Chester “Chet” Rohn – The Texas Liberators

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December 14, 2011

[We had some idea about what was happening in Europe.] Yeah, to some extent, but— In fact, I had even heard one of Hitler’s speeches, in German, they put on the radio. But it didn’t make that much impression. Yeah, Roosevelt said, “We’re not going to war,” so we believe him. But the war really didn’t affect us. We were just coming out of the Depression. I think the war was responsible because all of our [heavy industry]—we were part of the buildup there, all of the heavy machinery. And Allis Chalmers, A. O. Smith, all these big companies were really producing for England. So we knew that was going on, but the war was a long way away. There was no television. Whatever you knew, you got from the newspaper or radio. And the war made some impression on us, but not that much. It did later on.

December of ’41, that changed. I was in college by that time. University of Wisconsin in Madison. I was in chemical engineering, if you can imagine. . . . My dad said to me, “What do you think you’d like to take?” I said, “I don’t know.” So he said, “You know, engineering’s a pretty good field.” And I’d had a lot of math and science in high school, but—so I said, “Well, that sounds good to me.” So I started out twenty-one credits as a freshman. And it was—I—it was way over my head. But now the war is starting

to come on. And of course, every day, every weekend there was a party for somebody who was leaving for the service. And I got to the end of my first semester of my sophomore year. And my dad knew the guy on the draft board, so he knew exactly when I was going to be called. And he worked it out so I could finish that semester. So then I was called, and off I went.

During the Bulge, we were infantry. Everybody was infantry. We were so shorthanded, and they had lost so many men between Normandy and Bastogne. There was an awful lot of heavy fighting and heavy losses. So they needed more bodies. And we were getting these poor guys that had been in the army maybe six weeks, and they sent them to us. They barely knew how to fire their rifle. And it was terrible because these guys were some of the first casualties over there.

The worst part was the weather. I think that was worse than the enemy because it went below zero for a while there in late December, and we didn’t have winter clothing. And we didn’t have winter shoes, you know. We just had our shoe boots. I mean, it’s like a shoe, only with a high top on it that lapped over. And these were no good for that kind of weather. And we had wool uniforms, but it wasn’t padded or anything else. And we finally got shoe packs which had a felt insole and was much warmer, but that was after most of the cold weather was gone. [To stay warm], well, the first thing you did when there were a lot of pine needles, you took your bayonets and we’d slash low branches and put that down for our bed, maybe get pine needles this thick on the bottom of our hole. And I wasn’t in individual foxholes. We had to dig a machine-gun foxhole because I had my assistant gunner with me. So that was kind of like a shape here, the gun was there, and we’d get around this way and then that way, which was kind of nice with two of us because one of us could sleep while the other stood guard. But most of the cold—we learned the cold comes from the bottom, not just from the top. And you better be— You know, you can have all the blankets you want on top of you, but you got to have insulation below. And that’s what the pine needles, pine branches did. So we would really make a bed. And I think I only had one blanket to put over. But at least down in the hole you didn’t have the wind. It was a little warmer down there and you could finally fall asleep.

But the living conditions were the worst part of it. Absolute worst part of it. You were always cold, plus you were always tired. There were some times, if we had two or three hours of sleep in two or three days, we were lucky. And you could be talking to somebody and they’d fall asleep talking to you on their feet. And this happened to all of us. We were exhausted, dirty. I had two showers in almost five months.

They only— There’d be a big ring around your mouth as far as your tongue could go; you could clean this part. The rest of us, we hadn’t shaved, didn’t want to shave because it was too cold. But the bath would be out in the middle of a field, and they’d give you a shower in this weather. In Belgium, as I said, it was zero sometimes, or below. I don’t know how cold but, oh, ice everywhere, snow everywhere. And they said, “All right, you guys, you’re going to get a shower today.” . . . That meant going out in the middle of a field. They would put—I don’t know what they had, but it wasn’t a tent for going around like this because the guy giving you the shower is up on a ladder above you. And you had— They gave you thirty seconds, I think, to soap up and another thirty seconds to dry. And here you are, stark naked, and just this canvas around here. And then you got to get outside and dry. . . . But other than that, we were dirty. The filth was—you were just caked with dirt. But so was everybody else, you know. And why we didn’t get more—I did get dysentery over there, by the way. And I was stuck in a German block house for about three or four days. I’ve never been so darn sick in my life—but why we didn’t have more people get that. And it was from drinking water out of a stream. There probably was a dead horse ten yards up the stream or something. So the living conditions, to me, were the worst part of the war.

And then they gave us mittens. First, they gave us nothing. We had, I don’t know, some little thin thing. But this was a big, leather thing. Three fingers went here, and then they had a finger hole for here and a thumbhole here. There was—only problem was they didn’t get together with the rifle manufacturers to figure out your trigger finger could not go in the trigger housing of a rifle. So when we’re out on patrol at night—I mean, you know, it was kind of spooky. And I was not going to not be able to fire if I had to. I mean, you’d see a tree and you’d swear it was moving or some-thing like that. Walking on, we were silent, no noise. We even took the stacking swivels off our rifles because they would clank. So, anyway, here you are; my left hand was fine; I kept that big mitten on.

