♪ First to fight for the right ♪ ♪ And to build the Nation's might ♪ ♪ And The Army Goes Rolling Along.

♪ ♪ Proud of all we have done ♪ ♪ Fighting till the battle's won ♪ ♪ And the Army Goes Rolling Along ♪ ♪ Then it's hi, hi, hey!

♪ ♪ The Army's on its way ♪ ♪ Count off the cadence loud and strong ♪ ♪ For where'er we go ♪ ♪ You will always know ♪ ♪ That the Army goes rolling along ♪ (explosion booms) (suspenseful music) - I joined them in January of 1944.

Left here late in December of 1943.

The basic training in those days, infantry basic training was a 15-week affair.

It was very rigorous for most people.

For me, it was, to be honest with you, it was a lark.

And I remember we used to have to do nine miles in an hour and a half with everything we owned on our back.

And we used to have, that's once a month, and we used to have to do 25 miles in five hours or less, okay, with everything we had on our back.

And I always ended up carrying a couple of packs and a couple of rifles from somebody else.

I had no trouble with it at all.

I was in fairly good shape physically.

I played football at Cornell, and I was ready to do what I was supposed to do.

And I loved, believe it or not, I loved that aspect of the Army.

I loved the discipline.

I loved the unity of the whole thing, the comradery.

I was very happy in that role.

When I finished basic training, I volunteered to go overseas.

They couldn't send you overseas until you were 18 and a half in those days.

So I said, I'll volunteer if you send me to the first division.

I knew that they were gonna be in England.

They had fought in North Africa.

They had fought in Sicily, and I knew that what was coming next.

Idealistically, I wanted to be with an outfit like that.

It was a very professional outfit.

If you'll notice in the subsequent history, when they publicized a lot of people, they never publicized the first division.

You never hear about that.

It was a regular Army division, okay?

The 29th division, which landed with us on D-Day, was under the command and control of the first division.

So there were people who knew what they were doing, okay?

And I was very cognizant of the fact that business, if you didn't know your business, you died quicker.

I knew that they would be at the forefront of the whole thing.

And I guess, stupidly as an 18-year-old, I wanted to be part of that.

(suspenseful music) We got off the boat, and we boarded a train.

I said to the trainman, the little trainman that there was, I said, "Okay, you can stop worrying now.

I'm here."

And he said, "You son of a bitch, where were you three years ago?"

Okay?

So kind of put me in my place, but that's the attitude I had, okay?

Not realizing what it really meant or what it would take to fight in that atmosphere, or to survive in that atmosphere.

I got to the first division, didn't know anybody.

We were in quarantine.

We had come down and put, we were put in a quarantine along the coast.

We couldn't get out.

We couldn't go, we couldn't leave anything.

And we loaded up.

And when we got out into the channel, it was rough.

I got sick.

I was very sick.

When we got opposite the beach, which is essentially Omaha, Red Beach.

God only knows where we landed.

I'll be honest with you, I don't know where I landed, but it was in that vicinity.

Have you ever seen how you leave a ship and get on a landing craft?

You come down a rope, not a rope ladder.

I don't know what it's called, but they throw this rope thing over the side, and you can grab onto it, and you can have a place to put your feet.

The landing craft was being elevated and dropped maybe eight to 10 feet in the seas that we had.

You could lose a finger.

You could lose an arm getting tangled up.

You could lose your grip, fall between the ships, and that would be the end of you.

(suspenseful music) We finally grounded, and we hit the beach, and the ramp went down.

The automatic fire was almost instantaneous coming from the beach.

I was on the extreme right hand side, the starboard side of the landing craft.

And I don't recall, but I think I vaulted.

I think I vaulted over the right hands that put the starboard side of into the water in one fell swoop.

That's the type of reaction you have to the type of fire that came in.

I was wearing a belt with extra ammunition on it, and I was carrying my BAR.

So that was 25 pounds.

And then I had about another 25 pounds around my waist.

Okay?

So I went down, and I walked down the bottom, thank goodness.

And I stayed down there as long as I could and got away from the landing craft.

When I took a peek, and well, I got rid of most of my stuff when I was on the bottom.

I was overburdened, and I knew it would be very detrimental to me if I couldn't move fast, I couldn't run.

Subsequently, I saw a quiet moment.

The beaten part of the beach was quiet.

In other words, you could see where the shots were landing.

And when I saw the opening, when it was a quiet, I took off.

I maybe went 10 yards, and then I hit the ground.

I did that for, God knows how long, until I reached the base of the bluff, okay?

