Chick Havey – The Texas Liberators

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May 30, 2012

Text...[I decided to enlist in 1942.] . . . I wanted to be a pilot, and we enlisted on the air force reserve. They were taking a long time to go to pilot school. So every Saturday morning we’d go down to the recruiting office down at the [Robert A. Young] Federal Building in downtown St. Louis and see in what position we were, if any. Finally, one sergeant got a hold of me, said, “Well, why don’t you join the army unassigned. Then you’ll be assigned to the air force, and you’ll get to go to pilot’s training school.” So I took his advice and signed up. The next thing, my butt was on a train going to the mule packs in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

I kind of got a kick out of the tests that the army gave you. I guess I was more mechanically inclined. I had a fellow sitting next to me, and he copied off of my mechanical test. The joke was that after we ended up, he ended up head of the division motor pool, and he didn’t know anything about mechanics. You know, he had copied off of me (laughs), so. And I ended up at division, too, as a statistician.

[We didn’t know if we were going to North Africa or if we were going to Europe.] Not till a certain point, till we got on the trains. We headed for New York and that gave us a little hint. We rode on Pullman trains . . . to the camp in New York. We were as- signed a barracks. And we got passes to visit New York City, and I got to go into New York City. [We] just hopped on a train and went there, then went down to Times Square and looked around, had a few drinks. We just kind of enjoyed it. Finally, went back home a little dizzy.

[I think I shipped out in November of ’44.] We went over in a rather large troop ship. It was a captured German ship from the First World War. I was, I don’t want to say comfortable, but we all had bunks, some bunks down in the holds. It was crowded, but we kind of enjoyed it. I didn’t get too sick, and we just enjoyed the ocean. We went through close to South America because we went south in the Gulf Stream for quite a while. And the trip was pretty warm. That late in the year, it should have been cold. I learned better coming back.

[We] went and landed at Marseille, but we went through the Straits of Gibraltar. And we got to see North Africa and Casablanca, things like that. Then we landed at Marseille. When we first got off the ship, we were carrying our baggage, a barracks bag and our packs and our rifles. We were like we were drunk, trying to keep our—you know, on the dock because we’d been rolling around in the ocean so long. We were—it was then we marched up to our campsite and camped out and dug our holes and got ready and dinner prepared.

Well, we started up the Belfort Gap through the Rhône valley. That was right after the Eighth Air Force had been strafing where the Germans were pulling out. And that was a sight to behold be- cause mile after mile after mile of their equipment, horse-drawn, horses and oxen in the field, you know, bloated up. That was the first— Just for two hundred miles or a hundred and fifty miles of it, endless. . . . [T]hey moved us in trucks and then, on December the sixteenth is when the Battle of the Bulge started. That’s when it started freezing and getting cold and snow, even up in northern France—what do I want to say—up by Reims. [We] had our overcoats and regular gloves and our helmets and our little caps to pull down over our ears. One of the things we learned trucking up to the Third Army— We were assigned to Patton’s army to relieve the Bulge at that time. We were all riding in trucks, and I— For some reason, we had number ten cans, and I put dirt in, got some gasoline, and we had a little fire in the truck. With it closed, it was pretty comfortable. But the next morning when we got out, we all were black with soot. It was comical.

The city of Dachau, the town of Dachau was a small country town. It was in a wedge in the road. I remember when we were riding the lead tank and we got some fire from the right front on the side of a hill. We didn’t know it then, but there were some SSers dug in there. So we hopped off the tank, and there was a perfect ditch leading right up that road. We crossed at those trees at—I have a picture of it—and we had flat shooting, right in their holes. We shot them up—there were four to six of them— and killed them all, and we went on about our business, you know. And we stopped. They said, “We’re going to hold up for the night, dig in.”

But we went in this first house, and it was a real nice-looking house. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the doctor out at the camp, at Dachau. And his family—they had a sitting room, a kitchen, a basement, upstairs, and three or four bedrooms downstairs. Real nice farmhouse. The grandmother was there, the grandfather, the daughters—the family. There must have been six or seven of them. So we ran them out of there and let them stay in the basement. They had bacon and everything. They were cooking, frying bacon. I never will forget the Germans’ counter-attack. They were firing artillery. But anyhow, I set up a machine gun in that window, in that library. So we went about cooking, and I started frying some bacon. Here comes some artillery in, and you’re pretty safe in a house, unless it’s big artillery. One of those—piece of shrapnel went right through that frying pan, and the bacon grease caught fire on that stove and ruined our bacon grease for frying potatoes. Have to put the fire out. But later on, we found out that that was the doctor out at that camp. God knows what he pulled. The next morning, we were on the road again, and we came to the camp and the railroad sidings

[We came up to the camp along the railroad siding.] And to the right was the railroad and there were marshaling yards. There must have been seven, eight tracks across, and then the warehouses, whole long stretch of warehouses. About a hundred yards of warehouses. And that’s where we first broke into the camp. And we weren’t getting, we were getting some mortar fire intermittently. There was yelling and carrying on, and people were running.

