Interview of William Pepe
Transcript Number 091

OCTOBER 10, 2001

Good afternoon. I'm Paul Zarbock. We're at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Library. Today is the 10th of October in the year 2001. We're interviewing this afternoon William "Bill" George Pepe. We've chatted briefly before this video tape has started and I've asked him to tell us how did he get into the military initially and what happened after that and asked him to tell us a story. Take it away.

PEPE: All right. I entered service in October of 1942, not because I was overly patriotic. I guess we all felt some sort of patriotism at the time, but the Selective Service was breathing down my back and it was either joining the service and selecting my own branch of the service or having the Selective Service choose where I would serve. 

I chose the Corps of Engineers because this was my background. I was an engineering students at the time and I thought this is where I would probably fit in best in the Army and I was, well I was envisioning myself sitting somewhere in a comfortable, air-conditioned office deep in Fort Belvoir somewhere making maps or whatever. Seemed like a good place to sweat out the war.

However after basic training, I applied for and was accepted in the Officers' Candidate School in the Engineering School at Fort Belvoir.

INTERVIEWER: And this was what year?

PEPE: Let's see now, that was in 1943, early in '43. After getting my commission, they sent us to Omaha, Nebraska, to learn an automotive maintenance course. I don't know why, but I didn't think this was...this was the business of the Ordnance Department, not the engineers, but it was a welcome way to spend three months away from military procedure.

Upon completion, they sent me down to Georgia with the 297 Combat Engineer Battalion where I took maneuver training in Georgia and Tennessee where I contacted dysentery. That was my introduction into the Army really. 

INTERVIEWER: Were you hospitalized?

PEPE: Oh yes. As a matter of fact, I was running in a rock quarry and my temperature hit 106 degrees and I collapsed and I woke up in a hospital and at that time I didn't really understand what the problem was, but later I learned I suffered from dysentery. When you have dysentery, you know you have dysentery because I mean there is no way you can control bowel movements. You've got to be sitting right next to the john. 

INTERVIEWER: Where were you in the hospital?

PEPE: In Murphysboro, Tennessee. It was an Army hospital. Well we got through that all right. Then I was sent to a replacement depot in New York, no Pennsylvania, Camp Shenango. I got my orders there to report to the 5th Engineers Special Brigade. Now this was the last place in the world I wanted to be after hell because we were reading the casualty reports coming out of North Africa at the time and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Engineers Special Brigades assisted the infantry in landing on the beaches there and their casualty rates were running up as high as 80%.

When I saw I was being assigned to the 5th Engineers Special Brigade, I said "Oh boy, there goes my tail". From that point on, I really never expected to survive the war. Shipped over to England, great convoy. The flag ship of the convoy was a coastal steamer, the Santa Sacia (?) that used to deliver bananas from Central America to eastern ports. This was the flagship of the convoy.

The convoy consisted mainly of a lot of oil tankers with aircraft strapped to the decks. Our escorts were six Canadian destroyer escorts. It took us 11 days to get across the North Atlantic without serious incident. The escorts did chase down a few submarines along the way, but they never posed a threat to us. We arrived at Liverpool, England.

INTERVIEWER: Give us a date on that. Do you remember?

PEPE: I'm not...it was in November, I can't give you specific dates, it was November of '43. We arrived about 2:00 in the afternoon and we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast because they kept telling us aboard ship that we will be fed when we get ashore so we waited around for about four hours before we got our delivery trucks showed up and we still hadn't eaten. They told us don't worry, we're going to a great base, when we get there, we'll have steak dinners for everybody.

At this point, we're all salivating you know. So we figured it was good enough to wait for. So we got aboard the trucks and they drove us overland somewhere near Birmingham, England and we got to the mess hall at about 1:30 in the morning and we got into the mess hall. The most God awfulest stench you ever smelled in your life. 

What in the hell is that? Someone said that was lamb stew. Well where in the hell were the steaks we were supposed to get? Who ever promised you steaks? Well they told us aboard ship. They tell everybody that. At this point I developed an aversion to lamb and I've never ever eaten...I shouldn't say that, I did one time. 

INTERVIEWER: Were these British cooks or American cooks?

