Oral history interview of Henry E. "Hank" Freedman

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Henry E. "Hank" Freedman
Creator:: Goldfarb, Stephen
Freedman, Henry E., 1921-2021
Publisher:: Atlanta, Ga. : Kenan Research Center
Date of Original:: 2003-12-17
Subject:: Amphibious assault ships
Ardennes, Battle of the, 1944-1945
Malmedy Massacre, 1944-1945
Anti-Semitism
Prisoners of war--Germany
Prisoners of war--United States
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Aquitania (Steamship)
United States. Army. Infantry Division, 79th
United States. Army. Infantry Regiment, 313th. Company K
University of Alabama
Auburn University
United States. Army. Corps of Engineers
United States. Army. Infantry Division, 106th
United States. Army. Infantry Regiment, 422nd
Berga (Concentration camp)
International Committee of the Red Cross
Stalag IX B
Stalag IX A
Rich’s (Retail store)
People:: Freedman, Betty (Elizabeth Sartin)
Fakete, Andrew, 1921-1985
Jones, Alan Walter, 1894-1969
Cavender, Charles C., 1897-1995
Foster, Captain
Location:: France, Le Havre, 49.4938, 0.10767
France, Rouen, 49.4404591, 1.0939658
United States, Georgia, Floyd County, Rome, 34.25704, -85.16467
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, 33.749, -84.38798
United States, Kentucky, Kenton County, Fort Mitchell, 39.0595, -84.54744
United States, Massachusetts, Bristol County, Camp Myles Standish, 41.9474841, -71.1417201
United States, Massachusetts, Suffolk County, Boston, 42.35843, -71.05977
United States, New Jersey, Hudson County, Hoboken, 40.74399, -74.03236
United States, Tennessee, 35.75035, -86.25027
Medium:: oral histories (literary works)
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/mp4
Description:: In this interview, Hank Freedman describes his experiences in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. He recalls his childhood in Boston; his mother died when he was eight years old, and his father was a WWI veteran who was unable to care for three children. His grandmother organized the adoption of the children by relatives. By 1942 he was the sole support of his grandmother so he should not have been drafted, but he was. He trained as a machine gunner, but was sent to school to be an engineer. Before he could finish, the Army shut the school down. His original unit had already departed for Europe. He recalls that many of his friends were killed when that unit hit Normandy Beach. He joined an Intelligence and Reconnaissance (I&R) unit and left for Europe via Glasgow (Scotland). In addition to I&R, his duties included communications and laying wire. He describes his unit's movements across France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The weather was cold and cloudy, so they had little air support, but continued to aggressively push toward Germany. When the Battle of the Bulge began, his unit was the easternmost and were isolated and captured quickly. He describes the offensive as a complete surprise, and that the enemy had done a good job of finding their weaknesses. He kept a diary and quotes from it about his captivity. At the time of the capture, he was able to comprehend an argument between the German sergeant and an officer; the sergeant wanted to shoot them all. He relates that the Massacre at Malmedy has just happened. Freedman and his unit spent their first night of captivity huddled in a church courtyard; the temperatures were below freezing. They were then taken to a train yard to be placed on a train bound for a prison camp, but American bombers had bombed the tracks, so they were forced to march another fifteen to eighteen miles. They were placed aboard a Forty and Eight railroad car, which was designed to transport forty men or eight horses; he recalls the train was filled with at least 65 men. On arrival at the prisoner of war camp, the Jewish men were separated. Many men threw away their dog tags so their religion could not be determined by their captors. They were interrogated and asked about their families and home addresses. When they refused to tell, the guards stripped them to the waist and assembled them outside, where the temperature was zero degrees. One American officer urged them to divulge the information, but they would not relent; the Germans finally gave up. Because he was a non-commissioned officer, he was treated better, but all the Jewish-American soldiers were taken to a labor mine and many did not survive. He describes living conditions in a badly over-crowded camp, including food and lack of bathing facilities. He describes how the Russians would dig up grass and use their helmets as a cooking pot and boil the grass to make soup. He is critical of the policing of the delivery of Red Cross packages and states that they would have been much better off if they had received weekly packages. He recalls a time when the German guards shot at American planes flying overhead; the planes strafed the camp and killed some French prisoners and the German guards used the event to taunt the prisoners. Mr. Freedman describes his liberation by American troops; the Russians, French and English could not praise their liberators enough. The liberating troops brought cases of C-rations and the prisoners got sick because their systems were not used to large amounts of food. He was flown to Camp Lucky Strike, a medical evacuation unit in France, was given a perfunctory examination, and was given a choice of a rehabilitation camp or hospital; he chose the hospital. At the time of his liberation, he weighed 110 pounds. He flew home from France. Before landing in New York, the pilot of the plane asked if there was anyone from Boston on the plane, and he invited Freedman to come up and "see your city." He recalls crying like a baby. He called his grandmother and when she realized it was Hank, she fainted.
Train
Hank Freedman was in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II.
