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Part of Harry Snodgrass, Interview Transcript
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Harry Snodgrass
J17
48m 0s
Interviewer:
This is Mr. Harry Snodgrass from Mount Juliet, Tennessee. I’m Bob
Eisenstein. Harry is going to tell us about his experiences in World War II
in the concentration camp. So, Harry, you just go ahead and say what you
want.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, sure. I’ll just start when I went into camp.
Interviewer:
Sure.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, it was about this time of year in ’45, I can’t remember the dates. It
was in May though, because it was a few days after that that I think the
war ended. And I was driving this officer who was—I forget whether he
had made Captain—he was Lieutenant [Gant]. We didn’t know what it
was that we went into. I had never heard the word “concentration camp”
mentioned. We went in there and I have never seen anything and I had not
seen anything in my life like this, and I haven’t seen anything since then
that would compare to what I’ve seen. I’d seen hundreds of soldiers that
had died in battle but these people had been starved to death. I could pick
up a grown man in each hand and walk with him. He would have weighed
50, 60 lbs apiece. Some of the people were lying on the ground and you
didn’t know whether they were alive or not. You stop and just kneel down
and see whether they were breathing or not. But there was nothing that we
could do for those people. That’s why I’m here today. To tell what I’ve
seen, because there was nothing that day that I could do for those people. I
remember going in the barracks where they lived. It would make you think
of a potato bin where they had wooden slats, like maybe four or five of
them, slept on each one of these. I remember seeing these old buckets with
this green-looking pea soup in it, and some black bread. And this man who
was telling us these things—“That’s what we eat.” They must have not
gotten much of that even to eat or they wouldn’t have starved to death.
This one man, I don’t believe he was Jewish, it seemed like that he was
like Lithuanian or something like this. He must not have been there too
long before we got there because he was still able to walk around, pretty
good health. One of the things that I remember—of course, all of this is
faint now—but he took us in to a building and it would remind you of a,
say, a horse arena. They had a dirt floor and he said, “This is where they
kill people at night.” The ones that they, for some reason or other, they
wanted to kill. And so I asked him, I said, “Why aren’t the walls chewed
up?” I figured machine gun fire—if he’s going to kill several people
somehow. He said, “That’s not the way they done it.” He said, “They had
them kneel down and they come walk behind them with a pistol and shot
them at the back of the head.” If there was a gas chamber there, I don’t
know it. He didn’t take us to that. But it was—at the time I was 22 years
old. You know, a 22-year-old boy, he doesn’t think much. As you get older,
you think about things like this. And I have wondered as I got older—well,
before I say that, the American Army tried to feed those people, but their
stomachs had shrunk where they couldn’t eat. So they had to just start
them over like babies, I guess. I don’t know where they took them to from
there but they were put into trucks and take them out. As I’ve gotten
older—back then, I’d laugh at a Jewish joke. Since then, I’ve never
laughed at a Jewish joke. It’s not funny to me. I don’t think anybody who
had ever seen anything like that would laugh at it. As I’ve gotten older,
maybe other people have never thought about this and I couldn’t
specifically name the advances that have been made in medicine—Jewish
doctors and Jewish scientists, I know they had a lot to do with the diabetes
thing, diphtheria, and Dr. Salk, the cure for polio. I’ve often wondered,
since I’ve gotten older, maybe the cure for cancer was laying in there.
Maybe nobody else has ever thought about this like this but I’ve often
wondered about this. Those people, they’re only crime, if it was a crime,
they were born Jewish. Well, none of us have any choice of what we’d be
born. But that was their only crime. I could have been born Jewish. I could
have been born black. I could have been born anything. We don’t have any
choice for that. And that was their only—and I just—I was standing beside
a man that day at these bodies and he said, “I don’t believe there’s a God
in heaven.” Well, I had went to church all my life. He said, “If there was a
God in heaven,” he said, “he wouldn’t let human beings treat other human
beings this way.” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have any answer for
him. I just—I couldn’t say anything. I wished I could have but I was just
shocked just like he was. I didn’t say that, but I just—I don’t know how
long we were in the camp, it wasn’t long. Now, when we got there, there
was a—there weren’t any Germans there, they all run off. There were two
SS soldiers laying there. And they had been beaten and hung by the
strongest of the prisoners. And I have pictures. It doesn’t show all of
them. It shows one of them’s leg laying there, but they had pajama
bottoms on. You could tell they were SS because right here was the tattoo
of the two streaks of lightning of the SS. That was the only Germans there
in the camp. I really don’t know what else I can say.
