Ben Love – The Texas Liberators

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January 8, 1993

[B]efore going to Austin, Texas, to begin my studies there at the University of Texas . . . I had been educated in Paris, but the Paris to which I refer in this instance was Paris, Texas, not Par-is, France. I was in the University of Texas; the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor December the seventh. I graduated from law school in 1941, and the war at that moment seemed remote, although the newspapers, the radios—this is before television—would announce day after that in Europe, . . . Hitler was on the roll, he had nothing but successes. We would read about the Stuka dive bombers before killing so many civilians.

And then in the Pacific, the Japanese—again, just success after success.

I think at that time we didn’t envision that we were going to lose the war, but we knew that this was not going to be an easy thing. And even at seventeen, which I was in 1941, we inwardly began to recognize that our time would come. It was not going to be short—of short duration. When I turned eighteen, I had already decided either to volunteer for the navy submarine force or for the Army Air Corps, and I volunteered for both on the day that I turned eighteen. . . . The Army Air Corps contacted me

first, and having passed all the physicals and what other exams that they gave, I went in the Army Air Corps in February of 1942 and began my training in short order. I was eighteen. Most of the men who . . . became cadets, Army Air Corps cadets, training to perform some responsibility in flying were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and a few twenty-one, but we were young.

I got my commission in April of ’44, my wings in April of ’44, and was assigned to a crew in B-17 Flying Fortresses, and in short order, after another month’s training with my first crew, we were on board what had been a Swedish luxury liner, on our way to Great Britain as a part of the Eighth Air Force. We landed at Liverpool and in a few hours took a train to a place that all of us were unfamiliar with. It was the 351st Bomb Group that was for—B-17 Flying Fortress Group, and that was in Polebrook, near Peterborough in East Anglia, England.

We were, remember, very young, and we had all volunteered and had a sense of adventure, melded and blended with the realization that it was pretty serious business.

[T]he enemy was Hitler. Hitler personified the German nation, and the overrunning of weaker people was embalmed in our minds. There was no question as to whether or not we had a purpose—ever. We had seen pictures of the concentration camps, we had seen pictures of the slaughter in Warsaw, and that was part of our training. Not in a propaganda sense. I didn’t hear the word “propaganda,” I think, until about 1944. But what it was all about was pretty clear in our minds.

We were not— I do not want to turn this into a seemingly kind of adventure story. It wasn’t Tom Swift, Buck Rogers kind of attitude that we had, but despite our youth, we felt that we were professionals, and that if Hitler continued and if Hitler had not been challenged and met squarely, that the world was in for a terrible chapter. We were—we were inspired—and I use that word here almost fifty years later—by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and by Winston Churchill, and in my case in particular, by the courage of Charles de Gaulle.

. . . There was no what you would call a propaganda movie or exhortation. It was simply a realistic identification of the slaugh-ter that Hitler had launched against anyone who stood in his way. . . . I think there was a purity, a patriotism at that point in time among people of my generation, that we have seen at other points in time in this country’s history. But the purity of patri-otism was [different] from that which we saw in Vietnam and some other conflicts. And that’s with no disparity on those brave guys that were in Vietnam. The difference was that this was uni-versal, and during the Vietnam period, it was not universal.

[T]he reason I remained in Polebrook, I had the job of training younger crews, and so I was doing that from February 28 on; had been doing it in between missions, too. We’d take them up on practice bombing missions and bomb a place off the West Coast of Wales called Scares Rock. It was a great big rock that stuck up there out of the ocean. So they’d use that as our practice bombing and we could see our practice bombs hit, and grade the crews and so forth. But the war was over on May the eighth. And on May 10 we had orders from the Eighth Air Force. Our first orders were on a standby, because we did not know that . . . the Russians were going to stop at the line which had been designated, and we were told to stand by in combat readiness state, because if they did not stop, we did not know what orders might come to make them abide by the agreement.

They did stop, and on May 10 we got orders from the Eighth Air Force to fly into Lenz, Austria, not with our combat crew but just our standard lead crew, and pick up the French officers who had been captured six years earlier in 1939 when the Maginot Line fell to the Germans; the Maginot Line being the great fortification that the French had built anticipating that it would repel any line into perpetuity, and as you may recall, Hitler with his Panzer divisions flanked it and it fell rapidly.