VETERANS HISTORY INTERVIEW HANK FREEDMAN December 17, 2003 Interviewer: Stephen Goldfarb Transcriber: Stephanie McKinnell Stephen Goldfarb: This is December 17, 2003. We’re at the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta, Georgia. We’re having an interview with Mr. Freedman this morning. My name is Steven Goldfarb. Mr. Freedman, would you introduce yourself, spell your last name, and tell us a little bit about your background. Henry Freedman: Well I’ll start off by saying I’m Henry Freedman, everybody calls me Hank. My last name is spelled Freedman. I was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. I’m the oldest of three. I have a younger sister and a younger brother who are still alive. As far as my background growing up was concerned, unfortunately, when I was about 8 ½ my mother passed away and my grandparents, my maternal grandparents decided at that time that my dad, who was a World War I veteran and fought in the trenches during World War I would not be able to take care of us. So she made the big decision that various members of the family would adopt my brother and I and my sister. So grandparents adopted my brother and myself and an aunt and uncle adopted my sister. The big point of all of this is that my name used to be Miller. It became Freedman through adoption. I had three uncles, brothers of my mother. My uncles became my brothers. My sister did not know that she was my sister, and the family did not want her to know that she was my sister. And so she grew up until she was 20 years old not knowing that she had two brothers. I made the mistake one time of sending her a birthday card and this was before I went overseas, I was in the service, and I signed the card ‘your loving brother.’ When I got home, the family absolutely blew their top. My grandmother was a very dominate person, and it was her idea that those different things would take place with regards to the upbringing of us three. I feel very grateful that my grandparents did what they did. I might had, I’m a very sentimental person, and if I get a little emotional you’ll have to forgive me as I recollect everything. But at any rate, I went through the various elementary and grade schools and high school and graduated high school… SG: Where? HF: In Boston. And I had an uncle/brother who was a druggist, and my grandmother thought that since he was successful in the pharmacy business I should study pharmacy as well. Which I did for about a year, and it was not anything that I was particularly fond of, so I gave that up and just simply went to work. SG: What year would this be now? HF: Well, my mother passed away in 1932. She, I’m sorry 1930, she was 32 years of age. And so the years progressed, and I eventually went into the service in October 1942. I was working at the time of Pearl Harbor. SG: Give us your birthday so we can compare. HF: Birthdate was September 21, 1921. SG: So you were then 21 years old? HF: That’s right, that’s exactly right. And so I was drafted. I was working, I might add that I found out afterwards inasmuch as I was the sole support of my grandmother, my grandfather had passed away he died when I was 15. So I was the sole support so under the terms of the laws and the rules that the government had made, I was not even supposed to have been drafted. But nonetheless I was, and I served in the US Army. I entered the service in October 1942. I joined the 79th Infantry Division, 313th Regiment, K Company, and I trained as a machine gunner and went on maneuvers with the division in Tennessee. In those days we really didn’t have mechanized infantry as they have today, we walked everywhere we went. SG: Tell us about the machine gun group. HF: These were 30 caliber air-cooled machine guns that sat on a tripod, and they also equipped you with an asbestos glove, so if the occasion rose that it was more practical to hold the gun and use it as a machine gun, or as a Browning automatic rifle as we used to call them in those days, a BAR, that’s what we did. And I was a trained machine gunner. And I could hit anything at 50 yards, that I set my mind to, that’s a bit of trivia. And at the end of maneuvers in about the spring of 1943, I was given papers, a test, and there I was on the ground answering a million questions. I had no idea what the test was all about. About a month later, while in my bivouac area, I was informed by the company clerk that the test that I took turned out to be very good and so forth, and the government was sending me to school. So to shorten the story a little bit, I was transferred to the University of Alabama studying engineering at Tuscaloosa. And I went there for nine months and then they transferred me to Auburn university studying engineering. The whole point of the program was that the government was short of officers in the engineering area. And they wanted us to do four years of school in 18 months and be commissioned in the corps of engineers. It so happened that about the spring of ’44, after about a year in the program, the government shut the program down. So in the meantime, my outfit, the original outfit, the 79th division which had gone on maneuvers had already shipped out for the European Theatre. And I might add that somewhere along the line, I think the good Lord has looked over me, because they hit Normandy beach in D-Day plus 2 and suffered tremendous casualties. A lot of fellows that I knew and buddied with and served with were killed or wounded in that action. And at any rate, so it was a matter of reassigning me, and there was a division up in Camp Attebury, Indiana, the 106th Infantry Division, known as the Golden Lions. And I might add that my email address right now is goldenlionhef, and I happen to be the only one in the whole division who carries the golden lion reference in his email. For whatever that’s worth, I don’t know, but I mention that anyway. So I trained, I further trained with the 106th Infantry, but in this particular case, for whatever reason, they assigned me to regimental headquarters company INR. Now INR means intelligence and reconnaissance. And that’s what I wound up. So all of the machine gun training that I would either be devoted to either a rifle or a pistol or a Tommy submachine gun as a weapon in addition to all the other duties that I had to do, which basically was to communicate with the rest of the companies in the regiment to lay wire, as it were. We didn’t have too much in the way of wireless equipment. Motorola had made a sort of a walkie talkie that you could communicate with. And so I finished training with them, and in October was transferred to Miles Standish in Massachusetts… SG: ’44? FH: ’44. And from there we were sent to Hoboken, New Jersey, and we loaded on the SS Aquitania. And sailed over to Glascow, Scotland. All of these things are very vivid in my memory. I remember it was a very fast passenger ship, it was an English vessel. And it took us about four days. We had no escort or anything like