When I got there, you gotta realize that we had lost our cohesion completely.

I don't remember, but I never saw the guy that led our platoon again, never.

(suspenseful music) There was no combat on the beach.

It was purely a defensive rush to the base of the edge of the beach.

I'd say it was 100, 120 feet above the beach level.

When we got there, we were organized.

Somebody took a, they said, "BAR come with me."

And we were paired with a bazooka, a couple of riflemen.

And we went hunting.

That's what we did.

We went to destroy the strong points that we came upon.

And that's what we did for the rest of the day.

I dunno whether it was my BAR fire, or whether it was the bazooka fire exploding on the concrete or the nest.

I think we killed the whole machine gun team the first time.

It was so chaotic, the atmosphere.

If you can imagine, there were 14 to 16 inch guns, naval guns firing.

God knows where or what they were firing.

I don't know.

They were eight-inch cruiser guns and five-inch destroyer guns attempting to knock out whatever they could see on the bluffs.

And those destroyers, looks like, to me looks like they were running around because they were right, they seemed right behind us, to be honest with you.

And that was the only artillery we would really had.

The tanks that were supposed to come in to support us never got ashore.

Maybe one or two of 'em did, but we never had any of them with us.

They were supposed to be called, they were called swimming tanks.

And they were, it was just too rough for them.

And they were all sitting at the bottom of that beach, I think to this day, as a matter of fact.

But it was a constant, it was constant combat on a minute by minute basis.

You went from one, you went from one moment to the next until you hit the next nest that you found, and you took it on as best you could.

And I think we went that all day.

We were eating what amounted to K-rations.

We had no kitchen ashore.

I don't think the kitchen got ashore for maybe 10 days to two weeks.

You've gotta understand it was them or us.

You were compelled to do the very best you could, and I felt that way.

And there was nothing personal about it at all, none.

You realize that if you do not act in your own best interest, you'll be dead or maimed.

(suspenseful music) And I remember the next morning, the three regiments were lined up at the top of the bluff, 16th, 18th, and 26th.

Three regiments were up there.

Now, but we were not whole, I'm sure, but we were there.

We quickly received replacements, and we didn't integrate 'em very well.

That was one of the shortcomings of the replacement program.

We were not properly equipped to integrate those poor guys into our company, both socially and administratively.

We finally learned our lessons that you can't isolate those guys because they were killed right away if that would happen.

So if you wanted them to be a productive part of your squad or your platoon, you had to know who they were and make it meaningful.

And they were trained as soldiers, but to be part of a unit, you've gotta, there's gotta be another echelon.

And that's what, we didn't learn to do that for a long time, to be honest with you.

But, so that's what we did, and that's how we got off the beach.

(suspenseful music) The fighting inland was confined by what was known, what we know as hedgerows.

And it became a very difficult thing 'cause you couldn't maneuver as a unit.

You had to use the outlines of the field and the hedgerows that you were confined to.

And what we used to have to do, and I did this, I volunteered for this the first night.

They wanted some volunteers to get up and draw the fire of the German defensive machine guns.

So I went out, and in my mind, everything was a rectangle.

That's in my mind, but they're not.

So I went up, I had blackened my face, no weapon.

I put my wool cap on and got up there, and I had some stones with me, and I threw the stones, but I threw them off to the left and to the right and drew the fire.

And they were crossed indexed back so that they could be influated with either mortars or automatic weapons the next day.

And that's what happened.

I had done that a number of times.

And one night I did it, and I thought, you know, I'm in another rectangle, but I wasn't.

And what happened is I got lost.

I got so lost, I was petrified.

I stood up on the, and I started to yell for my platoon sergeant.

His name was Freddie Tatro.

And I started to scream for him.

Well, it started World War III.

The cacophony was unbelievable.

Everybody was firing at God knows what.

And I started to run.

I jumped off this thing, and my face was all scratched.

Everything was scratched that was in the brambles.

And I was panicking, and I was trashing around trying to find somebody or something.

And I fell through a grape harbor.

A grape harbor had been built by a farmer over a picnic table.

And I fell through that and hit the table, and I was stunned.

And I thought, oh God, where am I?

And a pair of hands grabbed me and dragged me into the house.

And it was the farmer.

And he went like that to me.

And I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me, but I had walked through the German lines.

Didn't realize it.

Well, he got up the next day, and he went out and looked around, and he told me in French, no, they're still, we're still behind the German lines.

Your outfit hasn't taken this part yet.

So, well, I was there for almost two and a half days, I guess, before he finally said all clear.

And he went out and got me.

