--Damon West regarding a German girl he came across that left a lasting impression:

Transcription

1 Damon West WV Veterans' Legacy Project Interview Transcript --Damon West regarding a German girl he came across that left a lasting impression: When we were on the train crossing Germany, we stopped in this demolished town while the engineers were working up ahead. We road in flat cars and box cars. Well, we were riding in a box car and I was sitting at the open door of the box car with a young man from New York and a little girl came up beside. He struck up a conversation in German. He could speak German. He had it in high school. I looked down and asked the little girl what she was carrying. She looked up and, with bright eyes, said, I speak English. I engaged in conversation with the little girl and she was carrying a German Bible. There was no place to go. She was just wandering with no food to eat. She said that she had seen her father and mother killed and she went to her grandmother. And her grandmother said that we are going to be separated, because there is too much bombing. When you survive this, I want to tell you three things to do. Number 1 - find the Americans; find the American Army, and they will treat you alright. Carry your bible with you. And when they ask you what you are, say, I am somebody. The train started to pull out and the little girl kept walking along, and she said, Take me with you, let me climb up in there with you. I don t know if I said or if my buddy said. We were both speaking English to her. We can t take you with us. We re headed to the front. Why do you want to go with us? She said, I told you before - I am somebody. Interviewer: Can you say your name and what branch of service you were in? Damon West: I am Damon West, living at Troy, WV. In 1942, I was teaching the 5th grade in Troy Elementary School. The next day, I was drafted, and I went to Glenville, where we were signed in and we were taken by buses to Carmichael Auditorium in Clarksburg, West Virginia for the physical examination. There must have been close to 20 doctors in little booths giving physical examinations. I would say that, off-hand, it lasted from 3-5 minutes. In other words, if you walked in and you could walk out, they said you were eligible. From there, we boarded a train in Clarksburg and went to Fort Hayes in Columbus, Ohio. In Columbus, Ohio, we re given uniforms, we were given a dog tag number, which the dog tags were our identification throughout the war. And a few other things such as: gave every bedroom or everyone that enrolled a bible and a prayer book from Camp Fort Hayes, in Columbus, Ohio. By train, I went to basic training at Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas. Six weeks of basic training and we boarded a train and thought we were going westward and thought we were going to the South Pacific. Now, this train took the southern route through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, into the southern part of California. Now, at that particular time, this train was traveling under orders, no one was allowed to get off this train. Although, it would stop occasionally for water. This goes back to the age when the trains were run by steam. No one was allowed to get off. A story I ve told many times is that it stopped and there were some other passengers on this train, even though it was a troop train. It stopped at a very, very small town and a very old lady on the train at that time, and I was standing on a platform between two of the coaches with some other GIs. I ll speak of GIs quite often. This elderly lady had a suit case and a shopping bag. She set them at the top of the steps and the conductor helped her down. Just then, one of the service men on the train, you have to remember they were under orders that no one leave the train, he stepped down and picked up the suit case and the handbag and carried them about 50 feet across to a platform and set them down. The elderly lady had not made it that far yet, and he came back and helped her over. When he came back as the train was pulling out, the Captain that was in charge of that coach came to the door, and we

2 were interested in seeing what would happen. If he would be court martialed or what. When he came back, he looked up at the Captain and said, Captain, I know, but that lady is somebody s mother. The Captain turned and walked away. Many times, during my service, things happened. I don t talk much about the war. I talk about human interest stories that really happened. We landed at Camp Stoneman, just out of Pittsburg, California. Pittsburg, California is on the San Joaquin River. We didn t know when we stopped there that we were going to be part of the personnel. They were building the camp then. To give you a little idea of how large the camp was, it was divided into sections A through M. You could not walk all over the camp without it would actually taken hours, it was that large. They were building barracks; they had already built the first part of it. It was Quartermaster, but they changed the name to Transportation Corps. I was assigned to the service unit, which the service unit took care of the entire camp. As servicemen were shipped into this camp, going to the South Pacific, they