Interview of Richard P. White
Transcript Number 080

SEPTEMBER 15, 2001

We're interviewing Mr. Richard P. White, currently living in the Wilmington, North Carolina area. I'm Paul Zarbock, an occasional employee of UNCW library. Today's date is the 15th of September, in the year 2001. I'm going to turn to Mr. White, and ask him...

INTERVIEWER: How did you get into the military and what branch?

RICHARD: Well, I was minding my own business, walking across the campus. There was a sign up for the Navy reserve program. This is in 1942. I met my father, who was a professor, who was somewhat excited by....

INTERVIEWER: What campus was that?

RICHARD: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He was somewhat excited, because the Army had just come out with a program to compete with the Navy B7 and B12 program. At least, that's the way they sold it, I think. I didn't care particularly which one, so I said to dad, who was an old Army man, "I might as well go with that". I signed up, and in May of 1943, '42, I'm sorry, was sworn in, and became a member of the enlisted reserve corps in the Army. 

That bought me ten months more of school, and then I went in at Fort Thomas, Kentucky, processed through the reception center, and was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia, for basic training. We were all in that basic training unit, members of what they called the Army Specialized Training Corps. The idea was to give us basic infantry training; and then send us off to school in the area. Well, one field was area and language. Mine was Germany. I went to school, went up to Fordham, and instructed in language and in geography and other things. Interestingly, they relied heavily on nationals, German nationals, who were living in Yorktown, in New York. 

The program was bad because the idea was, they'd say, "Okay, you're going to learn Germany, and you're going to learn German". They put us in Fordham University, which had no dormitories. They mixed up all the engineering and all the other specialties, all cramped into converted classroom buildings. So we had no opportunity to really develop any skills in German. Our area in language, the area studies were conducted in auditoriums by German, people of German descent, in big rooms, it was lecture, and it was not really on the subject, and it didn't really help much. 

So, after three months, I was able to transfer out of that and got into the Air Corps. They sent us down, first we went to Fort Dix and waited for assignment to an air base, a training base down in North Carolina. I think probably, at Greensboro, close to Greensboro. I don't remember now what it was. Then, we went back through, all of us who had been in that group and had transferred in from Benning in infantry training, so we got a pretty good basic training in infantry and weaponry.

INTERVIEWER: What year was this?

RICHARD: 1943.

INTERVIEWER: And, what part of '43, do you remember?

RICHARD: Now, it was around December is when I got out of the ASTP and into the Air Corps at Fort Dix. Then, down to the air base, we went through four weeks of intensive training which was a laugh because the people doing training were Air Corps guys and they'd stand up in front of the class teaching us about infantry tactics and infantry, by reading out of the book. They'd stand up there holding the training manual, and that was our training. We got some training on the range. Well, we had carbines that were not in very good shape, and we got a little bit of instruction, which was not needed by most of us.

INTERVIEWER: But you're in the US Army Air Corps, and they are now training you as an infantryman?

RICHARD: No, I was in the Air Corps. I transferred out into the Air Corps. Basically, I went through processing to become, hopefully, a pilot. I went through the screening, and I guess I qualified as a bombardier. From there, they sent us, me and others, to George Field, Illinois, which is right on the border between Illinois and Indiana. They sent us there because we had to wait for assignment into prefly. The Air Corps started out, and you went in prefly, went through that and came out a flyer, or whatever you were. The casualties that the Air Corps were suffering were so much less than they had planned for, or figured they had, so they kept bringing people in, but they had no place to go. They couldn't go to prefly because prefly was all filled up. Pre, prefly, they established that, to wait and go to prefly and that was full so we just stayed on the base doing whatever could be done. 

One of the things they used to tell you in the Army is that you don't volunteer for anything. Well one of the best things, a friend of mine and I volunteered to work in the, I guess he didn't know it at the time, but in the parachute room. We didn't fold the parachutes, but we had to go out there early in the morning and pass out the chutes. Check them out to people that were going into flying, and nothing then for a couple or three hours, then check them back in. That was it, that was the job. We got a lot of things done. It didn't really promote a career or anything, but after being in the Army for a year, I guess, for about a year, no, ten months, went in late May, and.....

