program start well, we were at home on a Sunday and my folks house and we had company and my aunt and uncle were there from Detroit.

And I got the word about Pearl Harbor.

I listened to and told the rest of the family what was going on.

They didn't believe me on the NBC newsroom in New York.

President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air.

I repeat that President Roosevelt says that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii from the air.

I was driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, going south almost to Mt.

Hope when they announced it on the radio.

And I heard about Pearl Harbor then.

And I never forget my sister returned home that evening and she was on the couch listening to the radio and crying, listening to the casualties that were coming out of Hawaii.

Very upset.

And I knew then, that's going to be bad.

Bad.

I was drafted, my principal, my high school, ahead of my draft board, the white rich.

And he called me in the office and he said, Bill, we're going to move your head a half a year.

And draft you.

And I was six foot one and weighed £125 when I got to do.

I told my mother and she said, Well, they'll never take you too skinny.

Wrong.

That was on December 7th.

The attack on Pearl Harbor.

And the next day was a Sunday.

And Monday I went out trying to volunteer.

I had a call from an uncle in Mexico to remind me that a country was attacked.

We should go in support.

And at that time I was told we're not taking Mexicans at this time.

I was in the 17th Armored Infantry Battalion and Company.

See, I was 19 when I enlisted, Lou.

20 when they took me in to the Air Force because that's where I wanted to be.

I was very, very, very scared for a little 18 year old boy from Michigan.

I didn't I'm not a hero myself, but I fought with a lot of heroes and all of my buddies were.

The United States entered World War Two with the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7th, 1941.

But the war in Europe essentially began in July of 1942, when U.S. Army Air Forces were deployed to England to join the assault on Germany.

Subsequently, the success of allied ground forces in North Africa led to the invasion of Sicily in July of 1943 and the beginning of the war on the European mainland.

Over 650,000 Michigan men and women served in the military during World War Two, including all major conflicts in Africa and Europe.

44,735 Michigan citizens were casualties of the war, including 15,414 who died.

Here are some of their stories about conflict and sacrifice.

There are too important to ignore and too moving to forget.

You're all pumped up, you know, First nation and and it was easy.

Then the reality finally set in as the missions grew longer, harder, deeper.

And you just didn't know you're going to hit the same ones that you fly until you die, unless you could finish your tour.

But the scariest one was when when you found out where you were going, you went into the Quonset hut and they would have the big map in front of you covered with a sheet.

And then all the crew would get in there, and then they'd close the door behind and put a guard there because they didn't want anybody know.

And so then they would raise the sheet and then there would either be relief or a loud gasp saying, my gosh, the first 310 missions were, in effect, missions through which you proved yourself to have, if you want to use the word the courage and the guts and the ability, not to fall apart when things got bad.

And once you got over that, then you start worrying about the more real mystic things of life.

And that was survival kind of quiet, where you get across a channel or the German lines or on the coast.

Then you start getting little flack and the closer you get to the target, the more flack again get on the bomber.

And that's when you you got to fly straight and lower.

The bombardier has control of the plane, not outside of an altitude, and he steers plane and winds up to target with the bombsight and drops the bombs.

No, no.

You turn off and go off.

This flak is coming up here.

All the time.

It's just black puff up and then the closing really of the plane.

And of course, you're making holes in the airplane all the time.

There's flak as pieces of shell explode and they go all over every place.

You never know what they're going to hit.

So sometimes what sort of enormous get out there in Washington?

He was there were about 25,000 feet.

So it's kind of heroism.

You never know when something's going to happen.

Every time there's a shell comes up and there's a black puff of smoke, you wonder, where did the pieces go when you got hit by a by a slew of Germans, yellow nose fighters, noses of them all painted yellow, because these were these were his elite.

And they came in high out of the south of the sun on a tail in attack.

And it's a see, you're moving this way.

They were coming down behind you and in the sun so you could you couldn't see them.

