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Gunskirchenlager Concentration Camp

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Then we moved on out in Rhineland. We moved up to the Haardt Mountains, tallest mountains I have ever seen. There were crows nests, and some in the pill boxes that look like toad stools. And machine gun nests, canons. My Company C had the task to go down the little part of the mountain—there were two towns down there—and they were fighting it out with the Germans. There were a couple of ammunition dumps—supplies dumps—and they blew it up, just caught on fire and blew up. That way you could see—that was the first time we fought at night—you could see up on the Haardt Mountains there, bringing prisoners out, going up to get them and blowing up pillboxes.

When we got on the other side—that's when we were in Austria—but before we crossed the Haardt Mountains, we kept chasing them over there. We fought sixteen different German divisions. We kept 4,000 troops. How we knew that in the record, they all had different insignias. Different units, different tank battalions, different outfits. Then we killed about 6,000 of them. We used, I don't know how many thousand tons of ammunition now, in the Battle of the Rhine. But Captain Bates told us. He kept all those guys, that's when we went over to Austria and came up upon this concentration camp called Gunskirchenlager. It was a receiving camp of Mauthausen. That's when they got too weak to work at Mauthausen, they would send them there to die.

How did you deal with seeing the horror of the camp and the people?

It was a shock at first—not a shock, but strange. We thought it was a German army barrack. We kept getting closer to get a better view. We had ammunition and came up with the guns loaded, ready for another battle, everything ready for action. And then as we got closer, you could see these people with their heads shaved—it was early in the morning—with striped suits, hanging out of windows, and laying all over the yard. "What the hell is this?" Then you'd see a lot of them wandering around, looking like ghosts. We just had to keep rolling on, there was no battle there. The infantry was in there taking care of everything, surprised like we were. We hadn't seen these concentration camps before.

Then we went on the outskirts of town there—of the camp—to set up a front—a barrier—just in case of a counter attack from the Germans. We stayed there for a short while. Then we went on to Staar, Austria where we were going to meet the Russians. Then we ran up on another camp which we didn't stop at, we just looked over and saw it. That was Mauthausen where they were working down in the quarry there, they were clearing out the marble and stuff, up 200 stairs they had to walk to bring it up. If they couldn't bring it or fall, they would shoot them, the skinny men. We went and that's where we met the Russians at the Steyr River. They made them jump in the river and come over to us, because the Russians would shoot them.

The Russians were shooting who?

The Germans. We got to the end of the river—they wouldn't let them give up—they pushed them in the river, they were jumping in the river, they were shooting them. Old Sergeant Rucker, he went across the bridge, the center of the bridge was shot out. He said, "a big fat Russian woman" came running to meet him. "America, America." She was a tank commander, wanted to give him a big hug. Then they wanted to put him in jail. We looked down on them, I don't know, he said, one of them with a .45 in his face, he told them he's an American. So they got together. Me, I was cheating, I always stayed in the tank. A lot of guys would get killed that way, booby-traps, looking for souvenirs. He stepped on a step, "Boom!" "Uh oh, he got it." So, not for me. "You guys go ahead and loot all you want to."

That's why did you stayed in the tank?

Oh yes, it was dangerous. I felt safe in the tank. I didn't trust the Germans, you know. You get caught relaxing too much, let your guard down, you get it.

Going back to the camp, you said you talked to a woman there who said that the Americans took too long to bring medicine, and you said that you were angry at that comment. Do you mind expanding on that?

I was at the Temple Emanu El, they called it "Liberator and a Survivor." Three survivors, and I was the liberator. This one lady made the comment that the Americans waited too long, she thought, to bring medicine and set up a hospital for those people. Talking to one of the other survivors there—this lady wrote a book—and talking to the other survivor she said that she was only in a camp two months, she didn't go through the stuff that they went through. I tried to explain to her that we were packing ammunition, we were fighting—we were not, you know, the hospital unit. And they came up later, and when they got in touch with them, they came up and they set it up. She was just _____

You also said that when you met with the Russians, they just saw your battalion as American soldiers rather than as African Americans. Do you wish that people at home would have seen you the same way?

To tell you the truth people often didn't give a damn one way or the other. And they didn't respect the guys in the uniforms. We had one man who was going to North Carolina, and he was on the bus, one of the sergeants. They stopped for a rest. He [bus driver] told him to take a fifteen minute break. "And don't be late." I guess the Sergeant was about two or three minutes late. The bus driver starts swearing at him. He had a uniform on, just coming from over there. That's what you call "talking back to me," you know how a parent—"You you don't talk this way to me, I'm your mother." "Who do you think you are talking to me like this, I am white, I'm the bus driver." And they got into an argument. Then he [bus driver] called the sheriff. The Sergeant didn't even drink. He said he was drunk and was swearing at him, so he beat him up, and took him to jail overnight, and threw the night stick and punched him in the eyes, and he went blind. The next day he finally somehow got to the VA Hospital. He was blind until the day he died. That was the way that we were treated when we got back home. That's what the guys talked about mostly. The Tuskegee Airmen also.

