Ted Hartman – The Texas Liberators

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May 17, 2012

I remember coming home from church and having the radio on and hearing the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. We didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was. We got out the atlas and looked it up and figured out exactly where it was and what it probably meant to us. There was very much a depressed feeling throughout the nation, I think. I was—let’s see—I was sixteen years of age at that time. I worked a lot, as all children in Iowa did. Most all of us had a job of some sort, and I did a lot of common labor of shoveling snow and cleaning windows and that sort of thing. I remember trying to be sure that I was earning enough money so that I could keep money in the bank if I ever needed to do something real with it and not have to do common labor the rest of my life.

. . . [In] high school, the army and the navy offered an examination for all boys. The girls, of course, at that time would not be eligible for anything like that. The examination was called the A-12—V-12 examination. If you passed grade-wise, passed that examination, the navy would send you to the college of your choice. They would give you a choice of several colleges. The army would send you for basic training first and then would send you to a college of their choice. . . . They told me that I would have possibly a year, but at least six months of college before I’d be called. So I enrolled in Iowa State. Six weeks later, I was called to active duty.

We were going to be engineers. But we were only there about two months when rumors began to surface that they were needing troops for the ground troops for the upcoming invasion. They weren’t going to be allow— They weren’t going to be able to just let us stay in ASTP much longer. Sure enough, at the end of ten weeks, they announced that all the ASTPs were closing except for medicine and foreign languages. They . . . sent all of us that were at the University of Oregon down to Camp Cook in California where the Eleventh Armored Division was very much in need of people. It was interesting. When we marched from the University of Oregon campus down to the train depot, the people in town lined the streets to say good-bye. We didn’t realize that we had meant that much. It was very touching.

We were starting— We were leaving our camp there in England and starting across. We went in absolutely pouring down rain. The driver has to drive with his head out when you’re on the road and going more than five miles an hour. There’s just no way you can do it otherwise. We drove for six hours in that rain—just pouring down—to get down to the harbor at Weymouth where we were to put our tanks on these landing ship, tanks, these ships. We backed our tanks onto the ships. The prow of the ships would open up like this and then a great big door would drop down, and we backed up on that door and into the ship. We backed all our tanks on. Our tanks filled a number of ships. A number of tanks could get on one of those ships, yeah. It took several ships to take all of us.

We all loaded and then moved away from the harbor and then sat there for two days. We had the finest eating we’d had in ages. Fresh rolls and ice cream. Things we’d never heard of for months and months. It was then that the Germans had started the Battle of the Bulge, while we were starting across. We were supposed to be going to southwest France to where they had a submarine pen. . . . We were supposed to come in and block it from the land and maybe move in on it as possible. That was our assignment when we started across on the boat. Well, just as we got to France, they totally changed that. Told us we were to engage in a forced march across northern France. . . . They had us load up with all the ammunition we could take because they were having trouble getting supplies across, too. As they moved inland, they needed more trucks and—that could carry supplies on roads. So they had us load every tank with every piece of ammunition and food and supplies that we could possibly take in the tank. And then we set out on these about a five-day forced march across northern France and ended up just barely into Belgium and not far from Bastogne. That’s then when we started into the Battle of the Bulge.

We spent the night just at the edge of—southwest of Bas-togne, just a little—thirty miles—just at the edge of where the enemy was. Then the following morning we were to take off. Usually the artillery shoots a lot and prepares the way for us to come in. But they had not been able to get there. Our reconnaissance also had not been able to get there, so we didn’t know what we were meeting. But they sent us out into the battlefield, and I kept thinking, Well, I hope all of the stuff that we’ve learned to do by rote we’ll do by rote and it’ll work. And it actually did. I had to keep low in the driver’s seat. I had to keep my lid down. So I had to look at where we were going through the periscope. And the tank commander is supposed to keep giving instructions to the driver, but he was really so occupied that he wasn’t giving me very much in the way of instructions. We were doing okay. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like our tanks were going in a different direction.

