Interview of Mr. Howard Rich
Transcript Number 021

February 11, 1999

Background information: I was born in Cincinnati and I was venturing around because my father was transferred several times. I lived in Central Ohio, lived in Kentucky, and then I got drafted out of Cincinnati. You could even get selected by a group of your friends and neighbors to represent them in the military. This happened while going to the University of Cincinnati. I had one experience where I took the test for the air corps intelligence test while I was a sophomore in college. I passed that and they asked me to come to Lexington in June to get a physical. I walked into the University of Kentucky and the first thing I did was a colorblind test and I flunked that right off the bat, so I went back home. Then, I tried to get into the Navy and the same thing happened there. I finally decided to wait until they drafted me and they did.

INTERVIEWER: What year was this?

MR. RICH: It was 1942.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you when you first heard Pearl Harbor was attacked? What do you remember? 

MR. RICH: I was at home in Cincinnati.

INTERVIEWER: You were at home in Cincinnati?

MR. RICH: Yes, it was Sunday afternoon. I was reading and we had the radio on when they made the announcement about Pearl Harbor and it was quite a shock to everybody.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know then that you would be in the service?


MR. RICH: I felt reasonably sure that I would be. I got the letter from the local draft board that I'd been chosen by a group of my friends and neighbors to represent them in the U.S. Army. In late December of 1942, right after Christmas, we had to report to Fort Thomas in Northern Kentucky. Then, we went through three days of being on the move for about 25 hours a day. We were fitted for uniforms, took physicals, and saw the VD film which was enough to turn you against sex for the rest of your life. Then, at the end of the third or fourth day, I was called out with 14 other fellows and we were given an arm rope. We got on a train going out of Cincinnati towards Richmond Virginia. I opened the brown envelope with all our papers in it and it read Battery 321 of the 101st Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I didn't know where Ft. Bragg was and I'd never heard of the Airborne Division. We got to Ft. Bragg and the balance of the division was out, so we were there for sort of semi-basic training for a month before the rest of the division got back. The 101st and 82nd were at one time just the 82nd but in Louisiana they split them and made the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne. Both of them were sent to Ft. Bragg. So, that became our training and luckily for me, I felt we got good training before we went into the service. I read this book recently about the war and how so many fellows got through with basic training and within 30 days were up on the front lines. Thank God that didn't happen to us, but the Army does things in strange ways. Some of the things maybe didn't make a lot of sense at the time, but they kept repeating so that in a tense situation you react correctly. It saves lives many times. At Ft. Bragg, we used to hike out to the firing range and we'd shoot with the M1 Garane rifle, but that was the last time I ever saw it because they issued carbines to us later. We stayed there until June and then the whole division went to Tennessee for basic maneuvers for close to two months. We were bivouacked in the woods with chiggers and mosquitoes.

INTERVIEWER: How was that?

MR. RICH: I'd never saw so many chiggers in my life. We had this one fellow that had so many chiggers on him, he looked like he had measles. They actually put him in the hospital. We were down close to Cedars & Revenue State Park. One of the funniest things that happened down there was that we were a six gun battery and we had what they called pack howitzers with 75 millimeters which can be taken apart and put back together again. They were firing blanks and they made more noise than the regular shell. We were by this farmhouse and they had 3 guns on one side of the house and 3 guns on the other side pointing the other way. There was one of those little hound dogs laying on the side of the house. When the first battery fired, the dog took off and he was running so fast his belly was almost dragging the ground. We were there at that same location about 2 or 3 days and the dog finally came back home. Just about the time he came back home, they fired again and that was the last we ever saw of him. After that, we came back to Ft. Bragg and they took us over to the Maxton Laurinburg Air force Base, which is near Fayetteville. There, they took us for our first glider ride, gave us a quick introduction of the parachute, and we put them on. There were 12 of us B six on each side of the glider. We'd taken off, we were flying around, and I looked down on my leg and saw there was a piece of straw, so, I pulled it. These were definitely dummy parachutes, and of course we couldn't have jumped out of there, we would have all gotten killed. 

INTERVIEWER: You're in a glider with a dummy parachute?

MR RICH: Yes. That was the last time they even did that, but we had some strange experiences. Then we went overseas in August of 1943.

INTERVIEWER: What port did you ship out of? 

MR. RICH: New York City.

INTERVIEWER: You took a train from Tennessee or Ft. Bragg?


MR. RICH: We took it from Ft. Bragg.

INTERVIEWER: Up to New York?

MR. RICH: Up to New York to Camp Shanks. We were there getting more shots and other incidentals. 

INTERVIEWER: What ship did you take? 

MR. RICH: It was a British ship and one of the largest convoys that left the port. Then, we got outside in the ocean, warmed up, and away we went. You could look in any direction and all you could see was ships. 

INTERVIEWER: Really!

MR. RICH: It was quite an experience and one night the ship was blacked out. 

INTERVIEWER: That's right. 

