it. He could sit down and write down a recipe and didn’t look at anything.
[284]
OB: Did you ever feel pressure or stress?
FB: Yep, yeah, there’s a number of times. I was on guard one night in Belgium and the Germans had stole a bunch of American vehicles and uniforms and we were in this little town, pitch dark, there wasn’t hardly any lights around, and I had to stop a jeep and I made him get out to be recognized, so I could get close to him and see him, and when you do that, you’re standing out there by yourself, you get pretty tense, but I come to find out, the boy that was driving for this officer, was from New Castle. I asked him what his name was and he said Carter. I said, Where you from? And he said, New Castle, Indiana. I said, what was your father’s name? He said, Russell. His dad and my brother worked together at Chrysler in New Castle. You don’t realize how small this world is.
[311]
OB: How did people entertain themselves?
FB: There wasn’t much time for that. You just pretty well kept your attention on what was going on around you. You had to be very vigilant and every move that was made and you just didn’t have much time for entertainment.
[317]
OB: What did you do when on leave?
FB: The only time I was on leave was––in Brussels, Belgium and I was off for four days and all we done was go through the museum over there and just—‘cause nobody speak English so it’s kinda hard to confer with other people, but you just more or less went around and seen the sights and that was about it.
[326]
OB: Do you recall any particularly humorous or unusual events?
FB: Well, this–– this was funny to me; I don’t know it would be to anybody else. We had a boy named--Vinable French, he was a full-blooded Frenchman. He’d been out a drinking one night and he come in and he had a loaf of that French bread about this long. He come over to the First Sergeant, woke him up and wanted him to take a drink of his wine. Sergeant Barne told him, “Get out of here, I don’t want it!” He said, “If you don’t take a drink of this, I’m going to hit you in the head.” Well, he told him get out of here and leave him alone and he warped right down across the head with that loaf of bread and cut a gash right down across his forehead. [Laughs] That’s about the most comical thing I seen.
[342]
OB: Did you guys pull any pranks, ever?
FB: No, you didn’t do much of that.
[345]
OB: What did you think of officers or fellow soldiers?
FB: Well, most of the soldiers, or most of the officers we had were some of the very best. They were officers that had worked their way up in rank. Now, they weren’t university officers, they had worked their way up from the private right up to their present rank. Our captain was from Florida and––We only had one officer that was West Point, he was a little second lieutenant, and he couldn’t get along with himself.
[358]
OB: Did you keep a personal diary?
FB: No, no I didn’t.
[359]
OB: Do you remember the day your service ended?
FB: Yes, I was discharged in January of 1946.
[363]
OB: Where did you first learn the war ended?
FB: We was out in Gmunden, Germany.
[366]
OB: What did it feel like when you learned that the war was over?
FB: It was a big relief, very much so. We were there in the Bavarian Mountains and it was peaceful there.
[370]
OB: How long was it before you got home?
FB: Let’s see, about three months.
[373]
OB: How long had you been in service at that point?
FB: Three years.
[374]
OB: Where did you get out?
FB: At Camp Atterbury in Indiana.
[377]
OB: What did you feel like, when you got to go back to America again? When you got to America what did you think or feel?
FB: Well, I was tickled to death to be home.
[380]
OB: Did you make any close friendships while you were in service?
FB: Yeah, quite a few. I've seen a few of them since I’ve been home but one of the main friends I made was from Washington��– the state of Washington, we got separated when I left the Airborne Division–– and he stayed with the Airborne Division––and they went over��–over to the islands.
[387]
OB: What did you go on to do, as a career, after the war?
FB: Well, I took some schooling, machinist schooling, here in Bedford, they had a program for veterans when I got home and I signed up for that and I took machinist schooling, here in Bedford, but as far as really planning out a career, I really didn’t, it was more or less a process of making a living, cause there wasn’t much money when we got home.
[397]
OB: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general?
FB: Well, yeah, you learned to respect people and you learn to be attentive, know what’s going on around you. It’s just one of those things, it’s hard to explain, but the things you learn in service is worth--it’s priceless, now I wouldn��t people to have to go to learn it, in service, but it does anybody good. I know these boys that are over there right now are in a situation where they don’t have any control, but we had more control than what they have.
