William Womack – The Texas Liberators

Scroll Down

May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012I grew up there in east Fort Worth. And in—about ’38—I was about seventeen, I imagine—yeah, seventeen. I was going to— There weren’t any jobs around for kids, so I joined the Texas National Guard just to get their twenty-one dollars a month. And in ’39, well, actually in 1940, they started mobilizing the Nation-al Guard, and they were drafting twenty-year-olds. I was going to be nineteen in October, so I’d be prime draft bait in about a year. I’d already been in the guard for about a year and a half, so I just went ahead and joined up with them. And we went to Camp Bowie, Texas, down at Brownwood; stayed there about a year, training. And we were supposed to get out in a year. I was actually home, waiting on a discharge, on December 7, 1941. And, of course, you know what happened then.

So I just—I went back to the camp and they said, “No dis-charges. Everybody’s in for the duration.” In ’42, we got—the whole division got transferred to north Florida, when we was taking amphibious training. And this unit I was in was the Tex-as National Guard Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division. After about a year there, we went on maneuvers up in the Pinelands of North Carolina, South Carolina, for several months. Then we moved on up to Cape Cod, a camp called Camp Edwards, which is when we were taking amphibious training out in Nantucket Bay. That was in 1942. In the spring, I think it was April or May of ’43, we loaded on this ship, and the whole division went to North Africa.

And that wasn’t bad over there, the combat. Where we landed was a little place called Mers-el-Kébir, which wasn’t very far from Oran. And we stayed there at Mostaganem, I think, for about a month, and we moved to the west coast, to the Casablanca area. And we practiced our surveying. That’s where I learned to run a survey instrument and how to “lay the battery,” we called it. And we were in combat reserves because the Afrika Korpswas just about defeated at that time. And our whole divisions caught one German in about a four-month period. And then, let’s see, we got up there in April, and then in August, the same year, we went to—made the Salerno invasion in Italy.

I remember the worst casualty I encountered was there in Italy. We were in a position, and there was a creek behind us, a little circular creek. We were in a direct observation of that Monte Cassino Abbey. We were in that position probably twenty-eight or thirty days. All we got was small-arms fire—I mean mortar fire—in our position. One day they decided they’d really give us a working-over and they did. I was in the dugout up in front of the battery. The battery was firing over me. So we started getting the fire, and when we shut down, everybody went in their holes. I was listening over the radio when the number one gun hollered, “Help, help, we got casualties on number one.” I said, “Stand by, I’ll call the medics.” I called the medics on another phone. And in just a minute an ambulance went right by us and down to the gun position, but the shelling continued. Then we got an-other phone call. This guy said, “God damn, both our medics are down.” I said, “Well, I’ll be down there.”

So I threw the phone down and took off, jumped out of my hole and run down there. Shells were still coming in. They’d come in, and there was a big bank to my left, sort of an erosional feature, and it went down into the creek. I was running down parallel to that bank. Shells were hitting up in that bank, and every time I’d hear one coming in I’d hit the ground and double up. I lost my helmet, so I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t go back and pick it up. I finally got down there to where the ambulance was, and it was shot all to pieces. Two medics, they said. One of them was hit in the back, and he couldn’t move. He was a captain, and he was laying down close to that bank on one of the wheels of the ambulance. And the driver was laying under the ambulance. I looked around, and there were three or four bodies lying in the creek, floating in the creek. So I waded out about waist-deep and got one, drug him back and turned him over. He started talking, you know. I went back and got another one, turned him over, and he started moving. I knew he was—and this last one I got, he just kind of moved a little bit. And in the meantime, another guy from the other gun came over and helped me. So there was two of us out there in that creek.