PEPE: It was a British base. Americans don't feed their troops lamb. I mean we're a beef eating country. The British are the lamb people. So well we got through that all right. Then I ultimately arrived at the 5th Engineers Special Brigade which was just forming at that time and I was assigned to the headquarters company. Of course, being the lowest ranking 2nd lieutenant in the brigade headquarters, I was assigned every lousy job that no one ever wanted and in the Army, you had this right. If you had a job you didn't like, you could assign it to someone of lower rank. I wound up with something like 26 additions to my normal duties, one of which was courier to London which I didn't mind at all because it got me out of the base and into London quite frequently. That's another story, how I almost lost the plans to the invasion. I don't know if you even want to talk about that.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, love to hear it.

PEPE: Well I used to make this run to London quite frequently and I generally did it by myself. That's something else too. On a Harley Davidson motorcycle, I didn't know how to ride a Harley. When I was told I was going to be a courier, I said okay, what's my mode of transportation. They brought me out to the motor pool and introduced me to this Harley. I said I don't ride a Harley. I've never been on a motorcycle. Then you've got six hours to learn. So I went to the motor pool sergeant and after many false starts, I finally got the hang of it, you know. It wasn't too bad, it was a good way to travel.

But I used to travel mostly by myself because just for communication between our headquarters and SHAEF Headquarters in London. SHAEF was the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces. This one time they asked me to go to London and they assigned a sergeant to come with me. I said we're not both getting on that motorcycle. Oh no, we'll give you a jeep. I should have known something was up because they issued us side arms with ammunition. Generally they issue side arms without ammunition. I don't know why, but I thought nothing of it.

I went over to headquarters, picked up this large package and the outer wrapper said "confidential" which doesn't mean anything because every piece of Army correspondence is rated, confidential being the lowest form of classification up until Top Secret which was the highest classification. Well I took the package, signed for it and sergeant and I had some time on our hands so we went over to the Albert Hall and we watched the performance of Blythe Spirit.

So we had this package and I'm thinking well and brought it over to the hat check girl and asked her to check the package for me. Okay. After the show was over, we went to reclaim our package and they couldn't find it. They looked around, looked around and it had fallen on the floor and was behind somebody's boots and the weather was bad and the package was all wet so I picked it up, retrieved it and brought it back to headquarters.

I delivered it to the colonel in charge and he said, "Do you know what you just brought here". I said "No, what?" He said "You have in your hands the complete plans of the allied invasion of Normandy." You're kidding (laughter). Of course I didn't tell him I had checked this package. But after I got through there, I went out and puked all over his petunias (laughter). 

Anyhow, the 5th Engineers Special Brigades are comprised primarily of engineering units. Our job was to support the 1st division in the invasion of Normandy and when I say support, I mean we were to bring them to shore and then get them ashore. Now how we got them ashore, well, we had a naval beach battalion assigned to us and their job was to neutralize any underwater demolitions, mines, whatever, booby traps and also to guide the landing crafts to particular areas of the beach.

The beach was broken up in several different areas. Different sectors. According to your orders, such and such a unit was supposed to land on a beach, but it never did quite go that way. There was so much confusion. Well you had beach battalion, beach masters, whose job it was to stand out there in the midst of enemy fire and direct these small boats to where they were supposed to be. For the most part, you couldn't find one. I don't blame them cause I mean who wants to stand out there subjecting himself to not only small arms fire but artillery fire. So it was mostly a catch as catch can thing. 

We landed where we could and for the most part, the naval people who were operating the landing craft selected that part of the beach that was under the least fire and we had a great concentration of troops in that area, very little in others. There was no cohesive chain of command really because the units were scattered so largely over 7200 yards of beach. I'm at a blank right now.

People ask me, you know, what happened on the beach and for the most part, I can't remember what happened on the beach. God has allowed me to immediately forget many of the sorry sights, but the strange thing is I went back to the 50th reunion, not 50th reunion but the 50th anniversary of D-Day back in France and you meet people there who were on the beach at the time and somebody would say something and immediately it would spark a memory in your mind. You can relate to that particular incident, but for the most part, I don't have a coherent recollection of what happened on that beach other than the fact I survived. We got off the beach.

I had some bad feelings about the Air Force on D-Day. We were told that, to understand what happened, you have to know the nature of the beach. The beach itself, there was nowhere on the beach that you could use, no natural area on the beach that you could use for protection. It was a wide open beach. The Air Force had promised us 100 tons of bombs for every 500 square yards of beach and that was not only to neutralize whatever was on the beach, but to also provide us some measure of cover from small arms fire. You know, you could at least try to find a crater and jump into that.