Interviewer:
Yes. What was your first impression when you walked in to that camp?
What was the first thing that hit you right in the beginning?
Harry Snodgrass:
I said, “My god, what has happened here?” I just couldn’t imagine all of
these people stacked up here that had been starved to death. Today, if this
was to happen in Nashville, there’d be 25 to 30 people laying on the road
some place dead, why, the news would be out there and the cameras and
all those kinds of stuff and here were hundreds of people just been starved
to death.
Interviewer:
Did you see the ovens while you were there?
Harry Snodgrass:
Yes, sir. Yes. Part of it you could see of—some of the pictures I’ve got
shows the ovens where they roll the people in on those railroad irons. It
looked like railroad tracks that they put in there.
Interviewer:
Did the prisoners over there have the striped uniforms?
Harry Snodgrass:
Yes.
Interviewer:
The jackets and the pants with the bullseye on the back of the jacket?
Harry Snodgrass:
You know, I can’t remember the bullseye. But I remember the stripes of
the uniforms that they wore.
Interviewer:
Did they take you to the mass graves that they had dug?
Harry Snodgrass:
No.
Interviewer:
You didn’t see it?
Harry Snodgrass:
I didn’t see that. I’d just seen the bodies and then the pile of ashes where
they cleaned out the furnaces. Someone said that they use those to
fertilize the ground.
Interviewer:
Were there any railroad cars visible? Did you see those cattle cars they
haul the people in?
Harry Snodgrass:
No, sir. I don’t remember that. They had to be around there somewhere. Of
course, at that time, I wasn’t looking for things like you’re asking me. It’s
just—I don’t know how long I was there in the camp, maybe an hour. But
it’s just all of a sudden when we came to this thing, just drove off the road
and there it was.
Interviewer:
Did you say what camp it was?
Harry Snodgrass:
Buchenwald.
Interviewer:
It’s Buchenwald.
Harry Snodgrass:
It said, “Weimar, Germany.” We pronounced it like “Why-mar” instead of
“Veimar,” Germany. And that’s where I was when the war ended because
it’s just a few days after that the war ended. Then we went from there on
to the Elbe River and we stopped at the Elbe River so that the Russians
could go on to Berlin and I went to Berlin. The first American troops went
in on July the 4th which was the Second Armored Division. We went in the
next day on the 5th into Berlin, never seen such a torn-up city in my life. I
didn’t think I had ever lived to see the day that they take it and build it
back.
Interviewer:
Was that camp—was Buchenwald like in the center of a town?
Harry Snodgrass:
No, sir. It wasn’t in a town. It was on the outskirts of a town.
Interviewer:
It had big wall around it? Barbed wire, anything you remember?
Harry Snodgrass:
Oh, I think it had barbed wire and stuff like that. But it didn’t seem like it
was real high. It’s just been so long I never paid any attention going in
what it was until I just head in there and seen what it was, this—I didn’t
see any women or children there in that camp. Now, maybe they had a
separate place for them, I don’t know. But from this man that I talked to, I
guess they were political prisoners from other countries or what, you
know, along with the Jewish people there too. It’s just hard for me to think
that this could happen. But we know that it did happen and it could happen
in this country too.
Interviewer:
Has it had an effect on your thinking after you got back and could realize
what happened?