That first day, we ended up gaining about five miles, which was the most that had been gained that day in the Battle of the Bulge. The first day, though, our company commander’s tank was hit and he was killed. Some of his tank crew were killed and two of them were captured. Another tank with some of my best friends in it was hit. That tank commander was injured badly. His knees—legs were shot off. The Germans captured them, and they forced them to carry the tank commander up about two miles to their headquarters. This all happened the first day. The next day, we went on toward another—maybe four miles forward—a little town named Chenogne, and we fought with the infantry. Our tanks and infantry fought together very well. We spent that night outside Chenogne. Then the following day, we went into the town in force and took it with the infantry and us working together. Finally, it was clear enough for the air force to come in. Eighteen out of twenty-one houses in that town were destroyed during the battle.

Well, we were coming along—we were moving along, and this was after we had started moving more quickly, gaining more ground. All of a sudden, these people started showing up in strange-looking clothes, and we couldn’t figure out what they were because we’d never seen anybody that had been in a concentration camp at that point. They started showing up in these stripes, broad stripes. No one had ever told us—I’m not sure anybody knew to tell us—about the concentration camps. We started seeing these people coming out from the trees, from the woods, and then getting in the road and getting in the way. We couldn’t run over them. That’s not American. They just kept—more and more and more intensely coming. We’d find some of them lying in the ditches along the road. Gradually, we began to appreciate that this was some sort of prisoner, maybe because they were wearing similar clothes. And then, over the radio they told us that they had just found out that these prisoners had been re-
leased from a concentration camp. . . . It was Buchenwald.

. . . [T]hey had been released to get in our way and to slow
our path, slow us down. They did slow us down, but they would absolutely stop us and kiss the front of a tank, or they’d salute us. It was—I couldn’t help but cry myself. I had never seen anything like that. I couldn’t understand. Of course, I didn’t know the whole background picture either, I just couldn’t figure out. Some of them had their buddies with them. One of them was taking care of his buddy over on the side of the road. He wouldn’t leave his buddy who, I gathered, was dying. It was just all sorts of little scenes, many scenes along the way. They kept coming, but gradually, we seemed to be able to get them to stay out of the way, and we were able to move on more. I think our infantry troops were better at dealing with them than we were because they were on the ground and could help them understand that they needed to stay away from the road so we could keep our force moving on forward.

The first dead people I saw really were kind of hard to accept. How could people do that to people? . . . I hadn’t seen anything like this, and it was so different. It was about three weeks after that, I think [that we went to Mauthausen]. . . . [O]ne of my friends was a medic. The way I got to go there was, he was going over. He was on duty of certain duty hours. He asked if I would like to go over and see this because it was so different. I said yes, I would like to see it. So he arranged for me to go over when he was going over for his duty hours. We went over, and he told me, he prepared me for it as we were going. He told me that he was—when he got there—he said he wouldn’t be able to spend a lot of time because he would be very busy doing the medical things for these people that were urgent. When we got there, there were these stacks of people like cordwood. There were still fires going. It was quite eerie, and there were still fires going in the furnaces with the bones in the furnace.

Then, in the barracks where they had their people, there was so many to one bed. I can’t even remember how many. You almost couldn’t count them. They were all so—they were just skin and bone, every one of them. People wandering around. You wondered how they could even move. They were just nothing but skin and bone. I was out in the grounds around there. There was a large ground around there because there was a big limestone quarry, and all around there were these skin-and-bone people wandering around kind of listlessly doing nothing, just moving around. I was glad I got to see it, but I was glad that I didn’t have to stay out there.

The two times we’ve been back—you know, they meet every year in celebration and to thank the Eleventh Armored. There are almost twenty thousand people [who] come to that celebration. We’ve been there two times. I didn’t know—I didn’t understand that one. The first meeting we went to, we got there and, as far as you could see, there were buses from all over Europe. People come who’ve had a connection. Some of them were the prisoners themselves who wear a scarf made out of material from their original outfit, striped, and others were from families who had a connection. But they all had a connection from Spain, Italy, all over the place. It’s been very touching every time I went. I really got very touched about all of it. You see that and you think, “They’re not going to let this happen again.”

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