that. They did have guns mounted on the deck. SG: Outrun the submarines? FH: Outrun the submarines, that’s exactly right. And so we further trained in England for a short while. Then we loaded on LSTs and went across the English channel and landed in France? SG: Was that stormy weather… FH: At that time, it was very choppy and the waves were extremely high, but my memory of that trip was that the Navy, perhaps eats better than any other branch of the service, the best meal I had overseas was from that LST going to France. And so we moved across northern France and did our thing as we moved across wherever we met up with the enemy. We had our little pitch battles, we captured a couple of towns. And then we moved into the Belgium Luxembourg area. And about the beginning of December of 1944. SG: Was it already plenty cold? FH: And it was very cold, zero degrees, a lot of snow on the ground, very cloudy. There was not too much in the way of air support because the planes could not fly at that time. And we were in an aggressive mode you might say, attacking and just trying to prod the German lines and see where the weaknesses were. In the meantime, they were doing a tremendous job of finding our weaknesses. They had been there for a long long time, and we had actually relieved another division when we moved in on that front. And so it so happened that history tells us that the 16th of December is when the Battle of the Bulge started, and the Germans started a counter offensive. SG: You were in intelligence and this was a complete surprise? FH: A complete surprise, that’s exactly right. And other intelligence that was available to us never indicated that. But as I said, they had done a very good job of finding out where our weaknesses were. And in preparation of this last offensive at it were, it was Hitler’s last great opportunity with his goal being Antwerp, Belgium. He wanted to get to Antwerp and get to the English channel and at that point seal off all the Allied Forces with an idea of invading England. And that was partly the reason that they did so much bombing over in England to try to soften it up and damage some of their resource areas and so forth. So there we were in front of this tremendous German offensive. And suffice to say we did everything we could, but the first thing that the Germans did was to knock out our artillery, and inasmuch as we had no support from the air force, and the artillery was gone, and the German’s had their Tiger tanks, 88 mm guns, and there we were trying to fight them off with machine guns, with rifles, with rifled grenades and things of that nature, and so my regiment, the 422nd regiment was the eastern most outfit along that Allied front, and the 423rd infantry was adjacent to us, the 424th was south of us. And ironically, we were attacking at that time when it happened. Well, everything happened in about three days, and on the 19th of December 1944, about 2 o’clock in the afternoon as I recall, I was captured. There were about 25 of us that had become isolated and the Germans had their tanks about 1000 yards away, and we could see them, but we had nothing. No way to try to counter attack or even stave them off. And they were just hitting us with everything they had. We were in the forest, we were in this Ardennes area, another reference is called the Shne Eiffel, and that’s another section of that particular area. And I was captured in the town of Bleioff, Germany. And that was in the afternoon. They lined us up as I had previously stated. The German sergeant wanted to shoot us, because they were on a very strict time table. And the 106th infantry which comprised about 15,000 men suffered about 8,000 casualties, a little over 8,000 casualties, dead, wounded, prisoners, etc… And so it was, you know, it was pretty much touch and go. And during the searching that they did of us, I had this little diary, this little diary right here, that I had brought from England and this particular diary is full with all kinds of places that I was going to visit, foods that I was going to eat, and cities and so forth. It even contains various recipes and all, and it contains a, almost a day by day recap of the time that I was in the prison camp. They called them stalags. I was at two stalags. I was at stalag 9B ______, I was at stalag 9A Zigenheim. SG: But they let you keep it? HF: They let me keep it. The German officer had his way. He told the sergeant I’m going to make the decisions and I’m going to determine whether we’re going to let these men live or whether we’re going to kill them, and go on. SG: You don’t know any German so you’re… HF: I can understand a little Yiddish, there’s a similarity between Yiddish and German. In fact one of the fellows next to me kept asking me what are they talking about, what kind of an argument is going on? And I told him, I said well, the German sergeant wants to kill us, and the German lieutenant is telling him he’s the guy in command and he’s the one that’s going to make the decisions. So the guy next to me said well I hope the lieutenant wins the argument, and obviously he did because I’m here to tell you all about it. And so… SG: It must have been frightening? HF: It was, because I think I mentioned earlier, when you go into combat you have two thoughts, one: you’re going to get killed, and two: you’re going to get wounded. And you hope that the wounds will not be too serious or life threatening. The idea of becoming a POW really never enters your mind. SG: Was there any training, basic training, about what to do if you were a POW? HF: No. SG: I know there is now. HF: Well the only part of the training was that you gave your name, rank, and serial number. And there was a little incident that I’ll tell you about when we got to the first prison camp. As to what happened along those lines. And so the Germans got us together, moved us into a church courtyard, and there we slept. And we all huddled. We made ourselves a little pyramid of bodies trying to stay warm. And the next morning they moved us out, and we marched ‘till I don’t know. SG: … December 20th? HF: This is December, that’s right December 20. SG: 1944? HF: Right, right. And so the whole idea as it turned out, was that we had to go someplace where they could load us on boxcars and take us to the prison camp. The first time we went to _____ was an area that had been highly bombed by our air force, and all the railroad tracks were sticking up in the air, so that precluded any trains from traveling in that area. So we kept walking and we walked another 15 or 18 miles. And we got to a town called _____, and that’s where we loaded on what is known as 40 & 8 boxcars. 