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Oral history interview of Fred O. Scheer, part one of two

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Fred O. Scheer, part one of two
Creator:: Brown, Myers
Scheer, Fred O., 1924-
Date of Original:: 2001-07-03
Subject:: World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
World War, 1939-1945--Prisoners and prisons, American
M1 carbine
Prisoners of war--United States
Prisoners of war--Germany
United States. Army. Infantry Division, 5th
Empress of Australia (Steamship : 1922-1939)
Stalag IV B
Stalag VII A
Mulhberg
Moosberg
Location:: France, Caen, 49.1828008, -0.3690815
France, Saint-Lô, 49.1157004, -1.0906637
Germany, 51.5, 10.5
Northern Ireland, Warrenpoint, 54.0999923, -6.2512827
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Kansas, Fort Riley, 39.058327, -96.8215535
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In part one of this two-part interview, Fred Scheer describes his experiences as an Army soldier and POW in Europe during World War II.
Fred Scheer was a soldier and POW during World War II in Europe.
FRED SHEER WWII Oral Histories July 3, 2001 Atlanta History Center Transcriber: Joyce Dumas [Tape 1, Side A] [Transcriber's note: Interviewer I is a female, possibly named Amy. Interviewer II is Myers Brown.] Sheer: Today's date and my name…I'm Fred Sheer. Today is July the third, nineteen…I beg your pardon, two thousand and one. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. Interviewer I: What were your initial feelings about enlisting? Sheer: Well, we all felt like we had to do something. And I joined the enlist reserves at Georgia and almost…at the University of Georgia and almost everybody I knew did the same. They joined something, whether it's the Air Force, the Navy or whatever but everybody was enlisting. And I had no qualms about it. Interviewer I: What about your family? Sheer: Well, you know, I didn't ask them. I told them. And at some later date my dad, before I went overseas, my dad made the remark that I imagine many fathers did and he said he wished he could go in my stead. He'd been in World War One. So, but you know, back in those days everybody, almost everybody, was for “let's get this thing done”. Interviewer II: What year did you enlist? Sheer: I joined the enlisted reserves at Georgia in nineteen forty-two. It was in my freshman year at Georgia. Interviewer II: Where did…let me backtrack just a little bit. Where did you grow up? Sheer: I grew up…you asked where I grew up. I grew up in Eatonton, Georgia. That's E-A-T-O-N-T-O-N. Now, as we use to say, Eat-a-ton, Georgia. [laughter] I went to the Eatonton High School, you know. Lived there all my life until I moved to Atlanta. Interviewer II: Go ahead. Interviewer I: I guess we'll just backtrack. Where did your initial training take place? Sheer: Okay. My initial…you ask where my initial training took place. I was inducted at Fort Riley…I mean at Fort McPherson here in Atlanta. And then after about a five-day train ride out to Fort Riley, Kansas, I was there for thirteen weeks for basic training. Interviewer II: Tell us a little bit about what your basic training consisted of. Sheer: Well, you want to know a little bit about what my basic training consisted of. Well to start with, Fort Riley, Kansas, is something that was new. You understand, I'd never been out of the state of Georgia but maybe once to the World's Fair in New York when I was a kid and maybe we took some trips to Florida, but to go to Kansas was just like going to another world. Didn't have to have a passport, but [laughs]…we were on something called Republican Flats. And this was just a very flat area and when it rained…when it didn't rain, you know, it was dust everywhere. In fact, I've got to get off on a tangent for just a little bit. We arrived there on a Sunday morning. We were sent to our barracks, which was…and these were these tarpaper barracks, weren't built very tight anyway. Wooden floor and tarpaper sides. One story. And you went inside and the dust was just flowing, just flowing inside. They issued us our rifles. And these rifles came right out of the crate and they were covered with cosmaline [phonetic]. Well cosmaline is something kind of like, you know, what Vaseline is like. Well, that's kind of like what these rifles…didn't smell the same, but that's what these rifles were. And can you imagine, those rifles covered with this gook and this dust flowing around and then, you know, we were told the first thing we had to do was to clean them. And [laughing] you'd think we were almost gonna use them like sandpaper with that dust. But at any rate, so we did it. Then our barracks were right next to the mess halls, so we had the mess sergeant as the…one of our…in our barracks. That's another story. I'll tell you about him later. But anyway, we did…we had, I'd guess you'd say, oh…instructions. Sit around and we're taught this, that and the other. We had a lot of marching and I guess this was to develop discipline. I'll never forget, there was a squeaky little guy from somewhere up in upstate New York in this group and he…we were sitting around and they said, “Whatever the sergeant says do, you do”. And he says, “Even if he says, ‘Go out in that field and pick up that pile of you-know-what and bring it back'”. He used more words, but any rate, I'll be polite. [laughter] And he says, “Yeah, you pick up that stuff and you bring it back here and you do it right now”. So you know, any rate, when it rained though, and it didn't rain that often, but when it did, all this dirt turned into gumbo mud and you could walk and marching in that you could almost lose your boots. Just, you know, stick to it. We…Kansas, as you may know, is known for its tornadoes. And we were sitting in the barracks one morning getting so-called instructions on this, that or the other—how to dismantle and redo your rifle—and somebody says, “There's a tornado coming”. We all ran out of the barracks and crawled into a ditch or whatever we could find. One came by and it was…well, it wasn't big. I think it took a little bit of something off and went over our heads. But that was it. But that was, you know, a new experience. Another quickie. We did…had a lot of calisthenics. And you know what a jumping jack is? Where you throw your arms out and your feet out and back down and up? Well, the sergeant whoever it was stood up on the top of a dyke and we were all out on this flat area in front of him and he was giving instructions. And it was raining like you wouldn't believe and we had our rain coats on, so every time you pulled your arms up you got an armful of rain and back down. And back then, by the way, the officers still rode horses out there. This was a cavalry post even though we were basic…we were infantry basic, this was a cavalry post. So this officer coming riding out, rode up on the dyke and says, “Get these men in”. We were all delighted. Any rate. So, one other thing. We went out on a bivouac on night. You know what a bivouac is. It's where you go out and you stay in tents and you act like you're on maneuvers or something. And we had what they call shelter halves. Each person had a half of a tent and you got two together and that made a tent, little low pup tents they put right down on the ground. And somehow or another, I ended up with the company captain and sergeant. And there was three of us in that tent. And I heard the captain say, “Don't look now, but I think there's water coming in under the tent”. And you know, I didn't know what to do. And he says, “Don't worry. Don't worry. In a few my heat will dry it out”. So, any rate. Any rate, that's kind of what basic training was like. We had a…there was a beer garden. Of course, I didn't drink beer. I never had had any whiskey or beer in my life. We didn't do that at my home. I learned about that later. But [inaudible]. Any rate, the mess sergeant would go in and he'd drink his fill of beer and he'd come in after lights were out. And the hut was long and narrow with little beds on either side, bunks on either side and a foot locker in front of each one. And there was two or three potbellied stoves, these big stoves straight up and down. The pipe ran up the front. And they were, you know, spaced along the middle of the aisle. And the sergeant would come in at night, loaded and he'd fight his way down those…through those stoves. There was not, you know, it was not cold weather so the stoves were not heated. And sometimes the stoves would win. He'd knock the pipes down and they'd soot all over [inaudible]. So, that's my answer. Interviewer I: Okay. What was your first assignment? Sheer: I don't know really how to answer where was my first assignment. We had basic training, then we went to…I was…as an infantry replacement. We went from there to Camp Putnam, North Carolina, where I was given a seven-day or whatever it was furlough at home before going overseas. And then from there…I must tell you this. Atlanta back then had two train stations. They may have had a third one out here, the Brookwood Station. But they had two main stations, Terminal Station and Union Station. They where up the hill…one was right up the hill from the other. And I let my folks know that I was gonna be arriving at such and such a time in the morning on such and such a day. I didn't tell them which station. So when I got here, they were much out of breath going back and forth between the two stations. [laughter] That's the first thing they told me about. After Camp Putnam, I was sent to Fort Mead, Maryland, to get issued, you know, equipment and what not for going overseas, a rifle and, you know, clothing. And I had to have G.I. glasses. I'd had some rimless ones or what not, but that wasn't the kind we had to have. Had to have some metal rims and whatever. The kind the kids liked a few years later. Any rate, and I stayed there for a few weeks before…I guess we went out the Port of New York. I don't know exactly. May have been Chenango or something of that sort. But I'm not…all I know is we loaded onto a ship. I'm not sure I'm answering your question Amy. Interviewer II: You are. That's fine. Sheer: Okay. Interviewer II: Did you know when you left New York, did you know where you were headed? Sheer: Well, we knew we were going to Europe. Interviewer II: Okay. Sheer: We went on the Empress of Australia, was the name of the ship. It's my belief, and I'm not sure about this, but…that the ship had been a German cruise liner, you know. One of the nice big liners that'd been taken over or captured by the British and renamed. And it was totally loaded with G.I.s. I mean…we were supposed to share each bunk in threes. Everybody would get, you know, each bunk had to have three people. Not at the same time, but in shifts. And people were sleeping in the companionways. Some on bunks. Some of them…I found a place like a lot of other people, I found a place on deck and I spent the whole…went the whole trip over on deck. I had my little spot. A lot of other people had theirs. You know, you were responsible for all your personal gear, but nobody I think was gonna take it anyway. So except for going down for meals or to the head, I stayed right on deck. And the weather wasn't bad. We went over right at the end of October. Landed in Liverpool on about the fifth of November of forty-four. That be right? No, forty-three. Forty-three. And so, it was…I'd never heard of a Seabee before. You know, those were civilian engineers of some sort that did bridges and what not. They were civilians, but