We got on the beach and the only craters we found were small, very shallow depressions of artillery fire from destroyers. Of course, before the invasion the larger ships were standing offshore heaving this humongous shells into beach fortifications. But when the invasion started, they had to lift that barrage because those large cannons did not have the degree of accuracy to provide us reasonable coverage.

Well what happened was the destroyers were running parallel to the beach, so close you'd swear their keels were scraping the bottom, and they were pouring in artillery fire in support of the landing troops, but they were very shallow there. They didn't offer much protection. We had to scramble to not only keep ourselves from drowning because the tide was beginning to come in now also, but we had to provide ourselves some basic means of protection.

Also the Air Force did a terrible job with the airborne troops. They scattered them all over the countryside. I mean it took them a day and a half probably to organize to a point where they were any kind of a valid fighting force. Generally the beach was won by green troops. I said there was no cohesive chain of command because we were scattered so. Part of one group would be on this part of the beach and another of the same group would be 1000 yards somewhere else. It was just small groups of people almost fighting on their own.

Of course, there were incredible acts of bravery that occurred on that beach that day, but they in themselves, did not win the beach. It was, for the most part, sergeants leading small groups. Most of your officers had been killed. And this was something else too, I mean it was stupid, absolutely stupid. To identify commissioned and noncommissioned people on the beach, noncommissioned officers had a white horizontal band on the back of their helmet. Commissioned officers had a white vertical band on the back of their helmets. Didn't take the Germans long to know who was in command.

You know, you became a perfect target. Also the British, oh God help the British. We had a tank battalion was supposed to land on D-Day and the British came up with this great flotation device that would assist the tanks. You know, they had to leave the tanks off somewhere way offshore and then they would make their way to shore. You know, in theory it sounded like a good idea, but in practical use. They made this flotation device out of inflatable material. The Germans stood up there on the beach, up in the cliffs, with small arms fire. You can take out a tank with small arms fire.

Out of 26 tanks that were launched, one made it ashore. That was our harbor on the beach on that day. So much went wrong, so much went wrong on that beach, it's incredible that we even survived let alone won the beach. I mean these are the things I remember mostly. You can read stories by Steven Ambrose, whom I don't think an awful lot of because I don't think he got the true picture from the people who really made history that day. 

So where did we go from there? Well we fought in the Battle of Saint Lo. There again the Air Force did a wonderful job. We had put smoke markers down to indicate where the allied troops were in relation to the Germans. The smoke marker was supposed to, in the Air Force, let them know what was a safe area and what, you know, where they shouldn't bomb and where they should bomb. Wouldn't you know that they bombed on the wrong side of the smoke (laughter). 

So I didn't have much use for the Air Force. Even the 8th Air Force that did daylight bombing, that was something that did not need to be done, but it was done only to prove to the world that the U.S. 8th Air Force was as good as the RAF. As a result, in daylight bombing, we lost far, far more people and equipment than was justified. The results of our precision bombing were laughable. Talking about Schweinfurt where they manufactured ball bearings, we must of bombed that plant, I don't know how many times, we still missed it -- so-called precision bombing. And I can't hardly blame the people flying those planes because all they wanted to do was drop those bombs and get the hell out of there. I just didn't think much of the overall command.

INTERVIEWER: Speaking of command, are you still a second lieutenant or were you promoted?

PEPE: No, I wasn't promoted until after V-E Day. I became a first lieutenant.

INTERVIEWER: How many men under your command?

PEPE: I was a platoon leader of about 75 to 80 men.

INTERVIEWER: And what specifically were you assigned to do?

PEPE: Hold the flank on the, the left flank that was adjacent to the British and there was something else too. I mean the British were supposed to maintain liaison with us, but they didn't. They had a relatively easy time coming ashore whereas we, that particular stretch of Omaha Beach, we had a fairly good idea of what we faced, what was defending the beach area. Our aerial reconnaissance of the beach stopped two weeks before D-Day. Well they did that so that we wouldn't' compromise the landing area. They didn't want any emphasis, we were trying to lead the Germans away from the beach.

In that two week period, the Germans moved in two divisions on anti-invasion maneuvers so we were faced with two additional divisions that we had no idea were there. Here again the French resistance, which was laughable also, the only thing they were resisting were each other. There was so much internal fighting in the French resistance that they forgot who the enemy was. They were supposed to have kept us informed of what was happening at our beach. Never got a word.