The first leave I had was in April or late March of '43. George Field was not too far from home, which was Oxford, Ohio. It was just across the state of Indiana. You know, it's long and skinny. Another friend who lived in southern Indiana, we got on the train and he got off at Aurora, Indiana, I got off in Cincinnati and hitchhiked up to home. The folks weren't there. My father at that time was teaching in, I wish I could remember the name of it, it was a consortium of The University of Georgia, The University of Alabama and maybe Tennessee. They were teaching pretty bright people from all of the schools in governmental things in those states.

INTERVIEWER: That might have been called the Southern Research Educational Association?

RICHARD: I think it was something very much like that, yeah. So he had that for a year. I guess mom had gone down to see if I was home, got there probably on the 30th or 31st of March. On the 1st of April, I got a telegram. It said, "Your leave is canceled, come back". 

INTERVIEWER: April Fool's Day?

RICHARD: I called my friend and said, "What do you think of this?" This timing is bad. We both agreed that we ought to go back. It was real. The Air Corps had decided that they didn't need all these people in their program and so we were transferred back to the infantry, up in Camp Atterbury. The 106th Division was coming in there, and we joined them up there. 

A couple of interesting thing was that those of us who had gotten in the Air Corps program were very happy to be in there and so sure that things were going our way that we had a big ceremony in the barracks one night. The barracks were heated by space heaters, fires, they were really fires, and we had a big ceremony, all of us in the infantry. We had taken the caps, at that time, they had the ribbon around, colored, and our infantry was blue, so we all ripped the blue piping off and burnt it. We were through with the infantry. Of course, that lasted for a couple of months at the most..

We went up and joined the 106th Division, at Camp Atterbury and they were just coming off Tennessee maneuvers. One of the interesting things was that the people that had gone through it kept saying, even when we got over into combat, they'd say, "You think combat is tough, you should have been on Tennessee maneuvers". I can believe it. The training was, well, I became convinced that the Army didn't know what they were doing. We joined; we came in for the division because they just pulled, what they call a POM preparation for overseas movement and pulled out a lot of the more experienced and better officers and non-com's, and sent them as replacements overseas. 

They filled up for them with guys like us and also, at that time, and in a couple of months later, brought in people who transferred, well, enlisted men, transferred from quartermaster, from MP's, from the artillery. Anybody that expressed an interest or willingness to transfer into the infantry, and they were promised to keep their grade, whatever it was.

We had a tech sergeant that had been, his whole experience had been loading and unloading ships up in, I guess up in Alaska really. The really tragic part about it was that our platoon leader, a heck of a nice guy, a lieutenant, had four years or more of service, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as an instructor in artillery. So he had no knowledge of infantry tactics, infantry anything. He was a nice guy, but didn't really help us much. 

I guess one of the things also that sticks in my mind always from that experience, we worked hard, we trained, we were out in the field two weeks out of every..., well, in two weeks, out two weeks, in the barracks, and then we were out in the tents, and on field problems and training. It worked very good except our company commander, the captain, was more interested I think in being liked than getting us to really know our jobs and really get tough. We, for a while, thought we were lucky in that we were in King Company, K Company. Another company in the battalion was I company, or Item Company. 

They were tough, they were, your non-com's were tough, the officers were tough. They were always the first ones out on an exercise. They always double-timed, they were the last ones in. They were having fights all the time. Their guys would challenge the non-com's and pull them out in back of the barracks and fight. They said, well I'm glad I'm not Item Company, but when we got in, things got serious, we wished, I wished, most of us wished that we had had that kind of a preparation because the only way I think you can prepare yourself at all, or get prepared for combat is to be just be driven. 

I think the Marine Corps, in their training, is much more realistic. The Army was worrying, I think at that time, and probably still worries, about mothers writing the congressmen, complaining about their sons, how they were being treated. There's no way you can train by being nice. So that was one of the things that really bothered me. At the time, we didn't really worry much about it.

INTERVIEWER: Where was the camp? Where were you?