they were in the military and there was a whole group of those on board. They were sleeping on the deck, too. And I guess because of the gulf stream, it wasn't really that cold. So. Interviewer II: Where…oh I know. Was the crew of the ship, were they English? Sheer: Yeah. Interviewer II: Or American. Sheer: They were English and you want to know about the crew of the ship. What little I saw of them, they were English. One thing I remember was that we had English sausage for breakfast and that stuff had a lot of meal in it. [laughs] You know, funny how you remember these things, but I guess that's where I was introduced to kippers. I like them now, by the way. Any rate. So. But the crew, I believe, was all English. Interviewer II: You had…go ahead. I'm sorry. Sheer: No, that's all right. Go ahead. Interviewer II: Had you been given your assignment yet? Did you know where you were… Sheer: No. No. I was strictly an infantry replacement. Interviewer II: Okay. So you had not been assigned to a unit. Sheer: That's correct. Interviewer II: Okay. And when you got to Liverpool, where did you go from there? Sheer: Okay. We went…you ask where we went from Liverpool from…Liverpool we went to a place called Theasey [phonetic] Farms. I don't know whether that was somebody named Theasey or what. But it was a large, you know, I guess transit type camp. Excuse me. Where we were assigned from there. We stayed there…oh, I stayed there cause, you know, you went in with a whole group of people and you never knew who went where from there. I was assigned to the Fifth Infantry Division. And I guess I was at Theasey Farms for maybe two days. Interestingly enough, while there, I'd always heard as a…you know, about London fog or English fog. You know, that sounded kind of strange or what not. But even in Georgia where I grew up, we didn't have any fog like that. But I learned about it there. It was so thick that really you could hold your hand up, hold your arm out and couldn't see your hand. So that was…that again was another new experience for a farm boy. We went from there to County Down…Warren Point and County Down in Northern Ireland. As you may remember, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland were totally separate. Southern Ireland was another country and they were supposedly neutral even though they really were leaning toward the Germans. And Northern Ireland, of course, was a part of the British Empire. And that's why they were stockpiling, if you please, you know, people getting ready for the invasion. So that was around the early part of November. And I stayed in Warren Point until going over to France on July the tenth or the ninth of the next year. Interviewer II: Okay. Now, the guys that you had crossed with over to Liverpool, when…since you went as replacements, did most of them go to the same unit or did you ever even see those guys again? Sheer: Never saw them again. Never saw them again. [laughs] While we were at…the couple of days we were at Theasey Farms, I always liked Solitaire for some reason and used to play it. You know, the one card up and all. And there was some guy there that I think I lost three million dollars to. But it didn't really matter cause I never saw him again. [laughter] Interviewer II: It's a good thing, huh? Sheer: Yes, sir. Any rate. But I was assigned to the Fifth Infantry and…oh. Before going overseas, I had been told I was going to be a saltwater…be a corporal for purposes of whatever, going over. So I had two stripes. And that's what we really referred to as a saltwater corporal. We got over there and was lined up in front of the first sergeant at the company where I was assigned to. And he looked at me on the line and he says, “Boy, what are you doing with them stripes?” And I said, “I don't know”. And I reached up and I yanked them things off right quick. That guy looked like a mountain standing in front of me. Scared me to death. [laughter] I'll never forget Sergeant Boyk [phonetic]. Interviewer II: Well, so you went in with the Fifth Division when they went into France? Sheer: Yeah. Interviewer II: That would have been in July? Sheer: Yeah. We landed July the tenth, which was just about a month after the invasion. But of course, I was in Ireland, in Northern Ireland with the Fifth training and what not for about nine months, which was an interesting time too. So. We were… Interviewer II: Take us through that a little bit. Sheer: Okay. You want to know a little bit about that. Well, to start with, County Down, I mean, Warren Point and County Down…County Down is right on the southern edge of Northern Ireland. Give you a few minutes on this if you don't mind. Interviewer II: That's fine. Sheer: We were the…Warren Point was a battalion area, which meant that when you were off duty you had freedom to roam the city. They city, pardon me, the town. And we were billeted in…the platoon I was in was billeted in a so-called three-story guest house that had been divided down the middle and on one side was civilians and it was totally divided. I mean, there was no connection whatsoever. Even the backyard was separated. And the other side was, you know, our platoon was in. And I don't know. There was four or five, maybe six people to a room. I've forgotten. Double-decker bunk beds. One thing I do remember, on payday, I never even learned to shoot craps, but at the foot of my bed, they were shooting craps all night long. [laughter] And we had one guy there by the name of Hager. He was from somewhere in West Virginia. And Hager, I guess, he must have been a pretty good marksmen. He probably learned to shoot shooting squirrels out of trees somewhere. But they made him a sharpshooter. He would lay on his bunk. When he was off duty, he would lay on his bunk all the time. That's all he ever did. Except on payday night. He'd lose all his money and he'd get back on his bunk again. [laughter] That was Hager. We did…we would go out and do night problems up into the hills and what not. I always kind of had…it was interesting to me that the Army had done a good job of conditioning us because, you know, you'd sit there. It never got too cold. It got, you know, cold enough for an overcoat. But it never snowed. The frost would be an inch, inch and a half deep sometimes, but no snow. And a lot mist and rain. I mean, you just got to the point where, you know, the mist was just normal. But you'd sit there and pardon the expression, but your nose would drip, you know, and what not. But you didn't catch a cold. One of the funny things was that the…we would be out on a hillside and after you got settled down and be put into position and so forth, the farmers all were ready for us. Some guy would ease out and go to a farmhouse. They'd find one close by. And they would…the farmers had boiled eggs. We never saw any chickens. But you'd buy, for a pound note you'd get a dozen hot, hard boiled eggs and they were so good. And I mean, I don't know where he got them, but there were always eggs. [laughs] But we did one night…I probably should tell you that I didn't realize it at the time, but I had a condition, I still have of course and will always have, called retinitis pigmatosa [phonetic], which cause you to lose your peripheral vision. And in fact today, for a long time now, I've been legally blind. But you know. Any rate, I'll tell you another story later down the line. But one night--it was a nice moonlit night—we were going on a night problem and we went a long single file with, I guess, the whole company strung out in one long file. And going up in that part of Northern Ireland…well, I guess probably all of Ireland, the fields are divided up by these little low, stone walls. And you know, maybe ten acres, maybe more, maybe less. But any rate. And we were going along. We got to one and the guy in front of me crawled over it, edged on up a way. I got to it and I started crawling over it and I dropped my rifle. And I reached down to pick it up as I got over the wall and I looked up and saw the guy in front of me and I started following him, but he kind of veered off to the right. But I followed him anyway and in a little bit I realized I was following a sheep. [laughing] I was about to lead the whole crowd into [inaudible] Ireland, where we'd be interned. So I realized my mistake and I was able to pick out…the moon came out from behind a cloud or something and I was able to…cause night blindness is part of this condition, you see. And so, I was able to catch up [laughing]. You never know. The town was, as I say, was Battalion A area. The mess hall for the battalion was the little railroad station. They had converted the dinning room there to a large mess hall or whatever. And just outside of it was kind of like little bit of a town square. And some guy sometimes, every once in a while, you'd see some guys come through with a tank and they'd park it there in that square and they'd go in…in the mess hall. And you'd see some little guy with a cap pulled down way over his eyes and a cigarette hanging off the edge of his mouth, walking around, you know, looking at it sideways and walking all around, taking it all in. And you just knew this guy was probably with the Irish, what you call the IRA. Interviewer II: [inaudible] Sheer: Yeah. Never amounted to anything but you just figured that. I had a very nice experience. I have to be careful how I tell this. I was out one evening walking after, you know, when we're not doing a night problem and after being off duty, on this walkway along the lot that was across the street from where we were billeted. And it was a nice walk. There was a very attractive young lady. Kind of, you know, looked a good bit like Amy McDaniel. And she was walking, ignoring me, and I kept following her and eventually I got her attention and we got to be friends. And it turned out that she living with some cousins of hers. She was about the same age I was, obviously. And you know, this was what? Nineteen, eighteen. Nineteen years old. Thereabouts. And she was living with some cousins, real old people. I think they were probably sixty years old or something. But [chuckles] they lived around, interestingly enough, around on the street behind this street I was billeted on. And you walked up Howe Street and down an alley and back down and you were at the house. That got to be a very friendly situation that I spent nine months almost. Well, it made my stay in Northern Ireland very, very nice. [laughter] So, we had a false start heading for France. We [inaudible] you know, hiked or marched over to the rail station with all of our gear and then were turned around and sent back to our billet and then a day or two later while we were still on alert…oh, I'll back up again. One other thing. We were on a night problem and just about daylight, a runner came out and told the officers in charge about the invasion. And this was the first we knew of it. The first we knew it had happened, of course. And from that time on, we began to be preparing and getting ready and not knowing when, but just knowing we would be heading for France sometime soon. Interviewer II: Now what was your job within the platoon? Sheer: I was a private in the rear rank. You asked what my job was. One thing, I was issued rifle grenades. I don't know if you have any idea what a rifle grenade is. You may. You know, it's a long thing about this long with pins on the back. And back in those days--I don't know what they look like now—but they had like a little football on the front end that had the explosive in it. And you had a tube