Oral history interview of Archie R. Hooks

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Archie R. Hooks
Creator:: Vick, Archer
Hooks, Archie R., 1916-2011
Date of Original:: 2003-10-08
Subject:: Anzio, Battle of, Anzio, Italy, 1944
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Italy--Sicily
Hutchison, Sam (Frederick Eugene), 1918-1945
Kenison, Jack, 1918-2007
Dennison, Bill, 1918-
Rommel, Erwin, 1891-1944
Patton, George S. (George Smith), 1885-1945
Clark, Mark W. (Mark Wayne), 1896-1984
Pyle, Ernie, 1900-1945
Reynolds, Quentin, 1902-1965
Darby, William O. (William Orlando), 1911-1945
Georgia Institute of Technology
United States. Army. Reserve Officers' Training Corps
United States. Army. Engineer Battalion, 387th
United States. Army. Motorized Division, 7th
United States. Army. Army, 5th
Germany. Heer. Panzerarmeekorps Afrika
Krupp 28-cm-Kanone 5
Location:: Algeria, Oran, 35.69906, -0.63588
Italy, Civitavecchia, 42.0937524, 11.7922462
Italy, Verona, 45.4384958, 10.9924122
Tunisia, Tunis, 33.8439408, 9.400138
United States, Delaware, Lewes, 38.7745565, -75.1393498
United States, Delaware, New Castle County, Delaware City, Fort DuPont
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Fort McPherson, 33.70733, -84.43354
United States, Kentucky, Hardin County, Fort Knox, 37.89113, -85.96363
United States, New Jersey, Burlington County, Fort Dix, 40.02984, -74.61849
United States, New York, Richmond County, Staten Island, 40.56233, -74.13986
United States, North Carolina, Montgomery County, Troy, 35.35847, -79.89449
United States, Virginia, Fairfax County, Fort Belvoir, 38.7119, -77.14589
United States, Virginia, Newport News City, Fort Eustis, 37.15204, -76.5781
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Reese Hooks describes his experiences as an Army Engineer in Europe during World War II. He was drafted in 1941, just after graduating from college and getting a job. On the train to Richmond, he learned from experience that the bottom bunk in a Pullman car sleeps two. After basic training, he became part of a coastal artillery unit working with the Navy to guard the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. He recalls hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor. He describes the increase in activity within hours, restoring old artillery pieces and issuing live ammunition around the base. He recalls his efforts to get in to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and was finally able to get in to the school for Engineering. He describes OCS as very physically and mentally demanding. He tells of their stateside work while attached to an armored division, harvesting corn in Ohio, dismantling an old bridge to reclaim the steel for war production, and preparations to go overseas. His unit traveled to Africa by troopship, which he discusses in detail. He describes their first days in Oran, which were full of bivouacking, digging foxholes, and air raids. He reccalls that after the first air raid, the foxholes got much deeper. They built roads, depots, and prisoner of war stockades. He participated in the landing at Anzio-Nettuno beachhead in an LST as a battalion supply officer, helping to unload supplies and establish a port. He recalls the conditions of four months of being trapped on the beach by Germans. He mentions the Battle of Cisterna and the Army Rangers. He remembers a German gun firing on them from the hills above the beach. He describes breaking out of the beachhead and seeing piles of the dead. He describes continuing air raids and the importance of situational awareness. When the war ended in Italy, the unit was disbanded and Hooks became part of a special engineering unit which recovered German engineering pieces to help with the rebuilding of Italy. He left to go home from Genoa on a Liberty ship in November 1945 and was discharged in 1946. He discusses what life in the Army taught him.
Reese Hooks was an Army Engineer in Europe during World War II.
ARCHIBALD REESE HOOKS, JR. WWII Oral Histories October 8, 2003 Atlanta History Center Interviewer: Archer Vick Transcriber: Joyce Dumas [Tape 1, Side A] Interviewer: …Wednesday, October the eighth, two thousand three. And today I'm interviewing Mr. Archibald Hooks. And Mr. Hooks, if you'd go ahead and give me your full name. Hooks: I'm Archibald Reese Hooks, Junior. Born Troy, North Carolina, September the twenty-second, nineteen sixteen. Interviewer: All right. Well, we're glad to have you here today, sir. Hooks: Glad to be here. Interviewer: If you would, just kind of tell me a little bit about how you actually got into the Army. I assume you were in the Army, correct? Hooks: I was in the Army, yes. I was a product of the draft, the lottery of nineteen forty and I received a notice as a result of my little number in that to report for a physical exam at Fort McPherson, Georgia, on April the third, nineteen forty-one. I did report. I took my physical. I passed. Three days later, I was on a troop train with two hundred and fifty, sixty other people heading for Fort Eustace, Virginia, for basic training. Interviewer: At that time, was it…for you was that difficult? Were you excited? Were you…what was your overall feeling about getting that draft notice? Hooks: I guess there were mixed emotions. I wasn't very interested in leaving my job which I'd only had for about a year. Interviewer: What were you doing? Hooks: I was in the brass and copper business, sales, industrial metals. Only worked for about a year after finishing Georgia Tech and was really just getting started. So I wasn't too much interested in leaving. However, I understood it was for only a year at that time and that I would be back. My company supported me in the decision. So I was not happy, but I was not unhappy. Interviewer: Were you scared? Hooks: No, I wasn't scared. It was…there wasn't a lot to fear at that particular point. Interviewer: What was going on in the world at that time that you were getting drafted? Hooks: I guess the biggest thing was that the country was coming out of the Great Depression. Jobs were beginning to become available. Economy was beginning to improve. Housing was being built and it was just a general good feeling about the condition of the country as far as I was concerned. There were lots of problems as far as young people were concerned because of the stories we were hearing from Germany, from England and the troubles that