They got me and took me back to my outfit.

But that's what fighting in the hedgerow country was like.

(suspenseful music) It was field to field, very tough defensively.

That was one of the things that I did, getting lost, and getting found again, and getting put back with my outfit.

But it was a repetition of that.

That went on until the end of July.

Okay, this was, you know, it was a dog eat dog, day in day out type of thing.

You slept in the ground.

One night they sent a another kid out to- I was on an OP, which was out in front of the lines.

And what was supposed to happen is that if there was a night attack, I was supposed to call the mortars in on the night attack.

And we were sitting in a covered dugout, a series of foxholes all covered with dirt and logs.

Well, the kid they sent out was even greener than I was.

And he grabbed me by the throat, and he panicked, and he tried to throttle me.

So I had to quell that particular aspect of it, and I had to call the mortars in.

I had to call 'em in on ourselves because there was a night they were out looking for prisoners, okay?

They went, so I did.

And it exacerbated the situation even moreso.

And the poor guy was deemed psychologically unfit and sent off someplace else.

God knows where.

But that's what life was like every single day and every single night in Normandy.

And at the end of 80 days, from what I understand, we had incurred 133,000 casualties with 33,000 dead at the end of 80 days.

The British had 95,000 casualties with 25,000 dead.

So it was a quarter of a million men between the two armies.

We had the American Army built up very quickly, and we very quickly became the predominant army in Normandy.

But you've gotta understand that the British, Montgomery was the land commander.

It was his plan that we were executing.

I didn't realize that, but that was his plan that we were executing.

And it really crumbled the whole German 7th Army and the remnants of what was the 5th Army.

So that was the better part of two armies that were destroyed in Normandy within two months of our landing.

We took (indistinct), which it's not a city, but it's a town.

I had gotten another ammo bearer.

And we were in the town, and we dominated the town on the main street.

And I was on the right hand side of the main street at a building at the edge of town.

And I was able to pick off whatever infantry tried to get in it.

And when the armor came in, I think we were, I think it was the 2nd SS Armor division, I'm not sure.

And then we had some anti-tank guns that took care of them very readily.

But then we got the, evidently we got a call to move out, to move back outta town.

They were gonna make a maneuver of some sort.

And I didn't get the call, okay?

So I stayed there, and all these infantry kept coming in, and this armory kept coming in, and I kept reducing them.

And I didn't know enough to leave.

I was there for most of the day.

And finally another company came up and relieved us, okay?

And said, you know, "What are you doing here?"

And we said, "Well, what do you mean what are we doing?"

And he said, "Well, you were supposed to leave, your company's back in reserve."

So I didn't realize that, but that's what happened.

I never got the call.

I stayed there all day, defended that position, and that was typical of communications in those days.

They're rather rudimentary.

We used to have these gigantic walkie talkies.

Have you ever seen them?

They're about this big.

And they never worked very well as far as I could see.

But they supposedly gave us the call on that to get out and move back and let this other company take over, but I never got that call, so.

No, we were not, no hand-to-hand fighting at all.

None at all.

But, you know, you knew they were there.

They were making incursions.

They kept trying to come up the main street to divide our forces.

I knew that's what they were attempting to do, and I was just fortunate enough to be there where they were and to be in a position.

I was in stone houses, and I could move from one stone house to the next stone house without exposing myself.

And I could go upstairs and downstairs off the backside.

So it was very convenient for me, and I did it almost instinctively.

Not that I did it by design, but I did it instinctively.

That was the thing to do.

(suspenseful music) At the end of July, 1944, when I told you that they lined up the 1st division, the 3rd Armor division, and the 9th division.

And the bombers came through, and we were supposed to attack after the bombers laid their bombs, but we had to delay that for a day or two.

And then we finally made that attack to break the crust of the German defense of Normandy, the Cotentin Peninsula.

It took us three days to break that crust.

And I, we would, we got down to the town of Marigny and we were working with a tank, and the tank got hit, and it blew it up burning at 2,000 degrees.

And I could hear the guy screaming, and the screams, unbelievable.

I couldn't believe it.

But I knew that we had a trap door underneath.

I couldn't get up there.

I dove under the tank, and I took my BAR, and I was pounding it.

There's a little lip on that door from on the outside, and I pounded on it, and pounded on it, and finally got it open a little bit, finally put my feet up there and got the thing open.

And this big black remnant of a human being tumbled out.

And he was screaming to beat the band.

And he was burned over 95% of his body.

And I went to grab him and bring him.

I dunno whether his clothing came off in my hand, I have no idea.