would have different clothes, shoes, trousers, shirts, then they would have in the States. So the service unit composed of, I assume, may have consisted of 1000 men because there was 2000 men running the camp. And I was assigned to the head unit. With a man by the name of Captain Dowden was in charge of it. Dowden, Stapleton, Joe Parrent, myself, and, at that time, two black boys. The one black boy s last name was Charles and I was assigned to his truck. I carried a clip board and when the requisitions would come in, we would go to one of the buildings in this camp. One building would have shoes. That building would have been twice as large as a gymnasium is today. Another had nothing but trousers, nothing but shirts, and on down the line. I think there were 11, 10 or 11 of those buildings. In 1982, 1978, when I won some honors, my wife and daughter and I drove across the country picking up the honors and, earlier in the week, we drove onto California and we drove by where this camp was. 40 years later, it s a housing unit. They had kept one of those buildings that had been a part of that. To make a long story short, I was there for almost 3 years. I come back across on a furlough was a 14 day leave. 3 days and 4 nights to come from California to Clarksburg by train. I did that 3 times in those 3 years. Out in Nebraska was a place known as North Platte. The Union Pacific ran from Chicago to California. North Platte got an idea. A young lady that will have food for servicemen that pass through here from For 4 years, 365 days a year. They served every serviceman that went through North Platte on the Union Pacific Railroad. I passed through there 6 times. 3 times going east, 3 times going west. You say, how can you serve that many? 125 towns and cities in the state of Nebraska gave them help. There was somebody that took over the Union Pacific Railroad station and put tables in the middle of it. Every train that went through there, they would announce, we are coming through North Platte, the train will stop for 10 minutes. You can imagine that many troops. Of course, they would always stretch the 10 minutes to about 15 but they would blow the whistle for you to come back. How did they feed that crowd? If they knew ahead of time by telephone or telegraph whether it was the troop train or just the local train. If it was the troop train, they would have 20 bushel baskets of sandwiches. They would have truckload after truckload of bushel baskets of apples or oranges. They could feed 2000 people. I have pictures. I just put a post card back in a book. If you find a veteran that is over 75 years of age, ask them two questions, did they ever travel the Union Pacific between California and Chicago, they were there. They would have stopped there. Of course, there was no food. It was 500 miles from Chicago to North Platte, it was 1500 mile from California to North Platte. With no food on the train. I have gone for 2 nights and a day and never had a bite to eat. It is difficult to picture that many and that much doing, but let s go back to California. We got the word that almost everybody that was in the transportation corps unit, the 1000, almost

3 everyone one of them were shipped out. I first went down to Fort MacArthur and a coast artillery unit for 2 months. I do not know why. Quite a number of my buddies and I stopped there and I don t know why. Then we were shipped on to Camp Howze, Texas for advanced infantry training. Advanced infantry training, they almost try to kill you there. You are getting ready to go to the front lines. To give you an idea, we lived in tents. And they had what they called bivouac. You would leave your base and you would go out into the countryside. Sometimes you d go into forest, sometimes you d go into fields and you d pitch your tents and stay a while. We were on bivouac 20 miles from our base. It had been raining and you and your buddy would carry half a tent. You d take it out of your light pack, it probably weighed about 35, it was supposed to weigh 35 pounds and you d take out your half tent and a buddy would take out his half and you d snap them together. There was a collapsible post for the center of it and you d crawl in there on the ground and I learned a long time, in the early part of training. You had one blanket. Most of us always carried two. You were allotted one blanket, but I always carried two. I have a blanket upstairs yet that I brought with me when I came out of the service. Incidentally, no moths have gotten to it yet. Well, the basic training, I won t go into it. It was tough. To give you an idea we were out 20 miles from our base and had been training all day. In training you do the same thing that you are going to do. At that time, they don t fight a war now like they did then, and we were trained to take hell. And we being in the infantry, the field artillery was there also. The field artillery would fire over your head. This is practice. They would fire over your head and cut a swath, take out the enemy, and you would advance and dig in again. You spent most of the time crawling up to an advance and you would do that one time after another. Then, later on, you would do that at night and this lasted for 6 weeks. But to finish the story, we had