the British Empire and the German people were having as far as the potential for an overall war. I can remember in September of nineteen thirty-nine, a group of my…we were all single fraternity brothers sitting around discussing the potential for going into the service. They were talking about what might happen there and there was some feeling there. But not a…I didn't feel a great deal of anxiety about it at that point. Interviewer: Tell me. You were…you had left…we had left off when you were on a troop train. Hooks: Yes. Interviewer: Tell me about that. Hooks: Well, I'll tell you one story that I've told that was quite interesting. When we got on the train at the terminal station in Atlanta, it was about a twenty-four hour trip in those days to Fort Eustace from here. We went through Richmond and changed trains there. Interviewer: Was this in the winter? Or is this…what time of year? Hooks: This was April. Interviewer: April. Hooks: April. And it was an overnight trip, so there were Pullman cars available and I thought I was being smart and I asked for the lower berth and got in early and I found out later that the lower berth slept two people. The upper berth slept one. So I turned all night, sleeping with a strange man in bed. [laughter] There wasn't a lot of sleep involved. Interviewer: I assume you were on your way to basic training. Hooks: Basic training at Fort Eustace. I had taken basic ROTC at Georgia Tech in the Coast Artillery. And I had indicated that on my forms and they assigned me, strangely the Army worked in a normal way, to a Coast Artillery outfit, which was basic training at Fort Eustace and I went there for about three months for the basic training. Interviewer: Is that hard? Hooks: It was a lot of hard work. It was a problem of sorts in that the training people…this was early on in the draft and the training, people who did the training were regular Army people from prior war, prior to the war and all. Some of it was tough to handle. We couldn't communicate too well with some of those. But it wasn't all that bad. It was busy. They had early hours and late hours and there was a lot of manual work involved with it. Interviewer: Did you…what did you think that…is there anything that's specific maybe that you struggled with or you found to be most difficult or maybe something that happened there? Hooks: There were some things that I'd rather not talk a lot about. It involved the mindset of the regular Army people. I could not cope with their understanding of life and what they expected. For example, we had a barracks of about, I believe about twenty-five people in the barracks. And there was a staff sergeant in charge of the barracks. Interviewer: Do you remember his name? Hooks: I don't remember his name and I wouldn't tell you if I did because… Interviewer: How old was he? Hooks: Thirty, maybe thirty years old. Probably had been in the Army for…I don't know this, but I would say ten years in order to be a staff sergeant. He expected us to wait on him a great deal. And he voiced his authority in sort of bad ways at times. He wanted us to buy him a radio for one thing, so he would enjoy life better and therefore we would enjoy life better. Those kinds of…a few of those kinds of things that bothered me. I don't know that they bothered other people. It did bother me. But as far as treatment and everything else was concerned, I have no complaints. The training was good and we learned. We worked on…I was assigned to a hundred and fifty-five millimeter long rifle battalion. I was assigned to a battalion of a hundred and fifty-five millimeter rifles. These are long-range artillery pieces. So our basic training was just basic military discipline and that sort of thing, plus the specialized training on the weapons and all. So it was interesting and I enjoyed that. Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about this…was this a howitzer? Hooks: No, it was a rifle which is the long…a howitzer's a shorter-range weapon. The rifle, hundred and fifty millimeter rifle is the long-range…I think it's about twenty-mile range on it. Interviewer: And how many people…I guess you were assigned to a platoon, is that correct? Hooks: I was assigned to a platoon and to a squad within the platoon, yes. Interviewer: And how many people in your platoon? Hooks: About forty, if I recall correctly. I'm not sure about it. It was four squads of about ten people, plus the non-commissioned officers. Interviewer: Do you remember any particular friends that maybe you tended to gravitate toward in your squad or in your platoon? Hooks: There were a few, but not close. There were no close ties. I did have a…one of my sergeants was…turned out to be a pretty good friend. I was the…my battery commander in this unit was a Georgia Tech graduate and he saw my record as Georgia Tech, and asked me if I would help this sergeant, who was trying to go to an officer's school, in his mathematics. So I got a pretty good assignment as a result of working with him on that and we got along pretty good. Interviewer: Well, good! Hooks: But that was about the only one. It really wasn't the time for…we had, as I said earlier, long hours and you were tired. I didn't get into much as far as personal relationships in that unit. Interviewer: Was it a time that you enjoyed? Did you enjoy learning to work with the weapons? Hooks: I won't say anything special. It was interesting. I mean, the fact of mechanics. Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about…during that training was there any one particular thing about the Army or the MOS that you had, the job you had…was being in the military just a job or was it exciting or was it something that you just were trying…wanted to get through. Hooks: At that time, it was probably more just getting through, because that was prior to Pearl Harbor. I was in for a year. Interviewer: That was before Pearl Harbor? Hooks: Yes. This was April of forty-one when I was drafted. And we only were signing up for a year service. So, I was…I just wanted to get my year behind me and whatever that involved. After the Pearl Harbor situation, it changed drastically. Interviewer: Well, tell us a little bit about that. Do you remember where you were on… Hooks: Very vividly. I was…I'll bring you up to it real fast. From that basic training, I was sent to Fort DuPont, Delaware, for assignment to a DuPont…to a Delaware National Guard unit. And