page 3 of 8

Play Movie

How long were you in New York for?

In New York itself? Just while we were on pass and then we went back to Camp Kilmer and in short time later, on another train to a dock in New Jersey, where we got onto a ferry boat and went across to New York harbor, where the Queen Marry was docked. We didn't know the Queen Mary at that time. We didn't know we were going to go on the Queen Mary. We got off in a big warehouse. All of us with a big number on our helmet and our duffle bags on our back. Then they'd call out our name and we're supposed to walk across this plank, this gangway into this ship. We still didn't know what it was, the Queen Mary. I remember walking across and looking up and I couldn't see the top of the ship. Someone guided us through there and down to where we were going to stay, which was in the swimming pool area. So some guys had bunks in the steam rooms and I had a bunk out near where the pool was. They covered the pool with planks and put the ships treasure down in the pool. The rugs and anything that they didn't want. Halfway up they had another floor built where they had a mess hall where you could eat up there. In rough seas, it took us six days to cross the Atlantic. It was rough it was in February and the food would slide off the tables and down the sides of the wall. Pretty soon some of those guys in the outfit never got up out of bed the whole time. They were sick the whole trip across! I don't know why but it didn't bother me across because I was still able to go up on the deck. Twenty-two thousand people on this ship. You were in A, B or C and you couldn't get out of whatever you were in. But you could get up and see the ocean and breathe the air. We traveled fast so they didn't have any convoy. Queen Mary was fast, she could outrun any German submarines and she changed course every six minutes I think it was—I could be wrong there. So you look back at the wake and we'd go like this. When we got to the coast, we passed Ireland up the Firth of Clyde. It was Scotland, and the seas calmed down. It was the first time these guys got up out of their bed and went up on deck and got some food. It was quite an exciting trip across there on the Queen Mary.

Have you ever done it again since then?

No, I've flown across but never on a ship. No. That'd be kind of nice to go back on a ship wouldn't it?

Did anything unexpected happen while on the ship?

No, but there were always rumors on the ship. “Boy we just saw a submarine over there, somewhere,” and somebody said, “they'd fired a torpedo.” Which were all just rumors. Other than the rough seas and the sick people it was fairly uneventful. Just think if they had of sunk that thing with twenty-two thousand people on board in the cold Atlantic there wouldn't have been any survivors I don't think, maybe a few. We didn't know about that. What they did on board ship on those few days was gamble. There'd be huge dice games, crap games, they called them. Huge, I mean someone would end up with two or three thousand dollars in a game! That was big money then I never got into those. Ever. But I watched them. So that was an exciting trip across there but nothing happened to us.

Were there any other ships or planes accompanying you?

No, none. No ships, no planes. We were all by ourselves because she was fast.

So there were twenty-two thousand people on the ship where they with the army? The people going into Europe?

They were all probably going into Europe. They probably weren't all army they were probably maybe some personnel I don't know that. They were American Army nurses, there were doctors, there were various company officers from many of the groups over there. So just a conglomeration of people.

When did you arrive in Europe, and where?

We arrived in Europe six days after we left which would have been in February of 1944. We got off the Queen Mary into another, like a ferry boat, they call them lighters. We were transferred from there over to a dock where the band was playing for us and the Red Cross was handing out coffee and donuts. Then we immediately got on a train to go down to this little town on the English-Welsh border called Hay, H-A-Y on the Wye River, W-Y-E. It was this small place and they'd set up Quonsets huts, barrack like things up in the field up by old Oliver Cromwell—one of his, summer homes, a castle with big brick walls around it with flowers, roses and all types of things. The officers we had slept in the castle or the big manor house and we slept in the Quonset huts. Anyway, it was quite nice. Hay had never seen an invasion like that. They had three pubs, a fish and chips shop, a tea room, and immediately if we had passes, they'd open the tearoom and there'd be nothing left. Tea and crumpets were gone, and the fish and chips shop never had any fish and seldom had any chips. The pubs would sometimes run dry.

How long were you in Hay?

We were in Hay probably from February till June 6, and what we did there was just take motor marches into Scotland and around. Get familiar with driving in England, which is on the other side you know. Other side of the road, they drive on the opposite side. But it wasn't difficult because there was nobody else on the road.

What was really your purpose of being in Hay? Where you just waiting to go to Europe?

Exactly. Waiting to go down to the English coast to go across. Eventually. In Hay, there’s one thing I should mention, because it happened several times. We were all dressed in our classy uniforms, marched down into town, lined up in the street. Evidently some young lady had been molested. So she and her father and the town constable walked down the whole line and we're all petrified, worried about if she was going to pick one of us, and she never did. Later on that happened to us again down near Plymouth, England. So we'd all decided that if they tried that again, we'd all say, “No! We were all involved! I was involved!” That story remains in my mind because I was an innocent little soldier boy. In fact, I’ll tell you one little story, I can't tell stories but I'm going to tell this story, you can edit it out. Driving in Colorado for this officer, this young lieutenant, three or four years older than I was. He was a convoy commander. He asked me one time—this still sticks in my mind—he said, “Private Sanders, you go with girls?” "Nope" “Do you smoke?” "No I don't" “Do you drink?” "No I don't" He says, “What the hell are you living for?” I never forgot it.

We're at the end of a tape. Lets take a break.

Section below transcribed by Rory H ('10), cleaned by Elana L ('07)
Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

Where did you go after you left Hay?

After we left Hay, we were on our way down to the coast and it was D-day because the villagers told us it was D-Day. I remember one of them saying, "Here comes the bloody meat wagons" meaning the ambulance. It's D-Day. So we are on our way down and we stopped along the coast, under some trees, along a road to wait to go across The Channel. We waited there for a month probably on that road.

