|
WWII History: This is the final part of a three-part written memory of WWII. It was recorded by Bud Laws, uncle of the club photographer Dave Laws (3rd Para Bde.), and provided here courtesy of Dave and with permission of the author. All photos shown with this article are from Bud Laws's private collection, taken during his service in the war and during occupation duties in Germany and Czechoslovakia. |
Bud Laws
314th Infantry Regiment
79th Infantry Division
The third part of interview finds Pte. Laws taking up occupation duties after the end of the war.
Our trip to Czechoslovakia was really nice, it was sunny weather and fairly warm. We could see castles shining in the sunlight on top of many of the hills. I do not remember exactly which towns we were in when we arrived in Czechoslovakia, but the first town we stayed at, we were stationed in a very nice house, more like a mansion than anything. Unfortunately, not all of our food rations seemed to catch up with us, so we had to live off the land. This meant bartering cigarettes, or swiping potatoes from the local residents. We did have a good stock of lard and chocolate powder.
The area also had many antelope. We would shoot an antelope as we needed meat, make french fries out of the potatoes, and drink hot chocolate. We got very tired of eating this particular menu, three meals a day, every day of the week. One day while I was in the residence, I left my room, bumped into a man in the hall, and looked up to see a star on the shoulder. It was the first general I had ever seen up close in my life. Turns out, he was a relative of one of our men. We had high hopes that he could do something about our food supplies, but no such luck.
One of the locations had a swimming pond at the edge of town. We would sit by the pond for hours watching the local girls change in and out of their swimming suits without showing a darn thing. They would pull the swimming suit up under their dress, as they did, their dress would come up, and when they had the suit up, the dress was off.
We used to go into Pilsen and get a keg of beer and bring it back for the company. Two of the towns that we were in or near while we were there, were Wudengrun and Fleissen, Czechoslovakia. I can't remember which town had the antelope, and which town had a lake stocked with bass, but in one town we had meat and the other nothing but fish.
Pte. Bud Laws at Ft. Lewis
While we were in Czechoslovakia, we were guarding the Russian/ American zone line. We didn't do much of anything there except shoot back and forth across the zone line all night long. The Czechs didn't like us either because we were going with their girl friends. We were fair game. Nobody was supposed to be out. Of course, we all went out. Occasionally we were shot at.
The last night that I was in Czechoslovakia, the company had a big party. The company commander had received a tip that a large group of displaced persons was planning to raid a nearby farm with the intention of killing everyone and destroying the buildings.
He assigned one other man and myself to guard the farm. I had a carbine and a radio and the other fellow had a BAR (Browning automatic rifle). We were to call into the company every half-hour with a status report. This worked fine for the first couple of hours, and then we could no longer raise anybody on the company radio. We decided that there wasn't a heck of a lot the two of us could do against over a hundred armed DP's, so we laid down on the floor in an upstairs room and went to sleep.
The DP's apparently knew that the place was to be guarded, since they were usually a couple of steps ahead of us, and did not show up. The day we got back to the company, we found out that they had left us about a teaspoon full of champagne apiece, to show us what it tasted like. We liked the taste of the champagne and were informed that we couldn't get drunk on it. We soon found out this was not true.
The next day, I went on a three-day pass to Paris with one of the other men. While we were in Paris they dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was pretty exciting. All the headlines were in French, but you could still tell, basically, what it was, what had happened.
My friend and I saw all the sights we could see. We went to the Eiffel Tower. They had a GI nightclub up on the second deck. They had an Air Corps show with a B 17 bomber underneath of it and a fighter or two.
We picked up a couple of girls. One was French and the other was a WAC. We went up there to dance. Each of us bought a liter of champagne. It turned out that neither one of the girls drank. As previously mentioned, the guys in our company had told us you couldn't get drunk on champagne. We had believed them. We weren't going to waste champagne at twenty bucks a bottle. That was a lot of money in those days. So we drank it. We were fine until we stood up to dance. That was about the last either one of us remembered till the next morning when we woke up in our hotel room in downtown Paris. I don't have any idea how we got there or what happened to the girls but we still had our money on us. We have no idea how we got back to our hotel or what happened that night. Not a blasted thing. Anyway, we found out we could get drunk on champagne. We were thirsty as heck so we had a glass of water and got drunk allover again. That was miserable. I didn't have champagne again for years and years and years.
