page 4 of 6

Play Movie

4-Company Commander & Combat

Transcribed by: Alison G (2007)
Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

How did you become company commander.

I think we had just crossed the Danube River, and we were running across this field. The Germans had us in time fire, artillery bursting over our heads, and so we had to run at least five miles across this open field. Some of the guys were hitting the ground, and I said, "Get up and run!" We were exhausted by the time we got across this field, but we made it. Nobody was hurt, even in spite of artillery rounds bursting over our heads. That was a little scary, of course.

Anyway, we got to the other side, and then we went into ... it must have been a platoon of Germans in the woods, not too far (to the front). We took them under fire. We had a couple of little M25 tanks with us, and they were firing into the woods at these Germans that we were fighting. The man who was the company commander, he was a (First Lieutenant), John Powers was his name, he had been the first platoon leader when the captain was relieved of his command - because he was incompetent, to say the least - so Powers took over the company, and I was the third platoon leader. He was up near a road and under a tree, and one of the rounds from the tank hit the tree, and burst, and hit him in the butt. He was hurt pretty badly. But he was able to call me, and said, "Warren, you have to take over the company. I've been hit." So I did; that's when I became company commander. I kept the company until the end of the war as a (First Lieutenant).

So now we were hoping to jump forward to your liberation of Dachau.

Okay, well let me tell you about my fun stories. Very briefly, the two stories. I'll try to make it real fast. One of them was with (Clarence Autrey), was a quite (...) Tennessee hillbilly. One night, I'm sitting in my foxhole, and we're in a defensive position. I hear these explosions down to the right flank, because he was down in his hole, down on the front of our company. I said, "(Autrey), what's going on down there?" And he said, "There's Krauts out here." And I said, "Well, throw out some grenades, (Autrey)." And he said, "Lieutenant, I done throwed four out. They done throwed five back!" So I said, "Well, I'll be right down."

The other one was (Jimmy Kitchens). One night, the Germans must've gotten a trainload of artillery ammunition, because they were bombarding our positions just mercilessly all night long. Our company commander, who was a captain, who was a pretty nervous type, he got on the radio - and Kitchens was down on the other side of the company, way out front- he kept asking - and his call letters were (Abel) six; I was (Abel) three; the (First Lieutenant) was (Abel) one, etc; A company; (Abel) company- and so he kept asking over the phone, "This is (Abel) six" - great big Texan, played football for Texas A&M- he said "How many was that?" Kitchen says, "Sir, I believe that was six rounds.” Ten minutes later, another volley would come over, "This is (Abel) six. How many was that?" Kitchens would say, "Sir, I believe that was nine rounds." It kept on and one and on. You know, we're just trying to rest. It's not bothering us, because we're hunkered down in our bunkers. Finally, he says - another volley came over - and he says, "This is (Abel) six. How many was that?" Kitchen says, "Uh, this is (Abel) Kitchens. That was 999 rounds, and we're all dead!

Dachau Concentration Camp Liberation

You wanted to talk about Dachau, huh? On the early morning of the 29th of April '45, we had gotten headed towards Munich - Munich was some maybe 40 miles away - and I was called up in the early morning by our battalion commander, Colonel (Felons). He said, "We're going to... instead of going to Munich, our orders are changed. We're going to Dachau." And I said, "Yes sir." "And I want you to lead the battalion, your company." I was company commander by then. " I want you to lead the company in all haste to Dachau." And I said, "What do I expect to find there, sir?" He said, "I don't know. Probably a prisoner of war camp. A few thousand maybe. Maybe not even that many." So he said, "Get on the trucks and jeeps and (half-tracks) and tanks, and get to Dachau in a hurry.

So we got there early in the morning. We found the camp. Before we got there, the 43rd division had gotten there earlier - they were on our right (flank), the third division was on our left - and they'd gotten there earlier, and they'd captured or killed all of the SS guards - captured a lot of them - and they were summarily executing them. The guards had their hands up, and they were shot down by the company of the 43rd division, which was certainly a no-no. But that's what was happening. So when we got to Dachau, there was hardly any resistance, and I couldn't figure that out.

But the first thing we saw was about forty boxcars on a railing outside the camp, and those boxcars were full of dead bodies, which had come from other camps. It was called The Dachau Death Train, because everybody but one man was saved, and I talked to you about him. He's still alive. There's an article that I showed you, I think. Didn't I.

Can you tell us about this one man that you found.

