- Mccm.

- In the fall of 1944, the beginning of the end of the European Theater of World War II came into view.

There was no doubt about this war.

German forces were intent on taking over Europe and turning it into what many expected might be a concentration camp.

They were good fighters while equipped, but they were met on the battlefield by soldiers from America, many of whom went on to live their lives in Hampton Roads.

This is the story of those last months of the war told through the experience of five of those veterans, it begins in North Africa, the staging area for the final push of the Allied forces through Sicily and Italy, north into Germany.

It was there that General George Patton, emblematic of the best of the American resolve to save Europe came riding into the lives of those who went on to win the war.

One of those was Tom Huggins, now of Hampton, then a platoon leader with the 894th Tank Destroyer Battalion - Jumped out of his tank wearing a shiny helmet, his pearl handle pistol, his riding boots and britches with his riding crop just whapping against his leg.

Where is the blanketed, blanketed, blanketed man.

He could curse commanding officer of this scruffy, no good outfit.

And we were scruffy.

We were, there's no doubt about it.

We were filthy, undisciplined.

Everyman was more or less on his own.

And the British were laughing at us.

They were regularly poking front of us.

I mean, they were dis disciplined, whereas we were just, you know, we were not disciplined.

And so here comes the captain, the General Patton says, captain, he says, I know why you look like a bomb, but tell, I know, I know why your men look like a bomb, because look at you.

And he says, why don't you ever haircut?

And why aren't you shaved?

He said, well, sir shave, we are here at the edge of the desert, was short on water fet your Jeep.

You had to driver and bring the Jeep, raise the hood, open the radiator, stick your finger in there.

You feel anything wet those days, you didn't have foamy.

You used a brush and soap.

And he says, now, I won't want Everman shaved within the next hour.

We had wool uniforms.

- We didn't have all the fancy things that they have today for desert training and camouflage and boots and, and nets, helmets, and this sort of thing.

We had the old GI helmet with a helmet liner.

We had wool uniforms, we had leggings, and we had to wear a tie, and we could take the tie off from two to four o'clock, two in the afternoon to four, we were allowed to take the tie off in Africa, which was in the combat area.

And so the discipline was tough and it paid off.

And I think that's what I'll always remember Patton for, for those thank him for the instilling that into all the personnel that you're the best.

You're tough.

You can do it.

You can win and do it.

And the history of the division proved that Hell on wheels was, was a good name - At that time.

Dan McNeil, now of Hampton was the extra man in a tank crew.

He was cannon fodder.

He was told, placed in the crew to become a casualty of war or to replace a crew member that might be lost.

Dan McNeil's Tank Battalion gave itself the name hell on wheels and set off from Tunis up the Mediterranean, first to Sicily, where it landed on D-Day in June of 1944.

A traveling tank was a hard place to work.

- It's very hot.

The fumes are from, the guns are very, very bad.

And, and sometimes you can't see at all in there.

It's, it's very tight, very close quarters.

And sometimes you stay in there for long periods of time in the Battle of the Bulge.

It was two weeks in the, in, in the dens in wintertime where we did not, I did not wash my hands for two weeks straight.

And we were warned that there would be very tense days.

There would be losses, there would be casualties.

And of course, we psychologically we we trained for this.

And we were pretty young.

We were healthy.

- Willie Hilton grew up in Newport News.

He and thousands of black Americans served in the war.

But after they enlisted, they seemed to disappear into the record of that time in now, Reverend Hilton's case as an army engineer, he proceeded the white soldiers in battle clearing the battlefield of landmines and building bridges before they arrived.

He experienced two different kinds of war.

- It it's, it's, it's really a sad situation.

There, there was, the black soldiers did a a lot of good things and, and they did fault, I mean fault.

And, and, and it was left completely out.

And then really, we was fighting two walls, you know, two walls.

It, it was there, there was, that was racist.

And then, you know, it was still existing even on the battlefield.

- When Willie Hilton set out on his journey to war, which would eventually bring him to this church, he says that the window shades were pulled down part of the way on the train from Richmond to his embarkation point.

Because Negroes were not supposed to be seen on these trains in some parts of the country, but they did the job that was set before them.