And as a kept getting closer, I got a glimpse of one and I thought to myself, What in God's name is that P-51 doing this close, close to our formation, because the rule was any enemy aircraft or a friendly aircraft pointing his nose at you you shot at because the Germans had a lot of our captured aircraft, too, and they could fly them up, sneak into your formation and race car and so on.

And anyway, he came in out of the sun and at the last minute I saw these big crosses on the side of his plane and I yelled out on them like enemy aircraft, 6:00 high.

And I saw my guns around and I was fine.

You're taught to fire short bursts because you'll burn out your guns if you don't.

So you fire bursts of 6 to 8.

So it's okay.

And I saw his he was firing a starting millimeter cannon machine guns and I saw his canopy shatter and oil start pouring out of the side of his plane.

Yeah.

And I lost them that way.

Cruz I started hit them like I got the sun.

I got it, I got it, I got it.

And he rolled over and he went straight down.

And I was just virtually ecstatic, absolutely ecstatic.

We bombed a the IG Farben chemical plant in Little Dutch Carbon Germany.

We were at 28, 30,000 feet.

It was camel ceiling and visibility unlimited.

You could see to the galaxy.

It was so clear and beautiful.

We were on this Marmara and one year on a bomb and you can't do evasive action.

Evasive action is is dodging the fighters.

It's like the charge of the light brigade.

You can't shoot back.

The Germans know where our bomb release point is going to be.

And four, ten, 12, 12, ten, 12 minutes.

You're on the bomber.

It's straight for the bomb release.

Boy in my mom site with crosshairs on the target.

The bombs would be released automatically at a certain trigger point in the atmosphere.

And the Germans were great at calculating your bomb release point.

And that is the area in which they would pump all of their firepower into.

And I look down and in the area surrounding the these chemical plants were these thousands, literally thousands of firecracker coming off.

You could see these flashes and these were the attack guns, any aircraft guns.

And I could actually see the shells zoom in into this area where our bomb release point was great.

You could actually see the show is going.

They're exploding.

We knew as we got closer, they bomb release point.

We were getting really peppered with flak and we got almost a direct hit on the nose of the airplane.

And I sat in the glass bubble as a bombardier and being hunched over the bomb site.

The plexiglass was shattered so badly that it blinded that the granules of the Plexiglas blinded.

My navigator and he was.

Walter never had good eyesight after that.

He was in the hospital for some for a long period of time.

And today I think he's blind.

When this Plexiglas exploded, shrapnel.

I was hunched over the bomb site.

The shrapnel cut my right shoulder, sliced that, and my pilot and copilot sat behind me up on a platform.

And that same shrapnel that sliced my right shoulder and struck and cut my pilot's left foot.

As I recall, we got to Tuskegee about July of 44.

And so I used to run into a lot of guys who were bombers and aircrew members, and they'd see my gunners wings and they would start telling me about the Red Tails.

According to the records, the Black Air Force remembers, their planes were painted with Red Tail and they got a reputation of never having lost a bomber that they were escorting to any planes fire they couldn't do anything about at ground fire downing bombers.

When the black guys were escorting the bombers on their missions, when they were escorting got back, except those who were knocked out by ground fire.

So it got to the point where they're in the 12th and 15th Air Force.

These these kind of these various bomber missions were requesting the Red Tails because they got the reputation they would get back.

We were escorted by the Tuskegee fliers.

They were the the black fighter pilots and boy, they they really came right in around us and made us feel very good because it was always good to be escorted by fighters, even though our chief opposition in our missions would be the anti aircraft rather than fighters, because the American Air Force and the British were quite dominant in that at that time.

But one of the Tuskegee fliers, I remember one of the big, the pilots had to bail out for some reason.

He opened the chute.

We must have been in about 20,000 feet.

And he shouldn't have opened it so soon because he could get anoxia because you went on oxygen at 13,000.

And I often wonder what happened to him.

And later on in my career, I worked with the Atomic Energy Commission and interviewed a black gentleman and he and I told him that and he says, that guy, I know who you mean.