We came back and they had moved the company from Czechoslovakia to a place called Dalherda in Germany. It was mud city. Boy was it something. It was down near Nurenberg somewhere.
There was one town, which I'm not sure of, that we were in while I was still with the 79th Infantry Division. We had a PW camp we were guarding. We had a dance there one night. I had to-take a jeep and go about twenty miles away to a hospital area and bring back some American nurses for the officers to dance with. We weren't supposed to talk to the German girls yet, but we did, and we had German girls there to dance with.
I had to take one of the guards back to the PW camp and he was smashed. I had trouble getting him awake enough to get him in to the place then back again- That was the only time I had been on that road. I didn't know where road was that went up to the camp. I could see the camp so I just put the Jeep in four-wheel drive and went through a fence, up a field and got up there. I dropped off my passenger and came back down the road.
Shortly after that, I had to take one of the lieutenants up there. We went up there. It was foggy and cold that night. On the way back I was going kind of slow, because I didn't know the road that well. The lieutenant wanted to go faster. "It's too dangerous," I said, "1 can't see good." I remembered there was a bad spot in the road somewhere. He said, "that's an order, you speed up." "Ok sir." I took off.
I got down and I found the bad spot I remembered. There was a bridge that had been bombed out so they had to build a temporary one over a little creek. You had to make a sharp right curve on a real steep incline and go up and make a real fast left turn. Up ahead there was a farmer's place that had a chicken coop there with a bunch of chickens in it. I managed to swerve so I wouldn't go into the drink. But when I went up the incline I got airborne and went over the railing of the bridge and landed on the other side of the creek in the middle of the chicken coop. We had chickens allover the place. He let me slow down after that.
We were getting ready to go back to the states when the war ended in Japan. That was the end of my trip back to the States. That night, we fired off all of the flares and tracers that we had left. We turned in the rest of our equipment to be shipped back to the States. The advanced party had gone already so they broke it down on a point system. Everybody with so many points went back to the States and got their discharge. I ended up being transferred to the First Infantry Division. This made me feel like I was being kicked out of my own home. It definitely was not a happy time.
It was somewhere down near Nurnberg at Windsheim that I joined the First Division. That is where I became switchboard operator with Cannon Company, 18th Infantry Regiment. Then I became radio chief and got my TS rating. I was actually acting as Communications Sergeant. It was written on my discharge as Communications Sergeant for MOS. However, my rating was frozen. I wouldn't be there long enough to get any advancement, so I stayed as a TS. It was at Windsheim that I met this one girl that I called Blondie. She had two sisters, one of which worked with her for our company. She and her sisters became good friends with our section. They were very nice girls and good company.
We had fairly decent quarters in Windsheim. The town itself was pretty interesting. There was a town square paved with cobblestones, and a little German tavern on one corner. In the evening, the townspeople would gather on the steps of the tavern, and play violins, guitars, and sometimes harmonicas or accordions. The people would sing in harmony. They were really pretty good.
We had our switchboard and communications group set up in a two-story house, with the switchboard being in what was normally the kitchen. It was on the upper level. There was a central wood-fired hot water heater located on the lower level. Apparently, the building had been heated by individual wood-burning stoves. There were chimney caps in several of the rooms, leading to a common chimney. One day, one of the fellows on the lower floor wanted to take a shower. He was too impatient to try to get a decent fire going to get hot water. He squirted lighter fluid on the wood to try to get it going. It exploded and blew off all of the chimney caps and filled the rooms with soot. It took quite a while to clean the place up.
Several of us in my group like to go out to the Air Corps repair base at the edge of town and look through the wrecked planes that were there. One day, a couple of the fellows and I had the opportunity to hop a plane to Munich and back. The pilot was a buck Sergeant and the co-pilot was a Corporal. They were picking up some parts that were necessary to repair a plane at the base.
While we were in Munich, the weather started closing in, and the pilots were talking about spending the night there to avoid getting lost in the clouds. Neither of them had any instrument training. We were getting worried because, technically, we were AWOL. Fortunately for us, they decided to fly back under the clouds. The Captain never knew we were out of town. Then we moved to Schwartzburg, (I believe it is called Scheinfeld on current maps) a few miles away. Schwartzburg was fairly close to Windsheim. It was an interesting town with a castle on the hill. Blondie and her sister continued to work for us at that location. We were there for quite awhile. Some time afterward, I heard that Blondie had been hit by an Army truck while riding a bicycle to work and had been killed.