been working all day practicing and we were wet and cold. The announcement said pack up, we re going back. All night long for 20 miles, which would be from here to Weston, they had a truck behind us, we were told afterwards. Now and then, somebody would fall out, but you would make it. I went into the service weighing 129 pounds. By that time, I weighed about 140. Most of them were young and they were getting us ready. Well when we finished basic training there we did not know if we were going east or west. Whether we were going to the South Pacific, but we guessed from what we were doing, we were going to Germany. We shipped up to New York, the port of embarkation there. We boarded, the unit I was with, we did not have a the headquarters had not given us a company name yet. We were just reserves. We boarded the New Amsterdam and set sail for the war zone. As I mentioned before, there were 5000 troops on the New Amsterdam and 1000 people to man it. It was a Dutch ship, manned by the English, carrying American soldiers. Human interest story here, my name starts with W. It seemed that they did everything in alphabetical order and I was always bringing up the rear. So when they placed us on the ship, there were 5 decks. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 down, and we were down in the 5th deck and our bed was a hammock swung from the ceiling, which was low, and we were down sleeping or trying to sleep in a swinging hammock. Right next to me was a young man by the name of Wood. To show how dedicated, I ve used this story of dedication to show how dedicated this young man was, he had a baseball glove and a baseball. And I made friends with him and I said what s new and he said, this baseball is my life. When I go to the front, this baseball and glove is going with me. He said that I ve been drafted by the St. Louis big league baseball team and I ve spent my life, since the time I entered high school getting ready to play big league baseball, and he said, I m determined that I am going to make it. This is the inspiration that I have. When we landed at Glasgow, Scotland, we had taken the northern route and fought their way and this New Amsterdam ship was well fortified with guns and they had what they called depth charges. One

4 day or night, we felt that big ship rock like everything and the word finally got out that they had spotted a German submarine and that ship was able to drop one of those depth down deep and that was you don t know if they got them. You never knew exactly what was going on. We landed at Glasgow, Scotland and Wood said to me, They ve asked for volunteers to unload 5000 duffle bags. Now the duffle bag was the big bag that had all of your belongings in it. He said, Let s get off this ship ahead of time. And we did. I don t know how many they had, but I ll tell you that you just threw the duffle bags up on a walkway and they hauled them away, you know. All of them were labeled. I have a duffle bag upstairs that was your suitcase on there. We got on a train in Glasgow, Scotland and went down across to we passed through London, incidentally, so I ve been to London but I didn t see it. We went to Hampton. South Hampton was shown on the map that I was showing you a while ago and we boarded a ship, I don t know, it would carry a few thousand I suppose, and crossed the channel, but when we get to the French side of the channel, we had to get off and we went over the side of the ship in a net. You may have seen it in the movies. You d go down the net onto a landing barge. The landing barge would run up onto the shore. As close as it could until bottomed out and then they would drop the end of the landing barge down and you waded ashore, which we did. We waded to shore, but, now, D-day had long past. We landed at Le Havre, and Le Havre had been bombed You ll have to stop and think that the Germans took Le Havre and bombed it and destroyed almost every bit and then the British and Americans came in and bombed it again to get the Germans out so there was no city left. There was no streets other than what was covered and they had taken a bull dozer and made a single path up through the debris so we could there was no particular formation at that time, so we could keep moving on. The only people that you would see were some elderly people. Some very elderly people. Old, maybe years old, and some children were along the path begging for food, begging for candy or chewing gum that you had. We actually, as we moved up to the front, I tell my grandchildren and people that I have told the story to that I walked across France. I rode on a train across Germany. And I remember Adam, my second grandchild saying, Granddad, are you sure you re not mixed up on that? I remember very well that we walked across France. There were no railroads left. I road across Germany from the time we entered Germany. That chart that I had, I can t remember the city, till we got nearly to Nuremburg by train. Here s what happened, when the Germans, you have to understand what the Germans were doing. The Germans who were holding Germany did not have their country destroyed yet, so they destroyed everything in France. Buildings, roads, railroad lines and everything. Along comes the Americans, who cross