that you fitted on the front of your rifle and this thing sat down over it. Well, myself and one other person were issued these in the platoon. And we had…they took us out to a quarry somewhere and they said, “Okay, you each have one rifle grenade to fire” and that was our training on it. [laughter] So and had this satchel with a dozen of these things. And you used a blank and I always wondered if you made a mistake and put a live round in instead of a blank round what was gonna happen. Any rate, I somehow or another lost that bag somewhere along the line after I got overseas, got to France, I think. But we did not have to go in a fighting area. I guess you'd like me to go ahead and go into landing. Well, we went over. I don't know how long it took. I guess it was not that long, but we were in Ireland and had to go around the tip of England and across the channel. But we landed on Utah Beach, which was relatively flat. We went down rope ladders off the side of the ship. And these were like real big fishnets, I guess you might say. But, you know, the ropes were maybe that big around, with squares maybe like that and you climbed down with all your gear hanging off of you onto a landing craft that was going up and down. They're not like they use today, where they can go right up on land. These things were…we climbed down. Nobody fell off. So, that was lucky I guess. And when we…it could not go all the way to the beach, but almost to the beach. So we virtually walked in on dry land. And this was…[coughs]. Excuse me. This was July the tenth of forty-four and so the fighting was already pretty far inland. This was on the Cherbourg Peninsula. But the fighting was fairly well in. In fact, contrary to the way wars were fought before and the wars were fought afterwards, it was more or less a static line. And you know, the line would move forward like that. And the line was stuck at that time. You've heard maybe of the City of Saint Leau [phonetic] on the Cherbourg Peninsula in France. Well, the Germans were holding Saint Leau and…excuse me. The Germans were holding Saint Leau and the Americans were trying to take it. And the American pushed the Germans out and the Germans pushed the Americans back out and so forth about three times before we finally took it. In the meantime, we had gone in and taken over for the Second Infantry Division and taken over their holes, their…what do you call it? Foxholes. So we didn't have to dig foxholes. This was in hedgerow country. So this was similar a little bit to Northern Ireland, except that this—instead of having stone walls—they were…I don't know if you know what hedgerows are or not. But they're like dirt banks with a lot of growth on top of them. Sometimes it's just bushes. Sometimes big tree and what not. But this again is the way the fields were divided up. And we sat in this area for about twelve days waiting for the line to begin to move forward. And where we were, we were kind of in farmyards, or part of it was. So, you'd…and during the day everything was quiet where we were. And you'd see two guys go out, one of them with a rifle looking up in the trees like this looking for snipers and the other looking in hen nests for eggs. [laughter] And we found out the French had buried some…I don't know whether it was Benedictine or cognac or what it was. But we found some of that and that stuff was really potent. Like I say, I'd never had a drink in my life but then, you know, I guess I did taste some of that. Any rate, it turned out that stuff was pretty good for cleaning your rifle, for putting in a canteen cup and lighting it and boiling eggs or making coffee. You could do almost anything with that stuff. It was pure alcohol is what it was, I think. In fact, the aid station every once in a while would get some guys being brought in that they were just completely out. They'd had too much of it. [laughs] Any rate, there was…unfortunately you see a lot of, you know, dead animals around and what not that were in a very bad condition by then. But you got used to that. The Germans knew that we were there and knew where we were. And at night, a German patrol…we would be, you know, right by our foxholes would be like an outpost or what not right behind the hedgerow. And the hedgerow was kind of protecting it. And the Germans would send a patrol around and they'd come around the flank somehow or another and get past and come around the hedgerow behind us. And then shoot automatic rifles down toward where we were. But the idea, they weren't really aiming at anybody, hoping that if we returned the fire, then the people with the artillery would know where we were and they could open up. Well, we never did. Interestingly enough incidentally, we would hear artillery shells going on. Our own artillery shells going over our head. And it was like a motorboat going through water. Interesting sound, these shells going through the air. But one night, the Germans did that. But during the day, a British recon unit had been pulled into on our flank and the Germans pulled that foolishness with them and they were not as reserved as we were. All hell broke loose, you'll pardon the expression. The Germans never pulled that again. They really…One night, you've heard of the B-1 or B-2 bombs that the Germans used for the British. Well, one night I heard this thing sound like a Model-A truck or washing machine or something coming cluck, cluck, cluck overhead. And all of a sudden the noise stopped and about two thousand feet away from where I was the most outstanding explosion you ever heard…saw, I mean. Red flames and dirt and all this stuff goes up in the air. And what it was was one of these things misfired and had hit. The next day, I went over to where it hit and there was a crater there that you could have put a small bungalow in. It didn't hurt me, but it was [laughing] a little shocking, I guess you might say. Another night, some of the…one of the other platoons thought that they had some German infiltrators and they went ahead and opened up on them and they got return fire and there was a firefight that went on all night long. There was no artillery, but small arms fire back and forth. And the next morning, it quieted down about sunup and people started looking to see about casualties and there were no German casualties. There were no American casualties. But there were a couple of big pigs that'd been wandering around and that's what they thought was the Germans [laughing] and they'd been shooting at each other. But we had barbecue. I don't mean to be making light of the war, but these are just things that happen. You know. Interviewer II: When you were in the hedgerow country, when you did have to advance through the hedgerows, can you tell us how that was accomplished? Sheer: Well, it wasn't easy and when you think about it, you want to know how we advanced through the hedgerows. Well, when you think about it, when you are the advancing party you've got to go through an opening somehow. You couldn't go over these things. Interviewer II: Right. Sheer: Cause all the stuff on top. And when you're on the other side of the coin, you're protecting. The you've got the advantage of having this protection. So, of course, obviously the farmers when they had them, they had to have a way of getting around them. So we would have to go around the ends of them or what not where they had gaps. They developed, the engineers developed something not too far into the hedgerow problem of taking…putting a big blade like a bulldozer blade on the front of a tank. And they would just bulldoze our way through them which helped a good bit. I never had too much of that experience because I got captured pretty shortly after we started moving forward. So that's another…that's another whole world. Interviewer II: Tell us, you know, take us through the hedgerows up until, you know. Sheer: Okay. Well, as I say, we were in a holding position for about twelve days there. And then on July the twenty-seventh of forty-four, finally the Americans had broken through and kept the Germans out of Saint Leau and we were east of Saint Leau in the so-called Caen [pronouncing it key-ann] sector. In France, I found out later, they call it Caen [pronouncing it con]. But any rate, it sounded like Caen [pronouncing it key-ann] to me. But any rate, it was Caen. We were in the Caen sector. Anyway, as my platoon was in a…what do you call it? A support position, rather than in the lead position. And as we started moving forward, we got a ways into it. One other thing. Sorry. I was along with a…well, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll never forget. We were right at one spot, right beside a real high bank and all of a sudden these G.I.s came tumbling over the bank. Just running as best they could. And they said, “Lookout! Lookout! We'd been zeroed in”. The eight-eights and the shells started falling and I mean, this is a huge bank and it was just knocking the end out completely. And you know, [laughing] one G.I. came along there and he had a German prisoner with him. He was taking him back for interrogation. And the shells started falling and he was trying to tell the German he's got to get down, you know. And he finally says, makes noise “Brzzzz”. And the German got the idea and they got…you know, it's funny. On the front lines like that, at least along about that time, people are not mean to each other. Now, I think they got meaner later. But at that point, you know, you're gonna kill somebody, you're gonna kill ‘em. But being dirty wasn't necessarily…I mean, they may have come up with dirty tricks later. But at that point, let's face it. We were all kids. Eighteen, nineteen years old. And so forth. Anyway, the company commander, who I was not really particularly very fond of as I guess a lot of people are not fond of that level of authority, but any rate, he got hit. And I mean he got really badly hit. His lower extremities and what not. And I got grabbed along with three other guys to carry him back to, you know, the aid station. And just about that time, the company exec was there or something and he looked down and said, “God, he's gone”. Give me something to cover his face with. Well, I was wearing a field jacket which was a little light field jacket and my shirt. And so, I didn't like the guy, but I took my shirt off and put it over his…put it over him. And you know, we carried him out. He was dead. This leads to something else. Any rate, after we got back to the company…and by the way, I'd always wanted a forty-five pistol. The thing was really interesting. So, I picked up his. You know, that's…the officers had those. And after I had it for about an hour, I got rid of it. That thing was heavy. [laughs] [inaudible] But a little later on, after I got back to…this is all part of the same day now. After I got back to the unit, again since we were in the reserve position, I guess is why, along with a group of other guys I was called to go to an ammunition detail, which meant we had to go back to the rear, load up with ammunition and bring it back to the front. Well now, you know the Mexican banditos that we see in the movies with the bandoliers? Well, that's what these were. These were kind of cloth things with a whole bunch of M-1 rifle clips in them. And you loaded up, I don't know, as many as you could carry. Hang them over your shoulder and what not. But walking back to get them, one guy had a carbine or a rifle, one or the other. He had it slung over his shoulder hanging down and all of a sudden I heard this rifle fire