Jack John Reynolds – The Texas Liberators

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September 13, 2011

[I was at Texas A&M University] [p]robably half a semester. I still call myself a member of that class. [I left for] Fort Sam Houston. And from there, I was sent to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. At Camp Claiborne I became a member of the 398th Engineer Regiment General Service, which was just being formed. And every-body in it, except a very small cadre of noncoms, was rookies, including the officers. And that was kind of interesting. Since I had a little bit of ROTC, both high school and A&M, and Boy Scouts, they made me a corporal. I knew how to set up a pup tent.

. . . [M]y basic was at Camp Claiborne. Halfway through that, they sent us to Arkansas, to work on a flood. We learned to build all kinds of stuff, you know, bridges and stuff like that. Gin poles and sheer legs and tripods and all kinds of stuff for moving equipment. But up in Arkansas, they were working on a flood of the White River. And so we learned how to match our slopes and to control seepage, how to build chimneys around sand boils so they wouldn’t wash the levee out. We built a few bridges and then went back to, went back to Claiborne and finished up. And just before they finished up, they came and asked me if I want-ed to go to the ASTP. And I said, “Well, what’s that?” And they said, “We don’t know.” But it was the Army Specialized Training Program, and nobody knew what it was. So anyway, they sent me back to college, and I went first to LSU [Louisiana State Uni-versity], which they called a STAR Unit, which was some kind of an acronym, I think, but only—it was just for casuals. And then they sent me up to Lake Forest College, on—it was thirty miles north of Chicago, on Lake Michigan, and—my training, well, it was about—it was kind of like a pre-engineering, but it wasn’t as much as I’d had at A&M, you know. I had some liberal arts stuff in there too, geography and all. But anyway, that was— I started, I think, in September of ’43, somewhere along in there. And along about in March of ’44, well, they broke us up and sent us out to the California desert. And that’s where we joined the 104th Infantry Division. And at that time there— An infantry division has about fourteen, fifteen thousand men in it. And they brought in five thousand replacements from the ASTP into the 104th. They were coming off of desert maneuvers at the time. And then they took us from there up to Camp Carson, Colorado, and we trained up there under General Terry Allen. And we specialized in night fighting. And then from there they sent us overseas.

Oh, I think everybody was in a pretty good mood [when we crossed]. They did a little zigzagging, but I think the U-boat threat was mostly taken care of by that time. And there was always some guys playing cards or running a shell game, something like that. But the last— I do remember, though, that they handed out some little bitty books that were stapled together, little book-let deals. And some guy was teaching us a few words of French, how to pronounce it and—you know, “Where’s the railroad station?” and all that kind of stuff was in this little book. And so we kind of went in for that. Then that little book, which I have since lost, when we got over there—when we finally got to where there were some people to try to talk to, was in Belgium. And it was in a Flemish part of Belgium, so the French equivalents didn’t do much good. We were writing down little—I was—writing down little Flemish equivalents, and then we didn’t stay in Belgium very long. Got over into Holland, so I was writing little Dutch equivalents in it. Writing very small, of course. And then I got into Germany, and for a long time there wasn’t anybody to talk to, but when we did find somebody, well, we were writing German equivalents down. So all of my lexicon of German and French and Flemish and Dutch, it’s lost.

[I had never been overseas before.] . . . [I]t was—damp. It was cold and damp. And this was in September and October. But in the Cotentin Peninsula—you know, that’s where I’m re-ally speaking of. Other places weren’t that much different in climate. But it was—it was interesting. In one of the places where we were in Belgium, we was on the grounds of the Peter Paul Rubens home, Flemish painter. And, of course, that was where our headquarters was.

And a translator came by and said, “Now, we’re not supposed to go to Brussels. It’s been reserved for the British. So you’re not supposed to go there. It’s off-limits. And the train station is right over there.” So we went off-limits that evening in Brussels. I remember, I think they gave us a couple of dollars or some-thing—a very, very little bit of money. We didn’t normally pay, but they gave us a little money. See, of course, we were making combat pay by now. But we decided we wanted something to eat, and we saw a sign on this door for a restaurant. We went in, went up the stairs, went down the hall, into the hall. Man comes to the door. He’s dressed up in a white tie and tails. And all these ladies and gentlemen wearing their dining [formal wear]—you know. He told us he didn’t think we’d be comfortable in there. And I’m sure we wouldn’t have. We couldn’t have afforded a cup of coffee.