France, The Germans were in France. They drive the Germans out of France back into Germany. Then, the Americans end up taking Germany. But the Americans under Eisenhower, they did not bomb the railroad. Some of it was tore up, but not much of it. As the engineers, the engineers were another group, went ahead of us, we d stop occasionally, and while they repaired the track. But you could see bomb craters on each side of the track. They meant to miss. This was Americans doing this. They meant to miss the track so they would have it when they got there. It is pretty hard to understand. I lost track of my buddy, after 4 or 5 days. It took a long time to move us up along France, because we walked and marched, but not in formation. I recall that it rained and they did manage to keep the supply of food up to you pretty well but most of it was what they called a K-ration. Of course, you were carrying your mess kit with you but it was going to be a long time before you had anything warm to put into that. The war ended and I moved back to my first move from Frankfurt was to Bamberg. At Bamberg, I was put to work as a clerk. I had been in the infantry and now I was put to work as a clerk, working on service records. I worked with a friend of mine. In France, we moved back over to Belgium for one

5 night and, then, rom Belgium back into France the next night. I ended up working in France as a checker on the railroad for five months. What happens is that they were shipping supplies, American supplies, from Antwerp to Paris. So when they crossed the border from Belgium to France, they had to put guards on every car that was American goods. France was running the regular trains, but on each of those trains there may be one or they may be two box cars. There was usually no more than three, and my job was to check them in at the headquarters. And they d assigned 2 or 3 of these Japanese-American boys, there was about 25 of them there, there were three of us that were checkers on the railroad. They would let us know when the trains were coming in. Two guards would be out at the edge of the railroad and even though the train would slow down, but still moving. One of them would swing up on each side, and they had M1 rifles, to keep the French from looting it while it was in that yard before it went on through. There are so many interesting stories that have been told about this. Some of the cars had already been broken into. We, as checkers, had to take a French worker with us. One of the fellows that worked with me only knew French. He couldn t speak English, and I couldn t speak French, but we knew what we were doing. One of the men spoke English and he was a fascinating young man. He wanted to come to America and go to school, but of course, I do not know what ever happened to him. Every day was an interesting time. Christmas time was there and the chef that was cooking for us, we stayed in a French chateau as they called it, there was very little heat. There was an old broken stove in there and, one day, the boys came in with some stove pipe. I never asked them where they got it. They stole it of course though from the French out of some building somewhere. So they knocked out half of the window and put the stove pipe into this old burnside stove. Then, they would go down along the track and pick up coal so we had heat. I stayed in a room with three of these boys, one of them was a checker, Yosinaga. Domo Yokinama became a very good friend of mine. I wasn t very big, but he was shorter yet. They had fascinating stories to tell. It was about Christmas time and we didn t have any sugar. The supply would come down from Belgium. I told the boys that when a car load of sugar comes through, if it hadn t been broken into, it will be when it goes out of here. When it did come through, I wasn t on duty, but they came up after me. It was in a flat car with a tarp over top of it, a French car of course, and it was loaded with 100 pound bags of sugar. We had the call to the weapons carrier, was the only vehicle that was stationed there. We called for the weapons driver to come down and get that 100 pounds of sugar. We stole from what we were guarding, but that was war time. You survived. Yosinaga was on duty one time and he said I need your help. I said, what s wrong, and he said I ve lost 2 cars, they came in last night from Belgium headed for Paris. Somehow or another they switched them. They must have got the guards attention someway. Anyway they switched them off and they were gone, but we had papers to show that they were on the train so I had one of them to send for the young man that could speak English and I said we ve lost 2 cars. Yosinaga was on duty and there s two cars gone. Do you know where they are? Well, I don t know. I m not sure. Well, you might as well take me and the other 2 guards to where they are. I ll have the whole company come down from Mans, and I wasn t joking. I m not trying to get into any difficulty but, when there is a problem, I will try to solve it. He then said, Well, I ll take you. There was a side track that went around the point where you couldn t see it where they had these 2 cars. We got out there. You could guess for a week and you wouldn t know what those two cars were filled with. Whiskey that was going up to the headquarters in Paris. One of the cars had been broken into. The other one had cases in there and many of the cases were gone. Some of them, just bottles out of the cases were gone and I had to try to make a list of that as part of my work. This Frenchman that could speak English came to me, you never saw Red Skelton I don t think the comedian, but he wore this big long coat this fellow and it had two big pockets on the inside and he said, You know, we haven t had anything in our home and we are poor. Would it be alright if