RICHARD: Camp Atterbury, just a little bit south of Indianapolis.

INTERVIEWER: What was the weather like when you were out in the field, you said, was it?...

RICHARD: Well, we went there and so it was April to the middle of September. 

INTERVIEWER: Pleasant summer. 

RICHARD: Oh yeah, it was nice to be back home again in Indiana. It was good. The training in the field was good; it could have been a lot better. We did a lot of hiking and a lot, of course, was by the book, but it was good. We learned to live in the field without a lot of things. I guess the thing I really wish that we had more work, hard work, actually with live ammunition, and not trying to be nice to everybody and get mentally prepared. 

As I said, the guys that were in the division before we came had been at Tennessee maneuvers had been impressed by that being really tough. What we had was tough in a way, but it was not what it should have been. But anyway, twice that division was racked by pulling people out and sending in replacements overseas, so we were basically, I guess the division had been activated in March of '42, and so the year later they had been through training, Tennessee maneuvers and then standard maneuvers there in Indiana. We lost ground every time because we had to start over with new people. We then were scheduled to go, incidentally, the 106th Division was the last division organized by the Army. It originated down in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. 

It may be best described, in retrospect, you know, I don't know whether you know it or not, but the Saturday Evening Post had a whole series of articles about Army divisions and military groups from the war and ours was one of the last ones written up. It was entitled The Glorious Collapse of the 106th. Deservedly so, I'll tell you why that's so. 

Anyway, we went up to Camp Miles Standish up in Massachusetts in preparation of boarding ship and going over to England. This was in September and we did embark from, we got by train from Massachusetts down to the port in New York. We embarked from there. We didn't know how lucky we were. We went over on the Queen Elizabeth. When we were... our regiment was the only one on there; and another division was on there, but our regiment, we were guests, we didn't pull any duty. We didn't do anything except ride. The Queen E was so big and so fast that they didn't want to endanger her by putting her in a convoy. So we went over unescorted. 

Just took off from New York and went straight over until we got to the Irish Channel, the Irish Sea, the first time just getting there and they picked up something on the radar and then the sonar, and it felt like the ship almost turned on its tail and then started evasive action and went on up. Nothing happened, we just picked up a warning that the subs were in the area. 

INTERVIEWER: There are a number of funny and some horror stories about being on shipboard. What was it like?

RICHARD: As I say, this was great. Well actually both my experiences on ship, going and coming, were good. As I say, we didn't do anything, but sit around, and get on deck and play cards or walk around or tell stories.

INTERVIEWER: Was it two meals a day or three?

RICHARD: Two, but it seemed to be plenty. I'm sure I don't remember exactly, I'm sure we had some meetings, some lectures, and this and that, you know, but basically it was a cruise. Our destination was Greenock, Scotland, which I now know is basically the point for Glasgow. We were there, went over the side, the ships were docked to shore and got on trains and went down to England from Scotland. We were stationed in Chelton, England, which was...actually we were quartered on the racecourse there, that's one of the famous steeplechase courses. 

We stayed in the stalls, and twelve guys in the stall, but it wasn't bad. We trained. We continued training. We had to wait for, we got new rifles, did our training, had lectures on kill or be killed and demonstrations on German weapons, how they fired so you would get used to the sound of it. We did training.

In early December, we went down to Southampton to get on ship going across the channel over to France.

INTERVIEWER: What year is this?

RICHARD: 1944.

INTERVIEWER: December of 1944.

RICHARD: Yeah. The night we went over, it was Army-Navy football game, so we were listening to that. We landed and went over in Le Havre. It was still beat up. We went over; actually, we went over on a ferry. Obviously a big one, but it was a ferry. Then we went over the side on the landing craft infantry, and deposited on shore, and we marched out into the country in open fields, pitched tents in rain, and cold. 

One of the good things about that was that one of the people that we inherited in our platoon was actually my squad leader, was a sergeant who had been in the MP's, but he was a Cajun from Louisiana. He could speak enough French even though it wasn't the dialect they were using. We did pretty well, he was there and he was sort of the front man. He worked a deal with some French bakers. We'd give them flour and they'd make us bread, you know. 