Harry Snodgrass:
Yes, sir. I guess I compared it to where the Japanese treated our American
prisoners from what all I’ve seen and heard of that. That that was about
the way they treated their prisoners like the Germans treated the Jews in
concentration camps—they starved them and beat them. But what has
always amazed me is that Germany has always been known as intelligent
people, cultural people, and how they could turn into this…They had to
have ordinary people in the army just like we had in our Army. But how
they got those people to believe in that they were doing something great
for Hitler, for Germany by killing all the Jewish people, that’s what scares
me. When you read the things that happened today where there were 20
or 30. To think what could happen if you have a size of a place like
Nashville, if you had 3,000 or 4,000 people like that, how that they can
take control and it’s all through fear. That’s what scares me.
Interviewer:
Harry, how did you happen to go to the camp? Were you directed to go
there or you just happened on it?
Harry Snodgrass:
We just happened on it. We were going to—I can’t remember, we were
going to stay or we did stay in this German Army Barracks there. But I
don’t remember I was driving this officer, this Lt. [Gant], and I don’t
remember wether he said, “Turn in here” or “Wait a minute, what’s this?”
or what. We just drove in. But undoubtedly, it couldn’t have been long,
very long since the liberation had taken place, because the bodies were
still there. The prisoners were still there, all those things.
Interviewer:
That’s left a lasting impression on you, is that right?
Harry Snodgrass:
Oh, yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, I guess I could see why some people might say
that this didn’t happen, because it was so horrible. No one would want to
believe that this could happen. I guess maybe if I hadn’t seen it with my
own eyes, I might doubt it if somebody had told me that this happened.
Because I have told people about this just talking. And they said, “Well, I
don’t see how you could stand it.” I thought, “My goodness, all I was
doing was standing there looking at these people. I hadn’t gone through
what these people had gone through—being starved to death. It would
have been much more humane if the Germans had lined them up and shot
them, but why they wanted to starve them to death is beyond me.” A
person who’s starving can’t work and produce no work or anything for
you.” It’s just didn’t make any sense. I had never thought about this until
maybe a year or two ago. I read this article. I either read or seen it or
something but, anyway, what that story was about was that the Jewish
people financed their own extermination. The German Army hadn’t
appropriated any money to build these camps. To do all these things, it
took money. It was financed by the property and the money that they took
from the Jewish people. I had never even thought about this, had never
entered my mind. But they financed their own executions. Of course, it
wasn’t by choice. It’s scary to think as many people as living today that
are saying this didn’t even happen. When my generation is gone, and
yours, there won’t be any more eyewitnesses to this. I just—I felt like I
had to do this since that day I couldn’t do nothing for those people. At
least I can do this much. Maybe it might do some good. I’d feel like a
coward if I hadn’t come over here and done this; however, it’s not
pleasant.
[AUDIO GAP]
…equipment stockpiling you’re [unintelligible 0:18:43] as it was in
England, the invasion.
Interviewer:
It was camouflaged though, wasn’t it?
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, some of it was. Some of it wasn’t. The thing that they had to
camouflage most was the bombs along the roadsides and the ditches where
there were trees around. They had out in the open artillery guns, tanks,
hive tracks, jeeps, and there was food as far as the eye could see. I don’t
know why they couldn’t—the Germans wouldn’t have seen it. I guess
there’s so much they couldn’t camouflage them.
Interviewer:
Yes, I guess so. I know for Anzio, when we were training with Anzio with
the Navy, they had all that equipment. It wasn’t camouflaged. It was just
sitting there. It’s amazing. All the secrecy and then the…
Harry Snodgrass:
Uh-huh.
Male:
Okay, Mr. Snodgrass, what you can do is just kind of—well, I’m shooting
a real tight picture of that so you don’t have to worry about it. Tell us what
this picture is of.
Harry Snodgrass:
This is a picture of the ashes of the—from the bones as they came out of
the furnaces. We were told they take from here and put it out on the land,
fertilize the land.
Interviewer:
How many did you—you saw the furnaces, how many did you see there?
Harry Snodgrass:
If I can remember, it seemed like there were…I’m guessing maybe five or
six but, of course, we just took picture of one there. It showed the wheels
and the—to where they go in there.
Male:
Did you see—was this the only pile that you saw? Were there a lot—
Harry Snodgrass:
Yes. You know, that was the only pile I’ve actually, that I’ve seen.
