William E Danner Sr. – The Texas Liberators

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March 6, 2013

One of the first things I can basically remember was my grand-dad. I can remember seeing this white-haired old gentleman sitting back in his wicker rocker. And I would come in, and he would call me Southpaw or Tarheel. And that was my granddad. And he passed away in 1928. So I must have been about five years old at the time. I was born and raised within that area in central Indiana. We lived on farms at some times and lived in the city. I graduated from Elwood High School in 1941. Elwood was the home of [Republican presidential candidate] Wendell Willkie. And he caused me and a couple of others to get kicked out of history class a couple of times because the teacher we had lived in Willkie’s home. And he was a hot Democrat, and we was always razzing him about it.

My father worked several things. He was the hired hand. But we had a great life on the farm. And I learned to be a farmer. And I thought when I graduated from high school that that’s what I would be, because in high school, I majored in vocational agriculture. I took all the agriculture courses, but sometime in my senior year, I decided that was not it, that I wanted to go to college. I was raised as a Baptist and Franklin College is a Baptist chool, and that’s where I wanted to go to school. I was accepted, and I started there in the fall of 1942. And I did not get a semes-ter completed before I was drafted. I dropped out of school, was drafted, went into the army, and when I got out of the army, I went back to Franklin in January of ’46.

I came from a military background. My eighth-generation great-grandfather had come from Germany in 1725, sometime in about that time. They left Germany for religious oppression. He had four sons. Three of them were in the American Revolutionary War. The one that our family is derived from is referred to in the genealogy as the revolutionary soldier. My great-granddad was in the Civil War. He died later as a result from a wound that he received at the Battle of Chickamauga. My dad had a brother that died, that was killed a month before the armistice in Germany, in France in World War I. Of course, I was drafted. And I had two uncles that were draftees. Well, the one was called from the National Guard, and my dad’s youngest brother was a draftee in World War II. As far as I know, everybody just went back to what they were doing before.

I started college in the fall of ’42, Franklin College at Franklin, Indiana, and was drafted in February of ’43. The army had a specialized—Army Specialized Training Program. They were going to teach us to be graduate engineers in eighteen months. And I was there when the invasion took place, and they sent us all back to the army. I took my basic training at Camp Swift, Texas, in the artillery as a forward observer. I was a radio operator for forward artillery. After the ASTP, I was sent back to the army, and I went to the antitank company, 414th Infantry Regiment of the 104th Infantry Division.

I knew that I would be drafted. I would get a draft card. We all had to register. I knew that I would be called. Of course, it was 1943 before I was drafted. I left Indiana. Was drafted at Fort Ben-jamin Harrison—inducted at Fort Benjamin Harrison in India-napolis. We left there on, ironically, the fifth day of March, 1943. It was five degrees below zero. We had on our wool uniforms, our wool underwear, the whole works. Three days later, we land-ed at Camp Swift, Texas. It was eighty-five degrees. And there we were, still in winter clothes.

When we went in, we were given intelligence-type exams. We were going through all kinds. And I think that’s where they got the information. . . . I was given orders to go. Everybody—a lot of the people that went into ASTP—were out of the air force, United States Army Air Corps at the time. And they had— A lot of them were sergeants and the like, but everybody was reduced to a PFC [private first class]. And I went to Louisiana State University, and we lived in the rooms underneath the stadium. But when the invasion happened, we were all sent back to the army.

I was assigned to the 104th Infantry Division. They had just finished their maneuvers from Camp Adair, Oregon, down to Yuma, Arizona. We met in some place in the desert outside of Yuma, and we were there just a short period of time. We were in a tent camp out there. We loaded on board trains, and we went to Camp Carson, Colorado, where we finished our train-ing to smooth out the rough spots. And in August of 1944, we left Camp Carson for Europe. I was with a regimental antitank company. We had 57-millimeter antitank guns, and our crew was thoroughly trained. Everybody within the squad was trained for every position on that gun. I guess we were lucky. When we got to Europe, we were lucky enough to never encounter a Tiger tank.