But I got him out, and I dragged him to a defelated position and got the medics to 'em.

And they started to pump 'em full of morphine.

I said, "Okay, you guys take him."

And I was gonna go back to my platoon.

And they said, "No, you're not going any place."

And I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Look at your left leg.

Look at your left leg."

And we used to wear leggings, all these canvas leggings.

And my leg was all red.

And so I'd been hit, but I didn't know it.

So he said, "You're going with us."

So they took me back to this place, which had American doctors and French nuns as nurses.

So I went there, and they put this poor kid in a, well, they had, it was a beautiful chateau we were in, and it was a temporary hospital, and they put him in this beautiful mosaic bathtub.

It was a sunken tub, maybe about six feet by four feet.

And they suspended him in there.

And the poor guy screamed, screamed.

And he screamed all night and died the next morning.

But you know, they took a look at me, and I found I had a little piece of shrapnel in my upper inner thigh, and it was just seeping this blood.

So they started to dig around.

They said, "Well, it's not worth digging for 'cause we're gonna do more damage."

So they said, "We're gonna put a patch on it."

So they put a patch on it, and that was the end of it.

I went back to my platoon, and within 20 hours we started down the peninsula, and we got to Avranches and then to Mayenne.

And when we got to Mayenne, we turned left, and we were ordered up into what then became the Falaise pocket.

The British and the Canadians came down from the North.

Yeah, and we came up from the South, and we trapped the remnants of two armies in there.

It became, that lasted I think 10 days to two weeks.

The slaughter was incomprehensible.

Horses, human beings.

You just couldn't, you couldn't differentiate between, but it was all just a massive of dead human and animal flesh.

And the roads, of course, that part of Normandy, both have hedgerows alongside 'em.

That's the way they are.

So they, it was an unbelievable scene to be part of it.

And the sensory part of it, the smells were overwhelming.

That's all I can tell you.

It wasn't long before, after that was over, I would say it was the end of August.

We were up around Mons in Belgium.

I think we took 25 or 30,000 German prisoners up there.

And within two weeks we were on the German border at Aachen.

We had gone up through Liege and then up to Aachen.

And Aachen was the first German city that we had invested.

We were on German territory.

They threw everything they had at us.

What I realized we did, I didn't know it at the time, the 18th Infantry went to the South, the 16th Infantry went to the North, the 26th Infantry went through the town, and it took, I think it took about a month.

You know, the Germans did everything to keep us out of Aachen, everything.

That was the first German city we invested.

And they couldn't do it.

It was a dirty fight.

I mean, it was a day in, day out fight for very little territory.

But it took a month.

As I recall, it took the whole month of October to reduce that town.

Those are very expensive ways to take towns, expensive in lives and maiming, but it was important that they did it.

And I guess that's what they got from up above, that we were not allowed to be successful there.

But they just weren't capable of doing it.

They didn't have the capability of doing it anymore.

It was a beautiful old town, a beautiful town, and it had a magnificent cathedral in it.

The town was literally destroyed except for the cathedral.

But it took us about a month, a month in that town, and we went from there to the Hurtgen Forest, which was in the Southeast of that.

The only division that was successful in the Hurtgen fores was the 82nd Airborne.

They were led by Gavin, who was a young guy.

And he did a personal reconnaissance and found an area through the Hurtgen Forest, which was high, and dry, and easy to traverse.

We all got stuck amid these towering furs in which the Germans, they would fire their artillery so that it would, they'd get tree bursts out of it.

So if you were down below, it was like raining shrapnel.

So you could dig a hole, but if you didn't cover it at night, you were vulnerable.

And it was damp, and it was cold.

The Germans, they were sending in troops, but they were very untrained.

We took them by the thousands, I think.

It seemed that way.

And they would go marching down these trails within the forest and seemed to be completely unaware of the danger they were walking into.

But the terrain lent itself to defense.

No two ways about it.

We were dug in on either side of this very faint trail.

At that latitude at that time of the year, by four o'clock it was dusk.

These guys came down the trail, armed to the teeth, and looking for a fight, didn't know any better.

And they walked right into our ambush.

It lasted about 15 minutes.

They lost most of their personnel.

And we gathered up their weapons, got them out of there, got the ones that survived, got them some help.

That was one of the fewest moments in the Hurtgen Forest where we had a clear picture of what to do and how to do it.

Otherwise, it was just artillery that was fired into the tops of the trees and showered everything down below it.

The Elsenborn Ridge.

And that's the first time since we landed that I got a shower.

The 99th division, which was an ASTP division.