Male:
Since there’s not really anything in that picture to give it much scale, how
tall would you say that was?
Harry Snodgrass:
Oh, it was maybe four or five feet high. A pickup truck could have
probably hauled what was there.
Male:
Could you pick out anything that you can identify in that—
Harry Snodgrass:
No. It was just small pieces of…
[AUDIO GAP]
Interviewer:
Stated like that, it makes you think.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, actually, you were so helpless that day. I’d have been glad to give
them some money. I’d have been glad to give them a K ration but they
couldn’t eat and there was—oh, I hated the Germans so bad then that day.
I hated them so bad that the next day, I believe it was. I was by myself in
this jeep, for what reason, I don’t know, but this lieutenant came out of this
building where they were cleaning it up for the Americans to use. He had
this German woman with him and he wanted to know if I would take her
to the hospital. I said, “Sir, if you will go with me, I will take her.” I
wasn’t going to do it on my own. He said, “All right.” He got her in the
jeep and I drove as slow as I could, hoping that she would die before I got
her to the hospital. That’s how I hated. I said, “If you die, you can never
have another German.” Now we took her to the American hospital and
they wouldn’t take her. So we had to take her to a German hospital. I don’t
know how far I drove. It was in the city or somewhere. We unloaded her
and laid her on the ground and said, “There she is,” and drove off. Now I
couldn’t do that today at all. But I could then after seeing what they had
done to those poor people in the concentration camp.
Male:
Tell me about this picture.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, this picture is inside of the barracks where they lived. You see some
of the people here and there are some of them are still laying. They had—I
believe it was two tiers of them. And they’re what you would call today as
like a potato bin. It was like maybe four-by-eight or six-by-eight with
planks in it and they had a blanket and there was a little partition like
maybe like this between them and there’s just rows and rows and that’s
where they slept.
Male:
This building wasn’t much shelter, was it?
Harry Snodgrass:
No. I’m sure it was cold in there but if you’re starving somebody you
don’t care if they’re cold.
Interviewer:
And there were no curtains or anything for privacy. It’s just…
Harry Snodgrass:
I didn’t see any if there were.
Male:
It’s pretty much void of human comfort.
Harry Snodgrass:
Oh, yes. There’s nothing like that. I’d say if you’re starving somebody to
death, you don’t care whether they’re cold or hot or comfortable or what
not.
Interviewer:
Where there any bathroom facilities in that building?
Harry Snodgrass:
I don’t remember seeing them. There might have been a bathroom outside
there that I didn’t see. I really don’t know. I hate to say something if I’m
not sure of it. But it didn’t make you feel good, I remember that. But
coming home, we came home after the war is over from Le Havre, France
on a Victory ship with 1,500 people on it. It took us 13 days.
Interviewer:
What year did you come back?
Harry Snodgrass:
’45.
Interviewer:
’45?
Harry Snodgrass:
See, I went on to Berlin. I left Berlin in October—about probably October.
I was discharged in November. It took 13 days to come back.
Male:
Tell me about this picture some.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, this picture was just a—I don’t know why that they were lying here
because, next to this building here, because it wasn’t close to the furnaces.
There were some other bodies it shows that were close to the furnaces. I
don’t know why—you’d think that they would stack them close to the
furnaces but they didn’t. But I couldn’t tell—I didn’t see any of these
people here that looked like they had been shot. That they would just die
from starvation.
Interviewer:
What kind of clothes did they have on?
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, just a few what looked like tattered clothes. Part of them didn’t have
any clothes on. Here’s a—I’m not sure about this scene, this right here. I
think maybe it was shown on another picture. It could be of the German
soldiers that were laying there. It looked like they had pajama bottoms on.
But there here, they’re just people who’d been starved to death just taking
a look at them.
Interviewer:
Was there any odor connected with that?
Harry Snodgrass:
Not much. There was some but not as bad as you might think. I wondered
about that. That maybe they didn’t have enough flesh on them to start to
degenerate.
