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Section below transcribed Logan L (2008), edited by Joseph Werhan (intern). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

What did you do after you had graduated from high school?

After I graduated I took a deep breath and moved back into Chicago where my parents had been living at the time. I'd been living with this house family in Highland Park for all this time—visiting my parents on weekends sometimes—and learning—which was much more important than all the schoolwork—about girls, and learning about dancing and jazz. I would be in bed and had the radio turned on, listening to the Hit Parade or to some kind of jazz late at night. This was overwhelming. I'd never heard any of that stuff—this was a whole new world. I had to settle down and find myself a job because I couldn't afford to go to college. My parents didn't have any money. I sure as hell didn't have any money. I barely got through high school and so I started working first in a millinery shop in downtown Chicago, making ladies' hats. I don't remember what I did. I think when the hats went down I packed them into boxes so they'd be shipped out. Then I decided I'm looking to be an engineer of some sort and so I became journeyman tool and dye maker. I worked in a machine shop and learned lays and machines, and got my hands beat up. I joined a union—became a job shop steward in the union—got my head beat up by the cops in Chicago because we were picketing one of the international harvester plants.

I ended up working doing some volunteer work at Hull House. Hull House—in Chicago—is a settlement house which was created back in the early 1900's for people in that neighborhood who were mainly Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, Polish immigrants and so on, whose kids were getting into trouble—the mafia, etc. This settlement house was set up to keep the kids out of trouble—give them something to do. The director of the Hull House—a Mr. Bruckner—had found, somehow—my relatives in Hamburg. He was originally from Hamburg—was a socialist, got out of Germany, got to Chicago—and ended up organizing this settlement house. I ended up working with immigrant kids just teaching English to a bunch of Puerto Rican kids who had just moved into the neighborhood. I was very mixed between wanting to do something technical—like doing dye work, engineering work and so on—but then working at Hull House, I thoroughly enjoyed the idea of working with people and working with kids and social service activities. That all combined eventually when I got into college. I'll come back to that in a minute. By 1943, the war was going and I decided it was too much fun over there. I better get involved.

Joining the Military and Camp Ritchie

Describe to us how you ended up joining the military.

I was working in this machine shop and in the meantime the war was going on. I really felt very strongly that I needed to get involved. Because I'm working in this machine shop I'm deferred from the army, because I'm essential for war work. So I had to quit my job and be off my job for a month, at which time my deferment ran out. It was a wonderful month because I spent most of the summer on the beach in Chicago. Then I got myself drafted—volunteered to be drafted. Now here I am—I'm a qualified tool and dye maker, I speak German fluently, I joined the army. What does the army do with me? They send me to Camp Grant, Illinois, which is medical corps. They're going to make a medic out of me. I spent four weeks complaining, and after four weeks I think they got tired of my complaining and they shipped me to Aberdeen, which is where wanted to be.

That's in America?

Aberdeen is at the proving grounds in Maryland and it's the headquarters—whether you design weapons and tested weapons and so on. I went through the technical training there, then ended up staying in Aberdeen for the first time to really use some of my qualifications. What had happened during the Africa Campaign—and the early Sicily and Italy campaigns—was they captured all sorts of German weapons and they shipped them to Aberdeen. Then they were testing them to see if they could learn something and—maybe not only that—I think one of the things they were thinking about was here we have all of these wonderful German weapons and all the manuals in very technical German. If we can translate the technical manuals and give them to our troops, when they then capture some of these weapons they can turn them around and shoot the other way.

It's a lovely idea. Frankly I don't think it ever worked because we were building better weapons and more weapons than the Germans did anyway. We shipped them all over the place so we didn't need their weapons, but that was the idea. When I got a little tired of all of that I volunteered to go to Officer's Candidate School in Aberdeen, and that was probably the toughest military duty I ever had. They really try to make it hard to become officers. After seven weeks of grinding through that process, we had a last week—the eighth week—of field training where we were going through mud and you-name-it out in the field. Then we came back—still muddy, still filthy as can be—we're having a final round up. The officers that were in charge of the candidates were giving their report on what was happening. They also decided who would stay in and who would be kicked out. We started with about 150 cadets—by that time we were down to about seventy—and we figured we'd already been measured for our new uniforms and everything.

