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Gunskirchen Liberation

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What were your memories and experiences when liberating Gunskirchen?

Gunskirchen? The concentration camp? That was a terrible experience, a horrible experience and surprising. After we left the Rhineland we were going to meet the Russians in Steyr, Austria. We were on our way to Steyr, Austria and we ran up on this camp. It seemed to me that it was a German—at the beginning, by seeing these buildings, we thought it was housing German soldiers—their barracks. But as we buttoned down and got battle ready, the closer we got we saw people—heads clean, and in striped suits, and some hanging out of the windows—so we didn't know what the hell it was. So we opened the hatches to get a closer look. Then you saw people that looked like ghosts—skeletons with skin wrapped around it—just walking, wandering around, a couple of them were, on the outside. Then all around the barracks there were bodies that looked like skin and bones. That's all there was.

What the Germans had done, the night they heard we were coming or they heard us coming some kind of way, they put 2600 people—that's how many they would house, in each one of those barracks—and they had some flammable fluid and they put them all in there and they torched them. But somehow the fluid went out and it was just smoldering and they were trying to come through the windows and so forth to get some air and so it smothered them. So as you looked through the dead bodies out there you'd see a leg or a hand or something moving, the medics would go in there and get them out, you know, and put them in ambulances.

I was talking to one lady, she was a survivor and I was a liberator. It kind of upset me a little bit because she was upset because she was a beautiful blonde, and she was playing like she was German for a long time. She was only in the concentration camp for three months. But the old timers, the ones that stayed in there a long time, and this particular lady was saying, "The Americans took too long to bring medicine and stuff up." And she was saying this and I was there with her. I had to straighten her out. We weren't packing medical supplies, we were packing ammunition. It took the Americans time to get that much hospital stuff up there, to clean these people up, to get the lice off of them, and to feed them. And they told us not to give them any more food, because what we were giving them was killing them, because their stomachs would hemorrhage, and they said they would court-martial any us if we gave them any food, even broth, you know, they couldn't have that. So we had to stop doing that. And for her to say something like that, it kind of made me angry.

Claudia, she was another lady, she didn't like her anyway, all she was trying to do is sell her book, and she was one of the last ones there. That's what happened in Steyr, the concentration camp. Then we pulled out, stayed there for a few hours. And where the Germans had put supplies in an old potato masher you know, the guns they turn in, some kids were playing and one of them pulled the pin and blew him up, blew himself up, and he had on short pants and you could see, all there was was this white meat. And then the people started coming around and they ran them away, they said they would come up and eat him, you know, so they would keep them away from us. And then we went on from there we went to Steyr, Austria. This Gunskirchen camp was a receiving camp from Mauthausen, that's where they worked, and when they got too weak to work that's where they sent them to, that camp. Then we went to Steyr, Austria, where we met the Russians at the Enns River.

I was talking to one of the soldiers the other day who was in my platoon—not my platoon, but my company, he was a platoon sergeant—he said, "Dade, remember when I got put in jail and got captured by the Russians?" I said, "Nope." "At the Enns River—the Germans had blown the center of the bridge out? And they wanted to go to Steyr and loot and see what was over there." So he said he crossed the bridge, looked up, and one of those Russians had a 45 in his face. They captured him for about two or three hours. And he said, "They sure hate to lose," because we used to play them volleyball after that and they would get angry because we would beat them.

Did you speak to any of the prisoners?

The prisoners? Yes.

Do you recall what the conversation was about?

First they wanted cigarettes. They came up—we used to tease them a lot—they would say "Komrad, Ich Ruski, Ihr nicht Deutscher, eine Zigarette, bitte"—to let you know that he's Russian, he's not German, just give him a cigarette please. And one of the Jewish guys, I'm not saying this to be—he had a gold watch, I don't know how he had it, but he wanted some cigarettes for it, and he wanted too many, we wouldn't give him any more than a carton. But he had a hard bargain, he wouldn't take no less than what he wanted. They had different ones in that camp. And we just gave them candy and cigarettes but we couldn't do that anymore. And they were so glad to see you, you know. So we moved out on the outskirts of town, and then people equipped for that had to come in and take care of them, like the medics and so forth.

