Raymond Stewart Watson – The Texas Liberators

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April 5, 2012

My college I went to, the first year was out at what they called the NTAC [North Texas Agricultural College] out at Arlington, which is now University of Texas–Arlington. But then I went on to A&M [Texas A&M University]. [I studied chemical engineering because], like most students, you know, you have some things you like to do, and [some things] you don’t. And I decided that I didn’t want to be on a drafting board for two or three years or four years, or whatever it was, after I got out of college. But I wanted engineering, so I picked an engineering course that I didn’t think I’d be on a drafting board for a while. Now, that might be a strange reason for picking that, but that was at the time. But I was glad I did it.

[As] far as our military experience there, I was with the corps [Texas A&M Corps of Cadets]. And the first two years at A&M you had to be in military, but the last two years you had to sign a contract, you know, to be an officer, if you wanted to go ahead and continue in ROTC. So I did sign that, and in my junior year they pulled us out and I went to OCS [Officer Candidate School], since I didn’t have my summer camp. And after OCS they sent me to Florida so we could practice landings and what have you. And this was about the time they were thinking about going into France, so they sent me over there and sent me to Southampton. And I was at Southampton, but I didn’t get called up for the land-ing. But I was there at Southampton when I did see many of the bodies coming back from—from what happened on the beach, from the D-Day invasion.

But then they sent me on—they sent me on up to—right—shortly after that. Well, I say, not shortly after D-Day, but it was in December of, I think it was ’44, I guess, that they sent me over to join the Eighty-Seventh Chemical Mortar Battalion. And we shot smoke screens for when we crossed—in river crossings and so forth. . . .

It was [toward the end of the Bulge], which was when the US Army and the others beginning to—you know, got things pulled together where they was pushing back. It was. And when I first went over— You know, a lot of times you think you’ll be getting instruction from various people, but not that. I mean, I had to go over, find my way over to somebody in Paris, and I got direction. And some unit I got—that I went to—they furnished a driver, and they said, “Well, it’s up in Liege,” or up in that part of the country, in Belgium. So we took out and I had a map, and just the driver and I. So we didn’t have a whole lot of instructions on how to get there, where they were, and along the way I had to ask. Well, I knew the outfit that I was supposed to go with, but I didn’t know where they were. So I had a little bit of a problem of finally finding out where they were. They were out in the woods, in the Ardennes Forest.

And that was—when I went in and reported to the colonel, that was quite an incident. He said, “I asked for a sergeant that I have, that has been through—since D-Day had been with me. And I asked for a battlefield commission for him. And they sent me you.” He says, “You’ll be out of here in two weeks, feetfirst.” So that was my reception into the unit. But I did join the unit. And the unit commander was a Tennessean, and I had to wrestle him. I’ll bet you we wrestled for two hours. I think after that they accepted me because it was a whole different story then. I became one of them.

Well, he said, “Let’s fight,” and so it was a wrestling match. Thank goodness he didn’t get the best of it. [We] had the whole blooming platoon [watching us]. It was something, because, you know, over here the officers were separated from the enlisted men and so forth, but over there we were all together. I mean, we ate together, we had the same where we slept and so forth. It was the officers right along with the men. So, I mean, it was a lot different than what you’d be if it was on the stateside. They accepted me. I mean, most of them had, of course, had been there during—on D-Day and all the way through. And I came in. Of course, they thought I was a greenhorn. And I guess I was, to a certain extent, but I had been around mortars. . . . But anyway, they did accept me.

Well, we were in the forest, Ardennes Forest, and they shelled us. They shelled us quite a bit at the time. And the first thing I knew that a foxhole wasn’t worth shooting at, because in the forest the artillery shell would hit the limbs and the stuff would fall right down, whether you was in a foxhole or not. But it—I think the—it was cold. We had more casualties from frozen feet than we had from people being shot. We had people being shot but, I mean, the most of our casualties were frozen feet. So you took care of your feet. And I learned that pretty quick. And I also learned not to go into a fire because, you know, you go in there and you get warmed up and so forth, and you come back and you’ve got to get used to cold all over again.

[We] weren’t the outfit that went into Buchenwald. They were on our right. And we heard that they were placed there where there were—there was a camp, and there were just a lot of dead people. And we didn’t—I didn’t—we didn’t know what the camp was at the time, but later on found out about it. But it was— They told me some stories about it, all the dead people and what have you, that I had to go over there because— Being a forward observer, we’d go up for two or three weeks, and then they’d be pulled back and let somebody go up again. And the time that I was back off the front line, I went over there to see what it was.

. . . [You] can see from some of the pictures we had that they stacked the bodies. They were just stacking up. They’d have them facing one direction on the first layer. The next layer, they’d turn them around forty-five degrees [sic; ninety degrees], and then they’d go up about five stacks high. And they were—I couldn’t count how many people that were just—just dead. And every one of them were skin and bones. It was awful. I mean, the odor was bad and—well, you just didn’t think a human could treat humans like that. But that was awful. I mean, anybody that saw that—it’s something you don’t ever want to see again. I mean, that many people just stacked up dead, and skin and bones to begin with.

[The camp had been liberated two or three days earlier.] Prob-ably two days. It was—I mean, it traveled fast. Communications traveled fast that way, and whenever that happened, well, the—it could have been three days, but I think it was about two days af-ter they took over. Now, all the German—that were—had some-thing to do with it, they had gone, but there were a few Germans around. But then I know that later on the—one or two of the generals had the whole town come in and just go over that whole thing. And they made some of them crawl over all the bodies. I don’t know whether that was revenge or what, but the whole thing was just something that you never want to see again.

There were still some [inmates wandering around]. There were still some that had not been killed. But there wasn’t too many, but there were still some, yes. In fact, also about that time was when we were beginning to see a lot of American prisoners that were released. And they came in, and they were hungry. And they—they were pitiful because they weren’t treated too well. I know that we had to watch our stuff because they’d steal it. But I can understand that.

I went through [Buchenwald]. I went through it. They had a lot of steel doors and stuff. They didn’t have the ovens like they had in some of the other camps, but they did kill. But of course, the barracks and all that sort of stuff, were just, you know, were really— They were awful. [They were preparing the bodies for burial.] . . . [T]hey had them stacked up, getting them ready for burial. But they didn’t have a chance to do it. And I wasn’t there when they brought the townspeople in, but I think that was an eye-opener for a lot of those Germans.

We didn’t [receive] direct encouragement to visit the camp. I mean, I didn’t see any direct—somebody from higher up come and do it, but we wanted to. Now, they might have encouraged some, I don’t know. But our outfit—I just wanted to go over there. I’d heard about it, and I didn’t believe it. But I did after I got there.

I didn’t think . . . human beings could treat other human be-ings that way. I really didn’t. But—well, it’s hard to say. I think a lot of people either said, “Well, you know, it didn’t happen,” or—even Germans, or what have you. But I think it was—I don’t know that just the basic people were much different than over here. I mean, a lot of them just didn’t pay any attention to really what was happening. And I think I see that over here from time to time. But I think they got a real eye-opener.

I didn’t want the army as a career, but if I needed to go back, I was ready to go back in Korea, and so forth, even though I had two daughters, what have you. But I felt that any situation like [the Holocaust], we need to do something.

The one thing I will say is, it did—we had some young people, and you know, some of them were—I don’t know, I guess they were hardened, but they would go—they see a ring or something on a dead body, they’d just cut the finger off and do that. I mean, some of that happened with our people. And that’s something I couldn’t take. I mean, anytime I found out about it, I tried to do something about it. But that trait, I guess, is in a lot of people, maybe all of us.

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