We shipped out of New York. We landed in Cherbourg, France, on the seventh day of September, ninety-one days after the invasion. We were the first division to land directly on the continent from the States. We were not in France too long. We made a couple of different moves in there. I remember I voted in my first presidential election from a foxhole in France in 1944.

But then we moved up into Belgium and Holland. And one little town, we were outside, I think, a day or two before we actu-ally got into combat. We went into this Belgian town, and there was a movie. And we went, three or four of us went to the movie. When we came out of the movie, there was one little old lady there. Came up to us, and she invited us to her house for dinner. We gratefully accepted and asked her if there was anything that we could do. And she says, well, her husband was an invalid and they had trouble getting milk. So the next— That night, I got into the mess tent. I midnight-requisitioned a gallon can of milk, and we took it the next day. And there were about four Canadian sol-diers there also that she had invited, and they had taken Spam. And she had spaghetti and meatballs that was made with Spam, and it was good. And I don’t know how many pies that lady had baked, but she would bring you— After we finished the meal, she would bring a big piece of pie. And by the time you had fin-ished it, and you couldn’t say no, she had another piece sitting down there in front of you. But it was just, the people were so grateful at that time that they would almost do anything.

We approached the Nordhausen camp. I know somebody come back and said, “They’ve found a concentration camp. They’ve taken it.” And we went up to see what was going on. And there was bodies. A building there that had stairwells, and there were bodies stacked under the stairwell like cordwood. They were laying out in the streets. And the medics come up. They brought up a medical battalion because some of them were still alive. Some of them were so weak that just a weak, warm broth did them in. They were that far gone to start with. And the people of Nordhausen, they denied knowing it was going on. But they found out in a hurry. They came out and had to clear up all the bodies. All the male residents of the city of Nordhausen, they had them out picking up bodies. But we were there just a couple of days after that. Then we moved on, and that was—

But I still cannot realize why people deny the fact that it took place. I know it did. I took—I—I saw it. We had other places where we got into towns or places where they had this slave labor. They were— And the people we saw, some were Russian, Polish, all nationalities of people that were just slave laborers for the German forces. This was just a factory. And these people were just worked, worked to death.

I guess we’d heard of them, but we came upon this unexpectedly. They found it. And there were two of them, Nordhausen and Dora, the two concentration camps that the 104th was involved in liberating. And it’s a horrible picture to see. You just can’t realize the physical damage that was done. And I think, most of these people that died in these camps like Nordhausen, I think, they were all buried in a common grave. Where they would bring in a bulldozer and dig a grave, and the bodies were all placed in there with no—nothing done. Just, I guess, to cover them up, to get them out, and keep the disease and whatever, any kind of something spreading is just—sanitary reasons as much as anything.

In the battlefields, I think, bodies were cleared up. The GIs, both sides—and fact is, there’s times that they called truces over there so that wounded and the like could be cleared off of a battlefield. I know this had happened. But there, there was nothing. These people, I don’t know who stacked them. Whether they had the people that were the slave laborers to clean out the bodies and stack them up like that or lay them out in the streets, but they were laid like a parking lot, just rows and rows of bodies. But there was still a few that were alive.

They had an event over here at the synagogue and they had all the veterans that were there stand up. And we were sitting way in the back. And the other noises, I didn’t quite understand. Genie poked me in the ribs and says, “Stand up. Stand up.” So I did. And there at the end, the lady that was the emcee of the program, she says, “We are honored to have a liberator in our midst today.” And she started through the biography that they had on this me-morial that they had out at Fort Bliss. And Genie again was pok-ing me in the ribs and telling me to “Stand up. Stand up.” And I stood up for myself then. It was— People appreciate it. At least

to me, it showed their appreciation, the Jewish community itself, they appreciated it. And the ones that were really involved in the Holocaust, the two ladies here, they appreciated somebody that knew what happened, that could tell what happened.

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