MR. RICH: They had a Red Cross ship that came the other way and right through the middle of the convoy and these destroyer escorts followed the Red Cross ship. They were dropping depth bombs because the submarines used to like to follow the Red Cross ship and get in the middle of the convoy and they raised all kinds of Cain. So, the depth bombs would hit the side of the ship and sounded like a big cattle drum. From that night on, I slept on the deck. It took us about 12 or 15 days to get over there. One of the ships booked out and those guys were on that ship for 45 days in Halifax Harbor. They took them off and hiked them around the hills, but they were a long time getting overseas. In the process of getting over there, we went to a horse farm and stayed in the stables. Well, that didn't't sound too bad to me because I had seen the stables down and around Lexington and they were pretty nice. Well, it wasn't like that, not at all. We had box stable stalls and there were four of us in each one. 

INTERVIEWER: And they were real stables?

MR. RICH: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Wow!

MR. RICH: There were bunk beds with a wire frame and straw mattress and the mattress was shaped like a body.

INTERVIEWER: Right.


MR RICH: I'd sleep sitting up wherever I'd be. This was at a place called Watkins Farm. I went back through England before the 50th Anniversary of VE Day. We went out to Watkins Farm and the place has so dramatically changed from when we were there. Some stables had over 150 horses there and about 1/3 of them were owned by the Arabs. 

INTERVIEWER: Really!

MR. RICH: I made the trip up to Newbury and saw what the old place looked like. 

INTERVIEWER: Sure.

MR. RICH: All the time we were in England, we did more airborne training and got some more flying experience in gliders. If you haven't ever flown in one of those gliders, they're nothing but steel tubing with some kind of plastic cloth cover.

INTERVIEWER: How does a glider get off the ground? 

MR RICH: A C-47 tow plane with a tow rope a little over 100 yards long and it was made of nylon and that's where all the ladies nylon stockings went. We were told at one time how many pairs of nylons could be made out of one of the towropes. We had some interesting experiences training with the gliders. We were out there one day and a pretty new glider pilot hooked up the glider and the plane started down the runway. The glider pilot instead of releasing the brake stepped down and locked the wheels on the glider and the towrope was still latched in the front and it broke the thing and shattered all the Plexiglas in the front of the glider. We had to get on another glider. I don't know if it was the same day or another day, but we were awaiting our turn to go and one of the C-47's came in and forgot to drop its tow rope before he came down. We were sitting there looking out the door watching him and there came this tow rope and wrapped itself on the wing of our glider and the glider turned and it unraveled and went on. Those were interesting experiences. Basically, we were there until May of 1944 when we went down to Wales for pre-invasion maneuvers and it was very similar to the Normandy Peninsula. The place in England, it was a wonder it didn't sink with all the equipment that was over there. They brought the 82nd airborne in from somewhere and they had enough equipment for one full division to get landed in Normandy. Well they had two airborne divisions and only enough equipment for one so each division was split in half and half went in by paratroop and glider and the other half went in by ship. I was one that was on the ship. We were to land on Utah beach and the ship we were on was sunk, but you never saw so many boats in all your life. I think if they could have put them end to end, they could have hiked us across the mainland to Normandy. I'd never seen so many ships in one place in all my life. Anyhow, we were coming up towards this Utah Beach and the ship hit a mine.

INTERVIEWER: The ship you were on hit a mine?


MR. RICH: Yes. A friend of mine was on a neighboring ship and he said it looked like the boat lifted clear out of the water because you could see daylight underneath it. Well, needless to say, the ship went down in about 45 minutes and it was supposed to be one of those sink-proof ships from a steamship line in the south Pacific that was owned by Dole. We were out on the deck and we were at the right level with the deck and we had left our guns and so forth inside. We were standing outside, naturally curious, overlooking what was going to happen. When that happened, they wouldn't't let us go back in to get our equipment. There were a lot of ships around there and they pulled alongside the ship and dropped over their landing nets and we climbed down. One thing that sticks in my mind, we had an Lt Col. in charge of our battalion and he was not well liked. He was going to be the first one over the side and some little General that was only about 5'6" and a real stocky guy, grabbed him by the back of the neck and drug him back on the deck and said, "You stay here until your men get off."

INTERVIEWER: Well?

MR. RICH: I, almost, was going to give him a hug as he went by. As we got on this landing craft heading toward the beach, they found out they were heading for the wrong beach and a small boat came running back and forth and they were waving their arms. We looked up and there was another mine directly in front of us. We made a right turn and landed on Utah Beach. Of course, we didn't have any guns and we weren't the first wave. That was in the afternoon. We waded to shore and we all had what they called belt life preservers. You'd crack them and they'd inflated and you were supposed to slide them under your armpits. We had one fellow in our battery that was barely five foot tall, just enough to get into the service, and he had his down on his waist and he stepped in the water. There were a lot of holes in the water from the shells that had exploded. He stepped in one of them and flipped right over and only his two legs were waving. So one of the fellows grabbed him and turned him back over and let him hold onto him and towed him ashore where he could walk. You know there's some things that happen at the worst time of your life that are funny, you can't help but laugh at them. So, we got to shore that evening, not too far from the beach and the rest of the battalion came in that next morning. We were in France on the lines fighting the Germans for about two weeks, but airborne troops normally don't stay on the line that long. We were not equipped for that type of fighting as all our stuff was light, mobile equipment and we never had enough trucks at one time to move our whole battalion or bring our own battery at one time. So, we did an awful lot of walking which wasn't bad because that got us in real good shape. I was in the best shape of my life then, because when we were still in England, we had to go out on a hike at least once a week and they were 25 mile hikes and we got so we could knock them off in 5 hours. That was one point where you learned very quickly to get up as close as you could to the front of the line because the front of the line moved rather steadily but the back of line would pick up and slow down repeatedly. One thing I remember quite well, the Red Cross did an excellent job for us. They'd meet us about half the time, about half way through the hike with a donut wagon with coffee and donuts and also the same thing when we would get past to London. We were about 75 miles from London. We'd go from Newburg to Redding, then from Redding to London. They had hotels and it cost us 50 cents a night. They were originally free but the British troops complained about that 