and I looked around. This guy had missed but he tried to shoot his toe off but didn't make it. [laughs] So he stayed in. I missed one thing I should back up and tell you if I can. While we were on the…in the holding position, one night I was on so-called guard duty and we had…I had a bayonet on my rifle. The bayonets were just little short things about that long with a good sharp point on them. And they clipped on the rifle with just kind of a catch. I don't know if you're familiar with the M-1 rifles are not and the way the bayonets hooked on to them. But any rate, next morning when I was off duty, I was…once you remove the bayonet from the rifle now, you know, went to take it off like that and it hung and then it turned loose and what it did, it hit me right here and didn't do any real damage but I went to the…I was taken to the aid station and this… [Tape 1, Side B] Sheer: You probably would not be familiar with. But the doctor, you know, treated that little bit of a minor wound and what not. But then he checked my eyes. I guess because it's all in that same area. And he came up with the fact that I had night blindness. Well, night blindness is the…one of the early symptoms of what we now know is retinitis pigmentosis [phonetic], which cause you to lose your peripheral vision. I thought everybody, ran over, you know, stumps and walked into posts at night. You know, who can see at night? Well, any rate. He sent word back that I wasn't supposed to do any night duty. Well, the captain wasn't terribly happy about that. He said he'd heard of soldiers with backaches and foot aches and headaches, but not night blindness. “Back to duty.” Well, I wasn't trying to get out of anything anyway, but so. One other little thing. I'll move on if you like for me to. But I'll tell you one other little thing. The way you cleaned you rifle was by…you had a string and you had a metal thong that was on the end of it and you dropped the string through it and then you put a little piece of cloth in the thong and you would pull it through. Well, one evening I was doing that and the string broke. And so I had this thumb right in the middle of the barrel of the rifle. And just about that time, one of the sergeants came by and said, “You and you and you”. And I was one of the yous. “Come on. We think there's an infiltrator in here and we want to catch it.” Well, if I had shot that rifle, it [would have] blown up in my face. But fortunately, I didn't have to do that. [laughs] Any rate. So. Now is at the point if you'd like for me to. Interviewer II: How did you… just… Sheer: Okay. Interviewer II: How did you get it out? [inaudible] Sheer: I don't remember. I must've found…oh, I guess there was a…what do you call it? A rod that you could get to pump it or push it out. But, that was in the daylight, I guess, the next morning. On the…coming back to July the twenty-seventh again, as the line started moving forward and we went back to get this ammunition detail and we came back up to the hedgerow area that we were designated to come back to and when we got there and the people we were supposed to join were not there. And there was a company exec, a noncom. There was about sixteen of us all told. And the Germans started dropping mortar shells. They'd drop them down on this end of the hedgerow and we'd run up to the other end. And then they'd drop them up there. They knew what they were doing. And then we'd run back this way. And a couple of guys got hit with shrapnel. And of course, you understand that you were running with your head down anyway because even though there was all this growth above the hedgerow, it still…some rifle fire or small arms fire could come through it. And they were covering that with small arms fire. What happened, the platoon on either side had pulled back and we didn't know it. And when the Germans had appropriately addled, if you want to call it that, they came around the end. And I was right at the very end up here and all of a sudden I'm looking up and this guy and looking right down the barrel of an MG-34 German automatic rifle. And this guy was saying, “Hands up, my boy. Hands up.” Interviewer II: Speaking in English? Sheer: He was. That may be all the English he knew but that's what he was saying. “Hands up, my boy.” So you know, there wasn't a whole lot of choice at that point. Interviewer II: Sure. Sheer: Cause he had his finger on that rifle, the automatic rifle. And so I dropped my rifle and I thought, “Well, that's too close”. And I reached down and picked it up and [laughing] threw it out a little further. It's a wonder he didn't shoot me. But any rate, they took us around behind to a kind of a…well, we walked past a stone wall that didn't have any growth on top of it and they had a whole firing line of machine guns and rifles and all this whole thing lined up there. And then there was a little stone barn right beside them with a kind of a gap between it. And they took us past that back—maybe a hundred yards back—to another little stone barn that, you know, by now these things didn't have windows on them or what not. But that's where they had us back there to search. And the first thing they were saying is…the soldiers were saying, “Cigarettes for the officers. Cigarettes for the officers. Cigarettes for the officers.” And the officers would say, “Cigarettes for the men. Cigarettes for the men.” They really liked Lucky Strikes. I mean, that was really a big deal back then. Any rate, and you know we had our packs and they were having a field day taking those packs off and looking through them and what not and so-called searching us and whatever. You know, what are you going to do? You're just standing there. And if you recall, I told you I'd given my shirt to the captain who was deceased. So I had this field jacket. It was hanging down over my sleeve. And I had a watch on--I guess on this arm—that my folks, my brother and father had given me. Well, I picked it up in Atlanta from my uncle at his jewelry store as I was going in, when I went to Fort Mac to, you know, report in. And it was…this was something very special back in nineteen forty-three. It was a self-winding, shock proof, water proof. I mean it was just really very special. Well, the Germans [inaudible]. I had my sleeve, my arms down like that. They didn't see it. So…cause they would have taken it if they had. But just about that time they got word that they needed two prisoners to come up to the firing line cause they…we found out later, cause they had a wounded guy in this little barn up there and they wanted us to carry him out. We started…they said, “You and you”. And I was one of the yous. And the other one was a Mexican kid, a Mexican descent kid. And we started running up there. You know, at this point whatever. Any rate, about that time a whole hell of small arms fire started coming across from the American side and the Germans were waving, “Get down, get down, get down”. Well, I didn't feel anything. This other kid didn't either. We just kept going. And we got behind this firing line and they were trying to tell us to go in this barn. What they want to do. You know, they weren't speaking English and we couldn't understand what the jabbering they were doing [sic]. And finally, I think it was an officer or a noncom got up and came over there, took out his…what was a P-38…whatever that pistol was and pointed and we got the idea right quick. [laughs] We went in this little barn and there was this German soldier laying there on some hay. Had a big hole in his shoulder and a lot of stuff coming out of it. [inaudible] But any rate. And we were standing there trying to decide what to do. About that time a mortar shell hit the side of the barn and set it on fire. Well, this guy didn't need any help. He got up and he came out of there in a hurry. And he took off on his own. So, we just went back out and about that time, they brought up the rest of the group and headed us on out, walking on out back toward the rear. As we were, there was a little lake out there. It was really a pretty setting. There was a little lake out there and I think I saw one of our airplanes coming in and loosen a couple of bombs, but that's just vague in my memory. So, from there they took us back to the rear. Interviewer II: Okay. We were…we had stopped off where you headed back to the rear lines after you had been initially captured. Sheer: Right. I need to back up a moment. Interviewer II: Okay. Sheer: And forgive me. I seemed to forget these things along the way, I guess. But, I'm Jewish and my dog tags, my American dog tags had a P on them for Protestant by mistake. And so while I was at Camp [inaudible] in North Carolina before going overseas, I wanted to correct this. And the first sergeant, or somebody, the supply sergeant, I guess it was, took a…you know, one of these markers and changed it to an H for Hebrew. Well, it didn't occur to me that this could be pretty fatal. Cause the Germans were not really…they didn't really kind of go for Jews over there. [laughing] Not in the same way, any rate. So, I'll tell you about this a little later. But any rate. So coming back to…coming back to…as I say, we were heading…we were headed to the rear and we walked back. And the first night, they stopped us at some little French farmhouse and there was a out-shed of some sort. And I don't know how many there was of us. Maybe…well, we left some guys back there where they originally searched us because a couple of them…three of them were wounded and I guess they took them some other way. But they walked us back and we spent--I guess there were fourteen…I don't know how many of us, any rate—in this little barn. And I'll never forget, one of the Germans came out with some barbed wire and a hammer and some staples and we had to help him seal up the windows so we couldn't get out. Unbeknownst to the Germans, since they didn't search me and at this point I wasn't really being overly brave I guess, I had a hand grenade in my pocket, but I never had an opportunity to really…and I didn't really want it to be found on me at that…in a…and a hunting knife on my leggings. So, I found a place to dispose of both of them in that barn that night just by taking them…you know, just leaving them in a corner. You know, there is a point where there is no point in being suicidal about things. Any rate, so the next day we got back on the road and all the time they kept adding prisoners. Some of them…I'll never forget seeing these guys that had been shot down, been flyers and shot down and with these wool-lined boots, wool-lined jackets. And this was again, in July. And you know, I guess they didn't have really real boots on. They just had these things on. Any rate, they…we stopped at…around noon time, we stopped at a little house and I guess the Germans told the French people there that they had to give us some food. I don't know if the Germans provided them some or not. But any rate, we went into this house and there was…looked like maybe three women, two or three women. And I noticed that one younger person, I'd say she was probably fifteen, maybe she was seventeen, eighteen years old, kept trying to motion one of the guys to go down these steps. She was going to try and help him escape and he never did either get the message or what not. [laughs] But we…then we went on and we were loaded onto trucks headed for Riems, France. And we got diverted at one point. They had some train cars, you know, freight cars under some trees, parked under some trees. That way, I guess, our--what do you call