40 & 8 boxcars comes from the days of World War I where the car would hold either 8 horses or 40 men. And, but in our cars, it not only held 40, they put about 65 men into a car, I mean, it was jammed, and we were in that car for a number of days. And on Christmas Eve, we were sitting in the freight yards near Frankfort and got bombed by the RAF. The cars were not marked, so the RAF obviously didn’t know what was down on the ground. The only thing they did know was that it was a marshaling area for German armor and German equipment, rolling equipment as we called it. And we kept yelling for the German guards to open the door and let us out because we were sitting ducks. Well nothing like that happened because the German guards had already taken off, they wanted to save their own skin. We get notice and feel that there were bomb shells landing pretty close to us. Finally the next morning, the Germans let us out and we saw where two cars down had been hit flush and 60 guys had been wiped out. So we continued the next day, Christmas day, we arrived at stalag 9B called ______. Now ____ was not a nice stalag by any means. The Jewish men were isolated, and then I was a non-com, which was fortunate because that was one of the few rules of the Geneva convention that the Germans adhered to. Non-coms under the Geneva convention don’t have to work, and non-coms were supposed to be treated a little bit better than privates or PFCs. SG: Non-com meaning noncombatant? HF: Non-commissioned officer. SG: Non commissioned officer. HF: Like a sergeant, staff sergeant, corporal, whatever. SG: What was your rank? HF: I was a sergeant. And so at that particular camp after a month, they moved me out to stalag 9A which was Zeigenheim. SG: Can we go back, you mentioned the Jewish POW being separated. How did they determine you were Jewish? HF: There were probably three ways. SG: Well I can think of one of them. HF: Well, one you told them. Number two, your dog tags indicated your religion. So for a Jewish soldier, it was an H, and if you were Methodist or Catholic or a Gentile, it reflected the type of religion that you had indicated to the army. The Germans knew this. Now I have to say that a lot of Jewish guys threw their dog tags away, in fact, a lot of guys threw their dog tags away, they didn’t even want the Germans to know what their name was as far as that goes. So at that, as I stated or implied a little while ago, when we got to the camp, one of the first things they did was to ask us our whole family history, what our family name was, where we came from, the names and address of our relatives and things of that nature. Of course we didn’t tell them. We said here is my name, this is my rank, and this is my serial number and that’s all you’re going to get. So what they did, they stripped us to the waist and took us outside. And said that, you know, you’re going to stay out here in this weather as long as necessary until we get the information that we want. And we were out there for several hours, and an American officer who happened to be there, I guess took pity on us, and he said look guys, it’s stupid and it’s ridiculous for you to persist in not giving them the information. I understand your training and the kind of information that you are supposed to give them, but in this case, tell them what they want to know so you can get back inside where it’s a lot warmer. SG: What was it, 10 degrees out? HF: Zero, zero. So we still insisted that we weren’t going to do it, and eventually the Germans got frustrated. One thing I found out about the Germans in this particular case, they have no patience. So if you’re a patient person, you usually can outlast them. It’s just a matter of making up your mind what you’re going to do, what the circumstances are involved, and so forth. So eventually they said let’s forget about this, go ahead back in the barracks. And that’s when they assigned us to various barracks. And I have all the barracks numbers in this little diary. And as I said, we were there for about a month and then they moved us out. Now what they did with the Jewish privates and PFCs and a number of other men who were not Jewish, they moved them to a camp called Berga. Berga was a camp run by the people who handled the holocaust, who were killing people in ovens and slaughtering them and so on. And they took these men and put them to work in mines. And what the Germans were trying to do is dig and establish underground mines [COUNTER 296] where they could build the resources they needed to continue the war. And these poor guys didn’t get any more food. They worked under just absolutely slave conditions. The fact that they were GI’s, the fact that they were American soldiers is what actually saved their lives. Because as I said, these were the same people who were slaughtering civilians. So that’s what happened there. I happen to have one of the men that went was from my hometown, I knew him very well, and he never made it because of the conditions. And so that was the stalag or the camp, it was called Berga. More recently, I think some of those men, if they applied could have gotten some kind of compensation through the German government for the way they were treated. SG: You avoided this because you were a sergeant? HF: Right. Now I might add that I did get a form like the other men got requesting compensation, but I simply wrote a note on there and said I’m not entitled to it. I didn’t go to Berga, thank God I didn’t experience what they did. So that’s what we experienced. I was at stalag 9A Zeigenheim for the balance of the time. I was actually liberated about the first week in April of 1944. Our diet consisted of a can of soup and a piece of bread. That was it. We had no washing facilities. Several times, as indicated on here, they de-loused us and the international Red Cross in my opinion, did a very, very poor job of policing these stalags and seeing to it that they got proper food and seeing to it that the men received their Red Cross packages. If we had received Red Cross packages once a week per man, as we were supposed to, it wouldn’t have mattered whether the Germans fed us or not. We would have subsisted very nicely because the packages consisted of all types of food, concentrated foods, cigarettes, and powdered milk and very, very highly concentrated chocolate bars. SG: Did you ever get any of them? HF: We got three, and again, I indicated it here, the first one we split amongst four men. The second one several weeks later, we split amongst eight men, and the last one we split amongst twelve men. Well in retrospect, as I think about it, it’s a little humorous because you take a can of sardines and start splitting it amongst 12 men, the sardines didn’t go too far. So you have to, there was a lot of compromising going on, I’ll swap you one sardine for this, that kind of thing. SG: Tell us a little bit about the other fellows who were in it, and have you kept up with them? HF: Yes, yes, I’ve got several buddies and I have been able to go to some reunions. And I also might add that we have reunions once a year of the stalags. And we had one this past year in the spring in Orlando, Florida. And I met with a bunch of guys, and thank God, that those that are left are managing. They are enjoying… SG: Did you have a best friend