So we flew into Lenz, Austria, and very readily found the camp, prisoner-of-war camp, where the French officers were, and it was rather uneventful, other than just their happiness, their joy that they had survived the war, and here they were going to be flown back to their homeland and see their families for the first time in all these years, and so they were very, very happy. They were in good shape; they were healthy and their uniforms were clean. They were frayed worn, but they were in, you know, they were in fairly good condition, and it was a leisurely kind of thing.

. . . And one of the officers who could speak excellent English got me aside and said, “Captain, if you want to see what this was all about . . . you want to walk over the other side of this air field.” And I walked over. He said there was a concentration camp there, but I didn’t know the name of it, I didn’t know anything else about it. And so I walked over. I can’t recall today whether he walked over with me, showed me where it was, but anyway, I know I got there, and the sight I saw is very—very difficult for me to recount unemotionally, even all these years later.

There were human skeletons holding on the wire fence, I guess it was the electrified wire—obviously it wasn’t at that moment—and men, women, children, some too weak to stand, had on their prison garb, identify by number, you know, just looking at them. They were just—you just can’t imagine how man, civilized man—and presumably the Germans were civilized—how they could have inflicted that cruelty here in this century on people who had never harmed them, innocent people. And then I recall going back into some buildings that were the gas chambers and learned later that they, the Germans, had gassed two hundred thousand people there at Mauthausen.

I knew that [the prisoners] were those of the Jewish faith. [When I entered the camp], there were three to five hundred [of them]. The advance medical units had not gotten there and so that compounded the horror, because the poor people there had not received medical attention yet. There was no German that I saw when I walked around—not every bit of it, but enough of it; as much as I could.

You would understand it better . . . if you weighed sixty-five pounds, and if you had on something that appeared to be made, as we used to call it in East Texas, a burlap bag or even a tote sack—rough, coarse material—and identified by a number, and just terrible conditions.

I did not [speak to them]. I mean, they— I only know what nationality they were, but they—I tried, but they couldn’t under-stand me, and they were so weak and helpless that you wouldn’t want to pull the last ounce of strength straining for them to understand, you know, what you were saying. I think they understood that we were from the United States Air Corps, and— [They were] too weak [to react to us]. They were just so weak that many of them [were] just lying there on the ground.

Someone had told us that the US medical teams were coming and that I recall the issue of food that we had brought coming up and we were told not to do it, that they had been deprived of food so long. If they were given food, they might become violently ill and as weak as they were . . .

It gave me confirmation of the faith that I placed in the leadership of our country; that Roosevelt was justified, that he knew that we had to eliminate Hitler and all that were associated with him.

[T]he sight—as a I say, it’s a nightmare, and I’ll never forget the sight. . . . We have learned that there were six million Jews who were killed. I can’t imagine anything in this country that could have happened without there being an uprising of the people in Beaumont, Texas, if there had been that kind of camp on the out-skirts of Beaumont, and—or anyplace else here in this nation.

It has carried forward throughout that length of time. I have great empathy for those who are in the minority segment. I don’t care whether it’s color, religion, whatever—great empathy. I am delighted and I have never said this before and maybe I haven’t thought it out. . . but I hope I practice what I preach.

I have told my children and grandchildren [about my experiences at Mauthausen]. They don’t understand it exactly. It’s impossible for them to conceive, impossible for my children to understand, too, but that’s the reason [this] work is important, I think.

I mean, you’ve got pictures—but maybe for children some-thing like this might make an impact. . . . The discrimination of Mauthausen—loading people in cattle cars—for absolutely no reason, no inquiry as to what the law is, much less trying to follow it.

It’s just because you’ve got the boot and the club and because someone has caused you to lose any individual thinking ability, you do the goose step and you take innocent people because someone who is mad himself, literally mad, tells you to do it, and you herd them into cattle cars and you take them to a Mauthausen.

. . . We have a lot to pass on, but that’s one of the profound philosophical moral issues that we’ve got to pass along. We are passing on a lot of science, but that my being here today is I be-lieve in what you believe in . . . that we mustn’t forget, we mustn’t forsake. We must graphically point out within the realm of our experience what a lack of tolerance can lead to.

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