The next day five of us were kicked out, and it was very disappointing. We'd worked very hard. We then found that all five of us were probably very fit to be majors or colonels, but not very fit to be second lieutenants—because all five of us had a much higher education than most everybody else—were probably a little brighter than most everybody else. There is some validity in the army's choosing its lower grade officers. They shouldn't be too smart because if you're too smart you think too much. There are some things you shouldn't think about, you should just do. As much as I hate that idea, I think the army was right. We would've made very good majors, but lousy second lieutenants. So then the five of us—there were two French speakers and one Italian speaker and another German speaker—ended up in this replacement company at Aberdeen, which means you're holding up there until they figure out what to do with you.

Why did you not get your officer's status?

I forget what the actual ostensible rationale was.

You talked in your Shoah interview something about how you said you were going to protect your soldiers?

Oh yes, I remember. My point was that as a line officer your main job was to take care of your soldiers, not big plans and things. That wasn't acceptable. You were supposed to—I don't know what. They couldn't figure out what to do with the five of us. There were a whole bunch of people who went through the replacement companies who went through and back out again—doing things. We're still sitting there, waiting to be assigned some place. Finally the company officer called us in and says, "You're really a problem. We don't know what the hell to do with you guys, but we got an idea. Do you think you guys would like to go to CIC?" Almost as one we said, "What's CIC?" He says, "I'm not sure but it sounds interesting." We said, "Okay, we'll go" That's how we ended up in Ritchie CIC—Counter Intelligence Corps. How you get to places like this—I don't know.

So we showed up and it was the most bizarre army place that you can think of. There were no “soldiers” there. They were all soldiers, but there there were no “soldiers” there. These were all oddballs. These were all people with PhD's in Medieval History or God knows what. People with language skills—they were all the right people—but they were certainly misfits in the “regular” army. How we got through—we got trained. We marched a little, but that was really a minor part of the army role there. We were studying the German order of battle: generals and majors and colonels and lieutenants and all this stuff. This army is supposed to be in this part of the world, and this division is supposed to be doing this. We think they're still there, but maybe they've moved to Russian in the meantime. We were supposed to know all about how the German Army works and how the party system works, and who is automatic arrest category and who is just check him out but if they're not too bad let him go. We didn't have any idea what we were getting into, but neither did any of the people who were instructing us because things were moving so fast, and the system had changed so fast. People had trained in Alabama or someplace, had landed in Casablanca, gone through the North African Campaign fighting Rommel. Gone from Tripoli to Sicily—Sicily to Anzio. The 36th Infantry Division that I was eventually assigned to was trained as a mountain fighting division—trained to fight in mountains. They were on the beaches in North Africa and Sicily and Italy and in Southern France—never any mountains. There were landing crafts. That's not what they were trained for, but who cared? They were where they were.

We've heard a lot about Camp Richie and how it was a lot of European soldiers.

No. They were all Americans, but as I said they were all oddballs from all over the place.

How did they organize? It was intellectual training on how to interrogate and things like that?

There was relatively little army training—marching, shooting and all this stuff. Yes, we did some of that, but that was peripheral. We took a lot of classes, a lot of study of what the organization was of the Nazi Party, German Army—also the Italian army, the Italian Fascist Party. We were there for nine weeks and that's it—go through fairly quickly—and then they got us out and we shipped out from Ritchie.

Before shipping out, let's make sure we have a chance to ask more about Ritchie.

Okay.

Who are these people? Who is he hanging out with? Where are they coming from? What language are they speaking?

I think we all spoke English, sort of. Many of the folks there were learning English, at best. Beyond that, you name any European language and you had somebody there talking it. We all ate the same army food, but most people spiced it quite differently. Obviously somebody coming from Yugoslavia, or from Southern Italy, or from Norway had different patterns of existence and looking at things. Pretty quickly we bridged those gaps. My best buddy was Freddie Robacheck. Freddie was a Brooklyn boy, born in America. Somehow—I don't remember why—his parents had moved to Berlin when he was a young kid but left there again in the early 1930's, when the Nazi's took over. He spoke German, but he was as American as a Brooklyn Jewish kid. There were a lot of people like that. Some of them had escaped from France and gotten over here and now wanted to go back.