When you met the Russians in Austria what were their reactions to African-Americans?

Well, that didn't make any difference to them. Americans are the only ones that have that stigma. You were just Americans soldiers to them. By the time you hit France, Europe is different. Nobody prejudice but here and we carried that stuff over there with us. In fact, they were telling ladies in France and England that the blacks had tails, so some of the guys they had to pull their pants down and show them. So you'd be surprised at what some people would do. The Americans were the only ones who were prejudiced like that. Everybody else was glad to see you. Even now, you go over there and they're glad to see you and tell you thanks for what you did. See, we died together, we bled together. Everything was all right. The only thing is they just couldn't live together. Like the Tuskegee airmen, when they were fighting, you know, they would come off from a flight. The white officers' club was over here, but the officers club, they couldn't go to it. They just had to go back to their bunks, couldn't go get a drink if they wanted. They had to go back to their bunks and go to bed.

Were there any children at Gunskirchen?

No. No children in the camp that we went to.

Were the people in the camp surprised to see black soldiers or did it not make a difference?

Well, they were glad to see anybody. But I found out later that one, Saul, we sometimes make speeches together, they said that he was crazy because he said that he saw black tankers—black troops in a tank—he was in prison camp. He had his striped uniform on. I remember passing those guys. He said it was a detail of prisoners that were moved from one camp to another. The German troops ran into the woods and they hid until we passed. And he told his brother that he saw some black tankers. and they said "No, you didn't see any black tankers." So they said he was crazy, said he'd been without food for so long and that he didn't know what he was saying. Did anybody see the tape where we were on it? That was him, and he said that he thought I was a black god, you know, when he saw the tank. There was another black soldier himself, he got caught in Battle of the Bulge which was touching. He got trapped in there for three days, and he and his company commander got under a jeep with snow on it and they hid under that for three days. What he was doing, this was another black quartermaster outfit that was in the Red Ball Express, bringing supplies up for the army. He brought up troops. They had to get us there so fast that they didn't have time for the train or the troops to march in. They had to get these trucks and put them on. Then they had to bring them up and put them off.

So what they did, they would bring them into the middle of the battle zone without any weapons or anything, because you didn't know where the battle zone was, there was no line. And they put them out there, and they got surrounded and they got trapped and he stayed there for three days. And he said people told him that he was crazy. He said "no, no no," and he kept telling his son that. One day I went down to Hollywood, the wife and I, to make a speech and I saw his son. He said, "Were you a tanker?" and I said, "Yeah." He said, "Where were you?" and I told him. And he said, "My dad said there were black tankers," he said, "and I'm going to tell him. How long are you going to be here? He wants to come over and meet you." So the next day, here comes his dad. He hugged me and he was so glad to see me. He said, "Man, I told them I saw black tankers and they said I was crazy. And when I looked up and I heard the roar of the engines coming, I told my commander, I said those are American tanks coming." He said he looked up and he saw that big black tanker sitting up on top of the tank, just rocking, and we were moving pretty fast, just rocking and rocking, and he said, "Which way are you going?" And he said, "I'm going the way they came from," because he knew that way was clear. So that's the way he got out of it, and he went back. And I gave him a peace of mind because then they didn't say he was crazy anymore.

More on the War

What was the weather like and how did that affect you?

The weather was horrible. We first went in—it was in October, that was during the fall of the year—and in France where it started raining all the time, there was mud and muck, the condition that we were in Louisiana down in the swamps. And then as it went on to the winter it started snowing. That's when we had to go down to the Battle of the Bulge. Snow, the worse snow they ever had, and freezing. The snow was about four to six feet deep in some places. It was so cold sometime you'd think a gun had fired, but that's a tree that has frozen and just exploded, it was so cold a lot of the time they would do that, and it would just split in two. Then we got to the Rhineland and it was about March, April, and May, and it started to begin to break a little bit. That's when we were doing our best, or a little better.

