Melvin Waters – The Texas Liberators

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September 14, 2011

I was a senior in high school when—sixteen years old when the war started. I remember December the sixth well. And I was so upset and all that I wanted to quit school and go in the navy, because I always heard of these underaged guys getting in the navy, and see the world. And my mother said, “I am not signing any papers for you until you have to go. You’ve got to wait for the draft.”

I left college early. I went home for Thanksgiving. Never did go back. I went down to the Marine Corps recruiting office with a friend of mine that I played football with. And he was going to join the Marine Corps, so I went down with him and saw him off. It was one of those deals where—I don’t know where his parents were, but it was one of those deals where he went down, took a physical, and left that night. So I went down and held his hand, and they talked me into taking a physical. And so I told my par-ents about it and my mother said, “You’re not going anywhere. I’m not going to sign papers for you.” So I was home, and I was going to start school in the second semester taking business ad-ministration. And my dad told me, he said, “If you want to go into the Marine Corps, you can.” And I said, “Mother won’t sign

the papers.” He said, “Well, let me work on that.” So finally he talked her into signing my papers and I went up. And, of course, I had taken a physical along with my friend in the latter part of November. I went up and left to go to San Diego on January the second. And then when I got to San Diego and started through my physicals and stuff out there they had for us, I flunked, got sent back. I was discharged from the Marine Corps. And so I came back in the spring of 1943. And my next-door neighbor who had been my roommate in NTAC [North Texas Agricultural College] had joined the air force under a new plan. They were taking in seventeen-year-olds, and when they got eighteen they would call them up for cadets. He had done that, and he was waiting to go into the air force. So I went up and talked to them and told them I had this medical discharge over my head. And they said, “Well, if you can pass our mental and you can pass our physical, and you say you can, I will get you into cadets.” So I passed the mental. I went down to take the physical. I was flying high, and they hit me right in the face again: “You’ve got high blood pressure.” So that kept me out of anything for over a year.

And I went back to school in a different way. I got a job at the
war plant out in Arlington, or Grand Prairie, and they sent me
back to school, night school, in Arlington. So I went back a semester of school in Arlington. I was supposed to have gone and
left in September of 1943. And they didn’t call me up, so I went
to the head of the draft board. Being Lancaster, you know every-
body and everybody knows you. And he said, “Melvin, why don’t
you just give up?” And I said, “Well, give me a chance anyway. I
think I can pass the physical. I’ve been going to the doctors.” So
he more or less told me I might as well just give up.

And so I had taken a job with Dallas Power and Light, a day
job. And while I was on this job, I read in the Dallas Morning
News, in the want ads, I saw they were looking for ambulance
drivers for immediate service overseas. And so [I] called the tele-
phone number that afternoon and got an interview the next day
with the person who put the ad in. . . . And he said, “Well, you’re
the type of people we’re recruiting now. I think . . . you have a
good shot of being offered a chance to go overseas.”

I fooled around a couple of months. I didn’t think we was ever
going to go. I thought the war was going to be over before we
even got in. [Eventually we were sent to Italy.] . . . But going over-
seas, it took us thirty days to get to Naples, Italy. . . . But I guess
the most beautiful sight was going through the Straits of—I
guess the Straits of Sicily, between Sicily and the boot. We went
through one Sunday afternoon, and that was several hundred
miles below Naples. Finally, the next day, which was a Monday,
we landed in Naples. We pulled up to the dock, and we disem-
barked onto the side of a ship that had been sunk and was laying
on its side, and that’s what we got onto when we got off of our
ship and went on ashore. And Naples had a big harbor and the
city, kind of, built around it. . . . [W]e stayed one week in Naples.

And I went back to school in a different way. I got a job at the war plant out in Arlington, or Grand Prairie, and they sent me back to school, night school, in Arlington. So I went back a semester of school in Arlington. I was supposed to have gone and left in September of 1943. And they didn’t call me up, so I went to the head of the draft board. Being Lancaster, you know every-body and everybody knows you. And he said, “Melvin, why don’t you just give up?” And I said, “Well, give me a chance anyway. I think I can pass the physical. I’ve been going to the doctors.” So he more or less told me I might as well just give up.

And so I had taken a job with Dallas Power and Light, a day job. And while I was on this job, I read in the Dallas Morning News, in the want ads, I saw they were looking for ambulance drivers for immediate service overseas. And so [I] called the telephone number that afternoon and got an interview the next day with the person who put the ad in. . . . And he said, “Well, you’re the type of people we’re recruiting now. I think . . . you have a good shot of being offered a chance to go overseas.”

I fooled around a couple of months. I didn’t think we was ever going to go. I thought the war was going to be over before we even got in. [Eventually we were sent to Italy.] . . . But going over-seas, it took us thirty days to get to Naples, Italy. . . . But I guess the most beautiful sight was going through the Straits of—I guess the Straits of Sicily, between Sicily and the boot. We went through one Sunday afternoon, and that was several hundred miles below Naples. Finally, the next day, which was a Monday, we landed in Naples. We pulled up to the dock, and we disem-barked onto the side of a ship that had been sunk and was laying on its side, and that’s what we got onto when we got off of our ship and went on ashore. And Naples had a big harbor and the city, kind of, built around it. . . . [W]e stayed one week in Naples.