It was miserable in that field. We were waiting there for the other regiments to get over, and get their stuff. We waited for a few days. It couldn't have been very many, but anyway, then we got on trucks. We went up from Le Havre, up to Saint-Vith (?) in Belgium. We got there, early morning, or late at night of the 11th. We were there for just a little while and then moved up into the line to relieve the 2nd Division. We moved in to prepared holes and everything else. We just took their place. They had been there for just about two months. They had two casualties. One had been self-inflicted, it was that quiet. It was so quiet, no, actually, I had always heard, I think they can verify now, the infantry division could be expected to adequately cover that four mile front. We had 27 miles. 

The people at Army and Corps or Corps and Army, whichever way it goes, were pretty well convinced the war was pretty well over, that Germany had no means of resistance. Surely they couldn't mount an attack so it was safe to put a green division, poorly trained, inexperienced, into that situation because the 2nd Division which was experienced, had been there all that time and nothing really. This is when we went in there on the 11th of December and we started night patrols, but we were ordered not to do anything other than just go out to see if we could hear anything. We were not to confront anybody, not to capture anybody, just exercise I guess, training or whatever. 

Almost immediately that we got there, every night there was action. We heard noise, movement of vehicles, lots of it, constant, most of the night. Daytime, nothing, and I don't know how far the messages got from the dog faces there back through chain, back to platoon and to company and to battalion. No matter how far back it got, but nobody was concerned there was all this movement at night. 

Let's see, the 11th was a Monday, we were there and reporting to somebody hopefully that there was something going on, and there was. The morning of the 11th, I mean the 16th of December, The Battle of the Bulge started. It started right through us. The noise we had been hearing had been tanks and trucks, the movement of the troops getting into place. 

So that started on Saturday morning, about 5:30 or something like that with artillery and everything else. We were not directly impacted by it. We didn't see anything except that during the day, relatively early during the day, they did a strange thing. The commander or the guys in charge, they pulled out all married men, out of the line, and sent them off, actually to combat, I mean to fight to somewhere, where there was a breakthrough or something, and sent them off. By night, they were back. 

Sunday morning, still not realizing exactly what was going on, but knowing there was something, we didn't do anything. We didn't see anybody, didn't fire anything. Then on Monday morning, we got orders that we were going to pull out, pull back. Well we did pull out of where we were. We took rifles, ammo, coats, bed rolls, everything. We got a ways back. It was snowing, but they said, drop all the stuff here and trucks will pick it up and bring it to you later. They wanted you to be able to move and fight. So we did. 

We moved and we seemed to have been going around in circles. Nobody seemed to know where we were going or what we were going to do. We did see some, like we were in the woods here and across in the open space, we saw Germans over there. They weren't coming towards us and there was not a whole lot we could do. Our orders were to keep moving that way. 

One of the things that they told us in training was that if you come across an enemy soldier, seemingly dead, don't take that for granted. Shoot him again which probably makes some sense if you're the first one going through there, but we were going past. I mean there were two or three German soldiers there dead or seemingly dead. Of course, there had been many ahead of us and you would worry about them. Maybe that didn't make sense, but I couldn't bring myself, and none of us could bring ourselves to shoot these guys again. 

We kept moving and by evening we still didn't know where we were going or what we were doing, but we stopped, but without blankets, without coats, without anything, it was a very cold night, it was snowing. Artillery fire was around and there would be some tree bursts, but nothing really threatened, but enough to shake you up a little bit. No food, of course, the whole day, I hadn't had anything to eat. Then the next morning, a Tuesday, the 19th, we started moving again. Early in the afternoon, we got to a place, it seemed like a reasonable place to dig in and prepare a defensive position. So we got there, one of the first ones there, and as we were told to do, we tried to take a good field of fire and dig in. The ground was frozen and rocky. We tried to dig in, get started digging in and all of the sudden some more people came in. Pretty soon that hilltop was crowded. You had a field a fire to start with, but then in the field the fire you just had people. 

