I was born in 1930 in a town called Arkwright, New York, which is half way between Buffalo, New York and Erie, Pennsylvania, along the lake plain. My mother's parents were from Poland. They lived on a big farm, I remember as a kid they used to have the priests up a lot. They had a retreat up there at the farm as a matter of fact. My father's parents were from Germany. Both my parents were first generation Americans and all farmers . . . They got through grade school and that was about the extent of it as I recall. . . Both my parents were living on the farm when they were courtin' and they made the decision to move into the city of Dunkirk and my dad worked for a few years at a place called Dunkirk Radiator where they made radiators for heating systems. My mother worked for years for Van Rault till they pulled up and left all their employees dry when they moved to Puerto Rico . . .
My folks separated when I was very young . . . I saw my dad once in a while, probably till I was about 14. . . . My mom stayed in the city and raised four kids on relief, now called welfare. . . . My mother worked two jobs and I worked from the time I was 11 years old if you can believe that or not . . . With farm people, that's the way it went . . . you worked, period. We worked part time at a farm out in a place called Sheridan, New York. We used to take my two brothers and sister out there on the farm when my mother and I were working . . . I grew up most of my childhood on the farm. We basically had grapes, milking cows, raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes.
What were your childhood interests?
Basically farming, animals, out doors . . . I loved it. Maple sugar time was a big time where we collected the sap and the maple sugar. I went to a one-room school house. As a matter of fact when we moved from one farm to another farm they took me out of school, out of grade school, so I could help drive the milking cows to the new farm. It was a distance of about seven miles. So we actually moved the cows along this dirt country road. . . . I can remember the days of being on the farm, we used to grow a lot of oats to feed the cows during the winter, and corn.
So sometimes you lived with your mom in town and other times you lived on the farm?
Yeah, because she was so poor and she was raising four kids. And there was no WIC or food stamps or-- There was nothing, there was absolutely nothing. And so we would, my sister and I, would live part of the time with my mom and part of the time with my granddad, [my fathers father] In fact, I was fifteen years old and I was hired out as a hired man. That's how poor we were. Family was, I think, was much more important than it is now. And I had my old, for example, I had my old Holstein calf there, called Snicklefritz, and it was just like a dog. She would follow me up the steps to the veranda . . . It was a lonely time.
Was your family hit hard by the Depression?
Yeah, very hard, very hard. We were hit hard. I can remember living on ketchup and mayonnaise and sugar sandwiches. I can remember going down one of the main streets in Dunkirk, the town my mother was living in. I can remember going and picking up the dried apples and the flour. . . . I can remember going down to the middle of town when Franklin Delano Roosevelt came through on a whistle stop train tour and standing in the crowd listening to [him] speak from the rear of the train. . . They had what they call the C.C.C. . . .I can remember I had four uncles at one time that worked in the C.C.C. and they would leave . . . Sunday night and come back on Friday night. And that's the way a lot of people kept their families together was thanks to C.C.C. I can remember I think the pay was twenty-one dollars a month as a matter of fact in the C.C.C., and they worked hard. They did a lot of work in the state parks at that time.
You were between the ages of 11 and 15 when America was involved in World War II. Did you follow the events of the war before American involvement?
I don't remember much prior to the war. Although I can remember my granddad saying that he thought because of his German ancestry that we may have problems . . . I don't recall conversation because again, the only way we got our information was from the local newspaper and Gabriel Heater at night . . . on the radio and Walter Cronkite and the other fella, I can't think of his name . . . But politics weren't a big thing as I recall. The local politics were big, and the biggest thing in local politics was who was going to be the road boss . . .because they were responsible for taking care of the roads. Now these were all dirt roads, so that was the big thing, to get the right road supervisor and so there would be a way to get around the roads. I don't remember much discussion in the family. I recall some things during the war period because of the pronounced effect it had on our life styles . . .
My mother's three brothers all enlisted and all wound up in the Army in combat. Of course, there was a big thing going on about draft deferments then. They were deferring quite a few people in our area, because right across the street from our house, my mother's house, as a matter of fact, was a huge plant and its still there. It was a huge plant that made locomotives in what they called American Locomotives Company. ALCO Locomotives, which is still around today. They switched over to making what they call Long Tom cannons, they were 155 millimeter cannons . . . My [fathers brother] Uncle Bud who actually raised me, he took the place of my father . . . He had a deferment because he was working on a farm, and he also had one young child. . . I don't recall him being embarrassed [about the deferment] because he was working from sunup to sundown on the farm because milk and food were a high priority so . . . [Later] my uncle Bud was drafted. And he went in, I remember it so well, he went in when Joyce was just a year old and Aunt Grace was pregnant with Lorraine and he was drafted. He felt he would have to go so he did. He went in the Navy and never got back for two years. All four of them who went in all came back . . . two of them not in the best shape.