This was all focused on European war. In the meantime, Pacific war was going on and probably there was something like Camp Ritchie out here in California or someplace, but Camp Ritchie was focused on Europe. Many of the folks there had relatives in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, New York—so when there were weekends off we'd end up getting all over the place. I had myself a girlfriend in Philadelphia—met her at the USO. She was a good dancer and had very, very long hair—so long that she couldn't comb it herself. Her mother always had to comb her hair every day—crazy. It seemed very long being there for eight weeks, but in the whole pattern of things it was relatively short. Then they wanted to get us out and so they first shipped us to a place called Indiantown Gap in—I think West Virginia [correction: Pennsylvania]—where we stayed just a week or two. From there we went to New York—the Brooklyn base—and there again we were there just for a week or so. I spent a lot of time with my buddy Freddie Robacheck who in fact never stayed at the camp. He always stayed with his wife in Brooklyn and we had a good time there. Then they shipped us out.

Shipping out was interesting because most people ended up on Liberty Ships which were these things they were building out here in Richmond. They were big tug boats stuffed with bunks. At the time when we went overseas the navy had just been training some of its flight crews that were flying off aircraft carriers. In Virginia or someplace, they used one aircraft carrier that was stationed in Brooklyn as a troop ship. The bunch of us were on this aircraft carrier going over to England—which was wonderful because we were staying in the flight crew's quarters—which was not like being shipped in a troop ship. We had good food, we had nice Hebrew Term?. One control the Navy had on us was we were not supposed to go on the flight deck. They were afraid we were going to fall off because there were no railings, and they were even more afraid that we would get seasick because most of the sailors got seasick on these big aircraft carriers that kept going up and down. We snuck up on deck and we found eventually that none—none—of the army folks that were on this carrier got seasick—whereas the navy guys all got seasick. I still remember sitting on the flight deck at night. We were in a convoy of many other ships and all you could see were occasional signal lights from the ships. It was all dark and it was very calm—It was very peaceful. I remember sitting on the deck saying, "I hate the sons of bitches. I really want to get over there and kill,” but that was not my job. My job was to interrogate and to find people and to arrest and to do my job. It was probably the most calming thing to have ever done in my life. I'm sitting there on this moonlit night on the deck of an aircraft carrier—trying not to get seasick, not to fall off—and thinking about where I was going to go. Then we ended up in Liverpool.

Were you with most of the people from Camp Ritchie when you were on the boat? It was the same group?

It was the same group. There were a whole bunch of others too. There was a group of about sixty of us in that class that had graduated that were going to go together. By the time we ended up going toward Liverpool we knew we were going to Europe. Until we got there we were never quite sure we weren't going to end up in the Pacific someplace. In this group of sixty, there were a bunch of Italian speaking, French speaking, German speaking.

What language did you speak? Did you speak English?

Yes, we all spoke English to each other. We were going to talk German to the bastards over there. We didn't need to do that there.

Can we backtrack to Ritchie one more time?

Wherever you want to go.

Interrogation Training at Camp Ritchie

You say you graduated and your job was to interrogate. What kind of stuff did they teach you to get you ready to go and interrogate prisoners?

We had practice interrogation sessions. "Don't beat 'em up. Try to get the information without beating him up." One of the things that really disturbs me—reading in the newspapers when we beat up prisoners in Iraq. There is no need to beat up anybody. They will give you information, but usually they will give you the wrong information. If you want information and you want it right—learn how to interrogate—and there are ways to do that. You build confidence, you build communication and you talk about all sorts of things except what you really want to know until you establish a sort of rhythm of communication. Then somewhere along the line people get into this rhythm. You do, and they do. Somewhere along the line at the right moment you break that rhythm and you ask the question you want to ask and they'll give you the answer—nine times out of ten—because you've established a pattern. Even if it isn't personal confidence, you've established confidence that they know what you think you're doing, and then you fool them. Then you break through that. But beating them up? That never gets you anything. They'll give you anything you want to hear.

And that's what you learned at Camp Ritchie?

That's one of the interrogation techniques, and we learned the order of battle. We learned who was stationed where and when. If somebody told us he was in Poland in 1943—and he was with X division—you know the X division was in Russia, not in Poland! We learned the patterns of things. We learned the history of some of the people. None of them had ever been Nazis. You learn pretty quickly as to who you are—who you associate with, what you do, who you know, where you went to school, where you were trained.