Anyhow, my specific job was maintaining the flank and we could hardly do that because the British just kept going, and there was a tremendous gap between the British and the American forces. Had the Germans found it and exploited it, that would have been another story. Also had the two divisions that moved in on the beach, had they been combat veterans, we never would have won that beach. But it so happened that they were like home forces, old men, young boys, no combat experience. But still in all, you've got somebody up there pointing a rifle at you and shooting at you, they become a formidable enemy.

INTERVIEWER: Describe the geography of the beach.

PEPE: The geography was about, oh I would say about 100 yards of sand and then from, what did they call it, from that point on, they weren't pebbles, they were like stones about this size, round, smooth stones. There was another maybe 50-60 yards of this stone area. Beyond that was a steep embankment. At certain areas, there were like cut-outs that we were going to use as beach exits, but the Germans had heavily fortified that. We had to find other means of getting off the beach.

We had one bulldozer operator who had two bulldozers shot out from underneath him. The man was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor. I don't know if he ever got it. When I got out of the hospital, I didn't go back to my old outfit because my old outfit had been disbanded. The 5th Engineers Special Brigade, we had a specific mission. The mission was to last 14 days. Beyond that point, we would cease as an entity. Everything within that group would be sent elsewhere.

Our job was to get them on the beach and off the beach. After that job was done, we had no further purpose. However that huge storm that hit the beach about two weeks after D-Day sort of extended our tenure on the beach to about three months. It got to the point, a lot of people don't know this, but it got to the point where we were running out of supplies because we had built what they called a "mulberry" which was a floating dock to which the ships could tie up and unload and then from that point on, across the causeway they would bring these supplies ashore.

But the mulberry was destroyed and as a result, we were forced back to the initial means of getting supplies which was through LST's and smaller landing craft. But we were rapidly running out of supplies. We got to the point where we were issuing German ammunition, captured German fuel and captured German foodstuffs because we didn't have any. If the storm hadn't broken when it did, we could have been in very serious trouble. 

After Saint Lo, I was assigned to an engineering general service regiment which do a lot of engineering work like repairing runways. We did a lot of that, repairing runways for the Air Force, building temporary bridges, taking care of POW's, guarding them. After the war was over in Europe, I found myself on the way to the Philippines. You know, when the war in Europe was over, a lot of people were being sent home, but those people who had combat landing experience were being filtered out for the projected invasion of Japan.

Now this was an operation where they were expecting in excess of a million casualties, invading the Japanese homeland.

INTERVIEWER: Excuse me. When you left Europe, the war was still going on?

PEPE: No.

INTERVIEWER: You were there at V-E Day?

PEPE: I was there at V-E Day and shortly after V-E Day, they shipped me down to Marseilles and from Marseilles, we went to the Philippines through the Panama Canal.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you on V-E Day? Do you remember?

PEPE: V-E Day, I was, no we had been to Germany. We were back into northern France. I know where I was, I was in Le Havre and we were, that's another story. We were in Le Havre where we were guarding German prisoners of war. It was our compound, but the French were manning, we had guard post at each corner of the compound and the French were manning those automatic weapons. When V-E Day was announced, those Frenchmen turned those machine guns on to the German prisoners and we had a hell of a time disarming those people. I don't know how many people they killed. That's what happened.

A lot of these stories you don't hear because, you know, it doesn't make good history. But we were at a point there where we were fighting the French to keep them from killing Germans. Generally the German POW's, we had no problems with them because they were happy to be out of the war. For the most part, the Germans or _______ soldiers were much like Americans in that they were drafted into the service. A lot of them didn't want to be soldiers, but they were drafted into the service and when they were captured, they were happy to be a prisoner of war because they were getting three square meals a day. They had shelter that didn't leak. We were using them as work horses, but they were getting exercise.

INTERVIEWER: And they were not getting shot at.

PEPE: They were not getting shot at and they did not want to escape. You know, where were they going to go. And so we had no trouble with the German POW's. There's a funny story. We had some Italian people with us at one time and when they discovered my heritage was Italian, they adopted me as one of their own. They were very friendly. Here again, they were happy to be out of the war too. I don't know where they ever got it, but their noontime rations consisted of a bottle of wine, a block of cheese and a loaf of bread. They were happy with this. I don't know where they got it and they want me to eat with them. You know, paisan, yeah sure. That was funny.

INTERVIEWER: Did you speak Italian?

PEPE: Hell, I don't speak Italian. Not at all. I mean my family is from Italy, but hell, you know...