- Our job was to fight and work.

See, we being in the combat in the front, on the front line, you, you had to protect yourself and also get the job done.

- At Cleo Leone grew up in Detroit.

He once thought he would like to be a doctor, so he became a medic.

But to get to his job in the war, he had to take a ride by parachute behind enemy lines.

- And it was kind of fun in a way.

It's like you had taken a ride down the rollercoaster when he had going down.

It's just great.

You want to, you get off the rollercoaster and you want to do it again.

It was, it was a good jump.

In fact, I had a soft landing, a big manure pile.

I stunk for a few hours.

- Creek Cleta Leone had to patch up the wounded as best he could and send them back to battle.

In most cases, it was harrowing work only the first time he had to do it, - I sutured his face and, and we sent him back to the lines.

He walked back to the, to the lines, I mean back lines.

But that was my first, my first casualty that night.

And, and then on, it was, it was easy to do the job, but you're always scared.

You know, you're gonna get hit too, because the guy gets hit.

I mean, he's right on the line.

He is right in the foxhole.

They'll be a medic.

And you go to that foxhole and you're just as exposed as anybody else.

- Presell crutch lo now of Seaford began a career that would take him on to Korea and Vietnam as the pilot of an un gamely looking fighter plane that served him well.

- I was a P 47 fighter pilot, single place aircraft, in other words, pilot only.

And you did everything not only operate the aircraft and navigate, but you, you fired the guns, you dropped the bombs, you fired the rockets.

And if you got into a dog fight, you, you had been trained to engage and do your best to shoot down the opposing force.

It was a very, it was a good airplane to fly because it would bring you back if you had battle damage.

It had to be extremely severe battle to prevent the airplane from, from flying.

It was tough.

They called it the jug.

- The jug was one of the tools of war, like tanks and guns and hands and parachutes.

In the fall of 1944.

These tools and the men who used them converged on the final battleground in Europe.

- Tanks open up on Zo Allied Firepower, pulverizes the objective.

- We were supposed to move out at Daybreak.

I said to myself, I better take another look.

So I, I made another, made a reconnaissance to be sure, double check and made a little sketch and to, to go back and confirm with my tank commanders what they were supposed to do and how to go.

And I looked in this field and there was haystacks there.

So this right away told me that the enemy was there and showing up.

They were, - Tom Hugins was chosen to scout ahead of his battalion for the Allied Landing in Anzio in Italy at the start of 1944.

His job was to prepare the landing site for the de waterproofing of tanks that would come ashore.

It was after that that he encountered the exploding haystacks in the field and was shot.

- When we started moving, they started firing and we started firing back at them.

I mean, haystacks blowing up everywhere, but shells falling everywhere.

And that was when I was wounded.

There was a, it was a shell hit near me and the wound, I wasn't killed, but luckily I wasn't.

And I was hit a piece in the chest legs.

And this right hand right here, this knuckle was broken.

The biggest thing that that surprised me was this metal hitting me was red hot.

And it burned.

I mean, I felt like I was somebody sticking cigarettes to you.

You know, that's about the only way I can exclaim.

And so I yelled medic and that quick, here they were, they had me on a stretcher.

- After recuperating in Naples, he returned to the fighting that reclaimed all of Italy and liberated Rome.

- It marched it through Rome.

The people cheered us through flowers.

And I was hit by a loaf of bread.

And I, I held onto that bread and I'm telling you, I never will forget how good it was because we were eating outta cans all the time.

And this was fresh.

So went on forward.

And the - Advance had been so fast from D-Day up until December.

That, that particular area in the dens from Luxembourg on in there to the, through the Dens area, it was wintertime.

It was snow on the ground.

The weather was bad.

So that when the German hit with all of that, might, all of those Panzer divisions, tank divisions, infantry, when they hit, of course they punched a hole 50 to 60 miles deep.

That's was the result of that.

We took a lot of casualties in the Battle of the Bulge and the Germans took even more.

- The Battle of the Bulge was the beginning of the end of the war for Germany.

It took place in the bitter cold and snow of the winter of 1945.

Willie Hilton and his fellow engineers had been literally crawling across the battlegrounds leading up to that point.