Then the commander of the regiment, the lieutenant colonel, came around and he was probably one of the few that most of us really, admired, figured he knew what he was doing. He told the colonel had surrendered the regiment, but he said, "I want you to"; I don't know whether you know about the M1 rifle, but one of the basic parts of it is the follower rod. The gas cap on the thing, I want you to take out the cap and throw it away, take the power arm and bend it so that the weapon is not usable. 

About that time, you start to think, well gee, we're Americans, we don't surrender. It had been done for us. At first he seemed to be a little resentful and then when it finally came out, the Germans realized then and saw that we'd been surrounded. They had 40-millimeter anti-aircraft guns down to the right, aimed right at us. They were just so crowded; nobody was really in a defensive position. We were captured and we fought aways that evening. 

We eventually ended up in an open area. Again, it was cold and we had nothing, nothing to eat. We survived the night and then we walked on into a town, through a town called Prum and went farther. Finally, we got to a rail end and put us into buildings there while we were waiting for trains to take us to prison camp. When the trains got there, we got on these cars which, they're not big cars like our trains. I don't know how many people we had in there, 60 or more. Nobody could really sit down or not everybody could sit down.

A little disheartening then and looking back on it at that point, most everybody seemed to be thinking only of themselves. When they finally did give us some food, they put it in through the door and that was it. It was very difficult to relieve yourself, if you had to and you had to. Somehow you worked through that. The worst part about the trip; on the train was that the thing that had made the breakthrough is what was impossible was the weather. It would have kept the Air Corps from flying. The first thing when we were on the train, the weather cleared. So they were out shooting up all targets including trains, and there was no way of knowing who was on or what was on the train. Fortunately, although there was some bombing close, none of it hit us. 

We spent Christmas on the train and got to a little place called Bad Orb, Bad meaning bath or spa and Orb being the town, the name of it. It has been sort of a spa, a health place for the Germans to use. They had baths and everything. It was really a nice, little town. We stopped there and marched through it and up to a camp. Then we found out later, it had been constructed in 1913 as a summer camp for children. 

They were turned into barracks. We had bunks three high and two guys to a bunk and for sanitary purposes, at night with the doors locked, they had a hole in the entryway, a big hole plus a big tub. You would relieve yourself and that was it. In daylight, you could go out and they would have slit trenches that you would use for the same purpose. You didn't really get a chance to bathe very much. 

I think the one thing I learned and I guess, well, one of the things the Germans did that didn't seem, well I knew their rank consciousness, you know, officers were officers and non-coms were non-coms and the rest of us were dirt. What they did, when we were captured and they captured everybody, you know, medics, all the officers, the medics, the chaplains, everybody. The first thing they did was move out all the officers except for a few, a couple of doctors and a couple of chaplains that stayed behind. Then a little bit later, they moved out all the non-coms. So they left us, you know, a whole bunch of privates, and PFC's, without much. There was no existing structure when we moved in there, command structure or anybody in charge of anything. With those of us with that kind of a background, nobody really seemed to take charge and nobody did. It was completely a disorganized mess. 

One of the things I did learn and I don't know how well I've been able to follow it, but most of us spent an awful lot of time sitting around talking about how miserable things were and how miserable we were and how hungry we were and all that kind of stuff. When we were liberated finally, we were sort of concerned that the, like one of the chaplains, he didn't seem to have lost any weight, he didn't seem much the worse the wear, so we wondered about that. Then really realized that he was one of the few people that was smart enough that when the doors opened, he would get out and walk and keep busy just doing something. Walking around, walking around and the rest of us sitting around just sort of went to pot, it was bad. 

We didn't do a heck of a lot, but once in a while they'd take a detail out under guard out in the woods to pick up logs and wood for the fires. I was out one day and the guard, not mean or anything, but he told us to pick up this log and it was hard. We were weak. I told him about that, you know. They were talking up to him and expressing the feeling that what do you expect, you're not feeding us anything. He said and I have no reason to doubt it, he said, "You're getting the same food and the same amount of food that we're getting". 