INTERVIEWER: So you're in Le Havre, the war is over and suddenly you become very important to the U.S. Army.

PEPE: Oh yeah, yeah, I'm shipped down to Marseilles. I get aboard a very nice troop transport. Most of the people, they were sending troops over to the Philippines for the invasion of Japan, but once these people got like 30 days leave in the States. They would take them to New York, port of New York, disembark, get a 30 day delay en route. Thirty days later, they report at San Francisco.

But they took us people who had combat landing experience and they shipped us directly to the Philippines through the Panama Canal. It took 40 days to get from Marseilles to the Philippines. All of our equipment went on LST's. It took 88 days for our equipment to get from Marseilles to the Philippines. But fortunately, the war ended while I was en route.

We pulled into a little island called Ulithi for fuel and provisions. While we were in that harbor, they dropped the two bombs. Well we continued on to the Philippines anyhow and all we did was spend an awful lot of time at the beach. As a means of diversion, we used to go up into the hills with the infantry. The war was over. I mean the Japanese had surrendered, but a lot of the isolated units didn't ever give up and we had units in the hills of the Philippines that continued to fight.

So to break the monotony, we used to go up there on occasion and join the infantry and root these guys out, you know. Something to do besides playing cribbage with my battalion executive officer. I lost a million and a half dollars to him. Fortunately he didn't ever try to collect (laughter). So I spent six months on the beach, where was it, Lingaya Gulf. Then from that point, came home.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned earlier that you had been in the hospital other than in...not the time that you had dysentery, were you in the hospital again?

PEPE: Yeah, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What happened?

PEPE: Nothing glamorous like a wartime wound. I mean I contracted pneumonia. There's a story too. I was the first GI overseas on whom they experimented with penicillin. They were giving me sulfa and sulfa didn't work. I went into a coma and then they started injecting me with penicillin. When I came out of the coma, I'm looking up there and I see a dozen pair of eyes looking at me. They say, "Oh, he's alive". Where had I been, you know, and then they told me at this point this was an experimental drug. They didn't know how it was going to work and they were kind of happy that it worked. And I said, "Well yeah, so am I". 

INTERVIEWER: Where were you hospitalized? Do you remember?

PEPE: No, it was an Army field hospital in France. Oh that was fun too. As officers, we were allowed the British Army liquor ration, didn't know they had that, but they do, which consisted of a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of gin, two bottles of cognac and as much wine as you wanted and oh a bottle of rum too. Bottle of gin, bottle of Scotch, a bottle of rum, two bottles of cognac and as much wine as you wanted per month, okay. Well I didn't care much for Scotch, I never did. So I traded off my Scotch for...one bottle of Scotch for two bottles of cognac.

When I'm talking cognac, I'm talking Remy Martin, Courvoisier, I'm talking good cognac. We were in this hospital and they had a little racket going there - that the ambulatory patients would requisition a jeep from the hospital motor pool and they would go to the liquor dump and they would say I am lieutenant so and so from such and such an outfit and I've come for my liquor ration. We've got 28 officers in the group, in the battalion. These are just GI's, they're not too concerned about whether this is legitimate or not and we got our liquor ration. And we had parties in that hospital every damn night.

Some of the nurses and doctors were in on this deal. They had to be in order for us to be able to avail ourselves of the transportation. They had bed patients that were sloshed every night. They're blind drunk and these people don't understand, how is this happening? Where are they getting this booze? But keep in mind, this was a field hospital which means they had no floors. The floor was the earth and grass and every one of these guys had a little dugout underneath his cot where he stashed his booze (laughter). That was funny. We had a party every night. I shouldn't say that because my wife will probably listen to this tape.

INTERVIEWER: You were a lot younger then. How old were you by the way?

PEPE: Oh God.

INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you went on the beach at D-Day?

PEPE: '44, I was 23 years old, second lieutenant in charge of people. This was something else too. You got to keep in mind that three years prior to that, I was an emerging teenager with not too much responsibility, just getting to understand life. Suddenly you're thrust into a position where you've got to make life and death decisions not only concerning yourself, but 70 or 80 other men. You know, if you make the wrong decision, I mean you may not only kill yourself, but if you manage to survive, you're facing a lifetime of regret. 

Of course I understand that during times of war, it's a mass confusion of troops or people into the Armed Services and a select number of people who are chosen to lead these people, but very frequently they don't use the proper criteria for selecting leaders. The criteria in those days was intellectual acuity. No concern for mental disposition or the other things that go along with leadership. Apart from being smart, you know, an intelligent person doesn't necessarily make a good leader. The best leaders we had during the war were noncommissioned officers. Probably not one of them had ever gone to college. Too many of them didn't even finish high school.