- We had to get on our knees side, shoulder by shoulder with a beane at probing from left to right, left to right, and moving in breath up at night.

And when we hit that, Bayer hit up any medal, you leave your band at sticking up, so you know what, and then everybody withdraw back.

But you, and that's your job then to deactivate that mind.

And many times that we have done that and saved them, man a lots of soldiers lives, - When the Germans pushed forward and made that bulge, we were sent there to hold Best Stone, which is a crossroads and hold it.

We did.

And the German just bypassed us and continued on.

But we denied 'em those crossroads.

It's, it wasn't a picnic.

It was hard.

You're told, okay, we're gonna move out tomorrow and we're gonna take those woods.

We move out and take the woods.

A lot of us didn't make it.

And a lot of people are still buried there.

A lot of 'em were wounded in their back.

But it's something that you had to do.

- Patton's armor racists madly to the relief of basto where parts of the ninth and 10th armor divisions and the 101st airborne tough paratroopers and glider men were surrounded by the enemy.

- Patton finally broke through and we were no longer surrounded.

We got supplies.

'cause we didn't have much to eat.

We didn't have much to, in fact, we were shooting German machine guns.

And we did hold the best stone and denied the Germans the crossroads that they needed in order to be, make that battle.

The battle of the Bulger success.

- Russell Crutch though participated in the Battle of the Bulger from the sky.

- It's two missions, and they're not in isolation, but they're not totally in harmony because they have two different missions.

And that that certainly is true of, you know, you get a lot of the ground pounders, we call them, anybody that was on the ground fighting the war was a ground pounder.

We, we get a lot of flack from them that you fighter boys don't even know what the war's about.

And that's true.

We didn't know what their war was about nearly as well as they did.

That's certainly true.

'cause we didn't have the experiences, but we had our own to contend with.

And a pilot shot down was a major catastrophe for a squadron.

When you only have, say, 30 pilots, 30 people that you're close to, and you one of 'em or two of 'em is lost.

And on the day we, the Weisel landing, our, our group lost six pilots that day.

- Certainly it was the end of the war, in my opinion, for the Germans.

And it, it delayed the war.

Instead of pushing forward where we were in December into the January and February.

We, we were delayed a good month, month and a half before we could get the bulge outta the way, and then get reinforced and then crank up the offensive and march on toward the Rhine, and then eventually into the heartland - After the Battle of the Bulge.

The next step to victory was the crossing of the Rhine River by Allied troops.

It was a gathering of forces for a final assault on the heart of Germany.

- We constructed bridges, all type of bridges to transport the soldiers across the Rhine River, the oil river.

- We would, we would be into what they call a holding area.

The engineers would be up there sometimes under fire, putting those pontoons across.

And then when the pontoon bridge was ready, they would call us up by unit and we would go sometimes bumper to bumper across those bridges.

And that's the way we crossed, we crossed the roar that way.

We crossed the Rhine that way.

And very dangerous at times because sometimes they, the Germans would be strafing.

- I thought at one point, after we built the first bridge across the Rhine River, and I thought that my men's, the men's would be a little shaky because that the whole river was covered with bodies because the bridge, you know, they were large against the bridge.

And you, the whole whole river was just covered with dead mens.

And - As I think about the war, the, the thing that comes back to me so often is watching these paratroopers go parachuting in watching these gliders go in with troops on board and crash in one on top of the other, whatever, you know, to get into the, the dz, the, the drop zone.

And it was, it was a nightmare.

P 40 goony birds towed the gliders in and goony birds were getting shot down with the glider still high tied onto them.

And, and the glider pilot trying to figure out how to get disconnected from it and, and, and glide in it.

It was, it was quite a scene - One night in an eerie respite from the fighting Willie Hilton sat alone in a foxhole - In the dangerous time of war is when everything quiet.

I mean, you don't hear a sound, nothing.

That's the dangerous, dangerous part of it, because it means that e or are they infiltrating your main line of resisting or something going on, but you can't put it together.

So everything's on alert and they start shelling.

And that night, that night, the Lord called me to preach.

He called me to preach in the fox hope.

And I heard it this as plain as I'm right now, and I'm talking to you burg, I thought I was having an hallucination and I said, I'm not gonna tell nobody.