Did you write to them when they were overseas?
Yeah. I did . . .God, I can remember the V mail, like it was yesterday. I didn't know what it was at first. They used to write as often as they could. It was kind of a surrealistic thing. I can remember my Uncle Frank being in the Battle of the Bulge and getting a letter from him talking about having trench foot. I didn't know what trench foot was and my mother didn't know what trench foot was and we couldn't figure it out. . .
Why did you think we were fighting the war? Do you remember any of your thoughts?
Basically it all hinged around the "dirty Japs" and Pearl Harbor. And Hitler, we, I think back now, there was not- well of course we didn't know about the Holocaust until the war was actually over really. It was mostly the Japanese who bore the brunt of our wrath because of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. I don't ever recall a conversation in school, but again this was farm country and our priorities were more getting up in the morning, taking care of the cows, going to school and getting back home and doing the work on the farm, even in winter time . . . My granddad used to talk about it . . .After the war got going pretty good there was, there was a bunch of Hitler songs that were around that we kids used to sing poking fun at him . . . a couple of them would be on the Hit Parade as a matter of fact . . . but, I don't remember much conversation. The concern as I recall was with the young guys going in the service and we had a lot of our family that served in the combat zones. . .
I know there was the rationing of food, [that] was a big factor, as was gasoline. After we were into it for a while [life changed], sure. Because everyone went on gas rations and being on a farm, we were better off. There were A cards and B cards as I recall. You put the sticker on your windshield. Yeah we got an extra allotment because we were on the farm. In fact, my granddad used to have us use the horses a lot to save the gas ration. Food itself was rationed. Sugar, you just couldn't get . . . There was no butter, but we lived on a farm so we made our own. Those were the days when you used to get margarine and you used to have to add and knead the color into it. The big thing was syrup. That's where I got my like for honey and maple syrup because there was no sugar around. But again, we were fortunate because we had our own milk, we had our own meat . . . So we could save on gas rations. . . I used to drive horses down to get our food, like the coffee and stuff and the make believe sugar . . . I never resented it, no. It was a thing to do, it was like the aluminum drives we would have where the families were urged to turn in cookware. There was a lot of those drives around . . . Being poor we didn't have that many pots and pans. [laughter] I don't recall, per say. I can remember taking . . . tin foil off cigarette packs, cause back then that's how bad they wanted it . . .
Did you ever wish that you were older so you could enter the war?
Yeah. I did, I did. But I learned later that I was thankful that I couldn't. There was a lot of guys that never came back, there was a lot of guys that never came back . . . The paper used to run a list of the casualties. You knew as soon as the family did, who in our neighborhood was dead. It seemed to run in families too.
Was the war was something that was present in your everyday life?
Absolutely. You couldn't get away from it. I think a lot of it had to do with once you had family members in combat. Even before they went in combat, because you knew nine out of ten guys were going to go where they were using real bullets. Again, the only media was newspaper and everyday the top headlines "Twenty-seven Bombers Lost" and "5,000 men Lost on Iwo Jima" or whatever, so, yeah. And then you had the rationing of course, and then the labor. It got to the point where there were so many guys gone, and then the ladies started going in [to work]. But the labor force, now you're talking farm country and food processing plants, they were really strapped for help, and a lot of people got used to working double shifts. This place that made the guns, they started making tanks. I mean those people were working weeks at a time without a day off. [My mom] was still working on the farm and at Van Rault and they were making clothes. They switched from making underwear . . . to making I dont recall what, stuff for the Army . . .