[410]
OB: How did your service and experience affect your life?
FB: Well, it made you appreciate more, appreciate the things that you have more than you did otherwise because people don’t really know what they do have until they go through an experience like that.
[416]
OB: Is there anything else you would like to add or tell me about that we haven’t already talked about?
FB: No, that pretty well covers it.
[419]
OB: Can you tell us something about the gliders?
FB: Yeah, we had quite an experience with them. See the glider troops, they pick you up off the ground in a glider, and take you in behind the lines and set you down in there and your on your own. You, more or less fought your way out. We had–– I was in one–– I was a squad leader and they picked my squad for the final training and–– where they had the general inspection and everything and they took us up in a glider and they were supposed to land in a small field down in–– under the woods–– and they didn’t think about it rained the night before–– and when we came down–– when you leave the ground you drop your wheels, then you got skids underneath––and they came down and they set the plane down in that field and just like he’s on ice, he just went right straight on into the woods and he cut the wings off between two trees–– and I was sitting right at the back of the right wing, just inside the door, and when that buckled that tubing and hit me in the back of my head and just drove my head right down to my knees and if I hadn’t had a helmet on I’d have been in trouble. You go up in one of those things and you’re on your own from there on–– and we didn’t have a parachute–– a parachute wouldn’t do you any good in a glider because if you jumped out the glider's going to be falling the same speed you are and it'd just suck you down with it. We had one incident where we were taking up gliders off the airport and planes had come around over, they’d turn the gliders loose, and then they’d go around to another area and release their tow cable–– it was a nylon cable about three hundred feet long––well this plane–��� they gave this plane the okay to come back in and when they pushed the button to drop the cable it locked–– it stayed–– the cable come right on around and they come right in over the top of the gliders and when he come in he hooked that big b- ring, that’s on the end of the cable–– run right up over the tale and snapped–– wrapped around and locked into the tale of that thing and he drug that glider right up over a guy that was standing in front of it. We had another incident, about a month later, they–– see you drive a jeep up in that glider––and they take a jeep with you––four men in it–– and they started coming in for a landing, they always landed on the sod–– but when they started coming in–– there was a tow ship coming in right along the side of it–– and it come in just a little higher and it got the prop wash and that thing dropped and killed all four of the people in the jeep and the two–– and the glider–– or the pilot and co- pilot. That was the worst thing that we had to do at that time. The gliders are something that they took over there to the Philippines, and they weren’t working like they ought to so they made all the glider troopers jump–– turned into paratroopers–– the boy from Washington State, that I made friends with there, he was a company clerk–– and I got a letter from him after the war was over–– he said their outfit lost five out of eight people in the whole outfit so that was quite a casualty. The gliders just weren’t quite as successful as they should have been.
[486]
OB: Is there anything else you want to add?
FB: Well, I can't think of a whole lot else––Olivia. There are a lot of things that you just can't remember all of it at the time.
[490]
OB: Did you have any training in being a paratrooper?
FB: No–– I didn’t have to jump–– no. In fact, at that time, they’d have had to shove me out of that plane. [laughs]
[497]
FB: I had to stand by for four days––we were just a moving about four knots an hour. There was another boat just like ours that passed us the night before and it wasn’t too long after that–– that the captain on our ship got word to stand by, that boat had gone–– he went right straight into that storm that we were going around, and cracked the hull. They were trying to get another ship in there to–– if we’d have had to go in I don’t know where we’d put 'em because we had 525 people on that boat and it was only equipped for a crew of 45. We slept in the hull on these–– they put up big poles from the floor to the ceiling–– and they put bunks that fold out on each side. I was a sleeping on the sixth bunk, up high. The boys up in the nose of the ship, they come back and they borrowed our gun belts to try them into the bed to keep from falling out, cause that boat would come up and it'd just fall, and you could feel the sides of that boat just going this way and when it fell it just sounded like thunder, so you didn’t sleep much at night. [laughs]
[516]
Robin Byers: Were you in Holland and Belgium and that area you say?
FB: Yeah.
[516]
RB: What was that land like up there?