Interviewer:
Right.
Harry Snodgrass:
It wasn’t hot. It was still cool then, in May of the…
Interviewer:
How long do you think those people have been dead?
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, I would guess maybe a couple of days. I don’t know how fast that
they put them in the furnaces after they died. They might have been dead
longer than that. I really don’t know.
Interviewer:
Was there any lime or anything thrown on them to—put on them?
Harry Snodgrass:
No. I didn’t see any. I was in a temporary cemetery at one time where they
buried American soldiers and they had lime scattered on the ground to
keep them from stinking.
Male:
Tell me about this picture.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, this one is the one of the furnaces. This big hinge here, that’s the
door that closes on this with the—they had like a rail coming out here and
it was on—really on top of these wheels here. They put the bodies on then
and just push them into the furnaces here. That’s the bones still in this
furnace here where they had burned out. Like I said, I don’t remember
how many furnaces were there. I’m sure it was more than this one.
Interviewer:
Did they put more than one body in it at a time?
Harry Snodgrass:
I really don’t know. Because, like I said, I was standing here. I just stand
and see that pile of bones there.
Interviewer:
You sure had a pretty violent reaction to that one, didn’t you?
Harry Snodgrass:
Yes. But sometimes I don’t know which made me feel the worse seeing
those bodies just lying there or the bones. It’s just hard to explain. It’s hard
to explain.
Interviewer:
How about this one?
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, this was a—of course, a different pile of bodies. Right here, is a
German SS soldier laying here. You’d see a—he had on pajama bottoms.
He didn’t have any top on. And there was another one laying right beside
of him that didn’t get into the picture. But there were two of them there
and, of course, you could see that they still had plenty of flesh on this.
Certainly, they weren’t prisoners. But what identified them as SS troops
were, in the middle of their chest, there’s tattooed two streaks of lightning
and each one of them had that. The strongest of the prisoners had killed
them I guess the day the Americans had got there. Some of those
prisoners, of course, hadn’t been there long. They were still strong. But
they had been beat in the face. They had been hung. I didn’t see where
they’d hung them from but the press of the rope was still around their
neck. That’s the only two Germans that were in that camp, those two SS.
Interviewer:
Were those bodies as badly decomposed as the other pile of bodies you
saw?
Harry Snodgrass:
No, sir.
Interviewer:
Were they clothed? Would they had uniforms?
Harry Snodgrass:
No, sir. They had on pajama bottoms. That’s all.
Interviewer:
No, I mean the pile at the…
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, most of these had some clothes on. They hadn’t took the clothes off
of them yet I reckon. Some of them looked like they didn’t have any
clothes on, you can see here. But, of course, these two here, it must have
happened at night or early morning or something because they were
sleeping in just pajama bottoms.
Interviewer:
In that building in the background, is that one of the crematoriums or is it
just the…?
Harry Snodgrass:
You know, I’m not sure what that building is. You just weren’t paying any
attention to what was what.
Male:
I’m sure it was difficult to take it all in.
Harry Snodgrass:
It was. It really was. When you’re 22 years old, you just don’t—I didn’t
know anyone would ever—somebody ask me about this. I didn’t even
know about the pictures that this lieutenant had made until about 15 years
ago. When I was visiting one of them he—I’m glad I did see it but not that
I got any joy out of it. At least, people can’t tell me it didn’t happen. That’s
what I think about.
Male:
Tell me about this picture.
Harry Snodgrass:
Well, there was—now these people here, I don’t think hardly any of them
had any clothes on. Why it made the difference, maybe they had taken
their clothes off of them and all, but they were just skeletons, just skin and
bones. You see this person, this man, lying on top here. Now he was a
pretty tall person. You could tell by the picture. But they just—it looked
like they’re just throwed up there. Just like it was cordwood you were
stacking or—didn’t care whether it was neatly stacked or not, it’s just what
it looked like whoever throwed them up there in it.
Interviewer:
Now was that near the crematorium?