He landed okay.

And he got out and he's got a family in Chicago.

So that made me feel good.

But it was cold.

The thing you noticed right away from my first mission on was and the moment you had a 10,000 feet, it started to get cold.

And by the time we got the 30,000, it got down to 35, 40, 45 degrees below zero.

And we probably had more injuries due to frostbite than we had from anything else, because the planes at that time had opened sideways because whenever you got into battle, we had to open the windows to swing the guns out in the waist.

And of course, that just sucked in all here in the sky, right through the plane and being in a tail, that's where all the air goes.

So I froze the tail on or on literally every mission.

You had to be very careful about it, because if you took off your glove to do any repair on a jammed gun or whatever, if you touch anything metal and didn't have a silk wire on your skin would stick to the metal and that was it.

You couldn't get it off.

You'd have to tear skin to to release yourself.

But it was the cold that got to you.

I remember after the lot, the 5020 mission, I said to myself, if I ever get out of here, I'm going to live north of the south of the Mason-Dixon Line, wherever I live.

Milwaukee, Michigan Operation Overlord was the codename for the Allied invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europe.

The D-Day invasion began during the early morning hours of June 6th, 1944, with parachute and glider landings behind enemy lines.

That was followed by the largest seaborne invasion in history.

That morning, approximately 3 million troops crossed the English Channel from England to Normandy, France.

It was the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.

You know, as years go by, you read so much story, you see Saving Private Ryan, you see all these kind of things and somebody starts talking and everything is embellished a little bit, you know what I mean?

It's just I think the further away we get from an activity to an event, the more sometimes we build it up just a little bit.

I mean, to make it more exciting.

There was nothing exciting about that that day for three weeks we watched this guy.

Every night nothing happened.

And finally and and the night from the fifth to the 6th of June, nobody was watching.

The weather was so bad.

Everybody I.M., our supreme commander, he was in Berlin celebrating his wife's birthday.

And then they came.

We were about 30 miles away from Omaha Beach, south of Cherbourg, and we were right under the incoming P 47 airplanes, which stepped out of the paratroops.

So we were happy then.

Then the invasion started.

The wedding was over, although they came de D-Day and we didn't know we didn't know it was going to be the 6th of June.

I guess Eisenhower and Churchill and all the rest.

And they knew they had their plans.

So six of June, Roland and I started going in, and I never seen so many planes in my life and chips I was living in a tent.

And by then, 1030, I woke up.

It was a horrible noise in the air.

And I looked out.

They came, these handlers of airplanes over.

And it was the scariest first first.

Besides, they were in a in the flying in then for a big air raid.

But then I because I was regimen staff by 12:00 they announce the invasion have started the rough body train all over our allies table got hit going over was out in the water I swam to shore so my clothes all around shore got a lot of clothes, all kinds of clothes, ammunition and all kind of.

So someone said, if we didn't land that day, it would be another week or so.

And I know I don't know about that.

All I know that we were there and guys were dying.

All right.

I know that we started pulling out.

The next thing that I know I want to say and I don't know how I got there this day, I just know that I'm on a beach and my face down and I could see the lives.

There's something there.

And the people that were shooting were on top.

You know, this is where she's really just raking in.

I remember that there's an expression we yesterday I hear the younger generation they awesome I in Spanish there was a war and at that time I would say it's a guy coming in Spanish and English, as it were that person you know it's a guy And just as I was down on the beach and I remember that I heard that expression and was you just hear somebody speak Spanish at that point that he had seen me or something is a guy and I felt him hit fall right next to me.

Just so in just about then I heard this sound that metal, like a turn around, had a hole in his helmet.

Never.

What?

I don't know who he was or anything, but that went on over and over again.

And like I say, I think although so many pieces of people all over the place, they had to get up and get out of there.

If not, they get killed, they had to move.

And that's when the battalion colonel, he said, Listen, you want to die here, you stay and die here.

There's a lot of dead people here.

Now we better move.

