In November 1942, I signed up in the first draft in Platte County. I was twenty years old. You asked if my parents approved of my going off to war. In the first place, we were poor and it was the Depression. When I went in, almost everyone that was eligible had already gone into the service. After I went in, they were drafting men right out of high school.

As soon as you signed up they did a roll call. Right after they did the roll call, then they loaded you on the trucks and hauled you to Fort Leavenworth. They stripped you down naked – jaybird naked – and gave you a physical! I tell you, they really gave you a physical!

My first type of training was infantry training at Camp Funston, which was part of Fort Riley. They made us armored infantry, and I joined the 9^th Armored Division. In other words we were trained to fight with tanks and without tanks. I drove everything from a jeep to a half-track to a tank. That’s what my military license allowed me to do.

I think the most important part of the training was the discipline. The sergeant used to tell us he would "beat the heck out of you" if we didn’t do something correctly. That was the kind of discipline we had. Discipline was a big factor in getting things done. You didn’t question the sergeant or the officer when they told you to do something. You just did it. You didn’t ask, "Why?" or "Why me?" or anything like that. Whether you liked it or not you did it. You couldn’t have any opinions. You could gripe and complain, but nobody would listen to you. Everybody was in the same boat, so complaining didn’t get you anywhere.

We went from Fort Riley, Kansas to the desert, five miles north of Needles, California. We were there during the summer time. We went on long hikes in the 100-degree heat. Then we went to the Louisiana swamps.

We didn’t get paid much by today’s standards. When you got different badges, like the expert combat infantry badge, you’d get paid more. Each badge was worth $5 more a month in pay. That was big money. I was getting $21 a month, so those $5 each added up. By the time I made corporal and was sent overseas, I was making $88 a month. I sent $50 a month home for a sister who was still in high school. That was extra money for me, and I knew they could really use it at home. But when I got home, I found out that they had saved every penny of it. My mom handed me a bank book with $850 in it. She had saved it all for me.

After basic training it was time for me to ship out. There were 22,000 of us who left on the Queen Mary from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. You know, it’s funny but I was homesick until I got on the Queen Mary to go overseas. Then, just like that, it was gone. The whole time I was in the States, I was thinking, "Well I’ll be getting home for a weekend" or I could do things that remind me of home. But when I got on the Queen Mary and couldn’t see the shore anymore, being homesick was over. I think I knew right then that the only way I was getting home before the war was over was if I got killed or wounded, so there wasn’t any sense in being homesick anymore.

On the deck below us were WACS and nurses. Guys were sending notes to the women, tying them on a piece of string and lowering the string down. But instead of female nurses or WACS there were Military Police (MPs) down there, and they were the ones answering these notes! It was really funny!

We went to Glasgow, Scotland on the Queen Mary and then by train to London. There we drew (were assigned) all our vehicles and weapons, clothing, things like that, before we went across the Channel. That’s when we first got live ammunition. They didn’t trust us with it before that, not even on the firing range.

Once we got all our supplies we sailed to Omaha Beach. We were way behind the D-Day invasion. They were already going through France by the time we landed. We waited there for two or three weeks for the rest of the division to catch up. And then we drove right through the center of Paris the day the Free French (resistance fighters) were liberating the city. We were right behind them. We stayed just outside Paris for a couple of days to see if they needed help. But they didn’t, so we went on ahead.

Then we got caught in the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans came at us with thirty Divisions. We were surrounded and trapped for ten days. The Germans were headed for Antwerp. The Allies had control of that port, and we were getting a lot of supplies through there, so of course the Germans wanted to retake it. The famous General George Patton was down there, and he got credit for cutting the Bulge off. But we were behind the lines and we got caught in there. We had to fight. We had no choice – it was fight or die.

We lost our entire kitchen crew – twelve people. They got captured by the Germans and were taken out to a field and shot along with three civilians. After we found out what happened, we were a different bunch of soldiers.