they set me with a detachment, a special detachment down to Lewes, Delaware, which is on the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. And we worked with a Navy group there, questioning shipping coming in and out of the…monitoring really was what we were doing, the shipping coming in and out. And on a Sunday afternoon, I was…happened to be a Sunday when I was off duty and I was lying in a tent listening to a ballgame of some sort on the radio. Interviewer: What ball…who was playing? Hooks: I can't remember the ballgame, I just remember some sporting event on the radio. Obviously we didn't have TV in those days. All of a sudden, they broke in and said that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. And within hours, this was an old fort, Fort Lewes, I guess it was. L-E-W-E-S. And it had been a harbor defense post and it had a hundred and fifty-five millimeter rifle in placements all along there. And one of our jobs was trying to restore those. We had been working on them. The government had civilian people in there putting revetments and things around them and all. Within hours after that, we were issued live ammunition and the activity around getting those guns back in order was amazing. Interviewer: Wow. Hooks: It…literally within hours. So, that's where I was at the time of announcing Pearl Harbor. Interviewer: What was going through your mind at that time that…that… Hooks: Well, that was different from that earlier time of just being drafted and what that meant. Now we realized we were in a war and the first thing that I thought about was, “My year is going to extend.” And so I immediately thought of what I wanted to do. I had been drafted as a private and at the time I was a corporal. So I applied for OCS, officer candidate school, through the Delaware division. But it was a National Guard division and I got rejected week after week. They had it…I guess it was in two-week intervals, they had classes of OCS starting in the Coast Artillery. So I kept applying and got turned down and one day my sergeant said, “Hooks, you've got an engineering degree. Why don't you apply for engineer OCS?” I applied and two weeks later was accepted and went to OCS at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Interviewer: Were you excited about that? Hooks: I was excited about that, yes. Interviewer: What did that mean to you? Hooks: Well, it meant that I was…two things, I guess. One, that I would have more responsibility and two, that somebody felt that I was able to handle the responsibility. So, I felt that was okay and that…I certainly…I guess had some ambition that I wanted to improve. And nothing wrong with privates and sergeants and corporals. You've got to have them. But I was proud to be accepted. So I went on through that. That was a ninety day…they call them the “ninety-day wonders.” They're second lieutenants who came out of OCS. Interviewer: [inaudible] where was it [inaudible]? Hooks: Fort Belvoir, Virginia, right outside of Washington. It's the head of the Corps of Engineers, schools and headquarters for Corps of Engineers in the U.S. Army. Interviewer: Did you like the school or [inaudible] Hooks: I liked the school. It was extremely difficult. It was very taxing. The officers that ran the school were West Point or who had just completed these earlier courses. I was in the fourth class that went through. They had three classes prior to mine. And there were about two to three hundred second lieutenants. Interviewer: Did you make any friends in there? Hooks: Yes. Some I still have. Interviewer: Do you want to name them? Hooks: Jack Kennison, Bill Dennison. Unfortunately, at my age, most of these have gone on. So, they're not around, but… Interviewer: So you did make some good friends? Hooks: But I did make some friends and I was with Jack Kennison at one of our reunions just two weeks ago. Interviewer: Oh, wow. Hooks: So, he's still alive and he was a good friend of mine. Interviewer: Was there anything in particular that stands out in your mind about officer candidate school? Hooks: It was tough. It was a very rugged program. Interviewer: What was hard? Can you remember a lot of it? Hooks: The discipline. You ran everywhere we went. We didn't walk anywhere. You had to run. The officers were very strict on military discipline. The problems we had, one of the big things, they called a forty-eight hour night problem, or day and night problem of field exercises, but it lasted for seventy-two hours and was very strenuous with no sleep. It was mainly physical and mental. The expectation of being kicked out because you didn't qualify or something was always there. We had people, many, who started off and never finished, didn't make it. So, there was a lot of mental and physical exertion [inaudible]. Interviewer: So to complete that course, you felt pretty proud about it. Hooks: I did. I did. I felt…and I've always felt proud about it. Anybody that completed it, I felt proud about it for them, cause I thought it was very vigorous under very trying circumstances. Obviously, it affected our lives very much as to what we did. Interviewer: During that time, was there an additional sense of urgency, I guess, since the fact that, you know, Pearl Harbor had just been bombed, so the likelihood that you were going to war was very real? Hooks: It was already real, because we had declared war at that time and we were in a war. So, yes. It was real. Interviewer: Did that make things difficult or… Hooks: I don't think it made it any…well, it obviously made more difficult from a time when we're not in a declared war. We knew, as I said earlier, I'd expected to be in a year and get out and go back to work. Now I didn't know when the end would be and what the end would be, so. Interviewer: So, what was the next step after OCS? Hooks: It was very interesting. And this was…seventeen second lieutenants from this OCS class were assigned to Fort Meade, Maryland, to organize the 387th Engineer Battalion. It was a paper unit and we, in addition to these lieutenants, we had a captain who was a West Pointer, who was a battalion commander. Interviewer: What do you mean by paper unit? Hooks: It was a unit that was in the Army on paper, but it had no people or anything with it. So it had been activated and we had this West Pointer as a battalion commander. We had a few lieutenants, a couple of captains who were reservists who had been called