INTERVIEWER: Why?

MR RICH: Because they were charged for things for their troops, so they had to end up charging us something which was a minor amount at that particular time. If you didn't have a place to stay, you could never get a pass to London. So, during the period of time from August until we left the following June for the invasion, I got to London almost once a month. We learned the success to go to London was to stay home on payday and save your money and towards the end of the month everybody was broke and there were so many passes, you could go. We'd get a pass once a month, go to London, and it was always a two day pass. You'd get the pass starting on Monday and you'd get out of camp on a walking pass on Saturday. So, you'd end up being out on it almost three whole days. 

INTERVIEWER: Laughing

MR. RICH: It was the tricks of the trade at that time. Well, getting back to the invasion, it was a mess. I think the pilots on the planes and gliders that had the paratroopers got panicky and they would drop them everywhere. Some of them would turn on the green light and they jumped them right over the channel and, of course, when they hit there with their gear, they were gone. I know a friend of mine who went through basic training with me who was with the 377th. They dropped him so far it took him three days to get to the front lines.

INTERVIEWER: Really.

MR. RICH: We stayed in Normandy for almost a month and then they took the whole division back to England because they took quite a few losses in the invasion. At that time, they gave us a week furlough to go to Scotland with two other fellows. There was a plane going up there with some of our officers on it and they said there was space for three guys and did we want to go? We said sure. Why pay for train fare if you can get a free ride?

INTERVIEWER: Yes, right.


MR. RICH: So, we went up on furlough to Scotland and we went to the Red Cross and they told us where to go for a bed and breakfast. I think we paid what we called 5 and 6, which was equivalent to a dollar and a dime a night. They sent us out to this one home and the woman said, "Oh my," and hit the panic button. She said, "I've already got my people assigned to me, just stay here a minute and I'll go see what I can find." She finds another family who had never hosted before and we went over there and stayed with them. They were most interesting. He had what I'd call a confectioners store down the street and around the corner. Through this wall you went upstairs and the apartment was up on top of the store. Because he had access to a lot of things because he owned a store, when we would go out at night and come back, he would have a table set up at the end of the bed with cakes and things like that. The first night we got there, the whole family was sitting there waiting for us to come back so they could find out all about us. This man, his ambition was to have a store in the bowery in New York. Of course, he didn't know what the bowery was, but he had always heard about the bowery and he thought he should have a store there. They treated us nice. When she heard us wake up in the morning, she'd start fixing breakfast and we were getting real eggs and bacon for breakfast which we only got powdered eggs at camp. We were there for a week and we went up to Edinburgh Castle and got our ration coupons and gave them to the family so they could replenish some of the supplies they gave us. That was very nice and then we and went back to the camp and right through the basic training again like we were some rookies in the Army. We had several false alarms that got us out to the airport. I don't know if any of you are familiar with when Patton and the group broke out of Normandy they were encircling this group of German Troops. Patton moved so quickly, we didn't have to do that so, we thought very well of George Patton. We had three dry runs and you always knew when you were going to go because they would feed you a good meal the night before. Then, finally in September was the invasion of Holland called the Market Basket. They were trying to open up the road and go all the way through so they could make a loop around. The 101st would drop the gear, the 82nd was there, and the British 6th airborne was up the road. I never thought well of General Montgomery before and thought even less of him since. We were there and ahead was the road and unfortunately, they didn't know but there were a lot of German troops that had been pulled out of the line and were sitting there and a couple of them were crack outfits. They were on both sides of the road and, of course, they could shoot from either side and it was a nervous situation.

INTERVIEWER: So, this was in Holland?

MR. RICH: Yes, but we flew over. We landed in our gliders and there were an amazing number of airplanes that were going across the Channel. We hit a fog bank and some of the planes got turned and the glider really didn't turn and they went one way and the plane another and down they went. We got over to where we were going in Holland and we only got hit once by a bullet and we picked up an extra passenger because one glider was afraid to take too many people with him and he'd put him on the jump seat back there, and I turned back to see him and when I saw three bullets go right through the ceiling, nothing didn't affect us one way or the other.

INTERVIEWER: So, a bullet went through?

MR. RICH: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: The glider?

MR. RICH: Yes.


INTERVIEWER: That you were in?

MR RICH: Yes, you could poke a hole in the glider with a pencil, so that was no big deal. 

INTERVIEWER: You still kept going?