INTERVIEWER: But they were men of practicality.

PEPE: Men who had an awful lot of common sense and that's what it really takes to lead people is common sense. The ability to think on your feet and not...I remember, they had a sign on the wall. It went like this, "Here lies the bones of Lieutenant Jones, a graduate of this fine institution. He died on the night of his very first fight applying the school solution". The school solution was not always necessarily the proper answer to a combat situation. What you did, you took the book and you put it some place where the sun don't shine and depend on your sergeants an awful lot.

INTERVIEWER: A lot of people have seen war scenes in movies and what they don't tell you in the movie is that you get really tired at least once a day and you lie down and go to sleep and you may get hungry more than one time a day and you're looking for food. Tell me just in general, where did you sleep, what did you eat and especially what did you drink?

PEPE: Let me tell you about food, okay. We're on the beach and we've got no place to go because the hill above the beach had not been secured. So we're lying in our foxholes and Captain Schmaltz, an actual name, Captain Schmaltz, West Point graduate, he said "You guys wait here. I'm going to make a reconnaissance". So Captain Schmaltz took off and he's gone for some time. We were getting a little worried about Captain Schmaltz. What in the hell did he run into. And during any battle, there's always a lull in the activity and during this one lull, you could hear this guy coming out of the beach whistling. 

We look around and look around and here comes Captain Schmaltz. He's carrying his helmet like a bucket and he's strolling down the beach and he's whistling As Time Goes By, you know. So we're trying to get Captain Schmaltz, "Put that damn hat on your head", that's what it's for. He comes strolling back, not a scratch. He finally makes it back to where we are and his helmet is filled with eggs (laughter). He had found a hen house somewhere and he brought back these eggs. So we sat right down there on the beach and we cooked those eggs in his helmet and we ate scrambled eggs. You said what do you eat. You eat what you can where you can. 

Sleep? Well the first night, I slept in a foxhole. Sergeant Russ slept right alongside me. He got killed in a bombing raid, I didn't get a scratch. Lieutenant Carter got killed on the beach, friends of mine. I don't know how, I got up the side of that hill without a scratch. My wife and I went back 50 years later and we're going up the hill and my wife trips and sprains her ankle (laughter). She's saying "Here, you come off this beach without a scratch. I can't get up this beach without a sprained ankle". 

INTERVIEWER: What happened to Captain Schmaltz?

PEPE: Captain Schmaltz, he stayed in the Army. He retired as a colonel. He died in 1976. He's buried out in Costa Mesa, California, I think.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know what the name Schmaltz means? It means fat.

PEPE: Yeah, but this man was far from fat. He was the epitome of a West Point graduate. I mean the guy, he was not only a fine officer. I mean he taught me a lot, but he was a gentleman. He never took advantage of his position, never lorded over you by being a West Point graduate like so many of these shavetails coming out of West Point at the time who hadn't even completed their course of studies. They made them lieutenants after three years of study. They never let you forget that they were West Point grads. Captain Schmaltz was one of the greatest guys I knew, not only as an officer, but as a gentleman. He was tall, ramrod straight, and he had one of these British guard moustaches. You would swear he was a British, but after you talked to him, you knew he wasn't.

INTERVIEWER: Now I'm going to ask you something that I've asked the other people on video tape. I've asked them to look right into the camera and know that you're now talking to your grandchildren, and maybe your great-grandchildren. I'd like you to teach them something. What did you learn that you'd like to pass on to future generations that was built upon your war experience?

PEPE: Oh gosh, I don't know. Hell, I'm not a philosopher, nor a poet or a preacher. I'm just a guy who, I don't know, I just don't know what could I tell them. Enjoy life because it's short. You don't know how much of it you're going to have. Live it to the fullest which I've done I think since that time. Of course, wartime situations are somewhat different, but you learn to depend on people, depend on the person who's alongside you because you don't know when or how or if sometime he may be in a position to save your life and you his. 

I say, I'm not a philosopher so I don't know how...you know it's a loaded question you gave me. I just don't know how to respond to it. You learn things during a war that you hope you never have to apply to everyday life, but an awful lot of the lessons you do learn during the war will help you to cope with life. Hopefully, none of you will ever be in a position where you have to learn these lessons.