William Dippo – The Texas Liberators

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October 21, 2011

I’ll start with date of birth—the real date of birth—okay, June 15, 1925. That was a good year for grapes, I was told later on. Boy, we’ll go from there—hey, wait a minute, me at a loss for words? (laughs) I have two sisters, both junior to me. My dad was born in 1900. And he wanted to enlist in the army during World War I, but his mother, my grandmother, was a tough old Irish lady. Killfoyle was her last name, and she boxed his ears a few times, and he realized he couldn’t enlist. So when my war came, I had nobody to box my ears. I could do just about what I wanted, if it was not immoral or illegal. And I live by that credo to this day. Mom was a stay-at-home mom. And there’s not much to say. She had raised three children. And—oh, she did hit me with a coat hanger when I told her I enlisted in the army. That was in November 1942.

Knowing that I couldn’t get in at seventeen, I had a couple of friends who made counterfeit coupons like the ones you had to have to buy sugar, gasoline, et cetera. They were counterfeiting those. So who do I go to fix my birth certificate? My two friends, who subsequently were in jail while I was in Bastogne. So any-way, I got in at seventeen. I enlisted, so I asked for the cavalry. I was a pretty good horse rider, as a matter of fact. I could jump. I could curry the tail. I was used to that because of the National Guard. I used to go away with my dad, who was in the National Guard. . . . And I would go when I was, like, thirteen—twelve, thirteen, fourteen—I would go away to summer camp when they were called to active duty for two weeks. And that’s where I learned how to take care of a horse. When they weren’t looking, I used to ride them bareback around in the corral. So anyway, I enlisted for the cavalry.

. . . I didn’t know any better. There was no cavalry. . . . When I went down to enlist, I went with my buddy. I can’t remember his name really. He was a buddy all right, but I just— It’s been so many, sixty some-odd years, I can’t remember. And he didn’t go to my school or my church, so I never knew him that well. And he had one of these elbows like Senator McCain has, but [Mc-Cain’s] was from being a prisoner. . . . [My buddy] was born this way, you know. So I said, “Okay, I’ll go navy.” So we went down together. The navy took him, arm or no arm, but wouldn’t take me. I couldn’t see the wall, and I was too skinny. Too tall to be that skinny. He was skinny, but he was short. So I didn’t bother to ask in the marines, and the army air force, I’m sure, wouldn’t have taken me. But somebody stuck their head out of the door as I was going down the hall from the post office to go home. And I was feeling a little upset and unhappy that they wouldn’t take me.

And then I heard, “Psst, psst.” I turned around and there was this big fellow, with all sorts of stripes on his arm and medals. And he says, “Come here, son.” So I went in. I told him, I said, “Okay, I want to enlist in the cavalry.” “Okay. Are you eighteen?” Well, I got ahead of myself there on that eighteen thing. I says, “Yes, I’ll bring in my birth certificate.” He says, “You do that. So in the meantime, you eat a whole bunch of bananas, and we’ll give you glasses. Don’t worry about that.” “And the cavalry?” “And the cavalry.” So anyway, my grandfather was a policeman, and I told him exactly what I did. And he was all for it. In fact, he was in the Spanish-American War, but he never got out of Flori-da. Never got to Cuba, but he was there. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, so— . . . I thought I’d uphold the name.

. . . Six-foot-one, and I weighed—well, I don’t weigh that much. I do, a little more, but not much. And the navy didn’t want me in there, like I said. But bananas, I weighed 138, so what the hell? I didn’t put lead in my pockets or anything. I knew they’d take me. So anyway, Mom was okay on that, and Dad finally came around. Of course, Grandpa was pushing me in, because he’s got a lot of stories from other policemen about me. But nothing was ever—I never was booked, as it were, because, “Oh, Dippo.” “Yes.” “Oh, Officer Dippo, Frank?” “Yeah, that’s my grandpa.” “Okay, go ahead.” I’d have a shirt full of apples or pears or something. That kind of nonsense as kids would do, I guess.

Our mission that particular day that we took off was to liberate Mauthausen concentration camp. Prior to our leaving, a day before, I’ll back up, on the sixth of May the Eleventh Armored Division, Combat Command A cavalry, armored cavalry, got there first. And I didn’t think—I was of the opinion there wasn’t anybody there, any Germans there. Well, in uniform anyway, or armed. That’s the way I was told, anyway. But the war still hadn’t ended, but the cavalry sent out help—asking for medical help immediately. And, of course, the purification would be our job, which we didn’t get until the next day, on the seventh of May.

Seventh of May we, the rest of the Combat Command A, arrived at Mauthausen concentration camp. And what we beheld—what we saw—and I’m sure I speak for my comrades—was worse, the condition of the people and what had transpired prior to our arrival was worse than the battlefield. They were terrible. They were covered with sores. They weighed seventy pounds. They were—if they were alive at all, they didn’t go over seventy pounds. And they were all sick and had lice, and—and it was terrible. But the medicals got in there that afternoon in force. They set up a tent to triage, but they didn’t have to triage. Everybody was the same, practically. But they took care of the women and children first. And they gave them first aid and gave them shots and operated on them and sent them back—further back into a more stationed hospital—a station hospital, a MASH [mobile army surgical hospital] unit, more or less. And then, from there, they could go on, if they were still alive.

. . . [T]he scene that we beheld when we went in to Mauthau-sen was really the living dead. And it doesn’t get to you as badly as it does when you see a human walking like he’s dead. . . . [T]o see these human beings walking, shuffling, and mumbling, and they don’t know what to do, and what’s going on. They—they—it was terrible. It was pretty hard to take for most of us. That’s it.But we did—the engineers—we dug. We had a trench dug by our dozers. And I recall, it was at least fifteen yards long and over six feet deep and at least five yards wide. And all the bodies had been stacked already, mostly on flatbeds, but some on the ground. And our commanders, our military commanders—military government commanders—made it known to the bürger-meister of the adjoining village that they were to show up at such-and-such a time.

And so the government—a colonel from the military government people—ordered the bürgermeister of that little village . . . to attend the burial of the deceased. And they were to wear their finest clothes. And no gloves. And they were to take each skeleton, each body down into the hole. Boy, you could hear them, “We didn’t know. We didn’t know.” . . . But we all know they knew. Then the burial. We had a chaplain from every religion say—after our dozers covered them. It was our dozers that covered them over. Then . . . the commanding general had all the chaplains of all the faiths that was represented in our division. It couldn’t—I’m sure there weren’t any religions that weren’t rep-resented here. . . . The Torah was read from. And all, everybody, all the chaplains and the people of the city—town, had to stay right with us. And believe it or not, some of them knelt while this was going on. Because Europe, if you go way back, before the other religions came, was always the Catholic religion. And they were kneeling, and crying, and moaning that they didn’t know.

The stench of the ovens would have—should have given it away, but it was—didn’t even need that. It was obvious what was going on in that enclosed area, Mauthausen. It would go down in infamy as man’s worst inhumanity to man.

[I]f I mention it or even think about it, I get emotional. It’s— I can’t help it. Because it’s there, it’ll never go away. But—and then you see it in the museums, and you see it on television even. Well, you don’t get a close look, but I have seen Mauthausen on television as well. But now it’s all dolled up, and, of course, they can’t go back and show those pictures on television, of course. But it is something that should never, never, never happen again. I don’t care what we have to do to stop it. I’d be the first to go if they’d take me.

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