it—our fighter pilots couldn't see them. And they had some…they wanted some people to unload them. And so they were like great big paper bags, you know. That was no big deal. We had to carry these bags on our shoulders and put them wherever they wanted them. Unloading these two or three freight cars. And right in the middle of while we were doing it, the Germans started hollering, “Fleer, fleer, fleer”. And what it was, some American airplanes were coming over and they wanted us to get, you know, under the trees or under the cars and get out of the way so we wouldn't be seen. After we finished that, we finally got back on our trucks and were taken to Riems, where we were loaded onto…well. Before then. [laughs] You'll have to stop me for this. I'm sorry. But before then, we were in the little town. I guess this is where maybe they loaded us on the trucks. We were right in the middle of the town square. And there was…by now there was a whole lot of POWs because we accumulated them as we went along the way. Any rate, and we were standing there and the French civilians were across the street. And every once in a while, one would run across the street and hand… [Tape 2, Side A] Sheer: …a G.I. an egg and run back. The Germans didn't stop them. But, I think if they had stood there, then the Germans would have hollered. But, that or bring them a drink of cognac. And I never could do it, but some of these guys could take a raw egg and they'd punch a little whole in one end and punch a little whole in the other and suck the goody out of it. You could pass me on that. [laughs] I didn't do it. But they were doing it and you know, the French people wanted to be helpful. They wanted to do something but, of course, the Germans wouldn't let them. They loaded us onto trucks and from there we went to Riems, France, where we were loaded onto what's known then and still is, I guess, rail cars known as forty and eights, which was…you probably are familiar with this term that was an endearment term, I guess you might say. It was given to these cars back in World War One when they could…either forty men or eight horses. And we went from there by train there in closed up cars to the first transient camp. Interviewer II: And then where did you go from there? Sheer: Okay. The first transient camp…I never can remember whether it's either Mooseberg [phonetic] or Muleberg [phonetic]. But we went to both of them. We went to one. And these were big, big camps with barn-like buildings and straw mattresses or what not. And this again was…you went in with a whole group of people and you went out with a different group. The Germans were good about, you know, not letting people develop, I guess, together. But when we got there, we were offloaded off the train in kind of a holding area and it was a beautiful sunny day as I remember. There was a big, wide-open area almost like a lawn or pasture or something and then there were some buildings on beyond that. And about halfway in between was a card table with two German officers sitting behind it. And each person was required to go and stand in front of this table and be interrogated. Well, interrogations were pretty short cause they pretty well knew what outfits we were from and what not and he'd…one of them, the officer would say, “Your papers”. And they always talked about papers. I thought about it since then. We carried driver's license and things like that now, but in Europe they were always talking about your papers. Whatever papers I had in my pockets, I put on the table there and whatever. Anything else I had in my pockets. And he fiddled through it a little bit. And after a while I said, “You know, if you're through with this junk, I'll pick it up”. And he said, “Don't get cheeky”. So, the other officer never said anything. He just sat. But any rate, so from there put all…he was finished. I put all the stuff back in my pockets and went from there into this next building, which we were required to disrobe, undress, take our clothes off in other words and go through a shower and we may have even gotten sprayed or what not. I know we got some shots. And one German medic looked at me and said, “Do you…are you Jewish?” And I just said, “Huh?” Like that. And it was never brought up again. Any rate, from there we went…we got some clothes of some sort and after we were at that camp for a couple of days or so, we then were loaded onto trains again and went to the other one. Again, I can't remember which one was Mooseberg and which was Muleberg. But we went to the other one, whichever one it was. And I was there for several days, I guess. And the first camp I remember thought as pretty hot outside and we got some…a little bit of German bread and what not. And we'd slice it real thin and we'd put it on a pole or something outside and they would be like toast in a little bit. [laughs] But they had these camps divided. This one divided in particular. On one side of the fence, barbed wire fence or whatever, was Russian soldiers. And they were really mean to them. On the other side, Americans, British, Australians, New Zealanders. You know. But the Russian soldiers…if a German guard was walking through the Russian side of the compound and the Russian soldier was in his way, instead of telling him to move, he might just hit him in the back of his head with his rifle and just keep walking. They really were brutal to them. Any rate, from there, as I say, I went to the other camp. The other camp was also a very large camp. You've seen the movie, “The Great Escape”, or something else. You know how they talked about having a…what do you call it? A kind of a group of people that were in charge of prisoners that were kind of in charge or what not? Well, I don't know really if they had the same thing at this camp. But one morning, three guys came around to see me and they had some writing paper and they said, “You need to write your folks, let your folks know where you are and that you're all right”. And I thought about writing my girlfriend. They said, “No. You write your folks.” So [laughs], I had a post [inaudible]. It was a lot more like a postcard. And by the way, I have a copy of the book I wrote about my experiences and I have some of that in that book. Any rate, so I did. You know, this…and they told us a little bit about the camp operation and that sort of thing. That was about as far as it went. But, one other thing, my dad always had liked to do like, you know, unusual foods and this, that and the other. And in our hometown, we didn't get a lot of that. But I had found out about Limburger cheese. He loved it. That stuff smells awful. But any rate, and they came around one day, the Germans did, for food and they gave us these cans of cheese. And they were cans about that deep and about that big around and with both ends bulged out. Just puffed out. And you could take a knife and hit the end of it and it would just spray. And a lot of those guys wouldn't eat it. I had a lot of that cheese and I really enjoyed it. [laughing] Cause I loved it. Any rate. One afternoon, or one evening they called—called you by name—and they called eighty of us out. Lined us up. And they said, “Okay, you're gonna be taken to a work camp. But first…” This German officer was standing up on this pedestal or whatever. Excuse me. And he said, “Now, it's against the German federal law for people of the Jewish faith to work in Germany. And anybody that's a Jew, Jewish faith, please step out…please just step out of line.” And he called out some names like Goldstein and Goldberg and some other Jewish sounding names. Well, he didn't call my name. In fact, I had registered…I wasn't a martyr I guess, so I had registered as Protestant when I got there anyway. So any rate, I just kept my mouth shut. I never have heard from any of those people or anybody that was Jewish that was in one of those camps. There may have been some that got by, but I don't know. Any rate. So we loaded up on trains and we went to a town called Adolf, Germany--excuse me--about sixty kilometers west of the Czechoslovakian border. And there was about eighty of us. And we went to, would you believe, Camp 4-F. It just happened to be the designation. Might be interesting to note and I didn't give you a chance to ask any questions, but please don't…interrupt me if you like. It might be interesting to note that officers, and I believe noncoms were included in this, were not permitted to work. They also had some camps they called wolf camps for fliers. I don't know whether those guys…well, I guess most of those guys were either noncoms or officers anyway. But we were…there were no officers or noncoms in our group. The camp was interesting. Would you like me tell you about the camp? Interviewer II: Yes, please. Sheer: The camp was U-shaped. One-story huts with a small, you know, what you call a yard in between. There was a small building at the end of the U, away from it a little bit and this is where the German corporal who was in charge of the camp and his either stayed or worked or whatever. That was his office. The place was fenced in, typically, and it was right beside…well. There was a real high embankment and on top of this was a rail line. We were right beside a coaling station and switching yard and a round house. You know, a round house is where they repair engines. And of course, back then, all they were using were coal-fired engines in that area. So, we were leased to the railroad by the German government. We were leased to the railroad, which I don't know. It was owned by the government, too, I guess. But any rate. And the switch track was right beside us, so they put us down below it, you might say. And I'll tell you in a minute about that. The way they switched the cars, they would back a long line of rail…of freight cars up this incline and set the brakes on all of them. They'd move the engine away and then one by one, they would unhook them and let the brakes off and that would let the car go out to wherever they wanted it to go in this switching yard. We had about…out of the eighty people, they had us divided up basically equally. I think there were four rooms. We had a day room or living room where we had each…they had tables around the wall and each person had a space at the table, you know. And we all had a…somehow or another, we had acquired a box that we had our worldly possessions in, quite frankly everything we had. And that room was open to us while we were--started to say off duty—while we were in camp. And we could [inaudible] whatever. Then there was another room. It was a sleeping room with bunks in it. Excuse me. Double-decker bunks. And at nine o'clock, the lights out. You put on your underwear and your…you had on your underwear and your overcoat and your shoes. Yeah. And that's what you went into the sleeping room with. And of course, it was locked up for the night. They had…and then of course, in somewhere in the complex they had a fairly large latrine. So that was the way the camp…but you [inaudible] from one…you could walk from one all the way around all the way through. The German guards, some of them were fairly decent. There was one or two of them…there was a little white-headed guy that was always screaming and hollering and nobody liked him. So another guy that we called Skullface, he looked like…that's what his face looked like. These guys were…and then there was another fella that looked like a family guy and he was always friendly and trying to talk, you know. But these were the older soldiers, I guess, that they called the “folkstrom”, like the home guard, I guess, kind of. But any rate. So, that's basically what the camp was like. Interviewer II: What did they have you doing on a daily basis? Sheer: Excuse me. There were about four guys that worked in the coaling station, shoveling coal back and forth. I guess I did that a few times, but not much. Had two or three or four that worked in the roundhouse, helping the people working on the engines. And I think all this was maybe kind of against the Geneva Convention cause we were helping their war effort. But I guess we were a lot better off doing that than doing what the other people were that were just sitting on their, you know. Waiting, doing nothing. Then, they had us in teams, the rest of us in teams of fifteen or twenty or whatever, doing section labor. This was, of course, repairing the tracks or what not. In Germany, they were using aggregate to make the road beds, the track beds for the rails. And they used metal crossties, you know. We're used to seeing wood crossties and cinders over here. These were metal crossties. And it's like just the top half of the crosstie and the under half was just hollow. There's no bottom. And they clamped the rails. They had a clamp like this with a bolt instead of, you know, here we use spikes. But there they had bolt and we would bolt them down. And what we'd do is…this German work master…we'd get there…we would ride on a train to wherever the place was they wanted us to work. And we'd…this German work master would…he'd get down on his knees and sight down the track to see it was level or needed adjusting. I guess they'd already determined where these spots were. And then we had a jack we put on the rail and we'd jack it up and then we would drive these…we used a thing we called a hawker. It was like a…you know what a pick looks like, what you use for digging ditches with a spike on either end? Well, these had a spike on one end and the other end, instead of having a spike, it came out and had a club on the end. So we would drive the stones up under the crossties to raise it up or we'd use a pitchfork to dig some out. And he'd put his…you know, he'd lean, put his head down on the rail and sight down the rail to see when it was level and stop. He was kind of funny. He had a pipe. And he'd have this pipe hanging over, a curved pipe. And it was hanging over the edge of the rail with this as he was sighting down. You know, he was not a hard person or what not. He was fairly easy. Of course, they still had the guards there. But I'll never forget, he gave me one of these pipes. I think he thought I was gonna be able to give him some tobacco that we got. I wished I…I often wished I hadn't lost that pipe just to have it as a show. But I really bummed, I think, some of the [inaudible] tobacco they had off of him. We were getting American…not American, but International Red Cross parcels. And we'd get about one of month for two people. We'd have to divide it between two of us. I have an idea maybe the Germans were getting the others. I'm not sure. But any rate. They were pretty nice. They had a can of powdered milk. They had a very important thing. They had two packs of cigarettes. This is very important back then. They had some wafers. And by the way, we learned to make pancakes by soaking one of those wafers. They were about that big around. And soak them in some of that powdered milk overnight. And the next morning they'd be nice and big and you could…we had these…and again, we had a big potbellied stove in each one of these rooms and we'd use it for cooking, whatever we had to cook as well as for heat and what not. And that brings up another story in a minute. But any rate. So, they had…in the packages they had those. They had…oh, I believe a package of coffee, a bar of soap. Maybe something else. Oh, something else tinned. I've forgotten what. But any rate. It turned out that the coffee, the soap and the cigarettes were like gold. We were riding a work train. Every day we'd ride out and then we when came back in the evening we'd right it back to a station, then walk back to the…wherever we were housed, you know. And as we were riding back, there were some…I refer to them as Czech linemen. People, Czechoslovakians that worked on the telephone lines or telegraph lines along the track. And they had a deal with the German bakers to buy bread. And you know, these were these nice, big loaves of bread like this. And it was, of course, obviously it was against the law for us to deal on the black market, but we did. And a pack of cigarettes or a bar of soap or a pound of coffee would buy a loaf of bread. And some of the guys were afraid to do that. But you know, I didn't think it made much difference. We got to the point where we…you know you got to be a real commerce [sic]. “You give me your pack of cigarettes plus two cigarettes for me to keep and I'd bring you in a loaf of bread.” You know, it was just that easy. So any rate, it was really a regular thing. One…I'm getting behind or ahead of myself. It doesn't really matter, I guess, cause all these things just happened. Well, let me come back to that. As we would go to the rail station to get on the train to go to where we were going to have to work, we'd go in a long single file beside this coaling station. And little piles of coals here and there and what not. And coming home we'd do the same thing. Well you know, you learn to do a lot of things. One of the things we learned fairly early on was when you wore your coat, your wore it like a cape. You wore it over your shoulders, buttoned and you left your arms free. And as we walked along, some of the guys reached down and grabbed a lump of coal. And at first the German guards would holler at them. After that they quit doing that. They let everybody do that. What we had in each room, each room they had a big wooden box about that square and about that tall. And when we first got there it was, of course, still in warm weather. I guess what, in September or something. Any rate, they had briquettes, coal briquettes which were made out of coal dust or whatever and this was used for the stove and for heating water for the latrine or whatever. And…excuse me. And they really didn't have very many of them and they said they couldn't give us anymore cause when the weather started getting cool, you know, we didn't have enough to keep the place warm. So that's when these guys started grabbing this coal. Well, we'd go in and when we would get in in the evening, those boxes, we'd fill them up. They'd be heaping over like this. And in the morning, we'd have burned down some of it. It's still be a full box. And when we come back in the evening, it'd be about half gone. So we were stealing from the Germans. The Germans were stealing from us. So they didn't mind. [laughing] They quit trying to stop us, you know. [laughing] Interviewer II: I have a question. Cause when you were captured, you didn't have a shirt. Sheer: No, I had this field jacket on. Interviewer II: You didn't have a shirt. Sheer: Didn't have a shirt. Interviewer II: You got a shirt somewhere along [inaudible]. Sheer: Well, after the showers or what not, then they gave us…got rid of all the clothes we were wearing. Interviewer II: Oh, they issued you clothes. Sheer: They issued us clothes. Yeah. Interviewer II: What did they look like? Sheer: Well, seems to me I had a jacket that had a bullet hole in the back of it. But they had a…it was a, you know, G.I. type jacket. Back then, we had what we called a field jacket, which was different than we used later on. That's another story. But I had a big diamond on the back that signified POW. And I don't know whether this was maybe a former English uniform or probably American uniform or what not, but you know, they were clothes they'd taken from other places. I guess maybe some of the same ones that had been taken off and then laundered and put back out. So. Interviewer II: Interesting. And they never did look at your dog tags. Sheer: Never did look at my dog tags. Interviewer II: And that's probably what kept them from ever finding out. Sheer: Except maybe…you said never looked at my dog tags. It may be that the H didn't mean anything to them. If it'd been a J for Jew, it would have. So, you know. Maybe. You never know. Any rate. Strange enough, they issued me another dog tag and it's just a kind of a square thing. It's a…I've got a picture of it in the book. In fact, I still have it at home. And my number was drei und octet six five ninish. I could try and figure out what that is, but I'm not sure. [laughing] Interviewer II: When did you…when were you liberated? When did you… Sheer: I wasn't liberated. I escaped after the third attempt. Interviewer II: Really? Well, take us through that. Sheer: [laughs] Well, before we get there, if you like, there's a couple of other things I mentioned. Interviewer II: Yeah. Yeah. Sheer: To start with, you know, you get to where you can do things, you know. If we walking beside a place that had cabbage, guys were pretty good about swiping cabbage. One day…I have never like rutabagas. Pardon me to the rutabaga world, but I can't stand them. Any rate, but I swiped some rutabagas one time or one. A nice, big one. On Sunday morning, we had…the day was free. During the week we had to work every day. But on Sunday, we had the day free. And you know, you would wash clothes or what not. We got to shower about once every so often. We had to go up to another place outside of the camp. I guess it was probably some of the railroad people's stuff. And we'd get to take a shower. But otherwise, on Sunday morning, we'd take it easy. And they would take a group of like four or five guys and take a thing, an old wagon or what not and go into the commissary and pick up the food for that day. The food, by the way, when we…early on when we got there, our rations were a quarter of a kilo of bread--a wedge like that, about that thick—a day. And [inaudible] coffee, which I think was probably made out of barley. And bread and…oh, and a bowl of potatoes. I'll never forget. We had a bowl, a little brown bowl with a blue inside and it was a lot of boiled potatoes like that with peelings on, you know. And that was our daily ration. We got that once a day. Coffee, I guess, we got it twice a day or whatever. Any rate. And you kept what you wanted to and what not. After a while, the potatoes got to be potato soup and then it got…the potato soup got to be thinner and thinner. Early on, they had given us, once a week we got a little patty of what we called bloodwurst. It was about that big around, about that thick. And I guess that was protein. That ended pretty soon. I guess, really the Germans didn't have all that much to eat either. Later when that soup got to be thinner and thinner, occasionally they would issue, instead of potato soup, some kind of gruel. It was made out of some kind of wheat or barley or something. I don't know what. But I didn't eat it. I mean, I didn't get that hungry. So [laughs]. Any rate, coming back to these rutabagas I'd stolen. Sunday morning I peeled this thing and cut it up and salted it. We had salt. And what not. And I boiled it and cooked it and what not. It looked real pretty. And I tasted it and I gave the whole damn thing…excuse me, the whole thing away cause I couldn't…I wasn't hungry enough to eat the rutabagas. [laughter] One day they had a group of us, instead of working on the tracks, we were working in a kind of barnyard down under the tracks or under a trestle. We had three paratroopers in our group and