[Morale stayed pretty high.] . . . I could see those guys after they’d been fighting for a long time, though, and they got the thousand-yard stare. You know, just exhausted, that sort of thing. But—after this little foray into the Harz Mountains, we—I think we were lost. It wouldn’t have been unusual with that particular officer. We went to a town called Duderstadt and spent the night in Duderstadt. And we met a couple of guys. One of them was from the 106th Infantry Division, which had been wiped out practically in the Bulge, and so he’d been a prisoner. They’d marched him east, and then they marched him back to the west. They get too close to the front on either side, and then they start-ed him back east again. And this guy told them he was sick. And they didn’t shoot him. They left him behind. So he was there when we got there.

Another little guy was a Jewish guy, I think. He wasn’t in our—wasn’t a soldier, and he was—the soldier hadn’t had anything to eat. And I went in a bakery. And they had one loaf of bread, and I made them give it to me. I’ve thought since that I should have given half back to them, but I didn’t then. We had plenty of food, but it wasn’t with—our kitchen hadn’t gotten there and—you know. So I wanted to feed the guy a little bit. He was starving. And so, anyway, this Jewish guy, he said, “Well, I can tell you where we can get eggs.” So the next morning, before dawn, we started out. And we went out in the country for a few miles, and he went up, and I stayed with the vehicle. He went up and rapped on the window, woke the people up, came back with a hundred eggs. And so we took them back to town and were feeding this guy that was starving. He would say, “Well, I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be sick.” He’d go ahead and eat it anyway.

And then, the following day was when we went—reached Nordhausen.

[I had never heard of it.] Zero. Never heard of it. We pulled into Nordhausen in the afternoon. We found these apartment buildings. They were quite nice, fairly large buildings, and there were several of them. They were spaced maybe a hundred feet apart, something like that. Out behind them, they had little gar-dens, you know, a little strip of garden for each apartment. And most of them would have a rabbit hutch. They raised their rabbits for meat. And we kicked occupants out of an apartment for our squad, and we went in there. And after we’d been in there a while, one of the guys came up, and he had a funny look on his face and says, “Come with me.” And we all went over next door. We got next door, and there was this stink coming out of there, a big stench. And we went in there and our medics were in there. And they had all of these people that were nearly dead, and they were just feeding them a little teaspoon at a time of hot chocolate or something. And if they fed them very much, they’d get sick and die—get sicker and die. And they were just barely alive. And the smell was the smell of death.

And so they told us where it came from—where it came from, and we all got in our truck and we went out there to the camp. On the way saw an older man, made him get on the truck with us to go out there. We didn’t bring any of them back. And when we got out there and—I know I didn’t see all of it. What I saw was all of these dead people laid outdoors, there on the ground, and it looked like acres of them. And they were—you know, they’d been living in there and—and there was others in there that were—they hadn’t brought out. And just a terrible scene. And what we—what we didn’t see at all was the underground factories that they had, see. That was back under the Harz Mountains that I told you about. They had these underground tunnels back under the Harz Mountains, and these were slave laborers who were build—who were working on the buzz bombs. And—V-1 rockets, and I think also the V-2s. We saw a lot of V-1s go by and on in. They had a distinctive noise to their engine, you know. And then you’d hear the engine cut off, and you’d know it was going into a dive and everything

Nordhausen. I’ve heard since that they called it Dora-Mittel-bau or something like that. Dora-Mittelbau, but we just knew it as Nordhausen. The ones that—that could be—had a chance of saving, our medics were working with—on them, and they did just tremendous labor to—to try to save those people and all.

Well, it still bothers me. We went back to our apartment. And the guys in my squad were as fine a young man as they come. Were just—well—nobody was saying a word. It was just almost like they’d forgotten how to talk or something, you know what I mean? They were— It just affected them so much. And the occupant of the apartment came and wanted to get something out of the refrigerator. I don’t know, milk for a baby or something, which—you can’t imagine anybody saying no. The guy that met them at the door said no and sent them off. It was just kind of beyond words. You know, we’d seen a lot of dead but nothing like that.

[Nothing really prepared you for—]

Nothing.

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