6 I took some of these? I said that I would have to check this other car. I didn t see him take them, but after we got through and got back into the weapons carrier, he said, You know, West, if I ever fall down, you ll have to help me up. He had so many bottles in that big ol coat of his. He said I selected what my family likes. This is some of the things you ll experience. There was very good basketball court; these boys wanted to know why we couldn t get a team of basketball there. I said that we can t find a basketball. Well, I decided I would get them one so I got on the French train and went up to the USO, the United Service Organization, where servicemen went to the USO. On the way up, I got on the train; I knew where I was going. The conductor said that he didn t know where to get off to find the USO. So after we had gone a few miles, I stood up in the train and said Is there anyone on this train that speaks English? The young lady setting on the far end said I speak English. I went up to talk to her. When we got to the place, she notified the conductor that we had a passenger that wanted off there, so I got off there and went to the USO and got a basketball. Brought it back there and started up a basketball team. The French were just starting to play basketball and I was one of those people that couldn t be still. If athletics could be had, I was willing to do it. Some of them would just sit in the barracks and worry about going home. I can t say that I didn t worry, but I tried to stay busy. So, that is the way I got a basketball. It finally came the day to ship out and we boarded trucks and moved toward Antwerp, Belgium. At Antwerp, we were stationed there for weeks and we lived in tents. It was out in the desert like and it would blow sand up inside the tent. There was 5 of us in the tent, and we had decided that we had enough of that so we got shovels and banked the sand up around the tent, all the way around, so it wouldn t blow under the tent. The wind was strong there and it would blow holes at night, and we would draw straws at night to see who was to go out and bank up the sand when this would happen to keep it from blowing underneath. Finally, the day would come when we boarded a small ship named the Westminster. The United States built a great number of Victory Ships to bring troops home from the South Pacific and from Europe. They could only carry about 1000 troops. They called them Victory Ships. We were on the Westminster. The Westminster did not ride as smoothly as the ship when we went over because of the size of it. When we landed, the first thing that we saw was the Statue of Liberty and it certainly looked good. I have pictures in one of the booklets that I have showing that everyone was out on deck looking for the welcome ship. There was a ship that came out to welcome the ship to harbor. I came back to Fort Meade, Maryland and stayed there 3 days and was discharged from Fort Meade, Maryland. It was 46 after serving 4 years and 28 days; I was back to civilian life. That about ends my story. There s lots of thingsi could fill in in between, happenings, always looking for that human interest story. I ve told many of them. I mentioned one or two. I want to back up and tell you one particular one. When we were on the train crossing Germany, we stopped in this demolished town while the engineers were working up ahead. We road in flat cars and box cars. Well, we were riding in a box car and I was sitting at the open door of the box car with a young man from New York and a little girl came up beside. He struck up a conversation in German. He could speak German. He had it in high school. I looked down and asked the little girl what she was carrying. She looked up and, with bright eyes, said, I speak English. I engaged in conversation with the little girl and she was carrying a German Bible. There was no place to go. She was just wandering with no food to eat. She said that she had seen her father and mother killed and she went to her grandmother. And her grandmother said that we are going to be separated, because there is too much bombing. When you survive this, I want to tell you three things to do. Number 1 - find the Americans; find the American Army, and they will

7 treat you alright. Carry your bible with you. And when they ask you what you are, say, I am somebody. The train started to pull out and the little girl kept walking along, and she said, Take me with you, let me climb up in there with you. I don t know if I said or if my buddy said. We were both speaking English to her. We can t take you with us. We re headed to the front. Why do you want to go with us? She said, I told you before - I am somebody. Thank you.