these guys were kind of aloof. They stayed to themselves and I mean, you didn't mess with those guys too much anyway. One of them…anyway, there were a lot of big buck rabbits running around on the ground in this farmyard. And one of them apparently got one, killed him and tucked him under his jacket and took it back into camp. That night he dressed him and put the leavings down the latrine. And he cooked that baby on that stove. It sure did smell good. But that's all we got. They ate the rabbit. All we got was the smell. [laughs] Oh me. Also, one of these three guys would go out at night. And it was kind of an understanding, he went out at night and he went under the fence. There was a group of Russian women that were also prisoners. There were some [inaudible] somewhere. I don't know where. But he'd go under the fence. And about nine o'clock, just before lights out, somebody [would] walk around our camp--could have been me, could have been anybody else—and start whistling. The Germans must have known this, but I don't know. Any rate, that was the signal for him to come back in. He was never stopped. [laughing] Any rate. Interviewer II: So, he was going to visit the Russian women? Sheer: Yeah. Incidentally, speaking of them. You know, from time to time we had to move one of these rails. You know, iron rails that the… [Tape 2, Side B] Sheer …some tongs that would clamp onto the rail like that with a handle. And it'd take, you know, probably eight of us, four on either side, to move a rail. A rail's pretty long. And I looked down at the tracks where these Russian women were working, four of them would pick up one and walk off with it. Just nothing to it. [laughs] They were something else. They looked liked they were well-fed with potatoes. [laughter] Any rate. But…so. I guess there were other things. Oh, one other thing I might…we were required to relocate a very large switch, you know, a rail that had all these different pieces to it and what not. And it took a lot of us to do it. But, we dug it. We unhooked it and did whatever with it and we moved it, oh I don't know, maybe thirty, forty, fifty feet. I don't know how far, but not too far. And tried to do our bit for the German war effort. We buried a few rakes and pitchforks and hawkers and what not in that gravel under that rail when we were covering, filling it back up. Would you believe about two weeks later they required we move that thing back and we dug all that equipment back up again. [laughs] Interviewer II: Well, tell us about your escape attempts. Sheer: Okay. I might tell you first, if you'd like for to, before I tell you about the escape attempts. We were working near the Czech border on a…near a town called Badelsta [phonetic] and this was right near the Czech border. Any rate, one day…there was an inn right beside the track and they let us stop there at lunch. Now, not to go in the inn, but there wasn't any way…we wouldn't go anywhere, I guess. And so they…we were kind of free at it. We had our…whatever lunch we brought along, I guess. And we…I wandered into the kitchen in this place. And I'd never played poker in my live. But one night in camp, these guys were always sitting around playing poker. One night in camp, one guy said, “Look, if you'll sit down here, I'll tell you what to do and you'll play”. And I said, “Well, what the heck”. And I had…the Germans had been paying thirty-two marks a month for working. So I had some marks; wasn't good for anything. Any rate. I ended up by winning a whole roll of marks. And I had them in my pocket and this lady said, in sign language or whatever, would you like some soup. And I had a delicious bowl of soup. It was really kind of cold outside. I really enjoyed it. And she…and I tried to pay her and she was…you know, I was gonna give her…I said, “Well here, just take, you know, the whole wad”. And she said, “So, you don't think our money's worth anything”. All this in sign language. She said, “You're gonna put it in the fire”. She was insulted, but any rate. I don't know what…maybe I gave her the whole wad of money. I don't know. It didn't mean anything to me. Walking out of there, I bumped into a German soldier who was obviously on leave or what not, because I think he was on crutches. I've forgotten but he had obviously been wounded, what not. And then I was wearing this watch that the Germans had missed very openly, you know. Short sleeves or whatever, I guess. Or rolled up. And he…I can't remember what arm my watch was on. He saw the watch and he wanted to buy it. He wasn't saying he would take it. He wanted to buy it and he offered me a hundred cigareth, which was like a hundred cigarettes which was like gold. And I said, “No, no. My mother and my father had given it to me”. By then, you know, you had some pidgin German that you could speak or pig German, as we called it. Any rate. He didn't pursue it, but he sure did want that watch. But I still have it. After that, the Americans came [inaudible] not too long after that and bombed this bridge that was over the Elbe River. That…and I…am I taking too much time? Interviewer II: No, this is fine. Sheer: As this…you've seen in the picture books these bridges with the kind of expansions underneath the stone bridge? I think this had one or two rails going across it, across the river. And they knocked a whale of a hole in the middle of it. Now, they didn't knock the whole bridge out. But they messed it up pretty badly. And incidentally, I don't know whether maybe one or maybe two bombs hit the bridge. That was all. But the whole area looked like pictures we've seen of the moon, with these pock marks all over around. Any rate. So we were required to go and repair the bridge. And we were…we'd taken, you know, they'd back the work train onto the bridge and we'd get off and work there. And I got picked, along with three other guys I think it was, to work with some stone masons. And what they were doing, they had this tremendously high scaffold. And this was now in February, I guess, so it was pretty cold. And up on top of this bridge where the wind was blowing, you know, you might think that was some pretty tough duty. And what we were doing, we were taking a jackhammer and blowing…and drilling holes up in this stone overhead. And then they'd blow cement in it to reinforce the bridge. Any rate, what we'd do, we'd have to climb up this…what do you call it…scaffold. And we were up there working. But the neat thing about it was, they had kind of an open grate sitting on the platform filled with coke and…what do you call it…a fire, a coke fire. And it was warm. I mean, the wind blowing through there just kept that thing red hot all the time. And they would stop for friestig [phonetic] for breakfast. And we'd go around the…what do you call it…the scaffold. And they had a little hut down at the bottom. And we'd sit down there and they had there…they always had their little lunch box with, you know, a little bit of bread and a little bit of margarine and some coffee. And we'd sit there and we'd just look at them. And they'd eat. And you know, we got to be friends, I guess. You know, any rate. So. Well, the one day they came out and one offered us an apple and one offered us something else. And so, it got to be better duty than working up on top. And we'd go back up and come back down. Not so long after that…well I guess…I guess it was in early April. One Sunday morning, we were doing the typical Sunday morning thing. Oh…got to tell you one other thing. We were [laughs]…one Sunday morning, one earlier Sunday morning, I was on the duty team going in to get the rations. And by the way, we could buy beer with that…those marks. It was sucre [phonetic] beer, that had saccharin in it and it had had the alcohol removed for the German war effort. So, we'd buy a keg of beer and we'd bring it in. The Germans used to tell us, you know, we always liked, you know, ice, you know, cold beer. Isn't that the way you drink it? Any rate, and the Germans said no, it would make you sick. You know, like that. So, we'd leave it outside and let it cold. But any rate. But this particular Sunday morning that I was on the detail, the guard went in to check on something and myself and another guy saw a place and we went down inside. Thought we'd do a little exploring, see what we could find to eat…I mean, to steal anyway. And didn't have much regard for their laws. It didn't matter, you know. And I found a whole bin of carrots. You learned, among other things I've told you about, your coat, where you could carry things under your arm. And you learned to also tie your pants at the bottom around your ankles. That way you could always put things in your pants leg. And I loaded…I was loaded with carrots when I came out. The German guard saw me and recognized it and made me put them back. But I got a nickname from then on. It was “Carrots”. Oh, one other thing. Talking about the…bread. We had one day or two days off or whatever it was for Christmas. And the…coming back to the camp just before, you know, we were off duty for Christmas, I think I must have brought eight loaves of bread in for different people. I was really loaded with it. The Germans never really stopped us too much. But one day, and this is even earlier on than that, the German…one of the German guards, I think he kind of had an idea. For some reason, he had it in for one of the guys. And he searched him and found a loaf of bread on him. And he called the corporal out. The corporal came out and says, “He must share with your friends…with your comrades”. And he took a big butcher knife and he walked through the camp, all the way through like this, and sliced a slice of bread and gave it to, you know, handed them out. Saying, “You must share with your comrades” all the way through. What he didn't realize was there was another POW walking behind him picking it all up. When he got all through the guy whose loaf of bread it was got it back except he got it back sliced. [laughter] Early April, I started to say, somewhere early April. I can't really…timing, I can't quite get. But Sunday morning, four P-47s or P-51s, I don't remember what, come in low over camp. And we heard these airplanes coming. And all of a sudden we heard the machine guns. And you talking about guys really trying to find cracks in the floor to dive into. We did. Under tables and anything else. And what they were doing, they were shooting at these engines that were at the roundhouse. And they really shot them up. There's one poor sucker though that was standing up in a window of the roundhouse with a machine gun shooting at them and they just plastered that whole section of the roundhouse with cannon fire. But I think one ricochet fell in our camp. That was all. But the German corporal ran out, opened the gate and ran back and crawled under the stove. [laughs] But that afternoon, they made us leave the camp and we went out into the woods. And we were, I guess, out in the woods for a couple of days. And I may have my timing…it may have been a little bit further into April than that. I don't really remember. But any rate, and after we were out there for a couple, three days, German Hitler youth started coming out with automatic rifles. Now you're talking about ten- and twelve-year-olds with machine pistols and what not and they were dangerous. Any rate. They were herding us back into the camp, which we went back to. And I don't know if you heard about this, but you probably have. Toward the end of the war, at the end of the war, the Germans would…if they had prisoners