Well, we were actually in the camp. I didn't see this going on. But we were in the camp, because that was my job—to take my guys into the camp, find what I would term "quasi-leaders" of the barracks - there were a lot of people and a lot of internees in these barracks, emaciated souls, half-starved, and a lot of people were dead in the barracks - but I was able to find these people that were sort of elected - or elected themselves - as leaders of the group in each barracks. Fortunately, I met a Belgian captain who had been captured about six months earlier, and he was brought to Dachau, and he was treated a little bit better than a lot of the prisoners. I met him, and he spoke about nine languages. I spoke German, and, of course, English, and he didn't speak any English, but he spoke German, so we were able to communicate. I used him as my interpreter.

We went into this one barracks, and I asked him to tell these two guys that were the quasi-leaders that “We're here to help you. Behind us are food service and medical personnel who will help you. We can't let you out of the camp, because if we did, you'd soon die, because you'd find food and eat too much of it at one time. Your stomach's sure shrunk to the point where you couldn't stand that.” They were relieved to hear that. I kept doing that until I think I covered the bases that I was charged to do by the battalion commander—to get in there and tell them why we're here, that “We're your friends, we're Americans, we're not gonna hurt you any more, but we have to keep you in the camp until these people behind us get here to help you.&rdquo.

He took me to all the barracks and then to the crematorium. We saw the piles of bodies everywhere, and 35,000 emaciated souls wandering around in the camp. Not a POW camp, by any means. It was so horrific that some of my guys fainted, and some threw up, and it was just an awful, awful realization of what we were in. We had known nothing about it, absolutely nothing. This, of course, was a shock. We didn't stay there - my company didn't stay there - because we had done our job, and we still had a war to fight in Munich, which was nine miles away, and to chase the Germans that had fled south. We were only there about two days.

Can you describe to us the physical layout of the camp, and everything you saw upon arrival.

We got to the main gate of the camp, and had to shoot the locks off the gate and go in. (And we were just) The poor souls - those that could move - came, and they were hugging us and crying and carrying on. Unfortunately, some of them - before we could turn the power off - had run toward us, and ran into the electrified fence, and killed themselves. Some, I think some twenty, did that. But, for the most part, we were able to find where the power turn-off was, and I sent one of my guys to do that, to turn it off. Anyway, we did our job, and we pulled out of the camp.

What we saw there was this wire, and of course the gates, and the barracks inside. There were lots of barracks, and the crematorium, and this moat. There was a moat around the whole camp. It was - I don't know how many acres it was, but several, couple of hundred acres, I guess - all barbed wire, electrified, with some moat all the way around it. And entrances: two or three entrances, one main entrance, and then others. And the crematorium, and the mess hall, which was pretty large. They didn't feed the prisoners very much, but some. And then there was an area where the guards slept, the ones that weren't on duty. And then, of course, the towers where the guards were with their machine guns. Most of them were SS, the guards were.

After we got in there, I sent - and I think the 43rd division did too - sent a group of people into the city of Dachau to get the people of Dachau to come and see what was going on there. We had interviewed - or I think the 43rd division did the interviewing, mostly - of people that live there, that said they didn't know anything about it, they didn't know what was going on in the camp. And how could they not, with the odor? The odor that came from that camp and, of course, the crematorium working day and night, and the odor from that should have told them, or did, probably. Well, the upshot of all this was they didn't dare even think what was going on at that death camp.

We then left Dachau toward Munich, and had our little battle in Munich. It wasn't a severe one; we didn't lose anybody in Munich, because a lot of the Germans had fled further south, out of Munich. They just had a small group within Munich, kind of holding their part of the city. We just overpowered them, and then we headed south.

Can we venture back to Dachau a bit? How did you feel when you got to Dachau?

Not knowing what I was going to see, I was overwhelmed just like everybody else who went in there to see these people that were half-starved, and all of the dead bodies around. But, you know, I'm the company commander; I have to keep my wits about me. I didn't pass out or throw up or anything. Fortunately, I met this Belgian captain, as I said, who took me around the camp. He was a little (titched) in the head, I think, from what he saw when he got in there, because he had only been caught six months earlier. He hadn't spent years in Dachau, like a lot of them had. He was surely well fed. They treated him pretty well.

In your book, you talk about feeling, at times, more like an executioner than a liberator. Can you tell us about this feeling.

What I said about the prisoners running into the electrified fence. I was a liberator, but they killed themselves on the fence, so I was an executioner too, because I hadn't realized that the fence was electrified. Everybody I've said that to has said, "No, you weren't. You weren't an executioner. You were a liberator." And I guess I was. That was my main job, to liberate these poor souls. Unfortunately, a group of them killed themselves on the fence.