FB: Well, Belgium and Holland are clean, they were real clean countries. France is the worst one of the bunch. Germany was clean, even though it was shot up, it was clean. Belgium and Holland, Holland especially, is a pretty country.
[521]
RB: They’re below...?
FB: ... They’re below sea level. What was so fun to see was–– you always seen these big dogs that pulling all these carts–– they use 'em still yet–– they’re some of the biggest dogs I’ve ever seen, some of them had feet as big as your hand [laughs]–– they would weigh as much as 200 lbs–– they were monsters. Some of them had a head that big a round! [Making a circle with his hands.]
[528]
RB: What was the prettiest thing you think you saw?
FB: Oh yeah, sure are.
[529]
RB: What do you think was the prettiest sight you saw over there?
FB: Well I think that Holland was the prettiest place of all–– 'course all we’d seen, the British island was South Wales and it was just bunched up with little old narrow streets and where we stayed was in an armory and there was nothing clean about it. I don’t know whether they just let it go during the war or what but that part hadn’t been shot up like the main part of Britain was.
[539]
RB: From the time you guys got the announcement that the war was over, was there a big celebration with everybody at that point?
FB: Oh yeah, yeah. Everybody was tickled to death.
[542]
RB: Was there anymore fighting after that or did it stop quickly?
FB: No, no it just stopped, that was it. This little town we were in––Gmunden–– it was in the Bavarian Mountains. I got to going fishing, when I was off from kitchen, I’d go up there–– and there were trout streams, really some of the prettiest trout in there you ever seen. They got to going out there and throwing hand grenades. In 'em so they made us quit. The worst part about it was, one of our officers, one of our captains–– here in the states–– he was from Florida–– he was a natural resources officer here in the states and boy you talk about putting a clamp on them, he did. He just absolutely wouldn’t put up with any of that.
[558]
RB: Now, when you came back in did you come into New York and New Jersey and that area on the ship?
FB: Came to New Jersey.
[562]
RB: So you went past the Statue of Liberty?
FB: Yeah, we come right past it.
[564]
RB: What was it like finally getting to see that?
FB: Early in the morning. It was, well I don’t know it’s just a feeling that you have. We were just so glad to get home and get back to where we could be on dry land again after that eighteen days, that’s about all we was thinking about at that time.
[572]
RB: Was the food on the ship any good?
FB: Yeah, it was good. You go down in there to eat and you eat standing up. They just had tables that were about this high and they had little rails around them and they’d be as long as this room. I’ve seen the time we’d be standing there trying to eat–– your coffee cup would start to going this way, back and forth. That ship would get to rocking and–– the worst time, we had a forty five degree angle, and that’s almost to the point of turning over–– one of the boys out there–– the deck was wet and if he hadn’t had on the great big 'ol wool coat he’d have been out in the ocean. Two of us grabbed him, he started slipping and he started out under the rail and each one us grabbed a–– that big 'ol coat that he had on and pulled him back in there. You talk about a boy that was scared, he was, he wouldn’t even get near the rail again. You have a lot of––
[601]
RB: When you come into New Jersey did... how did you get... where? Did you leave the service at?
FB: Over here at Seymour.
[605]
RB: Seymour? And how’d they get you there, they take you by train?
FB: Train, yeah. We came by train. We come to Atterbury, in fact that's the only time I would ever? Into? Camp Atterbury, is when they discharged us. Mother, Dad, and Vance come over there and picked us up.
[615]
RB: How long had you been gone at that point?
FB: Three years, yeah. I liked about sixteen days of being in about three years.
[619]
RB: Had you been home any––? Well you went–– from boot camp you were able to come home a little bit.