We'd get basically, a typical meal would be bread which I don't know what they used for grain, but it almost seemed like sawdust. You'd get some sausage, a piece of it; a little bit of it and then we had breakfast with something hot to drink. In the afternoon, we got soup. The soup was made of frozen vegetables. They'd throw a carcass of a cow into a big cooker, almost like a pressure cooker you know, and render it something to eat with. If you were lucky, when you got some meat with your soup, it would have gristle because then you could chew on that for quite a while. 

Things happened in the prison camps. Some of the guys gave somebody, some one or two, got out of the barracks at night and went down to the kitchen intent on getting something I guess. They were surprised by a guard, I say they, and I don't know if it was one or two, some number was surprised. One of them picked up a hatchet and started hacking at the guard and so when that happened, all of the sudden everybody was rousted out of their barracks. We stood outside in the snow and cold while they inspected the barracks looking for anybody with some blood. That was about the only incident where we had, you know, something like that. 

The worse part about I think the prison experience was the first real reminder of how bad the cigarette habit can be. You didn't, well, you could trade with the Germans if you had anything to trade, you could get some tobacco or if you got lucky, you could get some cigarettes, not just tobacco. We had one young man in the camp who traded his food for cigarettes, then died as a consequence. He'd much rather smoke than eat. 

INTERVIEWER: Did you get any Red Cross packages? Did you get any mail?

RICHARD: Never got mail, we sent out some. We did get a Red Cross package, I think once. It was sort of picked over by the time it got to us. I guess most of us didn't have a very high regard for the Red Cross anyway because there were several experiences. They were very big on coming around with donuts and stuff. Reasonably young women, American girls, but they were basically interested in the officers. I guess I couldn't blame them in a way, but that's the way it was. 

To skip ahead, after we were, well, we were liberated on the 2nd of April, the day after Easter. We had been following by just hearing and looking progress of troops moving. You could hear the battle, you could hear the firing of guns, you could see the smoke and everything. There was a big fire fight, not too far away from us on Easter Sunday. About Monday morning, we woke up and there were no guards. They were gone. Nothing happened right away, but then the 44th Division, which was the National Guard outfit from Illinois, and I guess maybe Michigan, I mean Wisconsin, they came through. It was a happy time.

One of the strange things, one of the medics assigned to them came through. He inspected the kitchen, tasted the staff of life that we've been living on and said something to the effect that this food is slop and isn't fit for Americans to eat. Throw it out. We didn't get any food for three days. When we got it, it was C rations and I don't know if you know C rations or not, but it's basically pretty concentrated. After having no real solid food for months, we got C rations.

INTERVIEWER: Tell for historical reasons or historical purposes, what do the C rations look like and what would you used to have in it?

RICHARD: C rations came in cans. The first part of our experience with C rations is, I think you got hash, you got spaghetti and there was a third thing. I don't remember. It was edible, but it wasn't exactly what you looked forward to. It was in a can. I'm trying to remember exactly. You also would have something to drink, a coffee or a lemonade or something like that in the ration.

INTERVIEWER: And some cigarettes?

RICHARD: Oh yeah. It was good. Later on, they started putting more appetizing things into the cans. I didn't have much experience with that. K rations were the other alternative. They came in a box and basically the same sort of stuff. They would have chocolate in there. We got C rations and most people were not prepared to handle that and so diarrhea was quite prevalent. 

The other thing is which sort of turned me against the Red Cross and it wasn't their fault at all, after we had been there for three or four days; they pulled everybody out of the camp and had taken them out by truck and down to a big center out in the middle of the field where they would take your clothes and get rid of them and give you clean, but not new, clean clothes. You couldn't get a haircut even then. 

We were a pretty ratted-looking bunch. After three or four days, I was still there, In fact, I was there for ten and the Red Cross group came in. Again, nice looking, young ladies and myself and I guess most probably felt the same, we just didn't really feel like we were ready, unshaven, dirty, sloppy conditions to see or be seen by some young ladies. So, that was not a particularly happy time either. 

INTERVIEWER: But you, you don't seem to convey the idea that you were cruelly or brutally treated by the guards?