amongst these people? HF: I had, no, I had a best friend in the 79th Division, and he has since passed away. He was a Hungarian fellow by the name Andrew Thackady. And he lived in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and we became very, very close friends, I mean real buddies. The action that took place during the battle of the Bulge to some extent was such you didn’t have that much time to establish a relationship. Now I know and I know of many cases where in various companies, the guys would share a foxhole or share a particular area or an experience and things of that nature, and it was, you know, that is nice, and it’s good, and I have gone to reunions where a bunch of guys, let’s say from H Company, maybe a dozen guys from H Company were able to stay together down through the years and communicate with each other and so forth and really become close friends. In fact, the last reunion that I went to in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, I was sort of adopted by H Company people because the, my old outfit, the headquarters company 422nd, I was the only one there. Now I communicate with several guys, there’s a fellow in Washington, there’s a fellow in Pennsylvania, there’s a fellow in Chicago, there’s one in Texas, Massachusetts, there’s about a half a dozen that I stay in contact with, and we renew our remembrances you might say. And we’re all thankful for the years that we have and hope to have. I’m certainly not a young guy by any means, but I have to say very honestly I don’t feel my age. I have a son, two sons. I have one son in Orlando, Florida. I have a son in Suwannee, Georgia, near where I live. Each son had two girls. And so I have my wife, unfortunately passed away this past January. Next month will be a year. SG: I’m sorry to hear that. HF: We were married for 51 years. SG: OK, so let’s get back to – is there anything you want to say about the officers that you served with? If you were in headquarters, you were around officers, any names you want to give us, any… HF: Well, I have, there’s several. Major Allen Jones. Major General Allen Jones was head of the division. And we had Colonel Cavendar and there was another Colonel, there was a lieutenant. Well, my immediate superior, Captain Foster, was from Knoxville, Tennessee, and he was our commanding officer, and he was with us at the time of our capture. SG: But they separated him out? HF: Yes. He went with us but eventually he was separated. The comment I could make I guess with regard to the officers and with regard to how they handled themselves, we had a very nice group of officers. They were all gentlemen. They were all men who had served in the army for quite some time, and men with compassion and you know, people type people as it were. We had, I guess to this day, we all feel that from General Eisenhower on down, the officers at the very high level did not make decisions that were right as far as we were concerned. History has proven, and in some of these papers that I have, it would be indicated that they had some army units, combat units in reserve, and when the time came that you needed to help out the 422nd, my outfit, because it was surrounded and being badly battered because they had no artillery, our thoughts were where was our artillery. Certain we’ve got other artillery battalions that can be brought up. We had cannon company, we have anti-tank company, groups that could have been brought up. The 422nd, my outfit, and the 423rd, were devastated. The 424th, which was south of us, they managed to pull back, and they didn’t suffer as many casualties as we did. SG: What kind of percentage of casualties did you have? HF: In total, over 50% of the division. SG: Of the division… what about your… HF: In my outfit, we had, it was just about 50% killed, wounded. Most of the casualties prisoners. SG: Like yourself? HF: Right. I was, according to some newspaper things that I’ve seen, my family heard that I was missing in January. They didn’t know until March that I was a prisoner. SG: And this is ’45? HF: That was ’45, that’s exactly right. So… SG: How did they find out? HF: Through the army. And through the chain of command as the information was progressed through the various army outfits, and it began to be able, you can kind of imagine that around the 16th of December, when the Germans started their counter offensive, it was chaos. Absolute chaos. The Germans, well just to give you a few little details that I can, the coldest snowiest weather in memory in the Ardennes forest on the German-Belgian border, now these are all battle facts. And they don’t ever recall that a battle was fought. I might add that the Battle of the Bulge was the largest land battle that this country was ever engaged in, so that gives you some idea of the scope. Over a million men, 500,000 Germans, 600,000 Americans, and more than fought at Gettysburg, and 55,000 British were involved in this battle. Three German armies, _____ corps the equivalent of 29 divisions. When you consider there’s 15,000 men to a division what we’re talking about here in terms of personnel. Three American armies, six corps, the equivalent of 31 divisions. One hundred thousand German casualties killed, wounded, or captured. Eighty one thousand American casualties including 23,000 captured and 19,000 killed. Fourteen hundred British casualties, 200 killed, and each side lost 800 tanks. And the Germans lost 1,000 aircraft, and the air support that the Americans eventually got as far as we’re concerned, came kind of late. But at least it came, and it turned everything around, no question about it. The battle of the Bulge actually officially lasted from the 16th of December to the 25th of January, those were the inclusive dates that, in which it took place. In addition to that, the __________ massacre which was near us, 86 Americans were murdered. And that’s what the German sergeant wanted to do to us, there were only about 25 of us at that time. And my division, the 106th infantry division, average age 22, suffered 564 killed, 12,000 wounded, and 7,000 missing in action, at the end of the offensive, that was January. And most of the casualties occurred within the first three days. Two of the division’s three regiments were forced to surrender. But they didn’t surrender as regiments, it was in groups that it all happened, it worked out that way but it was in groups, and my group as I said, we were only about 25 guys. In its entirety, the battle of the Bulge was one of the worst battles in terms of losses to the American forces in World War II. And to go on, mid-December, three powerful German armies plunged into the semi-mountainous, heavily forested, Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg, that’s where we were. Their goal was to reach the sea, trap the Allied armies, and impel a negotiated peace, that was their goal, and I would like to think, and history has shown, that as much damage as we experienced, we stopped them, we