FB: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was all. Now, when they sent us back to Cincinnati, Ohio to school, I could come home on the weekend and go back. In fact, I had to drive back one time, we had an ice storm and the buses were running five to six hours late and I knew I’d be overtime if I didn’t drive the car. I drove over there, and we weren’t supposed to have a car around but some people up on the next street form the university told me to park it in there. They parked it in their driveway and the next week I brought it back home. Those people over there were as nice as they could be, they��d come out and every weekend there’d just be a whole string of cars come out. Anybody, any cadet that wanted to go out for the weekend, they’d pick 'em up and take 'em home and they’d spend the weekend with them. There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do for us. That school was beneficial, but you know most of it was mechanical aptitude and mathematics, see, we were training for pilot, co-pilot, or a bombardier, so you had to have mathematics above all things, 'course that’s what that is. Your reflexes and your sense of balance is one of the biggest parts of it. In fact, the first tests we took, down in Miami–– I don’t know if you've ever seen one of these simulators or not–– you, it stands up on a pedestal, when you get in it it’s rocked over to the side–– what you do–– you just got the controls of a plane in there and when you get in that thing you are required to pick it up and hold it straight and level. Well, I’ve seen guys get in that thing and all they done from the time they get in till they got out was just flop, back and forth, and they didn’t pass either cause they–– when they couldn’t balance that thing out they wouldn’t dare let 'em into service because they wouldn’t be able to hold a plane straight and level––'course, you know, there’s a lot of times that if your visibility’s defected right? You can't even tell which way you’re going, it really upsets your whole vision and you had to–– that was one of the main tests that you had to have. Then the rest of it, we were there–– we had two weeks, eight hours a day of nothing but tests, never seen as much paper work in my life. We stayed in the McAllen Hotel, right on the beach.
[696]
RB: There in Miami.
FB: That’s where we took our calisthenics everyday out in the sand and the beach. Just before Christmas they sent us back up here and when we got here it was ten below zero, we couldn’t get on enough clothes. Oh, boy. When we left to go to Europe, we left Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky–– they put us on a train and we were four days from Camp Breckinridge to New York, Camp Shanks, New York. We had a car that we cooked in, and we cooked three meals a day, on that train. Half the time we was a sitting–– we sat over here in Seymour for four hours, we just went from Camp Breckinridge over to Seymour and we had to sit there for the tracks to clear for us to get through–– we were just running between schedules. I didn’t think we was ever going to get there. Then after we got there our kitchen force was picked to cook so we just, more or less, got off of the train and had to go into the kitchen and then we worked twelve hours in the kitchen. You never seen as many pumpkin pies in your life, that’s all we done, make pumpkin pies. They was a feeding by the thousand in there that was the reception center where they all came in and then were sent over seas. Just that one twelve hour period was all we had to be in the kitchen though. Going over seas we didn’t have to cook. What was funny, the first morning, you know what they brought us out for breakfast? Boiled fish. Well, that near caused a riot, we called the officer, the mess officer in there, he wanted to know what was the matter and one of the boys said, “Here’s breakfast.” He handed him that plate. He never said a word he just turned around and walked out of there. He was gone about five minutes. He said, “Be back here in one hour for your breakfast.” When we came back we had an American breakfast. He told us later what he told them. He said, now we put American rations on this boat for these people to have their meals. And he said, “You’re not going to take those rations over there and sell them on the black market. You take your fish and throw it over the side but you make sure that every meal is an American meal or you’re going to answer to me.” From that day on we didn’t have any trouble with meals. That was funny.
[764]
RB: You also drove a truck with tanks and stuff... and things.