MR. RICH: Oh, it wasn't any effect at all. It wouldn't be a problem.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

MR. RICH: So, we got to where the drop zone was and they cut us loose and we were landing going full blast. We headed across this field and I think we went through either one or two wire fences and soon the thing stopped. We were in the battery commander's jeep, our battery commander was in the co-pilots seat, his driver and I were sitting there with artillery shells in the back seat and as soon as the plane landed, we had to jump out with these 2 x 4's. There was a piece of pipe sticking through the tail and we pushed the tail up to raise the front end so the jeep could come right out.

INTERVIEWER: The jeep was in the glider?

MR. RICH: Yes. 

INTERVIEWER: Wow. I never knew that, so that's very interesting.


MR. RICH: Well they put the jeep and the howitzer in there. The cable hooked to the back end of the jeep and we started up and it pulls forward. He pulled forward but then as the glider went up, we propped the glider and they got the hell out of there. They were shooting at us because they resented the intrusion. When we first landed in Holland, we're getting out of the glider and got the jeep and had the rendezvous. I was a forward observer for the field artillery, which stayed with the infantry when the war was going on. The life span of a forward observer was supposed to be relatively limited. The 1st Lt., the radio operator, and myself were going around hitching a ride on the back end of a tank for a while. I didn't think too much of that idea because you're just a sitting duck sitting up there. So, on the third day, while we were up near a town called Vego, we got up to the front line. The Lt., myself, and the radio operator had a crazy glider pilot with us. Normally they evacuated glider pilots as soon as possible, but this guy missed the war before and he was determined he was going to stay to see what happened. So, he traveled along with us and we got up to this road and in a house and put the glider pilot and radio operator down in the basement. The Lt. and I were laying out on the ditch alongside the house and we hadn't been there very long when a shell hit the top of the tree. Normally, if you're in artillery, you like to hit the top of the tree because the shell just blows up in the air and you get better coverage. It hit us and this is one thing I'll never know, we were both knocked out and I still don't know how long we were out there because there was nobody around us except the two of us. The Lt. got killed and I got shrapnel in my back. I called for some suppressing fire, which would go ahead of us to try and chase those guys back. Then, I called back to the battery to tell them to send somebody else because the Lt. was dead, I was hurt, and I was going back to the H station. I went back to the H station and they looked at me, gave me a shot, and put me on one of those stretchers with those little short legs. I went to sleep and there was a guy right next to me. I woke up and looked at him and there was nothing but a covered up stretcher and I thought, "Oh my God, the man died beside me." Then I found out they pulled us apart and slipped somebody in-between. That evening, we got taken out by ambulance. That was scary because the Germans were shooting at almost anything that moved up and down that road. We got through alright and got to a what they would call a MASH unit. They took me in there, took out the shrapnel, taped me up, and I spent the night there. The next day took us down to the airport and put us on a plane and flew us back to England. I went to the field hospital near Oxford. All I can say is that I got the best treatment I think I ever had. I have no complaints about the medical treatment I got in the Army. The strange thing about the thing, the shrapnel hit my spine, pinched the nerve, and I thought I was hit in the leg. I swore it was shrapnel. Before they operated again on me in England , the doctor came in with the cork and the needle and stuck me down the leg to see if the nerves were alive. We were there for several days, they operated on me, and then I was there for a week. Every four hours, whether I was awake or asleep, I got a shot of penicillin. Gangrene would get in the wounds and would kill you pretty quick. So, as a result of that, to this day, I am allergic to penicillin and break into a rash. It saved my life. 

INTERVIEWER: Sure.


MR. RICH: I was in there from September until late November. They left the rear echelon back in Newbury and I went back there and there was the old Sgt. Major who looked to me as though he was older than God. He was because he had been in the Army a long, long time. He and I and one or two other fellows were what was left of the whole battalion. Finally in December, the division, in the meantime, had been up on the lines in Holland all that time but they were pulled out of the line or brought back to some place in France. I still don't know where it was, but we were there for two days when the Germans broke through in the Ardennes. The Capt. told me, "You're going with the major, his driver and another fellow up to Bastogne and wait for us to join you." In the jeep, we went up the road towards Bastogne and further up. We saw these guys coming back and they'd been pounded so bad they put their guns down and ran, literally. We got into town at night and there was so much commotion and we didn't know where in the heck we were. The major went to find out where we were supposed to go and people were coming this way and that way. Somebody said, "Oh, the German tanks are just three miles out of town." You have never heard of so many wild rumors in all your life. The major found out where we were supposed to go and took us out in the jeep and stopped alongside the road and said, "You get out here and wait for your battery to come by. This is where they're supposed to come." Well, this was sometime after dark. Of course, in December we were pretty far north and it got dark fairly early. We got out of the jeep and saw this wide-open field and downhill was a grove of trees. They said, "By the way, while you're here waiting, go down and check those trees and see if there's any Germans down there." So, I debated about that one after they left for awhile. I left my stuff I had there with me up at the top of the hill and went down to the clump of trees and there was nobody there except me. I came back up and there were some hedges along the road and I laid down behind them. I heard this clump, clump, clump coming down the road. It was a bunch of guys marching and I debated about saying something to them or not. I knew that if they saw me they would shoot me and if I'd said anything I'd get shot anyway. So, I challenged them and and all you'd hear was rifle bolts clicking and clumping boots. They had the proper passwords and they went on down the road and my heart started beating normal again. At that time, the snow hadn't started, it was a clear moonlight night. I didn't see a soul for about 5 or 6 hours and then the rest of the battalion didn't get there till late the next morning. We went and established our battery position near a farmhouse on the side of Bastogne. We were shooting over the town up the other way. I was assigned to some Lt. who was supposed to be our forward in charge of the forward observer party. We went to the regiment and that night the Lt. disappeared and we never did know where he went. Before he left he told us he wanted us to go up the hill and dig a foxhole. We didn't't, of course, because we were in front of a tree line. If you left the trees, you'd get shot as soon as you walked out. That night, this fellow named Zuccarelli, our radio operator and I dug a two-man hole and we were sleeping and all we had were the GI raincoats for cover. When I woke up in the morning, something hit me in the face and I thought my partner was just being smart and tickling me, but there was snow falling on us. 