Where was this road? Was it on the coast of Britain?

It was on the coast of Britain near Plymouth, England. Plymouth was where we were going to depart from on the Liberty ship. So we sat there on the road. There was a place called the Roman Rings where the Romans had had battles and there were rings around a hill. We would walk- this was just after D-day and we would walk up to the Roman Rings and sit there. There was an airfield down below where we would watch the airplanes pull gliders into he air to cross the channel to France. They just went constantly, all the time, pulling gliders. Either troops or materials would go across. On that day there were just thousands of air planes as far as you could see, of both sides. There were no German planes available. That was June 6, and we sat there probably until the first part of July. It’s in this book.

Then we went eventually down to Plymouth and loaded on to liberty ship called the Henry M. Rice and we drove our ambulances onto a cargo net and they were hoisted up into the hold of the ship and down into the hold. After we all were loaded, the ship went across the channel. It didn't take long. Just a few hours across the channel because its not far. We sat off the coast for six days, off Utah Beach, which was one of the beaches that was landed and probably the easiest beach. The only thing that happened to us there was one night —and this is documented—a German bomber came over and dropped a string of bombs. One bomb lit on one side of the ship and one lit on the other. That's how close we were. Down in the hold were air force tankers full of aircraft fuel. We thought that if they dropped one on us we were all gone. After six days, we were so eager to get off that ship that we went down in the hold and helped the longshoremen get our ambulances onto the side and into a landing craft tank, an LCT. Which could hold about eight or nine tanks or ten ambulances.

From there, we drove up the beach, Utah beach. We drove off into the water because they had put a bridge out into the ocean a ways that was underwater, with some flags sticking up so that we could stay on the bridge. Then we got onto Utah Beach and immediately we were taken to a field. The company commander said "Oh, you got to dig a  trench, we are in the war.” So we all dug a trench. We didn't even get the trench finished until he said that we were on the move. So we went up to a town called Sainte Mere Eglise, which has been in a lot of movies where the 101st Airborne landed and there was a man caught on the steeple. We continued on to a town in Normandy called Catants where we started to evacuate casualties, a little bit later. Any questions so far?

From there, on August 1st we were on our way to catch the 4th armor division to hook up with the battalion 8 station. On the armor column, it's a traveling truck type of operation. The wounded would come back and then we would take them back to a field hospital. Like a MASH unit. You've seen MASH in Korea. Well we called them EVAC hospitals. The same kind of thing, a tent hospital. This was on the First of August. The 4th armor was on their way on to a town called Rennes which was the first large town in Brittany. It was the first action and they really got hit hard. We pulled into a field eventually. It was August by then and it was summer time. The field, you have got to imagine this, was lined with trees all around and green grass. We pulled our ambulances in, all in a row. I think we were about five or six with this particular outfit. We started to load casualties. I can still see that first load. There were four litters. The ambulance could hold two litters up on here and two litters on the floor.

What was a litter?

It was like a stretcher, but we called them litters. The first load were four and a medical doctor came along and said "Pull him out, he's dead.” So that was out initiation. We went from that field back up to Catants up in Normandy. We drove for two days and two nights hauling people back. We thought that we would start keeping track of how many we carried and we never, ever could keep up with it. So that was our initiation in. One thing that still stands out in my mind is there was a German solider that had been killed on the road and every time we went by him, he was shorter because tanks or something would run over. I can't get that picture out of my mind neither. Finally, I didn't even look that way.

From there, we traveled down to...eventually we traveled to Ance and then to Chartres and Chartres Cathedral. If you know anything about France, you can see the two spires of the church. Everything was fluid- the Germans were here and we were there. Sometimes you'd go through a crossroad and then the Germans would go the crossroad. We had detailed maps. We had Michelin maps. They were very detailed. They would tell us when we left with a load of casualties "Okay, we think that we are going to be on this route.” N-40 or whatever it might be, "And you'll come back.” The way that we would find our way back a lot of the times is to watch the debris along the road where the sea ration boxes and the cans and various things. Or the road might be torn up by tank treads.

At about that time, Paris was liberated and we were in Fontainebleau, which is a city just south. Louis XIV summer palace was there and there again we had to dig in because there was some shelling going on. But still, our main job was to carry casualties back to these EVAC hospitals. If the front was not moving rapidly, then they would be a short distance behind. If we were moving rapidly, they could be 50,60,70 miles back till you found one. At night, we could not drive with our headlights. We just used little identification lights which we called "cat eyes" on the front fitter. It took us a long time for us to go.

Why wouldn't you use the headlights?

?So we wouldn't be spotted by any marauding aircraft or whatever. We never used headlights. We had good eyesight then, or pretty good. We would use the tops of trees because all of the roads in France through Europe are tree lines. If you watch up here, we weren't going very fast, then you could stay on the road. One incident happened there. I was driving one night and I went into a giant she shell hole or bomb crater. I just put it into four-wheel drive and went back up the other side and kept going. As far as the medical, what we did with the patients, which were all mostly young men of course unless they were civilians, take care of them the best we could. We used our helmet for any bodily functions that they had to use on the way back. If they need a plasma bottle change, we would do that. Sometimes we it would be four or five hours to get them back to an EVAC hospital where they could finally get some medical treatment like a MASH unit. They have been treated by a medical officer but not to any extent. They did amazingly well and we lost very few people after they received their first medical care from a medical doctor. Then from Fontainebleau, we went onto Chartres, was it? I'd have to have my maps out to tell you.  Anybody have any questions so far?