Harry Snodgrass:
I believe it was. Maybe they took the clothes off of them before they put
them in there so they wouldn’t burn up the clothes, you could use the
clothes again. Because I was—I never seen this with my own eye but I
heard they certainly took the gold teeth if they had it. They didn’t lose
that. They sold—even got money for it, I guess, have to finance this thing.
Interviewer:
And there was no odor with this pile?
Harry Snodgrass:
I can’t remember it. But I—it wasn’t like being around a cemetery where
American soldiers were being buried in August and some of them had
been laying there for a week. There was more odor there than there was
there. Because these soldiers, they weren’t starved to death. That’s the
only explanation I can think of in my mind, that there wasn’t this much fat
to degenerate. I could be way off on that thinking too.
[AUDIO GAP]
Interviewer:
Good-looking fella there.
Harry Snodgrass:
I had hair back then too. [Laughter] I had a full head of hair when I went
into service. When I came out and somebody said, “Well, maybe it’s
because you wore your steel helmet a lot.” Well, I did wear it for about
two years but other people wore steel helmets and they didn’t lose their
hair. I guess I would have lost my hair whether I’d ever been in the service
or not. I had a kid brother who was bald-headed like me. He was in the
Seabees. But my daddy had hair. So I guess it’s just a hereditary-thing I
guess. You know, you’re used to wearing that helmet, you felt naked
without it on, didn’t you? You sure you did.
Interviewer:
How old were you in that picture here?
Harry Snodgrass:
Let’s see, I was 23. Discharged, I was 23, been in three years. Told them
about anti-aircraft, there’s a fellow that lives out in Mt. Juliet…
[AUDIO GAP]
…last November. They invite veterans over there and the National Guard
puts on this thing. They feed you hotdogs, hamburgers, and drinks. Invite
you to stay for a football game. But before the football game starts, after
you eat and all, you march out on the field in units—Army, Navy, Air
Force, Marines. This time, there were two Medal of Honor winners there. I
have never in my life, until then, had never seen a man wearing the Medal
of Honor. But there were two men there. One of them was from
Clarksville, Paul Huff. And he had won the Medal of Honor in Italy. He
was with 82nd Airborne. This other fellow had won the Medal of Honor.
He was with an Infantry Regiment. He also had been in Italy. But he was
on a wheelchair and I can’t recall his name but he was from Chattanooga.
He wasn’t in a wheelchair because of war. He said that he had been up
walking around running a pretty good-sized company. Well, he mentioned
3-million-dollar-a-year business until a couple of years ago. Then he came
down with this multiple sclerosis.
Interviewer:
Is there anything, Harry, that you want to say any more about your
experiences that you want to have recorded?
Harry Snodgrass:
No, sir. Well, maybe one thing. That I think people need to judge people
on what kind of a person they are instead of what kind of nationality they
are. We had no choice what we’ll be born. But we do have a choice of
what kind of person we’ll be. That’s what I gather from all of this.
Interviewer:
That’s quite message to leave with people.
Male:
How do you feel about Germany getting back together? Does that worry
you?
Harry Snodgrass:
I have mixed feelings about that. There’s not many things that you
remember when you’re young. But in 1939, there was a magazine
published in this country. The name was Liberty Magazine. I guess that’s
when the Germans had started in to Poland. There was an article in there
and it said that wherever a German put his foot that was German soil to
him. Now, why have I remembered that all this time? That’s what it said.
Interviewer:
Have you been back there since the war? Have you gone back?
Harry Snodgrass:
In ’84, I went back for the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy invasion. We
were in London two days, and then we went down toward the coast and
stopped at Tidworth. That’s where this 29th Infantry Division had trained,
at Tidworth, England. They fed us lunch, the nicest thing to us. It wasn’t
like you’d think of Army food. It was like something you’d eat at Hyatt
Regency, something like that. I asked this fellow over there, a driver, he
was British. His name is Bryant, I forgot his last name. I said, “Bryant,” I
said, “I bet these boys resented us stopping here on Saturday.” I said,
“They would have been at home for the weekend, what not.” And he said,
“Oh, no, Harry, that’s not the way they felt about it.” He said, “They felt
like it was an honor to get to fix lunch for the American soldiers that had
been here in World War Two.” They really impressed me, those people
did.