slowed them down until other forces could come, you know, into being, including the air force, and really start to decimate their forces. And thinking the Ardennes was the least likely spot for a German offensive, the American staff commanders chose to keep the line thin. So there’s the weakness in the decision making that the top brass made, and what I was referring to earlier. So that the man power might concentrate on offensives north and south of the Ardennes, and we were in that middle. And we were in that, as the Germans moved in, and that’s where the name Bulge comes in, they created that bulge with Allied forces on the north and Allied forces in the south. And that’s, division sectors were more than double the width of normal defensive fronts, so to some extent, which when you consider that our artillery was knocked out, we were pretty defenseless, and its like a guy coming in here with a 9 mm gun and all you’re armed with is a pea shooter. I think the analogy is proper. And in snow and subfreezing temperatures, the Germans fell short of their interim objective, that of reaching the Muse River on the fringe of the Ardennes. And all the Germans accomplished was to create a bulge in the American line. In the process, they expended irreplaceable men, tanks, material, and four weeks after grim fighting with heavy losses on both sides, the bulge ceased to exist, and they had turned around and were hightailing it towards Berlin. SG: Let’s get back to, so you’re in your second prison camp. Tell us about liberation. HF: Well, at stalag 9A Zeigenheim, it turned out to be a rather monotonous kind of existence, I filled out what I could in terms of daily information. SG: How many people in the camp? HF: There were about 1,200 Americans, there were some French Moroccans, there were British, there were Russians. The French in the camp were split down the middle of the road, and there was barbed wire that separated barracks on one side and barracks on the other. The barracks themselves were partly wood and stone, outdoor latrine, still zero degrees. Sanitary conditions nonexistent. No real ability to shave, shower, wash. I never took my uniform off except when we were de-loused, about three times in about four to five months. SG: Did they just wash you, or did they have… HF: They didn’t have anything. There was a little bit of running water, or you could use a pail. What some of the guys would do, and Russians in particularly because we watched them, they would dig through the snow to get at the grass underneath and they would pull the grass up and they would put it in their helmets and try to get some hot water or try to build a fire and boil water and make a soup out of it. Well, when I got my rations, my slice of bread and my can of soup, I gobbled it down. There were some you might say buddies of mine, who when they got their bread, some of us had made little knives out of pieces of metal that we could find, so they would take that little slice of bread, that little slice of bread was almost an inch thick, and they would take that slice of bread and cut little slices out of it and they would nibble on it and put the rest in their pocket and at night, other so called buddies would sneak around and steal the bread out of the pockets. So one motivation as I said, get the bread, swallow it, I mean, saving it and trying to eat it piece-meal doesn’t give you any more nutrition than eating it all in one gulp, and the same way with the soup. And as I say, we did get three Red Cross packages in a period of about four to five months, which was believe me, very welcome, and we lived like kings for an hour or so because we had COUNTER 631 TAPE 1-B COUNTER 000 … split that package amongst all the men, so we didn’t really wind up with that much to go around. We had a few cigarettes, they were really welcome. It was great to take a big puff, and inhale and blow out that smoke. But I continued for the balance of the time. And they had a radio, a loud radio in the camp, and what they did, they would announce the goings on on the various fronts for the German men that were there, the guards and so on. They had, oh, they had outposts on the camp, machine guns, planned. There was one little tragic experience one time, one of the men, one of the German guards started firing at an American plane that was coming back from a mission and the plane was kind of low, we happened to be outside at the time, and we saw it all happen. And as he started shooting at this plane, the plane was heading away and maybe the pilot didn’t realize what was down on the ground and all he could see was this German machine gunner trying to get him, and he obviously got mad and before we knew it, the plane banked and came down and even before he reached the camp, we could see his guns going from you know, out of his wings, and it was at that time the Germans started yelling los, los, los, los, that meant get back in the barracks right now. So we got back in the barracks, we tried to get underneath benches, anything, because we knew what was going to happen and sure enough, these 50 caliber slugs started flying through the barracks through the wood, and unfortunately they hit about half a dozen French that were further down, and later on that day, the Germans told us, you see what your Allies are doing to you, they’re trying to kill you. Well, that was propaganda obviously, but they made a big deal out of carrying the bodies of these six Frenchmen to a cemetery not far outside the camp, and so that was one of those little incidents that took place. Other than that, it was as I said, kind of an everyday routine. Now and then they’d smack you with a gun butt and yell at you and we would cuss them out in English, which they couldn’t understand, so we had a ball doing all that. The big problem was we knew they couldn’t understand so we weren’t getting any satisfaction out of it. SG: Were the Jewish, in the second camp were the Jewish prisoners… HF: No, ______ was the one where they took care of all the separation and there was nothing at the second camp. The culmination of our stay in the second camp came when we started to hear the guns in the city near us, Zeigenheim. Later on, in later years, the Germans changed the name of that city to Trutsheim rather than Zeigenheim, I have no idea for the reason, but nonetheless, we knew that the GI’s were getting close. Everybody in the camp knew that the GI’s were getting close. SG: Did the Germans leave or did they stay? HF: Well, they decided that they’d better take off, but what they wanted to do was take us with them. Well we had a German, I mean an American officer, he was a medical man, he was a doctor, in the camp, and he came up with a plan. And everything, every time the Germans wanted to do something they would line you up outside and they would count you. That was their way of making sure nobody had escaped. You couldn’t escape from this place anyway, a couple of guys tried it, and they were