The kitchen driver was from Nebraska. He couldn’t read or write, but he really knew that truck and everything on it. We had an English teacher in our company who was teaching him how to read and write. Before the Battle of the Bulge happened, he’d written a letter home by himself with the help of the teacher. He got a letter back from his mother, and he would read it to you. He read to everybody before the Battle of the Bulge, before he died.

The Germans destroyed the convoy those guys were in too. The trucks had all our Christmas presents on them, as well as supplies. Our Christmas was really rotten that year, for a lot of reasons. The Allies caught the men who executed the kitchen crew and tried them at Nuremberg. They were sentenced to be hanged. But instead of being hanged, they were in jail for a week of hard labor and then they were let go. That’s all the punishment they got for killing our men.

After the Battle of the Bulge, we went to Metz, France. Gen. George Patton was our Commander. We got more ammunition and replacements for the men we had lost, and then we went back up through the German lines. We saw lots of combat. Sometimes it would last for a day or two, sometimes just an hour or two. I was awarded a bronze star at the Battle of the Bulge. By an Act of Congress, anyone with an expert combat infantry badge who was in the Battle of the Bulge was awarded the Bronze Star.

Our next big battle was the Battle for Remagen Bridge. Our company took the Remagen Bridge over the Rhine River. We weren’t even supposed to be there at Remagen. We were supposed to come up to the Rhine River and go south to link up with Patton to trap the Germans. But we came up a cliff and saw the bridge still intact, with German troops pulling across it. We said, "Hey man, get it!" And they got it. They blew it up, and it went up in the air and came right back down. We lost two people taking the bridge. When the bridge collapsed, the engineers lost 32 men.

We were the first invaders to cross the Rhine River since Napoleon. During World War I, they went up to the Rhine, but they didn’t cross it. When we took the bridge, we didn’t know the importance of it until after it was over. The Germans had been trying to blow it up and finally did destroy it. We captured a prisoner who said the Germans were going to blow it again at 4 o’clock. The engineers had 15 minutes to take the bridge, so they went across and they took it. They got the bridge. And I took the first half-track over about dusk. The reason we went across is because they needed something bigger than rifles on the other side, and we had a 57mm behind us. Our general was General Leonard. I think he’s from Ohio.

The first fellow that crossed the bridge, Alex Drabick, was from Toledo, Ohio. He wasn’t supposed to be first. Usually there is some honor in crossing the bridge first. Drabick reported to a staff sergeant named Delico, who was from New York. Delico was supposed to be the first one to cross the bridge. They started across the bridge, and when they near the other end, machine gun fire started raining down on them from a tower. They went into the tower to get the machine guns. They captured two or three guys, and dumped the machine guns over the side of the bridge into the water. Along came Alex Drabick looking for his sergeant. He hadn’t seen him go into the tower. He ran across the bridge looking for his sergeant, and became the first one to cross the bridge. The first fourteen men across the bridge got medals. Ralph, the guy that was with me, was number seventeen – he didn’t run fast enough.

They bombed it, they strafed it; they did everything to break that bridge. And when they did finally succeed, the Americans already had five pontoon bridges across the Rhine. When we were at Remagen, the first thing we saw was a jet airplane. We didn’t know what it was – we had never seen one before. We called them "stovepipes." We didn’t know they were called "jets," so we called them "stovepipes."

Two months after we took the bridge, the war was over.

Congress appropriated money for two paintings about World War II. One was the bombing of oil fields in Romania, and this was the other one. This is a print of the painting of the Battle of Remagen Bridge that hangs in Washington, D.C. Also see a picture of the bridge today and the plaque at the bridge.

After the Remagen Bridge, we regrouped and we had an encirclement of the Ruhr Valley. We trapped quite a few Germans in parts of France and Germany. The Ruhr Valley was Germany’s industrial area. Then we went to Leipzig, near the Elbe River. We stayed there for a day or two, and then we were relieved and sent down to Czechoslovakia.