into service and we had these seventeen second lieutenants from OCS, plus a number of second lieutenants who came from colleges right out of the ROTC units. I think it was a total of about forty-six officers and eleven hundred and fifty enlisted men. And all of the…they sent in a cadre of non-commissioned officers who had had training and all. And then all of the privates, the soldiers in the group, were from civilian life in New England, mainly from New York and New Jersey, I guess. Interviewer: Looks like you had your work cut out for you. Hooks: We did. We were fortunate. We had good commanding officers who were used to discipline and who were strict and had some good training behind them that our basic training…although we were new officers that were running the…sort of the guts of the thing, we were given good advice and all. It showed up. This outfit, and I'll go into a little more detail later if you want, but this outfit was…we took out of civilian life. When I say “we,” the officers trained them and went overseas and went with them through the African and Italian campaigns and disbanded the unit after the Italian campaign. One of the few that…one unit that went from nearly three years intact, all the way through from basic training to disbandment, which I thought was an interesting thing. Interviewer: So tell me, in creating this battalion, what was your job? What was your overall goal? Did you build bridges? Hooks: We were a unique unit. We were not…the battalion name sort of designates the separate battalion. We were not assigned to any one unit. For an example, after we finished our basic training at Fort Mead, we were assigned to the armored division headquarters at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and moved to Kentucky. And our work there involved…the primary goal was to support the armored division training thing by building bridges and obstacle courses and engineering roads and things of that nature. But during that time, we also did…ran into some emergency situations. I was a company commander at that time and one of the…my company was assigned for about two weeks duty to go to Ohio to harvest corn that was being threatened by rain storms, see. Interviewer: Wow. Hooks: Corn was a necessary part of the military and the sustenance of the people in that area and they were having bad rainstorms and the corn was not being harvested and all. And we took two hundred and fifty men up in December and cold and wet and rainy weather in Ohio and harvested corn for two weeks. One of our companies went to the Ohio River outside of Cincinnati and dismantled a large suspension bridge, metal thing, to recover the steel to go back into war production. One of our companies went to an old fort and dismantled the…a World War One post and dismantled it. So we did a variety of jobs like that. And we were at Fort Knox when we got orders to go overseas. And so, that changed our assignment again. We were relieved from assignment to the armored force and were back on our own to train and stage and get ready to go overseas. Interviewer: You were a leader and in being a leader, taking on that role, going from civilian life to now being in charge of numerous people and responsibilities, was that something that you just sort of assumed or went into naturally or was it something you had to learn? Hooks: I can't answer that totally. I suppose I had some inherent things that helped me. I had to learn a lot from my Army training. I have never been one to oppose the disciplinary training in the Army. I think that in a military format is absolutely essential. And I think the disciplinary training instills in you something that you don't necessarily have without that sort of thing. I knew that I had certain things to do. I knew that the people and men under me had certain responsibilities and I felt that the training for them and for me enabled both of us, or all of us, to do what we had [to do] and I think that's the reason we did as well as we did in the service. There's a lot of things you wondered how they ever got done, but I think that business of training, the discipline…when an order is given, you jump. Not necessarily because you want to jump, but because you know that you've got to do it, trusting that the people above you have been trained properly too. So, I think that helped me a lot. I don't know that I had anything…if you…if you read back a little bit, I was twenty-five or six years old at this thing. We had…I had a million plus dollars worth of equipment that I was responsible for and the lives of two hundred and fifty men. So, that's responsibility. And I was just one of millions of those twenty-five year olds and less. Interviewer: Well, tell me, you had just mentioned, from the point where you all set up this unit and then there were some other things that you had done and…within the United States and then you were given orders and…take me from that point. I believe you were in Knoxville. Hooks: We were in Fort Knox. Interviewer: Fort Knox. Hooks: Fort Knox, Kentucky. Interviewer: And from that point. What happened next? Hooks: Well, things speeded up drastically. We had…every Army unit has a table of organization and equipment. The organization brings the men. The equipment brings all of the supplies and things that you're supposed to have in order to do whatever your mission might be. And during the civilian…I mean the time at Fort Knox, we probably had ninety plus percent of the men, but maybe fifty percent of the equipment; equipment being Caterpillar tractors, trucks, weapons, all of the things that go to any kind of a military unit. Interviewer: Why were you short? Was that just because of [inaudible]? Hooks: We didn't have the need for them at that point in what we were doing. But as soon as we were given orders, the first order we got was to bring ourselves up to the table of operation and equipment. So we got the additional men we needed. We started bringing in supplies and on some of them, we had to start training people to use them. And we got a lot of supplies we had never even thought about getting. Nobody had paid much attention to them because they were unnecessary things. But they turned out to be useful later on. So, that was a time of getting ready, being sure everything, the trucks, were operational; all of our vehicles. The equipment that we had…road graders. We had Caterpillar tractors, motorcycles, Jeeps