When we got all those guys out, two of them were dead. We left the two dead ones laying there. And I got in the ambulance, and one of the shells had hit up on that bank, and a big fragment of the shell had went right through the right window, through the instrumental panel, right in front of the—through the steering wheel. I said, “This thing will never start.” But I turned on the switch and hit the starter. Cranked right up. I drove out to Highway 6, turned left, and saw a little sign on the road that said Aid Station Point, with an arrow. We went down there, drove in there. The captain come out—somebody come out and said, “I’ll take those two right there.” I said, “What about the other four?” He said, “I don’t have any more room for them. Take them down to that other ambulance, that other field hospital.” I said, “Where is that?” He said, “About two miles down the road.” So I took them down there and I unloaded them, and all of those guys survived. I was sitting in there muddy, dirty. I didn’t have my hat. I picked it up when we went by. I said, “You got a cup of coffee?” And they gave me a cup of coffee, and I sit there drinking this coffee. I looked up, and then in walks my best buddy with a big old bandage around his arm. I said, “God, what happened to you?” He said, “I was lighting a fire to make some coffee and it caught my shirt on fire.” So that was one of the hazardous experiences I had.

We didn’t have too much . . . trouble until—I can’t think—we really—well, except when we started capturing those concentration camps. The only one I went to was Landsberg, and I didn’t know about that until they come up. Well, the captain come down and said, “I want you to take three men from this gun section and get on this truck and go up to this—follow this other truck.” I said, “Okay, what are we going to do?” He said, “There’s something up there you need to see.” So that’s when we saw Landsberg. It was a—kind of a pretty location, really. There was a big row of dense pine—fir trees and a lot of them scattered around.

When we got there, all the prisoners were on the inside. We went inside, and then the prisoners started, kind of, drifting out. Then we saw all these dead folks, and then we decided we’d get out of there. The poor inmates were just kind of—were in sort of a daze. They didn’t act like they knew what they were doing. They just milling around from one place to the other, in between the trucks. And they’d get in the trucks and out of the trucks. Some of them were just boys, you know, like teenagers. And some of them were old men. But they all walked with sort of a stiff-legged gait. They were nothing but bones. They just had a little skin. So 53 William A. Womackthey wanted—they’d come up and they’d say, “Food, food.” Of course, when we first started that, we had rations in the truck and food scattered around the area, you know, like soldiers do. They’d get so much every day and they wouldn’t eat it all, so we started giving them stuff. And the next day we found out we made a big mistake in doing that, because our rations were so concentrated that it killed some of them. Why, they had been on a diet of water and turnips for years, and they didn’t—couldn’t handle any high-protein food.

. . .The fence looked like it was prefabricated. The posts were . . . about a four-by-four, and they’d stick it up this way, and then a two-by-four out this way on another post and then a two-by-four on the ground so that they were self-sustaining. You didn’t have to dig a hole to put them in, but they were supported by barbed wire. They had a mesh wire on this side, but heavy barbed wire on the top. They were just out on sort of a flat plain. Looked like they had cleared the trees off, because the trees were in a perfect line. Looked like they’d just took a bulldozer and went down that and cleared all the trees off. And there were a few trees around the front, but the gates were made out of wood and wire, real flimsy. But they had guard towers, probably fourteen, fifteen feet high. There was a wall—the fences were about, I’d say, prob-ably eight feet, eight to nine feet, about like these walls here. But the guard towers were about twice that high, and some of them were—had insulators on them, were electrified. But these that were in Landsberg that I saw, weren’t. They were just tacked on there with a staple, looked like you would use them around the barnyard. Barbed wire was very different, definitely. It had spikes on it that long. And these houses, barracks, I guess, some of them were sort of buried. One of them we saw. But most of them were just sitting out there in plain— I didn’t go in. I wasn’t about to go in any of those things. But they’d have windows down, and it wasn’t—just ordinary small buildings. They were about ten to twelve feet apart. But I don’t know about where the— I imagine they had separate latrines somewhere, bathrooms. But then I didn’t look around that closely. I saw all those dead bodies, and I wanted to get out of there.

They wanted us to see the atrocities that were committed. And these—most of the bodies were just bones and skins. They were starved to death, I think. The cold will kill you. But that was just one of the things they wanted us to see about why we were there, why we were fighting. But it was something I haven’t forgotten easily.

Keep Scrolling