When they made the agreement to split Germany among the Allies, a line was established between East and West Germany. We set up an outpost next to the Russians. We were there for about two or three weeks after the war in Europe ended. We were there when Roosevelt passed away and Truman became President. Since I was from Missouri, everybody asked me, "Who’s this guy, Truman?" But I didn’t know Truman from Adam.

I got my picture in the Weston Chronicle newspaper, and I kept it behind my seat in the half-track. My family used to send me the newspaper. They were about two or three months old, but we read them cover to cover. Half of our outfit was from New York and New Jersey, and the other half was from the Midwest. There was a constant battle between the two groups as to which part of the country was better. The New Yorkers couldn’t understand some of the stuff in those papers, but we all laughed and laughed together at their questions. Then, after everybody had read them, we’d tear them up into pieces and use it as toilet paper. Toilet paper was scarce and we spread that Weston Chronicle all the way from France to Czechoslovakia. So there’s a little of Weston, Missouri all throughout Europe.

We were able to send V-Mail home. The officers would censor it first and scratch out half of it. I saw some of my letters when I got home and there was hardly anything left on it. "Hi", "Love" -- that was it on some of them. They wouldn’t let you send anything home letting them know where you were. They’d scratch that out because they were afraid that the enemy would get a hold of it and know where you were.

When we were in combat, we were working twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week. There was no R&R, no break, no nothing. The only time you got a break was when you got wounded or when you were out of combat. When you’re in a foxhole and you have to go to the bathroom, you don’t get out of that foxhole to use a tree or anything. You go in the foxhole and you take your shovel and cover it over, whatever. So if you’re living in a foxhole you go to the bathroom in the foxhole.

Another driver and I stayed in one foxhole for three nights in the Battle of the Bulge. When we started out, the hole was only about waist deep. We took the shovel off the side of the half-track and by the third night, we had living room – we had logs on top of that and then dirt on top of that and we had a regular home in there. We dug all night long that first night. We needed it for protection and to keep us warm.

The Germans would send in artillery shells with what they called "time bursts." Once one landed in just about the middle of a pine tree. It sent limbs a couple of feet down right into the frozen ground. The next day we tried to pull those limbs out, but we couldn’t do it. Boy, it felt like every shell was coming in right down your throat.

During battle, I felt scared, SCARED! I cried and I thought of everything bad I ever did. My whole life went before me in about two minutes. I’d think, I wish I could’ve hugged my mother another time. I wish I could have done this or that before I got into this mess. Your life, your whole life, just flashes before you. I never had been very religious. But we went to services and we did a lot of praying, too. "Lord, get us out of this. And hurry up about it, too!"

I took my wife to see the movie "Saving Private Ryan." It really upset me. I came out of there with tears in my eyes. I was holding her hand, and I was squeezing it so hard I almost broke it. It wasn’t the plot or the characters – it was the noise, the shells going off, and everything like that. I don’t think you ever get over it. I don’t like firecrackers even today.

You had no choice but to cope with the fear. The only way you could get out of combat was if you got hurt or killed. We had fellows that got hurt. In fact that fellow who was in the foxhole with me got two Purple Hearts. He got hit in the shoulder, and he said to me, "Look, I’m hit!" His jacket and his shoulder were all torn up. I said, "You’ll be all right. We’ll put a Band-Aid on it and you’ll be okay." He got a Purple Heart for it. If you got wounded, but not very badly, you went to "Repo-Depot". But if you did that, you might not get back to your same outfit. So we had a lot of fellows who wouldn’t go back.

We had a guy who got hit pretty badly in the hand, but he didn’t want to go back. We had pretty good medics, who pretty much knew what they were doing. So he had the medics give him stuff so he could bandage his hand. He couldn’t write with his hand like that, so I wrote letters for him to his family and to his girlfriend. I was writing a letter to his mother, and he was telling me what to write. I wrote on the back of it, "P.S. Would sure like a cake." About two or three weeks later, he got a letter from his mother saying, "Your cake is on its way, but when did you start eating cake? You never liked it before!" After that, he checked every letter I wrote for him. He didn’t trust me after the cake.