and everything we brought that had to be made ready. And then these were made ready and packed up for…crated for shipment. And then we were, the unit of course, were brought up to…as far as we're supposed to have four pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks. People who wore glasses as I did were issued two pair of special glasses that were compatible with gas masks, could use with it. Things that we hadn't had any need for at all. Interviewer: Right. Hooks: We got all of that and we were sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for staging. And I forget the time we were there, but it was a very short period of time. Interviewer: Maybe a week or two. Hooks: Something of that nature. Till we got everything. Found our equipment and everything that was supposed to be loaded on the ship. And we boarded a Army transport, an old…well, it wasn't that old. It was a…it'd been in the service a good while, but it was not a piece of the Navy equipment. It was a U.S. Army transport, troop transport. Interviewer: [inaudible] Hooks: It was nice in a way. It was interesting. The officers had quarters, staterooms sort of. But where they'd had two in them, normally, they'd put extra bunks. There four in there. The enlisted men slept in hammocks as did the Navy people. They had a mess hall where the men stood up. They had tables that were at chest height for a space factor. Everybody…there were no chairs or anything. You stood up and ate. But the food was very good on the transport. Interviewer: What was your favorite thing to eat? Hooks: Steaks. They had steaks on the thing. And I was young in those days. Steaks were important. Interviewer: They had desserts? Hooks: They had good desserts. They had fresh fruits and they had vegetables that were…it was a very pleasant thing as far as that was…food was concerned. As far as the accommodations and all, it was tight and we were subject to a lot of drills. When we left, we left out of Staten Island, New York. I guess it was the next day when we woke up in the Atlantic Ocean that we were surrounded by a very large convoy including battleships and destroyers, cruisers. And we went across with that until we got to…almost to the…we didn't know where we were going until we got out on the sea. Interviewer: When you…when you first, I guess you said that you got out there and then it wasn't until the morning that you came out, I guess you got up that morning and you saw all these battle cruisers. What was going through your mind? Was that impressive? Hooks: That was impressive and exciting. I mean, also it gives you a little misgivings. “Why do we need all this?” Interviewer: Right. Hooks: Then they told us, I guess, a couple of days later we got notice that we were going to Africa. And… Interviewer: What was your initial reaction when you heard that? Hooks: I don't really remember, but I don't remember anything unusual about it. I didn't know except for what I'd heard of the African war down in the Egyptian area with the British and Rommel and those things. I didn't know too much about what was going on anyway. And I didn't know where in Africa we were going. So, we got almost to the Mediterranean and woke up another morning and looked out there and there was no convoy. All the battleships, everything, had gone except for a few miscellaneous ships. Of course, they understood what they were doing. We didn't know, but we were going into the Mediterranean at that time and it was, I suppose, a protected area. So we didn't need the convoy on there. So, we were the only…and we landed finally. We landed in Oran [port city in Algeria] in North Africa. Interviewer: What was it like there? Hooks: Unusual. It was sort of like the movie Africa. Oran and all of the Moroccan kind of culture. The buildings and things were what you would expect from seeing movies and reading National Geographic, things of that nature. It wasn't particularly unusual and there was no active military. The only thing that…in fighting, sort of thing, the only thing we got into at that point was some air raids. We were raided by air. Interviewer: The first time you realized that you were going to war, that you…that you saw, I guess, that…what was the first thing that you saw real that let you know, “Hey, I'm in a war”? Hooks: I guess, first inkling was all those battleships…the battleship and all those cruisers and things out there. That was the biggest mass…of course, it was Navy, but it was a mass of war vehicles. The first that I'd seen other than my harvesting the corn and stuff like that and building bridges and things. And then when we got into Oran, the first air raid we experienced was kind of a shocker to you. One of the things we had been told to do when we bivouacked was to dig us a foxhole to fall into. After the air raid, the foxholes were dug deeper than they had been the first night. That was certainly a [laughter] change. We got an awakening. Interviewer: You heard bombs go off and that sort of thing. You were actually being attacked by Germans? Hooks: The German air force. Interviewer: Did you see any planes? Hooks: Didn't see anything. They were night attacks. Interviewer: But you heard the bombs? Hooks: Yes. And they were in our area. We had some slight casualties. Not anything of…no deaths or anything at that point. Just shrapnel wounds and things like that. Interviewer: So they were actually right on top of you. Is that right? Hooks: Yeah. That area in Oran had some supply depots and things. I guess that's what they were looking for. Yeah. And then we were…they assigned a few of us to…parts of our units were sent up to Algiers and Tunis. And at that time, the war with Rommel was still going on in that area of Africa, but it was winding down. And before our units got up there, Rommel was defeated in Africa. So, they were all turned around and sent back to Oran and we were assigned to General Patton's Seventh Army and we found out later that we were staging to go into Sicily, when he made the invasion of Sicily. Interviewer: During this time, tell me a little bit more about it. Were there jobs that you were doing? Hooks: We did a number of different kinds of…I guess it would be called just engineer tasks. Always road building. There's always roads to be maintained, because the military traffic always tore up roads more than normal traffic. So there was always road building. In some areas, bridges