Were there any SS guards there when you got there, or had the 43rd division shot them all.

They either had fled or were being executed. And that's another story that I'd like to tell if we've got any time. It brings us up to the present, almost. I'll tell you about that, and we'll go further into Dachau.

Can you, first off, tell us about the SS guards who were trying to pass as prisoners.

They put on prisoner garb, and mingled in with the other prisoners. But they were so well fed that they stuck out like sore thumbs. We just turned them over to the prisoners, and they were beaten to death. Some of them were even thrown in the mote. We didn't see any of the guards, because they were either dead or captured. Let me go into that story a little bit, which brings us up to the present, and then we can go back again.

Because I was at Dachau the same time this (Lieutenant General) was when he was a (Lieutenant Colonel). He had been assigned by (General Patch) of the Seventh Army, he had been an aide to General Patton in the Third Army, but then he was transferred to (Patch's) Seventh Army. He was detailed by (Patch) to go to Dachau as fast as he could to try to save some of these SS guards, because they were all being executed by the 43rd division. He got there the same day I did, same time. He's now a retired (Lieutenant General), and he was able to gather up some of them - a lot of them had fled when they saw what was going on with the 43rd - but he was able to get some of them. I think he got something like sixteen of them. (General Patch) wanted them to be witnesses at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Now I'll go back to Dachau.

Do you have any stories about interacting with inmates?

Yeah. As I said, because of this interpreter, the Belgian captain, I was able to do the job I was asked to do, namely to tell them via these either self-appointed leaders or leaders elected by the other inmates, tell them what we were about— that we're here to help you. And I was saying this to the Belgian captain, who said in Russian or Polish or whatever the makeup of the barracks was - there were a lot of Russian, Polish, all kids of nationalities that were incarcerated there - and he spoke almost all the languages that the prisoners spoke. So he was really invaluable to me. We went from barracks to barracks doing the same thing, always telling them that "We've gotta keep you in here. Otherwise, you're going to die.

Can you describe the first inmate that you saw?

Not really, because a whole bunch of them just came, trying to hug us, and just so happy to see us, because they knew we were Americans, and we weren't going to hurt them anymore. So I can't single out anybody other than the first two people I talked to in one of the barracks. They were both Polish. The Belgian captain talked to them in Polish, and told them what I told him to tell them. I remember them being just as bad off as all the rest of the prisoners, but I guess with their quasi-leadership, they were a little better off, they seemed to be. They were standing, at least, and were in some authority, so I guess that was helping them a bit—not much, but a bit. They were half-starved too.

Were the inmates clothed, and if so, what were they wearing.

They were wearing these kind of striped pajamas, sort of. They were all emaciated, ribs sticking out, and skin and bones. Some of them couldn't even walk. A lot of them were laid where they died, on the grounds or in the barracks, died in the three-tiered beds, if you can call them beds. They didn't have any blankets. They slept on wooden slats in these barracks. It was awful.

Were you, at any point, nervous or scared.

No, I wasn't scared. I was revolted, I guess you'd say, just to see what I was seeing. And, of course, a lot of my men, as I said, fainted or were vomiting. It was an awful sight, if you can imagine. If you saw, what was the name of the movie? "The Last Days" wouldn't describe it. What was the movie.

“Liberation 1945.”

Well, you can imagine what we, who knew nothing about it, going into this camp and seeing this horror. And it was abject horror. You know, I'd seen a lot of death in combat. People got killed in combat, that's what it's all about. But never innocent souls in this horrible camp, dead or almost dead, thousands and thousands of them. Men and women. The women were mostly young, because the older ones had been gassed and executed and burned up in a crematorium. But the younger ones, the able-bodied ones, like Harold Gordon—he and his father were able-bodied, so that saved them from going to the gas chambers.

At what point did you realize who the inmates really were, and that most of them were Jewish? Who told you.

The Belgian captain did. He was my savior in trying to do my job. He said to me, "There's an awful lot of Jewish people here. There's an awful lot of Russians and Poles and other nationalities here, and I fortunately speak those languages." Of course, we're talking in German. He didn't speak any English. So anyway, I learned from him what the makeup was in there. Awful lot, I guess maybe I'd say 60 %, were Jewish, and the rest were a lot of Poles, a lot of Russians. I don't know, some Hungarians, although the Hungarians were mostly incarcerated in Auschwitz. I don't think many of them came to Dachau. But Harold was in Dachau for a while. He was on that death march. I guess he explained that to you in your interview of him. He and his father got away. That's how I learned what the makeup was in the camp.