And just so I didn't hear some noise that now this fellows next to him grabbed me and stopped.

And I told them, Listen, know, listen, we weren't talking.

So then what we heard somebody click.

Yeah.

And we couldn't see them because they were in a turn, you know, the trench turn there.

And then the fullback was over there in circles and we looked at each other and this guy yelled, Is that where is Yankee Stadium?

So and the engine that came back was not I don't recall what he answered, but it was not New York.

And the next thing is, I mean, we our grenades are just flying in there.

There were three Germans on that, but that was a close on that.

Well, D-Day was very real bad.

My my uncle was with me.

I met my uncle and you guys had shut off.

Right.

It was really going in.

I was right there beside of him when he got his head shot off the beach.

Was was a terrible place to be.

It was a living hell.

The hedgerow fighting.

You're not sure what was happening.

There was a point At one point I remember we had a van saying our had to move out.

Head of the company and we came to a little crossroads and I was was carrying a mod.

And he he said, Bob, I hear something up ahead.

And I said, It's hard to see on his here in his I'll take off this one direction, see what you can see.

So he take took off and then I heard a whistle.

I he was whistling for me.

I went over there and sure enough just as I went over there was about five or six Germans came down towards us and we opened fire and but you see, that was that was the kind of fight that you did for quite a while, going through France, the hedgerows and it took some time to get through.

Our commander said, okay, take cover.

And the Normandy is have these hedgerows.

They are very high and very sick and nobody knows what's going on.

So he said, keep take cover alley and every tree and it fell asleep.

And that night by 7:00, somebody came.

Come on, the Americans are here.

So in the meantime, they surrounded us all the way and they shot over us.

See, as it was hilarious.

And you could have killed us very easily.

And and after a while and one of our officers called.

I'll stand up and shoot, but instead somebody took his towel out as out of his knapsack and started to wave.

So he got up there.

And then after a while, we had to march into the ditch and and we had put up a hand like this.

And the hit and behind behind us was the guys in the pistol there.

And so I, I had faith in the medic and they wouldn't shoot us.

We were trained.

We were told, don't don't get caught.

They're making a killing you.

So but I had fears an American, because a man has been at my enemies, all my enemies, whether as the Gestapo, the part of the party that's Americans.

But the second day we were off the beach and now into some ravines and some gullies, and here he is sitting there with another soldier.

And I.

He had one of our smokeless lawn cups that you heat for coffee.

It was early morning.

We're sitting there both together.

Corpsman a cup of coffee, No smoke given off.

You know, you sit and I was sitting here and I said, Yeah, it's my birthday.

my God.

Just think, what would you be doing on your birthday?

And you try.

Well, I don't know.

And all of a sudden a shot came over and he fell off the top.

The cup of coffee, snipers, you know, you know, And you those those those things are pretty hard to take, though.

I think of Christmas Day in 1944, about the worst one.

We were up there a place in Luxembourg.

And two, you know, Stone Barn and building.

And in the morning it looked like the field had been plowed from the enemy shells.

It came in.

They rattled off that stone wall pretty good.

And then we got counter attacked by our own men.

Not a good day when I raised my glasses up and I hear the bullets go by my head for about two days.

We was up there near in lower river.

Mortar was firing at us and the machine gunner was firing at us when he went firing me and firing at the bridge.

So I finally located a point about to a tank.

And the next time he fired us, we put a shell right through the room up there in the building and getting more fire.

Every time I raised my glasses up to see where it was, he'd shoot the brush off around my head.

My division had been totally decimated, had just almost destroyed because the Germans were were it was 10 to 1 in the how much they outnumbered my division, my battalion.

They destroyed all our tanks.

And so when I joined our division, that's the first story I was told.

And so I was very fearful going into combat.

And it being at night, I figured there was somebody going to shoot me at any moment.

I was very scared for a little 18 year old boy from Michigan.

We marched all night in this Colmar area, which is part of the village mountains, and then we pulled into this farmer's courtyard where they are.