I don't know if these are all college kids that had joined the Army Special Training Corps.

We had run out of infantry, literally run out of infantry replacements.

They formed them into the 99th division, and they sent 'em over there.

They proceeded us.

We were in reserve at the Elsenborn Ridge The 2nd Division and the 99th Division took the brunt of what became the Battle of the Bulge.

Believe it or not, the 99th division, brand new, all young kids, no experience, fought the Germans to a standstill, okay?

But the 2nd division got the word.

They wanted them to go back to a more defensible position, which was the Elsenborn Ridge.

And they retreated to that ridge.

And the 99th Division came back there.

Then they called on us to go down and take the position, the position where the 99th and the 2nd Division was, which we did.

We were advancing along a valley, which had two villages in it.

We got to the point where we were held up by two anti-tank guns.

Well suited, couldn't identify them, couldn't eliminate them.

Made two attacks, attempts at attacking the position.

Lost company commander.

Lost an assistant company commander.

Lost four or five men.

Sum total of it was, I was asked to take the rest of the platoon or whoever I needed, and eliminate those two guns.

I agreed to do that.

I took them.

I had about, I think 24, 25 men.

We went down into the trough of these fast moving streams, which cuts through this particular area, and got to where we could attack them.

And which we did.

Got up, reduced the position, lost eight men, dead, and everybody got nicked one way or the other.

John Replogle became the company commander.

And he sent me back to the, an area that we had an old German dugout.

And he said that you need some help, you need some rest.

Go up and take a rest.

So I did.

I went in there and laid down on the straw.

They had straw on.

They had a Coleman lantern hanging in the middle of it.

And they hit the Coleman lantern with a helmeted head.

And it fell off, and all that, the contents, the liquid contents, the kerosene or whatever it was in the Coleman lantern, got all over me, and I caught fire.

It was then about five o'clock in the afternoon, almost pitch black.

So I exited that place in a hurry.

And within 10 seconds of me going out and leaving that place and being a flaming torch, the mortars started coming in.

They came in, and I got hit in the left leg.

I dunno whether it was a mortar.

I had no idea what had hit me, but I knew that I was hit.

Freddie Tetro, who was the platoon sergeant at the time, came to me and he said, "I'll take you back to the battalion aid station."

Well, he got hit, and his face was opened up from his chin to his cheekbone.

So we couldn't talk.

Tried to talk, and no words would come out.

It would be unintelligible.

So I put my arm around him, and he put his arm around my waist, and we started back to the battalion aid station.

And the last thing I remember is he put my hand on a tent rope.

And that's the last thing I remembered.

And I woke up inside.

I was on my back and they were taking whatever they hit me out of my leg.

I could hear them fishing in there, and then throwing it in these white pans.

But anyway, they did that, and they sewed Freddy up.

And then the next thing I knew, I was on a plane.

And I didn't realize, I didn't know why.

I woke up in a hospital in England.

I was North of the Thames River.

So I was there for four or five days, and they shot me full of penicillin and cleaned my leg out again.

And I said, "I've gotta get the hell outta here."

And the doctor says, "No, no, you can't go."

He said, "We're not gonna let you go.

You're not in any shape to go."

And I was worried because in those days, with our shortage of infantry, what they did, if they sent you back to a replacement depot, they could send you any place.

And if they send me to one of the new divisions, I knew my chances of surviving were pretty slim, okay?

So I took off, and I went to the nearest MP station, showed 'em my pass book, and told 'em I wanted to get back to the continent.

I said, "You got plenty planes going back?"

No, no planes going back.

The weather's not good.

So they assigned me to the Leopoldville, which was leaving from Weymouth, where I left from originally.

So I got down there and climbed down the Leopoldville.

It was full of troops.

And I went down, and there was a bunch of barracks bags in.

I flopped down and fell asleep.

I woke up about midnight, and I thought I'd go up on deck and take a look.

And it was cold as hell.

And it was a beautiful, clear, starry night.

And I went, took a deep breath and went back down to get a little more rest.

And the next thing I know, I heard a big harump.

The ship stopped and listed to the starboard.

I thought we hit a mine.

They brought a British destroyer alongside along the starboard side of the Leopoldville.

The troops were terrific.

There was no panic.

And they stood there on the rail.

The seas in the channel was so rough that night.

There must have been.

at the height of the disparity between the Leopoldville and the destroyer could be 20 feet at times.

Some guys missed, some guys just hung on and hit the destroyer the wrong way and ended up in the drink and were gone.

