George Wessel – The Texas Liberators

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March 2, 2012

Well, I was born out on the farm—actually a little town called Matlock [Iowa] that was not too far from where Sibley is. But I was born on the—out on the farm. The doctor came as far as he could with his car and then my father had to go get him with the bobsled because it was— And anyhow, I was three years old when they moved to Sibley. And then I grew up on the farm there and went to the eighth grade there. And then I had to help on the farm because my parents owned two farms up there, each 160 acres. So I never did go to high school.

And then in ’44, when I turned eighteen, I registered for the draft. And went to Fort Dodge for a physical, and they asked if I wanted to be in the navy or the army. And I said, “The navy.” So I took a navy physical. Then a couple months later they called me up. I go to Fort Snelling. And they told me—I said, “I’m supposed to be in the navy.” They said, “Sorry, navy’s full.” He said, “You’re in the army.” And that was it. And then I was at Fort Snelling, I guess, for about a week, all told. And then they discovered that I was only about three months—eighteen years and three months old—so they couldn’t put me in the infantry. So they sent me to Camp Stewart, Georgia, for radar and search-light and antiaircraft training.

We had infantry basic for half the day, and then we had the training for another half the day. But we had finished all of our radar training—I had gone through all of the infantry—the in-filtration course twice, and the—fired all the weapons and every-thing. And we were all set to go out in the field for our two-week bivouac, and that would have completed our training. But they canceled the training and shipped our whole battery to Camp Robinson, Arkansas. And put us back to the, like, the sixth week of infantry basic. So I went through all of the stuff all over again. Went through the infiltration course twice again, fired all the weapons again.

. . . And one thing I remember also, I had a toothache, and then I had a decayed tooth. I went to the dentist at Camp Stewart, Georgia. He said, “That’s going to have to come out,” he said. So he put a shot in there, and he says, “Go sit out there for about fifteen or twenty minutes,” he says, “and I’ll call you back in.” I walked out and sat down. And I hadn’t sat down but—not even I think—I guess five minutes, and they called me back in. And he goes—I could hear it crack, you know. He said, “Does that hurt?” I says, “Yes!” He says, “That’s funny,” he says. “It shouldn’t.” Wow, and he pulls it out. He crammed my mouth full of cotton and stopped the blood and sent me back to the barracks. And then that afternoon I had to go take a ten-mile hike. I still have that tooth missing over here.

[I hadn’t traveled much before then.] I think the furthest I got was Sioux City, Iowa. It’s the first time I rode on a train. And then—well, they put us on a troop train from Camp Stewart to Camp Robinson. So then after we finished basic at Camp Robinson, I got a ten-day leave to go home, and then I had to report out to Fort Meade, Maryland. This was about the first part of January of ’45. I had the leave and then I went—reported out to Fort Meade. And then, at Fort Meade, they had us participate in a live-fire demonstration for the congressmen and stuff like that. They wanted to show them this new proximity fuse they had developed for the artillery, where they could put air bursts over the enemy artillery. So we did a mock assault—did a mock assault wave, and they fired that stuff out ahead of us.

And then, after that, why, a couple days later went to New York, and then got on the Queen Elizabeth. And it just took us six and half days to go across from New York Harbor to Glasgow, Scotland. We got off the train, got on the—I mean, got off the boat, got on the train, went to Southampton, on the coast—on the English Channel. Got off the train, walked on an LST [landing ship, tank], went across the channel. There were about four hundred of us crammed into the tank deck of that—at the bot-tom of this LST, and there was about two or three inches of this old greasy water.

And then we got across the channel and the—they didn’t want to run all the way up and drop the ramp on the beach be-cause all they had to do was, they have an anchor in the back of those things. They can drop the anchor and then run on up and then drag themselves back off with the anchor. But they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to get back off. So they dumped us in about knee-deep water. Now, this is in winter. And the English Channel there. So we all got soaked up to about our knees, you know. Welcome to France.

We got to France there, and then we got on trucks and rode on trucks for a ways. And then we got on some of these old forty and eight boxcars and went from there to close to Belgium. And we got off and got back on trucks. . . . And then they drove us— They were sitting on the west bank of the Maas River, and the Germans were on the other side. And what had happened, the Germans had opened the spillways on the dams upstream, and then they blew up the mechanisms to close them. See, and then they caused the Maas River to flood, so it wound up being about a mile wide instead of just a quarter of a mile. When we got off the trucks at the Seventy-Fifth Division Headquarters, General Porter was the division commander. He welcomed us, and he said— he said, “Welcome to the Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division.” He says, “You may have heard about R&R, and all that stuff,” he says, “but forget it!” He says, “We’re going to attack, attack, attack until this is all over.” That’s exactly what he did, but, of course, we didn’t get started for about ten days.

. . . [F]inally we got across the Maas River. And I don’t remem-ber too much between it and the Rhine. And I know, we were moving all the time, all the time, all the time. And so it only took us about, I guess, ten days from the Maas River to get up to the Rhine River, because it was my birthday on the tenth. And we’d dug in on top of the dyke, my assistant BAR [Browning auto-matic rifle] man and myself. It was just an outpost up on top of the dyke there during the— We just manned it during the night, because otherwise, they could observe and they could see you. But for the rest of the time there, we’d—we were back behind the dyke in a farmhouse.

We started out on the thirty-first of March. And we finally—the division finally got the clearance to, you know, start using the bridge. And then—but we—yeah, we started our first attack on the thirty-first of March, there across the river. And that was the same day when—actually, when we ran into those slave labor camps, and that other battalion took that synthetic rubber plant.

We were advancing up the road in column actually, and, you know, with your fifteen—five-yard interval between you. And we were just moving on up, and then these buildings off to the side there, kind of like a stockade. But evidently the Germans had taken off. And then the prisoners inside there had broken—I guess they broke down the gate or whatever. They were already coming out, and they were all over the place. But as we went by—we couldn’t stop there. Our squad leader said, “Don’t stop. Don’t mingle. Don’t stop.” So we kept going. And, oh, a couple of them grabbed my hand, kissed my hand. And then after that, I stuck my hand up under my BAR sling so they couldn’t get a hold of it. Because they were all covered with scabies and—well, we thought they were scabies, but I guess what they were, were sores from malnutrition.

But they looked horrible. And they were emaciated, skinny. I had never seen, you know, all the time— I came from Iowa. I had never seen anybody that thin. And we saw a few yellow stars for the Jews on them, but there weren’t very many. And they—we didn’t even know actually at that time what it meant. We thought they were, like, trustees, or something like that, for the prison camp.

[We hadn’t heard of the camps.] Not before then. We didn’t even know it when we went along there and that—you know, it was a slave labor camp. We didn’t know. They told us later on, about three to four days later. They said, “Oh, that was a slave labor camp that we went in.”

[The survivors] were very happy to see us, yeah. There were big smiles on their faces.

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