and things of that nature. Some specialized…we ran some depots, supply depots, furnishing engineer equipment and supplies to various units and we built some prisoner of war stockades for the troops that were coming, had been captured. Interviewer: [inaudible] Hooks: Germans. German and Italian that'd been captured in the African campaign. They were all… Interviewer: Do you remember the…did you ever see a German soldier? Hooks: Oh, yes. Interviewer: Do you remember the first time you ever saw a German soldier? Hooks: I guess the first ones were in those prisoner of war camps. They were… Interviewer: Can you describe them? Hooks: Well, they were different. They had…part of this was Rommel's Africa corps, which were, as I understand it, the finest military people, troops and all as there've ever been. And some of them were just…the Italians were…there's a cliché, I think. “Italians are for love, not war.” And that was [laughing]…so they didn't want to fight. They weren't interested in really fighting. But they were just like people in any other thing. You're gonna find arrogance and you're going to find cowardice and you're gonna find different things that go on. Just a conglomerate of folks. Interviewer: Right. Do you remember…did they appear to be well…uh, uh…in good health? They appeared to be well…have the things they need or well-supplied or were they bones and… Hooks: No, they were not bones. They had been…Rommel's Africa corps was the elite of the German army. Their supplies far…were far better than ours. For example, one of them gave me his mess kit. We had a stamped out spoon and a knife and a fork out of some sort of aluminum or some other metal. This thing from the German, the Africa corps mess kit was a compact, stainless steel knife, fork and spoon that meshed together; beautiful thing. And their tents, where we had stakes, they had aluminum poles. They were well-equipped. There was no shortages as far as… Interviewer: They were a formidable enemy. Hooks: They were. He nearly…as I understand, they had much trouble with him. Interviewer: Did you ever see in any combat in that area? Hooks: Not there. As I said, before we got up into Algiers, Tunis, the war was over there. Interviewer: Okay. Hooks: But we went on into Italy after that and that was…I don't know whether you recall, but Patton and the British combined to go into various sides of Sicily and we were with Patton's army and during the time on the Mediterranean, after we sailed from Oran, we were circling around waiting for whatever the date and all was they had decided. The Italians supposedly capitulated. And they wanted to stop, give up. So the American force under Patton was divided into two groups, the Seventh Army with Patton and General Mark Clark was brought in as commander of the Fifth Army, which had been formed but not fully activated. We separated. My unit was assigned to Clark's Fifth Army to go into Italy. And we expected that we would just walk into Italy. But it didn't turn out that way. The Germans found out about what we were doing and they met the assault forces at Salerno and they had a tough time getting in. My unit was sent to go around Salerno, up above Naples. We landed at Banyoli [phonetic], which is a little port north of Naples and went into Italy from there. And there wasn't much…by the time…the Germans had gone down south to the Salerno thing, so we got in behind them a little bit at Naples. But they had…when they left there, they had destroyed a lot of the…what you call they trouble we're having…city functions and so forth. Naples had a great big port and they…for example, they had…they had sunk all of the shipping in the port to make it unusable for us. They had a railroad that ran up north. They had destroyed the railroad by going in and pulling up the railroad ties and blowing explosives to break the rails and to…those pieces of equipment and things. So, we were assigned immediately to try to bring back. And it was very interesting. The port, where we didn't have…where the shipping was sunk, we just went in and chopped off all of the top superstructure of all the vessels, laid planking on top of the ships and made a new port that extended out. It worked very well and it's something, you know, expedient, fast, to get our ships and supplies in there. And my company was assigned—I had a company at that time—was assigned to rebuild the railroad up to headquarters, to Serta [phonetic]. Interviewer: I bet that was pretty dangerous. [Tape 1, Side B] Hooks: Well, it wasn't dangerous. It was exciting to get it done. The Germans had taken what looked like a great big plow and put it on the back end of a locomotive and pulled the rail, the ties in too. And they had put tellar [phonetic] mines on all of the rails and blown them apart where they were bent. So we had to go in and salvage. They had two lines running and we went in and salvaged enough material out of the old by cutting on them and making short rails, short ties and things to get one line through, so we could get as far… Interviewer: Did it take a long time? Hooks: About thirty days. Thirty miles in thirty days. It was a…it was a…and then, at that point, we had companies that were building bridges, working at the port. I was on the railroad and then I was assigned, reassigned; we had a new commanding officer come in for our battalion. And I was assigned as battalion supply officer. And he made a lot of changes to the assignments of company commanders, staff and things of that nature. And we got orders to go to Fifth Army headquarters for a new development and it turned out to be the Anzio-Minturno beachhead invasion. And I went up. I was…I don't want to say fortunate. I went up with our commanding officer since I was involved with supplies at that time. And we got our orders to stage and get ready to go into Anzio. And Anzio at that time…the biggest excitement that I remember on that was when my commanding officer and I were talking to the Fifth Army engineer, who was giving us our instructions. He got between the two of us and he'd never met us in our life, didn't know us from Adam. But he put his arm around each of us and says, “It doesn't look good.” And then I had some trepidation. I was concerned about what was going on. [laughs] Interviewer: Well, tell me about it. Hooks: But we [went] in. The Anzio operation was…the Germans had stalled the land operation up through the middle of