INTERVIEWER: So, you're in a foxhole?

MR. RICH: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Getting snowed on?

MR. RICH: It snowed and snowed. When they sent somebody to take our place, we went back and I told the Captain, "Captain, you can do what you want with me, but I'm not going out with that guy again because he would have gotten us killed if we did what he said, and he disappeared." I ended up with his job. I was a corporal doing a 2nd Lt.'s job, but I thought that the pay scale wasn't too great. From then on, we were in Bastogne. At times, we were surrounded by the Germans but that didn't mean too much. That was part of your basic training in an airborne troop that when you landed, you were going to be surrounded by the enemy. To me, that was just a normal situation. At no time, did I ever think the Germans would run over us. I was working with George Company out of the 506th parachute infantry and they were tremendous fellows. They told us that if we thought we saw anything, they wanted us to ring up the battery and shoot them. They took good care of us. We dug holes up there, naturally, and we had been up there so long that we had a deluxe foxhole.

INTERVIEWER: What's a deluxe foxhole?


MR. RICH: Jesse Loop and I dug this hole together. In the meantime, the weather had cleared and they dropped some supplies to us because we were short on supplies. We were running out of ammunition and things like that. My Christmas dinner was a scoop of a cold macaroni. That's all I had to eat that day. When they dropped the supplies to us, they came wrapped in a large tarpaulin and you've seen this jute padding like they use for rug pads? 

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

MR. RICH: They used that for insulation and the shells, artillery, and rations were re-wrapped in this material. I kept the material and it must have been a good twenty feet long with it unwrapped. We built the hole and went down and looped it back over us again and put it all the way over us across the top of the hole and covered it with brush, dirt, and shoveled snow back over the top so it didn't show up too well. That was our home away from home there for several weeks in a quiet sector. We'd be up in the front for 4 or 5 days and then we'd get relieved by somebody else and they would come up and stay the same length of the time. Then we'd go back to the battery. It was on the fairly quiet side except one afternoon, for some reason known only to the Germans, they had a patrol came up across this open field at us. They were in their snowsuits and they had the white sheets over them, but you could still see them in the daytime. Why they came across there in the daylight, I'll never know, but we opened fire on them. I directed some first fire, but the shells of a 75 howitzer are relatively small and land in the snow and burst but they weren't doing much good. I called back to the battery and had them do an airburst at 20-30 feet up in the air. We never did see them anymore, whether we got them or not or they stayed there until dark, I don't know. When we go back to the battery we spent time in a farmhouse with this family. The farmhouse was this big, massive stone building and we'd sleep down in the basement because there was a concrete floor with beams across them. We slept up in the barn a few times, but it got too cold up there. We were up in the barn one night and I heard three or four whispering. We were telling them that there was a haystack there to keep warm. The German planes came over that night and bombed and you could hear shrapnel hitting the roof of the barn. We argued with ourselves whether we should get up, go down, or stay there. The argument was settled, we were still there, and the airplanes went away. We would get raids every so often at night. We didn't shoot the friendly airplanes and no sooner the bombs would drop but they never hit us. It was interesting, this old farmer and his wife had three big husky daughters. He had a thrashing machine and the barn was a U-shape construction. He had one barn here, the house at the end, and another barn with a dairy there. He had a thrashing machine and he'd roll it out apparently to cut the wheat without taking the grain off the stalk. They come out to thrash some of that wheat and fire up that machine. He'd come out in a suit and tie and the girls would do all the work and he'd holler directions telling them what to do. Man, that guy had it made and he didn't know it. We were in Bastogne up until sometime in late January.

INTERVIEWER: Of 1945?