I think I'm, I have had too much.

But it never left.

It never left it, it stayed with me - Entering the final phase of victory over Hitler's Nazis, yank army swarm across western Germany, bringing devastation to cities of the right.

- I'm still with the French.

And the war finally ended for us near Lake Majority.

We called it Lake Majority, which was just south of the, the Swiss border.

And oh, what a happy day.

What a happy day.

I mean, thousands and thousands of German prisoners we took and we escorted back to a holding area, okay?

Upper a point in, in my memory at this time was going home.

Well, I mean, that was on everybody's mind.

- And we all knew then the sooner to get it over with, the sooner we'd go home.

And that's exactly what happened.

We were always stretching out, moving along.

And every day, every day that we made 50 miles, we knew we were that much closer to the end.

And finally when we had 'em on the run through the ER area where we captured about 300,000 prisoners, we knew then that the, the A was next and after the elb, we were making about 50 miles a day, then right up the Audubons, the Super Highways.

And we got Magdeburg on the ELB when we were stopped.

And that was a political move move because that had already been decided at Yin.

And we didn't know anything about that.

Soldiers weren't told very much in those days.

And there were no TV or in any communication.

So we were stopped at the Al River, 60 miles from Berlin.

We could have been there in another day or two.

- The Russians demanded and received the option of going first into captured Berlin.

They had a score to settle and it's generally agreed that they left Berlin in even worse shape than they found it.

American forces cooled their heels outside Berlin until the 4th of July.

And then most of them came home.

- That ship coming into New York with all the fireboats out there and the Statue of Liberty was, was something that just, it just, you just can't describe it.

You just can't describe it.

And then to, to get off and go and get a milkshake or something like that.

So easy when it was so difficult to get anything like that.

Even a, maybe a little ice cream or something in Sicily, it was a big deal.

But to come home and get a milkshake and, and a hot dog or a hamburger or something, it was just incredible feeling.

- Oh, what a happy day.

I, I was put aboard a, a converted french luxury liner and slept in the motor, in the, in the swimming pool.

It was drained of course, and had a canvas over it that was about the end of it and came home and everybody was glad to see everybody.

I tell you, - It was really bitter after all that and come home and we couldn't get a job.

You know, the job was hard to find the job that, well, you know, we were trained to fight.

That's not our occupation.

You know, you can take that as a occupation, but we learned so much more.

I learned how to handle every heavy weight equipment.

I, I learned that I, I, I know to relate cranes and bulldozers and, and all of the road graders, all that stuff there, because that's even in our field, you know?

But women got back in stage.

It's, it was hard for a black man to get that kind of job.

- Willie Hilton didn't get the work that he knew how to do, but he did use the calling that came to him in the foxhole in Germany.

And the skill he had gained as an engineer to become a minister and build a church and come to terms with his anger, - It was really hurting.

But, you know, I thank God that, that, that he moved all that stuff.

He moved away from me because you can't live with that.

You can't live with hate.

You can't live with what happened yesterday or day before last year.

You gotta do one day at a time and make the best of it and you know, get along with people.

- It taught me that people are the same all over number one.

I remember when I, when we jumped in Holland, I expected a, a big brute for a German, you know, ruthless and this and the other.

And that's the way they pictured the Germans to us.

And I remember the first German I saw wounded, maybe 17, 18 years old.

And he was saying, mine motor, mine motor, mine motor.

And you know, you stop.

He's just like you are.

And on top of that, the kid had a rosary in his pocket.

A Catholic German, my gosh, they're supposed to be heathens and you know, animals.

And here they're just like us.

I learned that we have a lot to be thankful for in this country.

And I was glad to get back.

I didn't have never been back since reunions or otherwise, so, but I like it here.

I think all the gis say the same thing.

They're glad to be back home.

- World War II was a time of, of sort of universal commitment and it seems like everyone was involved in some way or other.

And it was a time of closeness, not only in military organizations, but you know, in the community too.

And that's, that I've never experienced since either in the, the Korean War or Vietnam War or either one.

It's, it was a different time.

The, the, the commonality of of purpose, I think was what was unique about that.