Italy at Monte Casino. And they had not…the Allies had not been able to get through and so the Anzio-Minturno was around the back, to get around the back and it was intended to go in behind, between Rome and Casino to cut off the Germans and make them get out of the Casino area. Well, it turned out that the landing was not much of a problem. There were no…very few Germans in there. The ones that were there were vacationing. It turned out that that was a rest area that they used. It's a little beach, two little beach towns on the Mediterranean. And I didn't see…I was assigned to go in with the early group to reconnoiter for a bivouac area for our headquarters and supply dump. I went into the beachhead at two o'clock in the morning riding on a tank full of seventy-five millimeter ammunition. That was the only way I could get off. We went in on LSTs as far as we could and then the tank got off and I took two of my sergeants and we went with the tank on the beachhead and we ran into no opposition at that point. Didn't even see anybody. So it was an easy landing, but the problem as far as the complexity of the thing was that the Germans had some reserve troops in Northern Italy that our intelligence had not spotted. And they brought them in and by the time we got established with lines on the beachhead, they had the opposition and the Anzio beachhead was a nightmare for four months. We had our biggest casualties in my unit and… Interviewer: How many casualties did you have? Hooks: Well, I don't have the whole figures. Interviewer: No, but I mean was it ten or… Hooks: Oh, it was more than that. We had a good many wounded. The best man in my wedding was killed. A captain was killed. A good friend of mine. Interviewer: What was his name? Hooks: Sam Hutchinson. He was… Interviewer: Can you tell me, were you with him when he was killed? Hooks: No, no. The beachhead was a very small operation. It was eight miles long along the beach and it was about six miles deep into the area. We were on a little knob of land there. Interviewer: Was there a name for this battle? Hooks: Anzio-Minturno was what…Anzio-Minturno beachhead operation, I guess was what it was called. And… Interviewer: So, you guys were basically attacked by the Germans. Hooks: Yeah, we were pinned down for four months and this…we had in the first thirty days over…nearly three hundred air raids on the little beachhead. And on February…we went in on January the twenty-second and on February the fifth, the Germans had brought those divisions from Northern Italy in to stop us in there and set up artillery. And on February fifth, they started artillery, round the clock artillery bombardment on the place. Interviewer: So what was that like for you? Hooks: That was unpleasant. It was… Interviewer: Was it scary? Hooks: Well, when things go on like that you get accustomed to expecting that this is going to be it. I guess February the fifth, we had our most casualties at one particular time. We had a number of my friends, officer friends, who were killed and a bunch of enlisted men got killed and injured when that artillery stuff started out. And that shakes you up. We hadn't had much in the way of anything except what I said earlier of the minor casualties before. So, it… Interviewer: Could you…when you were…tell me a little bit about where you were in Anzio. Were you in a…in a…in a…foxhole? Were you [inaudible]? Hooks: I was battalion supply officer at that time, as I said. And we set up our headquarters on the beach because our major project was helping unload shipping, supplies coming in. We established the port there and helped with the unloading of supplies as the LSTs and things brought equipment, people and everything in. Interviewer: Then you were doing this while being attacked. Hooks: Yes. Yes. Yeah. We had a number…that port was a target area because in the time when we had the air raids and all and the Germans brought shipping in around and fired from navy guns into the port area there. We set up our headquarters in the basement of, I guess, a four- or five-story apartment building that was right on the…oh, a couple blocks off of the beach. There were a number of groups that had…if you've seen some of the pictures of the Italian coastline, there's a lot of little stone looking buildings that are three or four, five, six stories high. One area, we had a company that was set up. It was a headquarters in a wine cave that was in the side of a hill. And it was a well-protected place for artillery, see. There were others. I don't know whether you remember Ernie Pyle or not. But Ernie Pyle and a group of… Interviewer: Did you ever see Ernie Pyle? Hooks: I didn't see him, but he was bivouacked in his group of media folks, usually writers at that time, were in the building right across the street from where we were. I didn't see him. I knew he was there and all. But they had a bunch of…Quentin Reynolds from one of the New York papers. I remember him writing an article about that. Interviewer: Do you ever remember during this time seeing the enemy besides…I mean as far as infantry? Did you ever see the infantry? Hooks: The only infantry I saw was on…were the dead ones who were left as we left through areas, which isn't so pleasant. But the Anzio operation was, I guess, the biggest concentrated thing that I was involved in. After Anzio, we sort of moved fast up the Italian peninsula. But at Anzio, there were a lot of casualties. There was a…what was that? I forget the colonel's name who formed the first ranger battalion. It was brought in there [inaudible]. Sisterna [phonetic] was a little village halfway between the beachhead and the Germans. Interviewer: Were these Darby Rangers? Hooks: Well, it wasn't Darby's. But anyway…it was Darby. Yeah, Darby. He was…I think he had about sixteen, eighteen hundred men in his unit. And they went into try to capture that little town of Sisterna in there and they were wiped out. It was a catastrophe. The Germans found out about it coming in and ambushed them and I was in the headquarters at Third Army there when the word came back to Darby who was there. He was with the troops at that time. He was there and it was a… Interviewer: Do you ever remember seeing Darby? Hooks: Yes, I saw him. He was there. And he was just, you know, in tears and all. It was…cause he lost, I think out of the whole…maybe three hundred got back. And when we went through finally and