FB: Oh yeah. Well, you see–– One trip I had to make, Clifford Stuts, he was from Alsburo, Kentucky––here in the states he was a greyhound mechanic–– he was driving one of these, you seen one of these great, big, steel cab tank movers––he was on the go all the time. One day he come in the kitchen and he said, “You’re going to have to take this thing up to the front for me.” He said, “ I’ve been driving for four days and I haven’t had a wink of sleep.” He said, “I can’t make it any longer.” And I said, “Stuts, I don't know how to drive that thing.” He said, “You drive that six by six all the time.” He said, “You come out here and get in it and I'll show you.” It only had three transmissions in it. He showed me what to do––and all kinds of gearshifts and everything else in it––it’s supposed to be a crew of four in the cab––in a big arm and steel cab. This thing had to be up at the front so I finally made it up there. When I come back, I come back through the creeks–– I tore down every bridge that I went over, when I’d come to a bridge I’d hit 'em just as hard as I could hit 'em, and that’s what he said to do. He said, “When you know you’re a coming to a bridge, you get every mile of speed out of this thing you can get and go right on across it, and don’t ever let up on it.” When I come back most of them bridges had fell in. It was a six-wheel drive and even the front wheels were duel wheels. I come back through the water that was the only way I could get back. I got back I said; “Don’t ever ask me to do that again!” The reason I was a truck driver–– the little guy that was our regular kitchen driver–– when he wasn't moving our kitchen, he was hauling ammunition and supplies––he was on the road day and night, he'd just be so tired and so sleepy, he couldn’t keep his eyes open and he’d say, “Well, you’re gunna have to drive.” We left the Bulge, we pulled back and we thought we was going to get to rest. At midnight, they come in and told us to load up everything and be ready to move in two hours. We started moving to Colmar, France. I drove for three days in a hundred-truck convoy. You couldn't use any lights, the only thing you could use on there was just little cat eyes, they call 'em, it was just a little triangle of light, front and back so that the vehicle in front of you and behind you could tell where you were, otherwise it was pitch dark. I drove three days and when we’d stopped I lay down in the truck and go to sleep and the cooks would fix a meal and then we’d get ready to go on. That’s the only way I got any sleep in that three days and that wasn’t even an hour and a half or two hours.
[829]
RB: Was it snowing in the Bulge?
FB: Oh, yeah.
[830]
RB: ... bad snowstorm too, didn’t it?
FB: Oh, well. The snow was a standing that high on top of them evergreen limbs. Every time you bump one of them it'd just cover you up. Or if they’d fire around and down and come through the trees–��� in fact, when we left there it just looked like you took a big bush hog and topped them trees out, cause they were always shooting at the same level. Snow drifts about six and eight feet deep, I slept in a snow drift many a night. We got to Colmar, France and 'course it was warmer, kinda like going from here to Florida, it was a difference in the temperature–– in the place we set our kitchen up, in Colmar, was an old textile mill, had all these great big brass ?Doors?/?rollers? With all the printing on it and everything, there was a creek running right under it and that’s where they got their water. When you take a meal out there, you was out in flat country just as wide open as northern Indiana, just flat as a floor. When they finally decided to go ahead and take Colmar, you know how they done it? They took some big, bright floodlights and they shined them right into that building––right into the city and we went in under the lights, 'course you couldn’t see out there. We had one incident before we started, these Legionnaires, was the roughest looking bunch of people you ever seen in your life–– we furnished some tanks and ammunition and guns–– they decided they was going to go in there one night, they’d go in there and all them guys dug in out in the flat country, they’d just pull up over one of them holes and locked the track, spin it around and go on to the next one. Boy, they done that all over that field, you’d be surprised how many there was dug in there. You ever tried to get to them you was out in the wide-open spaces and you didn’t have much of a chance. When they went in under the lights that put a stop to the whole thing.
SIDE B
[875]
FB: ... blew off the end of that bridge so they wouldn’t get it out. We burned up three or four machine gun barrels, water-cooled handguns. One of the boys brought a gun into the kitchen that he’d taken out; he’d just replace the barrels. The last shell, slug went out through that barrel just went out this away. It got up there so far and come right out through the side of the barrel, that’s how hot it was, he just melted the end off of that gun. We kept that barrel for a long time ‘cause I never seen one do that. I’d hate to think how much ammunition we moved through there. We were on a levy, on the east side of the river, and every time one of them would show up over there around the end of the bridge every gun out there would open up on ‘em. They finally shot it out. They got it at night, got a charge set in there and then they blew it up the next morning, it was quite an experience. After that, after we crossed there, we went across on that, I probably told you about that pontoon bridge–– that river is real swift and every other one of them big pontoons had a hundred horse Johnson Engine on it, run twenty-four hours a day, we kept them going completely. That’s the only way they could hold the bridge cause it already had a big sway in it and the cables wouldn’t have held it if we hadn’t. We brought trucks, tanks, everything across ‘em. They done that in the midst of all the–– the Germans didn’t hardly fire at them when they was building the bridge, 'course they’d have been out in the open if they had and they knew we was watching them real close. It took about two days to build a bridge, then we started coming across. When we started crossing that bridge they come up missing, they didn’t even wanna be around.
[Cut off 915]