MR. RICH: Yes, 1945. We were there when Patton's fourth came through and that was our first contact with other troops. We were glad to see them. We had a few tank destroyer companies with us. I don't know how many there were but they were very low on fuel and ammunition. If a German tank started coming, they would park behind a building, fire up the thing, pull out and shoot, and pull back and cut off the engine right away to save the gas because when that was gone, that was it. They did a tremendous job of keeping the tanks away. You've heard the old story about the Germans asking for us to surrender and McAuliffe, who was our division artillery commander because General Taylor, our division commander, had flown home for Christmas. We thought that was pretty nice. General McAuliffe told the Germans they were nuts. Well someone explained it to them and they sent him blindfolded back to the lines. They gave us a hard way to go for awhile and then we got moved from one quiet place to another. We really got the daylights shelled out of us. We were in the woods and the open fields. There was a valley and the Germans would go down but we couldn't see them, but they could see the tops of the trees. They would shoot at the tops of the trees because that was the most effective. They would start out and shells would land farther back in the woods and they would keep coming up closer all the time. We finally got run out of there one night and we asked one of the fellows with us for help with the radio and he just lost it. He was sleeping that night with his shoes off and his feet sticking up out of the hole hoping to get evacuated back. He was taken back, and of course, that was the last place on earth you'd want to be taken back to town and put in the what they were using for an aid station. That was where all the shelling was taking place and the Germans shelled it with regularity. We moved that night and I carried that radio out of there and it came in two sections. I did not want to be out of contact with the battery. We slipped and slid all over that icy road, went back there, and got back safe and sound. We went somewhere down near Lorraine and we were there for a few days. Our former battery commander, Capt. Fuller was a great man and got transferred from our battalion up to division artillery and got killed in Bastogne. We were in this little town sitting in this bar, but there wasn't any liquor in the place, unfortunately. It was not brightly lit. That night, we got the shock of our lives, because in walks this Captain but it happened to be his brother. It scared the hell out of us because we thought he was dead. He didn't know his brother was dead and we had to tell him what happened to him. In the meantime, we just rested in the area for a while. All the beds in the town and all the people must have been midgets because I'm fairly tall, but my feet were much longer than the bed. Then, we left there and went down further into Alsace near a place called Haguenau. Our forward observer place was in a three-story building on the outside of town. Nothing went on there but we were upstairs and we slept on the side away from the Germans. We had windows open on the other side where we could watch them. In the meantime, the Germans were off to our right and had these railroad guns and were shooting into the town. The shells would go past us and if they ever hit the building we were in, they would take the whole building with them. You could hear them go by. We had to hike up there and search all those houses. There wasn't a soul in sight. Fortunately, the three of us who were together had some good scavengers and one was an exceptionally good scavenger. I heard a rifle shot and I thought what the hell now. Pretty soon he came back waving a chicken. He brought it up and we cooked the chicken that night and enhanced our rations. After there, we were back at the battery because there were much better accommodations and we had a bed. After the 4th Armor broke through, a week or two later, three or four of us got passes to Paris for 4 or 5 days. When I came back, I checked into Battalion headquarters, this one fellow I knew who had taken basic training with us was a company clerk up there. He said, "Are you all right?" I said, "Yeah, I'm fine, but I'm tired." He said, "Didn't you get hurt?" What had happened, the fellows who had taken my place had gotten hit and he thought I was wounded, which was not the case. The one who had gotten wounded was the one who had gone through basic training with me and used to go to London with me all the time. So, he was gone when I got back to the battery and he joined us after we were down in Haguenau. He came up to see what we were doing one time because he was in what we called the incident section and had both the communications and forward observers. He came up and stayed the night with us and I don't know, but I didn't hear him go out of the room for some reason. He came back in the room and I heard him and I woke up. I reached down and grabbed my gun and was getting ready to shoot him because I thought he was a German. He said "Hold it, hold it, it's me." I said, "Don't ever do that again without letting me know you're going out of here because I have a sub-machine gun and the thing is always cocked at night." It was cold up in Bastogne. We marched in the woods one day and it got warm and the snow melted on our clothes and then we froze. Well, you know you'd think with all the cold weather and sleeping in the snow, you'd die from pneumonia. I never had a cold and I think that's because we were pretty healthy and we were in very good shape. Thank goodness, we had a lot of training and they were bringing in fresh troops from the States. They had been in the Army a few weeks for the most and they were shoving them right up in the front lines and they were not prepared. We got down to the Rhine River and replaced part of the 3rd army right at the bend of the river. Our observation post looked right across the dikes into this town over there. Our uniforms in the airborne were rather casual at the time. It was, we came up and we were in fatigues. I had coveralls on and didn't have them tucked in my boots. A Lt. with the 3rd Army looked up and said, "Where in the hell did you guys come from? If Patton ever sees you, he'd have you court marshaled." I said, "Patton's not our commanding General and I'm not worried about that." After we took their place, we could see all to the right where the American troops had crossed the Rhine and were coming up the river. At night, they would send up flares every so often so you'd know where the front lines were. They'd put search lights up at night, what they called artificial moonlight, and of course, that bothered me because that always showed you up to the Germans. We were putting patrols across the Rhine River at night. I was selected to go one night and suddenly they called it off which didn't break my heart at all. When they were sending patrols across, they'd bring up 50 caliber machine guns and put them right in front of us on the bank and shoot across the river. The Germans did not like 50 caliber machine guns and as soon as they fired them, the 88's would start coming back at us. We'd get down below the dike and they did not like this. This went on for quite a while. The only thing I ever saw was when we looked out, I saw one of the tiles on the roof across the river. When the guy stuck his head out, I figured he was an observer for the German artillery and we fired some shells over there and he retreated. That was the extent of our excitement for the day. That was in the spring and we were pooped out and 50 years later my mind is a little bit fuzzy on this. They put us down and the Germans were supposed to have what they called a redoubt. I think they were going to have a lot of suicide troops back in the Bavaria and so forth and fight to the bitter end. We got on the autobahn and we would go down the autobahn until somebody shot at us. We'd stop, chase them out, and continue on. Part of the autobahn was used for airplanes for take-offs and landings. The airplanes over there were funny looking and they didn't have propellers on them. Now, I realize those were the jets the Germans were building and they were just a little bit late getting there. The 8th Air force would have been gone from that. So, we ended up in Berchtesgaden and that's where we were when the war ended. We stayed in Berchtesgaden for awhile and then we were distributed out into some other town and then I got the tough duty back in Tennessee in June. On maneuvers one day, they called me and announced they were going to have somebody selected as lifeguard for each battalion. They said I had been chosen to go to begin life guarding. I went down to some place called Lake Ortracer which is near Springfield, Tennessee. We took the Red Cross training, came back, and thought that was a dumb thing to be doing. We got back and after the war ended, we were in Bavaria. One day they announced the division had charge of a swimming pool in town called Bad Bruckenau, and I was one of the people approved for lifeguard and three other fellows. The four of us went down to the swimming pool as lifeguards that summer while our division was there. This was tough duty, you know.