I dont know if I felt I had a responsibility, but I think we maybe tried a little more because again being in the food producing, where we put out a lot of milk out there and we put a lot of strawberries and grapes and potatoes and tomatoes. So, I'm not sure, I just have a sense that we did . . . I think [the mood] was [positive] and if for the only reason, you hoped that the guys you knew who were over there were going to come back. You could only hope that they would but you knew some of them weren't. See my family, my immediate family was very fortunate, because they all came back. . . . I remember very vividly, for example, there was, I lived in Dunkirk with my mother and the farm was in what they call Freedonia-Arkwright and in between was a decent sized fairgrounds. I remember German prisoners being housed there. And there was some very bad feelings, in fact, they tried, the labor market was so tight they tried using the German prisoners in this canning factory, Red Wing canning factory at that time. The animosity was so bad against them they could not use the German prisoners of war. They were not considered real, I guess purebred Nazis. There were never any problems, it was just . . . there was a lot of hatred toward them. Well, they were there you know, and the people in town . . .had lost family members. I can remember seeing the guns going out from the factory across the street, the Long Toms . . . I can remember my uncles coming home on leave, one of them, two of them. I remember, my mother when she found out that both her brothers had been shot up pretty bad; she was not a happy lady for a while. I can remember my grandmother doing a lot of knitting. That's another thing they used to do, the ladies on the farm . . . used to go to the Grange Hall and do a lot of knitting. They used to collect a lot of socks. I dont know why socks, but socks were a big thing they used to collect to send over to the guys . . .
. . . Basically [they were] hard times . . . Hard times, worry times because of the family being in the service. Poor times, we were poor and that didn't make it any easier. Then the shortages. I remember it as being a hard time . . . not an easy time. It was not easy to go hungry a lot of days and not easy not to have clothes and-- It's not easy for a mother who wants to give her kids something and you know she does but . . . But, as poor as my mother was, and she never finished school, none of the family in that generation did . . . She made sure her kids got through school and made sure we all learned to play an instrument. God bless her . . .
[V-E Day and V-J Day], it was a happy time. It was like you see a lot in the movies, happy people. Again we lived on a farm but town . . . It was a good time for my mother. She had brothers in the service. It was a good time for my granddad. It was like everybody just went "Ahhhh" (gives a big sigh of relief) you know its over with, its over with. . . . I can remember how glad I was to see my uncles when they came back. They didnt come back together. I remember where I was too when my uncle Bud came back because he was like my dad to me. They were older though, God they were older. I remember that. Four years, five years, three years, they looked like they had put on 20 years. They were like that until the day they died. They were old before their time . . . They were quiet . . . You know they were where you're shooting real bullets. I think it makes you grown up fast . . . You could always tell the guys, and it was something we learned, you could always tell the fellas who served in combat. Cause they would never talk about it. Anybody who's been in the service will tell you pretty much the same thing. The guys who brag about being in combat, you can almost make a bet and win that they weren't in combat, cause the guys who were in combat just won't talk about it.
[After the war] I was going to high school and so the jock part became part of my life. In high school . . . The coach talked me into going out for the football team and basketball team when I was a junior. We had some good years. In fact the last year we were so poor, I went back with my mother. True story . . . the town of Fredonia, New York kept me if you will. There was two diners where I went and I got my meals and there was a clothing store, it's still there, where I was allowed to pick out clothing . . . My granddad, just didn't have the time and my uncles, after they came back from the war, had their own lives to live. There was people who would drive me back and forth when the roads were good because they didn't have late buses then . . . I had several scholarships offered to me . . . to play football and basketball. Colgate, University of Miami in Florida, Miami of Ohio. But, my mother was still trying to raise three kids and I came back home and I never did go to school. We were poor people, we were poor, there's no other way to put it . . . I volunteered for the draft because that way I would not have to serve for three years. I also got to go in when I wanted to and not to Korea . . . I knew I probably would get drafted. So I wanted to get it over with while I was young enough. And I'm glad I did, it was a good experience. No, it was something you knew was going to happen so . . . You got it out of the way, moved on with your life.
[I was in the] Army Security Agency. . . You took tests and I had my choice of going to Officers Candidates School and becoming a . . .second lieutenant, or a chance to go to Airborne. So I didnt figure I was cut out to be an officer so I signed up for airborne which was after basic training. And then they picked a few of us out and asked if we would like to go into the Army Security Agency, which we knew nothing about . . . The Army Security Agency was formed around 1939 . . . They copied code. They copied Japanese . . . German and Italian code . . . There's a place called Vint Hill Farms Virginia. I was assigned there for a few weeks . . .
I was glad that I picked the Army Security Agency. . . I went into the Army Security Agency and went to school for a number of weeks in Vint Hill Farms and Fort Devins, Massachusetts. We used to sit there for eight hours a day, learning to copy code. And some of the guys used to lose it, and there was three stories to this building we were in and they finally wound up putting iron bars on the window cause the guys were jumping out. . .
