Ray Buchanan – The Texas Liberators

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November 6, 2012

In 1702, two brothers from Scotland came to the United States, in Tennessee. And we originally came from one of those Buchanans. They came down to Tennessee and raised the family there. My great-grandfather was buried in Howell, Tennessee. And, see, they had, I think it was, about five children. And my granddaddy was James Chambers Buchanan. And there— He was born in 1845 in Tennessee. And he was at home when the Civil War broke out. Well, all his brothers joined the army. And he was too young to go at that time, so he run off and joined anyhow. And his daddy went and found him and brought him back to the farm to work the farm. And he didn’t like that, so he run off again. He was only fifteen years old, I think it was, at that time. He run off again and joined the cavalry again, Forrest’s cavalry. All of them was in the Forrest cavalry.

And he didn’t like that, so he run off again. He was only fifteen years old, I think it was, at that time. He run off again and joined the cavalry again, Forrest’s cavalry. All of them was in the Forrest cavalry. So my granddaddy was at home when the Yankees had taken over Tennessee. . . . And my uncles all was older than him. And so they kind of had taken care of my granddaddy. All my uncles was wounded at least one time and lived over it. And my grand-daddy was wounded in the back of his leg. And we always asked him how come he was wounded in the back of his leg, you know. And he said, “I was just getting in a better position, you see.” And that was the way he’d said it.

My daddy was born here in Mount Pleasant [Tennessee] in
1888. My father was married around sixty-five years and never had a death in the family. . . . And I told my daddy how lucky he was to be married sixty-five years and never have a death in the
family. And he agreed that they was lucky. So we had not one death and there was seven of us, and there’s still four of us still living, still living. So the doctor has told me that I have the best genes that there are, and I’ll probably live a long time yet. So he
may be right, I don’t know.

My father was a farmer. He raised everything that you eat.
We raised everything on the farm. We never went hungry, even
during the Depression. He always had plenty of food on the table. And even families would come and eat with us on Sunday
that didn’t have anything. We wondered why we had company
all the time, but it was people that didn’t have nothing to eat. So
my daddy would work all day. And he’d come in at noon. And
he’d take that old double-barreled shotgun and go down on the
banks down there. And we had mulberries, trees. The squirrels
would like mulberries. And he’d kill a squirrel, bring it home, and that’s what we’d have for supper is that squirrel. My mother raised a lot of chickens, so we’d have chicken on Sunday. We had
plenty to eat, but a lot of families did not have a lot to eat during the Depression.

I was in high school when they hit Pearl Harbor. I knew I was
going to go to war, here now. So we got married. And I stayed out
a little while before they drafted me in ’43. [When I] got to Camp
Wolters, they’d run us through all kinds of tests, see what they
wanted in the army. See what we could use—the signal corps
and all that. But anyhow, we found out that the paratroopers paid
fifty dollars a month more. Not thinking about the reason they’re
paying it, because you don’t live long jumping out of a plane, you
know, into combat.

They sent us to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, with the Seventeenth
Parachute Infantry. And they were already in training. And we
had to go through all that jumping out of the tower, doing push-
ups. . . . [Eventually], we came back to Camp Hulen, Texas, down
here at the antiaircraft, 838. Then they had about two hundred
of us that come in there together. And so then they shipped
about six hundred to eight hundred Yankees from New York and
around up there, mixed with us. We was all Southern. That’s
when the Civil War ended, you know. During World War II, they
mixed the Southern boys with the Yankees, you see. That did
away with the Civil War.

So they give us all a ten-day leave. So I come home. I told my
wife, I says, “When I go back, if you don’t hear from me for a
while, you know I got on a boat and I’m going overseas. Because
I think we’re going to leave as soon as we all get back.” And sure
enough, when we got back they loaded us all up, went to New
York, and loaded us on the boat on December 1, 1944, I guess it
was. Well, we was on a convoy. On clear days, you could see—
count at least fifty ships in that convoy. We were in the middle,
and they had all these destroyers and sub chasers around us, you
see, protecting us. And it’d taken us thirteen days at sea, and we
landed on a northern part of England. And we got off the boat
there and loaded on a train in England. And we went all the way
across England to the southern part of England, to a little small
town.