Cooks had set up breakfast for us, and when the daylight came, you could see all the dead Germans laying around.

So it was it was a quick, quick start for my war experience.

Another time they'd gone down there and I saw a pair of field glasses laying up on the bank and and I thought to myself, man, I'm going to get those field glasses if we ever go back by there.

Well, we had to come back with ammo, was back by there and come back the next time There are guns sticking out of the ground.

Soldiers had had some.

Somebody tried to get and had it booby trapped.

It was a white phosphorus shell and at about 15 feet from me and that white phosphorus, you probably know what it is.

It burns as long as you get oxygen.

And I went all around and I just go from there and I looked down and I felt as if anything landed on my feet and everything.

This may seem like an impossibility.

Look at Missouri across a railroad track into a woods on the other side, two railroad tracks.

And the first thing that well, the first thing I saw was a dead German laying on the railroad track.

And the next thing I saw was another one.

There was he wasn't dead.

He was alive.

He stepped down behind a tree and he had a gun, which was a little machine pistol we call the guns.

He had that and he stepped up behind that tree and emptied it right in my face.

And I the main thing I remember the sparks flying out of the barrel.

You know, I would like all I could think of was one of these little Dick Tracy guns that the kids used to have and turn a crank just parked July.

And that's what it looked like.

I luckily he wasn't a good shot and I hadn't had one.

You know luckily I grew up with the rifle and it was we were outside of worms on the autobahn and driving along in our peep.

And I turned around as I sit in the back seat of the peep, and here was a German fighter plane coming down to strafe us, and he was real close.

I just could see the fire coming out of the machine guns and my jeep driver just quick whipped this off the autobahn down the embankment and flipped the sole over.

But the only one who was injured was the captain who was sitting in the front seat.

He got thrown out and bumped his head pretty bad.

The tanks we could see.

And on our left, going out to engage the enemy.

And it was kind of slippery going.

And the ninth Armored Division artillery come back and set up at our right rear in a opening in the woods.

We had woods all along one side and sparse trees on the on the other side.

On the left side.

And they set up and fired one round.

And then the whole sky just opened up with everything.

They fired one round and they got blasted and took off.

That's all they fired.

And then we kept getting all kinds of fire.

I had a tank dozer with me, which was a tank that had a blade on the front, and we I climbed under the tank and miles under there, the shell hit the front of the tank or side or corner, and a whole big steel plate just dropped right down at the front.

And and then things slowed down a little bit.

And I don't know whether they were what kind of fire we were getting.

I know I was every kind, but I think the kind it was during the most damage was mortars coming from someplace.

I don't we don't know or close behind us.

Siris certainly wasn't as weak as the woods was that way.

And I was standing.

I got out and stood behind the tank or not quieted down and all of a sudden we got another burst of shells and and I took a piece of shrapnel in my back, knocked me down.

So I only crawled under the tank again and and in the meantime, my driver had, who was also my second squad corporal, had climbed into the tank and to this day, he's still listed as missing in action.

So when the tank was hit, apparently he must've got killed.

I mean, he must not have dog tags or something.

But anyway, he's still listed as missing in action.

One day I was going on the tanks.

He.

We were with the tank outfit to narrow Ralph.

It's about seven guys get on a back, a tank.

They go down and we jump off everybody to have a house to go to.

And I. I want this one house and then have a look upstairs and looking at it, and then I come back down.

Yeah, I, I seen a little girl turn over looking at that table all the time and I want to wear jerked tablecloth off.

There is a guy underneath it.

He's head ready to shoot his gun too.

I landed by parachute and as I was cutting my way out of my chute, a plane went over me real.

All the guys were jumping out.

The whole plane was on fire, but they was too low.

They didn't make it so that's just off the flight.

May 3rd is my birthday, and I thought, I'm going to make it.

I'm going to be 19.

And then all be over.

And the next day, when we went into the mountains, into the Alps, there we were traveling along and there was a big explosion and a machine gun fire.