We had heard about these camps, but we didn’t know much about them. We knew there were camps; we knew that way back. There were concentration camps. And we heard their prisoners were being killed and all that. But it didn’t really register till we started seeing the dead prisoners in the striped uniforms all along the road, coming from the north down to Mauthausen. And I hadn’t seen any of that anywhere else in Germany until we got . . . right along the Czech border. . . . [W]e started seeing more and more of these bodies lying around the ditches. And I mean dozens and dozens and dozens. And we—what’s going on? What?—and then we figure, okay, they’re concentration camp prisoners. Why are they killing them here? So the day after liberation, I was in Mauthausen. And I don’t know how to explain it, but it was the— First of all, you could smell it way before you got there. The corpses around there. They had what they called the hospital yard, and it was what they—where they put people that were dying. Nothing to keep the weather out, you know. You just stay behind this barbed wire till you die. And I’d go—we’d stand, and these people would stare at you with a blank look, and all you could do is stare back. We had— Some prisoners who could speak English acted as guides. I mean, they took us into the gas chamber, and they took us into the morgue or whatever it is, where they knocked the gold teeth out. And so we saw all that. They took us to the crematorium. We were in that. And in the barracks.

And some of these guys were imprisoned because they were newspaper people from Czechoslovakia; anybody that was against the Nazi regime. Mauthausen was built back in the thir-ties, not as a concentration camp but as a prison for German civilians and I think also to provide a labor source because all—they had a big—I don’t know, limestone or granite or whatever they—they say that the city of Vienna was built with stone from Linz. And they had one of the big quarries there. And all the prisoners finally did that, but early on these were just German prisoners, you know. It looked more like a big federal prison than the pictures you see of Auschwitz, which were all these hundreds of barracks and out in the open. This was a big stone edifice and everything else. But they had a bunch of crummy barracks in there, too, where they’d put in, like, four or five to a bed.

And it ended up just being a death camp. Anybody that went to Mauthausen wasn’t ever going to get out. . . .

And the camp hadn’t been cleaned up. Our bulldozers had to bury the people and the bulldozer just pushing the bodies into a trench. There were so many—I don’t know how many were dead when we got there. It seemed everywhere you looked there were dead people, some of them stacked up. The crematorium wasn’t big enough. They couldn’t burn them fast enough. So that’s why we ended up burying them in trenches that were a hundred yards long. It was just—just awful.

They were just living skeletons. You’d look at somebody—the guy just be standing there, stark naked, on the other side of the barbed wire, and he’d just look at you with these vacant eyes. And you didn’t know what to say to him or anything. His knees looked like this because everything else— I could have put my hand around a guy’s thigh or here, with my fingers. And their hips were huge and their knees were huge and their heads were huge, and their rib cages stuck out all over. It was—their waists, about that big around. I couldn’t believe some of them were alive that I saw standing there. I thought, “How could anybody even be alive?” You know, maybe they weighed forty, fifty, sixty pounds. And you looked at them and they were probably guys that weighed 180 at one time, or 190 pounds. It was terrible. Dis-ease—luckily we’d all had all kinds of shots, so we didn’t get sick, but there was typhus and typhoid and you name it. They were dying from everything you can think of. It was something so different than we had been used to seeing. We saw a lot of dead Germans and a lot of dead Americans, but nothing like this. It’s almost impossible to describe. And together with the smell, it was unbelievable. We couldn’t believe it. We just couldn’t believe it. But there it was.

Well, they wanted us to see what they were doing. He said no-body—you know, unless they see it, they’re not going to believe it. I don’t know. I just don’t have words to tell you how bad it was.

[In 2010], we took a “battle tour.” [W]e covered the whole—and I don’t know how many hundred miles it is from Bastogne down to Linz, but I’m sure it’s got to be four hundred anyway. It was a fifteen-day tour, but the first couple of days we went there, we went to the different cemeteries. . . . [We went back to Mauthausen on that trip.] We ended in Mauthausen on the ceremony of the sixty-fifth anniversary of its liberation. That was all timed so it worked out. And all these people came from all over. They had a parade of people—we had all these VIP seats that they put out for the old gaffers. And these—parade of people came with their flags and huge wreaths of flowers to put on—I don’t even know what it was, some kind of memorial. . . . And delegations came from all over the world. Some, there were only four or five people; others, there were twenty, thirty people. It was very impressive. And all of them had had their nationals as prisoners—even China, which surprised me. But it was a—it was very impressive.

And we had our, as I say, our own ceremonies there. And met an awful lot of people; there’re just so many people. And I’ve got people I still want to see. . . . [One gentleman came up to thank me there at the ceremony.] He came up to me and I knew he was American—dressed in a suit and the way he talked. But I’d never seen him before. And he came up and just—all he said was, “Thank you for saving my wife.” And I thought, “What wife did I save?” You know, it didn’t register at first. And then, later, I found out he was the husband of one of the babies born in Mauthausen.

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