On about the twentieth of December, they called us and alert-
ed us to get ready to ship out. Well, we didn’t know what was
going on. It was the Belgian Bulge. And old Patton said, “Get all them antiaircraft units and turn them into infantry and let’s get
up here.” So that’s the reason they alerted us, you know, “Get
ready.” But we didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know
there was a Belgian Bulge, that they was having trouble. So on
Christmas Day they canceled our orders. They didn’t need us
now. See, they done stopped them. Old Patton and all of them had
done stopped them. So we didn’t get to go. So we waited about
ten more days and got everything ready. And we went and loaded
on them big landing crafts down there at Southampton. We land-
ed all our trucks and guns. It all hooked up. And we drove them
right into the end of them boats, in line, the whole outfit. And
we got on that. And at night, we went across the channel. They
almost had run into another boat that night, and I fell out of my
bunk. We didn’t know what was going on, and we asked what
was going on. Said, “Well, we almost hit another boat, see, going
across there.” Well, we got across the next morning, and they
run this boat up to the ramp. Anyhow, we drove our trucks right
on out. And we went to a camp there called Lucky Strike. And
there’s where they issued us our ammunition, all our ammu-
nition and everything to fight with. And so we got all that, and
then we loaded up on our trucks and everything. And we went
around the southern part of Paris and joined the Seventh Army
over there. We just kept driving and driving. And I kept hearing
artillery shells, and we got closer and closer. After a while, they
was firing back from us. We’d done passed our artillery. So we
went up there—and this was three o’clock in the morning.

Now, I’m nineteen years old and my buddies are nineteen
years old, in a strange country you don’t know where in the hell
you are. They give me a little map, and it had a fence up there
and it had a patch of woods there. And I was to go up there and
find that place with the woods up there, where I was going to
put my gun, the 40-millimeter and the .50-caliber machine gun.
So we got out, me and two more, and we ease up that fence row,
scared to death. Didn’t know what—where the Germans was. We
didn’t know nothing. Three o’clock in the morning, had a little
flashlight, we was afraid to use it. Afraid, you know, Germans
would see us and shell and kill us.

But I went on up there and we found the place. Then we come
back. It had taken about an hour’s time. We told them to follow
us. So we got in our trucks and we went up there. It was the right place. We put our gun in position around there and unloaded
everything. And at daybreak, when it got light, I looked down
in the valley there. And I never seen so many five-gallon cans
of gasoline in my life, stacked up there for half a mile. And that
was what we was supposed to guard. You know, if a plane come
in and drop a bomb on that gasoline, it’d just all blow up, you
see? And I didn’t know what we was supposed to do, but that
was what we was supposed to do. If any plane tried to bomb that
gasoline, well, we was supposed to shoot it down.

We got word that there was a prison camp up there, up the road there. Well, all them boys wanted to get in on it, you know, my gun section and all. They wanted to go up there and see about this prison camp. So we all went up there to see what was going on. So the infantry had already taken over the camp just a few hours before we got there.

But you know how GIs are. They want to help out. They want to get in on it. So we went up there to see. Now, I went up there, and I’ve never seen such a sight in my life. That was just—dead people in carloads, and all them walking around there with no flesh, just bones and—just hundreds and hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Just made me sick. I didn’t want to see no more of it. And I got pictures of it in there. I didn’t have a camera, myself, but my other buddies had the cameras and everything. They were taking a lot of pictures. But anyhow, I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to stay up there, really. The smell was awful, and to see all them people walking around there. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t stand it.

And the infantry we had had taken over Dachau. And it wasn’t any— We didn’t really have any business even being up there, because I don’t think the infantry needed our help. But, you know, nineteen-year-old boys and everything, they wanted in on everything. I seen all them people and everything. And the smell of it and all them people. They said there was fifty-two carloads of dead people that went out of there that day. And they dumped them. And so I didn’t stay up there very long. I was just— I went up there to see what it was all about. And that’s about all I remember of that.

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