And the Germans were up above us on the mountain and were dropping grenades down on us.

And I got out of the peep and ran and threw myself down on the ground and a grenade went off right beside me.

That was I could see the grenade before it went off, but I was lucky I didn't get hit.

I was so low that it went right over me.

And on Christmas Eve we were in Lyon, France, just over the border from Belgium.

And that was my first time that somebody ever shot at me.

A German plane came over and strafed the building we were in.

We were told not to return fire because this guy didn't really know anybody was there.

He was just just on.

It was a routine.

And the next day, Christmas Day, they sent us on up to a just outside of Bastogne.

We we'd been swapping shots with the Germans and we were quite a ways from the town that we were going to take.

And as soon as it was dark, we moved in and the high ground overlooking the town we dug, we were digging in and a couple of our tanks had pulled up behind us and they were down the hill and they were going to assist us in taking the town.

Well, the shells that we use were a little shallow as well, but on the back of the tanks, they have a shovel and a pig.

So we used to once in a while borrow their shovel and dig a hole and it was a black light is black as coal.

And we were milling around.

And so I told the fellow that I was going to shell share the hole with that.

I run down and get the shovel.

And I ran down the hill and I ran around back behind the tank and I stumbled or something and I looked down and there was a dead German laying on his back and his rifle like this, pointing right at me.

He didn't realize he's dead at that time.

And I looked at the tank and I wrong run down the wrong hill and the tank had a swastika on the side.

Well, my first saw, I'd get back to my hole and I started up the hill and several voices said, Stop.

Who's there?

Stop, who's there?

I said, Don't shoot me.

It's me.

I couldn't remember my name.

I was so scared.

And they kept yelling, Who's there?

So by then I'm on my belly, crawling on my belly, going up the hill.

Then I heard a snicker here and a snicker there, and they recognized my voice and they were giving me a hard time.

And, well, I finally made it the hole I stayed the rest of the night.

But every once in a while I'd hear a snicker and some whispering back and forth.

But I was well, I got over the scared, but that that was the scariest I ever was at any time.

So when we got there, you know, start building bridges, you know, every little bridge they had, the Germans, you know, blow it up and blow it up and blow it up.

We build them up or we built the bridge, the Rhine River.

And it was supposed to been at the time, the longest and the widest, the highest fixed military bridge in the world by 1944.

Well, all we had was a list of towns.

We didn't have a course.

We asked for it for a mature on a road map.

And the only road map by by choice.

Mitchell Entire road map.

But Major Scott had I said, give it to me, I'll head back.

You said, To hell with you.

He gave me a little give me a list of towns.

Unfortunately, one of those towns was still a German handful.

I went through it.

That's when I got shot.

Well, it was a lot of times in the woods and the woods I don't like because the woods, they had zeroed in on us all the time.

If we got up about noon when they knew what we're going to have the cook come up and bring us our chow, they knew that.

So the minute we started to get up, they would start firing those mortars at us.

They knew that and a tree burst.

You ever been in the woods?

When a tree burst, the whole tree explodes into fire and a whole stuff comes down on top of you.

I put my whole down and back under was was just laying in a hole would get you.

I was lucky and a lot of the holes and in wintertime you ever try to dig in a hole and in the dirt and wintertime that's pretty damn hard.

I'll tell you that.

We were lucky.

We found a lot of hold the Germans had, and they didn't.

For first, the Germans didn't know we were there.

They thought Patton was 150 miles away when we broke through the Panzer division.

Then we got behind the Germans completely.

And that's they really that really ended it right there because the British refused to come down from the north.

A myriad of us coming up from the south.

And Patton was real mad because Montgomery took his damn sweet time.

The British got to stop twice a day and have their tea and we go on patrols and they'd ambush us and shoot us, shoot at us, ambush us.

A lot of things happened that that you were just lucky if you got out of it.

I didn't like going on patrols too well, actually, in a town you never been in to when we were in one place and we walked through the woods of this town and had a clearing to get to the town we crossed.