INTERVIEWER: So, that's how the war ended for you as a lifeguard at a swimming pool?


MR. RICH: The thing of it was that the water was so cold. The water came off the mountains from the melting ice and snow. We lived in a house with the fellow who owned the pools. There were three pools and we used to sit out there and get tickled. These real macho guys would come out and jump in the pool and come out and climb out of the pool. They swam once but never came back again. Up until it was August, we fooled around there and some of the fellows had a friend who was with the Special Services and once a week he'd drop off a keg of beer for us. This was a tough war after it was all over with. Then there was a German camp in town and they had troops so we'd go down there and eat. At the end of the war, they only fed us twice a day. They figured we were not doing anything and we didn't need to eat three times a day. Across the street from a bunch of bunkers, they had ammunition and things like that. We found a bunch of blocks of explosives, which were about that square and that thick, and they were apparently tapped for a bunch of fuses. They had a three second fuse and we'd screw right in the block. There was a trout stream in back of us down the road and we'd go over there and toss the explosives in the stream and kill the trout. We would retrieve them and then take them back up and the lady back at the house would cook them for us. When the pool needed to be cleaned, we'd go down to the stockade and check out five or six German prisoners. The old man who was in charge of the pool would work the daylights out of those guys. Of course, they had no chlorine or anything and the pool would get real slimy. They'd slip and fall, and of course we'd sit there and watch them. We'd take them back down to the camp at night and check them back in. Then, they would fill the pool up again. We'd get the troops up there once a week to clean the pools. At night, we'd go into a little auditorium in Bad Bruchenau and the Red Cross had some people who played music to entertain us. Boy, it was hard duty all summer! One thing about it, the Army gets you pretty self-sufficient at times and one of the fellows with us found this Opal 4-door convertible sedan. Where he found it, I don't know, but he brought it back and we would run around in that and, of course, we'd put aviation gas in that car and it would go like a scared rabbit. We went down to see one of the fellows who got transferred to engineers down the road. One day, luckily it wasn't me, but one of the fellows was out in the car and the general came by and saw the car and we lost it. This was the way the summer went for us. Then after that, we went back to Avignon, France and it was a French army barracks. At that time, they were starting to count up points to go home. A lot of the fellows we had lost and particularly the ones that were married. I think I lacked about 3 or 4 points to go home in the first go-around. We didn't do much there at all except to go into town at night to drink a few beers and have a sandwich. One night, I caught a ride with a jeep back in the camp and there was a Lt. standing out there who I went to high school with. I jumped out of the jeep and saw him. He had just joined the division and he had his liquor ration, so we went up to partake. That was the first person I'd seen that I knew while I was in the service for the many years I was there. We passed the time and then it was time for us to go and we got sent down to a camp right outside of Marseilles. For three weeks, we sat on top of this cold hill because the ships couldn't get in the harbor. Finally, they got into the harbor and we got on the ship to come home. It was very calm and we hit the Straits of Gibraltar shortly after breakfast. I'd never seen anything like it before in my life and the waves go up like stair steps. You'd hit those waves and half the group got seasick. It never bothered me and I never missed a meal. Going back was all right, but coming over that was terrible. On this British ship all we got one morning was kippers and boiled tomatoes. Kippers smelled like rotten fish. If it wasn't for the bread and the PX on the ship, we would have died of starvation. These cooks, I think they called them Lascars and I'm not sure what a Lascar is, but they came from some part of India. They had these big cauldrons and they stayed at the cauldrons. They swept the floor with these brooms and stirred the coffee with the same broom. That was my first experience, going over to Europe, sleeping in a hammock but the hammocks were hard and it was like sleeping on the floor. Trying to get in them without falling off the other side was very difficult. That's when I started sleeping on the deck because I felt safer doing that. Coming back on this ship, it had been the Victory ship and had been converted into a troop ship and had shelves that we slept on. Of course, when the thing hit a wave you'd go up or sink down. You sort of floated up in the air. We came back in November of 1945 and we saw one of the worst storms I think I have ever seen. You'd get up in the bow of the ship and it would come up clear out of the water and bang, everything on the ship would rattle. We came in at Newport News and we ended up at Indiantown Gap. We went through the separation and got a train back home. I went back to Cincinnati and my folks lived in Kentucky but they came up and met me there. I went back to Europe on one of my trips for D-day's 50th anniversary and that was the first time I'd seen Omaha Beach. I was glad that I didn't go in there. We went into Utah Beach and had the same roughness as down on Wrightsville