And I didn't think that was too good an idea, especially with my leg in the shape that it was in, because it was still in pretty bad shape.

And I had a big bandage on the whole thing.

So I rigged the line off the port side and let myself into the, gently into the, as gently as I could into the water, and swam away as quickly as I could.

And I was wearing all my clothes and had a life jacket on.

And I was picked up by a British destroyer, like a fish.

The guy, they fished me out of the water, and they led me over to a gangway, and I fell down the gangway.

And I laid there, kind of exhausted at the time, but I was fine.

They dropped me off in Cherbourg and got me some clean clothes.

I got my, anything I could out of 'em.

They bought me some dry clothes, and I changed into that.

And then I asked where the Com-Z headquarters was.

This is the rear headquarters.

And they said, they told me where it was, and I went down and told them who I was, and I wanted to get back up to Chalvey.

That's where the big repple depple was.

And I knew I could get back to the division from there.

They said, "We've got a train going up tomorrow.

We'll put you on that."

So four or five guys and myself climbed into this Forty-and-Eight.

It took 40 men or eight horses.

And they locked us in there.

And it took us another day, freezing cold, no heat of course, to get up to Chalvey.

I got to Chalvey.

I went to the first division representative and told them who I was and wanna get back.

And he said, "We got a Jeep going back tomorrow."

He said, "We'll put you in that."

So there were four guys and a bunch of mail that were going to the first division.

They put me in that thing.

And I think it took us eight or 10 hours because you couldn't have the windshield up in a combat zone because it reflected light.

So the windshield was flat on the hood of the Jeep.

And we were sitting there going not very fast because the conditions was terrible.

But it took us another eight or 10 hours to get back to the vicinity of the first division.

And I finally get back, and I reported in, and nothing was ever said.

I just told him that I, I never told him that I'd left the hospital without permission.

And that's how I ended up back at the first division.

And I fought the rest of the war in that condition and paid a terrible price for it.

'Cause I started home, when I started home, I got taken off the train in Linz, Austria, and spent almost five months in a hospital.

You could tell that the war was coming to an end.

The German army is starving to death, for one thing.

And one of the things that we do, if we came across a beet field or a potato field, or whatever else, we would always stake it out.

And sure enough, the minute it got dark enough, those guys would come out and start digging, take whatever food they could get.

The minute that we threw a light on them and told them to (speaking in foreign language) throw your weapons away and put your arms up, they usually did it.

Except they, as we went along, the German army, in its infinite wisdom, put SS people with each unit thinking that he would give a counter order to what we were asking.

And that's exactly what happened.

That's how I jumped over the wall one night and put my 45 up against (indistinct).

He was a major in the SS who tried to give a counter order, and I wouldn't let him.

And he was wearing the most beautiful tunic, trousers, and boots, leather boots, that I have ever seen in my life.

So he was about my size.

So I took his clothes off.

I told him to take his clothes off, and I packed him up and sent him back to the kitchen with my stuff.

And about a month later, I got a courier came down and said, "You got a guy named Gorra."

"Yeah."

"He's gotta report to regiment."

Said, I will report to regiment.

And they were gonna court martial me because I'd taken his clothes.

He had made a complaint to the Red Cross and to us.

And so they were gonna make me the goat.

So they said, either give it back, or we'll court martial.

So I had to give it back.

I was gonna send it home, but I never got the chance to do that.

So, but that was the American army.

They went by the letter of the law.

The Geneva Convention was, I'm sure that we didn't always obey it depending on the situation, but that was very reassuring to me that we were still on the right track.

(Joseph laughs) That we hadn't begun to behave like the Germans.

I think the end of the, at the end, we were outside of Pilsen.

We had taken the town of Pilsen, which was in the old German Sudetenland.

And we were told to stand down.

And I got to platoon dug in, and I told 'em, you know, don't fire at anybody.

We're gonna standing down.

And night fell and firing went down, up and down the line.

I said, oh my, I was up all night.

What's going on?

There's somebody trying to get in.

There's somebody trying to.

So anyway, morning came, and it was freezing cold.

It was April or late May, late April or early May, I've forgotten.

And so I told 'em to go back, and we started firing.

We take turns going, getting warm.

So my turn came, and I got up, and I was sitting down, putting my hands up, getting warm.

I looked down and there was a pair of jack boot right next to me.

I looked up and there was this guy.

He said to me in German, "I've been trying to get in to give up all night," he said, "and you guys kept firing at me," he said.

But that was, I dunno how funny that is, but the poor guy, his shoes, he had no soles on his shoes.