broke out of the Anzio beachhead in May, there were still American soldiers, dead soldiers, in that area and piles of German dead. It was a horrible thing. It must have been a terrible catastrophe at the time. But, I didn't…I was never exposed to enemy, hand-to-hand combat with an individual soldier. Interviewer: Did um…at this…what…can you remember any things specific that…during Anzio that may have happened that was a scary part or maybe just…maybe a fun point or something in particular that sticks in your mind? About that time? Interviewer: Well, it was during the air raids, that constant air raid and all, you were careful where you went. The artillery shelling in the early days of it, from the fifth maybe to the middle of February, a little later, it was intense artillery fire and you were always aware of shells going off. One of the things that was sort of interesting, but not very effective was the Germans had…they were in the mountains about eight miles away. They had a railroad artillery piece that was…I forget. It was two hundred and eight millimeter, with around twelve, fourteen-inch shell that it fired. Weighed a ton. And it was a beat up piece of equipment. It was old and was worn, but it was a morale factor. And they would…it was stuck in a cave in the mountain during the…most of the time. And they would wheel it out with locomotives. Interviewer: And fire? Hooks: And fire it one time a day. The rifling in it was worn. We found that out. I'll tell you. And when the…you could almost hear the shell. It fluttered like a bird's wings fluttering, coming. You knew…of course, the sound came later. But you could hear the fluttering. Interviewer: [inaudible] projectile. Hooks: A projectile coming in. And we later caught the Air Force when they pulled out. They'd taken that train. It was a whole train. Had the gun in there and railroad cars for the troops and the ammunition in a town called Civitavecchia on the coast. And the Air Force had seen it and had bombed the rails at both ends of the train. And the train was sitting intact when we went through after leaving. We saw the gun after…it was in there. It was interesting to see the size of it. And I have a picture of it at home. It was an interesting one. It didn't do much damage. One of the projectiles exploded over our area one day into the street. One of the pieces of shrapnel, which was probably two-feet long and a foot wide, maybe two inches thick, fell and it had the rifling. You could see where it didn't fit all the way across. It had holes in it, in that two-foot piece. So that's why we were getting that fluttering; we found out why. Interviewer: Well um…tell me…we want to kind of wrap this up. Tell me a little bit about…at this point, when did your term in the military start to end? Hooks: Well, the war was over in Italy in…they signed a peace thing in April of nineteen forty-five, I guess it was. Interviewer: I bet that was exciting. Hooks: It was. It was exciting. And most of the troops were dispersed to other areas. Our unit, the three eighty-seventh, that was when we were disbanded and some of our troops went on ships directly to the Pacific. Some went back to the United States. I was assigned to a special engineer depot that was headquartered in Verona, Italy. And my function, job, was to get engineering supplies that the Germans had left in Northern Italy. I was assigned four hundred and fifty men. American unit was seven American officers and fifteen hundred men, intact German prisoner of war battalion. And we sent out groups of Germans, a hundred and fifty Germans and fifty of the Americans, to these various places in Northern Italy and would rehabilitate or get rehabilitable items, engineer items, bring them back to Verona, put them in a warehouse and then bring them up to standards that could be useable and give to the Italian people. Generators and batteries, any lumber and equipment that they could use in rehabilitating Italy. So I stayed there for six months when I should have been coming home, which was not pleasant. I wanted…I wanted…it was an interesting assignment, because I got to see a lot of Northern Italy. But I wanted to come home. I'd been over there thirty-two months or thirty something months. And finally, I was…I got orders to turn that group over to a British unit and I was given orders to come home. I went to Genoa, got on a liberty ship and came back home in November of forty-five. And I was discharged in February of forty-six and my military career, except for reserve duty later, ended at that point. So, it… Interviewer: Your overall experience in World War Two. Could you tell me…how would you…how would you sum it up, your experience. Hooks: Well, interesting. It was interesting. As I said, I learned a lot about people, the discipline in the Army, how people react to emergency kind of situations. I think it affected my…all of my life since in that I have…I don't get too excited about things that come up. Interviewer: You don't sweat the small things. Hooks: Not…the nitpicking is for somebody else, cause there's a whole lot of things worse and the little things that we get excited about today and all… Interviewer: It makes you appreciate life? Hooks: Very much. You appreciate life, family, friends. You learn to live with people that you had no contact with whatsoever and probably not expect to have contact with. But, it's a learning experience and if you don't get mad about it, I think it's a helpful learning experience. Some people fight the projects. And when you do that, you don't learn much from them. But that's my experience. I… Interviewer: Is there anything you want to add? Hooks: I probably talked already more than I've talked in sixty years. Interviewer: I want to say on behalf of the Atlanta History Center, Library of Congress, that we truly appreciate your time and your sharing your…what happened in World War Two and we truly appreciate it and appreciate you coming here today. Hooks: Thank you very much for having me. I think this is a great thing that you're doing for posterity. I hope somebody looks at some of this stuff and studies some of it and learns from it. Interviewer: Absolutely. [end of tape]
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Extent:: 1:07:22
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Holding Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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