shot. So… SG: Do you remember the name of this officer? HF: Morgan. SG: First name? HF: I want to say Edward. Morgan, in fact, if you’ll give me a minute I might even, here we go, here we go. OK, French and British moved out of stalag. Americans after lining up allowed to remain. Stalag 9A Zeigenheim officially turned over to American officer Captain Morgan. And we were liberated by the 6th armored division, 3rd army, and the 90th infantry division. I’ll read this to you, a day to remember. March 29, 1945. At 0800 we fell out in formation so the Germans could move us out of the stalag in groups. Previously, on the instructions of Captain Morgan, a certain number of the men were told to feign fainting and sickness. The results of which far exceeded anyone’s wildest hopes. While half of the men collapsed, the others carried them into the barracks where they were treated. In the meantime, the French and English had been moved out. After a while, the Germans told us that they would only take 150 of us. When the first group fell out, the Germans changed their mind and decided they wouldn’t move any of us at all. We got a very thick ____ soup and French bread. By early evening all the Germans had taken off or given themselves up. The camp was ours. The next day, March 30, we were liberated. White flags were displayed from all the towns. A 6th armored JEEP was the first American vehicle to enter the camp, what a sight. We got twice as much chow and were told that we’d leave at any time. Well actually I didn’t leave for about ten days I guess, something like that. And the few Russians, French, English were overwhelmed at their good fortune. They couldn’t praise the Americans enough, can we blame them. SG: When you went back to a regular diet after being on a starvation diet, was that a medical problem? HF: Yes, for me, because… SG: Can you say this in a nicer way? HF: All I can tell you is that when that 6th armored JEEP drove in, he had C-rations, cases of C-rations. C-rations to me would be like opening a can of dog food, it had that consistency. And I grabbed a can, I grabbed a case, ran into the barracks, tore it open and proceeded to get sicker than I ever though possible. I couldn’t down that stuff fast enough. It was vile. But it was food, and it was supposedly American food, and that was my experience with that. I might also add, after about 10 days, we were flown out of the camp to Le Havre, France, and at the airport, they had set up medical tents, and they gave us what I call perfunctory medical exams. Perfunctory meaning not too serious and not too comprehensive. In other words, open your mouth, say aah, and move over there. That was the problem, that was the problem that was created for the government in later years when all the GI’s started to come with all kinds of medical problems. But nonetheless, they told me then, he said we’re going to give you two options. We can either send you to a hospital in _____ which was south of where we were, or we can send you to what was called Camp Lucky Strike. Camp Lucky Strike like a rehabilitation camp where they took the men, they reoutfitted them with clothes, a duffle bag loaded with clothes, and they put them on a ship back to the states. I weighed about 110. I opted for the hospital and I said send me to the hospital. So they put about a dozen of us in an ambulance and drove us down to ______, which was heavily bombed. It’s sort of a city of churches, and I spent three weeks in the hospital there. Never got out of bed. They woke me up at all hours of the night giving me vitamins and food and everything. A week, about, after three weeks they sent me to another hospital in Paris. The problem there was I never got to see the city of Paris. I remember being driven through the Arc de Triumph but wound up, I think it was the 179th general hospital in Paris for about a week or ten days. I started to pick up a little bit, but still very thin. Even though I had an appetite, I couldn’t eat a lot of food. And I didn’t want to eat a lot of food because I knew how it would react. So then the time came for me to be examined by the doctors, the medical personnel, and they said again you’ve got two options, we can either give you a _____ kit with shaving equipment, fresh uniform and put you on a plane to the states, or we can send you to Camp Lucky Strike and reoutfit you and give you your duffle bag filled with all kinds of clothes and put you on a ship. So obviously I opted for the plane, keeping in mind that the plane ride that I took out of Germany to Le Havre was the first time I’d ever been on an airplane, so this would have been the second time that I would have been on an airplane. So 16 of us were loaded on a C-54 on May 8, 1945. And we flew from La Bourge field in Paris to the Azores for refueling. From the Azores to Newfoundland and we got there in the morning. The people in the Newfoundland at the airport had laid out the nicest, biggest breakfast that I had ever seen up to that point. And it was greatly appreciated, we were hungry. Then we got back on the plane and were flown to Mitchell Field in Long Island. And while on the flight, the pilot on the intercom said is there anybody here from Boston. And I was the only one. He said come on up to the flight deck, how would you like to see your city from 20,000 feet. I liked that very much, and I cried like a baby… SG: May 9? HF: 1945. I landed in Mitchell Field and I called my grandmother in Boston and I had an uncle who lived in Jamaica, Long Island, New York and when I told her, I used to call her Ma. I said Ma, this is Henry. And she kept saying Sam?, course she was an elderly woman by that time. And I said no Ma, it’s Henry. She kept saying Sam? I said Ma, it’s Henry and she fainted, and end of phone call. I then called my aunt and uncle in Jamaica, my Uncle Sam and my Aunt Ruth, and they were beside themselves, and the first thing my aunt and uncle wanted to do was take me to Macy’s and buy me a pair of shoes. But she also called Boston to make sure that somebody was looking after my Grandma. Then from there I went on R&R, rest and rehabilitation. They sent me to the Grove Park Inn. At the time I don’t know that I really appreciated the kind of place it was. SG: This is where? HF: Asheville, North Carolina. Magnificent place. Golf course, the whole bit, and I had four weeks of rest R&R. And from there they reassigned me to Maryland, I’m trying to remember the name of the camp. Somewhere I’ve got it. But I was discharged on November 25, 1945. Prior to my discharge, they reassigned me to Fort Meade Maryland, that’s where it was. And so, in order to keep me busy, they put me in charge of a warehouse, a big warehouse. The thing is the warehouse was empty. All it had was four walls and it was my job to sit there and make sure nobody got in the place, it was funny. But obviously I handled it OK. And November I might add, a little bit of trivia, a little bit of trivia. You’ve heard of Clark Howard? Part of