[I noticed] the stink. It’s a stench. But that wasn’t from the gas ovens. Just human stench. Death stench. [We investigated the railcars.] . . . [T]here were three hundred—I think on one of those photographs are the amount—there were three hundred railcars full of dead, and they all looked the same. They had their striped suits on, and they just died in there, starved to death. But they opened some of the doors and—our company lieutenant had a camera, and he took pictures of several of those, and I have those original, old, little photographs of them.

. . . [T]hose that could walk, they were like walking skeletons. You can’t believe that a person can walk that thin. It’s just amazing. But the dead and things like that—they weren’t embracing us, they were just yelling, and a lot of them were clustered up. Some of them brought some cans that they had gotten out of the German soldiers’ canteen or barracks or whatever—you know, like our number ten cans—and I was—we spent a long time opening those cans. In fact, that bayonet, I wore my hands out cutting cans open. We didn’t have can openers or anything. But it was for hours. We’d take turns.

[Before we got to Dachau, we hadn’t heard of these sorts of places.] Not one word, not one word, not one word. It was funny how they barracksed them, you know, like meal slots. They’re living lengthwise in a hole, four or five of them in a hole. They’re all stunk and dying and dead, crapping on themselves. Just— I guess that one day I saw more dead than the whole town of Galveston. We stayed there that night. We dug in that night. But we went around, and I went and looked at the ovens. The chimneys, big stacks, were there. I looked at the ovens, and they had dead stacked to go in the ovens. They had kind of a roller system. They’d put them on a long kind of stretcher and roll them in. But I read that that was coal fire, and they quit doing that. But I saw the gas jets. That was gas fire. I don’t know who said that was coal fire. It might have been both, but I saw the gas jets. When you— There were four ovens that I recall. I guess, if you put ten bodies on a roller—four ovens, that’s forty. And if it took an hour to do it, to burn it, I try to think of how many—going twenty-four hours a day—how many people that could die, that’d burn in there. That’s a lot. They had a lot stacked, ready to go.

. . . [There] was a lake, and I assumed it was around because it was a long ditch and there were a lot of bodies in there. They were throwing them in there.

. . . [T]hose that could walk, they were like walking skeletons. You can’t believe that a person can walk that thin. It’s just amaz-ing. But the dead and things like that—they weren’t embracing us, they were just yelling, and a lot of them were clustered up. Some of them brought some cans that they had gotten out of the German soldiers’ canteen or barracks or whatever—you know, like our number ten cans—and I was—we spent a long time opening those cans. In fact, that bayonet, I wore my hands out cutting cans open. We didn’t have can openers or anything. But it was for hours. We’d take turns

We stayed there that night. We dug in that night. But we went around, and I went and looked at the ovens. The chimneys, big stacks, were there. I looked at the ovens, and they had dead stacked to go in the ovens. They had kind of a roller system. They’d put them on a long kind of stretcher and roll them in. But I read that that was coal fire, and they quit doing that. But I saw the gas jets. That was gas fire. I don’t know who said that was coal fire. It might have been both, but I saw the gas jets. When you— There were four ovens that I recall. I guess, if you put ten bodies on a roller—four ovens, that’s forty. And if it took an hour to do it, to burn it, I try to think of how many—going twenty-four hours a day—how many people that could die, that’d burn in there. That’s a lot. They had a lot stacked, ready to go.

. . . [There] was a lake, and I assumed it was around because it was a long ditch and there were a lot of bodies in there. They were throwing them in there

[S]ome of the things that you don’t realize—it always makes you wonder how could human beings do that to human beings? But worse than killing is the deprivation that he inflicted upon those people by starving them to death. The misery over years and years and years. And that I don’t under— I haven’t ever come to grips with. The other thing is that each one of those prisoners had a bucket or a can and that was their duty bag. That’s what they carried. They ate out of it, they shit in it, they peed in it, and they didn’t have any place to wash it. The privation that he inflict-ed—or they inflicted—not he, they—because there were plenty of people to blame. Because you could—you know, a blind man would see what was going on.

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