of war that were close to the Russians…where the Russians were coming in from the east, they would take the prisoners out and put them on the road and they had no place for them, so they would walk them toward the west. And where they were coming toward…from the Americans and British coming from the west, they'd take those out and walk them toward the east so they were going back and forth like this. Well, they were about to do the same thing with us. And I had developed a…it wasn't really all that bad. But I developed a kind of a sore on the top of my foot, one of my feet. I told the German corporal I was going up to the French [inaudible] that was up on the hill. That was a little clinic that was there for the prisoners for that whole area. British, American, New Zealand, whatever. Any rate, he said, “Go ahead”, which was kind of strange. But any rate. I went up there. The French doctor was…it was operated by a French doctor and a French padre. And they had a few bunks and a little day room area and what not. Some people there. And he, you know, dressed my foot. And he said, “You want to stay here?” And I said, “Sure”. So I crawled…he said, “That's your bunk over there”. So I crawled in on the bunk. Well that night, two German soldiers came in. I know what they were doing. They were looking for me cause I hadn't gone…come back to the camp. And everybody said, no, they didn't know anything about me. So you know, they finally left. So I was left up there. Well, I was there for a couple of days and then the French doctor one morning says, “Now, I'm going to take four of you to within one kilometer of the front line”, of the, you know, of the lines. “Then you can go from there. And we'll do it by cutting cards.” And I happened to be one of the four that got one of the cards. So it was me and I think maybe another American and a…oh, me and a English guy, I think, and maybe a New Zealander and an Australian. And the next morning, we started out this very circuitous route. And we ended up in a deep woods, so to speak. And there we met a whole a bunch of French prisoners. Now these guys had boxes and bags and pots and pans. I'd always heard that French soldiers were excellent infantrymen. These looked like a bunch of cattle. I mean, they…and going through the woods they sound like a bunch of cattle. Well, the doctor says, “Okay, you guys go with these fellas and they'll take you through the lines and just go with them”. So you know, what are you gonna do? We said, ‘Okay. Thank you.” So we started out and they headed west, I guess it was. And we got close to a clearing. And just as we went out into the clearing, German soldiers came out of the foxholes and stopped us and took us back in. And you know, and so. They took us back to some little schoolhouse, of all things. It was empty. And said, “Okay, you wait here and somebody will be here to get you”. Well, there was us and the Frenchies and there were some other people, they were up on a kind of stage and a lot of there gear was up there. You know, everybody's traveling with whatever they've got, you know. That's another whole world. But any rate, after a while, after the Germans left, these people up on the stage just left everything they had and they took off. Well, this was like manna from heaven for these French guys. They all bounded up on the stage to see what they could find to add to all what they already had. [laughing] This was, you know, new treasure. Well, while they were doing that, the four of us eased out of there. We headed back toward what we felt like was toward camp. Well, we got to one place where we saw some German soldiers with what looked like a field kitchen. And we walked over there, I guess a little brazen. But we asked if we could have some food and they said, “Sure”. And we got in line and, you know, they gave something to eat off of. And we had a meal. We sat down and one of these German soldiers came over to us and said, “Now look, you have to be careful. You'd better get off the road because the SS was wandering around.” If they found any prisoners that they found loose, they'd just shoot them on the spot. I don't know. Somehow or another that didn't bother us too much one way or the other. We got…we went on back and we finally got to…back to the camp. And they said, “What are you doing back here?” And we told them. So, we spent the night and I said to the New Zealander and the Kiwi, the Aussie and the Kiwi the next morning at whatever breakfast we had, I said, “Look, we know where we've been. We know how to get there. Why don't we just do it on our own?” So we did. And when we got to the point where we knew where the German outpost was we just moved down to the right about two thousand feet. And said, you know, we'd head for that clump of woods across over on across the clearing. And you know, I guess in your mind you said, “What could happen?” Either they shoot you in the back, you keep walking or they stop you. Well, so we headed out. We didn't run. We just took it easy. And nothing…nobody hollered and nothing happened. So we went across. We got in this little clump of woods. And we looked down, way down the hill down there, you know, off in the distance. There was a little town. We said, well if a town's there, we know the Germans must be in that town. So we said, no, we'd better go. And there was an Autobahn, you know, like an expressway running across. So we headed in the other direction across it. That was our mistake. The town was held by Americans. When we got…just as we were crossing the Autobahn—there wasn't any traffic on it—but some guy hollered at us. It was a German soldier, waving for us to…he obviously had an automatic rifle in his hand. So, you know, what are you gonna do? But we went up there. He took us back to their camp and…I'll end up here in a minute. Am I going too long? Any rate, so…he took us back to that…where they had an encampment and conferred with their superiors. Then he took us to a little town to a little jail. On the way there, he spoke fairly good English. We were trying to get him to surrender to us [laughs] and give himself up. We said, the war's nearly over you know and so forth. And he says, “Oh no. In two weeks I'm going back to Berlin to visit my girlfriend”. He wasn't having any part of that. So they took us to this little jail and they told us to get in this cell. And they didn't lock the door. They just closed it. And the next morning, the jailer…you've got to understand now. This is right toward the end of things. The next morning, the jailer gave us some coffee and we took off and we figured if we head west [sic], by looking which way the sun was, we'd find the American lines. And we walked, we stayed off the roads, and we walked through the day and what not. And that night, we found a woods to sleep in. And you know, being good Boy Scouts, I guess, we learned we could take our shoes off and curl up in a ball as close as we could and we'd stay warm. We figured in the woods nobody would see us. Well, when we woke up the next morning, we were about [inaudible] just a short distance from a road. The woods were just as clean as they could be. You could see all the way across. But nobody had bothered us. So, we got out on the road and started walking. And we just decided in that case, we walked on the road and we begin to see houses with white flags. And more and more and more. And then we got to a place where two G.I.s jumped out of the ditch on either side and stopped us. And these were from the…whatever division it was. But any rate…excuse me. They stopped us and wanted to know, “Who were you?” And well, the kind of outfit I was…I told them I was an American G.I. And they said, they looked at me and the clothes I was wearing. They weren't real sure about that. I showed them my dog tags, my G.I. dog tags and then they did. And I introduced them to these other two guys, the New Zealander and the Australian. And then they took us back to where the captain was or whatever. First time I've ever had a drink of whiskey in my life. And this guy says, “You want Black and White or White Horse?” And I never…I said, “Either one”. [laughter] But from that, to end this thing up, we made…I made…those guys went on wherever, I guess, to join their units, and I kind of hitchhiked and worked my way back across Germany, till I finally got back to Riems and was from there flown to Le Havre--first time I'd been in an airplane—to a camp called Lucky Strike. The U.S. had set up these camps for repatriating up POWs. There was a lot of complaining going on after we got there and the camp commander got up on a platform one Wednesday morning and said, “I want to explain to you. We'll get you home as quick as we can, but this camp has grown from eleven thousand to sixty thousand since last Saturday.” And so, a couple weeks we were put on a liberty ship and headed home. Interviewer II: Now, just very quickly. One more question. What did you do with your G.I. Bill. Sheer: Well, I went back to Georgia. I did not take full advantage of it. Somehow or another I went to Ag school and somehow or another it just didn't gel for me and I finally went home and…so I didn't finish Georgia. Interviewer II: And how did you end up in Atlanta? Sheer: Well, after I…we were in a…I was in a family farming business. Lived in town in the evenings. And we had some farms outside. Myself and my brother-in-law, who had come down from up North, and myself and my mother and what not, we had a poultry processing business that had developed over a period of time. But, things weren't really as great as they ought to be and we had a child and what not and felt like that there'd be more advantages in Atlanta. And so, I had some encouragement from my in-laws. My wife had grown…she was born in Macon, but she grew up here in Atlanta. And so, I came to Atlanta and went into the real estate business and forty years later I retired. Or forty-five, yeah. Interviewer II: We've got just a couple more minutes of tapes. You've got anything specific? Interviewer I: I don't think I have any more questions. Interviewer II: One very quick one. Can you tell me what you thought was the best piece of equipment the Army issued you and what was the worst? Sheer: I guess the M-1 rifle was the best. And I don't know what the worst was cause that's really, you see, that was really all I…that was my friend. That was all I had. Interviewer II: And one more thing. When you were….when you landed in Normandy, and had landed on the beaches, quickly describe what you were carrying. Sheer: Everything I owned. A rifle, you know, a pack with clothes, you know, socks and what not. And canteen equipment like, you know, cup and plate and what not. And cigarettes and ammunition. And I had that bag with rifle grenades. And of course, I was…ammunition of other sorts. Interviewer II: Were you carrying a gas mask? Sheer: Yeah, I guess so. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, I guess we all did. Got rid of that probably somewhere not too long after that. Interviewer II: That was one of the things you read about is the guys would quickly dispose of the mask, but they kept the bag. Sheer: Yeah. Well, I don't know about the bag. I think we just got rid of the whole thing. [end of tape]
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Extent:: 1:00:51
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
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Oral history interview of Fred O. Scheer, part one of two

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