After dinner [one] night somebody came in the front door. And it was chilly out there. They were all bundled up and all. And they took our commanding officer into a room off to the side. Then they were in there about thirty minutes, and then they came out. And I was just about ready to go to my ambulance to go to sleep, because I was leaving early the next morning. And our lieutenant said, “Well, we’ve got a problem here.” He said, “They want ten volunteers to go with Company 567. And all we can say is that you’ll be leaving Italy. And we need ten volunteers.” There was eleven people there, eleven people volunteered. He said, “Okay.” We got down and—“We’ll just take you by seniority.” And so they turned to me and a friend of mine that came overseas together. They said, “You two are tied for the tenth place.” And there was a deck of cards on the table. And our lieutenant said, “Why don’t y’all draw cards to see who goes? High man goes.” I turned a tre. The other guy turned a deuce. So I got to leave Italy.

And we went out on the other side of—just outside of Leg-horn [Livorno, Italy]. And we left that night. We joined the 567 down the other side of the mountain. And then we went to—from Leghorn they took us by LST [landing ship, tank] over to France. And it was getting spring, and it was some beautiful flowers in the valley. We could see the snow-capped mountains off to our right over in Switzerland and southern part of France. It took us six days, I think it was, to get to Belgium. And then we went from there to southern Holland. We were there a few days. We had four platoons of about thirty-five ambulances each. All of a sudden, they said that we were going into Germany. And unknown to us we were going to Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen.

And the afternoon that we arrived at Belsen . . . Belsen is a town. Bergen I think is also a town. But we were in convoy, and all of a sudden, the convoy slowed down. And then— I was prob-ably in the first half of the convoy. And as we came up to the end of the forest that we were in—we’d been in this forest for about twenty miles—and we looked over to our left, and there was a camp over there. And the gates were open on the camp. Then there was about a half a dozen or so men in striped uniforms just wandering around. I mean, it was like they were in a daze. I don’t know how we— I don’t know. I don’t remember that we knew much about concentration camps and all or not.

But the gates were open and they were free to do what they wanted to do, and it just seemed like they were wandering around like zombies. And then we went on past the camp. And about a mile, a mile and a half north of the camp was a SS barracks. It had been a training—there had been a training facility there since, oh, about the middle thirties, I guess. There were dormi-tories built, two rows of them. And in the middle there were some wooden buildings, one-story buildings. The dormitories were about three, four stories high. They were the SS barracks, is what they were. I don’t know whether it was built for a cavalry post or not, but it looked like that these little wooden, part-stone, one-story huts that were in the middle, between them, might have been a place for horses.

. . . The British had left 250 engineers there, or an engineering company. And the camp had been without food and water for a couple of weeks. They said from the time it was liberated until the time we got there, ten days to two weeks, they had lost sixty thousand people. When we got there, there was forty to fifty thousand left in the camp. It had started in 1939 as a prisoner-of-war camp for Russian prisoners, and then they had added the concentration camp onto it. It was probably one of the smallest concentration camps that they had. Covered less than fifty acres.

We went in—the first day we went into the camp, I went in as a stretcher-bearer. And the English had all kinds of protective gear on; we didn’t. They’d just spray us [for decontamination], so we all were gray-headed there for a couple of months, spraying us. They’d spray us down the back of our neck and all. And we went in and there was a medical team. The doctors would, or a doctor would say which patient was too far gone, and we’d skip those. And we were in a women’s section, and they would—the doctor had a couple of orderlies with him. They would strip off the clothing of a person and then wrap them in a blanket and put them on the stretcher. We’d carry them out, and we would help them get the women on the stretcher. And there was one woman just fighting us like everything. She thought that we were taking her to the crematorium, which they did. They took—sometimes when they went in to get the bodies and there were some that were not quite dead yet, they would pick them up and take them to the crematorium also, evidently.

There was, when we got there, there was six hundred a day dying in the camp, and at the end there it was down to a hundred a day. We would take them up to a—one of these little huts I was telling you about that ran between the barracks. And they would take them in there and strip their clothes off of them and de-lice them and cut their hair, and get the lice out of their hair and cut their hair, and scrub them real good and put new clothing on them. And then they would move them into the hospital section. And there at the last we had German nurses that were doing the first cleanup on the patients, and then they were moving them into . . . SS dormitories that had been turned into hospitals.

And so, anyway, in the camp it was dead bodies around. They had some Germans who were in a flatbed truck going around picking up bodies. We would pick up women. We would pick up a woman and beside her was a corpse. But—then you had to watch where you walked because there was filth everywhere. The engineers had got them some water by detouring the creek below the camp into the camp. They had latrines built by just digging a trench and putting boards over it and drilling holes in the thing. And it was all out in the open, and women would just go up and squat on the top of the hole. And there was dead—there was an open grave on our side that they were putting about a thousand to two thousand bodies in. We had to drive right by it going out. And they had Germans standing in the bottom of the pit stacking bodies. And I remember one time the—a lot of times people’s eyes would be opened, and it looked like that they were staring at you. I don’t know how many of those graves that they had. I think some of them might have even been up to four thousand in a grave.

Took about ten days for us to clear it out. The war ended while we were in the midst of our work, and we stayed on. The war ended about May the sixth or seventh. And I think it was May the—I thought it was May the twelfth or twenty-first that the camp burned. And the operation, I guess, had been over with quite—several days, and I was in the camp. And there probably wasn’t a half a dozen people in the camp, I don’t know. They were going here and there and everywhere. A lot of them had gone to Paris on leave. And I saw this black smoke going up into the sky. And some—I asked somebody, I said, “What in the world is going on?” And somebody said, “They’re burning the camp, or what’s left of it.” So I jumped in the ambulance and drove down there. And, I mean, that was the blackest smoke I’d ever seen. . . . [I]t looked like the fires of hell.

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