From the war, were you able to share your sights and knowledge of the concentration camps with others?

Very few. People weren't interested in it then. They were just glad that the war was over.

How did they react to your stories?

Well you tell them what happened, they did no reaction at all, just said, "Too bad." Until they digging down there to know really what had happened. They didn't know it was on that large of a scale.

How did you personally react to the sites you saw in the Holocaust, at the time, and many years after? Do you still have horrors of it, or bad dreams?

No, to tell you the truth, just, I was sorry that it happened and to let it get in my head and bother me, I didn't. But, as they say, we got to keep telling the story, because if we don't, the story will repeat itself.

Did you practice a religion overseas?

What do you mean?

Did you ever conduct any services with your troops, or pray?

No, just go to church or a chapel. But when you're fighting, you're praying every day.

Can you say more about that? What does that mean? Your on the front, fighting every day. You are on the move for 180 some days. What are some of those feelings that you had or that your the people in your battalion had, with regards to faith and prayer? What role did it play for people?

See, I mixed it up. My favorite psalm that I liked, that I kept repeating, was the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepard I should not want." And I would repeat that over and over and over, silently, not out loud. After we got back, I cleaned the tanks and service them, you may have a minute. I would start a crap game about a minute or two. I just took it all in stride. See, my mother was praying, and everybody praying for you. You were just lucky, a lot of guys got killed you know. Some of them seemed to know it.

There's a Sergeant from New York. He kept saying this one time, "I won't be back, give this to my wife and send this to" so and so. "I want you to take this lüger and send it to my brother, and this flag and send it to my kids." And, it seemed to me like he brought that on himself because it was a freak accident. We were down near a place called Tillet in the Battle of the Bulge a little after Christmas. My sister had sent me a cake and I finally got it. It was smashed, but it was good, we all ate that. He was getting everything ready to go up to the front and relieve another company. So we were up waiting for lunch. We had a little water can to grease the guns with, we filled it with oil in it, about this size [points to a telephone handset]. And the hatch, when you pull it over, instead of opening it up, to get light you'd stick this can in there so we could see because everything was frosty. Then a German fired a round, an HE, high explosive, and it hit up on the turret right up right up under where he had that can, and that just scalped him. And he was the only one in his tank who got it.

In the last interview, you also stated that the 761st Tank Battalion documents were classified. Why do you think the government was hiding this information?

Sweetheart, you have to ask them. I don't know, but it's always "Classified."

You said that at the Battle of the Rhine, you destroyed seven different cities. Did you ever meet local people while you were fighting?

Some of them would come out, especially the ladies, and a bunch of kids. They'd come out, we'd give them candy, rations, coffee, sugar. The little girls would come out with their aprons open like that [gestures pulling up an apron]. This one lady I got a letter from last month, she explained who she was, and that her mother told her that the black troops were nicer to them than the white American troops. So she came up to our tanks, and she bring her apron and just hold it open, and we'd load it up with goodies for her. She'd take it and run home and dump it and come back. So we were always giving them stuff.

What I say about some of the whites, what I saw, I didn't like. At the camp—this is just after the war—we had a bunch of refugee people, they were misplaced persons, the Germans had ripped down their homes, and they were trying to get back home. They would come up with their little cups or a coffee can. At the end of the line, after you had eaten, instead of throwing it in the garbage can, they wanted you to give it to them—the food, the scraps that you had left. And I'd save my bread for them. The lady put it in a little dish. Some white troop came along and took this left over coffee and dumped it. I didn't like that.

I didn't tell you about the fight, the scrimmage I almost got into with one of those guys. We were going down to the Bulge to relieve. He was in the airborne, he had gotten wounded. I went to the hospital to get my foot checked one afternoon. I cleaned myself up and put on my new boots that I worn in America—they were all shined—and I got out of the muddy boots that I had. There was a paratrooper in the line and he said, "Sarge." I said "Yeah." He said "Where did you get them boots?" I said, "I bought them, this is what we call 'tanker boots.'" "Naw, your lying, they are paratrooper boots. That's all you niggers do—back here robbing the dead." He said, "I should come over and take them off of you." I smiled and said, "That's your next job Sarge, come on over," not knowing that it was his airborne division that was down there in Bastogne that we were going down to get out of there. And he said we were just up there robbing. I had a tanker outfit on, that's not quarter-master or the guys moving the dead or doing anything like that. That's what they thought the blacks all they did, service like that, and quarter-master. But if it wasn't for those guys doing all that hard work, we would have lost the war.