After looking back upon my experiences after joining the First Infantry Division, I really feel sorry for Captain Miller, the commanding officer of Cannon Company. As I understood it, he was a graduate of West Point, and came straight from the States to be commander of a bunch of ex-combat soldiers that had no intentions of becoming spit and polish peacetime soldiers. We were merely stalling until we could get our discharges. We got away with everything we could and a lot that we shouldn't have. We must have made his life miserable.
Bud Laws with cannon.
I recall one particular time shortly after he became our commander. He and the First Sergeant knocked on my door and walked in to find me still in my nightclothes with my room full of wood shavings from a model airplane I was building. I was definitely not ready for an inspection. He asked me if I was aware of the fact that I was supposed to be ready for a full field inspection that morning. I said "No sir" and he said, "Don't you read the bulletin board?" I said "No sir."
About this time, the First Sergeant walked out of the room to keep from laughing. He wanted to know why I did not read the bulletin board. I said that up to a few weeks ago, my section was maintaining a switchboard 24 hours a day and we had been exempt from all other duties including inspections. He said that had just changed and ordered me to show him the rest of the quarters. Everybody else in my section was on leave, and I had not looked at their rooms since they had left.
The first room we looked at had a beer stein full of mold on the table, an unmade bed, and dirty clothes allover the floor. The next room we looked at, we found a girl asleep in the bed. She said that her boyfriend let her stay in the room while he was out of town so that she wouldn't have to commute from the next town to go to work. That also ended right then. I forget what the rest of the rooms looked like, but the end result was that the Captain told me to have the whole place ready for inspection in two hours and he left. How he kept from laughing for that long, I'll never know. I had it ready at the end of the two hours, but he never came back.
The Captain had ordered me to get rid of all of the non-Government Issue that I had in my room, which included German radios, telephones, and tools. I knew a Lieutenant who was a radio ham, and I contacted him to see if he was interested in any of the gear that I had. He came by with a jeep and a trailer and took the whole works. Turned out that he was the Captain' s roommate. All of the equipment ended up under the Lieutenant's bed. I don't think the Captain ever quite forgave me for that because from then on I pulled 'an awful lot of guard duty and other chores that occupied my time from six in the morning until eight at night.
While we were in Schwartzburg, I was able to go to Division Technical School in Ansbach for eight weeks. I took machine shop, shop math and mechanical drawing. It was a good course. I liked it. I got a dog while I was there. It was pure white. They call them the American Husky now. It used to be called a Spitz. When I left, I couldn't take him with me. He was a one-man dog. I gave it to the First Sergeant. Before I left, I made sure it would be friendly with him. I started seeing, in the Stars and Stripes newspaper where that dog was winning every dog show in Europe. It was a beautiful dog, well trained.
Cannon company on parade in
Dortmund, Germany, 1945.
One day I went out to the air base and was able to get a ride on an AT6 with a pilot that was just building up his required flying hours. He asked me if there was anywhere I wanted to see from the air, and took me for a joy ride over Nurnberg and up over Schwartzburg. He asked me if I wanted to buzz the company, and I told him that we had a very strict commanding officer that probably would turn him in. He waited until we were clear of the company area and then dropped down on the deck. We hedgehopped all the way back to Ansbach. It really was a thrill.
In one place, we came upon a farmer hauling a load of hay with a team of oxen. The farmer looked back and saw us coming, and jumped off the top of the hay pile, thinking we were going to hit him. We came to a small town that was typical of many of the German towns where the upper floors over- hung the lower floors, narrowing the street. Instead of gaining altitude to clear the buildings, the pilot turned the plane sideways and knifed between them. It was quite a ride!
One of our favorite ways to pass the time was to drink coffee and eat donuts in the local Red Cross club. A Red Cross girl named Katy was in charge. She was a young, naive redhead fresh from the States. We liked to watch after her to keep her out of trouble. Whenever she went anywhere at night, we made certain that at least one or two of us were with her. One day we were sitting at a table with her drinking coffee and the condom I used as a rubber band to blouse my pants broke. I took another condom out of my pocket and proceeded to unwrap it and twist it into a long tight shape and tie a knot in it. I then looked up and noticed that Katy's face was beet red and her eyes were very wide. I explained to her that the condoms were handed out in a chow line and we used them for blousing our pants or making water balloons to drop on people. We also gave them to children in the village to use as balloons.