Interviewer:
Would you like to say [audio gap] landing on Omaha Beach?
Harry Snodgrass:
Things had calmed down whenever I got there. They were still firing and
all this but I didn’t go in D-Day. That’s the boys that deserve all the credit.
Because I go to a reunion each year in Salem, Virginia with the 29th
Infantry Division. They made me an Honorary Member of Company D,
116th Regiment. Those boys went in D-Day. The 116th bore the brunt of it.
I think they lost about 800, killed and wounded, of that regiment. There,
near Salem, about 20-25 miles away, there’s a town named—what is the
name of that little town…but there were 23 boys from that one little town
killed at Omaha Beach that morning. And two of them were brothers, the
[Hopback] brothers, and their sister comes to this reunion. I read different
accounts of it. There’s one boy, I call him a “boy,” a few years ago, he was
the youngest man there at the reunion. He was 60. And he’s a Catholic
priest in Ohio. He comes to this—David Silva is his name—and I read
about him in this book, The Longest Day, that Cornelius Ryan wrote. And
I never asked him did he make a vow that that’s what he was going to do. I
just wondered if he did but I never did ask him. But he told in this book
that when he stepped off the landing craft that they killed the men on both
sides of him. He fell in to the water and his rifle stuck in the sand and he
got up and he started running toward the hill. He could see the machine
guns firing at him down there. He couldn’t shoot back because he knew he
had sand in the barrel of that rifle. He told that when he got over to the top
of the hill, that his pack had been shot off of him. There are holes in his
canteen. He’d been hit twice in the back and he didn’t know it. I think he
was 18 years old. Cornelius Ryan wrote that, of course, that book, The
Longest Day, whether you’ve seen it or not.
Interviewer:
Did you—you mentioned Ernie Pyle, were you with him?
Harry Snodgrass:
On the ship, on the LST 392. He came on it June the 4th and then they told
us that night of June the 5th, because the next morning was the invasion,
we’d already been in the marshaling areas and everything, but they didn’t
tell us. The only thing they told us in the marshaling area were, they said,
“You people have been chosen for part of the Task Force for the invasion
of the continent.” They fed us fresh eggs for breakfast and chicken and
steak for dinner and supper. But we were on this LST for a couple of days
and then Ernie Pyle got on that. Then we figured, “Well, this is it,” you
know. But after when we got over there, we drove on this off the LST on
this Rhino, the Seabees were operating it. It was just like a flat barge with
an engine on each side in the back pushing us toward the beach. This
buddy of mine, Westcott, he mentioned this boy’s name in this book that
Ernie wrote, “Brave Men,” he mentions Westcott, that he was his driver.
And they drove off in the water and I followed them off in this Weasel that
I was driving. So, of course, we talked to him. He’s the nicest fellow in the
world. He couldn’t praise the infantry too much. I admire him for that. He
said, “The infantry lives like an animal, fights like animal, and dies like an
animal.” I’ll bet that’s about as good a description of the things that I’ve—
I’ve done a lot of reading about the war since I retired from work. That’s
where they lived in Italy and there were mountains and the men had tried
to carry those supplies up in those mountains because the mules couldn’t
even carry you. It was too slippery and all for the mules so American
soldiers had done it. That’s rough. Ernie said that he was writing—that he
would write and write, so that people here would know what their sons
and husbands were doing and were going through. He also told them, he
said, “The boys that left your hometown are not the same boys that left.”
He said, “They became hardened killers.” Of course, that’s the aim of
what the Army wants you to be. The war will get over as quick as you kill
all the enemy. It’s a sad thing, but that’s the reason we have freedom in
this country today. It didn’t come cheap. But a lot of people think that it
just came along and happen. I don’t believe it. It always seemed like
there’s always somebody somewhere that wants to take your freedom
away from you. If you’re not willing and able to fight for it, they’ll take it.
Sad fact.
Interviewer:
I think that’ll do it.