the time that I was in Auburn, Alabama, we heard that Atlanta had a very active USO. So I used to hitchhike from Auburn to Atlanta. And in hitchhiking, I used to walk from Auburn to Opelika. And I’d hitch a ride and get to Atlanta. I met up with a man who was very active in the USO, he’s a man that started the Loveable brassiere company. His name was Frank Garsen. He, I don’t know the extent of his family, I do remember he had a daughter Joy. We got to be good friends. Frank Garsen, was, is or was Clark Howard’s grandfather, Joy Howard’s son. Joy Howard had married a GI who had come into the Atlanta area and probably participated in the USO as well and met up with her. Well the interesting part of all this is that he told me after my second or third visit because it was close for me to be reassigned, and we had heard that the program was going to close down, and I told him that. He said, well God willing if everything goes OK, when this is all over, why don’t you come back and see me and I’ll help you decide what to do with your life. I had a job to go back to in Boston but it wasn’t much. I knew that the laws that the government passed guaranteed that anybody working at the time they went in the service would be able to get their job back. So after I was discharged, I told my grandmother I’m going back to Atlanta and I was going to look up Mr. Garson. When I told her why, she was very unhappy about it, but I think I convinced her that I really didn’t have too much of a future in Boston. While I could have knocked around and found something and done something, but not anything that would have been something long term, and so I did come back. And I got hold of Mr. Garsen. His plant at that time was on Spring Street. He had a loft across from Coca-Cola bottling company. He showed me from his office how he could look down in the manufacturing area where the women were working with sewing machines and making bras and other types of intimate apparel. And we talked, and he said I believe you belong in the retail business, and with that, he called a friend of his who was a merchandiser at Davison’s which became Macy’s and now is kaput. And I went over and talked to his friend and his friend called a buyer upstairs and said I got this young guy, just came out of the service and so on and so forth and I think you ought to hire him. So January 1946 Davison’s hired me to sell appliances and electronics at $40 a week. The job that I would have had in Boston would have paid me $30 a week. So I was in high cotton. I notified my grandmother, I found a place to live, and I went to work for Davison’s. During the seven years that I worked for Davison’s I developed an interest in merchandising. I used to walk around the sales floor and see all of this merchandise and wonder and ask myself questions how did they know what to buy, how did they know what price to put on it, how did they know how many to buy and so on. So I told the big boss that I was interested in going into merchandising and he said well be patient. In the meantime, he moved me from appliances and electronics to the furniture and bedding department, he said so that you can get more experience, you can broaden your experience in retail. After seven years I got a call from Rich’s. At that time, as you probably know, everything was downtown. Anybody who went shopping went downtown, whether you drove or whether you rode a streetcar or a bus or whatever, you went downtown. And the streetcars used to stop in front of Davison’s and then they went down Forsyth Street to Rich’s. And the executives at Davison’s used to stand outside and see how many people got off to go in their store and wondering how can we get the rest of the people to stop and get off here instead of losing them to our competition. Rich’s called me and wanted to know if I was interested in coming down the street, as they called it, and I said yes. So on my birthday, 1953, that was seven years later, I went to work for Rich’s as an assistant buyer in appliances and electronics. In six months I was the buyer. A short time after that I became a merchandising manager and I stayed there over 33 years and retired from Rich’s. SG: When was that? HF: January 1987. Next month will be 17 years ago, and I’ve had the pleasure of one of the fringe benefits was that I got to travel a lot, and I got to be, if I do say so, quite a knowledgeable guy in the electronics field. I introduced Mitsubishi to this market in 1971. I think I’ve run out of some things. SG: Your wife, how did you meet her? HF: I met her at Davison’s. SG: And her name? HF: Her name was Elizabeth. Everybody called her Betty. SG: Last name? HF: Sartin. She originally was from Rome, GA, but she had left Rome to go to work at Davison’s, and she had been there, oh I want to say 8 or 9 years. And the way we met, Davison’s had a bowling team at that time in the downtown area, there was a bowling league. So I decided I’d like to bowl, and we met on the bowling team. And we got married in ’52 and stayed married for 51 years. Unfortunately in 1998 she had a stroke and fought it and lived with it for over 5 years and she passed away last January. SG: We’ll tie it up with your children, their names, when they were born. HF: Allen and Robert. Robert was born in 1955. Allen was born in 1958. Each son married and had two daughters. Robert lives in Orlando, he’s divorced after about 16 or 17 years but his two daughters live in this area, or I should say live in the Roswell area. The oldest daughter Jennifer is 23. She graduated from Furman, she’s now a teacher at Roswell High School. The younger daughter who is three years younger, Haley, and I might add both beautiful, beautiful gals and loving gals and so on. Haley is a sophomore at Sanford University at Birmingham, and she wants to be an elementary school teacher. My other son, and I might add that Robert is in the electronics business, he’s with an electronics chain in retailing down in Orlando. My younger son Allen got married, married a girl from Ringgold, wonderful, wonderful girl Holly. They’ve been married about 17 years. They have one girl, 11, Tori, another girl Jacey who is 3. And Allen is with Phillips Electronics, he’s a national sales manger with one of their groups. In a way, they both wound up in electronics interestingly. And he lives in the Suwanee area. I sold my house in Roswell and moved to Suwanee, I have an apartment, and met this beautiful young lady here, we’ve become friends, and I wanted her to be with me to participate in what I feel is a real privilege. SG: Well, we’re delighted to have you. In fact, my feeling is that you really are a member of the great generation, and the ones that have come after are just a pale imitation of what you’ve done and thank you. HF: Thank you for that. COUNTER 286
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Extent:: 1:12:36
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
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