Were the Germans more prepared for the winter or did you have enough warm clothes for the winter?

Well we did, yeah, but the Germans had better because they had been fighting in Russia, and one thing they had was white uniforms for snow. They would rise up out of the snow and they would fire on us. Then they would lay back down. So you had to look for it, you don't know where it's coming from. But us, we had to whitewash our tanks, and then when the snow melt we still had a white tank and we had to get out and put mud on it. I didn't tell you about in France, when that mortar came over and almost got me. We were bombing, bombing the town and the P-51's were coming in and bombing and strafing. By me being outside of the tank, when he was making the round he came by and he saw me and he saw this tank—he didn't know if it was a German tank or what trying to sneak up behind the troops—and I saw what he was doing and he banked, I could look up there and I kind of wiped a star off—you know we had a liberators' star, white star on the side—and he just tilted his wing like that and he recognized me and then he went back and dropped his other bomb and took off. So the Germans had—what we would do, a lot of the guys would take the Germans' socks off, I mean not take them off but the ones they had in their backpacks, they'd have clean socks. One thing you had to do was keep your socks changed, if you didn't, your feet would freeze and you'd get trench foot. The Germans had wool socks, they had the best. So I never did get anything from the Germans, because if you are captured and they catch you with some of their equipment, they'd shoot you, they'll figure you killed somebody. A lot of guys they had souvenirs and all that stuff, but that was a bad thing to do.

Did you have any contact with the German civilians?

After the war. The German civilians we had contact with, they would be coming out of the towns. They called them refugees, displaced persons. People didn't have nowhere to stay. Not like the war today, civilians stay in the town, we'd go in there and wipe everything out. Everybody had to get the hell out.

Did you talk to them?

Oh yes. But they had a law out, they called it fraternizing, you couldn't fraternize with them legally because you'd be courtmartialed.

So what happened after the liberation of the camp? At that point did you know that the German army had collapsed?

Oh yes, it collapsed the next day, the sixth, when they surrendered.

So where did you go from there?

Where did I go from there? We went to Tausendorf, Bavaria, Germany. We had some guys up there—Göring, you know one of the Hitler's henchmen?—they went up and raided his castle then we went to Tausendorf, Germany waiting for the war in Japan to see what's going to happen. They were getting us ready to go to Japan.

Could you tell us about Bates?

Colonel Bates? He was our battalion commander. He was a great guy. What happened to Bates, he came to the 761st. Before they got started, they told him that they were going to activate a black tank battalion for combat and asked him if he would be interested in commanding it. He told them he would. They wanted to know what did he think about blacks, and he explained it to them and said what he thought about them, and how well he'd known them. Then when he trained us so well, we all worked together so well that we got to be a good tank battalion. What the white officers would do if they wanted to make a rank really quick, they would put them in a black battalion or company. If you're a second lieutenant, put you in a black company and you'd make captain. Then they move you on and they keep coming in and out like that. Rotating them.

So they wanted to rotate Bates like that. The said, "We'll put you in the 12th Army Division, all white, if you will transfer out and we'd get somebody else in here." He said, "Nope, this is the best tank battalion in the army, in the U.S. Army." He said, "Why should I do that?" So he wouldn't do it because he said they'd get some southern officer in there that wouldn't treat the guys right. And Jackie Robinson, he's the one who refused to courtmartial him when he got into that trouble in Texas, and he just transferred him into another unit out of Texas so he wouldn't get in any trouble, and so he freed him. So he knew how the southern officers were and how they talked and what they thought of the blacks. He said these men were too nice and too good to let something like that to happen with them. Also, I was fortunate enough to have a company commander, an Irishman, I told you, he thought he was black, little D.J. Williams, until the day he died.