I finished school and I went over on a troop ship, which was an experience, to Austria, and was stationed very, very near Hitler's lair in Bergesgarten . . . I was transferred to a place near Stuttgart, Munich Germany called Heilbron . . . Our compound was on a hillside and there was a mass grave with over, I don't know, 15,000 Germans buried in it. And, for example we were never allowed to blow the horns on the trucks. . . out of respect . . . cause there was a mass grave right there.
Heilbron was down in the valley and we were up on one of the slopes . . . One of the interesting things by the way is that all the time I was in Germany I never came across a German who fought the Americans, they all fought the Russians. That was their way . . . For example, when we were out, not only in Hof, but at the airport where we had, where we were copying the Russian code from, we lived the good life. We lived in a German house that the army paid for. We had a housekeeper and we had a cook . . . And they were as nice as pie to us, because I guess it's like a cruise ship. The nicer you are, the more tips you get . . . We were taken only for what good we could do to [for] them . . .
We copied the Russian code . . . radio code . . . One night we were sitting at a place called Hof, Germany [laughs] and all at once, it looked like [the Russians] were heading in our direction, and we though "Oh God, we've had it!" We didnt, but boy there was some dirty underwear there that night, I got to tell you . . . We were at this Heilbron and they absolutely hated us, the people in town. We had no place to go, and there was a trucking company there at our compound, [and] it was all Black. In fact on the day we got, when we came from Austria up to Munich, the train station was still bombed out, but they were using it. We were picked up, we got in around 2 o'clock in the morning and this company picked us up and it was all black. Cause the services hadn't been integrated back then. And there was some bad feelings, but one of the things that happened very soon after we were at Heilborn at the 302 Comm-Recom, it became very evident within a few days, how much we as Americans were disliked by the Germans. [And] how the whites were disliked by the blacks. I mean it was bad. In fact, one time they screwed up real bad and sent a white guy into this trucking company. Now what made it worse for us, there was two barracks. There was three buildings in this compound, the Army Security Agency had one building, the black trucking company had this other building, but we ate in the same mess hall. We had what they called a serviceman's club on the base. The white guys, we couldn't even go to it with the black guys. The blacks were there before the white guys got assigned there with the Army Security Agency, and the blacks had convinced almost every German we came into contact with, . . . that they were the Native Americans. And they thought that we were the intruders if you will, in America. They had reversed things. The black guys had got the Germans in our area to think that we were bad guys if you will. There were some tough times there . . . Where I came from, there were [no Blacks], none. There were two Jewish families, as I recall. Even when I went through basic training it was not a factor because we were with all white guys. We had a culture shock when we went over there. It was really bad, really bad.
One night one of our guys got drunk and went over the border and we went over there and got him back. God, coming back from the border one night, and I got some pictures of the wreck there, we were going down this hill, now it was two Jimmys, the big Army trucks. One had a radio hut on the back of it, and in the radio hut was a dog. The other one had another code hut on it. Going down this long steep hill, going back from Hof to Heilbron, we had to go through Nuremberg to get there. We were going down this hill in a snowstorm and there's a guy with a flashlight waving. So the first driver going down thought he was to go another way. He made a left turn, went right over this hill, and you see the picture of the truck. The only one that got hurt was the dog. Our truck got wrecked. Anyhow, down the bottom of the hill, what happened the Germans drove tandem trucks . . . and he had jackknifed also. Down the bottom of this hill was a little cluster of homes maybe, I don't remember, it was just a small village. So we went down the next day for food and warmth, and they wouldn't have anything to do with us. We were out there for three days and two nights, and it got so bad, that we were actually firing at people in the night because they were trying to . . . get at us. That's how they felt about us. They didn't want us there, they hated us. We did some stupid things too. To this day, the German language, the German words that I remember are not words I would use in polite conversation, but that's what we used there.
Were you still carrying the image of the Nazi with you?
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. We were not well liked. I think you could understand why if you saw the destruction. Now this is like six years after the war. But whole, I mean block after block of Nuremberg, there was nothing but piles of rubbish like you see in the photos . . . They had no military service then . . . Back then because they were still trying to rebuild the infrastructure, and the sewers, a lot of the sewage was still out. Honey wagons were tanks on wagons, they came along and collected the people's human sewage. I'm talking in big towns now. Munich, Stuttgart, Heilbron. . . We had machine guns set up. Now this was in peacetime . . . Fifty caliber machine guns set up around the house to protect ourselves. That's how we lived out there. Again, I'm not sure if it was all the Germans because we were copying the Russian code, it was no secret . . .