Later I was able to go to Lake Eibsee which was half the way up a mountain. At the top of this mountain was a ski resort. (F or 007 fans, this is the location where they filmed 007 skiing down a mountain, over a roof, landing on a platform and continuing down the mountain while he was getting away from the bad guys. ) The day I was there, there was a blinding blizzard, completely eliminating any view.
Zugspitze is accessible by means of a tram type of train that starts at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Lake Eibsee was accessible from Garmisch-Partenkirchen by truck. Lake Eibsee was a very plush resort area that had boats, skis, and other recreation equipment that could be checked out. I went out for a ride in the rowboat on the lake everyday.
I met a Polish girl name Jozia. She couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak Polish. I would meet her and we would go out on the lake together. On my 20th birthday, it was frozen over so I took the oar to break the ice so I could still go for a little ride in the boat. I was there at Lake Eibsee for two or three weeks. When I returned to my company I would send Jozia a letter written in English and one of the other people she worked with would translate it to Polish for her. She would write me a letter written in Polish and one of the German PW's that could read Polish translated it to German and a buddy of mine that was fluent in German would translate it to me in English. Her last letter to me, she had written in English using a Polish/English dictionary, and it made no sense whatsoever. I did understand that she was a DP and was being sent back home to Poland. When she was shipped back home we lost track of each other.
We went to Coburg, Amberg, Bamberg and Reginsburg. Coburg was a beautiful city with a beautiful castle and two GI nightclubs called The Little Brown Derby and The Big Brown Derby. It also had an opera house that was very popular with the local people. They would dress up in very formal attire and attend it almost nightly. We stayed in a hotel in Coburg. While we were in Coburg, we still had quite a bit of freedom to do and to dress as we pleased except for the meals. The chef prepared our meals, and we wore class A uniform at all meals. The food and the service were excellent.
Three of us were assigned to go to Regensburg for supplies. There hadn't been any arrangements made for us to get meals for ourselves while we were there. Since the staff there refused to serve us, we broke into our own supplies in our boxcar and served ourselves. Regensburg was right on the RussianlGerman line.
At one of the towns, they moved us into some old German barracks that had a wall around it. You had to have a pass to get out through a gate. It was strictly peacetime Army. I did not like it, and decided definitely not to reenlist.
One morning I got up and found out that my name was on the bulletin board. It showed that I was to be shipped out for home the next day. The First Sergeant and another friend went out partying with me that night. I ended up carrying both of them back to the barracks. I left all of my equipment to be divided up amongst my friends, packed all my other clothes in a duffel bag, and left for Bremerhaven. That was May 20, 1946. The boat we left on was a liberty ship and we were in the worst storm of the Atlantic for that year.
I volunteered to be the Non-com in charge of kitchen duty for the entire trip. There was really very little to do, as everyone was too sick to eat. I got back home from Europe about a week after being shipped out of Bremerhaven. We landed in New Jersey and took a troop train that meandered allover the states and into Canada before arriving at Fort Lewis, Washington. I was discharged on June 4, 1946. I joined the reserves the same day and spent seven years all together with the reserves.
Along the line, I collected a Combat Infantryman's badge, a victory medal, Army of occupation medal, I never got the medal, and I got the ribbons. I got the good conduct medal; they handed that out in the chow line one day, I got two of them. I got the European African Middle Eastern Service Medal with two battle stars.
We also had a French Croix de Guerre won by the regiment. There were two separate awards. One was red and one was green. They were a pain. When I ran the metal tips would flip up and hit my glasses.
It does not appear to me that this story can have an ending as long as wars are still being fought in many areas of the world. We thought we had won the war, but did we? We rebuilt many other countries after the war, and they ended up ahead of us in areas of technology and manufacturing to name a few. We have fought against countries that have been both our ally and our enemy at different times. Until such time as governments learn lessons from history, dating clear back to the feudal days, there can be no peace.
I imagine that anyone who has been involved in combat has found that it has impacted the rest of his or her lives. In my case, when I was a 17-year old youngster, I was well behaved, and had a clear picture of what I had hoped my future would be. When I came out of the Army at age 20, I was confused, rebellious, and it seemed that all of my priorities had completely changed.| Mr. Laws's written memories end with this newsletter. Please see the 2nd and 3rd Quarter 2003 Bulletins for the first two parts. |
