Robert Anderson – The Texas Liberators

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May 17, 2012

[B]oth of us have come from Swedish families. And I lived in my early life, I was very closely associated with a Swedish church. The denomination is the Covenant, the Evangelical Covenant. At that time it was Swedish. So my early, early years were centered on Sweden, really. I mean, you know, our—all my grandparents came from Sweden, and my parents spoke Swedish and so on. But unfortunately, they didn’t speak Swedish to us.

And I lived in the South Side of Chicago and went to elementary school and high school—Calumet High School in Chicago. And when I was about eleven, my father passed away. And then, later, my mother passed away. And I lived with my sister. I didn’t know anybody else but Swedes, although I lived in a— I hesitate to say it this way, but another, broader ethnic community that was Roman Catholic. And so I was actually a minority. . . . . And we—I suppose this might be of some interest—we had Irish mafia bootleggers in our neighborhood, very close to us. I always like to tell the story that I remember as a kid, when I was very young, Al Capone coming down the alley with his machine gun, shooting up our neighbors. And so I never went out with my daddy and shot rabbits. We had the Chicago mafia trying to knock off the neighbors, which they were succeeding in doing to a certain extent.

. . . I’d always wanted to go to school. And since in the late—
early forties and so on, there wasn’t much money, when I grad-
uated from high school, I started at Illinois Institute of Technol-
ogy, which is the old Armour Engineering school. I started in a
co-op program. In other words, we went to school one semester
and then worked a semester, and so on. I was in that program,
and I started in ’42. At the time I was, like, eighteen and a half,
or something like that. And while there, of course, the war was
going on, and many of us enlisted in the army or air force or—all
four services at that time. So I wasn’t drafted. We anticipated
going to school. At least, I was in the Air Corps and anticipated
going to school for a degree, but in March of 1943 they called us
all up. And that was it, after about a year of school.

Well, the recruiters came to the university. And they encour-
aged us to enlist, and everybody did. I mean, you know, if you
weren’t in the—weren’t being drafted—I was eighteen—if you
weren’t drafted, why, you weren’t so good. So we had a choice of,
you know, coast guard or marines or navy or air force or army.
You could enlist. And we did that . . . with the idea in mind that
you would complete your education.

So it was March 1943, and I went through the normal routine and wound up in St. Petersburg, Florida, for basic training in the air force. And we had a real rough time. I lived in a hotel that they had taken over as a barracks, but went through all the preliminaries, you know, the marching and all that stuff. And then following that, I was assigned to training as a radar operator. And I spent time doing some instructing and so on, in radar, which was new at the time, and had quite a bit of experience around Bradenton-Sarasota, Florida, and that area. Then this business about the Army Specialized Training Program came out.

And so I applied for [the program], and I was accepted. . . . I was sent up to the University of Georgia in Athens. And this was in engineering. And the idea was that we were to go on and finish our degree programs, but as you probably know, there were some two hundred and fifty thousand young men who were in the ASTP programs all over the nation. In March of 1944, General [George] Marshall decided that the ASTP program was expendable and they needed troops to fill out the divisions that were going to Europe for the big invasion. And so they canceled the two hundred and—the programs all over the nation. And all of us were put into various divisions.

Oh, boy. We didn’t know what was going to happen. I mean, they put us on a bus, and we went down to the Tenth Armored Division. And eight hundred of us went into the Tenth Armored as privates. Of course, the Tenth Armored was an established division. It formed in 1942, so it was—I mean, they had the officers and the enlisted people, and the non-commissioned officers, and so on, and we were just—we just filled in. I was fortunate. Since I had been in radar, I was put into the signal company, the 150th Signal Company. But many of my friends either went to be tankers or infantry, and so on. I probably wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been that way. And so we went in March of ’44 and by September, the division was sent overseas.

. . . We assumed, as an armored division, we were probably going to Europe.

What did I think? I am not a soldier. You know, I adapted. I did what I had to do. But it wasn’t my thing. And you just—you just did what you had to do. There was no real love for it and so on. Although a great deal of loyalty developed. . . .

And so we finally got over to Europe, and my division was the first division to land directly in France. And we landed in Cherbourg. And Cherbourg had just— Let’s see, that was in late September and so on. And of course, the invasion was in June, so they had just cleared out that whole Normandy area. So we came in at Cherbourg and did our staging—getting ready—in Normandy. So my first experience in Europe was in Normandy, with the hedgerows and so on. Living in pup tents, with a lot of rain.

I was in the signal company. I was a wire man. [I] had to climb telephone poles and lay the wire. And at that point we had two vehicles in our unit. One was a half-track and the other was a jeep. So we had those two vehicles, and they had reels of wire on them, you know. And you had the climbers and all that sort of stuff. And the telephone switchboard. . . . So that’s what we were learning how to do, of course. A guy like myself hadn’t been very well trained because we hadn’t been with the division before. So we came in as pretty raw, pretty raw.

But we left there in either late October or early November [of 1944] and headed out across France to the “front lines,” which was at that time around Metz, in Alsace-Lorraine region. So we went through Paris. My first experience in Paris was riding down the Champs-Élysées in a half-track, under the Arc de Triomphe and on the way.

[When we arrived in the Memmingen area], we just went into the camp. . . . I think it was a work camp, yeah. It was not a death camp. Well, I mean, I’m sure people died right and left, but it was a work camp. . . .

I mean, my experience—I have to talk about my experience. . . . My experience was, all of a sudden, here we are, we’re in a camp. And seeing those, those barracks that they have there. And, “Don’t talk to the soldiers. There’s a lot of Americans here. You can see their picture. Don’t talk to them.” I remember that, because there might be German spies. And that was my first experience at seeing men—people with the striped uniforms that you’ve seen in the pictures. So that they—whether—the picture here is of American prisoners, there were really a lot of real concentration camp people.

. . . [T]he other thing that struck me was they were—they looked like Mongolians. And they must have been from Russia or something like that. But there was a lot of people that didn’t look like Germans or didn’t look like us Caucasians. They were obviously from a different ethnic group. And they were wearing the striped uniforms. And they were, they were milling around and so on. They didn’t want us to have any contact with them. See, this was the first day that we were into this situation. You may not be familiar, or maybe you are, with how we are fed. You’re fed off the back of a truck, and they have three GI cans. And you dip your—throw your garbage in one, and you dip your mess kit into another and you clean it, and then rinse it off over here. And what I remember is those guys in those uniforms standing by the garbage, eating it.

And I suppose another experience that I had in Thionville . . . a very lasting, uncomfortable memory, is that we didn’t have a lot of heavy clothing. We were getting it gradually, but we had— As a wire man you had to go out and you work with your hands, so you had gloves. And I lost a glove. And there was no other glove, so I was out a glove. So we were parked on a road in the convoy. And I looked over there, and there was a whole pile of soldiers, dead soldiers. They just lined them up on the road, you know, and then they were waiting for the mortuary trucks to come and pick them up. But they were mostly German soldiers. There was one American from our division, who had been killed the night before. So I went through those [bodies], looking for gloves. I found a glove.

And—excuse me . . .

I took [the gloves] from a young German soldier, and on his belt, he had “God is with us.” Gott mit uns. . . . [And] my thought was, “Jesus, I’ve been praying to God all my life.” And he was my enemy, but the same thing. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make any sense at all.

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