Going through post-war Germany, did you see any of the concentration camps?
Yeah. Yeah, its-- I have never been at ease with this thing, speaking from a personal viewpoint. I have never been anywhere near at ease with hearing the Germans did not know about the atrocities going on with the Jews, for one very simple reason . . . Near Munich you could, and we did it, you could actually walk, and I can picture it to this day so well, its on a street with, its a long street with an incline, and you, and this is in 1952. You could actually walk up along the barbed wire and look down into the concentration camp. And I swear to this day, there was an odor coming from there. And you could not live there, being a German, and not know what was going on in this concentration camp. No, I have never forgiven then for that, to be honest . . .
Did the German people try to make it clear that they weren't Nazis?
Oh of course. Oh yeah, they never were. There were some good people we came across, but for the most part, they absolutely hated us. I remember one night, we did go into town, about five of us and this is when we had just come up form Austria into Heilbron, and like I said, we knew a little of German. We saw something that had to do with dance. This is only to prove the point out, it wasn't all Germany, it was some of us, and it was like six of these young GIs in their uniforms, 21, 22 years old. And we went in to this place and we thought there was a dance going on. You know, it was a dance recital for 10, 12 year old girls. And you know, here comes there American storm troopers . . .
They were not good times. You didnt dare go to town, you just didn't dare go into town. Of course, we were not angels, I'll tell you quite frankly. I would go down to the motor pool. I'd have to get approval, and get a truck and we would go up to another Army base to play basketball cause we had a pretty good basketball team. I'm sure you can visualize these old German towns, and a lot of them had got the glass store fronts back up. So, if you take one of these big army trucks and you are going pretty fast, and you put it into second gear and back off on the gas, and it starts backfiring and you're going through these German towns with the widows, it does a job rattling those windows, I'll tell you. [laughs] . . .
. . . And, another problem that we had, the Americans weren't very nice, a lot of them weren't very nice with the young people in Germany. Cause we had some guys in our unit and the Blacks, they almost absolutely ran wild over there . . . I think the conduct, number one, that was exhibited could not be excused. And it was nothing nasty, it was borderline. It was because we were young smart-ass GIs. I think the blacks were just getting back at the whites for what they went through.
The Germans were, they just didnt like us . . . They used us. . . I dont think Germany would be the vibrant country it is today if it wasnt for the help the Americans poured in there. I dont mean myself . . . the Marshall Plan . . . The way to do business there was with cigarettes, and beer, and food. I say, I dont recall a shortage of food, but I can remember how the guys who worked in the mess hall would make up sandwiches and peddle them downtown for favors . . .
[My tour ended in] 1953. As a matter of fact, when I came back from the service in 1953, I had a full scholarship to Michigan State for football. A friend of mine went out to Kellogg Center and we stayed there, met the coach Duff Dauchery . . . Well-known coach in his day. Jack Everts and I went down. I went down there, I didn't stay . . . It gets back to my mother having the three kids. I had to come home . . . I came back and started working . . . I married Joyce a year later.
What would you like today's generation to remember about the WWII homefront experience?
I think, and I will allude to something that happened here, last Sunday, Halloween Day. I had Brenda, her husband, and my other daughter over with her husband. And Brenda's girl is going to school in New Milford as you know, and they have the big reconstruction program so they want the kids to give up a lot of their holidays so they can get the construction started in May. And my daughter was bitching a little bit because the kids in New Milford were going to have to go to school on Veterans Day. But the veterans got together and petitioned not to have them go to school. My daughter really wasn't too keen on the veterans insisting on school being closed. I really let my daughter have it. I says, "You know, something's really wrong with this world, cause you don't give the veterans the respect that they are due because they saved this world." Not me, the WWII veterans, and Tom Brokaw has done a big thing on it. I'm very sensitive about that. I'm very sensitive about the way veterans are treated, including myself. My own kids don't respect what I did for them and that bothers me.
Do you think the people on the homefront deserve some respect? Do you think you played an important role?
I didn't do anything to save the world. I put my time it and made it
a little bit better for the people, but I didn't do anything like the WWII
vets, those are the guys and girls that we dont give the respect, we dont
acknowledge what they did for this country. We just dont acknowledge it.
Not my generation, the WWII generation . . .
Harry Thies' Introduction