We ran across a clearing, and then we got on to the town.

We looked at this thing was full of Germans and they spotted us.

Then they started counterattacked on us and we had to fire to keep them down.

So we get the hell out of there.

I think probably the time that I was really the most shook up was we were moving up into the line and I had stepped up onto a dead tree trunk.

And just as I stepped off of that dead tree trunk, a bullet hit the tree right beside of where my head would have been.

All that shook me up for a little.

man.

Scare scared you?

You didn't know how lucky and how good a sword you are.

Just how lucky you are.

That's all there is to it.

You just follow what they told you to do.

That's what I did.

And that was it.

And I run like hell.

I'm pretty good.

Run pretty fast.

When I said, Cross the road, I was already cross.

He was standing there.

He had those pearl handle revolvers on.

That's why I recognized him.

He looked immaculate.

You know, they're here.

The rest of us are in pretty, pretty rough looking bunch.

And he was just look like.

Like, like the man who should be running the show.

And I was proud to be part of his Yes.

Contingency.

And we did a great job for him.

I always had to keep my my officer awake because Patton was always checking columns in my office while I was sleeping.

If he were asleep and Peyton took down the number and when he got in the position, there was a reprimand for him.

But the Patton just had a jeep and a driver.

He didn't have any.

Anybody else around with him?

Yes, I saw Patton one time.

We're a small town and it took us a couple of days, three days to get in there.

And they were right on the Belgium German border.

And I think you're Flemish.

They speak German, too.

And they had those sheets out the window and stuff.

About the third day we're getting ready to leave and all of a sudden somebody in the windows were taking potshots at us.

So we asked the lieutenant, What do you want to get up, go to the buildings and find those guys.

Let me call them headquarters, because I had said no shooting, shooting if they got stuff out the window.

So he called up and down his commander's command car with a siren.

Him stand up in the back on that thing.

He went and talked to the mayor.

He come out and left.

He was only about five, maybe 10 minutes left, but half hour later, the shooting stopped.

So I said to Lieutenant, what the hell happened?

He said, I don't know.

We went down there and he went and talked to the mayor of the town, come out laughing like hell.

We said, What's what happened?

He told the mayor to stop him shooting or you take everybody in the town to blow the town down.

That's the kind of guy Patton was.

And it stopped for daylight.

Broke?

Here come the tanks.

They get getting closer and closer.

And I didn't want to retreat, take off on a run because I didn't want to get court martialed.

So I stayed there.

I didn't get orders told to pull back and I could hear the tanks, the feel the tanks coming closer and closer.

Ground was shaking and I turned my back on them because I thought they were going to shoot me.

Like my commanding officer said the day before.

And and when Germany they I was I was that meant get up because I, I was hunched over in my hole.

And so they match me over to the tank and and a German officer tank commander I think it was spoke very good English and and I told him that sir I was same as a German soldier.

I can only give you my name, rank and serial number.

And so that was the beginning of my prisoner of war days.

And and then I see the Germans overrun two divisions and they had a lot of American equipment, trucks, Chevrolet trucks.

And there so they put about 40 of us or 20 valor, maybe 25 of us in a truck.

This is practice in a president's.

And and then with that star up on the cab and they come along and strafed us, all jumped out and we was okay, except the truck was on fire.

That went on for three months and or it started to come to an end because Americans are on a fast moving and course, this is in 1945 and going through a small town just about dark one evening, a German outfit was coming toward us with heavy equipment and these small villages, the streets are wide, so we had to get right up against the buildings.

And I look front and back and and and I, I could see that nobody was watching me.

So I ducked into and then I got into a car bar.

So I stayed there.

And then I 5:00 in the morning, I thought I I'd get out of there because it might come and come my third due.

George So I had, but then I knew where the front was because it, when it would get, when it was dark, I could see flashes.

So I knew just about which way to go.

And so I headed for the wood lane.

And the third morning, third morning, about a half a dozen Germans come running toward me.

The coach on button of them didn't have caps.