So he had found a disabled German vehicle and cut the tires off of it and somehow attached them to the bottom of his shoes.

But he was happy to get in.

I called somebody from the regiment, told him we had a Russian, I mean a German prisoner.

Would they please come down and pick him up?

And they took him back up.

The Soviets took Vienna.

They took Vienna.

And when the war was over, they sent me to, there were camps, five camps around la Hague with 100,000 men each, guys that were eligible to come home.

They sent me up there.

I knew that I was at the tail end of it.

I was one of the youngest.

I didn't have as many points as most of the guys did, but I was scheduled to come home when the boats were available.

Well, John Replogle, who was at one time my company commander, was there too, but he was there in an administrative position.

And he said to me, "Joe," he said, "What do you think you're gonna do?"

I said, "I wanna get back for the full term at Cornell."

He said, "No, you're never gonna make it."

He said, "Look, I'm gonna, I've been tailored to build a camp for people going to the Pacific, and on the plains of Arles."

He said, "Why don't you come down and help me with that?"

He said, "And that'll take up a month of our time."

He said, "And then maybe you'll have a better chance to get a chance."

I said, "Okay."

So I went down to Southern France with him, helped them build that, and administer that camp.

And it filled up with 100,000 men, guys going to the Pacific through Marseille.

And after that was over, he said to me, he said, "They're sending me to Vienna."

He said, "In an administrative position."

He said, "Do you wanna go back and try to get home?"

And he said, "It doesn't look like you'll make it right now either 'cause they're backed up.

They've got hundreds of thousands of people that you gotta take."

He said, "Or you can come with me to Vienna."

I said, "I'll go to Vienna with you."

So I went to Vienna with him.

He installed me in the Bristol Hotel, and I ran the front desk.

I had three Austrians.

Two of them had fought with the Germans in the first World War.

And Mario, the youngest of them, had fought with the communists in Spain.

They all spoke seven or eight languages plus Esperanto, believe it or not, which was an international language.

And they were terrific.

Now, the two older guys had both lost their entire family.

We had dropped sticks of bombs on Vienna itself, and they lost their wives, and they also lost their son-in-laws, and their sons, and so forth.

They were two very nice old guys.

And at the end of the war, the German army came down and said, "Come with us."

And I took them up to the local park and gave them a food container, and a steel helmet, and a rifle.

And they marched 'em East.

I said, "What do they expect you to do?"

"Well, we don't know."

I said, "What happened?"

They said, "He ran into a Russian armored column, and the Russian armored column shot him to pieces."

And these two old guys took to the woods, took 'em a week to walk back to Vienna.

One was hurt very badly.

The little guy was.

I can't remember his name now, but he was.

And they, I took him up to the 124th General Hospital.

They fixed his leg up and took care of him.

And they worked until I left Vienna.

They worked in the Bristol Hotel.

And in subsequent days, we got some young kids to take, who'd come over as replacements to take over jobs of MP guys that had been there since Vienna was taken.

And they got a call, the two Russians had stolen an American Jeep and killed the driver.

We would apprehend them.

So these two kids got the call.

They'd never had an encounter with a Russian or anybody else before.

And they saw the Jeep, and they pulled up alongside and waved him to the side of the road.

And the Russian opened fire, and he killed them both.

That caused a real furor in the hierarchy of the American army and the Russian army.

The subsequent outcome of that was that the American Provost Marshall called me and said, "Assemble your platoon."

We also had, I was running the desk at the Bristol Hotel, but I was supposedly a platoon commander in Vienna.

So I called my platoon together.

And he said, "Meet me in front of the Russian headquarters."

So I did, took the platoon up there.

And we had a cannon company up there.

We had a light company, search lights up there.

We had, and the subsequent, what happened, we set up shop right across from the Russian headquarters, which was on the curve just below the parliament on the ringstrasse.

And with a loudhailer he said, "We're coming in to see the Russian Provost Marshall."

Now these guys used to have dinner once or twice a week, the Russian Provost Marshall and the American Provost Marshall.

So we did that.

And there were two guards, a guard on either side of the doorway of the Russian headquarters.

So I was on one side of the Provost Marshall, and my assistant, a kid from Webb City, Kansas.

I'll think of his name in a minute.

But both carrying Tommy Guns.

We escorted our Provost Marshal across the street and into the Russian headquarters.

When we went in, I thought they were gonna tell me to shoot the door down, but I didn't have to.

The door was open.

So I opened the door, and we went upstairs.

He knew exactly where the office was, our Provost Marshal did.

And I went to open it with my hand.

He said, "Kick the goddamn door in."