RICHARD: No, not at all, no. Most of them, at that time, were older guys that had suffered wounds and a lot of them from the Eastern front. So they were not really unhappy to be there. One of the things in your indoctrination, you know, what do you do if you're captured? Well, you know, name, rank and serial number. Nothing else. 

There was a whole regiment, two regiments, of the division captured, a lot of them at the same place and you didn't really limit yourself. If you knew that if you didn't, you'd be there, any guys would be outside standing, waiting, and you know, tell things like name, rank and serial number. We didn't know anything militarily so there wasn't anything we could tell them about that. We were there obviously, we wore our patch, our division patch so they knew what outfit we were in. They realized, at least for us, that we didn't know a heck of a lot anyway. That was one of the big problems that we never did know really geographically where we were in combat. We didn't know Kleue, and the ____ and the Siegfried line related to other things and where they were going. We didn't really know what direction we were moved and all of those nice things you're supposed to know. We used to brag about how well informed the American troops were. I wish that had been so. 

I don't live with great regrets or strong feelings. I just sort of shrug it off. What I'm talking about is the fact that you know the expression that somebody has to graduate last in the class. Some doctor was last in his class; some of the officers are going to be last in their class. I was not really more impressed or depressed reading about some of the things they happened and the attitudes of some of the so-called brilliant generals. They all seemed to get sucked in by the belief that the war was practically over and made big plans for Christmas and all that.

INTERVIEWER: Have you been back to Europe?

RICHARD: I've been back to Europe several times. I've been back working, as I did, for the Air Corps, Air Force. I went back to Wiesbaden. I went to Wiesbaden and went through Frankfurt which was on train, went through Frankfurt. I've been back there. One of the people I worked with over there who was stationed there, took me over to see the camp. My younger son when he graduated from college, his graduation present was a trip to Europe with a friend of his. He went back and he saw the camp. It looked very harmless by that time. I don't think they tore down the barracks, but it was still a camp area.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have regimental reunions?

RICHARD: No, never had. I think it's partly because of the history, the brief history of the division and the regiment, the turnover. It didn't really have a chance to develop much in the way of relationships, firm relationships with anybody. Even the guys we were serving within the infantry, the privates and PFC's and so forth, never really bothered since then. I suppose if the combat had gone on longer and we'd been there longer, we would have developed something. It was one week in combat, you know.

INTERVIEWER: Mr. White, look directly into the camera, and you're now talking to your great-grandchildren, or your grandchildren, at least. Would you tell them, all the time that you were in the military and all the experiences that you had, what deep learning did you get from that?

RICHARD: It's hard to say really what I learned. I think that you'd have to learn that you have to be able to depend on the guys you're with, the people next to you. Sometimes that takes time. As I say, with our division, I don't think we really had a chance to develop very much anyway, I guess what they now call or would've called then, esprit de corps. You knew people, but you didn't really know them. Many others did, my own experience was that you weren't sure what you would do in combat and for sure, if you didn't know that, you weren't sure what the other people would do. 

I do think, which is not related exactly to my experience, the actual experience, but I do think and I still think that some sort of universal training, military training for somebody right out of high school before you get into college and get thinking about futures; some kind of training which would give you some taste of discipline, organization and the order of things and force you to think about others would have been very helpful and would be very helpful to most all of us. I don't hear much talk about universal military training anymore, but that's one of the things that I think was good. Having grown up somewhat sheltered in a university community, in the Army, got exposed to an awful lot of people with completely different backgrounds, completely different expectations, completely different values really. I think, that to me, would probably be one of the best benefits of some kind of a forced training, people different from what you are. 

You know, despite what it was, I don't feel that my experience since I came through it was bad. The military experience was learning and you almost have to say, I was glad. I wouldn't have been so glad if the Purple Heart had been worn by something more serious than what it was.

INTERVIEWER: This is four days after the bombing of the Towers in New York. If called upon to return to the military, would you do it?

RICHARD: Yeah, I would. I didn't try to force myself back in during Korea or during Vietnam, but in some ways, you know, I guess I would, given a little bit better physical condition than I am now. I wouldn't be much use at any rate right now.

INTERVIEWER: I would too. Thank you Mr. White.

RICHARD: Yep.