I didn't see any guns and I thought, Well, I better check that.

They run right by me.

They looked at me and as I thought, Well, I go check to see where was where they were they were running from.

And I looked over the hill and there was a German tags.

All right.

That was a beautiful sight.

So I run fell, run, fell to just because I didn't want them to leave me just down the road too far.

I got there in time.

And if I wouldn't to got out of the way, I jumped in front of a tank and waved at them, but they they would have run right over me because I was a bad shape.

I didn't I didn't look like an American.

So I jumped.

I got off to the side and then I flagged down a jeep and we had a captain.

And then I told him who I was.

And then I went to the hospital and and the next morning they picked me up and took and flew me in France.

And the doctor there at the hospital said my outfit was right across the road, across the street from the hospital.

So and and they were all packed up, ready to go to Bert's Giscard.

And that was it was retreat and they were all playing ball and then they were off for a few minutes.

They had I walked up to them and they looked at me and all of a sudden they called Run and they, they couldn't get over the how I looked and, and I told them I had to get right back to the hospital because the doctor and when the doctor told me that I, I cheated death by one day and another event was we got close to the camps, the Jewish camps that Hitler had put together for those kind of people.

I remember going to a small camp, it wasn't as big as the actual camp, but there was small, I'd say, and probably still thousands of people in there.

And to see the way these people were tortured, that was quite a sight.

That was that was a unnerving to see that kind of thing in a war and other those people weren't fighting back.

We had to fight to get into that camp and we didn't we didn't take my prisoners.

We just got into the camp, released these people.

That was probably a big event.

They had a lot of a lot of prisoners in there.

And they're all come up to the fence and, you know, the, say, Russians and and Jews, boy, they look pretty sad.

I'll tell you, they're waving at us a lot.

Want to get them out of there?

We finally did.

We finally broke down front gates and got in.

I remember when they released them, they came out and of course, we shot the German guards and their guys coming out of the compound there.

They took their boots right off.

All the Germans got pictures of the Germans.

They long shot their boots gone.

That's the first thing you did is grab their boots because they didn't have any of their own.

The people that were on trial were German field generals that had permitted atrocities under their command in German concentration camp, commandants.

In a infantry company, you have four platoons and three platoons guarded the prison, and one platoon was in the courthouse with the courtroom or the prisoners came for trial.

And I was a courtroom guard.

And they would bring the prisoners over in the morning, sign them off to us, and then at the end of day, we'd send them back on to them.

And all we did was stand a side of the prisoners that were in the docket and make sure that there was no problems, that we were 45 pistols on our sides.

It was announced in San Francisco half an hour ago by a high American official, not identified as saying that Germany has surrendered unconditionally to the allies.

No strings attached.

The boat came in New York Harbor.

Wow, man, boys were home.

Wow.

Here we are.

And hey, look at all them girls.

There was a boatload with a girls band in on who knows where they were from some college or some come off the shore and on comes along side and everybody on that ship all went over to tried to look at all the girls in the dumb boat I thought was going dive over and I think crew begin to think so.

Drew goes over the page to measure everybody back another side so it level the back up again.

But it is at the moment for me, it was kind of scary, but I could have tipped over.

We all swam ashore and let it go that we I'm sure it was just a glorious thing to see the Statue of Liberty.

It was a sunshiny day, gorgeous day, and the pier was crowded with people.

There were bands playing music.

And it was it was such a touching moment, you know, you, you, you were so happy to be back.

All we could could stand it.

And the response on the part of the guys on the on the ship, balloons flying everywhere.

It was it was a great moment.

I know it was days that it was a day.

Of course, you look forward the same because I remember when we shipped out and passed the Statue of Liberty.

I'm sure everybody on that ship was saying himself, I hope I see you again.

And and we did.

These men and women and their stories of service to our country allow us to understand the honor, courage and sense of duty.

They and other veterans displayed.

These stories also offer a glimpse of the sacrifices they made on behalf of all Americans.