Beach. Omaha Beach went in and came up like that and the top of the hill was all those German pill boxes. Those pillboxes will be there from now until the end of the world. The concrete was at least that thick and heavily reinforced. These ships were shelling the place. You'd see where they hit the pillbox and ricochet off and plowed a furrow in the concrete but didn't knock them out. Those poor guys that hit that beach really took a tremendous beating. You wanted to get off the beach as fast as you could because the Germans were shelling the heck out of you. That was quite an experience going back for that D-day 50th anniversary. They had a presentation and I saw several of the cemeteries. In the cemeteries, they have a book with a list of all the people who are buried there and other cemeteries and where they are. The people I knew who died, I never did find out where they were buried but I found out that if their parents wanted them to, they would ship the body back to the states. I went to one cemetery where Patton was buried and originally he was buried with the troops because that's what he wanted. So many people trampled around the graves to see, that they finally moved him up away. The cemetery was beautiful and they certainly were well kept. We passed a German cemetery and all the German cemetery tombstones were black. The funny thing was that in France, the French let them have a cemetery there but they wouldn't let them on the ground. They had to pay rent for the ground the cemetery was on once a year. We saw the D-day ceremonies and it was quite a sight. Then, we went back through and saw St. Mary Church in Normandy, where a lot of troops died and where one paratrooper got hung up on the church steeple. He saw all the fighting while hanging up in the air. In the church, one stain glass window shows a Para-trooper hanging on the steeple. We saw a lot of the battle fields. Like I say, I was greatly impressed to how lucky I was that I went up at Utah Beach instead of Omaha Beach. The British beaches were much easier than the ones we had and that was the same thing in Holland. The British army really goofed off on that and they didn't get up there in time to save the British airborne. A lot of them were trapped across the Rhine River on the other side. They were just ravaged by the Germans. What got me was we were sitting there one day and the troops and tanks were going by and I think it was about 4 o'clock in the afternoon and bang, they stopped, dug a hole in the sand, dumped about 5 gallons of gas in it, and then they put on a pot of water to have tea. What a way to fight a war. Consequently, they never got across the Rhine River because they dilly dallied taking so long to get the British troops up there. The British airborne got pounded pretty badly. Our division took over their position and they were there from early December and they had just gotten back off the lines when I had gotten back from my experience in the hospital. On Armistice Day of November of 1943, they marched us up the hill to the church and we had church services. At the time, I started feeling bad and got back down to the barracks. Finally, they got the doctor to come down to see me and he sent me off to the hospital because my appendix was about to rupture. It was the same hospital I went to when I got wounded. I got good service. They put me in a room and the hospital had just opened and we were the first patients. The doctors came in and poked and prodded me and they stood in the door and said, "Yeah, I think that's it." That night, they took my appendix out. The only thing I regretted was that if that had happened in the states, I would have gotten to go home because there was an army regulation at the time that if you had an abdominal operation, you're off-duty for 60 days. I was in the hospital for about 30 days and then they sent me to what you'd call a convalescent hospital. We had this barracks there which was all right except they wouldn't let us have any heat from 6 in the morning till 6 at night. It was cold in England in the wintertime and it's a real damp penetrating cold. I found out that if you go to the back fence, you could go down to a town called Lymington and there was a spa down there. It was half a crown and you could go in and they would give a steam bath, dry bath, and a massage and give you tea and cakes for 50 cents. That's where I used to go and spend my afternoons because there was no place in camp to keep warm. 

INTERVIEWER: Would you like to make any final comments? Do you consider yourself a lucky person to have gone through what you've gone through? 

MR. RICH: Yes, I thought I was pretty lucky. You know you have different opinions about the Army and what things took place. Sometimes, they could do things awfully quick and sometimes, they could drag their feet. One day up in Bastogne, one of the medics came by and saw this stain on the snow and checked it and it was a gas shell. I'm sure to this day it was an accident and that the Germans had fired it. We didn't have gas masks but all of sudden, we had gas masks. Where it came from, I don't know but we got them in a hell of a hurry. I was glad to survive the war and I couldn't believe at the time I had gotten wounded. I thought surely, I'd go someplace else, but they had orders that they called a replacement depot that all airborne troops got sent back to their outfits. They didn't go anyplace else, so back I went. I thought, surely I'd get away this time and get into some place not so bad. 

INTERVIEWER: Ok, well very good. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us today. We appreciate it. 

MR. RICH: Ok.

END OF INTERVIEW WITH MR. RICH