I said, "Oh, God."

So I kicked the door in, and the Russian Provost Marshal was sitting there waiting for us.

And the American Provost Marshall went in and said, "I want two Russians for a public hanging within 24 hours."

We turned around and walked out.

Eh, so we had a hanging, and 24 hours we hung two Russians.

I don't know who they were, whether they were the right guys or not, but that's what they did.

That solved the problem.

But that's the way things were solved in those days.

It was a very primitive administrative place to be.

And it took about, I took about a month before the place became civilized.

(upbeat music) In the Bristol Hotel we had a nightclub, which had floor shows and was on every night.

It was for American officers only.

I was in bed sleeping.

It was about 11 o'clock one night.

I think Mario was on duty, and he came running.

He said, "You've gotta come downstairs right away."

I said, "Why, what's the matter?"

He said, "We've got a situation."

So I went, down and there was this Russian colonel drunk as the Lord.

He wanted to go down to the nightclub.

And I got one of our interpreters to tell him that he had to be accompanied by an American colonel.

If he knew an American colonel, get him, and he'll take you down there.

He didn't know an American colonel.

So, but he insisted he was gonna go down there.

And he unbuttoned his coat and pulled it back, and he was reaching for his holster, and it was empty.

Okay, he didn't realize it.

So I very bravely told him to button his coat, and I turned him around, and got him by the rear end, and shoved him out the door.

Went back to bed.

Well, at two o'clock in the morning, he showed up again, still drunk.

And we went through the same routine again.

He was gonna go down to the nightclub, and he wanted to see the floor show, and this and that, but he didn't know.

So unbuttoned his coat again, pulled his, and he had his pistol in his holster.

And I said, oh crap.

I had nothing, okay?

Though Mario was on duty.

And I told you, Mario was a very astute guy.

He spoke Russian.

He went out, he clapped the guy in the shoulder, the colonel on his shoulder, lifted his pistol.

Walked out the door, walked through the revolving door, and came back and put the pistol underneath the desk.

And we went through the same routine again.

He went to reach for his pistol, no pistol there.

I threw him out again, okay?

Well, he never made it back in.

I don't know what happened to him.

But that was a, yeah, that was typical of what it was like in Vienna in the early days.

Anyway, I was in Vienna, and I had been in Paris for a couple of weeks, and done some things.

And I said, "John, isn't about time I got going home?"

And those days going home was not like climbing on a plane, you're home, you know, 20 hours later.

It took weeks.

You had to get out of Germany.

You had to get out of Europe.

And how you did that by taking trains, and getting off every night, and going to a billet, and staying in a billet until the next train came along.

And I was leaving from Northwest Germany, Bremerhaven, which was the port of of Hamburg, okay?

And it took me a week to get there, and I had to climb on a freighter, and that took two weeks to get home.

So I got home on June 1st, 1946, okay?

That's when I got home.

Now I got home, a week before that.

Then they put me in the hospital again at Fort Dix, and they were going all over me again.

And they wanted to open my leg again.

And I said, "No, no, no, I wanna get home."

So that's how I got home.

I wasn't interested in going to the Pacific.

I had learned my lesson, okay?

One war was enough, more than enough.

The American Army at the end of World War II had 8,300,000 people.

That's just the Army.

The Navy had 4 million.

And the Air Force, which used to be part of the Army, had two and a half million.

So they had almost 11 million people in the Army and the Air Force.

I was glad that I survived with the wounds that I had, and it wasn't any worse than that.

I had a responsibility coming up to take care of them.

And I knew what my responsibility was gonna be.

My two sisters, my mother, cousin Sophie, my aunt Fannie, they were gonna be my responsibility.

So I was very grateful that I made it through in one piece.

(triumphant music) The reception was overwhelming to one thing.

My mother had a party for me and had all the Gorras there.

We had the New York Gorras.

We must have had 150 people.

Everything was so normal here that that disturbed me.

You came home, and if you wanted to tell a story, nobody would want to listen to you at the time.

It wasn't until 50 years later that all this agitation to tell your story started.

It was 50 years after the fact.

So, but it was very normal.

I was expected to go to work within a day or two after I got home, and which I did, yeah.

Representing your country in a time when really the world was on fire.

When you think about it, the whole world was at war.

I can't tell you the feeling I had about this country.

I was so proud of everything this country was, so proud.

I loved it so much.

How could you not?

How could you not as a citizen of this country, of an age that required certain actions in Europe?

I couldn't have lived with myself, if I didn't do it.

(playing "America the Beautiful")